Sandra Sabatini often gets ideas from unlikely sources. Take, for example, “Maternal Instinct,” one of her favourite stories in her new collection, The Dolphins at Sainte-Marie (Penguin Canada). It was written after reading Russell Smith’s 1999 book, Young Men. “For all his amazing talent and excellence, I thought he had given parents short shrift. I thought, ‘There’s more to families than that.’ So this story attempts to show that – it’s messy, hilarious, and sad. You laugh, you cry.”

The 46-year-old author and English professor at the University of Guelph, who is mother to five children ranging in age from 11 to 21, also gets a great deal of inspiration from family life. “I am a mother of a lot of children, so I think about their lives and compare it to my own life,” she says. “When you’re a mother you also think about how your own mother raised you.” Written over a 10-year period, the 12 stories in her second collection (which earned a starred review in the June issue of Q&Q) tenderly explore the experience of growing up, revealing poignant truths that are often forgotten by adulthood. “We may, as adults, think their life is innocent and sweet, but if we remember clearly, it isn’t,” says Sabatini. “There are all kinds of hazards and things to navigate.”

Sabatini’s previous short-story collection, The One with the News, published by The Porcupine’s Quill in 2000, was inspired by her father, who suffered from Alzheimer’s. Unlike other books on the subject, hers avoids dwelling on the negative. “I’d read other Alzheimer’s narratives, and they seem to be laced with despair,” she says. “There’s a lot of heartache, but I didn’t have that sense of desolation.”

In between the two collections, Sabatini also wrote a non-fiction book called Making Babies: Infants in Canadian Fiction, published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press in 2003. “It came out of my PhD thesis,” says Sabatini, who received her doctorate in literature at the University of Waterloo. “I started my PhD when I was 35 years old and I had five kids under the age of 11.” Soon, however, she found her maternal status was not a curse, but a blessing. “I was reading a lot of feminist theory and psychoanalytic theory about the formulation of self. And no one had paid any attention to babies. I thought, ‘This is what I have to look at.’ And then a whole world opened up.”

Although raising a family kept her busy while in school, Sabatini says she always wanted to write. “I went back to school in 1993 to finish my undergrad degree. I had to take night classes because I was home with the kids. One was a creative writing course.” Taught by the University of Guelph’s Janice Kulyk Keefer, the course soon led to a stream of published works. The first appeared in a University of Guelph alumni magazine; soon after, Sabatini submitted a story to The Malahat Review. “They sent a rejection letter and the editor had written on the bottom, ‘It’s a good story. Let me know if you have anything else,’” she recalls. Encouraged, she sent one of her “weirder ones,” and they accepted it.


It was The New Quarterly’s Kim Jernigan who encouraged Sabatini to secure her first book deal. Both were at the University of Waterloo, Jernigan as an instructor and Sabatini as a student. “I sent The New Quarterly a story, which they took. Over coffee with Kim, she mentioned The Porcupine’s Quill and that my writing would be a good fit. My husband had been after me five times a week to [contact them]. So I finally did.”

After The One with the News was published in 2000 (and nominated for the now-defunct Upper Canada Brewing Company Writers’ Craft Award), Sabatini also entered, and won, a writing contest run by the Kitchener-Waterloo Record. By happenstance, one of the judges was author Eric McCormack, who urged her to contact his editor at Penguin, Susan Folkins (who has since left Penguin due to a restructuring). “She was looking for someone new, so I very quickly contacted her,” says Sabatini. That led to a deal with Penguin, which will also release a future book by Sabatini – her first novel.

Although no release date has been confirmed, the next book does have a working title, San Placido Garden, and a setting, Italy and North Africa in the Second World War. The theme, however, is only beginning to be explored. Says Sabatini: “I want to create a character who is sympathetic, who is a fascist but struggling with the notion of which side [they should be on], to explore the conflict of loyalty to your brothers in arms and an emerging sense that the ideology is just bankrupt.”