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150 Larissa Lai is an Assistant Professor in Canadian Literature at the University of British Columbia. Her first novel, When Fox Is a Thousand (1995), was shortlisted for the Books in Canada First Novel Award. Her second novel, Salt Fish Girl (2002), was shortlisted for the Sunburst Award, the Tiptree Award, and the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Award. In 2009, she published a book-length collaborative long poem with Rita Wong called sybil unrest, a chapbook called Eggs in the Basement, which was shortlisted for the bp Nichol Poetry Award, and her first full-length solo poetry book Automaton Biographies, which was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Award. Smaro Kamboureli: We’ll start with what has become our standard opening question in these interviews, namely, by asking you to tell us about your experiences with arts funding in relation to the Canada Council, provincial arts bodies, or other agencies like Heritage Canada. Larissa Lai: I’ve had pretty good experiences with the arts councils, actually. I received my first grant from the Canada Council’s now-defunct Explorations program in 1993, for the novel that became When Fox Is a Thousand. They gave me $9,000 for nine months of work. It was to cover my rent and all my living expenses. I wrote probably about half of the novel on that money, and then I cobbled the rest together from bits of editorial work, writing, and arts organizing work. I had a small grant from the B.C. Arts Council as well. I think they gave me $5,000. So they weren’t huge amounts, but I was twenty-five and it was enough. I really do feel fortunate to have been around and young at the time when those grants were available , because I look at the generation that’s a decade younger than me, and I don’t think they have had the same kinds of resources. I think that one of the most important things that arts councils can do is to make grants available to young artists because it makes the difference between having a life that goes in a creative direction and one that doesn’t. Of course it would Interview with Larissa Lai 9 UnderConditionsofRestraint Larissa Lai 151 151 be great if the grants were really generous, but even if they were modest, it would make a huge difference. It was wonderful to be offered those small amounts of support when I was young. I had to do other things to finish the book, but the book got done, and got published. It did reasonably well. I think that without those grants and that modest success, I would be living a very different life now. SK: Did you have grant support for the second novel? LL: I got the equivalent of a Canada Council B grant for the second novel. They call them Mid-Career Writers’ grants now. They used to call them B grants. I also had some money from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts for a third novel that has been in the works for some years now. I have a complete but very rough draft. SK: You were in Calgary when you got that grant? LL: Yes. I lived in Calgary between 2000 and 2006. The Alberta Foundation for the Arts gave me actually a decent chunk. The Canada Council Mid-Career grant was also decent, though it didn’t seem to go as far as the amount I was given for When Fox Is a Thousand. I think partly I wasn’t so frugal, but also I think the cost of living had risen by that time, so that even for a person as frugal as I had been, it wouldn’t have gone as far. But I still did get a chunk of Salt Fish Girl written on that money. Kit Dobson: Have you had any unsuccessful applications? Or have they worked out by and large? LL: My applications for arts grants have worked out by and large. KD: One of the things we’re interested in is hearing from the writer’s perspective is what makes a difference between a successful and an unsuccessful application. LL: Oh I see. The only arts grant application I had that was unsuccessful was the grant to the Canada Council for a recent writer-in-residency at Simon Fraser University, which the university committee was so sure that I would get. We were thinking that the mistake I...

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