Giving ideas 'emotional reality'

 

“Fiction allows you to embody certain ideas and give them an emotional reality. The characters allow you to get close viscerally to an idea.” –  Anne Michaels

 

Born in Toronto on this date in 1958, Michaels is a poet, novelist and teacher whose numerous writing awards include a handful for her both her book of poetry The Weight of Oranges and her novel Fugitive Pieces.  The latter not only earned a Books in Canada First Novel Award, but also the Trillium Book Award, the Orange Prize for Fiction, and the Guardian Fiction Prize.  

When she's not writing, she also enjoys composing – particularly musical scores for theater.  But, it's fiction that Michaels most enjoys.

 

“It's a fantastic privilege to spend three or four hundred pages with a reader,” she said.  “You have time to go into certain questions that are painful or difficult or complicated. That's one thing that appeals to me very much about the novel form.”