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Leo Brent Robillard
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Interview /w Marsha Lederman
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E-mail Interview /w Joy Hewitt Mann for Valley Writers' Guild JHM: Tell me a little about yourself. Where were you born, raised? LBR: I was born and raised in Carleton Place, Ontario, just west of Ottawa; and although it has become a bedroom community for that city now, during my childhood, Carleton Place was a town of only six thousand. I could walk from one end to the other in under half an hour. A river – the Mississippi (poor cousin to its southern namesake) – divided the business section from the residential north end, and originally it was incorporated as the town of Morphy’s Falls, and eventually Bolton’s Mills. Morphy is still a popular family name in the area, and evidence of those mills and foundries, which are now condos, still line the banks. I spent many afternoons swimming in that river’s various holes, and swinging from the rusted mill workings down by the rapids. I roamed the streets on bike and by foot, and when I was old enough, I took trips to Blakeney, Appleton and the Mill of Kintail. I was surrounded by water and farmland and patches of forest. In retrospect, it seems a rather idyllic childhood experience – at least in its setting – but we always long for that which we don’t have, and certainly by the time I was a teenager, I wanted to travel further afoot. I’ve backpacked through most of western and central Europe on several occasions. I’ve been to Morocco and Costa Rica. I’ve lived in “the barrio” of Old Hull, and just outside the doors of Vieux Quebec. I’ve worked as a tombstone engraver, a painter and a muralist; I’ve been a security guard and an ESL instructor as well. I studied journalism at Carleton University for a year, and eventually took a degree in English. I’ve since received a Bachelor’s of Education from the University of Ottawa, and I’ve been teaching in the Upper Canada District School Board for the last seven years. Though I currently reside in Athens, I have at least returned to water. My wife and I live on Lake Eloida with our two children. JHM: How did all this influence your becoming a writer? How did you precipitate becoming a writer? LBR: I would be lying if I said that I always knew I would one day be a writer. I was always more an artist as a child and as an adolescent – though I have always written poems and stories, if only incidentally. However, hindsight is always 20/20, and when I look back, I can see the signs. Long before I was able to write, for instance, my father and I would pen stories after supper in a grade school scribbler. He acted as scribe, and I as illustrator. But it wasn’t until I was twenty years old and living in Quebec City that I began to write in earnest. And it was perhaps another year or two later, when I was working twelve-hour night shifts as a security guard that I began to produce a significant body of work. Now, however, twenty-five years after those first after-supper stories with my father, much of my poetry is steeped in the mythology of place, in the rural. Several of my short stories are also set in a quasi-fictional Carleton Place. So I guess I owe this to my childhood. But my novels (I am now finished two and working on a third) are largely imaginative works, and far from autobiographical – unless they can be considered vicarious wish fulfilment. Certainly they are a part of me and products of who I am and what I have experienced, but only inasmuch as they are commodities of my imagination. JHM: Tell me a little about your writing process. Where? When? etc. Describe a typical day. LBR: I have often said that I write like other people vomit. As unpleasant as that image is, nothing so aptly captures the writing process for me as the notion of purging. I keep a fat spiral- bound notebook, into which I throw all manner of ideas, jottings, doodles, figments, fragments, articles, and reflections – all of which bide their time, fermenting. However, when I am able to clear a weekend, a day, an afternoon, or a morning, I crack open that notebook and I write. I skip meals, ignore the telephone, forgo the bathroom (for as long as possible), and shut myself in. If my pen runs out, I pick up a pencil. I write until the timer goes off, until coffee no longer has any affect, or until my very understanding and supportive wife comes home with the kids. I can barely sleep in the days preceding such scheduled regurgitations. I lose my ability to concentrate. I think nothing but writing. This process has become such a fecund procedure for me that I can count on producing up to ten thousand words in a single sitting. Are they ten thousand good words? Not always. But once I have those ten thousand words, like a sculptor, I can press and mould and massage them into what I want later. Nothing is more daunting than the blank page. I try not to look at any. JHM: How long did it take you to write your first book? LBR: Leaving Wyoming took me approximately four months to write, from cover to cover, using the process I’ve just described. However, it took me at least another four to shape it into my final vision, and then perhaps four more months of periodic editing. And then, once I had found a publisher, I was also assigned an editor, and the process of shaping and moulding began again, though perhaps less rigorously. So in the end, it was a year in the writing, and another year in casual fine tuning. JHM: What was the easiest part of the process? The most enjoyable? LBR: Researching and plotting were the easiest steps. They were comforting, perhaps too much so. As long as I was searching the Internet, or visiting a library, or watching a documentary, I could convince myself that I was working. And it was fascinating history that I was witnessing. For instance, even though the book has been complete for almost two years, I’m still researching. I like it that much. And the plotting of the initial storyline was equally enjoyable. It was like building a jigsaw puzzle backward. And as it was with researching, I could delay the inevitable and daunting task of writing convincing myself that I was labouring toward that end without actually taking the final leap of faith. JHM: What was the most negative/depressing part of the whole experience? LBR: As exciting and rewarding as the publishing process can be – having your work validated and lauded, accepted and appreciated – it can be equally bleak and distressing. My novel was accepted by the first publisher I approached, and even at that it took nine months for them to respond to my initial excerpt. Had I been a female, I could have become pregnant and given birth in the interim. I couldn’t say how many times I checked the mailbox or my e-mail account only to be disappointed. And even after the publisher asked to see the entire manuscript, it took almost three months to receive word the second time. Even the honeymoon following the manuscript’s acceptance is worn to the quick after eighteen more months of waiting before finally seeing the book in print. JHM: Who have been your influences? LBR: Ernest Hemingway was the writer that turned me into a reader, and made me want to be a writer. Between the ages of eighteen and twenty, I read every book he’d ever written. I was young and highly impressionable, and I fell in love with his “masculine mystique” – the mythology he created of himself. But since then, I’ve drawn inspiration from writers like Michael Ondaatje, Erika de Vasconcelos, and Marguerite Duras, for their poetic and atmospheric style. And as much as I’ve tried to emulate them for that, I’ve attempted to couple those poetics with stories that move in the ways of Guy Vanderheaghe and Trevor Ferguson. I believe a story should be told with beauty and an underlying sense of urgency, in equal parts. JHM: Is there anything you'd like to add about writing in general? Philosophy? Favourite quotes? Or any advice for would be writers? LBR: In the beginning of Stephen Heighten’s On Earth As It Is, there is an epigraph from Marc Chagall: “Everything may change in this demoralized world except the heart, human love, and our striving to know the divine.” I think if you are writing about these things, you are on the right track. A writer should not give in to the superficiality of cynicism. It’s a more courageous endeavour to flounder in sincerity. |
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