I’m forever surprised at some peoples’ ability to fetishize the “writing life”… Especially when it comes from actual writers… You’d think if you’d ever actually lived it, you’d know it’s not about nice pens and big windows to write in;
News dropped a few days back that the body of Richard Vaughan had been found in New Brunswick. Richard was an old friend of mine, and all my memories of him are good. He was very supportive of my work in its earliest days, and very fun to be around. Hanging out with him made you feel like you were part of something. Such was the power of his charisma and personality that when he asked me, a straight 24-year old redneck dude who was living in a mostly Queer context at the time, on a date, I said yes without even thinking, and went out with him a few times. (You should read his poem “10 Reasons I Fall For Inaccessible Straight Boys Every Damn Time“) He was lovely and respectful and super kind, even when it felt like he was probably teasing you on some level you didn’t get, it felt like you were being included rather than excluded. We lost touch in the last 10 years or so, but would greet each other fondly if we bumped into one another. While I thought of him as a Toronto creature, the last year of his life was spent back in his home province, New Brunswick, working as a writer-in-residence in Fredericton. With Covid raging, Richard moved in with friends Amber MacMillan and Nathaniel Moore who led the movement of people searching for him. Bert Archer remembers him in the Globe and Nathaniel has written a lovely remembrance at The Star. Richard’s darkness was something you saw now and then, but it came and went like an untucked shirt, in my experience: something he didn’t notice was happening until he did, and tucked it back away. It’s upsetting me that I can’t find any pictures of us, but everything was on paper back then, so who knows where they are? I hope he’s found peace.
Richard Murray (RM) Vaughan, 55, was one of my closest friends, confidantes and collaborators. Two decades after I first met him, while growing up in Toronto publishing streams, Richard came home to New Brunswick in January, where I had been living for three years — when he was appointed Writer In Residence at the University of New Brunswick. It was a sort of CanLit relocation program and I was happy to see him. He was here only a short while when COVID-19 hit and he was booted from his digs in downtown Fredericton, so we asked him to live with us which, thankfully to us all, he did, on March 1. My wife, 11-year-old daughter, four cats and a new puppy were soon familiar with his hilarious personality, and his love of crafting — which would greet us in many forms every few days. Sometimes a collage would appear on my desk, left like a proud grade-school child bringing home work he’d made during art class.
This author wrote a memoir about her abuse as a child and is now being picked apart by a media mining for salacious detail. Read the fucking book. That’s all you get. She said what she was willing to say. You don’t get, or deserve, more than that. When you buy a book or pay to see a film or enter a gallery, you’re paying for the chance to experience story/image/sound the artist intended — not buying rights to demand something more/different. When audiences start to think of themselves as investors who are “buying” art rather than merely visiting it? She told the story she wanted to tell. The rest is none of your fucking business.
n the weeks since the launch of my memoir on grief and abuse, No Matter Our Wreckage, I have been asking myself a lot of questions. Questions such as, how much can I complain about people overstepping my boundaries when they want more information? What rights to privacy have I given up? To what extent is my consent being ignored, re-enacting the very abuse I wrote about when I am interviewed about the book?
I wrote a memoir about child sexual abuse, so I asked for this. Or did I?
Some of these questions have been prompted by readers, but mostly they have been prompted by the media. In particular, an interview at a radio station which asked for intimate details about the abuse that I found uninformed and uncomfortable, and who gave my mobile number to at least one listener who called in after it aired. The station has since apologised, but my mobile kept me awake through the night as it vibrated with messages from people who had heard the broadcast, reinvoking the anxiety that comes with feeling violated.
What a strange time to be alive. When was the last time your week passed without a worry or crisis? I feel like there was a window for this (for white folk) some time in the 50s, and the rest of history has been a wash of fear, punctuated by slowly increasing downtime in which fear is traded for lingering anxiety that gets medicated away through self-destructive habits. So, enjoy your two and half days of anxious intoxication. See you Monday.
Kitty Lewis, the brains, brawn, and brass balls behind Brick Books, is retiring. There was a hot ticket Zoom event that tons of people couldn’t get into, so I’d like to say here that Kitty IS Canadian poetry, and while she can never be replaced, she is now, and will remain, a shining example of grace, wit, and positive direction for the coming generations of poetry publishing folk to follow.
Who creates the meaning of a piece of fiction? The writer? The reader? Both? It’s a question I put to my poetry students all the time. This is a nice little reflection on the things at play here by a young writer figuring things out (I hope she has better luck that I have in this endeavour). Maybe too simple for some of you, but good for your students?
Barthes’s question seemed like a revelation to me. As a reader and as a writer, I constantly ask myself, “Who is speaking like this?” Among some writers and critics, first-person fictional narrators have become less popular lately. I understand the limits of this point of view, but its apparent drop in popularity doesn’t faze me. So far, all three of my published stories have had first-person protagonists as narrators. A completely objective, all-knowing narrator would be impossible, which is why I find omniscient third the hardest to write.
… my creative writing and English professor in college, helped me refine my fiction and critical writing. I wrote stories in his creative writing classes that were published years later. He asked me, about the villain of my best story, “Why do we hate him already?” It was a perceptive question that improved my story considerably. I was viewing the villain from my own perspective as the author, not as my protagonist would have seen him so early in the narrative. So, even when I tried to write fiction in first person, some of my own opinions would still come through.
When I can’t get into a book I’m reading, I often experience a similar dilemma. The narrator might know way too much or too little. Either can make a story confusing or unconvincing. I sometimes struggle to connect with a book because, like Barthes, I can’t pinpoint who the narrator is or why they’re telling this story. Characters’ inner monologues and telling stories to other characters are two devices that have been used countless times, but they can still be original.
Discussions about obscenity often devolve into this bad-faith dichotomy—the prudish schoolmarms with their red-pens painting over anything blue and the brave defenders of free speech pushing the boundaries of acceptable discourse. The former hold that there is a certain power to words that must be tamed, while the later champion the individual right to say what they want to say. When the issue is phrased in such a stark manner, it occludes a more discomforting reality—maybe words are never simply utterances, maybe words can be dangerous, maybe words can enact evil things, and maybe every person has an ultimate freedom to use those words as they see fit (notably a different claim than people should be able to use them without repercussion). Bruce’s theory of language is respectably semiotic, a contention about the arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified, whereby that chain of connection can be severed by simple repetition, as when sense flees from a word said over and over again, whether it’s “potato” or “xylophone.” But he was ultimately wrong (as is all of structural and post-structural linguistics)—language is never exactly arbitrary, it’s not really semiotic. We need theurgy to explain how words work, because in an ineffable and numinous way, words are magic. When it comes to obscenity in particular, whether the sexual or the scatological, the racial or the blasphemous, we’re considering a very specific form of that magic, and while Bruce is correct that a prohibition on slurs would render resistance to oppression all the more difficult, he’s disingenuous in not also admitting that it can provide a means of cruelty in its own right. If you couldn’t say obscenities then a certain prominent tweeter of almost inconceivable power and authority couldn’t deploy them almost hourly against whatever target he sees fit. This is not an argument for censorship, mind you, but it is a plea to be honest in our accounting.
…
Like any grimoire or incantation, obscenity can be used to liberate and to oppress, to free and to enslave, to bring down those in power but also to froth a crowd into the most hideous paroxysms of fascistic violence. So often the moralistic convention holds that “punching down” is never funny, but the dark truth is that it often is. What we do with that reality is the measure of us as people, because obscenity is neither good nor bad, but all power resides within the mouth of who wields it. What we think of as profanity is a rupture within language, a dialectic undermining conventional speech, what the Greeks called an aporia that constitutes the moment that rhetoric breaks down. Obscenity is when language declares war on itself, often with good cause. Writing in Rabelais and His World, the great Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin defined what he called the “carnivalesque,” that is the principle that structured much medieval and Renaissance performance and literature, whereby the “principle of laughter and the carnival spirit on which the grotesque is based destroys…seriousness and all pretense.” Examining the Shrovetide carnivals that inaugurated pre-Reformation Lent, Bakhtin optimistically saw something liberatory in the ribald display of upended hierarchies, where the farting, shitting, pissing, vomiting hilarity of the display rendered authority foolish. “It frees human consciousness,” Bakhtin wrote, “and imagination for new potentialities.”
A story can be raw and it might not be so technically facile. Sometimes it’s like over-polishing a diamond. You can polish away all the rough edges that actually make it beautiful. While I do think editing is important, you can over-edit a story. Then you’re kind of getting away from the beauty, the heart and the power it had.
Bookninja 