Canadian author Tessa McWatt’s new novel Higher Ed is a contemporary exploration into the lives of five individuals seeking personal connections in uncertain times.
McWatt, an English professor, uses the familiar environment of a university to weave stories of her main characters together, through work, school and family, by telling each one’s story individually.
Higher Ed is McWatt’s sixth novel; her second novel, Dragons Cry, was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Toronto Book Award, while another novel, Vital Signs, was a finalist for the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.
She currently teaches creative writing at the University of East London, but will return to Canada for a speaking engagement at Spur in Calgary on April 25, and will teach narrative at The Banff Centre over the month of May.
“Since I work at a university, I wanted to do something quite real about people working in the public sector at the moment because there are so many cuts in the public sector and across universities … so I wanted to portray ordinary people who are affected by that,” said McWatt.
“I came up with a bunch of different people working in different areas; the ones who teach, the ones that don’t teach and the students, then the people outside in different places that are affected by the recession and economic downturn.”
McWatt tediously wrote each of the five different characters’ stories separately to keep as close to their personal voices as possible before she started to have them connect throughout the novel. “I really got inside them as characters and then put them together after they were written separately, even though I knew they were going to be intertwined,” McWatt said.
Current issues of mobility, the banking crisis and employment are factors in Higher Ed, with McWatt using them to show how our ever-changing environment affects our personal lives and relationships.
“I don’t think enough people looked at some lives and how badly they’re affected by things that are beyond their control. I think that’s what I wanted to portray; a sense of economic life that’s beyond some people’s control no matter how hard they work,” McWatt said.
The author used the analogy of film editing as an example in the writing process for the novel – having to meticulously cut and paste sections of the characters individual stories together with one another for the final drafts of the novel.
“In film, they shoot a day’s worth of stuff all in the same location and it might not be in the same order that it will come in the film, and then they splice things together later on and that’s kind of how I wrote it – I made a conscious effort to try and think of it as a director would think of a film,” McWatt said.
“I had one character and maybe I had that actor just for a day so I would just shoot all his scenes. I wrote all of them separately and then edited together and I had four different versions of it at the end and this is the one that worked as a whole.”
The events that happen in Higher Ed didn’t happen at McWatt’s university, but she says they did happen at other universities, with friends and peers losing their jobs, and she feels very grateful for the fact it wasn’t like that for her career.
“The government cut subsidies to universities and universities had to put up their fees in order to get students and a lot of restructuring had to go on. The experience in the novel is based on a friend who had to reapply for his own job,” McWatt said.
McWatt knows first hand what mobility entails for economics, family and employment when having to start over in a new environment.
“I came from Guyana as a kid to Canada and I’m here most of the time now. Being an outsider used to feel like a disadvantage because of that kind of lack of belonging, somewhere specific, for my whole life where you have generations of people from the same place,” McWatt said.
“I used to, as a kid, really long for that, but now I do feel it’s a gift because I can see a lot of different things from being from lots of different places, but I still feel very Canadian – I think I’m never going to be anything but a Canadian no matter what.”
