My Good Teacher

“A good teacher,” Molly Peacock writes in her book The Paper Garden: Mrs Delaney Begins Her Life’s Work at 72, “urges you beyond your childish perfectionism.”

I have just spent five years working with a good teacher. I first met Merilyn Simonds online, when I signed up for her four-month course, Writing From Life, at UBC’s Booming Ground. The first pages I sent – an essay I’d been writing off and on for a couple of years – had been polished so much, I’d worn the finish off.

“I sense a holding back,” Merilyn told me gently after she read that first piece.

At the end of the course, I had rough drafts of several new stories and a sense that together they might just be a book. I had barely begun. Merilyn agreed to continue in a mentorship role. She combed through draft after draft, and later, responded to my weekly updates. She coached me on writing scenes and building tension. She encouraged me to attend to pacing and chart dramatic arcs. She pointed me to a rich reading list of personal nonfiction. Through it all, she urged me beyond the perfectionism I’d clung to since I was a child.

Stay open. Trust your gut. Move quickly.

Don’t think too much. Engage your sensual self. Enjoy the ride.  

Learning a skill, Molly Peacock suggests, involves an attention that moves an artist “beyond the self to the focused-on thing. All else drops away.”

This is what happened to me in my time with Merilyn. I rooted out the arch, persistent, know-it-all narrator who was always sneaking in and taking over. I sensed my story develop muscles and a pulse of its own. I learned how to let go of myself and surrender to the thing I was making.

A few weeks ago, Merilyn read the fifth draft of my manuscript. “Yes it is a book. And yes it is finished,” she wrote. “The tightness is gone.”  

After five years, I am going forward without my teacher. But oh, I have been taught well.

Over lunch a few months ago, Merilyn answered my questions about getting the manuscript out to publishers. As usual, she had several suggestions, but lately, I keep returning to this one.

“Get busy with the next thing.”

Yes, ma’am. And thank you.

Going Public

I don’t know how or when I first heard about Lisa Romeo, a New Jersey-based nonfiction writer, and an inventive, generous writing teacher and coach. But for the past few years, Lisa’s blog has been part of my morning warm-up. Her regular Friday Fridge Clean-Out is a weekly trove of writing treasures I try not to miss.

Today, I’m thrilled that one of my essays appears as a guest post on Lisa Romeo Writes.

Thanks for checking it out.

Under the Skin: A Sneak Peek

1. Where did the idea come from for your book?

One morning, when I was busy pushing my children through school and music lessons, I looked in the mirror and saw my maternal grandmother’s face staring back at me. It wasn’t just a physical resemblance: I was becoming as negative, rigid, and demanding as Berniece. A few years later, I was diagnosed with melanoma, a deadly but preventable skin cancer. The two experiences seemed connected. The resulting exploration became my book, Under the Skin.

2. What genre does your book fall under?  

Literary non-fiction. Memoir, if you insist.

3.  What actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

I’m a nonfiction writer, so I’d have the characters play themselves. If my book were fiction, I might choose old Bette Davis for my grandmother, and young Audrey Hepburn for me. My grandmother, if she were still alive, would have her own views.

4.  What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?  

When you have your face pressed up against the glass of your mortality, as the poet Jason Shinder describes the cancer experience, you find out who you really are.

5.  Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I’m old-school: I’m going to do my best to get an agent or a literary press interested in the manuscript.

6.  How long did it take you to write the first draft?  

A dozen years ago, my grandmother popped up in a piece of freefall writing. Five years ago, in a Booming Ground course with Merilyn Simonds, I began to think my Berniece essays might be a book. It took me eight months to write a first draft. The current draft (I’ve stopped counting) bears very little resemblance to the first one.

7.  What other books would you compare your book to within your genre?  

A combination of Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Mary Gordon’s Circling My Mother, and Karen Armstrong’s The Spiral Staircase.

8.  Who or what inspired you to write this book?  

A difficult, complicated grandmother; a strong, energetic mother; and my two, now grown-up children, who deserve to understand what lies under the skin.

9.  What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

This is a book where layers get peeled back – on the past, on the self, on the body. There are a couple of scenes where I take my clothes off. (Sorry, kids.)

Thank you to Rea Tarvydas for these questions, and her invitation to respond.

The Freedom to Be Uncomfortable

The other night at a downtown pub, I found a seat near the front and waited for the show to begin. I thought I spotted the featured speaker at this Freedom to Read Week event: a slim, thirty-something woman with long hair, tall leather boots and an air of relaxed confidence. But Cory Mack was in her early 50s, short, glasses, a little lumpy. Just like me.

Mack’s material is personal. She tells stories about her kids, her husband, her parents. Her landscape is a prairie childhood, the Calgary suburbs. Not so different than what I write about. Her sketches were frank, racy, rude, but often the laughs petered out too quickly. Mack segued to her next bit like the seasoned professional she is; from my bar stool, I squirmed in the silences. Be careful, Cory, I said under my breath. Don’t make yourself so vulnerable. I smiled harder, wider, offering myself up as a safe, welcoming harbour in the front row.

On the way home, I thought about why Mack’s routine bothered me so much. It was a tough room. A table of university students my kids’ ages sat at the back hunched over their smart phones. A group of arts administrators hosting the event camped in one corner. The rest of us, mostly middle aged women – who knew what we were expecting.

​A male comic, I thought, could get away with the coarse humour, the f-bombs, the jabs at domestic life. But something different happens when a woman – especially a middle-aged mom – peels back the layers of her private life and serves it up in public. 

If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.

Mother’s milk. The caution we ingest from the time we’re babes-in-arms.

The television critic Emily Nussbaum wrote recently in The New Yorker that shows like the HBO hit “Girls” upset people “because they violate the dictate that women, both fictional and real, not make anyone uncomfortable.”

The other night, Cory Mack made me uncomfortable. She rarely looked my way: she didn’t need the shallow harbour of reassurance I was offering. She had her own deep reservoir of courage, and craft, to agitate the silence.

I’m glad I saw her in action. I have work to do.