June 6th, 2008

Good Times

Today is the first day of Toronto’s arts/creativity/light festival, Luminato. There’s a quadrillion events, dance and music and art and theatre and literature… If you look at the website, it’s all very intimidating for one little human–so much cool! Ack! More intimidating: as I am a reader at the Festival of the Short Story I get invited to the Armani Opening Night Party. Which sounds super-glamourous, and I’ve never been inside the ROM crystal, or to a party sponsored by Armani. So I’m going to go.

Which sounds reasonable, until you realize I don’t leave the house a whole lot (witness: everyone and their dalmation has already been to the crystal) and am scared of parties. And yet I find them so alluring I must go (insert depressing moth metaphor here). So we’ll see how this all turns out. Once more, into the fray!

Tomorrow will be less alarming, as I am attending the non-glamourous but super-cool Toronto Small Press Book Fair
Saturday June 7, 12-5pm. I haven’t been in a few years, and it’s in a new venue, and I love small presses. If you want to go, too, this one needs no invitation–

750 Spadina Ave
> Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre
(a half-block south of the Spadina subway station)

Kisses for you
RR

June 4th, 2008

Look! A book!

Linocut print by Marta Chudolinska
Book design by Daniel Wells
Content by meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

I cannot pretend to be calm about this.

This energy beneath my feet
RR

PS–My scanner/blogger/the universe is being difficult and cutting off the bottom of the cover–it is a yellow band that says, “Winner of the Metcalf-Rooke Award” and is fully as beautiful as the rest the thing.

June 3rd, 2008

The Weatherboy…

a story by me, is out now in issue 7 of the University of Toronto English grad students’ journal, *echolocation.* That mag is going through a little change of management, so if you are neither subscriber nor contributer nor UofT student, it may be a little hard for you to get hold of it. It’ll be at Pages and Book City but outside of the Toronto area–well, hit me up if you are curious, and I’ll see what I can do for you.

Or just join me in a general feeling of well-being!

It’s your turn to go down now
RR

June 2nd, 2008

For Your Enjoyment

This is my CBC3 Radio Playlist. I think it’s so clever that you can make a playable list of your favourite CanRock, and then send it to your friends so that they can experience what it’s like to live in your aural landscape. I don’t know if anyone cares to listen to mine, but if you have one (or get inspired and build one) I’d love the link, as I am musically ravenous these days. When I like a song, I like it 15 times in a row.

I have read enough acknowlegement pages to know that many writers thank a particular song or album they have listened to on repeat throughout the writing (and/or they thank their housemates and neighbours for putting up with it). I am hoping that my relationship with the “repeat” button has more to do with my literary tendencies than my obsessive ones. Not all songs, no matter how beloved, are musically or lyrically complex to stand up to this treatment (sorry, Avril.) To listen to a 3 minute song for 3 hours, it’s got to have a lot of elements in play. If you are looking for recommendations, Wintersleep and The Arcade Fire both stand up to the challenge quite well (they’re on the playlist).

Another thing, completely unrelated, that you might enjoy is that Diane Schoemperlen did a 12 or 20 Questions or at rob mclennan’s blog. I’ve been waiting for this one (I have full faith rob will get everyone eventually), not only because Schoemperlen is so witty in everything she writes (not everyone who writes good fiction writes good non-fiction *about* writing fiction [witness that sentence]). The other reason: everytime I read one of these and reach question 8 (when was the last time you ate a pear?), I think of the Schoemperlen storylette, “Small Room with Pears” (from her brilliant Forms of Devotion) and thought the story would be referenced when the author herself answered #8. But she doesn’t bring it up, which was a small disappointment, but still, her answers were quite wonderful to read. Enjoy!

Resurrection/livin’ in the past
RR

June 1st, 2008

Yesterday

If you were worried–or have been forced to listen to my worries–know that yesterday’s presentation and reading at the UofT spring reunion went really well. Though I was v. v. pleased that my own part involved no falling over and a fair amount of audience laughter (with, not at), the greatest delight was hearing my co-reader, Elizabeth Hay speak. Her reading from Late Nights on Air was lovely, but I was particularly struck by her remarks on our topic, starts as writers. I can’t reproduce it here, unfortunately (I should’ve just been nerdy and taken notes) but I was heartened by her quotation of J. M. Coetzee‘s hopeful assertion that “there are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination” (from his rather dark essay, “The Lives of Animals,” in the collection by the same name or in his sort of novel, Elizabeth Costello).

My own piece was more nuts-and-bolts, about how I came to be at UofT at all, and how I write. I think I’m pretty practical about writing, really–in the Q&A, we got asked about writing at certain times of day, and all I could say was, “I write after supper, unless I go out.” Anyway, since I *have* my notes, I’ll post them below, with the caveat that of course I didn’t really say it quite like that.

After all that, I rounded up my beloved posse (consisting of my brother, and my posing-as-life-coach friend AMT) and then Lauren and her posse, and BBQ ensued. And then coffee, and strolling and park with AMT, and eventually I calmed down and was able to assess the day as, actually, having been pretty good. Whew.

Starts are difficult to pinpoint–you start with reading books and thinking you want certain stories to go on, you start with a red pleather diary and you write poems about the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. You start in high school when you win a literary award and everyone claps. A story in the newspaper, and then actually a story in a literary journal when I was just 18. Is that a start as a writer?

I would say no, I think. As a kid, you do stuff: I wrote, I played the piano, I ran track, I made stuff out of clay. You have a lot of free time when you are a kid. Writing was the one I was actually sort of good at–the prizes and the publications and stuff–but being good wasn’t the central thing. My friends were into art and music, and I liked being with my friends, so I did way more of that stuff, and I was not good at it at all.

Even though I wrote stories throughout high school, took creative writing classes in university, joined writing groups and wrote semi-steadily when I began working, I certainly wasn’t a writer. There was some pride involved, but no identity. If someone criticized my work, I would back away from it like a bomb—“Oh, of course it’s very bad, it’s just a hobby, I don’t take it seriously, actually I was just kidding.” That first high school journal publication had been upsetting–they wanted to change the ending, they wanted me to improve the writing, they wanted to teach me something, and I just wanted to do what I wanted to do.

In taking classes and opening myself to feedback, I learned to chill out and accept criticism, to improve, but I still
half-believed that publishing was too much for me, a foray into a scary world of real work that I wasn’t really up to. Publishing fiction would make me accountable for it, responsible for making it good, and that was the last thing I wanted.

I’m going to count my start as my arrival at University of Toronto, because then when I actually made a choice to write instead of other things. I had a decent job, other responsibilities and interests, and a more or less ok habit of writing in the evenings and showing it to my friends or people in my writing group or no one. I tried to learn from the books I read, the evening classes I took, I tried to become a better writer, but if it didn’t work, if I wrote another rambling self-indulgent story or didn’t even finish it…eh. I was trying, but nothing was at stake.

The UofT Creative Writing masters is actually English and Creative Writing, there’s coursework, lots of reading and critical theory and discussion. But still, principally, you write, and everything else in service of that–what I read, I wanted to learn from, my colleagues, everything was the texts that were sitting on my hard drive at home. I had a lot of different jobs during my degree, but when I ran out of day I just wrote at night–the jobs weren’t the important thing. I wasn’t exactly a writer, but I wasn’t letting anything define me, either. I was trying really hard, and when something wasn’t working in a story, I went back to it and back to it and back to it. I didn’t just want to write, I wanted to write well.

May 30th, 2008

Excitement all around

I am actually not feeling very excited about anything at the moment, suffering as I am from a new variety of headache that I have never encountered before, which is shooting little lightning bolts of pain across my cheekbones for some reason, despite the best efforts of generic-brand painkillers. Nevertheless, there is much that is good in the world, so I will try not to let my enthusiasm be *too* dampened by semi-agony.

Some good: last night’s launch of IV Nights, which was super-fun and very well-organized (mental note: Tranzac=awesome reading space).

Also very good, except for my nerves–my own reading tomrrow, in celebration of the UofT spring reunion (see link at right). The headliner will be Elizabeth Hay, and the moderator Rosemary Sullivan, so if you are an alum, you may well want to come (you have to register via the aforementioned link). And/or the reading prior to ours, featuring the wise and witty Barry Callaghan and my esteemed classmate, Lauren Kirshner. And then, if no one falls off the stage and it turns out that I am not having a mini-aneurysm right now (!!), we will go out for Chinese food.

So, other than the library recalling The Book of Negroes before I could read it, all is serene. But, headache!!!!!!!

Argh.

She was box-car-hopping
RR

May 29th, 2008

IV Lounge Nights

You are invited to Tightroe Books Spring 2008 Launch for

IV Lounge Nights

edited by Alex Boyd and Myna Wallin

May 29 — Doors open at 7pm
Readings begin at 7:30pm

The Tranzac
292 Brunswick Ave.
416-923-8137

Featuring
Readings by contributers
Music
Door prizes

New Friends

If I’ve gotten my dates right, today is the launch of University of Toronto’s online alumni community, of which this blog is a part! Which is cool.

Although I am UofT class of 2007, and have therefore been an alumnae (is that the right noun? I never took Latin) for less time than I was a student, I am already profoundly nostalgic. No matter how much you like your grown-up job, there’s no seminar-style debate, no library borrowing-privileges, no deadline-extension pink forms.

Worse, even though I can’t see it, I *know* that UofT campus is May-time gorgeous right now, and somewhere on that big field in King’s College Circle (why did I never learn the name of that field?) someone is under a tree sorta reading a book, and sorta watching some other someones playing Frisbee. It’s enough to make you forget all about seminar-snark, dead printer cartriges at the last minute, and low-caliber coffee.

This weekend is Spring Reunion, which will take me back to campus to read, to mingle, and to embrace my nostalgic side. See you there?

Oh the sweetness that could send me flying
RR

May 27th, 2008

Moving Right Along

The new issue of Exile Quarterly is out (with a gorgeous flame-y cover) which means I had to take “my” issue off the “Now” list. The saddest moment in publishing, the no-longer-on-newsstands moment. But moving right along, there is the summer issue of The New Quarterly to look forward to. In addition to what I hear is an amazing line-up in the “Salon de Refuses” feature, there will be (in a separate section) an interview with me by the insightful and charming Amy King, as well as my short story “Linh Lai.” I am excited about the whole affair, utterly.

Also upcoming–this blog is being “syndicated” at the University of Toronto alumni community website (not live yet, hence no link) starting on Thursday. If you are already reading this blog, this means very little to you. It’s just another place people can read a slightly abbreviated version of Rose-coloured. Anyway, it’ll be cool to encounter my fellow alums on the interweb, and I liked the idea of community, as you know, very much. So on Thursday I’ll be posting the link (I hope) and the “Welcome, new friends!” message, and then probably, business as usual.

Moving right along…

Where’s the tenderness? / Where’s the girl I miss?
RR

May 26th, 2008

Here in the Blogosphere

I am a big fan of blogs, and not for the reasons that people generally use to make a pro-blog argument: they are non-corporate and uncensored, withno word-counts and no agendas, no hierarchy or no cost/training/credential impediments. All those are of course good things (except when they are bad things–sometimes we all long for a length limit or a vocabulary requirement). But those things are not what won me over.

I like blogs because they are personal, and I am nosy. I love the chatty digressive voice, the ownership of the “I” in opinion-giving (not “This book *is* awesome!” but “*I* love this book!”) I also like to be able to follow a narrative–if I read a whole bunch of reviews or articles on a blog, I am hoping to also get a sense of the blogger’s personality and life, to follow a trajectory in reading or writing or both.

That’s what I’m into, but there are some very good blogs that don’t have these things. There are also blogs that have political discourse and/or recipes for mojitos, things that hold no allure to me, so I avoid those, too. Yet, politics and mojitos and unbiased impersonal perspectives are probably also good things, as are the people who write about or with them.

There are also many many many bad blogs out there. Blogs with no punctuation, blogs with no respect for women, blogs that make no effort to be interesting.

What’s my point?

You dig what you dig. But it is strange to me that some people don’t like blogs.

I think it is very strange to dismiss a *form* of expression, because most forms are wildly various, able to express so much or nothing at all. Saying you’d never read a blog seems to me much the same as saying you would never eat anything that came out of certain bowl (unless the bowl is made out of poison). If it’s a nice enough bowl and people are hungry, most things will go in it, eventually.

I believe novels were once considered a scandalous waste of time, too. I don’t think anyone would argue that now, although really, unless you choose carefully, you certainly could waste a lot of time reading a so-called “legitamate”, non-internet-based book.

If one uses equal discretion in choosing blogs, what worlds we can see! And I don’t know what you dig, per se, but might I suggest

Dennis Cass Wants You to Be More Awesome This is a blog about how to survive as a person who makes culture for a “living” and yet still likes to eat food and have self-esteem. It is written by a journalist who wrote a book on the brain and then started a blog to promote it. He quickly realized that it’s *hard* to promote yourself, and made a really amusing/horrifying video to prove it. And then he made the other, non-promotional blog, but all of these bits of the puzzle are really interesting and very very funny. And very meta.

Another author who extends her talent beautifully into the blogosphere is Kate Sutherland at Kate’s Book Blog. This is an author of short stories who writes about them, as a craft (reflections and excerpts on how authors do what they do) and an art (various reading and reviewing groups that she runs). I have to admit that while I like Cass’s blog, I’ll probably never read his book (because I’m not into that sort of thing), but Sutherland’s territory of short fiction is my first love, and I’ll be reading (and, I hear, adoring) her second collection very soon.

Although I mentioned above that I read these blogs for the “personal” touch, there isn’t all that much of actual personal *lives* in my favourite blogs. It’s rather the *personality* behind them, people I have gotten to know as intelligent, and thoughtful about the things *I* care about. It takes a while to find that out.

Maybe when we go searching for criticism, we are seeking opinions other than our own, and the reason hierarchized publications appeal is because we are told which ones to trust and how much (ok, that’s one of the appeals *for me*). With blogs, you can get access to a world of opinions, but you still have to do the work of winnowing out both the good and the relevant from all the other stuff. To me that’s worth the work.

All the boys who called their mothers on that deadline
RR