Radiance

Shaena Lambert is a fiction writer and poet. Radiance is her first novel. Her book of short stories, The Falling Woman (Vintage, 2002), was chosen by The Globe and Mail as a top book of the year and was short-listed for the Danuta Gleed Award. The Falling Woman was published internationally by Virago Press in the United Kingdom and by Berlin Verlag in Germany in 2003.Her fiction and poetry have appeared in many prominent journals and magazines, including Toronto Life, Image (Dublin), Marvels & Tales — The Journey of Fairytale Studies, Nimrod, Descant, The Malahat Review, The North American Review and Prism International, as well as being selected for The Journey Prize Anthology, a yearly publication of Canada’s best new short fiction.Lambert received her BFA in Honours Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and has studied fiction with Margaret Atwood, Bonnie Burnard and Peter Carey. She teaches creative writing by correspondence through the Humber School for writers in Toronto.Lambert lives in Vancouver with her husband, Bob Penner, and their two children, Peter and Lucy. Lambert wrote most of Radiance over a five-year period, between 2001 and 2006 – but she describes the book as having taken many more years to gestate. Her first inspiration came in the mid-1980s, when as an anti-nuclear activist she volunteered to unpack artifacts from the Hiroshima bombing. Shaken by the horror carried in the small items she touched – a burnt stone, a charred tricycle, the fused hands of a pocket watch – and by her own instinctive fear at touching these objects, Lambert began to research Hiroshima and mid-century North American attitudes to the atomic bomb. She travelled with her family to Hiroshima to do further research in the 1990s, but found the topic too difficult to write about and so put her notes away for a number of years. It was after 9/11 that she felt a fresh urge to work on the novel. "Writing fiction can be like that," says Lambert. "Sometimes you have to let the story take shape in the dark, trusting that it’s not a monster (while perhaps secretly believing that it is), never attacking it with too much rational thought or criticism. Even when writing about the searing brightness of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima – maybe especially in this case – a too-bright light could kill the story. For me, certainly, approaching Radiance sideways, with my eyes half-closed, was the only way I could say what I needed to say."