On Growing Up and Writing

by Andy Sinclair

Writing is hard.

That’s the rote comment exchanged between me and my writing partner, Angie Abdou, whenever we are stuck, or have had enough on-the-page frustrations for the day, or just... don’t feel like doing it. It’s the phrase that we text or email or say to each other that requires no thinking. It’s as easy as hello, goodbye, even WTF.

Like any aphorism, it’s not universally true. Sometimes writing is as easy as sitting down and allowing it. Sometimes it occurs when you just stop trying so much (although this strategy is not foolproof either). Deciding to put down words on a page is a practice that requires being comfortable with the idea of elusiveness. Because trying to safeguard something elusive is excruciating.

And yet, sometimes we get enough down. I’m very happy that my book Breathing Lessons is being published. It feels funny to say, “I have a book coming out,” and I usually feel like a fraud for saying it, and so I often avoid the subject completely. A book seems like something an adult would produce, and therein lies a discovery for each of us, one that we sometimes avoid: I am a grown-up now. Most of us are. But ever since Dimitri Nasrallah emailed me to say that Véhicule Press was offering to publish the manuscript and that he would be my editor at Esplanade Books, I have had to chew on it.

When I handed in the final revision, he asked if I was ready to stand by every word, and I said yes, somewhat solemnly. Does it sound like a marriage ceremony? My sister was pregnant at the time.

“Two new arrivals for the Sinclairs in 2015!” proclaimed my mother happily. It’s a lot of responsibility.

And also just a book.

Breathing Lessons is a very personal novel that describes situations that are hard to write about. I surrendered to any energy that allowed me to write freely and uncensored; afterwards I took out lots of stuff and made lots of things up, but tried to stay true to what I meant (I originally wrote that last bit and tried to keep the elusiveness, but I’ve already touched on how problematic that can be).

Since finishing it, I have bid adieu to the protagonist, Henry Moss. It was not a sad goodbye; I was ready to move on. And writing about Henry was good practice for writing down things that are hard not just to express, but to say. Henry does drugs and has lots of sex and can be jealous in a way that makes him come across as very ugly. But I wrote about those things. And now I’m writing (no new book yet!) about other things that are difficult to share, because they might make me seem disagreeable, and I would rather people find me likeable. Some of these are observations about our governments, worries about new security laws, and questions about why big industries seem to have such disproportionate input into new legislation. These topics have always been written about, and I haven’t made much headway into saying something new yet. But I wouldn’t have even started if I hadn’t had Henry to practice being scared with. So, I am grateful to him.

I’m curious about the power of fiction to make social commentary, and the way it evokes rather than describes truths. I’ve also had more time to read since the book was done, and the more I read, the more I am struck by how much people are thinking. I just finished The News by Alain de Botton and found it to be a helpful guide to selective information acquisition. And Families Are Formed Through Copulation by Jacob Wren, which makes a fitting adjunct and is a soothing balm for surveillance angst. And by the time you read this, I will be excited about something else.
     
Often I find something so nuanced and perfect that it makes me want to not bother with writing anymore, because I can barely follow it (sometimes I can’t), let alone try to expand on it (I have read similar statements by other writers but it deserves to be said again, for we must believe in our own adequacy if nothing else), but mostly I am just inspired. I hope we all are. I’m aware of how everybody has moments when ideas coalesce, when dots connect, or when reality becomes a speck more tangible. These revelations are unique, and some of us try to write about them. Others paint them, or put them into a dance. Many of us simply sit with them, without urgency, and accept them as they come.

But we are the grown-ups now. And I would encourage anyone with something to say, to say it. Or write it.

Even if writing is hard.

Sunday Poem

AFTER LOUISE BOURGEOIS’ MAMAN 

eight arched arachnid legs
giant ice picks en pointe
joints knobby, ropey muscles twined
tight as a girl’s braids 

at once nurturant tent
rigid mother superior
gargantuan black
widow    how 

to flee this vault of exalted
expectation, detoxify
the paralyzing venom
of self-doubt   the porous 

space between
the sinewy legs of steel
unbarred but charged
with the force field

of your mother’s love how sharp
the bite of disappointment, nagging
disapproval     why can’t you sew
your own clothes like Elizabeth, practise

piano as regularly as Grace, help
in the garden like Carol Ann
summa cum laude not
enough, good manners never

good enough, and though
you broke free never out
from under the smothering
ambivalence of Maman, her power

to gestate, loom, enmesh

From Realignment (Palimpsest, 2015) by Ruth Roach Pierson

I Contain Multitudes

Shane Book—whose second book, Congotronic, is nominated for this year's Griffin poetry prize—muses on his allegiance to the maple leaf:

I think there was something about growing up in a family of travelers, a family that lived in different countries and was itself made up of multiple nationalities, races, ethnicities, and so on—that seemed to me to be very Canadian. Perhaps this is because I have always associated Canada and Canadians with a certain inquisitive internationalism, an outward-looking curiosity about the world. Also, I have always felt like and been, an outsider. To absolutely generalize—I think there’s a certain quality of the “onlooker” or “spectator” that is part of being a Canadian. This quality of “watching” probably goes along with being from any smaller, peripheral nation: we’re looking to the centres, at what the empires are doing. Then again I have always felt like a citizen of several nations, so maybe that cancels out everything I just said. Apparently, like anyone, I contain multitudes, contradictions and some platitudes, as well.

A Space For Pleasure

David Wheatley reminds us why JH Prynne remains one of Britain's most fascinating contemporary poets:

JH Prynne is the ultimate poet of anti-pathos. Everything about him spells distance and difficulty. He does not give poetry readings; he does not appear in anthologies and is never nominated for prizes; his books have Captain Beefheart-like titles such as Her Weasels Wild Returning and Streak—Willing—Entourage—Artesian; he attracts acolytes and execrators, rather than run-of-the-mill readers, and, most important, no one knows what any of it means. Such are the familiar assumptions where this poet is concerned. Passions run deep: when The Oxford English Literary History had the temerity to suggest that Prynne was more deserving of notice than Larkin, the brouhaha ended up on the Today programme. 

Those assumptions need adjusting, argues Wheatley, who complains that "Prynne’s reception stays mired in discussions of accessibility and elitism rather an engagement with the actual work."

There is something impersonal, inhuman even, about Prynne, but the challenge for the reader is to move beyond the obligatory prefixing of the poet’s name with the word “rebarbative” and find a space for pleasure. It can be done: no other poet gives us “the acrid wavering of language, so full / of convenient turns of extinction” with the same steely beauty and memorability.

Quality Control

Danny Jacobs' poetry has a happy relationship with his reviewing:

I strive for some amount of clarity in both pursuits, but also (I hope) linguistic energy. I want readers to enjoy the piece, in either case. Review prose does not have to be dull. My review jobs also inform my poetry in that they continually force me to question what I think constitutes a good poem. When you review a book, you give its poems room; you can’t suffocate them with bias. But you also knock on them to find their hollow spots; you hold them at eye-level to look for wonky angles. You drop them from a height. Do they hold? Ideally, you then go forth and subject your own poems to the same quality control.

Sunday Poem

ARMADILLO 

My lover spent his summer in the south,
carving armadillos from their husks. It was, to hear him
say it, an experience—the term people save 

for the places they hate. He spent June in the sunroom
with a pitcher of sweet tea and a picture of me.
By August, just the tea, watching hicks 

suck cigarettes through long, aristocratic
sticks, papaya seeds stuck between their burnt
sienna teeth. Everything was burnt there. My lover 

carved years off his life with the very same knife
the armadillos learned to fear. Where are they
now, I asked him as snowfall took care 

of the candles I'd lit. The not-quite-rodents, the not-quite-reptiles,
not-quite-right gatecrashers of the ark?
How does their nudity suit them? Do they sigh 

all cool, how we sighed last year, when we threw our anoraks
off and found we had that chalet to ourselves?
If we were ever blameless, it was then. I held your locks 

in a Chinese bun as you went south indeed,
throwing, upon my balls, your tongue, how sea urchins
throw their stomachs upon the coral reefs they eat. 

At which point my lover raised his knife
to my hairline, scalped me masterfully and poured,
into my open brain, a tea so cold and sweet.

From Otter (Coach House, 2015) by Ben Ladouceur.

Weather Front

Peter Richardson's writing day begins in the cellar:

Every morning before breakfast, I descend two half-flights of stairs to one of those venerable pine secretaries with a folding top which you sometimes see at auctions.

There, on a rickety cane-seated chair, I jot in a spiral notebook, using blue pencils with smudge-proof erasers. A stylus and clay tablet would do as well. I write on one side of a page because I like to return to old notebooks and cull through them. When I go back to them many months later, I want those tomes legible.

The desk is a hand-me-down. My mother used it as the platform for her letter-writing campaigns of the Fifties and Sixties. Often coming home from school, I would hear her Smith-Corona clacking away in the study off her bedroom. The fact that we lived on a decommissioned farmstead six miles from the nearest town may have nourished her need to write to The New York Times or Commonweal on issues of utmost importance. Yet I think if we had stayed in southern Connecticut rather than decamp to northern Vermont in 1960, she would still have found time to correspond with a grab-bag of different people.

Sitting at the same desk, I record thoughts about a book I’ve been reading, scraps of dreams, or observations of clouds, and by that, I mean, what weather front is sweeping towards me across the spine of Gatineau Park. Living on a ridge above the Alonzo Wright Bridge not far from Cantley, Quebec, I find we get our share of blustery hill country days. With snow whipping against two transom windows to my left, I suppose that I hope to find myself riffing on a subject I won’t know I’m writing about till I’m about three sentences into it.