12 or 20 (second series) questions with Sean Dixon

Sean Dixon grew up in a family of 12, including his 8 siblings, parents and a grandmother, through several Ontario towns, predisposing him to tell stories about groups of people thrown together in common cause. His debut novel, The Girls Who Saw Everything, was named one of Quill & Quire’s best of the year. His previous books include The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn, The Feathered Cloak, and the plays Orphan Song and the Governor General’s Award nominated A God In Need of Help. A recent children’s picture book, The Family Tree, was inspired by his experience of creating a family through adoption with his wife, the documentarian Kat Cizek.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

I had a big bereavement when I was a child. I lost my 15-year-old brother when I was ten to a swift, horrible factory accident. It was a defining moment for me and it governed my life choices well into adulthood. Some months after I published The Girls Who Saw Everything — I don’t know how else to describe this — I felt all that grief leave my body. I knew the Epic of Gilgamesh held this kind of power all on its own, and I do believe that’s why I became obsessed with it, but I didn't know that my embodying and retelling of it would have such a life-altering effect on me.

It wasn’t an entirely positive feeling either: I didn't know who I was anymore. I had always loved the unchanging, wise, sad child that had grown up inside of me. I had always felt I had known death and was not afraid of it. Now suddenly, unexpectedly, I was like every other life-loving fool. I was no longer Max von Sydow in The Seventh Seal, but rather just the strolling player with his family and his wagon. Faced with grieving people I was just as tongue tied, bewildered and stammery as any normal, well-adjusted person. And, worst of all, I was afraid of dying too. Just like everyone else.

It was awful. I used to have a kind of wisdom. Now it’s gone. Though I will add that the up side of offloading all that wisdom was I was finally able to contemplate raising a child of my own. What happens when you don’t think you’re about to leave all the time.

So I guess the answer is my first book changed my life because it made me less afraid to be a parent.

My daughter asked me to read my latest book to her. So I did. Then she asked me to read my last one — The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn. My impression, reading them back to back, is that my experience reading thousands of words to my daughter out loud over the last several years has paid off, it’s made me a better writer than I used to be. I don’t add unnecessary details anymore. I seem to have a better understanding of what to put in and what to leave out.

2 - How did you come to writing plays first, as opposed to, say, poetry, fiction or non-fiction?

I was trained as an actor at the National Theatre School. In our second year, my class made a project with a Canadian actor from Denmark’s Odin Teatret named Richard Fowler for which we were asked to create short physical scenes using text and props, etc, where the meaning could be entirely personal and did not have to be communicated to the audience. This was a liberating exercise for us, a particularly shy bunch of acting students.

Then I observed, with great fascination, as Richard took our scenes, ordered them, combined some of them, changed a few details, snipped a few bits, and created something resembling a narrative with them. He called it “a process in search of a meaning.” It gave me insight into how you could generate a practice of creating raw material without necessarily knowing how you were going to use it. Our physical bodies provided the raw material, but I realized that material could have been anything, could have come from anywhere.

When my class graduated, we formed a company, Primus Theatre, and made a collective creation called Dog Day that we had begun in third year, still working with Richard Fowler. While in school, I had written some material for Dog Day in a ‘storyteller’ voice that I wanted to expand beyond the parameters of that creation. While waiting for the Dog Day rehearsals to get underway, I wrote a monologue play called Falling Back Home that ended up being a sort of tragedy about a spinner of tales who suffers from the delusion that every story he dreams up is true, no matter how outlandish. By the time the Primus company got underway, I was feeling the pull of responsibility to the script of Falling Back Home so much that the new company felt like a distraction from my true priorities. So I quit the company. It was an interesting decision: I was leaving behind my best friends, great dinners, the opportunity to travel to Denmark and Italy and meet hundreds of passionate and interesting people because I wanted to have more time to sit in my room and write.

So that’s how I started, but the experience gave me the tools to create a larger work of any kind: plays were just my entry point. My father has always been a big novel-reader, so it was the great desire for me to do that but I was so, so afraid that I never would. When I finally started, adapting my oversized stage play The Girls Who Saw Everything, I spent eight months writing constantly, always fearing that I would quit at any moment. But I had the grid of the story-as-a-play to keep me going.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I get an idea, an image, and I tell myself it’s never going to happen. (Currently I’m not going to write a modern version of Apuleius’s Golden Ass and I’m definitely not going to write a stage variation of Achilles sulking in his tent, standing in for all the grievances of men.)

I think my first drafts have a real shape. But they’re a mess on the sentence level. I dispute the idea that you have to build a work via one perfect sentence at a time — Donna Tartt writing The Little Friend. I’m more interested — to use an artist analogy — in sketching out the proportions of the full figure and then going back and filling in the details. If you don’t do that, I think it becomes very hard to throw things away, which is a necessary part of writing a larger work, and it can be very hard to tell a full story that feels proportionally satisfying to the reader. You’re reading and you feel you’ve passed the beginning and now you’re moving into the middle, and now you’ve hit the peak and now you’ve passed the peak. To use the artist analogy again: you haven’t committed to a nose too large and a forehead too small.

But then, once that is done, I think I really need some help from an editor saying now look this sentence here: it’s a mess. And this one, and this one.

4 - Where does a play or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I’ve always thought of a play as something I can write to inspire and challenge a group of people — something that would be fun for a little community of people to do. My impression is that most playwrights don’t start from this impulse. With a novel, the impulse is more private. I want to explore this world by myself.

With The Girls Who Saw Everything, I was initially challenged to write a play for the women of a repertory theatre company in Montreal that was concentrating on the classics and so there weren’t a lot of parts for them. All the great parts were for the men. So I set out to create a meaty part for every single one of them.

The younger founder of the company loved the play but the older one decided not to pursue it. I’m not sure, but my theory is that he misconstrued the heightened aspect of my characters for mockery. The play was doomed by that point, too large for Canadian theatres, although it did get a second life as a theatre school exercise.

Then, when I rewrote it as a novel, I dove in to what the Gilgamesh epic meant to me, all the personal stuff that came into my mind while I was working on the play but had no performative outlet. The last third of the novel — when the characters find themselves following the old Nindawayma ferry ship across the world to a scrapyard in the Persian Gulf — is a complete departure from the play, and I suppose it renders the play out of date. It provides a much more satisfying ending, at least. It made me realize that it can take a long time to find a really good ending for a story.

For my most recent novel, I suppose I set out to explore what had thwarted my teenage impulse to make visual art. I wanted to feel again the joy that I had felt when I used to do that kind of work.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I love them. I think I’m good at them, but I also think that audiences who go to public readings are so super attentive (compared to theatre audiences, say) that they don’t ascribe a lot of value to whether the reader is a good performer or not. The entertainment value is just a side benefit. So my talent for it doesn't really stand out, it seems to me, except in the eyes of people who really care for that sort of thing. I remember once I tried to behave like a regular, mature writer at a public reading. An old friend admonished me afterwards for trying to behave like everyone else. Ever since then, I’ve stopped worrying about it.

My favourite public reading experience, though, remains a children’s reading at the Ottawa festival, in a packed space. A library, I think? I was promoting The Feathered Cloak, I think. I can’t recall who introduced me but they mentioned that I played the banjo. So all the kids were asking about the banjo. But I had not brought my banjo. I thought that would let me off the hook, but then, during the question period, someone asked me if I would sing a song without the banjo. I sang an old Scottish a Capella ballad called The Blackbird Song and then got mobbed. It was unbelievable. I felt like Taylor Swift.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I think I’ve always held on to that idea from my youth of the process in search of a meaning. what that idea means to me now, is: I sense that, as a very dull person who only finds depth — gratefully, humbly — when I’m in conversation with a searching, thoughtful, charming, vibrant, observant person that is not me, I have no choice but to try to conjure such voices out of the world that surrounds me when I write. I try to be attentive to serendipities that provide the raw material and can then be sketched lightly into my work, and later hammered home. Perhaps that is gobbledeegook. I look for the questions. I don’t think they’re inside me. It has to be a conversation with the world.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I do think the writer has a responsibility to cultivate alternative points of view. My alt pov has always been a celebration of the imagination, so I can see how that is not as important as explorations of culture and class.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Not difficult. Certainly essential. But also: celebratory. I loved working with Liz Johnston on The Abduction of Seven Forgers. I recall a time when I was trying to convey something a little otherworldly, wherein my storyteller was catching a magician in the middle of a mind-boggling sleight of hand. Liz kept writing back that she didn't see it, she didn't get it. I think I rewrote that passage four or five times before I got it right. And I trusted her judgement 100%.

I also like to write about groups of people. My bio addresses that. It can be tricky to keep the reader’s comprehension when you have several names flying around. Liz was instrumental in helping me clarify and distinguish the introduction and follow-through of all those voices.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

I love the line from The Misanthrope (I think) that got retooled in a French Moliere biopic to be more pointed advice to the writer: “Time has nothing to do with the matter.”

And, along with it: do not hurry, do not wait.

How I interpret these fragments: you might come up with the essence of your work, the rosetta stone, in five minutes — but it’s a burning a nub that will warm your hands through a hundred thousand exploratory words. An image can drop so deep that whole chapters will pour out in joyful plumbing of it. Other times, you might spend days and days just trying to catch something that’s just around the corner. Time has nothing to do with the matter.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (playwriting to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

To summarize: I see playwriting as more of a social impulse and fiction as more of a private impulse. But Daniel Brooks once said that theatre is a young person’s game, and I’m finding this to be more and more the case. I know fewer and fewer people who are making theatre, which means eventually, inevitably, there will be no one left who wants to play with me. So I suspect, if I want to keep writing in a way that feels meaningful, it will have to be from the more private impulse.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

Every time I fall in love with a routine, I always mourn it when it’s over and it takes awhile before I realize that I’ve just started a new routine. But I don’t write at all when I’m worried about the basic welfare of my loved ones. And that catatonia can sometimes go on for months, during which time I start thinking I need to become a gardener, or a tree-pruner, or a teacher, or a plumber.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Ovid. The Golden Legend. Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. A lot of obscure classics like the first poems in English or the Carmina Burana. A series of poetry and photo collections that were published in the 60s and 70s that my educator father acquired, called Voices, edited by Geoffrey Summerfield, printed on durable paper. One day I will return to Gilgamesh. Zombie. Troy. Superstition. The first Rickie Lee Jones album never gets old. Get Out of My House from The Dreaming. Running Up That Hill. I aspire to write like those Kate Bush songs, which are rigorous in adhering to their own interior logic. Self-contained. AWOO by the Hidden Cameras. That first album by Joanna Newsom, which I have not heard in awhile because she doesn't stream.

Florence and the Machine. Lhasa. The Waters of March. Halo. Walking in Memphis. Tracy Chapman, HAIM.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Old pee in the panel-board, sadly. And pine needles.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Yes. The Abduction of Seven Forgers was, for me, a joyful exercise in celebrating the influences of visual art.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Is it okay if I link to this essay I wrote?

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Honestly? I’d like to front a band as a vocalist. No instrument hanging off me. I want to dress up, ostentatiously, Prince-like, and dance and sing. If I woke up tomorrow in the body of a 20 year old, that is what I would do, no question.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I’m often haunted by the fact that I looked into the architecture program at the university of Waterloo while I was a first year theatre student there, and realized that my course list from Grade 13 read like I had planned to enrol. But I was dissuaded by the seven year long program. Well and a theatre colleague of mine had suffered a nervous breakdown while attending that program. That scared me away too. It’s one of the reasons I set out to explore what it means to have a visual imagination as a writer with The Abduction of Seven Forgers.

When I was a kid I loved Farley Mowat and wanted to be a marine biologist. I’m recalling that because I’m currently reading some of his books to my daughter. I was dissuaded from marine biology when I heard you spend most of the time in a laboratory, not in the field. But I’ve come to realize that this is true about everything. As a writer, I spend most of my time in the laboratory too.

But if I were just coming of age right now, though, I suspect I’d want to go fight forest fires. Maybe I’d convince my backup band to fight forest fires with me, while we’re not doing gigs.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Being a middle child in a very loud and opinionated family that drowned me out. The thought that ‘brainstorming’ inevitably meant going with someone else’s idea. The fact that my father has always been a voracious reader and always had a book at hand. The fact the my elder brother—five years senior to me, who was my mentor in all things—died when I was ten. I was trying to write a story that morning, before I learned that he had died. An SF story called ‘The Circle’ about a time-traveller who loops back to — well, I don’t even know because I never finished it.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I loved Malicroix, by Henri Bosco. I loved The Corner That Held Them and Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner. I loved Tarka the Otter. I’d like to find another animal novel that consumes me as much as that one did.

I want to read that Canadian book about the forest fire fires. Western writer, yes?

I’m trying to read Pip Adams’ The New Animals. I am bridling against its rigorous realism despite admiring it greatly. What is wrong with me?

I read two blockbusters recently: Cloud Cuckoo Land and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. I admired them but did not love them.

I loved the film about the hawk-healers in India — All That Breathes. I am a sucker for the Guardians of the Galaxy movies — all of them, except maybe the one about the starlord’s dad.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I recently asked a local Toronto theatre to reconsider a three-hander from a few years ago that they rejected. The leadership there has changed so I thought I’d give it another shot. They have offered a reading in early Feb. But I’ve had a look at the script and it truly is a mess. So I’m currently trying to use the limitation of the theme and the actors I requested to write something wholly new.

(As of today I’m failing, though, because a 4^th character has suddenly revealed herself, foiling all my plans.)

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Lyse Champagne

Lyse Champagne writes in French and in English. Her collection of short stories The Light That Remains was published in 2016. It chronicles the lives of six families before History closes in on them; snaps a picture before the film runs out. Many of her stories have appeared in literary magazines, including Descant, The New Quarterly, The Antigonish Review, Room of One’s Own, Windsor Review, and Wascana Review. Her first book, Double Vision: Reflections of a Bicultural Canadian was published by Key Porter and her play, Chicane de famille, won the David Smith Playwriting Prize. She lives in Ottawa with her family.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I wrote my first story when I was 11 so publishing my first book at 40 was exciting, if a bit anticlimactic. Little did I know it would take another twenty-five years to publish my second book and not for lack of trying.

2 - How did you come to memoir first, as opposed to, say, fiction or poetry?
I didn’t come to memoir first. I had three unpublished novels to my credit and many of my short stories had appeared in literary magazines.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I write by accretion. One sentence at a time, always going back to the beginning and adding a little more. I rarely write something straight through. I write many drafts, constantly polishing (it’s my favourite part) and revising.

For my latest project, The Light That Remains, my writing process remained the same but was preceded by months of research. For each story, I immersed myself in the history and culture of my characters, reading their literature, listening to their music, watching feature and documentary films, exploring their geography, architecture, language, customs, and social structures. It’s amazing what you can learn from listening to a language you don’t understand, especially if you are listening to a poem or a lullaby or an ancient hymn.

4 - Where does a work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I usually know before I start if it will be a novel or a short story.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love public readings. I am comfortable on stage and welcome the opportunity to read a story aloud. The whole process appeals to me: from choosing the right passage, rehearsing the way I will read it, to the event itself. I have listened to many writers read and find that I always learn something new from listening to a story read by the person who wrote it.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I think about writing a lot. What is it for? Would I serve the world better by doing something else? Is it just an act of self-indulgence?
I am more concerned with the why than the when or where of a story. The context. Why did this happen? This includes the probability that there is no answer to the question. That something can be random.

Writing to me is about understanding. People, events, emotions. Trying to understand because it is an incremental, never-ending process. It’s like knowledge. The more you know, the more you realize how little you know. The more you think you understand, the more you realize how little you understand.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
The circumstances change but the role stays the same. To speak the truth. To challenge power.

To help ourselves and others to understand. This is the role of every human, writer or not. As writers, we take an extra step: we write it down, we put our name to it, we send it out into the world.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
No. I welcome the feedback. Having worked as an editor (not for fiction) for many years, I understand the process.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Pay attention. It not only makes you a better writer but a better partner, parent, friend, citizen. It forces you out of your head and into the real world.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (memoir to short story)? What do you see as the appeal?
I started with novels. Wrote short stories because they were easier to publish although harder to write. I’ve also written two plays and the memoir. I have no talent for poetry which I consider the most rigorous of the literary forms.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I write every day of the year, even on Christmas. Even on vacation. Even in hospital. I’ve been doing this for almost twenty years. I have a minimum but no maximum. I average three hours a day at the beginning of a project which grows to five or more hours a day as I get to the revising and editing stage and even longer hours when I am getting it ready for publication. But writing isn’t just about sitting at your desk with a pen or a laptop. You write while you walk, wait for the bus, wash dishes, buy groceries, even while you sleep.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
If I’m stalled, I work on some other project. I read. I go for longer walks.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Jergens lotion, the smell of my mother’s hands.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Writing comes from paying attention to what is happening around you. Reading enlarges the world you live in, offers insights you might never have had, reminds you of how many ways there are to tell a story. I love art and often find a story in a painting or sculpture. Love all kinds of music. And I find film very inspiring, how the story flows from the images more than the words spoken on the screen.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
This is an impossible question. There are so many writers I love and each of them has had an impact whether I can pinpoint it or not. And because I read in French and English (and translations from other languages), the influences are many. As far as my writing short stories are concerned, the writers who have influenced me the most are Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Grace Paley, and Guy de Maupassant. I love nineteenth century writers (George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, and the great Russian writers, Tolstoy in particular). I can’t begin to list all the contemporary novelists I love so I won’t even try. Suffice it to say, there are not enough days in a life to read them all, let alone reread their best works.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Publish one of my novels.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I’d have been a history professor.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I don’t remember ever thinking I’m going to be a writer. I just started writing when I was 11.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The last great book I read in English was Lila by Marilynne Robinson. And in French, Ru by Kim Thúy.

The last great film I saw was Coming Home, by Zhang Yimou.

20 - What are you currently working on?
A novel about a journalist who loses her job and writes a blog, a rant about the gutting of journalism, about truth and ethics and politics.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 questions: with Diana Fitzgerald Bryden

Diana Fitzgerald Bryden was born in London, England and moved to Canada as a teenager. Her poetry and prose have been short-listed for the Pat Lowther Award, CBC Literary Contest, K.M. Hunter Award and Prism Short Fiction Contest.  She has published two books of poetry, Learning Russian (Mansfield Press) and Clinic Day (Brick Books). Her novel, No Place Strange (Key Porter Books) has recently been short-listed for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award. She is currently working on her second novel, Tunapuna. Read more about Diana and her work at her website, www.dianafitzgeraldbryden.com

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Every first book is a “coming out” story. Out of the closet, with your book of poems, short stories, essays, novel. My first book, Learning Russian, was partly about my love affair with the Russian language, and with poetry, so I felt I’d gone public with what had been very private material, but also that I was admitting to the world that I was, or wanted to be, a poet. For quite a while, that book embarrassed me. Now I love it like you might love a younger sister – it’s a portrait of the artist as a young woman. Also, although the poems are almost all free verse, I played with rhyme and rhythm in a way that made me eager to go on and try other formal structures in poetry.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I had tried writing short stories, and they all sucked. Which isn’t a bad thing in itself – your first efforts probably should suck, if you’re going to learn anything from them – but they also felt completely sterile to me. Then one day I wrote a poem instead, and even though I could see its flaws I had a feeling that this was it: this was what I wanted to write. I didn’t write prose again for years, except for the occasional essay.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

It really depends. Poems, for example, arrive in all kinds of different ways. Some are sudden and instinctual or somehow emotional in origin, so the first draft comes in a rush, and others begin with an idea or an image, and slowly develop. And I don’t find it predictable, at all, which kind will be easier to finish to my satisfaction. With any poem I tend to write many drafts, and usually end up cutting the last couple of lines – I’ve noticed a tendency in myself to want to sum up and tell the reader what to think there, almost as if I don’t trust the poem itself, so now cutting those lines is almost automatic. I still have to write them first, for some reason, but then, off they go!

Fiction seems to gestate as a thought or idea or character for a while, and then when I sit down to write I produce a lot first, then slow down as it starts to become clearer to me what it is I’m trying to write, or write about. I speed up again later as it becomes more solid. It’s less stressful than poetry in the sense that I can’t possibly produce a first draft of a novel in a sitting, or a few days or weeks, so I can allow myself to write pages and pages of notes, or drivel, knowing that I’ll get rid of it later.

4 - Where does a poem or piece of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

My first book of poetry consisted of discrete poems that happened to be connected by certain themes. Some poems began with a line or an image, others with an idea. My second book of poetry was conceived of as a book, complete with a narrative structure, but I’ve come to think that it didn’t succeed in the way I originally envisioned it. Not that it failed completely, but the strongest poems in it are the ones that aren’t contingent on the narrative – at least in my opinion. A novel is a novel, so obviously a book – I still write the occasional short story, but my short stories still, mostly, suck! I just do them for practice, or if I’m stuck with a novel and need to distract myself, but can’t turn to poetry.  I write much better essays than short stories, so perhaps I should do that instead.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Tough question. I’m doing a lot of readings right now to promote my novel, and some of them are excruciating, others wonderful. I suffer from nerves before I read but in the moment I often enjoy it. It can be good to communicate face to face. Writing is so solitary. I think poetry readings are easier – for one thing poetry is meant to be read aloud as well as on the page, and in a poetry reading you have more opportunity to vary tone and musicality as you shift between poems, without having to explain. If you move around while you’re reading from a novel you usually have to give as much thought to your explanations as to the reading itself.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I don’t think I’m a very theoretically oriented writer. In poetry I’m concerned mostly with how the words sound, with images, and with a poem’s ability to distil. I do enjoy working inside formal structures, but that’s about it. As a fiction writer and reader I’m very old-fashioned. I love a good story, the more complicated the better, and I love my characters, and want other people to as well. I don’t mean, by the way, that the characters must be loveable people, but that they must be interesting, you should want to know more about them even than I’ve written. I really enjoy shifting points of view – the opportunity that this allows me as the writer to show (or conceal) the different dimensions in a story. I want the voices to be believable. This is all very pragmatic, not really theoretical at all.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I can only speak for myself, and I think it’s dangerous to want to speak for anyone other than oneself as a writer – that’s where you’re at risk of pontificating, or proselytizing, or writing cant rather than fiction or poetry. I see my role as being to entertain, and if I’m lucky to move my readers. I want them to be able to lose themselves when they read a book I’ve written. As a child what I loved about reading was the way I could enter another world, another life, one that I was unfamiliar with, or not ready for, and travel without ever leaving my spot on the floor behind the couch (my favourite place to read back then). As a writer and a reader, using your imagination is the most exciting thing.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I love working with an editor. I’d read interviews with famous writers talking about their editors and it sounded so glamorous, all those boozy lunches and late-night phone calls. The reality is less glamorous, of course, but very rewarding. I had relatively light editing on my poetry books, so it was exciting to work with my editor at Key Porter, Jane Warren, who is both generous and demanding as an editor – a great combination.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

“Expect the worst.”

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

It’s been very easy to move from poetry to fiction – not at all to move back. I’ve hardly been able to write poems since starting to write fiction, and the ones I have written get shorter and shorter, the language more and more plain. I’m not happy with them. I would love to be able to move freely between the two genres, but can’t. It’s as if they use different muscles. I wrote an essay for the New Quarterly a few years ago which is a kind of love letter/lament for poetry and I’m still pretty much at that point. With fiction I love the expansiveness of it, the ability to play and create a whole world.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I take care of my nephews during the week, so I get up very early, drive across town, take them to school and then I have the day to work. I work in the kitchen, mostly, either at my place or my sister’s. I’m a physically restless person, so I need to move in between stints. Sometimes I go to the gym. Because school ends at 3:30 my work can be interrupted earlier than would be ideal, so I sometimes snatch more time while the boys are doing homework or watching TV. I occasionally work at night but not by choice, only if I have insomnia.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Other writers. Exercise. Sex. Conversation. Usually when it’s hard to write there’s a reason – fatigue, or I’m worrying something out that needs to sit for a while rather than be written down.

13 - Have you have a lucky charm?

Different ones for different books, connected to the book in some way.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Film, for sure. Movies have clearly influenced my novel and those of many writers I read. My poetry was influenced by visual art and music, I’m not so sure about fiction. I read so much as a kid that I think it’s still other books more than anything.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Actually this is an impossible question to answer. Almost everything I read is important in some way, even things I don’t like. You define yourself just as much against the work of other writers as with them, I think. Conversations with my friends and my husband are important. I’m often humbled by the things other people see or understand that I seem to come to so slowly.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Write my next novel, better than the first, of course. And the one after that, and the one after that….

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Professional misanthrope. Or maybe criminal lawyer. Or detective. I always expect to find a body in the woods.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Love. What could be more fun? And I hate most other jobs.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film? 

Hmmm, great book. I’m re-reading Middlemarch right now, and it’s marvelous: funny and tragic both. Film, Night of the Hunter, with Robert Mitchum. He’s terrifying, and the kids are fantastic in it, and I love all the shots of animals up close. I can’t believe it’s the only film Charles Laughton directed.

20 - What are you currently working on?

My second novel, Tunapuna.

12 or 20 questions (second series);

12 or 20 questions: with Nichole McGill

In Girl #3, her first novel for young adults, Ottawa author Nichole McGill tells the tale of a 14-year-old papergirl who finds peace and predators, stalkers and ghosts in a Toronto ravine. Nichole is also the author of 13 Cautionary Tales, the screenwriter for The Waiting Room, which was featured at the Berlin Film festival, and her fiction has been published in numerous journals and anthologies across North America. A veteran of the Ottawa reading series scene, she also curates WESTFEST LIT. She blogs at http://www.nicholemcgill.com/ and tweets @nicholemcgill.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

I thought that the publication of my first book, 13 Cautionary Tales, would change my life; it didn’t. This gave me Healthy Perspective.

In some ways, my second book is a continuation of the last short story in my short story collection. “Blood & Bubblegum” also deals with bullies in a magic realism fashion.

However, Girl #3 is:

1) a novel,
2) a young adult novel, and
3) plays with time and genre.

The journey for writing this novel was a personal and stylistic challenge for me. I figured out the novel form by wrestling it to the ground. Now that it’s out, I am far more assured in my storytelling ability.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?

I started off in journalism but really, I was pushed into that field, as are most who express a love of story. At university, I fell in love with films and pictures but somehow all stories for me begin with the written word.

My writing career was unintentional. After backpacking in Europe, I was offered a job as a print journalist in Ottawa covering the arts scene on a stop-over between Prague and Vancouver, where I was headed with a notion of working in the film industry. This is how I ended up in Ottawa and two years later, I signed a short story book deal while trying to sell my print columns as a book collection.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

A writing project catches fire when it catches fire. I poke at it but if nothing catches, I move on to the project that is speaking to me. I will return to bother the dormant ideas occasionally to see if there’s any spark in it. Once an idea catches, I work best if I dip into the story everyday to keep the flame alive.

4 - Where does fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

All stories for me start with the character’s voice. Once I nail that, the story flies whether I decide it’s a short story or a novel; the length depends on the time I want to invest into that character.

Once I have the voice, I chart out a general course for that character with appropriate twists and turns, write a bit, alter my general course if need be, write some more, etc. My first draft is writing the main “A” storyline down and in subsequent drafts, I determine which of the “B” stories are integral or not.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I love, love, love doing readings. It forces me as a writer to confront the story that I’ve written and during a reading, I quickly discern what parts of a story are extraneous and which parts I need to expand upon. Often it renews my enthusiasm in a project.

I have found readings to be particularly valuable as a YA author. The Ottawa International Writers Festival sent me to read and discuss my works in schools as part of their Think Ink literacy program in March. The interaction with students confirmed my instinct that teen readers are a sophisticated audience and if they are invested in a story, they will follow what twists and turns and devices you put in their path, a subject that I’ve addressed in my blog.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

Like many writers, I am rethinking the format of the book particularly in light of the social electronic media revolution that we are currently going through. I contribute to a Google group on rethinking the book and am developing Web versions and electronic versions of a book in separate projects with a local Web venture and the Ontario College of Art & Design’s Strategic Innovation Lab.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

[ have no response for this one ]

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

This, naturally, depends on the editor. Linda Pruessen of Key Porter Books and Jenny Antilla at Gutter Press were wonderful editors. Then again, they shared my overall vision. That said I crave working with editors who are able to identify those this-almost-works-but-not-quite passages. Both these editors fulfilled that essential role.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

When you are no longer nervous before a reading or a release of your work, this means you have lost your passion for writing.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction to young adult fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

Too easy; the difficulty is committing to one genre and maintaining one’s interest.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I lead a somewhat insanely packed life. Currently, I have two preschoolers and I work full-time as an E-Communications Manager. Hence, creative writing is pushed to the evenings, weekends and leaves of absences. When babes go to sleep, I go to a café. By nature, I’m a night owl yet I live in Ottawa where cafes close at 10 p.m. and my preschoolers have not adopted teenage sleeping patterns.

These are my challenges.

I work best when I am focused on one project and I draw up a detailed schedule that will allow me to stay in the zone. I call it “dipping in the well”. You have to enter the world of your story to nurture it. Otherwise, the moment you step out of it, it’s a different story. The sentence you write this moment will not be the same sentence that you write in an hour, or the next day. So when you decide to write, you have to be committed to following through on capturing the story before its shape shifts again.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Go to a café. Wait until 10 minutes before close. The muse will wallop you with a motherload and you’ll be furiously writing, cursing that you don’t have another 20 minutes. (Like now – it’s 10 p.m. at Bridgehead and the café’s closing. I will have to return to finish this questionnaire another night.)

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The hair of my children.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Books come from living life.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Writers who confirm that yes, it is possible.

Short list: Joyce Carol Oates, Lynn Crosbie, Evelyn Lau, Deborah Ellis, Laurie Halse Anderson, Neil Gaiman, Dennis Foon, Haruki Murakami, Barbara Gowdy, Angela Carter, Marie Hélène Poitras.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Don’t get me started.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Being a full-time fiction writer might very well be delightful.

In my parallel life, I am a filmmaker (which I may very well get to doing one day). In my third life, I’m an architect building tree houses in the jungle. In a fourth life, I live in a loft in Berlin, am a powerful crone with have no children or commitments to anything but I’m not as sympathetic.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

The need to exorcise the voices in my head.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

A confession: I’m not one of those writers who have a favourite book that they prize above all others. I have no idea where to begin with creating a list of favourite books. All books are just parts of an ongoing conversation and storyline, a small part of which has been captured in book form.

Last great film: Pan’s Labyrinth

20 – What are you currently working on?

I’m finishing a draft of my second novel Deadhead Lake to send off to publishers; it’s a YA fantasy horror thriller set at a boy’s summer camp in Muskoka. I am working on an interactive Web literary project for the upcoming website, Ottawa Tonite – the site will officially launch in the fall of 2009, the project TBD – and am developing a short story for a hybrid electronic-print book with OCAD’s Strategic Lab.

Oh yes, and carving out time to write, in general.

12 or 20 questions (second series);