Today Open Book talks with Elizabeth Hay, author of Alone in the Classroom (McClelland & Stewart), as part of our IFOA Interview series. Also the author of the Giller Prize-winning novel Late Nights on Air, Elizabeth Hay lives and writes in Ottawa.
IFOA: Ontario is the International Festival of Authors' touring component, bringing authors from IFOA’s roster of the best contemporary writers from around the globe to a number of Ontario locations.
Open Book:
Tell us about the book from which you will be reading at IFOA Ontario.
Elizabeth Hay:
Alone in the Classroom is my fourth novel. At its heart lies a love and hate triangle between a teacher, a student and a principal. The title summons up the feeling of being alone with your stupidity, your loneliness, your anxiety even though you’re not alone at all. The teacher is hovering, the principal, and other students. From them will come rescue and further trouble.
OB:
To what aspect of the IFOA: Ontario are you most looking forward?
EH:
The bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin in the hospitality suite.
OB:
Tell us about a favourite spot or area in Ontario.
EH:
I love the Ottawa Valley, in fact the whole of eastern Ontario. My spirits rise when I see the scruffy countryside marked by split-rail fences, stony pastures, twisting roads, deep lakes, meandering rivers. Stories and poems are around every corner.
OB:
What is your favourite part of touring?
EH:
I enjoy the readings themselves. To be on stage with a good microphone in front of an attentive audience satisfies the ham in me, I suppose, the would-be actress.
OB:
What were some of your early experiences with public readings? Is there a learning curve to reading in public?
EH:
An early mistake (this happened when I lived in New York) was speaking so softly that a friend in the little audience had to move forward several rows to hear me. Certainly there’s a learning curve. Most helpful was being told by someone seasoned that reading is a performance for which you must prepare. I try to choose the material carefully and read it aloud beforehand. I also prepare some remarks ahead of time. I try not to waste people’s time.
OB:
Tell us about a favourite book set in Ontario.
EH:
Much of Michael Ondaatje’s poetry collection Secular Love is set in eastern Ontario in the area of the Rideau Lakes. He makes the fields and rivers and stones, the farmhouse and the moonlight, utterly delectable.
OB:
What is your writing environment like?
EH:
A second floor room with windows on three sides. A long desk covered with papers and notebooks. A computer on the desk. A rocking chair in which I sit when I write longhand.
OB:
What are you reading right now?
EH:
Poetry in the Making by Ted Hughes. Published in 1967, it’s his handbook for teaching writing. It’s a gem. Also The Counterlife by Philip Roth, who is a genius.
OB:
What can you tell us about your next project?
EH:
Just that I’m mulling it over, making notes, gathering materials. It will be a novel. Then there are the stories that are getting very tired of waiting for me to get to them. They are sulking on a shelf near the floor.
Elizabeth Hay writes novels and short stories. She won the Giller Prize in 2007 for Late Nights on Air, having been nominated once before for A Student of Weather. The novel Garbo Laughs and the story collection Small Change were both nominated for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction. Her most recent novel, Alone in the Classroom, was published in April 2011. She lives in Ottawa.
For more information about Alone in the Classroom please visit the McClelland & Stewart website.
Buy this book at your local independent bookstore or online at Chapters/Indigo or Amazon.
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