Anne Michaels is a novelist and poet. Her books are translated into more than fifty languages and have won dozens of international awards, including the Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, and the Lannan Award for Fiction. Among many other honours she is a Guggenheim Fellow, has received honorary degrees, and has served as Toronto’s Poet Laureate. Her novel Fugitive Pieces was adapted as a feature film. Her most recent books include All We Saw, Infinite Gradation and Railtracks (co-written with John Berger). In 2020, her novel Fugitive Pieces was chosen as one of the BBC’s 100 Novels that Shaped the World.
1. Why do you tell stories?
When we meet another’s gaze - mind to mind, heart to heart, writer to reader, reader to writer - something is mended.
2. Describe your novel Held in one (or two) sentence(s).
Held explores the ways love continues its work long past the span of a life.
We’re used to measuring history by events and actions, but this book wants to assert a different measure for history, the real and powerful effect of our inner lives – what we believe, what we value, what we love, what we aspire to. Again and again, in different ways, Held asks what forces bring us to a present moment. These forces, from particle physics to evolution, to revolution, to the replication of cells, to hauntings, to a gesture, to an error, to a silence, to desire, to memory... the ways we choose, and all the ways beyond our choosing, how we are connected to each other and through time... this is Held’s investigation.
3. How did you choose the historical figures that were included in the narrative? Had these people always held a certain fascination for you, or was there another way you came to see them as belonging in the life stories of your characters?
These figures took their places quite naturally as I was writing - they each have a relationship to questions in the book - about our conflation of science and technology, and how science in the late 1800s and early 1900s, in its manipulation of the atomic world, began to supplant our ancient and crucial relationship with invisibility. The scientists in Held were not afraid to consider areas of knowledge that - by their very nature - can’t be proven. And it was a joy to show the close friendship of Marie Curie and Hertha Ayrton, to depict them as women, as mothers, as well as formidable scientists; both were brilliant, kind, socially conscious, loyal, loving, full of both doubt and resolve. Held is steeped in history but I didn’t want the history to be overt, instead to glint at the edges and beneath the surface. It was very important to me that we see that history through the inner lives of these figures.
4. In some ways Held feels more akin to your collections of poetry than to your more narrative works. Were the stylistic choices made here intentional, or does the story simply come to you in the form it does?
Every structural choice - and every word - is intentional. I believe that, whether you are writing a 10 line poem or 450 page novel, not a single word should be extraneous or wasted - and that is respect for the reader; I don’t mean structure should be skeletal, not at all, but that we need just the right balance of flesh, muscle, bone. The intensity is very deliberate and it’s crucial to me that there is space for the reader. The structure of the book also reflects my rebellion against the idea that we can summarize or sum up a life - every life overflows any summation. Instead, it can be more truthful to present a core sample - and these moments, these fragments, assert that these lives have existed before this moment, and will carry on past this moment; and that what has occurred - the inner life that is often so unknown to others, so intimate and inexpressible - can have an influence beyond the span of a life. In Held, I longed to honour this mystery, these privacies, at the heart of a life.
5. You use as points of reference for each chapter rivers, forests and years. Chapter by chapter, the years are not presented in a linear fashion, but we were curious: is there a pattern to the order of rivers or forests as they are presented to us?
Rivers and forests are an acknowledgement of the geologic time that we are all immersed in. The date, the place, the geography…each element situates us in time in a slightly different context.
6. The act of feeling close to loved ones through clothing, is a much-loved recurring motif. The images of Mara wearing her Father's hat, the guard confiscating the lovingly made child's clothing, the unique fisherman's sweaters and many others all had us almost sobbing remembering our own memories of loved ones making or gifting us precious wearables. Are pieces of clothing touchstones to the beloved?
Yes, absolutely…And those who have had the task of deciding the fate of clothes of a loved one who has died, know how deeply invested we are in what has held and been close to the bodies of those we love - simply and powerfully: they have lived in them.
7. When and where do you write?
I used to write through the night when my children were young - knowing they were asleep and safely oblivious to the dark thoughts of the history I was researching; young children are always aware of your every mood and I felt that writing while they were asleep was somehow a way of keeping that complicated darkness from them - and it was the only way to have uninterrupted time. Parenthood and writing are both full-time and so the only solution for many years was to divide the 24 hour day in two. Now I write during the day, with the same never-diminishing teetering piles of research around me.
8. What are three things that sustain you as an author, or while you’re writing?
In these urgent times, I am sustained by the thought that nothing enrages the tyrant more than hope.
9. Name three books that you couldn’t live without, or that were crucial to the writing of Held?
Over the course of time our relationship with our necessary books ever deepens, even hard truths are companions… For me, one of these necessary books is Shakespeare’s King Lear.