And I’ve been doing that since I was 11 years old, as a nerdy little kid with a journal under my arm all the time. It’s a mindset of observing, considering, and recording. I was talking with Waubgeshig Rice the other day and I was saying to him the older I get the more I believe writers are born, not trained. I think it was a progressive thing to go from allowing myself to be possessed by a world created in a novel to moving up to this sense of literary fiction, to develop that notion of craft that makes room for the reader.īut no, that’s not when I realized I was a writer. Is that the moment you realized you were a writer?īoth my parents were avid readers and that was something that was modeled to us from the time we were infants. That’s an incredible insight to gain at sixteen. And reading their work gave me insight into how literature is like a song, like jazz, where the power is really between the lines, how the writing creates a frame and the reader furnishes the unspoken through their own conscious absorption of the work. I was also reading Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, all these trailblazing women. It was a beautiful “aha” moment about the uniqueness of Canadian literature and what it means to understand something as literary fiction. So we were assigned Swamp Angel and I was so blown away.

And I was doing an English lit course, and that’s how I was introduced to Canadian literature. I was at this time still a ward of the state, but I was permitted to live alone, which is really something I needed. It’s really everything by Ethel Wilson that I love, but what you need to understand is when I was 16 I had just negotiated my way out of foster care. I understand Ethel Wilson, particularly her book Swamp Angel was an important book for you when you were young and discovering literature. If there are things we feel driven or compelled to do, we should do them.

I just believe we’re given one life here on earth - who knows what happens next - and we should treat it that way. That’s a ton of work that you took on at a time in life when many people are winding down - what drives that for you? Your novel Five Little Indians came out when you were in your 60s, which is after you earned an MFA degree in your 50s, which follows the career in law you started pursuing in your 40s.

Michelle good books