Living the Questions: Should You Have Children if You Want to Write?
Years ago, a science-fiction writer named Judith Merrill told me she couldn’t write after her children left home.
Without the structure children imposed on her day, she was lost.
My daughter Sam transformed my day too. In order to raise her and write fiction I had to learn to say no to other people’s expectations.
Her birth was the start of my creative life.
Living the Questions: What Advice Gives Writers Confidence?
Ignore the advice to write about what you know.
Write about what obsesses you and what you know will transform every word you say. Why? Because what you know will come into play naturally and that’s the best way to write.
Living the Questions: Where Do Writers Live?
Anywhere that’s cheap.
Writing is a lifestyle and luckily, it has perks. People often rent to writers at a discount because writers are quiet. (Well, most writers.) That’s how it was for me at the Hotel Chelsea when Jerry Weinstein ran the desk. There’s a Jerry Weinstein for every writer if you keep an eye out. Look around and see.
Living the Questions: How Do Writers Make a Living?
This new series on the blog is inspired by the poet Ranier Maria Rilke, who wrote in a letter to a toiling poet:
“Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will find them gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
A writer’s life is filled with frustrations. There’s writing and there’s making money. How do you do both?
One year I earned $160,000 from a book to film deal and not a cent the next. I made the writing life work by having one reliable source of income and freelancing the rest.
Below are a series of photos taken by Irene Grainger. The theme of the photographs is the frustrations of the writing life.
Here’s what others say:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/canada-authors-poorer-than-ever-says-study-1.4908086
Why Start a New Literary Prize for Women Writers?
When my friend Janice Zawerbny asked me to help her start a literary prize for women, I had no idea what I was signing up for. Zawerbny is a Toronto editor and she was upset by the grim statistics about women’s writing that I brought to a Vancouver Writers Fest panel in 2012.
Like people who knew about the international success of literary stars such as the late Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood, I thought women’s writing was killing it.
Research proved me wrong. In both the US and Canada, women authors won a third of the literary prizes and received a third of the coverage for their books in magazines and newspapers. And although they publish roughly the same number of books as men, women earned 45 percent less.
There’s been improvement since 2012 but the overall stats are still discouraging. Today only 17 women out of 119 winners have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Since 1918, female authors have won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 31 out of 94 times and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction 13 out of 41 times.
Canadian statistics are more encouraging. The Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Atwood- Gibson Writers Trust Fiction Prize have an equitable gender balance but there are still weak spots. Female authors have won the Governor General Award in English language 31 out of 84 times while women authors have won the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour a shocking 9 times out of 75.
That Vancouver night after I shared my statistics, there were gasps and despairing groans from the large audience (you guessed it) of mostly women. In her book, The Authority Gap, M.A. Sieghart says men consciously or unconsciously don’t accord as much authority to books by women or they make a lazy assumption that women’s books aren’t for them. According to Sieghart, men read only 19 percent of the top 10 best selling female authors while 45 of percent women and 55 of percent men read the top 10 best selling male authors.
A few days after agreeing to help Janice, Don Oravec, former CEO of the Writers Trust of Canada, joined us. In the spring of 2014, American novelist Roxane Robinson, president of the Authors Guild, and Noreen Tomassi, founding director of Brooklyn’s Centre for Fiction, came on board. Since women authors in both countries had the same problem we felt we could be stronger if we worked together. Over the next decade, supporters and financial patrons from American and Canadian cities followed. Prominent philanthropists like Melinda French Gates and Jennifer N. Pritzker also gave us money.
And so it was that a small group of determined women and one man started the largest literary prize in the world for American and Canadian women fiction writers and non-binary authors. On May 4, the prize will have a historic moment when it awards its first winner at Parnassus, the fabled bookstore owned by our literary patron, Ann Patchett, in Nashville, Tennessee. BMO is generously donating the prize purse: $150,000 USD for the winner and $12,500 USD to each of the four nominees.
The Carol Shields Prize also gives grants and residencies to emerging female writers from marginalized communities. It does this through 11 mentoring partnerships in Canada and the US. Our first two mentees will attend the May 4 awards and meet writers like Margaret Atwood, who is speaking at the event.
Why did we start a new literary award? Winning a prize radically improves a writer’s economic circumstances. Women authors still earn less than men and often carry the burden of caregiving for dependents. Catriona Lily, a janitor at Trinity College Dublin, was able to pay for her daycare and a water tank after she unexpectedly won Ireland’s Rooney Prize. When Anna Burns won the Man Booker Prize for Literature, it enabled her to stop living off food banks.
After Jennifer Egan won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for A Visit from the Goon Squad, sales of her book tripled, selling an average of 10,000 copies a month until dropping to an average of 5,000 copies. And after Esi Edugyan won Canada’s Giller Prize for Half-Blood Blues, sales jumped 479 percent.
There was early pushback to the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. Two prominent West Coast male writers claimed we had to give the prize to every ethnicity if we were giving an award to women writers. Women, who make up half the world’s population, were an ethnicity?
Oh well, I thought. Not everybody thinks that way. But a few did. The head of an important literary festival said he was starting a prize for male writers. As if literary prizes weren’t mostly awarded to men!
A national Canadian radio host surprised Janice Zawerbny on his show by featuring an audio clip of a female writer denouncing the prize for relegating women authors to “a pink ghetto.” How does a substantial financial prize hold women back, Janice wondered. Maybe we were missing something.
Interestingly, the pushback stopped when we named the prize after the late Carol Shields, a beloved, prize-winning author in both the US and Canada. Her life mission was writing away the invisibility of women’s lives. A dual citizen, she grew up in Chicago and lived over half her life in Canada.
Today many male authors like Richard Russo and Scott Turow have endorsed the prize. Our two boards are made up of high-profile Americans and Canadians, and managed by a CEO. The authors committee consists of established women writers from diverse backgrounds and different generations. Literary patrons include Margaret Atwood, Jane Urquhart, Louise Erdrich, Edwidge Danticat, Zadie Smith, Louise Penny, Alice Munro, Shauna Singh Baldwin, and Gloria Steinem.
Do I regret the hard work we did? Not a bit. Despite its early history, the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction isn’t a grievance award. It celebrates the brilliance of women’s writing and boosts their economic circumstances. It took us longer than expected to get there but here we are.
Originally published in The Globe and Mail, April 29, 2023.
Why don’t more Canadians know about Constance Beresford-Howe?
When you think of the giants in Canadian literature, chances are you think of writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Alice Munro or Margaret Atwood. Few readers these days remember Constance Beresford-Howe, who wrote ground-breaking novels about the struggle of women to be autonomous.
You may not know about her because she was shy. Or because, unlike some of these household names, she never won a Giller or the Man Booker Prize. But only a few decades ago, she wrote 10 feminist novels including The Book of Eve (1973), which critics have called a Canadian classic. And, recently, a dedicated band of her readers unveiled a beautiful bronze plaque in her honour in the Writers’ Chapel at St. Jax church in Montreal.
She is the 11th author to receive such a plaque, and I attended its unveiling because Constance Beresford-Howe was an encouraging mentor who taught me creative writing at McGill University. Back then, almost no Canadian colleges offered such a course.
Her colleague was Hugh MacLennan, whose workshops were known as Uncle Hughie’s bedtime stories since he was fond of long rambling conversations about American politicians and fellow authors such as Morley Callaghan. It was Beresford-Howe who could be counted on for tips on the craft of writing. She excelled at discussions of plot and character development. And she admired my writing, although she told me with a wry smile that my sex scenes were too graphic. Hugh MacLennan agreed.
As students of the sixties, we naturally felt we knew far more about sex and real life than our dignified mentors and we used to joke about being the first to write the toilet-bowl novel — a coup in literary naturalism that thankfully has never materialized. Later, I was startled out of my youthful arrogance when I read The Book of Eve and realized Beresford-Howe deeply understood the intimate relationships between men and women. Its saucy account of a 65-year-old woman walking out on an aging and crabby husband still stands up.
At the end of our undergraduate course, she wanted me to write a novel as my MA thesis. It was the chance of a lifetime to do graduate work with her. Yet, I turned down her generous offer because an ex-boyfriend had been stalking me on campus.
In 1967, I took a job as a reporter at a daily newspaper in Toronto. Two years later, Beresford-Howe moved to Toronto herself. Disturbed by the rising separatism in Quebec, she came with her husband, French teacher Christopher Pressnell, and their young son, Jeremy. When she applied for a teaching job at the University of Toronto, they turned her down. Jeremy thinks it was because she had taught at McGill, a rival university. For two long years, she had no teaching work and that’s when she wrote The Book of Eve.
Eventually, she took a teaching position at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute (now Ryerson University). And she went on to write novels such as The Marriage Bed and A Population of One. Her last novel, A Serious Widow, was published in 1991. Beresford-Howe couldn’t find a publisher for her next book. So she and her husband retired to the Suffolk village of Lavenham, where they lived for 25 years. She died in 2016 and her husband died two weeks later from cancer and a broken heart, her son says.
A writer’s legacy is an elusive thing. A few writers are so famous their work turns into memes, such as George Orwell‘s 1984 or Atwood’s handmaids, while some are known for influencing other writers. And then there is Beresford-Howe, whose readers are honouring her work and that of other deceased Canadian writers. The volunteers who install the plaques are led by retired English professor, Michael Gnarowski. His former student Karl Feige makes the plaques at a foundry outside Ottawa.
Coming back from the unveiling, I wondered what Beresford-Howe would say about a writer’s legacy. I bet she would give me one of her wry smiles.
Meet The Lizard Man
No matter what he says, he believes what he says when he says it
An Unpublished Short Story from The Dead Celebrities Club.
Originally Published in Now Magazine, November 26, 2019.
He was called lizard man at school but he didn’t let it bother him. He isn’t really scaly. The look of his skin is closer to a mild case of psoriasis. Red, blotchy – sometimes inflamed. Definitely not scales, although he knows some lizards don’t have scales as such. They have leathery skin, and a leathery sensation is what you would feel if you touched him intimately.
Above the neck he is normal, more or less – aside from the bulb at the base of his throat that he prefers not to mention. He wears shirts buttoned up to his neck so it’s covered over. The other part of him, the nether part, is bound up tightly against his back. It hurts when he sits in a chair but not always. Some days the tissue is softer than others. He has learned to live with that fact.
He gets angry if anyone mentions the bulge under the back of his suit jacket. “So I have put on a few pounds,” he snaps. “What’s your problem?” It’s not the only bit of him that is tucked up. He’s a tucked-up kind of guy. Nothing wrong with that, although he is older now, and horrible things could be happening to his insides.
His ticker, for instance. He scoffed when his doctor told him to take it easy with the campaigning. He never phones it in. That’s his genius. No matter what he says, he believes what he says when he says it. A real liar doesn’t believe his lies, right?
He will give it his best shot today although his handlers want him to wear a body shield that fits over him like a plastic bubble. Who the fuck do they think he is? Darth Vader? The body shield with its metal mouthpiece is going to make him look weak. But they insist. They say there have been bomb threats, and worse.
There will also be security drones flying around the ones with gizmos like radar that help them dodge obstacles.
It will be hot inside the plastic dome. He sweated like crazy when he tried it on. And his sweat stung because his skin is so dry. His condition is worse. His condition. Is it something in the water? Now there are more and more people like him. Mostly men, of course, although he isn’t sure why he added “of course.” A subliminal prejudice against his gender, maybe.
People mimic his mannerisms, even his posture. There’s no mistaking his ability to attract women and intimidate his rivals. It took him years to develop the display structures that befit a man like himself.
He heads for the stage, moving from side to side in characteristic fashion. His slender, dignified wife smiles encouragingly. She advised him to obey his handlers and wear the plastic body shield. So he’s doing it for her. Staying safe so she feels safe.
The crowd’s eager voices, their flailing arms fill him with satisfaction. This is a righteous thing. Enjoying the admiration of thousands, the way he basks in the afternoon sun at his oceanfront retreat. Free from prying eyes, he sprawls in a lounger, sliding his tongue in and out, savouring the salty breeze.
Will there be air in that goddamn thing? He doesn’t want to suffocate. When he reaches the stage, he jokes that his handlers are turning him into a Russian babushka doll. The crowd roars with pleasure. They’re an easy laugh.
But not all of them are laughing. Some goofs in the row behind his wife are scowling. He flicks his tongue at them once, twice. Then he hitches up his pants and stands like an American war hero as his handlers lower the thing over his head. He thinks he hears frightened shrieks although he can’t hear as well as other people. He looks out through the klieg lights, trying to see what is making them crazy.
There is nothing to fear. He has command of the room. He takes several good sniffs inside his dome. The air tastes slightly bitter, like the kale smoothies his wife makes. It’s all good. He is safe and sound inside his full-body shield.
He feels as dangerous as a Komodo dragon. He loves their ugly snouts, beaded with shiny scales. Above his head, hundreds of security drones are gliding back and forth. They are protecting him. Nobody can hurt him now. He says hello to the crowd through his mouthpiece.
His fans shout back but something is wrong. The drones have convulsed in a ball around him, and he is falling backward against the plastic shield, his jaws oozing a weird greenish froth. The security guards lift off the plastic dome and he crumples to the floor. He hears a ripping sound as his dewlap bursts through his collar. There’s a light pulsing in his fracture planes, followed by a louder ripping noise, and a sudden weightless sensation at the back of him. He smiles sheepishly. A writhing snake-like object lies twitching on the stage. The crowd utters a horrified cry while the thing jerks and quivers in a puddle of body fluids.
It is what it is, he thinks, as the voices in the crowd grow fainter and fainter until the noise sounds far off, like the distant thunder of surf on the Florida shore.
Susan Swan is a Toronto-based writer. Her latest novel is The Dead Celebrities Club.
Literary Review Of Canada: Double Or Nothing
The Literary Review of Canada wrote an article about my new novel, The Dead Celebrities Club, and it’s deconstruction of the marketed, monetary value first language and society we have developed in the 21st century. Examining the way Stéphane Larue and I look at financial characters and stories, the article talks about how our novels look at the human capital versus human character question in the modern world.
To read the article, follow this link: