This is part of a series of conversations between authors to commemorate the 2021 edition of The Globe 100, which is our annual guide to the most noteworthy books of the year.

The lives of Alix Ohlin and Randy Boyagoda met when Boyagoda served as the Scotiabank Giller Award jury in 2019, and Ohlin's novel "Dual Citizenship" was shortlisted that year. Ohlin is the Dean of the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. This year, she published her third collection of short stories "We Want What We Want", which was shortlisted for the Atwood Gibson Writers Trust Novel Award. Boyagoda is a professor of English at the University of Toronto, associate dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and an undergraduate. This year he published Dante's fourth novel "Indiana". His first governor of the Northern Province was shortlisted for the Gilles Award in 2006.

Martha Lederman: You all work in academia-teaching and management staff. I'm curious about how you perform this balancing act in terms of allocating time and energy, even in reality.

Alix Ohlin: I always feel that I am not doing very well. To be honest, there is always something lost in the shuffle. I don't know what good system I have, except that I try to make time for the slower part of the school year to spend more time writing. I am always full of wise advice to others, I would say "you need to arrange writing like a meeting". I said this to others, and then I didn't do it at all.

Randy Boyagoda: Since graduate school, professors and colleagues have told me that I can't have both. Whether it is to my academic life or the life of the writer, this will be a kind of harm. I have been doing these two things. I think the way I can do it in the first place has nothing to do with accidents that require little sleep. When I am writing, I can wake up at 4 am and work for two hours before the rest of my family wakes up. Then I took a nap on the campus table in the afternoon. I seem to have made very detailed and thoughtful notes at the executive meeting. They almost always have nothing to do with the meeting; I am just writing a story.

AO: I do become less precious in terms of setting aside time. I do a lot of what I call a 20-minute sprint: I stop on my way to work for a cup of coffee. I used to do this in a coffee shop. During COVID, I sometimes found an abandoned academic building and sat there for 20 minutes before checking work. I agree with what you said, Randy. I took a lot of notes at the meeting, literally wrote: "Minutes of the budget plan", and then read "What if a woman murders her cousin?"

RB: I ride a bicycle to work. I live in the east end of Toronto, teach at the University of Toronto, and ride a bicycle about 10 kilometers across the city. Setting the plot in my mind is a perfect rhythm and experience for me. I don't teach creative writing; I mainly teach American literature and religion and literature. Teaching is usually a way for me to think about what I do as a writer.

ML: If you are doing something, can you bring it to class and solve it? Like Randy, maybe you have no other way to teach Dante?

RB: I have been writing this novel for the past five years, and every fall I teach Dante to a group of first-year students. I also teach contemporary American literature, culture and public life courses. Therefore, the idea of ​​writing a novel about the Dante theme park opened in an opioid-ridden town in the middle of the United States—provided that I can participate by teaching Dante and teaching contemporary American fiction.

AO: I won't say that I did this explicitly, but when teaching creative writing, I assign texts and change the syllabus almost every semester. I have been learning; I always try to get something from these writers that can be used in my own work.

ML: When I read "Indiana" by Dante, it felt like you had a great time. Was it interesting to write this book?

RB: It was interesting to study this book, including going to the creationism theme park in Kentucky. Writing this book is very interesting, but this is where the discipline of being a writer comes in. A key sequence in this book involves a reality show called "America Has Jesus". The idea is that a group of contestants express their love for our Lord through various acrobatics. In the first version, I might enjoy it too much in some ways. My editor John Metcalf (John Metcalf) helped ensure that I contained this situation. Because Dante’s Indiana comedy serves bigger and more serious things. So yes, I am very happy to write. But it always follows discipline to ensure that it brings more than just another funny joke.

AO: Story and humor have a lot in common. A good short story usually adopts a familiar situation or environment, and then tries to make it unfamiliar, or uses exaggeration, satire or inconsistency to provide readers and even the characters with some insight. This is also how many jokes are made. Most of the time, the stories and jokes are unexplainable. A good short story is often not plot driven. This is about seeing how the beginning twists and turns into the end experience. The same is true for jokes.

RB: I'm very curious about dual citizenship-I think it goes without saying that I like it very much, in the context of the jury: Do you have a prerequisite for your work?

AO: Novels need more scaffolding, and the organizational structure you must have is much broader. I wrote a lot of very exploratory drafts; it took me a long time to really figure out the format of the book. So I always knew it was about sisters. But other than that, in terms of the time scale or the special focus of this book, it has indeed unfolded very organically for a long time. For me it is a short story, it must just announce itself. It's like a popular song. It must establish its melody very clearly from the beginning.

RB: One of the challenges I faced was trying to achieve the strength of a short story in the form of a novel that Alix just described. Scaffolding is a great term. This is what I really need, and I want to destroy it by writing a Dante novel. Because in the early editions of Dante's "Indiana," it was all scaffolding; it was Dante in numbers. This is where academics are sometimes dangerous-it's just that I try to satisfy some more academic titles than literature. this is too scary. This is a complete exercise. Then at a certain moment, I have the feeling that I am not writing a tribute to Dante, I am writing Dante’s comic book world in a sense, which is also a way to understand contemporary America, and then the scaffolding is just parting Up.

AO: The writer needs scaffolding to write this book. Then there is the scaffolding that readers need. And those scaffolding are not the same.

RB: Exactly. And I think few writers can add scaffolding to the finished version in a mutually interesting way. But you know, Martha, about our views as scholars: As a scholar, due diligence is important to you. This is the death of a writer. As a novelist, the last thing I don't want to be is to do my duty.

This interview has been compressed and edited.

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