Diaspora Dialogues

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David Huebert

Immersed in Sinking

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Before the DD mentorship, I’d had smaller, informal mentorships, but nothing this deep or sustained. The Diaspora Dialogues mentorship gave me the chance to work long-term with the stories collected in Peninsula Sinking and, most importantly, to consider those stories as a coherent entity. I’d been working on these stories for a while, some of them for about five years. For the application to the mentorship, I placed my strongest stories together and hoped for the best. The process began with my mentor David Layton reading the entire manuscript very closely. Then we had three long, rigorous in-person meetings. We discussed the manuscript in detail, and David pushed me to understand—to face up to—what I was doing in my own stories. (David always generously refused to figure this out for me). After that, we began editing individual stories more closely, and now we’re almost finished that process. The most beneficial element of David’s teaching practice was his ability to tailor the mentorship towards exactly what I most needed. If asked for advice, I would encourage future mentees to remain flexible. If the mentorship offers something unexpected, embrace it.

The title change—from Terrible Human Beings to Peninsula Sinking—most neatly encapsulates the moulting process of this manuscript. David and I diagnosed certain themes—Nova Scotia, the ocean, the relationship between centre and periphery—that I now explore with more clarity and self-awareness. The trickiest part was revising parts that didn’t offer enough subjective insight. How does one give the right amount of detail about character motivations and backstory without spoon-feeding the reader? In the end, every writer has to find their own balance. For me, the most enjoyable sections to write usually come fairly late in the process. At this point, I often know that what I’m writing really needs to be there, and I’ve held back enough throughout the story that I’m willing to add some flourish. The end of “Bellyflop” is one example. I had a lot of fun writing that.

I plan to shop the manuscript around starting this fall. Six of the stories are forthcoming or already published, and I’ve recently found out that one of them, “A-Word,” has won The Dalhousie Review’s 2015 short story contest. I think the collection is ready.

My dream blurb would say I’d written characters that readers want to spend time with, done some sort of bruised justice to my home province, and evoked the joy of treading water while watching the world sink.

I’ve got my first book of poetry, We Are No Longer The Smart Kids In Class, coming out in fall 2015. I’m currently working on a second book of poetry and a dystopian novel. But what I’m most excited about is a few new stories that have been gestating in the womb of my brain.

The Next Level

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I hope the Diaspora Dialogues mentorship will help me turn a collection of stories into something closer to a book. Ideally my mentor, David Layton, will show me new ways to push myself at the level of sentence, paragraph, story, and collection.

I’ve been writing fiction seriously for the past five years or so, and I’ve just recently gotten a few stories accepted by quality publications (Grain, Broken Pencil, The Dalhousie Review). I didn’t just want to write ten or fifteen stories and throw them together in a book. I wanted to be proud of every piece, every word. After three or four years of writing stories that were technically proficient but still lacking something, I think I tapped into a voice that allowed me to push my fiction to the next level.

I suppose “ecstatic” is not the most modest way to describe my own work. But it is the voice that I often think breaks through the story and makes it something more than just proficient. I think of it as the ecstatic or frenetic or fluorescent voice. If I’m writing something I really didn’t expect to produce, that’s usually a good sign. I hate to sound all spiritual about it but when it comes I just have to step aside and let it happen. That said, I always have to put in many hours of hard work before it comes.

I’m enrolled in a PhD program so I don’t have much free writing time. But who does? I block time on the weekends and sometimes I type frantically at night, when I should be shaving or washing dishes or relaxing with my wife and our cat. I think about my work pathologically as I ride my bike or stand in lines or sit on buses. I’m always prepared to make a note. I think that’s the most important thing.

In a perfect world, a writer’s life would basically the exact opposite to how J.M. Coetzee lives his life. That’s a joke. Seriously: the writer would be financially liberated to write 3-5 hours a day, five days a week. The rest of the time the writer would explore life in all its variety.

Ten years from now I’ll be happy if I’m still producing work and making small breakthroughs. The lowest point, I think, will be the times I lose sight of the wonder of creating stories and see writing as a chore or burden. The high point will be the times when someone else indicates, however subtly, that my work was worth the time they took to read it.

Zany fact about me: I sometimes order things from Amazon just because my cat Moby Dick loves the boxes. Also one of my favourite songs is Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the U.S.A.”

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