Tag: writing

Reins on the Whale

Suzanne BiroLeave a comment

I’m smitten by the complicated mask[1]. These last weeks I’ve written my way through what I feel was my greatest point of resistance for the novel in progress[2]. I’ll use this post to list four observations that unpack the resistance—perhaps it ought be resistances plural because it’s not one resistance but many; interrelated, complex, dynamic—and the process I used to write through it/them.  Heavily footnoted …whatevs.

I want to begin with this wisdom, packaged so beautifully, from Alexander Chee, related to writing through the pain parts:

“Also must it be a struggle. Can you leave treats out for this thing you are wrestling with, can you seduce it, or even just get it to sit down and tell you a story? Have you turned what should be a conversation into a struggle for dominance?”

Ah yes. I’m practicing conversations.

First observation (and I think this is important to declare): what I thought my resistance was about was only tangentially related. I discovered—and only through writing—a different avoidance[3].  And it surprised me. I can’t help but quote Joan Didion here because for me it’s the same, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.[4]”

In an earlier post, I wrote about what I thought would be the most difficult section of the novel for me to write and why: the labour and delivery of my first daughter. I believed my resistance writing that experience was due to how my daughter’s birth impacted my marital relationship[5]. Instead—no, in addition—I resisted writing how I felt being “cared for” by the hospital clinical staff. Once I figured this out (through writing) I made myself lean into those memories and the associated emotions and try to report them as authentically as I could in the writing. I’ll come back to this shortly in observations #3 and #4.

Second observation. My resistance was also related to writing against the tidal current of socialised ideas about writing childbirth: it’s navel gazing; no one wants to read it; serious literature eschews it; get over it, women give birth every day, it’s no big deal. Relatedly, I’ve written a previous post about the necessity of killing this phantom, what Virginia Woolf described (though, to be clear, she was not referring to childbirth, she was referring to the experiences of women) as the internalised blocks women writers must learn to write through, “impeded by the extreme conventionality…telling the truth about my own experiences as a body”.

This was the single dahlia blossom on the plant that sheared in a June storm. I’m so grateful it blooms. Table centrepiece.

Writers like Sylvia Plath and Dorris Lessing wrote childbirth scenes…but through a disconnected, third person revulsion of a bestial act[6]. In researching the writing of childbirth in literature, I came across Alice Braun’s fantastic writings and research. Braun’s academic interest focused following her own experiences becoming a mother to “looking for the ways female authors who wrote about themselves had dealt with the immense shock of becoming a mother.”

It’s her description, “immense shock” that resonates with me. It was/is exactly that. The reverberating effects and affects continue to ripple and splash more than a quarter century later.

Anyway, writing through my own experience of childbirth and shaping it into a piece of creative writing …well, I basically wrestled the sharp thorns and gagged the toothy mouth and bound the claws of that persistent phantom each morning I wrote. I worked with its heaving and spluttering shadow in the corner where I’d forced it, beyond my desk, and I ignored its howls each time its muzzle slipped free (which was like, several times each morning).

The reality is there’s a dearth of childbirth details—and here I’m not just referring to the physical gut and gore of it that seems to be the point of disdain for so many readers, I’m talking about how few renderings exist of the emotional experiences of it, the interior cascade and intertwining of physiology and psychology before, during, and after giving birth—in art and literature[7]. But also, in conversations in real life. The emotional experiences are barely visible. Glossed over. Summarised and squashed. Sanitised. It’s uncanny, I think, for an experience that all humans have been a part of since the dawn of human time[8].

Here’s a quote from artist Heather Spears who drew gorgeous scenes of childbirth with pencil and paper:

“For me a great part of the joy I have in drawing is that it has been private, I have gotten into places I never would have experienced otherwise, come close to and witnessed human experience that is secret and fleeting, that takes close observation and sometimes was so difficult that my attention was all that was left; in the words of Rilke, the work absorbed every feeling, everything personal “so there was no residue.”‘

Observation number three: writing this section of the novel (several chapters), I needed to switch methods to be able to render the scenes. I’ve drafted most chapters so far using keyboard and computer. When I began writing the pregnancy and birth scenes I fell into my old avoidance pattern: reporting rather than creative writing, leveraging a distanced, disembodied narrator. I needed to immerse into the sensual and psychological experience and memories, as well as imagination.  So, I began timed writes (30 minutes) using notebook and pencil. Over the years, using this method, I’ve successfully trained myself to let go and write using stream of consciousness. I also force myself to practice this method through regular volunteer work, facilitating writing sessions with the Writer’s Collective of Canada[9].   Interestingly, the writing that came out when writing about pregnancy and childbirth by hand included strong and surprising imagery of giant octopuses and whales.

Here’s an extract, unedited:

“…how the ingredients of hope and dreams in the mind become the fuel and the food what is fed the fetus. This is what I poured into the being, the little fish, the whale inside my stomach. The whale, out in Howe Sound, at that time, rolling beneath the surface so the moon’s light, the beam of it, splitting into a thousand glittering splinters, confetti of light across the sea and beneath the beams made spiral by the shape of waves. How the whale rolls and buoyant lifts, toward the eye of light pulling from the milky way, how th eye of the moon reflects in the dark pool of wet in the whale’s eye and who is seeing who and who is looking at who?”

Instead of assuming this image (which arrived in more than one free write, dreaming its way present) to be irrelevant to my writing of labour and birth, I leaned into it as metaphor.  When I transcribed the pencil writings to the computer, the image of the octopus became the mechanism by which I could describe the pains of labour. Not surprisingly, the image of the whale did the same.  Marine metaphor felt entirely …inevitable.  It was only later, when reading poems about birth in Jess-Cooke’s anthology Writing Motherhood, I was astonished several different poets applied ocean and marine life metaphors and imagery in their creative works.

Final observation, number four, this should not have been a surprise, but it was: the painful emotional memories arrive on the page fractured.  What do I mean by this? I mean the images and scenes written by hand with pencil and paper are scattered…not hooked to a timeline. They are like puzzle pieces thrown into disorder, or that silly card pack game where someone asks if you know how to play 52 pick up before tossing the cards to the air.  A strong narrative line provides the illusion the images and scenes are fitting together along a storyline, but because I know what I am trying to write as part of the novel, I could see how I needed to extract sections and sequence them differently to serve the story better.  This makes me wonder about the use of creative practices for healing emotional pain ….it seems a viable…useful…helpful way to pull splintered pain out of the human body into the body of an artifact.  There’s lots of research on this…I won’t go into it now.  It’s just interesting to be experiencing it first-hand.

Thank you for reading, holding my hand, as I write.

[1] Wary. Intrigued. Wing-tree-ed.

[2] I felt euphoric writing through and past this resistance…it opens me up, confirms I’m able to move forward (not be stuck). I considered buying champagne but felt somehow the gesture premature…I have a lot of work to move through still. A lot. Like, years. Instead, I made a fabulous dinner: five-spiced duck breasts, honeyed cranberry ketchup with a chili kick, celeriac puree, roast carrots, lentils with an astringent vinaigrette (the Lillian in my mind interjects: why do you insist on feeding people lentils?! It’s polarizing! People hate them), saffron and honey poached pears with bars of sugared shortbread. Wine was a Cabernet Franc from France…I would have preferred a Pinot Noir from the Russian River Valley in Oregon, but Canada has boycotted stateside liquor and I can’t justify the cost of a good French Burgandy…I might as well buy champagne …there, how was that little seesaw trip through my thinking, and uh, my stomach?

[3] There is something to do with the physical act of writing…the fine motor coordination of the fingers moving across a keyboard, or better, the soft whisper of pencil or pen across paper that enables …let’s call it enriched communication from the body. This has always interested me, and I may have written it before, but there is a deep interconnection between manual dexterity and cognitive development. Rudolph Steiner, the founder of Waldorf education, had his students (all boys back then, eyeroll) knitting, as well as other ‘hand work’ during lessons to improve learning and thinking.

[4] Although, I disagree with Didion’s position about writing being an aggressive, bullying act. My own take on this, and I’ve written it before, is that the communication between writer and reader is an intimate one, also one of consent. I offer you, as much as I am able, my authentic voice and really, my love; you, as reader, gifts me time and attention. And, when I’m very lucky, also love.

[5] This is a broader exploration in the whole novel…one of a few it seems. When I tell Lillian about the difficulty writing a fictionalised(ish) version of her birth she says, It’s not surprising, it was the beginning of the end. And she’s right. Who knew an ending could be stretched across twenty-five years?

[6] See Alice Braun’s 2022 post, Representing Childbirth in Literature: From Third to First Person. Also, I’ve pulled The Bell Jar off my shelf and intend to read through it from this different angle, birth filtered through a third person narrator illuminating clinician opinions related to medical interventions. Also intend to read Rachel Cusk’s first person rendering of childbirth in A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother.  I have a large reading pile on this specific subject to be honest, some I have read through already but many others lie in waiting…and I recognise my tendency to sink into the pleasure of reading instead of continuing to write forward in this novel project….so…trying to balance this. I did find reading the poems and interviews in Writing Motherhood: A Creative Anthology, edited by Carolyn Jess-Cooke, to be particularly edifying …a kind of cheerleading on the sidelines to KEEP WRITING! AND I am trying to read through the spectacular translation of Olga Ravin’s My Work without weeping uncontrollably (translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell).

[7] It’s interesting how so much (western) art through the ages depicts “the birth of Jesus”. Mary is often painted kneeling, wearing the precious blue pigmented painted dress, pristine and clean…but the imagery is depicted as a serene, divine post-birth event as opposed to any realistic, naked, bleeding, raw rendering. Mary is winsome not wild. It’s a potent communication of how a mother should look/behave immediately following birth…completely idealistic and utterly impossible. Artists who focused a lifetime to develop the technical skills to render life as it really is …I mean, take a look at the miraculous detail of the light captured on folded fabric! Not a drop of blood or hint of pain.  Talk about false advertising!  The message is displayed all over the globe on national gallery walls. Natalie Lennard, also known as Miss Aniela, is a fine-art and commercial photographer who created ‘Birth Undisturbed’ , an award-winning fictional narrative series – here is a fantastic short video of Lennard describing her process to create her real and raw photograph of the Virgin Mary giving birth. Here is Lennan’s personal story about giving birth to Evan, a baby who was stillborn.

[8] A thought, not backed up by any research so hefty grain of salt here…but I wonder, no, I assume, that historically the conversations and experiences of giving birth trace an oral retelling as opposed to a written or artistically rendered one. And perhaps passed through the mouths of women only…As we in the western world have shifted over the last century to a medicalised model of childbirth (which, yes, of course, has drastically reduced mortality rates for mothers and infants, there is no denying this proven fact), we have (I mean women) surrendered the communal emotional supports and knowledge which would have been such a part of any birth in the past. I missed this. I wanted this. I think my own experience would have been less terrorizing and my recovery, I’m referring to my psychological recovery, would have been better supported and swifter.

[9] It’s a very simple and empowering method: a writing prompt is provided (e.g., write about burning a bridge), often taking inspiration from poems or images; everyone writes together in silence for 10 minutes; we take turns reading what we wrote aloud; people respond to the writing by saying what stood out for them, what they loved in the piece; there is no critique or suggestion for improvement. The writing I have been fortunate to hear in these sessions is absolutely beautiful and authentic. Facilitators write and read too.

Acrobatic Cats

Suzanne Biro2 Comments

I’m back writing the long project—a novel (!)—after taking a break[1]. Writing that post last month…well, it opened a gentle but week-long weepy grief. I do not know, exactly, what I grieve…but the sorrow wants (needs?) to come out. Maybe this is why I write… to transform it into a container outside the boundaries of my skin so I don’t drown in it. To see it and know it and share it…and through sharing, an offering of deep connection.  

For many years I believed if I cried, I would never be able to stop. And I worried I’d need to be hospitalised[2].  But my grief doesn’t operate like that. Instead, it seeps into my days and then one morning I wake and my eyelids snap open and my body feels lighter and my immediate thought is: I’m okay, I’m going to be okay. 

A thought: I climbed a lot of trees as a kid, and I fell out of them frequently. Unlike the lithe performance of falling cats, I always landed on my back with a thump that knocked the breath from my chest. Waking after episodes of weepy grief feels kinda similar. No bones broken, breath returning, ambient sounds roaring back to awareness, fingers and toes wiggling: I’m okay, I’m going to be okay. 

I tried—stubbornly, I know (!)— to force the writing through weeping and moping. Surprise! It clenched up, too concerned with itself. Roped and showy, a bow tied blowhard at a barbecue. Devoid of humour or light. Verbose, abstract, imprecise and rushing the scenes like a circus with a train to catch[3]. 

So, I took a break. 

I took a week off to drive with Willa (daughter #2) and her partner Nadine to Halifax, Nova Scotia, helping their move there[4]. I vowed to collect small beauties along the way. There were many; I’ll relay a few.  

One of the wonderful moments of the long two-day drive was arriving halfway, in Edmundston New Brunswick, as the sun was pooling the darkening horizon apricot with shots of violet and pinking the bellies of clouds.  Willa and I took turns driving her car, an ancient Hyundai replete with tattered remnants of some previous owner’s purple tinted windows and no air conditioning. We followed Nadine’s family who were towing a U-Haul trailer. All of Nadine’s family travelled to send Nadine off (and yes, this caused me pangs of envy tbh): dad, mom, grandfather (lolo in Tagalog), teen brother and Willa and Nadine’s pet cat, Sapho. He was a barn cat “rescued” from the farm and I’m pretty sure he knows how to play a banjo. He has stunted squirrel sized ears and copper eyeballs that can look in two directions at once. But that cat got game: demonic strength, steely resolve and the acrobatics of an anemone in a rip tide when anyone tries to put him in a travel box. Willa and Nadine walked around with shredded forearms, no biggie. Sapho spent the drive languishing on his spine between headrests on the back seat, oblivious and disinterested in any escape at gas stations. Why leave when you are so well loved?  I was glad to trade the cat (and his litter box) for no air conditioning. 

Anyway, back to arriving in Edmundston. Willa had driven the latest relay and, as we folded ourselves from our seats in the Days Inn parking lot, she greeted Lolo with a long phrase of Tagalog unspooling effortlessly from her lips. I was stunned! I didn’t know she was learning the language. Then Lolo replied and Nadine punched him, playfully, in the shoulder. Later it was explained to me that Willa had said, It’s a beautiful evening, and Lolo had replied, Yes, but not as beautiful as you are. 

Willa and Nadine’s apartment in Halifax that they had rented by touring it remotely and briefly through the cracked screens of their phones, was…recovering (I’m praying) from a recent cockroach infestation (the cockroaches had eaten the stove; a new one was set for delivery at some point later in the week). The lease was signed for a year and my close reading of the NS legislation (on the tiny screen of my own phone) confirmed there was no getting out of it. So, after a significant donation to Canadian Tire for cleaning and bug proofing supplies, we unloaded and performed a minor sanitization miracle over the ensuing days (and a new stove was delivered and the black moulded caulking lining the bathroom was replaced with new). 

Willa and I interspersed cleaning duty with sightseeing, taking in the beauty of the ocean and the beach and the sodium air. We toured the Art Gallery of Nova Scota and experienced the joy-imbued works of Maude Lewis. Her tiny house she shared with her husband has been moved to the gallery as a permanent exhibit. Peeking through the windows reveals the magic wonder she painted almost every surface of the cabin’s insides: stairs, walls, tables, chairs, shelves, doors…all covered in bright coloured flowers and animals and evidence of the living world around her, glowing and brimming with joy. Her husband painted too to help her keep up with the demands of patrons out of sync with creative process. I loved how he painted his eyelashes on his red cows…sweetly, gently, with care. 

Nadine asked what my favorite work in the gallery had been. My answer surprised me, but it was accurate. There is a massive Kent Monkman painting, Breaking Waves. But there are two smaller works exhibited alongside it, studies created as part of the process for the larger work. My favourite piece in the whole gallery was an 8×11 pencil sketch of the planned project which had as much handwriting on it as pictures. I could see the artist’s thought process in the pencil lines and the conceptual meanings toyed with. 

We ate clams from Malagash (north coast of NS) with chorizo coconut broth washed down with a Stillwell IPA. A transportive dish in the mouth, splashing tastebuds with flavours from across oceans.  

While away, I read N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn and fell swooning into his poetry rendered on every page but also his lines about the sacredness of language:

“My grandmother was a storyteller…she taught me how to live among her words, how to listen and delight…the simple act of listening is crucial to the concept of language, more crucial even than reading and writing…that old woman was asking me to come directly into the presence of her mind and spirit; she was taking hold of my imagination, giving me to share in the great fortune of her wonder and delight. She was asking me to go with her to the confrontation of something that was sacred and eternal. It was a timeless, timeless thing; nothing of her old age or of my childhood came between us.[5]”

And Wendell Berry passed away. A line from one of his poems, The Wild Rose, became a kind of mantra for me for many years, reminding me each day that staying married was a choice[6]. I came across Berry’s writings through his food and farming essays before I read his poetry. More interesting is this essay, written by Gracy Olmstead in Front Porch Republic, about Tanya Berry and a book of her photography capturing the practice of hog killing. 

This month, Lillian begins her “professional job” in Hogtown (Toronto); she has been with me on and off over the last few months trying to land one. When she stays with me, she exudes heavy exasperation, for, well, everything (it’s hard being twenty-five and living with your mom), but especially when swinging open the kitchen cupboards or staring into the fridge to complain, There’s nothing in here! What the hell do you eat, nuts and seeds?! I find this puzzling; my cupboards and fridge are stocked. I gather she means something prêt-à-porter. She’s an excellent cook but man oh man when she’s hungry? There’s no fuse shorter on a stick of dynamite. I used to toss almonds and bananas into the car’s backseat when I drove her home after elementary school, but my attempts to soothe the starving beast were lost to her roars. Dinner had to be on the table by 6 pm each evening…6:05 and the whole house crashed inwards, wails and arguments that always ended in tears. Mine mostly. She’s a kid (and an adult) who thrives on routine and I got her into competitive swimming very early on to blow the energy out of her. Can you tell I’m gearing up to write about her? She knows of course; she has an excellent sense of humour, though she has asked me to change her name AND ha ha my own.

As I thought about writing this little vignette, I was eating tomatoey Moroccan spiced chickpeas I’d made and warmed before adding minced mint and parsley harvested from my patio planters. I piled the chickpeas on top of raggedy bits of torn, well toasted, sourdough (I like the edges …well, burnt, ha (!), the crusty caramelization is delicious – I continue to make bread; it’s part of my staple diet), topped with two olive oil fried eggs (local, yolks sun coloured and runny), several grinds of black pepper and crumpled feta cheese. I have learned, after many years, Lillian’s exasperation and, ahem, constructive criticism, derives from a deep well of care and concern (she worries I don’t eat enough protein among other things). While eating my delicious lunch I enjoyed a terrific laugh reading Nick Cave’s latest Red Hand Files. 

My application to the Kingston Writer’s Fest advanced fiction workshop was accepted so I spent another week polishing up a short story I originally wrote…good gawd, over ten years ago?!  I’ve come back to it intermittently over the years and even workshopped it before with Rabih Alameddine[7] and a terrifying literary-criticism crowd who behaved not unlike, come to think of it, Sapho’s dislike of the cat carrier. The story attempts to embody the idea (yeah, I know, first wrong move: starting with an idea) of food system interconnectedness and our complicit participation in a system that profits off violence and marginalization and really, slavery. You won’t be surprised the writing is devoid of humour and hauls in a hefty seasoning of bleak but very Canadian blasé, token nod to colonialism, lost in the barrens with whining winds, tumble weed and prairie grasses freezing over in a midnight blizzard je ne sais quoi[8].  

Alemeddine’s feedback: “SoWhat?!”  He was yelling. “So what? We know this is bad and sad,” his tone turned simpering and mocking, “everyone knows, nobody cares. Why should we care? What do you want us to do about?” Us. Meaning readers.

I sat with his feedback, grasping strands of my hair and putting them back into place after the blow, and you know, I realized he was absolutely right (though, to be sure, weak on sensitivity and delivery). 

It took me many years to figure out that I need the protagonist in the story to be faced with a choice: system versus human. She chooses human but risks losing her nurse’s license. I have rewritten the story along these lines…it falls short…not false modesty, I know it’s not there yet.  So.  A good one to workshop. 

I have returned to writing the novel in progress. Knowing I am working through the most difficult sections of the story, I have started to write by hand with pencil in my notebook …a place where the writing feels les precious and I am more intimately connected with my hands.  Interestingly, transcribing from there to the computer expands the writing, e.g., two short, penciled paragraphs became six paragraphs and an exchange of dialogue that is 1400 words in digital format.  I’m trying to quell the scream about this story getting too long. Too long for what? She scoffed. It’s fun!  

Okay…I’ll leave it there. So many small beauties in any day to catch us falling so we twist amidst the firmament, almost dancing, to land, lightly, on our feet. 

[1] I read somewhere (Substack? It seems lost to the mists…) that one ought to claim—emphatically—that one’s project is writing a novel.  So, closing in on 50, 000 words drafted, yes, I am writing a novel. (current count: 49, 881). An aside: a friend suggested this blog is my “long project”. Perhaps it is. 

[2] My thoughts on this may seem overly dramatic, but my father experienced what was termed “a psychotic break” in 2003; he was hospitalised for six months. I intend to write about the experience in the novel…the episode, and the years following. In that strange movement of unexpected reversals, it enabled he and I to establish a relationship of respect and a kind of love we had never shared previously. He softened and I opened myself to it. But I sense (and worry), perhaps not directly through a genetic disposition…more a suggestion of having been witness to his “break”…how close the line is between this reality and the perception of another, how easily it may be crossed, by which I mean, how easily I might cross over myself.  Grief feels precipitously close…so I have learned to give grief respect and time and space. I know writing this so plainly (as well as last month’s post) is not always received well by readers. Though my porcelain-thin transparency may give the impression I’m broken or easily shattered, rest assured, my will is wrought of iron. It’s just, I have to remind myself sometimes. Writing and posting my thoughts here proves it to myself, and if you are still reading, I’m grateful. You too, are courageous.  

[3] Good gawd, I’m on a manic upswing, I mean, just look at the number of images crammed into that little paragraph!

[4] Nadine transferred from OCAD to NSCAD; Willa is working at a coffee shop at Lawrencetown Beach 

[5] These are lines taken from pages 83 and 84 of the fiftieth anniversary edition, HarperPerrenial Modern Classics, 2018. There is a longer passage reflecting on “the white man’s world” of language …how it “has diluted and multiplied” and how we have become insensitive “for the Word itself—as an instrument of creation”. And he goes on to explain the beauty of his thinking “words were medicine; they were magic and invisible. They came from nothing into sound and meaning. They were beyond price; they could neither be bought nor sold. And she never threw her words away.”  Amen.

[6] I know this was not Berry’s intention in his poem, nevertheless, this is how I chose to interpret it. It’s the final lines of the poem I repeated frequently in my own mind: choosing again what I chose before. I’m not kidding, every morning for a few years, I repeated this line to myself. I explained it to my then husband too but he focused on the words and missed the meaning. 

[7] You gotta hit that link!   I might have skipped the workshop if I’d seen the pic. Or at least had a better idea of what I was signing up for.  

[8] That, my non-literary friends (and yes, I’m looking down from upon my high horse) is a perfect example of what we call hyperbole. High per be olé! And for my literary friends, ignore the grammatical stretching. 

The Hell of Mirrors

Suzanne Biro3 Comments

I waffled about this post. Writing it. Sharing it. But here’s the thing…I committed writing this blog to address the process of my own writing practice. 

Working through (pushing through) during points of resistance is very much a part of the process. And writing about it here helps me to “see” it and understand it better…and, I guess, work with it.

Pushing through resistance is part of the medium.

Recent (i.e., used in the last couple of weeks) strategies that (intentionally? unconsciously? yes) slow or detract from writing towards the long project book-length work underway:

  1. Veering off into researching (just this week it has been: where/when the belief about photographs stealing souls came from; oxytocin (attachment hormone) and its relation with social emotional functioning; long term impacts and consequences of men who experience trauma witnessing their partners giving birth (the heart of what I’m avoiding writing about); liberation psychology and its founder, Ignacio Martín-Baró)[1].
  2. Reworking a very small piece of writing (<250 words) for submission to River Teeth Journal, specifically their submission window for Beautiful Things.[2]  
  3. Participating in a focus group, as well as being part of a panel to talk about starting creative writing sessions in public libraries with the Writer’s Collective of Canada[3].
  4. Attending physio appointments to help heal my left wrist (stupid injury: scooting fast across Princess Street, carrying two bags of groceries, I tripped the lip of the sidewalk and came down with all my weight onto my left wrist and right elbow…strawberries went flying…eight people lunged to try to catch me but I was too fast for them…gawd it was embarrassing. And I haven’t injured myself in years!). Bonus: the physio guy is a very beautiful man; I’m mesmerised watching his fingers manipulate my forearm while he regales me with epics about he and his wife travelling in Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Egypt[4]. 
  5. Signing up for a couple of local creative writing workshops[5].
  6. Writing this blog post during time “reserved” for long project writing instead of writing it on a weekend[6]. 

Huh. That’s a longer list than I thought. 

                  Researching (#1 above) is my default. Yes, I remain curious about so many things …but it’s also a way for me to feel comfortable, hiding behind the metaphorical wall of academic knowledge (and its seductive illusion of authority). [Deleted: paragraphs of run on writing trying to escape having to lay out the next sentences here.] One (the main? I have no idea) thrust of my book-length work is to illuminate, as authentically as I am able, using a fictionalised approach, my own experience of how the birth of our first child impacted sexual intimacy between my then-husband and I.

The emotional vortex associated with this forces me to be blunt and factual. Lillian’s birth, 25 years ago, was three days of labour, an ambulance ride between two hospitals, the use of high forceps with the physician’s leg up on the mattress/table for leverage, ripping and tearing of my insides and outsides requiring substantial stitching, inside and outside[7]. My husband believed I would die. He thought the baby might die too, but in the moment this was a lesser concern. The pain was so intense, I wished and wanted to die. I probably screamed that out loud. My changing body during pregnancy and the violence of labour and birth impacted my husband’s attraction to me as a woman…read: he was no longer attracted to me. We did not talk about the fact he was no longer attracted to me because we did not know or understand the emotional rupture was caused by the physical one. Trying to have sex with someone who you are no longer attracted to reduces the frequency and quality of sexual intimacies. My husband explained he was not attracted to me because: I had put on too much weight; I gave too much of my attention to raising our children (which, I did); I was no longer the pretty young woman he had fallen in love with. I felt deeply ashamed and…surprise…deeply unattractive (so I flirted, though not outrageously, with other men but never crossed the line into consummating an actual affair…though I fantasised several in my mind during our twenty-five-year marriage). We never spoke about this…it never came up in ten years of marriage counselling because we did not acknowledge—to ourselves—the arresting of sexual intimacy due to the violence of giving birth as “a thing” at the root of so many other issues. An insidious pain.

 When I finally had the ability to voice a version of the previous paragraph to my therapist (circa 2020-21?), it came out as a hoarse whisper in a voice that was physically painful to move up and out of my body[8]. It was as if I were hauling out a heavy bowling ball from my stomach, squeezing it up through my esophagus and rolling it past my teeth and out my mouth. A physical pain becoming voiced.  

Why is my long project devoted to this? I guess it’s for three reasons. The first is so that I can understand the whole experience, “in the round”, for myself[9]. The second is that this is a subject that is rarely acknowledged or spoken about. In researching, I was interested to discover there are support groups for people having experienced or witnessed a traumatic birth in the UK. There are supports in Canada now too, though they cost money. For me, the difficult birth was only the beginning of pains to come. The third reason I’m writing this is because I can’t seem to write anything else without related themes and pains bubbling up and out of me to the page. Read: I need to write this to get it out of the way so I can write other things I’m also interested in. Or maybe to be able to tell the same story better, more eloquently, more elegantly, with beauty. I don’t know. At present it’s expressed messily …there is no other way I seem to be able to pull it out of me. 

A fourth reason: by writing this long form I am learning how to write long form. 

Another issue I’m struggling with is trying to portray Fanboy (the protagonist’s husband in the story) in a balanced way. I don’t want him to be villainized; I want to present a complex character with qualities that are sensitive and kind. My issue is that, so far, I’ve been unable to write him this way. And when I do write him, he’s coming out worse …more unkind, more insensitive[10]. I think that’s why I wrote the short piece about my father, trying to cram some pill shaped analysis of growing into a compassion for a person who, in real life, has been very broken by the effects of war and revolution and immigration and racism. 

Working with my therapist (man, she’s come up a lot in this post…I’m very fortunate to be working with her) we have managed to narrow down my experiences of anxiety to a distinct presentation pattern: it kicks off when I’m trying to voice my own thoughts or opinions about something that is deeply meaningful to me, in public.

So. 

Here we are at the root reasons for my resistance. Unpacked, dancing around so nakedly here in the mirror, my writing reticence shows itself as A COMPLETELY HUMAN ANIMAL REACTION to working with difficult emotional material. I wish I could write it better.  I wish I could write it beautifully. I wish I could write it straight.  

Suzanne: give yourself some grace. 

I’m writing it. 

Thank you for reading; it keeps me writing. Really. 

[1] Reading this list, I realise how much pressure I’m putting on myself to try to integrate some of these learnings ….which is in complete opposition to the flow necessary for loose creative writing that will offer up the gifts of creativity. I am driving myself nuts most days just trying to loosen up …not be so tightly wound…let go…

[2] This piece is about my dad and I in a canoe …I’m very young, too little to paddle…the piece pulls in the imagery of the tornado shape and sound made in the water off the tip of a J-stroke and compares that to the emotional storms in my father’s body having been witness to atrocities during the Hungarian revolution…how he wrestled with anger and a hair trigger temper raising his kids …but I wanted the piece to encompass the idea that in sharing those beautiful quiet moments with him in the canoe…they allowed me, as an adult, to understand his anger was born of fear, to allow that as a person, he was complicated. The writing in this short piece failed to capture what I was after …and the writing itself, poetic and cryptic and stuffing images on top of images…I’d reverted back to my (default?) pattern: too much for the reader to take in at once…missing crafting in breathing space/white space for a reader to settle with an image or an idea and feel it.  And ha ha …had to admit…how the hell do I remember tracking the whorl off his J-stroke when I would have been sitting in the middle of the canoe and he would have been steering from the back?  This means someone else was in the canoe and he was in the front …but I have no idea who that would have been. Piece is shelved for now. 

[3] In both of these zoom calls, gathering volunteers from across Canada, I experienced, again, attacks of anxiety …deeply uncomfortable—it feels like a knot of cold in my stomach, coupled with an inability to breathe…wait, no, it’s the feeling of not being able to breathe but the body still continues to breathe, though it labours to do so—also extremely embarrassing as my voice fails to project and I work very hard to get what it is I’m trying to say out of my mouth.   

[4] I am starved for touch. 

[5] For me, this is a sure sign of …was going to write procrastination but no, that’s not the right word…resistance is the right word. Worse, maybe it’s pining for validation. Ugh. For one of the workshops, the author was a no-show (eye roll). The other one, scheduled for October, is for a full day workshop as part of the Kingston Writer’s Fest.  I have a chip on my shoulder about the KWF…it boils down to feeling like an outcast whenever I’ve attended sessions over the years.  Obviously, this speaks more to my personal insecurities as opposed to the KWF. If I’m honest, part of the reason I applied is that it’s a competition for one of twelve spots in the workshop and maybe I’m looking to feel and confirm a certain level of outrage when/if my writing (the application required submission of 1000 word fiction example) is declined. I know, this is a very bad reason to sign up for writing workshop. If I get in, I will be an angel and support the other writers who are there, I promise. 

[6] I wish I was a person who is not so regimented …I’m tempted to make a joke about being tightly wound (the beautiful physiotherapist called me “special” because my muscles are so tight “they should be written up in a textbook”)…but the deeper truth of it is that I grew up with a lot of unpredictability; adhering to a schedule makes me feel calm and comfortable, conditions necessary for creative work. It also reduces the number of decisions I need to make in a day, and it ensures that I make consistent, small-step efforts toward my creative work. A critical ache in me taunts me to wonder whether adhering to a schedule means I’m a lesser artist. I try to ignore this ache, stupid for so many reasons. This too requires energy. 

[7] I healed completely. Physically.  

[8] Writing this paragraph was also physically challenging: thumping heart, tears, difficulty breathing, cold in the stomach, shaking. It took an hour. More. I have, in recent years, spoken to friends about the experience and I have discussed it openly with Lillian and Willa, my two daughters, too. 

[9] Yes, writing it is a form of therapy. I rarely articulate what I’m specifically writing about with other people, instead I describe the writing as exploring the dissolution (disillusion?) of a marriage nested in my family’s stories.  A fictionalised version. Many people will quip: So, it’s a form of therapy. And this feels…minimizing…I receive it a s a sort of criticism…that what I am writing is definitely not literary and definitely not interesting to the majority of readers…it’s simply navel gazing. It stings because there is truth in it: I am navel gazing …my head so far up my own ass, I’m looking at you from the inside-out, from the gut punched belly buttoned knot of my bruised insides.  

[10] Having a lot of cognitive dissonance over this.  Is it because I’m angry at my husband IRL? Am I? Not really. Is it because I don’t know what kindness might look like? That can’t be right.  Is it because I don’t have enough distance? Is it because I’m unskilled rendering character into words? Do I lack imagination? The questions spiral dark and deep to pierce the pain at its hot point: I’m infuriated…fucking outraged (!) at myself for staying in such a situation and being so fucking innocent and so stupid and not having the fucking balls to question it sooner. [I talk a lot about this with my therapist; she reminds me I did not have the knowledge then that I have now and that I chose to stay in the relationship to be able to raise my children in a stable environment. Yes. I know these things; I remain livid with myself. She says: give yourself some grace.]  

Bare with Bas Bleu

Suzanne BiroLeave a comment

Walking the other day, I noticed the children’s song, The Bear Went Over the Mountain, was looping my mind. I laughed when my attention turned to listen and name it; it was communicating a valuable message. Before that I’d simply endured its irritating, repetitive, background noise while thinking (trying to think) More Meaningful Thoughts about this long form writing project (MMTs…always in pursuit of these…but my brain tosses in a distracting salad of grilled cheese sandwiches, an itchy elbow, whether it might rain, taxes, etc.). 

The bear went over the mountain (repeat, repeat, repeat), to see what she could see (repeat, repeat, repeat), and all that she could see (repeat, repeat, repeat), was the other side of the mountain (repeat, repeat, repeat). 

Yes. Exactly. Summitting (aka, completing the long form project) might only provide a different view of the exact same thing…though, of course, I’m moving in my learning journey, physically and emotionally. (Remember this, Suzanne.)

  I’ve been spending (wasting) too much energy worrying about “the end product” of this long form writing project. I find it’s a continuous practice to keep myself calm and to just settle into the process of making without wondering if the creative decisions I’ve made (and continue to make) are…quel est le mot?… there are lots of mots: crazy, loco, cracked, barking, batty, barmy…

“You’re writing a novel then?” someone asked me recently after I’d bored them with an inordinately long diatribe about what I’m creating, this chaos of stories collected into a circling container that is “book length”.

“Yeeaahheesssss….I think so?” For some reason I have a lot of trouble naming and speaking about my long project writings as a novel. I don’t know why.  It’s a description I can’t quite embody. But ho ho ho-boy-oh-boy I can embody crazy!  So…here goes, a long project progress update baring the details of my current creative insanity.

(Note: if you’re looking to watch the video of the public reading I participated in on Sunday, feel free to skip the Micro/Meso/Macro level mountain of details and scroll to the bottom of this post.) 

Micro Level (sentence) 

This project uses a lot of different registers: a loquacious (and uh, sometimes pretentious) intellectual formality, lyrical elegance (I hope) combined with slapstick and potty humour; elements of research (so far (my gawd): social factors affecting methylation patterns impacting gene expression; combat fatigue following WWII; history of the pee-on-a-stick pregnancy test; labour and birth protocols; policy and legislation related to adoption; history of Formula One motorsport engine design and racing…don’t worry, these aren’t integrated with a heavy hand…I hope…more light brushstrokes of interest, contextual textures…I hope); literary references (yes, these are sneaking their way in, I can’t help it); and pop-culture references, mostly movie lines.  

“You’re so conceited Claire.[1]”

In the process of writing, I’ve discovered that a few characters, namely the protagonist Claire’s sibling characters (Nyree, Mohan and The Wailing Baby) often intrude with lines of dialogue inside Claire’s mind. I resisted this for a few weeks of writing and then, when I surrendered to instinct (swift kick in the bum of my intuition), allowing those voices to speak in the way they were revealing themselves on the page, I struggled with how to signal the interjections in a way that is clear for a reader to follow. I mean, these are characters who are part of actual story scenes but then they also come in during scenes where they are not part of the action as “the voices in Claire’s head”. That’s confusing. 

In a blog I used to write about cooking and marriage, the voice of my then-husband (the Gearhead) was so strong in my own mind I depicted his—though, I imagined them— interjections (dialogue and observations) using square brackets to signal them, here’s an example: 

“Wife as a noun is simply the tacky plastic figurine that tops the wedding cake; it’s not even the icing. [Gearhead edits: wow, someone got up on the wall side of the bed today. I’m feeling so loved]. [Wife edits: you should, love is a verb. I work really hard at it. I’m a love athlete, an Olympic level lover.]”

But in my current project, the combination of italicized movie lines popping in willy nilly amidst the text and square brackets for “sibling in the mind” lines and the use of square brackets in a way that is not usually applied, made me worry it was too confusing for a reader to follow. Also, when the “sibling in the mind” lines plopped down following a paragraph of scene, even with a bit of white space or a paragraph break, it made the interjection feel too abrupt. 

I also wanted to include brief descriptions of what the “sibling in the mind” might be doing, to provide an image of the character the reader can “see”. Nyree, for example, is always smoking a cigarette or a joint (love that a spliff is also called a “dog walker”); Mohan, most often the mouth of potty humour, uses gestures and facial expressions that I feel enhance the line of dialogue. So….how to do this technically? How to achieve this signal to the reader more smoothly? I struggled, trying different things and making a right mess of different approaches in different chapters and not settling on one strategy. 

This problem was solved when I rediscovered a saved short story, written by Rivka Galchen, How I Became A Vet.  The protagonist in Galchen’s story has the figure of her father speaking to her in her mind, as follows: 

“I spoke to the father in my mind. In reality, my father was in Kansas and I was in Colorado and I strongly dislike speaking on the phone, but this father in my mind is kind and useful and a good listener, too. I told him that people are often unhappy in our waiting room, and that was an immutable truth. He said, Do you like working there, with all those sad people? I often pictured you working more with the worried well, you know? Maybe on a farm. Remember when we met that sheep who was very sociable and not afraid, not like the other sheep? I often think of that sheep, he said.”

And: 

“To the small puppet of my father that I keep in my mind, I said, So many well-meaning people and small-minded people, too, told me nothing would come of me, and yet here I am, replete with skills.[2]”

Meso Level (compositional elements) 

Good grief this post is already far too long, and I haven’t quite revealed the depth of my cocoloco. So, briefly, Meso alterations to date may be summed up as follows:  I have a lot of characters, so I’ve started to collapse a few of them into each other. They serve the fiction better this way (and oddly, introduce more tension as they weave cameos in and out along the narratives unfolding, also providing levels of additional meaning…it seems…early days still, so TBD). 

Macro Level (Structure) 

This project is committed (read: I’m committed[3]) to a compositional ring structure. Some orientation for the ring structure diagram to date (it has been updated from earlier versions) pictured below. It’s meant to be read clockwise, beginning at noon and moving around the circle from there. The pink/purple toned boxes indicate (at this point) eight different sections. Each section is made up of chapters (number varies, no set pattern) hanging (loosely) around a theme. The theme is depicted in blue block letters beneath each pink/purple section box. The different pink/purple toned boxes round the circle show how different sections “mirror” each other across the ring, the second half in mirror opposite to the first (i.e., the light pink section one (theme: falling in love) is mirrored by the light pink section eight (theme; falling out of love). The turn (sometimes referred to as the story climax, though, in this structure it’s more about when things turn around to head back to the beginning) is at the six o’clock position (at present anyway…I suspect sections 4, the turn, and section 5 will blend into each other as I get there). Each section is anchored with a return to the same scene. Here’s the diagram:

I also needed another way of seeing how the stories, drawn from different times in the protagonist’s life, are integrating together to form a wholistic ..what? book? Novel?  Thing. There are five different time periods that story components are derived from. I call them “time pockets”. In order to make sure I don’t get too far afield from any set of character interactions, I colour coded the time pockets to ensure that within each section, the chapters (which are set within distinct time pockets) are balanced. I don’t expect the reader will tune into this (or be signalled to do so), but (I hope) it will create a sort of rhythm that is entertaining to read, more felt than known. I also like the associative hanging together resonances the time periods, placed side by side, create. I am not dictating a distinct pattern here, I’m simply gesturing toward a sense of balance[4].   Here’s the colour coded list of sections and chapters and their respective word counts:

Some personal observations about long form creative writing compared with shorter forms:

  1. It’s exhausting. I feel sooooo tired at the end of writing days. 
  2. There is a lot (a lot!) of administrative organisation work that is separate and distinct from creative work. I imagine this is where a lot of creatives struggle. Including me. I’m messy. Admin work includes file organisation, version control, project oversight to keep content and story timelines aligned (i.e., change one detail in chapter 20 and you need to go back and update chapters 1-3, 6, 17 and 19 where you may have mentioned that detail ….and a search and find and replace button just can’t level up to the task, it just can’t, it requires rewriting to fit the new angle). 
  3. The process of writing long is not done in discreet “whole story” steps— “first draft”, “second draft”, “nthdraft”—as it’s often referred to in creative writing craft essays and books.  It is ITERATIVE[5]. So, for the word count and chapters chart pictured above, many (all?) of those chapters have been touched and re-touched a few times already …and they will continue to be rewritten and refined, over and over and over and over …the mountain [of this work[6]].  
  4. Reading an extract of a longer work at a public reading doesn’t achieve the same transaction of energy with an audience…the reading hangs and the audience can’t quite connect to the story in the same satisfying way that sharing a short story or a poem can achieve. Here’s the video of me reading in the Prince Edward County Dime Stories event last weekend[7]. 

I’m humming a different song in my head today as opposed to my mountain laid bare. Thank you for reading. Vraiment merci. 

[1] This is a line from the 1985 movie The Breakfast Club. It’s a line my siblings (IRL) toss my way all the time, to bring me down a peg when I become too condescending. It serves in the long form project the same way, a text-based interjection interrupting other blocks of text that focus elsewhere but, when placed side by side, the two elements create a resonance with additional meaning…almost like a second language.  This example here, in this blog post, is also the method I’m using to incorporate the movie lines, italicizing the line, inserting a hyperlink to the scene (to keep track of its source), and embedding information about the line in a footnote. 

[2] It is only now, in the writing of this post, that I discover two aspects of Galchen’s technique I want to apply in my own writing (and missed in my initial applications…ugh…go back over my chapters again and integrate this change). First, the protagonist doesn’t just hear the voice of her father in her head, she also talks back to it!  Two-way conversation, which, yes, it’s what we all experience I think, talking to ourselves, hearing the voices of others…this is the salient point I want to integrate into my project to acknowledge the impact of various levels of environmental influences on human behaviours. Second, the lines of dialogue here don’t use quotations to signal the dialogue. I’ve always liked this, but I rarely feel confident integrating the technique in my own writing. So…an opportunity to practice AND a subtle way to distinguish different “types/occasions” of speaking, i.e., inside the protagonist mind versus outside in story scene. 

[3] Should I be committed? Maybe.  There are much simpler ways to write a book.  I don’t know why I’ve chosen this most difficult of structures with which to pin the pieces of my story to. Except I do…I like that the shape echoes the shapes of living/lives. Cycles (seasonal, developmental, relational, rhythmic) and mirrors (the tension of holding oppositions at once, comparisons, juxtapositions, the structure of chromosomes, patterns, memory, socio-cultural influences and impacts on self and identity). “You’re so conceited Claire!! “ Yeah, thanks Ny.  I don’t know if working with this structure will succeed. But I feel I gotta try it. My intuition bum tells me to.  So. It works until it doesn’t. The bear went over the mountain…

[4] The other thing too is that I don’t anticipate trying to repeat the time pocket pattern in the second half of the ring structure….that feels too…meta (and I want this whole project to feel organic as opposed to mechanical ….in fact, that’s a major symbolic exploration in this work: Claire’s character is all about life and nourishment and flesh and joy and Fanboy (the character of Claire’s husband) is all about metal, inert objects, mechanical technologies, surfaces that rust and decay. 

[5] And feels very similar to conducting qualitative research projects. And I can hear the masses of creative people say: Well duh?! Of course it’s iterative. But for people who are more rule bound or comfortable with a clear protocol or following a recipe, the loose description category of ‘numbered drafts’ can be misleading. The process is more of an immersion in the stream of making as opposed to jumping from rock to rock to cross it. Maybe the process is different for everybody, maybe even for every project…this is the way it is feeling for me and this project. 

[6] It is rewarding. I’m not complaining. Not really. Kinda sorta …but ha ha ha it’s fun to complain sometimes. 

[7] It is not visible in the video (unlike my linebacker shoulders), but when the woman before me was reading my heart started to crash in my chest and I felt really panicky but I breathed slowly, practicing the slow inhale, the slow exhale and told my heart it was okay and safe and by the time I got up the podium it had calmed enough that my breath was even and steady (and controllable).

In the Mouth of Canon

Suzanne Biro2 Comments

After a morning of writing the other day and frustrated by how my efforts feel so far below the level of skill I aim for, I was huffing up Fort Henry’s steep grass slope towards its eastern defensive wall. I was grumbly and hot and completely in my head, stomping my way up, arguing with myself about the necessity of practicing, the only way to learn, improve and trying to quell the taunting little voice that floated the idea I might never get there. Despite the punishing heat and humidity, I refused to pause (I’m trying to improve my slope stamina…just ‘cause)[1]. I was quite out of breath and I’m sure quite fuchsia when I reached the hilltop where it faces the dry ditch separating the slope from the outer defensive wall.  There was a man standing on the inner side of the fort’s limestone, taking in the view of Lake Ontario, the St Lawrence River and Deadman’s Bay (indeed, the almost dead in addition to the dead were dropped by boat to a clapboard sided hospital and temporary morgue on the eastern shore, outbuildings that burned down long long ago). 

“Have you ever been to Fort Henry?” said the man. He had a Brooklyn accent but explained he was from Toronto.    

What an odd question, I thought, I’m standing here directly in front of you[2]. But of course, he mistook me for a tourist, I mean, why else would I be on the scorched grass, facing the mouths of cannons? I explained I walked the perimeter frequently and often swim off the point between Deadman’s Bay and Navy Bay[3]. I was heading there next. I was struggling to catch my breath, but I was proud I hadn’t had to stop and rest on my ascent. I turned around to take in the spectacular water view and, I’m not kidding, there was a woman carrying a full-sized wooden canoe on her shoulders stepping her way up the hill’s spine. Her gait didn’t even slow when she removed one hand from the gunnels to check her heartrate on her smartwatch.

I burst out laughing. I mean, what better sign from the gods to let me know there will always be people who write better, who write faster, who write more elegantly or lyrically or intellectually or comedically. There will always be people who run faster, who are fitter, who accessorize with canoes. I still made it to the top of the hill with my persistent plodding.

Just. Keep. Going. 

My stamina for the long project improves. The writing is slower than I had anticipated…much slower[4]. I’m finding long form writing feels texturally different compared with writing short stories, essays or poetry. There are a lot more spinning plates to keep in the air[5]. Even though I get frustrated, I’m also really enjoying this time of immersion in creative practice. 

A quote from Annie Dillard that I copied down in a notebook in 2017, from The Writing Life, captures the exact sentiment I’m feeling, “[a book] is sufficiently difficult and complex that it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free.” 

And in case, due to frustrations, I forget, the quote continues: “It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself. In the democracies, you may even write and publish anything you please about governments or institutions…”

Thank you for reading, I hope it makes you smile; your belief keeps me singing. 

Oh, and I’ve kinda been dipping into reading a few classical works, coming at them slantways, having my hand held by others to lead me through their difficulties: Mark Scarbrough’s podcast about Divine Comedy, Walking with Dante, Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey, and Don Quixote through Douglas Glover’s essays in The Enamoured Knight.

In a weird way, these classical works make me feel my own composition of mixed voices, digressions, associations, text forms, structure, tonal ….chaos my gawd, is okay, at least to try[6]. 

[1] Well…not ‘just because’… In the spring, when I first started to climb that slope (and I must interject and explain that for friends who live in the mountains, this hill is but a trifling speedbump compared with hiking jagged, cloud-hugged peaks, so, some grace please), I wasn’t able to make the summit (ha ha) all in one go. Because my heart kicked up such a fuss with the effort, my neurophysiological system rang the “Hey! You’re having an anxiety attack!” alarm and I had to stop mid-grade once or twice and talk myself down. This sometimes happens in the cycling workout I subject myself to once a week…there, the coach talks me down and he kindly leaves the door to the studio open so I feel like I can run out of the room when I feel like ripping my cleats from the foot stops and screaming out of there whenever my heart rate climbs to the point of punching my tonsils…I haven’t left the stationary bike (yet). All this to say, I have pretty good cardio; it’s just my body catapults my brain to panic mode. Cause yeah, I’m an anxious freak (can be…it’s episodic not chronic…though I can hear the chorus of friends and family griping). Anyways, back to my point: I am climbing the hill a few times a week to train myself to calm my body when my heart rate spikes. Why? So that when I read my creative writing in public, as I plan to later this month, I won’t asphyxiate myself at paragraph one. 

[2] I do suffer from extreme literal interpretations at times…an odd affliction given my own writing and communications can be obtuse and vague. 

[3] Less swim…more of a cooling dip. 

[4] I’m also trying not to freak out about time, how quickly the weeks of sabbatical fly by. I have maintained my commitment to attending to long project work five days a week…consistent effort is what I’m trying to focus on instead of time…a better measure for creative work. 

[5] I’ll write about spinning plates in my next blog post. 

[6] Just in case this is misinterpreted as my having the extreme arrogance to place myself on equal footing with the classical works, that is NOT what I mean. I’m very humbled by them…I’m interested in their structures, forms and techniques.  

Yeah, the grass is not really scorched but I love that word. Creative liberties.

Into The Lake of My Heart 

Suzanne Biro2 Comments

I’m out of sorts after a week away from writing routine[1]. I woke Tuesday morning with the robins calling up the dawn (3:30 am…it’s still dark robins)[2].  

While away, I managed to reread the essay, published in The Believer, The Sentence is a Lonely Place, by Garielle Lutz[3]. I took new notes and recognised (again) the importance of incorporating music into writing and that I haven’t been as intentional about sound in my writings as I ought to be[4]. Sigh.

My sister asked, “What is it…are you compelled to write?”

We were drinking coffee on her back deck. The conifer covered mass of the Stawamus Chief, its great granite wall, commanded most of the horizon beneath a band of cerulean sky. Floofy seedheads floated the air and mingled among fine lit lines of spider webs threading the treetops, invisible lines cast by the breeze and spinning gold when caught by sunlight. This was after I’d laid down my pen, closed my notebook and folded the screen of my laptop down with what must have been an audible frustration when she found me at her kitchen counter at 6 am. 

“No,” I said, “that’s not it. Not exactly…” I struggled to articulate a jumble of thoughts…I’ve been writing(ish) since I was very young, a kid…did she not know this? She’s seven and a half years younger than me, almost a decade between us (certainly a generational difference). Maybe she never saw me writing when we were growing up…or if she did, maybe she was too young to remember; she was twelve when I left home for university[5].  

I tried to explain. It’s not that I’m compelled to write, it’s more like writing is …a quest. And not a quest just to finish “a story”. And not a quest just to write beautiful and cohesive sentences one after another, though of course that’s part of it. There is far more …mystery involved. Magic, even. It’s a mystical practice. Language is a layer, a layer of symbols and representations, a barrier between us and the physicality (this is an inadequate word, but it will have to do) of ‘all things’ in our world. Deep attention and presence to physicality helps call up language that can create an intimacy with the objects and experiences and sensations, to re-create a “composed reality” on the page …but words are only ever proximal, they are not reality itself. She nodded …didn’t seem too bored, so I continued. 

It’s hard to explain, I said, but the magic happens when, through the process of writing, the words called up are communicating back through the writer/writing, illuminating new/intriguing/curious observations/experiences/sensations sourced from what I sense (believe?) is a collectively shared well (or lake), a shimmering, deeply beautiful wild reality happening in parallel to our experiential reality …a reality not quite, but almost, beyond the limits of human perception…reachable only through the process of writing (or other art mediums). The writer is a translator, of sorts, from that shared mystical layer to the one we live in.  As a writer, I cast into this collective subconscious lake and fish out proximations of the beauties there…small beauties of pure elegance and truth in the form of phrases and images that take my breath away. There’s a moral aspect to the writer role too…recognising I can do this (sometimes), I feel I have a duty, a responsibility to the process. This is the quest…a journey of translation. And just like real fishing, there’s a lot of silence and waiting and exercising patience to hook and land beauties to the page[6]. 

I’m following you, she said, nodding…though I felt I wasn’t convincing and I felt frustrated not being able to explain what I experience and I could tell she believed I’d entered woo-woo territory alongside healing crystals and coloured haloes. 

“The trouble is,” I said, “it feels very close to tipping into insanity.”

“Now, you’re just being dramatic,” she said. 

~

Another “out of sorts” I’m wrangling with …and I think I’ll wait till I’ve recovered from jet lag and convocation ceremonies (Willa’s is Friday) before focusing on this task next week. The ring structure I’m using as a “form” to write the story into is kind of …not collapsing…but, through the process of writing, rearranging itself. I’m remaining open to these changes, trusting the process (see ‘quest’ above) as opposed to being rigid[7]. 

Emily, a dear friend and romance writer who I exchange writings with, pointed out that for a reader to care and have compassion for Claire, my story’s narrator and main character, they need to understand the love between Fanboy and Claire to feel its loss later in the story. 

“I want to see Fanboy and Claire fall in love. How do they meet?  What are they like together as a couple?”

“I don’t think I can write that,” I said.  I felt a mixture of inability (am I skilled enough to write those scenes?) and strong resistance (an avoidance to sitting with those powerful experiences of falling in love, that now, can’t be recalled without considerable emotional pain). 

She’s right, of course, about getting that information in the story very early on[8]. Focusing at the sentence level, I’ve become blind at the plot level.  

 “Course you can,” she said, a wrinkle of confusion between her brows. 

Maybe these are rookie writer mistakes, embarrassing ones, but I’ve promised fidelity to recording my process here, so[9]. 

                  I began writing scenes toward Claire and Fanboy meeting at the Formula One Grand Prix in Montreal. Getting Claire there, in her early twenties, to begin with needed some serious imagination, a story that made me laugh writing it (so that’s good). But I’m over five thousand words into this account and I’ve got Claire dissing Fanboy because she discovers he’s married so they’re not even talking to each other, let alone hopping into bed together (what I thought I was going to write…I even collected a few delicious literary sex scenes to emulate)[10]. 

                  Then, one evening, while still trying to sort through this writing predicament, in real life (not the imaginary one I’m making up which is kind of bending my brain to confusion about what is real and what isn’t, what’s memory and what’s made up), my daughter was upstairs on speakerphone with her dad.  I couldn’t make out their words; I could hear laughter and joy in my ex-husband’s voice. He was driving home after a good day at the racetrack[11]. I haven’t heard that tone, that side of him, for many years and I miss it. I burst into tears. I still love him, that part of him. Tumultuous love, and grief mixed with incredulous surprise at my reaction, but without any measure of regret for making the decision to leave our marriage, like, zero. Quite the cocktail.  This too is what I must learn to write somehow…this love, this loss, this complexity. It explains my reluctance, my fear. Why I said to Emily, “I can’t write that”. 

And I’ve been thinking a lot about this since… how humans love multiple people at the same time, love multiple people in different ways, love only certain parts of people…but not who they are entire…and is this a failing? Or is it that we fail by setting expectations that aren’t realistic, that can’t align with the limits of human biological programming or physiology or developmental trajectories or emotional capacities? Is true love a fantasy? Or is true love only fleeting? What is true love? And then I think…love happens in the in-between …it’s relational and moving…something luminous to keep alive, to nurture and feed and grow. I’m learning to embrace its complexity. I’m trying to write it. 

Anyway, to put some sort of example to unite the two halves of this half-assed blog post, I’m sharing a response written earlier this week to a prompt to “write something little”. I share it to show how words draw from the lake of subconscious to bubble through my writing and show me my thinking (in this case, a particular slant of grief following that episode of hearing my ex’s voice…the subconscious has hauled out baubled memories related to holding hands and riffing on the “to have and to hold” of marriage vows). 

Here it is, transcribed unedited, from my notebook:

It is the little gestures I remember most. How, when you held my hand in yours, raised above our pillowed heads, you squeezed the tiny bones between the knuckles of each finger, a pressure that says I am here, I am holding you. To have and to hold. 

Once, when we had been arguing, you walked ahead of me on the street, striding with those long legs of yours so that I had to scurry to keep up. When I reached for your hand, you pulled it away, quick, decisive, punishing. The feathered touch of skin the moment before you did so was cold. 

Another time, when the baby got so suddenly sick, trouble breathing through her tiny nose, her throat sputtering, I was struggling with the buttons on my coat, readying to take her to the ER. In my vision—confined to a circle of small focus outlined with black, a consequence of my fear and anxiety the baby might stop breathing—you handed me a fried egg sandwich saying, ‘eat this, you may not get food for a while’.

Your tears and your anger when I told you I was leaving you because you only wanted to have me but not hold me, the way you used to. 

~

 Hm. A melancholy post. These happen. 

I signed up to be part of a public reading in July (see the poster at the end). I’m nervous about experiencing anxiety when I read …this is outweighed by my curiosity to feel how my current writings land with an audience…the experience shapes my writing. I plan to read an excerpt from the Long Project. I’ll post the video here (if the reading goes well)[12].   

[1] Attended Lillian’s convocation ceremony in Victoria and visited my youngest sister and her partner in Squamish. Every trip I vow to keep up writing practice (or at least reading practice). I never manage it. And I tell myself over and over: It’s important to be present and engaged in these moments of living and celebration…let the writing go, take a break, relax. But I remain in the bardo…not writing…feeling anxious about not writing…something like an opaque semi-permeable membrane preventing me from full participation in the current and physical world…a reticence others sense and resent (I don’t blame them). Why this longing to be in a world of imagination? As I write that question, the answer rises easily: it’s safer there…the risk of pain (disappointment, grief, etc.) is far better controlled.  Well.  We shared fantastic meals and the weather was gorgeous (though cool) and I did practice (some) sentence level creativity. 

[2] Weirdly, this does not at all correspond to time change hours.  

[3] Thank you Stacey for reminding me about this essay (and printing the hard copy)! 

[4] I ask myself: When should I do this?  After drafting? Now? Myself answers: Yes (this includes an eye roll). Myself also whines: will I ever finish this project? I’m reminded of that Sesame Street character Don Music who always bangs his head on the piano in frustration when trying to write songs, lamenting he’d never get it, never! This makes me laugh. 

[5] From the beginning I changed her diapers and rocked her in the pram, a constant jiggling chore, back and forth, back and forth. She was an intensely colicky baby. In the long project, her character is referred to as The Wailing Baby. She has forbidden me to write about her.  You can see how that is unfolding. 

[6] ‘Hook’ and ‘Land’…a two-step process: haul the words and imagery from the subconscious (step one) then study and work with them to best showcase their shape and form (step two). I have written about this before. And here too. 

[7] Definitely a self-improvement.

[8] Emily’s first romance novel will be published in Germany next year (which makes us laugh…neither of us speak German). I’ve asked her to model her next romance heroine after me and to pair me up with a kind, decidedly virile, intellectual partner who loves poetry and fiction and who will read to me before we fall asleep. Other stipulations: not married to someone else, gainfully employed, healthy (sufficiently fit in body and mind), loves to eat good food, quietly confident, someone who wants to be a partner. I do love the guy she’s writing about now, nick-named the Ancient Mariner. In all seriousness though, Emily has a keen and practiced eye for story components and beauty; she’s an active voting member for the BAFTA awards (has been for 20+ years). 

[9] A common refrain from my (now ex-) husband during the years we were together: How can you be so smart and so stupid at the same time?! [insert sheepish shrug-shouldered grin of idiocy.]

[10] A restricted selection:  Ian McEwan’s glorious capture of what it is to experience the wonder sex,  from his novel, Lessons, “It seemed as if he had been shown a hidden fold in space where there was a catch, a fastener, and that as he released it and peeled away the illusory everyday he saw what had always been there…It was either hilarious or it was tragic, that people should go about their daily business in the conventional way when they knew there was this.” ; the orgasm described in Barbara Gowdy’s short story, Sylvie; the tender innocence captured in Brian Doyle’s short story First Kiss; a vague disconnection during lovemaking described in James Salter’s Light Years; the stupendously orchestrated scene of lovemaking woven with ocean metaphor in Texaco, a novel by Patrick Chamoiseau; and, of course, the romantic love making in the apple shed, described in Hamnet, written by Maggie O’Farrell. 

[11] Auto racing (Formula Ford). A good day means nothing mechanical broke, including human bones. 

[12] If instead the reading goes very badly and I stop breathing and collapse into a jellyfish I may still post a video…anything for a laugh (wink). 

Passion Progresses

Suzanne Biro

I adore this new house I’m renting, high on a limestone bluff, dawn spilling into the kitchen, afternoon light pouring warm the wooden floors to mellow gold. From where I write, in front of a large glass plane on a landing at the top of the stairs, the tips of maples sway unfurling pale shivery leaves. In a neighbour’s yard, a massive magnolia proffers pink cups to confetti. Scent of lilacs. Fresh cut grass. Tulip petal drops. I delight the wild apple blossoms mingle invisible with the domestic, united by honeybees and songbirds. And love.

I’m three weeks into sabbatical time. It’s wonderful. Long project writing progresses; I’ll provide a brief update on that. But first, a response to a recent prompt to write about a dream, unedited (the response includes the passages of reflection and the recent dream surfacing an older dream): 

                  This morning I dreamt my good friend E, divorced with three daughters who lives on Wolfe Island, came over to my house to inform me he would be moving the house I have just rented to a waterfront property he owns near his own house. I wasn’t sure. I worried the current owner of the rental house might object. But the bulldozers and cranes were outside. My own daughters were yelling at me to get with the program. I was wearing my pajamas still and the kitchen was piled with dirty dishes. 

                  I said, I want to see the property first. And it was a tiny piece of lawn the lake might swallow in any flood, a spit of land too near the ferry terminal, bordered on one side by marshland and a field of cattails. A giant old weeping willow wept toward the lake, threatening to uproot in the direction of its longing. E said to me, his hand up in the air to halt the operations, get the workmen to turn off their machines, “It won’t work. The foundations don’t match.” And I said, “Yeah, I want the windows to face east/west to maximise the sun.” He replied, “Yeah, it just won’t work.”

                  Now as I write this, I can’t help but read the metaphor of trying to match the homes we make separately together in one relationship. The foundations don’t match, there is the threat of flood and the fetidness of marshland, and I see myself as the weeping willow, clawing to be free of foundations or being rooted. 

                  This brought to mind another dream, an ancient dream I had about Steven Heighton, the poet, now dead. He died too young, in his prime. In that dream we stood on opposite sides of a low-ceilinged room. It was morning and the light poured into the room making the warm wood floors gleam and glint, almost blinding. There were a few people hanging around, speaking softly to each other. It was some writing event that had yet to begin. I was eating a golden delicious apple, chomping great juicy bits of it as I turned its flesh in my hand. I caught Steve Heighton’s eye from across the room and perhaps my attraction to him was obvious because he strode toward me with those long spider legs of his, crossing the room with energetic intent. He strode up to me and kissed me, pressing his body entire up tight against my own. I could feel his erection against me through his black jeans and my own clothes. I worried and was a little ashamed I had chunks of golden delicious apple he was moving around in my mouth with his own tongue, but the kiss lingered on. I thought, Oh no…he’s too earnest! That was the word, a warning, my body declining the desire on offer. And then the strangest thing, because the kiss continued, I fell, golden delicious apple and all, into his mouth and moved through his throat into a dark universe of glowing stars, floating there in space, comfortable in the vastness, the emptiness. It was beautiful. Before waking to a feeling of disappointment about Steve being too earnest to take on as a lover[1]. 

                  But why this particular memory of a dream from so long ago? Because in this new house, I recognise it, the warm gleaming glow of morning and afternoon sun on the wood flooring. It’s the floor of my earlier dream. The golden delicious dream. I live with this glorious floor now. Right now. And writing about these two dreams, dreamed over a decade apart but connected together here on these pages, I think it must be something about bright foundations, a steady plane to stand and be held by. And the apple…well, the apple, it’s delicious and golden and a key to a much wider universe. 

So. The Long Project. 

I started at the beginning. From scratch. Again. Yes, I have a lot of copy written toward this book length work already. A lot. But now that I know (ish) the story’s backbone[2], I needed to set it up from a slightly different angle. I also needed to figure out a sort of cadence…a sense of the pacing for how information is offered to the reader as well as playing a bit with transitions between…chapters. There are (roughly) eight sections to this book; within each section, there are chapters (their number will be variable) which hang together (associatively, loosely) around an idea (theme? Not sure about this yet). 

Released from my day job, I’m keeping Monday to Friday working hours for Long Project writing. I’m at the desk by seven and I write till lunch. Then I go for a walk, huffing up Fort Henry Hill, and then I settle into writing adjacent work (reading), before winding down by four (my evenings continue to be crammed with other routines: gym, volunteer work, meeting friends, etc).  

I try to begin each day reading poetry. These last weeks, Lucille Clifton. I say try because, caffeine in hand, after one poem (with Clifton, I often weep), my gaze drifts from the page and I find that some indeterminant time has passed and I’ve been staring out the window as spring reveals herself. But Clifton’s lines…a word, or a line, or a thought…drive me to my own writing and I set off from the place I left off the previous day. 

The first two weeks of this I found that by 10:30 a.m. my brain, for this particular writing anyway, was pretty well fried.  Granted, I was recovering from the move to this new house and the agony of transitioning my work portfolios to colleagues terrified to receive them. The last few weeks of work I’d delivered several briefs to executive decision makers and, unfortunately, I suffered dreadful anxiety attacks for several of them[3]. 

The writing those first two weeks was also…tightly wound. I’ll try to explain this. It’s an issue I’ve struggled with for years (aka, whipping my words to pheasant under glass when really chicken will do).  And I was trying to figure out a technical solution(s) to fix it. 

Here’s an example:  “Catching dad in flagrante delicto ought to have been conclusive, but affairs are complex: I was supposed to rage at him, reject his paternity, in a parenting sense, yoking myself to cultivated ideas related to monogamy and swans mating for life, except now, deep in my own decades long marriage, hanging together by a connected bank account, little else, I envied, even applauded, the sex—so flaming hot my shadow in the doorway remained unnoticed, so raw, so rutting animal, so human, so just.”

This sentence is a whole story. It’s great as a stand-alone. But when placed alongside other sentences that are just as informationally dense, zipping back and forth along a historical timeline with only minimal time stamps or inserting abstract conceptual narrator intrusions without sufficient contextual signals…well, the reader’s mind is taxed (not to mention my own, trying to write it). Throw in a few movie line quotes and the whole thing slides sideways very quickly. 

I bulk my sentences with A LOT of propositional material, and it comes at the reader as “too much too fast”. I need to learn how to insert some pauses, some breathing spaces. When I tried to do this intentionally, I could “sense” a textural difference, but I didn’t understand the actual writing technique I’m using/doing (this may seem strange to read, but it’s true). 

My daughter, Willa, provided an explanation that helped me make sense of the quandary. She said the “stream of consciousness writing” needs to be interspersed more frequently with “scenic” writing (which she said, for me, is poetic and lyrical). Another friend who is a great reader of my stuff described it this way: your writing is cognac and caviar when sometimes it really needs to be a light wine. This made me laugh. Pheasant under glass and caviar…and the truth is, I don’t keep that up…it’s arbitrary, the writing devolves into truck stop diner dishes reliably and quickly. 

So. the prologue, and the first two chapters of section one, are “staccato”, zooming the reader across space and time and hopping inside and outside the narrator’s head and assaulting the reader with dizzying knife points of “illumination” like a cleaver spiked disco ball gone rogue (see what I mean?). 

By week three I started to settle and slow the writing of moments down (scenes, narrator reflections, furnishing contextual information to allow a reader to follow where we are in time and place). I’m rereading Douglas Glover’sessays on elaboration, as well as Brooks Landon’s Building Great Sentences and Nina Schuyler ‘s How to Write Stunning Sentences (that sentence example above was born of practicing through a Tessa Hadley sentence that Nina had pulled apart for reconstruction). I’m also skimming through random books pulled from my bookshelf, opening their pages to allow my eyeballs to land where they will and glean inspirations and examples. 

Now, with this gift of time, I’m balancing working through these exercises with generating chapter drafts. It’s slow and steady work that I hope will support accumulation (and absorption) of these skills. 

I’m trying too, to be less…how do I say this? Less selfishly indulgent toward my own writing pleasure and trying to write with you in my mind, allowing only a few sentences of refined flavouring, like this one: “I tasted a fresh oyster tipped from its opalescent shell and paused to tend to the texture and the primordial taste flooding my tongue, it slipped and splashed sea spray, churning its own tide, a magnetizing moon that bloomed a briny fluorescence, pulled the tails of whales and sent anemones tickling the clefts of corals.” 

My plan is to keep progressing forward (if I stop and twiddle and fix and play too much, I’ll never get a manuscript draft completed…I’m aiming for Xmas). My plan is also to integrate existing drafts into the narrative spine, editing them into this structure as those pieces start to “fit” into the right place. 

And Sunday is getting on here and the girls are visiting and I am being a terrible host by sitting here typing away madly to try and get this posted while they make their own breakfasts and clatter around the kitchen discussing what they will wear to their convocations (next month)[4].  I will try to remember to do my hair and maybe wear a little mascara and sigh through my closet for something presentable…enter the real world instead of lingering this delicious place of imagination. 

[1] I never knew Steven Heighton personally, though I’ve read a lot of his writings. Kingston is a small place, and I would see him from time to time. When he ran, striding the sidewalks of downtown almost on tiptoe, his gaze often turned to take in his own reflection in the shop windows.

[2] See previous blog post outlining the planned ring structure of the novel. 

[3] For one of these briefs, I actually had to stop in the middle of presenting, saying, “I’m sorry, I need to pause, I’m having trouble breathing.” Immediately, two of the physicians who were part of the briefing texted me to ask what was going on, no doubt suspecting a stroke or something. I managed to pull my shit together, an extreme battle of will, forcing myself to pull air deep into my lungs and counting seconds intentionally to slow my exhale. In another brief, when my name was called upon to speak, my body began trembling so violently and my breath sucked up up and far away, I knew I wouldn’t be able to perform…so I texted my back up colleagues, my manager, sorry I can’t do this, please take over…but  they didn’t read my messages in time as they were listening to the ADM talking his way along a tangent. By the time attention was turned my way again, I’d moved through the episode, and I delivered the presentation perfectly (thinking all the way through it: what the fuck is going on with me?!). Anyway, it was dreadful…cortisol hangovers are really dreadful. An aside: I was asked to read at a public reading again this summer and I’m not sure I can do it.  I explained the anxiety I’ve been having, told the story of how and when I developed it twenty-three years ago when I was pregnant with Willa, and the organiser said, well, that story is great, why don’t you read that one? So now I’m considering integrating performance art, reality show style, into a public reading. It’s in July…maybe I’ll feel up to it by then. 

[4] Here is Willa’s website which features her thesis project. Yes, I’m very proud of her. 

With the girls visiting, I offered my bed to Nadine and Willa and slept in the living room. Lillian, who is staying with me for a few weeks, commands her own room. It was like sleeping outside beneath a canopy of trees, looking up from this pillow. Slept…okayish…that analyst couch is fucking hard.

Soux Vide

Suzanne Biro2 Comments

Have to laugh; most of the content of this post is in the footnotes, the underwater section of prose. Sous vide means “under vacuum” in French, a cooking technique that uses vacuum-sealed bags. With this post you’re being sucked into the bag my brain[1]. So, there’s your warning.  

I’ve been having a hard time writing toward the long project this last while because I’m frustrated during my usual early morning writing, its forced stuttered stopping and starting and stopping and starting, interrupted by having to clock in for the day job.  It’s knowing the sabbatical shines there, waiting for me to fall into its outstretched arms…so close[2]. 

I’ve been writing other projects[3]. 

I’ve been practicing a lot of mind work. A LOT.  Mind work to set myself up for …slowing down. What do I mean? Creative practice, as I’ve come to experience it, tracks a different cadence compared with the grease slicked gear shifting daily grind I’m trained to. Chained to. The writing I want to get better producing requires patience. Focus. Calm commitment. A loose openness. Love. The writing I’m chasing imbues vitality, an energy shimmer vibrating beneath-around-within-between the words, the sentences and the paragraphs. Writing that becomes a glowing whole when the project is finished.  Writing that is a movement felt in the body and sparking the brain so it fizzes. And I know, from my years writing, the pace of this precise practice is plant like: seasonal, incremental, dendritic, efflorescent. [And perhaps, Suzanne, a little less adjectival? Or, at least, adjectival with intention as opposed to self-indulgent, as this paragraph, ahem, has now become.]

I’ve been practicing mind work because back in February I spiralled a tight anxiety worrying about…fucking this up. By “this” I mean squandering the time away from my day job to focus on creative work and not getting “a novel” drafted. I’m not going to waste time or space recounting that here. Anxiety wastes time and kills creativity. Crushes creativity’s esophagus with iron cold fingers. 

Anyway, since then, I’ve been practicing how to enter this gift of time without expectation and fall into the joy of nurturing my story to being…even if it’s a nascent, beautifully crafted (and funny) chapter(s)[4]. And I’m ready[5]. And excited. 

I’ve been playing around with coloured cards, trying to work out the narrative arc for the long project, this book length work. This puzzling has gone well (though, has taken several weeks of thinking…walking and thinking, sitting and thinking…a fair degree of daydreaming…it requires a looseness of the brain…a letting go). I now have a sense of “sections”—I think of them as containers—following a ring structure with its requisite mirroring. 

Here it is, in first draft, rough, form (as a list because this must be read sequentially; in reality, the first half circles round and mirrors the opposite in the second half and we (the writer and the reader) end where we begin[6]: 

  • Prologue: introduces 2-3 siblings of the protagonist, the way they speak to each other using movie quotes. Also, the conversation they had one day when very young, predicting who each would marry. Of course, couched as an insult. The siblings teased the protagonist she’d marry an archbishop (said with a priggish English accent). 
  • Start Argument: Structurally, the argument is almost a second prologue. The fight that ends a marriage, “the argument” is the anchor point for each subsequent section round the ring, the narrative arc, returning the reader each time to the next section from digressions (side stories that are back stories, but collaged, not in chronological order). The argument is between Claire, the protagonist, and Fanboy, her husband, set in their beautiful kitchen[7]. Each time we return to the next section (signalled by being back in the kitchen in medias ras argument), the narrative builds out this couple’s life together and Claire’s experience raising their children[8]. The argument is a recurring one between this couple, Fanboy always accusing Claire of having an affair. This becomes a central question—did she?—driving (pun intended) the story. 
  • Section 1 – Claire’s idiocy in the affair department. 
  • Section 2 – Recipe for falling in love[9].
  • Section 3 – Recipe for children bring people together.
  • Section 4 – Claire falls in love with a man outside the marriage[10]. Though, she never tells that man; it’s an unrequited love. As far as she knows, he has no idea. But she decides, despite transgressive sexy action never happened, she has betrayed her marriage in her mind, ergo, she must end it.
  • The Turn – Structurally, this is “the climax” of the story, directly opposite the beginning of the circle. It is the point at which the story turns and “repeats”, moving back through the previous sections, but following an opposite pattern (theory says the reader will “feel” this progression, as opposed to “know” it). In this section, Claire tells Fanboy she wants a divorce. But it becomes very clear Fanboy will fight for custody of their two young children (5 and 7 years old). Claire, for reasons there’s no need to elucidate right now (isn’t her name perfect?) believes he will win custody. She has a vision of what a separated family will mean for her children. Her choice is is suddenly crystal clear; she stays in the marriage. 
  • Section 5 (= 4’) – Structurally, the opposite of section 4. The man Claire fell in love with confesses his love to her, but she remains committed to her marriage. He marries a mutual friend. 
  • Section 6 (= 3’) – Children bust people up.
  • Section 7 (= 2’) – Recipe for falling out of love.
  • Section 8 (= 1’) – Claire discovers evidence supporting strong hypothesis Fanboy is the one who had an affair[11].
  • End Argument: Structurally we return to the argument for the final time to move through to its inevitable end, the dissolution of a 25-year marriage. 
  • Epilogue – two wonderful post-marriage vignettes that I want to riff on ‘cause they’re just too good.  

Each section will have associative digressions exploring stories inspired by my growing up, complete with sibling antics. I thought about trying to place these scenes on little cards attached to each section in advance, but I think that risks too much control. I gotta be able to keep the dream alive through this process. 

So, there’s the recipe for the adventure, for submersing my shadow self.  First recipe anyway…it will shift and move, but I’m diving in.  

[1] Soux is a unique spelling of Sue. It is how I sign any artworks I create. 

[2] Also, I’m moving at the end of this month to a delightfully quirky tiny cottage in a historic village walking distance from downtown, across from For Henry. I think I’ll be able to hear the cannons when the reenactments, their profusion of fireworks, are performed on summer evenings. It will remind me of Mexico.  Though I’m sad to be leaving this beautiful Victorian apartment (it has held me, stoically, shepherding me through my grief), the tiny house has a second bedroom for when the girls visit. It also has a gas stove!  This latter feature…my gawd….the current induction model I’m working with threatens a coronary, turning off in the middle of cooking whenever it feels like it, deciding only certain pot bottoms are worth its heat, and only on certain days. I’ve been cooking with an angry gremlin, and it threatens to turn me into one. 

[3] Collaborating with a friend, a romance writer, on an essay exploring erotic writing. Originally, I thought the essay would be about comparing craft techniques along the erotic spectrum between porn and romance…how at one end it’s fewer story elements, all mechanical body bits inserting other body bits while at the other it’s more tension, narrative techniques layering emotional explorations of unrequited love and tropes. In writing the essay, the angle contorted delightfully (ha ha) and the categories, I came to understand, blur at the edges. I’ll expand further (oh yes, yes!) in a future post. Maybe. Reading a whole lot of erotica …a pleasure. 

And I realised l will incorporate sex scenes in the long project …not for getting off but rather, they’re another (perhaps the best?)  tool in the writer’s toolbox for exploring intimacy, relationships, power dynamics, the erotics of consent, the complications of shame… Yes, sex is actually a central exploration feeding the long project…not in the way you might assume, it’s much sadder. I feel ready to adventure through it. 

Unfortunately, the erotic essay—even though the editor who suggested I write it said it’s “a great essay”—was summarily (and rapidly (instantly?)) dismissed for being “extremely academic” (including the voice….which…stung. Probably ‘cause that’s kinda true?). 

It reminded me of the time then-husband and I went to a dinner party where there was a scotch tasting competition and I won the prize for identifying the different scotches in  the blind tasting. When we got in the car to go home afterwards, husband turned to me and said, “You know, you didn’t have to guess all of them right”. Indeed, we were never asked back to dine with that group. Though, could have been ‘cause I was flirty with the husbands, but I digress. 

[4] And this is the thing; I want the writing in this project to be BOTH beautiful and funny.  When I explained this to a friend, she said, “does that even exist?”. Yes…James Salter’s Light Years (heavier on beauty but very wry); The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz; The Liar’s Club by Mary Karr (worth noting Karr is also a poet); The World According to Garp by John Irving…there are lots…listing only a small sample here. One on my list to read, because I’m trying to find more women writers in this space, is Iris Owens’ After Claude. 

[5] I’m also practicing “writing silly” …not always, but sometimes, in response to the writing prompts we work through each week in the writing sessions I facilitate (volunteer), I try to let myself respond with humour and even ridiculousness (e.g., How to walk among humans, when you’re an alien. A multiple-choice test). In these sessions, there’s a live audience responding, like, actually saying how they feel about the writing, in real time and we enjoy laughter together, there’s delight…there’s an instant relaxation when a roomful of adults experience childishness (not in a puerile way, but in that innocent state of wonder or in the way of that underdeveloped sense of understanding that can be so charming with how children view the world) or self-deprecation (I’m good at this). A recognition. A vulnerability. I’m practicing this…cause my project needs it…it’s the oxygen it breathes. And also, because I’m such a serious fucker too much of the time…so much, I almost feel like I have a split personality. No, of course, not diagnosably. 

[6] I’ve waffled about whether to write details about this long project on the blog, fearing it risks…what? Giving the plot away? Having too much here that it could never be published? Someone might steal my brilliant ideas ha ha ha?  But then I think, this is a teeny tiny corner of the internet, and writing out my process here, over the years, has been extremely helpful to me. And I do read my earlier entries, especially when you ping them. Often, I’m stunned by what I’ve written …as if I am learning from myself. I guess I am; they guide me. If I looked at this drafting process as I would a qualitative research project, this blog would be my “research diary”, a record of decisions and ideas to be able to iterate and build toward a final “meaning making”. Plus, how the hell can I write about the process of writing a novel without referring to details? That would be tedious for any blog reader. And plus, plus, even if someone “stole” this idea, they would never be able to write it the way that I am.  Writers: the way we think, is unique. Like a fingerprint. And plus, plus, plus, publishing…what is this now anyway? The industry quakes along the fault line of its foundation at 9+ levels, it will be interesting to see what topography surfaces afterwards. I’m doing this writing for fun.  And…because I sing to you, you’re reading it (wink). 

[7] Claire is my middle name. It’s the right fit for this character in many ways.  I toyed with the idea of calling her Zannie (this is what my mum calls me…and still remembers, despite her advancing dementia). I liked Zannie too for its playful nod toward a combination of the words zany and insane, as well as its historical allusions to Zanni, the trickster character in the Italian commedia dell’arte. But Claire is a better fit tonally and Zannie does try a little too hard …at least that’s my present thinking…I’m allowing all these decisions to be flexible. Incidentally, Nyree, when I made her suffer my disquisition of coloured index cards on my dining room table said that when this book is made into a movie, she wants her character (who is remaining Nyree, at her request btw) to be played by Amy Schumer. I admitted, a perfect cast. And who would I be played by? She thought about it…went out for a smoke/toke…came back in, pointed at me and smug, said, Kate Winslet. Another friend, when I relayed this casting story, suggested it needed someone more shambolic, Rachel Weisz. Neither of these suggestions were received as a compliment. Fanboy is a serendipitous autocorrect discovery. It’s perfect. A reminder: the project is becoming fiction. It’s a new genre: Becoming Fiction. 

[8] Yes, I will be reworking previously written material from an earlier blog I used to write, Food by the Gearhead’s Wife. I had thought I wouldn’t …but there are lines and stories in there that are funny and bring me right back to those experiences of exhaustion (and yes, depression) and I have your blog pings to thank for guiding me to reread these regularly. I will be weaving in the race car stuff and…after savouring Salter’s sentences in Light Years recently, I’ll be including food writing too. It’s as much a part of me as anything else. Did you know Salter wrote a cookbook with his partner? I wish I’d dined at his dinner table before he died. 

[9] I don’t know why I am referring to this as “a recipe” but it came to me as a breezy idea and my instinct kicked in so I’m keeping as this for now. 

[10] I have not assigned this guy a name yet…still thinking about it. 

[11] Like, a sexual affair but not one of the mind …which leads one to question, what constitutes an affair?  Is it only physical? And shouldn’t our minds remain our own to indulge fantasies?  These are interesting questions…intersections with the essay on erotica, but these footnotes are getting ridiculous. 

Two+gether To Gather

Suzanne Biro

Last week I read through the proofs of a creative nonfiction story and interview questions now published with SmokeLong Quarterly, How to Mourn Your Mother.  I teared up reading the story because seeing my work reflected on this publication’s website, with their familiar font and set alongside a gorgeous photo by Olivie Strauss,  feels like…being held and seen.

And though the story sits with my name attached as its author, the writing is the culmination of many people who read earlier drafts and provided suggestions and impressions. And its subject, my mum, she’s also a co-creator in a way too, if only as an unwilling participant suffering dementia and dragged into story chez moi.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to launch into an Oscar like speech listing all you wonderful people here, but I do want to address how much art making is co-created with community as opposed to work being produced singly, individually[1].  We do ourselves a disservice perpetuating the myth of solo creator…and who knows, maybe our bodies are simply an instrument through which the universe—by which I mean collective creativity—sings.

The first writings of How to Mourn Your Mother arose out of stream of consciousness writing to interrogate an emotional moment: dropping mum off at a long-term care home. But wait, that’s not quite right.  The first stirrings of this story were written in emails to loved ones…fragments and phrases and images…those stand ins for my grief and sorrow   It was winter 2023, about 6 months after I’d moved mum into the facility, a place she vehemently refused ever to set foot in prior to her cognitive decline.

In the spring of 2023, I completed the first draft of the story, entering the material from the side, slyly, bypassing my guilt and dissonance by writing my feelings into the container of a How-to Manual form. I workshopped that story draft and received six different writers’ thoughts and suggestions for improving the piece. In 2023, I re-drafted three more versions, receiving additional feedback from at least eight additional unique readers, as well as a large handful of family and friends.  

The story was a runner up in a small contest that fall, where it received professional editorial feedback. Then I sent it out for publication twice, reworking it each time. It was rejected twice. I didn’t look at the story again until July 2025 when I was searching for a short story to read for a local reading event. The reading needed to be less than 5 minutes (and, uh, that draft—reworked again—at 817 words, took more than 5 minutes to read).  Something happens during a reading when a story is voiced to an audience – there’s a transfer of energy, a vibration I can feel from the room…I feel where and when the bits of the reading touch people or don’t.  Audience participation (maybe thirty people?) helped me shape the story again.

Then I sent the story to SmokeLong Quarterly where it was accepted for publication. But it still required tweaks; I emailed back and forth with Christopher Allen, a wonderful editor with a wicked sense of humour, to finalize the version published this month.

Here’s a recap:

Number of people providing editorial feedbackNumber of drafts (this is a conservative estimate)Time from inception to publication
~ 24 (plus an audience ~30)~ 10~ 3 years

This much time, this many drafts, this many supportive people with their own time and suggestions gifted to the creative process of making, this for a story of 800 words. It’s wonderful to experience this collective.

This exercise of recounting (actually counting) is a powerful reality check: making art takes time and the support of many different people offering their attention, their love, as well as their faith and belief in the work (art). And when I think of it this way, I’m reminded my own responsibility is to show up each day and pour attention and love into the work with the understanding I’m one small component of creative process[2].

I practice being part of creative community too. It’s integral to creative process. Over the last few years, I’ve slowly incorporated writing community work into my days. It’s incredibly rewarding.  Here’s a list:

  • Participating with two writing groups where we share and provide feedback on each other’s writing. We meet every month or two, in person. I love that I’m working with writers of fantasy and romance and essay and poetry and short stories and long stories…how I’m learning about genre but also ‘story’ in general and how all of us aim for literary beauty and clarity in our work.
  • Volunteering to read for Folly Journal, a literary magazine out of Wellington, New Zealand. It’s an annual, print-only anthology of short stories, non-fiction, poetry and art aiming to publish emerging writers. I love this work for many reasons. It provides an opportunity to practice reflecting what each writer is trying to accomplish with their work…this stretches my mind, makes me think differently.  It has been great to learn and understand the back end of the Submittable platform, but also the backstage processes of a group of people working together to curate a tangible object of beauty for sharing and reading.  It’s interesting to experience the selection process for pieces that “hang together”, created through different voices and literary approaches. Submission readers, a small handful of us, connect from around the globe through the digital submissions software yes but also through spirited chats on WhatsApp and monthly zoom meetings. At editorial meetings we dialogue about specific pieces, selecting the ones with wildly disparate ideas and reader interpretations about the creative work. Soon, we’ll be moving into supporting editorial work with specific pieces. I’m also beginning an essay which is a planned co-writing project with two other writers, for (fingers crossed) inclusion in this year’s issue (more to come on that when we’ve moved it further along).
  • Facilitating writing sessions with the Writer’s Collective of Canada. Weekly sessions online most Monday nights over the last year or so and started an in-person session at the local library in January. These sessions have me practicing coming to the blank page and writing with abandon. Also practicing deep listening. These workshops are more about creating a space for people’s voices to be heard and held; there is no ‘critique’ of what is written, no suggestions for how writers might improve their piece. Instead, the group listens to writers read their response to a writing prompt and, in turn, reflect back to the writer what stays with us, what we’re most struck or surprised by, what we find most beautiful in their work. Approaching writing this way, I’ve witnessed the power of positive feedback. I love we write together in silence and then share. I’ve learned everyone is a writer, that every voice is beautiful and unique. My most-loved part of these sessions is at the end, where each writer chooses their favourite sentence they wrote and we move round the circle and listen to each person read their favourite sentence aloud. Always (always!) the writer plucks the sentence I would have chosen as “their best”…it has little to do with technique and everything to do with “feeling it”.  Experiencing this over and over and over each week, I’ve learned (and practice!) that all of us know, with keen instinct, what “is best” in our own work[3]. It’s about learning to trust ourselves.
  • Offering creative writing sessions with colleagues at work. Working with two other writers (both ex-journalists), we’ve put together quarterly creative writing sessions open to anyone interested (they are online). We’ve done this for a few years now…attendance varies…it’s challenging in this space for people to feel safe to express themselves. This is learning too.  
  • I’m working with a mentor to support my long project writings, Kate Moses.[4]
  • Attending, listening and reading at local reading events.
  • And I love to read other writers’ work, inviting people to send me their work, asking them for what would be most helpful for them for me to consider and feed back to them.  Reading others helps me practice many skills at once: structural considerations from the sentence to the paragraph to the whole; content considerations, what might be missing, what might be expanded, what might not be needed; clarity; rhythm and sound; point of view; most of all, listening to the writer’s intentions and honouring that as well as I’m able.
  • And you. I write to you. With you in my mind and my heart. Too many times I have thought of giving up, giving in to my grief. Knowing you are here and reading …well, I will not let you down.
I visited a friend for dinner the other night and she reminded me of a pastel drawing I gifted she and her partner waaaay back when they helped us with house construction – another collaborative project. This was 2004? 2005? I took a quick snap of the drawing hanging on her wall to share here.

All this, to show, with so much proof, I do not create alone. I’m nested within a co-creating community, one that helps me hold up my eye and my ‘I’ to continue to work and believe in my work, to know and feel how important art is for us.

Quick (and exciting! and terrifying!) update: my year long sabbatical was (finally) formally approved. It begins May 1st.

[1] Serendipity. Was going to link to the shlocky music they play when someone’s Oscar speech has gone on too long, but instead I look up Chloé Zhao’s acceptance speech at the Movies For Grown Up Awards with AARP for her film adaptation of Hamnet (book written by Maggie O’Farrell). Zhao’s speech is beautiful. Humble. From the heart. And she communicates exactly what I am trying to write about here. Such a delight to discover this. Do take the 3 minutes, listen to her voice. Here’s the link again. I have not yet seen the film…I have heard it is very beautiful.  Knowing the story, I’m choosing to watch the film when I have the space and time to cry.  

[2] And to show up to the task of making with a body that is focused, well rested, well nourished, physically healthy and emotionally attuned. I’m aware too, living in our world of wasp nest systems designed for capital gain, the ability to show up this way for creative work is cruelly challenged. I do not take my privilege for granted; I work knowing others do not have the choices I have. I work, called to the important task of making art that synthesizes the impacts of our pain. And there are many days when I’m overwhelmed with sorrow and depression, thinking (wailing) what can I possibly make of all of it?  It’s at these points I haul up this knowledge: I’m one small component of a larger creative process…with responsibility to simply show up … and get to work. Loop this message on repeat, get the fuck out of bed, keep working. Wasps are pollinators. Their mud-papery nests of hexagonned cells are works of art. Find the beauty in the sting. Work with it.

[3] I keep reminding myself of this as an antidote to my anxiety spirals and fears my writing isn’t “good”.  Good gawd the inner critic is an obstinate bitch.

[4] I met Kate almost ten years ago (my gawd) and it was only by serendipitous chance!  Another writer friend in Montreal had signed up for a writing retreat with Kate in Maine but had to fly to the UK last minute to attend a funeral.  It was the week before the retreat and she couldn’t get her money back so she phoned me up at work and said, can you go? It starts Friday…all expenses paid. Yes!  I would not have been able to afford that cost back then, and the fact M shouldered the cost was the key for convincing my then husband to look after our kids so I could go.  I think it was a four- or five-day retreat, I don’t remember. I do remember it was wonderful and that, at one point, as a group of writers read our work to each other in a pale robin egg-shell painted dining room, Kate got out of her chair across from me, moved to stand behind me and gently pressed her cool palms to my cheeks to tilt my head around the room saying, “we want to see what you see”. It is only now, recounting this memory (I had forgotten it!) I understand the importance and interestingness and unique entertainment of reading the world through another’s experience (for, isn’t this what writing is? Getting into the head of a character to experience their experience?). And, if I’m honest, it’s an aspect of creative writing I continue to struggle with: believing what I have to say, how I see the world, is valid and interesting. This reminds me of a short story by Carol Shields, Absence, where the protagonist is a writer working with a keyboard where the letter ‘I’ is broken …so she writes the story without ‘I’ …enacting what it is to be absent (my goodness how the memories beget memories…). Will need to find and read that story again (it will have new meaning for me now).   I loved working with Kate back then, and a little over a year ago, we connected again and I began working with her to support me through the development of my long project. I love that we love the same books and reference different techniques used by different writers in all our conversations.  She turns my thinking inside out and progresses my thinking about my own project by leaps and bounds.   When we zoom call, her dogs (salukis?) stretch out behind her on great olive velvet chaise-longues with rose-pink floral-patterned throws, lounging as if their bellies are filled with the most delicious sweet meats and I feel exactly like them.

Mise en Place

Suzanne Biro

We start, this time, at an art opening at a local gallery. It’s a month after I walked out of a twenty-seven-year relationship, a twenty-five-year marriage. The clothes I’m wearing hang from the bones of my shoulders and hips cause I’m a walking coat hanger; all the crying seems to have displaced my need to eat. A first. My eyes are sore swollen and pink veined and the skin at my nostrils is red raw. I look like the grim reaper, hollowed out, dark hooded, hawk-eyed and awkward at a culture appreciation event.  I’m trying not to look like I spend my days sobbing. I’ve discovered it’s possible to cry and work at the same time; it’s possible to cry and grocery shop at the same time; it’s possible to lift weights at the gym and cry at the same time. I wake with wet cheeks. Every day I wonder when the crying will stop. I don’t know it at the time but daily weeping ends after ten months.  After that, sorrow surprises, gushing at inopportune times: online meetings, phone calls, paying at parking meters. Once the sluice gates swing from my eyeballs it’s hard to know how long the tears will flow …minutes maybe…a few hours…a couple weeks. I get good at convincing my colleagues, my friends, my daughters to gloss the crying, it’s normal, nothing to worry about, this river of grief flowing through. I cry and continue to be “productive”. I cry but with wider spans of time between jags.

The art opening. There are many people crowding the gallery space, but when I enter, I lock eyes with a woman across the room. I think: I know that woman… I move toward the nearest wall and gaze at the paintings there, round the perimeter, trying to focus on the art but I can feel the woman’s eyes warming my back. Who is she? I’m three-quarters round the gallery when I realise it’s H, my (ex) husband’s first wife.

I’d met H only twice, both times at funerals, where we’d shook hands and exchanged expressions of…puzzled bewilderment.

By the fourth wall of my self-guided gallery tour I make up my mind to speak to her, introduce myself. And when I turn around, she’s directly behind me so I reach to shake her hand saying, You’re H, I’m …

Suzanne, I know.

Welcome to the club of ex-wives! I blurt, laughing, grasping her hand.

Her eyes widen, not quite believing. No! she gasps. She says, I can’t believe you lasted as long as you did!  Then she says, Are you a hugging person?

We hug for a long time. It feels like there’s only the two of us in the gallery, in the whole wide world, though a joyfully noisy crowd and beautiful art works orbit us.

Why the memories of H today?  What has this to do with creative writing? Well, a few weeks ago, I went to watch H perform in a play. She played the lead role in W;t, a one act play written by Margaret Edson. H’s performance was so good, marvellous really. It’s an exceedingly challenging role due to the linguistic and conceptual gymnastics of so many of its lines. I was delighted by H’s accomplishment, the whole performance as well as the playwriting and the emotional impact of it all. Sitting there, in the theatre audience dark, I played participant within a work of art in a way that enabled me to understand my own long project writings in a new way. I’ll try to articulate this.

The play, W;t, combines several different components:

  1. A story line: a strong, independent, professional academic woman’s career is overcome because she is dying of cancer
  2. A weaving of disparate academic elements, using dialogue, to elevate one of the play’s overall meanings (there are a few) about what might be lost by devoting one’s life focus toward intellectual advancement at the expense of living, experiencing joy: language, lingo, and theory from medical research (oncology) right up alongside/interspersed with literary criticism (metaphysical poet John Donne)
  3. Scenes from a variety of time periods with clear signals to guide the audience: the scenes do not progress in chronological order, instead, the sequencing jumps forward and backward in time and uses lighting, stage positioning, stage props, gesture and language variations to signal to the audience where and when the scene is taking place (e.g., a hospital, a lecture hall, a living room in a childhood home, etc.)  
  4. A main character narrator who forces audience participation and explicitly speaks about the structure of the play: the “fourth wall” is broken several times throughout the play when the main character addresses the audience directly, calling out into the dark and reacting as the audience reacts, but also, explaining how the play is put together and giving away the ending (death) at the beginning with the opening lines.
  5. Other components…but I’m drifting too far from my point so, let’s refocus…

Watching how all these components came together on the stage helped me to see how my own long project (book length) writing is also made up of quite a few different components, so I decided to list them[1]:

  1.  A main story line: a woman’s desire to create a “perfect family” is thwarted
  2. A weaving of pop cultural elements (movie lines, mostly from 1980s movies) to provide comic relief but also to elevate one of the story’s overall meanings about how we are silenced through shame, both interpersonally and culturally.  Too complicated to explain here, but the technique applies the use of humour and language layering as a coping mechanism for characters in emotional pain. Like a play, this is predominantly done through dialogue.  
  3. Scenes from a variety of time periods associated with the protagonist/narrator (yes, I think these are the same character at this point, a persona of yours truly [insert graceful sweeping bow]). The “digression” elements of the overall structure (will touch on this below) are stories during the narrator’s childhood and during the narrator’s prehistory (before the protagonist is born) and some scenes are forward in time from the main story arc. I know, this is confusing to read in the abstract …in my mind it works though.  What I continue to try to figure out is what I will use as the “signals” for the reader to keep track of where and when they are in the story. I don’t want this to be a disorienting mess…the path must be clear and effortless for a reader to follow[2].
  4. I really like the use of second person point of view brought into the experience of reading. I’m sure you’ve noticed how frequently I speak to you directly through my writings.  It makes me feel less alone. Gives me a sense that I’m being supported and nurtured and held and connecting through gossamer threads winding the world wide web. I like the collusion feel of it. It’s an intimacy. In the long project, I feel it’s a way to pull disparate elements of the writing together…a way for the narrator to admit she’s figuring things out as she goes and she’s making mistakes and maybe even this is one of them…trying to put pieces of this long project together before great swaths of it have even been drafted. Am I being too deterministic with my project by building out this recipe?  You might let me know.
  5. Another element I’m playing with is the integration of scientific research (neurophysiological development, epigenetics, trauma theory, attachment theory, blah blah)…but NOT from a pedantic standpoint[3]…I’m trying to sprinkle these in creatively playing with narrative distance, micro and macro settings, and personification as the formal techniques to make it artistic, even beautiful. Very much in development.  

I wrote last month about coming to the idea of applying a ring structure for my long project.  I’ve continued to play with piecing of story elements using different coloured cards and writing, well, not quite scene titles, I guess they’re event titles, on little cards.  This way, I can move the events around and play with the various sequencing of information a reader will read from the beginning of a book to its end. I’m still figuring this out…a lot of the story events have been written, albeit in very (very!) drafty bits…some of them have yet to be written. Here’s simplified diagram of the ring structure I’m working toward, the model, followed by a photo of this exercise in progress.

Working this way, I’ve come to realise the story, and what it is I want to say through its writing, will be served better by fictionalizing it. This is a VERY BIG change[4]. Until now, I’ve been working with nonfiction, adhering to “what really happened” and some sort of “truth” from my own experiences of events. But it’s clear, especially if trying to match structural elements of the main story line so they hang in mirror image to one another to be “felt/intuited” by a reader, taking off into imagination territory will enable me to explore and uphold story and story meaning more comprehensively than sticking to the facts.

So. All these elements, it’s kind of like a recipe no? It’s like I’m assembling all the story ingredients together to create a book shaped dish. Let’s call it a meal because I want whatever comes out of this process to be satisfyingly delicious…in the, um, read way (I’ve lost the metaphor here but whatevs). I want the writing and reading to be shared pleasure. Mise en place (hit that link, it’s funny) is a French culinary term for having all your recipe ingredients fully prepared before you begin to cook: onions chopped, garlic minced, cans opened, oils and spices measured out.  The techniques of cooking…the tools, the timing, the temperature, the equipment…remains equally important…the mise is only one phase of the cooking. In this way, I’m confident that setting all these components out on my metaphorical countertop is not deterministic, but simply a “recipe” for helping me to contain the associative creative writings towards realising this project. A cure for chaos, so to speak. Or layering different melodies into harmony so they play in concert together.  

[1] A caveat: these elements are fluid, not locked down…this is how they emerge at the moment of current drafting; I’m open to shifts and changes…I’m learning about what my writing is about as I write it…there’s no other way through it …I’m remaining flexible.

[2] The signals could be comprised of a repeated image or repeated paragraph elements or a phrase or even a super-duper clear signpost from the narrator “and now we are back in [insert location element]”.  I have a particularly arresting image in this work (a fetus in a jar)—an aside, I was delighted to discover John Irving includes the same image in Hotel New Hampshire—but I know, from having included this image in writings I have workshopped, how heavily it lands with people (and often, not well)…so I’m looking for something less overt.  The fetus in a jar will of course be part of the story…but it speaks volumes as itself and doesn’t require any additional window dressing emphasis.

[3] I have made this mistake many many many times…I can spot it now, when I write this way…I’m practicing transforming it.

[4] Have to say, I’m frightened by this change. Like, what if I can’t do it?  Like, what if my imagination is bust? But then I think…well, fuck, what else might I be doing with my time…at least I can try. This is the same attitude I’ve been wrestling with (inner critic can be pretty vocal on this point] about the long project and this incredibly convoluted and complex approach to writing a novel. I mean, I KNOW I could write a decent enough (sufficient for publication? Not sure) essay collection on these topics that would be far easier to complete…but, for some reason, I’m choosing this crazy path …maybe just to see if I can do it. And again, the refrain, Well, fuck, what else might I be doing with my time? This works. I like doing this with my time.