Q&A

Melanie Little
2005/06 Markin-flanagan Canadian Writer-in-Residence

Interview by Janice Lee

OnCampus: You've recently packed up house and husband to move from Ottawa to Calgary. Besides Catso (cats are a given), what is your most prized possession?

Melanie Little: I think Catso regards us as “her” possessions, anyway. So it would have to be the laminated poster we got at the Cinemuerte Horror Film Festival in Vancouver a few years ago. It’s signed, you see, by my favourite B-movie actor of all time, Udo Kier. I’m neither a collector nor a celebrity worshipper, usually, but Udo is just so…well, outlandish. See Blood for Dracula and Flesh for Frankenstein and you’ll know what I mean.) I’m happy to say that it survived the trip unscratched, thanks to my husband Peter’s packing prowess.

OC: Your residency runs until June 2006, but you've made the decision to make the move to Calgary permanent. Why?

Little: I was here for WordFest in 2003 and I just fell in love with the city. There’s an energy here—even the air seems livelier than it does in other places. In Calgary, I always want to get out of bed in the morning. And I really like bed.

OC: One of the writing projects you'll be working on during your residency is a novel for young adults set in medieval Spain. How have you been researching this book?

Little: I’m writing two novels simultaneously at the moment, which can be either creatively stimulating or organizationally disastrous, depending on the day. One of them, a historical novel set in medieval Spain, is incredibly research-heavy. Before we left Ottawa, I had over a hundred books out of three different libraries there, all for this book. We were still returning milk crates full of books to these places on the day we left town. I also travelled to Spain last spring so that I could really soak up the atmosphere of Toledo, where the story is set. The city is practically unchanged from the 15th century—a great many of the houses, churches and city walls from that time are still standing.
Generally, however, I’m quite a playful writer, and the huge responsibility of writing a historical novel can be, on a bad day, suffocating. That’s why I’m happy to be working on the second one, which is entirely character-based and involves exactly zero research. Well, that’s a bit disingenuous, perhaps; it’s sort of a parody of Gothic novels, a kind of contemporary Northanger Abbey. So the years and years I spend consuming gothic novel after gothic novel could be counted as research,
I suppose.

OC: During your residency, you'll also be conducting individual manuscript consultations with local writers. What’s the best writing advice you ’ve been given?

Little: Hemingway, love him or hate him (I fall more into the former camp), said some extremely helpful things about writing. My favourite advice comes from him: don’t stop writing on a given day until you know what sentence is going to come next.

OnCampus: And the worst?

Little: “Write what you know.” I recently judged a short– story contest and at least 50 of the stories I read had someone sitting in a café, observing the quirky characters around them. No, no, no! I believe that every work of art has an inherent set of demands that it must adhere to: but the so-called “authenticity” of experience is not one of them. The whole point of writing is to create something that wasn’t there before. The world does not need another perfect-bound blog.

OC: What is your favourite book?

Little: Wuthering Heights. It still gets me, every time I re-read it. No other book has that kind of claim on me. Though anything by Alice Munro is a close second.

OC: The book or the movie?

Little: The book, almost always. I’m so tired of slavish, plot-point by plot-point adaptations of books. They’re so incredibly boring! Adaptations of books should be like translations of writing from one language to another. They should be completely separate works of art, with their own agendas, slants, techniques. Too many adapted screenplays are simply like computer files saved in a slightly different format from the original. It’s a lame analogy, but I hope you’ll forgive it: our computer didn’t survive the move and my whole life feels like a series of incompatible computer files at the moment.

OC: What book(s) are you reading right now?

Little: I’m normally one of those people with the proverbial tower of books at her bedside, but because of the chaos of settling in to a new city, not to mention the fact that most of our book boxes are thus far unpacked, I’m actually enjoying the rare pleasure of reading only one book right now. It’s something I’ve read before: Restlessness, by U of C professor Aritha van Herk. It has so many smart things to say about travel and place and Calgary in particular. It’s a perfect book to be reading as a somewhat disoriented new Calgarian.

OC: When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?

Little: I wanted to write books as soon as I gleaned that this was something a person might get away with calling her job. When my parents read to me, I’d make them return to the “Written and illustrated by” page every few minutes.

My own first book was self-published. I was three or four when I made it, and the staples went up the wrong side. My mom still has it—it’s about a couple who can’t pay their bills and therefore rob a bank. They get away with it, and everyone lives happily ever after. I don’t think the Canadian market was ready for it.

OC: How has your experience as writer-in-residence differed from what you expected?

Little: What surprises me is that despite all the moving-in and computer shenanigans, I’ve already settled back into writing. I was expecting a much longer period of adjustment before that could happen. There’s something about having a program like the Markin-Flanagan program to endorse you as a writer—as, you know, someone who writes—that really puts a firecracker right where it counts.