Conversations with Timothy Findley

Timothy Findley (1930–2002) became one of Canada’s most beloved and honored writers during the last four decades of the twentieth century. Because of their controversial subjects and unconventional style, his first two novels, The Last of the Crazy People (1967) and The Butterfly Plague (1969), were initially published only in Great Britain and the United States. Success in his native country finally arrived in 1977 with the publication of his novel The Wars, which won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and is considered a Canadian classic and an iconic portrayal of World War I. He went on to publish seven novels, a novella, three collections of short stories, four plays, and three works of nonfiction, as well as numerous screenplays, TV scripts, and essays, reviews, and opinion pieces in periodicals. His play, Elizabeth Rex (2000), won the Governor General’s Award for Drama. In addition, he was appointed an Officer in the Order of Canada, which is the highest honor a Canadian civilian can receive, in 1986; was named to France’s Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1996; and received seven honorary degrees. During the last two decades of the twentieth century, he was a leading public intellectual who often effectively criticized censorship and the destruction of the environment. The interviews collected here, which span three decades, offer candid, extensive, intimate, often amusing, and sometimes provocative commentary on a wide range of topics, including but not limited to his life and works; his love of nature and of animals, his homosexuality and alcoholism; politics in Canada and the US, and Canadian literature. Timothy Findley began his creative life as an actor, and in many ways, he often seemed to regard interviews as performances which he relished—notably, most were in a Q&A format, which he preferred and are thus true "conversations"—and his enjoyment of them is fully apparent in the pages of this collection.