December 15th, 2009
Happy Holidays–all of them
Some years I don’t feel a need to explain, some years I do. This year I do, so: I am a Jew who celebrates Christmas. No intermarriage in my family, just long-time residence in–and affection for–a very Christian community. There were no other Jews in my grade-school classes ever (my younger brother also went to the school, and there was a much older girl somewhere in the system who was also Jewis, so I wasn’t completely alone). It was either figure out how to draw a Star of David on my own, or draw a Christmas tree with everyone else. And the others were so happy drawing the tree.
I don’t think I would have been ostracized if I’d refused the tree. There were no other Jews, but there was a boy who was a Jehovah’s Witness in the class, and he went and stood in the hall not only during any sort of holiday festivity but also during the national anthem and Lord’s Prayer (it was a very small old-fashioned country school) every morning. No one ever teased him, and he was actually a well-liked kid, but it couldn’t have been easy to miss out on all the festive stuff.
Christmas has a lot of good things that go with it. This year I’ve been involved in a couple different charity drives, for children both in this community and overseas. I’ve been to beautiful parties and received cards covered with glitter and eaten delicious food, and am happy to think there’s more to come.
I am sad to think that anyone would ever feel I was being disrespectful to my Jewish identity by enjoying other people’s traditions. And I would be sad also to think that anyone would think I was disrespectful of Christianity because I take only bits and pieces from that tradition.
And I would also be upset to be held as an example for why the Christmas-observant don’t need to be sensitive to the non-observant. “Rebecca likes Christmas and she’s *Jewish*, so I don’t know why I need to say ‘Happy holidays’ or take down this giant public creche…”
I’m easygoing, fairly secular, and deeply festive–I am non-extrapolatable, though there may well be others like me. Every year I gear up for Christmas with a tiny bit of trepidation over these misunderstandings, but mainly joy that I’m going to hear Barenaked Ladies sing “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” and eat eggnog flavoured candy canes again. And put tinsel in my hair.
And of course I wish you whatever your heart desires this December, of whatever denomination your wishes fall into.
This picture is hard to make out, but that’s my little fourth-night menorah in the front, and my little overlit tree in the back. I guess it is appropriate that this pic, like so much of what is written above, is all blurry.
RR
December 14th, 2009
Self-publishing online: any takers?
What do you think of putting stories or novel excerpts up on your blog? I was recently asked by the writer, editor, and teacher Allyson Latta what I thought of writers publishing their fiction on their own websites and blogs–if it would interfere with work being published elsewhere or cause other problems.
The short answer is yes, it’ll cause some problems as some journals consider a piece published if it has appeared on the internet except in closed writers’ forums and critique groups. And that makes sense to me. Journals don’t make much money and every sale counts, so if by some happy circumstance someone hears RR has another story out (and wants to read it) and web-searches the title to find the journal ordering information, only to discover that the whole piece is on a blog… Well, that’s one less sale for the journal.
So even though not every journal explicitly states that they won’t consider blog-published works, I consider that implied. When my stories are published in online journals, that counts absolutely as a publication, so why shouldn’t it count if I put it up there myself?
Of course, if I wanted desperately to put my stories on Rose-coloured, I might not be so swayed by my perceived impression of journal editors desires. The fact is that my stories, and most fiction, are a terrible fit for the blogosphere. 1000 words is pushing it on the long skinny column of a blog post, and many of my stories are 4000+. I can’t speak for most blog readers, but for myself, I prefer my blog posts meaty, but not that meaty–a few bits of insight, some links and recommendatiosn and points to ponder and we’re done. I’m not ready for an hour of deep reading when I surf the blogs, and thus (with typical egocentricity) I assume no one else is either.
That said, I’ve seen some wicked cool uses of the blog medium in publishing fiction. Like The Montreal Fiores, Dave Fiore’s collection of short and short-short stories about that city. These pieces are brief and punchy and engaging: perfect for the web. And then there was Jim Munroe’s ingenious Opening Act of Unspeakable Evil, a novel in blog form, which Munroe posted to daily until the entire story was up–and then he published the physical-form novel (sadly, the original roommatefromhell.com has been hacked, but the novel’s still available). That project hooked people in because, like on all the best blogs, there was a reason to come back every day–suspense, engagement, and a reader poll to determine the nature of the spin-off project. But that’s a limited-time thing: no one wants to scroll all the way back to post 1 and read the whole 88 posts upside down, so those who missed the initial fuss buy the novel.
What I’m saying here is that, to my mind, there’s nothing wrong with publishing on the internet if you are clear on your goal and know what you are doing. Messieurs Fiore and Munroe both have some serious experience with self-publishing, and are aware of not only how to craft something that people want to read (and buy) but to get it to them. And having done so in the past, they have fans who are eager to see what’s happening when they start new sites or post new stuff. I think that’s awesome.
Less awesome to set up a site to put writing if the writer is unsure who, if anyone, is going to read it, or how to get them to want to. That’s just basically going to disqualify the work from consideration in certain publications, without accomplishing anything cool–the piece is just going to languish there without an audience. I would discourage folks who don’t have a clear sense of how or why to self-publish on the web; it is really not that easy. Publishing companies, even small ones, are so idolized for a reason: they do a lot of hard work editing, polishing, formating, printing, promoting and distributing pysical books *and* online versions, that most writers simply aren’t equipped to do ourselves. I’m very sure I’m not.
So I guess my advice to anyone thinking over putting their stories or novel chapters on the web would be to think carefully why they want to and how it will work. Because there’s nothing wrong with that idea when it’s done well, but when it’s not…better to have saved that energy for writing, or reading.
Anyway, I’m posting this here rather than just emailing Allyson because I’m really not sure what other people think, or whether my feelings on the matter are common. Would anyone care to weigh in?
RR
December 12th, 2009
A passion for narrative can make you a jerk
Well, me, anyway.
I saw an ad for Kraft Dinner Szechuan a few months back and, as appalling is that sounded, I wanted to try it so as to verify the appallingness for myself.
Then I forgot all about it–it’s not like I’m going to spend money on this stuff or anything–and then today I saw they were giving away free samples of KDS at Metro. Yes! The girl at the little sample-table was talking to someone else when I approached. I waited patiently, but when she turned to me she looked aghast.
“May I try some too, please?”
She tried to thrust the whole container at me, realized her error, forked a tiny bit into a bowl, could not free the fork from the noodles because her hands were shaking violently, and finally handed it over, eyes wide and wet.
“Thank you.”
“Oh, you’re very welcome,” she said, only a slight quaver.
I went off with my sample, but she called me back to offer, and explain, a coupon booklet. Except she couldn’t turn the pages easily, her hands were shaking so badly. When I thanked her, again she seemed incredibly touched.
I’ve been thinking about her ever since, wondering what tragedy or incident prompted all this, and how she would do for the rest of the day and after. Bad news? A near-miss car accident? An irate or violent sampler? Surely, it would have to be something big; the story wouldn’t be as good if she were simply wildly nervous about giving out samples at Metro.
Clearly, I’m an asshole, because I was sort of hoping for the worst-case scenarios in the name of a good story!! Why wasn’t I hoping from the beginning that she was just a very edgy kid, and she’d grow into her role and in time get a better one? I’m hoping that *now*, but I had to roll through all these other fun catastrophes first. I suck. And, come to think of it, why *wouldn’t* the coming-into-her-own of a Metro sample-distributor be a good story? A story is only as weak as its writer.
And the KDS is more abominable than you could ever imagine–you have to try this!!
RR
December 10th, 2009
Announcing *The Big Dream*
Hey. Um, hey! I…had so much fun with that first book I published that I’ve decided to do it again. Really!!! Biblioasis will publish , *The Big Dream*, my next of short stories about people and their jobs and their lives around them. As the book is currently only slightly more than half done and the publication is thus rather far away, I am having a lot of trouble believing this good news, but it helps that it’s announced in Quill and Quire.
Thanks, Samantha, Dan, John, assorted friends and loved ones, for being excited about the book and believing I can do it. I am very very pleased about this!
RR
December 9th, 2009
Postal excellence
Today’s mail was extra good: 1 magazine, one letter, one holiday card, one return-to-sender misaddressed holiday card (the only down note, to be hand-delivered on Saturday), and 2 copies of the fall issue of The Antigonish Review (the issue is not yet online) containing my flash fiction, “Do.”
I am so delighted to see it there, and it is a story I am quite proud of, but it is somewhat jarring reading as it was written a few years back and is *much* different from what I’m doing these days (how much flash fiction are you seeing from me lately, really?) It’s nice to be reminded that I have a little bit of range, though it’s sequential–I can no more go back to doing what I was doing in 2006 than I can skip ahead to whatever I’ll be up to in 2012 and see how that goes. I can only hope the cycle repeats, one of these days.
Anyway…hope you enjoy the story, and the whole of a very attractive-looking issue (mine was in *3* layers of shrink-wrap–it’s like they *knew* about the slush-storm!)
RR
December 8th, 2009
Not by any other: on names and naming
I have stolen a rose. It is in a glass water on my kitchen table, and I look at it as I eat breakfast. It’s pretty and I like looking at it, but I also feel a little guilty. I’m pretty sure no one misses it, but it was still not my rose to take.
Except there is a part of me that feels that all roses are mine. Because of my name, you see: when I see a rose, a tiny part of my brain says “mine” or, sometimes, “me.”
I identify very very strongly with my name. I have a strong interest in all the other Rosenblums in the world, of which there are not that many. There are more Rebeccas, and I always enquire after them if I hear the name mentioned–I want to make sure they are upstanding women and not doing anything under the aegis of Rebeccaness that might sully our reputations.
But I am willing to admit that their ways of being Rebecca, whatever they are, become the definition of Rebeccaness in their context. Names are tautological–whoever you are, that’s you! For that reason, as soon as I know a person slightly, I have no trouble keeping him/her straight from other people with the same name: the personality hooks into whatever the person is called (at one point I knew 13 Jasons). I have never met a person whose name didn’t seem to me to suit him or her; everyone simply becomes the embodiment of that name to me.
The only people whose names aren’t a simply tautology to me are, ironically, my parents, because I don’t know them by their names (although of course I know what they are). I have been known to obliviously introduce them as simply “my mom and dad,” and leave them to give their proper names themselves, which in fact sound strange to me, though I don’t honestly expect people to address my mom as “Rebecca’s Mom”–I just forget that that’s not actually her name.
I have known people who changed their names when they married, when they immigrated, when they broke away from their families, or when they began writing. They seem just fine with the change, learning to identify fully under the new rubric. I imagine that must be a huge transformation of self, a serious mental and emotional change. It’s enough for me to even remember to call them what they now want to be called.
So I am not one of those authors who takes great joy in researching names, keeping lists of cool names, or matching the meaning of the name with a character (my name means “bound”–not even close). To me that’s not how names work: the person inflates the name with his or her being, not the other way round. Because real people come to me with names in place, in my mind so do characters. I generally think of an appropriate name within the first few paragraphs of writing about someone, and then that’s it–it becomes who they are. I almost never alter the names of characters once I’ve been writing about them for a while, and though maybe I can fiddle with a minor character’s name if she’s only on the page briefly, the characters I know well would disturb me greatly by another name. It would be as if my mom suddenly demanded I call her Barbara.
So the fact that I now need to change a character’s name is making me bonkers. It’s a coincidental reality/fiction overlap, and since I have no wish to edit reality, it’s fiction that’s going to have to take the hit, so as to avoid confusion. I thought I would avoid upsetting myself by writing the story with the original name in place and then search’n’replace it right before submitting the piece for publication–I wouldn’t even have to see this alien name on the page for very long.
But my attempt to pull this clever trick on my own brain isn’t working: now that I know this guy isn’t keeping his name, he’s shifty on the page whenever I try to write about him. “Who are you?” seems to be my question for him, although I thought I already knew. It’s really slowing down the writing, as I stare at the paragraph where he drinks the soda and think, “As Paul took a sip of his soda,” “As Nick took a…” “As Dave took…” We can’t spend 20 minutes on the soda-drinking paragraph!! It’s only two lines long! This problem remains unsolved, and in progress.
I love my brain–it is a very interesting place to live, but sometimes I wish it were just a little more flexible. Even my father, who has been living under the Rosenblum rubric the longest, is baffled by my enthusiasm, and claims to “not really think about it.” He does sometimes give me roses, though.
RR
December 7th, 2009
For Your Information
1) The Fantastic Mr. Fox is pure unadulterated joy. Go if you like animated movies, film technology, Wes Anderson, or subtly weird humour. I think go if you like Roald Dahl, but I haven’t actually read the book on which the film is based (don’t start with me) so I can’t say for certain. That link above is the Rotten Tomatoes Top Critics page–the film got 100% tomatoes (that’s good, yo!) Also, I’m still slightly nauseated from laughing so hard. “I see…a fox on a motorcycle…with a slightly littler fox in the sidecar, along with what might be an opossum-type creature…this mean anything to anyone?” See it even if you are not or do not possess children–this film has enough layers for anyone.
2) Did you know Facebook has friend-spam? You get these friend requests from randos and then if you do it, they just send you ads and things. Well, they do, and this is why I never respond to FB friend-requests from people whose names I don’t recognize and who don’t send a note. If, however, some nice friendly blog reader thought it’d be fun to be my FB friend, I would totally endorse that. So, if you happen to be one of several people I don’t know who friended me in the past couple days, but are not a spammer or a stalker, please send me a note to that effect and friends we shall be.
3) I am listed as one of the judges for the University of Toronto Alumni Writing Contest, story division. I’m thrilled to be associated with the amazing stories that won, as well as the energy in the UofT Magazine office that got it together, and my groovy fellow judges.
However, a wee disclaimer here, as you might have noted that a very dear friend of mine won. So you should know that another judge read “Georgia Coffee Star” in the first round, and when it appeared on my list in the 2nd, I made arrangements to recuse myself in further rounds. Which wound up being a sort of fascinating experience, as the rest of the committee made exactly the decisions I would have made, for rather different reasons. Everything I do with short stories teaches me something.
Anyway, I’m so pleased for Kerry’s winning story–go read!
RR
December 4th, 2009
Canada Reads Report
I don’t know a lot about…stuf that happens…unless that stuff a) happened in my living room or b) someone came to my living room (or invited me to theirs) to tell me about it. This is not helped by the fact that I can’t really listen to talking on the radio. Here’s my terrible secret: I have a hard time listening to a voice without looking at its source. Great for being an attentive conversationalist, lousy for radio listening. Music, no problem, and inane chatter I can maybe drift in and out of as I mop the floor, but to listen to a newsreport, an audio book, or a dialogue about books, I would pretty much have to sit down and look at the radio, or at least close my eyes.
So I don’t, which is why I used to always miss everything about Canada Reads: things that happened on the radio and involved talking were not for me. But then some of my favourite blogs started covering it, and last year I (felt I) had a really good sense of the process despite never listening to the actual show.
This year, however, no one is all that excited about the list, so I think my sense of the process is about to go away again. But I can’t help but be excited that one of my favourite books of all time, Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, is on the list. I know it’s no longer as cutting edge as it was when it was first published, 18 years ago, I know a lot of people have already read it–but in my mind, good books don’t get old, and they don’t get used up.
Do they?
I am one of the youngest members of Generation X (1961-1981, according to Wikipedia) so maybe I don’t exactly relate as those more embedded in it do. But I think even those who came before 1961 or after 1981 can relate to loneliness, career disorientation, the wish for less, and the feeling that stories and friends can save your life. That last bit is pretty much my philosophy of life.
It’s true I read this book really young, and it is possible that I imprinted on it as a baby goose does on its mother, or sometimes a human or a feed trough. I read the review in Sassy Magazine (that literary bastian) and it impressed me enough that I recognized the book later that year when my parents said I could have a book from Barnes and Noble on our trip to Manhattan (that was before B&N was a commonplace thing). I actually got two, that and Trainspotting (a book I consider even less of a “novel” than GenX). Both books have stuck with me through countless rereads, but I admit that I did start with them during an impressionable period in my life.
But my last read of *GenX* was only a couple years ago, and for a grad school class, and it was still as funny and wistful and lovely as I remember. And looking at the structure with a more grad-school critical eye maybe even made me appreciate it more. I love the tales that form the much of the “novel” that is *GenX*. This year’s Canada Reads list has no short story collection on it, but the nested narratives of Coupland’s book come pretty close, and I love that formal envelope-pushing.
I’ve heard this a time or two, but surely people don’t really think the book is shallow, do they? Perhaps it is confusion akin to those around Calvin and Hobbes’s mystification over colour photos of a black-and-white world–*Gen X* is a deep searching warm and funny novel about a shallow world–I mean, the liposuction fat and trinitite and stuffed chickens are just…detritus.
Aren’t they?
Maybe I’d better watch the radio show.
RR
December 3rd, 2009
Russell Banks On Research
I am ashamed to admit Russell Banks’s essay “On Research” in the PEN anthology Writing Life might be the first thing of his I’ve ever read. But clearly, I should take a look at his novels, since his views on writing and research so brilliantly express things I’ve been failing to articulate, even to myself, for years:
“Write about what you know, we’re constantly told. But we must not stop there. Start with what you know, maybe, but use it to let you write about what you don’t know.
“The best fiction writers seem to be great extrapolators; they start with a cue, a clue, an iceberg tip, and are able to extrapoloate from that the hero’s entire soliloquy, the motive for the crime, the entire iceberg. How does Joyce Carol Oates, for instance, know so much about the sexual secrets of lusty, irresponsible, working-class white men? Or of African-American, inner-city male adolescents, for that matter? I mean, come on! … She’s got to be extrapolating all that information from some small bit of only marginally related information close to home, conjuring a an entire world of quotidian data, speech, nightmoves, anxieties, sweaty desires, and hormonal after-effects, drawing it out of what…? A pair of men’s undershorts flopping in the wind on a backyard laundry line, glimpsed by her from the passenger’s seat of a car speeding down the New Jersey Turnpike? I suspect so.
…”As a fiction writer, one has no need to master a subject, to become as expert on it, or to report or otherwise testify on it later. In fact, quite the opposite. Because if I had done as much research to master a subject as would be required of a scholar…then it’s very likely that my novel would have died aborning. Its form and structure would have served no puropse but to organize data more or less coherently; its characters would have been case studies instead of complex, contradictory humany beings; and its themes would have led me, not the acquistion of a comprehensive vicion of the larger world, but to a narrow, parochial didacticism and/or ideology.”
As they say in the funny papers, wowsers. This creeping tendency of research to take over a text, to enslave characters it was meant to illuminate and make the plot into a mechanism for someone to walk into a room and demand, “Can someone explain this crazy proportional representation thing to me one more time?”–well, it’s enough to make a devoted fiction writer refuse to write about anything she didn’t make up entirely inside her head, just to keep safe from an academic onslaught.
But that’s not how inspiration for fiction works. Sometimes the story one most desperately needs to tell takes its spark in the dubiously real world, and we have to go to the material–learn the history, listen to the accents, memorize the map and/or order off the menu–out of respect for the story that needs telling. Banks is somewhat coy in insisting that that sort of work is *not* research, merely getting the story right. But whatever you call it, sometimes you need to do it.
I think an antipathy to fiction that’s been made submissive to fact is a reason some of us are not wild about most historical fiction. I don’t think that anyone would discur that any novel that makes its story, characters, setting, and world live and breathe and affect the reader is a superlative achievement, whether it’s set in the past or future, Liberia or the author’s living room (I am thinking, actually, about Chester Brown’s Louis Riel). Who doesn’t want to read that book? Some miss the mark a bit, and thought I don’t myself dig it, I do understand why even second-rate historical fiction is popular: for those who feel, like an Austen heroine’s mother, that reading novels without “learning anything” is a little indulgent, the historical novel as accessible textbook is not a bad bargain.
But I don’t do that, myself–I suspect that my reach is not that far, or at least, not in that direction. My fiction strays very rarely from the world I see while going about my daily life. But even then, it’s important to get it right, to study the facts that anchor the story, so there are no gaps for characters to slip through, no inaccuracies or incongruities to jar the reader. Mr. Banks can call that work what he likes, but research is fine with me. So, in just a sec, I’m going to gather up my taxiways map, my laptop, and my TTC pass, and head for Pearson International. It’s no grand project, an afternoon at the airport, but it’s the story I desperately need to tell.
RR
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