Six Questions interview #53 : Missy Marston

Missy Marston’s first novel, The Love Monster, was the winner of the 2013 Ottawa Book Award, a finalist for the CBC Bookie Awards and for the Scotiabank Giller Prize Readers' Choice. Her second novel, Bad Ideas, is about daredevils and love. She lives in Ottawa with the artist, Peter Shmelzer, and the two small dogs with which they have replaced their grown children.

Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?

I moved to Ottawa when I was 18 to go to school and, except for a brief and super fun Student Work Abroad stint in the UK, I have been here ever since. Thirty-five years of joy and sorrow.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

I wrote as a little kid and I had a couple of kind teachers in my hometown that encouraged me. This led to some angsty teenage journaling. (I would write day after day, filling notebook after notebook. Then I would tear each notebook to pieces and shove them in the garbage.)

At Carleton I found writing friends. I remember Andrea Thompson and I sitting at the dining room table in her apartment on Bronson, typing up submissions to poetry magazines. We sent out stacks of them. My first reading was at an open-mic at Rasputin’s. My first published poem was in Arc magazine. I still have the check for ten dollars pinned to my bulletin board. Treasure.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?

I guess being exposed to the variety of work being produced gave me a better idea of where my work fit and how I wanted to define it. I was still kind of a child when I moved here so this was the first time I was part of a community and making friends that weren’t my exact contemporaries (that weren’t in my grade!). So, I was able to benefit from other people’s experience and also I was able to picture my future as an independent adult which honestly had been impossible for me before.  

Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?

I love Ottawa. Almost everything important that has ever happened to me has happened to me here.  My kids were born and raised here. I found the love of my life here. I went to my first rock concert here (Fifth Dimension at the Ex when I was four). I wrote both my novels here and had launch parties in rooms full of beautiful friends. I don’t know what happens here that doesn’t happen anywhere else but I have loved living and working here.

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How have the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?

I’m not sure how much direct evidence there is of Ottawa in my work. I can tell you that every reading I have ever been to -- at the literary festival, VerseFest, Plan 99 at The Manx, open mic stuff at Tree or Sawdust – has energized me and made me happy to be alive. I have my “writing group”, whose activities mostly involve talking about books and drinking beer but when it matters, providing advice on works in progress. Writing a novel takes a long time. A person can lose hope or get lost. These friends have kept me on track. Eye on the prize.

Q: What are you working on now?

I am working on my third novel. It is pretty juicy. Full of the unthinkable and the unbelievable. Sometimes I hate it. Today I love it. As usual, it will take me forever.