Michael Murphy doesn’t believe in signs.
So when he found an envelope addressed to a name eerily similar to his own, he did what any non-superstitious person would do: he dropped it in the nearest mailbox and continued on his way. But for some reason, Murphy couldn’t shake the idea of that lost letter.
The incident soon became the basis for the Dalhousie law student’s first novel, A Description of the Blazing World. Murphy, who was living in Windsor, Ont. at the time, discovered the letter on his walk home from school.
“It got me thinking,” he says. “If somebody was a little less stable, how might that be interpreted? If it had actually been their name, would they open it? What would they see?”
And with that, the character of Morgan Wells was born.
Wells is a recent divorcée who feels his life is crumbling around him. When he discovers a postcard from France (addressed to another Morgan Wells), he sets off on a haphazard journey to find its owner.
Meanwhile, an unnamed 14-year-old boy finds a dusty old copy of Margaret Cavendish’s book, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World (which Murphy explains is one of the earliest known works of science fiction). For the boy, the discovery is no coincidence; it’s a sign of the impending apocalypse. And so he begins a search for more evidence of the world’s end.
A Yarmouth native, Murphy says his love of writing stemmed from a passion for reading. Fascinated by the work of fantasy writers C.S. Lewis and Tad Williams, he began to dabble in fiction writing while completing his English degree at Dal. Though he focused primarily on short stories, he also wrote a series of poems in what he describes as “a fun experiment, more than anything.”
But it was a fellow east coast novelist who drove him to pursue writing on a more serious level: Alistair MacLeod (author of No Great Mischief, among others) was teaching English at the University of Windsor. Having been a longtime fan of his work, Murphy enrolled in the school’s masters of creative writing program.
A Description of the Blazing World began as a 16-page short story in early 2006. But Murphy quickly decided he hated the ending. “It just didn’t seem complete,” he says. “There was something missing.”
So he hid the story away for the next four months.
In September, Murphy was entering the second year of his program and decided it was time to move forward with the piece—this time as a novel. But after writing 60 to 70 more pages, he hit another wall. Frustrated with the way things were going, Murphy scrapped the entire project and restarted from the perspective of a new character. Seven months later, he had a first draft.
It wasn’t until early 2008 that Murphy began looking for a publisher. After a series of rejection letters and “encouraging letters that were still kind of rejection letters,” he settled on Calgary-based Freehand Books.
In April 2011, Murphy’s hard work finally paid off. The book was a hit—and major Canadian newspapers began to take notice
National Post book reviewer Nathan Whitlook referred to Murphy’s work as “something of a throwback to that love child of Kafka and Alfred Hitchcock, the Existential Mystery, in which selves are endlessly fungible, characters are walking question marks, alienation is the norm, and obsession almost always ends in tragedy,” while Patricia Dawn Robertson wrote in the Toronto Star: “A Description of the Blazing World is timely, profound and telling. It’s misfit fiction at its finest.”
Murphy says he was “humbled and surprised” by the response. “It’s one of those things where you don’t want to have any expectations,” he says.
Now, as Murphy finishes up his second year at the Schulich School of Law, he’s also beginning work on a second novel. Though he says it would be “premature” to disclose too much about the book, he does reveal his secret for balancing his hectic work schedule:
“I actually find it really useful to write,” he says. “Some people have badminton, some people play squash. That’s my writing to me.”
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