Elisabeth de Mariaffi talks about how an artist retreat inspired her latest mystery thriller novel
Vicky Qiao | | Posted: August 27, 2021 1:25 PM | Last Updated: August 27, 2021
The novel The Retreat by the St. John's author is an atmospheric thriller
An arts retreat and an unexpected avalanche — these seemingly unrelated ideas are connected in Elisabeth de Mariaffi's latest novel The Retreat, a tense mystery thriller.
de Mariaffi is a bestselling author from St. John's. Her debut collection of stories, How to Get Along with Women, was a finalist for the 2013 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her other books include Hysteria and The Devil You Know.
She joined Gill Deacon on CBC Radio's Here and Now to discuss how The Retreat came to be.
What is the book about?
The Retreat is about a professional dancer Maeve Martin. She's a single mother. She has left an extremely difficult marriage, and has decided to go on a two-week arts retreat in a secluded residency up in the Rocky Mountains.
She's there with just a handful of artists when winter blows in surprisingly early, and because of unstable conditions they become trapped at the retreat. But when people start dying, Maeve realizes that somebody at the retreat is not what they seem.
Where did you get the idea of the story?
I really did go to a retreat a long time ago. In 2009, I went to the Banff Centre for the Arts, which is much bigger than the retreat in my book. But in some ways it was very similar — I had just left a marriage; I was a single mom of two kids and I had to leave them behind.
I went for two weeks. While I was there I was so struck by the experience. I was there with writers. I was so struck by our communal experience. You arrive and at first it seems fun.
Then two days in, everyone realizes the clock is ticking, and we actually only have this set amount of time away and we're all supposed to be producing art.
I really did go to a retreat a long time ago. In 2009, I went to the Banff Centre for the Arts, which is much bigger than the retreat in my book.
You have a lot of ambitious people, creative people. All of a sudden everyone goes into the room and shuts the door and has to live with that pressure and ambition.
I really wanted that for my character.
LISTEN | Elisabeth de Mariaffi discusses novel Hysteria on The Next Chapter
I remember reading a blog post of yours, about a note you posted on your office door with the word 'no' on the outside and 'yes' on the inside. Tell me about how you navigate that balance between your creative time as a writer and real life outside that office door.
That was a system that I brought in, when I was working on my first novel, which came out in 2015. At the time, we had a blended family so we have four kids all together. I was working in the book industry as a publicist as a day job so I had very little time that was my own for writing.
I put this note on the door so that when I was in that office and the door was shut, you already had the answer ['no] to all your questions. The 'yes' was for me so that I could forget about everything that was going on on the other side of the door and really allow myself to use that time.
Now fast forward six years, everybody has grown up quite a bit, not everybody lives at home. And I am mostly a full-time writer aside from teaching. I don't need the 'no' sign as much anymore, but sometimes I feel like I need to go back there and remind myself of that 'yes.'
The aspect in The Retreat of being trapped by an avalanche was kind of similar to something you experienced in St. John's. How did that inform your writing?
In St John's, we get a couple of big snows a year. But here we were working on revisions of the novel in January 2020 and we got a storm of the century. It was over a meter of snow in 24 hours. And the thing that was most remarkable to me was that many of the things that I had imagined would happen in a situation like that, I got to watch them in real time.
One of the things that I thought about so much when I was writing the book was our ease and our reliance on modern convenience. In St John's, this was about six, seven weeks before the pandemic when we had this tremendous storm.
One of the things that I thought about so much when I was writing the book was our ease and our reliance on modern convenience.
The city had to call a state of emergency and that existed for seven days. In some ways it was a more austere shutdown than what we ended up experiencing later on.
I think it really prepared people in this city for the pandemic lockdown, because we'd all had to get face and eyes against that reliance on convenience.
de Mariaffi's comments have been edited for length and clarity.