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Becky Blake

Afterword: Becky Blake

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On the first of what would become her multiple trips to Barcelona, Becky Blake opted to live in the El Raval neighbourhood. She had heard that it was a rough, notorious area in the way of new-immigrant neighbourhoods, but figured it couldn’t be any different than similar neighbourhoods in Toronto where she’d previously lived. In a way, that turned out to be true. While she witnessed more crime, anger, danger and disease than she ever had, bad things refused to happen to her, even though she once sported a decoy purse hoping to attract a thief who she could then interview for research.

Over the next several years, the eight-page story that grew out of Becky’s initial trip to Barcelona would expand to become the novel Yours to Keep. She began the work of expanding the story during her time at the University of Guelph MFA Creative Writing program. With the guidance of mentor Pasha Malla, Becky worked on completing the first draft of the book, and with Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer she wrote several additional drafts to fulfill the MFA thesis requirement. That accomplished, Becky still felt that the manuscript had more problems than she could identify working on it alone. In search of a new perspective, she submitted the fourth draft of Yours to Keep to the DD mentorship program, which is uniquely focused on a writer completing a full-length work. This was ideal for Becky, since that was exactly her aim.

Mentor Shyam Selvadurai, who believed that Yours to Keep was close to being finished, had set the goal that the draft that Becky ended the mentorship program would hopefully be her last. After all, she didn’t want to be writing the book forever! With that in mind, he asked her to clarify the remaining problems and how she would fix them. As per Shyam’s request, she wrote him a letter explaining the project’s history. Then, Shyam read the manuscript. After he sent Becky detailed comments, they had a Skype conversation during which he asked her some tough questions, among them, what makes her book different from others similar and what she is saying on a mythological level. Then, before beginning her edits, she had to write him a second letter about her intentions, especially regarding the structural problems in the story. A few more correspondences and an in-person meeting followed. As Becky says, it really helped that “Shyam was able to frame the novel for me in a way that I hadn’t thought about before: as a picaresque story with almost Dickensian characters, a classic Hero’s journey with a couple of twists.”

Since everyone’s writing process is different, Becky recommends talking to your mentor about what your needs and goals are before starting work to take maximum advantage of the flexible nature of the DD mentorship program. As a more established writer, a mentor can not only give you constructive feedback, but also the confidence to finish your project.

Throughout her work on Yours to Keep, Becky has focused on revealing more of the thoughts and memories of the protagonist Nicole, and complicating the nature of her relationships with other characters, a lot of whom come from backgrounds and lead lives that are vastly different from Nicole’s privileged status as a white Canadian with a passport, free to travel and stay in places without harassment. In part, Yours to Keep deals with the feeling of discomfort between using privilege and rejecting it, wanting things to be easy versus fitting in and living the life of a local. Nicole’s dilemma is also one of wholeness. Like the half-built or half-demolished structures that surround her in the story, Nicole inhabits an empty, vertigo-inducing internal space that is neither past nor future. In Becky’s chosen spare writing style punctuated by sharp imagery, Yours to Keepcharts Nicole’s movement towards living in the present moment and feeling whole again.

That’s not to say there’s an abundance of soft in Yours to Keep. Quite the opposite; Becky’s research—a year-and-a-half’s worth spread over a three-year period—included trips to a rehabilitation center for Barcelona’s retired thieves and prostitutes, and a squat on the site of a former leper colony where she labored for half a day in exchange for a tour. She also spent a whole night conversing with a street beer-seller about illegal Spanish visas. Unfortunately, she didn’t get to speak with a working thief until she was many drafts in, so she used his input for some backwards fact-checking instead. A lot of what she gathered from her research has gone towards details that give the mostly fictional characters inYours to Keep, and their environments, a quality of realness.

Tattoos and other markings, permanent and semi, feature strongly in Yours to Keep. Not being one for tattoos herself, Becky considers Yours to Keep as her mark on Barcelona, her favorite city and one to which she will always return for its natural and architectural beauty. A dream launch for Becky would be held in a cocktail bar-cum-library in her former Barcelona neighborhood, with her Spanish and Catalan friends and informers present to see the finished book. They would sit and chat for hours, staying up late, in that lifestyle which Becky says brings out the best version of her.

Currently, she is spending about four hours daily incorporating Shyam’s final comments and adding her own tweaks to the fifth draft of Yours to Keep, paying attention to the slightly neglected last two thirds of the book. She’s also considering changing the current title and the three section headers that each references a stage of grief from the Kubler-Ross model. Her recent success at winning the CBC Short Story Prize has garnered agent interest in her work and she plans to send the manuscript out by the end of the summer. It is Becky’s hope that readers, male and female, will be as interested as she, to read “an adventure story with a female protagonist who really got her hands dirty” by way of choosing to live on the streets of Barcelona, trying out pickpocketing, freeganism, and breaking into her former apartment through a window (one of the most challenging passages to write for Becky), to name a few.

The journey of writing Yours to Keep has been exhausting but rewarding, requiring as much patience as Becky once drew on during an elephant wrangling course in Thailand—an experience which she says is not too far removed from writing. There will probably be more of this as she tackles the many unfinished pieces she has in her virtual drawer, many of them non-fiction—a genre that she is still figuring out.

One round-the-world trip and repeat stays in Barcelona and Buenos Aires later, Toronto remains the only city where Becky has been robbed; dramatically so: on Roncesvalles Avenue by three men in balaclavas. But it still remains home, so as much as the new continues to inspire her and living abroad continues to provide jolts of inspiration, Becky will always be writing in some way about the place she knows best: Canada.

Yours to Keep

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The yellow line of the subway made stops at the beach, the cathedral, and the most expensive shopping street so the trains were always packed with tourists. I hoped I understood Manolo’s instructions. Espera. He’d said the word a number of times but it was a verb that meant both to wait and to hope. In any case, I was doing both of those things: waiting for him inside the Jaume metro entrance, and hoping he was going to appear. It had been at least twenty minutes, but I didn’t think he’d abandon me—he’d given me a pair of his shoes to wear. I looked down at my feet, winter-pale and too-small against the rubber frame of his dirty white flip-flops. The shoes seemed like an obvious prop to me, a glaring indicator that something wasn’t right. To steady my nerves, I pretended to be waiting for a friend, pretended so hard that I could almost picture her, another ex-pat whom I’d greet with a hug before we smacked up the stairs in our unseasonal sandals, talking loudly in English.

Beside me on the wall, there was a map of Barcelona, sprawling and complex. At the top, the streets were organized into a grid, but in the centre there was no pattern, just a broken china plate that someone had tried to glue together. Superimposed over the city, the lines of the subway looked like a small child had drawn them with crayons of many colours.

I turned from the map just in time to see Manolo coming down the corridor from the tunnel. He touched the leather cuff on his left wrist. I glanced at the man on his left and did a quick assessment: he was wearing a novelty t-shirt and cargo pants, he didn’t look very fit. I watched him from the corner of my eye as he pushed through the turnstile. I guessed he would take the escalator instead of the stairs. Just before he passed, I turned and stepped onto the escalator ahead of him, a shiver racing up my spine like an extra sense being activated.

Three steps from the top, I slipped off one of the flip-flops as though it had gotten stuck, then hopped around for a moment trying to get it back on. Behind me there was a minor traffic jam as the man backed up as far as he could on the escalator to avoid running into me. Manolo was behind him.

“Sorry,” I said in English, turning to the man and smiling. I saw him glance down the front of my shirt as I bent to adjust my shoe. Then I walked off down the street, the finest details of the city leaping out at me for a moment until my heart-rate returned to normal. I turned to look back, but no one was following me. The whole thing had been so easy—it was almost disappointing.

Manolo met me back in the courtyard a quarter of an hour later. He pulled the wallet from the waistband of his jeans and handed it to me. It had the weight of a human heart, and it’d been the simplest thing in the world to steal. I tore open the Velcro flap. Inside was the man’s face, an old picture on a gym membership. His life would be different now. He’d be less trusting, safer maybe. Maybe we’d done him a favour.

Manolo frowned; I was taking too long. I dipped my fingers into the billfold and slid up the edges of the money. The colour was orange, 50 euros. I spread the bills with my fingers: one, two, three. Each of them was crisp and new, straight out of the bank machine.

Manolo’s jaw relaxed. “Tienes suerte,” he said.

That was funny. I didn’t feel lucky at all.

Emerging Author of the Month: Becky Blake

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Tell us about yourself.

I’m a fiction writer who has worked as a journalist, a script consultant, an advice columnist, and a playwright. My short stories and articles are often inspired by my travels around the world. I’m a recent graduate with an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. I currently live in Toronto where I’m working on my first novel.

Tell us about the piece you’ve decided to share.

The piece is a short excerpt from my novel-in-progress, Yours to Keep. Barcelona is my favourite city in the world (so far!) and this novel was born out of the many impressions I came away with after living there. The book is about a Canadian woman who suffers a loss shortly after moving to Spain and ends up living on the streets, where she apprentices with a pickpocket. This excerpt shows her assisting in her first theft.

When and why did you realize you had a passion for writing?

According to my mom, my first word was ‘book,’ and I think a passion for reading and a passion for writing are often connected. The first story I wrote that garnered attention was called “Seaweed Soufflé.” It was about an underwater dinner party; I wrote it in Grade 1 and I’ve been writing pretty much ever since then. Growing up, my favourite place to hang out was always the library. I know a couple of writers who don’t read very much, but most of us read like our lives depended on it.

What pieces of writing/authors have had the greatest impact on you?

Wow. This is going to be quite a long list! When I was a young teen I remember being given Judy Blume books as a reward when I did well in school or had something scary to tackle. Her books were always provocative and important to me. As an older teen, I was reading Leonard Cohen, Barbara Gowdy, Michael Ondaatje, Heinrich Böll, J. D. Salinger, Allen Ginsberg, and Sylvia Plath. Then I became an actress for a few years and I read a lot of plays: Shakespeare and Chekhov were my favourites. When I began to focus more seriously on the craft of writing, I fell in love with many of the usual suspects: Virginia Woolf, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Raymond Carver. Then, I spent a year reading only female writers and my most significant discoveries from that exercise were the works of Angela Carter, Marguerite Duras, and Jean Rhys. My favourite contemporary writers over the last two years have been Francisco Goldman, Sarah Hall, Junot Díaz, and Daniel Alarcón.

What kind of writer do you aspire to be?

The kind who learns how to write better and faster so I can share as many stories as possible.

How and when do you find time to write?

I write in the morning. I used to meditate in the morning and then start writing, but after a while I realized that writing is a form of meditation in itself, so now I just get right to it. At my day job, I’ve been working only afternoons for several years now and it’s a sacrifice that feels right to me: to have a little less money and more time to write.

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