{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02435026925778506, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0034340123312260984, 'mean_word_length': 4.549588566478995, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 1, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 1, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Memento Mori: Pushing Past the “Dead Queer” Stereotype in Fiction about Suicide

Writing a novel about suicide without taking the more predictable, formulaic route of concentrating the narrative on the suicide victim and her or his immediate family and/or close friends can prove to be a challenging process. It is especially challenging to write about a non-heterosexual character who has committed suicide without the risk of turning the novel into a “dead queer” novel – a genre of text often accepted by and celebrated in mainstream North American film and literary culture. Texts such as Joyce Carol Oates’ The Falls show, however, that there is a way to write a fictional text about suicide without succumbing to the “dead queer” suicide plot formula. Building on Oates’ unusual textual treatment of the suicide victim in The Falls , Canadian novelist Suzette Mayr explores Kenneth J. Doka’s notion of the “disenfranchised mourner.” By focusing on the characters of the “disenfranchised mourners” in her novel-in-progress, Mayr was able to write her fourth novel Monoceros without relying on pre-existing narrative formulae.

I didn't know him at all, but his death had a definite impact on our small household. For my partner it was the last straw: she quit her job at the Catholic school and, making a major career change, she decided to apply to graduate school and study the institutionalization of homophobia in Canadian Catholic schools. Although I had never met the boy, I was struck with the lingering sadness that I think most people feel when they hear that someone very young has taken her or his own life. I was also disturbed by the injustice of the fact that his death went publicly unacknowledged and his bullies unpunished in any formal way. I felt very keenly that the boy who'd committed suicide was a soldier fallen in battle, but his struggle was not recognized as such, particularly in the context of Alberta (coincidentally the last province in Canada to allow same sex marriage) and his Catholic school where queerness would have been either unrecognized or addressed only as love the sinner, hate the sin. I was struck by the injustice of the fact that even though being LGBTQ is not illegal in Canada, an inordinate number of young people still kill themselves because of it, one Alberta study concluding that homosexually oriented males account for 62.5% of Alberta suicide attempts (Bagley 24). Although the school's refusal to openly acknowledge or publicly mark the boy's death for fear of encouraging copycat behaviour among the other students made sense, I wondered how the problem of the high rate of suicides and suicide attempts among queer youth might

Suzette Mayr
Canada and Beyond 1-2 (2011): 54 ever be solved if suicide and queerness in general were topics that were never explicitly addressed, especially in a publicly-funded Catholic school setting? How could I write about this and do it justice?
All of these issues were at the forefront for me in the process of starting work on the novel. Because the novel would be so unlike the novels I had written before, the writing came with a number of constraints that I had to impose or were necessarily imposed upon me if the book were to not be part of what I saw as a worrying phenomenon in mainstream North American culture of the "dead queer" genre. By this I mean the fact that non-heterosexual characters are rarely central characters in film or mainstream texts, and when they are, those films or texts that do receive significant attention usually include that disturbingly popular character of the queer man or woman who is doomed and/or dies either directly or indirectly because of his or her sexuality. It became essential that I write a fiction that, although it addressed queer suicide, could not be as easily read as another example of the "dead queer" genre. I needed to know if there was a formula for this "genre," and if so how I could avoid it in writing my book about a queer suicide in Alberta. I also needed to challenge myself as a writer, and not inadvertently follow my own formula and reproduce books I had already written. As such, I gave myself a number of constraints on the level of plot, narrative, character, and language: 1) I did not want to write a typical "dead queer" story, but I also did not want the alternative of yet another cute coming-out story. This was going to be difficult when writing a book centering on a young, dead, gay man.
2) The novel had to take place in Alberta.
3) The boy would not appear alive in flashbacks -a common strategy I'd noticed in other fictions about suicide. He could appear, but if he did, it would be in the present, as a corpse.

4) No ghosts allowed -every other book I'd written had fantastic or magical elements
and I wanted to see if I could do a novel without any fantasy or magic.

5)
The book had to be queer even on the level of the sentencemy solution to this was to borrow from Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein because of their disregard for conventional grammar and Stein's use of repetition appealed to me. To do this I would start every sentence in the novel with the word "Because." 6) I would focus on the "disenfranchised mourner": Commonly in texts about suicide or trauma, the story centres on the person who has died and his or her immediate circle of friends and family as in texts such as Anne Enright's novel The Gathering, Salvatore Antonio's play In Gabriel's Kitchen and Bechdel's Fun Home. Joyce Carol Oates's novel The Falls, which begins with a gay man committing suicide, presented a model that was closest to what I was looking for in that the majority of that novel revolves around characters who never knew the main "dead queer" character, but they are still affected by his death. Set in the 1950s, this novel opens with a man named Gilbert Erskine throwing himself into Niagara Falls while on his honeymoon because he realizes that he can never love his wife because he is in love with another man. Once Gilbert commits suicide, he never appears again as a character, except in his new wife/widow's seven-day vigil on the shores of the river, and her few brief memories of their disastrous wedding night. The rest and structure-wise The Falls is highly unusual, Oates disappointingly seems to rely on the stereotype of the "dead queer" to jump-start the story. I absolutely could not have the boy's suicide in my novel appear simply as a plot device.
Although I did not appreciate the way Oates seems to be using her queer character's suicide as a plot device, her novel's branching out into the lives of characters who have no direct relationship with Gilbert Erskine, but who nonetheless are affected by his suicide, was a provocative one. Noticing the depth of my partner's grief when the boy in her school died, I realized that there was little fiction available that examined the outer circles of people affected by suicide, the ripple effects of the suicide, what Kenneth J. Doka refers to as the "disenfranchised mourners." Doka defines disenfranchised grief in the following way: "There are circumstances . . . in which a person experiences a sense of loss but does not have a socially recognized right, role, or capacity to grieve. The person suffers a loss but has little or no opportunity to mourn publicly" (3). By concentrating on a selection of disenfranchised mourners as the main characters of my novel, perhaps I could avoid the "formula" of narratives about suicide and make something new. Ha! Easier said than done.
I immediately encountered problems. By deciding that the boy and his family would not be the centre of the book, a writer friend of mine pointed out to me that I was saddled with an unwieldy narrative structure from the very beginning: seven unconnected, distinct characters and their separate storiesconnecting them to each other was going to be very difficult. In addition to this, every sentence was going to start with the word "Because" but I had to somehow prevent the language from being too repetitive; I had a gay main character, and it was supposed to be a book that centered on

Suzette Mayr
Canada and Beyond 1-2 (2011): 58 his suicide but was not going to be about a "dead queer." Essentially I'd let the novel jump into its own Niagara Falls before I'd even begun.
I recalled from writing a previous novel that the writing method that had proven the most useful to me as a writer in the past draws from a technique I'd heard Michael Ondaatje uses -and maybe it's not even true. "They" say that how Ondaatje writes a novel is that he begins by writing disconnected, non-sequential, unrelated scenes, images and snippets of dialoguewhat basically sounds to me like eating dessert firstand then after he's written all the scenes, he bridges them together, and voila! A novel. heterosexual couple in a story about a queer youth who killed himself was perhaps counterintuitive. So I started again, and on a whim changed the pronouns in the bickering husband and wife scene from "he" and "she" to "he" and "he," and the "he" and "he" would be two male characters selected from the seven fictional disenfranchised mourners: the couple bickering over the box of dishes would be the Catholic school principal Max and the school's guidance counselor Walter. Suddenly, I was able to generate 100 pages of story.
I gave the 100 pages to two readers with very different aesthetics, one a poet, one a prose writer, and they both hated that initial draft. They hated that every sentence in the 100 pages started with the word "Because" and found the repetition tedious; they both said that all the characters were interchangeable and that I clearly didn't know how to manage them. They asked, why is there a girl obsessed with unicorns in this book, and both observed that she didn't fit in at all. Even though the book was loosely structured around the seven characters and seven days, structurally it was still an amorphous blob. I know nothing about music, but I was so moved by this song and Rufus Wainwright's beautiful voice and his Canadianness and unabashed gayness, that I bought the CD immediately and played the song over and over again -and realized that I'd finally found my structure and I'd figured out how to end the book.
After listening repeatedly to the song is "Do I Disappoint You," I decided that it was obviously a love song about a torturous love affair sung by a man to a man that starts on a drum climax, hits bigger and bigger climaxes and then ends on a few cute notes played on a flute -I was moved by the excessiveness and decadence of the orchestration, the over-the-top lyrics, the references to Hell, the repetition and upping the orchestral ante that comes with every repetition. I approached the song as a text I could transcreate, and basically choreographed my novel manuscript to the song. The "Because" sections would operate as the book's repeating chorus.
After giving in to the operatic excessiveness the book had been missing all along and settling on a loose, repetitive "song" structure, and after watching many episodes of Star Trek, I realized that the giant collection of characters I had assembled didn't have a lot in common, but they did have the dead boy in common. By having him in common, they were in fact their own little solar system, and perhaps he was the sun in the middle of it. Maybebecause the boy had diedtheir solar system was circling around a dead star, a supernova that was burning everything up in its path as it expanded and exploded.
It incinerates everything around it, or perhaps burns away the impurities and leaves unicorns: I found out that during a period in the middle ages, unicorns were often incorporated in Catholic iconography because of their association with virgins, that there were actually virgin cults around unicorns, and a strong association was made between the capturing of a unicorn and the passion of the Christ with the unicorn as a stand-in for Christ. Unicorns belong to the age of chivalry, the characters on Star Trek often trade heavily on this notion of or discourse around chivalry and codes of honour. I learned that there is a unicorn constellation called Monoceros which is positioned close to Orion, and maybe my solar system centered around an exploding sun was actually also a constellation.
I had a marvelous coincidence of themes blooming out of all this material. A constellation structure permitted me the freedom as a writer to find multiple meanings in the same cluster of characters. The title of the book would be Monoceros.
The Suzette Mayr waymy manuscript was now 300 pages long.
Monoceros will be published very soon, and looking over the final drafts I see that many of my initial constraints have fallen away, and that as a writer I do in fact have