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Writer’s Block: Sky Gilbert
Sky Gilbert’s latest novel The Blue House (Cormorant Books) explores the dark side of creative genius through the fictional memoir of Rupert Goldmann, a cello prodigy whose extraordinary talent is not publicly recognized. Inspired in part by a real-life encounter from Sky’s youth, The Blue House delves into questions of artistic failure, obsession, and whether artificial intelligence can ever truly create art. In this interview, Gilbert speaks openly about the real figure who sparked the novel, his need to write, and the surprising epiphanies that came through telling Rupert’s story.
Photo of Sky Gilbert by Sean Leber.
ALU: What inspired the idea for The Blue House?
Sky Gilbert: Robert Spergel was my cello teacher in 1970 when I was 18 years old, he taught me in quartet class at the Royal Conservatory. He terrified me, as he was very cranky and demanding. Of course I was not a very good cellist. Anyway I didn’t think about him for a long time until many years later I happened to see him in a “gay establishment” (shall we tactfully call it that?). And I figured out he was gay. At this point he was an old man. He soon died and I found his obituary in the Globe, and there was quite the writeup and a photo of him at 15 when he was a child prodigy. He was an absolutely beautiful youth. He had toured Canada at age 14 as Bobby Spergel. He had gone to NYC and met Leonard Bernstein and Vladmir Horowitz. He wrote a quartet. How did that brilliant beautiful boy become the bitter old man that I met? Hence: The Blue House.
ALU: What was the most exciting thing you discovered writing your book?
SG: I discovered that nothing matters. I don’t think it’s the point of the novel so I’m not giving anything away. But it is a revelation that the hero has at one point. My hero comes around to a certain “zen” way of looking at things, which I think is profound and important and it kinda happened by accident that he came to that point in his life.
ALU: Why do you write?
SG: I write because I have to. I’d go crazy if I didn’t. I’m very close to the edge; I had a “nervous breakdown” of sorts years ago. I’ve always been in therapy. There are voices in my head; but not to the extent that I think they are real. What I mean is conversations, constant comments, turns of phrase, dialogue, sayings I suppose are witty or pithy; my brain is constantly having conversations with itself. I need people around me and I need to be talking to them as much as possible, but, of course, sometimes I am alone. So I have to write. Writing fills my life with incident and conversation, and of the finest type. I love hearing myself talk, and there is nothing quite like a good conversation. As I get older, good conversation seems even a little bit better than sex. (Oops, sorry I said that!)
ALU: Describe your writing style.
SG: See above. I am a stylist—not meaning that I am a “master of style” but that I am primarily concerned with style. Until I find my voice for that particular novel, I can’t write it. I don’t like my own voice—my real voice (whatever that is—so I have to put on a mask and hide behind it). I don’t like “literary” writing; that is writing when, after you read it, you say “that was so well written.” You should just be caught up in the book, and believe that it is true for the time that you are bewitched by it.
ALU: What does a typical writing day look like for you?
SG: Get up.
Have a good healthy breakfast.
Go to a cafe or to my room. Put on my favorite opera.
Review the writing from the last date; edit.
Write another couple of pages.
Go to the gym.
Have lunch.
Try and live life after that (much more difficult than writing….).
ALU: Which writers have had the most important impact on your writing?
SG: Lately: Charles Bukowski, Karl Ove Knausgard, Michel Houellebecq.
As a teen: Ayn Rand and Noel Coward.
When I was young I was swept away by the romance of Rand’s novels, which are pretty fascistic in some ways, but when it comes to love, and old fashioned plotting, well she knew how to tell a good story. I loved Coward’s magical, supremely witty beings who did not work but just partied and made love and had such profound things to say. (My love for Coward grew to a love of Harold Pinter. ) Bukowski for honestly, Knausgaard for an exercise in lean style and his experiment with “reality” and Michel Houellebecq — wow to find there is another writer like me who is obsessed with sex, the decay of civilization and survival at all costs of literary artifice.
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Sky Gilbert is an author, playwright, director, and drag queen extraordinaire. He studied at York University and obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. In 1978, he co-founded Buddies in Bad Times, now the largest and longest-running queer theatre company in the world. Sky is the author of eight previous novels, more than thirty plays, three volumes of poetry, and three works of non-fiction. He has been awarded three Dora Mavor Moore Awards, the Pauline McGibbon Award, and the Silver Ticket Award, and has a street named after him in Toronto. In 2005, he won the ReLit Award for his fourth novel, An English Gentleman, published by Cormorant Books.
Photo of Sky Gilbert by Sean Leber.
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