QWF Writes

Tag: wellness

  • The Importance of Being Silent—By John Arthur Sweet

    The Importance of Being Silent—By John Arthur Sweet

    A DIALOGUE. Persons: John Arthur and Pal.

    Scene: A deck in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, one summer day.

    JOHN ARTHUR: Would you like some more kombucha? No? … Hey, I’ve got a little story for you. A while ago, I submitted one of my monologues to a theatre festival where I was hoping to perform it. The comment I got back from the Artistic Director was that the show had too few words in it, relative to the show’s length. He estimated, based on the word count, that the show should take thirty-five minutes, but I’d indicated that it takes sixty minutes in performance, and he said that twenty-five minutes of non-verbal action is too much. Can you believe that?

    PAL: Well, yeah. I mean, people are busy these days. If you give them silence, they’ll just start checking their phones. How many words was it, anyway?

    JOHN ARTHUR: According to the appropriately named Word, it was 4,522.

    PAL: So, that’s a lot of words. Get them out, and let your audience get on their way. Don’t be precious! Everyone has their story to tell, opinions to deliver. But you don’t need to milk it. Get your message across, and then make room for others.

    JOHN ARTHUR: But … First of all, I’m not delivering opinions. It’s a piece of theatre.

    PAL: That’s fine, but there’s a point to it, I imagine. You just need to make your point without dragging things out.

    JOHN ARTHUR: Why does everyone assume that everything has to have a point?

    PAL: You’re a writer, yeah? So when you sit down to write, you must have some point you want to get across.

    JOHN ARTHUR: I have something to communicate, yes. But it’s not necessarily a “point,” as you call it. I’m not a journalist.

    PAL: Okay, let’s say you have an imaginative notion—how’s that?—an imaginative notion to transmit. So, in the monologue you were just telling me about, you had—what was it?—4,522 words by which to transmit that notion. That’s a lot of words! There’s no need to then drag it out—

    JOHN ARTHUR: If you say “drag it out” one more time! Anyway, all this “dragging out,” as you call it, is what is otherwise known as Life.

    PAL: Oh no, please, don’t get all metaphysical on me, it’s ten o’clock in the morning. What I’m saying is, words have meanings. You’re a writer, so express your meaning in words and then leave it at that, don’t dr—

    JOHN ARTHUR: Oh no, stop! Words, words, words!! It’s not all about the words. There’s another way of looking at this. Look, if that artistic director is right, and my monologue features twenty-five minutes where I’m not speaking, then that means a group of people who mostly don’t know one another are sitting in a darkened room together in quasi-silence for twenty-five minutes. When else does that ever happen?

    [Silence.]

    PAL: Look, I’m sorry that guy didn’t want your show. But I don’t really understand what point you’re making here.

    JOHN ARTHUR: The point I’m making, since you’re so fond of “points,” is that we’re drowning in words. As a society, we are gasping for air, desperately thrashing around for a glimpse of the sun as we go under, dragged down beneath a tidal wave of words. Listen, back in about 1999, an editor I worked with raised tired eyes from her computer screen one afternoon and said to me wryly, “I’ve just been dealing with my e-mails. God help us, there is not a thought these days that is allowed to go unexpressed!” That was twenty years ago she said that, and all we were dealing with then was e-mail. Now it’s social media, smartphones, apps, and they’re all talking to us all the time, in words. We have words coming out of our mouths and entering our ears, we’ve got earbuds stuck in our ears to replace some words with other words, we’re writing like mad in the virtual world, tweets, posts, blogs, vlogs. Everybody’s a writer! We’ve got words seeping out of our—

    PAL: Don’t be vulgar.

    JOHN ARTHUR: No, but honestly, how many more words do we need?

    PAL: Right! So don’t do your show at all. That’s 4,522 fewer words in the world.

    JOHN ARTHUR: But I’m a writer-performer! And also an editor. I live by words.

    PAL: Sweetie, you’re getting all worked up and not making any sense. So you’re a writer and you want to make words. But, you insist, there are too many words in the world. So what can I do to help you? You seem to be at an impasse. Would you like some lemonade?

    JOHN ARTHUR: I guess what I’m asking is, are we simply aiming to cram as many words into our lives—into the available time, be it sixty minutes or sixty years—as possible? Or does silence (or, at the very least, word-free time) have a place? I just think that maybe, in 2020, one should have an opinion about this—especially if one is a writer. As writers, maybe we have a responsibility to write less and better, and even to think sometimes about what maybe doesn’t need to be expressed in words. What opinion or thought or observation can we just let sit, without formulating it in prose and then putting it out there? Do people really need to know that I thought Call Me By Your Name was a shitty film? Centuries ago, Saint John of the Cross wrote to a correspondent: “It was not from want of will that I have refrained from writing to you, for truly do I wish you all good; but because it seemed to me that enough has been said already to effect all that is needful, and that what is wanting is not writing or speaking—whereof ordinarily there is more than enough—but silence and work.”

    [Silence.]

    PAL: Um … did you just deliver a fairly lengthy quote from Saint John of the Cross?

    JOHN ARTHUR: I did.

    PAL: Do people even do that in real life?

    JOHN ARTHUR: No, but in literature they do.

    PAL: Okay … So, we’ll just sit with that, then, shall we?

    JOHN ARTHUR: Why not?

    [Silence, broken only by the bells of the church of Très-Saint-Nom-de-Jésus.]

    NOTE: This dialogue was inspired by the form used by Oscar Wilde in “The Critic as Artist.” It may or may not have actually taken place.

    John Arthur Sweet usually writes words that he expects to speak, as opposed to words he hopes others will read. In other words, he is a monologist and occasional spoken word poet. If we were living normal lives, he would currently be in England, performing at three theatre festivals. As it is, his last full-length show (Running to Saint Sebastian) was last year, at the Montreal Fringe, and before that, at the Prague Fringe (where he has performed four shows). He is a regular invited artist at Words and Music, most recently for a live-streaming edition in May. www.johnarthursweet.online

    Photo credits: John Arthur Sweet

  • A Body Divided—By Joe Bongiorno

    A Body Divided—By Joe Bongiorno

    In April 2020, we invited writers in Quebec to submit a story of a single day during the strange, uneasy time of coronavirus and pandemic, of social distancing and self isolation, of lockdown and quarantine.

    We’re thrilled to announce that these stories have been gathered in Chronicling the Days: Dispatches from a Pandemic (Guernica Press). To learn more and buy the book, please visit https://www.guernicaeditions.com/title/9781771836579.

    Please also join us on the QWF FB Community page, and let the authors know if their words resonated.

    I jog on the gravel path along the train tracks. I readjust my surgical mask and stray off into the grass to maintain a two-metre distance from a cyclist. My butt throbs. Pain gives way to numbness. Hamstring nerve pinched. I’m out of breath. My lungs open up to the cool air, fortunate to be left breathless by exercise and not COVID-19.

    To read the rest of the story, please support our community and check out Chronicling the Days: Dispatches from a Pandemic

  • Healing, One Story at a Time by Licia Canton

    Healing, One Story at a Time by Licia Canton

    In 2012, a driver pulled up behind me while I was putting a box in the trunk of my car. He crushed my legs between the two bumpers. I was bedridden for four months, and then I started physiotherapy. Within a year I was able to do 95 percent of the activities I had done before the accident. People would ask me how my legs were doing and I would smile and tell them I was doing well. I was, physically—but I didn’t tell them that I wasn’t able to write.

    I wasn’t able to write for clients, organize events or attend networking functions. I didn’t think any of it was worth it. I had lost my drive. In fact, I had lost my desire to do anything at all. A few weeks after the accident, I had looked at the positive side of things: I had decided to finish my second book of stories; I was going to write on my laptop while in bed. But that never happened.

    My insurance agent suggested that I see a therapist. I would only be able to move forward by dealing with the trauma. I decided to try it, and I discovered that writing itself was what would cure my writing block. It’s called narrative therapy, and it changed my perspective on life.

    Vera, my therapist, asked me to do exercises in automatic writing. I had to just put words on the page without thinking about what I was writing. Then she said that I had to write about the accident in order to regain my confidence. At first, this seemed like an impossible task. If I could write, why would I be there? I could talk about the accident during therapy, but I couldn’t write about it. I didn’t want to write about it.

    Eventually, I wrote a story about a writer who was unable to write about a traumatic experience. It took me many months to be able to do that. I could not sit for longer than five minutes at a time. I worked at it early in the morning when everyone was still asleep, when I was least likely to be interrupted—and when no one would see me crying.

    As part of the therapy, I was obliged to read that first story “Because of Leonard Cohen” at every therapy session until I could read it without crying. That accomplishment was priceless. Then, the therapist asked me to read the story at a public venue as I would have done with any of my other stories. But I couldn’t fathom the thought of sharing my very personal writing in public. I come from a background where broken bones get fixed and as for the rest, we simply move on. Everyone knew that I had been in an accident. Very few people knew about the ensuing depression. It was not a topic of discussion.

    “I could not sit for longer than five minutes at a time. I worked at it early in the morning when everyone was still asleep, when I was least likely to be interrupted—and when no one would see me crying.”

    I first read “Because of Leonard Cohen” abroad, at a short story conference where very few people knew me. The story was later published in the international short story anthology Unbraiding the Short Story, edited by Maurice A. Lee. Then, I wrote more, and more. I wrote and published other pieces inspired by my accident, “In Front of the Bell Centre” and “The Woman in the Red Coat.” And I still haven’t finished writing all of the stories that I need to, and want to, write. I have a Table of Contents with the titles of all the stories that I am working on, all part of my narrative therapy. With the completion of each new story, the process is the same. I ask for feedback from several writer friends. I read it repeatedly in private until I feel completely comfortable with it. I read it to my husband and children. Then, I read it in public either before or after it is published. Now, I preface the readings by saying that the story came out of narrative therapy.

    Vera told me about Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de style (1947), a collection of ninety-nine retellings of the same story, each in a different style. Although I am no longer in therapy, I continue working on my own version of Queneau’s book: multiple literary variations of my accident and its aftermath. Just as I was not thrilled about physiotherapy and osteopathy, I am not exactly fond of this literary project—mostly because I have had to postpone other writing projects. On a positive note, however, narrative therapy has encouraged me to go beyond my comfort zone by doing other activities connected to writing that I would not have done a few years ago: guest blogging, giving workshops, mentoring other writers, writing/speaking about depression and narrative therapy, and actively seeking venues to read the writing that has come out of narrative therapy.

    I still cry every time I tackle a new story, but I always feel a great satisfaction when I share it in public. It is part of the process that moves me towards complete healing, as is this piece that you’re reading right now. In fact, I prepared my pitch for this column two years ago. I just wasn’t ready to share my experience then.

    headshotLicia Canton is the author of the short story collection Almond Wine and Fertility (2008), published in Italy as Vino alla mandorla e fertilità (2015). She is also a literary translator and founding editor-in-chief of Accenti Magazine. She has published personal and critical essays and edited nine books. She mentors emerging writers, journalists, and editors. She holds a Ph.D. from Université de Montréal and a Master’s from McGill University. See her profile in LinkedIn or the Hire A Writer directory.

    Photos: Flickr (top); Ohayon (headshot)