Contemplation of Dr. Kathleen Wall's blog, Blue Duets

This semester, I have been following the blog of author and University of Regina professor Kathleen Wall at Blueduets.blogspot.com. Her comments tend to be very philosophical and grounded in real life. She really looks at the world thoroughly, sees it, experiences it, contemplates it. In reading her posts, I get a real sense of being inside her head and riding the waves of her consciousness. It’s a deep, yet unpretentious, blog, which I like.

In her most recent post, Dr. Wall talks about going to visit an aunt with her father on Christmas Eve when she was a child. She says that her own memories of it do not agree with the memories of her sister. She describes her childhood memories like this:  

“So this silent, capable man who is driving us:  what is he thinking?  Is he feeling guilty for not visiting at other times of the year?  Does he see this as a simple duty he must discharge?  What role does my mother's impatience play in this pilgrimage?  What is his tie to Aunt Nell, given that he lost his mother when he was in his early teens?”

I find this interesting because recently I have begun thinking of my parents in this way as well, as repositories of stories that are ultimately unknowable to me. They are like novels that I can try to decode, but often, in my classes, I feel like I could write several completely different and contradictory essays about the same text, so can I ever really know my parents, or anyone else? Or can I only know them according to the analytic approach I choose to apply to them? Are people who they are, or who I decide they are? Am I me, or am I a multitude of varieties of myself, as decided by everyone who meets me?

I also think about this a lot when I’m with my kids. I wonder what they make of me, and what they’ll make of me when they grow up. I wonder what memories they’re making and how they’re going to re-interpret those memories later in life. I wonder how they’re interpreting my behaviour, what they might one day wonder about or realize about me. I wonder if I will be a bit of an enigma to them, like Dr. Wall’s father seems to be to her, according to her quotation.

Overall, Dr. Wall’s blog gives a real sense of personal engagement with the world, both physically and meditatively. There’s something about it that feels soothing to me. Reading it, I feel like I’m sitting next to her with a cup of coffee and a cat in my lap, too, contemplating the changing colour of the sky.

One more video, now that I know how

Here's one more video by Ok Go. You've probably already seen it, but it's worth seeing again. If only I had this much interest in treadmills, I might fit back in my old jeans.

Also, the sentiments of both songs coincide with my feelings about starting my next English paper, which I am about to do.

Yay, I'm posting a video!

I finally realized how to post videos, and to properly appreciate You Tube (thanks Aislinn, Kelli, and Chelsea)! This is not literary, but it is an example of what I find interesting in the world. I thought of it after watching Kelli's dance video, I'm not sure why. They are both technical, but in very different ways.

Note on a quote I have been pondering

Recently, I have been re-reading Munro’s book through a Gothic lens in relation to research for my portfolio project. It eerily reminds me of the really awful book I wrote fifteen years ago. There are so many similarities it’s almost creepy, but my story was very poorly written (I see now) whereas Munro’s is essentially perfect. Anyway, Munro’s book reminds me a lot of my own life growing up as well. So if her book reminds me of my life, and her book is like my own book, then I must have subconsciously been writing about my own life, in some way, those fifteen years ago.

Which brings me to a quote I recently found while doing research for my modernist essay. It is by a scholar named Aaron Jaffe, who writes: “writers frequently tell more about their true selves and convictions under the guise of fiction than they will confess publicly.” I didn’t mean for my book to be about me, but looking back on it now I can see where my true self was in there. A teacher friend of mine read it to her grade 6/7 class a few years ago and she said she could hear me in it. But I didn’t intend to present at all in my recent story about the “conversation house.” Yet, a friend of mine who read that story said that he could sense so much of me in it. That sort of disturbed me and I can’t exactly say why. But I think that’s why fiction resonates so well, because it is an expression of the author’s convictions and that makes it socially relevant. So when my husband asks why I want to read stories that aren’t even real, I guess it’s because all fiction, to some degree, has this element of ‘real’ to it, the real expression of the author’s take on the world.

Today, I am happy...

...because Jann Arden has written her memoir! I LOVE this woman. Then, I read in the inside cover that she has previously published two other books, so I went on the Chapters website and put them in my cart. Oh, happy day! I will begin reading it immediately after my last final exam on December 15 and report the next day on how amazing it is. I am especially intrigued by her father's quote on the back cover: "There isn't a goddamn morsel of any goddamn sense to be made of any of this goddamn book." How great is that?!

I feel so special...

I got a letter from Alexander MacLeod in the mail today. He wants me to renew my subscription to The New Quarterly. Oh, Alexander, anything for you!

Why I am not entitled to be an adult

In far too many ways, I have wholeheartedly embraced being a full-fledged adult. Yet, in other ways, I cannot stop being a child. Take, for instance, my Jasmine Becket-Griffith fairy collection that I keep next to my computer.

This montage changes regularly because I have about forty of them. It is so much more fun, and less lonely, to write stories and essays with these little creatures (a.k.a. inanimate objects) sitting next to me. It all began with this one:

She's called "Once Upon a Midnight Dreary" and is holding a teeny-tiny copy of Poe's "The Raven." I was only going to get this one, but clearly these figurines quickly became a crack-like addiction for me, albeit with less debilitating repercussions. But I figure that since I'm already such a prematurely old fart in so many ways, they help to balance me out by bringing out a bit of the kid in me that has been repressed by those evil things called 'responsibilities'. Also, I find them oddly inspiring for some reason.

This is a bittersweet moment

At this moment, I feel like an old person that I love, who had a great, long life, is about to pass on. I feel happy and sad at the same time. Yes, I am about to press play on the final installment of the Harry Potter series. I have been putting off seeing it because I don't want it to be over. Now, the time has come. Deep breath. Here goes.

Pictures, if you are interested

I have finally posted the pictures my daughter drew to go with my assignment #3. If you are interested, scroll down and take a look. You won't be disappointed (but remember, I am partial).

Just having a pity party. You don't have to come if you don't want to

Okay, so I don’t handle stress well at the best of times. But this semester is particularly bad. (Chelsea, Kelly, and Aislinn, please feel free to skip this post as you have already heard all of this three – or maybe four – times a week for the past few weeks). Lately, I feel like I’m having a constant out of body experience and looking down on myself in wonder and horrified awe as I struggle through assignments. My brain feels like a brewing storm on open water, a turbulent, rolling, heavy sloshing of incoherent thoughts.

My portfolio assignment is like a stubborn, disobedient toddler that refuses to give in and be written. No amount of threats or pleading is working. I have been struggling with it for four weeks and still have nothing. I can only hope that the pressure of being down to seven days sparks something, even something insipid, but at least something. Also, it appears that some modernist literature, to me, is like a car motor, or plumbing, or most of our current technology: sure, I could learn how it works if I wanted to, if I were willing to put in the effort it would take to figure it out, but I’m just not interested enough to expend that kind of energy. This is not true of all modernist literature; some of it I find very interesting – mostly the stuff that critics denounce as not being entirely modernist.

I told my husband yesterday that something amazing has happened, something I never thought would happen to me: I am finally sick of reading. He told me that’s not good, because one of us has to be able to do it. What a guy, he knows just the right thing to say!

My response to my own most recent post

I am still thinking about my last post. I heard/read a few days ago that “parenthood is a continual process of letting go.” That’s what I think writing is, too. The things we write are our progeny, of a sort. We create them from nothing, grow them, birth them, nurture them, then give them to the world where they take on a life of their own. I think it’s easy to want to be prescriptive with our creations, to determine what they are and how they should be perceived. With my daughters, I want to believe I can choose who they are. I say “Avary is this” and “Olivia is that,” but as soon as I say they are one thing, they change and become something else. And when I am away, they will often behave in ways (and give people opinions of them) that are incompatible with my perceptions of them. I can only believe that this is going to continue to happen to a distressing degree (for me, at least) potentially for the rest of their lives (or at least mine). I think the same thing goes for texts. Writers are their biological parents, but they will be influenced by their environment, by time, by social attitudes, by individual readers’ backgrounds, etc.

A professor once wrote on one of my papers that I seemed to imply that the writer was trying to put a message into their fictional text, and he said that writers do not put messages into their texts and that if they wanted to do that they would write an essay instead. I’m not sure I entirely agree. I know, as a writer, that I do usually try to have a general idea of what I’m trying to get across in a story. But sometimes in a workshop I realize that I have not succeeded or that it is being read in a different way than I intended. Sometimes this makes me alter my story, but sometimes I find the other readings interesting and leave it as it is. Recently, I have been doing genre research and came across this quote by John Frow: “Complex aesthetic texts...are rarely contained by the limits of a single genre.” This suggests that a multiplicity of readings is a good thing, that it speaks to the complexity of the text. I agree. I tend to think that if something can be read in many ways, it is more interesting than if it can only be read one way.

Next Up: Author Intent vs. Reader Response

Recently, I was talking to a classmate who said that, regardless of the many different readings and analyses of stories that are made, the ultimate and definitive meaning of a story should be the one the writer intended it to be. I jokingly said that my classmate obviously was not a New Critic, because in my understanding they completely ignore author intent and focus only on the text as an end in itself (unless I understood Garry Sherbert incorrectly, which is entirely possible).

On this topic, I am working on an unrelated essay right now and came across an interesting quote by William Faulkner, about his novel ‘Sanctuary,’ that reads “Faulkner suggests that Popeye, the shining voyeur, is very real, that we can perhaps recognize his presence within ourselves: he is merely “another lost human being. He became a symbol of evil in modern society only by coincidence but I was still writing about people, not about ideas, not about symbols.”” William Faulkner himself has said that he wrote the book merely as a potboiler to make some money off a popular genre and that he did not intend for his character, who is now viewed as the epitome of evil, to be a symbol of evil. And yet, people go on writing essays about how Popeye is a symbol of evil. If even he can’t dictate the direction of critique with respect to his stories, I suppose there’s no hope for the rest of us. In this book of Faulkner’s, there have been essays written that say the main female character essentially brought on her own rape, and obviously other essays that violently refute that assertion. If I, as a woman, had written that book, I would be extremely disturbed to think that anyone would read my story as suggesting that a woman asked to be raped. But what if that kind of assessment were made after I was already dead and could say nothing to deny it? Then that might become a legitimate reading of my work, as it has of his.

I think that’s a difficult thing to accept about writing, the fact that once it’s out there in the world people will read it in whatever way is relevant to them and we have to accept that. It’s kind of like giving birth to a baby and then letting everyone else in the world just name it whatever they want to name it so that it has a million different names. One day you won’t be around anymore to call it by the name you gave it, and it will go on having perpetual multiple personality disorder for all eternity. It’s kind of like the way U of R MFA grad student, Mike Binzer, recently had his final portfolio on display at the MacKenzie Art Gallery -- a series of abstract representations of the human body – and my daughter walked in and said “This one is an otter, this one is a tree trunk, this one is a submarine (or a plum), this one is a snake, this one is a manta ray, etc.” Granted, she’s only six years old so he might not take her imaginative associations as seriously as an adult’s. But my point is that I think this is the nature of art, something that we as artists have to come to terms with. People will not always see our work the way we want them to see it and we have to find some way of being able to live with that and still sleep at night.

Do you spell that with an uppercase or a lowercase ‘w’?

In art class, my professor has been asking “What is art?” His idea is that something cannot be called art, and someone cannot be called an artist, until their work has been curated for exhibition by people in the “art world” and put on display. Even someone who creates amazing things is not an artist until this happens.  A girl in our class said she had a painting on display in a cafe somewhere, so did that make her an artist? “No.” His opinion is that the closer artwork is to food, the less likely it is to be called art (which I guess is why in Chapters Margaret Atwood’s books are on the furthest possible wall from Starbucks, which is instead closest to the teenage, self-help, and children’s section).

But I kind of agree with him with respect to the art of writing. I would say that I am a person who enjoys creative writing, but no matter how great I think my own writing is (which, by the way, I don’t), and no matter how great someone else thinks my writing is (mostly my mother), I will never consider myself a writer until someone in the “literary world” publishes my work.

Now, this doesn’t mean I think that everything published by publishing companies is worth reading or that all of those authors should be considered good writers either, or that some unpublished people may not be far superior writers, but I feel like I do not personally have the right to confer that title upon myself. I just think of myself as a person who participates in the act of writing. At what point can a person feel justified in calling themselves “a writer” as opposed to just “a person who writes?” Is there a difference between being a writer and being a Writer?

Insight from a student colleague

Thank you to Kelli for offering to give me "music to write by," which I thought was the name of a band. Apparently, the CDs in my vehicle (Kesha, Jennifer Lopez, Hannah Montana, Demi Lovato, Pink's Greatest Hits, and the soundtrack to that excellent animated Brazilian bird movie, Rio), which my children so enjoy, are not what one would normally call "inspirational." Who knew? Thanks, Kel. I will come armed with my flash drive asap.

I get by with a little help from my daughter

This afternoon, in between fetching snacks, searching for Strawberry Shortcake figurines, and putting the caps back on abandoned markers, I tried to work on my third short story. My 6-year-old asked what I was doing, so I started to read her the first page. After a few paragraphs, she said: "This is going to take all day, isn't it?" Which led me to believe that it must be very engaging. Then she decided that she would help me with ideas. The following are her suggestions:

1. "Then she gets hit from a car. Write that down."

2. "She stinks like a rotten egg."

3. "She's dripping with blood."

4. "Her face is squished like a big plate."

No, she did not come up with all of these morbid quotations in a vacuum. My story does in fact have some morbidity to it. I must admit, the simile in the fourth one intrigues me.

Then, she sat down with her markers and drew an illustration to go with my story. "Here is her face when she's beautiful. And here is her face squished and covered with blood." I told her that if I ever need an illustrator, she's hired.

"Here she is when she was beautiful, and here she is when she is squished and bloody." - Avary

In this one, Avary adapted my story and made it her own. She drew five pictures, then put them in order. 1. She gets married; 2. She has a baby; 3. They are a family; 4. She is a mother; 5. She is dead.

What's fair in fiction?

It has taken me awhile to process last week’s readings. Between all of my classes, I have read three poems about the death of young children and two stories about potentially terminally ill children. Because my own kids are the reason I breathe, these texts hit me particularly close to home.  It got me thinking about the ethics of writing about death and serious illness.

With Ben Jonson’s two poems about the deaths of his first daughter and first son, biographically I know that he was writing about his own children; the poems have a special poignancy for me because of that. With the others, I don’t know if the situations were purely fictional, or based upon stories told by people they know, or if they are essentially works of non-fiction. It seems to me that if you have not actually had a child in the pediatric oncology unit, it may be insensitive to write imaginatively about that situation, especially if you receive financial compensation for it. On the other hand, you could be doing a service by giving voice to a situation that others who are enduring it may not be able to adequately articulate. If a person wrote about the experience of being a soldier in war when they had never been a soldier in war, would it seem offensive to soldiers who had actually had that atrocious experience? And would it be accurate? What about someone writing a story about labour who has never given birth?

Particularly in Lorrie Moore’s “People Like That are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk,” I felt like I questioned the reliability of the narrator because I didn’t know if the story was fictional and because she identified herself as a writer from the beginning, so I didn’t know whether to feel manipulated or genuinely touched by the text. It’s like when I read James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces while everyone still thought it was totally true and I cried while I read about the tooth-pulling-without-painkillers incident. After I found out that that part was basically made up, I felt like I wanted my tears back. I still appreciated the literary skill he displayed, but I felt cheated, and almost violated, at having my emotions played with like that. Apparently, many others were upset by his lie, too (or were we all just upset that he lied to Oprah?). Are there unspoken rules about what is okay to write about fictionally and what is not? Or is it all okay, as long as we make it clear whether it is fiction or non-fiction? Is anything off the table, or no?

My progeny: four small feet of inspiration

Yesterday morning, my youngest daughter crawled on top of me in bed and said "Mama, get up! I will say cockadoodledoo to you! There is colour outside!" Even though I was still excruciatingly tired, I woke up because I was so intrigued by what she had just said. I could struggle for a creative way to say that the sun is shining, but how truthful and interesting it is to say that there is colour outside. (My oldest is just as creative: at four years old she said a passing train looked like a giant caterpillar -- check out that simile! An English major in the making!) My youngest's comment yesterday reminded me of a story by Richard Matheson called "Born of Man and Woman" in which a child raised in a basement refers to rain as "the water from upstairs." I am intrigued by voices like this, that try to find a way to describe something that they can't understand or explain or have no knowledge of. I have often heard the saying "Write what you know," but there is so much potential creativity hiding in the things we don't know, too. One day I might be able to write a book just based on all the amazing this my children say -- a children's book, anyway!

I am officially becoming paranoid

I have been unintentionally reading way too many stories lately about insect infestations and very ill children (not necessarily in the same story). Thanks to Cassidy McFadzean, I have begun checking my bed for bugs before I go to bed at night and am afraid to go to garage sales. Thanks to Alexander MacLeod, tonight, while I was at the Backyardigans with my children, all I could do was stare at strangers' heads and worry about the likelihood that one of the thousand children there might have lice that might attach to my own kids. Yesterday was cowboy day at the elementary school and I was unnaturally fearful that they might share hats. And all the stories about ill children are only exacerbating my own fears about losing my kids. I've been having enough trouble sleeping already this semester, and all of this is not helping.

Just hanging out with my main character

I'm sitting here at my computer right now, hanging out with the main character of my next story. I've been having a lot of trouble with this one because I really want to write it, but I want to be respectful and fair, and I want to understand her, even though I'm not at all convinced she understands herself. It is based on a story I heard a few years ago that has been haunting me ever since, and I really want to do it justice. My main character has been hanging out in the back of my brain for a few weeks now and I feel like I'm getting to know her a little bit. I'm starting to like her more than I expected to and I'm starting to feel empathy for her, which I wasn't really expecting. She doesn't even have a name yet and I don't know if she's going to. Right now I kind of want to give her a hug, and also a slap. I feel frustrated with her, like she's a friend that I just can't get through to.

But I've left her long enough. I'd better get back before she gets lonely.

I came across some interesting advice about writing

This summer I was reading the 1991 version of Orson Scott Card’s novel, “Ender’s Game.” In his introduction, he has some great insight about writing. He talks about how he had a great idea for his Battle Room, but “[he] hadn’t the faintest idea of how to go about turning the idea into a story…the idea of the story is nothing compared to the importance of knowing how to find a character and a story to tell around that idea.” This sentiment really inspires me, because ideas come to me all the time, but trying to figure out how to turn them into compelling stories is always the hard part. He also says he “learned to separate the story from the writing, probably the most important thing any storyteller has to learn – that there are a thousand right ways to tell a story, and ten million wrong ones, and you’re a lot more likely to find one of the latter than the former your first time through the tale.”

Card goes on to give his opinion about why we read in the first place. He says, “why else do we read fiction, anyway? Not to be impressed by somebody’s dazzling language – or at least I hope that’s not our reason. I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not “true” because we’re hungry for another kind of truth: The mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about ourself.”

I don’t always read introductions, but for some reason I read that one and I think it was fate. My husband says all the time that he doesn’t understand why I like to read things that aren’t true. Card explains it here more eloquently than I ever have.