Elizabeth Hay’s novel Garbo Laughs, was the winner of the Ottawa Book Award, a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, a Globe & Mail Notable Book of the Year, and a Macleans’ Top Ten Books of the Year. Her other words include the award-winning novel A Student of Weather, and the short story collection Small Change. Nathaniel G. Moore talked with the author about her most recent novel, Late Nights On Air, winner of the 2007 Giller Prize.
Nathaniel G. Moore: You worked for the CBC in Yellowknife from 1974-78. Did this experience directly inform your latest novel Late Nights on Air?
Elizabeth Hay: I tried to recreate as accurately as possible the small radio station where I started out in 1974. I changed the layout slightly, but, in the main, it’s the same place. I like to have a bit of real ground under my feet when I launch a fictional story and that station in Yellowknife was one of the most vivid worlds I’ve known. It was cozy, crowded, tense, and terrifying, the small and complicated kernel of a small and complicated town.
NGM: Harry Boyd, who works at the station, seems like a noir-type, a bit of a lowlife with a hint of charm. Was he a difficult character to write?
EH: When I worked in radio, it was a young person’s profession. There were a few older men on the sidelines who seemed over the hill to me, a bit pathetic. Harry Boyd is one of that type. He’s the sort of old hand you can learn a great deal from. First, he’s not a snob. Second, he’s known enough success and failure in his life to be careless of his tongue and of his heart. I enjoyed his company very much. Harder to write was Eddy, a scary and confusing loner. And Dido, with her less than transparent personality.
NGM: How important was the work of George Whalley to you while writing this book?
EH: George Whalley was a Canadian academic and a poet. His field was Coleridge, but he also wrote a tremendous biography called The Legend of John Hornby. He got as close to the mysterious figure of Hornby as it’s possible to get, and his tools were assiduous research and a sympathetic and far-reaching imagination. His book is so disciplined and generous that it makes most work look lazy in comparison. I read The Legend of John Hornby when I lived in Yellowknife, then canoed through the part of the Barrens where Hornby starved to death, and the book remains a touchstone for me. The quality of Whalley’s approach – his thoughtful persistence – actually reminds me of my editor, Ellen Seligman. I owe a great deal to both of them.
NGM: Can you give us a single word for each of your seven books?
EH: Crossing the Snow Line. Tentative. The Only Snow in Havana. Oranges. Captivity Tales. Trapped. Small Change. Squeezed. A Student of Weather. Knuckles. Garbo Laughs. Longing. Late Nights on Air. Embrace.
NGM: What is Yellowknife like in the summer? Were you writing then?
EH: I spent four winters and five summers in Yellowknife and one of those summers was the most glorious I’ve ever known. That was the golden summer of 1975. It’s rare to have a string of still, warm, luminous days like that. Usually it’s cooler, windier. At that time I was writing poetry and taking stabs at prose in the form of journal entries. I’ve been back to Yellowknife once, in 1988. I didn’t return for the purposes of this book. Yellowknife has changed so much since the 1970s that I thought a visit might throw me off my fictional track. Instead, I relied on memory and research and imagination, and on the memories and knowledge of others who were there.
NGM: As you wrote Late Nights on Air did you ever think about how radio itself is an interesting dialogical tool?
EH: I thought about radio as a personal and intimate medium that’s been important to me since childhood. Setting a novel in a radio station gave me the chance to write about the romance of disembodied voices, the importance of listening, the terror of being on air and the burden of embarrassment, the power of unseen connections, and the sounds made by all manner of things.
NGM: How soon after Garbo Laughs did you commence Late Nights?
EH: I let a number of months go by. I’m always mulling things over and making notes, but I’ve learned that I shouldn’t rush into the next novel too soon. Right now, for instance, I’m working on some short fiction as a bridge between Late Nights on Air and the next novel. Well, in truth, I don’t seem to be getting much done.
NGM: Has traveling within Canada or abroad influenced your writing?
EH: I boast that by the time I was 23, I’d traveled across Canada from Newfoundland to the Queen Charlottes and up to Yellowknife. In those days certain remote landscapes captured my imagination, the wilder the better, and I had a huge urge to see them. Living in Yellowknife then ignited my interest in what I thought of as its opposite, New Orleans. Later on I went farther south to Mexico and Latin America, completing my north-south travels. I was writing about the physical details of place and the emotional burden of homesickness and the difficulty of loving well. I’m not much of a traveler anymore. I’m older and rather anchored to my desk.
NGM: Do you ever imagine your characters in cross-hardcover encounters? If Harriet Browning met up with Gwen Symon, on air or not, what do you think they’d talk about?
EH: I wanted to have Norma Joyce Hardy from A Student of Weather make an appearance in Garbo Laughs. I wanted the song detective and Dinah Bloom from Garbo Laughs to have cameos in Late Nights on Air. I never managed it. Either those little intrusions were indulgent thinking on my part and extraneous to the story, or they were beyond my abilities to carry off. Maybe next time. If they were to meet, Harriet and Gwen might well talk about the texture of Judge Berger’s voice and how in its lightness it bears a slight resemblance to the voices of Gene Kelly and Marlon Brando.
NGM: Do you worry how your own family will react to your books?
EH: Before publication I feel spasms of embarrassment when I imagine members of my family reading certain lines, certain scenes. It’s part of the cloud of anxiety that settles over me. It’s hard to have a writer in the family. I understand if they choose not to read what I write, even though I want them to read it and like it. My only way of coping with the awkwardness is to work on something new.
NGM: Do you feel today’s media is making us more human or less human? Part two of this question is a statement you can agree with or disagree with: Media (including radio) is human-made weather.
EH: Today’s media are making us stupider. Generally they’re chatter-filled and audience-obsessed and less and less concerned with stimulating and deepening our thoughts. I like your notion that radio is human-made weather. The title Late Nights on Air is meant to convey the various meanings of air – as atmosphere, as elation, as exposure. Radio at its best is still a wonderful thing. Like a good book, it can make you feel more alive, more connected to the world.
NGM: How has the Ottawa writing scene changed over the years?
EH: I’ve lived in Ottawa since 1992 and know the writing scene just well enough to know it’s as lively or as quiet as you want it to be. I’m at the quiet end of the spectrum. People leave you alone, which is delightful.
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