Category Archives: About Writing

On Not Writing

The Effective Expletive

If James Lipton, famed interviewer of Inside the Actors Studio, were to ask me my favourite expletive, I would blurt out the word “fuck” without hesitation. It is what I say when I stub my toe. It is versatile and works as almost any part of speech. So it was with joy that I read two pieces this week that offer excellent examples of using expletives effectively. Both are blog posts about the Jian Ghomeshi trial, a man and a situation that call for the strongest possible language.

The first blog post is called “Fuck You, Jian,” from Bone Broth and Breastmilk. This is an incredible blog post. Personal, brave, revealing, raw, honest and real. I admire her fragmented sentence style. It conveys the difficulty of bringing words together about the case. It conveys the anger. She speaks of being “deeply disturbed,” the “subterranean sludge,” the trial brings up and a situation that has “absolutely gutted so many of us.” She writes, “But the big secret that Jian Ghomeshi blew wide open last year, is that there is a sickness in our culture. A sickness that allows nice guys, educated guys, guys with culture and thoughtful analysis – gentle guys – to feel entitled to treat women as less than human.” A guy you might have thought was feminist even. A guy with famous feminist friends, feminist friends who even stood up for him, at least in the beginning. The writer never says Fuck You, Jian in the post. She keeps it up front and puts it right in the title. And I have to say, I respect that. I wish I knew her name. She’s a solid writer. Kudos to you. Fucking great blog post.

Eaton Hamilton is another solid writer, more than solid, an award winning writer who I have read and admired for years. She too has written about Ghomeshi this week. Her blog post is even more personal. She relates an encounter she had with the accused called The Preludes to Assaults. Again, I can use the words brave, revealing, raw, honest and real. Hamilton’s point is that those who prey on women have a pattern, a method, and that she (and dare I say #yesallwomen) have been part of what can only be described as a prelude to an assault, an assault interrupted. Her post starts starts like this: “Jian Ghomeshi, you [redacted].” She repeats this phrase every time she uses his name in the post, which she does often. I prefer to think that the redacted word is “fuck” but it could be anything. That’s the beauty of the redaction. It lets us put our own favourite expletive into the mix.

Now, even though I would generally rather use the word fuck than not, the redaction is brilliant. It makes the expletive stand out even more. And since it is destined to be used so many times in this difficult piece, it is probably a relief to those less inclined to use expletives as liberally as I tend to that it is left off the page. It’s a good reminder that with expletives, less is often more. Overused, an expletive loses its effectiveness. And lastly, something else happens with this technique. I find myself reading new inflection into my favourite expletive every time the word [redacted] shows up.

Sometimes you have to say fuck. But it’s not just Jian Ghomeshi I want to say fuck about. It’s every man who ever raped or beat a woman, every man who ever manipulated a woman, tried to gaslight her, told her she didn’t look right or catcalled her or told her to smile while she was minding her own business just walking down the street. It is every man who made a woman believe she had to be something he wanted her to be, to serve his purposes instead of her own. It’s a system that teaches women to be nice, to be subservient, to ignore their instincts, to say “thank you” for something they never even wanted, to be grateful it wasn’t even worse, to be “pragmatic” even when they know it is wrong. This is not a time to be nice. This is a time to let a few expletives fly.

On earning an MFA

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To MFA or not to MFA. That is the question. Plenty of people have answered it, some with vitriol usually reserved for the mommy wars or politics. It’s a question that has a different answer for every writer. We all find our own path.

My path to an MFA wasn’t typical. I’m in my fifties, for one thing. But a few years ago I learned I was leaving my exceptionally talented and supportive writing community in Calgary, Alberta to live in Boston for two years. (The move was about my husband’s work, and an adventure I was quite willing to take with him.) But I needed to do something to keep my writerly momentum going, and immersing myself in a writing community was the right thing to do. Had I not moved, I never would have considered an MFA. And I would have missed out on a really difficult and wonderful experience.

You absolutely can learn what is available in an MFA outside of a program. Read craft books, lots of them, and apply the ideas in your own writing. Audit courses. Go to every writing event you can find. Watch craft lectures online. Study good writing. Really study it. Write down how it works, what the writer is doing, the techniques they are using, and again, apply it to your own work.

If you choose to go the MFA path, it’s not easy to find the right program. I stumbled upon Solstice at Pine Manor College. It’s small, supportive and low-residency. Low-residency was important to me because I knew another move loomed in our future and it was the only way I would be able to finish. Further, low-residency means students come from everywhere and bring with them lots of different ideas about writing and life that make conversations rich and deep. But no matter what program you take, or how you decide to become a better writer, the onus is always on you to put the work in, to study, to reach for something more.

Truth be told, before I moved, I was having trouble finishing my novel. I was writing myself in circles. I would abandon it for months at a time in favour of smaller, easier projects. At Solstice, the novel was just as difficult, but when the going got tough, I’d have a little talk with myself. I’d say, “You don’t know how to do this. They have a plan. You have no plan. Why don’t you follow their plan and see what happens?” So I did. Trust. It’s all about trust. I trusted them and now I have pages, really solid pages, of a novel that I will be proud of, no matter what happens to it after I’m done. And I know how to finish, something I didn’t know before.

But here’s what really sold me: Meg Kearney, the Director. Writing about the nature of the program, she says, “In an environment of creativity and imagination, the number-one poison is envy; it is by nurturing the work of others that our own work begins, through some mysterious process, to grow and flourish.” I thought if the folks at Solstice can accomplish that, I’d like a piece of it. And I have it now. This has been the greatest gift of this program. And so I embark on my new series of blog posts to keep this gift alive – a celebration of books and stories I like and admire. I offer no other reason for highlighting a book except it moves me in some way. I hope these posts inspire you pick up the work or try something brave in your own writing.

And keep writing. Keep striving to be better. It’s worth the struggle.

Writing from Scratch

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Just as someone who loves good food might yearn to cook, my deep love of books has burgeoned into a need to make them. At first, I thought that meant I had to create books from scratch. I like this analogy. Writing starts with scratches, a few tentative pencil marks, a word or six and it grows from there. That’s how my notion to write a novel started. I’m not finished it yet, but while I’ve been at it, I’ve created a couple of other books not quite from scratch and I’m finding this work equally satisfying. I don’t have to can the tomatoes (or grow them) to make a good sauce. If what I love is creating books, editing is as satisfying a way to get there as writing. It’s not starting from scratch but maybe that’s why I enjoy it so much.

I’ve always joked that I’m a re-writer more than I am a writer. Scratching those first words onto the page never comes easily to me, but crafting them afterwards is a joy. I recently had the wonderful experience of editing the work of over fifty other writers for an anthology I created with my friend and colleague E.D. Morin. It’s called Writing Menopause and it’s been picked up by Inanna Publications who plan to bring it out in Spring, 2017. The book is a literary anthology and the variety and high quality of work that writers submitted was inspirational. As we worked to shape the anthology, I was able to do the parts of “writing” that I like the best–revising, editing, crafting–in collaboration with the contributors and my co-editor. (And I also contributed my own piece, a short story I’ve been working on for six years. Like I said, writing is slow work for me.) One day it occurred to me that the things I find most difficult about writing like starting with the blank page and the need to work alone for long stretches of time disappear when I’m editing the work of others.

Another editing project is at the printer. I’m on my way today to check the first proof and the excitement I feel is no different than when something of “my own” gets published. The book was written by my friend Tanya Coovadia. It’s called Pelee Island Stories. These are linked short stories all set in Tanya’s childhood home, an island in the middle of Lake Erie. Tanya trusted me and my fellow members of the Crabapple Mews Collective with her work, and again, I’ve had the incredible pleasure of working collaboratively with her and with the other wonderful editors in the collective to create a magnificent book.

Books are beautiful physical objects that last far longer than we do. They speak to us while we’re here and for us after we’re gone. They reach toward immortality. Being part of making them is a labour of love for me, even when the book has someone else’s name on it, or lots of other names on it. Whether I make it from scratch or not, this is work I love. Next up after my MFA, I think I’ll take a course in book binding. I’ll probably love that too.

Writing Imperfection

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I once took a course called “Bibliographical Research and Documentation” which sounds about as boring as any course could possibly be. But it included one of the most profound lessons I’ve ever learned about writing and perfectionism.

Our professor, Father Leland, (both Priest and scholar) was trying to impress upon us the near impossibility of accuracy in the transmission of text. To do so, he sent us to the basement of one of the oldest buildings on campus which housed an even older printing press. It was a behemoth, massive and intimidating, a mechanical beast that looked to me like it might cause some unfortunate mangling of limbs. There were large wooden trays divided into sections that were in turn full of “sorts,” single iron letters. For the most part, they were organized alphabetically but it was clear a few letters had been thrown into the wrong boxes. Father Leland demonstrated how to insert the sorts into forms. Text for a printing press is assembled in mirror image, making the process even more prone to error. We saw precisely how the page was assembled, piece by piece, letter by letter. And incidentally, we learned the origin of the phrase, “mind your p’s and q’s,” which look identical when inserted backwards and are easily mixed up in the trays. Once printed, the mistake is noticeable, especially if the font has a serif.

It had been hard enough to achieve accuracy, said Father Leland, when monks were copying text for hours by candlelight in the Monastery and trying to decipher each other’s cursive writing. These scribes could misread a handwritten word, skip something by accident, or write something twice. The printing press was a revolution for all the obvious reasons, but also created new possibilities for error. It was easy to change the word “from” to “form,” “or” to “on,” or even “god” to “dog.” And how might those simple errors change meaning and interpretation? God to dog could be a particularly juicy slip.

To prove the point, we were told to reproduce a paragraph of text, any paragraph. The assignment would be finished when we had printed one correct copy.

I chose the last paragraph from one of my favourite novels at the time, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. It took hours for me to set it properly. When it was finally correct, I felt so proud that I inked the press with gold and printed the paragraph on a bright yellow card stock. It was glorious to get it right, but what a process.

I wish I could find this yellow sheet of card stock now, the text vivid and practically glowing. If I could, I would frame it and send a thanks to Father Leland. But this story is the best I can do; Father Leland died in 2005 and, after thirty years, I have lost track of the physical object that resulted from his lesson.

We writers attempt this near impossible task of accurately transmitting our thoughts. We hope that mistakes have not been made, knowing they have. We hope that our meaning is clear, knowing that every reader will bring nuance we had not imagined to the text and the meaning will change. We write knowing so much is beyond our control. Try as we might, the p’s and q’s get mixed up. Now I have a computer, a spell checker, the internet. But mistakes are still made, just like they always have been.

It seems no coincidence that I chose the last paragraph of Gatsby for this assignment. In the immortal words of Fitzgerald, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Jane Cawthorne

Writer and Editor