Keith Maillard

His Huguenots great grandparents immigrated to Montreal from Lyon, France, in the early 1880s.

His Maillard grandfather and two Montreal-born uncles continued the family tradition of glass-blowing, working for Dominion Glass in Montreal and in Redcliff, Alberta.

Maillard's parents divorced when he was a baby and he never knew his father.

His father, Eugene C. Maillard, avoided glassblowing work, trained as a draughtsman, and worked for twenty-five years at the Hanford Site nuclear plant in Richland, Washington.

Keith Maillard (born 28 February 1942 in Wheeling, West Virginia) is a Canadian-American novelist, poet, and professor of creative writing at the University of British Columbia.

Maillard left his native West Virginia in 1965 and moved to Boston where he lived for five years.

He worked in the anti-Vietnam-war movement from 1968-1970 and contributed numerous articles to Boston underground newspapers and radio.

He moved to Canada in 1970 (due to his opposition to the Vietnam War) and became a Canadian citizen in 1976.

Maillard has French, Canadian, and American roots.

In 1970, disillusioned after the Kent State shootings, he emigrated to Canada.

He was not eligible for the draft and was a war resister rather than a draft dodger.

In the early 1970s, Maillard worked as a freelancer for CBC Radio, contributing pieces to This Country in the Morning, Five Nights, and Our Native Land. He also contributed to periodicals, including Fusion, The Body Politic, Malahat Review, Books in Canada, Canadian Literature, and newspapers.

He was in the Writers' Union of Canada, served on the National Council for two years, and co-founded the Federation of BC Writers.

Maillard studied music at Vancouver Community College, played the Irish pipes, taught recorder and the rudiments of music for the Vancouver School Board and Vancouver Community College, and played bass in the first band formed by Vancouver singer-songwriter, Ferron.

In the late 1970s Maillard taught writing workshops in Vancouver's literary centre, The Literary Storefront, and participated in a number of readings and other events there.

Maillard's first published novel, Two Strand River, appeared in 1976, published by Dave Godfrey's Press Porcépic.

Most reviewers were confounded by this strange book with its cross-gendered protagonists and weird events, but Two Strand River soon acquired a cult following, came to be labeled a classic of Canadian magic realism, and has been republished twice.

In 1979 Maillard interviewed Canadian novelist Howard O’Hagan who explained to him his writing process; the interview appeared as a chapter in Margery Fee's Silence Made Visible: Howard O’Hagan and Tay John (1992).

Maillard's second published novel was actually the first one he had begun; the book rejected by 26 publishers finally – after having passed through eight major rewrites – appeared in 1980 as Alex Driving South.

In this gritty, naturalistic tale, Maillard first introduced the fictional town of Raysburg, West Virginia, where most of his novels have been set.

The Knife in My Hands, influenced by American writer Jack Kerouac, followed in 1981, and its sequel, Cutting Through, in 1982.

Then, with a fifth book half-completed, Maillard was afflicted with writer's block.

From 1985 through 1988 Maillard applied his writing skills to designing university and adult education courses for the Open Learning Agency and, from 1986–1989, he workshopped his screenplay, Two Strand River, with Patricia Gruben's Praxis Film Development Workshop (Simon Fraser University).

Maillard's fifth novel, Motet, published in 1989, won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.

Reviewer David Homel assured readers that despite the novel's sixteenth-century Dutch choral mystery and Vancouver setting, "power and madness made in the USA is still at the heart of Maillard's creativity."

Having taught as a sessional lecturer at both the University of British Columbia (UBC) and Simon Fraser University, Maillard was appointed in 1989 to a regular teaching position in UBC's Creative Writing Department, where he has taught every genre except stage writing.

He served as Advisory Editor of PRISM international for 10 years.

While at UBC, Maillard began what he considers his mature work – what has come to be known as the "Raysburg Series."

Called "a small masterpiece" by the Georgia Straight, Light in the Company of Women was published in 1993 and was runner-up for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.

It was followed in 1995 by Hazard Zones, which was included on the Toronto Star's list of the best Canadian books for that year and was short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

Maillard's novel, Gloria (1999), was well received in Canada, short-listed for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, and brought him national attention in the United States.

Maillard also returned to his first love, poetry, and published Dementia Americana, which won the Gerald Lampert Award for the best first book of poetry published in Canada.

He became interested in the re-emergence of formal poetry in North America and commented about it in his oft-cited essay, "The New Formalism and the Return of Prosody."

The last of the "Raysburg Series", The Clarinet Polka (2002), was well received in the United States, particularly by the Polish American community.

It received starred reviews from Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Kirkus Reviews, and was included in Booklist’s Editors’ Choice ’03.

It won the Polish American Historical Association's Creative Arts Prize, and came to the attention of scholars in Poland.

He describes the process of his earliest childhood fiction in his 2011 essay, "Kilroy: A Writer's Childhood."

Keith Maillard is married with two daughters and lives in West Vancouver.

His mother-in-law is Canadian novelist Rohan O'Grady.

Maillard's mother's family settled in the Ohio River Valley in the late 18th century and it is from her family stories that Maillard draws inspiration for much of his historical fiction.