Far to Go - By Alison Pick Page 0,103

different format. Interview by Erin Balser. Reprinted with permission.

Torontoist: Describe Far to Go in one sentence.

Alison Pick: Part mystery, part love story, Far to Go tells the tale of one family’s struggle with war and with the legacy of secrecy as it unfolds down the generations.

TO: How long did you work on Far to Go? Did the process differ from previous projects?

AP: I started working on Far to Go in January of 2007. I spent four months reading and planning, and then headed to Europe for residencies in France, Germany, and the Czech Republic. So, right away the process was different in that I knew I needed to be “on location” to get a feel for the place I was writing about. My first novel, The Sweet Edge, was contemporary, and Far to Go is historical, so I also had to do much more extensive research into the little details of daily life. That said, by setting the book against a dramatic backdrop such as the lead-up to the Second World War, part of my work was already done. I had a series of actual events and preexisting political tensions. All I had to do was drop my characters into the scene and see how they’d react.

TO: You’ve written both poetry collections and fiction. Is your creative process different for these different projects?

AP: Yes, very different. A poem is a short burst of inspiration, written in maybe one morning, then honed and sharpened over weeks or, more often, months. Since a novel has a much larger canvas, I have to pace myself differently. With long fiction, I use the creative burst to write an outline, maybe twenty or thirty pages. Then begins the slower and more deliberate process of colouring in the outline (actually writing the scenes). The final result deviates wildly from the original plan, but having a plan in place gives me confidence to keep writing. Alistair MacLeod once said to me, regarding novel-writing, that a carpenter trying to build a house wouldn’t just grab a bunch of nails and two-by-fours and start banging. That got me thinking! Once I’d given myself permission to “plan,” fiction became a whole lot more manageable. And, of course, with a poem, there’s no plan.

There are those who think it’s impossible to write both good poetry and fiction, whereas I find that each genre feeds the other. It’s like exercising the same muscle in different ways. Writing both makes me stronger.

TO: What was the editorial process like with Far to Go?

AP: It was a pleasure. I worked with Lynn Henry, who edited both my first collection of poetry, Question & Answer, and my novel The Sweet Edge. We knew each other well at the start of the editorial process, which makes everything so much easier. It’s like the difference between going on a first date and being married. I knew from past experience that I could trust her—both her judgment and her aesthetic—and that she understood where the book was trying to go as well as, if not better than, I did.

TO: Were you tempted to make major changes when the galleys arrived, or is this novel truly finished? If it is, when did you know it was truly finished?

AP: I wasn’t tempted to make any major changes, no. Being a bit of a perfectionist—at least where my writing is involved—there are always little niggles about sentences I might have tweaked differently or punctuation I might have altered. Silly things. In the big picture, though, I knew the book was finished because I couldn’t stand to look at it any longer. My energy for it was completely gone. I’ve learned that this is the way to tell that I’ve taken a book as far as I’m able.

TO: Anything you wish you’d done differently?

AP: Far to Go is partially about the Kindertransport, a series of trains that left Czechoslovakia in 1938 and ’39, taking young Jewish children to safety. In 2009, a special “Winton train” traveled to London via the original Kindertransport route, and in an ideal world my book would have been published to coincide with that event. On board the 2009 train were some surviving (now elderly) “Winton children” and their descendants. Their trip marked the seventieth anniversary of the original Kindertransports. So, from a marketing and publicity perspective, as well as from an emotional one, it would have been nice if the book had been out. That said, there’s no hurrying the creative process. I needed that extra year to