I first heard about Michelle Butler Hallet when she won the David Adams Richards Prize in 2004, for Obliged to Drink Bad Water, and since that time, Michelle has released three well-received books, been anthologized in publications such as The Vagrant Revue of New Fiction, and most recently in Hard ol Spot, won the 2006 Arts & Letters award for her dramatic script, Aphasia, as well as having written several other short scripts workshopped at various festivals. And, so we’re clear she wears every hat a writer can, she has poetry out there as well, including a publication in Contemporary Verse 2: The Canadian Journal of Poetry and Critical Thinking. Moreover, she has worked in books-related roles and is or has been associated with various prestigious and important literary journals, such as Riddle Fence and The Antigonish Review.
What fuels all this work? I’ve gathered that tea seems to play a big role, and an awe of Flannery O’Connor perhaps. (I’m only speculating. Also: I am jealous of her prolific output.)
The one thing you’ll hear said, consistently, about Michelle Butler Hallett’s work is that it is hard to categorize. It’s unique; rare in its style, delivery, and effect on a reader. I’ve felt mentally exercised by her work, and I give that out as a compliment, and, what better a compliment than to have everyone agreeing her work defies categorization? The Globe and Mail has even said, “Butler Hallett seems often to be creating from a subliminal place, riding on intuition, unencumbered by the counsel of editors.” Books in Canada were apt offering up two words to describe her writing, “Economy and power.”
The shadow of grace (2006), her debut and collection of short fiction, was graced with the following, spot-on front-cover endorsement by CanLit icon Michael Crummey, “A rare debut, a collection that takes more risks than some writers take in a lifetime. And Michelle Butler Hallett has the talent to match that courage. She has command of an astonishing range of voices, places and era and never shies from confronting the thorniest, most troubling questions about what it means to be human. More please, ASAP.”
Double-Blind (2007) was shortlisted for the Sunburst award, and, the jury summarized it as “Sanity, madness, torture in the name of science—Double-blind is wonderfully original while chillingly based in history. It really shook us up. Through the chronically self-deceived mind of the narrator, the novel delves into profound questions of ethics in a morally ambiguous world, and comes up with tragically ironic answers. The writing is incredibly layered, with metaphor and symbol perfectly balanced against the hard neutrality of scientific language.”
Sky Waves (2008) really exemplifies the whole can’t-be-categorized bit. It’s told as a “drew.” I plucked this description right off her website: “Throughout ninety-eight non-linear but interconnected chapters and several different narrators, characters, and storylines are networked together, almost as a mural against a timeline of 1901 to 2005. Sky Waves explores the often funny and often sad human need for — and fear of — meaningful communication.”
Salty Ink Q & A with Michelle Butler Hallett
Salty Ink: Off the top of your head, without struggling for “favourites,” name one or two books you really liked by a fellow Atlantic Canadian author.
MBH: Lives of Short Duration, by David Adams Richards; Right Away Monday, by Joel Thomas Hynes.
Salty Ink: How did you end up writing books?
MBH: It’s a bit spooky. I bashed at a typewriter before I could read. I copied out the text of storybooks before I went to kindergarten, yet I felt I had some trouble learning to read. (I could read already, not sure how, but the teaching methods in school utterly confused me at first.) I used reams of white typing paper for my own comic books. In second grade, just before Christmas break, I finally recognized that this ‘creative writing / language arts’ work Miss Ellsworth set us to meant the same stuff I did at home . I understood motive and desire for a lovely moment there and saw – did not decide, saw – that I would be a writer. I feel very much like a conduit some days, a channel. I do not choose the stories I tell; they seem to choose me.
Salty Ink: What’s your main goal when you write a piece?
MBH: To let the characters speak. To stay sane. To keep the story honest. To finish it.
Salty Ink: Of all your works, do you have favourite, or hold one more dear, if so, why?
MBH: Can’t say I do, but I have some characters I really love. Keefer Breen turns up in two stories in The shadow side of grace and twice, unnamed, in the background in Sky Waves. A good friend’s after me to write a novel about Keefer, but Keef needs a stern linear realism – and to tell me what he’s been up to. My doomed hard cases – Kit Marlowe in my play Peter’s Accent, Harry Singer in the novella Obliged to Drink Bad Water, Nichole Wright and Gabriel Furey in Sky Waves – they fight. Fight hard. And they love, despite their own suffering. The children in Double-blind: I feel such sorrow for them, because the institutionalized and specific psychiatric abuse they suffer has plenty of precedent; read up on Ewen Cameron or the Duplessis orphans if you’d like to lose several nights’ sleep … and they’re just Canadian content.
Salty Ink: What book of yours came the easiest/hardest, and any guesses as to why?
It all hurts. My books – one story collection, one first-person linear novel, and one multi-narrator networked novel – are all quite different from one another, and they each needed different kinds of writing. The shadow side of grace exposes all my worst weaknesses. Double-blind, with its unreliable first-person narrator and weird subject matter, helped drive me towards a depressive collapse. Me, Prozac and the black dog – we’re old friends now. That kind of acceptance and recognition of histories fuels Sky Waves, too, which is about communication and love and how, like a net, they bind us. I continue to work with themes of recognition and history in the novel I’m clewing up now. Some characters from Sky Waves recur in the next novel. Characters recur all over my work, in fact; I want to build an interconnected fictive world.
Salty Ink: What is your favourite part of the writing process? Your least favourite?
MBH: I love to outline, and I love to revise. I find the first draft, fighting past all the demonic voices prophesying failure, by the far the most difficult part.
Salty Ink: What has been the most memorable moment of you writing career to date?
MBH: A night in Miramichi, New Brunswick, when I got to hang out with friends Judy Bowman, Lee Thompson and Doug Underhill and unexpectedly receive the honour of becoming a Daughter of the River, an honourary Miramichier. Later the same evening David Adams Richards told me that the last time he spoke to Alistair MacLeod, they enthusiastically discussed my work and talent. (I studied with both Richards and MacLeod through the Humber School for Writers.) A potent night. One I return to when I fear I’ll never get another sentence right.
Salty Ink: What’s next, any works in progress?
MBH: Lots. For now, I’m only willing to mention a novel that wrestles with history, histories, harm and healing – with the odd laugh, of course – and a collection of short stories that knife-fight with medical misadventure, self-determination and power.
Salty Ink: As a writer of both novels and short fiction, do you have a favourite medium? Do you see short fiction as its own distinctive form of writing than novel writing, and if so, how so?
MBH: Good lord, yes. Quite distinct. Why, oh why do we in Canada treat the short story as some sort of finger-exercise for novel writing? It’s like we’re ashamed of it, the way a terribly respectable Edwardian family might be ashamed of a child born with an alleged but invisible defect they insist exists. A novel allows for longer development arcs and more conflicts. A short story is more focused, and, arguably, somewhat more intimate. A novel feels to me like a long and significant conversation. A short story is what a stranger whispers to me in the fog while grabbing my arm hard enough to leave marks. Very different. Just as stage plays and screenplays differ greatly, or sonnets and epics.
Salty Ink: You’ve been described as, and declare yourself, “part-steampunk.” Enlighten us on that term, steampunk.
MBH: I can’t define ‘steampunk’ because then I will impose my own mental limitations on it. I can comment on some of what steampunk is about. It’s an aesthetic that celebrates human potential though recycled art and the muse of the road not taken. Ask yourself: what if we’d never gone digital? What if dirigibles remained the dominant form of air travel? What if we always got our hands dirty and felt the satisfaction of building something really cool out of, I dunno, locomotive parts, a discarded teapot and a Jacob’s ladder? Steampunk, one can argue, grows out of cyberpunk (think Blade Runner) but is usually nowhere near as dystopic. I use steampunk tropes in my work – and science fiction tropes, historical fiction tropes, and literary realism tropes — but first I take them apart, adjust gears and recalibrate to my own needs and liking. I love the optimism.
Salty Ink: You say Sky Waves is written as a “drew.” Can you explain that term to us, and, why you chose this structure for Sky Waves?
MBH: ‘Drew’ is old Newfoundland English for a row of mesh in a fishing net, sometimes 98 or 100 meshes. Because the novel is set in an historical and then speculative Newfoundland and Labrador, one which votes Responsible in 1949, I figured a fishing net as a governing structure might work – never know what you’ll haul in after you cast out. Sky Waves gets told in 98 chapters, and each is connected somehow to the preceding and following chapter, even though the novel as a whole is non-linear. The individual storylines go forward in their development, even if they, too, jump around a bit in time and narrative voice. Sky Waves talks about families, histories, communication and love, and how we are, ultimately, intertwined. Even entangled. For better or worse.
