Frequently Asked Questions

1. How did you come to be a writer?

I first thought of being a writer when I was eleven or twelve. At the time I used to read a great deal, and at some point it occurred to me that someone had to write all those books out there, and that one day I might write one myself. I had already shown a penchant for writing by then and indeed was known among my classmates for my long stories. I wrote my first novel in the fifth grade, filling about one and a half exercise books. The story concerned a rather large, multi-purpose bicycle that also did service as a space ship and a time-travel machine. Much of the plot line was borrowed from TV shows I watched at the time (for instance, a series called The Time Tunnel) as well as a popular Disney series of films and books about a Volkswagen Beetle called Herbie the Love Bug. It was not until my mid-20s, however, that I actually made a concerted effort to write in a consistent way, after several failed attempts at doing so. At that point I enrolled in a Master's program in creative writing, the primary virtue of which was that it provided a structured environment for me to develop the discipline to write on a daily basis. It was as a result of that experience that I wrote my first novel, Lives of the Saints.

2. What role did your Italian background play in your becoming a writer?

I am not sure what role my Italian heritage played in my formation as a writer. On the one hand, it was not a profession encouraged by my parents, nor was our household one in which books abounded, given that both my parents received a very limited education--to grade five--as children in Italy. Thus my literary education took place almost entirely outside my Italian heritage, and had much more to do with English (i.e. from England) literature, with a bit of Russian, French, American, and Canadian thrown in there and perhaps a few books from Italy as well. When I came to be a writer, it was more with the thought of writing in this world tradition of literature than out of my Italian-Canadian background.

That said, the experience of being an immigrant probably gave me the necessary sense of marginality and outsidedness that I think is important to one's formation as a writer, since it is often that sort of distancing that gives writers their clearer perspective on the society around them . Also, my Italian-Canadian background bequeathed me a wealth of rich material which subsequently proved very important to my writing.

3. Which authors have most influenced your own writing?

It probably would be true to say that the most influential writers are those one reads youngest, since the mind is most malleable then. Among my influences I would have to include, then, a host of nearly forgotten children's writers such as Hugh Lofting, creator of the original, pre-Eddy Murphy Dr. Dolittle; Walter R. Brooks, author of the Freddy the Pig series of books; and many other writers whose names have long faded from my memory, authors of such books as Pitcher with a Glass Arm, Today I Am a Ham, The Horse in the Grey Flannel Suit and, of course, the Herbie the Love Bug series.

In adulthood, I have moved on to more conventional influences -- Shakespeare, Swift, Dostoevsky, Yeats, Nabokov, Woolf, and many others. My own ideal is to try to take something from everyone I read. I am very opposed to the school of writing -- if it actually exists -- that believes you should try to avoid influence. I believe you should seek influence, and cultivate it; it is the only way to progress as a writer.

There is no single quality I look for in a writer other, perhaps, than credibility--in other words, that the writer has succeeded in creating a well-rounded, credible universe, regardless of whatever rules that particular universe is governed by. I tend to think of literature historically, and feel a literature can only really be grasped and understood through knowing its historical roots; and as I result I tend to give somewhat short shrift to contemporary writers, since if literary history teaches us anything, it is that the vast majority of us writers will be utterly forgotten in the space of a generation or so. That said, I don't think I could survive as a writer without having a good stock of contemporary writers who I admire and learn from, and who help keep my own writing fresh and alive. Among that group I would include Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, Don Delillo, Italo Calvino, Thomas Pynchon, Doris Lessing, Richard Ford, and a host of others, as well as many single books such as Fifth Business and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz that proved important in my own formation as a writer.

4. Do you have a regular writing schedule?

Children make having a schedule difficult, particularly as my wife and I are both writers and so are often competing for the same thin slice of time against the encroachments of childcare and domestic chores. On a good day, I will be able to work from, say, 9:30 AM to perhaps 3 or even 4 or 5 PM. Currently, such days happen perhaps two or three times a week. The rest of week, it is a matter of squeezing in what time I can.

5. What do you do when your work is not going well?

When my work is not going well I just tend to keep working until it does. I don't really have any other method for dealing with that sort of problem. Generally I take heart from the fact that I have completed other projects in the past which also didn't seem to be going well, and will probably complete the present one too.

6. What is your opinion of literary critics, and have they influenced your work?

In Canada there is no real class of literary critics per se, which is perhaps a shame, and hence many reviews tend to get written by other writers. This mightn't be such a bad thing if most of the writers in this country didn't know most of the other writers, and so could write truly objective reviews, or if writers were any more likely to be good judges of literature than anyone else. The fact is that book reviews tend to be superficial and unreliable by their very nature--they are written by people who are being poorly paid to give a day's thought to a work that someone else has just spent three or four years thinking about. As for academic criticism, it tends to be unreliable for different reasons, usually because it is written out of whatever school of thought happens to be in fashion at the time and because it tends to stress things like symbolism and theme that have little to do with how books are written.

I think we would be hard-pressed to find much in the way of literary criticism that has stood the test of time. On the other hand, we find a fair amount of literature that has done so, often the very stuff that was vilified or dismissed by literary critics when it was first published.

7. What inspired you to write your most recent novel, Testament?

The original seed of inspiration for Testament probably goes back to the first book I ever owned, a picture bible called The Guiding Light that was presented to new-borns in my hometown by our local hospital. The light-bathed Jesus depicted there became my first hero, and its stories of sinners and miracles the backdrop to my imagination. As I grew older, that first blissful relationship I had with Christianity gave way to a somewhat thornier one that saw me pass from post-Vatican II Catholicism to born-again evangelism and finally to a last, desperate phase with Norman Vincent Peale. But though by early adulthood I could no longer have properly called myself a Christian, neither could I say I’d got free of Jesus, who seemed far too powerful a figure to rid oneself of by so simple a thing as a loss of faith. Already by my early 20s I had conceived the idea of doing a fictional treatment of the life of Jesus, to reconcile my sense of the power of this figure with some of the more problematic aspects of the Christian tradition. It took me some two decades to finally get around to the project, the final outcome of which was the novel Testament.

My idea in Testament was to try to look at the figure of Jesus in purely human, and hence non-Christian, terms. In other words, if we supposed that some actual historical figure lay behind the myth of Jesus as it was handed down, what might he have been like, stripped of interpolations and inventions of Christian tradition? What sort of person could have been responsible for the teachings that have come down to us, some of which were truly revolutionary for their time, and for the often contradictory figure that comes through in the gospels?

(For more information on the writing of Testament, click here.)