Elizabeth Hay - Transcription

"I like to write about places that are overlooked but really meaningful to me and about characters that are underestimated. So, I really need when I'm working to have character and place working together.

And then, my habits are very messy. I have notebooks and I jot things down in notebooks and then I transfer what I've written in the notebooks onto the computer. And I print that out and I have a hard copy to work with. But, there's a lot of patching and rewriting. Huge amounts of rewriting. It's a messy operation.

The public tends to presume that what's interesting and important happens elsewhere. So, for me the challenge is to try to write about Canada in such a way that it wakes people up, and it wakes me up, to what's interesting here. This country, actually, is full of stories and full of colour and intensity if you just look for it."