TDR: Have your work habits changed much over the
years? What exactly is your routine? Do you have regular daily writing hours? And are you a
planner, someone who puts together detailed outlines and then follows
them till the work is finished, or is your verse and fiction-writing
more spontaneous?
MCGRATH: Basically I try to write when I'm
feeling lucky. There are moments of neuron fireworks and synaptic leaps,
clear thinking and complex associative patterns. I try to write when my
head's working this way. I'll drop whatever else I'm doing if I can (though right instincts prevailed and I
never dropped the baby on the floor over an idea). These moments,
sometimes hours, are when I get first drafts and make notes on them.
Revision happens slowly, over time and with a cooler head. Often before
I write anything down, I develop it in my head. I work on the
composition of both poems and fiction scenarios this way. I go tramping
around St. John's, especially the trails around Signal Hill, and the whole time I'm making
stuff up. So my work begins spontaneously, in the moment, and gets
revised by my editor alter-ego. I never use outlines or plots. Instead I
ask what next? what now?
As for work habits, all of my self-directed work has to fit with raising
a child and making money to live on. Hence, educational texts,
government propaganda, freelance editing, articles, reviews, scripts
etc. Sometimes I teach a writing course or workshop. So I do what I can
when I can and hope it all comes together and that I don't go nuts in the meantime. I do
work long hours, like most self-employed people.
TDR: To what extent is your work collaborative before you send it to
a publisher? Do you belong to a writer's group or collective? In St.
John's, is there a group of writers with whom you share early drafts of
your work?
MCGRATH: Years ago, starting out, I was lucky enough to belong to a
group called the Thursday Collective, which had some fine writers like
Ann Hart, Paul Bowdring, Roberta Buchanan, Gordon Rodgers and Percy
Janes. They are all good critics too. Percy Janes was one of my literary
idols because of his courage and willingness to break taboos about what
can and cannot be said. It was an honour to be there. They encouraged me
to submit my work to literary magazines. I did, and work got published.
I was 24 and overjoyed. I owe that group a lot.
The hot group here now is the Burning Rock, but I'm not a member. I did
edit their second anthology, Hearts Larry Broke. I belonged for a
while to a poetry group with Mary Dalton, Susan Ingersoll and Barbara
Nickel. We ate and drank really well.
I don't think I could find the time now to be in a group. I'm working on
three manuscripts, plus freelance. I do try new work out on audiences at
readings. And I make sure that there's a skilled and hands-on editor
involved in each book.
TDR: To what extent do you see your fiction as different from that of
the Newfoundland tradition, writers like Percy Jane, Gordon Pinsent, Kevin
Major, and Wayne Johnson?
MCGRATH: Percy was one of my heroes. When I read him as a
teenager, I thought, what nerve he has to write like that. And he was
from here, which made writing from here seem possible. I share certain
affinities with all of these writers, perhaps chiefly a strong sense of
place and how it shapes us, and also a belief in the power of narrative.
But my work is different from theirs. My work is shaped by female
consciousness and experience.
TDR: In 1993, American writer E. Annie Proulx won the Pulitzer Prize
with The Shipping News, which is set in outport Newfoundland. Do
you think she comes close to describing honestly the world of outport
life, or do you find her work marred by romanticizing, sentimentalizing,
or even patronizing tones? And does she get the accent right?
MCGRATH: Newfoundlanders have a love/hate relationship with this
book. Proulx got some things very right, such as the ways in which
people here strategize to make a living and to turn bad things into
good. But she got syntax and the rhythms of speech wrong.
Anyone doing criticism or comparisons have stellar examples of how to
get it right in three books by Newfoundlanders--Patrick Kavanagh's Gaff
Topsails and Bernice Morgan's Random Passage and Waiting
for Time. In capturing something large and essential about the Newfoundland
experience, these are definitive.
TDR: In Walking to Shenak, your heroine
Sheila notes in her diary how she is "sick of my separateness, the
old thing, the unwanted childhood aptitude." Since your writing, in all of your work, imparts a
strong feeling of honesty and lived-experience, I wonder if this
"unwanted childhood aptitude" is yours? And if yes, to what
extent does it work positively as a muse,inspiring you to write from a
point both inside and outside of the lives and situations you have been
a part of?
MCGRATH: Yes, Sheila's "unwanted childhood aptitude" is
something I know personally. As a child, Sheila could leave her body and
watch people, even herself. It's the observer's gift and curse, and
people who have it are, I think, likely to become writers or artists of
some kind, if they find the thing they are supposed to do. In Sheila's case, she has the observer's sense
of separateness, but is not yet mature enough to have found out what she
can do with it. Life is still happening to her. I wanted a character here
who could explore physical and psychic isolation from a very personal point
of view.
In my case, separateness does act as a kind of muse, allowing me
to leave my own skin and imagine other possible lives and states of being.
It can inject objectivity into the personal, and subjectivity into what is
seemingly objective and other and remote. It allows for self-mockery
too. And it can keep one from going mad from the ridiculous limitation of
having only one life.
TDR: In your 1999 short-fiction collection, Stranger Things Have
Happened, there is a powerful story called "A Notice of
Passage," about a woman's childhood friend, Darry Doyle, who dies
of AIDS in his early adulthood. The story is remarkable, in part, for
the "magic realism" involved in child-Darry's fending off of
older and much larger boys in a forest fight. This magical element - a
young boy suddenly imbued with superhuman strength - seems like a
departure from the nuanced realism of the Labrador stories in Walking to
Shenak and most of the other stories in Stranger Things, set in outport
Newfoundland and St. John's. Is this magical vein one you plan on
returning to, or have already returned to in new stories?
MCGRATH: I read that story recently at a reading at Mount Allison
University, and people commented on the magic elements--they seemed
pleased that magic was thrown into otherwise quotidian events. I think
that life is often strange and beautiful and inexplicable, and we are
more open to the possibility of everyday magic when we are children. The
appearance of superpowers, ghosts and possible angels in that book came
because I was finally letting in some influences from my own
childhood--tall tales, the supernatural and religion as supernatural
territory.
I read magic realism extensively in my twenties and thirties
and found myself looking at its presence in my own experience and asking
why not here? why not now? In "A Notice of Passage," I also
wanted magic to confront the reality of AIDS, a disease of mythic and
tragic proportions, which has been surrounded by superstition and
terror. I think I will likely mine the vein of magic more deeply; I'm
happy with where it takes me.
TDR: As a Newfoundland woman who grew up "around the bay"
and now lives in the heart of St. John's, to what extent do you feel it
is your writerly duty to get-it-right, to carefully chronicle the lives
of women who also inhabit, and have inhabited, these worlds? You have
done this successfully in two works of fiction and two volumes of
poetry; does part of you think, okay - why not try another place for a
while? Some place like Greece, where you could write about other kinds
of people in a different kind of place. Sheila in Walking to Shenak
bewails the fact that "no place feels like home"; well,
Newfoundland seems very much your home, both artistically and literally.
Does a change of scene interest you, perhaps for "the shock of new
material"?
MCGRATH: "New material" is everywhere. One morning I heard
a knock against my front window and looked out to see the face of a man
I knew plastered against the glass. Two policemen were restraining and
cuffing him. Well, shock. Me drinking tea; him being arrested. As long
as something surprises or interests me, I'll write from there. But I
never want to do the same thing twice. I did want to work with the lives
of girls and women and to use the outport/city split as a jumping-off
point to other dualities -- youth/aging, passion/responsibility,
love/loss, routine/magic.
But the new works in progress do go in new
directions. I often work over a long period of time with a set of
concepts or ideas, and I read about and research them from several
angles. Right now, I'm exploring ideas about reinvention, escape and
return, the forces of attraction and repulsion that affect people,
objects, particles.
Perhaps in all this I'll find some new space between
my own love of travel and the desire to kiss the ground on return to
Newfoundland. Artistically, this is an energizing, dynamic place to be,
but it is also a fishbowl. And I would dearly love to escape with good
company and a laptop to some warm place by a different sea, where English is not
the first language, and where the politics are not my own. Right now,
however, I would have to bring all my daughter's grade five class, all
her friends and possibly her bedroom. And the cat.
TDR: Each of your four volumes have been published
by Killick Press, a Creative Publishers imprint, and the books are published in St. John's.
Have you considered getting an agent and moving to a bigger Canadian
publisher, in order to increase the presence of your books in the shops
and subsequently the hands of more readers across the country?
MCGRATH: I'm not the hot/cool property agents
are looking for. One of the manuscripts is poetry, another short fiction, which in Canada is as good
as saying they are marginalia. I think I will try to find an agent for
the novel, though. I do support the local presses and the local work that
goes into the production of books. But distribution and marketing of
small-press works is depressing; unless the small press is in Toronto, who cares?
The rest of Canada is "regional." None of my four books has been
reviewed in national newspapers, despite the fact the last two won
awards. Obviously I need to move to TO, buy cocktail clothes and learn
to blow my own horn more loudly.
TDR: You mentioned earlier that you are working on three manuscripts,
and also that you are investigating such ideas as reinvention, escape
and return, the forces of attraction and repulsion; would you be willing to
talk in a bit more detail about your new projects? Or do feel that is a
jinx, and the Old Hag you write about will plonk down on the chest of the new
gestating work and suffocate it?
MCGRATH: They are a novel, a short story collection, a collection
of poetry. I am afraid of being my own jinxer, in a way. And it's always
hard to describe collections. The novel explores a durable friendship,
disaffection and art in the midst of cod moratorium angst, and the power
and fallibility of wishes. It has nice guys in it who don't finish last. All three
manuscripts have a lot of sex and death in them, Big Death and Little
Death, Eros and Thanatos -- heck, I must really be middle-aged!
TDR: Finally, you mentioned that the vibrant writing group in
Newfoundland today is Burning Rock, represented in the second Burning
Rock anthology - edited by you - called Hearts Larry Broke. What are
these writers doing that's different and exciting? And who's carrying certain
Newfoundland traditions of theme and narrative structure?
MCGRATH: Burning Rock members tend to be experimental and willing to
take risks, which is always exciting. Also several members work in other
art forms (Lisa Moore, for example, is trained in visual art); I think
such backgrounds expand and open up forms of expression and lead to works
that are texturally rich.
But there are so many writers doing good work here now. I mentioned
Bernice Morgan and Patrick Kavanagh. But there's also Libby Creelman,
Lillian Bouzane, Michael Crummey, Joan Clark, Paul Bowdring...I could go
on and on.
Tradition has been transformed as writing has
exploded. The literature that comes out of here now is aware of
tradition, but also sees it from a critical standpoint. I believe that
literature that has momentum both honours and subverts the traditions
from which it arises. Full speed ahead is what I see going on here.
Harold Hoefle teaches high school English in
Montreal. He has published fiction and book reviews. |
