By Michael Elves
Like all readers, I share the same vantage point – staring at the words printed between two covers (or perhaps the pixels dancing across a screen if you’re not a Luddite like myself) – reading what an author has written and attempting to hear what they’re actually saying. When I close a book, I may do so with certainty that I’ve figured out what the point was, or I may have no answers and burning questions. But unlike other readers, I have the opportunity to address those burning questions.
As the host of a weekly program called Turning Pages (Wednesdays at 10:30 am on 101.5 UMFM, online here) I am afforded the privilege of sitting down with authors and talking at length with them about what I’ve just read. For roughly thirty minutes I have the writer entirely to myself and can explore any conversational avenue they’ll allow me to drive down. Sometimes we’ll pull into a conversational cul-de-sac and go round a subject several times. At others, we might miss an exit where some interesting roadside attraction is situated as we cruise along, but ultimately – as with life – it’s about the journey much more than it is the destination.
Having made the drive many times over the past year, with passengers who have written everything from contemporary fiction to historical genre work, from memoir to travelogue, I have come to realize that ultimately there are two questions each of these interviews hangs on: “HOW?” and ”WHY?”
As diverse as the collection of writers can be (from first-time novelists to non-fiction writers with titles in the double-digits) they ultimately have written their books with an eye to asking the latter question, while I come away from reading each book and find myself peering over the microphone and posing the former.
While Miriam Toews’ All My Puny Sorrows finds the author asking “WHY is my family forced to relive the trauma of its past?” I sit across from Toews asking “HOW can you come out of the depths of grief and write something so deeply personal and turn your story into a work that speaks to us all?”
To Dionne Brand I ask her of Love Enough, “HOW do you manage to write with such economy that in under two hundred pages and in the story of one night you are able to explore the lives of several characters in a way that leaves the reader convinced they know these people and what happens to them beyond the night you’ve written?” And “HOW are you able to say so much about modern identity, the weight shouldered by immigrants in our country, and what it means to be from somewhere in this modern age through one brief anecdote related by a character about travelling through airports?” Brand, meanwhile, spends those nearly two hundred pages asking “WHY, when love can cause such pain and heartbreak, do we continue to seek it out?”
Sometimes – as with Brand – our conversation continues after the recording of the program has stopped, and I find myself wishing the microphone was still on so that others could be privy to what I hear when the two of us compare storytelling styles to the play of running backs. To hear Brand talk about ‘north south’ or ‘downhill’ running and its similarity to a straight ahead writing style while contrasting that with ‘east west’ backs who make quick cuts and lateral moves, sharing attributes with writers who practice digression and write allegorically, is one of the least expected and most rewarding moments I have had over dozens of interviews this past year and I share it here because I couldn’t on the program.
But I digress. (Needless to say, I’d be an ‘east west’ back).
And speaking of digression; of all the writers I spoke to in 2014, the most digressive would have to be Michael Winter, whose Into the Blizzard: Walking the Fields of the Newfoundland Dead is an exercise in blending travelogue, war history and personal digression into a fascinating, unique read. It’s a literary high-wire act with no net below and though his first few steps teeter precariously, like a third-generation Wallenda Winter eventually makes the feat seem easy. As he hikes and bikes among the battlefields that claimed so many of his fellow Newfoundlanders, Winter asks a WHY that is the easiest to ask and the hardest to answer: “WHY did these young men; these boys, have to die?”
“HOW do you even begin to answer this question when numerous historians have failed?” was the crux of the question I put to Winter, and his answer essentially is that you try. Writing is at its core an attempt. Putting one letter in front of the other, one word, one sentence, one paragraph – onward in the hopes of finding something within the journey that can begin to answer the question or that reveals personal truths that will suffice in lieu of full resolution.
That’s a lesson that the protagonist in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s latest novel, Adult Onset, discovers over the course of a week. She’s a woman who finds herself with the exact life she dreamed she wanted and then spends it wracked with guilt that she’s not happier and – like the author herself – asks “WHY is it that our response to getting what we want is to then focus on what we don’t have or thought we weren’t interested in?” It’s a thoroughly modern version of ennui that is the result not of boredom, but of overstimulation – our pleasure-receptors just can’t handle being happy.
Eventually, MacDonald allows her protagonist the self-understanding that goes some way toward providing a measure of happiness. It’s an allowance that I thought of as I finished reading Winnipeg author Maurice Mierau’s adoption memoir Detachment. As Mierau struggles to understand the son he has adopted from the Ukraine and to come to an understanding of his father’s horrific childhood during wartime, he forces himself to reconcile his own unhappiness in much more mundane circumstances and ask “WHY is it that I too go inward when I have far less to retreat from?”
In our conversation, I was particularly intrigued with questions like: “HOW someone who writes himself as circumspect or closed off can share so much of himself within the pages of Detachment? HOW do you override the you that would never share this with the you that needs to write it?”
It’s the “you” that needs to write something that I always find myself across the table from in having these conversations – each of these writers and the others I have spoken to may vary in their approach, their subject matter, their genre or style, but they all share the compulsion to write what it is that only they can say. I just get the best seat to listen from.
Talking about Talking about CanLit on the Radio
Articles
By Michael Elves
Like all readers, I share the same vantage point – staring at the words printed between two covers (or perhaps the pixels dancing across a screen if you’re not a Luddite like myself) – reading what an author has written and attempting to hear what they’re actually saying. When I close a book, I may do so with certainty that I’ve figured out what the point was, or I may have no answers and burning questions. But unlike other readers, I have the opportunity to address those burning questions.
As the host of a weekly program called Turning Pages (Wednesdays at 10:30 am on 101.5 UMFM, online here) I am afforded the privilege of sitting down with authors and talking at length with them about what I’ve just read. For roughly thirty minutes I have the writer entirely to myself and can explore any conversational avenue they’ll allow me to drive down. Sometimes we’ll pull into a conversational cul-de-sac and go round a subject several times. At others, we might miss an exit where some interesting roadside attraction is situated as we cruise along, but ultimately – as with life – it’s about the journey much more than it is the destination.
Having made the drive many times over the past year, with passengers who have written everything from contemporary fiction to historical genre work, from memoir to travelogue, I have come to realize that ultimately there are two questions each of these interviews hangs on: “HOW?” and ”WHY?”
As diverse as the collection of writers can be (from first-time novelists to non-fiction writers with titles in the double-digits) they ultimately have written their books with an eye to asking the latter question, while I come away from reading each book and find myself peering over the microphone and posing the former.
Sometimes – as with Brand – our conversation continues after the recording of the program has stopped, and I find myself wishing the microphone was still on so that others could be privy to what I hear when the two of us compare storytelling styles to the play of running backs. To hear Brand talk about ‘north south’ or ‘downhill’ running and its similarity to a straight ahead writing style while contrasting that with ‘east west’ backs who make quick cuts and lateral moves, sharing attributes with writers who practice digression and write allegorically, is one of the least expected and most rewarding moments I have had over dozens of interviews this past year and I share it here because I couldn’t on the program.
But I digress. (Needless to say, I’d be an ‘east west’ back).
“HOW do you even begin to answer this question when numerous historians have failed?” was the crux of the question I put to Winter, and his answer essentially is that you try. Writing is at its core an attempt. Putting one letter in front of the other, one word, one sentence, one paragraph – onward in the hopes of finding something within the journey that can begin to answer the question or that reveals personal truths that will suffice in lieu of full resolution.
In our conversation, I was particularly intrigued with questions like: “HOW someone who writes himself as circumspect or closed off can share so much of himself within the pages of Detachment? HOW do you override the you that would never share this with the you that needs to write it?”
It’s the “you” that needs to write something that I always find myself across the table from in having these conversations – each of these writers and the others I have spoken to may vary in their approach, their subject matter, their genre or style, but they all share the compulsion to write what it is that only they can say. I just get the best seat to listen from.