Luddites, Permissions, and Reprints

Right now we are preparing to move back to Kelowna. There are the usual anxieties, despite having moved about every year, sometimes every third year--probably every second year, on average--since I left home the first time after high school. I feel like since then I have carted around boxes and boxes of unsorted paper. Stacks of old typewritten poems that thankfully all the editors rejected when they were written, a few dot matrix printouts of my first short stories, also, thankfully, unpublished.

I have no idea why I can't get rid of them. They are a trial to read, but I think I just wonder if there will come a time when I have grown enough that I can see something useful in them, in the same way it's been growth that makes them appalling to read now. I remember the old story of the man who had dementia and would wake up happy each day, eat his breakfast, take his pills, then disappear into his cluttered office to redo the taxes from some distant year. I wouldn't mind being stuck in that kind of loop as long as my aesthetic judgement has deteriorated along with my memory and I am moved by some spark in the work of myself as a child.

The sad part is when I think of that old man working to fix a problem, to prove he didn't owe in some distant tax year decades past.

I think digital copies of things will make this more awful, too. I am compulsive about keeping all my work now that it's digital, too, but if I actually have to work on it I print it out. Imagine trying to make sense, with a failing mind, of 16 copies of one poem or story improperly filed on your computer, encountering the title changes and the same story in different folders from different years and thinking it's new, and then not even being able to sit with it and remember, say, when you had that cheap yellow paper because it was all you could afford and when you sat on the floor with your old typewriter, working on a coffee table in an otherwise empty apartment.

When I was younger the cigarette smoke that was caught in the latest used fantasy or science fiction book I bought from the old Westgate Books, or Donald's Bookstore, made the books seem romantic to me. I romanticized what I didn't know then were marginal figures, those adults who were obsessed with those fantastic worlds I was beginning to discover. I thought the perfect life would be working the most menial job you could find, so your mind might be free and you could afford books and role-playing games and who cared what else?

And just now, while packing, I have found two permission agreements I need to sign and send off, before my next novel comes out. I don't know why four lines of Leonard Cohen cost 30 dollars plus tax, and three lines of Jorie Graham cost 50 dollars, but I guess that's how it goes. I remember that first time I read the Leonard Cohen poem from which I'm quoting. I found the book, a selected poems paperback, in that same Westgate Books. I returned there every chance I got, until it moved to the east side, I guess, when I would find myself back in Saskatoon between years in school, or projects in construction. In those days a book could save my life, it seemed like. I would live in a old and cheap motel in a small town, most of the time, working on a highway job somewhere, and if I picked the right book, the evenings could mean something more than exhausted sleep.

I am also looking at copies of my latest collection of stories, since it's been accepted for publication and will come out in the fall of 2014 (though no contract yet, so anything could happen, but it's 99 per cent sure). I think of an old story I had one paper copy of. It was called "Barn Burning" because I had not read many books in those days. Why can't I find that old story? I think it was quite good.

But in reading books from the catalogues of some of the publishers to which I'd sent the ms., I find odd things, and things that cannot help but hurt your feelings, sort of.  (And here I have to remind myself this is healthy. As the writer Ed Allen once told those of us in his class, probably in response to some criticism of criticism in a workshop class: "It should hurt!")

For instance an old collection of stories recently reprinted and with a foreword by the author. The foreword seems apologetic. It's framed as an attempt to argue for the writer's particular aesthetic, but it comes across as an apology, with nothing but a kind of whiny but I like this kind of writing underpinning the short foreword. There is no need to apologize, but further, any argument for your own writing becomes a kind of apology, because in any explanation is a kind of acknowledgement that what you explain is not normal.

That's stupid. No apologies or explanations necessary. I recently got pretty close to having this next book accepted by a very good publisher, and it hurt when it didn't happen, but the rejection was flattering. One of the comments was that my stories are unCanadian. It was meant as a compliment, and I took it as one. It was in the context of over-explanation, something quite common in CanLit. What's worse, to me, is that the over-explanation often takes the form of tautological constructions that are gauzy and accepted as "poetic" -- a kind of gosh, I don't understand it so it must be deep. They are actually nonsensical and do nothing to further our understanding of the fictive world. They distance us from it.

Far better to leave space for the reader, let the reader inhabit the fictive world, than use obfuscating language to distract the reader from those spaces. Painting flames on a car does not make it fast.

Style Again

Last time I kind of had to leave without finishing my thoughts, but then here they are now. I have always been kind of curious where style ends and bad writing begins. I am all for someone working more in their own voice than in a copy of someone else's voice, but I suppose the main thing for me is when rules are broken it should be purposeful and have something to do with the context. Writers who break the same rules routinely, regardless of context, irritate me, and, as I said previously, I think some of the main offenders have been discussed in that excellent "A Reader's Manifesto."

One of the things that bothers me sometimes, too, though, is when the content of a story or novel is considered part of the writer's style and so ridiculous things are somehow forgiven (I hope they are not believed, but I suppose for some reason readers are just suspending disbelief completely). I know some things are not style, and there is a distinction to be made between, say, someone writing in the magic realist mode and someone attempting to write in the realist mode and failing.

The best example I can think of is this bit I heard at a reading about 10 years ago or maybe a bit more. A Canadian novelist was reading from a recent book written about someone in Toronto researching her lineage in a library. At one point the character pressed her ear to the pages of an open old phone book and hears the voices of the past. Now I cannot remember if it was described as a person "imagining" she heard the voices or whether it was presented as her actually hearing the voices, but it doesn't matter. What does matter is the physical act was presented as real, and here is the problem: Are we meant to believe a character would do this, whether she expects to hear something or not?

I mean, would a person in real life do this? Of course this is often an overused question in workshops, but it's worth answering because it gets to the main problem with writing like this. Are even the actions of the characters meant to be stylistic versions of their emotional truth or are we allowed to take the actual actions as real? So are we supposed to believe a real character would take part in this metaphorical action, or are we supposed to believe that her actions are not real?

I didn't read the book because the reading turned me off, so maybe in the end something is revealed that would make us reread actions such as these, but simply by the reading, the Q and A afterwards, etc. it seemed that no, this was real, honest writing. And the reverence with which it was recieved was really hard to take. There is a sense, when a "literary" writer does something like this, that it must be good because it's unusual.

Okay, here is a clarification. It is unusual in real life, because it is stupid. It is not actually unusual in so-called "poetic" fiction. In fact, it is a cliche. How many well-meaning heroines have we read who have an epiphany by hearing objects speak, or the wind, or whatever?

I think the problem comes from the same thing that happens in a lot of horrible poetry. The poet declares himself a poet and since he is a poet, whatever he writes is poetry. Then we get these people who simply walk around and describe things, and, since their sensibility is more refined than the average person, they are blowing our minds.

So here we get a poet as a heroine in a novel. This wacky character, so in tune with the world around her compared to the great unwashed, actually would do this thing that most of us would reject as incredibly silly, and she would do it with such earnestness that it's would simply be mean to object.