Month: May 2021

Finding the Form with Donna Seto

I started writing “Generation Congee” after my father was diagnosed with stage-3 colon cancer. My father doesn’t speak English. Or he pretends he doesn’t, especially when I’m around to translate. But I’m not fluent in Cantonese either. I’m pretty sure my fluency is equivalent to a three-year-old’s. People often ask how I manage to communicate with my parents. I shrug and say, “We make do.” Besides, communication is livelier with mispronounced words, misunderstandings, and awkward silences. This worked wonders during parent-teacher nights but was a nightmare during my father’s cancer treatment.

“Generation Congee” started to take shape during the silences we shared in the BC Cancer waiting room, or as I watched my father nod off during treatment, or when my anxious mother told us not to share my father’s diagnosis with the extended family. My parents have always been private people who used silence as a survival tactic and, during this time, I used this silence to write, to observe, to record the details of those around us.

I started jotting words down in my notebook, recording the nervous energy in the waiting room, the shuffle in the oncologist’s walk, the openness of the translators. I wanted to make sense of this traumatic time – not so much to mark it in history, but more so, to understand my own conflicted emotions and struggles.

The story interweaves the present and the past, memories of my mother’s anxiety, my trip to rural China, my attempt to navigate the medical system and my own struggle with identity. There’s a sense of humour in the story, or my attempt at humour. Even the title where I use the word “congee” to describe my watered-down Chinese identity or “sing-sing”, which I assume means star, are shadows of my assumptions and misunderstandings that I have interwoven into the fabric of this piece.

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This was always going to be a nonfiction piece, although since completing this one, I’ve started writing shorter pieces on immigrant experiences that are more fictitious. Whereas a personal nonfiction piece invites a writer to experiment with words, structure, tone and pace when retelling a real story, I found that fiction challenges the imagination and gives me the freedom to explore alternatives.

My work blends fiction and nonfiction. As an academic who was trained to write objectively, I initially struggled with writing fiction but now find that it brings me the most freedom. Nonfiction, however, especially personal essays such as this one, is unnerving because it’s personal. Too personal, almost. I can no longer hide behind convoluted sentences or theories that academics tend to hide behind, nor mask my true intentions through the actions of a fictitious character. A personal essay exposes the self, the self that was once silent, protected and hidden. But there’s a sense of liberation that comes with writing a personal essay or a memoir. At the very least, it de-silences what was once silent.

Donna Seto is a writer and academic from Vancouver, BC. Her work has been published in The New Quarterly, Ricepaper Magazine, and academic journals. Donna is working on her first novel and a collection of short stories.

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Photos courtesy of Donna Seto.

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Tamas Dobozy’s Writing Space

It is very important for a writer to work in a public space, where disturbance is continual. With the current plague, e.g. C19, I have taken advantage of collective quarantine to situate my desk at the veritable crossroads of my home.

This dining room location also happens, not incidentally, to be the site of my library which allows me simultaneous access, while I am writing, not only to my books and pens, but also dinner.

The proximity of my guitar is also critical during extended periods of writing time, because not infrequently I find that playing the C Major Scale, which happens to be my forte on the guitar, further enables that “zoning out” so crucial to entering “the space” where “the magic of writing” takes place. In this particular photograph, I believe I am on the tail end of the “fa” part of the scale. 

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Another thing that helps writing—and this has been known at least since medieval times, if not earlier—is holding oneself upside down for prolonged periods insofar as one’s arms allow it, to increase the flow of blood, and by extension humours, to one’s brain. Two or three seconds is really all you need, which also, luckily, happens to be about all I can manage. This is what we, in the fancy English professor industry, call “embodied knowledge,” where your knowing is directly informed by the sensory information and general disposition of straightforward physical being.

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The overlay from Cornelius van Den Kneijnsberg’s infamous treatise, “Quae Tanta Ineptias!” (c. 1183) upon my straining and tense form shows precisely which organs account for the particular emotion (liver = hysteria, gallbladder = schizophrenic delusion, etc.) that informs my writing process, depending, of course, on what any given character needs, at any given moment in the writing, to feel, with slight micro second adjustments in my arms allowing that particular organ to pump slightly more blood into my brain than the others, delivering better “embodied information.” It is therefore, and I guess obviously, important for me to have a wall space close to my writing desk which allows me sufficient support for my weight, since my aesthetics instructor, Coach Nyhof, hasn’t quite been able—and may, now that I think about it, never be able—to train me to support myself in this way without the help of a structure.

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Finally, and most importantly, creating a public workspace like this allows for the smooth interplay of inspiration with interruption, or, if you prefer, “the collaborative process,” in which my family members inspire me to question the plot and character elements I’ve chosen

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to focus with determination on certain narrative intentions

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or to assert my authorial independence in the face of overwhelming criticism.

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I recommend this work environment, and not just a little, to any writer who finds it creatively conducive to work in a place where:

1. Books and dinner are both nearby;

2. One is continuously in the midst of sometimes harmonious, sometimes conflicting, sometimes mutually independent conversations;

3. The apparatuses of creative assistance (pens, guitars, handstands) are readily available; and

4. There is nowhere else to go because of the plague.

Tamas Dobozy’s work has appeared in One Story, Fiction, Agni, and Granta. He has won an O Henry Prize, the Gold Medal for Fiction at the National Magazine Awards, and his book Siege 13: Stories won the 2012 Rogers Writers Trust of Canada Fiction Prize. He teaches at Wilfrid Laurier University.

Photos courtesy of Henry Dobozy.

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Donna Seto’s Writing Space

When I think about my writing space, I think about a space constantly in flux, a space that is neither permanent nor temporary, a displaced space, one that can be shared and occupied.

My writing space has never truly felt like my own. It was in a coffee shop, lunch hours in a busy library, or words hastily tapped on a screen while waiting for the bus. When we were sent home in March 2020, my writing space suddenly became my workspace or, rather, the workspace of two. This blending of space, mixing of lives, amalgamation of two 9-to-5 jobs suddenly consumed what was once my writing space. It became a place of endless video calls, non-stop pings from colleagues, of 3pm team check-ins, and a space that I alternated with my husband.

Nevertheless, my writing space is a large mid-century modern desk, teak, something we found at an antique store on Commercial Drive in Vancouver years ago. For a while it was the most expensive item we owned, and I still think it’s the nicest thing we own.

The desk was once nestled in a corner of the living room of our 1-bedroom apartment and sticks out like a centre piece, because that’s what I like to think writing should be – not something shoved into a closet or hidden behind the laundry room. It should speak for itself, be bold, be oozing with charm, and this desk does that.

But the desk is too large for our one-bedroom apartment, and it has been moved to every corner of our living room because of my husband’s obsession with the sound of his speakers. Each time he would spend a Saturday afternoon shifting our couch, the wall mounted bookshelf, the television, the plants, the rug; we would end the day off with an action-packed movie where he would blast the speakers and ask, “Can you tell the difference?”

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“Yes,” I would say each time, but the truth was I couldn’t hear the difference.

“It’s in the details,” he would add. Of course, three months later, as if with the changing of seasons, my desk would somehow migrate to the other side of the room and trade spaces with the speakers.

“Can you hear the difference?” My husband would ask as I tried to orientate myself.

In November, the opportunity to take over my parents’ rental unit came up. Over the holiday season, when health officials told us to hunker down, we did just that by stripping old wallpaper, ripping up old carpet, putting in laminate flooring, figuring out dodgy electrical. With some hard back-bending work, I now have a separate space to work and my teak desk has a semi-permanent space of its own.

Donna Seto is a writer and academic from Vancouver, BC. Her work has been published in The New Quarterly, Ricepaper Magazine, and academic journals. Donna is working on her first novel and a collection of short stories.

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Photos courtesy of Donna Seto.

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Finding the Form with Carla Hartsfield

Pencil and Ink 

During the winter of 2017, I was revising a poetry manuscript and had begun exploring different poetic forms. I wondered if some of my older poems could be spruced up by turning them into sonnets, villanelles, ghazals? My muse, being supportive said, “Sure, give it a go.” I began by using a quatrain from Anne Carson’s “Beauty of the Husband,” I created my first-ever glosa entitled “How Love Settles”, and it was published in the Literary Review of Canada.

Was I hooked from the start? Yes, but it had nothing to do with that initial glosa publication. That one felt more like an illicit affair, an obsessive love-trance with another poet, dead or alive—whom I’ve anonymously admired. For me, each line of a chosen quatrain acts like a door that “my poet friend” opens, but I don’t always appear at their front door. Sometimes they let me in the back way, and I exit the side (translation: you write the fourth stanza first and the second stanza last). I might even stand on the porch, staring at their front door for ten minutes or two days. Once—two months, but that longest of waits turned out to be perfect. When I finally wrote that particular glosa, words magically appeared on the page as if they were conjured. Because I’m the designer of each of my glosa-houses, I must choose the locks (translation: lines) carefully. Occasionally, they don’t work.

Shoes

Nevertheless, that’s another exciting aspect in writing glosas—choosing the quatrains. Once the glosa is completed, I can feel the sheen of my poet friend’s brilliance, washing over the floors, ceilings, and kitchen of my grateful self and our poetic house. By the time I’m ready to show up at the next poet’s door, I’ve already used ink for each line of the quatrain in a ruled journal, spaced accordingly and leaving plenty of room for the other thirty-six lines to build the glosa. In my world, the majority of a glosa can only be written in pencil.

Four years later, I’m back to writing free verse and prose poems, but every time I think I’ve written my last glosa, another one starts playing a seductive tune in my head. I’ve written close to fifty glosas, though, I would have to admit that some were not that great, nor was the journey free of bumps; in fact, there were some downright crashes. However, what has become a delight, is how easily many of the glosas can be converted into free verse. The form lends itself to internal rhymes. Take away the quatrain—its presence often like jumper cables needed to jolt your car battery to life (translation: confidence, imagination, a start)—and you hear these words afterwards, purring at you from the page: “Yes, that’s exactly the poem I intended to write.”

Carla Hartsfield is a poet, singer-songwriter, piano teacher and visual artist. She has had three poetry collections, the most recent Your Last Day on Earth (Brick Books). A chapbook titled Little Hearts was released by Rubicon Press in 2016. Three glosas from a completed ms. of form poetry have appeared in LRC, Grain (2019) and The Dalhousie Review ( January, 2020). Carla is a recipient of a grant from the Writer’s Trust Woodcock fund. She is also recording a second album of original songs titled Last Chance Dance. 

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Photos courtesy of Carla Hartsfield.

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The Ethical Standard of TNQ

When you are a co-op student, you can feel like a commodity. It can seem like we are just a staple of the university that is not given our own choice in the matter because we are just looking for a job to help us fund our education. The horror stories that have been told to me by my co-op friends and the mistreatment that they have received on a daily basis is disheartening. Due to the fact that we are temporary, HR just has to wait us out instead of dealing with the issues that we bring to them. In many cases, our complaints mean nothing. Our opinions mean nothing. We mean nothing.

The ethical issues that crop up on the job are things that we are meant to suck up and carry on with. Anything we might do in response to it can tarnish our end-of-term review, which makes it harder to get the next co-op job, which makes it harder to fund our education. The program seems like it is more willing to punish us than protect us. So, while uneasy feelings come into play and we are stuck in a monotony of complacency, we are primed to hold onto this passivity throughout our careers.

However, I am very happy to say that none of the above applies to my role as the Circulation Assistant at The New Quarterly. Not once did I feel ethically compromised or morally ambivalent. TNQ has some of the most inclusive policies that I have ever seen and it is evident that they strive for equity in their publications. I can say with confidence that they aim to take the literary world into a more progressive future.

The 2020 Wild Writers Literary Festival is a prime example of their accessibility values. Knowing that this was their first time attempting to put the festival online, they immediately took away any ticket charge and ran the events based solely on donations. In this manner, they removed a monetary barrier to entry while simultaneously showing their value of not wanting to raise money through a means where they cannot give the optimal experience of the festival, as they could in previous years. On top of this, all the events were offered with a subtitle option for people with hearing difficulties, which I had brought up and was pleased to find was already implemented.

“When you are a co-op student, you can feel like a commodity.”

I found that I was not just a means to an end that could be replaced by another desperate co-op student. The decisions I made, and actions I took, had an impact on the entire structure of the organization. When I had suggestions to make things more equitable or more efficient, I was not written off like I have been so many times previously. I was heard out and some of my suggestions were implemented. Those that weren’t implemented were more of a logistical issue than a refusal to change.

But the feeling of having my own autonomy as a co-op student seemed like an oxymoron. I didn’t feel dread from having to wake up on Monday morning like I had so many times before. I felt like I was succeeding when things went well for everyone at TNQ and my supervisor was adamantly telling me the extent of my influence in the organization. I was treated as an equal, which should be the norm for co-op students considering most of them are adults but seemed novel with my experience here.

I am uncertain of how my experience would have worked out if I was working in the office instead of from home, but it was definitely the best I’ve had so far.

Photos courtesy of Viktor Talashuk and Nathan Dumlao.

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Finding the Form with Yohani Mendis

After a decade-long hiatus from the writing practice, I didn’t think too deeply about craft and structure when I began this piece. I focused on the characters and scenes, as one might do with fiction. Several years ago, I took a Diaspora and Transnational Studies class, and a concept from an academic paper I read has stayed with me since. An essay by Aihwa Ong described “astronauts” as father figures in constant orbit between managing a family abroad and earning an income in the homeland. It always amazes me how so many people I meet from the wider Asian diaspora can connect to this seeming lack of connection—one of a globalized, oftentimes fragmented family unit. This was the seed from which my creative non-fiction piece grew.

“The economic migrant story often comes as a result of centuries of colonial undoing and political upending in the homelands.”

While writing about family history and dynamics, I knew I did not want to impose blame or judgement on any family member. I wrote in such a way as to avoid that. The economic migrant story often comes as a result of centuries of colonial undoing and political upending in the homelands. I wanted the piece to acknowledge that history as well. At the same time, I wanted to angle my family’s story not as something set in the past, but continuing indefinitely into the future. This is where I experimented, blending the personal essay with themes one usually sees in science fiction. I had recently watched 2001: A Space Odyssey and, already familiar with Clarke’s legacy in Sri Lanka, saw the opportunity in dovetailing his work and life with my family’s story. It was a lot more of a braided essay in the earlier drafts; I ended up removing large sections of his life from the picture. After all, the focus is ultimately on family, in all its unorthodox and unexpected and adapted forms.

The first people who workshopped this piece asked me whether it was fiction. I tend to write with a lot more Show than Tell in my non-fiction; I suppose this fact, combined with writing about spaces and events that might be alien to the general Canadian reader, give the piece a fictitious feel. Every bit of it is true (or I wouldn’t have submitted it for a Personal Essay Contest!). My aim was to keep it open-ended, but also to evoke a sense of empathy and connection through truth telling. It would be enough if I managed to do that.

Yohani Mendis is a Toronto-based emerging writer. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Watch Your Head, This Magazine, and Best Canadian Poetry 2021. She works at Brick, A Literary Journal.

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Photo by NASA on Unsplash

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Linda Light’s Writing Space

My writing space is rather like my life – crowded, messy, and often full of noise. 

I write at a funky, old veneered plywood desk of my Uncle Ebe’s. It’s too small for my needs but fits well into the too-full, multi-purpose living room/playroom/study in which it sits. It serves as a divider between what was supposed to be the living room and what was supposed to be the playroom, but which is, in reality, one big playroom for my grandchildren.

Since I look after some combination of my three grandchildren five days a week and often see them on weekends as well, I have learned to fit my writing in and around their lives – just as I did when my own kids were young. Luckily, I don’t need a long stretch of quiet time to sit down to write. As long as I have an idea – and better yet, some words – in my head, I can grab a few minutes here and there to sit at my computer and get them down on “paper”. Which is not to say that I don’t love to have hours at one go for writing. 

If I have to think something through or solve a writing challenge, then I do need more time and space for that. My writing space is my own in the evenings and for hours on the weekends, though, so I’ll often be at my desk during those times. But my thinking-about-writing space expands to the outdoors when I’m gardening, walking my 10,000 steps, or walking the dog. And to my bedroom when I’m sitting staring into space before I go to sleep. Often in the morning, the floor around my bed is littered with scraps of paper with notes scrawled on them!

Having my writing space and computer in the middle of the living/playroom can be a bit of a problem, though, when the kids have time on my computer. I find my papers which (contrary to appearance) do have a sort of order to them, and my computer files (which are occasionally, I admit, left open) can be alarmingly disrupted by even the most well-meaning little hands.

Linda Light writes about a wide range of topics, from the joy of family recipe books to homelessness. She lives in Vancouver close to her daughters and grandchildren.

Cover photo courtesy of Bram Naus 

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What is Susan Olding Reading?

I’ve long admired Leona Theis’s nonfiction and often recommend it to others. She’s always doing something interesting with structure or point of view. Her recent novel in stories, If Sylvie had Nine Lives, shows similar strengths. The conceit is simple. Each chapter follows the protagonist, Sylvie, on one of her possible life paths—a bit like a “Choose Your Own Adventure.” Except Sylvie’s adventures are complex, funny, sharply observed, sometimes heartbreaking, and always beautifully written. I found myself rooting for her in all her mutually inconsistent incarnations— reluctant yogi, new wife, guilty widow, divorcée, businesswoman, grieving daughter, university prof, loving and sometimes irritated parent and grandparent. Sexy, self-deprecating, prone to lousy choices, and full of spit and vinegar, Sylvie’s a character to grow with. 

This book will appeal to anyone who sometimes wonders what would have happened if they’d chosen a different path. Married, or stayed unmarried. Studied pure math instead of medicine. Moved to Japan instead of Ottawa, crashed the car instead of swerving at the last minute, inherited the family heart condition rather than escaping it. It will also speak to anyone who’s spent any time at all in the Canadian prairies. The landscapes and small towns there are evoked with such affection and precision.

Susan Olding is the author of Big Reader: Essays, and Pathologies: A Life in Essays. She lives and writes in the traditional territories of the Lekwungen and W_ SÁNEC´ nations, in Victoria, British Columbia.

Photo courtesy of Harry Cunningham 

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