Interview with Ann-Marie MacDonald, 2024-2025 Richler Writer in Residence (2024)

During the Fall 2024 semester, McGill’s Department of English welcomes Ann-Marie MacDonald as the 2024-2025 Richler Writer in Residence. MacDonald’s literary works include ten plays and four novels, touching on feminist, queer, and decolonial themes.

During her residency, MacDonald will be participating in two events: a conversation on historical fiction with former Richler Writer-in-Residence and McGill alum Heather O’Neill, on October 30th, and a talk with Dr. Neta Gordon from Brock University on her SSHRC funded interdisciplinary project of literary geography and the mapping of MacDonald’s literary works. During her time at McGill, MacDonald will be working on two new plays, one of which is a stage adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice for the Stratford Festival.

MacDonald will hold office hours for students in Arts-310 on October 21, 25 and November 29, from 9:30AM to 12:30PM. Students are welcome to bring any material that is readable within 20 minutes. A sign up sheet for appointments with MacDonald is available in Arts 310.

On the Outside, Looking In: The Journey of a Writer

Over the last four decades, MacDonald has been engaging in various forms of art and expression; from acting to playwriting to novel writing, to broadcasting, she has engaged a vast array of audiences across mediums and subjects.

Due to her father’s work in the Canadian Air Force, MacDonald moved around a lot in her childhood. Born in Germany, MacDonald’s upbringing was shaped by her parents’ own history: her father, who could trace his family’s lineage back to the Highland Clearances and her mother, the child of Lebanese immigrants, both hailed from Cape Breton Island.

Growing up, MacDonald learned traditional Lebanese dancing as well as Highland dancing and was exposed to her family’s memories, myths and repeated stories, which shaped her perspective as an artist. A sense of being different has followed her ever since.

“Moving around a lot gave me the sense of belonging and not-belonging, of being ‘normal’ and ‘not normal’,” she says. “Always inside and outside at the same time, which when you think about it, is the perspective of the artist. A writer who is sufficiently ‘inside’ to understand something and sufficiently ‘outside’ to always be observing.”

The Period Novel and its Contemporary Dialogue

The period novel is a genre in which MacDonald has worked extensively in and serves as the main topic of her first event at McGill. Her latest novel, Fayne, published by Knopf Canada in 2022, is set on a remote estate straddling the border between England and Scotland in the late 1800s, and was written in the spirit of the Victorian novel (readers will recognize the world of the Brontë sisters in Fayne’s pages.)

For MacDonald, Fayne is a book that couldn’t have been written in any other moment than the 21st century.

“I am interested in the idea of writing a period novel since it can only ever be written now,” says MacDonald. “What is it about something in a distant time period, in a historical setting, that enables you to speak to the present, to the contemporary moment?”

“In writing Fayne, I know that I am entering into an agreement with the reader,” says MacDonald. “The tropes and conceits of the genre will be abundant and those are going to buoy the reader experience.”

In honouring the tradition of the Victorian novel, MacDonald transports us to Fayne, the Bell’s lonely and isolated estate where the protagonist, Charlotte, who lives alone with her reclusive father on 12,000 acres of moorlands, has an insatiable thirst for knowledge and enjoys exploring the boglands of her father’s estate, learning about the old healing ways of the bog from the estate’s hired man Byrn.

Storytelling Through Research

Charlotte’s hunger for knowledge and her eventual discovery of science via her tutor reflects MacDonald’s own fascination with the history of science in the late nineteenth century.

“Historical fiction offers an opportunity to create an immersive experience for the reader, because we are going to a faraway time and that means that you are already letting go of the present moment, the suspension of disbelief has begun,” says MacDonald. “We are going to time-travel, we are going to taste, and smell, and feel what it was like then and there.”

In creating Fayne’s universe, MacDonald undertook extensive research at the Osler Library of the History of Medicine at McGill University, as well as medical museums in London, Glasgow, and Edinburgh.

“I was in my happy place reading old case studies, paging through catalogues of surgical implements, medical devices and diagnoses and prescriptions, as well as descriptions of female diseases and disorders, all of which stem from gynaecology,” says MacDonald.

Fayne’s protagonist has been kept from the world by her father due in large part to a “mysterious condition” and her quest for knowledge upends her world, leading her father to arrange for her to be “cured.”

“The woman is her uterus, that was the abiding principle,” adds MacDonald. Her book addresses this rise in gynaecology in the nineteenth century, the concept of female “hysteria”, and the cliché of the rescuer.

Understanding and recreating that universe is crucial to the reading experience. Everything from Victorian medical terminologies to the shape and heaviness of the first gynaecological speculum, to the movers and thinkers that went on to shape and shift early 20th century thought, come together to immerse the reader in the protagonist’s universe.

Crossing Borders: The Past in Dialogue with the Present

Borders are another topic that has always fascinated MacDonald. The Bell’s estate sits on the borderlands of England and Scotland, and Charlotte’s quest for knowledge crosses between the boundaries of ancestral knowledge and wisdom and the emergence of scientific thought.

“Binaries have bedeviled me my entire career,” she says. “Fayne is the ultimate challenge to any binary notion, whether it is of our body, our sexuality, our gender, or the nature of reality and our world itself, and the discovery of what is truly valuable.”

In Fayne, MacDonald also engages with contemporary themes of ecocriticism and biodiversity. Charlotte’s fascination with the bogs on her father’s estate is an example of the past in dialogue with the present. Today, we now know that wetlands such as boglands, are an important carbon sink for the planet. Decades of human interventions on wetlands, such as the draining and burning of boglands for agricultural purposes, produces a large amount of CO2 emissions.

The act of ‘curing’ Charlotte is mirrored in our ‘curing’ of the planet, and MacDonald asks us to ponder, who needs to be ‘cured’? What is a ‘cure’? And what’s the difference between curing and healing?

In our own contemporary context, the commercial and cultural rise of self-care, debates on the reproductive rights of women, and the ever-looming threats of climate change, all point to a continued conversation on who and what needs to be cured.

MacDonald’s works engage the reader in multiple conversations that crisscross the borders of history, art, and science, reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of storytelling.

Readers can discover more about MacDonald's novels and plays by visiting her website.

Interview with Ann-Marie MacDonald, 2024-2025 Richler Writer in Residence (2024)
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