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Off the Record

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Robert Weirsema reviews Off the Record in the Toronto Star

“Metcalf’s latest project, the anthology OFF THE RECORD brings together six of the writers with whom Metcalf has worked, in what becomes a dazzling collection of memoir and fiction. If Caroline Adderson, Kristyn Dunnion, Cynthia Flood, Shaena Lambert, Elise Levine, and Kathy Page aren’t quite household names, OFF THE RECORD is a powerful argument for just what a mistake that oversight is.

John Metcalf, who celebrated his 85th birthday on November 12, is the rarest of commodities: an editor who has gained fame in a position which, usually, goes unremarked and unheralded. Also a noted writer in his own right, Metcalf worked for more than fifteen years at publishers Porcupine’s Quill, and twenty years at Biblioasis; in that time he has helped shape Canadian literature for successive generations.

Metcalf’s latest project, the anthology “Off the Record,” brings together six of the writers with whom Metcalf has worked, in what becomes a dazzling collection of memoir and fiction. If Caroline Adderson, Kristyn Dunnion, Cynthia Flood, Shaena Lambert, Elise Levine, and Kathy Page aren’t quite household names, “Off the Record” is a powerful argument for just what a mistake that oversight is.

Each section begins with an autobiographical essay, of sorts, from the featured writer. Shaped by Metcalf’s “continuing questions,” the editor has stepped in to remove any evidence of those interviews. “To leave in the questions once they’d been answered,” he writes in the book’s foreword, “seemed to me rather like leaving up unsightly scaffolding when the building was finished so I removed them all enabling the responses to flow as seemingly unprompted narrative.

That decision, to strip away the artifice and leave the author’s voice to stand on its own, is a hallmark of Metcalf’s editorial approach. Here, it results in a succession of powerful personal narratives, ranging from each writer’s childhood experiences (generally unhappy, often powerfully conflicted, which likely doesn’t come as too much of a surprise) to their early successes (often with a nod to Metcalf’s role as editor), and including insights into their processes, their perspectives on writing, and their interpretation of their role as writers.

The experience of reading each of these stories after reading their paired essay offers a uniquely insightful experience, as one can trace the impact of each writer’s recounted histories and insights within the fiction itself (“death of the author” be damned). Kathy Page’s unprepared immigration from England to Canada, for example, accounts for what she refers to, in her essay, as why it has taken her “a while to get to the point of tackling Canadian settings and characters” in her fiction. “Low Tide,” the story which follows, demonstrates a bridging of those two worlds: it’s a story set, largely, on the sea and in a light-keeper’s cottage, its setting bringing to mind Canada’s west coast while its concerns and voice resonate with Page’s English upbringing…”

Full text https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/in-their-own-voices-six-canadian-woman-writers-on-the-stories-that-shaped-them/article_aacc8e12-906c-11ee-801e-9f7b581abe3d.html

A Secret Garden, with Hollyhock

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Sept 17-22 at Hollyhock on Cortes Island, I’ll be co-facilitating A Secret Garden: Writing Childhood Memories with the wonderful Caroline Adderson. It’s a workshop/retreat that focuses on accessing childhood material and points of view and how to use them in your writing, whether that be memoir, fiction, writing for children, or purely personal.  Participants will be in all stages of their writing journey. The purpose of the workshop is to generate the material, so you don’t have to come with anything already written, but you can.  We’ll spend about an hour on guided writing in the morning, then everyone goes off to write.  One on one sessions are available in the afternoon. We’ll meet again after dinner to share, discuss, and consider.  To prepare, try to gather as much childhood material as you can — photos, memories, etc.  Reread the books you loved at that time. We’ll give more specific instructions closer to the time. Time travel is possible! NB Early bird discount runs until 18 June.

Link to Hollyhock page

Programs

Dan Vyleta’s Walrus review of Paradise & Elsewhere

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A huge pleasure to have this review from Dan Vyleta in The Walrus.

The Short List

Book jacket courtesy of Biblioasis

Paradise and Elsewhere
Kathy Page

Toward the end of Paradise and Elsewhere’s longest and structurally most intricate story, “The Ancient Siddanese,” an enigmatic tour guide to the ruins of a desert city invites the group to “close your eyes and explore Sidda by touch.” The narrator, an inhabitant of a near-future in which the sun has become humanity’s enemy, accepts the invitation and finds an unexpected perspective in his fumbling: that of a hypothetical interstellar tourist who discovers the dried-out planetary lump that was Earth and wonders at the creatures who left their marks on the dead world.

The whole of Kathy Page’s beautiful, daring collection can be read as an invitation to seek out new points of view, with all the discomfort implicit in the act. The opening story, “G’Ming,” stages an encounter between what we so confidently call the “developing world” (as though its primary marker were stunted modernization) and the “developed world” from the point of view of a village boy, whose close observation of tourist behaviour is as shrewd as it is disconcerting. Like all the stories in Paradise and Elsewhere, “G’Ming” remains elusive about its precise setting, sabotaging the reader’s yearning for certainties. It sets the tone for a collection that moves seamlessly from realist accounts of the here and now, to dispatches from our imminent future, to the timeless worlds of myth and dream. It makes for giddy reading: each story’s opening paragraph an unlabelled door that may lead anywhere at all.

In “Low Tide,” we find ourselves deep in Angela Carter territory, where fairy tales are reunited with their latent sexual content to take soundings of the treacherous depths of desire—Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” reimagined as an abusive relationship between a lighthouse keeper and the creature of the sea he seeks to possess. The next story, “My Beautiful Wife,” is a realist portrait of an eastern European intellectual who is unsettled to find that the democratic revolution has brought in, among its stock of fresh ideas, emancipation; he witnesses his wife becoming other to him, despite his love.

Attempts at communication across lines of gender, wealth, and even species; sudden changes in points of view and their implied reshuffling of certainties—despite the book’s many shifts in genre, protagonist, and setting, the collection has a startling coherence. Like children at a sleepover, tucked beneath shared covers, the stories whisper to one another, providing a thematic richness to the book that far outstrips its page count. As with all good fiction, Paradise and Elsewhere helps us to see more clearly (though clarity is not without its dangers: in “I Like to Look,” the narrator literally observes her sister to death).

The result is a collection that, while neither flawless nor comfortable, is always intriguing, often dazzling, and—for all the bleakness it unearths—immensely fun to read. Page has rebelled against the provincial assumption that we readers care only about the familiar and understood. “We must learn to talk to each other differently now,” Liia tells her husband in “My Beautiful Wife.” It is the awareness of this need that sets this fine book apart from so many others.

—Dan Vyleta

https://thewalrus.ca/the-short-list/

The Kissing Disease on Storyville

News, Paradise & Elsewhere, Short Fiction, Uncategorized
Kathy Page’s story, “The Kissing Disease” features this week on Storyville, who e-publish one story each week from the best story collections published by commercial and independent presses. What a great idea!  To quote form their information “Storyville was launched to  change the way you interact with the world of literature through your iPad, iPhone, and Kindle.”  Below is some background to “The Kissing Disease.”
THIS WEEK’S STORY
PARADISE AND ELSEWHERE
Kathy Page
Biblioasis
“The Kissing Disease”“The Kissing Disease” is from Kathy Page’s collection, Paradise & Elsewhere (Biblioasis, 2014).  Page is the author of seven novels, including The Story of My Face, nominated for the Orange Prize in 2002 and; Alphabet, which was nominated for a Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction and scheduled for American release Fall 2104.  She is a British writer living in Canada.

Page said this about her story: Well, who doesn’t like to kiss? I’ll admit it cheers me to see other people kissing, too. At high school we called mono the kissing disease, but when I wrote this story I was thinking more of HIV/AIDS. That pandemic surfaced during my twenties. Everyone lost someone. There was a before, and an ongoing after. It was terrible time, but there were eventually some positive consequences: increased honesty and more open public discourse about sex, for example. It was that aspect, the silver lining, that I had in mind.

The story begins with Gary arguing with the radio. My roots are in England, and for decades BBC Radio 4 was the background to my life. No ads, little music, just wonderful voices. Between the drama, poetry and news, panels of experts and pundits would discuss in intricate (sometimes exhaustive) detail the controversies of the day. My family and I frequently joined in and I still sometimes listen online. Gary’s position as the story opens is so vehement that it implies his eventual willingness to enjoy what he thought repugnant. That’s the seed from which the story grew.

Men and masculinity interest me a great deal, as does the way in which, generally speaking, we deal with otherness by separation, as if it was contagious — which brings me right back to disease. Bodies — our relationship with them, the ways in which they may betray or overtake us or be dramatically transformed — are a preoccupation of mine. One of the protagonists in my novel Alphabet is in transition between genders; The Find centres on a woman’s struggles with the onset of Huntington’s disease, and there lies yet another of my many preoccupations: identity. How much can we change and still remain who we are? At what point do we become someone else?

Biblioasis

News, Notes & Queries, Paradise & Elsewhere, Short Fiction, Uncategorized

It’s done! I’ve  just sent the final edit of the text of my  collection of short stories, Paradise & Elsewhere,  to Biblioasis. Years of work go into a book; sending it out ushers in a delicious cocktail of  emotions, which may include (but is not limited to) satisfaction, lassitude, excitement, euphoria, anxiety, and exhaustion. The net effect could be summed up as a feeling of deliverance:  I’m free, now, to explore something new.

I’m delighted that Paradise & Elsewhere  has found a home with small but beautiful Biblioasis  (Such a lovely name! And so appropriate to this book!) of whom a  Quill & Quire reviewer recently wrote: “If there is a gold standard for Canadian short  fiction in the new millennium, it is probably set by Biblioasis. The press has been at the forefront, season after season, of producing collections by some of the finest practitioners of the form, both veterans and newcomers.”

Biblioasis is a small team of exceptional people absolutely committed to the books they produce. In this instance they have been brave enough to take on a set of stories pitched somewhere between myth and realism and verging on impossible to define or describe.  The collection spans human time from its origins to its later days: in the beginning, there may  have been a garden, an oasis­ – or perhaps an island. And there was sex, money,  and a bargain of some kind, though between whom and how and exactly what  was done, why, and what the consequences have been: you’ll have to read the book to find out.  It comes out in the spring of 2014, which is not so very long to wait.

 

Huacachina, Peru, by Luca Galuzzi g

 Biblioasis

Biblioasis catalogue Spring 2014

To Make Much of Time

News, Other Writing, Uncategorized

TNQ  (The New Quarterly)  publishes stories and poems by wonderful contemporary such as Caroline Adderson, Patricia Young, Steven Heighton and Mark Anthony Jarman; it  was recently shortlisted for no less than five National Magazine Awards. The editors put each illustrated issue together in a beautifully produced book that does not fall apart when you open it, and chose an intriguing title that both connects  and enriches the contents. So  I’m delighted that my story, “To Make Much of Time” appears in the current issue, 123,  The Time of Your Life, along with an essay, “Going Backwards”, that touches on the tricky business of writing fiction inspired by one’s own relatives and family history.

The story is one of a story sequence in progress which centres on the emotional life of one Harry Miles, born in 1919, and at the same time looks at what poetry does, not in a literary sense, but in terms of its influence on the way we live and think about our lives.  Each  story connects in some way with a particular poem or poet.  The story in TNQ,  “To Make Much of  Time” refers to a poem by Robert Herrick (1591-1764), “To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time”.  The poem begins: Gather ye rosebuds while you may…  and goes on to warn:

That age is best which is the first,

   When youth and blood are warmer;

But being spent, the worse, and worst

   Times still succeed the former.

Continue reading To Make Much of Time →

It Can Happen to Anyone

Other Writing, Uncategorized

Here’s a humourous essay about the need for a dedicated workspace first published way-back-when  in Finland, and recently republished in WordWorks. Shortly after the events described, I did graduate to an out of home office, and have not looked back since…

It Can Happen to Anyone  & A Room of One’s Own Is Not Enough

A writer’s office may be small and richly cluttered, or light and well organized; it may be splendidly equipped with the paraphernalia of modern communications, or simple and monastic, containing just a desk and a chair.  The important thing is that no one comes into it uninvited. A writer of fiction must conjure up imaginary people and plot courses of events which have no existence in fact, and yet, at least while doing so, believe in them, and in order for the imaginary world to flourish, the actual world must (at least for a few hours at a time) be kept at bay. Writers are both passionate and strict about their offices.  Marcel Proust, for example, lined his study with cork to insulate himself from the world.  Virginia Woolf used the title A Room of One’s Own for her essay about the needs of women writers.

My office is on the top floor of the house.  Windows look over gardens and treetops; there are books along one wall, a fireplace, and a photograph of the Earth seen from Apollo 10.  Its one disadvantage is that it is in my home.  This means that I have to discipline myself to disregard whatever is happening or might need doing downstairs in order to get up to it:  although hard, this can be done.  It also means that the carpenters, plumbers and other noisy tradespersons often needed to deal with an old and previously neglected house must be organised so as to be here when I am not trying to work.  This, it seems, is impossible, and so here I sit on a Monday morning, ready to explode.

Ken and Michael, the decorators, who failed to come two weeks ago, when we were on holiday, and failed to come again last week, when I was researching media coverage of the  moon landing in the British Library, arrived at 8 a.m.  They will be working in the kitchen on the stairs and on both landings.  I explained about writers and their offices, how very passionate they feel on the subject.  I really shouldn’t worry, Michael said, rubbing the greying stubble on his chin.  Really, he said, I wouldn’t know they were here! Meanwhile they were desperate for a cup of tea.

When I entered my office, there was a large, sheet-covered pile of kitchen cupboards in the middle of it.  I squeezed past, sat resolutely at the desk.  I told myself not to be fussy about the muffled thumps and curses from downstairs and attempted to think myself back into the part of my novel concerning the disappearance of the red-haired girl, Natalie, who was crossing a field at dawn last time I wrote about her…   She has been up all night, watching the moon landing on television and is trying to find her way back to the campsite.  Meanwhile –

Michael knocks.  He wants me to come and take a look at the plaster work on the first landing.  It’s shot, he says.  What should he do about it?  I, being a writer, don’t know.  He phones his boss, then abandons the lower landing and sets about sandpapering the cupboard doors on my landing.  This is not a bad sound, rhythmical, steady, though he does keep interrupting it to cough, or mutter to himself.

Half an hour passes, during which I manage  a paragraph or so of Natalie’s  thoughts as she  crosses the field.   I’m about to cut back to the campsite, when Ken shouts for me from the bottom of the stairs. I thread myself past ladders and trestles, descend cautiously to ground level.  Whereas Michael is potato-round and softly spoken, Ken is thin and has an aggressive bark of a voice.   Should the tiles go this way or that way around the window?  This way? I guess.  You’re a writer! he states, putting the tiles down, folding his arms across his chest, leaning against the wall.  I think I know what’s coming next, and I’m right:  he has had a very interesting life and he is sure it could be turned into a book.  For example…

Writing may drive you crazy

Forty minutes later, fully informed about Ken’s birth by caesarean section, the family’s various moves around the country and their brief emigration to Australia, his father’s collection of model airplanes, his own period of fantastic wealth in the nineteen-eighties, the band he plays in, his recent failed attempt to set up a computer business, his wife’s exercise regime, his  father’s death and his children’s problems at school, I manage to extricate myself in order to answer the doorbell.  It’s fast-talking,  barrel-chested Gary, the Boss.

Since I last saw him three days ago, Gary has severed three of his fingertips during an attempt to adjust a lawnmower while the blade was still moving.  These fingertips have been re-attached by microsurgery.  One has a steel pin through the top, which, he informs me with relish, keeps catching on the indicator stick when he is driving.  Sensation has returned to the fingers.  He wiggles them.  We examine them in detail.  They are a kind of purplish black; the skin is flaking  and the nails have fallen off, but, he assures me, they are doing very well.  We proceed to the plaster work, examine that in much the same way and negotiate a price.  I leave him and Michael arguing on the stairs and return to the office.

The point of Natalie’s journey through the field eludes me and I’m finding it quite hard to even remember the names of my own characters, so I put on some music to drown out the voices, abandon the computer and write the names of my characters on a big sheet of paper, with arrows indicating the important relationships.  This seems to work.  I feel I’m on the verge of having an idea for the climax of the scene after the one in the field, but then Gary pushes the door open without knocking.

Sorry, I forgot, he says.  With all that extra work, I better warn you that we’ll have to go well into next week.

No, I tell him.  Please. Gary likes please.  As a favour, he says, he’ll see if he can get an extra hand.   The moment Gary leaves the house, Michael knocks. He waits for me to come out and stand on the  dim, sheet-shrouded landing where he tells me how he has been twenty years in the trade.  He tells me about his unfair dismissal from the top decorating firm in the country.  Things in the industry are going downhill.  Bosses like Gary are just in it for the money and don’t listen when told of the problems involved in doing a job properly.  So – he’ll be honest with me – Michael now never pushes himself on a job and does only what he’s paid for, no extras, no initiative.  This has reduced the stress on him and revolutionised his life.  He recently got married, and tells me about the fantastic honeymoon he and his wife enjoyed in Tenerife.  There will be a bit of noise he says, while he knocks the plaster down …

There is not only noise, but also a vibration rising through the floor and the desk itself with each irregularly timed blow.  The computer screen starts to flicker.  I turn the machine off, gather up my pieces of paper, blunder coughing through the dust-filled  staircase and  out into the garden. Unfortunately Ken is now working on the back door.  What do I think of Jeffrey Archer?  Of Iain Banks?  Could he borrow a large cooking pot to heat up his lunch?  He has certain firm beliefs about healthy nutrition, the balance of proteins and  vitamins, which he explains in depth and then, never one to be left out, Michael descends to the garden to eat his lunch too.    He takes his vest off to catch the sun while he eats, revealing   a huge, pasty white stomach. He enumerates, in intricate detail, his plans for the afternoon and the reasons for doing things in the order he has chosen.  Unfortunately there will be a period of several hours during which I can’t go up or downstairs.  It can’t be helped.  I must choose, office or garden.

There are books in the office, so I go to the kitchen, fill my water jug, and manage to squeeze past Michael on his first landing camp with only a short explanation of the science involved in the setting of plaster.

I blow the dust from my desk, drink some water and for five minutes or so I  feel it is possible that I might go better than just reading, and do something low key, such as  edit a previous chapter.  I fiddle with the dialogue in  the scene where Barbara combs Natalie’s hair.  I want this simple act to suggest all of the longing Barbara feels for the daughter she lost many years ago… I want her to realise – abruptly Michael stops singing to  himself. I hear him yell down his mobile to Charlene,his wife.  He comes up to tell me that she has passed her physiotherapy exams. Congratulations!

I drink more water and stare at the picture of the earth seen from Apollo 10….   A spaceship office would suit me fine, I’m thinking, when Michael knocks again, requiring me to come down and praise the completed plastering.  He explains how he will vacuum the stairs and then undercoat the gloss paint on the banisters.  When I come out of the bathroom, my way back up is blocked by the vacuuming. I go down instead.

The front door is open and Ken is sitting on the front step, talking to a very old man, a  trim, upright type,  bright-eyed, with a grizzled terrier panting on a lead.  You must listen to this!  Ken tells me.  This is Bill, he’s one of only eight survivors of the battle of Arnheim!  And indeed, Bill has a medal in his pocket to prove it and also a photograph of himself shaking the Queen’s hand in 1995.  For my benefit, Bill tells the whole story again, including his escape from interrogation in the Sudetenland, his recapture, a second escape via Belgium, his eventual return to his family who had been told he was dead.  He salutes us and departs.  There’s something you could write about, Ken says, triumphant.

In the kitchen, I find a lumbering bald-headed man with red-rimmed eyes sitting at the table drinking inky black  coffee from a  flask:  Derek.  Gary sent him to help the other two, he says, offering his hand to shake.  Soon begins the inevitable monologue:  a riches-to-rags tale. I learn that not long ago Derek had two yachts, three classic cars, gold bath taps and a top model for his girlfriend! But now all that’s left is the six-bedroom house, snatched from the jaws of repossession.  He plans to go into partnership with Gary and split it up into student bedsits.  He sketches a plan of the conversion for me on his sandwich wrapper.

At this point, there’s a pause:  pure, delicious silence.  No vacuuming.  No hammering.  No barking voice.  I take a step towards the door.  Lurching to his feet, Derek closes the distance between us. He takes  my hand in his, looks  into my eyes and announces that  he feels he must be honest. He wants me to know that this is his first day back at work after a two year stay in a psychiatric unit.  He heard a voice in his head telling him to do things.  But that’s all over now and it can happen to anyone, he says – and regarding this, I am sure he is correct, because forget the girl with the red hair, forget Barbara, the moon landing in 1969,  forget whether to have a semi colon or a full stop, all that. There is a very loud voice in my head and it  says: ‘A room of your own? Bollocks. You need an office that is separate from the house.’   I push past Derek and stumble up the stairs to write it down.