Posts Tagged ‘Interviews’
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 »
Monday, June 22nd, 2009
Books of essays by a single author are seldom an easy sell. But anthologies containing essays by multiple authors seem to fly off bookstore shelves. Ever since Dropped Threads, each season brings at least one example, with subjects ranging from parenthood (or not) to illness. The demand seems insatiable, for readers and writers alike.
Since so many essays these days begin life with a call from an anthologist, I thought it would be interesting to interview editors as well as contributors. Cori Howard is both. Here, she talks about her work on Between Interruptions: 30 Women Tell the Truth About Motherhood.
Cori Howard and children
Q: What sparked the idea for this project?
A: A conversation in the park, with a good friend. I seem to get a lot of ideas that way, these days. We were talking about our post-baby sex lives, and that led us to start talking about how babies had changed our relationships, friendships, ambition, identities. And I had read some of the anthologies on motherhood published in the US, but I still craved more. That’s all I wanted to read about at the time. And I could only manage to read anthologies. Snatching a few moments to read an essay was (and still is) so much more manageable than a whole work of non-fiction.
Q: Why did you choose an anthology of essays rather than poetry or fiction?
A: Non-fiction is the only genre I’d ever worked in, the only genre I felt I could handle. I never considered anything else.
Q: Does the essay genre offer something different to readers? If so, what?
A: Truth, raw and honest emotion, deep and penetrating insights. All that.
Q: Was it difficult to secure contributors?
A: No. It was incredibly easy, even with seasoned writers who could have charged a fortune for their contributions were more than willing to share their stories. They all said they’d never been asked, but had always wanted to write about it. So I was lucky.
Q: Tell us something about the editing process.
A: I don’t remember. I did it all at night with a newborn and a 3-year-old. Just kidding. I remember staying up after putting my children to bed and reading one or two essays a night and feeling like it was such a privilege and an honor to be doing what I was doing. I remember sipping my wine and revelling in the stories that were being told, often so well-told that I didn’t need to do much editing. I would email the contributors with my initial thoughts, ask them to do a rewrite and send it back. The contributors who hadn’t published or written a personal essay before required more work, but every contributor was smart and savvy and easy to work with.
Q: What was the greatest challenge in getting this project off the ground?
A: There wasn’t one. I found an agent who was 8 months pregnant and pitched her the idea by phone. She got me a contract within 2 weeks, just before she headed off on mat leave. It was a truly impressive turnaround, even for a fast-paced journalist like myself. But even before I signed on the dotted line, I had started calling all the writers I knew and admired, soliciting their ideas and feedback.
Q: What has been the greatest reward, either in working on this book, or post-publication?
A: The book itself. I get so many women emailing and coming up to me to tell me how much it meant to them, how much they could relate to the stories, how it helped them feel less alone. And I owe it to the book, and to the response to the book, for doing what I’m doing now: teaching writing to moms online and in Vancouver. The gatherings that I have initiated have been even more rewarding than the book. I have witnessed remarkable transformation, both in personality and in writing. I’ve seen a community grow from nothing and I’ve met some of the most amazing, talented women. I’ve learned so much from them and their stories about bravery, courage, strength and power.
Q: What advice might you offer to someone else who wanted to put together a collection like this?
A: Have a partner who can help you pay the bills while you’re doing it! Just kidding. Although I’m sure that would help. I wouldn’t know. What I do know is that it was never really an onerous process, but always rewarding in some interesting and surprising ways. I knew if I ever did a book, it would have to be on a topic I would perpetually be passionate about, or it could easily become an awful experience. But I knew from writing and publishing essays on my experience as a mother that it was a topic I wouldn’t tire of….and I haven’t.
Cori Howard is an award-winning journalist who has worked in newspapers, magazines, television and radio, filing stories from across the world. Her writing (much of it personal essays on motherhood) has appeared in publications including The Globe and Mail, Canadian Geographic, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Independent, Maclean’s, Chatelaine, Reader’s Digest and Today’s Parent. You can find more information about her, her writing, and the courses she leads at The Momoir Project.
Tags: Anthologies, Essays, Interviews
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Sunday, May 17th, 2009
Caterina Edwards got the 2008 Edmonton Litfest Cabaret off to a hilarious start with an expertly paced excerpt from her memoir, Finding Rosa: A Mother with Alzheimer’s, a Daughter in Search of the Past. I knew right away that I’d want to read the whole book. It didn’t disappoint. Finding Rosa is not only funny, but also searching, honest, and deeply compassionate, so it’s no surprise that it’s been shortlisted for the Wilfred Eggleston Award for Nonfiction. My review will appear in a few weeks at Prairie Fire. Among the compelling aspects of this book for me is its expert blending of genres and its careful exhumation of public – as well as private – memory. Here is Caterina in conversation.
Caterina Edwards
Q: When did you start writing? Tell us a bit about your writing history.
A: I began telling myself stories before I could write. For many years, I was an only child, and my family moved often. I was often alone. So I told myself stories and peopled imaginary worlds.
My first conscious writing – that is, my first attempt at producing a real book – was in grade five. For a few years, I wrote all the time. But creative writing was not encouraged in schools then the way it is now.
Especially in high school and the early years of university, I absorbed the lesson that you had to be a genius to be a writer. And I obviously was not. During that time, I stopped writing, but not spinning fantasies. I began again when I studied creative writing with Rudy Wiebe. I did a Master of Arts in English literature, but wrote a creative thesis under Rudy and Sheila Watson. I published my first book when I was 34.
Q: What inspired you to write this book?
A: I wanted to make sense of my relationship with my mother. This required discovering her past. That led me to search for the history of the place where she was born. I felt the connection between the personal and the public, between memory and history, before I understood it.
Q: What kind of work routine did you use?
A: I didn’t have enough of a routine. I was still teaching writing online and doing other writing assignments. I tried to write about 4 days a week. I wish I was one of those writers who gets up and goes straight to the computer. I’m fairly useless for the first couple of hours. Every now and then, when I could afford it, I’d go to a writer’s retreat. Then I would work long hours and make good progress.
Q: What was the biggest challenge you encountered completing this book?
A: Finding the proper structure. It is much more difficult in a work of creative nonfiction. I’d written over a hundred pages when a writer-friend told me that I had no narrative through line. I threw everything out and started again. It took me a couple of years to figure out how to interweave the story of my caring for my mother with her life story and the history of the Istrian-Italians in the twentieth-century. Partly, it is finding the right rhythm. Also, the imagery and ideas are consistent throughout. I hope they gather resonance and meaning as the book progresses.
Q: What was the greatest reward?
A: Writing the book was cathartic. I grew to understand my mother and to forgive her.
Q: What do you like most about your chosen genre?
A: I love the scope and the flexibility of creative nonfiction. Memoir can easily contain history, biography, travel writing, reflection, exposition, and literary theory. There is no formula to this genre.
Still, I don’t have a chosen genre, per se. I’m drawn to new challenges. I’ve published a novel, a collection of short stories, a book of novellas, and a play. I’m not interested in repeating myself.
Q: Why did you choose this particular title for your work?
A: I didn’t. My title was “What Country is This?” taken from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.
Q: What advice would you give to writers trying to get published?
A: Persevere. Don’t give up. But first of all, write for yourself. Your motivation can’t be publication or monetary success.
Q: What book would you tell them is a must to read and why?
A: I like The Writing Life by Annie Dillard because she makes you understand the full import of being a writer. There are lots of good “how to” books. I found Carol Bly’s Beyond the Writers’ Workshop: New Ways to Write Creative Nonfiction useful when I was teaching writing.
Q: Who is your favourite author and why?
A: I don’t have one favourite. I love different writers for different reasons: Alice Munro, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Marcel Proust, W.G. Sebald, Italo Calvino, Leonardo Sciascia, and Claudio Magris. Certainly, my favourites when I was 25 are not my favourites now.
Q: What book are you reading right now?
A: I recently finished Netherland by Joseph O’Neill and Pathologies by Susan Olding. Both impressed me. Susan’s book touched me. [Editor's note: I promise I didn't pay her for this!] I’m just starting Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights On Air.
Caterina says: I was born in Earls Barton, an English village famous for its Saxon tower and shoe factories. My father was a Barton lad, my mother an Italian war bride. I’m told that as soon as I could talk, I became my mother’s translator. I suspect that learning both languages simultaneously encouraged my later distrust of a singular approach or point of view. We immigrated to Alberta just before my eighth birthday. I grew up in Calgary, but most summers I visited my mother’s family in Venice. The contrast in cultures led me to understand at a young age that identity is not fragmentary but multiple. I’m also impatient with the traditional categories of genre, crossing boundaries whenever I can.
University brought me to Edmonton and – to my surprise - I still live here. After obtaining a Master of Arts in English, I began to publish short stories in literary magazines and, now and then, an anthology. I wrote when I could snatch an hour or two. I was teaching full time at MacEwan College on three campuses – I was in the English department from its beginning – and was busy at home with my two daughters. Soon after the birth of the second, I published my first novel, The Lion’s Mouth with NeWest Press. Next came a play, Homeground, which was professionally produced, a collection of short stories, Island of the Nightingales, two novellas, Whiter Shade of Pale/Becoming Emma and more stories and essays. I also wrote a docudrama, The Great Antonio, for CBC Radio. Despite a taste for nonfiction, I used to define myself as a fiction writer until I co-edited with Kay Stewart two collections of life writing by women. I became fascinated with how to express the complexity of lived experience, the jumble of the individual and the universal.
I eventually left the college, and over the years, taught literature and writing at almost every post-secondary institution in Edmonton. I worked as a freelance editor and also as a grants officer for the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. I was a writer-in-residence at both the University of Alberta and MacEwan College.
When I was eighteen, Robert Kroetsch told me:“It doesn’t matter what you’re writing now. What matters is if you are still writing thirty years from now.” When I was little, I told myself stories for reassurance and companionship. My motivation now is different: it is my way of exploring and understanding the world. But I continue to write because I’m compelled to.
I am looking forward to taking on the projects I had to put off when I was juggling my writing with teaching, child-rearing, and looking after either ailing in-laws or parents. I have been in the same house for 26 years and with the same husband even longer. And I’m still obsessed with multiple selves and cultures, with private memory and public history, with here and there.
You can find Caterina at her website, here.
Tags: Awards, Creative Nonfiction, Interviews, Memoir
Posted in Awards, Creative Nonfiction, Interviews, Memoir, Women and Writing | 1 Comment »
Monday, May 11th, 2009
I’m delighted to present my first author interview with Shawna Lemay. Shawna’s book of essays, Calm Things, is currently shortlisted for the Wilfred Eggleston Award for Non-Fiction, an Alberta Literary Award.
Shawna Lemay in New York City
Q: What inspired you to write this book? Why did you choose to use the essay form instead of poetry, since you have already written a great deal of ekphrastic poetry?
A: I’m fascinated by all the ways there are to write about art, to approach painting, to translate pictures, what we see, into words. So in many ways this was a natural progression, the move from poetry into prose. I had been reading a lot of travel writing beforehand, and I remember feeling very unsettled and wanting to reconcile this with the circumstances of my life, and also this desire to learn to be alone in my room, to sink into that, to learn how to be present in exactly the place I found myself. A good friend had travelled to Africa and had begun writing some excellent essays (A.S. Woudstra) and I started wondering what would it be like to write travel essays about home. Just looking at things with the fresh and curious eyes of a traveller.
As luck would have it, I had written one essay the summer before I began grad school at the U of A. I had signed up for Greg Hollingshead’s graduate seminar in creative writing fully intending to write short stories. Most of the people did write short stories but he was very open to the essay form, and encouraging. I remember him saying, ‘this is great material.’ The book really started in that class, then – my confidence in the possibility of writing a collection of essays came from that experience.
Q: What, if anything, do you feel distinguishes the personal essay as a genre?
A: I think it’s another possible mode of telling truths. The genre draws on other genres – poetry, fiction, journalism or reportage, and so for me, it’s the openness to these permutations, the possibilities inherent in the form, that distinguish it.
Q: What was the biggest challenge you encountered in completing this book?
A: There is some pressure, when you begin shopping your book around to publishers to revise the entire work, the single essays, into one larger book with a narrative arc. Originally the book had included essays on other subjects besides still life, and though I couldn’t envision the book as a single piece, I could see the sense in narrowing it to only those essays about still life. It was very difficult to excise those essays, but I’m glad I did, because one of them has turned into a much larger piece that I’ve been working on in the several years since.
Q: What was the greatest reward?
A: There have been many! Having written poetry for so long, my writing community is filled with wonderful poets – but the essays have also introduced me to others in the community that I might otherwise not have met.
I had long been interested in the idea of writing a short book, and had read an essay by Kristjana Gunnars on the topic in her book Stranger at the Door which solidified this yearning. There was a time in my life, when my daughter was young, that I sought out short books. Anything else seemed extravagant. So there was some pleasure in having accomplished this small feat without really setting out to do it.
Another reward is hearing so many people say that after they read the book they were inspired to paint or write, or head back to the studio.
And one last lovely reward – is that given the nature of the book, I knew that it would take a special kind of publisher to take it on. Palimpsest Press, it seems to me, is a perfect fit with the book. Dawn Kresan, publisher extraordinaire, did a superb job of designing it, so that the object itself, the book, is calm. It’s been a pleasure working with Dawn and Palimpsest.
Q: What do you like about writing essays, or how would you compare your experience of writing essays and poetry?
A: My experience of writing poetry is that it’s so much more intense – poems come out of the fire. One does a lot of preliminary work before coming to write a poem, but usually the poems I keep are written during one wild, mad, impatient day. After that, they’re revised and revised, but the bulk of the poem comes in one piece. I’ve found I need to be far more patient with an essay, to wait for various strands to appear, and then I need to work much harder to make the connections clear, though not too clear.
I think the form chooses us, and we write what we can, when we can. I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that I wrote poems when my daughter was an infant and toddler, and then essays when she was in the early grades of elementary school. And now I’m writing a longer piece while she is 10 years old and so much more self-sufficient.
Q: Why did you choose this particular title for your work?
A: It’s the central question of the book, in a certain way. The Japanese call still life, “calm things,” I found out while researching the book. But for the French it’s nature morte, and for the Italian, it’s vita silente. So it has to do with perspective, about choice, how we choose to look at things, objects. It has to do with an approach to life, then, a way of understanding where we fit into the world through these every day, often overlooked, objects that in fact say so much about not only us as individuals, but the world from which they are plucked. These things that seem calm, still, silent, are at the same time, anything but. I could have easily chosen the title of another essay as the title of the book, “Precarious.” The book is very much about how to live as an artist, to live as creative souls in this most precarious world, this un-calm world, but I want the reader to come to that truth, through another, which is that it’s possible yet, to arrive at what is calm by attending to things, listening to things, and really, by receiving. As creative people, we receive so that we may send our creative energy back into the world in whatever form it may take – and this is the source of calm, the centre or core of it, that I hope resonates from this small book.
Painting by Robert Lemay
Q: What book would you tell aspiring writers is a must-read, and why?
A: I wish I’d come across Making a Literary Life: Advice for Writers and Other Dreamers, by Carolyn See earlier. Her advice is practical and given in a light, humorous tone. She talks about what to wear to a reading, how to deal with rejection, how to maintain a practice of writing, how to get published. She’s well known for recommending that writers send out ‘charming notes’ to writers they admire. She says that “the energy that accrues around messages is extraordinary, mystical, immeasurable.” She also says that ‘there is no better cure for a bad review than a thank-you note.”
I find Helene Cixous’ Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing indispensable. She delves into writing via dreams, the depths, those places I need to travel. Reading this book, I always remember why I want to write – I’m reminded of the pleasure of language, of those magic words that spark and delight and resonate deep in the belly.
Q: Who are your favourite authors and why?
A: Helene Cixous, Clarice Lispector, Susan Griffin, Annie Dillard, Elizabeth Smart, Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Kristjana Gunnars.
I think in every case it comes down to how they use language. I’m more and more obsessed with works in which the language is thickly poetic and so am constantly re-reading The Waves, and The Stream of Life.
Q: What are you reading right now?
A: Besides the aforementioned, I’m also about to read Anne Michael’s new book, and have been reading White Ink, interviews with Helene Cixous.
Shawna Lemay is the author of five books of poetry - Red Velvet Forest (Muses’ Company, 2009), Blue Feast (NeWest Press, 2005), Still (published by the author, 2003), Against Paradise (McClelland & Stewart, 2001),and All the God-Sized Fruit (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999). Her book of essays about living with still life is titled Calm Things (Palimpsest Press, 2008). She has a B.A. in Honors English and an M.A. in English, both from the University of Alberta. All the God-Sized Fruit won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Stephan G. Stephansson Award. She lives in Edmonton with Robert Lemay, a visual artist, their daughter Chloe, and well-walked black Labrador retriever, Ace.
Shawna’s blogs are Calm Things and Capacious Hold-All. You can also find her at her web site.
Tags: Awards, Essayists, Essays, Interviews
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Wednesday, April 15th, 2009
Congratulations to Caterina Edwards and Shawna Lemay, both shortlisted for the Wilfred Eggleston Award for Non-fiction. Shawna is nominated for Calm Things, which I recently reviewed, and Caterina is nominated for Finding Rosa: A Mother with Alzheimer’s, a Daughter in Search of the Past, which I will be reviewing shortly. Both writers will also be interviewed here shortly.
Congratulations also to my fellow-Freehand author Marina Endicott who was nominated in the fiction category for Good to a Fault.
Tags: Awards, Essayists, Essays, Interviews, Reviews
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