QWF Writes

Tag: storytelling

  • 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 Mentorship: An Interview with Robert Edison Sandiford

    The Art of Mentorship: An Interview with Robert Edison Sandiford

    Every couple of weeks, Robert Edison Sandiford calls me from Barbados. Robert is one of this year’s QWF fiction mentors, and I am his protégé. We’ve made arrangements to speak at 5 p.m. via Skype so this interview would feel more face-to-face. At 5:10, we still have no audio so he switches from his desktop to his laptop. At 5:25 the recording app on my phone stops working. At 5:37 we decide we’ll have to hobble back and forth between the computers, a phone, and another phone app to somehow make it work. Afterwards, when it’s all sorted, he says: “Well, there’s a lesson about tenacity.”

    Robert was born in Montreal to Barbadian parents. He is the author of nine books that range in form from short and long fiction to memoir, graphic novels, and erotica. Over a period of four months, he’s worked with me on my own collection of stories and we’ve talked about many things: process and voice, the German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, and how baking helps to reduce stress. Robert answers my questions below.

    —Pamela Hensley

    Fairfield Cover

    PAMELA HENSLEY

    Let’s start with a quote from Fairfield, your most recent collection of short stories. In reference to engaging fiction, you say: “All that matters… is the individual and the moment.” Can you expand on that?

    ROBERT EDISON SANDIFORD

    In the context of the collection, it had to do with making the most of art. It had to do with knowing when something is ready or when an artist has what it takes. It comes from a quote by Matthew Arnold [“For the creation of a masterwork… two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment”]. How do you know when you’ve got what it takes? All we are is who we are and the talent that we have. My contention is that most people are a little better than they think they are. They can do better than they’ve done.

    HENSLEY

    Besides being a mentor, you’re an editor and teacher. How does one turn a good manuscript into a great one? Or a good writer into a great writer?

    SANDIFORD

    There has to be that spark within the work itself, or within the writer. There has to be something inside that person already that lends itself to greatness. And it may depend on how we define greatness. There are a lot of artists, not just writers, people who never enjoyed recognition while they were alive or young enough to enjoy it. So there’s that question again, of the individual and the moment and the individual and talent. There are certain things you can teach people to make them better writers but that sort of greatness, that may also depend on them.

    HENSLEY

    In Fairfield, a fictional editor writes that the character G. Brandon Sisnett borrowed from other authors, including one from Montreal who wrote Caribbean fiction on the themes of “familial loss and managing the pain of living.” Which are themes that recur in your work. Would you like to talk about theme?

    SANDIFORD

    I’m curious about theme. Both of us are writing from a particular place. Germany finds its way into your stories, as well as Canada. For me, it’s Barbados and Canada. Theme is distinct from subject matter but they inform each other. I write out of where I am but also where I come from. I do believe that all writing is regional, in a sense. People talk about things being universal but I think it goes to honesty. If you write in a way that is honest, the regional will get you to the universal. Someone will pick up the story halfway around the world and say, “I relate.”

    “There are certain things you can teach people to make them better writers but that sort of greatness, that may also depend on them.”

    HENSLEY

    Is place a detail?

    SANDIFORD

    Place is a necessary detail: your characters have got to be somewhere. But it’s more than that. It’s a space in which you invite the reader to share an experience. It’s about learning, actually. If I write about a particular place, I want you to feel that place. I want you to experience it as if you were actually there. Unless having a non-descript setting is important to telling the story, then why have this non-descript thing? I get the answer, “But I want it to be universal.” I just say, “Stop. What you may be doing is taking out the necessary edges that people need to relate to the story even more.”

    “I do believe that all writing is regional, in a sense. People talk about things being universal but I think it goes to honesty. If you write in a way that is honest, the regional will get you to the universal.”

    HENSLEY

    What’s the difference between style and voice?

    SANDIFORD

    Style and voice tend to be synonymous. But to make a differentiation, when writers are starting out I like to talk about approach. I used to talk about style but I think writers get confused. They say, “But the way I put it down is a style. I like to use all these ellipses when I write, that’s my style.” And I say, “No, that’s more of an approach and it may even be a bad approach.” Style is something that you develop over time. Voice is all those things combined. It’s reading a work and recognizing who it is. Ultimately, it’s telling a story in a particular way. It can’t be told by anybody else.

    HENSLEY

    You published your first story collection more than 20 years ago. Does it get any easier?

    SANDIFORD

    Hell, no! Publishing is more difficult now than it was before. Coming up with a story, I don’t know that that gets any easier. What gets easier, maybe, is knowing what works and what doesn’t. But I wake up every morning doing what I do and I have no regrets. Ever. That’s a hell of a thing to be able to say.

    On June 4, the 2017 QWF mentors and mentees will present new writing at the annual public reading in Montreal. Click here for more information.

    Rob Profile, ACA Painting BackgroundRobert Edison Sandiford is the author of nine books, most recently Fairfield: The Last Sad Stories of G. Brandon Sisnett. He is the founder, with the poet Linda M. Deane, of the cultural forum ArtsEtc Inc. A recipient of Barbados’ Governor General’s Award for his fiction and the Harold Hoyte Award for newspaper editing, he has also worked as a teacher and video producer.

     

    Pamela Hensley is new to Montreal, having relocated once again after returning from Germany to Ontario. She was selected to participate in the 2017 QWF Mentorship program and is currently attending her first QWF workshop. You can read her stories in Canadian journals, including The Dalhousie Review and EVENT magazine, and are invited to hear her read with other QWF mentees at The Comedy Nest, Montreal Forum on Sunday, June 4 at 2 pm.

     

    Photo credits: Pamela Hensley (top banner); Aeryn Sandiford (Sandiford headshot); Gordon Hensley (Hensley headshot)

  • Writing About Ukraine by Alexandra Hawryluk

    Kyiv_at_night

    Seeing the images on my television screen, I froze in shock and anguish. People running for cover behind piles of rubber tires, a man being struck down by sniper fire. This was Maidan – Independence Square in the centre of Kiev, a place where I had talked to the book vendors, met friends, watched a busker do a routine with his two little monkeys. Those were the paving stones my feet had crossed and re-crossed and now those stones were stained with blood. In that one moment, as I watched the scene unfold from my living room couch, I understood something of how the people who had entrusted their stories to me may have felt as eyewitnesses to the destruction of their homeland under Soviet rule.

    As the Maidan revolution in Ukraine turned into an international story, I developed an almost obsessive need to know what was happening there hour by hour. It took a good dose of fatigue and a beautifully reasoned e-mail from a friend in Kiev to make me realize that it would be more useful to finish writing about my 1998 trip to Ukraine than to trade second-hand opinions about events in which I played no part. Weeks had gone by without my adding a single new page to my book.

    To take my mind back into the 1990s, the heady time of Ukraine’s newly won independence, I listened again to the interviews I’d done, re-read passages in my favourite reference books and immersed myself in Ukrainian music and contemporary literature. I remembered the impassioned, witty conversations in Lviv’s coffee houses with writers, publishers, students and community leaders. We’d talked about the function of opposition in a democracy, the ethics of responsible journalism, the role of education and religion in building a new civil society. Students, once they found out I was Canadian, wanted to know how we had achieved a peaceful pluralistic society. If I mentioned multiculturalism and inter-faith dialogue they inevitably wanted to know which group was winning. A discussion about Western wages always led to an explanation of income tax, medical insurance, mortgages, the cost of university education and personal accountability – concepts entirely foreign to the Soviet world view and social order. Political pundits at the table said that it would be more than twenty years before the prevailing mindset could change.

    Sometimes, I lost the thread of a story because people alternated freely between place names from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Polish Commonwealth, the Russian Empire and the USSR. (In the 18th century, Ukraine was partitioned between three political entities before being annexed by the Soviet Union in the 20th century.)

    Eventually the Ukrainians told me their side of history: World War II and the successive advance and retreat of Nazi and Soviet armies across their country, Nazi and Soviet labour camps, an atmosphere of relentless suspicion and fear. The elderly would talk about those who perished in Stalin’s deliberately planned famine of 1932-33. Many regretted that Communist war criminals had never been brought to justice. Writers complained that the only change undertaken by the newly elected deputies was to replace the hammer and sickle on their lapel pins with a trident.

    As these tales of loss, death, sorrow and anxiety poured out, my writer’s objectivity often abandoned me, and I silently grieved with the storyteller. All I understood then was that after seventy years of state-enforced silence, there was a great need to speak and to be heard. Now it is the young Ukrainians born and educated after the fall of the USSR who are speaking out. And the world is listening.

    Alexandra HawrylukAlexandra Hawryluk, an editor and translator, was a correspondent for Radio Canada International. At present, she’s writing a memoir about her time in Ukraine during the 1990s.

    Photo of Kiev, top: Anton Molodtsov/Tony Wan Kenobi [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons