Category: Literary

Do Big Girls Cry? Six Foot Two Writers Jane Smiley and Susan Swan Compare Notes

Jane Smiley: I think the great pleasure of your book is that it makes you understand what it feels like to exist—to come to terms with who you are, how your body works, what you look like to others, and how that shapes you. Why did you write a memoir about your height?

Susan Swan: I had no intention of writing Big Girls Don’t Cry. Margaret Atwood, who’s a friend, suggested it. I wrote it off as a goofy idea but the more I thought about it, the more I realized my Amazonian size has shaped my life. For many of us, our size is how we pattern ourselves, and its influence affects us psychologically along with other markers like our class and cultural background, our race and our gender identity. This is especially true for women whose bodies are constantly scrutinized and judged in a way men’s bodies aren’t. To be a tall woman is to be a big woman, and to be big is to take up space, a cultural no-no for women of all sizes who are taught early on to cede space while men are encouraged to take up as much room as possible. God forbid, I might get bigger, I told myself when I hit six-foot-two at twelve.

To be a tall woman is to be a big woman, and to be big is to take up space, a cultural no-no for women of all sizes who are taught early on to cede space.

JS: At six foot two, you and I are in the 99th percentile of women in most Western countries. How did you feel about your body as a girl?

SS: When I grew up in the late 1950s and early 1960s children laughed at me on the street, and a boy burst into tears when he drew me on a blind date. Another teenage boy suggested I should get four inches cut off my thigh bones, so I didn’t have to join the circus like Anna Swan, the Victorian giantess who exhibited with P.T Barnum in New York. Interestingly, when I was a reporter in my twenties, I interviewed a formerly six-foot-one woman who had that very operation in the 1960s because she was so traumatized by her height. The Toronto surgeon who performed the surgery said he did it as act of compassion. No medical doctor would say something like that now about a tall woman. 

But don’t forget in those days the Guinness Book of World Records defined a giantess as a woman six-foot-two and over. In the 1958 Hollywood movie, Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman, a giantess played by Allison Hayes squashed men like bugs until the town sheriff killed her. The movie was a metaphor for men’s fear of big women and that subtext wasn’t lost on me. Mothers used to say, isn’t it too bad you’re so tall when you’re a girl. Did you have those reactions when you hit six foot two by the age of fourteen? 

JS: Not really. For one thing, I didn’t have to put up with teasing. My mother did take me to some doctor with the idea of shortening me, but the procedure sounded so painful that I refused. I also thought that my hands would be down by my ankles if they shortened my legs, and so I would look even weirder. I kept me eye on Verushka (a model) and Vanessa Redgrave (an actress), and I thought there was something independent and graceful about both of them. My mother spent years as the Women’s Page editor of a St. Louis newspaper, so she had her eye on the models, too. She even took me to someone to see if I could be a model, but whoever it was said that my hips were too narrow. But my two real passions were reading and horseback riding, and both of those had nothing to do with height.

SS: It sounds like your mother was more worried about your height than you were. And you didn’t have a giantess lurking in your family background like I did. I was deeply affected by Anna Swan’s story. She was my childhood bogey woman because she stood seven-foot-six in her stocking feet and weighed 418 pounds which is why Barnum billed her as The Biggest Modern Woman of the World. After she left Barnum’s American Museum on Broadway, Anna and her husband the Kentucky Giant, Martin Van Buren Bates, travelled with American circuses. Anna looked attractive in her photos. She was said to be intelligent and enjoyed books and learning. 

Nevertheless, I was terrified I would grow up to be too tall like her. My country doctor father and his medical texts didn’t help either. I used to sneak looks at them when nobody was around. As a child, I was horrified by the naked photographs of women and men who suffered from genetic disorders that to my kid’s mind made them look like ogres in a gothic fairy tale. There were several pictures of people suffering from gigantism, a defect that makes the pituitary gland produce excess growth hormone. Sometimes the hormone also causes their bones to thicken.

JS: Are you related to Anna Swan?

SS: I’ve researched my ancestry several times, but no family connection has come up. While I was writing a novel about her life, I did interview Anna’s descendants, and they had interesting stories to tell about Anna sitting on the floor, so her head was level with her siblings when they ate their meals of crowdie or porridge. They were poor farmers. But the Nova Scotian Swans are short people who had no connection to my branch of the Swans who are tall except that our families both come from Scotland. Experts say now that Anna likely suffered the effects of an excess growth hormone from her pituitary gland.

JS: You grew up in a small Presbyterian town in Canada where social rules, especially for women, were very strict. Is that why your book uses the metaphor of breaking out of boxes that held you back?

SS: Most of us grow up inside political and psychological frameworks that can restrict and confine us instead of helping us grow into our best selves. A conservative, rule bound Fifties culture like the one that socialized me had lots of restrictive boxes, the Go Along Box, the Traditional Female Box, the Spinster Box, the Dutiful Daughter Box. You get the idea. Canadian culture then was concerned with appearances and not blotting your copy book, as the expression went. 

JS: You were young during the 1970s second wave of feminism and the constraints women faced then. Why did you say some forms of feminism can become another box?

SS: I wouldn’t be anywhere, and neither would you without feminism and its support of women’s rights which are being severely challenged right now in the US. What I’m saying in my memoir is that feminist moralizing can turn into a box if the ideology becomes too narrow and rigid. In the 1970s, women who publicly admitted to liking and desiring men were sometimes dismissed as lipstick feminists even though they, too, were rebelling against the patriarchal attitudes and behaviour that hurt women. So, two of my friends in the performance art scene and I started exchanging diaries by snail mail to talk about our obsession with men and our sexuality. 

A screenplay I wrote then based on the diaries was called A Treatise on Ethics: It’s Not All Porn. While exchanging our diaries, we concocted a revenge mission we referred to as The Assignments. The idea was to punish predatory men by seducing them and then humiliating them. We each did one assignment and that produced sad, comic and unfortunate outcomes, so we dropped the project. We ended up feeling petty and mean, and our mission didn’t change the political situation women like us faced. I get the sense that you had fewer boxes to break out of growing up in St. Louis. Was that the case?

JS: There was something about St. Louis, at least where I grew up, that was easygoing and accepting, maybe as a result of all of the cultures that developed there because of its position, more or less, where the south, north, east, and west come together. My family was non-judgmental. But I also think I would have been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder if they had had that diagnosis at the time. One of my early report cards—I think fourth grade—said, “She only does what she wants to do.” I wandered around our neighborhood, was very curious, and I felt safe. As I got taller, I felt sorry for the shorter girls, because I thought maybe they were in more danger. I think that I attributed my failure to attract a boyfriend to my glasses, my mouth-breathing, and the fact that I was skinny as a rail. But that was okay with me, because I was more interested in books and horses.

SS: I also felt safer and threw several men who assaulted me against the wall. My size gave me an advantage most women don’t have. Books were an escape hatch for me too. I read constantly, walking to school, at night under the bed covers with a flashlight, after I finished my work in class. I went to the town library every couple of days and read all the books I could get my hands on including Wuthering Heights and Lolita, which came to our home because my mother was a member of the Book of the Month Club so popular in the late 1950s. My mother hid the then shocking novel Peyton Place by Grace Metalious under the cotton batten in her jewelry drawer, but I found it anyway and read it too. I also fantasized about riding horses, and as a kid, I did ride a few but they secretly scared the daylights out of me. I found the courage to be different later than you.

JS: What was going on with you as a young woman? You started out as a journalist with ambitions to write fiction in the 1960’s; became a performance artist and single mother in the 1970’s and then a novelist and professor who moved to New York City for a while to further your literary career.

SS: My memoir is like a quest novel because I was searching for a place where I fit, and each new environment gave me something I needed to complete my quest. Margaret Atwood’s suggestion made me realize my life had followed the pattern set by Anna Swan who spent most of her forty-four years searching for a home that would accommodate her size. She never found it, even when she and her giant husband gave up the circus and retired to Seville, Ohio. Sadly, her two babies died. At the end of my novel about her, I have her say: “I was born to be measured, and I do not fit in anywhere. Perhaps heaven will have more room.” Because I didn’t face the same debilitating obstacles as Anna, I learned to accept myself and my body in a way that was never possible for her. Don’t bother trying to fit the gender script I told myself—be your own norm. How did you handle not fitting the gender script?

JS: When I was in high school, I wasn’t drawn to any of the boys, and my mother didn’t give me any sort of sex-education info (I had to ask my roommate about that when I got to college, and she was very informative). Because of the ADHD, I didn’t pay attention to traditional expectations, and, in addition to that, my mother and her sisters had jobs, were athletic, and were very independent. I was allowed to do pretty much whatever I wanted to do, and my real pleasure was watching the other kids and eavesdropping.

However, once my roommate (who had a boyfriend) told me what she knew, I got more interested in finding a boyfriend, which wasn’t easy if you went to a woman’s college. I tried mixers and met a few guys, but that was when I realized that I wanted my boyfriend to be taller than I was. In December of ’69, Yale invited some Vassar girls to come to New Haven for a week and go to classes to experiment with coeducation. I enjoyed it, and then, in the Yale Daily News, I saw a picture of the center on the basketball team, on one knee, next to a ball, and smiling. He was so handsome that I couldn’t resist looking for him. Someone told me his college and room number, and I went and knocked on the door. When he opened it, I said, “Hi! I’m your new girlfriend!” and walked into the room. And it turned out that he hadn’t dated anyone, either, so it was the perfect way for both of us to come to understand relationships and love. We both loved travel, history classes, and making jokes, and I loved the way that he had accustomed himself to being 6’10”. But let’s go back to books for a minute? Is there a relationship between writing and fiction and unusual height?

Being unusually tall makes you feel set apart because mostly everybody else sees someone with the same weight, height and coloring every day.

SS: Why don’t you answer that question first? I’m curious to hear what you think.

JS: I think the relationship is between fiction writing and simply being unusual. Almost all of the writers I loved in high school and college—Dickens, George Eliot, Jane Austen, Agatha Christie—were outsiders in some way, and so they became observant, and then curious, and then eager to find some way to sort through what they were observing and turn it into something logical and understandable. One of the main things you learn when you start reading and then writing is that each writer is unique, and that gives you permission to investigate your own unique qualities. And then it all gets more interesting, and you can’t stop.

SS: I agree. A lot of writers I know, including myself, felt like outsiders growing up. Being unusually tall makes you feel set apart because mostly everybody else sees someone with the same weight, height and coloring every day. But I didn’t know any people who looked like me and the fact that I couldn’t see myself reflected back to me in the world was a strange, lonely feeling.

JS: How did your time living as a writer affect your quest?

SS: I lived in New York off and on through most of the 1990s when American male novelists like Norman Mailer, Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis achieved rock star status and my friend Kathy Acker was writing her performance art style of novels. I was in Aphrodite Mode. (No, it’s not a fashion account on Instagram.) It meant putting pleasure and fun on an equal footing with my work and I flitted from man to man without any intention of settling down. In those years, Gordon Lish was an important editor at Knopf encouraging his coterie of writers to place themselves in jeopardy in their stories. Many of my New York writer friends took his class. He would stop them reading their work out loud if they began to bore him and order them to go back to their last provocative sentence and start again. 

The example of Lish and many of the literary people in New York encouraged me to drop a leftover notion from my Presbyterian childhood that making a show of yourself was somehow embarrassing and disgraceful. Why did it take you so long to understand, I wondered. Get out there and perform yourself. My size was a bonus not a drawback. That’s one of the big gifts that America has given to the world—celebrate who you are and what makes you unique. Unfortunately, that gift has been tarnished by the Trump administration’s narrow definition of who an American is.

JS: You also lived in Greece. How was that part of your search to find a home as a writer and a woman?

SS: I stumbled on Greece by accident when I was invited to teach a writing workshop on the island of Skyros and was struck by the way the Greeks accepted their bodies. They didn’t need to look like movie stars or online influencers to enjoy the physical pleasures of daily life in Greece. After the workshop, I met the late feminist theologian Carol Christ who was my height of six-two. I went on her tour of Minoan shrines and was impressed by the groundbreaking feminist scholarship of Christ and the late Marija Gimbutas, an archeologist who believed these ancient sites were places where Minoans worshipped a goddess deity. Christ’s books describe embodied spirituality which involves an understanding of the body as the portal to spiritual wisdom. I personally don’t believe in a male or female god, but it was liberating to discover another way of thinking about our bodies instead of the traditional Christian belief that the body, along with physical reality, is something we need to escape. Carol Christ’s philosophy encourages people to inhabit their bodies, and in her later books, she said that anyone, no matter who they are, can represent the divine.

JS: What did Greece teach you about living inside a big female body?

SS: Let me leave you with a story. I went with the late Carol Christ to a local hot spring on the island of Lesbos where naked Greek women of all sizes and shapes and ages were bathing together and having fun, and for a moment, I saw them without judging their bodies. It was as if I was looking at them in the same accepting way that I might look at a beautiful garden or a pleasing grove of olive trees. Now that’s progress, isn’t it? 

JS: Amen to that.

*

SusanSwan is a novelist and non-fiction writer, a professor emerita, and a recipient of the Order of Canada. Her books include The Wives of BathThe Biggest Modern Woman of the WorldWhat Casanova Told MeThe Western Light and Stupid Boys Are Good to Relax With. She is also co-founder of the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, the largest literary prize for women and non-binary writers in the English language publishing world.

JaneSmiley is the author of multiple works of fiction and nonfiction, including Perestroika in ParisA Thousand AcresLucky, and Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel. She has won several awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for A Thousand Acres.

Big Girls Don’t Cry – Q&A with Beacon Press

Susan Swan has never fit inside the boxes that other people have made for her—the daughter box, the wife box, the mother box, the femininity box. Instead, throughout her richly lived, independent decades, she has carved her own path and lived with the consequences.

In her revealing and revelatory memoir, Big Girls Don’t Cry, Swan shares the key moments of her life. As a child in a small Ontario town, she was defined by her size—attracting ridicule because she was six-foot-two by the age of twelve. She left her marriage to be a single mother and a fiction writer in the edgy, underground art scene of 1970s Toronto. In her 40s, she embraced the new freedom of the Aphrodite years. Despite the costs to her relationships, Swan kept searching for the place she fit, living in the literary circles of New York while seeking pleasure and spiritual wisdom in Greece, and culminating in the hard-won experience of true self-acceptance in her seventies. Beacon Press sales and marketing coordinator Frankie Karnedy caught up with Swan to chat about it and about taking up space.

Frankie Karnedy: Big Girls Don’t Cry is your first memoir, but your novels have also drawn from your personal experiences. The Biggest Modern Woman of the World’s giantess Anna Swan is mentioned by name in your memoir, and The Wives of Bath is set in an all-girls boarding school much like the one you attended in your youth. Did it feel different writing directly about your own life and experiences?

Susan Swan: With the exception of my novel about a fraudster like Canada’s Conrad Black, you’re correct to say I’ve drawn from my life experiences for my fiction. Maybe that’s why it didn’t feel strange to write a memoir, a form that distills and dramatizes like a novel. And I had to find a trajectory through my story the way I do when I’m writing a novel. After Margaret Atwood suggested I write about my height, I realized that I was just like my literary character in my first novel, the real-life Victorian giantess Anna Swan, who exhibited with P. T. Barnum. Anna spent her life looking for a home that would accommodate her extraordinary size and never found it, and I have spent my life as a woman and a writer looking for the place where I fit. My search was more rewarding than hers.

FK: In the time since your childhood, tall girls have begun to “take up space”—as you may put it—in pop culture with movies such as Tall Girl, celebrities like Michelle Obama, and now memoirs like yours. What sort of takeaways do you think twelve-year-old you would have if she was growing up in this time period instead of in the 1950s?

SS: When I was a girl, the cut-off point for acceptance seemed to be just below six feet. To be six-foot-two at twelve like me was considered unfortunate. Thanks to the popularity of supermodels, that’s not as true today, but I suspect if I grew to be six-three or six-four now, I would still get put-downs and still be called names. But I have the comebacks I wrote for my daughter when she grew to six feet, so I would be able to put anyone who insulted me in their place.

Unfortunately, people often don’t realize (or don’t want to realize) that teasing others about their size can be hurtful. They see someone who is the same height, weight, and coloring as them every day, so they don’t understand that it’s a strange and lonely feeling if you don’t see anyone else in the world who looks like you.

FK: Your friend Margaret Atwood wrote in her foreword for Big Girls Don’t Cry that she encouraged you to write this memoir. Are there any other women writers who encouraged the writing process for this book, or whom you drew inspiration from as you were writing?

SS: It’s been a thrill to meet a number of impressive young women novelists and short story writers through my work on the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, writers like Talia Kolluri, Daphne Palasi Andreades, Alexis Shotkin, and Fatimah Asghar. But, right now, I take my inspiration from women writers in Canada and the US like Sheila Heti, Claudia Dey, Miranda July, Maggie Nelson, Sarah Manguso, Nell Zink, and Rachel Kushner. They’re writing full out about their lives as women and writers and damn the consequences. I admire how free and brave they are in their work about subjects like selfishness, sexuality, and disillusionment with the conventional paths women are supposed to take. The fact that they’re able to do this so well and be celebrated for it tells me there’s a lot right about our literary culture at a time when our political culture leaves a lot to be desired.

FK: The first part of your memoir is shaped by social and thematic “boxes,” such as the “dutiful daughter,” that you tried to fit yourself into or break out of. What is your advice to women who may feel trapped inside their own boxes on how they can try to break free?

SS: Asking questions and coming up with answers is the key to getting out of boxes or frameworks that don’t fit who you are. Questions like, Why is this box holding me back? Why does it feel so uncomfortable? What is lacking for me in this framework in which I’m currently living? Once you name a problem, you can start to solve it.

FK: What message do you hope readers will take away from your memoir?

SS: Remember that making decisions that seem outrageous and even downright dangerous for you at the time may seem perfectly sensible and the right choice when you have become the person you set out to be.

About the Authors 

Susan Swan is a novelist and nonfiction writer, a professor emerita, and a recipient of the Order of Canada. Her books include The Wives of BathThe Biggest Modern Woman of the WorldWhat Casanova Told MeThe Western Light, and Stupid Boys Are Good to Relax With. She is also cofounder of the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, the largest literary prize for women and nonbinary writers in Canada and the United States.

Frankie Karnedy is the sales and marketing coordinator at Beacon Press. She joined Beacon in 2022 after graduating from Johns Hopkins University with a BA in Writing Seminars and English. Previously, she interned at a literary agency and worked with children and teens at her local library. When she’s not trying to get to the bottom of her endless TBR list, she enjoys taking dance classes and baking fun desserts.

Appointment to the Order of Canada

Thanks to the Governor General of Canada and the Carol Shields Prize for celebrating me today. Congratulations to my fellow recipients.

Toronto, ON — Susan Swan, award-winning author, journalist and professor, has been appointed as Member of the Order of Canada by Governor General Mary Simon. Established in 1967, the Order of Canada is one of the country’s highest honours and was conferred upon Swan for her contributions to Canadian literature and culture, and for her mentorship of the next generation of writers.

“Receiving the Order of Canada is thrilling for me as a writer and as a Co-Founder of the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. Women writers hold up half the sky, sometimes even all the sky and the Milky Way too,” shared Swan.

“The Staff and Board of The Carol Shields Prize Foundation are proud of Co-Founder and Board Director Susan Swan. The Order of Canada is a distinguished honour, and Susan is the most deserving recipient not only for her writing, but for her decades of passionate and dedicated work in the service of literature and writers in Canada,” said Alexandra Skoczylas, CEO of The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction.

A prominent figure in Canadian literature, Swan has made significant contributions to the creative industries as an author, journalist, novelist, activist and teacher. Her critically acclaimed works have been published in twenty countries and received numerous honours. These include The Wives of Bath, a finalist for the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Trillium Award, later adapted into a feature film, and The Biggest Modern Woman in the World, which was a finalist for Canada’s Best First Novel Award and the Governor General’s Award for Fiction.

As a former Associate Professor of Humanities at York University, Swan has held a variety of esteemed positions, including Millennial Robarts Chair in Canadian Studies and Chair of The Writers’ Union of Canada.

Since 2012, she has worked towards launching a major prize celebrating women writers, which culminated in the inaugural Carol Shields Prize for Fiction announced in 2020. The inaugural Prize was awarded on May 4, 2023. By putting the work of women writers in the spotlight — and by creating charitable grants and mentorships for marginalized and underrepresented writers — this new annual literary award acknowledges, celebrates and promotes fiction by a wider, more diverse and inclusive group of women and non-binary writers.

Earlier this month, Swan received a lifetime membership in The Writers’ Union of Canada “in recognition of extraordinary contributions to the Union and the lives of Canadian writers.”

BOAT TROUBLE Podcast

Row Boat on Water

It’s been two years since I wrote a blog here. My excuse? I’ve been down a rabbit hole with my new novel, The Dead Celebrities Club, and I am only now coming up for air. This website is getting a face lift in October and I will start posting about Anxiety Pancakes: Life at the End of the Novel.

But right now I wanted to let you know that Accessible Media is airing a podcast this Sunday of my short story in the Walrus titled, Boat Trouble. AM is also broadcasting a short interview with me talking about the real life incident that inspired the story. That is, the summer night, my partner and I were out in an old wooden boat without a moon or proper running lights, lost like cijits (short for city idiots) in the Open, as the locals call the wide open water of the Georgian Bay.

Here is the pertinent info about the podcast:

The broadcast is this Sunday July 30 at 7pm Eastern time. It will be available on AMI-audio’s audio-only cable television channel (Rogers 196, Bell 49, Telus 889, etc) as well as on our online livestream at www.ami.ca/listenlive

This group also puts the shows up online as a podcast: you can search for “the Walrus with Lloyd Robertson” on iTunes or any other podcast program.

Read BOAT TROUBLE (published by The Walrus, summer 2017) BoatTrouble-WalrusPub

Anxiety Pancakes: Writing a Novel is like Building a House (Or Something)

1024px-Wood-framed_house

“Wood-framed house” by Jaksmata – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons 

It’s back to the drawing board for me. My knowledgeable readers have spoken and said that the story in my novel doesn’t start moving early enough. I accept their views because I did what I said was necessary in my last post: I listened to them and I reread a good chunk of my manuscript myself.

Some writers have to complete each page perfectly before they move on to the next. But for me, writing a novel is like building a house. I do it in stages. First, the note making and research, and filling a large page with the names of some of the characters and a list of some of the scenes. Then I do the first draft on a tape recorder so I have something to work with–a blurt, as I call it. You get the gist. Down goes the floor but oops maybe I’ve forgotten to dig the foundations. And how about that missing roof?

A crucial stage is finding the voice. It took me almost a year to find the right voice for The Dead Celebrities Club. Now it seems I have been confusing the theme of my novel with the story and I need to go back, and streamline my prose so the story isn’t lost in my descriptions. That means throwing out some chapters and extraneous pages, something I find hard to do because I am the loyal type. If I’ve worked on passages until they glisten it breaks my heart to say good-bye although saying good-bye is what I must do.

I’ll put my discarded sections in a file so I can bring them out if I need them. That way these passages aren’t banished forever.

So I’m picking up my hammer and saw and possibly a wrecking ball. It’s time to get down to work.

Anxiety Pancakes: The Horror of Vulnerability

 

girlfloatinginairI’m waiting for reactions from two very knowledgeable readers to the latest draft of my new novel, The Dead Celebrities Club.

The experience of waiting is like floating free in a void, as if I’ve been set adrift in the galaxy without a space station in sight. Adrift? Really? Yes, adrift in the sense that my identity seems to be on the line. Do I rely too much on my work for my sense of who I am? I do, I admit it, and I hate waiting for reactions to my writing. It makes me feel vulnerable and edgy.

Waiting on others is especially hard for someone like me. In the personality chart of the enneagram, I’m number eight, the challenger. A prominent trait of this personality type is taking charge of their circumstances. The basic fear of the challenger is being controlled by others. Being vulnerable, in other words. And feeling vulnerable is horrifying.

Yet vulnerability is the link to creativity. Without it, I would understand nothing about myself or my fellow humans. So I’m going to hang there in space and stay open to the help that others can give me with my book. Aren’t I?

Anxiety Pancakes: When Is A Novel Finished?

Anxiety Pancakes

In the spring, I said I was finishing my novel, The Dead Celebrities Club, about a white collar fraudster who starts a betting game about old and frail celebrities in a US prison. My dreams told me I was on the home stretch. Well, it turns out there are home stretches and then some.

The first job with a novel is getting the voice of your character right and finding your story. After that, it’s anybody’s guess how many times you will revise your draft. Leonardo da Vinci said art is never finished, only abandoned and Paul Valery said the same thing about a poem. Writers have been talking about the need to abandon and not finish novels for a long time now.

But when is a novel finished? That is, what makes the writer decide it’s time to show it? When I began novel writing, I handed over my draft to an agent long before my book was done. I wanted my agent to find an editor who would help me finish it.

Today I hold onto my work much longer. Most editors are too busy to nurse along a work of fiction so sometimes the agent steps in and helps the writer finish their book before it is shown to publishers.

So when is a novel finished? Here’s a clue: When you show it to a few knowledgeable readers and they don’t say your book needs a lot more work. Key phrase––a lot more. Critical readers will always find something wrong; that’s their job. But if their comments resonate with you and the problems they spot are easily fixable, your novel may be close to being finished.

The other answer is your own reaction. Leave your novel for a month or so. Then go back and read it through. If you find it (mostly) surprises and pleases you, maybe it’s time to show it. Or you can always hug your manuscript close like Alistair MacLeod until somebody pries it away from you.

Riding through the Waves like Poseidon Scouting Out Film Locations

IMG_4127IMG_4124IMG_4137On Labour Day Sunday, I rode through the waves like Poseidon with my brother John and the young film makers who are making a film of my last novel, The Western Light. It is set in a tourist town on the Georgian Bay.

We scouted out the lighthouse on Hope Island, part of a trio of huge wooded islands off Cedar Point on the Georgian Bay. The blue watery realm is so isolated that the physical experience of being there feels like drifting into a metaphysical dimension. This atmosphere is partly created by the lack of cottages or homes since the islands belong to the band on Christian Island. The film makers Hannah Cheesman and Mackenzie Donaldson took pictures and tried to imagine filming in such a rugged location. Unfortunately, the original top of the 1881 lighthouse had been replaced by a steel structure and light. Hannah is wearing a captain’s hat; Mackenzie is smiling into the camera.

These are Mackenzie’s photos, a taste, she says, of our afternoon on the water. The trip ended with a visit to the Waypoint Health Centre in Penetang, the old psychiatric hospital that is also in my novel. An old Georgian Bay lighthouse is also in the story.

Hannah and Mackenzie were just named two of the 2015 top five people to watch in Canadian film. Their short Boxing is at TIFF this September. The other producer Lauren Grant was home looking after her month old baby. Her most recent feature Wet Bum, which debuted at TIFF last year, was featured in a recent Globe and Mail article.

Film Deal for The Western Light with Upcoming Canadian Women Producers

Three young creative Canadian women film makers have come together to make a feature film based on the prequel to my international bestseller, The Wives of Bath. The prequel is The Western Light about Mouse Bradford, a precocious girl who is pushed to the brink when she mistakenly places her trust in an institutionalized ex-hockey star and convicted murderer, only to flee her small town and discover that goodness is more mysterious than evil.

The three film producers are Mackenzie Donaldson, an associate producer of Orphan Black, the hit television series about a cabal of cloned women and Hannah Cheeseman, script coordinator and an executive assistant on the Orphan Black series who together form Aberrant Pictures; and Lauren Grant of Clique Films who produced Wet Bum, a feature film with rising TIFF star Julia Sarah Stone. The women from top down in the photos inserted in my blog are Hannah Cheeseman; Mackenzie Donaldson and Laurie Grant.

Hannah will write the screenplay for The Western Light and play the part of Little Louie, Mouse’s aunt. Hannah also wrote the script and acted in “Whatever, Linda”, her newly released web series made with Orphan Black producer Mackenzie Donaldson. “Whatever, Linda” is an Internet Odyssey about an alleged secretary who is the mastermind behind Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Lauren Grant was recently named one of 15 talents to watch by the Hollywood Reporter. I’m currently finishing my new novel, The Dead Celebrities Club.

The novel The Western Light was published by Cormorant Books in 2012 and The Wives of Bath (published in 1993) was made into the 2001 feature film “Lost and Delirious” shown in 32 countries and starring Jessica Pare, Mischa Barton and Piper Parabo.

hannah cheeseman headshotmackenzie donaldson headshotlauren grant headshotKim Witherspoon of Inkwell Management handled the deal in association with Samantha Haywood of Transatlantic Agency.