André Alexis on Discovering as He Goes

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to André Alexis about his new story collection, Other Worlds.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: Your first short story in Other Worlds called “Contrition: An Isekai” is very complex. It’s 77 pages and has a type of shamanic reincarnation and covers a large time span and takes place in two different countries. I’m just curious how you set about structuring it or writing it.  What is your process? Are you a stream of consciousness writer? How did you make all the pieces come together?

André Alexis: It’s a good question. I am a stream of consciousness writer only to the extent that it’s important for me to be able to discover things as I go.  That’s when things tend to be more interesting or more emotionally involving. In this case, I was living with Elaine in her apartment, and to get some private time to write, I would go to the Barbara Frum Library, which was a five-minute walk away from the building that we were living in. So, going to that library was like exploring that world that preceded me by 100 years. And so, each time I went to the library the days of writing the first part were great. They were really like a discovery of the Trinidad within me, in a way. And once it was over, I wasn’t sure what to do, but I was excited by where I’d gotten to, and using the conventions, you know, having the guy reborn in Canada allowed me another kind of exploration, which is an exploration of the small town that I lived in when I was growing up, Petrolia, Ontario, and just imagining what that was like as I was growing up, which was another form of remembering. And so both, both places, Trinidad and Canada, exist as sites for memory and feeling and longing in a way that I don’t think I’ve managed to do in any other story. To answer the question, I discovered how that story would go as I went along.  I had no idea at any point how it was going to go. I was grateful for the framework that the isekai provides, because that allowed me to make the jump in an easier way than if I had to really reimagine a new genre. Having older genres can be very helpful in allowing you to know what the next step is at times, and that was the case with this one.  The surprise was also though that the notion of contrition is tied up with the notion of forgiveness and what that might mean. And most isekais are about revenge. And so, in writing this one it was really about the opposite of revenge. It was about feeling sorry for what one has done, but also gaining forgiveness for or forgiving because the main character forgives in the end, as he finds out how deeply contrite the British gentleman that he has inadvertently saved and who has inadvertently caused his death. He finds out how contrite that gentleman was, it moves him, you know, and you can be liberated by that, by contrition and forgiveness. And I think the end of it is a kind of liberation.

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André Alexis was born in Trinidad and grew up in Canada. His novel, Fifteen Dogs, won the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. His internationally acclaimed debut, Childhood, won the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Trillium Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. In 2017, he was awarded the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for fiction.  His new collection is Other Worlds.