October 8, 2010

The world in fiction

Last night I was part of a discussion with a group of women whose collective brilliance could light up the universe, and we were talking about using the real world in our writing, fiction or non-fiction. (We were also drinking champagne, eating cake, and delicious cheese, but that is another story.) Everybody had such fascinating input, about the ethics of using other people’s stories, about writing historical fiction or speculative fiction, and using the details but not conspicuously. About writing memoir, and something about fiction being the truth told twice. And then someone brought up Carol Shields’ Small Ceremonies, which was so perfect, being about this very topic, and also because for about two days, I’ve been dying for somebody to talk about Small Ceremonies with.

Anyway, I thought about the one story I’d ever done substantial research for, which was set in 1976 when the CN Tower first opened. I have long been fascinated by my impression of the CN Tower as a permanent fixture on the horizon, as old as the universe, or at least as old as the TD Tower, but then to realize that it’s only three years older than I am (but then, don’t we all envision ourselves too as well as permanent fixtures on some horizon, old as the universe?). That, not entirely literally, Torontonians went to bed one morning and woke up to a tower in the sky.

So that was what my story was about, and I spoke to people who remembered the tower’s construction, and read a 1970s’ Toronto guidebook, and read every archived newspaper article I could find on the subject. I went through the CHUM charts to find out what was playing on the radio (an aside: these were all available online until about two years ago, when CHUM was bought by CTV). I read Toronto fiction from that time, and spent a lot of time thinking about the view from our friends’ high rise apartment at Yonge and St. Clair. We were also so poor at this point in time that a research trip up the tower itself required budgeting for weeks, but we did it on one cold February day in 2006. I’d brought a falling apart book about Toronto from the library so we could compare the views.

Geographic or historical detail, as someone noted last night, can function as a scaffold. We seemed to also conclude that broad strokes work best in convincing historical fiction, and it reminded of what Alison Pick said in our interview: that the essential goal of historical fiction is that its details be grounded in time and place, but the feel and its characters be entirely contemporary. That a scaffold has to come down once the building is completed. That a writer has to ground herself in the details of time and place, and then forget it in order to get the story written. That the detail of where a story takes place, or what is playing on the car radio, or what kind of car it is– that none of this is important, unless it functions in the story at a deeper, symbolic or metaphoric level. And in terms of place, I thought of how Claudia Dey did this so well with Parkdale in Stunt, and Elise Moser with Montreal in Because I Have Loved and Hidden It. The broad strokes with which Hilary Mantel evoked the Tudors inWolf Hall. How with the best novels we’ve read in our book club (Shirley Jackson, Muriel Spark), we’ve remarked that these stories are ageless, could have taken place in any time. And perhaps a similar spirit needs to be striven for in historical fiction too, in any fiction. Spirit can’t come from detail for the sake of detail– everything has to mean something. That the song on the car radio is a kind of cheating, and it shows.

My CN Tower story was a mess, a catalogue of facts and coordinates. I haven’t tried to set anything in the past since, but I’m thinking about it now, as a kind of challenge. A detail-less historical short story– I wonder. And I will keep in mind a point somebody made last night– that people themselves are the centre of our stories, and people themselves don’t change that much. Reflecting this morning upon this, I remembered how my CN Tower view was nearly identical to the pictures in my battered book. Perhaps this means something more than itself, and I’ll try to keep it in mind.

September 22, 2010

There is no such thing as a canon

All the books of my dreams are coming out in the UK this fall: I want to read Comfort and Joy by India Knight, Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson, and Burley Cross Postbox Theft by Nicola Barker (which is epistolary and about a postbox, if a book could be so full to bursting). I am going to read Room by Emma Donaghue, which seemed like the most wretched book imaginable when I first heard of it, and I still think so, but too many intelligent readers have convinced me to go there anyway. I have just moved Alexander MacLeod’s Light Lifting (which I keep calling Lift Lighting in my head) up near the top of my to-be-read stack, due to his Giller nomination, and Robert Wiersema’s review. I am going to be rereading Nikolski, We Need to Talk About Kevin, and Small Ceremonies in the coming weeks. Also from the Giller longlist, I think I am going to read Lemon by Cordelia Strube, and the rest I’m not really fussed about. Because I already read This Cake is for the Party, and it was wonderful, and Jessa Crispin has given me permission to shrug off everything else: “There is no such thing as a canon — what you should read or want to read or will read out of obligation is determined as much by your history, your loves, and your daily reality as by the objective merits of certain works.” Rock on, and bring on the old dead British ladies then with their hideously outdated Penguin covers and pages smelling of must.

In others, I am going to the Victoria College Book Sale on Saturday, but with a budget (how novel) and also, I am obsessive-compulsively fiction writing lately, which is wonderful, because I thought I lost the knack with the advent of my child, but I’m at 10,000 words and haven’t yet thought about giving up because the whole piece sucks (and the thing about having once completed three drafts of a bad novel is that you learn that just barrelling through to the conclusion won’t necessarily work out okay in the end, but at this point I still feel like there might be some worth in bothering).

And also, there is a pie in my oven. And on Saturday, that oven will be replaced with a new one that doesn’t require a barbecue lighter to start.

August 23, 2010

A Room of One's Own

In March, I spent $130 signing up for ten yoga classes, of which I’ve gone to two, and my pass expires this week. Which is good actually, because then I get to feel less bad about the money that’s gone to waste. I’m not typically a quitter, or one who doesn’t follow through, but when I signed up for yoga class, thinking it would give me a fine escape from the stay-at-home nature of stay-at-home-motherhood, I really had the wrong idea. After a long day alone with a pre-verbal midget, the last thing I need is to be silent in a room of levitating hipsters. It is also distinctly possible that I just picked the wrong yoga studio, but that is another story.

What the story is, however, is that it turned out I didn’t need that much push to get out of the house after all. Yes, indeed, I could probably do with more exercise, but I’ve also joined a fabulous book club, take part in an incredible writers group, and do some work for a charity’s board, and that takes care of quite a few evenings each month. And I enjoy these evenings out so completely, their social nature in particular, because it turns out what I need at the end of the day is company and conversation, but I didn’t know that in March.

Similarly, I have abandoned my garret. Tragic, I know, that the garret is forced to make do without me, and I find myself garret-less. And yes, the garret was a bit bleak, actually being the back of my very strange bedroom closet/storage area, and now it’s packed to the sloped ceiling with newborn baby gear (which, yes, we haven’t gotten rid of. Though it won’t be put back into use for a very long time), but it was a garret, and it had a window, and an outlet, and it was nothing to scoff at, being a room of one’s own. Or at least a corner of an expansive closet of one’s own, which was plenty.

But it turns out that after a day at home alone with a young child, spending an evening alone in the back of a closet is bad for the soul. Or so I imagine, having not bothered to try. For the last year, my office has been a chair in the corner of my living room, by the window with my laptop, with my husband busy at his actual desk on the other side of the room. I miss him when he’s at work, and when he’s home I like to be close to him, even if neither of us are talking and both of us are working on various projects. I’ve contemplated moving back upstairs, but this arrangement seems to be working, and so my desk in the garret sits terribly empty, a magnet for layer upon layer of dust.

One of the best things I own is my A Room of One’s Own tea towel, which was a gift from  my friend Paul. Due to its literary nature, it used to hang in our library, before the library became Harriet’s room. Since then, the tea towel has been homeless, and I’ve wondered where to put it, no longer actually having a room of my own (or rather, now that my room of my own is usually empty. Which would make hanging the tea towel there particularly sad).

Last night I finally hung it up in the living room, on the last bare spot left on our increasingly riotous walls. True, this room isn’t one of my own, but I’ve decided to regard Woolf’s idea as a metaphor. This idea underlined by Rachel Cusk’s suggestion that perhaps the greatness and distinction of women’s writing came from women not having rooms of their own, from their novels being composed amidst the hustle and bustle of family life.

Perhaps she’s right, or maybe that only works for some people, and I’ve no doubt my mind and my location will be changing one of these days, but having the tea towel up again, I feel that I’ve arrived somehow. Or that I’m home again, settled, and that it’s not so much a room of my own that I need as much as simply room.

*I guess this is my how NOT to be alone post. I never claimed to be consistant.

July 27, 2010

Grains of salt

Sometimes, when I really want to die a little bit inside, I sit back and take stock of all the bad advice that I’ve given out in creative writing workshops. Like when someone referred to a “bird of paradise” in a story, and I wrote: “Be more specific. What KIND of bird? How is it paradiscial? SHOW ME!”. When I told the (now published, very successful) poet who knew exactly what it was she did, “You’ve sort of written yourself into a rut. Why not try something different? PROSE???” Every time I thought that me not understanding a term or concept was a reason the writer should think about changing it.

The very first story Rebecca Rosenblum workshopped in our Masters program had a reference to a baby “squalling.” Never having heard this term beyond the snowstorm variety, I wrote, “Wrong word. Do you mean ‘wailing’?” Rebecca is now my dear friend, and we’ve never talked about this, mostly because I’m still absolutely embarrassed.

It’s amazing, the kind of authority I’ve assumed in these sorts of situations. And all the things, and words, I never knew, and never even knew I was missing. There certainly is a reason why a grain of salt or two should go with everything, in particular  if that everything is a bit of advice from me.

June 28, 2010

Hers is still the second sex

‘It may be that today’s woman writer doesn’t have much to do with the concept of “women’s writing”. Feminism as a cultural and political crisis is seen to have passed. Marriage, motherhood and domesticity are regarded as so many choices, about which there is a limited entitlement to complain. If a woman feels suffocated and grounded and bewildered by her womanhood, she feels these things alone, as an individual: there is currently no public unity among women, because since the peak of feminism the task of woman has been to assimilate herself with man. She is, therefore, occluded, scattered, disguised. Were a woman writer to address her sex, she would not know who or what she was addressing. Superficially this situation resembles equality, except that it occurs within the domination of “masculine values”. What today’s woman has gained in personal freedom she has lost in political caste. Hers is still the second sex, but she has earned the right to dissociate herself from it.’ –Rachel Cusk, “Shakespeare’s Daughters”

June 28, 2010

I love pruning

“I love pruning. If gardening is unsuccessful, I’m going to be a hairdresser.” –overheard through my open window, from one of the two wonderful women working in the garden down below

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.