Kay brings new book about exile home to Winnipeg

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This article was published 14/07/2023 (1160 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It has been nearly 50 years since the Saskatchewan-born, Winnipeg-raised Guy Gavriel Kay was invited to Oxford to help J.R.R. Tolkien’s son, Christopher Tolkien, edit his late father’s last book, The Silmarillion.

He launched his own writing career in 1984 with The Fionavar Tapestry trilogy; the books were what’s called a “portal fantasy,” where people from contemporary times are transported to another world/dimension.

He now writes books that could be called “historical fantasies.” But Kay prefers to call them stories with “a quarter-turn to the fantastic,” set in Byzantium or 12th-century China or medieval Spain.

Kay’s books have been translated into more than 30 languages and he was awarded the International Goliardos Prize for his work in the literature of the fantastic. In 2014, he was named to the Order of Canada.

Next week, the Toronto-based writer will bring his 15th novel, All the Seas of the World, to McNally Robinson Booksellers. Kay always brings his books home, saying he enjoys reading to — and being in conversation with — his Winnipeg fans.

The event will be Tuesday at the Grant Park location and will be streamed live via YouTube.

Free Press: What do you want people to know about All the Seas of the World?

Guy Gavriel Kay: Over the years I’ve learned that every reader has their own takeaway from a book. I try not to guide or shape that in my comments! I’ll say that it is very much a book about the idea of exile (caused in various ways) — the longing for home, or the feeling one cannot go back.

I wanted to find ways of offering the thoughts and feelings of several characters surrounding the issues of being forced from home.

But for me this idea of “themes” always has to go together with narrative drive, keeping the reader awake at night, so the craft partially involves the interplay of these two ambitions. I don’t see it as either/or; I see it as my job to try to offer both.

FP: This is your third book set in a “near-Renaissance world.” What are the pressures of writing linked books? Do you have an enormous timeline up on the walls of your office? A series of maps?

GGK: It was never planned out as an interwoven series, each can be read alone, and different effects I like come from reading in different order. I did have to keep notes as to what I had already committed to paper or pixel.

FP: This is your 16th book. What have you learned about your process so far or do you have a new process for every project?

GGK: Each new book is still a journey into a dark forest holding a lantern that doesn’t illuminate enough at the start. I suppose I’ve learned that this is a normal process or feeling for me, not to panic about it.

FP: What books were important to you while you were writing All the Seas of the World? Who are your late-career influences?

GGK: I put a selected bibliography at the back of each novel now, of books that were helpful, for any readers who want to know more about the time and place I’m riffing on. By now, honestly, life itself becomes the major influence, not any other art. Family, friends, arrivals, losses, the wider sorrows and joys of the world. All the Seas isn’t an overtly COVID-related book at all, but it was written during the worst of the pandemic and we all live within the times we are given, and are shaped by these, to a greater or lesser degree.

FP: What are you reading right now?

GGK: I’m belatedly reading Marguerite Yourcenar’s hugely praised Memoirs of Hadrian and there is the newest book by the French Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano cued up next. He’s a sorcerer for me, a favourite writer. Plus, I’m always reading poetry.

FP: As a poet, I need to know: when are we going to see another poetry book from you?

GGK: I’ve been writing poetry all along, publishing occasional pieces. At some point I might feel there are enough for a book.

FP: You live in Toronto now, but what does it mean to do events for your books at McNally Robinson Booksellers, in the city where you were raised?

GGK: I’ve had this discussion often with childhood friends, also living “away.” Every one of us still thinks of themselves as a Winnipegger. And as I’ve often said, McNally’s is in the shopping plaza adjacent to my former high school. I cut classes in that mall! Also, the story goes that my mother was Holly McNally’s first customer, when she opened a small store at Kenaston and Grant. So there are many, many vivid associations for me. I absolutely love coming back home to do events there.

Ariel Gordon’s next book, Siteseeing: Writing Nature and Climate Across the Prairies, will be launched Nov. 8 at McNally Robinson’s Grant Park location.