November 26th, 2009

This week in review

Of course, this week is not technically over yet, but rather a lot has already happened. I think it was enough to occupy an entire week if it was spread out, and I am rather hoping nothing further will happen until next. Thus, I dare to pre-emptively summarize:

Tuesday: I attended the Writers’ Trust Awards. It is a pretty glitzy event, with roaming waiters and lots of excited chat before the ceremony. At the ceremony, the Journey Prize was the first to be awarded, which meant co-presenter Anita Chong and I could get our moment of stress out of the way early and enjoy the show! I had perhaps 200 words to say, and really people just wanted to know who won, but I was very worried about flubbing it, or not even making it to the podium because I had spotted a gap between the top of stairs and the stage where I could easily wedge my foot.

But nothing happened like that, and I was able to present the winner, Yatsuko Thanh, for her story Floating Like the Dead with no trouble. What an honour to do so, and what an incredible story. I was charmed by how sincerely stunned Ms. Thanh seemed, and was really glad I got a chance to meet her. And the other two incredible finalists, Dave Margoshes for “The Wisdom of Solomon” and Daniel Griffin for “The Last Great Works of Alvin Cale.” An evening like this one really makes me feel alive to all the wonder and diversity of wonders in CanLit.

I was also happy to see that Annabel Lyon took the fiction prize though I have not read the celebrated book, *The Golden Mean*. But if my intense love of her first book, Oxygen is any indication, I should. And I was pleased to hear that, though Ms. Lyon was also pretty stunned by the win, she remembered to mention in her speech all those smaller literary magazines where she got her start, and to please for no further cuts to arts funding in Canada.

Wednesday: On Wednesday morning I went out to University of Toronto Scarborogh to do a guest lecture in my fellow UofT Creative Writing alumni Daniel Tysdal‘s short story class. I did, as promised read the end of a story, “Massacre Day.” When I told the students that I would read the last three pages of that piece, I had the extraordinary experience of watching a roomful of students pull out copies of my book and prepare to follow along.

But that extraordinariness did not all compare with the level discussion after my reading and (very brief) talk. The students were reading intently and speaking insightfully, not just about my work (although I appreciated that very much) but about everything they laid their eyes and minds on. What a fantastic way to spend a morning.

That evening, was the Biblioasis fall poetry party, featuring Zachariah Wells, Shane Neilson and Robyn Sarah. The non-present presence of a 4th poet was Wayne Clifford, whose work was read by all three of the others to make up for his absense. It was really cool to get three interpretations of one voice.

Also last night, I got to meet London, Ontario, novelist A.J. Somerset who just won the Metcalf-Rooke Award. There’s a lot of literary winning going on this week!

Today, is the real American Thanksgiving, I’m pretty sure, so I am wishing you all a happy one of those–I remain as Thankful I was last week, on fake Thanksgiving. Also today, due to a minor incident, I was without tights for a portion of the day, and it was actually warm enough that I didn’t mind dreadfully, temperature-wise. The upside of global warming. What was strange is that I felt like a total scandal, bare knees and nothing under my dress but panties, when of course that is how I spent the entire summer. I think winter makes me puritanical.

I also spent part of today talking books with Kerry Clare while I lay on the floor eating scones and playing with her baby daughter. That was, as you might imagine, delightful.

To continued, low-impact delight.
RR

July 22nd, 2009

Excitement

I did complain about lack of mail in a previous post, but the fact is I get something interesting, if not something actually personal, almost every day. Of course, it helps that I have signed up for a lot of free-sample mailing lists (“oh, look, a package of egg-salad seasoning/skin cream/energy bars/tampons!”) and have a low threshhold for excitement.

At the higher end of the scale, we have yesterday’s arrival of the Fiddlehead’s Summer Fiction Issue, which contains my stories “Tech Support” and “ContEd” (click the link to see an excerpt, as well as lots of other exciting stuff by Andrew MacDonald, Shane Neilson, Katia Grubisic and many awesome others.

Oh, and while I’m on the topic of myself, and things I’m doing with awesome others, I should mention that on August 19, I’m participating in a Now Hear This! reading, as a part of the SWAT program (that I taught in last spring? remember last spring?) My fine fellow readers include Mariko Tamaki, Colin Frizzell and Andrew Daley. Note the the early start time–6pm! This event is *all ages* and friendly to the hungry, since you can order supper during the readings. Don’t get anything crunchy, though, ok?

Yes the heart will always go one step too far
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 26th, 2009

What the last 10 years have taught me

What I mainly did on that dock, as I said, was read *The New Yorker* fiction issue, which I had been waiting for with avid enthusiasm (because I can’t read magazines out of order, natch). Obviously, I was rabid for the stories, but I had also been forwarned by Facebook friends that there was an article on teaching creative writing that I would want to see.

The piece turned out to be a review by one of my favourite critics, Louis Menand, of a book called The Program Era by Mark McGurl. I haven’t heard more about McGurl than what Menand wrote, and I have little intention of reading the book (beyond the vague miasma of “oh, yeah, I should probably read that” that I feel about most books). So on the one hand, it’s pretty presumptuous and glib for me to respond to the article. On the other hand, Menand’s piece is one of *The New Yorker*’s rambling “Critic at Large” pieces, which encompasses a lot of general thoughts on the issue. So maybe I’m responding to those general comments. Or, on yet another hand, this is a blog, and maybe presumptuousness/glibness is the least of the worries of the blogosphere.

So!

The book, and to some extent the article, deal with the rise of the university creative writing class and degree, and simply the increasing presence of the “certified” writer on the lit scene. It was indeed edifying and maybe mildly shocking to see how many names got listed here (nice to see Bharati Mukherjee’s name in *The New Yorker*, whatever the reason). An interesting thesis of the book, and one that Menand deals scantly with, is how creative writing programs shaped the evolotion of later-20th-century prose–in fact, the subtitle of the book is “Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing.”

Menand has concentrated much more on the ever-scandalous question, also inherent in McGurl’s work, “Can creative writing be taught?” Both offer lots of fascinating “well, maybe” answers, well worth reading at least in the short review form. I’ve written about this here before, and so I’ll add only my usual quotation of the immortal Judith Viorst–help helps–plus: Creative writing classes, and eventually an MA in the subject, helped me so much with my writing. The classes gave me the discipline, focus, friends, inspiration, connections, snack foods, mentors, party tricks, informal workshop groups, cold terror, and cheerful ambition to take the writing I was already doing to the next level. If that’s not learning, I don’t know what is.

But I also know there are other kinds of learning, and this is something Menand leaves to the very last paragraph. This is moving, but I think it elides something else:

“I stopped writing poetry after I graduated, and I never published a poem—which places me with the majority of people who have taken a creative-writing class. But I’m sure that the experience of being caught up in this small and fragile enterprise, contemporary poetry, among other people who were caught up in it, too, affected choices I made in life long after I left college. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

The majority of people who take a creative-writing class in undergrad don’t continue to write after graduation, he says. Well, I don’t have the stats, but judging by the folks I know, that sounds about write (ahaha. I actually wrote that accidentally.)

So, maaaybe, if impermanent writers–elective takers, dabblers, interested experimenteers– is who is in the classes, Menand and McGurl are missing the boat. Maybe what creative writing classes in universities do is not (only) shape the national fiction style or create silken prose out of sow’s ears, but *teach 20-year-olds to think creatively and write coherently*. Transferable skills if ever there were.

I think this issue is actually larger than creative writing; it stems from a larger misunderstanding of liberal arts education, although I don’t know that one is mine or society’s. When I was wee, but after I figured out that being intelligent was not a profession, I asked my liberal-arts-professing father what he taught people to do–like, medical school taught people how to cut open bodies and fix them, and police school taught people to shoot guns. My father’s response was that his sort of teaching wasn’t about learning to *do* a thing; he taught people how to *think* about things in a certain way, and then they could apply that way of thinking how they liked.

Revalatory, when you’re ten and trying very hard to learn to do a lay-up and spell “persimmon.” (And the author will allow that she may recollect her childhood as slightly more Socratic than it actually was.)

I have a BA Hon. in English Literature and an MA in English and Creative Writing, and I swear to you, I use what they taught me every day of my life. No, no one has asked me about Grendel, Tess, or semiotics today. And yet, the skills of close and careful reading, of contextualizing what I read with as much related material as possible, of reasoned and elegant essay arguementation, and of clear and relentless questioning of whatever I think I know–well, thank you, liberal-arts education.

Of course, as you can see by my Facebook friends above, conversations about the nun’s priest or Samson Agonistes are likelier to happen to me than perhaps to most. But I really do believe that folks in advertising and marketing, in law and government and even medicine are able to use reading and writing skills they picked up in liberal arts classes. Not to mention the endless insights into the human condition we are given in reading about humans, in fiction or in non-fiction. And the ability to not only answer questions but ask them intelligently. And to empathize with people so foreign to us they actually don’t exist.

Most people know that learning to think in different ways is always to the good. But I worry they don’t prioritize that good. Having TA’d a little, and generally being around academic life, I do worry about the vocationalization of university education. I worried that my Effective Writing students wanted only to work on resume cover letters and mission statements that would translate directly into career skills, rather than work on the whole craft of writing and then make the cognitive connections in the work world for themselves.

I did actually go to vocational school too, so please know I don’t knock that course at all. It was interesting and stimulating and my publishing certificate leads more or less directly to me being able to eat food and sleep indoors in a relatively entertaining fashion. But those skills I learned there are rigid, specific, and date-able. Every time I switch software platforms, style guides or subject matter, I start over…not from square one perhaps, but certainly from a square nearby. Vocational skills are generally like this: welders certified to do stick welding have a fundamentally different skill than those who do pipe welding. The skills may have much in common, but you can’t just extrapolate one to the other; you have to go back and learn again.

Which is, as I said, a fine way to learn, but fundamental different than the fluid (or, admittedly, amorhphous) skills of the liberal arts education.

What a very long way of saying I think that evaluating university creative-writing programs by the famous writers they’ve produced does many students a disservice. I spent this spring trying to teach 90 teenagers how to write a short story, and although I can see perhaps a dozen of them pursuing the craft, I truly truly believe many of those kids were a least a little smarter for having tried it. I think creating strong introductory creative writing classes, as well as Intro Psych, Philosophy and Film, can help a lot of people think a little bit different, and better.

But then, I would think that.

The eventual downfall / is just the bill from the restaurant
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

March 25th, 2009

Writing exercises: how to get over yourself

I spent today running three workshops with 30 kids each–I can barely hold my head up, but the experience was amazing, and in a few cases I was genuinely excited about the promise of more work by these kids. The interesting thing about most of my students, and I’d have to gender-stereotype here and say especially the boys, is that they are in no danger of taking themselves too seriously. They don’t draft and they don’t fret; if it’s not good the first time, well, then it’s not going to be good. An amazing proportion of the work *is* good, that’s the startling thing, which speaks to a) natural talent and b) the power of egoless writing.

It’s harder for an adult to write without hoping to impress someone, even ourselves. We aim for perfection, truth and posterity, and are crestfallen when we just obtain accurate interesting prose. Not that a little truth and perfection isn’t a lovely thing, but writing fast and furious, without wondering, “But is it *beautiful*?” can often show a writer just what he or she is capable of.

Here’s a couple exercises given to me a few years back by my wonderous mentor, Leon Rooke. I had a bit more free time back then, but I’d still recommend doing these if you have a free weekend. They’re fun and low-pressure, if a lot of work. I’ll bet you’ll be as surprised as I was at how much good material you produce. Lots of nonsense, too, but you can’t make a cake without breaking some eggs.

1) Write 20 opening paragraphs. Go from one to the next if you can, and don’t follow up on any of them until you’ve got all 20 down. Use as many different voices, tenses, tones and styles as you can.

2) Write 3 stories in 3 days. I guess this one would take a long weekend, or you could space 3 days apart. But only 24 hours allotted to each story, which means you probably can’t revise at all on this draft. Which is ok. Really. I promise. Unlike the whippersnappers, I won’t check your work.

And now I have to go, because the funny thing is, *I’m* being workshopped tonight. It’s a theme day. And so, I must make pizza.

Sweet summer all around
RR

March 12th, 2009

The Kids Are All Right

A few people have asked me how my residency at a local high school is going–I teach grade 10 and 11 creative writing every Wednesday through the Descant Arts and Letters Foundation’s SWAT Program. I won’t be able to go into detail about my students’ specific weirdnesses and wonderfulnesses, because I think if they found out I was posting about them on the internet, they would quite rightly stop coming to class in protest.

Within the bounds of the privacy act of teenhood, I can tell you that I love my classes and that I am exhausted. Teenagers have a lot of energy, and this energy is resulting in some really funny, honest, interesting work. It’s also resulting in a lot things information needing to be repeated, things falling on the floor, papers getting lost, people not writing their names on their work, not being in uniform, not understanding the assignment, not understanding that the assignment was supposed to be handed in, and/or being in the bathroom when the assignment was mentioned.

Much as I love learning, love talking, love a challenge, I am very much not a natural teacher. I am a selective chatterbox: show interest and I’ll tell you more than you ever wanted to know; show indifference or distain, I’ll clam up like the proverbial shellfish. One of the many incredible challenges of teaching is to have enough faith in what you are saying to keep saying it to people who…aren’t super into it. I think I’m lucky to have quite engaged, intelligent students, but they have a lot on their minds, and as soon as I see attention waver, I get intensely doubtful about the whole endeavour.

If we were chatting over lunch, this would be the point in the conversation where I’d hunch back in my chair and say, “But of course, what do I know? What do *you* think?” Sometimes I can, in fact, throw the discussion point to the class, but sometimes I’m not at place in the lesson where I can do that (or I throw it open and no one responds) and then I’m stuck pursuing my thesis that I believe, though I am fast losing faith in my ability to explain it.

This is unusual for me, and very hard–I hate trying to convince the unconvinced; I’d rather just allow them to remain unconvinced. Also unusual for me is granting people permission to go to the bathroom, so let’s just say the whole experience is foreign, but I’m learning a lot from trying to stick to my guns, as well as from the questions I get asked.

I’ve listed some of the things we’ve been questioning and discussing below. For sure I have my own opinions on these matters, but since I’m not so sure I can prove’em anymore–or that these are questions on which definitive answers are possible–maybe I’ll throw it open to the blogosphere and see if anyone responds. What do *you* think about:

1) What does bubblegum taste like? What does Red Bull taste like? What does Axe Body Spray smell like? What does Christmas smell like? What does hair smell like? What does the inside of a vacuum cleaner smell like? What does a sour-cream doughnut taste like?
2) How much imagination is too much? When can you make it all up and when do you have to do research? Why is ok to write a fantasy novel about an imaginary kingdom that you made up, and not ok to write a prison novel without knowing anything about prisons? Or is it, in fact, ok to make up an imaginary penal system and set it not Canada but “Canada”? Because it’s *fiction*, after all–people should know that, right?
3) Do all major characters in books have to have flaws? Can you think of a character in a book (or a movie) with no flaws? Do all villains have to have some complexity or good qualities? Can you think of a villain with some good (in a movie or a book)?
4) What can you infer about a man who wears cords with his t-shirt tucked in? What can you infer about a woman who wears a dress with holes in it? What can you infer about someone who is very pale and always wears hats? What can you infer about someone keeps a barfridge in his bedroom? What can you infer about someone who hangs salamis up in her kitchen?

I await your responses eagerly. Cause really, what *do* I know?

Oh I take a look at that picture
RR

February 6th, 2009

Exercise–The Single Moment One

Wednesday evening I went to the info session/meeting/dinner for me and my writing/teaching/administrating colleagues at SWAT/Now Hear This. It was very exciting/friendly/delicious/scary, because very very soon, I’m going to be entrusted with some actual high-school students, and expected to teach them something, and that will likely be every adjective mentioned above (except delicious).

In an effort to calm down, I will of course be over-preparing. I have a wealth of classroom experience from the other side, because I have had so many good writing teachers the past 11 years or so. So I will be culling through memories and notebooks, trying to find what helped me most. I’ll also be asking around to find such things that helped *other* writers–if you have recommendations or fond memories (or, in fact, bitter memories that you would like me avert for future generations) please drop me a line/comment.

I actually used to love writing exercises, and find they work well in a classroom, where everyone’s used to obeying orders, and it’s tough to order anyone to “think freely.” Exercises are a trick to free you up in tight parameters, and to that end, usually they are timed. I prefer 10 minutes for the ones I’ll be running, but if you are playing along at home, obviously I won’t be checking your work!!

Single-Moment Exercise
Describe a single moment in the life of a character. It could be someone in a piece you’ve been working on and got stuck in, or someone you just invented clean out of your head. If you are really stuck, use yourself, right now. Describe all five senses as the character is experiencing them: the taste in her mouth, the feel of his clothes, temperature, comfort-level, smells, feeling of health or illness, what’s in her field of vision/aural landscape, and of course what’s on his mind. Do not move forward into ramifications–these are unknown–and try to stay away from flashback unless the character is dwelling on the past. Stick to immediate perception as much as possible.
Ok, go!
I’ll put up my exericse on the weekend, in case anyone’s curious.

Outside the thunder’s jealous / of the way you shake
RR

January 22nd, 2009

Next

My “Now and Next” list (at right) is all now and no next–I’ve gotten behind! Lest you think January has defeated me (it hasn’t, much), here’s what’s upcoming:

Starting in February–I’ll be participating in the very very cool Now Hear This/SWAT program through the Descant Foundation of Arts and Letters. SWAT=Students, Writers and Teachers, and what this means is I’ll be teaching high school creative writing classes one day a week for a couple months, in conjunction with an actual professional English teacher. This is a thrilling opportunity for me to learn about teaching and about teenagers, as well as (I hope) offer something useful about writing practice in return. I can’t *wait*.

Sunday February 15, 4:35-5:45pm–I’ll be speaking on a panel entitled “Wandering Jews?” at the Limmud day of Jewish learning at UofT. My fellow panelists are Adam Sol and Sidura Ludwig.

Sunday April 5, Time TBD–I’ll be reading at the Gritlit literary festival in Hamilton.

Sometime in 2009–My two stories, “ContEd” and “Tech Support” will appear in The Fiddlehead.

Of course more to come eventually–there’s always something!

I don’t have a simple answer/but I know that I can answer
RR

June 28th, 2007

I wash my hands of this weirdness

Post-posting, yesterday continued to be strange. I was doing Pilates at the gym with my iPod on, possibly not a brilliant idea. I was doing jack-knifes, my favourite Pilation, wherein one lies flat on her back, then kicks legs into the air and pulls off the floor into a shoulder stand, then *jack-knifes* the body to put the feet behind the head. In that last step, I accidentally kicked an elderly gentleman with both feet, because I hadn’t heard him step onto the mat behind my head. He hadn’t seen what I was doing because he was bending over away from me, thus I kicked him in the, um, posterior. Needless to say, I tried to apologize and, also needless to say, he wanted only to get as far away from me as possible.

Following that I bought a Greek salad for lunch, only to find that the chunks of red juicy-looking tomato were, for some reason, watermelon. Then I went off to teach and it was the last day of school and the kids were *haywire.* One of my favourite students (I have many favourite students–is that bad?) gave me an end-of-term gift of candies. I was pleased, but when I read the card listing the things she liked about me, one was that I always let her go to the bathroom when she asked! Kinda scraping the bottom of the barrel for compliments there, aren’t we? At this point I went home to lick my wounds.

Today promises to be a better day, despite the fact that I am eating distinctly sketchy tinned tuna salad (it was on sale!) The evening promises Indian food and hilarity, and I only have a half hour more of work left. Huzzah.

Oh, I did hear a rumour that Rose-coloured comments weren’t working, but when I tested them they seemed to. You can always email me at RebeccaBooks@excite.com should you need to comment but be unable.

Floodwater pours from the mouth
RR