Literary Hub

My Essay on Literary Hub

I wrote a piece about what really happens while writing a book (especially fiction, but this can apply to memoir, as well), and Literary Hub—many thanks to them!—published it on the day that MOLLY FALLS TO EARTH came out. I think a lot about the impulse that many writers, especially beginning ones maybe, have toward ten-step lists and formulas, and what this says about how writing is taught. This is not to say that there is anything wrong with lists and trying to find a concrete pathway through the sometimes murky terrain of creating something, but rather that the fever to plan everything out and know in advance what is going to happen—either in terms of the trajectory of the narrative or even what will happen to the book itself—can indicate a desire to dominate a process that is only partly concrete; the rest is mysterious, thankfully, and often out of our control. This is excellent and good news. Click here to read the essay on LitHub.

MOLLY FALLS TO EARTH!

It’s been just over a year since the beginning of the COVID lockdowns. I remember—vividly!—teaching an in-person workshop (the last of its kind) on March 14th, 2020, and by the 16th, everything was shuttering up. My husband recently went back to his office where he found the communal whiteboard still had writing on it, dated March 16, 2020. The whole office was pretty much a ghost town, he said, and so he continues to work mostly from home.

But home is not a ghost town, that’s for sure. It’s been action central for months now. My husband, two sons and I (plus the two felines) have carved out our own corners and office spaces. We had our previously unfinished basement finished, which was a huge project five months in the making and wildly noisy—at a time when our collective senses were already overloaded. We engaged in this apparently insane endeavour mostly because of my older son, Gabriel; he has Down syndrome and autism and his day program closed early on when everything went into lockdown. We’ve needed the added space, and now that it’s done, I have to say it has been so incredibly worthwhile.

The big news, of course, for this month—and also long in the making—is that MOLLY FALLS TO EARTH launches on April 27th. At last! Molly was scheduled to release last year, but due to the pandemic, the date was shifted. I’m grateful in many ways for that change, as we’re all had so much practice adapting to dealing with books in a new way, but more than a year in and circumstances generally are much the same. Slow vaccine roll-outs in many regions and the variants have meant that the world is still grinding along, hoping for all those numbers to get better. Hoping for some sense of liberation.

So I’m celebrating MOLLY against this backdrop, but celebrating nonetheless; and moreover I’m celebrating writing and reading in the larger sense because I think they are more than good pursuits, I think they’re life saving, especially now.

The Toronto Star recently called MOLLY FALLS TO EARTH, “Highly anticipated.” The story is this: a dance choreographer has a seven minute seizure on a sidewalk in Manhattan and encounters a kaleidoscope of memory, her past and present, secrets and mysteries, old love, the people gathered around her and questions of existence. There is a thread of missing people, also, as her old love is nowhere to be found, and so the narrative is an impressionistic unfolding and “inventive exploration of time, absence and desire.”

Time and the Story of MOLLY's Date

New Release Date: APRIL 27, 2021

My novel has a new release date, as do many books right now, due to the stresses of our current situation, to which we all have to adapt. I think there’s something in here about time, too, and our perceptions of it. Does time seem different to you, too? As they say, the present moment is all we ever have. Time in the land of COVID is a different animal, though, and has taken some adjustment. Part of the reason for the discombobulation is no doubt due to the wearing of pajamas or yoga pants for extended periods or, heck, wearing them continuously. Also the eschewing of regular bathing in favour of radical cleansing and disinfection methods for groceries and packages. In my case I also have an old-school calendar book that I’ve suddenly stopped consulting, giving me that what-day-is-it-even feeling; although, as the weeks have gone by I’ve gotten better at keeping tabs on the date. (It’s as if I removed myself from the calendar’s reach or have no longer found a use for it, or maybe I don’t like being reminded of the world and the sense of time that the calendar represents.)

*This is a note from the future: tonight Saturday Night Live’s cast will create their show from their individual quarantines and Tom Hanks, the host, will declare that Saturday no longer exists. There! I knew it. I told my husband that there is only Today and I-Don’t-Know, and they alternate.

But maybe the larger problem at work here is the emotional dissonance that many of us are experiencing (or we’re experiencing the dissonance of the people we live with or friends that we’re waving to on video or those neighbours in the distance). At any rate, the effect is there, the time warp of this time, the way that it’s more elastic than usual, more Twilight-Zone-ish. Dreams, too, have been unrelentingly strange and vivid, so that sleep is less of a reliable blank and more yet another experience of narrative time.

All this leads to forgetfulness. I forgot to pay some of the bills that aren’t already electronic, which rarely happens. If I have a scheduled call with someone I have to write it in big letters on a whiteboard in the kitchen, where I know I’ll see it, because I’ve been forgetting things—events, places, thoughts, names, schedules, all of it falling into a COVID void only to suddenly bob to the surface later (and for whatever reason scheduling it into my phone doesn’t seem like a better response). Everyone in the computer screen world is wearing their pajamas and clutching a coffee cup or a martini glass, their hair askew, regardless of the hour. A friend and her husband were having cocktails in the morning, because time no longer made sense, or rather it made sense to have a cocktail when they wanted it; she napped at dinner.

All of this is to say that time, as ever, is malleable and artistic, and we are all Alice in Wonderland, and our immediate family is more immediate than ever, and our friends now live inside our screens, and we are all too big and then too small. Not that our perception of time wasn’t this way before, only that the particulars have changed. In the larger, outer world, the postponement and rescheduling of things has been rampant, for good reason. Everyone is madly scrambling to adjust, re-tune, plan for a later time when we can stick our heads up from our burrows and look around, and maybe—someday—attend concerts and go to restaurants, and the beach.

So my novel, also, is in this category of movement (and funnily enough, at the heart of the book is the individual, impressionistic experience of time by one woman). The original date was for the end of this month, but that was arranged long, long before COVID; now publishers, bookstores and the entire delivery system are under an unprecedented strain and so Simon & Schuster Canada has scheduled the release of MOLLY FALLS TO EARTH for April 27, 2021. Given the topsy-turviness of the world, and on a micro level, the fact that my home-life is filled with Gabriel-care at the moment, this is a good decision, and it makes for something to look forward to. So now the event that was on the brink of happening has made a leap in time; this reminds me a little of leaving a party one night as a teenager, very possibly having smoked some pot, and getting closer and closer to the end of a street where the end continually seemed to move out of reach. But I did eventually get there, my destination, and so will we all, and hopefully we’ll be in the present moment as we go. Happy Saturday (Sunday?).

Molly Falls to Earth... advance copies!

I’ve been busy with the beginning of teaching a class, and so haven’t posted yet in January, but this happened on Saturday: the postman delivered, while I was having a winter’s nap, a parcel containing the ARCs (advance reading copies) of my novel! Et voila, here she is, with her dynamic cover. Much excitement and gratitude.

There’s a palpable shift from reading a manuscript in word-processor form to reading it as a bound book. Seismic, really. The book form has a new authority, a personality and a kind of permanence (or an illusion of permanence, anyway, in an impermanent world). It’s on the heftier side, too, being a longer book than my previous two.

So here we go! Molly is beginning to make her way.

Writing Acknowledgments

Last week was Thanksgiving, and I’ve been thinking a lot about gratitude and expressions of it. Eckhart Tolle says, to paraphrase, that being grateful for something is to pay attention to it—the thankfulness can be wordless; the point is the quality of attention. Gratitude has definitely developed a public face and something people post about on Facebook or Instagram. I’ve seen various friends over the years with a daily gratitude practice that then becomes their social media update; it becomes clear that the posting of thanks is something deeply separate from the original practice and maybe even undermines it. Not to knock the saying of gratitude out loud, of course, and we all feel good when someone thanks us (don’t we?), especially when we weren’t expecting it (or demanding it on some subconscious level). But we all know true alignment when we see it, and genuine gratitude, too. Maybe thankfulness is best when it’s a somewhat private affair, spoken between two people or to no one in particular—or not spoken but felt—and maybe that’s when it has the chance to be the most powerful, and something like a wonderful secret. Maybe that’s when it’s more of a practice, something quiet and without agenda.

I’ve been thinking of the last tasks of writing MOLLY FALLS TO EARTH, all the signals that a book is coming together, and creating the acknowledgments is one of them; and so I had to come up against whatever feelings I have about public thank-yous. And it made me wonder if, at the same time that I sometimes enjoy reading the acknowledgments for a book (maybe because you can get another sense of the writer, one that you didn’t glimpse in the rest of the work), I’m a bit uncomfortable with long ones, especially at the end of novels where they can seem over-the-top and unhinged from the real. They can seem to have a competitive heart. Nonfiction is possibly the exception (and I seem to recall the acknowledgments for KNOW THE NIGHT as running to the longer side, in part because it was my first book; would I write it shorter now?)—there tend to be numerous sources to thank and point out, permissions people, even institutions. So maybe what I’m saying here applies more to fiction. 

When I see long acknowledgments, I sometimes wonder if what I’m seeing is really the immense pressure, unconsciously expressed, for status that’s driven by social media (nothing against social media per se; everything has a dualistic nature and a shadow side), something like a desire to protect oneself with a complexly-rendered shield of helpers. Or at least to give the appearance of it. #squadgoals. If I thought that the gratitude was simply gratitude—that is, without another intention behind it—I wouldn’t be writing this. And I would have to include my own experience here, which is that when I’m writing my gratitude I find it impossible to escape the social-construct aspect of it and that the enormous thankfulness I may feel (and most certainly do) and its nuances and surprises, how it is often aroused by very simple occurrences, has little to do with the expectations and social conformity of writing the acknowledgments page. At the same time, getting to that point feels like a privilege, something to be considered deeply and savoured... but then let go of. You say your thanks and hope it is enough. But for whom? The people you’re thanking, the readers, yourself, the cosmos? I noticed in Ali Smith’s latest novels that she simply makes a list of names and that’s it. No indication of what position the person behind the name fulfills, how they rendered help, or how close they are to her. There’s a very spare hierarchy in that it’s a list, but that’s all the hint you get. And I really, really like that. It seems a very Ali Smith thing to do, too. 

Anyway, in the end, to each their own. It would certainly be a shame if all acknowledgments could only be a few words (though using only a few words has become so decidedly unique, that it now seems radical) or had to be any particular way. If someone has really dug down and done their work and made a long acknowledgments that rings with whatever in them is genuine, then who am I to suggest they shouldn’t? It would be amazing, though, to see other, completely different expressions. What if the acknowledgments was just an image—maybe even an abstract one? 

When the day came that I sat down to write the acknowledgments for Molly, I decided to go toward the short, if not the bare list of names. I’ve been practicing metta (also called lovingkindness) meditation, and it suddenly came to mind and seemed appropriate. But whatever I wrote down is only a shade of the real experience. How do you say, once you’ve finished a book, everything there is to say about what goes into it and the people—not to mention chance opportunities, the sheer luck—who helped you along the way? 

Which is maybe exactly why many writers choose to devote pages and pages to it... 

Completing a Novel... Part Two

Photos for MOLLY FALLS TO EARTH

A space forms after a big project; small ones, too, actually. I’ve had this feeling after finishing short pieces, like a story or an essay, and it happens especially after finishing a book. And it happens in stages, because finishing happens in stages—you complete a round of edits and there it is: a space forming, or a pause that’s both bright and shadowy. The world had been full of words and then suddenly it isn’t. Or the words have changed, maybe, neglected ones coming to the surface, or maybe it’s images or sensations. Something, anyway, is different.

Some writers have the next book already queued up, so one project is simply exchanged for another in a seamless word fabric. When I finished my story collection, I was in that position, having already started MOLLY FALLS TO EARTH because it began, literally, as one of the stories before I understood it wanted to be something bigger and removed it. But I still took a pause, or rather the pause took me, and there was that space again, both welcome and uncomfortable. If you’re too hooked on doing, the space can be disconcerting. Somehow boundaries have shifted, gotten bigger and maybe unwieldy. New terrain, or old terrain that had gone unseen for a time. But I know better than to avoid spaces and pauses; they’re maybe the most important “thing,” for not being a thing.

Anyway, the photos above. They’re of Washington Square Park. Molly, my novel’s protagonist, is a contemporary dance choreographer who has a seizure on a sidewalk in Manhattan—right on the edge of WSP. Her seizure lasts seven minutes, which is the crux of the book, as she experiences a confluence of her past and her present, including her secrets, and the people who have gathered around her. WSP is the kind of smallish park that seems big in memory. It has an outsized history and presence and colour. The trees and plantings in it are wondrous. The people, too. The wanderers and settlers and chess hustlers. There’s an enormous English elm that’s perhaps 300 years old, and there are some 20,000 people buried beneath the park’s surface. Walkways weave through that are made of hexagonal pavers. There’s the fountain, of course, and the gleaming white arch, and the beginning of Fifth Avenue. It’s been the scene of untold protests and subversive gatherings, and you can feel that energy when you’re there, all the possibilities.

So, the photos. I took some of them in summer and some in winter. Naturally, the park changes dramatically and when the branches are bare and you can see the curving shapes of them against the sky, there’s a spookiness and atmosphere. Not unfriendly in the least, but certainly stopping. The photos I took are mostly very simple, and quiet, and I avoided shooting people or the arch or the fountain. I took numerous shots of the hexagons, and some of the chess pieces, and a couple of pigeons; also various bits of litter: an old crossword, a folded blue-lined paper, a crumpled napkin. A small delicate white feather. When I shot there in summer, I was with my husband, and the park was full of movement and people. I was busy, focused on my camera, with my gaze mostly to the ground, looking for interesting items. I missed, according to my husband, the bare-chested woman sunning herself on a bench very close to me. And no one paying much mind, this being New York.

Back to space. I realized the photos are a kind of space or pause. The mind can’t help making its interpretations, it has to come up with a story or a meaning of some kind when it sees a picture—it’s almost helpless to the process, I think—but at the same time the image in amongst prose forms a void, or it can. And that’s one of the reasons that I find images within novels and short stories so fetching. There’s a shift, even one that’s in a blink, and something opens up that feels, if you’re open to it, almost eternal. Or something like that.

Completing a novel... Part One

Introducing Molly…

to be released

April, 2020

It’s done!

Complete!

This is my third book, but my debut novel (yes, friends have joked with me about writing a book in each existing genre). MOLLY FALLS TO EARTH is now complete, even the acknowledgments. All the larger edits have long been done, and the copyedits, too, and then a proofreader read the manuscript after that (which is when you really know you’re done). And this being my third go-round, I can say that the copyediting still astonishes me, and maybe a little more so than the general editing, which is its own kind of magic for sure, but one that I more or less expect. The fineness of the copyedits is what I’m talking about here, how every tiny decision in terms of commas and paragraphs and eccentric wording is accounted for, every character (meaning both characters and the letters on the page) noted and gone over numerous times. There are, too, the ensuing discussions in the margins and by email of what is meant by something and should it stand or be changed for something else. It’s a beautiful process, in part because it means you’re almost done, and it involves other people, including ones you don’t know, after you’ve spent so much time (months, years) of being with the ideas and story mostly alone (apart from, in this case, the wonderful company and astute mind of my acquiring editor, and then a few writing friends besides). And if you can get over the closeness of the inspection, how you’ll be questioned on things you’ve taken for granted, the process itself becomes enjoyable, even if it’s arduous (and you don’t want to do yet another read-through, but you must…). It becomes easy to see that great copyeditors are a godsend, and their attention to detail is an art form. And did I mention that it signals completion? Done-ness!

And the jacket design, too. If you’re very visual (I am), maybe that’s the best magic of all. More collaborations and mulling and going back and forth with the (long-suffering) designer. I’ve loved each jacket I’ve had, and the process of finding the right image, the right font. In the case of MOLLY FALLS TO EARTH, the chosen design was one of various iterations, all of them attempts to get at the topsy-turvy atmosphere in the book. The other arrangements and colour schemes were completely different. As the author you get a bit of say, if you’re lucky, but the jacket decisions tend to fall to the larger team, including, naturally, the marketing department. I did campaign for certain things, though, including the title font that you see up there, which, for whatever reason, makes me absurdly happy. If font can make one happy, which I can guess it can. I’ve realized fairly recently that I have a thing for typography and book design and all the small but entirely big details. (WHEN WE WERE BIRDS has a tiny pair of bird scissors on the dust jacket and then a tiny pair of bird scissors embossed on the actual spine, which blew my mind.)

… more to come…