Jared Bland - Finding the Words: Writers on Inspiration, Desire, War, Celebrity, Exile, and Breaking the Rules

Copyright 2011 by McClelland & Stewart

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency is an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Finding the words : writers on inspiration, desire, war, celebrity, exile, and breaking the rules / edited by Jared Bland.

eISBN: 978-0-7710-1370-6

1. Canadian essays (English) 21st century. I. Bland, Jared

PS8373.1.F56 2011 C814.608 C2010-906742-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010940060

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporations Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

A Conversation Diana Athill and Alice Munro; Lulu Tash Aw; Requiem for My Grandfather, Jakov Milner, Zionist David Bezmozgis; The Hurting Joseph Boyden; The Words for a Place David Chariandy; Across the Divide and Back Denise Chong; How to Swim in a Sea of Shit Karen Connelly; On Writing Alain de Botton; Finding Jacks Voice: Some Thoughts on Children and Language Emma Donoghue; Let It Ride Gord Downie; How to Talk About Mayerthorpe Marina Endicott; The First Time Stacey May Fowles; On the Weight of Separation and the Lightness of the Non-belonging Rawi Hage; Between Books Elizabeth Hay; Given to Inspiration Steven Heighton; On Tuition Row Lee Henderson; TMI: Authors in Cyberspace Guy Gavriel Kay; As It Were: On the Metaphysics Ethics of Fiction Mark Kingwell; Feeling for Akkoo Martha Kuwee Kumsa; Alexander Annabel Lyon; On Mediocrity, Consensus, and Success Linden MacIntyre; The Ethical Code for Writers, According to Fifty People Who Are Not Writers Pasha Malla and Moez Surani; My Character Lisa Moore; To Tell Her Story Stephanie Nolen; A Story Without Words Heather ONeill; Affricates Richard Poplak; Visitation Miguel Syjuco; Photocopies of Photocopies: On Bao Ninh Madeleine Thien; Thinly Veiled Michael Winter. All material remains the property of the respective author. No material may be reproduced without permission of the author. All rights reserved.

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CONTENTS

When I was thirteen years old, I said something extremely rude to my father. It was a summer day in central Illinois, which meant it was exceedingly hot and humid, the sort of weather that clings like a particularly thick sweater. We were on the path that wrapped around the back of our house, and as soon as I said what I said he turned on me. His rage was radiant, and I knew that he was doing all he could not to strike me. Instead he pushed me off the path and through a landscaped bed of plants and flowers, until my back was pressed against the brick wall of our house. With his large hand pinning my shoulder to the bricks, he leaned in so that our faces were mere inches apart.

Do not say anything like that in my presence ever again, he said.

I must have muttered something pathetic. His palm slid up off my shoulder, so that he pinned the fabric of my shirt against the flats of the bricks and grooves of the mortar.

And then he let go. He just let go, turned around, and walked away. I never looked at him quite the same way again, which isnt to say I loved him less, nor even liked him less. But something passed between us, my transgression manifest, and on that day our relationship underwent one of the innumerable adjustments that define a lifetime of knowing another person. His words exist still in my mind I can hear them echoing between my ears. Few things said to me have ever had greater effect.

But heres the thing: I cant even remember what I said to him in the first place.

One might conclude that my inability to remember is a result of wilful forgetting or some other form of repression. I prefer not to think so, partly because I remember everything else of that day with such vividness when I finally left the flower bed, I looked down and could see the darkening imprint of my heel left like a bruise on the leaf of a hosta plant and partly because I believe that this moment highlights one of the things that is so unique, so incredible, and so challenging about language and its power over us.

I remember with piercing clarity each word my father spoke to me that day. If I tried, I could probably remember more words said that day, and certainly many others said in the years that followed, especially between him and me. This is nothing unusual, of course. Many fathers and sons have the sort of relationship marked by these big, ugly moments, and its quite natural to remember such moments as being lit with an especially bright light. But nor is it unusual to forget vast quantities of what we say or hear, even when recalling such formative incidents. This is the essential mystery of the way words function in our lives: they are at once capable of altering the course of the world we inhabit and changing the amount of sugar in our coffee. Language exists for us as something sublime and, for some, even divine as well as something incredibly banal. Is there anything else that is so defining yet disposable, so immortal yet instantly forgettable? And this is more complicated still for writers, who are, after all, the artists whose raw material is most omnipresent in their lives. (A pianist plays notes to make art, but must use the words window seat or gluten-free alternative to make an airline reservation; a painter, it is true, could write a letter in acrylic, but he cannot speak to his child in watercolours.)

That unique fact makes language an incredibly rich subject for an anthology, and to capture it as broadly as possible we invited novelists, journalists, songwriters, memoirists, philosophers, and essayists to write about the idea of finding the words. And as material began to arrive from writers across the country and from around the world, we were gratified to find this evocative theme had led our contributors to produce such multi-faceted meditations on the nature of creativity, language, power, and storytelling, pieces that reflected the varied and unique experiences, obsessions, and inspirations of each writer. Many of the pieces are wonderfully intimate; they open the doors to their authors creative lives and invite the reader in to learn about how a certain character was shaped, how a given book was composed. Some essays deal with the intersection of language and the writers own lives revealing the quiet desperation that comes from the silence of a small prairie town, or the incredible wealth of stories that exists behind prison doors. Some grant the reader access to a previously unknown corner of the world through the remarkable lens of a South African intellectual or a Malaysian expat in Beijing or a streetwise wannabe gangster in mid-century Montreal. But as diverse as they are, each of these pieces reflects in a particular way on the role words play in all our lives on what it means to be a citizen of a world both united and divided by the lines language draws.