QWF Writes

Author: john@qwf.org

  • Poetry at Elizabeth House by Dale Matthews

    The Writers in the Community workshops mostly culminate in zines (literary magazines of the participants’ work) and readings. Sometimes there are more elaborate performances. Last night I was looking back over the three zines that have come out of workshops I’ve facilitated at Elizabeth House since autumn, 2012 in Montreal. Each poem or short prose piece brought back memories of its writer, her face, her voice reading to the rest of the group, her pride in her work.

    On their website, Elizabeth House is described as “a private rehabilitation centre that offers a continuum of intensive intervention and specialized support services to parents, particularly young mothers and mothers-to-be, experiencing serious difficulties adjusting to pregnancy or in their parenting role.” Many of the young women come from Montreal or other places in Canada. Some have origins beyond Canada’s borders. English is the first language for most of the residents but the second or third for others. Mostly, the young women choose to write in English, but they also write in French and, occasionally, Creole or Patois.

    I’ve written something I called poetry since middle school, but became a social worker in my forties and used writing poetry as a therapeutic tool with groups of parents. There was little difference in that work and the work I’d done earlier in my life – teaching poetry workshops to children in schools in Maryland and North Carolina. My inspiration was the work of Kenneth Koch, Wishes, Lies and Dreams and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?, two books about his experiences teaching poetry in public schools in NYC. The books contain poems, prompts and methods to get people of all ages writing and over the hump of “I can’t write poetry!” or “I don’t know what a poem is!” or “Poetry! I don’t like poetry!”

    I don’t have a definition. Each word in a poem matters, where it comes, what words it’s next to, how the line sounds. Compared to a novel, more like arsenic than an atom bomb, a storm in a teacup than a hurricane. Or a bolt of lightning in a teacup or a broken teacup or a cracked plate? Maybe none of these. Language pulls us along and we swim with the current or against it or diagonally. It’s bigger than any of us and has a lot to do with how we think of ourselves, how the young women in Elizabeth House think of themselves and their children. Think of the words in the mouths of powerful people in your own life that have changed you, maybe a little, maybe for a lifetime: Good, Bad, Lazy, Yes, Stupid, Pretty, Fat, Brilliant, Lovely, Never, No, Wonderful.

    Some of these young women have been talked at, down to, by powerful systems: families, schools, and the street. Sometimes they’ve been talked up by others, sincere and not so sincere, who only had to say the words they wanted so much to hear: “You’re so beautiful. I love you.” Some of these young women have been abused or neglected. Some have secure backgrounds. Most of these mothers and mothers-to-be have islands of safety that appear in their writing, special people and places that nourished them and will continue to nourish them and their children. None want their children to suffer the bad things they’ve suffered, but the tools to keep that from happening are sometimes tricky to learn. Many of the women at Elizabeth House know how tricky.

    Maybe some of us grow up without ever having to doubt our ability to swim in the river and teach our children to swim and look as if it’s all for fun, but many of the young women at Elizabeth House know how easy it is to just slip under, to drown or watch, helpless, while somebody they care about drowns.

    At the end of one of Nelica’s poems are the words:

    TOUCH MY CHILD & I KILL YOU DEAD
    NO REGRETS

    Sara writes:

    It is an addiction,
    this crimson melancholy.

    Becca:

    My dimples are so cute
    Hello Kitty is jealous.
    They’re so deep that
    you could bury a body in them.

    Amanda:

    I’m the bird in the window
    looking out for you

    Poetry can help us see clearly. The pen or pencil can be used like a scalpel to separate what drags us down from what’s buoyant and alive. The young women at Elizabeth House work very hard to give better than what they’ve gotten, one way and another, and if poetry can help a little, we can all be grateful.

    Dale Matthews’ first book, Wait for the Green Fire, was published by the New Orleans Poetry Journal Press in 2010 and her chapbook, A Puzzle Map of the World, won first place in The Ontario Poetry Society’s 2011 Golden Grassroots Chapbook Contest. Dale has lived in Montreal since 2005 and works in the Writers in the Community program, a joint venture of the Quebec Writers’ Federation and the Centre for Literacy. Most recently, her poems have appeared in the Literary Review of Canada and in Best Canadian Poetry (2013).

    QWF is in the midst of its annual fundraising campaign to help bring Writers in the Community to more at-risk adolescents.

    To learn how you can help, visit http://www.qwf.org/programs/wic/pyramid_2014.html.

    To learn more about the Writers in the Community program and see more examples of the participants’ writing, visit http://www.qwf.org/programs/wic/index.html.

  • I Can’t Even Imagine Not Being Here by Carolyn Marie Souaid

    I Can’t Even Imagine Not Being Here by Carolyn Marie Souaid

    I can’t even imagine not being here.

    So ends my third poetry collection, Snow Formations, which, on one level, is about honouring and appreciating the present moment, and about using the senses, fully. About cultivating an awareness for the hushed presence of each and every living thing.

    I can’t even imagine not being here.

    I struggled to get that ending down on paper. The manuscript was nearly done, but it was missing something. I was on the last poem, in search of the right ending. One line. Something weighty.

    I was at a friend’s house and we were talking about death and the statistical probability of heaven, all that deep stuff you talk about over tea on a cold winter’s day. I was thinking about all those viewings I had been to in my lifetime, how the faces of people in their coffins never quite look like they are just asleep. I couldn’t for the life of me fathom what it would be like to not exist. To be that inert thing someone else is looking at – and not to­­ know it. To never again drink a good strong espresso or write another poem. I couldn’t get my head around the concept of not being. Out of the blue, I blurted it out.

    I can’t even imagine not being here.

    Now might be a bad time to be bringing this up, at the start of a new year, when what’s on a writer’s mind is the new book she is about to write, what readings he’s going to line up for himself, what writers’ retreats and arts grants are worth applying for. This is a time for new beginnings. The January light is upon us. The days are getting longer again.

    And yet, perhaps this is the perfect time. There is a certain clarity in the air.

    For many years now, the QWF has been an important part of my life. It has provided me with a supportive community of like-minded people, many with whom I’ve developed lasting friendships. It has offered me teaching and mentoring opportunities. It has honoured and celebrated my writing. I know there are other Quebec writers who feel the same way.

    What started out as the big idea of a handful of Montreal writers attending a backyard barbecue – creating a professional organization that would represent the diverse interests of Quebec’s English-language writers – has grown steadily into what now boasts over 600 members. Over the years, it has spearheaded a wide range of literary activities, publications and programs, including writing workshops, an online searchable database of English Quebec authors, mentorships, an annual awards gala and an interview series showcasing Quebec authors. More importantly, it has created an awareness of the existence and importance of English-language writing in Quebec.

    For most of us, the QWF is here to stay. But to guarantee that it does, we must contribute to it. We must imagine all that it can be. A healthy organization has to keep growing and renewing itself.

    Now that I have more years behind me than ahead of me – it’s already been over a decade since I wrote Snow Formations and its final line – I have begun, reluctantly, to imagine the unimaginable: not being here. And I’ve decided that the best gesture, in lieu of sending flowers, would be for people to make a donation to the QWF, an organization that I have appreciated and benefitted from in my lifetime.

    I would urge other QWF members to consider doing the same. (Those of you who are fortunate enough to be able to live off your creative labours might even think about bequeathing a sum of money.)

    I can’t even imagine the QWF not being here.

    Carolyn Marie Souaid’s new poetry collection This World We Invented is forthcoming from Brick Books in 2015. Currently, she is teaching a master class in poetry at Bishop’s University and working on a novel she began during a 7-week writer’s residency at The Banff Centre last spring.

  • Writers and Their Readers: In Conversation with William St. Hilaire

    William St. Hilaire is artistic director of Montreal’s literary festival Blue Metropolis, but she is also an author. Director and author, reader and writer, she has a somewhat privileged vantage point for experiencing and observing the relationship between writers and their readers.

    I met up with St. Hilaire to talk about this very relationship. We spoke broadly on the subject: authors in relation to the general public, to friends, to publishers, and even to reviewers. We also discussed the relationship specific to her own situation as a writer of erotic fiction. Appropriate for the director of a literary festival, she professed an appreciation for a range of books. And while her own erotic fiction has garnered her readers, it has also evoked a certain reaction from some readers. “The fact that I wrote erotic fiction has changed the perception that people have of me … people just freeze and they don’t know what to say,” she explained. “It’s been a while that I haven’t published anything. My last book was released in 2010. But it was not erotic and I didn’t sell many copies, so I have to think about going back into hardcore writing.”

    In terms of a personal readership it seems St. Hilaire would rather not have one. “I hope my friends and acquaintances don’t read my books. Sometimes I don’t even read my own books. On the off-chance I’ve had to go through my files, I’ve been horrified. I cannot believe I went to school in a nunnery and played the harpsichord. And this is what I write? Oh, man!”

    Why write at all and where do the words come from? “I write out of rage, or anger, or out of fear of being abandoned. It’s all therapy. I don’t care much about other people’s opinion of my work. If it gets published, fine. If it doesn’t, fine. Once it’s done, I don’t want to talk about it. I can’t be very satisfied and happy about my writing. A few people that I really value told me that I have talent; I don’t need general approbation, I don’t need praise, I don’t need recognition. It’s very personal, because if my entire life was about writing, it would be pure pain, you know? I would expect something more.”

    She mostly works on her books by herself, without feedback from other authors. “I will accept a few recommendations from publishers, but the recommendations are not all good. If you trust one, that’s enough. It’s like a psychologist. I don’t need ten people to psychoanalyze me.”

    St. Hilaire spoke a bit about the person behind the erotic novel, satisfying a personal curiosity I’m sure I share with many. “Erotic writers are usually people who have their own story. Maybe they were abandoned or rejected, or have body-image problems. Or at least they need a great deal of attention. You don’t choose to write erotic literature if you want to go unnoticed. Readers sometimes get upset, or they feel challenged because of the nature of my work. But nobody is obliged to read it, or even like it.”

    Our talk of readers prompted me to inquire who she writes for when she’s working on her erotic fiction. “I’ve been writing for men I loved, for men I could not have in my life. There was always someone I was sharing my thoughts with. And some of my books were written based on an exchange with a muse.”

    We moved onto the subject of another kind of reader, a contentious one: the reviewer. “Even if you don’t read the newspaper,” says St. Hilaire, “and I used to never, never read any review of my books, there’s always someone who will say, ‘Oh, that was such a bad review.’ I value the work of journalists and critics, they’re part of the system, as long as they don’t destroy people’s lives.”

    When it comes to finding out more about an author, St. Hilaire isn’t interested in the how-to of writing and books, but, whether she’s the author or the reader, she is interested in talking about the person behind the writer. “I like human beings, I like their stories, their kids, their favourite food. The worst thing for me is to start asking technical questions, like at [Blue Met] events where we asked people ‘How do you write?’ The how-to doesn’t interest me, it’s the who-are-you, really? What brought you here? What’s the story behind your writing?”

    St. Hilaire cares about the author’s story, which isn’t necessarily revealed through their books. “If you write thrillers, dark books like Patrick Senécal, people will not ask you, ‘Oh, do you torture people in your basement?’ So don’t expect erotic writers to be having wild sex on the counter every five minutes. Probably it’s because they’re not having wild sex that they have the time to write.”

    William St. Hilaire is president-general manager and artistic director of Blue Metropolis Foundation. A harpsichordist by training, St. Hilaire completed studies in public relations at HEC Montréal. She began as a manager, notably for Bob Walsh and the Arthur Leblanc Quartet, before being hired as general manager of Montreal’s I Musici chamber orchestra. She then worked in communications for ten years at Radio-Canada. St. Hilaire has sat on the board of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, of the Salle Pierre-Mercure, and of the Association pour la création et la recherche en électroacoustiques du Québec. She is the author of eight books. Les femmes planètes (VLB, 2010) is her first novel.

    Interview by Vanessa Bonneau on June 20, 2013, in Montreal.

  • Seamus Heaney and I at Midnight at the Ritz by James F. Olwell

    In 1984, still well before his 1995 Nobel Prize, Seamus Heaney was already Ireland’s best-known poet. As I hosted an Irish cultural radio show (CINQ 102.5 FM) it was an easy decision to head over from Mile End to McGill to see what the fuss was all about.

    After his reading, which, once people became attuned to his northern Irish accent, found an appreciative and good-humoured audience, there was time for a few questions. One student asked, “what is it about rhyme with you, isn’t it a bit passé?” I knew I could do no worse and raised my hand. My first question was eminently forgettable and then I asked if I could interview him for my show. There was a murmur of disapproval in the wings, but he said to come see him after the talk, which I did. A few tight-collared academics tried to block my way, but I called out “Seamus” and he beckoned me forth. Midnight the same evening at his hotel was his only availability.

    His scraggy face, bushy hair and lightly musical accent combined to produce a delightful and friendly mien. A mouth that turned down at the corners belied his readiness to laugh given the least provocation.

    He opened the interview with two glasses into which he poured two inches of John Powers. We triple-clinked “sláinte,” cheers and santé and I pressed the record button.

    He expressed delight at the size and appreciation of the McGill audience earlier and pondered on who comes to poetry readings. He was glad to see people from “both town and gown” as well as those “with an Irish hankering.” He admitted to sometimes underestimating the growing genuine interest in poetry. The poet is perceived to have a function within the world as “keeper of some kind of cultural memory, rooted in a sense of belonging.” This function would not necessarily be to break down barriers, but to escape them or to go around them.

    He felt the traditional role of the poet in Ireland was possibly overstated, but admitted it conferred a certain status as a public figure. “A poet’s name might be known even by those who did not read poetry, but had some sense of a poet as meaning something within their world. If a poem is published in the Irish Times, it was sure that the top civil servants would at least glance at it. Certain ministers might read it, they might even know you. The size of the culture plays a role. Poetry can be an important lung for the spirit to breathe in.”

    “But it is always a function of poetry,” he insisted, “to be in some way with the defeated. The poetic imagination can’t survive for very long among the triumphant and the privileged. It needs to know the whole picture of reality. Its morality must remember the shape of the world, the wounds as well as the glories. The best writers are still haunted by the rest of the world that isn’t there.”

    I asked him to read a poem for my listeners and he chose “Sweeney Praises the Trees,” based on an Irish mythological story situated in County Antrim, not far from where he grew up, and nearby to his school where camped a family of Tinkers named Sweeney. Sweeney was the king of Dal-Arie who, upon finding St. Ronan building a foundation for a church without first asking, “laid violent hands on him” and ordered him out of the territory. The saint then cursed Sweeney, that he’d be turned into a bird, which curse was fulfilled at the Battle of Moira (AD 637). Thereafter Sweeney lived in the trees in constant discord between his incurable loneliness and his love of the wild.

    “This was probably one of the first Gaelic-Celtic/Roman-Christian confrontations,” he said, and appeared delighted when I knew of the great poetic battles between Celtic bards and the newly dominant Christian saints, as to whose god was the greater, and why.

    I then had the courage to read to him one of his own poems “St. Francis and the Birds,” from Death of a Naturalist. He smiled, “now we’ll have to take you with us when we tour.” My delight was unswayed by never hearing of this again.

    Finally, I had the temerity to ask what weaknesses he had as a poet. He responded that his mentor Bernard MacLaverty had told him an anecdote about W. Somerset Maugham. When asked the same question at an interview in Paris the English writer had stated: “My books don’t have lyrical quality.” Whenever any critic reviewed any book by Maugham subsequently, after bouts of praise they would always end with “of course, his writing has no lyrical quality.” We spoke no more of weaknesses.

    Heaney recalled Wallace Steven’s belief that a writer’s only possession is “his sense of the world, the way your nervous system picks things up. My own sense is derived from rural Ulster, where people are watchful, tentative, silent, ironical. I have a fondness for immediate things, reading, and pleasure in people, places and words. I am suspicious of those labels, someone too readily called bad or too readily called good.”

    He died twenty-nine years later in August of 2013. “My writing,” he had said, “finds itself part of the church of poets.”

    Jim Olwell organized and directed (1973) the Irish Arts Center in NYC (1972–78), where he was first published. He was community organizer with the CLSC NDG from 1991–2013. He has enjoyed reading recently at the Yellow Door, the Westmount Visual Arts Centre and Argo Bookshop. He’s looking to publish two villanelles recently produced at the QWF winter poetry workshop (with Robyn Sarah). Finally, he received an Outstanding Citizen award for 2013 from the borough of Côtes-des-Neiges/Notre-Dame-de-Grâce.

  • Writing What I Don’t Know by Elaine Kalman Naves

    Ever since working at a historical research centre way back I won’t say when, I’ve always wanted to write a novel set in nineteenth-century Montreal. My job at the research centre depended on mining the contents of nineteenth-century Canadian newspapers, which I found to be intriguingly racy, and saucy founts of information.

    Four years ago I was between projects and began to think about this putative nineteenth-century novel of mine. I thought I would set it in 1849, when the Tory merchants of Montreal decided to burn down the Parliament buildings, then located in the city. A great background, but when I started digging, I invariably dozed off over the details of the Rebellion Losses Bill.

    My next idea, sparked by a column in The Gazette by John Kalbfleisch, was to focus on a pair of star-crossed Montreal artists, but alas I couldn’t find enough material on them for a magazine piece, let alone a novel. But it was while rooting around in search of this couple that I happened upon William Notman’s photography studio, the splendid venue where Montreal’s painters exhibited their work in the 1860s. Notman was the first Canadian photographer to achieve international renown and the most commercially successful of all North American photographers of his time. His life – it became apparent – would be my project, and it would be a radio documentary, not a book.

    At the initial stage of my research, I asked an idle question of my main source, Nora Hague, the go-to person at the McCord Museum, the go-to place for all things Notman.

    “Were there any black sheep in the Notman family?”

    I wasn’t deliberately fishing. I was simply doing what a writer does automatically, sniffing around for a story.

    “Well,” came the answer, “there was his brother, John. Also a photographer, who was run over by a train. He had what today is called a drinking problem.” She paused. Picking her words carefully, she added, “And of course there was Robert, another hard-living boy. The brother who was tried for murder … A huge case that was reported in all its ins-and-outs in The Gazette.” Her voice trailed off. I had the distinct impression that this chapter of the Notman saga was strictly classified.

    While conducting my study of Notman’s career, I started to poke around for the tale of the allegedly murderous brother. And I stumbled on a yarn far more absorbing than a Gothic whodunit. A drama through which Victorian Montreal, so lavishly depicted by the camera of William Notman, could be viewed beneath the surface of carefully arranged settings, heroic poses, and gorgeous costumes. A story with themes that travel well across generations and cultures: the flouting of society’s rules, and its consequences.

    There was no murder, but there was illicit sex, suicide, a trial. It was a big story and so difficult to research that I gave up working on it several times. Too much of the source material derived from smudged editions of newspapers on microfilm. Too much of it was couched in nineteenth-century legalese. But even as I contorted my back over the microfilm reader and strained my eyes trying to decipher poorly reproduced pages of ancient newsprint, the story would not let go of me. There was the famous brother and his estimable wife, and the other brother in whose wake tragedy inevitably followed.

    Here was a topic for a book, but if cast as a novel it would be too far-fetched for credibility. How to handle it?

    It took me time to resolve the conundrum. In the end I chose to go a route I had already taken twice: creative non-fiction. But whereas my earlier works drew on my own Hungarian-Jewish roots, this book with its Presbyterian Scottish background was terra incognita for me.

    The most elementary lesson of how to write and what to write is the well-known doctrine “write what you know.” But as I remind participants of my writing workshops at the QWF, the poet George Bowering maintains that “if you write about what you know, you will keep on writing the same thing, and you will never know any more than you do now.” Even when presenting my own family, I’ve always preferred to explore what I didn’t know, in order to learn something new.

    So I took courage and kept plugging away at this true story that seemed too difficult to undertake. I started it knowing next to nothing about nineteenth-century photography, law and medicine, all vital elements of the drama. The result is Portrait of a Scandal: the Abortion Trial of Robert Notman. Yes, that’s right. An abortion trial set in Victorian Montreal. Coming soon from Véhicule Press.

    Elaine Kalman Naves is a two-time winner of the QWF Prize for Non-fiction. Visit her website at ElaineKalmanNaves.com.

  • Damn That Story Arc by Lori Weber

    Damn That Story Arc by Lori Weber

    I’ve been thinking a lot about story, about the patterns that stories take. When I begin to write a book, I rarely know where it’s going. But go it does, on and on, through a trajectory that is both consciously and unconsciously created. It mainly follows the Western story arc – conflict, rising action, climax, denouement. Even though that seems formulaic, when I write that arc stretches above me, like a preordained path that I, willy-nilly, must follow. At the end of that path lies resolution. Editors (and readers) expect it.

    In the young adult (YA) genre, it is expected even more. At the end of Shine, by Lauren Myracle, the culprit responsible for the near fatal beating of Patrick Truman (who is gay) falls off a cliff and dies; at the end of Feed, by M.T. Anderson, Titus visits Violet and tells her stories while she withers away on her deathbed; at the end of Wintergirls, by Laurie Halse Anderson, Lia says she is “thawing,” hence beginning her recovery from anorexia.

    The problem is part of me has always resisted resolution. Life is not full of closure; it is full of gaping holes.

    In Yellow Mini, I juggled five story lines, one for each character. “More arc, more arc,” my editor would say. The novel is told in verse, so I was to some degree liberated from focusing too much on plot. But still, for my editor, and ultimately the reader, there had to be “movement” for each character. Something had to be gained, learned or altered. I was willing to give up small pieces of resolution: a hug between father and daughter at midnight, or a ride home in an unlikely comrade’s car.

    But what I’m always conflicted by is the way YA novels are held up to a higher moral standard; they require more learning and growth from their protagonists. I think it’s because there’s an assumption that our books, apart from being works of art, are also implements in the formation of young minds. Editors are troubled by villains who aren’t punished or heroes who don’t triumph. In YA lit, they always do. Could Suzanne Collins have killed Katniss off in The Hunger Games? It’s unthinkable; it’s anti-arc. Plus it would dash the hopes and spirits of all its young readers.

    In my first book, Klepto, Kat’s negligent parents didn’t show the slightest glimmer of awareness that they’d been crappy parents. My editor wasn’t happy. “You have to give hope,” she said. “Imagine the young reader longing for that moment of parental comeuppance.” But in real life, I argued, there are crappy parents who don’t repent and who don’t pay. It’s their children who pay.

    But fiction is not real life, and in YA fiction we are told that the young reader wants some reassurance that the world isn’t a despicable place. It was my first moment of awareness that writing for a YA audience came with some pretty heavy responsibility. There’s almost a moral imperative to make good guys triumph and bad guys pay. But, wouldn’t it be delicious to create a villain who isn’t punished, or a hero who doesn’t learn a damn thing? Through seven novels, I have found subtle ways of deviating, but never enough. In Klepto, I did have Kat’s parents apologize. But when they hug her, she stiffens and will not give an inch back. I know that she was me, the writer, saying, “Okay, repent if you must but I want no part of it.”

    I wonder if authors of adult fiction feel the same responsibility to be moral. I once read that Dostoyevsky felt pressure to make Raskolnikov get caught. Did having to be moral bug him too? Still, adult novels don’t always contain closure or payback. Their authors can more readily abandon, alter or camouflage the Western story arc. YA novels simply cannot leave their readers dangling over a moral abyss. But what would such a pernicious reading experience lead to, other than a heavy dose of reality?

    In my new book, Picture Me, there is a scene of remedy, but I deliberately leave the “bad girl” totally unrepentant and even unaware of her own moral failings; in other words, she has no regrets about being a bitch. There is only a closing door in an apartment where her distant mother sits mesmerized by the TV screen. I am hoping that is payment enough.

    Lori Weber is the author of seven young adult novels, including Yellow Mini (2011) and Picture Me (2013). My Granny Loves Hockey, her first picture book, will be out in Spring 2014. Lori teaches English and Creative Writing at John Abbott College in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue. She lives in Pointe-Claire with her husband and two highly amusing cats.

  • Take the Train, Eh?: A Mini-Memoir of a Maritime Mentorship by Ian McGillis

    Flying, to me, always somehow feels like cheating. When travelling long distances that don’t involve the crossing of an ocean, I try, whenever time, budget and access permit, to take the train. What’s lost in efficiency, I believe, is more than made up in respect – by which I mean a true appreciation and humility in the face of the awesome immensity of this country and continent. You just don’t get that in a few hours at 40,000 feet. (The fact that I’ve never had a driver’s licence may well factor into all this, too.)

    So, when I went to Nova Scotia to represent Quebec in the first Quebec Writers’ Federation/Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia Mentorship Exchange earlier this year, there was really only one way to go.

    Disembarking in Halifax after a blissful if nearly sleepless 24 hours, gingerly regaining my land legs and breathing in my first intoxicating shot of salty Atlantic Ocean air, I knew I’d stumbled into some form of lit-friendly Narnia when a young VIA Rail worker on the station platform espied my T-shirt, a fashionably black item emblazoned with the logo of a Canadian literary publisher (I’m trying to avoid any appearance of buzz marketing here, so let’s just say that this particular publisher’s logo consists of a large upper case vowel in a circle), and inching toward me said, simply, “Writer?” I nodded, and the warm fuzzy feeling thus engendered never left me for the whole visit.

    The writing life, if you’re lucky – and I have been, extremely so – brings occasional moments of convergence and full-circle symmetry so perfect that you couldn’t make them up, and that certainly proved true for me on this, my first-ever trip to the Maritimes. No small part of my sense of Atlantic Canada has been gleaned by my reading, at an impressionable age, the short stories of Alistair MacLeod as collected in The Lost Salt Gift of Blood. So the fact that my Nova Scotia fellow mentor in this exchange was to be his son Alexander – whose debut collection Light Lifting I had also read with great admiration and no small sense of envy, funnily enough just weeks before learning I’d landed this gig – was, not to put too fine a point on it, very cool indeed. I met Alex on my first visit to the Writers‘ Federation of Nova Scotia office on Marginal Road when he swept in on a break from teaching at nearby St. Mary’s University and, while the seven or eight of us present sat snacking, launched pretty much unprompted into an impassioned speech on the importance for aspiring writers of reading – and reading, and reading some more. (An obvious point, you might think, but you’d be surprised.) First impressions don’t come much better.

    Equally eerie, for me at least, was that I was put up in the Waverley Inn on Barrington Street, the very hostelry where Oscar Wilde stayed for four nights while in Halifax on a lecture tour in October 1882. Wilde, as it happens, was my first proper favourite writer: when I was probably a bit too young I devoured both The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Ballad of Reading Gaol and got my first faint stirrings of the idea that putting words together might be something I’d like to try in earnest. Also as it happens, the suite where the great man slept was the very room in which I stayed on the second of my two Halifax trips. Several people I apprised of this amazing fact cited Wilde’s famous alleged last words, in a different hotel, in Paris: “Either that wallpaper goes or I do.” Well, I’m pleased to report that the wallpaper in the Waverley Inn’s Oscar Wilde Suite not only didn’t make me want to kill myself, it was actually quite nice. If you ever get a chance to stay there, I urge you to do it. It’s handy for Bearly’s House of Blues and Ribs across the street, too, and for the wondrous Henry House just a few doors down. Ask for a Propeller in either place. They’ll know what you mean.

    Lest I give the impression that this is all about me and my little epiphanies, rest assured that this exchange was really all about – yes – exchange. Writing is a solitary calling, and the communities that support it are far-flung; something that can make those communities and the people in them feel less alone is invaluable. The payoff comes in ways tangible and less so, both immediately and at unpredictable moments down the road: in essence, you have a bigger and more embracing sense of things, and that can’t help but show in your work. Thanks, then, to the QWF for choosing and sending me; thanks to Alex MacLeod and to poet, novelist and teacher Sue Goyette, my Halifax foot-tour guide; to the Haligonians who attended my workshop, thanks for your gracious attention and perceptive questions; and to my mentee/prodigy Jess Chisholm (remember that name, people), thanks for your dedication to the cause, and for helping recharge my own creative engines. I truly hope I’m only the first of many Quebec writers who will have an opportunity like it.

    Ian McGillis‘s novel A Tourist’s Guide to Glengarry was shortlisted for the QWF Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction, the McAuslan First Book Prize and the Stephen Leacock Medal. He writes a weekly books column for the Montreal Gazette.

  • Secrets and Storytelling by Monique Polak

    “What I’m telling you I never told nobody.” So says the teenage narrator of Sandra Cisneros’s short story “One Holy Night.”

    Every school year, I teach this short story. I want my students to see how Cisneros’s narrator draws us in. Sure her grammar is poor, but she understands the power – and privilege – associated with secrets.

    Secrets make great stories.

    I think I understood this even as a child, when during dinner parties, I liked to sit under the dining room table. If I sat long enough, the guests forgot I was there… and then I’d hear the best stories, ones not meant for a little girl’s consumption.

    After we read “One Holy Night,” I give my students an assignment that makes some of them uncomfortable. I send them out to uncover – and bring me back – a secret.

    I share my own tips for finding secrets (all writers have them). I tell my students about my favourite spots for listening in: a city bus, the doctor’s waiting room, the girls’ bathroom on Monday morning.

    I explain that some of the best secrets are close at hand. If they have grandparents, I urge my students to uncover their secrets. I offer tips here, too. Always begin with a cup of tea. Never just say, “Tell me your secret.” Instead, tell a secret of your own.

    Several of my novels for young adults are inspired by secrets. Scarred tells the story of a teen who self-mutilates after she is abused by a coach. All In is about teens hooked on online gambling who get into more debt than they can handle. If the plot sounds familiar it may be because it is based on events that occurred at a Montreal high school.

    Once, at a conference in Toronto about the impact of the Holocaust on the second generation, I heard a therapist say, “There is no such thing as a family secret.” She explained that though family members may not know the details, they feel a secret’s existence.

    I grew up with such a secret – and uncovered it for my 2008 YA novel, What World Is Left. As a teenager, my mother was imprisoned in Theresienstadt, a Nazi concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic. She kept her experience there a secret for more than 60 years – until the daughter who used to sit under the dining room table pried the secret out of her and used it as the basis for her novel.

    My mother, her brothers and parents survived the Holocaust because of my grandfather, a Dutch artist forced by the Nazis to produce propaganda art.

    It wasn’t easy for my mum to share her secret. I told her her story might help young people going through their own difficult times. Besides, I said, I’m not really writing about you; I’m writing about a fictional girl inspired by you.

    But all this time that I have been mining other people’s secrets, I’ve been keeping a secret of my own. This fall, I’ll publish my 14th YA novel. It’s taken me until now to share my own secret.

    “What I’m telling you I never told nobody….”

    At seventeen I fell in love with a man who turned out to be abusive. When he hit me – always in the face – I saw stars. I never told anyone what was going on. I was too ashamed. Now I see that I was keeping the secret from myself, too.

    Here is what I have discovered in the telling of this story: sharing other people’s secrets, even those of people whom we love, is way easier than sharing our own.

    When we tell our secret – even through fiction – we expose ourselves in the rawest way. But there’s a jittery freedom that comes with the telling. Once it’s out, a secret loses some of its power over us. If we’ve told our stories right, they will have a power over others and perhaps give them the courage to share their own secrets.

    Monique Polak’s next YA novel, So Much It Hurts, will be released by Orca Book Publishers in September. Look for another YA novel from Monique, Straight Punch (Orca), in spring 2014. Monique teaches creative writing and journalism at Marianopolis College.

  • What Would the Ancient Greeks Think of This? Old-Fashioned Imagination in Newfangled Fiction by Alexander MacLeod

    I know the psychoanalysts among us may find this a bit disconcerting, but I’ve been thinking a lot about poor, old Oedipus these days. It’s not Freudian, at least, for my parents’ sake, I hope it’s not; but there is a deeply seated mix of admiration and jealousy at work here. You see, when I think about Oedipus, I think about Sophocles, and when I think about Sophocles, I picture a figure I think I can understand: a writer with a deadline, trying to pull something together in time to make the cut for the annual drama competition in Athens in 429 BC. I see him sitting at his desk, shaking his head, unsure of himself. He has a basic plot, a story inherited from an earlier myth, something about the doomed King of Thebes, and he has characters and he knows he wants to say something, or more accurately, he wants to show the audience something. He wants to share a concern he has that touches on free will and fate, power and weakness, strength and desire, arrogance and shame. He has all the required elements and he probably has some sense of where he wants to go, but, like his character, he can’t quite see the full picture. The thing he does not have, not at this stage anyway, is his image, the image of Oedipus Rex.

    Think about that for a second. There was a moment in the history of world literature when Oedipus’s story was still mostly undecided, a moment when Sophocles wasn’t sure about how it was all going to work out. He hadn’t done his thing yet, hadn’t sent his character off stage to commit his signature act of self-mutilation. This idea that we all take for granted now didn’t always exist. It wasn’t just lying around as “source material.” It had to be made up, created, by a real-life person with a real-life imagination. Something significant happened when Sophocles ignited that image and put it into action. The King with his empty sockets, the blood running down his face, his daughter leading him by the hand: this scene has been translated into every language on the planet and it has travelled all around the world, and all the way down through millennia, yet we still talk about it today and kids download plagiarized essays straight to their iPhones, because – and this part really is unbelievable – Oedipus is still relevant. He still matters.

    It’s pretty basic, but in the end, I think all creative activity eventually comes back to the raw work and the strange and powerful forces of the imagination. And though I know it’s an old debate that’s been going on since at least the time of Aristotle, it’s also worth repeating that there is a profound difference between imagination and intellect. Both have value, and in my job as a teacher in a university, I have a deep respect for both endeavours, but when I turn to literature as an excited reader, I have to admit that I’m looking for the former rather than the latter.

    I’m looking for originality and hunting for surprises and waiting, really waiting, for writers who can make up things that I have never seen before. Don’t get me wrong, I like a good historical novel as much as the next guy – and I read a ton of them every year – but the fact remains: diligence and discipline are not the same as creative power. We can be as earnest as we like and we can do countless hours of research to bring forth our annual harvest of historiographic metafictions, but all that archival material we’ve dug up on the injustices of the Seigneurial system or the victories of Bluenose won’t matter to readers unless it is harnessed to the shocking power of an imagination that can re-order and re-direct the project in new and unpredictable ways. Again: think of Oedipus Rex. Nobody ever read that story to “learn” about the sexual politics of Thebes.

    Maybe this is a goal to strive for. If we can still see something essential in Oedipus, even though he comes to us from a distant place and time and he lives in a different culture, then could the reverse be true? Could contemporary writers produce stories and craft images that are powerful enough to cut back through the near-impossible distortions of space and time, to return to Sophocles, and find him quietly reading at his desk, nodding his head, and gasping with surprise and recognition?

    Alexander MacLeod lives in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. His collection of short stories, Light Lifting, won an Atlantic Book Award and was a finalist for the Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Book Prize and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. In the Spring of 2013, he participated as a visiting writer in the QWF’s Mentorship Program.

  • In Solitude by Louise Carson

    Over one month last autumn I shlumped around in robe and slippers all morning and part of the afternoon feeling sorry for myself. I was convalescing from a brutal cough. In the evenings I plugged in to the boob tube. (Boob as in booby, but was it me or the characters on TV who were foolish?) Then I’d crawl into bed to read Agatha Christie or Jane Austen, the literary equivalent for me of slipping into a hot bath. Somehow, at the end of the month I had written about twenty pages of poetry and prose. From those, after the necessary cull, I felt three or four pages were good, and that maybe one effort – a poem, a story – was excellent.

    Granted, a lot had been happening of a profound nature. The shock of the sudden death of one parent had cascaded into revisiting all the emotion associated with the drawn-out death of the other. Breaking up the family home and the resulting tensions and sorrows combined with planning a holiday and managing normal daily life weakened my ability to stick to a writing schedule. And yet, with all these old and new experiences, the senses were sent into overdrive and material couldn’t help but bubble up.

    But I am only able to transform that material into a written product by the fact of my daily solitude. From Monday to Friday I am alone from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. That’s eight hours during which I can research, think, write, revise and conduct literary business. I don’t usually receive original ideas when interacting with people. And if I am inspired, I only have time to jot down a key word or two, to be pondered in solitude later.

    Musicians looking to improve their technique leave town, hole up, and, in a practice known as woodshedding, cut themselves off from others. Solitude is just as necessary to my writing. I spend hours on research, then on finding a way into the material and, finally, on writing.

    But I’m not alone. My loves and fears keep me company. On my desk: a ticking, golden, art deco clock which belonged to my mother, a small black lamp which used to be on my father’s desk and this year’s school photo of my daughter. There are also the non-visual cues: the taste of chai made with cardamom pods, the smell of Old Spice, the sound of old-style jazz guitar.

    In most regions of Canada writers have a seasonal advantage. Winter: the great Canadian metaphor for solitude. A field or street or yard covered in snow is a blank slate to which I turn first my eye and then my mind.

    And in the summer? Hibernating requires physically relocating away from enticements such as gardens in which to play, terraces on which to lunch and shady avenues on which to jog in the cool of the morning.

    I admit to a feeling of relief when autumn closes in; most people disappear from view and the season of privacy reappears. For an introvert this will seem a natural and comfortable part of the writing process. I love the definition of introvert when it’s used as a verb: to fold in so that an outer surface becomes an inner surface. What else does the writer do but take that outer-now-inner surface, process it and turn it outward again?

    Louise Carson’s first book Rope: A Tale Told in Prose and Verse was published by Broken Rules Press in 2011. Mermaid Road will be published by the same press in 2013.