Faculty Research Fellow
Robert McGill (Ph.D. University of Toronto, 2006) is Professor of English, and Director of the MA program in English in the Field of Creative Writing. In 2018, he won the Robert Kroetsch Teaching Award from Canadian Creative Writers and Writing Programs. Professor McGill’s first novel, The Mysteries, was named one of the top five Canadian fiction books of 2004 by Quill & Quire. His second novel, Once We Had a Country, was named a book of the year in 2013 by reviewers in the National Post and the Montreal Gazette. He published The Treacherous Imagination: Intimacy, Ethics, and Autobiographical Fiction in 2013 and a second monograph, War Is Here: The Vietnam War and Canadian Literature, in 2017. Professor McGill’s newest novel, A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life, will be published by Coach House Books in June 2022. He has published short fiction in The Atlantic, Hazlitt, The Journey Prize Anthology, Toronto Life, and journals including Descant, The Dublin Review, The Fiddlehead, and Grain. His nonfiction has appeared in the National Post, The Toronto Star, and The Walrus, as well as on CBC Radio One.
Fellowship Project—Simple Creatures: Minimalist Living and Constrained Writing
What does it mean to enact minimalism comprehensively and ethically? What are the particular possibilities and limitations of minimalism in fiction, especially when it involves not the conventions of “dirty realism” but authors adopting constraints analogous to the ones involved in the “simple living” and “voluntary simplicity” movements? I will address these questions in a novel focusing on a protagonist who, upon returning home after his final year at boarding school, seems a different person to his mother, a retired high-school teacher. The protagonist has decided to practise minimalism in every way he can: for instance, he has stopped shaving, largely stopped speaking, abandoned social media, and sold most of his belongings. He gives two reasons for these developments: first, he wants to do his part to fight climate change through sustainable living; second, he claims to have determined that one of his birth parents was a sasquatch and that he feels alienated from humanity’s wastefulness. His mother, who has raised him without divulging his birth parents’ identities, newly wrestles with the question of whether to reveal them, while she finds herself balking at his minimalism, especially in the face of financial and health-related constraints that have long forced her to make do with less. Meanwhile, through writing exercises using linguistic constraints, the protagonist begins to write a field guide to humanity for an imagined sasquatch readership. In telling this story, my novel will investigate the possibilities of minimalism for facilitating both responsible, sustainable living and literary innovation. My aim is for the novel to foster reconsiderations of simple living and to demonstrate the potential for minimalism as an approach to daily life and writing that emphasizes not just what can or must be dispensed with but also what can be valuably produced through carefully chosen constraints.