Zen and the Art of Pad-ing

At the zen centre recently, I found the Master in the kitchen, with his Ipad, or some kind of pad, showing visitors pictures of his granddaughter. Since he speaks little English, he relied on the images and a few words to let us know that this baby lives in Toronto. He showed a video of Eva in brilliant pink, sitting in her chair, eating grapes that seemed huge for her tiny fingers, resting in her mother's lap and laughing at a little dog. Then he showed still pictures that turned out to be single frames captured from the video we had just watched:  Eva smiling, Eva waving, Eva gazing at the brightly coloured mobile above her crib. It was as if he had stopped each moment to dwell more thoroughly in it, which, as I understand it, is exactly the lesson of zen.

I'll read you my story, you tell me yours

The people who attended my first Travelling Book Café opened their lives to me and to each other.

My format for the afternoon was to introduce my new book, You Again, by describing what had inspired the trilogy that this novel completes; then read a bit, parts that demonstrated the themes I wanted people to pick up on, then invite my listeners to tell their own stories.

How incisive a discussion that invitation sparked. Some people I knew and some I didn't told tales of their search for identity, of waiting until  their 30's, or 40's before embracing whom they felt themselves to be; the importance of recognition or non-recognition from mothers. The talk wound around to sisters, especially those from different fathers; then single mothers and the ways they were stigmatized in the days when banks would not approve mortgages, when potential employers considered lone women with children risks instead of assets. How more than one parent had opened discussions of a daughter's future with the phrase "when you're safely married". The crowd ranged in age from late 20's to early 70's, so layers of history unfolded through the speakers.

One person told of growing up with an invalid mother who thought of her daughter as her emissary to the world. Another of how she has been looking for an image that truly reflects her since her mother rejected her when she was a child. The mother of two daughters from two different fathers talked about the sibling rivalry between her girls, how both had courted the favours of the only father who was in the picture. An actress who is caring for her dying father revealed that she cheers him up by imitating the Irish lilt of her late mother. "I have her down to a t-e-a!"

All this, and just outside the gallery where the event took place, in the Mall, a pre-Easter petting zoo attracted a different crowd: parents and kids, some sitting nicely with bunnies or guinea pigs on their laps; others standing outside the fence watching little pigs, and some fluffy headed breed of chicken, beautiful yellow ducklings, and newly hatched chicks snuffle and scratch and gaze back at the spectators with that trust unique to infants.

A few days later, it was not baby animals but the stopping and going of the #9 Broadway bus outside the window of the Heartwood Café that provided the rhythm and the potential to distract. Under the stamped tin ceiling, in the cozy front part of the café, I read the two sections I had read at the gallery, in which Annette and Elfie, (the middle and youngest of Shinny's daughters, who are nearing and midway through their 30's in You Again), contemplate their own identities and their place in the family. But I added a paragraph from the eldest daughter, Lawreen, in which she grieves for the lost identity her daughter's career as an actress had made possible:

            She swallows, works her mouth from side to side, rolls her lips together. But the tears come anyway, and since Ken is not home to ask her what’s wrong, she sits down and gives in. It’s just so stupid. She misses Mariah, her energy, her beauty; she misses the thrill of walking onto a movie set, or into a wrap party, of dressing up, of not pretending to be but actually being someone. The star’s mother, or the second-lead’s mother, or the girlfriend of the lead’s mother. Mariah has not actually needed a chaperone for years, but no one minded Lawreen tagging along. Everyone knew her, the crew, the producers, some of the regular Vancouver actors. She went from vigilant at first, to eventually relaxed, and could sip a cup of coffee and make small talk with anyone. It isn’t her life, it’s Mariah’s; she knows it’s time to back off. But she misses it. Oh how she misses it. What will she do with herself? Now her chest is tight and she’s struggling for air as if she has run a marathon. Could it be asthma?

  

This audience included two women who are both the middle sister of three girls, none of whom have children of their own. And a new thread unravelled from stories about how sisters remember childhood experiences as differently as if they had grown up in two different families. To conclude the evening, a writer friend, Ethel Whitty, read a section from her forthcoming novel, in which the bond between mother and daughter is expressed by the dress the mother sews for her daughter's first dance. The lyrical language itself testifies to their complicated love for one another.


The Travelling Book Café moves onto Toronto first weekend in May; Quebec in June. Have book, will travel.

The Travelling Book Café

The Travelling Book Café heads out for the first time this week, stopping in Gibsons (Windows on the Water, April 12) and Vancouver (Heartwood Café, April 15).

The challenge for authors required to do their own book promotion, which is most of us, is to find a way  to reach readers directly. But at this point in life, I can't pretend to be someone I'm not, and so I came up with the idea of meeting small groups, in neighbourhood cafés or independent bookstores, presenting the book, You Again, and then inviting people to relate to my novel's themes by telling their own stories. I don't know how this will work. One person I invited said she didn't think people would want to publicly reveal their thoughts about mother/daughter relationships; another invitee confessed that she might be too shy to speak in a crowd, even a small crowd. It could be a very small crowd, a handful of people. That would be fine, and if people would prefer to listen rather than talk, that's fine too. But I want to say how writing for me is a way of thinking about things. In fiction the thought process develops, usually unconsciously, through stories employing scenes that show, in this case, the complexity of the relationships between mothers and daughters, sisters and sisters.

Beyond that, I deal with identity. At the beginning, when I first conceived the character and her life for Shinny's Girls, I wondered, what do Shinny's daughters, each from a different father, have in common as sisters? Well of course they have Shinny, and the shared experience of growing up with a single mother, and all that implied in the 70s and 80s, including a judgemental society and, almost always, very low incomes. It was a different world, but we were further along than when my grandmother lived as a single mother, with all the shame I fear she may have felt in the early 1900's.

I hope people will engage with me in a dialogue about these things, and others that come up in the book, including the sub-plot concerning Shinny's grandson Mattie and his escape from a ring of identity thieves.

A wonderful cover from Stephen (p0ps) Harlow; free coffee from the excellent roasters, Strait Coffee; a free book draw... how can I miss?

Before I die..

On the cinder path along the harbour in my small town, someone placed on a fence three chalkboard panels headed with the phrase, Before I Die...

Before I die I want to ... lines end with blanks that people fill in spontaneously.

One recent sunny spring day I saw... I want to love myself. I want to meet my Dad. I want to publish a New York Times best seller. 

I didn't write that. In fact I wrote on the board only once, to say that I wanted to finish my work. But I like to imagine the people who stop there, perhaps when it is dark, so no one can see them expressing their most secret hopes. The girl, I imagine a girl, who printed carefully, I want to love myself. Maybe someone who has never liked her looks, who took the harbour path on her way home from a party where she drank too much beer and regretted having worn the too tight top that showed the bulge around her waist, that her Mom calls baby fat; who said something stupid to a boy she liked, so he laughed drunkenly and made a big deal of it to his buddy. Did you hear what she just said? Lights from the government wharf illumine the blackboard. Sticks of chalk protrude from the tin bucket next to it. Before I die... She sort of wants to die, it would be so quiet. There's enough of a wind that the rigging of certain sailboats clangs against metal masts. No sea gulls screaming, though, not this time of night.

She can't remember exactly what she said,  but she doesn't want to go to school tomorrow, because she'll have to see him and his buddy and the girls who were there, who always wear the right thing. She doesn't want to face them in the hallways, even though they probably won't notice her anyway unless she says something else stupid, like, Here I am! It's me! She doesn't want to go even though she has a chemistry exam, and she needs to keep her grades up if she wants to be considered for a scholarship; it's her last year; this is chemistry 12. Her mom has said all along that she better get a scholarship or plan on a career at Starbucks, so it's been like, there, that goal, and she always does her homework, and she mostly pays attention in class, except when she stares at the periodic table chart on the wall and wonders to herself why the random chemical elements she is made of have not and may never come together into a compound she likes. Even loves.

As for the, "I want to meet my Dad," when I turned around at the end of the cinder walk and started back, a young mother was strolling with her little girl, holding her hand as the, perhaps, five year old child balanced along the low cement wall between the water and the land. "It's because," she said to the child, "he had not had a good relationship with his own father, and so..." The little one was listening, but I hurried past.

Rainy day musings #739

There are big holes in my knowledge of literature and as life speeds by I'm trying to fill them. If I were a scholar, I would do this methodically, but I'm only a curious person and The Aeneid, which I have just finished re-reading, has got me thinking about Gods.

If you replace the word Gods with the word spirits, there are similarities between the worlds of the Greeks and Romans and aboriginal cultures in North America. For example, the orenda is a supernatural force believed by some tribes, such as the Iroquois, to be present in, to animate, all objects and persons. About the same time I was reading Virgil, Joseph Boyden, the author of a novel called The Orenda, was explaining the concept in various radio interviews. I have The Orenda on order, so can't yet say how the concept plays out in his historical novel, but it sounds similar enough to the polytheism of the ancient world to have me wondering what polytheism offers over monotheism

While acknowledging that I am simplifying in a way that would drive classicists (and aboriginal culture scholars) crazy, it seems to me that the relationship between the Gods and humans was reciprocal. Aeneas was pious, brave, loyal, and so when he got into trouble on his journey to Italy, the Gods stepped in to help. His enemies destroyed his ships, but instead of letting them fall to the bottom of the sea, the Gods transformed the ships into maidens that swam beneath the waves until they were needed again and turned back into ships. Because of the love of his mother Venus, when it seemed that Aeneas's cause would be lost, his mother asked Vulcan to fashion armour to send to Aeneas so that he could win the battle and ultimately triumph over Turnus. 

"Aeneas rejoiced at these gifts from the goddess and the honour she was paying him... the terrible, crested, fire-spurting helmet, the death-dealing sword, the huge, unyielding breastplate of blood red bronze like a dark cloud fired by the rays of the sun and glowing far across the sky.... " (The Aeneid, Virgil, a prose translation by David West).

I like it that the relationships between the Gods and the mortals were direct and particular. Today when someone, especially a non-aboriginal person, talks about honouring, let's say the forest spirit, or the spirit of a salmon, they might be dismissed as hippies or wackos. Considering that polytheism existed way longer in human history than monotheism, you'd think that we'd want at least to hedge our bets.

Most of us crave to know why things happen - natural disasters, personal tragedies, unexpected turns in fortune, and as science took over the role of providing answers to much of what we want explained, there was a move to one god. Thing is, science has changed; instead of the more linear cause and effect world of Newtonian physics, relativity has come into it. Explanations are more complex and include the factor of randomness.

I wonder if our contemporary understanding of nature will wind us back to the time when honouring the spirit behind the person, the tree, the ocean, will become important once again in a way that makes us more aware of our personal responsibilities.

Lessons from an indie musician

On a recent trip to New Orleans, I chanced on a performance by Helen Gillet and her band at the Three Muses.

I was looking for what I described to the doorman as interesting jazz, and he recommended I come back for the 9 o'clock show. Helen, a cellist, and her group, which consisted that night of a sousaphone, a clarinet and ... (I forget the fourth instrument), delivered a set that charmed me with its rhythms, playfulness, and the novel combination of sounds. On the way out, I ran into Helen, taking a break, and thanked her and she recommended that I come to Bacchanal where she performs regularly on Monday nights. So I did, and when she announced that she was going to be touring the northwest,  and was willing to do house concerts, I wrote down my email and invited her to stop in my town, a ferry ride north of Vancouver.

Short version is that in middle of February she started out from Louis Armstrong airport with a roadie and her equipment in a rented car, and drove across Highway 10 to Joshua Tree, south of San Diego, then headed north, stopping at various venues along the way and eventually arriving in Vancouver for a show at the The China Cloud on March 1.

The next day she sailed over, and that night performed for a petite but wildly enthusiastic audience at Boomers Burger Bar. The Boomers group may have been her smallest audience, maybe not, but it didn't matter to the quality of her work. She played with all the passion and inventiveness I admired when I first saw her on Frenchman Street, and the next day, after a walk on the beach, she packed up to continue onto Denver and Kansas City, and finally back to New Orleans, where she had a date around St. Patrick's day.

I admire her not only for her musical chops, but also for her go-for-it spirit, the way she maintains contacts, works hard to organize a tour and then drives herself all over the continent to play for most any audience of most any size. She feels comfortable as an indie musician, managing herself, promoting her work, producing cd's she describes as self-released.

That's like self-publishing, really, but self-releasers are better accepted - even considered cool - in the established music world. In the literary world there lingers that stigma of vanity publishing, and I can't say that I have been able to entirely shake it, despite joining the leagues of self-publishers with my latest novel You Again. Maybe I'm the wrong generation. I hear about committed, adamant and successful self-publishers (Cory Doctorow) and read rah-rah self-publishers on the various sites I peruse each week. I agree with the principle of being an independent, and, now, having set up a couple of dates to introduce the print version, I'm working to feel just as confident about presenting You Again as I did about the previous two novels in the trilogy, Shinny Girls and Flashing Yellow, which were published the conventional way. Here goes!

What are you doing for the apocalypse?

Have you noticed how the climate change discussion has changed?

 I first heard the biologist and broadcaster David Suzuki talk about global warming at least 20 years ago. In his old testament prophet fashion he used to warn that we had ten years to alter our ways, or the trend was going to be irreversible. Of course more than ten years have passed and the agreements nations made to reduce the probability of radical climate change have seldom been honoured.  A glaciologist friend, Garry Clarke, recently finished a report which demonstrates that most glaciers will be gone in a hundred years. Amazingly, deniers persist despite all the dramatic evidence to the contrary.

Depressing, eh? But wait. Lately I've been seeing more discourse on how best to live through the calamities sparked by global warming, the floods, the droughts, the heat waves. My nephew Jeremy Hays, for one, wrote about the importance of social capital in a Huffington Post article

The observations he makes about self-sufficiency and neighbours relying on neighbours may ultimately be more useful than the practical suggestions included in a somewhat  tongue-in-cheek article in The Guardian.

Wondering how the imminent, potentially catastrophic scenarios are being reflected in literature, I scanned Wikipedia for apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction and found a huge list, organized by year, and featuring more films, TV shows and games as the numbers move towards then past the millennium. Among the novels listed are classics by some great writers, including those who were my favourites when I was reading sci-fi, i.e. Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, John Wyndham. But also writers better known for realism, like Walker Percy and Margaret Atwood. Not all the literary apocalypses have been generated by eco disasters; some have been precipitated by war or technical failure. There has to be an entire sub-genre inspired by visions of a nuclear holocaust. I remember Jonathan Schell's "A Republic of Insects and Grass," though that is non-fiction.  Now a new sub-genre, "cli-fi," as writers react to potentially bizarre worlds created by momentous transformations in the usual. The hope is that literature may be able to convince those skeptics whose eyes scientists have not been able to open.

The effects of nuclear war are immediate; global warming occurs more gradually, and people respond accordingly. At the opposite end of the spectrum from optimistic activists like my nephew, there are those who are not sure why their lives are different and wonder how they can cope. I read about a new kind of sadness, called "solastalgia," which describes people who feel homesick even when they are home because the place around them has changed so much. The researcher who coined the word was studying the effects of long-term drought on people in eastern Australia. The same term has been applied to Inuit in Canada's north.

That such studies exist, dismaying though their discoveries can be, suggests that we have accepted the inevitable and are now thinking of ways to adapt. Seems it's not too early to be making plans for an apocalypse that is well underway.






 

How Can I Explain?

What do you do, the lady from the insurance company asked. Simple enough question. I'm a writer, I said. She was filling out an application for house insurance, a renewal actually, and, as she explained, the insurer needs to understand its potential liabilities.  Since there was nothing in my file that had  identified me as a writer before, she wanted to know what kind of writer I was, a journalist?  Someone who might be sued for libel? No, a writer of books and plays, mostly fiction. So you produce a book about once a year? Oh, no, it takes much longer for me. Perhaps an average of three years per book. Maybe longer. What kind of books? Literary fiction. And how would you describe that, she continued. Given that she was trying to imagine my writing "business," I used a comparison. If I were seriously in the business of writing, I would write romance novels, or inspirational books, or fantasy, because those genres are the most likely to find a paying readership. Literary fiction is something one writes for the sake of the work itself; art and craft values are more important than the work's commercial value.

Oh yes, I see, she went on. You used to be a teacher but now you're at a point in life where you want to do something for enjoyment.

Um, it's not exactly like that... I've been a writer my whole life, since well before teaching. That I had published books of short stories won me the teaching job in the first place. It's not so much for enjoyment that I write, though I do enjoy it in a complicated way; it's what I do, who I am.

I was tempted to invoke literary superstars whose names she might know, whose books she might have read. But of course it would be hubristic to put myself in the same category as Faulkner, or  Tennessee Williams, or Alice Munro, even if we all probably started from the same place.

Still, if you make any money at it - and I make some - it's a business, she concluded, despite my arguments about what I do being art more than business. Not that I would not like to earn more from what my tax form lists as a "story writing" business; not that some literary fiction writers do not do extremely well for themselves. In my case, though, it is more a life I have made than a living.

The issue has come up before, and I usually find myself depressed after trying to explain to a businessman (to whom I was applying for project support), or an accountant, or, now, the insurance company representative, why I would persist in something so obviously unprofitable. It's hardly a good business plan. The thing is, in my opinion, to make my "business" profitable I need a broader vision, sharper scene development, better sentences, more patience to wait for just the right word. These are the things that will make my writing better. Better writing might attract more attention, I might sell more books. In theory, the possibilities are boundless. Yet, if I could buy the qualities I need to invest in my work, and write them off as business expenses, would the insurance company cover me for losses... of concentration, originality, perseverance, brilliance? We all know the answer to that one. There are immensely valuable things that money can't buy and insurance can't cover, no matter how the corporate world tries to manipulate definitions.

Leonard Cohen

When the kids were old enough to drink wine and they were all - him and her and the kids - sitting around and talking, his tales became more revealing. There was this one time, he began, and continued to tell a story about a woman he had known, who had introduced him to Leonard Cohen's poetry... oh yes, she had a book of it, which she read to him from, and it was beautiful; but, more than that, she had slept with Leonard. She called him Lenny.

They weren't actually kids, but to their elders, early twenties is still kid-territory. On the other hand, they were all drinking wine, and so he talked on, heading somewhere she wondered if he would really go.  As it turned out, he told the kids, the woman who read the poetry smoked a certain brand of cigarettes she could get only in a town across the border, 60 miles away. She said she would give him anything he wanted if he would drive her, and so he said yes.

The kids were not exactly hanging on his every word, but they were interested. She, though, had heard the story more than once before and knew the payoff, and as he described the tavern where he and Leonard Cohen's ex-lover had stopped all those years ago when he was about the same age as the kids, she considered reminding him of his audience.

Because how much would these kids, his kids, really want to know and if he repeated the same line she knew, from having heard it repeated, how would they take it?

Before he got to that point, however, his son broke in to ask a question, something she could not remember later because all she could think of is that maybe the son had sensed that he did not want to listen to what came next, not the details, not the rim shot that would make his dad sound like an old man boasting nostalgically of past triumphs. Unless he could convince them, the kids, that he really once was as dashing and perfectly attentive as the Leonard Cohen women used to fantasize about while listening to one of his plaintively romantic ballads. Women who wished that Lenny would touch their perfect bodies with his mind, just as he had touched Suzanne's. Women whose bodies were, perhaps, perfect only in their minds.

 Instead, the conversation snaked around what might have been a pothole in the middle of the road, which could have damaged the undercarriage, and moved along the harmless aggregate, rolled smooth, where no memories had yet been created.

When you need a friend, try Steinbeck's Journal of a Novel

Seventy-five years ago, as the world was rising out of the Great Depression right into a new world war, John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath.  That novel and others concerned with the big issues of the century - and this century, too, given the gap that not only still exists but has possibly widened between rich and poor - helped to form the social conscience I was developing in my teens. It was a big book for me in that sense, not the first of Steinbeck's I'd read. I went on to love others, the characters and setting of Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday being favourites.

Years later, when I was working on my first book of short stories (Suburbs of the Arctic Circle), a friend recommended another Steinbeck book, but non-fiction this time; the diary Steinbeck addressed to his editor, a passage for each day, which was later published, virtually unedited, as Journal of a Novel: the East of Eden Letters.

It's a great book for a working writer to dip into midstream, especially during not a block exactly, but a stall. Steinbeck's thoughts are so intimate, it feels like you're listening to a friend, maybe an old friend you haven't seen in some time, who is a writer, too. Of course this is because Steinbeck was addressing his thoughts to an actual close friend and confidant, Pascal Covici, someone to whom Steinbeck could confess his worries about his sons, his health, the details of resettling in NY:  "Such excitement a red rug can cause in a house you wouldn't believe. And now it really is time to go to work." His occasional impatience with "the scene" that Covici, an editor at Viking's New York offices, knew well.

My edition of the book has examples of Steinbeck's clear but small handwriting. He wrote the novel on one side of a lined paper notebook, and the journal entries on the other..in PENCIL! Sometimes he got ahead of himself, particularly in the beginning, when his story was just starting to come, and the journal entries filled more pages than the actual story. Though repetitious in parts, as he tells himself (and Covici, and we readers) again and again why he's writing the novel and what he is trying for, it remains a fascinating look into the mind of a writer whose very name has always evoked humanism for me.

Here are some excerpts:
"A good writer always works at the impossible."

""Lord, this is a complicated book. I hope I can keep all the reins in my hands and at the same time make it sounds as though the book were almost accidental."


"I am breaking pencil points today -- overvehemence. This is usually the thing that happens at first, before a connection establishes."

"I drank too much on Saturday night and had a hangover on Sunday, a fine depressed hangover in which nothing seemed any good and I myself seemed the most no good of all."

"..a story has a life of its own. It must be allowed to take its own pace. It can't be pushed too much. If it is, the warp shows through and the story is unnatural and unsafe."

"A chapter should be a perfect cell in the whole book and should almost be able to stand alone."

I could go on and on. Every once in awhile when I'm in one of those stalls that compel me to step back and ask why and if and how, I remember the bookshelf where Journal of Novel lives, and take it out, look over a few pages, and then... it really is time to go to work.

Birdiness

Here on the west coast of Canada, spring has declared its intention to once again astound us. Purple crocus open when the sun beams on my yard, snow drops gradually lift their finely patterned white faces, daffodils gather in buds that will burst into buttery trumpets when the temperature is consistently warmer.

But what I've really been noticing are the birds: a thrush surprising me when I thought it might just be a dead maple leaf skittering across the stone path; little brown wrens, fat even at this time of year, their tails like pinky fingers scribbling at the sky behind a bare branch; creepers pecking at the moss on my Siberian elm. Just now, on my walk up the hill, I felt almost threatened by the breathy whir of the ravens flying over, beaks full of what looked like building material for nests, squabbling with other ravens in a part of the forest I couldn't see. They flew so low, their voices so loud, so menacingly squawky. On the beach, oyster catchers trot, their long curved red bills poke, their shrill whistles pierce a cloudy afternoon. A robin lands on a driftwood log. The ubiquitous seagulls, but more of them, it seems. Rafts of golden eye ducks, the males so crisply black and white that when they turn a certain way I might be seeing the crest of a cranky wave. Herons hunched into their necks.  A bald eagle sweeping towards the ferry terminal, wings outstretched on an up draft. Two human friends make sure that their virtually resident hummingbirds can continue to sip from feeders, by taking the feeders in at night so they don't freeze. Ah, birds ...to inspire such reverence.

"Hope is the thing with feather, that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words and never stops - at all." Emily Dickinson

"I watch in the morning when I wake up...a blackbird... He seems as if his singing were a sort of talking to himself, or of thinking aloud his strongest thoughts. I wish I was a blackbird, like him."D.H. Lawrence

The Anatomy of Grey

At least one of my family members and more than one friend suffer from bi-polar disorder. When I hear that someone has been so diagnosed, my heart sinks for them, because mental illness is so complex in general and this one seems particularly slippery. It can be managed with medication, but, from what I have been told, getting the medication right is a matter of trying, failing, succeeding, failing again, tweaking, re-tweaking doses. Some people are luckier than others in finding the right treatment. Too many, like my sister, try, try and try again. She needs the meds to balance bouts of anxiety and/or depression, but too much balancing can leave her simply flat.

She has been in one of those flat periods recently. The January blahs that seem to affect everyone, except maybe alpine sports fanatics, haven't helped. With her free-lance work slow this time of year and the garden too wintry to offer release, she turns to her favourite TV show, Grey's Anatomy. She has watched the seasons available on Netflix ten times. "Isn't that weird?" she asked. She knows exactly what's coming, she has the dialogue practically memorized and she doesn't cry at the sad parts anymore, though she did smile at something during one recent viewing, she admitted, laughing at herself. She can appreciate why people would think her crazy for doing this. She thinks it herself and doesn't really understand why, instead of trying a new series or a new book - because she is also a great reader - she returns to Grey's.

When I told this story to a friend, he compared her to a child who wants the same story read over and over again at bedtime. The comfort of familiarity, no surprises. Considering that my sister's illness was triggered by a major traumatic event, it is easy to see why she likes to know what she's getting.

This started me thinking of why people like to read genre fiction, which generally adheres to a formula, with some changes in plot and character in each book, like driving through an old neighbourhood where people have been doing a little renovating, and a few new families have settled. You basically know what you're in for. It may be why people on vacation in foreign countries are relieved to see a Starbucks or McDonald's sign, or shop at a chain store where even the floor plans could be identical to those in their hometowns. Opera purists like their operas pure; new music is a harder sell than Beethoven's Fifth; bands do well playing "covers". The herd impulse to seek out the comfortingly well known hearkens back to survival instincts that steered human development. Hunter gatherers turned to agriculture because growing plants was presumably a less chancy way of feeding themselves than depending on wildlife to show up. Big agriculture is trying to make the uncertain business of farming even more predictable, and profitable, with genetic modifications to common crops.

There's much to be said about reducing stress by leaning towards the predictable, but predictable becomes boring. Grey. Maybe it's hard to notice the status quo for what it is simply because it is the norm, like traffic when you live on a busy street. Sure there are probably quieter streets, but it might cost more to live there, and who knows what the neighbours would be like? A person has to be healthy to venture out of the grey zone, to open the curtains, change the channel.  I'm hoping that the right mix of drugs, or whatever else it takes, will give my sister, and anyone else who has been idling in the shadows, the courage to do that soon, no disrespect to G.A., which I have never watched myself; but could it really be worth that many re-views?

Self-publishing = self-awareness

Having come to the print-on-demand stage of my first self-publishing project, I understand all the reasons I like conventional publishers. For one thing, they make up for my weaknesses, my tendency to overlook small details; my shortcomings in the formatting department; my reluctance to sell myself; my urgency to move onto new projects.

Not that conventional publishers don't have their own weaknesses. When I was going over the  already paper-published first novel, Shinny's Girls, of my trilogy, I noticed copy editing errors, things I had depended on someone else to point out. The already published-in-paper Flashing Yellow, the second in the trilogy, was cleaner but went virtually unpromoted. When I added the third novel, You Again, not yet published conventionally, to complete my eccentric family saga for epublication,  those responsibilities suddenly fell on me. So I paid a copy editor to go over the entire trilogy, including You Again, relied on Kindle and Lulu to guide me through formatting, got cover art from a talented and resoundingly generous artist friend, uploaded, waited, tried a few feeble things like sending out emails or FB or G+ posts advertising sales, i.e." Now reduced to only 6.99!" I've given a few talks and will give more, I will try to think of other ways of letting people know that the Trilogy is available, and that You Again is even available separately as an ebook and soon in paper.

Meantime I'm steeling myself to go back to the ecopies of two editions, Kindle and epub, and search for any inadvertent mistakes. Inadvertent, well what else would they be? I almost let a big error slip into the text for the print on demand edition. Lucky that my designer, a friend who is a graphic artist and a novelist herself, has a sharp eye. Because with all the file switching around for different versions, between two computers with different word processing programs, I had lost the italics required for certain titles, and to delineate correspondence between the characters. Soon I will have to think of copy for the back cover and then how to introduce and promote the new print book. What will I do?

It's much easier to leave these jobs to people who have the skills to do them. I'm a writer, not a publisher, with all that entails, and even when I get my "team" to support my work by supplying services, often gratis, I have to be the boss. If a conventional publisher had been willing to take on this project, in an expedient fashion, which was beginning to seem unlikely - especially the expedient part - I probably would not have self-published. While it is faster and I can earn more money in royalties, I have not yet earned enough to cover costs, and I wonder, considering my befuddlement or reluctance regarding promotion, if I ever will. I'm writing social realism when many readers find social realism, maybe reality itself, depressing. Literary fiction is a hard sell in any format and hard to describe. It's literary, but accessible; simple on the surface, but with themes I feel are important, such as identity, what makes us who we are. I consider myself a serious writer, serious about the craft, I mean; the actual novels have been described as fast-paced and funny, though the readers who want stories in which everything turns out well might not agree.

As far as publishing goes, I have learned skills I never expected to want to learn. I doubt I have mastered them, but I have also learned a lot about myself, about how far I am prepared to go, about why I do it in the first place. If  I have a book that is ready to present and there are no other options for making it available to readers,  no matter how many or few there may be, I can't say I won't self-publish again, because as John Cheever famously said, "I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone."

We'll see.

Those illusive insights

A cartoon in The New Yorker a number of years ago showed an outdoor market with lettering on a striped canvas awning that read,  Marketplace of Ideas. Another sign hung above a stall right in front: Fresh Insights, .25, or some such price that mockingly undervalued that which cannot be bought for any amount of money.

I cut out the cartoon and had it pinned up near my desk for awhile, and then it went missing. But, even though I have not actually seen it for years, the image slides to the front of my brain when I know something is missing from my story, but I can't think what. Last week I took out a manuscript I thought was ready to submit. No, not yet. There was a breeze blowing through it, and I didn't know where the gaps were, the source of the air that made the whole feel insubstantial.

One thing I do when I hit a problem like that is tell myself that time will cure it; that when I wake up in the morning I will have an idea; it will just come to me. The other thing I do is walk, my favourite place being the path that stretches along and above the waterfront between our neighbourhood and the village. I don't know what it is about physical activity, including walking, but I do know I'm not the only writer who depends on it. Maybe it's just that we need a physical jolting to knock inspiration loose.

Sometimes an idea scoots into consciousness, all clean and brand new and crying, like a baby just born, which is not the cliché it may seem if you've been there. Other times it's like reaching into a box of crackers and coming up with halves or jagged-edge pieces.

I feel I know what's missing from my new novel now, but the next stage, of filling the holes and then smoothing them into the body of the piece so that a reader will never suspect there was anything different, well, that's the challenge. I think I have an idea, but it's glimmering, slippery. I've had my line out for days now and while I might have hooked one, I have to be careful; if I reel in too eagerly, it may drop back into those depths I always picture as watery; I may never land it.

How much easier it would be to run over to that Marketplace of Ideas and see if there are any fresh insights for sale, if money would work or if I would have to make a kind of bargain, like the princess made with Rumplestiltskin.  More comforting perhaps to remember what the late Canadian novelist Robertson Davies said: "I don't get ideas, they get me."

Treme: some literary parallels

Historians of pop culture in the early 21st century will note that we adopted serial TV in a big way, and that there were many series worth our loyalty. Some of the cable shows and many of the BBC productions are what keep me watching. I get attached to various characters and want to know what will happen to them. As in a good short story or novel, the plots turn on the characters' conflicts, and as they face new complications, their characters develop; they don't become more worthy people, of course, or not necessarily, but as they confront issues rising from within, or coming from without, the best written characters become more complex, which is to say, truer to life.

No wonder I can't keep away. I've always been curious about people. But binge viewing, which can be fun, does not work for every TV series no matter how captivating it may be in single episodes.

I love the series "Treme," based in New Orleans. After the first season, I wanted to visit the city, and did, and as I watch the following seasons, I look for places and references that I recognise. Nevertheless, binge viewing isn't working for me with "Treme".  It's a wonderful show, each installment a full hour, multiple plot lines, multiple characters, many minutes of great music. In one episode or chapter," I counted nine story lines attached to nine different characters, with various degrees of overlap and potential subplots ripe to spin off from them. The show is content-heavy, dense, and while the content is always good, sometimes great, the staccato structure wears me down. At the end of an episode, my mind is crammed full of what I have just watched. It has been a multi-course meal of rich foods Janette may have dreamed up and served in small portions. The kind of meal one may be able to fork into the next day, but certainly not the same evening.

Serial television, especially the best of it, tempts comparisons with serialized books, such as  the popular novels of Dickens (The Pickwick Papers), Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo), even Tolstoy (Anna Karenina) and Dostoyevsky (The Brothers Karamazov).  Perhaps The Count of Monte Cristo was the most popular. Serialized in Le journal des debats, a French newspaper of the day (1844), The Count apparently had readers waiting on the proverbial edges of their seats for each new segment of the 18 through which the story unfolded. In this way, Alexandre Dumas' epic adventure may resemble "Breaking Bad" more than "Treme."  Yet Dumas and the writers of "Treme," do seem to share the view that a strong story is made of many equally strong components.  At nearly 500, 000 words and with a huge cast, The Count of Monte Cristo has been described as a megapolyphonic novel.  Considering the sub stories of nine characters reeled out over only 60 minutes, I'd say that "Treme" is right up there in mega territory, too.

Tribes

In this post Christmas lull, while winter light draws me to the window again and again, unusually clear, cold days on the coast and skies stained pink and melon, tangerine, the unusual colour of old Lifebuoy soap gone white around the bottom where it sat in the soap dish; all those warm glowy colours reflected in the water, I'm thinking about tribes. Something the anthropologist Wade Davis said about how - did he say this year? Is it possible? Could he have meant this decade? - we will lose 50 percent of existing human languages as people and communities are absorbed or  gradually wiped out. Davis said the reason we should lament this loss is because each of the fifty languages complicated and enriched the chorus of humanity. I'm not sure if he used those exact words, but it's what I remember.

That's part of the reason I started thinking about tribes: people associated with one another because of a dominant thing in common. Language is a big definer because language reflects and creates culture, a bit of an abstract word that stands for so much - how we communicate, what we create, the way we do things. Wade Davis talked about the people of the Anaconda who do not distinguish between the words green and blue because the blue of the heavens we see is the green jungle canopy of their world, their heaven. This is a wonderful way of illustrating the differences in world view, but I have experienced those differences more simply,  as a visitor encountering "we's," as in, "down here we..." or, "in Quebec we...,"noting the sense of basic understanding that passes in glances between people who are included in the we. The comfort.

Besides language as a seminal tribal marker, there are national tribes, regional tribes, and within those, political tribes. Certainly those who belong to  religions consider themselves part of a tribe, a Catholic, a Sufi, a Buddhist, and within each religion are sub-tribes, i.e., not only a Protestant, but a Methodist or a Lutheran. Not only Jewish, but observant, non-observant, orthodox. The eminent Canadian writer Margaret Laurence talked about her "tribe" of fellow Canadian writers during one memorable speech. There are tribes of hockey fans and maybe, where it's recreational, the tribal connection is looser, lighter. It's just a game after all.  On the other hand, there are those infamous blow outs between opposing soccer or football teams in Europe. The more I think about it, the more my thoughts swim wildly in a racing current of words we possess to describe commonality, nation, clan, family, tribe, race, species....

Obviously personal identity depends to some extent on tribal identity, but when does it get divisive? How far from the ultimate tribal connection, that of being the same species, does the split begin and the chorus become quarrelsome? Another thing that particularly interests me is the determination some people have to identify with a tribe long after they have physically left it. Plenty of fodder for the new year.

We are not alone

 Much has been said about the noble solitude of the artist, the writer. But it is not always painful solitude; some solitudinous personalities find writing a perfect match. I used to wonder whether I became a writer because I like to be alone, or if I have come to like or need to be alone because I am a writer. Well, a recent web article in The Millions, and a holiday party with neighbours and old friends, at which a quarter of the guests were writers, have convinced me that we writers only think we are alone.

Besides myself and my house partner, both lifetime writers, the festivities included three twenty-somethings and one middle-aged woman who had published her first novel this fall. The twenty-eight year old young woman, an MFA student in Creative Writing, had just had her first story collection accepted for publication; the 25 year old young man is applying to MFA programs in CW, and the other young man, late twenties, is stubbornly, sometimes tortuously, according to his partner, writing a novel from which he has already jettisoned 120,000 words.

According to Dominic Smith's Millions piece, there was a 39 percent increase in the number of writers and authors between 1990 and 2005. In the nearly ten years since, with self-publishing having exploded, one can only imagine.


"After studying the data," writes Smith, "I’m inclined to think there’s a million people writing novels, a quarter of a million actively publishing them in some form, and about 50,000 publishing them with mainstream and small, traditional presses. Then again, I have a novelist’s penchant for rounding numbers for the sake of narrative convenience. Putting the numbers aside, what we do know is that there’s an army of folks writing novels — some bad, some glorious — against staggering odds. Writing a novel is like starting a small business and investing thousands of hours without knowing exactly what it is you’re going to end up selling. It’s a leap of faith every time, even for someone who is five novels into a career."

As I used to tell my writing students, just walk into a library and you will see that there are plenty of books for people to read. The only reason to write another one is that it comes from you, it is an individual... what? Effort, expression, exploration... It certainly should be an individual work - at its best a work of art - unique as a person's fingerprints.

The freedom to essay, to examine, to execute ... maybe this continues to compel me, so that, like perhaps as many as a million others, I am sitting in my study by myself, in the first week of a new year,  about to make that leap again.

Writing to size

Thanks to The Passive Voice for linking me to a New York Times article on how reading habits can now be analyzed. Here are some notes that caught my attention:

  "...The longer a mystery novel is, the more likely readers are to jump to the end to see who done it. People are more likely to finish biographies than business titles, but a chapter of a yoga book is all they need. They speed through romances faster than religious titles, and erotica fastest of all....

"Oyster data shows that readers are 25 percent more likely to finish books that are broken up into shorter chapters. That is an inevitable consequence of people reading in short sessions during the day on an iPhone." 

   Coincidentally, I recently read Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! which, according to the Guinness Book of World records, contains the longest sentence ever written, 1,288 words. I wonder how that would look on an IPhone. A better fit might be the roughly 2500 word chapters in the contemporary novel I started yesterday. Muddling in the conceptual stage of a new work, it is interesting to contemplate reading preferences. The size of a page was not a concern before now, nor was the size of a chapter. Not to me. As I insisted to a friend, the work determines the length of a chapter. It's a breath thing.

What does it mean this new size/length concern? Are the short chapters bits of action, bits of plot? Character cameos? If it is still a matter of breath, do shorter chapters mean that readers are panting through novels? We would not want that sort of experience for every book, which makes me wonder, what sort of novel works best in the digital form? Will readers' preferences end up changing the type of literature produced today?

Some words ...

".....Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept."

A Child's Christmas in Wales, Dylan Thomas

Good show!

#book prizes

The latest broadcast of "Writers and Company," the long-running CBC radio show about writers and books, featured a discussion about book prizes. Irish Kevin Barry, British Justin Cartwright, American Meg Wolitzer and Canadian Charlotte Gray talked about their experiences as winners and as jury members and it was all pretty fascinating. The founding host of Writers and Co, the brilliant Eleanor Wachtel, has to have interviewed every prominent and not so prominent writer in the world and knows the right questions to ask.

Part of the conversation concerned the value of prizes to a young writer's career. Coincidentally, earlier that day I had walked on the beach with a friend who recently published her first novel, Lucky, itself the winner of a provincial prize. Now that the launch is over, the book available in bookstores and on line, she feels the only way it will garner attention is if it makes it onto the short list for another prize.

On Writers and Company,  the panelists agreed was that the "prize" mentality makes it harder for a writer to make a career. If a work is worthy of publication, a publisher will take a chance on it, but if it is not noticed by any prize juries and doesn't gain enough attention otherwise, therefore does not sell big, the new writer gets, perhaps, a second chance, and that's it. Eleanor remarked that prizes have taken the place of a strong reviewing community, at least in Canada, something Canadian writers, including me, lament.

My first book, Suburbs of the Arctic Circle, was selected for a small, national award, and the second, Shinny's Girls and Other Stories,  received the greatest promotional efforts from my publisher, therefore, attracted most attention. To me those books were just the beginning of what I planned to be, what has been and continues to be, a long and rich writing life, with each book a new challenge, an opportunity to develop. Yet, perhaps because my work has never made a big commercial splash or been nominated for one of the really big prizes, it has been hard to gain the critical attention that might draw more readers to my work. That later books are more thematically ambitious and better written is something only random faithful readers, many of them library patrons, may ever notice. Thank you to them.

As Kevin Barry said, however, the only way a writer can really fail is to stop writing, and lifers such as myself never consider such a thing.  

Writers and Company offered an immediate prize to those who had not yet heard it, and those who had but never find it old, a selection from the recording of William Faulkner delivering his Nobel acceptance speech:

"Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands."