LL: It hasn't really sunk in, I don't think. A lot of people that I know, who have read the book, sometimes I feel like they read it out of sense of duty to me. But I've been meeting more and more people who have read the book and really like it, that don't know me from a hole in the ground - that feels good. For some reason that seems to be more validation than having your relatives tell you they liked it.

BnM: And how are sales?

LL: Well, the first printing has sold out.

BnM: Really!

LL: Yeah.

BnM: Congratulations!

LL: Thanks. I thought it was just this local store that sales were going well, but I told someone who couldn't get a book here that they should try Chapters in Moncton. They went down there and they had already sold their last book as well. So, it's been going well.

BnM: Are doors opening for you now that were closed before?

LL: Not yet. But you know I'm confident there will be. The sales rep for the publisher thinks that the book was perhaps the best novel written in Atlantic Canada since Kit's Law by Donna Morrissey. So, she's enthusiastic about it and perhaps that's why the first print has already sold out, because I think they're doing a good job of promoting.

BnM: Are you tired of being compared with David Adams Richards?

LL: I haven't been yet really. But it will be hard not to be compared I think, because of the sheer geography of us. I think a lot of the characters have similar traits too. Some people think his books are kind of bleak and the characters have to overcome things right from the cradle, and perhaps you could say the same thing about some of my characters too.

BnM: Do you think that's the nature of the river?

LL: Yeah, I kind of think it is. I think people are born with that. It's sort of an innate sense of we're going to have to overcome things before we even get started. That's probably accurate I think. Less so nowadays, but you know, we weren't born with a silver spoon in our mouth, that sort of thing.

BnM: Let's talk about the novel. One of the most striking things for me was your description and the way it pulls you into the story. How do you capture scenes so vividly?

LL: You'll notice that with most of the descriptions in my book, rather than describing a person or situation outright, a lot of the times I'll choose to describe it with the details of the things that surround it. For example, take Roy the bus driver. If you describe Roy's bus then perhaps you describe Roy, you know with the speaker wires and the tape and the tools behind the seat. The same way when you describe Bern's mother. The way she is cleaning her kitchen, how she's small and she can fit right inside the cupboards and how she cleans and cleans and cleans. That describes her, her never being able to be clean enough. Calvin's mother cleaned the house but more dirt got into the cracks in the floorboards than got into the dustpan. And she seemed to be a foreigner in her own home, all the kids and her husband looked identical with the blonde hair. So, describing people's surroundings rather than describing them directly is a tactic I always seem to apply with my fiction.

BnM: Well, it works.

LL: Yeah, I think it does too. One of my favorite writers is a guy named Greg Hollingshead and his characters always seem to be witnesses to things rather than actually being participants. You learn a lot about them by the things they witness and by the things they surrounded themselves with, and I think that is a great way of characterization.

BnM: It is. So, where are you in this novel? Which character are you?

LL: Oh dear.

BnM: Or are you in there? Or are you bits and pieces of everyone?

LL: Well actually, bits and pieces of everybody I've met managed to make their way into the book. There's probably a bit of me in Huey McTavish more than anybody. There's a bit of me in Roy, and there's probably a bit of me in Calvin's mother. You know people ask me who is this and who is that, but really no one is modeled after anyone specifically. That's kind of the way I work it. If I need a sentimental character, or if I needed someone who had a particular characteristic, a lot of the times rather than just trying to pull the characteristics out of thin air, I'll think of someone who reminds me, that has that characteristic. And I won't take the image of that person wholesale, I'll just take the pieces of them that are necessary to fulfill the character I'm trying to write. So, I'm really not in the book. There's nobody in the book that was modeled right after me or right after anybody that I know. But I mean, you can infer a lot. Writing is very, you know, you expose yourself. You become very vulnerable when you write fiction because a lot of people are trying to glean the source of the story, the source of the characters. They try to imagine what it is that has happened to the writer, what his life was like that made him dream up these situations and these characters. But nothing directly correlates between me, or the people that I know, and the story itself. I just kind of pick things here and there that work.

BnM: One of the things that totally blew me away was the way everything is woven together. A lot of writers don't do that very well, they lose you.

LL: The story was always in my head from start to finish. But my biggest preoccupation was in piecing it together. I was very conscious of the fact that when you leave one scene or one section, if you don't return to it within two or three scenes or sections, or even in the following chapter, chances are you'll lose your reader. So I was very conscious of leaving each section with something memorable and picking up the following section in a way that the reader wouldn't be lost. But not only that, even though maybe one chapter deals with two or three different characters in two or three different situations, a lot of the times I tried to keep a common theme between the chapters. That was a big preoccupation, in putting things together in a way that people wouldn't be lost, but I didn't want to tell the story from start to finish because I didn't think it would be very compelling. The story actually starts in two places. It starts when the boys are kids, then the second chapter starts when Bern is an adult. And that's kind of the way that I wanted it. It was sort of modeled after a book, The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. But that's told over a period of two days and from several characters points of view and by the time I figured the story out I thought that it worked quite well. I didn't want mine to be as confusing, but that was kind of the intention.

BnM: Well, it's not confusing, it works really well.

LL: Yeah well, everyone has said that and I think that's great. I'm glad. I think I'm most proud of that accomplishment -that it came together so well.

BnM: Are you satisfied with it? Or do you want to edit it still, even though it's done?

LL: Yeah, every time I pick it up and read it, especially if I'm at a reading or something, I'll come to a sentence I'd like to change. But there are things you have to live with. If I had to do the book over again I'd probably make Bern, he would still be a central character, but probably a little bit less self-aware.

BnM: So, what are you working on now? What are you writing?

LL: I am writing a book called The Morning Show and it's about a man and his family. The man used to be the co-host of a radio morning program. His very gregarious and popular co-host quits the show for personal reasons and his life kind of goes downhill after that. But the whole book is about media and how our lives are effected by it even though maybe we're not totally aware of it all of the time. So, anyhow I just got a creation grant from the New Brunswick Arts Board for it. And I have a story coming out. Doubleday Canada is publishing a Maritime Anthology called Victory Meat and they included one of my stories for that.

BnM: Good. That leads into my next question, are you still going to write short stories?

LL: Yeah, I have two unfinished stories and whenever I find time to finish them, I'll have a complete collection. What I would like to do is finish the collection of short stories and Gaspereau Press, who treated me very well, I'd like to give them my short story collection to publish. I know short story collections aren't big sellers but I think they would do a wonderful job of it. They have a lot of integrity and I like dealing with them.

BnM: Where do you see your life going with this writing thing? Are you quitting your job or what?

LL: (Chuckling) I'm going to keep working at it. The idea of writing for a living appeals to me. There are things about my job I wouldn't miss, that's for sure. My plans are to try to find an agent once my next novel is completed and go from there. Writing full time may also require moving to Toronto, perhaps; that's where all focus seems to be. I'm going to take it one book at a time, and see what happens. You never know.