Coach House Books asks Andrew Wedderburn a few things about The Milk Chicken Bomb
CH: Okay, so what's a milk chicken bomb? Have you ever made one?
AW: The milk chicken bomb is absolutely the worst thing. No one should know how it’s done because no one should ever make one. You can tell a kid who’s made a milk chicken bomb by the glaring cloud of guilt that follows him everywhere he goes.
CH: Marvin, Alberta, sounds like a pretty discouraging place. It’s fictional, but near Okotoks, where you grew up. Is this what it was like?
AW: Okotoks was still a small town when I was a kid – grain elevators, curling rink, one high school, no traffic lights. As I got older it became less familiar and more suburban, more indistinct from any set of cul-de-sacs in Calgary. Marvin is an exaggerated version of how I remember my town. Darker, more ridiculous.
CH: Are there a lot of Russians in Alberta? What brought Pavel, Vaslav, and Solzhenitsyn there?
AW: In the mid-eighties there weren’t a lot of recent immigrants of any sort in that part of Southern Alberta. Although you were aware that there was big world out there full of different kinds of people, there wasn’t a tangible sense that you’d be meeting any of them any time soon. So a house full of newly-arrived Russian men in this setting is meant to be eyebrow-raising, yes. The Russians are in the same boat as the other men in Marvin: probably in Alberta because of the first oil boom, and stuck in this town after the first oil bust, a little confused, a little lost.
CH: You play in a band called Hot Little Rocket. How does your music affect your writing?
AW: It lets me get a lot of bad ideas out of my system – plenty of things that will really gum up the works when it comes to fiction writing make for great rock ’n’ roll (and vice versa). It also makes me deaf and tired.
CH: What’s it like to spend so much time in the head of a ten-year-old?
AW: On one hand, writing from the kid’s point of view was really exciting. There’s a real sense of anything being allowed to happen. But how anything gets reported to the reader – that’s the tough part. Mostly I just want a cookie and a nap.
