Writer’s Block: Christine Fischer Guy

ALL LIT UP: Tell us about your book The Instrument Must Not Matter. What can readers expect?

CHRISTINE FISCHER GUY: The Instrument Must Not Matter is the coming-of-age story of Lila Rys, a gifted classical pianist with a family history in 1968 Prague. Then, her grandmother, also a musician, was silenced by invading Soviets and cheated of her debut. She never played in public again. Fifty years later, in 2018, Lila wins a competition to work with a prestigious mentor in New York, so she leaves Toronto and the comfort of the familiar. Under pressure from the industry, and her mentor, and her family, she must find her own unique and untransferable musical voice. A chance encounter with a renegade pianist makes her question everything she knows. Readers can expect a portrait of a young artist-in-process, carrying the weight of family history and trying to bring the music back.   

ALU: What inspired the idea for your latest book? 

CHRISTINE: On a bench in front of the CBC in downtown Toronto is a seated brass statue of Glenn Gould. I think I walked past that statue one too many times and realized I didn’t know enough about the patron saint of classical music in Canada. One biography led to seven more, and I realized that there was something for me in the story of a musician. While researching the book, I interviewed British pianist James Rhodes for the Los Angeles Review of Books about his memoir. Rhodes was a Gould fanboy whose wish to play one of Gould’s pianos became an episode of CBC’s Q with Tom Power, and I scored a seat in the CBC control booth to watch the recording. By that point, I came full circle with the inspiration point and I was all in. 

ALU: Do you have any rituals that you abide by when you’re writing?

CHRISTINE: If I’m drafting, I can’t be outside on a morning walk in the big city I live in. I miss that morning ritual very much, but keeping myself safe from vehicles and occasional dive-bombing birds* takes me too far away from that dreamy state I need for the first draft. I have to protect that permeable state if I want to do imaginative work. Editing is different, and I can enjoy my morning exercise without disrupting my creative process too much, but I’m generally too distractible to write in a café at any stage. For me, cafés are for visits with friends, not for work.  

* I’m looking at you, red-winged blackbirds. 

ALU: Is there one stand-out moment or experience you had that helped you realize you wanted to become a writer? 

CHRISTINE: I’ve been thinking about this question lately quite a bit because I also studied visual art, and I’ve continued a visual art practice in adulthood, though not to the same degree as writing. It’s very much a part of my process to draw, paint, and photograph, and my writing desk is surrounded by photographs and drawings. I can’t say that there was a single inciting incident that made me a writer rather than a visual artist, but I’ll never forget listening to my first poetry reading as an undergraduate. I didn’t grow up in a poetry-reading household, so although I’d read poetry as part of the school curriculum, I didn’t really know poetry. A visiting professor in a survey of British lit class read Yeats’s “The Second Coming” to us, properly, and I felt like that guy in the big leather chair in the Maxell tape ad, hair blowing back by the sheer force of those words, arranged in that sequence, spoken in a rich baritone voice.

ALU: If you could spend a day with one of your characters, who would it be and why?  

CHRISTINE: I’d hang out with Sofia, the pianist Lila falls for, because she’d swear a lot, take me to jazz bars, and guide me to all kinds of good trouble. 

Christine Fischer Guy’s fiction has appeared in journals across Canada and has been nominated for the Journey Prize. She reviews for the Globe and Mail, contributes to Ryeberg.com and themillions.com and teaches creative writing at the School for Continuing Studies at the University of Toronto. She is also an award-winning journalist. She has lived and worked in London, England, and now lives in Toronto.