Sharon Bala's Blog, page 7

Pay attention to your boredom

Originally posted: February 19, 2016

Podcasts are like opinions these days; everyone seems to have one. One of my favourites is Startup (the podcast about what it's like to start your own business). It's hosted by former NPR/ Planet Money guy Alex Blumberg and it's fantastic. If you haven't already listened, go have a binge.

“The first draft always sucks. Things want to be bad... the only way to get that stuff to be good is with editing.” — Alex Blumberg

I was listening to this episode one evening and it stopped me short. Blumberg talks about how he and his team create their podcasts, how every second of tape is obsessively edited to catch and hold the listener's attention, to educate as well as entertain, and just how much effort goes into making that happen. Skip ahead to about 21 minutes in and listen to what he says about editing. If you're a writer, it will 100 per cent resonate.

"The first draft always sucks," Blumberg says. "Things want to be bad. Talented people with great ideas still produce horrible stuff and the only way to get that stuff to be good is with editing."

Let's savour that for a moment. Things want to be bad. The only solution is editing.

A few beats later, he says: "pay attention to where you are confused, annoyed, bored. A big part of editing is paying attention to your boredom."

If you listen to the episode, you'll see that much of what Blumberg and co. do in their edits is straight forward deletion, skipping past the verbal diarrhea, straight to the good stuff. And this is much of what I do in my edits too. Delete. Delete. Delete. Sentences, words, scenes, whole characters and subplots. Delete. Delete. Delete.

Originally, there were 50 extra (boring) words and the start of this post. Delete!

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Required reading

In my study, a corner of shelf space is devoted to how-to manuals, books I read with a red pen and highlighter in hand. These are my life savers, the guides I return to whenever I'm floundering.

Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway - the closest thing to a creative writing text book you can get and fully worth the price tag.

In Appropriate edited by Kim Davids Mander - This collection of interviews with Canadian authors tackles the question: how do you write from outside your perspective and should you even try? This is absolutely essential reading for anyone who is trying to conjure characters whose ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and/ or disability are not their own.

Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing by and About Indigenous Peoples by Gregory Younging - And this one is essential for everyone in the publishing industry especially crucial for settler/ immigrant authors who have Indigenous characters in their work.

From Where You Dream by Robert Olen Butler - immensely helpful when I was first starting to work on The Boat People. Butler advocates a system of imagining individual scenes, jotting them down on cue cards, then once you have sufficient cards, organizing them into an outline. And then putting pen to paper to write a first draft. I fell down on the outline part but being able to take each scene as they came, one at a time, really made the prospect of writing a first draft less overwhelming.

Aspects of the Novel by EM Forster - short and sweet, illuminating for readers as well as writers.

How Fiction Works by James Wood - teaches you how to take apart literature as you would a clock so you can understand what works, what doesn't, and most importantly why. Wood taught me how to read like a writer, critically and carefully.

Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction by Jeff Vandermeer. This book is a delight.

Confession: I’m not a fan of Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. It’s amusing but was maybe too rudimentary for the stage I was at when I first read it.

What you know

Originally posted: June 30, 2016

I once adjudicated a junior short fiction contest. Young writers ages 12 -20 submitted their stories and essays and I was given the monumental task of picking winners. When I told a couple of teacher friends that I was doing this they told me to expect cutting. Cutting is important, my teacher friends said. Teenagers always write about characters who cut themselves.

I didn't read any self harm stories but there were some common themes: New York City, spies, zombies, violent crime, and the tragic deaths of healthy young people. The body count was high. Everything about these pieces felt familiar. Maybe a little too familiar. I was a teenage writer once, pouring all my imagination and purple prose into page after page on WordPerfect. My stories were invariably about teenagers on an island, being picked off by a serial killer (spoiler: the killer was one of the teenagers). I knew nothing about deserted islands or serial killers just as I suspect most of these young writers know little of spies and violent crime. What I wanted to say to all of them was: never mind all this; write what you know!

Because here's the thing: there was a lot of talent in these pieces. Evocative scene setting, beautiful turns of phrase, and endings that surprised and thrilled me. But a lot of it was overshadowed by the emphasis on high-stakes plot. Occasionally, a glimmer of some real truth, some messy uncomfortable human emotion, shone through and that's when I got interested.

The problem - I think - is when we are told to write what we know, we think: what I know is boring; no one is going to read that. My advice is more specific: focus on the real feelings and emotions of which you have intimate knowledge. Interrogate those areas of your life which are most painful, most awkward, most cringe-inducing. And then write about those things.

Write about being bullied. Write about feeling inadequate. Write about being abandoned by your friends in the cafeteria. Write about failure. Write about loneliness. And then if you want to set the story in New York City, by all means. Or make your characters werewolves. Have them join MI5. Send them to Saturn.  If your writing is driven by real emotions and feelings, if writing makes me you feel unsettled and deeply uncomfortable, then the setting and characters and plot will matter very little. Because the things you invent will be secondary to the emotions that you know. 

I'd like to go back in time and give this advice to myself: You'll never be this age again. And when you're older you won't have access to the intense, complex emotions you have now. Write this stuff down.

It's low stakes (emotionally) to construct a high-stakes plot that is removed from the reality of one's own life. But when you make yourself vulnerable, when the act of writing feels high-stakes to the writer... that's when the story gets real, gets interesting.

ps. Was this post helpful? If you’d like more feedback, specific to your project, you can hire my services. Get in touch for more info or a quote.

Poetry police

Originally posted: January 25, 2021

During the Inauguration, National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman stole the show with her poem “The Hill We Climb”. I watched the ceremony the same way I read my reviews - breath held, jaw clenched, and squinting - because remember the confetti canon and the armed terrorists who stormed the capitol? Luckily, it was fine. No one got assassinated and I had the privilege of witnessing Gorman’s performance in real time. It was a tour de force and 99% of the millions who saw her agreed. But you know…there’s always the one per cent.

The next day, a fellow author posed a question on Facebook (I know, I know): I'm not a poet, they said, and asked the experts to weigh in. Was Amanda Gorman's "poem" any good?

This is a writer whose work I have long admired. Their latest book is currently sitting on my coffee table. I wasn’t expecting the professional hit to come from inside the house, you know? Critique is one thing but imagine someone solicited opinions on your book by derisively calling it a “novel”? I waded into the comments to find out what the poets were saying.

Those Himalayas of the Mind

“people need heroines… it just gets trying to see sentimentality elevated to art”
“Well, the problem is, people will now think, oh that's what good poetry is. When it isn't.”
“it is what a lot of people would LIKE poetry to be. Feel-goodish stuff.”
“can we expect anything different from officially sanctioned and mandated poetry?”
“It is a speech, not a poem.”
“will soon be forgotten”
“the whole thing was a lie… and stank of currying favour…Makes sense that she has presidential aspirations.”
“If she sticks with it, maybe, MAYBE, depending on more factors than I can name, she will write a poem….I want to be generous to her, so I can sincerely say, you had a lot of feeling there, Amanda, if you like, if it gives you something you can't get anywhere else, just keep going.”

Oh, you thought that one was comically bad? I saved this gem for last (formatting: mine):

“I did not like the poem.
She was using words that should not be in poems.
It's more a rockstar performance than art.”

The House of Poetry

At last check there were 300+ comments and most of them were not of this ilk. Savvier poets pointed out that what Gorman wrote and performed was indeed a poem, of a type classified as occasional poetry, that it comes from traditions of spoken word, slam, and hip-hop, all of which are meant to be experienced live and in the moment, not read off the page like narrative and lyric poetry. My favourite was the commenter who prosaically declared: “The house of poetry has many rooms.”

The poets who move between rooms are a generous lot. They were offering up a hell of a lot of free educational labour and I’d like to believe some of the grumps took note and learned something. But, as one persistent commenter made clear, over and over: hope is for dupes and liars. So more likely they stayed stubbornly put in the draughty old wing, sucking on their sour grapes.

Just so we’re clear: Amanda Gorman is a Harvard graduate. Her unpublished poetry collection is a bestseller. None of this derision matters a whit to her success. But some of these writers, I imagine, are teaching and mentoring less fortunate emerging poets. Is this the level of arrogance and ignorance they bring to those encounters? Easy to see why so many young writers, especially writers of colour, feel disillusioned with traditional creative writing programs. Because often this kind of critique - which has more to do with who you are than the quality of your work - is a hell of a lot more subtle and insidious. The burn is baked into the subtext and you can’t quite articulate why you feel the criticism is destructive rather than constructive.

So it’s instructive to consider what the critics found triggering. Gorman’s ambition, for one. How dare she? (Once at a party, while I was out of town, a cranky old poet snarked about my ambition to my husband, and then asked him not to tell me what she’d said. lol)

The laziest critique in the world is to ridicule what you don’t understand. Gorman’s spoken word influences are foreign to her detractors so they dismiss her art as a speech. A stump speech. She’s just gunning for the Oval Office, after all.

Powerful people have elevated her to Capitol Hill and put a microphone into her hand. It must be because she’s young and they can bend her to their will, use her as a mouthpiece of the state. The trigger here is agency. Who gave her that? Let’s pretend we can take it away.

The hope in Gorman’s poem is belittled by people who, conveniently, have no idea what it’s like to be a Black woman in America facing down a climate catastrophe that’s going to plague her long after the rest of us are dust. Gorman’s hope is an act of resistance, not a folly of youth. It’s also the burden of resilience that’s foisted on Black people, and women, in particular. The poetry police are shockingly unimaginative.

And then of course there are art’s perennial twin questions: is this any good and who gets to decide? For too long a homogeneous cabal have been the arbiters of taste. But now the times, they are a changing. The house of poetry has built new wings. And some of the old guard are….well old and scared, it seems like.

The Myth of Zero Sum

Gorman is a triple threat - young, Black, and a woman. I’m sure every bitter poet on that Facebook thread would balk at the insinuation that their dislike stems from racism. Fine, that’s their truth. Here’s the incontrovertible truth: Black women are rare in poetry workshops. They’re almost never students or teachers or included in the canon. Because the whole damn institution is racist. And when you are part of the institution, some of that stink sticks to you. You must be vigilant about hosing it down (yes, me too. All of us). But if you don’t pay attention, you won’t even notice. It’s 2021. I can’t believe I’m still having to spell this out.

It’s hard out there for a poet. There’s no fame, no fortune, entirely too little respect. When you are part of a marginalized group and the podium and shelf space is limited and the publisher says: “we love this book but we’ve already got an immigrant novel coming out this year” (lol. true story) it can be complicated to witness someone else’s success. It’s easy to mistake the game for zero sum. It’s easy to denigrate the perceived competition, especially when you think the competition should be more marginal than you. It’s the same ugly psychology that drives the anti-immigration sentiment in immigrant communities. I paid my dues; why should this new guy have it easy?

Here’s what many writers of colour have figured out: we’re better off working together than against each other. Constructive critique is necessary. Envy is not. So we indulge our sour grapes in private. Then we get the fuck over ourselves and cheer for the home team.

The sanity thief

Originally posted: February 18, 2020

2019 got off to a rocky start. For reasons I still can’t fully articulate, I fell into an anxiety spiral in the first half of the year. It felt like one of those Escher paintings where you’re climbing stairs to nowhere that never end.

It began during a quiet period, when I was home and not travelling, not even really doing much book promotion, supposedly stress-free. That’s when the anxiety crept up. All stealthy like. Like a bank robber. To steal my sanity. And for a long time I didn’t realize it was even anxiety. Or rather, I knew I was anxious but also, I thought I was dying. Because these are the wholly rational thoughts anxiety produces. You. Are. Dying. Now.

Helpfully, my best friend pointed out that mortality is the human condition. We’re all dying, Shar, she said, then grinned at her own cleverness because she’s perverse like that. We were having cocktails at Sassafraz after one of my events and I told her I was putting those words into my next book as revenge.

Sometime in the spring, I realized I wasn’t actually dying. Or at least, not right this second and not any faster than any other mostly healthy person my age who occasionally eats kale and zones out in spin class. There was nothing much wrong with my body except a screw had come loose in my head. So then I cast about for the cause. Objectively and subjectively, life was grand. What can be wrong when all your professional pipe dreams have come true? What can be wrong when you have a nice life with people you love in a safe country with free healthcare? What is there to be anxious about?

I’m having a mid-life crisis, I group texted my friends. It’s fucking tedious. Six months and I’m getting it out of my system.

Turns out, I’m the person who gives her midlife crisis a deadline. I’m also the person who does her homework. I took up meditation (Calm is a really excellent app by the way). I began each morning by thinking of three nice things from the day before. I read a bunch of research articles about anxiety and had a long, long chat with a friend who is a cognitive psychologist. I went to one deeply unhelpful and condescending therapy session. I took all my bad feelings and channelled it into my work. I wasn’t totally sure any of these things were getting me closer to a solution. I still felt like an anxious thrumming ball of awful.

And then, one day in September, when I was coming to grips with things and feeling genuinely better, I was listening to Rebecca Traister talking about her book “Good and Mad,” how its unexpected success had lengthened her book tour and how stressful that was and how the fall out was intense, irrational, anxiety. Hello. What’s that? Anxiety caused by book publication? DING DING DING. And yes, let me just acknowledge this is peak first world/ fortunate author problems.

Tom, my doctor, some other people probably, had suggested that perhaps it was publication and publicity and the whole whirlwind of the previous year that was to blame but until I heard another author mirror back my experiences, it was impossible to believe a good thing could cause bad feelings. As Daniel Lavery likes to say, life is a rich tapestry.

This week I was listening to John Green, whose fourth novel, The Fault in Our Stars, went super nova in 2012, talk about his own success and its resulting fall out. His issues, like his success, are so much more intense than mine ever were, but much of what he said, about the bad that comes married to the good, was familiar.

All this to say, if you are an author on year two of an even mildly successful book, feeling crappy for no good reason, it’s not a mid-life crisis. It’s not a catastrophic illness. It’s success. This is what it feels like.

And also! Importantly! It will pass.

There be dragons

Originally posted: July 8, 2019

One Saturday a few months after The Boat People came out, I was at my local nursery, pleasantly hung-over, and feeling optimistic about the fact that this time I would for sure keep the new basil alive (spoiler: I did not). It was one of those sunny, hopeful mornings. And then, while in line, I made the mistake of checking email.

There was a message from a reader. The subject was in all caps, angry and accusing. The message itself was a dissertation, in length, if not quite in cogency. How do I hate your novel? Let me count the ways.

It wasn’t the first or last time a molotov cocktail has landed in my in box. But this one got to me. Something about the timing and the all caps subject line calling me a lazy writer was shocking. It felt so personal and mean, an attack on not just my writing but my whole weekend. I began to shake, right there in the nursery, surrounded by ferns and succulents and other people buying ficus plants. Instinctively, I put the phone away. I blamed myself for being the dumb ass who checks email in line. Good writers don’t distract themselves from the moment. They pay attention. Watch. Store the real world up for later. I vowed to stay off email until Monday. I thought about my new plants, how I was going to spend the day outside, potting and writing. I stopped shaking. I paid, made chit-chat with the cashier, carried my purchases to the car, congratulated myself on being so well adjusted. And then a woman came running out of the nursery waving my wallet.

Now, a year later, I can laugh about it but in the moment that reader’s anger was de-stabalizing to my work, to my ability to focus. I remembered this email the other day while reading Scaachi Koul’s excellent piece about a YA author who stalked a Goodreads reviewer. Yes, you read that right. This author got a bad review, lost all common sense, hunted down the reviewer, and showed up at her door. Let this be a lesson to all of us published authors: Goodreads is not for us.

Before my book came out, I used to be a regular lurker on Goodreads. Whenever I finished  reading a book I really liked, I would go online to see what other readers were saying. My first Goodreads review was a one-star. It popped up while I was still working on the manuscript. Disturbance in the matrix? Break in the time-space continuum? Either way, my days on the site were over. 

Goodreads is for readers. It’s for honest critique and dialogue and yes, sometimes, vitriol, about books. It’s for people who hate the synopsis and rate it one star. It’s for readers who want recommendations. For readers who want to keep and share to be read lists. It’s a democratizing force that bypasses the traditional gatekeepers and allows a wider range of books to gain traction. It’s for book lovers and bloggers. It’s for marketing departments. It’s for trolls (because the whole internet is for trolls). It’s a lot of things for a lot of people. BUT GOODREADS IS NOT FOR WRITERS. It’s a free internet so go on there if you like but I’m telling you right now it’s a mistake.

Because what are we on this earth to do? Write. And there is a limit to how many beatings one’s own ego can take before it begins to impact your work. And trust me, there are enough beatings to go around. There are hideous reviews that can’t be ignored. There are readers who itemize your failures via email or at a book club or event. There are rejections. Prizes you lose, lists that snub you, shops that don’t carry your book, loved ones who won’t read it. Trust me. Enough beatings. You need not go looking for more. And while I’m on the subject, for the love of god, stop googling your name. Get rid of that google alert. Leave it to your mom/ lover/ agent/ editor. GO BACK TO WORK.

Gripes

Originally posted: December 7, 2018

Rebecca wrote this dark comedy of a blog post recently and I was all “SING IT, SISTER.” It’s about the indignities she has endured in her years as a writer. Rebecca has been writing and publishing longer than I have so she’s had to grin and bear more, but I share indignity #4 on her list.

Anyway, like Rebecca, I had mostly wonderful experiences in my debut year as an author and I know I’m incredibly lucky to even be a writer and have work published but there are also moments that make me want to shake my fist. Please enjoy some dark humour…

In March I adjudicated a short story competition. Reading stories and choosing the winner was a pleasure but then the organization tried to scam me out of my payment with the old “the cheque is in the mail” routine. It was not in the mail. Not even after I sent several emails. And then there was radio silence and I started to get seriously concerned. Fortunately, the organization was the PEI Writers’ Guild and I have an acquaintance from PEI. She intervened and then the cheque really was in the mail.

In April I took part in the book club at my local museum (The Rooms in St. John’s). People paid $15 each to attend. The evening was a delight. We had a really big and wonderful audience and the interviewer was fantastic. But the payment took months and several emails on my part. If I don’t pay the plumber within 30 days he charges interest. But some organizations seem to think writers don’t deserve to get paid on time. Anyway, good thing our province has a toothless Status of the Artist legislation, huh?

An organization asked me to give a key note speech at their event. Key note speeches take time, effort, and stress. I wrote back a very polite email (which I put a lot of thought into) where I laid out why I couldn’t work for free, how to get in touch with my agent and negotiate a rate, and then listed a couple of other much cheaper options for how I could help them out. Think I got the courtesy of a reply? Nope.

A group of writers asked me to teach them a private workshop for free. LOL.

FOR REAL THOUGH…WHY THE HELL DO PEOPLE THINK I WANT TO WORK FOR FREE? FOR THE RECORD: I DO NOT.

Once I was on a panel where all the authors were asked to prepare a 10 minute reading. One of the authors yammered on for about 25 minutes while the other author and I stared dolefully at each other. Finally the moderator cut him off (he hadn’t even gotten to his reading yet!). Then we did a Q&A and he kept trying to hog all the air time. Who am I kidding? Of course this happened more than once. And to paraphrase Rebecca, it’s not all male authors of a certain age but it is ALWAYS male authors of a certain age.

Writers are forever being picked up at airports and driven places by strangers. Sometimes it’s innocuous and you make pleasant small talk. Just as often it’s a bloody nightmare. Once, I got into a fight with a driver about “Hilary’s emails.” I hope he wasn’t expecting a tip. In New York, a driver with a Spanish accent complained about “Muslim foreigners.” He didn’t get a tip either. Once, soon after the miscarriage of justice that was the Coulton Bushie trial, a driver talked about why “Indian boys” deserve to get shot.

Hello older man I’ve just met. Please remove your hand from my upper back. Please stop taking every opportunity to randomly touch me as we stand at this registration table making awkward small talk while we wait for our name tags. I’m going to stand waaaaaay over here now and go out of my way to avoid you for the rest of this literary festival.

At a big event, in a room of 500 people where everyone had a copy of my book but most of them hadn’t read it yet, a woman stood to ask a question and shamelessly gave away the ending while the rest of the audience shouted her down. (Not the first time it’s happened either.)

Nasty emails from readers. Yes, really.

I agreed to take part in an event with another author. After the arrangements were made and plane tickets were bought, I found out it was an unmoderated conversation. For an hour. With an author I had previously met once for five minutes in an elevator. I happen to like this author very much and I think the feeling is mutual but it’s really unfair to make authors act as their own moderators. Promoting your own work and moderating a conversation are two very different skills and it’s impossible to move back and forth seamlessly. Fortunately, there were only 7 people in the audience.

Once after I’d given a 45 minute speech that I’d spent a very long time researching and preparing, a man in the audience said: “I haven’t read your book but let me tell you why everything you’ve just said is problematic.” LOL. When it was my turn to reply, I very politely eviscerated him to audience applause. Come at me, bro. But you best not miss.

In praise of agents

Originally posted: December 27, 2017.

Soon after I'd signed with my agent Stephanie, an acquaintance said (appalled): "but why would you want to work with an agent? they take 25%!" Well, first off, my agent is not taking a quarter of my royalties. Secondly, there would be no royalties without her.

Look, I think it's like real estate agents. Sure you could buy direct from the owner and negotiate a three per cent price reduction or whatever the realtor going rate is these days. But a good agent will save you from a lemon, point out the water damage, the cracks in the foundation, have advance knowledge of a gem before it hits the market. Of course a useless agent will do squat all and give the entire profession a bad name. So in all things the advice is: find a good professional.

Agents have knowledge of, and relationships with, editors. They don't just send your manuscript to a house, they target specific editors who would be a good fit for you and your book. Second, they know how to play the game. I only have the murkiest sense of what this game is to be honest but it involves a clever balance of hype and reticence, careful timing, and the intervention of benevolent deities called scouts. Stephanie has tried to explain it all to me but it's like when my husband Tom starts talking about string theory (or whatever it is that he does). My eyes gloss over and all I hear are cats. 

International sales are a completely different beast. Agents go to the big book fairs where they champion your book. They have contacts with overseas editors and subagents. They know how to time submissions. In short, agents get you the best deal possible and as many deals as possible.

And then once a deal is made, they negotiate the finer points of the contract. Even after you're working with a publishing house, the agent stays close, to make sure you're getting good editorial support, the right sales and marketing treatment. If things go pear shaped, they intervene. It's not just the business side of things either. Agents can help with interview prep and presentation skills. They check in to make sure you're not hiding under the bed hyperventilating into a paper bag. Sometimes Stephanie really feels like my personal cheerleader, therapist, and coach, all rolled into one. But most importantly, she takes care of a whole ton of stuff behind the scenes (and there is A LOT going on back there) leaving me free to WRITE.

Poetry police

Last Wednesday, during the Inauguration, National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman stole the show with her poem “The Hill We Climb”. I watched the ceremony the same way I read my reviews - breath held, jaw clenched, and squinting - because remember the confetti canon and the armed terrorists who stormed the capitol? Luckily, it was fine. No one got assassinated and I had the privilege of witnessing Gorman’s performance in real time. It was a tour de force and 99% of the millions who saw her agreed. But you know…there’s always the one per cent.

The next day, a fellow author posed a question on Facebook (I know, I know): I'm not a poet, they said, and asked the experts to weigh in. Was Amanda Gorman's "poem" any good?

This is a writer whose work I have long admired. Their latest book is currently sitting on my coffee table. I wasn’t expecting the professional hit to come from inside the house, you know? Critique is one thing but imagine someone solicited opinions on your book by derisively calling it a “novel”? I waded into the comments to find out what the poets were saying.

Those Himalayas of the Mind

“people need heroines… it just gets trying to see sentimentality elevated to art”
“Well, the problem is, people will now think, oh that's what good poetry is. When it isn't.”
“it is what a lot of people would LIKE poetry to be. Feel-goodish stuff.”
“can we expect anything different from officially sanctioned and mandated poetry?”
“It is a speech, not a poem.”
“will soon be forgotten”
“the whole thing was a lie… and stank of currying favour…Makes sense that she has presidential aspirations.”
“If she sticks with it, maybe, MAYBE, depending on more factors than I can name, she will write a poem….I want to be generous to her, so I can sincerely say, you had a lot of feeling there, Amanda, if you like, if it gives you something you can't get anywhere else, just keep going.”

Oh, you thought that one was comically bad? I saved this gem for last (formatting: mine):

“I did not like the poem.
She was using words that should not be in poems.
It's more a rockstar performance than art.”

The House of Poetry

At last check there were 300+ comments and most of them were not of this ilk. Savvier poets pointed out that what Gorman wrote and performed was indeed a poem, of a type classified as occasional poetry, that it comes from traditions of spoken word, slam, and hip-hop, all of which are meant to be experienced live and in the moment, not read off the page like narrative and lyric poetry. My favourite was the commenter who prosaically declared: “The house of poetry has many rooms.”

The poets who move between rooms are a generous lot. They were offering up a hell of a lot of free educational labour and I’d like to believe some of the grumps took note and learned something. But, as one persistent commenter made clear, over and over: hope is for dupes and liars. So more likely they stayed stubbornly put in the draughty old wing, sucking on their sour grapes.

Just so we’re clear: Amanda Gorman is a Harvard graduate. Her unpublished poetry collection is a bestseller. None of this derision matters a whit to her success. But some of these writers, I imagine, are teaching and mentoring less fortunate emerging poets. Is this the level of arrogance and ignorance they bring to those encounters? Easy to see why so many young writers, especially writers of colour, feel disillusioned with traditional creative writing programs. Because often this kind of critique - which has more to do with who you are than the quality of your work - is a hell of a lot more subtle and insidious. The burn is baked into the subtext and you can’t quite articulate why you feel the criticism is destructive rather than constructive.

So it’s instructive to consider what the critics found triggering. Gorman’s ambition, for one. How dare she? (Once at a party, while I was out of town, a cranky old poet snarked about my ambition to my husband, and then asked him not to tell me what she’d said. lol)

The laziest critique in the world is to ridicule what you don’t understand. Gorman’s spoken word influences are foreign to her detractors so they dismiss her art as a speech. A stump speech. She’s just gunning for the Oval Office, after all.

Powerful people have elevated her to Capitol Hill and put a microphone into her hand. It must be because she’s young and they can bend her to their will, use her as a mouthpiece of the state. The trigger here is agency. Who gave her that? Let’s pretend we can take it away.

The hope in Gorman’s poem is belittled by people who, conveniently, have no idea what it’s like to be a Black woman in America facing down a climate catastrophe that’s going to plague her long after the rest of us are dust. Gorman’s hope is an act of resistance, not a folly of youth. It’s also the burden of resilience that’s foisted on Black people, and women, in particular. The poetry police are shockingly unimaginative.

And then of course there are art’s perennial twin questions: is this any good and who gets to decide? For too long a homogeneous cabal have been the arbiters of taste. But now the times, they are a changing. The house of poetry has built new wings. And some of the old guard are….well old and scared, it seems like.

The Myth of Zero Sum

Gorman is a triple threat - young, Black, and a woman. I’m sure every bitter poet on that Facebook thread would balk at the insinuation that their dislike stems from racism. Fine, that’s their truth. Here’s the incontrovertible truth: Black women are rare in poetry workshops. They’re almost never students or teachers or included in the canon. Because the whole damn institution is racist. And when you are part of the institution, some of that stink sticks to you. You must be vigilant about hosing it down (yes, me too. All of us). But if you don’t pay attention, you won’t even notice. It’s 2021. I can’t believe I’m still having to spell this out.

It’s hard out there for a poet. There’s no fame, no fortune, entirely too little respect. When you are part of a marginalized group and the podium and shelf space is limited and the publisher says: “we love this book but we’ve already got an immigrant novel coming out this year” (lol. true story) it can be complicated to witness someone else’s success. It’s easy to mistake the game for zero sum. It’s easy to denigrate the perceived competition, especially when you think the competition should be more marginal than you. It’s the same ugly psychology that drives the anti-immigration sentiment in immigrant communities. I paid my dues; why should this new guy have it easy?

Here’s what many writers of colour have figured out: we’re better off working together than against each other. Constructive critique is necessary. Envy is not. So we indulge our sour grapes in private. Then we get the fuck over ourselves and cheer for the home team.

Joy

Here we are. The closing days of this Year of The Devil 2020. We’re all THISCLOSE to getting the vaccine, friends. Try not to die before Armistice, okay? To celebrate and because end of year lists are always “fun” here are some things that brought me joy this year and a couple that failed to deliver:

Watchmen. A smart concise show that takes the super hero genre to task with humour. My only quibble is with the characterization of the token Asian mother-daughter combo.

Match Made In Hell. Watch it. You won’t be sorry.

Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was A Girl by Jeannie Vanasco. The author interviews the friend who raped her years ago. Provocative, uncomfortable, and everything a memoir should be. Reminds me of Attiyah Khan’s fantastic documentary A Better Man.

Last Seen. Podcast about the biggest art heist in history. I was totally into it for two episodes and then got bored. Not for me.

The Guardian’s Today in Focus had this killer piece in August about a painting that is either a rare Da Vinci or a forgery… or something in between.

Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art. During lock down, Hot Docs streamed free films and we had virtual watch parties with friends. Barry Avrich’s doc about a massive art fraud at New York’s Knoedler Gallery is fantastic. For the record, I’m Team (Fake) Artist.

Queen’s Gambit. To echo Aminatou Sow, the show is “White Excellence.” +1 Elisabeth’s take at Maclean’s. One tiny note: if you’re going to have the Black friend swoop in for a deus ex machina in Act Three then please make her motivation clear (ie. “if you win, I want a cut”).

East Coast Trails 2020 gave the island an exceptional and long summer and Tom and I took advantage of the trails. Cape St. Francis to Pouch Cove is one of the more strenuous and technically difficult ones but worth every step. Spectacular.

RPG. Back in April, when we were deep in lockdown, my friend Joel invited me to join an online RPG (that’s Role Playing Game, to you non-dorks). A mysterious mansion + 1920s Boston + demons. Sure, why not? I didn’t love playing online but since the restrictions relaxed in mid-summer, we’ve been playing in person and it is SO. MUCH. FUN. It’s just imagination and play and all the things we did as children for hours and have forgotten we love.

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno Garcia. A quick, compelling, and delicious horror novel. Moreno Garcia takes all the recognized tropes of horror and gothic and turned them upside down. I wish the writing had been stronger.

Evil Eye. Young woman meets the perfect man. Or is he too good to be true? You’ve seen this horror movie before. Except you haven’t because all the characters are Brown. And one of the principals is an older woman. Great cinema, this is not. But it is fun and gore-lite which is perfect for wimps like me.

Return of the Living Dead Turns out, a pandemic is the perfect time to re-visit classic horror and Return surprisingly holds up. Its themes of the environment and capitalism and the massive side-eye it gives the army are all evergreen. By some miracle, the Black character is allowed to live and be heroic for quite a long time. The women are utterly hopeless of course.

Shawn of the Dead. Another re-watch that’s even more satisfying in the context of 2020. This PSA from March was spot on.

Kamala Harris. Hell yes, Auntie K! I cherish this old interview with her even though I don’t agree with everything she says. But her thoughts on race as a security issue were right on the money and I will admit to tearing up a little when she said “don’t forget you have people, you come from people.” It’s something I’m going to hold on to the next time I’m the only one in the room.

House of Anansi has been knocking it out of the park this year. I already gushed about Eva’s All I Ask but you should also add: The Ridgerunner by Gil Adamson and We Two Alone by Jack Wang to your reading lists. Gil’s western is beat-for-best perfection and includes a nuanced and rounded Indigenous supporting character who does not die. Jack’s collection features the Chinese Diaspora as you’ve never seen them. As in, Chinese characters in late 30s Nazi Vienna helping Jewish characters escape to safety. Or Chinese characters in South Africa during Apartheid. Beautiful and ambitious with a killer ending. Bravo to Anansi and their Class of 2020 authors.

Speaking of books, you’ve read Souvankham’s Giller-winning How To Pronounce Knife, right? I had the good fortune of an advance peak last year. Move over, Munro and Gallant, there’s a new Queen in town.

Tiger King. Is this supposed to be compelling television? Not for me, thanks.

Deep cleaning the fridge. Solid stress relief activity. Podcast accompaniment: Reply All’s The Case of The Missing Hit is a delight.

The Border Patrol Agent I Know. Fascinating series of interviews between a public radio reporter and a Mexican-American border patrol agent. There’s a lot of nuance in this exploration of collaboration and complicity. Related: This American Life’s No Where Man.

Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli. An American road trip novel I actually wanted to read! Highly literary with an epic sentence that goes on for eternity. The main concern of the book is children crossing the border, children in peril, whose land is this anyway? All up my alley. But. And this is a sizeable but. Dead Apaches ahead. Magical Apaches ahead. Maybe, maybe the author was trying to play with the trope and make a more interesting point here but I fear that’s wishful thinking on my part. SIGH.

Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite. One of the last films I watched surrounded by strangers. Astute, intelligent, laugh-out-loud funny with a proper blood bath. Probably best watched in a theatre, unfortunately.

Corduroy dungarees. Soft-pant adjacent, warm, with a handy pocket in the front. I’m channelling Angela Chase this Covid winter and I’m not sorry.

Kidd Pivot’s Revisor. So many times this year, I’ve thought back to Valentine’s night when a thousand townies packed the rafters of the Arts & Culture Centre to watch Vancouver dance troupe Kidd Pivot pull off a one-night-only performance of their new show Revisor. Revisor was spectacular. Even more special was sharing the extraordinary experience with so many friends.

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan. A history of the world from the vantage of Central Asia. This was our lock-down co-read. Two thumbs up from the Bala-Baird household.

Covid Classics on Instagram. A must follow that buoyed my spirits during lock down.

Dr. Isaac Bogoch. Isaac went to med school with my bestie and his dad treated my mom’s broken collarbone so on those whimsical grounds he’s been my go-to source on everything from is take-out safe (yes) to when are those jabs coming “sooner rather than later” to how’s old Alberta doing? prognosis: fucked. He’s also an infectious diseases specialist, a researcher at TGH, and a prof at UofT. I’m not taking medical advice from Goop.

Jabra Earbuds. A 2019 stocking stuffer that could not have been better timed. Highly recommend.

St. John’s. Three cheers for a cautious and politicians who get the hell out of her way. We’ve avoided a second wave (so far) and life has been safe and felt relatively normal since late summer. You could call that a miracle. I say it’s good public health.