Falling Back
It’s that time of year again. Saturday night we got our extra hour, and now it’ll be dark before afternoon’s even had a chance to take hold. In the place I call home, at the corner of the Canada/US border and the Pacific Ocean (well, the Straight of Georgia if you’re being picky), we’ve begun the few months that can stretch our inner resources to the limit. Sure, much of the rest of Canada has a well-deserved reputation for hard winters. They laugh at us when we get any real amount of snow because we’re ill-equipped to deal with it here individually, where many of us have all-season tires on our cars all year round, and municipally, where we have too few plows and sand trucks to deal with “real” winter. That’s okay. We get our own back on Valentine’s Day, when the flower count in Victoria always numbers in the millions while a lot of the country is still buried under dirt-crusted white stuff. But in the meantime, a West Coast winter has its own challenge: rain. It doesn’t sound like much on the surface, but you’d be surprised. I have friends who’ve had to move away because of it and others who rely heavily on prescription lamps and mid-winter trips to sunnier climes. It’s not the rain itself that’s the problem. The rain can be pretty, and it sounds lovely against the roof snuggled in at home on cold winter evenings with stew bubbling on the stove. But with the rain comes the grey, oppressive clouds. They settle over the city for days at a time so that it never gets truly light out before the sun goes down and it’s dark again. It can be tiring and dreary and depressing. Yet most of us love it here, and not just in the summer. Why? Because no matter how wet and dark it gets, every once in awhile, we wake up to a day where the sky looks like it did yesterday: The sun shines from beyond that expanse of blue, and it turns out that rain polished everything up so it’s all green and clean and lovely in the sunlight. And in just a few short months, it’ll be time for this again: Share...
SiWC 2009
Well, Surrey’s over for another year, and thanks to a husband kind enough to turn off my alarm this morning and handle the getting-child-to-school routine alone, I’m not quite as physically and mentally exhausted as I expected to be today. Don’t get me wrong; I’m still far from functioning normally, as the quality of this post will no doubt reveal, but at least I feel like driving to the grocery store isn’t actually too risky an activity for my current capacity. Good thing, too, since the cupboards are bare. I don’t know if it’s even possible to convey what a whole weekend at the Surrey conference is like in one post, but I’ll give it a shot. This was a really different year for me at SiWC. As the incoming conference coordinator for 2010, I was in a unique position. I was at once shadowing kc dyer (coordinator extraordinaire), getting a sense of things from her perspective, meeting presenters, spending time with the board and so on while still being an attendee, sitting in on workshops, having meals with friends I see once a year, sitting in the bar, and all else that comes from being on that side of the registration table. It was an interesting challenge to find the balance between both roles, but I enjoyed it. I arrived at the hotel late Wednesday morning, having picked up my good friend Pam from the airport en route. The Sheraton’s quiet on the Wednesday before the conference. Only a few people have checked in, and the hub of activity seemed to be mostly in the coordinator’s room, where we helped tend to some last-minute details including one that involved cardboard, chocolate, and ribbon. Any task involving chocolate is okay by me. A little time in the lounge that evening with karen, Pam, Michael Slade and later Jack Whyte, and Wednesday was over already. Never do days go by quite as quickly as they do in Surrey, and the rest of time continued in the same appallingly speedy fashion. The rest of the weekend went by in a blur of friends, workshops, board meetings, meals, keynote speeches, comfortable lounge chairs, and altogether too little sleep. But even in the midst of the busyness, there were moments where things seemed to slow down long enough for me to realize I was seeing or hearing or doing something pretty special in that instant, and those are the moments I’ll remember long after this year’s conference blends and blurs with those gone by and those still to come. Some of them are simply ‘you had to be there’ things that I’ll take out, look at, remember, and enjoy before tucking them away again for awhile, flashes and moments that wouldn’t mean anything to anyone else. But some of them weren’t just mine, or, if they were, still speak to the general experience of camaraderie and magic that is at the heart of Surrey. Here are some of those: – seeing my friend Pam arrive at baggage claim at YVR and come toward me with a giant smile, arms spread wide, echoing my own excitement that Surrey time had come again; – watching Mike Carson’s face when he found out he’d received an honourable mention in the storyteller’s category of the SiWC writing contest and had won the non-fiction category. Both had been kept as a surprise, with the help of his wife, until the announcement of the winners, and he had no idea until his name was called; – listening to moving and stirring keynotes. I’ve never heard an Anne Perry speech I didn’t love, for example, that didn’t move me to write and to embrace joy, sorrow, and fear to make my fiction the best I can make it, and this year was no exception. It was a great year for keynotes all around; – picking up tidbits from presenters including Jeff Arch, author of Sleepless in Seattle, who echoed beautifully what most presenters seemed to feel about why they write what they write: “Strip away all the details and it’s an idea that wouldn’t let go of me;” – sitting in the ballroom for Michael Slade’s Shock Theatre, in which his version of War of the Worlds came alive through the vocal skills of an all-star cast that included Slade, kc dyer, Diana Gabaldon, Anne Perry, and Jack Whyte, the keyboard prowess of an amazing high-school student called Althea, and the pumpkin-smashing power of Sam Sykes; – getting a little dressed up for Saturday dinner, a rarity in a mostly casual life; – hearing the standard smattering of applause for a door prize winner swell...
Craft is craft is… life?
My husband’s on his way back from NYC tonight following five intense days in a Jay Maisel photography workshop. He’s feeling that strange combination of exhaustion and exhilaration, sadness and joy that comes from a really good immersive experience. I recognise the symptoms: it’s the same feeling I come home from Surrey with every year. What I realized reading his blog about his time there, though, is that the post-immersion haze he’s experiencing isn’t the only similarity between his photography workshop and my writers conference. The mechanics of photography and writing may be different, but the awareness – of self and of craft – that elevates your work in either medium from the everyday to something special are the same. And ultimately, the same things apply to life itself. Not sure what I mean? Here are a few of the ideas that were reinforced for him this week, taken from his blog: 1. If there’s a nervous feeling about the quality of any picture, it’s probably warranted. 2. Who cares how much effort it was to take a shot if it’s bad? 3. “If you’re not your severest critic, you’re your own worst enemy.” Jay Maisel 4. “What’s all this shit in the corners? You’re responsible for every square millimeter of your frame!” Jay Maisel 5. I’m learning to let go, and to truly have fun, and take the chance to either succeed gloriously or fail gloriously. Take the photography context away, and every single one of those applies to writing, to cooking and housekeeping and parenting and to doing whatever job it is you do in life, don’t you think? I do. They’re all part of my writing life, that’s for sure. If my gut tells me something’s wrong in a scene, something’s almost certainly wrong. I’ve had to kill more of my darlings than I care to remember, scenes I loved or even whole chapters, because of number 2 on the list. And so on. You get the idea. Number 5…. phew. That’s a biggie. It’s what we should all strive for in work and in life, but it’s bloody difficult to do, risking failure for the chance of success, let alone having fun while we do it. But if we can manage to let go and take the chance, we’re in for a hell of an interesting ride. And isn’t that the point? Share...
Surrey Excitement
Fall is in the air, complete with blowing leaves and weather that shifts from rain to brilliiant sunshine and back again several times a day. For me, the autumn air means one thing: Surrey. Exactly one week from when I’m writing this, at 9:00 on Thursday evening, I’ll be ensconsed in one of my favourite places: among writing friends in a comfortable chair in the lounge at the SiWC. I attended a meeting at the hotel this afternoon. It was the first time I’d been there since last year’s conference, and even driving into the parking lot gave me a thrill of anticipation, the same as the one I get every year when I drive up for the conference itself. The Surrey International Writers Conference is a highlight of my year every year. Where else can you get fabulous professional development, hang out with writer friends, watch a live performance of a radio play with a cast that includes no fewer than four bestselling authors and possibly a few little green men, and ride in hotel elevators that have a reputation for interesting encounters? Amazing stuff, and I haven’t even mentioned the swashbuckling sexy Englishman, the singing Scot, the storytelling lawyer… I could go on, but you get the idea. I’m especially looking forward to this year. It’s my last as an attendee for now, because I’m taking on the job of conference coordinator as soon as this year’s conference wraps up. I intend to enjoy every moment. The registration numbers are strong this year, already ahead of last year, so if you’re thinking about attending, don’t wait too long! A sellout is a definite possibility. And if you’re a writer, you should be thinking about attending. You definitely won’t be sorry! Share...
Why do you write?
Four of the women I know from the Compuserve Books and Writers Forum have started a joint blog called All The World’s Our Page. It’s joint venture across continents: two of the contributors are Australian, the other two American. Four like-minded people coming together from totally different parts of the world appeals to me, so I’ve added them to my reader. Their initial posts explore the question of why each of them writes, and reading their answers got me thinking about my own. It’s not something I think about very often, because writing is just what I do. I can’t imagine not doing it, can’t fathom ignoring the stories that bubble up in my head or missing out on the rush that comes with putting together a sentence that feels just right. I’ve always written, in one form or another. I can’t remember a time when it wasn’t part of who I am, though it’s been channelled in different ways at different times in my life. When I was nine or ten, I won ribbons for poetry. Around that time, I got hooked on Anne of Green Gables and its sequels, and dreamed of writing that well. Anne’s vividness inspired me, as my love for those books still does. When I was a teenager, I penned really awful romantic short stories. As an adult, my writing energies went into teaching others to put coherent sentences together in my role as a high school English teacher. The stories still brewed in my mind, though I did little more than play with them here and there. The decision to stop dabbling and get serious about writing came suddenly. The morning of my 30th birthday, my husband woke me up to come and see the news. Planes had just flown into the World Trade Centre and North America was in shock. For me, the double whammy of a milestone birthday and that violent reminder that life is short was the push I needed to put my butt in a chair and write. Every day. I joined the forum immediately after that and began learning about the craft. And I wrote. I wrote while my child slept, while her dad took her out to have fun without me, and whenever I could carve out a few minutes. Since then, I’ve written an ‘under the bed’ book that probably will never see the light of day, completed a manuscript that’s had good feedback but hasn’t found a home yet, and am about a third of the way into my new MS, a story that’s a big challenge to write but is really exciting, too. I keep writing every day, even if some days it’s not working and in the end all I write is an email to a friend. So really, I suppose the short answer to the subject of this post, if I need one other than “Because I can’t not write” is “Because of LM Montgomery and Al-Qaeda.” Bet you’ve never seen those two in the same sentence before. Share...
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