Words At Large

Three writers who weave stories about very different times and places — historical India, modern-day Northern Ireland and Scotland past and present — talk in today’s podcast about how family and place of origin have influenced their writing.

The panel “Where You Started From,” was recorded by CBC Radio at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival last spring, with host Anne Legacé Dowson.

Canadian Padma Viswanathan, author of The Toss of a Lemon (Random House), reveals how her novel was inspired after she said something her grandmother was longing to hear: “Tell me about our family’s history.” The tales told by her grandmother became the seeds of Viswanathan’s debut novel, although she also visited India on a research trip and then reinvented the family stories as fiction.

Glenn Patterson was born in Belfast and has six novels to his credit, most of them set in contemporary Northern Ireland. He says that the question of where he comes from has a complex answer, because origins are always an intersection of a specific time and place. We can’t travel backward in time and truly go home again, but he believes this makes it even more vital to revisit our origins through the imagination and literature.

Andrew O'Hagan, who was born in Glasgow, Scotland, first wrote about his own childhood in his debut book, The Missing (Faber & Faber), and has since written a number of novels set in his country of origin. He talks about being brought up in a house with no books, and recalls the look of horror on his father’s face when he once sauntered in carrying a copy of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (Penguin Classic). In O’Hagan’s family, songs and stories were more important and more personal than books, and their sense of community and a shared past was created through their conversations.

Listen as these writers share their stories with CBC Radio host Anne Lagacé Dowson.

Recorded in May 2008. [runs 36:30]