Michael Ondaatje, In Peak Form

"Survival of the tough and uninteresting," Bevington replies.

"Well, thanks -- I see my own book there," Ondaatje shoots back.

Ondaatje's life can be seen as a successful improvisation from a set of unlikely circumstances.

He was born in 1943 in the island nation of Sri Lanka, then the British colony known as Ceylon. Ondaatje's Dutch name (on-DA-chey) comes from an earlier generation of colonizers, but his complex ancestry includes multiple nationalities, among them Sinhalese and Tamil. His 1982 memoir, "Running in the Family," portrays his parents as members of an innocently decadent upper class. Their marriage ended, destroyed by his father's alcoholism, when Ondaatje was quite young.

Both parents were readers, but "in Sri Lanka you never heard of a writer," he says. The literary impulse found its home in the oral tradition, in raucous family stories told over and over, with inevitable reshapings and embellishments.

He left for England at 11 and became an English schoolboy. He wouldn't return to Sri Lanka for two decades, and in his new surroundings, literature felt so intimidating -- "it was Keats and Shelley and, you know, blah, blah, blah, T.S. Eliot" -- that he was "terrified to even think of being a writer."

Canada changed that.

He crossed the Atlantic in 1962, at the urging of an older brother who'd preceded him. "I was sort of lost at that point," Ondaatje recalls. "He said, 'You should come here, it's great.' And he was right."

For one thing, Ondaatje had the luck to encounter an inspirational teacher, Arthur Motyer, at Bishop's University: "Everyone in the class started writing as a result of his enthusiasm." For another, something in the Canadian air made writing less frightening.

"People were writing and they weren't famous," Ondaatje says, groping for words to describe the creative atmosphere in which he began publishing poems. Hanging around such welcoming venues as Coach House meant "finding writers your age, and you were not that great, but you were all about the same place."

Poetry was all he wrote at first. But eventually his literary horizons widened.

In the late 1960s, he set to work on what he thought would be a book of lyric poems based on the life of Billy the Kid. (Even a child in Sri Lanka wasn't immune to the lure of Westerns.) But after writing for a year or so, the poet started feeling trapped by verse.