QWF Writes

Tag: learning

  • Pushing Past the Fear of Writing Nonfiction—By Chanel M. Sutherland

    Pushing Past the Fear of Writing Nonfiction—By Chanel M. Sutherland

    The trees of St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

    If I’m being completely honest, writing nonfiction terrifies me. 

    But recently, I’ve felt compelled to write the truth.

    To write the stories that have shaped the trajectory of my life and—as if that wasn’t enough—have lodged themselves into my creative conscience, demanding to be told at all costs.

    It started with a single story, “Umbrella,” that I wrote out of pure exigency two years ago. 2020 was a heavy year for many reasons. The world became saturated with personal stories and confessions. Everywhere I turned—social media sites, the news, books, conversations with friends—people spoke out about their experiences with various kinds of discrimination and violence. 

    Suddenly, I found myself confronted by my own memories. They rose out of the trenches of my mind like shadows growing bolder in my darkest hours. They wanted to be written.

    Before, if you had asked anyone who knew me as a writer, they would have told you that my stories mainly deal with the unreal or unproven: futuristic robots, aliens walking around in human skin, scarecrows climbing down from their perch to seek revenge on those who impinge on their domains. This is the realm of storytelling where I feel most at home. One can argue that I write these stories to stay detached from real life.

    I had spent more than two decades circumnavigating my memories and deferring the day when I’d have to finally write about them. When they began to emerge unprompted, I knew my time had come. For the first time in a long while, I found myself turning away from speculative fiction to write something that made me uncomfortable. Nonfiction.

    “Umbrella” is the second nonfiction story I have ever written and the only piece I have shared with readers. Perhaps it is short and breathy for that reason. A panic attack on paper. When it won the 2021 CBC Nonfiction Prize, not only was I surprised, I was frantic. 

    Was I ready to expose myself in this way?

    The simple answer was no, but I’ve since learned that nothing is ever simple when it comes to writing. If it were, it would hardly be worth it.

    It became clear that nonfiction had chosen me, and I had no choice but to take the plunge and see it through. Once I decided to start curating a collection of stories based on my experience as a Black Caribbean immigrant child, I faced another difficult question.

    How much can I reveal about others in my stories?

    In this case, the “others” were primarily my family, and without their support, I knew that I would not be able to write the collection. There were no stories without them. My mother was the catalyst for many integral moments in my childhood. My grandparents the glue that fixed the pieces together in many ways—however imperfect. 

    I’ve always been a solitary writer. I prefer to be completely isolated when writing, and I usually avoid discussing any story until it is completed. With these stories, I knew there were people I needed to speak to and include from the start. 

    Not only was nonfiction changing my craft, but it was also now impeding on my process.

    Having that first conversation with my mom was one of the greatest moments we have shared. It was a warm autumn day; mom and I were meeting up for our weekly walk around the neighbourhood. I don’t recall how I broached the subject of writing the stories. Knowing myself, it would not have been direct.

    What I do remember is the excitement mom expressed in learning that I wanted to do this. She answered any questions I had, voluntarily filled in gaps in my recollection, and even offered to help with the research. Her reaction trickled down to my sisters and aunts, and before I knew it, everyone else was on board.

    I will forever cherish a messaging thread between mom, my sisters, aunts, and me. We were trying to remember the name of a tree native to St. Vincent and the Grenadines. We all knew it by a different name and had our own tales about it, but no one could figure out its one true name.

    This tree became the emblem of my nonfiction endeavor. A thing from my family’s collective past that—though still elusive—we are learning more about each day from one another. 

    As I continue to research and write these nonfiction stories, there is a certain sense of unshackling from the past. And while I begin to see who I am today refracting from each new piece, I am also illuminated by another light: that of my family. 

    So, maybe being terrified of writing nonfiction is not such a bad thing after all.

    Chanel M. Sutherland is the winner of the 2021 CBC Nonfiction Prize for her story “Umbrella” and the recipient of the 2022 Mairuth Sarsfield Mentorship, a component of the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s Fresh Pages initiative. Born in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Chanel moved to Montreal, Quebec when she was ten years old. She holds a BA in English Literature from Concordia University, and is currently writing her first book, a collection of short stories that explore the Black Caribbean immigrant experience. csuther.com

    Photos: Lyn Gateley via flickr; Chanel M. Sutherland (headshot)

  • I Thought I Was Writing a Potboiler—By Robyn Sarah

    I Thought I Was Writing a Potboiler—By Robyn Sarah

    Robyn Sarah, age eight. (Photo courtesy of author)

    I’m a literary writer to the bone: nothing I’ve written has ever paid enough to keep food on the table for long. But in 2009, during a spell when my muse for poetry and fiction seemed to have gone AWOL, I had the idea to write a short personal narrative, a book I could finish quickly and get published quickly. A potboiler, so to speak—not in the commercial sense, but to reassure myself that I was still a writer. It would be a story about returning to study piano at the age of fifty-nine, after a thirty-five-year lapse, culminating (hopefully) in a modest recital on my sixtieth birthday. A debut at sixty! I had never performed on piano as a teen or young adult. Of course, I would have to live this story before I could tell it. One year of goal-oriented piano lessons, during which I would track my progress in a journal; then a few months to turn the field notes into a book.

    Ten years later, the manuscript still wasn’t finished. And it wasn’t short.  A two-year purgatory of editing and revising had yet to begin. Music, Late and Soon was finally published in August 2021. Only vaguely does it resemble the book I thought I was going to write. What happened? How did I lose control over the best-defined, most straightforward writing project I had ever conceived? 

    The key may be in that term, “writing project.” Poetry is my primary genre, and while some poets do conceive poetry collections around a premeditated subject, I’m not one of them; my poems have always been composed individually, to be gathered later into collections. Even individual poems tend to begin without a clear subject in mind, but rather with some observation of the moment—an image, a feeling, a memory fragment, maybe just a phrase I like the sound of. My short stories begin similarly; there’s never much plot or a clear idea of where I’m going. This makes for some anxiety while writing, but it’s my natural process as a writer.

    When I contacted my old piano teacher (then in his eighties) and outlined my project, asking if he might be willing to give me some guidance, he wondered why I was fixated on the idea of performing, especially on a schedule. “Why not just start working again, and see where it leads? Playing the piano is like any art form, any creative process. It can’t be forced, it doesn’t work by deadline.”

    In retrospect, he had answered my “What happened?” question before it could need to be asked—had I really been listening. Wasn’t I listening? I thought I was. I thought he was saying something I already understood as a writer. But I didn’t think what he was saying applied to the book I had in mind. This book was going to be different. It was going to be easy—a straight line from here to there. The return to lessons, the year of preparation, the recital, The End.

    But wait. A “return” to lessons implied a past. Why had I stopped studying piano? Why was I now fixated on the idea of performing? Moment of truth: I might need to provide a bit of backstory if I expected to interest a reader in my late-life musical venture. I did, in fact, have some experience of musical performance; the trouble was, it wasn’t on piano. For a decade I had studied clarinet in a professional music school, aspiring to a career as an orchestral musician. I had graduated, but had not pursued that path. Nor had I ever really looked back or asked myself why.

    Robyn Sarah, circa 1972.
    (Photo courtesy of author)

    Obviously this wasn’t the time or place to get into all that: it would just complicate the main story. Sticking to my plan, I began studying piano again, keeping detailed notes on the lessons. In tandem, I wrote some reminiscences of childhood: earliest memories surrounding the piano, early lessons with three different teachers before I came to study with the mentor I’d just reconnected with. I drafted a first chapter based on this material—a summary that, I thought, adequately contextualized where I was coming from. It glossed over my music school years on clarinet, allotting them a passing mention but keeping the focus on piano.

    Next moment of truth. I read the chapter aloud to a friend I’d known since high school, who had studied piano with the same teacher-mentor and was now a professional pianist and educator. After listening affably, expectantly, to the end, he was silent a moment, then blunt. “So, what’s the purpose here? I’m not getting a sense of why I should care about all this. And how could you leave out your ten years as a clarinetist?”

    “I didn’t! They’re there.” I pointed to the relevant paragraph. 

    “What, that’s it? Are you telling a story, or writing a CV? Those years were a fundamental part of your musical history! You aren’t being honest with the reader here. This isn’t you. I’m not hearing your real voice, because you’re not telling your real story.”

    My heart sank, because I recognized immediately that he was right. The bottom had just dropped out of my “project.” But once I accepted that, the book suddenly came to life. I realized I did have a story to tell—a buried one, on which the significance of the current one depended. I was going to have to delve into that unexamined past and make some sense of it, find out how it connected to my present moment. There were mysteries to explore here…

    I began asking myself questions: one led to another. I dug up and pored over surviving journals and letters from my high school and music school years. Present self and past selves collided and seemed to have things to say to each other. The pianist and the clarinetist had things to say to each other. The writer and the musician had things to say to each other. They all had questions of their own about creative process: what nurtures it, what can get in the way of it?

    A familiar anxiety swept over me as I realized that my “potboiler” was morphing from a brief narrative with a one-year time frame into a musical autobiography spanning my whole life. How was I going to weave all these strands into something coherent and beautiful that I sensed could be made of them, the way a composer weaves together multiple voice-lines in contrapuntal music? A familiar excitement tempered the anxiety, giving me the patience to spend ten years finding out.

    A Biblioasis Interview with Robyn Sarah

    Robyn Sarah reads her poem “Station”, from her Selected Poems, Wherever We Mean to Be (Biblioasis, 2017).

    “The book’s title is taken from this poem. I chose it because it expresses something that runs through all my poetry: a fascination with the way past and future, memory and intention, inhabit our present moment.”

    Spotlight on Wherever We Mean to Be by Robyn Sarah

    Photo by Stephen Brockwell

    Robyn Sarah is a Montreal poet and writer whose 2015 poetry collection, My Shoes Are Killing Me, won the Governor General’s Award for that year. Her “potboiler” was short listed for last year’s Mavis Gallant Prize for nonfiction.

  • Writing to Perform, and Performing to Write—By Deb Vanslet

    Writing to Perform, and Performing to Write—By Deb Vanslet

    I always go back and forth between telling and writing when I create a story. Below is an audio file and a transcript of that process.

    I write a story by telling a story. I started to call myself a writer when I was around fifty. But in the late 1980s and 1990s, I was a video artist, performing stories for the camera. I discovered a Video 8 camera in a university art class. It was small, easy to handle, tape was afforable, but mostly, I was kind of amazed that the teacher thought that it was a great idea for me to just talk into the camera, confessional-style—it was a genre.

    So I go for it: telling unrehearsed stories about dead pigeons, barking dogs, late night TV, bus trips across the country, and the insanity of Botox, pet hotels, and plastic surgery. Nothing is ever resolved, there’s not much reflection, and I don’t really know what I’m doing.  But that’s part of the magic: it’s a first, and it’s fun, and so unselfconscious. I’m telling stories like hardly anyone is listening, or watching. The finished video, Sick World, is a modest hit at film festivals. I’m still surprised. I make more videos, but now I know that people are watching.

    The last time I told a story on video was in 1996. Sick World 3: the baby. It’s about my girlfriend and me having a baby with a gay sperm donor friend. It’s an unusual story, and it’s even more unusual to talk about it, even though lesbians became very hip in the mid-nineties—the cover of Newsweek, the Ellen show! We got a lot of publicity for being so out about having a child this way. My story practically wrote itself. Practically.

    In 2012, an incredible story unfolds in my life. My aunt Christine dies in the hospital of blood poisoning, a few days after cutting herself on a beer bottle in her small apartment. I’d been close to her as a kid, but she’d been gone most of my adult life, struggling with mental health and addictions.

    When she finally reappeared she’d kicked heroin, but she was never able to really function again.

    Christine’s final year was brutal. She fell three times in her apartment breaking her wrist, her hip, and finally her ankle. Six days after my aunt dies, I get a message from a man looking for a Christine Vanslet. I don’t even have to think about this. I knew right away. This was the son that she had give up for adoption.

    I tell everyone the story. The synchronicity is incredible. 

    People are rapt. 

    “Write it down! You have to share it.”

    I know it’s a special story, especially the ending. But so what? Lots of people have incredible stories. And, I’m not really a writer. I just have a beginning, and an ending. What do I put in between? Stories, as I learned over the years, don’t really write themselves.

    I spot a storytelling workshop with Taylor Tower at the QWF, and she introduces me to Confabulation, Monreal’s monthly live storytelling event. This changes everything.

    I start writing to perform, and performing to write. Working between the two genres is an excercise in finding my voice. My middle-aged voice, maybe I should say my mature voice, even if that’s cliché. I didn’t learn much about putting a story together in the early performance videos; I learned about getting comfortable, becoming acquainted even, with my face, my body, the sound of my voice, and then, of being able to separate myself from that person on the screen. 

    Writing for performance is different than writing for page but it also really informs how I write for the page. My voice is stronger, the writing is looser, playful, more conversational. More me. I can’t get to me just by writing it down. I have to perform it first. 

    Deb Vanslet is a media artist, videographer, and writer. Her independent videos, including Sick World, Weather Permitting, and Rules of the Road, explore storytelling, performance, and dance. For sixteen years Deb produced and hosted Dykes on Mykes, at CKUT 90.3 FM. Deb is a producer at Confabulation, Montreal’s live storytelling show. She also produces and hosts the Confabulation podcast. She won the 2015 3Macs carte blanche QWF prize for her short story Self-Serve, and published Ghost Station in the Queer Perspectives edition of The Malahat Review. Deb is the production coordinator at Ada-X, a feminist artist-run centre.

    Photo credit: Liz Miller (headshot)

  • The Art of Embarrassing Oneself at Public Readings—By Renée Cohen

    The Art of Embarrassing Oneself at Public Readings—By Renée Cohen

    Giving public readings is crucial to establishing oneself as an emerging writer. After attending a diverse array of Quebec Writers’ Federation (QWF) workshops—from food and travel writing to literary fiction—it became clear that regardless of the writing genre, workshop leaders often proffered those same words of advice. For years, I avoided ‘open mic’ nights. I slid under the table when called upon to read. In my defense, I am not alone in the belief that any form of public speaking is nightmare-inducing—regardless of the circumstances. Introverted, I’d always hoped that becoming a writer would require less speaking and more silent solitude.

    *Embarrassment and Bloating Cartoon R. CohenUnlike the act of writing, which allows for the deletion of words before they’re read, speaking before a live audience isn’t as forgiving. There’s no delete button one can press to make oneself disappear.

    So, uncharacteristically, when one of my flash fiction pieces was recently published in the My Island, My City chapbook, I accepted the invitation to read it at a gala. Since proceeds from the event would benefit the QWF’s Writers in the Community program, I reasoned that service to the cause was far more important than my own aversion to public speaking.

    As I was about to leave the house on the night of the gala, my face suddenly bloated like a pufferfish, my neck erupted in itchy hives, and my nose bled. Apparently, my anxiety about the reading was manifesting itself physically.

    “How can you be nervous? It’s a flash fiction story that will take you forty-eight seconds to read!” my partner said after I’d gently dissuaded him from joining me. Why was I so nervous? I was honored to be involved in the charitable event!

    Then, when a roadblock prevented my cab driver from turning on de Maisonneuve Boulevard, he stopped the car. “Walk from here!” he firmly suggested. Too anxiety-ridden to protest, I passively agreed. The moment I exited the vehicle, a freak snowstorm hit. Within seconds, my freshly-coiffed hair was drenched.

    Along the closed street, massive pieces of concrete lay strewn about. People loitered, examining the detritus.

    Inspired by the scene, I compiled mental notes for a future work of fiction.

    I then realized that my imagination was partially to blame for my current state of anxiety—If not for my vivid imagination, I wouldn’t be compelled to write. If I didn’t write, I wouldn’t have to worry about giving public readings.

    After wiping a snowflake from my eye, I discovered that my black mascara and eyeliner were not as waterproof as advertised.

    Looking like a wet raccoon, I cut through Westmount Park, which was eerily desolate save for a lone teenaged boy smoking under a snow-covered gazebo.

    I paused briefly to scratch my hives.

    I reflected upon traumatic incidents from my past that contributed to my fear of appearing before an audience: during a figure skating competition in my teens, someone clapped after I completed a movement that was undeserving of applause. I scanned the audience, only to discover the culprit was my father. Distracted by his misplaced burst of applause, I fell. (Needless to say, I didn’t win that competition). From then on, I dissuaded (nay, banned) family members from attending any competitions or events that required me to appear in front of an audience. That longstanding ban has carried over to include my partner and friends.

    When a recipe of mine was included in a cookbook, I was invited to prepare it on live TV during a pledge drive to benefit public television. Nervous during the shoot, I momentarily lost my ability to speak and instead, flapped my arms in a futile attempt to generate words.

    Finally, I arrived at the gala venue. Soaking wet, freezing, hive-covered, my makeup smeared, my face bloated, and blood caking in my nose. While attempting to compose myself in the foyer of the church hall, I was shocked to see one of my friends enter the building. “Surprise!” she squealed upon seeing me. Moments later, another good friend showed up unexpectedly. Both explained that upon seeing my name in the ad, they’d reserved tickets to support me (and the cause)!

    Chatting with them, I gradually felt my fear dissipate. Believing that friends and family were stress-inducing distractions had been a mistake. The opposite was true! Their supportive presence was comforting.

    After my reading, I returned to sit with my friends in the audience, relieved that I hadn’t thoroughly embarrassed myself. Courtesy of the resulting adrenalin rush, I contemplated the advice of my writing mentors. I decided I would bravely endeavor to give public readings in the hopes of becoming an emerging writer.

    My thoughts were interrupted when one of my friends gently tugged on my sleeve.

    “Did you know that your sweater is on inside out?” she giggled.

    Pic. Cohen_Y. PelletierRenée Cohen is a freelance writer for numerous international charitable organizations. Her personal essays, prose, and flash fiction have appeared in Accenti Magazine, Prairie Fire, Litro UK, The Globe and Mail, the Montreal Gazette, Reader’s Digest, Zvona i Nari’s ZiN Daily, Croatia, and in numerous volumes of the Canadian Authors Association anthologies, in the My Island, My City chapbook, and elsewhere. Her artwork has been exhibited in group and solo shows and featured in Montreal Writes Literary Magazine, Headlight 22, 3Elements Review, Spadina Literary Review, Flash Frontier New Zealand, and Sonic Boom Journal (India). She recently won The Fieldstone Review’s Banner Art Competition.

    Photo credits: Renée Cohen (header image); Y. Pelletier (headshot)

  • The Circle of Mentorship—By Shelagh Plunkett

    The Circle of Mentorship—By Shelagh Plunkett

    Linda Kay—author, journalist and teacher—died last October. In 2006 she was assigned to mentor me by the Quebec Writers’ Federation, and in the twelve years that followed became a great friend as well as remaining a generous-hearted and gracious advisor. In the months since she died, during the hundreds of times I’ve missed being able to email or call her, I’ve thought often about what I’ve lost without her in my life and what I learned from having her in it. Perhaps most importantly, Linda showed me how essential mentorship is for a writer.

    Linda Kay
    Linda Kay

    Linda’s achievements as a writer and teacher were impressive (including no less than a Pulitzer won as part of a team early in her career), but recording them here would leave nothing more than a superficial sketch that failed to convey who she was. Similarly, outlining the empty space that her death has opened in my life would leave a hollow impression of our friendship. I’m left wanting to convey one of the most important things I learned from Linda: that mentorship is essential for a writer.

    When I moved to Montreal, I joined the QWF to meet writers. I applied to the mentorship program and was introduced to Linda. The first time we met she brought the essay I’d submitted with my application—a short piece about growing up in Guyana, in South America. “Send this in to the CBC Literary contest,” she urged me.

    I’d written it in a flurry of frustration one afternoon. It was the sort of writing I wanted to do but was unlike anything I’d ever tried, because it was not the kind of piece my freelance clients were interested in publishing. I didn’t know if the piece was good or bad, but I’d had fun writing it. Linda was adamant, so I took her advice.

    She was right; the essay won the CBC Literary Award for creative non-fiction. Linda told me my life would change, and it did. With that award to reflect on and with her encouragement, I began to think I could write more than just simple news pieces, arts profiles, or lifestyle columns. I began to think I might have the chops to string a few words together that might have a deeper purpose, that might offer something more to a reader than a few minutes of entertainment. Linda suggested I approach publishers. “They’ll pay attention to you now,” she said. She was right. Penguin signed a contract with me and my memoir of adolescence overseas—born out of the essay I’d written—was published in 2013.

    In the years that followed, Linda continued to inspire me to take the work of writing seriously, because that’s what she did. She applied all her skill, insight, and effort to everything she did, from writing to teaching to friendship; to every assignment, be it a book or a short piece for Costco Connections. Ultimately, what we try to do as writers is communicate. Linda showed me that without giving one’s full passion, focus, and commitment, communication isn’t worth the effort.

    Linda didn’t tell me she was sick until quite close to her death, but in her last months we wrote often and our conversations continued to ramble around writing, family, new and old loves, life. She remained as she’d always been, even in our last correspondence, an email sent less than a week before her death from her hospital bed. Linda wrote that she’d passed on my name and the title of my book to a Guyanese intern she’d met, encouraging the woman to seek out my writing. Right to the end, Linda remained a supporter and mentor.

    It is not an exaggeration to say I would not be a published author, and would not be writing still, if not for Linda. And now, things have circled back for me: I’ve been hired by the QWF to fill the role for someone else that Linda did for me when we first met. As I key these words, I am embarking on three months of mentoring a promising writer in our community. Though I miss Linda immensely and often, I’ve not lost the gifts she was lavish in bestowing. I will turn to my memories of Linda now and into the future, knowing that by doing so I’ll be motivated to achieve much more than I imagine myself capable of. More significantly, her memory will inspire me to pass on to my mentee what Linda gave me as a mentor.

    ShelaghPlunkett_photocredit-NiamhMalcolmShelagh Plunkett is a past winner of the CBC Literary Prize for creative non-fiction. In 2013 her memoir, The Water Here is Never Blue, an extension of her winning essay, was published by Penguin Canada. It was shortlisted for both the QWF Mavis Gallant Prize for Nonfiction and the QWF Concordia University First Book Prize. Shelagh now lives in Montreal, where she is at work on too many projects. Her past hometowns have included Georgetown, Guyana; Kupang, Timor; Vancouver, Victoria, and Toronto; Ricón-de-la-Victoria, Spain; and Salt Spring Island.

    Photo credits: Flickr (header banner), Courtesy of Emily Kay-Rivest (photo of Linda Kay), Niamh Malcolm (headshot of Shelagh Plunkett)

  • Coming to My Senses: The Healing Properties of Fiction—By April Ford

    Coming to My Senses: The Healing Properties of Fiction—By April Ford

    It was the start of my second year in the undergraduate creative writing program at Concordia University, and I was feeling refreshed. Ready to take my craft by the horns. I had spent the summer purging myself of all the problems my first-year fiction instructor had pointed out in my work: my habit of making characters fall in love in springtime and out of love in a post-New Year, Montreal-style winter; naming all secondary male characters “Adam,” and imbuing these Adams with vaguely biblical qualities; etc.

    I had built up stamina over the summer, so imagine my delight when my second-year fiction instructor, an accomplished and quirky visiting writer named Peter Such, told the class we would each write 60 pages of a novel under his mentorship. He dictated no rules or structure, and I churned it all out in the first month. I really wanted to impress him. One day after class, Peter asked me to stay behind. Naturally, I was hoping he would say something positive about my work (I’ve sent your 60 pages to every literary agent in North America!). He did, he said I was exactly where I was supposed to be, and then he posed a question whose answer was so shockingly obvious that I felt embarrassed for not having come to it on my own, especially after my summer of intense writing practice:

    “April, why do none of your characters ever experience taste or smell?”

    The truth is, I haven’t experienced a new flavor or odour since December 12, 1995, the day I ran across an intersection at the same time as a motorist sped through the yellow light. It didn’t end optimally for me, as you can imagine, but after five months in hospital and rehabilitative care, I found my footing and moved on—without the trusted companionship of my gustatory and olfactory senses. And while I had focused, post-accident, on all the real-life ways this loss affected me (I was now susceptible to food that was “off” enough to make me violently ill, for example), I hadn’t begun to tap into the ways my unconsciousness—the writer’s dreamscape—was also being affected.

    “The truth is, I haven’t experienced a new flavor or odour since December 12, 1995, the day I ran across an intersection at the same time as a motorist sped through the yellow light.”

    When we write fiction, we empower our characters with human qualities. Often, this isn’t a difficult task; by impulse so subtle it’s more like instinct, we continuously assign our own sensory experiences to our characters, whether it’s because we haven’t yet learned enough about a developing character to know what his/her/their/its individual experience is like, or because we’ve been so marked by a particular sensation that we’re compelled to write about it until we get it right. In my case, my reaction to Peter’s question was the beginning of my understanding of how experience—and lack thereof—shapes whom and what we create in fiction. “How can I write about a lover’s scent if I can’t smell? Maybe it’s totally foul! How in hell would I know?”

    “By impulse so subtle it’s more like instinct, we continuously assign our own sensory experiences to our characters.”

    I was pissed at my instructor. It wasn’t because I’d been covering up my still relatively new deficit; it was because Peter had, very kindly, presented me with a writing challenge that I had internalized as a handicap. So many of the aftereffects from the car accident were and always would be preventing me from doing certain things (like driving a car, due to my loss of peripheral vision in both eyes), and I had imported that resignation into my writing.

    When I complained about not being able to describe things I hadn’t experienced (and isn’t this every writer’s Achilles’ heel?), Peter said, “Then describe the things you know.” When I claimed that all I knew was boring, he said, “Then make it interesting. It’s your job, after all. This is what being a writer is about.” Finally, I got over myself. Finally, I heard what Peter was saying: My “deficits” were also assets, constant reminders that just because we cannot experience something in this realm, it doesn’t mean we’re off the hook in terms of finding ways for our readers to experience it in that place of dream we go to when we settle in with a book we love. I wrote my first novel that year. It was gaudy and embarrassing the way our earliest works often are, and it’s one of the reasons I’ve kept writing.

    AprilFordApril Ford’s fiction has appeared in Grain, New Madrid, SAND, Atticus Review, and elsewhere. Her story “Project Fumarase” is featured in the 2016 Pushcart Prize anthology. Her debut story collection, The Poor Children, was released worldwide in 2015 by SFWP, and her debut novel, Carousel, is forthcoming in 2019 with Inanna Publications. April has spent time at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts as a Robert Johnson Fellow, and at Ucross Foundation as a Writer in Residence. She lives in Montreal and is Associate Publisher of SFK Press in Atlanta, Georgia. www.aprilfordauthor.com

    Photo credits: Flickr (top banner); Antonella Fratino (headshot)

  • What Playing Piano Taught Me About Writing-by Carly Rosalie Vandergriendt

    What Playing Piano Taught Me About Writing-by Carly Rosalie Vandergriendt

    The movers cost about as much as the piano. When they pulled up in front of our house on a muggy day last August, I understood why. Cars darted around the delivery truck as two men coaxed the swaddled instrument down a ramp and onto a dolly. They worked swiftly. Soon, the piano was being ushered up the walkway to our home. I stepped out of the way.

    “Who plays?” asked the first mover, in a thick eastern European accent. “You or him?” He nodded at my partner, who was standing on our front porch with a mystified look on his face.

    “Both of us,” I said. It was both true and untrue. My partner, a musician, could play the piano. You wouldn’t find him fleshing out a riff on one, though, as he often did on guitar. As for me, I’d played as a child and into my late teens. But the only keys I’d graced as of late were the ones on my MacBook.

    The movers hoisted the piano up our front steps. I hovered while they deliberated removing our front door. My partner hurried away to procure the necessary tools. Then the men decided they wouldn’t remove the door. When my partner reappeared, the piano was crossing the threshold.

    “You play Bach?” the first mover called to me as he disappeared inside the house.

    “Ten years ago I did,” I said. Piano still felt like a first love, cast off with the arrival of adulthood. During my time at university, the digital piano I’d optimistically bought and shuffled from one apartment to another had all but gathered dust. Eventually, I had resigned myself to reality and sold it off.

    Now, I was keenly aware of the privilege of owning a piano, especially in the city, where space, soundproofing, and noise-tolerant neighbours are limited. My partner and I had just moved into an apartment that felt like a real home—another privilege. Fortuitously, that home also happened to be on the ground floor.

    With the piano stationed in our living room, the movers left as quickly as they’d arrived. I stared at the instrument with both awe and unease. It had been my partner’s idea: something for both of us. Privately, I had reservations. Where would I find the time? Could I even still play? Would this piano, like its abandoned digital cousin, become a symbol of the person I wanted to be, instead of the person I actually was?

    “Would this piano, like its abandoned digital cousin, become a symbol of the person I wanted to be, instead of the person I actually was?”

    I spend a lot of time thinking about the person I want to be. I may call myself a writer, but without a published book, I don’t always feel like one. I may have a string of small-time successes, but those publications are also reminders of the frustrating slowness of the writing process. Patience is a virtue when it takes years to go from an idea to a polished manuscript to a published story.

    “I spend a lot of time thinking about the person I want to be. I may call myself a writer, but without a published book, I don’t always feel like one.”

    The piano arrived during a transition period. The move meant more financial responsibility, and as a freelancer, I quelled my anxiety by taking on a full-time contract in addition to my regular workload. Suddenly, I was juggling clients and rising at an unspeakable hour, hoping to squeeze in some writing. Most of the time, I was barely managing my inbox. I thought constantly about my stalled manuscript, and envisioned its completion date slipping farther and farther into the future.

    Playing music, I soon remembered, was exhilarating. My fingers settled back into the waltzes and études I hadn’t played in years. I had never been a technically oriented player; now, the mistakes I made mattered little, if at all. There was nothing to prove and no one to prove it to. The joy of playing was enough.

    As busy as I was, piano felt like a reprieve instead of an obligation. Sometimes, just seeing the piano—the fact that it took up a quarter of our living room made it hard to miss—was enough to make me stop whatever I was doing, sit down, and play. Why, I wondered, couldn’t writing be that easy?

    “Sometimes, just seeing the piano… was enough to make me stop whatever I was doing, sit down, and play. Why, I wondered, couldn’t writing be that easy?”

    As summer turned into fall and fall into winter, I kept juggling work commitments. Yet, I knew it wouldn’t be like this forever. A few months of industriousness meant I was in a position to be more selective in the months to come.

    Meanwhile, I’d learned a new song on the piano. I hadn’t told myself I would learn anything; I’d simply made a habit of sitting down on the bench. My new musical practice served as a reminder that it is the act itself, not the end result, that counts. As the year wound down, I kept thinking about my manuscript but I stopped agonizing over when it might be finished. All I can do is keep writing when I can. That is enough.

    CRV_HeadshotCarly Rosalie Vandergriendt is a Montreal-based writer and translator whose work has appeared in Prairie Fire, Matrix, The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, Room, PRISM International,and elsewhere. Her story “Resurfacing” was recently shortlisted for the Carter V. Cooper Short Fiction Prize. Carly is a recent graduate of the University of British Columbia’s Optional-Residency Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program, and is currently working on a short story collection titled Playing the Man. Visit her at carlyrosalie.com or follow her @carlyrosalie.

    Photo credits: Simon-Pierre Lacasse

  • ‘Been good, time to be bad’ by Richard Andrews

    ‘Been good, time to be bad’ by Richard Andrews

    Divorce, surviving a mass shooting, discovery of cancer at 24, and a walk on the wild side in California. Students enrolled in my Magazine Writing course often want to learn more than catchy leads, pitching stories, dealing with grumpy editors, and the Inverted Pyramid. They’re turning to writing as a form of therapy, closure, or a way to chart a life transition.

    Many participants are going through divorce, coming out, bored with their jobs, looking for purpose, or seeking validation of unconventional choices. Passive voice does not come up as a writing issue in these cases.

    One of our warm-up exercises is a version of that job-interview chestnut: Describe a difficult situation. How did you respond? What did you learn? However, the answers are rarely what you’d expect in an interview.

    When I first tried that exercise, I thought a failed recipe or a forgotten anniversary would be the limit of a student’s openness to a room full of strangers. But it turns out that the process of writing somehow gives people the license to share their most intimate feelings and personal experiences.

    “They’re turning to writing as a form of therapy, closure, or a way to chart a life transition.”

    In her piece, Camille* wrote the most moving opening line I’ve ever read: “Mom, I have fucking cancer. I’m a jobless, degreeless, broke 24-year-old that’s going nowhere in life.”

    Camille developed that lede into an article published by the Huffington Post, along with some of her unusual tips to other cancer survivors. Her responses to falling ill included throwing dishes,exploiting her boyfriend’s pity to get a Prince Charles Spaniel, and showing her scar to a club doorman to get in for free. “Go shopping, rock it with a Hermes scarf for your hair loss,” she advised. “And stay true to your emotions. Don’t cover them up.”

    Camille emailed me recently with the latest chapter of her life. Four years on she has things under control and is living happily with her boyfriend, a new baby, and the dog. Less happy was Ingrid, a survivor of the 2011 massacre by a right-wing extremist that left 77 Norwegians dead, including dozens of teenagers at a summer camp. Ingrid escaped death by hiding behind a boulder but left Norway for Canada to put distance between herself and the tragedy. Her writing revealed a young woman trying to deal with the apparent meaninglessness of life, after a horrific experience and the loss of friends.

    When she joined the class she wrote she was at Stage Five of Grieving (acceptance). However, I’m not sure how much meaning she finds in reports that the convicted shooter recently won a human rights case against the Norwegian government about his prison conditions. (He had previously complained that his PlayStation was outdated.)

    Nicole, on the other hand, had no illusions about the meaning of life: it was to blast her husband, who’d left for a younger woman. Despite gentle suggestions that other topics were worth writing about, Nicole shared reports each class about the weight gain and balding of her ex, plus the styling challenges of his mistress.

    Other class writings have included an account by one student who woke up at the minority end of a complex threesome after a wild party. Another wrote of baking hash brownies, forgetting them on the kitchen table, and coming home to find her peckish parents “stoned out of their tree.”

    Sometimes a class exercise changes lives, and here I credit Hemingway’s creation of the Six-Word Story. His ‘saddest short story in the world’ (For sale: baby shoes, never worn) reputedly won him a bar bet and spawned dozens of websites devoted to flash fiction.

    “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

    I use the Six-Word Autobiography as a variation on the original concept for an exercise on writing headings. It can produce some telling results when people try to summarize the main theme of their life into a bumper sticker.

    There’s regret (Found true love, married someone else), contentment (Painful nerd kid, happy nerd adult), the search for meaning (Tried it all, but still looking), or resignation (Turning into Mom without being one).

    Some months after the end of one course I received an email from Pamela saying the six-word exercise had made her sit down for the first time in years to think about what she was doing and where she was going.

    “When I saw what came out on the page, I decided to leave my life in Montreal and move to California,” she wrote, leaving most details to my imagination.

    Pamela, if you’re reading this, I hope you’re still writing. Please send me your latest chapter and let me know what happens when your story is:

    Been good, time to be bad.

    richard-seville

    Richard Andrews is a freelance journalist who teaches Magazine Writing at McGill University. ric_andrews@hotmail.com

    *All names have been changed

    Photo credit: FlickR

  • Saying Yes by Monique Polak

    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…)