April 16, 2011
A stop on the Sarah Selecky virtual blog tour (with prizes!)
Sarah Selecky’s writing has been published in The Walrus, Geist Magazine, Prairie Fire, The New Quarterly, Event and The Journey Prize Anthology. Her short story collection, This Cake is for the Party, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize, shortlisted for the Commonwealth Book Prize, and longlisted for the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award.
Thanks to Sarah for making Pickle Me This a stop on her virtual blog tour. It has been truly lovely having her stop by.
I have taken a leave of absence from Toronto this winter. I’ve been lucky enough to hide myself away in one of my most favourite parts of Ontario: Prince Edward County. For two whole months, I have been house sitting in a beautiful home, all alone, with a big bathtub and a fireplace and a view of the river. There is nothing for me to do here except write.
My plan was to come out here and write every single day. I let all of my students know that I was on sabbatical and I put a hold on my editing and teaching work. I am working on something new – a book about writing – and I was sure that I would be productive and focused while on retreat. I thought that by the end of my time here, I’d have a good chunk of my first draft written.
The truth: I have not written very much while I’ve been on my writing retreat.
When the glittery carnival that was the Scotiabank Giller Prize happened last fall, it was a complete surprise. At first, I thought I could keep up with my regular life, that it wouldn’t be that big of a deal. But my days quickly became busy and strange. There wasn’t enough time for me to do Giller stuff and keep my regular life running smoothly. With all the interviews and phone calls that came each day, I could barely keep teaching, let alone do any writing. I started taking Gravol at night so I could sleep (thank you Susan Swan for that advice). Eventually, I succumbed to bi-weekly meltdowns (likely due to the aforementioned sleep deprivation) where I would cry my eyes out for about ten minutes and then get up, wash my face, brush my hair, and answer the phone or go to a cafe for an interview with whatever journalist I had an appointment with that day. I felt like the media could find me everywhere. A television crew spent twelve hours with me one day. My husband took that day off work so he could be in the footage, and then he ended up taking a few more personal days, just to make sure I remembered to eat and drink while I was doing other interviews. He also answered my phone for me and took messages. He made a little clipboard with my schedule on it for each day of the week.
Those autumn weeks were one hundred percent nutso. And amazing.
But I was just so – unprepared for it all. So by the time December came around, I felt depleted, exhausted, and completely out of touch with my family, my friends, and myself. I felt like a soggy orange rind that had been totally juiced – I was just the pulpy skin left over. Now, when I think back to last fall, many of my memories are blurry and unformed, like I wasn’t even there. It was official: I’d hit burnout.
So I packed up my suitcase, my laptop, and a box of books and I moved out to Prince Edward County for this writing retreat.
As I write this, I am watching a pair of swans float in the river just out the window. I realized today that I have only five more days left on retreat.
So, what have I done for the past two months?
I watched the entire Friday Night Lights series on DVD, knitted a purple hat and scarf, learned how to make sauerkraut by hand, finally read a book by Malcom Gladwell, attempted to write a song on the electric piano, wrote long handwritten letters to friends in faraway places, went cross-country skiing on the frozen river, checked my Twitter account, developed an addiction to raw cacao, learned the names of the three species of woodpecker that come to the bird feeder (Hairy, Downy and Pileated), listened to coyotes howling at the Supermoon, took long drives on country roads, stared into the eyes of cows, canoed in the river during the spring thaw, and drank shot glasses of locally-made maple syrup straight up.
Have I wasted my time out here, or what? I’m a writing teacher. Every day in my work, I try to help people develop a daily writing practice. I’m all about commitment to the craft: that’s my thing. I’m supposed to be writing about writing, for crying out loud! So, why didn’t I take my own advice? How can I tell people to write every day, when I don’t even do it myself?
Here’s the thing: I know I’m not going to have the energy to write another book unless I take some serious time off from writing. Not writing is important: it’s restorative. Taking a break from the work is also a part the work. Nobody really talks about that part of being a writer, and I know why they don’t. It’s scary. When I’m writing, I feel plugged in and energized and in sync. But when I’m not writing, I feel out of it. I have the very real fear that I’ll never be able to write anything ever again. When you look at the stiff, dark branches of trees in the winter, isn’t it hard to imagine those same trees all lush and full of leaves?
But winter happens. Then spring comes.
Yesterday, I sat down and wrote a rough outline for my new book. Five days left to write, and I just sat down and did it. I’m not going to come close to finishing a first draft in five days, but that’s okay, because after taking half a year off, I finally feel like writing again.
Leave a comment, and you will be entered for a giveaway to win a free copy of This Cake Is for the Party. And one lucky person who visits all of the participating blog tour stops will win an e-reader.
April 14, 2011
On platforms, professionalism, and the "it's just a hobby" excuse
Joan Didion. Not a hobbyist.
Recently, one inflammatory online post led to another, and I found myself reading a comment from a blogger-ish sort who defended his lack of professionalism by claiming that it wasn’t required of him. And he’s right. But then there’s bloggers and there’s bloggers, and if we’d like the enterprise to have any legitimacy (and yes I would, please. Here’s why), then we have to hold ourselves accountable to high standards. Or, more importantly, when we slip up, we should not use excuses like, “I’m not being paid for this. It’s just a hobby.”
Which is not to say that blogging should not be fun. Blogging should always be fun, basically because we’re not getting paid for this and it’s just a hobby. When blogging becomes obligatory, it’s time to stop. But fun does not negate your responsibility to provide material that is thoughtful, original, well-written, and interesting. I suppose that if your blog is very much your own personal project, then these things matter less, but the minute you attract enough attention to work with professionals, then you owe it to them.
If, for example, you are interviewing a writer on your blog, you are responsible for having read her book. (That journalists very often don’t bother to read the books of those they interview does not make this okay.) If you have no interest in reading her book, then don’t have her on your blog. Because that writer (who probably doesn’t earn much more than a blogger to do what she does, and that pay must stretch even thinner to cover the amount of time she spends blathering on about her book on your tiresome blog) is appearing in a professional capacity, and your lack of professionalism will be a waste of her time. Sure, you are offering her a chance to promote her work, but your contact with her offers you legitimacy. Um, and your professional behaviour offers further legitimacy for bloggers everywhere.
Of course, if you’re a blogger and everybody wants a piece of you, and you’re not getting anything out of the arrangement except “legitimacy,” then we’ve got a problem. Because blogging is just a hobby and you’re not being paid for it, you should ensure that you’re getting something out of everything you do, particularly if someone else is making money off your efforts (however indirectly). Write about topics you’re engaged with, read books you’re interested in, write posts to learn and answer your own questions, and ask authors questions whose answers you’re really curious to know. (Also aim to make these questions that author may never have been asked before. Which is no easy feat.) Say no to what isn’t interesting, to any authors whose book you wouldn’t bother reading, to anything that start to feel like an obligation.
Ensure that a professional appearing on your blog represents an opportunity for both of you: for her, the chance to promote her work, and for you, a wonderful read and fascinating conversation.
April 14, 2011
In which Joan Didion articulates my lack of interest in federal politics
“When we talk about the process, then, we are talking, increasingly, not about “the democratic process,” or the general mechanism affording the citizens of a state a voice in its affairs, but the reverse: a mechanism seen as so specialized that access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals, to those who manage policy and those who report on it, to those who run the polls and those who quote them, to those who ask and those who answer the questions on the Sunday shows, to the media consultants, to the columnists, to the issues advisers, to those who give the off-the-record breakfasts and to those who attend them; to that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life. “I didn’t realize you were a political junkie,” Marty Kaplan, the former Washington Post reporter and Mondale speechwriter who is now married to Susan Estrich, the manager of the Dukakis campaign, said when I mentioned that I planned to write about the campaign; the assumption here, that the narrative should be not just written only by its own specialists but also legible only to its own specialists, is why, finally, an American presidential campaign raises questions that go so vertiginously to the heart of the structure.” –from “Insider Baseball” (which I’m reading in After Henry).
April 12, 2011
How to woo a Barbara Pym heroine
I am exhausted from being constantly ridiculously overwrought, so here’s a fun diversion, totally stolen from 5 Dates for the Jane Austen Superfan (via Booksin140). How do you woo a Barbara Pym heroine? It’s no simple task, because spinsters are spinsters for having kept their standards high, and nobody is more romantic. The surefire way is to become a curate, of course, but here are five less dramatic suggestions.
1) Take her to church! High or low, mass or evensong. Going over to Rome and incense. I actually understand nothing about any of this, but that I’ve read and loved each of Barbara Pym’s books anyway is a testament to her wide appeal. At church, your heroine will encounter someone distasteful, either for being sluttish and ostentatious, or mousy and pious, and afterwards (over a nice hot drink) she will regale you with amusing stories about this woman. Someone will see the two of you in deep conversation, sparking inevitable rumours (and where there’s smoke, there’s fire!).
2) Accompany her to the jumble sale, and buy her a special piece of bric-a-brac, supporting foreign missionaries or distressed gentlewomen in the process. At the very least, you’ll get a cup of tea. And then at church in days ahead, you and she can talk about what dress the Vicar’s sister is sporting, and how she must have removed it from the jumble for her own personal use.
3) Arrive at her office (at the Society of Archaeologists) and take her out for lunch at a cafeteria. She will be slightly uncomfortable eating lunch from a tray, but she will try not to show it. She is nothing if not stoic. Listen to her talk of office politics, and who got fired for failure to make a proper cup of tea. Someone will be angry at her for having not sent around her tin of biscuits. And you will wonder how an Oxford grad with an endless capacity for quoted poetry works as an assistant in an office (however scholarly), and you’ll be pleased to liberate her from this life when you make an honest woman of her.
4) Take her to the library, and sit across the table in the reading room. Fall in love to the whispery din, to the scratch-scratch of pencils, and turn of ancient pages. In this atmosphere of restraint, emotions will become heated, and love will surely bloom.
5) Don’t say a word when you encounter the caterpillar in her cauliflower cheese. Ever-discreetly, set it aside, and proceed with your conversation.
April 11, 2011
That damn reflection
That damn reflection really doesn’t do the window any justice, so I invite you to go see it for yourself instead. It’s the Royal Wedding Window at Good Egg in Kensington Market, and it’s a wonderful celebration of all things bookish, British, potty and teapotty. I loved it.
April 10, 2011
Carol Shields, yard sales, departures and arrivals
When I looked out the window at our gorgeous Saturday, I had a craving for a yardsale, but suspected it was too early in the season. Not too early to get outside though and take in that glorious sunshine. We walked down to Kensington Market after breakfast, determined to spend no money, but then got hungry, went to the bank, and bought an empanada, a peanut butter and jam cookie from Miss Cora’s Kitchen, and a block of cheese. In retrospect, it was a very positive change of heart.
Then walking back up Major Street, all my dreams came true. A woman was selling a pile of stuff out on her sunny lawn, and so we crossed the street with glee. There wasn’t much that caught my interest, however, though it’s the browsing that’s half the fun anyway. But double the fun when I see that Carol Shields’ Collected Strories is on sale for 50 cents. Which is not only a bargain, but it contains an unpublished story. What a prize! I couldn’t think of a better find.
And it was the perfect day for it, because I was reading Carol Shields’ play Departures and Arrivals, which I bought at the Vic Book Sale last fall. I wasn’t sure about the play at the start, but I warmed to it quickly– absolutely Carol Shields, about conversations between friends, family, lovers and strangers in the middle of a busy airport. I’d say there were about 30 Carol Shields novels contained within this slim volume, and I am so pleased that I got a chance to read it.
For the next week or so, I will be focusing on my unread books before new releases, trying to clear a little space on my shelf before things get (even more) out of control. It’s funny, there are books on that shelf that have been sitting there for years, and I’ve even tried to get rid of them but can’t, but it seems harder to actually read them. I should have one of those rules like for closets where you have to pitch anything that’s been sitting untouched for a year. And it’s true, there are these books I know in my heart I will never, ever read, but I haven’t quite come to terms with it yet. The others, however, I’ll be getting to soon.
April 10, 2011
Irma Voth by Miriam Toews
My review of Miriam Toews’ new novel Irma Voth will be published in the May issue of Quill & Quire, but is online now. It begins:
“Miriam Toews’ follow-up to 2008’s The Flying Troutmans details its eponymous protagonist’s various attempts to answer the question, “How do I behave in this world without following the directions of my father, my husband, or God?” Only 19 years old, Irma has been abandoned by all three: by God and her father for marrying outside her faith, and by her husband, Jorge, for failing to be a good wife. When a film crew arrives at Irma’s isolated Mennonite community in Mexico’s Chihuahuan desert, she is offered a glimpse of a different life. Irma’s involvement with the crew sets in motion events that force her to flee with her two younger sisters to Mexico City to evade both their father’s violence and a terrible family secret.”
April 10, 2011
On Jessica Westhead's And Also Sharks
Once upon a time, so long ago that Harriet was merely a giant protrusion in an unflattering blouse, I went to see Jessica Westhead read at Pivot, fell in love with her short stories, and ever since have been looking forward to her new book And Also Sharks. And because Jessica is my friend, and because I read her stories with joy, with such utter abandon, I can’t possibly post a straightforward review, but I can say this: my friend Jessica Westhead’s new book And Also Sharks is wonderful.
The book met my litmus test for hilarity on page 3, which is that I started laughing hysterically and woke up my husband to read him the line: “I don’t know if I would’ve said before all this that she was nice enough to give you the shirt off her back, but when you stop to think about it, that’s a lot to ask from anyone.” This from the storyWe Are All About Wendy Now, about how a group of office colleagues rallies around one of their own when she becomes ill. Eunice, the narrator, tries to be magnanimous about her colleagues, who are not always that nice to her, and about their intentions towards the sick woman (Wendy), but the story belies her true feelings. Eunice also lives alone with her sick cat and subsists on a diet of ham sandwiches, but she has a solidity to her that the other characters lack, a sense of herself. What she doesn’t have much of is a sense of humour, which makes this absurd story as delivered through her voice so perfectly deadpan, hilarious.
The pathetic are rendered with sensitivity here, and embued a sense of worth and purpose not apparent to the outside world. There is virtue in understatement, in reserve, in being a misfit. And though Westhead’s touch is light, her stories aren’t– the world through these characters eyes is the world as it is, and these strange and wonderful characters take it it on everyday, brave, weird, and ever-unflinching.
April 7, 2011
Better Living Through Plastic Explosives by Zsuzsi Gartner
There are no innocent bystanders in Zsuszi Gartner’s mind-blowing short story collection Better Living Through Plastic Explosives. A car shoots down the street in the title story with a “fifteen year old future ex-con at the wheel”, white trash is skewered along with the middle class in “Summer of the Flesh Eater”, you start to believe the Marmot that the parents of the kidnapped child had it coming in “Investment Results May Vary”, and even the tragedy at the end of “Better Living…” is a kind of quid quo pro. Gartner’s stories in third-person (and in first person plural) take on “types” of people, and no one escapes the bitter scrutiny. Her first-person narrators examine their surroundings on the same level as everybody else, down in the trenches, were the trenches the whole world.
(One moment of grace: the Japanese exchange student appearing riding out of a ravine on the back of an ancient tortoise. Twice. But then I have a thing for literary tortoises.)
The stories document moments on the edge of the apocalypse, a Vancouver I recognize from Douglas Coupland. Apocalypse is fitting for a city on the edge of the world, whose houses perch on the edges of mountains (which keep devouring the houses in one story). The collection begins with “Summer of the Flesh Eater”, about what happens to a suburban cul-de-sac when a piece of prototypical white trash moves in, puts his truck up on blocks, and starts to make the neighbourhood women carnivorous. Narrated as field notes after the fact, by the men whose wives are all now pregnant and straddling motorcycles, the story traces the cul-de-sac’s descent after the throwback appears in such an evolved population.
(“From time to time he’d wave to us with a monkey wrench or soldering iron. ‘Now that he’s discovered fire,” Stephen quipped one morning while squeezing into Patel’s Mini Cooper with those of us who didn’t telecommute or weren’t on paternity leave, ‘maybe’s trying to reinvent the wheel.’)
In “Once, We Were Swedes”, Peter Pan gets literal as a burnt-out foreign correspondent hits early menopause when her husband regresses to adolescence, all against the backdrop of an urban wasteland. In “Floating Like a Goat”, a failed-artist-turned-actuary writes her daughter’s teacher after teacher chastises daughter for failing to have her people’s feet touch the ground in her drawings. “Investment Results May Vary” is narrated by the unhinged and desperate, one being that kidnapping marmot I mentioned earlier.
In “The Adopted Chinese Daughters’ Rebellion”, said daughters disappear leaving footprints in the snow (and here, like the last story, is another parable about wanting what you can’t have). I become semi-hysterical with laughter upon the thought of Susanna, the natural-born little sister (Oops!) who wants “to be a Chinese daughter more than anything else… And in the evenings, while her father diligently quizzed Huan Yue at at the kitchen table about Chinese history… Susanna was banished ot the den with Betty and Veronica Double Digest and a mug of Ovaltine”. And then that image at the end, “little Susanna tumbling end over end across a snowy lawn with stunning alacrity, an illuminated Catherine wheel, her bare heels and tail spitting sparks”. Oh my.
“What Are We Doing Here” is a Toronto story, about an obnoxious woman drunk on her fabulousness who finds herself at a party that isn’t what she promised everyone it would be. “Someone is Killing the Great Motivational Speakers of Amerika” is the story I had the most trouble with, but upon rereading it, it had a new poignancy, knowing what I knew. (And yes, there is poignancy. It’s not just the girl on the tortoise. Gartner is scathing, but her world is also painful in its loveliness). “Mister Kakami” is a riff on Heart of Darkness. “We Come in Peace” is angels on a mission to earth to discover the experiences of the senses, inhabiting the bodies of five teenagers on another cul-de-sac.
And yes, it is fitting that suburban dead ends recur throughout the collection, and Sponge Bob underpants, and I even found myself positing connections between the Lucy in the first story and the Lucy in the final. These are not connected stories, but they fit together in a way that creates something altogether new as a whole.
I’ve got two conflicts of interest here. The first is that my husband is currently working on a project with Zsuzsi Gartner, so there was one reason I was hoping to like book. Second (and more pressing, to me) reason was that I read the final story “Better Living Through Plastic Explosives” last year in The New Quarterly, and it blew me away. I’d never read anything like it before, and I’ve been wanting to read this book ever since. And I’ve been wanting it to measure up to my amazing expectations.
And it has. And now let me tell you about “Better Living Through Plastic Explosives”, which I reread tonight and finished stunned and stuttering expletives. (No, but first, let me tell you that whatever these stories are about doesn’t half tell you what their impact is. That Gartner’s stories start with premises, but they deliver. She holds nothing back, writes fearlessly, and goes where you can’t quite believe she will.)
“Better Living…” is the story of a recovering terrorist, member of the support group (and it’s absurd, I know, but it’s perfectly executed) who is fighting her urges as she tries to play by the rules, taking on city hall bureaucracy on install traffic calming devices on her street. Because she is thinking of her son, how speeding cars violate that sanctity of the life she’s made: “She loves this crazy kid so much it actually physically hurts. This love does devastating things to her intestines that only something like listeriosis generally does to saner people. Or is she confusing love with fear? For all her past-life bravado, she finally understands what it means to be willing to do for something, or rather, someone. He is her ur-text, her Gospels, her Koran.”
We see the recovering terrorist in her three guises: suburban mother, host of a militant call-in gardening show (“Gardening is like warfare, and it’s time for you to call in the troops”), and 12-step groupie. And when worlds collide, as they do, there is the inevitable explosion, and it ripped my heart out, both times. And then I immediately wanted to read it again to find out exactly how Gartner had made it happen.
April 5, 2011
The Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers
Patricia Storms asked me to accompany her to the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s RBC Bronwen Wallace Awards for Emerging Writers tonight, and I was happy to accept for various reasons, not all of which regarded drinks and hor doovras. It was a lovely event, and so great to listen to the three finalists read from their work. The winner was Garth Martens, who won me over with his absolutely perfect acceptance speech. I had to skip out before the mingling got out of hand, but I was so pleased to be there and watch goodness enacted.
And if you haven’t read Bronwen Wallace yet, do so. Here’s why.
