Recently, I sat down with John Barton, poet, editor of The Malahat Review, and the University of New Brunswick's current writer-in-residence, to talk about his latest book of poems, Hymn,as well as the politics of being a gay writer in Canada.
A resident of Victoria, British Colombia, John Barton is also the co-editor of Seminal: The Anthology of Canada’s Gay Male Poets, and has been a finalist for a CBC Literary Award in poetry, as well as a National Magazine Award winner. His poems have been featured in journals across Canada and around the world, including The Fiddlehead.
Kwame Dawes, who has a MA (Creative Writing) and PhD (English) from the University of New Brunswick, was featured on the PBS Newshour. He spoke about his reporting and poetry on AIDS in Haiti. He has been working with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
The winter 2011 issue of The Fiddlehead (no. 246) will be mailed out to subscribers and on the newsstands in January. Enjoy the five stories: Greg Bechtel’s “The Mysterious East (Fredericton, NB),” Marjorie Celona’s “Big Sex,” Michael Doyle’s “The Disappearing Man,” Sheila McClarty’s “Stolen,” and Shane Neilson’s “Freight.”
Turn to the poetry and read new works from fifteen poets including Jan Zwicky, Jack Hannan, Christine Lowther and Shane Rhodes. There are also reviews and Anna Cameron’s wonderful artwork, “Untitled V” graces the cover.
I’m stealing from Stephen King’s On Writing: write the first draft with the door closed and the second with the door open, which is to say realize the difference between creating and thinking. The first time around a composition does not have to be good, it has to be there. Good comes later.
As one of my supervisors said, “I give you permission to write absolute shit.” You can’t work with a blank page but, you can rework some good, old-fashioned textual fertilizer into something better.
Write whatever comes no matter how ridiculous. Remember, NO THINKING. Try for a mentality of and this happens, and this happens, and this, this, and this rather than a mentality of what happens next?
Tell the story YOU want to hear. Forget about what anybody else will think or feel. Please yourself. It is story-time, and you are the teller and the audience.
Okay, that is all frame-of-mind stuff, but what about actual drills?
Write for 20 minute bursts everyday—stream-of-consciousness if that is what comes. You’ll be surprised how quickly this exercise will gear up your creativity. Think of the bursts as push-ups. Today you can do one. Next week you will be able to do four. And the week after that you’ll feel like something is missing if you don’t do any. I know a professor at the University of Toronto who uses this drill to teach writing and the students say it works.
Play 20 Questions if you are really stuck. Write 20 questions about your project. Keep them simple. What is his name? What are his hobbies? Why is he mad at his sister? And after you have all 20 write a simple 3 or 4 line response to each. NO STOPPING. NO THINKING. It is a great way to brainstorm and it pushes you to create as if you are under the pressure of someone else’s questions.
Play 20 Questions with someone else. Make sure you choose someone you trust not to feel stupid in front of and who is patient so they won’t mind when you get irritable as the pressure to answer questions you don’t have responses to begins to annoy you. This one is my personal favorite.
Safety in numbers. Buddy up and set a specific time every day. At this time you will exchange whatever you wrote that day (be it 3 lines or 3 pages) with your partner and then provide just reactionary comments like this made me laugh, or I tripped over this bit, I loved this, this was boring etc. NO THINKING!
And here I’ve provided just a couple of assignments for writing. You can obviously come up with more on your own. Set small, specific goals like write a scene with a lamp, a dog, and blue sedan. Remember, education is about drills and jumping through hoops. Most of those hoops are going to be completely arbitrary, just like lifting a dumb-bell up and down is completely arbitrary, but arbitrary hoops provide practice, and you need to practice creativity to develop it as a skill. Editing comes later. Learn to just grow a story first. You can train yourself to do that. If a creative writing teacher asks you for story after story with no change in the pattern no matter how well or poorly you do, that teacher is interested in seeing where you are as a writer. But if a teacher gives you little assignments or arbitrary drills (either regularly or in response to seeing you need some help), then that teacher is interested in teaching you to write. There is a difference. Don’t let anybody discourage you by convincing you differently.
I for one am getting sick and tired of being told that you can’t teach creative writing, that there is no reliable pedagogy for it, that the most you can do is provide people with a space and a time to workshop their material and allow them to get better over time.
True, you can’t teach talent and you can’t teach inspiration. And yes, the workshop—providing time and place for closed circuit feedback—is an essential component to teaching emerging writers to hone their craft. And true, the only real way to get better as a writer is to write. And to read. And to write some more. But that does not mean there is no pedagogy for the field, or, rather, that the only way to teach writing is to get people to write stories or what-have-you, pass them around, and receive comments back on what worked and what didn’t. I will defend workshopping to the nines, but frankly workshopping is only half of teaching creative writing. The golden rule to learn to write is to write but that says nothing about what to write or how to write it.
You can’t teach someone to be a good writer per se, but you can teach people, or rather train people, to regularly access the creative side of their brain. You’d think this would come eventually as you write more and more stories (however failed those stories may be), but this is not always the case.
My creative thesis (and the vast majority of my short fiction prior to it) has been kicking my ass! And after weeks of beating my head against the thesis, I finally understand why. I think too much! There is a difference between thinking and creating—a fundamental one in fact. I thought any time you engage in mental activity you are thinking. This is not true anymore than any time you are moving you are necessarily swimming. I just thought writing (the act of composing language) was simply always the same kind of writing which inevitably used thinking, mostly because years of school has taught, has trained, me to write critically, to think, or rather to make logical or symbolic connections between ideas in varying ranges of complexity, judging merits and assessing application value—how good is this and what does it do for us as a society. No wonder my fiction kept stalling out, if it ever got started in the first place. Every time I put something down I would never see it as good enough. I’d crush it before it had a chance to grow.
Thoughts like that’s lame or that’s stupid or who would want to read that would be common for me. After two or three of those babies your line of thinking … no your line of creating is shot and then the blank page will stare you down. In a staring contest, the blank page always wins. You have to build momentum, which doesn’t really happen, in my experience, when you think. Thinking is like building—a piece at a time until you have a structure that works for an essay or argument because you are not aiming, in the back of your mind, for someone to like it or identify with it. You are aiming for it to stand up against the elements of counter-argument. But when you are making something creative, you want to touch people, or anger them, or insert emotional response here. A creative piece is organic, and thus does not form one piece after the other but rather grows. If you stop the growth every five seconds and pick a leaf off, dude, your plant is going to go heels up.
What I see now is that I was editing as I went either consciously—that’s too melodramatic, Matt—or unconsciously—that’s stupid. Editing as you go is thinking. Creating should feel like the ideas aren’t even yours, like they are arriving for you from somewhere else and you are just writing them down as they come. The moment you start up with what happens next or, even worse, where do I want to go with this you aren’t creating, you are plotting, and that way there be monsters—clunky, artificial-sounding ones. Of course, this is all semantics—even while in the creation zone you have a direction you want to go with your, art, obviously but the point is that question-of-direction should never really form as actual words in your mind. It sounds very The Matrix or The Empire Strikes Back—don’t think you are, know you are—but that pseudo-leap-of-faith is the essence of creativity—don’t plan where your art will go, go where your art will go. And if you are like me, used to thinking critically rather than creating, creating something will be exhausting. I am talking major exam headache after only an hour of writing. So, we’ve got to train your brain up! Which, after a long ramble, brings us to pedagogy.
I stress again that work-shopping is essential, but that does not mean instruction is without merit. In fact, assignments (rather than just write me a story) and instructions are the other half of teaching creative writing. What is any education but a series of broken down drills to teach someone individual skills so that at some time in their life they have a cache of abilities to call upon to achieve a goal. Creativity is the same. You cannot be taught to be a good writer, but you can be taught to compose language and you can train yourself to use creativity rather than critical faculties.
Hopefully by now you have heard that this year we are celebrating The Fiddlehead’s 65th birthday! And if you haven’t, what planet are you from? Oh, that’s nice. Is it hot there? Welcome to Earth! We have cookies.
And in 65 years we have built up a strong tradition of publishing excellence, greedily devouring…ahem…I mean calmly perusing as much poetry and short fiction as comes our way and putting what we think of as the cream-of-the-crop into print. But just because we mainly publish poetry and short literary fiction does not mean that it is all we are willing to publish. WE’LL READ ANYTHING!As long as it is good. Send us your creative non-fiction, send us your plays, and send us speculative fiction and your genre fiction. Admittedly, it is hard to find examples of the last two that scream a healthy combination of awesomeness and quality necessary to see print, but that doesn’t mean we’ll turn you away at the door. If it is great literature, we’ll print it. Period. Just because the likelihood of something being good is very low doesn’t mean you should look down on it. Every once in a while something comes along that combines sharp, smart composition with more-leaning-towards-straight-up-fun content, the result being a piece of art that just plain rocks! Case in point, The Walking Dead— a weekly late night series that you can catch on AMC Sunday nights at 11:00 pm (AST).
Developed, executively produced, and at least partially written by Frank Darabont(the director that translated Stephen King’s work into The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and The Mist) right away promises that The Walking Dead will deliver quality. And the series keeps its promise, handing out a little something for everybody like treats at Halloween.
For those of us who lean towards a more formal or literary bent, the script is crisp, entertaining and convincing to the ear. And the players deliver the dialogue superbly and act in a way, if the series keeps on keeping on, that promises Emmy’s in just a few short looks to the horizon. But it’s the cinematography that stops you in your tracks and makes you gape, the pop-corn burning in the microwave as you just can’t tear your eyes from the screen.
In the pilot, our hero, sheriff deputy Rick Grimes, wakes up in the hospital from a gun-shot wound induced coma only to find a world transformed by a zombie apocalypse. Yes, yes, not overly original as Danny Boyle has already put it on the big screen (let’s not talk about who actually wrote the idea first) in 28 Days Later, but it is the first reel of the first episode so we’ll let it ride for now. Rick wanders the halls, disoriented, seeing signs of destruction but no people of any kind present in the rooms, in the halls, at the desks. Signs of struggles are everywhere and even signs of outright battles. And at the end of a long hallway our hero sees his first sign of life … sort of—a double door secured with a two-by-four and a chain-and-padlock bumping and rattling as a group of somethings moan and shuffle and push to get out. And spray-painted on the door, no doubt surreal to sheriff’s deputy Rick Grimes but oh so clear to the viewer, is DON’T OPEN. DEAD INSIDE. And of course Rick panics and goes for the elevator despite the building obviously having no power, you on the couch, either in your head or right out loud, screaming don’t do that, you idiot! That’s just a big box! Luckily the buttons are useless and Grimes proceeds to the stairs. Awwww, ok, says the horror viewer, as the stair door swings open and light fills the stairwell. And then bangs shut taking its light with it. No power. No windows. Grimes is on the stairs in a gurney, in total blackness, with only a few matches to light the way. Convenient that he just happened to pick these up at a nursing station, but we don’t care because my GOD! He can only see six inches in front of his face and there may be things in the dark and I was feeling comfortable because I thought he was safe because he made the sane choice and went for the stairs! Darabont and the team of The Walking Dead excel at getting you where you live and doing so with no dialogue but rather with just a bit of acting and some well-placed camera shots and lights (or lack thereof).
For those who want the gross-out in the horror you’ll get it: see episode two and wonder how does one make oneself smell like the dead? By covering oneself with the dead, of course, my darling.
Are you looking for action? Or drama? A simple fist fight in episode three is a straight-forward, run-of-the-mill beating but it’s not, it’s visceral because of how it is shot, how it is blocked, and how it is sounded (I think I just made that film-verb up). The beating isn’t exactly Mortensen dancing for Cronenberg in an Eastern European bathhouse, but, folks, we are definitely moving in that direction.
You get the point. The series is awesome. Check it out because at The Fiddlehead we pride ourselves on decades of publishing literary excellence, enjoying the caviar and fine wine of the printed word, if you will. But every once in a while you just need some good junk food too. So if you have a story or poem that is more fantastic than it is F. Scott Fitzgerald, send it our way. It might be good literature. Hell, it might be great. But even if it isn’t those things, it might be worth a read and a print because it might be good fun. It might be good junk food, like The Walking Dead. Give it a watch. I guarantee you’ll get a mouthful.
Five poems first published in The Fiddlehead were selected for inclusion in The Best Canadian Poetry in English, 2010, edited by Lorna Crozier and published by Tightrope Books.
The five authors and poems are:
Michael Johnson’s “The Praise of the Village Idiot” (The Fiddlehead 238)
Robyn Sarah’s “Messenger” (The Fiddlehead 239)
David Seymour’s “The Photo Double” (The Fiddlehead 238)
Paul Tyler’s “Manitoba’s Maples” (The Fiddlehead 241)
If you happen to be in Fredericton this weekend, come on down to the Small Press & Community Fair on Saturday, November 13, from 12 – 5pm. The fair is being held at Gallery Connexion’s new space in the Chestnut Complex (440 York Street, Fredericton). Staff from The Fiddlehead will be there—so drop by and say hello.
