Alexi Zentner: How I wrote The Lobster Kings
In his sophomore novel The Lobster Kings, Governor General's Literary Award finalist Alexi Zentner takes the father and three daughters from Shakespeare's King Lear and sets them in a modern-day lobster fishing community. Only this time, it's up to Cordelia to protect her family when their fishing business is threatened by meth dealers from the mainland. (Good thing she knows where the pump-action shotgun is kept.)
Zentner reveals some exclusive details about the writing of The Lobster Kings — including the songsmith who inspired his modern-day King Lear.
Surf and turf
"I started writing The Lobster Kings the day after I sold my first novel, Touch. On that day, I went to a writers' residency that was in the middle of Wyoming, so I was about as far away from the ocean as I could possibly get, working on essentially a cattle ranch, in my little shed, writing about lobsters and fishing and the ocean and looking out at cows. It was kind of a funny way to start the book."
Cabin fever
"The shed in Wyoming where I was writing was a narrow rectangle. It had a nice wooden desk with a window I could look out of. At one end was a bookshelf. I brought a crate of books with me — a couple of works of Shakespeare, a few novels I was reading for pleasure, a few I was reading for research, a couple of books on Canadian history, because I was always a terrible history student — and then it had a little stove that heated the room and a reclining chair by it. I would often, in the afternoons, sit down in the chair to read for a few minutes and wake up an hour or so later to go back to writing."
Taking names
"When I'm writing a novel, one of the things I do is get big poster boards. They're actually canvases that artists use. And I keep all the characters' names on them. If you write a big novel, there's a lot of characters. And it's really easy to remember the names of the main characters, but at some point when you're on page 300 and you're trying to remember 'What was the name of the person who was serving coffee?,' that can get kind of complicated."
The man in black
"For The Lobster Kings, I listened to a lot of Johnny Cash. And it makes its way into the book. The father of the narrator, Woody King, has a cassette tape of Johnny Cash stuck in the tape player in his truck, and so I in some ways did the same thing. I listened to the same few albums on repeat over and over and over again and at some point, it kind of becomes this beautiful background noise that I both hear and don't hear at the same time."
Alexi Zentner's comments have been edited and condensed.