‘The characters just tumble out, and are very quick and easy to write. Then she decided that a novel would have more readership, which meant inventing characters, plots and subplots. When she decided to write something based on all this curiosity-driven research, she wanted it to be factual, ‘a nice didactic boring thing of some length’. Fifty of them are on the shelves behind me in her office. After seeing that sign in Michigan, she started reading and collecting books about trees, forestry and the timber business. A slow-germinating seed was planted that day, she now realises, and it flowered three decades later in Barkskins. She drove around, and found not a single white-pine tree. ‘After many miles of driving on wonderful empty roads, I came into this non-place, a crossroads with some shrubby little trees and a sign that said, ‘In this place grew the finest white-pine forest in the world.’ The makings of a masterpiece ‘I would drive across the country a lot in those days, just to see it, and I found myself one day in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan,’ she says.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |