One Question Interview: Amber McMillan

Amber McMillan has won a Penguin Random House award for fiction and has been shortlisted for the Montreal International Poetry Prize. She is the author of the memoir The Woods: A Year on Protection Island (2016) as well as two poetry titles: We Can’t Ever Do This Again (2015) and This Is a Stickup (2022). This question concerns her book of stories, The Running Trees (2021) available from Goose Lane Editions.

I’m impressed that your quietly meaningful stories use a variety of techniques, including description that’s sparse and precise, but sometimes (even most often) dialogue as a way to get everything across. What appeals about that particular technique? 

Approaching writing in terms of sparsity and precision comes from my practice as a poet in which the idea is to see what can be effectively communicated in as little words as possible. I want to communicate but I don’t want to be the authority; that is, I want there to be an interpretive relationship to the text available to the reader that bypasses the author, or whatever authority on the text the author is thought of to have.

I made a particular point in The Running Trees not to assign gender to the characters as often as it was meaningfully possible because I wanted the thoughts, behaviours, and words of the characters to be experienced out of that (out-dated) context. For similar reasons, I also eliminated descriptions of age, race, body type, hair colour, profession, and other characterizations to see – as a kind of experiment – how much of what we’re used to be told about a character is actually unnecessary to the story. I’m still thinking a lot about the idea of an “author” and the ways we not only allow but expect them to take on the role of narrative expert, leaving us, the readers, as passive receivers and interpreters.

I’ve been troubled by the cultural notion that an author’s aim for a book is the aim that most matters – and so that is the aim that gets unpacked in, say, a Creative Writing class. What is the author’s intention? What is the author trying to tell us? What does the author mean? When I’ve been faced with questions like that I think to myself: who cares? As an author, I can admit that I have aims when I write, but I’m not convinced that what I meant to do is worth doing, nor that what I meant to say is worth interpreting. I’m far more curious about how my work is interpreted, how it reaches or doesn’t reach you, how it fits or doesn’t fit into the current milieu.

When I write poetry, I’m interested in atmosphere. I create atmosphere by word choices, rhythm, and imagery. I feel the same way about writing stories. Like other authors I have a narrative focus, I have intellectual aims, I have “a message” in mind, but… who cares?

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Published on December 12, 2022 16:04
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