George Murray is an award-winning, internationally published, and a much lauded poet, also well known as the man behind Bookninja.com. Whiteout is his sixth book.

Click here for yesterday’s review of and a sample poem from Whiteout.

They’re saying you’ve peaked with this collection. You’re certainly on top of your game. But do you think a writer gets “better” over time of just different?

Peaked?! I certainly hope not. How disappointing that would be! I appreciate the confidence it shows, but it’s one of those killing compliments. I still think of myself in my apprentice phase, which is to say that while this book is good, and while I might be successful in other ways in terms of my “career” as a poet (whatever that means), and am teaching others through various venues, I am also still learning who I am as a poet and what my art will be. I don’t think of being in an apprentice phase as an insult or pejorative judgement, I think of it as an asset. Why does everyone want to grow up so fast?

We kind of throw around these plaudits and blurbs for poets: “brilliant”, “top of their game”, “height of their powers”, etc., all of which are useful for publicity bumf, but which make no justifiable sense in the on-the-ground real world of writing. The most “successful” poets in the world will, over the course of their careers, maybe produce between 20 and 50 indelible poems — poems that are undeniably good and important to understanding the scope of their art. They will be studied in schools for their value to the local literature and traded among admirers for their value to beauty. In terms of poems that are undeniably PERFECT and important to the history of the world, a truly successful poet might get between one and five. I mean, let’s be realistic here. Seamus Heany, Wislawa Szymborska, WS Merwin, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, whomever you hold up as your hero: how many of their poems are actually great? How many are actually “perfect”? Ideally, I’d like to one day create one of these perfect poems. Until then, I’ll get as close to my definitions of good and great as I can. And this is why I still call myself an apprentice.

To actually answer (or avoid) the question: I am getting better over time, but I’ve watched many others get worse. So it’s largely dependent on the poet.

The backcover description and book design play heavily into the title, Whiteout. Explain the title to readers; if the book’s poems share a concept, what is it?

Most of my previous books had a shared concept or throughline, whether in terms of form, imagery, narrative, or that ugly university term, “theme”. I hadn’t really thought of Whiteout in that way, but as I built it, and discussed it with my editor at ECW, Michael Holmes, I realized the book does largely focus on seeking order in chaos. It’s a post-divorce book in much of its subject matter and, as such, plumbs and organizes that chaotic mental space and time, but it’s also about allowing that rampant confusion, grief, and chaotic rebirth to exist within the confines of a life that requires some illusion of dignity, stability, and grace. The cover is monochromatic and the back is clear and clean. Only the bars of colour on the spine show what’s going on inside: chaos and beauty.

Canadian folk band The Once adapted a poem of yours from this collection – “Song for Memory” – into a song. How did the collaboration come to be, and how closely did you work with them in their adapting the words into a song?

We worked fairly closely, passing the melody and words back and forth, and adapting them to fit. There were words in the original poem that just didn’t fit a song. Later, I even decided that many didn’t fit the poem. The poem itself was altered by the song, and made better, just as the melody was altered and made better by the words. It’s an incredibly interesting process and something I’m actively seeking to do more of. Very energizing.

Play the song here:
“Song for Memory” by The Once

In the opening poem, “Dante’s Sheppard,” you “revisit” 15 lines of a famous piece of work by Dante Alighieri. What was it about this piece that spurred you into writing a poem in reaction to it?

Many years ago while living in New York City, I was somehow invited to read as part of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine’s yearly marathon reading of Dante’s Inferno on Maundy Thursday (the day before Good Friday). I was assigned the first half of Canto 24, the canto of thieves, shared with American poet Mark Rudman. I studied the HELL out of that canto over and over in preparation (I read from the Ciardi translation), and having just returned from living in Italy, I began to translate the poem myself, starting with Canto 24. The first fifteen lines are an interesting parable, a respite from the narrative of Hell, in which a shepherd who has no stored grain for his sheep goes out one spring morning and finds the hills covered in frost, which means his flock won’t eat. He gets frustrated and goes inside and has a wee cry and by the time he’s done feeling sorry for himself, the sun has melted the snow. It’s beautiful. When I had a very similar experience of walking to the bank in the cold rain, the bank where I probably had very little money, I instantly made the association and thought, I wish I could write that poem instead of Dante. Well, I just did.

You’re not from Newfoundland, and yet Newfoundland is featured prominently in several of these poems. Has the place absorbed you this much, or are you still observing it with a poet’s eye and pen?

Newfoundland has become home for me. I’m very much here to stay. But place isn’t a primary consideration of my work, I don’t think. I don’t consider myself a “St. John’s” poet, or a “Newfoundland” poet, or even a “Canadian” poet. I’m a poet who writes in English, but I happen to live in Newfoundland, Canada, so these places sometimes appear in my poetry. It’s a rich place, culturally and visually, so it’s bound to have an effect. Would Brampton, Ontario appear in my poems if that’s where I’d ended up? Probably not, but who knows.

Many people claim Newfoundland artists are exceptionally supportive of each other, including those who move here. Would you agree?

The writing and arts community in Newfoundland has been exceptionally kind to me. I don’t know if it has much to do with the arts and more to do with Newfoundlanders. It’s just a kind, considerate, and welcoming place full of kind, considerate, and welcoming people. I know that sounds like a stereotype, but there you go. It’s my experience. I hope I end up like them.

Another common point of rumination in these poems is the passing of time, as seen in some of my favourites here, like “Child’s Play,” and “The Accident.” What’s drawn you to this subject matter?

Dude, I’m 41. One of the aphorisms in my previous book Glimpse read something like, “Turning 40 is like looking up and realizing it’s 2 in the afternoon.”

I think this is the first time you’ve published twice in a row with the same publisher? What are the pros of doing so?

I published twice with McClelland & Stewart and twice now with ECW. ECW has been very good to me in terms of publicity effort and spending real time and money on my book and tour. It’s a no-brainer to work with a press this good. Why would I leave?

Sometimes publishers are like people: you need to go regretfully through a few before you find the right one. After that, you know enough about what you want and don’t want to be happy and to make them happy.

This is where I am in both my personal and publishing lives. It’s kind of nice.

The poems in Whiteout have clearly been crafted with great care over time – not a word of it feels weak, extraneous, or out of place. How long have you been working on this collection to get it so solid? When do you know when a poem is done?

The book itself is comprised of poems from the last 10 years. These are mostly culled from poems I published in magazines and journals, but then edited with an eye to their flow and readability as a book. Several of the obviously divorce related poems are from the last few years, but other than that, they’re from many years of writing between longer projects. Books like Glimpse, The Rush to Here, and The Hunter were large “concept” books that were written as sequences. The work of Whiteout appeared in bits and pieces during this time, but fortunately seemed to be “of a piece” when collected together. I think that’s what they call “voice”, but I’m still skeptical of this.

Is there one writer in particular you’ve learned from, or, a piece of advice that’s stuck?

I am often wary of those platitudes that creative writing programmes foist on their young/new clientele, but there is one that’s always made sense to me: You can’t fix an empty page.

What’s the last great book or two you’ve read?

I quite liked Patrick de Witt’s The Sisters Brothers. It was one of the few well-hyped books I’ve ever read that fully lived up to its accolades. Exceptionally entertaining and thoughtful.

And what is it you’re looking for in a book – poetry fiction or otherwise – when you crack its spine?

I just want one thing in a book: words that won’t let me forget about them on the nightstand. You’d be surprised to see the number of bookmarks I have in shelved titles around my house; set 100 pages, or halfway, in.

Is there one fundamental trait all great writers share?

A heart.

Kerri Cull, curator of the fine book blog, The Book Fridge, put out a debut collection of poems this spring, called Soak. It’s an admirable, accessible, enjoyable read for pretty much everyone, given its truly universal appeal, and like any good collection, there’s a fair share of lines to stop you dead in your tracks and tip your hat to her poetic prowess, and insight into what makes a moment explode with enough meaning to mull over. In a previous article I did with Kerri, she  told me “Soak follows the life of one woman from childhood to death … Divided into three sections, the collection asks questions about the nature of identity, our connections with place and home, love and death.”

It’s written in three conceptual sections: Stretch, she’s told me, “refers to stretching toward something.  Its poems are about first experiences, innocence, and imagination.” the second section, Run focuses on “running toward what we will become, that part of your life where you have your first adult experiences, the time when you feel strong, powerful and certain.” The book closes with Bend, which “hosts poems that are about bending toward the end of something such as a period in your life, a relationship, death, be it yours or someone else’s.  The last poem tells the story of the speaker on the day of her own death.”

Read a poem from each section here: http://saltyink.com/2012/03/14/a-perfect-introduction-to-kerri-culls-soak-from-kerri-herself/

Share a title of a great book you’ve read so far in 2012.

Glass Boys by Nicole Lundrigan

What are you reading right now?

Why Men Lie by Linden MacIntyre, Mad Hope by Heather Birrell, Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins, Grace Must Wander by Stephanie McKenzie

Without struggling for favourites, who are some Atlantic Canadian poets you admire?

Randall Maggs, Robin McGrath, Michael Crummey

Fiction writers?

Wayne Johnston, Jessica Grant, Joel Thomas Hynes, Michelle Butler Hallett, Sara Tilley

Poetry, fiction, whatever: What are you looking for in a book when you crack its spine?

A good story.  It doesn’t have to be complex but it needs to be intimate, authentic and solid.  I want to experience something when I open a book. I don’t want to necessarily read a book because of dedication to craft; I want to remember a character, have a reaction.

What’s been a highlight so far for you and your brand new book?

A couple months ago I had a chance to go into my old high school and do some poetry workshops. It was the first time I stepped into that building since I graduated in 1997.  The students were so gracious and fun. We had a great time.

That same week I read at the March Hare in Corner Brook.  I participated about ten years ago as the “new poet” and this was the first time a new poet came back as an established author.  Being recognized like that by the Hare was really amazing.

What’s one piece of writing advice you’ve heard that’s really stuck?

To keep at it.

You published Soak with Breakwater Books. One of their best known writers was Al Pittman. What’s this I hear about you having learned a few things from Al? How did you two meet?

I did my undergrad degree at Grenfell in Corner Brook and while I wasn’t failing math for the second time or figuring out how to wear pants to the skirt-above-the-knee nights at the Studio and still get free drinks, I worked as a bartender at Casual Jack’s Roadhouse, a small pub that hosted arts events. Al was there on my first shift and he was there when I did my last. During that year, especially when it was slow, we’d sit at the end of the bar smoking, talking about poetry and exchanging stories.  He would red-pen my work and write little poems on napkins.

What sparked this concept for a collection of poems?

When I had a body of work I discovered a narrative thread so I felt that there could be some separation between the stages almost like chapters in a novel. I also wanted a trace of a storyline that readers could follow.  I’ve noticed, too, that readers tend to connect to the sections that represent their present life stage.

To quote “Make-Up”:

“She used to look like a doll, wore glasses at three:
big innocent eyes had no idea what they would see.”

What is it we all revere about childhood, and what is lost as we move into adulthood?

I think we can learn a lot from children, how they live in the moment and take things at face value.  They’re generally happy unless we do something to mess them up.  To pull from fiction: look at Wayne Johnston’s characters, Deacon Druken and Bobby O’Malley, We revere them for their innocent take on the world which is lost as we age and move into adulthood with all its stresses and responsibilities. It’s what makes his books so good. We fall in love with these characters in the same way we fall in love with the children in our own lives.

Most poetry fixates on emotional explorations of memories, or moments, or the natural world. Soak seems big on physical experience, the physical world, and descriptions thereof. For example, the fingerprint on the wine glass in “Mark,” or these lines, “Our skin is all over that apartment—
ledge corners, tops of door frames, book spines—
remaining silently the same.”

Was writing about the physical world a conscious effort?

I think it’s common for us to have trouble centering ourselves in that we’re always thinking about the future or the past or whatever.  Like Esther Greenwood in Plath’s The Bell Jar, I think we grapple with the Self at some point or another—what we want, the different paths our lives can take, who we want to be versus whom we feel we should be.  Esther’s Mind/Body disconnect is very wide and gets wider as her depression worsens.  I think we all have that potential to lose sight of our Self.  Focusing on the physical world—nature, our bodies, our senses–and using that to help us appreciate daily life can help keep the Self intact.

You’re teaching English these days. What if you weren’t a teacher? What’s one profession that got away?

Something that has to do with Women’s Rights.  Not sure what.  I got lots of working years left in me yet so maybe something like that will happen.  Who knows.

You’re working on a collection of short stories now, correct? Halfway done a collection yet? Can you tell us anything about it?

I haven’t really accomplished much with that yet.  The stories are mostly drafts of ideas.  I feel like an arsehole just saying that I’m working on a collection… it’s more of a grab bag of potential stories. Nothing to tell yet.

You run a great book blog over at The Book Fridge. I often ask myself why I sink so much unpaid time into a book blog. I have no answer beyond passion, excitement, and knowing books need a voice to get sold. What makes you blog books?

To talk about books.  To motivate readers to try new genres.  To get people reading.  Selfishness.  Love.

Because it really is quite fantastic, Laura Boudreau’s debut, Suitable Precautions, made the top 5 “Best Books of 2011,” after votes were cast by readers of the country’s finest book blog: the National Post‘s The Afterword.

Her deeply human and deftly crafted stories feature the right balance oddness and ordinariness to make them both original and universally appealing. Not to mention poignant and memorable. Her fine balance of humour and profound humanity — the kind that defines the best of ultra-modern Canadian short fiction — shines like stars here. I’m not alone in thinking so. Her work has appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including The Journey Prize Stories 22, Grain, The New Quarterly, PRISM international, Canadian Notes & Queries, and Oberon’s trustworthy Best Canadian Stories series.

Her fresh writing and engaging stories show good range, and are unified by, to quote the backcover, “a sense for the strange, tenuous fragility of human bonds.” Laura Boudreau is among the next wave of Canadian writers to watch for. That’s a fact. The thing with all the good first books coming out lately is they’re pumping new blood into CanLit, and diversifying it. I would, comfortably, place this book into the hands of any reader curious of what I mean by the new wave of contemporary CanLit. Suitable Precautions, among other things, captures  what it is to be human in an unfair and unpredictable world.

“Strange Pilgrims” was a stand-out Story for me. Tell us Something about it. Anything.

“Strange Pilgrims” is secretly one of my favourites. Its logic is 99% emotional and 1% rational, and yet the story manages to be plot-driven, almost detective-y. At one point I wanted to call the entire collection Strange Pilgrims and Other Stories, but that was before I realized that Gabriel García Márquez had beaten me to the punch.

In “Hurricane Season,” a tourist in Cuba chooses to stick around for an incoming, dangerous storm, while the rest of the tourists flee. What sparked the idea for this story?

I don’t typically look to images for inspiration, so it’s unusual that “Hurricane Season” was sparked by a photograph — specifically, the one on the dust jacket of Open, Lisa Moore’s collection of short stories. The photo is of a woman wearing a bikini and a cardigan, and she’s looking out over the water, or maybe it’s the sky. It’s cropped just below her eyes. I found the image vulnerable and sad, but also purposeful and sexy. My fascination became a thought experiment: what is that woman’s story?

 In “The D and D Report” a premed student bonds with another girl over mocking their weirdo pool-owner boss. A friendship forms and one never gets to repay the other’s favour. What inspired the story?

“The D and D Report” is, in part, a meditation on the nature of friendship. Although it’s not autobiographical, I’ve certainly experienced or enacted the kind of callousness (or is it carelessness?) that takes place between Alexa and Cheryl in the story. I think many young women have. There was a headline a few weeks ago in The Onion that read “Female Friends Spend Raucous Night Validating The Living Shit Out Of Each Other,” and I thought, Yeah, this is what I’m talking about. What makes that headline funny is also what makes “The D and D Report” such a kick in the teeth.

What about “The Meteorite Hunter”

“The Meteorite Hunter” was inspired by a magazine article about, well, a meteorite hunter. This man’s quest to collect space rocks struck me as both noble and fruitless, and I wanted to capture that dichotomy in my main character’s struggle to connect with his daughter. I found it difficult to focalize the narrative through David, a divorced man and estranged dad (that’s pretty far from my own experience, and subject position), but I must have done something right because the story seems to resonate with readers, particularly men. I think it’s healthy for writers to stretch their voices. If you find you’re writing endless incarnations of yourself, you’d probably be better off investing in a private diary. As one of my teachers used to say, nobody cares about what it feels like to be a potato.

I’ve been calling Biblioasis the country’s metal detector for short fiction gold these last few years. What’s a collection they’ve recently published that you recently read and liked?

Last October I had the pleasure of being part of the Women of the Short Story Book Tour, with Biblioasis writers Rebecca Rosenblum and Cathy Stonehouse. I knew Rebecca and was familiar with her work, but all I knew about Cathy was what I had read in reviews, which scared me. My work is sometimes characterized as dark and disturbing, but the stuff I read about Cathy’s book, Something About the Animal, made me fear sharing a hotel room with her. However, not only was Cathy a charming, insightful, entirely non-psychotic person with whom to spend a week, I’ve also been really impressed with the nuance and humour of her collection. I think Cathy is one of the very few people who can write a story about an animal psychic and a Ritalin-medicated dog and get away with calling it “Child Abuse.”

 What about a few favourite shorts or collections overall?

Some of my all-time favourite short stories are “Tell The Women We’re Going” by Raymond Carver, “People Like That Are the Only People In Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk” by Lorrie Moore, and “Emergency” by Denis Johnson. I guess I’ve got a thing for the Americans.

My favourite Canadian collection is Natasha by David Bezmozgis.

What are you working on now, and how’s that going?

I’ve started work on a novel. It’s called Anonymous Anonymous, and it’s about a self-help group for people who have purchased new identities for themselves. Let’s just say it’s going slowly.

I’ve read hundreds upon hundreds of novels, but now that I’m faced with writing one, I realize that I’m not exactly sure about what makes the form work from page to page. The scaffolding of a novel is fundamentally different from that of a short story, and it’s not just about being bigger or necessarily more complicated. (In fact, I think the best short stories do the work of novels, and their structures can be just as challenging.) Maybe it has something to do with the novel being on a more horizontal axis, over time, and the short story being on a more vertical axis, through time? Actually, that sounds a bit like bullshit. It probably has more to do with me being a chicken in the face of a really big and scary project.

Salty Ink authorial intrusion: that did not sound like bullshit, and was one of the best novel versus short story comparisons to have appeared on this blog

 I find, when writing a short, where I start and where I end can surprise me as much as a reader. I get the sense that in some of these stories, that was the case with you. Was there one story in particular here that took a direction you weren’t planning on?

“The Dead Dad Game” definitely took a left turn. In the original version, Mickey the pot-bellied pig was a dog, and the story was falling flat on its face, just not working at all. It was part of my University of Toronto MA thesis (which went on to become Suitable Precautions), and it was my good fortune to have Michael Winter as a mentor for that project. He refused to let me cut “The Dead Dad Game” from the collection, and so instead we met in a café and had this thirty-second conversation:

Michael: What if Mickey weren’t a dog. What if she were something else?

Laura: Like what?

Michael: What about those pigs people have. Where are they from? Korea?

Laura: Vietnam. Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs.

Michael: Vietnam? Okay. I think we’re done here.

I think the story works because that change wasn’t about using a gimmick to get out of a jam (“Look, a freaky pet!”), but rather about opening up the life story of a character. It’s like I was aiming for one target, but then at the last second the arrow turned 90 degrees, hitting another bulls-eye altogether. As a writer and a reader, these are the kinds of endings that I like best — the ones that are both absolutely inevitable and yet completely surprising.

Another Salty Ink authorial intrusion: it should be noted, since Laura shared that fantastic cafe chat, that “The Dead Dad Game” went on to be a Journey Prize finalist: the country’s top award for a short story.

What are you looking for in a book, when you crack the spine and read?

All I really ask for is psychological realism and emotional honesty. For example, let’s say there’s something really crazy/emotional/interesting going on in a story (think bombs going off, or a heart-wrenching death, or even just a man on a unicycle appearing out of nowhere) — is it really believable, in the middle of that, to have a character contemplate the particular cochineal red of a sunset from his childhood? Probably not. In my opinion, there is so much overly descriptive, nostalgia-laden junk in Canadian fiction. It drives me bananas. It can be such a downer, too. All that big, baggy prose. Give me insight, give me action, and give me irony! And step away from the window: people don’t spend all the days of their lives looking into the middle distance, wondering how things might have been different. Life is funny, sometimes horribly so. Show me that.

You’ve taken writing courses with people like Michael Winter. What is it, ultimately, that a writer takes away from these kinds of classes?

My work with Michael Winter was a one-on-one mentorship, so it wasn’t so much a class as it was a conversation, but it certainly happened within the context of a creative writing program. I think the highest function of writing courses is to create an environment that fosters these kinds of conversations, an environment that brings new writers together and invites them to take themselves and their work seriously. I remember attending a party that Rosemary Sullivan and Constance Rooke organized for their creative writing students, and it was surreal: Thomas King was there, reading his work, and I was there, reading my work (!!!), and we were drinking wine and eating prosciutto. It was a revelation! And a dare. Like, Welcome to the club, now show us what you’ve got. The confidence I got from these encounters changed my life, and I don’t think they would have happened outside of the creative writing school framework.

Short fiction is getting its due lately. More of it is being published, read, and awarded. What are some pros of short fiction, in your mind, as both a reader and writer?

Pros for readers:

1. You can live an entire lifetime during your morning commute. In a good way.

2. You can dip in and out of, and return to, short story collections. It’s not always so easy to do that with a novel.

3. Short stories are demanding, and so for discerning readers. Who doesn’t want to be one of those?

Pros for writers:

1. The short story is a beautiful, challenging, unique form. Nail it, and you earn your stripes.

2. Short stories can get written (and maybe even finished) in the time after dinner, before breakfast, on a plane…

3. Publishing short stories builds your bibliography, and your professional credibility. Seeing your work in a literary journal is excellent motivation to keep writing.

What is the ultimate, most barebones trait a writer should possess?

Tenacity.

Photo Credit: Allan Neilsen

Former Halifax Poet Laureate, Lorri Neilsen Glenn, is the author of several searing books of  poetry, and the author/editor for several books of non-fiction as well. Much of her work dwells in profoundly personal yet universal subject matter that asks the questions we all do. Often, what she’s wringing out of these questions is the beauty of life, hammering home a paradox: the things that make a person forlorn are the very things they live and breathe for while they’re here.

Her diction is elegant, exact, and evocative, her subject matter genuinely moving, and all those clenching one-liners tie it up into a neat package of poetic radiance.

She’s carried this trend over into her newest release, Threading Light: Explorations in Loss and Poetry. Threading Light is a great mix of prose and poetry. Here’s a snippet from the backcover,

In Neilsen Glenn’s lyrical language — language that George Elliott Clarke has called ‘bordering on the sacred’— we explore loss, grief, and the paths that lead us into writing and community. A blend of memoir, observation, wit, and lament, this book is a trickster, layering the philosophical, the spiritual, the literary, and the personal in ways that both challenge and comfort us, and leave us filled with hope.

Lorri has won the full gamut of awards, from your standard literary awards, to some more unique wins, like the Meade Award for outstanding research in the English/Language Arts and the Halifax Woman of Excellence Award (Arts category). She’s been remarkably successful with awards’ recognition in the literary journal circuit, having won or been shortlisted for  awards through Arc, CV2, Prairie Fire (in two categories), and Grain, among others. Judges Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane had this to say about her winning poem in the Malahat Review’s Open Season Award, “How smoothly the phrases move through the mind and into music. It’s a small tour de force of sound and meaning, lyricism at its most brilliant.’”

She’s currently working on a family memoir, and the piece that won her Prairie Fire’s 2011 Creative Non-fiction contest is part of this project. She’s also co-editing (with Carsten Knox) a collection called Salt Lines, which focuses on “wisdom from Maritime writers.” It will be out in the spring. In the meantime, she’s also busy editing a new collection of prose and poetry on mothers by Canadian female writers, which will be coming out with Guernica next year. And when she’s not busy writing and editing, she’s teaching, and has taught writing in Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, all across Canada, and in the spring she’s off to Greece. Also, she’s one of my favourite poets.

Sue Goyette’s first book of poetry, The True Names of Birds was shortlisted for the Governor General’s award, the Pat Lowther award, The Gerald Lampert Award, and the Atlantic Poetry Prize. It was also Globe and Mail Books of the Year, and it comes up a lot more than most books in discussions of Atlantic poetry. Her second collection, Undone, “a cornucopia of highly personal, hard-hitting passionate poems,” was equally well received, and shortlisted for several awards, and won the 2005 Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry. Her debut novel, Lures, was shortlisted for the Thomas Head Raddall award, for the best novel of the year by an Atlantic Canadian.

She’s also been involved with The Maritime Writers’ Workshop, The Banff Wired Studio, and The Sage Hill Writing Experience, in addition to teaching packs of lucky students at Dalhousie. Lastly,and most notably, in my opinion, her so-personal-it-strikes-a-universal-chord brand of poetry has resonated with the public to the point that her poetry has appeared in places like the Toronto subway system, wedding vows, and sidewalks.

Her latest collection of poems, outskirts, is as sophisticated in its fine, figurative language as it is accessible. Its poems jump right to “the energy of human love,” and as the backcover says, “this book will name you, and frighten you; make you laugh, and arm you for what is to come.” Starting out with a poignant, unsentimental look a parenthood, and ending with a candid take on ecological concerns (not without humour), the book runs the gamut of what it means to be a mother, a writer, sleepless, human, a person observing the modern world, and more. John Steffler nailed it, so I won’t bother saying more:

“These poems are all about people – the quick-winged emotions passing between people, love’s claws, love’s rock slides, the heart’s narrow escapes.  Goyette peels back the surface of the familiar human world to reveal the forest-world mysteries, the shape shifting, the glories and agonies truly at play there.  Domestic and shamanic, these open-hearted poems are filled with the lift of discovery and insight.  They stir up language, kindle emotion and appetite.”  – John Steffler

 

What’s been a highlight for you and Outskirts this year?

I really liked the launch. I held it in a great, local bar and asked about 17 people I know: former students, my kids, neighbours, my husband, co-workers, fellow poets, former teachers, friends—to pick a poem from the book and read it. Having people who wouldn’t ordinarily read a poem on stage get up and talk about how they knew me and why they chose the poem brought a great energy to the evening. It amazes me how people still talk about the event, how it threw another log on the great fire of our community and how, because of that night and their shared experience, all those people feel a solid connection to each other.

At the end of the day, what’s nicer: formal recognition from critics and awards, or, knowing your poetry has appeared spray painted on streets and subways, and in peoples’ wedding vows?

It’s always a pleasure to hear that a poem has found its legs and is still walking after I’ve written it whether by being awarded a prize or by finding its way into someone’s day. I figure once my poems are out in the world their migration is mostly out of my hands so I’m always grateful to hear about where they’re turning up.

What are you looking for in a book, when you crack the spine and read?

I like writers who are hospitable to their readers. Who understand the alchemic combination of imagination and curiosity and who aren’t intimidated to dip into the undercurrent of silence that is beneath all good writing. I like it when writing is so authentic and fortifying everything else steps back and I’m following a great trail of thought or story rather than reading a book.

What is one thing you hope a creative writing student walks away from your class with? And is there one universal dogma of writing you believe in?

I love my class. I love that there are students in Halifax who have committed to writing poetry for the year and that they turn up with poems and are willing to read them and listen to others read. Hopefully, my students leave my class with the discipline it takes to keep a writing practice in place as well as being open to discovery and leap in whatever guise they appear in their writing and reading practices. This openness is kin to a kind of playfulness, a willingness to forge into unknown territory and being all right with not doing it well at first, but doing it nonetheless. I also hope they leave the class, whether they to choose to continue to write or not, with an appreciation for the importance of creativity, imagination and curiosity.

What’s some writing advice you’ve read or been told, that’s stuck?

I like Yogi Berra’s: When you arrive at a fork in the road, take it. And Goethe’s: Do not hurry, do not rest. And a great editor once said to me: watch your Goyette-isms, so I keep that in mind as well.

What would you have to say to a bright-eyed first year English student who believes in the mythical figure known as the rich and widely heralded published author?

I find it’s always best to hose that kind of ambition down to the dishevelment and dailiness of an actual writing practice. There’s the other ambition, the ambition to write in a way that exhilarates, that leaps and lands in a direction that wasn’t anticipated. I try and throw logs on the fire of that ambition which isn’t a public, ego ambition but has more to do with artistic integrity and verve.

Any pet peeves with the book industry?

The book industry is changing so fast we can’t properly see it anymore for the dust it’s raised. Some of the writers I know feel more responsible for selling their books so I guess my pet peeve is how the industry’s idea of commerce and value has trespassed into some of our writers’ sensibilities. I think it’s really hard to dive into whatever you’re writing if you’re worried about marketability and sales revenue. The idea of commerce is too harsh an exposure when you’re trying to write authentically.

What’s your favourite part of the writing process, your least favourite?

My favourite part of the process is how the very act of writing realigns me and then leaves me behind so that every part of myself dissolves and is participating in the writing.

I need a wide moat of silence around me to be able to write which wreaks havoc on a social life. Mine is severely endangered. That need for silence often wrestles with the need to sit in a crowded bar and talk loudly with people I love. So my least favourite part of the writing process is when the necessary aloneness slides into loneliness.

Is there such thing as one book everyone should read?

If you’re lucky, you’ve encountered a book that fortifies and instigates not just your imagination but your resolve to be the person you most want to be. Whether it’s the story that demands your full attention and presence or it’s the way the language has set a trail through its idea that is both a sanctuary and a call to arms, either way, you’re fully present and awake to the reading of it. These kinds of books are often reliable markers on our trail; we remember where we were when we read them and how they affected and changed us. I hope everyone finds that kind of book to read. Especially when they need it most.

I read an interview where you described your last collection, Undone, as “a sort of lyrical map through emotional territory I knew very little about.” What was being “mapped,” in your words, with the writing of Outskirts?

Undone was part map and part compass and writing it created a sort of trail through a real wilderness in my life that I needed to move through. Outskirts was written a few years later, from an entirely different terrain. I was trying to stay attuned to an imaginative approach to my craft and investigate what was going on in our houses and further afield in a way that invites conversation and reflection and that, hopefully, revitalizes how we appreciate and perceive the people and place around us. It’s a kind of mapping but instigated from an entirely different intention.

If it’s a lyrical mapping of moments that compels you to write, can you trace this pattern back to what incited your very first poem, and provide a rough date of when you became a writer?

Writing, for me, is metaphor. One of the first poems I wrote was inspired by grade eight heartbreak. I wrote a poem about how it felt. The poem had buildings crashing down, a dark sky and the silent opera of my ache. It was really bad, over the top writing but it showed me how ache could be made into or carried in something. A poem, in this case. That was an exciting prospect for me. I could make translations, or maps of things I didn’t understand or ideas I wanted a closer look at with poems. I could put something of this into that.

Your collection made me appreciate my mother even more than I do, and we’re pretty damn close. It’s clearly a big part of who you are, a mother, so, how do you think motherhood has changed and enriched your life, and for the sake of humour, hampered your life?

Being a mother taught me about love. I know that sounds sentimental but I mean love with all its teeth and all the hands it takes to truly let someone go to become who they were meant to be. I was young when I had my kids and I came from a difficult and challenging place. Having kids, hanging out with them, playing and watching how they learned and developed soothed a part of myself that still felt burnt. Their company was the best company and I’m a better person for having them.

Having said that, living with kids is kind of living with wilderness. They don’t conform. They barge into conversations, insist on being answered and then, some of them, for a while, go underground into the basement years and when they do appear it’s sometimes in a puff of smoke which they insist is incense. They biggest thing they hampered, I guess, was my dancing. They hated my dancing which made me dance all the more but to misquote Bob Dylan: it’s pretty hard to dance with all that booing going on.

Speaking of which, we’re all busy, us writers, but motherhood trumps any kind of busy I’ve ever known. I know many a mother who wishes they “had time to write.” Tell those of us reading this who “can never find time to write” how you managed your time to and release such a heralded output of writing.

I didn’t get up at the crack of dawn. I couldn’t. I remember exhaustion and laundry and grabbing minutes at a time. I read like a fiend and kept a book in every room, in the car, in my bag. I wrote bad poems. I once wrote a ten-page poem about ants. My daughter would rush home from school to tell me what had happened that day and she learned to make me pinky swear that I wouldn’t write about it. So I wrote about not writing about it. There’s that great Chinese proverb about if you always head in the same direction, you’ll eventually get there. I believed in that. I had to.

Lines like “Fuck, the new mothers want to say. They have to wash their water with water,” in the award-winning poem, “The New Mothers,” speaks to the intense pressures put on mothers to do everything right, from not eating X foods while pregnant, to attaching “umbrellas to the things that move their children from here to there.” Is the poem a candid and scathing statement, or a sort of humorous portrayal of modern motherhood, washed over with levity. Both, I’d imagine? What spawned the poem?

Both, I think. I was thinking of all the things we did growing up without helmets and seat belts and car seats. How we’d pile in the car and be driven around, rolling in the back seat or lying in the ledge of the rear window. How we were thrown into lakes with the hopes that we’d swim. Skated into boards, sometimes tobogganed so fast we’d bash into fences or trees. We got bruised and skinned and scratched in ways that my kids didn’t. I think helmets and seatbelts make sense but our sense of safety and control sometimes is a little exaggerated, a little intense and we rob our kids of falling and of learning to get back up again. And sometimes it isn’t exaggerated. I have a six-year-old friend who is deathly allergic to peanuts and her mother has had to teach her to ask about everything before she eats it. That level of safety is intense and necessary and, unfortunately, more common than we think. Today’s parents are facing challenges that are different than when my kids were young and the poem was my way of reckoning with all of this.

What drew you in to the use of multi-part poems in Outskirts?

I like how I can circle an idea with a multi-part poem. Explore different angles of it. I also really like the push of a multi-part poem, the pressure the extended look gives to an idea or image, and how that push opens something that is often totally unexpected and surprising. I think these poems are another version of what I’m trying to do with the long line I sometimes use.

My favourite poetry tends to be personal ruminations on fleeting thoughts that find meaning and metaphor in the grander world. Certainly, much of yours does just that. Do you feel like you’re coming to understand more about life, the world, and yourself, as you analyze and translate life events into crystallized language? Or are you just better understanding how to capture moments and metaphors as a poet?

I believe that the way we talk to the check-out person at the grocery store, the way we drive when the roads are crowded, the way we wait for the kettle all are opportunities to define who we are and how we want to be and so writing, the way I write, has become an important way that I define who I am and who I most want to be. I think if you’re nailing something that’s true, that is authentic, it doesn’t lose any of its strength when you put it in the context of the grander world. And that’s a good way to test it.   

Do you have another collection in the works?

I have a collection of poems called Ocean coming out next year with Gaspereau Press.

Congratulations on your recent Established Artist Recognition Award at the latest Creative Nova Scotia Awards Gala. As someone so entrenched in Halifax’s arts scene, can you say it’s a vibrant, booming scene? Predict a few up and comers we’ll be hearing about?

Thanks. Halifax’s art scene persists and does so with great verve and spirit and I’m happy to be part of it. There’s a lovely and vital independence that artists bring to their communities, an invitation to step out of the well-trodden routines of our days to consider a different perspective. And, sometimes, just considering a different perspective can instigate great change in someone. Any arts scene is vibrant, I think. And important.

Glass Boys is the fourth novel by Newfoundland novelist Nicole Lundrigan, an author dubbed as “a serious contender for the next great Canadian novelist” by critic Sarah Weinman. It received rave reviews throughout 2011, and landed on Amazon.ca’s top 100 books of 2011.

Her previous work has enjoyed plenty of recognition, including comparisons to Faulkner & David Adams Richards, and the Globe and Mail‘s Margaret Cannon put her debut, Unraveling Arva, on her Top 10 Books of the Year list. But Glass Boys, in keeping with her consistent growth between books, is her best one yet.

It’s a family saga, sped-up and clipped of as much filler as possible, centering on a tension-filled history between the Trench and Fagan families. Lundrigan presents us with the daily lives and histories of Lewis Trench and Eli Fagan, along with their wives and children, and the ways they shape — and misshape — one another. The book features a full cast of broken characters: there’s the troubled son and the mother too spiritually withered to see it; the wife and the bad man she married to get a roof over her son’s head; the perfect son and the guilt-ridden mother who cannot reciprocate his love; the husband turning a blind eye to his wife’s dark side until she’s literally out of his sight. For a book juggling half-a-dozen points of view, Lundrigan does a commendable job keeping them all distinct.

There are enough commendable qualities in Lundrigan’s approach to the family saga to put her novel in the same ranks as similar contemporary classics, such as David Adams Richards’ Mercy Among the Children. In fact, Lundrigan and Richards share many of the same strengths as writers. But Nicole’s writing is distinct, and something of a “best of” collection of my favourite traits of Newfoundland writing: raw human stories with crisp, lush writing, and empathetic in a way that connects reader to story like a fly in a web. This was one of the best Canadian novels of the year.

Read Salty Ink’s Review of Glass Boys (in the National Post) here.

What’s been a highlight for you and Glass Boys this year?

There have been a number of highlights, but the best has been the reader reaction. I’ve had so many readers contact me through my website to share their impressions, and I’m so touched by some of the notes. For me, the best highlight is when a reader says, “I can’t wait for your next book.”

Off the top of your head, without struggling for “favourites,” name one or two books you really love by an Atlantic Canadian author.

Kathleen Winter’s Annabel and Lisa Moore’s February always jump to mind. I’ll never forget Lure of the Labrador Wild by Dillon Wallace, and my childhood favourite Down by Jim Long’s Stage by Al Pittman.

What are some of the best books you read in 2011?

I read both Annabel and February, which were amazing. And I loved Light Lifting by Alexander MacLeod, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, Florence and Giles by John Harding, and The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano.

What are you looking for in a book, when you crack the spine and read?

It really depends on the book. Could be simply information, or a good laugh, or to have a creepy feeling when the lights go out, or to have my heart squeezed.

Any pet peeves with the book industry?

No pet peeves really. Everyone I’ve met who writes or is in publishing works incredibly hard. Some things are certainly disheartening, like independent bookstores closing. Or large bookstores shipping books back to the publisher after what seems like a blink. It’s a real knuckle to the heart. Does that count?

What’s your favourite part of the writing process, your least favourite?

My favourite part of writing is adding to the bones. Least favourite is building the skeleton.

You’ve got an interesting background. You’re an archeologist turned writer, you’ve played a role in sea turtle conservation, you’ve played a hands-on role in bringing healthcare to small villages in Guyana. You’ve lived in France with a Baron and Baroness in the Chateau de Prouzel. Do you think living a “storied life” helps an author in crafting stories? Or is the recipe for literary fiction simply:  imagination meets rumination on life?

Imagination is key, of course, but I think there’s more to it. I’ve always had an adventurous spirit, and like to do things that feel difficult. Travel was so important to me, and it really helped to shape who I am. Certain experiences were very humbling.

In addition to imagination and a wide variety of interests, I suspect writers need a stubborn streak as well. When I first started writing Unraveling Arva, I told someone I was writing a book, and he said, “Sure, tell me again when you’ve got ten pages.” Now I tend to be somewhat secretive about my progress, as I never know when I’ll run into a snarl.

You’ve written for some interesting places. How’d you end up writing for Law & Order: Police Management? Was your freelance writing a gateway into writing fiction?

When I was freelance writing I tapped into various personal experiences (my trip to Guyana) or my education (the Law & Order stuff). With Law & Order, I just contacted the editor of the magazine through email, explained my background, and asked if he’d review an article I’d written. He said yes, liked it, published it, and it went from there.

In some ways freelance writing gave me courage. The editors were all very positive about my writing. So in that way, it was a gateway to this crazy world of fiction.

As tragedy falls around all of the characters in Glass Boys, somehow Toby remains the spark of light in the novel. He’s not happy go lucky, so much as he is where the reader lays their hope. Was that a conscious decision? Do you have a reason for this?

No, not a conscious decision, that’s just who he was. I try to get to know my characters as I write them, and from the onset, Toby was different from the others. He dealt with sadness, but didn’t quite absorb it. He was very open and aware of others, and not a hurtful kid. He always wanted to make things easier, better.

The book features a full cast of broken characters: the spiritually withered mother who doesn’t notice a budding darkness in her troubled son; the wife and the bad man she married to get a roof over her son’s head; the perfect son and the guilt-ridden mother who cannot reciprocate his love; the husband turning a blind eye to his wife’s dark side until she’s literally out of his sight. Which relationship in the novel was the most tragic in your mind? The most beautiful?

This is a tough question, and I might change my answer tomorrow. Right now I’d say the connection between the mother and her sons. For various reasons, she is unable to connect to them, doesn’t feel that she deserves the adoration they are offering. I found this heartbreaking – for the mother, but mostly for the boys. The rejection is devastating.

Most beautiful I would say is the bond between the two brothers. There’s a part in the story near the end when Toby goes to visit Melvin. Every time I read it my eyes well up. I’m a bit of a softie, but I love how deeply they care for each other.

Everyone has a history, and this novel feels built on that premise. Would you agree writing a novel is merely answering a series of questions about your characters, once you’ve put them into the very first scene and observed their reactions?

No, I wouldn’t agree with that statement. Questions, yes, but I feel it’s about so much more than that. It’s about believing, understanding, respecting, exploring, and connecting. And stepping out of the way.

Speaking of which, what’s it like as a writer to hear other people making presumptions, and taking away different reactions about your work?

I certainly find people’s reactions interesting. I recently attended a book club via Skype and one of the readers expressed her fears over a particular scene. And her interpretation of it was entirely (and I mean completely) different from what I’d intended. The thoughts she had never even entered my mind. I was really surprised, but I could easily see her point.

When a male writer takes on the voice of a female character, or the opposite, there’s always the question of “How’d you do that?” or “How did you find that?” Personally, I don’t find it difficult or that much different, as we’re embodying characters, not genders. And, ultimately, don’t we all share the same emotions. Do you agree, disagree, fall in the middle?

I don’t really give it much thought. I just write the character’s personality in a way that feels authentic.

Notable critic Sarah Weinman dubbed you “a serious contender for the next great Canadian novelist.” How, if at all, has your approach to crafting a novel changed now that you have both the experience of having written 4, and, experienced public reaction to your work?

I like to think I’m getting better at telling a story, but I still find it super hard work. Public reaction is wonderful (when it’s positive), but it really doesn’t affect the way I write.

You leave a lot up to the reader in this novel, like if the death in the opening scene was an accident or murder. It enriches the reading experience, I believe, to let readers write some of the story themselves. Is this a conscious effort? And, do you have the answers you don’t give on the page, like, if Roy Trench’s death was murder or an accident?

To be honest, when I working on a manuscript, not much is a conscious effort. I really try to let my characters dictate what will happen. Occasionally I try to impose my own ideas or toss in some lines that I think sound clever, but I always go back and delete. If I’m re-reading my writing, and am aware of myself, notice myself on the edge of the page, I have to remove it.

I do have an impression about Roy’s death, but only Eli Fagan knows for sure what was in his heart at that moment.

Can you give us a few lines on what your manuscript in progress is about and when it’ll be published?

I’m writing a literary mystery about three children who discover something valuable in a government field in the 1950s, in Yugoslavia, and make the risky decision to keep it. Shortly afterwards, one of the children disappears. The story covers the before and after of the two remaining children, as well as the mother of the missing boy.

It might be a debut novel, but it seems strange to call it that, given how seasoned and stellar a writer Compton is. She’s been doing this for twenty years, teaches the stuff of writing, has contributed to the country’s finest publications, and her work has appeared in many journals. In fact, a chunk of this novel was shortlisted for the CBC’s annual short fiction award in 2004, and an excerpt was published in Riddle Fence.

Tide Road tells the story of a mother whose daughter drowned under unsettling circumstances, leaving behind troubling questions and a husband and daughter left stunned by her sudden absence.  The police declare it an accidental drowning, but her mother Sonia suspects otherwise, including foul play at the hands of her son-in-law. Her daughter’s death forces Sonia to “revise her perception of her daughter’s life and dramatically change the way she lives her own.” It is a fantastic novel.

Compton’s crisp, bright writing, paired with Tide Road’s motif of dealing with loss, brings to mind Lisa Moore’s masterpiece, February. They share a similar narrative structure, and with a dazzling style, x-ray a compelling character’s  life and coming to terms with how it’s been irrevocably changed. Compton’s novel and style, however similar, do stand on there own here, in a way that’s made her one of my favourite finds in Atlantic Canadian writers in recent years. The novel largely centres on these lines from the book:

Memory changes, as the events of history never do …it depends on where you start, on the details you attend to, and the ones you let slip away.

The Winnipeg Review called her writing “a beauty to behold.” Big praise that she lives up to. It’s got all the teeth, heart, punch, and tenderness I want out of a novel; it flared my desire to write myself, and that’s my favourite reaction to a book. Her style of storytelling does what it should with this story: It sets you in the shoes of a shocked mother and shaken family, where a mind wonders, wanders, and wants an answer it might never get. Her short, supple, non-linear chapters were just the right way to tell this story, as they do exactly what Richard Cumnyn’s endorsement promised, “deliver the truth with a kind of fierce economy [of words].”

I expect to see this novel turn up on some Atlantic Book Award shortlists soon …

What’s been a highlight or two for you and Tide Road this year?

It’s been thrilling to hear from readers who have been touched by the novel and its characters. Before publication, I’d not really imagined what this might be like. So I’ve been surprised and delighted to discover that when a reader speaks or writes to me about Tide Road, the experience feels just the same as when I read a book I love, then burst with wanting to tell people about it.

I love reading aloud from the novel because doing so allows me to be inside the story again, and to feel as I did when I was writing it. This too confirms my belief that writing and reading are somehow almost the same activity.

Off the top of your head, without struggling for “favourites,” name one or two books you really love by an Atlantic Canadian author.

This year I reread Lisa Moore’s February and Anne Simpson’s Falling, two gorgeous novels about loss. I love Anne and Lisa’s sentences and piercing insights, and the compelling uniqueness of each of their voices. I can’t wait for whatever they do next, and I know I’ll read both of these books again.

What are some of the best books you read in 2011?

Outside the Maritimes, two books I’ve admired this year are Helen Humphreys’ deft, mature and elegant The Reinvention of Love and Rosemary Nixon’s emotionally brave, smart and stunningly beautiful Kalila. These novels enlarged my life.

What makes a good book a good book, anyway?

A magnetic connection with its reader’s heart and mind. Since the reader is fifty percent of this equation, there can never be one good book: that definition is slightly different for each of us.

You teach creative writing. What’s one or two things you’d impart on any writer?

Listen to the story. It will tell you things.

What’s some writing advice you’ve read or been told, that’s stuck?

The brilliant American novelist Marilynne Robinson (Housekeeping) has said: “Usually in fiction there’s something that leaps out—an image or a moment that is strong enough to center the story.” This is what she tries to teach her students. “If they can see it, they can exploit it, enhance it, and build a fiction that is subtle and new. I don’t try to teach technique, because frankly most technical problems go away when a writer realizes where the life of the story lies.”

Is there such thing as one writer we can all learn from?

Probably not, since we are all different.

What would you have to say to a bright-eyed first year English student with dreams of being a rich, widely heralded published author?

Oh, dear. Does this student buy lottery tickets?

I would say, Write because you love sentences. Understand that poverty and silence are the norm, and that the road to publication is unimaginably long. Savour sentences the way a sommelier savours wine. Taste broadly, and develop your palate. One day you will be rich (not monetarily).

What’s your favourite part of the writing process, your least favourite?

My favourite part of writing is revising. Least favourite: sorting out the muddle that is plot.

In Tide Road, a woman’s daughter simply vanishes, leaving her husband and young daughter bewildered, but Sonia suspects her daughter’s disappearance was no accident. What sparked your idea for this novel?

After the fact, it can be very difficult to tease out the true origins of a novel. Some decisions are the result of instinctive impulses, and some result from attempts to solve technical problems.

I lived happily for years with the setting and main character of the novel before I realized something dramatic had to happen. In a way, Sonia’s search for her daughter is a manifestation of an interior search for her own younger self. It’s possible I created the outer drama in order to justify the interior story that compelled me.

What was the biggest challenge of writing this novel?

The biggest challenge in the writing was finding the wisdom necessary to tell the story from Sonia’s point of view. Until the final revision, the novel was from her daughters’ perspectives.

I’ve heard it took you 7 or 8 years to write this wonderful novel. To what do you attribute sucking up most of that time?

Yes, Tide Road was eight years from start to finish.

Novels take time. Some of this is time is necessary to solve the emotional, intellectual and technical puzzles the novel presents. Some of it is simply a function of real life intervening. I moved house three times during the years I wrote Tide Road. I wrote it in all three Maritime provinces!

You’re an accomplished short story writer, but this is a debut novel. What was the hardest part of upping a story’s wordcount to novel length?

It’s not a matter of upping the word count so much as solving the dilemmas of a story that is too complex to be resolved in small span of words. A novel does, and should, require depth and breadth and time to complete.

Why do you write?

I write in order to discover what I know; because I love sentences—and words and lines; because, despite all my complaining, I have come to relish the vexing puzzle that is plot. And I write because I love to read: writing is like getting to read the story you most crave, every day.

Lynn Coady’s The Antagonist was shortlisted for the Giller Prize this year, the country’s most illustrious literary award. Over the course of her career, she’s written a body of work that’s helped keep CanLit fresh. It’s the vivacity of her writing that I really like. Her authentic voice and lively characters, and how they’re bursting with humanity and life and convincing universal conflicts. And she’s funny with substance, a great sentence-level writer whose writing isn’t overly adorned with lyrical tendencies: It cuts right to the chase, to drive the story along. These are rare qualities, rare balances that I’ve not seen shine so brightly in another writer, which might be what makes her books so distinctly Lynn Coady. And so very good.

In The Antagonist, Lynn crafts characters who’ll make the real-life people you know seem lifeless and unconvincing. It’s a novel about a man born big, and his sheer size has had an outside influence on his life. By 21, “Rank” had three violent stains on his life, all attributable, somehow, to his not knowing his own strength, or, others knowing his strength and using it to accomplish their own goals. Rank tried desperately to wash himself clean of that past, but nearing 40, he finds out his college roommate has written a novel that shines a spotlight on those very stains.

The entirety of the novel is one big rant from Rank to his old friend. It’s Rank trying to set the record straight. And turning himself inside out to do so reveals the life of Gordie Rankin Jr. in all its tenderness, sadness, hilarity, and absurdness. It’s all memorably delivered by Lynn’s skilful storytelling, witty turns of phrase, and eye for what really defines a life.

Over the course of her career, the headlines about Coady’s work have gone from “One of the best new writers in Canada,” or “One of the most lively writers in Canada” to simply, “One of the best writers in Canada,” because of a suite of trademarked traits.  Those traits have never been more alive in one of Coady’s novels as they are in The Antagonist. Here, they’ve clicked together and made an exceptionally vivacious Giller-worthy read.

What’s been a highlight or two for you and The Antagonist this year?

Hearing from readers online has been the best—this is the first novel I’ve published in the age of social media and it’s been exciting and pretty heart-warming to have people tweet their enthusiasm at me when they’re in the middle of the novel, or have just finished it.  Someone Facebooked me the other day to say The Antagonist is one of only two novels that made her cry in her life.  To get that kind of feedback from a total stranger is about as gratifying as it gets.

What are some of the best books you read in 2011?

I really liked How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti. It’s probably the most original thing I’ve read all year.

What are you looking for from a book once you crack the spine?

A voice that strikes me as honest, breathing, uncontrived.

What would you have to say to a bright-eyed first year English student with dreams of being a rich, widely heralded published author?

Probably “Why are you talking to me?”  Then I’d say maybe try to read everything by Dan Brown, Stig Larson and Stephanie Meyer and see if you can distil what they are doing down to some kind of cross-genre formula, applicable to all three authors.  Then follow that formula.  Then send me the formula.

Any pet peeves with the book industry?

I don’t like to kick people when they’re down.

Now that you’re 5 or 6 books into your career, do you approach writing or crafting a novel any differently now that you’ve had a lot of experience and public reaction to your work? Are there things you’ve learned from writing the first few you applied to The Antagonist, for example?

Yep, I’m better at plot I think and I have a lot more respect for plot than I did as a younger writer.  Around the time I was writing Mean Boy I started to develop an appreciation for the well-paced novel.  I decided the reader’s experience was more important than my wish to indulge all my Big Philosophical Ideas, and I realized the writers I admired most were writers who were able to explore big ideas via basic storytelling, without a lot of fancy footwork. Now I believe that anything worth saying in a novel can be articulated through character and conflict—the two most rudimentary aspects of narrative. The writer just has to stand back and let the story do the work, weave its own profundities.

You’ve created some of the most memorable characters in CanLit, as far as I am concerned. If characters could get any more real or fun to read, yours would make half the real-life  people I know seem dull and unconvincing. I know there’s no formula, but are there any tricks or conscious steps you take in your characterization to craft such well-wrought characters?

I pay pretty close attention to what makes people distinctive in real life, and I take a lot of pleasure in that distinctiveness.  Cape Breton was a good place to cultivate an appreciation of “characters” growing up—forceful, undeniable personalities; people who express themselves in ways that make them unforgettable.  At the heart of it, I’m just an aficionado.  I’m naturally interested in the kind of people who make an impression, so subsequently I pay close attention to how it is they do it.

Also, a key to writing character is never losing sight of a) what your character most wants; b) what he or she is most afraid of.  If you have those two things down cold they will be elucidated by everything your character says and every move he or she makes.  And those two things have to be pretty big, cosmos-level things.  It can’t be something like: He wants a car and he is afraid of getting beaten up—it’s gotta be, He wants to belong somewhere and he is afraid he will never be loved.

Many writers seem struck by the glitz and glamour of the Giller Award Gala. How was your experience?

What is there to say?  I live in Edmonton and barely ever leave my house.  Next thing I know I’m sitting one table over from Robbie Roberson and getting tapped on the shoulder by Malcolm Gladwell.  Also: people in headsets chasing me with panicked looks on their faces every time I got up to go to the bathroom.  It was a lot of fun.

Writers wind up in all sorts of day jobs, but how’d you become an advice columnist at the Globe and Mail?

This is a boring answer: They asked me and I said yes.  I’m done now, though, I just wrapped that gig up in the new year.

There are a lot of people in the world.  Billions. To make a national or even regional award’s shortlist is quite a feat, but to land on one for an international award is astounding; something fewer than 1% of people will ever do. In 2011, Jacob McArthur Mooney was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, which recognizes exceptional authors under 30, in all genres. Mooney is an award-wining poet with two collections and a novel in progress. His latest release is 2011′s Folk, which is what got him on this shortlist, alongside Orange Prize winner, Téa Obreht, the author of the international sensation, The Tiger’s Wife, and London’s Lucy Caldwell who made the list a second time. He was the only Canadian shortlisted.

“Throughout the book, short terse poems full of memorable phrases capture a sense of place and the lives of people coming to terms with their identity and communal realities.” – Dylan Thomas Prize Jury

It’s the strong, unifying concept in Folk that draws a reader in and holds them there. Its inciting incident is the 1998 crash of SwissAir Flight 111 off the coast of Nova Scotia, not far at all from Mooney’s bedroom window at the time. The collection is divided into two sections: Peggy’s Cove Nova Scotia, after the crash, and the modern day immigrant communities around Toronto’s Pearson Airport, where Mooney also lived for some time. It deals with motifs of identity and community; how towns, and the individual, react separately and together to, in his own words, “the psycho-cultural reorganization of what a small place means before and after being reframed by the sudden impact of such a massive thing as the death of 200 plus people.” Many of the book’s passages are subtle, understated commentary on the world’s and the townspeoples’ appropriation of the tragedy.

“Everyone can tell you where they were
when the world arrived. Everybody happened
to be walking their dog,
eyes on the ocean, 11
P.M. and raining.

Those who didn’t own dogs
went out walking their intentions

…. And everyone wanted to pose for their portrait. Everyone wanted
to figure.”

But it is the poems and passages that scale back from the community “we” to the narrator’s “I” that reveal an affecting personal affinity for the disaster.

“Newsprint on my hands
Drowned names smudged free and left to float
to foreign surfaces. A pen. A desk. The greying tape at the handle
of my Little League bat. Death gets into things like that.”

Quill & Quire’s review of Folk spoke of Mooney’s “unsettling poetic grace” throughout the collection, and I can say it was the most satisfying collection of poetry I read in 2011. The poems in Folk are compelling, confidently constructed, muscular in form, and tender in content. It’s also a collection of poems as accessible as it is insightful: if you’re not be an avid reader of poetry, but find Mooney’s concept intriguing, trust me and buy yourself a copy.

 What’s been a highlight or two for you and Folk this year?

Let’s see. I went to the Yukon for three months. I went to Europe for three more. I fell in love. I learned to bake. Folk has of course had its own adventures, too, but mostly we’ve been spending the year apart, after the launch and the readings I did back in the spring. We haven’t really been in touch much.

Making the 2011 Dylan Thomas Prize shortlist technicality crowns you as one of the world’s best under-30 writers. How do you like that, and what’s your stance on literary awards?

It’s nothing if not ambitious, isn’t it? I will say this: I was honestly and unironically excited by the news, both for my own rotund ego and for the possibility of an expanded readership it gave the book. But let’s not kid ourselves; I live in a rich and youthful literary community filled to overflow with dazzling with young brains, and I’m lucky if I go out to a reading or a coffee shop and I’m the best writer under 30 at the bar, let alone the world. It all depends on the tastes of the jury, and I guess this was just my year. Next year it’ll be five other people’s year and then they can be the best writers under 30.

Off the top of your head, without struggling for “favourites,” name one or two books you really love by an Atlantic Canadian author.

Recent books? I’ll assume so. I liked Sue Goyette’s new collection quite a bit.  David Hickey is a PEI guy originally and I can definitely shout some love for his new collection, Open Air Bindery. There’s a lot of books on my must-read list right now, what with all the time I’ve been away, and chief among them is Mark Callanan’s second book, Gift Horse.

What about a book or two from people you’ve met up there in Toronto?

A pretty endless list, really, for reasons detailed by that “overflow of dazzling brains” line above. I think my favourite new collection of the year, and I say this having missed a lot of books I’d likely love, is Ken Babstock’s Methodist Hatchet. His life’s work, from Mean to now, is an incredible little object lesson in the tension and the joy of a constantly expanding aesthetic. Ken refuses to break anything down, to erase; he just wants to build and build and add and add, you know? People think his new work is too antic, too obscure, but that’s because they loved Mean too much and they refuse to let him move beyond it. If, say, Airstream Land Yacht had been his debut, nobody would bat an eyelash: the new collection is just a more assured, more politically and sociologically mature continuation from his last one. This is the thing people don’t get, everything Ken’s done is built directly on the husk of what came before it, with no clearing away or even any recommission. Starting from that intimate specificity of Mean and just building out, out, more and more and more. It’s like watching someone construct a pyramid upside down, starting with the tip on the ground floor and expanding out toward the base. It’s foolish and wasteful until you pause enough in your complaining to see the miracle present itself. That fucking thing actually stands. It somehow doesn’t fall over on the greedy dude who made it.

Your blog, Vox Populism, is fantastic, even if you’ve been understandably sidelined lately. Where do you think book blogs fit in, in the modern online world? Are they an alternative to straight-laced traditional media, or a distraction from them? And why write an unpaid blog instead of a paid gig? To write about whatsoever you want?

I’m not sure what blogs are. They’re not an antidote to anything, surely. I started Vox Pop to try and capture, in a semi-permanent place, the energy and vocabulary of informal conversation, by intelligent people, about ethereal things. I wanted the bar room rants and the overcaffeinated arguments that are the lifeblood of my sense of literary community to have a sort of sandbox where we could bounce things around between each other, where we (or sometimes just I) could be flippant, audacious, ignorant, impassioned, rude, all these things that get–quite rightly–edited out of official essays and reviews. I’m not sure what’s going to happen next with the blog. Doesn’t it seem, looking around at the poetry bloggers that are left, that’s it’s just become a bunch of gig announcements and reading lists?

Obviously, I’m partly responsible for that. I’m going to try and bring Vox Pop back this year though, in one form in another. Mostly, the blog has served as an instrument to make people I’ve never met feel confident in their hatred of me. And that’s a shame, because I imagine many of those haters are decent and committed people with whom I’d agree with on 95% of the world’s important topics. Blogs eat subtlety and poop out earnestness.

You’ve been away at the Berton House Writers Retreat in the Yukon. I’ve only heard good things about people who’ve been there. How was that?

It’s awesome. How could it not be awesome? It’s you, in a historically resonant cabin in the middle of a historically resonant small town in the middle of the most beautiful landscape in the country, for three well-paid months with nothing to weigh on your time except the books you’re reading and the book you’re writing. Nothing has been more comfortable since the womb. Well, maybe I’m saying this because I was there in the summer. It’s not quite womb-temperature there now, I understand.

Tell us a little about your novel-in-progress?

Sure. It’s about 400 pages long, and it’s set on The Earth, and it’s typed up in Times New Roman on 8.5 X 11 paper, and that’s all the information you’re getting until I finish it, Chad

You’re a graduate of the University of Guelph-Humber’s MFA in Creative Writing program. What’s one concrete thing you can say you took away from that experience.

Friendships with generous and intelligent people that I hope to hang onto forever, both among my classmates and my teachers. Also, time. Authors always say that grants are a form of time, they let you quit your job and take time out to focus on writing. I’d argue that an MFA program is a gift of structured time. It makes you throw your life away for a couple years, to push your tired old dreams and authorly pretensions to the forefront.

Also, I took my girlfriend away from my MFA experience. She’s not made of concrete, though. She’s made of skin and patience and something I can’t identify that always smells like lavender.

What’s your favourite part of the writing process, your least favourite?

My favourite part is editing. I love taking something that I’ve cobbled together, or written down in haste, and begin pulling it apart, jostling it and making it uncomfortable. I love relineating a poem completely, on a hunch that the natural grain of the thing wants to be a sonnet, or all long couplets, or prose. First drafts are an emergency, really, you drop what you’re doing and tend to their intensity, but editing is where it’s at for me. I like to move things around in the quiet.

Any pet peeves with the book industry?

Sure, but why bother? I mean, there’s too few good book stores, too many shitty ones, and the wrong books get read by the wrong people for the wrong reasons. But my problem with complaining is this: my dad is a butcher. My grandfather worked odd jobs for forty years. They both would have been much happier doing something else with their lives.  There are many injustices afoot in the book world, and people have often said brilliant things about those injustices’ root causes, but I can’t stay invested in that conversation. I always find myself drifting back to the historical unlikelihood of my being able to spend this much time with something as beautiful and useless as a poem. It shocks me out of the minutia. Not to be a brute about serious and complex things, but I’m just too fucking lucky to care.

Maybe that’s Vox Pop’s problem. Maybe I can’t maintain the day-to-day grumblings of the blog when the above is my core opinion…

Folk is divided into two sections. Peggy’s Cove Nova Scotia, after the 1998 crash of Swissair Flight 111, and modern day neighbourhoods around Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. Explain the origin and the concept of the collection to those who haven’t read it.

Okay. Well, it’s what you said, a two-parter. The throughlines connecting the two parts are in descending order of importance: airplanes, community planning, geometry, atheism, and me.

You were still living in Nova Scotia at the time of the crash in 1998, and it occurred quite close to your home. What lingered so much that you wrote about its effect a dozen years later, or, have you been working on this set of poems for quite  some time now?

I’ve been working on them on and off for a few years. The necessity of having to wrap something up for use in my MFA thesis spurned the decision to focus on the crash more directly. What I wanted to capture in the Swissair section is the tension between the diversity of individual expressions of grief and the homogeneity of the public face of that grief.  And that tension really becomes the tension of the book: How do you belong to something? How to you manage beholdenness,  in the context of being an individual?

Do you think people and places shape each other equally, or, do we shape our communities more than our communities shape us? How has being a Haligonian transplanted in Toronto affected your identity (if at all)?

Being a Haligonian gives me a place to cover myself in outsiderness when talking about Toronto. It’s a bit like being a Canadian when talking about, say, American popular culture. You can shield yourself away in a sort of truculent “we don’t do that back home,” stand separate when you need to feel superior to something. I love Halifax, love Nova Scotia, but life here is more all-in, it’s more naked and weighty somehow. I know that sounds awful and people who hate Toronto are going to love that answer, but so do I. I love this city and feel protective of it. But maybe that’s me being shaped by where I came from, even there. To be a Maritimer is to fall quickly in love, and turn on a dime to protect it. Or maybe it’s just me.

I love these four lines and could interpret them so many different ways. “Every night in winter / a forgotten million snowflakes fall / on the ocean and so all / they learn about is water.” What’s it like to write a poem, put it out there, and hear other peoples’ interpretations (or misinterpretations) of your work? Likewise, do past reactions – criticism, or praise of specific qualities — affect your mindset as you write a new poem? 

It’s great, you know, it makes the heartache of publication worthwhile. We have to take our individual readers so seriously, as poets, because there are so few of them. I try to read the critical work that’s out there, because I feel like it’s part of the process, part of the conversation. You need to scan over the adjectives a bit though, those words that get affixed to you, for better or worse, can start to pull you apart. My adjectives tend to be conspicuously tied to my being a younger person: lots of boyishness and brashness and (in the negative reviews) naivete. They’re words you use to describe kids. But I still think you need to look into the fire all the same, you need to read other people’s readings of you.

There’s a line in your book. “everyone / is nationless. Everyone’s a nation.” I think it’s fair to say there are very few things that unite me and the people in my neighbourhood. I think it’s fair to say PEI and Alberta are two very different provinces. So what makes a “nation” or country, beyond geographical borders? Anything?

This is a question of political sociology really. A nation is a geographical expression of shared history: linguistic history, ethnic history, religious history, whatever. A country is a self-governing political construct. Some countries are nations (France) some nations are not countries (Tibet) and we happen to live in one of the few countries that aren’t nations. I’m not being disparaging of Canada when I say that, I prefer our calmer acceptance of the truth (despite the occasional nostalgic hymnals from the Don Cherrys of the world) to the attempt to force the lie of nationhood on non-nations or supernational entities like what so often happens in America. America is my favourite country but it makes me cry a lot.

Ours is a post-modern country, and we should embrace everything that word post-modern encompasses. We should embrace the irony and obscurity of ourselves. It doesn’t mean we don’t have a culture, or lots of shared experience, it just means that we live less in our borders than everyone else. And that’s a good thing. There’s another poem in the book that ends on something like, “This isn’t patriotism. Maybe it’s the opposite, the decision to bend in the wind.” I could bend in the wind with others, I could be beholden to that gesture, within a crowd of fellow post-modernists. Who wouldn’t want that?

Warner on Double Talk, winner of the Percy Janes First Novel Award …

Ireland’s poet and novelist, Patrick Warner, moved to Newfoundland in 1980 “in search of better weather and economic prosperity. Bitterly disappointed on both counts, he turned to writing.” He’s currently bunkered down in Memorial University’s library as their Special Collections Librarian, and has penned three genuinely great, critically acclaimed collections of poetry between 2001 and 2009. Among his many accolades, he’s won the EJ Pratt Poetry award twice, and I so revere his brand of poetry I won’t try and capture why in words, for fear of doing it an injustice. I can only, confidently, call him one of our best extant poets. Hilarious and profoundly insightful, poignant and unpretentious, his poems resonate, linger, and make its readers want to pick up a pen themselves.

Double Talk is his debut novel. Any expectations that, as a poet, Warner would approach this story with a poet’s voice are not there. This novel is piercing and fearless; there is less CanLit emotionality here, and more barb-wired honesty. Marketed as a “love story in reverse,” it takes a scalpel to the idea of marriage, and shows, with shocking precision, how easily dissected it is. It’s also dryly hilarious. Warner ought to be a stand-up comedian on the side. The story is a truthful look at the potholes any two people in love are going to hit along the way, until they break down, or patch up who they are to each other. He uses alternating chapters of third-person Violet and first-person Brian to show how differently two people can experience the same moment, hammering home the notion that there is no right and wrong in a lovers’ quarrel, just conflict. In showing us that, Double Talk is one of the most potent he-said she-said novels of its kind. Using alternating points of view also lets the reader get to know both characters equally well, so they can choose sides, which was a goal of Warner’s.

Click here to read Salty Ink’s review of Double Talk

What’s been a highlight for you and Double Talk this year?

A highlight for me has been the number of people who have read the book. I’m used to the poetry world where the readership is very small. A highlight for Double Talk has been the number of strange bedrooms and bathrooms it has visited.

Off the top of your head, without struggling for “favourites,” name one or two books you really love by an Atlantic Canadian author.

 Tom Dawe’s In Hardy Country. Ed Riche’s Rare Birds and Paul Bowdring’s The Roncevalles Pass.

What are some of the best books you read in 2011?

The Possibility of an Island, Michel Houellebecq
Room, Emma Donoghue
Selected Poems, Mick Imlah
The Meaning of Life: A very short introduction, Terry Eagleton
Gift Horse, Mark Callanan
The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, Hiruke Murakami
Bull Fighting, Roddy Doyle

What are you looking for in a book, when you crack the spine and read?

I’m looking for excitement, for that feeling of being drawn into the work, time disappearing. I want the book to have a moral centre. I want to laugh. I want the book to have ideas. I want to be shocked and amazed by the writing. I want the book to occupy my mind long after I’ve put it down.

What’s some writing advice you’ve read or been told, that’s stuck?

Learn the rules and then break them.

Any pet peeves with the book industry?

Yes, but I will bore the hell out of your readers if I go on about them. Let me just say this, boot camp for publishers should include several years of pouring heart and soul into the writing of a manuscript which they then have to take to market.

What’s your favourite part of the writing process, your least favourite?

I love the initial ideas phase, the excitement of fragments coming together, the work gaining traction. I also really like the final sentence-by-sentence polishing.

I’ve heard your interest in writing was spurred on by Paul Durcan’s Daddy, Daddy. How so?

Durcan was the first poet I read who put his poems together in a way that felt completely natural to me, natural in the sense that the poems sounded very much like my own inner voice. I liked that he was a very serious poet who didn’t feel that he had to sacrifice humour, playfulness or social commentary at the high altar of capital P poetry.  I had a similar experience this year with Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. His approach to storytelling lit up a map of the novel that was already in my head but that no one else had found. I had the sense when reading both books that I had found a match for something that needed matching.

Michael Crummey said, of your novel, “It’s an exhilarating and sometimes terrifying look at the murky complexities that lie under the surface of all relationships.”  There’s so much for a writer to explore in that underlying surface he speaks of (and you write about), Is that why you tackle relationships in this novel? 

Relationships are profoundly interesting to me. Even those that appear superficial have a breathless complexity to them when you look closely. Other people are both windows and mirrors. We see them, we see through them, we see ourselves in them, and the view never stops changing. Whether we are conscious of it or not, we never stop asking Who are you? Who am I? Paradoxically, the answers to those questions can only be found in relation to the “other.”

 There’s so much going on to pull two people apart that it’s a miracle any relationship lasts; there’s so many reasons to stay with the person you’re with that it’s perplexing any relationships end. This is perhaps a question for Dr. Phil more than you, but what ultimately makes one couple stay together and another fall apart?

Like a great poem or a great novel a successful relationship has its own force field, a delicate web of tensions and counterbalances. It’s highly specific, though infinitely mutable.

You’re an acclaimed, multi-award-winning poet. This is your first novel. I’m sure people are asking you how hard it was to go from 30 lines to 300 pages, but I’d bet you probably found it more liberating than challenging, did you? To have all that space to dissect a relationship, versus one page?

I found it both liberating and challenging. There is so much craft to learn with any form.  Often the key to artistic breakthrough is not a personal insight it’s a technical one. I have built this new arm….now what can it reach? There are whole areas of my experience I have never been able to capture in a poem, whereas I was able to capture some of them in my novel.

Poetry crams you into a small space, word count wise, while a starting novel is like being lost in a boundless, endless field. Which do you prefer, and what are you working on right now?

I’m now infatuated with both forms. Frustratingly, I still only have the same amount of time to write.

 I adhere to the philosophical dogma: “There is no reality, just perception.” I loved your novel because it proved that. Your use of alternating chapters between both Brian’s and Violet’s points of views show how differently two people can experience the same moment, and how there is no right and wrong in a lovers’ quarrel, just conflict. Was that your goal? Did you ever choose sides? Have your readers?

My goal was to create two convincing characters. I think what you say about “There is no reality, just perception” is largely true for Brian and Violet, though it is not true for me. That probably because I’m middle-aged. The world is not just a social construct. It has a reality independent of us. And yet, you are right in the sense that we often behave as though the world is whatever we perceive it to be, which is a great recipe for comedy. It always amazes me just how differently people read the same event, the same book, the same e-mail (oh the confusion a group e-mail can unleash). But getting back to Brian and Violet, I didn’t choose sides, though I hoped my readers would. Many did.

You balance dark subject and humour as good as anyone I know. In both your poetry and this novel. Is this a task and something you’re conscious of doing, and if so, why?

Humour is often the most intelligent response to life. It seems to kick in when our other systems fail. Stand-up comedians are the philosophers of our age! Humour is so present in our everyday lives that it boggles my mind why it is not present in more poems and novels. Also, the mechanism that operates in most humour–the quick turn–is the same one that underlies good writing. As ee cummings famously put it: “Would you hit a woman with a child? No, I’d hit her with a brick.” That kind of momentary shifting of the ground under our feet–that kind of lift–is magical because it offers us a radically different perspective. Suddenly the world is fresh and full of possibilities, if only for a few minutes. Another word for it is insight. Irony is hugely important for me. It’s a powerful tool for artists and writers who are trying to construct a mirror of the time they live in. Irony is also a spectrum, with satire at one end and compassion at the other. It’s a brilliant way of acknowledging and accommodating “the other.”

When a male writer takes on the voice of a female character, there’s always the question of “How’d you do that?” or “How did you find that?” Personally, I don’t find it that much different, as we’re embodying characters, not genders. And, ultimately, don’t we share the same emotions? Do you agree, disagree, fall in the middle?

I think you are right in that the core is the same, but that we express ourselves differently for lots of reasons. I found that my wife and female friends were critical not so much of what Violet said but how she said it.

Does writing a book like this, about the effect of time and children on a marriage, make one’s partner a little paranoid?

Not my wife. She is a profoundly secure person, emotional intelligence out the wazoo. There is nothing in the book that we hadn’t discussed in one way or another over the years, though we often revisited those discussions as we looked at drafts of the book. We both guessed that some readers would read the book as autobiography. And we have had comments from readers that lend themselves to that conclusion. If only they knew!

Gerard’s been winning awards for a decade, and finally gave us a published collection last spring. In Moonlight Sketches, Collins excels in hooking his reader with a well-paced sense of impending tragedy, and the stories ring true to the irrevocability of isolated moments. He’s got a cast of convincing characters here, many of whom having been wrung through the wringer of small-town mentality. Collins knows the recipe of his own work: when to add nuanced comedic relief to a dark story, and when to add a closing line that clangs like a gong. These are these well-structured, well-paced stories that ride on a tension of some kind, as a sense of looming danger bait and hook its readers. The sharpest images from these stories will sink in like a knife, and I take that as the sign of a dedicated, talented writer. If a reader isn’t feeling a story, they’re reading a lesser book.

What’s been a highlight or two for you and Moonlight Sketches this year?

The invitations to readings and literary festivals like Winterset at Eastport and Word on The Street in Halifax, as well as the Mixed Type event in St. John’s were just thrilling to be a part of because of the feeling of acceptance into a larger writing community. Also, being asked to talk to young people about the writing life was particularly gratifying. A third (because 1 or 2 means 3, just like a 50 km/h speed limit means 60 km/h) was meeting people like Stan Dragland, Don McKay and Ed Riche and having them say, “I know who you are.” I’m also going to sneak in that the book launch rocked with all those old and new friends, and students from over the last few years.

Off the top of your head, without struggling for “favourites,” name one or two books you really love by an Atlantic Canadian author.

Annabel by Kathleen Winter and Baltimore’s Mansion by Wayne Johnston. And, in the spirit of my earlier response, I’ll add Anne-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees, along with Ernest Buckler’s The Mountain and The Valley.

What are some of the best books you read in 2011?

It’s hard making time to read when teaching and writing, but I try. Winter’s Annabel was the best I read last year and also a poetry book by Leslie Vryenhoek, Gulf. I was very impressed with the juxtaposition of rugged and peaceful beauty in Samuel Thomas Martin’s This Ramshackle Tabernacle. I’ve started on both Deluded Your Sailors by Michelle Butler Hallett and Glass Boys by Nicole Lundrigan, as well as a sneak peak at Stephen King’s gigantic 11-22-63 on my new e-reader and they’re all captivating. When I do have time to read, I have several books on the go at once. I write manuscripts the same way, in fact, always with one on the front burner and another one or two simmering on the back burners.

What makes a good book a good book, anyway?

Two things: first, when you’ve finished, you know in your gut, that you’ve just read something quite satisfying, even if you didn’t like some of what just happened in the plot.  Second, while you’re in the process of reading it, you have at least the occasional euphoric moment when you know you just swallowed something tasty and perfect. I’m a sucker for the quiet moments in a book, more than the exciting bits. To answer your question, I really haven’t a clue. But if I feel like I’ve gotten some insight into the human condition—which really means I’ve had my own suspicions validated—by the end of the book, then the writer has given me what I paid for.

 You teach University English. Why?

I am addicted to the intellectual energy of a classroom setting. My classroom, I once told my students, is a “sacred space” in which you can think and say anything you want without fear of reprisals or censure. It’s one of the few places I’m aware of where you’re encouraged to have an opinion, and your opinions are expected to evolve over a certain period of time. I’m a philosopher and a writer, and I’m interested in who we are, how we got this way, how we get along or hurt each other, and where we’re headed as a race. So I teach university English, just for kicks. It’s an extension of what I am.

 What’s one piece you always teach and why?

“Always” suggests infinity, but there are some pieces I’ve used many times. The novel I most enjoy teaching is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, for all the reasons I stated above. It’s spare and powerful. It’s about who we are and the road we’re on. But, mostly, it’s about what is the essence of humanity and our world. “Apocalypse”—which is what the novel is about—simply means “revelation” or the lifting of a veil, and that’s how McCarthy treats the supposed end of days, showing us what can be learned about ourselves even in the darkest of moments and, if we can learn that lesson now, we can maybe avoid the worst case scenario. Only literature and art can go where he goes.

What would you have to say to a bright-eyed first year English student with dreams of being a rich, widely heralded published author?

I’ve actually never met one of those. They’re pretty savvy these days about what to expect. Mostly what they’re hearing is how difficult it is to make a living as a writer. That’s good because the ones who do it anyway, despite knowing how hard and, at times soul-sucking the business side of it can be, those people actually stand a chance of being the last writer standing, the ones who publish. I tell them all that, but I also tell them to seek a mentor they can trust, to work hard at their craft, revise until your fingers bleed and submit work to any place that will offer feedback even if they reject you. Oh, and I also say, “Don’t take rejection personal. It is personal; you just shouldn’t take it that way.”

If you weren’t a writer/instructor, you’d be a … ?

Singing-songwriting-picture-taking, filmmaking-painting-drawing-beachwalking-foresthiking-financially-constrained savant. In other words, really living well on my way to an early death.

What’s your favourite part of the writing process, your least favourite?

To quote Mumford and Sons: “The blank white page.” That’s the best part, and then watching that infinite number of blank pages fill up with words, feeling characters come to life. The least favourite part is that moment when I’m finished the first draft. I hate that feeling of closure, of limiting the possibilities because, before that, it’s all possibilities.

Which story in Moonlight Sketches are you the most satisfied with in hindsight?

None, really. I’m proud of all of them for what they attempt, and some of them actually come close to what I set out to do. “Hold Out” might be the best written story, but “The Darkness and Darcy Knight” gets the biggest reactions. A lot of people say, “Really? You had to go there?” But a great many readers confess it’s their favourite story of the collection because it’s so unflinching in its depiction of darkness. I can do better, though. I can be even more unflinching.

Which Story was the easiest to write / came the fastest, and which did you really struggle with (and why)?

“Break, Break, Break” was the result of an intense four-hour writing session and amazingly little revision after, even though it’s been published in two different collections. I’d spent all night lying awake and listening to the characters’ voices in my head (or seemingly outside of it), and the next morning, I just skipped breakfast, sat at the computer and wrote without a break. The title seems apt, in many ways.

“Our Julia” was a struggle. It was the last one I wrote for Moonlight Sketches—and I think I was putting a lot of pressure on that story—on that poor little teenage girl and her family—to say so much that I hadn’t said already about the state of Newfoundland culture, the outports and the crossroads we’re at. Also, the idiocy of certain intelligentsia in trying to tell people who to be. My editor didn’t seem to particularly like the first draft that he saw, so I worked on it for two or three weeks, and then again some more before I finally had a draft that we were both happy with. Julia is very real to me—a first-year university student on the doorstep of life, with so much energy and curiosity and maybe too much love for the world. It was hard getting that one right. I hope I did.

Break, Break, Break, really hit me in the guts, and I know it’s won an award and been anthologized.  Did you know anyone affected by the Ocean Ranger disaster?

Not directly. But the real answer is yes: everyone. And that includes me. I avoided writing about that disaster for the same reason I avoided writing about my father’s death for many years: it was too close and too raw, and I needed to process my own grief. I truly didn’t think I had any right to write about the Ocean Ranger because it wasn’t my tale to tell. But then the story came, and I found a way to write about it that made sense to me and gave me the most artistic satisfaction. Curiously, Mike Heffernan’s Rig and Lisa Moore’s February—both fantastic books—came out around the same time that one was first accepted for publication. To me, it feels that Newfoundland literature is really coming of age when we are able to process events like that in a visceral, meaningful way.

You’ve set all your stories in the small fictional town of Darwin, tell us why you went with this concept, and how it fostered many of your themes and tensions. And, was calling it Darwin as bit of a veiled stab? Darwin being synonymous with evolution and several of your peripheral characters needing to evolve a little socially. 

I started writing about Darwin nearly twenty years ago as a university student—short stories and then novel manuscripts. Since then, no matter where the stories are set, for me, it’s always been a question of, “Will this take place in Darwin or somewhere else?” After some of my Darwin stories won awards, I decided a collection was taking shape and Darwin had to be the common ground. It was partly a way to help myself grow as a writer, my own personal evolution, to challenge myself to see if I could get inside the head of a sixteen-year-old girl, a twenty-something schoolteacher, or an eighty-year-old woman. Or if I could make sense of my own reaction to something like the Ocean Ranger, gender prejudices, and certain kinds of darkness to which I’d been privy. “Chosey Bilch” is probably the most discomforting character in the book, and that’s precisely why I wanted to get inside his head, regardless of what I would find there.

Oh, and the town is called “Darwin” for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is, as you suggest, the actual lack of evolution one sometimes sees in society, specifically in an isolated, rural community. I’d rather not explain them all—although there was one critic who wrote a nice review but questioned why it was called Darwin, ruling that the name didn’t fit. I responded with a two-page explanation of why Darwin was, in fact, the perfect name for that town. I didn’t send my response to the critic, but it was an exercise in self-reassurance….or justification. Either way, it’s about the devolution of the town, of society in general, of our province, but also about survival of the fittest—meaning those who are best able to adapt, as Charles Darwin says. Every story is a study in survival, in some way, but then so is the collection as a whole. One example: the Ocean Ranger is often said to have “no survivors,” but truly it did—the survivors were those on land, who were faced with the challenge of adapting to a new and cruel reality. Every story is one of adapting—or not adapting, or surviving or not—or about who or what survives under the cruelest of circumstances.

Any pet peeves with the book industry?

Yes. They won’t give me as much money as I want.  Also, I’m not a big fan of the tendency in the Canadian industry sometimes to publish, or favourably review, books based on whether they might be capable of winning a Giller or GG award. It seems that if you’re not considered for one of those major awards, somehow you’re relegated to the “whatever” pile. On the other hand, there are publishers, obviously, who will take a good story and run with it. To me, that’s more culturally important than basing your list on somebody else’s criteria. I think a star system is kind of important, and I do think those awards people play a strong role in helping establish one. But I wish publishers and agents in Canada were a bit more open-minded about what was worthy of notice—if only to reduce some of the sameness, not just of content, but of style as well.

Tell us about Finton Moon? When is it out, and what’s it about in 10 sentences or less?

Finton Moon is a gothic adult fairytale novel, set in the fictional town of Darwin. It’s about a misfit boy with an odd perspective on the smalltown Catholic world in which he grows up. He finds early on that he possesses the ability to heal people’s injuries and diseases, which further sets him apart. It’s dark and funny, filled with all the important issues of life, mortality, faith, hope and the nature of family. It’s scheduled for release this April (2012).

One of my favourite stories in Moonlight Sketches was “Run, Mother, Run!” The surname, Moon, was in that story I believe. Am I right to predict we’ll be hearing more about the Moons in Finton Moon?

Yes.  Elsie Fyme, the pregnant, female protagonist of “Run, Mother, Run” is the mother of Finton Moon. Other characters recur too, including her ultra-Catholic mother-in-law, now known as “Nanny Moon.” The novel begins about seven years after the events of the short story.

Author Ed Riche in the vines of Chateau Beaucastel, Chateauneuf du Pape.

The main character in Ed Riche’s new novel, Easy to Like, is a screenwriter turned winemaker … Ed knows his stuff, so read up and learn what to serve with your Christmas turkey and then some. Also, buy the book.

If I restricted your wine shopping to three countries, what would they be?

France, Italy, Germany in that order, steeply declining .  I’m tempted to say France, France, France

Name your top three varietals. And one varietal that should not be sold as a standalone.

Pinot Noir, Nebbiolo but as I can no longer afford the best examples from Barolo and Barbaresco I will say instead, Sangiovese.  I’d say Chardonnay, but as I mean only in its manifestation in some parts of Burgundy, I will, instead, say Riesling.

Counoise is a great grape that I had the good fortune of tasting vinified on its own, courtesy (and he was extremely courteous and generous) of Robert Haas at Tablas Creek.  It is weird, like (as I say in the book) raspberry kimchi.  But since having had that pleasure I can detect the note in wines in which it is a tiny part of the blend.

Name three blends you love, and why Elliot is such a fan of Chateauneuf du Papes.

Strangely I don’t like many Chateauneuf de Papes.  They are mostly hugely overblown wines with far too much alcohol for their own good. At their rare best, when made with restraint, they capture the heat and sun of the Southern Rhone so that it can warm a winter meal of roasted meat, so you get a gust of that smell of garrique from the hills down there when you need to be reminded of summer. And while the wine is famous as a blend, some of the best examples are Grenache alone. Chianti blends are great, and some of my favourite wines from Bordeaux have unusually high percentages of cabernet franc or petit verdot (another grape that doesn’t seem to work alone).  Eliot likes Chateauneuf  du Pape because he tasted a great example at a perfect moment in his life, when everything seemed possible.  He believes it is because of the fascinating agricultural alchemy involved.  He doesn’t know it but he is actually driven by the wine’s associations rather than the wine itself, he’s trying the reinvent the past and create a perfect, fanciful, future to resemble it.

Some of the best Côte Rôties are syrah, not only blended with, but co-fermented with small amounts of viognier (there is a good reason to do this beyond taste that is too long to explain here). I used to be able to afford those fantastic wines – nose like a field of wild flowers, inky blueberries, smoked meat and black olives in the mouth – but they’ve gotten too dear for a writer.

What’s your take on Italian “Super Tuscans” and other blends that break rules? Blasphemy or tasty?

Mostly a waste of time and a huge waste of money – they are really pricey.  Sure they are good but they are too much like wines from Napa or Bordeaux most of the time.  Why they would want to mess with brilliant sangiovese magic with additions of merlot and small oak barrels I do not know.   The decision was based on the perceived direction of the market I suppose.  I could be saucy and say “The best are brilliant bores,” but I have also really enjoyed Sassicaia and Tignello – again wines that are now ludicrously overpriced.

What should we drink with our turkey on Christmas day?

Lightly built pinot noir, even try a Canadian example (see below) or top Morgon or Moulin-a-vent from Beaujolais.  Good German Kabinett works.  Nothing heavily built as the meal is too rich and even gluey on its own.  I think I may have eaten enough turkey for a lifetime.

Recommend a few great bottles of wine under $25.

Pelee Island Reserve Pinot Noir out of Ontario will surprise you. It’s not Grand Cru Côte d’Or by any means, but it’s got something going.  Perquita from Portugal is a perfectly good drink for under $15.  A Bordeaux Superior from a great year can often be affordable and surprisingly good – but avoid in a bad vintage.  Any of the Perrin wines from the designated villages in the southern Rhone i.e. Vinsobres or Carainne are great value for people who like wines with some fur on them.  Many of the top makers of the great and costly wines of Piemonte,  Barolo and Barbaresco, also make great Dolcetto d’alba and Barbera d’alba.  The prestige nebbiolo wines are north of $60 a bottle and the dolcettos and barberas south of $25. They won’t be as complex as the more august wines but they are tart, honest wines that are great with food.   Whites are trickier.  A solid bet is a Muscadet but make sure the words “sur lie” are on the label.  Spain makes interesting affordable whites in Rueda.  I can drink the inexpensive Torres white called, I think, “Vina Sol.”

For super bargains go sherry.  Fino or Manzanilla sherry, served cold on a hot day, with a salty snack, are a lavish experience for very little dough.  Same for quality Oloroso or Palo Cortado sherry on a cold night in front of a fire.   Careful though, they have more booze than you think.  On a hot day you can drink a lot of dry sherry fast and get blasted.

Name a bottle or two of wine everyone should treat themselves to over the holidays

If you can get a grower/maker champagne, not big brand name stuff, split one with your partner.   They are usually twice the quality and half the price of brands. Unless you salt them away in good spot in your basement you are not going to be able to buy mature red burgundy, which would be my choice.  The same is true of the Barolos and Barbarescos,  those that are at maturity aren’t to be found in stores, so unless you’ve taken the time to cellar them …

There is usually decent Rioja that is ready to drink in the stores.  Get a decent reserva.

There’s a great quote early on in your book. “The best winemaking is no winemaking at all.” What are 1 or 2 particularly cheap, dirty tricks that taint/enhance wine these days?

Most of the mass produced stuff, the critter labels from Australia for instance, is really made in a factory with all kinds of weird intrusions, added sugars or acids, stabilizing agents etc.  Almost everything is subjected to some sort of sulphur exposure to stop strange things happening in the bottle, but some measure is necessary if it is being shipped around the world.  The thing I most dislike is too much residual sugar and too little acid – tastes like flat Pepsi.

What’s meant by “Dry Farming?”

Not using irrigation.  All fruit that is grown with irrigation at the surface finds it unnecessary to drive their roots deep into the ground in search of a drink.  En route those roots pick up all kinds of trace goodies from the earth that positively affect the taste of your wine.  Put grapes aside and taste the “strawberries” they grow using drip irrigation in the Salinas Valley of California.  They look like strawberries but they taste of nothing. Also stressed fruit must make an extra effort to continue their greedy genes by putting more into their fewer seed bearing packages.

The eco-conscious oenophiles are worried about global warming’s effect on wine. What’s meant by “A Baked Wine?” And how can we tell a wine’s grapes have been “baked”?

The wine has a flabby, over sweet character, there isn’t enough acid to get that bracingly, puckering feeling in your mouth.  Graves apple juice from Nova Scotia has terrific acidic zip but American stuff grown in warmer climes has this flabby character to which I refer. Baked wines have a raisin taste and do nothing to cut through the fat from the meat that was just in your mouth.  Global warming is going to make Prince Edward County in Ontario the best pinot producer outside of Burgundy, and Nova Scotia the equal of Champagne when it comes to bubbly.

Sideways remains the most popular modern film about wine, and its protagonist, Miles, argues that merlot is an over-rated, easy to like, berry-licious grape not capable of greatness, and he loves pinot noir because it so embodies its terroir, and requires such care on behalf of its producers to make a good bottle. Would Elliott agree with Miles on both accounts? What’s your take on Sideways, anyway? I loved the movie, and, like both Miles and Elliot, default to pinot noirs and chateauneuf du papes. Do you have a default wine type, one you can always count on when you can’t make up your mind?

I liked Sideways, it was a good yarn about the way men think, but didn’t care much for Miles’ moronic take on Merlot.  Merlot can make brilliant wine.  Merlot in the right setting can be as much about terroir as the most rigourously biodynamically neo-french-hippy grown Cab Franc in the Loire.

I have a couple of defaults that relate to food.  Inexpensive sur lie Muscadet is default with fried or grilled fish or with mussels, clams and oysters; with game it’s always red Burgundy; with leg of lamb it’s got to be a Bordeaux or one of the few good California knock-offs.

Your protagonist’s vineyard is in California. California is the exclusive source for zinfandels. What’s your take on zinfandels? Elliot didn’t seem a fan, when his help suggested he sell a brand, Zebra Zinfandel, with the zinfandel growing on their property.

Ridge makes a couple of passable Zins but most of it is awful, one dimensional junk.  I now avoid Zin and Australian Shiraz like the plague.   Back in the 90s guys were selling Zin from California with slogans like “no wimpy wines”  or “wines with  giant balls.”   It’s like they were selling bear spray, not something you were going to put in your mouth.  Those Zins are just awful garbage.

When people tell me they find red wine “too harsh,” I assume it’s the snap of tannins turning them off. So I recommend the lowest tannin-containing red, Beaujolais: it’s like drinking a juice box, but it’ll get them started. What would you recommend to white wine drinkers as a gateway into reds?

I’d love to say Burgundy but buying a bottle really requires knowledge, boring wine bore knowledge.  I think some of the less “horsey” riojas people gotta love.  A truly gastronomic rosé from the south of France, like Bandol,  on a hot day on the back deck, munching a few olives and other nibblies has to win anyone over. I don’t care who they are, or what they have drunk in the past a great bottle of red from Burgundy or a mature Paulliac is going to wow anyone.

I’m almost exclusively a red wine drinker. The whites just lack the complexity, boldness, and magic I’m after. Am I missing something? Do you have a readymade suggestion list of whites you can share with me?

Yep, you are missing something.  Get your hands on a good 5 year old Chablis Premier Cru (it’s going to set you back $40) get it cold, DECANT IT, and have it with a great piece of fresh fish.  You’re there.

Ed Riche, recently crowned Atlantic Canada’s King of Satire by Salty Ink, writes for the page, stage, screen, and radio. Well. A Chemistry student turned film school graduate, he co-created and wrote for the radio program, The Great Eastern, which won him the CBC Vice-President’s Award and a Writers Guild of Canada Award.  From there he’s built an extensive and impressive array of radio, television, and feature film scripts that have earned serious recognition, awards-wise and other wise …

But this is a book blog, right, and I really wanted to mention he’s the guy who wrote Rare Birds. It’s one of the best novels out of Newfoundland, ever, and a funny as hell story of a man whose restaurant by the sea is failing, so, to attract a crowd, his eccentric neighbour carves fake rare birds to lay out at sea. Hilarity ensues. It was adapted (by Ed) into a feature film that starred Molly Parker of HBO’s Deadwood and William Hurt.  The film was nominated for a Genie Award. I think “a funny as hell take on the human condition” is a fine enough one-line summary. If everyone has a book that reminds them of a time and place in their lives, this one’s mine. I was clewing up university, and realizing it was sham, ending a 6-year relationship, and I read the thing in a hospital bed, recovering from a surgery, where they attached a chunk of metal to my heart. So, I was really relating to Dave “fuck up Man” Purcell to say the least.

Penguin published his second novel in 2004, The Nine Planets. It made The Globe‘s year end best of list, and won both the Winterset award (for the best book out of Newfoundland that year) and the Thomas Head Raddall Award (for the best novel out of Atlantic Canada that year). He also won the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council’s Artist of The Year in 2004.

The fine-tasted folks at Anansi have just published his latest, Easy to Like. It’s a scathing satire of modern taste, and the corporations who cater to it, that tells the hilarious story of a screenwriter turned winemaker, striving to save his vineyard and the CBC. Funny as this book is, there’s no nonsense when it comes to what’s being knocked, which adds poignancy to the punchlines. Consider the novel your companion in disdain for the way things are, and if you can’t change them, you may as well laugh at them. See yesterday’s post for more on this new novel.

CLICK A BOOK COVER TO READ MORE ABOUT THAT BOOK

Shedding Some Ink on Ed Riche

Off the top of your head, without struggling for “favourites,” name one or two books you really liked by an Atlantic Canadian author.

Recently Craig Francis Power’s Blood Relatives impressed me.  Dark and funny and with very mature prose for a first timer, there was more storytelling and less writing than one usually sees these days and that was to my taste. A couple of years ago I had to read, for the first time, Anne of Green Gables.  I had formed prejudices about the book without having read it but it turned out to be an exceptional book.

You’re big into theatre and screenwriting. What’s the draw there, What do they offer you that novels do not?

Most of the screenwriting I do is to order, it’s at the behest of a producer who often comes with a story (or part of one) so the draw for me is mostly the paycheck.

The theatre is the danger and excitement of witnessing a story take on its own life, having a story respire in time with the breath of its audience. It’s as if your book caught fire in your hands.

If you weren’t a writer, you’d be a … ?

Chef.

What is great about being a writer? What isn’t so great?

The solitude.

Which piece of yours are you the most satisfied with in hindsight?

The opening night of a play I wrote many years ago called Possible Maps.  The show ended and I thought, “Wow, that’s exactly what I intended.”  I’m happy with my novels.  There are things I would change in some film and television work and one play in particular.

You’re being dubbed one of the country’s finest satirists. Is knocking things cathartic, or just fun?

It isn’t much fun at all, it’s an expression of outrage and a call of warning.  It might just come from frustration over  a feeling of impotence to effect change. I know people get laughs from the humour, from your showing them the absurdities, but you can get angry rooting around in the darkness locating them.

If you were to write a satire of CanLit, what might you mock?

Its mawkish lyricism, its preoccupation with pioneer days, its pandering to female readers, the tendancy to mistake the notation for the music.

A lot of Elliott’s frustrations with the film and TV industries, with regards to catering to taste and marketability, translate to frustrations shared by authors/readers about today’s book industry. Publishers, for example, pay attention to sales, as if, because a book sold it was loved by its reader. Not the case, yet they associate sales with taste. Do you have any frustrations with regards to the Canadian book industry?

First I really have to say that the people I’ve met in the industry have been great.  Easy to Like was my first dance with House of Anansi, and I couldn’t have worked with kinder, smarter folk.  But it is so hopeless a business these days one wonders whether they have the right to use the term “industry.”  Some of the big national awards that were created to promote the whole have ended up creating a “winner-takes-all” situation, where only the award winners are in the public consciousness.  This can be disasterous when something like the Giller so often gives the prize to an incredibly shitty book.

It’s a mess out there now, bookstores are a thing of the past, the big box places are more about housewares and chocolates than books.  A title has to be associated with some sort of stunt, like Canada Reads, to get attention.  But bitch as I might, I have no solutions. We’re in an interegnum, not only in writing, but in the creation of any sort of content that can be copied.  The prediction that the internet would make anything than can be reproduced valueless has happened much faster than anyone expected.  We are in the midst of revolutionary change so no one knows what’s going to happen.  I was grousing to Lisa Moore the other day about how meagre was the financial reward for writing a serious novel and she said that writing was becoming “a priesthood.”  My heart isn’t as big as Lisa’s, so I have no time for that kind of “vocation.”  I adhere to Dr. Johnson’s dictum that, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”

You’ve done some research to inform this novel. What are some of the most notable things you dug up about wine, CBC, Hollywood, whatever? Does the existence of feral zebras in California take the cake? What was the highlight of all your research?

Some of the things I learned about F. Scott Fitzgerald have really stuck with me.  I went to the house in which he died in Los Angeles, and I felt some sort of fraternal sympathy with the guy.  He was a joke from the past when he died, a relic from a bygone era that wasn’t 20 years earlier.  I feel, regardless of how much more important an author he might be, that he and I are somehow in this racket together.

The wiretap stuff in the novel is based in fact.  I think I was surprised how genuinely thuggish Hollywood gets at its worst.  The suggestion in the novel that scary people would conspire to keep Elliot in Toronto isn’t a stretch.

I learned much much more about winemaking than is in the book, lots of details that I judged would lose readers.  Similarly, and I regret some of this, I greatly simplified some aspects.  I referred to both vine stock and root stock in an early draft and made them the same (which they are not) in later drafts so as not to confuse the larger audience.  I think I will change that if there is another edition.

Funny as this book is, there’s no nonsense when it comes to what’s being knocked, which adds poignancy to the punchlines. Do you agree humour helps sink the core of a novel even deeper into a reader?

Absolutely, that’s the very trick of it.  Nobody can talk as candidly about society’s failings, about perfidy, as a someone who can dress it up with laughs.  There is also nothing more dangerous to tyrannies, from the grand to the petty, than being mocked.

I’ve read an encyclopaedia on wine (literally, I even ran a blog called Red Teeth for a while), so I like to think that I appreciate wine more than casual drinker, via my knowledge thereof. Yet I have friends who drink sloppy wine, who couldn’t even tell you what they’re drinking — what zinfandel or super tuscan even means — and yet they talk about how much they’re loving it, while I’m finding my more expensive, properly prepared wine a little disappointing. Where do you stand in the debate that the more we know about wines (or a particular artform), the more we enjoy them? 

You’ve gotten to the essence of my book with that question.  Is it possible that having a more informed taste diminishes your ability to be satisfied?  Maybe a naïve, uninformed approach to anything that has simple enjoyment as an objective is the best?

Elliott works on shitty scripts to fund what he really loves: his vineyard. Are there examples of real life screenwriters like this that you know of?

Francis Ford Coppola most famously.  No screenwriters I know personally have vineyards, but every single one of them has wrtiten shitty scripts.

How is a good bottle of wine like a good film/book?

You can’t identify what it is that moves you, or rather what it is that moves you is elusive or changing.  In both cases you just keep thinking about when it’s over.  They talk about “length” in wine, the same should hold true for good literature.

If this book was taught in a university classroom, 9 out of 10 professors would tell their students that Elliot’s going looking for that elusive, possibly extinct Matou grape (to perfect his wine) is a metaphor for the key ingredient, and what’s gone missing in the recipe big corporations use to make films/books these days. Care to take credit for the metaphor?

Thank you, I will.

Your new novel is a pretty scathing attack on CBC and similar corporations. I liked the line, “the ornate poetry of management non-speak.” What’s the deal, Do you feel like the goal of a company like CBC gets lost in its management, mandates, and regulations?

Yes, [having] too many layers between the creators and the managers always manages to fuck the product.

I found Elliott admirable, particularly with his refusing to make Easy to Like wines. There are two kinds of artists. Those who make what they love, and hope people love it. And those who make what people love, so they’ll love it. Are the former really more noble, if both are making things at the end of the day? (I think so, but I am asking you.)

I’m too long in the racket now to know. I’ve tried to make crowd pleasing work and have not always managed to pull it off.  Rare Birds was certainly an extremely popular piece but not by design.   Audiences ate up my most recent play, Hail, and it was not a light, fluffy piece with a redemptive ending.  My novel The Nine Planets was never meant to be a crowd pleaser and, to my ultimate regret, it really wasn’t.  Yet I think more highly of that book every day.   I would like to believe what I’m doing is noble, I really would, but I don’t feel that.  There have a couple of occasions when I’ve taken a pass on a paycheque to write crap but as many others where I’ve sold out.

Your novels feature normal people striving to be decent and happy, and making mistakes like the rest of us. Like “fuck up man Dave” from Rare Birds.  Is that intentional, not having heroes and happy endings? What’s wrong with books that do that?

There is nothing wrong with happy endings.  They don’t seem to be part of my act.  I cannot stomach “heroic” characters because I never believe them.  And I find happy or redemptive endings deny the story in the novel a continued life beyond the last page.  It’s like, “My work here is done, tuck the kids in and go to sleep out of it.” My work tends to come to conclusion before the characters have completed their journey, they are only ending a stage and there is evidently more to come.  I just like that better myself.

“It’s not so much that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living,’ but that the unexamined life has not yet been lived.” – Mark Callanan

I don’t hesitate at all in calling Mark one of the best poets in Atlantic Canada right now, or one of my personal favorites in the country. Clean, lean, and unpretentious, his poignant poems skillfully dissect their subject matter, peeling back layers to expose rich imagery, metaphor and meaning. His work manages to be lucid and reflective in a small space. In this very interview, he speaks of being drawn to the power of compactness provided by poetry, and at their best, his poems really are nothing short of linguistic firepower. Some poet’s aim to capture a fleeting thought or moment; Callanan tends towards mulling them over for meaning. And it’s what makes his work so powerful. I’m quite often left feeling struck like a bell by his work, so I’ve got no problem suggesting you go ahead and get a copy of his brand new collection, Gift Horse.

“Chicken Scratches” from Gift Horse

Hen-pecked
pencil markings
in a weak hand,

symbols scrawled
across bedroom walls
in manic crayon

or written ten-foot-tall
in spray paint
on a passageway,

cuneiform entrenched
on a baked
sheet of clay,

elegant cursive
pissed in a
snowbank.

Everything written
is doomed
to be misunderstood.

Now, if you will,
your signature
here, please.

A Newfoundland-based poet, Mark has won a Newfoundland & Labrador Arts & Letters award 5 or 6 times now, and his work has appeared in journals and anthologies as notable as Breathing Fire 2: Canada’s New Poets and Open Wide A Wilderness. He published his first collection, Scarecrow, in 2003, which was shortlisted for the NL EJ Pratt Poetry Award. Track down a copy, trust me. Or trust The Chronicle-Herald via poet George Elliott Clarke, who said “Callanan has talent to burn … his eye is exact.” It received the ultimate compliment from University of Toronto Quarterly: “This intelligent book will yield more riches with each reading.”

He followed up on that praise with a chapbook last year, published by chapbook champs, Frog Hollow Press. They dubbed it “A nautical tale bent by poet’s logic.” It was shortlisted for the coveted bpNichol Chapbook Award, and quickly sold out. But you can read the whole thing here: http://issuu.com/markcallanan/docs/sealegend

Callanan is back in fine form this fall, with his latest collection, Gift Horse (Véhicule Press). Many of its poems were written in response to his near death experience in 2007, so its poems “offer up the story of a young man whose gratitude at being alive is undercut by Lazarus-like confusion and ambivalence.”  Quill & Quire praised its “understated, thoughtful observances” and wrote, “Callanan’s poetry is not fussy, nor is it driven by ego; it is humble …  There is an exactitude to his art, displayed in the efficiency of his diction and his tightly organized stanzas. [Callanan] should also be applauded for his pitch-perfect rhythm, and his unforced use of metre and rhyme.” Likewise, The National Post praised its “deceptively simple language.”

Click on a Book Cover to Read More about One of Mark’s Books:

Salty Ink: My favourite poetry, and much of yours, dissects fleeting thoughts; it’s about mulling over moments for meaning. So how does the quote, “The unexamined life is not worth living” tie in to why you write? What is it you are trying to do when you sit and write a poem?

Fundamentally, what I’m trying to do is figure out my own thoughts and feelings on a given subject. I don’t really know what I make of anything until I sit down to write about it—more than that, it feels as if I haven’t properly experienced the thing until I try to articulate that experience on paper. Really, in my case, it’s not so much that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” but that the unexamined life has not yet been lived. I’m sure this is probably a deficiency on my part—my inability to parse experience without writing about it—but it’s the way I was made.

According to your publisher, this collection, conceptually, was written in reaction to your own recent, near death experience. What’s the story there, right from the Gift Horse poet’s mouth?

Many of the poems in the collection were written in the aftermath of a brush with death I had back in 2007; the ones written before that have gained greater resonance since the event. To be brief: I contracted Meningococcal Meningitis, was admitted to hospital, and then put in a week-long, medically induced coma. At a certain point, my prognosis didn’t look very good, but I came out of it relatively intact. It’s strange to have missed such a significant event in my life, especially given that, for my friends and family, it was a nightmarish experience. I have trouble reconciling my own experience with theirs. For them, it was a period of complete uncertainty, during which they almost lost me. For me, it’s just missing time—I have no recollection of that week, or of the hours leading up to and following the coma.

 Why might the extinct Newfoundland wolf, and sea legends like mermaids, be prominent in your poetry? 

I was fixated on the extinct Newfoundland wolf a few years ago because of its symbolic potential. Extinction is the death not only of the self, but of all other selves. Martin Amis writes about this in an essay on nuclear warfare called “Thinkability.” He’s talking about a nuclear holocaust being “unthinkable,” not in the colloquial sense of the term, but literally: “the unthinkable is not thinkable,” he writes, “not by human beings, because the eventuality it posits is one in which all human contexts would have already vanished.” On a micro level, neither can we conceive of a world in which we, as individuals, no longer exist. I can entertain thoughts about my own death, but it’s no more real to me for that. Extinction is death writ large; an extinct species like the Newfoundland wolf, then, is a towering memento mori.

The mermaids are part of a wider obsession I had with mythological creatures. There’s a poem called “Kraken” in my chapbook, Sea Legend. Really, they’re all stand-ins for humanity. The mermaids are particularly useful because they’re split between two worlds, and I like thinking about them in relation to Newfoundland, which I conceive of as a liminal space.

“Kraken” from Sea Legend

Past the diorama of the diving birds,
the swimming birds, the birds
perched on a cliff face, the faces
of the cliff besmirched
with splattered egg whites
of faux bird shit;
past the skeleton of the extinct
auk in a glass case, propped up
by a metal rod that pins
his long-dead bones in place;
a tank with riveted metal frame
contains the giant squid.

You’d hardly think its phallic shape,
its length (some porn star’s
money shot at fame) would dredge
more than giggles from the belly’s
depths, but this decaying
length of dick and tentacles
once roiled the waters,
crushed ships in its embrace,
and gripped the minds of sailors,
half afraid, half amazed.

You can’t help but tap the glass
as if the squid might scatter
like a flock of birds,
as if it weren’t a kind of relic
from a time when the bones
of saints could cure
the sick and make the lame
ditch crutches, dance a jig,
as if it were a living thing,
and that its eyes,
the size of doorknobs,
might then turn
on you and see you
looking in on death,
watching your reflection in the glass.

Moreover, a lot of your poetry is rich with animal imagery and symbolism paired with personal experience. As a poet published in the anthology Open Wide a Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poems, why do you think so many poets are drawn to “Nature Poetry.”

I don’t know that poets are drawn to nature any more than they are drawn to other subjects, but the reason we write about nature at all is that we’re horribly aware of the disconnect between the human race and the natural world. Gerard Manley Hopkins has a great line in a poem called “God’s Grandeur”:

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

It’s a poem about nature’s resilience against human destruction, but the crucial bit is that line about our feet being shod: we can no longer feel the earth beneath us, and when you can’t feel the damage you’re doing, it’s much easier to do damage. Ironically, the intellectual abilities that made us succeed and proliferate as a race will probably also precipitate our demise.

In my attraction to writing about the animal kingdom, I’m greatly influence by Ted Hughes. He’s a poet for whom the animal world was a place of violent impulse—Tennyson’s “Nature, red in tooth and claw”: “Nature” being both the natural world and human nature. And part of that human nature is our simultaneous feeling of attraction and repulsion in the presence of violence. We’re amazed at nature’s obliviousness to our human plight—surprised, for instance, when a grizzly kills a hiker, just as it would any other piece of meat—its indifference both frightens and thrills us.

Other than the whopping royalties, what’s drawn you to poetry?

The power to create something that has a life beyond me. That could be said of any art form, I guess, or of procreation. I’m drawn to poetry in particular because of its concision, because there is great power in the ability to say a lot in a small amount of space; and because I like working with such space constraints; and because poems, to me, when they’re working well rhythmically, have an incantatory quality that feels magical. I’m not writing poems so much as casting spells. If I wasn’t writing poetry, I’d probably have to play RPGs to get my kicks.

What’s the biggest misconception about poetry?

That it’s difficult to read. It’s not. It just requires patience and a willingness to engage. We don’t walk into a new relationship expecting a person to reveal their deepest secrets immediately, so I don’t see why we should expect a poem to blurt everything out at once. Actually, though, I guess people are a lot more willing to reveal things about themselves in the era of Facebook. But on the whole, they trade in deathly boring details; I think they still keep the good stuff to themselves.

 If there’s one trait common to all good poetry, it is …

 A sense that these exact words, in the precise order they’ve been set down, are inevitable. See below.

 What is your favourite part of the writing process? Your least favourite?

 I’ve always appreciated that Dorothy Parker quote: “I hate writing; I love having written.” Let that be my mantra. I find writing extremely difficult to do; I’m too concerned with doing it well to actually enjoy myself. That being said, there’s a moment that comes, countless drafts in, when the elements that constitute a poem start snapping into place, when all its little gadgetry suddenly works and those disparate pieces unite to a single purpose, when the trajectory of the poem seems inevitable—that’s the good bit: when the poem works, when it becomes more than the sum of its parts. Otherwise, it would seem like a lot of pointless toil and frustration.

On Sean Cranbury …

What we consider piracy is a basic function of the internet. If you don’t want piracy then you don’t want email, twitter, facebook, online banking, flickr, skype, etc … Enthusiasm is the fuel of piracy. Any publisher who believes that they should limit ‘enthusiasm’ for the books that they publish gets what they deserve.” – Sean Cranbury

Don’t let the relaxed photo above fool you. Sean Cranbury is two things: very busy, and always ready for a fierce debate on books. And he brings a searing passion and intellect to the chat every time. In fact, I met the guy in the middle of an online argument, and just as I stepped in on the thread, Julie Wilson was dubbing him, “The Henry Rollins of CanLit.” By the end of the thread, I knew her comment was an understatement. I’ve lost every argument I’ve had with the guy, and he ends every discussion with an appreciative thanks for the chat gesture, the way a Samurai master extends a courteous handshake to a guy whose ass he just kicked. In his perpetually putting me in my place, I now consider myself enlightened, converted,  and feeling better about The Future of Books. Sean is easily on Canada’s shortlist of Those Who Could Save the Industry from its Supposedly Impending Demise. He always makes a good point, so I hope the right people are listening. The Canadian book industry is afraid of the future, but they should be embracing it. And consulting with visionaries like this guy, instead of the DoomSayers and dinosaurs.

Sean is the Vancouver-based host of Books on the Radio and he’s involved in a dozen other things at any given time, like: – The Giller Lite Bash Vancouver – W2 Real Vancouver Writers’ Series – BookCamp Vancouver – The Advent Book Blog – He’s been in the book trade for more than 20 years as bookseller, events coordinator, marketer and managing editor. – He’s on the Faculty of the country’s finest publishing program, at Simon Fraser University. – Etc.

The World According to Sean Cranbury …

2 great songs …

“Art of Almost,” the first song off the new Wilco album, The Whole Love, just blows me away.

“Got More Rhymes,” by Young MC. One of the coolest songs ever recorded.

2 great books …

Salad Daze: The Hot Knives Vegetarian Cookbook. Best. Cookbook. EVER.

The Warhol Gang, Peter Darbyshire. The weirder the world gets the more sense this book
makes.

2 great authors …

Vladimir Nabokov. I picked up my trusty copy of Invitation to a Beheading last night and read a
random chunk before bed. Incredible language. And it’s not even approaching Lolita, Pale Fire
or Speak, Memory territory.
Roberto Bolano. Very gratified that we’re getting to experience his writing for the first time
as his backlist is rushed into print in English. He’s got that great rebel sensibility and poet’s
understanding. He’s funny. He’s the writer that I would most love to be able to emulate.

2 new books you’ve got your eye on …

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. Obviously. This will be a major victory for publishing.

Uncreative Writing by Kenneth Goldsmith. An interesting examination contemporary
developments in expression that asks: “Can the techniques we traditionally think to be outside
the scope of literature, such as word processing, databasing, appropriation, identity ciphering,
collaboration, and intensive programming, inspire a reinvention of writing?” Goldsmith is an
American poet and the founding editor at UbuWeb.

2 great bookish events you look forward to every year …

This is the first year ever for the Giller Light Bash Vancouver. I’m helping to organize it and
it’s going to be an absolute blast.

Bookcamp Halifax: I’ve been lucky enough to participate remotely via Skype with BCHFX
the past two years. I look forward to it because it’s great to connect across the country with the
great people in that city. I hope that next year I will be able to attend that event in person and
then we can all go to the Liquor Dome for drinks after.

What’s one thing that’s wrong with the publishing industry right now?

The acceptance and/or support for DRM in any form on books or devices. It’s pure blindness on behalf of publishers who have been bullshitted by Amazon, Adobe and other DRM providers into believing that they need it to ‘protect sales and defend copyright. DRM will kill many more books than it helps and it’s prevalence shows an utter lack of leadership in some of the corner offices of the publishing industry.

What’s a more positive note about the industry right now?

Book design is achieving an amazing level of accomplishment right now. People who care about bringing quality books into the world – and aren’t chasing the invisible butterfly of piracy with their DRM nets – have raised the bar for the quality of books. Books are in good hands. I’m pleased by what I see. Especially what’s coming from the small presses.

What are some of the reasons you advocate that piracy won’t be such a bad thing as we all transition into the world of eBooks?

a) what we consider piracy is a basic function of the internet. if you don’t want piracy then youdon’t want email, twitter, facebook, online banking, flickr, skype, etc…
b) books and ideas are meant to be shared. they will be shared.
c) enthusiasm is the fuel of piracy. any publisher who believes that they should limit ‘enthusiasm’ for the books that they publish gets what they deserve.
d) digital files are infinitely replicable and therefore their basic cost/value is $0*.
e) Piracy is the equivalent of the Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street.
f) the internet is the greatest and most democratic invention for communication across boundaries that we’ve created. why do we want to limit that? because of money? really? think about that.
g) books are the greatest, most durable revolutionary technology that we’ve ever invented.piracy points us towards better books, it destroys centralized control over ideas, and spreads information without prejudice.
h) piracy sells more books. ebooks don’t matter to me.
* this is not technically true, i know, since publishers will invest money in every book and all sales channels are vital. what I mean here is that they don’t have the same cost and physical presence as books do don’t function according to scarcity in the same way. if an ebook is being traded online it is being replicated without a central control. the question isn’t how to stop it, it’s how to use this enthusiasm to sell more books.

What’s the last book-ish event you were part of, and how was that?

A BBQ at Dennis Bolen’s back yard in east Vancouver with poets George Bowering, Brad Cran, Gillian Jerome, Heather Haley, New Star publisher Rolf Maurer, writer/comedian Charlie
Demers, Jean Baird, Soressa Gardner and a few others. It was a lot of fun. We talked about baseball a lot.

What’s BOTR all about, for those who don’t know?

Books on the Radio is an experiment with the internet featuring my voice and the voices of others. A kind of choral work, you might say.

BOTR is a blog where I post interviews with writers whom I find interesting and also a platform for my writing and ideas around technology and books. It’s an extension of my work as an independent bookseller. It’s my contribution to the conversation about books and publishing during this transition. In many ways BOTR started because I could no longer endure the tone of the conversation around books, DRM, piracy, digital, etc… It was making me sick.

I see BOTR as an expression of what I consider to be my responsibility to books, writers,booksellers, publishers. It’s an exercise in freedom of speech, too.

What’s the best thing you’ve done so far this year?

I traveled to Saskatchewan this summer to do some work with the Sage Hill Writing Experience in the incredibly gorgeous Qu’Appelle Valley. I’d never traveled through that part of the Prairies before. Just amazing landscape and wonderful people. In places it really reminded me of the time that I spent in PEI many years ago.

What’s the worst?

I saw Rob Zombie open for Slayer in Saskatoon. Slayer were amazing and the heavy metal parking lot outside the venue was awesome. Beaters and pick-ups for as far as the eye could see. But Rob Zombie? Man, that show SUCKED. In some ways I think that the magnitude of crappiness could be considered ‘progressive’ since he was clearly breaking new ground for pandering awfulness and predictability. The band came out for their encore performance of ‘Dragula’ wearing matching white tunics with a red maple leaf emblazoned on the chest and I threw up a little bit in my mouth.

Canadian Short Fiction Champ, Rebecca Rosenblum. (c) Dave Kemp

 Rebecca Rosenblum …

Those of you familiar with Newfoundland audio book publisher, Rattling Books, and their ultra hip anthology series, Ear Lits, will have heard Rosenblum’s stellar stories, “Christmas with My Mother” and “The Weatherboy.” Or … you’ve seen her work in the million other places its found itself.

Rebecca’s an exclusive writer of the short story, who’s been compared to Alice Munro by critic Steven Beattie. Her short fiction has been shortlisted for all three of the country’s major short story gold detectors: the Journey Prize, the National Magazine Award, and the Danuta Gleed Award. (She was herself a juror for the Journey Prize 21.) And her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including the honourable Coming Attractions and Best Canadian Stories.

How does she accomplish this? Take the above photo as proof she ” works in publishing during the day and writes short stories evenings and weekends, and…that’s pretty much it. I spend my remaining time on the bus or asleep or both.”

Her debut, Once, won the Metcalf-Rooke Award and was one of Quill and Quire’s 15 Books That Mattered in 2008. It featured 16 stories that set Rosenblum apart as a distinct voice in Canadian short fiction. Her latest collection, The Big Dream, is brand new on the shelves, and her publisher sent me a copy the very day I read and fell in love with  “How to Keep Your Dayjob” on The Afterword, so I dove right in to it. Like most of her writing, it depicts the monstrously large role our dayjobs play in our lives.

A Quick Review of The Big Dream …

The stories in The Big Dream act like 13 sneak-peek snapshots of the staff at a magazine, Dream Inc., as they struggle to keep their jobs and dreams alive. Where most books act like a character’s job is secondary to who they are, The Big Dream focuses on the truth of the matter: we are never separate from what we do to pay the bills. And she best shows this in the stories that aren’t even set within the office: we don’t have to be physically there for our mind to be on the job, or on someone at work, or on something that happened at work, or, conversely, how our personal lives aren’t on pause when we’re there. In “Complimentary Yoga,” a man is in love with his boss, who certainly doesn’t care for the guy she’s bound to fire. But he fabricates an entirely believable and creepy delusion that speaks to the reality of the inter-office romances, uneven personal bonds, and real-life emotional connections we form with the people we see 40 hours a week (i.e more than we see our partners). Sometimes it shows another reality: work bonds us to people we wouldn’t normally associate with, were we not co-workers. This is shown caustically in “After the Meeting.”  The book also marks Rosenblum as an original, dialogue-strong stylist among Canadian short story writers.

The World According to Rebecca Rosenblum …

2 great songs …

How about 2 great writing songs?

“Rewrite” by Paul Simon

and “Rattled by Failure” by the Paperbacks

2 great books …

… about writers and the writing life: Bech: A Book by John Updike and Forde Abroad by John Metcalf

2 great authors …

… that have inspired me lately: Mavis Gallant and Joshua Ferris

I’ve been calling Biblioasis the country’s metal detector for short fiction gold. Is there a Biblioasis-published collection you’ve recently read and loved?

Well, there’s Clark Blaise and then there’s the rest of us. The Meagre Tarmac is very different from the work of his I’ve read previously. Though I haven’t read everything he’s done, it’s the first time I’ve gotten this sense of communal life, of characters knowing each other and affecting each other’s lives across stories, drawing the reader into a world bigger than the pages of the book. It’s engaging and, in some small ways, very warm—which cushions some of the harsher realities that Blaise always has in his stories. It’s a very hard collection to describe, but a very very good one—generous to the readers and to the characters.

Dan Wells at Biblioasis is among my most respected figures in Canadian publishing. Is he a big reason you’ve continued publishing with Biblioasis?

Cathy Stonehouse, Laura Boudreau, and Rebecca Rosenblum, with Biblioasis publisher Dan Wells, on their Women of the Short Sory (WOSS) Tour

Absolutely. I’m sure he would be deeply alarmed by your “most respected figures” comment, but I’m also sure it’s true for a lot of people, myself included. There’s something to be said for not listening to the hype, just doing the work, and the work will speak. In 7 years, Dan (and a host of wonderful others) have created a publishing company that you can’t dismiss with words like small or independent. The books on their list are always worth reading—you might not like every one, but they repay the time spent. The covers and pages are also lovely, and they promote and support their authors as well as any publisher in Canada, I think.

You can’t ignore that Dan chose to launch our “Women and the Short Story” tour on his birthday, his whole family came to the reading, and Biblioasis’s publicity assistant/superwoman Tara Murphy made us all cake. Stuff like that makes it fun, and warm, and cushions the blows when literary life doesn’t run smooth, as it often doesn’t. The respect is on a professional level and on a personal one as well—you can’t work that hard without a considerable amount of love for what you do.

So, Steven Beattie, a critic best known for his harsh (mostly valid) opinions, dubbed your debut, Once, “The most exciting first book of short stories by a Canadian writer since Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades.” Are you a Munro fan? Have a favourite collection or short?

I admire Steven and appreciate his assessment, but that’s a terrifying comparison to live up to—I don’t know that I ever will. That’s ok—Munro is a worthwhile summit to shoot for. The best thing about her? In my opinion, it’s that she keeps getting better, getting weirder, challenging what it is we think of her—yeah, she’s that northern Ontario mid-twentieth century childhood/underappreciated and overeducated young girl/unhappy marriages writer, but lately she’s been doing all this other stuff. Like the totally bizarre piece, “Some Women” (I don’t know if it’s in a collection; I read it in the New Yorker a few years back)—you think it’s just what she’s always done, but it is, but it isn’t.

What about the ultimate collection or short story, one of your very favourites?

Once you know a lot about any given genre, or form, or school of cooking for that matter, it’s very hard to have favourites. The best surreal stories are in a completely different category from the best modernist stories, and it’s so hard to compare Mansfield to Atwood, or Proulx to Cheever, or Barthelme to anyone. That said, one story-writer I return to again and again is John Updike. His stories are so quiet and lovely, emotional and yet funny, and his voice is so purely his. Sometimes I hate the people he writes about, but I always love them too. My favourite collection of his is Too Far to Go — I love the Maples. But any of his stories have that tone, that warmth, that strange little spark.

You’ve been acknowledged by all three if the country’s major short fiction awards – The Journey Prize, The Danuta Gleed Award, and the National Magazine Award. What’s been a serious career highlight so far?

I think the highlights are not the nominations themselves, but the praise implied by the company you’re put in. When I was up for those prizes, it was beside a short story by Craig Boyko and The Withdrawal Method by Pasha Malla. Their books are an honour to have mine compared with. Seriously, read them immediately. I’ve also read with the best—Elizabeth Hay, David Bergen, Kathleen Winter, tonnes of others. To be put on a bill with someone I really admire is a huge compliment—I always try to live up to it.

In your acknowledgments, you thank one of my favourite short story writers, Jessica Grant, “for whom ‘How to Keep Your Dayjob’ was originally written as a performance piece.” What’s the story there?

(This One?)                  (… no, this one.)

It’s actually a different story than you’re thinking, because it’s a different Jess Grant! The one I’m talking about is a Toronto improviser who has performed with a couple different groups, including the theatre group Free Biscuit, which I was also briefly a part of (FB is no more, sadly). We were doing a night of short monologues and were each assigned a performer to write for, and Jessica was mine. She spent a lot of time performing all the various drafts for me, which was really generous. I had never written for the stage before, and she really helped me see what worked and what didn’t. It was a big relief to rewrite the piece, after the performance, as a story, but a lot from the stage version stayed in.

You also thank Kerry Clare, of Pickle me This and Canadian Bookshelf, who introduced you at your launch. How did you two meet?

Grad school. I had an amazing class in the University of Toronto Creative Writing Masters, but Kerry Clare is the one I had and have the most in common with, personally and creatively. I think we both want a lot of the same things from fiction, written and read, and we have a good time talking about it. And everything else, too—she is a very easy person to talk to, so I was really grateful that she agreed to conduct the stage interview at The Big Dream’s book launch. She always asks very insightful questions, but she’s also a lot of fun, so I was able to escape nervousness…well, mainly.

The Big Dream is very much a collection about co-worker relations — fabricated and factual — and how, to quote from a story, “Our jobs are our reality.” The job-life connection has played a role in your previous writing as well. What draws you to this concept? And what do you do by day to pay the bills?

Jobs are a part of life—quite often up to 50% of our waking lives. I find a lot of fiction disingenuous in pretending everything important in our emotional lives happens after hours or on the weekends. We continue to be thinking, feeling, weird, emotional people even while we’re working on spreadsheets in a grey baffle-cloth cubicle. I’ve been working in publishing on and off for—oh god—almost 10 years now, and most of that has been in large office buildings in small cubicles. I have met some fascinating people in that time, learned a lot, and done some good work. Sometimes I’ve been ignored or pushed around, sometimes things have been very boring indeed, but I never stopped growing and evolving as a human being, even on the clock. I feel that sort of life—the one I and most people I know live—is not represented enough on the Canadian page. I wanted to do that.

Another line from the book, “He was wasting a perfectly good girlfriend.” To what degree do you think the necessary evil of work gets in the way of who we are, and, our connections with others?

It depends on how you interpret that line and that relationship in the book. I was writing about someone who pretty literally needs to work to survive—he has a lot of debt and little else—dating someone who didn’t really get that concept, someone who thinks if you don’t like your job you don’t need to stay. That’s a really hard bridge to cross; for a lot of people it’s the bridge between childhood and adulthood. I think whether work unites or divides people is as individual a question as each relationship. It’s how you deal that matters, not what you do.

What’s been the worst or most awkward moment in your writing career, or something you dislike about the industry?

Oh, man, I need to stop telling this story, but I love it. Very early on in the writing thing, before I’d done anything or knew anyone, I wound up getting invited to a very fancy, very exclusive, very huge arts-industry party. The invitation explicitly said I was not to bring a guest. “Ah, they want us to mingle and meet new people,” I thought sagely. So I got very dressed up and went all the way across town to this enormous event that actually had velvet ropes and searchlights outside. The thing that makes this sound like a morality tale is that I ran into friends sitting on a patio drinking beer on my way to the party. They wanted me to come sit with them but then they saw how dressed up I was and said, “Oh, you need to go to your fancy party.” So I get there and present my invitation and go in, and there might literally have been a thousand people. I knew no one, and of course no one was mingling with strangers; sane people who attended this party did so in posses, or at least somehow arranged to meet up with folks there. No one talked to me except waiters and bartenders. I did a couple circuits of the room, had two drinks and assorted very elaborate hors d’oerves (cream soup in shot glasses!) and then went home in dismay. I was there less than 20 minutes, but by the time I got all the way back to my neighbourhood, my friends had left the patio and I had no choice but to go home in my finery. See? Total morality tale.

What’s been the best or funniest moment in your writing career, or something you love about the industry?

Oh, it’s too hard to pick—there’s been so many good times. Yesterday was pretty fun—how about that? I was a part of a roundtable on the short story for Quill & Quire with all these amazing people, and then they decided to do a photo shoot of us, so we got to meet and hang out in person for a couple hours. It was so nice to do that, but at the same time, it’s very hard to be photographed, period, let alone with a bunch of other people you’ve not met before. It was Michael Christie, Jessica Westhead, D.W. Wilson, and me (Alexander MacLeod was also in the roundtable, but too far away for the photo shoot, sadly), and none of us knew what to do with our hands, or where to put our gazes, and we all had these lame ideas for how to pose. If they weren’t such funny, kind people, and the photographer weren’t so patient and generous, it could’ve been a disaster; instead, it was a kind of brilliant way to spend a rainy Wednesday morning.

What’s the worst thing you’ve done so far this year?

I got stuck in the lineup at Gatwich airport right before the border patrol strike—3 hours in a barely ventilated hallway. Ugh.

What’s the best?

Get engaged. I’ve swapped the order so we can end on a positive note.

Fitzpatrick’s off to a good start, having secured convincing endorsements from fellow Newfoundland novelists Jessica Grant and Ed Riche, in addition to a glowing review from the Globe and Mail.

“[Fitzpatrick] Upends our collective myths about family, love, and sport. A remarkable novel – with more wit and wisdom than you can shake a stick at.” – Jessica Grant

“His award-winning first novel is a fast-moving, unsentimental look at amateur hockey, masculinity, mid-life crisis, drink, drugs and family secrets … the book itself is brisk, engaging and, in the end, very moving. An altogether impressive first effort.” – Globe and Mail

The novel is about a 41-year-old with a lot left to discover. His girlfriend has just walked out on him, and his half brother has just waltzed back into his life, stirring up what The Globe called “a tangle of squalid family secrets.” His father, a DJ at the local classic rock station, is about to go to court, and as the back of the book says, “You Could Believe in Nothing is a biting, often hilarious study in familiarity, underlining how little we sometimes know about the people and places we know best, including ourselves.”

I asked Jamie a few questions about winning the Fresh Fish award, and he mentioned it was obviously a great boost “especially for a guy who had never published a word of fiction. And it proved to be a turning point for the manuscript.” The Fresh Fish Award is awarded to a  single unpublished manuscript, once every two years, deemed worthy of publication and public consumption by the masses. In addition to the $5000 and getting a publisher’s attention, the award comes with $1000 of editorial time with an editor of your choice.

“With the $1,000, I hired Kenneth Harvey to do an edit. Partly because I heard good things about his time as writer-in-residence at MUN, how he helped people out. Also, he’s a writer I admire, but one whose style is nothing like mine. That seemed like a healthy situation.” Turns out Harvey showed up at Jamie’s house one day and “we sat for five or six hours, going through it one page at a time. The issues he raised really pushed me through the next couple of drafts, to where the book is today.”

“The other turning point,” Fitzpatrick says, “was when Vagrant Press in Halifax came on board. It was a blind submission. They had no idea who I was. But the managing editor, Patrick Murphy, worked with me on a significant edit before we even had a deal. Then he assigned me to their in-house editor, Kate Kennedy, henceforth known as St. Kate in my house. Kimberly Walsh is an online marketing whiz, and very patient with a reluctant crank like myself. I feel quite lucky, especially considering some of the publisher horror stories I’ve heard from other writers.”

I asked him about comparisons, “Some early readers mentioned the humour right away. Others found it pretty bleak. I came up with some dramatic circumstances to move the story along—Dad’s sex scandal, the family secret, etc. But to me it’s a story of ordinary life, which is both bleak and funny, as we all know. In any case, categorization is more of a reader response issue. Now that it’s out in the big world, how I would define or categorize the book hardly matters anymore.”

Hop on over to his website, and check out this literal map to his novel, and read a little more about Jamie and his book.

A Little More Q&A With Jamie Fitzpatrick …

What was the last novel you’ve read by a fellow Newfoundlander that blew you away?

I shy away from superlatives like “blew me away.” People throw such phrases around all the time, and they become meaningless. It’s like those gold-plated adjectives that keep appearing in book reviews – “breathtaking” and “courageous” and so on. It’s a dead language.

So that’s my little rant. As to your question:

I just finished Ed Riche’s Easy to Like, and loved it.

Michael Crummey’s The Wreckage always comes to mind when I’m asked about Newfoundland novels. The way he sets up his characters in the outport, then sets them adrift in the world, forced to become whoever they are, finding their way back to something … It’s hard to explain, but I really like the overall structure.

Jessica Grant’s Come, Thou Tortoise, because it’s voice and tone are like nothing I’ve read before. How often can you say that?

Last winter I heard Libby Creelman read from her novel-in-progress, and it’s stayed with me ever since.

I’ve been reading Al Pittman’s Down By Jim Long’s Stage to my daughter. It’s great.

I suppose it’s no surprise that I very much liked Night Work, Randall Maggs’ collection of Sawchuk poems.

Do you have any favourite authors, and are they the same ones who might have influenced your writing?

My all-time favourites are among the giants: Chekhov, Trollope, Tolstoy, Austen, though it’s been years since I read Austen.

Otherwise I tend to have favourite books rather than favourite authors. The current list would include books by David Malouf, William Trevor, Tessa Hadley, Umberto Eco. After seeing bits of their work I’m looking forward to reading David Mitchell and Amitav Ghosh.

I’m a sucker for a well-told story set in the domestic world—scenes of family, friends, social connections, daily trials and tribulations, and all that. All of the above are good at mining drama and character from life’s minutiae and mundane details. That’s the thread of influence I find in that list of names.

Is there such thing as a “Coming of Age” book when the main character is 40, not 20? And if so, might your book fall into this category?

A “coming of age” episode could happen at any point. For example, a big part of my story is Derek’s effort to get a handle on who his parents really are. That’s a typical coming of age bit. But I’d guess that most of us are well into adulthood, even middle age, before we solve that mystery. Assuming we ever do.

Though I wouldn’t give this book the “coming of age” label, it tinkers with some of the same questions—identity, maturity, what it means to lead a decent life. I ended up surrounding my main character with people who face those issues in different ways. You could argue that Derek’s father never really grew up, while his sister seems almost hyper-mature, nothing childlike left in her. His mother is dogged in her devotion to family and stability. His brother is constantly on the move, always searching. The women in his life are searchers, too. Derek exhibits traces of all of the above.

You began your career as a sports writer, and you’re clearly an avid hockey fan, but what got you writing fiction and where’d the rest of this story come from?

I was in my early or mid-thirties before I had the urge to write. Not sure why it happened then, or why it didn’t happen before.

I guess at some point I decided to commit to my imagination, pursue my ideas and see if I had anything to write. I enjoyed it, so I stuck with it.

Time to spare was another big factor. My partner and I lived in Ontario for five years, and I was unemployed or semi-employed during that stretch. So I could indulge my ideas and try my hand at the craft.

As for the story itself, I can only say that I made it up, and had a lot of fun doing so. Like any novel, it draws on elements of real experience. But the best part for me was the invention of it all—figuring out who the characters were and dreaming up interesting ways to afflict them.

You’re a hockey fanatic and an arts lover. If I bent your arm, What would you take: the 6-figure book deal or the 6-figure hockey deal?

The book deal is surely a wiser choice, and probably more rewarding. But I’d take the hockey deal, because it’s the more spectacular and colourful fantasy, going back to when I was a kid. I’d be a fleet-footed, whip smart defenseman, like Scott Niedermayer. And I’d be looking for a big raise on my second contract. Six-figure deals are for rookies and pluggers.

The New Quartely is one of the country’s finest literary Magazines. How were you recently involved with them?

It was a happy coincidence. We moved to Ontario so Danine could take a job in the English department at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo. That’s where TNQ is based. It’s a small college and everyone knows everyone. So I got to know Kim Jernigan and Rosalynn Tyo, and they eventually asked me to write an essay for an issue on the Burning Rock collective. Then they invited me to guest edit an issue on hockey writing, probably because they were at a loss as to who might do it. I’m grateful for the trust they placed in me. TNQ is a great book, a great outfit. Working with them was a pleasure.

As Host and Producer of CBC’s Performance Hour, you’ve profiled many great local songwriters, like Amelia Curran, Sherry Ryan, and Andrew James O’brien. Do you have any default Newfoundland musicians you’re always listening to, or, a particular Newfoundland artist’s album in your CD player at the moment?

Amelia Curran and the Pathological Lovers. I might have a different answer next week or the week after. But that’s where my ear is right now.

Everyone likes a good song and a kick ass band.  But that’s just the starting point, the minimum. What really grabs me is hearing a true musical personality at work. Amelia and Jody Richardson aren’t just great writers or performers. The music they do is their own in a more fundamental way. It’s imprinted in every note, if that makes sense.

~~~

Let’s end this interview with Amelia’s “Bye Bye Montreal”; Amelia being a Salty Ink favourite, that being my favourite song of hers, and the whole Bye Bye as a sign off, you know?

Very few Canadian writers have had short fiction published as widely, and to as much acclaim as Mark Anthony Jarman. More importantly, there’s no one like him, not even an imposter. Normally an Atlantic-based author — think Lisa Moore, Michael Winter, or Joel Thomas Hynes — fashions a distinctive style, and all the cool kids take being derivative one step too far, but I’ve never come across someone who has reminded me of Jarman. He’s widely hailed as the country’s most original short fiction writer, and has earned the adoration of even the most critical readers (Steven Beattie defended The White Planet for The National Post’s Canada Also Reads Competition).

But original doesn’t cut it; original implies he is the first of our generation. It’s more like he is beyond this generation of writers. He is the first of the next to come. He is post-original. It is like he is ten years in the future, writing from a place where story has evolved to, and more often than not you finish a story having experienced something no other writer in this country is offering.

Before I start a collection, I find myself flipping to the page that mentions where the stories have already appeared, won awards, whatever. It doesn’t sway my opinions, I’m just curious.  But you do that with a Jarman collection and it reads like an endless biography. My White Planet is the best-decorated collection I’ve come across, and I won’t bother listing his accolades. They are too many. And he’s done it all, so why list it, from the O. Henry to some Journey Prize recognition.

He’s best known for 19 Knives and My White Planet, among other collections and his novel, Salvage King Ya! (which is on Amazon.ca’s list of 50 Essential Canadian Books), but he’s also at work on a novel or two, and has written poetry (the title quite alluring, Killing the Swan) as well as a travel book, Ireland’s Eye.

Click A Book Cover to Read More about That Book …

1.) Off the top of your head, without struggling for “favourites,” name one or two books you really liked by a fellow Atlantic Canadian author.

Without thought, the poet John Thompson sprang into my head.  Stilt Jack, At the Edge of the Chopping, the marshes around Sackville.  Not too far from there is Leo McKay in Nova Scotia; his book 26 is very good.

The west coast poet Phyllis Webb got me to read John Thompson in the 1970s when I was in Edmonton and he was an influence.  I still haven’t figured out what it is he’s doing for the effect he has.

2.) Any advice for aspiring writers looking to be published authors?

I am very bad for advice.  I’m not sure I know my own process.  I collect material all the time, so I never have a blank page.  I keep a notebook or paper out when I watch tv, any kind of show, just in case I hear something or it reminds me of something.  I am nosy and eavesdrop.  I’m a bit of a sponge, a magpie.  Same with when I read.  I find reading good writers makes me want to write and to be better.  I’ve had to learn to do tiny bits of writing, as I don’t have big blocks of time, but the tiny bits add up versus nothing.  I’ve never tried to write for a market and don’t think I could if I tried, though I wouldn’t mind higher sales.  Thom Jones (The Pugilist at Rest) said to write a story that an editor can’t say no to.  I like that idea, but easier said than done.  It’s hard, takes time, but when it’s going well at 2 am, nothing beats it.

3.) What book of yours came the easiest/hardest, and any guesses as to why?

They seem to all take more time than I thought.  I had a dream where I wrote a really fast slim novel and it was done, and I thought why didn’t I do this before?  They often change from what I think they’ll be.  Salvage King Ya! was going to be about a huge hockey star and his fall from grace ala Derek “The Turk” Sanderson of the Bruins, but then it became about a journeyman.  I’m working on a novel set in Italy now and thought it’d be sunny and appealing and it’s become dark and appalling.

4.) I’ve heard tales you’ve spent time all over the world, from The States to Italy. What brought you to the New Brunswick? The teaching gig at UNB?

I came to NB for a temp job and ended up staying.  I grew up in Edm and lived in Victoria, Iowa City, Seattle, Calgary, Victoria again, and Freddy Beach.  I like to travel, but I’m not exactly a gypsy; I’m home a lot, looking at cat litter.  As a lesser-known author, I still get a kick out of going somewhere to read; I’m not jaded that way.  I try to go spring skiing in the Rockies every May.  I want to have a beer in Prague, but haven’t yet.  I was in Italy two summers back, Rome, Pompei, Napoli, Almalfi coast, which was just stunning, and have been to Ireland a lot, love Ireland,  and wrote a book called Ireland’s Eye; in April I’m going to Belfast and Dublin and Cork, reading with Alistair MacLeod and Gerry Beirne for a Canadian Night at the Cork World Book Fest.  Should be fun.

5.) Steven Beattie, one of Canada’s most prominent (and worthwhile) critical voices, championed your book, My White Planet, for the National Post’s Canada Also Reads competition, and wrote that “conventional notions of character and plot are less important than the jazzy, jangling music of Jarman’s language.” A.S. Byatt called 19 Knives “Something new,” and Barbabra Gowdy dubbed you “Dauntingly innovative.” So who are some writers that, in turn, amaze you with a unique gift or innovative flair of some kind?

Cormac McCarthy, esp Blood Meridan.  Barry Hannah’s Airships.  Thomas McGuane’s Panama was a big influence at the right age; I might not like it as much now.  Joan Didion was a big influence, I love her tone.  Robert Stone, Renata Adler, Celine.  John Cheever was very important, he showed me you can write about the suburbs, he got me away from the gutter.  I get a kick out of Flannery O’Connor and I’ve always taught Munro’s first book, Dance of the Happy Shades and Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow.  Poets like Richard Hugo, Larry Levis, Denis Johnson made me want to write that way in my fiction.  My favourite book from around 2007 was The Driftless Area by Tom Drury, a bit like David Lynch.  I love the voice.  I still get a kick out of teaching Eliot or Shakespeare or Conrad or Isaac Babel.

6.)  While it is fun to hear notable people talk on what sets Mark Anthony Jarman aside, what, in your mind, sets you apart from other writers? And what goals, if any, do you have in mind and the outset of a piece?

I don’t know what it’s like for a reader with my stories, so I can’t say what sets me apart.  Glad if it’s true.  Some stories I know what will happen but many I have a fragment or a scene or an image and I see where it goes.  I often add as I go; I heard of a knifing in New Brunswick and I dropped it into an Italian piece I’m working on.  Assiniboia Death Trip sprang from an article I saw on an old hat store in Fredericton and I thought of the different hat styles in vogue when Custer was killed and the new hats when Riel was hanged.  A few stories started as postcard stories and grew much longer.  Sometimes I start a new doc if I get a new machine or laptop and I add to that file over time and see where it goes.  It’s a mystery to me.

7.) Your short fiction has been remarkably well received and decorated. Of all your shorts, what are some that stand out to you? And for what reasons? Also, out of curiosity, how does one come up with titles as great as yours, like, “Bad Men Who Love Buzz Lightyear.”

I like titles.  That title came from an idea of Leon Rooke’s to hit one lit mag with a bunch of stories from different writers all titled Bad Men Who Love Jesus.  I had a piece called Buzz Lightyear I was working on and modified it a bit.  The New Quarterly ended up doing a special issue for that idea.  If I see a theme issue I often try to make something I’m working on fit that theme.  Re shorts standing out, I like some of my pieces in New Orleans is Sinking, maybe because that book isn’t well known, so it’s like my little orphan that I favour.  It came out just before 19 Knives which got way more attention.  And I had fun with the airport pieces that are the Bonus Tracks at the end of My White Planet.

8.) There are a significant number of references to music/songs in your work — unless, for example, story titles like “Guided by Voices,” (a band), “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (A Dylan song) and “Brighten the Corners” (A Pavement album) — are all coincidences. What are you listening to these days? Have a favourite song or musician/band?

I was in Banff and heard a reggae version of Radiohead’s OK Computer called Radiodread, and it’s spookily good and I really want to plug The Mountain, by Heartless Bastards.  I like the new Decemberists, which sounds a little like REM, and my van has an old cassette deck and it has REM’s Murmur in it right now, a cassette that has somehow survived over three decades of bad treatment.  I just picked up used CDs by the Detroit Cobras, Hot Tuna.  I like Julie Doiron out of Sackville and her CD Daniel Fred & Julie.  I found a copy of Love’s Forever Changes from 1967and cannot stop listening to it, it’s making me nutty.

9.) The story “Cougar,” from 19 Knives. What prompted you to write that, and have you ever had a dangerous encounter with wild- or not-so-wildlife yourself? It was a very convincing mauling.

Monday Magazine in Victoria asked me to write a Christmas story for them and I had been following some cougar maulings on Vancouver Island and also read of a man who kept a wolf at bay with a stick that turned out to be rotten; it worked to keep the wolf away but would have done nothing if the wolf had tested it.  And I heard of someone who had to walk miles and miles backwards to keep a cat from jumping him and thought how hard that would be, so easy to trip or fall.   When I was younger I hiked more and I’ve seen black bears and grizzles and coyotes and elk and moose and mountain goats and mountain sheep and a cougar and obnoxious English stag parties in Dublin pubs, but never been mauled.  An elk charged me at Banff.  The odd thing about Cougar is that a UVic student disappeared right after that piece was published and his body was found in the woods; my character goes into the woods thinking of ending it all, and I’ve always wondered if there was a link.

10.) “Burn Man on a Texas Porch,” shortlisted for the very prestigious O. Henry Prize, seems to be the first Jarman story out of a lot of peoples’ mouths. (And I assume it’s where the flaming shoe on the book cover comes from.) Does this surprise you, the way one story, for whatever reason, stands out? Or is there something about this story you are particularly happy with yourself? What sparked the idea for the short? (Pun honestly unintentional.)

Burn Man did not seem different than others I’d worked on, but you’re right, it’s had more attention.  I had a great editor (now deceased) at The Georgia Review work with me on that and Martha Sharpe also edited it for the anthology The Turn of the Story; that was how I met Martha who edited 19 Knives and Ireland’s Eye.  I like the part about the blue mug and the bird because it reminds me so much of the front steps of the house I had in Victoria at that time in Ten Mile Point.  The story had a few sparks: my kids were afraid of a clown with balloons advertising a shop in a strip mall and I was interested in masks and what aging does to your face slowly vs fast changes.  I did have a landlord when I was a student who woke up on fire, but he was all right.  He also set his TV on fire accidentally.  He drove a motorcycle too.  The shoe was from Nanaimo BC where a man was set on fire, perhaps a drug debt, and he jumped on fire from a balcony and ran down the street, leaving a burning shoe in the road.  I loved that detail.

Aside from his prolific output and versatility, and aside from being talented — Major has caught some major awards’ attention over the years — he’s also among the ranks of Newfoundland writers who have been Newfoundland writers before Newfoundland writers were the hot commodity they are now. In fact, by 1992, he’d won the Vicky Metcalf Award, an award doled out in recognition of “an outstanding body of work of significance to young people.”

“Kevin Major is among the best Canadian writers of his generation.  He has established himself as a figure of singular importance in our literature.” – John Moss, from A Reader’s Guide to the Canadian Novel.

He’s been writing full time since 1989, and his work has been translated into more languages than any one person can speak. He has adapted his novel No Man’s Land for the stage, and Rising Tide Theatre in Newfoundland have performed it ten years in a row now. Ann and Seamus was shortlisted for eight awards, in addition to becoming … a chamber opera! One that has toured internationally. And it looks like his debut, Hold Fast might be a movie soon enough.

Normally, I list an author’s catalogue here, but with Kevin, that’s just too much, and I’d rather focus on his latest adult novel the critics have been raving about.

New Under the Sun (Cormorant, 2010)

From the Publisher: Needing a change, Shannon Carew takes a job in the National Parks system in Newfoundland and Labrador. The journey brings her life full circle, returning her to the birthplace she abandoned years before. As she makes new connections, and unearths old ones, Shannon learns the land holds many memories, stories of Maritime Archaic, the Vikings, the Basques, the Beothuk, and the Europeans who came after. New Under the Sun is the work of a master storyteller.

 

“Each narrative strand is compelling in its own way … A skilful work of fiction.”
— Quill and Quire

“A gripping, even poetic, narrative of survival … Major’s verbal play is delightful, especially to a reader like me, who appreciates fine rhetoric and a good pun.”
— The Globe and Mail

“All the elements of the perfect summer read,”
— Open Book Toronto

Enjoy the Very Insightful Q&A Below

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.

The one book that has stayed with me longer than any other is The Afterlife of George Cartwright by John Steffler.  A wonderful work of the imagination. I have been anxiously awaiting his second novel … for years now.

SI: If you weren’t a writer, you’d be a … ?

A doctor, likely. I started university doing pre-med, and was accepted into the first class of Memorial’s Medical School. I took a year away from university, travelled to the West Indies and Europe for six months, came back with my mind changed. I now wanted to become a teacher … and beyond that perhaps a writer.

SI: What, in your mind, marked a turning point or real upswing in your writing career?

After a year teaching, I published an anthology of Newfoundland writing in 1974 called Doryloads that was used for a number of years in the province’s schools. It didn’t include any of my own work, although I had published some poetry and short stories by that time. I decided to make the leap into writing a novel, in part because as a teacher I was dismayed by the lack of Newfoundland stories that touched the lives of my students. It was at the time that the label “young adult fiction” was just beginning to be used, and what I was interested in writing — a contemporary novel about growing up in Newfoundland — seemed to fall into that category. My first attempt at a novel was never published. The second was Hold Fast. It received considerable attention (and remains the novel of mine that has sold the most copies). Ironically, it never did make it to the Newfoundland school curriculum. The denominational authorities in the Department of Education at the time took exception to the few swear words and a wet dream (both of which I would have thought crossed denominational lines). Hold Fast was definitely the turning point. The book is still read and is now in the hands of filmmaker Rosemary House. It looks very promising that a movie will be made from the book in the next year or so.

SI:  What is your favourite part of the writing process? Your least favourite?

My favourite part is conceiving the book, imagining what it could be. Sketching the characters, the storyline, thinking that there has never been a book quite like this one, that a reader will be surprised and intrigued.

My least favourite part? Trying to get the darn thing in print. Time and time again I have had books rejected, books that have eventually gone on to be published, in a number of cases winning awards in the process. That’s partly the reason I have so many different publishers. I found a lot of them unwilling to take chances, especially when I moved out of the YA field. In recent years, with editors more and more under the gaze of the marketing departments, and with the sand shifting under publishers generally, the choice of what to publish has led to fewer and safer choices. (This is particularly true of fiction.) That, or they are all looking for the “next big thing.” Loyalty to backlist authors is not what it once was.

SI: Which piece of yours are you the most satisfied with in hindsight?

I do like the most recent book, New Under the Sun. I think it is the best writing I have done. Because it works with several different voices stretched over almost 8,000 years, there was a lot to work out, a lot to bring together in a way that would hold the interest of the reader, and at the same time say something worthwhile. I was extremely fortunate in having Marc Côté at Cormorant as my editor. He pushed me into taking it that extra step. There was no safe route, but that was never a concern for him. And it’s a beautiful looking publication. I’m very connected to the aesthetics of the book.

SI:  What is taking up too much of your time lately?

I write a wine blog (www.onebrilliantbottle.wordpress.com) on organic, biodynamic, and natural wines. I became very interested in wine a few years back, but as much about the people behind what’s in the bottle as the wine itself. So I began doing these weekly profiles of winemakers, together with tasting notes on one bottle from their vineyards. I call it One Brilliant Bottle. It been great fun and of course a great reason to drink wine! It takes me away from the novel I’m working on, but I do need a brief diversion of some sort during the course of my writing week. I think of it as my volunteer bit for the environment.

SI: For you, what makes for a good book?

I want a book that steps out of the safety zone. I want it to challenge my view of the world, past or present. I want to be excited by the writing, by seeing the author strike the perfect note. I want to feel a human presence that moves me, from an author who knows what it is to struggle with words.

SI: Your work, collectively, feels very much attuned to what makes Newfoundland Newfoundland, and the history that has shaped us.  Can you attribute this interest to any particular moments or reasons?

Any writer who was born in Newfoundland and has lived here most of his life, as in my case, is drawn naturally to writing about it. We are of this place, and we see the world from the perspective gained from living through the currents of its everyday life. We are infused with its geography, with the rhythms of its people; we feel at home.  Yet I’ve never ever thought of myself as being in any way isolated from the broader world. And for me this has all been enhanced by my reading of Newfoundland and Labrador history.  I have a favourite comment to make about my birth in September 1949, the year of confederation with Canada, and my birthplace, Stephenville: I was conceived a Newfoundlander, but born a Canadian, and grew up next to the biggest American Air Force base outside the U.S.

SI: New Under the Sun has gotten some fabulous reviews, such as The Globe stating “A gripping, even poetic, narrative of survival,” and Open Book Toronto saying it has “all the elements of the perfect summer read.” Did you have a goal in mind as you wrote this novel?

The starting point for the writing was the Maritime Archaic burial mound in L’Anse Amour, Labrador. I set out to imagine the people and their world and what led to this highly unusual burial. I knew I would go beyond that particular incident, although I wasn’t entirely sure in what direction. I had the idea of building a character who lives parts of her life in different time periods, from the era when the first humans reached Newfoundland and Labrador to the present. As with any book, its shape changed from the conceptual stage to its publication. As did the goal in writing it. Ultimately, a writer wants to tell an interesting, timely story, making the best uses of his talent with words.

SI: Do you find the historical research for your novels, and the fact they are based on actual historical events, creatively limiting, in that you have to stay within the boundaries of what happened, or, the opposite: did basing elements of your novel on actual events help craft your story?

I tend to stay within certain boundaries, but can’t feel myself limited by them. What I am writing is first and foremost a novel, a work of the imagination. It goes beyond the written record. A writer of historical fiction seeks a deeper truth than what the known facts deliver. I don’t what to malign historical figures by presenting them in a light for which there is no historical evidence, but if there is a hint of something I may take it well beyond the limits of what is understood as fact. That becomes more and more dicey as you approach the present day. I can reimagine William Cormack who died in 1868, but I am not sure I (or my audience) would be comfortable if I were to create a fictional Danny Williams, playing with the facts of his life, other than in a comic novel perhaps. And in Danny’s case a comic novel definitely wouldn’t do him justice.

Burning Down the House: Fighting Fires and Losing myself went on to burn up the country, all through 2008 and 2009, starting with high praise from fellow Newfoundland writers, like Kenneth J. Harvey, Michael Winter, and Lisa Moore who wrote, “Russell Wangersky’s Burning Down the House deals with horror and it’s aftermath, the nature of suffering and coming through. Here is a haunting, shockingly honest and harrowing memoir about firefighting, unflinching and gorgeously written. Profoundly brave.” From there it stormed across the country, awing critics and winning the country’s biggest cash award for a work of non-fiction, the $40,000 British Columbia’s National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. It also bagged the Edna Staebler Award and the Drummer General’s award, among others, and was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Non-fiction award, and was a Globe and Mail book of the Year. 

All that praise came on top of his immensely successful debut, a stellar collection of short fiction, The Hour of Bad Decisions. The consistent sentence-level craftsmanship in this collection is a rarity. A solid display of literary talent. A sentence-after-sentence assurance this man earned that Giller nod. It was a winner or finalist for close to ten awards, including the Giller, The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and The Winterset Award.

His latest book is a novel, The Glass Harmonica (2010), and exposes the lives and secrets of a dozen or more McKay Street residents, and the direct and indirect threads that link these characters. He varies points of view, jumping in and out of each character and house on the street, and back and forth in time, and the end result is a league of narrators: more than a dozen. The upside of this carouselling point of view is that it gives Wangersky so many more lives and therefore stories to explore and entangle. The result is astounding number of subplots clicking together to form a grander plot far beyond what a novel with a single point of view could carry. He intersects lives and makes compelling mysteries and betrayals and side stories out of everyday life on an ordinary street, which therefore becomes an extraordinary street.

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Q&A With Russell Wangersky

Off the top of your head, without struggling for “favourites,” name one or two books you really liked by a fellow Atlantic Canadian author.

One of the first books I really liked by an Atlantic Canadian author was The Lost Salt Gift of Blood by Alistair MacLeod – it was written in 1976, an it was already on my Grade 12 curriculum, thanks to a forward-looking high school English teacher. It is still a favourite, as is David Adams Richards’ The Friends of Meagre Fortune.

What, in your mind, marked a turning point or real upswing in your writing career?

The biggest turning point for me was a four-week stint in the Banff Centre’s spring fiction program, working with Edna Alford on the book that became The Hour of Bad Decisions. It was the first time that I really felt I was being treated as a serious writer, and as if my work had value outside of the pleasure I took from the actual writing.

What is your favourite part of the writing process? Your least favourite?

My favourite part is when I’m in one of those few-and-far-between times when I’m simply lost in a spate of writing on a first draft – my least favourite is the small-p politics that can be the publishing industry in this country. So much time is spent looking for the next big thing – ignoring masses of excellent work being done by writers who aren’t the flavour-of-the-year.

What’s next, any works in progress?

I’ve just finished a first draft of another collection of short stories, which I expect will be published by Thomas Allen in 2012. I’ve also got a short non-fiction piece to accompany a photo book on Danny Williams (photos by the splendid Paul Daly) that will come out in the spring of 2011 with Breakwater Books. After that, I’m about halfway through the first draft of a novel.

What’s the most unexpected media response or interview question you’ve had?

Probably the most unexpected question was getting ready for an interview with Michael Enright for Sunday Edition, and having him tell me that they wouldn’t delve too deeply into personal details that weren’t in Burning Down the House — and then having his very first question, right out of the gate, be about the section of the book that deals with sex and death. He is a kind and gentle interviewer, but he has the ability to make you spill far more than you intend. Goes with the turf, I suppose, but it can be startling.

I have to ask how long you spend polishing your rough drafts to make your sentences shine as much as they do, because there’s no gap between what your reader should get from a paragraph, and what they get from that paragraph. So, share with us the one writing tip or technique you live by.

The one writing tip that I received from an editor years ago – and still live by – is that we read with our eyes, but we follow stories, strangely, with our ears. I read ever single word, every sentence, of everything I write out loud. Often, I talk it through out loud while I’m writing. But I read final drafts out loud to see how sentences are weighted, to see if words crop up too frequently, and to see if sentences are too long to work well. If you can’t read all the way through a sentence (or clear-cut clauses of that sentence) in one breath, it’s probably too long. It works for me – it might not work for everyone.

Burning Down the House is an honest, visceral, and potent book, reflecting on your time as a firefighter and the impact of that on your life. Writing it must have been a cathartic experience, but the nature of promotions would have you reading from it and diving back into it over and over. Can I assume that made for a real catch-22 for you, wanting the book read, but not necessarily enjoying reading from it at festivals and the like?

Even writing the book was not the catharsis I had hoped it would be — what I ended up with was the chance to live it all over again, and it brought back scores of nightmares. On tour with the book in the first round of media tours, I had nights broken up by as many as nine nightmares. Reading it now is almost impossible — I have actually started to turn down reading opportunities, because it simply takes too much out of me to go back in, and then have a few weeks of nightmares and flashbacks.

What sparked the idea of The Glass Harmonica for you?

The first spark was the idea that we’re all living in our own little worlds, coloured by our impressions of events around us and what we’re told about those events – I wondered if it would be possible to lead a reader through a narrative through different points of view that would supply an event, and then actively change the reader’s impression of what they thought they knew about the characters throughout the book. I know the process hasn’t captured everyone who’s read it, but I have no idea of any other way it could have been written.

The scene in The Glass Harmonica, where Robert Patten hits the moose on the highway … You must have hit a moose yourself to have conjured up such an evocative scene?

No, I haven’t. But I’ve come close to hitting moose, and I’ve seen plenty of moose accidents on the road, or the results of them in various places. The moose lottery on the highways is, to me, one of the great clocks of life – if you’re drive fast enough, maybe you’re past the spot where the moose will cross five seconds before it gets there. If you’re driving slow enough, you see it cross the highway. The arbitrary chance of it is a driver for me – someday, everybody gets their moose. It might not be a real live actual moose, but the concept is a very real one.

As a writer living in St. John’s and setting fiction here, do you think certain Canadian critics expect some sort of romanticized “Newfoundland flavour” in such stories? (A flavour that’s more of an outsider’s perception or expectation than a reality, I mean.)

Yes – I was criticized in one review for the lack of dories, etc., by a critic who suggested that one of the great sins of The Glass Harmonica was that it could apply to a neighbourhood in any city. That’s exactly what I wanted it to do: I wanted the neighbourhood to resonate with anyone who had experienced the tight dynamic of a small neighbourhood with some history – I  wasn’t aware that, as a writer in Newfoundland, I was expected to provide a travelogue, complete with quaint accents, as well.

As a poet, Alison has since excelled. Fresh off the Bronwen Wallace win, she won the 2003 National Magazine Award for Poetry, and she’s also won in the poetry category of the CBC Literary Awards (in 2005). Her first book of poetry, Question and Answer, was shortlisted for both the Gerald Lampert Award for a best first book of poetry by a Canadian, and for the E.J. Pratt Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award. So, by the time McClelland & Stewart released The Dream World in 2008, she was a force in Canadian poetry. The title story of The Dream World ended up in the yearly anthology, Best Canadian Poetry. Alison has studied and spent significant time in Newfoundland, and here’s a fantastic poem whose title is the name of a famous nook of St. John’s: “Quidi Vidi.”

Her debut novel, The Sweet Edge, came out in 2005 (and was optioned for film). The Globe and Mail called it “Gorgeous … funny and terribly sexy,” and they made it a Globe and Mail book of the Year in 2005. The Sweet Edge tells the story of a young couple who spend a summer apart to assess their relationship. Ellen works in a trendy Toronto art gallery, while Adam takes a solo canoe trip deep into the Arctic tundra, and the chapters alternate their stories and points of view, “until their worlds — and their changed worldviews — suddenly and dangerously collide.”  Lisa Moore dubbed it an “ultra-sensuous novel sparkling with wisdom.”  Click here to read an excerpt.

Her latest novel, Far to Go (Anansi, 2010), is already on fire. It is being adapted for film, and has sold into the US, the UK, Italy, the Netherlands. Far to Go, currently Salty Ink’s featured book, is a well-written work of rare authenticity, in which both the story and the storytelling quite simply outdo themselves. Steven Galloway at The Globe referred to its “clean, crisp, and unencumbered” writing, and Now Magazine referred to its “terrific craft and emotional intelligence,” crowning it “a winner.” In Far to Go, Pick takes a widespread tragedy — the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia — down to the level of one family experiencing it. In capturing this slow-then-sudden change in one family’s life and country, through their eyes, the reader is taken on a dark journey with a family who could be any family — loving but with troubles of their own. The story of the Bauer family’s plight is interlaced with another: that of an at-first unknown first-person narrator recounting his own harrowing, connected tale. It adds a great dynamic to the story — it makes for a two-in-one novel. The story is potent and multi-layered, and the novel sticks with the reader after they’re done reading, which is the mark of an accomplished writer and novel.

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Q&A With Alison Pick

Off the top of your head, without struggling for “favourites,” name one or two books you really liked by an Atlantic Canadian author.

This All Happened by Michael Winter,

Play the Monster Blind by Lynn Coady, and

The True Names of Birds by Sue Goyette. (I know, that’s three! I couldn’t choose).

The Sweet Edge was a contemporary work of literary fiction, but Far to Go is a work of historical fiction. What made writing historical fiction easier/harder than The Sweet Edge? I mean, were the particulars limiting, or were they little bits of readymade story to flesh out?

This might sound like a cop-out, but writing Far to Go wasn’t easier or harder, only different. The Sweet Edge was my first novel, so all the way through its writing I wondered if I could do it, actually finish the thing and end up with a book that readers would enjoy. By the time I got to Far to Go, I had a basic confidence in my competence with the form, but, as you say, there’s a big difference between contemporary and historical fiction. I had to do a ton of research to create the sense of day-to-day life in Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 39. (That said, it was a time and place I was very curious about for personal reasons, so even though I’m not especially historically minded, the research was a pleasure.) I was also surprised to find that the historical background in Far to Go let me relax a little in terms of creating tension. When writing The Sweet Edge, I was constantly creating obstacles to put in my characters’ paths. With Far to Go, the main obstacles were already very real and clear (to both me as the writer and to the reader). There was still the dynamic between the characters to attend to, and I wanted that to be what ultimately drew the reader through the book, but an historical backdrop of tension and intrigue certainly didn’t hurt.

If you weren’t a writer, you’d be a … ?

Miserable person.

What, in your mind, marked a turning point or real upswing in your writing career?

Winning the Bronwen Wallace Award for the most promising unpublished writer under the age of 35. I was 27, and just starting out, and I don’t think I really appreciated how fortuitous that award was at the time. It helped me get a publishing contract for my first book of poems, and, as they say, once your foot is in the door…

Any advice for aspiring writers looking to be published authors?

Read lots. Write lots. Be discerning about who you show your work to, and solicit feedback only from people whose opinions you really respect. Make sure your manuscript is truly as good as you can make it before you send it out. Be gentle with yourself. Be persistent.

What is your favourite part of the writing process? Your least favourite?

I love the very beginning of a new book, when everything is still up for grabs, when the imaginative scope is endless and all the fun work of writing lies ahead. Unlike a lot of other writers I know, I also love the first draft. Conversely, there’s a point maybe halfway through when it becomes clear what the book will be, and therefore, also, what it won’t or can’t be. When you realize the very real limitations of the particular book you’re writing. I’d say that’s my least favourite part, although, truthfully, for a classic introvert like me, book promotion is also fairly exhausting. But necessary, I know.

Which piece of yours are you the most satisfied with in hindsight?

I’m kind of sweet on my 2008 poetry collection The Dream World, partially because it garnered so little public attention, so I feel protective of it, like the smallest, unnoticed child. I think it marked a significant leap in terms of my ability as both a poet in particular and a writer in general (the final section especially).

What’s next, any works in progress?

I’m working on a memoir. It’s about the reclaiming of my Judaism, and also about a bout of depression I suffered several years ago. And about a crisis in my marriage. Fun stuff! But really, I’m still not sure which of those themes I’ll emphasize, or what exact form the book will take. I’m at the very initial stages. Excited to be writing again, though.

The authenticity of Far to Go is astounding; it is so well informed. Can you talk a little about the research process and interviews you conducted, or your residency abroad?

First of all, thank you. My grandparents were Czech, so I was able to draw on some of the details I remember about them, like what they ate and what kind of clothes they wore. Otherwise, I read anything and everything I could get my hands on that was set in Czechoslovakia before the war.  My Dad still has a few Czech connections, and he helped me access a handful of unpublished memoirs about pre-War Czechoslovakia, from which I stole shamelessly. I also interviewed one of the original Kindertransport children, a now elderly man living in Israel who had been sent to Scotland and whose parents died in Auschwitz.

Can you explain to any readers who might not know, what your personal connection is, to the story in Far to Go?

Sure. I grew up not knowing my father was Jewish. His extended family had died in the camps; his own parents escaped Czechoslovakia, came to Canada, and raised their children as secular Christians. This decision was something I spent much of my adolescence and early adulthood trying to understand.  Writing Far to Go allowed me to go back into my grandparents’ world, and to imagine a time when they WERE Jewish, and were known as Jews to everyone around them. It was a way to explore the might-have-been in my own family.

That said, I hasten to add that Far to Go is NOT autobiographical in terms of plot. Pavel and Anneliese’s story is different from my grandparents at even the most basic level (my grandparents escaped; my characters didn’t). The book is a novel, not non-fiction, and my fidelity was to narrative pull and literary convention rather than to historical truth.

Photo Credit: Eva Crocker

Superman can fly, Billie Holiday can sing, and Michael Winter can capture life in a way that makes even the ordinary feel explosive. He is good for Canadian literature: if he isn’t reinvigorating a genre, he’s making one up. His distinctive, ultra-fresh writing, and his critically acclaimed eye for detail have made for a pleasure-to-read style that sets him apart from other Canadian writers. And it’s made him a “writer for writers.” When I talk with other writers, Michael Winter’s name comes up more frequently and with more enthusiasm than most others, and that creates some kind of well-earned individuality about him. Any writer can win an award and charm the critics (and Winter has done both), but Michael Winter’s literary individuality and clear influence on a new generation of writers is proof he’s really nestled into the core of Canadian literature and has played a role in redefining it. There are qualities to Michael’s writing that, when spotted in a new writer, end in comparisons to Michael Winter. Because he got there first.

His crisp, detail-rich short fiction is modeled after by leagues of emerging writers, his 2000 journal-a-clef, This All Happened, is a lesson in sentence-level writing: say it fresh, The Big Why turned historical fiction inside out, and his last novel, The Architects are Here, boldly soars through many genres, effectively beating down the walls that trap most writers. It’s because of innovative writers like Winter that Canadian fiction can and has evolved. In many ways, his works can be credited for granting CanLit a freedom in experimentation, and nowhere is this more evident than in his new novel, The Death of Donna Whelan. It is being dubbed as “documentary fiction,” but it’s the first case I’ve seen of a book being “curated,” moreso than written. The story in The Death of Donna Whalen is lifted entirely from the actual transcripts and court testimonies of the real-life St. John’s murder trial of Donna Whelan:  a woman stabbed 31 times and found by her young daughter. Michael filtered 10,000 pages of court documents — 3 million words that stood 5 ½ feet tall — into a book just under 300 pages. The result is the purest vicarious reading experience you’ll ever have. It makes you the jury and the judge, because of the way he’s structured the novel, and how it exposes discrepancies and a flawed justice system.

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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.

Inside, by Kenneth Harvey, and So Beautiful, by Ramona Dearing.

Salty Ink: How did you end up writing books?

Our family took a trip across Canada when I was about five.  Five of us in a Plymouth Valiant towing a soft-top camper trailer. The three kids shared the back seat, I was youngest so I got the middle, and we made up elaborate stories and drew treasure maps. I remember crinkling up the paper maps and opening the back window a little to let the rain get on the paper to smudge the pencil lines, and the crinkling made the maps look old. I think we would have gone crazy without the long stories. There was a lot of storytelling as kids, my father made us make audio cassette tapes of skits we’d perform and we sent these tapes to our grandparents in England. But the first serious story I recall, the first really ambitious narrative, my sister Kathleen wrote that for her Grade Ten English class, and she hand wrote the text on a scroll and it was sort of a Hans Christian Andersen tale — a boy loses his shadow, and I was blown away by the imagination it took to create it.

Salty Ink: What, in your mind, marked a turning point or real upswing in your writing career?

Getting a letter from a writer I had admired saying I read your book and loved it.

Salty Ink: What is your favourite part of the writing process? Your least favourite?

I enjoy thinking about an answer to a question that answers the question but in a slightly angled way. This answer is usually in the form of dialogue. The part I hate is forcing myself to sit there and write something even when I feel as dumb as a cardboard box.

Salty Ink: For you, what makes for a good book?

When I first finish a book part of what I can love about it is its plot. But after a year I don’t remember the plot. I can’t remember the plot of any book. All I’m left with are moments. I remember, for instance, in a Charles Portis novel, our protagonist enters a bar where all the seats are taken. He waits for an empty stool. He sees a man get up. But he has to wait to let the heat dissipate off the seat of the stool before he can sit on it. And while he waits another man takes the seat. That kind of detail I remember, it betrays character, it tells me a lot about what it is to be alive. If a book doesn’t have that kind of intimacy in it, I won’t like it. The bizarre logic of one’s own compass.

Salty Ink: You were a founding member of what became the country’s most well-regarded and almost idolized writers’ group, The Burning Rock. As far as I can see, you were the group’s biggest enthusiast, having compiled an anthology of Burning Rock members’ fiction in Extremities, and you still use Larry Mathews and Lisa Moore as first readers. In what ways did the Burning Rock act as a foundation upon which you built your career? To what degree did that creative like-mindedness spur you on?

Writing is a lonely event. It helped me to have some people along for the ride doing the same lonely thing. It’s like ice fishing, it’s encouraging to see a few huts around your own. Now, there are some writers who don’t mind the solitariness of it. But to be honest, I don’t think I’d have written without seeing other people around me doing it. My brother is a mechanic and he has this big bright red metal box full of tools and in the garage his buddy has the same box. It demystifies the process of repairing an engine. Having friends around who keep notebooks and have computers and printers in the corners of their apartments, that drives out the mystique of creating text and story.

And by the way, I was the editor of that anthology only because no one else was stupid enough to do the work.

Salty Ink: You take some very inspiring gambles by putting innovative books like This All Happened or The Death of Donna Whalen out there. What does it feel like to throw out a curve ball of a book, and wait to see how people react? And do you really care; is pleasing yourself more important than the critical response?

I wrote This All Happened because there was provincial money to make art projects to celebrate the 500th anniversary of John Cabot bumping into Newfoundland. Painters and dancers and musicians were all doing their thing and getting paid and I thought how does a writer get their hands into that pot of money? I thought okay Cabot kept a logbook. Why don’t I do the same, instead of mapping the physical coastline I’ll map the emotional terrain of the province. So that was the start of that book, which, of course, changed tremendously once I had a draft and realized people have to read this. People can’t keep track of three hundred people, nor do they care about what happens to me. So you begin reducing the cast, conflating characters, torquing events to make them more dramatic, and embedding a narrative arc (two characters get together and have a baby during the year, another couple with a child splits up and then we have our two main characters who fall somewhere in the middle).

Donna Whalen has a similar formation, except the raw material from which I compiled the novel was not from personal observation, but from the transcripts of a murder trial. No one wants to wade into these ten thousand pages of transcripts for the purposes of entertainment – the challenge was to create a compelling narrative that examined urban St. John’s stripped of its romantic veneer and myth, illuminating the love and hate that exists in any downtown city, the societal problems, the troubles with family, the gossip and loyalty and crime and violence that goes on, that many of us see obliquely but never quite comprehend. It’s a less funny book, and yet the process of creating it was similar.

I don’t set out to throw curve balls, I write books that interest me, that somehow seem accurate to the world I live in. These may be difficult or unusual books to read, but, as Claire Wilkshire told me a long time ago, new thoughts and ideas and situations are always difficult to read.

Salty Ink: Deciding on an opening paragraph is always a big ordeal for a novelist. How did you choose where to start The Death of Donna Whalen, and why did you choose to start with the scene you did?

The novel begins with Ruth Vivian. Ruth lived in the apartment below Donna Whalen and spoke to her the night she was murdered. Ruth Vivian represents that neighbourhood quality that I wanted to capture in the book, that a murder like this can happen near us and what is our responsibility to our neighbours. The police felt like Ruth Vivian was not telling the whole truth, that she was scared of Sheldon Troke, who was accused of the murder. So they arrested Ruth Vivian’s son. When that happened, her testimony changed. It also changed because she’d spent several months absorbed with newspaper accounts and TV reports about the murder.

In court, a witness gives testimony for several hours or days and then you never see them again. This, of course, would make a rather strange novel, to have a series of characters who appear once and never again. So I staggered Ruth Vivian’s testimony throughout the book, as I did with all of the other major characters. So the reader, acting a bit like a juror, can witness her changing testimony depending on the actions of the police and the media who are reporting on the murder, and the wiretaps which show what the neighbours were telling each other.

Salty Ink: I agree, entirely, that this story is more potent without you taking liberties with it. The daughter’s barebones testimonies are heart-breaking and the discrepancies in everyone’s statements are clear. So what does that say about fiction, then, if fiction wouldn’t have the same potency as the bare truth, the way you’ve presented it? Do you think fact packs a potency that fiction can’t muster?

Yes. There were many passages I could have torqued up a little to create more drama, and yet once I’d decided I wasn’t going to add any words I was handcuffed to being accurate to how something was witnessed. But there is something to be said about knowing that what I’m reading here was actually said this way, it was sworn as truth in a court of the land. The veracity of that testimony makes up for any flatness that one could be tempted to rework.

Salty Ink: In “documentary fiction” you’re limited, creatively, in many ways. You can’t create a scene to “show us a character,” for example. I noticed you’ve retained each character’s dialect. Was this an attempt at subtly rendering culture, character and place? Because it certainly felt more genuine the way you left it than had you of “tidied up” the language. I think that would have sterilized these testimonies or fogged up the reader’s looking glass onto these characters.

Court testimony is all dialogue. There is no-one in the margins of the page telling you what these characters look like or are they gesturing with their arms or do they have a tie on or sneakers. But reading their testimony and how they framed their story and the idiomatic ways in which they spoke gave me a sense of what they looked like. Novels are very physical, dialogue can be abstract. So I had to combat that abstraction with the physical attributes of verbal colour. Each time a character deviated from standard grammar I checked to see if I could keep it, or did it veer too far and could be construed as the author making fun of the characters. That’s the last thing I wanted to do, that would destroy the entire contrivance of the novel as a vehicle for a neutral hearing. The rules of grammar are, of course, relative, and I hope that what I kept in the novel makes grammatical sense over the long haul in the same way the Dictionary of Newfoundland English makes our language rules as complex as the Oxford English Dictionary’s does.

George Murray

And he’s easily one of my favourite Canadian poets. He’s that hungry hounddog you’ve seen probe-nosing through brush or rubble, but what Murray is foraging for is truth and understanding in a complex world. And he always finds it. More impressively, he articulates it in a way that makes the reader nod their head in agreement. It is one thing to write a glistening line of poetry; it is another to brighten your reader’s bulb, if you will. George Murray is that guy. He’s also the kind of poet who can pull off using shitcrazy as an adverb without faltering the cerebral nature of his poem.

His first book Carousel: a book of second thoughts (Exile, 2000), came out with a bang. The Globe called it “a highly impressive first book” and Eye Weekly called it “unusually sharp line-to-line [and] borderline brilliant.” He followed up quickly, publishing The Cottage Builder’s Letter with M&S in 2001, on which The National Post said, “He has the poet’s instincts, the knack for turning a good phrase and the verbal grit and suppleness to keep the reader engaged.” Also with M&S, he published The Hunter (2003) to much critical acclaim. The Toronto Star called it “an ambitious, visionary collection with many haunting images,” and I liked the Globe and Mail’s summary, “A spooky portrait with a compelling tone and constellation of imagery – less a moral tale of Armageddon and more its soundtrack. The collection is quite powerful, inventing an original way of seeing a world which seems to enjoy using its own tools against itself.” In 2007, Nightwood published The Rush to Here, and I’m not going to give you quotes on this one, I’m going to holler that you BUY IT. This book is literary triumph. This month, Murray published a book of aphorisms with ECW, called Glimpse. It’s a collection of 409 snappy one- or two-liners of wisdom and wit. Aphorism authority James Richardson had this to say about Glimpse, “Murray masters the whole range of aphorism … I’ve got dozens of collections of aphorisms on my shelves. This one I’ll keep right on the desk.”

MURRAY IS LAUNCHING GLIMPSE THIS SUNDAY NIGHT AT THE SHIP IN ST. JOHN’S. 8p.m.

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Q & A with George Murray

Off the top of your head, without struggling for “favourites,” name one or two books you really liked by a fellow Atlantic Canadian author.

Galore by Michael Crummey and Mole by Patrick Warner.

Any advice for aspiring writers looking to be published authors?

No matter how many words you put on paper, you’re not a writer unless you regularly and deeply read the work of other writers. Plumbers don’t just pick up pipes and solder and start jamming things together. They learn from others. You have to, too.

What book of yours came the easiest/hardest, and any guesses as to why?

I wrote my first book, Carousel, in about three months. It was a great idea that seemed to have generative energy. It was of a piece and of a time and unlike many other authors with their first books, I’m not ashamed of it. My second book, however, was accepted by a very large press on Oct 6 of 2000, and had to be gutted and rebuilt by Nov 1 … of the same year. I feel as though I could have done much better with that book if I’d been given more time, or not been so eager to publish. I’m very careful now, because of that disappointment.

What has been the most memorable moment of you writing career to date?

I was invited by Roddy Doyle to read in Dublin at his Fighting Words venue and when I looked out into the audience, I saw Paul Durcan sitting in the front row with his hands folded, calmly waiting for me to say something. I had dinner with the two of them after. That’s kind of like being hosted by Jesus and having God show up.

I hear you are writing a novel. Why the venture into fiction, and is it too soon to share some details?

I started as a fiction writer in university and made the switch to poetry. I’m not really sure why. It just happened. I’ve published half-a-dozen short stories or so, and used to run a fiction magazine called Smoke. I’m doing the novel now because instead of feeling like I “should” write one, I finally have a story that’s compelling me to write it. It’s set in Belfast in 1969.

So, a publisher in New Zealand is doing a book of your poetry. That’s pretty amazing. How did that come to be? It’s a sort of “Best of George Murray” collection, isn’t it?

I was contacted out of the blue by the publisher, Kilmog, who had found a few of my poems online and liked them. He asked to see more and I sent him my books and he asked to do a sort of mini-selected. He’s a letterpress operation and is doing a beautiful hardcover edition with poems from my last three books. Very nice!

Your latest book, Glimpse, is a collection of 409 aphorisms. What I’ve called “Snappy one- or two-liners of wisdom and wit: a poetry-philosophy fusion, and something more accessible than either.” What was the inspiration here, how did this book come to be?

A few years ago I had been invited to speak and read at Princeton. I read with the director of Creative Writing, James Richardson. He has written a couple books of aphorisms (Vectors) and commented on how the closing couplets of my sonnets from The Rush to Here had a very aphoristic quality. He suggested I might have more aphorisms tucked away in my journals, so I went looking and found about 1000 from the last five years. I started culling them and arranging them. Then when I read in Dublin (as noted above), I recited about 30 or so as part of the gig. Paul Durcan recommended I publish them as a collection. How do you say no to Paul Durcan?

What is it about the aphorism you are drawn to?

I’m drawn to the essential and crystalline. I’m drawn to their nearness to the moment of epiphany. I’m drawn to their relative lack of artifice (at least as compared to the lyric poem). Some of them can stand alone, while others build on one another. As a book-length entity, they loan and borrow energy, to and from one another. They can be read individually or as a unit. And with most of them, people can walk away with, if not an immediate fix then, something relatively accessible to chew on.

Explain the process of assembling this collection: did you loot from personal journals? Salvage good lines from discarded poems? Or did you sit and write aphorisms specifically for this collection?

A bit of one and three. I settled on about 300 from the journals and then wrote up to about 500 from there over a couple years. Then I cut back to 409.

Do you think an aphorism is more truth, or, a personal observation? I ask because I am of the philosophy that “there is no truth, only perception,” and yet more than 400 of your 409 aphorisms rang true to me.

I think it can be either. I think there’s a lot of truth in personal observation. We’re all having these little moments of connection with the universe. I’m just becoming an expert in writing them down.

I certainly think the mass appeal of a book of aphorisms like Glimpse is its accessibility and the fact it is fun like a coffee table book, but is also a solid work of poetry. How does the book feel to you, relative to your other works? Like something different, or like a book of poetry no different than the others? Seems like it’d have a broader audience at least: are you anticipating this? (I can see myself gifting this book to non-readers for instance.)

It feels like something different, in part because the reaction I get from reading it in public is gratifying. People seem to love it. I think it can have a broader audience, especially if people who love poetry use it as a gateway book for people who don’t. It doesn’t look like poetry, but it is. It’s an ancient form, though not much practiced these days, and I think the combination of colloquial prose and bite-sized pieces allows a certain ease of entry and pause for reflection. It’s hovering in a great space where it seems to somehow work for poets, critics, and the “general public” (whatever that is…)

Can we look forward to another book of aphorisms some day?

Possibly. I’ve got an open file on the computer with about twenty-five new ones in it already.

It’s the vivacity of Lynn Coady’s writing that I really like. Her authentic voice and lively characters.

And she’s had quite a remarkable career, right from the start. Her recently re-released debut novel, Strange Heaven, was a GG finalist and shortlisted for Thomas Head Raddall Award, and it won the Atlantic Bookseller’s Choice Award and the Dartmouth Book Award, earning her the Canadian Author Association’s Emerging Writer Award. Her follow-up was a very, very good collection of short stories, Play the Monster Blind. A national bestseller, it was declared a Globe and Mail book of the Year and won the CAA Jubilee award. She followed up with Saints of Big Harbour and possible fan-favourite  Mean Boy — both of which were national bestselling Globe and Mail Books of the Year. See the pattern?

This is the kind of praise she prompts:

“It’s a miracle when a book as good as Lynn Coady’s comes along. Saints of Big Harbour is as good as it gets.”  – The Calgary Herald

“Lynn Coady is a brilliant new voice in Canadian literature.” – David Adams Richards

“Lynn Coady is the best young writer in Canada.” — The Gazette (Montreal)

Lynn has also edited the anthologies Victory Meat: New Fiction from Atlantic Canada, The Anansi 40^th Anniversary Reader, and The Journey Prize Stories: 20. She’s also recently written “A butt-kicking comedy about couplehood” called Mark.

Click a book cover to read more about that book:

Q&A with Lynn Coady

Off the top of your head, without struggling for “favourites,” name one or two books you really liked by a fellow Atlantic Canadian author.

I don’t have to struggle for this particular ‘favourite’—David Adams Richards’ Road to the Stilt House.  It’s unflinching—leaves all the flinching to the reader.

I’m also a big fan of Michael Winter—tossup between his story collection One Last Good Look and his novel This All Happened.

How did you end up writing books?

Stories were my favourite thing growing up, so I assumed that meant they must be the most important thing in the world and arranged my adulthood as if that were the case.  By the time I realized that only a small percentage of the world agreed with me I was past the point of no return.

What is your favourite part of the writing process? Your least favourite?

My favourite and least favourite thing about writing have turned out to be the same: the utter self-indulgence of the process.

What book of yours came the easiest/hardest, and any guesses as to why?

Strange Heaven came the easiest because it was the first and I was completely unselfconscious in the writing process.  It was pure experimentation: let’s see if I can write a novel.  Everything I’d learned up to that point told me that it was next to impossible to get a novel published so I genuinely didn’t expect it to ever see the light of day.  That’s the ultimate creative freedom, when you’re young at least.

What is taking up too much of your time lately?

My day job. As they do.

There is a passage on page 54 of Strange Heaven, “It seemed like, even if you didn’t want to, or even if you paid no attention to it whatsoever, life, existence, whatever it was, carried on and it carried you with it.” Is Strange Heaven in some ways about the awkwardness of life at 18: floating between child- and adulthood? Or is it more about life being beyond us, as expressed in a following line, “You can build a nice little house on the shore and a tidal wave will come and eat it up.”

It’s about helplessness, which in some ways, yes, is a big part of crossing the bridge from childhood into adulthood.  But it’s also the realization that adulthood entails a certain degree of helplessness too.  I think Bridget’s so obsessed with that idea because she finds it intolerable—she wants adulthood to be about exerting control but so far the defining experience of her newfound adulthood—giving birth—has been steeped in helplessness.

You followed up Strange Heaven with a collection of shorts, Play the Monster Blind. One of the shorts featured Bridget and Allan from Strange Heaven. You weren’t done with them?

It was a pretty straightforward affair. I had this story with two characters who I realized were exactly like Bridget and Allan.  I thought: That’s lame.  Don’t write about the same characters and give them different names.

I loved every single story in Play the Monster Blind. Out of curiosity, what’s your favourite, if I forced you to pick one.

“Jesus Christ, Murdeena” because it was fun.  The writing of that story represented, for me, an acceptance of all the things that were infuriating about the place I grew up and having fun with that—making light.  It still has an edge of anger, and sadness and futility, because that’s inevitable, but there’s an element of fuck-you glee too as represented by Murdeena once she has fully “come out”.  Nobody understands her and everyone is ashamed of her but she doesn’t care—she knows who she is and it makes her ecstatic. She’s going to share it with people whether they want it or not.

When I talk to someone about Play the Monster Blind, they are quick to talk about “Jesus Christ, Murdeena.” A story about an always-walking young woman who stops wearing shoes and starts telling people she is Jesus, round 2. Where did this idea come from?

It’s a straightforward metaphor for what Alice Munro identifies as the “who do you think you are” factor of growing up in small towns.  Never dream, never imagine great things, never suppose the world holds anything more in store for you than it does for anyone else.  I remember the moment I came up with the idea for the story. I was making a joke about something—some decision I’d made when I was young that had astonished and exasperated some people.  I spoke the words: “You’d think I’d announced that I was Jesus Christ or something.”

All of your work has a rare and highly enjoyable liveliness to it. Particularly your characters. In my review of Strange Heaven, I’ve said, “If characters could get any more real or fun to read about, then Lynn Coady would make all the real-life  people you know seem dull and unconvincing.” What’s your favourite character from all of your novels?

I think Isadore from Saints of Big Harbour, because I pushed him very far, in terms of his unconscionable behavior, and he kept surprising me—he would one up me.  He’d be like: Oh yeah, you think that’s bad?  Well what if I do this?  And I’d be appalled.  But even more exciting than his capacity for bad behavior was his ability to deflect blame—he did it automatically, without a moment’s reflection. He’s the kind of character you just let loose on the page and sit back and watch in astonishment.

Your work tends to be a delicate balance of laugh-out-loud humour and gasp-out-loud moments of pathos. Is this just how it comes out, or is it intentional?

It’s just how it comes out. Writing fiction is a kind of primal scream therapy for me.  I just close my eyes and give ‘er.

Kathleen Winter is no stranger to writing, in any form. She has written for television — from Sesame Street to CBC documentaries — and for newspapers, including her former weekly column, Naturally, in The Telegram.

Her last book, boYs, a top-notch collection of short stories, won the hip-assuring Metcalf-Rooke Award and the prestigious Winterset award. boYs is a rare gem of a collection, showcasing a rare vibrancy of language. The book is alive, sentences pop like firecrackers: it is ultra-modern, punchy, lucid diction. Every paragraph is blocked full with a microscopic attention to detail, and it makes for captivating read that is a lesson in creative writing. Click here to buy boYs now.

Her latest novel, Annabel — hot off Anansi’s press and only a month old — was released to immediate acclaim and buzz, and Kathleen has been reading that wave of success on a very engaging and remarkable blog tour. Her writerly stamina is commendable. Catch her being interviewed or thinking out loud at palces like The Afterword, Open Book Toronto (who have just revealed that Annabel is part of Ben McNally’s Summer Reading Presentation), Kevin from Canada, and a rather fantastic read on The Globe and Mail’s website.

Already a bestseller in many of the country’s finest bookshops,  and already sold into the US and the UK, critics are eating it up.

“Read it because it’s a story told with sensitivity to language that compels to the last page, and read it because it asks the most existential of questions. Stripped of the trappings of gender, Winter asks, what are we?”- Globe & Mail

“Finely observed detail and gut-wrenching honesty, together with some rich characters and a perfectly rendered world, make Annabel a rare treat.” – Winnipeg Free Press

Annabel is an unforgettable novel of struggles, personal and inter-personal, and Kathleen’s empathetic voice does them justice in a way that connects reader to story. Destined to be one of the biggest novels out of Newfoundland this year, this is a story of isolation and a communication breakdown that breaks a family down, and breaks the reader down along with them. Click here to Read Salty Ink’s summary and review of this sure-to-be-a-book-of-the-year novel. Her writing is a mesmerizing combination of crisp language, deep empathy for her well-wrought characters, and a world-savvy wisdom. Click here to buy Annabel now

For a chance to win a copy of Annabel, email chad@saltyink.com by July 10th — subject line Annabel giveaway. (Also, she will be having a St. John’s launch on July 20th, at The Ship. 8 pm.)

Click the book covers below to read more about boYs and Annabel at their publisher’s websites.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Enjoy the Interview Below ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Off the top of your head, without struggling for “favourites,” name one or two books you really liked by a fellow Atlantic Canadian author.

Well I have to say the first one is House of Hate by Percy Janes. It is a dark book but beautifully written, and it is set in Corner Brook where I lived from the ages of 12 to 16, so reading it was the first time I read a piece of literature that was set in a place about which I had my own intimate perspective. Another work that affected me is the journal of Lucy Maud Montgomery, with its compelling undercurrents of isolation and revelations about barricades of class and gender.

How did you end up writing books?

My dad taught me to read phonetically long before I went to school. I knew when I was four that I wanted to write books, because I loved them so much. There was always a library near where we lived – at one point, in Curling, the library was a mobile library in a van.  I have learned how to live in the real world by now, but I remember that feeling of escape, entering a book, and I can’t remember a time when I didn’t just assume I would make that happen for other people; create worlds.

What, in your mind, marked a turning point or real upswing in your writing career?

I will never forget the night John Metcalf phoned me to talk about some stories I had mailed to him. I was at a point where I began writing notes to myself on the outsides of the stamped, self-addressed envelopes you have to include with fiction submissions to editors. I was receiving so many rejection slips that I felt a need to write, on the envelopes that I knew would come back to me containing these rejections, “Kathleen, you are a good writer. Keep going and do not give up.” Believe it or not these notes cheered me up, though I had written them to myself, sometimes six months before. So John Metcalf phoned me and said he loved my stories. He said he felt, on reading them, as if he had come home, and he wanted to put the manuscript on the shortlist of the Metcalf-Rooke Award, which I later won.  The award was in his name but was also named after Leon Rooke. I had no money then, and before this phone call I used to visit the local bookshop and take Leon Rooke’s stories off the shelf and read them, and rejoice that someone in Canada was writing crazy, wonderful, immensely satisfying stories like this. Rooke was my hero. And now John Metcalf, one of the most eminent editors in Canada, was telling me I was being considered for the Metcalf-Rooke Award. That was the turning point, the upswing, in my writing career.

Any advice for aspiring writers?

Take rejection slips as reminders that you can improve. Look at the stories when they come back. It takes a long time to get a story back, so you have time to gain perspective about how to write it better. What is the reader getting out of it? Have you a clear vision? Work on a new draft, and send it out again. Always have something sent out. No matter how wretched you feel when it returns, have another piece ready and send it the day you are rejected. Then hope will come back to you. That crazy bird, hope. I felt hopeless all the way to the post office the day I sent my stories to John Metcalf. Always have a package of big envelopes nearby (many submissions still cannot be done online) and remember postage is less if you write the address horizontally.

What is your favourite part of the writing process? Your least favourite?

I guess I love the inspiration part, the new idea part, the “what if” part, when a magical world opens up, a new story with its own rules of physics, psychology, spirit and event. I also love the craft part though, working alone and with an editor on things like structure and technique. What I don’t like is those moments or hours or days when the writing is dead. You write it and you look at it and it is a corpse and it stinks and you are afraid the life inside the work has abandoned you.

Which piece of yours are you the most satisfied with in hindsight?

In my story collection, boYs,  I’m particularly happy with the stories Binocular and The History of Zero, because they pack an emotional punch. Binocular is a big, fully-realized story that might have become a novel there is so much that happens, but because it is  short it is highly concentrated. Binocular makes people cry, and The History of Zero makes some people laugh until they cry, though it was inspired by events that I originally thought were tragic. I don’t have hindsight yet about Annabel since the book has just been released.

Annabel is a novel about many things. It is also, undeniably, an evocative portraiture of ethereal Labrador. It is convincing, right down to the plants, the smells, or how a blind man can navigate a canoe and hunt ducks, and the details of work on a trapline. How much research was involved here, or how much time have you spent in Labrador?

Labrador captivated me the first time I went there. I made a television documentary there, and for that documentary I spent quite a bit of time on the land, and was invited to stay with an Innu family in their hunting encampment. I also met people of Scottish and Inuit descent, like Treadway in  Annabel, and these people too showed me a great deal of beauty in the land, taking me ice fishing and teaching me how to do Labrador arts like making moccasins. The description of Labrador in Annabel as having a unique, magnetic energy, comes from my personal experience of the land. I have visited with children as part of the Labrador Arts Festival, and I have also visited for personal reasons. Each time I have been, the land has deeply affected my spirit. I have also studied Labrador maps and non fiction.

In Annabel, there is an engaging tenderness and empathy in the writing that connects the reader to the story. It must have been exhausting to dip yourself in and out of these people’s lives? What were some of the biggest challenges in writing Annabel?

The biggest challenge for me is always telling a story. I love writing character, and I love the characters in this novel. They surprised me, especially Treadway. But the bones of the story, that’s what I find hard, because my natural tendency is toward character and atmosphere and I have to remember the reader needs reasons beyond these to keep turning the page. The reader has to be dying to know what happens next. I have had to work like a dog to know how to achieve this compelling quality in a book. I practice in hope that my weakness can, with hard work, become a strength. The tenderness and empathy come easily to me, compared with the bones of the story, and I’m really happy that reviewers of Annabel have called this story compelling to the last page. That is a huge achievement for me.

Despite Wayne/Annabel’s hermaphrodism, predicaments, and role as the main character, in my mind, the father, Treadway, is the most complex character in this novel. He is a man whose ability to connect with the natural world exceeds his ability to connect with his family, yet he is there, faithfully, when needed, and out of love, not fatherly or marital duty. Knowing how the writing process works, would I be right in saying his character evolved as you wrote the book? Were you, in the end, as taken by his depth of character and complexity as readers were/will be? 

Yes, Treadway really surprised me during the writing. I had no idea he would become so conflicted, or that he would show so many sides. He has made me think a lot about the difference between who we appear to be (both to ourselves and others) and the true selves or longed-for selves inside us. He has made me look at people differently and not come to conclusions about them so fast. I love that this could happen even though, supposedly, I am the one who created his character. Maybe the depth of people I have known in my life has manifested in Treadway. I write unconsciously much of the time, before the technical work, and I stop if the writing goes dead, so maybe this is how Treadway came alive for me in a way I did not predict.

Wayne/Annabel’s physical status is a crux of the book, but, in my reading, wasn’t “what the book is about.” What is the book “about” in your mind?

The book is about how point of view can change identity. I deliberately chose an omniscient point of view for the writing, as well as a consecutive storyline that you might call old-fashioned. I wanted to restrain myself structurally so that I could know, and the reader could know, what was going on in everyone’s minds as well as how the big picture looked. This is not my ordinary way of writing. I like to get more close-up and more stream of consciousness. But to me this story was always about other possibilities inside the self we choose to project at any one moment.  For Wayne, there was an obvious and dramatic conflict between the inner and the outer person. But we all possess unexpressed selves, and this story explores the tension in that. I would love to know what you think the book is about. Thank you for these wonderful questions.

 [Salty Ink: the pleasure was mine, so thank you. And what did I think the book was about? I thought that Wayne/Annabel's gender ambiguity was simply a great means by which to explore questions of identity, and several societal constructs that can box us in. Also: that it was a novel about the basic desires and humanity that overide gender and age and connect us all.]

The qualities of Jessica Grant’s writing are beyond words, and for that reason, she might be the freshest, most readably original voice in the country. In the spring of 2010, the country clearly agreed with that sentiment. Her debut novel, Come, Thou Tortoise — a Globe & Mail Book of the Year — won the heavy-hitting Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the prestigious Winterset Award, and the Newfoundland & Labrador Downhome Fiction Award. She also won The National Post’s Canada Also Reads competition, garnering close to 50% of the votes, and is one of the ten official selections for the 2010 Evergreen Award.

Come, Thou Tortoise is an innovative, unprecedented, unforgettable gem, and, pardon the cliché but I mean it: There is nothing quite like this. The story, the tone, the characters, the ultra-modern diction, the delivery: all Jessica Grant’s. Grant’s crisp, accurate descriptions dance the story so vividly off the pages as the story’s heroine, Audrey Flowers, sees and describes the world in a consistently unique way: “Why did she name her horse [Rambo] after that sweaty, bullety Sylvester Stallone?” Bullety; no one has ever used that adjective before, that apt neologism. As mentioned in her acknowledgements, it is a very “punny” novel, Grant plain has fun with language. Her outwardly off-kilter novel works because it is balanced with a sadness not milked into melodrama like most writers would do. This is a book you will never forget.

Every story has been told, writers are getting sharper and more talented, but no one except Jessica Grant is writing so fresh and so clean in a way that is accessible to a broad audience. Her first book, a collection of shorts, Making Light of Tragedy, is an original piece of work, perhaps most notable for its off-kilter, endearing, and often over-contemplative characters. Every story is delectably unpredictable and delivered in a distinctive way. She’s unique, vibrant, fun, or at times sad-sans-pathos. “I jogged down the walk from my building, hopscotching over the ice patches.” Hopscotching as a verb. She experiments with structure, has fun with language, and her characters are all experiencing some facet of life too few of us can tune into. Whether you want to read something for its creative merit, its originality, or because it’s plain fun to read, buy this book and meet these characters. I’ll reel it in, but I’m blowing nothing out of proportion: these stories have been published in numerous journals and anthologies, and the opening story alone won the country’s top short fiction award, The Journey Prize, in addition to the heavy-hitting Western Magazine Award.

Search Salty Ink’s archives for Salty ink’s reviews of her books, or, click on a book cover below to read more about that book at their publishers’ websites.

 Salty Ink Q&A with Jessica Grant

Off the top of your head, without struggling for “favourites,” name one or two books you really liked by a fellow Atlantic Canadian author.

Mean Boy by Lynn Coady.

The Colony of Unrequited Dreams by Wayne Johnston.

If you weren’t a writer and professor, you’d be a … ?

Good conversationalist. That is my dream. To be, I believe the word is, scintillating.

What, in your mind, marked a turning point or real upswing in your writing career?

Coming home to Newfoundland. I’d been away for ten years and I came home and, just like that, I wrote differently. I don’t know why this is. I’d like to say it was all Newfoundland, but I think the time I spent in the States was crucial. The U.S. is a very dreamy, literary place. Something of that sunk in. But I couldn’t write while I was living there.   

For you, what makes for a good book?

I have to be surprised. I am very demanding about surprises. I don’t mean in terms of plot. I mean the ideas have to surprise me. They have to surprise me by being true. I have to fall off the sentences in amazement. Also, the voice must be earnest; even in its irony, the voice must be looking earnestly outward, trying to communicate.

In Come, Thou Tortoise, in a mistaken act of heroics, Audrey disarms an air marshal aboard a flight. Later, her father builds an airplane in the basement to help her get over a fear flying. In your short story, “The Plane Princess,” a woman finds a flight attendant badge, and on her next flight, wears it and acts out a fantasy she’s “one of them.” A.) are you aware of your fixation with airport culture and currently working towards a pilot’s license? B.) where do all of your original ideas come from, are they the product of exploring a fleeting thought and really running with it?

A.)  Yes, it’s an obsession. I’m possibly at my happiest in an airport. What’s that movie where Tom Hanks gets trapped in a terminal. Terminal. I loved that movie. I love watching planes take off. I love watching them land. I think they’re amazing. Very few people seem to feel this.

B.)  I don’t know how to answer this part. I like part A a lot, but part B is hard. Maybe some of the ideas come from odd thoughts I’m about to dismiss, because I think they aren’t worth their salt, but then I say, hey, maybe you are salty enough, come here, let’s put you on the page and see how you shake out.

Your work features a great deal of animals, and to a lesser degree, scientists devoting their life to obscure and specific research related to lab animals. These elements of Come, Thou Tortoise and some of your short fiction, like “Humanesque,” are well-informed. Do you have a background in the life sciences or is this the product of research? Are you an animal lover or  just fascinated by esoteric scientific research? What’s the deal?

My mother is a psychology professor who studies animal behaviour. She has a lab. In that lab there have been rats and goldfish. I’ve had close encounters with both.

Am I an animal lover? I love the animals I’ve known personally. They are, in no particular order:

A horse (Mick), four hamsters (Pumpkin, Pumpkin II, Squeaky, Mogul [as in a ski bump, not a business tycoon]), six cats (Cedes, Tosca, Aida, Cosi, Lumpy, Mittens), a dog (Yoldi), a tortoise (Scooter), a caterpillar (Pilly). 

Yes, I read author bios and acknowledgements, and it says in your bio for Making Light of Tragedy that you’ve written music in addition to literature. Elaborate, and is this something you still dabble in?

I no longer dabble, thanks be to Jesus. I used to play guitar (not well) and write intense political songs that made people uncomfortable – which I enjoyed. This was when I was living in the States. I played open mics and after a while got gigs and a bass player and a CD. We travelled around with our gear in a van. It was not a cool van. I played in Buffalo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Hartford CT, Ithaca NY. I’m kind of proud of that. But I’d be mortified for anyone to hear now what I was playing then.

Salty Ink has twice spoken of your “not milking the sadder aspects of the story into melodrama ,” and your “sad-without-pathos moments.” It works, it suits your style and delivery of the story, but is it a conscious choice you make as a writer, to not tug too overtly at a reader’s heartstrings or to do so at length?

When I started writing, I had no sense of humour and I wanted to make my readers cry. This was in my late teens, early twenties. I tried to write a novel. It was quite bad. In fact, that whole novel ended up compressed into a single sentence in one of the stories in Making Light of Tragedy. What does this have to do with not pulling on the reader’s heartstrings. I don’t know. But again, I’d say it’s about the idea dictating its treatment. You remain true to the idea. The reader’s heartstrings shouldn’t come into your brain while you write. (That’s quite an image – sorry.)

If a bad storm trapped you in cabin for a full week, who’d you rather spend the week with, Audrey Flowers or Uncle Thoby?

That’s the kind of hypothetical question my grandmother used to ask, and not about characters, but about real people, and the question would usually involve leaving someone to die in the desert. Actually writing a novel is kind of like being trapped in a cabin with your characters, except for years, not a week. And so you have to love them a whole lot. I’d be happy with either Audrey or Uncle Thoby. In fact, I would not say no to spending time with either. I miss them.

Audrey “Oddly” Flowers is accused of being IQ-challenged throughout the book. I prefer to think of her as ethereal and open-minded. Certainly endearing. You?

Yeah, the novel treats the idea of IQ with irony. I hope this comes across. Skulls can be measured. Brains can be measured. But inner life – or intelligence – can’t be. We are immeasurable. We are universes. This is a paradox. We’re finite. But we’re infinite. This paradox is made manifest in the book through Winnifred, the tortoise, who is a portable room, and whose room is both involuted, like a galaxy, and cosy. We are portable rooms too. Or take the human brain in Audrey’s father’s lab. Audrey can’t get over how small it is. She can hold it in her lap. And yet, it’s a person. It makes no sense to her how small a human brain is. But back to IQ: An IQ test, as her dad tells her, is a test that measures how similar your brain is to the brain that made up the test. Audrey’s brain is not similar to the brain that made up the test. But is she less busy on the inside? No.

Carla Gunn’s writing has been featured in the Globe and Mail, The National Post, The New Brunswick Reader and heard on CBC radio. From her publisher’s website: “Along with writing, she teaches psychology and she worries. About everything. But especially climate change, mass extinctions and that mole that she can feel but not see.”

Her 2009 debut novel, Amphibian, about a nine-year-old, environmentally conscious, ahead-of-his-years-and-peers Green Channel addict, has had an amazing year and deserves all of its due attention. She’s emerged as one of Canada’s exciting new voices, and lucky for us, she’s at work on a new novel already. Amphibian was shortlisted for the prestigious Commonwealth Writers Prize (Canada and Caribbean Region) — a career-affirming pat on the back like few others — along with being A Globe & Mail top five debut novel of the year, a National Post Book of the year, being featured in the Quill & Quire best of 2009 edition, a Canada Also Reads nominee, and has garnered a striking abundance of rave reviews, in addition to landing itself onto countless other best of 2009 lists, (like Salty Ink’s, click here). Amphibian is also set to be translated into German and published by Verlag Random House. Click here to read more about Amphibian at Coach House Books’ website, and click here to read Salty Ink’s glowing review of Amphibian.

“Sometimes you start reading a book and fall in love by page two. That’s what happened when I tore through Carla Gunn’s novel Amphibian. The book’s narrator, nine-year-old Phin Walsh, is an encyclopedic pint-sized worrier … it’s a sparkling, memorable debut.” – The Coast

“Carla Gunn has fashioned (more likely been possessed by) an irresistible voice. I confess this kid grabbed me from the top and held me in tender thrall.” – The Globe & Mail

“’One of this year’s most original literary creations is Phineas Walsh, the nine-year-old narrator of Fredericton author Carla Gunn’s polished, engaging first novel … Phin is a “symbol for our times – a child so overwhelmed by information that his childhood is being stolen from him, Yet Gunn manages to alleviate the intensity that threatens to overwhelm the novel with good doses of humour and hope.” – The Quill & Quire.

Enjoy the wonderful interview below.

Off the top of your head, without struggling for “favourites,” name one or two books you really liked by a fellow Atlantic Canadian author.

 Nights Below Station Street by David Adams Richards has stuck with me for years. It has a very strong narrative voice and I’m drawn to those sorts of novels.  It also takes place in Miramichi, N.B. where I grew up.

How does one go from being an aspiring writer to a published author, any insight? Suggestions?

There’s an episode of the British show Keeping Up Appearances in which Hyacinth Bucket, who had never been on a horse, leads some people she’s trying to impress to believe that she’s a skilled equestrian. When they invite her to ride at their ranch, Hyacinth is unfazed and says, “Well, maybe I can ride. How would I know? I’ve never tried.” I’m a bit like Hyacinth and that’s helped me most, I think. So my advice to aspiring writers: foster a naive optimism. 

What is your favourite part of the writing process? Your least favourite?

Fantasizing and imagining what my characters will do or say is more fun to me than actually writing.  I love listening to people’s conversations and plucking little bits out to seed a scene. I don’t like the final stages of the editing process because by that time my work is so familiar to me that I’m utterly bored by it.  

What is great about being a writer? What isn’t so great?

I like the autonomy that comes with writing and with the other forms of work I do. It’s comforting to know that if I piss someone off, they’re out of luck. If I were a capuchin monkey, they could punish me by withholding bananas or by biting off my fingers or toes, but in this capitalist system where money is the primary form of power, they don’t have much recourse since I have so very little to lose – as evidenced by my income statements. The downside to writing is that I have very little to lose – as evidenced by my income statements.

What’s the most unexpected question you’ve had in an interview or talk about your novel?

One reader at a book club meeting in Ontario asked – in a very challenging manner – if I belong to the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.  That surprised me…kind of.

What is taking up too much of your time lately?

I try to cobble together an income with a patchwork of contract jobs and that often interferes with writing.  Most irritating, though, are those pesky things I do for free because I’ve gotten into this mentality of being some sort of subsidization service (anyone who does contract teaching at a university in Canada knows what I mean by that). After a week of not having time to write, I get really cranky and bitter and David Adams Richards’ advice to writers becomes more and more attractive: “Burn your bridges.”

Where did the idea for this book come from? Did Phin come first, or did the idea come first, and a nine-year-old narrator felt like the right way to deliver the story?

When my son was nine, he jumped off his bike to pick up a plastic bag and yelled, “Don’t people know sea tortoises choke on this?!” This happened just around the time I decided I should try my hand at fiction. It really was the perfect motivating event since I’m passionate about environmental issues and gravitate to child narrators.  As soon as I had the theme and a rough idea as to the protagonist, Phin’s voice became louder and more insistent with each scene I wrote. I enjoy that feeling of being possessed because then writing feels like some sort of weird altered hypnotic state instead of hard work.

What I found so effective in using Phin to deliver this story, and all of its environmental concerns, was that children see the world in right and wrong, they do not have that grey zone we adults create by justifying our actions or plain ignoring social and environmental issues. Was this in some part why you chose to use a child narrator for this story?

Yes – and partly because I find children a lot more interesting than many adults. Children haven’t been entirely “socialized” so they’re more likely to clearly see some of the illogic and inconsistencies in the adult world. And because their perspectives are so fresh and interesting, we’re compelled to listen to them.  Some readers say they loved Phin because he gave voice to their own fears and concerns about the environment, while other readers who aren’t particularly interested in such issues liked him because he was funny and insightful – they could forgive his righteousness because of his age.  I don’t think this book would have worked with an adult protagonist, or even an older child.

The book is jammed full of enlightening, random animal facts and stark stats about environmental issues, particularly about endangered species. How much research was involved here? What were your sources?  When one of my sons was younger, he found a lot of fiction creepy (I tried once to read Roald Dahl’s The Twits to him and he was totally freaked out by how mean they were to each other and asked, ‘Didn’t they ever hear of a divorce?’), so he tended to gravitate to the decidedly less disturbing (!) realm of real life.  Animal encyclopedias were his favourite and that’s where I got a good start on accumulating Phin’s information.  I loved the research part of writing this book – so much fun to learn that some lizards can squirt blood out of their eyes and sea cucumbers can throw up their guts on predators. 

I’ve read you are at work on a new novel, Nuts. Is it too soon to tell us a little bit about it?

It’s narrated by a thirteen year old, Sam, who’s baffled by his father’s seemingly bizarre behaviour – like spending all of his time building some sort of secret device in the back shed and taking scything lessons.  When he discusses his concerns with his best friend and his mother, they have all sorts of unpleasant theories. And although his mother scoffs at Sam’s hypothesis that maybe it’s a brain tumour, given the alternatives, that’s what he’s rooting for.  In a nutshell, ‘Nuts’ is about social alienation and disillusionment and what qualifies as ‘disordered’ in present-day society. Now all I need to do is burn some bridges so that I have time to write it…

Crummey ventured into fiction, like most, by writing short stories. His first published short story was a runner up for the 1994 Prism International Short Fiction Contest. Since then, his work has been published in many anthologies, including the most esteemed anthology series to be included in in Canada: The Journey Prize Anthology (Vol.10 in this case). He published a stellar collection, Flesh and Blood, in 1998, which Random House republished in 2003, with three new stories. Flesh and Blood is a collection of stories set in a fictional Newfoundland town, Black Rock, “a community of exiles, characters estranged from their home, from their families or, just as often, from themselves.”

His debut novel, River Thieves (2001), is a “richly imagined story about love, loss and heartbreaking compromises” that tackles the contact and conflicts between the Beothuk and European settlers. It could not have been better received. A national bestseller, it won the Winterset Award, the Thomas Head Raddall Prize, the Atlantic Independent Booksellers’ Choice Award, and was shortlisted for some of the most prestigious national and international awards, like Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Prize, and the IMPAC Dublin Award. He followed up in 2005 with one of my favourite novels, The Wreckage, another critically acclaimed national bestseller. “A truly epic, yet twisted, romance that unfolds over decades and continents. It engages readers on the austere shores of Newfoundland’s fishing villages and drags them across to Japanese POW camps during some of the worst events of the Second World War. Haunting, lyrical, and deeply intimate.” In 2009, he gave us Galore, the mega-hit masterpiece mentioned in the first paragraph. “An intricate family saga and love story spanning two centuries, Galore is a portrait of the improbable medieval world that was rural Newfoundland, a place almost too harrowing and extravagant to be real.”

Click a book cover to read more about some of Michael’s Books. 

Crummey, now known as one of the biggest novelists out of Newfoundland and a top name in Canadian literature, actually got started with poetry, in 1986, while at Memorial University, when he won the Gregory J. Power Poetry Contest. He jokes that the award gave him “the mistaken impression there was money to be made in poetry.” From there he won the inaugural Bronwen Wallace Award for Poetry, amongst other awards, and has since published several books of top-notch poetry, including: Arguments with Gravity, Emergency Roadside Assistance, Hard Light, and Salvage. Michael also has a non-fiction book under his belt, a collaboration with photojournalist Greg Lock, entitled Newfoundland: A Journey into a Lost Nation.

Crummey’s career is one to aspire to, and he deserves every bit of recognition he has gotten. Random House’s website summarizes Crummey’s writing quite well: “[There is a] grace always present to redeem whatever hardships his characters endure. Both lyrical and political, Crummey shows the inevitability of loss and suffering in our lives without letting us lose sight of what’s worth loving, holding onto, and fighting for.”

Enjoy the interview below:

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.

The Big Why, Michael Winter and Open, Lisa Moore

  Salty Ink: How did you end up writing books?

Pure, stubborn, ignorant pig-headedness. I started writing poetry at the age of 17 and it felt like a vocation from the start. I had no notion how to go about making a “career” of writing. I just kept plugging away, even when any sensible person would have thrown in the towel for a real job.

 Salty Ink: Any advice for aspiring writers looking to be published authors?

I’m a big advocate of stubborn pig-headedness, at least when it comes to the work of writing. There is no way to learn to write, or achieve any kind of success, other than working at it. A lot of the time you’ll feel like nothing’s happening, that there’s no progress being made. And you just have to keep working. 

 Salty Ink: Which piece of yours are you the most satisfied with in hindsight?

I’ve been saying for years now that Hard Light is the best thing I’ve ever written. I knew as I was writing it that something different was happening, that I was tapping into a vein that was giving a particular life to the material that had never been there before. And I had the same experience while writing Galore – which by the way, I now think is the best thing I’ve ever done. It felt like there was more going on than just me writing a book, that I had opened a door onto a larger world than the one in my head. I hope I still feel as strongly about Galore ten or fifteen years from now.

 Salty Ink: What has been the most memorable moment of you writing career to date?

I don’t think anything has quite matched the experience of seeing my material in print for the very first time, a trio of poems in the St. John’s literary mag TickleAce. This was probably 1985 or 86. The thrill of opening the journal to find myself in there is still something I can feel to the tips of my toes.

Salty Ink: What is taking up too much of your time lately?

Driving. I have three step-kids, all of whom are busier than the average Fortune 500 CEO. Spend half my life dropping off and picking up.

 Salty Ink: Hard Light is quite astounding in its impact on a reader, and is the most visceral and convincing portrayal of Newfoundland’s bygone culture I have read, exceeding any work of non-fiction I know of. The backcover calls it “a love-letter to a world and a way of life that has vanished completely.” Was this intentional from the beginning, or did these poems/stories just come to you and then you made a cohesive collection?

That love-letter was intentional from the beginning. Although I had no more coherent a plan than that. I started collecting stories and material in the summer of 1995, intending to write a book about Dad’s life growing up in Western Bay and fishing on the Labrador coast. Had no idea what it would look like, I just dove in and hoped something would come to me. Most of that material wound up in the first section, 32 Little Stories. Stumbled on John Froude’s diary of life sailing around the world on tall ships and immediately saw that as part of the collection. Most of the pieces in Hard Light came to me relatively easily. It felt at times that I was just channelling something.

 Salty Ink: Much of your writing focuses on the loss of culture or a struggle with identity, is this intentional or more subconscious?

It’s something I’ve become aware of over time, looking back and seeing the repeated pattern. But it wasn’t at all a conscious choice. It wasn’t until a year or two after I finished River Thieves that it struck me how preoccupied with cultural loss I was. 

 Salty Ink: Your debut novel, River Thieves, could not have been better received. It won the Winterset Award, the Thomas Head Raddall Prize, the Atlantic Independent Booksellers’ Choice Award, and was shortlisted for some of the most prestigious national and international awards, like Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Prize, and the IMPAC Dublin Award. What was the biggest thrill attached to River Thieves for you?

Got to bring Mom and Dad to Toronto for the Giller Prize ceremony in 2001. My parents were endlessly supportive of my writing even though I a) often used them as material and b) seemed destined to live a life of relative poverty and complete obscurity. It was great to watch them taking it all in at the Four Seasons, the two of them dressed to the nines.

 Salty Ink: Galore draws largely on Newfoundland folklore and seemed like a real divergence from your previous two novels, which were steeped in specific historical events (European contact with the Beothuk in River Thieves, and WWII in The Wreckage). Why the leap from well-informed history to folklore?

 I’ve always felt the real wealth of Newfoundland is the oral culture of the place, the cumulative stories, knowledge, superstition, wisdom and foolishness that constitutes the lore of Newfoundland. There’s plenty of interesting history here, interesting events that make for great fictional terrain, but that’s not what makes Newfoundland what it is. There’s something less definable than a war of independence or a constitution or a language at the heart of what makes the place unique. And I guess I wanted to take a shot at a book that was a kind of spiritual or cultural record of Newfoundland. My ambition at the outset (which I quickly recognized as ridiculous but it was still worthwhile shooting for the stars) was to have all of Newfoundland happen in this tiny fictional outport I was creating. I also planned to make nothing up, to have everything included in the novel be something I found in the folklore. I abandoned that notion as well, just to have a little control over the narrative arc of different storylines. But there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of details, incidents, stories, superstitions, folk cures, names, characters from Newfoundland folklore in the book. I like to think of the book as one of Nan’s patchwork quilts. Mom can look at them and recognize the blouse or skirt or pants the patches originally came from. But the whole is something more than the sum of those parts.