Author: john@qwf.org

I Didn’t Want to Write This Book by Elise Moser

I didn’t want to write this book.

I first heard Milly Zantow’s story in Sauk City, the small Wisconsin town where my sweetheart lives. Someone from the local historical society mentioned that the woman who invented the recycling symbol was from there.

A woman did that!

A woman from Sauk City!

I figured everyone else in town must know this astounding fact. But no.

I Googled her. I found a wonderful short video in which she explained how she kick-started plastics recycling in 1978, although the experts told her it couldn’t be done. I thought kids should know a woman did this.

I tried to get someone else to do it.

I ran into a Wisconsin publisher I knew and told her the story. “I don’t have an author to write it,” she said.

I couldn’t do it. I’m a fiction writer. And I write for adults and teens, not kids.

I talked about Milly to everyone I met, at dinners and parties and bookstores.

Everyone agreed it was an amazing story, but no one wanted to take it on.

Eventually I decided I’d better do it myself. I already knew the narrative; it would only take me a few months. Then I could get back to writing fiction.

It took me three years. (That’s what happens when a fiction writer veers off into the wilds of non-fiction.)

I wrote a draft, but there were a few pesky details to clarify. I didn’t know if Milly was alive. I couldn’t find an obituary, but I couldn’t find contact info, either. I spent a week hunched over microfilm at the library, reading back issues of our small-town paper, the Sauk Prairie Star. I found a letter from Milly thanking the public for their support of the International Crane Foundation. There was a letter from Vietnamese boat people thanking Milly and her husband for sponsoring them so they could leave their overcrowded Arkansas refugee camp for a new life in Wisconsin. I found articles about the landfill where Milly sat one day and watched the trucks dump garbage—“plastic, plastic, every kind of plastic.” My mental picture of Milly was getting richer, but my story was also getting more confusing.

“That’s what happens when a fiction writer veers off into the wilds of non-fiction.”

Some articles said the landfill was full; others claimed toxins were leaching into the water table. The woman from the historical society had said that Milly invented the triangular recycling symbol, but Wikipedia said it was a guy from California. In the videotaped interview, Milly mentioned putting the numbers 1-7 inside the triangles on plastic goods, but gave no specifics. Who thought of the idea?

Elise Moser

I began to realize just how slippery facts were, and how the passage of time greased them further. People made mistakes, misunderstood things, left out the complicated parts. I’d written about this kind of thing in fiction, but it felt very different when I was trying to track down real facts and tell the real story of a real person—someone whose friends and neighbours might read it. I was used to being in control of the narrative (sort of). It’s so much easier to make stuff up!

“I began to realize just how slippery facts were, and how the passage of time greased them further.”

But research has its own satisfactions. I found someone who had worked with Milly thirty-five years ago, someone who knew that the landfill was leaching toxins and that it was too full. She also gave me a (totally unexpected and very useful) feminist perspective on the history of garbage and recycling.

I knew that if Milly were alive she’d be very elderly. I couldn’t wait any longer to find her. In April 2014 I flew to Wisconsin.

If necessary, I was prepared to cold-call all the Zantows in the phone book. But first I went to the local nursing home to visit a friend who was recuperating from a serious accident. Walking the corridor, I happened to glance over, and there I saw it: Mildred Zantow. I knocked, and she graciously invited me in to talk, even though she had just been given the news that her brain cancer had gotten worse.

I asked her my questions, but as she answered, I began to realize that the things that were important to her about her experiences were not necessarily the things I thought I needed to know for my account. Her story was not the same as my narrative.

“I knocked, and she graciously invited me in to talk, even though she had just been given the news that her brain cancer had gotten worse.”

The following year I had the privilege of interviewing two of Milly’s sons. I mentioned that I’d met her in the nursing home, and they asked me when. I told them, and there on the screened porch in Sauk, Jim and Todd looked at each other.

“That was probably her last lucid day,” Jim said.

Since I started this book, things I’d confirmed have changed. In three years, technologies for recycling or replacing plastics have advanced. The environmental impact of plastic pollution has intensified, as has research on the subject. The information available on the history of recycling has improved; more than once during the process of editing I had to change wording or go back and re-research to be sure that what the book said was as true as we could know it to be.

Now that the book is printed, I’ve been telling people about it. The sporting goods manager at the local hardware store/agricultural machinery dealership, where there is a little book display next to the hunting supplies, remembers Milly. “Thank you for doing this,” he said.

Ironically, it’s easier to write fiction that is true, and that will always be true, than it is to write non-fiction. Fiction only has to express a truth; it can do that by any means, whereas non-fiction is expected to tell the literal, verifiable truth about the material world, and as we all know, there is nothing constant in the material world but change.

Another thing that’s changed: I’m so glad I wrote this book!

Elise Moser is the happy author of What Milly Did: The Remarkable Pioneer of Plastics Recycling (2016), Lily and Taylor (2013), both from Groundwood Books, and Because I Have Loved and Hidden It (2009), published by Cormorant Books. She has published short stories, edited anthologies, and led short story workshops and mentored for the QWF. She serves on the board of PEN Canada and is an associate editor with Linda Leith Publishing.

Photo credits: Fred Lauing (headshot; photo of Elise Moser next to the Milly memorial), Elise Moser (the other two)

July 27, 2016
QWF Writes featured on WordPress Discover

QWF Writes is featured in WordPress’s Discover blog.

WordPress selected their favourite articles from the QWF Writes archive to share with readers.

They also took the time to ask QWF Writes editor Crystal Chan a few questions about writing and reading in Quebec.

Do you want to learn more about the QWF Writes essay series? Read the piece here.

July 11, 2016
Finding Perspective: Writing in the Dark at Berton House by Shelagh Plunkett

On the wall above my desk in Montreal is a photograph taken in February at the Arctic Circle. The print is four feet wide by almost three feet high and foreground takes up most of that space. The horizon line is high on the print and marked by the Richardson mountains: white and treeless. It was -34C that day and my eyelashes froze together while I focussed the camera. In the foreground are the faint stains of a recent caribou kill, one hoof hidden amongst highbush cranberry and yellow grass poking out of the hard snow.

The perspective is deceiving. Trails of Black Spruce bisect the wide flat plain in middle distance and lead toward the base of the distant rounded mountains. Those peaks look close enough to touch, but they are many kilometres away.

It is an image that encapsulates much of what I learned during my three-month residency at Berton House in Dawson City, Yukon.

Berton House is owned and operated by the Writers’ Trust of Canada and each year four authors, supported by Canada Council grants, are chosen to spend three-month stints at the house. Residents do not have to teach or lecture, offer manuscript evaluation or coach emerging writers. In fact, they don’t even have to write while staying at the house. CanLit icon Pierre Berton, when gifting his house as a retreat, made that stipulation. He said, “the main purpose is not to let them write, but simply to give them time off from writing if they want it, or time off to think about writing or about the place they’re living in.” In the house are two binders of letters each resident has left for the next. Over the winter I spent a few hours reading what Lawrence Hill, Charlotte Gray, Joan Thomas, and the rest of the residents who’d come before me had to say. Some got a fair bit of work done. Others shut down Dawson’s bars nightly. Everyone left with something new: a stronger sense of their writing, the seed of a manuscript, suitcases of notes and ideas, friendships.

“The main purpose is not to let them write, but simply to give them time off from writing if they want it, or time off to think about writing or about the place they’re living in.”

I landed in Dawson on December 23. When I stepped off the plane at 10:30 a.m. it was still too dark to see the tiny terminal building fifty feet away. My eyelashes froze—yeah, that happened a lot—and I immediately lost sight of my seatmate, a woman in a velour tracksuit who’d come to Dawson to “experience the Yukon winter.” Betty and Dan Davidson, part of the Berton House team, eventually found me in the crush of people inside the terminal. I was taken on a quick tour of town: “Here’s the curling rink. Do you curl?” I don’t. “Here’s the Anglican Church. Here’s the Baptist Church. Here’s the Catholic Church. Here’s the nondenominational worship house. Are you a churchgoer?” I am not.

When they dropped me off at the house it was 12:30 p.m. and still too dark to see across the road. I watched the cloud of vapour left by their car’s tailpipe dissipate and sighed as the house settled around me, pipes banging as the heating system fired up. I was the seventy-fourth Berton House writer-in-residence, and I had the place all to myself. I didn’t know anyone living in that remote town. It would be dark for most of my stay (or so I was led to believe) and bitterly cold (or so it had been in the past). Alone in the cold and the dark, I would write reams.

“I had the place all to myself. I didn’t know anyone living in that remote town.”

The phone rang. I was invited to a Christmas Eve party and then to a Christmas potluck and then to a Boxing Day gathering and a New Year’s dinner. Did I know about the twice-weekly film festival screenings? Would I like to snowshoe up the Dome? Was I coming to the gallery opening and lecture next week?

For a town of about 900 winter residents, Dawson was hard to keep up with.

Initially the invitations arrived with an accompanying “don’t feel obliged, we know you’re here to write.” Initially, I agonized over the daily choices: write or hike, write or read, write or … and ground myself to a standstill over words that weren’t piling up. In my self-inflicted wracking I lost sight of why I write and nearly turned my prized three-month residency into the demise of my writing.

“I agonized over the daily choices: write or hike, write or read, write or …”

But, at some point, I came to my senses and relearned something important. Perhaps it was the night I spent lying on my back on the frozen Yukon River hypnotized by the Northern Lights or while I was listening to Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in storytellers speak on the cultural importance of “story” or maybe when I stepped over the Arctic Circle. At some point I remembered that sometimes that thing which seems so close can’t be reached until one moves away from it.

Sometimes to write good stories we have to stop trying to write.

When I left Dawson the airport terminal was again packed, but this time I knew everyone. I came home with new friendships, more than one thousand photographs, and twenty-two thousand words towards a new book.

Shelagh Plunkett is an award-winning writer and journalist living in Montreal. Her work has been published in various Canadian and American journals including The Walrus, enRoute Magazine, Geist, The Vancouver Sun and The Globe and Mail. In 2007 she won the CBC Literary Award for creative non-fiction and her memoir of growing up in Guyana and on Timor, Indonesia, The Water Here is Never Blue, was short listed for the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction and the Concordia University First Book Prize. She has just returned south after three months in Dawson City, Yukon as the Writers’ Trust Berton House writer-in-residence and is now in the thick of a new manuscript tentatively titled Caught By All That’s Come Before. Follow Shelagh on Twitter and Instagram @shelaghplunkett. shelaghplunkett.wordpress.com

Photos: Shelagh Plunkett

June 29, 2016
Healing, One Story at a Time by Licia Canton

In 2012, a driver pulled up behind me while I was putting a box in the trunk of my car. He crushed my legs between the two bumpers. I was bedridden for four months, and then I started physiotherapy. Within a year I was able to do 95 percent of the activities I had done before the accident. People would ask me how my legs were doing and I would smile and tell them I was doing well. I was, physically—but I didn’t tell them that I wasn’t able to write.

I wasn’t able to write for clients, organize events or attend networking functions. I didn’t think any of it was worth it. I had lost my drive. In fact, I had lost my desire to do anything at all. A few weeks after the accident, I had looked at the positive side of things: I had decided to finish my second book of stories; I was going to write on my laptop while in bed. But that never happened.

My insurance agent suggested that I see a therapist. I would only be able to move forward by dealing with the trauma. I decided to try it, and I discovered that writing itself was what would cure my writing block. It’s called narrative therapy, and it changed my perspective on life.

Vera, my therapist, asked me to do exercises in automatic writing. I had to just put words on the page without thinking about what I was writing. Then she said that I had to write about the accident in order to regain my confidence. At first, this seemed like an impossible task. If I could write, why would I be there? I could talk about the accident during therapy, but I couldn’t write about it. I didn’t want to write about it.

Eventually, I wrote a story about a writer who was unable to write about a traumatic experience. It took me many months to be able to do that. I could not sit for longer than five minutes at a time. I worked at it early in the morning when everyone was still asleep, when I was least likely to be interrupted—and when no one would see me crying.

As part of the therapy, I was obliged to read that first story “Because of Leonard Cohen” at every therapy session until I could read it without crying. That accomplishment was priceless. Then, the therapist asked me to read the story at a public venue as I would have done with any of my other stories. But I couldn’t fathom the thought of sharing my very personal writing in public. I come from a background where broken bones get fixed and as for the rest, we simply move on. Everyone knew that I had been in an accident. Very few people knew about the ensuing depression. It was not a topic of discussion.

“I could not sit for longer than five minutes at a time. I worked at it early in the morning when everyone was still asleep, when I was least likely to be interrupted—and when no one would see me crying.”

I first read “Because of Leonard Cohen” abroad, at a short story conference where very few people knew me. The story was later published in the international short story anthology Unbraiding the Short Story, edited by Maurice A. Lee. Then, I wrote more, and more. I wrote and published other pieces inspired by my accident, “In Front of the Bell Centre” and “The Woman in the Red Coat.” And I still haven’t finished writing all of the stories that I need to, and want to, write. I have a Table of Contents with the titles of all the stories that I am working on, all part of my narrative therapy. With the completion of each new story, the process is the same. I ask for feedback from several writer friends. I read it repeatedly in private until I feel completely comfortable with it. I read it to my husband and children. Then, I read it in public either before or after it is published. Now, I preface the readings by saying that the story came out of narrative therapy.

Vera told me about Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de style (1947), a collection of ninety-nine retellings of the same story, each in a different style. Although I am no longer in therapy, I continue working on my own version of Queneau’s book: multiple literary variations of my accident and its aftermath. Just as I was not thrilled about physiotherapy and osteopathy, I am not exactly fond of this literary project—mostly because I have had to postpone other writing projects. On a positive note, however, narrative therapy has encouraged me to go beyond my comfort zone by doing other activities connected to writing that I would not have done a few years ago: guest blogging, giving workshops, mentoring other writers, writing/speaking about depression and narrative therapy, and actively seeking venues to read the writing that has come out of narrative therapy.

I still cry every time I tackle a new story, but I always feel a great satisfaction when I share it in public. It is part of the process that moves me towards complete healing, as is this piece that you’re reading right now. In fact, I prepared my pitch for this column two years ago. I just wasn’t ready to share my experience then.

Licia Canton is the author of the short story collection Almond Wine and Fertility (2008), published in Italy as Vino alla mandorla e fertilità (2015). She is also a literary translator and founding editor-in-chief of Accenti Magazine. She has published personal and critical essays and edited nine books. She mentors emerging writers, journalists, and editors. She holds a Ph.D. from Université de Montréal and a Master’s from McGill University. See her profile in LinkedIn or the Hire A Writer directory.

Photos: Flickr (top); Ohayon (headshot)

May 30, 2016
Saying Yes by Monique Polak

I am bad at saying no. As part of a better-late-in-life-than-never self-improvement exercise, I try to turn down extra work—especially the non-paying variety. (more…)

April 12, 2016
Gadfly at the Festival by Peter Richardson

In the hospitality room at the Hôtel Gouverneurs in Trois-Rivières, you are greeted by two perky volunteers whose first question after introductions is: “Will you three be reading the French translations of your poems yourselves, or will you be requiring the services of a French reader?” Oh, my, you think. What translations? The hotel carpet begins to yaw under your chair. What was I thinking coming to a poetry festival in a city whose population is 97 percent French—without translations?

“Ahhh,” your hand goes up, feigning nonchalance, “I don’t have any translations with me.” The two other English-language poets and the volunteers swivel their heads in your direction as if you had just morphed into a large red crustacean whose claws and antennae waved merrily in their direction. “Can I give a short explanation of my poems in fluent French and then read them in English?” One of the cordial volunteers laces her fingers together and lowers her voice: “You see, people reserve restaurant tables months ahead to hear our guests read in French. It would be unfair, don’t you think, to subject them to English, when most people here rarely speak it?”

How could you have not foreseen this eventuality? For the next twenty-four hours, you huddle with a hotel dictionary, churning out translations and cross-checking these with your translator sweetheart via long distance telephone. You thank fate that years before, you earned a university certificate in French-English translation. Although that hardly qualifies you as an ace in Gallic syntax, it limits the number of world-class howlers you’re likely to churn out. You are going to have to revise up to the wire. And once a reading is finished, there will be no stopping off for sparkling conversation with fellow scribes in downtown Trois-Rivières. It’ll be back to your room to crank out more translations. There are four readings a day in restaurants, bars, parks, and libraries; you’ll have to furnish two poems, four times a day.

Accordingly, you show up for each venue as if this were a lark, your fraudulent grin assuring audiences that you’re dishing up the real thing, the slaved-over equivalents they’ve come to expect. The rest of the time you are a mole, looking up words like “dip” or “wobble” in a battered Robert-Collins. At readings, you unfold two sheets of spiral notebook paper and smile at your hash-marked, arrow-filled texts as if it were normal to achieve verbal legerdemain with the French versions overnight.

You can’t point to the Russian poet, Evgeny Tchigrinne, huddling by the hotel elevator in a rumpled hockey team manager’s parka, and say to his interpreter companion: “It’s not fair. He should have to read his stuff in French too.” You can’t complain that Andrés Morales—one of the leading poetic lights in Chile, a man who also speaks Croatian and English—should be prevailed upon to read his translator’s French versions. His credentials precede him, and plus, with his dark suits, Brylcreemed hair, and killer smile, he is a serious candidate for the festival’s Mr. Cordiality Award.

“At readings, you unfold two sheets of spiral notebook paper and smile at your hash-marked, arrow-filled texts as if it were normal to achieve verbal legerdemain with the French versions overnight.”

The other English-language poets seem like consummate professionals. The Canadian geneticist-poet, Jan Conn, for instance, looks you straight in the face and says: “Months ago, I commissioned someone to translate twenty of my poems. I knew I’d have to have this stuff ready. I practiced it for weeks.” When she says this, you feel as though you’ve been transported back to that fourth-grade field trip to the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, where, standing in the cafeteria’s lunch line, you reached into your pants pocket for change and pulled out pebbles. Earlier in the day, while waiting for your mother to drive you to school, fearing you would miss the bus from school to the planetarium, you found yourself scooping up pebbles and chucking them by the handful, and some of these found their way into your pockets. But so what if you’ve spent a lifetime picking nickels out of the pebbles in your pockets?

Does it stop you from making interesting acquaintances? No. And your readings manage to clear those imaginary telephone wires at the opposite end of an airfield that is a reader’s five minutes at the microphone. Your cloth-and-wire craft ascends. It swoops up to a reasonable height in the short runway’s space over the tilted beer glasses and stilled bar chatter and its undercarriage avoids calamity. But without good conversational French, without a chameleon-like ability to don an entertainer’s alter ego at brasserie readings, without a knack for chuckling your way through introductions which contain a reference to the dog-eared papers you clutch, you shudder to think how this forty-eight-hour period might have transpired, and how close you came to earning the title: Worst Anglo Festival Invitee Ever.

Peter Richardson is the author of four collections of poetry: A Tinkers’ Picnic (1999), finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award; An ABC of Belly Work (2003), short-listed for the Acorn-Plantos Award; Sympathy for the Couriers (2007), winner of the QWF’s 2008 A. M. Klein Award; and Bit Parts for Fools (2013), which was short-listed for the Archibald Lampman Award. A retired airline worker, he lives in Gatineau, Quebec.

Photo: Via Flickr; no changes made (top); Martine Chapdelaine (headshot)

Peter Richardson, Jan Conn, and a small group of other authors will be reading on April 11, 2016 at the launch party of Vallum Magazine‘s Issue 13:3. The Brass Door Pub (2171 Crescent Street, Montreal), 7:30 p.m.

March 24, 2016
From the Underground: A Writer’s Life with Zines by Jeff Miller

It wasn’t reading the classics that convinced me to become a writer. My gateway drug to the world of letters was zines—cheap, photocopied, self-published magazines filled with their authors’ reflections on the world.

Over twenty years later I still remember some of the first zines I read in the early 1990s. There was Saucy, a thick zine from Cornwall featuring interviews with bands. There was a bilingual political zine from Hull, titled Moo in English and Meuh in French, where I first read about vegetarianism. And there was Design 816, full of personal essays, which I picked up when the author was visiting Ottawa from Chicago.

Cats love zines too!

From the first moment I encountered them, I became a zine obsessive. My suburban teen years were spent hunting these underground publications, picking them up on my trips to record stores and punk shows downtown. I sent large chunks of my allowance, a dollar or two at a time, to post office boxes across North America, ordering zines with titles like Dishwasher, Fuzzy Heads Are Better, Tyger Voyage, and Spunk. Needless to say, this was long before the Internet became ubiquitous.

Coming home after school, I often found the mailbox at my parents’ house filled with literary treasures in envelopes from faraway postmarks. The zines I read covered many topics: political polemics, music, food, train-hopping, feminism, secret histories, and intimate personal narratives from the underground. I devoured them all, but I was particularly drawn to those telling true stories from the author’s life. In the pages of Cometbus, Doris, Scam, and I’m Johnny and I Don’t Give a Fuck I found compelling narrative voices that I deeply related to. Reading them felt like getting a letter from a close friend. I had tapped into a vibrant community of punk writers who crafted great stories and then cut and pasted their work together, photocopied it, and released it with no thought of gaining attention from the world of mainstream literature. These were my first literary heroes. In a time before our current memoir boom, they wrote honest and true stories full of grit and heart.

“I had tapped into a vibrant community of punk writers who crafted great stories and then cut and pasted their work together, photocopied it, and released it with no thought of gaining attention from the world of mainstream literature.”

I instantly wanted to make a zine and the democratic nature of the form made me feel that I could do it. Reading other zines gave me a model for how I might write my own stories and get them out into the world. I also voraciously read contemporary novels as a teenager, but unlike those books—perfect works with no typos or evidence of the human hand that made them—zines convinced me that I, too, could be a writer. The status of zines as unofficial publications in a time of media conglomeration made the prospect of publishing one even more entrancing. Zines were secret, precious, hard to obtain. This, along with their tactility, made them almost magical objects, even as I tattered them with frequent re-reading.

Since its first issue in 1996, my zine Ghost Pine has been made up of true stories about my life. When I was younger I wrote about hitchhiking, long Greyhound bus rides, and visiting the cities where my many zine pen pals lived across North America. But as I got older and moved around less, I still wrote about my life in short creative non-fiction pieces, discussing things like my relationships with my grandparents, late night conversations with friends, and recollections of my high school social justice club. In all my stories for the zine I tried for honesty and hoped to improve my writing with each new issue. Over the years I have sold more than 10,000 copies. In 2010, a collection of the best stories from Ghost Pine was published by Invisible Publishing.

Ghost Pine #13 (2014). Featured photo at top of article: Assembling Ghost Pine #8 (2004).

Ghost Pine’s publication schedule has slowed from annual to once every few years as my writing practice has grown and diversified into the “overground” with formal publications, cultural journalism, creation grants and a Master’s degree. Nevertheless, the work I did on my zine over the last twenty years remains at the heart of who I am as a writer. There might be an assumption that one graduates from making zines to publishing books and other “real” writing, but I’ve put out two new issues of Ghost Pine since the book came out.

Twenty years and fourteen issues later there is still a thrill to making a new zine. Writing and editing the stories, then doing my antiquated cut-and-paste layout (every year I make a resolution to learn how to lay it out on the computer and then don’t) and going to the copy shop to print, cut, and staple it together. I sell them at zine fairs and mail copies to my pen pals and to the people who order them online from as far away as Kuala Lumpur and Florianopolis, Brazil, often getting their zines in return.

Slipping them into their envelopes, I’m reminded that this subcultural community that nurtured me as a young writer continues to thrive and produce amazing writing from voices that might otherwise have remained silent without this low-cost and low-pressure art form. The endurance of this feisty corner of the wider world of writing is extremely gratifying. Long live zines.

Jeff Miller has written the zine Ghost Pine since 1996. In 2010, the best stories from the zine were published as Ghost Pine: All Stories True (Invisible Publishing). His creative non-fiction and cultural journalism also appear in a number of anthologies and periodicals. He will be a CALQ Writer-in-Residence at the Banff Centre in February-March 2016.

ghostpine.wordpress.com

Photos: Sara Spike

February 10, 2016
That Sense of Not Belonging by Adam Leith Gollner

The Quebec Writers’ Federation hosted its 17^th annual gala on November 18, 2015. Author Adam Leith Gollner opened the ceremony with this remarkable meditation on how a writer seesaws between isolation and community, and on what it means to be a writer, right here, right now.

(more…)

January 15, 2016
Hello Baby, Bye Bye Books by Mike Steeves

My daughter was born on August 25, 2014, and during the interminable lead-up to her birth I was, like all new parents, subject to a deluge of unsolicited advice, warnings and thinly-veiled threats from family, friends and complete strangers about what I could expect as a new parent. One of the warnings I heard most often was that the time I had for reading was going to be severely curtailed.

Maybe my friends didn’t appreciate how dedicated I was to my routine, because I soon discovered that it was actually pretty easy to carve out the three hours I needed in order to stay on top of the steady stream of books that I had begun purchasing early on in my wife’s pregnancy as a way of offsetting my anxiety over not reading enough.

For starters, I used to bike to work. But once I realized that I could eke out at least forty minutes of reading on my daily commute, I started taking the metro to work, thereby forgoing the last form of physical activity I practiced with any sort of regularity.

Another threat to my reading habit was the immense amount of time required to help my daughter sleep. Newborns spend a lot of time sleeping, but they are notoriously bad at it and require assistance (referred to as ‘soothing’). This basically amounts to walking the streets of your neighbourhood with your baby stuffed into one of those obnoxiously priced “carriers.” Once I was over the new-dad jitters and was no longer trying to impress passersby with the baby I had strapped to my chest, I got into the habit of doing laps around the pond at Parc Outremont while reading from a book that I held in front of me. I made my way through Michael Hamburger’s translations of Paul Celan this way, and while I typically have little memory for poetry, many lines from this work are now frozen in place, triggered every time I pass a fountain or leafless tree. And one of the most memorable reading experiences of the last few years is the time I spent on a cold bench at Parc Saint-Viateur with my daughter sleeping in the carrier as I read the final pages of Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams while kids dressed up as penises made their way to Halloween parties.

” …the time I spent on a cold bench at Parc Saint-Viateur with my daughter sleeping in the carrier as I read the final pages of Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams while kids dressed up as penises made their way to Halloween parties.”

My aforementioned friends, the ones who warned that I would have to sacrifice my love of reading to my role as a new dad, were also an enormous tax on the time I had for reading. By refusing dinner invitations, birthday party invites, brunch for babies, etc., typically blaming my absence on my daughter, I was not only able to keep up my reading schedule, but, after I had refused enough of these kind invitations, they no longer came in with any regularity, which also spared me the enormous time-suck of responding in a considerate manner something to the effect that “I would love to! But…”

While it turns out that my friends were wrong about finding the time to read, there is one aspect of parenthood they were right about, but that I’d never taken very seriously: I may still manage to find a comparable quantity of time, but the quality of that time has been seriously degraded. I can sit for hours with Knut Hamsun’s Pan in front of my face, but I regularly find myself rereading the same line over and over again. Or an hour passes and I don’t even make it to the bottom of the page I started on. I’ve managed to read an impressive number of excellent and difficult works, but I’ve hardly retained anything. Within a week or so of finishing a book, I even struggle to remember what I had just read (except for the Celan). So while I have plenty of time to read, I can’t maintain the level of focus and attention I had in my pre-paternal reading sessions.

Which brings me to the final obstacle to my reading habit – writing. Before my daughter was born I used to try to write at least a few lines every night, but even this small commitment now seems to take an inordinate amount of time away from doing the thing that I really enjoy (it would be quite a stretch to say that I enjoy writing). On account of the soul-wearying exhaustion I feel at the end of every day, I find it pretty easy to excuse myself from writing for the night and to settle into a good book. And by “settle into a good book” I mean “read the same line over and over again until I eventually pass out on the couch.” My friends say that it’s perfectly natural to neglect my writing for the next year or so, and that eventually I will find the time and energy to start up again. I hope they’re right. Goodnight moon.

Mike Steeves lives with his wife and child in Montreal, and works at Concordia University. Giving Up is his first full-length book of fiction. Connect with Steeves on Twitter @SteevesMike.

Photos: Via Flickr; no changes made (top); Mike Steeves (Halloween); Nikki Tummon (headshot)

December 18, 2015
Bye Bye Darlings: The Editing Gauntlet by Alice Zorn

Alice Zorn’s new novel, Five Roses, is named after the FARINE FIVE ROSES sign that marks the southwest horizon of Montreal and Pointe St-Charles, where the novel is set. Photo: Alice Zorn

You’ve finished your novel manuscript and you even – finally! – get a publisher. It took ten years. You have Neanderthal muscles across your brow from frowning at the computer screen. But now you’re home-free. Bingo!

Then you get the first slew of comments from your editor. She’s the objective eye who sees what the book can be, but isn’t yet. Does it begin in the best possible place? Is there too much exposition? Does it have structural integrity? What about the ending? She tells you all the darlings you cherished while you were writing don’t belong unless they serve the book. The clever turns of phrase, the crisp dialogue, the research that shows off your erudition, the quirky events that really happened. Your clean manuscript pages are tattooed with strokes and question marks. Some editors slash with red pen. I’m so glad mine used pencil.

With my first novel, Arrhythmia, I was advised to lop two main characters, cut ninety pages and replace them with new writing. I couldn’t believe it. Hadn’t the publisher already accepted the book? My editor was firm. I had to learn how to rethink developments in the novel as narrative choices. I reminded myself that my editor, like me, only wanted what was best for the book. After all, she brought the manuscript to the acquisitions table, arguing that – out of all the other manuscripts being vetted – mine should be published.

I rewrote those ninety pages because I realized the change was structurally necessary to the novel. And I rewrote them, yes. My editor didn’t tell me what to write, only that the direction I’d originally taken wasn’t the best option. However, I did not lop those two characters. I made them stronger and more integral to the novel. Writing the novel was hard, but editing it might well have been the more profound learning-about-writing experience.

“Writing the novel was hard, but editing it might well have been the more profound learning-about-writing experience.”

My second novel, Five Roses, will be published by Dundurn Press in 2016. I’m at the copy editing stage now. This is the finicky time when syntax, word choice and punctuation come into question. I open the document and scroll through 320 pages with red commas added, words underlined and lassoed to dialogue bubbles. Individual words are highlighted in yellow. A character is cycling along a city street, alert to the nervous rush hour traffic, as she thinks about the police sending out an alert to catch a criminal. I swear at myself for not having noticed. I must have read this page twenty times already! But my brain was in a groove. And as I’ve repeatedly witnessed, my brain is willful in its fondness for repetitions, internal rhymes and alliteration.Now, too, is when I discover that grammatical niceties aren’t as ingrained as I assumed they should be after five decades as a voracious reader. Shouldn’t I simply know all these distinctions by now? Seems not.

And so I learn that there’s a difference between hanged and hung when it refers to a human body that is being put to death. I hung a picture on the wall. The executioner hanged a man. However, a human body that was already dead hung from a hook. I need to know that for this novel, since a character was hanged.

I had to teach myself the farther/further dance after having worked with a copy editor who changed all my farthers to furthers. He thought further sounded more posh. Fine, I thought. He’s the copy editor. Maybe it’s one of those UK vs US things. For a couple of years I banned all farthers from my writing. Then I had a story returned from a copy editor who had changed some of my furthers to farthers. That was more curious. I finally pulled a tome of grammar off the shelf and discovered there’s a rule. Farther is for physical distance. Further is the abstract concept. You might think that I would already have known this, but I didn’t. And I’m not the only one. I continue to see farther and further misused in books published by reputable houses. (If you want a trick to remember which to use when, think far > farther. Thank you to Carol Weber for this tip.)

You aren’t the best judge of your work, because you’re too close to the writing.You need an editor. Not your partner nor your best friend, who won’t want to hurt your feelings, but an experienced and discerning professional who will help you realize the full potential of the book.

I’m now at the last read-through before Five Roses goes to the design people. I’ve rewritten the manuscript three times since I thought it was finished in 2013. Cutting, puzzling, moving pages around. Lots of darlings sent marching to the recycling bin. At each stage of editing, the book becomes more of an entity that lives separate from me. Which is what it will have to be when it’s sent off into the world.

Alice Zorn’s book of short fiction, Ruins & Relics, was a finalist for the 2009 Quebec Writers’ Federation McAuslan First Book Prize. In 2011 she published a novel, Arrhythmia, with NeWest Press. She has twice placed first in Prairie Fire’s Fiction Contest. Her second novel, Five Roses, will be published with Dundurn Press in July, 2016. She lives in Montreal and can be found at http://alicezorn.blogspot.ca

November 20, 2015