By Eric Bourque
THE VANGUARD
NovaNewsNow.com
Michael Murphy recalls how he got the idea for Morgan Wells, a character in his novel, A Description of the Blazing World.
In the book – the first novel by former Yarmouth resident Murphy – Wells reads a postcard addressed to someone else named Morgan Wells.
For most people, mistakenly getting a postcard or letter meant for another person might not be a big deal, but it plays a key role in the development of the Wells character in Murphy’s book.
“I was living in Windsor, Ontario, at the time,” Murphy said, explaining how the idea came to him a few years back. “I walked down the street and I saw an envelope on the ground. I don’t know if it said ‘Mike Murphy.’ It might have been ‘Mike Murray.’”
In any case, the letter apparently belonged to someone with a similar name to his who lived next door to him. Murphy put it in the appropriate mailbox and walked away, which likely is what just about anybody would have done. Still, Murphy started thinking: if the same thing had happened to someone maybe a little less balanced, what might their reaction have been?
“They might want to read into it, see it as a sign of maybe something more, and I guess that kind of got me started with this,” Murphy said. “You know, what kind of character would do that?”
The other main character in Murphy’s book is a 14-year-old boy whom the author describes as a typical teenager in many ways “but also a little bit dark, a little bit morbid.”
In the book, which is set in Toronto, the boy finds a copy of The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish, hence the title of Murphy’s novel. That he finds the Cavendish book during the Toronto blackout of 2003, the boy feels, is no coincidence, much like Wells believes there is meaning behind a postcard mistakenly sent to him.
Murphy had been working on the Morgan Wells story as a separate project, but it occurred to him at some point that the two stories, even though they were quite different, also had much in common.
“They both have that same idea of outcast characters,” Murphy said. (Indeed, in a review of Murphy’s book in the Toronto Star, Patricia Dawn Robertson wrote that neither of his characters “would be very popular on Facebook.” She called the book “misfit fiction at its finest.”)
Said Murphy, “I guess once I decided that they could go well together, it really just kind of came together, both stories.”
Murphy, 29, is attending law school. He did an undergraduate degree at Dalhousie and has a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Windsor. He’s pleased that his book has been getting good reviews.
Published by Freehand Books, the novel is available locally from At the Sign of the Whale. Murphy says he would like to do a book reading in the Yarmouth area, but nothing yet has been scheduled.
A member of the class of 2000 at Yarmouth Consolidated Memorial High School, Murphy tries to come home as often as he can, but this is harder while he’s studying. While he plans to work in the legal profession, he says he wants to continue writing.
“I have a couple of things that I’m working on,” he said, referring to new writing projects. “They’re still fairly new and kind of in the beginning stages.”
