Madeleine Thien interviews Eleanor Wachtel on the final original Writers & Company episode
The conversation took place at the 2024 Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival in Montreal
After 33 years of fresh interviews and one year celebrating the show's best conversations, Writers & Company's official final episode will air on Sept. 1, 2024.
The episode features a thoughtful and funny conversation between writer Madeleine Thien and Eleanor Wachtel on stage at the 2024 Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival, where Thien turned the tables and became the interviewer.
During their discussion, Wachtel referenced two of her favourite conversations over the years, a 2002 interview with Jamaica Kincaid and a 2001 interview with Oliver Sacks.
Thien is the Montreal-based author of the novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which won the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General's Award in 2016 and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Her other books include novels Certainty, Dogs at the Perimeter and children's book The Chinese Violin.
Thien dove into Wachtel's childhood love for reading and how she approaches her signature, in-depth interviews.
A house without books
"I grew up in a house without books. Books came from the library and it didn't take me long to realize the power of reading. I shared a room with my sister and it was down at the end of a long hall and halfway down was my brother's room.
"On Saturday mornings my mother would shout down the hallway and say from the kitchen, 'Get up, get out, do things.' And I learned from my older siblings — I'm the youngest of three. 'Yes,' we would say and turn the page.
"Growing up in 1950s and 1960s in Montreal, my reading was haphazard. I managed to completely bypass children's classics like Alice in Wonderland or Winnie the Pooh. The English critic Sir Frank Kermode, who grew up on the Isle of Man in the 1920s, told me about his own stumbling upon classics like Dickens only by accident, and that he was always mystified when people would make reference to Eeyore. And me too.
"But what I did know was that British books had a different smell than North American ones and I don't know if it was the glue or the binding … I remember Mavis Gallant mentioning that as well. The children in those English books were always much more independent than their North American counterparts. So I came to favour that scent.
I read for plot, for stories and in some ways I still do.- Eleanor Wachtel
"Although the very first thing I can remember reading on my own was pure description, it was actually the squeaking sound of a bear crunching on frozen snow — I mean how atavistically Canadian — and the bear wasn't a danger and it wasn't a threat or anything. But I read for plot, for stories and in some ways I still do.
"I only became aware of an identifiable author and a voice later. In primary school we had a collection of short stories and I remember The Night the Bed Fell on Father by James Thurber and Edgar Allan Poe's Descent into the Maelström."
Interview as a portrait
"This is something that I would like to think because I like the sound of it.
"I've so often been accused of being a shrink manqué, because I ask everybody about their mother and their father and all this, which of course I do. But that's in part because everybody has more or less had them and therefore can the listener, even if they haven't read the book or don't know much about the author, they can connect with someone's upbringing, how they were shaped by their families and things like that.
"But I'm certainly interested in writers' backgrounds in their coming of age, their life choices.
I'm certainly interested in writers' backgrounds in their coming of age, their life choices.- Eleanor Wachtel
"A portrait almost sounds too fixed because over the span of the program, I've had the privilege of interviewing a number of people many times and the different books invite a different line of conversation to some degree."
Eleanor Wachtel's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
The complete archive of Writers & Company episodes will be digitized and available on the SFU Library's Digitized Collections website, a project being done in collaboration with Simon Fraser University's Special Collections and Rare Books and the SpokenWeb project.
Ten episodes are already available online, with more being added over the next two years. Until then, the recent seasons are available on CBC Listen.
The final Writers & Company episode also passed the torch from one author interview show to another — and featured a conversation between Wachtel and Mattea Roach, the host of CBC's new show Bookends.
You can listen to Bookends on CBC Radio One on Sundays at 1 p.m. (1:30 p.m. NT, 3 p.m. PT) starting Sept. 8, wherever you get your podcasts and on the CBC Arts Youtube channel.
Bookends will take over the Writers & Company podcast feeds, so subscribe on Chartable or check out CBC Listen to never miss an episode.
