Talking with Michael Van Rooy

Award winning Winnipeg author, Michael Van Rooy was signing books at McNally Robinson on Saturday when I spoke with him.  An Ordinary Decent Criminal, the first book in his Monty Haaviko crime series, won the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book by a Manitoba Author in 2006.  Van Rooy was also awarded the John Hirsh Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer in 2009.

Van Rooy was very friendly and helpful. He is the Literary Arts Ambassador for the Winnipeg Cultural Capital of Canada 2010.  He offered to send me a copy of An Imagined City: A Literary History of Winnipeg, as part of the Arts For All project: It’s About The Stories…It’s Always About the Stories!  

After he signed my fresh-off-the-shelf copy of An Ordinary Decent Criminal we chatted for a while. Some background info and some of the topics we discussed are below: 

His education: Van Rooy was born in B.C. but raised in Winnipeg.  He graduated from Sisler High School, studied history at the U of M, and more recently English at U of W.  Van Rooy received his criminal education during a stint in Stony Mountain Penitentiary and Rockwood Institution for armed robbery in his early twenties.  In a Winnipeg Free Press interview Van Rooy said, "I didn't do it.  I was in the wrong place at the wrong time."

CreComm: When I told him that I am a CreComm student he explained that his mother was a CreComm instructor for twenty years. As a teenager he helped her mark papers.

A recommendation for aspiring writers: Get business cards printed calling yourself a Writer, “They are really useful.”  Van Rooy said, whether you are published or not “you are a writer."

On making time for writing: "You need to develop a pattern, a rhythm.  Whatever works for you.” Van Rooy said David Bergen used to go to work an hour early every morning and would “write in his car in the parking lot of Tech Voc." He suggested getting up an hour early each day and trying to write a page. Just 330 words. "By the end of the year you will have a novel."

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Recommended reading for writers: A book on screen writing by Robert McKee called Story, and Aristotle's Poetics.

Thanks Michael.

Soupy Out