Reader review/Booker correlation or not?

Yesterday someone tweeted it would be interesting to see whether the Booker Prize went to the novel with the most reader reviews (using the Guardian Books as the reader review source). I think this is rather unfair, since it's a British publication and Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending was the hands-down winner on that site (only four of the six shortlist nominees this year are UK authors; the other two are Canadians).

So as the 2011 Booker is about to be announced, I thought I'd use another reader review site (Goodreads) and we'll just if there's a correlation or not. Here are the stats:

The Sisters Brothers - 4685 reviews
Jamrach's Menagerie - 2046 reviews
The Sense of an Ending - 1862 reviews
Pigeon English - 1730 reviews
Snowdrops - 1013 reviews
Half-Blood Blues - 581 reviews

Update: And The Guardian called it!

This just in via Twitter:

ManBookerPrize Man Booker Prize 

The winner of the 2011 #manbookerprize is Julian Barnes: The Sense of an Ending!

Every year is the year of the short story

2011 is not only the Year of the Entrepreneur, it's also the Year of the Short Story, I've belatedly realized.

Who cares if the year is three-quarters done - both themes are worthy of celebration. I'm working on a volunteer project in my community to celebrate the former.

But as a bit of a boost for the latter, here are some wonderful short story collections I'd like to share with you (bonus: three of these writers were actually discovered by me in 2011). I'm taking their injunctions seriously, and have not only written this post, but am hoping the hashtag #yoss will take off on Twitter.

Sarah Selecky and her marvellous collection, This Cake is For the Party. I was late to this particular party. Now I don't want to leave (i.e. I'm reluctant to return it to the library. I am upset the title story got cut.) I find her writing process fascinating. I can't wait for more of her work.

Julie Booker's phenomenal Up Up Up. Julie does some interesting things with the short story form in this book - and was roundly criticized by one reviewer for writing short stories that were too - short. Aritha Van Herk and I had an excellent snicker over that one at the writing workshop I attended (and she was teaching) in Fernie this summer. In fact the whole class had a good laugh about it. And yes, I was name-dropping there. Deal with it.

Jessica Westhead's And Also Sharks. She and another female Canadian writer seem to be reversing a tradition in Canadian publishing of producing a volume of short stories and then going on to write novels, something that's never made to sense to me, given there really are more novel-lovers out there than short story-lovers (at least in terms of buying books). But that brings me to a point I was going to make anyway - I'm told this is not the case in the UK, where no publisher will consider bringing out a volume of your short stories unless you've already produced three or four successful novels.

That info is courtesy of Hari Kunzru, whose own collection of short stories, Noise,  I'm dying to read. As a treat, here's his story "The Culture House."

The amazing Robin Black collection, If I Loved You I Would Tell You This, was released in paperback in 2011 as well. On Shakespeare's birthday, no less. If you haven't read it - it you must.

And while I certainly haven't succeeded in buying - or in reading - every single edition of Best American Short Stories, whether you think you're not a short story fan or know that you are, it's always a wonderful starting place to discover American writers from whom you're going to be hearing a lot more in decades to come, as well as ones you should already have been reading. The combination of a series editor working in conjunction with an annual guest editor makes this a consistently astonishing collection. In fact, I'm feeling a little faint with book lust as I notice the guest editor of the 2011 edition is Geraldine Brooks.

I'm now dying to get my hands on a copy of Robert Boswell's The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards. Came across a review of it (somewhere) recently and while I no longer remember what they said about him (and it), I know it was enough to make me write it down so I'd remember to beg, borrow, or buy a copy. As if the title alone weren't enough....

For (slightly) longer reviews of books I've read and rated, you can find me on Goodreads.

Cormorant Books kindly provided me with a copy of And Also Sharks, a lovely surprise because I was expecting a copy of Michael V. Smith's Progress and the other was a bonus treat.

House of Anansi sent me a copy of Up Up Up - out of the blue, as is their wont. Don't stop!

Fear, loathing and frustration on Writers in a Digital Age Panel at Fernie Writers' Conference

The final panel session of the 2011 Fernie Writers' Conference (held at the Arts Station after the last of the student/workshop participant readings on July 23, 2011) was 'Writers in a Digital Age' and was supposed to be a discussion about whether eBooks will change the way we write and writers and social media.

Panel participants were Dave Margoshes, writer and poet, moderator (DM); Angie Abdou, writer (AA); Warren Cariou, writer (WC); and Robyn Reed, Acquiring Editor of Freehand Books (RR).

After a brief introduction of the panel and the topic by Dave Margoshes, each member of the panel was asked to speak. Please note: I'm not an automaton. While I take good notes, these are not direct quotes but rather paraphrases. If you feel I've misrepresented what you said, please get in touch with me and I'll be happy to correct.

AA: We were also going to talk about authors and social media. In terms of ebooks, let's talk first about pricing – they're about $6. But instead of authors getting royalties of 10% for paper books – which means if your book sells for $20 you get about $2 per book – royalty rates for ebooks are much higher – 50%.

In terms of social media – a lot of authors are stomping their feet and saying, 'we don't want to promote our books.' In fact, at the recent Saskatchewan Festival of Words, one well known science fiction writer said he believes in a division of labour: he writes the books; it's the publisher's job to edit and promote them. But the demand for writers to get involved with social media seems to be coming from readers, who want a more active relationship with authors these days. This means there's a lot of potential for engagement via social media, but it's time consuming. [Actually, from everything I hear and see, the demand for authors to get involved in social media is coming from publishers, most of whom don't understand social media themselves and show little desire to learn. There are some doing an amazing job. From what I see, it's less than 10% of those who've plunged into social media willy nilly. And writers have started doing their own marketing and promotion because they've finally realized it's the only way they're going to be able to sell their books, because publishers actually seem to be worse at promotion and marketing than they used to be. Again, there are exceptions to this sweeping statement. Readers have certainly responded very positively to authors who engage well - and more - with them. Whether we were demanding it or not I'm not so sure.]

WC: For the last year I've read ebooks almost exclusively on my iPad and have exclusively bought ebooks. It provides 'a kind of freedom from the encumbrance of the physical weight of books.' This has already changed the way I read. 'There's a cornucopia of books available at the touch of a finger,' and ebooks also give you the 'ability to carry around your entire library.' Those are the ebook pluses. The negatives, if reading on an iPad, include reading on the same device on which you can check your email, which can lead to 'distracted reading.' There's also a lack of connoisseurship factor and perhaps a lack of authenticity due to the sheer availability of texts. He mentioned an article he'd read, written by a musician re the digitization of music and that this had led to songs becoming increasingly trivial. A publisher acts as some guarantee of quality. [See my comments at end of the post on this topic - it ain't necessarily so in the 21st Century. But hear hear for Warren immersing himself in this new delivery system!]

RR: Ebooks are primarily about reproducing rather than producing, that is, they're usually not originals. Available through Kobo, iBooks, Barnes and Noble, and through publishers' own web sites. She said she was concerned about losing the integrity of design in the transition to ebook process, since some ereaders allow people to choose their own fonts and 'paper' colour. The design process needs to be valued. She then talked about how the role of the writer has changed in the digital age – authors are now a brand and need logos and social media platforms. She said the way we choose what to read has changed and authors have to think about how their online presence changes the way we buy books.

DM: We've talked about how ebooks and social media change how we read, buy and sell books. But we haven't yet talked about whether ebooks will change how we write. Does technological change have an effect on how we write?

RR: Talked about Nicholas Carr's writing about the digital age and said that if you want to find a specific book, you just have to Google it. Carr writes about whether the medium [I'm more likely to consider it a delivery mechanism than a medium, but never mind] changes the way we read or write. We tend to scan when reading digitally and words on a screen are more readily digestible.

AA: Hyperlinks and video included in ebooks will change the way we read.

DM: That's already changed on blogs.

AA: Heard of a piece via Sandra Birdsell about how the typewriter would be the death of writing. [In other words, quality concerns always accompany technological change.]

WC: Word processing did affect the way people wrote – writing multiple drafts becomes naturalized. I tell my creative writing students to try writing without a computer for a change. But it's hard to tell how ebooks will affect writing.

DM: The proliferation of self publishing due to ebooks is scary. There have always been vanity presses that 'don't have professional standards.' Ebooks have really blossomed. I was curious about the ebook self-publishing phenomenon and bought one of Amanda Hocking's books [although he couldn't remember her name] and it was crap. [I don't think Dave Margoshes is part of Amanda Hocking's target market in even her wildest dreams. I really wish he'd bought an ebook by an author he knew and/or actually wanted to read so he could better assess what I think of as an alternative book delivery system. I also wish he'd read a book that had been written by someone other than - you know - a teenager. Conventional wisdom still says poets mature early, prose writers later on, yes?]

AA: The science fiction author at the Festival of Words who advocated continuance of 'division of labour' was RJ Sawyer, who seemed to think author self promotion success stories were all hearsay. She cited the example of Terry Fallis, whose podcasts and self-publishing ventures led to winning the Stephen Leacock medal and to a traditional publishing deal for his two novels.

WC: From a reader perspective, readers can be intrigued by authors [who are self promoting].

The session was then opened up to the audience, with first comment/question coming from Aritha Van Herk. I'll identify the questioners/commenters when I can, but since the event was open to the public, I didn't know everyone in the room.

Aritha Van Herk: Really it's the editors who will be the new arbiters of quality. Editing is the key part of the publishing process, and if a self-published book is edited by someone you trust, you'll invest money to buy it. Sadly there are very few editors being trained or paid.

AA: We're talking about substantive editing here, not copy editing, by the way.

RR: We've entered a different phase in the creative writing process – accessibility is the issue. Printed books take a minimum of eight to 12 months to produce – ebooks can take far less time.

Andreas Schroeder asked, but will ebooks change the way writers write? That was the original question, yes? Will they change writerly decisions? Will interaction with readers lead to choice of one ending rather than another? [Apologies to Andreas here – my cryptic notes read something like 'enc. cmd. response' but as I recall, this is what he was getting at.]

DM: The film world has been using audience market research for years.

AA: Some aspiring writers are being encouraged to get onto Twitter long before their books are even published, since there's often a two-year lag between manuscript sale and the book's appearance. My advice is to start using social media in the time between final edits and actual appearance of the book. But sometimes I feel like I spend all my time doing Facebook updates. [I disagree with this advice, actually, for a variety of reasons, chief amongst which is that there is no 'one size fits all' strategy for either social media or for marketing books. In my experience, already-established authors can afford to wait to engage with social media because their following will grow very quickly - they're already household words, the publication of a new book still drives backlist sales, and the effect of public relations and marketing is cumulative. New or lesser known authors need to engage early and in different ways with social media. I would also put Facebook at the very bottom of the list of any social media efforts an author is making. The demographics that Facebook provides can't be easily used by authors trying to sell books because there just aren't any stats available on who buys which books based on age or gender – all the data you get is going to be anecdotal and from live sales in actual bookstores – good luck gathering that information. Furthermore, I don't think readers flock to Facebook. It might well be useful to target books with regional appeal only. But publishers who've used Facebook ads say they've had far greater success using Goodreads ads. And you're looking at a built-in platform with more than 5 million readers on Goodreads. I'm not sure what you're looking at on Facebook – the great unwashed?]

RR: Social media can distract from writing efforts and can lead to abuse of social media platforms. [See my comment above. My biggest pet peeve with publishers these days is their insistence that authors establish a social media platform and presence when they themselves have not done so. No wonder publishers think readers don't buy books based on a publisher's brand – most of them don't even seem to understand the concept of branding. They've obviously never seen me at the Hurt Penguin or the Virago sales, where I buy bagsful of books by authors of whom I've never heard, based on my faith in the publisher's brand. Remember the Vintage Contemporary Classics series that was introduced in the 1980s? I bought most of that line too. Of course, McClelland & Stewart's New Canadian Library was a triumph of anti-branding that was reminscent of Soviet-era 'art': they managed to make every novel in the series look like a colonial yawn that could substitute for a sleeping pill.]

WC: What about the current bestseller Go the F*** to Sleep? [whose success was fuelled by an unintentional viral marketing campaign – see article here.

DM: Will enhanced ebooks include reviews, for instance?

RR: Publishers are giving 25% royalties for ebooks, not 50%, due to lower production costs - 50% royalties would just destroy publishers. Ebooks are edited carefully as well (when produced by traditional publishers] but ease of distribution leads to streamlining of the production process and how quickly books can be produced.

Alison Calder then demanded that the panel talk about 'the book' and talk about writing, not about marketing, selling, or producing books. She seemed a little upset.

WC (who is Alison Calder's husband): We value the book.

AA: I try not to push my obsessions onto my creative writing students, but rather to help them achieve their goals.

Tom: On the subject of writing and social media – we're facing a difficulty – the absence of readers of books. Creative writing students now think they should write, and other people should read.

AA: It's the reality TV generation.

Tom Wayman: Is there any hope that there are still/will continue to be people who read critically and carefully?

RR: I'm worried about ereaders leading to skimming rather than actual reading, especially for the young adult market (those aged 14-19). All the writing aimed at that market seems to be about vampires, and narcissism on the writing front has been enhanced by blogging.

Gordon Sombrowski (who was in my workshop and whose first book of short stories will be published by Oolichan Books this fall): Skimmed reading leads to skimmed writing – we need to read critically.

RR: But there are still good educators who are teaching people to read critically.

WC to Tom Wayman: There's the danger people are not engaging as deeply with the text when reading online or on ereaders. But this allows other ways of approaching a text, especially for things like sound poetry, which is enhanced by the technological potential of being read online. Sound poetry like that produced by bpnichol demands to be heard, not just read. [Fairly substantial paraphrasing going on here.]

Sid Marty talked about James Keelaghan's songwriting course – he doesn't accept musicians into his course unless they already know at least 80 songs. How to translate that to creative writing classes and not let people who don't read into them. 'If people don't read, they don't know how bad their writing is.'

A member of the audience who identified himself as a software developer working on iPod, iPad and iPhone software said that there is always resistance and fear in the existing marketplace when technological change occurs, and that he was hearing a lot of fear from the panel and from audience members – the notion of music self-publishing led to fear that a 'sea of rubbish' would be created and distributed by 'bedroom artists.' He also talked about the gaming market: games used to sell for $40, but are now selling for $2.99 per game. But, he said, the quality of the games hasn't diminished with the price cut – what's fuelled the price cuts is the fact that so many more people are buying and playing games [i.e. economies of scale have kicked in as market base has increased exponentially]. Ebooks and self publishing means there can be zero friction between you, the author, and your audience – but you need to find the right price, and it is not going to be $20. App developers are selling a lot more apps for a lot less to a lot more people.

I'm not sure when I made my comments, but I did want to challenge some of the things the panel had said. I said I was glad Angie had brought up the higher royalty rates for ebooks and she replied that some publishers were offering only 7% royalty rates now – while 10% was standard and it could rise to 12% or 15%, overall the royalty rate was decreasing rather than increasing. I talked about the fact that ebooks are ephemeral and that the larger publishers are completely missing the boat by pricing them far too highly. I said that while opinions re the 'sweet spot' ebook price point ranged from 99 cents to $6.99, larger publishers were shooting themselves in the foot by pricing ebooks at anything higher than the price of a mass market paperback because these are ephemeral objects, not tangible ones (and that most of the larger publishers in Canada and the US seemed oblivious to this]. I also talked about how Harper Collins in the US has essentially announced that by allowing only 26 'lends' of its ebooks, it's transformed the transaction from a purchase to a rental.

DM: I'm glad someone mentioned fear. We're afraid not only of ebooks but of all technological change. He asked Robyn Read if some publishers were angry about ebooks.

RR: I was at a conference recently where I hoped everyone would be excited about ebooks, but instead everyone was scared. We resent software. We comment on blogs etc. but we don't comment fairly. We're living in the age of snark – and it changes the way some people write.

Another audience member said the discussion reminded him of the way the introduction of the printing press was received - as well as radio and television. 'A story is still a story.' There's no reason to fear new technology. What we're missing now is acceptance of the fact that the role of traditional publishers will become even more important – and that that was also the role of traditional (rather than etail) bookstores.

AA: To play devil's advocate: has writing today become not about good writing, but rather about celebrity?

WC: Poetry writing is very strong in Canada. But it has never been a money maker.

AA: Does poetry work on ebooks?

RR: Fear is necessary.

Another audience member suggested that the panel wasn't giving readers enough credit – that the inclusion of many classic novels free on ereaders and available online through Google Books was leading to an increase in reading the classics by young readers.

That was a lovely note on which to end, and whoever the young woman who raised that point was – thank you.

A few thoughts of my own that I wasn't able to express during the panel discussion (in addition to those appearing in square brackets after the panel members' remarks):

• No one talked about the sheer volume of books being published these days or about the fact that publishing a million books per year will inevitably lead to a crisis for bricks and mortar retailers, who simply cannot afford to rent larger and larger spaces every year – it's just not realistic.
• Aritha Van Herk was really the only commenter who rang an alarm bell that needs to be rung at five-minute intervals: publication by a traditional publisher no longer represents (if it ever has) any guarantee of quality whatsoever if there are no longer any editors working at publishing companies. And there are, indeed, fewer and fewer skilled editors working at traditional publishing companies.
• No one talked about the horror stories of books being rushed into publication to meet imagined or real market demand without any editing whatsoever. And I can certainly attest to the fact that this does, indeed, happen, and not to first-time authors either.
• And there was a certain irony in hearing so many poets in particular at the conference expressing fear and loathing of all self-publishing and not really distinguishing between vanity press publishing and self-publishing that involves actual substantive editing and is, in many ways, one response to a publishing model that everyone seems to agree was handicapped to begin with in small markets and is becoming increasingly enfeebled and confused as time goes on. What about all those little poetry chapbooks, chaps? Did all those poems benefit from editing before you started selling them at your readings and on your web sites? Until you can all say yes to that, I'm thinking, hold back on sweeping dismissals of everything that's self published. And don't assume that just because one of the big Canadian publishers put their stamp of approval on the self published novels they picked up to make a quick buck that they actually assigned an editor to work on it. Because I'm pretty sure, in the case of one author mentioned in this post, that that really didn't happen.
• Not to be TOO bitchy, but I found it rather irritating that the word 'curation' wasn't once mentioned by the panel - Warren Cariou came closest to it when he talked about lack of connoisseurship and market research. I cannot imagine a similar panel of US or UK authors and publishers who would not have focused on this concept in a panel on authors in a digital age.

Resources:

Here's a good article I found today that supports my contention that your social media efforts have to start earlier rather than later and gives you some idea of where you should focus your efforts.

Here's an article I wish I - and the panel members - had read.

And apparently there's a UK psychologist named David Galbraith who's working on the way writing influences creativity, so he might be a resource to answer the question none of us could answer, whether ebooks will affect the way we write.

The Canterbury Trail Mountains

The Canterbury Trail Mountains, originally uploaded by The River Thief.

Since the WiFi at the Fernie Alpine Resort is rather spotty (at least for me and my iPod it is), I wasn’t able to live tweet the panel session of the Fernie Writers’ Conference I attended this afternoon and thought I’d blog about it instead.

Because there’s another event this evening and I have an assignment due tomorrow morning at 11AM, this is going to be a quick and dirty blog post, with hyperlinks added later.

Panel topic was, Can Creative Writing Be Taught? Panel consisted of Alison Calder (AC), Aritha Van Herk (AVH), and Andreas Schroeder (AS), with Peter Oliva (PO) moderating.

PO began the session by quoting Michael Ondaatje, who apparently once said that he’d heard a writer’s research was like panniers. He didn’t know what a pannier was, so looked it up and learned it was either containers in which you could put things or the framework that held up a Victorian woman’s dress. But by the time he’d learned this he was at least a third of the way through writing The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and it didn’t really matter much.

PO posed the first question to the panel: are creative writing programs and workshops therefore designed to create the framework for the pannier contents.

Marina Endicott piped up, ‘What about the student with nothing in their panniers – or, alternatively – with bloated panniers?’

AC said to some extent creative writing programs involve a redistribution of the wealth of the pannier contents, involving a certain amount of trading. (This immediately put me in mind of the quilter’s stash and the trading of not only small quantities of fabric but of the peer learning process that goes on when you quilt with others – the solutions proffered by other quilters are often both far more creative and far more practical than anything you’ve been able to come up with yourself. You’ll see a minor panel theme is textile-based.)

AVH said Michael Ondaatje can use anything and make it work, but that the gathering process teaches you both constraint and restraint.

PO then asked whether the panel had any teaching creative writing horror stories and told one himself. He’d had a student in his class whose work was very promising and he encouraged him to pursue a career as a writer. He subsequently discovered his student was in the Guinness Book of World Records as the person who could play the most musical instruments – 115 in all. He was horrified to learn that to fund his writing career his student had begun selling off his instruments, saying he was tired of playing in smoky bars anyway. This happened just as smoking bans in bars started to go into effect. We didn’t learn whether the student became anywhere near as successful as a writer as he had been a musician.

AS told the story of a female student who – like those people who have as many surgeries as possible (I couldn’t help but think of Elizabeth Taylor) – had workshopped the same manuscript for more than 20 years, attending workshops and classes with some of Canada’s most distinguished writers. It was in great shape after 20 years of editing, but when he had the presumption to make a suggestion about how it could be improved, she said, ‘Well! Mordecai Richler didn’t say that was necessary.’

AVH said she’d a female student who submitted three 500-page manuscripts, which she diligently read and commented on, providing feedback on all three. ‘Huh,’ replied the student, ‘that’s what last year’s writer-in-residence said too.’ But of course she hadn’t made a single change to any of her submissions in the intervening year.

Dave Margoshes began the audience participation portion, saying that you don’t teach talent or imagination in a creative writing course, but you do teach craft and an appreciation of the revision process. While Jack Kerouac talked disdainfully of rejecting everything that smacked of being ‘crafty or revised’ he was really talking about the contrived.

PO said you don’t hear about Kerouac’s notebooks, and implied that the notion that his final published was written as a single long stream-of-consciousness teletype was a myth and that there was a process, which undoubtedly involved rereading, selection and editing, whether self-editing or by an actual editor prior to publication.

AS said he doesn’t believe in one-draft wonders, and that they’re the exception, not the rule.

Marina Endicott talked about private tutors and learning from reading, which isn’t a part of creative writing course work. She also said that actors don’t expect to be successful based solely on their talent or skill without undergoing training, and asked why anyone would think it would – or should – be different for writers.

AS said there’s a notion that taking a creative writing degree program or workshop has, to some extent, the same taint as athletes on steroids, but in fact plays are usually written then workshopped, making them collaborative endeavours involving feedback from directors, producers, and actors. He also talked about the story that circulated about Jerzy Kozinski’s first novel, The Painted Bird: some say Max Perkins’ (Kozinski’s editor) contributed 95 per cent of that novel with his extensive rewrites of what amounted to a first draft.

AC said all writing is essentially a collaborative process involving friends, family, first readers, and editors.

AVH said even though some people can stand on their toes they don’t become ballerinas without training, training, training, and more training. Creative writing programs teach ways of using language, and, more important, teach people to get out of their comfort zones so they can make use of ‘all the muscles we use when writing – not just one’s biceps.’

She then asked if there was a book in all of us.

AC said, there may be a story in all of us, but not necessarily a book. Let’s face it – some people are boring.

PO told the story of Margaret Atwood on a cruise ship. She encountered a doctor who told her he was thinking of becoming a writer. Yes, she said, I’m thinking of becoming a brain surgeon myself. Angie Abdou suggested this story was somewhat apocryphal and that she’d heard the writer was Margaret Laurence. Someone else said they’d once been asked, ‘So are all Canadian authors named Margaret?’

AC said that in order to get out of her own comfort zone and get away from the well-worn paths she usually travels as a poet, she’d started working collaboratively. This forces her to – if she finds herself writing about elephants yet again – ask herself the question, ‘would this work better if it was about a turtle rather than an elephant?’

AVH said you have, as a writer, to look for what will discomfit you most.

AS said that while creative writing programs aren’t therapy sessions, they can indeed force people out of their comfort zones (the implication being that this a good thing in terms of creativity).

AC said that it was always a good idea to work outside your genre and try something new – if you’re a poet, take a prose workshop; if you write non-fiction, try taking a poetry course.

AS said in UBC’s MFA creative writing program you have to take classes/workshops in a minimum of three different genres.

PO talked about the vast increase in the number of MA programs in creative writing that currently exist.

AVH said this was especially true in the US, where the number of creative writing programs - many of them online - has increased from about 300 to 1200 in the last 30 years or so. Of course, she said, a fair bit of this amounts to nothing more than ‘tuition harvesting’ on the part of post-secondary institutions. (I found this a refreshing cynical admission.)

Angie Abdou asked a question of her own, followed by another posed to her on Twitter. Angie’s question was, ‘If you’re thinking of taking a creative writing program, what’s the one piece of advice you’d give a potential student?’ And then passed on the question from Twitter, which was, ‘why are students being pushed into MFA programs in creative writing – which primarily teach you how to teach, when there are no jobs available teaching creative writing, rather than MA programs which would teach you how to write?’

AVH said you need to look closely at every program and think about what your goals are. It isn’t easy to get the information you need, but you need to look long and hard at the faculty, and not just who’s listed on the masthead, since they may well not be doing any of the teaching. She cited the example of an author named Malcolm who’s listed as being one of the instructors in a UK creative writing degree program – and he’s basically window dressing. Marina Endicott knew who she was talking about but we’ll have to fill in the blanks re the writer’s last name (and that of the university) when we remember who it is (if you know, please let me know via a comment – it might save one of us waking up at 3AM shouting the guy’s name).

AS said the lack of positions available for teachers of creative writing was directly related to lifting age of retirement requirements for profs, and that Baby Boomers can now continue to work till they’re 90 at universities. The point of the UBC program is to prepare students for a career as a writer, not to prepare people to teach creative writing. And UBC’s program is unique among creative writing programs in Canada in that there are no course work requirements, it’s all workshops. He also said that UBC used to hire on CVs only, but that degrees held have assumed greater importance and that a recent dean wanted everyone teaching in the creative writing to have PhDs. There’s been a temporary reprieve on this issue, but degree requirements to teach creative writing continue to edge up and an MFA is the rock-bottom requirement.

He also said fact finding was a difficult process and that the one thing every student contemplating taking a creative writing degree program should avoid was a program where the teachers were intent on creating disciples.

AC said she’d finally remembered a student horror story. She said every year, when she asks if there are any questions, someone will ask ‘how do I get an agent?’ As a poet, she says, she wouldn’t have the faintest idea. And that as a beginning writer, this is putting the cart before the horse (ok I’m editorializing a bit there, she didn’t actually say that, but it’s what she meant). ‘You don’t need an agent,’ she said, ‘you need to learn how to write!’

AVH said creative writing programs always focus on working on craft, never on the business aspects of a writing career. (From my perspective as someone who tries to help authors market their work, and that of many agents, publishers, and booksellers, I’m betting this is something we’d like to see addressed in creative writing programs taken by adults, but never mind….)

PO quoted Roberto Bolano, who said, ‘short story writers should be brave’ and Mark Twain, who said, ‘a tale should accomplish something and arrive somewhere.’

AVH said her one rule in her creative writing classes is, ‘no guns, no killing – let your characters live’ – you don’t just to get them kill them off by shooting them or having them killed by a bus when stepping off a curve.

A workshop participant asked what was the one thing students should bring to a creative writing program.

AVH said her favourite students are those who know how to celebrate the local, and said Andrew Wedderburn had been in her class. One of the other students told Andrew he couldn’t write a book set in and about Airdrie, AB, ‘because no one’s ever heard of Airdrie.’ His novel The Milk Chicken Mom is now being published. And it’s set in Airdrie. (Obviously no one said this to Dianne Warren before she wrote Cool Water, or Angie Abdou before writing The Canterbury Trail.)

AS said that when he’s reading manuscript submissions for admission to the UBC program, he doesn’t give a damn how good the writing is – what he looks for is a lively imagination, because this is something he can’t teach or transmit, and without it good writing doesn’t really matter.

AC said she looks for what’s produced as a result of assigned exercises, that the students she gets excited about are those whose imagery is striking and original and that direct her to look at things in new ways.

I then asked my devil’s advocate question regarding training and academic qualifications for those who teach creative writing. Surely, I said, there’s some merit in having someone teaching actually know how to teach (although an MA, an MFA and/or a PhD are certainly no guarantee of a good teacher). Writing workshops 30 years ago were often treated by authors hired on the basis of their CVs (i.e. the work they’d produced as writers) as paid vacations, and that I’d taken two, taught by well known Canadian authors, who had absolutely no plan at all. At the second one two of us had read and I had happened to bring with me a copy of John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, and to compensate for the instructor’s lack of a plan, we’d done several of the group and individual exercises he’d provided.

PO said he likes to teach using the Socratic dialogue model, teaching his students how to critique and how to learn distance – that teaching creative writing involves direction given by a good teacher.

AS said that teaching creative writing can be done very badly and that there’s often a closed loop system in play, where classes are highly scripted and there are no surprises and no challenges. This doesn’t work for everyone, and when it doesn’t, sometimes a one:one tutorial system works. He also said they can’t always make an exception for the students who aren’t benefiting from the workshop approach, which was a shame because young writers are very vulnerable.

PO then quoted some (highly questionable) statistics on writers’ lifespans. Poets and fiction writers tend to live much shorter lives than non-fiction writers. We’d all like to see the source of those stats, I think.

At this point we were a good half hour over our allotted time, so I didn’t get to ask my final question: If you were choosing a creative writing program, which would you rather take, the one John Gardner taught at SUNY Binghamton (taught by an obviously very dedicated instructor at an institution that doesn’t have an amazing reputation for creating successful writers), or one taught by Raymond Carver (who seemed to have been, one way or the other, barely there) at the Iowa Writers Workshop, which has an astonishing track record of producing successful writers?

On the Outside, Looking Like a Writer in Desperate Need of an Editor

This week I took a detour from my usual reading after seeing a rather surprising Tweetstorm regarding Walrus Magazine's review of Rupinder Gill's memoir, On the Outside Looking Indian.

The Tweetstorm centred on Emily Landau's audacity in writing a negative review and the question was asked, 'couldn't they have found a brown girl to review it?' I didn't get into it. My question would have been, Why should they have? And my snarkier comment would have been, Here we go again with yet another version of the appropriation of voice argument. Frankly I'm fed up with this nonsense when attempting to evaluate writing. I doubt very much Rupinder Gill's intended audience is other 'brown girls' in the same way I doubt very much that Joseph Boyden writes for other people of aboriginal ancestry (he's certainly not sufficiently First Nations to make it in that category, and in fact, like Louise Erdrich, suffers from some pretty ugly reverse racism from First Nations folks).

Wary as I am of Walrus Magazine's lit crit and reviews, based as they are on a desire to be provocative rather than fair and reflecting a sensibility that is peculiarly 416-Toronto while thumbing its nose at the 905 area code and the majority of Canadians, and having found another, diametrically opposed review of OtOLI, I decided I was going to have to read it for myself and make up my own mind.

Luckily the library had it and it was a quick read. It was also a bewildering read on many levels.

Gill is the second child in a family of four girls and one boy (the youngest). Growing up in Kitchener Waterloo, she was isolated within her own family, as there isn't a significant IndoCanadian presence in the area. (Take a look at the demographics - IndoCanadians aren't even listed - there are barely any Italians in K-W!) And the book is both a memoir of her childhood spent in front of a television set and of her 31st year, in which she attempts not so much to recreate her childhood, but to overcome its legacy by finally doing some of the things she wished she'd done as a child. To some extent this book should really be compared with Eat, Pray, Love I think - except for the fact that Gill's year of living goal-mindedly was self-funded and - well - I refuse to finish reading Eat, Pray, Love.

Among the many things Gill's childhood lacked: summer camp, sleepovers, dating, and dog ownership. The child of first-generation Punjabi immigrants, Gill's parents wouldn't let her - or her sisters - do many of the things we think of as classically Canadian. As a WASP who's old enough to be Gill's mother, I have to begin my quibbling here though. Yes I had a dog. Yes I went to summer camp for four years in a row. Yes I learned to swim there. Yes I've been to a grand total of two sleepovers and I remember one of them. Yes I was allowed to date in high school - although I didn't do it much (nor did many of the other kids who attended my academic high school - we were busy with music lessons, student council, demonstrating against the war in Vietnam and nuclear testing, orchestra, theatre, sports, etc.). What I wasn't allowed to do was watch unlimited quantities of television - au contraire. I wasn't even allowed to read for pleasure until and unless my homework was done. And I certainly had household chores - by the time I was in high school I was responsible for doing all the dishes, cleaning the bathroom once a week and both vacuuming the living room and sponging down all the furniture (the pets, a cat and a dog were officially mine, therefore the responsibility for feeding them and for cleaning up after them was also mine).

And so, the year she turns 30, Gill takes tap dancing lessons, investigates dog ownership and decides she's better off as a dog aunt (after one of her sisters does eventually acquire a dog), quits her job as a TV publicist, attends a week-long summer day camp as a counsellor, spends two months in New York where she takes some swimming lessons, and goes to Disney World. More important, she comes to some sort of understanding of and reconciliation with her childhood and her parents, whose strictness regarding appropriate activities for a good Sikh girl chafed so much when she was growing up.

So this book's premise is just fine. Whether you accept Julian Barnes' character's dictum in England, England that over the age of 25 you're no longer allowed to blame your parents for anything or not, Gill's desire to live purposefully rather than whinily is to be applauded.

But then there's the book itself, and Gill's writing skills. For someone who in high school was voted 'most likely to become a stand-up comic,' Gill's writing indicates she needs either one hell of a good editor or a writing partner. From the book's first page: 'In Indian adolescence you never break free of the rules. You cook, clean, babysit, clean, get good grades, clean, be silent, clean, and don't challenge your parents in any way -- especially while cleaning.' That paragraph could work vocally, but timing's everything in comedy, and with the flat delivery of print, it doesn't quite cut it. There are repeated 'jokes' about IndoCanadian facial hair - from the 'hibernating slug' that is her eyebrows (have you ever seen a photo or a self portrait of Frida Kahlo, Rupinder?) to the 'sideburns' she artfully arranges her hair to hide.

Then there are the earnest segments, as when Gill's asked for - and been denied - a three-month leave of absence from her job and decides to quit instead.

'On Monday morning I walked into my boss's office and said the two words I have been agonizing over for the past week: "I quit." As they came out of my mouth it was as if I was having an out-of-body-experience. I couldn't believe it, but it was done. I offered more than a month's notice. I would stay until the end of August and then I would be cast out into the world, jobless, clueless, and full of hope and excitement. I was. In fact, I could not wait.'

There are myriad examples of Gill's awkward prose similar to the one above, but for me the failure to use contractions ('I could not wait' as opposed to 'I couldn't wait') is indicative of someone who's neither a naturally good writer nor someone who's been properly edited. During her swimming lessons she stays 'under the water' rather than 'under water.' 'The second I would extend an arm' - 'Zoe splashed a downpour onto my face' - 'I needed to get everything in line for a chance to return to NYC once again, and not just as a visitor.' This is prose written not in dialect but just badly.

The issues Gill raises are important ones. I've been fascinated by the immigrant experience and by the pressures on first-generation Canadians, caught between two worlds and two cultures, for decades now. The whole 'vertical mosaic vs melting pot' (Canada's approach to multiculturalism vs the US's) notion was first articulated just as I was entering university and embracing my own young adult freedom. She's not unthoughtful, and she's not silly. But oh did this book need to be sent back for a rewrite and very very carefully line edited. I'm very glad her 'second childhood' changed her life. I hope she succeeds in her goal of writing for television. However, since my taste runs more to gritty, dark, cerebral television dramas (or so Netflix tells me), I won't be salivating at the prospect of watching a show written by someone who grew up on a steady diet of Welcome Back Kotter and Three's Company without gagging. I'll be sticking with The Wire and Mad Men, thank you very much, and continuing to give Hot in Cleveland a miss.

Oh and by the way - for an absolutely phenomenal interview with David Simon, creator of The Wire, and someone who's committed to pushing the boundaries of television - take a look at this.

Music Mondays for an ESL class - Alberta

Ian Tyson Four Strong Winds lyrics

Valentines, feminists and fathers

You make me laugh, originally uploaded by The River Thief.

It's hard to believe it's been 20 years since my father died. This photo was taken when he was about the same age I am now, so I suppose it's an appropriate one to use for this post.

This version of the photo (which was, I believe, taken by cousin Douglas Ward), is cropped. In the photo my father is standing, looking down at my mother.

They had recently moved from Ottawa, my mother's home town, to Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, a village of about 3000 people 40 miles from Halifax.

My dad had been working for the federal government for quite some time, and despite a year-long French immersion course, it seemed unlikely he would ever be certified bilingual. Without that certification it was unlikely he'd ever get another promotion. I'm not so sure he really cared about that, but my mother certainly did. So when a unilingual English job came up in Halifax, he applied for and got it.

My parents rented an apartment in Dartmouth for the first year they were in Nova Scotia. It was the first time in a very long time they'd been tenants, and they couldn't seem to grasp the idea of paying rent or of sharing a building. They were on an emergency route, and were frequently awakened in the middle of the night by ambulances howling as they tore past the apartment building. Then there was the woman upstairs, who came home long after they'd gone to bed and would drop one of her shoes on the floor of her bedroom, waking them up. They'd wait in vain for her to drop the other shoe so they could go back to sleep.

After just over a year of this, they decided they'd had enough, and started looking for a place in the country, a little hobby farm from which they could commute. After looking at only three houses, they decided to buy an old, unrenovated Victorian full of antiques in Shubenacadie. It came with close to an acre of land, but in a long narrow strip that included a railroad right of way, and was next door to one of the remaining farms in the village.

I'll spare you the saga of the renovations and of the foolishness of the purchase, except to say that the house (while boasting some truly lovely Douglas fir woodwork, particularly a cathedral-ceilinged living/dining room and some primary coloured stained glass windows), had absolutely no insulation, was heated by an oil stove in the kitchen - and that the commute to Halifax took close to an hour. Oh, and that their purchase coincided with the OPEC oil crisis. All of a sudden the house didn't seem like quite the bargain they'd initially thought.

None of this matters, though. I'm musing about the irony of a tweet from Alain de Botton that I saw shortly after logging on to Twitter this morning, which is so singularly a propos I have to wonder if he's reading my mind.

'Perhaps the most unambiguous victory of feminism has been to ensure that fathers properly nurture their children.'

When I try to explain to people that my father was my primary caregiver, I'm often met with blank stares and certainly with a profound lack of understanding. It's not just that he - born in 1926 - pitched in on diaper changing (although one of his favourite stories to tell was how he'd changed my diaper on the glass counter of a Buffalo department store display case and how helpful the sales girl had been in this endeavour - hard to imagine this happening now, isn't it? 'We have washrooms for this purpose, SIR.')

My earliest memories are of my father singing me to sleep when I was still in my cot. I was diagnosed as hyperactive as a child, although it may just have been the result of a gluten intolerance I outgrew by the time I was seven. Certainly I had trouble getting to sleep and terrible insomnia until I was close to 30. My dad's repertoire consisted of Baptist hymns and the occasional popular song. 'Little White Church in the Vale' was one of his specialities, as were 'You Are My Sunshine" and 'Beautiful Beautiful Blue Eyes.' If you don't recognize the latter or are having trouble Googling it, look up 'Beautiful Beautiful Brown Eyes' instead - my father changed the title of the song and its lyrics since I was a very blue-eyed, blonde haired child at the time. One night he forgot to change the lyrics (he must have been tired) and I was inconsolable. He never made that mistake again.

Having taken a year's maternity leave when I was first born, my mother had returned to work. Initially we lived in an eccentric flat on the top floor of my grandmother's house, and she looked after me during the day. My father would often come home for lunch even then. After we bought our own house, there was no daycare, and my mother stayed home for a couple of years to look after me. I have almost no memories of this time at all (which I find a little odd, since I was almost five), except for one fierce argument in the kitchen of our new house in the Ottawa suburb of Alta Vista. My mother was determined that I wear my winter coat to school. I was determined that I would not. (It was January - in Ottawa - what was I thinking? Probably, 'you're not the boss of me!'). I believe my mother won that round.

According to her, I drove her back to work. Certainly if there were more arguments as ferocious as the one about the winter coat, I see her point. But in truth, she had always considered herself a feminist and a career woman. Domesticity wasn't her thing. Neither was motherhood, although she tried, in her own way.

My mother's return to work just as I started Grade Two posed numerous problems relating to child care. Day cares didn't exist at the time. We lived only two blocks from my elementary school. School didn't start till 9AM - but both my parents had to be at work by 8:30. That problem was easily enough solved - I'd just stay at home for half an hour or so after they both left for work. I got home from school by four o'clock. My cousin Marsha, in high school at the time, was hired to babysit me after school. Getting dinner started was also part of her job. There were a couple of times Marsha had something she had to do after school. In those instances, my Aunt Pearl swung into action and took us all - my cousin Sandy and her houseful of foster children - to the movies (I'm still not so sure Lawrence of Arabia or Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea were appropriate viewing for an eight year old, but never mind).

But because we lived so close to the school, they wouldn't let me take my lunch - I had to go home, and the school was adamant at the time - they were educators, not babysitters. So be it.

Eventually my parents came up with a solution. My father would come home to make me lunch every day. He'd already started making breakfast every day when my mother went back to work. He seemed to love the problem solving inherent in the timing of bacon, eggs, toast and coffee, and within a few weeks he had the whole thing sorted out. Lunch wasn't anywhere near as difficult a challenge - soup and sandwich doesn't require the same kind of precise timing as bacon and eggs.

When I got sick - and I had most of the usual childhood illnesses, perhaps more until I had my tonsils out the summer I was eight - my maternal grandmother was always there for us. 'Bring the baby over here, I'll look after her,' she'd say. When I got scarlet fever, her house had to be quarantined. I was isolated in the apartment upstairs, and everyone had to take penicillin. This was, I thought, suitably exciting and exotic.

I'm not sure why he first got involved with the bicycle safety workshops - whether that was preceded by his joining the Parent Teacher Association (PTA) or not. I know there'd been a child from my public school who'd been killed by a car because the Elmo the Safety Elephant flag was permanently lowered at my public school. But the bicycle safety workshops became an annual spring event, and my dad was always both the behind-the-scenes organizer and front and centre in delivering the workshops.

He initially got involved with the PTA because I was having trouble in school - not my grades, but with my grade two teacher. I'm not sure what the first warning sign was, but I do remember a fuss at the Christmas party over the teacher not believing something I'd said and demanding a letter from my parents to confirm I was telling the truth. When my father started digging into what was going on in the classroom, he was told by the principal that yes, they realized she was a bad teacher, but that she had so much seniority no one could touch her. Yes, I could be transferred to another class, but it would mean my leaving the accelerated program, which was the alternative to skipping a grade - we spent about seven months in each of grades one through four rather than 10, and sped through four years of school in three.

My father was enraged on my behalf. And he started digging into the issue. He joined the PTA. And he discovered at least half a dozen other children who were having trouble with our grade two teacher. Some of them had started bedwetting. Others had broken out in stress rashes. Some were having nightmares. A few were suddenly getting average or poor marks, even though they'd done significantly better in kindergarten and grade one.

Eventually grade two ended (although it was the beginning of grade three for me part-way through the year). My father stayed on the PTA. Eventually he became its president. Other than the bike safety workshops and reassuring other parents that their children weren't mentally ill, I'm not sure what he did there.

What I do know though is that the effort my father made during those five or six years was extraordinary. I don't know many men who'd be willing to step up to the plate to the extent he did. Between the breakfast and the lunch making (and supervision), the PTA meetings and driving my babysitter cousin home, he must have put in at least four hours a day devoted solely to my welfare and nurturing. Somehow he never made any of it seem like a chore. He never made me feel that he resented doing any of the things he did, that he'd rather be having lunch with a colleague or even just having a sandwich at his desk, just as he never made me feel he'd rather be watching TV, reading a book, or even enjoying adult companionship with my mother those nights he'd sing me to sleep. Most important, he never made my mother or me feel that what he was doing was 'women's work' or in any way unnatural - even though my mother was one of a grand total of only two 'working' mothers among my classmates.

After a series of cerebral hemorrhages in his early 60s, my father had severe anomia and became an expert at circumlocution. My mother and I would ask him what he'd had for lunch, and he'd say, 'A round thing on another one of those round things.' We were puzzled by this, but confident he'd eaten something. I decided to spend some time with him before he died, and moved back in with my parents when I was in my early thirties. It was difficult for all of us, but in some ways it was worth it. I'd taught myself how to cook after leaving home, and the brain damage my father had sustained had made him a lot less resistant to vegetarian cooking (his attitude when I'd cooked meatless meals before he got sick was, 'It's good, but there isn't any meat in it.'). I made him a curry once and he ate it with relish, saying, 'Oh, I like this - it has those little round animals we never used to eat before you came to stay with us.' I never open a can of chick peas to this day without thinking of their alternate name.

With only spotty occupational therapy, he wasn't comfortable using the phone after he got sick and never initiated calls. My mother would call me and put him on the phone. He'd forgotten the conventions of telephone conversation, and no longer knew he was supposed to say hello at the start of conversations and goodbye at the end. Instead he'd say, 'I love you.' I never minded.

There's something fitting about the fact that he died on Valentine's Day. If I'd ever needed an excuse to celebrate a made-up holiday that I find intensely hypocritical in an alternative way, his death gave me a permanent out. What I learned from my dad is that there's nothing passive or commercial about love. It's a noun, but it's also an active verb. It's something you show people 365 days a year, whether it's making the tea or shining someone's shoes for them or just being there for them, letting them know you're on their side and that they're not alone in the world. It's not about roses and diamonds and champagne.

Thank you for teaching me that, Dad.

Allan Frederick Seeley
May 21, 1926 to February 14, 1991