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Author Esi Edugyan will be presenting the Arts & Science Book Club events on October 22

Q&A with Esi Edugyan - 2015 Arts & Science Book Club Author

Half-Blood Blues won the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize and was shortlisted for various other national and international honours

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by dee Hobsbawn-Smith

Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan is the 2015-2016 College of Arts & Science Book Club book of the year.

Students, faculty and staff across the college will be reading Half-Blood Blues in anticipation of the author’s October 22 visit. On that day, Edugyan will appear on campus to discuss Half-Blood Blues and her life as an author.

Esi Edugyan was born in Calgary and now lives in Victoria. Half-Blood Blues won the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction and the Rogers Writers Trust Fiction Prize.

Saskatoon writer dee Hobsbawn-Smith connected with Edugyan by email this spring on behalf of the college. Here is their conversation.

Q: HOW WAS THIS NOVEL BORN?

EE: Through accident and happenstance, as is so often the case. In 2005, I found myself in Stuttgart, attending an arts residency. I had never spent any appreciable time in Germany before this, and I noticed at once both the differences there—of course—as well as the similarities, similarities made strange by the differences surrounding them. As a black woman in Germany, for instance, I felt acutely aware of my own skin, in a way I did not at home. I began to wonder about the history of black people in Germany; when I came across a reference to the so-called “Rhineland Bastards,” children born to German women and French black colonial soldiers at the close of the First World War, a story started to take shape in my mind. I wondered what had happened to those children during the Third Reich. But it wasn’t until Sid and Hiero started talking that the novel was truly "born."

Q: TELL ME ABOUT THE RESEARCH YOU UNDERTOOK TO WRITE HALF-BLOOD BLUES.

EE: I tend to live inside a novel, for the long years that it takes to be written; everything feeds into the book. It’s difficult for me to go back, sometimes, and reconstruct where elements came from. Certainly I read extensively, and listened to various records, one record leading me into another, Miles Davis’ Porgy and Bess leading me back toward Armstrong, in a strange and unexpected way. But the novel itself is a creative act, not a research paper, and the governing principle in its writing tends to have something to do with instinct, what feels right, and an element of the unexpected—a delicious surprise when the book brings something into focus that I hadn’t myself noticed. Where does it come from? Sometimes, as the author, you find yourself asking that very question.

Q: IF YOU WERE TO WRITE THIS NOVEL, SET IN A DIFFERENT ERA BUT WITH A SIMILAR THEME, WHERE AND WHEN MIGHT YOU SET IT?

EE: This story, its characters, the pressures they face, all of this is so much a part of its era that it would be difficult to answer this. Changing the era would change the characters; changing the characters would change the story.

Q: WHICH OF THE CHARACTERS IN HALF-BLOOD BLUES WAS EASIEST TO WRITE? WHICH WAS THE MOST DIFFICULT?

EE: Every character presented their own pleasures and challenges. The most fun to write, certainly, was Chip Jones, being somewhat of a loose cannon and the most prone to outrageous behaviour. I’ve always been drawn to people who live in broad strokes, perhaps because I lean in the opposite direction. Hieronymus Falk might have been the most difficult to write—creating a fully blooded person, but keeping him unknowable.

Q: IF YOU WEREN’T A NOVELIST, WHAT MIGHT YOU SEE YOURSELF AS DOING AND WHY?

EE: Oh! I don’t think I’m much good for anything else.

Q: WHAT WRITERS INSPIRE YOU AND WHO AND WHAT ARE YOU CURRENTLY READING?

EE: I’ve grown fussier in my reading of late, maybe because time is at such a premium. Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead blew me away recently with its quiet wisdom, its sense of wonder. I am currently reading Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage, which is a sort of swashbuckler’s take on slavery, if such a thing can be said to exist, and enjoying it very much.

Q: WHAT IS AN OUTSTANDING BEGINNING OR ENDING TO A NOVEL YOU ADMIRE?

EE: As for beginnings, I tend to like things that are slightly idiosyncratic, things that hook without being showy. I have always preferred the second sentence of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (“Everything had gone wrong in the Oblonsky household”) to the first (“All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”). The beginning of Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March is breathtaking; so is the opening of Philip Roth’sSabbath’s Theatre, which has been much imitated but never outdone. The endings I love still bring tears to my eyes: A House for Mr. Biswas by Naipaul, Mordecai Richler’s Barney’s Version.

Q: WHAT IS YOUR CURRENT WRITING PROJECT?

EE: Another novel. I seem fated to live in any era but my own, and this new project is no different.

Q: WHAT WOULD YOU TELL EMERGING WRITERS ABOUT THE BUSINESS OF WRITING AND THE CREATIVE ACT OF WRITING?

EE: Remind yourself daily that writing is a joy and a privilege and that nothing matters but the words. You are in it for the words—it is that simple. You are in it to explore and challenge through language. You cannot control what happens beyond yourself. The business of writing is a distraction and tends to work against the act itself. I wish it weren’t so.

Q: HOW DO YOU AND YOUR PARTNER (writer Steven Price) ORGANIZE YOUR WRITING LIVES AND PERSONAL LIVES? DO YOU READ AND PROVIDE FEEDBACK ON EACH OTHER’S WORK?

EE: My husband is my first and my best editor. He reads every draft of what I write and gives me hard, clear, sometimes withering, feedback. (I can hear him in the next room, protesting that it is never withering!) I do the same with him. We bring different strengths to the art of writing and so it’s been a rich and symbiotic life together.

Q: HOW ON EARTH DO YOU MANAGE TO WRITE WITH A YOUNG BABY?

EE: Oh, you don’t. What you do, I think, is brood and anguish and struggle. I’m joking, a little, here. But you do have to surrender, I think, that part of your life for a few months. I tried it and ended up only feeling guilty and frustrated and exhausted. Better to take the time with your child, which passes quickly enough.


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