Notes on Writing: A Preview

June 15, 2015 at 2:43 pm  •  Posted in Articles, Blogs by

We’ve just mailed out EVENT 44.1, our annual ‘Notes on Writing’ issue (so you can stop those eager daily calls to your local post office). Every summer, we feature a collection of four or five brief, personal insights into the writing process, written by a mix of established and emerging writers from across Canada.

This year’s selection includes writers from Nova Scotia to BC (with an Ontarian or two in between). They touch on the pleasures and despairs of the writing process, telling stories of their own paths to publication and beyond.

Here’s a preview:

Michael Christie, whose second book, If I Fall, If I Die (Penguin Random House) was released this January, and who was recently profiled in Quill & Quire, gave us a piece that made me immediately download one of those anti-procrastination apps. In his essay, he writes about the digital distractions that plague today’s writers, who come to the screen ready to type great fiction and end up Googling stuff instead. He writes:

I often wonder if Dostoyevsky, if he were alive today, would have played week-long, sleepless sessions of online poker, while he simultaneously tweeted and blogged about his painful struggle with gambling addiction. Or if Virginia Woolf would’ve made short experimental videos on her iPhone and posted them to her 200K-follower Instagram account, eventually translating it into a lucrative online clothing brand bearing her iconic logo.woolf t-shirt

Nova Scotia poet Sue Goyette, a finalist for the 2014 Griffin Prize, and who has just released her fifth collection of poetry, The Brief Reincarnation of a Girl (Gaspereau), has written a piece that is both funny and profound. She describes watching an amateur comedian perform at a Halifax pub, and how she ‘had been thinking about the ways comedy is akin to poetry.’ Her essay is a discussion of silences, those that exist after a joke and in among the stanzas of a poem. She writes of the artist’s courage:

What vulnerability it takes to tell a new joke in the hot-frying-pan silence. The bright-light-in-a-crowded-room-and-you’re-up-there-alone silence. What courage it takes to fill the words of our poems with our voice as a sort of testimony to the experience and to the value of that experience to a room filled with the expectant rows of chairs and, hopefully, people.

Padma Vishwanathan’s second novel, The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (Penguin Random House), set in the aftermath of the 1985 Air India bombing, was a 2014 Giller finalist. She writes movingly about how, in her early 20s, she had her first experience with depression. She says, ‘I was confined, couldn’t act, couldn’t properly be with others, could not even do much real thinking beyond the idea that I was to blame for this—that it was a punishment for my having failed, by the ripe old age of 21, to find my life’s calling.’ The essay follows her experience in therapy and journaling, and how this ultimately inspired the title character of her second book, who practices ‘‘narrative therapy”: writing clients’ life stories for them according to what they tell him; showing them how their own narratives can trap them; then helping them to take control of the course of their stories from that point forward.’

Clue-Board-Game-Characters

Journey Prize winner Naben Ruthnum writes both literary and crime fiction, the latter under the pseudonym Nathan Ripley. He also has his own column in The National Post, called Crimewave. His essay begins ‘in a van somewhere between Winnipeg and Toronto,’ where at age 23 he toured as a musician. The piece follows his path from music to writing, and on the way he considers issues of genre, referring to Kingsley Amis’s statement that ‘a proper writer should be able to write anything,’ exploring the meaning of the word ‘hack,’ and the differences between his dual writing personas. He writes, frankly:

‘From the beginning, there was murder in my fiction. Not whispered news of a cancer diagnosis, not admissions of ancient crimes that had poisoned a family tree, but murder—in-the-library with-a-candlestick murder.’

Ashley Little, a YA author and MFA student at UBC who had two books nominated for the 2015 BC Book Prizes, sent us a piece called ‘Signposts on the Road of My Writing Life, or How I Learned to Cheat the System and Reached the Point of No Return.’ She provides glimpses of her writing experience from ages three to the present, touching on the theme of financial success in writing, and what it means to ‘make it’ as a writer. She describes one memory from a visit to her grandparents’ farm at age 10. ‘Grandma reads Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes to me,’ she writes. ‘I cry at the end. I didn’t know it was possible to cry because of a book.’

You can pick up a copy of EVENT 44.1 at your local bookstore, or order a subscription here. Check back in a couple of weeks to order print and digital single issues.