A story based on circumstance

St. Vital

Linden Woods

Although the first line of local author Michael McMullen’s new book, Leaving Lisa, can’t be replicated for a news publication, there is a reason for its vulgarity — it’s entirely real. A phrase from a conversation McMullen overheard at a café about 20 years ago. The less-subtle way of saying, “do you want to get out of here?” is the genesis of the author’s third novel, which was launched at an event at Indigo’s Kenaston location on Sept. 24.

According to the official synopsis, the novel follows the paths of four main characters — two women and two men — as they “face major turning points in their lives, each one leaving something behind to gain a new, as yet murky, future.”

Now, McMullen has taken Lisa on the road. He has conducted over 30 launches around the country, and alongside the expected readings and Q-and-A sessions, he and Thomas Gut, a musician based in Beausejour, Man., have also used the launches as a platform for an accompanying country album, which shares the same name as the book and tells the same story.

Leaving Lisa is a romantic comedy story, which differs from McMullen’s previous works, Garbageboy and SCARRED — a result of its original inspiration and the natural progression of its story.

“I had no idea where the story was going to go, except that I had a setting, I had the sentence, and I had four potential characters,” McMullen said from his car in northern Ontario, on the coast of Lake Superior. “It developed into a very different genre.”

The four characters, and the way their lives interact, are the very core of the story itself. As McMullen determined their backstories and their relationships with one another, the genre began to take shape and an unexpected comedy poked through the leaves.

The musical component was an unexpected addition, as well, McMullen added.

“There’s one part of dialogue between the two women in the book that I thought sounded like a country or western song,” he said. “And that was in my head. And I thought, I’m just gonna write some lyrics and see how I feel about it. And that was the start of the music.”

Although McMullen always had a love of music, he has struggled with cadence and coming up with enough lyrics for an entire album was a new experience for him.

“It’s definitely out of my comfort zone,” he said. “It’s a different form of writing and thinking process … I didn’t know cadence. I didn’t know rhythm. I didn’t know breaks. And this goes back to what I say to other people: ‘don’t let the things you don’t know stop you.’ And it’s a phrase I use a lot — stop stopping before you start. And so I just decided that (I shouldn’t) handicap myself with what I don’t know.”

He gave Gut, as well as other musicians who were involved with the project, full creative control — encouraging them to take advantage of their own personal styles and talents — and was pleased that they respected the original vision.

In the spirit of that collaboration, McMullen also described Leaving Lisa as a very Canadian novel, in the sense that it was built upon the sentiment of lifting each other up, and added that he prefers to use the term “passing the puck” over the well-known “elbows up.”

“There’s one sidebar tangent in the book about a homeless couple and how they essentially save two business tycoons,” McMullen said. “And that little part of the book captured the essence of what I was trying to write, that we, no matter what our situations are in life, we as Canadians, have this ability to understand and lift each other up, support each other.”

“We understand when we need to pass the puck and set each other up … we have the ability to help others on their path … That’s the feeling I come away with, especially as I present my book as we tour across across this wonderful country of ours.”

Following the book tour, a second reading and concert event for Leaving Lisa will take place at the Indigo location in St. Vital Centre on Nov. 1 at 2 p.m.

Leaving Lisa (the album) is available on Spotify. The novel can be found at local booksellers.