Andrea MacPherson

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Linda Richards of January Magazine.  Her questions were thoughtful, and often thought-provoking: Are you one of those who loves to write? Or one of those who loves to have written?

It reminded me of the careful business of interviewing – a skill not always acknowledged, but appreciated whole-heartedly when done right.  And Linda certainly does it right.

Read the interview here.

I came downstairs to my office this morning – old door repainted and used as desk, two north facing windows that let a cool breeze come through for most of the day, large white chair where I sit crosslegged, jasmine plant perched on top of a stack of books, dripping and scenting the room – full of a poem I had started late last night, and turned on my computer.

After typing out the few lines that still were with me, I dutifully checked my email accounts. The first one I read? A note from a reader, discussing Beyond the Blue. Now, I’ve had many letters and notes from readers before, but this one resonated with me in a new way. The writer had a connection to Dundee, similar to mine: his great-grandfather had been a mill owner at the same time that the novel takes place.

This prompted me to think about locations and relocation. How did his family wind up here, in BC? Was the story similar to my grandmother’s? How do all these threads combine and come apart to make these stories, these histories, all these memories passed down and filtered?

My grandmother, to whom the novel is dedicated, came to Canada as a war bride. She left industrial Dundee and found herself in rural Merritt – wooden walkways, still. Outhouses. Fields, and fields, and more fields. It’s often given me pause to consider how this location – and this relocation – affected her and, in turn, all the members of my family. How would our lives be different if they had stayed in Dundee? Strange, how that one decision – a step onto a boat, a plane, a train – can shape everything around it.

I replied to the reader, asking about his great-grandfather and his experiences in Dundee. I’m left to wonder how similar the stories will be, how immersed in location we all are.

I’ve been working on my third novel for the last few weeks (which I won’t give details about, if nothing else, I am superstitious) and have found myself in a strange, hazy place.  I started the novel in early 2005, but it was lurking around in my head long before that, as far back as 2000 when I first visited Ireland and stood in a blue bedroom with a dead crow on the floor. 

 It felt like something lost, something written by a strange hand, something foreign to me.  I knew the story.  I knew I had written it.  But I had no actual memory of the act of writing it – late at night?  rainy afternoons? – or of creating the language that stared back at me from the white page.  And so I wondered, is there some kind of fugue that comes with the writing of a novel?  Is it such a grand undertaking that if we, as authors, really remembered the process, we would never attempt it again?  Or, rather, do we work in a heightened state that becomes only a distant possibility after the fact?

 I haven’t decided yet.

What I do know is that now, I am a different person, living a different life, and a different writer.  Our voices are similar – there’s always those words that slip in too often, ‘enough’ and ‘imagine’ and, in this novel, ‘cerulean’ for some reason - but now the challenge is to blend these voices together and really see the novel.

So I’ll be rereading it.  And writing.  And finding myself in that lovely fugue again.

Natural Disasters, my first collection of poetry, will be available this July.  The collection has been a long time coming – it was completed in 2001, originally to be published in the fall of 2003, and now has a new, lovely home with Palimpsest Press – and I am thrilled to finally have it out in the world.  

Please feel free to attend the Launch – August 16, 2007 at Whitby’s Bookstore in White Rock, BC.

 George McWhirter, Vancouver’s Poet Laureate, says of the collection:

This book captures the core of Andrea MacPherson’s Scots-Irish-Canadian heritage, where even spite is a delight and dread, delight and devotion all feed on the lush BC criss-cross of cedar cloak on tartan and saffron lines.

 Stephanie Bolster, Governor General award winning poet, says:

MacPherson knows where desire and grief, inextricably bound, lodge in the body and she knows that language can awaken memory to make ‘wings beat against the chest’.  In Natural Disasters, the chest is pulled open to show the wings inside.

I attended the Michael Ondaatje reading last night at Christ Church Cathedral with my friend, Jane Silcott.  The venue was amazing – stained glass, hurricane lamps, beams – and the conversation between Michael Ondaatje and Hal Wake even better.  I’m really looking forward to finishing Divisadero, and thankful to Ondaatje for saying that he never writes from an outline (neither do I!).  A memorable moment with Hal Wake: rephrasing an audience query to contain the phrase new tenants move into your head.

I had the wonderful opportunity of participating in two readings – one at Silk Purse with Jen Sookfong Lee and Shaena Lambert, another at the Parkgate Library with Trevor Carolan.  They were lovely events, complete with the gracious folks from 32 Books and enthusiastic audiences.  Thank you to all involved.

I’ve had a wonderful interview with Mark McLaughlin of the Courier in Dundee, Scotland.  I was so excited to talk about the novel with a Dundonian, nevermind a reporter from a paper that features in Beyond the Blue.  On the morning of the profile’s publication, I got a message from my aunt who had opened the paper to see me smiling back at her – it would be lovely if they were able to walk into a bookstore and see the novel there as well!

You can read the profile here