George Saunders: What stories are "about"

George Saunders was interviewed by Deborah Treisman about his latest New York short story, Mother's Day. The following paragraph resonated with me, about how important it is to not be bullied by intention when starting out with a story.

It’s funny with stories (or, at least, with mine)—they are, of course, going to be “about” something and appear to present certain views re those things, but if I start out with that sort of intention the story never proves interesting enough to finish. What seems to happen is that, while I’m concentrating on the more mundane technical aspects (working on individual lines and the point-to-point logic and velocity and so on), a certain set of meanings will begin to come forward. So I’m dimly aware of those but trying not to be too aware of those, lest the story become only about those, if you see what I mean. It’s really only when the story is done (like, in this case, within the last week or so) that I can do much direct thinking about what themes it might be taking on, and then—weirdly—the thematic stuff seems to have taken care of itself. The story is about something . . . but hopefully more than I planned or could see at the outset.

Literary Gut Punch: From Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated

I've been waltzing down memory lane the past few weeks, first, enjoying my favourite novel— Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close— in an entirely new form, and then, feeling ravenous for all the Safran Foer work that exists, I decided to reread Everything Is Illuminated.

Last night, as my eyes were still reading, my eyelids began doing their sleep dance. And through drifting lashes, my eyes swept across these two sentences, so beautiful that my eyes shot open again. I creased the upper corner of my book and made a note on my heart to add this to my Literary Gut Punch collection as soon as I woke up. Here it is:

He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping.

 

Literary Gut Punch: From Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close has been my favourite novel since the day I picked it up. While working as a bookseller at The Bookshelf in Guelph, I remember I sold a record number of copies over one particular holiday season, so enamoured with Oskar that I seized every opportunity — which typically presented itself in the form of an unsure reader wanting to be dazzled by some piece of work, or wanting for a loved one to be dazzled by some piece of work — to send a copy of the book out into the world. 

Recently, I decided to listen to the audiobook, which I had never done before. It was a beautiful way to experience the story. How could I not include the following passage in my ever-expanding collection of Literary Gut Punches? 

In bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York, and would connect to the reservoir. Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go to the same place, and in the morning the weatherman could report if the water level of the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New York is in heavy boots.

My Oma took a nap and decided she'd stay asleep

My Oma, Adelheid (Heidi) Margarethe Tomaszewski, passed away yesterday during her daily afternoon nap. She was not someone that you'd call a pushover in any sense of the word, but much of that can be attributed to the hard shell she built around herself in order to survive. She lived in Germany during the Second World War. After the radios were confiscated by the nazis, her and her mother would take turns each night pulling an old radio out from underneath the floorboards, dusting it off and listening to the news on the BBC, full of horror and fright. When the war ended and my Opa (a prisoner of war) was released, they married quickly, had my Dad, and soon found themselves on Pier 21 in Halifax. New Canadians, with only $10 dollars to their names, they got on the train that would eventually lead them home, to Alberta, a place the three of them would come to love fiercely (hence my namesake). While on the train between Winnipeg and Calgary, my Dad took his first steps.

Oma smoked like a chimney for a lot of her life, but she "didn't inhale" so apparently it didn't count. But she still quit all the same and loathed that my Dad smoked. For as long as I had known her, she had been heavy. Walking in the mall once, someone called her fat and I remember she turned to me and said, "So long as you like yourself, that's all that matters." Her weight didn't ever stop her from wearing bathing suits or dancing when she and my Opa went to Cuba, which they did all the time. Due to an iodine deficiency during the war, she had developed a goitre on her neck that was quite large. Doctors were always pressing her to have it removed, but because the surgery came with the small risk of her losing her ability to speak, she always said no. "If it's not bothering me, why should it bother them?" she'd say when people would stare. Oma is one of the only people I've ever known who really seemed to like herself, through and through.

She was also the only person growing up who always encouraged my writing, which is still so strange to me, because she never stopped working a 9-5 job for a day in her life. You would think that to someone like her, the arts were a frivolous pursuit, something that was fine to enjoy but not to build a whole life around. But that wasn't the case. When we'd go out to feed the ducks, as soon as I'd come home she'd encourage me to write a story about it. She loved telling me how many relatives of mine were painters, actors, and musicians. I never heard about the lawyers or doctors or engineers. Only the artists. Maybe she knew that wasn't what I needed to hear? There was always music in the house. In fact, it was not unusual for my Opa to wake me up by playing the accordion. I was playing cribbage as soon as I could add numbers, and it was expected that I contribute to conversations on politics as soon as I was old enough to have a sense of the world around me. So long as I didn't contribute too much. You'd think as a couple of lifelong lefties, we wouldn't have fought about much, instead focusing on the big picture similarities we share. You'd be wrong.

What I'm thankful for: 

  • That I spent time with her this summer, putting up all the pictures in her room at the care facility she had to move to. I know whose faces smiled back at her as she laid down for her last nap.
  • That I wrote her a poem this Christmas, instead of sending her a plant. A plant can't say 'I love you, you tough old thing'.
  • That I found her old apartment in Berlin this summer, and brought back photos and videos to show her. The facade had changed so much she couldn't recognize it, but you should have seen her face when I showed her the courtyard.
  • That I brought back so many little things of hers with me when Dad and I packed up her house. Every night I brush my hair with her brush. We dry our hands on her tea towels ("They don't make them like that here," she'd say.) A coffee mug. Mensch ärgere dich nicht (The best German board game ever.) A glass jar for earrings. A big old German cookie tin that still makes me drool every time I see it. (It's where all the goodies were kept growing up.) I gave some of her costume jewellery to my best friend. I'm so thankful I'll still "see" her everywhere. 
  • That she passed away in her sleep, since she told me she dreams of Opa most nights. She had the same dream all the time: that they were young again, him in a blue suit, and they're back dancing at the Austrian Club that overlooks the Deerfoot highway. 

But why the Austrian Club and not the German Club?
"Because the German Club's food is just crap," she told me when I asked.

Ich liebe dich, Oma.

"I thought of it as espresso"...

I read a great piece in The Atlantic that summarizes a year of writing advice from various writers. Viet Thanh Nguyen shares how he "found a novel with a narrative feel he wanted to emulate". He read a bit of it each morning and this is what happened:

The language itself had some kind of impact on me that was more emotional than intellectual. The book acted as a condensed, compact, extremely powerful substance that woke me up to what I needed to do, each day, as a writer. I thought of it as espresso. It wasn’t coffee—I couldn’t drink it all day long. I could only take small doses, and that was enough. With caffeine, how do you quantify what’s happening with that? You just know you need it. The process was mysterious, and it worked.

What a splendid way to describe reading for influence. I'm doing that right now with Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated. 

Don't be a competent clone: David Mitchell's writing advice

In a recent interview, Mitchell gave some awesome advice for young writers. He wanted to be a writer in order to "do to other people what [his] favorite authors had done to me."

A few parts really stood out for me:

"Send the thing out and forget it. Quickly get to work on the next thing. Don’t sit by the phone or watch your email. Don’t hope. You’ve done a big thing by finishing something. Spend all the energy on possible despair. Avert that possible despair. Transfer the despair to the next manuscript. Right away, like the next day."
If you don’t want to write a realist novel, that’s not who or what you are. Work out the kind of novel you want to write, that you’re best suited for and do that one instead. It’s likelier to be more interesting. It might be awful but it won’t be a clone. Better to be brilliantly bad with your first novel than competently clone-like.
Things that are your obstacles often turn out not to be. Things you think are stopping you from writing, these distractions, can feed into your work in positive ways. You just may not know it yet. Things you don’t want to discuss—your scars, your shadows, your psychological baggage from childhood. It’s useful. It’s therapeutic to deploy them. You kind of win by using them. You can give them a right to exist but actually give them a job to do as an informant about reality, about language, about the human heart. 

My story "Kitten" is featured in Matrix Magazine

I'm so excited that "Kitten" found a home with Matrix Magazine. 

This story has been around for a couple of years, but its needs eluded me for a long time.
Yet, I couldn't quite give up on Barry. I kept coming back to him, hat in hand, every few months. 

The whole story dances on the head of a pin: this small moment where Barry walks in on something he was not expecting.

I hope you like it. Here's a little taste:

The youth began to snore and more than anything Barry found himself craving the Good Old Days he’d been born too late for. The days he had only ever inherited nostalgia for, from books and films. Back when daughters slept in thick, wrist-to-ankle nightgowns, made preserves, and essentially stayed in their bedroom brushing their hair until they got married. And how, when they’d hear a scary sound they’d creep down the stairs with nothing but a tiny nub of a candle, and at first they’d feel brave but they’d ultimately call for their Papa, who’d spring from his bed, boots already on and musket already in hand because men used to be like that, ready for confronting anything, but the sound would only ever end up being the wind riling up the trees or creaking the outhouse door and so they would hug and each go back to bed laughing like loons.

Most Read on Joyland 2015!

I'm dead chuffed that my story 'Swimming through whales' is one of Joyland Magazine's most read stories of 2015! It's also the most read story in Joyland Toronto. 

I was this close to giving up on that story. I felt like it wasn't saying anything.

It had lost its effect on me.

Thankfully I stuck it in a drawer for a couple months, and my brain did that wonderful thing where it hit the reset button on it. When I returned to it, I remembered what I liked about it so much. Particularly her; this distracted, distressed woman. 

I've been so touched by the people who have sought out different ways to tell me how much this story means to them. It makes me so happy I didn't give up on it when my Fuck It energy was at its highest. The story (and me!) just needed some space. To breathe, to ferment.

Thank you, Joyland, for seeing something special in it. I'm so happy it found such a great home.

 

 

First, a story should be a conversation a writer has with herself

Lately I've been having great conversations with my students about why we write. There are endless responses to this question, but one that pops up again and again is the idea of "being part of a conversation". The "conversation" meaning any number of things. I think most of the time it's "the conversation about what it means to be human".

But lately I've been wondering if this is something I need to reframe for myself. When you're first starting out, developing your writing practice, doing all that lonely work of trying to find your voice (which is buried underneath clunky dialogue and bad impersonations of George Saunders or Heather O'Neill), if part of you is actively writing to be "part of a conversation", you run the risk of writing for an outer audience, no matter how much you convince yourself you're not. Because your stated end goal involves an audience.

I had this mini revelation while folding laundry last night: I think I want to write to have a conversation with myself. Or, at least I think that's what I've actually done in the stories I love the most, the ones that tug at me the hardest. I was writing to myself. Full stop.

When I write this way, I think it will move me more, which in turn, will move the reader more, if and when the story goes out into the world. 

Once it's out there, then it can be part of "the conversation". It should be part of the conversation. But I think until then, a story needs to be a conversation a writer has with herself.

Colum McCann's Letter to a Young Writer

McCann has shared some exquisite writing advice on the official blog of The Story Prize. If this doesn't get your ass in a chair, I'm not sure what would:

Do the things that do not compute. Be earnest. Be devoted. Be subversive of ease. Read aloud. Risk yourself. Do not be afraid of sentiment even when others call it sentimentality. Be ready to get ripped to pieces: It happens. Permit yourself anger. Fail. Take pause. Accept the rejections. Be vivified by collapse. Try resuscitation. Have wonder. Bear your portion of the world. Find a reader you trust. Trust them back. Be a student, not a teacher, even when you teach. Don’t bullshit yourself. If you believe the good reviews, you must believe the bad. Still, don’t hammer yourself. Do not allow your heart to harden. Face it, the cynics have better one-liners than we do. Take heart: they can never finish their stories. Have trust in the staying power of what is good. Enjoy difficulty. Embrace mystery. Find the universal in the local. Put your faith in language—character will follow and plot, too, will eventually emerge. Push yourself further. Do not tread water. It is possible to survive that way, but impossible to write. Transcend the personal. Prove that you are alive. We get our voice from the voices of others. Read promiscuously. Imitate. Become your own voice. Sing. Write about that which you want to know. Better still, write towards that which you don’t know. The best work comes from outside yourself. Only then will it reach within. Restore what has been devalued by others. Write beyond despair. Make justice from reality. Make vision from the dark. The considered grief is so much better than the unconsidered. Be suspicious of that which gives you too much consolation. Hope and belief and faith will fail you often. So what? Share your rage. Resist. Denounce. Have stamina. Have courage. Have perseverance. The quiet lines matter as much as those which make noise. Trust your blue pen, but don’t forget the red one. Allow your fear. Don’t be didactic. Make an argument for the imagined. Begin with doubt. Be an explorer, not a tourist. Go somewhere nobody else has gone, preferably towards beauty, hard beauty. Fight for repair. Believe in detail. Unique your language. A story begins long before its first word. It ends long after its last. Don’t panic. Trust your reader. Reveal a truth that isn’t yet there. At the same time, entertain. Satisfy the appetite for seriousness and joy. Dilate your nostrils. Fill your lungs with language. A lot can be taken from you—even your life—but not your stories about your life. So this, then, is a word, not without love, to a young writer: Write.

 

Literary Gut Punch: from Jill Margo's How to Become a Mascot

The latest in my compilation of Literary Gut Punches comes courtesy of the exquisite, hilarious Jill Margo, whose story— How to Become a Mascot— broke me in the second sentence. (It appears in the latest issue of The Walrus and you can read it online here.)

First, quit your day job and go back to school, even though you're thirty-two already. Do this because your boyfriend is dead and you will never get to run your fingers through his curls again.

I read Margo's stuff closely and with the kind of reverence my Mother reserves for Popes. Margo so often gets me laughing right before she pulverizes my heart. And this story (which is actually based on her real-life experiences) is no different. It's the way the character's resilience coils around her grief that makes this story so compelling. 

Literary Gut Punch: from Lisa Moore's Sea Urchin

I love a sentence that pummels me. I've slowly started compiling gorgeous Literary Gut Punches (LGPs) as I encounter them in my reading life. 

The latest example comes from Lisa Moore's story Sea Urchin which appears in The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore: Open and Degrees of Nakedness. (You can also find it online here.)

The character she's describing is the narrator's father, whose blotchy face becomes such a tender force in the story.

"He sunburned easily and when he drank or became emotional, his skin would break out in red blotches, quickly, like the wind blowing a field of poppies all in the same direction."


Image credit: Alain Delmas (France) (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons

"Swimming through whales" was published by Joyland Magazine

This story is one I'm still really proud of. It kicked my ass for a while, until some talented/generous eyeballs (AKA: Jessica Westhead and Lindsey Smith) pored over it and helped me find the heart of it.

It's been received really well. Kind people on Facebook and Twitter have taken the time to tell them it moved them. One person said "this killed me in a delicate way".

I hope you enjoy it too. You can read it here.

Do the thing you wanted to do when you were 15

After nearly a year, last night I officially completed the final level of the Second City Improv program. I had wanted to do Improv since high-school, but I couldn't locate/hold onto the courage needed to do so (After being picked on pretty seriously in grade school, I hit puberty at 100 miles/hour and then worked very hard to cultivate my 'womanly coolness' and therefore making fun of myself was inconceivable). Then all throughout my 20s, I kept talking myself out of pursuing it, plagued by the silly belief that if I wasn't already doing it by high-school, then there was no point. Luckily J. kept on my case about it, and in my 29th year I bit the bullet (hard) and signed up. In other words, I spent the last year of my 20s doing what I'd wanted to do when I was 15.

So the thing I want to say is this: do the thing you wanted to do when you were 15. No matter how old you are now. Or how silly you think you'll look. Or how much of a loser you think everyone around you will think you are. Yeah, maybe you'll hate it, but then you can stop, and at least then you'll know you tried. But maybe you'll love it!

And if it seems selfish to prioritize your dreams because of your job/family/the state of the world, think of it this way: the world needs Late Bloomers. We need people who arrive at their passions newly uncaged and hungry. I imagine what the world would look like if George Saunders never pursued his writing because he knew he'd never be a wunderkind. Or Ricky Gervais, who was 40 when 'The Office' premiered.

I share this in the hopes that you can benefit from my longtime cowardice, and go after the things you really desire, however uncomfortable, and however much you still feel like the 9-year-old girl who everyone thinks is a boy thanks to your Mom's unflinching obsession with the mushroom cut while meanwhile all the popular girls have silky horse's manes poking out the backs of their pretty heads. (Photo shared for proof. I call this my 'Harry Potter' look).

My latest for blogTO: a tour of the baby animals at Toronto Wildlife Centre!

My latest piece for blogTO is up! A couple of weeks ago, I had the immense privilege of touring the Toronto Wildlife Centre (TWC), which sees as many as 5000 animals come through their doors each year. Me and J. have brought countless animals to them, and have been part of some pretty epic releases too. We've even had a coyote in our car.

As a follow up to my tour in the fall, this one was focused on the injured or orphaned baby animals currently in care. Anyone with heart issues: proceed with caution. These little cutie beans may cause it to explode.

Literary Gut Punch: from Kevin Hardcastle's Montana Border

As you know by now, I love a sentence that whomps the reader in the gut. So I've slowly started compiling my favourite Literary Gut Punches (LGPs.). How appropriate that my most recent example actually describes a character getting punched in the face! 

Kevin Hardcastle's Montana Border appears in the June issue of The Walrus. (You can also read it online here.) I swear my testosterone quadrupled after reading it. 

"In the fight he got hit so hard that his molars sang."


Image credit: Alain Delmas (France) (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons

Don't expect a cathedral, expect a brick: my feature on Sarah Selecky's site!

Hello to anyone crawling around on my site thanks to the wonderful, generous feature Sarah Selecky has up on her site! (You can find it here.)

Sarah gave me the opportunity to talk a bit about my writing process, and share an "open letter" to nervous writers. I also got to share an excerpt of a work-in-progress (or as Sarah likes to call them: Mysterious Middle Drafts). The response so far has been overwhelmingly lovely! I've received dozens of comments from people who have also felt anxious while quietly "collecting their bricks" and felt that my letter was empowering. Many people wrote to tell me how much they enjoy Eileen, the main character in the excerpt I shared. I swear this feedback is like emotional Wheaties: it's packed with so much good stuff, it fuels me!

Deepest thanks to Sarah for being so generous with her virtual space, and thank you to every person who read the feature, and who took the time to write such thoughtful comments. I am feeling the literary love over here!