Victoria Bell

Last night I went to hear Andre Alexis, Anthony de Sa and Steven Galloway read as (a late) part of the Ottawa Writersfest. Three quite different works in voice and tone (all great, all purchase worthy, although I could only bring myself to drop the cash for one hardcover… Sorry, guys), but all, as organizer Sean Wilson said, with a common theme of “home”. Which anyone who knows me well might know is something that comes up again and again in the stuff I write.

In the post-reading discussion, Alexis said something I responded to deeply: he said he reads “for company,” and writes for the same reason. This resonated with me. I may be misinterpreting/mangling what he said, but I understood it as meaning he reads for companionship. I think this is the reason my most-loved books are those featuring “real people” characters – Jhumpa Lahiri’s work; Alexis’ character Walter in the piece he read last night. (Oh, yeah, and immigrants or lost/displaced people, evidently.) I don’t do so well with magical realism; I can’t connect.

The importance of being deeply observant and aware as a writer, of finding ways to portray the world, was also discussed, which rang familiar. A good night.

Agent things

A couple of groovy places that talk about agents:

http://guidetoliteraryagents.com/blog/

http://agentquery.com (look for me on AQ Connect as VictoriaBell (surprise!))

Of course, the brilliant and much-missed Miss Snark: http://misssnark.blogspot.com/

It’s the last day of class today. I’m rather sad. I’ve enjoyed coming “eye to eye” (as our teacher, Peter Levitt, puts it) with my peers and partners, seeing them lay themselves open honestly, reading their writing, seeing them progress. I think I’ve progressed too. Below I’ll paste in parts of my “learning statement” I had to submit today as part of my final sub.

Learning Statement

For me one of the most interesting and educational things in this Translation course had to do with the differing degrees of modulation as we worked with the various texts (and various versions of the texts) and my reaction to these. At one end of the scale, there was the sticking closely to the bones. This felt pretty familiar and comfortable for me, coming from the perspective of a translator and editor, both of which are really about being a medium for the text from its originator to the source, trying to get a message across as clearly and faithfully as possible (I’m talking not so much about literary translation, but, say, technical).

And then, as I got braver and Peter gave us permission to get freer about playing with structure and form, we moved further down the scale, deviating from the bones more while trying to retain the essence of the work: that’s when I learned about writing and my own process. I think this was most successful for me when we worked on our own writing, or did the “backwards-forwards” poems [throughout the year, we had to post poems that resonated with us in some way. For this exercise, we had to choose one of those poems, break it down to its "bones" (see description here), and then recreate it], an exercise I loved. By really thinking about what I had wanted to say, and to play around with new ways to express it, I kept surprising myself. Towards the end of this semester, I felt like I had had a breakthrough. I know the writing I’ve come up with is not great or perfect or “there yet” by any means, but I have a start and I’m more confident in general. I feel more connected to my own pieces and my own “essence,” what I’m trying to say, to get across; this has felt like a stranger to me at times over the last couple of years, so it’s a relief to shake hands with it again.

I’ve also written some poetry, which is something I haven’t done for a good 15 years. I was surprised to realize how much I loved getting back to it, and I believe it’s helped my other writing: thinking on a microscopic scale about word choice, taking the time to sit down and slow down and be methodical. My biggest disappointment during the course—note I said during and not with!—has been lack of time to truly engage, sit, be still, during this unbelievably busy year. However, I’m coming away with a tool I’ll be able to use going forward.

Another tool learned has been the usefulness of breaking things down into the “bones” as a way of accessing the heart of the piece. This has been essential.

As an example of stuff we’ve done this year, below is a paragraph that came bubbling up out of some bones Peter gave us (I won’t paste them in wholesale, but basically there’s a boy at the end of a trail by a river that sounds like people chanting. He looks up and sees the geese flying; he realizes spring is coming).

He finds trees again at the bottom of the arid mountain, stunted survivor trees bent grudgingly over patches of shade. He sits beneath one of the trees and watches the water. Brown with mud, white with foam, the river tears the landscape apart. He’s trapped; he can’t get across until a ranger on horseback comes. He wonders how the Incas did it, how many they lost. They kept renaming this place: Conconcagua, Canconcagua, Concahua, Aconcagua. The foreign syllables bring a sudden gut-punch of homesickness, a sharp intake of breath. Eyes fixed on the other side of the river, he whispers the words to himself, a chant blending with the rushing roar of the water. He looks upward to find some familiarity in the sky. The sky looks the same wherever you are, even though it’s nearly autumn here, and at home, it’s nearly spring.

So, the end of another course, another phase, winter.

Well, I’m just going to pretend I’ve been posting regularly…!

I’m currently reading Betsy Lerner’s The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers, and I keep being smacked in the face (in a good way) by recognition of myself in the pages. I’m drinking it in; I can’t read it fast enough, but am trying to read it closely enough.

The latest is this, from pages 59-60 of the hardcover edition:

If when you were a child stories took you far away, if characters from books kept you company as you peered out a rainy window and tried to discern that great mystery of how other people live, then you know that books are the most important things in life. If you were drawn to books and in turn to writing, chances are you found the world wanting. You knew that a record had to be kept, or the world or you would disappear. People are motivated to write for a variety of reasons, but it’s the child writer who has figured out, early on, that writing is about saving your soul.

Yes, yes, yes.

This hot on the heels of her statement on page 21 (I am NOT going to quote the entire book, I promise!):

I can assure you that you will never finish any piece of writing if you don’t understand what motivates you to write in the first place and if you don’t honor that impulse, whether it’s exile or assimilation, redemption or destruction, revenge or love.

I think I write to escape, to build new worlds I can take refuge in (not that I need to take refuge in anything now, but I’m building on a long-standing personal tradition). And by the same token, once I started thinking about that, all my characters are trying to escape something, too, to run away from something. (Sorry, this isn’t going to mean much to you, but I’ll note it here for myself: Remy — dealing with his past, himself; James — real life and his inability to form relationships; Madeleine — dealing with what happened to her. Alex is probably the exception; he’s the one who deals with things head on.)

The book came highly recommended and I’m passing on those high recommendations, especially if writing feels unbearably daunting sometimes, as it does to me at the moment…

To pin this down before I lose it again: the Turkey City lexicon. Hilarious and wise reading. I think my favourite is the “As you know, Bob” syndrome…

Have stopped procrastinating, thank God.

And here’s Donald Barthelme’s reading list, before I lose it again:

• Flann O’Brien, At Swim Two-Birds
• Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman
• Isaac Babel, Collected Short Stories
• Borges, Labyrinths
• Borges, Other Inquisitions
• Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
• Thomas Bernhard, Correction
• Rudy Wurlitzer, Nog
• Isaac B Singer, Gimpel the Fool
• Bernard Malamud, The Assistant
• Bernard Malamud, The Magic Barrel
• Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
• Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano,
• Samuel Beckett entire
• Knut Hamsun, Hunger
• Max Frisch, I’m Not Stiller
• Max Frisch, Man in the Holocene
• Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
• Tommaso Landolfi, Gogol’s Wife
• Thomas Pynchon, V
• John Hawkes, The Lime Twig
• John Hawkes, Blood Oranges
• Paley, Little Disturbances
• Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
• Susan Sontag, I, Etc.
• Tillie Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle
• Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces
• Bellow, Henderson the Rain King
• John Updike, The Coup
• John Updike, Rabbit, Run
• The Paris Review interviews
• Rust Hills (ed.), How We Live
• Joe David Bellamy (ed.), Superfiction
• Puschart Prize Anthologies
• Sternburg (ed.), The Writer on Her Work
• André Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism
• Motherwell (ed.), Documents of Modern Art
• Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation
• Hugh Kenner, A Homemade World
• Flaubert, Letters
• Mamet, Sexual Perversity in Chicago
• Joy Williams, The Changeling
• Joe David Bellamy (ed.), The New Fiction
• Tim O’Brien, Going After Cacciato
• Amos Tutola, The Palm-Wine Drunkard
• Ann Tyler, Searching for Caleb
• Kenneth Koch, Thank You
• Frank O’Hara, Collected Poems
• John Ashbery, Rivers and Mountains
• Wesley Brown, Tragic Magic
• Roland Barthes, Mythologies
• Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text
• Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel
• Ann Beattie, Falling in Place
• William Gass, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
• Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life
• Gass, The World Within the Word
• Mailer, Advertisements for Myself
• Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
• Celine, Journey to the End of the Night
• Kobo Abe, The Box Man
• Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
• Peter Handke, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
• Peter Handke, Kaspar and Other Plays
• André Breton, Nadja
• John Barth, Chimera
• Walker Percy, The Moviegoer,
• Jayne Anne Phillips, Black Tickets
• Peter Taylor, Collected Stories
• Colette, The Pure and the Impure
• Carver, Will You Please be Quiet, Please
• John Cheever, Collected Stories
• Leonard Michaels, I Would Have Saved Them if I Could
• Eudora Welty, Collected Stories
• Max Apple, The Oranging of America
• Flannery O’Connor, Collected Stories
• Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo
• Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
• Carlos Fuentes, The Death of Artemio Cruz
• Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
• Wayne C Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction

Thanks to Phil Gyford!

I’d forgotten that via 43things, my past self had sent my future self a reminder about publishing my novel, but I got said reminder today. Normally this would have prompted an attack of the guilts, but as fate would have it, just this morning I popped my very first query letter in the mail. Kismet!

I know nothing is going to come of this other than my very first rejection letter (I’m sending it to the wrong market, but I don’t know where my stuff fits — who on earth publishes books about people and for people who like things like “Lost in Translation” and “Me and You and Everyone We Know” and “Shortbus”?! OK, so maybe I need to make a movie instead), but just sticking it in the postbox felt like an act of faith. And that was quite something.