For thirty-three years, Eleanor Wachtel hosted CBC’s Writers & Company. Each week, her hour-long conversations—generous, probing, serious, illuminating—opened windows from every corner in Canada into the worlds of artists, writers, photographers and filmmakers, among them Carol Shields, Mordecai Richler, John le Carré, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Anish Kapoor, Oliver Sacks, Nadine Gordimer, Michael Ondaatje, J. M. Coetzee, Toni Morrison, Kazuo Ishiguro, Alice Munro, David Hockney, Renata Adler, Zadie Smith, William Kentridge, Jamaica Kincaid, John Berger, Sophie Calle, Alexis Wright, and many more.

Since 1993, four collections of Eleanor’s interviews have been published; she served as chair of the 2024 International Booker Prize jury; and her interviews have long been a staple of Brick, first appearing in this magazine in 1988.

Reflecting on the task of a reader, Virginia Woolf described a person who, “from the twist and turn of the very first sentence” is attuned to “signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness.” Such depth of reading can bring a reader “into the presence of a human being unlike any other. Steep yourself in this, acquaint yourself with this . . .” These words could have been written with Eleanor Wachtel in mind. She knows, as a conversation unspools, how to accompany another person into memory, reflection, and revelation. With a barely perceptible half step, a pause, the smallest turn of phrase, she opens a space for artists and writers to speak about beginnings and returns, art and life.

On April 26, 2024, I had the pleasure of interviewing Eleanor Wachtel at Blue Metropolis Literary Festival in Montreal. In my notes for this interview, I wrote, I hope I get the chance to express gratitude for the world literature you brought to Canadian listeners and, specifically, to Canadian writers. You invited us to read widely and inhabit multiple forms, to know what craft and devotion make possible—and to commit to a life’s work.

The complete archive of over a thousand Writers & Company episodes will be digitized and available on the SFU Library’s Digitized Collections website. How very fortunate we are to be the listeners.

This conversation with Eleanor aired on CBC Radio as the official final episode of Writers & Company on September 1, 2024. An edited excerpt follows.

Madeleine Thien: It is such a joy to be here. I feel like I am the luckiest writer in the world, getting to interview Eleanor. I wanted to start by asking you about you. You were born and grew up in Montreal. What are some of those early memories of Montreal?

Eleanor Wachtel: I know that’s one of the things I often ask authors, what is their earliest memory of their city. I grew up in a house without books. Books came from the library, and it didn’t take me long to realize the power of reading. I shared a room with my sister at the end of a long hall, and halfway down was my brother’s room. On Saturday mornings my mother would shout down the hallway from the kitchen and say, “Get up, get out, do things.” And I learned from my older siblings—I’m the youngest of three—to say “Yes” and turn the page.

Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s in Montreal, my reading was haphazard. I managed to completely bypass children’s classics like Alice in Wonderland or Winnie the Pooh. The English critic Sir Frank Kermode once told me—he grew up on the Isle of Man in the 1920s—about his own stumbling upon the classics, like Dickens, only by accident, and that he was always mystified when people would make reference to Eeyore. Me too. But what I did know was that British books had a different smell than North American ones. It was the glue or the binding. I remember Mavis Gallant mentioning that as well. And the children in those English books were always much more independent than their North American counterparts, so I came to favour that scent. Although the very first thing I can remember reading on my own was pure description. It was actually the squeaking sound of a bear crunching on frozen snow—I mean, how atavistically Canadian. And the bear wasn’t a danger; it wasn’t a threat. But I read for plot, for stories, and in some ways I still do. I only became aware of an identifiable author and a voice later. In primary school we had a collection of short stories, and I remember James Thurber’s “The Night the Bed Fell” and Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelström.” You know, laughter and fear and anxiety.

There wasn’t much money at home. I mean, my immigrant father believed in education and bought two encyclopedias. The Encyclopedia Britannica had these door-to-door salesmen. I think they were salesmen. I think they were almost preying on poor immigrant people who just wanted the best for their children, persuaded that this is what you needed, and they’d pay in instalments. I never asked my father about it. One of them was called The Book of Knowledge, and what we liked about it, my siblings and I, was that it had a lot of games to do on a rainy day. We started collecting another encyclopedia because the local supermarket, it must have been Steinberg’s, would offer volume 1, volume 2, volume 3 for a dollar each. So we got the first three and then stopped because they went back to the full price anyway.

But Montreal—I will let you get a word in, in a second. When I was growing up, Montreal was divided by language. But I think of it as an optimistic time, culminating in Expo 67, when the world seemed to discover Montreal, and Montreal welcomed the world and its cultures. It was just extraordinary. I still remember the Czech pavilion and things like that.

Thien: It really touched something in me, when you described those early relations with books, because we also didn’t have books in my house for pretty much the same reasons. There was not enough money. But we had Encyclopedia Britannica.

Wachtel: Did you?

Thien: Yes. And I had heard an interview where you said you also had Reader’s Digest Condensed Books.

Wachtel: That’s right.

Thien: Those are the earliest novels I read as well. My mom had a subscription. I would read them cover to cover because that’s all there was to read. Do you think not having books easily at hand instilled a hunger for them?

Wachtel: Yes. There was the hunger that was partly satisfied by going to the library. My mother took us before there was a local branch of the NDG Library for Boys and Girls, to which my first collection of interviews is dedicated. We had to take a bus and a streetcar, when Montreal still had streetcars. But I never had a chance to own a book until high school. There were these book tokens you could win if you got good grades or something like that, and they were five or ten dollars. You could get a whole bunch of paperbacks at Classics Books on Saint-Catherine. Once—I don’t know if I bought a book, or someone gave me a book—I actually sort of smuggled it into the house because I knew my mother wouldn’t approve of me spending money on a book.

Thien: I used to hide mine under the bed. I didn’t want anyone to return my library books.

Wachtel: You would hide the library books under the bed? Oh, that’s better.

Thien: It was a very obvious place for my parents to look.

Wachtel: But you probably read good ones. I was reading Sue Barton, Student Nurse and The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew because Nancy Drew drove a powder-blue roadster. The first literary book I read was in eighth grade. We had a new, young English teacher from Wales, and he must have found a whole bunch of books in a closet. So he went off-curriculum, and we read Wuthering Heights and The Pickwick Papers. Again, laughter and anxiety. All the girls were crazy about Heathcliff. And The Pickwick Papers is one of Dickens’s most obscure. Whenever I meet people who love Dickens, they say they’ve read everything and then they say, Oh, but I never read that one . . . And I can boast—I mean, I’m not sure I finished it because it was long.

Thien: I was talking to my partner, Rawi, about this interview, and he said something so fascinating. He said that when people read Pinocchio, there are readers who are most interested in the toy, the thing that’s made, that comes to life, but other readers are most interested in the old man who makes it. I wondered if early on you were interested in the makers. The ones who breathe life into things.

Wachtel: I would like to think that. I probably wasn’t. It took me a while to even realize books had authors. So this discovery about Thurber and Poe—it was a discovery. When I was fifteen, I read Henry James’s A Portrait of a Lady, and I remember my aunt was disapproving. She told my mother I shouldn’t be reading it. So I felt really proud that I was. But even enjoying that book, I didn’t then go on and read a whole bunch of Henry James.

Thien: I wanted to ask you about the craft of the interview. I had the joy these past few weeks of listening to so many interviews from the past. I would walk and do things, and I had your voice in my ear all the time. Of course, I’ve been listening for thirty years. I kept thinking about portraits and self-portraits and how you somehow made this sound-space in which the portrait is made between you and the person you’re interviewing. I wondered if this idea of portraiture resonated.

Wachtel: Again, this is something that I would like to think, because I like the sound of it. I’m so often accused of being a shrink manqué and asking everybody about their mother and their father, which of course I do. But that’s in part because everybody has more or less had parents, and therefore the listener, even if they haven’t read the book or don’t know much about the author, can connect with someone’s upbringing, how they were shaped by their families. I’m certainly interested in writers’ backgrounds, in their coming of age, their life choices. But a portrait almost sounds too fixed, because over the span of the program, I’ve had the privilege of interviewing a number of people many times, and the different books invite a different line of conversation to some degree.

Thien: This morning, I was thinking that it’s almost as if all the pages of a writer’s book are spread over a wall, and you and the writer are standing looking at that wall and you’re pointing out things, and they’re pointing things out to you, and in this process a kind of story emerges.

Wachtel: That I think is true. And some writers have even said, You pointed out little corners I haven’t been thinking about, or they’re happy I noticed something.

Thien: I am so curious about how you do what you do, because it looks so effortless. I was noting how distilled your questions are, gentle prompts that push the writer through these trap doors—

Wachtel: Trap doors!

Thien: They fall into memory.

Wachtel: In that sense, yes. I actually had to learn to be as audible as I am on the radio. When I first began my career, I did a lot of interviews with writers for magazines, for print journals in Canada. But when I started to host a program, I had to learn to have a presence on the radio, not just nod, because that wouldn’t work. But I’m wondering about this trap door.

Thien: Well, it’s kind of related to another question I had about agility in the craft of the interview, in the sense that you’re so incredibly prepared, one can feel it. And, maybe, does this give you the possibility of improvisation?

Wachtel: Exactly. The more you know, the more you aren’t afraid to ask a “dumb question.” Being well prepared gives you the liberty to say anything, to go anywhere, and to focus intensely in the moment of the conversation.

Thien: I was wondering, because I couldn’t quite access all the interviews I wanted to listen to—I wanted to ask you where the archive is. What’s happened to the archive?

Wachtel: Well, this is a timely moment, and I didn’t plant that question, I just want you to know. Exactly one year ago, I announced that I was wrapping up Writers & Company, and in response many listeners expressed a desire for access to the digital archive of the show. This is something that I’ve championed as well, for a long time, to make the complete thirty-three-year run—more than 1,000 episodes, 1,000 hours—available to anyone from anywhere in the world, free of charge. And now I am thrilled to report that this is happening. The CBC has partnered with Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections and Rare Books and the Spoken Web Project to make Writers & Company’s complete archive accessible online. And the fact that they’re conversations: Voice is so key. Alastair Reid, the translator of Borges and Neruda, once wrote that voice is perhaps the most essential and lasting incarnation of any existence. So to have 1,000 hours of those voices of writers—some of the finest writers in the world, some living, some passed away—I feel exceptionally proud and happy that this is going to happen.

Thien: I’m so happy. I was thinking about how many conversations you’ve had with these extraordinary writers from around the world, doing such different kinds of work. And you’ve had them in your ear, that headphone-to-headphone relationship, studio-to-studio, not necessarily seeing their face. To have all those writers in your ear, what is that like?

Wachtel: When I first began, some interviews were in-person. I think there was more money around and publishers were touring authors more frequently and so on. The other aspect of the archive I’m very proud of is that it includes twenty-five special, international series. Over the years, I’ve travelled to different countries, often at a pivotal moment in their history, and interviewed writers, filmmakers, journalists or artists who are well known within that country, but not necessarily abroad. Then we put together 3 – 5 programmes focussing on a particular place. Early on, I remember talking to my executive producer, Anne Gibson, since there were so many interviews that were just studio-to-studio, and I said, “You know, I kind of miss not seeing people in person.” And she said, quite accurately, “You’re getting what the listener is getting.” I thought, Well, I shouldn’t feel deprived at all. There’s such an intimacy with the voice in the ear.

Thien: As a writer being interviewed, I prefer it. I prefer just the sound. I feel like there’s some other connection and it is intimate. You are in a space together that in a strange way is almost more together than being in the same room.

Wachtel: Well, that’s a very nice way to put it. It’s the reason that Madeleine Thien is the award-winning writer.

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MADELEINE THIEN was born in Vancouver. She is the author of five books of fiction, most recently, The Book of Records, a novel. She is also an editor at Brick.