January 19, 2022
Book News!
I’m thrilled to share news that my third novel, ASKING FOR A FRIEND, is coming Spring 2023 from Doubleday Canada. It’s a story of friendship over decades and how motherhood complicates that connection, at times drawing friends together, other times pushing them apart, and how IMPOSSIBLE it seems sometimes to find other women making different choices from one’s own. This is a story that I’ve been working on for a very long time and I’m so thrilled for the opportunity to finally share it with you!
I’m grateful to Samantha Haywood and her team at Transatlantic for their work on the deal, and to the wonderful Bhavna Chauhan for having me back for another book.
December 8, 2021
The Books of the Years
I’ve written different versions of this post a million times over the years, about the books that are launched into the world and how hard it is to tell as an author, for most of us, if our books ever really land, because while there are several metrics for taking stock of these things—awards nominations, rave reviews, billboards, celebrity endorsements, bestseller lists, appearing on the New York Times Notable list, etc—there are so many books and so few opportunities that most of us won’t end up making any of these. Which can be crazy-making, which I know from experience, and also every time I post anything like this, someone responds with an angry comment how about how I still haven’t reviewed their book yet*—one woman once did this ELEVEN YEARS after she’d sent me her book, which I’d say is a long time to hold a grudge, but then I’m an author too, so I get it.
But also, you’ve got to let that shit go.
It is very hard to release a book in Canada in 2021, and while I would have told you the same thing when I published my first book back in 2014, since then it’s only gotten harder. But one thing that’s the very same is the author’s lack of control over most of it, even if you hire a super fancy publicist.
Which is really hard, of course—that you can’t make magic happen. But also: the magic is going to happen without you, which is the very point of magic.
I’ve written this too before: the life of a book is long, and your book is out there in the world being picked up and put down, and picked up again, read, and reread, borrowed and lost, and found, and shelved, and picked up again. Even if you don’t know about it, it’s happening.
Yesterday I published 49thShelf’s Books of the Year list, a job I so enjoy being tasked with because I know how much it will mean for each and every author to have their book recognized by our humble little list. And I have another list of my very own coming up soon, with a few overlaps, another chance to shine light on the titles that I’ve loved best, but also to take stock and make sense of my own reading year. It’s really personal, mostly, and as arbitrary as any of these lists really are, in that they mean everything, and nothing at all.
Also yesterday, Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club announced their December pick, which is a big deal, this decade’s version of Oprah’s, and it just so happens to be my good pal Marissa’s latest novel Lucky, which came out in Canada in the spring, a truly life-changing opportunity for an author, and this is the kind of magic I’m talking about, a game of fortune and chance, and it’s the one thing that just can’t be plotted. I think we ought to just be grateful that they happen to anyone, and be glad we live in a world where books are still hot commodities, even if it might not be our specific books enough of the time….
To just keep going, and writing, and reading, and dreaming, and to be a part of the literary fabric of the world at all, as readers and writers alike—what a privilege that is. Most of the time, though it doesn’t pay the rent, it’s even enough.
November 26, 2021
What Comes Next
I’m so tired this week, and I’m trying to think of reasons this might be (I woke up too early on Tuesday morning because I was very excited for my husband’s birthday and also to book Iris’s vaccine, and these days I need eight hours of sleep to be a properly functioning human), and then I recall that I was also so tired this time last week, and maybe that’s just how weeks go. Last Friday I was also trying to work through a substantive change within the novel I’m revising, a change that would alter the project considerably, and when I am tired, everything is terrible, hopeless, impossible. In the week since then, I’ve come so far in figuring out what to do about the problem in my book. Last week it was a giant gaping hole, and by now it’s been filled in so much that you might not even notice that it hasn’t always been this way, and I’m thinking that waiting and patience really are the answers to so many questions. In writing, or anything, to skip over the part that’s got you stuck is usually a good strategy. You don’t have to do everything in chronological order, and become exhausted and paralyzed by the question of what comes next. (Wait and see, remember?)
The news seems dire today, not catastrophic floods of last week (climate change news has wrecked my jaw, so much clenching, and now I have to sleep with a night guard that I really ought to wear all day), but a huge increase in Covid numbers and also a brand new variant of concern, and no one knows any more about this variant than they did yesterday when I first spied the headline, the article, when I clicked, just a handful of lines, but it’s almost like a balloon now, so much speculation and opining about something still very unknown and uncertain, but way inflated, and I don’t understand why ordinary people think they have to follow the news, to refresh and refresh, I mean, when really you could check out a newspaper about two times a week and not be that much less informed. It reminds of right before I finally quit Twitter, when I logged into the site and Van Morrison was trending for penning an anti-lockdown anthem and I wish I’d never known that. Passively scrolling and refreshing Twitter does not count as engagement. Neither does refreshing your favourite newspaper’s Covid life-feed, or watching a cable news channel 24/7. What if you decided to curate your own feed, and it was the world right in front of you?
More than anything else in the world, it’s other people’s anxiety that makes me anxious, and I sure wish the media would stop so unceasingly feeding it.
I am looking forward to the holidays, the same thing that happens to me reading-wise on the verge of happening again, which is that I SCRAMBLE to get all the current year’s news releases read, and that at a certain point I thrown up my hands and say, “Fuck it!” Which always happens in early December, before I begin my holiday properly, but my reading habits are on vacation already, and I start reading the fully indulgent paperbacks that have been piling up, books of little consequence and it’s this reading off the beaten track that’s my favourite part of the holiday season, along with the Globe and Mail holiday crossword, so rich with strangeness and surprises.
It was during the Christmas holidays a year ago that I first learned about the UK variant. I always spend my holidays offline, but had opened my laptop to google Eilis Ni Dhuibhne, whose novel The Dancers Dancing had been sitting on my bookshelf since 2013, and which I was finally reading, totally obsessed with. And I remember perusing The Toronto Star online when I was done, and it was either a story about the existence of the variant, or that it had found its way to Canada, and the overwhelming sense of all this was dread, which is what I’m feeling today. (It’s also overcast, which doesn’t help).
But here’s the thing: there’s been far too much of this for far too long, I know, but we’re still here, so many of us, and real life goes on to the point where I’ve started getting frustrated at people again for swimming too fast in the slow lane, such a petty concerns. The pettiness continues, which is wonderful, really, don’t you think? That even two years into a pandemic, that everything needn’t be high stakes all the time, and I just think that adapting is what we do, and we will, and we don’t have to be afraid all the time, freaked out about what’s next, because we’ll find a way. My youngest daughter is getting vaccinated tonight—what a thing is that! And as we headed off into this new year, a miracle like that was certainly never predestined, and maybe just that not everything is always going to turn out terrible, is what I’m saying. Allow for the possibility that some things will be fine.
October 21, 2021
Back Home Again
After months of floundering around (and not so fruitfully) in the Land of First Drafts, it’s such an absolute pleasure to find myself back at work on a manuscript that has a four walls and a roof, plus windows and doors (not to mention precious editorial feedback). The imagery of a house particularly fitting between this is so much a book about homes and spaces, more rooted in place than anything else I’ve published. And while the story is fiction, many of the places where they’re set are not, homes and apartments I’ve lived in, plus the Lillian H. Smith Library’s Osborne Collection and and the Royal Ontario Museum, and the effect of becoming immersed in this project again is so completely transporting, plus kind of cozy as the autumn weather makes way for the inevitable chill.
October 21, 2021
10 Questions
The excellent Kate Jenks Landry did a Q&A with me on her inspiring blog, and you can read it right here!
October 18, 2021
When I’m shining everybody gonna shine
I don’t know if I smiled any wider last week than I did at the news that my friends’ new novel (The Holiday Swap, by Maggie Knox!) had made the Toronto Star bestseller list, and with this news came such overwhelming gratitude that other people’s good fortune could be fuel for my fire. And I’m writing this not to be smug, but just because I’m glad, and I’m still not 100% sure how I got to this place (though I wrote about it in a post a few years ago called “How to Get Over Literary Envy”).
I remember many years ago feeling so much more desperate, perceiving other people’s wins as a kind of violation, and no doubt some of the change has come about as I’ve grown older and settled into myself, achieving creative goals that I’m proud of (though I have yet to land on a bestseller list). This process too has taught me how much of success is usually a combination of painstaking work and glorious fluke anyway, which makes it harder to resent it when it lands on somebody else’s doorstep.
Though I will confess that there still exist more than a few people whose success makes me roll my eyes and grit my teeth—but these are mostly petty grievances, and the people in question are largely unknown to me (which, obviously, doesn’t mean that I’m barred from finding them annoying).
The people who matter to me though: I want them to win, and not just because of how I seem to win when they do—but yeah, that part also feels pretty good too.
October 13, 2021
Class Reunion: ENG 369Y 20 Years Later
During my third year of undergraduate studies, from 2000-2001, I was part of ENG 369Y, a creative writing workshop led by Dr. Lorna Goodison through the Department of English at the University of Toronto.
For so many reasons, many illuminated below, this class would be an unforgettable experience, though it seemed especially remarkable when—two decades later—four of us from the class would all be publishing books within the same year and a bit.
- Souvankham Thammavongsa’s How to Pronounce Knife was published in April 2020, and it was awarded the Scotiabank Giller Prize that year, as well as the 2021 Trillium Book Award, among other accolades.
- Faye Guenther’s Swimmers in Winter came out in August 2020, and it has been a finalist for both the Toronto Book Award and the 2021 ReLit Award.
- My book, Waiting for a Star to Fall, arrived in October 2020, and the Montreal Gazette called it, “Subtly complex […a] romantic drama tailor-made for the #Metoo age.”
- And Rebecca Silver Slayter’s The Second History found its way into the world this summer, with no less than Lisa Moore writing that it’s “one of the most honest renderings of romantic love I’ve ever read. [A] truly mesmeric story, tender, unflinching, quakingly good.”
To me, the serendipitous occasion of our new releases after all this time seemed like an splendid opportunity for us to reconnect and reflect on our time together, as well as so much that we’ve learned about writing in all the years since then, and so the four of us shared our thoughts and ideas via email.
tell us about 20 years in the writing life, about the trajectory of your writing life since our class together in 2000.
Kerry Clare: I don’t think I had a focussed relationship to writing at all in the first ten years after our class together, even as I completed a MA in Creative Writing at the University of Toronto from 2005-2007. There is a line in Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life that I may have misremembered, but it’s about a superficial idea of writer-dom being analogous to one admiring the way one looks in a particular hat, and I always thought she was talking about me, which was mortifying.
When I finished graduate school, I worked for two years reading financial documents all day long, which was not fun, but gave me stability and a salary, though little in the way of creative inspiration. It also gave me parental leave benefits, which I used when I had my first child in 2009, and becoming a parent really seemed to up the stakes for me writing-wise. I became invested in the world in a more meaningful way, and therefore had more to write about. My first big success in writing was an essay about new motherhood I published in 2011, and this led to my first book, the essay anthology The M Word: Conversations About Motherhood, which I edited and was published in 2014.
At this point, I wasn’t sure that writing fiction was going to be my destiny, and was even making peace with that (throughout this entire period, I’ve been blogging, which has been a creative lifeline), but then something clicked shortly after my second child was born and I finally figured out how plot works. My first novel, Mitzi Bytes, was published in 2017, and I’ve been writing them ever since, and though I am constantly terrified that one day I won’t know how to do it anymore, it seems to keep happening.
Souvankham Thammavongsa: I am not a very good example of a writing life because my trajectory isn’t a simple one and it is not for everyone. I don’t think anyone would want it. I worked for fifteen years in the research department of an investment advice publisher, I counted bags of cash five levels below the basement, I prepared taxes. This work helped me write what I want and it didn’t take away my desire to write. I still have that from 2000, this desire to write, but it wasn’t anything someone taught me.
Faye Guenther: I stayed at the University of Toronto to do undergraduate and graduate degrees in English. Then I went to York University and did a PhD in English. While I was a student during those years, the jobs I had to support myself weren’t related to writing, but they showed me things about the world and this is useful to a writer. I’ve found that no matter what you do, the key is to make the time to write. My writing life has also been shaped by who I’ve met along the way, including fellow writers. In 2017, I published a chapbook of poems and short fiction, Flood Lands, with Junction Books. In 2020, I published a collection of short fiction, Swimmers in Winter, with Invisible Publishing.
That is probably most of what I’ve learned in these two decades. How to take in all the advice, all that you’ve learned from other things you wrote, from things you read, from other writers, and then listen very hard for the tiny sound of this book calling for what it needs from you.
Rebecca Silver Slayter
Rebecca Silver Slayter: I decided to stop writing not long after that workshop. I think, to reverse what Souvankham said, I worried my desire to write might be something someone had taught me. That I had lost track of why I wanted to write at all.
So I stopped for a year. Or two. Or three? It felt like forever because I was 20-something and everything was forever.
And meantime I decided to make my life and work writing-adjacent. I interned at Quill & Quire and The Walrus. I worked for a startup children’s publisher. I did odd jobs to complete the financial math, yardwork and errands. Eventually I was hired for my dream job, working as managing editor for Brick literary journal.
Sometime in the midst of that, I met my husband, and told him, proudly, how I had made the tough, mature decision to give up writing, and he listened and nodded and then said, I know you are a writer, with such certainty that I didn’t know how to doubt him and I began writing again. And I found to my great joy what I had been missing in those earlier writing years; a desire to write that easily overtook the desire to be a writer.
I did graduate studies in Montreal, where I wrote the first draft of my first novel, In the Land of Birdfishes. When I graduated, I returned to Nova Scotia, and bought a house for a song in Cape Breton, which I will be renovating for the rest of my earthly days.
This is for me a very good place to write, near the ocean and the highlands, in a community where music and storytelling are woven into everyone’s daily life. Here I published my first book and then wrote and rewrote and rewrote my second book, which was just released this summer: The Second History. It took me eight years from first draft till now, mostly because I tried to write it faster than I’m able to. It turns out I’m a writer who needs to take my time…
That is probably most of what I’ve learned in these two decades. How to take in all the advice, all that you’ve learned from other things you wrote, from things you read, from other writers, and then listen very hard for the tiny sound of this book calling for what it needs from you.
what was the best thing the writer you were in our classroom had going for them? And what writing advice would you give that previous incarnation of you? (Though would you even have taken it?)
ST: My intuition. I listened to everyone, and knew when not to. This taught me how to pick through edits. When we see edits, sometimes it’s about the person and their life experience and it doesn’t mean they are right or know but you have to be generous and allow them to have their thoughts.
I wouldn’t give myself any advice. I think advice can be a disservice to a writer. There’s a lot I didn’t know and I want myself to not know and to live in that not-knowing in order to know it. I want myself to encounter and work through those difficult and lonely moments. I don’t want anyone to hold my hand or do me any favours or make it easier or easy. I like the difficult, and I want to continue with that difficulty.
RSS: One of my clearest memories of that workshop was of Professor Goodison saying, as we discussed one of my poems, “You come from preachers, right?”
I was tongue-tied with confusion. “What?”
“Your people, they’re preachers, right?”
I had absolutely no idea what she meant. “No….” I stammered.
“Then why are you preaching at me?” she asked.
Oof. Caught. I was constantly preaching. Trying to find a much-too-simple way of understanding much-too-large things. I had a weakness for sentences that began like “Love was…”
I think somewhere in this is both my weakness and strength as a writer (probably as a human too). It is writing-in-bad-faith to just polish up pretty turns of phrase that sound truish. To go around making tidy summaries of untidy things. But… I think if I mine deeper I can find underneath that impulse what drives me to writing still, and to reading itself… The sense that there is some luminous other way of noticing the world that will make it brighter, stranger, more visible. That certain words can be incantatory, a pathway to looking again and seeing more.
I have two small children, and have found it astonishing to witness language dawn within a person who formerly had none. How each child altered a bit around the language they used. How they learned what it was then to be nervous, even tired, even thirsty. How what began as the ragged, indeterminate longing of a baby’s howl became so clear, so precise, so unmysterious. And I miss a bit the mystery. The wonder of watching a peer being who doesn’t know what yesterday is. But I think there’s another way that language can give us back what experience has made ordinary. And I think that’s what I was searching for twenty years ago and search for still, but with a few degrees more purpose. And a lot more joy.
So I would maybe advise myself something like this: First, don’t write any more poetry. You are very bad at it. And for a time, don’t write at all. Wait until the desire to write is something you have to resist. Wait until it wells up in you. And then go find the joy of writing words that make you look again, more deeply.
I wouldn’t give myself any advice. I think advice can be a disservice to a writer. There’s a lot I didn’t know and I want myself to not know and to live in that not-knowing in order to know it.
Souvankham Thammavongsa
FG: I remember being openhearted and creative. The writing advice I would give my earlier self is to be bolder. I think when boldness is combined with a practice of being open with yourself and to the world, there is a sharpening of creative focus that can happen and a strengthening of creative perception, no matter what challenges life brings.
KC: The writer I was in our classroom had no idea how much she didn’t know, and far more confidence that she deserved to have, and I’m so happy she did because being 21 is hard enough. I was not a serious person or a serious writer AT ALL. (I remember that Souvankham appeared to be both, and it was such a powerful example for me, though I think I was still too young to fully appreciate it.)
What a tremendous opportunity to develop my skills that class should have been!! But I did not work all that hard, honestly, too busy checking out my look in the hat, remember? I mainly wrote poetry because you could finish a piece in a few minutes. This did not mean my poetry was good, however, although I think sometimes some of it was.
If I could give that writer I was any advice it would be to write something REAL, instead of something you think sounds like something that could be real. (And find writers you love, instead of reading all the writers you’re supposed to love.)
For the record: I would not have listened.
what roles have literary journals and small presses played in your writing career?
RSS: I know literary journals and small presses better as a worker than as a writer. But I am shaped permanently by my years at Brick literary journal, and by the trips I made then, twice a year, to Coach House Press, where the journal was designed at that time.
The Coach House basement was a kind of church I visited like a disciple of those beautiful machines for cutting pages and laying type … and of the people who made them run and knew the stories of an older Toronto and the mesmerizing adventures then had by not-yet-famous writers. In a way that is both corny and essentially true to me, that is what I feel a tiny part of when I write: all the people in all those tiny offices and studios and nooks making small-press books and magazines; their labours of love, their care and bravery, those parallel arts of ink and paper, alongside those of prose and plot.
They taught me what was foundational to writing; the courage and the care of the work. And the kinds of community it can build.
FG: Reading literary magazines gave me an awareness of community. They were the first space where I was published, and I know this is true for many writers. Smaller presses often foster innovative and ground-breaking work. They frequently publish voices and stories that historically have been marginalized. I think smaller presses are important for energizing and sustaining a vibrant creative culture.
My first piece of published fiction was in The New Quarterly in 2007. I will never forget the joy of receiving that acceptance
Kerry Clare
KC: My first piece of published fiction was in The New Quarterly in 2007. I will never forget the joy of receiving that acceptance, especially in the wake of the novel I’d written for my Masters thesis that went nowhere (because it was boring!) because I was really feeling kind of discouraged, and then this message from the universe arrived suggesting maybe I should keep going after all. In the next few years, I would publish pieces in TNQ and other journals, and the high of an submission being accepted has never diminished for me. And then Goose Lane Editions, a remarkable Canadian indie press with an impressive history, published The M Word, and did the book such justice. Without literary journals and small presses, I’d be nowhere.
ST: Literary journals teach you things a writing class or editor or a dear friend and family cannot. They don’t love you and are not beholden in any way. They teach you about rejection—what that feels like, what to do with it. They are often the first place where we get to see ourselves in print. It’s important for a writer to understand the difference between seeing yourself in print and publishing a book. They are not the same.
what are your favourite memories of our class?
ST: I remember the talent and fun. There were so many writers in that class who are more talented, more ambitious, more interesting…but they aren’t here, or with books. They became lawyers and engineers and professors. I always keep that in mind. Having a book doesn’t mean I am good.
KC: I have so many memories! I don’t know if we were particularly interesting as a group, or if it was the work of Professor Lorna Goodison in creating community, or just the particular mix of experience and personalities in our class, but I felt very connected to everyone. I think we were a well written cast of characters.
I remember Souvankham on the very first day, and how she impressed me so much with her sense of herself. I remember we had to write a poem inspired by postcards, and mine had a field of sunflowers and said, “Welcome to Michigan,” and I wrote a poem with the line, “I won’t forget the motor city.” I remember REDACTED who wrote a poem with the line, “Let’s make love in the astral plane,” and I was seriously impressed by how sophisticated he seemed. And someone else who wrote a poem about someone sucking on her toes while listening to Robbie Robertson sing “Somewhere down the crazy river.” Everyone seemed to be having a lot more sex than me. (One could not have been having less sex than me.)
I remember Faye seemed especially interesting, partly because she seemed kind of badass with a shaved head, and we always sat in opposite corners of the room. And how I was in love with the name “Rebecca Silver Slayter,” which belonged to the woman who often sat in the same corner as me and whose work I felt very drawn to.
I think it’s kind of wonderful that in addition to the four of us, plenty of others in that group have gone on to very interesting careers in academic, television writing, and more.
One of my memories of the class was discovering what a literary reading could be—the ways prose and poetry can be shared beyond their existence as words on a page and become something like music in a public space.
Faye Guenther
FG: I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to learn from our teacher Dr. Lorna Goodison. One of my memories of the class was discovering what a literary reading could be—the ways prose and poetry can be shared beyond their existence as words on a page and become something like music in a public space.
RSS: This sounds like very cheap, opportunistic flattery, but honestly, though I remember well many of the talented, interesting writers in the class and their poems and stories, what I remember most clearly is the three of you.
I remember how beautifully Souvankham’s work was always laid out on the page in lovely, tiny type—the form so perfectly echoing the work itself, the grace and economy and polish of her words; how her work seemed always already complete, and I was stumped on how to write any feedback that didn’t just feel like tampering.
How Kerry’s writing was funny and powerful at the same time, and I hadn’t even known that was possible. How she seemed so at home both on the page and in the classroom, warm and open and at ease in a way that awed me. I remember Faye’s compassion for her characters, their rich interiority. How reading her stories felt like someone whispering in your ear, that intimate.
My strongest memory of the class was the first one. When we went around the room and each offered up our names.
Souvankham was near the end, seated at the table perpendicular to the one where Professor Goodison sat.
After she said her name, Professor Goodison asked, “So what do you want to be called?”
I was caught off guard by the question, but Souvankham answered clearly and immediately. Without blinking or skipping a beat, she said: “I want to be called a writer.”
Professor Goodison looked at her and Souvankham looked back. Then she said, “I’m going to call you Sou.”
And I was as astonished as if Souvankham had wafted out of her seat and up into the air between us. I was at that time so uncertain, so full of twenty-one-year-old desires to be interesting, to be brave, to be invisible and/or famous. I would have probably told Professor Goodison she could call me whatever she wanted. Or tried to guess what she might prefer me to be named.
Year by year over these last twenty, I get a little closer to what Souvankham already had then. That certainty. That clarity of purpose and identity as a writer that struck me silent when I was twenty-one.
April 30, 2021
The Forest App
Everybody in my household is obsessed with video games, except for me, who spends weekend mornings reading the paper while everybody else is intent on the Switch, and sometimes I feel a bit left out of the narrative, but mostly I don’t care. I am gad that video games are something my husband gets to share with our children, and I am glad that there’s an adult who’s paying attention to this part of our children’s lives, but video games just don’t factor into my framework at all…except for the one instance in which they really do!
I learned about The Forest App two years ago from an article about reducing cell phone addiction. I’ve used social media blockers on my laptop and phone for years, which is how I manage to write anything that isn’t a pithy instagram story, but the Forest App was kind of a cool twist on the idea of these blockers, generative instead of restrictive. I set a time limit on my phone and if my phone stays undisturbed during that period, I grow a tree in my forest. If I use my phone, the tree dies. And reader: I’ve never ever killed a virtual tree. It would break my heart to kill a virtual tree.
I even have a vague suspicion that I’d have to go out of my way to kill a virtual tree—a couple of times I’ve picked up my phone to check an email and my tree has kept growing anyway, so maybe it’s just the apps or clicking on them. I don’t even know. I don’t want to know. I love that this app that’s only vaguely restrictive and may not even be restrictive at all helps me make good choices for focus even when I could be making different ones. Which is much more meaningful to me than a lock and chains.
A few weeks ago, I finally purchased the pro version of the Forest App, partly because I’m trying to pay for the online things I value, but also because I realized this could make the trees in my forest much more interesting and diverse. Tragically, however, this process deleted the substantial forest I’d been growing over the past year and more, but what can you do…but luckily I was able to start again, and with a camellia tree to boot. As part of their Earth Day challenge, I was able to unlock the luminie plant. This week, I actually increased by focus time from 45 minutes to an hour because I realized I get TWO trees when I do this (and yes, I get extra work done too).
As I grow my forest (while focusing on the work I want to do) I acquire points. I can use these points to unlock more trees, which is how I recently got the camellia. I need 2000 points to plant a plum blossom tree or a weeping willow. And I’ve got my eye on the apple tree and the maple tree (with orange leaves, and a park bench underneath!), and as my forest grows, I’m ridiculously proud of it, beyond my pride at what it represents in terms of attention and commitment to my writing…and everyone I live with is very kind and encouraging and pretends to be interested in my virtual trees.
And of course they are! Because this is my video game! Like Animal Crossing for boring people (or so I assume—I am too boring to know). And what with my virtual landscape and acquired points, what is this whole business but a video game after all. But one that is not remotely a waste of my time. Instead, it’s one that makes the best of it.
Even better? I’m not going to be unlocking any new virtual trees anytime soon, and do you want to know why? Because I’m saving my points. I’m currently at 393 after that camellia tree cleared me out but if I focus hard and work intently, I can earn 2500, at which I can use the points to plant a real tree! The Forest App is involved in the Trees for the Future program in Sub Saharan Africa. I can’t think of better motivation to get down to work.
September 25, 2020
How to Be a Champion, and Not a Sycophant
Some of my most important mentors have been the people who said no to me, the people who couldn’t accommodate my request, who didn’t want to help, who had better things to do than answer my email. From these people, I have learned that I too can set my own boundaries and limits, that none of us are required to be everything to everyone.
And so similarly was I impressed last spring when I approached a fellow author-friend for a blurb for my forthcoming novel, and she responded with a caveat—she would agree to read my book, but not necessarily to endorse it. Because how could she know if she hadn’t read it yet, and as a person who aspires for everything to mean what it means, this was a particularly powerful moment.
This story has a happy ending too, because this person really liked my book. And how much more her endorsement meant to me because it wasn’t granted automatically, because it meant something. But even if she hadn’t endorsed it, I would have admired that too. A sign that honesty and integrity are not as rare as one might think. And yes, my ego would have taken a bit of a bruising, but every public-facing person benefits from such an exercise from time to time.
Last week I wrote about the importance of making space for promoting books and reading, but this doesn’t require one to have to love everything. “The standards we raise and the judgments we pass…” Virginia Woolf refers to in “How Should One Read a Book,” and those standards and judgments are important. Not because they are the law, because they aren’t, and different readers and critics will have different standards and judgments, which is just the way it should be (and this is the great thing about making space—there can be enough of it to go around).
If you are making space and not adhering to your standards and judgments—raving about books you thought were terrible, blurbing books you’ve never read, recommending titles about which your take was mostly “meh,” holding your nose to post about a title your favourite publicist has sent you which is not your cup of tea, writing about a book that was rubbish but the author is super nice—then the space you are creating is not going to be very meaningful. And sometimes these kinds of situations are difficult to avoid, particularly if you are new to a community or less sure of your taste or less confident as a critic. But I would advise you to find yourself in these situations as little as possible to preserve your own literary reputation, your sense of self, and on behalf of the cause of better books, which is a cause we all can believe in.
Here’s how you can do it.
- If you can’t say no outright to review/blurb requests (it takes courage to be that bold) then you can make excuses. A lack of time is something nobody is going to argue with. Be vague. Don’t reply to emails. They’ll get the point. (There are people who will claim I am being unfair here, and that you owe it to authors to be honest and upfront. I have tried this. It has never gone well, and I will never do it again.)
- Build your wheelhouse. Most historical fiction, books about young men coming of age, novels with child narrators and fiction about philosophers I’ve never heard of are outside mine, which makes it easy for me to ignore these books without compunction.
- If that author on Instagram is super nice (even if she is me, although I am not that nice) and her book just didn’t jive with you, you don’t need to post about it. Even if she put it in her mailbox with her own two hands. The favour you did her was trying out the book at all. It’s not your fault if it didn’t work. And perhaps you can write a critical post that highlights the book’s redeeming features, but if none of those features can be found, just let it go.
- Be as brave as my friend and don’t agree to blurb a book you haven’t read yet. If you do agree to blurb a book that turns out to be terrible, fail to meet the deadline.
- Understand that a book may not be to your taste, but someone else might enjoy it. And that is terrific. Because you got to be honest with yourself and your audience and the book still got love. There is enough to go around without you bending over backwards.
- Know that it is not your job to take care of everybody
- And understand that your word is only ever going to mean anything if you mean the things you say. Your platforms matter. Use them wisely, smartly, and don’t water them down. And yes, we could be all throwing up our hands about declining ways to get the word out about books (and we do! And we are!) but that makes it all the more important to preserve the integrity in the places/platforms that are still available.
September 18, 2020
How to Do Self-Promotion
“There is nothing wrong with self-promotion!” someone tweeted at me a few weeks ago, an attempt at encouragement that demonstrated that they don’t know me very well, because clearly, I already know this . If I could afford to buy billboards for my selfies, I probably would. I really do hope that you will pre-order my new book (coming October 27 from Doubleday Canada!), is what I’m saying, but also that all self-promotion is not good self-promotion. There is a certain kind of grace required.
This all started because I have the best part time job ever, and I work with the best people , who fill my life with goodness and have been so supportive of my work for the past nearly-ten years. And my job involves getting excited about Canadian books, which is the greatest pleasure, and comes pretty naturally to me. But I am careful not to use this particular platform to promote my own work. I have other platforms after all, and it would be more than a little gauche. For me to include my book on the site’s Fiction Preview, for example, a project I care very much about and work hard on compiling.
So I didn’t, and my friend/colleague Kiley didn’t notice (it was a very busy summer!) until my book ended up on the Toronto Star and CBC Books’ Fall Previews the other weekend. And then she tweeted from the 49thShelf account about my forthcoming book, and how I hadn’t included it on our list. I replied that it’s kind of tacky to put your own book on your own list, and that it is to be hoped instead that somebody else might be anticipating my book, someone who isn’t even me—a gamble that had paid off (phew!) because at least two media outlets were.
Um, and yes, props to my fantastic publicist at PRH, of course. I suppose it’s easier to be kind of laissez faire when you have such people in your corner. It’s not all karma, is what I’m saying. But some of it actually is.
And what I mean by this is that the best way I know to do self-promotion is to create the space, instead of focusing on my own book specifically. This is a long-term goal, of course. You don’t start this six weeks before your pub date. Instead, you use whatever platforms you have—both digitally and in the actual world—with the intention of creating meaningful conversation, in my case about books and reading in general. Supporting a culture of literature in the places I hang out in, connecting with others who do so. And this culture matters. As Virginia Woolf wrote 95 years ago of the importance of readers in her essay “How Should One Read a Book?”—“The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal into the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work.”
So how to create this space? Maybe you have a book blog. Maybe you interview writers on Youtube. Maybe you started an online literary magazine. Maybe you post about the books you love on Facebook. Maybe you run a reading series. Maybe you post photos of your library haul on Instagram. Maybe you talk about books exuberantly to the people you encounter in your everyday life. Maybe you support independent bookstores/ Maybe you read conspicuously in public. Maybe you do things to support the spaces that were created by other people, attending literary events, buying books, reading book reviews. Maybe you listen to books podcasts, and then tell other people about the books podcasts. Maybe you write Goodreads reviews, and leave reviews on Amazon—although even typing this makes me nauseous because nothing associated with Amazon is good for anybody, so if these are your tactics, perhaps think of one more.
The point of this space you’re creating is still not to promote your own book. Forget about your own book, for now. This is not about you. The point of this space you’re creating is to make more room in the world for books and readers, and even just a little tiny bit more space means something significant. And you’re benefiting from this space, because you are a reader, and you live in the world, and you’ve done your part to make the world a little closer to the kind of world you want to see—where books and reading matter.
And then, yes, because there is more space, there will also be more room for you and your book. Because you’re steeped in the atmosphere of books and reading, it will not seem so awkward to make your own book a part of the conversation. And because you’ve cultivated connections and built relationships, you won’t be the only person talking about your book either, which is the kind of promotion that really matters, which is really just living the dream.
But first, you have to make that space. Talk about and share the books you really love. You are not in competition with other writers—a world where people love and value books is good for everyone, even if the books they’re loving and valuing aren’t yours. There is room enough for everyone, especially if you’re making space. The success of any writer can be a success for all writers.
Of course, feel free to take all this with a grain of salt because modest success is all I’ve ever known anyway. I’m a blogger after all, inherently on the margins. But still.
When you hear someone asking for a book recommendation, resist the urge to suggest your own book (because of course you’re going to suggest your own book). Not because there is anything wrong with self-promotion, but because it’s just too easy and obvious to create any meaningful connection. You really do have to go the long way around, but it’s worth it. Because it’s real.
