Author Elizabeth Hay. (J.P. Moczulski/Canadian Press)
Meeting up with Ottawa author Elizabeth Hay at the CBC Broadcast Centre in Toronto the morning after her Scotiabank Giller Prize win feels a little like interrupting a family reunion. Hay, a former CBC radio producer, was surrounded by a tight knot of former colleagues wanting to congratulate one of their own.
Hay’s prize-winning novel, Late Nights on Air, is set in a Yellowknife radio station and is loosely drawn from the author’s own stint with the CBC in the North in the 1970s. The jury called the book “flawlessly crafted, a timeless story masterfully told.” With her honeyed radio voice husky from the previous night’s celebration, Hay sat down to talk with CBCNews.ca about the intimacy of fiction, the power of radio and the thrill of winning.
Q: You’ve been a finalist for both the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award. Is it true that it’s great just to be nominated, or is winning especially nice?
A: There’s always a difference when you win. Anyone who says otherwise is lying. I’m totally and utterly thrilled.
Q: I thought it was very gracious of you to congratulate “everyone who’s written a book this year.”
A: Wonderful though the long list is, and wonderful though the shortlist is, there are all kinds of fabulous books that fall through the cracks. And sometimes yours is the fabulous book that’s fallen through the cracks. It’s great to have written one of the books that get all the attention, but you grieve for the books that don’t.
Q: You drew on your own experience working for CBC Radio in the North in the 1970s for the novel. Why was now the right time to mine that material?
A: To be honest, I finally managed to get around to it. Also, it took me a long time to figure out how to write a novel and it cost me a lot of blood, sweat and tears. This is my third novel and now that I had some experience, I felt I could deal with larger subject matter, like the North, like politics and history.
Q: Even though it’s set more than 20 years ago, it feels very timely, with the pressing issue of Arctic sovereignty. At the centre of the novel is the story of the Berger Inquiry, which reviewed plans to build an oil and gas pipeline down the Mackenzie Valley. Why were you so interested in Thomas Berger, who plays a small but very significant role in your book?(McClelland & Stewart)
A: He was above all a fabulous listener and he tried to learn something new from everyone who testified. He was exceptionally well informed about Native rights, for one thing. He brought a tremendously sympathetic imagination. You felt that what he did was rather revolutionary in understanding the scope of what was at stake and he held the government at bay for the time he needed to write this full report. All of that still resonates today.
Q: Did your background as a journalist help or hinder you as a fiction writer?
A: When I worked in Yellowknife, I was writing poetry and stories on the side and not getting very far. I felt kind of schizophrenic, like my radio work was one type of thing and my writing was another and there was a gap between. That became even more pronounced when I started working for [CBC’s] Sunday Morning, doing radio documentaries. I took me a while to realize that there didn’t need to be such a wide gap between those two forms of writing, and that they could cross-fertilize. Good radio writing is similar to any good writing. It’s direct and economical and intimate and full of detail. Also, it sets your visual imagination working.
Q: Your previous novel, Garbo Laughs, about a family of cinephiles, explores the power that movies have over us. Late Nights on Air is about the lure and intimacy of radio. Does the medium still affect you?
A: I’ve always been a radio person. I just got trapped in Charlottetown in the aftermath of the hurricane. I turned on the radio in my hotel room to see about flights and see what was happening at the airport. I listened to the fellow from CBC for a couple of hours. You know, he never identified himself, but I knew his name was Stan, because people would call in and call him by name. It was wonderful radio, and it was important radio. Here were people withstanding the aftermath of a hurricane, their power was gone and they were comforting each other keeping each other informed by way of radio. One woman called in and said “It’s kind of lonely in the dark with just my cat.” And Stan said, “Well, actually, it’s you and me and the cat, isn’t it?”
Q: That intimacy and power to connect is something that makes for great novels, too.
A: Absolutely. Last night, Michael Ondaatje quoted the writer Henry Green, who said that “prose should be a long intimacy between strangers.” I thought that was a fabulous quotation.
Late Nights on Air is published by McClelland & Stewart.
Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.
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