Posts Tagged ‘Interviews’
Wednesday, October 14th, 2009
Ann Rauhala is well known as former foreign editor at The Globe and Mail and as a documentary maker for CBC television’s The National Magazine. But I met her when I responded to a book review she’d written in the Globe. The book was written by an American and it had to do with adoption from China. Ann’s review was less than complimentary. I’d read the book in question, agreed wholeheartedly with her assessment, and was pleased (or should I say, smug?) to see my own opinions expressed with such elegance. Her signature line mentioned that she was compiling an anthology of memoirs by Canadians who had adopted from China, and since I’d recently written a piece on the subject, I decided to contact her. It took a few years longer than either of us had anticipated, but The Lucky Ones: Our Stories of Adopting Children from China appeared in 2008 and was chosen as an Adoptive Families Best Book of the year. I spoke with Ann about the process of putting this book together.
Ann Rauhala
Q: What sparked the idea for this anthology?
A: People seemed curious about our adoption of a girl from China and rather than being offended by that –as some adoptive parents are- I felt an obligation to explain to them, to her, to myself. It hit me one day, walking across the schoolyard, that the obvious way to inform, amuse, maybe even enlighten the curious, given my background as a newspaper editor and columnist, was to bring together the voices of the many talented writers I knew who had adopted. And of course, by doing so, I’d get a chance to shape the narrative.
Q: Why did you choose an anthology of essays rather than poetry or fiction?
A: Collections and anthologies are a whole dinner party of viewpoints rather than a table for two. Although I read a lot of novels, when it comes to non-fiction, I like variety. Let’s carry on the food conceit and call it a preference for a smorgasbord. If I want to know about the Iranian election or mutual funds, for example, I much prefer to read four or five newspaper articles rather than one magazine piece.
Q: Does the essay genre offer something different to readers?
A: For me, essays are a more meditative genre, one in which I tend to mull over the arguments that are raised. While some great novels have changed my life, fiction nowadays feels more often an escapist sleeping potion rather than a stimulus.
Q: Was it difficult to secure contributors?
A: It wasn’t. Adoptive families are connected online and off and I tapped into that. A few people needed more encouragement than others. At least one person said yes only because I promised the book would not be sappy and self-congratulatory.
Q: Tell us something about the editing process.
A: I was a newspaper editor for almost 20 years so I knew a little bit about working with writers. I know that people, including writers, don’t always understand editing. One example: the best writers don’t get edited much so they don’t realize how much polishing may have gone on elsewhere. Ahem. Nevertheless, I was surprised sometimes by which parts went smoothly and which did not.
Q: What was the greatest challenge in getting this project off the ground?
A: Getting it off the ground wasn’t so hard – it was keeping it airborne. I knew it was a worthwhile idea but also knew that I wouldn’t be able to focus on it for a year or two after I sent out the first call for submissions. (I had started a new job teaching journalism, had a toddler and a school-age child at home and also did an MA part-time.) That year or two turned into several years.
Q: What has been the greatest reward, either in working on this book, or post-publication?
A: The greatest rewards have been my daughter’s exuberant delight in the final product and my 87-year-old mother’s quiet pride. I expect that as my daughter matures and appreciates the essays on a deeper level, there will be rewards to come.
Q: What advice might you offer to someone else who wanted to put together a collection like this?
A: It could take longer than you think but delays can enrich the final outcome. In my case, the longish time between the original notion and the delivery of the manuscript meant that the oldest cohort of adopted girls had reached 16 and had more insight about their experience and more to say than they would have at 11 or 12.
Ann Rauhala spent 16 years at The Globe and Mail, where she worked as a copy editor, assignment editor, beat reporter, foreign editor and featured columnist. From 1994 to 1997 she was a television reporter, making documentaries, mostly on health and social policy, for CBC television’s The National Magazine. She has also written editorials, business stories, book reviews, magazine articles and radio commentaries. She’s currently director of the newspaper stream at the School of Journalism at Ryerson University in Toronto.
Tags: Anthologies, Interviews
Posted in Anthologies, Interviews | No Comments »
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
Posted in Appearances, Essays, Interviews, Women and Writing | No Comments »
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
Posted in Creative Nonfiction, Creative Nonfiction Collective, Essayists, Essays, Interviews, Women and Writing | 6 Comments »
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
Posted in Interviews, Memoir | No Comments »
Monday, July 20th, 2009
I first read Cathy Ostlere’s work in the pages of Prairie Fire, and I was so impressed that I wrote to the magazine’s editors, asking them to pass along a fan letter to the author. “Somewhere in the Middle of the Atlantic,” which later became a chapter of her book, is a passionate and tautly structured account of Cathy’s dawning awareness that her adventure-loving brother, David, has been lost at sea. What she does with that knowledge is the subject of her memoir, Lost. She begins in a search for what may have happened to David, but the search soon expands to the question of what has become of her own youthful dreams. Part detective story, part elegy, and part excavation of her past, Lost is both a moving tribute to Ostlere’s brother, and a promissory note to herself.
Q: When did you begin to write?
A: I have a degree in English literature from the University of Manitoba. I began taking creative writing courses about twenty years ago. Alexander Writer’s Centre, U of Calgary, Banff Centre.
Q: What inspired you to write this book?
A: The circumstances that are told in Lost interrupted my life in such a dramatic way I thought that if I wrote it all down, I might be able to finish the story that had no ending. Instead, the writing of the book took over my life, as obsessions can, and ten years later my retelling was done.
Q: What kind of work routine did you use?
A: I write in the mornings. From about 8 to 1. I get up from my chair a lot to make tea because my neck gets sore when I write. And sometimes I forget to breathe. Standing up helps. I screen calls. Turn my email off. Agonize a lot. Doubt myself constantly. But I set small goals: a page, 500 words, a section, a poem, anything that has an end point. This maintains the feeling that I am actually getting somewhere.
Q: What was the biggest challenge you encountered completing this book?
A: I was concerned about what people would think about what I wrote: family, people in the book. Invading privacy (one’s own and others) feels like you’re moving through the world with a sword drawn.
Q: What was the greatest reward?
A: Just finishing. “The end.”
Q: What do you like most about creative nonfiction?
A: Creative non-fiction is the richest genre because it’s indefinable and therefore anything goes. Bits of poetry, snippets of letters, documents, remembered conversations, memories, sensory reminders – any and all of these things provide the raw material for the essay or book. It’s like having the world at your fingertips and the writer can tell the story any way they like. It is the freest genre. And has the capacity to be the most creative.
Q: Why did you choose this particular title for your work?
A: Everyone in the book is lost, in their own way.
Q: As a first-time author, what advice would you give to writers trying to get published?
A: Write for love. Love of words, ideas and stories.
Q: What book would you tell them is a must to read and why?
A: Jill Ker Conway’s When Memory Speaks. The text explores the art and the history of autobiography. I’ll quote her: “We want to know how the world looks from inside another person’s experience, and when that craving is met by a convincing narrative, we find it deeply satisfying.”
Q: Who is your favourite author and why?
A: Only one? I’ll choose a book instead: Jacques Poulin’s Autumn Rounds. It’s imaginative, quiet, lyrical, and a love story.
Q: What book are you reading right now?
A: Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier.
Cathy Ostlere was born in Portage La Prairie, Manitoba. She and her three siblings grew up as air force brats moving between Manitoba and Ontario military bases. Her family eventually settled in Winnipeg, the home of her Ukrainian grandparents, where Cathy completed high school and a degree in English at the University of Manitoba.
Cathy Ostlere’s first book, Lost, began as a series of poems but grew into creative non-fiction essays with the assistance of Sharon Butala, Greg Hollingshead and Edna Alford at the Banff Centre and Roberta Rees at the University of Calgary. Karen Connelly, of the Humber School of Writing, guided Lost into a memoir. Essays excerpted from Lost have been short-listed for the National Magazine Awards, Western Magazine Awards, CBC Literary Awards, and Prism International and Event Magazine Non-fiction Contests.
Cathy is currently finishing a YA verse novel and has adapted Lost into a one-woman play.
Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Interviews, Memoir
Posted in Creative Nonfiction, Interviews, Memoir, Women and Writing | 1 Comment »
