Writer’s Block: Jacob McArthur Mooney

All Lit Up: Tell us about The Northern. What can readers expect?

Jacob McArthur Mooney: I’m happy to! The Northern is a coming-of-age novel, a road novel, a novel of sports, and a labour novel. It is set in a minor league baseball league in the summer of 1952, amid a trio of travelling salespeople signing up young athletes on behalf of a small-time baseball card company.

ALU: Why do you write?

JMM: I write and read for the same reasons: in my mind, these are the same activity: zipping and unzipping the same bag. To that end, I write because I theorize that the point of being alive is to know things, and know people, and that’s what books are in the end, other people. They are means to interrogate and live within a world that isn’t yours, either because it’s someone else’s (non-fiction), it’s imagined (fiction), or it’s fleeting (poems).

ALU: What books have you read lately that you can’t stop thinking about?

JMM: This is always a favourite question. Let me celebrate:

• Joseph’s O’Neill’s Godwin, a novel that shares a lot of my current obsessions (sports, labour, class);
• Camilla Grudova’s protean and politically astute short stories in The Coiled Serpent;
• Christopher Moseley’s translation of Andrus Kivirahk’s Estonian epic The Man Who Spoke Snakish;
• Diane Seuss’s memoirish sonnet sequence frank;
• Andrew Forbe’s newest collection of essays on baseball (and labour, and class! So much to find in this vein lately) is called Field Work. This book and The Northern are cousins.
• Angela Rodel’s translation of Georgi Gospodinov’s wonderful scifi morality play Time Shelter;
• And fellow Canadian poet-turned-to-novels Suzannah Showler’s romance (with raccoons!) Quality Time, which is also Time Shelter’s cousin.

ALU: If you weren’t an author, what do you think you’d be doing?

JMM: Everyone who is an author does other things in the pay-the-rent sense, so I take the question as a way to rethink my answer about why I write above. If I didn’t get that sense of living with otherness from writing, where would I get it? It’s a good question. Maybe I would live a life more directly of service? Maybe I’d be a priest? Maybe not having the path to others that reading and writing give me would inspire a belief in God? I don’t know. Despite all the assistance of books, it is hard to sometimes imagine being a wholly different version of yourself. It’s easier to imagine being a marmoset.

ALU: Which writers have had the most impact on your own writing?

JMM: The entire first tier of this canon is occupied by my wife, Alexis von Konigslow. This is because Lex’s work is plainly impactful and inspiring on its own merit, but also because when you share your life with someone, their outline is as clearly seen in the work you produce as yours. And more prosaicly, when you share your life with someone, the time that you can snatch free from the world to write is always sponsored by them, supported through them, and not just the time but the mental capacity and thought space. My partner is singularly impactful to my life as a writer.Lex’s new novel, The Exclusion Zone, is also out this month. Strongly recommended!

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

JMM: Curious, because of course: I have spent days with my characters! Whole long days, slogging through the mud of each other. What is writing a novel but spending the day with fictional people? I’ve spent days with all of them, and while I wouldn’t trust many of them with much of personal value, I love them all, even when they hurt.

ALU: Give us a peek of your workspace/surface. Where does the magic happen?

JMM: Okay, so: I appreciate this question, and I’ve liked looking at the other writers’ photos. But I also think that this column is about advice, and my advice to other, especially younger, writers is: do absolutely everything you can to avoid feeling like you need to have a “writing space.” You often won’t have access to this. Instead, try and train yourself to write everywhere: on your phone, on the bus, while waiting for classes and meetings, in your head while you walk home, everywhere. The world doesn’t want you to write, so you’ll need to adopt some guerrilla tactics to get anything done. A good way to help with this is to become uncontrollably migratory. Write in the shower. Write in the cracks of life under capitalism. Slow-walk a task and spend the dawdling time brainstorming. Be a parasite.

I used to see authors with their beautiful writing spaces and feel bad. Now, at this point in my life, I’m lucky to have some space, but I still write nomadically even in my own apartment. Parts of The Northern were written in every room. Consider that maybe you don’t need physical space: you need a portable cathedral you can drop over your head in a crowded room. That’s really the skill I’d recommend working on.

But I don’t want to come across here like I’m Too Cool for the Question. I promise I’m not. Here’s a photo of my coffee mug. My wife got it for me and I bring it around with me all day. Anywhere with my coffee mug is mine.

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Jacob McArthur Mooney’s work has been shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Trillium Award in Poetry. An MFA graduate from the University of Guelph, he lives in Toronto with his partner, the novelist Alexis von Konigslow, and their son. The Northern is his fifth book and first novel.