November 2011 Archives

One of the upsides of reading other writers’ blogs: realizing you’re not crazy. Or at least, you’re not alone. On reflection I suppose “not crazy” does not follow.

A case in point: many, many writers seem to have playlists for their books. I was so glad to learn this: I didn’t know anyone else did it! I always have, for fiction. I’m fairly literal about it, too. For my abandoned World War Two book (which eventually became Ghost Maps, my first book of poetry), I listened to scratchy old Glen Miller recordings — the “lost records” they recorded in German and broadcast into Germany in a “Radio Free Europe” sort of way. Ever hear someone try to cover “Is You Or Is You Ain’t My Baby” in German? The clash of civilizations has rarely been so audible.

For Plain Kate, I listened to a single album over and over again: Burkene Bruse’s Stone Chair. This, for instance, is Kate’s “main theme,” the song that instantly transports me to the foggy wood and the river, the rough-hewn granduer and the soft sadness of the Russian and Northern European tales from which KATE borrowed its flavour.

The books I’m drafting — Children of Peace, and its sequel The Swan Riders — take place in a far future, in a depopulated Saskatchewan. In the Children of Peace world, they’ve lost the car, the suburbs, the principle that collective punishment is wrong, and (apparently) the electric guitar. I want a to evoke a world where AIs ride horses: modern bluegrass is obviously the way to go. Or, actually, I started out listening to Basia Bulat, and Pandora took me to modern bluegrass from there. This, for instance, is the love theme (GUYS! I wrote a book that needed a love theme!) for book one, where the hero realizes that a) quietly preparing all one’s life to be ritually murdered in a good cause may not in fact be a good thing and b) she may be in big scary love.

But the book I’m editing, Sorrow’s Knot, is so far mostly music-less. I do have a playlist, but I’ve never found the music, the music that takes me right into the story. This may, in fact, have been part of the problem when it came to getting the book out of the box. (See this blog entry, in which my book is STUCK.) LIke Plain Kate, it’s a high fantasy, so the usual moody rock (Van Morrison, Cowboy Junkies) and gospel soul that populates my iPod seem like obvious nos.

It might make sense to go geographically near, but that has proven problematic. The Sorrow’s Knot setting got its start from ancient North America. That is, the same way the people in Plain Kate are NOT Polish, the people in Sorrow’s Knot are NOT Mandan. They may build the same houses and live in the same landscape and grow the same food, but the whole bit about the disembodied zombies is not, to say the least, historically accurate. But the traditional music of the Great Plains is hard to come by, and most modern interpretations of it that I’ve found have a faint whiff of recreational ethnicity — you know, white people hanging dream catchers from their rearview mirrors and visiting sweat lodges on vacation. To idealize and romanticize (and steal parts of) a culture like that is nearly as problematic as demonizing it: both treat the culture as something less than human. That’s something I’m acutely aware of, as a white chick writing about not-white people, and maybe that’s why I haven’t been able to sink into that music.

I think drumming might be the way to go. One of the characters in the book is a drummer, and I love drum music. (I bought my first djembe this year; my bodhran sadly needs reskinning.) I could listen to this guy below forever, but he doesn’t seem to have an album. I don’t know that my blog readers constitute a crowd, but I’m tempted to crowd source here. Anyone want to recommend some music? Something world-beat — not necessarily North American. (Taiko, for instance, would be fine.) Something with some force and energy, though slow is okay. Not too crystal-healing-dolphin. No orchestral windchimes tinklers need apply.

Hurrah! My poetry granting season has opened with a "yes"!

Every year the Ontario Arts Council runs a grant competition called The Writers' Reserve. It's an interesting program: the OAC gathers a number volunteer publishing houses, literary magazines and the like. They allocate to each house a certain pot of money to give away, and writers approach each house directly. The house doesn't publish the work, or make other commitments to the writer -- they just nod in the direction of the kind of work they like. So the OAC is supplying the money the houses are doing the work, just for the joy of being able to say yes to the stuff they love. The result is a great array of small grants, supporting a hugely diverse body of work. I'm such a fan of this program.

Like many pretty-much-mainstream poets, I approach a variety of houses through the Writers' Reserve. Last year it was ten, and I got two recommendations. This year it was 13. The first one just came back: and it was a yes. Thanks for the nod, ARC magazine.

So, what am I writing? Well, according to the project description, I'm writing this: "Too Strong to Stop, Too Sweet to Lose" is a long poem in small parts. The poem is about 30 pieces now: I hope one day it might be 50 or 80, which could make it chapbook or book length.

In what it says "Too Strong Strong to Stop, Too Sweet to Lose" comments on what is knowable - but ultimately the poem is about what it doesn't say, what cannot be known. To wit: What we do with this life that we cannot hold onto, and cannot bear to let go?

"Too Strong" is sometimes known (on Twitter and elsewhere) as Big Weird Poem. Here's a sample:

What do we hold to?

This sweet world -- how we love it.
As an old horse loves the harness,
loves the stall.
The drenching smell of leather.
The work and rest.
The sweat and hay.
Dust-slanted, cricket-singing, the barn.
Even when it's burning.

I think Sorrow’s Knot may be slightly less stuck. This week, I had an 800-word day, a couple 700-word days, and yesterday at last a sticker day, a 1000-word day. There was a brief relapse on Tuesday when I went: “But what if this is all WRONG?” and was again paralyzed for a bit. But I am slowly shaking it. I again feel loose and even a bit excited when I walk into my writing office in the afternoons.

Embarrassingly, the breakthrough came from using one of those “oh, just try for ten minutes: you won’t get much done, but that’s okay, and then you can have chocolate” mental tricks. This particular iteration of the just-ten-minutes trick came in the form software called Vitamin R.

Vitamin R is another in the family of software that urges you to work for just a little bit. I’ve used lots of them, over the years, and particularly like Freedom for the Mac and Write or Die. But when you’re as fragile as I’ve been these last few months (and the “or die” part of Write or Die seems like a real possibility), a nice friendly version is perhaps called for, and Vitamin R seems tick that box for me.

Why did it take me so long to figure this out? I don’t know. Recently I did an interview at an online community for teenage writers, Write On. There I talked about the universal writers’ experience of My Writing Sucks, and how to keep going in the face of that. This was my advice to them, which I myself proceeded to turn around and forget:

*”lower the stakes for yourself. It doesn’t have to be the next New Yorker short story, it just has to — and here you should fill in the blank. Be a fairy tale told from the villain’s point of view. Be a soap opera that’s so over the top it will make people laugh. Use rhymed couplets. You can’t succeed at a whole novel/play/book of poems all at once, but you can probably do this, and it will hone your skills and sharpen your confidence.” *

For me, lowering the stakes turned out to be “write for ten minutes on the scene where Otter rescues Cricket from the ghost in the cornfield.” Compare this to the previous stake, which was: “rescue a book you used to love, but which your editor doesn’t seem to, by making it totally perfect right NOW.” I mean, which of those tasks would get you to lift your head weakly from your desk and peer around with a tiny bit of hope?

I feel silly, but hey. Silly is in fact one of my favourite words. Did you know that “silly” originally meant “blessed”? Sounds unlikely but it’s true. The drifting path of its usage went roughly like this: happy —> blessed -> pious -> innocent/childlike -> weak/pitiable -> foolish. The root is an Old English word, gesælig, meaning happy or goodhearted. It may be related (distantly) to the word “soul.” Fairy story readers will know its much closer cousin “seely” (also spelled “seelie”), which is just silly with an older spelling, and an older meaning hanging on.

What an important idea, an important insight: that to be silly and to be happy and to be holy are the same thing. I am at my most creative and productive (and happiest and holiest) when I remember this.

Even if it takes a rather silly bit of software.

Guys, it’s unbelievable, but my awesome big kid (the one whose online handle is Ninja Princess Scientist) is SIX YEARS OLD today!

She is in first grade, a partial immersion program that has her already speaking more French than me. She can read. We are in the process of writing a picturebook called Don’t Let the Moose Drive the Monster Truck. She can swim like a dolphin. She wants to be a ninja. And a Mythbuster. And a rock star.

In fact, she’s chosen a Rock Star birthday party, on for this Saturday. Yesterday she posed for pictures to be printed on her cake, and improvised (I think?) a song that rhymed “rock star,” “near and far” and “this guitar.” Scansion! Makes a mommy writer heart so proud.