Category Archives: Publishing

The Art of the Happy Family: Review of Padma Viswanathan’s “The Toss of a Lemon”

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A gorgeous novel by Padma Viswanathan, an author who kindly provided a “blurb” for the cover of my own novel.

A few weeks ago, I did my first interview leading up to the launch of my novel.  It should appear in the Summer issue of Montreal Review of Books.

One of the questions I was asked began by acknowledging that books about happy family situations – like the high-functioning marriage central to my novel — are scarce.  I’ve thought about this a lot since the interview.  I’ve tried to make a mental list of memorable, happy literary relationships.  Maybe another reader could do better, but for me, it’s a short list – one full of characters who usually end up dead within the first quarter of their books.  Most often, a happy relationship is a preamble for a story – a cheap tableaux meant to be quickly dismantled.  Otherwise, it’s the pat-ending of a story – the trite song-and-dance finale.  The interviewer who posed the question is right.  Seldom does a happy relationship make up the balance of a story, especially in literary fiction.

When most readers want to know how to behave and be happy in a family, we reach for the self-help shelves of the bookstore, not the literary fiction section.  I think the reasons we’re not interested in seeing happy families in fiction are fairly simple.  Happy relationships are typically written as uneventful.  They’re boring.  Their sweetness is cloying.  It’s mapped out in cliches and feels contrived.

And that’s a mistake.  It’s not the relationships that are boring but the way writers approach them. Happy families come with their own difficulties and complexities – ones I find fascinating.  They’re surprising, interesting and, obviously, I believe they ought to be explored in literature.

I recently came across an example of a novel that portrays a generally happy family in a way that’s both believable and compelling.  It’s Padma Viswanathan’s The Toss of a Lemon.  Set in the final decades of colonial India, spanning two world wars, and sweeping changes to the traditional Hindu way of life, the book comments on the intricacies of religion, class, and politics without the tedium of a history or the tiresomeness of a polemic.

It also presents a picture of a large, mulit-generational family that manages to function and produce healthy, happy members in spite of inevitable adversity.  The central character is a matriarch, a child-bride widowed and left with two children by the age of eighteen.  She manages to maneuvre within the strict limitations of her caste, her gender, and a crushing notion of fate to shield her grandchildren from the self-destruction of the family’s patriarchs.  There’s an amazing irony at work in the book: the place where the matriarch seems to be weakest – her utter servitude to oppressive customs that keep her marginalized and invisible to the world outside her family – is also the focal point of her greatest strengths.

The rest of the cast of characters is large and complicated and badly flawed in places. Like any story meant to deal with realistic ups and downs of daily life, the books has its share of illnesses, untimely deaths, and family spats that drag on for years.  Yet the tone of the book is not dark or dour.  It’s sun-lit and warm.  The book’s heart is like a real heart – one that is much more than the sum of its parts.  Its warmth is at once miraculous yet credible with a bittersweetness that only comes with honesty.

I really enjoyed this book. It was strange to find myself feeling so at home in a novel set in a Brahmin household.  Maybe the familiarity springs from the lines Viswanathan drops into the narrative expressing sentiments exactly like ones I’ve felt in my own family life.  For instance, when she says that certain burdens only become heavier when we share them, I know just what she means.  Sometimes, even in a close family, the best way to handle suffering is privately.  For me, Viswanathan is not only a story-teller.  She’s someone who seems to understand family in much the same way I do.

A large part of being happy in a family – or maybe in anything – is understanding and accepting the limitations of what it can make possible and forgiving and forgetting the absence of what it was never meant to provide.  That’s what the women in The Toss of a Lemon do.  As Viswanathan writes of them in the aftermath of a disaster, “We were not shattered.”

In writing the book, Viswanathan drew on her own family history.  Maybe that’s what gives the story its organic, authentic, universally relatable feel.  Reality — even an unseen, faraway reality — comes with a badge of truth.

Thanks to my family history, writing about a happy family came naturally for me.  That’s what I told the reporter when she asked me if writing a good marriage was difficult.  I don’t know why, but it’s my excellent fortune to have only ever lived in happy families.  It may be a rare way to live but it’s real and it’s worth the work it takes to give it a voice.

Lost in the Post: My Silly Ambivalence for Epistolary Novels

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The first epistolary book I ever disliked.

At one point during the painful process of compressing my novel into a tiny synopsis to print on the back of the book, we ended up with a paragraph that described the book as a series of letters.  Letters — I guess the connection between the book’s back cover copy and the title, Love Letters of the Angels of Death, on its front should have been obvious, especially to me.  So it must have seemed pretty strange to everyone else involved when I objected to seeing “letters” mentioned in the synopsis.

I blame L.M. Montgomery for my aversion to the epistolary novel — a work of fiction imagined as a bundle of personal correspondence.  Yes, I said Lucy Maude Montgomery, the Canadian author of the Anne of Green Gables series – the woman I hold personally responsible every time I cringe at a fellow Canadian using “delicious” to describe something that cannot fit into a mouth.  She’s also prone to portraying fat people as bad and birch bark as important enough to interrupt everything with a lengthy description of it.  She might be onto something with the birch bark but she’s definitely wrong about the fat people.

Naturally, after our visit to Prince Edward Island when I was nine, my mum bought me the first book in the Anne series.  Maybe because we moved so much, we were often without many books to read and I was stuck with Anne.  Then came the rest of the series.  I enjoyed the books well enough that I started adding to the collection myself.  They were great resources for soaking up vocabulary and learning to discern the sublime in domestic life.

The worst of the Anne books is Anne of Windy Poplars.  It does nothing to advance the larger story arc.  It’s like a long detour.  And it’s the volume of the series written as a collection of letters.  I must have balked at the idea of the novel I’ve written getting filed in the same letter-book category.  The little girl reader still working somewhere inside my consciousness didn’t want our work to bear any similarities to the book we remember as one of the most boring reads of our adolescence.  Readers accumulate some strange, complicated baggage.

It’s true that my book’s title does contain the word “letters.”  But my book lacks the form and lexicon of letter writing – or even diary writing or any of the other gimmicks that flag a book as epistolary.  There is no “Dear,” no “To Whom it May Concern,” no “Yours Truly” with a signature at the end — not even a token date dashed beside the chapter headings.

The reason I put “letters” in the title is to orient readers to the book’s second person narrator.  Most of the writing we produce and read – all of our emails and texts – is written in the second person.  Poetry and song lyrics are typically written this way too.  A second person narrator speaks as “I” but he doesn’t just ramble to himself.  He’s talking to “you, you, you.”  With all our experience reading short pieces in the second person, it didn’t seem like much of a stretch to ask readers to follow this familiar point of view throughout a book-length piece.  An introduction to a second person narrator, along with an informal, intimate tone was all I wanted out of the epistolary form.

I was about to say Anne of Windy Poplars made such an enduring, negative impression on me because it was the first epistolary novel I ever read but then I remembered Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.  (This one counts as epistolary even though its second person messages are sent through prayers.)  I read this book during the same time period (ahem) as the offending Anne book but I’m fairly certain it didn’t bore me.

With more thought, I realized there were other fictitious diaries and letters I had forgotten on my bookcase.  There’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Anne Brontё’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Douglas Coupland’s Hey Nostradamus!, my husband’s copy of C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, and Christopher Priest’s The Prestige – a novel I’ve been meaning to return half-read to my brother-in-law for ages.

I enjoyed some of these books – but not all of them.  When I was enjoying them most, their letter-writing form slipped past my notice.  While I didn’t remember that Dracula was epistolary, I do remember getting up at night to quiet my baby while I was reading it and being idiotically afraid of running into undead Lucy in the hallway.  I felt many things for all of these books but I never felt confused or alienated by their narrative styles.  It works.

I’ve over-generalized my dislike for the epistolary form.  Rejecting it was silly – the result of a tenacious childhood prejudice.  I wrote an epistolary novel.  And that’s okay.  It’s not the kind of thing that should amount to a scrap with an editor — though I did feel a little lighter when I flipped my advance reading copy onto its back to read the synopsis and saw the word “letter” had disappeared.

Reconnaisance at Someone Else’s Book Launch

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Here’s one more insultingly obvious pro-tip from a newbie novelist: the first book launch event you ever attend should not be your own.  For once, I didn’t wait to learn this bit of wisdom the hard way.  My novel’s release date is Aug 3, 2013 – just 86 days from now.  There isn’t much time left for me to get familiar with promotional literary events before the author in the fabulous arts-chick shoes standing behind the microphone winds up being me.

Fortunately, the closest publisher to me geographically – Edmonton’s NeWest Press – held a “spring spectacular” this week.  They collected three of their authors and one poet and brought them into the city for readings and signings of their newly released books.  It was a perfect opportunity for me to sneak into the literary scene and do some reconnaissance.

I started by plotting.  What I needed was a pair of wing-people.  I convinced these two.

Emily MacKenzie and Allan Taylor -- you know, from the Hunt and Gather blog

Emily MacKenzie and Allan Taylor — you know, from the Hunt and Gather blog

This is my extremely helpful and supportive brother-in-law and my baby sister.

[You mean the nursing professor sister? No.  The millionaire business tycoon sister? No.  The ultra-marathon runner sister? No.  The Edmonton slow-food lady sister?  Yes, that’s the one.  I am gifted with lots of gifted sisters.]

NeWest was holding the launch in a downtown coffee house housed in a restored brick building.  By the time we arrived, it was humid-warm and crammed with people and hot beverages.  Its name – Roast – couldn’t have been more apt.

The only place left to sit was in a dim, empty corner.  This was exactly how I had pictured myself here – dark and peripheral.

As we waited for the readings to start, I kept accidentally making eye contact with a lady sitting along the wall perpendicular to me.  I’m awkward and silly so I kept making sure I politely turned away every time we looked at each other.  But if I’d checked my Twitter feed at that moment I would have found this:

@JennQuistAuthor hi, I’m sitting at the next table over #creepytweets

The message was from one of my Twitter/blogger buddies, Laura Frey.  She was the woman I kept looking at across the crowded room.  I’d never met her in person and I was too stupid to recognize her until later when I overheard her name.  This is fairly typical.  Sometimes we joke (because brain injuries are hilarious, I guess) that I have prosopagnosia – brain damage that makes it hard to recognize faces.  I probably don’t.  It’s the kind of disorder that usually only comes on in survivors of horrendous no-helmet motorcycle accidents.

The time came for us to stop whispering in our corner and start listening to the readings.  The first was poetry from Jenna Butler’s Seldom Seen Road.  Her work is set on the central Alberta prairie but it isn’t the usual  western Canadiana.  In the selections she read, there was a longing and loneliness that didn’t just arise from the physical struggle to subdue a harsh landscape while maintaining human relationships.  It rose instead from the decline of the communities that had originally been built on the land.  The first wave of prairie settlers is ebbing away as their posterity rejects their way of life.  And the second wave of settlers, like Butler and her family, is arriving without a script for how to connect themselves to the crumbling social and physical landscapes left behind.

I hadn’t heard of Butler before the launch but the second reader was someone I’d already been admiring on the Internet.  She’s Rebecca Campbell, author of The Paradise Engine.  I know it’s sexist and vapid to comment on a woman artist’s appearance but I have to mention how impressed I was by Campbell’s height.  There’s nothing I’ve seen on her website to reveal the fact she’s at least six feet tall once she puts on shoes (yes, I asked her).  Her book was the one I used my launch party budget to bring home.  The section she read – a gorgeous picture of a Cold War kid’s night frights over nuclear war – could have been a narration of my own childhood.  Campbell writes about crows and Apocalypses – things I love.

Marguerite Pigeon – yet another author I’ve stalked on the Internet – read from her central American thriller Open Pit.  It’s about a hostage taking and a fictitious open pit gold mine.  This was the book Emily brought home after Pigeon tantalized us with a crafty cliff-hanger ending.  Em and I are going to trade books once we’re finished reading – which, knowing me, will not happen soon.

The fourth reader was novelist Corrina Chong.  I’ve quoted her insightful ideas about the influence of authors’ realities in their fiction in an earlier post.  Any girlie-ness that might have been implied by her pinkish book cover is offset by pencil sketches of squid in all their tentacled loveliness.  The selections she read from her book, Belinda’s Rings, felt a lot like real family life to me – especially real life with a demanding little boy who needs his caregivers to be everything and nothing to him all at the same time.  She nailed it – nailed it right to my Goodreads to-read list.

Roast was roasting and my home was over 100km away so we didn’t stay very late into the night after the readings were finished.  I got to meet a few people but not as many as I wanted before my wing-people and I stepped out into the fresh-enough inner-city air.

On the sidewalk, with Emily and Allan, I indulged in lamenting my missteps.  When I groaned at myself for demanding to know how tall Rebecca Campbell is Emily said, “It’s okay.  I figure as long as you’re still talking, it’s all good.”

And for my first outing, maybe she’s right.  The mix-and-mingle concept is not a big part of my current skill set.  Maybe it never will be.  Under the high wooden beams of the old coffee house, maybe we were all just a bunch of bookish writer-types lurching out of our comfort zones, trying to recognize each other’s faces from tiny Twitter and blogger head-shots, forgiving each other for not being as smart and shiny in person as we are in print.

Linda Leith Publishing, Montreal QC

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A Note from JQ:  I admit I’m jealous this blogger, Erinne, has met my publisher, Linda, in person while I have not — jealous of her and grateful to her for the look inside the far away company. Hooray for the interwebs!

esevi's avatarThe Great Canadian Publishing Tour

(April 21)

The drive to Montreal from Toronto, at five hours, seems quite short after northern Ontario. For the first few hours, things are great. The sun is out (dare I call it… spring?), the tunes are blaring, and I just snagged one of the last Roll-Up-The-Rim cups from the Tim’s.  (Please Play Again…sigh.)

But as soon as I drive past the Quebec border sign I’m hit with a wave of anxiety.  I’m in Quebec. I’m probably going to have to speak French. Here’s the deal: I’m an editor. I HATE making mistakes. In French, I KNOW I’m making mistakes.

And my vehicle, oh my vehicle. I’m not good at cars, but I can feel something wrong. I place both my feet on the floor (cruise control) and can feel grindy vibrations through my flats. I’m terrified that at some point a seam beneath the car will…

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Crybaby Reads Her Book

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Me and my advance reading copy, taken from my good side.

Me and my advance reading copy, taken from my good side.

The sight of a thick, yellow envelope postmarked from Montreal usually means a happy day for me.  It’s mail from my publisher, Linda Leith.  The most recent envelope was closed around an advance reading copy of my unreleased novel,  Love Letters of the Angels of Death.  I was as happy to see it as I can get without crying.

The same week, my brand new writers’ group had its first meeting.  Each of the members was invited to bring “one or two pages” of work to read aloud.  The timing was perfect.  Here was a small, low stakes environment where I could make an early attempt at reading my novel in public.

It sounded easy.  As long as it’s all talk — no singing or yodeling involved — I’m comfortable with my own vocal performance skills.  I already had the chops I needed to do a reading from my novel.  All that was left for me to do was pick a short section out of the book, read through it once, jam the pretty new book into my purse, and show up at the meeting as if I do this kind of thing every day.

The first step — choosing a selection — was harder than I thought it would be.  I’m ginger with other people’s time so I wanted to be sure I read something I could end neatly when I reached the equivalent of the roughly two 8.5×11” sized pages I’d been invited to share.  It meant simply reading the first chapter of the book wasn’t an option.  I also wanted to avoid spoilers, which meant the last third of the book was off limits and I had to be careful about what I chose from the middle.

And then there was one more consideration.  I wanted to read something gripping.  But it also had to be something that would not make me cry.  If you know me, you know that’s asking a lot of myself.

I may have held it together the day I found the ARC of my book in the mail, but I can still call myself an easy crier.  It’s awful.  I hate it.  Everyone hates it (especially my teenaged sons).  I am such an easy crier that my own novel – a story I wrote myself – still makes me sniffle two years after I’ve finished writing it.  The last sentence in it is only two words long and it makes me choke into tears almost every time I look at it.

Don’t misunderstand.  I am not emotionally delicate.  I react with appropriate sorrow when something terrible happens but I’ve never struggled with enduring feelings of depression or anything crippling or frightening.  Alarming as it may be, I simply relieve tension best by crying.  And it’s not just negative tension.  It’s the positive too.  When a stranger stopped on the Alberta Autobahn and helped me change my flat tire last month, I was so touched by his kindness I could hardly speak to him.  I knew if I loosened up, I’d start crying.  Stupid crying – or even just the dread of ending up crying — it taints most of my best moments.

I guess I should be grateful my emotional depressurization system isn’t any more complicated than simply opening the valves of my tear ducts.  It’s a fine mechanism in private but in public it’s an embarrassing mess.

Back to the book: chapter nine was where I found what I was looking for.  I chose a main character’s quick flashback to a bad teenaged romance.  That was my selection – the very first part of my novel I would ever read aloud in public.  I’ve always thought the passage was strong.  It has everything except something to cry about.

Still, when the time came to read it to a room full of friendly, un-threatening writers, I felt shaky and unnecessarily emotional anyway.  And when I was finished, I was a little mad at myself for being too high strung to read it exactly the way I had wanted to.  I’m experienced in speaking about many things.  But my novel isn’t one of them – not yet.  I’m still cagey and protective when it comes to my book and the secret well inside me that it sprang from in the beginning.

Here is yet another aspect of this career as a novelist that I hadn’t anticipated.  Once again, writing the book wasn’t enough.  I guess I need to become slick, smooth, and professional at reading my novel out loud.  Even though its opening chapter is a little long and a lot emotional, I need be able to chew up it until I can recite it with a fluent, steady voice.  I need to hone my reading until those two tight passages where it’s easy for me to get overwhelmed don’t squeeze me anymore.  I will transform myself into a flesh and blood book-on-tape.  There – I’ve decided.

“No,” one of the nice Nancies (there are two of them) from the writing group gently protested, “the fact that your book means so much to you made it mean more to me.”

And with that, I’m weeping all the way back to where I started.  Dang it, Nancy.

How I (Almost) Botched My Writing Career

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Writing in bed on a tea tray — like a boss

Last night I attended my very first writers’ group meeting – a “writers’ salon” at the home of a local wire-tap-transcriptionist turned edgy poet.  And I’m realizing now that my late entry into a writing group is yet more evidence that I have gone about my writing career the wrong way – the hard way, the backwards way.

Let me explain exactly how I’ve botched it – so far.

1)      I should have joined a writers’ group years and years and years ago.  All you kids at home, don’t wait until the advance reading copy of your first novel arrives in the mail before joining a writers’ group.

I’m in the habit of not showing my serious writing to anyone – not my husband, not my sisters, no one.  My utter lack of writing colleagues meant I mistook my work-in-progress manuscript for a finished book, started submitting it too early, and inadvertently ended up work-shopping it with the few gatekeepers at literary agencies and publishing houses who were thoughtful enough to jot a line or two (never any more) about why they were rejecting it.  It was a traumatic, slow, costly, and stupid way to get feedback.

Don’t be like me.  Before anyone in the business reads your work, make friends with writers with similar interests and better abilities than your own.  Read each other’s work and offer feedback.  Share contacts and news.  Learn to be gracious.

2)      I’ve never taken a creative writing course.  When my publisher and I were looking for a “blurb” for my book, Linda suggested I consider my former creative writing teachers.  It would have been a good suggestion if I’d had any.  It’s not that I didn’t take university-level literature classes.  I took them and I did well.  But I never took any courses dedicated to creative writing.  I’ve never had my work assessed and graded in an academic setting.

It’s not a fatal mistake.  Many writers spring up outside post-secondary creative writing programs — but not as many as I used to think.  So far, most of the people I’ve met in the working writing community have some past or present connection to writing as an academic field.  They don’t talk about writing as a vocation merely in a romantic, figurative sense.  They mean it the same way plumbers talk about their vocations – as papered credentials and regular, paying gigs.  There is middle ground between an institution-centred career in writing and never enrolling in a class.  And I should have spent some time there.

3)      I haven’t read much of the current literature in my field.  Instead of keeping up with the industry, I’ve used my precious reading time to polish off classics and to survey the YA books my kids are reading.  By now, I’m pretty well-versed in Dostoevsky and Dickens.  And I know my way around J.K. Rowling and Daniel Handler.  But I don’t know much about – whoever the heck has been important in literary fiction since the 1990s.

This was a bad move.  Stay tuned to the tone and the content of the industry.  Don’t raise your head only to when the mainstream media starts clamouring about yet another wave of erotica.  And don’t worry about being unduly influenced by other artists.  It’s the post-modern age – a time when humans have been reading and writing long enough for all of us to be a little derivative.  There’s no way to avoid it and the best we can hope for is to be able to admit it when our work looks like a freaky chimera of Carol Shields, Emily Brontё, and Napoleon Dynamite.

4)      I don’t have a physical space set aside especially for writing.  I write on my lap, sitting on my pillow, leaning against the head-board of the bed where I sleep at night.  It started as a desperate play for peace and quiet in a large, busy household.  I guess that’s still what it is.  It’s bad for my mattress, my spine, my wrists, and my temper.  Get a desk – or at least a chair.

That’s a short list of a few of my most obvious missteps.  I won’t repeat them during my next project — except for the bed-desk.

But there’s something like irony at work here.  I failed in all these ways yet I continued to publish anyway.  All my stumbling around with an unsuitable manuscript served to match my timing up with Linda’s and we found each other at just the right moment.  There’s no fail-safe formula for good fortune.

And on top of all these errors, I did do something right – something vital.  I finished the dang book.  I took good advice when I was finally given it.  I kept revising and submitting.  I kept fighting.  Of all the things I’ve heard people name as the undoing of their literary ambitions, not finishing their projects has got to be the most common.

Maybe that’s the biggest, most valuable lesson of all the ones I’ve learned so far — the one I’d leave with everyone, the one I kept repeating like a holy mantra at the writers’ group last night.  Finish it.  Keep going.

Carbon Copying Vulcan – Shreds of Reality in Fiction

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The Roman God Vulcan, smashing stuff

If my youngest brother-in-law was a Roman god, he’d be Vulcan.  Wait — let’s not let Star Trek confuse us.  I’m not trying to say he’s cold and hyper-rational and his sleeves are too short.  He’s like the original, Classical Vulcan — fiery and powerful and smart.  Like Vulcan, he makes his living building things out of metal with torches and hammers.  When he’s having fun, he still likes to yell and hit things.  I adore him.  And if I was a goddess, I’d be Juno, the shrill but scary wife of the boss-god Jupiter (Zeus, to all you Greek fans).  I also like to yell and hit things.  It’s a sign of enthusiasm and love.  Both Vulcan and I understand that very well.

In the years and years I’ve known him, Vulcan has not been a voracious reader of contemporary Canadian literary fiction.  It’d be out of character for him to rush out and buy my novel when it’s released this August.  But I hope he will.  In order to encourage him, I did what Juno would do: I got up in his face and bullied him about it.

“Hey, are you going to buy my book when it comes out?”

He paused.  “Uh — how much money will you get from each one?”

It wasn’t the response I expected.  “I don’t know,” I said.  “About two dollars maybe?”

He reached into his pocket.  He said, “How about I just give you two dollars right now?”

“What?”

The Roman goddess Juno

He was laughing at me.

“You have to read it!” I bawled at him.  “You have to.  Because…”

This is where my Juno started to lose her nerve.  Even with my loved ones, I am a shy, apologetic promoter of my work.  I tell my friends and family where to find it and then I leave them alone.  There’s no follow-up – no awkward audit of their patronage of my art.  My loud, bossy questioning of Vulcan was not about getting him to cough up a twoonie.  It was about something much more delicate.

He was standing in front of me, towering over me, one hand still in his pocket.  He was looking down with his big brown face, waiting for me to finish.

I began again.  This was important – something between a warning and a gift and a confession.  “There’s this character in the book – and – he might seem like he’s kind of like you.”

Vulcan’s eyes got a little bit bigger.

“But he’s not you,” I hurried.  I explained there’s a scene in my novel where a woman meets her in-laws for the first time.  That meeting is written a lot like the time I first met Vulcan, when I was twenty-one and he was not quite ten years old.

“They’re not us.” I said again.  “They just look like us for a minute.  The little boy grows up and does things you don’t do.  He’s not you.”

“But someone might think he’s me.”

“Yeah.”

“Would he be in the book if you didn’t know me?”

Strictly speaking, it’s an impossible question.  How can I say whether I could have imagined someone so much like my brother-in-law ex nihilo now that I already know him?

What I could say was this.  “If I hadn’t lived the life I’ve lived, I wouldn’t have written the book the way I have.”

This was honest and fair to both of us.  The fact is I could have this same conversation (hopefully without the offer to pre-emptively buy me off) with dozens of people.  There are sparks and shreds and sometimes even long swaths of all sorts of real people in my work.  It feels inevitable.  Even if I switched genres and started writing hardcore science fiction, the spaceships and alien planets would still be full of traces of my friends, family, neighbours – everyone.

I’m certainly not the only writer who’ll admit this.  In an excellent essay, novelist Corrina Chong reflects on “writing as thievery.”  She says, “here’s the truth behind the fiction: as a writer, I am a thief…My writing is a collage of the bits and pieces I’ve stolen.  Once your piece is glued on, it’s no longer yours.  Finders keepers, I say.”

She sounds flippant but writing real life into fiction isn’t something done lightly.  We agonize over it.  We weigh the benefits of doing it against the risk.  And we understand the people unwittingly serving as our literary models might not agree we’ve struck the balance right.  Frankly, it’s scary.

Chong goes on to acknowledge that this theft is actually more like an exchange – a swap.  She says, “the very act of writing a story and releasing it out into the world assumes that readers will be able to see something of themselves in the characters, thereby stealing their own little pieces as keepsakes…any idea that rings true in your universe becomes your own.”

Maybe that’s what makes it possible for my self-consciousness at my own thieving audacity to be outweighed by my sense that it’s important for my reluctant, metal smashing baby-brother-in-law to read my novel – the one with a scene rooted in our shared history.  It’s not about the two dollars.  It’s about us.  Maybe that’s why I want all of the poor souls I’ve pilfered to read it.  I want to complete the second half of the exchange.  I want them to take something from me now – something bigger than my thanks for the inspiration.  Take yourself back, I say, and with it, take a piece of me.

Confessions of a Slow Reader

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If this old picture of me could talk it would say, "What?"

If this old picture of me could talk it would say, “What?”

I am a slow reader – painfully, tediously slow.  It’s been true since I was in grade two and it’s still true today.  Whether I’m reading aloud or not, I can’t move through a book any faster than the speed of speech – not nearly quickly enough.

If you’re one of the people who’s surprised to learn this about me, thank you.  Most people assume writers are also accomplished readers.  I am not.  I have read and understood a lot of very good books.  But it’s taken me a long time.

Why am I talking about it now?  I just read book blogger Laura Frey’s Can-Lit confessions – a list of hard truths about her experience with our country’s literary canon.  She admitted to not liking, not reading, and being slow to hear about a few of the authors and books considered Canadian classics.  I enjoyed her candor so much I made my own confession about getting through my entire adolescence without reading a single word written by Farley Mowat (as proof of my ignorance, I think I even misspelled his name in my comment).

And then I started considering the short-comings in my own career as a reader.

Early elementary school – the learn-to-read years — was a hard time for me.   In grade one, the fluid left behind my eardrums by a streak of bad ear infections made me mostly deaf.  For about a year, nobody noticed.  That’s how it is with hearing loss.  No one’s to blame.  The loss meant I spent my time at school listening to the dull tides of my pulse moving through all that fluid – fwum, fwum, fwum.  I didn’t realize there was anything more to hear and I thought school was just really boring.  It seemed like we sat in our desks or on the carpet doing nothing at all.

In the second grade, I had surgery, the deafening fluid drained away, and I came back to the land of the hearing to find I’d been bumped from my place in the reading group meant for the best readers in our class.  After all the loud reprimands I remembered little deaf-me getting for not paying attention and not following directions, I figured I deserved the demotion and slunk away with my mediocrity.

Indignant current-me isn’t so sure I deserved it.  I have always understood and retained what I read.  But I will concede this: if we were being ranked based on our reading speed alone, mediocre was a generous assessment of my skills.  Grade two is when I remember Her coming.  She’s this voice in my head – an adult woman’s voice, I don’t know whose – that spoke every word I saw with my eyes.  I couldn’t read any faster than she could talk.  I still can’t.

After grade two, we moved to a new school where my teacher was just as interested in our writing as our reading skills.  She told me I was talented and I became her unofficial language arts protégé – the student invited to the front of the class to read creative writing out loud, at the glorious pace of speech.  No one ever mentioned my reading speed again.  It was my secret to keep.

And I did keep it.  I never cheated but I did learn how to read enough of a book to be able to sound informed about it and no more.  During my Arts degree, I learned how to wade through enough of the material on a course reading list to still get an A.  It was risky and stressful but I simply could not complete all the “required” readings.  There wasn’t time for someone moving at my pace to finish it.

Thanks to the years and years I spent pinned under nursing babies, forced to sit down and hold still and listen to Her, I have ended up fairly well-read.  It was another unexpected irony of motherhood – the way the babies who were supposed to stifle and suppress me ended up being what made it possible for me to become what I wanted all along.  Eventually, I did read everything on the lists from my university classes.  I’ve read hundreds of pounds of thick, daunting prose, poetry, and non-fiction.  And I’ve loved it.

Now that I’ve finished my reading lists — now that the Bachelor of Arts degree hanging in my kitchen doesn’t seem so much like a sham anymore — I can freely admit to anyone that I’m not what people might think I am.  I am a working writer but I am not what my early elementary school teachers considered a gifted reader.  I am not incorrigibly bookish.  I’m still poking my way through the literary landscape, warning my friends I’ll just drag their book clubs down with my sluggish ways.  But I’m working in this field anyway, in spite of my nature.  I’m reading and writing anyway. Maybe it’s true for anyone who tries to write as a vocation.  We’ve probably all got something deep-seated and shame-laden that we had to overcome before we could do this.

I know, it reads like a sports cliche.  But that’s the thing about cliches — they’re tired because they’re usually true.

Judging My Book by Its Cover

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The Cover of "Love Letters of the Angels of Death"The book itself won’t be out until August 2013 but this week my publisher released the image that will be the front cover of my debut novel, Love Letters of the Angels of Death.   And I couldn’t be happier with it.

Before the cover was created, my publisher, Linda Leith was generous enough to ask for my thoughts.  She asked me even though visual design is not a talent of mine.  It’s the same with me and music.  I know what’s good and what I like when I actually encounter it but creating something from my own imagination is a dodgy venture.  Not surprisingly, my first few suggestions were way off the mark.  But Linda still didn’t dismiss me from the process.

Finally, I said, “I wouldn’t mind a pair of birds as long as they weren’t too maudlin.”

It seemed risky to me — the possibilities for sentimentality putting two birds on the cover of a book about a marriage could inflame.  It’s not that I actually feared I might end up with a book cover with a pair of pastel, cartoon lovebirds canoodling on it.  But just to be sure we all understood what I meant, I did an image search and came up with a picture posted on a British wildlife photography website called Warren Photographic.  As time went on, we agreed we didn’t just want something like this photograph.  We wanted this photograph for the cover of the book.

The birds – with their long tails and iridescent blue-green plumage — are magpies.  Even though this pair has probably never set foot on the North American continent, western Canada, where most of my book is set, is teeming with their far-flung cousins.  They don’t migrate with the seasons.  They stay here all winter long making noise, scavenging food, and cleaning up the remains of other animals naturally selected out of the harsh environment.  They’re the most beautiful carrion birds I know — especially when they’re quiet.

The first time I noticed magpies – as an angry teenager newly arrived in southern Alberta from Nova Scotia – they were perched on some statuary outside a Lethbridge cemetery.  I assumed the city must have planted them there – like the swans in the Halifax Public Gardens – to make the urban landscape more exotic and elegant.  Every Albertan I’ve ever told this story laughs at me.

Like other corvids – ravens and crows and jays – magpies live in mated pairs.  And what I love about the pair on my book cover is the way they’re facing different directions but looking at the same thing.  The smaller one (which my prejudices tell me to call the female) is closer to what they see and the male is watching her as part of what he sees.  It’s like the narrative structure of my novel where the male narrator addresses his vision of the world directly to the female – the “second person” to whom he is narrating, the one individual who’s included in everything he sees.

I love the rest of the cover too.  I’m thrilled to have a blurb by Padma Viswanathan as the header.  Even after seeing it in print, I didn’t have a fit of self-consciousness and start hating the title (something that would not have been uncharacteristic of me).  And I’m grateful the surname I lifted from my husband when I married him is distinctive (unlike my first name and my McMaiden-name) while still being short and easy to say.  Hooray for my fine, Swedish in-laws, doggedly justifying the existence of the little-used “Q” section at the dry-cleaner’s – and now, hopefully, at the bookseller’s.

Review: “The Shore Girl” by Fran Kimmel, NeWest Press

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Fran Kimmel’s new novel, “The Shore Girl”

I’ve had my head down, raising my kids, for a long time.  It meant that, when my publisher asked if I knew any well-known writers who could provide “blurbs” (that’s fancy-shmancy publisher talk for short reviews) to put on the cover of my book, I had to confess I didn’t know anyone.

It was a revelation for me.  The silly mystique of writers toiling away in thoughtful silence and social isolation really is a sham.  People who hide by themselves have nothing to write about – except maybe science fiction.  I’ve done all my writing in crowded, noisy houses.  The only thing I’ve been isolated from was other people doing the same thing.  And the time had come to find them.  My publisher was able to take care of the book blurb herself but I still needed to lift my head out of my laundry pile and meet my colleagues.

I didn’t expect it to be easy.  Canada is huge and sparsely populated and its artistic communities are densest in urban areas.  What were the odds there would be another literary fiction novelist living in my obscure little town?

Apparently, they were amazingly good.

After about two minutes on the Internet, I discovered Fran Kimmel.  She’s the author of The Shore Girl, a novel released in Sept 2012 by NeWest Press.  And she’s also my neighbour.  We had “coffee” at our local library’s café where she signed my brand new copy of The Shore Girl.  I liked Fran right away.  She’s closer to my mom’s age than to mine but, thanks in part to my big sister complex, I felt comfortable and happy to be with her.  She was gracious and generous with her encouragement and advice.  I came away scolding myself for not finding her sooner.

There was just one lingering worry for me.  I hadn’t yet finished Fran’s book.  By page eighty-eight, I liked it.  But would I keep liking it all the way to the end?  Not knowing any writers personally meant I could always say whatever I wanted when I finished a book without any fear that the old authors from pre-revolutionary Russia, or wherever, would get their feelings hurt.  What would it mean for our new friendship if I got to the end and realized I didn’t like it?

I read Fran’s book anyway.  I trusted her.  I trusted her publisher.  I read.  And I thoroughly enjoyed The Shore Girl.

It’s told in polyphony, through the voices of half a dozen different first person narrators.  They vary in age and gender but they all have two things in common: a girl named Rebee and the question of whether surrendering power to other people by loving them is worth the burden it brings.

I won’t risk trying to write a detailed plot summary.  I’m afraid I’d botch it and make the book with its unstable mothers, homelessness, and all that alcohol sound like an old after-school television special bemoaning the effects of dysfunctional families on developing children.  That’s not what this is.   Somehow, Fran has taken a set of circumstances that are usually treated in sentimental, tiresome terms and knocked the cloying clichés off them.  The clarity of the details of everyday life – the fingernail clippings and the insides of refrigerators – along with the stoic resignation with which the characters negotiate their difficult landscapes allow a story that could have been mired in gratuitous melancholy to become a story told with sincerity, warmth, wisdom, and even hope.

“It’s not a happy story,” Fran warned me.  She’s right.  But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t leave me feeling hopeful about the resilient, resourceful people who can grow out of tumultuous home environments.  Imperfect, incomplete love is still love.  And maybe — miraculously — it’s enough.

It was with perfect sincerity that I emailed Fran the morning I finished The Shore Girl and congratulated her for writing a very fine novel.  Just one more thing remains unsettled between us: Fran has yet to read my still unreleased novel.  Now that’s scary.