I turned 39 recently. As a way to express gratitude at this fact, I spent a few days reflecting on/writing out 39 of my most cherished poems, prompts and affirmations — the “bits and bobs” that have kept me buoyant and dazzled and open. Then I nestled them in and among some of my favourite wild spots, in the hopes they offer sneaky delight to wanderers who find them.
Perv Jungle (short script)
After venturing into a forest known locally as ‘Perv Jungle’, two adolescent girls confront the explicit dangers and mundane disappointments of the grown-up world.
Last night I put the final touches on Perv Jungle, my latest short script.
It was adapted from a short story I wrote by the same name that won Lit POP some years back. I wrote it as a love letter to David Foster Wallace’s Forever Overhead — an achingly beautiful short story about a boy crossing the threshold into adolescence. I wanted to explore the “double burden” of female puberty. The metamorphosis and the new danger it brings. (And the relief we find inside our friendships.)
Snafu (short script)
An eager teen seizes a unique opportunity to endear herself to a popular girl having a pregnancy scare.
I finished a new short script today, called Snafu.
It’s a loose adaptation (very loose) of my short story Why Can You Not Just Glide Over the Snow Also? which won the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival Literary Contest and was later published by The New Quarterly.
I love writing stories like these, where everything is contained and constrained. Contained in the sense that the whole thing happens so quickly and constrained in that there are limited characters and locations. It’s so fun to write from inside such a tiny moment.
Outside is icy grey blah, but inside is the springtime of my infatuation with Edna St. Vincent Millay. Her poems are such pinpricks to the heart and these early editions were such a find! (Plus, they smell like they’ve been living in the makeup drawer of someone’s happily unmarried Aunt since 1939.)
Despite being one of the greatest American poets of her time (not to mention a feminist, anti-fascist critic of capitalism), more attention was often paid to her romantic relationships than her writing.
Sadly, she died at only 58 after falling down the stairs. Imagine all she had left to say that will remain forever unwritten.
Also, note to self: maybe stop racing down the stairs in fuzzy socks?
I found this Louis Muhlstock print from his “Empty Rooms” series (1938).
Muhlstock explored deserted apartments in Montreal’s Jewish ghetto. He said, “Although the people were never introduced in these paintings, there were traces of their having been there.”
“I was born in a hatbox on a train in the past, when there were dining cars and menus and bud vases and chaperones and dandies. I was born as sweet as that and if I am too sweet for your tastes then just clamp your mouth shut and spin on your heels. I can’t add sourness to my sap just to fit onto a menu in a restaurant for wimps.” - Jenny Slate
Our film premiered at Sundance this week. Octavia Spencer gave me a high five. Ira Glass and I had a conversation. I had my photo taken by the LA Times. Is this real life?
1. Whatever the work is, do it well—not for the boss but for yourself.
2. You make the job; it doesn’t make you.
3. Your real life is with us, your family.
4. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.
- Toni Morrison, for the New Yorker
16 terraced lakes, connected by waterfall. Candy-blue water. Like hiking in heaven.
The museum displays a curated selection of items donated by people from around the world to commemorate an ended relationship, along with the story of that item/relationship. Some of them are stories of broken marriages, but some are more nuanced: fractured friendships, deceased parents. I swam along the entire spectrum of emotions as I wound my way through the tiny space. And thought a lot about the past. Felt thankful for all of it.
PS: My favourite submission— a black and white photo of some beautiful pond, surrounded by trees. It's sunny outside. The story is about some sort of summer fling if I recall, but the ending is what got me: "This is also the first place I saw a penis in the sunshine."
Mozart's Requiem is my most beloved piece of classical music. It has eased me through countless all-night study sessions, unforgivingly long transit rides, and bouts of loneliness that left me feeling disconnected from even myself. To stand in his old apartment, in the very room he's said to have created some of his best work was surreal.
"Prague never lets you go...this dear little mother has sharp claws." - Kafka
He remembered me from a brief email correspondence we had a couple years ago, because he's just that kind of person. His sincerity almost makes me weepy. He talked about ghosts, Trump, Huckleberry Finn, elevating the energy of a story, how "imagination" is a technical response to a technical problem, and how important/difficult it is to ensure all the "boxes" you've opened in your story are thoroughly explored, lest your reader notice you haven't explored one and "lose a bit of respect" for you.
Heather O'Neill's work always has this dreamy, fable-like quality. And They Danced by the Light of the Moon is no exception. Jules is desperate to believe he can escape the collective fate of the town. Manon is the girl of his dreams. For Manon, Jules is something altogether different:
Manon, however, only decided that Jules would do when she saw him roller-skating at the Récréathèque. Jules was skating backwards and doing figure eights with his feet. He did this gesture with his hands as if he were dealing cards onto a card table. Everyone else ignored Jules’s grandiose performance that night. But Manon knew suddenly that Jules was different than anybody else in Val des Loups. That’s what young people look for: someone who will open strange doors for them.
Go figure George Saunders' thoughts on revising are the opposite of boring and unfeeling. Instead he went and made me cry.
But why did I make those changes? On what basis?
On the basis that, if it’s better this new way for me, over here, now, it will be better for you, later, over there, when you read it. When I pull on this rope here, you lurch forward over there.
This is a hopeful notion, because it implies that our minds are built on common architecture – that whatever is present in me might also be present in you. “I” might be a 19th-century Russian count, “you” a part-time Walmart clerk in 2017, in Boise, Idaho, but when you start crying at the end of my (Tolstoy’s) story “Master and Man”, you have proved that we have something in common, communicable across language and miles and time, and despite the fact that one of us is dead.
Another reason you’re crying: you’ve just realised that Tolstoy thought well of you – he believed that his own notions about life here on earth would be discernible to you, and would move you.
Tolstoy imagined you generously, you rose to the occasion.
We often think that the empathetic function in fiction is accomplished via the writer’s relation to his characters, but it’s also accomplished via the writer’s relation to his reader. You make a rarefied place (rarefied in language, in form; perfected in many inarticulable beauties – the way two scenes abut; a certain formal device that self-escalates; the perfect place at which a chapter cuts off); and then welcome the reader in. She can’t believe that you believe in her that much; that you are so confident that the subtle nuances of the place will speak to her; she is flattered. And they do speak to her. This mode of revision, then, is ultimately about imagining that your reader is as humane, bright, witty, experienced and well intentioned as you, and that, to communicate intimately with her, you have to maintain the state, through revision, of generously imagining her. You revise your reader up, in your imagination, with every pass. You keep saying to yourself: “No, she’s smarter than that. Don’t dishonour her with that lazy prose or that easy notion.”
1) Kiss your partner goodbye before they leave town for work for 10 days.
2) Think about how long 10 days is, and how much you'll wish you had accomplished something significant. Fish around for that mystery story you've had kicking around in you for at least a year. The one your brain juices have really been marinating.
3) Ask yourself: Have I watched an acceptable amount of Euro-noir mystery shows on Netflix?
If yes, proceed to 4).
4) Buy so many index cards. No, more than that. Still more than that.
Consider writing an email to Sharpie about why none of their black markers seem to work when you need them to, decide to focus on story instead. Use crappy Sharpie.
5) However strange and broken your protagonist is, make sure you give them an even stranger, even more broken sidekick. Also, put them in the strangest, most broken town imaginable.
6) Drink a lot of coffee. So much so that it feels like you have eleven brains, not one, and they're all speaking at the same time and the same volume.
7) Don't worry if everyone in the story has horrible names like 'Randall' and 'Dickie'. Or if all the roads are "Side Road 7". You just need to name them so the details can be included in your poorly crafted scenes that barely move the plot forward.
8) Write poorly crafted scenes as though it is your specialty. It's okay if you're stage directing too much (e.g.: "He walked across the kitchen floor and looked out the window."). Or if you're running out of non-verbal gestures that convey confusion or discomfort (e.g.: rubbing at chin, twisting hair on finger, furrowing brow, etc.) You will fix all this later. Probably. Maybe.
9) Absolutely have five red herrings— why not 50?
10) Go ahead, lean too much on coincidence and your protagonist’s uncanny ability to keep poking around when any other reasonable person would have given up.
There you have it!
Oh - and when you're finished, ensure you give your manuscript as moody a title as possible. For example, mine is currently titled Before the Flooding Dawn. Don't name it after anything too banal or on the nose (e.g.: The Knife Murderer).
I devoured Amy Jones' debut novel earlier this summer and have been enjoying all the well-earned praise it's receiving. I was delighted to see that the winter issue of Taddle Creek magazine (No. 38 to be exact) features, Aurora Borealis, a pretty, little story by Jones in it. I say 'pretty' because it's just that: filled with beautiful verbal "landscape shots" of the epic drive from south to north, and I say 'little' because it's short. But not too short. Just right. There was one line in particular that stood out as a Literary Gut Punch:
There's something about the way the air up here feels in your lungs, as though you are the only person breathing it —unlike Toronto, where the air has already been breathed hundreds of thousands of times.
Perv Jungle was chosen by Sam Lipsyte as this year's winner of the Lit Pop awards (by Matrix Magazine.) I wrote this story as a way of "conversing with" Forever Overhead, a gorgeous coming-of-age story by David Foster Wallace. It took me years to figure out why I couldn't let this little story of mine go, despite draft after draft that just languished. But I think I just figured it out: while I love coming-of-age stories, my unconscious wanted to talk about the double burden felt by girls at this time. We're feeling the shifts in our biology the way boys are, but that same biology puts us at risk. Our bodies start to become the object of male fixation, even grown men. Therefore, our coming-of-age automatically includes an element of danger. I couldn't give up on this story, and I think it's because I needed to say something about this.
"The truth is, you leap into something and then for (in this case) five years, you keep leaping, making tens of thousands of intuitive choices, but you’re not really sure why you’re making those choices, except that they seem, in the moment, to produce more beauty – and then, at the end, you look up and you’ve made something that is the sum total of all those choices, made over those many years. The wonderful thing, and the thing that keeps me writing, is the hope that the result is somehow better than you, the writer: more alert, kinder, funnier, more big-hearted, more big-minded, and that working on it has enlarged your view of things – made the world seem wilder and more confusing than before, albeit lovelier."
