Barnstorm Interview: Margot Livesey

Feb 29, 2011

Margot Livesey is a writer, professor and editor of the award-winning Ploughshares. She is the author of, most recently, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, a novel about a spirited young woman orphaned at the age of ten and her pursuit of a better life in 1960s Scotland. In our interview, Ms. Livesey shared her thoughts on the writing craft, guilty pleasures and soufflés.Q: Eight books after your debut, does the process of writing a novel continue to surprise you, and, if so, what's one thing you learned about the craft while writing your most recent novel?A: I still find it surprising that writing unlike, say, making a cheese soufflé or playing table tennis, doesn't get easier.  One thing I learned, or relearned, in writing The Flight of Gemma Hardy was how much the setting of a novel governs the action.Q: Can you share an example of one of the ways in which your experiences as an editor have informed the decisions you make in your own writing?A: Working as a fiction editor at Ploughshares I get to read a number of very accomplished stories and it's interesting to see how certain images or turns of plot become clichés.  I will never again write “all the oxygen seemed to leave the room.”Q: A contemporary writer whose prose style you envy. Who? And what are you going to do about it?A: Alice Munro.  I plan to keep reading her obsessively.Q: As a reader, what's your guiltiest pleasure?A: Personal ads in The New York Review of Books and even better the London Review of Books.Q: What is one subject, theme, or point of view relevant to your life experience that you haven't yet tackled in your own writing? Why do you think that is?A: Living in a foreign country.  I think it's quite hard to write about the US as an outsider because people already have so many opinions about this country unlike, say, Belgium.Q: Kurt Vonnegut once advised writers to “write to please just one person.” Do you feel this advice applies to you? If it does, who do you write to please?A: My dear friend, the wonderful writer Andrea Barrett.Q: Set the scene. What has been the happiest moment in your writing life so far?A: A tiny note, six inches by four, from Cynthia Good, an editor at Penguin Books in Canada, saying yes, she would like to publish the stories I'd sent her.  I just had to write some more.-- Dustin Martin