The Writing Life Turns Out to be Exciting After All

 At the morning panel on the Writing Life held at the Banff Centre, Kiran Desai, Gail Anderson-Dargatz, Carrie Tiffany and Ameen Merchant were frank, forthcoming and charming. They managed to make writing sound like just another job and the most wonderful way to spend a morning (Ameen can only write from 4-8am), afternoon (Desai says she dreads the morning and likes to sleep till 10) and evening (Carrie Tiffany’s got a day job as a farm journalist in Australia).

Writing, of course, is a passion  as much as it is a profession and an obsession more than anything else. That point was made abundantly  clear when British Columbia’s Anderson-Dargatz spoke movingly about the death of her father. She said that as the family sat by his bedside in his final hours, both her and her mother (also a writer), took notes. “There’s something pathological about this writing life,” she said. “I feel like there’s a vulture on my shoulder watching all the time.”

So writing as support mechanism, as a way to order and make sense of the world. Carrie Tiffany told the rapt audience that she never meant to be a writer and, in fact, her book was rejected by all the major publishers in Australia before going on to publication and widespread acclaim.  Tiffany started out as a park ranger and describes herself as an “intensely practical person.” She said she only started writing only because images and themes kept demanding the kind of attention she couldn’t give them as an agriculture journalist.

For Desai, writing also comes out of being inspired by daily life – particularly the need to escape it. She talked of the need to somehow coalesce and transcend daily experience and thereby escape the world as we know it. She noted that, like many immigrants, she identified and understood herself as an Indian only after leaving India. Similarly, when writers find a world they can envision that is not quite the world they live in, they are able to reflect on the complicated totality that otherwise seems to utterly elude us. And so Desai spoke about writing as a lifelong quest to get “a place of no place”, a kind of writing that is both from, about, and beyond who we are and where we are.

****

At the end of the panel, a semi-serious question from the audience: “Can you be a writer if you’d had a happy childhood?” Ameen Merchant answered impishly: “If you can imagine unhappy things, then sure.”

Banff

Okay, the festival has moved to Banff, and so have I. There are 3 events today at the Banff Centre. At 11, there’s a discussion of the writing life with four very interesting, very different writers from all over the world. Challenges, frustrations and rewards goes the promotional bumpf. What about the boredom? Writers are glamorous fascinating people but getting up everyday and scribbling words until they blur isn’t exactly the stuff dreams are made of. That, of course, doesn’t dissuade the many of us who want to be writers. Nor should it. If you really want to be a writer you’re probably pretty weird in the first place. You probably like the idea of spending all day pacing back and forth in a cramped dusty office covered with indecipherable notes you wrote in a Red Bull-gin cocktail frenzy the previous night.

Later this afternoon, there’s the festival finale. Don’t miss it. Where else are you going to see a Brit born in Nigeria, a Canadian who lives in France, the man described as Mexico’s edgiest literary genius, and a Canadian who’s written a novel about slavery that spans Africa, the USA, and back again? The world’s come to your doorstep and there’s nothing boring about that.

politics…

You don’t necessarily get a lot of politics at an author’s festival, unless you count who’s going first and who’s selling the most books as politics. Relatively short readings don’t lend themselves to discussions of political change, and writers tend to focus more on incremental bursts of character and whimsy to achieve maximum effect. But the tone changed last night when Tom Wayman read a searing indictment of Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan. He was followed up by British poet Daljit Nagra whose funny poems about immigrant life turned quickly bitter as he ruminated, for instance, on a particular bitter gourd his family often favoured, categorizing the subsequent dish as part of a series of “inedible historical fryups.” The festival stayed with a serious tone when, earlier today, panelists took the stage to discuss the writer’s role in depicting and coming to terms with war. Experiences ranged from Vincent Lam’s grappling with the story of his Chinese grandfather’s antics in Vietnam war era Hanoi, to Anna Porter’s discussion of experiencing the brutal suppression of the Hungarian uprising against the Soviets in 1956 as a child and channeling that experience to better understand the pressures on Reszno Kastner, the Hungarian Jew who negotiated with Eichmann to save Jews in the last year of WWII (he was assassinated in Israel after the war for his trouble). There was a sombre tone to the event as you might imagine. When the writers were asked to comment on the possibility that storytelling might serve as the redemptive bookend to war, Nancy Houston, whose new novel is a searing indictment of the US in the age of Iraq (she depicts a six year old accessing YouTube to view online atrocities) said dryly: “I actually don’t think the human race is likely to be redeemed.” Maybe not, but at least for a moment we were reminded that the true role of the writer isn’t to sell books, but to bear witness whether we like it or not.

Tribute to Steve

Steve bought me and Bidini drinks last night. Bidini is, of course, Toronto’s Dave Bidini, author of a mess of great sports-travel books, kids books, and more. But who’s Steve? As it turns out, Steve is what WordFest is all about. He’s a reader. He’s a book addict come into the light for one glorious week. Steve is a Calgary resident, a WordFest gold pass holder, and an author’s best friend: the unabashed enthusiast who buys writers drinks. Steve’s in renovation. And when he’s not renovating offices he’s reading. Bidini (who reads today as part of the road stories event) waved him down as he came into the bar adjacent to the Vertigo Theatre. Steve was clutching a bag of books to his chest. They’d met at WordFeast – Steve bought a ticket to the fundraising dinner and ended up sitting next to Bidini. Talk about getting your money’s worth. Steve sat down, told us about how he once presided over what may well have been Canada’s longest running weekly open stage poetry night, and enthusiastically discussed the six poets from all part of the globe we’d just had the rare honour of getting to hear. When we finished our drinks, he offered to buy us a round. We should buy you a drink, I said. You’re the reason we get to be here in the first place. But Steve insisted and so, we, of course, immediately relented. Bidini’s gin and tonic made a swift arrival and we clinked glasses. To Steve, we said. And we meant it. We were talking books with a fellow book addict and there was no place any one of us would have rather been.

Alberta (re)Bound

One of the mandates of any festival worth its salt is to support local talent. Film fests, folk fests, writing festivals all program special events focussed exclusively on local talent. This looks great on paper, pleases government funders and seems to be a win-win situation. But this inevitable practice also puts the artists themselves in the slightly awkward position of representing a notion of local that isn’t really found in their work. Such was the case this afternoon at the second installment of Alberta Bound, a series of readings focussed exclusively on new works set in Alberta.  I went thinking that I was exploring the characteristics and ongoing emergence of a distinct Alberta literature, and left thinking about how authors explore complex commonalities that underlie our society’s love of tagging, categorizing and dividing into groups.

Darcy Tamayose read from her debut novel Odori. Though it starts off in the Southern, Alberta town of Rainmaker Hills, the bulk of this book transpires in ancient Okinawa and a dreamland between death and life populated by a woman in a coma and a storytelling spirit. As Tamayose so eloquently put it in the q+a session after the reading: “land is a character and there is a commonality of all places.” We might want to label her an Albertan writer (she lives in Lethbridge after all), but I’m not sure that does much to help us understand her writing or the writing of the Western Canada.

Tim Bowling also read this afternoon. He’s from BC, but his book The Bone Sharps, an eloquent, ambitious novel, is set in a late 19th and early 20th century Alberta Badlands, and the fetid trenches of World War I. Bowling was inspired to write the book after spending 5 weeks on a ranch near Dinosaur Provincial Park. He told the audience that it wasn’t like he set out to deliberately explore any particular notion of the West and its landscape. It just happened that way. I think that’s true of most artists – we set our stories where we feel the ideas we want to get across will be able to grow, live, breath, and take on their own life.

Then again, that’s maybe just the luxury we have today as Canadian writers and creators. We don’t have to justify the very idea of setting a book in, say, the smalltown Alberta town of Marvin. Marvin is where the action of Calgary first time novelist Andrew Wedderburn’s Milk Chicken Bomb takes place. Wedderburn, responding to Bowling’s book, noted that one of his inspirations as an Alberta writer is Robert Kroetsch’s hallucinatory Canadian masterpiece Badlands, the tale of a deranged archeologist willing to risk anything and everything in the quest for bones. For Wedderburn, Kroetsch’s book legitimated the idea of setting a book not just in Alberta, but in the forgotten, partially populated areas of Alberta the rest of Canada doesn’t even know exist. In Milk Chicken Bomb, Wedderburn creates a genericly distinct smalltown with a single cross street, a ramshackle IGA and a curling rink. It’s a town as recognizable in smalltown Ontario and rural Manitoba as it is in Winnipeg. And yet, there’s something almost accidentally distinct about Wedderburn’s Marvin. As he put it today, “It could have been anywhere, but it turned out that it could only be where it was. “

No Swearing Please.

I hope you don’t mind a little cursing, said Joel Thomas Hynes before ripping into a reading from his new novel Right Away Monday last night in the Vertigo Theatre. The audience sat rapt as Hynes took us into the lonely mind of a Newfoundland drunk making all the wrong choices, a profanity strewn rant as lyrical and precise as anything Shakespeare might have  wrote had William been born on an Eastern Canadian island and found inspiration channeling the best of James Kelman and Ernest Hemingway.

Clearly no one minded Hynes adopting some touch of the vernacular on stage backed up by an trio of musicians expertly weaving in and out of his tangled web. But earlier in the day when I dropped the f-word at a panel discussion before 100 or so people at Mount Royal College there was at least one muted reprimand. After the show a member of the audience approached fellow panelist Michael Winter to pass on a message to me: Swearing, the fellow said, is passé.

I’m not sure why exactly I threw that word into the wind. Robert Sawyer and I were having a pretty heated debate. The discussion was about whether or not we need the cultural gatekeepers who decide what books to publish, what shows to broadcast, what movies to finance and distribute. I argued that in the age of the web we can all decide for ourselves, everyone can have equal access to mass media, so the days of the gatekeepers are numbered and we’ll be better for it. Sawyer argued that there’s still a role for editors, publishers, and other arbiters of public taste. Michael Winter was the quieter of the 3 of us, though he did note that an experiment with publicizing his book on FaceBook had seemed to be a success, suggesting a middle path which combines cultural gatekeeping with a transperancy that sees authors reveal their process and open themselves up to direct unfiltered dialogue with their readers.

Anyway, somewhere in the midst of this discussion for some unknown reason I swore. I cussed. I cursed. No one seemed to really notice or mind at the time. Driving back downtown after the panel sci-fi writer Sawyer told us that, in fact, his readers only complain about profanity when he has a character say Jesus! or Christ! instead of, say, holy shit! If you want to shock, it seems you’re better off targeting always sensitive religious sensibilities.  So maybe our audience member was right: swearing is passé. But I dare ya to tell that to Joel Thomas Hynes.

Tonight: The Poet’s Are Coming

Okay the poets are coming. Actually they’re already here. But tonight some of them will be gathering to read and collaborate with a live band, so if you want to have a beer with Hal and take in the Word of Mouth poetry night, come on down. As added enticement I’m bringing along some copies of my magazine Broken Pencil, and anyone who comes up to me and tells me they read this blog post gets one. You’ll know me ’cause I’ll be the guy in the Hello, I’m Special t-shirt.

So let me tell you a bit of what I’ve found out about the Word of Mouth poets performing tonight. Valerie Mason-John is a London based playwright, novelist, conflict resolution consultant, and performer. I’ve had a chance to spend a bit of time with her and I can tell you that she has the kind of presence that commands a room, that makes you stand up and take notice. No project seems too daunting for her to take on. If you get a chance, ask her about the time she spent in India  writing a book about the ongoing plight of women trapped in the untouchable caste. Tonight, I suspect we’ll be seeing Valerie take on the role of her alter-ego Queenie, described on her website as “one of the most startling subversions of racial imagery you’re ever likely to see on any side of the social divide.”

Another artist from overseas performing tonight is Morganics. Coming to us from Sydney, Australia, this soft-spoken gentleman blends world beats, hip-hop and his own unique Aussie sensibility. I went to his website to check out some of his music and found out that not only is he an accomplished writer and musician, but he’s also heavily involved in his community. Click on Listen and you get not just his songs, but also recordings of songs he’s worked on with high school kids in Bali, and up-and-coming aboriginal rappers in the outback. Very cool.

Okay so add Agnes Walsh, the poet laureate of Newfoundland, and Andrew Weddeburn, local Calgary indie musician and author of the very funny, sad, sly first novel Milk Chicken Bomb and you’ve got a pretty sweet night, right? But we’re not even done yet. Tonight we’ll also get to hear from one of my favourite Canadian writers, Toronto’s Mr. Stuart Ross. A indie publishing activist, poet, and fiction writer, Ross is equal parts Kafka and Krusty the Clown, a downbeat deadpan chronicler of the absurdities of modern life. At Wordfest he’s been handing out a poem called I Have Lived. Here’s a sample (for the rest you’ll just have to drop by tonight):

“I have lived in a water-filled/plastic container/that once held spumoni ice cream./I swam in endless circles/but could find neither television/nor hula-hoop and thus/had nothing to do but swim,/my whiskers brushing/the cylinder’s smooth inner walls.”

I asked Stuart how he was planning to work with the band. He rolled his eyes and told me: “Oh man, it’s a hip hop guy, a spoken word performer, and me. I’m dead man. I’m finished.” I don’t buy it for a second. Author of ten plus books, and you know what? — he’s just getting started.

The Bulgarians Come to Cincinnati

Okay, life may be random but at least that keeps things interesting. I’ve been having a lot of fun meeting writers from all over the place and discovering random but fascinating things about their careers. Montreal writer Sylvain Meunier has written over 20 books for kids and adults. I asked him if any of his books had been translated into English, and he told me that one of his books for children was finally going to get translated and published in English. How is it possible that a 2 time Governor General’s Award Winner has never been translated? It’s a sad state of affairs. But lest we fall into despair, Sylvain began telling me the story of how one of his books, a thriller, was published in Bulgaria. This got me very excited until I remembered that my Bulgarian is even shakier than my French. At which point, the Newfoundland novelist Michael Winter wandered over and told us a lovely story about a plane load of Bulgarians who all defected to Canada and settled in St John’s during a cold war refueling stopover. Winter says that one of the best restaurants in St. John’s is now devoted to Bulgarian cuisine. Speaking of translation, I also had the opportunity to talk to the writer Daniel Sada, from Mexico City. Daniel’s won Mexico’s biggest literary prize and is considered a master novelist, but, alas, only 2 of his short story books have been translated into English. Once again looking to cheer ourselves up, I asked him how he’s liking Calgary. He shrugged and noted that it’s very cold and that he was glad he’d packed a big coat. Then he looked out the window and made a somewhat sombre gesture at the skyline. This city, he said, it is like Cincinnati.

Later today on the blog: The Poets are Coming!

My Ugly Sweater, Crown Shyness, Tonight…

Okay so before my talk on pop culture with American fantasy writer D.J. MacHale, one of the kids offered to buy my Lacoste sweater for $60 bucks. We negotiated but the transaction fell to pieces when his friend mentioned that my sweater wasn’t that nice and that he had a nicer Lacoste sweater at home. So there you go. Otherwise, the event went great. MacHale quickly brought them up to speed on his 10 book series but declined to tell us if the hero dies in the end despite prompting from the kids. (Though he admitted that he totally knows what’s going to happen.) I was asked what the difference is between pop culture and a homemade brownie. My ignorance was thus revealed. Anyway, while I was busy with the kids several other interesting events were taking place, including a reading by Curtis Gillespie from his new novel Crown Shyness. Crown Shyness is a big bold book that deals with – among other things – brotherly love and conflict, fringe militia movements, and right wing evangelical politicians. The story centers around a journalist working for a great magazine in its death throes on his final assignment – to profile a Preston Manning/Stockwell Day type figure about to win his first major election. It’s a fascinating take on contemporary Western Canada and luckily for us we’ll get another chance to hear Gillespie read tomorrow (Wednesday) when he’s part of a lunch hour new Canadian fiction event at the University of Calgary. Okay, speaking of lunch I’m going to go find something to eat. Then I’m going to rest up for tonight’s showcase reading featuring bestselling crime writer Peter Robinson, award-winning author Roberta Rees, Governor General’s Award winner Marie-Claire Blais, acclaimed Scottish author A. L. Kennedy and award-winning Maori novelist James George. If you make it out, come by and say hi. I’ll be the guy in the ugly Lacoste sweater.

WordFest/WordFeast

Okay, got to know some of my fellow writers tonight at a fundraising dinner marking the opening night of the festival. (yes WordFest is underway, get your tickets now…) And what did I find out? Well, for one thing, I found out about some of the festival writers who also have blogs…Meg Tilly has a  blog. It’s a discussion of her everyday life, and she told me that she considers it a bit of antidote to those who think they automatically know her because she was once an actress. Anyway, the blog is fun to read and she says in it that she’s going to write about her experiences at WordFest, so hopefully we’ll get her take on fame, Calgary, and her burgeoning career as a writer. She’s reading, by the way, from the YA novel Porcupine, which I read a few months back and really enjoyed (more on that book soon). On a completely different note, poet Sina Queyras, currently living and writing here in Calgary, also told me about her blog. It’s an intense rumination on all things poetic. The blog is called Lemon Hound, which also happens to be the title of Sina’s new book. But according to her, the blog came first and one has nothing to do with the other. Except maybe the fact that, as she mysteriously pronounced, “neither are me.”