Alistair MacLeod (July 20, 1936 – April 20, 2014) was a Canadian novelist, short story writer and academic. His powerful and moving stories vividly evoke the beauty of Cape Breton Island's rugged landscape and the resilient character of many of its inhabitants, the descendants of Scottish immigrants, who are haunted by ancestral memories and who struggle to reconcile the past and the present.Joan Thomas. "Alistair MacLeod's expressible island." The Globe and Mail, April 15, 2000, p.D16 MacLeod has been praised for his verbal precision, his lyric intensity and his use of simple, direct language that seems rooted in an oral tradition.Jane Urquhart. (2001) "The Vision of Alistair MacLeod" in Alistair MacLeod: Essays on His Works ed. Irene Guilford. Toronto: Guernica Editions.
Although he is known as a master of the short story, MacLeod's 1999 novel No Great Mischief was voted Atlantic Canada's greatest book of all time.Adams, Trevor J. and Clare, Stephen Patrick. (2009) Atlantic Canada's 100 Greatest Books. Halifax: Nimbus Publishing Limited, pp.9-11. The novel also won several literary prizes including the 2001 International Dublin Literary Award.
In 2000, MacLeod's two books of short stories, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (1976) and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories (1986), were re-published in the volume Island: The Collected Stories. MacLeod compared his fiction writing to playing an accordion. "When I pull it out like this," he explained, "it becomes a novel, and when I compress it like this, it becomes this intense short story."Wayne Grady. "Complexity graces MacLeod's stories: Short works soar with details worthy of a novel." Calgary Herald, May 13, 2000, p.E10.
MacLeod taught English and creative writing for more than three decades at the University of Windsor, but returned every summer to the Cape Breton cabin on the MacLeod homestead where he did much of his writing.Alistair MacLeod at The Canadian Encyclopedia."Alistair MacLeod author of No Great Mischief, dies at age 77" . National Post, April 20, 2014. In the introduction to a book of essays on his work, editor Irene Guilford concluded: "Alistair MacLeod's birthplace is Canadian, his emotional heartland is Cape Breton, his heritage Scottish, but his writing is of the world."Irene Guilford, ed. (2001) Alistair MacLeod, Essays on His Works, Toronto: Guernica Editions Inc., p.10.
Early life and education MacLeod's Scottish ancestors emigrated to Cumberland County, Nova Scotia from the Isle of Eigg in the 1790s. They settled at Cape d'Or on the Bay of Fundy where they appear to have leased farmland. In 1808, the parents with their seven daughters and two sons walked from Cape d'Or to Inverness County, Cape Breton, a distance of 362 kilometres, after hearing they could farm their own land there. An account of the journey, written by MacLeod himself, says the family took their possessions with them, six cows and a horse. He adds there were few roads at the time, so his great-great-great-grandparents followed the shoreline.
MacLeod was born in North Battleford, Saskatchewan. His parents, whose first language was Canadian Gaelic, had migrated to Saskatchewan from Cape Breton to homestead during the Great Depression. The family moved on to Edmonton when MacLeod was five and then to the town of Mercoal, Alberta where his father worked as a coal miner. However, the MacLeods suffered from homesickness and when Alistair was 10, they returned to Cape Breton and the farmhouse in Dunvegan, Inverness County, that his great-grandfather had built in the 1860s.Christopher Shulgan. "The Reluctant Scribe: Alistair MacLeod's first novel has been eagerly awaited since 1969 when he wrote a short story that had critics hailing him as Canada's greatest living writer. Thirty years later, No Great Mischief is finally in the bookstores. What took him so long?" The Ottawa Citizen, November 7, 1999, p.C6.
MacLeod enjoyed attending school and apparently did well there. He told a CBC Radio interviewer that as a student, he liked to read and write, adding, "I was the kind of person who won the English prize in grade twelve."Shelagh Rogers. "An interview with Alistair MacLeod," in Alistair MacLeod Essays on His Works Irene Guilford ed. (2001) Toronto: Guernica Editions Inc. After graduating from high school in 1954, MacLeod moved to Edmonton where he delivered milk for a year from a horse-drawn wagon.
In 1956, MacLeod furthered his education by attending the Nova Scotia Teachers College in Truro and then taught school for a year on Port Hood Island off Cape Breton's west coast.Christine Evain. (2010) Conversations with Alistair MacLeod. Paris: Éditions Publibook, p.17. To finance his university education, he worked summers drilling and blasting in mines in British Columbia, the Northwest Territories and, in the uranium mines of northern Ontario. At some point, he also worked at a logging camp on Vancouver Island rising rapidly through the ranks because he was physically able to climb the tallest trees and rig cables to their tops.
Between 1957 and 1960, MacLeod studied at St. Francis Xavier University earning a BA and B.Ed. He then went on to receive his MA in 1961 from the University of New Brunswick. He decided to study for a PhD at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana because Frank O'Malley taught creative writing there. MacLeod said he was used to analyzing the work of other authors, but wanted to start writing himself. That wouldn't have happened, he added, if he had not attended such a "creative, imaginative university."
He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the English novelist Thomas Hardy whom he admired. "I especially liked the idea," he told an interviewer years later, "that his novels were usually about people who lived outdoors and were greatly affected by the forces of nature." MacLeod was awarded his PhD in 1968, the same year he published The Boat in The Massachusetts Review. The story appeared in the 1969 edition of The Best American Short Stories along with ones by Andre Dubus, Bernard Malamud, Joyce Carol Oates and Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Academic career A specialist in British literature of the 19th century, MacLeod taught English for three years at Indiana University before accepting a post in 1969 at the University of Windsor where he taught English and creative writing for more than three decades. A story published after his death in the student newspaper called him "a dedicated professor, an approachable colleague, and an inspiration to young, local writers." It quoted Marty Gervais, one of his university colleagues, as saying that the door to MacLeod's cluttered office was always open to students, faculty and even members of the public. "It didn't matter whether you were a good writer or a bad writer; he was open to talking with you, he would read your work, he would be honest with you, and he would be encouraging as well," Gervais added. "He could talk your ear off with stories...but he was also a good listener."
Alan Cumyn, who studied creative writing at the University of Windsor, remembered MacLeod as a teacher who placed great emphasis on the fundamentals of good writing such as language and metaphor, character and conflict, narrative structure and form. He wrote that MacLeod read student work carefully and always began his critiques by pointing to the best things about a story before turning to its weaknesses. "By the end," Cumyn wrote, "a story might seem in tatters, but in the oddly inspiring way that gifted teachers and editors have, issues and directions were made much clearer, and many of us felt more confident and enthusiastic about our work than we had going in."Alan Cumyn. "The man who Loves Stories: Alistair MacLeod then and now." The Ottawa Citizen, September 10, 2000, p.C16
Another student, who attended an intensive writing workshop in Toronto, wrote that if something bothered MacLeod about a student story, he would simply say, "I have a question about that, but not a big one." If he noticed a glaring inconsistency, MacLeod would say, "Some words and phrases startle me." When a student asked how long a good short story should be, "MacLeod clasped his hands and looked up toward the ceiling as if in prayer, then responded in a lyrical Cape Breton accent. 'Well then. Well then. Just make your story as long as a piece of string, and it will work out just fine.'"Rod McDonald. "Literary boot camp." The Ottawa Citizen, August 3, 2003, p.C2.
MacLeod found that his university duties left little time for creative writing. "One time correcting all my papers and putting circles around their and there and they're," he told a radio interviewer, "I began to think that maybe this wasn't the most worthwhile thing I should be doing with my life and so I said...I'm going to try to write like imaginatively or creatively for two hours a day." The experiment failed, however, because MacLeod found that by the end of each day, he was too worn out from his academic work to produce stories that were any good.Michael Enright. "A Tribute to Alistair MacLeod." CBC Sunday Edition April 27, 2014 (a rebroadcast of the MacLeod interview conducted on April 27, 2013.) So, he did most of his writing during the summer breaks when his family lived on the MacLeod homestead at Dunvegan, Cape Breton. He would spend mornings there "writing in a cliff-top cabin looking west towards Prince Edward Island."
Published works and methods MacLeod published only one novel and fewer than 20 short stories during his lifetime. Writing in longhand, he worked slowly refining his sentences until he found what he felt were just the right words. "I write a single sentence at a time," he once told an interviewer, "and then I read it aloud."
I think we should realize that "story" is much older than literacy, and that all kinds of people tell stories who can't read and write. But I think that as a writer, I like to give the impression that I am telling the story rather than writing the story. – Alistair MacLeod Robert Jarovi. "An Interview with Alistair MacLeod," The Scots Canadian, Vol 5, February 2002.
Fellow Cape Breton writer Frank Macdonald described MacLeod as a perfectionist. "He wouldn't set a story free," Macdonald said, "until he was convinced that it was ready." He added that MacLeod never rewrote a story. "He wrote a sentence, and then waited, then wrote another sentence."Tom Ayers. "He always found the right word," The Chronicle-Herald, April 21, 2014, p.A1. During a CBC Radio interview in 2011, MacLeod spoke about how he shaped his work. He explained that halfway through a story, he would write the final sentence. "I think of that as the last thing I'm going to say to the reader," he said. "I write it down and it serves as a lighthouse on the rest of my journey through the story."
MacLeod's published works include the 1976 short story collection The Lost Salt Gift of Blood and the 1986 As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories. The 14 stories in these two volumes appear in Island: The Collected Short Stories of Alistair MacLeod. The book, which also contains two new stories, was released in 2000 the year after the publication of his successful first novel No Great Mischief. When asked why, as a master short story writer, he had suddenly turned to the novel, MacLeod smiled and replied: "Well, nothing I do is very sudden. I think I just wanted more space. I needed a bus rather than a Volkswagen to put my people in."Elaine Kalman Naves. "Writing on the side: For Alistair MacLeod life comes first, fiction second." The Gazette, December 4, 1999, p.J3.
In 2004, MacLeod published an illustrated edition of his story, "To Everything There Is a Season" with the new heading of "A Cape Breton Christmas Story".
In October 2012, Remembrance, a story commissioned by the Vancouver Writers Fest to mark its 25 anniversary, was published and sold there as a chapbook.
MacLeod's books have been translated into 17 languages.