"Predestined for Failure:" The Writing Life - Episode 1 of 2 with Canadian writer Guy Vanderhaeghe

 SUMMARY KEYWORDS

writer, writing, write, work, thought, creative writing, story, point, good, people, reader, canada, attempt, literary, students, craft, person, kipling, literature, describing

 

00:00

Welcome to Woman of Culture, I'm Mira T Sundara Rajan. Join me and my distinguished guests to discover untold stories from the world of culture.

 

00:47

In recent years, writers from Canada have become increasingly prominent on the international literary scene. Not only are they winning literary awards, including the Booker and the Nobel Prizes, but they also create incredibly influential, and even prescient works like Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and 1985 novel that seems to predict the current direction of US politics. What's the secret? How did Canada become so good at making writers? My guest, writer Guy Vanderhaeghe, shares a wonderful and unique perspective on this history. One of the most prominent and celebrated Canadian authors today, Guy has been active in writing and publishing for more than 40 years. His first book, the short story collection, Man Descending, was published in 1984, and won the Governor General's Award for Fiction Canada's leading literary prize, an almost unheard of distinction for a first book. It was his first of three such awards so far. Guy’s latest book, the novel, August into Winter, was just published in 2021. In part one of this interview, I asked Guy if he would tell us about his experiences as a writer, what it meant to be an aspiring writer in and from Canada, and how he has seen Canadian literature evolve during his career so far, a period of dramatic social change in Canada and around the world. Not surprisingly, Guy had a wealth of ideas and stories to share about the challenges he faced as a young, aspiring writer, the changing face of literature in Canada, Canada's place in a post-colonial world order, and, of course, the impact of technology on the written word. Above all, Guy offers rich insights into the craft of writing that will be sure to fascinate writers and readers alike. Here is the inspiring and impressive Guy Vanderhaeghe, a writer and teacher of integrity on the world that made him and that he has helped to make. My profound thanks to you, Guy, for showing me how exciting, challenging, unpredictable, competitive, cynical, yet ultimately humane the world of literature can be, and how much hope, with a stubborn tenacity perhaps peculiar to the trade, writers continue to hold out for the future.

 

03:47

Well, Guy Vanderhaeghe, I'm absolutely thrilled to have you on the podcast today and to have this opportunity to interview you. And that is no exaggeration. I never thought that I would be speaking to you and having the opportunity to ask you some questions about your very interesting history as a writer and the times that you've lived through so far. So thank you so much for agreeing to do this,

 

04:12

You can't see me but I'm blushing right now.

 

04:19

Fantastic. Well, I'm going to cause you more reason for embarrassment here just by saying, but I absolutely have to point out that you've been a leading figure in Canadian literature for a long time for as long as I can remember. And again, it's a thrill for me, partly because I grew up with your books at home. So you've been a presence in my life for a long time, and you've won so many extraordinary honors as a writer. I'm not going to try to list them all here. But that does lead nicely into the icebreaker that I thought I would start with today, which is just to say that, you know when we're when we're having the opportunity to talk with some When as successful as yourself, there's a tendency to think that your career was predestined. And of course, it all started out. And it made perfect sense from the beginning. But I know that's often not the case. And I imagined, you must have faced some interesting challenges when you were first trying to get started as a writer. So would you like to tell us a little bit about that how you developed an interest in writing and maybe what role you feel your background as a Saskatchewan native has also played in your career development. Sure.

 

05:30

I did not grow up in a bookish or literate, particularly literate household. I was the first person in my family to get a university degree. But from the moment I went to school, I was obsessed with reading. And when I say that, I have to also say that there was no library in town. And the school burned down the year before I started, and with it, whatever library was in the school at that time, and when the school was rebuilt, any money that was left over after construction went to textbooks. So I was always attempting to find something to read, which was often things like comic books, or any book that I could get my hands on. So in that sense, I think probably my background is somewhat unusual for a writer. But I did have a passion for reading and even writing at a young age. My grandmother was the little town seamstress, and she did alterations for the menswear store. And she was my babysitter because my mother worked when I was a child and I would sit beside the sewing machine with a notebook and pester her as I was writing my stories asking her how to spell words. I think it's a really annoying, annoying child, particularly since you are probably too young to have ever been exposed to classics illustrated comic books. But they were…

 

07:20

Unfortunately…

 

07:22

…so called literature that teachers and some parents wanted children to read. But it appeared in a kind of digestible form with pictures and they had everything from Hamlet to John Taylor to cities to read your Kipling's Kim, all of these classic comic books. I read Caesar's commentaries in classic comic books as bizarre as that sounds. So I was driving. I remember driving my grandmother crazy, because I was inventing names that I thought sounded Roman, because I was writing a random story. So, you know, I was, say things to her like, how do you spell auditorium? Right? Or gymnasium? Or what? So that, I guess, that was the beginning, then that sat on the back burner for a long time, I remained a reader, but I didn't write. And when I went to university, and I became a graduate student, I was studying history. A local literary magazine began, it was the first literary magazine in Saskatchewan, it was called grain. I read the first issue, and I wrote a short story that I submitted for the second issue, which they accepted and published. And that got me writing again, not writing habitually. But I was writing and, and I had always harbored kind of a dream, I suppose to be a writer, I used to read the biography of the writers in the back of the classics, illustrated comic books, to detect whether I saw some sort of common feature in their backgrounds. And, you know, I've just 10, nine or 10 years old, and trying to figure out what I needed to do to become a writer. So I did have the ambition for a long time. And after I graduated from university, I had a period of unemployment. And I started writing virtually every day. faced a lot of rejection. Oh, gosh, yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, I think writers nurture their rejections and what, like what people had said to them,

 

10:04

They’d almost need to.

 

10:05

So it was a time in Canada when even the last name Vanderhaeghe seemed unusual. And I remember someone writing to me and saying to me that they thought that perhaps, if I wanted to write, I should attempt to write in my mother tongue. So, I remembered that, obviously, because I've just recounted it to you. But to become a writer, takes a long time. And it takes a lot of effort. And it takes doggedness. I used to say to my creative writing students that when I was in my early 20s, I had two friends. And the three of us confess the dirty little secret that we wanted to be writers. Two of them, I think, were much more talented than I was. They were more natural writers than I was. But I was more dog and like, I kept on working at it, and I kept on working on craft. And I think that makes a huge difference. Just a sort of commitment to, to learning how to do this thing you want to do. I think many people who think about writing think that they term inspiration that somehow that's the propellant for all writing, at least in longer forms. I don't think inspiration carries you very far. It's doggedness and stick to it-iveness. And a willingness to accept your day to day failures. Right, and then get up the next morning and say, the mistakes I made yesterday, my duty is to attempt to fix them today. And if I can't fix them today, my duty is to attempt to fix them the day after. And just keep at it.

 

12:24

Yeah, this is, I'm just aware that I'm sort of receiving some pearls of wisdom from you here. So I'm just listening very carefully. You know, because it's incredible the perspective that you're offering, and also the advice for anyone who has any interest, I think, in doing a good piece of writing, you know, this is this is really valuable.

 

12:44

I mean, I think that in many ways, I was not predestined for success, I was predestined for failure. Why? By that, I mean, like, if anybody looked at my antecedents, my background, even what I studied at university, they would likely have thought, or at least suspected, that I didn't have what everybody thinks writers need to have, or what writers should be.

 

13:29

Yeah, listening to your narration of your background, I mean, it is really eye opening, I have to say, I find it both inspiring and very moving. Actually, that, you know, to think of you as a, as a child, you know, somehow you had this, this passion, as you quite rightly describe it that is almost inexplicable, in a way.

 

13:51

Well, for instance, my father was functionally illiterate. He could, you know, he could sort of pick his way through a newspaper, but he couldn't write a check. And so when I was a child, he would take me with him to write checks for him. But my father never, never read a word I wrote. And this is not a complaint. It's, that was just the circumstances. My mother on the other hand, she was incredibly sort of encouraging in terms of like school, and getting an education. And my mother had aspirations that she couldn't fulfill. And I was an only child, and a lot of them when I say pushed on to me, that that sounds harsh, right? It wasn't harsh, but she, she was my encouragement. You know, my father would have preferred if if I had had stayed home in Esther. Hey, See, worked at the mind. And maybe did a little bit of farming with him because he did both things he he farmed, and any work done in mind. I think he would have preferred that. But I knew I knew at a very early age, that was not for me. And I don't know why I knew that.

 

15:21

Well, that's the mystery. You know, and I hope, if you haven't already done so, I don't think you have, but I hope you'll consider writing your memoirs. At some point,

 

15:31

I don't think I'll ever write a memoir, though I have, in lectures and talks, actually talked about these things about my past, especially when I'm talking to other writers. Because people who want to write are often in search of the key that they think is going to unlock it for them. And I don't believe that that key exists. That what makes any writer is the desire to write, I used to tell my creative writing students, do you want to be a writer? Or do you want to write because many people think of writer as this being of some kind, that is surrounded by whatever word you want to apply, none of which are true, some sort of glamour, some sort of prestige, some sort of wisdom, or anything else. So a lot of people think of becoming a writer as becoming a figure of some kind. Right? Whereas I don't believe you get very far thinking that way. You'd be you actually, what gets you to where you might want to go is devoting yourself to the act of writing, and the craft of writing.

 

17:08

Yeah, I mean, you started out all of this by contrasting your situation with that of your roommates. And you said, you said some very interesting things there, you said that you thought they may have had more natural talent versus your own doggedness. That's a really interesting thing to say. And I'm not entirely sure what it means because I think, you know, from what you're describing, you had that, that spark in you, that kept you going. I mean, that's a form of, of talent, too. But your point is well taken about the kind of approach, one would need to take, you know, to make this a success. And I don't mean that in a career sense, but in terms of, to make the act of writing a success.

 

17:54

I mean, one of the things is that often, writing that looks effortless on the page is only won by great effort. Yeah, of course, writing and revising and rewriting and struggling to find not only what you want to say, but how to say it. And there are people who say that they want to be writers, but that doesn't interest them very much. What interests them is, is what they would call the idea.

 

18:32

This is so true about so many things, but perhaps especially this one, because that that work that you're describing, that involves, that's a kind of mining, I guess, an internal process of mining, and discovering and self-discovery, as well as, you know, actually conveying that discovery to your reader, to another person.

 

18:56

Like, what's a light to that? Unfortunately, I'm sort of like reviewing my past and working with other writers. And I always used to tell them don't, don't calculate. Right? What you need to do is write what interests you rather than what you think would interest somebody else. Because if you're actually not interested in what you're writing, it's going to show, it's going to be evident. And, and it tempts, you know, to, even at the simplest level, those people who decide that they are going to write something that is like something else that has been successful. By the time they've got that, that thing written, that is modeled on the thing that was successful, something new is successful. Right. So you're constantly chasing down something that you can't catch. It's like a dog chasing it, chasing a car. Dog;s not going to catch the car.

 

20:13

And maybe the worst part of that is that the dog doesn't know it.

 

20:19

Exactly. It's true, true of human beings, too, right? But the pursuit of things that you don't know, you ought not to be pursuing. And I understand that, I mean, that's part of ambition, right? And to do anything, you're going to make mistakes. I'm not saying that you rule out every possibility, and whatever you're doing. The only thing is, is that I think that, that what needs to be the focus of the work, or the meat in the nut is what you can really commit yourself to. And if you don't do that, wholeheartedly, and passionately, you're not going to get very far. When I first started writing, and this is the last example I'll give, I would say, at least in literary magazines, the ruling orthodoxy was post- modernism. And I would get rejections because I was writing something that looked to most literary editors, as old hat. And not actually, as they would have said, like, pushing literature forward, or attempting to engage with the newness of fiction, like making it new. But I read postmodern work, I could appreciate it. But I wasn't interested in writing it. What I was interested in doing was writing what I thought of as a kind of realism that on the surface, was, I mean, I used to make the argument that that of course, realism is not documentary. It's edited experience. And within the editing of that experience, what you attempt to do is reveal something of, of, of substance that transcends the dailiness of our life. I mean, even at the simplest level, dialogue is not really the way people speak, or choppy, no. Okay. So it's not reportage, good dialogue, operates as if you expect your characters to say interesting things, make interesting revelations, and to guide the reader to a place or a point of view, that will surprise them. That's your hope. Okay. And post modernism can do that, or magic realism can do that, and so can realism, all the different literary forms that you can imagine, have, in my opinion, basically the same potential. And that potential is some form of transcendence.

 

23:33

Absolutely. I mean, I am thinking about a couple of things as I'm listening to you, you know. One is that a lot of what you're describing to me does involve, you know, an important degree of internal clarity, which I think is, is probably not something that most of us are born with, it's something that we have to achieve also as a process of work. You know, that's, that's why I was saying you need to, you need to do the interior or the internal work in order to, to find out, you know, and I do think that I myself, think of life as a process of discovery. You know, that's, that's what keeps it interesting. And if we were sort of born and knew everything, I mean, I'm not even sure what that would look like. I think I think you're right and pretty boring. And a lot of other negative adjectives could come in there as well. But in terms of, of discovering that inner, that inner commitment, discovering the things that are important to you, that you really do want to write about and how you think you want to tell your story. What are the what are the words, what are the sentences that you want to use? I mean, I think all of these questions are are a key part of the process. But to me, what you're describing is very individual. You know, it's, it's, it's about the process of developing an individual vision. And I'm just curious about what that means in the, in the context of the environment that we're living where I think my own sense is we seem to be moving away from what is really individual, or honestly, for that matter really diverse. And towards sort of more homogenized visions of how things should be how even how things should be done. I mean, I'd love to hear your thoughts on creative writing programs, you know, which now are our, I think, by many people consider to be prerequisites for careers and writing. And I choose that phrase carefully. Yeah. So how can you? How can you talk about this very real, authentic process that you're describing, in the context that we live in today?

 

26:03

Well, I suppose that that I was always something of a renegade in terms of teaching creative writing. A bit of an outlier. Now, what I always granted was that the only thing that you can teach his craft, or at least it's the only thing that you can make people aware of his craft.

 

26:29

Can I interrupt you just momentarily to say that, I'd love for you to talk about that, too, whenever you're ready to, because you, you commented on that. And you said that, you know, we have to learn how to write and how to write well, but you didn't talk about too much about how we might do that. So I would very much like to hear your thoughts on that as well.

 

 

 

26:51

I can I can give an example perhaps. Perfect. What I used to get students to do was an exercise in point of view. And what I would say I want you to write the same scene, and the first person point of view, then I would like you to write the same scene from an omniscient point of view, the way a 19th century novelist would have written, I'd like you to write that scene also from a third person limited point of view, which is very close to a first person point of view. What are the changes that you can detect between all of these different versions of writing the same scene? That, you know, I used to tell students that the most important choice that you're likely to make at least in an extended period, or a piece of fiction of an extended length, like a novel or a novella is what point of view is are you going to choose certain point of views offer different limitations? And, and, and different strengths? Okay. So that I mean, one of the things that the first person point of view, I would argue does is that it often involves an exercise of the vernacular. You know, if you think about many great first person novels, like whether it's Huckleberry Finn or Catcher in the Rye, what really engages the reader is the sound of the voice, which is non-standard English. And the intimacy of the voice. And a first person very good first person narration ought to make the reader feel as if they're sitting across the table at a coffee shop or a bar with someone who's a gifted raconteur. Okay? So that's one of the strengths of it. One of the weaknesses of it is everything is funneled through one consciousness. So you can't necessarily be fair to every other character. Right? And in almost in an absurdly – I mean, it's obvious. Okay? War and Peace could not be written in the first person. Okay. Often you will see writers who are just starting to write, which is what I did. They write in the first person, because in a sense, everything, everything's tighter. There are fewer things to worry about. You've got that one voice, that one consciousness, that one way of speaking, or narrating the story, all the rest of it. But you can start telling a story that you discover it's almost impossible to tell in the first person. What you end up doing is dragging in all of these other people to report things that happened, that their error rate or couldn't know, you know, etcetera, etcetera. So, I mean, one of those things is, is that with time you either become conscious of these things, you know, like, like, what happens with point of view, and, and what might be the best way to tell the story that I want to write, or you start writing in a certain way, and you discover the limitations, and then you have to go and step away from that limiting point of view, and adopt a different one that's craft, the longer you do it, the easier it is for you to recognize probably the way the story should be told. That's the time saver. Right? That, you may not be able to teach it to a student, okay. But you can make the students aware of that, you can make a student aware of how dialogue ought to operate, you can make a student aware of how you begin a piece of writing, how you put the things in place, that will guide the reader’s reading of the story or the novel, or whatever it is you're writing, you get certain things in place to free you to tell the story. You can give people examples of that. What you can't do is give them the story. Or you shouldn't do, like, for instance, students would say, are you going to give prompts? And I would say if you need a prompt, you're not a writer.

 

32:09

Absolutely. And did you find that there was an exodus from some of your classes at that point?

 

32:15

Actually not. One of the things that I used to do is I laid out everything right at the beginning, about what people could expect, how it was going to run, what people could say, how they could behave and how they couldn't behave. And then I would say, and if you don't like it, this class is not for you. So you began with a kind of commitment. Now, this is increasingly difficult to do now, or has been over the last few years. And so, but even in the last few years, there was sometimes surprise at some of the things that that I said, like the university said, like with online teaching, which I hated, that you could turn their cameras off. That's, you know, they said instructors should allow students to turn their cameras off, because some of them are, are uncomfortable about being scrutinized, or perhaps they didn't want people to see their living circumstances, all the rest of it. And I said, we can't really engage and have a dialogue if we don't actually see people's responses to what is being said. Like we read faces, we read gestures, all the rest of it. So you can't turn your I'm sorry, you can't turn your cameras off. Now, I wasn't a tenure track faculty. Right? I was a part timer. So I could say that sort of thing. One of the, you know, I and I used to warn creative writing students that there are 15 people in this class, you're going to read each other's stories, and you're going to talk about each other's stories. And, and you're going to praise them, or you're going to make suggestions for improvement and all the rest of it. But the person who's listening has to make a choice about what's valid for them from what they've heard. Yeah, good advice. You'll hear bad advice. Right? But the ultimate responsibility rests with you. Just the way it is with a writer with an editor. An editor can make suggestions and in my experience, the editor is like usually 90% correct.

 

34:49

You must have a good editor.

 

34:54

Then there's going to be the 10% for their way in your opinion as a writer. They misunderstood, or you think the advice is absolutely wrong. At that point, you don't submit to anybody else's opinion. You say, I want it this way this, this is the way it's going to be. And it doesn't matter if you're a creative writing student, or you're a publishing writer, you still have to take responsibility for what you've written. And you have to make decisions about how you want the story to develop or to be. I also told people that if you attempted to satisfy all 15 people in this class plus the instructor, what would be left of what you had done? Nothing. Right? And I'm telling tale, so to speak at the school, but I got an email.

 

36:02

About two months ago, from a former student who had gone to a writers group.

 

36:10

And he had said that people had said this, and that to him and all the rest of it, and what did I think of it? And I said, Well, I think basically, it's pretty nonsensical. I said, but the other thing I would say to you, is, maybe it's time for you to stop going to writers’ groups. Tthe training wheels have to come off at some point. So you have you've had enough experience now that maybe you should just attempt to go it more or less alone? I mean, almost everybody turns to somebody for advice, or, or, or, you know, just an intelligent reading of what they've done. When my wife was alive, that was my wife. She was a literary person. She was a painter. But I respected her opinion. And she had, she also had a sense of what I wanted to do. Because she knew me. Right? So she wasn't going to attempt to change what I wanted to do,

 

37:25

To change who you were at a certain level.

 

37:27

I'm not I'm not making an argument for no advice whatsoever. But I am making an argument that, essentially, I don't think that writing is a group project. And I'm a little bit astounded when people meet in a coffee shop, like 10 people, not even to talk about writing, but to write together. I can't get my head around that.

 

38:04

Yeah, well, yes.

 

38:07

I'd say, oh, Elise is writing. She's writing more quickly than I am on the keyboard. I've got her for job, thinking, Maybe I should stop and think. I'm sorry, I didn't like obviously, some people find this fruitful, but I can't get my head around it.

 

38:32

Well, well, I think, I hear you saying very clearly, or emphasizing the importance of self-reliance. I hear you when you talked about craft and learning, what stood out to me is that you are emphasizing the experience that one acquires by doing, you know, put potentially under the guidance of someone like you to the extent that you're able to, to suggest some things that a student should notice, you know, for example, with point of view, something to be aware of, but the experience of trying it, trying and failing, trying again, and then also of, of reading and becoming a better reader, you know, that stood out to me in your, in your comments as well.

 

39:24

There is nothing more important than reading. I used to actually have students who would say, I don't read, I don't want to be influenced. And I would say yes, you do. Absolutely. Yes, you do want to be influenced. I mean, when I when I was teaching myself to write because I never had a creative writing class. I never visited a writer in residence. I did none of those things. When I read a short story that particularly moved me or gripped me. I read like anybody else I read a story. If I was caught up in the story, I let that story carry me right through I didn't particularly analyze or Think, think about what I was reading. I just read the story. Then when I got to the end of the story, I said to myself, Why did I like that story? And how, how does the writer make me like that story? How did the writer go about engaging me and putting me under her spell? Because really good writer, writing puts a reader under a spell. And we all know that magicians have tricks.

 

41:07

Yes, indeed.

 

41:09

So, you know, I remember reading, I think it was the Constance Garnett translation of Chekhov's “Lady with the Lapdog.” And I could not put my finger on how Chekhov created that mood in the story. And then I started noticing how many times the word gray appeared in that story. I actually counted them, right. And then I thought this is this is almost like subliminal advertising. And you read gray, here, gray again, and you're not even really aware that gray is popping up all the time. But gray, gray creates a mood. Now, I don't believe for a second that Chekhov said, I have to use gray 26 times in the story to produce an effect. He understood that instinctively. But in reading that story, what I learned from reading that story, is that what you have to do is allow your instincts sometimes to do things that that someone should say, might say, you shouldn't do. Like, I mean, how many times we've been told in writing, or at least when I went to school, that a lot of repetition was bad.

 

42:39

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, me too. Yeah.

 

42:42

But sometimes repetition is very, very good. Just like sometimes a sentence fragment is very, very good. You know, and when you employ those things, whatever you're doing, when you allow your instinct to guide you, I think it creates effects. But what you have, as a writer, I think what often what you have to do is say to yourself, I'm going to put aside the rational part of my brain until I need it. When you're, when you're writing a piece of writing, and you realize it's not working, then you have to turn on the rational part of your brain. And you have to find out why it's not working. And what you might do to fix it, as long as it's working. You shouldn't, you shouldn't play with it. Just let it work. You know, often sports analogies, right? You know, like, like, athletes say I was in the zone. So sometimes writers get in the zone, right? And just like every app athletes doesn't analyze what they're doing. You know, when they're in the zone, they just do it. They trust it. You know, things feel good to them. They're confident that they can do what they need to do. Well, if you're writing and you're in that zone, trust it.

 

44:24

So that's another skill that that one needs to learn as a writer then is how to how to hear that internal voice or how to sense the direction of that incident. And go with it.

 

44:39

Just say I felt this way before and the results were good. I had this feeling one time. You don't have it very often, quite frankly. But when you get it and you get a good result you trust it. Trust the next time you get it. Because that's a happy accident.

 

45:05

Well, I mean, so my partner is a neuroscientist. So I sometimes find myself thinking about these things in ways that surprise me. But I'm sure that one of the things he would say is that an activity, sorry, an activity like, like writing, especially creative writing, it uses your brain, your mind, on so many levels. And all of those interactions need to be synchronized. It's not something we do with our conscious, you know, mental manipulations. It's something that happens organically.

 

45:45

Or you hope that it happens organically.

 

45:47

Yes. Well, yeah, I think you'd want to do whatever you can to facilitate that, you know, things like suspending the judgment in the analysis until, you know, that activity is necessary when you're rereading or, or at the right time.

 

46:02

Or even the source of a piece of writing. You know, it can be virtually anything. And I think most people would say, people who don't write I think would be surprised about sometimes how banal the source of a piece of writing would seem to them, you know, something that you overheard on the bus. I wrote one short story about when I was falling asleep, and I was in that sort of liminal state between whether you're awake or dreaming or whatever, I got an image of a man standing in a dark street, singing to a lighted house. That I said to myself, What is the story that gets this man singing in the street to the dark house? And why is he doing it? Incredible. So again, like you just have to be open, and don't dismiss and the worst thing that you can have as a sensor in your own head? And what I, I would argue that, that one of the things about creative writing programs. One of the downsides of them is that basically, everything's about censorship.

 

47:40

I was just thinking.

 

47:42

That’s kind of the way they operate. Because most people, when they sit down and look at a piece of writing, what they focus on is, what's wrong with it? They don't focus on what's right with it. Now, as a teacher, I would do both. I would say, Okay, there's always something that's right about, something that people put effort into. Okay. But, you know, it's like, having too many voices in your head is not a good thing. And if you're sitting down, and you're writing, and you're maybe anticipating what classmates might say about what you've written, yes, it's kind of goign well, so Eleanor last week, she said this, about that. I don't want that to happen again. I mean, everything's never black and white. I'm not I'm not saying that creative writing programs are all bad, by any stretch of the imagination. But not everything about them is good. And one of the things I think that that they tend to encourage is the idea that, that it's necessary to win approval, whether from the teacher or your fellow classmates or whatever, rather than trying to win your approval for what you've done.

 

49:28

Well, I'm just feeling a degree of, of, you know, really intense concern as I'm listening to you talk, I don't want to use the word despair. But I'll, I'll tell you why. It's because, again, you know, I feel that what you're saying is so valuable and honestly, I didn't expect that our conversation would get into this kind of material. So it's also has taken me by surprise a little bit. But, you know, again, I hear you emphasizing so much this idea of self-reliance, self-discovery as being integral to the creative process. And also, you use the word, a really interesting word, the word submit, when you talked about dealing with other people's critiques and opinions, and you said that a writer shouldn't submit to those, you know, without making the necessary evaluation of what is important to themselves. And the choices, you know, that they make about what they choose to attend to, and what they choose not to attend to. And that word was a very interesting word, because, you know, submit to me that again, it suggests not only self-reliance, but a sense of, of personal integrity, and a certain, a certain drawing of a line, not in any kind of arbitrary way, but just internally knowing that, you know, this is what I will and will not do, this is what I will and will not accept, and this is my commitment, this is my judgment. And we live, I think, in a society where all of these ideas are just becoming so disregarded.

 

51:34

Yeah, I mean, every correction in societal mores or, or what, whatever they might be, has a tendency to go too far. And I, you know, I, I wouldn't make an argument that that, for instance, of course, we should be concerned about, about people's feelings, of course, we should, we should weigh what we say and what we do. But at the same time, it's impossible to write without giving offense. Just can't be done. Right. On the on the simplest level, I mean, people will complain, if you use words that they don't know, it a piece of writing. I mean, the complaints can be can be endless. There can be complaints about the confusion of what a character What a character might be saying or doing. And the offer, author know, the authority fallacy. And, and the sort of self-editing that, that that goes on in the attempt not to draw any fire whatsoever.

 

53:04

Yeah, avoiding controversy.

 

53:07

Controversy, all of those sorts of things. I mean, even the, you know, the case of whether a bad person can be a good writer. I think there's lots of examples of bad people who were really good writers. There's also examples of very good people who are very good writers. But I think it was W.H. Auden you know, in the 1930s, in the in the midst of the controversies between right, right and left, and I will get the quotation wrong. But in one of his poems, he said, Rudyard Kipling and Paul Claudel, will be forgiven for writing well.

 

53:59

You know, Kipling was a rabid imperialist. All of those sorts of things. Paul Claudel was an extreme French right winger, all the rest of it. But I would argue, in many instances, they were brilliant writers who had bad ideas. Okay? The same could be said of Ezra Pound, you know, Knut Hamsun you can you can go through a list of 20^th century – Céline, horrible, horrible opinions. Okay. When the opinions didn't intrude too strongly into their work, I think it's hard to dismiss it. The work itself.

 

54:51

Yeah, I mean, this is a this is a question on which I haven't made up my mind.

 

54:57

It's a fraught question. You know, Yeah, there's no question about the difficulty of the question.

 

55:07

But I do. I mean, it's very easy for me to, to say that you've pinpointed a key issue, which is, you know, which is where the issue of I guess self-censorship comes in, doesn't it? I actually I said that it was a fear of causing controversy. But I think a better way of putting it would be to say that it's a fear of disapproval.

 

55:31

Yes. And also, you know, in some instances, the fear of ostracism, of shunning. You know, in many ways, an artistic community can almost be like one of those Christian sects, who employ shunning to discipline their members. Because, because nobody wants to be left out. Nobody wants to be thought badly of.

 

Transcript generated by otter and lightly edited for readability.