October 26, 2007
Lighting a Fire
Maud Newton’s interview with Kate Christensen contained only good bits, and I wish I could quote it all here. So many fascinating thoughts about books, writing, about women writing, and it was only a short interview anyway.
I will share with you just one more part I particularly liked.
Kate Christensen on her first book’s reception: “I felt a bit like an underdog/loser with a thwarted ego and an axe to grind in one of my own novels, and in that sense it was ironic, fitting, and really, the best thing that could have happened to me. Sure, it pissed me off at first, because few things are more infuriating than being underestimated, but it also lit a fire under my ass, so to speak, and taught me a few valuable Zennish lessons about writing: Let It Go (you can’t control what people make of your work); Keep Moving Forward Like a Shark (all you can do is write more books); and Ride the Ocean Tides and Stay Your Course (your internal compass, not a glowing or scathing review, is the one authority to be heeded and obeyed).”
October 23, 2007
I vow
Lying there with her head on his chest. “I vow to never forget the Robin’s Rest,” she said. “Or the tartan of its bedspreads.”
October 23, 2007
The world is good
I can’t remember where I read it– in a letter, an interview, an essay or a novel– Carol Shields writing about reading obituaries, the stories you find there. The closest thing I can find now is the passage from Unless. Reta and her husband are walking through the cemetery: “Here is an inventory of relics and fashion and a sentimental embrace of death, invoking what may well be the richest moments in a lifetime, the shrine of tears and aching history”.
I don’t read celebrity gossip anymore, but I do read the death notices in The Globe every Saturday. It’s a bit morbid, I realize, and I do end up getting tears on the newsprint, but really I find what lies in the obits such an antidote to the rest of the paper, such marvelous stories. There are people in the obituaries who stay married all their lives. They leave behind their spouses, children, nieces, nephews, friends. They are proud, beloved, missed. And oh the details: they fought in wars, moved across the world to call this country home, had multiple careers, made great discoveries, loved their families, loved their pets, enjoyed their cottages, changed the world, taught school, told jokes and stories, and were the bravest, strongest, most loving, kind, hilarious, unique and vibrant person many people ever knew. Of course not all of these stories are so satisfying: young people whose deaths must leave irreparable holes in a family, those who leave behind partners and children after so little time. But still, there is so much love here, and it’s heartening. So little else is, and so I savour these things.
I love that due to brevity, how cryptic and mysterious these stories become– and how beautiful. On our trip to England in June we went walking through a churchyard in the Lake District, and I was so intrigued by the gravestone of a man who had been “village postmaster and pharmacist for 30 years”. And the man from the photo, that “observer of rainfall.” And these are ordinary lives. The last two weeks in the paper I’ve read about the woman who “never failed to stay in touch”, the longtime resident of Leaside who pursued his love of painting, the top-ranked junior ski racer, the man whose Parkinson’s prematurely ended his brilliant legal career. “She was a renowned expert on the history of children’s books and lectured widely on the topic.” “His top priority in the spring was that his son son raised his beautiful Royal Canadian Air Force Ensign to fly proudly on the beach.” She whose husband “was executed by the Soviets in 1945 during the siege of Budapest” and moved to the US to run her uncle’s hotel. “A great lover of family, friends, good music and a glass of red wine.” The woman who will be remembered “for her kind heart, generous spirit, wonderful sense of humour and her beautiful voice.”
And that this is the stuff of an ordinary life is really quite remarkable– perhaps there really is no such thing? Real life sends delicious shivers up my spine, and the world is good, or at least it can be.
October 18, 2007
Fiction is all right.
I thought Philip Marchand’s article “Why novelists are nervous” was sort of strange, the nervous novelists being John Updike and Philip Roth. Apparently Updike wrote a novel seven years ago that sold poorly and Philip Roth has remarked, somewhat self-deprecatingly, I thought, “The status of literature was much higher when I began writing.”
Oh Philip, fear not! Ben McNally and Book City’s J. Frans Donker are not worried about the status of literature in the slightest. Neither is anybody I know, most of whom devour fiction like it’s pie.
Marchand’s hysteria is the result of the International Festival of Authors now featuring nonfiction writers, Charlotte Gray, Larry Gaudet, David Gilmour and Rudy Wiebe in particular. Which is interesting, I think. One of these writers, Gray, is prolific, acclaimed and, though I’ve not read her work, seems to write nonfiction about as literary as it gets. And then that the other three “nonfictioneers” are novelists first and foremost, which Marchand doesn’t even refer to. Granted we could make something terrible of the fact that market forces have pushed these writers to turn to nonfiction, and the hysteria could continue unabated. But I’d rather take the angle that perhaps nonfiction writers are those who should be nervous. Watch out Margaret MacMillan! The novelists are passing into your ranks. They’re injecting fact with fancy and, I would be willing to bet, the writing has never been so good.
October 16, 2007
The pageness of the page
I’ve been thinking about this conversation from Baby Got Books, regarding the effect of the internet and computers upon the art we create, and the ideas we generate. And I’ve realized that for me the computer is not so much a new medium, but simply an extension of a pen and paper. That though my computer is infinitely valuable for revisions and alterations, when it comes time to begin a new draft, I always make a brand new document. Retyping out my previous work is more time-consuming, but the new page’s blankness allows for so much more possibility. Also, that when I write, I keep my document small, at nearly 100% so I can see my whole document on the screen. I need my page to look like a page, as it would were it stuck inside a typewriter, so that I can see where I am at. For me, the pageness of the page remains essential, and still has yet to be replaced.
October 11, 2007
Descant Blog
And in exciting news, I’m thrilled to announce my new incarnation as a Descant Blogger. My first posting goes up this weekend, I believe. I’ll be writing about the remarkable intersections between reading and every day life, and I hope that you will join me in that conversation.
October 4, 2007
More from Kate Grenville
“In the years after Lilian’s Story was published, our children Tom and Alice were born, and I added another mantra: Don’t wait for time to write. I learned to work in whatever slivers of time the day might give me– one of my favourite scenes in Joan Makes History was written in the car waiting to pick up Tom from a birthday party, on the only paper I could find, the inside of a Panadol packet. I had slivers of time, so I wrote in slivers of words: a page here, a paragraph there. Eventually the slivers would add up to something.” –Kate Grenville, from Search for the Secret River
September 27, 2007
Particularly telling
From The Guardian Review of When To Walk: “It’s a sign of how good a writer she is that you even forgive Ramble’s perusal of boxes of memorabilia – usually the sign of a book that deserves to be forgotten beneath the bed.”
Exactly.
September 22, 2007
I have to hope
~Before I could say anything, she declared, ‘Personally, I have an ignorance towards books. Don’t ask me nothing about books. I only read magazines.’
‘I write for magazines,’ I said at once. ‘That’s my job.’
‘Kidding me,’ said Mrs. Shaw. ‘What ones?’
I hoped I wouldn’t lose cachet by showing her. I have an unfiled heap of them on one of the counters right there in the kitchen, where they sit like beached jetsam above a swill of more mobile rubbish.
…[I]t pleases me to know that, technically speaking, ‘jetsam’ is the matter you throw out of a ship when you’re afraid it’s going to sink, whereas, if the ship sinks anyway and is destroyed by the tides, ‘flotsam’ is the debris of the smashed vessel itself.
I have to hope my work is jetsam.~
Rebecca Gowers, When to Walk
September 12, 2007
I made a pie instead
The Poet’s Occasional Alternative — by Grace Paley
I was going to write a poem
I made a pie instead it took
about the same amount of time
of course the pie was a final
draft a poem would have had some
distance to go days and weeks and
much crumpled paper
the pie already had a talking
tumbling audience among small
trucks and a fire engine on
the kitchen floor
everybody will like this pie
it will have apples and cranberries
dried apricots in it many friends
will say why in the world did you
make only one
this does not happen with poems
because of unreportable
sadness I decided to
settle this morning for a re-
sponsive eatership I do not
want to wait a week a year a
generation for the right
consumer to come along
from Begin Again Collected Poems, 2000
