U of Alberta writers-in-residence interviews: Lynn Coady (2008-9)

For the sake of the fortieth anniversary of the writer-in-residence program (the longest lasting of its kind in Canada) at the University of Alberta, I have taken it upon myself to interview as many former University of Alberta writers-in-residence as possible [see the ongoing list of writers, as well as information on the anniversary event, here]. See the link to the entire series of interviews (updating weekly) here.

Lynn Coady is an award-winning author of six works of fiction. Her first novel, Strange Heaven, was nominated for a Governor General’s Award, and in 2011, her novel The Antagonist was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, an award she won in 2013 for her short story collection Hellgoing. Her work has been published in Canada, the US, the UK, Germany, France and Holland. Coady lives in Toronto, where she writes for television.

She was writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta during the 2008-9 academic year.

Q: When you began your residency, you’d been publishing books for about ten years. Where did you feel you were in your writing? What did the opportunity mean to you?

A: Oh this was a while ago, 2008-9. I was just starting The Antagonist and really looking forward to the residency because I was staying in a friend’s apartment. Being in another person’s space is a great way to begin a new project. It’s just you and your computer in a room that’s completely devoid of context and meaning, therefore no subconscious static happening in the background. And the routine of going to the university a few times a week broke up that solitude nicely. It was ideal for starting a new book—a quiet, routinized life with very few distractions.

Q: Was this your first residency?

A: No my first was at Green College at UBC and after that I did shorter ones at places like UBC Okanagan.

Q: How did your experience at University of Alberta compare to those other residencies?

A: I felt a lot more “embedded”—it was much longer than any of the others. The Green College one was just a semester I think. So I felt like I became a part of the U of A English department, somewhat—or at the very least a part of that community. It had an intensity to it as well—different people from all walks of life showing up at my office at various time to talk about their secret, hitherto private writing passions.

Q: Given the fact that you aren’t an Alberta writer, were you influenced at all by the landscape, or the writing or writers you interacted with while in Edmonton? What was your sense of the literary community?

A: It’s actually a bit hard to talk about my experience in Edmonton with particular respect to my residency at U of A, because I spent a lot of time in Edmonton before and after that. I was there from 2005-2007, and then when I came back for the residency in 2008, I ended up getting married and hanging around for another seven years. But Edmonton and Alberta definitely had an impact on my writing. I can’t really quantify it except to refer to some of the work I produced around it—sections of The Antagonist are set in Alberta, and my story The Natural Elements is a real psychic distillation of my time there. I also wrote a story called Fin set in Edmonton that's coming out in a UK anthology pretty soon. There is something shocking about the Albertan landscape to a coastal person like me—it’s sort of terrifying to be so far from the ocean. And the winters feel like nature has a grudge against you personally. But at the same time, as a maritimer, I found something comforting in the people and culture—in Edmonton’s underdog, working class attitude. Vancouver was very alienating for me when I lived there because the people all seemed so healthy and well-adjusted.

But it’s kind of impossible to talk about how a place might have influenced your work without talking about how it influenced your life, and my time Edmonton, both inside and outside of the U of A residency, has influenced my life immeasurably.

Q: What do you feel your time as writer-in-residence at University of Alberta allowed you to explore in your work? You mention starting to work on The Antagonist; was your initial goal to explore the possibility of another novel, or did you see it more of an opportunity to expand your repertoire?

A: Yes, I just wanted to use the time to make a start on a new novel.

Q: How did you engage with students and the community during your residency? Were there any encounters that stood out?

A: There were some odd ones that stood out, which maybe I won’t go into—every residency involves its share of wild cards as I’m sure you know. But I worked with some really interesting people. There was a woman in Fort MacMurray who I would talk to on the phone every week or so about a memoir she wanted to write about growing up in an outport of Newfoundland—it sounded like a fantastic story. There were people from all over the city, secret writers with regular lives and day jobs, who came out of the woodwork. And only the occasional creative writing student from the department. You would think the students would be the main ones stopping by, but I saw far more people from around town. I liked that—that a job in an english department ended up taking me outside the world of english academia to such a degree. U of A does a good job of getting the word out, reaching out to the community. Feels like the kind of thing universities should be facilitating, so I was pleased to be a part of that.

Q: Looking back on the experience now, how do you think it impacted upon your work?

A: Well the residency definitely helped me make a start on my novel. I had the focus and the routine and the peace and quiet and big, empty office that I needed. And it brought me to Edmonton for the next few years of my life, so, insofar as Edmonton and Alberta has impacted on my work (as discussed above) the residency did as well.

WRITING: WHAT MATTERS ; University of Alberta

On Thursday, I was able to go to a panel discussion at the University of Alberta called “Writing: What Matters,” chaired by Janice Williamson, with brief talks by Lynn Coady (Writer in Residence, English & Film Studies), Kevin Kerr (Playwright in Residence, Drama), Rita Espeschit (Writer in Exile, Edmonton) and Derek Walcott (Nobel Laureate, Distinguished Visiting Professor, Faculty of Arts). U of A has been pretty lucky to have Walcott around the past little bit, giving talks, being available and otherwise, including even doing a poetry workshop with various writers taking classes throughout the English & Film Studies Department, and he even gave a reading to a packed hall last fall, perhaps but the beginning of this longer-termed arrangement.

Lynn Coady, this year’s writer-in-residence, started her talk referencing how she found it difficult not to take Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s comments against artists personally, suggesting any argument against was “whining” and/or “self-absorbed bullshit,” and suggesting artists aren’t ordinary Canadians, which make their concerns somehow diminished. She talked about writing as her way to address the question of “what matters,” and to “engage the world.” Writing is, she said, what she’s best at doing and like doing most, but how is it that culture at large says its irrelevant? Rita Espeschit, a writer who immigrated to Canada from Brazil in 2001, and the author of fourteen books, talked about how she originally heard that Canada was “like the United States but colder.” She was very pleased and surprised to learn, soon after arriving, that she was wrong (“but not about the colder,” she said). Unlike Coady who read from a pre-prepared speech (call it the writer in her, I would have done the same thing), Espeschit spoke informally of how writing shapes who we are (as Canadians) and is a reflection, showing us to ourselves and to different generations and parts of the country. She wondered if much of this conversation had to do with us having an aggressive neighbour with the same language; when you have an aggressive neighbour with a different language, she said, you have a gate between you. She referenced, too, something Prime Minister Harper said about Canada not having a culture, but a series of regions. Perhaps he should have talked to John Ralston Saul, who recently talked about Canada as a Metis nation, forming ourselves through the fact that we have a range of diversity. Can we simply not see “Canadian culture” because there is no single “one” culture, but a range of cultures? Such ideas become far harder to reduce, and thus grasp onto, by someone willfully working to pay little or no attention.

Kevin Kerr [above, talking to Edmonton poet/publisher Trisia Eddy], playwright, who is actually in the second year of a two-year term (I would have loved a two-year term) and husband of poet Marita Dachsel, took another point of view, taking the “what matters” of writing into his own specific process, and talking specifically how he got into the five year project that turned into the play Skydive, currently being performed in Calgary. Worked through with Vancouver’s Realwheels, a theatre company that writes pieces around and with disabilities, this is the second production Kerr has worked on with them. He talked about the idea of the Frankenstein monster, the “spark of life” as metaphor for theatre, with a final production made up of a series of disparate body parts sewn together, searching for that spark that always evades answers, as in, what makes a project work, what makes a project live? Although he made a point to say that the playwright wasn’t the doctor, but perhaps the head, with the actors as arms and legs (he did keep going with the metaphor, but I stopped taking notes after the first bit).[above: Rita talking with Janice Williamson] Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, an award-winning poet, playwright and visual artist from St. Lucia (he currently divides his time between New York, Trinidad & Tobago and St. Lucia), started out by saying that, as a Nobel Laureate, he gets asked to talk all around the world, from Mexico to Brazil to Italy, to and with writers, and always about this subject of how and what writing matters. He sees it as a repeated question, where is the centre? He talked about how culture demeans, misunderstands and misrepresents artists through monetary reward as being a mark of success, and that centres such as New York, Paris and London by themselves do not produce great work. Money is not a measure, he said, and he was increasingly disturbed by this, that the notion of craft gets overtaken by career and financial competition. Unlike what the “centre” of what is usually spoken of, his centre is, as he called it, a semi-literature island, and talked about measuring criteria that have nothing to do with the craft. This has been said before, he said, this is not new. He cited examples of obscure geography creating genius away from any idea of “centre,” including Joyce, turning Dublin into a village and he the village explainer, Faulker and Marquez. Who would have thought about the blasphemous hymns, he said of Emily Dickinson, of a spinster recluse out in the country? He ended by saying that the comments made by the Prime Minister were profoundly scary and ridiculous, and about how it is insulting to “ordinary Canadians” that their Prime Minister presumes them not smart enough to engage with it, instead forcing the dumbing down of such works. He ended with these magnificent lines:

Those who presume to speak for the common man demean him.

And then I got lost on the way to the reception, and ended up somewhere else entirely.

12 or 20 questions: with Lynn Coady

Lynn Coady is the author of Strange Heaven, Play the Monster Blind, Saints of Big Harbour and Mean Boy, as well as the forthcoming Hyperborea. She lives in Toronto.


1 - How did your first book change your life?


A whole lot. To a head-spinning degree actually, because of the GG nomination. I went from being this kind of grungy post-grad student with all the usual issues of insecurity and self-loathing to being invited to literary festivals, interviewed on the CBC, meetings with people I perceived as "big shots" in Toronto, and so forth. This was totally beyond my experience up until that point. My experience of 'being a writer' then was, you know, poetry readings in basement cafes and all-but-empty university classrooms in the afternoons. Sending out countless submissions to countless, tiny, literary magazines and never hearing a word back from them, and so forth. But in the late 90s when Strange Heaven came out, it was a heady time for Canlit in general and if you were young and new onto the publishing scene, you got a lot of attention. It raised some kind of crazy expectations among writers of that generation, but it had an overall positive effect on me because after being told my whole life that it was impractical and foolhardy to devote yourself to writing, I began to perceive it as a real possibility. It was what I had planned on doing anyway, but itwas nice to know it wasn't as much of an interminable hunger strike as it had been portrayed. I was meeting people who were doing it--full-time artists and such like. That was important. I started to realize there were artistic communities out there that weren't subsets of the academy. My horizons broadened and my expectations started to shift.


2 - How long have you lived in Toronto, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?


I've been here not quite a year. I arrived March 1, 2007. It takes time for a physical environment to have an impact on my work. When I was in New Brunswick, I wrote about Cape Breton. When I was in Vancouver, I wrote about New Brunswick. When I was in Edmonton, I wrote about--not Vancouver exactly, but I fashioned a kind of fictional world that I think was very much influenced by my years in Vancouver and that futuristic 'city of glass' element it has to it.

Race and gender come into play in that I'm often preoccupied with the idea of losers and winners, social hierarchies. The blurry line between the idea of community and that of conformity--how something that is meant to be welcoming and comforting can so quickly turn exclusionary and oppressive if an individual fails to live up to certain standards, or perform the role that's expected of him or her.


3 - Where does a 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?


Usually the first one. Saints of Big Harbour started as a short story and Mean Boy started as a short story, and, come to think of it, so did my most recent MS. When I begin a short story I'm often suffused with a kind of euphoric creative energy that is addictive. So when the story is finished, I inevitably ask myself: Is that it? Couldn't I take this further? In an effort to recapture that feeling I suppose. But any writer will tell you that first-blush love affair with a piece of writing usually dwindles at around page 150.


4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?


I think neither. Well, they're part of it in the same way anything I experience on a given day ends up being part of it. It's an experience I file away, just like grocery shopping or a given conversation with someone.


5 - 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 realized just yesterday that any time anything makes me feel outraged and confused (it has to be that combination--it can't be just one or the other), I write a book about it. That is, whenever I find myself feeling something very strongly, but am not entirely sure what it is that's upsetting me so much--or even if I have a right to feel that way (that's a big part of it too), I start writing to try and figure it out. For example, that thing about community and conformity I mention above is something I've grappled with a long time--it comes from being a small town girl and coming of age and finding yourself thinking things like: Jesus! Small towns are fucking awful! When all the commonly accepted wisdom tells you they are not awful at all, they are warm, endearing places with a slower pace of life and a generally more humane atmosphere than, say, big cities. And so you get confused, because no one seems to agree with you, even though every braincell you have to rub together is telling you the opposite. So I write a book to figure out where I stand on the matter, and usually the conclusion I come to, no matter what the issue at hand happens to be, is: 'It's complicated.' And that conclusion satisfies me very much.


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


Both.


7 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?


Harder. I'm not as arrogant as I was in my youth, and insecurity is thefount of bad writing. So I take a lot more care, and taking care is of course essential, but then you're in danger of being overly self-aware, and over self-awareness is also a fount of bad writing. So then you sit there in front of your computer thinking: Oh no! Am I being too self aware? Thereby becoming even more self-aware. Etc. The upshot: harder.


8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?


This past summer, I bought a couple one day instead of buying apples, on a whim. I'm crazy that way. I couldn't believe how good and non-appley it was.


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


"Don't become the thing you hated." (I don't know if it's the best necessarily, but it's what comes to mind.)


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


I haven't written any book-length non-fiction. I've written some personal essays, and they've been pretty easy, and fun, but I have to say deep down there is something about the form that I despise. All the 'I, me, I, me'. Even doing this interview, all the I-me kind of makes me cringe. I feel on some level that I am capitulating to the reader's voyeuristic impulse with respect to the author, and, while I understand that impulse (I'm a reader, so I have it too), it doesn't quite sit well with me to be indulging it. Also, you know those people who, in conversation, just sit and talk about themselves, and it never occurs to them to ask anyone else any questions because they are so enamored with their own being and experience, and how they make you sick? It feels a bit like I'm doing that, too. So it's hard to imagine ever sitting down to write, say, a book-length memoir.

That said, I love first-person narrative journalism, like Jon Ronson's Them. That kind of work where someone or something else is your focus, but you're still present as narrator, as the reader's way into the story. That I would like to do.


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?


Oh rob. I drink coffee, I read. Feed the cat. Then I check email. Then I force myself to stop with the email. Then if I'm lucky, I write. Zz.


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


When I'm not writing, I wait. I just get other stuff done and don't worry about it. It's like that Buddhist saying about when the student is ready, the teacher appears. I've learned to trust the rhythms of my creative process--that sound airy fairy, but it's just what you do if you're like me and you dislike stress. I know so many writers who walk around completely freaked out if they're not writing anything. And people who force themselves to write even if there's no particular story they want to tell at the moment--just because they feel they should always be writing if they want to call themselves writers. And then they worry because they find the stuff they've forced themselves to write is shit.

Books and music. I wash the dishes while listening to music that inspires me and that usually puts me into a meditative state. I have all my best ideas washing dishes.

(I mentioned this once during a talk I gave with another writer for the Alberta Writer's Guild. There was this woman there who'd been asking really pointed questions about our respective financial situations the whole time, and so when I made this point about washing dishes, she stated, as if to herself, "So you don't have a dishwasher"--looking very perturbed.)


13 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?


It is not realism, it is not set in Atlantic Canada and it is not particularly comic. I've been calling it my "right brain" book, as opposed to Mean Boy and Saints, which are both left brain books. Strange Heaven was right brain too. For some reason, my right brain books are the books with female protagonists.


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?


Conversation is a big one. Human interaction, human moments.


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


Oh, lots. Anything I can get my hands on.


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


Learn another language.


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 don't like to think about the latter part of that question, and I can't think of anything else I'd like to be. Part of what I do to make a living is editing, and I love editing, but it feels part and parcel with my life as a writer.


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


I'm not good at anything else in particular.


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


Book: The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen. Flick: No Country for Old Men


20 - What are you currently working on?


A ghostwriting project, purely for eating and rent-paying purposes (to put it another way: I don't own a dishwasher). But I hope to be doing revisions on my new MS shortly.


12 or 20 questions archive