Dr. Vincent Lam burst into bookstores across Canada in 2006 with his debut collection of short stories, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures. The series of connected tales about the trials and triumphs of medical students and doctors won the Giller Prize, Canada’s richest and most prestigious literary award. Lam, an emergency physician in Toronto, is now working on a novel. He spoke with The Varsity about his work and the challenge of multiple careers.
The Varsity: You’ve probably heard this question many times before, but how do you manage to be a doctor and a writer at the same time?
Vincent Lam: You know, it’s really quite busy. But emergency medicine is quite self-contained. […] You don’t take a lot of paperwork home with you, whereas in other specialties you do end up taking more home with you. The other thing that helps is that it’s shiftwork, so you often have shifts that start in the afternoon or evening, which means that you can write during the day.
TV: Do you find that being a doctor drains you emotionally or mentally in terms of writing?
VL: Well, there are different kinds of demands. I find that both medicine and writing are quite draining, actually. Medicine is much more external; medicine is all about taking care of other people’s problems and me using my professional skills to help people. Writing is very internal, and it has a lot to do with figuring out how I see the world, and me figuring out what I think about things, ultimately. And that’s draining in a different way. A lot of people ask me whether writing is a good break from medicine, and I wish it were, but actually it’s not, it’s actually a lot of work.
TV: I find it interesting that you say medicine is external and writing is internal. You’ve clearly successfully made the transfer from the external medical world into your writing in Bloodletting. How important is it for you to write about what you know, to take your environment and put it into your writing?
VL: It’s probably simpler in some ways to write about the environment that you know because you have access to all the details, and you understand how things work. Do I think that people should always write what they know? I’m not so sure. I think that it can be helpful, but depending on the kind of writer, and depending on the kind of book they want to write, it could be a help or a hindrance. It’s actually very important to distinguish between the world that one knows, and that being actually different from the fictional world. Most writers who write about the world that they know will tell you that as a writer you have to make a break. You have to be able to say, “You know what, even if such-and-such would be in the world that I know, that’s not what I’m doing in my fiction because it just doesn’t work as well in the fiction.”
TV: You’ve traveled Vietnam doing research for your upcoming novel Cholon, Near Forgotten. Why did you go, and was it difficult to find what you were looking for?
VL: Well, my own family background is the Chinese community of Vietnam, and so I’m very interested in that community. In a sense it’s very hard to find, because the era that I’m writing about, the community that I’m writing about, basically no longer exists. And this is not an uncommon problem for fiction writers, especially those who write historical fiction. You have to kind of deal with the shadows of the past.
TV: Who are some of your literary influences? Which authors influenced you at a young age when you decided to be a writer?
VL: Tough question, too many to list. I try to give a different answer every time. And so my influences today will be David Malouf and Michael Ondaatje. I probably decided I was going to be a writer when I read Hemingway. I was always amazed at how much I would know in something that he wrote without him having said it, which always seemed all the more vivid. I have to say I enjoy reading a lot of people whose styles are basically totally different than the voice I would ever use. And in some ways it’s probably because their voices are so different.
TV: You went to the creative writing summer program at U of T’s School of Continuing Studies. Did that kick-start your career, or did it simply polish your writing?
VL: I was early in working on this collection at the time. And it was encouraging just to meet other writers. Writing is quite lonely, so it was very encouraging just to know, “Okay, other people are out here doing this, and we’re all kind of struggling away, and that’s what one does.” I think most of the work, me as a writer, remains work alone. It’s just nice to know that there were other people out there who were doing the same thing, that I wasn’t just crazy.
TV: How has winning the Giller Prize changed your life and work, if at all?
VL: I’ve become far more busy doing readings, traveling, and speaking. And so the whole thing about writing being alone, there’s a certain border that gets blurred. Ultimately the writing is still alone, but I spend more time communicating about the books in a way that is public, in a way that is not alone.
TV: Has this infraction on your aloneness been a negative influence?
VL: I think there’s some, that as a writer I have to be careful to manage. At first I was very busy and saying “yes” to everything, and then I began to realize that meant there was less alone mental space, while also balancing a medical career and family life.
TV: Do you have any advice for students who want to be writers, or who are trying to decide between writing and a professional career?
VL: I would say that it’s not totally necessary to decide between them. Even before I went into medical school, what I said was I wanted to write and I wanted to do medicine, and a lot of people were skeptical. I don’t think that it’s necessary to feel that one has to be in place of the other. And I don’t think that I’m alone, you know. There are quite a number of doctor-writers, lawyerwriters, engineer-writers who are out there. If you scratch the surface you’ll find a lot of other things going on.
The tricky thing once you have a profession is that you do have the potential to earn a fair bit of money, in some professions, and so it can be very tempting to not do your art, and to make money. Actually, people who do have a profession should look on that as an opportunity to work less, earn a little bit less, and have time to consider art.
