Taking stock on old resoutions

I was going to take stock of how well I achieved my 2011 New Year’s Resolutions, but then I saw that the last ones I posted were at the beginning of 2010. I also saw that I only posted three times in all of 2011…clearly a resolution waiting to happen right there.

So I’ve had two years to work on these goals:

Read more American fiction

I did this, a little, though less than I would have liked. (Then again, I would prefer to have read more of everything, in every category.) I read The Corrections (yes, finally), A Visit From the Goon Squad (really amazing), We Need To Talk About Kevin (really good…very curious to see the movie, especially as Tilda Swinton seems like perfect casting), Home (tremendous), The Human Stain (the only Philip Roth I’d read before was Portnoy’s Complaint…my, what I’ve been missing), and Mr. Peanut (a totally dark and amazingly clever novel about marriage and murder). This last one was recommended to me by another amazing American writer, Joanna Pearson, whose novel The Rites and Wrongs of Janice Wills is the perfect YA treat. (YA = Young Adult, for those of you who don’t occasionally take great pleasure in dipping into what’s available for the younger set.)

Read more British fiction Unless you count rereading Villette, the only British novel I’m sure I’ve read is The Little Stranger. It’s a great story – I got spooked reading it – and it was the perfect companion piece to Downton Abbey, which I got swept up in last January. Oh no, wait! At some point I also read Skippy Dies (solid, enjoyable).

Read more poetry Yes, I absolutely did! Not only did I read a fair bit from the library, but I'm also fortunate enough to know a number of amazing poets who've published books recently. I promise you will not be disappointed by any of the following: Hypotheticals by Leigh Kotsilidis, The Id Kid by Linda Besner, A Complete Encyclopedia of Different Types of People by Gabe Foreman, and All This Could Be Yours by Joshua Trotter. Now I just need people to do this all the time and I'll be totally covered on the poetry front.

Finish my novel Well, what does finish really mean? I finished and submitted the initial draft I’m sure I was referring to here. And then another. And…one more? And now I’m waiting for notes. That’s about as much as I feel like saying about this right now.

Write another one Hahaha, it is to laugh. Well, not really. I have two other serious projects underway, and a few other less ambitious things somewhat started/imagined/idly planned. But a lot of major work needs to happen before this gets crossed off the to-do list. 

Try writing something in another genre Yes! A little. Though I haven’t tried submitting anything yet.

Conclusion: Decent progress? Unless you consider the fact that I had two years to work on these. (Secondary conclusion: time to make some new goals.)

dreams

It is a commonplace that other people find it tiresome to hear about your dreams. I find this odd --- what gives more of an instant insight into the subconscious than dreams? What can more quickly express the mood or hidden longing or compressed anxiety of the dreamer? I agree that quite often dreams are mundane: you dread going back to work, so you have a dream in which your boss is continually finding fault with you. Or you fall asleep hungry and dream about having cake. (I have, rather pathetically, recently had both of these dreams.) But it seems to me to be indisputably true that dreams can tell us more important things...not prophecy, but things that we might know already, on a subconscious or unconscious level, but haven't processed yet. How fortunate we are, that our minds can do the heavy lifting while we slumber away and get some rest!

The downside of always remembering dreams is when
a bad one can linger over you all day.

All this to say that I'm always up for listening to a good dream! Though of course it's more interesting when it's someone you know.

I've kept dream diaries on and off for years, though not in a long while. The definite dream book is not the sadly ubiquitous 10,000 Dreams, which I think puts a lot of people off dream interpretation, with its one-size-fits-all symbolism (e.g. to dream of a fox means you are engaging in a risky love affair), but Ann Faraday's The Dream Game. She offers some great advice on learning how to remember your dreams and decode their symbols.

I've realized over time that whenever I dream of pregnancy, or a baby, it's always at a moment when I'm in the process of realizing a large project. Once when I thought things were going badly with a manuscript, I dreamed I accidentally sent my baby to Brazil. When things are going well (or more specifically, better than I could have believed), I have dreams of driving cars. I don't know how to drive, I've never even sat behind the wheel of a car, but in the dream, none of this matters --- I'm revving and turning corners without a hitch.

In the book Seven Nights, a translation of seven lectures delivered by Borges in Buenos Aires over a few months in 1977, Borges discusses dreams in a lecture on nightmares. As you can imagine, there is no more eloquent or suitable advocate for the importance of dreams as a kind of improvisational fiction. He says, "We don't know exactly what happens in dreams. It is not impossible that, during dreams, we are in heaven, we are in hell. Perhaps we are someone, the someone whom Shakespeare called "the thing I am." In dreaming the dream, in clutching at its fading remnants, in recounting it later, in all of this we are making fiction.

One of my recurring nightmares is about an escalator.

Are there any famous stories inspired by dreams? It seems to me that dreams are mostly the place in which to work out the anxieties created by writing. I recently borrowed and flipped through David Lynch's recent book on creativity, Catching the Big One: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity (an easy afternoon read, though be warned: it is *mostly* about meditation), and he has a short section on dreams in which he declares his love of dream logic (no surprise), but says that only once has he gotten an idea from a dream --- the sudden recollection of a dream solved a problem for him with the end of Blue Velvet.

What do you dream about?

how to become a (published) writer

When I decided to start a public blog, I spent some time thinking about what its focus should be, and I have to admit it wasn't initially obvious to me that it would end up being (at the very least tangentially) about writing. Generally, I've tended to blog mostly only about cleaning my apartment, and other things that fill me with an unwarrantedly large sense of accomplishment.

But lately I've fielded a couple of questions from friends and family about how to go about getting published, so I thought I would share my recent response to a friend of a friend asking on behalf of her friend's (!) father:

Q: "Do you mind my asking how you went about getting your book published? A friend's father might be interested in publishing something, but they're not sure where to start. I know we could just google it, but I was wondering if you'd be willing to share your story."

A: What kind of thing is your friend's father interested in publishing? All I can really talk about is my experience with Canadian literary fiction (rather than mass-market fiction or non-fiction). Generally, it goes something like this:

1) Send stories to literary journals (places like the Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, the Dalhousie Review).

2) Once you have some sort of publishing record, you can query publishers with a sample of your manuscript. Big publishing houses (Random House, Penguin, etc.) do not usually accept unsolicited submissions (i.e. sans agent), so you would basically be writing to small literary presses (like Goose Lane, Coach House, etc).

3) If they want to see more, they'll tell you..and at that point, you send it!

You could also skip step 1, but it will help with grant applications and building credibility with editors and agents. Also, in step 2, you could also query literary agents to try and represent your manuscript. If you have a novel (rather than a short-story collection or poetry, which most agents will not represent), this might be a good choice. Also, the time in between sending stuff and hearing back from people is usually a minimum of 2 months and anywhere up to 8 months or longer...so you need to be patient. But please keep in mind I'm not an expert on any of this! It's all based on hearsay and my own limited experience.

Hope this helps!

by way of introduction

...I'll start with a book list or two.

Recently read:

Crabwise to the Hounds by Jeramy Dodds
City of the Mind by Penelope Lively
Open Arms by Marina Endicott

Currently reading:

Horse Latitudes by Paul Muldoon
Between Mountains by Maggie Helwig

Up next:

Not sure. I have a huge pile, full of Amazon orders, books of friends, and a bunch of things I picked up at the recent McGill Book Fair. I think it will probably be Cockroach by Rawi Hage (unfortunately, I don't already have this) because I feel out of the loop for not having read it yet.