September 11, 2007
Blowing off dust
Today was exciting for a number of reasons: that I woke up and sat down to spend the morning working on my manuscript, which has been living under my bed since April. Had to blow off a layer of dust, but it was easy to get started, and strange to be affected by words I’d written so long ago they’ve ceased to belong to me. My goal is to finish this final revision by the end of this year, and then what’s next would, quite naturally, come with the future. Further exciting, was lunch with my old dear friend Erin Sanko who I’ve not seen in at least five years. Nice to have it feel like no time had passed, and her boyfriend is lovely. (I was also happy to hear that she had so much enjoyed Half of a Yellow Sun). I spent the afternoon shopping, for skirts, shoes, and turtleneck sweaters. Also for a new backpack, and any number of things to replace hideousness. And then I had my first visit to Ben McNally Books, which was a marvelous experience, and I had the good fortune of picking up a copy of Jonathan Garfinkel’s new book Ambivalence. It’s a beautiful book, and I am very happy for him. I also look quite forward to reading it.
August 28, 2007
A Word from Rosie Little
“I could get all writerly about it, and call it an ‘aqualine nose’, but to do so would be to confine its owner for all time to the pages of fiction, for how could I ever expect you to believe that he truly existed were I to plonk such a literary phenomenon squarely in the middle of his face? An actual nose– a nose of flesh and bone and cartilege– might in be be aqualine in profile, but it is a strange fact of life that it is almost never so described unless the describer has a pen in her hand or a keyboard beneath her fingertips”– Danielle Wood, Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls
August 19, 2007
In another space
“We were brought up to believe that stories have meanings and that meanings have stories and that journeys have ends. We were brought up to believe that there would be an ending, that there would be completion. For each and every life, for each and every organism. But we now know that that’s not true. It was true, once, but it’s true no longer. We have passed the point in time and in history where that truth applies. The universe has shed the teleological fallacy. So now we have to work out what can take place. We have to tell and shape our stories in another space, in another concept of space.” –from Margaret Drabble’s The Sea Lady
August 9, 2007
The non-presence of friends
“I have been careful to give Alicia a few friends. It’s curious how friends get left out of novels, but I can see how it happens. Blame it on Hemingway, blame it on Conrad, blame even Edith Wharton, but the modernist tradition has set the individual, the conflicted self, up against the world. Parents (loving or negligent) are admitted to fiction, and siblings (weak, envious or self-destructive) have a role. But the non-presence of friends is almost a convention– there seems no room for friends in a narrative already cluttered with event and the tortuous vibrations of the inner person. Nevertheless, I like to sketch in a few friends in the hope they will provide a release from a profound novelistic isolation that might otherwise ring hollow and smell suspicious.” –Carol Shields, Unless
August 2, 2007
Boys are ordinary
Happy she is tonight, what with golden tomatoes ripe in the garden, and a short story forthcoming in The New Quarterly. Up to her elbows, also, in To the Lighthouse, and with a date scheduled with Rebecca Rosenblum. The whole third person thing because she’s somewhat delirious with glee, and because sometimes the universe sets up so well.
July 27, 2007
Seasons Change
Now out of school, with my wide-open days full of writing and reading behind me, I’ve found I need something different. Whereas last year it was important for me to work alone, listen to myself (and to my advisor), and dance to my own tune, now that writing is quite officially something I do “on the side”, I crave connection. Sitting at my desk at the end of a long day, putting in a few hours of writing whilst I’m conscious enough, ignoring my husband– it all feels terribly lonely in a way it never did at high noon, bathed in the sunshine of my self-importance. And so I am very lucky that my creative writing group from school is willing to have me back among them. As soon as I knew they would, my whole self was flooded with relief, and contentment. The group is a on some sort of hiatus this summer, but sessions continue informally. This eve I met with Rebecca for two hours of discussion, paragraphs read aloud, and silent typing across the the table. It was absolutely inspiring, and we both came away feeling we’d been quite productive. More than anything, too, I was fascinated by writing in a different place. For the past two years, I’ve been writing in the same little corner, and how fabulous it was to sit somewhere different, in a hot and crowded cafe, and all the different stimuli. Which opened up my story in ways I hadn’t considered, somehow, and it was almost as though I were a different pair of eyes looking at it. Now I don’t think writing on location will always be for me– I am way too much of a hermit– but semi-regularly will be a most interesting exercise. I look forward to finding what future Thursdays have in store.
July 24, 2007
Truth is Overrated
I’ve been thinking a lot about the authenticity of fiction, and the Penelope Lively quote I cited a few weeks back:
Story is navigation; successful story is the triumphant progress down exactly the right paths, avoiding the dead ends, the unsatisfactory turns. Life, of course, is not at all like that. There is no shrewd navigator, just a person’s own haphazard lurching from one decision to another. Which is why life so often seems to lack the authenticity of fiction.
As a woman who yesterday fell over a ledge, landed hard at the foot of concrete staircase, and has spent today at home packed on ice, there is plenty I could discuss about this from a personal perspective. I will, however, refrain, because I recently watched the movie Breach, which I enjoyed for the reasons I like most movies involving Russians and espionage, but I also found the things wrong with it so worthy of discussion.
Breach, you see, is BASED ON A TRUE STORY. As a result, the tension is subtle, pacing is slow, and various aspects of character don’t make a lot of sense. The main character has a wife who is East German, which is incidental to the plot. Afterwards we were discussing the movie and I said, “I just don’t get why she was East German.” And then I remembered– oh yeah, because she was. It’s that simple. Why didn’t the movie come with much of a climax? Because real life doesn’t tend to take the shape of an arch. Why did some bits drag? Because that what days do. And so on– I suspect the mini-climax this movie offered was fictional; it seemed implausible. There were other bits which suggested mere spice, and it was jarring to be knocked in and out of truth and fiction this way. I might have even felt manipulated, had they actually managed to do it well.
The movie lacked the authenticity of fiction. Forced to be based on truth, a fascinating story was stripped of liberties, bound, gagged, and wrapped up in a 110 minute package where it faltered. A better script might have saved the film, but its relationship to real events would have always been troubling. Life is stupid, for example people fall off ledges. And later we will tell the story, its very point being unreality, but in the realm of the unreal, the story doesn’t function. The story is without context, like most things. Threads will fail to tie up neatly, and people will keep insisting upon being East German for no reason. And all of this mess isn’t even truth, but just somebody’s supposed version of it. At least with fiction you know what you’re in for, and you can do with the story what you may.
July 22, 2007
Dave comes home again
Dave comes home again, for this is what he does. Dave goes out in the morning and he comes home at night, always the same, unwavering. I think about lighting a fire in a wastebasket just to watch him spring up to extinguish it, or collapsing onto the floor so he could rush right to my side. But he wouldn’t. I mean, he’d put out the fire, if a fire was lit, but I’d never hear the end of that, and if I lay down on the floor, he’d know that I was faking. He’d check to see my chest fail to rise before he’d rush right to my side. But then maybe I’m being unfair. He’d only check because he suspects I’m prone to such displays, and in a true emergency he’d be discerning enough to act. Dave “has my back”, I suppose, this defined by the very fact he so perpetually comes back home again. I’m lucky, I know I am, and I love him, but lately that love has been like loving the trunk of a tree, or the back of an elephant. The back of an elephant that keeps coming home again, and sitting down to dinner, puttering around annoyingly in the evening, and then asking, “You coming to bed?”
July 11, 2007
Wholly visible and reliable
What is it when pathetic fallacy functions in reading? Because at the moment I feel like I’m reading Salt Rain in just the right climate: “the raindrops making an endless circuit from earth to clouds, the same water falling again and again for decades.” 80% humidity is probably as close to the Australian rain forest as Toronto ever gets. It’s a funny thing.
So far Salt Rain is a pretty good story, but then you’ve got to feel sorry for any book that has to follow Henry James. Such an unfair pitting, but the narrative voice feels so slight in comparison. Which came to mind last night when I was reading James Wood’s review of Edward P. Jones’ Aunt Hagar’s Children in The London Review of Books. Writes Wood:
These days, God-like authorial omniscience is permitted only if God is a sweet ghost, the kind with whom the residents can peaceably coexist. This is especially true in most contemporary short stories, where the narrator may be wildly unreliable (first person) or reliably invisible (third person), but not wholly visible and reliable. Few younger contemporary writers risk the kind of biblical interference that Muriel Spark hazards, or that V.S. Naipaul practices in A House for Mr. Biswas, in which the narrative eschatologically leaps ahead to inform us of how the characters will end their lives or casually blinks away years at a time: ‘In all, Mr. Biswas lived six years at The Chase, years so squashed by their own boredom and futility that they could be comprehended in one glance.’ Comprehended by whom?
And now, post-James, I am craving omniscience. And have set myself a little challenge: the next story I begin will have a narrator who is not a sweet ghost at all.
(Update: Oh, yes, I looked it up. “eschatology [esk‐ă‐tol‐ŏji], the theological study or artistic representation of the end of the world.”)
June 26, 2007
Call For Submissions
I know there are more than a few among you who write short fiction. As Fiction Editor of echolocation (the Literary Journal of the Graduate English Department at the University of Toronto), I’m sorting through our submissions right now, narrowing down the batch, and if you would like to add your work to it, I would really love to see it. We pay $10 per page, and our coming out with issues I’ve been really proud of. Submission details are on our website, though summer means the process has slowed right down. It would be best to email me at my echolocation address (find it here) so I get it directly. And please contact me if you’ve got any questions.
