August 20th, 2009

Variousky

1) In case you were in suspense following yesterday’s panic post, the reading last night went fine, the other readers were fab, as were the friends and food (all-day breakfast very soothing when in a state of freak-out, I discovered). My big fear in reading an unpublished and thus unfixed story is that I would try to fiddle with it, ie., edit, while onstage, and render myself incoherent. But I managed to contain myself, stick to the script and read a half of a brand-new story–yay!! And I think it went well, as confirmed by several persons who are, ok, my friends and brother, but are also honest enough to be trusted.

2) How can we be 20 days into the month and me just reporting to you on That Shakespearian Rag‘s 31 Days of Short Stories program. It’s a good, occasionally critical, introduction to a wide range of stories, and also just great to see stories get this much attention.

3) More on stories: last fall, Nigel Beale did an audio interview with me about what makes a good short story. The interview touched on a lot of points from Flannery O’Connor’s views on stories, good company to be in, and riff off. Nigel then did a couple more interviews in similar formats, with Nam Le and Anne Enright, also extremely good company, Highlights from all three are now available in text form in Cha, an Asian literary journal.

4) While I was writing this post, the sky turned black, the wind began to rip leaves from the tree outside my window, thunder rattled and the sky downpoured. An outstanding show–I hope you weren’t outside.

There’s man holding a megaphone / it must have been the voice of gad
RR

July 20th, 2009

An honour and a privilege

I have ever maintained that the short story is thriving, as challenging, fantastic, funny, depressing, thrilling, shocking, entertaining and inspiring stories continue to be produced in this country at a fantastic rate. I read frequently and vigorously–journals and collections and online stuff–and still there’s a million things about this tricksy form that I’m trying to understand.

This spring and summer have afforded me some marvelous opportunities to try to learn this craft. The first was teaching grades 10 and 11 to write short stories. Anytime you want to call everything you think you know into question, just try telling it teenagers. Even before the kids started their questions, the act of putting together my thoughts and beliefs about how something ought to work in a story showed me a lot of my limitations, and opened up doors I never knew existed. Of course I want to think that my teaching served the cause of the short story by showing kids how fun it is to try to write them, and how much can be gained by reading them. In addition to that, though, I do think that my own contributions to the genre will be shaped by what I learned from teaching.

The other thing I’ve been up to lately is acting as a judge for the Journey Prize 21. Obviously, it was a huge honour to be asked to take on this role, but also a huge privilege to get to immerse myself in some of the best work done in the form this year in Canada, and to then to discuss that work deeply with my inspiring fellow judges, Lee Henderson and Camilla Gibb. This was, once again, an opportunity to interrogate what I think of as a “good short story,” why I think that, and how that might be limiting.

I plan to write more about this process around the book’s release (October 6; the winner will be announced at the Writers’ Trust Awards in November). This little post is just to say that I hope you are as excited about the upcoming anthology as I am–it’s full of wonderful, challenging, weird, etc. stories that inspired us, and might inspire you, too. And also to say that I think I’m a lot smarter than I was six months ago.

Our still lives posed / like a bowl of oranges
RR

June 18th, 2009

Rose-coloured reviews *From the Fifteenth District* by Mavis Gallant

Back before I realized the advantages of reading anthologies (in case you don’t want to read the whole post, in brief: taking a chance on new authors who you haven’t heard of/didn’t know you’d like, hearing the chimes and discordancies between different writers, seeing vastly different takes on similar themes), I almost exclusively read single-author short story collections. In my naivete, I believed in doing this, I was seeing the stories the way the author wanted them. Of course a lot of the time the author is fine with the stories in half a dozen forms: in journals and anthologies and on the internet, later in a collected or selection, as well as that one slim book. Nevertheless, there is something to be said for appreciating a writer’s gift over a longer span, even their gift is for short pieces, arranged in the order they wanted. I had read two of the nine pieces in From the Fifteenth District elsewhere (where? probably anthologies, although I don’t really recall). I knew that I had loved “The Moslem Wife” and “The Latehomecomer”, and I loved them here in the collection, too, but I felt a different affection seeing them working in concert with their fellows. *Fifteenth* is a book about Europe in the middle 50 years of the last century, about nationalism and nationality, very often about war, the indignities of being a woman, or a Jew, or a child, or simply alive.

These themes sound terribly heavy and imposing, but in fact such is Gallant’s subtly that you sometimes only realize two stories on what other layers were going on while you read blithely away. “The Moslem Wife” is a story about Netta’s devotion to Jack, their marriage and its tensions, and what happened after that, when the war came to their part of France. That romance and the intervention of history absorbed me entirely on first reading, and mainly on second, but I did notice that Netta and Jack were both Brits working and living in the south of France, not quite of the place but hardly of England, either. I noticed this because I had just read “The Four Seasons”, the first story in the book, about a young girl who goes to work for an American family living it Italy. The girl is Italian, but from another part so she doesn’t understand the local dialect, nor the English of her employers. Gradually she learns the latter, but remains so aloof from them she denies that she understands a word they say to her. Just as “Poor Netta, who saw herself as profoundly English, spread consternation by being suddenly foreign…”

The characters in these stories are French in Holland, Germans in France, Americans in Italy and Bulgarians in Scotland. They are the diaspora and the left behind. Is that the theme of this book, then–dispersal, foreignness, home and lack-of-home? Maybe…as usual, what I like best is stories that are examples and examinations of how people are, and I think *Fifteenth* is such a collection, under slightly narrower terms. How people are out of context, under duress, without the confidence-making banality of being like everyone else.

One of Gallant’s considerable achievements is that these stories are not only as tough and intense and wrenching as life is, they are also as funny, as ironic, as sardonic (although, I must say, rarely as silly–one thing Gallant doesn’t bother much with is lightness). One of the back-cover blurbs made me flinch as I read it on the bus (you mean you don’t read all that stuff? don’t you know how the intern slaved over it?): “Gallant’s fiction is so finely observed and so forbearing in the face of the shortcomings we ascribe to human nature that the reader might easily come away with the impression that these stories are narrated by God.” That’s from Mirabella, a now-defunct “women’s magazine” that one would not necessarily zoom to for serious literary reviews. This seemed at first a giddy overstatement.

But when I got back into the stories, the comment actually started to make good sense to me. Because what Gallant is very very good at is omniscient narrators, which even university professors do describe as “the God POV.” Her narrators speak with the gentle, slightly distanced affection of a parent listening to a child describe a nightmare. She writes with a long view of history (as I say, the stories are mainly about the time before and after WWII, and the book was published in 1979, when much had been discovered about small and large culpabilities and heroism in Europe). There is always that awareness in her writing of how minor human foibles link up with global concerns…and how that’s ok.

Forbearing is exactly right for the tone in the line about Netta above, I think–the narrator genuinely pities her, while eliding none of her pretension and “gas”. In some of the stories, a character gets to take on this long, quiet, accepting view. My favourite in the collection is “Baum, Gabriel, 1935-( )”, the story of an actor living in Paris who is the only surviving member of a family destroyed by the Holocaust. No, it isn’t light, but nor is it a bludgeon. I have a hard time reading about the Holocaust, and I often find writers can’t get beyond descriptions of intense physical and emotional suffering…nor should they, I guess…it’s important. Gallant, however, finds much else to unfold in Gabriel’s loneliness, his disconnection from the world around him, his faint bewilderment by it. I think this account of the main character’s reading of the newspaper is very funny, and yet, it is designed to do much more than amuse:

“Some journalists tried to interest Gabriel in Brittany, where there was an artichoke glut; others hinted that the new ecumenicity beginning to seep out of Rome was really an attack on French institutions. Gabriel doubted this. Looking for news about his pension, he learned about the Western European consumer society and the moral wounds that were being inflicted on France through full employment. Between jobs, he read articles about people who said they had been made unhappy by paper napkins and washing machines.”

Is this satire on the news? Only the most gentle sort; Gabriel lacks the energy or inclination to mock. He is beyond it, and while *that* is his tragedy, it is also his strength, what allows him to survive these and greater ironies of life going on and lunch getting eating after one of the greatest cruelties of modern history.

These are small stories, and Gallant leaves you free to read them that way; each piece is self-contained in it’s detail and emotion, but the more history and feeling you bring to the pieces (and she supplies it small ways, too), the bigger they get. This is a writer who has found a way to keep her gaze firmly on individuals in all their simple sadness, and yet let that reflect all the wild complexity of the worlds they inhabit.

I wonder where you are / curious
RR

June 8th, 2009

Blogging the NMAs

Right off the bat, I’ll tell you that my short story “Linh Lai,” originally publishing in The New Quarterly did not win the National Magazine Award for which it was short-listed. But Friday night’s shindig was still an amazing good time, not least because I got to sit with the TNQ crew, and chat with assorted other cool folks. 

Rosalynn Tyo (left) and Katia Grubisic were nominated for their work on TNQ’s Montreal Issue (they didn’t win, either, I’m afraid–boo! it’s a fantastic issue!)

The TNQ table, from left: Chair of the Board Kathy Berrill, editor-in-chief Kim Jernigan, Managing Ed Rosalynn, me giggling with Katia.

My and my glamourous friend Corinna vanGerwen, nominated for editorial work in Style at Home.

Other highlights include the food: chocolate fountain, smoked salmon wraps, spicy popcorn (not in that order, but in that order in my heart!) The crazy cool opening video collage of magazines–I wonder if that will eventually be available somewhere… Also, The Carlu where it was held was really glam (watch that link, though; borderline porny music plays when you open it!)

Although I can’t say I was 100% thrilled not to win, the fiction winner Andrew Tibbetts brought the percentage up into the 90s with his acceptance speech, which ended with “and thank you to transsexual sex workers, just because.” He rightly received an additional award, for best acceptance speech. Way to represent, Mr. Tibbetts!

Find the river
RR

June 5th, 2009

Revenge Lit

The Revenge Lit contest in support of Terry Griggs’s new novel, *Thought You Were Dead* rages on. It’s not too late to get your entry in (June 12!) Mine is on the site now, although in lieu of a title I put the name of the contest, because I am an idiot. So scroll down until you hit an entry called “Revenge Lit”…then roll your eyes and, if you feel like it, read on.

He robbed the Glendale train
RR

June 4th, 2009

Danuta Gleed Citations

These came in the mail today, and as I haven’t seen them anywhere on the web, I thought I’d share. Obviously I’m pleased for *Once*, but also for *The Withdrawal Method* and *Evidence* too–sincere congratulations to Messieurs Malla and Colford, and much gratitude to Merilyn Simonds, J. J. Steinfeld, Rudy Wiebe, and The Writers’ Union of Canada for the following:

*The Withdrawal Method* (Anansi): “Wonderfully imaginative stories that carry the reader from contemporary childhood bewilderment to loving and dying young adults to nineteenth century chicanery or a future world where Niagara Falls has dried up and life exists between detritus and rage. A profound, compassionate voice that creates a world where ‘the streets will be black and wet with melted snow and spangled golden with street lights, and riding back home along them [on your bicycle, you] will tonight feel a little bit like falling.'”

*Evidence* by Ian Colford: “A disturbing, moving, and most of all, insightful look at the life of a wandering outsider attempting to find his place in a world that is often emotionally physically dangerous. The stories in *Evidence* demonstrate a firm control of narrative and language: they are the work of a skilful, talented storyteller unafraid to confront the darkness, confusion, and yearning for sense that is at the heart of our fragmented modern societies.”

*Once* by Rebecca Rosenblum: “A pungent, witty exploration of the lives of working class twentysomethings, *Once* is both highly imaginative and closely observed. The writing in *Once* is assured; the voice, compelling. While these stories grapple with gritty contemporary urban realities, they are enlivened by an almost whimsical hope.”

It’s not confidential / I’ve got potential
RR

April 9th, 2009

Plot Hypocrisy

I had not intended to teach a class on plot to my beloved grade 10s and 11s. Plotting is neither my great strength nor my great interest, and the kids had already gotten pretty far imagining the stories they’d like to write. I felt that the stories would naturally assume the shapes that would suit, as mine do…eventually.

How much I had forgotten about being a high-school writer!!

Their ideas were all over the place, encompassing a life-time or several, entire court prosecutions in the prologue, marriage and divorce and reconciliation and childbirth in an (allegedly) 4-5 page story, or ideas that had dozens of characters roaming free plotless and happy. This is, of course, *exactly* what I did as a whippersnapper, and it’s actually what I still do today. But these days, after the plotless and happy first draft, then I write four more drafts, ask everyone’s advice, obsess for weeks, and finally tone down my ambition and work the piece down into something a reader could actually understand, and maybe even relate to.

I sensed that the teens would not be willing or able to do this. So I rather grudgingly taught a class on plot.

I drew the inverted checkmark on the board (can’t find a decent online image for some reason; sorry). The short horizontal line at the beginning to introduce character and setting, the sudden upward tilt indicating a change or catalyzing event (Flannery O’Connor’s fabled knock at the door, which I didn’t mention, fearing blank faces), the jagged peaks of crisis and climax, the short slope down of falling action, straightening out to resolution.

They were familiar with this sketch, drew it out in their notebooks, answered my questions easily, and seemed to have quite a bit of new insight into how they would shape their stories.

I was relieved.

I felt like a giant hypocrite.

I rarely write stories that fit into the inverted checkmark pattern, and in a distant part of my mind, maybe I thought of it as a bit simplistic and constraining. But as I worked through it with the students, I was surprised at how efficiently it presented information and moved a reader from strength to strength. I was surprised at how many good examples from books I loved I was able to fit into the check, even examples from my own work. I thought maybe I should reevaluate my antipathy towards the plot graph.

At the end of the lesson, I admitted, “If any of my colleagues were here right now, they’d be laughing pretty hard. I don’t actually do this very often. This is only one sort of story.”

And then I drew some other plot graphs for them–a spiral, a flat line–and talked about the pros and cons of writing on those structures! The kids looked alarmed, and I didn’t even get into my personal faves, which are the double-line plots, parallelling or criss-crossing.

Even the above paragraph feels sort of like a lie, because I rarely think of the shapes of my stories until I’m well into them, and I *never* outline in advance (although I often write an outline of the second or third draft, in order to see where I’m going wrong). It was only while thinking on the bus home that I realized that I often write stories with two lines running on.

I think this means I’m out of control. Definitely really inefficient. I hope the students will learn to do better than I do, although not *necessarily* on the inverted checkmark pattern, good as it is. And maybe I should look into that a bit more, really, for myself.

I guess this is what’s meant by “do as I say, not as I do.” And also, “we learn by teaching.”

If you change your mind / will you let me know
RR

April 2nd, 2009

Ditto

It is so handy when someone else says exactly what I’ve been thinking, but wittier, and in the Globe and Mail so that everyone else can appreciate it too. I’m going to print out Craig Boyko’s essay on short stories and novels and pin it to the front of my sweater.

(via Kerry)

In the field behind the cages
RR

March 27th, 2009

Mr. Cheever, I hardly knew ye

Even before *Once* came out, I was amazed at how generous readers were in sharing what they thought of my work. It’s not like I’m deluged with fanmail, but a good number of people have bothered to send me a note, or say a word to me at an event, to share their reactions to my stories.

And though really that’s why anyone wants to publish anything–to get people thinking about these characters and situations that have been in the writer’s head–I didn’t really know how thrilling it would be see my imaginings refracted through other imaginations like this. I’ve enjoyed everything expressed to me, including “I just didn’t get it” (more than once)…it’s important for me to learn about ways my work can misfire. No one ever got better by dwelling on successes.

Of course, everyone’s been pretty nice–I’m sure I wouldn’t appreciate negative feedback if it came in the form of people yelling “you suck!” at readings. But there is one comment that’s come up a couple times, always voiced as a compliment, that does trouble me: variations on “I feel as though I’ve read your diary.”

A big scary hurdle of publishing is accepting the idea that I can’t control how people read the work once it’s out there; if people enjoy thinking of all the characters I write as manifestations of Rebecca Rosenblum…uh, I guess I have to go with that.

But I wish they wouldn’t. And not only because I am not a terribly autobiographical writer and that’s not how *I* read the characters. Of course I use real life sometimes–it is right there, after all. Besides, all my ideas come from inside my own head, so they all reflect me to some degree (I believe I’m paraphrasing Margaret Atwood there, but I can’t find an attribution). I’m sure if a person with the right degrees read any book with enough attention, he or she could construct a reasonably accurate psychological profile of the author.

My concern is that that doesn’t seem a terribly good use of anyone’s time, or their $19.95. You can hang out with me for free, after all (and then there’s the blog…). Also, I haven’t spent a lot of time coding myself into the book–I don’t know that there’s great reward for the reader in figure out the details of any author’s life through fiction. But I *did* spend a *lot* of crafting the imaginary characters on the pages–I worked really hard to make them fleshed-out people who live in the work, who talk and walk and think like people who might exist, even if they don’t.

Autobiographical detail: in my first year of university, I fell in love with a couple stories by John Cheever’s. That summer, I bought a collected works and read all of the man’s short fiction in chronological order. When I was done, I recall storming down the stairs of my parents’ house and announcing, “When he got old John Cheever was a misogynist.”

I was genuinely upset because I felt that this author that I loved hated me, or my kind (or would have, had he been alive at that point). And I was upset and confused, too, that even some of those later, woman-unfriendly stories were *good*–that I liked them and related to the characters stuck in realities I didn’t believe in. It was all very disorienting.

My father, a Cheever fan (but not a misogynist), tried to comfort me by saying, “Well, Cheever had some issues.” Really, he didn’t see why I was so distraught. The stories were what they were, after all, no matter who wrote them, and it wasn’t like I was ever going to have to sit next to Mr. Cheever on the bus (him being dead and all).

What my father did not say was, “Actually, Cheever was a homosexual.” Because he didn’t know, it turned out when I called to check (good times, being associated with me: early morning phone calls that begin, “Hi, it’s me, did you know John Cheever was gay?”) My dad didn’t sound that interested in Cheever’s sexual orientation when I told him, and really, why should he? Maybe a life in the closet affected the author’s perspective, and maybe he was simply consumed by virtiol. As readers, all we’ve got are some brilliant stories, some that are both hateful and incohrent, and some that keep both the brilliance and the bile.

We all have a point of view that we’re stuck with most of the time. I think the true thrill of narrative art is losing myself in other perspectives, one I’ve created or one someone created for me. Mainly I don’t care where they got the idea from, because I’m never going where the ideas came from; all I have is the imaginative space.

Facts confuse the matter. Once you have a few details about someone’s life, either by meeting them or reading some biography or hearing some gossip, it’s hard not to start mixing up the narratives. What looped me this week was the news of Cheever’s homosexuality. I found out from John Updike’s review of a new bio; found out that I’m the only one in the free world who didn’t know, and then realized that it doesn’t matter.

It never matters how true the story–it matters how *accurate* the writing is, how it feels. Because sooner or later, the author will be dead, and eventually all the facts become blurred. And though that’s when we’re left with only the story, I think that’s mainly what we had all along.

Which is all to say, read stories any way you like, mine, your own, and anyone’s. Myself, I prefer to stay out of the frame.

Sweet summer all around
RR

March 13th, 2009

Rose-coloured Reviews “Goodbye Porkpie Hat” by Mike Christie

It’s occurred to me recently–this morning, actually–that when I say a short story is weird, I pretty much always mean it as a compliment. I guess I would have to, because the opposite certainly isn’t. You never hear someone say, “What I love about your work is how it completely conforms to my expectations! Way to stay within the paradigm!” A short story has a lot of tasks to accomplish, but I’m pretty sure one is to surprise the reader, somehow, at least a little.

Of course there’s a continuum of weirdness, with some brilliant writers inserting a little frisson into an otherwise tradional narrative, and others choosing to go big or go home. In his Journey Prize longlisted story, “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” Mike Christie goes very very big on weird–it’s the 27-page story of a crackhead living in modern-day Vancouver, who is visited and befriended by the ghost or spiritual manifestation of the father of the atomic bomb,J. Robert Oppenheimer, and the two go on a rock-smoking bender together.

If Mike Christie weren’t a sizeable talent, you can pretty much see the above turning into a ghastly mess, rather than what it is, which is a genuinely funny and moving story about the general state of be f*cked-up. Among the above-mentioned tasks assigned to the short story are to move, to entertain, to teach and to challenge, as well as to to unsettle and unnerve, and Christie doesn’t let the weird overwhelm any of his other duties.

The protagonist of the story, Henry, lives in a room “the size of a jail cell” and spends most of his time thinking about, procuring, cooking, and smoking crack. His other interest is reading a grade-10 science book that he found in a dumpster. Henry has a passion for science, and he mocks the kid who trashed the book thinking “September would never come.” Henry knows better, and works hard to learn, in a sweet, sad, drug-addled way–at one point, he tries to memorize the periodic table.

Henry gets beaten up, goes hungry, gets stoned, gets beaten again, and reports it all with the sort of dopey equaminity of born loser who has burnt away all the braincells for bitterness. Even when trying to placate a guy who wants to steal his crackpipe, Henry feels he is trying avoid a “probably already inevitable beating.” Henry exists in such a strange and narrow part of reality–for certainly there are people like him–that when the most famous and troubling dead scientists of two generations ago appears at his window, it seemed a story twist I was willing to go with.

J. Robert, as Henry calls him, is interested in crack-cocaine: the purchasing of it, cooking and smoking and contemplation of it. He wants to perform an experiment with his brain and the drug. And Henry, lover of both the scientific method and being high, is happy to help. It’s, obviously, a strange evening, but Christie’s achievement is not only that it rings true, but that the reader empathizes with the characters, both of ’em. Well, this reader did.

J. Robert also has a few braincells he wouldn’t mind burning away–you can imagine that the so-called father of the atomic bomb might. His wordy, pompous diction matches the delusions of grandeur that go with the crack high perfectly–his speechifying is terrifying and boring and funny, all at once: “Hank, once I tired of your platitudes, now I see you for who you are, a great probing and unflinching mind, steadfast and brilliant in the greatest of fashions, but yet modestly so…”

Christie’s other big achievement in this story is that he made me feel like I know what it’s like to smoke crack, and that’s something I really wanted (come on–if somehow you could get a promise that you wouldn’t get shot or arrested buying it, or addicted or permanently damaged smoking it, you’d do crack just one time to know how it feels, wouldn’t you? it can’t be just me) I don’t know if they’re accurate, but Christie’s descriptions of the chemical ride are wild and visceral, and they put you there: “my brain has a family reunion with some long-lost neurochemicals, and I crouch beneath the party, not wanting to disturb it, shivering and eurphoric next to a dumptster. A seemingly infinite and profound series of connections and theories swamp my mind.”

Most drug stories I’ve read are resolute in their morality one way or another –sometimes people get detoxed (and thus redeemed), sometimes everyone just burns out and destroys themselves (and thus punished) but rarely do you see a writer take on something as loaded as drug addiction and then make it just a part of the plot. One of the reasons I wanted to review this story is because I’m at a place in my work where endings are just so hard to nail down, and the one to “Pork Pie Hat” really does everything I want the ending of a story to do: encapsulate some of what’s happened, and some of what might–or must–happen next; and make it naturally meaningful.

There’s more I’m not mentioning–minor characters and plotlines, the titular hat, the titular song by Charlie Mingus (a funeral song, which seems about right). A big big story, but like all the good ones, only exactly as long as it needs to be.

Nothing matters when we’re dancing
RR