November 2nd, 2008

Nigel, Flannery, and Me

Nigel Beale and I sat down in a room filled with books to talk about what Flannery O’Connor says about good and bad short stories for The Bibliofile. Listen in here.

How sweet the sound / to save a wretch like me
RR

October 15th, 2008

At least it’s not a majority

Almost more depressing than the election returns is the fact that they are the result of the lowest voter turn-out ever in Canada. How can there be democratic representation if the majority does not register an opinion to represent?

Other things that are stressing me out include ongoing Sturm und Drang over the Salon des Refuses/Penguin Anthology debate. Very interesting reading, all of it, but surely not designed to unknot one’s shoulders.

Also, my brief flirtation with blow-drying my hair must end, because over the past few weeks I have burnt the tops of both ears and, this morning, the back of neck. I think I would honestly rather go out with wet hair and risk catching my death. It’s worked every other year!

Though the post must have been stressful for the writer, more joyful reading is Emily Schultz’s great post on rewriting her novel at the Joyland blog. How wonderfully inspiring to know that books that seem so fully whole and complete when we read them as published fictions were once scrambled stacks of notes and nerves. It increases my awe, really, while at the same time, sparking a tiny voice in the back of my head that says, someday.

Not to mention fishing poles
RR

September 15th, 2008

Moving Right Along

It is comforting to know, unless I actually spontaneously combust at tonight’s launch (note: highly unlikely; no need to wear anything flame-retardent), the world will continue to be amazing.

Emily Schultz’s lovely multi-city short-story web compendium, Joyland continues to be a joy, showcasing great and strange new stories by authors like Claudia Dey and Lydia Millet. And as of today, there’s also a story up there by yours truly. The piece is called Black-and-White Man and I’m really thrilled that’s being included in such an amazing project.

On Wednesday, I’ll be attending opening night of Atlas Stage’s production of George Walker’s Theatre of the Film Noir, which is exciting not only because I like George Walker and haven’t been to the theatre in a while, but also because the last time I talked to star Magdalena Alexander, her enthusiasm for the project was practically pyrotechnic. If you come to opening night, there’s a party afterwards at the Drake, but the show runs in Canada until Sunday (or, if you’re going to be in Poland, also in October…)

Ok, enough distractions, back to worrying about tonight.

Now that it’s raining more than ever / know that we’ll always be together
RR

August 10th, 2008

A Week of Us

This week, everyone is talking about Canadian short stories–about writing them, reading them, liking and hating and utterly ignoring them, anthologizing and mythologizing them. If only it could be this way always!

If you’ve not already been reading Steven W. Beattie‘s amazing month of short stories for the past ten days, this week you can tune into 7 Canadian stories, with a bonus essay by me (though, it’s mainly on an American author’s [Donald Barthelme] story, sorry). Today you can read Alex Good take on the stories in the Toronto Star, you can pick up the new issues of Canadian Notes and Queries and The New Quarterly for some of the best of the story writers in the country, and you can hear an assortment of all these people Wednesday night at the Gladstone to talk about it all.

It’s fun to be immersed in the hot topic for once!

It could be fantasy / or maybe it’s because he needs me
RR

August 6th, 2008

The Salon des Refuses

You may have heard that Penguin Canada recently put out a new anthology of Canadian Short Stories. You may also have heard that it doesn’t seem to contain a number of true innovators of the form–people like Clark Blaise, Mark Jarman and Heather Birrell. To make these omissions a bit more obvious–and perhaps a bit more appreciated, The New Quarterly and Canadian Notes and Queries have worked together to create The Salon des Refuses (I’m sorry, I can’t for the life of me get Blogger to do the accent). The summer issues of these two journals will showcase some of the best of what’s being done with short stories these days, and to talk about stories in general and in specific. I suspect there will be some word for the art of anthologizing, as well.

These two issues will be on newsstands this month, and if you subscribe to one I think the other one will just turn up, too (good deal!) There’s also going to be a This is Not a Reading Series event–a literary forum–on Wednesday August 13, at the Gladstone, from 8:30 to 10:30. I’m stoked.

Full disclosure: I have work in both these issues, too. There’s the Metcalf-Rooke Award feature–three stories plus an interview with Amy King–in TNQ, and a long profile with John on the writing life in CNQ. Getting to rub margins with the Salon authors is a huge honour, and it does inspire the imagination…maybe if I keep on going, keep writing and rewriting, keep learning and asking questions and leaving parties at 10:30 to go home and work, someday in the far off future, I too could be ignored by a prestigious anthology. In such company, it’s a pretty heady thought.

I love all the boys with the band
RR

July 30th, 2008

More cheer

A quicky post of further things to distract you from your woes, if in fact you have any woes from which you need distraction.

–Amusing and insightful: Fred’s wisdom and wit as applied to The X-Files movie
–Sad and sweet: Lydia Millet’s lovely strange short story, Walking Bird at Joyland New York.
–Hilariously tragic: Gonzales’s clever rhyming triplets in Working Together

See, it can be a good day even though it’s raining!

I say real crazy
RR

July 16th, 2008

On nostalgia

For my birthday, my friend Shannon gave me Listography, a workbook compiled by Lisa Nola so you can make up an autobiography in lists, cued by prompts in the book (or on the website. Obviously, fun for those of us who like lists, and possibly a little OCD for those who do not. I’m ok with that, and appreciate Shannon’s endorsement of my fetish.

Still, not every list is magic–the one I made of every address I’ve ever had was depressing, mainly because I can’t remember the apartment number of a place I live in seven years ago, which is frustrating for my obsession. I probably can’t remember every toy and game I ever played with, either, but that toy-and-game list *is* magic, because there are plenty of them I *do* remember, and those toys are far enough in the past that I feel a pleasant burst of oh-I-remember thinking of them, whereas I still have most of the same furniture from the apartment of no-particular-number.

Oh, kid nostalgia! It’s been making the rounds lately, must be seeing all the water-fights in the park. Kerry and I were pleased to find we both desired a Power Wheel and never got one. I was mentioning to a less-astute friend that I still think Power Wheels are cool, and he said, “Uh, don’t you have a driver’s license now?” As if that makes it any better! Driving acar is totally not the point.

Nevertheless, my parents weren’t stupid–they knew that kids that could make an afternoon out of playing with a toad and drinking from the hose (my friend Nancy reminded me of that long-lost glee!) didn’t need to drive around the backyard. I don’t mean to paint my youth as quite the countryside idyll of Laura Ingalls or anything–we were as obsessed with Nintendo as any kids anywhere, we just also had the toads and the fields and spring run-off, etc.

And then eventually, you get into high-school and either start trying to be cool or actually are, and either way there’s a lot less time to waste on playing–what are toys and games but ways to occupy people who don’t have anything else to do.

I wrote a story once about hanging on to kid games when you’re in high school, about not feeling up to growing up–it’s called Grade Nine Flight. I always forget about that one, because it was written ages ago, though it later appeared on The Danforth Review, that wonderful online journal of (mainly) the short story. Someone reminded me of it recently, because it’s the only actual story that comes up when you google me (TDR archives all their stuff). She read it wanting to know what my work is like, and there’s a kind of double-nostalgia here, because that story is in a very different vein than my work these days. I’m not only nostalgic for childhood, I’m nostalgic for three years ago.

I’ll go back to that sort of story one of these days, I’m sure. On Monday night, in High Park, I saw a toad.

When Johnny saw the numbers he lied
RR

July 4th, 2008

Everything is alarming: more on stories

I was talking recently with a writer who writes mainly highly technical instructional books. She asked what I wrote, and when I told her, it was clear that stories were not something she dealt with often. However, she is well-read and gracious, and after a moment’s thought she offered me what she had enjoyed about the stories she’d read: that, being so brief, short stories can be event-focused and not bogged down in character development. She mentioned a couple of O. Henry stories that focus far more on *what* happens to the characters than *who* they are.

I was stunned, this being so very antithetical to how I write. Characters are what I care about: who they are, how they develop, what changes them and why. I care about event, too, but only for it’s human affect and aftermath. And yet this woman wasn’t wrong. The story form certainly permits a sort of elegantly epigrammic style (“epigram” sounds reductive, but I don’t mean to be–I just mean a story carefully spun around a precise nut of truth. A story that can be summarized easily.) The stories of O. Henry, and Guy de Maupassant are still stunning after a hundred or so years, and I like them a lot. I don’t know if people still write like that very much, but there’s no reason they shouldn’t; there’s still more to tell.

That’s what I think now, having recovered from my bewilderment of the conversation mentioned above. At the time, I think I seemed confused, and I can only hope I was polite. I think I live pretty far into my own work, and though I *try* to read widely, the authors that I come to most are the ones that I’m trying to learn from, the ones who do what I want to do. It’s good to remember that that’s not all there is, or all that’s good.

And yet I was startled also by a compliment that I received from a woman who’d read a story of mine and liked it, even though she “doesn’t like short stories.” I had a knee-jerk reaction opposite to the one above, that the story is infinitely various and that there is a story to suit the tastes of everyone. Just for a flash, I thought that not liking stories would be like not liking shirts–you just need to find your style.

Nonsense, of course. Short stories *are* infinitely various, but they are various within the parameters of prose sentences occupying no more than about 30 pages or so (that’s as bare bones as I can get on this definition–dare you to strip it more). If your “style” is prolonged engagement, or flashes of intensity, or lots of things that aren’t pages of prose sentences, then you won’t like stories–and if what love is being topless, then there will never be a shirt you really love as much. Which is sad for me, but true nontheless (hmm, I can’t unmuddle this paragraph, so I’ll just add the disclaimer that I really like wearing shirts).

I think the point of this post is that I need to be a bit more flexible and openminded. But also, that people are talking about, and thinking about stories, and that people (besides me) *are* flexible and openminded–short stories may not be everybody’s preferred genre, but a surprising number can appreciate them, if they choose to read.

Oh, good, I’m glad that turned out to be the point of this post, since it’s so positive. I’ll leave it there.

I am the rain king
RR

June 26th, 2008

Joy

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about short stories, which *may* have had a “persecuted” air to it. Which was in reaction to things I’d read and heard, but that was also somewhat selective listening. Obviously, short stories have many defenders and protectors–thanks to all who wrote to me to say so! I felt much better, and more inclined to look on the bright side.

And there is much brightness, including the speech Lynn Coady made at Luminato, pointing out the artistic experimentation permitted in short stories (I wish I could reproduce it, but of course I can’t. This is why everything in the universe should be written down.) And then there is Emily Schultz’s new pro-story website, Joyland. Commmitted to keeping the living art of short story, and international, and cool, Joyland’s first story is actually one of Coady’s (and it is alive, and cool, and very funny and weird). One of mine, “Black-and-White Man”, will actually run there in September–I feel priviledged to be a part of the party.

Other joyful news from the land of writing, though not particularly story-focused:
–novelist, book-reviewer, cat-lover, friend-of-mine Lauren Kirshner writes as beautifully and warmly on her new blog as we all knew she would.
–writing, reader, friend to all things bookish Julie Wilson is bringing her crazy-cool literary voyeurism to the youths with Seen Writing, a workshop for teens with poetry readings, on-the-spot writing exercises, and reader models that (cough) you might know. This event is part of the The Scream Literary Festival, which has too many great events to name.

Obviously, the fate of literature, in its myriad forms, is in little danger. Not that we shouldn’t all be vigilant and all…

He could not know another tiger
RR

June 16th, 2008

Rumours of my demise have been greatly exaggerated

To my great surprise, this week’s celebration of the short story (at the Festival of the Short Story at Luminato, in conversation and in the press), has contained a great deal of defensiveness and/or (depending on the speaker/writer) mourning for the form, which is apparently/allegedly (depending on the future, as I suppose is everything) dying.

Dying?

I have heard mutterings of this sort before, but in the random, sourpuss way that I never take seriously. However, after this week of hearing so many people I respect sing tragedy for my so-far chosen metier, I do wonder if I ought to be thinking/worrying/defending myself. By which I mean both myself doing some defending, and doing some self-defense.

Self-defense–I do feel implicated/assaulted here, hence the semi-confusing header. Because I spend so much time reading, writing, thinking about this form, I guess I’ve come to believe that we are somewhat synonymous, or at least symbiotic. Not actually; of course the short story will be just fine if *I* go, but how would I do without the short story?

I don’t want to find out.

Short stories have a lot of technical challenges that make them difficult to write, and difficult to read. But if you’ve tried to do either, then you know that, and if you haven’t, I don’t want to discourage you. So let’s talk instead about what’s great about short stories, about how they will never die:

Short stories give the intensity of single moments and incidents–a playground game, a barroom brawl, a cigarette break–that would have to be contextualized into a life in a novel, pared down into pure language in a poem. Sometimes, you just need what happened, right there, right then–he said, she said, the chandelier crashed down and I took the puppy into the street. You need every detail and dialogue tag, but maybe not the how and the why and the what happened next.

Short stories can be read on the bus to work, and thought about all day long.

Short stories can be shared in magazines and journals and newspapers. You can sell them–it’s not easy, and you won’t get rich, but there are dozens and dozens ways to get your stories to readers, and find stories to read.

Short stories are complete, and thus you know (nearly) right away what you are dealing with–whether you like it if not why, and whether you want more. They are self-contained, offering all you ever need know about the given situation. And yet they are by nature constrained and thus spare–non-essentials are left out, leaving space for the reader to slide inside, inserting imagination of whys and wherefores, physical descriptions and psychological profiles. For readers that like that sort of thing.

Short stories be can sent as attachments.

Short stories contain lines like:

“I felt like I was turning into a reptile, an iguana sitting on a rock with a decaying memory and no compassion.” Douglas Coupland, “In the Desert”, Life After God

“Bodies look white in the winter light and now she is cold under his nervous fingers, breath sawing, springs creaking like the poplar branch clawing at the frosted pane and he rolls from her on the cool sheets, tense, held back by something.” Mark Anthony Jarman, “Wintering Partners”, Dancing Nightly at the Tavern

“You struck me as a circus performer. You were fat-thin, your hair long-short, the fingers that held your cigarette swollen like those of a midget (though I know that’s not what they like to be called).” Emily Schultz, “I Love You, Pretty Puppy”, IV Lounge Nights

I remain unconvinced.

Never say die, comrades. Never say die.

The declaration of spring / the next day it starts snowin
RR