a beautiful story

Summer!  It feels real.  We'll have two perfect days of blue skies and whispering trees, and then everyone will scream about the humidity.  Canadians and weather: a love/hate story.

You'll be happy to know that I am working on "narrative tension", jumping right into the heart of the story.  I can see it now: I'll give a few new pages to Wayson and he'll say, "Too much tension!  Lighten up here."  No, this will not happen.  A student asked me yesterday, "How can you stand it when there's a tough critique like that, after so much work?" 

I replied, "Stand it?  I feel blessed.  Listening to an editor's criticism is part of a writer's job.  I don't have to take every word he says to heart, but I trust his expertise, taste, and knowledge of me as a writer.  It's a huge privilege to have that kind of attention."

Of course, the fantasy is always that an editor or reader will say, "Don't touch a word.  It's stunningly brilliant, the best thing you've ever written."  I'm sure that happens.  Once in a blue moon.

And now, the beautiful story.  I teach that you never know where your writing will end up, how it might touch a little bit of the world - how Anne Frank wrote because she had to write, never knowing that her words would change the world.  I have just received a great gift myself, of learning that something I wrote more than forty years ago has had an impact today.  

Those of you following the blog have heard a bit of the story of Barbara, my British childhood pen pal who died during an operation on her heart at the age of sixteen, in 1966; how this February I tracked down her family in England and have been corresponding with her younger sister, Penny.  I kept all of Babs's letters and sent copies to Penny, but she had found only a few of mine to Babs.  I assumed they had all been thrown out.  Recently, digging through a box of stuff looking for something else, Penny found an old brown paper envelope, sealed with Scotchtape, imprinted with "Beth's Letters to Me." Barbara must have put them into safekeeping before leaving for the operation on her heart at the Mayo Clinic, the operation from which she never returned.

Penny was in the middle of her own birthday party when she found the envelope, and so consulted her children Rosy and Tom and her cousin Rebecca and Rosy's boyfriend Phil about what to do. Her kids felt that she should leave the packet sealed, as was Babs's wish.  I turn the telling of the tale over to Penny, who is a superb writer.  This is what she emailed a few days ago:

Then Rebecca, who had been sitting quietly, said, "Can I hold them?"  She just sat there with the envelope in her hands, looking at the writing.  "I have her middle name.  My name is Rebecca Barbara.  I have the cross and chain she was wearing at my parent's wedding.  I have always felt close and yet I know nothing about her.  No one ever talked about her and I couldn't ask."

She handed the package back to me, and I turned it over and very gently pressed on the tape which with age had lost its strength.  The paper unfolded and the bag was open.  Holding it like a bag of sweets, I offered it to Rebecca.  "Read one," I said.  

Rebecca dipped into the bag and pulled out a letter.  "Dearest Babs..." she read.  They looked at each other and sat up awake with interest.  No one but me had ever heard her called Babs before.  Rebecca read aloud - about you being a dreadful mess packing, with suitcases, trunks and clothes all around you ... about the Paris book showing a bit of the beautiful city you were going to be living in.  

The bag passed on to Rosy who took out a letter dated June 18, 1963, about your ballet recital and a description, so witty, of the best dancer Clare Bader, tall and skinny, light and airy, who always walks with her feet in second position, and Cathy, not so airy.  We laughed so much that tears filled my eyes with pleasure and relief.

Phil had been reading another letter which he passed across to me.  "You'd better read this," he said.  "This has Big News."

So I read - your complaints about the Dave Clark Five and understanding comments about Babs's views on Ringo, your potted biographies of the Fab Four and then the revelation of your marriage to Paul, your children Paul and Paula, your ranch-style house by the sea and your cosy summer cottage.  Do you remember it, Beth?  I so want you to remember.  And then the BIG NEWS: "We're coming to England!"  And honestly, Beth, the five other people sitting in my kitchen cheered.  

Babs was buried on my birthday, Beth, and today you broke the spell with your gift, your talent and generosity.  You worked magic in that room.  You brought my sister alive for a generation who had only known her to be dead.  We talked for an hour about Babs and why it was we never really mentioned her, other than at formal times like family gatherings, how Rosy and Tom grew up seeing her picture on the wall, feeling her part of the family but never liking to ask about her.  

So the letters will be flying across the ocean to you very soon.  I haven't read the others but with your permission, I would like to do so, although I concede the argument that one really shouldn't read other people's correspondence, especially when it has been sealed for forty years in a brown paper bag.

Penny.

Pardon me while I dab my eyes.

I must protest that talent and generosity have nothing to do with it - I was simply a 13-year old who loved to write letters.  But Penny's words mean so much because after Barbara died, I reread all her letters to me and was filled with guilt.  She was often in hospital, and I was busy and didn't write to her as often as I should have.  I was so sorry that at that moment, I resolved to be a writer, to make a difference to the world with my words.  To redeem myself for Barbara.  And now, in a small way, with her own family, I learn that the 13-year old me has done so. 

A great blessing, yes?  A mitzvah.  And now, out to Ryerson, to teach the value of stories on this perfect summer night.  Heart full.  

 

tension schmension

And yes, she did speak too soon, folks, the pessimistic writer.  I showed some of those brave new pages to my friend and critic, wise, stern Wayson Choy.  And he came right back at me. "The voice works," he said, "but there is no narrative tension."  What that means is that NOTHING HAPPENS.  The nice voice goes charmingly on and on, but nothing is at stake. "Never forget, your reader is asking, 'Why am I reading this?'" he said.  "This is much too leisurely." 

He said: Show don't tell; use detail to paint pictures, to let the reader see, hear, feel the story; dramatise, don't summarise; justify every word; grab the reader immediately.  These are things I have said a million times to students.

And then, "I sense you are getting a little too fond of your narrative voice.  That will lead to sentimentality.  Like in American films."

Omigod.  So I was growing to like the voice a little, yes, and now I'm at risk of writing "White Christmas"?  He's right, as usual.  Every writer should be so lucky, to have a trusted editor of this calibre.  Wayson himself has Martha, a superb editor at Random House. Thank the lord for good editors, who give writers, lost in the thicket of words and thoughts, a ball of string to help find their way home.

Mr. Choy and I went to a heavenly movie yesterday, after he'd savaged my tensionless prose. "When did you last see your father?" is a classic memoir, beautifully written by Blake Morrison.  When I heard they were filming it, I couldn't imagine how - it's so personal and intimate.  And now there's a personal, intimate movie, wonderfully written, filmed, and acted by a crack British cast including one of my biggest crushes, the divine Colin Firth, beautiful in this film about a son struggling with love and hatred for a difficult father.  Unless you had a perfect father, you'll find familiar conflicted feelings in this story. Highly recommended, both book and film. 

Nothing conflicted in my feelings for Wayson Choy.  At the risk of sentimentality: it's love, love all the way.   

Junuary

My Newfoundland friend Debbie called this month Junuary.  Definitely an odd late spring, with already a few days of muggy breathless heat, followed by days so cold I wanted to get my wool hat back out.  Lots and lots of rain, a blessing because it means the garden is watered from above.  There's no rush, my Toronto friends - the heavy weight of real summer will come.

No more about writing classes and workshops - both the U of T and the garden one will run in July, and there will be another garden workshop in August; please contact me for details.  I am happy to report that something has shifted in my own work.  I've been struggling for a long time with how to get an important story onto the page - what voice,  structure,  time line, will allow me to tell this tale.  One day, it was just there, in a flash - a name and voice, and the pages slowly piling up. 

We'll see if I'm right.  I did test it on my Ryerson class - to show them the tortuous process of rewriting to make something work, I brought in several previous drafts of the first pages of the story and read them and the current one.  Unanimously, to my enormous relief, they preferred the latter.  I could tell it was working as I read - often there's a point, when you're reading your own work out loud, where your voice falters and you lose steam.  That didn't happen with this one.  

At least, not yet, said the writer pessimistically.

This is my rigourous fitness regime, on the days I don't go to a class at the Y: I put on my running gear, warm up a bit, and then set out - for Riverdale Farm, which is three minutes away.  Yes, a whole three minutes of jogging, and then I'm at the Farm where I walk around and look at animals, especially, these days, the baby goats which are black with white spots or vice versa - "Glory be to God for dappled things," as poet Gerald Hopkins wrote - and the rust-coloured piglets, sleeping in the mud with their massive rusty-haired mama.  I may jog slowly down to the ponds and back up again.  On the way out, I often ask at the cafe window if they have any eggs for sale.  Last time they had none from chickens but they did have duck eggs.  I tentatively took two - huge ivory spheres.  I who live, as I tediously repeat, an eight minute bike ride from Bloor and Yonge, had poached duck egg, just out of the duck, for lunch. 

And now - back to work.   

great U of T course, July 7 to 11

Writers, Continuing Studies at the U of T is running a summer writing program July 7 to 11, and there is some space left in my section.  It's a course entitled Narrative Non-fiction, which covers a large spectrum - biography, memoir, personal essay, as well as more journalistic pieces.  The great thing is that you will have a lot of time and attention in a small class, as we spend the mornings workshopping writing and doing some in-class work, with at least one session focussed entirely on you and your work and needs.  In the afternoons, the U of T is presenting some panels, including Noah Richler talking about the importance of place in writing, and another panel on the business of writing. 

If you're interested, go to www.learn.utoronto.ca and look under writing programs to find the summer ones. 

I have just finished reading Pierre Berton's "The Joy of Writing."  It's an upbeat, gossipy, practical book full of useful advice, with 30 rules for writers (Rule # 1 - Know and understand your audience.  Rule # 6 - Don't give up your day job.  Rule # 15 - Dig deeper.) He includes pages of his rewrites or of editors' comments to show how the process works. 

"You can learn a good deal about the techniques of storytelling, " he says,"by listening to bad storytellers, some of whom may be your friends and relatives."

Recommended.   

the Garden of Cabbagetown

Here is the famous garden.  Please contact me through the Contact page or this blog if you'd like more information or have suggestions on the workshops. One former student would like to attend but is at the cottage every summer weekend; she suggested holding a one-day session mid-week, for which, she said, she would gladly skip work. Let me know if you agree.  

Registration is once again limited to fifteen.