Emily Walker interviews Alexander MacLeod
Alexander MacLeod currently lives in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, which, for an ignorant American like myself, sounds like a place you’d film landscape shots for Irish Spring commercials. Someday I will visit this mystical place and I hope it lives up to the fantasy I’ve concocted in my twisted brain. After years of slogging through the rigors of academia, MacLeod released his first short story collection, Light Lifting, in September 2010. Hours after its release it was long-listed (and eventually short-listed) for Canada’s Scotiabank Giller Prize. MacLeod went from university professor at the relatively small St. Mary’s University in Halifax, to a Canadian literary sensation seemingly overnight. The reality: Light Lifting took the better part of fifteen years to create before the world was able to first crack its spine. The first time I met MacLeod was in February 2011, when he visited the University of British Columbia’s Creative Writing program and he sat in a workshop of a story I wrote. Since then, I’ve stayed in occasional contact with him, and decided to discuss his crazy ride over the last year.
EW: It’s been a bit of an interesting year for you since releasing Light Lifting. How have being nominated (or winning) awards like the Giller, the Frank O’Connor Award, and the Atlantic Book Awards over the last year impacted your writing and your life?
AM: Well, I haven’t done any real writing at all in the past year so I guess that qualifies as a serious impact. I have travelled more in the last ten months than in the previous ten years and there were times when it got a bit tiring and the schedule was hard on my family at home, but we got through it. My wife and kids and I all understand that this past year was kind of like winning the lottery, so we just held on tight for the whole strange ride. It was great to meet so many different readers from different places and the response the book received was almost overwhelming. Now, though, there are new prize-winning stories for everybody to think and talk about and I’m actually very eager to climb back under my rock and get back to work.
EW: Light Lifting has a lot of characters in these stories that are working-class- was that a conscious decision you made to primarily create those kinds of characters?
AM: No, not really. When people ask me about representations of class, I think the question says more about our standard readings expectations than it does about my particular book. I see the characters in Light Lifting as completely normal and average. Strange things may happen to them during the course of the plot, but there’s not too much that’s out of the ordinary about their lives. Class is a relative term and though in real life we all know there are far more people working in factories than in universities, you’d never guess that from reading most contemporary North American literature. I think that’s why a story about somebody who puts in interlocking brick is immediately seen as a ‘working class’ story while a story about a family in the suburbs is rarely discussed as ‘middle class’ literature. Both kinds of characters are shaped by the material conditions of their lives, just as they are both shaped by gender and race and sexuality and the rest of it, but it’s normally the bricklayer that will be interpreted as a classed subject. If you pushed me on it, I’d say that I am far more interested in the idea of ‘work’ itself – the way we all have to give our energy over to something – and I think that is a far more personal negotiation.
EW: I think “Wonder About Parents” is probably my favourite story from the collection because it showcases how love can be created and thrive in chaos. You’ve described that story as being the ‘dividing-line’ of the book, and it definitely has a different tone and feel than the rest of the stories. Why did you choose to include it considering it’s a bit different than the others?
AM: Thanks for bringing up that particular story. It’s my favourite, too, but that may be because I’ve had to fight for it a bit. I’ve found that if readers will ‘go along’ with Wonder About Parents, then there’s nothing else in the book that’s going to bother them. They may, in fact, find the rest of the stories to be kind of traditional and conservative and boring. ‘Parents’ was almost the last story I wrote for the collection so it feels the freshest for me and I really wanted it in there to show that the whole book wasn’t going to be exclusively about loneliness or about kids and the risks they take. After I read Hans Zinsser’s extraordinary (and slightly crazy) book – Rats, Lice and History – I knew there was something powerful in that image of how civilization has struggled with lice over the millennia. The way these stubborn parasites are so intimately connected to human experience and all those associations they carry with filth and poverty and shame: I thought I could do something with that mix of ingredients. I also wanted to think a bit about how love works in the real world and the challenges of dealing with a domestic lice infestation – all the deeply personal but seemingly never-ending work that demands – came close to how I see it. ‘Parents’ isn’t really a romantic story, but at some level I wanted it to touch on the fragile possibilities of mutual trust and loyalty and I thought those qualities were worth looking at.
EW: When I was in undergrad I was a double major in English Literature and Creative Writing, and by the end I felt like the English part of my degree was sort of hindering my writing because I always tried to think about it in academic contexts, rather than character and narrative arc. You teach English Literature primarily- do you think being an English academic has hindered or helped your writing over the years?
AM: That divide between the creative and critical is an ancient bit of conflict and there’s no easy resolution to it. I was teaching a class on Plato’s literary theory this week and it came up again in a text that was 2,500 years old but still hit on the exact same frustration you’re describing. Knowing that this is a timeless, give-and- take relationship that is never going to go away is actually kind of comforting to me – writers will always need readers and readers will always need writers – and in my experience, I have tried to balance both sides. Teaching and all the plain old bureaucratic work of a university do certainly take away the time and energy you could devote to writing, but I think good writers have to be good readers. Like lots of other people, I often find the purposeful obfuscation of some theoretical jargon to be very frustrating, but I also feel that concentrating on ‘difficult’ books and giving them careful attention in a university classroom is never a bad thing.
EW: There’s a bit of a fear among artists in Canada with the recent election of a Conservative majority government, because under a Conservative minority government we had some of the largest cuts to arts grants. How have grants like the Canada Council Grants helped your career over the years, and where would your writing be without them?
AM: I’ve received one Canada Council grant and another similar award from the Nova Scotia Department of Culture and both were very helpful to me because I used the money they gave me buy time and that clear block of time turned out to be far more valuable than the cash. I think governments owe it to their constituents to support the arts at the local, provincial and national levels. I’ve heard the conservative party line on this issue – we should leave everything to market forces and whatever kind of lowest common denominator culture they produce should be accepted as an accurate representation of our society – but I just don’t buy it. Practically every important advance in Canada’s intellectual life – in both the arts and the sciences – has received some key support from the government and if we want to continue to make advances, we need to continue to support that kind of work.
EW: You teach Creative Writing at St. Mary’s as well. What are you telling your students about the art of short story writing? Is it dying? Is it thriving?
AM: I tell them that it’s not dying or thriving, but it is getting along and there are definitely many, many excellent readers of short fiction out there. Yes, I understand that most book clubs, and therefore most big publishers, prefer big historical novels, but I believe that artists should be left alone to do whatever they think is best, and I would never force somebody away from the genre. Our students at Saint Mary’s work primarily in short fiction while they’re here in the workshop, but they have gone on to do lots of other things in their writing lives so I don’t see it as a test of purity or anything like that. Good writing appears in lots of different forms and the short story has strengths that we don’t find in novels or poems, just as those other genres have strengths we don’t find in short fiction. I love the way short fiction often surprises its reader – the way a good story can surge, or pivot, or drop you into a whole new world. The writers I love have complete mastery over the narrative structure of their work, and I’m often amazed at how they can take us from one starting point to completely unforeseen conclusion in just a few carefully crafted pages.
EW: What next? Any more manuscripts on the horizon or are you still reeling from the last year?
AM: I don’t have anything new yet. There are a couple of ideas I’ve been churning around for the last little while and whenever I do get back to the desk, I know exactly where I’m going to head. It’s actually been great to have that feeling of anticipation again, to be raring to go with a clear vision in your head and at least a beginning notion of how the project should be tackled. Looking forward to writing is much more fun than writing itself and even though I know the long grind is coming, I still can’t wait to get at it.
Emily Walker’s essay “Breadcrumbs and Bird Legs” appears in Issue 10 of the Los Angeles Review.