Robert Rayner's Blog, page 6

Got the story just can’t write it (2)

And suddenly the logjam of doubt over how to write the story gives way.

Don’t really know what changed – there was no Eureka I gottit! moment – just, I feel that my mind once again is open … The hypnosis is over and no-one / Calls encore to the song … (a stretch to quote these lines from Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal, because the poet was writing about lost love, and I’m not equating being stuck in writing a story with the tragedy of lost love, but the feeling seems apposite.

(Incidentally, MacNeice follows this passage with one of my all time favourite lines of poetry: When we are out of love, how were we ever in it?)

The key to getting the draft moving seems to have been the emergence of the voice of the narrative, or, rather, the voices, two of them, one sardonic, bitter, and morose, the other tired and cynical but at the same time measured and elegiac.

So, despite the ever present doubts, and the conviction that everything I write deserves the old, derisive soccer chant, shouted in sing-song unison from the terraces – What a load of rubbish! – despite all that, the draft – messy, unpredictable, saltatory, tangential, frustrating, as always – stumbles forwards.

Until the next logjam.

Got the story just can���t write it (2)

And suddenly the logjam of doubt over how to write the story gives way.

Don���t really know what changed ��� there was no Eureka I gottit! moment ��� just, I feel that my mind once again is open ��� The hypnosis is over and no-one / Calls encore to the song ��� (a stretch to quote these lines from Louis MacNeice���s Autumn Journal, because the poet was writing about lost love, and I���m not equating being stuck in writing a story with the tragedy of lost love, but the feeling seems apposite.

(Incidentally, MacNeice follows this passage with one of my all time favourite lines of poetry: When we are out of love, how were we ever in it?)

The key to getting the draft moving seems to have been the emergence of the voice of the narrative, or, rather, the voices, two of them, one sardonic, bitter, and morose, the other tired and cynical but at the same time measured and elegiac.

So, despite the ever present doubts, and the conviction that everything I write deserves the old, derisive soccer chant, shouted in sing-song unison from the terraces ��� What a load of rubbish! ��� despite all that, the draft ��� messy, unpredictable, saltatory, tangential, frustrating, as always ��� stumbles forwards.

Until the next logjam.

Take a deep breath and …

Got the story. Just can’t write it.

Can’t find voice and tone. Can’t decide point (or points) of view, linear or non-linear time.

Usual remedy #1: Walk and ‘talk the story’ into digital voice recorder, then transcribe. But voice recorder needs bare hands, so risk frost bite just holding it, and fingers too cold to manipulate it, anyway.

Usual remedy #2: Take a break from the story, work on something else, come back to it fresh, and … And that didn’t work.

Usual remedy #3: Write any old stuff until words start to flow, so wrote pages and pages of rubbish (always do, of course) and … And that didn’t work either.

Usual remedy #4: Abort! But not ready to do that, not yet, not quite. Still feel it’ll work out in the end. (It’s happened before; always worked out in the past, in the end.)

Meanwhile.

Frustration like a boil.

Take a deep breath and ���

Got the story. Just can���t write it.

Can���t find voice and tone. Can���t decide point (or points) of view, linear or non-linear time.

Usual remedy #1: Walk and ���talk the story��� into digital voice recorder, then transcribe. But voice recorder needs bare hands, so risk frost bite just holding it, and fingers too cold to manipulate it, anyway.

Usual remedy #2: Take a break from the story, work on something else, come back to it fresh, and ��� And that didn���t work.

Usual remedy #3: Write any old stuff until words start to flow, so wrote pages and pages of rubbish (always do, of course) and ��� And that didn���t work either.

Usual remedy #4: Abort! But not ready to do that, not yet, not quite. Still feel it���ll work out in the end. (It���s happened before; always worked out in the past, in the end.)

Meanwhile.

Frustration like a boil.

All’s Well After All

Winter has been ��� still is ��� brutal and long, the world is going to pot in a flurry of hate and intolerance, the environment is as pristine as a sewer, your most trusted public servant, it turns out, has as much integrity as those helpful people who telephone you just as you���ve sat down to supper offering to remove a deadly virus from your computer if you���ll only give them your credit card details, your dog bit you, your cat has fleas, and there���s another snow storm coming.

But relax. Everything���s okay.

That���s how you feel ��� well, how I feel ��� after spending the day in the company of children, as I was privileged to do when I spent a day at Park Street Elementary School, in Fredericton, New Brunswick, last week, privileged because what more could you want than to be among such bright faces, such enthusiasm, such freely given trust, such easily provoked merriment?

High expectations come with the privilege, of course.

Like: Here we are. What have you got?

Like: One or two hundred faces looking up at you, waiting to be entertained or enlightened or, preferably (and optimistically on my part), both, as you wonder if the kids are seeing you as W.B. Yeats��� ���comfortable kind of old scarecrow��� in Among School Children, as you launch into talking about writing, and reading a few episodes from the books.

From being greeted at the door by a couple of charming and helpful student Ambassadors, through two presentations (130 grade 1-2 students in the first, 205 grade 3-5 in the second), to leaving with a gift bag and a warm note of thanks, feeling that the thanks should all be going the other way, how could you have a more fulfilling and uplifting day, convincing you that all is well with the world, after all?

Total Offence

Surveying the audience, I thought ��� Uh-oh.

It consisted not only of the adults and older teens I���d expected, but also a good number of younger teens, as well as several preteens, and I���d prepared to read an episode in which a man reveals to a friend that he���s dying, and another about the shooting of a dog, and between them the passages included the words frigging, fucked, fart, bastard, crapping, pissing, and shit.

Three shits, actually.

I���m not usually given to self-censorship, but thought ��� maybe the language is a tad inappropriate for young ears, the content a little on the heavy side for the youngsters.

First thought that followed: Maybe I could kind of wheel around the potentially offending words, maybe fudge the f word (���Come out feeling like I���m f-f-f-ed���), replace ���Crapping and pissing��� with ���Doing its business���, change ���You bastards��� to ��� er ��� ���You cads���, or, ���You rascals���, or, ���You very unpleasant people���. None of them seemed to work, didn���t quite have the intended effect.

And of course all I���d brought with me were Footprints and Second Wind, the books I���d planned to read from. The occasion was the Saint John Fog Lit Festival���s Emerging Writers Awards, the presentations interspersed with readings by Lisa Moore (Caught, February, Alligator), and me, and music by Dwayne Doucette, of Earthbound Trio.

Lisa Moore reads from February

Fortunately we were at the Saint John Free Public Library (���Canada���s first free public library���), so I scurried across to the children���s section where ��� whew ��� I found all the Brunswick Valley books about Toby and his soccer mad friends. I grabbed Total Offence and explained to the audience that it was a late substitution for the passages I���d planned to read from Footprints and Second Wind, because I didn���t want to risk giving offence to the younger members of the audience, choosing instead probably to give offence to the older element by reading the passage in which Toby and his stepfather make chocolate chip cookies, and Toby sneezes into the cookie mixture, and it���s too late to start all over again, so ��� You get the picture.

(In hindsight, I���m not sure the snot and goobers that appear in the Total Offence passage are that much worse than shit, etc.)

The readings and the music, and ��� especially ��� the readings by the winners, made for an enjoyable and engrossing afternoon, and congratulations go to those winners, who are:

Youth Poetry English: 1st ��� McKinley Leonard-Scott, You left on the twelfth day. 2nd ��� Diyasha Sen, Dusk and Dawn. 3rd ��� Gwyneth Moir, ���Little Poems���.

Youth Poetry French: 1st ��� Ania Hache-Wilczak, La voix que tu entends pas. 2nd ��� Nicholas Connors ��� Une vacance de st��r��otypes.

Youth Fiction English: 1st ��� Meaghan Boyle, Lacuna of Thought. 2nd ��� Melinda Worboys, Fear. 3rd ��� Kathryn Reilly, The Four Doors.

Comic Book: 1st ��� Stephen Hurley, Stephen’s Comics Annual of 2015!

Adult Poetry English: 1st Annette Robichaud, Castoffs. 2nd ��� Helena Hook, The Man in the Shed.

Adult Fiction English: 1st Sloane Ryan, Speak Now. 2nd ��� Jake Swan, Wood Lake. 3rd ��� Kyle Peters, The People Around You.

Adult Literacy: 1st ��� Stephanie Adams, Free.

When Fiction and Real Life Collide

I���ve been absorbed and transported by Michael Crummey���s Sweetland, absorbed in the story, transported in memory back to my early days in Newfoundland a few years after the time the novel is set in, captivated not just by the story, and its stunning evocation of period and place and its capture of detail about Newfoundland outport life, but also because, reading it, I kept thinking ��� I was there, green from England, teaching music, speaking in a puzzling hard-to-follow foreign accent and reading that puzzlement on the faces of the students, at the same time as I struggled to understand them, as much a curiosity and a faranji at that spit end of the old outport life in Newfoundland as I was in Ethiopia years later.

Remnants of the last days of that outport life:

A trip up the bay to abandoned island communities with a friend who had grown up there, and whose father returned to spend every summer there, until the summer he refused to ���come in���. Tumbledown wharfs, leaning fences, empty houses, glassless windows like accusing eyes.

The priest who gave me a ride to Gander in my first week in Newfoundland and railed all the way against the Smallwood resettlement programme, describing how he���d had to bring parishioners in from the islands to the mainland for medical attention because there were no longer any medical facilities on the islands.

Kids arriving at my door at supper time with a dish from Mom when I was living in Newfoundland alone, then standing silently in the doorway to watch me eat, as if suspicious I���d feed myself in as alien a way as I spoke.

Students visiting and watching in silence from the same doorway when (then) wife and baby arrived, watching these curiosities as if they came from outer space, strange adult beings with funny voices and a baby that looked surprisingly normal and even felt normal when, after being invited and urged to do what they so obviously wanted to do, to hold it (him), they took him and held him gingerly and tenderly, but still wary, who knew what strangeness lay beneath the swaddling blanket.

Visiting friends on Christmas morning and eating a Christmas morning snack of dried capelin.

All this as unforgettable as Sweetland.

Mystery Readers

Idly perusing stats for this blog, I���m astonished ��� probably na��vely ��� all over again at the number and variety of countries in which it is or has been read. Who are these readers? How do they stumble upon a trivial blog by a no name writer living in a little town in a little province in Canada?

Some of them I can guess at, family members or friends living or working around the world, in England and Spain and Hong Kong and Ethiopia, but others are a tantalising mystery.

I mean ��� Iraq! Who is reading my blog in that troubled country ��� unless maybe the geologist I sat beside, flying from Frankfurt to Khartoum, with whom I exchanged names and emails (promptly and foolishly lost), and who urged me to visit him, and he���d show me around. Could it be that brief friend has stumbled across the blog and is reading it now?

So here they are ��� not out of self-aggrandisement, but out of na��ve wonder at the way our messages effortlessly travel the world ��� the latest list of countries:

Canada, England, Scotland, United States, Ethiopia, Russian Federation, Spain, Hong Kong, Australia, Luxembourg, Jersey, Macao, Iraq, Denmark, Italy, Republic of Korea, St. Lucia, Greece, Switzerland, Jamaica, Philippines, France, Columbia, South Africa, Panama, Czech Republic, Germany.

Back to School Again

5 presentations

+

10 classes

+

3 grades (3, 4 and 5)

+

200 students

+

4 hours of readings and talking and answering questions about writing

+

200 book marks given out

��+

4 books presented

=

1 happy day at St. Stephen Elementary School, New Brunswick, helping to celebrate Family Literacy Week.

�� �� ����Thanks to students and teachers and staff for making it such an enjoyable and rewarding (return) visit.

All the students wrote one thing they learned from the visit on a scrap of paper, and all the papers went in a tub, from which I drew four names at the end of the day for copies of Miss Little���s Losers, Total Offence, Libby���s Got the Beat and Libby on Strike. Here are the four happy students whose names were drawn.

For the Benefit Of …

Last Friday evening was Sing for the Cure in St. Stephen, New Brunswick, featuring half a dozen bands playing through the evening to a sold out ��� in advance! ��� house at the new Civic Centre, all to benefit the Charlotte County Cancer Society.

We ��� the band, Stepping Out (that���s Tony on drums, John on guitar, Julie and Dave on vocals, and me on keyboard) ��� were first on, followed by Dashboard, 29 and Holding, Desperado, and One Night Stand.

Benefit concerts with multiple bands are never easy gigs, with the scramble first to set up and check sound, and then to strike, as fast as possible in order to keep to your scheduled time. But they���re always fun and exciting and rewarding, and this ��� the fifth St. Stephen Sing for the Cure ��� was no exception. Thanks to the inimitable 29 And Holding (pictured below) for organising it once again.