telling the truth

May 30th, 2007 writerspice

Awhile back I read somewhere that Philip Roth would never have become the writer he was without the help of his mother. When he came under attack by the neighbours and relatives for using them as characters in his fiction, it was his mom who stood by him. It was Mom who said: You’re a writer. Write.

This might seem like a no-brainer, but it’s not. For lots of beginning writers, it’s the hardest thing to get over - that urge to not tell the truth, that silent contract signed with parents or partners.

I’m no expert on this. Sure, I hear stories that people tell me and slot them into the must-remember-that space in my brain (a corner that is regularly, despite my best intentions, dusted and vacuumed by my cerebral cleaning staff). And once, in University, my roommate J.M. skewered me with his best impression of Uma Thurman out of Henry and June after he shared some tidbit from his past with me and I rubbed my hands together in glee. “You’re a writer. You make love to whatever you need,” he drawled, in his best Jersey accent.

But this is hard for me. And I’ve had a lesson in it recently.

While out at my uncle’s in Oregon, I went through his boxes of articles and poems, letters and notes. He let me read his journals, mostly travelogues from various long-distance walks or brewery tours in England. In the process, I learned a lot about him, about his life. It was a profound experience for me.

By the time I left, staring out into darkness on the shuttle bus from their town to the airport in Portland, I felt a lot of stuff inside me that I couldn’t really understand, so I just jotted a few things down. Weeks later the whole thing started to make some sort-of sense. My feelings began to come into focus and I pulled out those notes and wrote an essay that’s now slated for the Globe and Mail’s Facts & Arguments page (date unknown, but I’ll post when I know).

In the essay, I was honest. I told the truth about how I’ve felt about my uncle over the years and about how hard it is to be around him now, old and suddenly so changed, so slow. Writing about it felt necessary. It was necessary. It’s still necessary (I feel there’s more to come).

I didn’t think that he might not like it until after I’d sent it off and the acceptance email came. As the editor was going about the process of commissioning an illustration, I was sending it off to my uncle to give him a head’s up, to let him read it.

Twenty-four hours went by.

I wondered if he’d hate it, if he’d ask me to stop the presses or if he’d draw on his own experience, realizing that people get written about, that not much is sacred, that this is the reality of the role. I thought a lot about that story about Philip Roth, written, I remember now, by Betsy Lerner in her book The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers. “Unless you have sufficient ego and feel entitled to tell your story, you will be stymied in your effort to create,” she writes. “You think you can’t write, but the truth is you can’t tell. Writing is nothing if not breaking the silence.”

And in the end, I decided not to be afraid. This is who I am, I thought, with a shrug in the bathroom mirror. Part of me trusted him. After all, he’s a writer, too.   

My aunt finally emailed me. He’s very pleased, she wrote.      

Posted in Writing Life | 2 Comments »

busy young bees

May 24th, 2007 writerspice

Yesterday a shocking new Stats Canada study surfaced in the media. It found that lots of Canadian teens aren’t exactly hanging out at the pool hall, smoking pilfered cigarettes while wondering who to ask to the prom. 

Instead, an incredible amount of them are a bit more like Michael J. Fox’s Alex Keaton in Family Ties: hustling around the locker-lined halls carrying attache cases crammed with important papers. 

Get this: 39 per cent of surveyed teens “felt under constant pressure to accomplish more than they could handle.” A whopping 16 per cent considered themselves workaholics.

Workaholics. At age 16, 17. Fifteen, even.

It’s not that I don’t get this. When I was a teenager, I was the founding editor of the high-school’s first newspaper, in a couple different bands, on students’ council, in school plays and doing a few other extracurricular things. I remember being tired. I remember catching the early bus and the late bus and walking home, exhausted. 

And now that I’m nearly in my mid-30s, nothing much has changed. Well, the clarinet has gone by the wayside, but I’m still hustling to make a living while planning several projects to humanize my city and not taking much time to feel happy about it all. It was the same in my 20s: working, trying to get my writing published (and to get editors to follow-up on their promise to pay for said writing), all the while postering nearly every single night for various activist campaigns. I lived off coffee and cigarettes and rice and beans. My adrenals were held up by scaffolding. And the word no was not, well, is not, in my vocabulary.

Today’s teens don’t know how to say no, a quoted expert said yesterday. 

I’ve been thinking long and hard about this lately. Finding myself exhausted much of the time, I’ve been contemplating this longtime trend of being too busy. For me, it isn’t so much that I’m doing too much. It’s that I’m not recharging my batteries. I’m not going inside myself. I’ve forgotten how to day-dream. Poetry has been swept into the corners like a floor-full of dust.           

This, I think, is the problem with today’s teens, a problem that no study in our current system will ever point out, a problem with society in general. It used to be that people worked all week and then recharged on their sacred day, the day when they contemplated their relationship with something larger than themselves, or ran off into the woods to catch frogs or sat with their family or embroidered or went fishing. These days, we don’t get that. We don’t stop. We keep on going. We are always external. We work to get, instead of to give.    

And that kind of busy can never, ever last. 

Posted in Issues | 4 Comments »

lauren is…

May 15th, 2007 writerspice

finally updating her blog! Lauren is excited. Lauren is giving her dog a cookie. Lauren is out in the garden, going to bed, packing, off on an adventure, back to work. Lauren is procrastinating. 

For many of you the above claims might make no sense at all. But if you’ve been bitten by the Facebook bug, they’re probably ringing a few bells.

Yes, Lauren is a Facebook addict.

And, holy cow, no sooner did I become a Facebook addict than the world started talking about it. Or so it seemed. Although, sure, it is unlikely that people struggling somewhere to stay in their mud homes in the face of an ever-more-oppressive government are all that tuned in to Facebook and the recent controversy it has spawned.

But in my little North American universe, Lauren is hip!  

Hip because, while I am part of the .1 percent of the population of Facebook users born in the 1970s and was actually begrudgingly introduced to it by my sister-in-law who was born in the 1980s, I am still part of it! On Mother’s Day, much to my mother’s annoyance, my sister (born in the 1960s!) and I spent a good chunk of time discussing our Facebooks. My husband napped. Her’s talked about a group he wants to start: people who have lost their partners to Facebook.

Seriously, Lauren has is having a problem. Her sister is, too.

The pressing difficulty for me is not so much stumbling across bitchy comments by teenie-boppers in group forums, an issue that has hit the news big-time over the past little while and which I’ll get to later. The issue, for me, runs a bit deeper. It goes like this:

Lauren is her own boss. Lauren is not going to make any money if she is on her Facebook every ten seconds changing her status and uploading new pictures and cruising around to see what all her friends are doing like some manic partier who can’t sit still. Like all classic addicts, Lauren is out of control.     

And what a strange thing this is. Sometimes, late at night, as I’m lying in bed thinking of clever things to write on people’s walls, I will wonder if anyone actually cares that I am going to bed, eating breakfast, bringing my dog out for a walk, taking a shower, contemplating ladybugs. But still the compulsion is too much. I must keep everyone in the know.  

Because I, like everyone else, want to be part of something. And despite the fact that I just came back from a worldwide gathering of 6,000 people talking about reconciliation with their pasts and building meaning in their lives, despite the fact that I really am part of a deep, meaningful movement that is making a true impact in the world, I still feel a thrill when I update my status.  

How weird is that?

For me, it emphasizes how different it is for teenagers these days. The 99.9 percent of Facebook users who were born after the 70s have more or less grown up in this other world of online communities.

And how funny it is that the answer that adults have for kids saying mean things online is to try and ban the medium.

As we all know, say it with me, the medium isn’t… Yeah, yeah. 

The simple truth is this: as technology races ever faster, the world changes more and more. We hit 30 and start shaking our heads at the teenagers around us (a fact that reinforced how hip I felt to be doing something so youngsterish!)

But a different – and, yeah, worse – world doesn’t automatically equal apocalypse. What is scary right now, with teenagers spending more time in Second Life than the real world and using Facebook to bully and be mean, are actually the same things that have always been scary: violence and meaninglessness and isolation. We need to find an answer for these things, not the way they might be expressed.

Lauren is done. She is going to check on her friends.         

Posted in Just For Fun | 5 Comments »