André Alexis on Martha Baillie’s There Is No Blue

André Alexis (winner of a 2017 Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction) joins Michael Kelleher to kick off the 2025 winter season of the podcast with a vibrant discussion of Martha Baillie’s memoir, There Is No Blue. TW: the book and this episode include discussion of suicide and abuse.

For a full episode transcript, click here.

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Reading list: 

There Is No Blue by Martha Baillie • The Search for Heinrich Schlögel by Martha Baillie • Falling Hour by Geoffrey D. Morrison • Finnegans Wake by James Joyce

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From the episode:

André Alexis:  The book itself concentrates on house and room, which is why it’s so beautiful to end with the final poem, with the idea of small changes changing the way a room looks, changing the way a room feels. The book itself is an illustration of that and how things change within a house, within a family, based on whether the father sexually molested the sister or not. The effort to,come to terms with someone who won’t sit still, who in fact keeps changing, so that there is only the adjustment. I mean, one of the interesting ironies about the final poem, small changes, is it’s really lovely to imagine that a small change can in fact influence how you feel about a room. But if you push that just a little bit further so that there is only constant changing, what does the room become?