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A new short story zine: “The Invisible Girlfriend”

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Maybe it’s just a short story time of year

I’m writing this during the strange in-between world of the holidays at the end of December, when days are short and nights are long (for us in the north), when most of us are eating too much sugar, and people joke that they’ve lost track of what day it is. 

And for me at least this time of year is also pretty emotional and complicated, which makes it tough to concentrate, or get much writing done. But it’s also not a bad time for catching up on sleep, listening to music, reading books, watching old movies, and going for walks — which can all be good things on their own, and can all help with generating ideas too. 

And I’ve also been thinking a lot about the Victorian tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas. Wouldn’t it be great to bring this back? I don’t think I’m the only one who wants it — thousands of us listen to CBC Radio’s annual broadcast of The Shepherd every year, and see for instance these little books illustrated by the great cartoonist Seth, and published by Biblioasis. 

This year’s small and spooky Christmas stories, from Seth and Biblioasis.

When I saw a display of these beautiful titles a few days ago at the counter of  Upstart & Crow (a small and very elegant bookstore on Granville Island here in Vancouver) I took it as a sign — maybe it was time to go back to one of those strange little short stories I had sitting around, and make another zine.

Because after a couple of years of being very focussed on novel writing, for the past few months I’ve been mostly working on short fiction — including some very short stories that started off as contest entries with strict word count limits. Mostly they’re what you’d call “literary,” but I have also ended up with a few little strange, oddball pieces, with elements of fantasy or at least weirdness. Not exactly ghost stories, but still… maybe I could do something with one of them?

And let’s face it, it’s also satisfying to shift gears from just staring into screens and typing typing typing to drawing little pictures, laying out pages, and then taking a USB stick to my local print shop — and coming home with a stack of actual folded and stapled paper. 

A zine: The invisible girlfriend, with a drawing of a fireplace, a gust of wind coming out of it.
The Invisible Girlfriend.

Giveaway

So here it is! “The Invisible Girlfriend” is a slightly weird and very short little story (under 500 words) that I originally wrote to enter a contest. (There is nothing like contests with challenging word-count requirements to generate ideas!) Later I added a couple of illustrations too.

Did I mention that it is very short?

And would you like a copy? 

To enter your name in the draw, just message me with your email address via my contact form, and I will add you to my very informal and very home-made mail list. (I’ll only use this list to send out very occasional news updates — probably one or two a year.)

And I’ll randomly pull some names from my mail list in January, and contact the winners for details so I can send out physical copies. 

Good luck!

Exhausted, but in a good way: Some notes after the 3-Day Novel Contest weekend

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I’m writing this the day after writing a manuscript for the 2024 3-Day Novel Contest, which means that I’m tired and definitely not thinking clearly, but also still vividly aware of what it feels like to do this bizarre and intense thing. So maybe it’s exactly the right time to talk about it, even if I’m not at my most coherent at the moment?

The contest itself goes all the way back to 1977, and from what I can tell, right from the beginning everyone has seen it as a wild daredevil kind of experience more than a platform for creating serious work. Because obviously the whole idea of writing a novel at all, let alone a decent novel, over a long weekend is completely preposterous — and yet according to Wikipedia, the 1985 winner (Momentum, by Marc Diamond) was also shortlisted for a big literary award. 

A tree trunk with moss, against a background of green ferns and leaves.

I can’t remember now what motivated me to try when I wrote my first 3-Day Novel back in my twenties, but according to my records, I did pretty well with it — at least the organisers wrote me what I described as a “very nice note,” although I’m not sure if my entry was officially shortlisted. And I’ve done the contest four more times after that: the year after the nice note, then again in 2021 and 2022 (when my novel came in third place!), and now again in 2024. 

What I remember most about each of these times is a) the physical and mental exhaustion, and also b) the intense high of the altered state that took over at a certain point.

And now I’m trying to think how to describe that sensation. 

Long-distance runners famously have their own kind of high, and most of us have experienced or at least heard about the joy of being in a flow state, and I have absolutely experienced highs from playing live in bands, but — as far as I know — a high is not usually something anyone expects to get from the act of writing. (Although maybe my poet friends will disagree? I really hope they do.) 

Most writing is slow, and it’s solitary, and a lot of it is painstaking and detail-y. As for me, since the beginning of the pandemic I’ve managed to write for a while every day, but a lot of that is not forward progress — I spend at least half of that “writing” time doing revision, unravelling or improving something I’ve already done.

A log on the forest floor, with yellow fungus and moss.

Which is not exactly joyful and definitely not trippy. But trying to write as much as 10,000 words in a day? That is truly pushing yourself beyond your limits — maybe the nearest thing a writer can do to jumping out of a plane or being chased through the forest by a wild animal (while sitting at home in front of a screen). 

A tree with peeling bark, against a background of temperate rain forest.

You may start off with an outline or a plan, but to get to that kind of massive word count, eventually you have to let go of your usual rules and standards and just let things happen. Something kicks in — who knows where it comes from — and then shit gets weird. That’s when new characters appear, or the existing ones develop crazy ideas of their own, and the story starts to run away from you. At this point your physical body has been taken over by some kind of cosmic energy, and you hardly know what you’re typing. 

Once that starts happening to me, I’ve found it hard to step away from my keyboard, which is part of the reason I’ve felt so physically beaten up by the experience in the past.

This past weekend I tried something a little different. The first night (Saturday) I felt terrible, stiff, sore, and stupid, much worse than I remember from previous years. So starting the next day (Sunday) I started taking short breaks to do some stretches every couple of hours, and to get outside for quick walks when I could. That helped with the physical side, anyhow, and last night I didn’t feel so much like I’d just got off a long international flight (in the cheapest possible seats) — although by the time I decided I was finished my novel I was so tired I probably couldn’t have put together another sentence.

A close up of the bark of a Douglas fir, showing blue-green lichen.

Anyhow, it’s over now — for 2024. I have no idea whether what I wrote is any good, or even makes any sense. But it’s done.

About the photos: I took these pictures in Pacific Spirit Park, a forest on the west side of Vancouver, near the University of British Columbia. After all of those hours sitting in one place staring at a screen, I needed to get outside.

Glorious: A July writing retreat

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It’s been a long time since I went anywhere at all. I’ve probably been a bit slower than most other people with re-entry into society after the pandemic, which means I’ve hardly been in any indoor spaces with groups of people, and certainly not on an airplane.

At least until this month, when I got to do an incredible thing: I went to a writing retreat in Saskatchewan, run by dedicated and impressive staff, in a stunning location, with courses led by brilliant, exceptional, caring, and well-known and highly respected instructors (confession: I was star-struck). And surrounded by students who were smart, funny, kind, serious, well-read, hard-working, accomplished, and very very skilled. (Unlike me, many or maybe most of them already had published at least one book or produced at least one play.)

It was intimidating, it was terrifying, it was fun, it was overwhelming, it was a kick in the pants. And I’ll be processing it all for quite a while.

What is it about dorms? For me at least they really are a creative and energizing kind of space. Behind those doors: writers working hard. In the communal spaces: conversations, ideas, and energy.

Somehow I had never been to Saskatchewan before, although I’d wanted to for a long time — to see the famous prairies and that famous big sky, and to meet the people who elected Tommy Douglas, which led to Canada’s universal healthcare system — or at least their descendants. (And Saskatchewan is also the home of the wonderful Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild!)

And the landscapes turned out to be even more beautiful than I expected, and people even kinder and more friendly.

Conifers silhouetted against a hazy sunset, with long grass and canola in the foreground.
Saskatchewan fields and sky.

But of course that was only part of it. A retreat is its own small universe, and that was where we went to our classes and one-on-one meetings with our instructors, and hunkered down alone in quiet spaces to work on our projects, and crowded around long tables at mealtimes to share and listen to stories, and did readings, and hung out in the lounge for unofficial happy hours (and a couple of sing-alongs), and talked and talked and talked.

And we carried this little universe with us when we walked into town in small groups and had drinks in the bar; the generous owners even let us take it over one night for a kind of literary cabaret. 

A wedge of pie with purple berries, on a 1960s style diner plate
Saskatoon berry pie.

Back at home, most of us spend most of our days doing things that are not writing-related at all — when we make time to work on our stories or novels or plays or poems it’s always at the expense of something else that we’re supposed to be doing, work or school, looking after our homes or children or other people, and so on.

I know some writers go to retreats regularly and it may not be quite so magic for them, but for me it felt like a glorious thing to have no responsibilities at all except to write, and to know that I was never more than a few steps or a few minutes away from being able to talk other writers — writers I like and admire and can learn from. (And writers I hope I can stay connected to.)

And I did learn a lot, and I came home energised, and while I really hope I’ll get to do this again someday, I also hope this experience might hold me for a while.

Thistles against a field of canola.
As a person of Scottish descent in an unfamiliar place it was tempting to see the thistles as some kind of metaphor. But sometimes a thistle is just a thistle.

Postscript: Old and new notebooks

Coincidentally I found a notebook today from a writing course in Victoria that a friend and I went to many years ago. It was also in the summer, and we also stayed in some kind of dorm set-up, but many of the writers there were absolute beginners, which meant that the energy was quite different, with most of the conversations about getting started, establishing a practice, and where to begin submitting work.

It’s interesting to me now that those old notes hardly say anything about the classes (or workshops?), and nothing about the instructors —my scribblings are mostly about what we students talked about when we weren’t talking about writing.

But looking back at my notes from Saskatchewan, mostly what I see is writing and talking about writing, the silence in the hallways as everyone worked in their rooms, talk about word count and craft — and of course line after line around ideas and process — and oh, the focus of the place and how it was motivating me!

That feeling of being surrounded by powerful and determined writers, everyone around me working hard and well. I’d almost forgotten the power and intensity of place — and other people.

I think I saw a couple of these adorable thirteen-lined ground squirrels. Photo: Wikipedia.

A writer reads: Book review #3

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The Book of Love, by Kelly Link

I was nervous about starting The Book of Love. What if my expectations were too high for this novel? What if I didn’t love it? When her last book came out (White Cat, Black Dog), I was that person who pre-ordered a copy, ran to my local bookstore as soon as it arrived, and then took it to a local park to start reading it right away — because I couldn’t wait till I got home.

Because while this is Kelly Link’s first novel, it’s not her first book — she has published four short story collections and won a lot of major awards. So even if you’ve avoided reviews before picking up The Book of Love (as I did), you might already have read her work.

(And even if you haven’t read her short stories yet, you may have heard her compared to people like Shirley Jackson, Jorge Luis Borges, and Angela Carter.)

My own introduction to Link’s writing was “The Specialist’s Hat” — which I discovered after someone in a workshop said her name in that kind of hushed tone that writers use for their real heroes. And it felt world-changing to me when I first read it — it shook me in the same kind of way I remember being shaken when I saw the Blair Witch Project in a theatre back when it came out. Like that film, Kelly Link’s stories often upend the rules and drop you into a weird world that doesn’t make sense and yet feels believable, where surprising things happen quickly and without explanation, where you are left feeling unsteady and uncertain: what just happened? 

That’s an overall effect thing that I don’t want to try to dissect. But one of the factors may be a craft decision that so often sticks with me from the stories — a sense that Link is intentionally leaving loose ends and unfinished elements — defying writing “rules” that require stories to be tidy and to hit certain marks.

So her style is subversive and bold. It’s thrilling. But that past experience also made me a little anxious about picking up this novel — because what if the rule-breaking didn’t work in a longer format?

Or worse still — what if The Book of Love didn’t break the rules at all?

I approached The Book of Love cautiously, starting by looking at the cover for clues:
Four rows of images of moon phases, each row with a profile silhouetted in one of the waxing or waning moons — signalling that this will be a complex, layered story of multiple characters, and that there will be lots of changes.
Plus, of course, the moon symbolism.

And I am reporting back with good news. Very good news: The Book of Love does break a lot of the rules I hoped — especially the ones I’ve seen in well-known instructions to novelists, the types that would make the story predictable. 

It also follows the rules that matter more (at least to me): the characters are treated with respect (and yes, love). 

And where details matter, Link takes them seriously. As a former campus radio kid who used to play in bands, I can be pretty sensitive about music details (probably far too sensitive). Would a kid in X type of band really play Y kind of guitar? Does the author really understand about the complicated relationships in bands? 

And I’m happy to report that the answer to both of these questions is yes: while the kid’s band in this novel is probably not one I’d want to listen to in real life, their passion for it feels very authentic — and so does their taste in guitars and amplifiers. (At least Link is speaking the language of my music friends and past bands, having a character yearning for a Gretsch; even a Gallien-Krueger bass amp makes an appearance.)

Part of Kelly Link’s playlist for The Book of Love, available on Apple Music and Spotify.

You can read other reviews if you want to know more about the plot — but I hope you won’t. (Or you can go over to Cory Doctorow’s review, where he calls this book “A deceptively quirky tale with rusty razors at its core,” and carefully avoids spoilers.)

And I won’t say anything at all about the story, because I hope you will experience it the way I did, without knowing what to expect, except that Kelly Link is definitely a writer who knows what she is doing, and that she cares a lot. 

As for me, yes, I did love, love, love The Book of Love. It’s a book that will stay with me for a long time and I have already recommended it to a lot of my friends. I hope it’s the same for you too. 

More of Kelly Link’s playlist.

Notes and more info

Thank you NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for sending this book for review consideration. All opinions are my own.

Looking for more info about Kelly Link? This interview with Helen Oyeyemi feels very relevant! Horror Stories Are Love Stories.

A literary magazine, reporting back on a contest, and more about memory and place

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Story in The Tahoma Literary Review

News!

The wonderful Tahoma Literary Review has published one of my short stories, “Rewind: I dreamt of flowers and flight.”

I am thrilled and so grateful to the very kind editors. (And I know what a huge amount of work it is to run a literary magazine. If you want to contribute to the cause, you can support them by buying individual print issues, subscribing, or making a donation.)

You can hear audio versions of some of the stories, poems, and creative nonfiction pieces from this latest issue at Soundcloud.

Content warning: My piece is pretty heavy, and deals with pregnancy loss.

2022 3-Day Novel Contest update

My submission came in third place! 

Thank you to the lovely judges, and congratulations to the winners. 

[My instagram when I finished my manuscript.]

Going back to my Instagram feed from the end of that Labour Day weekend reminded me of just how tired I was, and how I had no idea whether the manuscript was any good or not.

It just goes to show, you never can tell.

Memory and place, redux

It’s early in the Academic New Year, the season of optimism. (And regretful goodbyes, but let’s not talk about that.)

And also memories of past back-to-school seasons. 

A couple of weeks ago, just before the Labour Day weekend, I had to pick something up from the student radio station where I used to volunteer, so while I was out there I took some time to walk around the university campus where I used to take classes. 

I still go out there a few times a year, usually very focussed on some task, getting something done or meeting someone. But this time I wasn’t in a hurry, so I walked over to the area where all my old humanities classes used to be, past a student lounge with floor-to-ceiling glass (where I had set a scene of Lonesome Stars, last year’s 3-Day Novel), and up the stairs of the building where the Creative Writing department used to be — a place where I spent a lot of time.

And the department is still there, still on the fourth floor, a climb I remember bitterly resenting, and complained about every time I had to go up them — although this time it didn’t feel like a big deal at all. (Apparently at some point I have learned not to hate moderate exercise?)

In that stairway, I thought about how the buildings in that complex were not terribly old at the time I was a student, but yet it always felt to me like they were some distant era. Which of course they are now, being the product of a remote age when people were dreaming of moon landings and driving cars with fins — and not surprisingly after all this time they truly are looking a little shabby. (While meanwhile the parts of the campus serving the law school, medicine, sciences, and business, are new or newly renovated, and look glossy and well-fed.) 

When I got there, the fourth floor turned out to be recently painted and quite empty. The students hadn’t arrived yet, and maybe all the faculty and staff were at a retreat, because it was just closed doors on each side of the long hallway, with no hint of the room where we used to have our editorial meetings, the classrooms where we used to sit around big tables to workshop, and the lounge where I used to loaf on a couch between classes. 

Even the bathroom, and the hallway connecting the different wings of the building, didn’t really bring anything back — although they looked almost exactly as I remembered them.

I thought I would feel more sentimental. I went there to check in on my memory of the place, with the vague idea that I could chat with someone in the office about alumni events or newsletters or some such thing, and I was expecting something bittersweet, something a little painful, maybe the sensation of picking at a scab, but instead I had very little reaction at all. 

Maybe it would have been different if I could have gone into one of the classrooms. Or maybe the place has changed too much, and too much time has passed. 

So that’s another thing you never can tell.

A university campus courtyard,

The 3-Day Novel Contest and other updates, and moments of joy and compartmentalising while the world is on fire

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Good intentions and all that: since January I’ve been meaning to write a review of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, which gutted me, and then intending to write reviews of some other not-quite-so-gutting but still beautiful/difficult novels I’ve read and loved since then — and even some very good nonfiction.

Source: Wikipedia.

The Ministry for the Future feels much more important than other books, for obvious reasons.

Here at the western edge of Canada, even though we haven’t experienced the terrible smoke this summer that other places have (yet!), even if we aren’t quite going from flood season to fire season yet (where we used to go from rainy season to less rainy season), it’s close enough that the worry is always there in the background.

Things can get worse. Things will get worse.

But I’m trying not to worry all the time. And of course other things have been going on too.

I’ve been taking courses at the local art university. Partly because as a kid it was my dream to go to art school, but more practically, I decided it was time to develop some basic illustration skills and then apply them to zine-making. The classes haven’t been super applicable to what I’m doing with zines so far, but they have been excellent anyhow.

And for one of them I did a big project using text from that novel I keep talking about, How Does It Feel to Feel.

How Does It Feel to Feel: Drawing by Tove Black, with text from a novel-in-progress

I also have a story coming out very soon in a literary magazine, and I’m very excited about that. I will post details and links once it happens!

3-Day Novel Contest news

Source: 3-Day Novel Contest, May 2023

And as of today, as far as I know, my novella Lonesome Stars is still shortlisted for the 2022 3-Day Novel Contest.

So I’m enjoying this moment, this space between the good news of being shortlisted and the announcement saying who has won.

And the 3-Day Novel Contest is special. I’m always surprised when something of mine gets accepted, or shortlisted, or wins something — but this news surprised me in a particularly funny way, because when I first saw the title (Lonesome Stars) in the announcement, I couldn’t recall anything (nothing at all!) about the book. I vaguely remembered the 3-day novel I wrote in 2021 (it’s a prequel to the novel I’m working on right now, set in an alternate version of Western Canada), but I was drawing a complete blank on what I had done in 2022. Lonesome Stars — what the heck was that? It sounded like a small-time1990s indie musician’s idea of a somewhat alt-country-inflected band. Which of course is what I intended when I wrote it, as I realised when I went back through my files and found my Scrivener document. (And I reread it; to my huge relief it wasn’t terrible.)

The thing about the 3-Day Novel experience, at least for me, is that all the times I’ve done it (4? 5?) I’ve spent that Labour Day weekend in state of altered consciousness. In 2021 and 2022 I drafted up an extremely short and sketchy outline the day before, so I would have a very rough idea of where I was planning to go. Then I aimed at writing 10,000 words a day — and for those three days I didn’t talk to anyone or leave my apartment — except to get takeout, and maybe the occasional walk around the block to try to get unstuck.

When I was younger and tried it, I did “finish” my novels and I loved the full-on experience of writing them, but I didn’t have the discipline or knowledge for them to have any kind of shape or structure. Now, after taking a lot more workshops and doing NaNoWriMo several times, it’s easier for me to get a lot of words when I need to, and for them to make more sense. But the 3-Day Novel Contest experience is still all-consuming, and the whole weekend had the kind of intensity I think some people look for when they sign up for spiritual retreats.

And yet what I didn’t really expect was how successfully I walled off that weekend of writing from the rest of my life. I wrote for all those hours for those three days, and even did a quick review every evening so I would have the threads of the story in my mind for the next day. Then, after I submitted the novel to the contest folks, I completely put it out of my mind. COMPLETELY.

When I reread the manuscript a couple of months ago I couldn’t remember a single thing about what was going to happen next to the characters, although as I went through the scenes I kept thinking, oh yeah, this person, and oh yeah, this part.

I guess it’s not totally unlike life outside of writing. It’s a little bit like that sensation of going back to a place you haven’t seen since you were a child, and had forgotten about — and then stopping and looking around, suddenly haunted by very specific and vivid details.

Anyhow, I am enjoying this moment.

Thank you to the wonderful 3-Day Novel people for reading and considering Lonesome Stars.

I’m so proud and happy to be on this shortlist.

3-Day Novel Contest

A writer reads: Book review #2

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Late Nights on Air, by Elizabeth Hay

Yellowknife, from Wikimedia Commons (cropped)

Here is book review #2 in this series of reading from a writer’s perspective. And I need to start it off with an admission: this is going to be at least as much about me as it is about the book — maybe more than usual. 

I have never been to the North, although I have worked in radio — which is probably why people have been recommending this book to me for years.

And more than that, I love radio. There is something magic about it, and emotional — faraway people going straight into your ear in a way that feels like what you’re hearing somehow belongs to you and only you. (Ira Glass said it much better: “I think that radio is a machine for empathy and intimacy… and not seeing the person actually makes it more intense. Like you’re on the phone in the dark with someone you love.” From a 2014 interview in Vogue Magazine.)

Also, there is my own experience working in radio, for many years as a volunteer at my university station, and then a little bit at the CBC — although in a very small and part-time way. All those hours in front of a microphone and a mixing board were magic too — even the smell of the acoustic tiles and decaying album covers in dimly lit studios was intoxicating. And I experienced or at least saw many of the same things in the hallways of those radio stations that happen in the book: the disconnect between the complicated physical people and their beautiful voices, the built-in and inescapable technical and time constraints, the fiefdoms and politics (even feuds), the rigid separations between the different roles. 

(Note to self: Should we have more books set in radio stations? Radio has all the ingredients of successful literature: strong personalities, and strong emotions, and beauty, and illusion. I’m going to give this more thought.)

A 1970s-era radio studio setup, from Wikimedia.

And now on to Late Nights on Air — and thank you for your patience.

This novel isn’t just a way to experience the North, or personalities in a radio station, although it is definitely those things too. Elizabeth Hay brings a tonne of research and life experience to the book, and on top of that she is also a masterful writer.

The canoe trip, closer to the end of the book, is an extended polished gem, full of beauty and exquisite observations, as well as echoes of history. 

There are also tragedies here, some more low-key and subtle than others, some foreshadowed well in advance and inevitable-feeling, but not all. 

And there are complicated characters, mostly people from elsewhere in Canada who have arrived in Yellowknife for their own complicated reasons, including for the Berger Commission, about the possible building of a pipeline. (This ends up being a triumph but in a way is another tragedy — if we knew the true costs of pipelines in the 1970s, why did Kate Beaton have to write (the brilliant) Ducks almost 50 years later?)

Syncrude oil sands mine works, Mildred Lake, Alberta, from Wikimedia Commons.

And yet I almost didn’t read this book. At least three times I picked it up and started, but on page 2 was so angry at Harry, one of the main characters, that I put it down again. Finally I set the book aside for a while and picked up where I left off — after that scene that upset me so much, and putting it out of my mind — and then finally I felt the way about the characters that I think I was supposed to. 

In the end, after I finished the book I went back to the beginning and checked in on all the seeds that Hay had so carefully planted in the first few pages: once I knew what would happen, it was so impressive to see how she had laid so many details in place almost from the start. 

As for Harry, he had won me over by the last page, but I was still enraged all over again when I came across that scene at the beginning. Once again I thought that I would never have forgiven him, and I couldn’t see how anyone would want to be friendly with him.

But that was my present self talking. 

What about my long-ago radio self? Would the old me have forgiven him? One thing I know for sure, from all these years later: my old radio friends and colleagues forgave bratty clueless me for a lot. 

Maybe I could be a little easier on Harry. 

A writer reads: Book review #1

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When We Lost Our Heads, by Heather O’Neill

Execution of Louis XVI By Isidore Stanislas Helman [detail] — Bibliothèque nationale de France, Public Domain.

I’m trying a new thing this year: writing the occasional review.

It could be about books, movies, music, or other things that are somewhat or slightly connected to the experience of being a writer.

This is an experiment — let’s see how it goes.

First of all: Books can be powerful. We all know that, at least on some level. That’s why some people want to stop other people from reading them.

And when I’m writing, I always feel like I have to be extra careful about what I read. I worry I’ll start unintentionally imitating the voice. (Although I haven’t seen much evidence of that lately, I still think it will happen.)

I also worry that I’ll read something that will discourage me. That’s what’s happened to me when I asked for George Saunders’ A Swim in a Pond in the Rain for a Christmas present last year. I know other writers loved the book and got a lot from it, but that kind of close examination of the Russian masters triggered my over-zealous internal editor, and turned out to be fatal to my own writing for a few very painful weeks.

Ideally, when I’m writing, I want to read books that are the literary equivalent of that old story about the Velvet Underground: they didn’t sell that many records while they were still together, but everyone who bought one started a band.

So what I always hope for is the kind of book that makes me run to my notebook or computer. The books that make my head buzz with ideas. That make me pull over my car to write down descriptions or plot lines quickly before I forget. 

Second: No one else writes like Heather O’Neill.

And her books are always strong stuff.

And… sometimes I just don’t feel tough enough for Heather O’Neill. I’ve been gutted and messed up by her books before, starting (like a lot of other people) with Lullabies for Little Criminals. 

On the other hand, earlier this year I watched an excellent video where O’Neill talks about writing, and reading, and writing community, and the differences between English and French storytelling traditions, among a lot of other things. (“McGill24: Writing your story – Heather O’Neill in conversation with Kasia Van Schaik.”)

It was energising. It started to give me that get-out-and-start-a-band feeling.

When We Lost Our Heads by Heather O’Neill, a copy from the Vancouver Public Library.

And a couple of weeks ago — by pure luck — I managed to get a copy of When We Lost Our Heads at my local public library. 

Now back to that second point: No one writes like Heather O’Neill. 

So, a little nervously at first, I dove into When We Lost Our Heads. And I was glad I did. To extend the Velvet Underground / rock & roll metaphor a bit further, I felt right away that she is not at all interested in sounding like everyone else on the radio, or changing her topics or style to appeal to a broad audience. And if she buffs something it’s to make it gleam — which is a lot different from sanding down the edges to make it less dangerous.

More than that, after reading and getting accustomed to quite a lot of utterly devastating but also very “show, don’t tell”-style literary writing over 2022, it was deliciously bracing to spend time in the world of this book, with its unashamed telling and the snicker-snack of O’Neill’s vorpal blade cutting through the bullshit with startling directness.

What bullshit? Oh, you know, just in general. Look around. Her subjects here include capitalism, misogyny, social inequality, gender roles and identity, sex work, social history, feminism, female friendship, cruelty, selfishness, female sexual pleasure, reproductive freedom, the divide between the English and French in Québec, and many other kinds of injustice. (In no particular order. And just to name a few.)

Her characters are almost entirely women, and almost entirely not anyone you would want to have a beer with. (I say almost because I would very much like to have a beer with George.) They are mostly or entirely named after major French Revolution figures, and they are generally pretty unpleasant, in the ways their names would imply. 

(I’m not super confident about this, but I think O’Neill is pulling names a bit more broadly than just from this one set of historical events — although my own spotty education and limited Wikipedia browsing may have let me down here.)

As a reader, I felt like I was watching O’Neill make an announcement: “I’m not going to waste our time being subtle about the symbolism here. Here are your archetypes. Let’s go!” 

An overdrive pedal, from the author’s collection.

After an announcement like that, some people will say this book is not for them — just like some people will leave the bar when they see the band walk in with big guitar amps.

But for me this was a signal to hang onto my chair and see where the author was going to take me. 

For me, this was an invitation to get out my own guitar and tube amp and overdrive pedal, and make some noise. 

And yes, I did have to stop my car yesterday, so I could write down a story idea.

I loved this book. Thank you, Heather O’Neill.

On memory and place

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It’s happened to everyone: you go back to a place that was once very important to you, and find that it has transformed somehow while you were away. 

It is smaller, or run-down, or just underwhelming. And you feel pangs of nostalgia or disappointment — maybe mixed with a sensation of accomplishment or even wisdom, because you see that you have grown up, your perspective has widened. You’ve learned things in the years that have passed.

And hoping for this, sometimes — when I’m feeling especially strong, or defiant — I drive past places where especially bad things happened. And I can report that over time, and with practice, they have become more ordinary. The malevolent sparks that used to fly off of them have faded, and from the inside of my car they mostly just look like buildings, the way they probably do to everyone else. 

(I haven’t stepped inside those particular places again. Years and maybe even decades have passed since the people I remember moved away, so maybe they wouldn’t feel like houses of horrors anymore. But even if someone were to invite me in (unlikely), I know I couldn’t go inside, and the force that would stop me from doing it feels just as strong as the force that stops me now from walking through their closed front doors.)

Less often, I go into a space where a nightclub or bar I knew used to be, places where I sang with my old bands (and watched many more). When that happens I always feel disoriented, and swivel my head around, trying to picture how it used to be. Where was the stage, anyway? Where did we put our gear? Who were the other bands we played with? There were so many hours, and so many details, and so many other people, and so much of it is completely lost to me — so now I sometimes find old posters or newspaper listings for shows I have no recollection at all of playing. 

Which is what I was expecting a few days ago when I went back to the dorm where I lived from September through April in my first year of university. 

“Interior, U.B.C. houses, Typical student room, Totem Park Residences, University of B.C., B.C., Canada, 40-60s.” Source: HipPostcard

This dorm is the setting of a novel I’ve been working on for quite a while now (How Does It Feel to Feel — in what I hope are the polishing stages now), and in my own imagination it has become very real to me again, even after my long absence. 

As I wrote, I could picture the layout of the floor very clearly, and how many rooms there were, and where the shared bathrooms were, and the stairways, and the elevator. I could even picture the walk to the dining hall, and the wall of mail slots, and — less distinctly — going past the common rooms on the main floor, spaces I probably only went into two or three times, for mixers — the kind of dance parties that happened in those institutional-looking spaces, soulless boxes even with the disco lights. (And thinking of that now, I am certain that they had worn parquet floors.)

And because I could picture it all so clearly, I assumed I was wrong. But when a kind student (the daughter of some friends) let me come up to her floor to look around last week, it turned out that I was right. 

The stairway was the same. The H-shaped floor plan was the same. When I looked down the hallway the row of doors was almost identical to what I remembered. Although —as you’d expect — the old stained carpets have been replaced, and there is different paint.

And (of course!) there is no sign of the pay phones that were literally and metaphorically at the centre of the floor when I lived there.

University of British Columbia campus plan (detail), 1967.

I didn’t stay long, but it turned out that the spaces I remembered and thought about the least had changed the most. The dark common rooms on the main floor were opened up and bright. The dining hall, from outside at least, actually looked cheery — which is not the way I remember it.

Maybe the strangest part: it didn’t feel weird to be there again, even after more than thirty years, even though the place was so important to me as a young person, and is so important to this story I’m telling. 

A dormitory floor plan, this one from the New England Conservatory.

Late summer updates: Sending out queries, open mic, a new zine, and more

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Well, the skies here in Vancouver have been grey (or yellowish) with smoke from wildfires, and we’ve had more heatwaves, and today our prime minister called a federal election, which means I might have have to turn off the radio and social media for a while. 

Which might be a good time to do some more writing and editing, I guess?

Howe Sound, near Vancouver BC, August 2021

Querying, an open mic, and a novel excerpt 

Lindsay Wong, the current Vancouver Public Library Writer in Residence, is hosting an open mic/author reading on Thursday August 26th — and I’m excited to say I’ll be one of the readers. I hope you can drop by! (Yes, it will be via Zoom.)

In mid-July I took an excellent course with Lindsay* on writing query letters, and then (after some more revisions of my first few pages) I spent some time reading up on agents who might be interested in a novel set in 1986 Vancouver, about dissociation and gaslighting, female friendship, and rock and roll. 

Finally I sent that query — for How Does It Feel to Feel — out to an agent who sounds great. It’s a start!

And then last week, I also put together a zine version of an excerpt from that book, called Bidwell Island. 

Stay tuned: I’ll be posting more here about how you can get a copy if you’re interested.

How Does It Feel to Feel after the latest revision

Zine making

For me at least, it sounds very simple and yet is frustratingly fussy to make a so-called literary zine. Because these days I don’t have the time or patience (or easy access to a photocopier) to do it by hand, I don’t have to figure out the fancy folding and layout and page ordering details I would have in the old days (although fortunately there are excellent resources for it!) — I do everything in Pages (the Apple word processor), export to PDF, and take my PDF over to a print shop. And yet it still takes me ages to get that file ready.

The first part is to figure out just how long your piece of work should be, or how many pieces you need and how long they should be. There’s no “right” length, really — or rather your right length depends on how many pages you want to print, and what size your font and margins will be, how much space you need for your images. 

So I take a guess at the word count I want, and then fuss around for quite a while with different fonts and margins, trying to see what works. 

And you also have to remember that the page will be a different shape than what you see on your screen — not the default 8 1/2 by 11 that most of us work in in North America, but the shape of that sized paper folded in half. I’ve made zines before where I didn’t take this into account and then after I printed the pages out the margins looked very wrong. (My completely close-enough-for-rock-and-roll solution this time was to lay out the pages for A5 printing. I hope I’ll remember next time.)

Then, your page count has to be a multiple of four. This includes your cover, the back cover, the verso, etc. For Bidwell Island I decided on 12 pages — which works out to 8 pages of actual text and images.

Oh yes, the images. I figure out what I want, and then I figure out what I can actually draw, and what should reproduce somewhat successfully. Then I draw and ink my pictures, and paste them into my Pages document. Even though I’ve made theoretical space for them already, this always leads me to a lot more fussing around with line breaks, page breaks, etc. etc. (Because I am absolutely untrained, this means I just move things around and make minor adjustments until things look okay to my eye.)

And last of all, I constantly, constantly remind myself that it’s a zine. It’s not supposed to be perfect. 

Bidwell Island printed zines

*If you are a writer and get a chance to take a class with Lindsay Wong, I encourage you to do it! She is wise, kind, and very frank.