I realized that I didn’t say how often I’d be sending out this newsletter: it will be every two weeks, and I’ll be aiming for an end-of-the-work-week drop date, mostly because I like to read this kind of stuff over Saturday morning coffee, so I’m basing my decision on my focus-group-of-me (a dangerous practice, as the magazine editors on the recipient list will tell you).
Craft: Going deeper
I spent last Saturday afternoon in the company of 13 writers (an auspicious number!) at the Lunenburg County Lifestyle Centre in Bridgewater, leading a Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia workshop that explored techniques for using research to strengthen memoir and personal essay writing. I had six exercises for participants to try—four aimed at developing and exploring memories, and two designed to tap into external research to deepen understanding and meaning in your manuscript. I’ll include the memory exercises in an upcoming newsletter, but today, will focus on the two techniques for using external research to deepen your work.
What’s the meaning?
The first exercise is simple: Find a word, a location, an historical reference in your manuscript, and use it as a jumping off point. What are the roots of the word? What can you find out about that location? What is the context for that historical reference? Poke, prod, explore—go down the rabbit hole. You’re looking for connections—insights that spark new thoughts or new ways of seeing what it is you’re writing about.
One simple example: a section from my manuscript in progress, Grudge: My 10-Year Fight with Forgiveness, where I explore the origin of the word grudge:
“Grutch.” The online dictionaries tell me it’s the Late Middle English origin of the word grudge. I roll it in my mouth, rhyme it with crutch, the “utch-iness” of it conveying just enough rounded cranky cantankerousness to make me want to stroke its prickly form. Its meaning? “Complain, murmur, grumble,” from the earlier Old French verb grouchier. We don’t just hold grudges, we nurse them, a deeply feminine verb conjuring up images of sickly things kept breathing through attentive female care, of hurts fed from vitriol-heavy breasts. The psychological literature speaks of grudges as “a commitment to remain angry (or to resume anger periodically).” The parenthetical makes me smirk, with its suggestion that I’m turning my grudges on and off like a favorite television show I revisit to relax. We hold grudges, they say, out of a desire to preserve an image of ourselves as the victim, to save face, to regain control or seize the moral high ground (“When they go low…”).
There is a supposed balance at the center of this. In a just world, a grudge allows the disempowered victim a certain kind of ethical sway, affords her a claim on her oppressor, an entitlement to sympathy: her grudge, well-wielded, might lead to restitution or, if released, to moral superiority. And if she doesn’t get justice in this life? A forgiving spirit will wing its way to heaven more quickly than a grudge-burdened soul ever will.
It’s easy in conversations about forgiveness and grudges to flatten the peaks and gullies of power, presuming an equal—or equalized—footing for the parties on either side. Because that’s what a grudge is supposed to do: give someone who has been diminished or harmed a leg up, an opportunity to enumerate their losses and perhaps, to exercise the noble strength of forgiveness. It’s why grudges held by the already powerful make them look small, inviting the charge of childishness when revenge-seeking pettiness is expressed by presidents and kings.
In a more complex example, exploring the origins of the name of the town Defiance, Ohio, writer Hanif Abdurraqib builds a heartbreaking and beautiful arc in his piece “Defiance, Ohio is the Name of a Band.” Abdurraqib creates an echo from the attitude of the soldier credited with naming the town, to the determination of a mother facing down the heroin epidemic and its impact on her family centuries later. Here’s Abdurraqib reading the piece.
You can also find it in his book They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us.
Author Alexander Chee also uses this approach in his piece “The Rosary,” which appeared in The New Yorker and in his book How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. Chee is writing about creating a rose garden in the backyard of his small apartment in Brooklyn. As he digs holes for his newly delivered plants, he unearths the skeleton of a pet wrapped in a pale blue cotton housedress along with a small crucifix and rosary. He writes:
The more I think about the word ‘rosary,’ the more I understand it must be related to ‘aviary,’ ‘topiary,’ and so on. When I check the definition, I see the first meaning is for the prayer, and then, in italics, that it meant ‘rose garden’ in Middle English. How did the word for a rose garden come to connote a prayer?
That question prompts more digging (into the history of the word, as opposed to the garden), and leads Chee to develop a powerful metaphor that enlarges the meaning of what is, on the surface, a straightforward story about a backyard garden.
Find a metaphor
Chee’s development of his metaphor is a nice transition to the second exercise I shared in last week’s workshop, which was simply to review what you’ve written with an eye to developing or enlarging a metaphor that may provide another entry point to the ideas you are exploring. In the workshop, we looked at Alicia Elliott’s terrific essay “Dark Matters,” originally published by Hazlitt and also included in her collection A Mind Spread Out on the Ground. Elliott does a masterful job of braiding what at first appear to be two distinct strands of content: in one, her family’s vacation break in Vancouver and the coinciding jury verdict in the Gerald Stanley murder trial, and in the other, an exploration of the scientific understanding of dark matter and its influence on the universe. The metaphor emerges over the course of the essay: that dark matter influences everything though we don’t see it, in much the same way that racism influences behaviour even (perhaps most particularly) when it is unacknowledged. As Elliott shared with us when she participated in the University of King’s College MFA in Creative Nonfiction summer residency in August 2019, the metaphor emerged naturally: her family went to the HR MacMillan Space Centre on their vacation, and as she sat there, preoccupied with the Stanley verdict, the presentation on dark matter struck her as a powerful metaphor for the case and Canada’s reaction to it. Of course, the hard work of developing that metaphor on the page remained, as she then dove into the research necessary to explore and explain the scientific concepts—and to use them in the piece in a way that illuminates and enlarges her exploration of the Stanley case.
We’re used to seeing metaphors dropped as one-offs onto the page—a turn of phrase used once in a paragraph to expand an idea or image so that it resonates a little more vividly. Elliott uses her metaphor to create both structure and meaning in her essay, while Chee leans on his more for meaning than for structure. Extending a metaphor over a number of paragraphs—or over the length of a piece—needs to be done carefully. Ask yourself: Is there enough depth to the metaphor to allow you to sustain it at length, or has the metaphor exhausted its power in a single mention?
One final example, this one my own, again from my manuscript in progress. It’s simpler than Elliott’s or Chee’s, designed more to shed light on character and relationship, in a scene where I’m recounting a telephone call with my father. I’ll leave it to you to consider whether the image I’m leaning on enlarges your understanding or not.
I’m talking to him on the phone, checking in because Mom has gone away for a few days with some nursing school classmates. It’s a tradition she and her friends started in retirement, a few days away together, just the girls. She’d hesitated about going this year, worried Dad might burn down the house while she’s gone. She was right to be concerned: a recent bedding scorching was fresh in her mind, worrisome for her though not enough of a scare to convince him to quit smoking in bed. Instead of fighting an unwinnable battle I’d suggested a smoke detector for his bedroom, dropping one off the weekend before Mom’s trip. When I call to check up on him, he thanks me for the alarm.
Or at least, his words say thank you. His tone tilts more to ambivalence than appreciation.
“Your mother told me that if it goes off, I’m just to leave the house. Not look for the cats, not grab anything important, just to leave and call the fire department. As if that’s bloody goddamned likely.”
“That sounds like pretty good advice to me, Dad,” I say, my tone deliberately emotionally flat, the verbal equivalent of approaching an unpredictable hound from the side, without eye contact. He snorts. I pause. “Well, what were you thinking you’d do instead?” I ask. One step closer.
“I’ve been thinking about it since your mother left, and I think the first thing I’d need to do is turn it off, but it’s hard to reach, and there wouldn’t be time to go get the step ladder, so I’d have to stand on the bed.”
“Do you think that’s a good idea? Your balance isn’t very good. The bed isn’t very firm.” I can’t resist a quick aggressive glance into the old dog’s rheumy eyes. “And it might be on fire,” I say.
He doesn’t lunge yet though. Instead, he cedes the point. Then says maybe what he needs is a stick long enough to hit the off button with. And maybe he needs to practice to make sure he can reach it. (“He wants to turn that detector into a piñata,” says a friend later. “He wants to beat it to death.”)
“But why do you need to turn it off, Dad?” I ask, back to edging in sideways.
“Because the sound of it is bloody annoying,” he spits. “I’ll need to look for the fire and I don’t want that goddamned thing going off in the background.”
I rattle his chain. “You know, Dad, all of this planning could be avoided if you just didn’t smoke in bed.”
“Expecting me not to smoke is exactly the same as some little old bitch in the apartment next door expecting me to put our cats down because she doesn’t like the smell of fucking cat piss,” he barks.
Except there is no little old bitch in the apartment next door because they don’t live in an apartment. Yet. But their house is up for sale, and he knows some apartments won’t take cats—or smokers. And so he’s pre-fighting a fight with an imaginary neighbour while fighting in real-time with me, nothing if not efficient in the deployment of his anger.
“Dad, nobody’s saying you have to put the cats down. I’m not even saying you should quit smoking. I’m just suggesting you shouldn’t smoke in bed.”
“If I have to, I’ll take those fucking cats and get them their shots and move to England and live on a Narrows boat.” It’s an old fantasy, one Mom and Dad tried when they first retired in 1998, living part of the year on the British waterways in a houseboat, until the costs of fuel, food and living in England had driven them back to Canada. The original fight is forgotten, his anxiety about their two cats overtaking it.
“You’re not going to have to put down the cats,” I repeat. “No one is saying that. We’ll find you an apartment where you can keep the cats.”
“I’m not going to give them up. Your mother can live by herself. I’ll go to England.”
We circle each other for a few minutes more, him grumbling, me consoling, conciliating, cajoling. Eventually, we hang up, a mandatory “Love you” tacked on to the end of even the most frustrating phone call. I’ve noticed for a while he’s not as sharp as he used to be. A mild stroke four years ago had left no apparent physical deficits, but since then, there has been an erratic erosion of his faculties. He’d told Mom he couldn’t follow the instructions on how to put the smoke detector up, though I’d suspected that had more to do with the detector than the instructions. Still, he had trouble with his computer, seeming unable to navigate programs and processes he’d once had no challenge with. There was a kind of muddledness about how to do things, anxiety over things that hadn’t—and might never—happen. He was still an unpredictable old dog, with teeth that could still wound. But slower. And barking at shadows.
What I’m Reading: Hilary Mantel’s Giving Up the Ghost
I will confess: I haven’t read any of Hilary Mantel’s novels (though I thoroughly enjoyed the television adaptation of Wolf Hall). What I have read, more than once, is her lovely memoir Giving Up the Ghost. (Another confession: I love books as both object and content, and my copy of Mantel’s memoir is a gorgeously produced hardcover from Slightly Foxed Editions. Their books are a joy to hold and a pleasure to read.) Mantel is a master of metaphor. Consider these gems:
“He wrote a small, exact, engineer’s hand, and his mind was subdued to a discipline, but inside his chest his heart would knock about, like a wasp in an inverted glass.”
“…this tiny animal, with her own strange phobias, fright shivering behind her marzipan eyes…”
“My grandmother was so creased by anxiety that her face resembled a pleated skirt.”
In describing a schoolyard bully: “He is broad, white, muscled, compact, and made of rubber.” (Didn’t we all know a boy like that at school?)
And so many more. The book is a wonderful telling of what it took for Mantel to become an author, while also a masterclass in writing.
Other Good Stuff
Read: Wondering what to add to the stack of guilt next to your bed (oh, wait, that’s next to my bed—but maybe you have a pile like that too)? Check out Literary Hub’s list of the 10 Best Essay Collections of the Decade. John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead makes the list, and includes a wonderful piece about going to a Christian rock concert that is, by turns, hilarious and poignant. Aleksandar Hemon’s The Book of My Lives is also there: his essay “The Aquarium,” about the illness and loss of his young daughter, is wrenching and powerful. One of my favourite writers, Rebecca Solnit, makes the list with her book The Mother of all Questions. And there are seven more—plus seven more again that didn’t make the main list, as well as dozens of others under “honorable mentions.”
Watch: I love Helen Mirren, and enjoyed every minute of her in the just-released first episode of the four-part mini-series Catherine the Great (I almost typed Helen the Great there…). One small quibble: Mirren is older than the character she is playing by decades, though since we’ve put up with that kind of age-shifting by male actors in the past, I’m trying to ignore it here. Still, if you want the real scoop on Catherine’s life, I suggest you augment the series with the terrific biography Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman by Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Massie.
Listen: The Highwomen. Seriously. 100% fangirl.
Book Industry Stuff
Check out Jane Friedman’s roundup of 2019 publishing trends in adult fiction, nonfiction and YA—and try to figure out if you have what it takes to become a non-celebrity celebrity…
Get the scoop on the state of Canadian independent bookstores with BookNet Canada’s report. Good news for Canadian authors: Over 60% of indie bookstores have increased their percentage of Canadian authors, and most of the rest are maintaining existing levels of Canadian inventory. (Under 5% are cutting Canadian inventory.)
Queer creators have a new imprint to which they can pitch graphic novel fiction, nonfiction and YA: Mariko Tamaki’s Surely Books. Check out this interview with the founding publisher (and celebrated graphic novelist) herself, by Sarah Sawler in Quill & Quire.
Tweets & Stuff
Teapots + Octopus = Delight
The kids are alright (because they’re not taking any shit)
Alan Syliboy’s drums bring me joy
2nd issue, 2nd picture so now it’s obligatory
Buddy says “Sleep in on Sunday!”