David Huebert explores the complexity of our relationship with oil in novel Oil People

Bookends with Mattea Roach23:34David Huebert: Exploring the complexity of our relationship with oil through fiction

When Halifax-based writer David Huebert moved to southwestern Ontario to do his PhD, he was immediately intrigued by the towns and villages he found as he was looking around the area.

The names of these places, including Petrolia and Oil Springs, sent him down a research "rabbit-hole" that led to his fascination with the prominent history of oil in Ontario which was actually the first place oil was produced for commercial use in North America.

"This history of oil seemed to me, very literally and metaphorically, buried in the area," he told Mattea Roach on CBC's new author interview show Bookends.

"There are these traces there, but it was sort of almost an open secret."

• Past winner David Huebert shares 5 reasons to enter the CBC Short Story Prize

This "open secret" ultimately became the premise for his debut novel Oil People, which is set in southwestern Ontario and weaves together two narratives and timelines to unravel family secrets and the toxic yet powerful nature of oil.

"I'm definitely someone that is very, very immersed in geography, geology, ecology," said Huebert, who holds a PhD in human-animal relations in American literature.

"It's one of the ways I compute my surroundingsto write fiction about a place. On the flip side of that, one of the ways that I express myself as a fiction writer is to tap into the ecologies around me, the non-human life around me."

This keen interest in ecological systemsis apparent in his 2016 CBC Short Story Prize-winning entry Enigma, about the end of a beloved horse's life, and his two short story collections that draw on natural elements: Peninsula Sinking and Chemical Valley.

• The CBC Short Story Prize is now open!

In Oil People, Huebert tells the story of 13-year-old Jade Armbruster in 1987, who is living on the family's deteriorating oil farm, as her parents decide what to do about the land and their business. Jade's teenage experiences are juxtaposed with the 1862 story of Clyde Armbruster, who built the oil farm, and the rivalry he develops with his neighbours.

"Many generations have to live with the consequences of [Clyde's] decisions, which were clearly problematic decisions but at the same time, [he] personally is also very caught up in historical forces that are beyond his control," said Huebert.

"A huge element of this is people trying to live their lives: people that are not necessarily that well-off trying to feed their families and people just trying to get by."

The 'magic'of oil

To Huebert, as much as oil isa contentious topic, it's also a bit magical. The substance is essentially a character in the novel, affecting the characters in ways both physical and spiritual.

"I would like to think of oil as an animated creaturely presence in this novel," said Huebert. "One of the ways that it creeps into the characters is through their bodies, through disease, through rot. It also creeps into the landscape and some of the animals around them in this way as well."

Huebert also noted the massive way oil affects our understanding of time and how that plays into the dual timeline in Oil People.

"The 1862 seam and the 1987 seam bounce off each other [reflecting] the way that oil affects temporal thinking and temporal life," said Huebert.

Because oil itself is made up from the remains of animals and plants that lived millions of years ago, when we use it now, we're almost bringing it back to life, he explained.

"Oil makes us temporally crazy in certain ways. We're like temporally deranged," he said.

What's under the surface

With Oil People, Huebert wanted readers to think about oil in a way that they maybe hadn't before.

"Part of that means just looking at it, understanding it, facing it and confronting it which I don't think we do enough of," he said.

But while Huebert's fiction holds a mirror to some parts of society that we don't always want to see, his is a "distorted environmental mirror" that manages to hold room for moments of happiness and connection.

"That's something that I always have to come back to," he said. "I tried to make it fun at times ... to give the characters a little space for joy and intimacy and music and dance and make the story live in its own way."

This interview was produced by Ryan B. Patrick.