Echoes from The Other Valley: An Interview with Scott Alexander Howard

Despite it being a beautiful Saturday on a long weekend, a full house gathered at the Gibsons & District Public Library on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia to hear Scott Alexander Howard read from his first novel, The Other Valley (Scribner Canada, 2024). Surrounded by his wife, mother-in-law, grandmother-in-law, and friends, Howard discloses that he planned the second draft of his book at this very library in 2019 for months while living in Gibsons waiting to move into their home in East Vancouver in exodus from Toronto, Ontario.

Scott Alexander Howard at Gibsons & District Public Library book launch, May 18, 2024. Photo by Stephen Smith.

The philosophy professor, who obtained his PhD from the University of Toronto and did a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard, says his book is primarily a “romance”, but readers will find that it also carries weighty themes of grief, mourning, the passing of time, parental influence, coming of age, myth and destiny. The story is entirely told from the female voice of Odile Ozanne at two stages of her life, first as a teen and twenty years later. The plot centers around the death of her classmate, Edme.

Howard read to us in an easy, soft-toned voice welcoming us into a new world, like only the best storytellers can do. After the reading we peppered him with questions and I was also able to ask him some follow up questions during and after reading his stellar book.

Inspiration from Loss

Howard says the book was inspired by the loss of loved ones that he wasn’t able to say goodbye to, at least not in the way in which he wanted to say goodbye. The timing synchs up with the pandemic, but I didn’t ask. However, I asked if writing The Other Valley gave him a sense of peace about the passing of his loved ones?

He said that it was both “bittersweet” when a young woman passed after two battles with cancer, because she died before she could fulfill her dream of being a fiction writer, and it also “deepened the grief” about the passing of another friend who would have been “such a supporter” of the novel.

First Build a World

Howard’s writing process was to first build the Valley. He says the world he’s built physically resembles aspects of “Dawson Creek and the Okanagan Valley” of his youth. To the west of the Valley is a time zone that reels the same town and people twenty years back to the past. To the east of the valley, the time zone shuttles citizens twenty years ahead to the future.

There is no free passage between the valleys. There are instead gatekeepers to the multiverses, or parallel universes, called Conseils or counsellors, who control entry into the portals for compassionate reasons — presumably, to prevent the butterfly effect.

Readers will notice the infusion of French language, food and culture, so I asked him if he meant it to be set in French Canada, or France? (I looked up a recipe for a French fish stew in the book that looked delicious, but it’s 910 calories per serving without even using cream. No one over thirty-five can eat that without a load of statins in their system and even then it’s a cardiac disaster. But the world in the Valley is equivalent to the 1930s, with low tech, rudimentary transportation, so they are much more active than most present day lifestyles.)

The French naming conventions came about for a few reasons. I conceived of the novel’s location as being like a vivid dream, but parts of the landscape are inspired by BC’s Southern Interior where I grew up, and I was struck by some resemblances between that environment and the Mediterranean. So when it came time to name people and places in the book, I experimented with French (but also some Spanish, Maltese, and Italian) and found that I liked the effect. I wanted the world of the novel to hover halfway between familiarity and foreignness, and a natural way to achieve that was to use familiar languages that are nonetheless foreign to most anglophone readers.

I lived for a year in Kelowna, then visited my parents there frequently for decades. I’ve also traveled in wine regions in France and the Mediterranean, I find that the Okanagan Valley is much like European wine regions. Stopping to sample the nectar of the grapes along winding roads, like hummingbirds lapping at honeysuckle blossoms, in the Kelowna area could easily be France or Greece. Also, the Okanagan has a vibrant French-Canadian community, so the French allusions work and give the novel a placeless and timeless quality.

After Howard built his world, he created “vignettes” with potential characters to people it, as if they were being auditioned for the book including a girl from his early memories who stood apart from her classmates during recess. Howard says that the central female voice of Odile is “much like my own.”

His Deep Secret

Howard says that he kept the fact that he was writing a book hidden from others. That’s a luxury an author has only once in their writing career, because after you’re published it’s assumed that you’re always working on your next book, which he says he is. Although, it’s not the next book in a series for The Other Valley. However, he says that the book does leave room open for a sequel.

I asked Scott how he managed to keep something so central to his life as writing a novel for many years secret? He replies,

I didn’t keep it a secret from my wife, but I also didn’t let her read anything for over a year. And then nobody except her read it for three years. I think that sharing early drafts and talking too much about something early on is risky for a story. The vision is still vulnerable and often quite feeble, so even a bit of well-intended feedback might do disproportionate damage to the writer’s confidence.

Few authors have the self-discipline to not share their drafts per chance to dissipate away the creative energy like Howard, but it’s a balancing act as sometimes authors need sounding-boards. However, Howard seems to have a circle of trusted literary and family members to turn to when needed.

Philosopher Who Writes or Writer Who Philosophizes

A novel written with mastery of literary elements, such as poetic language, plot structure, character development, and thematic layering that The Other Valley is so richly embedded with doesn’t come out of nowhere, so I wanted to know more about Scott’s roots in writing.

I started writing fiction with the nebulous goal of being a writer when I was in elementary school. The summer before high school I got a horror short story published in a small magazine in the US that didn’t know I was thirteen. I put fiction aside for many years to pursue academic philosophy, but I always intended to return to it, and in the meantime my philosophical studies crept along the border of literature (a lot of my dissertation is about Virginia Woolf).

One quirk of the book is that quotation marks are stripped bare. I wondered why Scott did away with that convention?

I wrote the first draft with quotation marks to demarcate dialogue and then stripped them out. Lots of novels jettison quotation marks (including books by megasellers like Celeste Ng and Sally Rooney), and I assume it’s always because their authors prefer the flavour it gives to the text. In my case, the novel is Odile’s first-person narrative of her life, and I wanted all the text to look like it’s in her voice; I didn’t want to have visual distinctions between her descriptions of events and her descriptions of what people said. Of course, if it was ever unclear what was description and what was dialogue, I wouldn’t have done it, but people find it easy to follow. I don’t think it’s surprising that we can follow along without quotation marks … before toddlers even learn what punctuation is, they’re able to hear that the cow said Moo and the pig said Oink and easily understand what’s dialogue and what’s not.

Twenty Years East

I put a modified time travel question to Howard, a self-proclaimed “nostalgic”, that his characters are asked, If you were to observe yourself twenty years in the future in Est 1, what do you think you would see?

I await his answer.

Scott Alexander Howard lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. He has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, where his work focused on the relationship between memory, emotion, and literature. The Other Valley is his first novel. Connect with him at ScottAlexanderHoward.com.

Publisher: Simon & Schuster (February 27, 2024)
Paperback 9″ x 6″ | 304 pages
ISBN: 9781668023563

Cathalynn Labonté-Smith

Cathalynn Labonté-Smith grew up in Southwestern Alberta and moved to Vancouver, BC, to complete her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia (UBC). After graduation, she worked as a freelance journalist until present. She became a technical writer, earning a Certificate in Technical Writing from Simon Fraser University. She later went to UBC to complete a Bachelor of Education (Secondary) and taught English, journalism, and other subjects at Vancouver high schools. She currently lives in Gibsons, where she is the president and founder of the Sunshine Coast Writers and Editors Society, and North Vancouver, BC. Her new book, Rescue Me: Behind the Scenes of Search and Rescue (Caitlin Press) is a British Columbia bestseller.