QWF Writes

Tag: time management

  • Hello Baby, Bye Bye Books by Mike Steeves

    Hello Baby, Bye Bye Books by Mike Steeves

    Man holds baby while reading a book

    My daughter was born on August 25, 2014, and during the interminable lead-up to her birth I was, like all new parents, subject to a deluge of unsolicited advice, warnings and thinly-veiled threats from family, friends and complete strangers about what I could expect as a new parent. One of the warnings I heard most often was that the time I had for reading was going to be severely curtailed.

    Maybe my friends didn’t appreciate how dedicated I was to my routine, because I soon discovered that it was actually pretty easy to carve out the three hours I needed in order to stay on top of the steady stream of books that I had begun purchasing early on in my wife’s pregnancy as a way of offsetting my anxiety over not reading enough.

    For starters, I used to bike to work. But once I realized that I could eke out at least forty minutes of reading on my daily commute, I started taking the metro to work, thereby forgoing the last form of physical activity I practiced with any sort of regularity.

    Another threat to my reading habit was the immense amount of time required to help my daughter sleep. Newborns spend a lot of time sleeping, but they are notoriously bad at it and require assistance (referred to as ‘soothing’). This basically amounts to walking the streets of your neighbourhood with your baby stuffed into one of those obnoxiously priced “carriers.” Once I was over the new-dad jitters and was no longer trying to impress passersby with the baby I had strapped to my chest, I got into the habit of doing laps around the pond at Parc Outremont while reading from a book that I held in front of me. I made my way through Michael Hamburger’s translations of Paul Celan this way, and while I typically have little memory for poetry, many lines from this work are now frozen in place, triggered every time I pass a fountain or leafless tree. And one of the most memorable reading experiences of the last few years is the time I spent on a cold bench at Parc Saint-Viateur with my daughter sleeping in the carrier as I read the final pages of Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams while kids dressed up as penises made their way to Halloween parties.

    Happy Halloween

    ” …the time I spent on a cold bench at Parc Saint-Viateur with my daughter sleeping in the carrier as I read the final pages of Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams while kids dressed up as penises made their way to Halloween parties.”

     

    My aforementioned friends, the ones who warned that I would have to sacrifice my love of reading to my role as a new dad, were also an enormous tax on the time I had for reading. By refusing dinner invitations, birthday party invites, brunch for babies, etc., typically blaming my absence on my daughter, I was not only able to keep up my reading schedule, but, after I had refused enough of these kind invitations, they no longer came in with any regularity, which also spared me the enormous time-suck of responding in a considerate manner something to the effect that “I would love to! But…”

    While it turns out that my friends were wrong about finding the time to read, there is one aspect of parenthood they were right about, but that I’d never taken very seriously: I may still manage to find a comparable quantity of time, but the quality of that time has been seriously degraded. I can sit for hours with Knut Hamsun’s Pan in front of my face, but I regularly find myself rereading the same line over and over again. Or an hour passes and I don’t even make it to the bottom of the page I started on. I’ve managed to read an impressive number of excellent and difficult works, but I’ve hardly retained anything. Within a week or so of finishing a book, I even struggle to remember what I had just read (except for the Celan). So while I have plenty of time to read, I can’t maintain the level of focus and attention I had in my pre-paternal reading sessions.

    Which brings me to the final obstacle to my reading habit – writing. Before my daughter was born I used to try to write at least a few lines every night, but even this small commitment now seems to take an inordinate amount of time away from doing the thing that I really enjoy (it would be quite a stretch to say that I enjoy writing). On account of the soul-wearying exhaustion I feel at the end of every day, I find it pretty easy to excuse myself from writing for the night and to settle into a good book. And by “settle into a good book” I mean “read the same line over and over again until I eventually pass out on the couch.” My friends say that it’s perfectly natural to neglect my writing for the next year or so, and that eventually I will find the time and energy to start up again. I hope they’re right. Goodnight moon.

    Bookjacket_M Steeves

    Mike Steeves lives with his wife and child in Montreal, and works at Concordia University. Giving Up is his first full-length book of fiction. Connect with Steeves on Twitter @SteevesMike.

    Photos: Via Flickr; no changes made (top); Mike Steeves (Halloween); Nikki Tummon (headshot)

  • Busting the Myth of Work-Life Balance by Susan Olding

    Inside the Cardinal Studio, one of the Leighton Studios at Banff Centre for the Arts.

    About a year ago, I was invited to give a talk to some graduate students at Queen’s University about what was billed as “work-life balance.” Sure, I said. Why not? That should be easy.

    There was only one small problem. For me, “work-life balance” is an unattainable mirage. I am the farthest thing from an expert on the topic.

    The truth is, most of my days pass in a blur of immediate “to-dos.” And the hours that I so carefully set aside for creative work often go instead to the unanticipated trip to the doctor, the emergency phone call from the school or the rush-rush project for the paid job.

    I used to spend a lot of time feeling resentful, inadequate and guilty about that. Because other people seemed to combine their creative work with the rest of their lives successfully. Other people seemed to have some magical ability that allowed them to flourish in the face of constant interruptions and distractions.

    Except, when I questioned them, these paragons of multi-tasking all felt exactly the same as I did: weary, overwhelmed and vaguely at fault for failing to maintain their inner equilibrium in the face of multiple competing demands.

    “Other people seemed to have some magical ability that allowed them to flourish in the face of constant interruptions and distractions.”

    Those of us who don’t blame ourselves for this state of affairs sometimes blame the pace of contemporary life. After all, we’re all juggling numerous roles, and we’re all subject to the relentless beeps, pings and dings of our various devices. No wonder we feel beleaguered.

    But what if the problem is less about us, less about the world and more about our basic expectations? What if the language we use contributes to our sense of failure? What if the problem is the metaphor itself?

    What does “work-life balance” even mean?

    Imagine a seal, spinning a ball on its nose. Stop that insane momentum and the whole thing comes crashing down over its head.

    Is that how we want to construct ourselves – as performing circus animals? Is that how we want to conduct our writing lives?

    Consider other images of “balance” – say the scales of justice… or a teeter-totter. Load up one side and the other comes crashing to the ground. The whole apparatus seems so precarious! No wonder we feel so inadequate. No wonder we fear the possibility that something might shift.

    Yet shift it must. Change it must. For “balance” implies stasis – and stasis is antithetical to the creative life.

    What if, rather than “balance,” we spoke instead in terms of dynamic harmony, or cycles, or an ebb and flow? That way, we might not feel so guilty or inadequate whenever we had to give one role or another precedence in our lives for a period of time. Say the first few years of our son’s life, or the first few months of a new paid job, or the last few months of work on a novel, when nothing and nobody in the world matters so much as those characters, and we can barely pull ourselves away from our created world to face the real one.

    Thinking in terms of ebb and flow rather than “balance” has made it a little easier for me to give myself fully to whatever role is demanding most of me that moment – whether that be partner, wage-earner, teacher, parent, friend, writer.

    Outside the Cardinal Studio, one of the Leighton Studios at Banff Centre for the Arts.
    Outside the Cardinal Studio, one of the Leighton Studios at Banff Centre for the Arts.

    It has also helped me recognize the enormous value of writing retreats. I’ve been privileged to participate in several formal residencies, at places like the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, Wintergreen Studios in Ontario and Sage Hill and Stegner House in Saskatchewan. Each of these provides a different kind of experience, but every one offers uninterrupted time and quiet – two of the most precious and hard-to-source ingredients for the creative stew.

    Of course, it’s fun to travel, exciting to stare out at different views and blissful to let somebody else do the shopping and cooking and cleaning for a change. But retreats don’t have to be formal or lengthy or costly to be valuable. In fact, some of my most memorable or useful retreats were short, cheap and close to home. Like the weekend I spent in an absent friend’s house powering through the final edits on an important manuscript. Or the day the rest of my family went to Toronto and left me digging in our back garden. In the process, I uncovered the seed of the next book.

    Alas, I never did manage to tell those Queen’s students anything helpful about “work-life balance.” Instead, I read them some poetry that I wrote while crouched on one side of the work-life teeter-totter. And dared to suggest that if we’re lucky, there’s no real dichotomy, and “balance” is beside the point. Work is part of life, not separate from life, and life means growth – and change.

    Susan Olding

    Susan Olding is the author of Pathologies: A Life in Essays, winner of the Creative Nonfiction Collective’s Readers’ Choice Award for 2010, and selected by 49th Shelf and Amazon.ca as one of 100 Canadian books to read in a lifetime. Her writing has won a National Magazine Award, two Edna Awards and many other honours. A graduate of UBC’s MFA program, she lives with her family in Kingston, Ontario. In the spring of 2016, she’ll facilitate a one-day workshop for the QWF called “Telling It Slant,” where she’ll share some strategies for adding depth and originality to your memoirs, personal essays and short fiction. You can find her at www.susanolding.com.

    Photo (top): Inside the Cardinal Studio, one of the Leighton Studios at Banff Centre for the Arts.