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Leo Brent Robillard
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Interview /w Rob Riendeau
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Interview /w Rob Riendeau for the Humm Humm: My first question has to be: why did you choose to write about Jesse James and Wyoming -- how did that all come about? Brent Robillard: To be honest, when people ask me why it is that I wrote a book that's so close to being a western, I ususally say it was an accident. It's a western in the way Guy Vanderhaeghe might write a western -- not genre, really. But it does harken back to my dad spending Sunday afternoons on the sofa, "resting his eyes," and ostensibly watching westerns. I remember him saying, "Oh, you've got to watch this one. It's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." I think that I was just the right age to really embrace that mythology of the two good guy bandits -- that Robin Hood dichotomy. So I suppose that's where the initial idea came from. I wanted to tell that story and another story, but not through them -- they became incidental charactes in the book. The main character Wyoming is actually fictional and never existed in their gang. Humm: And where did he come from? BR: Sometimes I think that the main characters, bot just in my books but in most writers' works, are probably their alter egos, their vicarious life-livers. Certainly I 'm never going to jump onto the back of a speeding locomotive, and I'm not a short, energetic, figety sort of person. He's the flip side of what I am, which is a more sedate, thoughtful person -- not a man of action. Humm: Besides being a writer, you also run a program for advanced level high school students on writing. Can you talk a little bit about that? BR: When I first started teaching in Smiths Falls there was already a Writer's Craft program in place. It was a real mixture. We'd do a unit on journalism, one on non-fiction, one on peotry, that sort of thing. Eventually, I took overthe program and I thought I would turn it into a novella writing class. There's a sying that there's a novel in everbody, and I thought that it would be great if these kids could out of the program and actually have a novella in their hands. The first year we did it -- about three years ago -- it was a real trial period for the program. I did it alongside the students, because I thought, "if I can't do this, then they can't do this." That was actually the beginning of Leaving Wyoming. Humm: It must be very empowering for the students to complete something as daunting as a novel. BR: It is. And really, it's a lot less about talent than it is about self-discipline. It's amazing to be in a room of thirty-seven seventeen-year-olds and realize that they are all novelists. Even if they never do anything else with it, even if it's never published anywhere, it's a life-changing experience. For the most part, they don't consider themselves writers when they come in, but every year there are one or two who aspire to that. One of the goals of the course is to study post-secondary programs that are available for fine arts and writing. We look at the jobs available to writers in public relations, in communications at every level of government, in journalism. They see that you can make a life as a writer and you don't have to live a bohemian lifestyle of sacrifice, forgo children and all that stuff. |
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