Ben stayed in Winnipeg. It was his city, it was his home and it became his final resting place.
P.S. Ideas, interviews & features
About the author
Author Biography
NOT LONG BEFORE they brought my brother, sister and me into the world, my parents had moved to Canada from Washington, D.C. Dad was black and Mom was white, and 1953 was no time to be marrying or living in the American South as an interracial couple. Toronto was better, but far from perfect. While Dad was still a graduate student at the University of Toronto, he and my mother were unable to rent an apartment together. Nobody wanted an interracial couple as tenants. To secure a place for the two of them, Mom had to take on a surrogate white husband for a day—Don McFadyen, a close friend of theirs who played bass in a jazz band. After the lease was signed, Don moved out and my father moved in, and my parents waited nervously to see how much of a stink the landlord would raise. Luckily, the landlord chose not to make an issue of it, and they were allowed to stay.
I was born in 1957 in Newmarket, Ontario, and grew up in a Toronto suburb. Throughout my childhood, stories of my parents’ marriage and of their subsequent work as pioneers in Canada’s human rights movement punctuated our kitchen table conversations. I was entranced by their ability to navigate injustice with humour and to become engaged Canadians without succumbing to bitterness. Later, I used the stories of my ancestors as emotional fuel to write Any Known Blood, a fictional family saga about five generations of men moving back and forth between Canada and the United States.
From my earliest childhood, I recall my mother reading avidly to my siblings and me. I can still hear the inflection of her voice as we listened to “Disobedience” by A.A. Milne.
James James
Morrison Morrison
Weatherby George Dupree
Took great
Care of his Mother
Though he was only three…
I live for the sound of music in language and have come to believe that good fiction enters the reader’s ear first. Initially, I read and wrote to make sense of the world and my place in it. Turning to adult literature at the age of fourteen, I ate up the dozens of novels and essays on my parents’ shelves. Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Richard Wright and their contemporaries became my first literary mentors.
“I live for the sound of music in language and have come to believe that good fiction enters the reader’s ear first.”
I worked for a spell as a newspaper reporter, initially for The Globe and Mail in Toronto and later for the Winnipeg Free Press. But I didn’t want to spend my life writing newspaper copy. I longed to write fiction and ached every time I came in contact with great art because it reminded me of what I wasn’t doing. Finally, at the age of twenty-seven, I felt despair at the thought of growing old and not accomplishing something more. I decided to take the plunge. I quit my job, moved to Spain, and, since I had no mortgage, car or kids, managed for a year or so to live cheaply. For the first time in my life, I wrote for hours every day, and after returning to Canada I continued to work on fiction. Eventually, I finished my first novel, Some Great Thing. I could wallpaper my bathroom with all the rejection slips the novel generated, but finally, in 1992, Turnstone Press in Winnipeg published the story (which was acquired by HarperCollins in 2009).
I have many interests in life—learning languages, reading, travelling, running, and loving my wife and five children are chief among them—but writing is the only kind of work for which I have a real thirst, and novels are what I most like to write. The novel is one of the few art forms to which a person can give birth almost entirely unassisted. The individuality of novel writing entrances me, and it never ceases to amaze me that the quirky turns of a solitary mind can create stories that hum for years, outlasting even the rise and fall of nations.
“Writing is the only kind of work for which I have a real thirst.”
I have written seven books (fiction and non-fiction), with Some Great Thing being my first novel and The Book of Negroes (U.S. title Someone Knows My Name) my third and most recent. I hope that there will be many more and that they will move readers as deeply as literature has moved me since it lifted me off my feet at the age of fourteen.
About the book
Lawrence Hill Discusses Some Great Thing
You were for a time a newspaper reporter yourself. How did your experience play into the writing of Some Great Thing?
I could never have written Some Great Thing without having worked as a reporter in Winnipeg. The characters and their flight paths are of my invention; it is truly a work of fiction. But working in a newsroom and pursuing stories daily for two years in Winnipeg offered experiences—sad and hilarious, personal and professional—that made it possible for me to imagine the novel. After I had been away from the world of journalism for a year or two, I had enough emotional distance to look back and begin to concoct Some Great Thing.
Are you as cynical about the media as the satire in your novel makes you sound?
“It did me a lot of good to poke fun at some of the inanities I discovered, or dreamed up, while working as a newspaper reporter.”
I had terrific fun cooking up the novel, and it did me a lot of good to poke fun at some of the inanities I discovered, or dreamed up, while working as a newspaper reporter. I enjoyed writing playfully and satirically, but I do not generally feel cynical about the media. I met many fantastic journalists and believe that they do a great service to our country and to the world. I still devour newspapers and magazines, and occasionally write freelance pieces for them.
“Imagining a story, and starting from scratch, is such an immeasurably pleasurable process.”
Arguably journalistic writing and creative writing have different ways of trying to get at “the truth.”Why does writing fiction speak to you?
Imagining a story, and starting from scratch, is such an immeasurably pleasurable process. I get to create an entire world in my own head. Writing fiction helps me process life, making sense of it, tearing it all apart and putting it back together in a way that satisfies my heart and soul.
You’ve said that while working as a reporter, you felt compelled to do something more with your life. This has a familiar ring. How much of you will the reader see in the book’s central character, Mahatma Grafton?
“Imagining a story, and starting from scratch, is such an immeasurably pleasurable process.”
Mahatma was urged by his father to do “some great thing” in life, and my own father certainly did the same. I stepped into the world of newspapers feeling somewhat cynical, as does Mahatma. And we both moved from that initial cynicism into a place of personal engagement with journalism. The novel does reflect my voice and its construction reveals the way my mind operates, so in the deepest sense it is autobiographical.
It is somehow poignant that Mahatma’s aging father, Ben, saves all those boxes of clippings about family and about black history. Are you such a saver yourself, or do you have family members who are?
My paternal grandmother and my father never threw out a letter or a piece of paper in their lives. Old report card? Letter received from a relative twenty years ago? Don’t discard family history, my father would say. Preserve it for future generations. Like my ancestors, I can’t get rid of personal papers. They represent my own life and the lives of my loved ones. If I lose the papers, don’t I risk losing a definition of the life I have sculpted? I can’t bear to be hemmed in by boxes and junk, however. Fortunately I have been able to donate dozens of boxes of my own papers to the University of Toronto Archives, which will organize and keep them and make them available to researchers in the future.
Several threads run through this novel: the world of the media, the English-French language issue in Quebec, the history of Black Canadians, and particularly black railroad porters, in the province. Were all of these in your mind from the outset, or did some weave their way in as you wrote?
“Like my ancestors, I can’t get rid
of personal papers. They represent my own life and the lives of my loved ones.”
I wanted to write a novel about a black journalist who begins to discover himself and his own cultural interests, history and identity, as a byproduct of covering a political and social contest pitting English- and French-speaking Canadians against one another. So, yes, I had these various threads in mind from the beginning, but I had no idea how I would weave them all together. I just had to jump in and start writing, and I chose to do so without spending too much time plotting out the novel, which might have run the risk of choking off spontaneous, energetic writing. The first draft came out messy and unorganized, but at least it appeared to be a living, breathing, animated beast.
Judge Melvyn Hill is a particularly fascinating character—a black man who has worked hard and risen to a respected position, but who is unhappy in his personal life and often shows bad judgment in his professional life. Why did you mould him as such a sad and conflicted personality?
Conflicted personalities are interesting to observe, and to write about. Melvyn Hill strives to create a world for himself in which he can operate with dignity, but his obsession with success makes him intolerant and judgmental. Still, he is alienated and lonely and I wanted the reader to care about him and feel for him, despite his failings.
“My favourite character in Some Great Thing is Yoyo, for his complete astonishment at the silly, inexplicable ways that we live in rich, developed nations.”
Paul Quarrington described your book as “filled with wonderful people.”Who is your favourite character in the novel, and why?
If I had thought to put Paul in the book, he would probably have become my first choice. But my favourite character in Some Great Thing is Yoyo, for his complete astonishment at the silly, inexplicable ways that we live in rich, developed nations. I like the way his being a foreign visitor to Manitoba offers the reader a fresh lens through which to see Canada and its foibles.
As well as offering a large cast of characters, Some Great Thing has lots going on. Can you share some insight into your writing process for a novel with a number of subplots?
I was worried that I would never finish it—or if I did, that I’d never make it interesting—if I wrote the novel with the same painstaking technique that I had used to draft short stories (some of which I thought were stilted and lifeless). I decided to loosen up and just “let it rip,” without stopping to think about writing. There’s a moment early in the novel when the older, jaded reporter, Eddy, advises Mahatma to stop thinking and just write in order to finish a news story before the deadline. I tried to do that. To not think too much, or intellectualize the process, but just to get comfortable, write quickly and let it all boil up wildly on first draft. So that’s what I did. Later, I rewrote madly, chopping out more than half of an energetic but unwieldy six-hundred-page draft.
“I rewrote madly, chopping out more than half of an energetic but unwieldy six-hundredpage draft.”
Some Great Thing is filled with dark humour. Did you set out to write comedy, or did the characters and situations draw this out?
I did not set out to write comedy, but I did want the story to be lively and engaging. It seemed that the more and the faster I wrote, the more humorous it became. It was a natural development. The very process of writing brought the humour out of me, and encouraged me to throw it down on the page.
Do you think your novel could have been set in the United States, or do you feel that it’s purely Canadian in its way of exploring racial, cultural and linguistic friction?
The first time I sent the novel in draft form to a prospective agent, I was turned down and encouraged to consider setting the story in a more interesting place than Winnipeg. The argument went that if I set it in Toronto or New York, it would no longer be seen as a regional novel. To me, this was hokum. It suggested that a novel is “regional” if it is set in Winnipeg, but of global, universal reach if it is set in a big metropolis. But Winnipeg is pretty well the only city in Canada where this novel could unfold. The novel gives Winnipeg a communist mayor in the 1980s. What Canadian city, other than Winnipeg, could have had a communist mayor at that time? And the particular French-English conflict that provides the socio-political backdrop for Mahatma Grafton’s growth on the job could only have taken place in Manitoba.
“Winnipeg is pretty well the only city in Canada where this novel could unfold.”
I do not like to think of Some Great Thing as a regional novel. I prefer to think of it as a novel set in a specific time and place—Winnipeg, in the 1980s, during a crisis over the constitutional rights of French Canadians in English Canada—that will, if it works successfully as fiction, appeal to a wide swath of readers. I love novels that are anchored in specific times and situations. This doesn’t make them regional. It makes them real.
Read on
A Writer’s Dream: Supporting the Passion
by Lawrence Hill
The prospect of writing my first novel terrified me. Surely I wasn’t sufficiently brilliant to write a novel. And I certainly wasn’t knowledgeable about all earthly matters. How would I envisage such a big project, or get every line just right? Eventually I would learn to narrow my focus, limit my anxieties, and just relax and let loose with the writing, page by page. But an ongoing problem was finding a means to live that would allow me the time and energy to write creatively and passionately.
“Reporting was, for me, an engaging and stimulating job.”
After completing a BA in economics at Laval University in Quebec City in 1980, I took a couple of years to write short stories while working two days a week for my father, Daniel G. Hill III, who ran a small human rights consulting firm out of his home in Don Mills, Ontario. After that, I worked as a newspaper reporter, first as a summer intern at The Globe and Mail in 1982, and then as a salaried employee at the Winnipeg Free Press.
Reporting was, for me, an engaging and stimulating job. Time flew. Most days, I would start chasing stories at ten in the morning, and the next time I checked it would be six o’clock. An uprising in Stony Mountain Penitentiary, an Air Canada 767 running out of fuel in mid-air and making an emergency landing on a car-racing strip in Gimli, a freight train carrying hazardous materials derailing in the city…every week, it seemed, some exciting and unpredictable story pulled me deeper into the heart of Manitoba and its people. I loved the work. There was just one problem: I loved something else more. I didn’t dream of being a reporter for the rest of my life. I didn’t want to be a reporter for any longer than it would take to put aside enough cash to coast for a year or two and do nothing but write fiction.
I had been writing short stories since I was fourteen. I wrote them through high school and university, and I kept writing them at night and on weekends while I was a reporter. But spending long hours nailing down news stories in the streets of Winnipeg and hammering them out in the downtown newsroom crowded out creative writing. Frequently I would stagger home at night, exhausted after working for twelve hours or more. Reporting left no juice for vivid, imaginative writing. I didn’t know a single full-time reporter who was managing to write and publish fiction consistently.
“Reporting left no juice for vivid, imaginative writing.”
I longed to write creatively, and found it painful to watch other artists in full flight. I went to see the movie Sophie’s Choice, which came out in the early 1980s while I was still in Winnipeg. It was a sad and troubling movie, and my eyes filled with tears over the story of the young writer in New York City who happens upon a family tragedy during the Holocaust. The beauty and art in Sophie’s Choice reminded me of everything that I was not doing in life.
At the age of twenty-seven, I finally decided that I was wasting my years and had better quit and write what I dreamed of writing before it was too late to change my life. It was a good time to leave the job. I had no mortgage, no car, no children, no debts and no pressing reason not to head off to pursue my dream. So I sent in my resignation letter and, soo
n after that, boarded an airplane for a village called Sanlúcar de Barrameda, on the Guadalquivir River near the Atlantic coast in southwest Spain. There, I wrote every day. I loved being in Spain, and much of my happiness derived from the daily pursuit of my own true working passion: writing stories. I finished a dozen or so short stories in the year I lived in Spain, and managed later to publish a few of them.
By the time I returned to Canada, I felt ready to begin writing the novel that eventually became Some Great Thing—but there still remained the small matter of earning a living while carving out time to write. I feared that a return to full-time journalism would throw me back into the familiar cauldron of that intense and depleting profession. And I knew that working as a freelance journalist would be unlikely to generate cash fast enough to suit my purposes. My vague plan was to earn money quickly and save it, then drop out and write fiendishly until I ran out of funds—and to keep on like this until I had finished the novel.