12 or 20 (second series) questions with Melia McClure
Melia McClure
is the author of the novels
All the World’s a Wonder
and
The Delphi Room
. After a childhoodspent dancing and acting, she has been seen on film, television, and the stageof The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Favourite acting memories include aturn as Juliet in an abridged collage of Shakespeare’s classic and . Film and theatre along with visual artare the three muses that inspire her writing. They kindle her fascination withthe book-to-film metamorphosis. Her fiction is a confluence of magic realism,black humour, and abnormal psychology, opening unexpected backroads to elementsof the metaphysical. Melia is a graduate of The Writer's Studio at Simon FraserUniversity in Vancouver, where she was born. She now divides her time betweenCanada and Europe.1 - How did your first bookchange your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? Howdoes it feel different?
The publication of my firstbook vindicated my conviction that I could do something unusual with the novelform and see this odd literary concoction enter the wider world. The DelphiRoom mixes prose—much of it in the form of an epistolaryrelationship—with screenplay and is a nod to cinema. Mymost recent work, All the World’s a Wonder, is a hat-tip to the theatreand marries playscript with prose, some of the latter as diary entries andemails, but almost all as character monologues that speak directly to theaudience. One of my aims with this book was to transform the novel into a stageperformance, with the reader in the front row. A play within a novel.
The Delphi Room is a love story about two cinephilestrapped in adjacent rooms which they believe to be hell; it uses an insularsetting to access the expansive internal realities of its characters. Incontrast, All the World’s a Wonder traverses from Manhattan to Corfu,and from modern day to the Jazz Age; it likewise plunges into emotional abyssesand psychological chasms, but through a broader scope of storytelling.
2 - How did you come tofiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
I’m an actor, and for me,fiction is a natural extension of performing. When I write, I’m channelling thecharacters the way an actor does, and for that reason my fiction isvoice-driven and dialogue-rich.
3 - How long does it take tostart any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly,or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their finalshape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I can be slow to commenceand slow to proceed. My approach is careful and intuitive. I can also writescenes at a rapid pace once I’ve said to hell with it and stepped on stage, soto speak. I often have an opening scene in mind. Because I work by listeningfor direction from the characters, who frequently say surprising and inconvenientlyillogical things, I must make an epic pact of trust that what they say isleading somewhere, preferably not off a cliff. Although the editing process isinvaluable, my early drafts look quite similar to the final result. Perhapsthis is because I need to be loving the language and the voices and feel thatthe bones of the piece are strong to continue the journey.
4 - Where does a work ofprose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end upcombining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" fromthe very beginning?
I began my writing life withshort fiction, but now most of my prose begins with the idea that what I’mwriting will become a book. That said, a novel is constructed scene by scene, andbecause my work tends to spring from the perspective of a dramaturge, I ventureforth with a focus on the dramatic microcosm and let the macrocosm take care ofitself.
5 - Are public readings partof or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoysdoing readings?
My novels are written forlive performance. Storytelling is an oral tradition. I love to put on my actorhat and share the work with an audience.
6 - Do you have anytheoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are youtrying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questionsare?
When I began writing Allthe World’s a Wonder, I was musing on how one might go about bringing toliterary life the mysticism and theatrics of the creative process, itsdevastation and exultation. My lens was on the artist as conduit, on theartistic impulse being dictated by deathless otherworldly characters.
All my work asksmetaphysical questions, bends time and space while remaining rooted in realism,and probes the possibilities of the mind, love, and redemption.
Art is a call and responseabout the search for meaning. So, although the questions posed by a given workmay be coloured by the details of the day, the answers we are striving towardare intemporal. An artist offers incomplete answers which are perhaps fragmentsof an ineffable completeness.
7 – What do you see thecurrent role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? Whatdo you think the role of the writer should be?
Art reminds us that what werefer to as reality is just one possibility plucked from an infinite spectrumof potentials. The writer opens the door to dimensions which are not already unveiledin the temporal world, and these dimensions would never be actualized here,were it not for the artist’s insistence on prying into shadowy corners.
It is through the stories wetell and the stories we read that the stories we live are revealed anew.
8 - Do you find the processof working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
A keen editor is theessential first audience member, and the editorial process is an extended dressrehearsal, to lean on theatre jargon. Is the performance playing to the back ofthe house? Will tomatoes be tossed?
Still, the process isdelicate, and thus stepping into it involves a degree of trepidation. To feelprotective of one’s creations is only natural; for the writer, a difficultbalance of defensive vigilance and open-minded serenity is required.
9 - What is the best pieceof advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved inyour heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and likebooks that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek theanswers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you willthen gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into theanswer.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
10 - How easy has it beenfor you to move between genres (writing to acting to dance)? What do you see asthe appeal?
Dance was an important partof my childhood and my introduction to performance. Acting also began early, asdid making up stories and writing them down. Storytelling and self-expressionwere always essential, no matter what form they took. Writing and acting seem anatural pair to me, the internal and external versions of the same expressiveimperative. With writing, I love that I can both become the characters as anactor does—even though no one can see me—and perch in the director’s chair, guiding theaction.
11 - What kind of writingroutine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day(for you) begin?
Morning, when the mind hasjust journeyed back from the other side of elsewhere and life has yet to pouncefrom all angles, is preferred. Tea, reverie, write, celebrate wee victories.
12 - When your writing getsstalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word)inspiration?
Years ago, I began dabblingwith paint. It is a way to experience the pure freedom and joy of creationwithout the pressure of striving to excel. The art of child’s play.
13 - What fragrance remindsyou of home?
The scent of backstage, of aslant of spotlight streaming with dust.
My parents gave me thechance to taste the stage early on. Their support is my talisman. Even when I wasa very young child in a ballet recital, the scent of an old theatre and the warmsmell of bright lights felt like a second home and meant both a deep connectionto my family and to grand unknown realms, soon to be born.
14 - David W. McFadden oncesaid that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influenceyour work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Books are sensory experiencesthat come from other sensory experiences. Henry, a character in All theWorld’s a Wonder, is a violinist. I was inspired by the singulartransporting sensation of a solo violinist playing Ravel. Anais, from the samenovel, is passionate about cuisine, her culinary creations paying homage both toher Hungarian grandmother and to the beauty of Greece.
15 - What other writers orwritings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I will read the gamut fromcrime fiction to haiku to stage play. I am less concerned with my taste andmore simply curious about the possible majesty of words and story. Many of thewriters I’ve long loved—Alice Munro, to name a beloved icon—have a style very different from my own. If anything,I am drawn to what is far departed from my favoured stomping ground. I love reading stage playsas it feeds my fondness for dialogue. I adored The Cripple of Inishmaanby Martin McDonagh when I sawit on the stage and recently loved it again on the page.
16 - What would you like todo that you haven't yet done?
Travel the Silk Road. When I think ofstorytelling as a spoken-word tradition, I think of a caravanserai full oftraders bearing tales. The chronicles collected and shared along these fabledroutes doubtless served as spiritual lamps for weary travellers in the coldfirelight, and likely influenced the world of then and now in far more waysthan we can imagine.
As both the traveller and the storyteller know,and in the words of André Breton, “…literature is one of the saddest roads thatleads to everything.”
17 - If you could pick anyother occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do youthink you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
The healing arts. Words canheal, but if not words, then herbs.
18 - What made you write, asopposed to doing something else?
It is in writing the voicesof others that I feel most myself.
19 - What was the last greatbook you read? What was the last great film?
I reread Lisa Moore’s short-storycollection Open. A white napkin, marked with red lipstick and fallen tothe ground, is a wounded dove. Arresting.
One of my treasured films isThe Road Home, directed by Zhang Yimou. Simple, gentle, graceful, timeless.
20 - What are you currentlyworking on?
There seem to be characterschattering in my ear, flinging themselves between Southeast Asia and New York, barkingout another novel. Heaven forfend.
