Camilla Gibb reads and writes at a friends country house outside Toronto.J.P. Moczulski/The Globe and Mail
My dear friend Chris Kelly bought this land just south of Creemore about 10 years ago and built this serene, modernist Eden at the edge of the escarpment. I've often retreated here to read and write and be still over the years. I read many of the 100-plus books I was sent as a Giller Prize juror here a few years ago, and I recently lost an entire copy-edited manuscript to the wind.
I'm seven and a half months pregnant and Toronto is in the middle of a heat wave, and I have come here this week for the breeze and the water. I have been reading all the standard baby books, most of which seem designed to invoke terror. The one book I am enjoying is Great Expectations: Twenty-Four True Stories About Childbirth, edited by Dede Crane and Lisa Moore. It's full of tremendously moving essays by a number of great Canadian writers, taking you into an intimate world of the most extraordinary ordinary experience of people's lives.
I've been off fiction these past few months - a terrible admission as a writer of fiction - going through some introspective passage in search of guidance, answers. In addition to reading about babies, I'm reading about Vietnam, having just finished a novel set there. Despite its uninspired title, Understanding Vietnam, by American academic Neil L. Jamieson, is an inspired attempt to understand 20th-century Vietnamese culture and politics through Vietnamese literature.
Meanwhile, I'm compiling a list for when I return to my true love: fiction,. First up is David Mitchell's new novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet. He must be the most interesting English-language writer working today. I marvel at his skill and dexterity. Reading Mitchell makes me want to be a better writer.
Camilla Gibb's new novel, The Beauty of Humanity Movement, will be published in August.