Featured Interview With Marcel St. Pierre
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
My name’s Marcel St. Pierre, and I’m a Canadian writer, born in the province of New Brunswick on Canada’s east coast, and I currently call Toronto home. I moved here in the early 1990s with a teaching degree, but I wanted to try comedy, so I became an improvisor, actor and comedian. I’ve performed across North American, and I’ve been writing for television here in Canada since the mid 1990s, mostly in kids’ television for YTV (Canada’s home-grown version of Nickelodeon) as well as various kids’ shows on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). My wife and I share our little city box dwelling with our four-pound Yorkshire terror-dog, Bella.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
Books have always been around me, from story books to comic books to novels to Readers’ Digest – you name it, if it had words I was all over it. Thanks to my mom and Sesame Street, I could actually read well before I entered grade one, which is not to say I’m gifted in any way; more like I peaked early. But I started little stories and jokes as long as I can literally remember. I would make my own comic books with Spiderman and Star Trek characters, and write my own stories featuring my television heroes – basically I was doing fan-fiction before it was even a thing. My grade 5 friend Eric and I wrote a series of picture books featuring characters drawn with our geometry kits, and we’d charge kids 5 cents a pop to read each episode.
All through high school I was the kid who would yell “YAY” every time our English teacher said we had a writing assignment, and by university I had a regular opinion column in the student newspaper.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
My work could be described as what would happen if you mixed Stephen King with Douglas Adams via The Muppets. I’m also a huge fan of David Sedaris and Steve Martin. Overall, my favourite genre to read is biography and autobiography – which I’ve noticed draws an absolute blank from anybody wanting to know what other books I like reading. I find myself drawn to reading the biographies and autobiographies of 1960s counter-culture heroes, mostly musicians the likes of Neil Young, The Beatles, Bob Dylan and the like. I also have recently read the journals of Michael Palin as well as John Cleese’s recent autobiography.
I find reading about people whose work inspires me in any discipline tends to stoke my own creative juices and come up with awkward analogies like “stoking my juices” and such.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
My latest book is “Cliche And Wind Go Hitchhiking”, a collection of short, humorous stories. It’s the second book to come out of a year-long writing experiment I undertook in 2013. I’d been down on myself about how little personal writing I’d been doing for myself, so starting on January 1st, I tasked myself with writing at least ONE piece of creative writing a day. A poem, a limerick, a top 10 list – it didn’t matter what it was, as long as I wrote ONE thing every day.
By the end of the year, I had 365 pieces of writing to sort through – and over the next year or so I dabbled with editing a story or poem here and there. But it wasn’t till 2015 when I was laid off from my day-job that I truly took stock of what I had and decided that – rather than mope and get depressed until I found new work – I would actually make some calls and pull some strings and see where I could go with this.
I was determined that getting laid off wasn’t going to be the straw that broke the camel’s back, but instead I turned it into the spark of necessity (awkward metaphors. I love them) that so far has resulted in two books of short stories, and a small publisher who believes in the work enough to take me on and publish them.
Many (okay, most of the stories) touch a little on the paranormal. They’re absurdly surreal short stories – really short for today’s dwindling attention spans, and that’s by design as well as personal preference. Most are between 1 to 3 pages long. The stories and characters in Cliché and Wind Go Hitchhiking turn the truly absurd into the new normal, for instance: a lovesick, muscle-car-driving Sasquatch takes matters into his own hands. A man’s shoes start telling passersby what he’s really thinking. A bumblebee witnesses a plot by four inept criminals go horribly wrong. A grizzly bear waiting tables reconsiders his career choices.
The stories portray real people and characters you can identify with — then I tweak their reality and put them in scenarios that absolutely turns their worlds upside down. It’s sort of an exploration of fantasy, daydream moments that are just real and weird enough that at least one other person must think they’re funny, too, right?
… delightful… on par with the best of David Sedaris…
Paul Bellini, author and writer for Kids In The Hall
… a worthy companion to Steve Martin’s Cruel Shoes or Jon Stewart’s Naked Pictures Of Famous People…
Steven Shehori, author, writer, Huffingon Post
… twistedly unexpected, delightfully bonkers and highly recommended…
Marilla Wex, The Beaverton Foreign Correspondent
… a great escape … quirky, zany and funny…
Ali Hassan, host of CBC Radio’s Canada Reads
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