“Writing is a saving grace”—Anne Michaels

Canadian Anne Michaels,author of four poetry collections and two critically acclaimed novels—Fugitive Pieces (1996) and The Winter Vault (2009)—presented a President’s Distinguished Lecture Feb. 18 during a special convocation ceremony in which she received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from UVic. Her lecture examined faith and failure, pain and love, memory and silence—themes apparent in her novels.

She writes and she reads “in order to hold another human being close.” To embark on a journey with a reader and deliver him or her “to the other side.” To make a connection.

According to Michaels, the process of writing Fugitive Pieces taught her a lot about being a writer. It also taught her about humanity. The novel follows the life of a Jewish boy, orphaned during the Second World War. With such huge historic events guiding the story, Michaels felt a moral responsibility to tell it right. After all, the truth was at stake.

It took 10 years to write and began with a cluster of questions that inherently had no answers. Questions related to historical events that Michaels believed were connected, though the connections were not apparent. Characters and situations formed from the questions. Then the research began in earnest.

Michaels conducted in-depth research on topics relating to history, archaeology, paleobotany and geology. “To collect facts is one thing,” Michaels explains, “to discover the meaning of the facts is quite another.” It is the meaning—the details of the facts—that takes the most time. Michaels recalled staring at a single photograph for years before that eureka moment when all the connections suddenly became apparent. Some facts, she feels, must be long thought about before one can assume an understanding.

There were times during those 10 years when Michaels was utterly silenced by the horror of the things she was attempting to understand. She asked herself, “Who was I to speak?” She put the pen down and didn’t write a word for months. It felt like the right thing to do. But once the truth unfolded, she wondered, “Who was I if I did not speak?” And then the words spilled out of her, fueled by a responsibility to the characters, an opportunity to memorialize the past and a “foolhardy courage” to write the truth in her own words.

During her lecture Michaels took a moment to reflect on failure, “that great engine of creativity.” Failure, she explained, “teaches us precisely what we need to know,” and it’s “custom made.” For Michaels, things like failure, grief, shame and regret are not the end of a story, but the middle of the story. “Failure is always forward motion;” it’s part of the journey that will eventually deliver you “to the other side.”

Michaels’ lecture was the second in a series of three special convocations celebrating UVic’s 50th anniversary. On March 27, ecofeminist and social justice activist Dr. Vandana Shiva will be presenting “The Future of Food.” See all anniversary events at uvic.ca/anniversary.