While I was away last week reading in another city, I was talking with a friend, another writer, and the conversation turned to personality quirks and obsession and the way we shake a piece of life between our teeth until it’s a bloody mess, hoping it will yield up its secrets. He said he’d read a piece of research that studied artists of all flavours – writers, musicians, visual artists, actors – and concluded that all of them showed a far greater than average tendency toward psychoses or at least mild neuroses. We laughed over why on earth someone would waste money to study the obvious.
I came home pondering my own obsessions, most of them tucked into safe corners of my brain. For now. But my need for solitude was underlined by those two days away and another two days this week. So many good people to visit, so much to say. I’m able to don a sociable, really sometimes near-loquacious persona when I need it, but it exhausts me. Which is why the discovery of “retreats” soon after I became serious about writing fifteen years ago has added a dimension and a survival mechanism that I can’t imagine being without. And that is why, in spite of having a quiet house and almost enough discipline to sequester myself here to do the work that needs to be done, I’m off to the Banff Centre at the end of the month for eight days of immersion in a project that must be done before I find another thread that needs to chewed and shaken.
Solitude. Retreats. I highly recommend them. May as well celebrate our neuroses.
Next week I start out on a small flurry of readings from A Crack in the Wall and as always, each one will have me cogitating over the point of it all. I decided some time ago that there is little to be gained from reading in cities where I have no contacts, no faithful friends or family to join the bookstore manager and the unfortunate customer who gets trapped at the back of the store with no way out except past the lonely author. But really, why bother reading to people who will buy the book anyway? The sheer pleasure of giving voice to story, that’s the point for me. A book in hand is a lovely thing, a gift. Reviews, emails, the old neighbour I bumped into at the grocery store yesterday who said she’s been meaning to phone and talk with me about one of the stories in my book, one of her favourites, those are the rewards. But as a writer for whom short fiction is all about storytelling, it doesn’t get any better than reading aloud. Nothing better than hearing laughter, or silence so intent the words seem to hang in the air waiting for the next sentence. My words, my voice, my audience – the people I’ve been writing to through the whole agonizing process of getting a book into print.
So! Off to Regina, to Lethbridge, to Banff, and then back in Calgary on Oct 10 to read with a stellar young poet, Adrienne Gruber. Now that’s even better – the chance to mix prose and poetry and share the joy of it all with a friend.
Join me if you can. Let me read you a story.
Reading from A Crack in the Wall
at the Banff Public Library
101 Bear St. Banff AB
Sunday Oct. 5, 2:00 PM
Probably a beautiful day for a drive to the mountains! From wherever you are.
Author Talk at the Lethbridge Public Library. A reading from A Crack In the Wall, and some author chat (shameless admission, actually) about fiction writers as thieves and liars.
Sept. 15, 7:00 PM, Theatre Gallery
810 5th Ave S., Lethbridge AB
September 11, 2008 7:30 PM
Book and Brier Patch
4065 Albert Street
Regina, SK S4S 3R6
Come! Let me read you a story …
I know there are writers who practice the art in solitude — those disheveled characters who stumble out of their garrets with manuscript in hand after ten years of labour, and go straight to a publishing house. But not me. Since I became serious about writing fiction fifteen years ago, I have sought out friends and mentors with the sure sense that there were people whose experience and knowledge I would need to stay the course. Loneliness would have done me in long ago without this strong writing community to which I belong.
One of my favourite extensions of community has been the Sage Hill Writing Experience where I’ve twice worked on major projects — and both of those projects eventually became books, so you see why I love the place!
Next week I’m spending three days at Christopher Lake in the wonderful wacky company of the members of the 2003 Robert Kroetsch Novel Colloquium. Unfortunately, RK isn’t able to join us, but we’ve had the reunion “blessed” by this amazing mentor just as our work was blessed by those ten days we spent with him in 2003. Dave isn’t able to join us either, but Leona, Jean, Rod, and BettyJ will be there!
And on my way back, I get to have dinner in Saskatoon with one of my UBC classmates, Adrienne — gifted poet whose first book is poised to leap out this fall.
Other writers. Yes. We need them.
