Your cart is currently empty!
Writer’s Block: Rod Moody-Corbett
In our rapid-fire Q&A, Rod Moody-Corbett shares how his characters are shaped by the quirks and cadences of everyday speech and his openness to the fluid boundary between reality and imagination.
Read on for our interview with Rod and more about his new novel Hides (Breakwater Books), a story of family and politics.
Photo of Rod Moody-Corbett by Elyse Bouvier.
All Lit Up: Is there one stand-out moment or experience you had that helped you realize you wanted to become a writer?
Rod Moody-Corbett: In junior high—in response to an exhausted teacher’s exhausted prompt (“Take twenty minutes and describe your summer vacation.”)—I wrote and read aloud a short piece of what I can only begin to describe as “gothic autofiction,” in which a family of beleaguered kayakers, overnighting at some desolate, mosquito-plagued beach in British Columbia, set aside domestic grievances in the hopes of repelling a gaggle of drunken nudists.
The story, a true-enough account of one nudist’s near-death encounter with a capsized motorboat and such rescue efforts as the family tendered (via kayak), received rave reviews from my classmates, but elicited a call home from my teacher, who judged its situations concerning and graphic. Well, you can’t please everyone. But I was hooked.
ALU: Describe your perfect writing day.
RMC: A perfect day of writing, for me, involves a caffeinated spasm of reckless drafting combined with—ideally—a few hours lost to intensive editing, while my muse, a three-legged cat named Five, discourses with the magpies roosting in the spruce outside my office window. I’m happiest, most completely myself, knee-deep in the nitty-gritty, losing sleep to a semicolon, winnowing chaff from grain.
ALU: Where do you find inspiration for your characters?
RMC: Language. Whether speaking or narrating (or both), a character evolves in the chatter, in the peculiar idiosyncrasies of speech. Much to the annoyance of family and friends, I’m constantly jotting down little oddments of dialogue and detail. I never know how much of “the real world” will figure in my writing, but part of my process (if so slapdash a strategy can be so called) entails opening myself up to the permeability of fact and fiction. The first story I ever published (“The Mansbridge Affair”)—which charts the carnal high jinks of a married couple who, in an effort to resuscitate their floundering sex life, begin re-enacting episodes of The National in their bedroom—required an inordinate amount of listening and looking. Lucky for me, I happened to be living in Toronto when Peter Mansbridge: One on One came out. I attended the launch and took copious notes. The elderly couple I sat next to wondered if I was an aspiring journalist. After the reading, I bought a copy of Mansbridge’s book, and stood in line for an autograph. When he asked me who I’d like it made out to, I blurted out the names of my characters, Henry and Catherine. “Is that Catherine with a C?” he asked. “Sure,” I said, which was a strange thing to say in this context. When the story came out in Riddle Fence a year or so later, my Katherine (originally with a K) became Catherine with a C.
ALU: What do you enjoy reading?
RMC: I’m betting most writers make pretty unreliable readers in so far as we read what returns us to the page. The books I enjoy most induce a kind of cureless excitability. This library mutates over time (as well it should), but there are a few immovables on this list, books so precious to me that I’ll hold off naming them here for fear of weakening their charms.
Right now, as I’m back working on short stories, I’m reading (and rereading) as many collections as I can—a thrilling binge. Last week I read Lantern Slides by the late Edna O’Brien (absurdly good), Lorrie Moore’s Bark, Scholastique Mukasonga’s Igifu, and the new Tony Tulathimutte (Rejection).
I’m a sucker for seasonal reads, so, as I write this, I’m eyeing J.M. Tyree’s The Haunted Screen, and rereads of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Edith Wharton’s Ghosts, the latter of which—like Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw—doubles as a fairly serviceable Xmas read, for those us looking to keep our yuletides eerie.
ALU: If you had to describe your writing style in just a few words, what would they be?
RMC: By the mouth and for the ear, to borrow from William H. Gass. A sentence speaks before it means.
* * *
Hides is a novel of family and politics that distinguishes itself through its careful intermingling of seriousness and comedy, and its surreal but eerily plausible setting.
As wildfires rage across the country and another federal election looms, four friends convene for a week-long wilderness hunting trip at a secluded hunting facility in northwestern Newfoundland called The Castle, operated by an enigmatic ornithologist, Dr. Judith Muir. A reluctant conscript on the trip, the unnamed narrator of Hides travels out of a guilty sense of obligation, forced to commemorate—in a way he finds morally ghoulish—the death of his best friend’s son, who was killed in a mass shooting in Calgary the year before. The novel traces the emotional ruptures following this violent, untimely death, along with the tensions of old friendships and father-son relationships marred by loss, betrayal, and a pervasive political and environmental disenchantment.
* * *
Rod Moody-Corbett is an award-winning writer from Newfoundland. His writing has appeared in Socrates on the Beach, The Drift, The Paris Review Daily, and Fiddlehead, among other publications. He is the recipient of the 2022 Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Story, a Newfoundland and Labrador Arts and Letters Award for Short Fiction, the University of Calgary’s Kaleidoscope Prize, and the CBC Canada Writes Short Story Prize (People’s Choice Award). He serves as a contributing editor for Canadian Notes and Queries.
