On a buzzy evening in late January, Dr Theresa Muñoz—a Canadian poet living in Edinburgh, and Green College’s 22nd writer in residence—opened the first instalment of “Living Archives: Legacy, History, and Creation” to a full Coach House. Muñoz has published two books of poetry to date, with the most recent, Archivum, nominated for the Saltire Literary Prize in 2025. She has received several other awards, including the Scottish Muriel Spark Centenary Award and the Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship. Muñoz was joined on this occasion by Madeleine Thien, a Montreal-based novelist and a former resident member of Green College. Thien’s novels have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and the Folio Prize. Her most recent novel, The Book of Records, was named as a best book of 2025 by numerous publications (including The Globe and Mail, The New Yorker, The Guardian, and The Boston Globe). The two writers were at Green College to discuss the use of the archive in creative practice and how they engaged historical documents in writing fictional narratives.
Muñoz began with a selected reading from Archivum, a collection of poetry born from her work in the Muriel Spark archive, a collection in the National Library of Scotland. Spark was a Scottish novelist and short story writer who kept an incredibly detailed personal record of diaries, letters, and documents related to her daily life. Her most well-known novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, is considered one of the most defining works of 20th-century Scottish literature. Muñoz spent six years going through the Muriel Spark archive. Archivum is a document of this work, and both interprets the paper remains of Spark’s life, all while self-reflexively documenting Muñoz’s experience in analyzing such ephemeral traces of the artist’s activities.
During her presentation, Muñoz alternated between detailing her inspirations and experiences, and reading poems and excerpts from Archivum. She noted how during her six years of labour, she found herself inspired by and writing about a variety of items and experiences from both within and peripheral to the archive. She lingered, for example, on the archival traces of Spark’s friendships from her time at the James Gillespie’s School for Girls. This school—and Spark’s teacher, as she explained—is what inspired The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. It is also the school where Muñoz’s own daughter is zoned to eventually attend, creating a poignant and powerful slippage between past and present, subject and researcher in Muñoz’s approach to these works.
Muñoz also drew inspiration from crossing through the environs that Spark also once inhabited. She mentioned Canongate Kirkyard as a site of some significance, for example. There, famously, lies the grave of a man named Ebenezer Scrooge, a historical figure that was reimagined by Dickens into an infamous and fictional re-embodiment in A Christmas Carol. Not just places, but other historical documents from Edinburgh have led to this sense of overlapping through time. A 17th-century recipe for jam, as a record of past embodied pleasure, also inspired a poem, as did reading about the lives of other figures from the past, such as Eliza Junor, one of Scotland’s first historically-recorded people of mixed-race. During the many years that Archivum was developed, Muñoz repeatedly encountered such fragments from the past that reminded her of aspects of her own life, and the remaining and seemingly incommensurable lacunae between past and present.
Madeline Thien then took the podium and, for “exactly 17 minutes” (as she promised the audience), described the creation of her latest novel, The Book of Records. This book, she explained, had taken on many names in her head during its formation: ‘The Thing,’ ‘The Beast,’ and ‘The Monster,’ all nicknames that reflected the long labour of ten years.
The Book of Records concerns a child named Lina and her ill father, living in the near future in a waystation called The Sea. Throughout her presentation, Thien showed images from the New York Public Library that inspired her design and conception of The Sea. Thien said that The Sea was also inspired by places like the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong, as well as Albert Einstein’s concepts of experiencing physical space as time. While Lina’s room in The Sea is ‘in’ the 21st century, time shifts spatially through the building. Lina’s immediate neighbours include Blucher (based on 20th-century German philosopher Hannah Arendt), Bento (based on 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza), and Jupiter (based on 8th-century Tang poet Du Fu), with each existing in their respective centuries. As Lina visits her neighbours in their rooms, she, too, shifts through time.
Lina’s movement through time vis-à-vis the places and spaces of the past in some ways was paralleled, Thien suggested, in her experience writing The Book of Records. She was continuously grappling, she said, with a sense of the presence of the historical-cum-fictional characters of Arendt, Du, and Spinoza, and their own written records. She said that to write about them, she needed to both strive to know them while also ‘filling in the gaps,’ engaging in a kind of productive slippage between figure and fiction. These rearticulated figures were continuously reminding her, she said, that they were not who she thought they were, and that an essential and hard-to-define gap remained unbridged.
In comparing their two works, and in the conversation that followed, both Muñoz and Thien talked about the difficulty of shaping narrative out of “copies of copies, [from] echoes of echoes,” of the politics inherent to such work, and the ethical tension that preoccupied them during the writing process. It was a truly memorable conversation on the act of writing, and on the haunting at the core of the creative process.
Dr Theresa Muñoz is a Canadian poet living in Edinburgh, Scotland, with a PhD from the University of Glasgow. She has published one collection of poetry, Settle, which was shortlisted for the Melita Hume Poetry Prize. Her second collection Archivum, an exploration of what it means to engage with archival artefacts, is published by Pavilion Poetry (2025) and was nominated in the Saltire Literary Prizes 2025. She has been awarded the Scottish Muriel Spark Centenary Award, Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship, Creative Scotland Award, and shortlisted for The Kavya Prize and a Sky Arts Royal Society of Literature Writers Award. She has directed several literary initiatives in the UK, including the Newcastle Poetry Festival and the James Berry Poetry Prize.
Madeleine Thien is the author of a collection of stories and four novels, including The Book of Records, named one of Obama’s Best Books of 2025, and Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and the Folio Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere, and been translated into twenty-seven languages. She lives in Montreal, and is a former resident member of Green College.
Post by: Claire Donnan, Green College content writer and resident member; and Heather Muckart, assistant principal, Green College.