“I have the right to write about my life.” — Marie Calloway
Lately, a confusing debate has erupted over the validity of what is being called “confessional writing,” the kind that places its author and its author’s intimate experiences at the centre of the narrative. The modern confessional exists in transparent opposition to objective writing, where the writer is removed and reports narrative facts largely without opinion, and definitely without feeling. The proliferation of online sites that facilitate impromptu personal writing has cultivated a belief among the status quo that serious writers shouldn’t share an “excess” of personal details or opinions, lest they risk a public shaming. It’s certainly not uncommon in the Internet age to see a personal piece met with a clumsy, trolling comment chorus of “Keep that to yourself,” “TMI” or “Why should I care about your life?”
Additional indictments hurled at confessional writing are that it’s boring or embarrassing, although for whom is not entirely clear. Some critics have concluded that it is without exception bad writing, unworthy of publication, blanketing the form with disdain in hopes it will be forced back into the writer’s private documents folder. By even referring to it as a confession suggests that the author has done something wrong, that there is a central sin they should be repenting; at times, it seems the sin is merely in the act of telling: “How dare they?”
Exactly what differentiates the loathed confession from the lauded personal essay is difficult to name. But it’s impossible to ignore that a majority of these controversial and oft-dismissed confessions are being written by women — primarily young, under-published outsiders accused of lacking the self-awareness that presumably comes with age. The complaints suffered are often of the gendered variety, suggesting a naïveté on the part of the authors to be proud of documenting and distributing their experiences, much like web cam self-portraits posted on Facebook. The suggestion is that they are boring, reprehensible, or invalid in some way, and should never see the light of day. (more…)
Douglas & McIntyreJoshua Knelman’s Hot Art: Chasing Thieves and Detectives through the Secret World of Stolen Art explores the evolution of the international black market in stolen canvases, sculptures, and antiquities through alternating stories of crooks and coppers from two continents. Hot Art, published earlier this month, is being widely described as non-fiction that reads like a novel; it’s been favourably tweeted by Margaret Atwood, among others, and Knelman has embarked on a promotional tour of morning television and talk radio shows across Canada. All of which makes everyone at The Walrus rather proud, because the story that inspired the book happened right here at this magazine. The author explains.
MATTHEW MCKINNON: You worked as head of research at The Walrus when you began investigating international art theft. Where does the Hot Art really start?
JOSHUA KNELMAN: Before the magazine launched, way back in 2003, I was sent to write a short piece about two burglaries at an art gallery in Toronto. The first of those burglaries, by the way, was discovered on the morning of September 11, 2001. When I showed up at the gallery, the owner was apprehensive about moving his story into the public arena. “I don’t know much about this world of art theft,” he told me. He did, though, give me the phone number of a cultural property lawyer based in Toronto — Bonnie Czegledi. “Apparently she knows something,” he said.
Czegledi agreed to meet. It was a lucky break. She turned out to be one of only a handful of lawyers in Canada, and one of only a few in the world, who was focused on understanding how the international black market in stolen art operates. (more…)
Biblioasis Press“There were ‘birds’ whose purpose was to record
the movements of the masses, to repeat
working-class conversation verbatim.”
— from Joshua Trotter’s “Continuation of the History of Utopia”
Joshua Trotter’s debut, All This Could Be Yours, slipped quietly into (better) bookstores earlier this year and quickly became something of a totem among the poetry-reading public. A small number of people seem to like it a great deal. I’m among them. The Montreal poet’s eclectic, unformulaic approach to form has resulted in a book of language games and sci-fi–flavoured experimental riffs that stick around in the reader’s mind, both propelled by sound and sustained by content.
Trotter and I exchanged emails about the book and his creative process. That correspondence is shared below.
Jacob McArthur Mooney Thanks for doing this, Joshua. What’s most striking about All This Could Be Yours, at least in terms of content, is its diversity of interests. You really take from across the culture, and from science and the social sciences. At the same time, the poems possess a sort of self-containment as individuals, giving the book a real “collection” feel. Despite a handful of recurring motifs and characters, the book’s unity comes from disunity: it’s a book of poems, rather than the less specific “book of poetry.” How do you feel about unity in the context of a book of poems, as it relates to the assumed necessity (especially with a first book) of a singular voice?
Joshua Trotter I spent a lot of time attempting to coerce the book into coherence — in terms of style, in terms of content, in terms of voice — and I found I could not force it to happen. At least, not without damaging the poems. So, as it says on the cover, it’s a book of poems, rather than poetry. The poems are self-contained organisms, I hope. The book is their exoskeleton. It took me awhile to be okay with that. I have long been a fan of books with a distinct, consistent tone. Recurring images, morals, themes, grammatical forms, even words. It is a wonderful feeling to buckle yourself into such a Volvo, to let it carry you from page to page in comfort and relative safety. Yet, as I read more, as I get older, I’m becoming more interested in books that jump from place to place. Books that go off-road, scratching the paint, dragging the muffler — books that are willing to drive without insurance, perhaps a little drunk. (more…)
Irshad Manji wants to stir things up. The author, journalist, and advocate for religious reform opposes the hijab, saying it “makes [women] a billboard for the most chauvinistic aspects of Arab tribal culture,” and was offended by plans to create an Islamic community centre near Manhattan’s Ground Zero. She is committed to her Islamic faith, but is urging all Muslims to ask questions and hold moral stances about things like honour killing and suicide bombing.
Manji’s new book, Allah, Liberty and Love, is out this month. It’s a follow-up to her wildly successful The Trouble With Islam Today, which was banned in many countries. But droves of readers, especially women and youth, reacted positively to Trouble, which has now been published in thirty languages and downloaded more than two million times. In Allah, Manji writes that the imam at her mother’s mosque in Vancouver “declared me a ‘bigger criminal’ than Osama bin Laden. His rationale: among Muslims, my book had allegedly caused more debate.”
Manji, a feminist, lesbian Canadian, is perhaps not many orthodox believers’ preferred critic of mainstream Islam. She frequently receives death threats, and reprints some of them in Allah, Liberty and Love. But she argues that the focus can be taken off of “bombings, beheadings, and blood” if Muslims practice ijtihad — using one’s mind to understand the world and “exercising the freedom to ask questions — sometimes uncomfortable ones.” Manji emphasizes that both Muslims and non-Muslims have a responsibility to query what is happening in Islam. Yet Muslims, she writes, are fearful of speaking out and acting in non-traditional ways for fear of dishonouring their families, while non-Muslims fear being labelled bigots for questioning the religion.
Manji is outspoken, determined, and, some would say, fearless. But as I interviewed her at Random House Canada’s Toronto office, I was taken aback by her charm and openness. A condensed version of our conversation follows.
Lindsay Lafreniere Your book The Trouble with Islam Today created such strong praise and criticism from people all over the world. Did you anticipate such reactions, and are you expecting a similar response to this book?
Irshad Manji I didn’t know what to expect after The Trouble with Islam Today came out. I only knew one thing, which was that my conscience required me to write it. I certainly didn’t expect the emails from young Muslims in the Middle East asking when I was going to get the book translated into Arabic. It’s been somewhat surreal, but more instructive and eye-opening than anything else. I truly would not have predicted being able to write a book called Allah, Liberty and Love after putting the finishing touches on my previous book. Love was not what I was thinking. I’ve [since] learned that I’m not alone and in fact, there is such a constituency of reformist Muslims who need to be equipped with the “how” of expressing themselves and not just the “why.” (more…)
J&L BooksThe author and journalist Adam Gilders contributed to the very first issue of The Walrus, an article about a fanatical German sub-culture of Wild West re-creationists — Gunther and Hans dressing up in cowboy hats and feathered headdresses. It was a story about identity and the strangeness of life, themes that would crop up in his later contributions to the magazine, too. When Gilders passed away in 2007, succumbing to a brain tumour at the age of 36, he had published twice more in the magazine, reportage about a feral boy on the island of Fiji and a shimmering piece of fiction titled “Barnyard Desires,” in which a rodent infestation is a harbinger of a tenant’s own tunnel-like self analysis.
For those of use who knew him personally — in my own case, through this magazine — the news that we would publish one of his stories was always an exciting time. He was one of the new Canadian voices that the magazine was seeking to discover, in many ways typifying the idealism that many of us felt in the year of The Walrus’s launch. However, Gilders’ writing always operated on a much less grand scale, particularly his fiction, where each sentiment was an exercise in concision. In fact he was known to work and re-work each sentence laboriously, a self-styled perfectionist of the minutiae of language.
Another Ventriloquist, a posthumous collection of Gilders’ short fiction to be released this evening in Ottawa, and in Toronto tomorrow, showcases this approach to a tee. Some stories are only a few sentences in length, witty fragments that focus on the irregularities of life. Others, such as the longer “One Theory About My Marriage,” offer acerbic scenes of everyday Ontario (Gilders grew up in Ottawa and later lived in Toronto). (more…)
Canadian Notes & Queries 80: The Gender Issue, Taddle Creek No. 26: Summer Issue, Granta 115: The F Word“If I were a man, and cared to know the world I lived in, I almost think it would make me a shade uneasy — the weight of that long silence of one half of the world.” — Elizabeth Robins, 1907
Recently Good Magazine published an article with a simple solution to inequity on conference panels. What if white men refused invitations to panels that don’t properly represent the diversity of their industries? The idea was so basic, yet I had never even considered it. Usually when I see five men on a magazine, marketing, tech or publishing panel, I criticize the organizers: “You couldn’t find a single woman?” I ask. It never occurred to me to question the participants.
Good broke it down:
“Why don’t the white men who are asked to engage in this nonsense simply stop doing it? The boycott is a protest with a long history of success. If white, male elites started saying, ‘I will not participate in your panel, event, or article if it is all about white men,’ chances are these panels and articles would quickly dry up — or become more diverse.”
But why not take this ingenious idea even further? Since literary publications so often struggle with gender disparity, in their contributor lists and mastheads, in the books they review and the viewpoints they include, why don’t men who consider themselves allies to equality simply refuse publication? Why doesn’t the “How do we fix this?” question include the responsibility of male writers, not just male editors, in its solution? Why shouldn’t writers cultivate a list of publications they will and won’t submit or pitch to on the basis of equity? (more…)
ECW PressMy dear Julie,
This morning on my walk I watched a house catch fire. I was walking down the empty road, staring at my black shoes turning brown with dust, and something made me turn and stare through the shimmer of heat. I knew that I should be in the Gulf Hotel, working at my desk, constructing a virtual version of this day and of this place to wire around the world. I looked back at a house that I had just passed and I saw nothing, just a flat roof and some broken windows. Then it seemed as if the roof were rising. I thought I saw black birds escaping, but it was smoke and ash, and in the time that it took for the dark transformation of those birds the house suddenly caught — struck like a giant match — and it was blazing in the middle of the morning beside an empty street. Blazing away and all the air above it turned black and I thought of the bedsheets catching fire inside and writhing across the mattress, and the white pillows smoking, and the curtains evaporating.
I thought of your necklace with the cherry wood beads. I thought of a song that I memorized in high school. I thought of the little plastic boat that used to float in the tub with you, holding your perfume and your scented oil. I thought of you sitting in the tub with your face flushed and your hair in a ponytail, and you covering your teeth to laugh. I stood and I watched the house fall in upon itself the way that my thoughts were falling in upon themselves. I felt thirsty and my eyes stung.
Here, I should tell you, crows fly into ruined houses and spend the night. My easy rhetoric does not dispel the ashes. In the day there are, of course, loud noises that you would find unbearable and I have become somewhat hopeless at my job. The waves break before the shore and I imagine what it must be like to live here always, drifting through the hot and noisy days and sleeping through the quiet dreadful nights and feeling no ambition, no ambivalence beyond the war. It seems as if people have ceased to be like living things, like animals, and now we only tread through time. We are detached from ourselves. Every action and reaction here has politics. And so you think before you buy three bananas and a loaf of bread whether it is right. Do I need three bananas today or should I buy just one and another tomorrow? Should I buy twenty? What will happen? (more…)
Have you heard the one about how hunters in helicopters
chase wild jokes across the flats? How they rifle
feathered darts into the herd, then sling
the groggy fallen off to urban zoos
— and how limp each witty punchline gets
once penned?
Out of context, unable to fend,
a joke makes no sense, just heaps of crap
for some kid to point a dripping milkshake at
and laugh, while his pregnant mother rolls her eyes.
Let me throw you a banana:
this joke has longed for death so long
it isn’t even funny. (more…)
Hunters and gatherers used to grumble that written language had given birth to craziness, and that craziness would grow up to be a culture that forgets everything it hears.
Now that cellphones have become so tiny you can clip one to your ear. You can stroll and chat with business contacts worlds away, hands-free. Today, a dozen brokers cluster like hungry mallards around my hot dog cart, each well-dressed multitasker talking to itself in the sun.
One of them, abusing my mustard container, announces to the open air that we should all expect to switch careers twelve times or more before we retire or die. The reason is the market or something. (more…)
When we fixed the grackle’s wing
and dabbed the grit from his cuts, we found
bits of shattered beak in the grass. It was fall,
orange foliage brittle — he had tumbled
through a rose bush after walloping the glass.
That night from his shoebox bed
he sang of flowing water and of a flightless
aquatic child who craves the summer air:
‘Afraid of submersion, it tries to swim.
It struggles for the moon
and brings us pain …’
His cuts began to stink.
Within five days the glands on his neck
ballooned into sick orange cysts. Mom made us move him
from Eric’s dresser to the shed. She was sorry, said
‘He’s going to a better place,’ but the grackle disagreed.
‘Each better place is next to nothing,’ he sang.
‘The difference is both hard and clear.’ (more…)
Follow the high road, take the low.
What can it matter? When your card
is dealt, some jerk in a stiff smock
will hammer your coffin lid shut. Hell,
as far as time can tell, our names
get scratched into planks and planted
in a willow’s shade to weather
forever, as though we were saints —
not deadbeats on shoulderless roads.
Come. Saddle up. Let’s scoot.
For we have miles to ride
before we sleep
beneath a heaven dark and deep
as hell, as far as I can see. (more…)
If humans were more like plants,
a bee might make a pitstop at your crotch
to sprout a family tree you never planned for.
‘We weathered the Cold War and missed the last
fun bus to summer’ — that’s what some people say,
older folks mostly. I bet in her case, your mother
could picture that winter baby till her main squeeze
choked, pulling out at the last minute. Today your dad
steps to the window, taps a pair of metal tongs
and points across the lawn. Sporting your shades,
a knee-high terra cotta squirrel smiles back discreetly,
frozen in the bold volcanic shadow of the barbecue
like the ghost of true baroque furniture at Versailles. (more…)
best seo forums: Thanks for sharing such an brilliant post. I make sure to visit this post regularly. keep sharing more and more..
Seenloitering: The “gender analysis” in this article is upside down. Marie Calloway is a threat to the status quo because she threatens the myth that women are morally superior, above...
Jefry: I do not really like to read a story like a novel or a real story but I think this is very interesting and need to be read
Legong: I know I am replying to this pathetic, racist statement a little late and the whole ignorant rant probably doesn’t even deserve a reply. Wanhenglo, if we were all to generalise about...
Legong: I know I am replying to this pathetic, racist statement a little late and the whole ignorant rant probably doesn’t even deserve a reply. Wanhenglo, if we were all to generalise about...
Sky Goodden: This is startling, refreshing, overdue, and damn good. Thank you, Shary.
Mark: It’s not just in Canada, it seems all over artists don’t get the local recogtnition they should. I was in Malaga where Picasso was born and it is much different, but then he is...
Guest: I didn’t want babies or a period any more. I KNEW without a doubt I did not want children so I had been asking for a hysterectomy since I was 19. I finally got it at 39. My...
Djzklj: Pretty interesting article, despite that I don’t wanna make a voyage there
Sanyo Seiki: I love this game! Very addicted! Sanyo Seiki