The Life Of A Writer. #3. Mentors.

I have been fortunate over my lifetime as a writer to have attended a number of first class workshops, retreats and courses from the Banff Centre of the Arts to the Humber School for Writers. The facilitators and mentors have been top notch, ranging from Austin Clarke at Glendon College (York University) in the mid 1970s to Alistair McLeod at the Humber School for Writers in 2006.


There were two who stand out as my ongoing mentors, both of whom are unfortunately no longer alive. I didn't meet either of them at workshops or courses, but they were the two who became both mentors and friends for the long haul. The first was William (Bill) Kilbourn whom I met through municipal politics (early 1970s) and the other, Adele Wiseman, when I interviewed her as Writer-in-Residence at the University of Toronto (mid 1970s) for a paper I was writing for the MLS degree on the various resources for writers as they learned their trade. Both of these courageous and talented writers encouraged my writing and I enjoyed their support and friendship over a period of over 20 years before they both died in the early 1990s. 

 I have many friends who are writers, but I don't think at the advanced age I have reached I will have another mentor like either Adele or Bill. Neither of them were alive when my first book, One Day It Happens, was published in 2007, but both of them believed there would be books. Especially about the northern mining community where I grew up and my second book, Ile d'Or, is the book they might have envisaged. Or I hope so. It was their faith that often kept me going. Their humourous responses to my despair at that ever happening. Their insightful comments about it. Now my friends and I encourage each other. Sometimes we read and critique each other's work. We go to each other's launches. We discuss promotion and applaud each other's successes, We carry on, knowing how important that camaraderie around writing is, that understanding of the long hours we slog away in solitude that precede any published article, story or book.

Two friends who have shared this journey over many years since I met them in the early 1980s are Joy Kogawa and Ian Wallace and I have appreciated, and still do, our conversations and mutual support. Now I am also meeting many other writers through my writing group and through the Writers' Union. Having books published gives one access to the work that goes on around the writing itself, including the advocacy of the Writers' Union and access to their resources on a myriad of topics (legal, copyright, etc.). But that's another story (or blog post).  

See also — Lisa Young's blog on writing:
www.50essaysonwriting.blogspot.com 

The Life of a Writer. #2. A Week of Avoidance.

Sometimes avoidance is necessary. Or is that just another excuse? No, there are too many events this week that nourish my mind and spirit. And after three months on crutches (another excuse?) when I read and wrote much more than usual, I need that nourishment. Or I need some level of change. So on Monday evening I went to the Toronto Dollar Supper Club to hear David Crombie speak. What a treat to hear a talk on cities within the context of ideas and vision. There is such a lack of that at the municipal level  in Toronto (not to speak of other levels of government) these days. My mind was challenged again to think of what can happen in positive ways as the democratic process leaves room for ideas to thrive. And for people to make their voices heard. Yes, such an evening (when my friend, Joy Kogawa, was also honoured for her work around the Toronto Dollar) helps replenish the spirit.

Tuesday: A friend took me out to dinner at Zucca's where we both ordered black cod with an olive crust. After admiring the presentation, the meal then melted in our mouths. Ruby has done so much for me over the time of healing from foot surgery that I felt I ought to be the one treating her to dinner, but she reminded me that I'd given her my Metropass for three months and how she had been able to use it to find out if it would be useful for her. Of course, that led to some discussion of the deterioration of the TTC. Unfortunate reality as the infrastructure seems to crumble and service is about to be cut. Not to mention fare hikes. In any case, she enjoyed the flexibility of the Metropass and wanted to treat me. Thanks, Ruby.

Tonight I will go to my local library to hear a talk on Chagall given by David Wistow from the AGO. I took a course from David on the Group of Seven many years ago and know him to be a fine, informative speaker. I have seen the Chagall show at the AGO twice as well as many years ago his work at the Chagall Museum in Nice. I look forward to tonight's speech.

The week goes on. And the truth is that this week I have also been revising some stories and as well have read an unusual novel by Teju Cole, a Nigerian born author, set in New York City called Open City. I am now finishing a book of essays called Why Not?, such a literate little book, by Ray Robertson, a thoughtful Canadian writer.

After tonight, two evenings of socializing.. Open House at Dance Cafe and Christmas party of my writing group, Moosemeat. Better to avoid writing for a while than these stimulating events!!! Or better to take them in along with a bit of writing on the side. The balance will shift the other way soon enough.

The Life of a Writer. #1. What I do to avoid writing.

Ah well. I think about it a lot. I make my bed. Do the laundry. Cook. Bake. Do you want a recipe for cheesies made with rice krispies? Or an apple crisp made with cinnamon raisin bread as a topping? I've made both of these this weekend. I ate the apple dessert in two days. The challenge becomes not to eat the cheesies before going to the Christmas party of my writing group later this week. I think I'll make a salad for that as well.

Oh yes, I went to St. Lawrence Market yesterday morning. Then had a friend over for lunch. She is en route from the east coast to Saskatoon where she lives now. She brought the flowers!

I also read both the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star, Saturday editions. And am reading a couple of books. And I guess while all of it was interesting and even necessary, now it is time to do some work.

McGILL ALUMNI (TORONTO) BOOK CLUB. NOVEMBER, 2011

 A wonderful evening of conversation with a group of McGill Alumni in Toronto. I had the opportunity to speak for half an hour and then to answer questions for another hour. What a privilege for a writer to spend that amount of time with a group (over 30) who know one's book and want to talk about it.

Each format for a reading or presentation is different and I stayed pretty flexible because what I was requested to do was quite open-ended. The closer the event became, the more time I was given to present and/or speak at the beginning. When the time came, I spoke with a couple of short readings interspersed when they fit what I was talking about. For instance, I talked about a character who popped into the book in the final revision quite spontaneously. I was surprised and not sure what to do with Marcel, the ten year old boy, but he demanded to be there. So he stayed and wound his way through the book as I proceeded with the final revisions. The section I read was about his first appearance next to a rock where Nick, a man who had returned to the town for a visit, was sitting deep in thought.

Ah yes, Marcel appeared on the page fully formed and demanded to be there. I have no idea where he came from, except I wrote him. Writing is sometimes such a mysterious process. One has to be open for what arrives. And then there are all the hours of sheer work as while something may present itself spontaneously, one then has to work with it.


In any case, this book club was one of my best experiences and I will cherish it for a long time. An honour to have been asked and to have met with so many others from my Alma Mater for the evening.

HOW TO WRITE A MEMOIR. A FEW HINTS!

1. READ. 
William Zinsser's Writing About Your Life is a particularly helpful book to read if you are contemplating writing a memoir. Also, read lots of memoirs. As you learn about the life of someone who interests you, you can also see how that person tells his/her story.What makes it interesting? That may help you decide what it is that makes your life interesting that you can make into an appealing story for your readers.

Pick a point in time at which to start. This does not have to be in chronological sequence. In the same way a novel may go back and forth in time, so can a memoir.


2. WRITE.
At some point, it is necessary to start writing. At the beginning, get things down. You can choose what to keep later when you have thought about what stands out about your life. And what story you want to tell about it. You will have to decide what to include and what not to include. It is important not to include everything.


3. REVISE.
You have to create a narrative of your life. writer of a memoir doesn't simply try to convey every detail of an entire life, but has to select what is important to the narrative chosen. And to tell a compelling story.

Everyone has a story, but do you have a reason for wanting to share it? It might turn out that your reason is the hook for your readers. And provides you with the thematic unity your story requires.


Note: It may be presumptuous of me to try to convey how to write a memoir when mine has yet to be published. However, I've almost finished it and what I have learned thus far is fresh in my mind and may be helpful. And I have had both a short story collection and a novel published.

Good luck with it!

MEMOIR. Draft Prologue. When Gold Was Worth $37 An Ounce.

Come to Val d’Or for your first million.*My father went to the golden valley because of gold, but I don’t think he thought it would lead to his first million. I'm quite sure he never reached a million. But it was certainly because of the gold that he, a mechanical engineer, was hired by Sigma Mines to design the hoist and to oversee the technical aspects of its operation. It was the first home of my parents who were married in 1935, the same year they moved into a company house built for the first residents at that mine in northwestern Quebec. Here they lived for thirty years and this is the town where they raised three children.

The impact of this town, and others like it across the north in that era, was to create a tribe of northerners, something that remains in one’s blood for a lifetime. Yet other factors and themes are the basis of whatever myths sustained our family. Myths that are likely at the very root of what created the life trajectories of each of the three children, my two younger siblings and me. Each of us might answer differently the question of how and why we’ve followed particular paths, yet there would be some commonalities drawn from the themes of the isolation of a mining camp in those days — the sound of the whistle at the mine as well as the blasting underground, the French language surrounding us, the family silver, the focus on reading in our lives, the English dictionary, the fireplace. Or could it have been mainly the experience of our father going to war that formed us? Was it his focus on overseas as well as on ancestors and family trees? Perhaps it was our father’s alcoholism. And our mother’s joy in good company, good food and dancing.

I knew early and only too well the impact of the alcoholism, but I wasn’t aware of the importance of most of these other themes except as underlying refrains. And even underlying that perhaps it was after all the gold that had the greatest impact on all of us. The gold about which we knew so much more than we were even aware of knowing. For we children of the company houses all knew the price of it. $37 an ounce. We knew that it was melted in a hot furnace and poured out in a liquid stream into rectangular pans to create gold bars that were then hidden away somewhere none of us knew about. We knew it was because of it the miners went underground to that dark place where only men were allowed to hack and dig into the rock, looking for it. We knew these things, but we ignored them as we played games, went to school, made friends who came and went in our lives when their fathers moved from one mine to ours and then away again.

Some of the men probably did make their first million in the frontier era of the gold mines. Probably not by mining. More likely on the stock market or by high-grading. There were always men who brought out bits of gold from underground, hidden in their mouths, in their clothing, in their lunch buckets. High grade gold it was called because it was of the highest grade and consequently the most valuable. And there were ways of selling this stolen gold down the line through mob contacts in places as far away as Montreal, Buffalo and New York City. Like so many things children know, this was something we overheard the adults talk about. We knew who was suspected of high grading and who had put money into the stock of some penny mine that had gone into production and created wealth for owners off in some city, but also for them as a result of that.

I don’t know about my father’s success on the stock market, but he did invest in some of the larger gold producers. He tended to his finances, but in reality he left most of that to my mother. It was his job to draft and design and to go underground to check on how the equipment worked down there. And in 1942, after his third child was born, he went off to join the army. I do know that he was proud of his family, particularly of his antecedents. And it was my father who showed us family trees and how to read the hallmarks on silver. 

Most of this held no interest for me, or only peripheral interest. Except, I suppose, for the gold that was not possible to ignore. Until I went to a writing studio in Banff in 1992 long after my father died and discovered a story there about someone known to us as our maternal grandmother’s Uncle Billy. Of course, we had been told this story but never in as vivid a form as I found it there in a manuscript in the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies.

As children we had only known this ancestor of my mother’s as Uncle Billy and the story told about him was that he had discovered the Banff Springs. Like gold, another discovery of something of the earth. But it was more than that that struck me as I read from his manuscript. It was in those moments, sitting quietly with his huge, unpublished material that I began to realize ways in which all the different branches of our family had a role in the creation of our country. From the grandfather who worked in gold mines in South Africa before emigrating to the gold mines of northern Ontario. From the discoveries of Uncle Billy in western Canada of the hot springs and apparently also of oil. From the ancestor who settled on the banks of the St. Lawrence, who was the first settler in Canada. And it was at Banff I realized I wanted to explore more the small role of the nuclear family to which I belong in this wider picture. And these themes began to resonate as I delved into my own life and history, tying it to that of a family and a country.

Everyone has their own story, of course, and every Canadian’s story is part of the larger whole that is our country. I just hadn’t thought of it that way before going to Banff and it is because of that discovery that I began to write this memoir.

*“Dans son rapport annuel de 1934, le Service des mines du Quebec rapporte que ‘la ville connue sous le nom de Val-d’Or, située sur les lots 61 et 62 du canton de Dubuisson, et sur le bloc 14 du canton de Bourlamaque, a déja une population considerable.’

A l’été1944, un vaste panneau apparait a l’angle de la 3e Avenue et de l’Avenue Centrale.

On peut y lire:

‘Val d’Or , Québec.

La croissance de population la plus rapide au monde

1934, population: 5 prospecteurs

1944, 7,500 personne prospères.

Une augmentation de 1,500 %

Venez a Val d’Or, pour votre premier million.’”

(*Société  d'histoire de Val-d'Or)

What Are You Reading?

When I read, I feel a sense of well-being when language is poetic and has surprising images and metaphors, when stories are intriguing. I am delighted with books of that exquisite caliber that soothe, transfix, even transform me. This is the gift of well-written fiction. I have been reading practical books about the financial mess that has taken over on a global basis, but it was only when I picked up a couple of novels recently that I was satisfied at this deeper level.


These novels were:

• Itani, Frances. Requiem.

• Ondaatje, Michael. The Cat's Table.

There are many other novels on my 'books to read' list and I will try to mention them at some future date. In the meantime, I'm interested in the recommendations and comments of others. Both for my own interest and for anyone else who drops by this site for ideas about writing and reading.


Oh, by the way, I've been rereading my own novel, Ile d'Or, before my next book club appearance. And I would like to recommend it to readers as an interesting read that will intrigue and surprise you and give you insight into aspects of Canadian life and history.