A number of years ago, Michael Ondaatje claimed that Alistair MacLeod was "one of the great undiscovered writers of our time." But with the publication of MacLeod's collected stories, Island (Norton, 2000), and his novel, No Great Mischief (Norton, 1999), he's been universally recognized as one of our best living writers of fiction. No Great Mischief received Canada's Trillium Book Award as well as Ireland's prestigious IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The Times Literary Supplement described the novel as "a lesson in the art of storytelling," and the New York Times called MacLeod "a great writer." He delivered the Keynote Address at the Association of Writing Programs convention in Vancouver on March 31 of this year.

Born in 1936, Alistair MacLeod was raised on Cape Breton Island at the north end of Nova Scotia in the Canadian Maritimes, and most of his fiction is set on the island. During part of his youth, MacLeod lived on a farm, but he also worked as a logger and miner. Eventually, after teaching in the Maritimes, he finished academic degrees at Saint Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia and the University of New Brunswick before he went to the University of Notre Dame for his doctorate in English literature. He subsequently taught for three years at Indiana University-Purdue University in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, before he moved to the University of Windsor in 1969, where he taught for several decades until his recent retirement. Writing approximately one story a year, his early published collections were The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (McClelland & Stewart, 1976) and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories (McClelland & Stewart, 1986), which were eventually collected into Island: The Complete Stories. No Great Mischief took over thirteen years to write.

The father of six children, MacLeod lives with his wife, Anita, in Windsor, Ontario, and they spend the summers on Cape Breton Island.

WB: When you were a boy in Cape Breton, the island could only be reached by ferry until the Canso Causeway was finished in 1955, allowing cars to drive to the island for the first time. Were you very conscious of a sense of isolation when you were growing up there?
AM: We didn't think of ourselves as being isolated because we lived in such close-knit communities. But it's true that once the winter came, we wouldn't see many "strangers," as we used to call them. If someone missed church, he would ask, "Were there any strangers in church today?" And there very seldom were, unless someone was called back home by a death in the family or something like that.
WB: Do you remember the causeway being built?
AM: I do, but I grew up about fifty-five miles north of the site, so we didn't actually see it being constructed. The way that it affected us the most was when we needed to get off the island, which only happened about once a year. Previously, we had to worry about Atlantic storms and ferry delays, but the causeway eliminated those concerns, and it gave us better access to the outside world.
WB: Many of the families on Cape Breton Island survived by farming, fishing, logging, and mining. You came from a family of miners, and many of your relatives suffered debilitating injuries working the mines on the island or in other places.
AM: That's true. My father got lead poisoning in Virginia City, Nevada, and one of my uncles lost a hand, another lost an eye, and others suffered various injuries.
WB: How did the lead poisoning affect your father?
AM: He lost a lung, and his bones calcified, and he was very much weakened by the experience. All this happened when he was thirty years old, before he was married and obviously before I was conceived, but the things that happen in the previous generation always affect the next generation.
WB: Did he continue mining?
AM: He did for a while.
WB: During your college summers, you also worked the mines.
AM: I worked my way through the university by working in the mines, and I was very grateful for the opportunity. I never minded the work; it was just what people did back then to make a living. By the time I started in the mines, the local sites in Cape Breton were pretty well finished, so I ended up working in the Northwest Territories, and British Columbia, and the uranium mines around northern Ontario. It was quite a transient life, and it was almost an all-male workforce. We lived in bunk houses, usually with about forty men sleeping together in one building, and we didn't do much more than work, eat, and sleep. The food was pretty good, and the money for those times was very good, but it was a peculiar kind of lifestyle, and certainly not appropriate for family life. I never remember anyone in any of those places saying, "This is where my children will start school and grow up." It just wasn't like that.
WB: In your elegiac novel, No Great Mischief, and in many of your stories, death is ever-present in the minds and fortunes of the principal characters. Do you think that comes from your youth in rural Cape Breton?
AM: When you grow up in a rural area, especially on a farm, which I did for a while, you become very accepting of death as just another part of the cycle, especially regarding the animals. You breed them, you often see them born, you care for them, and then you kill them and eat them. So you grow up, as some people say, very close to your food chain, and some of the animals in that food chain have almost become friends for a while, so I think that farming people have a rather non-sentimental view of death. I also believe that if you work with your body—like a farmer, a miner, a fisherman, or a logger—you're always putting yourself at risk. Such people are always in danger of losing fingers or hands or breaking their legs or being killed. It's also a physically taxing life for the women, but it was generally the men who were out doing the mining and logging and so forth. So it wasn't uncommon to see young wives who were widows or who had husbands who were crippled in some way. So growing up in such an environment, you could never be surprised by death, and it certainly wasn't something that could be avoided.
WB: Another aspect of your fiction is your interest in folklore, legends, and the art of storytelling. You once said that "I like to think that I am telling a story rather than writing it." Did you know any exceptional storytellers in your youth?
AM: Although no particular individual stands out in my mind, I did hear many stories as they were passed around. I also enjoyed reading very much, especially literature, and I actually liked school.
WB: Your fiction is also full of history, mostly the Highland past of the Cape Breton Islanders. No Great Mischief and your stories make many references to a number of key moments in Scottish Highland history: the Bruce's victory at Bannockburn in 1314; the massacre of the Glencoe MacDonalds in 1692; the end of Bonnie Prince Charlie's revolt at Culloden in 1745; the Clearances from 1785 to 1850; and the resultant migrations of many of the Highlanders, especially to America and places like Cape Breton Island. The characters in your stories are often like the patriarch, Ruadh Calum, in No Great Mischief who wept for two days when he landed in Canada, "crying for his history."
AM: One of the things I tried to explore in No Great Mischief is just how slippery history can be sometimes. We can learn the dates and the facts, but we can never really know what went through the minds of the people who were involved in those historical events. Very often it wasn't written down, or, if it was, it was done by the victors, the people who won the battles. In No Great Mischief, some of the characters are very interested in their historical past, and others just take it for granted, and this is especially true in the contrast between Alexander's two grandfathers. The so-called serious grandfather is a man who was born out of wedlock, which was certainly not a good situation to be in back then. As a result, he's always trying to understand where he came from. He's never known his father, and when he tries to ask his mother about his father, she hits him in the face, and he quickly realizes that he'll never learn anything from her. He doesn't even have a picture of his father, but since he's often heard people saying that so-and-so "looks just like his father," he often stares at his own reflection in the mirror, trying to see into his past, thinking, "My father probably looked like me." Anyway, as a result of the circumstances of his birth, he grows up a rather serious man who constantly pursues the question, "Where did I come from?" and this eventually leads him to ask the related question, "Where did we all come from?" So he starts to study and explore his Highland past. On the other hand, Alex's other grandfather, who has roughly the same ancestry as the more serious grandfather, is not at all interested in such things. He's a very outgoing man who likes to dance and play cards and socialize. When he thinks of his Scottish past, it's highly sentimentalized, and it all seems rather wonderful.
WB: He doesn't like to think about the defeated and wounded Highlanders returning home from Culloden.
AM: Yes, he'd rather not think about such things, and if they come up, he'll simply say, "I don't like that part," and he'll try to move on. So the two grandfathers represent certain kinds of people that you'll find in all cultures: the ones always searching into their past, and the ones who simply accept it and are basically comfortable with it.
WB: After teaching for a while in the Maritimes, you finished up academic degrees at Saint Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia and the University of New Brunswick. Then you went to Notre Dame to get your doctorate in English literature with a focus on the British novel of the nineteenth century. It was while you were at Notre Dame that you first started writing. What got you going?
AM: Two things got me going. The first was that I was naturally reading and analyzing quite a bit of literature, and at some point I decided that instead of just analyzing Joyce's "The Dead" or Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," maybe I should try and write a few stories of my own. The other thing related to being so far from home. I found myself becoming more and more thoughtful about where I'd grown up. I'm not saying that it was simply "absence makes the heart grow fonder," but I do think it's true that sometimes when you're removed from your home, you start to think about it differently, which certainly happened to me. So I decided to write my own stories and set them in my native landscape. Of course, I wasn't very prolific, averaging about a story a year over the next twenty years.
WB: Were you aware of the unique cultural richness of Cape Breton Island?
AM: I really wasn't back then. I just said, "I think I should do this." Maybe in the same way—not to flatter myself—that Faulkner probably started writing those stories about where he'd grown up in Mississippi. Cape Breton was what I knew best, and it seemed to provide a number of issues that I wanted to deal with in fiction.
WB: Did you study with Frank O'Malley at Notre Dame?
AM: I was originally hoping to, and it was one of the reasons that I went to Notre Dame, but by the time I got there, he wasn't teaching creative writing anymore.
WB: Was there somebody else who offered help or encouragement?
AM: There was. In the midst of all that academic stuff, I was able to take a creative writing course with Richard Sullivan. He was a very good person, and he was my first serious reader and commentator for about two or three years.
WB: Earlier, you mentioned the sense of distance from Cape Breton Island that you felt at Notre Dame, and this is a crucial theme in your fiction, which often deals with the sense of displacement and exile that your characters experience when they leave the island. These migrations can be seen as the most recent aspects of a centuries-old diaspora that includes the westward migrations of the Celts, the forced removal of many of the Scottish clans from the Highlands during the Clearances, and the twentieth-century movements away from Cape Breton by Islanders seeking a stronger financial security.
AM: Most of the migrations of the past few centuries have been motivated by economic reasons and have often resulted in severe emotional losses. In some families and societies, there are always a few adventurous people who'll want to go out and explore, or become astronauts, or something like that, but most of the present population of North America consists of people who came here for economic reasons. Even today, in other parts of the world, we see the same thing happening. Just this morning, I was reading that there are about twelve million refugees, mostly in North Africa, trying to make their way into Europe, especially through Italy and Spain. These are people who don't necessarily want to abandon their homelands, but they're starving, so they stow away in boats or under the carriages of airplanes. When I look back at my Highland and Cape Breton past, I see many of the same kinds of things. My father left Cape Breton when he was just seventeen to join the Army, and he did so for economic reasons since he was the oldest in a very large family. Later, as I mentioned, he went off to work in the mines. Every single house that I know in Cape Breton has relatives living in Boston, or Seattle, or, like your own family, in New York City. And many other places as well. The Irish are quite eloquent about it, saying that the "Irish nation" is not contained within the shores of Ireland. Not too long ago, I was visiting Ireland, and many of the people I met over there were talking about the economic unification in Europe, and the euro, and all the rest of it, yet they still feel that they have much more in common with the Irish in Boston than they do with the citizens of Berlin. So their economic ties are in one direction, and their emotional or social ties are elsewhere, and that's certainly true of the Highlanders from Cape Breton Island.
WB: Along with the loss of landscape comes the loss of traditions—and even values and morals. In your story "Clearances," an older man is being encouraged by his son to sell off his property and clear his trees before the tourists and wealthy outsiders get everything. But he tries to hold on, since he has such a reverence for the things that he sees falling apart around him.
AM: He does have a reverence for those things, but he can't do anything about what's happening. He's an older man, his wife is dead, and he's now alone. For many years he did what he thought was right—clearing the land, buying bigger boats, and so on—but in the end, it's just not working economically anymore. In his final scene with the son, I don't believe that his son is betraying him; he's just a realist saying, "We have to go forward, and we have to clear these trees, and maybe if we can sell this land, I won't have to live so far away in southern Ontario." And the older man has no answer for that. For generations, he and others have been thinking, "If we can only learn English instead of Gaelic, then we can move forward. Or if we can only get a bigger boat. Or if we can only clear more land. Or if we can only find the right kind of dogs to herd the sheep." But it hasn't worked out that way, and now the older man's emotional yearnings have finally run up against the hard facts, and there's nowhere to go.
WB: This is a problem in a number of the stories, like "In the Fall," for example.
AM: In that story, the father has to sell the horse. He doesn't want to, and he knows his son doesn't want him to, but he has no choice. In a Disney kind of world, everything would work out O.K. The dog or the horse would eventually come back, which is very satisfying and leaves us greatly relieved. But in real life, of course, things have to yield to the cold facts.
WB: Another sense of loss in some of your stories relates to aspects of the Scot culture on Cape Breton Island like the music, which you refer to as the "lubricant of the poor"— especially the piping, the fiddling, and the singing of the old Gaelic songs. In "The Tuning of Perfection," the "last of the authentic old-time Gaelic singers" refuses to alter any of the old traditional songs for an upcoming concert in Halifax, much to the dismay of his more contemporary family.
AM: The old man, Archibald, is determined to sing the traditional songs the way they're "supposed to be sung." He's a very gifted singer, a kind of pure and perfect singer, but the songs are twenty verses long, and the concert, which will be broadcast by the media, only has room for about three verses. Archibald's descendants, his family, are gifted singers, but they don't care about the tradition. When he asks them, "Do you know what the words mean?", they'll answer, "I don't care what the words mean." Then there's the MacKenzie family. They can really sing in the old style, but most of them are dispersed, working construction jobs in Toronto and places like that. Finally, there's the young man, Carver, who wants to perform in Halifax so he can buy new clothes and a new engine for his boat. He and his group see the singing strictly as a means to an end. So there are four kinds of people involved in the competition for the performing slot in Halifax, and Carver knows that he'll succeed because, like Archibald's granddaughters, he's willing to make the necessary adjustments, and he knows that the old man won't because he's much too stubborn.
WB: But Carver also understands and respects what Archibald is doing.
AM: He does, and he feels bad about it, and that's why he brings the old man all that liquor near the end of the story. It's an awkward attempt to show his admiration for the old man's reverence for the culture, even though Carver lives in the modern world and is consciously undermining his own culture.
WB: Also fading for the Islanders in your stories is their use of the Gaelic language, which you've referred to as that "beautiful prison," especially as the younger generations abandon it for English.
AM: For a long time, the Scottish people on Cape Breton Island were unilingually Gaelic. They were living on an island, and, in general, they didn't work for anyone else, which is quite rare in this world. Down in the Appalachian Mountains, you have something like that, but for most North American immigrants, when they set down in Boston or New York or Pittsburgh, they took whatever work was available, and they had to learn English. But in a place like Cape Breton, you live there for three or four generations and never work for anyone else, at least until Peabody Coal and the other outside businesses started to arrive. So you could live a rather self-sufficient life by fishing and farming. In Inverness County where I grew up, Gaelic was my parents' first language, and my grandparents' first language, and so on. They were a Gaelic-speaking people, but eventually, when they started to work for outsiders, they had to learn English. They couldn't just say, "I'll never compromise. I'm a Gaelic-speaking man, and I think English is a silly language." They had to compromise, and they gradually allowed the new language to be grafted onto their lives. So for several generations, English became the language of work, and they would learn the nouns for the tools—like pick, and shovel, and rock, and so on. But for them, English was never the language of "sensitivity," and they would never, for example, be comfortable saying "I love you" in English. And over time, as the younger generations learned English in the schools and took it for their first language, there was a real sense of loss felt by the older generations.
WB: Over years, Cape Breton has managed to keep its fiddling tradition alive with people like Buddy MacMaster and Howie MacDonald. More recently, the government has been making various attempts to revive interest in the Gaelic language, and the only Gaelic college in the Americas has been active for many years at St. Ann's. How do you feel about these efforts?
AM: Well, there's a number of good programs that encourage Gaelic, and there are similar things happening over in Scotland, like the excellent program on the Isle of Skye. One, of course, hopes that it will endure, and we know that such things can happen. Years ago, it seemed that Welsh was ready to fade out of the valleys of Wales forever, but it's made a comeback. There's a remarkable resiliency there. Despite all the attempts of so-called conquering powers to stomp out the "Irish tongue," as the Irish call it, it's still surviving.
WB: It's quite ironic that the Romans tried to crush out the Gaelic language, and they not only failed, but their own language, Latin, has ended up a dead language. Then after Culloden, the English banned Gaelic—along with the Highland clothing, dancing, and fiddling—and they also failed. But now the modern world, rather unthinkingly, has overwhelmed it.
AM: But it's still an aspect of the culture, and I'm glad that there's been a number of successful efforts to keep it alive in Cape Breton and Scotland and Ireland.
WB: All of these cultural losses certainly weigh heavily on Alexander MacDonald, the thoughtful narrator of No Great Mischief. Alexander has left Cape Breton Island, and he's now a successful orthodontist living in Ontario, but his displacement has taken a serious toll. One reviewer has described him as "dulled and sterile," except when animated by his memories of Cape Breton and his Scottish past.
AM: Alexander is someone who's continued all the way through school, done well, and ended up in a very modern and lucrative profession. As you mentioned earlier, the novel deals a lot with history, so I wanted Alexander to have a modern profession. He's moved away from Cape Breton, living in Windsor, and he makes his living adjusting the teeth of other rich people. Yet he's haunted by what his grandparents taught him as a child after the death of his parents, "Always look after your own blood." So Alexander, always indebted to his grandparents, feels this obligation far more than his older brothers who lived on their own after the death of their parents. Even after moving to Ontario, Alexander feels a very strong tie to his relatives, which is why he often drives from Windsor to Toronto to visit his oldest brother, Calum, a self-sufficient man who's now dying of alcoholism.
WB: A perfect example of Alexander's loyalty to his blood is the earlier incident when his American cousin shows up at the mining camp.
AM: That's right. Calum just shrugs and says, "Well, who is this fellow?" but Alexander feels an obligation to look after his cousin, even though the young man is far removed from Cape Breton culture. When the grandfather first saw the cousin, who's very strong and fearless, he says, "You'd be great for Culloden," but the young man has grown up in San Francisco, so he asks, "What's Culloden?" And the grandfather responds in disbelief, "You don't know what Culloden is?" So there's a real cultural disconnect, yet he's still MacDonald blood, and Alexander feels obligated to help him out.
WB: Earlier in the novel, Alexander had taken the place of another cousin named Alexander MacDonald who was killed in a mining accident. Then he tries to help the American cousin, who's also named Alexander MacDonald, who comes to the mines trying to avoid the Vietnam draft. Each of these three related Alexander MacDonalds represents a different stage in the movement away from Cape Breton: the first cousin has no intention to leave, but he's killed in an Ontario mine shaft; the narrator is in a gradual transition away from his native landscape; and the third Alexander has spent his whole life in San Francisco.
AM: That's true. But at the same time, the people outside their Cape Breton circle tend to see them as rather interchangeable. When the U.S. Alexander MacDonald comes along, they give him his dead cousin's documentation, and the people in the payroll office couldn't care less. All they care about is whether they have enough of those "Cape Breton miners" to do the job. Just as in other parts of the world, they might say "We need twenty Mexican migrants to get the job done," or something like that. So Alexander grows up aware of the similarities between the various groups, and aware of the individual differences within those groups, and he thinks about these things as he drives past the migrant workers picking the fruits and vegetables in Southern Ontario on the way to visit Calum.
WB: I'd like to ask you about the unusual title of the novel, which relates to a written comment by General Wolfe before his 1759 assault on Quebec during the Queen Ann's War. Just before that crucial victory of the English forces over the French in Canadavictory won in no small part by the talents and bravery of the Scottish Highlanders—Wolfe wrote of the Highlanders, "They are hardy, intrepid, accustomed to a rough country, and no great mischief if they fall." So the title of the novel is loaded with irony since Wolfe himself was killed during his great victory on the Plains of Abraham, and, of course, if too many of those indispensable Highlanders had fallen before Quebec, the victory might not have been secured.
AM: That's correct. I'm also interested in the fact that Wolfe, when he was only nineteen years old, was at "the '45," when Prince Charlie lost at Culloden. It's important to remember that the 1745 rebellion was essentially a Catholic rebellion that was supported by France, and when the Highlanders were defeated in the spring of 1746 they ended up with a price on their heads, so many of them went to France where they learned French. Then over a decade later, when the English were confronting the French in North America, the British remembered that there were all these Highland fighters still living in France, so they offered them a pardon if they'd fight for England. So it's quite complicated. Then Wolfe, who'd fought against the Highlanders at Culloden and didn't really like them very much, ended up, ironically, dependent on their fighting skills at Quebec in 1759. As the story goes, when a French sentry at Quebec called out, "Who goes there?", he was answered by a Highlander named MacDonald who'd learned to speak French in France. As a result, the British forces were able to ascend the cliff and succeed in battle due to the trilingual MacDonald, who would have also spoken the banned Gaelic. Even the Gaelic made Wolfe very suspicious of the Highlanders since they were always speaking the language among themselves, and he didn't know what they were saying. So he might have questioned their true loyalties, but he never doubted their courage or their abilities, and he was on record, both publicly and in his private letters, saying, "Oh, my brave Highlanders."
WB: Apparently, after you finished the novel, you learned that Montcalm had written a letter saying that he wished he could win the Highlanders over to the French side.
AM: At that point, some of the Highlanders had become like mercenaries, and Montcalm did have a few on his side, but he would have naturally preferred to have them all fighting for the French.
WB: I know you've been asked this before, but it does seem rather curious that a MacLeod is writing a novel about the MacDonalds, given some of the historical animosities between the two clans in the Highlands.
AM: I never really thought much about that, maybe because my great-great-grandfather was a MacDonald, and two of my great-grandmothers were MacDonalds. The real reason I wanted to use the MacDonald clan was that it's so large and had such an effect on Scottish history. They were involved in everything: Bannockburn, Culloden, Glencoe, Quebec, and the Clearances. So I think of them as being everywhere, with all their many branches, so they seemed appropriate for the story. Some of them, of course, loom larger than life, like the powerful and independent "MacIan" MacDonald who was killed at Glencoe. He had the same kind of self-confidence and self-sufficiency that can be seen in Alexander's oldest brother, Calum, who generally faces his problems by thinking, "I've been looking after myself since I was sixteen. I can handle this." But you can't always handle everything, as MacIan and Calum eventually found out.
WB: You always seem a bit wary about discussing possible literary influences on your work, but you're an expert on Hardy, you did your dissertation on his work, and you've published an analysis of his second collection of short stories, A Group of Noble Dames. You've also, for several decades at the University of Windsor, taught a course in British nineteenth-century literature. So do you feel a special affinity in your work for Hardy, or Dickens, or the Brontës?
AM: I don't know. I certainly like all of those writers, and I do think that the nineteenth-century British novel was one of the greatest periods for the novel, and I doubt we'll ever have a century like that again. But I don't believe any of those people influenced me in any specific, identifiable way. I think I would have written the way I do, even if I'd never read them, but, of course, you can never be sure about such things.
WB: Let me press you a little bit about this. Hardy's very interested in the relationship between people and their environment, as are the Brontës, and this is very important in your own work.
AM: That's true, but I still don't know if I would use the term "influenced." I do believe that you're drawn toward the things that attract you, and I did my dissertation on Hardy because I really like his work. I especially liked the idea that his novels, like Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, were usually about people who lived outdoors and were greatly affected by the forces of nature. I also consider him one of the great tragic novelists, but I was interested in these things long before I read his works, and I think I would have told my stories just as I've told them, even if I hadn't had the pleasure of reading Hardy.
WB: You've managed, like Hardy with Wessex and Faulkner with Yoknapatawpha, to find ways to write about your own particular cultural landscape and then transcend the regional for the universal.
AM: When I first started writing, I said to myself, "I think I should set this in the place that I know the best and that I care the most about. So I'll do the best I can, and I'll see where it leads me." Now some people back then would say, "But why would you write about a place like that?" But once I'd started on my path, I never wavered. And other people would say, "Why don't you write about New York?", and I say, "Because I don't know anything about New York. Certainly, not enough." So even today, I always advise my students, "If you believe in your heart that it's worth doing, and you do it well, then you'll be fine."
WB: Your regional stories have now been translated into over fifteen languages.
AM: I was delighted when the cold-weather places like Denmark and Russia and Norway translated them, but now they've also been translated for the Turks and the Bengalis and the Albanians and the Israelis. It's definitely true that we all live our lives set against a particular landscape, but while we're living in that microcosm, we're also living in a larger macrocosm, and the people out there understand the basic problems that occur in every other culture. Alexander MacDonald, for example, is an orphan, and every society has children who lose their parents. Such things can clearly translate across the cultures.
WB: You've created a beautifully lyric and often lush style in your fiction. You have an uncanny ability for what's been called an "authenticity of detail," especially details from the natural world. I recall, for example, the line in the novel, "It was one of those nights which was so cold that you could hear the trees exploding with the frost." You also tend to pile your details on top of other details, and to use compound metaphors, both of which have the potential for excess. So how do you know when to stop?
AM: I think it's mostly intuitive. When I'm actually writing, I write a single sentence at a time, and then I read it aloud. It's like the old Perrine textbook, Sound and Sense. Like any writer of fiction, I need to give information, but I try to relay it in a creative and sound-conscious way. Prose needs to aspire to something more than declarative sentences. I hesitate to say that it should express itself in a beautiful manner because that might seem pompous, but that's the general idea.
WB: More poetic? Or lyrical?
AM: I think so. Coleridge says something like, "Prose is ideas expressed in language, and poetry is the best ideas expressed in the best language." But I think prose should also aspire to use the best language; it shouldn't be just declarative sentences. As for your question about the details, I think it's a little like being a cook. Even if you know putting in a half teaspoon of salt will improve the broth, you also learn that you can't dump a cup of salt in there or you'll ruin it. So you learn from trial and error, and in my case, reading each sentence aloud helps me to find the balance. You have to know when to stop.
WB: Most of your fiction has a first-person discursive narrative, where a narrator reacts to current events with reflections and memories that invigorate the meaning of the story.
AM: I've encountered quite a few individuals who'll say, "You should never write a novel in the first person, and you should never write short stories in the first person." But I've never believed that. I think first person can be used very effectively as a story-telling device. I think readers can get quite involved in a story that's being told from a first-person point of view. It's O.K. to begin your story like Snoopy, "It was a dark and stormy night when he set out." But I think that if you begin, "It was a dark and stormy night when I set out," it has more immediacy. It sounds like I'm going to tell you what really happened to me, and the reader will sense that the story has great meaning to the narrator.
WB: As a consequence, you've often been referred to as a writer of autobiographical fiction, which is not the case. But you don't seem to mind?
AM: Well, it's supposed to be true, and I want you to think it's true. All art is supposed to be true. If you go to the theater, you're supposed to think, "This is really Lady Macbeth." You're not supposed to say, "This is just some actress pretending to be Lady Macbeth." That's part of our suspension of disbelief, and it's a triumph of the technique. So I always like my readers to think the stories are true.
WB: Do you mind when they say, "Oh, I bet that's coming from Alistair's life"?
AM: I only mind in the sense that it's not true, so I much prefer when the reader says, "I could swear this is true." That's the reaction I'd really like. Now, of course, sometimes you have readers who'll get mad or disappointed that the fiction's not autobiographically true. But that really means that your technique is working properly. So it's a tricky thing. It's like painting an apple so well that somebody takes a bite out of it and says, "That doesn't taste like a real apple." So you'll have to admit, "Yes, it isn't a real apple," but you're still very pleased that the person thought it was.
WB: I have a few more questions about your rather distinctive writing methodology. Apparently, you never write drafts, but instead, as indicated earlier, you work from sentence to sentence until you're satisfied. What happens when you're not sure where to go next?
AM: I get up and walk around the room. Occasionally, there are times when I just can't get an individual sentence right, so I'll go on to the next sentence and come back later. But generally, I never move on until I'm satisfied. I could never, for example, write a 350 page draft, and then go back and edit it. For me, it's like making a doorstep. I don't want to make the doorstep and then come back next week and tear it all apart. I prefer to make it right the first time, even if it's a slow process.
WB: Since you carefully plan out all of your writing projects, do you write outlines?
AM: Only in my head.
WB: Do you still write in longhand?
AM: I still do all my writing in longhand.
WB: Do you have any favorite times of the day?
AM: The best time for me is early in the morning, between eight and eleven.
WB: When you plan the stories in your head, do they generally work out in the length you anticipated?
AM: Not always, because I usually don't think of them in terms of length. I just say, "I'll have this person, and this person, and then this will happen, and then that will happen, and so on." Eventually, when I'm about halfway through the actual writing, I'll write down the last few lines.
WB: Do you know the end of the story when you first start writing?
AM: Yes, but not specifically. I might say to myself, "The father has to die at the end," and that's where I'm heading, but I don't know exactly how it'll be worded. Then halfway through the story, I'll write it down specifically, say something like, "There was not much left of my father physically as he lay there with the brass chains on his wrists and the seaweed in his hair." At that point, I'm deep enough into the actual writing of the story that I realize exactly what I want to say to the reader at the end. When I was writing No Great Mischief, the final image of the well coming up through the ice was something that I'd decided on years before I actually finished the book. Then once I'd settled on it, I proceeded toward it.
WB: Another amazing image near the end of the book is Alexander and Calum racing their car across the causeway in the violent storm. Do you have any idea where that came from?
AM: I don't, except that I always knew I'd have to get them across the strait to the island in the storm. But I get all kinds of letters from people saying, "Were you there in 1983 when I drove my Dodge Dart across the causeway? You must have seen us driving between the waves of the ocean." So it seems to resonate with some people as a very specific experience, and, hopefully, it resonates with others as a kind of universal experience.
WB: It took you ten years to complete your first collection of stories, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood, and ten years to complete the second collection, As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories, and then it took you over thirteen years to finish the novel. Has it simply been a matter of finding the time? Was it the obligations of teaching and raising your large family? Or the fact that you could only work in the summers? Or is it just a pace that you prefer?
AM: It was just the limited amounts of time. There's only twenty-four hours in the day, and I was doing lots of other things. At one point in my life, when I wasn't getting any writing done, I wondered if I was just being lazy, so I decided to try to write for two hours every single day. But it didn't work. If I was busy with other things until say four o'clock, then I'd be worried that I hadn't done anything yet. So maybe I'd push it back to ten o'clock in the evening, but then I'd only have two hours left before midnight, and I'd be so tired that I really couldn't think. So all my efforts at a self-imposed discipline were actually making things worse instead of better. So I gave up the idea and accepted the fact that I could work better and more efficiently on the vacations. There's just too much to do during the semesters as a university professor, and my wife and I had six children. But I have no regrets about anything.
WB: Many apocryphal stories have popped up in Canada about how your publisher, Douglas Gibson, finally got you to finish No Great Mischief. One story has him driving from Toronto to Windsor, sneaking into your office and stealing the manuscript, supposedly written on exam booklets. Another has him flying to Nova Scotia and literally pulling the manuscript from your grasp. Another involves a bribe of a bottle of whiskey. Gibson has written an interesting essay about the whole business that was published in Alistair MacLeod: Essays on His Work. But regardless of what really happened, there's still the lingering impression that you were reluctant to wrap up the novel. Is that true?
AM: Not really, it's just that Douglas wanted the novel before it was finished because he was trying to meet a publishing deadline.
WB: Did he have to wait very long?
AM: No, it all worked out just fine. He came to Windsor because of his deadline, and the novel was actually finished at that point, but I hadn't had the time to type a lot of it, so he said, "Just give me what you've got." Then he got a typist to type it up rather quickly, and I didn't mind at all since I had no intention of doing any revising at the typewriter. So I was very fortunate with the way things worked out, publishing my first novel at the age of sixty-two!
WB: I hope, now that you've retired from teaching, that there'll be many more stories and novels in the future, and I'd like to finish up today by asking you to read a passage from your story "The Road to Rankin's Point," which is about a sick young man of twenty-three who has only a few months to live and decides to visit his elderly grandmother.
AM: I'll be glad to read that passage:

"I rise and climb the steep road until I am standing at the cliff's edge which faces out to sea. I turn my head to the left and try to look up the coast to the home and buildings of Rankin's Point, but I cannot see in the darkness. For the first time in the centuries since the Scottish emigrations there is no human life at the end of this dark road. I turn again to the open sea and concentrate very hard on seeing something but it is no use. My grandmother cannot see Prince Edward Island now nor ever will again. I look down into the darkness beneath my feet but there too there is only a darkened void although I can hear the water lapping gently on the boulders far below."

WB: Thank you, Alistair, for your time and your wonderful writings.
AM: Thank you, Bill, and since your grandmother was a MacDonald, I'll finish up by saying, "My hope is constant in thee, Clan Donald."