Michael Redhill
Michael Redhill
Michael Redhillis an American-born Canadian poet, playwright and novelist. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Redhill was raised in the metropolitan Toronto, Ontario area. He pursued one year of study at Indiana University, and then returned to Canada, completing his education at York University and the University of Toronto. He was on the editorial board of Coach House Press from 1993 to 1996, and was the publisher of the Canadian literary magazine Brick from 2000 to 2009...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth12 June 1966
CountryCanada
I've always loved Houdini, not just because of what he did, but also because of what he stood for. He was a self-made man in a time when the idea of celebrity was still new, and he used his celebrity for good.
I wasn't against becoming a dad: I'd had a good childhood, as childhoods go, and as role models, my imperfect parents were as good as or better than most.
I found that through my life, living in the city of Toronto, I look above the Pizza Pizza sign, and I look above the other signs and window dressing, and I see evidence of a city that no longer exists in the keystones and the decorations that line the tops of buildings. That presence of the old city has always moved me.
No one is depressed when they're asleep, which is why being in bed is such a safe place if you're really down.
Like a lot of people, I've often wondered what else I might have been. When I was younger, but even after I was a child, I thought Batman was the whole package. Smart, calculating, pragmatic. Depressed, but in a way women found hot. Tragic at his core and struggling with his demons while trying to save the world.
I have a strange habit of walking down streets and staring up, rather than looking at shopfronts and stuff like that.
The reason so many intelligent and creative people suffer from depression is that when you take the risk of being fully conscious, you open Pandora's box, and you can't close it again.
It's no mistake that the moment of impregnation is called conception: at first, parenthood is nothing more than an idea.
We are already so many things by the time we reach the middle of life that it is possible to see that really anything can happen, and that, by extension, anything is doable. I decided I'd write 'The Calling' as someone else. Another writer entirely, a fictional one who would be played by me.
Depression is a surfeit of empathy - a killing empathy - that makes depressives great friends to everyone but themselves. Having a self is a rough business, and depressives can empathize with others who have to deal with it, but not with themselves.
Having a child is sowing the seeds of your own obsolescence: birth is the fuse that leads to that other thing. You appear, you replace yourself, you die.
Sufferers of depression have 'episodes' the same way those who suffer from multiple sclerosis do. It comes, wipes the floor with you, and then somehow returns you to the world. But it comes back.
I'd had an early stint in acting school, and there was something satisfying about becoming a character, about being inside another mind that you had to create out of yourself. As I moved toward a life in writing, I found many of the things I'd learned in acting school still applied.
I'd fully taken the road many people start on, but most abandon: common sense had given me a miss, and I'd become an artist.