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by: Tyrone Warner
Date: 11/9/2009 12:07:00 PM ET

Best known for her wildly popular 1996 novel “Fugitive Pieces,” Anne Michaels returns with another moody tale of memory and loss.

Michaels’ new book, “The Winter Vault” tells the story of newlyweds Avery and Jean, who work on rescuing the great temple at Abu Simbel from the rising waters created by the Asawan Dam. The book also reveals how the couple met during the construction of the St. Lawrence River Seaway, and the couple’s eventual journey to Toronto.

• Click here to read an excerpt from "The Winter Vault"

“The Winter Vault” is one of five nominated novels for this year’s 2009 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

The private and quiet-spoken Michaels previously appeared on the Giller shortlist for “Fugitive Pieces,” a book which also won the Trillium Prize, the Canada First Novel Award, The Beatrice and Martin Fischer Award and England’s Orange Prize. “Fugitive Pieces” was also made into a film in 2007, and directed by Jeremy Podeswa.

Since “Fugitive Pieces,” Michaels has published a poetry book, written five unpublished children’s books, composed an oratorio with Omar Daniel, and gave birth to two children, all while mentoring graduate creative writing students at the University of Toronto.

The Toronto-based writer tells CTV.ca that she first began working on “The Winter Vault,” just around the time “Fugitive Pieces” hit the shelves.

“I think every book delivers you to the next one somehow,” says Michaels. “I was thinking a lot about how we remember, and a lot about private memory and public memory. How do we publicly memorialize large historic events?”

 “In that book (‘Fugitive Pieces’), I’m talking about historical forgiveness, and in this book (‘The Winter Vault’) it’s a very private one.  Every community after a war or any traumatic historic event has chosen to remember in a public sense... I was thinking of those things and the ecological consequences.”

For Michaels, pondering those lofty questions led to a vision of her new book’s opening image.

“Avery painting Jean’s back at the site of the temple being taken apart, that was the first scene to come to me. It made me understand the relationship between the two of them, the privacy between them… as well as that dismantled temple, which is disturbing and intriguing.”

Despite achieving so much success in the years since “Fugitive Pieces,” Michaels admits that she didn’t feel any pressure, or have any sort of agenda in writing her next novel.

“I wish I could be so calculating… it’s not like that for me. I really think very deeply into the material and the questions I’m asking, such as what I need to know and learn as a human being by going into a particular book. It is it's own task,” says Michaels.

“My job as a writer is to tell that story in the best possible way, to do justice to the history being told, and to do justice to the stories of the characters, because it’s a responsibility to those characters to not misrepresent them and deeply portray their experience. Also, when you’re dealing with historic events, I think it’s important to feel that responsibility.”

When determining the themes and the broader issues explored in her work, Michaels says that sometimes even she’s not in control of where she’s headed.

“You can’t have your own agenda, and you can’t lay an agenda on top of the story or on top of the characters. They’re not going to let you! It sounds ridiculous, but their story needs to be told… I don’t like to have an agenda myself, or any preconception. I want to divest myself of those things, so I can really try and reach the core of something,” says the author.

“If I feel that preconceptions are getting in the way, I try to divest myself of them, and look at something as honestly as I can. That’s a risky business because without realizing that, what you’re finding out can be contrary to what you thought at the beginning. Or even in the growth or development of a character, you have to really go so deeply into it that there’s an honesty there, and they have to act as they must act.”

One of the biggest changes in Michaels’ life between “Fugitive Pieces” and “The Winter Vault,” has been the introduction of motherhood into her identity. Not only has it changed her approach to working, but the author also admits that it has somehow changed her as a person too.

“I’ve always been very serious about what I do, and a lot has not changed. But the fact is, when one becomes a mother, irrevocably and blessedly, you must be changed. There are all kinds of changes that happen, in terms of one’s sense of fragility of things, and one’s own sense of mortality, vulnerability. All these things I like to say I’ve always possessed, but not only do they become more acute, there’s also a quality that changed that I can’t quite put words to,” says Michaels.

“The time factor is a huge question. I knew I did not want to compromise my time with my children and my work time. I needed several hours at a time, uninterrupted. By day I was a new mother, and at night, I would right write between 1 and 5 in the morning. So I solved that problem. It was exhausting.”

But despite the exhaustion, Michaels found the challenge beneficiary.

“I think that it’s an extremely focusing situation to know that you only have those hours, you have to make them count. And research and all the other things you can do here and there, when you have it. I think that I just learned to use my time differently.”

Now that the book has been earning favourable reviews and nominations, Michaels says that there’s no current plans for a film adaptation of “The Winter Vault,” but is open to seeing that happen in the future.

“I think this book is incredibly visually interesting book, from the construction of the seaway to the rebuilding of the temple, the building of Warsaw, there’s a lot for the screen,” says the author.

“I would probably want to be involved this time around in a certain way. These things are strange and mercurial, so who knows. But I do think this book could be a very interesting film.”

Find out if Michaels wins this year’s 2009 Scotiabank Giller Prize by watching the gala event live on Tuesday, November 10 at 9 p.m. ET on BRAVO!, BookTelevision and here on CTV.ca. The literature celebration will also air across CTV and /A\ stations four times over the following four days.