Canada move inspired writer

Ellen MacAskill’s story/novella A9 is published in new book Home Town Tales: Highlands & Hebrides. Currently in Canada, Ellen’s finished her debut novel, a road trip story about queer friendship. Below she answers Margaret Chrystall's questions about writing and home ...

1 How long have you been writing fiction for?

I’ve been writing fiction since I was a wee kid. It’s something I’ve always done, and since my teens I’ve taken it seriously as something I want to do as a career. My family and teachers at Culloden were always very supportive. I went to Glasgow University to study English because they have a creative writing department which I worked my way into.

2 How did having your piece published in the Weidenfeld & Nicolson series come about?

W&N Books put out a call for submissions from new authors to write 15,000 words about their hometown in the UK, which I noticed on Twitter. This was when I had graduated and was on my way to Canada to work. I was prioritising my creative writing now that my studies were out of the way. Moving gave me the space and perspective to write something set at home, and it also helped with homesickness to revisit Inverness in my head every day. I wrote it over the winter in Vancouver, submitted it in January, then heard back in August that they wanted to include it in the series. The editor of the series, Jennifer Kerslake at Orion, provided feedback and edits, then the final draft was finished in the autumn.

3 Have you got anything else coming out that we should know about?

I also write poetry and this summer I’m making a zine (a DIY mini-magazine) of poems with my friend Lizzie, a visual artist. It’s about our year living in Montreal and should be available to order or read online. I have a website – www.ellenmacaskill.com – with some other writing on it, including a link to my newsletter.

4 Some of what happens to your heroine in the story has parallels apparently with your own life ie particularly moving to Canada. How are you finding the country after Inverness, Glasgow and Scotland?

I really love living in Canada and owe this place a lot. I’ve spent most of my adult life here - I moved to Ontario for an academic exchange when I was 19, came back to Glasgow for a year, then moved straight back. The sense of space and possibility and the diversity of the people is really freeing. There’s amazing literature coming out of Canada. I’ve been lucky to travel a bit but it is expensive to do so. That makes me miss the cosiness of the UK, where you can hop on a bus and visit friends on the other side of the country for a weekend.

5 You beautifully express the challenges your character faces growing up in a small town/city like Inverness. Was that something you needed to write about?

Just before I wrote A9, I read Girl Meets Boy by the amazing Ali Smith. It’s a novella set in Inverness, where she also grew up, about a romance between two feminist women. Reading it blew my mind and inspired me to write a queer narrative into the landscape of Inverness. I’ve never experienced that because I moved to the relative safety of big cities at 17 - but I wonder a lot about the ways queer and transgender folks outside of the metropolis make lives for themselves and stay safe without a big LGBT+ presence around them.

Growing up rurally in the Inverness area, gay people were either invisible or talked about in hushed voices or explicitly hated. Maybe things have improved now, but it feels important to be honest about the difficulties that environment can cause for a person emotionally, even after you leave.

6 If you want to say, I would love to know something about the novel you are working on now?

My novel, Coasting, is a road trip story about queer friendship with a speculative fiction twist, set between Canada and Scotland. I’ve had a lot of fun writing it and am in the editing stages, looking for ways to get it published. I love writing about travel and different settings, and this story allowed me to further explore rural vs. urban experiences. It could be read as a sequel to A9 at a stretch. Hopefully it’ll find a home on the shelves in the next couple of years.

7 Given that you have been in Canada and that the series of books A9 is published in is about home, have your views on home changed at all since your ‘exile’?

I’ll be moving back to Scotland in the autumn, so I’ve been thinking about home a lot, and writing this book stoked a nostalgia for it which is easier to feel when you’re not there. Overall most of us are lucky to be from Scotland, and getting critical space has allowed me to appreciate that. I can’t wait to be among all the magical, wild places again, and the cultural scenes of Glasgow. I also miss the sense of humour, and my friends and relatives. I will take lessons home, like healthier drinking habits, among other things!

Home Town Tales: Highlands & Hebrides containing Ellen's novella A9 and also Colin McIntyre's The Boy In The Bubble, about growing up in Mull, is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson and is out now in hardback (£9.99) and as an eBook (£5.99).