Barbara Wade Rose's Blog, page 2

Don’t say I never told you this

There won’t be a lot of words in this blog, but you’ll notice the ones that aren’t there.

We grow into our skills and understanding in life, and some we develop sooner than others. I was pretty good at observation even as a child. When I was 12 I told my mother there were two kinds of memory: primary, when you’re in the story you’re telling, and secondary, where you’re watching yourself in the story. Clever, perhaps. But noticing what wasn’t there was a skill that took me longer to develop.

In 1992 I was an adult and the movie A Few Good Men came out, one of Aaron Sorkin’s early scripts. You can’t handle the number of truths it provided in the form of quotable quotes, and it provided a fascinating military mystery as well. The mystery was in part solved by what the victim did not have in his travel clothing. What he would have taken, he didn’t — and it meant he didn’t go.

Over the years what’s absent has become more and more interesting to me. In a novel, it can be the wearing of her wedding dress by Miss Havisham that horrifies the reader and sums up all we need to know about her. When I was a journalist I had a tendency to babble and cured it by learning to ask a question and then STOP talking. People told more secrets that way. Conversely, that led to learning in my personal life that you’re more effective if you say something once to your children, or to anyone, ONCE — and fall silent. Not easy, but it works.

In some cases an absence reveals a terrible trait: a famous comedian uses drugs or a famous radio personality uses violence, neither of which were ‘necessary’, to ‘seduce’ women, when the celebrities were likely famous enough to seduce some of them without.

In families, what’s absent can the most important stuff. Not telling a lover you’re more casual than he or she is about the relationship. Not talking to a brother for years. Ignoring family mental illness. Shunning. Or in my family’s case, drinkers in previous generations who absolutely and successfully relied upon the choking inability of the rest of us to point out what they were doing.

Families also provide the best, the very best, moments we give and get as we grow older, the looks that say we understand one another, each other, without words.

But I don’t need to tell you that, do I?

Go set a timer

Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman was released this week and quickly sold 105,000 copies in its first day. Barnes and Noble reported the novel’s sale to be the highest in its history.

Reviews superceded even the date of publication: the New York Times printed its review late last week. New Yorker reviewer Adam Gopnik has proclaimed the book a failure. Below, therefore, some sure-to-happen developments:

NYT investigation of Harper Lee’s lawyer and friend, Tonja Carter, for her curious role in the novel’s resurgence.

Questioning of Lee’s fitness of mind in releasing the book, at length and devolving throughout, on Twitter.

“The contrasting Attici: Songs of Innocence and Experience,” a 50,000 word essay in the New York Review of Books.

Opinion piece in the New York Times, entitled “To Mock all of Us” on how neither of Lee’s novels actually speaks to a single person of colour in south or north.

Opinions on the book’s literary merits, pro and con, will be issued by the following in no particular order: Martin Amis, J.K. Rowling, Calvin Trillin, Margaret Atwood, and Toni Morrison, as well as Donald Trump.

A survey five years’ hence will report that the sales of To Kill a Mockingbird have survived any challenge by subsequent works by Harper Lee, including Go Set a Watchman, Shitstorm: An Author Breaks her Silence, and Truman was my Man.

The cottage rental, 2015

That title looks harmless, doesn’t it? Perhaps pleasant, perhaps nostalgic. Maybe your family had a cottage when you were little – maybe you got heartily sick of going there. Maybe it’s the source of some of your very best memories.

Our family camped. My dad was in the Army so we moved around too much to put down stakes somewhere, and we just couldn’t afford one.

I visited the cottages of friends and dreamed some day I’d have my own.

Thirty years in Toronto made that a distant idea. Then last summer, someone at a party mentioned they were selling their cottage, on a peninsula, two hours away, Crown land (i.e. undeveloped) across the lake. It’s most people’s checklist of a great real estate purchase. I went into a frenzy that surprised me, alarmed everyone else in the family and caused a couple of the worst fights my husband and I have ever had.

He grew up without a cottage. He knows there’s a lot of work owning one, and it can get monotonous, and it can eat up your summers. He’s right. I need nature at this time in my life, I said. I want to be near living things. I want to own a piece of Canadian shield.

We went at each other like ninjas.

Finally, we compromised: as an experiment, we would rent a cottage July and August of this summer. Realize the ways in which it’s different from owning, contemplate the ways in which it’s the same.

The girls may or may not come up. They witnessed one of those fights, and “come join us at the cottage” makes them avert their eyes.

I’ve been packing tiny containers of spices and folding towels for the last several days, just like my mom used to do when we were going camping. She was ingenious at remembering things like rubber bands and twist-ties or finding a nesting set of plastic cups that quenched the thirst of four people and collapsed into one, like a Russian doll. She had a system for water conversation – cooking to washing bodies to Dad’s shave to washing dishes – the Kyoto Accord could have used.

We, city people, have guidelines on what constitutes an event or meeting important enough not to go or to come back early. We’re taking this one weekend at a time. We go up for the first time tomorrow. I’m nervous as hell.

What story would you tell?

Yesterday I wrote about a half-naked woman who walked through a downtown intersection looking distressed. I thought she might need help and wondered anxiously whether I should get off my bicycle and approach her.

I started to tell my daughter about her last night. She stopped me and said, Wait. I’ve seen her. Twice, in fact.

Turns out this woman often walks back and forth on Bloor Street — the premium jewellery and designer row in Toronto. Tiffany’s, Prada, Dolce & Gabbana line the sidewalks. You can buy watches worth a quarter of a million dollars.

Which brings me back to . . . no, that’s neither true nor polite. Anyone who exhibits him- or herself on a regular basis like that must have something going on in the head. Maybe she likes to shock — which certainly worked for my daughter’s visiting friend from New Zealand. Maybe she works for Toronto tourism. Maybe she’s in mental distress. Maybe social workers should . . .

I related the earlier story, about the woman’s possibly escaping a bad situation, to one of my closest friends, a psychologist. That’s your story, she said firmly. You don’t know what her story is. Every person looking at her makes a story about her, but only she knows what it is. You just like to think she’s in distress.

She was right. We are all natural storytellers, and that’s okay. So what story would you tell?

What should I have done? What would you?

At this time in my life, I am trying to be less helpful. If someone’s on their cell phone walking towards me on the middle of the sidewalk, I don’t step to one side. I eat the last orange. I don’t help out like I used to–it’s someone else’s turn. But there are situations in which I thought I always helped. Once I saw a woman at the side of the road hurrying away from two men and I pulled my car over and asked if she needed help. She said she didn’t, but I am satisfied I did the right thing. Wasn’t it in my nature?

Those two inclinations came into conflict yesterday. I was on my bicycle at Bloor and Avenue Road (a major downtown Toronto intersection) waiting for the light to change, watching the people in front of me cross the street. One of them was a shock to see. She walked expertly in silver platform shoes with six-inch heels. She had long white-blond hair and an expression on her face I think meant distress, although I may have been imagining it. She was wearing a T-shirt with no bra.

Beneath it she wore only a thong so see-through you could tell she had a Brazilian wax.  Essentially she was naked from the waist down. As she passed in front of the traffic everyone’s head swivelled to the right. Yes, she was naked–a really nice pair of buttocks propelled her forward. She walked in front of the Royal Ontario Museum, at the same steady pace. The light changed, and we all surged forward.

I have been thinking about her ever since.

There are a few really high-end hotels north across the street from the intersection. Did she know she was dressed in such a way? Of course she did. Was it her choice? I’m not so sure. She kept her gaze steady, looking straight ahead. And there was that expression, perhaps, of distress.

Was she escaping from something? She was missing a skirt or a pair of shorts. Was she an attempted rape victim? She would have begged someone to help her instead of walking down the street, yes? Was she a sex worker? Had an assignation gone wrong? It was hard not to imagine her facing something in a hotel room that wasn’t part of the deal, that frightened her enough to leave in silver platform shoes with six-inch heels.

My thoughts in the seconds I watched her were, successively: that’s a hooker. That’s a woman in a bad situation. Maybe it’s her choice. Maybe she needs help. It’s none of my business. I should ask her if I can help. She might lash out at me. What would you have done?  What if . . .?

Then the light changed.

Hand me the Band-Aids

The replacement of words seems to be a response to changing times, but it’s really a simplistic and superficial way to pretend you’re doing something. The most recent example is the transgender focus in the media as a result of Caitlyn Jenner’s transformation from the pentathlete Bruce Jenner this summer of 2015. The eye-opening of attitudes about transgender people is terrific–including for me. In the mid-1980s I declined an evening with another couple because they wanted to bring their transgender roommate. It was partly because the roommate seemed to want to attach herself to everything this couple did, but if I’m being honest, I should also plead guilty to narrow thinking. I promise you I’ve changed.

But, as journalist Elinor Burkett wrote in the New York Times recently, the New York Abortion Action Fund now offers its services to ‘people,’ not just women. The campus word ‘sisterhood’ is being papered over with ‘siblinghood.’

Words are the easiest way to declare you’re enlightened. You may not have any transgender friends, but you can correct those who call Caitlyn Jenner ‘Bruce’. You may not have any black friends, but you can scold when someone calls African-Americans ‘black.’ In fact, the way in which people of colour are referred to over the decades gives the best example of how superficial the naming process is. “Negro” became “black” became “African-American” because the earlier name was demeaning without any honest examination of whether the demeaning came from the serious wound behind the label, and hence the need to replace it. (and can be inaccurate: “African-American” applies only to Americans, after all.) The same thing happened to words describing people with mental handicaps (I am conscious that this may be an offensive term, but in this case the Band-Aid is frayed around the edges and is continually being replaced.) Half-wit became retarded became handicapped became disabled became differently abled. The advocacy-association in our Toronto neighbourhood is now called The Association for Community Living. I’ll let that speak for itself.

When our children were small the co-operative daycare they attended decided that ‘diversity’ was no longer an acceptable term. (Admittedly this daycare also had a Free Nicaragua Day, on which the children wore little red T-shirts.) We henceforth had to use the term ‘anti-racist’ because it reflected a stronger stance against discrimination. It did, but we were mandated to use it in such a way that the staff became word-police, checking conversations for Newspeak. The term comes from George Orwell’s 1984, in which an engineer for the government observes, “Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year.”

The mall goes on lockdown

Yesterday I was buying earmuffs at Toronto’s most splendid shopping mall. This mall, call it Richdale, has designer shops (the earmuffs are fake fur), 30 eateries in its café-like food court, a full parking lot no matter when you go, and the most wonderful collection of secular shoppers, Orthodox and not-so Jews, Muslims covered and less covered, Asians, Caucasians — you name it. It’s the global village furiously shopping.

Then the alarms went off.

Everyone stopped strolling and looked up at the 40-ft. high ceilings where the noise shrieked from. Lights were flashing. Clerks in shops, from Tiffany’s to the pretzel place, began rolling security cages across their entrances. Heaven forfend, Richdale was undergoing lockdown.

I have no idea why. The alarms kept going for nearly half an hour. Security guards trotted thoughtfully towards the part of the mall that had a Shopper’s Drug Mart, a photo booth and a Starbucks, happily using their collar walkie-talkies. Maybe Halloween candies and ibuprofen had been stolen at gunpoint.

Of course, it being Richdale and full of furiously shopping people, almost nobody left the mall. Most kept going into the stores not shuttered and shouted at the clerks (“I’ll take the salad bowl!”) as if the ear-splitting noise was not going to get in the way of a fat credit limit. Others stood around, eyeing one another, as if furious shopping had kept them from noticing they were in a global village.

The horrible alarm and disco-pretty lights eventually went silent. Possibly Richdale registered a slight dip in its number of sales yesterday. More likely they went up, seeing how a nice pair of earmuffs would look fetching during an apocalypse.

The cottage internet

Got my new handkerchiefs in the mail today. They came from the Flying Needle Gallery with a business card and a bow, so I suspect they’re not made and shipped by a large factory in a faraway country. Today a significant part of the online business I do is with the kind of company that used to be called the cottage industry. Before the Industrial Revolution in England, lots of women did piecework at home for a centralized business. ‘Piecework’ meant getting paid by the article, and for these women it could mean very long hours, eyestrain and sometimes blindness. The term ‘cottage industry’ for their work was a complete and cozy misnomer.

Today’s cottage industry runs on the Internet with better conditions. It starts with someone self-indulgent like me typing “handkerchief” into Google. When I click on what comes up it’s often a beautifully designed website with examples, sizes, costs, instructions for measurement, delivery options and, bless ‘em, Paypal, so you can trust your order is valid. Contrast that with walking into a box store and being told they don’t have your size, charge $75 for delivery and you won’t see it for two weeks. The sellers on the Internet with which I do business are often artisans, who may not make much, but they’re sisters doing it for themselves.

Obviously both businesses have their place in the consumer marketplace, but here’s the extra bonus from the cottage keepers. You get little notes. You get business cards with ribbons. When I ordered something from England that wasn’t available, there was a flurry of apologetic, witty little emails worthy of 84, Charing Cross Road. (Oh, look it up.) It’s like gazing from my lighted window down a dark street and seeing someone in her lighted window looking back at me. Who knew the Internet could be so old-fashioned? It’s like — it’s like choosing to use a hankie.

 

 

 

Should your novel be evaluated?

You’d think the obvious answer is duh, or yes. But it’s not that simple.

Unless you’re a bestselling author you need to complete a draft of your story, one that’s as big as, or close to, the novel itself.  Probably around 50,000 words. Yes, it means you are writing the book before you write the book, but the way we roll.

Evaluation by a reputable reader–a fellow writer, an editor, and/or an experienced professional–means you will be investing anywhere from $100 to $800 for a close-eyed scrutiny of what you’ve written so far. You shouldn’t pay more, but you should pay whatever you can. If you can get a free evaluation,wonderful, but the comments of friends and family do not count. They’re biased and feel pressure to say what they think you want to hear or may simply be unhelpful. My husband gave me a great evaluation on my current novel, with lots of opinions and questions neatly sewn into the cuddly blanket of praise. He’s been trained ever since he handed me my first novel with the single comment: “It’s good. Now make it better.”

The draft you hand over should be as muscular and marvellous as you can make it. Ask for more time if you need it: my current novel, Clamour, needed three extra months before it was ready to be read, and my evaluator, bestselling author Barbara Kyle, was kind enough to grant it.

When the evaluation is given, brace yourself. You’re not paying for praise. Try to remember the kind words in among the criticisms, and remember, both of you are trying to make your story as vivid and strong as possible. Ask questions. Disagree. I have found that the reasons I have for doing something may be valid, but are not interpreted the way in which I intended.

Then it’s back to work, and work hard. I should mention that an evaluation is also useful for pointing out that the character you killed off in Chapter 7 is happily pouring tea in Chapter 8!

The Lucky Seven Wake-up Call

Lucky Seven Blog



The idea for this post came from the wonderful writer Barbara Kyle, author of the historical Thornleigh Saga thrillers. Writers are challenged by their colleagues to post on their blogs seven lines beginning from the seventh line from the seventh or seventy-seventh page of the work they’re currently writing.
My first thought was: Gosh, I haven’t written a blog in ages. I’ve been to California and Hawaii and have not yet told my readers about the Kaua’i chickens or the rabbi who made me want to commute across country to his synagogue. I haven’t written about anything other than an eighteenth-century English girl named Kescilda, in fact, and have forgotten blogs and Twitter posts and the brilliant and necessary promotional work a writer’s got to do. So here’s my entry in the Lucky Seven contest from my current work-in-progress CLAMOUR, and I promise as well to whip myself into better scribe shape:


As the baby grew, it pressed on my pelvis, but from the inside, not the nice way Evan did. It pressed down so I made water all the time, and it rose up until I could feel my stomach in my throat. It sharpened my ears somehow. Voices in the marketplace reverberated in my head like copper plates rolling down the cobblestones.
Evan’s friends were visiting our rooms in Neverford a couple of times a week. They drank late into the night and woke me up to cook for them. They talked about the focking English and the focking rich and, after they drank their ale, words like gaddewch in ni dwynn came out of their mouths.