“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…)
Clark Blaise, pictured with his wife, Bharati Mukherjee, in their California homeQuillcast is a podcast series from Quill & Quire featuring behind-the-scenes conversations with authors and publishing insiders. In this episode, recorded during Toronto’s International Festival of Authors in October, Catherine Bush interviews Clark Blaise about his career and the writing life.
Blaise recently released his first new short story collection in nearly two decades. Shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, The Meagre Tarmac (Biblioasis) is a collection of linked stories exploring various characters from the South Asian diaspora. Bush is coordinator of the University of Guelph’s creative writing MFA program and the author of three novels, including Claire’s Head.
Listen to the episode here, or subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.
Quillcast is produced with media partners The Walrus, Open Book: Ontario, and Open Book: Toronto, with support from Toronto Life. This project has been generously supported by the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Entertainment and Creative Cluster Partnerships Fund.
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…)
In our May 2011 issue, The Walrus is pleased to publish “We Come in Peace,” a new story by Zsuzsi Gartner that also appears in her new collection, Better Living Through Plastic Explosives, published this month by Hamish Hamilton/Penguin (Canada). I recently emailed with Zsuzsi about the story, the collection, and the direction of both her own writing and Canadian fiction more generally.
Jared Bland Last year, you edited an anthology called Darwin’s Bastards that featured some of the country’s finest writers offering tales of strange, dystopic futures. What is the relationship between the direction of that collection and this new book of your own stories? How did working with so many different visions of the world change the way you look at the worlds you create?
Zsuzsi Gartner Realism and I have finally parted ways — amicably but irrevocably. That’s the most direct relationship between the fictions in Darwin’s Bastards and the fictions in Better Living Through Plastic Explosives — they all eschew literary realism for more “imaginative” writing, as J.G. Ballard called it, all the while being deeply interested in language, in the way something is written, in order to convey meaning. And plot. For Darwin’s I wanted stories with plots in addition to narrative arcs, and I’ve tried to do the same with the stories in Better Living. I wanted external movement in addition to internal movement. I wanted things to happen, protagonists with missions. (A film producer trying to save his latest project and his best friend; a motivational speaker on the run from hit men and trying to find a cure for her severely autistic daughter; five angels on an earthly mission to discover the zenith of human sensory perception.) I don’t know how well I’ve succeeded with that. (more…)
David FrancoDavid BezmozgisIn our April 2011 issue, The Walrus is pleased to offer its readers a sneak peek at David Bezmozgis’s long-awaited first novel, The Free World. Set in Rome in 1978, the book follows two generations of the Krasnansky family as they flee Russia and attempt to find their way to America or Canada. It’s markedly different from the book with which David made his name, Natasha and Other Stories (2004), yet it is equally remarkable, a novel of tremendous beauty, generosity, and sadness. “Rome, 1978,” the portion of the book which appears in the magazine, follows Samuil Krasnansky, the family’s patriarch. An excerpt also ran in The New Yorker last year, when David was selected as part of the “20 under 40” summer fiction showcase. We corresponded over email about the book and the process of adapting it for excerpt.
Jared Bland As this excerpt focuses on Samuil, perhaps we can begin by you telling us a bit about his character. How did he develop for you?
David Bezmozgis Samuil is part of a generation that is dying out. These are people who were born at the dawn of the Bolshevik Revolution and who still would have suffered from tsarist repressions. They are people who would have experienced every bloody episode of Russia’s twentieth century. And if they were Jewish, as Samuil is, they would have experienced it at a level even more brutal than the average Soviet citizen. My grandparents were of this generation and it still astounds me to think of everything they saw and everything they lost. When I conceived of the book, I felt it was essential that there be someone like Samuil, someone who could attest to this complicated, terrible history. In the book — and in this excerpt — he serves as a fierce, severe counterpoint to his modern, free-spirited children. (more…)
Granta’s study of Pakistan, a nation defined by its stresses, is a tome for the ages
Pakistan has never had a rosy history, but over the past decade it has been cast in an ever more frightening light. The flooding of the Indus River in 2010 brought to the world’s attention a nation that is ravaged by insurgency, constricted by a corrupt government, and left without the basic infrastructure that could have saved scores of lives from the deluge. But the Western mass media offered little more than a fleeting glimpse into the world of Pakistan’s people before its twenty-four-hour news stations quickly moved on. By contrast, the 112th issue of Granta — the UK literary journal which dates to 1889 — offers readers of journalism, fiction, and poetry a window into the terror and hope this troubled region faces, the difficulties of exile, and the scarred-but-enduring beauty of the arts in times of war.
One does not have to look far in the collection to see such scars. “The first year of Pakistan was marked by the staggering bloodletting that accompanied partition,” observes Jane Perlez in “Portrait of Jinnah,” a journalist’s survey of the region which introduces the measured chaos that follows. Kashmir, recognized by Salman Rushdie and others as a paradise on Earth, is reduced to rubble and terror by decades of war waged by foreign powers (“Kashmir’s Forever War,” Basharat Peer). Mohammed Hanif, penning fiction (“Butt & Bhatti”), unleashes a storm of gunshots, robberies, and tire fires after an altercation in a hospital hallway. Intizar Hussain, in his memoir “The House by the Gallows,” watches as public discourse degrades into mindless nationalism, and capital punishment becomes a spectator sport: “What an era General Zia had brought to Pakistan!” he writes, “The echoes of prayer and the roar of public hangings.”
The interaction between pieces is particularly noticeable where such transformations are concerned. While the emotional suffering in Nadeem Aslam’s “Leila in the Wilderness,” rooted in tradition, is drawn out over the course of a novella, Mohsin Hamid’s ”A Beheading” imagines the sudden and unexpected end of a life within only a few minutes’ worth of reading. The juxtaposition is meaningful: where moral lessons were once learned over the course of a life’s natural rhythms, they are now dished out at gunpoint or the gallows, by the state or terrorists, in a matter of moments. (more…)
Giller Prize nominee David Bergen joins a lengthy list of the old master’s disciples
© University of ChicagoSaul Bellow“A writer,” Saul Bellow once said, “is a reader moved to emulation.” One way to define Bellow’s stature is to note that aside from all the critical adulation and prizes the novelist won, he’s also been among the most emulated of modern writers. This was certainly true during his lifetime and continues to be the case even though Bellow died in 2005 and has been out of literary favour for several decades.
More than one reviewer has noticed the similarities between David Bergen’s new Giller-nominated novel, The Matter With Morris, and Bellow’s Herzog, the 1964 novel that aroused the greatest emotional response from his readers. Bergen is upfront about his homage to Bellow. Morris Schutt, Bergen’s hero, is a Bellow reader; we’re told that Herzog is “one of Morris’s much-loved novels.” (Bergen’s novel was excerpted in the September 2010 issue of The Walrus.)
One reviewer described The Matter With Morris as “Herzog using a Winnipeg setting.” The parallels are many: both novels track the nervous breakdown of a middle-aged soulful intellectual who waxes philosophic about life’s unexpected tragedies. Moses Herzog and Morris Schutt share the same peculiar hobby of writing frenzied and perplexed letters addressed both to famous politicians (Dwight Eisenhower, Stephen Harper) and dead philosophers (Plato, Nietzsche). The two heroes have a common tendency to become ensnared in farcical situations and fall under the suspicion of the police. Moses and Morris, Bellow and Bergen: even the names sound alike. (more…)
Everybody knows book prizes are wonderful things — but so are wonderful books
© Paul StuartDavid MitchellOne of my great anxieties in this age of the dominance of literary prizes is that most of the good novels that don’t win a major award will somehow cease to exist for readers. What happens, for instance, to Andrea Levy’s The Long Song in the wake of its failure to win the Giller Prize? Is Michael Winter’s The Death of Donna Whalen somehow unworthy of your time if it’s not selected for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize? Such honours are inarguably positive things: they raise the profile of many books — and the “longlist” contrivance is designed to bring more titles into the warm ring of light cast by these shining awards — and the authors who win them receive much-needed and often very large amounts of money. But they inevitably create a culture wherein people gradually become less inclined to think about books and more inclined to think about the select few that bear the imprimatur of juried success.
There are authors for whom this doesn’t so much matter. Philip Roth became no less relevant this past month in being again overlooked for the Nobel Prize in Literature that so many people think is due. And a writer like Tom McCarthy, whose new novel, C, didn’t win this year’s Man Booker Prize, is assured some measure of success because of the cult following for his last work, Remainder. Which brings us to my favourite novel of the year: David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.
When the Booker longlist was released, Mitchell was an oddsmaker’s favourite, a man who had made three previous longlists and two previous shortlists (and who’d only published four novels), generally considered among the best and most exciting writers of his generation. But then Thousand Autumns proved unable to squeeze into the cramped waiting room of the shortlist, and everyone seemed to stop talking about it. Or, rather, everyone who talks about books for a living seemed to stop talking about it. Mitchell, like Roth or McCarthy, had readers well before this current period of awards eligibility and will continue to have them well after. (more…)
At just thirty-two, Miguel Syjuco — who contributed a new short story, “Stet,” to The Walrus’s Summer Reading issue — has written one of the most inventive, challenging, and entertaining novels of recent years, Ilustrado. And now it’s a bestseller, too. He spoke with The Walrus in Toronto this spring, a few weeks before the book’s publication.
To start, can you tell me about how Ilustrado formed, and how it’s developed over the years you’ve been working on it?
The book came to be, in my head, when I was doing some fact-checking at The Paris Review and living in New York. They were putting their Writers at Work series online, so they wanted to make sure whatever was in their archive was right. They had us freelancers hitting the library stacks, and I was looking at all sorts of different sources — literary biographies, interviews, profiles, articles, introductions to the authors’ books. Say for example I was doing Jack Kerouac, and I was finding out all these really interesting things about him, from the factual — where he was born, when he died — to his writing style, everything. And I thought, that’s a really interesting way of getting a portrait of an artist. It struck me as a method that was really organic, because our way of grasping reality today is precisely through fragments of sources. When you find out about, say, the Icelandic volcano, you hear from friends, someone text messages you, newspaper articles, internet, blogs, whatever. So I wanted to write a book that did this, in a sense. But I didn’t know how — it’s my first novel.
I was writing Ilustrado as part of a PhD at the University of Adelaide — it’s the creative component. So I thought, I’ll make this portrait of an artist, Crispin Salvador. I’ll create all his work the best I can, and I just did it linearly; it wasn’t as fragmented as it was now. But I couldn’t crack it — it was thick, it was difficult to get through, and it was 200,000 words. I pity my poor PhD supervisor. I didn’t know how to do it. I just kept writing, and writing, and writing. It didn’t feel right. (more…)
This spring, Steven Heighton has released two books, Patient Frame, a collection of poems, one of which appeared in The Walrus last year, and a novel, Every Lost Country, which was excerpted in the magazine’s April 2010 issue. I’ve written in this space before about the process of excerpting the exceptional new text, but after revisiting the finished book I found myself with more questions for Steven. He was kind enough to email back and forth with me over the last month.
This novel begins with a fictionalization of a real incident. How did you come across the story that you used to begin Every Lost Country, and how did it shape your writing as you moved ahead?
In September 2006 a group of Tibetan refugees, fleeing up a glacier toward the China-Nepal border in hopes of joining the Tibetan expat community in India, was pursued and attacked by Chinese border guards. At least two Tibetans — both of them young Buddhist nuns — were shot dead. A group of Western mountaineers at a base camp along the border, preparing to climb the Himalayan peak Cho Oyu, witnessed the event, and a Romanian climber caught images of it on his cellphone camera.
I heard about the shooting when the story broke a few days later. I also heard that there had been some debate among the climbers at base camp about whether to go on with the climb or instead stop and get the video and testimony out to international media, as soon as possible. Several of the climbers decided that exposing the crime was their priority. So the story got out and spread, despite the Chinese government’s efforts to hush it up and then, later, ludicrously, to maintain that the guards had shot down the nuns in “self-defence.”
For the last decade or so, I’ve been obsessed with the ethics of intervention — when is it necessary to get involved, to cross the border that separates my problems from yours? As soon as I heard about the Nangpa La shootings, I knew my next novel would start with a fictionalized version of the atrocity. I saw that it could be a powerful way of exploring the ethics of intervention while at the same time testing my characters to the limit. (more…)
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