In conversation with U of G’s writer in residence, part one
Writer and performer Alison Wearing has recently been named the University of Guelph’s writer in residence. Following a performance of her piece Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter, Wearing sat down to talk about her writing, performing, and traveling with The Ontarion.
Tanner Morton: The other day you were talking about your origins as a storyteller, I was just wondering about your origins as a writer.
Alison Wearing: Did I mention that I failed high school English?
TM: Yes.
AW: I like to be upfront about that. I never imagined that I would be a writer because I didn’t think I qualified, but I loved to write letters home. I did a lot of travelling, I left home at 17, and travelled off and on for the next eight years, eight to 12 depending on how you look at it. I wrote a lot of letters home and I mean serious long letters with lots of detail. When I did study, I studied poli-sci and music and I became very good friends with one of my poli-sci profs.
After I graduated, I was living in Czechoslovakia just after the revolution and I was working in parliament, the very first democratic parliament with Václav Havel as president—a great playwright, a great dissident playwright as president.
I was working in parliament teaching English, but it meant that I had this insider view into this democracy that was being birthed. I began to write letters home to this prof friend, and he wrote back and said, “If you should just polish this piece and send it to the Globe and Mail.” He said when he received the letters he would take them into his lecture that day and just read it to his class.
TM: That’s cool.
AW: Yeah it was cool, so that’s how it started. So I did that, I polished it up and sent it into the Globe and Mail and they published it. It’s that funny thing where I don’t know if I would ever call myself a writer—I would’ve eventually, but I certainly didn’t at that point. When they printed it, by then I was living in China. I remember my mother sent it to me [and] at the bottom it said Alison Wearing is a Canadian writer. I remember just reading that and thinking wow, that’s how it happens.
Right away I became a travel journalist and because I was travelling so much and living in so many different places, I just started sending pieces to newspapers and then very quickly I realized I was not a journalist, my mind just doesn’t think like that. […] Getting something out quickly isn’t really my style at all. I love to sit and ruminate, sculpt, and come back to things. I also was not very interested in reportage as I was painting. I was much more interested in a more creative expression of a scene rather than reporting on it.
I think it’s the difference between a painter who is drawn to realism rather than someone who is drawn to impressionism.
All that is to say that very quickly, I began writing fiction. […] My first story was selected for the Journey Prize anthology; […] it was a big deal in the writing world. It launched me pretty quickly. Those awards do that—they bring a certain amount of attention and support.
This crazy thing happened which was the very next thing I wrote, which was a long piece based on some travels in Serbia during the Balkan war won the National Magazine Award gold medal. So bang, bang, out of the gate, it was pretty crazy actually. I think I got a false impression on how this whole business works. […] I disabused that notion later on, but I had it pretty easy at the beginning. So I wrote longer pieces, these travel pieces keep getting longer and longer, and no magazine these days would publish the length of stuff that I wrote then because of people’s attention spans. […] Even The New Yorker, which used to publish 40-page pieces, I think the most they publish now is maybe, if you’re lucky, 10 or 15. So I was writing these 40-page pieces in literary journals and I realized I was writing for a book. I had lived and traveled in the Middle East quite a bit, I was very comfortable there and fascinated, I just decided I wanted to travel to Iran and write about it. I had never been before and I didn’t know more than the average person, but I boned up a lot before I went, and that became my first book.
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TM: What inspired the travelling? You said that all of these stories come from your desire to travel and all of the travels that you’ve done, but what birthed that?
AW: I’ve never been asked that before. Probably my childhood, in that growing up with a gay father it was very clear to me that I did not belong in that neighbourhood. My father became something of a pariah. It’s not that we weren’t accepted, but it was also false. We had to lie contently in order to be accepted. And so I was very anxious to get out, very happy to leave. I think I had this, probably fairly common, naïve vision of a place where I would just fit in and everything would be lovely. I spent many years of my life looking for that place and it took me a long time to realize that place doesn’t actually exist. In the course of looking for it, it was a pretty fascinating search, it wasn’t a waste of time. I mostly traveled alone. […] It was a lot of solitude, which I think is what writers and artists of all kinds need. That’s where you develop your voice—an internal voice.
Great & inspiring article looking forward to many more.