Michael Redhill: I should warn you, in interviews I usually just answer “yes” or “no.”

Naomi Skwarna: That’s fine. I’ll fill in the blanks.

M: You can make it up as you go along.

N: All right, Michael, I have several interrelated questions.

M: I’ll be the judge of that.

N: You’re the 2010 Writer-in-Residence here at the University of Toronto. What does that mean for you?

M: I was a student here, so it’s cool to come back and serve the community that I was once a part of. As time goes on, I get to assume some of the roles that I once benefited from. The position also gives me time to write and not be too harassed by the problem of making a living for the next few months. That’s partly why the position exists. U of T wants to give writers the opportunity to have a space that’s quiet to work in as well as to interact with the student body.

N: And you’re teaching a seminar in creative writing.

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M: Yes, but I’m also open to the university community at large. I used the writer-in-residence when I was a student here.

N: Who was that?

M: Patrick Lane, a very important Canadian poet who lives on the west coast. He read the manuscript of mine that went on to become my second collection of poetry (Lake Nora Arms).

N: You’ve published poetry, short stories, novels, several plays, as well as a literary journal (Brick). Do you consider yourself one type of writer over another?

M: These days, I think of myself as a novelist. I haven’t written a lot of poetry in close to 10 years, partly because the pace of life has increased. The way I wrote poetry always took a certain amount of solitude, time to contemplate. I don’t really have that now. I’m also a much happier person than I once was (he laughs).

N: Do you need to be sad or unhappy to…?

M: Well, no. But I think that poetry often enacts a battle between the self and the world. It’s a way to unravel certain kinds of mysteries. I’m not saying that I’ve unraveled them. I just think I’m more at peace with them. I find the kinds of things I want to work out now are best worked out in fiction and theatre.

N: Like what?

M: I know that one of my main obsessions [in writing] is the problem of attachment. Not in the Buddhist sense, but in that life has no value unless you’re connected to other people, but all the worst things that happen to you in your life come through connections and through that attachment to others. I think that in my own work, I’m constantly chewing on that particular issue. The greater your ability to love, the more loss you’ll suffer. Unless you’re lucky enough to go first.

N: How do you work with students, knowing the instincts that motivate are as personal as that?

M: My goal with students [in the workshop] is to get them to react to each other’s work in terms of what they think the writer’s intent was. A recent story in my seminar had a lot of lacuna* in it, but I believed that the story might have been further developed if the writer had followed through more on her intention, which was to raise our heart rate, not through absence, but through actual threat and menace.

N: Is there a correlation between developing good critical skills and becoming a better writer?

M: Absolutely. I don’t mean theory—some people think it’s just about that—but there are a couple of caveats: most of what I offer up is subjective, and I know it’s subjective. I want to instill a sense of how important it is to have a sort of sanguine approach to your own writing at certain stages. Be passionate, but when you can, be as objective as possible. Try to determine whether it’s obeying its own set of rules.

N: How does one develop that objectivity?

M: Sometimes, it’s just a question of time. It’s not easy to be objective about something that you’ve just finished and the paint is still wet. While I’m writing a book, I’m always going back over sections and discovering things as I go on. But when it’s all done, I put it away for a while and try to come back to it with as cold an eye as possible. The book that I’m working on now, I probably won’t even have a draft to read until the fall.

N: How long have you been working on it?

M: Coming up on three years, which is actually a short period of time for me. Martin Sloane took me 10 years, Consolation took six, and by the time I finish this one, it’ll be four. So I’m getting a little faster.

N: Do you have a title for it?

M: It’s called The Sugar Cloud. I think the experience of reading a first draft is one of great despair, usually, because you have memories of all the good passages you thought you wrote, and they’re still good passages, but they just don’t all fit together the way you hoped they would.

N: Within the process of making a book, when is it that you decide to write a play?

M: I don’t decide so much as I respond to the opportunities. I have one particular relationship, with Ross Manson of Volcano Theatre Company, with whom I did both Building Jerusalem and Goodness. We meet every few months to have a coffee and see how the other is doing, and in both of those cases, we had a conversation that led to sitting in a room with actors, which led to a draft of something. I think that theatre often happens behind my own back.

N: But it’s a bit less solitary then writing the novels.

M: That’s what I love: that I get to be with other human beings. Keeps me sane. The fact that I’ve been attracted to and have worked in so many different forms has been a really lucky thing for me, because I find myself drawing on things that I’ve learned from working in theatre and poetry and novels. Taking stuff out of all those drawers, mixing stuff up—that’s really great. The theatre’s been important for that. Actors keep you honest.

N: Oh hey, I’ve a question based on my own personal curiosity!

M: Hmm, okay. Five-foot-eight-and-a-half.

N: And now that I know that, what do you make of the relationship between the life experience of a writer and his or her writing work?

M: Mmmmmm.

N: I can be more specific.

M: Okay.

N: Someone I know, a writer, recently described himself as occasionally feeling sort of “vampiric” in the way he interacts with people.

M: I think on some level, most writers are vampires—sharpening your fangs is really important—

N: !

M: —not so you can do harm, but so you can drink deeply. Experience also comprises imagination. The way that you fantasize about the world is part of your experience, and you draw on that, too, when you’re writing. I think part of your question also has to do with how much real world / real people is acceptable in your writing.

N: Yes. It can be difficult to gauge.

M: There’s a famous story of Henry James receiving a novel from a woman he knew quite well, and he could see her entire cohort and life in the novel. He said to her, “Madam, your novel has not undergone the processes of art.” In the work of the greatest writers, you always see personal obsessions and experience; especially you see the mechanism that allows people to cope with their own suffering. But the best of it has undergone the processes of art. The raw material has been milled into something that can stand on its own and speak to a lot of different people.

N: The art is in the invention that comes up under the obsession?

M: I think that’s a good way of putting it.

N: Do you think it’s important for a writer to seek out experiences or relationships—

M: That will feed their fiction? I don’t think that’s a very authentic way to live. If you think “I’m going to go out with a bunch of really crazy people because I think they’ll be good for my fiction,” that’s not necessarily the way to live.

N: Maybe it’s better to be motivated by personal curiosity rather than “How can I mine this for my next MASTERWORK.”

M: You will end up mining it, and if this becomes your life, the people around you will adapt to that. If you’re a writer with a good soul, people don’t feel unsafe around you.

N: What do you mean by a writer with a bad soul?

M: I think there have been writers who really exposed people, who made thinly veiled portraits of others as a form of revenge, or a way of winning. There are some great books out there that are sort of like that. I mean, I wouldn’t want to be Kafka’s father. He wrote out of love, but a very dark kind of love. One’s responsibility is always to the page, the choice to publish is a different thing. And, you know, the instinct to leave things out [lacuna!] is a great one, but you can leave too much out. Something possessing that balance is what I find delicious to read.

N: Speaking of delicious things to read, who or what has been important in your life?

M: It changes all the time, but I have touchstones. Denis Johnson because he’s so strange; an American novelist named Norman Rush, whose novels are absolutely astonishing. I love Alice Munro, Richard Ford, Jim Harrison. Philip Roth used to be a big one for me, not so much anymore. Chekhov and Flaubert, Stendahl.

N: You check back in on those writers from time to time?

M: With someone like Munro, she’s really great at giving you characters and situations where you can feel the weight of the past and present. I think that’s what good writing does: provide things that aren’t in the scene but that the reader intuits. There’s a great moment in The Sportswriter by Richard Ford where his estranged wife has dropped off his kid to him and he’s going to take the kid on a road trip to see a bunch of baseball stadiums. It’s clear that the father and son don’t know each other very well, and the son is eight or nine years old, sort of uncomfortable, and the father asks him, “Who are your best friends now?” It’s a great moment, because you see how little he knows his own child, how much he wants to know the world that his kid lives in. You’d expect him to say, “How are you doing in school? How’s your mother, does she have a boyfriend?” you know, questions that would serve him on some level. It’s a wonderful moment of intimacy because he doesn’t say, “I miss you, I don’t know who you are anymore,” he doesn’t say “I’m a bad father.” I’ve always remembered that tiny moment. We do this all the time in our lives to protect ourselves.

N: It’s so exciting to find that in fiction, but it’s intensely challenging to write.

M: When you’re trying to seek authenticity, it takes a lot of energy.

N: Observing yourself as a student, speaking to Patrick Lane and then seeing where you are now, do you feel like there’s been a constant process of training?

M: As your self-knowledge increases as a writer, you recognize what kinds of things you need to look at. What books you need to turn to, what thoughts you need to work on. None of us die fully formed, if you know what I mean.

N: I have one more question.

M: Mmkay.

N: As the Writer-in-Residence, do you have some piece of advice for young writers? Something you think is really important?

M: I would encourage anybody who wants to take it seriously to read widely and to engage in literature in a meaningful and personal way. Studying books in university is great, but reading organically and querying how something was done is equally important. The other thing I would say is to be merciless with yourself. Work really hard, try to develop an honest editorial frame of mind when you look at your own work. And don’t be in a hurry. That’s all. Patience, attention, and patience.

(He chuckles)

*Lacuna: “A hiatus, blank, missing portion” (OED)

For more details on the Writer-in-Residence, contact the Department of English, Sixth Floor, Jackman Humanities Building. Take the elevator.