June 2, 2010
If I weren't the one who could nurse the kids
From the site, No Country For Young Women, writer Laurel Snyder on how being a woman has helped her career:
“So I’ll just offer this: I went to school, and got the right degree. I did summer conferences, and had a nice fellowship, spent some years adjuncting, and all that. But none of it really led me to a career. So then I got myself a day job working for a non-profit, because I needed health care. But then I got pregnant, and realized (to my horror) that I made less than a full-time babysitter. I could not afford to keep my job, and I couldn’t think of any way to make much more money, so I quit work to stay home with the baby and freelance on the side.
And it was then that I started thinking of my writing as a career—seriously sending out my children’s books to editors and pitching freelance stories to magazines. Because I made so little money and had a baby, it made sense for me to stay home, and that led to the time to take my work seriously, so that I could eventually make more money. I know it sounds a little crazy, but it feels very true. I don’t think it would have been likely to happen that way if I weren’t the one who could nurse the kids.”
March 22, 2010
Just think of all I'd miss
Ten months of not sleeping for more than three hours at a time are starting to catch up with me, I think, as I am absolutely exhausted and keep falling asleep to wake up moments later unsure of what my name is and where I am. Yawn. I am also wonderfully busy with writing work (which is handy, as I’ve just quit my job and this is what I do for a living now, in addition to prying dustbunnies from the baby’s fist. And, if anyone’s asking, I could take on further assignments at any time). I’m currently reading a book for review that is good popular fiction, as opposed to the bad literary fiction I was reading just before it (and the former is preferable, don’t you think?). I am making good progress on an essay about Sharon Butala’s wonderful book The Girl in Saskatoon, which should appear in a special issue of Prairie Fire next year. And I’m also working on something for Literature for Life, which should be finished tonight or tomorrow (and I continue to be so pleased with my involvement with this group).
Naturally, all the books I’ve requested from the library came in at the same time, and so I’ve got mountains of reading before me (glee!). I will be picking up Bad Mother by Ayelet Waldman this week for the second time (last time I had to return it before I got a chance to read it). After that I am going to read Solar by Ian McEwan (which some most esteemed readers have been raving about on twitter, so I am looking forward). Joan Bodger’s The Crack in the Teacup is after that, and then postcard and other stories by anik see (on the recommendation of Steven W. Beattie). We’ve also got Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger coming at you (which I’ve wanted to read ever since I encountered this review), and Lionel Shriver’s So Much For All That (which Rona Maynard has been mentioning on Twitter [and just so you know, I refuse to acknowledge the word “tweet”]). And another book called The Breakwater House, and probably another book, and then another.
So imagine if I woke up dead tomorrow? Just think of all I’d miss!
December 12, 2009
A masterful essay by Rachel Cusk on women's writing
Rachel Cusk’s “Shakespeare’s Daughters” is a masterful essay on women, women writers and women’s writing. I’ve just read it and feel blown away by the craft of it, how she has articulated a muddle of thoughts that have been clouding my head for years. I urge you to read it in its entirety, and I’ve also copied some excerpts below:
“The future, of course, never comes: it is merely a projection from the present of the present’s frustrations. In the 80 years since Woolf published A Room of One’s Own, aspects of female experience have been elaborated on with commendable candour, as often as not by male writers. A book about war is still judged more important than a book about “the feelings of women”. Most significantly, when a woman writes a book about war she is lauded: she has eschewed the vast unlit chamber and the serpentine caves; there is the sense that she has made proper use of her room and her money, her new rights of property. The woman writer who confines herself to her female “reality” is by the same token often criticised. She appears to have squandered her room, her money. It is as though she has been swindled, or swindled herself; she is the victim of her own exploitation….
It may be, then, that the room of one’s own does not have quite the straightforward relationship to female creativity that Woolf imagined. She, after all, had by dint of circumstance always had a room and money of her own, and perhaps being the eternal conditions of her own writing they seemed to her indispensable. Yet she admits that the two female writers she unequivocally admired – Jane Austen and Emily Brontë – wrote in shared domestic space. The room, or the lack of it, doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with writing at all. It could be said that every woman should have a room of her own. But it may equally be the case that a room of her own enables the woman writer to shed her links with femininity and commit herself to the reiteration of “masculine values”. The room itself may be the embodiment of those values, a conception of “property” that is at base unrelated to female nature….
Some of the most passionate writing in The Second Sex concerns the ways in which women seek to protect their privileges and property under patriarchy by condemning or ridiculing the honesty of other women. This remains true today: woman continues to act as an “instrument of mystification” precisely where she fears and denies her own dependence. For the woman writer this is a scarifying prospect. She can find herself disowned in the very act of invoking the deepest roots of shared experience. Having taken the trouble to write honestly, she can find herself being read dishonestly. And in my own experience as a writer, it is in the places where honesty is most required – because it is here that compromise and false consciousness and “mystification” continue to endanger the integrity of a woman’s life – that it is most vehemently rejected. I am talking, of course, about the book of repetition, about fiction that concerns itself with what is eternal and unvarying, with domesticity and motherhood and family life. The sheer intolerance, in 2009, for these subjects is the unarguable proof that woman is on the verge of surrendering important aspects of her modern identity.”
December 4, 2009
Laying down among the tea cups
“At which point the much-tried Wimsey lay down among the tea cups and became hysterical.”
I am adoring Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers, which I’m reading because I’m interested in literary Harriets (Harriet Vane, in this case) and because of Maureen Corrigan’s recommendation. At first, I supposed Corrigan having given away the ending might have ruined the experience, but it hasn’t actually– the thing about detective fiction is that even if you know the final piece of the puzzle, it doesn’t matter until the rest of it is put together.
I do find it remarkable how difficult the book is, however. I thought there would be something of a breeze about it, and maybe it’s just that I’m incredibly tired, but there are entire passages I don’t understand no matter how I try. Part of it is that the book is bursting with allusion, the characters make a game of literary quotation, but I don’t pick up the allusion at all or know where it came from. Who knew that detective fiction could make one feel wholly ignorant? Also, the novel takes place at Oxford University, which seems to be a foreign country for all its customs, rituals and own peculiar language. None of this is detracting from my enjoyment of the book though, but I must admit there has been some skimmage.
And also remarkable is how Sayers treats the “work” of writing. Maureen Corrigan wrote considerably of her own search for “work” in The Novel (whose characters are usually writers who never write and banks who work off-page, etc.). But here we find it– Harriet Vane is a crime writer, though various circumstances have led her to be sleuthing on the side. And throughout the book as she seeks to get to the bottom of goings-on at her old Oxford College, she is plotting her latest novel. We see her actually working– as well as being distracted by all the parts of being a writer that keep one from actually writing. For Harriet Vane, plotting is an actual occupation, sort of akin to moving furniture around a room, and it’s so rarely that we see this kind of intellectual activity enactioned. It has been fascinating to encounter.
Oh, and yes. Like all the English novels I’ll ever love, there are obligatory tea references. Delight.
November 16, 2009
On Hilary Mantel and Fludd etc.
I’m currently reading Fludd by Hilary Mantel, as an experiment in reading books by Hilary Mantel I have no desire to read. Fludd, at 186 pages, you see, is much less an investment than Wolf Hall‘s terrifying 650. I still have no desire to read Wolf Hall either, but for various reasons have been possessed to buy it. And now I’m enjoying Fludd so immensely, that I feel enjoying Wolf Hall could be less unlikely than I previously thought.
All this leading to two points.
1) Hilary Mantel is absolutely scathing in this book. And I’m reminded of a writing teacher who once criticized a story of mine for lack of sympathy toward the idiots within it, and so I rewrote these idiots with a more human touch. With hearts in their depths. But now I kind of wish I hadn’t. Though Hilary Mantel is a far better writer than I could ever hope to be, I think that some meanness is delicious, and not all fictional characters need hearts in their depths. I just need to learn to be mean more intelligently.
2) Her range! Fludd is more like Beyond Black than any of her others I’ve read (and I’d term these “supernatural realism). Could these possibly be by the same writer who wrote historical epics Wolf Hall and A Place of Greater Safety? The brutally black comedy Every Day is Mother’s Day? The more conventional (but no less brilliant) novels Eight Months of Ghazzah Street, A Change of Climate and An Experiment in Love? I am becoming more and more unafraid to read Wolf Hall, because I’ve never met a Hilary Mantel novel that wasn’t amazing.
Which makes me think of Margaret Atwood, and Doris Lessing too– writers who’ve branched out in unimaginable ways. Challenging their readers’ sensibilities, exploring the limits of genre, breaking the mold again and again. Seems like these are writers to whom “the novel” is a brand new blank white page, every time they sit down to write one.
September 1, 2009
September
September is the end of my self-imposed fiction writing maternity leave. Though no doubt the world would not miss my fiction if I never went back, I find that I miss it, and I have a feeling the experience of writing it is going to be different now that I’ve had a baby. So my goal is to write for fifteen minutes every day, which is a small goal but with my current schedule will some days be impossible. Therefore I should ideally do it before breakfast, right? Oh, but I’m not quite ready to sacrifice sleep, which is still far too precious. So we shall see.
September is also two literary events I’m looking forward to– first, the launch of Patricia Storms’ picture book The Pirate and the Penguin on September 12 at the Yorkville Public Library. Harriet and I are very excited, and not just because we’ve been told there will be cake. I can’t wait to get the book, and help to celebrate the work of such a marvelous lady.
And then the following week, we’re off to the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival! Terry Griggs! Miriam Toews! Mary Swan! Lynn Johnston! Zoe Whittall! Etc. etc. I am very looking forward.
(Also exciting is that today I’m wearing a pair of pre-pregnancy pants. I’ll sure miss elastic waists, but it had to happen sooner or later…)
August 27, 2009
Alternate Endings
“You know all those blank pages they have at the end of books? I always thought they were there so that if you didn’t like the way the book ended, you could write your own ending. I wrote rediculous alternate endings on those pages to pretty much every book I ever read as a kid… I pretty much made everything a happy ending. Leslie dying in Bridge of Terabithia was just a dream; Winnie decides to drink from the spring and run away with Jesse in Tuck Everlasting; Elizabeth returns to Frobisher Bay forever in The Other Elizabeth; Walter’s death in World War One was just a case of mistaken identity in Rilla of Ingleside. Oh, and the end of every one of my Nancy Drew books now features a love scene between Nancy and Ned. I was so frustrated that he was supposed to be her boyfriend, yet we never saw them kiss!”– Amy Jones from “Amy Jones in Conversation” by Katia Grubisic, in The New Quarterly
August 21, 2009
Not an alternative
“It is not that I think every person should become a parent, or would claim that childbearing enhances one’s creative capacities (although I do think such an argument could easily be made given that childbirth, perhaps even more than other life-changing experiences, broadens one’s sense of meaning as well as being). It is that being a parent — a mother, especially — should not be narrated as an alternative to having an engaged, creative life, as if one must choose one or the other or be crippled by both.” –Amy Lavender Harris, “Pure Light”
January 14, 2009
When my head was not to be trusted
“A writer, if he is any good, does not describe. He invents or makes out of knowledge personal and impersonal and sometimes he seems to have unexplained knowledge which could come from racial or family experience. Who teaches the homing pigeon to fly as he does; where does a fighting bull get his bravery, or a hunting dog his nose? This is an elaboration or a condensation on that stuff we were talking about in Madrid that time when my head was not to be trusted.” –Ernest Hemingway, The Paris Review Interviews, I
