Bill took last Monday off as part of a four-day weekend, and we drove to Moose Jaw for a little early Christmas shopping and for a stop at The Quilt Patch. I wrote last month about a change in seasons prompting me to look at nature with different eyes. Monday required another shift. On Monday, the world was muted, tangled; it was made of texture rather than colour, teaching me again that each kind of tree--not to mention each tree--has its own shape. You could see the human footprint in the fields, the scoring in the stubble like words on a page that told you exactly how that field had been harvested. You could also see the low-lying places in the field that remained wild, outside of human efforts. Dugouts were mostly iced over; the water birds had gone. What remained was a neutral world of hyphenated colours: ruddy-brown, grey-brown, grey-gold, greeny-grey.
It is a thought-provoking landscape. On the way to Moose Jaw, I thought about Katherine Lawrence's wonderful interview of Lawrence Hill at the Sage Hill Fundraiser. Katherine seemed to have read everything Hill has written, and asked moving and intelligent questions about his writing practice. There were three things he said that I have been reminding myself of since that evening because I think they're important to anyone's creative practice. One is that when you are creating, you have to realize that whatever it is you are making--whether of words or notes or colours--has to be and is a beautiful thing in your life, whether it's published or heard or bought--or not. Katherine Arbuthnott would chime in here and tell us that our motives have to be intrinsic, part of who we are, not extrinsic--a desire for the world to tell us who we are and how important we are. Creative people make things for their own sake, to glory initially in the making. And then Virginia Woolf would like to have her two words, and would remind us that at some point, if we want "self-expression" to become "art," we have to find a way to bridge the gap between our vision and our craft and the people we'd like to share our work with. We have to create a conversation. But if we haven't been deeply joyful while we've been conceiving and drafting, we've missed the point. To go back to Lawrence Hill's wisdom: our work has to be a beautiful thing in our life first.
Katherine asked him what it was like to suddenly be famous with The Book of Negroes, and Hill quipped back that he thought his career was going just fine: every book he wrote was better than the last one. The Book of Negroes has sold 600,000 copies in Canada and is being made into a mini-series for TV. We could say Hill has arrived. Yet he has humbly and wisely stuck with his own principles: just keep writing better. That's do-able.
Katherine's good questions about character produced this wisdom that I was thinking about in particular as Bill and I drove to Moose Jaw. He exhorted us to remember that the character who has the most to loose is the most interesting character. We'll let Henry James in on this discussion with his observation (I paraphrase, but I'm pretty close): "What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?" One of the weaknesses of Blue Duets, I think, is that none of the characters had more to lose than we all risk losing every day. I'm trying to think beyond that for Soul Weather.
Two days later the hyphenated colours of the landscape were swathed in white. They reminded me that my mother used to call December and Christmas-time "a season of light." Given that I have difficulty with the shorter days, I pondered that awhile, until yesterday I was out shoveling snow after dark. Mother was right, but not in the way I expected. The season's light is the light you make--fires and candle light and comforting food, and the light you search out. As I threw the snow under the trees, there was quite a lot of light and I wanted to shine it on the writing I was getting ready to do when my two current projects go out to publishers.
There are (at least) two questions all writers need to ask themselves. The first concerns their world view. Roger Fry felt that art was a complex of vision and design. You can translate that roughly into content and form, yet his word "vision" insists on something else: a world view that is provocative and intriguing, an understanding of the world and of human nature that is in some way visionary: seeing the world with a particular kind of accuracy, from a revealing perspective and with the breadth that is generous to everything that is human, natural, and cultural. Though of course, my definition of what is visionary is part and parcel of my world view. A satirist would describe "visionary" much differently. We are all, to some degree, limited by our world views, seeking out other people--friends and artists--with whom we can have a conversation about that view and how it influences our lives. But we have to know what that view is.
The second thing writers have to understand is the people they believe they can have the most fruitful conversation with. I caught an odd glimpse of this in October, when I was taking manuscripts for Grain Magazine to the SWG office. I was traveling north on Broad Street, waiting at the light at Saskatchewan Drive. Just ahead was the overpass used by trains and pedestrians traveling between Casino Regina and their parking garage. There was a single woman in black walking across it. Behind her was a tall fence that separates the pedestrian path from the railway tracks. The fence curves away from the tracks to make it impossible to climb--a design element that I found disquieting. Because it says that someone might want to make that climb. The fence itself suggests that someone may lose their balance--a simple thing with appalling consequences. Somehow the scene captured what people do every day: walk alone through a landscape of vague threat, trying to pretend it's ordinary, that we're just going through our days. I want to shine some light on that element in our lives, some light that means something to the person walking alone.
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