I think the first time I thought clearly that I wanted to be a writer was when I was in elementary school and I read a poem I’d written about war aloud at the Remembrance Day assembly and it made the school librarian cry.
I never ever start with a full-fledged idea of the story in its entirety. I start with language. Not even a whole sentence. It’s as if the writing literally flows out of my fingertips as much as out of my brain. I am wildly envious of people who are able to plan out their stories and then when they can catch a moment, they pour the whole thing onto paper in one shot.
I think the role of the writer, like the role of any artist, should be self-defined. To me it seems that the writer’s role is to look at the world and try to see what it is, and then to create something out of that investigation. A novel is an intimate form that can explore interior landscapes in a way that other forms, even film, struggle awkwardly to describe. My aim is to exploit that power.
Writing poems is not just a matter of sitting in front of the computer; it also involves living a life, going to work, doing the dishes. Perhaps the real question is how we arrange our lives so that we live as fully and as interestingly as possible?
In The Amazing Absorbing Boy, Maharaj takes a look at immigration from the POV of a young man, forced into moving to Canada after the death of his mother. His father had moved to Canada years previously, and now Samuel finds himself in a small Regent Park apartment in Toronto with a stranger who could charitably be described as ‘cold.’ Samuel is the prototypical stranger in a strange land, fish out of water hero; alone, frightened, resourceful, and very confused as to what a typical Canadian might be.
Canadians already read Margaret Atwood. Was there any person actually interested in Canada Reads who hadn’t read The Handmaid’s Tale? Ditto Life of Pi, ditto The Stone Angel, ditto A Fine Balance, ditto A Complicated Kindness. Again, I do not mean to disparage these novels; I unreservedly love Handmaid and Life of Pi, I dig Complicated, I’ve never even read Balance, and my views on Stone Angel are likely distorted by the overall unhappiness of my high school years and cannot be trusted.
