Preview
MELANIE LITTLE
WordFest: Banff-Calgary International Writers Festival
Thursday, October 16
Uptown Stage
The characters in Melanie Little’s stories often suffer from nerves or demonstrate nerviness. Sometimes both at once. There’s the terrified and superstitious little-girl figure skater in "Don’t Rush Your Slow Part." Or there’s the L.A. shopgirl who supplements her meager wage by selling (completely unauthorized) all-you-can-grab shopping sprees to her gobsmacked customers.
Little cultivates this "neural" quality.
"I tend to write with my nerves. I try to capture that nervous energy that I have, in my characters and in the prose – the voice," she says, speaking by telephone from her home in Ottawa. It’s the fourth Canadian city she has lived in, after Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. ("Not Calgary yet," she says, although she pays a visit to WordFest next week.)
The nervous/nervy dichotomy is not unrelated to the ambiguity coiled within her book’s one-word title, Confidence. What is confidence, really? It might be belief in oneself. It might be a whispered private confession. Or it might be the kind of treachery suggested in the abbreviation "con." One of Little’s instructors saw this last element in her work while she was in the master of fine arts program at the University of British Columbia.
"My thesis supervisor said to me, ‘Your characters are really rotten to one another. They’re constantly betraying one another.’ I realized this thread ran through everything – and I’ve always been fascinated by the confidence man and the trickster."
It’s striking how little confidence Little’s child characters have in the adults that surround them – con men and women, most of them. Many of her adults are self-absorbed, vain and compulsive, while the children are just trying to survive and make sense of things.
"Even though I’m an adult, I have a profound ambivalence toward the state of adulthood," Little says. "I’m an only child, so adults have always played a very large role. And as a figure skater, adults controlled my whole life."
The world of figure skating, it turns out, provides more than just the setting for several of Little’s stories. The arena was her whole world from the age of six to 16. During those years she attended school halftime to allow for more practice. Summers meant nine hours a day on the ice. Finally, a bout of illness gave her time to stop and think about how much more time she wanted to devote to a highly-strung pursuit she now describes as "just one humiliation after another."
Little opted for university instead, and got four years into a PhD (she’s still "on leave" from the doctoral program in English at the University of Toronto). But skating remains a vivid source for her work.
"I lost interest in the figure-skating world many years ago, which is why I quit," she says. "But it’s such a rich world that it does bleed into what I’m writing." At the same time, she dislikes the idea of being "pegged as a figure-skating author."
"Figure-skating author" really is a more limiting epithet than "future Alice Munro" – which is what some reviewers have dubbed the 33-year-old author. Little acknowledges Munro’s work has been important to her. But when I mention that one of her characters, the "borderline geek" Jerry Storey, even bears the same name as a Munro character from Lives of Girls and Women, she is momentarily startled by the unintended allusion.
"Talk about anxiety of influence," she jokes, before speaking at more length about what Munro means to her. "I remember when I woke up to the complexity of her work," she says. "I admire writers who can tell a story and create believable characters, and also pay great attention to language. So I like the way Munro plays with the idea of storytelling, and is really interested in the meanings of words and plays around with that. And, you know, at the same time isn’t just wanking about."
However, Little’s reading is so broad that no single influence predominates. While at UBC, she co-edited the literary review Prism International for a year and read up to 100 submissions a week. Add that to the PhD studies and Little has abundant inspiration for her current project, a novel in which the younger character cons the adult in her life. One sentence at a time, she plans to keep chipping away at the ice – not with skate picks, but with a sharp pen to dig away at what Franz Kafka called "the frozen seas" we all have "locked within."
Melanie Little will be reading along with James Bradley, Sarah Dunant, Frances Itani, David Adams Richards and Jorge Volpi at the Thursday Stage event at 7 p.m. |
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