Raw materials from Alexander MacLeod's life inform short story collection 'Light Lifting'

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by: Tyrone Warner
Date: 11/3/2010 5:26:00 PM ET

With his first collection of short stories, this author provides vivid insight into the lives of runners, couriers and parents.

“Light Lifting,” the first short story collection by Alexander MacLeod, has been awarded a nomination on the short list for this year’s Scotiabank Giller Prize.

MacLeod tells CTV.ca that the response to the book has been “overwhelming.”

“Sometimes it brings you great elation and sometimes it dumps you down to the depths of fatigue. It’s a good problem to have; it’s not a problem at all,” says MacLeod.

“It’s totally changed my life. I think it’s only temporary, thank God, because I wouldn’t want to keep this pace up for the rest of my life. I’ve been on the road a lot, trains, planes and motel roots, probably more in the last few months than I have in my whole life.”

MacLeod was born in Inverness, Cape Breton and raised in Windsor, Ontario. And his stories have appeared in a variety of Canadian and American journals. He has studied at the University of Windsor, the University of Notre Dame, and McGill and currently lives in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia and teaches at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax.

MacLeod’s father is Alistair MacLeod, a noted Canadian author in his own right and member of last year’s jury for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Despite his literary lineage, MacLeod says he didn’t grow up with literature being an important part of his life.

“I don’t think it was a literary house, where they have floor to ceiling bookshelves and things like that,” says MacLeod.

“We were five boys and one girl in my family, so we were more interested in sports. I’d say creativity was very important, more than literature. It was more musical than literary.”

As for “Light Lifting” itself, the seven stories contained in the tome feature stories about brick layers and runners, nearly all experiences MacLeod pulled from his own past.

In the book, MacLeod says, “I was interested in having as many sets of people in there as possible. I think everybody has experiences, bigger than their own experience. Most of them are things are kind of in my local atmosphere, I think I drew them from that, from the world around me.”

“They’re from different phases of my own life. I once delivered prescriptions, and I have small kids now, and I was once a runner. At different stages, many of them are close to my own experience.  There are certainly raw materials in my life. My friends who are runners never did what those guys in the story are doing, but they were runners.”

MacLeod has been married for 12 years and has three children.