Adrian McKerracher - What It Means to Write: Creativity and Metaphor

What
It
Means
to
Write

What
It
Means
to
Write

Creativity and Metaphor

ADRIAN MCKERRACHER

MCGILL-QUEENS UNIVERSITY PRESS

Montreal & Kingston London Chicago

McGill-Queens University Press 2019

ISBN 978-0-7735-5633-1 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-7735-5721-5 (ePDF)

ISBN 978-0-7735-5722-2 (ePUB)

Legal deposit first quarter 2019

Bibliothque nationale du Qubec

Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country.

Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. Lan dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de lart dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

McKerracher, Adrian, 1981, author

What it means to write : creativity and metaphor / Adrian McKerracher.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-0-7735-5633-1 (cloth).

ISBN 978-0-7735-5721-5 (ePDF).

ISBN 978-0-7735-5722-2 (ePUB)

1. Metaphor. 2. Creative writing. 3. Creative ability. 4. Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.). I. Title.

PN228.M4M35 2019808.032C2018-905902-8

For my brother, who travels with me everywhere

Contents

What
It
Means
to
Write

It was supposed to be a simple semester abroad at the University of Havana in Cuba. It was 2003. I would be there for three months, taking classes at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities. The program was pleasant but predictable, the usual tour of a sanitized curriculum. Maybe it was no surprise that I began to lose interest. Or maybe I was there for another reason.

Soon enough I started skipping class to go on long walks through the city. From a birds eye view my route would have looked aimless, but I was searching for something. A secret project had taken hold. I repeated my mission to anyone who would listen, asking at bookstores, museums, cafs, on sidewalks, in parks, theatre lobbies, and during musical intermissions. It became a mantra, something I turned to in the inevitable moments of self-doubt that haunt months away from home, when I wondered what I was doing. During those mornings, those days, those nights, when nothing seemed to hold the trip together, I remembered my private purpose and time rallied in a rush of hope not only hope for the future, where hope was usually found, but for the present, where hope was lifting me up. I wasnt there for the classes or the music or the political history, although I was willing to use any of them to reach my goal.

I was there to meet writers.

I went to publishing houses and literary talks and libraries, describing my quest to anyone who would listen. By chance, after attending half a dozen book launches, smiling dopily at strangers, shaking hands, beaming at the glimpses of community, I found myself face to face with the president of the Writers and Artists Union of Cuba. He had enormous hands and the rugged face of a bear. I stammered my mantra.

Im here to meet writers.

Yes yes, fine, he said, and passed me off to someone he said was the editor of a literary magazine. That man said the same thing, yes yes, fine. Then he gave me a piece of paper with a number on it.

Call this woman, he said. She can help.

I called, waiting so long in the hot sun of the phone booth that sweat poured down my neck, the phone ringing into the void, until a woman answered breathlessly, as if she had been running up a flight of stairs.

Im from Canada, I said, and Im here to meet writers.

Look, she said. I dont have time to talk right now. But come to this address at eleven oclock on Thursday morning.

Then she hung up.

The place was in Old Havana, a bell tower with a little bookstore tucked into the ground floor and a pile of stairs at the back. I followed a man who I decided was a writer. He had a lean, gentle face with a thin beard, stooped posture, wearing a bland shirt tucked into his jeans, and he carried a book under his arm. We passed moss-covered rooms filled with broken chairs. I lost sight of him and followed the sound of his shoes on the stones until I reached the tower where the bell would have been a long time ago. In its place was a table with eight people seated around it. A freckled woman turned and looked at me.

You must be Adrian, she said. It was the woman from the phone.

Im Reina Mara Rodrguez. Sit down. Were starting.

As luck would have it, this was the place where some of the most prized writers in Havana met every week to give talks to one another about some aspect of their work. That day a playwright was presenting on the challenges of translating a script set in rural France into a bucolic Cuban dialect.

A farm in France doesnt sound like a farm in Cuba, the playwright explained, but somehow they are the same farm.

The bell tower was affectionately called La Torre de Libros The Tower of Books. For the next two months, I skipped class every Thursday to join these sessions. Soon I asked the writers if I could meet them in their homes. I had hardly read any of their books but I wanted to know about their lives. I wanted to know how they felt about converting thoughts into words. I visited them with a tape recorder and a bottle of wine and asked questions that were naive when written down but out loud were sincere: Where do ideas come from? How do you know when a paragraph is good? Is there such a thing as fiction? One conversation with the novelist and playwright Antn Arrufat stood out: citing his friend the late Virgilio Piera, he explained that a writer must learn not only how to hear himself but also how to write himself.

I adored the writers that I met in Havana. I wanted to be them, to talk the way they talked and know what they knew. But it wasnt simply worship. It was research. I wanted to know what it meant to be creative.

I had wondered this for years. Back in Canada, I hosted a community radio show called the Creative Experience at CHMA 106.9 FM in New Brunswick about the lives of artists: why writers wrote, what it meant to paint, what happened when people sang. Before that, when I was much younger, I idolized Walter Elias Disney the man, not the empire or the tantrums because he had found a way to make a living from his imagination. He had invented a world in his mind that eventually came to inhabit this world. He was living by his creativity.

But beneath any research on what that word meant was a question that swam like a dark and terrible fish. It had the power to overturn me and leave me to drown in the wide space of mediocrity: Was I a creative person?

What if I couldnt do anything original? I wondered. What if my most personal act turned out to be banal? What if I was nothing like my heroes? What if I put my life into art and people rejected it, found it clich, pat, conventional, dull, done before? What if I had nothing unique to offer and it was just me, another me, a me among the billions, winking into oblivion with no spark to illuminate even the little patch of life I inhabited? What if I didnt have the strength to carry out my ideas what if I was too weak to deliver my own thoughts? And what if, once delivered, those thoughts turned out to be ugly? They would be out, I would wish they had never happened or that I had treated them better, but by then it would be too late.