I went around asking writers the following question — and these were mostly novelists. What is it like when you go into a novel? And nobody said: What do you mean, go into a novel? They all said: It’s dark. It’s like a dark room. It’s like a dark room full of furniture I can’t see. It’s like a tunnel. It’s like a cave. It’s like going downstairs into a dark place. It’s like wading through a river. It’s like entering a labyrinth. Isn’t that interesting? … Nobody said: It’s like skippity-hopping around on the clouds. Nobody said that.

I’ve been in the dark tunnel with this novel for a little over a year now.  I started it before my daughter was born, believing I would have ALL THIS EXTRA TIME to write while I was on maternity leave.  I know, just typing that seems incredibly stupid even to me.  But, honestly, I didn’t know.  I didn’t know how much time, effort and attention a newborn required.  I thought, I’ll write when she naps.  I’ll write when my husband is home.  I’ll write when her grandparents babysit.  Turns out, I slept while she napped.  I wanted to spend time with her and my husband when I was home.  I wanted to go out for dinner, to take a long bath, to watch a movie, to do anything but WORK while grandparents babysat.

So, this novel is taking longer than any other I have written.  I’m about 1/3 in, but feel like I have been there for months on end.  I’m stalled, paused, plateaued and it is a strange and slightly unnerving feeling.  And then I realized, everything has changed in the last year of my life–new baby, new job, new house–and I am still moving around that dark room that is the novel, trying to feel the furniture.  Turns out, I forgot I put the chaise by the window.  These are the small details that I need to get back into the novel, to stop thinking about it and worrying about it and just WRITE IT.

I’m planning some extra hours at my campus office, huddled there in the dim light, thinking only about the novel, about the characters who will not get out of my head, about all the furniture that now needs rearranging, dusting, and a little airing out.

But, then, anyone who knows me would call me out, screaming in that way of children, Not it!

I’m more superstitious than I would like to admit.  I write with a certain kind of pen–always longhand, unless editing–and I throw spilled salt over my shoulder, and I avoid putting shoes on tables, and I knock wood, and I believe in signs, and I think I have a couple of guardian angels, and I don’t walk under ladders, and…..and….and…..

So when my grandmother’s bracelet broke tonight, I wondered what this meant.  A break from always looking to the past?  A reminder that she is here with me, as I write?  A moment to consider the long line of women in my family [the line not yet broken, three generations and counting of baby girl daughters, only]?  There are so many options, that my mind momentarily paused: omen?  Good fortune.

In the end, I decided it meant that my grandmother was near me, reminding me to do the things she most wanted me to do: write stories, take pride in my work, be honest even when no one else wants to hear it.  And so I stare at my stack of papers, my newest novel, and believe in honesty and, most of all, the spirit sitting at my wrist, urging me to write.

Natural Disasters

Longlisted for the ReLit Awards!

Natural Disasters is the first poetry collection from Andrea MacPherson. It explores memory and history, asking if it is possible to inherit the past and the generational complexities that come along with it. Stories of lost sisters and marriages based on card games combine with the immediate and personal responses to wild fires and collapsed schoolhouses.

The collection is also concerned with place, from the dry land of the interior of BC to the rugged beauty of the west coast shoreline. These settings affect not only language and mood, but tangible links to the past, the ‘dusky valleys’ and ‘planks stained with fish blood’.Here, the tragic mingles with the everyday, allowing shadowy figures and hazy memory to once again become real.

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Away is inspired by travels abroad. Never leaving Canada far behind, Andrea MacPherson takes us with her on her grand tour of Europe from Ireland and Scotland to France and Greece, where the vast legacy of human history and her own ancestral origins mark her so subtly that, as a record of her stay in each country, she assembles suites of deft, personal lyrics that probe the mystery of estrangement from the familiar and the shock of the old’s sometimes anticipated, sometimes unexpected, impress.

Whether she is crossing the uneasy if commonplace border between north and south in Ireland, visiting the ruins of a jute mill where her Scottish great-grandmother once worked, stopping for a kir on a ruelle in Montparnasse, or voyaging out by ferry into blue clarities of the Aegean, MacPherson is a traveller always aware of how her perceptions—and her self—are being shaped. In this book of quiet beauty and careful observation, MacPherson embarks on re-inventing the travel poem on her own terms.

What she brings with her as a poet is more than equal to what she encounters. Away marks a voice that knows what it is for the heart and mind to journey.

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‘When She Was Electric is a powerfully poetic story of secrets and departures that vibrates with the energy of family ghost and chilling events.’
- Herizons

When She Was Electric is a layered, evocative first novel from a young writer. At its heart is a wrenching disruption–the disappearance of a young girl in a sleepy town in the 1930s.

Electric digs deep into the story of three generations of women: the enterprising grandmother who bought a rejected piece of land near an Indian Reserve; the daughters, ethereal Min and bold Nellie; and granddaughters Ana and Willa, who embody the hopes–and the secrets–of this matriarchy. MacPherson brilliantly reveals the hazy unreliability of memory, the fragility of life, and how a child’s death haunts a splintered town.

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Beyond the Blue (Random House, 2007)

‘Given these cramped circumstances and its generally naturalistic tenor, Beyond the Blue is a surprisingly poetic account of working-class life. A fine memorial, then, to MacPherson’s own Dundee-born grandmother, and to a way of life whose passing is scarcely mourned.’
- The Georgia Straight

In a Scottish mill town purged of men by war, four unforgettable women navigate a treacherous time, guided only by the bonds of family and their bold dreams of escape.

In 1918, rainy Dundee is nearly emptied of men. The Great War has left the town’s women both newfound freedom and servitude. They toil in the deadly jute mills, taking in the children of perished family members and praying their own bodies – and spirits – do not fail them too.

A grateful widow of the war, Morag shelters her daughters as best she can: beautiful Caro schemes to escape the working class with well-calculated seduction, while Wallis works in the mill alongside her mother, slowly fortifying both spirit and pocketbook for a more radical departure. Morag’s orphaned niece, Imogen, seeks to understand her fragile mother’s death, and the return of the father who abandoned them.

Infused with the longing, courage and passion of its indelible cast of characters, and steeped in the faith and terrors of its time – from the suffragettes and the Easter Uprising to the influenza pandemic and the Tay Bridge disaster – Beyond the Blue is a lyrical, reflective novel about finding purpose and freedom in a place without hope.

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What does September mean to me?  My daughter turns one and I go back to work to a position that has seemed something like a ghost to me.  Accepting the position, yet not having actually worked it, is an odd limbo.  I’ll be taking on new responsibilities at work, which I am excited about, but it’s been months since I even thought about classes, course development, student assignments, committees, marking, texts, department meetings, etc, etc, etc.  I’m not sure what this means in terms of practical application–how to balance teaching with writing with motherhood–but I suspect I will become close friends with my campus office desk…..and late nights.

The Bleak Future of the Arts

With all the new funding cuts to the arts, you might wonder what the arts will look like.  How better to express it than with something visual?  Thanks to artist Perry Haddock for forwarding this beautiful, if tragic, view of the arts.