Sean Michaels in a Creative Writing classroom

Sean Michaels doesn’t carry himself like A Great Writer. I doubt he ever will, despite a writing life earmarked by incrementally greater achievements.

            One Friday in January of 2015, he generously explained to students of Creative Writing Strategies the process that resulted in Us Conductors, his first published novel and the 2014 Scotiabank-Giller prize winner. From a life choc-a-bloc with familiar opportunities and idiocies, he picked out key choices – most deliberate, but others that just happened along – which helped transform his public self from high-school lit-geek, through renowned blogger, to literary superhero. It was a typical list, told with atypical panache, and included:

• starting the music blog “Said the Gramophone” with friends while he was still in his teens.
• after a degree from McGill, deciding to work as a legal assistant, as a job that paid all right, but that he could leave behind at the office each day. A portable job; he worked in Edinburgh for a while.
• six years writing a novel.
• his blog getting the attention of editors at The Guardian; they hired him to do tiny, daily blurbs about the North American music scene. He quit the legal-clerical trade.
• finding the right agent – not too new, not too successful – by combing through the listings on Publishers’ Marketplace. 
•  re-editing the MS with her.
• her Sisyphean efforts to find that book a home, over months and months – the big US presses, the little ones, the big Canadian presses, the little ones.
• putting that MS in a drawer.
• watershed moment: deciding to start the next book, even though he’d just shelved an MS that represented seven-years’ labour without return.
• writing the next MS.
• sending it to his agent. This time they started in Canada, and several big presses were interested.
• negotiating a largish advance, for the current Canadian market. (Still,  it broke down to something just over $5000 per annum for the years that he wrote it, not including the time spent learning his craft with the first MS.)
• editing, again, some more. With his agent, with his workshop group, with the big Canadian press, and with the little American one. At one point there were six people giving him feedback on the MS.
• publication!
• and now, the Scotiabank-Giller. When we saw him, he was on his third week of not having to write for The Guardian.

It doesn’t make sense, does it? It’s a tale of luck and exploitation of luck, and hard work and no reasonable expectation of return. But it put Us Conductors in our hands.