If At First You Don't Succeed ...

Although his first novel Lives of the Saints won the 1990 Governor General's Award for Fiction, Nino Ricci has not always been viewed as a successful writer.

Now, let me make it clear, my intention here is neither to laud Ricci as a novelist nor to ridicule those who failed initially to recognize his talent. In fact, I will confess that though I have been conscious of his work I am not amongst the ranks of his readers. The point is simply this. When Lives of the Saints was finally published after being rejected by some major Canadian publishers, the public saw qualities in Ricci's work that some others obviously had not.

A recent interview with Nino Ricci disclosed yet another irony concerning his early efforts to establish himself as a writer. Way back when Ricci was still a first year student at York University he was asked to drop out of a creative writing workshop because his instructor did not believe that Ricci had the qualities to be a writer. Compounding the irony is the fact that the instructor concerned was none other than another acclaimed, award winning, Canadian author W. O Mitchell.

Now I am sure that not every reader of Ricci's several novels [which, in addition to Lives of the Saints, include A Glass House (1993), Where She Has Gone (1997) and Testament (2002)] are uncritical of his skills as a writer. However, his work has certainly been received with sufficient acclaim that no one would suggest that it doesn't deserve to be in print. Fortunately, as his life unfolded, Nino Ricci had enough confidence in his own skills and sufficient encouragement from other teachers and friends to persist with his writing.

(Note: The interview referred to appears in "Concordia University Magazine" (December 2004), the alumni publication of Concordia University in Montreal, from which Ricci received an M.A. in 1987.)