Archive for the ‘Memoir’ Category
Wednesday, November 4th, 2009
I’ve been an admiring (and sometimes envious) reader of Russell Wangersky’s prose since I first encountered it almost a decade ago in the lit journals, where we frequently competed in the same contests. Burning Down the House, the precise and gripping memoir that Russell based on some of those early essays, is now in the running for some much bigger prizes, such as the BC Award for Canadian Nonfiction, Canada’s richest CNF prize (which it won earlier this year), and the Edna Staebler Award, for which it was recently nominated. Russell began as a journalist and is now an accomplished writer in multiple genres, including short fiction and the essay; his novel is forthcoming in 2010.
Q: You’ve written and continue to write in multiple genres – journalism, creative nonfiction, and fiction. What is the particular appeal of creative nonfiction to you? What draws you to this genre as a writer?
A: Creative non-fiction is both enticing and frustrating – enticing, because of the fun of moving through experience and working elements into a narrative line, but frustrating because stories don’t draw to the strong peak they might otherwise reach in fiction. You’re both helped and hamstrung by the truth. You always know where you’re going – without always knowing how you’re getting there – but you don’t always know if the story will be strong enough. Until, finally (hopefully), you know that it is. I’ve actually been drawn to creative non-fiction by my particular work in journalism – I write columns that are about whatever I want – they draw on memory, my personal experience, and sometimes the experience of others, and often involve drawing up remembered experiences to illustrate or highlight new events. My own voice is also the easiest voice – you hardly ever put a foot wrong.
Q: What draws you to the genre as a reader? Who are some of your favourite writers of creative nonfiction or memoir, and what appeals to you in their work?
A: As a reader, I like the fact that you feel like your footing is always safe. I guess that’s a little facile – but what I mean is that the footing is already tested somehow by experience. The other thing I particularly like is the consistency of voice by the writer. I’ve been reading creative non-fiction for years, since before it was even called creative non-fiction, and many stick out in my memory, new and old.
Report from Engine Company 82, by Dennis Smith, The Making of a Surgeon by William Nolen, and The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls, are all favourites from one point in my life or another, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg. What I like about those three in particular is the combination of extraordinary events told retrospectively, so that there’s not only the immediate drama of the circumstances, but also the weight of how the experiences have changed the writers.
Q: Do you find it difficult or stimulating (or both) to move between different genres? Have you ever used the same material and put it to different uses in fiction and creative nonfiction?
A: I like moving between the two, because, strangely, my fiction almost always begins in non-fiction. Almost all of my fiction work depends on hearing or seeing something, and imagining how things would turn out if that single instance was the anchor for a whole life. I have used non-fiction experiences in fiction for sure – a new collection of short stories will have two firefighting stories, stories that spring out of particular experiences I had while fighting fires.
Q: During our panel discussion at the Vancouver International Writers’ Festival in 2008, you mentioned that Burning Down the House grew, in part, out of individual essays that you had written. Can you tell us something about the process of turning those essays into a full-length narrative? What was gained – or lost – in the process?
A: What was lost was the cohesive strength of the shorter essays: I broke them up and moved them around in Burning Down the House, and while they were still strong and significant for the narrative, I think they lost something of the jewel-like precision they had in the beginning. I think essays are like short stories – they gain part of their particular strength because the whole concept of them is defined enough that you can hold the whole package in your head at one sitting. I can work on the beginning of an essay, strengthening its development towards the end, with almost every word in my head. I think it makes essay tighter and more singular – and more effective. It’s much harder to hold the same tension throughout a whole book, and I’m not even sure readers want something pulled that tight for say, 64,000 words or more.
Q: What was the biggest challenge you encountered in writing Burning Down the House?
A: Nightmares. I thought that writing the book would be cathartic. It wasn’t – it dredged up everything right to the front of my brain again, and kept it live. I was tormented by nightmares all through the writing, and still am – especially on tour or at readings, where people inevitable come up to me to share their own accident or fires experiences.
Q: What was the greatest reward?
A: I’ve heard from a handful of emergency services personnel who have found the book to be a great help overcoming their own demons – at least four are back to work, regularly in contact with me, and I feel (hopefully,perhaps) that I’ve had a part in that.
Q: What might you tell aspiring writers to read, and why?
A: Read lots. Read every genre you can. One of the best things about journalism is that I exercise my reading and writing muscles every single day. It’s like a foreign language – you have to use words until they are all second nature.
Q: What are you reading now?
A: Half-broke Horses by Jeannette Walls, Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving, Galore by Michael Crummey and Arnaldur Indridason’s Jar City.
Russell Wangersky was born in Connecticut but came to Halifax as a young child. He has worked as a journalist since the mid-80s, at the St. John’s Sunday Express, CBC Television, and finally, at The Telegram, where he became editor in 2002. For many years he also served as a volunteer fire-fighter. His book of short stories, The Hour of Bad Decisions, was included in both the Globe and Mail and Toronto Star’s lists of Best Books of 2006, and garnered an impressive string of awards nominations. Burning Down the House is his most recent book.
Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Interviews, Memoir
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Sunday, November 1st, 2009
The shortlist for this year’s Edna Staebler Award has been announced. A list of nominees, with the jury’s comments:
- The Darien Gap: Travels in the Rainforest of Panama (Harbour Publishing) by Martin Mitchinson. The Darien Gap is the fascinating story of one man’s trek into the heart of the Panamanian rainforest. As the author journeys deeper into the unknown, by foot and canoe, his narrative skillfully weaves together the region’s history of European exploration and exploitation, its modern-day social and cultural realities, and his personal search for understanding in a jungle paradise that is both welcoming and dangerous.
- Lost: A Memoir (Key Porter Books) by Cathy Ostlere. Intensely lyrical, hypnotic and haunting, Cathy Ostlere’s memoir of personal loss is unafraid to take risks. The rich language of Lost pulls the reader into an intimate and singular state of mind, into a place “where time has collapsed” and a fierce gravity takes hold. This is a book that refuses easy consolation, taking us beyond a traditional tragic ending to reconsider our understanding of love, responsibility and loyalty.
* Note: Cathy is interviewed on this site, here.
- Burning Down the House: Fighting Fire and Losing Myself (Thomas Allen Publishers) by Russell Wangersky. Burning Down the House offers a crystal-clear portrait of a man who, through his career as a firefighter, becomes addicted to the rush of danger. In a narrative stacked with house fires, car wrecks and various other human tragedies, Russell Wangersky portrays the emotional contingencies and lingering trauma that slowly begin to pull his life apart. This is a powerful book that illuminates the darker natures of those whom we trust with our lives.
* Note: Russell is interviewed on this site, here.
- The Riverbones: Stumbling After Eden in the Jungles of Suriname (McClelland & Stewart) by Andrew Westoll. Set in the steamy jungles of Suriname, The Riverbones charts the colonial legacy of South America as much as it explores the beauty and peril of a geographical region. This is a memoir that locates its own “heart of darkness” in the author’s self-reflexive obsession with the tragedies of twenty-first century eco-tourism. Westoll’s exploration of the exotic is tempered with an awareness of what it means to trespass in a land that is not one’s own.
* Note: Andrew is interviewed on this site, here.
As judge Tanis MacDonald remarks: “The books that are the finalists for this award are evidence that the memoir, in all its political, personal and contemplative glory, is a force in Canadian non-fiction writing.” Congratulations to all the nominees.
Tags: Awards, Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, Travel Writing
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Monday, October 26th, 2009
Photo: Jill Krementz
“I’m eight years old. My mother and I come out of our apartment onto the second-floor landing. Mrs. Drucker is standing in the open doorway of the apartment next door, smoking a cigarette. My mother locks the door and says to her, “What are you doing here?” Mrs. Drucker jerks her head backward toward her own apartment. “He wants to lay me. I told him he’s gotta take a shower before he can touch me.” I know that “he” is her husband. “He” is always the husband. “Why? He’s so dirty?” my mother says. “He feels dirty to me,” Mrs. Drucker says. “Drucker, you’re a whore,” my mother says. Mrs. Drucker shrugs her shoulder. “I can’t ride the subway,” she says. In the Bronx, “ride the subway” was a euphemism for going to work.
I lived in that tenement between the ages of six and twenty-one. There were twenty apartments, four to a floor, and all I remember is a building full of women. I hardly remember the men at all. They were everywhere, of course - husbands, fathers, brothers – but I remember only the women. And I remember them all crude like Mrs. Drucker or fierce like my mother. They never spoke as thought they knew who they were, understood the bargain they had struck with life, but they often acted as though they knew. Shrewd, volatile, unlettered, they performed on a Dreiserian scale. There would be years of apparent calm, then suddenly an outbreak of panic and wildness: two or three lives scarred (perhaps ruined), and the turmoil would subside. Once again: sullen quiet, erotic torpor, the ordinariness of daily denial. And I – the girl growing in their midst, being made in their image – I absorbed them as I would chloroform on a cloth laid against my face. It has taken me thirty years to understand how much of them I understood.”
- from Fierce Attachments
Vivian Gornick, critic, essayist, memoirist, feminist. Her latest book is The Men in My Life.
Her revelation that she had made up some of the conversations in Fierce Attachments created a stir on Salon. Her response is at NPR.
Tags: Memoir, Memorable Lines
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Sunday, August 16th, 2009
Photo by Sally Somers Austin
I met Paul Austin in 2005 at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Paul was what’s known as a “contributor” that year - in other words, a paying student – and a more gentle, thoughtful, hardworking and dedicated classmate I can’t imagine. At that time, he had written and published a few essays about his experience as an emergency room physician, and he was thinking about weaving them together in a book. It’s a dream that many Bread Loaf alumni share, but in Paul’s case, the dream came true. He went back to Bread Loaf several times, as a work-study student and a scholar; this year, he holds a coveted fellowship to the conference. And his memoir, Something for the Pain, appeared in the fall of 2008 to deserved acclaim. In prose as clean as a scalpel’s shave, and as fast-moving as the pace of the emergency ward itself, Paul re-creates the atmosphere of blood and guts and heart-stopping pain, of wry humour and supercharged adrenaline that fuels a busy hospital. At the same time, he describes the ripple effects that emergency work can have on a family, and his own efforts to achieve balance in the midst of so much death and suffering - not to mention, sleep-depriving shift work. Honest, gripping, fiercely compassionate, and unafraid to pose big questions, Something for the Pain should interest anyone who likes good memoir and anyone who cares about the caring professions.
Photo by Paul Austin
Q: When did you start writing? Tell us a bit about your writing history.
A: My first go-round with college, I was an English major. I dropped out during my sophomore year, to build a cabin on five acres of land in rural North Carolina. I was an English major at the time, and planned to use my experiences in the woods, to write an updated Walden Pond. The book would be a literary success due to the singularly clear-eyed prose I would bring back from the woods. It would also be a block-busting commercial success, because it would include sex – lots of sex.
I worked construction for a year, saving money to move out to the land. During that period, I filled beer-soaked napkins with morose and heart-felt poetry, but surprisingly, the poems did not result in literary fame. Equally surprising, the young women in my hometown did not swarm to my table, to see what I was writing. I was baffled – isn’t beery poetry a sure-fire turn-on?
Eventually I had enough money to quit my construction job, live in a tent, and build the cabin. But I did not write a book – having enjoyed insufficient sex to ensure the huge commercial success the project deserved. (This was before James Frey established that fiction sells very well as non-fiction.) But it was just as well: the sex scenes I would’ve made up – the kerosene lantern flickering a smoky yellow light, embers from the campfire pulsing red, blouses unbuttoned with trembling fingers, jeans unzipped and shimmied out of – would have been as implausible as any Penthouse letter ever written.
After a long series of jobs, I eventually became a fire fighter – yellow hat and red truck, canvas hoses and aluminium ladders. I did not write much then, but I read more than in any other time of my life. I eventually went back to college, and from there, to medical school. During residency training, I wrote a detective novel. The hero was an emergency medicine intern. Smart. Brave. Intrepid. I’ve not shown the manuscript to anyone.
Q: What inspired you to write this book?
A: I have always loved to read, and about ten years ago I took a Saturday morning class on creative writing. I wrote several stories about different jobs I’ve had: trash truck labourer, carpenter, pizza cook, and firefighter. They were okay. Then through the North Carolina Writers’ Network, I had some of the stories critiqued. I got the hang of “show, don’t tell,” pretty quickly, and began to get encouraging feedback from teachers. Then I wrote a story about working as a doc in the emergency room. I read an excerpt of that story a local writer’s weekend retreat. Everyone loved it. So I stuck with ER stories.
Q: What kind of work routine did you use?
A: My writing schedule is just like my ER schedule: totally random. I get some day shifts, some night shifts, some afternoons. The bad news is that I work half of the weekends, and that there is no pattern to my schedule. The good news is, I get days off during the week (when the kids are in school) and I get used to being interrupted. ER docs and nurses get interrupted constantly, so we have to be able to re-focus on a problem quickly. When I sit down to write, I write.
Q: What was the biggest challenge you encountered completing this book?
A: Knowing when it was good enough. Early on, my teachers thought that agents would snap it up. It took me four or five years to get an agent. I am so grateful for each and every agent who rejected my manuscript. The book is much, much, much, stronger than it was when I first started sending it out. If I’ had been “luckier,” I could’ve published a book that was half-assed, at best.
Q: What was the greatest reward?
A: I think that the process of writing – the hours at the keyboard, trying to get the words on the page to do what I want them to – has been the biggest reward. And those hours continue to sustain me. It’s like spending a morning in a tree stand, bow hunting for deer, or canoeing on a lake or river. Those are hours are in “the sanity bank,” and those hours help bring a different focus to my life. At one level, it doesn’t matter if I don’t even see a deer, or don’t get a nibble on the hook. What matters is losing myself in that focused moment, suspended in the moment of waiting for what might come, and hoping that I’m ready for it when it does.
Q: What do you like most about writing non-fiction?
A: With non-fiction, I don’t have to generate a good story – all I have to do is recognize one. The creativity revolves around choosing the best words to tell the story. With non-fiction, the life experience provides a big chunk of marble. The creative decisions involve what to chip away, what to leave in.
Q: Why did you choose this particular title?
A: Titles are hard. I wanted one that would be all evocative and everything. Poetic. At first I pitched it as The Topography of Night, because a poet at Bread Loaf loved the line – I was trying to explain what the book was about. But that title was too static. I then scanned the book, looking for phrases that sounded cool, and came across “something for the pain.” I was hoping that my agent, or editor, would come up with something better, but they didn’t. I read a lot of poems about insomnia, hoping to come across something. I suggested, “Day Destroys the Night,” from the Doors’ song “Break on Through,” but they didn’t like it. Ultimately, the editor decides what the title will be, and what the cover looks like. So all the writer has to do, is to come up with something that doesn’t suck so bad that no-one will look at it.
Q: What advice would you give to writers trying to get published?
A: Focus on the writing. The redemption occurs in the struggle to get the words to be as honest and true and clear as possible. Each “success” along the way – placing a story in a literary magazine, finding an agent, publishing your book, are undoubtedly great milestones, and should be celebrated. But the real successes are the moments in which we find the right words and put them in the right order. The second piece of advice is one I was given by a writing teacher: “It’s a war of attrition. Don’t attrish.”
Q: What book would you tell them is a must to read and why?
A: Something For the Pain: One Doctor’s Account of Life and Death in the ER, because the more books I sell, the sooner I can cut back on my shifts in the ER. But seriously, I think it is always a good idea to go back to your favourite book, and read it again. Another book that is worth reading is the one that your favourite teacher loved, but you didn’t. I’ve read The Great Gatsby four times. I like it okay, but I’m embarrassed that I don’t “get it,” as deeply as other writers. So I keep reading it, hoping that I’ll understand it better, and that my writing will improve.
Q: Who is your favourite author and why?
A: Gosh. Can I answer with my favourite books? I’ve read The Angle of Repose, several times because the writing is so good, and it’s a guy’s take on a marriage. Stegner gets so much done, in so many layers, in that book. I also love Nobody’s Fool, and Empire Falls, by Richard Russo. He does such a good job writing about men who are struggling to remain true to themselves and maintain relationships with the people around them.
Q: What are you reading now?
A: A Tale of Two Cities. It’s the second time I’ve read it, and I’d forgotten what a fun read it is. I love reading a classic that is also such a good story.
Photo by Mark Austin
Paul Austin has worked in emergencies for twenty years: first as a firefighter, and now as an emergency room physician. His essays have been published in The Gettysburg Review, Creative Nonfiction, Ascent Magazine, The Southeast Review, and turnrow. His essay, “Tucker Put His Gun to His Head,” was listed as a notable essay in Best American Essays 2005. His memoir Something For the Pain: One Doctor’s Account of Life and Death in the ER was published by W.W. Norton September 8, 2008. Contact Paul at paulethanaustin.com
Tags: Interviews, Memoir
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Tuesday, August 4th, 2009
“Though I am alive now, I do not believe that an old man’s pessimism is truer than a young man’s optimism simply because it comes after. There are things a young man knows that are true and are not yet in the old man’s power to recollect. Spring has its sappy wisdom. Lonely teenagers still arrive in San Francisco aboard Greyhound buses. The city can still seem, I imagine, by comparison to where they came from, paradise.
Four years ago, on a Sunday in winter, a brilliant spring afternoon, I was jogging near Fort Point while overhead a young woman was, with difficulty, climbing over the railing of the Golden Gate Bridge. Holding down her skirt with one hand, with the other she waved to a startled spectator (the newspaper next day quoted a workman who was painting the bridge) before she stepped onto the sky.
To land like a spilled purse at my feet.”
– Richard Rodriguez, From “Late Victorians.”
Tags: Essayists, Essays, Memoir, Memorable Lines
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