Posts Tagged ‘Memoir’
Thursday, May 13th, 2010
A thoughtful post from biographer Julija Šukys on her blog Writing. Life. Thanks to Andrew Westoll for the link.
“It’s easy to sneer at the glut of memoirs of the past decade, and to discredit the genre as somehow dishonest or narcissistic, but autobiographical texts and personal essays that really work are always about something bigger than the person writing them.
The best first-person texts flirt with navel-gazing, but are redeemed by insight, artistry, self-criticism, and honesty. By telling a story about their own singular lives, skilled autobiographers and personal essayists inspire revelations. In other words, these texts not only reveal something about the person writing them, but also about the one reading them.”
Tags: Biography, Blogs, Essays, Memoir
Posted in Biography, Essays, Memoir, Women and Writing | 2 Comments »
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
Posted in Anthologies, Interviews, Memoir, Women and Writing | No Comments »
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
Posted in Creative Nonfiction, Ethical issues, Memoir, Poetry, Women and Writing | No Comments »
Friday, January 15th, 2010
For The Boy in the Moon. Congrats to him and to all the short and long-listed authors.
Tags: Awards, Creative Nonfiction, Memoir
Posted in Awards, Creative Nonfiction, Memoir | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009
rob mclennan has probably done more to put Ottawa on the literary map than anyone else alive. He writes poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction and literary essays; his clever blog attracts hundreds of readers each week. All this, and he’s also a walking, talking archive of Canadian literature and a tireless promoter of other writers’ work. rob may be best known for his poetry, but today, December 1, he launches his second novel, missing persons. In addition, rob’s currently engaged in two intriguing nonfiction projects. In the selections of these I’ve seen I’m particularly interested in the ways he puts literary history to work, using little-known or sometimes well-known details as springboards for further exploration, looking at place through the lens of its literary past. These manuscripts continue and extend his experimentation in poetry and fiction. I spoke with rob by email between November 5th and 7th, 2009.
Q: You’re an incredibly prolific writer who seems to cross genres with ease. Is it as easy as you make it look? Does one genre feel most “natural” to you than others? What are the challenges?
A: Well, I’d hardly call it easy; my self-education process is both extremely quick and excruciatingly slow. I learn by fumbling around, in not knowing what it is that I’m doing. Like bpNichol working the presses at Coach House Printing, figuring out what do to by not knowing, and exploring the boundaries. The obvious drawback is that the short term becomes more frustrating, but hopefully the longer term becomes richer, deeper. I don’t want to write books that look like everyone else’s.
Before my first novel appeared in print, I’d been over a decade attempting fiction, with numerous manuscripts in various stages of completion, including a few already abandoned. For any genre I work in, it seems, I need a book to fail, before I figure out the process for anything subsequent; I learn by doing. Fail better, said Beckett. Perhaps I should be listening better to this. perhaps I need a larger failure before what follows can transcend itself.
Part of what took me forever into the novel form was figuring out the shape of my own style, after attempts into what I thought a “novel” was supposed to look like. Remember Jack Kerouac’s first published novel? It was completely different from what came after; that first book written, it would seem, in the style he thought a novel was supposed to.
When I was still a teen, I worked in multiples, writing poetry and fiction, playing piano and guitar, drawing, painting and taking photographs. I even attempted a comic book script at one point. My interests have always been multiple, diverse yet frustratingly separate. Part of what I’ve long admired about 1990s English-speaking literary Montreal was the way the younger writers like Corey Frost, Anne Stone, Dana Bath and Catherine Kidd were blending and blurring poetry, fiction and performance, one slipping easily and seamlessly into the next (and almost even a matter of context). It’s what I find fascinating about Vancouver writer Michael Turner as well, exploring alternate shapes of a literary work. Why do these genres have to have such solid barriers between them? Who gets to decide such a thing?
It appears as though Canadian writing is one of the harshest climates, in terms of the barriers between these arbitrary notions of genre, yet we’ve produced some of the most daring when it comes to breaking those same barriers down, including Erín Moure, Phil Hall, Ken Sparling, Sheila Watson, Elizabeth Smart, Nathalie Stephens, Michael Turner, Nicole Brossard, and so many others.
Obviously I’m far more interested in lyric prose, so the form of fiction I’m working is closer to poetry than certain straighter and more narrative kinds of fiction, deceptively called the “poet’s novel” (a term I find needlessly dismissive, without really being descriptive). Whatever else their poems were doing, Elizabeth Smart and Sheila Watson were writing wonderfully lyric books of prose. One does not automatically fall into the other (Smart’s poems, for example, seemed quite traditional, compared to her prose).
My current prose fiction works to explore moments, slowly working out the threads between those moments, and projects that end up weaving a sequence of threads into a particular weave, somewhere between complicated and straightforward. Does that even make sense?
Perhaps, as you ask, not with ease, but with patience over quite a long period.
Q: You’ve currently got (at least) two memoir projects on the go: house, a (tiny) memoir and Sleeping in Toronto. What sparked your desire to write memoir? What are the special joys and challenges of this genre for a writer? For a reader?
A: As far as non-fiction goes, there is a merging of essay, history and memoir I’ve been exploring through projects such as McLennan, Alberta (my Edmonton year as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta) and current Sleeping in Toronto.
Years ago, maybe a decade or so, I started a similar project on my home territory, Glengarry County, eastern Ontario, wanting to mix a memoir of sorts with writing done on the area, as well as working through the county’s rich history. Glengarry County is well documented in poetry and fiction, going back well over a century, including “Ralph Connor” (pseudonym of the Rev. Charles Gordon), who was Canada’s bestselling novelist circa 1900, and his aunt, Margaret M. Robertson, writing novels from the 1860s to the 1880s (Connor’s mother and aunt were classmates of Emily Dickinson at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Mass.). Being that my family grew out of the Gordon Church, St. Elmo, a building created under the auspices of Rev. Gordon’s own father, writing became geographically local for me at quite a young age; when I was about ten years old, my father pointing out where various scenes of Glengarry School Days (1902), for example, were set.
I got fifty pages into such a project well before I knew what the hell “creative non-fiction” even was, and the whole manuscript, Reading and Writing Glengarry County (I really need to revisit that title) just felt unwieldly, so I set it aside to return to, later. Heading west in September 2007 and discovering the work of Edmonton writer Myrna Kostash, it was as though simply by existing, she was giving me permission to move into what I had already begun, these forays into “creative non-fiction,” without knowing a shape or understanding the genre. From Kostash, I headed into some other directions, rereading early Elizabeth Hay, and into the non-fiction works of Ted Bishop, Guy Maddin, Monica Kidd, Stan Dragland, Sarah de Leeuw and Brian Fawcett, exploring some of the possibilities of what the form could provide.
I’ve long been interested in the idea of memoir, but uncomfortable with writing a story that’s all about me. I can’t imagine finding anything about me interesting enough to sustain such a project, and much prefer the movement of the creative non-fiction form, exploring a particular idea or geography through its writing and history, using the memoir as its framing, the bare thread that ties the project together.
Once west, I started a project of creative non-fiction, McLennan, Alberta, to explore my nine months in Edmonton, trying to figure out the context in which I’d entered (the project got its name from a town north of the city, which may have been named after a doctor from my Glengarry County who worked for the railroad, Dr. John K. McLennan). After thirty-seven eastern Ontario years, what did it mean to be in Alberta? Over nine months, I wrote pieces centred around the Banff Centre, Whyte Avenue, the University of Alberta and the West Edmonton Mall, exploring the histories and myths of the place, and writing by such as Elizabeth Smart, Sheila Watson, Robert Kroetsch, Eli Mandel, Aritha van Herk, Kristjana Gunnars, Douglas Barbour, Erin Knight, Christine Stewart and Trisia Eddy.
The book even writes of the beginnings of a new relationship, which turned the manuscript into another kind of project, another kind of thread woven in. I admit, I still haven’t decided if the manuscript as a whole even works (I plan on returning to it soon, to complete it, finally), but now that she’s in Toronto doing a Master’s Degree, I’m here too, as much as she’ll let me, making Sleeping in Toronto a loose sequel, writing out what comes next, through the exploration of a brand-new city.
Q: In house: a (tiny) memoir, you’re working from old family photographs, using visual records to piece together what you remember – and don’t remember – of the past. Tell us something about that process.
A: I’d been thinking quite a while on writing from old pictures, and somehow, this project came together during my Edmonton year. What is it about going away that makes you think back to home? It must have been Christmas, heading back to the farm and pilfering that old photo album, getting back to Alberta and picking away at it during the first few weeks of January. I’m hoping the project, once published, can appear with one picture per text, if possible. In many ways, house: a (tiny) memoir was my attempt to reclaim the good parts of my childhood, before my mother got really sick. From the mid-1970s all throughout the 80s were pretty rough, and I know there are stories that, unless I tell, would never be told. Ones my sister (b. 1976) wouldn’t know, or her kids, or mine. It’s a tribute and acknowledgement to a period of time that existed, and my family tells few stories, so would disappear completely, otherwise.
It is a strange process, to work through one’s own history, and one’s own memories. I’m hesitant to check information from my family, to potentially taint or second-guess what I think I know from my own memories, although wonder if the project requires such, once it’s further along. My mother claimed surprise a couple of years ago at some of the things I remember, vivid memories of her mother’s cabin in Quebec, sold by the time I was two and a half. And yet, nothing of my grandfather, who died around the same time. The challenge, really, is to write these pieces in such a way that a potential reader might care to read them. Why should a reader care?
Q: Sleeping in Toronto is in its early stages, but so far, it appears to be constructed in journal-like installments (written during, or of, your visits to Toronto) that don’t entirely resemble journal entries. It’s a voyage around, through, and into Toronto, beginning with a bird’s eye (condo) view of the lake, finding its feet on the Island and waterfront, and then travelling, by way of history, to points west, east, and north, and through poetry – yours and others’ – aiming deeper into the city’s mythologies. It’s memoir in the sense that the narrator’s experience provides a point of departure – but it’s less about the narrator than it is about the narrator’s attempts to understand the place. Thoughts?
A: Sleeping in Toronto starts in her condo by the lakeshore, and then works its way out, which, as I learned into the process, is how the city itself got created, so I really appreciate the happy accident of such. I’d much rather a book about learning Toronto than about me in Toronto. When travelling to any place, it’s impossible not to be aware of myths, thinking of Ernest Hemingway when seeing the Toronto Star building, or Daniel Jones when seeing the CN Tower. How could you not? Alberta was thick with that, the mythology of the landscape. I would like to learn where I am, and where I am headed. My own Glengarry County is rife with history too, to the point, sometimes, that it has almost no present (a joke from my 1980s high school days was that Alexandria had just entered the 1950’s).
Is my creative non-fiction working to understand place, understand history, and my fiction working to understand story, and people? Perhaps I’m reading too much into myself.
Q: Do you ever adapt the same material for poem (or fiction) and nonfiction?
A: No. I might work around different aspects of themes or ideas in a different form, but never the same material. That said, I’ve put a poem or two of my own into the creative non-fiction, but only inserted as self-quotation. To illustrate a point.
Q: You’ve written many literary essays (and Sleeping in Toronto includes entries that are mini-essays about poetry). What do you like about the essay form?
A: I like the essay because it’s entirely malleable; I enjoy working the form. My essay on Anne Carson looks entirely different than, say, my essay on Phil Hall, or Andrew Suknaski. I like forming the shape based on the subject. My essay on Suknaski took the shape of a series of open letters to him directly, which is how many of his own essays and reviews were written, writing directly to Eli Mandel, for example, or Robert Kroetsch. I would like to think it adds another level of stepping inside an author and their works to write further into such shapes. It seems rather arbitrary, somehow, to write every essay solely in the same singular shape. Arbitrary, and somehow lacking. I mean, I’m not an academic, so there would be something insincere in any attempt to write purely academic pieces. It’s also a form I know I don’t understand, so why not go somewhere else, make the process more interesting?
Look at Phil Hall’s “Essay on Purdy” from An Oak Hunch (2005), or Michael McClure’s essay on Richard Brautigan in Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writing and Life (2006), moving the form around to suit their subjects. Art, including fiction, poetry and non-fiction, is supposed to be fluid, not static. I’m not interested in writing everything out the same way.
Perhaps there is a sense of freedom here I’ve managed that I haven’t quite yet in my poetry or fiction, who knows. But I am still exploring.
Q: Who are some of your favourite writers of nonfiction, and why?
A: Apart from the list of authors I’ve already given ( I haven’t gone through as much as I should have), I quite liked Robert Kroetsch’s book on Alberta, and Jonathan Lethem’s The Disappointment Artist. Can we call Dany Laferriere’s books novels or novel-essays? Or what of David W. McFadden’s “Great Lakes Suite”? As far as literary essays, Aritha van Herk and George Bowering have always made the form far more engaging, blending in parts of fiction along the way, or even memoir. Sly traces, one might say. I remember Clint Burnham had some really engaging essays in the mid-1990s out of Vancouver’s old Boo magazine; why haven’t they been collected yet into a single volume?
Q: What would you tell aspiring writers to read?
A: Everything. Read as much as possible and as widely as possible. And every so often, make a point of reading something you know you disagree with; there are still things to be learned.
Q: What are you reading now?
A: I always have a mound of things I’m carrying around, actively or passively reading over various stretches of time, but here is a list of sorts, in no particular order: Hemingway on Fishing, ed. Nick Lyons (New York NY: The Lyons Press, 2000), Peter & Max: A Fables Novel, Bill Willingham (New York NY: DC Comics / Vertigo, 2009), Stitches, a memoir, David Small (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2009), Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt, Ken Sparling (Toronto ON: self-made by author upon request, 1996), Excerpts from the Real World, Robert Kroetsch (Lantzville BC: Oolichan Books, 1986), declining america, rob budde (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2009), Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry and Poetics, eds. Kate Eichhorn and Heather Milne (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2009), The False Laws of Narrative: The Poetry of Fred Wah, ed. Louis Cabri (Waterloo ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009), Toronto: The Unknown City, Howard Ackler and Sarah B. Hood (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2003), Barcelona, Robert Hughes (New York NY: Knopf, 1992), Once Upon a Hill: Love in Troubled Times, Glenn Patterson (London UK: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009), Quarter Life Crisis: Only the Good Die Yung, Evan Munday (Toronto ON: self-published, 2009), My Beloved Wager: Essays from a Writing Practice, Erín Moure (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2009), and Translating Montreal: Episodes in the Life of a Divided City, Sherry Simon (Montreal QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006).
Born on the Ides of March in Ottawa’s Parkdale neighbourhood in 1970, rob mclennan is an Ottawa-based writer, editor and publisher, and author of more than twenty titles of poetry, fiction and non-fiction in Canada, Ireland, England and the United States, with work appearing in over two hundred journals in fourteen countries. He has published a travel book on Ottawa (Ottawa: The Unknown City) and a collection of literary essays (subverting the lyric: essays). More recently, his second novel is missing persons (The Mercury Press), launches in Toronto on December 1, 2009, and his eighteenth poetry collection, wild horses (University of Alberta Press), is due out in February 2010. He spent the 2007-8 academic year as writer in residence at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, and blogs regularly at robmclennan.blogspot.com.
Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Essays, Interviews, Memoir
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