QWF Writes

Tag: book

  • Keep Calm, Shut Up, and Write—By Lea Beddia

    Keep Calm, Shut Up, and Write—By Lea Beddia

    One full-time teaching job (hybrid online teaching included), three school-aged children (complete with homework, lunches and the occasional emotional meltdown), and one pandemic (anxiety I never thought I’d have, a bonus). Add a house to help maintain, and there’s no time for a creative outlet. It’s enough to turn me into a Netflix zombie. You may be busy like me, but even if you’re not, you may find your creativity stifled, vacuum-packed, and freeze-dried during this whole soul-sucking, stay-at-home-and-don’t-come-out situation. The state of the world is so real, yet surreal and heart-breaking, that my aspirations for all my wonderful ideas and plots are twisted up with anxiety, sleeplessness, and an obsession with watching the news. Enter Shut Up and Write.

    Shut up and Write: the name says it all. We really just shut up and write, for twenty-five minutes at a time followed by five-minute breaks. I don’t know about other writers, but in twenty-five minutes of absolute silence, with nothing but focus and my fingers tapping away, I’m more productive than during a full weekend in front of the television with my kids on my lap spilling popcorn all over me. It’s such a great stress-reliever to know I’m prioritizing myself ahead of my to-do list. I commit to be present when all my best-laid schemes have gone awry, and it’s the only chance for the stories swarming my head.

    I myself never attended the in-person sessions. I live an hour out of the city, and taking a Saturday morning away from busy mom life was not feasible. But since the sessions have moved online, we’re only limited to the distance our laptop charges will allow us to roam. I started attending after my QWF mentorship ended last June. I was so close to finishing what I had started and needed a little extra push to get my manuscript done. The result, for me: a manuscript completed and queries written.

    More importantly for my soul and morale, however, are these tenacious people, who like me, are ignoring real life for a little while to meet online and pursue personal or professional writing. Every time I sign up for a session, there’s this excitement: I’m going to see other people, and they’ll be writing, because their writing is important to them, too!

    I miss meeting with my writing critique group: an ensemble of talented, funny women who I met during a workshop, now almost two years ago. We still keep in touch, but each of us admits to lacking the energy and/or time for our writing, because “How can I not place my family, health, work, fresh air, and rabbit hole of online shopping ahead of writing?”

    SUAW is my antidote to isolation. I have something to look forward to in a time with no appointments or visits. I’ve found a community of writers willing to have my face in a two-inch square on their screen for two and a half hours a few Saturdays a month. Loneliness is at bay when I write during these sessions. There’s camaraderie in knowing we’re all struggling for time to be creative. I am grateful for the connections I’ve made.

    In our five minutes off, we chat, and in a short time, we share what we’re working on, or talk about recipes and make each other laugh. We’re all starving for positive human connections to people with a common interest and here it is, at my fingertips! When those five minutes are up, I’m like a superhero, relinquishing the destructive powers of procrastination because I’ve got twenty-five minutes to make the rest of my story shine, or at least get it from my head to my screen. Good enough.

    We may all be “Zoomed-out” and tired of hearing “You’re on mute” or “Can you mute yourself, please?” But to be honest, I kind of like it when someone forgets to turn off their mic and I can hear their keyboard clicking. It’s not a race, but it gets me going every time.

    Lea Beddia is a high school teacher, writer for young adults, and mom of three. She grew up in Montreal and now lives in the woods, on top of a mountain. She’s published short stories for young and old and you can find her work @LeaBeddia or www.leabeddia.com. In her free time (those rare, glorious moments), you can find her with her nose in a book, tuning everything out.

    Photo credits: Header banner is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0; Sarah Fortin Photographe (headshot)

  • Realists of a Larger Reality (Or Why I Read and Write Science Fiction)—By J. DeLeskie

    Realists of a Larger Reality (Or Why I Read and Write Science Fiction)—By J. DeLeskie

    I started reading science fiction young, before realizing it wasn’t suitable material for a girl with aspirations of fitting in with her fourth-grade contemporaries. It was the genre my dad and older brother favoured, and the surfaces of my childhood home were littered with paperbacks with lurid covers: a dinosaur riding an ichthyosaur across the desert (Jack Chalker’s Midnight at the Well of Souls); or a humanoid cat glowering over a worried-looking, two-headed tripod (Larry Niven’s Ringworld). Who could resist opening these books to see what tales lay inside? Not I.

    I soon discovered that the sex scenes in these books were way more interesting than the chaste kissing and petting the kids at Sweet Valley High were up to (albeit in a Dürer’s Rhinoceros sort of way; in retrospect, many of these old-school SF authors did not appear to possess firsthand knowledge of female anatomy or— you know—the actual mechanics of sex). Soon I was hooked, and not just for the salacious content. When the reality of being an introverted, slightly awkward kid attending Catholic school in rural Ontario became unbearable, I’d escape to Arrakis and lose myself in the messianic journey of Maud’Dib, or follow the adventures of a resurrected Richard Burton (the explorer, not the actor) as he searched for the source of the great river on Riverworld.

    By my teens, I contained within me an archive of worlds, characters, concepts, and stories that enriched my life immeasurably. The trade-off—a sense of not quite existing on the same planet as many of my peers—was worth it, even if it didn’t always feel that way. Not only did science fiction provide escape, it was an antidote for religious indoctrination, challenging the conservative, Catholic vision of the world I had been raised to accept as my own. My allegiance was to a universe far bigger and weirder than anything Christian dogma could encompass.  

    At some point in my early twenties, however, I stopped reading science fiction. I lost patience with the flat characters, clunky prose, and outright misogyny that typifies so much of the genre. My reading began to veer toward realism and non-fiction. In retrospect, I think I was trying to accept the world as it was, to put away childish things. I went to law school, got married, had kids, and embarked on a career as a corporate lawyer. I felt I no longer had the luxury of questioning the world as it was; my job as an adult was to succeed according to its metrics.

    Yet gradually, as my kids grew older and began asking the thorny questions that kids ask, I started to wonder if my acceptance of things had gone, perhaps, too far. It took a few years, but I managed to find my way out of the corporate cul de sac. And slowly, I found science fiction again. I rekindled a childhood love for Ursula K. Le Guin and was dazzled by her ability to imagine less destructive ways of organizing society. I read Octavia Butler for the first time and was astonished by her depiction of society collapsing into a racialized dystopia— and then being rebuilt, one community at a time. These authors and others—Marge Piercy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Corey Doctorow, Karel Čapek, etc.—eroded the shell of cynicism I’d formed over my conscience by insisting that there was nothing inevitable about environmental degradation, white supremacy, capitalism or misogyny.

    Thus, when I decided to try my hand at writing, it was science fiction that called to me. I’m now in final revisions of my first novel, Everclear, a coming-of-age story set in the near future in northern Quebec. The act of imagining this future feels laden with responsibility, and I’m attempting to construct this story with great care. I believe firmly that our words bring potential worlds into being.

    In her brilliant and fearless acceptance speech at the 2014 National Book Awards, Ursula K. Le Guin put out a call to “realists of a larger reality” who “see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society […] to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope.” The call is increasingly being answered by Indigenous, Black, and LGBTQIA writers of science fiction such as jaye simpson, Cherie Dimaline, Nnedi Okorafor, and N.K. Jemison— writers who, because of their lived experiences, assemble the pieces of our shared reality in unexpected ways. To me, this is the opposite of escapism; it’s an invitation to see the world with new eyes and answer the moral imperative this vision affords us. This is why I read science fiction, and why I write it: not to escape this world, but to re-imagine it.

    And, of course, for the cringy sex scenes.

    Suggested Reading List

    Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit & Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction, edited by Joshua Whitehead, 2020

    The Dispossessed: An Ambiguious Utopia, by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1974

    Woman on the Edge of Time, by Marge Piercy, 1976

    The Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler, 1993

    Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson, 2020

    Jennifer DeLeskie is a former lawyer and new writer, currently revising a draft of her first novel. Her non-fiction piece, “April 2, 2020,” will appear in Chronicling the Days (Guernica Editions), forthcoming in Spring 2021. Jennifer volunteers on the board of the Quebec Writers’ Federation.

    Photo credits: Header banner is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0; Annabel Simons (headshot)

  • Writers Need Libraries; So Do Our Children—By Deborah Ostrovsky

    Writers Need Libraries; So Do Our Children—By Deborah Ostrovsky

    Not long ago, during the Before Times, I received a small award to pursue a non-fiction project. I planned to dedicate an entire week, maybe two or three, to writing without interruptions.

    The morning I opened my laptop to begin—it was World Book Day, which seems ironic now—I found an email from my daughter’s primary school. They needed a parent to volunteer at the library.

    Our primary school is fortunate to have a library at all. Many schools don’t have libraries. A primary school a few blocks from ours recently turned their library into a supply closet. Over 20 per cent of Laval’s public schools are without libraries, or enough books in classrooms.

    Radio-Canada reports that a quarter of all school boards in Quebec don’t have librarians. Our library is run by volunteers. We shelve. We search for lost books. Like a team of amateur first responders in an emergency room that should be staffed by qualified surgeons, we learn to repair the broken spines of bandes dessinées from video tutorials.

    The email from the school said that a few classes hadn’t been able to borrow books for months. Could you come today, maybe now, to turn on the computer and let the kids finally take some out?

    So I did what any emerging writer starved for time to write would do. I closed my laptop. I put on my coat. I rushed to the school. I stayed all morning and returned in the following weeks until the pandemic shut everything down. 

    Writing, editing, and translating are jobs that can sometimes feel easy to walk away from. This is especially so when other urgent business gets in the way—like helping to provide literacy and library resources for kids when neoliberal education budgets consistently sap them dry.

    It’s overwhelming to try and comprehend all the ways the arts, books, and writing are shaped by government policy. Even more overwhelming is the thought of my own personal luck at being born at the twilight of a golden age of state interventionism—right before the neoliberal assault on education. The idea of dedicating a life to writing would have never been possible for someone of my family’s background without policies that made public libraries, and librarians, part of every school.

    “Books have their sources in, are made from readers (would-be writers) reading other people’s books,”muses Kate Briggs in her book This Little Art. “All books are made from other books,”she writes. Anything I have ever written, then, has come in some way from other books, and in turn from a childhood of reading books that had date due slips glued to the back cover, and which were tucked under my pillow at night. The stories within these books made their way into my dreams. These books were always borrowed. They belonged to my public school.

    Now school libraries only open when parents have the income and the time to spend mornings taping together torn pages of Astérix.

    It’s okay, a parent told me a while ago when we talked about this. We have plenty of books at home.

    Lucky you, I thought. And what about those who don’t?  

    Lucky me, though. I get to write. It’s a privilege, in today’s economy, to do this thing with my life. But access to a school library should be a right, and not a privilege. The deep connections between my privilege and this right are buried somewhere within the early manifestations of my own creative desires over which I can take some measure of ownership; but they were undeniably helped along by state policy, making it possible for the artistic inclination and writerly imagination to be fostered by something other than luck, wealth, or family. It can’t be denied. My writing life is a result of private ambitions but also public will.

    For now, I’ll keep writing until the school library finally reopens, when the pandemic is under control. Then the school will call and say that they need somebody to help the kids take out books. I should really say no, and stay at my desk, to avoid more interruptions.

    But I will say yes. I will do this until something in the system changes radically, so kids can get their hands on more books. Maybe some of those kids can write in the future, too. In the meantime they’re waiting, hopefully not for long.

    Deborah Ostrovsky is an editor, writer, and translator. Her work has been generously supported by the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Marian Hebb Research Grant, the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and the Writers’ Trust of Canada.

    Photo credit: Gopesa Paquette

  • On Best-of Lists and How We Actually Read—By Genny Zimantas

    On Best-of Lists and How We Actually Read—By Genny Zimantas

    I am a big believer in lists. Grocery lists. To-do lists. Lists on phones and bits of envelopes and bills. Lists are satisfying to write, and even more satisfying to work through. But best-of lists, the kind of lists which flood journals and newspapers towards the end of each year, summarising “The 10 Best Books of 2019” or “The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century”—even though we’re only a fifth of the way through that century—are a pet peeve of mine.

    It’s no secret that yearly best-of lists are a marketing tool: for specific books, and publishers, and the journals or newspapers in which they appear. Few journalists, after all, can boast of having read every book they enumerate come December, let alone the thousands of other titles published in English and translated into English each year. The “best” books are usually chosen from an already shallow pool of previously successful titles, titles already supported by big marketing machines.

    That best-of lists so often equate financial success with literary value can be deflating, but my problem with best-of lists isn’t the “best” books themselves. It isn’t even whatever methods the list-makers use to arrive at their final selections. Instead, my issue with year-end best-of lists is how they dominate mainstream readerly conversation and keep us so focused on the immediate past—on the latest publishing triumph or controversy. To be clear: at this point in history, more books have been published than any of us could feasibly read in a dozen lifetimes. So why restrict our focus to the last year, or even fifty? Best-of lists help solve the problem of picking a next title out of overwhelming choice, but they distort perceptions of how we can (and do) read.

    In what I like to think of as defiance of market-driven, “of the moment” reading, booklovers around the world have come up with inspiring and invigorating criteria for deciding what to read next. UK-based reader and author Ann Morgan launched a project called “A Year of Reading the World” in 2012, embarking on a mission to read one book from each of the “196 independent countries—plus one extra territory chosen by blog visitors.” Making a similar readerly commitment the year he turned 25, Jerome Blanco decided to “stop reading white people,” in the process discovering more about himself, reorienting what he thought of as “real” literature, and revaluing his own work as a writer, too.

    These selection methods are, of course, restrictive in their own ways, and both readers relinquished complete adherence to their own rules after the periods in question. Both also maintained, however, that their reading habits were more open and varied after their readerly experiments than they had been before. Other bibliophiles set themselves more pointed challenges, like reading all of Proust during lockdown or responding to each of Emily Dickinson’s 1789 poems (from the Franklin variorum edition) online. Perhaps the most prominent rebellion against “best-of” reading, though, comes in the form of the counter list.

    Claiming to present “The Best Overlooked Books of 2019” or “The 13 Most Underrated Books of All Time,” counter lists seek to redress the presumed authority of yearly best-of lists and to expand our horizons beyond the already popular. They are, however, comparable to their more mainstream analogues in several key ways. Like year-end lists, they select and elevate specific titles. Also like year-end lists, they make an authoritative claim for quality, privileging not just books they identify as great, but books they claim are better than all the other great books. Counter lists thus fall into the same myopic trap: they claim objectivity and project a knowable universe of reading, where neither objectivity nor comprehensive knowledge exists.

    I’m not trying to suggest that best-of lists should be discarded, or even that we should shift our focus away from popular contemporary authors. We owe a certain responsibility, I think, to read work that is being produced now, to engage with our world and support living writers—especially writers from continually underrepresented backgrounds and marginalized groups. Best-of lists do, of course, bring attention to deserving new titles, and so have an important role to play. But a list, any list, is first and foremost a way to collect and categorize information, to make that information seem manageable, finite, knowable, known. Fortunately, if overwhelmingly, that just isn’t how the catalogue of 21st-century reading works.

    So, this year, I’ve started making my own lists, of books I want to read but also of new routes to discovery: talking to independent bookstore owners, and librarians, and friends; reading non-list articles; consulting catalogues from local small presses; seeking out books written in languages I’ve never read in translation before. I’ll be looking for books I can share with hundreds of thousands of other readers around the world, but also books few other people have read, books from two thousand years ago and books written this year, but from perspectives unlike my own. Best-of lists are fine, of course, but books are just so much cooler than “best.”

    Genevieve Zimantas is a writer and educator from Montreal whose poems and essays have appeared in journals across North America. She holds degrees from McGill University, Dalhousie University, and the University of Cambridge. In 2018, she was pleased to have been selected as the QWF’s poetry mentee and had the privilege of working with poet Peter Richardson. She now lives and reads in the United Kingdom.

    Photo credit: Lewis Weinberger

  • A Book Fair to Emulate by Connie Guzzo McParland

    A Book Fair to Emulate by Connie Guzzo McParland

    Più libri più liberi: more books, more freedom. Unlike Frankfurt, London, or Torino, Rome’s book fair has been designed for small- and medium-sized publishers. Big fairs like Frankfurt can be overwhelming for a small publisher. You do meet a lot more people there, but by the end of it, it’s all a haze. As the publisher of Guernica Editions, I participated last December in the Rome fair’s Fellowship Program, an opportunity for foreign publishers to strike deals with Italian publishers.

    What did I learn? Bigger isn’t necessarily more productive.

    In the outskirts of Rome, Più libri più liberi’s 400-plus exhibitors were packed in a maze-like configuration in the Palazzo dei Congressi—an imposing marble building on the aptly-named Viale Della Letteratura. What makes this fair unique may be the smaller, more manageable scale that renders it less intimidating and more accessible to small independent publishers, but public attendance is huge and so are book sales. Più libri più liberi, which has been organized by the Association of Italian Publishers since 2002, has become an important event in Italy and Europe, and it receives a lot of press and attention. Held every year just before the Christmas shopping spree, it attracts 50,000 attendees over five days. Besides the book exhibits, this year there were over 1,000 participants in various events, some televised, all well-attended: readings, launches, and discussions with Italian and foreign authors, including Quebec’s Dany Laferrière, who was a featured author. As in Canada, children’s books are of great interest, as well as crime fiction and graphic novels, but the full range of literary genres is represented in Rome.

    “Bigger isn’t necessarily more productive.”

    I was one of sixteen foreign participants in the fellowship program. Others came from the USA, UK, Israel, Portugal, Turkey, Latvia, Poland, and Greece. Because we were put up in the same hotel in the centre of Rome, we shuttled back and forth and lunched together. It was easy to connect and network with each other, and meetings with Italian publishers were also pre-arranged by the organizers.

    As stated, the aim of the program is to promote internationalization of the Italian publishing industry, but there are opportunities for Canadian publishers to promote their own authors. Many Canadian publishers may not know that Italians read a lot more foreign authors in translation than we do in North America.

    In the past, while browsing in Italian bookstores, I had noticed the proliferation of translated foreign authors, both classic and contemporary. As I visited the various book kiosks at the Rome fair, I also noticed the many publishers who specialize in translations of work from particular niche regions: the Slavic countries, Chile, etc., with Canada seemingly underrepresented. For sure, bestselling Canadian authors are pitched in the more prestigious fairs like Torino and Bologna, but I believe that there are as-yet untapped opportunities for interesting exchanges between smaller publishers.

    At Più libri più liberi, there are big players represented by medium-sized publishers, but giant houses like Feltrinelli, Mondadori or Rizzoli aren’t here to overshadow independent publishers. The exhibitors are all given the same space and importance. No one dominates the scene.

    I don’t believe there’s anything like it here in Canada, apart from the Salon du Livre de Montréal, which caters to French-language publications. Just consider what happened to the Inspire Book Fair experiment in Toronto. When the first edition closed and the big conglomerates failed to renew their participation for the following year, the organizers were forced to cancel.

    “I don’t believe there’s anything like it here in Canada.”

    So what event looks after the interest of independent English-language publishers in Canada?

    The Rome Book Fair is not Frankfurt, but it serves independent publishers well. It puts them and their authors at the forefront during the busiest book buying season of the year, and gives them an opportunity to interact with their foreign counterparts. Canadian publishers’ organizations should take notice. This fair is one to emulate.

    connieguzzomcparlandheadshotConnie Guzzo McParland has a BA in Italian Literature and a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from Concordia University. Her first novel, The Girls of Piazza d’Amore, published in 2013 by Linda Leith Publishing, was shortlisted for the Concordia First Novel Award by the Quebec Writers’ Federation. The sequel, The Women of Saturn, will be published by Inanna Publications in April 2017. Since 2010, she has been co-director and president of Guernica Editions. She lives in Montreal. www.conniemcparland.com

    Photo credits: Sara Cervelli (top banner); Anthony Branco (author’s headshot)

  • Don’t Blink by Marianne Ackerman

    Don’t Blink by Marianne Ackerman

    Choosing a book title and cover is a lot like naming a baby. Quite a few people tend to weigh in, so the process can be a serious source of anxiety. Yet somehow, once you settle, the choice seems obvious.

    In the case of my new short story collection, Mankind and Other Stories of Women, the title was spontaneous. The title story, “Mankind,” first saw the light of day last Christmas as a monologue directed by Harry Standjofski, performed by the wonderful Leni Parker at Centaur Theatre’s annual Urban Tales event. For Leni’s character, a lonely woman enduring Christmas Eve with her box of wine and chocolate, the word mankind is a euphemism for the scent of a man. It’s very much a woman’s story. So are the other nine, hence the title. I made a conscious effort to focus on women this time after my last collection, Holy Fools + 2 Stories (Guernica 2014), was full of male characters—puzzling, since I thought I’d won the struggle over the animus-domination of my imagination ages ago.

    The cover was not obvious. On a brief trip to Calgary in April, I discovered an amazing sculptor at the Trépanier Baer Gallery. Walking through the door, I was hit by the super elongated shape of a very thin, nearly naked corpse behind glass: Evan Penny’s Homage to Holbein, an eerie rendering in silicone and real hair of a Christ-like figure, almost fourteen feet long and chillingly life-like. My first thought was, this work belongs at the entrance to a church. It’s a religious experience.

    Days later, the images were still strong. Perusing the gallery website, I settled on Marsyas (Model), a twenty-four-inch high sculpture of a male torso, inspired by a Greek statue, which was part of the exhibition. Covers are traditionally the publisher’s domain, with input from the author. But I’ve known my publisher Mike Mirolla for a long time. I know he’s a dark soul. He loved the image immediately. Thus began the dance by which a raw visual idea and text become one.

    I could not explain why that image worked with my stories, which tend to be airy, urban, sometimes playful, and, some people say, funny. Maybe the figure’s vulnerability, resistance or air of fatalism speak to the tragic thread found in all comedy. As I revised the manuscript for publication, I found myself working him into the first story, “Mina,” which is about a friendship of rivalry and complicity between two women, their creative struggle, and one crazy night.

    mankind-final-cover

    “As I revised the manuscript for publication, I found myself working him into the first story…”

    After the normal back and forth, designer David Moratto’s concept was finalized. I slapped the cover up on Facebook, eagerly announcing my forthcoming fall book. It was mid-winter. The response was pretty well total negativity. Some of my dearest friends, smart people, said it was awful, scary, repellent. Nobody would touch this book!

    I was not prepared. I threw myself on the bed, lamenting once again my weakness for getting over-involved in practically everything. Now I’d have to face Mike and David with bad news, not to mention the gallerist, Yves Trépanier, and the artist, whose work I love.

    Mike did not share my panic attack, but held back. Yves did not. “Don’t listen to them! It’s a strong cover,” he barked via email. “You were right the first time. Don’t blink.”

    “The response was pretty well total negativity. Some of my dearest friends, smart people, said it was awful, scary, repellent. Nobody would touch this book!”

    Next to my control freakishness, impulsiveness is probably my greatest flaw. Here was somebody I respected telling me to trust my impulse. I looked at the cover again. At the other options I was trying to like. I asked Yves what his wife thought. He assured me she loved it. So I decided to take his advice, remain faithful to my first impulse. Well, except for a last-minute tussle over (ahem) how much “cleavage” should appear below my name. I did not want readers to be distracted by a dangling sack of flesh.

    Now that a stack of books is sitting on the dining room table, I can’t imagine a better cover than Evan Penny’s classy, classical all-too-human torso. I have no idea what readers will think, how it will affect their desire to pick up this book. But the baby isn’t mine any more. It is thoroughly herself.

    Mankind and Other Stories of Women will be launched along with three other local titles from Guernica Editions at Montreal’s Atwater Library (1200 Atwater Ave.) on Thursday, September 29, 6 p.m. The event is co-sponsored by the QWF. Click here for more information on the launch.

    ma-for-qwf-piece-sept-7

    Marianne Ackerman writes plays and novels. marianneackerman.com

    Photo credits: Photo of Evan Penny’s Marsyas Model (2016) courtesy of Evan Penny, and Kevin Baer – TrépanierBaer Gallery; Lesley McCubbin (headshot)

  • Literary Influences: E. L. Doctorow’s Lives of the Poets by John Goldbach

    Literary Influences: E. L. Doctorow’s Lives of the Poets by John Goldbach

    The first time I read E. L. Doctorow’s wonderful Lives of the Poets: A Novella and Six Stories (1984) was in early 2001, after picking up a used hardcover copy at City Lights Bookshop in London, Ontario, at 356 Richmond St. Not City Lights Bookstore, the famed bookstore in San Francisco, California, at 261 Columbus Ave—City Lights Bookshop (the one in London ON) is one of my favourite used bookstores ever, a small but dense and rich oasis of books and comics and records, etc.

    A few years later, after reading Slavoj Žižek’s Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (2004), I reread Lives of the Poets. Much to my surprise, Žižek references Doctorow’s collection in his second book about 9/11 and its aftermath (namely, the illogic of the Bush administration’s reasons for invading Iraq). I was surprised to learn Žižek uses Doctorow’s collection as a sort of model. Žižek writes,

    The hidden literary model for this book is what I consider E. L. Doctorow’s masterpiece, the supreme exercise in literary post-modernism, far superior to his bestselling Ragtime, or Billy Bathgate: his Lives of the Poets: Six Stories and a Novella—six totally heterogeneous short stories (a son is set to the task of concealing his father’s death; a drowned child is callously handled by rescuers; a lonely schoolteacher is shot by a hunter; a boy witnesses his mother’s act of infidelity; a car explosion kills a foreign schoolgirl) accompanied by a novella which conveys the confused impressions of the day-to-day life of a writer in contemporary New York who, as we soon guess, is the author of the six stories. The charm of the book is that we can reconstruct the process of the artistic working-through of the raw material of this day-to-day life.

    As soon as I’d finished Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, I reread Lives of the Poets, my engagement with the book deepening.

    I’ve read the Doctorow collection twice since then. About a decade later, in 2015, I used it as an oblique model for organizing a book of my own fiction, It Is an Honest Ghost, which consists of six stories and a novella (Hic et Ubique). There was something about how Doctorow’s stories stood alone—were “totally heterogeneous,” in Žižek’s words—but nevertheless informed one another, that I found haunting.

    My new collection was originally made up of eight stories and a novella but for myriad reasons I cut two stories, not the least of those reasons being for the sake of uniformity, a loose strange symmetry—a uniformity and symmetry impressed upon my mind by Doctorow.

    And then I read Lives of the Poets for a fourth time in July 2016, while working on this short appreciation. Lives of the Poets remains politically perspicacious, deeply insightful, and contemporary.

    Here’s Doctorow on US immigration, and mass migrations in general. The writer, the narrator of the novella, emerges from the NYC subway, and observes the new waves of immigrants to the city. He writes,

    Dear God, let them migrate, let my country be the last best hope. But let us make some distinctions here: The Irish, the Italians, the Jews of Eastern Europe, came here because they wanted a new life. They worked for the money to bring over their families. They said good riddance to the old country and were glad to be gone. They did not come here because of something we had done to them. The new immigrants are here because we have made their lands unlivable. They have come here to save themselves from us.

    Lives of the Poets continues to shed light on the present for me. Out of Doctorow’s impressive and celebrated oeuvre, it’s often overlooked. But it remains an insightful and inspiring collection, chock-a-block with strange echoes and resonances.

    KateHutchinson19webJohn Goldbach is the author of The Devil and the Detective (Coach Books, 2013), a novel, which was an Amazon Best Book of 2013; Selected Blackouts (Insomniac Press, 2009), a story collection; and, most recently, It Is an Honest Ghost (Coach House Books, 2016), a collection of six short stories and a novella (Hic et Ubique).

    Works Cited: Žižek, Slavoj. Iraq: the Borrowed Kettle. New York: Verso, 2004, p. 7.

    Photo: Kate Hutchinson (headshot)