June 2nd, 2010
Gender Observations on a Hot Walk
Well, today largely sucked, but at least it had a theme–everything seemed to have something to do with gender and gender roles. I have decided not to post about the several men I overheard being jerks to women today, because that is not the tone we should have around here. I will instead share with you the shocking fact that a man in a pickup truck whistled at me today and I was wearing a skort. In general, I don’t think whistling is a great form of communication, but three cheers for skort acceptance. Also, what do you make of this:
I ate lunch alone at a fast food restaurant (don’t cry for me–it was Moe’s). It was late and there were only six of us in the place, all eating alone. The three women were sitting at booths and reading (the other two had newspapers; I had The Invention of Morel, though I was still on the intro). The men were sitting at tables, eating and staring into space. What can this mean???
June 1st, 2010
Jobs for Writers, part 2 of ?
Every time I try to write about this subject, I get uncomfortable–so much as just what works for the individual writer. Some people really need to have a job they love a lot, even it it’s just a “day job,” or they can’t be motivated to get up in the morning. Some writers would rather not like their jobs all that much, or they “day job” winds up distracting from the writing. Some would rather work part time and have half of every day to write; some people will work nonstop for part of the year and not even touch their manuscripts, then have a big block of time to write and do nothing else (teachers!)
Whatever is functional for you, do that. But, as I told the students at that careers event that sparked all this ages ago, I’ve had a lot of jobs and some were more functional for me than others, so maybe there’s something people could learn from that! I mean, as Ms. Difranco says, “Nobody likes their job / nobody got enough sleep” but below are some things that let me write and even helped with some projects, as well as helping me to be reasonably happy with my life and lifestyle while I was working there.
Bookstore salesperson was the first job I ever had that I didn’t utterly loathe; it was shocking. What did I like about it? The obvious, first off: getting to hang out with books, seeing the new stuff first, the world’s most useful-to-me employee discount and other book-related bonuses. I sometimes liked chatting with customers about what they might like to read, though you still do get your jerks and your people who want “the thing that was on the radio this morning, about that dog? What do you mean you don’t listen to the radio?” I found the running around of the job, and all the chitter-chat with customers was a good balance to the sedentary silence of writing.
Less obvious perks were that, unlike most minimum-wage retail jobs, this one drew a wider range than after-school teenagers. Lots of bookish adults (including other writers) worked there and were fun to talk to–actually, even the after-school teenagers were pretty bright and well-read.
Most of the downsides of this gig may have come from the fact that I worked for a couple big chain stores. I’ve never had an indie bookstore job, unfortunately, but since I’ve known a lot of folks who did, I can make a reasonably educated guess that those jobs are more fun, though not much better paid. One issue was that the stores were mamoth, and floor staff and cashiers were forbidden to sit or, heaven forbid, read. There was always something to run to the back for, something to dust or scrub or carry–and books are heavy. After 8.5 hours darting about on concrete floors, I often had little energy left for writing. And no matter how literate, retail is retail–you can’t really live on minimum wage unless you are working a bloody lot of hours, you likely won’t have benefits, customers feel free to treat you like a moron and (sometimes) so do managers. Low points of my bookstore career include being berated by a customer for getting a mystery author’s name wrong, being berated by a manager for wearing a candy necklace, and being berated by everyone once I started working at the special orders desk because it, despite the big sign, apparently looked like a complaints desk.
Library clerk was basically a less capitalistic, more relaxed, better paid version of the bookstore job. You occasionally got to do some fun cool book-tracking-down, occasionally got screeched by a crazy person, but mainly as long as you got your work done, you were allowed to do what you wanted (ie., read). I guess I can’t vouch for every library (this was an academic one), but there was no “keeping up appearances” busywork, which was really nice. Downsides? Well, it could get a bit dull on some days, and on others, because it is a public place, a library attracts the sorts of people who get chased out of malls (teenaged hooligans, the homeless, the ranting, unsupervised children) and the staff has to deal with them as best they can. From what I hear, most library jobs have a strong hiking-around-carrying-books component as exhausting as at a bookstore, but I actually had a desk-sitting gig. Once again, this was a desk that people frequently mistook for the complaints area, despite another big sign, so I came in for more than my share of yelling, but at least I had a comfy chair. The real trouble with library gigs is that they are limited in scope, hard to come by and rarely full-time–I left the one I had because I was graduating and it was a student position. If you are seriously interested in being an actual librarian, you need a degree in library science–fascinating, but surely not easy.
Teaching is, as judged by per-hour strain, the hardest job I have ever had. I have tutored ESL, TA’d essay writing and literature, and taught high school students how to write short-stories, and all were fall-on-the-couch exhausting. Deeply rewarding, mind, but exhausting. And of course, the biggest danger with teaching is that, unlike waiting tables (the second-hardest job I’ve ever had), you can’t just eventually say “Screw it, it doesn’t matter,” with a given class, student, semester, etc. Because it does matter, so much, what you teach kids (or anyone, really) so the temptation exists to put in the overtime, do the extra projects, come out for the sports teams, and put everything you can into it, because the kids will get so much (or at least something) out of it. This is, of course, deadly if you are trying to write in your “off” hours.
This post was original going to include some of the silly things people say about jobs for writers (“You should just do a little journalism to make money!” Last time I checked, journalism was a four-year degree and a competitive field, and also not overflowing with money) but I am (mainly) not doing that because it’s too annoying. One thing that I will put in is that I once read a writer profile that said that once one had published a relatively successful book, one could get creative-writing teaching jobs and “make a living as a writer.” I am sure any teacher reading this will recognize this as offensive–if one is teaching, one is making a living as a teacher. Which is actually still amazing for one’s writing–students will challenge so many standard assumptions about writing and bring you all kinds of new energy and ideas, so it is totally worth the exhaustion if you can figure out how to teach briefly or temporarily or somehow not have it overrun all your time. But if you take a teaching gig under the impression that it is basically a grant with a bunch of annoying students hanging around, said students will become incredibly embittered and if they are lucky, hate only you and not actually writing. Just sayin’.
You may have noticed here that none of these jobs are incredibly well-paid and my standards of “fun” are pretty low (ie., not getting yelled at). That is because I have left out of here all the jobs I had that didn’t work out at all, including the fast food restaurant where hooligans regularly stole the mirrors out of the bathroom, the factory that turned out was actually some guy’s bedroom, and the fancy restaurant where the enormous wall-mounted ketchup dispenser exploded. And the time one of my fellow chambermaids seemed to be considering taking a swing at me with the carpet sweeper. So possibly I am not the best person to be getting career advice from–please chime in if you have other jobs to suggest to writers, or would like to contradict anything I’ve said (nicely).
I’ll do another post on the wonderful world of publishing soon, and that will pretty much be the sum of my knowledge.
May 29th, 2010
Admission
After yesterday’s “I’m right about everything” rant, I came across this in a story of mine that had unaccountably been rejected by yet another magazine: “undulant wave.” What does undulant mean? Why, wavelike, of course. So, what I meant apparently was “wavelike wave.” The generous editors sent me a bunch of feedback on pacing and dialogue, but I think we all know why this one was really rejected.
Ugh.
May 28th, 2010
Vocabulary Rant: Romance Edition
My dark secret: I proofread romance novels (and other varieties of genre fiction, but mainly romance) for four years. I learned a lot lot lot about grammar, style, usage, and regional dialects, and a not inconsiderable amount about plot structure and pacing. But I also got driven mad by a lot of small errors that, if you saw them only once in a while, would not even register. I saw certain things a lot, to the point that 5 years later I still have Vietnam-style flashback and get upset all over again. Today is one of those days, brought on perhaps by marking student fiction that echoes some of these concerns. I know that the Rose-coloured readers are mainly not romance writers or teenagers, but I have no one else to rant at. Most of these are anatomy-oriented, for obvious reasons. Please bear with me (or chime in!)
The muscle in the front of the arm is spelled biceps whether it is singular or plural. There is no such thing as a “bicep.” Ditto triceps.
The word prone means to lie facedown on the ground/floor/bed. I think some people have conflated this meaning with the other one, when “prone” is used in combination with “to”, to mean “inclined to or liable” to somehow mean vulnerable. “She was lying prone, gazing at the ceiling,” is physically impossible, even if it sounds nice. The word for lying on one’s back is supine, which some think sounds pretentious. Which it does; I like “she was lying on her back,” myself.
People have two clavicles, also referred to as the collarbones. Each one joins its respective arm to your torso. They are not one bone–there is a space between them, that I just found out is called the jugular notch (which does not adequately articulate how adorable I find that spot, but whatever). I realize even as I type this that I sound like an anal-retentive lunatic, but it actually bothers me when I read “He ran his finger all along her collarbone, from her right shoulder to her left.”
Final rant: eyes can’t be graceful, hair can’t be dynamic, and perhaps sex could be elegant but I hope not; just because an adjective is generally positive doesn’t mean it applies to anything positive. End rant.
May 27th, 2010
Some Links
Did you read La Vita Nuova by Allegra Goodman in *The New Yorker* last month? I think you should. I feel like I’ve read 35 versions of the “woman bereft in love struggles to reconnect with her life” story in the past couple years, and this is the best one. It’s simple, short, and specific–no straining for universality or “deep” meaning–when being really sad is examined with enough care and humour, that’s deep enough.
I can’t believe I forgot about Sinead O’Connor’s song The Emperor’s New Clothes, one of the favourites of my youth, for ten or so years. I had never seen the video before I went looking for a link for you guys (why is it you can always find video links and not audio ones?) and it’s actually sort of odd, but the song is brill. I actually didn’t recall what she looked like (I was never a fan–just the one song) before watching the video, and was shocked at how pretty she is! How come no one ever mentions that?
I did one of Alex Boyd’s One Question Interviews over at BoydBlog. The OQI is a really good idea, no?
May 26th, 2010
Fun and paranoia
So I spent my birthday weekend (also Queen Victoria’s) in Montreal, frolicking and getting tan and eating tasty food and sleeping in a king-size bed in a glamourous hotel (of course I dislike the recession, but there are some fringe benefits, like glamourous hotels costing normal-people prices for a while). Sorry for not mentioning it here (or anyplace electronic)–sites like this freaked me out about “locational privacy.” So a few people who wanted to spontaneously chat with me this weekend could not and I feel a bit silly about that, but otherwise, it was a very very lovely weekend. And bonus: now I’m 32!
Back in TO, further good things are afoot (and not even just being taken out for lunches and getting cards in the post). Kerry’s daughter Harriet is turning one, and to celebrate Kerry is having a best literary babies contest, with the prize being a subscription to the wonderous The New Quarterly lit journal. Go enter! For another thing, it is a skrillion degrees out, but just perfect in the shade if you are on a patio…I’m just suggesting. And I have an essay coming out in the summer issue of Maisonneueve, on newsstands at the end of June, which I’m happy about.
There’s always more to do, natch, and also the niggling worry of the potato bug I found in my stairwell, but really, Toronto in the summer is a beautiful thing. Hope you are enjoying it.
May 25th, 2010
Jobs for writers, part 1 of ?
You may have been wondering about what happened to that whole “jobs for writers” post I promised to write (so long ago it was on a whole different site). What happened was I attended that UofT graduating students careers event and was really humbled by the breadth of skills, ambitions, backgrounds, and lifestyles the students had. They all came from and were going to wildly different places, both from each other and from me, and the idea that I could give them much in the way of advice seemed pretty perposterous.
And yet they were really open to hearing what had worked for me and what hadn’t, so I hope I at least saved them some false starts and offerened some good ideas (and some laughs). For me, it was a reminder that however modest (or infuriating) my accomplishments may seem, they would have been inconceivable to me ten years ago and so I should be proud. However, I’ve been reading the advice to myself 10 years ago posts around the web inspired by Steven Heighton’s 10 Year Memoranda. There’s a lot of good advice in these, like “12 Because you want your work to have a teeming subconscious. In your early drafts, write everything that occurs to you, then cut ferociously. The material you cut—the rich or jagged silences you create—are the textual subconscious.” But I think this sort of thing is a rhetorical exericse that, if taken literally, might overestimate a human being’s ability to actually follow advice.* Because when I was 22, you could have told me 1000 times that rough drafts are the block of wood out of which one hews a final sculpted story–I would still have thought a rough draft that sucked was a story that couldn’t be saved. It took individual stories that I couldn’t bear to see die, and friends and teachers who knew how to edit and did it to me against my will, plus lots and lots of agony before I could believe what Heighton says–actually, I forget this lesson pretty much every week and have to reteach myself. Just because someone knows and is will to share his knowledge doesn’t mean anyone can gain it by reading/hearing it.
So, fine, maybe you can cope with anything, in which case this whole post is irrelevant to you and you should just take the first thing that pays decently. But some of us need the decent pay plus social interaction and/physical activity to make up for writing’s silence and inertia. And some people need excitement and change and other people need stability. Unchallenging vs. overtaxing? Overstimulating vs. boring? And I’m not even going to touch what constitutes “pays decently”–even this one is personal. I know people getting by on way less than I make, and on way more too (and they still consider it getting by). Some people need to pay off debt, to own a home, to care for children, or simply to maintain a certain standard of fun so they don’t hate their lives. Who am I to tell them what’s necessary and what’s frivolous?
At the careers event, the only thing I could really tell people is what worked for me and what didn’t (many things in that latter category). So that will be part 2 of this series.
RR
* Although, one piece of concrete advice I would have given 10-years-ago me and think I might well have taken is, “Why don’t you give AMT a little heads-up that you’ll be staying with her on your last night in Montreal? Your ceiling really is going to collapse, after all.”
Also, it would have been great if 10-years-in-the-future me had come back while I was writing this post and stopped me from chewing on the wrong end of my pen and getting blue ink all over the roof of my mouth.
May 21st, 2010
We are now entering the fifth power
I subscribe to a lunatic form of birthday numerology, which–while pleasing to me–has no known correlation whatsoever with reality. Sometimes when I start prattling on to someone about what their current age means for their fortunes, I assume they know I am being in(s)ane, but then they say, “Really?” and I get worried. So just to be clear:
I made this shit up.
I was good at high school math, not amazing, but good enough that I took it in university too. I was not good at university math, but I was a ways into it before I realized that. So now…I know a lot of low-level math stuff, but my life is pretty word-based. My only chances to use numbers are 1) calculating the tip in a restaurant, 2) tax season (I got reassessed yesterday–boo!), 3) birthdays.
My age is the number most central to my life, and I like thinking about it (certainly more central and more pleasant than my income, or my address, SIN, whatever). My mom and I even have an adorable algorithm that spits out the years in which our ages will be the reverse (diget-wise) of each other (this is possible because I was born in a year in which my mother’s age was divisble by nine–isn’t that cool? Did you just stop reading?)
All this is by way of saying, I am going to turn 32 on Sunday. Do you know what 32 is? Well, the subject line mentions it, but maybe you had a boyfriend/girlfriend in grade 9 and thus your math homework from that year does not loom in your memory as vividly as it does in mine.
32 is 25 or 2 x 2 x 2 x2 x2 or the only fifth power in the human lifespan!!! The next one is 263, possible mainly for trees and coral. I guess you could count age 1 as a fifth power, because it is all powers (all powerful?) but that seems like sort of cheating and anyway I didn’t get much out of math as an infant.
So this year is going to be a year unlike any other for me, unlike anything I’ve ever experienced…and yet, because it is so divisible, I think that 32 will contain much that is familiar as component parts, though perhaps in new forms.
This is where I figure it is ok if I believe my own mumbo-jumbo, but I have to FYI anyone who is listening to me without rolling their eyes that they probably shouldn’t (listen to me, not roll their eyes–they probably should do that).
Do I have a point? Oh, barely. I’m just really really excited to be 25. Though 31 (a prime, and therefore a year of strength due to indivisibility) was a pretty fantastic age, too. Actually, I liked 30 too…
Maybe mathiness is just excuse to talk about my birthday. I like other things about birthdays besides numbers…cake, glitter, gifts, hugs, balloons…
This is going to be a really good weekend, I think. The rest of the year, too.
May 20th, 2010
On Obscenity
I got an email the other day with a number of obscenities in it. It was a short note and they really stuck out, plus I was a bit bleary eyed and was having trouble grasping the rest of the content (one of the many awesome things about my life is that people very rarely curse me out early in the morning anymore). It took me a few moments to realize the note was from someone who had read a story of mine and was struck by certain language in it that might cause problems publishing it. The note wasn’t even critical, just factual, and all the obscene stuff was in quotation marks–I wrote it.
People say stuff, do stuff and, especially, think stuff, that I never would–and would never want to–but I do want to write about people who aren’t me. So, I have to learn to think (if not say and do) like someone else. Someone with different beliefs, values, standards than me. Someone who likes gefilite fish and ignores lucky pennies, to name two inane examples. Someone racist or disrespectful to women, to name to less inane ones.
So?
No so–I need to do it, because people like that exist. They are even charming and kind on occasion and witty at parties–and I want to write about them. Part of the thrill of writing and reading fiction is breaking out of our own tragically limited points of view and seeing why and how someone might do something completely else.
So if I write seriously, respectfully, and thoughtfully about someone who is is glibly thoughtlessly hateful–what is that? In my mind, that’s not only fine but necessary, but then again, it makes me nervous.
I finally finished reading *Tribal Justice* by Clark Blaise, probably one of the most nuanced, multi-dimensional and utterly agonizing fictional examinations of race and culture as I have ever read. As much as that book challenged and absorbed my every intellectual synapse, I still somehow had the mental space to wonder how my fellow bus riders were interepting the brightly titled cover, or if anyone had glanced over my shoulder to see the range of racial ephithets on many pages.
Those words needed to be there–they reperesented the language people used in the times and places Blaise was writing about. So did the graphic accounts of violence, the weird sexuality, the inflamatory rhetoric–that’s what these characters said, did, believed. These were the stories Blaise wanted to tell, and they needed telling, in the actual lived language. But oh my goodness, I hope no one got the wrong impression based on the cover, etc. (I would recommend this book, but not to everyone: it’s really hard to deal with parts of it).
So, with such openmindedness, RR, why did you note “too close to hateful language” in the margins of a couple of the student stories you were marking just now? Surely those teens have different viewpoints on race/sex/culture/etc, and have a right to represent the world the way they see it–don’t they?
Oh, man, I’m still not sure I did the right thing (don’t worry, I still have the papers, and some white-out). After reading more than 60 stories, I am pretty convinced that a lot of these kids could not distinguish well between their characters and themselves (witness the number of main characters who have perfect wardrobes, expensive cars, and perfect love, all 17). And I want to run up the flag of sensitivity without necessarily making them salute–I can’t make anyone like other races or religions or sexual orientations, I can only make them aware that they are *not* perfectly unbiased in these regards and see what they do with that new self awareness. (I am making this sound really pervasive so I can generalize, lest my students stumble on this blog–actually, it was only a couple kids).
What if I am wrong, and the students are simply writing about characters who believe these things and they don’t themselves? Well, then they’re really talented because it reads so heartfelt. And I owe them an apology.
I wonder, if I ever manage to publish the story mentioned above, if it’ll be something people read and squirm about, ducking the book into their chests on the bus? Or if I could ever be conflated with my characters, assumed to have their blindspots and uglinesses (my own are plenty).
Hmm, this post has a theme but no thesis–I certainly don’t know the answers.
May 19th, 2010
Pivot Farewell
Tonight is a Pivot at the Press Club reading with Jeff Latosik, Sachiko Murakami and Souvankham Thammavongsa.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
8 p.m. at the Press Club
850 Dundas Street West
Hosted by Carey Toane
PWYC ($5 suggested)
Obviously, the readers, venue, and fab Pivot crowd would make this a worthwhile evening, but I also wanted to mention that this is mistress of ceremonies Carey Toane’s last night at the mic. She is off to thrilling new horizons and I am sure there is an exciting sucession plan in place (perhaps we will learn of this tonight??) but I am still sad.
For a year and two-thirds, Carey has booked, advertised, organized and hosted Pivot every other Wednesday and she has done a just incredible job–especially when you consider her own poetry, her Toronto Poetry Vendors project, and a day job, too! If you’ve never had the joy of attending a reading, I can tell you that all ran smoothly and joyfully, and Carey was always funny and warm onstage (and off, for that matter). I can speak from experience to say she made the readers and the audience both feel a part of something special, and she gave some good hugs.
In August 2008, when Alex Boyd, the wonderful host of IV Lounge, announced that that series would end, and that something new would replace it, I was similarly sad. These series have a way of changing and growing in wonderful ways–but things are pretty wonderful the way have been, too!
Thanks for all you’ve done, Carey–we’ll miss you!
Buy the book: 