Sunday May 4th, 2008

Writers and Self-Censorship (panel discussion)

Panelists: Anke Feuchtenberger, Gary Geddes, Nairne Holtz, David McGimpsey

This panel attempted to answer some difficult questions: “To what extent is self-censorship a necessary part of the process of creation? And to what extent is it destructive of the work in progress?” Anke Feuchtenberger, born in Berlin and writing before the fall of the Berlin Wall, seemed uniquely positioned to talk about political censorship, but actually spoke more about the ripples of writing through her personal life. Her first book is W the Whore Is Throwing the Glove. Gary Geddes, writer and editor of over thirty-five books, most recently published Falsework. He has also written extensively about South America and Afghanistan. Nairne Holtz, based in Montreal, just published her first novel, The Skin Beneath. David McGimpsey writes travel articles for The Globe and Mail and has also published numerous collections of poetry and the award-winning critical study Imagining Baseball: America’s Pastime and Popular Culture.

Gary Geddes got things rolling by quoting Margaret Atwood: “You can say anything you want in Canada because nobody’s listening.” He recalled a Chilean writer, imprisoned for his work, who told him, “In Chile, your book may survive, but you may not.”

David McGimpsey said that our current talk-show culture makes non-fiction hotter: self-exposure is in fashion, quite literally. He termed the rash of memoirs “slapped child books.” He also emphasized a sense of responsibility in story-telling, not wanting to position himself as a narrator in a story he “was fully part of.”

Feuchtenberger questioned the writing explosion after the fall of the Berlin wall, asking whether it is possible to disclose anything powerful after the danger is over.

McGimpsey felt that self-censorship is often undermined, since people are always more transparent than they think. A friend told him, “You know, you’re your own worst enemy.” He replied, “You have no idea what a great friend I’ve been to myself.”

Geddes insisted on the construction of multiple personae, in real life as well as fiction. He talked about the way we change our voice when a particular person gets on the phone, constructing “a myriad of selves.” For Geddes then, all writing is fiction, as every writer, even a writer of memoirs or non-fiction, constructs a persona for herself.

Nairne Holtz said she didn’t censor herself at all while writing, but did say some of her friends asked her whether she’d based particular characters on them. She’s usually very surprised at their guesses, but said time and time again that what she writes is fiction. She finds writing a character based closely on yourself easy and lazy.

Geddes brought up the wonderful image of someone sitting on your shoulder while you write, asking who that person was: your inner critic? A parent or teacher? A lover, a friend? Who is listening while you write?

One of the questions at the end got everyone riled up. Someone asked, “Wouldn’t this discussion be more pertinent if the panel was made up of television journalists, since censorship is irrelevant for poetry and fiction, which no one reads?”

David McGimpsey responded by saying that thinking your work will change the world is for fatuous rock stars. He spoke of his happiness with what he was doing and creating every day.

Geddes brought up W. H. Auden’s poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”. He said the oft-quoted line “poetry makes nothing happen” is actually Auden reporting Yeats’ view, and for Auden the act of making a poem is a political act. One of the things tyrants are most afraid of is laughter. Geddes gestured along the panel and described a range, from his own overtly political poetry to McGimpsey’s more lighthearted subject matter, and said to lose either is to lose something precious.

Saturday May 3rd, 2008

Listen Who’s Talking (five hour workshop)

This workshop, run by Glenn Patterson, offered advice on both voice (modes of narration) and voices (dialogue). Glenn Patterson has published seven novels and a collection of his journalism, Lapsed Protestant. He lives in Belfast, and his memoir Once Upon a Hill is due for release in September. And, if you ever get the chance to take a workshop with him, jump at it. This was a fantastic day. He’s very easygoing but manages to pack an enormous amount into the hours.

Books recommended throughout the day:

• Richard Powers The Singing of Our Time
• Jane Gardam Old Filth
• Markus Zusak The Book Thief
• Alfred Alvarez The Writer’s Voice
• Philip Roth Deception
• Philip Roth Everyman
• Philip Roth American Pastoral
• Vladimir Nabokov Pale Fire
• John Boyne The Boy in Striped Pajamas

A major theme of the workshop was the importance of voice in the story. Patterson said at the beginning that real literature is immune to speed reading; reading imaginative literature is listening to a voice.

Questions a writer needs to ask at the beginning of the process are: how am I going to tell this story? Who is going to tell this story? Why this person/character?

There are many possibilities. We talked about Homer’s Odyssey, “I was told all this by Calypso, who said she had heard it from the mouth of Mercury,” as an example of a first-person narrator using the technique of reporting. One of the workshop participants had written an entire novel in which one character told another the bulk of the story. The narrator is sometimes just accepted as a construct of the novel (not every book begins with an explanation of why or how the story is being told), but sometimes needs a reason to speak or someone to speak to.

Stories often move between describing particular moments and making general statements. We need to locate the narrator’s voice consistently. A writer’s job is to make readers go along with it.

Some more specific tips:

- Avoid describing thoughts by saying, “she thought” or “…brought her back from her reveries”. Move naturally between speech and thought, with actions in the narrative making it clear we are no longer inside a character’s thought.

- The less you surround dialogue with, the better. Patterson emphasized his love for the word “said” and said that tricks to avoid it (”he sputtered,” “she muttered”) are a marker of amateur writing.

- Always have a reason for mentioning a specific time of day or year.

Finally, give shape to your novel. The Latin root of the word fiction is fictiō: “the action of shaping, a feigning, that which is feigned.” Good writing shapes a story into something worth listening to.

Friday May 2nd, 2008

Becoming a Writer II (panel discussion)

Panelists: Adam Leith Gollner, Alice Kuipers, Yu Shi, Andrea MacPherson

This panel consisted mainly of novelists, with the exception of Adam Leith Gollner, who writes non-fiction. His first book is The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce and Obsession. Alice Kuipers just published her first novel, Life on the Refrigerator Door, which tells the story of a mother and daughter through Post-It notes left on the fridge. Yu Shi is a writer and translator living in Shanghai, and has published five works of fiction, including one blog-to-book. Andrea MacPherson writes poetry and fiction. Her two novels so far are When She Was Electric and Beyond the Blue.

Panelists shared their own tips for writing, both practical and motivational. Adam Leith Gollner finds early morning the best time for writing. He quoted Harold Bloom, another early riser: “4am is neither yesterday nor today” and spoke of the liminal nature of writing fitting well with liminal times like this, or liminal spaces such as the subway. Writers exist in the in-between.

Andrea MacPherson has just finished a novel on mill workers, and spoke about when to stop researching and start writing. She asked, “where can fiction take over?” She had to learn to let characters do what they want, and not to shoehorn interesting bits of research into the story if they didn’t fit. Having attempted historical fiction myself, the balance of research and story is an abiding interest for me. I loved her final wording: “reality is a framework to hang the canvas on,” which emphasizes how much creative work needs to be done beyond writing down the facts.

Picking up on the theme of work, Alice Kuipers derided the fantasy of easy writing. She spoke of finished manuscripts sitting in drawers, and piles of rejection letters. She was also the most openly encouraging of the panelists, asking participants about their own work and urging writers to find their own personal method. If you’re stuck with a story, she said, try and figure out why it’s not working. Instead of asking what is missing (which is what I would think of first), she asks, “What do you have too much of? Action? Dialogue? Interiority? Description?”

Adam Leith Gollner referred to difficulties of structure, describing the process as akin to making your way through an overgrown forest; sometimes a path opens up, but most often you’re blindly hacking your own route out. He also recommended Margaret Atwood’s book on writing, Negotiating with the Dead. He introduced me to the fantastic concept of the vomit draft - that first draft when you just let everything spill out, as messy and disgusting as you like. This is also the method recommended by NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month): get the first draft on paper without fussing.

I think that’s good advice.

I just got home from the last day of the festival, so I want to write everything down while it’s fresh. I’ll organize it by session.

Friday May 2nd, 2008

War and Peace (panel discussion)

Panelists: Karen Connelly, Adam LeBor, Josip Novakovich, Adrian van Dis

This session brought together writers of war, from journalism, fiction and non-fiction. Karen Connelly wrote Touch the Dragon: A Thai Journal, which won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction in 1993. She spoke about her experiences writing this book, and her current work with guerrillas along the Burmese-Thai border. Adam LeBor was a war correspondent during the Yugoslav wars, and just wrote a book about six families enmeshed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: City of Oranges: Arabs and Jews in Jaffa. Josip Novakovich, born in Croatia, also addressed issues arising from the disintegration of Yugoslavia.

I have to admit to listening much more than writing during this, and all panels, so my notes are somewhat scattered good quotes or striking phrases.

In his introduction, Josip Novakovich admitted to feeling “like a war profiteer,” an interesting admission for a war writer. I’ve often wondered whether writers feel like this, feel any sort of guilt from making their living writing about terrible events. Karen Connelly expressed her anxieties about voice appropriation, a white woman speaking for a brown man. But all these writers were convinced and convincing: stories of war need to be told.

Novakovich also spoke of the utter disbelief among citizens of the former Yugoslavia that a people who considered themselves friendly and easygoing could be capable of such violence against each other. Adam LeBor picked up on the idea of normality, saying that the best way to tell the story of a war was to follow people’s everyday lives. While covering the Bosnian conflict, he (in what he admitted was a typical move for war correspondents) wrote about the daily route his interpreter took home, where she had to duck behind walls and the open squares she had to sprint across for fear of gunfire.

In opposition to this factual approach, Novakovich emphasized the power of fiction, allowing us to plunge into someone’s mind, an exploration of subjectivity. Adrian van Dis agreed, terming memories “factories of lies”. Through his travels in Africa, van Dis came to understand stories as a means of escape. Villagers would tell him stories about the gruesome events going on in a neighboring village, women having their breasts cut off, when the same thing had happened in their village just a month before. Their story, they did not tell.

Finally, Josip Novakovich talked about the origins of Western storytelling in accounts of war, as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. His own moral imperative, when writing about war, is to portray wars as idiotic and absurd, to eventually stop war from being an option. Just as most wars start with a sense of outraged justice on one or both sides, these stories seem to begin from a similar outrage.

Have you ever wondered how long a particular food has been around?

Check out this Food Timeline.

While admitting that precise dates are impossible for foods, since most of what we eat evolves rather than being invented, Lynn Olver nevertheless presents an impressive catalogue of dates. Dates appear around 6,000 BC, by the way, along with broccoli. But hopefully not together. Marshmallows, surprisingly, are quite the venerable foodstuff, dating from around 2,000 BC, preceding chocolate by 500 years. Grape tomatoes, on the other hand, are younger than I’d imagined at just ten years old. Deep-fried Coca-Cola, space cornbread and Kool-Aid pickles are unsurprising in age (2006-7), but it will be quite some time before I try any of them.

The Food Timeline page also provides links for literary menus, with a whole section devoted to Shakespeare’s food. We already know playgoers at the Globe theatre ate apples, pears, gingerbread and crunched hazelnuts in place of popcorn. The food was launched, not into space, but at actors to signal disapproval.

On the site you’ll find recipes, lists of foods served at banquets, links to cookbooks and excerpts from diet books from the period. One of my favourite passages differentiates appropriate meats by class:

“Beef is a good meate for an Englysshe man, so be it the beest be yonge, & that it be not know-flesche; yf it be moderatly powdered [i.e. salted] taht the groose blode by salt may be exhaustyd, it doth make an Englysshe man stronge; Veal is good and easily digested; Broawn [boar’s meat] is an usual meate in winter amonges Englisshe men; Bacon is good for carters and plowmen, the whiche be ever labouringe in the earth or dunge…”

Andrew Boorde’s Compendyous Regyment or Dyetary of Health of 1542

Lastly, there are lists of sources for further research, including the delightfully titled Take a Thousand Eggs or More: A Collection of 15th Century Recipes, by Cindy Renfrow.