the genealogy book : (a new work-in-progress,

Nearly a year ago, I started a substack for the sake of prompting a particular writing project, and have just started posting from the most recent work-in-progress, "the genealogy book," the first two of which are now available here and here. Since my teens, I've been the self-designated genealogist for my family, and spent years working through a variety of archives to piece together innumerable threads of genealogy. Through this, I've been fully aware that I was adopted, and had other threads as well, but I've only been learning them over the past few years, and am now pushing further to explore those threads, and what that potentially means, through a non-fiction project. If I self-identified so heavily through one set of threads, only to be presented with a whole slew of alternate threads, how does that fit in with my consideration of self? What does it all mean?

Through the substack, I'm aiming to post weekly, with every third or fourth post for paid subscribers only (I mean, I have to give some incentive to sign up with money). The substack originally started to prompt my non-fiction "Lecture for an Empty Room," a book-length essay on literature, small press, community and responsibility, so there's a bunch of pieces on there for that. The weekly prompt I originally gave myself for posting sections on this blog of the manuscript-in-progress that eventually became my pandemic-era memoir, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022), worked out pretty well, after all. As well, I was posting fragments of a forty-ish page essay I had worked on, "A river runs through it: a writing diary," composed during the months that Denver poet Julie Carr and I were actively working on our collaborative poetry call-and-response. Other threads via the substack include a two-part essay on above/ground press, a variety of self-contained short stories, and the sprinklings of a journal project from 2019-2020 around genealogical discovery, Christine's health and my father's illness and eventual death, "the blue year." I've also been posting self-contained essays on fiction writers as part of an ongoing series titled "reading in the margins: a writing diary," with some new pieces forthcoming, hopefully, on Lucy Maud Montgomery, John Lavery and  Dany Laferrière, among others. Since starting, I've tried to treat the substack as a kind of weekly column, and the trickling of support from such has been helpful, although the big push is really to get me writing further and deeper into these ongoing prose explorations. Why not sign up? Who knows what might come next? And I'm completely fine with folk signing up gratis; the working-class farm lad in me always thinks that lack of finances should never be a hurdle to engaging with literature, after all.

reading in the margins: Kristjana Gunnars

I’m appreciating the reminder of how important Kristjana Gunnars’ novels were to shaping my early thinking on writing, thanks to The Scent of Light (2022), a reissue of her five novels—The Prowler (1989), Zero Hour (1991), The Substance of Forgetting (1992), The Rose Garden: Reading Marcel Proust (1996) and Night Train to Nykøbing (1998)—in a single volume, offered with a stunning introduction by American poet and critic Kazim Ali. “Perhaps it is not a good book, he said, James Joyce said,” Gunnars wrote, to open The Prowler, “but it is the only book I am able to write.” I most likely picked up second-hand copies of those first three novels somewhere in my early twenties, possibly from the now-defunct Richard Fitzpatrick Books, a store that sat somewhere along Ottawa’s Dalhousie Street. Returning to these novels, I’m startled by how deeply some of these sentences resonated, and became foundational for my thinking of, and approach to, composing fiction. The very notion that we write the books we do and in the ways that we do, in large part, because we simply haven’t the ability to write them in any other way. How did you do that, someone might ask. Practice, intuition, judgement. The question becomes unanswerable, beyond what might otherwise sound flippant. Experience.

I recently read a passage in Montreal poet Gillian Sze’s quiet night think: poems & essays (2022) that caught my attention: “Why do you write? was a question that I was often asked, and my answer for both weeding and writing was Rilkean: I must. Yes, there was something inherently futile with every weed I pilled, but I did so stubbornly, thinking of what Mordecai Richler said: Each novel is a failure or there would be no compulsion to begin again.” I was struck by Richler’s quote (I would be curious of the context around the original source), one that suggests a difficulty around such an adherence to scale: the massive narrative undertakings of his novels, writing hundreds of pages encompassing such a wide swath of detailed, world-building, narrative prose. The scope of works might be comparable to other Canadian writers of his era such as Margaret Laurence or Robertson Davies. Each novel, Richler said. Well, each novel of his, maybe. As with the example of Gunnars, my own sense of writing is not to encompass the whole world, or even the whole world of a space, but a particular portrait of a scene or a sequence. I don’t agree, I suppose, but it also doesn’t apply. But the difference in approach is interesting.

I spent a great deal of my twenties telling myself that I preferred the French-language aesthetic of writing interior monologues over the English-language aesthetic of the exterior description—pages upon paragraphs to describe every inch of a tree, for example, or what colour a particular character’s hair might be—none of which I considered required unless it is actually essential for the story itself. It took years to realize that my prose didn’t require dialogue, something I didn’t know how to include either way. I wonder now if it was actually through Gunnars that I became interested in novels propelled by language over cinematic scenes, and assembled via a narrative constructed through accumulation. Whatever else a book-length project might be, at least in my thinking, it is less all-encompassing than a kind of lyric, narrative burst, which relate to my early readings of writers such as Kristjana Gunnars, Elizabeth Smart and Dany Laferrière, all of whom also explored the form of the novel as accumulations, and of auto(biographical) fictions. “For eight hours we concentrated,” Gunnars writes, as part of The Substance of Forgetting, “not noticing time passing. Dawn turned to morning. The sun rose and shone on the water. Once we stepped out and watched the blank stillness of the water. The thick forests of the mountainsides mirrored themselves in the lake.”

“I have sometimes thought: it is possible there is no such thing as chronological time. That the past resembles a deck of cards. Certain scenes are given. They are not scenes the rememberer chooses, but simply a deck that is given. The cards are shuffled whenever a game is played.” I held on to this passage of The Prowler for more than a decade. Thinking back on it now, the notion of memory as a deck of cards shifted the foundations of how I saw the construction of narrative prose. A deck of cards, or a photo album: each section imparts the possibilities of the next. The novel I fumbled to compose across the mid-1990s, titled “Place, a novel,” was a collaged-suite of self-contained bursts that attempted to hold itself together across a very loose narrative, akin to how my twentysomething self understood Gunnars’ novels. It didn’t cohere, but it was certainly the narrative structure I furthered across my two published novels—white (2007) and Missing Persons (2009)—as well as my current work-in-progress. As Ali writes as in his introduction to the new edition:

The struggle of the writer to transform or transmute life into literature in a meaningful way may be why in each book there is a fluidity of time (the story as it happens, but also the narrator writing the story) as well as place (Denmark/Iceland, Winnipeg/Portland, BC, Interior and Coast, Trier/Hamburg, and Denmark/Saskatoon/Calgary). The shifts in time and space are required by the core structure of each book: a writer is writing a book. She writes the book and she tells you about what it was like to write the book.

There is such a lovely and lyric interiority to her passages. Gunnars’ novels exist as much through ideas, theory and speculation, writing internal monologues over descriptive scenes, and writing out the ways in which one writes, far beyond simply offering a story told through sentences. As the opening paragraph of The Prowler reads, in full:

Perhaps it is not a good book, he said, James Joyce said, but it is the only book I am able to write. It is not a book I would ever read from. I would never again stand in front of people, reading my own words, pretending I have something to say, humiliated. It is not writing. Not poetry, not prose. I am not a writer. Yet it is, in my throat, stomach, arms. This book that I am not able to write. There are words that insist on silence. Words that betray me. He does not want me to write this book. The words make me sleep. They keep me awake.

So much of my articulations on Gunnars’ work appear in the past tense, although that shouldn’t suggest I’d been absent from thinking about her writing across those intervening years. More recently, I was fortunate enough to produce a chapbook of her poems in 2016, snake charmers : a cycle of twenty poems, for an event we were both participating in through the University of Alberta’s department of English and Film Studies, celebrating the fortieth anniversary of their writers-in-residence program. A bit later, I produced a chapbook-length essay of hers as well, a moment in flight: essay on melancholy (2020). “There are fragments of eternity in all passing things.” she writes, as part of that essay, suggesting a clear linkage between those early novels and her current work, although the essay was restructured into a long poem, set as the opening sequence of Ruins of the Heart: Six Longpoems (2022). I’m not sure why the difference in structure, but it does alter the flow, just a bit. I am still looking into it.

reading in the margins: Joy Williams

Thanks to a tweet by Denver poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert, I discovered a craft essay online by American writer Joy Williams, “Uncanny the Singing that Comes from Certain Husks.” What emerged, very quickly, was Williams’ quick wit and dark humour, and a particular kind of wisdom, hard-won and practical. I’d not heard of Williams prior to this, but I became curious. In a 2014 interview I found with Williams for the Paris Review, conducted by Paul Winner, she displays that same wit and humour, as well as a kind of evasiveness, although that might be too strong a word. It is the way she responds indirectly to his questions, using Winners’ prompts as jumping off points into further thinking. Her mind, it would seem, simply moves too fast.

INTERVIEWER

I think of the Internet, the sheer volume. Cynthia Ozick wrote recently about the influence of this environment, all those Amazon customer reviews.

WILLIAMS

Who writes those?

INTERVIEWER

Anyone. People who may, in an earlier age, have written letters to the editor.

WILLIAMS

It’s one thing when it’s a restaurant. I mean, they can destroy a restaurant overnight. To do that with books?

Williams is wonderfully present, deeply engaged and comfortably outside the mythical inner-circles or goings-on of big name authors, of which she might even be one. She presents an aura of practicality and confidence; doing her work in her own way, conducting her own silences and spaces, and building up her own solitudes, from where she is able to contemplate and create her best work.

I like the way she references Alice Munro as part of the interview, so wonderfully evocative and charming in her descriptions: “That nice Canadian writer who recently won the Nobel—beloved, admired, prolific. Who would deny it? She said she had a ‘hellish good time’ writing. This could be a subject for many, many panels. Get a herd of writers together and ask them, Do you have a hellish good time writing? Mostly, I believe, the answer would be no. But their going on about it could take some time.”

Responding to my follow-up, Elisa recommends I begin with Williams’ novel, The Quick and The Dead. I hesitate to attempt to read a novel during pandemic lockdown, predominantly for the fact of our two wee children are underfoot, in the midst of their online schooling. But the summer will soon be upon us, my wife reminds. You can sit outside, then. Elisa also points me to a November 2020 profile on Williams in the New York Times by A.O. Scott. Scott writes of comparisons made between Williams’ work with that of John Hawkes and John Barth, Donald Barthelme and Lydia Davis, and to Raymond Carver, who studied writing at the University of Iowa at the same time as Williams. He writes:

Not that she needs their company. Her protean aspect — her manner of showing both a realist and an experimental face, sometimes in the space of a single page — exposes the limitations of such sorting. The bird evades capture, even in a notebook. Capture and evasion, not incidentally, are what she writes about most.

Given my own leanings toward Davis, perhaps this article does provide me with an answer of where to begin: her collection of micro-fictions, Ninety-Nine Stories of God. My searches also uncover options for a new novel, published in September 2021. That might be a later step. On my part, I quote the first two sentences of her essay as part of a short story I’m working on, slipping her lines just underneath the railings. They fit just fine.

reading in the margins: Ernest Hemingway

Across three consecutive evenings we watch Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s 2021 documentary Hemingway, on the life and work of that most American of twentieth century authors. It is a great task to take on such an overwhelming figure, and I’ve long found Hemingway himself fascinating, even if his writing hadn’t any direct influence upon my own. That could easily be a rather naïve take, I suppose. When I think on some of my own early prose influences—Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findley, Milan Kundera, Sheila Watson and Elizabeth Smart—were they influenced by Hemingway? I’m sure, even if to do something other, they must have been. Offhand, I don’t directly know.

There were works of Hemingway’s I studied during my eastern Ontario high school days: The Sun Also Rises and the short story “Hills Like White Elephants.” Works that I realize, upon watching this documentary, I clearly didn’t understand at all. Perhaps I was too young, or too inexperienced a reader. Perhaps I felt too temporally removed, distracted by the period from which Hemingway wrote, that half century between publication and my then-teenaged self. Either way, I don’t remember any particular effect his works had on me, apart from his name. His name and biography. The weight of it.

In Ernest Hemingway: Dateline: Toronto, Hemingway’s Complete Toronto Star Dispatches 1920-1924, you can see articles such as “Trout Fishing in Spain” and “Trout Fishing in Europe.” I suspect one of these might have been a direct influence, years later, upon Richard Brautigan, in the pacific northwest. Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America is an American classic, but as far from Hemingway as possible, and yet, the influence is obvious. Brautigan’s short, American sentences. His life-long interest in fly fishing and guns. One could say he was downstream, stepping into that same river. Even Heraclitus might have to admit to that one.

Have we one good Canadian sentence? Hard to know, given we don’t identify in the same way. Our sense of self is not as reliant on that same foundation of rugged individualism. Our storytelling, our mythmaking, is different. A Métis nation, as John Ralston Saul argued in A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada: our founding ideas a perfect blend of French, English and Indigenous, even as our policies perpetrated the ongoing thefts and genocides of colonialism.

I took notes as we watched the documentary, prompted by some of the conversation around Hemingway and his work; his insecurities, which snowballed into everything else. His drinking, his bravado and tall tales, his treatment of others, particularly women. My dear wife Christine found it difficult, and had little sympathy or patience either for Hemingway or for his seeming apologist, Edna O’Brien. At the end of the third episode, clips of the late John McCain, who had been interviewed on For Whom The Bell Tolls, almost seem to present Hemingway’s shortcomings as wistful, and not of an insecure man who lapsed from self-absorbed into self-destructive.

There’s a quote by Orhan Pamuk I read recently: “I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.” It is a straightforward enough quote, repeated for the sake of showing an example of the power of reading, the power of ideas and of story. And yet, what I’d wish to know from Pamuk: what was that book?

From the notes composed during the days watching the documentary, I crafted a new two page short story, “The snows of Mount Yamnuska,” attempting to play with some of the structures of Hemingway’s straightforward sentences, snow-capped peaks and human disconnection, although foregoing dialogue for density, as is my way. The story was completed that same week, with the voice of Jeff Daniels in my head, narrating throughout. If only.

 

reading in the margins: Bobbie Louise Hawkins

  

BARBARA [HENNING]: Did you get there?

BOBBIE [LOUISE HAWKINS]: Oh God, nobody ever gets there.

During pandemic mornings lifeguarding our young ladies in their e-schoolings, I sit on the couch with notebook and pen, amid various drafts of in-progress short stories, and a copy of Bobbie Louise Hawkins’ reissued 1984 novella, One Small Saga. Produced with a new introduction by Laird Hunt and Eleni Sikelianos, as well as a long out-of-print short story, this new volume also includes a lengthy excerpt of an even longer interview that Barbara Henning conducted with Hawkins across 2011. Throughout the book, Hawkins’ prose is sharp, attentive and coiled. Her prose is descriptively expressive in this really lovely subtle way.

I’ve been attempting to be more proactive about seeking out prose that strikes my attention. It isn’t as easy as one might think: as an active reviewer, I’ve received books in the mail almost every day for more than two decades, but the kinds of prose that really strike are few and far between. Lydia Davis, Sarah Manguso, Miranda July, Anik See, Kathy Fish, Heather Christle. Lorrie Moore. I pour through literary journals and pry open envelopes, but much of what I encounter reads as too straightforward; narratives that might be easier to adapt into film, but harder to hear the music of the language.

As part of a post-reading panel at the Ottawa International Writers Festival in October 2007, the late Quebecoise novelist Gil Courtemanche complained heavily about English-language North American novelists. “You don’t want to write books, you want to write stories,” he proclaimed, thanks to my notes from the time. He was on a panel alongside British writer Marina Lewycka and Newfoundland writer Michael Winter, both of whom he dismissed with a wave of his hand. Courtemanche declared the problem with “our” fiction was that we all wanted to be filmmakers. It was no longer about words, he said. It was no longer about anything more than action. He went on, of course, saying that he doesn’t bother reading North American fiction anymore, because something always has to “happen” in them, and writers can’t just write anymore. Where is the interiority, he accused.

He also complained about being prevented from smoking indoors, claiming we were a culture of barbarians. Once he left, we christened a side-room of the festival hospitality suite the “Gil Courtemanche smoking room.” It was where all the conversation occurred.

Hawkins’ is a name I’d heard for quite some time, but never quite got to, in those ways in which we all do, filing an ever-increasing list of names of writers that one wishes to get to, but haven’t quite been able to, yet. Julia Cohen, Paige Lewis, Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. In my own way, I do wish to get to everyone, but it does take some time.

My prior of Hawkins’ work was limited to the fact that she published a novel with Coach House Press at one point, and had been one of Robert Creeley’s wives. I only mention Creeley for how important his work was for me throughout my late twenties and into my thirties, having spent an enormous time learning through his rhythms and lines, and those other writers that surrounded him, although I seem not to have paid nearly enough attention. I first caught her name through the association, and possibly her Coach House title catching my eye in multiple second-hand shops over the years.

I slip downstairs through our fiction shelves, and there it is, Almost Everything (1982), a co-publication between Toronto’s Coach House Press and East Haven, Connecticut publisher LongRiver Books. A paperback set amid Elizabeth Hay and Fanny Howe and Sheila Heti titles. A price sticker on the front cover is dated January 1999, $3.99, from Toronto’s late, lamented community bookstore, This Ain’t The Rosedale Library. A whole book by Bobbie Louise Hawkins, there on my bookshelf, entirely unread. And so, to begin.

I’m fascinated by the ways in which Hawkins utilized the information of her life to shape fiction, writing out a narrative propelled by observation and commentary, composed over her own situations and experiences. She married a Danish architect when young, and begin to travel; so, too, did the narrator of One Small Saga. She was deeply pregnant during the cruise across the Atlantic; so, too, was her narrator. She uses the structures of her own life, but her work is fueled by her observations, her language. Her clipped articulations of what might not have been spoken of in fiction by male writers, or even caught at all. Her paragraphs expand, and then curl into conclusion. There is nowhere to go but the next line, the next thought. The language itself, propels. Hers is the most wonderful music, and one I regret not spending time with before this.