that interesting? Real, yes. And marked by its share of loss, redeemed by the love of a son with eyes the colour of his mother’s. It’sjust that I don’t see my life as satisfactory material to present as fiction. I find it challenge enough just muddling along as who I am, never mind casting myself as hero.
This is the reasoning I call on when, as now, I try to squeeze out a paragraph to be read at the next circle meeting, and nothing comes. I’m taking lunch at my desk, gnawing on a cafeteria hamand-cheese, randomly pecking at the keys of my computer. Tim Earheart, who finds my literary aspirations perplexing (“Why do you think anybody would pay to read the shit you’re pulling out of your ass?” is how he put it to me, unanswerably, when I told him of my attendance at a fictionwriting circle), comes by to read over my shoulder.
“I’m no judge,” he says, “but I’m not sure you’re going anywhere with this.”
He’s right. Over the next hour and a half, only a few sentences remain on the screen.
Here’s what good Write What You Know has done for me today:
After my wife died I started hearing voices. Just hers at first. And then others I’ve never heard before. Strangers. I can’t know this for sure but I have the feeling that all of them are dead.
They come to me before I go to sleep. This is what frightens me. Not that they’re dead, or that I can hear them. But that I’m awake when I do.
Once this passage of luminous prose has been accomplished, I turn my mind to my Couch Potato column for the weekend edition. This week it’s a gloves-off attack on the Canadian franchise of American MegaStar!, a talent show that is the toprated program in this country, as well as the fourteen others it has colonized. An entire, worldwide generation being led to believe they are entitled to be famous. It’s toxic. A lie. It’s wrong . And it’s also how my frustration with Writing What I Know opens the gates to Writing How the World Has Gone to Crap, which has never been much of a problem for me.
Even though I know that Canadian MegaStar! is owned by the same multinational media behemoth that owns the paper I work for, and even though there have been ominous hints from the section editor to “go easy” on “content” which is produced by said behemoth, I let slip the dogs of war on MegaStar! as if it is single-handedly responsible for carrying out a cultural atrocity. In fact, this last phrase makes it into the lede. From this measured opening, the column goes on to be brutal, hyperbolic and libellous, all leading to the kind of hysterical finish where you’re actually a little concerned about the mental health of the column’s author. It’s personal .
I stay at work late (Thursdays keep me at the office at least until midnight copyediting the Best on the Box listings) and walk home wondering if today will prove to be my last in my currentposition. Or, come to think of it, my last in any position. It’s almost amusing to wonder what else I might be qualified to do. I’ve always rather liked the idea of running my own business. Something very hands off. Automated, preferably. A laundromat. A spray-it-yourself car wash.
I round the corner on to my street speculating over what kind of pay cut, if any, would be involved in delivering newspapers instead of writing for them, when I notice the yellow police tape around the house across from mine. It is the neighbouring family at 147, and not my own family at 146 that the four police cruisers are parked in front of. But I still run the half-block up Euclid, ring the bell at my front door after twice dropping the keys, and confirm my son is safe with Emmie before going back out to ask the cop turning traffic back toward Queen what’s going on.
“Break and enter,” he says, chewing the inside of his cheek.
“What’d they take?”
“Didn’t touch a thing. The kid was the only one who saw him.”
“Joseph. My boy plays with him
This is the reasoning I call on when, as now, I try to squeeze out a paragraph to be read at the next circle meeting, and nothing comes. I’m taking lunch at my desk, gnawing on a cafeteria hamand-cheese, randomly pecking at the keys of my computer. Tim Earheart, who finds my literary aspirations perplexing (“Why do you think anybody would pay to read the shit you’re pulling out of your ass?” is how he put it to me, unanswerably, when I told him of my attendance at a fictionwriting circle), comes by to read over my shoulder.
“I’m no judge,” he says, “but I’m not sure you’re going anywhere with this.”
He’s right. Over the next hour and a half, only a few sentences remain on the screen.
Here’s what good Write What You Know has done for me today:
After my wife died I started hearing voices. Just hers at first. And then others I’ve never heard before. Strangers. I can’t know this for sure but I have the feeling that all of them are dead.
They come to me before I go to sleep. This is what frightens me. Not that they’re dead, or that I can hear them. But that I’m awake when I do.
Once this passage of luminous prose has been accomplished, I turn my mind to my Couch Potato column for the weekend edition. This week it’s a gloves-off attack on the Canadian franchise of American MegaStar!, a talent show that is the toprated program in this country, as well as the fourteen others it has colonized. An entire, worldwide generation being led to believe they are entitled to be famous. It’s toxic. A lie. It’s wrong . And it’s also how my frustration with Writing What I Know opens the gates to Writing How the World Has Gone to Crap, which has never been much of a problem for me.
Even though I know that Canadian MegaStar! is owned by the same multinational media behemoth that owns the paper I work for, and even though there have been ominous hints from the section editor to “go easy” on “content” which is produced by said behemoth, I let slip the dogs of war on MegaStar! as if it is single-handedly responsible for carrying out a cultural atrocity. In fact, this last phrase makes it into the lede. From this measured opening, the column goes on to be brutal, hyperbolic and libellous, all leading to the kind of hysterical finish where you’re actually a little concerned about the mental health of the column’s author. It’s personal .
I stay at work late (Thursdays keep me at the office at least until midnight copyediting the Best on the Box listings) and walk home wondering if today will prove to be my last in my currentposition. Or, come to think of it, my last in any position. It’s almost amusing to wonder what else I might be qualified to do. I’ve always rather liked the idea of running my own business. Something very hands off. Automated, preferably. A laundromat. A spray-it-yourself car wash.
I round the corner on to my street speculating over what kind of pay cut, if any, would be involved in delivering newspapers instead of writing for them, when I notice the yellow police tape around the house across from mine. It is the neighbouring family at 147, and not my own family at 146 that the four police cruisers are parked in front of. But I still run the half-block up Euclid, ring the bell at my front door after twice dropping the keys, and confirm my son is safe with Emmie before going back out to ask the cop turning traffic back toward Queen what’s going on.
“Break and enter,” he says, chewing the inside of his cheek.
“What’d they take?”
“Didn’t touch a thing. The kid was the only one who saw him.”
“Joseph. My boy plays with him
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