Q & A with Maura Hanrahan

1. What do you like to do in your free time?

Mostly homey things like hang out with my husband and daughter—cooking and eating, going for walks, talking, playing. I also love a good hot bath!

2. What is your favourite food?

Authentic Mexican food like I once had in an indigenous village in Mexico—with lots of heat and spiciness. I am a dedicated foodie and love Leo’s fish and chips, Thai and Indian curries, and wild game. With my husband, I founded the “St. John’s Food Club,” which is a group of our friends meeting once a month to share recipes and meals on a theme. This month’s theme is the 100 mile diet.

(Editor’s note: For those interested in Newfoundland and Labrador food and nutrition, check out A Veritable Scoff: Sources on Foodways and Nutrition in Newfoundland and Labrador.)

3. What city/country would you most like to visit and why?

I love to return to New York because it is full of life and joy. You have the city’s wonderful energy, art, and restaurants and a subway ride away you have the beautiful, serene Jamaica Bay bird sanctuary.

One day I want very much to go to Antarctica; I am attracted to its rawness and beauty—there is some of that in Labrador, where I have spent a great deal of time.

4. What is your favourite book(s)?

There are a few: Jan Morris’ Spain; Sara Wheeler’s Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica; Tony Parsons’ The Stories We Could Tell (a novel set in Thatcher’s Britain, where I lived for three years); Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, which is just so beautifully written; House of Hate by Percy Janes, which is so brave and striking; Wuthering Heights, ditto. I love most of Jon Krakauer’s work and Reynolds Price’s work as well.

5. What are you reading now?

David Yallop’s The Power and the Glory: Inside the Dark Heart of John Paul II’s Vatican. There is much that’s memorable in this book, especially the sad tale of how the Vatican deliberately and cruelly crushed liberation theology in Latin America, completely disregarding the tragic consequences.

6. When do you like to write (time of day, day of week)? Where do you do your writing (location)?

I try to keep my writing within nine to five because downtime is important for your creativity but more important for your life and health.

7. What was your first piece in print (book, review, or article, etc)?

This would have been an article in my high school newspaper. In university I wrote for the Muse at MUN. Later, I was one of the last journalists to work on Fleet Street (for the London Evening Standard) before they moved all the papers to the Docklands after five hundred years of writing and printing there.

8. What character from your book(s) is the most like you? What one would you most like to be?

Perhaps Hannah Dyson from Domino is most like me. Richard from The Doryman as well in some ways. For fun and adventure, I’d most like to be William Bartlett or Bob Bartlett from Domino.

9. What other jobs have you had besides being a writer?

Not completely in order: babysitter, retail sales clerk, waitress, bartender, naval trainee and officer, museum assistant, archival assistant, teaching assistant, journalist, writing workshop facilitator, editor, sociology and anthropology professor, consultant (researcher/policy analyst/advisor on Aboriginal issues), city commissioner, parent.

10. Make a question of your own and then answer it.

What book would you most like to write?

A book on the complicated spirituality of mothering. I think the seeds of it are in there.