women ¢ food © travel

August 5, 1981

‘Tel. 985-2131

LIONS BAY AUTHOR PLUNGES INTO ‘MADNESS’

Success and the black hole

By PAT RICH
black hole -
postulated

(n) in space,
object whose
mass ts so intensly con-
centrated that normal
properties of space in its
vicinity are altered
drastically and even light
cannot escape the
gravitauonal attraction ...

Maggie is

swallowed by a black
hole and her whole life

has become a
meaningless play of
trivial actions against a
background of all

encompassing blackn-
ess.

ROSALIND

Betore you buy
your budgel a tavour

being:

do yourself and

The crisis drives her to
attempt suicide and-she must
then begin the long route
back to a reasonably health
acceptance of the world as it
is.

Allin blank verse. no less.

“Read this as a novel,”
said Lions Bay author
Rosalind MacPhee when she
first handed me her book
‘Maggie’.

It seemed to be rather a
superflous instruction when
handing somebody a novel,
but not when you open the
book and find it consists of
41 poems.

But ‘Maggie’ is a novel,
even though wnitten tn blank
verse, as the poems trace

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Maggie's internal journey.
MacPhee says that
‘Maggie’ started as a poem
and she did not begin to
write it as a novel until she
had written about a half a
dozen poems and found they
contained a similar theme.
Published by a_ small
Toronto company, ‘Maggie’
is about to go into its fourth
printing, although MacPhee
says the company is still
unclear about how many
copies have been printed.
Because of the size of the
company, MacPhee is
personally responsible for
distributing the book on the
West Coast and has been
trekking from bookstore to
bookstore, with a fair
amount of success.
“I'd like to be able-to

spend the time on new
work,” MacPhee said, but
explained that in order to get
the work read she was
willing to work on the
distribution.

“I believe in the book,”
she said.

MacPhee said the book is
not based on personal ex-

perience and 18 totally
fictious.

With the plunge = into
maddess as one of the

central strands in the book,
she said people frequently
ask her ‘How could you write
a book like that”
sane ©

MacPhee also wants to
make it clear that the book 1s
not totally depressing

You te so

“It could be a book that
people could be scared of
reading |

She osatd the main
character ois capable of
laughing at herself and
seeing the humour tn che

Ys)

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situation.

This light self-critical tone
comes through in many of
the poems especially when
Maggie is talking to God,
her scapegoat.

Although black holes are
the most dominant image in
the book, MacPhee said they
were not originally part of
the book.

“The biack holes crept in
very subtly.”

MacPhee has taken a
course in astrophysics and
did not just make up the
physics which is behind
some of her images and
themes, one of which is the
concern about where
science Is taking us.

MacPhee’ describes
writing as “a_ self-created
adventure.

She said she frequently
does not know what is going
to happen to her characters
until she actually writes it

CONTINUED ON PAGE C2

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