Can you tell us about your formative years and how they shaped your creative imagination? Was reading and writing a big part of your world growing up?
I was very much an outsider as a child. I wanted to be involved in dangerous activities, and I was up for more imaginative adventures than, say, getting a ball game underway. I liked setting things on fire and going places I wasn’t supposed to go. I didn’t have much time for competitive sports, even though I was marginally involved in softball and hockey for years. I’d say the only sport I put any real value in was, and is, cross-country running, and that’s a very solitary, masochistic activity, which suits me fine. But where I come from, hockey players are hailed as community heroes, no matter if they happen to be illiterate, bullying narcissists. And if you don’t excel at sports, then you’re pretty much useless. I think that’s the way with a lot of Canadian towns. There certainly wasn’t any room for creative thought or artistic expression. And, of course, when you’re really young, you don’t have any way of knowing that you’re an artist or a writer. So you just think you’re useless or fucked up somehow. There’s something wrong with you if you don’t care about the Stanley Cup. So with me being a rather rambunctious individual, I just found ways to rebel and satisfy my interests.
“As a child, I wanted to be involved in dangerous activities.
My father was a voracious reader and I always strove for his approval, so from a young age, I found a lot of comfort in books.
It never really occurred to me that I could write until I was in my early teens. I discovered The Doors, typically, and thought I was Jim Morrison for a while. And through The Doors I got on to Bob Dylan and Jack Ker-ouac, and then Steinbeck and Hemingway and all those crazies.
My mother is a closet-case songwriter and spent her entire life playing the piano. My uncle is the renowned songwriter Ron Hynes, and so I felt I was close to creativity somehow. Ron would put out an album every couple of years, and he’d be all over the TV and the papers. He was quite famous on the Southern Shore, and I remember finding some sort of indirect inspiration from all that, a feeling that it was possible.
“I always feel like I am moving forward when I write.”
So I started writing poetry. Flat out. Three or four full poems a day. Perfect rhyme schemes. Teenage stuff. Then I moved on to journal writing, and fictionalizing my journals. I started a band and we played the bars. We were all hungry and young and naive, and we had fun. I was reading all the while.
I guess I’ve been writing since I was a child—stories and essays and poetry and lyrics—and I’ve always identified with books and writers. So I am a writer, and always was, long before I was ever published.
Writing offers me control. I always feel like I am moving forward when I write.
Many of your characters, but particularly Keith Kavanagh and Clayton Reid, have a propensity toward self-obliteration. Yet they don’t seem to take death too seriously; rather, they get a thrill out of courting self-destructiveness. In fact, one of Clayton’s favourite toasts is “There’s always suicide.” Can you talk a little about that?
I’ve never taken death too seriously. I have an egotism that lets me believe I’m immune to it, or that my own death will be timely and poetic. Or that it can’t happen to me. Or that I’m not one of the ones who actually will contract lung cancer from smoking. Or that AIDS is something that happens to someone else. Or that I can become involved with certain drugs and can pull out whenever I like, no trouble. That I am different. It’s stupid, I know, and maybe it’s a sort of defence mechanism. Maybe it just means I’m a bit of a nutbar. But I have a suspicion that a lot of people think that way. The truth is, I’ve had a few close calls and lived to tell the tale, and I feel like I’ve been spared for a good reason, like if I didn’t check out that night ten years ago with all those downers packed into my system, I won’t kick it on my way to the grocery store tomorrow either. And that attitude helps me run red lights and give lip to big guys downtown.
“I have an egotism that lets me believe I’m immune to death, or that my own death will be timely and poetic.
But seriously, once when I was seventeen, I was kicked out of a club on the Southern Shore because I was practically legless. I walked a small ways down the road toward home and collapsed in the woods in the snow. That night it rained a little and then warmed up for a while before it got really cold again. When I woke up the next morning, my hair was frozen into the ice—I had really long hair back then—and I had to yank hard to get out of it. I didn’t die, and I always think I defied physical reality by living. And something else in me believes I was being watched over and kept here for a reason.
These days I’m working on a number of different projects, some personal and some commissioned. I’m writing a screenplay a new stageplay, and I’m developing a new novel. I also teach creative writing at Her Majesty’s Penitentiary in St. John’s, where I’m helping the inmates create an anthology of their work. I’ve always got a lot of things going at one given time, even though half the time I feel like I’ve got nothing going on at all.
“I’ve always got a lot of things going at one given time, even though half the time I feel like I’ve got nothing going on at all.”
The novel I’m working on is called Say Nothing Saw Wood. It’s based on the true story of a murder that happened in my hometown in 1971. A teenager killed an old woman after she woke up to find him robbing her home. She had known him all his life and looked out for him from the time he was a small child. The story is basically an exploration of a life gone horribly wrong, how one split-second decision can change the course of so many lives. It’s a look at how we are remembered, how we would like to be perceived and received by the world, and whether or not we can ever truly rise above the stigma of the worst thing we’ve ever done.