Hello Melissa, Welcome to BrandEducation and thank you for being part of The RV Book Fair! As both a pianist and writer, how has music shaped the way you write?
Good question. I think my musical background makes me aware of the sound and flow of things as well as the “correctness” of what I’m writing, which means, I tend to be an “edit-as-I-go” type of writer. I think this comes from years of practicing and teaching piano: we spend a lot of time focusing on small parts and details so that we can perform an entire piece, which, after all, is simply a collection of notes played in a specific order and way. While this works at the piano, it is often suggested that editing-as-you-go slows down the writing process and interrupts the flow of inspiration. I appreciate that theory and believe there is a time and a place for free-writing, but I still have difficulty surrendering to that way of writing. I used to think this was “bad” and that I “should” write in this free way, but it was an unnatural process for me. Finally, during the Distance Learning master of Arts program at Lancaster University, my tutor (or supervisor, as we say in Canada), Michelene Wandor, who also happens to be a musician, suggested that if editing as I wrote was how I created a piece of writing that I was happy with, then it was totally fine to write like that.
In addition to this perfectionism process, music can shape the way I write, especially in poetry, where I find both inspiration for narrative and form. The greatest example of this is my collection A Most Beautiful Deception, which was originally published by the University of Alberta Press in 2014, and which I’ll be republishing soon. For this book, I wrote three sets of poems that corresponded to three collections of piano pieces. For each set of musical pieces, I wrote a poem that had the same title and a predetermined formal relationship to the written music. Sometimes this meant I wrote as many lines of poetry as there were measures of music, while other times this meant that a five-part song became a cinquain, et cetera. Plus, wherever the music repeated or quoted from another piece of music, I did the same. This idea may have arisen from music analysis, just as my study of and interest in music history (and history in general) led me to weave details about the composers and the creation of the pieces in question into the narrative. The poems are somewhat academic, yet, I think and hope, also lyrical and touching.
As for my recent prose writing, both the novella I published in the summer and my forthcoming novel, Song of Songs, had their genesis in music. The first, Adventures of Ivan, is a collection of eight stories each named after and inspired by one of the Ivan pieces in Aram Khachaturian’s 1948 collection of the same name. In addition to trying to capture the same mood as the pieces, I retained the name Ivan and kept the Eastern-European connection (Khachaturian was an Armenian Soviet; my Ivan’s ancestors were Polish-Ukrainian and Russian). However, unlike the original, which is considered to be about a boy, my book is about a 97-year-old man—but, like I recently realized during an interview, what is a 97-year-old-man but an old boy.
Though much has changed since I wrote the first draft of Song of Songs, it too stemmed directly from music. The deadline for my first assignment at Lancaster was quickly approaching, but whenever I searched for a story to write, all I had in my mind was a French folk song. Time was ticking, so I went with it. I wrote out the words of the song, and in-between each verse, I told the story of two people who might have sang the song had they existed and tried to create a narrative that linked the events of their lives to the words of the song. Then I chose another song for the next assignment and the next, and then I had a collection of stories that, over many years, became the novel you will soon see.
Do any of your experiences teaching piano or writing appear in your characters or stories?
Funnily enough, no, not really. I think my upbringing, beliefs, and experiences appear in my characters and stories much more than my writing and teaching experiences. However, since I’ve been doing both for so long and I’ve arrived at a point in my life in which most aspects of my being have coalesced into one unified being, I’m sure something from the decades does appear. In fact, as I’m typing this, I am reminded of certain choices I made for the characters in Song of Songs that stem from piano teaching and writing related experiences: Stéphanie’s music education courses, the lesson books her cousin uses, some of the pieces Émilie plays, and hydrangea plants (I’d never seen these until I went to Lancaster University as part of my M.A. writing program).
What inspired you to tell the story across 4 generations, shifting between past and present.
The Tremblay story actually began with Rose and Pierre meeting; however, once I knew who those two characters were, I needed to know more about where they came from, so I worked backwards and wrote about their childhoods and their parents. Then I wrote forwards: who they became as a couple and how their earlier experiences affected their children. That got a little out of hand and grew into something much larger than I knew it would. In fact, I didn’t intend the stories to be a novel—I just kept writing about these people until I had a book’s worth of interconnected episodic stories built around songs and prayers and showed them to a few editors and mentors. The former told me, “Short stories don’t sell,” and the latter helped me try to find a more cohesive, novel-like structure and narrative for all the stories. What eventually emerged was the fact that I needed one more generation (Stéphanie and Christianne) to connect all the stories and show the cumulative effects of generational traumas and experiences. By adding Stéphanie, I also made the story more relevant and timelier—of course, by now 1990 is almost historical! Still, it places Stéphanie in my generation and leaves room to explore the current century with her infant sister, Renée, and future generations…
Probably because the stories came out episodically and theme-based rather than chronologically, I didn’t decide to shift the narrative of Song of Songs between the past and the present—it simply seemed the only way for me to connect everyone and everything together.
Music plays a key role in the book—why did you choose it as the link between timelines?
Since there was always an intrinsic link between music and the creation and development of the characters in the book, it was natural that Stéphanie should sing the stories. What was not as natural was coming back out of these stories (or songs). I added dates to help readers, but that is a bit boring. Plus, since Song of Songs wasn’t constructed in a traditional sense nor written in chapters, I felt there needed to be more to connect the pieces of the story together: in came the idea of the suite. Now, the 1990 sections work like individual pieces (or chapters) that are interspersed between songs (or chapters) about the past. It made sense to me, and I hope it helps readers follow the passage of time and the various storylines of the book. Finally, as Canadian media theorist, Marshall McLuhan, said, “the medium is the message,” so I really had no other choice but to link the timelines this way.
Why was it important for you to highlight French-speaking communities outside of Quebec in this story?
This was not my intention at the outset—I simply wanted to tell the story of the folks who sing the folk songs, but, if the medium is indeed the message, then choosing Saskatchewan for a story about Francophones, who are only 2% of the population, is certainly a message as well. So why did I choose it? Because Rose and Pierre were inspired by my Fransaskois grandparents and because my mother and her siblings, and many of their generation, lost the French language, and because I refound it and was raising my children in French in what Stéphanie calls “a huge sea of English.” In other words, I chose to highlight French-speaking communities outside of Quebec for the simple fact that they exist.
You work across music, translation and literature—how do you balance these, and what advice do you have for blending different art forms?
It is said that art breeds art, so whatever art inspires you, follow up on it and let it lead you. However, one thing I’ve learned since entering the authorpreneurial world, is that the final “product” can also be an important consideration. I suppose that is where balance comes in to play for me. Also, I seem to work towards my strength—I am a better writer than composer or pianist, so I find inspiration in music and form it into words. Sometimes, I feel like this is a type of translation, but that seems like a discussion to have on St. Jerome Day (International Translation Day). I will be flexing my translation skills in 2026 when I set about translating 2025’s publications into French.
Find out more about Melissa at: https://www.instagram.com/morelli.lacroix/ and The RV Book Fair 2025: https://www.relatable-media.com/the-rv-book-fair