Photo Credit: Kris Krug

Interviewed by Kris Kosaka

Bestselling author Ruth Ozeki celebrates the Zen idea of the “positionless position,” the “not one not two” ambiguity of life with her being and her work. Her third novel, A Tale for the Time Being, was short-listed for the 2013 Man Booker Prize in Literature. Her earlier novels, My Year of Meats and All Over Creation were also critically acclaimed and have been translated into 11 languages and published in 14 countries.

Ozeki is half Japanese and half American in ethnicity, holds American and Canadian citizenship and divides her time between New York city and Desolation Sound along the Sunshine Coast in British Columbia. Ozeki started her artistic career as a filmmaker, and her documentaries and dramatic independent films have been shown on PBS, at the Sundance Film Festival, and in colleges and universities across the States.

In addition to being a filmmaker and novelist, Ozeki is also a Buddhist priest. Not one thing, not another, Ozeki is a true master. A fan of all her works, it was an honor to connect with Ms. Ozeki recently by phone from my base in Japan.

Describe an ideal morning in Desolation Sound.

Wake up early-ish, maybe six or seven, and it is raining outside.  It is clear that it is going to rain all day. Go down to my office, which is in a different building, and make a pot of tea.  Go to the zen-dō and sit.

Maybe read a little bit, and then go up to my office to spend the day writing.

*The is a spiritual hall or place where zazen, sitting meditation, is practiced. Ozeki has a small zen-dō on her property in Desolation Sound.

[Read more…]

By Zoë Gulliver

Alec Nevala-Lee is a novelist and freelance writer whose first book, The Icon Thief, is a thriller set in the New York art world. It’s the first in a trilogy published by Penguin. A second installment, City of Exiles, came out last year, with a third, Eternal Empire, to appear September 2013. In addition to writing short fiction, his essays and nonfiction have been featured in the Los Angeles Times, Salon, The Rumpus, and The Daily Beast. He lives in Oak Park, Illinois with his wife and baby daughter and somehow finds time to blog eloquently at http://nevalalee.wordpress.com/ and give smart replies to interview questions by email.

You say on your website that you wrote your first novel at the age of thirteen, but that “thankfully, only one copy survives.” How many copies were there? What is the general premise, and does it relate to or foreshadow some of your work now?

The only remaining copy consists of two hundred faded double-spaced pages from an ancient dot-matrix printer, and although there’s probably a version of it somewhere on floppy disk, it’s in a format that’s no longer readable—which is true of almost everything I wrote before high school. I haven’t looked at it in almost two decades, but it was heavily influenced by Dune and the work of Orson Scott Card, and involved intelligent fish and a religious matriarchy on a planet covered entirely by water. I still love science fiction, but these days, I tend to focus on contemporary settings, and leave the world-building to the experts. [Read more…]

By Nathan Smith

Annabel Lyon is a Canadian novelist and short story writer, born in Brampton, Ontario, but raised in Coquitlam, British Columbia. Her short story collection, Oxygen, was published in 2000. Since then, she has published a second short collection, two young adult novels, and two historical novels.

The Golden Mean, published by Random House in 2009, was the only novel that year to be nominated for the three major Canadian fiction prizes: the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Governor General’s award for English Language Fiction, and the Scotiabank Giller Prize–the first of which it won. Her most recent novel, a sequel to The Golden Mean, is The Sweet Girl.

Annabel currently teaches in the Creative Writing department at UBC.

What did you do before you were a writer?

My very first ambition as a child was to become a musician. I studied piano intensively and taught it for years, but to make another sports analogy, I was like someone who was 5’5″ and wanted to be in the NBA. It just wasn’t going to happen. I studied philosophy in my undergraduate program with English and French literature minors. I also did a year in the Law program. I initially didn’t think I would be able to sustain myself as a professional writer, so I thought I’d better have a backup. It seemed like the logical next step. After a year I was miserable and I dropped out.

Eventually it just came down to finding the confidence to say, “Okay, I’m going to throw myself into fiction writing wholeheartedly and work as hard at it as with any other profession.” The next day, I woke up at six in the morning and decided to start writing a novel. [Read more…]

By Kat Haxby

Hailed by the Globe and Mail as “a masterwork of revelation,” Nancy Lee’s collection of short stories, Dead Girls, (McClelland & Stewart, 2002) was named a Best Book of 2002 by the Globe, Toronto Star and Vancouver Sun, and NOW Magazine. Winner of the 2003 VanCity Book Prize and finalist for the Ethel Wilson Prize, the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, the Pearson Reader’s Choice Award and the Wordsworthy Award, Dead Girls has been published in the UK, Germany, Italy, France, Holland and Spain, and has been optioned for film.

Nancy Lee is the recipient of numerous fellowships, residencies and awards, including a Gabriel Award for Radio and a National Magazine Award. An Adjunct Professor in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, she also teaches at the Simon Fraser University Writing & Publishing Program and the UBC Writing Centre. Nancy has served on numerous prize juries and panels, and was selected as the first Canadian Writer-in-Residence at the prestigious University of East Anglia Writing Program in the UK. She most recently served as Writer-in-Residence for the city of Vincennes, France from September to December 2011. Her novel, The Age, will be published by McClelland & Stewart in 2014.

I interviewed Nancy Lee in her office on UBC campus. She was hilarious, inspiring and entirely gracious. She also didn’t make fun of how ridiculous I looked fumbling with the iphone app I used to record the conversation, or how many bad jokes I made.

Is there a story to how you became a writer? Was it a flash of inspiration or more of a slow realization?

Well, there is actually a story, and it’s a very strange story. I was twenty-five and working as a publicist. I had my own cottage public relations company and I was working as a publicist for a bunch of live theatre things in Vancouver. I had a business partner and while my business partner and I were in LA taking a series of meetings with a potential client, we went to see a psychic in Santa Monica. It was one of those trashy LA shacks with a neon storefront, a TV on and some kids screaming in the back. We went just as a joke, just to get our palms read. My business partner got the usual, “You’re going to meet a man, have adventures,” your stereotypical palm reader stuff. So when the palm reader looked at my palm, She said, “Oh. You’re not doing the right thing with your life, and until you do the right thing you’re not going to be happy.” And that was about all she said. After when my business partner and I went out for coffee, I said it was a bunch of horseshit and she said it was actually an interesting question, “What would you be doing if you weren’t doing this?” [Read more…]