From science to storytelling: U of G’s Madhur Anand on her leap into fiction

She’s a scientist, a poet, and now a novelist.

Madhur Anand is best known for her work as a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Guelph and for exploring the natural world through poetry and a memoir. But her latest book takes a bold turn into fiction. 

Her debut novel To Place a Rabbit follows a scientist who finds herself unexpectedly drawn to storytelling.

Anand spoke with CBC Kitchener-Waterloo’s The Morning Edition host Craig Norris about what inspired the novel.

Audio of this interview appears at the bottom of this page. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Craig Norris: Tell us about To Place a Rabbit. Give us a sense of what this is about.

Madhur Anand: To Place a Rabbit is a novel that tells the story of a scientist who is suddenly possessed with the desire to write fiction in her life.

She’s about middle-aged and she doesn’t know why it’s possessing her. Because she’s a scientist, she’s been living her whole life in that world of sort of pursuing truth, chasing facts, communicating clearly and honestly and in a straightforward way about everything. She just has no idea how to make things up.

Craig Norris: I can’t help but notice there are some congruencies here. Where did this come from and why did you want to write it?

Madhur Anand: It’s true there are some similarities between the protagonists of the novel and me. The novel does draw partly on elements of my life.

The difference between me and the protagonist is that I actually already am a writer. I’ve published two books of poetry and a memoir. I was curious about fiction and novels and I had no idea how to write them. The idea of writing a novel actually just kind of really scared me. For some reason, I just have trouble making things up. So that’s kind of where the similarities are between the two protagonists and then things go in a certain direction.

Craig Norris: Why did you feel a novel was what you wanted to do right now?

Madhur Anand: There were some stories I wanted to tell you about love, translation, and identity. Those are all themes in the novel. 

I did attempt to write nonfiction. I thought I’ll just write another sort of memoir-ish book. It just wasn’t working for a lot of reasons, partly because I didn’t have as much access to that part of my past and I had to rely too much on memory. It felt like I was inventing things. 

It’s not like science where you can go back and look at data or you can go back and look at published studies. There was really very little evidence of that pass. So I thought if I am going to write about these ideas, it’s going to have to be in some other form. This novel is kind of inspired through the process of translating another novel.

Craig Norris: Talk more about that, how did that happen?

Madhur Anand: I was at a literary festival and I met a writer. The writer is Lisa Moore, Canadian novelist. She told us that she had published a novella in French, but decided not to publish the original version in English, which is a very curious decision.

It occurred to me because I do speak French, that I thought it would be kind of interesting to translate the novel from French back into English, but without looking at the original. I think that that was actually how I managed to create my own fiction. What happens in the novel, and also what sort of happened to me in real life was that translating that piece from one language to another, from French to English, it became a creative process. I didn’t end up translating it practically at all. I just used fragments of it and then it became part of a larger story that allowed me to tell another story.

LISTEN | Award-winning Guelph poet Madhur Anand releases 1st novel: