Winter’s tale

Author Michael Winter. (Penguin Canada).

Early September marks two big releases for author Michael Winter. The Architects are Here, his first novel for his new publisher, Penguin Canada, is coming out on Sept. 8. Around the same time, Winter’s girlfriend, writer Christine Pountney, is due to give birth to the couple’s first child. “I’m very productive these days,” Winter says over the phone from his home in Newfoundland, where he spends his summers.

With another author, this timing might just be a happy coincidence, but with Winter, who’s spent most of his career chronicling the life of an alter-ego named Gabriel English, the line between fiction and reality, and chance and intention, is a blurry one. Gabe, who is back in The Architects are Here, has been thinking a lot about fatherhood, too.

Readers who’ve followed Winter’s career will remember Gabe from his early short story collections — 1994’s Creaking in Their Skins and 1999’s One Last Good Look — and his 2000 breakthrough novel, This All Happened, which established Winter as a rising talent. Like Gabe, Winter grew up in Corner Brook, N.L., and is the child of British parents. After university, Winter, like Gabe, started writing semi-autobiographical fiction about his family and friends and his romantic troubles, some stories set in St. John’s, others in Toronto, where Winter, like Gabe, eventually moved.

“It’s really hard to make your own life story interesting to anyone else,” Winter says. “The truth of what happens to me is very boring except to me and my mother.” Gabe isn’t him, he insists, but those stories do reveal a “torqued-up emotional truth” of what’s happening in Winter’s own life. “I’ve spent my career trying to fool the reader into thinking that what I write is real when I know that it’s made up. I’m a private person. [I don’t] want all my dirty laundry hanging out and I don’t want to expose the people I love.”

This doesn’t mean that some of those people haven’t felt exposed. In The Architects are Here, Gabe, in a moment of self-loathing, laments, “I’d written about people close to me and in small unforeseeable ways, at least unforeseeable to me, I had hurt them. My brother, for instance, had written me a letter. He said that if I wrote about him again, he would deliver a punch to me head from which I may not recover.” The reader can assume that there’s as much Winter in that expression of regret as Gabe.

(Penguin Canada)

“Okay, the thing about my brother is an actual true story,” Winter says, laughing. “I thought, ‘Well, Paul, I’m going to sign off on your life and give you one last quote and then it will be over.’”

Over time, he’s gotten better at covering his tracks. “It used to be that a buddy from high school would show up as himself. Now, I know enough to disguise him as my great-aunt from Peru.” But being confused with your characters, he says, is a consequence for any writer, not just one who mines his own life for material. “A lot of writers hate it when readers mistake them for their character, but I love it. When it happens, I think, ‘Good, I got you. You believe it.’”

Winter has been so identified with Gabe that his 2004, postmodern historical novel The Big Why was a surprising departure. Loosely based on New York artist Rockwell Kent’s sojourn in Newfoundland in the early twentieth century, the book was more critically admired than widely read. It was also his final novel with the small but prestigious House of Anansi Press. Last spring, he signed a lucrative deal with the higher-profile — and deeper-pocketed — Penguin. The break from Gabe and the new publisher have served Winter well. The Architects are Here reveals a new maturity and sophistication in his writing. Like Gabe, it seems Winter has done a lot of soul-searching in the past few years. This latest Up Series-style check-in on Gabe’s life finds him drifting towards 40, settling into a tentative domestic idyll with his girlfriend Nell and getting dragged into trouble by his childhood friend David, a dot-com millionaire.

The book is, in part, an examination of approaching middle age and what it means to be a grown-up. “[It’s] when you’ve been an adult long enough to have a go,” Winter says. “You’ve succeeded in some ways and failed in others. You have a range of friends who are at different places on that arc — some have financial success, others, domestic success. I think we’re all struck by the moment we realize we are the same age our parents were when they had us. I was the youngest of three kids and I had that realization at 30. I thought, ‘How did my father do all that stuff by 30, and what am I doing?’ I think that’s a real crucial moment.”

Now in his early 40s, Winter is increasingly comfortable with the trappings of adulthood and professional success. He was chosen to be a judge for the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize, a kind of initiation into the ranks of CanLit stardom. (Previous judges have included Margaret Atwood, Alberto Manguel and Mavis Gallant.) He was flattered to have been asked, but says the experience was “torture. I don’t wish it on anybody. The only person who’s happy is the winner. I could see the merit of every book — and it’s just so hard to write a book in the first place — that it crushed me every time we had to peel one more book away.”

Other forms of approbation have been easier to accept. His two-book deal with Penguin enabled Winter and Pountney to buy their home in Newfoundland and to feel secure enough in the future to have a child.

“For the first time in my life I can look two or three years down the road and know that I’m okay for money. Things are clicking into a pattern that I might have rebelled against before, like the idea that the projected future is obvious: I’m going to have a son, so I’m going to have to think about school and all the other things that come with having a kid. That doesn’t fill me with dread. I’m enjoying it and [I think] that I’m ready to take it on.”

Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

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