Andrea MacPherson

I’ve been away on a book tour for my new collection, Away, for just over a week.  Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal.  Living in hotels and out of suitcases.  Writing on planes, trains and small round tables overlooking busy streets or parking lots.  And this got me thinking about the places we write, how they inform us as artists, how they might inspire or challenge us.  At home, I have a large, glass-topped desk in a room with large windows, but now – here, in Toronto – I’m making due with a ‘desk’ that also houses a coffee maker, bottles of water and a half a lemon.  Writers are chameleons of sorts; if the mood strikes, if the muse appears and demands to be heard, we can write anywhere.  Desk.  Lap.  Park bench.  Sometimes, even, on the back of a napkin or hand.

The Guardian runs a series on writers’ spaces, and the Vancouver International Writers’ Festival has started something similar as well.  When I looked through these, it became apparent that where a writer chooses to write can be illuminating about who they are as a writer.  What does my white desk and collection of old photos say?  Old soul?  Consistently preoccupied with the past?  Or perhaps that I find it hard to let things go – the past, the photos, all the stories that come with them.

I got some early copies of Away last week, so that I might have some with me for a reading at the Pacific Festival of the Book in Victoria.  It arrived in a non-descript cardboard box, a little dented and very well taped.  It sat on the kitchen counter, looking at me.  Away is my fourth book, and I keep waiting for the whole process to become blase – seeing the book for the first time, holding it in your hand, seeing it in a bookstore.  All that.  I’m still waiting.

It was all excitement and rosy cheeks.  I held the first copies in my hands after only slightly struggling with tape and scissors, bordering on giddy.  It’s always something to see a new book.  The concept of the abstract to the tangible applies here: they were just words in my notebook, on my laptop, in my head, and now they are made concrete.  I flipped through the collection, sometimes surprised by the words.  Publishing is a long process; I had forgotten some of the lines, some of the images, and at times was actually surprised by what I read.  The author and audience meet.

Away has turned out beautifully.  I couldn’t be happier with the final product, with my publisher, or with the excitement that still comes in a tattered old box. 

Exciting news: Beyond the Blue has been chosen for CanadianLiving.com’s May issue.  So, grab a copy and join the discussion!

Last night, I co-hosted a reading at the UCFV Bookstore with Kuldip Gill.  Our aim was to showcase not only published authors, but some of the amazing student writers taking creative writing classes at UCFV–essentially, giving them a platform to try out new work, to show an audience what they have been working on.  And the night did not disappoint.

We opened with two student authors, both students of mine, Kim Morden and David Thomas.  They both took a Short Fiction class with me, and are now participants in the Historical Fiction class.  They each read a postcard story, both, oddly, about ghosts in their own way.  Kim’s detailed ghosts inhabiting a woman’s home, and David’s talked about the ghostly calls of lost soldiers on a battlefield.  They both read with enthusiasm and grace.

Trevor Carolan read from his latest book, The Pillowbook of Dr. Jazz, and Keith Maillard was invited to campus to read from The Clarinet Polka.  As always, Keith was engaging and humorous in his descriptions of music and the members of an all-girl polka band.  We even had an accordian player at the reading to add to the ambience.  It was a wonderful evening.

And the evening caused me to start thinking about readings – good ones, bad ones, all those ones in between.  I’ve certainly done my share, and am gearing up again to participate in a variety for Away–Victoria, Ottawa, Montreal, Surrey.  To me, readings are strange things.  When I’m writing, I’m never imagining myself reading the work aloud–I’m thinking about it on the page, in the reader’s mind.  So it can be difficult to find a selection that works as a spoken art–it needs to be dynamic, active, perhaps humorous or tragic.  And since I’ve not been blessed with the ability to write decidedly hilarious scenes, I’ve had the most luck with darker things: girls being caught in industrial machines, drownings, accidents.  You know, all those lovely, lightearted moments in literature.  I wonder if this makes me seem overly concerned with sadness, with melancholy and despair.  Certainly, there is love and hope and desire in my work, as well, but those aren’t the passages I tend to read.  And therein lies the rub: a reading is only a glimpse into the soul of the work, and the artist.  It’s a bit of a tease, giving the audience just enough to (hopefully) pique their interest. 

Reading is an art in and of itself, and I’m always pleased to be a part of any good one–like the one Kim, David, Trevor and Keith gave for us last evening.

I don’t make resolutions.  I don’t believe in them.  But I do consider things that have been working over the last year, and the things that haven’t.  What wasn’t working in 2007?  How little I was writing.  Maybe it was because of a demanding teaching load, maybe it was because I had two books come out and I had a lot of readings and press to do, or maybe – and this is what I always fear – I was fresh out of words.

The most frightening thought to a writer.  No more words.

Is this possible?  Can we use them up?  Do they melt away, disintegrate if we don’t use them frequently enough?  Is writing, like everything else, a muscle that needs to be exercised?

 In a bout of new year’s office cleaning (inspired by my friend Jane) I came across some pictures and scraps of paper with lines of poems written on them.  Most of them were fragments only, snippets I had scribbled with the intention of coming back to them and fleshing them out.  And now, here they were, a strange and sad gift.  Limbless poems.  Lines looking for their whole.  Titles floating.

I sat with them for a while, these words I had written but barely recognized now.  I couldn’t quite get the texture back: where was I going with words like treeline, face, pebble?  I set them aside, but found myself – for the first time in a couple months – really thingin about poetry.  Not reading someone else’s poems, but thinking about my own, about the words and the way one line might end, hang tenuously over the edge towards the next.  It was exciting – that rush when language fills your mind, a hot, quick blush of possibility.

I’ve written two poems since then.  One containing one of the found phrases from my desk, and another inspired by a photo left at the bottom of my drawer.  Both kept me up late, doing research, trying to find the right word, considering (at length) a comma or a line break.  And it felt grand.

December is a tricky time of year.  Full of holiday cheer, family and friends, but also cold weather and, here on the west coast, rain.  For the last ten days, though, I’ve managed to avoid the rain and was, instead, immersed in another kind of whiteness in another kind of place.

We travelled to the west coast of Mexico for some much needed relaxation.  It was warm and sunny, all things a tropical holiday should be.  I was hoping, somewhat secretly, that a new environment would melt away some of the writer’s block I had been experiencing lately.  Usually, travel inspires me, and I was hoping this time would be the same. 

While there, we took a few trips, one to the remote fishing village of Yelapa and another into Puerto Vallarta on Our Lady of Guadalupe’s feast day.  What we experienced there was far beyond what we had expected.

The Cathedral of Our Lady of Guadalupe sits in the centre of town, and we can hear the bells from the moment we step on the malecon.  The cathedral is a faded orange, with the bell tower spire high in the long, blue sky.  But it’s all the white that we notice as we get closer; the streets are full – bursting – with people dressed in white, carrying armfuls of flowers and candles, singing and praying.  In every direction, the streets swell, pulsing with the devout.  Children sleep on shoulders, women place handkerchiefs over their heads to keep the sun at bay, men slink into small shallows of shade bordering the street.  And everywhere there is white – dresses, bands of lace, open-collared shirts, the frill of a bonnet.  White candles shimmer.  The heat of the day is made crystal.  I could feel the words starting to form: the pinpricks of a poem.

We moved slowly down the side streets, away from the worshippers and their long day of waiting.  But we listened to the bells, and held the vision of the brick cathedral, the blue sky, and the streets tumbling over with white.

What author doesn’t at some point imagine her book turned into a sweeping, tour-de-force of cinematic impact?  Of course, the reality is slightly more grim.  So, it was an entertaining experience in imagining when I was asked to imagine Beyond the Blue as a movie.  Who would it star?  What might it look like?  You can read my response here.

I recently did an interview with the wonderful Danforth Review – you can check it out on their website.  The Danforth Review

I’ve been thinking a lot about perspective lately.  It seems to be following me around like an ghost, appearing where I will least expect it: lectures, poems, research, a story (or two) that I am working on (or, thinking: really, they are the same thing).  It’s made me stop and consider: how do we determine perspective?  What happens when we cahnge it, alter it, reconsider its use?

Last week, I told a group of students that perspective was essential in their stories.  Who was telling the story?  Why?  And what does their perspective – observations about the world around them, biases, judgments – tell us about their character and about the story?  And I realized, these were the exact questions I was asking myself in research for a new novel.  I was enthusiastic about the material, but had not yet found that elusive door into the story.  I could not hear the voice of the main character, and was plateauing without it.  Whose story is this?

It surpirsed me, then, when a few days later the same concept appeared in my poetry.  I was working on a suite of poems, each individually inspired, but with a common thread running through them – perspective.  I paused.  The poems were ostensibly about one thing, but were actually questioning the sightline, the perspective.

This morning I started a draft of a new short story – a genre I work in in fits and starts, when the muse descends- and it happened again.  Perspective appeared, forcing me to look at it in a new light.  Whose story is it?  How does it shape the outcome, the language, the meaning?

Lecture to research to poems to short story.  Perspective has been following me, nudging me, reminding me to look at it – and at each project – with a cool, fresh eye.  These projects have voices, and the voices demand to be heard.

I witnessed an earlier verison of myself last week.  At least seven years younger, sitting in a small room in Buchanan building at UBC with a group of women poets and George McWhirter navigating us through poetic territory (sidhe instead of siren, the luminous title blue salt, the reminder that an image always speaks the loudest).  Pen poised, notebook filled.  Busy, hot years; prolific.  A new intimacy with words – especially grief, which kept inexplicably appearing on the white page.

This was me when Natural Disasters was written.  And how did I come across this alternate?  How did I manage to wade, again, into the murky past?  A book launch.  Or, more specifically, the launch of Natural Disasters, some seven years after it was completed.

 The collection was first scheduled to appear in Fall 2003, only months after the publication of my first novel, When She Was Electric.  What happened?  The strange world of publishing.  There were delays with the original publisher, promises that it would appear in the next season, then the next, and the next.  After some time – and mounting frustration – it was revealed that the publisher would no longer be producing poetry books.  Then, that it might go to the publishing house that took over the list.  Then more uncertainty. 

Natural Disasters found a new home with Palimpsest Press in 2006.  It appeared like a magic window to the past this summer, in some fated manner, just months after my second novel, Beyond the Blue, was released.  And there I was, as clear as a rubbed photo, smiling into the lens.  It reminded me of who I had been, who I had come to be, and who I might turn into in another seven years.  When I read a few of the poems at the launch, I realized I could see myself more clearly than I had before.  A strange and wonderful gift, this snapshot, this moment in the past.