In 1996, writer Andrew Pyper’s debut Kiss Me, a remarkably prescient, poignant and clever collection of short stories written during his U of T law lectures was published by dissident Canadian editor and critic John Metcalf through his cutting-edge Porcupine’s Quill imprint. Not bad for not paying attention in class.

Pyper followed Kiss Me with his much-anticipated first novel Lost Girls, the story of junior criminal attorney Bartholomew Christian Crane’s first homicide trial. Pushed by the partners of his (dis)reputable law firm to defend a smalltown Ontario English teacher suspected of killing two of his students, he’s saddled with a case that should be easy enough to win, thanks to entirely circumstantial evidence and a thermos filled with enough cocaine to last Barth until Christmas. But the bravado he derives from each snort is menaced by a century-old urban legend that threatens his suppressed past and his case. Lost Girls won the Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel in Canada, and received international acclaim, being named a Notable Book Selection in the New York Times Book Review and the London Evening Standard in 2000. Universal Pictures snapped up the film rights, with a screenplay currently in development.

Pyper’s latest novel, The Trade Mission, was published last September. The story is set in Brazil, host nation of the Southern Hemispheric E-Business Conference where two Canadian Internet prodigies, Wallace and Bates, have come with their team to sell their “vaporware” venture, Hypotheses, a subscriber-based website that has a virtual compendium of contemporary ethics to answer people’s hypothetical questions, without ensuring moral correctness but universal relativity.

Currently Pyper is at work on his third novel, The Wildfire Season, and is acting as Writer-In-Residence at the Kitchener Public Library. He has previously served as Writer-In-Residence at Berton House, Dawson City, Yukon, and at Champlain College at Trent University.

The Varsity had the opportunity to chat with the U of T alumnus about his writing before his reading last week at TREATS V (Toronto Readings By English Alumni, Teachers & Students) at University College.

Dora Emerson: What’s the typical progress of an idea finding a place in your short stories and novels?

Andrew Pyper: I have come to think of stories and novels not only being distinct in terms of form, but also by their origins. For me, short stories are more improvised, thought-bolts, instinctual, whereas novels are necessarily deliberate and the products of some planned architecture. This is not, by the way, an expression of hierarchy or even personal preference. It’s just the way I come at them. So the translation of “idea”: image, argument, character, mood into a story is spontaneous. It’s why a lot of my short stories, when I think of them, started out as sentences somewhere in the middle. Just thoughts, from which whole narratives feel their way out.

My novels, are the other hand, tend to be syntheses of several ideas, stitched together over time. So far, each novel has undergone at least a full year or two or four of this idea-assembly before the writing even begins.

DE: Do your techniques tend to come before your subjects?

AP: Neither subject nor technique comes before story. But what is “story”? Everything, I guess. It’s that thing that, when you come to talk about it in post-grad courses, ends up sounding like bogus formula. Better to leave it the mysterious-and mysteriously compelling-thing that it is.

DE: Do you aim at certain goals, or do they occur inherently in your writing?

AP: I suppose I aim for very general goals in undertaking a novel. They could only be expressed in the most simple terms. For example, in writing Lost Girls, I thought it would be cool to write a Victorian ghost story set in the present day. There are many other elements to that book, but at the back of my mind, that was probably the finish line I wanted to cross.

DE: Out of all your writing activities and creative ideas, how do you decide which ones to pursue and develop?

AP: A novel takes so much time and commitment and obsessive mental energy that I really believe you have to love a story before you undertake it. As a result, I have several “ideas for a novel” that strike me as great… for a day. Then they’re gone. They’re one- night stands. I think the ideas that I end up writing about are the ones that, for whatever reason, can be nurtured as obsessions for four years straight. At least.

DE: Your novels have elements of mystery and suspense, like a psychological thriller. Do you think in terms of genre when you write?

AP: I don’t think of genre when I write. In fact, I don’t really think of genre when I’m reading, for that matter. There is too much conservative, categorical thinking about genre going on at the moment in this country for me to add to the problem by giving it too much credence. Having said this, I am aware that there are bits and pieces of what is generally associated with genre writing in my novels-suspense, plot, a mystery, maybe even a ghost or gotcha! or two. But they are borrowings, subversions at most, I think, and nothing close to an adherence to formula.

Lost Girls might seem like a murder mystery at first, but it refuses to comply to the expectations of that form as it goes along. In other words, I use whatever I can get my hands on to achieve certain effects, but not at the expense of submitting to any strict form.

DE: In Lost Girls and The Trade Mission you have focused on pairs of youth, specifically youths of promise. Why does youth seem to be one of your central subjects?

AP: I am 35 years old. An age to be described, most charitably, as “youngish”. Still young as far as novelists go, anyway. For the past fifteen years of my life that I have been writing seriously, youth has not only been a favoured topic and perspective, but I was young. And you’re right-for me, there is nothing more moving and haunting or tragic than youthful promise that has been taken. It’s why the lost girls of Lost Girls are true ghosts, and why Wallace and Bates in The Trade Mission act not as “heroes” (in the Bruce Willis sense), but as the fucked-up, unpredictable, self-dramatizing creatures we know 24-year-olds to be.

DE: What is the most important thing in your opinion that readers get from your novels?

AP: My primary wish is that anyone who reads my work-including those who read it without liking it-react to it; feel something, anything. Sad, frightened, pissed off… More than anything, I wish for emotional response.

The next TREATS reading features author Paul Quarrington on Nov. 19 at University College (UC 179) at 4:10 p.m.