![]() ![]() The CBC building in the novel is the one she remembers, though she says the characters do not have real-life antecedents. And a tremendous canoe journey the Late Nights characters take draws from Hay’s own 1978 canoe expedition along the Thelon River. Hay herself worked in radio in Yellowknife for a couple of years in the 1970s (having followed a boyfriend up north), first as a receptionist, then as an announcer-operator. You just have to be convincing and imagine something sufficiently that the reader is also convinced.” “I thought it was a very good idea for a writing exercise.” Says Hay: “The wonderful thing about fiction is you don’t have to be right. “She was excellent and gave very salient feedback,” Lahey says. Author Anita Lahey, who took a creative writing class at the University of Ottawa taught by Hay, remembers an exercise that involved listening to a radio interview with a runaway and then filling in the blanks of the story, addressing things that weren’t covered. Radio has long been a jumping-off point for Hay. And, in a way, anybody that listens to radio is a natural fiction writer, because you’re creating, in your mind, on the basis of a voice, a personality.” It’s an example of one of the ways we aren’t what we seem. “We hear just the voice and we make up a face that bears no resemblance to the real face. ![]() “The starting point of this book is that real voices have fictional faces,” Hay says when we meet near her Old Ottawa South home, a world of back lanes, canal views, and neighbourhood shops. The characters’ various hang-ups are magnified and elevated by the lonely vastness. This book will no doubt be remembered as Hay’s “Yellowknife novel” or even her “radio novel” – it follows the lives of a handful of people running a northern CBC station in the 1970s. After publishing with several houses early in her career, she’s now settled into a steady relationship with McClelland & Stewart Late Nights on Air, published this month, is her third novel with the house. The latter was nominated for the Giller Prize, and her 1997 short-story collection Small Change was a finalist for multiple prizes, including the Governor General’s Award. Hay is a steady writer and much respected, best known for the complex and intimate Garbo Laughs in 2003 and the passionate A Student of Weather in 2000. When she speaks about her memories of Yellowknife – where she lived briefly in the 1970s and where her new novel, Late Nights on Air, is set – she pauses and closes her eyes, as if she’s mentally evoking the exact moment. In person, the 55-year-old author is reserved and fond of earth tones. They hold up the wall at a neighbourhood dive, unravelling enchanting yarns that never seem to make it to paper.Įlizabeth Hay, though, saves it all for the page. They busy themselves grooming a persona, or perhaps a sartorial signifier (knotted scarf, horn-rimmed glasses) to flag their idiosyncratic nature. Some writers are known more for their affectations than their output. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |