Tour de Blog

Thanks to Samantha Warwick for handing me the “Tour de Blog” baton.  This literary relay proposes four questions to Canadian writers about their writing. Links to other in the relay appear at the bottom of this post. I pass the baton to Calgary-based writer and blogger, Rea Tarvydas.

1. What am I working on?

After writing a literary memoir, I am back to essays. This summer, I’ve been thinking about my complicated relationship with Calgary – the city where I grew up and have lived most of my life. A quotation from Kris Demeanour, our first poet laureate, sits on my desk for inspiration: “Calgary is a place of infuriating possibility.”

Photo: Calgary Public Library

This new essay has been a crash course in Calgary’s first boom – that gilded age before World War I. I’ve been reading history, scouring old photographs and haunting Thirteenth Avenue West, the city’s first Millionaires’ Row. My essay started out as a short profile assigned in Susan Orlean’s online writing course and has turned into something else entirely. Such is the way with essays.

Across the room, over at the Career Desk, I’m working through Andrew Simonet’s excellent Making Your Life As An Artist: A Guide to Building a Balanced, Sustainable Artistic Life. This involves setting goals and other important tasks that often seem more difficult than writing.

 2. How does my work differ from others in its genre?

My essays start in the particular ground of my own life. I’m interested in making connections – between the present and the past, the self and the world – as a way to discover and understand.

3. Why do I write what I do?

I’m a cautious, private person but midlife has made me more bold – at least, on the page. After many years writing for other people, I’ve become preoccupied with the personal. Writing literary nonfiction is a way for me to untangle my own life in well-crafted prose that resonates with other people. The essay is a wonderful, malleable, capacious form – the perfect place to ask questions and see where they lead.

 4. How does my writing process work?

Shitty first drafts, reams of them. Fresh air and walking. Reading. Getting feedback from trusted first readers. Living a life that has nothing to do with writing but may, one day, end up on the page.

Being inside an essay-in-progress is the best part: the tug of new questions, the stumbled upon, breath-snatching surprises, the art and craft of making fine sentences and telling good stories.

Check out these other writers in the relay:

Samantha Warwick Cassie Stocks Ali Bryan Leanne Shirtliffe Bradley Somer Janie Chang Theodora Armstrong Kathy Page Lorna Suzuki Barbara Lambert Matilda Magtree Alice Zorn  Anita Lahey  Pearl Pirie  Julie Paul  Sarah Mian Steve McOrmond Susan Gillis  Jason Herou

Summer Village

Years ago, we would visit friends at their cabin on Sylvan Lake. Not far from the turnoff to their place, a sign told us we were entering a summer village. I’d never heard of such a thing before, but I liked the sound of it: a small community that comes together to savour a short, precious season.

This week in Calgary, we’re having classic summer weather: an unusual string of hot days and sultry evenings. I set up my work outside, spreading my books on the patio table. I’m allowing myself a mid-summer diversion from the work-in-progress on my desk: puzzling through W. G. Sebald’s Vertigo – a book I’ve been meaning to read for years, and recently finished.

Inspired by Sebald’s digressive prose, I wander through essays and interviews about his work, scribbling notes as I go. My attention moves the same way the bees do among the tall purple spikes of salvia in the garden. The weather is perfect for purposeful wandering. Inside, I check in with writing friends online. Some are working on manuscripts, others have organized retreats of their own making, reading slowly and closely, taking notes and figuring out how things work.

“There’s so much to learn, you know?” my friend Rea posted on her blog the other day. And there is. The summer village of writers is humming. 

Susan Orlean Comes to Banff

I headed into the smoky, sultry Rocky Mountains to hear Susan Orlean in conversation with Ian Brown at the Banff Centre. She read four excerpts of her work, jammed with detail. (No surprise that her husband has had to shame her into packing light when she travels. Reformed, she told Brown she came carry-on to Banff.) In the Q&A, no one asked about her note-taking technique, but she did dish about how she gets people to talk: be pure of heart, she says, come to a story without knowing anything. Outline? Agenda? Structure? “I begin with nothing.”

She looked a little like Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, petite and pretty in a polka-dot summer dress and white sandals. A person you could get chatty with.

And what about the blank page, after a 25-year career? No writer’s block, but she does admit to performance anxiety. “You don’t build equity as a writer.”

I came home with The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup, a collection of “encounters with extraordinary people” published in 2001. First stop for me when I dig in? “The American Man, Age Ten.” She spoke at length about that piece with Brown: a profile of the young McCaulay Culkin assigned by Esquire that turned into something else entirely. Why the change of direction? A different story caught her imagination and she chased it down.

“I’m just curious,” Orlean said last night with a girlish grin. “I’m a tourist of the human condition.”

Seven random truths my father taught me

1. Where you stand depends on where you sit.

2. Dear Mother: Life’s a bugger. Joe.

3. It’s only money.

4. Pigs get fed, hogs get slaughtered.

5. Take no prisoners.

6. If your aunt had balls, she’d be your uncle.

7. I didn’t dress you, cowboy.

Thanks to Susan Calder for the prod, and to Lori Hahnel and Rea Tarvydas for priming the pump.