Canadian or American?

Write what you know. Write from your heart. The number one rules for writing, right?

I've always thought so. Everyone has their own voice, their own backyard, which is different than everyone else's. The literary world would sure be a boring place if every author in the world set their stories in New York, as exciting as the Big Apple may be.

Still, there's a real temptation for Canadian authors to set their stories in the U.S.A. Do other writers from other countries feel the same way or is it just us loathsomely not-confident Canucks? The thing is, the American market is HUGE and the Canadian market is tiny. The thing also is, there is a general consensus that Americans are not the least bit interested in reading about Canada, even though Canadians regularly read American books and watch American TV/movies.

Is that true? As a reader, would you automatically reject a book because it is set in Canada?

I am wondering about this because last weekend I attended the North Words Literary Festival in Huntsville, which was inspiring, amazing and downright awesome. One of the speakers was a Canadian literary agent who was asked whether it's better to set books in the States rather than Canada.

Her answer was, "I'm embarrassed to say, but it's much easier to sell a book set in the States." American publishers, she said, are not interested in Canadian locales, and America is where the big money is, publishing-wise.

This really got me thinking.

I have always been a fan and a big supporter of Can-Lit. I believe that Canadians have important stories to tell and there's no reason why we should be writing about other countries when our own is so rich in character, scenery and history. And yet I want to sell my books – so on the one hand, I'm touting Canadian literature; on the other hand I want a big fat publishing contract and movie rights in Hollywood.

It's hypocritical, sure, but there have been success stories. Take The Shipping News, for example. Set in a tiny Newfoundland fishing village, Annie Proulx's wonderful book won a Pulitzer Prize and spawned a successful big budget movie. Not that I am in any way comparing my work to The Shipping News. I'm absolutely not. I'm just saying it can be done.

My writing group friends asked if I would be willing to change the location in my manuscript to a place in the States. Maybe, I said, if it was a deal breaker. But then I got to rereading my novel and realized small town Ontario is more than just a location – it's the very soul of the story and it's what makes the main character who she is. It would be an entirely different story set somewhere else.

Then I thought, well, why not set my next book in the States. So I started scouting the internet for ideas. I thought, well, Maine, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Michigan – they're all close to the Canadian border. Geographically, they're a lot like Canada. But as I narrowed my thinking south of the border, I realized I don't know a thing about local history, dialect, geography, scenery. Nothing. I turned away from the computer with frustration, thinking, "why am I even bothering to think about this? What is wrong with writing about what I know?"

I realize that, if you're a true writer of fiction, you should be able to write about anything, anywhere. After all, it's the characters who matter, not the geography, right? Maybe... I don't know...

So I'm asking you. What do you think? Should we write about the place we call home? Wherever that may be? Or should we write to where the market is, hoping to tap into a bigger economic pie?

Terry Fallis, you're the best!

Kevin Smith, that actor and writer guy, was on TV the other day pontificating about his Big Life, taking questions from the audience.

This guy in the audience had two questions and his first one was a beauty, a dazzler. Smith answered with gusto. The guy with the question grinned ear-to-ear because he had asked a Good Question.

Then he came to question two. He was a writer too, he said. He’d been plugging away for a number of years and had never shown his work to anyone. “Would you mind,” he said, “having a look at it and telling me what you think?”

The audience, formerly eating out of the man’s hand, started booing. Smith looked discomfited.

On the chesterfield, in my living room, I writhed in embarrassment.

I had done exactly the same thing.

Not to Kevin Smith, of course, but to Terry Fallis, an award-winning Canadian author, the winner of the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour and 2011 Canada Reads, no less.

(Cringing as I’m writing this.)

Obviously I’m not the only doofus on this planet to seek validation at the expense of one’s dignity. Knowing there are others like me is not, in any way, comforting. It just makes me feel like a regular doofus. Not a special doofus.

I did my doofusying about a month ago at the North Words Literary Festival here in Muskoka. As well as fawning all over Margaret Atwood on the Friday night, I fawned all over three of the authors at an appropriately named Authors’ Forum on the Saturday night. The forum included a veritable who’s who of Canadian writers, including Richard B. Wright (Clara Callan), Claudia Dey (How to be a Bush Pilot), Charles Foran (Mordecai Richler, Mordecai: The Life and Times won the Charles Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction), Dr. Vincent Lam (2006 Giller prize winner for Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures), Gill Deacon (There’s Lead in Your Lipstick) and Terry Fallis.

The event was called “The Stories Behind The Books,” meant to give us mere mortals insight into how award-winning, successful authors get things done. So I was all about wanting to hear how they write because I am apparently challenged in that department.

I also wanted to do some fawning. Specifically, I wanted to fawn all over Richard B. Wright. We had a connection, you see. When my marriage fell apart a bazillion years ago, my good friend Mark treated me to a weekend in Toronto meant to cheer me up. Which it did. Unfortunately when his marriage fell apart a few years later, he wasn’t interested in a weekend in the country. (Can you blame him?) Anyway, while I was in The Big Smoke, I popped into a bookstore and saw a book called Adultery, written by an author I previously was unaware of, the afore-mentioned Mr. Wright. I snapped it up because my own marriage had suffered at the hands of my ex’s adultery so the topic was hot with me, to say the least.

 

The book was fabulous. Even though adultery turned out to be the least of the main character’s problems, and offered no insight whatsoever to my own predicament, I did enjoy the book and became a big fan of Mr. Wright who, I discovered, was FAMOUS and I didn’t realize it. His Clara Callan won him both the prestigious Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award for Fiction. That’s what happens in Canada, by the way. You can win the country’s top literary prizes and people still don’t know who the heck you are. When I was bragging that I had tickets to go see Margaret Atwood, for example, there were plenty of people I work with who had no idea who Margaret Atwood was. Which slayed me. Knocked me over completely dead. One of Canada’s Grand Dames of literature and they didn’t know who she was. They know all about Charlie Sheen and Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory, though. Makes me wonder if there’s any hope for future generations.

The point is (yes, there is one), I was all set to fawn all over Mr. Wright. I lined up after the forum, with a dozen or so other fawners, waiting to meet him. When it was my turn I described, in bated breath, how much his novel meant to me when I was recently separated. I guess I was hoping he’d be as interested and excited as I was.

“Uh huh,” he said. “That’s nice. What would you like me to say in the autograph?”

I felt like Fred Flintstone, you know, when all the wind blew out of his sails and the tuba made a funny rumbling noise and he shrank to a mere kewpie doll size.

Oh well. I had other fish to fry. I also wanted to talk to Dr. Lam because I liked the answers he gave during the forum. He seemed approachable and he was. But when I told him I had spent all my available cash on Mr. Wright’s books and wanted to buy his but couldn’t afford it, he got a dazed, scared look in his eye and suggested the public library. No, no, I said, I’m not poor, even though I am, sort of. Things got even more awkward so I excused my self before he called security.

The other person I wanted to fawn over was Terry Fallis. I hate to admit this but I had never heard of Mr. Fallis before. After hearing what I told you about Margaret Atwood, are you really surprised? But Mr. Fallis (from here on in I’m going to call him Terry because he’s too nice for Mister) really caught my eye during the forum.

He wrote a book a few years back called The Best Laid Plans. He shopped it around traditional publishers for a year and it was thoroughly and completely ignored. Not one to be discouraged, Terry recorded himself reading the novel and released it, chapter by chapter, as a podcast. People liked it. They really, really liked it. Encouraged by their reaction, he self-published the book. Again, folks liked it.

One day he decided to enter the book in one of Canada’s top literary contests for humour – The Stephen Leacock Award. This is one of the few literary contests that allow self-published books. One of the stipulations, however, is that 10 books be sent in with the entry form. Terry counted the books he had left in his garage. He had exactly 10.

He told me at the forum that, if he had nine, he would gave up right then and there, not having the further chutzpah and will to publish more books. But he had 10 books and he had the chutzpah and he entered the contest before he could talk himself out of it.

Well guess what.

He won! Beating out major authors from major publishing houses. He won, he won, he won!

“Twenty minutes don’t go by in a day when I don’t think, ‘I won the Stephen Leacock Award.’ It never gets old,” he told me.

Suddenly publishers wanted Terry Fallis. Not too much longer after he won the Leacock award, his book was picked up by McClelland & Stewart, one of this country’s most prestigious and oldest publishers.

The Best Laid Plans has done extremely well for Terry. In 2011 he won the Canada Reads contest put on by CBC. He has already published a second book, The High Road, and his star continues to rise. Just a week ago he announced he had finished another manuscript. 

It’s funny, I went from never having heard of Terry to admiring him greatly. He did what the rest of us dream of doing. He wrote a book. He was ignored by publishers. He said, “to hell with you,” and did it himself. And now he has the what must be too-delicious knowledge of knowing they were wrong and he was right.

How cool is that?

He was definitely the coolest guy at the forum. And he was nice to me. We struck up quite a conversation, me fawning, him laughing and smiling and giving me really wonderful answers to sometimes silly questions.

After talking to him for a few minutes I summed up all my courage and asked him if he ever read newbie writers.

“Yes,” he said. I think his sunny smile dimmed a slight bit, or maybe it was just Deerhurst Resort hadn’t paid their electric bill.

There was a slight pause. I spit the words out before I could change my mind.

“Would you,” I asked, “read mine?”

“Sure!” he said, dissolving me into a heap of happy bubbles.

Anybody who knows me knows I suffer from perpetually low self-esteem, especially when it comes to writing. Yes, I’ve been writing all my life, as a reporter – but that’s a completely different kind of writing than fiction. I only started writing fiction less than two years ago when I was encouraged by a blog buddy named CJ. She wrote Friday Flash stories once in a while (really, really good stories) and she talked me into giving it a whirl. CJ changed my life. The stories changed my life. I discovered I liked writing fiction and I was kinda, sorta good at it. I joined a writers’ group here in Muskoka and started mingling with people who wrote novels and I began to think about writing a book. It was so scary, though. Me? Write a book? It was almost too ostentatious to even consider.

As time as moved on, and I have continued writing, I am beginning to accept that I am a writer. I am also plodding through my novel. It isn’t easy. If anything, it’s probably the hardest thing I have ever done and every day I wrestle with self-doubt.

Sure, my friends and colleagues who have seen my work are encouraging. But I wondered how much of what they were saying was because they are my friends.

I asked Terry, who didn’t know me from Adam, to give me honest feedback.

“I want you to tell me if I suck,” I said. “I have to know.”

He nodded. He promised to be completely honest. I went home that night with a happy heart. The next morning, I sent him the first chapter of my novel and waited, heart in throat, to hear back.

In the meantime, I started reading his book and fell in love with it. He. Is. So. Funny. I dropped him a quick e-mail to say how much I liked the book and how good he is.

And, this is what he sent back.

(Cue happy music.)

Hi Cathy,

I’ve just read your chapter, and you’re good too! I really like Weezie. She’s my kind of heroine. You succeed in conveying a lot about her without just telling us. Funny too, and funny is hard. I’m a sucker for the kind of humour you’ve injected. The purple splotches on her face had me smiling and feeling for Weezie at the same time. I liked the finish too. I think you were right to end the chapter there. There’s not much more to say after the little guy loses his breakfast.

I don’t really have any criticism to impart. I quite liked what I read and think you’ve hit upon a wonderful voice. I think most readers will want to know more about Weezie and what sounds like a great ride.

My suggestion: keep writing and let Weezie do her thing...

Glad to have met you in Huntsville. Keep me posted…

Terry

WOO HOO!

I was squeeing all over the darn place when that e-mail came in. An award-winning author telling me to keep writing! My happiness ranneth over. It was just the inspiration I needed to buckle down and get my novel written. In fact, I have signed up for NaNoWriMo this year and for the month of November I will be immersed in novel-land. Forgive me if you don’t see me online much. I know this will be all-consuming. I don’t have much extra time in a day as it is and I’m going to have go give up some of my favourite things – including blogging, television, potato chips and sex – in order to find two hours a day for writing. (My kids never read my blog. They think I’m boring. Thank gawd.)

As for Terry Fallis, I am so impressed with this man. He is such a fine writer. As I’m reading, I laugh out loud – no mean trick, I can assure you. It takes a lot for me to laugh out loud at books. When he writes about his character, Daniel Addison, catching his wife with another man, I just about fell over laughing. Not usually a funny subject, but Terry made it hilarious.

I can relate to so many things he says in the book. Like this, for example: Addison lives in a boathouse. A BOATHOUSE! When my marriage fell apart, I moved into a boathouse! Who DOES that? Only me and Daniel Addison, obviously.

The other thing, one of his other main characters is named Angus. That’s my son’s name!

There are lots of other aha moments in the book but they’re not really what gets me going. It’s the writing that gets me going. The humour. The plot. The characters – all the characters are so well-written, so quirky, that they leap off the page.

This is how I want to write when I grow up.

Like Terry Fallis.

And until a month ago, I didn’t even know who he was.

I do now, though, and I’m singing his praises to the skies. Find the book. Read it. Or listen to his podcast. It’s still on iTunes and it’s still free. A bargain, for sure.

For links to his podcast and his book, you can visit Terry’s website here, http://terryfallis.com/

Thanks, Terry!

You really are the best.

Memoir Writing

Other than blithering on about Margaret Atwood, I haven't talked much about the North Words Literary Festival in Muskoka (Sept. 30 - Oct. 2, 2011), but I want to. North Words was one of the most inspiring, most fun, most fabu-lishus celebrations of the written word I have ever been to.

This year I signed up for a full day writer's workshop, the Margaret Atwood speech and an authors' forum but there was more I would have enjoyed, including a live book club, readings, and breakfasts with well known authors. Next year, for sure, I want to buy a weekend pass and go to every darn thing they've got.

When I signed up for the writer's workshop, I was more interested in the morning presentation (how to find a publisher and an agent) than I was for the afternoon (memoir writing). I only signed up for the afternoon session because I already had to book a day off work and, what the hell – lunch was included. And you know me, it's always about the lunch!

As a former newspaper columnist and a blogger, I thought the memoir writing workshop couldn't teach me anything new. I thought it might be leaden lessons for a bunch of old ladies who want to know how to write their boring life stories – boy, was I wrong. I mean, yes, the room was full of old ladies, including myself, as well as young ladies and some men of various ages; and yes, they wanted to learn how to write their life stories – but they were anything BUT boring.

The workshop was led by Cori Howard, an award-winning journalist who has written for some of the top newspapers and magazines in the country. She is the editor of the best-selling anthology Between Interruptions: Thirty Women Tell the Truth About Motherhood. Cori started The Mommoir Project to teach and inspire mothers to find their voices and inspire the confidence necessary to believe the mundane details of their everyday lives matter – and make compelling stories.

She started out by reading a few memoirs to us, including Lit by Mary Karr. The segment she read absolutely stunned me – I need to read the whole book asap. Yes, it was first person. Yes, it was a memoir, but it read like a finely crafted book of fiction, and the prose was undeniable – hard-edged, poetic and magnetic in its appeal.

Cori then talked about finding a moment, or a scene, from our own lives and how to write about our lives from the perspective of that scene. She gave us a half an hour or so to write something and then some of us read our stories out loud.

I was obnoxious – I know, hard to believe. But I was so excited about what I had written down that I started waving my arm in the air when she wanted to know who wanted to read first. Picture Arnold Horshack from Welcome Back Kotter and you get the idea. Other people were also excited to share what they had written and everyone was excited to hear what they had read. Laughter rang out through the Huntsville Public Library as funny bits were read. Tears were shed at other parts. By the time the afternoon was done, everyone felt a new closeness as well as a confidence that, hey, we could do this.

Cori's right – everyone does have a story to tell. Many stories, actually. All it takes is a little direction and inspiration to get them on paper.

Because I really am like Horshack, here's what I scribbled down:

It’s a wonder I don’t fantasize about the Maytag repairman. Not someone who goes ga-ga over a man in uniform, perhaps that’s the reason; maybe it’s also because Gordon Jump is the actor who is playing the latest Maytag man in the TV commercials, and I can’t think of Gordon Jump without thinking about the dumbass character he portrayed on WKRP in Cincinnati.

No, it’s not the Maytag man that keeps me coming to the big white boat of an appliance hulking in the back corner of our little log house. It’s the dirty socks and underwear that seemingly breed in the washing machine’s presence. My husband and two sons are veritable factories of filthy laundry.

Diesel oil, road dust and gasoline on Dave’s once-navy-blue work coveralls, the ones with “Angelo” on the embroidered nametag because, when he started working at the Huntsville Chrysler dealership three years ago, the woman who ordered work clothes ordered the wrong name. I don’t know how she mistook Dave for Angelo, but she did, and while she has been promising for three years to get Dave his own name on his own shirts, it hasn’t happened yet.

So I wash Angelo’s coveralls, and hoodies out the yin-yang from Angus and Sam. It’s all they want to wear. Hooded sweatshirts, even in the sultry thick of a mid-summer day. The hoodies belonging to Angus, who is 14, come back to me and the Maytag smelling vaguely of goat. It must be a teenage thing, this heady goaty aroma, a mixture of B.O. and, gawd, I don’t even want to imagine what else. I remember my boyfriends all smelled the same way. When I was 14, I thought it was sexy. Not so much, anymore. Sam, who is still only 11, has hoodies that smell clean, like fresh air, like sunbaked sand.

I inhale this 11-year-old hoodie fragrance, so beautiful it should be bottled, because I know that some day soon, it will change. I am tempted some days not to wash it, to put it away in a bottom drawer, to keep it as a sweet vestige of a time before everything changes, for good, and forever.

Meeting Margaret Atwood

Those eyes. Those dazzling clear blue eyes; maybe blue; maybe grey. Maybe both.

I can’t stop thinking of Margaret Atwood’s eyes.

When you see a photograph of her, on a book cover or the internet, you notice them right away, because you can’t help it. They’re stunning.

But when you meet her, and she’s sitting down only a couple of feet away, signing a book, it’s her eyes that draw you in. Those eyes, the ones that stared back at you from books since high school, now trained on your own imperfect self, and you think, when you can rustle up a lucid thought, “I am in the presence of Greatness.”

Rarely do you live in the moment, despite Oprah’s constant urgings to do so. But last night I did. Two minutes. Or so. The stage lighting at the Algonquin Theatre in Huntsville, Ontario, shutting out the hundreds of people lined up behind me, books clutched to their hopeful chests, like schoolgirls, shutting out their distractions, pooling Canada’s greatest writer, Canada’s most iconic author, and me, in a shroud of stillness.

“For Cathy,” she began writing in the book I had just purchased, “In Other Worlds,” her newest book, so new it won’t even be officially released for another week.

I wanted to ask her something.

“With best wishes,” she continued to write.

I leaned forward. She was just finishing “Margaret” when I blurted it out.

“Did you ever doubt your writing?” I asked, because that is what is in my own writer’s heart. “When you were starting out?”

She signed “Atwood,” with a messy flourish, and turned those amazing eyes up to meet mine.

I was struck by her resemblance to one of Canada’s most beloved prime ministers, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, her curly hair, her clear, almond-shaped eyes; but also to my friend Mark’s mother, Mary Champion, a historian, a woman of intelligence. I was struck by the feeling that I knew her, that I had always known her, yet I knew nothing at all. Most of all, I realized that I was meeting a living legend and what I really wanted to know was, what is it like being this legend, this icon, this Atwood person?

Instead, I listened to her answer.

Our gaze locked for a moment. She seemed to choose her answer carefully, or maybe she was just sizing me up. Her voice was measured, throaty, as remarkable as her eyes, actually.

“No,” she said. “In those days I worried mostly about who was going to publish it.” At least I think that’s what she said. And she said more, of course, all kinds of interesting things about the publishing world when she was beginning her writing career. It’s just that, as soon as the words left her lips, as soon as they reached beyond the pool of stage lighting, they were as lost to me as if they had never been said.

And then, oh then, I interrupted her.

I did.

I can’t believe it.

I actually interrupted her, in mid-sentence, to say something inane about the many people who were lined up behind me, and not wanting to take up too much more of her time, but would you mind having a photo taken with me for my blog?

I am such an ass, sometimes.

There was a split second where my ineptness seemed to startle her. Then she asked me to come behind the table and stand beside her. As Dave took two photos, I joked about making me look skinny. She joked back (she is very, very funny), then she asked me what my blog url was, and wrote it down on a yellow sticky note. She wondered if I would let her know when I posted the photo, and my heart did a fast soprano trill, and I told her I followed her on Twitter, and how much I loved her Tweets, how funny she was.

“I’ll tweet you when it’s posted,” I said.

“That would be great,” she replied.

(Me and Margaret Atwood. Talking about Tweeting each other. Un. Bee. Leeeeavable.)

Before I left her side, before I stood up straight and walked off the stage into the chilled evening of the last day of September, before all that, I whispered in her ear, with such grave reverence that it almost brought me to tears, “It was such a great honour meeting you.”

I straightened up and those incredible eyes met mine one last time.

Then the next person came up and I walked away.