What Only the Peacock Knows
Do Teachers learn from Their Students?
Last week end, one of my former students, Canadian playwright, Paul Ciufo, interviewed me at a book event in Bayfield, Ontario. We kicked off the evening with Santa Claus and the lighting of the Christmas lights in the town square, and then Paul and I went back to the Village Book Shop, which is run by its new owner Mary Brown. One of the first questions Paul asked was about a remark I’d made in a creative writing workshop at York University.
“You need to tell me something that only the peacock knows,” Paul said, quoting my feedback on his short story about a peacock.
He said my remark had haunted him as a playwright and what on earth did I mean? At first, I hemmed and hawed. Had I given Paul bad advice? Shouldn’t I have given him more information instead of making mysterious pronouncements about peacocks?
Flummoxed, I took a stab at what I had meant twenty years ago when he had been a promising and talented student in my class. “We need narrators who are like us and not like us so we have room to invent,” I replied. Paul looked at me blankly. I went on. “And students tend to offer a long and often cliched laundry list of descriptive details about a character instead of finding the specific, defining details that let us see who their character is. So I wanted you to tell me specific things about the peacock. Instead of using vague, general language to describe your peacock.”
Paul still looked puzzled, and I knew this wasn’t what I had meant at all. So what had I been going on about?
Reflecting on our conversation this morning, it strikes me that I was telling Paul what writers do. Our job is not only describing what our character knows but what is special about what our character knows. And in each case, it is up to the writer to find out that special knowledge and convey it. The writer can express this in a variety of ways, through an image or a metaphor, or an inner dialogue of some kind.
And that reminds me of something that Thornton Wilder once said, that an artist’s job is to reveal the truth and hide it at the same time. And what did Wilder mean by that? Only the peacock knows.
More Magazine Reviews Susan Swan’s The Western Light
This month in More Magazine four authors look at love, lineage, and, most of all, loss.
Click the image to read:
Making the Calgary Festival Scene
Just arrived in Calgary for Wordfest which this year has 70 writers and 65 events over six days in Calgary and Banff. Flew in with Julie Wilson, author of Seenreading, who was herself reading a new hot novel titled Malarky along with Russell Wangersky, whose book Whirl Away was shortlisted for the Giller. Good discussion in taxi ( kindly driven by Dennis a thoughtful festival volunteer who listened in) about the merits of Facebook versus Twitter, with Facebook coming out on top because Facebook allows for more discussion. Twitter, said my colleagues, often just repeats what an in group has already decided to think about a certain subject, whether it is politicos or literati speaking to each other.
Another bon mot, this time from Julie Wilson who says it is no longer enough just to win the Giller; the writing community gets excited when there is the possibility of a triple win with the Rogers Trust and the GG fiction awards. Food for thought. Writing books as a sport takes a new up twist. Yikes.
- Julie Wilson with her new book Seenreading
Swan’s Q and A on The Western Light
1. In this novel, you’ve returned to the narrator, Mouse Bradford, in your bestseller, The Wives of Bath. Why?
Mouse Bradford is my favourite alter ego. She appeared in The Wives of Bath first. But you don’t have to have read that novel to understand The Western Light. In this book, Mouse tries and fails to get her father’s attention so she turns to a dubious father substitute, Gentleman John Pilkie, the ex-NHL hockey player sent to the local asylum after murdering his wife and child. He’s an ambiguous character who’s emotionally present for Mouse when her own father is too busy working. Is somebody who gives themselves to their community and neglects their family a good role model? That’s one of the questions I explore in The Western Light.
2. Where did Mouse come from?
I knew a girl at school like Mouse. She was shy and walked with a limp. But she had an authority that the other students who were striking poses lacked. And yet she couldn’t play sports. She had a weak leg and she needed to accept her limitations so she could navigate her schoolgirl world. Does accepting what makes you vulnerable help to grow courage? Maybe so.
3. The fifties play a big part in this novel. Toronto reviewer Susan Cole said: “… where Swan’s experience speaks most tellingly is in The Western Light’s vivid evocation of life in the 1950’s and its essential signifiers: the clothes, the hair, the telephone party lines and the all-out-hate-on-between fans of the Montreal Canadians.” Was it nostalgic to write about that time period for you?
I hated the fifties when I was growing up because I was extremely tall and interested in books and ideas when girls were supposed to be breezy five-foot-two cheerleaders. But looking back on it, I realized there were progressive things going on, like the emergence of rock and roll, which gave a voice to young people in a way that hadn’t been done before in human history. And there was optimism, lots of it, and not the cynicism young people experience now living inside a global culture with more competition and a bottom line mind set that wants to run everything like a business, including education.
4. Hockey and concussions are part of the plot in The Western Light. Have the attitudes to hockey concussions changed much since the days you write about?
The NHL still doesn’t give players a penalty for a headshot. The penalty is for deliberate intent to injure and that’s hard to judge. The biggest difference now is the salaries the NHL players make and their pensions. In the 1950’s, salaries were small and there were no pensions. Injured players were discarded without compensation; in some ways, those players were gladiators without rights.
5. Is The Western Light a 1950’s hockey novel?
Another title for this novel could be Girls and Men because Mouse is trying to understand men, especially her own father, and in Canada anyway, understanding men is going to involve understanding hockey. The game is how Canadians express the aggressive side of our character. My usually compassionate father turned into a raging maniac if the calls were going against the Toronto Leafs. Once he smashed a man’s hat in at Maple Leaf Gardens. Another time he climbed up and over the wire fence behind the Habs goal and threatened the referee. So a girl like Mouse Bradford has to figure out how to fit into this male world and decide what she thinks of it. And her relationships with her neglectful country doctor father and the ex-NHL hockey star Gentleman John Pilkie help her to figure this out.
Susan Swan’s Fall Book Tour Schedule for The Western Light
Here it is–a fall of national literary festivals and Ontario bookstores since The Western Light is set on the Georgian Bay and in Oil Springs and Petrolia. The pub date for reviews has been moved to September 22. With more events to come. (I will be taking lots of ginseng):
Upcoming publicity and events:
Thursday October 4 – Not So Nice Italian Girls reading (College St., Toronto)
http://www.openbooktoronto.com/events/not_so_nice_italian_girls_and_friends_swan
Tuesday, Oct. 9 — WordFest “WordFeast” Fundraising Event, River Café, Calgary, 6pm
http://www.wordfest.com/festival/wordfeast/
Wednesday, Oct. 10 — WordFest “Wednesday Night Showcase” Vertigo Theatre Centre, Playhouse, Calgary, 7pm
http://www.wordfest.com/event/44-how-should-a-writer-be/
Saturday, Oct. 13,— WordFest “How Should a Writer Be?” The Banff Centre, The Kinnear Centre KC-303, Banff, 1:30pm
http://www.wordfest.com/event/15-wednesday-night-showcase/
Sunday, Oct. 14 — WordFest “Worldly Words: Canadian and International,” The Banff Centre, The Kinnear Centre -KC 203, Banff, 3:30pm
http://www.wordfest.com/event/51-worldly-words/
Monday Oct. 15 and Tuesday Oct. 16 – WordFest Summit Salon in Banff
http://www.banffcentre.ca/programs/program.aspx?id=1299
Thurs Oct 18 — Vancouver International Writers’ Festival panel event with short reading, 8pm (Event #40,Waterfront Theatre)
http://www.writersfest.bc.ca/at-a-glance/2012festival
Fri Oct 19 — Vancouver International Writers’ Festival, reading, 8pm (Event #51 Performance Works)
http://www.writersfest.bc.ca/at-a-glance/2012festival
Wednesday October 23 – 7pm reading at Wordsworth Books in Waterloo, with Tamas Dobozy
http://www.wordsworthbooks.com/Tamas%20Dobozy.htm
Sunday, October 28 - IFOA Harbourfront—2pm Round Table discussion: Reading Like a Writer, Lakeside Terrace (Moderator: Antanas Sileika)
http://www.readings.org/?q=ifoa/round_table_reading_like_a_writer
Monday, October 29 – IFOA Ontario – Reading in Parry Sound, 7:30pm
http://www.litontour.com/events/ifoa-parry-sound-2
Friday, November 2 – IFOA Ontario – Reading/interview in Midland, 7:30pm
http://www.litontour.com/events/ifoa-midland-3
Tuesday, December 4 – Reading at Different Drummer in Burlington, 9am
http://www.differentdrummerbooks.ca/a_different_drummer_books/Home.html
Monday, December 10-Tuesday, December 11 – Speeches at Sultan Bin Zayed’s Culture and Media Centre, Abu Dhabi
Heroines of the Sexual Gothic Celebrates the Toronto Women’s Bookstore
Coralie (left) of the Billie Hollies and Susan Swan (right) at Heroines of the Sexual Gothic
On Thursday June 7th, Canadian author Susan Swan and the all girl folk-noir quartet, the Billie Hollies, delighted a packed house at The Toronto Women’s Bookstore with the forty-minute performance reading: Heroines of the Sexual Gothic.
Why celebrate? Because the Toronto Women’s Bookstore is back and better than ever with an array of new features: an Espresso bar and lounge, summer patio, writing workshops as well as a reference library of important feminist and queer theory texts. The store also sells books for university courses in these disciplines.
The first writing workshop will be led by Toronto fiction writer Zoe Whittail.
The new owner Victoria Moreno explains that the new features have been designed to make her store more community oriented, and she encourages visitors to drop in for a coffee and browse.
“In an age of increased commercialization, women’s stories and histories can be easily marginalized,” Swan says, explaining her support for the store. “But stores like this offer an important counterpoint. Why should we be obliged to re-invent the wheel with each generation?”
During the event, Swan discussed her intimate relationship with three of her best-known characters, including Mouse Bradford, who appears in The Western Light, Swan’s new novel, which will be published early this fall. The Billie Hollies are popular newcomers to the Toronto music scene. Their latest CD is Light of Mind.
Thank you to all who came to the event and everyone that helped make it such a success.
Three shades of sex talk: female writers on the challenges of erotic fiction
This article is featured in the Globe and Mail June 2, 2012 and can be found at www.theglobeandmail.com
SHEILA HETI, SUSAN SWAN, ZOE WHITTALL
Sheila Heti: I find most books still shockingly puritanical. Can we try to understand why this is?
Susan Swan: Does it come from a traditional Christian suspicion of the body? Let’s face it: Canada has a long tradition of Presbyterian Scots who saw sex and the body as sinful.
I’m reading Fifty Shades of Grey – not just for entertainment, but to see if its depictions of women having orgasms resonates with me. Usually, with such books, there is a degree of faux artifice that follows the portrayals of sex in Hollywood movies. Many women writers fall into writing a version of that. First, one or two kisses, some gropings and then mutual orgasms. I think this romance code is a hard thing to shake. Maybe both men and women long for sex to be snappy and smooth, or women still hesitate to tell men that getting them aroused takes longer than it does for a man.
Zoe Whittall: I think if the writing is good in and of itself, and you respond to it, then it’s good sex writing. There is no fixed way to write sex well, just as there are no fixed ways to write a job interview or a car explosion well. If you’ve avoided the clichés and are being real and aren’t all freaked out as a writer about what you’re writing, then that is a place to start. So if bored housewives are scandalized by mild S/M in Fifty Shades of Grey, but I find it tame, that’s just the way it is.
Swan: When it comes to bad sex writing, I think the reason most men are going to have a trickier time coming up with compelling, authentic descriptions of women’s experiences of sex is a lack of knowledge about female nature. Both sexes are still discovering what female nature is. Traditional attitudes to women, reflected in 19th-century science, have been based in prejudice or wish fulfilment, so how could male writers get it right? When I was a young woman, feminist theory insisted that women weren’t that different from men. Now researchers like Louann Brizendine, in her bestseller The Female Brain, says that the neurochemical make-up of women makes us very different from men, in the ways we experience language, being a parent and sex.
Whittall: Theorists like Brizendine are popular because they simplify gender and use some easy-to-dispute neuroscience to traffic in stereotypes and reaffirm from a biological-determinism perspective that all women feel one way about sex and all men feel another. Gender isn’t fixed in this way.
Heti: One of my favourite books about sex is U.S. writer Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick. What excited me about her approach is that the book is so suffused with desire, yet the characters have sex only once, late in the book. I like it when a writer shows sex as embedded in life. This is different from “sex scenes,” which read weird to me. Sex is so much closer to our humanity than scenes. It’s as if writers put in “thinking scenes” or “relating scenes.”
Swan: I think that’s why Henry Miller wrote about sex so well. He was trying to say, this is how I experience life, and myself with my favourite women.
To read the full article please click HERE.
A P.S. on Agents Next Week
Sunday Morning Writer’s Blog
There is always lots more to be said about agents so I’ll be blogging about them again next Sunday.
Check my blog on the long week end for more information. I’m currently out of town.
What You Should Know about Agents:
Sunday Morning Writer’s Blog:
First of all, most agents are too busy to regularly submit short stories and poetry to magazines on your behalf. They will likely place a piece of fiction or non-fiction for you at the time of your book’s publication, but for the most part, your shorter submissions are your responsibility. And the easiest way to find out who you should submit your work to is to read American and Canadian literary magazines as well as Harpers, the New Yorker and the Atlantic. McSweeneys takes edgier writing at http://www.mcsweeneys.net
Secondly, you must check out the submission guidelines on the website of a literary agent before submitting a cover letter with a sample portion of your manuscript. Each agent has slightly different guidelines. Some like email submissions; some don’t and so on. And some agencies, like the Anne McDermid and Associates in Toronto and Amanda Urban in New York, now don’t accept unsolicited manuscripts. This means you would have to get a veteran author to introduce you to their staff.
McDermid’s agency is also one of the first Canadian agencies to publish their authors’ work in an e-book format. Other agencies as well as Amazon and Kobo do some digital publishing too, and there is likely going to be a lot more online publishing by agents and big box book sellers as time goes on. So keep your eye out for who is doing what. Publishers’ Lunch in the US is a good place to keep track of this sort of news. http://www.publishersmarketplace.com/lunch/free/
A blog called the Shatzkin Files also has up-to-date news and opinions on trends in publishing. http://www.idealog.com/blog/
Unless you have a non-fiction scoop like the secret sex life of Stephen Harper, your manuscript should be finished and very polished before you try to find an agent. AN AGENT WHO HAS REJECTED YOUR UNPOLISHED DRAFT WON’T LOOK AT A MORE POLISHED DRAFT. Keep in mind that most agents get between 20 to 30 submissions a day from new clients, and eighty percent of published Canadian writers don’t have agents because competition for agents is tough.
Here are some of the reputable Canadian agents I know personally and can recommend:
Denise Bukowski (The Bukowski Agency); Dean Cooke, (The Cooke Agency); Jackie Kaiser, Linda McKnight, Hilary McMahon, Natasha Haines (Foreign Rights Director at Westwood Creative Artists),* John Pearce (who lives in Victoria, B.C.) and Bruce Westwood (Westwood Creative Artists.) Michael Levine handles film and TV rights at Westwood (Westwood Creative Artists) Samantha Haywood,* Meghan Macdonald,* Shaun Bradley, David and Lynn Bennett (Transatlantic Agency.) Sam Hiyate,* (The Rights Factory); Helen Heller (Helen Heller Agency); Anne McDermid (Anne McDermid and Associates Ltd.); Rick Broadhead* and Associates; Bella Pomer (The Pomer Agency); and Beverly Slopen (Beverly Slopen Agency). Daneman, Haywood, Macdonald, Hiyate, and McMahon, are all relatively young and more receptive to younger writers, but if your work is really good most agents will still want you.
Canada has more agents than those listed above. And there is more information about agents available on the Writers’ Union of Canada www.writersunion.ca Preditors & Editors (P &E Literary Agents) has information about American agents who are willing to take on Canadians if the work is good. Some of the top American agents include: Virginia Barber of Virginia Barber Associates; Kim Witherspoon and Alexis Hurley at Inkwell Associates: Amanda Urban at ICM (who is not currently accepting submissions), Ellen Levine at the Levine Agency, and Andrew Wylie at the Wylie Agency.
If you want to get your manuscript evaluated before you try to find an agent or a publisher, you can pay for a workshop like the excellent July workshop put on by Humber College. Humber also has a correspondence course where unpublished writers mail professional writers like myself installments of their manuscript and get the writer’s feedback returned to them by mail. AGAIN: DO NOT SUBMIT UNPOLISHED WORK TO AN AGENT. YOU WON’T GET A SECOND CHANCE.
The Writers’ Union of Canada also has a fee based manuscript evaluation service. And some professional writers will edit work for other writers. Lorna Owen, an American freelance editor, looks at unpublished drafts for a fee. Average fees for this kind of service are between $35 to $75 an hour.