Nino Ricci, an award-winning Canadian author, is currently teaching creative writing at Bridgewater State College. He describes it as “a very intense experience.’’
(Paul-Antoine Taillefer)
G FORCE | NINO RICCI
Lessons learned
Nino Ricci, an award-winning Canadian author, is currently teaching creative writing at Bridgewater State College. He describes it as “a very intense experience.’’
(Paul-Antoine Taillefer)
Toronto writer Nino Ricci’s first novel, 1990’s “Lives of the Saints,’’ about a young boy in a tiny Italian village, was internationally acclaimed and became a made-for-TV movie starring Sophia Loren. It was the first in a trilogy and won Canada’s top literary award, the Governor General’s Award, roughly equivalent to the National Book Award. Ricci won another last year for his fifth novel, “The Origin of Species’’ which will be published in the United States in April. This semester Ricci, 50, is Bridgewater State College’s inaugural Killam Professor of Canadian Studies. He’ll read from “Lives of the Saints’’ Saturday at the North End Branch Library, 25 Parmenter St., at noon.
Q. Why Bridgewater State College?
A. It’s unusual in that it has an old Canadian Studies program going back to the 1970s and it’s well-known in Canadian Studies circles.
Q. What’s your role there?
A. I’m teaching creative writing. I’m not a natural teacher, I will admit that. It’s a very intense experience. You’re not only dealing with issues of craft and communicating in the normal way you do in a classroom, but people invest a lot of themselves in writing and you’re constantly juggling the psychotherapy aspect of the job. Nobody really trains you for that.
Q. Is teaching writing to American students different from teaching Canadians?
A. I’ve found a lot of [American] students who have had other workshop experiences are used to a very brutal approach to critique which I found jarring initially, and contrary to the way I work. I don’t know if this is an individual predilection or a national characteristic. The attitude is, if something is bad, it’s bad off the top and you don’t pussyfoot around and try to protect writers’ egos by couching it in more gentle terms. My approach is to look at a piece of writing and assume it’s trying to do something and your first job is to find out what it’s trying to do. How has it been successful and how could it be more successful, as opposed to going in with guns blazing.
Q. Tell us what to expect in “The Origin of Species.’’
A. I started it eight or nine years ago but as it happens it’s a very timely book, coming out around the 200th anniversary of [Charles] Darwin’s birth. His version of the origin of species and evolutionary issues are very much in the air and this certainly plays into the novel. The main story line involves the main character’s relationship with a woman suffering from multiple sclerosis, and within that a lot of other things come up and play out, including a trip the narrator makes to Galápagos, which has quite an impact on his life. It’s quite traumatic and sets him off on this course of delving into evolutionary theory.
Q. Will Boston factor into your next novel?
A. The locations in my novel are somewhat anonymous at the moment. But one of the locations is going to be an unnamed American city. The narrator is an academic and at one point his life is disintegrating and he ends up coming to an American city and teaches for a year. So my stay in Boston, apart from being pleasant in and of itself, has a definite research component.
Interview was condensed and edited. 
© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.
