Tag: Writer

On the Back of Turtle Island Reads—by Shannon Webb-Campbell

A year ago, I’d have never believed I would be asked to advocate Indigenous literatures on CBC for Turtle Island Reads. Given that I was living in St. John’s, Newfoundland, teaching and studying in the English department at Memorial University (MUN), I had no clue I’d be islanded again, but this time in Montreal. Let alone be invited to speak about Indigenous literature on national radio.

Just over thirteen moon cycles later, after taking the first (and only) “Aboriginal Myth, Medicine, and Magic” course offered at the graduate level at MUN by Dr. Valerie Legge and co-instructor Amelia Reimer, I shared a knowing wink with Creator while sitting on the stage with my fellow Indigenous advocates. As a student of literature, I came out of the academy and into the public with Métis poet and musician Moe Clark, who advocated for Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s This Accident of Being Lost; and Anishinaabe comedian and writer Ryan McMahon, who heralded Eden Robinson’s Son of a Trickster. I trumpeted Carol Daniels’ novel, Bearskin Diary.

“I shared a knowing wink with Creator while sitting on the stage with my fellow Indigenous advocates.”

We gathered at Tanna Schulich Hall at McGill University on September 20, days before the fall equinox. Our host and moderator, CBC’s Waubgeshig Rice and Nantali Indongo, facilitated a vital conversation spanning issues of storytelling, trauma, healing, and the need for Indigenous literatures. Truthfully, all three of us advocates could have sung praises for one another’s texts, as each book is made of powerful medicines and provocative storytelling, and each one embodies Indigenous knowledge systems.

Part of the role of advocates is to select a book, and each of us picked texts that spoke to our own craft and the relationship to our own Indigenous being. Clark was drawn to Simpson’s This Accident of Being Lost because of its poetic and sonic qualities. Much like Simpson’s work, Clark’s music breaks and beckons to tradition. Simpson doesn’t adhere to the infrastructure of the colonial English language. She avoids capitalization. Sometimes she writes in Anishinaabe, and doesn’t feel it necessary to translate. Clark approached her pitch in a similar fashion.

McMahon highlighted the fact that each of the authors were First Nations women: “We’re in a moment now for Indigenous women artists. We need to not forget that.” He pitched Robinson’s Son of a Trickster with his trademark humour and intelligence.

As I first encountered Daniel’s Bearskin Diary when reviewing it for The Malahat Review last year, I recognized how much the novel has shaped my own work. Not only did I feel a strong kinship with the novel’s protagonist, Sandy, a Cree journalist and TV reporter for CBC who comes into her Indigenous culture through telling other people’s stories, but also with the book’s relationship to the ongoing genocide of Canada’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirits.

“I feel a strong kinship with … the book’s relationship to the ongoing genocide of Canada’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirits.”

My own work spans genre, as I began my writing career as a journalist. Much like Sandy, I became comfortable asking questions and conveying the narratives of other people’s lives. Criticism has always been equal parts discovery and intellectual engagement. It’s a place to find and be found. From there, I became a poet (Daniels writes poetry, too). My forthcoming book, Who Took My Sister? (BookThug 2018), is a collection of poems and texts that hold and carry trauma. These poems are contemporary poetic strategies, both haunting testaments and a mix of Indigenous medicines. Who Took My Sister? is a rally cry, a space for raising awareness and cutting truths. It bears witness to the national genocide of Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two Spirits, whose lives are cut short due to the colonial agenda.

“Criticism has always been equal parts discovery and intellectual engagement. It’s a place to find and be found.”

Who Took My Sister? is also being transformed into a touring classical music piece for violin and piano composed by Melissa Hui, and will be performed by Indigenous Inuk artist Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory in spring 2019.

Poetry has been an ongoing journey with many twists and turns. Recently, it’s led me to writing plays. I’ve been working on The Landless Band, a theatre show about a character who grows up in the suburbs, then learns she’s Indigenous. Tying back to Daniel’s work, while her protagonist Sandy was visibly Indigenous with darker skin, her storytelling techniques overlap with mine: we both draw from a personal narrative and explore it through characterization. The Landless Band is being presented in a workshop form at LSPU Hall in St. John’s, Newfoundland in spring 2018 by Eastern Edge Gallery.

“The most exciting writing in this country is rooted in Indigenous writers, playwrights, and poets.”

While Turtle Island Reads promotes Indigenous literatures, it also honours the advocates and their practice. Having only recently arrived in Montreal, to find myself in a room full of avid readers who are excited about Indigenous writing was an honour. It’s a testament that we’re ready to step beyond the canon, and unpack Canadian literature. We’re making room for new voices. Perhaps I’m biased, but the most exciting writing in this country is rooted in Indigenous writers, playwrights, and poets.

Shannon Webb-Campbell is a mixed Indigenous (Mi’kmaq) and settler poet, writer, and critic currently based in Montreal. Her first book, Still No Word (2015), was the inaugural recipient of Egale Canada’s Out in Print Award. She was the Canadian Women in the Literary Arts (CWILA) critic-in-residence in 2014, and sits on CWILA’s board of directors. Her work has appeared in many anthologies, journals, and publications across Canada, including the Globe and Mail, Geist magazine, The Malahat Review, Canadian Literature, Room, and Quill and Quire. In 2017 she facilitated a book club-style reading of The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada at Atwater Library. Who Took My Sister? is her second book.

Photo credits: Courtesy of the CBC (header banner); Shannon Webb-Campbell (Bearskin Diary); Dayna Danger (headshot)

November 9, 2017
‘Just Do It’ for Writers—by Carolyne Van Der Meer

The thing about writing fiction is you need to know what kind of writer you are. The kind who needs a plan, or the kind who doesn’t. I was convinced I needed a plan. Lori Weber taught me I didn’t.

Earlier this year, I was chosen as one of the mentees in the QWF’s annual mentorship program. The goal was to work on my young adult fiction novel with Lori, a prolific children’s writer and YA fiction novelist. I’ve been at this novel—my first—for a few years. I’ve worked with other mentors, attended workshops, and been part of writing groups. But I was stuck. And Lori, using wisdom gleaned from writing ten books, unstuck me. It has been euphoric.

Prior to beginning the mentorship in February, I handed more than 100 pages over to Lori, written over the last three years. Chapters, scenes, flashbacks, character sketches—and a plan. A plan that outlined my novel in thirty-three chapters. This novel was planned to the hilt. Every move was carved out. So why couldn’t I write it?

“I’ve been at this novel—my first—for a few years. I’ve worked with other mentors, attended workshops, and been part of writing groups. But I was stuck.”

At our first mentorship session—a two-hour foray into scones, homemade jam, and Earl Grey—Lori asked me to tell her my goals for the four-month mentorship. Of course I wanted to advance my novel. But I wanted to talk about craft. I wanted to pick her brain. Hey, here I had, right in front of me, a very fine YA novelist, a successful one with some ten books to her credit—one, Yellow Mini, even written in verse. I’m a poet first—so Lori became my hero pretty fast. I wanted to understand how she does it. How does she hammer out all those words and weave them into a believable story, one that young people will not be able to put down? I wanted to know her secret.

“This novel was planned to the hilt. Every move was carved out. So why couldn’t I write it?”

It was simple: drop the plan.

What? Yes, I had heard right. Get rid of that bloody plan.

So as much as our mentorship together was about writing, it was also about teaching me something I didn’t at first believe I needed to learn—and something I doubted I was capable of learning. How?

Well, she asked me, why did this novel need to be mapped out so tightly? I had a general idea, didn’t I, of where I wanted to go, so why not run with that? It didn’t seem to me to be enough. But Lori had plenty of examples, the most significant one being that she was hard at work on her eleventh book, one that she was mapping out—as it got written—on the wall in multi-coloured post-it notes. The plan didn’t come beforehand: it was being developed as she wrote.

This was a completely foreign notion to me. I was used to writing poetry, where the idea could be banged out in a few minutes. I knew from minute one what my storyline would be and I could get it out in one sitting. Of course, then I would spend hours reworking and reworking—until I had something that I was convinced was jolting. Something that would move the reader in some way. And then Lori asked me the question that changed everything: why was writing my novel any different?

Of course I had lots of reasons for her: because I didn’t know what the outcome would be; because I didn’t know how to deal with the passing of time; because I need to describe what happens in every second of every minute; because I need a plan to get from A to B.

You just believe, she said. And you write. It was like the Nike slogan. Just Do It.

Over the next few months—over many cups of Earl Grey and too many scones, Lori taught me how to “let go” and believe that I don’t need a prescription. If I had a strong general notion of the plot and of the various climaxes on the plotline, I could simply start writing and gently push myself towards the outcome. Her mantra of “just write it” became my own. Simple but true. Lori kept telling me that if I didn’t write it, there would be nothing to work with, nothing to fix. Just like the poem I could write in a few minutes and rework and rework.

“Her mantra of ‘just write it’ became my own. Simple but true.”

So apart from some very concrete accomplishments, such as a general plot overview, a complete character tree, the necessary historical research—and five completed chapters—I have come away from this mentorship with a new skill: being able to let go and just believe. Lori showed me how to work with intuition, energy, even faith. She claims she doesn’t know what will come out until she writes. So writing is the key. I believe her now. And I got rid of the plan. Really.

If you are a Quebec-based English-language writer and you’d like to apply for mentor, or to be a mentor, visit the call for applications for the 2018 program.

Carolyne Van Der Meer is the author of Motherlode: A Mosaic of Dutch Wartime Experience. Her second book, a collection of poetry called Journeywoman, will be published by Inanna this fall.

Photo credit: Bassam Sabbagh (headshot)

September 21, 2017
How Do I Research and Write About My Subject When There’s No Archive?—by Linda M. Morra

When perusing the scrapbook of a Canadian female writer and artist, I find a twig of cedar clipped to its pages. Later, I read her handwritten letters, which reveal that the twig was exchanged as a token of affection between correspondents. I have been researching this writer for over a decade, and her archives have undergirded three of my books—a real gift, when I know that women’s archives are often scarce, if they exist at all.

“But how do I research and write about my subject when there’s no archive?” This is a question I’m often asked because of the frequent lack of material about women’s lives. The answer is layered, multidirectional.

I.

Perhaps there is an archive—just not one in an official, state-sanctioned place, such as a university, museum, or library. There are materials; you just haven’t found them yet. You have to go beyond formal institutions and ask surviving family members of the subject in question—sometimes more than a few times. And you have to consult with documents in out-of-the-way places. The latter sometimes means borrowing someone’s truck—or hopping into a stranger’s—and carrying a pocket knife along with your laptop, just to be sure you’re going to be okay.

“Perhaps there is an archive—just not one in an official, state-sanctioned place, such as a university, museum, or library.”

II.

How do I research and write about my subject when there’s no archive? Sometimes you don’t yet have access to the archive, so you have to know how to ask. You have to be there at the right time and the right place and the right day and ask the right person. (Surely, not that guy? Yup, that guy.) Sometimes it means drinking a Guinness for breakfast because that was what was offered to you, and you don’t want to be rude, and you were never one to back down from a challenge. Then it means waiting until you’re headed towards being more than just a bit tipsy, even after the whole omelette you ate for good measure, and then it means asking right then for permission to access files. Who knows if you slurred your words when you asked? That’s not on record anywhere. Sometimes that’s what it takes to gain confidence, and not just your confidence to ask for permission, but also his: he needs to know you’re a worthy candidate for permission. Drinking a whole Guinness at 9 a.m. apparently qualifies you.

III.

How do I research and write about my subject when there’s no archive? At other times, the archive is stashed away in a basement, hidden from prying eyes, waiting for daylight—or perhaps, you tell yourself optimistically, waiting for you. And accessing it takes earning trust, but not by drinking beer this time. No, this time it means taking all kinds of precautions: reading documents, preparing documents, writing documents, rewriting those documents, and rewriting them again. It means signing contracts, and trying to do all manner of intellectual calisthenics to be sure you’re in top form to handle this one just right. Oh, you’ll still get it wrong—or, at least, your copy editor will—but it won’t matter. It seems you were doomed not to get this one right. When you work with an archive that no one even knew existed, a misstep can happen in spite of your best efforts.

“It seems you were doomed not to get this one right. When you work with an archive that no one even knew existed, a misstep can happen in spite of your best efforts.”

IV.

How do I research and write about my subject when there’s no archive? Maybe the archive isn’t a tangible thing, such as a document or photograph. My dear colleague and friend, TL Cowan, researches cabaret. A performance is an elusive thing, but someone’s memories about one night can help you reconstruct it; recollections about the scene tell you something about what a performer might have been trying to accomplish. Many witnesses recounted how a Kahnawake poetess at the turn of the century wore a stereotypical “Indian dress”—a short little buckskin number—before an audience of white men. Titillating, you might think, until you read the fiery tone of her lyrics and understand that where and how she performed her work added value and meaning to it. Then you realize she was giving these men unmitigated shit for their assumptions of superiority, and for the violence wrought upon Indigenous nations.

V.

How do I research and write about my subject when there’s no archive? Consider archival deposits that may not seem to have anything to do with your subject—at least, not at first. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police files offer one example. Maybe you’re not interested in the RCMP. Perhaps they’re not exactly your cup of military tea. (I personally prefer espresso, if it can be had.) But sometimes you may want to drink that tea because of what you might learn. The RCMP, as it turns out, spied relentlessly on women activists in the 1970s. They have files upon files on feminist associations and meetings. You don’t have to like RCMP tactics, but reading their records will reveal a lot to you about these women activists. And, later on, you can still drink your espresso.

VI.

How do I research and write about my subject when there’s no archive? Have you considered different searches on the internet? Ah, the digital world, that mysterious place that consistently reminds me of the ocean, which washes up a wealth of material one day and is a seemingly flat, calm, and inscrutable surface the next. What lies underneath that surface? If you just bait the right hook, what will you draw up? Sometimes the hook dangles there, brings in nothing much—an old shoe, candy wrappers, and some algae. You suppose it’s possible you can reconstruct something from the old shoe. Then, at other times, you find a whale, and you have no idea how to fish for whales. Befriend it, perhaps? Yes, that’s better, and don’t turn your back on it while it frolics in the harbour. How did that whale get there? You download everything you find that day, because tomorrow it may swim away back into the ocean, and only surface again with a whole new set of research terms, whatever those might be.

“Ah, the digital world, that mysterious place that consistently reminds me of the ocean, which washes up a wealth of material one day and is a seemingly flat, calm, and inscrutable surface the next. What lies underneath that surface?”

By now, you’ve tried everything you know. What do you have left? You may have found material completely unrelated to your current subject. A postmark, say, that proclaims “God Bless America” or “Help Retarded Children.” You wonder: has anyone written about these postal slogans? Your imagination begins to suggest a future project.

Gather these materials. Delight in the wealth of all that’s left behind—from twigs to postmarks to letters. Leave your own trail, to form in effect a new archive—a gift for another generation of researchers. Finally, remember to call upon your own imagination. That has a peculiar and unaccountable wealth of its own. Don’t forget to visit that archive, ever.

Linda M. Morra is a professor of Canadian literature and Canadian Studies at Bishop’s University. Her book, Unarrested Archives (UTP 2014), was shortlisted for the 2015 Gabrielle Roy Prize in English; her edited edition of Jane Rule’s Taking My Life (2011) was a finalist for the LAMBDA prize (2012). She is the current president of the Quebec Writers’ Federation.

Photo credits: The National Archives (UK) [CC BY 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons (top banner); Linda M. Morra (postmarked envelope)

August 25, 2017
Transcendence—by Francine Cunningham

I had the privilege of being an artist in residence in Mistissini, a community in northern Quebec, this February and March. The community was small and welcoming; the snow, on the other hand, was otherworldly. There were mountains of it piled and strung along the road to the school, like a miniature version of the Rockies I am used to. While I struggled with the overwhelming volume of the white stuff, I welcomed the natural beauty of the land, the quiet of the nights, and the stillness that comes from being outside the city. With nothing to distract me I was able to spend hours every night writing and painting. I read something like ten books and slept deeper than I have in a long time. It was a treat to turn off my email for six weeks, not take on any additional contracts, and really focus on my writing and visual art. I was teaching youth how to integrate their visual art with their writing through zines, so it was the perfect time for me to spend some time doing the same.

The Mikw Chiyâm arts program was commissioned by the Quebec Cree School Board in 2015 and has just finished its second successful year. It brings together artists and students, the hope being that by creating a safe and creative space, students will be inspired to come to school more often and have a more positive experience once there.

I am an Indigenous writer, artist, and educator, and have been working with Indigenous youth for over ten years. I have been a part of many different programs that use artistic practice as a way to intercede and help guide students onto a path that will give them confidence and knowledge so they can succeed in the world. The thing I hear most from students is how much they wish that they, as budding artists, were treated with the same level of care and given the same number of opportunities as in the sports or science concentration programs. Having an arts concentration program inside of a high school is remarkable; having one that has the level of support of Mikw Chiyâm is something I have never seen. It is literally making opportunities for young artists that they would not get otherwise.

Often the arts can go unrecognized as a valid life path for a young person, but you just have to look to who the people are that are revitalizing our Indigenous communities and you will see artists at the forefront. When working with youth, Indigenous or not, I try to help them infuse their work, whether it’s fiction, poetry, or non-fiction, with a spark of who they are and their own unique point of view, with their own experience, tradition, and culture. Whether that takes the form of simply setting their dystopian dramas in their own community, or adding in bits of their language, or having characters that speak and act like them and their friends, these sparks are what makes their writing so unique.

“I try to help them infuse their work, whether it’s fiction, poetry, or non-fiction, with a spark of who they are and their own unique point of view, with their own experience, tradition, and culture.”

Growing up, I never read a story from a viewpoint that felt like my own: that of someone considered white passing, who grew up off the land, was raised in the city, yet is still Indigenous. I’ve found in my work with Indigenous youth that many are craving a varied point of view in the stories they read, something different than the stories they have thus far been presented with. There is a shame that comes with feeling like you are disconnected from your community. When you don’t know your language. When you can’t answer all the questions from non-Indigenous people. There is a shame that can infect a person when you aren’t what you see in movies, in stories—when you aren’t a real “Indian.”

If not treated like a valid feeling, this void only serves to make youth feel more alone, more different, when in reality they have a whole network of people around them who feel the same way. Opening up space, letting discussion flow through these gut-wrenching topics, is so important. Oftentimes this can be the first time they’ve been allowed to talk about such things. I have found that once you break down those thick walls a flood of words come out. And eventually they land on the page. And they become something more than art. They transcend the writer. They help. They heal.

“Once you break down those thick walls a flood of words come out… They transcend the writer. They help. They heal.”

The zines that the students created were powerful. They tackled issues like sexual abuse in the community, the stigmatization of mental illness, loneliness, and identity. These stories were told through humor, visual art, prose, and end-of-the-world disasters. At a final celebration night, we invited the community to come see the students’ work. For weeks, I had been telling them that people would buy their zines, that people other than me cared about what they were writing. The students wouldn’t believe me.

Right before we opened the doors to let people in, they again tried to let me down easy, telling me not to get my hopes up, that no one would come and that was okay. They were trying to protect my feelings because I was so excited. But the community did come out. They read through all the zines, and by the end of the night we had sold out of everything we had created and made over five hundred dollars. The students were shocked. I was elated. I knew their words were valuable, that they were worth listening to. And now they had the proof.

Francine Cunningham is a Canadian Indigenous writer, artist, and educator. Her creative non-fiction has appeared in The Malahat Review, the anthology Boobs: women explore what it means to have breasts (Caitlin Press), and more. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in The Puritan, Joyland Magazine, Echolocation Magazine, The Maynard, and more. She is a graduate of the UBC Creative Writing MFA program and a recent winner of The Hnatyshyn Foundation’s REVEAL Indigenous Art Award. You can find more about her at www.francinecunningham.ca.

All photos in this piece are by Francine Cunningham.

July 21, 2017
How to Get Out of the Slush Pile—by Rachel Thompson

I yawn and keep flicking through my virtual stack of submissions. I need one more piece that will not only fill a few pages in the next issue but also resonate with the writing I have already accepted for the magazine.

A short story pops up; a few lines in and I’m wondering: is anything going to happen? Flick to the next one, and words start to blur together. Is this the same story, or another one? Why does it sound like everything I’ve already read today? I click, click, click, until I land on one that startles me at the first line. I read on. And on. Now I’m alert, driven to read to the end. I scan the cover letter and see it’s submitted somewhere else at the same time; a competitive voice in my head says, Mine first! I hit the “accept” button.

—

Reading, accepting, and rejecting lit mag submissions has taught me so much about writing and publishing.

For one thing, I’m totally over the idea that if my writing doesn’t make it into an issue of a magazine, it means they think my work is no good. Editors get many, many submissions: far too many for us to print. The people reading these can be tired (see above) and overlook things. We try to give it our best attention, but at our drop-dead deadlines, we have to make quick and cold choices.

Writing that doesn’t begin at a critical moment upon which everything else hinges, or with an opening line that raises more questions than answers, is unlikely to hold my attention for long. You never quite appreciate in media res until you’ve read hundreds of submissions that languish in the beginning. If you’re writing narrative work, and you don’t open with an action or decision point, you’re going to lose me. Consider the opening line of Rebecca Fisseha’s story, “What Grows”^{^[1]}:

“Once, upon a day of politics trouble, I saw my mother burying her gold in the vegetable and herb garden at the back of our house.”

After just one sentence, I have so many questions. What is the politics trouble? Who calls it “politics trouble”? Why is the mother burying the gold? Where is this home? When is this trouble happening? When an opening line makes me ask at least three of the five W’s, I feel as if I have struck gold. No wonder I picked her piece for Room issue 38.1.

More often I read submissions that start by explaining things to me—where we are, when we are, who these people are, etc., etc., when the most compelling narratives make us curious and allow us to savour the discovery of these answers. There’s a simple explanation for why this happens. New writers just don’t have the experience to know how many drafts professional writers go through before publishing. (It’s more than most think, likely by a factor of ten.)

“You never quite appreciate in media res until you’ve read hundreds of submissions that languish in the beginning.”

Speaking of explaining, in cover letters I find writers are often tempted to tell me what their writing is about, and why it’s important for me to read it. But I’m going to read it anyway. You don’t need to convince me. And telling me why I should read something I’m already going to read puts me off a bit. Let your work show me what it’s about. Let the cover letter just deliver the facts we ask for.

Writers often ask me if simultaneous submissions are cast in a negative light. Quite the opposite. It’s more likely to compel me to accept something I like more quickly and it has never had the effect of turning me off of reading something.

Another thing I’ve learned is that the earlier you submit in a reading period, the likelier your piece will make the cut. Remember how I said earlier I was looking to fill not only a space but to find a piece that would join in a conversation started by the other pieces I’ve already accepted? We truly do sometimes turn down some of the best work because it a) either repeats themes, styles or settings in work we’ve already accepted for the issue, or b) is too long to fit into the space we have left. Because most magazines will read the work in order of receipt, if your piece is in an early stack and we like what you’re doing, there’s a better chance we’ll make other pieces fit around your writing than vice versa.

“New writers just don’t have the experience to know how many drafts professional writers go through before publishing. (It’s more than most think, likely by a factor of ten.)”

Start in the middle. Revise, revise again, revise better. Don’t explain in your story or in your cover letter. Tell us you sent it elsewhere. And submit early. My last bit of advice is to submit more often. You’re only going to increase the chance your work is published by sending it out to more places.

But make sure it’s the right place. If you’re sending to Room, a journal that publishes women and genderqueer writers, and you are in fact a man (this happens a lot)—then I can’t help you.

Rachel Thompson’s book of poetry, Galaxy (Anvil Press, 2011), won the SFU First Book Competition. Contest judge Gregory Scofield said her poems had “Wonderful and clear imagery as well as a ‘real’ and ‘true’ sense of place, love, longing, family, and the constant struggle and re-negotiation of self and experience.” She’s a current editorial collective member and former Managing Editor at Room. Rachel helps writers level-up their writing lives with practical advice and kind support at LitWriters.co.

^{^[1]} Used with permission.

Photo credits: Joel Penner (top banner); Vivienne McMaster (headshot)

June 19, 2017
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

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.

Robert 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)

May 25, 2017
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.

Kate 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)

November 24, 2016
Ghostwriter by Peter McFarlane

Working as a ghostwriter is not something you plan for; it is something you stumble into. In my case, it began when an old friend, a political activist who had long spoken about wanting my help in putting a book together, called to say he had found a private source of funding for it. Was I interested in writing it?

It was a subject I had some a background in so I was able to rough out an outline in a couple of weeks. We got together every couple of months for two-day work sessions and within a year we had a manuscript and a publisher. While I was wrapping up that project, another friend recommended me to someone else who had a story they wanted told, and some funding for it.

This time the world I would be writing about was one I was unfamiliar with, but I liked the subject of the book and I decided to give it a shot. It was during this project that I began to understand what a privilege it can be to tell someone else’s story. I had written biography before, but this was a strange hybrid: a first-person biography. In a very real sense, you become the person you are writing for, internalizing their thoughts and feelings as you use all of the tools at your disposal to tell their story as if was your own.

“I began to understand what a privilege it can be to tell someone else’s story.”

Part of the job is also putting the subject and their life in a larger context. This means researching time and place and weaving their narrative into the world they inhabit. In this, you can allow yourself a measure of literary freedom, secure in the knowledge that the character whose life you are temporarily inhabiting will get a chance to look over your shoulder and make whatever corrections are necessary.

In this case, the book was for someone who had a brief media fame but for the most part lived under the radar. And it was an admirable life. A man with principles and convictions and an unwavering sense of solidarity, moving through a world that was often unwelcoming and at times outright hostile. But he stood his ground and pushed forward and through the force of character made a success of things. That is how the story played out. An honest man confronting his times without compromising his principles. I was pleased that the first publisher I approached picked it up. The experience confirmed to me the truth of the cliché that everyone has a book in them—at least in the sense that all of our stories are worth telling. And for a writer, telling those stories can be as rewarding as any other literary form.

“The experience confirmed to me the truth of the cliché that everyone has a book in them—at least in the sense that all of our stories are worth telling.”

About ghosting in particular, I learned that even what was supposed to be a negative turned out to be a positive. I am speaking about the fact that your work goes unrecognized by the larger public. This might have mattered when I was twenty-five but now that I am over sixty it is a hidden benefit, as I discovered at the launch of my activist friend’s book. It was a relatively big event, with about 200 people packing a hall in Toronto for an on-stage interview. I sat near the back and it was one of the most pleasant literary events I ever attended. I had dinner with my friend before the event and we went out later with others to celebrate. The next day, my friend left for a long but low-budget book tour. I returned to my home in the Laurentians, realizing that I had the best of both worlds: the satisfaction of having written a decent book that was off to find its public and freedom from the obligations that accompany book publishing.

So when the publisher of the recently completed book asked if I would like him to add my name on the cover, I unhesitatingly declined. When the work is finished, better to be free to move on to the next project while someone else has the chore of flogging it. Ghostwriting a book, I discovered, can be a bit like ghosting a party. When you have had your fill, and your fun, you can slip away without stopping for those awkward good-byes.

Peter McFarlane has written five books of nonfiction, including two ghostwritten books, as well as more than 100 newspaper and magazine features. He has specialized in Indigenous history and politics and has worked on several CBC radio programmes as a researcher and on-air contributor. He is currently completing another ghostwritten book and a new work of non-fiction.

Photo: Flickr

October 24, 2016
Literary Influences: E. L. Doctorow’s Lives of the Poets by John Goldbach

The first time I read E. L. Doctorow’s wonderful Lives of the Poets: A Novella and Six Stories (1984) was in early 2001, after picking up a used hardcover copy at City Lights Bookshop in London, Ontario, at 356 Richmond St. Not City Lights Bookstore, the famed bookstore in San Francisco, California, at 261 Columbus Ave—City Lights Bookshop (the one in London ON) is one of my favourite used bookstores ever, a small but dense and rich oasis of books and comics and records, etc.

A few years later, after reading Slavoj Žižek’s Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (2004), I reread Lives of the Poets. Much to my surprise, Žižek references Doctorow’s collection in his second book about 9/11 and its aftermath (namely, the illogic of the Bush administration’s reasons for invading Iraq). I was surprised to learn Žižek uses Doctorow’s collection as a sort of model. Žižek writes,

The hidden literary model for this book is what I consider E. L. Doctorow’s masterpiece, the supreme exercise in literary post-modernism, far superior to his bestselling Ragtime, or Billy Bathgate: his Lives of the Poets: Six Stories and a Novella—six totally heterogeneous short stories (a son is set to the task of concealing his father’s death; a drowned child is callously handled by rescuers; a lonely schoolteacher is shot by a hunter; a boy witnesses his mother’s act of infidelity; a car explosion kills a foreign schoolgirl) accompanied by a novella which conveys the confused impressions of the day-to-day life of a writer in contemporary New York who, as we soon guess, is the author of the six stories. The charm of the book is that we can reconstruct the process of the artistic working-through of the raw material of this day-to-day life.

As soon as I’d finished Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, I reread Lives of the Poets, my engagement with the book deepening.

I’ve read the Doctorow collection twice since then. About a decade later, in 2015, I used it as an oblique model for organizing a book of my own fiction, It Is an Honest Ghost, which consists of six stories and a novella (Hic et Ubique). There was something about how Doctorow’s stories stood alone—were “totally heterogeneous,” in Žižek’s words—but nevertheless informed one another, that I found haunting.

My new collection was originally made up of eight stories and a novella but for myriad reasons I cut two stories, not the least of those reasons being for the sake of uniformity, a loose strange symmetry—a uniformity and symmetry impressed upon my mind by Doctorow.

And then I read Lives of the Poets for a fourth time in July 2016, while working on this short appreciation. Lives of the Poets remains politically perspicacious, deeply insightful, and contemporary.

Here’s Doctorow on US immigration, and mass migrations in general. The writer, the narrator of the novella, emerges from the NYC subway, and observes the new waves of immigrants to the city. He writes,

Dear God, let them migrate, let my country be the last best hope. But let us make some distinctions here: The Irish, the Italians, the Jews of Eastern Europe, came here because they wanted a new life. They worked for the money to bring over their families. They said good riddance to the old country and were glad to be gone. They did not come here because of something we had done to them. The new immigrants are here because we have made their lands unlivable. They have come here to save themselves from us.

Lives of the Poets continues to shed light on the present for me. Out of Doctorow’s impressive and celebrated oeuvre, it’s often overlooked. But it remains an insightful and inspiring collection, chock-a-block with strange echoes and resonances.

John Goldbach is the author of The Devil and the Detective (Coach Books, 2013), a novel, which was an Amazon Best Book of 2013; Selected Blackouts (Insomniac Press, 2009), a story collection; and, most recently, It Is an Honest Ghost (Coach House Books, 2016), a collection of six short stories and a novella (Hic et Ubique).

Works Cited: Žižek, Slavoj. Iraq: the Borrowed Kettle. New York: Verso, 2004, p. 7.

Photo: Kate Hutchinson (headshot)

August 27, 2016
Saying Yes by Monique Polak

I am bad at saying no. As part of a better-late-in-life-than-never self-improvement exercise, I try to turn down extra work—especially the non-paying variety. (more…)

April 12, 2016