Canadian literary magazines need your support
Read Teri’s post about the proposed funding cuts to Canadian literary magazines, and the quote from the Facebook group started to fight against it.
Archive for February, 2009
February 28, 2009 | 0 comments | View Post
I swear I’m not a shiftless writer!
So, a few days ago I wrote about finally finishing one of the short stories I’ve been working on for an unholy five years. In that time, I did the character development workshop, made a few resultant revisions and solicited feedback from one of my favourite writers (and a dear friend) as well as my husband (not being a writer, he provides my “Everyman” angle).
My husband gave me his feedback this afternoon, and by the end of the work day I had it sent off to a magazine. Sorry Teri, I know I’d sent you a second draft – I hope it didn’t make you vomit! I just had to do something with it, get it out of my life for a while. I was talking to a friend of mine on the weekend about how frustrating it is to write short stories, because there is absolutely nothing stopping you from chipping away at it anytime the fancy strikes. With a novel, I imagine the sheer size would be daunting, or the possibility of affecting elements further in the novel one would have to then hunt for. Not so with a story, at least for me. I need to learn to just put a period on the thing, underline it a few times, seal it, notarize it, put an anvil on top of it.
It was kind of sad when I went to enter the submission in my Submission Log spreadsheet and actually had to use my computer’s search function to find it. Guys, I hadn’t opened it since December. 2007. I know I was actually writing in that time since then – freelance work – but I still felt a modicum of healthy, invigorating shame.
Oh, and I just realized I completely forgot to use my pen name on the submission. Maybe that’s a good thing. I kind of wasn’t 100% behind it anyway. I’m so weird about issues re: privacy, coworkers Googling me. Maybe it’s an unnecessary worry. So they find out I’m a writer. I suppose there are worse things!
Early Tolkien book coming out
Okay, so the thing about me is I am a nerd and this excites me:
Publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced Tuesday that Tolkien’s The Legend of Siguard and Gudrun, featuring notes by the author’s youngest son, Christopher Tolkien, will be released in May.
Tolkien wrote the book, said to be a reworking in verse of old Norse epics, during the 1920s and 1930s while he was teaching at Oxford University.
In other news, I wrote a little article for Suite 101 about spring writing prompts and it’s left me quite eager for spring, even though this is Alberta and spring is a good four months away. Maybe three. Maybe. Oh how I love transitional seasons!
February 18, 2009 | 0 comments | View Post
Character development
I spent all morning and most of my afternoon in a crowded old basement library taking a writing workshop. Specifically, the workshop was on character development, something I sorely need in my fiction. I tent to neglect it, which can be bad. At first I thought I just had poor dialogue writing skills, but if I don’t have properly fleshed out characters than the dialogue will necessarily ring hollow.
Anyway, the workshop was great and I got some really useful tips on building up the main character in one of my stories (oh, I finished one of the two I’ve been writing since 2004 – hooray!) in particular.
If you’re into that kind of thing, we worked with the character development worksheet on this page (or a variation of it anyway; things have been added since the instructor printed it out). I used to find worksheets like this a little cheesy, and they kind of are, but it’s just amazing how much they help. Even if you don’t ever write about the character’s family or what his/her favourite clothing is. It really shows when a writer knows everything about his/her characters.
I think I should do things like this every season or so. I always feel so energized about writing (as corny as that sounds) afterwards!
The workshop was also great because I overheard the following exchange:
“What’s that movie . . . the one where the astronauts . . . go up in space . . .”
“Oh, ‘The Right Stuff’!”
“Yes, that’s the one!”
Whaaaat?
February 14, 2009 | 4 comments | View Post
Jane Austen + zombies
My husband loves zombie movies.
I love Victorian literature. So when the headline, “Austen’s Pride and Prejudice set for zombie mash-up” appeared in my Google Reader, I immediately sent the article to my husband, thrilled.
Jane Austen’s classic tale Pride and Prejudice has been updated and reimagined in a host of ways over the years, whether set in modern times or perhaps with a Bollywood flavour. However, a new parody — incorporating zombies — is generating buzz ahead of its release.Television comedy writer and producer Seth Grahame-Smith is set to release his manners-plus-monsters mash-up novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies this spring.
Not holding my breath re: this parody being technically good, I am looking to it with interest nonetheless. Even if it’s not bad in a good way, the way Turkish Star Wars was, it should at least be notable!
My life with Robertson Davies
Robertson Davies is my favourite author. I first read him him the year he died, 1995. I was in a Grade 10 course on Canadian Literature, which still stands out in my mind as the Best Class Ever. There were highs and lows. I read Robertson Davies and Nino Ricci, but also struggled through Margaret Laurence (whom I later fell in love with). My teacher, like most English teachers in my school, was a real person, funny and honest and loved books.
What I liked about Davies was how he solidified my own romantic visions of Ontario, where I was born and raised. Brick houses, old trees. But he wasn’t rural about it, a style I wasn’t into at the time. At 15 I wanted the wide world and new experiences. And Davies, coming from a well-to-do journalism and theatre background, gave me all those things while still feeling accessible to me. I was not from a well-to-do family, I had no interest in being a journalist and I was too shy for the theatre, but Davies’ books really appealed to me.
The book we read in that class was Fifth Business, still one of my favourites. I hadn’t discovered AS Byatt yet, so the thought that an author could write literary fiction (a term I personally dislike) while injecting elements of myth and the fantastical was new and just thrilling to me. Davies was the first author I read who did that. It gave me so much confidence in my own work. I don’t necessarily believe in the things I was raised to believe anymore, but I am still drawn to the absurd, the fable, even a bit of the magical in small doses. I am interested in the way these collide with their opposites in our everyday lives, and how this collision informs our lives. Though it’s not a terribly major theme in the book, Fifth Business was my small introduction to all that.
Recently I found out that there was a collection of Davies’ letters published, from 1977 to his death in 1995 (I later learned that there was an earlier volume, which I’m reading right now). I was excited to read it, since he is one of my literary idols. But it was such an interesting experience to discover that there were parts of him I just didn’t like. In some of his letters, there are a few low-level sexist and racist comments. And, don’t get me wrong, I am not condoning it, but it just so solidly proved how much of an Old Boy he was. It was just how the world was in his time (I know he died in the ’90s but by then he was quite old and set in his ways). It took me a while to get past it. It was an interesting lesson in humanizing my heroes.
I got past it, with a stern finger shake to him in my head, and I’m quite enjoying the earlier book of letters. I didn’t know that he was constantly plagued by self-doubt about his work. It’s comforting to know.
Oh, and he looks like my godmother’s husband, who had this great farm I used to visit when I was young.
Click this image to watch a 1973 CBC interview.
I love the interviewer in this. He’s so strange! “Do you do what I would call ‘research’?”
Video Credit:
Impressions of Robertson Davies.
The CBC Digital Archives Website.
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
February 7, 2009 | 2 comments | View Post