QWF Writes

Tag: memoir

  • Changing the Scenery to Refresh Your Writing—By Kate Hammer

    Changing the Scenery to Refresh Your Writing—By Kate Hammer

    There’s a bit of writing advice that I receive a lot: treat writing like your full-time job, sit down at the same time and place everyday, train your brain to be creative. I’ve heard it again and again, because it works. 

    For others, I’m assuming. 

    I’ve never been able to hold down a routine. Consistency makes my skin crawl, so I’ve had to find another way to inspire creativity and meet deadlines. By changing where you write, you change the way you write: it becomes varied, rooted in distinct experiences, and tonally original. And when was the last time you complained about writing too dynamically?

    Being in a different place can help our stories feel easier, inspire us to notice more, and make returning to our writing place a whole new experience. It can be as small as changing the direction of your desk, or as big as a weekend away without a whisper of internet connection. Or, you can uproot your entire life and move across an ocean.

    At the end of 2020, I moved to Scotland for a writing Master’s. I’d lived in Montreal for a few years, the longest I’d settled down anywhere for a decade, and was starting to get the itch. I was aware moving in the middle of a pandemic wouldn’t be easy, but I also knew it was the challenge I needed. Not only did I instantly become an outsider, but all the habits I’d labeled as normal in myself became something to scrutinize, something of interest.

    Without meaning to, we put our surroundings into everything we write. Maybe the sun is shining, you’ve just had an argument, or you’ve been given an eclectic mug that you know the protagonist of your story would also have; we are sponges that ooze plot. Now, I’m not trying to convince anyone to move halfway across the world like I did, but I am trying to inspire you to get out of your comfort zone. 

    Perhaps it is sitting outside, acting like a tourist in your own city, or treating yourself to a cafe that you’d normally walk past. It can be directly useful, such as visiting the same city as your character, or discovering a hobby by chance that you never thought they’d be into. 

    As soon as I landed in the UK, I knew my brain was aware in a whole new way, and I have the journal entries to prove it. From the roads never being wide enough for two cars, to the public walking paths taking you through fields of sheep who think you have food and charge towards you with impressive speed. I was learning again how I react under pressure; meeting new types of people with traits that could easily be given to characters; feeling the familiar stress of not immediately belonging.

    Putting ourselves in different environments makes us think differently about our stories, and our characters. As much as you know them on paper, knowing what they’d notice in an all-night pharmacy at 1 a.m., or who else would be there, is another matter entirely. You’re reconnecting with your world, and observing the behaviours of strangers as they unknowingly walk through your homework. Those real character actions aren’t something you can buy with money, only with your time. 

    It can take a lot of energy, to suddenly be aware of what’s around you again, or to take on new places, but alongside a healthy relationship with discomfort comes a balanced connection with rejection. As writers with a list of submission dates, we need to practice resilience against the vulnerability and fear of the job.

    The best part of switching up your space, however, is coming back home. Whenever I return to Canada, to my family farm, to my writing desk, I see everything all over again. Not as if for the first time, but I notice different things, items I’ve forgotten to look for. It’s that nostalgia of returning somewhere that makes you comfortable. I guarantee you’d describe your living room in a whole new way if you went a few days without seeing its walls, its stained carpet, how the afternoon sunshine has faded the couch.

    Changing your writing space may not always go well, but this is part of the magic: we’re rarely lost for words when complaining. Every experience feeds into your writing and characters in unexpected ways. 

    Remember that writing isn’t always putting words on paper. Even if you don’t get a lot of work done, changing the scenery can be an excuse for a vacation, a walk, or a redecoration. It’s how we turn ourselves into our own best editors, looking at things in a whole new way, as a slightly different person. And if you need to move to the UK to do that, I’ll be here to support you. 

    Kate Hammer is a writer, producer, and performer born in Canada, and living in Scotland. An award-winning playwright, director, and published writer, Kate constantly strives to create community representation in order to tell the stories that need to be heard. They now work in television development and are publishing a non-fiction book later this year called, Bruce Willis is My Dad. They are a queer, neurodivergent creator who never forgets their goat farming heritage. katethehammer.com

    Photos: Monstera via Pexels; Jeremy Cabrera (headshot)

  • 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, Mothering, and the Wild In-Between—By Gillian Sze

    Writing, Mothering, and the Wild In-Between—By Gillian Sze

    My first reading of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are was as a parent. Growing up, I somehow managed to miss this childhood classic, which I now recognize as surprising given its widespread popularity. I was given the book as a gift when I was pregnant with my son, and even then I didn’t read it until after he was born. I kept it safe, waiting on a bookshelf along with the other picture books we received.  

    After my son was born, we were advised that it was never too early to start reading to him. We filled those tiny periods when he was awake with reading. I reacquainted myself with books I hadn’t picked up in years: Mercer Mayer, Robert Munsch, Margaret Wise Brown, Eric Carle. My husband, who took the advice to heart, started with Beezus and Ramona, Charlotte’s Web, and The Hobbit. (It took weeks but we eventually completed them in small increments.) Included in our stack was, of course, Where the Wild Things Are. 

    I was struck by the sparsity of the opening pages of text, words just hanging on their own like Sapphic fragments, sentences spilling across pages. With each page turn, the white frames of the illustrations shrink, the images fill up each page until we follow Max into his dream. When Max announces the commencement of the wild rumpus, what follows is three illustrated spreads of the boy reigning over the beasts. Time passes on those pages, without a single word in sight. 

    *

    When I entered motherhood, I simultaneously found myself entering a period of wild wordlessness. Bleary eyed, I was keenly aware of time and sleep. I saw time racing along as my son filled out his onesies. I saw time cherished as much as it was squandered as I lay beneath my sleeping son, not daring to move lest he wake up again for the thousandth time. I saw time slipping away as more (if not all) of it became devoted to caring for him. I oscillated between too little time (his naps were either short or nonexistent) and too much (nursing in the dark, exhausted and impatient as each passing minute stole from what was left of my own slumber). Moreover, I struggled with how to use my time as both a writer and a mother—the former of which I had identified with for much, much longer. I didn’t know how to fill—or not fill—that time with words as I once had. 

    Sendak’s illustrative spreads in the middle of Where the Wild Things Are remind me of what Anne Carson says about the middle section of To the Lighthouse. Carson describes Woolf’s book as “a novel that falls asleep for twenty-five pages in the middle” (22). Set at night, Part II of To the Lighthouse is entitled “Time Passes,” and describes the changes that affect the characters, their lives, and the house. As the characters in both Sendak’s and Woolf’s works go through their necessary transformations, I realized how possible it was to hold these books and sense Time passing both in words, as Woolf had written, and wordlessness, as Sendak had drawn.  

    In truth, I didn’t know how to “read” those illustrations when I flipped to them with my son. At first I felt compelled to fill the silence with my own commentary, and so I did. “Howling at the moon! (page flip) Swinging! (page flip) Marching!” Eventually, I learned just to observe my son take in the pages, looking at the images without my input.

    However which way Time moved (Mr. Ramsey stumbling in grief along a passage, or little Max riding triumphantly on a wild thing, or my son letting go of the table edge for his first steps), it just did. My anxiety about never writing again lived along with me through those day naps and night feedings. I accepted that becoming a mother meant having to lose myself as a writer. This primal and sleepy period of adjusting to a new person was tinged with mourning. My husband, supportive if exasperated, would remark on my melodrama. But at the time it felt true. It’s only now as my son is approaching six and his toddler-sister is starting to sleep through the night, that I recognize this tumultuous era as something transformative for me as a writer. I think of Carson’s wise assertion of the chapter “Time Passes”: “Virginia Woolf offers us, through sleep, a glimpse of a kind of emptiness that interests her. It is the emptiness of things before we make use of them, a glimpse of reality prior to its efficacy” (23). 

    Words, much like Max voyaging towards wakefulness, eventually “sailed back over a year and in and out of weeks and through a day.” It may have taken a little longer, but we arrived together… changed, relieved, and a little sleepier. 

    Works Cited 

    Carson, Anne. Decreation. Vintage Canada, 2005. 

    Sendak, Maurice. Where the Wild Things Are. Fiftieth Anniversary ed., Harper Collins, 2013.

    Gillian Sze is the author of multiple poetry books, including Peeling Rambutan, Redrafting Winter, and Panicle, which were finalists for the QWF’s A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. Her forthcoming prosimetrical collection, Quiet Night Think, explores the early shaping of a writer, the creative process, and motherhood, and will be published next spring with ECW Press. Since becoming a mother, Gillian has started writing picture books and has two books forthcoming with Philomel Books (Penguin Random House USA). Her first picture book, The Night Is Deep and Wide, was recently released in March. www.gilliansze.com

    Photo credit: “Where the Wild Things Are” by Skinned Mink is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 (header banner); Nadia Zheng (headshot)

  • Writers: The Truth Can Set You Free—By Tamara Jong

    Writers: The Truth Can Set You Free—By Tamara Jong

    Ma was so many things; a Jehovah’s Witness preacher, an alcoholic with a troubled past, and an avid reader, poet, and writer. When she was sober she was engaged, a bright star in our neighborhood and religious community. But then she was also a yeller: when she kicked her sisters out of her life, she literally cut them out of any photos she had. Ma would punish me because I chatted in class, ate pumpkin seeds during Halloween, and was sent to the corner by the teacher. Lying wasn’t an option to save my own hide.

    TamaraJongreadingyouth
    A younger Tamara Jong.

    I escaped by reading fiction. Little Bear by Else Holmelund Minarik was an early favorite for me. In the first set of stories, little bear’s mum makes him clothes when he is cold and throws him a birthday party. Nine-year-old Pippi Longstocking took me on all her adventures with her monkey Mr. Nilsson on the South Seas. Although she was parentless, she seemed resilient and nothing could stop her. I related to A Wrinkle in Time’s Meg: she never seemed to fit in anywhere and was devoted to her father; my dad was my idol until Ma kicked him out for his infidelities. I moved on to the worlds of the Brontës and Austen, where I felt safe and where the ending always seemed to work out. I would write and draw pictures of my stories and plays. There was no such thing as writer’s block.

    My first attempt at writing fiction as an adult came under the guise of autobiographical fiction. I mixed up truth and fiction so no one would know that it was mostly me I was writing about. My story was about Keaton, a suicidal fourteen-year-old. Keaton’s angelic mother worked all the time, made a hell of a bunch of tea, and didn’t really know her kid or see her for who she was. Keaton wrote lousy poetry, had a bestie, and obsessively liked a boy named Josh. She ended up getting help after being hospitalized, taking anti-depressants, and undergoing extensive therapy. I wrote it after my own stint in the hospital after a suicide attempt. But there were truths missing in the story that I couldn’t write down yet. I made the father the alcoholic and the mother a loving TV mom, a cardboard cut-out of a mother. There was nothing about religion anywhere. Then I got stalled and didn’t work on it.

    Things didn’t really click for me until two year later, when I decided to try out a non-fiction writing course with Ayelet Tsabari. God, she made me fall in love with it. I wrote and wrote and wrote. I couldn’t stop. The words came easier than in fiction for me. The only things that interfered with my writing were my day job and sleep. Ayelet introduced me to her stories and so many other great diverse writers and made me realize that there were so many ways to spin a story.

    I took a second course with her, and then another. It was the first time I had written about being a Jehovah’s Witness and my parents, my siblings, and our lives. Once I had a taste for non-fiction, I didn’t want to let go. I started reading less fiction and more non-fiction. I submitted to contests and literary magazines, and revised my stories. When my creative non-fiction piece, “Father Hallowed Be Thy Name” got accepted at RicepaperMagazine, I was ecstatic. Ayelet encouraged me to write a memoir. I had only started writing non-fiction in her classes and she believed in me! Something had started shifting for me.

    In an earlier creative writing class, I had written fiction about a Catholic girl who got pregnant, a dog called Jehovah, and Medusa. Nothing was really wrong with those stories but they lacked a depth of what I really wanted to say. They were starting points that were necessary for me to get where I had to go. Testing out the waters until I could go in myself, immerse myself in the work.

    I realized I had been hiding behind fiction so no one would know about my real life and who I was. What if others judged my life choices or no one wanted to read my stories, or they thought that I had nothing original to say? I was terrified of people’s reactions. I had been so good at hiding my trauma. When I was penning fiction, I could take those risks. After all, it was imaginary. No one would ever know it really happened.

    When I shelved the idea of writing a fiction novel, non-fiction stories emerged in its place. I’ve been working with them for months now, reading them, revising them, losing and finding Ma, collecting our stories together. Non-fiction freed me to tell my real-life story on the page in a way that fiction couldn’t. When I was growing up fiction had protected me by letting me escape in stories, to live another’s narrative.

    Tamara_Jongph_Photo_Credit_Charles _MarschuetzTamara Jong is a Montreal-born mixed-race writer of Chinese and European ancestry. Her work has appeared in Ricepaper, Room, carte blanche, The New Quarterly, Invisible Publishing, and Body & Soul: Stories for Skeptics and Seekers. She is a graduate of The Writer’s Studio (Simon Fraser University) and recently had her piece “Thanks for All the Lice, Pharaoh” longlisted in The New Quarterly’s 2019 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest. You can find her on Twitter @bokchoygurl.

    Photo credits: Tamara Jong (header image); Charles Marschuetz (headshot)

  • What If Your Computer Listened to You?—By Mariam S. Pal

    What If Your Computer Listened to You?—By Mariam S. Pal

    “New line numeral one period space cap that the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog bold lazy dog exclamation mark.” My telephone rings. “Go to sleep,” I say to my computer, and the cute little green mic on its screen turns blue and shuts off. I answer my phone: “Hello?”

    It’s a typical day in my sunny second-floor home office. Headset on, I look like a faraway call-centre worker whose thankless task is to explain why your suitcase is in Montevideo. But I’m not calming cranky customers; I’m writing by dictation. I turned off my mic before answering the phone because otherwise, my conversation would have ended up as text on my screen.

    When I write, I don’t scrawl with a pen or pencil, hunt and peck on a keyboard, or even bang away on a typewriter. I slide on a headset, say “Wake up,” and start yakking at my computer. My voice recognition software converts speech to email messages, text in Word, and more. Line by line, paragraph by paragraph, my writing silently scrolls onto the screen every few seconds. I’ve been working like this for about fifteen years; chronic repetitive movement injuries forced me to look into alternatives to typing.

    I use Dragon Naturally Speaking, one of several voice recognition programs available to writers. It costs about the same as a couple of trips to the physiotherapist. If prescribed by a physician, voice recognition software is a tax-deductible medical expense. Google Docs, Windows 10, and Apple have similar features for free. All are based on the same technology.

    Leaning back in my swivel chair, feet up on my desk, I feel like Don Draper in Mad Men, dictating a letter. Unlike Don Draper, I don’t have a secretary, so I need to tell my computer where to add commas and what to capitalize. The first sentence of this essay, in “dictate-speak,” is what I would need to say in order to have the following text appear on my screen:

    1. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog!

    Verbal commands allow me to switch the mic off or on, add punctuation, capitalize or underline. Don’t like the last sentence? Say, “Scratch that!” It’s erased. Want to change a word? Say, “Correct that!” then select one of several numbered options or type in your change.

    When trained for the user’s voice, my dictation software is 95 percent accurate. It’s important to use a good quality headset and to enunciate clearly. This makes it easier for the program to understand you.

    All this technology is great but it can drive you nuts. Despite repeatedly adding “Amritsar,” a city in India, to the dictation vocabulary, I still find “Emirates are” merrily spelled out on my screen. Argh! In my experience, homonyms are handled better: “four” and “fore” are rarely confused.

    Dictating changed my writing process. Once I got used to talking to my computer, I realized that I wrote for longer stretches of time. I was physically comfortable and relaxed. Writing was definitely easier and faster. Liberating my hands freed my mind to think more creatively. Like most of us, I speak faster than I type or write by hand. The words poured out of my mouth onto the screen. It was thrilling. I could finally get the ideas, descriptions, and dialogues swirling in my head onto the page and Dragon kept up with me. Once my words were on the screen I rewrote and refined them.

    At first, some of my dictated text sounded like emails or text messages. I used too many contractions and my sentences were either too long or too short. Colons, semicolons, and other punctuation from written English were noticeably absent. Eventually, I got better at verbalizing in a written style. I’ve developed a habit of working from an outline composed of key words or points. This keeps my dictation focused.

    If typing is painful, then it might be time to look into voice recognition. I caution that dictation is not the solution for everybody. If you write mainly in cafés or libraries, you probably don’t want the world to hear your masterpiece. Also, your microphone will pick up other voices, which will end up as gibberish on the page. Bilingual writers should know that voice recognition programs can only distinguish one language at a time. If you’re writing about going to a “5 à 7” or a dépanneur, you’ll have to enter these words manually.

    I love writing by dictation but sometimes low-tech is best. Simple corrections to dictated text are easiest typed in manually. And when I send a personal note or write the occasional cheque, I go no-tech and enjoy the tactile pleasure of writing: with a fountain pen, filled with ink from a glass bottle.

    fullsizerender 2

    Mariam S. Pal’s essays have been published in the Montreal Gazette, the Ottawa Citizen, The Globe and Mail, Le Devoir, The Times of India and The Hindu. She is completing a memoir about being Pakistani-Canadian. A recently published excerpt is available at http://south85journal.com/issues/spring-summer-2018/non-fiction/behind-the-walls. Mariam has an M.A. in Economics and B.C.L./LL.B. degrees in law, both from McGill University. She is semi-retired. Mariam and her headset live in NDG.

    Photo credits: Mariam S. Pal (header banner); Eli Krantzberg (headshot)

  • Amazing Grace: A Literary Friendship—By S. Nadja Zajdman

    Amazing Grace: A Literary Friendship—By S. Nadja Zajdman

    I was sitting by the gas-lit fireplace in my local library when a book on the table caught my eye. It was the collected correspondence of the novelist Marjorie Rawlings and her editor, Maxwell Perkins. As I read their letters I could hear their long-stilled voices speaking to each other, and to me, across the expanse of decades. I tried to check out the book, but was told it was a reject from a book sale, and if I wanted it I would have to buy it. So I did.

    At home, I looked up Maxwell Perkins on the Internet. A link led me to Perkins’ granddaughter, the novelist Ruth King Porter, who lived in rural Vermont. Ruth was giving away her novels, asking nothing in return but that readers post reviews on her website. I sent for Ruth’s books, and a correspondence began. Soon, we wanted to meet in person. I scheduled a visit to Ruth in spring, then her mother’s dying began. I rescheduled to autumn, then my mother’s dying began.

    Instantly I cancelled travel plans and let go of my already-purchased bus ticket, but a friend with a car offered to take me on a shorter day trip to Vermont. Encouraged by my mother, I accepted.

    “We are two middle-aged women, both wearing glasses.” I wrote to Ruth. “My friend is a blonde with dark roots. I still think of myself as brunette, but there is more salt than pepper in my hair, now.” Ruth wrote that she would be waiting for me under the clock tower of Montpelier’s City Hall. I knew what Ruth looked like from the photographs on her website.

    PerkinsRawlingsBookCoverWe rode into Montpelier on a gloriously warm day at high noon. I saw Ruth sitting on a bench under the clock tower, scribbling in a notebook. Main Street was packed with tourists, and we couldn’t stop the car in front of City Hall. We found a parking space down the street. My friend waited in the car, while I ran down the block. “Ruth?” The woman on the bench looked up, and then leapt up.

    Ruth was a pre-hippie Back-to-the-Lander, in her early seventies when I first met her. At our first encounter, she wore a white work shirt, faded blue jeans, and a black money belt slung over her shoulder. She walked like someone who rode horses.

    “Where’s your friend?” Ruth called through the crowd of tourists blocking the sidewalk.

    “She’s waiting in the car!” I called back. I led Ruth to the car and the friend in it. Ruth led us both on a tour of the golden-domed state capital building. “I hope we don’t run into my son.” Ruth twinkled. “He’d be embarrassed by the way I’m dressed. My son Louis works as an aide to the governor.” When the tour was over Ruth led the way in her battered old car out of Montpelier and higher into the Green Mountains, where another world awaited.

    Ruth’s husband Bill and a second son, Robbie, rode their tractors out of the woods to greet us on the porch of a rambling farmhouse. Nearby, three large dogs stiffened in alert: Ellie and Flora danced in attendance to the top dog, Chief. Ruth’s daughter Molly, an artist who lived, Thoreau-like, in a cabin she built with her hands, bounded up a hill to join us. The open and friendly faces of Ruth’s family smiled at me kindly. I’m sure they were aware of my situation, though no one referred to it. Taut, lean, Alabama-born Bill wiped the grime off his hands and stepped forward to shake mine. I felt as though I’d stepped into an illustration by Norman Rockwell.

    As an early darkness fell my companion and I crossed back over the border, returning to Montreal and my mother’s apartment. “Hello sweetheart.” My dying mother smiled tenderly. “How did it go with the lady in Vermont?”

    What could I say? I felt guilty at having left her, even for a few hours. I didn’t feel like relaying the details of an excursion to Vermont.

    Six months later I returned to Montpelier by bus, alone. Once more, Ruth met me under the clock tower. For a few days I curled under Ruth’s wing, sunning on her roof, sleeping in Max Perkins’ bed, waking to birdsong and skimming the staggering array of autographed out-of-print books dedicated by grateful authors to their engaged and caring editor. “Grieving is hard work,” Ruth would say in greeting when, after a nap, I descended a steep staircase into her dark country kitchen. As we stood side by side in the verdant meadow which was her front yard, Ruth added, as much in amazement as in sadness, “A year ago this time, both our mothers were alive.”

    Ruth King Porter is an American blueblood whose antecedents hark back to a woman who held a door open for George Washington. I am the Canadian-born daughter of refugees. My mother, a woman who survived three invasions and the Warsaw Ghetto, later in life became prominent in Holocaust education. Many people find my mother’s story repellent and turn away from any mention of it, whereas Ruth and her husband Bill were fascinated. Ruth did for me what I had done for my mother; she listened. And she encouraged me to tell my mother’s story.

    Six months after that, I was back on the farm. Ruth and Bill acknowledged what would have been my mother’s birthday by lighting large candles in a spectacularly tangled chandelier made entirely of logs. Through the wall-sized picture window we watched the cold autumn rain and wind lash the last leaves off a forest full of trees. As we ate hot squash and a pot full of peas grown in Ruth’s garden, the lit log chandelier shone, the tree-bark-shaded lamps glowed, and the wood stove burned.

    I have been back to Ruth and Bill’s farm several times since. In between visits Ruth does for me what her grandfather did for Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and Marjorie Rawlings: she writes to me and elicits writing from me, reads and critiques my material, encourages, cajoles, indicates where and when she believes I have veered off-track, and gently nudges me back. Clutching the psychic lifeline tossed to me by the descendant of a legendary literary editor, I live and work alone and in growing peace in my suburban Montreal apartment, producing a memoir of my mother. My mother knew that my writing would sustain me after she was gone. Ruth Porter’s mentorship sustained me during the darkest days of my life.

    S Nadja Zajdman_HeadshotS. Nadja Zajdman is a Canadian author. Her short stories and non-fiction pieces have been featured in newspapers, magazines, literary journals and anthologies across North America, in the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand. In 2012 Zajdman published the related short story collection Bent Branches, which spans four continents and seventy years in the life of a family. Recently Zajdman completed a second short story collection, as well as the above-mentioned memoir of her mother, the noted Holocaust activist and educator Renata Skotnicka-Zajdman, who passed away at the end of 2013.

    Photo credit: MaxPixel (header banner)

  • Writing by Numbers—by B.A. Markus

    Writing by Numbers—by B.A. Markus

    1. Show Up

    A link to the Spoken Word residency at the Banff Centre shows up in my feed. I didn’t get a teaching contract with the English Montreal School Board in the fall so I’m not feeling too enthusiastic about spending the $65 non-refundable application fee. I’ve applied to the Banff Centre residencies at least six times and never gotten in. And I’m not convinced that what I’m working on, a collection of dramatic monologues based on interviews with mothers called “What Mommy Needs,” is even a spoken word piece. Most of all, I’m not ready for another rejection. In the end I justify spending the money because it counts as “Doing something about my writing.”

    2. Pay Attention to What Has Heart and Meaning

    In January, I get offered a contract at the school board that’s going to last until the end of June. The application for Banff is out there but I know my chances of getting into the residency are even less than my chances of getting a permanent teaching gig in Montreal. It’s amazing I got the contract for six months. Money is important to me. I’m two kids beyond not worrying about heat, secure housing, and groceries. But I haven’t given up on “What Mommy Needs.” I’m doing interviews when I can. And I’ve started to tell stories at Confabulation and Yarn in Montreal. It’s great to be performing again. I start to think about how I could use storytelling in the mommy monologues. Maybe my project is spoken word after all.

    3. Tell Your Truth as You Understand It

    A month into my teaching contract I get the acceptance letter from Banff with an offer of financial aid. In ten seconds I go from delight to despair. I can’t go to Banff. I just signed a contract. Two days later it occurs to me that I could ask the principal if there is any way I could leave my job for two weeks to do the residency. But I have my doubts. He’s young and ambitious. He likes to follow the rules. And there are fifty teachers who would gladly grab my contract if I left. I practice my speech, aiming for the sweet spot. Somewhere between grovelling employee and self-assured writer. He cuts me off mid-grovel. He says I can go.

    banff residencycohort
    My cohort: participants and faculty of the 2017 spoken word residency at the Banff Centre (I am in the second row from the bottom, second from the right). The photo above this essay shows me performing at Confabulation, a storytelling series in Montreal.

    4. Remain Open to Outcomes

    Waiting for the plane to Calgary, I download the schedule for the residency. I’d assumed that my time at Banff would be two weeks of uninterrupted writing time. Now I see that most of my days at the residency will be filled with workshops led by the faculty. Attendance is compulsory. I vow that I will spend all my unscheduled time either working on “What Mommy Needs” or getting regular exercise in the pool at the Banff Centre.

    At the end of the first day, one of the faculty members asks if anyone plays the piano and I put up my hand. He’s doing a poem at the faculty show in a couple of nights and he wants some simple piano in the background. In Montreal, I live surrounded by professional musicians. Now I feel like an amateur. I practice for the show on a Steinway grand because that’s the kind of piano you get to play at the Banff Centre. The show goes well. Afterwards, one of the other residents asks me if I’d like to collaborate with her and play piano while she performs her poem. She wants to record us in the studio.

    Despite my promise to devote my unscheduled time to “What Mommy Needs,” I spend many hours in my hut playing piano and singing Jewish prayers, Christian spirituals, and French cabaret songs.

    My plans for daily swims are also squashed, by the appearance of a giant sty that swells my right eye shut.

    We are going to do a show at the end of the residency. I intended to perform an excerpt from “What Mommy Needs,” but instead I write a story about identity that includes three sung sections. I’ve never sung while telling a story. I start to think about how I could integrate music into “What Mommy Needs,” which is now definitely a spoken word project.

    “This writing project has transformed me. And all I had to do was follow the numbers.”

    On the last day of the residency, I meet with one of the faculty members, a historian and dub poet whose work weaves together poetry, performance, and primary research. When I start describing my ideas for enhancing the performance experience in “What Mommy Needs,” she starts shaking her wise head. “No, no,” she says. “‘What Mommy Needs’ is a book.”

    I come back to Montreal with a musical story about identity, a professional recording of me playing piano behind someone else’s poetry, and the possibility that I’m actually writing a book. This writing project has transformed me. And all I had to do was follow the numbers.

    The four “rules” I followed are by Angeles Arrien.

    You can watch an example of my spoken word performance below:

    [vimeo 108630079 w=640 h=360]

    bamarkusphotoB.A. Markus is a writer, teacher, and performer living in Montreal. She is an award-winning creative nonfiction writer, a Grammy- and Juno-nominated songwriter, and her reviews, essays, and stories can be found in anthologies and publications such as Carte Blanche, Queen’s Quarterly, and The Montreal Review of Books. She tells stories live at the Confabulation and The Yarn storytelling events and is currently writing a series of monologues, entitled “What Mommy Needs,” about what mothers do to survive the realities of motherhood. BAMarkus.com

    Photo credit: Jean-Sébastien Dénommé (header banner)

  • Tuesday, or Was It Wednesday?—by Joshua Levy

    Tuesday, or Was It Wednesday?—by Joshua Levy

    One Tuesday—or was it Wednesday? —I visited my parents.

    Written anything lately? asked my dad, during supper.

    I had. I fetched my laptop from my car and read a short story about my brother’s recent engagement to them while we ate.

    When I was done, my dad said it was very witty, great use of metaphor, but why hadn’t I told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God?

    My dad’s a lawyer.

    But, I said, it really happened. You were there!

    I never said those things, said my mom. And I made butternut squash lasagna that day, not hummus or feta salad.

    I felt accused. You uttered extremely similar things, I said. I can’t remember exact dialogue. But you’re right about the butternut squash lasagna. I’ll change that.

    They looked at me sadly, my parents did.

    I don’t think Menachem was wearing a fanny pack that day, added my dad.

    The point, I said, is that the major facts are all true, if not the minor ones.

    My dad stood up and went to the freezer, bent down behind the kitchen island, and resurfaced holding a tub of Neapolitan ice cream.

    None for me, Ricky, said my mom.

    Josh? asked my dad.

    Sure, I said.

    “My dad said it was very witty, great use of metaphor, but why hadn’t I told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God?”

    He opened a cabinet next to the sink and grabbed two ceramic bowls. Each had a different colourful made-up bird painted on it. Or were they real bird species? My parents had bought them a decade earlier in Nova Scotia, while visiting my sister at university. Mind you, it could have been New Brunswick where they bought the bowls….

    I wasn’t sure. The facts felt like slippery fish in my hands.

    If you’re going to write non-fiction, offered my dad, while running a spoon under hot water, it should be 100 percent true.

    I agree, said my mom. Don’t make anything up.

    But, I said, I’m not. Memories change colours and shapes under different conditions.

    Two scoops or three? asked my dad.

    Different what? asked my mom.

    Two, I said.

    Different what? repeated my mom.

    Conditions. Like the passage of time or evolving perspectives. That stuff.

    My mom said, ah, I don’t buy it.

    A fact’s a fact, Josh, said my dad, handing me an ice cream bowl.

    One, two. I count two scoops in your bowl, declared my mom.

    My dad nodded. That’s a fact, he said.

    I sighed. I didn’t disagree with my parents. Facts are vital and I wanted them all.

    But my story had been about shining a light on unverifiable, deeper truths: family relations, love, loneliness. Whether Menachem wore his fanny pack or not on that particular day was, in my opinion, such a minor fact that researching it could stifle the creative process.

    “Memories change colours and shapes under different conditions.”

    Another Tuesday—or was it Wednesday?—I visited my parents.

    Written anything lately? asked my dad, during supper.

    I had. I fetched my laptop from my car and read a factually bullet-proof story about Visiting Day during my first summer at sleepaway camp to them while we ate:

    On Visiting Day, my parents came with my younger brother, Daniel. They brought me a bag of Archie and Spider-Man comics and some candy. My sister, Samantha, was probably also there, since she was less than a year old at the time.

    The camp director made a speech to all parents and campers. The speech was almost certainly in English, since that was the only language he spoke. I think we then went to the waterfront and paddled in a canoe, but that could be a memory from the following summer.

    I don’t remember if it was a sunny or rainy day, but I do remember the emptiness I felt when Visiting Day ended.

    That’s a terrible story, said my dad.

    Embellish a little, said my mom.

    linkedinJoshua Levy splits his time between Montreal, Canada, and Lisbon, Portugal. He is grateful to the QWF for their support over the years and has participated in eight QWF writing workshops to improve his craft. Joshua is a winner of the 2010 QWF Quebec Writing Competition and was longlisted for the 2007 competition. He has had poetry published in Carte Blanche, told stories live at Blue Metropolis for This Really Happened, and written for QWF Writes. Joshua has been published by the Oxford University Press, Véhicule Press, Maisonneuve, Vallum, The Feathertale Review, The Rumpus, and The Malahat Review. He is a regular storyteller on CBC Radio and recently received a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to write a memoir.

    Photo credit: Seth Sawyers (top banner); Steve Gerrard (headshot)

  • Death is Why I Write by Kate Henderson

    Death is Why I Write by Kate Henderson

    When my grandfather died, it was as if his thoughts were transferred to me. All those years he said I had itchy feet, I’d thought he was criticizing the fact that I changed jobs every year or suggesting I’d had too many boyfriends. But no, he just wanted to see me settle down while he was still alive. I wrote a story about him, and found myself for the first time in a place where it didn’t feel like I was being told what to do or trying to please anyone. Death cuts through the clutter.

    From then on I had to write.

    Now both my parents have died. If it weren’t for my day job, I’d be writing all the time. I wake up early to clutch at details before they are erased by waves on sand. I recall how my mother smiled for a camera, the way my father used to swear through clenched teeth. Small gestures are all that’s left, isolated incidents, and the broad strokes of their lives.

    I used to think that writing about real people was a phase. But then it seemed frivolous to invent characters when they were sitting right in front of me, rich and fully developed. When they stopped living, well, I realized I couldn’t possibly improve upon the compelling arc of a life. My work is to distill. I gravitate to the restraint of truth.

    “If it weren’t for my day job, I’d be writing all the time. I wake up early to clutch at details before they are erased by waves on sand.”

    My mother tried to be a housewife, but she was never comfortable with domesticity. The four of us knew she loved us because she tried so hard. One year, she joined the women who formed a phone chain to keep the price of vegetables down at the local Dominion store. While she talked, she doodled on scraps of paper, creating labyrinths of shapes that eventually took on a life of their own. We all remember the time the face of Batman emerged from the page.

    My mother landed a job reading the news on television. It was how she supported us after divorcing my father. Like Neil Armstrong, Betty Friedan, and John Lennon, she taught us anything was possible. Early morning shifts and dressing for the public ate up a lot of time. It wasn’t until after we’d left home that she went back to school for the degree she’d always wanted and started writing stories and plays.

    I knew my mother would die eventually; there had even been a couple of false alarms. But when the time came, I treated it with the nonchalance I suspect children require to carry on. I have to be at a meeting, I said to her that morning. Can you wait? Yeah, I can wait, she answered, her tone shifting, sounding as if she had waited before. Surely I added I love you—it was how we said goodbye on the phone.

    “It wasn’t until after we’d left home that she went back to school for the degree she’d always wanted and started writing stories and plays.”

    The morning after she died, I woke with the sensation that I’d been left to contemplate fathers. My mother never really got over my father, even though it was she who’d left him all those years earlier. Or was it that she never got over missing her own father? I’ve learned that while adults maneuver around broken connections, children absorb the intensity of missing into their flesh.

    All those years, my mother loved my father. Even after she found out about the affair. Even after another husband. In conversations with us, she had started to refer to him as if they’d kept in touch, each knowing how the other had changed. As if he didn’t have another wife.

    When my father died, my mother’s vision, already clouded, deteriorated. It became harder and harder for her to breathe. It was as if without him in the world, an important part of her was no longer accessible. The last entry in her journal, dated a couple of weeks before her death, recorded a dream where my father had kissed her, just like in the old days. “Wow,” she had written. “I’d forgotten how good that felt.”

    The desire to capture my mother’s essence after she disappeared is more profound than anything I’ve ever felt. I write to sit with her, remember textures, and relieve the missing for a while. I write to piece together meaning. Death is her closing chapter. Writing allows me to sift through the pages of our life together, looking for clues.

    Headshot 2-2.jpgKate Henderson lives and writes in Montreal. She recently published a story about her thesis advisor, who died too soon, and is currently working on a memoir about her mother.

    Photo credits: Lisa Henderson (Batman doodle, drawn by Lynn Henderson); Vanessa di Gregorio (headshot)