Marnie Woodrow was born in Orillia, Ontario, in 1969. As an only child, she found that writing came naturally to her at a young age, as a way of using her imagination to entertain herself. “I’ve always written stories,” she has said. “As soon as I figured out how to write a sentence, I started doing picture books.” It’s not surprising, then, that she progressed to publishing her stories at an early age. Woodrow’s first book, a collection of short stories entitled Why We Close Our Eyes When We Kiss, was published in 1991 when she was 22 years old. Her next book of stories, In the Spice House, was published in 1996, and garnered even more praise.
But despite her early successes, Woodrow is no stranger to taking on interesting jobs in order to support her writing. In between her earlier collections and Spelling Mississippi, Woodrow worked at various times as a dishwasher, a theme-park moose, and a bookseller -- the last of which was perhaps the most difficult to manage during the writing process. “I was working full-time in a bookstore, watching tons of books go by. Everyone says, ‘Isn’t it great to work in a bookstore?’ and it is, except when you’re trying to write a book yourself.”
For Woodrow, there were two prime inspirations for the story that became Spelling Mississippi. First, there was the image of the child that would become Cleo in this novel, inspired by a 1966 photograph of flood workers in Florence. For Cleo, who carries with her a copy of the National Geographic magazine it appeared in, this event is doubly important: not only was it during the flood that she was conceived, but also the work in Florence is one of the few things she knows her mother had a passion for. Woodrow, who came across such a photo, wondered what a child of a flood worker would be like as an adult.
The second inspiration for this novel was New Orleans itself, a city in which Woodrow spent three and a half months after leaving university, and a favourite place to which she has returned since -- for both research and pleasure. There, Woodrow not only met fascinating people and discovered a lush setting, but came across the basis for the character of Madeline: “I was intrigued by the idea of someone swimming across the Mississippi, because it’s dirty and rough.” The first image that hit her was of a woman coming out of the water fully dressed. And then, thinking her story along, she wondered what two women could bring to each other’s lives if they were brought together in a single moment, and what could come of their gradual and fateful rejoining: “There’s no real ‘reason’ for two such people to meet, yet they do, and the profound simpatico they feel comes as a surprise to both of them. I wanted to explore their journey toward one another just as much as the meeting…. I was preoccupied with the notion that people can haunt each other indefinitely, for so many reasons.”
But once she thought about the story, and what it could become, Woodrow knew that the material she was working with was too much for short fiction, and it was then that she decided to write it as a novel. Five years and a hot bidding process later, Spelling Mississippi was published by Knopf Canada as a part of their New Face of Fiction program -- a program geared to publishing new Canadian writers with distinct voices. The process was far from easy, and one thing Woodrow would certainly change next time around was her dependence on her computer: she has often mentioned in interviews that one of her worst enemies was the “delete” key. She would start, and then “delete, delete, delete,” and then regret losing those precious words later on. Next time around, she says, she’ll try long hand.
Since its Canadian release, Spelling Mississippi has found a worldwide audience. It has been published in the United Kingdom and the rest of the Commonwealth, and will soon be published in Sweden. And for Woodrow, the sharing of stories is what’s most important, in both this novel and for being a writer, so this is wonderful news: “For me, it’s about what people bring to each other’s lives in terms of stories and experiences and how, when you bring these stories together, there’s an alchemy…” Her next projects, including a screen adaptation of Spelling Mississippi, a young-adult novel, and a second novel for adult readers, will prove just how wide her audience can become.
