IN THE winter of 2002 a young woman from a small island off Canada’s western coast was working in the basement warehouse of a home-furnishings store in Montreal. She had moved to Montreal with her boyfriend, but when that relationship ended, she found herself alone in a city where she knew essentially no one and wasn’t fluent in the prevailing language, French. Every morning she met a delivery truck outside the warehouse at seven o’clock and spent the next six or seven hours laboriously slapping price tags on martini glasses and arranging vases on shelves.
The job had one virtue, though: It ended early in the afternoon, leaving her the rest of the day to write. And write she did, quietly, steadily, showing her work to almost no one. Soon she moved to Brooklyn, New York, and kept writing for seven more years until her first novel found a home with an indie press in Colorado. Five years after that, her fourth novel, Station Eleven (Knopf, 2014), became a breakout hit, a National Book Award finalist that has sold more than 1.5 million copies worldwide.
This story is from the March - April 2020 edition of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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This story is from the March - April 2020 edition of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Literary MagNet
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