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Margot Livesey on Continuing To Push Oneself as a Writer "Go look at the world and compare your pages
to
the world."
Born and raised on the edge of the Scottish Highlands, Margot Livesey earned a BA in Literature and Phi, losophy at the University of York in England. After a stint in Toronto, where she began honing her writ, ing, Livesey moved to America af~ ter being granted a job at Tufts Uni-
versity. Since this beginning, she has gone on to teach at numerous writing programs, including Boston University; the University of Cali-
fornia, Irvine; and the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop. Currently she divides her time between LonPholO credit: Sigrid Estr'Jd(l don and Boswo, where she is a writer-in-residence at Emerson College. Her wricing has appeared in such distinguished magazines as The New Yorker, Five Points, and TriQuarterly. She is the author of one collection of stories, Learning by Heart, and four novels, including Homework, Criminals, The Missing World, and Eva Moves the Furniture, and has been the recipient of significant acclaim, including grants from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. In November, her latest novel, Banishing Verona, was released to hugely enthusiastic reviews and has been hailed by critics as one of her finest books to date. Livesey came to the University of Idaho in October as the MFA Program's Distinguished Visiting Writer in fiction. She led an inten~ sive week-long workshop for a number of the program's graduate students and gave a mid-week reading from Banishing Verona, which had not yet been released nationally. Despite tirelessly conferencing with individual students about their work and about writing in general, Livesey made time to sit down with one of Fugue's editors, Ben George, the day after her reading. On a gorgeous and unseasonably warm afternoon in Moscow, the two took up residence on a bench in the 54
FUGUE #28