Samantha Garner, Freelance Web Writer & Editor

Yes, this looks like an ad for Ikea’s Poäng chair, but it’s not. This is my favourite writing spot in the house. There are windows along one wall and continuing for a bit around a corner, so I feel surrounded by light. And, okay, the Poäng chair is pretty comfortable too.

Oof. What busy times I’ve seen since my last post! On Friday I left on a last-minute trip to visit my parents in Ontario, returning on Monday to a busy workload. While I was at my parents’, I did unearth some . . . interesting material from my writerly past that I have planned for a blog post once I can sit down and prepare it. In the meantime, here are some good things other people have written recently:

• Are Your Clients Really Getting Your Best? from Men With Pens.
• Teri Vlassopoulos blogs about choosing the name of her new short story collection.
• Lija at The Writer’s Pet writes about Fifth Business, a favourite novel we have in common!
• An article about the writing advice industry at the Globe & Mail.

Another plagiarism accusation’s popped up in the book world, this time involving a teenage author. Not that every teenage writer does it, but I mean: I wrote two books when I was 13/14 and – I’m not gonna lie – they were pretty blatant ripoffs of The Outsiders. Anyway, from the Independent:

Ms Hegeman, whose father is the renowned German literary director and theatre professor Carl Hegemann, has already written a play and the script to her own film. But her novel about a 16-year-old girl who suffers the death of her mother and subsequently plumbs the depths of wild sex and heavy drug taking on Berlin’s techno music scene has been her first runaway success.

Read the full article here.

The above is a tagline from an Ontario tourism campaign that, I don’t mind saying, used to bring me to tears when I first moved to Alberta and was terribly homesick.

My dear friend Suzen and I, among the many things we have in common, share the unique preoccupation with Home that only being away from it can bring. Admittedly, her Home, Newfoundland, is a bit more picturesque and immediately evocative than mine. However, Ontario works its way into almost everything I write. There’s even a literary style named for my home region, though I don’t think my fiction fits into it – much as I’d love it to.

So, it made my wee expat heart soar to read:

This summer, Ontario’s literary history will become a permanent part of the province’s physical landscape with a new project called Ontario: Read It Here.

A series of eight plaques will be installed across the province in the exact geographic location where Ontario-based literary scenes takes place.

The full article can be read here. Having lived here in Alberta for nearly a decade, I’ve taken my fair share of lumps about being an Ontarian. Say what you will about Ontario – I’m excited about this and wish I could see it!

The other day, I made a post about Doris Lessing. Below is a video which further illustrates why I think she’s so great. She discovers she’s won the Nobel Prize for literature and is kind of sassy about it. She’s old, was taken off-guard and was previously disliked by Nobel representatives, so this response is pretty great. Observe:

A few posts ago, I mentioned how I used to always confuse Mavis Gallant with Doris Lessing. I learned my lesson once and for all after I accidentally bought a copy of the first volume of Lessing’s autobiography. I’d picked it up from a discount book store in St. Jacob’s, Ontario, when visiting my parents. At first I was very excited about it, because I was confused, thinking Mavis Gallant. I didn’t realize my mixup until I returned home and started reading.

I decided to continue once I realized my mistake. I was disheartened at the beginning because it started out so confusingly, Lessing listing her grandparents and talking about them in a way that was hard to follow. I almost gave up, especially since the book was volume one of two and not at all short. But, happily, it got loads better. There wasn’t really a structure to the autobiography. I mean, yes, she does tell her story chronologically, but she digresses into stories and memories that might not have to do with the “plot,” at least not obviously. And she does this in such a compelling way; her stories are so interesting and her tone is so engaging. She was born in Iran and grew up in Zimbabwe, the daughter of British parents who were farming in “the colonies,” and was also a Communist. Though she seemed to like living there (even if her childhood wasn’t perfect), she has a pretty realistic view of this time in history; she leans towards the side of “this was a kind of ridiculous time and I tried to change it in my own way.” Also, I love when people branch off into side stories, especially elderly people who often have a lot of great stories.

Anyway, I read the book eagerly and am now reading the second volume, starting after she leaves Zimbabwe for England with her young son. She writes about her writing process and I thought it’d be useful to share. She writes:

Impossible to describe a writer’s life, for the real part of it cannot be written down. How did my day go in those early days in London, in Church Street? I woke at five, when the child did. He came into my bed, and I told or read him stories or rhymes. We got dressed, he ate, and then I took him to the school up the street . . . I shopped a little, and then my real day began. The feverish need to get this or that done . . . had to be subdued to the flat, dull state one needs to write in . . .

And now, on the little table that has been cleared of breakfast things, replaced by scattered sheets of paper, is the typewriter, waiting for me. Work begins. I do not sit down but wander around the room. I think on my feet . . . I find myself in the chair by the machine. I write a sentence . . . will it stand? But never mind, look at it later, just get on with it, get the flow started. And so it goes on. I walk and I prowl, my hands busy with this and that . . . I walk, I write. If the telephone rings I try to answer it without breaking the concentration. And so it goes on, all day, until it is time to fetch the child from school or until he arrives at the door . . .

So that’s the outline of a day. But nowhere in it is there the truth of the process of writing. I fall back on that useful word ‘wool-gathering.’ And this goes on when you are shopping, cooking, anything. You are reading but find the book has lowered itself: you are wool-gathering. The creative dark. Incommunicable.

She then goes on to recount how different publishing was back then, in the ’50s, how there used to be a close relationship between writer and publisher/editor, and books were sometimes published even though they wouldn’t make any money – just because they were good. Thoroughly depressing. This is why I like small/independent publishing. For the love! Or any other, less cheesy, phrase you’d like to substitute.

Anyway, this was long but I hope it was interesting. Personally, I can’t get enough of reading about the writing/creative process!