Month: March 2019

What’s Sarah Totten Reading?

Reading: Piazza, Jo. If Nuns Ruled the World: Ten Sisters on a Mission. Open Road Media, 2014.

Since my day job involves reading non-fiction, a non-fiction book has to be very unusual to entice me to read it in my free time.

Each of the ten chapters in this book features a different nun’s life story.

I was interested to find out what a typical nun’s life is like, but that is not what this book is about. The nuns in this book are not garden-variety nuns. They are “badass nuns”, as the author calls them. And they are all American. Given the book’s title, I was hoping for a more international focus.

Two chapters were the highlights of the book for me, because they described how the nuns were making a positive impact on people’s lives.

Sister Joan Dawber runs a safe house for survivors of human trafficking. It’s a dangerous job, as not all of the perpetrators involved have been caught by the police.

Sister Tesa Fitzgerald, runs a charity (Hour Children) that helps mothers in prison stay connected to their children and on release, helps the mothers train for and find work and a safe place to live. Tesa fosters a lot of these children while their mothers are in prison. I would honestly read an entire book dedicated to her work, as I felt that a single chapter barely scratched the surface.

 

Photo by Flickr user adm

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What is Terry Watada Reading?

I am reading, every chance I get, Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami. It’s a long book (over 600 pages) and really heavy in weight – too hard to read in bed as a result.

My wife and I noticed a few novels ago that the settings, incidents and characters in his writing are not so outlandish. During our trips to Japan, in Tokyo especially, we see locations described in his books, and we see characters in the street that could be Murakami characters.

In his latest, he is describing Aokigahara, a forested region (about 30 square kilometres on the northwestern flank of Fujiyama). What makes the area remarkable is the fact that there are no insects, birds or animals in it. It is deathly quiet. You can’t use a cell phone or even a simple compass. There are three caves within: an ice cave, a wind cave and a bat cave. The wind cave figures prominently in the book. The area is also known as the “Sea or Trees” and the “Suicide Forest”. Approximately 200+ suicides take place annually. There are signs that ask victims to consider the consequences of their actions and to call a suicide prevention centre. Furthermore, a sea of trees is part of Murakami’s novel as well as a river crossing by a ferryman, who is very interesting. He is a noppera (a being with no-face), which is not elucidated in the translation. Japanese myth figures prominently in his novels. I don’t know if an explanation is in the original Japanese. The reference to the River Styx is obvious.

Killing Commendatore is about a world of metaphor. I can see how Aokigahara is a metaphor – of what is up to the reader to find out. It is a brilliant book.

 

Photo by Flickr user Iloé C. PARDO

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Outside the Comfort Zone: On Creative Community

This feature is part of the Platform Series, which was made possible with generous support from the City of Waterloo and the Kitchener-Waterloo Community Foundation. Read more about the Platform Series here.

Introduction

Tanis MacDonald

When I was writing my memoir-in-essays, Out of Line: Daring to Be an Artist Outside the Big City, I searched for ways to describe creative community: its joys and pitfalls, its strengths and scarcities, and maybe most importantly, how to recognize it. I took time with these descriptions because many beginner writers have asked me about how to find creative colleagues, because just as many seasoned writers have written about how finding such a community changed their lives, and because the idea of creative community seems to be an open secret until you are in the middle of it. So I salted Out of Line liberally with anecdotes and analogies, weird stories and plain-spoken admissions, some from my own writing practice and others supplied by members of my own far-flung creative community. Many of those people recalled their craving for artistic community acutely, so sharp had been their need for it. After hearing these stories, I was primed to find out more of what beginner artists thought about creative community and how they viewed their writing practice.

I didn’t have long to wait. I designed my EN272: Introduction to Creative Writing course at Wilfrid Laurier University to address students’ interest in writing two traditional genres (short fiction and poetry), and also to introduce them to the possibilities of writing creative nonfiction. Lively discussions ensued in that fifty-person class about how writing “outside their comfort zone” could change what people thought writing could do. Getting the fiction writers to write poetry, getting the poets to try fiction, and getting everyone’s feet wet in the pool of CNF yielded some terrific work. And I confess: I had a trick up my sleeve.

The trick up my sleeve was a mysteriously-named assignment: a “creative community essay” in which students would write about locating their own writing practice. But I had their backs; they didn’t have to do this without models. I assigned four short readings from Out of Line: a manifesto, a piece that discusses analogies for the writing process, a series about making art when you come from a non-artistic family, and a section about identifying community. I worked with the examples I had written and reminded the students that these anecdotal approaches were driven by requests for real-life examples of how the writing life works. Then I told the students that it was their turn, that they were each going to write a short essay about their writing lives as though they were introducing the subject to writers with less experience. People laughed when I said “writers with less experience,” but by that time everybody in the class had written in genres well outside of their comfort zone, worked in peer feedback sessions, and were planning a long final project. Like confidence, experience is relative.

When the students submitted their essays, there were so many good ones that I knew that I couldn’t keep them to myself. If you are an editor of a magazine, you get to choose those fresh new voices for publication in your magazine. But instructors don’t have that prerogative; we do a lot of sitting in our offices, reading student work and thinking “This is so good,” sometimes jumping up and running around the desk in a paroxysm of hope for the future of writing. But sometimes the editors of magazines want to read what your students have written when you rave to them about how awesome the writing is. What follows are four of the best of those essays, pieces by writers who are forging their literary communities. Milas Hewson uses the metaphor of water resistance to create a parallel between writing and diving. Emma Davis writes about grief as an artistic incubator. Tyra Forde brings live performance together with writing to discuss the politics of voice. And Maria Antonella Menta Fernández recalls how the influence of a writing group changed the way she thought of herself as a writer. They were all at one time my students and I can’t pretend objectivity, nor do I want to. But if you’ve been thinking about creative community and writing practice, check out these essays that puzzle their way through expectation and process. I recommend them.

 

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5

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Seen, Unseen: An Interview with Meaghan Rondeau

 “To never be seen. To be unseeable, to not occupy physical space, to be present only as absence. To nonexist. That was the fantasy, although I didn’t articulate it to myself in those terms then.”

Meaghan Rondeau, “Half-Thing”

 

TNQ’s 2018 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest winner is BC writer Meaghan Rondeau, for her remarkable essay, “Half-Thing.”

 You can read the essay in our fall contest issue, TNQ 148.

TNQ’s annual Personal Essay contest has no word count and all submissions are considered for publication. The 2018 adjudicators were: Tasneem Jamal, Pamela Mulloy, Emily Urquhart, Peter Woolstencroft, and yours truly.

—Susan Scott

TNQ Nonfiction Editor

Meaghan, in our first email exchange, you assumed we’d made a mistake—you couldn’t possibly have won the contest. One prof had told you “Half-Thing” wasn’t actually a personal essay. It worked for us, though; judges loved what nonfiction guru Phillip Lopate might call the “highly intentional literary style,” and curiosity about the backstory ran high. What’s the genesis of the piece? Why unspool your thoughts in an essay?

I still believe this is a mistake, but it’s too late for you to back out of it now. I gave you opportunities and you doubled down on your original e-mail every time, so here we are.

I also agree with that prof (hi Andreas) that my submission is not a personal essay. It for sure nails the “personal” part super hard, but I wouldn’t call it an essay. My kickass thesis supervisor (hi Rhea) called it a meditation, which feels more accurate. Really though I don’t care what it is or what anyone wants to call it. Categorizing writing is arbitrary and limiting; it has everything to do with authority and therefore nothing to do with creativity. Genre to me is something to be mistrusted and messed with. The label “half-thing” applies as much to my work as to its author.

As far as the essay’s opening sentence goes—well, it’s a fact that puts, uhh, “the speaker” [glances around nervously] in an unusual position. For me as a person, it’s an increasingly uncomfortable and alienating position to be in. For me as a writer, though, it’s an advantage, in the sense that communicating from unusual positions is a writer’s job.

The actual decision to open a document and start writing the piece(s) was boringly circumstantial: there was a personal essay assignment in my nonfiction class, so I thought, here’s a good low-stakes opportunity to see if, and how, the view from this unusual position can be translated into words, and to see how a room full of my peers reacts to it, and to see how it feels to be in that room. (It was great, I felt like Walder Frey at the Red Wedding.) At the time, even though I was allegedly in the middle of writing a poetry thesis, poetry and I weren’t getting along at all (we fight constantly, and I thought this time we might be breaking up for realsies), so doing it as poems never crossed my mind. One of the things I argue about with poetry is the cleverness and artifice it demands. I’m super into those things, arguably too into them, and I think they can come at the expense of real emotional risk, or real honesty. Like that Keats sonnet with the line “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all.” You can sit there and be like, Ah, how profound; Ooh, what a delicious chiasmus. (ßOne of my Greek profs used that phrase in class in like 2003 and I’m still obsessed with it. Hi Dr. Cropp.) It’s true, that is a beautiful line. Language can and regularly does achieve beauty. But like, “beauty is truth”? Come on. I’m staunchly pro- both of them, but it’s self-serving melodramatic nonsense to claim that they’re the same thing. In the last ten years or so, for various reasons (stay tuned for next year’s essay), I’ve come to value truth more, and I think that’s why poetry and I are having a much harder time getting along than we used to. Truth doesn’t give a shit what it looks like or sounds like or makes you feel like. The truth is, Keats died of tuberculosis in his twenties. Also, that delicious chiasmus doesn’t scan properly. Not only do I reject it, the poem itself rejects it.

What am I longwindedly saying?  That I didn’t want this piece of writing to offer me, or the reader, anywhere to hide.

“Half-Thing” begins with a question—“How does one begin an essay on almost-middle-aged virginity?”—then unfolds in segments that explore interlinking chambers of experience, reflection, and doubt. You then question yourself constantly; you’re relentless, really. That’s part of what attracted us—who is this person, we wondered. Talk about your process: how did the essay come together? Was it built on earlier drafts? Did you map it out? Did you have to talk yourself off the ledge while writing? 

Ultimately I guess it began with the book-length nonfiction manuscript that I pounded out in 2007-08 after my life fell apart and I left my PhD program. One of the reasons I left was that I wanted to give writing a real shot and had realized that would never happen if I was constantly trying to stay afloat in academia (god I hate that word). In my mind I’ve always been a writer—I’m not a confident person in general but that’s always felt like an obvious fact to me. Is that arrogant? [Shrugs.] But in reality, out where it matters, I’d never written anything, aside from academic essays and the occasional funny poem. So I cranked out this manuscript. I was in a scary-horrible place emotionally—but also, it turned out, a place of ecstatically productive creativity. I ended up deciding that manuscript should never be published, but I’ve been using it for parts for years since then. “Half-Thing” is full of ideas, scenes, and structural and voice elements that first came to life there.

Once I started writing it, it came together fairly quickly. It pretty much had to: I left it to the last minute, classic Meaghan, so I had like a weekend to get a draft done in time for the class submission deadline. The version I sent to TNQ is very similar to the original. Same structure, same beginning and ending, same concepts.

I did spend a lot of time shifting the segments around. I didn’t map it out physically, but when I write something like this there’s a sort of bulletin board in my mind of the themes involved and the connections between them, kind of like what police on TV set up when they’re trying to solve a case. My thinking tends to be more theme-oriented than time-oriented. I don’t think in a straight line, and I have a hard time sticking to one topic. There’s a Simpsons episode where people are lined up outside a theatre and one of the movie titles on the marquee is Too Many Premises. That’s my style of writing, and thinking. One of the challenges when I write is that as much as I want fragments and gaps and a broad range of ideas, I also want it to be possible for a reader to connect, and connect with, the ideas (although not necessarily—in fact, necessarily not—in the same way I do). I’m always looking for a patch of semi-comfortable middle ground between hand-holding and abandonment.

I almost always write from the ledge. That’s the best place to be, logistically. You can see everything at once from up there. But it’s also emotionally unpleasant. So it’s more like I have to talk myself onto the ledge in order to start writing.

Clearly, you love language and it loves you. You’re an accomplished translator, a graduate of UBC’s MFA program—tell us how you came to writing, and what, if anything, attracts you to creative nonfiction (CNF).

I graduated from UBC in February. I’ve officially mastered the fine art of creative writing! Now it’s just a matter of kicking back with my cats and a gigantic drink and waiting for the money and book contract offers to roll in.

I’m an accomplished translator? That’s great news! Please inform the agents and publishers in your circle. I haven’t done that much translation, really, and only one of my translations has ever been accepted for publication. But yes, I love doing it, and I’m going to do more of it.

Writing came to me. For a long time I was too fucked up or busy with school or both to do anything about it, but I always knew it was there, waiting for me to get my shit together. When I was younger I thought I’d write fiction, but nope. I don’t have that kind of imagination. Huge props to the people who do, because they’re keeping me entertained: fiction is what I read, most of the time. CNF isn’t something I’ve ever had a great love for, and I’m still not sure that I do, but I’ve been stuck with it implicitly all my life, and explicitly since mid-2006. I don’t want to get into it here—see above re: too many premises and next year’s essay—but I learned something important that had been scrupulously hidden from me since I was very young. That revelation collapsed my identity, which was terrible and terrifying at the time and for many years afterward, but has ultimately allowed me to rebuild myself into something stronger and realer. And this story, as far as I’m concerned, must be told, insists on it, and can only be told as nonfiction. That’s the only way to stand up to the fiction I was made to exist in pre-2006. It nearly killed me, but it failed, and now I’m killing it.

Are you a fan of particular essayists, fiction writers, or poets? Any works you turned to for guidance when composing “Half-Thing”? Anything or anyone you’d like to endorse?

I’m a fan of bazillions of writers…. Essay-wise, I can’t not mention David Foster Wallace. I know he was a dick to some people and I’m not endorsing that, but I am wholeheartedly endorsing his essay collections (and everything else he wrote). Long-form-CNF-wise, Temple Grandin’s book Animals in Translation is fascinating in itself as well as being a helpful example of a weird person kicking ass. Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens is…I don’t know how to put it…a relief? Yeah, let’s go with that. A good antidote to the obsessive categorization of humans that’s all the rage these days everywhere you look on the political landscape. Maggie Nelson, through The Argonauts, gave me some permission I hadn’t realized I’d been searching for. Dorothea Lasky’s Black Life, likewise. That’s poetry, but whatever, it reads like nonfiction to me, emotionally. Recently I read The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir, and I’d already written “Half-Thing” by then but I found it super comforting that here was someone else who seems to be taking the murder suspect board associative approach to writing, plus more importantly she’s just super badass as a human. Not only does she have zero fucks of her own to give, she’s running down fucks that other people have given and smashing them on the ground and doing a dance on the pieces.

Fiction I’ve loved recently: Sum (David Eagleman), The Idiot (Elif Batuman), Human Acts (Han Kang), Home Fire (Kamila Shamsie). I’m currently coming down the home stretch of N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, and it’s very strange and compelling. 

There’s a whole slate of CNF contests these days, which is great for editors and publishers because contests alert us to shifts in writerly preoccupations. Still, submitting can be time-consuming and expensive. You pushed past all that to submit to a personal essay contest—why? 

I’m really not that into submitting, in any sense of the word. I send stuff out maybe five times a year. Honestly, I submitted to this contest because it’s one of very few that don’t have a word limit. My essay is over 6000 words, and most lit mags are having none of that, and I wasn’t willing to remove a bunch of its limbs and organs in order to make it more submittable. I definitely didn’t have a target contest or magazine in mind as I wrote it. Publishability is a concept I’m actively uninterested in. Anyway, I sent it to you with no expectations, not believing it was a personal essay, but very much believing in it as a piece of writing, and figuring, hey, maybe along the way someone will read it and like it.

Oh god, I’m a terrible role model. I hope none of my ex-students are reading this. Don’t be like me, kids! Submit your work at every possible opportunity! Real writers aim for twelve thousand rejections a day! 

“Half-thing” is now a prize-winner. Does that change your relationship with the piece? I’m interested in the enduring power of a work—how it resonates with readers, yes, but also its impact on the writer. Are you invested in the topic still? Or have you said all you’ve got to say—for now?

My relationship with external validation isn’t what it used to be. In the moment, it felt great—unbelievable, in fact—to learn I’d won this contest. It was a shock to be accepted like that, as a writer and as a person. This prize is a big departure from lit mags’ usual response to my submissions, and a big deal in my writing life. But it doesn’t change how I feel about the essay itself. Before the contest came along, and regardless of its outcome or whether I even submitted to it, this piece of writing already was what it was and is, and I believed in it.

I did have a weirdly emotional reaction to the proof. Even though I’ve spent hours staring at this thing and picking at it, somehow seeing it in a different font and layout, with my name on it, made this realer. By “this” I don’t mean just the fact of my having won the contest, but the fact that this is my life, this is who I am, these things have happened and are happening to me. It’s not just 6000 words of text, it’s not just a contest submission, it’s the real voice of a real person.

I am still invested in “the topic,” in that nothing is resolved in the essay (it ends with a question, as well as beginning with one…) and nothing has been resolved in my life through writing it. But I don’t think I’ll necessarily be writing about it head-on again any time soon. I’m definitely still very much invested in the ideas and concepts I play with while exploring it—time, comedy, translation, dis/connection, un/embodiedness, identity, humanity, integrity. Those are my jams.

Edna Staebler was the pioneering writer from Waterloo region whose generous bequests support two national contests (including this one) as well as two writing residencies. Any special plans for your prize money—is it earmarked for something that will safeguard or contribute to your writing life?

Well, any increase in my income contributes to my writing life…. Regardless of where the money ends up going, I appreciate it, and I’m grateful to you and to the other readers, adjudicators, profs, and classmates who were involved in making this bizarre situation happen.

While I’m here: shoutout to my awesome cool cats, Peter and Larry.

Do I get a song request? This is “Motherlover” by The Lonely Island on CKNQ 104.6 Wridiculous Writer Wradio.

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What is Fiona Tinwei Lam Reading?

I’m currently re-reading a number of Ellen Bass’ fabulous poems in Like a Beggar (Copper Canyon Press, 2014) and Evelyn Lau’s lyrical gems in Tumour (Oolichan, 2016), while dipping into W. S. Merwin’s Selected Translations (Copper Canyon, 2013). I especially love his terse, concise translations of Malay, Korean, Japanese and Chinese figures, plus the variety of poems from diverse cultures and epochs. If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend the documentary about Merwin’s life and mission, Even Though the Whole World is Burning, which shows how he and his partner transformed eighteen acres of a barren plantation on Maui into a vast, thriving, lush oasis of diverse palm trees, restoring the soil and ecosystem there over four decades. Merwin the magician! https://merwinconservancy.org/the-documentary-even-though-the-whole-world-is-burning/

Sci fi is what I tend to read for pleasure when not reading poetry (in 2018, I devoured two post-apocalyptic novels–Cherie Dimaline’s chilling The Marrow Thieves about First Nations being hunted down for their blood marrow, and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven about a wandering theatrical troupe trying to survive). This past week, I started Cixin Liu’s Hugo award-winning bestseller, The Three-Body Problem, which is part of a trilogy that I gave my 17 year-old son for Christmas. He’s already read the first two volumes so I have a lot of catching up to do! It’s about a secret military project that establishes contact with aliens who are on the brink of extinction. It reminds me a bit of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series in its scope. Reading the same book or series enriches our conversations beyond the usual “have you done your homework yet?” although I am toying with the idea of asking him to teach me how to play on his Nintendo Switch.

 

Photos by Fiona Tinwei Lam and Ted Belch

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Bernadette Rule’s Writing Space

As you will be able to deduce by the telephone in my study, I have no social media handles.  My friend and fellow writer, BD Ferguson, always asks whether we’re waiting for a call from the Kremlin when she sees my “Cold War phone”.

My study was carved from a small room behind my living room, and is a good size for me.  As you can see, if I had more space I would only fill it with more books, papers and other odd aids to inspiration.  I designed it, and another friend and fellow writer, John Terpstra (a cabinet maker in his other incarnation), put in the shelves, desk and counter.

It may look like forgotten heaps of junk to the uninitiated, but each teetering pile has its separate purpose, involving either a writing project, or my artist-interview program, Art Waves, which airs live Sunday evenings from 7 to 8, and then is podcast at archive.org/details/artwaves. The program is my effort to create a spoken word archive on Hamilton artists in this period.  Talking to artists of all kinds is not only fascinating, but is healthy for networking, and gives me energy for my own work.

Virginia Woolf was right.  Having this “room of my own” has dignified my writing life, as well as helping in a practical way.

Photo provided by Bernadette Rule

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What’s David Yerex Williamson Reading?

Over the Christmas break, I read This Wound is a World by Billy Ray Belcourt. Belcourt’s intense collection of poetry about love, loss, politics of race and gender won the 2018 Griffin Prize and the 2017 Best book of Poetry by CBC. Despite these accolades, it wasn’t until I attended the Voices in the Circle even of Thin Air: Winnipeg’s international Writers Festival that this collection gained my interest. Billy Ray, one of half a dozen young Indigenous writers appearing at the festival, laid open his body of poems in a short but compelling reading. This body, like Billy Ray’s own physical body, conveys desire and fear, being both powerful and powerless in the hands of those who have tried to control the poet’s sexual, cultural and political identity. The body is a limited space and Billy Ray pushes its boundaries with many emotions.

I usually juggle a poetry collection with prose. Currently, I’m re-reading The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline. This my third reading. Where many may see a dystopian tale of cultural and familial loss, I see a story rooted in hope and personal evolution. At times, we need to review those feelings.

 

Photo by Flickr user Nimit Rastogi

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What’s Jenny Boychuk Reading?

My 2019 resolution was to read more books. While I’ve always been a steady and consistent reader, I had stacks of unread books piling up (I buy them faster than I can read them—hopefully others can relate) and the sight of them was stressing me out. So, I decided to craft a 2019 Reading List, which is comprised of 75 books and spans across several genres. We’ll see how far I make it!

I always like to have a book of prose and a collection of poetry in the queue at the same time. One of the first novels on my list for 2019 was The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh, which was recently released in Canada. The prose is gorgeous—almost ethereal, watery. As a poet, this kind of delicious language makes me swoon. Meanwhile, the story itself is an enthralling gaze at toxic masculinity, as well as our human capacities for violence and desire.

I’m also currently rereading Handwriting by Michael Ondaatje. I found this collection in the stacks of Russell Books in Victoria, B.C., and I’ve returned to it several times over the last five or six years. The poems have a quiet intimacy and mystery to them, like so much of Ondaatje’s work, and the imagery is staggering. It surprises and haunts me every single time.

 

Photo by Flickr user AUM OER

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Carrie Snyder’s Writing Space

My word for the year is SPACE. In choosing it, I’ve been thinking conceptually, holding in my mind the idea of space as time, a luxurious clean openness into which I might step, spreading out thoughts and dreams and words with enough room to really look at and enjoy the creation of something larger than myself.

Essentially, I keep envisioning space to write. Space to sit and quietly stare out of the window. Space to think.

As I’m acquainting myself more closely with the word, it seems to be telling me that space isn’t merely a concept, but a physical construction. Where are my writing spaces?

I remember writing The Juliet Stories in 2011 in a child’s bedroom, desk against one wall, behind me a crib and a bureau of cloth diapers. Now, I have an entire office, a small space to be sure, but all mine. Truth be told, it’s crammed with crap, wall to wall. A glance around the room (in which I’m sitting now to write) reveals, in no particular order, an orange kettlebell, a drum kit stool with an art portfolio resting atop it, a brick wall of my own taped-up cartoons, last year’s calendar, black pens, pencil shavings, a box of crayons, reading glasses, a tiny speaker, scissors, a candle (unlit), a backpack crammed with teaching supplies on a homely rocking chair, stacks of file folders and books, more stacks, more books, more files and shelves, a meditation stool, and a dog bed (currently empty).

I haven’t listed the half of it.

Confession: when I walk into this room, a feeling of despair descends, outright panic. Should I be Marie Kondo-ing this space? What brings me joy?

As it happens, I often write, instead, at my dining-room table. I clear a small spot amidst the newspapers and crumbs, cup of turmeric tea by my elbow, notebook and pen, or laptop before me. This isn’t to say that I don’t write at my actual desk in my actual office; but it’s easier, somehow, to write in space that feels temporary, space I’ve made just for the purpose of writing in it.

My office has become so much more than what it was originally intended to be: mainly storage space, now that I think of it. The kids come in to print their school projects. I answer emails, pay bills, shop online. I file receipts. I plan classes, mark student’s work, update spreadsheets. At this desk, I fall down the rabbit hole of to-do-lists, must-do-lists. It’s all business in here.
And writing—writing isn’t business for me. Writing is luxury.

It is space.

It is time.

I believe firmly in the concept of having a room of one’s own; but in practice, this room of my own has become something it was never intended to be: an albatross of responsibilities and expectations, few of them to do with writing at all. Maybe my perfect writing space is nothing but space: the end of a table, the corner of a bedroom, the front seat of a parked car, anonymous, temporary, with no particular associations attached. To write is to travel somewhere imaginatively; it’s easier to leave behind that which is temporary, that which has taken little effort to clear. That which does not otherwise belong to me.

It’s imaginative space I intend to claim this year. Luxurious, clean, open space for my mind to wander freely. Away from to-do lists, receipts, invoices, budgets, grant applications, course outlines, time tables, school fees, and all of the other things that pull my shoulders up to meet my ears as soon as I step into this office. Maybe someday I’ll Marie Kondo the crap out of this particular space, but meanwhile, that crap needs somewhere to live. I’ve got a different solution.

Look for me at the end of the dining-room table.

Photos provided by Carrie Snyder

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What’s Adan Jerreat-Poole Reading?

 

Right now I am reading How Long ‘Til Black Future Month? by N.K. Jemisin. As a teenager, I loved getting lost in science fiction and fantasy worlds, but as a young queer woman (and later nonbinary person) and aspiring feminist, I quickly grew tired of the racist and sexist hero journeys in popular Eurocentric white male SFF.

In the past few years, I have fallen in love with the genre all over again through the writings of brilliant authors like Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, Kameron Hurley, Rebecca Roanhorse, Becky Chambers, and so many others.

P.S. Anyone who’s read Ursula K. Le Guin’s famous short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” needs to read Jemisin’s response and homage in this collection, “The Ones Who Stay And Fight.”

 

Photos by Adan Jerreat-Poole

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