Interviewed by Christopher Evans
Author photograph: Ayelet Tsabari

Elisabeth de Mariaffi’s debut story collection, How to Get Along with Women (http://invisiblepublishing.com/?p=30 ), was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and shortlisted for the ReLit Award in 2013. Her work has won the Lawrence Jackson Writers’ Award , appearing in the New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, This Magazine, Prairie Fire and more, and she was one of the masterminds behind the unique Toronto Poetry Vendors project (http://torontopoetryvendors.wordpress.com/). A graduate of Guelph University’s Creative Writing MFA program, de Mariaffi has recently moved from her hometown of Toronto to St. John’s, where she lives with her husband, the writer George Murray (http://georgemurray.wordpress.com/), their combined bevy of children, and one noisy dog. De Mariaffi’s first novel, The Devil You Know (http://www.harpercollins.ca/books/Devil-You-Know-Elisabeth-De-Mariaffi/?isbn=9781443434744), is a literary thriller set in 90s Toronto and will be available in January 2015.

I was fortunate enough to meet Elisabeth when she visited UBC earlier this year and read How to Get Along with Women shortly thereafter. It’s an incredible collection—sharp, intimate, and wry. I reached her through email at her home in St John’s.

Let’s start with something easy: what is your current day job? Besides financial stability, how have your day jobs affected your written work?

Right now I’m the marketing coordinator at Breakwater Books, an indie publishing house here in St. John’s. I’ve been at it since 2012, and for the first two years it was a full-time gig—now we’ve split it into a job-share, where I handle mainly publicity (rather than sales) and only work two and a half days a week. The thing about day jobs, at least for me, is that they are really mainly about financial stability and if I stop and think about it too much, the effect on my writing feels mostly like, “I get to write less,” and that’s a bit depressing and counter-productive.

Having said that, there are real pros to day jobs, beyond finances. I once spent a year working as flight crew. I was a purser on Porter Air, which means I’m the flight attendant who stands up front and tells you what to do and is basically in charge of the cabin. Ninety-five percent of the training for that job is emergency evacuation scenarios and drills, which is stellar if you have a loopy imagination. You travel all the time, you’re constantly out of your element, which I think is good for the interior life of the writer. And mid-flight, you’ve got a ton of time to stare out the window at the clouds—also good. But did I use all that time in strange hotel rooms to write? I did not. I was very tired from flying and I just wanted to go have a beer.

Working in book marketing, you get to have relationships with festival directors and booksellers and reading series coordinators, and then they know your name, which is handy. And I do think that working a full-time job, you learn to value your writing time and, moreover, your ambition. I’ve become very efficient at both my day job and my writing over the years, in order to live up to my own expectations. [Read more…]

Interviewed by Kyla Jamieson

Billie Livingston is the author of seven books, including her recent novella The Trouble With Marlene, which has been adapted for the screen and will be released this year (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2814080/). Billie’s first book, the novel Going Down Swinging, was published by Random House in 2000. Her debut short story collection, Greedy Little Eyes, won both the CBC Bookie Award and the Danuta Gleed Literary Award; the Globe and Mail called it “dark, funny, graceful, witty.” One Good Hustle, Billie’s most recent novel, was long-listed for the Giller Prize, and her essay “Hitler Sea Skank” (http://eighteenbridges.com/story/sea-hitler-skank) earned her a nomination for a National Magazine Award. Her recent stories have appeared in both print and online editions of Hazlitt (http://www.randomhouse.ca/search/node/billie%20livingston).

Billie and I met for coffee and continued our conversation over e-mail. Up for discussion were Evil Application Forms, mental furniture, and the job of the writer.

You’ve said you once thought of writers as “those people,” referring to the Oxford and Harvard-educated, and I’m wondering when your perspective shifted: When did being a professional writer start to seem possible?

In hindsight, my feelings were a sort of familial hangover. My mother was of the opinion that only people from the other side of the tracks wrote books, people with PhDs. My perspective shifted when I started reading and submitting to literary journals. I couldn’t get published to save my soul in Canada. What I was writing didn’t seem to be in vogue in this country, so my first publications were in England, Ireland, Australia and the U.S. The journals were often independent—i.e. they didn’t come out of academic institutions—and they published fiction and poetry with an urban feel, which was more in line with what I was doing. Having said all that, Banff was the significant turning point in terms of seeing myself as someone who could be a professional writer. [Read more…]

Interview by Rachel Jansen

Joseph Boyden is a Canadian novelist whose books on First Nations people have been internationally acclaimed. His first novel, Three Day Road, won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Award. Through Black Spruce, published in 2008, received the ScotiaBank Giller Prize. Most recently, Boyden published The Orenda; a thrilling epic that weaves together the lives of a Jesuit missionary, a captured Iroquois girl, and her captor, a great Huron Chief, in an unforgettable story of our past. On March 4th, The Orenda was announced the winner of CBC’s 2014 Canada Reads competition.

Boyden was born in Willowdale, Ontario. He completed his BFA in creative writing at York University, and then went on to earn his masters at the University of New Orleans. He currently splits his time between Louisiana and Northern Ontario, and teaches in the Optional Residency Creative Writing MFA Program at the University of British Columbia.

With his long list of credentials, and my deep admiration of his work, my hand shook as I dialed his number to conduct our interview over the phone. I soon found my anxiety dissipating; Boyden is humble, soft-spoken and quick-to-laugh.

What was your first publication?

I published a collection of poems in my undergrad. At the time there was something called Proem and they took a liking to a lot of the poetry that I was writing, the first time I tried to send out my work.
[Read more…]

Interviewed by Jeffrey Ricker

Rob Byrnes has been making me laugh since I met him in 2009 at a writing conference in New Orleans. He also deserves credit for prodding me to submit an essay to an anthology that became my first published piece of creative writing. The author of six novels, he won a Lambda Literary Award for When the Stars Come Out (2006) and was a Lambda finalist in 2009 for his novel Straight Lies. His most recent novel, Strange Bedfellows, was published in 2012 by Bold Strokes Books. Originally from Rochester, New York, Byrnes is a graduate of Union College and lives in New Jersey with his partner.

Your first novel, The Night We Met, came out in 2002. What inspired you to become a writer, and what was the process that led to the novel’s publication?

I was encouraged to read a lot as a child, which no doubt was an influence, but I think the desire to write is innate – like the desire to create music, or even become an accountant. That said, I was in my early thirties before I tried to tie the desire to actual work. I failed at first, of course, but I kept writing, and sought out peer support through the CompuServe writing forums. (Remember – this was the early ’90s!)

The men and women I met online became mentors and taskmasters, and the forum served as a workshop for the novel that eventually became The Night We Met. And let me add that when you’re getting personal feedback from people like the writers Diana Gabaldon and John L. Myers – not to mention the artist who eventually became the noted novelist Rabih Alameddine – you’d be a fool not to take their advice.

That’s not to say that publication of The Night We Met was a slam-dunk after that. It took a few more years, a lot of rejection, and perhaps a bit of luck before the book was published in 2002. Still, my willingness to put my words out there and listen to some (occasionally raw) feedback was the most significant step I took on the path to becoming “A Writer.” [Read more…]