Archive for September, 2009
Monday, September 28th, 2009
Thanks to Merilyn Simonds, Jan Walter, and all the many volunteers at the Kingston WritersFest last weekend. The Festival was an overwhelming success, with huge, enthusiastic audiences for every event and happy writers. The venue is already booked for next year.
With Merilyn Simonds at the helm you can be sure that writers of creative nonfiction were well represented at the Festival. In particular, I enjoyed a panel moderated by Charlotte Gray on Penguin’s Extraordinary Canadians series. Mark Kingwell, Daniel Poliquin, and Jane Urquhart spoke brilliantly on their subjects (Glenn Gould, René Lévesque, and Lucy Maud Montgomery, respectively) but also on the art of biography itself.
The Extraordinary Canadians series, edited by John Raulston Saul, imposes strict length restrictions on its authors. All three at the WritersFest mentioned that early in the process, they began to think of what they were writing as extended essays, and that ultimately, this idea that they were writing essays liberated them from doomed attempts to encapsulate an entire life in forty to fifty thousand words. Instead, the form itself required – but also inspired – non-linear and highly personal interpretations. Structure arose organically from the themes that dominated their subjects’ lives, together with their need to cut through the many myths and presuppositions about these famous people. Each book in the series is therefore a dialogue of sorts between author and subject.
I liked this idea of essay-as-inspiration and look forward to reading the results.
Tags: Biography, Creative Nonfiction, Essays, Kingston WritersFest
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Saturday, September 19th, 2009
Merilyn Simonds recently interviewed me about women and writing for her column in the Kingston Whig-Standard. Find the article here.
Tags: Essays, Interviews, Pathologies: A Life in Essays, Women and Writing
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Tuesday, September 15th, 2009
Theresa Kishkan is the recent winner of the inaugural Creative Nonfiction Collective’s Readers’ Choice Award, in recognition of two fine collections of essays, Red Laredo Boots and Phantom Limb. Her answers to the questions in this interview offer clues to her writing process and suggest why, for her, the essay is such a congenial form. She watches the world intently. She reads widely and she reads deeply, without regard for fad or fashion. She follows her own passions and preoccupations, lets her questions take her where they will, and trusts in the journey. I talked to her about Phantom Limb and her other work.
Theresa Kishkan
Q: What inspired you to write this book (Phantom Limb)? Why did you choose to use the essay form in particular, since you also work in other genres?
A: I love the essay for its space and potential, for its generous willingness to expand to include so many of my preoccupations. I’m less certain that I chose it than that it chose me. What happens is this: I find myself musing about particular things and I begin to write about them, usually by following a thread. When I begin, I don’t always perceive that the thread is part of a skein and so I discover that the thing that has interested me is connected to other things, many of them unexpected. I didn’t know, for instance, when I began to write about bears in “month of wild berries picking” that the piece would ultimately concern itself with the wild nature of women’s sexuality. Or that writing about quilts would lead me to plunder the rag-bag of family history.
Q: What, if anything, do you feel distinguishes the personal essay as a genre?
A: Its capacity to be self-revelatory, to range across a wide field and share the writer’s pleasures and discoveries, in an intimate voice.
Q: What was the biggest challenge you encountered in completing this book?
A: I had difficulty restraining myself in particular essays. I’ve suggested that the form is expansive but sometimes I found I was testing its limits. I felt such urgency to get everything in!
Q: What was the greatest reward?
A: The luxury of writing about things I love and have paid attention to, then having others read and respond to such personal passions.
Q: What do you like about writing essays, or how would you compare your experience of writing essays and poetry (or fiction)?
A: I began my writing life as a poet but stopped writing completely when my children were small. Returning to it later on, I found that I couldn’t stretch the line of a poem to get it to do what I wanted it to do. Other poets could, and did, but I needed a different kind of narrative line, I suppose – one that reflected the tension between the private and public, wild and domestic, Cartesian and quotidian. Poetry did teach me to trust that connections could be made and sustained across time and space. I never intended to write fiction at all but discovered that by employing a fictional perspective, I could sometimes get closer to what I wanted and couldn’t quite negotiate with my own voice, my own experience. Essays use techniques and strategies from these other genres, of course, and that’s part of their intense satisfaction to me, both as a writer and a reader.
Q: Why did you choose this particular title for your work?
A: I wanted a title which would reference the past, the layers of history that we carry, lose, and constantly try to relocate and come to terms with: a shifting and transitory archive.
Q: What books might you tell aspiring writers to read, and why?
A: I read like a magpie, I suspect, choosing books like bright objects. It’s often only after I’ve read them that I realize their value to me as a writer. I have shelves of field guides, for instance, and have come to understand how they form part of the scaffolding of my own work. I consider myself a citizen of a specific geography and I think it’s important to know the place as well as I’m able to. This means reading it with the same attention that I’d devote to any other text, alert to its grammar, its syntax, its word-hoard and tropes. Plant taxonomy, marine systems, geology, the archaeological record – they have a lot to tell us about relationships, precision, and history. So I’d suggest that aspiring writers read any and everything and in the process they will absorb something of the beautiful possibilities of language and form.
Q: Who are some of your favourite authors, and why?
A: I’ve counted Gary Snyder as a literary mentor since I first began to write. His work grows out of an attention to the world around him and he’s that rare thing (these days, at any rate), the passionate amateur – house-builder, philosopher, naturalist, activist, poet-scholar, traveller. . . John Berger’s essays and novels always engage me. Pliny the Elder’s Natural History has pride of place on my desk because no one has quite that arrogant confidence and insatiable curiousity. A few years ago I discovered Ellen Meloy’s books about the red rock country of southern Utah. She wrote with ardour and humour. I read Jorie Graham’s poems because of their electrifying intelligence. I admire Harold Rhenisch’s work in general for the originality of his vision. I keep Herodotus’s The Histories (in the excellent Landmark edition) at hand because it’s such a sustained careful work of historiography. I love the poems and translations of Michael Longley for the delicacy of his language and the density of his affections. I think the Scottish writer Kathleen Jamie is extraordinary. Her poetry is concise and fine, and her essay collection Findings is quietly brilliant.
Q: What are you reading right now?
A: I’m reading a strange and wonderful book by John Keast Lord, a veterinarian and naturalist with the Northwest Boundary Commission from 1858-62. He wrote a memoir of this experience, The Naturalist in Vancouver Island and British Columbia, published in England in 1866, which in fact ranges all over the Pacific Northwest and California. It’s wildly eccentric and disorganized but it has moments when one realizes what an astute observer this man was. Nothing escapes his notice or comment. There are windows in this book that allow a long view, a historical view, to a time and place I love and which I fear is threatened by the nervous energy of a culture unaware of what it’s losing (Barry Lopez calls it “the commodification of landscape”). The great runs of salmon described by Lord, the vast groves of Garry oaks on Vancouver Island, the camas and butterflies and grey wolves near Fort Victoria…
Theresa writes:
I was born in Victoria, B.C. and have lived on both coasts of Canada as well as in Greece, England and Ireland. I make my home on the Sechelt Peninsula with my husband, John Pass. John and I built our house and raised our three children on an acreage near Sakinaw Lake. We operate a small private press, High Ground Press, printing broadsheets and chapbooks on a 19th century platen press.
I began my writing life as a poet and published three full-length collections of poetry – Arranging the Gallery (Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1976), Ikons of the Hunt (Sono Nis, 1978) and Black Cup (Beach Holme, 1992) – as well as several chapbooks, including Morning Glory (Reference West, 1992) which won the bpNichol Chapbook Prize the year it was published.
After the births of my three children, I turned to prose and published Red Laredo Boots (New Star Books, 1996), a collection of personal essays about history and travel. Since then I have published two novels, Sisters of Grass (Goose Lane Editions, 2000) and A Man in a Distant Field (The Dundurn Group, 2004), and a novella, Inishbream (first published in a limited edition by the Barbarian Press in 1999 and then as a trade edition by Goose Lane Editions in 2001).A second collection of essays, Phantom Limb, was published by Thistledown in 2007. The Age of Water Lilies, a novel set in the orchard community of Walhachin in the years just before and during the Great War, has just been published by Brindle & Glass. My work has been nominated for a number of awards, including the Pushcart Prize, the Relit Award, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and the Hubert Evans Award for Non-Fiction. Inishbream won an Alcuin Award for Design Excellence.
Here is the beautiful cover of Theresa’s new novel, just released today!
Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Creative Nonfiction Collective, Essayists, Essays, Interviews
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Thursday, September 10th, 2009
“Good-bye,” Bingo’s parting smile seemed to say; “it’s not worth quarrelling now. You haven’t made much of a success of your time at Crossgates, have you? And I don’t suppose you’ll get on awfully well at a public school either. We made a mistake, really, in wasting our time and money on you. This kind of education hasn’t much to offer to a boy with your background and outlook. Oh, don’t think we don’t understand you! We know all about those ideas you have at the back of your head, we know you disbelieve in everything we’ve taught you, and we know you aren’t in the least grateful for all we’ve done for you. But there’s no use in bringing it all up now. We aren’t responsible for you any longer, and we shan’t be seeing you again. Let’s just admit that you’re one of our failures and part without ill feeling. And so, good-bye.”
That at least was what I read into her face. And yet how happy I was, that winter morning, as the train bore me away with the gleaming new silk tie round my neck! The world was opening before me, just a little, like a grey sky which exhibits a narrow crack of blue. A public school would be better fun than Crossgates but at bottom equally alien. In a world where the prime necessitities were money, titled relatives, athleticism, tailor-made clothes, neatly brushed hair, a charming smile, I was no good. All I had gained was breathing-space. A little quietude, a little self-indulgence, a little respite from cramming – and then, ruin. What kind of ruin I did not know: perhaps the colonies or an office stool, perhaps prison or an early death. But first a year or two in which one could “slack off” and get the benefit of one’s sins, like Doctor Faustus. It is the advantage of being thirteen that you can not only live in the moment, but do so with full consciousness, foreseeing the future and yet not caring about it.
– George Orwell, from “Such, Such Were the Joys.”
Tags: Essayists, Essays, Memorable Lines
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Tuesday, September 1st, 2009
Awards by their nature are controversial. Somebody wins and many others don’t win. It would be surprising if hard feelings didn’t sometimes result. But hard feelings are one thing; perceptions of unfairness are another - especially if the perceptions are justified. This year, heated discussion about the jury for the Governor General’s Award for poetry overshadowed a related but less public conversation among writers of creative nonfiction. The GG kerfuffle centred on the rules regarding conflict of interest and the complications that can arise when judges are drawn from a small community of peers. Here, the question was even more basic: Do the jurors of the major nonfiction awards in this country understand the genre well enough to assess the literary merit of the books they are assigned to read and evaluate? The problem centres not on any individual juror’s comportment, or even on the rules governing jury behaviour, but on the jurors’ fundamental competence to judge.
The Creative Nonfiction Collective discussed the issue at length at their Annual General Meeting, unanimously passing the Motion that appears below. The Motion was then presented and unanimously passed at the Writers’ Union AGM in May, and the indomitable Myrna Kostash was assigned as an Advocate to liaise with those responsible for jury selection for the major nonfiction awards in Canada, to ”raise the issue of the current definition of literary nonfiction and how jury composition may reflect that definition.” Of particular relevance to this blog, it seems that jurors of some of this year’s awards were not even aware that the essay is a form of creative nonfiction. Read on for more details.
MOTION FROM THE BOARD OF THE CNFC TO THE CNFC AGM APRIL 26, 2009
PASSED UNANIMOUSLY
PREAMBLE
Over the 2008-09 literary prize season, the Board of the Creative Nonfiction Collective has noted several anomalies with respect to the juries which selected the prize-winning nonfiction books.
Altogether, fourteen jurors served on the juries of the Writer’s Trust Non-Fiction Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction, the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction and the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. Of these fourteen, five were staff newspaper journalists, one of whom, Chantal Hebert, problematically served on two juries; one was identified as an investigative journalist; one was the retired head of the Canada Council; leaving seven jurors whose principal writing has been within the boundaries of literary nonfiction although two were also identified as “university academics.” That is, only half the jurors on the juries which awarded literary prizes for nonfiction were peers of the practitioners of the genre, even under the most elastic definition.
(CNFC notes that, in the past, TWUC has also expressed concerns about the preponderance of academics on nonfiction juries at the Canada Council.)
In response to a column posted by the Globe and Mail’s James Adams announcing the short-list for the Charles Taylor Prize, Richard Bachmann, owner of A Different Drummer Books in Burlington, Ontario, wrote that he was “thoroughly baffled, bothered and bewildered” by the selection. Juror Jeffrey Simpson defended the list: “With literary nonfiction, what does ‘literary’ even mean? We ultimately define it as being well-written.” Adams concurred: “the term ‘literary non-fiction’ is so broad and amorphous that each year its definition appears to come down to whatever a particular jury seems to think it is.”
Yet, in 2008-09, it was precisely the make-up of the “particular” juries which has provoked lively and sometimes anxious debate about the definition of literary nonfiction that these juries seem to have achieved consensus on. Noreen Taylor, for instance, who had established the prize in 2000 to honour the memory of her late husband, writer Charles Taylor, expressed her “surprise” to Adams that the short-list was so “historically-based…because this is not a history prize per se” and that the “hot area” of “memoir-oriented and memoir” titles was overlooked. Adams also underlined that, of 135 books the jury considered, a very short short-list of three was announced. “Perhaps this year there was too much consensus,” he wrote. “Or at least insufficient awareness of the provisional, compromised nature of the adjudication process.” And there’s the rub.
Without wishing to denigrate individual jurors or their choices of winning books, members of the CNFC have nevertheless expressed concerns about the “tilt” of this past season’s short-lists. Note was made of the preponderance of reportage and research-based titles to the detriment of such literary genres as the personal essay, travel writing, food writing, popular biography, autobiography, memoir and the nonfiction novel. Some wondered whether the problem was that these genres were in short supply, or just not up to snuff, craft-wise? Others observed that books “about the dire straits of the world” got a boost as opposed to the essays and belles-lettres which the Charles Taylor Prize, for one, includes in its criteria. And what are writers of literary nonfiction to make of a nonfiction jury which admits ignorance of what “literary” means? Without this understanding, it is felt, jurors will inevitably favour social and political
commentary over literary style and innovation.
Finally, a member summed it up: “I’m beginning to realize that the people who pick the juries often haven’t a clue about what creative nonfiction really involves. Some don’t even realize that essays are part of the creative nonfiction genre: they say they want a really good story, or evidence of research in the archives, the more, the better. They have only the most conventional knowledge of the genre – and pick journalists, or academics, surprise. And this won’t change until the public discussion about creative nonfiction becomes so mainstream that even the jury-pickers can’t avoid that information and will incorporate it into their jury selection.”
MOTION
Whereas writers of any genre have the right to be evaluated for prizes by a jury of peers, and
Whereas consternation has been expressed by literary nonfiction writers about the imbalance in past jury composition and particularly during the 2008-09 season, and
Whereas there is a perceived link between composition of a jury and that jury’s definition of literary or creative nonfiction,
Be it resolved that the CNFC ask that the Writers’ Union of Canada strike liaise with the persons responsible for jury selection in the matter of nonfiction prizes particularly at the Canada Council, the Writer’s Trust, the British Columbia Achievement Foundation and the Charles Taylor Foundation to raise the issue of the current definition of literary nonfiction and how jury composition may reflect that definition.
Tags: Awards, Creative Nonfiction Collective
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