Giller Prize nominee Alix Ohlin on writing, and reading

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Photography by Stephanie Noritz

Alix Ohlin, 40, moved around a lot in her life before she came to rest two years ago as a professor of creative writing at Lafayette College in Easton, Penn. But she was born and bred in Montreal, the city thats home to many of the characters in her novel Inside, shortlisted for the 2012 Scotiabank Giller Prize (and this years Rogers Writers Trust Fiction Prize). I feel very rooted there, in a place so particular and vibrant, she says in an interview. Wherever I go, I always identify as a Montrealer. The city, though, took a while to enter into Ohlins writing. In grad school, she was reluctant to set a story there, for fear her classmates, mostly American, wouldnt understand the references. I used a generic suburb instead, sort of like the one I grew up in, but it felt really wrong. One of the purposes of this novel was to go back to writing about Montreal in a way that felt truer to the memories I have of it, including the way people move back and forth between English and French. But Inside is far from being a novel of place, Ohlin agrees. Theres a line in it, she points out, that reads that some people are destined to leave a place and keep on leaving. The book moves from Montreal to New York to Iqaluit to Los Angeles. And to Kigali in Rwandathe one place in Inside where Ohlin herself has never beenduring the 1994 genocide. In a story about therapists and patients, the latter scarcely more psychologically damaged than the former, the Rwanda section is, in some regards, the entire novel writ small. The book is about rescue and the importance of attempting to helpwhether or not the attempts succeed, theyre central to our humanityand the Rwanda section was a way of writing that theme in an international way, to reflect and underscore how it unfolds in individual lives elsewhere in the novel. Here is Alix Ohlin on reading (and writing), followed by an excerpt from Inside:

Prince Edward Island in the 1870s. A mansion on Long Island during the roaring twenties. Mars in the early years of colonization.

Ive never been to any of these places, of course, but each of them feels like home to me. They were as much a part of my childhood as my actual house in Montreal, because they were the settings of books I loved. Anne of Green Gables, Jay Gatsby, the troubled explorers of The Martian Chronicles (to name just a few)these people populated my universe, kept me company, made me laugh and cry. Ive spent most of my life reading, blinking with confused surprise when I look up to discover that Im sitting in a chair, somewhere in the 21st century.

Writing for me is first and foremost an act of gratitude toward the books that have shaped my life and helped me make sense of the world. It is a way of participating in an ageless conversation, across culture and time, about what it means to be alive. The writer Iris Murdoch once said that the subject of her work was the otherness of other people, and to me this has always rung true. Literature gives us access to the interior lives of people different from ourselves, no matter where or when they live, in their fascinating, mysterious, even frustrating complexity. Its nothing short of miraculous.

When I first began writing, I would sometimes copy out, by hand, passages from books I particularly admired. I wanted to feel what it might have been like to build those sentences, clause by clause, word by word. I remember doing this with Herzog by Saul Bellow, a writer pretty remote from me in subject matter and style. It wasnt that I wanted to write exactly like Bellow, or the other writers I chose. I was trying to catch the music of their language, to understand how it led to such wit and perception and depth of humanity. I do this less often now, but a friend recently reminded me of another book I love, David Marksons Wittgensteins Mistress. I went back and looked at the opening line: In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street. I had to write it down, because it is so enigmatic and simple and sad. A sentence like that can break your heart: what an amazing thing for words on a page to do.

People sometimes ask me whether I get lonely, spending so much time by myself working. But I hardly ever do. I have all these books on my shelves, waiting to be read and reread. And I know that there are writers like me all around the world, hunched at their desks, each of them crafting singular, beautiful universes, telling stories about what it means to be alive.

*EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT*

Montreal, 1996

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Giller Prize nominee Alix Ohlin on writing, and reading