I've been meaning to ask you (interviews)

But what if I’d just farted in front of him? What if he’d been the sort of person I could fart in front of?

I've been meaning to ask Susan Sanford Blades

May 04, 2025

What is your first memory of existing?

This probably isn’t the first memory, but this came to mind: me, a tiny girl walking with my dad in the aisles of Beaver Lumber, taking like twenty little hurried steps for every one gigantic step he took.

What is your first memory of being creative (writing, art making, etc.)?

I was always writing illustrated stories when I was young, and I still have some, but the first actual memory I can conjure is of a pretend magazine article I was writing about my Cabbage Patch Kids going on vacation.

I think it was a travel article about Bermuda, because my parents had recently gone on a trip to Bermuda (without my sister and me—they would go on these “alone” vacations and always come back happier than I’d ever seen them. It led me to believe my sister and I were the source of all of their misery).

I remember dressing my Cabbage Patch Kids (I had five of them) in various outfits and posing them in different scenarios—like eating ice cream cones or riding their “moped,” which I think was a little doll-sized motorbike I’d made with my dad out of wood and an old bicycle seat—and taking photos of them in my basement. This would’ve been with a real film camera, so then I guess I had to wait to get the photos developed and then cut them out and glue them into the travel article I was writing by hand or maybe it was with our IBM computer and dot-matrix printer.

I’m really amazed at the patience I had, not to mention the time and space, for this project.

What is the best or worst dream you ever had?

My dream to be a writer is both the best and worst dream. haha. But really, sometimes I wish I could just have free time like a normal person and not be constantly thinking about a writing project or feeling like I should be writing. To actually relax. Wouldn’t that be nice sometimes?

What is your favourite or significant coincidence story to tell?

This is just a weird indication of my naïveté, maybe, but when my kids were little and in swimming lessons, I was waiting for them on the last day of lessons where sometimes parents sat to wait, on the edge of the hot tub at the Oak Bay Rec. Centre. This man sat next to me and sort of awkwardly tried to engage me in conversation. He said something about the wet edge of the hot tub and then offered his towel to sit on, or maybe he dried a section off with his shirt or something. I remember being a bit grossed out, and not wanting to partake, whatever it was.

Then, when I got home, there was an email from him saying I’m the guy who you met at the pool today. I remember he said something like, “I’m the one who protected you from the wet,” and I remember feeling particularly icky about that phrasing: the wet. It felt very pervy to me. He went on to say, I knew I recognized you from somewhere—I’ve seen you read your writing. And then maybe he asked me to meet him to discuss my work or something.

I was like, what? That’s wild! I’m famous! At that point, I did not have a book published and I don’t even know if I’d ever done a public reading. How did he know I was a writer? I later realized he probably saw my son’s last name on the swimming report card I’d been holding that day at the hot tub and had Googled it and found my blog. Me and my sons are probably the only Sanford Blades in existence.

Do you have a preferred emotion to experience? What is it and why? Or is there an emotion that you detest having and why?

I’m a big fan of enneagram and I’m a true blue 4: the hopeless romantic or the individualist, depending on which source you consult.

I sometimes pretend I wish I wasn’t a 4, but actually that’s such a 4 thing to say—I totally love the fact that I’m guided by my emotions.

A 4’s kryptonite is nostalgia. I love curling up with my diary and wallowing in desire for things to be like they used to be, in the glorified past, when I had the perfect love with my perfect ex-boyfriends (whyever did we split? I dunno) or when my kids adored me and they behaved perfectly or when music was actually good and exciting.

As for an emotion I detest: jealousy. You know why. I mean not you, Kathryn, but like, the bigger you. Has anyone ever enjoyed being on the giving or receiving end of jealousy?

Can you recount a time (that you're willing to share) when you were embarrassed?

Probably all embarrassing stories have to involve farts, right?

This one is an after the fact extreme embarrassment. I had this boyfriend whom I adored but he was so perfect that he never farted in front of me, which meant that I obviously could never fart in front of him. We were together for three years and even travelled together, which made this holding in farts business a bit tricky at times.

My saving grace, I thought, was the shower. I knew that when I was in the shower, I couldn’t hear anything that was going on outside of the shower, so, for some reason, I thought also that everyone outside of the shower couldn’t hear what I was doing in the shower. I don’t know why I hadn’t figured out yet that this wasn’t the case, I was in my thirties.

Anyway, so whenever I’d shower on all the trips we’d taken or when I’d slept over at his place, I’d fart away all the farts I’d been storing up during our time together, just letting all these super loud farts rip, believing he couldn’t hear me in the next room.

I don’t remember exactly when I realized this wasn’t how it worked. Probably I just heard one of my kids do something in the shower one day and then it hit me like in those montages in movies when a character finally realizes the shit that’s been going down throughout the whole movie, really puts all the pieces together.

I probably had a flashback of all the loud farts I’d let out in all the showers throughout our entire relationship. I was broken up with him by then, but I just realized, oh my god, that whole time, he knew that I farted!

But what if I’d just farted in front of him? What if he’d been the sort of person I could fart in front of? We could still be together today. But he’s not that sort of person, is he?

Can you describe a strange or hilarious memory when something was the opposite of what you anticipated?

This probably fits into the embarrassing moment category too, but it’s sort of funny to me now. But also still sort of not.

In the fall after graduating from high school, there was a day when all the graduated Grade 12s came back to the school to pick up our yearbooks and to have all our former classmates sign them.

I remember asking to trade yearbooks with this boy who was super dreamy and popular. At a party a few months earlier, when we were still in high school, I’d had a moment with him—we were both incredibly drunk, of course—where we’d hung out and he called me Party Girl. This was seared into my memory, of course, because he was dreamy and popular. I, however, was not.

I’d written a message in his yearbook, probably some sort of reminiscence of that night, and signed it Party Girl, but when he handed my yearbook back to me, he’d written something like: I’m not sure what to say, I don’t really know you, but have a nice life.

What do you cherish most about this world?

Those amazing pom-pom cherry blossoms, the sun on my skin, the ocean, whales! Stationery, real paper books, patios, grass, hockey, Edmonton’s river valley in the fall, emotional connections, my children—especially witnessing the love they have for each other.

What would you like to change about this world?

I wish computery technological inventions had stopped with email. I do love that I no longer have to rely on speaking to people over the telephone to communicate, but that’s it. I hate everything else that came after email. Let’s go back and stop at the invention of email. No Blackberry, no smart phones, no apps, no social media, no AI, no robot takeover.

What advice would you give to your younger self? Your younger self could be you at any age.

I’d tell high school me: you are actually really fucking cool. Nobody knows it yet, but you are. Also, you don’t owe the boys who are interested in you anything. Not one fucking thing. It’s not your job to protect boys’ feelings.

Do you believe in ghosts? Why or why not?

Absolutely.

First, because there are so many people with stories. But, just last summer, I was staying in this Air BnB on Galiano Island, and it was its own little cabin on someone’s property. It was super cute, but it was really cheap. Like way too cheap given its location, privacy, amenities, etc. I couldn’t see any reason why it was so cheap, except the bed was super old and saggy and squeaky.

Once night fell, I started feeling a bit creeped out. I went into the bedroom and felt really scared. I noticed there were these creepy dolls on top of the wardrobe—wooden dolls in the shape of a man and a woman with stern, painted-on faces.

I took them out of the bedroom and put them in a closet in the living room but even still, when I went to bed, I felt really uneasy. I couldn’t sleep the whole time I was there. I definitely think that little cabin was haunted.

Maybe those wooden dolls held the spirits of a couple who died in that cabin and they were mad that I hadn’t let them watch me sleep?

If you could send your love to anyone, who would it be and why?

I think I would send my love to my parents. They’re at the age now that I think they might die before I have the relationship I wish I could have with them.

Black and white photo of author Susan Sanford Blades — Susan Sanford Blades

Susan Sanford Blades lives on the territory of the Lekwungen peoples, also known as the Xwsepsum and Songhees Nations (Victoria, Canada). Her debut novel, Fake It So Real, won the 2021 ReLit Award in the novel category and was a finalist for the 2021 BC and Yukon Book Prizes’ Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Her short fiction has been anthologized in The Journey Prize Reader: The Best of Canada’s New Writers and has been published in literary magazines across Canada as well as in the United States and Ireland. Her fiction has most recently been published in Gulf Coast, The Malahat Review, The Masters Review, and in Send My Love to Anyone. She runs the Wild Prose Reading Series in Victoria and publishes a quarterly newsletter, Gurls to the Front! which celebrates mostly small-press Canadian books by female and nonbinary writers.

My debut novel-in-stories, Fake It So Real, which contains all the bodily functions and fluids you could ever ask for, is available to order from your local, independent bookstore or directly from Harbour Publishing.

Buy Fake It So Real

Publisher’s Description

Fake It So Real takes on the fallout from a punk-rock lifestyle—the future of “no future”—and its effect on the subsequent generations of one family. In June of 1983, Gwen, a gnarly Nancy Spungen look-alike, meets Damian, the enigmatic leader of a punk band. Seven years and two unplanned pregnancies later, Damian abandons Gwen, leaving her to raise their two daughters, Sara and Meg, on her own.

The voices of Gwen, Sara and Meg weave a raw and honest tapestry of family life told from the underbelly, focused on the grey area between right and wrong, the idea that we are all equally culpable and justified in our actions, and the pain and ecstasy that accompany a life lived authentically.

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