By Brandon Brady

Alistair MacLeod

Island Life
Author Alistair MacLeod would start his classes as a professor of English at the University of Windsor, Ontario, with one key piece of advice: "To do serious literature, I think you should care really, really seriously about it. If what you care about most is that you really love your father or really hate your father, then that's what motivates you. You should take what you care about, and then try to craft it so that it's good both in terms of feelings and its artistic merits. I think if you can take the feeling and channel it into something that is intellectually sound, then you should do that," MacLeod says. His Gaelic lilt is in full tilt as he checks in from a Denver hotel on a book tour that brings him to Joseph-Beth Booksellers at 7 p.m. Thursday.

MacLeod is beloved in Canada for his intellectually sound writing. This despite the fact (or perhaps because of it) that he's not very prolific. In 30 years, he has written a mere 16 stories and one novel. His short fiction, though previously published, has been assembled into one volume, Island: The Complete Stories.

The island in question is Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where MacLeod has spent most of his life. He uses the setting as a primary character in most of his writing. "I think landscape is very important, and I think sometimes people bond with their landscape. But I think your language almost comes out of your environment," he explains.

Whether he writes about a son urging his sheep farmer father to sell their land or a man recalling the golden collie that saved his life as a kid, MacLeod infuses his stories with a strong sense of the environment.

It's all mapped out as MacLeod handwrites his work up to the middle, jumping to its conclusion and then filling in the in-between. "I'm one of those people who like to know what I'm doing before I'm doing it. That's the last thing I'm going to say to the reader," he comments. "It seems to me like kind of a lighthouse or a destination for my journey."

E-mail Brandon Brady

Here's Where I Belong (March 21, 2002)
The Kids Feel Alright (March 14, 2002)
Boycotting the Closet (February 28, 2002)
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