Implication 22/31 #SOL2024

I’m sharing a writing exercise from the writing workshop that I facilitated tonight.

EXERCISE NINE, PART 3: Implication (from Steering the Craft by Ursula Le Guin)

Each part of this should involve 200-600 words of descriptive prose. In both, the voice is either involved author (3rd person omniscient) or detached author (3rd person limited). No viewpoint character (no first person).

Character by indirection: Describe a character by describing any place inhabited or frequented by that character — a room, house, garden, office, studio, bed, whatever. (The character isn’t present at the time.)

The computer table in his room sits up against a murphy bed, one folded and shut away in the wall with handles that make it look like a cupboard. Light grey fluffy dust clings in a crown around the edges of the black surface, behind the computer, and rolls over a white air purifier and other objects left unmoved for some time. The keyboard is clean. The mouse too.

To the right, two white blinds near the ceiling of this basement room windows are pulled shut and like the desk show signs of being frozen in place. They hang unused but fulfill their roles blocking out all daylight, all night light, even the light from the full harvest moon which glows just behind them.

Notes on Writing While Reading 18/31 #SOL2024

I was recently asked to facilitate an upcoming book club discussion at Westboro Books, so I quickly acquired three of them, two Canadian literature and one translation. I started taking notes on the pages realizing that this could potentially make its way into my writing workshop.

I started with the International Bookclub selection; a translation from Danish, Blue Notes by Anne Cathrine Bomann. The premise of the book suggests this is science fiction, while the ideas span the breadth of psychology and philosophy. The blurb at the back reads,

“A Danish university research group is finishing its study of a new medicine, Callocain; the world’s first pill for grief. But psychology professor Thorsten Gjeldsted suspects that someone has manipulated the test results to hide a disturbing side effect … Blue Notes is brimming with ethical and existential ideas about the search for identity and one’s place in the world while offering a highly original literary adventure that ultimately underscores the healing power of love.”

Names and dates (September 2024) are used as subtitles below numbered chapters and grieving simmers below the surface of each interation between characters whose descriptions are subtle and inner thoughts are often revealingly funny. For example, Shadi first meets Anna in the quiet of a university reading room where Anna bursts in disturbing the silence. Shadi turns and notes,

…Anna, that’s her name. With her crop top and the vestiages of pink in her short hair, she looks like she just came from a festival. Shadi’s never really spoken to her, but she’s got a pretty clear idea of who Anna is. She’s the type who’s stuck to the reading groups they were assigned by the teachers at the start of the course, because she enjoys having someone to discuss Simone de Beauvoir with until late into the night while she smokes roll-your-own cigarettes and takes a metaphorical hatchet to the patriarchy. (Bowmann 19)

Then I noticed this skillful technique whereby the narrator and the protagonist’s inner voice merge in a paragraph and the reader pulls together threads from previous dialogue carrying it forward with emerging action. The author hints at scenes allowing the reader time to develop context. Anna says,

“I’m heading over to the bag.” Without any knowledge of the kind of bag, the context develops a paragraph later.

The first punches hit home. Precise, swift out and swift back; she could floor a man with blows like that. The yells of others fill the air around her, and the thick reek of sweat scorches her nose. She switches between jabs and hooks, whirls around and aims a hard kick into the side of the bag. How is she going to write the dissertation now? Does she really need to find a new topic? She kicks again.

She can feel her technique slipping as the weariness eats into her muscles. Her feet skid in the drops of perspriation from her brow. Her knuckles sting. And then there’s the whole fucking car crash with the neuro class she failed. As she left, Thorsten suggested she make a formal complaint, but that’s easy for him to say. He has no idea what that would take. (Bowmann 28)

The story continues to switch from 2011 to 2024 – a tragic loss in the past leads to an attempt to eliminate grief. The narrative switches, the tense switches, setting switches, and all of this creates a kind of intensity requiring deep attention to the story. “Like watching a beautiful wound heal over, Blue Notes embraces the necessary scars that hold us together. Andrew F. Sullivan, author of The Marigold.

“The Art of Words” 15/31 #SOL2024

My mind is still spinning threads of wisdom and writing advice from Ursula Le Guin this week which prompted a flashback to a soundcloud audio file that I had used in a grade 12 English class. In the clip, Le Guin speaks to a large audience of writers in defence of arts over profits. This was 2014; she was accepting National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. This was ten years ago, yet this seems increasingly more relevant today, and all of this connects with another Slicer’s post. After reading Mr. Fornale’s blog post, “Literary Profecy” I felt this tension between naive optimism and skeptical realism.

“We will need writers who can remember freedom. poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality. We need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Resistance and change often begin in art and very often in our art – the art of words.”

Coincidentally, I had coffee and walked with a friend, (Cathy, who happens to be a librarian) then we made our way to the local bookstore. The owner of the bookstore specializes in translations and tries to focus on small print publications. Cathy picked up Denison Avenue which I blogged about here, and she started talking about the convergence of forms and the ways that new writers are resisting traditional narratives. A student told Cathy that they had read all five of the Canada Reads books and told her to “ignore all the other books” and to “just read this one because it’s the best”.

This felt like a strange weaving of Le Guin’s advice – “resistance and change begin in…the art of words.”

Book Chocolate #SOL2024

Reading Jane Alison’s book, Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative reminds me of dark chocolate with notes of peanut butter or coffee. I bought the book on a whim, not fully convinced it would satisfy, but lingered with the introduction, tasting and retasting the lines, consuming each idea in deep satisfaction feeling the richness of language and complexity of ideas. Reading this book has purpose (I’m facilitating two writing workshops), but now it feels like a momentary obsession; I am not rushing through pages but savouring, digesting.

I came across this section that reminded me of recent discussions around the teaching of reading and the return to instruction with phonemes and graphemes. Alison writes,

What are the elements of our medium? Most craft books say that the ‘elements of fiction’ are character, plot,place, etc. But I want to go down to true elements, the tiniest particles a reader encounters: letters, phonemes. These gather to form words, which line up as sentences, which clump into paragraphs or crots (prose stanzas, stanza being Italian for ‘room’), everything flowing over white space.

Although we first obsorb printed letters or words as pictures, we also ‘hear’ them; neural activity registering sound is about the same whether a word is read silently or aloud; a part of the brain called Broca’s area generates the ‘sound’of a word internally. So, reading, we see a picture and ‘hear’ a sound, and inboth cases we experience the word in time. (The sense of a word, its clarity or cascade of connotations, naturally also affects how long a word feels to us.)

Overly sweet processed chocolate fails to satisfy, but dark chocolate, polyphenol rich chocolate, lifts my spirits, feeds my senses, and rewards my palate; likewise, beautiful words remain with me long after reading. In fact, the residue of some books lingers and I nodded my head at this concept of a temporal aspect to word effect; yes, I feel the words inside and I wondered why “unravelling” clings (I have a page of notes in my phone with words or phrases or sentences that stay). I imagine them as inner temporary tatoos shifting across the landscape of my body. They echo in my ears and activate the hair on my forearms in a corporeal chorus.

How does one explain the captivating consumption of book chocolate to an inexperienced reader? I wonder if maybe the language palate takes time to develop and working on the feeling of words in the body might help. Then again, not everyone likes chocolate, but it is good for you.

Story Crash #SOL2023

All week, these adjacent words stayed in my thoughts floating up then submerging again like roiling waters – “story crash”. These two words stuck in me like some earthy odour of mixed herbs while I wrestled with each trying to sense some odour of meaning. These words felt known, but not yet understood.

I walked my usual morning route with the dog, listening to a podcast and heard the speaker, Matthew Croasmun, (Yale lecturer and co-author of Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most) speak about his university course. He tells his students this course “just might ruin your life”. And then he asks them, “What happens when your story crashes?”

This is where I stopped, paused the podcast and typed the words story crash on my phone. Resuming, I learned that this line of questioning came from a story of the Jewish people. (You can find it in this TED Talk by Benay Lappe.) He says that a “story crash” happens when the life we have created (with its intrinsic stories) ends in tragedy — this ending is so substantial that there is no space for the old story, and a space opens for a rebirth of the “third option”: a new story.

The dog continued ahead of me across the blinding white snow, picking up sticks and prending to toss them in the air with some secret hope to entice me to play. I noticed, then focused back on the podcast marvelling at the complexity of his message. Croasman said that insight is required when your story crashes, and paradoxically, while all of this dismantling of past thinking is taking place, what remains must be supported by those same stories which have come before.

My chest heaved and I sighed audibly with an understanding now flowing through my body – story crash. I am living one. The dog barked to get my attention and I was pulled from back to the scene of my bodily experience. Two other morning walkers emerged on the trail and began a conversation with the dog. “Aren’t you the most joyful being this cold morning?!”

And yes. We are.