Friday, April 30th, 2010
Several years ago, busy writers Shannon Cowan, Fiona Tinwei Lam, and Cathy Stonehouse joined forces to edit Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood. Although some questioned whether an audience existed for a book like this, their faith in the project never wavered, and they proved the doubters wrong. They talk here about the process of working collaboratively and editing an anthology of essays.
(from left) Fiona Tinwei Lam, Cathy Stonehouse, Shannon Cowan
Q: What sparked the idea for this anthology?
A: Cathy had just had her first child, and was struggling with trying to find time to write. As a writer/parent she wanted to read something other than how-to books that spoke to her experience. Something nonprescriptive, more descriptive and nuanced. She felt she and others would learn better that way—through the poetic and rich, rather than flat and often patronising self-help. As there was a dearth of material on the subject, she envisioned a project that would seek out the experiences of other women writers who had had children that could inspire other women in similar circumstances. We three already knew each other mostly through writing, and were exchanging parenting tips, so working on the project together arose naturally.
Q: Why did you choose an anthology of essays rather than poetry or fiction?
A: Nonfiction seems to speak more directly to our experiences as mothers, with real life events and experiences that readers can relate to. We considered various parameters (other art forms, other countries) but settled on these (creative non-fiction and Canadian) because they defined what we most hungered for. There were other fiction/poetry anthologies on this theme already. We wanted the writers to speak to the readers about their lived lives. Also, given how isolating both mothering and writing can be, we wanted readers to feel part of an ongoing, vibrant community, part of a continuum, irrespective of location, age, or circumstance.
Q: Does the essay genre offer something different to readers? If so, what?
A: It provides real life, honest, unembellished stories that readers can identify with. It provides well-written (and therefore nuanced, complex) versions of people’s realities that readers can return to over and over again. With essays, you can use novelistic techniques or weave in poetry (as some of our contributors did), but the overall effect is one of truth.
Q: Tell us something about the editing process.
A: A number of essays were extensively revised, and some were rewritten. There was a lengthy to and fro process between editor and writer prior to the review by the copy editor. We worked collaboratively on all aspects of the editing, which made the process time-consuming and complex but also rewarding. Having three editors review and edit each piece makes more work overall, but we had high standards and wanted the best deal for our writers. We did most of this work through email and after the kids were in bed. There were many late-night conference calls, because that was often the only time we were all available.
Q: What was the greatest challenge in getting this project off the ground?
A: Although the book didn’t take that long to place, we found ourselves convincing publishers/agents/editors that the project was worthwhile and had a market. There was a real misconception that the book’s readership would be a narrow one—yet when the manuscript came together, editors and reviewers alike chimed in that men, women, parents, and non-parents would all find something inspiring and captivating in the book. The writing spoke for itself, as we always knew it would.
Q: What has been the greatest reward, either in working on this book, or post-publication?
A: Knowing that many women across the country, of varying ages and at varying stages of their writing career, and even non-writers juggling children with work outside the home, have connected to the book, finding solace, wisdom, affirmation, support. We continue to receive many enthusiastic responses, whether in person or through others, and know that the book will have a long shelf-life.
Q: What advice might you offer to someone else who wanted to put together a collection like this?
A: A project like this is deceptively straightforward. It is truly a labour of love—quite time-consuming. (For us, it took us sometimes many hours every week, over about three years.) Personal writing projects might have to go on the back-burner. Tight deadlines can be almost impossible to deal with when one has young kids. Be prepared to work for virtually nothing and make sure you balance maintaining editorial control with finding a publisher earlier rather than later, so the work is not all for naught. Have faith in your writers.
Join Double Lives contributors and editors at:
Mother, Writer: Panel and Reading, Vancouver Public Library, May 5,
2010 at 7:30 pm
This Mother’s Day, celebrate the intersection of creation and
creativity with award-winning authors Catherine Owen, Rachel Rose, Luanne Armstrong, and Dorothy Woodend. Hosted by Cathy Stonehouse (Double Lives: Writers and Motherhood) and Cori Howard (Between Interruptions and The Momoir Project), this event will illuminate the rewards of nurturing children while pursuing the passion to write.
Wednesday, May 5, 7:30 p.m. Peter Kaye Room, Lower Level, Central
Library, 350 West Georgia Street. Admission is free.
Tags: Anthologies, Essays, Memoir, Women and Writing
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Tuesday, January 19th, 2010
Lorna Crozier and I shared a stage at the Kingston WritersFest last fall, and I can’t imagine a more generous or engaging co-presenter. Her warmth, wit, and humour were the talk of the festival. Recently, I invited her to answer a few questions about her book for the blog, and once again, she surpassed all expectations. Along with her thoughtful answers, she has forwarded new work. Enjoy.
Q: You’ve been a poet for many years. What sparked the leap (or the fall?) into prose.
A: I’ll never lose my fascination with poetry, even though I’ve now written 15 books and have another manuscript almost ready to go. There’s just so much a poem can do in its very limited space. Some of the material that has appreared in my poems (that is, autobiographical anecdotes about my family) is in the memoir. Having said that, I started falling in love with the way the mind moves when you’re writing an essay. At first it almost feels like writing a poem—there’s a strong first-person voice that begins to speak but doesn’t know where it’s going. But an essay allows more room for arguments with the self and for a longer story to be told with its necessary information, the kind of explication and digression that a poem would just as soon spit out. I’m going to contradict myself here and say that essays often want to spit that out, too, but even though I pared down early drafts of prose, the pieces were still more accepting of longer descriptions and more direct statements of feeling than a poem might have been. Poems love to say as much as they can through metaphor and succinct, cut-to-the-chase imagery. Although metaphors and imagery are part of good prose, in essays they become a means to ground the writer’s thinking, which, on the page, has more room to show its many convolutions. I don’t know if this is making any sense. I haven’t quite worked out what the two forms do differently from one another, but I do know that, as a poet, I feel an affinity for nonfiction that I’ve never felt for fiction.
So, I about a decade ago, I started writing essays. And Rob Sanders, the editor of Greystone Press, who read them in various anthologies, asked me for a book. I initially resisted, but he kept on phoning me, and I finally discovered that I had enough published, commissioned essays to pull together a manuscript. I sent it off and immediately received a contract. After I’d signed it and he revised it to meet my few demands, including a request for Barbara Pulling as the editor, I found out that it wasn’t the book he wanted. He and Barbara persuaded me that a better book would focus on the pieces about my life in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, a small part of the original manuscript. Agreeing with them meant that my “book,” the manuscript I’d submitted, disappeared. Although I could use some of it, I had to start from scratch and try to shape my past into a coherent and interesting work of nonfiction.
Q: What was your greatest challenge?
A: I was terrified when I dared to look at what was ahead of me. A poet, remember, is used to saying everything that needs to be said in one or two pages, sometimes in only a few lines. The fact that I had to write a whole book, not just one poem after another, overwhelmed me. I was also worried about the tone. I told Barbara in our initial meeting that I didn’t want the book to be another “Little House on the Prairies.” I feared lapsing into nostalgia or sentimentality. She comforted me by saying that my family did not fit into the little-house genre and that sentimentality had not been a problem for me in poetry. Why did I fear it now? she asked.
For weeks I lived inside Alice Munro’s question: who do you think you are? Can any memoirist not worry about that? What was it about my life, I kept wondering, that deserved telling? Why would anyone be interested? It was only after the book was written and I was driving to an interview that I thought, “Of course, “memoir” has two “me’s” in it, the English followed by the French! No wonder I was worried about being self-centered.
As well, I was torn, as surely every memoirist must be, by the great ethical question: how much of the truth could I tell? I worried about hurting my mother, who was still alive when I began the book. In fact, I was in therapy, discussing the issue with a counselor. I knew anything less than the truth would make the writing vague and weak, and even I would lose interest in it. Part of the joy of writing a memoir is finding our what you really want/need to say. The content makes demands about the form and memories unfold as you write. Things you’d long ago forgotten recreate themselves on the page. Sometimes, they’re painful but there’s a glory in their discovery when you get the words right.
I had to be true to myself, to language, and to the goings-on in my family, seen through my perspective, of course. Otherwise, why write? As a poet, I’ve never allowed myself to hide in words, even if I end up looking bad. I knew I’d have to write the story as close to the bone as I could, and then after the work was done, decide what I wanted to do about publishing it. Was this a way of tricking myself? Probably, but if I’d let a censor sit on my shoulder, the pages would have remained blank or worse, been gutted of anything necessary and true. My mother died before the book was finished. Though I mourned her death, I was freed from my worries about wounding her.
Q: The book includes short narratives of life in Swift Current interspersed with prose-poem like sections that you call “First Causes.” Why structure the book this way?
A: Maybe because I’m so used to working in a short form, I saw the book, right from the start, as a compilation of pieces, a mosaic of sorts, rather than a coherent text with a linear, narrative movement. There are other reasons, too, for the form I chose. Memory, at least mine, doesn’t arrive as a big, well-wrapped package with sections bearing labels such as “The first ten years,” “Adolescence,” etc. Memories startle the brain with lightning flashes that reveal brief crucial scenes, one building on the other. Even their significance isn’t obvious and the link that draws them together, I think, is subterranean at the start, there only at a subconscious level.
This way of working—of perfecting small passages that I felt were self-contained before moving on to the next—pleased me greatly. I saw each chapter as something that could stand alone yet carry with it, like memory, tones or images or feelings from the previous chapter and, at the same time, endow what followed with a deeper meaning. I wanted the chapters to function as single pieces that contained little hooks that attached to what was said before and what would follow. I hoped the chapters would throw off the kind of prickly grass seeds that catch in your socks as you move forward down the path. Sometimes the hooks are images and sometimes pieces of narrative that connect to the previous and next chapters. The challenge for me was to write a narrative that would pull the reader through the book, but also to achieve another of my purposes—to build in a stillness to each section so that there’s a tension between what-will-happen-next and let’s-just-sit-here-for-a-moment-and-feel-this. I’d like a reader to be drawn forward but content to sit in this one place for a while.
The First Causes were my way of dropping into the family stories, pieces that are densely lyrical and poetic but still written in prose. While the other chapters have, I hope, a sense of movement through time, though not strictly linear, I wanted these to be plotless. They are still points, like lacuna but strange ones because the gaps are filled with words. I imagined their structure to be like glass bells, the ones that hold taxidermy and samples of plants. The function of the First Causes, like those transparent bells, is to focus the reader’s attention and to hold the reader’s mind in a state of deep engagement and wonder. I wanted them to be timeless, to have the quality of myth. I’m not saying I was successful in achieving any of this, but that’s what I was after. Whatever else they achieve, they represent the landscape—the origins and holiness of its essential elements—which shape the characters who live there. That of course includes me and my parents.
The idea of the First Causes also comforted me because I knew I had the tools to write them—they are, after all as close to poems as they can be while still being written in prose—but I wasn’t sure about the rest of the book and its demands. I’d take a break from the other writing and go into that deep place where poetry takes you and meditate on the sky or insects or gravel. Then I’d go back to the stories where the challenge was different.
Q: What was your greatest reward, with this book?
A: Whatever the book ends up meaning to others, this is really a life work for me. I don’t mean it will be the last thing I ever write, I hope not, but it’s about questions and concerns I’ve been living with since I became conscious of my thoughts. I’m pleased that between the pages of a book I’ve explored the place that is in my blood and bones. Saskatchewan, particularly the small city of Swift Current, is one of the memoir’s central characters. I’ve always been intrigued by Northrop Frye’s revision of the question, “Who am I?” into “Where is here?” That question has been central to me. I never tire of thinking about it. And I probably won’t tire of writing about it because in writing about place, I am writing about myself and my ancestors.
Also, it’s rare to find poor working people like my mother and father between the pages of a book. Being able to recreate my mother as a character, to give her a literary significance, pleases me. The book, in some ways, feels like my gift to her although she wouldn’t have wanted me to reveal so many secrets about my father. His alcoholism and our poverty was never talked about outside the family, for instance.
And finally, I feel good that I’ve written a book of prose, a whole book with real covers, a title page, chapter headings, etc. It sits there on my shelf beside my books of poetry, and I think it feels at home there.
Q: Can you name some memoirists you admire?
A: I wouldn’t have written this book if I’d not read Wallace Stegner’s Wolfwillow. I came to it years ago but I’ve reread it countless times. It’s set in Eastend, Saskatchewan, though he gives the town another name. I don’t think any other nonfiction book set on the prairies comes close to its profundity, exactness, and elegance of style. When I was a young writer, it gave me permission to write about my own lost place and to believe that such writing could matter to people who wouldn’t even know where Swift Current was.
John Berger’s Here Is Where We Meet, which came out in 2005, led me to write the final chapter in my book. After reading him, I wrote about speaking to my mother after her death. A passage from his book remains close by me when I write, as a kind of ars poetica. It’s part of a conversation between the narrator of Here Is Where We Meet and the stubborn, lively ghost of his mother. The narrator, whom we assume is Berger, is speaking first:
I risk to write nonsense these days.
Just write down what you find.
I’ll never know what I’ve found.
No, you’ll never know. All you’ll have to know is whether you’re lying,
or whether you’re trying to tell the truth, you can’t afford to make a mistake
about that distinction any longer.
That passage is hard to beat. It’s so important to the book and the central character that it appears twice. I believe in what it says and it gives me courage to try to tell the truth.
Finally, I am overwhelmed with the linguistic beauty of Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. It’s a wonderfully strange book that is both a memoir and a novel but transgresses the conventions of both. It’s fragmented, dense, poetic, and challenges any ideas of fixed forms. Another of my favourite writers is Dermot Healy who’s written stunningly in every form: fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama. Every nonfiction writer should read the first page of his autobiography.
Q: What are you reading now? And what might you tell aspiring writers to read?
A: Perhaps because I’ve just come out of writing prose and because the idea and form of the First Causes continue to tantalize me, I’m now working on a series based on objects (I’ve included one on doorknobs, below). For inspiration I’ve returned to Francis Ponge, a brilliant writer of prose poems about things. His book that I have on my desk right now is Selected Poems, edited by Margaret Guiton. I also just bought the Best Science Essays of 2009, but haven’t had a chance to open the book yet. I’d encourage aspiring writers to pick up some essay anthologies, like that one, find the essayists who engage, enrage and tantalize them and then go out and find their books. And read everything that John Berger has written. I adore his And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos because it can’t be categorized and has sublime passages of beauty in its prose.
Here’s an example of the writing I’ve been working on since this summer. Is it poetry or creative nonfiction? Let me know.
DUET
1.
Two things that need each other: the mouth and the ear, the left foot and the right, the wind and the hawk, the doorknob and the hand. Yet the doorknob dreads the human touch. It has a phobia for germs, especially the knobs made of glass common in the 1940s after the war, a touch of class in small stuccoed houses with big radios and ottomans of fake leather. To respect the fears of doorknobs, you should always wear a glove or rub away the invisible bacilli with a chamois. Who has time for that? Anyway you’d be pushed aside by others in a rush. You’d be mocked and laughed at. Best not to think about it. There are whales, after all, and disappearing salmon. Disappearing doorknobs? That’s a laugh. Like rats, they’ve adapted. In fact their population’s gone berserk. Think of every new skyscraper, every condo development eating up the fields and marshes at the edges of the cities. Think of the multitude of doors. Think of all the dread each building holds.
2.
All doorknobs are twins, joined at the centre by a bolt narrow as a pencil, inflexible, un-vertebraed. Though they move as one, they never get to see each other. They are like brothers separated at birth by war, a wall of stone and broken glass. Neither speaks of this. One turns; the other turns. One is outside the room; the other, in. If the door is the entrance to the house, one shimmers with the rain; the other is dull and dry. One is often cold or hot; the other basks in the temperate climate of the thermostat. Does anything pass between them? Does a rumour, a memory, a snatch of song run through the metal spine like an electric shock when the door is opened? Perhaps they desire different things and loathe each other. Each knob wanting, above all else, not to turn in the same direction as its double on the opposite side of the door.
Lorna Crozier, poet and essayist, is a Distinguished Professor and the former Chair of the Department of Writing at the University of Victoria. Inventing the Hawk received the Governor General’s Award in 1992. She has been awarded two Pat Lowther Awards for the best book by a Canadian woman, the National Magazine Gold Medal, the Canadian Authors’ Association Award and first place in the CBC literary competition. In 2004 she received an Honourary Doctorate from the University of Regina for her contribution to Canadian literature and in 2007, one from the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. The Blue Hour of the Day, Selected Poems came out in 2007. She is also the co-editor of two books of essays, most recently Addicted: Notes from the Belly of the Beast, and two anthologies of young Canadian poets. Her essays have been published in a number of anthologies, including Dropped Threads 1 and 3,, Nobody’s Mother, and My Wedding Dress.
Her poems have been translated into several languages and she has read her work across Canada and in such countries as South Africa, Scotland, Australia, Malaysia, France, Italy, England and Chile. Margaret Laurence called her “a poet to be grateful for.” Books in Canada claimed “she is one of the most original poets writing in English today.” The Ottawa Citizen wrote, “One of Canada’s most read and most honoured poets….[Crozier’s poems] become part of the reader’s permanent memory.” Perspectiva del Gato, a collection of her poems translated into Spanish, was published in Mexico City this June. And a memoir, Small Beneath the Sky, was published by Greystone this fall.
Tags: Interviews, Memoir, Poetry
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