Geeky

I sent a letter to the Globe and Mail. It didn’t appear in our edition, so of course I thought it hadn’t been accepted. In a Christmas card, a friend wrote, “Liked your letter to Globe, Nancy. Last thing we need is charismatic leaders – Charlie Van Horne, Bill Van der Zam, PET etc. Leaves a bad taste in the mouth!”

I searched the Globe and Mail on the internet and came up with the following. In my letter I mentioned Doyle and not LeBlanc, so apparently there were three people who used the term geeky on Dec. 4.

The Dion verdict
NANCY BAUER
Print Edition 05/12/06 Page A22
Jeffrey Simpson (Will Dion Or Critics Have The Last Laugh? -- Dec. 4) and Daniel Leblanc (The Master Of Proving People Wrong -- Dec. 4) describe Stephane Dion as ''geeky.'' I learned 50 years ago that, when choosing a man, geeky is better and a funny-looking haircut beats a good one every time.

This and That

My first arts column will be a discussion of whether it is better to have many centres of art, art-making going on in every little corner, or whether it is better to have one dominant centre, such as New York City or Toronto. New Brunswick has at least three centres and no one dominant centre. Nova Scotia and Newfoundland each have one dominant centre, Halifax and St. John’s. Maine has several centres, no dominant one. In fact Maine is more fractured than we are, and yet it is a hotbed of artistic endeavor.

Microsoft Word seems to feel that centre is a correct spelling, but not centres. In The Opening Eye, one of the group activities is “centring.” I spelled it “centering”, the American way, but the publisher wanted it “centring.” Microsoft Word doesn’t like “centring” either. The man who edits our church newsletter wants us to use British punctuation, but the publisher of The Opening Eye used American punctuation. In Canada, things are all mixed up.

Going Public

Shameless Words comments that he doesn’t write about the people in his life, that he prefers to write more anonymously. I don’t write about certain members of my family because they have requested that I not. There is a great fear of the internet, and I can see why. I have heard several stories about marriages breaking up because one of the partners has met someone on the internet. These are not urban legends but about actual people I know. Parents in particular are nervous that their children will encounter an evil person on the internet.

I have had to get over the fear of going public because I have published so much. When my first novel was coming out, I was afraid that two of my relatives in particular would be offended, and so I told my father not to tell anyone. He was like me, big-mouthed, and had a hard time holding in this news. When the two relatives did eventually find out, they were pleased! Wondered why I hadn’t told them before! Said that because at the time they were going through a bad patch, this news would have been a bright spot! Only these two people provided models for the novel, and they were heroes. My stepmother read the novel first and told my father that he was in it because there was a character who had been the youngest child and the only son of a large family. This character was the opposite of my father. How my stepmother could think the character was like my father, I don’t know. When my father read the novel, he was obviously disappointed that he wasn’t in it. Very few of the characters in my novels have a model; in fact I can’t think of any others. I employ the smile of one person I know, or an incident, or a detail of a room. Yet, my son said reading my novels was “like putting my finger in my belly button and twirling it.”

I still tremble when something of mine gets published, but I keep doing it. I am not being guilty of false modesty when I say that I am not a great writer, that the world has plenty of novels and blogs and reviews and columns. Why then publish? I am not sure. Perhaps the words in my blog description provide some of the explanation.

Whither?

I am in the process of writing for my new arts column. At first I hesitated to take on the job, thinking that I could never come up with something every week. When the editor suggested every other week, I agreed, yet still with fear and trepidation. But now, to paraphrase the old punch line, “Everything reminds me of an arts column.” The magazine won’t be launched until January and already I have written five columns with many more ideas for others. My new schedule of getting up at 5:30 is working great – I am writing more than I have for several years. To think that I wept when I contemplated giving up my office -- strange. In the past I sometimes had the feeling that I was being led, but I honestly didn’t know how, or why, or to where, or by whom. I have had that feeling for the last month.

Writing a Christmas Newsletter

I’ve just finished writing my annual Christmas newsletter. I’ve read brutal satires of these newsletters, but what are the alternatives? Write a personal note to all 60 people on my list as I used to do and wind up sending out cards in February; write nothing but our name as some people do, leaving us wondering what is happening to them; or give up sending cards all together and lose touch with people who meant a lot to us in the past? I myself like family newsletters, but then I always have had an intense curiosity about other people’s lives: why I like to read blogs; why I love local gossip; why I was utterly absorbed in my grandmother’s diary even though nothing exciting happened and there was no soul-searching.

Pensées

Several of the people on my blogroll have changed templates: “Sharp Sand”, “pages turned”, and “my space” most recently. This creates a curious feeling, as if an acquaintance of mine should show up having had cosmetic surgery and dyed her hair.

For quite a long time I thought that Shameless Words was a woman, but then he wrote something that told me otherwise. He travels alone quite a bit, and I thought that was unusual, until he revealed himself to be a man and then it didn’t seem unusual at all. I began to think, Men do travel alone more than women do. The friends of mine who are my age travel a lot, all over the world in fact. That seems to be the thing to do with one’s retirement, but the widows travel in groups, never alone, and even the couples travel in tours or with another couple.

Bill and I are like the geese being fattened for foie gras: we are tied to a rope that allows us to travel in a certain small circumference of the northeast section of the continent.

A long while ago, the writer John Metcalf wrote an essay about how to punctuate a thought. Do you put it in italics? In quotation marks? After much discussion, he determined that it was best to use a comma and then a capital letter. He convinced me, and I have done that ever since. I did it in paragraph two.

Hoping For a Sudden Floater

When I first started to write in earnest, about 1967, I came under the sway of Viktor Shklovsky, of his novel A Sentimental Journey, and of his formalist writings. Instead of starting off as a sensible person would have, with a traditional novel, I devised complicated forms and schemes. I was not interested in publishing, in fact the possibility terrified me, so I was not constrained by having to write a publishable, a popular novel. My husband was the bread-winner, so I didn’t need a financial reward. What interested me was whether writing could help me make sense of my world, help me make order out of chaos. In A Palpable God, Reynolds Price articulated the reason I wanted to write novels back then and why I continue to write: “the chance that in the very attempt at narrative transaction something new will surface or be revealed, some sudden floater from the dark unconscious, some message from a god which can only arrive or be told as a tale.”

Rewarded

One of the rewards of coming to New Brunswick for me personally was that I was thrown into a minor renaissance of art. Two years after we arrived from the US, Kent Thompson came from the US with his family. As he put it, he could do immediately what he had only dreamed he would ever be able to do, that is, teach creative writing, edit a literary magazine, organize a writers’ group, and publish. His enthusiasm was embraced by some, satirized by others, but for me, it was catching and exciting. In his first year the Canadian poet Dorothy Livesay was writer in residence, and she began to have students come to her apartment to read their work. Soon Kent was going too, and when Dorothy (one of those larger than life individuals – how she got up out of our basement is a story for another post) left, Kent carried on. I had been writing after the kids were put to bed, and Bill told Kent. Kent invited me to come to the writers’ group. I was having so much fun there that Bill decided he would write too so he could come along. Bob Gibbs, then a graduate student/teacher, also a poet, began to attend. A succession of students, townspeople, professors attended from 1967 until 1983.

At that time, chapbook publishers were springing up all over Canada. Here in Fredericton, Professor Fred Cogswell was publishing the Fiddlehead books, but he wasn’t publishing New Brunswickers, so Kent and Bob decided there should be a chapbook series entirely devoted to the poets of the province. They asked me to be the editor. Without any experience in publishing or editing poetry, I took on the job. I consulted Marjory Donaldson, an artist at the UNB art centre, and she got Bruno Bobak, artist in residence and a major Canadian artist, to design a cover. It was simple but strong – at the top a band of colour in which the title would be embedded and at the bottom a drawing by one of the province’s artists. Marjorie silk-screened the colour band. Someone would type the manuscripts, and they were printed offset at the Provincial Artisans, 250 copies. We would have a collating and stapling party at our house. We didn’t need government money. We sold them for sixty cents. Ah, those were good times.

The Miracle Cactus

The Miracle Cactus

Twenty-four years ago, on the occasion of the launch of my first book, a friend gave me one of two cactus leaves she had brought back from California. It was a special and rare cactus, she said, and would produce beautiful flowers. I planted it; it took root and grew. For nineteen years it produced a lot of green leaves but no flowers, and then, inexplicably, buds appeared and indeed the resulting flowers were spectacular. For the first two years, it blossomed once a year, but now it blossoms three times a year. As far as I can remember, I did nothing different to induce it to bloom. We would comment on what an ugly plant it was, but because it was a special gift, we did not have the heart to throw it out. Was it our loyalty and patience that prompted it to produce? Even after five years, Bill and I are still amazed and pleased each time it blooms.

Tracing My Writer Life

It was many years before I understood that I had surrendered myself to the chief temptation of the artist, creation without toil. W.B. Yeats

In 1980 or so, my friend Peter Thomas inherited Fiddlehead Poetry Books from Fred Cogswell. He decided in 1981 that he wanted to start a fiction imprint, Goose Lane Editions. He needed a first manuscript, he knew I had been writing novels, and he asked me if I would submit one to him. I chose two of the four I had written and submitted them. He chose Flora, Write This Down. I had been writing for fifteen years without any desire to publish, just for the pleasure of writing, and if Peter hadn’t asked me, I might never have got up the gumption to try to publish.

My novels are definitely not plot-driven, mainly because I am deficient in plot construction. I begin with an image, a scene, an idea, with no notion of where the novels will go. When people learn that I am a writer, they invariably ask me, “What kind of novels do you write? Mystery? Romance? Detective?” I have to answer, “Literary novels.” “What are they about?” I don’t have a good answer for that, but usually I say, “About different kinds of family.” If I had been born 20 years later, these plot-less novels would never have been published, and this life that I have been tracing would have been very different. Once when I was discouraged about writing, I said to Bill, “I don’t want to be a writer anymore.” He said, “What are you going to do? Send out an announcement that you are no longer a writer?”

Now I am once again discouraged; I am old; I no longer want to be a writer. But the thing is, the novels are out there. Unread, true, but still out there, so alas, I am a writer whether I want to be or not. I have been working on a novel for 15 years, writing, re-writing. Back in 1981 I would just have abandoned it and gone on to something new and exciting. But now, after all these years, it seems that the thing can’t rest until it is published. In its various shapes, I have sent it to two publishers, who wrote nice things about it but still rejected it, and one agent, who agreed to hawk it, but couldn’t.

Like Yeats, I have yielding to the temptation of creation without toil: this blog.