Why Lori McNulty sees Mars as a metaphor for the human experience

Lori McNulty, a past CBC Short Story Prize finalist, recently published her debut short fiction collection titled Life on Mars after years of writing and revising. The imaginative stories explore the human experience and raise existential questions through their compelling characters. 

In her own words, McNulty reveals how she conceived the collection.

Becoming a "real writer"

"I wrote one piece of fiction and I sent it to the UBC MFA and they let me in. That started my journey on nonfiction and most of the stories in there were started in my first year of UBC. UBC launched my career, in the sense that they force you to produce, in a good way. You meet people, you engage. You just have to get the courage. You can be a writer, but to be a real writer you have to get your work out there and get criticized and engage with real people who are going to challenge you and take you further."

Why Mars

"It has nothing to do with Mars the planet. It has to do with the human condition — an existential journey, about imagination, a journey and desire and fear and violation. It became much bigger, like a symbol and a metaphor. It's really not about physically inhabiting a planet. It's about our aspirations to go somewhere or be something or to experience something. And how we feel is foreign, how we're afraid of the foreign as well. It's otherness." 

Contemporary relevance

"I think everything surprised me. None of these stories had the same titles as they do now. I certainly had no idea that I was writing a collection called Life on Mars. I had no idea what it was going to be. Thematically I didn't understand that something I was writing about seven years ago about transgender [identity] would become very pivotal in this contemporary moment. There's a story about immigration. There's a story about mental illness. Some of these topics, all of a sudden, became very critical. But you're not writing with that idea in mind. You're just writing from your own heart and mind." 

Lori McNulty's comments have been edited and condensed.