nineteenquestions

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…]

By Reece Cochrane

Michael V. Smith, originally from Cornwall, Ontario, is a writer, filmmaker, and performance artist now living in Kelowna, British Columbia. Smith is an MFA in Creative Writing graduate from UBC, and he currently teaches creative writing at UBC’s Okanagan campus. Smith’s short story “What We Wanted” was nominated for the McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize. His first novel, Cumberland, was nominated for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award. His book of poetry, What You Can’t Have, was published by Signature Editions in 2006, and his most recent novel, Progress (Cormorant Books, 2011), is a compelling story about a woman’s struggle to conceive her own notion of progress amidst a changing landscape and revelations about her past.

What in your childhood do you believe contributed to your wanting to become a writer?

I had a terrible childhood. I needed a lot of escapism, so I read a lot of books. And books were civilizing. People in books were moral; the heroes ultimately made good decisions, and their lives were better for it. I found books very educational in terms of other possibilities for how to live. I’ve always learned well by example—maybe that came from books. They saved my life, and so I’ve always been really interested in the arts. [Read more…]

Interviewed by Leah Mol

With nine novels under his belt, Dennis Cooper has been called “the most dangerous writer in America,” (by the Village Voice) although he’s humbly stated that the tag is nothing more than a “journalistic convenience.” Along with his work as a novelist, he’s also published poetry collections, short story collections and nonfiction, has worked as an editor and publisher, and has collaborated on projects with artists of all kinds. His most recent collaboration is his seventh work with French director Gisele Vienne, a theatre piece called “The Pyre.” It will premiere in Paris in May.

Dennis is best known for his five-book George Miles Cycle (http://www.dennis-cooper.net/georgemiles.htm), which he planned for over a decade and then spent another ten years actually writing. The cycle was heavily influenced by and written as a result of his relationship with friend and lover George Miles. It’s been thirteen years since the last book of that cycle was published, but George Miles has certainly not been forgotten. Dennis is currently working on his tenth novel, a retelling of his real-life relationship with George, which he hopes will give people an opportunity to get to know “the real George.”

While working on both his theatre collaborations and a novel, Dennis still, somehow, finds the time to update his blog, which has become an artistic project in itself. You can read it here (http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.ca). He also found the time to answer some of my questions about his work and his life as a writer.

Was there ever anything you wanted to do other than be a writer?

Right before I decided to be a writer at 15, I wanted to be an archeologist. My parents arranged for me to go assist on an archeological dig in Peru for a summer, and the work was so tedious that I changed my mind. In my later teens, there was a period where I wanted to be a visual artist and filmmaker in addition to being a writer, but I didn’t have anywhere enough talent in those other two areas.
[Read more…]