Words At Large

At one point in the novel, Lauchlin considers the glory days when “Cape Breton was called the Cradle of Canadian Boxing.” How did you first hear about the boxing history of Cape Breton?
I think I first became aware of it when my cousin Donny MacLeod came to live with us in Ohio in the 1950s. He was twenty and he mentioned some fighters there and how popular boxing was. But it wasn’t until many years later that I learned about the number of good fighters that island turned out when I read an article about some of them in Cape Breton’s Magazine (now defunct, unfortunately). I did more research in newspaper archives and talked with a former champion Tyrone Gardiner who told me about all the gyms there used to be and how active they were in his day, the 1960s. That era produced several champions.

You spend your time between California during the academic year and Cape Breton during the summer. How does a sense of place inform your writing?
Since almost all my fiction has been set in Cape Breton, a sense of that place is fundamental to it. The characters in my stories and novels have been shaped by its history and culture, by the language of its people and its landscape, by the way my own sensibilities explore my understanding of it. I have set, I think, one story in California, but it was as much informed by Cape Breton as it was by that western place; both were important in that instance, however, and I believe that place makes us much of what we are, just as it often does the characters of fiction.

Why do you return to Cape Breton each year?
I guess the answer is implicit in the previous one—it’s where my stories arise and take shape. It is also refreshing to get out of a crowded and rather frenetic urban environment where I have no roots and spend a good stretch of time in the peace and space of our own land, and be among friends and relatives there. It’s good for the soul.

People from the many small communities like those in your book often leave to look for opportunities for work and better lives in urban centres. The opposite seems true for Lauchlin, who thinks, “I’m sunk in deep as a fencepost, nothing left but to weather down.” Why does Lauchlin feel compelled to stay in Cape Breton?
At this point in his life, his fifties, he is, of course, past the age when one usually feels the urge to emigrate. I am not sure that he sees “a better life” elsewhere anyway since his conception of such a life was so tied into his hoped-for success as a boxer that once that ambition was thwarted, he had little will to seek opportunities beyond his island. He did live in Halifax for awhile when he was young, but he is not a city person by nature, not deep down—his drift of mind, his imagination, his simple and basic pleasures are more suited to where he is, surrounded largely by country. He is not “compelled” to stay in Cape Breton but rather I see him as nurtured by its familiarity, aware of his complacency and predictable life but lacking the will to alter it: not until Tena and Clement come into his life is he challenged by new circumstances he must respond to.

Lauchlin is a character trapped in the past and “used-to-bes.” He’s a man who has spurned life’s opportunities, afraid to make choices for fear of making the wrong one. What intrigues you about this idea of living life retrospectively?
A man inclined to live too much in his past can be, paradoxically, both trapped in it and by it while at the same time, if he has a vivid imagination, be enriched by his ability to call it forth, to have it, sometimes, brighten the duller hues of his present existence. It can paralyze him of course, but it can also sustain him, if his past has the stuff of excitement and pain, of joy and fulfillment, disappointment and defeat. In Lauchlin’s case, he does not just wallow in old stories—he examines his past, he questions it, explores its meaning, finds in it at times a sort of energy. Without that, his present would be to some degree impoverished, could he not relive the sensuousness of a lovely woman or the feeling of a knock-out in the ring.

Why did you decide to become a writer?
I never did decide, not in any conscious or formal way. I sort of eased into it over a period of years, when I had the time from teaching. I admired short stories and by the time I felt I had one in me worthy of the page (I was in my late thirties then), I worked at it. I guess I was ready by then. But it was a long time before I considered myself a writer, as opposed to someone who writes. I suppose the former is someone who has to do it, he can’t keep himself from doing it, no matter what. It’s a way of dealing with the world, of finding your place in it and trying to hold onto it. It’s how I face the awful truth of time—I try to freeze a piece of it in art.

Describe your writing process.
In the early stages I write a good deal in longhand, mainly notes, passages, bits of dialogue, description, scenes, as they come to me. Then gradually they begin to coalesce into a narrative until I can write a whole draft that gives me a sense of the shape. I do that on a word processor, but I never stop writing down notes, lines, pieces that I will work in later. I go through a series of drafts until the revisions get fewer and fewer, more and more focused, until they become matters of paragraphs, of sentences, of single words, honing it all down finally to that version I feel I have taken as far as I can and I have to leave it alone.

What advice would you give to writers starting out?
No new advice there, I’m sure they’ve heard it all. Read a lot of what you want to write--watching movies won’t do it. See how good writers handle their material, their different perspectives and styles (style is a way of seeing the world and how you see it will determine your own way of expressing it). You have to work with language consciously and with respect, you have to write again and again because it never comes completely the first time, you have to revise and revise and make it as good as you can. It’s hard work, and most of what you learn will for a long time be negative—that is, you try things that don’t work very well, and you learn from them, you find your way. But you have to want to write, you have to put it on the page. Sitting around thinking about it will never get you anywhere.