Interview: Ami McKay

You've heard me rave about Ami McKay’s first novel, The Birth House -- winner of numerous awards and a bestseller on many lists including holding the top spot on the Canadian Booksellers List for Canadian fiction.

Today, we get to meet Ami through an interview she did for this blog in moments between promoting her book, teaching a writing course, writing a play and healing an injured back! Thanks, Ami! I don't know how you manage to juggle it all.

In 2000, Ami moved to Nova Scotia from Indiana and became intrigued with the history of her new home – the former house and birthing centre of midwife Rebecca Steele. Ami began researching and basis for The Birth House was born.

Here is Ami’s story of her road to publication.

What a road the past few years must have been for you! How did you transition from music teacher to documentary producer and then to novel writer?

Even through music school and university, I was always a writer. I had piles of notebooks filled with scribblings, but I preferred to keep my writing hidden away from the rest of the world. I had no intention of ever getting published.

Then I met the man who would one day become my husband… We found we had a shared love for poetry and fiction and eventually I admitted to him that I had written some poems and short stories. As the relationship grew, we wound up having an “I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours” exchange with words. After we got married, he kept after me to continue writing. It was his encouragement that led me to putting my writing into the world - first in the form of an impulsive thank-you note that landed me on the Oprah Winfrey Show, then to taking a workshop on writing for CBC radio, and then he cheered me on when I decided to write a novel. His support made it all feel “meant to be” and possible. As unrelated as my choices may read when listed side by side, it’s always felt as if I was following a very natural path.

Can you tell us a bit about your research? How was your interest in the history of your home piqued and where did you go from there?

My research for The Birth House sprang from a serendipitous journey. Not long after we moved into an old farmhouse in Scots Bay, NS, I became pregnant with my second child. My pregnancy sparked conversations with my neighbours about Mrs. E. Rebecca Steele, the midwife who had once owned the house. She lived in the house from the turn of the century to 1947 and she opened her home to the other women in the Bay as a birthing house. The entire time I was pregnant, I was hearing these wonderful tales of the midwife and the women of Scots Bay coming together to support one another through pregnancy and childbirth. Their stories led me to wonder many things – How many of us can tell our own birth stories? Why are midwives no longer an important part of today’s medical system in North America? What kind of world would we have if communities honoured the birth of every child?

When did you think: “I’ve got something worth telling in this story?”

That was a pretty clear moment for me. It was during a trip to a nursing home to visit Mary Huntley, the adopted daughter of the midwife. Even at 89-years-old, she had clear, beautiful memories of the past and of growing up in the birthing house. At one point in the conversation, she took a piece of paper from her pocket and began to read from it. It was a list of all the names of the mothers who had come to the house and the names of all the babies born there. She had put the list together when she found out I was coming to see her. Listening to her read those names one after another made everything very real and important to me.

Can you describe your writing process for The Birth House? Did you stick to a writing schedule? How long did it take to complete? How did you hone your work? (i.e. did you belong to a writer’s group, have a mentor, etc.)

I started out on my own, writing whenever I had a little extra time (often while breastfeeding my new baby.) I wasn’t sure what I creating at first, especially since I was trying my best to avoid the vast territory of the novel. Writing a novel seemed too daunting, and too much of a commitment. But once I made the decision to go for it, the writing felt stronger and it actually became easier to sit down and write on a regular basis. After I had a fair chunk of writing, I submitted an application to the WFNS (Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia) Mentorship program. I promised myself that if I got a spot in the program, I’d make the novel a priority and write a rough draft in that time period.

Happily, I did get a spot and was able to work with Richard Cumyn, a wonderful writer and mentor. With his encouragement and feedback, I reached my goal. It’s only a nine month program, so the draft was incredibly rough (and very different from what became The Birth House)…but it was wonderfully liberating to have it in hand! It’s so important to set goals for yourself and to celebrate each milestone.

As a mother and wife, I had a lot of guilt about taking the time and space to write. I wouldn’t have finished the novel (and the subsequent drafts) if I hadn’t set do-able goals along the way.

In all, it was a three-year journey. Aside from one creative writing course I took, the mentorship, and some amazing feedback from my husband, I wrote alone. Writing groups can be havens for some writers, but they don’t seem to work for me – I wind up writing the same thing over and over again and never make any progress. I tend to be pretty tough on myself and don’t mind going back and editing. I was trained as a musician from an early age, so going back to something until it “sounds” right (I read everything I write out loud every step of the way) is an important part of my writing practice.

Let’s talk about finding a publisher and an agent – two things on every writer’s mind. Did you get an editor or an agent first? Would you describe the steps you took from completion of your manuscript to landing an agent and a publisher? (Copy of Ami's query letter.)

I went for an agent first. Agents work with editors every day and they know what sparks the interest of specific houses, publishers and editors. I had no connections in the publishing industry and had no idea who might want to publish my manuscript.

Either way, (whether I wanted to query publishers or agents) I knew I was going to have to do a lot of research to figure out where to send it. So, I started sleuthing around to make a list of my top 15 choices for agents based on the kinds of books they had sold and the authors they represented. I subscribed to Publisher’s Lunch via Publisher’s Marketplace. (It’s a free e-newsletter that comes to your inbox. It tells you which agents are selling what and where they are making their sales.) I started reading the deals section of Quill and Quire’s web site. I read up on how to write a query letter.

I wrote draft after draft, working to make the letter as tight and interesting as possible. The time you spend researching agents (and/or publishers) as well as the time you spend writing your query letter is just as important as the time you spent writing your novel. Don’t toss off something in a hurry because you’re anxious to get published. (And because there are crooks out there waiting to take your money, remember this: you should never ever have to pay an agent to look at your work!) In the end, I had a handful of agents really interested in the manuscript and wound up working with Toronto based agent, Helen Heller. She really seemed to get what I was trying to do with the novel and (more importantly) with my career as a whole.
Prior to publication, your book won second prize in the Atlantic Book Awards for unpublished fiction under the title, Given. Did this award help you in the query process?

Writing credits, mentorships, and awards certainly help round out a query letter. It shows you’re serious about your work and that others have noticed you along the way. That said, don’t stress out if you don’t have a long list. Quality trumps quantity every time. The main thing is to hook the agent or editor in those first lines of the query. You want them eager to read the manuscript and anxious to get their hands on the rest of the story. Your list of writing credits is like icing on the cake.

The story described in your original query letter has some differences from the final book. Would you tell us about the editorial process?

The query letter on my web site was the one I sent to agents after I had tightened up the rough draft I completed in the mentorship program. It’s for Given, which was a story of two women’s lives – one in the past, one in the present. When I first began conversing with Helen Heller, she put her finger on something that I had secretly been hoping no one would notice …that the present-day protagonist was a much weaker character than Dora (the midwife protagonist from the past.)

Having once been an editor herself, she expressed her concern that the other character wasn’t strong enough to support her own storyline. As soon as she said it, I knew she was right. (I’d made the mistake a lot of first-time novelists make – I had written myself into the novel!) I told her I’d be willing to go back and give the entire novel to Dora (which meant throwing out nearly half of my manuscript) if she’d be willing to stick with me and have a look at it when I was finished. She said she couldn’t make any promises as far as selling the revised manuscript, but she let me know she would definitely be there whenever I thought I was ready to show her the new version of the novel.

I went back and tackled it again (and then yet again) and when I felt that I had written the story I wanted to write all along, Helen agreed that it was ready to send to publishers. It didn’t take long before she had it in the hands of the editors at Knopf and we had a deal.

Changes made during the editorial process at the publishing house were subtle ones. My editors were fantastic to work with – incredibly nurturing. I felt it was a true partnership and that they had the best interests of the story and my voice as a writer at heart. Together we shaped the novel in gentle but important ways so that the narrative flowed. Dora’s voice was always top priority. It was Dora’s voice, along with her journey that had captured the publisher’s heart from the start. As she once told me, “I was willing to follow Dora anywhere.” Needless to say, that comment left me feeling elated!

Do you have any advice on how an unpublished writer can get the attention of an agent or editor? For a first book, is it better to seek one or the other first?

I’m not sure I can say which should come first. Having an agent has been extremely important for me. I know I couldn’t have shopped the manuscript around to the big houses without her. On the other hand, I know some authors who represent themselves well and are happy with that. For instance, short story collections are sometimes a hard sell to agents and big houses – but smaller presses are willing to take a chance with them. It can be an excellent way to build a career. There’s also nothing that says you can’t approach publishers with a manuscript and then, once you have their interest, seek out an agent to help you make the deal.


Try your best not to get distracted with deal making tactics while you’re writing. Don’t worry about the market, or what’s hot – these things are subject to change. Always strive to become a better writer. Write the stories you want to read.

Does this differ between Canada and the U.S.?

I think the US market is harder to break into without an agent. It’s such a circus down there! Editors and their assistants are constantly changing houses and it’s difficult to keep track of who’s who.

Your novel was published in hard cover in 2006 and in soft cover this year. What promotional activities have you undertaken? What has your publisher done for promotion? Were there elements of promotion that you were expected, as the author, to provide, for example: to have a website?

With my Canadian publisher, I was chosen as Knopf Canada’s New Face of Fiction for 2006. It’s a program that introduces debut novels (and occasionally short story collections) to booksellers and to the public. (other authors who have come through the program have included Yan Martel, Ann-Marie MacDonald, and Beth Powning, among others.) That program, along with my commitment to connecting with readers and book clubs through my web sites (my husband is my amazing web designer) really helped foster a readership in Canada.

I have different publishers in different countries, so my experiences have been varied outside of Canada. My readership in the UK is smaller, but very loyal. Reviews there were strong. US readership has been very slow in the making. I haven’t really toured there at all and sometimes I wonder if it’s just harder for them to warm up to a “Canadian” novel? -- even though I’m originally from the States.

The expectations placed on me by my publishers have been reasonable. Their part in all of it (how much marketing, publicity, etc. to expect) usually doesn’t become clear until you’re almost to the pub. date. To be honest - it’s difficult to guess what the response will be for a debut novel. Marketing budgets are small for first novels and publicists are constantly scrambling for precious face-time in the media.

I've tried to do my part by building the web site. My philosophy behind my web site is, the more I can help my readers directly connect with my work, the better. I wrote my own reading group discussion guide, I set up a blog, a facebook group, etc. It’s my way of reaching out to readers and inviting them consider my work.

Have you begun to think about a second book?

I’m currently working away on my second novel as well as writing a play for the Nova Scotia based theatre company, Two Planks and Passion. It’s crazy to be working on two big projects at once, but it’s loads of fun. They are set in the same time period, so a lot of ideas, themes and topics overlap.

How do you juggle your writing career with being the mom of two home-schooled boys?

My husband works from home as well, so we live by the motto: “we’re all in this together.”
Our goal is that we make time for one another’s dreams. So far, so good.

Many thanks for taking time away from your busy schedule to give pre-published authors some insight into the creative and business sides of writing life.

For more information about The Birth House,including a reading guide, recipes, news and more, please see: http://www.thebirthhouse.com/

Ami's personal web site: http://www.amimckay.com/

Get in touch with Ami via -My Blog - incidental pieces: http://amimckay.blogspot.com/

Facebook - The Occasional Knitter's Society Group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2499221501

My Space:http://www.myspace.com/amimckay

_______________________

More good news!


There is a second part to Ami's interview that I'll post as soon as she's able to get to it and the marvelous Maureen Hull will be dropping by on Monday via her interview.

I hope you're finding these interviews helpful and inspiring. I am delighted our NS arts community is so accessible and we pre-pub authors are able to learn from the best.

Colleen