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

Cottage conversation

J: I hate cottages.
R: Oh.
J: Well, I like the hanging out with people, food and cards, the indoor stuff. I just hate the bugs, and the rain, and wildlife.
K: What, like bears?
J: Yeah, like bears. Who likes bears?
K: Indoors, bears are ok.
J (very shrill): Bears in your house?
K: No, you’re inside, the bears are outside.
J: I would prefer there be no bears anywhere nearby.

Would you be my wonderdrug?
RR

June 25th, 2009

Post-cottage miscellany

That orange chair is where I’ve been more or less steadily the past few days, chatting with old friends, petting the dog, reading The New Yorker fiction issue (oh, Jonathan Franzen, you’ve done it again!), eating cookies, and periodically staring up in stunned silence at the beauty around me. So *that’s* what people like about cottage weekends. Now I know.

But I am, as ever, glad to be back in the 416. Happy things that greeted me upon my return are phone calls from friends, emails from same, my beloved indoor toilet, a nice review in Gloss, and the news that Canadian Notes and Queries new website is up, with tonnes of good stuff, including my first ever published review. I’m pretty proud.

My little review is the smallest reason to go get a copy of–or subscribee to!!–CNQ. It’s a great journal and full of things to make you think. As Dan points out, putting your name on a subscriber list to a litmag is, these days, pretty much a political act, tantamont to signing a petition in favour of keeping small creatively and critically engaged communities alive and funded. So if there’s a journal you believe in and you can possibly afford it, put your name down.

I was helpless as a chess piece/lifted up by someone’s hand
RR

June 19th, 2009

Incommunicado

Until my late teens, almost everyone I knew had not only the same area code but the same first three digits in their phone numbers. It was a very small town, but as far as I was concerned it contained everyone it needed to. Sure my extended family and parents’ old friends lived in the faraway U.S., but so they always had, and it was hard to miss people whom one rarely saw in two consecutive years.

Nevertheless, I delighted in post from such farflung correspondants, and a few made an effort to write to my young self on a regular basis. I was a far more ardent correspondant than any one recipient could handle, however, so whenever the elementary school penpal program circulated, I signed up again, winding up with a worldwide network of fascinating penpals, all of whom I would exhaust into silence within a year or two. I also wrote a family newspaper for distribution within my household, with articles on such topics as whose birthday it was that week, and what we needed from the hardware store (oh, this blog was so clearly presaged). I was also likely the only kid in the world who didn’t have to be nagged to write thank you notes for gifts.

I went away for the summer I was 17, made no friends, and used up half a dozen books of stamps. I went away the summer I was 18, wrote only slightly fewer letters but did finally actually make genuine friends who didn’t live in my township. They were older than I, already in university and conversant in the ways of university email addresses. I had no idea about any of this, but when I returned home, I tried to figure it out.

We’d had a computer in the house since the end of the eighties, which my brother and I used to play endless video games of steadily evolving complexity, and occasionally to do schoolwork. I had no idea what my folks were doing with it, or with the shrieky dialup “internet”; work of some sort, it seemed.

So the fall of my last year of high school, my dad taught me about email. I don’t know if freemail accounts hadn’t appeared on the scene yet or I just didn’t know about them, but my father generously shared his work email account with me, leading to a whole new form of household nagging (“Did you email Amanda back yet? That note’s been in my inbox all week? You really should…”) Everyone was sad when I moved away for university, but at least I got my own damn email account. By then I was hooked.

Far away from my area code and all the relevant people it contained, I started emailing my friends and family constantly–minutia about school and new friends and food and weather and clothes and health…and people *emailed back*. Letters had become old-school and boring: you had to buy stamps and envelopes and remember to walk past a mailbox, so I very rarely got post, but email still had the gloss of novelty to it, and I was thrilled to get email every day.

More than a decade and several technological revolutions later, I’m still pretty excited to see that Inbox (1) bar pop up! Letters have largely gone dormant for most people, though I can’t resist that heart-leap hope when I unlock my mailbox that today will be a day that one of the six people on earth who still use post will have sent me something.

In truth, I think the bloom is off the rose a bit with email, too. Most people’s jobs require them to send and receive dozens per day, and most of those are of the “Please reconfigure the pages completely and within the hour” variety that rarely causes heart-leaping, even in me. I’m sure I know a lot of people who, off the clock, would like their computers firmly silent and email-less.

Not me. I’ve never gotten over my childhood desire to hear from those distant, and much as I love to talk, I still feel my best self-expression–most coherent, most thoughtful, most amusing–is in writing. I like to think over a letter/email/story, rewrite a line or two, delete (some of the) extraneous stuff. I think I have a career as a writer that I could never have had as an “extemporizer,” and I think you’ll agree if you’ve ever gotten voicemail from me.

So I’m an email junkie. I send and receive dozens a day in a professional context, and although fewer in personal context, I’m still ever-emailing. I do get that not everyone wants to write long discussions of life, the universe and everything in their off-hours. Actually, I’m sort of amazed that some people (other than myself) do, and that I can be the recipient if only I continue to respond in kind.

All this email-relection has been brought on by the fact that I’m headed out of town this weekend to a cottage, on an island…with no internet. This has never happened to me before, really–not since that critical turning point back in the late nineties. I think it’ll be good for me, although challenging. I think the lake water, sunshine, friends, tofudogs, boardgames, actual dog, boat, bonfire, and coleslaw will help.

But I’ll still miss you, interent, and all my lovely far-flung friends that live inside you!

You just can’t do that again
RR

June 18th, 2009

Rose-coloured reviews *From the Fifteenth District* by Mavis Gallant

Back before I realized the advantages of reading anthologies (in case you don’t want to read the whole post, in brief: taking a chance on new authors who you haven’t heard of/didn’t know you’d like, hearing the chimes and discordancies between different writers, seeing vastly different takes on similar themes), I almost exclusively read single-author short story collections. In my naivete, I believed in doing this, I was seeing the stories the way the author wanted them. Of course a lot of the time the author is fine with the stories in half a dozen forms: in journals and anthologies and on the internet, later in a collected or selection, as well as that one slim book. Nevertheless, there is something to be said for appreciating a writer’s gift over a longer span, even their gift is for short pieces, arranged in the order they wanted. I had read two of the nine pieces in From the Fifteenth District elsewhere (where? probably anthologies, although I don’t really recall). I knew that I had loved “The Moslem Wife” and “The Latehomecomer”, and I loved them here in the collection, too, but I felt a different affection seeing them working in concert with their fellows. *Fifteenth* is a book about Europe in the middle 50 years of the last century, about nationalism and nationality, very often about war, the indignities of being a woman, or a Jew, or a child, or simply alive.

These themes sound terribly heavy and imposing, but in fact such is Gallant’s subtly that you sometimes only realize two stories on what other layers were going on while you read blithely away. “The Moslem Wife” is a story about Netta’s devotion to Jack, their marriage and its tensions, and what happened after that, when the war came to their part of France. That romance and the intervention of history absorbed me entirely on first reading, and mainly on second, but I did notice that Netta and Jack were both Brits working and living in the south of France, not quite of the place but hardly of England, either. I noticed this because I had just read “The Four Seasons”, the first story in the book, about a young girl who goes to work for an American family living it Italy. The girl is Italian, but from another part so she doesn’t understand the local dialect, nor the English of her employers. Gradually she learns the latter, but remains so aloof from them she denies that she understands a word they say to her. Just as “Poor Netta, who saw herself as profoundly English, spread consternation by being suddenly foreign…”

The characters in these stories are French in Holland, Germans in France, Americans in Italy and Bulgarians in Scotland. They are the diaspora and the left behind. Is that the theme of this book, then–dispersal, foreignness, home and lack-of-home? Maybe…as usual, what I like best is stories that are examples and examinations of how people are, and I think *Fifteenth* is such a collection, under slightly narrower terms. How people are out of context, under duress, without the confidence-making banality of being like everyone else.

One of Gallant’s considerable achievements is that these stories are not only as tough and intense and wrenching as life is, they are also as funny, as ironic, as sardonic (although, I must say, rarely as silly–one thing Gallant doesn’t bother much with is lightness). One of the back-cover blurbs made me flinch as I read it on the bus (you mean you don’t read all that stuff? don’t you know how the intern slaved over it?): “Gallant’s fiction is so finely observed and so forbearing in the face of the shortcomings we ascribe to human nature that the reader might easily come away with the impression that these stories are narrated by God.” That’s from Mirabella, a now-defunct “women’s magazine” that one would not necessarily zoom to for serious literary reviews. This seemed at first a giddy overstatement.

But when I got back into the stories, the comment actually started to make good sense to me. Because what Gallant is very very good at is omniscient narrators, which even university professors do describe as “the God POV.” Her narrators speak with the gentle, slightly distanced affection of a parent listening to a child describe a nightmare. She writes with a long view of history (as I say, the stories are mainly about the time before and after WWII, and the book was published in 1979, when much had been discovered about small and large culpabilities and heroism in Europe). There is always that awareness in her writing of how minor human foibles link up with global concerns…and how that’s ok.

Forbearing is exactly right for the tone in the line about Netta above, I think–the narrator genuinely pities her, while eliding none of her pretension and “gas”. In some of the stories, a character gets to take on this long, quiet, accepting view. My favourite in the collection is “Baum, Gabriel, 1935-( )”, the story of an actor living in Paris who is the only surviving member of a family destroyed by the Holocaust. No, it isn’t light, but nor is it a bludgeon. I have a hard time reading about the Holocaust, and I often find writers can’t get beyond descriptions of intense physical and emotional suffering…nor should they, I guess…it’s important. Gallant, however, finds much else to unfold in Gabriel’s loneliness, his disconnection from the world around him, his faint bewilderment by it. I think this account of the main character’s reading of the newspaper is very funny, and yet, it is designed to do much more than amuse:

“Some journalists tried to interest Gabriel in Brittany, where there was an artichoke glut; others hinted that the new ecumenicity beginning to seep out of Rome was really an attack on French institutions. Gabriel doubted this. Looking for news about his pension, he learned about the Western European consumer society and the moral wounds that were being inflicted on France through full employment. Between jobs, he read articles about people who said they had been made unhappy by paper napkins and washing machines.”

Is this satire on the news? Only the most gentle sort; Gabriel lacks the energy or inclination to mock. He is beyond it, and while *that* is his tragedy, it is also his strength, what allows him to survive these and greater ironies of life going on and lunch getting eating after one of the greatest cruelties of modern history.

These are small stories, and Gallant leaves you free to read them that way; each piece is self-contained in it’s detail and emotion, but the more history and feeling you bring to the pieces (and she supplies it small ways, too), the bigger they get. This is a writer who has found a way to keep her gaze firmly on individuals in all their simple sadness, and yet let that reflect all the wild complexity of the worlds they inhabit.

I wonder where you are / curious
RR

June 17th, 2009

Introducing Samantha

I’m pleased to say that my future work in the world will now be represented by the very book-savvy Samantha Haywood at Transatlantic Literary Agency, Inc. Here we are at Samantha’s author party last week, her looking like the charming individual she is, me looking mildly deranged for wearing an enormous winter coat in June (you can’t even tell in the picture, but it’s actually buttoned wrong, too!)

June 15th, 2009

Nice places to read

It’s Toronto-only, plus there’s a definite centre-North skew here, but I thought I’d get it started and hope that others would chip in…anyone?

–Third floor library, window seat (feet on radiator), Hart House, University of Toronto.

–Tiny parkette (three benches plus tree; possibly owned by apartment building), Shepherd just east of Yonge, north side; on benches only (no grass).

—Tequila Bookroom rooftop patio (or anywhere else in that restaurant, really).

—Swiss Chalet, any. Bustling enough that one conversation doesn’t take over, friendly yet impersonal, and you can stay for hours without a murmur from staff. Especially good if you *have* to read something for work or school.

–Front Street median, just in front of Union Station. Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it, but probably not good for serious Proustian reads, either.

—Queen’s Park, northern edge (above Parliament), lying on grass under trees. Benches available but pointless; grass is best.

—Starbucks on Yonge just south of Lawrence, west side. Some people hate Starbucks, I know, but if you don’t, this is the best one, in my opinion. Leather chair by the fireplace (!) is big enough for me plus laptop, notes, several books, plus (sealed) cup.

–Departures lounge, Pearson Airport. Again, bustle drowns out individual conversations, plus Zen feeling of adventure-about-to-begin makes for good reading headspace. Chairs reasonably confortable, floor not bad.

–Desks near children’s area, Northern District Library. Window seats are better for heavy reading, couchs near entry good also (but if you put your feet anywhere near the [vinyl!] upholstry, you risk humiliating reprimand).

–As far from computers as possible, Sanderson Library. Outside the library works too, in a pinch (this is the noisiest library ever; I find that inspiring).

—Futures Bakery patio. Indoors is a bit dark and, I find, slightly damp, but certainly congenial enough on rainy/winter days.

–Grass or benches by Philosopher’s Walk. Benches: any; grass: especially on the east side.

–The 34 bus. Any window seat behind the back doors, particularly the second row on the right.

–The blue chair under my living room window, curled up in a ball. Special permission needed for this one.

Then the bridge disappears / and I’m standing on air
RR

On free will

Mom: And the cheese has been in the freezer since January, so we’re all set.
Rebecca: I don’t think you can freeze cheese.
Mom (indignant): You can freeze *anything you want*. It’s whether it will survive the process that’s the question.

Reachin’ for the stars
RR

June 12th, 2009

Saving you from boredom, one link at a time

Did you know that AMT has a blog? And that’s it’s fabulous, and contains regular updates about dogs, the Weather Network, and all the other various ways life is amusing? I have been dreaming of (and campaigning for) this for *years*, and now I am happy. You go read and be happy, too.

Another thing I’ve been wanting for a while is the re-emergence of rob mclennan’s fascinating series of author interviews, 12 or 20 Questions. And now it’s back, and being posted regularly on rob’s clever blog. Hooray! (Am I now going to get everything I’ve wished for? That would be odd. Maybe only blog-related things I’ve wished for.)

Finally, Penelope Trunk has a good post on prioritizing. Actually, it’s a slightly snarky post about how people who don’t read blogs are dumb and slow (I don’t agree with that; much as I like blogs, they are a personal choice, like a New Yorker subscription. Or heroin.) But she makes some really good points about how we have time for what we care about, and less time for what we, consciously or not, regard as unimportant. This is a good truth to acknowledge for me, and it’s stuff like this that keeps me reading PT although she a) is mean and b) talks a lot about her sex life for no reason. But actually, neither of those things are boring either!

Happy reading!

Thank you stranger for your therapeutic smile
RR

June 11th, 2009

The work in the work

The estimable Steven W. Beattie has a great post up on writing about work that’s worth reading if you care about such things.

I found SWB’s comments, along with those from the Alain de Botton column he was responding to, very interesting and somewhat encouraging. Because I do care about such things, which makes me write about them, and I want to do it well. It’s comforting to know that others see a void in a lot of fiction where I do–the workaday world–and think it worth filling.

The flagship “office novel” in recent years, which both de Botton and Beattie reference is Joshua Ferris’s *Then We Came to the End*, and for the laugh/cry/aspire to be a better writer experience that I am always hoping for when I crack a new spine, this book is pretty outstanding. It was actually one of the first reviews posted here on Rose-coloured, although I can’t for the life of me find it now because I used to name posts clever things and not actually what the post is about. Anyway, I love that book, but I am sometimes I am concerned about how it is regarded, the genre-izing. Somehow “office-novel” implies the work isn’t strong enough to be regarded as simply a novel.

Indeed, I loved Ferris’s book because it offered that office setting that I relate to, write about, and laugh at. Ferris knew his terrain well and treated it with subtle satire and insightful criticism, and I definitely enjoyed that flare and humour. But more than a relevant setting, some good jokes and well-crafted set pieces, this “office novel” is a *good* novel. And to me, it’s good for the same reason so much of my favourite fiction is: because the author has created characters that seem like real people in our world, and he shows them to such effect that we react to them and with them, recoil at their cruelties and smile at their small victories and desire them to grow beyond their failures. At least, I did.

I understood Ferris’s topic not to be “office culture” or work or layoffs, much less snark and gossip and all the unattractive parts of the field. Call me crazy, but I thought he was writing about that eternal topic of literature: *how people are*. This book concentrated mainly on how they are during their working hours, but in any frame the Mona Lisa is still herself, as in any context so are we all. These characters were varying degrees of hurt and suffering, cocky and vulnerable, funny and mocked, but they were all recognizable as human human human, and they recognized their own foibles, too. They especially knew when they were making good jokes.

A lot of writing set in offices is funny, which is something that I love about it, but also something that puts those “office” books in danger as being dismissed as *merely comic* or *merely satirical*. And although I would also like to take on the difference between comedy and satire, one thing at a time: let’s talk about diagetic and non-diagetic comedy first. I just googled those terms and it seems maybe I made them up. But I think they work, even if they don’t technically exist.

If diagetic music in a film is music that the characters in the film can hear and that comes from some source within the scene (a radio is playing, someone sits down at the piano, etc.), and non-diagetic music is a part of the soundtrack but not the scene, so the characters don’t hear it then…does it make sense to say that diagetic humour is a joke the character(s) make(s), or a situational irony that they appreciate and comment on? And non-diagetic humour is a joke *on* the characters, or at least one that they miss but the reader is supposed to get?

Still with me? Like, M*A*S*H was a revelation in diagetic humour in TV shows–Hawkeye made jokes and the other characters laughed or at least rolled their eyes knowingly; everybody was in on the jokes that the audience was laughing at, in a way that simply wasn’t true on *All in the Family*–Archie Bunker had no idea he was funny.

Ok, so what’s interesting to me to write about is to write about characters who get the joke, Because they’re smart, and they’re funny a work environment is a fertile field for such people. A high concentration of reasonably intelligent folk, stuck together in tight proximity over long periods of time, under mild duress, trying to kill the boredom, create the bonds, defend their territory in order to get through the day, and life, without losing their jobs, their dignity, or their sanity.

It’s funny. Workplaces are funny places, and writing, tv shows and films about them *can* be satirical in the sense that the jokes are on the characters (who on *The Office* is laughing?) or they can simply be mimetic, showing a reasonable facsimile as life as it is lived for a lot of the gainfully employed, reasonably amusing world.

And of course “a reasonable facsimile of life as it is lived” is not the only right answer to the question, what is fiction? but it is certainly one of them. Writing about work is important because it’s relevant and true, just like writing about war and babies and sex and taxes are important and relevant and true. I would hate to see that importance be diminished by gags involving photocopiers, rubber chickens and Outlook Calendar. Because those are facts of life, too.

You look so good in the shoes of a poseur
RR