Diaspora Dialogues

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Toward Agreement in dis.chord

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I worked on dis.chord as my thesis for the University of Guelph-Humber’s MFA in Creative Writing program, and the awesome Russell Smith served as my advisor. The structure, support and accountability of that mentorship was immensely helpful. It also helped to have an objective voice to help with the often isolating work of organizing an imaginary world! However when I finished, I found there were big questions left lingering about the format that I needed time to digest. Coming back to the project and those questions through the DD mentorship (that comes with a timeline that isn’t self-imposed) gives me confidence in my ability to resolve the issues with structure and narrative.

dis.chord started as a voice in my head: Astra Hallet, the main character, prompting me to reconcile issues that I saw as themes in the mental health system. I started organizing that voice as a series of poems, which I workshopped in the MFA program. Then I felt the need to give other voices and perspectives to understand that character, and so it became a multi-voice novel. I was looking for an editor to reconcile some questions I’d had about this work when I found out about DD’s mentorship program. Here I am!

I’m fascinated by works that use both poetry and prose. When do you choose one over the other? I chose to share the between 5 unique first person voices in an attempt to show the story from a number of angles. 4 of them are prose, and the main character’s sections are mostly poems. I think poetry gives an angle and attention to language/syntax that can’t quite be represented in another format . . . or that’s my current hypothesis anyway.

I was most productive with my writing when I read and wrote every morning no matter what. When I thought of it as a ritual, not a routine—one I was adamant to protect. I also took time off (to travel, to be alone) while coming to the end of big writing projects so I could immerse myself completely in the story and make it my sole concern.

If I were the ruler of a perfect world, writers would know their work was meaningful and would have myriad viable sources of income. One of the ways I’d make that possible would be to mandate contemporary Canadian literature in Canadian classrooms.

Chuck Klosterman would be the author I’d choose to write about my life. Only he could do justice to my twenties.

I hope the lowest point in my writing is over—which is that I took a long period away from writing to build a career and financially stable life. It was a low point to realize I had to make big life changes in order to create protected time—hours and days each week to write—again. Ideally in 10 years I have a viable source of income that is flexible, allows me that time and space to write every day, and the ability to buy ridiculous amounts of books. The highlight would be my work being discussed in classrooms.

Questing and Questioning

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I expect the mentorship to provide structure and motivation for my writing practice, connect me with other Toronto writers, help solidify my identity as a writer in this city, and support me in completing a manuscript I can confidently submit to publishers.

Two and a half years ago I decided to leave Nova Scotia where I had lived for my entire life, and move to Toronto. Once here, my identity as a queer person, as a Maritimer, as a white settler, and as a writer seemed to undergo a significant shift. My mid-life change, the separations, the dislocations and heart-sickness all made their way into my writing. During that time I also travelled twice to Guatemala and witnessed stories of displacement and struggles for land justice that shifted my ideas about relationships to land, home, and dislocation. The poems that have emerged from those experiences seem to belong together.

My family roots in Nova Scotia stretch back seven generations and I grew up feeling very entitled to say I belonged there. I bought a piece of land and began to settle into permanent rootedness. Once I uprooted myself and moved to Toronto, I no longer had that to lean on. My poetic voice has been stretched and challenged by exploring for myself the experience of destabilization and uncertainty. I feel that I’ve moved away from a predictable, comfortable voice toward one that is questing and questioning.

I tend to write on the move. I carry small notebooks and capture images, emotions, experiences as they happen. At my desk, I patch together fragments to create drafts of poems, which I rewrite until they feel complete. During that process I share drafts with other writers for feedback, and read them out loud to listen for rhythmic glitches or phrases that don’t sound true.

If I can choose from among writers no longer living, I would pick Elizabeth Bishop. Among living writers, I would choose Louise Glück.

In my perfect world, writers are adopted by cafes and pubs and skating rinks—every place has a writer-in-residence who is offered support, encouragement, audience, solitude, sustenance. There is generous, easily accessible financial support through a wide range of funders, beautiful places around the world where writers are invited to stay and work, and excellent cheap health insurance for writers so we can get the glasses and dental work and back care we need.

Ten years from now, I will have at least two poetry books and a set of short stories published. I will be invited to teach at the Banff Arts Centre and at a Toronto university, and I will be leading writing trips to Latin America. A highlight will be the two book launches for my first poetry collection, one in Toronto and one in Halifax. A low point will be the necessity at times to set aside projects to earn regular secure income from a 9-5 job to support myself and my family.

Teach, Write, Parent, Clean, Repeat!

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I am hoping and expecting that the DD mentorship has a strong impact on my writing, in both quality and in quantity. My mentor Marina Endicott has a discerning eye (she’s given me feedback on my work before) so I know my writing will improve under her guidance. It’s also great to have hard deadlines . . . forced productivity!

I’m a bit surprised I’m writing a police procedural mystery. My dad was a police officer and policing’s male hierarchical culture never appealed. I’m also a bit of a scaredy-cat so I only read the tamer thrillers and cosy mysteries. But my dad was an officer on Toronto Island in the 1960s. The Island is a wonderful local jewel, with an intriguing history of amusement halls, water rescues, murders, drunkenness, cottaging, and political unrest. It begged to be a novel setting. When I decided my protagonist would be a six-foot-tall police woman trying to ascend the ranks so she could pay off her mom’s gambling debt, I was hooked.

In some ways it’s easy to re-create the Toronto Island of the 1960s as some things are very similar: the communities, the pathways, the beaches, the feel of being close to an urban centre yet immersed in a natural setting. The 1960s was a tempestuous time for Islanders as the government was trying to demolish their homes and this is well documented in the Toronto Archives. I interviewed my dad and several senior Islanders . . . and they are helping me bring the time period to life.

I have interviewed police women who started on the Toronto Police Force in the ’60s. I’ve also read extensively about police women in North America and unfortunately, the experiences of sexism, harassment and bias are endemic even today.

My writing process is to write and research at the same time. I can get sidetracked by research as it’s absorbing and so much easier than writing a first draft so I have to rein that in. I write for two or three hours in the afternoon (after I teach in the mornings and before my kids come home from school). I also write in coffee shops and libraries as I seem more productive in these caffeinated locals.

My life is too busy yet mundane (teach, write, parent, clean, repeat!) to be the subject of a book.

In a perfect world, I would do what I do now: teach children to read, write books, and read books. . . . I just need more time to do all three and more money!

Ten years from now, I have three books out in my Toronto Island mystery series, I’ve sold my literary novel The Monkey Charm and have another literary novel on the go, and I have an agent who is busy selling the film rights for all my books. In between, I write articles and poetry and short stories. Getting published in book-form would be my career highlight . . . the low point is the wait (and patience!) it has taken to get my first novel published.

What the Heart Yearns to Tell

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I expect the long-form mentorship will help me to see the strengths and weaknesses of my writing more clearly. I’m hoping the experience will allow me to grow as a writer. My novel The Nap-Away Motel has been alive in my mind for so long now that it is hard to remember how it came into being. Two years ago I wrote a couple of paragraphs about a teenager who was a homeless runaway. That simmered for a while, until I placed her at a run-down Scarborough motel. The novel grew from there. I had some themes that I wanted to explore, including poverty, gender, and mental illness, which all eventually found their way into the novel.

Initially the novel was going to be told from the alternating first-person POV of the two main characters. But then a third character appeared, needing his story to be told as well. I decided at that point to have a single narrator, the motel, tell the story of its occupants. I have always loved stories told by unique narrators or unique perspectives, like death’s narration of The Book Thief. But I wasn’t able to create this narration successfully, so I decided to have the motel become one of the main characters in the novel instead. I think it adds a bit of quirkiness to the novel.

When I write, I usually start by re-reading what I last wrote and doing a quick bit of revising and editing to get me going. When I’m deeply entangled in a writing project I spend a lot of my non-writing time thinking about what I’m going to write next, so I rarely struggle with trying to figure out what to write once I’ve got the time. I started writing seriously when my first daughter was a newborn, and so I tend to write whenever I get an opportunity, whether it ends up being five minutes or two hours.

I think Virginia Woolf had it right when she said that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” In a perfect world, every writer would have the space, time, and money to write what their heart yearns to tell. Some free chocolate and a super comfy writing chair would help too.

I’m not dreaming too big for what I foresee happening ten years from now. I’d love to have at least one published novel. Ok, at least two, maybe even three. I’ve always wanted to write a novel about animals (like The Plague Dogs by Richard Adams, or The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy) so maybe that project will be finished in ten years time. Low point: losing faith in my writing. High point: holding a copy of my published novel for the first time.

Zany fact about me: showing or marked by a lack of good sense or judgment; writing a novel while caring full-time for a newborn and a three year old.

This Sliver of Reality That I Know

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As all writers must experience, I find difficulty in keeping things original and different enough to stand out. I’m hoping this mentorship can either help me find ways to be interesting or completely look at my writing process and goals differently.

During my last year of my undergraduate studies a friend and classmate told me about a senior level creative writing course that allowed students admitted into the course to write a creative writing project of their own. Knowing Daniel Scott Tysdal, the course’s instructor, and having been taught by him before, I was more than happy to potentially work with Daniel. The specific idea to write about a family ironically came from my own hiding from my ethnic culture. As I was studying different non-Western cultures and literatures during my studies, and seeing how scholars negotiated their personal histories with wider cultural histories, I became more interested in depicting this sliver of reality that I know.

Because I wanted to depict four different voices, I though poetry seemed the best medium for my project. While different voices have been depicted within one text of fiction, I was more interested in showing varying personalities through form as well as content.

In a perfect world, writers would be left alone to write and only meet people of their own accord, not obligation.

Ten years from now, ideally, I will have been constantly writing and researching especially about music. My lowest point(s) might be constant rejection and uncertainty about where I want to go in my career. My highest point might honestly be having the opportunity to make a living doing what I love, writing.

Zany fact about me: I play in an experimental fusion band, called Fine, That’s Ok, that doesn’t take itself seriously enough.

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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