Writers’ Trust Award winner Martha Baillie reflects on her memoir There Is No Blue | Canada Voices

On Tuesday evening at Toronto’s Glenn Gould Studio, Martha Baillie won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and the $75,000 that went with it. That’s the happy news.

The sombre side is that the people she most wanted to be there to share the honour are all gone. She wrote about them in her winning book, There Is No Blue, a memoir about the death of her 99-year-old mother, the life of her late father, and the suicide of her sister. As her publisher Coach House Books so succinctly describes it in the promo info, “Three essays, three deaths.”

And three steps up to the stage to accept the award and make an acceptance speech that one might have expected to be overly emotional. It really wasn’t, though, even if she did ask for a Kleenex.

“If I seemed calm, it’s because I had to do an incredible amount of soul searching before writing, giving myself permission to write the book in the first place,” she tells The Globe and Mail on the morning after the ceremony via video conferencing. “And weighing the ethical concerns of what does it mean to write such intimate portraits of people who are not there to give you their consent?”

In addition to her memoir, the 64-year-old Torontonian has produced six novels and co-written the nonfiction Sister Language, a 2019 collaboration with her late sibling, Christina Baillie, a schizophrenic who took her own life shortly before it was published.

The sister had already figured in novels written by Baillie, who would clear things with her before sharing private details.

“In those instances, I could ask her, ‘Would you really be disturbed if I put in that you have hydrophobia and that bathing is a real challenge for you?’ And she could say, ‘Actually, you know, that’s not a problem. I’m fine with people knowing the challenges I’m up against.’”

Baillie studied history and modern languages (French and Russian) at the University of Edinburgh. She completed her studies at the Sorbonne University in Paris and at the University of Toronto. Her poetry has appeared in the Iowa Review, and her 2013 novel The Search for Heinrich Schlögel was Oprah-approved.

Her fourth novel The Incident Report, longlisted for the 2009 Giller Prize, was adapted for this year’s film by Naomi Jaye, Darkest Miriam. The story involves a “public service assistant” at a Toronto library branch. One does need to have studied at the Sorbonne to learn the “write what you know” lesson.

Baillie works three times a week at a downtown branch of the Toronto Public Library as, yes, an assistant. Living years ago with a musician, she obviously needed a job for some stable income. She’s still there.

”There is something about the order of the Dewey Decimal System that is very calming” she says. “I mean, at least I really don’t have anything like that kind of organization at home.”

With that, she turns her laptop camera around to show a desk at home that is only slightly dishevelled.

At the library, Baillie sits at a records desk in the circulation section. That hardly defines her job. She runs a poetry appreciation group for adults, tells stories to toddlers, de-escalates conflicts around the public computers, hands out socks to homeless people and monitors how long someone has been in the bathroom to be sure that they’re not in crisis.

“I find it really incredibly enriching work,” she says. “It’s a very special environment and I feel really privileged to be part of it.”

Before writing There Is No Blue, Baillie had read Sharon Olds’s poetry collection The Father, which was shortlisted for the 1993 T. S. Eliot Prize. The American poet’s father was an alcoholic, and her portraits of his death and dying body were detailed. “I could smell the alcohol coming out of her dad’s pores,” Baillie says about the intimacy of the writing.

The poems left a Post-it note in her head. If she ever had an opportunity to be close to a loved one who was leaving this world, she would take advantage of it on a professional level as well as a personal level.

“It gave me permission to just dismiss whatever might be convention and go for it, and get as close as I could,” she explains. “And so my hope was that if I then wrote about that experience of getting as close as I could to my mother in those last stages of her life, that might give someone else permission to do that as well.”