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An online education

I think I’ve said this before. Of course I’ve said this before: I love school. I love being in an environment made for learning. I like knowing stuff and then learning more about stuff I thought I knew so that I can’t really for sure know that I know anything much at all. I like the rabbit hole of research and study and reading. Deep.

So, it shouldn’t be a surprise that I am excited beyond words to be going back to school this fall. I’m officially a grad student and I like that sound of that. (For readers who don’t know already, I’ll be working towards my MFA in Creative Writing through UBC’s optional residency program).

I live in Vancouver, so I could have applied to the full residency program and take the bus to that beautiful campus to attend classes live-and-in-person. But I didn’t go that route. Mostly, I chose optional residency because I have to work and attend school at the same time and I couldn’t do it the traditional way. The optional residency route allows me to be flexible with my workload.

But there’s another reason. When I started taking my writing seriously, my first writing community was online and it was that community that has supported and encouraged me through the years. I learned how to critique and workshop online, I found great craft books that have opened my eyes from online recommendations and with the help of my online writer friends (some of whom I have “known” now for 10 years) I’ve learned how to make my work better. Maybe I was lucky, and maybe all online writing forums are not the same as I have experienced, but for me it was (and still is) a great learning experience.

That’s not to say real-life experiences don’t have their benefits! I’ve been lucky to be able to add real-life mentors to my writing life, attend readings and book launches and learn from talented writers right here in the city thanks to The Writer’s Studio at SFU and different continuing studies classes at UBC over the years.

I expect I would have found the same on campus at UBC, and that would have been great, but I know by participating in the optional residency program I am going to “meet”and work with writers from all over the world, and I’m excited about that.

 

Five for Twelve

I’m a fan of resolutions. I’m less a fan of the actual resolutions than I am of the mindset that it takes to make them. That’s the part that rocks — the hopefulness, the idealism, the moment in time when you think to yourself, “ok, let’s do it.” I’d like to see more moments like that throughout the year — but it is that mindset that makes it easy for me to participate in the new year ritual, even as I avoid the other typical end-of-the-year broohaha (I’m looking at you Xmas).

Would it surprise those of you that know me that I am, beneath my bitter, caustic shell, an eternal optimist? A realist, yes. But an optimist first. A real polly anna if the truth be told. Now, with that bit of sharing over with — it is another year, so here is another list:

  1. Up my game. Sometimes a long run can’t be finished at your usual, leisurely pace. Sometimes to click off those final kilometres you have to push it. You have to speed up and get a cramp and risk running out of breath. Yeah. I’m so close to the end of my novel I can smell it. I feel like it’s time to up my focus, up my writing hours and just general push through the fucking sound barrier to get to the end.
  2. Run, baby, run. Following on the brilliant running metaphor above, I’m going to don spandex more often in 2012. Three times a week should do it. Additional exercise isn’t written off either. Oh and to quote Woody Guthrie: eat better, wash teeth (if any). That’s two extra for you.
  3. Ask questions. This one’s easy. Questions can take you places you never expected. Questions can make you smarter, much smarter than listening to your own voice all the time. The more questions you ask, the more you know, the more interested you seem, the more people like you. Asking people questions is also a good indicator of how interesting they are — the tipping point is how many questions does it take to elicit a question from the one being questioned? There’s a question for you.
  4. Read, baby, read. Twenty-eleven was a slow book year. I read a lot of different stuff and a lot of it was very good, but my to-read list is getting way too long. Lunch hours at work are being turned over to book reading time. This will give me at least a half hour three days a week on top of my hour before bed to whittle that list down.
  5. Go forth into the world. I’m a hermit, I admit it. But this year I’m going to say yes to going out (once in a while, see point #1). I’d like to start with a house party or dinner party or something like that but I don’t think I’m on many invite lists anymore — I just don’t accept invites often enough. Whatever I end up doing, it will be pushing this introvert’s buttons to be out in the world socializing. It just might save me from a future as a recluse complete with Howard Hughes-like beard and fingernails.
  6. And finally, an extra, an easter egg, for those of you who have made it this far. In 2012 I will find a good red wine and I will drink it. This doesn’t sound like much, does it? I gave up alcohol a few years ago — due to complications after surgery, not because I was lush or anything (well, I probably was but that’s besides the point) —  The recent holidays saw me drink 2 glasses of wine in one sitting and no side effects. This bodes very well for 2012. Very well indeed.

Now, a question (see point #3): how do you feel about resolutions? But more importantly, do you have a favourite wine you’d like to recommend?

The best of intentions

I’m working with a character who has been on the backburner for months and months. It is nice to write her again. She’s one of those characters that seems to shift the whole story around when I’m writing her. She’s a major player but compared to the others her personality is so light and charming and funny. My other characters take themselves far too seriously — and they’re dealing with life and death stuff. I write their stories and I sometimes think this book could be a very serious kind of book, but then this character pops up again and she’s got other plans. The book transforms …

Now I wonder what kind of book am I writing that it can shift and change so easily. Well the short answer is: I don’t know. Another short answer: I don’t care. Third short answer: first draft. We shall see.

What kind of book are you writing? Is it the book you thought it was or is it different?

Unanswerable questions

I apologize in advance for the less than thoughtful blog post, but as I’ve been writing and working on my novel this weekend I have come to realize that some questions just can not be answered. Such as:

will I ever finished

did I take a wrong turn somewhere in april/november/2009

what the hell am I doing/who the hell am I kidding/etc.

is it any good, really

can I magically make sense out of this jumble of words

is this the same story I started with

whats the big idea

Thus endeth this post. Thank you.

Glass eyes will follow you everywhere

Wolf Table by Victor Brauner, 1939

Wolf Table by Victor Brauner (1939). And yes, it's a fox.

I recently attended a talk about taxidermy at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum. Rachel Poliquin, who has spent some time thinking about these things, shared some interesting examples of taxidermy in contemporary art.

Viewing an animal this way – in art or in a museum is a visceral experience. Viewing an animal head or body mounted as a hunter’s trophy adds another disturbing level to it. Either way, something about the animal magnetism remains — even though the animal is gone and it is just skin over wire frame with glass eyes and fake eyelashes. The animal pulls you in and repels you at the same time.

Rachel was quick to assure the room that most of the artists did not kill the animal to use in their work (with a few unsettling exceptions like Tinkerbell and, yes, Damien Hirst). I was amazed by Cai Guo Qiang’s “Head On” and Maurizio Cattelan’s pieces and others. Victor Brauner’s Wolf Table (above) — a surrealist piece — wasn’t part of the VAG Surrealist exhibition, but it should have been.

Art is one thing, but hunting trophies are another. The hunting aspect adds a barrier of sadness and disgust but even with that there’s something in the animal that’s impossible not to connect with. I wish it weren’t so. I wish my feelings about killing animals and presenting them this way — a head erupting from your living room wall or emerging from your tiger-striped carpet — were strong enough to keep me from being drawn to it. But even in these circumstances, even when I am torn up inside about the fate of the animal, sometimes I feel a connection, like the animal and I are seeing each other — as if a part of it is still alive somehow.

I used to visit the old Ottawa Museum of Man (now the Museum of Nature) quite a lot when I was a kid. I loved the 4th and 5th floor with the animals in their shadowy dioramas. The painted backdrops made to look like desert sunsets behind the huge American Bison. A night sky over the resting family of lions and their cubs. I never asked myself then how they got there — never guessed that they might have already been generations old by the time I saw them – sewn and re-sewn to preserve them for unending appreciative audience of little girls like me.

But these are the animals that appear in my dreams and in my imagination to this day — real and yet unreal at the same time. Full of myth and fairy tales, full of story. So full of story that it can be a bit overwhelming to walk through a museum, past row upon row of animals presented and preserved this way.

After the talk was over we toured the Beaty’s collection. The halls are just as shadowy as I remember from the Museum of Man but there aren’t any diorama’s, just row after row of lockers and a few places to peek inside. Bottles of yellow, orange and brown formaldehyde filled with fishes and snakes. Rainbow beetles and butterflies pinned to cork. Horns and skulls of all kinds. Glass cases of mink and rabbit skins, flattened and piled high — no need for glass eyes here.

But in the corner, is a collection donated to the museum from a private collection. It’s a birdcage full of songbirds and one rusty-coloured passenger pigeon. He’s a little dusty but that makes sense, seeing as how the living birds went extinct in the wild around 1900.

He’s been dead a long time that bird, but those beady glass eyes looked right into me.

Rachel Poliquin has a website, Ravishing Beasts, if you’re interested.

passenger pigeon

The Unexamined Life

“An unexamined life is not worth living.” – Socrates

“An unexamined life may not be worth living but the life too closely examined may not be lived at all” Mark Twain

I think that just about explains it. I’ve been thinking about this blog and all the other forms of online communication I partake in. I’m on facebook. I’m on twitter (in a binge and purge kind of way). I frequent a writing forum where I’m fairly active. But “participate” and “active” are tricky words — more and more I’m beginning to feel that my online persona is a bit of a schmo and I’d like to rectify that if I can.

Doing that, making the change from schmo to someone who actually has something to say is going to take a bit of work on my part. This is where the examination comes in. I’m a writer-in-training. I’m an unpublished hack writing her first novel. There’s not much more I can say — or want to say — about that. That part of the experience, the word counts, the bouts of insecurity, the rejection slips and the sitting in the attic typing day in and day out, while interesting to me (in small doses) isn’t really the examination I’m talking about.

So, I’m going to have to dig a bit deeper. I don’t think writing about writing is enough. I think it’s time to write about the why and the what instead of the depressing and repetitive how.

I’m not sure how to cure a lifetime habit of hoarding information like that. Because that’s what I’ve always done, grabbed on to the things that interest me and stuff it down for future reference. Sharing it means giving it away and if you give it away how are you going to use it later? But maybe hoarding isn’t the way to go. Maybe hoarding just shoves ideas in a box never to be handled or turned over and delved into in a deeper and more meaningful way. Hoarded ideas remain full of possibility — it’s only when they are held up under examination that their weaknesses or their strengths emerge.

So, what does this mean? Well, I’m not sure what my next post will be about yet (or when). But I’m going to try to be a more thoughtful, examined schmo at the very least. Stay tuned.

 

A Walk

Today we went out for a walk and came back with a great new haircut.

There’s nothing like a walk to clear the mind. I’ve heard writers say they do their best thinking while on a walk. As I usually have a walking buddy (that’s him up there) I’m normally too focused on other things, to really think about what I’m writing. But that kind of break can be beneficial too. I say this after a dismal week of writing — I’m hoping that my brain just needed a break, an extended walk over a couple of days, so to speak. I hope by indulging in some non-thinking time that this week will be better when I am sitting at my desk.

If I want to have a think, or if I’m looking for ideas, the best thing I’ve found is to take a long ride on public transit. Or a bath. A bath almost always works. Sitting down in front of the computer to wait it can work too. What works for you? And, more important, what do you think of his haircut?

Busy

This writing thing can keep you quite busy really if you let it. I’m trying to open my schedule up a little bit. Spring is here (I think. Or is that summer?) and I have the socializing itch. This doesn’t happen often so I have to take advantage of it and fill up the social calendar as much as I can as far into the future as I dare. So coffee dates galore in the coming weeks — a few readings too. Not me reading, of course. Just me listening. I have a couple of poet friends who really do that kind of thing well. I feel  a wee bit cooler just from being in the audience and listening to their phenomenal delivery.

I think I have a bit of the reading itch as well (can I blame that on the weather too? Perhaps it’s just dry skin) but I’m a long way off from reading my current stuff. I need to get the bloody thing finished — which requires no audience. Though the dog likes to watch. And I’m okay with that.

 

 

Hard drive horror show

My hard drive died last week.

A moment of silence, please.

My computer is barely a year old so I wasn’t expecting it, not that you really ever expect this kind of thing. But, I’ve lived through dying computers before so I had backed up my work which saved me A LOT of pain, believe me. Still, just imagining that my back ups were corrupted or unavailable gave me a major anxiety attack.

I sent my computer into the shop and there were a few glitches in getting it repaired. That left me computer-less for little over a week. This was terrifying in its own right. But I’m on a deadline so I couldn’t just wait it out. Instead, I went back in time and picked up pen and paper.

Let me say now: I write on my computer. I don’t hand write first drafts and transcribe. I don’t use pen and paper for much other than jotting down a quick note here and there. Although I am fond of a well-made notebook. (I purchased a new one specially – “Zequenz”)

I didn’t think writing this way was going to be for me, but I surprised myself. Writing by hand, aside from the cramps (and as long as you have the right pen) was fantastic. I actually wrote MORE, which is still confusing me, mostly because I am not good with math. But it seems I managed to get more writing done the old fashioned way. It might have something to do with all the distractions that come along with the computer, but I still had my husband’s computer for those so I’m not so sure. Maybe.

So the lesson learned?  Backing up rocks. Multiple back ups are even better. External hard drive and dropbox and emailing to my Gmail account. Whatever it takes. Printing out copies will do the trick too.

And another lesson — don’t be afraid of leaving technology behind for a bit when it comes to writing. Try picking up pen and paper once in a while. You might surprise yourself.