I am not sure what I think about readings in other towns, yet. I've been doing a few, and there are things that are heartening and things that are not. Most of the things that are not are simply a matter of perspective. I wonder if they matter. I wonder if it does result in book sales. I think it does, though sometimes it doesn't seem like it.
What is good, though, is meeting the other people, even for me, who finds social situations difficult often, and many new people at once quite tiring. But the beautiful part is seeing the people who organize these things, like Jordan Fry in St. Catharines, Andrew Hood in Guelph, and all the people of Lit Live in Hamilton. Each of these small communities of writers and readers reminds me of my time back in Ottawa, when I went to Carleton and got involved with a group of writers from Chris Levenson's poetry workshop and would go to the Tree Reading series. Those were big nights for me. I loved them, and I loved to argue about poetry and short stories with equally animated people.
I miss that, and I wish I was a bit better at getting into conversations slowly with people, hanging out at the bar with strangers who I could come to know enough that we would share our real feelings about the writing we loved and the writing we hated.
One of the things that brought home last night was talking to Stan Rogal after we read at Homegrown Hamiltion with Ann Shin, Amanda Jernigan, Chris Pannel and Barbara Fradkin for the LitLive reading series. Stan read long ago in Ottawa, and I remember two things about it. I didn't know his work (everything was new to me then--it was the first time I'd met a like-minded group and shared books with them and learned what other people were loving and were writing at the time; prior to that it was simply aimless wandering in the old Westgate Books in Saskatoon or another little bookstore I forget the name of in Kitchener) and I was really upset I missed the reading because of the night shift at Tim Horton's. I remember a girl whose name I forget, a classmate, raving about Rogal's reading the next time we were all together.
Anyway, who knows? I hope some of the people there last night will remember our readings. I came away with a Brautigan-inspired book of haiku by Rogal (Love's Not the Way To) and Ann Shin's new collection, The Family China. Both look great. I need to find time to read, though.
Monday, November 4, 2013
Tuesday, August 27, 2013
Closer Than You Think
The title of this post is about my next book, which I have seen, though not held. I am quite taken by it. I love it, which is not a surprise, since it's a Gaspereau book. There were a few different covers considered at various stages and though they all had something in them which I loved, this final one is the best. I will post a picture of the jacket next week, after it's up at Gaspereau's site.
I've been thinking a lot about what may happen with this book. I think I am as excited as I was with my first one, and I don't know exactly why. Probably simply a funny thing that happens in the careers of most writers, I think -- the first book got some good reviews and I thought publication would be easier then, though it has not turned out to be. It happened years ago with my first journal publications, too. A couple of short stories in The Malahat Review, and then what? Years before the next stories were published.
Now I have this novel coming out in September and a short story collection coming out next fall, and a novel-in-progress almost complete. It seems like I've done a lot in the last year, but it's much less than it seems. Some of the stories are new, but most of my work has been on the new novel. The short stories were rejected many times prior to finding a publisher, both by agents and by publishers, and that can, obviously, be disheartening, but it's also bracing and invigorating.
I don't want to be one of those people who believes his obscurity is proof of his worth. I don't mean that. I want readers. I would like millions of them, of course. But finding the rewards of the work in the regular effort expended, in the solitude and the empathetic attention to the wounded humans around me (whether in my imagination or at the next table in the doughnut shop) is necessary and whatever readership one happens to find is a byproduct of the pursuit, not its goal. Or should be.
And as high-minded as that sounds (and I do believe it), I have the luxury of having no choice in the matter right now. I must find my rewards in the work itself, because there is no money in it. I am lucky financially in other ways, of course . . . like the job that afforded my a leave to write the next book, like being born where I was born, etc. The accidents of my life have been good to me.
But the best part of it really is the attention that this kind of work requires of me. It doesn't always make it into the books, but the pursuit of rendering some of these human stories overheard into fiction is what fuels everything I write. Last summer, for instance, overhearing an earnest young man having lunch with his mother and grandmother at a Tim Hortons. He reminded me of myself at that age, as they had come into the city from a rural area, and the visits to the city were not frequent. He'd gotten a haircut and liked it, and was trying to figure out how often he could come in to get his hair cut at the same place. His grandmother was large and spoke tersely to him. His mother didn't stay much, and it seemed as if something was troubling her and I wondered if it was the same thing that the grandmother expressed with meanness to the boy.
Even now, as I remember it, I cannot tell how much is made up and how much is not. I took some notes, and I'll get back to it, but how much of the notes are real and how much did I fictionalize as I wrote. I know what made me want to know those characters. The boy reminded me of one of my brothers, the grandmother reminded me of one of my grandmothers, and also of me--I have often reacted with meanness toward undeserving people when I am anxious for other reasons.
But the conversation those characters had at that table made me think also of my own private childhood, when that same brother and I would play The Queen is Dead, by the Smiths, outside in the summer as we threw the Frisbee around. And it was sunny out, and the yard was dusty, and in such a situation why would the lyrics "Another sunny day, and so I meet you at the cemetery gates" resonate? Why would, years later, James Kelman's A Disaffection seem to save me from despair while I inspected the construction of subdivision in a small town in Alberta?
I don't know. But that kind of conversation, overheard, is what keeps me working, I guess. I don't begrudge the writers who need some kind of flash to motivate them, those writers who may decry the use of a coffee shop as a setting for a story, or whatever, but I don't understand them.
I've been thinking a lot about what may happen with this book. I think I am as excited as I was with my first one, and I don't know exactly why. Probably simply a funny thing that happens in the careers of most writers, I think -- the first book got some good reviews and I thought publication would be easier then, though it has not turned out to be. It happened years ago with my first journal publications, too. A couple of short stories in The Malahat Review, and then what? Years before the next stories were published.
Now I have this novel coming out in September and a short story collection coming out next fall, and a novel-in-progress almost complete. It seems like I've done a lot in the last year, but it's much less than it seems. Some of the stories are new, but most of my work has been on the new novel. The short stories were rejected many times prior to finding a publisher, both by agents and by publishers, and that can, obviously, be disheartening, but it's also bracing and invigorating.
I don't want to be one of those people who believes his obscurity is proof of his worth. I don't mean that. I want readers. I would like millions of them, of course. But finding the rewards of the work in the regular effort expended, in the solitude and the empathetic attention to the wounded humans around me (whether in my imagination or at the next table in the doughnut shop) is necessary and whatever readership one happens to find is a byproduct of the pursuit, not its goal. Or should be.
And as high-minded as that sounds (and I do believe it), I have the luxury of having no choice in the matter right now. I must find my rewards in the work itself, because there is no money in it. I am lucky financially in other ways, of course . . . like the job that afforded my a leave to write the next book, like being born where I was born, etc. The accidents of my life have been good to me.
But the best part of it really is the attention that this kind of work requires of me. It doesn't always make it into the books, but the pursuit of rendering some of these human stories overheard into fiction is what fuels everything I write. Last summer, for instance, overhearing an earnest young man having lunch with his mother and grandmother at a Tim Hortons. He reminded me of myself at that age, as they had come into the city from a rural area, and the visits to the city were not frequent. He'd gotten a haircut and liked it, and was trying to figure out how often he could come in to get his hair cut at the same place. His grandmother was large and spoke tersely to him. His mother didn't stay much, and it seemed as if something was troubling her and I wondered if it was the same thing that the grandmother expressed with meanness to the boy.
Even now, as I remember it, I cannot tell how much is made up and how much is not. I took some notes, and I'll get back to it, but how much of the notes are real and how much did I fictionalize as I wrote. I know what made me want to know those characters. The boy reminded me of one of my brothers, the grandmother reminded me of one of my grandmothers, and also of me--I have often reacted with meanness toward undeserving people when I am anxious for other reasons.
But the conversation those characters had at that table made me think also of my own private childhood, when that same brother and I would play The Queen is Dead, by the Smiths, outside in the summer as we threw the Frisbee around. And it was sunny out, and the yard was dusty, and in such a situation why would the lyrics "Another sunny day, and so I meet you at the cemetery gates" resonate? Why would, years later, James Kelman's A Disaffection seem to save me from despair while I inspected the construction of subdivision in a small town in Alberta?
I don't know. But that kind of conversation, overheard, is what keeps me working, I guess. I don't begrudge the writers who need some kind of flash to motivate them, those writers who may decry the use of a coffee shop as a setting for a story, or whatever, but I don't understand them.
Friday, June 14, 2013
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.
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.
Thursday, June 6, 2013
A Few Stories
A little news about my short fiction manuscript, We Don't Celebrate That:
1) I just got the new issue of Grain (40.3), which contains my story "You Didn't have to Tell Him." It's a great looking issue, with some unsettling art by Zachari Logan on the cover and throughout the journal, and great work by Sheri Benning, "Gone." I've long admired the way she writes about Saskatchewan, our common home, especially since I've made my own attempts since I was quite young, and have not quite succeeded, where it seems she does so effortlessly. A line from "Gone," for instance -- "The farm, sold, and our blue spruce, their sleek shadows all we knew of water on skin during those years of drought, are dying too."-- captures somehow everything I know about my own background, the endurance of my relatives, the harsh landscape, and my own necessary leaving.
And again, in a poem called "Saskatchewan," in the same issue, by Bruce Rice, the lines:
Then between this blue and this,
the world went on, creating itself over and over,
a rasping sound, then nothing--
Anyway, I grew up reading Grain, and wanting to be in it. This was when it was smaller and literary journals seemed more rare. It was back in the old days, when we had no cable television out on the farm and so we didn't know anything about the NBA except a few names and our heroes were players on the University of Saskatchewan Huskies, or the teams they played, like UVic. I was a point guard and I wanted to be Eli Pasquale, not Magic Johnson.
It was the same with Grain. I'd find the old issues in the old Westgate Books, when it was on the west side of Saskatoon, with its original owner. I'd find my models in there as I was learning to write.So it's always a great feeling to be published in there.
2) My story "Leave Her Alone" has been accepted by The Fiddlehead.
I've always struggled to reconcile the two competing impulses in my fiction, one toward minimalist realism (as the story in Grain is) and more voice-driven fiction, as this story is. The voice ones seem harder to place in journals, so I am really happy to have this one in The Fiddlehead. I reread it prior to sending off the digital version and it seems like a different mode completely, which makes sense. The novel I've been working on all year is 3rd person and realism. Still, it makes me want to get back to something a little more loose.
1) I just got the new issue of Grain (40.3), which contains my story "You Didn't have to Tell Him." It's a great looking issue, with some unsettling art by Zachari Logan on the cover and throughout the journal, and great work by Sheri Benning, "Gone." I've long admired the way she writes about Saskatchewan, our common home, especially since I've made my own attempts since I was quite young, and have not quite succeeded, where it seems she does so effortlessly. A line from "Gone," for instance -- "The farm, sold, and our blue spruce, their sleek shadows all we knew of water on skin during those years of drought, are dying too."-- captures somehow everything I know about my own background, the endurance of my relatives, the harsh landscape, and my own necessary leaving.
And again, in a poem called "Saskatchewan," in the same issue, by Bruce Rice, the lines:
Then between this blue and this,
the world went on, creating itself over and over,
a rasping sound, then nothing--
Anyway, I grew up reading Grain, and wanting to be in it. This was when it was smaller and literary journals seemed more rare. It was back in the old days, when we had no cable television out on the farm and so we didn't know anything about the NBA except a few names and our heroes were players on the University of Saskatchewan Huskies, or the teams they played, like UVic. I was a point guard and I wanted to be Eli Pasquale, not Magic Johnson.
It was the same with Grain. I'd find the old issues in the old Westgate Books, when it was on the west side of Saskatoon, with its original owner. I'd find my models in there as I was learning to write.So it's always a great feeling to be published in there.
2) My story "Leave Her Alone" has been accepted by The Fiddlehead.
I've always struggled to reconcile the two competing impulses in my fiction, one toward minimalist realism (as the story in Grain is) and more voice-driven fiction, as this story is. The voice ones seem harder to place in journals, so I am really happy to have this one in The Fiddlehead. I reread it prior to sending off the digital version and it seems like a different mode completely, which makes sense. The novel I've been working on all year is 3rd person and realism. Still, it makes me want to get back to something a little more loose.
Thursday, May 30, 2013
I Need a White Board
I would like a white board, but we are about to move, so I won't buy it now. In the meantime, I am sorting through the first draft of my latest novel project and would like a big place to put the scenes and sort them out. I kind of dislike completely linear plots, but I know they have their appeal. The reason I dislike them, I suppose, is you spend so much time making characters get up out of a chair and walk across the room to leave through the door. A lot of stuff seems to happen that doesn't matter, but something has to happen, I know.
Anyway, I just posted a scene, maybe the beginning scene, on my website, here.
Anyway, I just posted a scene, maybe the beginning scene, on my website, here.
Thursday, May 23, 2013
Listen All You Bullets
Just working on the proofs for the new book, to be published by Gaspereau in the fall. It's always a welcome relief to return to the work, knowing someone else has read it attentively, and still be happy with it.
I'm not sure how it works for other writers, but I always find odd sentences that may be changed, or should be changed. But the fewer times that happens when you return to a work after some time, the better it is, of course. Right now the big thing for me is getting back in the space of the novel in question. Sometimes I dislike a bit of writing (and actually I should not really be reading it much at this stage; I should be looking for typos and so on) and change it, only to read further and realize it was a bit of parody, and its style meant as an allusion to another author or genre.
It's my last work I'll write, I think, in this mode. That's another reason I worried about disliking it upon my return -- the novel I work on presently, The Whole Show, is realism, with less show, kind of. I like it, too. I suppose I can like both.
And besides, all the writers I admire (without making a list and looking hard for exceptions) have things that recur in all their separate works. I may think I am writing a completely different novel now only to find it's the same exact thing in different colours. Who knows?
Anyway, the next step is figuring out how to read from Listen All You Bullets. It's going to be a bit of a tough fall, but fun. Lots of events planned to promote the book, which will be a lot of fun. But it's not a traditional novel, and if I read from one passage in one style only, perhaps I alienate certain readers . . . . That's okay. I'm not really James Joyce.My voice is in all the pieces somehow, I suppose.
I'm not sure how it works for other writers, but I always find odd sentences that may be changed, or should be changed. But the fewer times that happens when you return to a work after some time, the better it is, of course. Right now the big thing for me is getting back in the space of the novel in question. Sometimes I dislike a bit of writing (and actually I should not really be reading it much at this stage; I should be looking for typos and so on) and change it, only to read further and realize it was a bit of parody, and its style meant as an allusion to another author or genre.
It's my last work I'll write, I think, in this mode. That's another reason I worried about disliking it upon my return -- the novel I work on presently, The Whole Show, is realism, with less show, kind of. I like it, too. I suppose I can like both.
And besides, all the writers I admire (without making a list and looking hard for exceptions) have things that recur in all their separate works. I may think I am writing a completely different novel now only to find it's the same exact thing in different colours. Who knows?
Anyway, the next step is figuring out how to read from Listen All You Bullets. It's going to be a bit of a tough fall, but fun. Lots of events planned to promote the book, which will be a lot of fun. But it's not a traditional novel, and if I read from one passage in one style only, perhaps I alienate certain readers . . . . That's okay. I'm not really James Joyce.My voice is in all the pieces somehow, I suppose.
Saturday, May 4, 2013
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.
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.
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