Sofi Papamarko’s debut book of short stories, Radium Girl, came out with Wolsak & Wynn’s Buckrider Books imprint in May, 2021. It was shortlisted for the 2022 ReLit Award in the short fiction category and was the gold winner of the 2021 Foreword INDIES award for short stories.

The stories in this book all create such full and often strange worlds. I felt as though many of them could have (and should) been made into movies, in and of themselves. They’re about conjoined twins, pedophiles, creepy magicians, a family in a bomb shelter, women working in a radium factory … how do you come up with the ideas for and then create the worlds for your stories?
Thank you so much for saying they should be movies! It is my greatest (and unlikeliest!) hope that a production company or major studio out there feels the same way someday.

Different stories have different origins. Sometimes it’s an image. Sometimes it’s a line of dialogue. With “Margie & Lu,” the story about conjoined twins, the opening line came to me first. The story about the pedophile, “Tiny Girls,” was a challenge to myself to create a character as vile-yet-charming as Humbert Humbert. The title story was, and I can’t believe I’m admitting this, inspired by an article I read on Buzzfeed by Kate Moore. I picked up her book immediately and was enraged by this historical injustice I’d never known about.

Once I have my characters, the worlds build themselves.

A few of these stories are either set in the Baby Boomers’ heyday or focus on someone of the boomer generation in present day, and touch on the ignorance or the sort of insular worlds that are stereotypical of that generation. Was this something you consciously wanted to explore?

Interesting question! Many of the stories do take place in the eighties and nineties, but that’s primarily because those are decades I remember well (I was born in 1980). I hadn’t consciously attempted to explore the collective psyche of Baby Boomers, no. But it seems appropriate that they took over my book without even trying. Damn it, Boomers! Try to leave something for the rest of us!

From what I noticed on your website, it looks as though you used to write a dating column for Sun Media (with great titles like “Manscaping a Hairy Business” and “Is Nickelback a Dealbreaker?”). Did “Everyone I Love is Dead”—a story where a woman fools old, freshly widowed men into going on dates with women their own age when all they want is “youth, beauty and access to sex”—come out of that writing experience?

I was a relationships and sex columnist for several different newspapers for quite a lot of years. However! I would say my perspectives on dating, relationships, and matchmaking were primarily inspired by my being a literal matchmaker for six years. I founded Friend of a Friend Matchmaking in 2013 – the same year I started writing Radium Girl. Friend of a Friend still exists under lovely new management, but I’m no longer involved. I learned so much about love and lust and relationships and loneliness during that era – not all of it good -- and I suppose I had to unpack that in some way.

Many of the stories in this book are about being seen—characters wanting to be seen, or having to hide their monstrous selves, or ignorant characters not seeing beyond their own noses. Would you say that’s the most important element of human existence—seeing others for who they are?

If you mean love and acceptance, then yes. I think being loved and feeling accepted are fundamental human needs. For much of my life (and I know many others can relate), I felt like an outsider and as though I were fundamentally romantically unlovable. Those feelings certainly wormed their way into the characters in this book. But nearing the end of writing Radium Girl, at the not-so-tender age of 37, I finally met my partner/baby daddy/soon-to-be husband. So that story I told myself, about myself, changed. That said, I am grateful to have had the emotions and experiences and humiliations and disappointments that helped to shape Radium Girl. They also shaped me.

Finally, do you have anything else in the works?

I’m working on a novel that began in a deluge while I was pregnant with my daughter during the pandemic. It’s on hold these days because I’m exhausted all the time (said daughter is a highly energetic toddler), but I hope to pick it up again soon.

One thing I ask authors to do is to provide me with a song list – either songs that are inspired by your book, or maybe songs that you listened to while writing the book.
I love this question! Here’s a list of songs I listened to repeatedly while writing Radium Girl. One or two of them even inspired scenes/characters, but that’s between me and the music.

Radium Girls Soundtrack

“The Way it is, The Way it Could be,” by The Weather Station

“Save Yourself,” by Sharon van Etten

“Burn the Witch,” by Radiohead

“Johnny Feelgood,” by Liz Phair

“Love’s Gone Bad,” by Chris Clark

“Rattlesnakes,” by Lloyd Cole & The Commotions

“Moi Je Joue,” by Brigitte Bardot

“Raising the Skate,” by Speedy Ortiz

“Black Star,” by David Bowie

“Tell Me When It’s Over,” by The Dream Syndicate

Sofi Papamarko is a former regular columnist for The Toronto Star, Sun Media Newspapers and Metro Canada. She’s also written for The Globe & Mail, Chatelaine, Flare, CBC, Reader’s Digest, Salon, Exclaim! and many other publications, both living and dead. Her short stories have appeared in Taddle Creek, Maisonneuve, Room, and The Toronto Star. She lives in Toronto with her partner and their children.