A glimpse of Keith Maillard

Keith Maillard grew up in Wheeling, a curious, fatherless boy who soaked in the stories, history, and the  atmosphere of Wheeling when it was a booming steel town. He has written six novels set in Wheeling, renamed Raysburg in his books. "I needed freedom to make up parts of the story, so I called it Raysburg. But it's basically Wheeling."
 
In the 1960s, Keith moved to Canada. Today, he is a full Professor of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia and a celebrated Canadian writer and teacher. His most recent  book, The Bridge: Writing Across the Binary, is a personal and a literary memoir, as is his memoir, Fatherless.

The Vancouver Sun called Keith Maillard "one of the finest English-language novelists in Canada today. Almost all his books are set in the northern part of West Virginia. His books show us how to start with a real place and time, then mix in a fictional story about people living through that time and place. His Raysburg series starts in the 1700s, when Wheeling was a village along the Ohio River, and ends as Wheeling Steel is booming. "Keith Maillard is that most vexing of literary creatures: a writer’s writer," wrote a Quill & Quire reviewer. "The author of more than a dozen novels – as well as poetry, screenplays, and journalism – Maillard is a consummate and dedicated stylist, and an unabashed advocate of lengthy, complex novels." 

He works for it. He describes himself as an obsessive writer. "When you're really heavy into something, you're writing all the time, even when you're not writing," he said. "You're walking about, writing. You're having dinner, writing.  You drive your kid to ballet class, and you're writing.  At its most intense, it's a process that takes over your whole life."