Melia McClure is the author of the novels
All the World’s a Wonder and The Delphi Room. After a childhood
spent dancing and acting, she has been seen on film, television, and the stage
of The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Favourite acting memories include a
turn as Juliet in an abridged collage of Shakespeare’s classic and a role in the
much-loved TV series Stargate Atlantis. Film and theatre along with visual art
are the three muses that inspire her writing. They kindle her fascination with
the book-to-film metamorphosis. Her fiction is a confluence of magic realism,
black humour, and abnormal psychology, opening unexpected backroads to elements
of the metaphysical. Melia is a graduate of The Writer's Studio at Simon Fraser
University in Vancouver, where she was born. She now divides her time between
Canada and Europe.
1 - How did your first book
change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How
does it feel different?
The publication of my first
book vindicated my conviction that I could do something unusual with the novel
form and see this odd literary concoction enter the wider world. The Delphi
Room mixes prose—much of it in the form of an epistolary
relationship—with screenplay and is a nod to cinema. My
most recent work, All the World’s a Wonder, is a hat-tip to the theatre
and marries playscript with prose, some of the latter as diary entries and
emails, but almost all as character monologues that speak directly to the
audience. One of my aims with this book was to transform the novel into a stage
performance, with the reader in the front row. A play within a novel.
The Delphi Room is a love story about two cinephiles
trapped in adjacent rooms which they believe to be hell; it uses an insular
setting to access the expansive internal realities of its characters. In
contrast, All the World’s a Wonder traverses from Manhattan to Corfu,
and from modern day to the Jazz Age; it likewise plunges into emotional abysses
and psychological chasms, but through a broader scope of storytelling.
2 - How did you come to
fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
I’m an actor, and for me,
fiction is a natural extension of performing. When I write, I’m channelling the
characters the way an actor does, and for that reason my fiction is
voice-driven and dialogue-rich.
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 can be slow to commence
and slow to proceed. My approach is careful and intuitive. I can also write
scenes at a rapid pace once I’ve said to hell with it and stepped on stage, so
to speak. I often have an opening scene in mind. Because I work by listening
for direction from the characters, who frequently say surprising and inconveniently
illogical things, I must make an epic pact of trust that what they say is
leading somewhere, preferably not off a cliff. Although the editing process is
invaluable, my early drafts look quite similar to the final result. Perhaps
this is because I need to be loving the language and the voices and feel that
the bones of the piece are strong to continue the journey.
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 began my writing life with
short fiction, but now most of my prose begins with the idea that what I’m
writing will become a book. That said, a novel is constructed scene by scene, and
because my work tends to spring from the perspective of a dramaturge, I venture
forth with a focus on the dramatic microcosm and let the macrocosm take care of
itself.
5 - Are public readings part
of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys
doing readings?
My novels are written for
live performance. Storytelling is an oral tradition. I love to put on my actor
hat and share the work with an audience.
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?
When I began writing All
the World’s a Wonder, I was musing on how one might go about bringing to
literary life the mysticism and theatrics of the creative process, its
devastation and exultation. My lens was on the artist as conduit, on the
artistic impulse being dictated by deathless otherworldly characters.
All my work asks
metaphysical questions, bends time and space while remaining rooted in realism,
and probes the possibilities of the mind, love, and redemption.
Art is a call and response
about the search for meaning. So, although the questions posed by a given work
may be coloured by the details of the day, the answers we are striving toward
are intemporal. An artist offers incomplete answers which are perhaps fragments
of an ineffable completeness.
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?
Art reminds us that what we
refer to as reality is just one possibility plucked from an infinite spectrum
of potentials. The writer opens the door to dimensions which are not already unveiled
in the temporal world, and these dimensions would never be actualized here,
were it not for the artist’s insistence on prying into shadowy corners.
It is through the stories we
tell and the stories we read that the stories we live are revealed anew.
8 - Do you find the process
of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
A keen editor is the
essential first audience member, and the editorial process is an extended dress
rehearsal, to lean on theatre jargon. Is the performance playing to the back of
the house? Will tomatoes be tossed?
Still, the process is
delicate, and thus stepping into it involves a degree of trepidation. To feel
protective of one’s creations is only natural; for the writer, a difficult
balance of defensive vigilance and open-minded serenity is required.
9 - What is the best piece
of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in
your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like
books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the
answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will
then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the
answer.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
10 - How easy has it been
for you to move between genres (writing to acting to dance)? What do you see as
the appeal?
Dance was an important part
of my childhood and my introduction to performance. Acting also began early, as
did making up stories and writing them down. Storytelling and self-expression
were always essential, no matter what form they took. Writing and acting seem a
natural pair to me, the internal and external versions of the same expressive
imperative. With writing, I love that I can both become the characters as an
actor does—even though no one can see me—and perch in the director’s chair, guiding the
action.
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?
Morning, when the mind has
just journeyed back from the other side of elsewhere and life has yet to pounce
from all angles, is preferred. Tea, reverie, write, celebrate wee victories.
12 - When your writing gets
stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word)
inspiration?
Years ago, I began dabbling
with paint. It is a way to experience the pure freedom and joy of creation
without the pressure of striving to excel. The art of child’s play.
13 - What fragrance reminds
you of home?
The scent of backstage, of a
slant of spotlight streaming with dust.
My parents gave me the
chance to taste the stage early on. Their support is my talisman. Even when I was
a very young child in a ballet recital, the scent of an old theatre and the warm
smell of bright lights felt like a second home and meant both a deep connection
to my family and to grand unknown realms, soon to be born.
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 are sensory experiences
that come from other sensory experiences. Henry, a character in All the
World’s a Wonder, is a violinist. I was inspired by the singular
transporting sensation of a solo violinist playing Ravel. Anais, from the same
novel, is passionate about cuisine, her culinary creations paying homage both to
her Hungarian grandmother and to the beauty of Greece.
15 - What other writers or
writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I will read the gamut from
crime fiction to haiku to stage play. I am less concerned with my taste and
more simply curious about the possible majesty of words and story. Many of the
writers I’ve long loved—Alice Munro, to name a beloved icon—have a style very different from my own. If anything,
I am drawn to what is far departed from my favoured stomping ground. I love reading stage plays
as it feeds my fondness for dialogue. I adored The Cripple of Inishmaan
by Martin McDonagh when I saw
it on the stage and recently loved it again on the page.
16 - What would you like to
do that you haven't yet done?
Travel the Silk Road. When I think of
storytelling as a spoken-word tradition, I think of a caravanserai full of
traders bearing tales. The chronicles collected and shared along these fabled
routes doubtless served as spiritual lamps for weary travellers in the cold
firelight, and likely influenced the world of then and now in far more ways
than we can imagine.
As both the traveller and the storyteller know,
and in the words of André Breton, “…literature is one of the saddest roads that
leads to everything.”
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?
The healing arts. Words can
heal, but if not words, then herbs.
18 - What made you write, as
opposed to doing something else?
It is in writing the voices
of others that I feel most myself.
19 - What was the last great
book you read? What was the last great film?
I reread Lisa Moore’s short-story
collection Open. A white napkin, marked with red lipstick and fallen to
the ground, is a wounded dove. Arresting.
One of my treasured films is
The Road Home, directed by Zhang Yimou. Simple, gentle, graceful, timeless.
20 - What are you currently
working on?
There seem to be characters
chattering in my ear, flinging themselves between Southeast Asia and New York, barking
out another novel. Heaven forfend.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
