Waiting For An Echo

Conferences, Memory Lane, and West Coast Adventures

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Mon, 28 May 2012 17:15:00 +0000

I'd promised myself I would be good about this. I honestly, truly did. It's no problem, I said. I'll find free time somewhere in my week in Vancouver and Victoria to update the blog. I really will. I want to stay topical and engaged and blah blah blah.

Blah blah blah.

Well, what do you know: it's Monday, the beginning of the week after my trip, and it's been a full two weeks since I've posted. As it turned out, I didn't have all that much free time out West. I probably opened my computer a grand total of three times. I did, however, manage to scribble various things in my journal -- on the beach, on the ferry, at various stolen moments in a series of cafés. So I'm going to transcribe some of those scribblings here. I've altered them in some places to make sense to the blog-world, as opposed to the scribbled-and-messy-Amanda-journal-world. They are not nearly as coherent and lovely and smart as I was hoping this blog post to be -- but then, when does that ever happen?

Sunday, circa 10:30pm

It's raining in Vancouver -- surprise. Everywhere I look I see grey sky and fog. Behind the fog, the great blue hulk of mountains. Sarah (dear friend from my UVic days) picked me up at the airport and took me back to her place for brunch, and then later in the afternoon it was out to The Noodle Box (The Noodle Box! THE NOODLE BOX! Oh, joy of joys) for dinner, and after that out to a film.

I haven't had curry from The Noodle Box in over five years. And now I'm fed and full and getting ready to head to Victoria in the morning.

I forgot how different the air smells out here. Now it seems like the most impossible thing to forget.

Monday, circa 9:30am (on the ferry) and 11pm

The bell that pings ahead of announcements on the ferry took me right back to seven years ago, just like that. I'm sitting at a table next to a gentleman from Scotland -- at least, from the sounds of it he grew up in Scotland, though it sounds like he's been in Canada for a while. So now I feel like I could just as easily be taking the ferry across to Arran, and visiting The Motorcycle Blonde. Existing in 2012 and having your memory pull you into two different years at the same time is a strange feeling.

Victoria is damp and cool. Spent the day with one of my oldest friends, reminiscing about high school. High school was sixteen years ago. Sixteen years! I feel ... inadequate to that. I feel like I haven't done enough. I feel like I haven't been enough. But I suppose I'll feel that way when I'm eighty ...

Dinner tonight at The Mint. Seven years ago I celebrated my champagne birthday at this restaurant. I don't remember what I had then. Tonight my friend and I ate cheese and curry and aloo sandheko. We talked about writing and work and love. She's about to launch this magazine. You leave and grow and come back and everything is the same as it always was, only better, and tonight this makes me glad.

Tuesday, circa 10:30pm??

Breakfast at The Blue Fox. (Can it be true that they still don't have a webpage? Ha.) This morning I actually felt as though I could leave the restaurant and take the #14 right up to UVic and go to class. It was that close.

Lunch in Oak Bay with Christin, whom I hadn't seen in seven years. It's so fascinating to be able to come back and hear what everyone's been up to. People are publishing books. People are getting agents. People are writing, still.

The words keep coming, it seems. One way or another, in and around all of the heartbreak and the day-to-day life.

Wednesday, on the 3pm ferry

Walked through the old neighbourhood this morning. So built up, and they finally finished the swanky new condos on the corner of my old street. Stopped in front of my old apartment building and remembered. The strongest memory I have of that place is the day that I moved in, way back in the summer of 2004--the carpet had been freshly shampooed, and before I moved any furniture in I took off my shoes and stretched out on the floor and thought: mine.

Favourite video store, still going strong ...

Thursday, late at night sometime

Breakfast in Gastown. Breakfast so beautiful I almost didn't want to eat it.

Got to hear all about the business that my friends are set to launch later this year. I am so inspired -- I know such creative, talented people. So many stories of friends making it work, somehow, in the midst of difficult times.

Meandered about for the better part of the day. Went to The Noodle Box again and then made my way to the TWUC conference, which started at 4pm. Met the lovely Ayelet Tsabari and got our badges. Don't we look all professional? (Well, Ayelet looks professional. And calm. I look like a big fat nerd, but what are you going to do ...)

The TWUC conference opened with a keynote address by Patricia Aldana. It was fantastic. Very political and heartfelt. She talked about Canada's National Reading Campaign, which I'm sad to say I hadn't heard about until today. But once again, I find myself inspired. I'd been hoping that coming to the TWUC would light that fire in my writing heart again -- it's a fire that keeps on going, yes, but every now and then it's nice to connect with other people who recognize that writing is important, that reading is important, that words on printed paper change lives.

Friday, again late at night

Great panels today. Lovely discussions about first-time authors, and eco-writing, and in-depth looks at how much technology is changing the pfor an award ublishing landscape. It's the kind of thing that we talk about all the time, I know, but so great to physically be there, listening to what other people are thinking and breathing and doing about the changes.

More on the conference after I get home. There's just so much to say.

--------

And ... I spent Saturday on the beach, and in the West End of Vancouver, enjoying the sun. More to come in the next few days on the conference, and what I learned, what I heard, how it made me think. Today I'll just close off and say: the entire trip was lovely. Everything about it seemed to speak, somehow, to the journeys that we make as writers -- the people that we love, the memories that we gather, the lessons that we learn. Sometimes I forget that life in Victoria, life on the West Coast, taught me as much about writing as did those four years of school at UVic.

It's good to remember that, and think of the mist in the air as these days in Hamilton grow hot and long and humid ...

In defense of the humble blue Papermate pen

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Tue, 15 May 2012 01:32:00 +0000

Today I got a letter from Janet Fitch. Yes, that Janet Fitch. It wasn't addressed specifically to me -- it came as part of my ongoing subscription to Letters in the Mail, from The Rumpus -- but still, it was lovely to think that at some point in the not-so-distant past, Janet Fitch had plopped down in front of her computer and written a letter that eventually found its way to my mailbox.

It was a lovely letter. I was particularly tickled by this discovery: Janet Fitch (Janet Fitch!) writes in big black unlined artists' sketchbooks, just like me. Like me, she has a need to sprawl herself out on the page in order to get the words down.

However, unlike me, Janet writes with a series of ritzy black fountain pens. Never a blue pen, she wrote. Never that.

And suddenly I found myself thinking: why not, Janet? What you have against beautiful, darling blue ink?

A few years ago, when I was living in Edinburgh and had started my little pen-pal/email exchange with The Motorcycle Blonde, I discovered that she didn't like blue ink either. It just seems so un-writerly, she said. Nothing says writer like black ink on a white page.

I'm biased here. I admit it. I have eight beautiful, big artist's sketchbooks filled with page after page of blue scrawl. I've been using blue ink since I started keeping these notebooks -- we're going on twelve years now, the unlined artist's sketchbook and I, and every day of that time has been glorious. Almost every single one of those pages has felt the tip of a blue Papermate pen. And that's it. No fancy fountain pens, no expensive BIC concoctions. I have sometimes, on occasion, used (and quite enjoyed) a Gelcap. But these pens have always been random -- I've picked them up from the office, or somewhere else unknown. (Like many people the world over, I have a habit of attracting stray pens. I also suffer from a complete inability to use any kind of pen that doesn't have a cap. I cannot write with a naked pen, folks. It just makes me so anxious.)

But all that aside, even the random pens that I've used have been blue. I'm not quite sure why. Is it because black ink on a white page feels too final? Is it because it feels "writerly" to me too, only in an overly self-conscious kind of way? I'm not sure. Call me crazy, but somehow blue ink flows easier onto that page. And there's something so wonderful about my loyal Papermate pens. They always feel the same. They rarely ever smudge. (I suffer the leftie's eternal torment of smudged pages and ink smears on the hand. I even had a teacher in elementary school who made me rewrite all the notes in my binder because of the smudging. "It's the type of pen you use," she said. "If they're smudged, rewrite them.")

More importantly: I can buy these pens in boxes of twelve without letting go of half my paycheque. Is that a flimsy excuse? Should I be suffering for my art in all ways possible, including in the wallet? What matter money when one has a Moleskine and a Visconti? What words of note could one possibly hope for when writing with one simple, cheap, humble Papermate pen?

But let's face it: it's a DOLLAR AND FORTY-NINE CENTS FOR TWELVE PENS, people. I like that kind of math. Also, I'll admit that my mother used Papermate pens almost exclusively while I was growing up. And my aunt, who is also a novelist, pretty much had a Papermate permanently attached to her hand. So maybe there's something deeply nostalgic and comforting about those little Papermate soldiers, as well.

Virginia Woolf, in case anyone was wondering, used a certain type of purple ink exclusively for her notebooks and to autograph her work. What say you to that, oh defenders of the stalwart black pen? Granted, she was probably shoving that ink into the English version of a Visconti, or some other lovely type of fountain pen, but there. Purple. Virginia Woolf, most lovely lady of letters, gave her heart to the purple. I see no reason, therefore, why I can't give my heart to the blue. Besides: who the heck cares what you write with, so long as the words matter in the end?

I'll admit that when it comes time to sign that spleet-new novel, I might have a change of heart. Blue ink looks very well in my sketchbook, but there's something very dashing about a black scrawl on the front page of that book. We'll see. I'll have to think about it. I will also, most likely, have a few nights of guilt over it too. I can hear the Papermates now. Don't you love us anymore? Haven't we done all you asked of us and more?

They needn't worry, though. Blue Papermate pens and I -- we go way back, and we'll be going way forward too. So long as there are Papermates, you can bet I'll be writing with them. Sometimes there's nothing like a plucky little pen to get the job done.

On how Rabble has saved the world, yet again

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Fri, 11 May 2012 14:39:00 +0000

So, as it happened, a few days after I read that rather cringeworthy list from Glamour that included all of those helpful tips on how to live A Certain, Prescribed Kind of Life by the time you hit the big 3-0 ... I came across this article.

I like this one much better. Don't you just love Rabble? Megan Murphy, oh sarcastic writer of untold brilliance -- I salute you. You and your excellent advice about shoes. Here's hoping that your wonderful advice makes its way into a chain letter of its own.

(I'd read that chain letter. And I'd force it on all my female friends -- in the nicest way possible, of course.)

I Have a Degree in Being Useless ... What do YOU have?

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Wed, 09 May 2012 17:33:00 +0000

This post has been turning over and over in my head for a while. I was hoping (my hopes are always grand when they first start out) that I could hammer my thoughts into an Actual Article, and maybe try my luck at something like The Huffington Post or, I don't know, Maisonneuve or The Walrus, but then last week I got sick with the flu, and spent nearly seven days sleeping and watching old episodes of Glee, and by the time I felt like a human being again I felt as though the topical nature of this would-be post had become, well, not so topical anymore. News rises and then disappears almost instantly in this here Internet age. And so here it goes on the blog, instead. Hammer back in my (slightly weak, underfed) hand.

Today I would like to talk about the 13 most useless majors in university. And, oh, the opinions of a certain Margarent Wente. And also the fact that the cultural world seems to be disappearing, and society as whole seems not to care.

I mean, who cares about culture anyway, right? Why even bother with a blog post? Who, to paraphrase our Prime Minister, wants to hear about a bunch of rich people complaining about how their slice of the pie just keeps on shrinking?

So a few weeks ago, The Daily Beast came out with a list of the 13 most useless majors in university. I'm pretty sure no one was surprised to see that Fine Arts degrees topped the list. I certainly wasn't. I mean, heck -- I have two Fine Arts degrees, and I used to joke to my parents that I was singlemindedly pursuing the two most useless fields of study in the world. Creative Writing? Philosophy? What the heck was a gal supposed to do with those? (Back in 2005, when I was living in Victoria, a Shaw technician came to my house to set up my cable. Somehow or another we got to chatting about school, and when he heard what I was studying, his exact words were, "Well, you might be able to do something with the writing one day, but philosophy -- good luck with that. I was a philosophy major back in the day. It got me nothing.")

And then, if a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree wasn't enough, I decided to go and get a Master's degree in Writing. Just, you know, because I wanted to make sure that the nails in the coffin of my Adult Life were pounded in good and tight. Every single member of my immediate family has a "practical" profession, and I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that they all thought I was nuts. They probably still do. I'm surrounded by tradespeople and nurses, and while my younger siblings go about buying cars and houses and planning vacations up north, I spend my days posting rants on my blog, and paying exorbitant literary contest fees, and fiddling with commas and semi-colons with decidedly less finesse than Oscar Wilde did once upon a time. Sure, there's a book deal. But there's also a lot of debt, and this creeping sense of second-class-citizendom because I like to peruse Kijiji ads and furnish my house from secondhand stores. I do not have a credit card. I do not have a car. I do not have savings.

But I was okay with that. It took a while -- years, in fact -- but at some point in the spring, I realized that this was, at least in some sense, what the writing life was all about. We don't remember Ernest Hemingway because he was some flashy CEO. We don't remember William Faulkner because he pulled in scads of cash and drove a BMW. In fact, we remember how William Faulkner worked as a night watchman while he wrote As I lay Dying. We remember that Ernest Hemingway worked as a reporter and apprenticed his craft while doing so, that he slummed around Cuba, that he drank. That he liked bullfighting. We remember that in fact, most writers worked odd jobs over the course of their writing careers. Some of them, like Hemingway, got to be halfway "respectable". But we also remember that for most writers, a job was a job was a job, so long as it mean they could keep writing. And at some point in the spring, the penny dropped for me. It's okay, I thought. It's okay that I'm not teaching, not yet. It's okay that these degrees have taught me about craft, about thinking, about literature and what that means for the world. It's okay that I didn't walk out of school and into a steady job. It's really okay. I can still call myself a writer, even if the money isn't steady. It's OKAY.

And then I read that article from The Daily Beast, and a few days later I read this one, from Salon, about how the creative class in North America is shrinking, and no one seems to care. And then I read the now infamous article from Margaret Wente in The Globe and Mail, and learned something new about myself: I am the barista of tomorrow.

Me, with my dual degrees in Creative Writing and Philosophy, with my expensive MFA. I'm your barista, folks. We live in a world that "increasingly demands hard skills", says Ms. Wente, and as everyone knows, Writing and Philosophy are soft. SOFT. Ergo, there will be no Real Job for me. My epiphany, as above? Merely soft, spoiled thinking. Delusion. In actual fact, the world will never be kind to me. I am spoiled and self-indulgent and two bricks short of a load, and if I'd been thinking clearly at all ten years ago when I jumped into that whole university business, I'd have gone for an MBA instead. The End.

And then, to top it all off, I read this. 30 Things Every Woman Should Have And Should Know.

Not surprisingly, I suppose, I came down with the flu a few days after that. Maybe it was psychically as well as physically inspired. It's like the universe was converging in one great Assault on Creative Types. Attack from the left! Attack from the Right! Sneaky Attack from Behind that Masquerades as Inspiring! (See the above article re: 30 Things you "Should Know" ...) It laid me out flat. Literally.

Anyway. I am better now, and pulsing with rage. And sadness. Because somewhere, somewhere, our society seems to have forgotten that there's more than one way to live a life. We have forgotten that the arts have tied us together through the ages. We have forgotten that the words of people like Aristotle and Socrates and Shakespeare have survived for centuries. We no longer seem to care about things that last, or about those things whose worth lies not in so-called tangible results (university degree = $50,000-a-year job, hurray) but in the fact that experiences can shape people, and make them see the world differently, and allow them, from that vantage point, to go about changing the world in however small a way. We have forgotten that English degrees matter, that architecture is a valuable enterprise, that disciplines like sociology and anthropology might carry within themselves the threat of a barista future, however temporary, but also equip our young with a better understanding of where we fit in the big picture. Degrees in the Humanities and Social Sciences (and I say that not as a slight against degrees that aren't in these disciplines, but only as acknowledgment of the fact that all of the "useless" degrees profiled in the Daily Beast article come from there) are about greater-than-ourselves thinking, on some level.

The Toronto writer Mike Spry wrote a fantastic (and much more concise) rebuttal to Ms. Wente that says everything I'm trying to say here, only better. Among his many brilliant points is this one: university is not trade school. It's about ideas, it's about idealism, it's about thinking and imagining and using that to influence how you go through the world. Where did we lose sight of that? When the recession hit? Decades earlier, when consumerism had planted its roots in earnest and had begun to infiltrate our world with fantasies about having it all and spending however much money you could to get there? Is that when a university degree became less about knowledge and more about what kind of job it could get you, and from there what make/model of SUV your job would allow you to buy?

Or maybe it started back in the 1500's, perhaps, right about the time that Michelangelo finished the Sistine Chapel. No one patronizes artists anymore -- or, rather, they do, but it's patronizing of the other kind, the kind that anyone who's struggling to get by in a recession will understand. Who the hell do they think they are? Why the hell should I feel sorry for someone who wants to make shit up all day, or throw paint on a canvas, or take pretty pictures? Why don't those people stop whining and go out and get a real job?

We don't have artist apprenticeships anymore, and so for a great many of today's artists -- our writers, our visual artists, our photographers and architects and musicians and graphic designers -- university is the only place that people have to learn the skills of craft. It's the only place and time that many of us will ever have to engage in a workshop setting, and exchange those ideas, and this is precisely why degrees like this are still important, even if the world demands other skills of you in order to put food on the table.

"The world will not be kind to them," Wente says, as though this is actually news. Well, duh. Since when has the world ever been kind to artists, or to those who persist in optimism despite all evidence to the contrary? I am baffled by this, by the tone beneath that statement that somehow manages to say it would so entirely be worth your while, and much kinder to you in the long run, if you decided to study something else. I take issue with Ms. Wente's comfortable assumption that the only people who were protesting were, in effect, humanities people who suffered from excessive amounts of idealism. "The protesters," she said, "do not include accounting, science and engineering students, who have better things to do than hurl projectiles at police."

Don't get me wrong -- I don't condone the violence that erupted at points during the Quebec protests. But I can understand where the rage comes from, where the frustration and the anger bubbles up. I can understand how people who entertain the idea of a different kind of life -- a debt-free life, a life where they can put their university dreams into practice unencumbered by tens of thousands of dollars in student loans -- get frustrated when the only greeting they receive from society, post-graduation, is a frown or a finger wagging in response to their choice of degree. And I can understand how a girl -- much like myself, say -- might get frustrated when literature that tells her how many material things she should possess by a certain age ("A decent piece of furniture not previously owned by anyone else in the family," or "Something ridiculously expensive you bought for yourself, just because you deserve it" -- does an education in the arts count? Or are we talking diamond bangles? Inquiring minds want to know ...) also persists in telling her that she -- or anybody, really -- should have a solid career under her belt by the time she hits the big 3-0.

Excepting those lucky devils who manage to publish to wide acclaim/release that breakout record/find that big accomplishment somewhere in their twenties, isn't that assumption about what one should or should not have by a certain age just muttering about a "useful" degree all over again, in a different kind of way? Doesn't that just bring us back to what seems to be the boiling-directly-under-the-surface-point, ie. one should forego the arts and humanities altogether if one wants to make any kind of life at all in this day and age?

Or maybe it just means that in order to be an artist, and socially accepted as such, you need to be savvy about where you ply your trade. Shakespeare, all you English majors, is so out. You should be reading (and discussing, and getting your degrees in) Twilight. And who really wants to study opera anymore when it's obvious that all the money lies in reality TV? I mean, isn't that just good business sense? Why be a starving idealist awash in snobby myths of high culture when you can be the pandering millionaire?

But there. Now I'm getting snarky. And no one wants to listen to a snippy idealist. That's almost as bad as listening to your barista drone on about their wasted degree ...

On litfic, and books of all sizes and shapes

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 16:00:00 +0000

As usual, the fab Will Johnson has inspired bookish thoughts in me, and another entry in my blog. Will's blog is just so great -- it's conversational, and intriguing, and funny, and I always come away from his posts eager to pick up my pen. (And trust me, these days I need all of the prodding I can get.) He always makes me see the world differently, in however small a way.

His latest post, filled with all of the nostalgia for good television and reading alike, had a smile on my face a sentence in. It made me think of my own forays into television this year, which haven't been nearly as extensive as Will's (I get lost in TV, and nothing else happens. My dishes pile up, the laundry goes undone, etc. So it's best to just leave it alone, or parcel my TV out in little bits, like my current one-episode-a-night non-marathon of Mad Men), but most of all it made me think of the books that I read while growing up, the ones that bring back the childhood, and the books that I devour now to keep me sane, and fill my heart, and make this whole writing business possible day in and out.

I haven't been watching much TV -- aside from Mad Men and Grey's Anatomy and, okay okay, I'll admit it, The Vampire Diaries (Will, this is obviously not nearly as good a pedigree of television as what you find yourself watching these days, but I suspect I'll get sucked into Boardwalk Empire and not come out until all the episodes are over) -- but I have been reading an awful lot. If I ever had to choose between no Internet and keeping my public library open, well, folks, I'd go for the library every single time. I have so many books on hold! I have so many books on order! I have so many books in my soon-to-be-on-hold-and-then-in-my-hot-little-hands pile! And they're all so different. I've been reading non-fiction. I've been reading CanLit. I've been reading fantasy, and science fiction, and short stories, and books about brain science, and books about God, and books about poetry and wisdom and desire, and books, glorious books, all of the time.

Will's nostalgia around reading Jurassic Park (not to mention his lovely story about Jurassic Park III, that little laminated book lying somewhere in his parents' basement) made me think of some of the books that I've devoured over the years. Take, for example, the Terre d'Ange novels written by Jacqueline Carey. I love these books. Love them. There are nine novels in total, three sets of trilogies that tell an alternate, fantasy-laden history of France and the people within. I read the very first one, Kushiel's Dart, years ago, and had to wait until the next novels in the series came out. Devoured those. And then when the next trilogy came out a few years later, I nearly swallowed those whole. I'm not kidding. I've just finished the latest trilogy (it might be the last, which I very much hope isn't true, but neither would I want the lovely Ms. Carey to spend her days slaving over pen and ink purely for benefit of me), and it took me less than a week to read. No word of a lie, folks -- each hardcover book is about six hundred pages, and I read each one in about two days. Hours and hours in my reading chair, turning pages, letting my mind go far away. Delicious. Also? Plenty of sexy times in these books. And what lapsed Catholic doesn't like to read a sexy book now and then? You want adventure, you want a rollicking good read, you want some sex and spice in your book pages -- read these. You won't be disappointed, I promise.

I haven't just been reading these, though. (There are lots of glorious hours in the day when you only have half a respectable job.) Right now I'm making my delicate way through Wisdom and Metaphor, by Jan Zwicky. A week or so ago I finished The Brain That Changes Itself, by Norman Doidge. I have The Angel Esmerelda by Don Delillo waiting on my library book shelf. I have Rebecca Rosenblum's The Big Dream, also waiting. I put as many of the books from this list on hold at the library as I could. I gobbled up The Golden Spruce while at work. I take in words, and I breathe out ... magic. That's what reading feels like, these days. As though each book that I encounter somehow changes the air, just as the trees that we see all around us (a common thread here, that the books which I love come from the trees that I love -- I wonder what John Vaillant would say?) change the air for us in unseen, vital ways.

The Hunger Games arrived for me a few days ago. I've been like 125th on the library list forever, so it was a surprise to see that title show up in my list. I started reading it last night at work. Slowly, slowly, I find myself getting sucked in. And I can't help but marvel and be glad for this, the fact that books like The Hunger Games and Wisdom and Metaphor can thrill me so equally in such different ways.

The Irish writer Julian Gough held a conversation on Twitter a few days ago, looking at literary fiction and what that term means in this day and age. It was fascinating. A lot of people, it seems, find literary fiction an almost outdated genre -- pretentious, highbrow, so comfortably upper-middle-class as to be almost irrelevant. There was a lot of talk about sales, and how one is much more apt to make it as a writer these days if one ventures a novel about dystopian bisexual vampires as opposed to a novel about suburbia.

It made me think. It reminded me of something that Margaret Atwood said a year or so ago, also on Twitter, about how the greatest thing about books is that they'll always find a home somewhere. Someone, somewhere, will love a book even if the rest of the world despises it. (Read the hilarious snippet about Mein Kempf in this blog post, and you'll see what I mean.)

In some ways, I think this observation is more relevant now than ever. We all know that the landscape of the publishing world is changing. We've heard the Seth Godins and the Ewan Morrisons pronounce the death of the book, or at least the death of The Way The World Was. We hear daily about the death of literary fiction. (Nothing, it seems to me, has died and died and died again quite so much as that.) And then on the other hand we hear people moan about how the world's literary prizes have been infiltrated by genre and populism to the extent that last year's Booker shortlist was, quote unquote, a "dud". (And this despite the fact that people like Patrick deWitt have been praised for bridging that terrible gap between genre fiction and so-called litfic, making readers think and grow and learn in precisely the way that literary fiction purports to do.) The emergence of prizes like The Literature Prize seems to speak to literary fiction as that one last bastion of excellence -- the one thing that the critics and the real readers can hold onto while the rest of the world is engulfed in dystopian vampire flames. The rest of the world might be reading The Hunger Games and other such novels and really, really loving them, but the literary establishment soldiers on. No one will know about The Hunger Games a hundred years from now, but look! They'll probably be reading Julian Barnes.

Susan Sontag once wrote a journal entry about the three circles of literary influence, putting things exactly so:

In every era, there are three teams of writers. The first team: those who have become known, gain “stature,” become reference points for their contemporaries writing in the same language. (e.g. Emil Staiger, Edmund Wilson, V.S. Pritchett). The second team: international—those who become reference points for their contemporaries throughout Europe, the Americas, Japan, etc. (e.g. Benjamin). The third team: those who become reference points for successive generations in many languages (e.g. Kafka). I’m already on the first team, on the verge of being admitted to the second—want only to play on the third.

Sometimes I wonder if the literary establishment (whatever that means) seeks the third team as a measure of ultimate proof for a writer. We want books that are exciting and relevant and difficult, yes. We want books that will withstand the test of time and geography, books that can appeal to generations of people over vast amounts of time and land, and I suppose there is some comfort to be had in thinking that some of these novels that challenge and inspire us will continue to challenge and inspire five hundred years from now, in much the same way as Shakespeare continues to be read. There's a whiff of immortality there that any booklover might champion. Sure.

But no one knows this. Not for sure. Not beyond a shadow of a doubt. Who can tell whether, as that Guardian article so disparagingly noted, a novel "about two 19th century cowboys" might withstand the test of time and be read hundreds of years from now in a way that (gasp) a more straightforward litfic novel might not? Nobody. It's a fool's game. We don't know. We won't know.

All we can know is that the love for books -- in whatever shape they take, whatever form they eventually encompass -- will endure. That, I think, is certain. So too, as the lovely Ms. Atwood said, will books continue to find a home no matter where they are. As someone who trained in language, I have the utmost respect for a novel that shimmers with craft, a novel that challenges and provokes and encourages us to reach beyond ourselves and touch something infinite. All great art does this. But as a reader first and foremost, a lover of books and story, I also have the utmost respect for those novels that gladden my heart, for those books that stir the nostalgia in my soul just as Jurassic Park stirs the nostalgia deep inside of Will.

Those fantasy novels that I gushed about earlier in this post -- they contain everything that you want in a good book. Fascinating characters. Engaging plots. Crystalline language. True, I don't read them for the same kinds of reasons that I might read Jennifer Egan, or Patrick deWitt, or Ali Smith. It's a different experience. But why should all of reading aspire to be the same? Why should I want my chicken wings and take-out pizza to have the same kind of quality of experience as dining on prime rib in a fancy restaurant? They are different. It doesn't mean that one is inherently more palatable, or exciting, or worthy of praise than the other.

If anything, it means that chicken wings and pizza have a broader appeal, and can therefore connect with more people than my lovely prime rib, as much as I might adore it. If anything, it might mean that chicken wings and pizza -- as a staple, as something that so many more people can enjoy -- have more of a chance of surviving.

I know it's a dangerous metaphor. I know I run the risk of further entrenching the litfic divide. But readability -- the quality that so incensed the literary establishment world when the Booker judges made note of it last year -- is, ultimately, that je-ne-sais-quoi quality that keeps readers coming back. People can moan all they like about the literary quality of Harry Potter or gripe about how the genre-blurring words of Patrick deWitt spell further doom for the industry. I disagree. I think everything has its place. People like Alice Munro and Yann Martel and Gabriel Garcia Marquez make me glad to be a writer, but people like Jacqueline Carey, or Guy Gavriel Kay, or Michael Crichton, or Stephen King -- these are the people that make me love books.

And love of books is the only thing that will keep this industry going. So now I'm off to write a little, and stick my nose back into The Hunger Games. I wish you all a joyous day filled with books -- books that teach you, books that inspire you, books that will settle deep in your heart forever.

Happy reading, one and all.

In praise of lovely little bookstores ...

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 23:03:00 +0000

Today my friend Julie opened her bookstore, JH Gordon Books, in the heart of downtown Hamilton. I'm so happy for her! In an age where it seems like all of the world's bookstores are dying or soon-to-be doomed, it's refreshing to know that there are still brave souls out there who think the mantle of The Independent Bookseller is a nice thing to wear.

Three cheers for JH Gordon Books!

So professional and cheery with her customers!

I was in helping Julie organize some books last week, very nearly salivating over every single book that came into my hands. (You can, if you like, read all about Julie & her husband Cory`s bookstore journey and renovation here.) It was great fun. And I'm looking forward to attending -- and perhaps even organizing! -- some events at her store in the future. For now, I'll leave you with some pictures and a plea: if you live in Hamilton, you must pop your head into Julie`s shop at some point. I`m sure you`ll find something to strike your fancy ...

So cute! So many delicious books! Nom nom!

Roberto Bolano and I are kindred spirits ...

Pretty chandeliers! This is going to be my Tiffany`s. I can just tell.

Author photos and all that jazz

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 17:53:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I had my author photo redone. Some time before that, ECW had sent me an email asking for an author photo to use in promotion and/or on the book jacket (!!!! Book jacket! My book jacket! Holy smokes, it's actually a Real Thing!), and I'd spent a few days going through self portraits that I'd taken over time. It rather quickly became obvious that none of them were really what I wanted on the back of that book -- even though one of them ended up being the photo that TLA used on their website.

This was further solidified when I sent a few shots to a friend and asked him what he thought re: their book cover potential. He oh-so-diplomatically wrote back and said, I'd be happy to take new ones for you. Heh. Strike one for Amanda and her somewhat photography skillz.

Anyway, after a delightful photo session in which I spent an awful lot of time squinting into the sun (I appear to be developing vampire-ish tendencies, it would seem), we got some fairly decent shots. And after some hemming and hawwing and further whittling down of the list, I found my author photo.

Author. Photo. I know it doesn't seem like a big deal, but yesterday I sent it off to ECW and thought, I've wanted my photo on the back of a book since I was five years old.

I really like this photo. I really like it. And yet I can't help but giggle from time to time when I see it, either. It looks like me, I think. And yet not like me at all.

That girl in the photo--she knows what she's doing in life. She looks like a Real Writer! I bet she spends her days writing serenely in a little office, and when she isn't writing she's having engaging, wise conversations with her friends, or reading heavy-duty philosophy books (and not, say, the Sookie Stackhouse novels), and all of her books come together in a flow of inspiration and ink and, well, she just knows. She has that Wise Adult look on her face. She looks so together.

She most assuredly does not, for example, spend her writing time in her pyjamas, drinking tea and playing Words With Friends on her phone when she could be freewriting, or freelancing, or figuring out what the hell is supposed to happen in the next novel. She does not suffer crippling attacks of anxiety in the middle of the night. She doesn't walk down the street and think: what if the novel doesn't go anywhere? What then? What if all of this time and energy spent on this one thing means that I can't actually do anything else? What if I'm too attached to italics? Does that make me a bad person? What?

Funny, isn't it, how we can be one thing and yet another all at once. How we can show one face to the world and yet at the same time be made up of a million other faces, hold a million other insecurities, be a million other shades of complex. Funny how a simple little author photo gets one thinking so many little questions.

When I was five years old I probably thought that I would be together when that photo was finally taken and placed on the back of that book. When I was five years old, publication was the absolute pinnacle of existence. And now I find myself staring up at the heavens much like Emily Starr, sitting on the grass with her first novel "spleet-new" in her hands. Ahead, the rosy peaks of the Alpine Path. So many more mountains to climb. So many more challenges to face.

Sometimes it's nice, though, to stop and bask in that feeling for a while. The "Who knew, but you've arrived" feeling. The "You can be silly and insecure and worried about how far your skills will go, and still know a thing or two" feeling. You can look together and be together and still not know how any of it's going to turn out. That feeling.

It's a lot of philosophizing for one little photo. I know. But every time I reach a point like this, I find myself thinking back to the writer that I was a year ago, two years ago, five years ago, and from there to all of the writers that I know, all of the writers who are young right now and want this thing so badly and dream, just as I did, that everything will be okay -- that life will all make sense! -- when that book finally comes out.

Some of it will make sense. Some of it will be wonderful. And some of it will just make you laugh, and think, how the heck did I ever arrive in the first place?

The eternal conundrum

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 23:21:00 +0000

I've been thinking about going back to school.

Which is ridiculous. Completely. utterly ridiculous. Don't I have more than enough degrees already? Don't I have more than my fair share of student debt? Haven't I talked time and time again, on this very blog, about how one doesn't need to garner an MFA in order to be a writer?

More importantly: don't I already have an MFA ... of sorts? I have a Master's degree. I have a Master's degree in Creative Writing from my *first choice* of universities. And when I got that paper in hand four years ago, didn't I pause for a moment and think, "Hurrah! It's all done now!" ... ?? DIDN'T I???

And still. Over the past few weeks I've been fantasizing about being back in school. This is probably driven in no small part by the utter un-glamourness (that's a word because I said so) of a writer's day-to-day life. People: I go to my day job, and then I ~~write~~ try to write. Occasionally I make enough money to buy groceries, and then I make food. I tweet varying degrees of nonsense to the world. I read books. And I also, occasionally, watch TV. (Hello, Don Draper! Hello!)

But that's, like, it. That's all I do. So maybe this desire to go back to school is fuelled in part by a desire to feel like I'm Relevant, or Engaged and Involved in The World, or something, instead of being exactly what I am, which is a hermit of increasingly anti-social proportions.

It's also, I confess, driven by an increased fascination with the MFA program at Guelph-Humber. Last week I had lunch with Ayelet Tsabari (we went to an Indian buffet and I ate too much, but she didn't seem to mind and has therefore now become one of my best friends), and her tales of life as a G-H MFA student were quite lovely indeed. Apparently you get at least partial funding. And you don't take as many workshops as you do in the universities on the West Coast, and you get to study with a writing mentor of your choice from anywhere in the world (so long as they agree) during your first summer in the program, which gives G-H the best parts of both Canadian and UK MFA programs. And--oooh!--I could delve more deeply (in an academic sense, as opposed to a solitary-hermit-who-lives-in-her-pyjamas sense) into creative non-fiction, which is a genre that I didn't explore at all when I was at UVic and have now come to quite enjoy.

But I'd be an idiot if I didn't also acknowledge that sometimes it's just easier to go back to school. When you're lying awake at night trying not to hyperventilate over the possible future of your soon-to-be-published novel and the possible death of your struggling-to-be-written next novel, it is easy to think: I'll go back to school, and learn how to be a *real* writer, and two years from now when they spit me back out everything will make sense. In the intervening two years, I will have become awesome. Novels will spew from my fingertips like symphonies from the mind of Mozart. Or they will shape themselves beneath my hands like the bread dough that rises perfectly beneath the palms of Julia Child. Just think: in two years, after the MFA, I will no longer use bad metaphors!

That's almost worth the price of application alone.

The good news is I have lots of time to think about this. If I do decide to apply to Guelph, I'd be applying for the Fall of 2013, which means that I wouldn't have to get my application together until November, which means that I can comfortably put any more thought about this away until October 27th, at which point I will wake up in a roaring panic and send frantic emails to overseas acquaintances asking for letters of reference.

Procrastination. Bastard saves me every time.

Making Money ... or not

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 20:20:00 +0000

I've been ruminating on this post for the past few days, and this morning a happy coincidence arrived in the form of Seth Godin doing an interview on Q. Seth Godin, as some of you may know, is known to many as the Doom And Gloom Man of publishing. He's an author himself and has worked in the publishing industry for the better part of 25 years, and for the past two years or so he's come out with increasingly dire predictions about the future of publishing, the future of books, and what all of this means for us lowly, little authors.

Last year, at the Edinburgh Book Festival, author Ewan Morrison set out a spectacularly bleak argument for the demise of books that had me more than a little depressed. Mr, Godin, with his arguments about book income and what authors can/should expect from today's publishing world, seemed all set to plunge me into another depression, especially seeing as how I'd spent the past few days tossing around the idea that it might just be time for me to start trying to make money from my own work.

I've always cherished the idea of one day being able to write full-time. Just like, oh, every other author on the planet, I suppose. I know it's a silly dream. Silly because most authors (as my so-much-wiser friends have pointed out to me, time and time again), even the ones we all know and love, have had to juggle other jobs with their writing careers at least at some stage in the game. Stephen King did it. Vincent Lam, whose new novel is out this spring, continues to do it despite winning the Giller Prize. And TS Eliot worked in a bank for thirty years. (A bank. How's that for rooting a dream firmly in reality?)

But dreams persist precisely because they're just that--dreams. Sometimes we hang on to them even in spite of their silliness. And so, even as I know that the likelihood of a lovely little life spent drinking tea and swearing loudly at my computer whilst in my pyjamas nigh on 40 hours a week is most probably never going to materialize, at least not in the way I envision, still I dream. And I clutch that dream ever tighter, even as people like Ewan Morrison argue that this new spate of ¢99 e-books is effectively glutting the market for any kind of viable living wage for a writer.

But the conversation with Seth Godin (who has argued, among other things, that writers shouldn't *expect* to get paid for their work) surprised me. Nary a whiff of doom and gloom in sight. Sure, he spent a lot of his time talking about the changes in the industry, and how writers need to adapt in response to these changes, but I didn't get a sense that he was talking about imminent death. The end is not nigh, lovelies. We're just changing. We're in the midst of the cocoon.

I've given a great deal (probably 99%) of my written work away for free over the past decade. I submitted to journals that were respected but could not, for one reason or another, afford to pay their writers. And I was happy with that because at the time, all I wanted to do was get my name out into the world. Build up a solid portfolio, yadda yadda. I never thought really truly seriously (even though, yes, I've whined about it in the past) about making a living from my writing in my twenties. I dreamed about it (who doesn't, at one point or another), but I recognized that there was still a way to go. I submitted to paying markets, too, but I knew that those markets were even more competitive, and so when rejections came back it was no surprise at all. Disappointing, sure--rejection always is. But not surprising.

When The Raptured was making its way through publishers, back at the beginning of 2011, my agent said that one of the best things I could do for myself would be to get more of my work seen in other arenas, even if I showcased things for free. "It's about getting your name known to the world," she said. "That's important, and it's worth a lot, even if there's no monetary compensation for it." And so I put more work into the blog, and I started sending work away as much as I could. And slowly but surely things started building up. In the past year I've published in a bunch of different magazines. None of this means money, but it does mean that I have more weight to my name now. My cred, homies, is beefing up.

Here's a secret, though: even as I sent things away to non-paying publications and told myself it was as much about building a platform as it was about recognition, there was a part of me that always thought: you don't deserve to get paid for your work because it's simply not good enough. And you won't deserve to get paid for your work for at least another ten years. Maybe twenty. Maybe, lowly little writer you, you'll never deserve it. Maybe you're just some hack. Maybe you just have to deal with that.

Thing is, there's also this to consider: just as part of getting published entails sending things out, so too are submissions to paying markets a part of the journey. You won't get published if you don't sent out your work, and you'll never get paid for your work if you continue, like me, to submit only to those magazines that give you a contributor's copy and thanks.

Don't get me wrong--I love contributors' copies. Love them. And I will sing the praises of every little struggling, non-paying publication out there until the day I bite eternal dust. Every writer who's ever felt that delicious thrill of publication knows that the world is a happier place for those little publications that can't pay but do love and spread the word about their writers. We would not be the writers that we are if they didn't exist.

But there comes a point, I think, when you have to say I'm worth the money. This is not to say that one should automatically move from this to saying, "I am worth a six-figure advance, publishing world!" From what I could gather of Godin's conversation today, that was his main point. He was arguing that gone are the days of authors being able to live solely from the fruits of pyjama days in front of the screen. He was saying that what authors need to do is diversify, and explore different ways to build income in addition to their book writing. He was saying that authors need to make sure they're creating a product that's unique. He talked, near the end of the interview, about how authors that tie in with book clubs and work hard to build a dedicated following are some of the ones that will survive. And he didn't seem to be saying that these authors didn't deserve to get paid for their work--he was saying that how they went about doing that thing for which they got paid had itself become different. Instead of writing in solitude and reaping advances from a publisher, authors must now actively engage with their readers. They need to do things like make podcasts and Facebook pages (strike one against me, but that's a whole other blog post) and maybe, yes, offer some of their work up for free in exchange for building readership. Like Godin said, it takes away from the real business of writing. Absolutely.

But almost a year ago, now, I came across this article in The Guardian, where the Scottish writer Sara Sheridan talked about the different book- and literature-related projects she's involved in in addition to her regular authorly time at the desk. She made life sound so exciting, and engaging in a way that's completely different from the excitement I get when I picture an existence given over to my computer and the screen. Maybe it's not all doom and gloom, kids. Maybe we just need to get smarter about the market. Build our street cred, and know when it's time to start asking for a paycheque here and there.

I still send my work away to smaller publications. I love them--I love what they do, I love what they offer, and I love how they treat me as a writer. And I still, against all evidence, nurture that full-time writer dream. But I think I'll start cashing my cred in and try a paying market or two, and look at how a writer builds her life out of all things, whether writing-related or not.

Seems to me it's worth the trouble. :)

Letting go, and other surprises

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 04:28:00 +0000

Yesterday I sat on my patio for an hour, in the unseasonably warm weather we’ve been having, and wrote. And then I came inside to a deliciously warm house that smelled of banana bread, and wrote some more. Earlier in the day, I spent some time perusing the streets of downtown Hamilton. It was Sunday, so a great many of the shops downtown were closed—how quaint, and yet how lovely, to be in a city once more that recognizes a need to have a rest at least once during the week. When I lived in Edinburgh this frustrated me, but now I find it reassuring. Maybe it means I’m getting old.

Life in Hamilton has been so unexpectedly delicious these past few months, and this even in spite of the weather. True, it hasn’t been nearly as cold as the winters we all know and remember. But I don’t deal well with unending days of grey. (This, of course, is hugely ironic, considering that I spent most of my twenties in BC and Scotland, two places known for their stretches of grey, dismal weather. But I digress.)

Every day I feel as though another gift lies somewhere in wait. After the heartbreak of leaving Scotland, the frustrations of unemployment and no space of my own, the worry over the novel and What Would Happen To It—after all of this, it feels so strange to suddenly find myself in a space that
I enjoy. And so today I pose a question for myself, and for all of you. What, exactly, is the difference between letting go and giving up? Is there a difference, at all? Are they one and the same?

Three years ago, if you’d sat me down and said to me that I would find myself back in Ontario before five years were up, I would have cried. Hard. Or I would have refused to listen. I’ll never go back, I might have said. I can’t write there. I can’t be the person that I want to be when I’m there. And so I stayed in Edinburgh, and I worked so very hard, and whenever a door closed in my face I thought—that’s okay, Amanda. You just have to work harder. You’ll stay in Edinburgh, and eventually everything will fall into place, and it will all be okay.

When I came back to Canada, a year and a half ago now, I thought: it’s still okay. You’ll work for six months, and save for that visa, and then you’ll go back. And you’ll write in Edinburgh again, and travel, and—yes, repeat it to yourself ad nauseum—eventually everything will fall into place.

Now it’s a year and a half later, and somehow, somehow, everything has fallen into place. But I’m not in Edinburgh. I am, in fact, living in the city so close to where I grew up, the city to which I swore I’d never return. And in the span of the last year and a half, I’ve made more writing connections, fostered more relationships, and had more success with my work than in the entire three years I lived in Scotland. I’m working a part-time job and freelancing. I have a space of my own. And all of this seems to have come about so easily in comparison to life when I was abroad. I wrestled a life together when I was there—I carved it from the rocks and the sand and the cool beauty of those Edinburgh stones. It was lonely. It was filled with light. It was amazing.

But the light here in Hamilton is altogether different. Suddenly it feels like things are happening with little to no effort on my part at all. Suddenly there are friends everywhere, new and old. There are literary lunches. There are literary festivals. There are nights at cozy readings in Toronto. And suddenly the writings are finding a home. Is this how it happens? Is this the flip side of those long lonely hours in front of your desk—connections and progress when least you expect it?

One of the greatest bits of writing advice I ever received was simple, but so true (the best advice always is): Just let go. Don’t worry so much about what you want it to be. Just let it happen. And of course I thought, at the time, that I could “let go” by working really hard to seem effortless. “Letting go” was also just a matter of elbow grease and opportunity and trying really hard. “Letting go” was definitely not the same thing as “giving up”, because why have dreams at all—for your stories, for yourself—if you choose the path that goes away from them? That just makes no sense.

And yet. And yet. Turns out that this is pretty damn good writing advice. Turns out that it works well in real life too. Turns out that letting go, in real life, sometimes feels just like giving up, in the same way that acknowledging that your story might do better with a different theme—or scene, or point of view—can sometimes feel like a defeat.

But who knows what wonders might await? Who knows when you’ll find yourself surprised by a glorious sunshine-y day, once more in love with words, with writerly friends and loved ones only a short distance away? Who knows when those long days of solitary slogging in front of your computer (not that they ever go away, not really) will start bearing fruit? A year or so ago I read an article about how Jeffrey Eugenides slogged away five years during his twenties—five years during which, apparently, nothing much happened at all. He wrote. He worked. That's about it.

[Note: I could be making things up, here. I've tried to find the article in which the original reference appears, and I can't. Ergo, any horrendous misquotes and mistakes in referencing here are entirely my fault. One hundred percent.]

In other words, he put in the time. And then things started happening. I wonder if he found himself letting go at some point during that timespan. Did he, too, bow his head in surrender to what was waiting for him as opposed to what he wanted? Did his writing explode as a result?

Will mine, I wonder?

Will yours?

Writers On Writing

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 02:21:00 +0000

I feel like articles like this get featured and re-circulated every few months or so, but I couldn't help smiling when this Guardian article showed up in my morning Twitter feed today.

Aren't we writers an amusing bunch? The image of Will Self masturbating under his desk definitely put a smile on my face.

And I like sense of freedom that Colm Tóibin's rules ("No going to London ... [and] no going anywhere else, either.") set off in my heart. Oh, to be a recluse who pounds out five thousand words a day!

Recovery, Fangirling, and Literary Mischief

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 17:15:00 +0000

Finally -- the cold seems to have retreated in defeat. Hallelujah! Though I still have this cough that sneaks up every now and then. I feel like I'm emerging back into the world from a germ-induced fog. Back to the computer. Back to the notebook. Back to the words.

Even awash in sickness and snot, though (aren't I painting pretty pictures for you today?) somehow I still found time to get up to literary mischief during these past few weeks. Fun times!

1) Literary Luncheons and Other Endeavours

For years now, ever since I spent time in Edinburgh and got to experience the magic that is their literary salon, I've had a dream. A dream of an opening and welcoming space for writers that isn't quite as official as a literary salon (going to a salon all by your lonesome is terrifying) but isn't just a meet-and-greet-free-for-all either. I want to meet other writers, the dream went, and I want to do it over yummy food. I mean, what could be more perfect than that? So I resolved, years ago, that when I was finally in a space of my own and had the means to do so (this is key, since I had hardly any means at all, of any kind, when I was in Scotland), I would host a literary lunch.

A literary lunch? How exactly, one might say, is that different from a literary salon? I suppose it isn't that different, in a way. It's still a space for writers and readers to get together and network -- it just happens slightly earlier in the day. But I gambled on the fact that I was hosting said lunch in my teeny tiny (but wonderful, oh so wonderful) apartment. There's only so much pomp and circumstance one can sustain when you're in a space sans couch, when people have to sit on the floor and eat with their hands. This is what I figured, anyway. So I took the plunge. I posted an ad on Kijiji, advertising said lunch, sat back, and waited to see if anyone was crazy enough to respond. I also talked about the lunch on Twitter, and put out Twitter feelers to see if any of my tweeps were interested in coming.

And wouldn't you know it, but people were interested! Excited, even. And they promised to bring food as well! So time went by, and I drew up my menu, and on Saturday, March 17th, Hamilton had its very first Literary Lunch.

It was a grand success. There were seven of us there in total, a mishmash of writers and booklovers and artsy types. My apartment was more than big enough for everyone. No one minded sitting on the floor. (I did have extra chairs, and we made ample use of those.) And for people who had never really met each other face-to-face prior to the day (some of us knew each other from Twitter, and I had been lucky enough to meet two of the ladies who came at previous engagements), we all got along swimmingly well. I got to see the folks behind Not My Typewriter, and Lay Off The Books! It was fantastic. So fantastic that we've decided to make a monthly thing of it. The Lit Lunch for April is being held at the home of one of the girls who came to this inaugural event (her name is Sara, and you can find her here), and we have big plans for literary-themed things later in the year. Fun fun! So, you know, if you're in Hamilton (or heck, from Toronto, or anywhere, really) and feel a hankering for some of the Lit Lunch fantasticness, keep an eye out on this blog. I'll be blogging and talking details about the next one soon enough. Hopefully it's just the first step towards strengthening Hamilton's network of writers and readers and booklovers galore.

One of the girls who came, too, just happens to be opening a bookstore in Hamilton later this year. So we got all giddy and bookish talking about that. I foresee great things from this Lit Lunch phenomenon. I'm so glad I did it. And I hope that I get to host another lunch at my place at some point in the summer, so I can make use of my lovely little patio!

2) Pivot Reading Series

Back in the spring of 2011, when I was living at home with my parents and trying not to splinter under the constant barrage of rejections from publishers, I read an essay in the Spring 2011 Nonfiction Contest Issue of PRISM International. The essay in question was "Missing In Action", by Ayelet Tsabari, and I loved it so much that when I finished reading the essay I instantly Googled Ayelet's name and read everything I could about her. I devoured her website and decided that my own website was definitely in need of a revamp. Then I decided that Ayelet was my new favourite name, even though I didn't know how to pronounce it. (Eye-let, like the fabric? Eh-let? What?) Then I read "Missing in Action" again, and cried, because it was incredibly obvious to me that my own life would never be one iota as interesting as the life of this woman. And then I cried because it was also incredibly obvious that I'd never be as a good a writer as she was, either. And then I cried because my novel was being rejected left, right, and centre, and I was penniless and living with my parents, and I'd never been to Goa, and would probably never travel anywhere again ever, nor would I make money, make anything at all of myself, live on my own again, or do any of the exciting things that normal people do, because I was a failed writer doomed to walk her parents' dog along a quiet country road for all eternity. The End.

Anyway. As we all know, eventually I got a job, moved out of my parents' house, and started climbing back to the front of civilization again. I kept writing. I got that lovely little acceptance from ECW. I put "forthcoming novel publication" on my CV, and started to think that maybe this writing endeavour wasn't hopeless after all. Etc. etc.

And then, one day early this year, Ayelet Tsabari started following me on Twitter.

Ayelet. Tsabari. Followed. Me.

Honest to God, it was like being followed by a movie star. So I instantly followed her back, and sent her a little direct message saying how much I loved her essays. And she wrote back almost right away, and suddenly I was bantering back and forth with Ayelet. Tsabari.

And. Then. She said, "Hey! I remember your work -- I read Evolution when it was published in PRISM and loved it!"

Cue heart explosion, right there. We're funny little creatures, we writers. (Or maybe I am just stranger than most. It's a definite possibility.) That nod from a writer you admire is the greatest elixir ever.

ANYWAY. The upshot of all of this was that Ayelet and I decided that we definitely needed to meet and have a literary lunch of our own at some point in the year. And when I heard that she was going to be reading in Toronto at the end of March as part of the Pivot Readings Series, I decided that I just had to go. The cool thing about that, too, was that a friend of mine from my UVic days, the poet and short story writer Caroline Szpak, was now living in Toronto, so I decided to make a grand night of it and see them both at the Pivot Reading on March 21st. And that, my friends, is exactly what happened.

I'm guessing that I've gushed enough, and am now probably verging on creepy, but suffice to say that the night was wonderful. It was so lovely to see Caroline, and catch up (and she gave me a copy of her chapbook! And it is amazing! I am blessed and so lucky to be surrounded by so many talented people), and meeting Ayelet in person was just amazing. We have mad plans for a lit lunch of our own sometime soon, and I'm a giddy kid at Christmas just thinking about it. She's a great reader, and if you find yourself in Toronto you should definitely look and see when next she's reading, because it will totally be worth your time. I guarantee it. Her collection of short fiction, The Best Place on Earth, will be coming out with HarperCollins in the spring of 2013 (which is also cool, because it means that our books have the same birthday season, hurray!), and if you don't know it already, you should definitely hear her story of how it came to be published.

And I should stop fangirling now, I think. Moving on.

3) Last but not least ...

I, erm, appear to be on the shortlist for PRISM International's 2012 Short Fiction contest. Happy dance! What a nice email to receive. I'm sharing spots on the shortlist with a host of really talented writers, so just being in their company makes me all warm and fuzzy. Huzzahs all round.

And just think: a year ago I was unemployed, penniless, living at home, and worried that things would never happen. Now, here I am, surrounded by the richness of new friendships and words. Moral of the story? Who knows what goodies the future might hold ...

In Which The Mean Reds Make An Appearance

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 02:05:00 +0000

[Side note: when I first started typing this blog entry, I mistyped it as 'The Mean Reads". Isn't that grand? Sounds like some sort of vicious literary contest.]

You know those days when you get the mean reds?

The mean reds -- you mean like the blues?

No. The blues are because you're getting fat and maybe it's been raining too long, you're just sad that's all. The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you're afraid and you don't know what you're afraid of. Do you ever get that feeling?
(Breakfast At Tiffany's, 1961)

In the fall of 2003 I sat in on a reading that Ann-Marie MacDonald gave at UVic. She read from her novel As the Crow Flies, and she was, predictably, spectacular. Dramatic, engaging, hilarious -- everything you could possibly want in a speaker. She also gave a great Q&A after the reading. When someone asked her about her next project, she just sort of smiled and held her hands up in the air.

"I can tell you one thing," she said. "It's not going to be a novel. I hope I never have to write another novel. In. My. Life."

Of course everybody laughed. Most of us, I am sure, thought she was joking. (I did.) We thought she was joking even as she went on to say things like, "I find writing a novel to be one of the most horrible, painful things I've ever experienced."

Joke! Haha! Hilarity! Smiles all around. I'll admit to a tiny sliver of incredulity at the time. I didn't believe her. Ms. McDonald, the two-time bestselling novelist, hated writing novels? Tosh, as they'd say in Britain. Complete and utter bunk. Maybe she found aspects of it unpleasant -- who the hell doesn't -- but to hate it enough that she never wanted to write another novel? Silly. Didn't she have ideas? Didn't she have other thoughts as to The Next Book, or even The Next Book After That? Didn't she have moments of blissful joy at her computer screen? Didn't she ever think, this is totally freaking awesome? Didn't those totally freaking awesome moments justify -- indeed, didn't they almost require -- the creation of another book? What would she do if she didn't write another novel?

Obviously, the answer is: lots of things. Ann-Marie MacDonald does lots of things, and she does them all very well. And wouldn't you know it, but we're almost ten years down the road now and there has yet to be another novel. And now I find myself saying: good for you, Ann-Marie. Good for you.

We're all acquainted with the reality of novel-writing as a more-often-than-not-unpleasant business. Sure. But sometimes I forget how forcefully we writers kick and scream against the pressure of the Novel Gods. How much we wail. (If you are in fact unaccustomed to how much authors wail, start following this blog. You'll get the idea inside of ten minutes.) How much we despair. How truly terrible -- and I mean that, in every possible sense of the word -- the business is at times. Sometimes, in the cozy warmth of little publications here and there and meeting other folk of the writerly tribe, it is possible to forget how awful the act of writing can be.

Today I almost dissolved into a snot-ridden mess at the computer. I don't know what started it, but suddenly I was ABSOLUTELY CONVINCED that my time was up. That it had in fact never started, that the train would simultaneously never arrive and yet (in an astounding display of physics) had already managed to disappear in a puff of tired clichés and lackluster verbs. Done. I was finished. FINISHED AS A WRITER, BY GOD. It was just that simple.

Sometimes you want to say to the Leafs: guys, give it up and golf 365 days a year. And sometimes you want to say to yourself: dude, put the dreams away and start being useful. You are No Good. You've had Extraordinary Luck, but your period of sunshine is over and now it's time to Get Real. You will never Be Anything. You will never Write Anything. Your new novel Stinks. You are Garbage. You are Garbage enough that you feel the need to capitalize everything, thereby adding Weight and Gravitas to the pithy little worries in your pithy little life.

Etc.

Of course, soon enough Twitter (because I am incapable, it would seem, of soldiering through these bouts alone, which is another thing to feel guilty about, but whatever) came to the rescue. I tell myself: it's just a draft, and genius can come later, said one friend. Don't give up. Tell your inner critic to shut up and just keep going, said another.

Read something amazing and aspire, said one more. And when I gloomily shot back with, But what if you read something and you just think, "Why even bother?", said friend gave me exactly the tough love answer required.

That's wanton self-destruction. Stop it.

Indeed. Stop it, Amanda. So you're afraid of that niggling "what if". So what? You do not, as dear Sugar once said, get to decide all that much about your work apart from the actual working of it. You don't get to have control over anything except those words that you put down. Who thinks "why bother"? Givers-up, that's who. You KNOW that. So the mean reds have descended. So what? You know what you're afraid of -- you're afraid that All 'Twill Be in Vain. But what does that mean, exactly? Sure, you want to be a successful writer. One day. Maybe. If the gods are kind. But you also want to be a good writer, even more than you want to be a successful one. (And while we're at it, what exactly does "successful" mean, anyhow?) And you're slogging through these moments of unease and icky self-pity and doubt and horribleness precisely so that you can be a bad writer, and learn from there how to be a good one.

As it happens, that friend of yours so ready with the tough love also had this wisdom to say: most sports teams need to spend a certain amount of time being bad before they can be any good. They need to start the team from the ground up, and grow together as a unit. (This was, by the way, a separate conversation, but lo and behold, it fits! AND SO I'M PUTTING IT IN.) The Leafs haven't done this. The franchise is too much of a machine -- they'll sell the arena out anyway, win or lose, so why bother putting in the extra time and effort? Why bother going through the slog? Except that you don't build a winning team that way. That's not how it happens.

Okay, so the metaphor isn't perfect. I'm not talking about winning. Obviously. But how easy, truly, to forget that small fact of the matter: we're always spending time being bad, we writers. You slog through the angsty poetry of your teenage years in the hopes that one day you'll finally start to understand how words go together. You put in the time. You get better. And as you get better, you realize that you'll never actually put those angsty terrible words, or those clichés, or those purple phrases aside, not quite. You weed them out, sure, but drafting will forever be the process.

I do know what started the emotional dissolve today, actually. I almost-dissolved because I was working on a scene and trying to think of exciting verbs and nothing -- absolutely nothing -- was coming to mind. My verbs were dull. My words were all dull. It was but a short jump from that trembling place to the Horrible Pit of ALL OF MY WRITING IS DULL, AND WILL NEVER GO ANYWHERE, SOB SOB.

But it's just a draft. That's all it is. I'm not under deadline. I'm not about to shoot this off to my agent. (Thank the fiery gods for that.) It. Is. Just. A. Draft. Like my friend said: the genius can come later. Besides -- you want to be a good writer, yes, but even more than that, even more than wanting to be a good AND successful writer, Amanda, you want to be someone who likes what she does at the end of the day. It's that simple. You love words. You choose, day in and out, to sit down at your computer with your cup of tea because that's exactly how you want to spend your day. You have your Ann-Marie moments of horrible pain, sure. But sometimes you still find it lovely. And isn't that a lucky thing? Think of all the people the world over who don't get to do what they love. Think of that.

So I "stoppited" and kept on writing and repeated the genius mantra out loud, while at work. (Yes. My Real Life workplace affords me time and space to do my own writing. I've laid many a burnt vegetable offering at the altar of the Writing Gods to swing that deal, let me tell you. It also had a lot to do with sheer dumb luck.) And eventually the Mean Reds went away, and I kept on writing, and I tried to worry less about finding exciting words, and then a couple of hours or so later I came across this quote, from this post by Chuck Wendig, and now the serendipitous nature of the day's unfolding is complete, and I can bid you all good night.

Finding the perfect word is as likely as finding a downy-soft unicorn with a pearlescent horn riding a skateboard made from the bones of your many enemies. Get shut of this notion. The perfect is the enemy of the good. For every sentence and every story you have a plethora of right words. Find a good word. Seek a strong word. But the hunt for a perfect word will drive you into a wide-eyed froth.

So there, folks. So there.

The Inertiatic Introvert

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 16:27:00 +0000

A few weeks ago my friend, the writer Will Johnson, posted an entry in his blog about being anti-social. Or, more specifically I suppose, about the tendency toward anti-socialism (if that's even a phrase) that comes when one gets a little older and perhaps not quite as well suited to hard parties every night. The sudden and inexplicable urges to curl up and stay inside the house, even if it's alone. The odd feeling of having to Do Something Worthwhile, and work. The Supreme Satisfaction that comes from a good night's sleep. (When I was thirteen or so, I remember my father once saying, "The best part of my day is when I can crawl back into bed and go to sleep." I'll admit it: I thought he was a very, very sad man.)

But now? Seventeen (shudder) years later? I completely understand.

I mention all of this because the past few weeks have been, well, kind of weird. There's no other way for me to say it. I've worked a fair amount, which has perhaps contributed to the weirdness (although "working a fair amount", these days, does not compare at all to what "working a fair amount" meant three years ago, when I was living in Edinburgh and working an average of 60 hours a week), but I've also done a fair amount of socializing, and writing--aka my work--has completely goten lost in the maelstrom. I haven't written a word of my new novel in weeks. And I find it so exhausting, this not-writing. Exhausting even as I'm out there earning money and being with friends and to all intents and purposes living an excellent, well-balanced life.

Living in Scotland was hard, yes. But more often than not, these days, I find myself thinking back to my "golden period" of time in the country, which would have been the latter half of 2009. What did I do during that golden period? I worked. A hell of a lot. I never went out, because in spite of all that working, I never had any money. And every Saturday, I woke up at six, made myself tea, and wrote for at least twelve hours.

That was all I did -- work and write. Occasionally I went for walks on the beach. What kind of strange person looks back on a period in life such as that and thinks, I wish I could go back there?

Don't get me wrong. I love my new life here in Hamilton. I love it a thousand times more than I expected I would. Every day is a surprise in some way, whether it be through the discovery of a new antiques shop (bye-bye paycheque), or the meeting of new friends, or a delightful new theatre show (side note: if you ever have the chance to see Corin Raymond's "Bookworm", or Morgan Jones Phillips' "Emergency Monologues", do it. Do it, please).

But lately I find myself longing for the anti-social days of yore. Just like Jennifer Egan said, in the article that I've quoted from before and will no doubt continue to quote from ad nauseum, there was a wonderful kind of clarity in being reduced to myself as a writer, and nothing else, while I was in Scotland. There was no room, financial or otherwise, for being any different. There was no room or means to be social. There was no space to be anything other than a girl who worked hard and had the delicious expanse of an entire Saturday to scribble words into her notebook.

Which is so funny, when you think about it. Right now I'm working less than half of the hours that I did in Scotland, and making more money. Most weeks, I have three or four whole days in which to write. I also have the means to go out, and do delicious things like buy antiques and go out for food (though not a terrible amount, I'll admit--I'm not destitute now, but neither am I rich) and go on bus trips to Toronto and away for weekends to Peterborough and contemplate--whilst actually having the means to make a reality--potential road trips to Montreal.

And it's wonderful. All of it. But it's also so very easy to let the writing, the work, slip to the bottom of the pile.

When I was in my third year at UVic, one of my instructors, the wonderful Sèan Virgo, said, "The world will conspire to keep you from writing." I feel like I relive this truth every single day. Here, in this surprisingly lovely little city, where I have a beautiful little apartment and a decent job that gives me space and time to write, and friends who make me laugh and introduce me to new things and keep my cultural heart beating in a way that continues to surprise, the balance of real-life and writing-life seems that much harder to maintain. Counter-intuitive? Definitely. Why am I not writing more when I have more time to do it? Why not? WHY NOT?

And slowly but surely I find myself pining for those times when writing was my only choice. Longing for excuses to shut myself up in my apartment and get the words out. Looking forward to that moment when I, too, can crawl back into bed and stretch out and forget the various stresses of the day. (I feel guilty about saying this, because my father worked very hard his entire life--still works hard, in fact--and even though I also know that the work of a writer is hell-bendingly difficult in its own way, sometimes I still find it hard to admit that I am also tired at the end of the day, when I spend most of my hours sitting in a chair and swearing at my computer screen while my dad most likely spends his day lugging two-by-fours and huge pipes and straining himself in all kinds of physical ways. But there you have it. I'll say it anyway.)

Anyway. Why do I say all of this? Because I haven't even been blogging! It's been more than two weeks since I posted anything of substance. First you get busy, and then you get distracted, and then you get apathetic. Oh, it's been so many days since I did my morning pages. Meh. Oh, it's been x amount of time since I worked on the novel. Who cares? Do I really want to sit down and get immersed in it right now? Or do I want to stay in bed/watch another season of Sherlock/check my email for the millionth time/read someone else's novel/stare at the wall?

I'll take whatever's behind Doors 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, please. Anything but Door #1. ANYTHING BUT.

It's like running. If I go for more than five days without a morning run, it takes me that much longer to get back into the groove. I'll scramble up all manner of excuses to avoid restarting the routine. It's raining. It looks like it might rain. It's less than zero outside. It's more than 15 degrees outside. I feel sick. I might fall and twist my ankle. I COULD GET HIT BY A BUS. I should stay inside and fortify my insides with chocolate. Etc.

And now, here I am. Not running. Not writing. But sooner or later the guilt (you gotta love that guilt, you really do) kicks in, and eventually the routine starts again, somehow. I just need to find that balance. Somewhere between being an incoherent recluse and a super-productive powered word machine. It's there, somewhere. It has to be.

In the meantime, it really is almost -15 outside. And I have a doctor's appointment today. So, uh, maybe the routine will start in earnest tomorrow ...

Well, would you look at this ...

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 17:25:00 +0000

Waiting For An Echo has been nominated in two categories (Best Written and Writing & Literature) for the 2012 Ninjamatics Canadian Weblog Awards! Isn't that swell?

This little blog will be jostling shoulders with a whole bunch of fine, upstanding weblogs from across Canada. The nomination period is open until November 30th, so I'm sure there will be plenty of other nominees cropping up in the ensuing months. I'm so glad Ms. Schmutzie saw fit to get some folk together and celebrate the vast array of talent in Canadian blogging. I am humbled and so very grateful to be included in the bunch.

And -- I get another funky button for the blog. How cool is that?

Two new publications!

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 00:46:00 +0000

So. A funny thing happened yesterday. Was just about to close up shop and make my way to work when a friend posted a rather nice little message on Twitter. Said message read like this:

Got a nice three-part Valentine's Day gift from @fillingStation, with work by @AmandaLeduc, @PainEyre, and @derekbeaulieu.

It was a lightning bolt of surprise. Cliché, but true. Curious as to why? Read on ...

I submitted two pieces to filling Station back in July of last year, and never heard anything back from them. Since they state on their website that their response time is 3-4 months, when October rolled around and I hadn't received anything from them, I figured they'd turned me down. Imagine my surprise, then, to hear, via someone else, that my work actually had made it into the journal. Exciting! Fun!

I thought it was a joke at first, naturally. Or that this friend had somehow misread my name. Maybe the essays in his issue had been written by an Amanda DeLuc. (You have no idea how often people mix up my name like that.) So I sent him a Twitter message to confirm. And eureka--'twas all true! Both essays that I'd submitted to the journal had been chosen for publication. Woot woot!

Of course, adding to the drama (because there's always drama, always) was the fact that one of the pieces, "Mr. Dolittle", had in the meantime been accepted and published somewhere else. So as soon as I got over my elation at the fact that two of my pieces (two! Two at the same time! TWO!) were appearing in an issue, I shot them a wee little email explaining the situation. Also wrote to clarify as to how, exactly, they'd managed to publish two of my pieces without ever getting in touch with me.

It's a bit of a tricky thing, this simultaneous publication business. It was simplified a great deal by the fact that the initial publication had only acquired first-time rights, and also further simplified by the fact that neither publication would be paying for the work. (Sometimes, it would seem, there are advantages to not getting paid.) Anyway, the upshot of it all is the the non-fiction editor sent me a lovely, lovely email right back, explaining that they'd had several staff and structural changes over the past year, and that the magazine had experienced a bit of upheaval in the process and unfortunately allowed some correspondence to fall through the cracks. He apologized profusely for the situation and noted, happily, that there was no issue in reprinting the one piece. Hallelujah.

So! Now I get to add two (two! TWO!) more publications to The List. I'm also chuffed about the non-fiction acceptance. I love writing novels and short stories, but it's very nice to know that I can turn my hand to another medium in a way that doesn't send readers screaming for the door.

In the meantime, work on the new novel continues. Predictably, I have been overcome with a sudden need to delve into a new television series, and am thus spending perfectly usable writing hours scouring the Internetz, on the lookout for my newest Favourite Show. The eminently respectable Will Johnson tells me that Breaking Bad really is the way to go. I foresee many more hours spent in the testing of this noble hypothesis.

On Deadlines (Or, The Delicate Art of Lighting A Fire Under One's Own Ass)

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 16:16:00 +0000

I'd been meaning to write and submit an entry to the Canada Writes nonfiction contest since November of last year. That's when I first remembered the contest. Perfect, I thought. That gives me a good three months to write and work on a piece to submit. Three months? Fifteen hundred words? No problem at all.

Except, of course, that I didn't write the damn essay. At all. I didn't even scribble words into my journal, and I try and write in my journal every day. Nothing. Nothing.

And then February 1st rolled around, and suddenly it was 9pm. Two hours and fifty-nine minutes before the submission period for the contest ended. And I thought, well, heck. Should probably get to that essay now.

Ridiculous, I know. Why even bother? If I hadn't bothered to get myself in gear for this essay in the three months preceding the contest, why in heaven's name would I bother to cram all of that energy in the last three hours before the essay was due? Why not just give up?

Because I'm stubborn, that's why. And apparently because, like so many infinitely more worthy writers before me, there's something galvanizing about having that imminent deadline so close you can see it.

So I sat down and wrote that essay. It ended up being just over 1200 words, and I finished it fifteen minutes before the deadline, which means that from first word to last, the essay took about two hours and forty-five minutes to write. Roughly four hundred words an hour. When I break it down into those numbers, now, it seems slightly less intimidating. I've written four hundred words in an hour before. I've written far more than that, sometimes. (Not often, but sometimes.) Four hundred words an hour, two hundred words every thirty minutes, one hundred words every fifteen. That is not undoable.

What made it different, of course, and exciting, was the fact that I was editing and revising and writing all at the same time. There was something very pared down and spare about that two hour and forty-five minute stretch. I didn't hit that keyboard unless the word I wanted was absolutely essential, and sometimes I took words away even then. There was no I'll try this out, and take it out later if it doesn't work. There was no time.

This, I am sure, is what so many other writers like about deadlines. There's something so liberating, strangely, about being locked into a timeframe with a piece. About forcing yourself to really truly let go of those distractions and just get it done. Hard, yes, but liberating all the same. Of course our relationship with deadlines isn't always so clear-cut -- I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by, said Douglas Adams, and I'm pretty sure every writer everywhere has felt the same at one point or another -- but there's definitely something about having to get it done. Something about lighting that fire under your own rear and saying that's it, no one's playing anymore.

Of course, pared-down nature of the above notwithstanding, there's a very real chance that the essay I wrote won't turn out to be any good. I'm not about to argue that an almost three-hour writing sprint, free of distraction and full of zealous writing mojo, necessarily translates into fantastic writing, at least not all of the time. I do think that that need for editing-as-I-went lent the piece, and the process, a certain kind of clarity and directness that can get lost when you're writing around the distractions of Twitter and The Internetz. But as to whether it is good, as to whether it will win -- well, that's anyone's guess.

Still, I found the whole process inspiring. Nothing like the feeling of flames on your posterior to get those creative juices flowing. And so, dear readers, here's a challenge.

Pick a writing contest. Any writing contest. (Though obviously, if you need to conserve your cash, might be best to stick to those contests with lower or no entry fees.) Want contest ideas? Look here, and here, and here. Note down the deadline of said contest. Slot yourself a three hour window just before the deadline closes. Refuse--absolutely refuse--to write anything in relation to that contest until your three hour window arrives. And then, when it does, sit yourself down in front of your computer and write that gosh darned essay/short/flash fiction piece. Be concise. Be brief. Think hard about your word usage. Remember that there's no time to go back and revise.

Obviously I'm not advocating that you do this all the time. But take your safety net away, just this once, and see what happens. Submit that three-hour piece to the contest in question. And let me know what happens, will you? I'll keep you all posted as to the fate of my little Three Hour Essay. Chances are it won't go anywhere, but now I know, once more, that the words can come right when I ask them. I know that I can edit and write and revise all at once, and get a submission-ready piece under my belt in less than half a day. That's valuable knowledge. It's almost as good as winning a contest!

"Instructions" on WIll Johnson's Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 02:54:00 +0000

Hey kids. Check it out -- Will Johnson has featured Instructions for an Inexperienced Lover on his website. Cool beans. Will is a Vancouver-based writer currently completing his MFA at UBC. He has exciting plans to relocate to Nova Scotia for the summer (in a renovated church, no less), which makes me more than a little envious.

His blog is hilarious (tips on being anti-social, anyone?) and definitely worth checking out. Also, you should definitely, definitely follow him on Twitter. As he says in his entry about my book, that's more or less how we discovered each other in the world. And it's been hella fun.

I love Twitter. Have I gushed about that lately?

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 06:09:00 +0000

Home from a night of volunteering at the swanky Book Lover's Ball. Three things.

1) Guy Gavriel Kay, whose books made me weep as a child and whose novels are still among my favourite reading companions, period, came to me twice and thanked me for volunteering.

2) Margaret Atwood is the tiniest of women, with soft haloed hair and bones like robin's eggs. She wore a lovely blue-green shawl and snuck out quietly at the halfway point of the night.

3) Kathleen Winter is taller and even more beautiful than I could have imagined. How I wish I could have stolen a moment away from my auction table and pulled her aside and said, "Your book changed the world for me." But I couldn't leave my post, and so instead I watched her smile and laugh and look so unbearably graceful as she went about the room, and I coveted her fascinator from afar.

Alas for lost opportunities. Sigh.

FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 02:05:00 +0000

[Or, as the CBC likes to call it, Canada Reads!]

So. Canada Reads is up and running. Can’t you smell the blood in the air, the anger, the hurt feelings? Once more into the drama and the egos and the literary smackdown. Hoo-ha. Some of us are rubbing our hands together in glee … and some of us are throwing those same hands up in disgust. Fun times.

A few thoughts on the drama:

I’d never heard of Anne-France Goldwater prior to this show. But given that the CBC explicitly calls her “Quebec’s Judge Judy”, I don’t think anyone should be surprised that she’s saying inflammatory things on air. Also, let’s remember: Canada Reads might have started out as a show about books, but it has increasingly become a spectacle about the panelists, and how they lead the show. What the CBC wants is viewership, and controversy, and debate, and the formula that they have now for Canada Reads delivers it in spades. Sure – did Goldwater go overboard calling Carmen Aguirre a terrorist? Maybe. But it’s also probably true – to someone, at least. Like Shad said: one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.

Did she go overboard when she called Marina Nemat a liar? I don’t think so. I’m not saying that Nemat deliberately lied in her book, but she did mention, right at the beginning of her memoir, that she altered certain events and people in the narrative. This almost always happens in the case of memoir. Why is anyone acting surprised that she’s getting called out about it? Why do people persist in thinking that memoir, based as it is on human memory (which can be corroborated with research and what not, yes, but still remains fundamentally flawed), is absolutely airtight in terms of how it deals with facts? Anyone who writes memoir (and I include myself in this category) knows that they’re dealing with a version of the truth. So it’s perfectly possible for Nemat’s version of the truth to be different, in subtle ways, from what might have transpired. Sure, Goldwater’s method of delivery in noting this was blunt and forthright and decidedly lacking in tact. Absolutely. But Canada Reads is out for blood, and anyone who thinks otherwise needs a little shaking up. Like I said above, the woman is delivering in spades.

I’m also not sure about Nemat’s rebuttal to Goldwater – both her Facebookpost and her response last night to the Globe and Mail. Nemat argued, first of all, that her book was voted off because it was “popular”, and that the judges were therefore not necessarily concerned with what book had more merit. And then she told the Globe and Mail that the judges needed to be careful with how they handled the voting of this contest, dealing as they were with nonfiction, with personal accounts and stories. “People are putting their souls on the line here,” Nemat said. “You cannot go in non-fiction at someone who’s been tortured or who’s been a revolutionary in South America, who’s invested everything into something that’s of value to them.”

I disagree. I wholeheartedly understand that Ms. Nemat found Judge Goldwater’s comments hurtful and disrespectful, because they were. But, as above, this isn’t some genteel show. It’s not about merit, in many ways. It’s about other things—debate and controversy and viewership. Sure, Goldwater could have been nicer. But then she wouldn’t be Goldwater, and they wouldn’t have invited her on the show.

But the larger issue here, as I see it, is this idea of the books—and, by extension, their authors—being both exempt from heavy critique because of the true nature of their material, and then inherently having merit because of this aspect of reality. What does that mean? That one book might “deserve” to win the contest because its story is … what? More “real”? More harrowing? More interesting to those of us that might not watch hockey or listen to The Rheostatics? Are the judges supposed to pussyfoot around their opinions of the books simply because the characters are actually real people? Are they supposed to coach their decisions in pretty language and let everyone down gently simply because these things have actually happened? Are they supposed to shift their attention away from the merits of the book as a literary narrative and more to the emotional responses that the books may elicit simply because they detail personal struggles?

I don’t think so. The fact that there are personal memoirs contending for the “top prize” just means that, well, there are personal memoirs in contention. It just means, really, that there’s more chance for authors to get offended. That’s all.

I enjoyed Prisoner of Tehran, but in terms of a book that “deserved” to win the competition? Purely on the basis of literary merit alone, I thought it lacked the chops. I found it forthright in its honesty and deeply interesting, but I didn’t find it compelling in the way that I found The Tiger compelling, or all-encompassing in the way that The Game reads, in the sense of appealing to a wide demographic of people, touching on issues that a variety of people can relate to. (Yes, it's a human rights book. Yes, we can all relate to the struggles therein. But the job of the memoirist--and it's a hell of a difficult job--is to reach beyond the narratives of their own tale and connect with the wider world inside that same narrative. I didn't feel that Nemat accomplished that.) I didn’t find it particularly well written, either. When I made up my top five list, I put Prisoner of Tehran at the bottom.

But look--that's just me, saying that. It's a subjective enterprise. And this is why the whole notion of a book “deserving” to win in the first place is ridiculous. This will probably ruffle a whole bunch of feathers, but I’ll say it anyway. As an artist, as a writer, you do not “deserve” to win any kind of accolade at all, ever. (Except perhaps in the case of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and that only because it references a wide body of work and is therefore so much more comprehensive than one single award.) As an artist, the only thing that you “deserve”, in the sense that you’ve worked for something and should receive some kind of recognition, is the ability to continue practising your art. That’s all.

The only thing that books deserve is a wider audience. They do not deserve prizes. I mean, obviously it’s nice and wonderful and lovely when they do get accolades, but how can they deserve them, in the sense that they’re intrinsically more worthy than other books? Who decides what’s more worthy? The judges on Canada Reads will decide one thing; I as a reader will decide another. Anyone who has ever practiced as an artist will know that the whole business is entirely subjective. Entirely. You might be able to get the finer points of craft down; you might be able to produce a work that is technically proficient and even emotionally powerful all at once. But all that that “deserves” is exposure. More readers. That’s it.

This is why the drama associated with Canada Reads both fascinates and frustrates me. As an artist, I think contests are great for garnering more exposure. So many more people will read Prisoner of Tehran and The Tiger now as a result of this debate. And at the end of the day, this will translate into more sales for Nemat and Vaillant and all of the other authors whose books are in discussion. It will mean more money for them, which will mean more time and hopefully more opportunity for them to keep writing. And that, at the end of the day, is what’s most important.

But prizes? Accolades? These are gifts. They are unlooked-for delights. Obviously it’s great if you get them. Obviously, as a writer you want to get them. But you don’t deserve them, at all.

Anyway. Day Two of the contest is now over, and most predictably, The Tiger was voted off. Along with probably 95% of yesterday’s listeners, I pegged that outcome as soon as Goldwater said the word “terrorist”. So it really is about the interplay between the judges now, and the politics therein. I therefore predict that On a Cold Road will be voted off tomorrow, and that the final two will come down to Something Fierce and The Game. And even though they’re not supposed to let this influence them, I wouldn’t be surprised if the judges decide to go for Something Fierce, in the end, at least in part because of what has transpired thus far on the set.

We shall see.I did find the debate today quite interesting, and I liked the fact that the panelists (particularly Shad, who just seems so calm and levelheaded and nice) tried to discuss a wide range of issues pertaining to the books. But. In the end? It's definitely a show about the spectacle. So why, in heaven's name, is everyone all up in arms about it being so ... spectacle-y?

WritBits 4

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 20:53:00 +0000

Holy smokes -- it's been forever since I've done one of these! Cue feelings of Enormous Guilt. (Not that I harbour any illusions of you fine folks languishing in despair about the absence of a writerly info post. That would necessitate the arrival of the Enormous Ego.) But -- it's a new year, filled with more dazzling contests and shindigs and writerly love/fistfights. Just the thought of it all makes me excited.

So, in the spirit of all things resolutions (February isn't too late for optimism, is it? Even in spite of the dreadful dreary weather?), here's some get-up-and-at-em writing tidbits to get you at that page.

1) SLS Unified Contest: The deadline for the 2012 SLS Unified Literary contest is fast approaching. Get your fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction (three cheers for the CNF portion of the contest!) in to SLS by February 28. You can email your entries to sls.contest@gmail.com, or send them in the old-fashioned way -- check the website for their mailing address. Entry fee is ONLY FIFTEEN DOLLARS! Heck, even I can afford that. And most days I can't afford toilet paper.

Moving on ...

(I do actually purchase toilet paper on a regular basis, in case anyone is wondering.)

2) EVENT Magazine CNF Contest: EVENT's annual CNF contest is now underway. And Zsuzsi Gartner is the final judge! Deadline for submissions (maximum length of 5,000 words) is April 15. See the magazine's website for contest details in their entirety.

3) Q's Modern Love Six-Word Story Contest: I've never much been one for Valentine's Day, I'll admit (maybe it's my past life as a server speaking, and the utter horridness of making sure every dining experience is "special" and "unique" for those starry-eyed lovers at your table), but this little contest from CBC Radio's Q put a smile on my face. Taking its cue (ha! pun totally unintentional, BUT AWESOME!) from Ernest Hemingway's famous six-word story, Canada's most popular arts & culture radio show is inviting listeners to submit their own six-word short stories on the theme "Modern Love". See the Q webpage for details -- you can enter in the comments section. Post your entries before February 13. Winner gets their story read on air and a Q prize pack!

4) I've mentioned this website before in a previous WritBits post, but it really is fantastic enough to bear repeating. If you're on the lookout for markets to submit your work, have a peek at Places For Writers. Sublime.

5) And while you're at it, drop by Duotrope's Digest. Again. Sublime.

6) The Sketchbook Project: I found out about The Sketchbook Project via Kathleen Winter's wonderful blog. She's got some lovely sketches on her site, and you should definitely check them out. But I find The Sketchbook Project itself hugely fascinating anyway, just in general. It reminds me of the creative energy that Julia Cameron talks about when she advocates morning pages. I haven't signed up for the project myself, but I might. Will you? What if that creative energy that fuels your words and grammar were to break forth in a picture? What do you think you would see?

7) WritBits from the pros: Nothing like a commandment to make writing easy. Yes? Do this. Don't do that. Avoid this. Try more of that. Etc etc. Here's a delightful article on Open Culture that pulls together some of the best writing advice from The Greats. I'm partial to Peggy's segment, of course. If Margaret Atwood ventures to tell you something about writing, you can be pretty sure it's the holy kind of truth.

8) More WritBits, but with swearing! Struggling with the what, why, and oomph of your short story/novel/literary gift to mankind? Look no further, for Chuck Wendig can help! True, he might tie you to a chair in order to do it, but sometimes we writers must sacrifice comfort for Artistic Success. Behold Chuck's 25 Things You Should Know About Story Structure. Read it. Laugh. Repeat.

9) More Valentine's Day treats: Sugar's Coming Out Party! If you follow this blog you'll know that from time to time I reference a wonderfully wonderfully fantastic advice columnist who goes by the name of Sugar. Her column in The Rumpus is one of my all-time favourite literary pleasures, ever. This despite (or perhaps because of?) the fact that the column makes me cry nearly every single time I read it. Anyway, Sugar has been anonymous for the past year and a half or so, and there's been all kinds of speculation around who Sugar actually is "in real life". (I say that in quotations because, as Sugar herself has said, the anonymity of her column has allowed her to be the truest version of herself.) We know that she's published fiction and memoir under her real name, but we don't know what her real name is. Yet. But all will be revealed on February 14th! Bit envious, for sure. Wish I had the means to get myself down to the States so that I, too, could attend the party.

In the absence of the funds for travel, though, I'll be watching my Twitter stream like a fiend on The Day Of. If you haven't seen the column--or, heck, the magazine itself--I highly suggest you check it out. Delightful stuff. And the essays that they publish are amazing. I'm trying desperately to think of something that I could submit to them, but I fear that my life is just not that interesting. Woe.

10) Iconic Author Accessories: This is a great list--I came across it today, via the wonderfulness that is Twitter. Three cheers for author accessories! My favourite of this list is David Foster Wallace's bandana. I love how very ordinary the origins are. (Likewise for Joyce's eye patch.) Oh, and I also adore Nabokov's butterfly net. Look at that man. He wrote better novels in his second language than I'll ever manage in my first, he taught, and he was a BUTTERFLY EXPERT. So much so that butterfly science is now bowing to the man. I mean, what's the point in trying to go about one's own writing life in the face of that? Why. Even. Bother?

Anyway. What about you? Do you have any authorly accessories of your own that verge on the iconic? This list has inspired me so much I'm tempted to find an accessory of my own ... which would of course undercut the originality and ordinariness of the above. Like I said, my life isn't that interesting. (See No. 9.) I can't even lay claim to an authentic prop. More woe.

11) And on the Famous Author theme ... I tweeted about this article some time ago, but I don't think I blogged about it. *Amanda scrolls through blog entries and finds ... nothing. Phew.* And now look -- there's an updated version! The American writer Lizzie Stark recently blogged about what might have happened had other writers done their thing with Twilight. See the original here. And see the updated version here, complete with a TOTALLY OUTSTANDING version of Twilight as written by Dr. Seuss.

See this vamp? This is Ed.
Ed is pale. Ed is dead.

Clear. Concise. Straight to the point as only Dr. Seuss can be. Bravo!

12) Author Addictions: [This post is taking an increasingly list-ish slant. Ah, well. You go where the muse leads, no? Such interesting things one can find on The Internet!] Once you've finished learning about Author Accessories, hop on over here to learn about those invigorating, heathy, inspiring habits that fuelled the masters of yore in their pursuits of genius. Alternatively, let's all have a class in opium, absinthe, and the delicate art of determining the unique flatulence of one's spouse in a roomful of other farty folk. Inspiring. Totally.

So, to sum this post up in one sentence: we writers all start out with good intentions, and then end up caked in drugs. Come on now. Who wouldn't want this life?

In Praise of The Letter

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 23:21:00 +0000

(Okay, so this is kind of like a post I wrote last year, but what can I say? Letters never get old ...)

Have any of you heard about this? I read the article in The Guardian this morning and got all excited, and nostalgic. And then I went to the actual explanation page on The Rumpus (let's just say it -- my new favourite online publication, period) and did a little happy dance.

I love letters. I love everything about them. And anything that can bring them back into the world in a big way is a Most Wonderful Thing indeed.

Ten years ago I moved overseas and lived in England for a year. The Internet had just started to become more or less commonplace -- we had Internet lab classrooms at my campus, and the absolute thrill of email had faded somewhat in light of how useful emails could be. When you're away from home for the first time, that constant ability to keep in touch with family can be lifesaving. (It can also be crippling, which is a whole other post, but I'm happy to report that my family dynamics never fell into that category.) No more waiting days or weeks to get that letter in the mail. I could jot off an email, and bam -- someone, somewhere else in the world, would get it almost right away.

But email was still new enough that letters hadn't faded entirely. I have a whole binder filled with the letters that I got over the course of that year. This month, while I was moving my things around in my new apartment and trying to figure out where everything needed to go, I found the binder. Lost an hour or two or three going through those letters, and remembering how much they'd made me laugh and smile, how delightful it had been to have a real, tangible experience with a friend or a family member who was still so far away.

The strongest postal memory from that year was receiving a package from my friend Heather, who sent me, among other things, three snack-size bags of Mrs. Vickie's jalapeno chips. (You couldn't get them in the UK--in fact, I'm pretty sure you still can't--and I had a major case of withdrawal.) But when she went to mail her parcel to me, the postal clerk told her she couldn't send food through the mail unless it was accompanied by something else. (The rules of Canada Post never cease to amaze me. Like this rule, about mailing baby chicks. Whuh?) So Heather sent me a pair of McMaster gym socks. The socks have been lost to the ages, but the memory remains.

I had two pen pals as a child. The first pen pal was from Russia, and we wrote to each other for four years or so, from when I was eight until I was about twelve. The second pen pal was my aunt, also a novelist, and I have all of these letters in a lovely little binder as well. There's something so ... beautiful about them. We can talk all we want about the efficiency and practicality of emails--and believe me, as someone who checks her email roughly a million times per day, the efficiency of emails is a big point in their favour--but there's something intrinsically beautiful about the art of letter writing. Something incredibly special.

When I sit down with a letter that someone's written--especially if the letter is handwritten, although this applies to typewritten letters as well, to an extent--I'm always bowled over by this thought: someone sat down with pen and paper for an hour, just for me. In our hyper-charged world, where it's the norm to be busy and doing five million things at once, setting an hour or two aside for someone is almost akin to a sacrifice. Why spend an hour (or two) writing a letter to someone when you can dash an email off to them in a fraction of the time? Why bother?

Here's why: because as anyone who's ever received a letter knows, there's nothing quite like that thrill of a letter in the mailbox. What joy, to discover a handwritten note in amongst your bills and flyers! For me it's a complete excuse to drop whatever I'm doing and curl up with those sheets of paper, just as I might curl up with a book. It's a reminder to stop, and slow down, and appreciate what beauty comes from being patient and putting thought and craft into something.

In one of her many interviews last year, Jennifer Egan talked about her experiences traveling in Europe in the early 1980's. This was, of course, during The Time Before Cell Phones. It was also, as Egan noted, the time before answering machines. She describes the experience so beautifully--queuing up for the payphone and waiting alongside other travelers, only to reach the phone, dial your number, and hear it ring and ring and ring. That feeling of waiting in line, she says, paying for the phone and then not only having no one answer, but not being able to leave a message so that they would never know you called. It's hard to fathom what that disconnection felt like. But I'm actually very grateful for it. Because it was extreme. And that kind of extreme isolation showed me that I wanted to be a writer.

I think this is so interesting, and so applicable, in its way, to the dwindling letter phenomenon. Just as the absence of answering machines brought Egan face-to-face with her own kind of isolation, so too, I think, do letters bring us isolation of a kind. They remind us of how physically removed we can be from other people, and yet how inextricably connected to them at the same time. They are at once an homage to the physical world and the mental/spiritual plane--the physical nature of the things that we make and gift and carry with us, and the mental nature of thinking and missing and loving those friends and family members who might be far away. And in this present age of instantaneous everything--instant music, instant communication, instant publication, you name it--the time-traveling nature of physical letters (which are created in the past, in a sense, and come to you in the future carrying news that might already have settled and gone) is entirely unique.

A friend of mine once said that the thing she missed the most about film photography was the anticipation of getting her rolls of film developed. So too, I think, can emails do away with a certain sense of anticipation. Bereft of steady written correspondence, we look at our mailboxes now with little more than dread. (Or maybe that's just me, and my perma-impoverished status of cringing in the face of steady bills.) We don't see our mailboxes with excitement anymore, because emails can bring us everything in less than half the time.

I think it's time, like I've talked about before, to bring the mailbox back in vogue. And so, three cheers to The Rumpus! I'll be signing up to that little letter service of theirs for sure. Imagine getting a letter, addressed just to you, from DAVE. EGGERS. Holy smoke. That's exciting.

Know what else is exciting? Two nights ago, when sleep wouldn't come, I crawled out of bed at midnight and sat down to write a letter to a friend. I mailed it today. Nothing fancy--no special stationery (remember those days? Remember the stationery collections? Sigh...), and a plain white business envelope to address it all. But the simple act of writing the letter felt like the best kind of meditation I know. Maybe if everyone took time to write one wee letter a week, or even one a day, like in this fun challenge hosted by writer Mary Robinette Kowal, we'd find more time in our days for breathing.

PS. If you're on Twitter, and you like letters, make sure you follow Letters of Note! You'll find your faith in pen and paper (not that it was ever shaky, right?) completely renewed ...

This is where it all gets done

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 06:00:00 +0000

I’ve talked about this before, so I’ll try hard here not to belabour the point. But this recent article from Anis Shuvani on the age-old question of whether or not creative writing can be taught got me a-thinkin’, and as is my wont (perhaps unfortunately), I thought I’d share some more of these thoughts on this here blog.

Can creative writing be taught? Can it really?

Mr. Shuvani makes an excellent point in his article, for sure. (The Victoria-based writer Matthew Hooton, via Twitter, called him a “perfectly articulate devil on my shoulder”, and I’d say that’s pretty apt.) Do creative writing programs—particularly those in North America—run the risk of promoting one particular writing style (ie. Hemingway, Carver, Munro, etc)? Perhaps. Do they champion minimalism above all else? In my experience—at least in my North American workshop experience—they did. Is workshop an oddly sadistic, thinly-veiled form of therapy? Maybe. Okay, sure it is. The word cathartic isn’t used to describe the workshop experience for nothing.

But. But.

I take issue with Mr. Shuvani’s neat separation of “craft” and “literature”. Craft is a very revealing term, he says, as though writing were a matter of figuring out the essential components of a story or poem (the novel is typically not taught in workshop, because it's too hard a nut for craft to crack), and duplicating those elements in the comfort of your home. In that sense, creative writing can absolutely be taught. It's just that it's not literature.

He goes on to explain that literature, at its heart, is essentially the study of this messy enterprise called life. Literature is about having, first of all, a broad humanist understanding of the tradition, how vastly oppositional styles of writing have sought to grapple with the same human problems over time, how history and politics have shaped national literatures, how you can not necessarily learn--for that is too reductionist a term--but be challenged by great writers like Chekhov or Tolstoy or Kafka, to create something utterly unique to yourself.

So—okay. Fine. Craft is about the nuts and bolts of writing—the how-to, the steps—whereas literature, according to Mr. Shuvani, seems to be about how we can create something that both speaks to and transcends our specific human experience. Using your particular filter as a writer to imagine something that goes beyond what’s come before you, and manages to speak to the world anyway. Encapsulating how you view the world in a way that other people can respond to, and be affected by.

I suppose his point is that too high a focus on craft puts on in danger of distilling their own particular voice—of submerging their own unique ways of seeing in favour of always checking the right boxes where craft is concerned. Do away with your adverbs, Young Skywalker. Cross out those clichés. Don’t go heavy on description, even if what you really want to do as a writer is detail the hell out of that tree, because no one reads long descriptions anymore. That simply isn’t in. (I’ll never forget the time when one of my instructors told me that the second person, as a voice, was “done”.)

All of this is fine and well and good. I do think that an over-adherence to craft can be dangerous. And I do think, from time to time, that the North American view of writing-as-a-skill, one that can be taught to anyone in much the same way as one might be taught baking, or knitting, or whatever, has a tendency to produce writing that is exceedingly competent and yet lacking in original thought. (I’m quite happy to shuffle a large degree of my own writing in here. One always hopes for improvement, of course, and prays that the gradual discovery of one’s voice yields more originality as time goes on, but I’ve definitely, in my time, produced a story or ten that sounded like every other workshopped piece out there.)

When I was studying in Scotland, my one instructor put it this way. In the UK, she said, we tend to think that artistic capability is something that you either have or don’t. It’s a question of helping people uncover what’s already inside them. She talked a lot about how the good old American dream—the idea that anyone, anywhere, can pick themselves up and obtain whatever they want in life through dint of hard work and time—had a huge part to play in the creative writing workshop boom in North America. I always found her perspective fascinating. I did find the European writing workshop experience quite different from my time as a student in North America. Workshops were much looser, if indeed they happened at all. You were mostly there to read loads of books and write whatever you wanted and take advantage of your supervisors whenever you could. That was it. In comparison to my life at UVic, where I’d had fifteen hours of workshop a week, life in the UK felt like a scary, it’s-all-up-to-you-now vacation. Of sorts.

But all this focus on workshop, and the question of whether or not adherence to craft destorys a writer's sensibility, tends to ignore one small and yet very important fact: your real growth as a writer comes after you’ve graduated. I did five years of academic training in writing—in addition to the twenty-odd years when I’d been writing little bits of nothing whilst growing up—and I think I can safely say, now, that my real growth as a writer happened once I was finally out of school. What taught me the most? Living on my own. Living overseas. Working sixty-hour weeks in Edinburgh and scribbling late at night. Never (ever, ever) having any money. Walking dogs for food. Crying in the middle of a nice café in Paris. Being lonely in Amsterdam. Being lonely everywhere. Locking myself in my apartment on Saturdays and working on my novel. Taking minutes at board meetings and thinking about dialogue. Zoning out of conferences and having imaginary conversations in my head. Spending non-existent money on writing contest fees. Moving back home with my parents. Never figuring anything out.

Etc. Etc. You get the idea.

Of course, this is only my experience. But those writers who stick with the game after workshop is over—I think there’s a pretty good chance that they’ll grow in monumental ways too. Think about it—you’re only in workshop for a small fraction of your writing career. As nice as it is to have that group around you, ready with feedback (as sadistic, yes, as the experience can be), sooner or later you have to do things on your own. You have to edit your work, by and large, on your own. Sure you’ll have a first reader, or two, or three. And eventually you’ll have an editor, too. But you also have to know, for yourself, whether it works. Writing is a solitary experience. True, finished, “graduated” writing—outside of the academic sphere, in the comfort of your own little home—is entirely self-driven. And so in that sense, yes, the workshop is artificial. In that sense, yes, one can question whether or not a workshop really helps a writer in the long run, especially if a student spends their workshop career trying hard to emulate instead of trying to discover.

But as to whether or not we’re “fucked” because of it? I’m not so sure. For every malleable student that Mr. Shuvani mourns, there will be another student who’ll take those lessons on craft and transform them into something extraordinary. (Never mind the fact that hundreds of writers get published and forge careers for themselves without ever having taken a writing class. It still happens! Gasp! Extraordinary!) Maybe it won’t happen right away. Maybe it will take this student years of “unlearning” in order to get to that point. Maybe the difficulty lies in thinking that four years of workshop can make or break a writer, when in fact what four years of workshop does tend to do, more often than not, is provide a student with tools and memories to hold onto when they go out into the writing world alone.

Plenty of people will leave workshop and leave writing altogether. They’ll probably do it gradually, but leave it all they will. But some writers will go away and live their lives and keep writing—in the early morning hours, around their regular jobs, in their crumbling little apartments. And as time goes on and distances them from the intensity of workshop craft, they’ll find their own ways of saying things. This goes for “workshopped” writers and non-workshopped writers alike. Whether they learn the ins and outs of language through school, or apprentice in another way—working as a journalist, maybe, or sitting in their living room and reading millions of books—all writers learn craft at some point. And eventually they’ll take the elements of craft that resonate most with them and grow and mature and make their stories their own. This is where the real writing happens. This is where and when and how it all gets done. There's nothing wrong with focusing on craft, as long as you understand and acknowledge that craft is only part of it. It's an important part, though.

It's absolutely crucial. Look - if you're going to build a fucking temple, first you have to know how your bricks and mortar go together!

A raise o' the glass to Robbie Burns

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 03:45:00 +0000

I've been thinking about Scotland all day today, and missing Edinburgh like mad. The office windows of the Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature Trust are papered with a variety of poems and quotations about that fairest of bookish cities. My favourite of them all, from the Scottish poet Iain Crichton Smith:

Dear Edinburgh, how I remember you,
your winter cakes and tea, your bright red fire,
your swirling cloaks and clouds

Yesterday my best friend--who's finishing her PhD in Scotland, as it happens--said, "You know what I love best about the bagpipes? That first moment when you hear them, and you can't tell, at first, if you're hearing music, or if it's just the air."

Sigh. Oh, sigh.

I'll get back there one day. I promise.

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 15:48:00 +0000

Tonight, one of the women that I work with came into my office and asked me what my story was. How did I end up at the hospital? Where had I come from? Is this what I had studied? When I told her, no, that it was basically a fluke that landed me in a hospital job at all, and that I'd gone to school to be a writer, she said, "Really? That's so wonderful. You know, I've been working on a collection of short stories for years. They're mostly based on my life, and my experiences, and I have no idea if they're any good, but I'd love to see if I could find a publisher for them one day. I've always thought that when I retire, I'd like to devote all of my time and energy to finishing my stories, and then see if I could get them out into the world."

Isn't that just lovely? Look -- stories find us anywhere, and grab each of us, no matter where we are or what we're doing in the world. Years ago, when I was little, I remember my grandfather purchasing a typewriter for himself because he wanted to write the Great Canadian Novel. Or I remember those stories--you know the ones--of that woman or man who nears the end of their life and sits down to write their memoirs.

I think it's comforting, this knowledge that the written word lies buried deep in each of us. Some of us will hear it more than others, but still--so lovely, I think, to know that it's there.