Welcome to the 5 Minutes Series. Each week, I’ll ask five questions of some of my favorite authors, editors, publishers, and other industry professionals. This week I’m talking with Michael Blouin. Blouin has been a finalist for the Amazon First Novel Award, the bpNichol Award, the CBC Literary Award and his first novel won the 2009 ReLit Award. He has been the recipient of the Lilian I. Found Award, the Diana Brebner Award and the Lampman Award. His 2019 novel Skin House won the 2020 ReLit Award for Best Novel and has been included on the NASA/Astrobotics Peregrine Mission to the Moon and along with his most recent novel I am Billy the Kid will be a part of the 2024 SpaceX lunar landing. He has served as an adjudicator for The Canada Council and is an Instructor at the University of Toronto. He is represented by Westwood Creative Artists.
In a recent podcast, you said you collected rejections for years. What do you think inspired you to keep going when times were hard?
I do believe that a persistent faith in one’s own voice is key to success in traditional publishing. It’s not the only key of course but it is an essential element in a business that can be quite hard on writers. So I do recall years in which I collected nothing but rejections, be they for novels, short stories or poetry, and thinking “Why aren’t they seeing what I’m seeing?” Part of the answer of course is that I was seeing more than what was on the page because I had not yet fully defined my voice, and this is another important key to getting published. As to what kept me going? I suppose it was a hard-headed belief in my own abilities in spite of what others were telling me. You could also call it stubbornness. Let’s call it what it was – it was stubbornness.
Do you have a writing process and what happens if it gets interrupted?
I think of writing as the process of noticing things acutely and also in terms of the author being a filter of experience – all aspects of experience, so my process tends to be twenty-four hours a day accordingly. There is not a time when I am not writing. But in practical, temporal terms I wake between five and six, exercise, make coffee, and get to the desk. I’ll spend half the day in the process of actually working but that can entail reading, research, listening to music, filling fountain pens… a myriad of activities that serve to keep my butt planted and my pen moving on the paper when the time is right. I’m currently working on a longish novel composed of shortish sections and my goal is a section a day. I’ll stop when the voice has nothing else to say, hopefully with a sense of where I’m going to pick up the story the next day.
Does writing poetry hone your novel skills and vice versa? Or are the two unconnected?
My fiction tends to the lyrical and my poetry likes to tell stories so I suppose that they are connected and likely do inform one another, but I tend to not think in terms of how my writing works. I have an abundance of caution about examining the nature of that mechanism too closely. I don’t want to know how the car runs; I just need it to start each morning.
I’m sure you’re tired of talking about your books going to the moon, but it’s just too exciting. Can you talk a little about how that happened?
Just at the start of the pandemic we had a house fire, and we were between air bnb’s for a year and a half while rebuilding. I had known about the possibility of being included on a mission but due to the upheaval at the time I woke one morning to the realization that I had just missed the deadline by twelve hours. I was crestfallen until I got a text from Carolyn R Parsons (author of the amazing books “The Forbidden Dreams of Betsy Elliot” and “Desolate”), and she had space for me reserved. Space exploration has long been a fascination for me, and I jumped at the chance. If all goes well both Carolyn and I should be waving from the moon in a few months! To make a longish story short I’ll be reporting from Cape Canaveral for the CBC as my book “Skin House” launches later this year with NASA and the Director of The Lunar Codex has informed me that my most recent book “I am Billy the Kid” will be included on a separate SpaceX mission in 2024.
Finally, what are you working on now and when can we expect a new work from you?
For the last year I’ve been writing a novel with an element of magic realism and I’m approaching the completion of a first draft, but my publisher Anvil Press is preparing a comprehensive poetry collection in narrative form entitled “Southbound” for publication in 2024 and you can expect the rollicking sequel to “Skin House” entitled “The Big Bad” to follow. In total I’m projecting four books over the next few years which will bring me to ten so far, with more to follow!
Michael Blouin’s novel, Billy the Kid, can be found here.
His novel, Skin House, is available here.
And for more information about Michael, check out his website here.
Finnian Burnett 