Alone in the Classroom
What can you tell our readers about your new book Alone in the Classroom?
The novel is a love and hate triangle between a headmaster, a teacher and a student. That’s the first and most basic triangle, which opens into others – between mother, daughter, granddaughter, for instance. The story offered me a way to enter my mother’s past. That was the original impulse. To explore how the past resides in the present. How our mothers and grandmothers live on in us – their personalities, their conflicts with each other, their inhibitions and their anger.
The character Connie Flood aids a student to read, is this something you had to observe in practice before you wrote about it?
I didn’t go into schools and watch, no. I have a dyslexic friend, now seventy, who speaks colourfully and sorrowfully about the nightmare of his years in school. I have another friend who’s the mother of a boy with learning disabilities. I used details they gave me to help bring the invented characters alive. Connie came into clear view when I imagined the sort of female teacher my father (a teacher) would have admired. I also drew from my own vividly remembered experience of feeling stupid and lonely in school. This is a vast well that most of us can draw from very readily.
How much did you know about the working of a school before writing this novel? Did you have to look into this more than what you had gleaned from your own school days?
I’m not a tireless researcher. I’m almost lazy. I hunt for the sort of specific detail that will give my imagination a jolt, usually something visual. I knew an elderly couple, teachers in Saskatchewan in the 1930s, and I went to see them and we had tea in their living room. I jotted down things they told me in my notebook and went away thinking that I hadn’t learned very much. But when it came to picturing the school in 1929, I found what they had described to be very useful. They had also spoken warmly of a certain school inspector who would arrive out of the blue and take the children bird watching. That’s the kind of detail that’s golden, because suddenly you have a whole scene that speaks volumes about a character and a place. I should add that there is a murder in the novel, based on what happened to a schoolmate of my mother’s. I found the transcript of the trial in the National Archives in Ottawa. I also read a lot of old newspapers on microfilm and ruined my eyes.
You decided to set the novel in Saskatchewan and the Ottawa Valley, why was this?
My mother grew up in the Ottawa Valley. It’s a scruffy part of the world, remote in its way, filled with vivid stories and unlike anywhere else. I came to live here twenty years ago, largely out of interest in my mother and in her past. I’ve never lived in Saskatchewan but I feel such an affinity for the landscape and for its history. I was about twenty years old the first time I saw the prairies from a train window and they made a huge impression – the enormous sky, the mesmerizing roll of the treeless land. I don’t have such profound reactions all that often and so, at risk of repeating myself, I often go to the prairies in my fiction.
Your novel Late Nights on Air won the Scotiabank Giller Prize, how did this make you feel as a writer?
I was overjoyed. These awards are a matter of luck, as we all know, but it would be a waste not to enjoy the moment to the hilt. There’s a price to pay for everything, of course. By the end of the year I was toxic to myself. I couldn’t stand the sound of my own voice, the din in my head from talking about the same things over and over. There’s also the feeling that you’ve had your moment of glory and it’s downhill from here.
You were a radio broadcaster, so when did you decide you wanted to write?
At fifteen I knew. An exercise in English class opened up the marvellous possibility of writing poetry and I began to write stream of consciousness poems. It transformed my life because I had something entirely my own, a private creative world. Learning to write well, however, and learning to write stories, has been a long process requiring much doggedness. My years as a radio broadcaster came in my twenties and early thirties, and were a way to earn a living.
You have traveled a lot, so tell us about some of the best places you have been?
I would say I’m an ex-traveller. As a young woman I had the sort of restlessness, curiosity, and bravery that baffles me now. Now I can barely park a car. But in those days – again, my twenties, early thirties – I wanted to see the world with my own eyes. I went to the far north of Canada and there I developed a yen for hot places like New Orleans and Latin America. I lived in Mexico for a time. There was a real north/south tension running through me. Then I had children and lost my bravery. And now I just want to work at my desk.
Who do you most like to read?
I like to read poetry first thing in the morning to loosen up my mind and to give me company and courage before I start to write. Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Hughes, Louise Gluck. I read what helps me write. That is, what excites me enough to pick up my own pen. Edward St. Aubyn at the moment. Penelope Fitzgerald always. I think I’ve read her Gate of Angels five times. Alice Munro. Coetzee’s Disgrace. And classics. Yesterday I finished The Iliad in the Robert Fagles translation. I’m so glad I didn’t go to the grave without reading it. I see the world differently now. A friend was here for lunch the other day and in tremendous pain because of the end of a love affair. She felt so humiliated, so ashamed of herself. But there is no need. The gods are responsible. We are shot by the arrow of love and there is nothing we can do but endure it.
Click here to buy Alone in the Classroom by Elizabeth Hay
Female First Lucy Walton