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November 5, 2011 07:38:28
Posted By Michelle
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Winter has officially landed on the southern Canadian prairie bringing with her not only a first dusting of snow but an urgency to settle into a good winter project. My winter goal involves shopping, not in the traditional mall type but rather in the shopping my novel kind of journey.
My winter goal is to finally complete this saga that has been dancing around my desk for far too long and shoo it out the door. It is complete in principal but not in that writer angst way, as every time I open the file I change and shift and rework and hopefully better the storyline. Eventually, this winter perhaps, I hope to let it go and clear my desk and my thoughts making way for the next big story welling up and wanting out onto paper. I am at my writer-happiest when delving into historical fiction and my work in progress, about to take wings, has taken me on a wonderful literary journey and beyond. Writing a long story of novel proportion is a grueling, energizing and rewarding task I highly recommend. With or without a goal of eventual publication the writing process has been a rewarding journey that in near-completion I trust is only just a beginning for this story. The shopping has begun for a publisher and/or an agent while the re-writing, re-working and deciding which of my multiple endings will make the final cut draws to a close and my next novel starts to percolate over the coming winter.
For those who have been asking what is Shunned about I have this synopsis to share:
Every family has their secrets but does every family know them?
Does what one generation said and did a century ago affect our family story still today?
Are our family history and our family heritage one in the same?
Do we really know where we came from and where we are going based on that truth, or was it all lies?
Compound all those questions with the social upheaval of leaving your history behind and coming to a new country with no language, no money, no family and nothing but half truths and broken promises while your struggle to start a new life. Then add into that unfortunate mix the clinging to faith and a much closed community of the Holdeman Mennonite life, throw in the unbroken prairie, turn of the century homestead hardships, a sin beyond that which the Mennonite faith could explain and a shunning that changed everything.
Shunned, is a story of all that and more. It challenges our Canadian prairie heritage, our strength of the family unit and our devotion to faith, with a simplistic honesty and a longing to believe in that which moves one forward. It follows generations of a family with a faith unable to carry the lies, to the defeat of the history and the detachment from all which should matter. This story is very unique and yet very common all in the same plot, a tale so interchangeable and threaded through many families with a history routed in old-country denials, new-world half truths and modern day dysfunction.
Follow old world newcomers to the unbroken prairie at the turn of the century, and on to generations of the struggles in the dirty thirties country wide, the war years, mid century modern changes challenging old world faith and onto a century ending with a family torn into pieces by the past.
Shunned changes everything we hoped to be true and makes us question our own family history in a way we never imagined.
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July 20, 2011 05:42:50
Posted By Michelle
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I have not used this blog space to review a book before and actually this is not exactly a book review but more of a comment or two on a recent book I had the privilege of reading. A life-altering read is so rare for me, and I imagine for many writers, with a critical eye often hard to keep closed while hoping to get caught up and swept away while reading fiction for pleasure.
I met author Beverly Akerman at a writing conference last month in Montreal, a fellow PWAC (Professional Writers Association of Canada) journalist, and was thrilled to have her sign a copy of her much talked about recent release, The Meaning of Children. This collection of short stories is her debut into the fiction book world after a solid career in molecular genetics research. Her stories are as diverse as her changing career path and yet string together a theme as connected as a genetic chain.
Very few times in my life resonate so strongly to a past and a childhood that has me always facing forward and rarely wanting to look back. As I read Akerman’s book instantly I am that child on the first page, in the first sentence, whose parents “When the arguing started would get louder and louder, till they broke into my dreams.” As the stories moved along I, like her character, realized how much I learned from eavesdropping during the arguments, and sadly like the child I too knew “… where the patched holes were in the walls” and that “… it would be smarter to keep my opinions to myself.” In the next few tales the loneliness hit home of a child walking along to school wishing for her own puppy and that she could write a book and feeling very misunderstood by grown-ups. The stories continued to remind me of the confusion of growing up and not knowing, as the author puts it, how to ask the questions that needed answers.
The middle year stories remind the reader of the challenges and fears of raising our children, the uncertainty of it all, the fragility of life, and the strength or disappointment in our partnerships deals we make and break which we had hoped would have carried us up through it all. Heartache over loss, the loss of youth, loss of freedom, the loss of some piece of our very being and mostly the vulnerability of childhood and how it plagues on the greater vulnerability of a marriage.
As the book makes it to the end years we are taken into that empty space children leave behind as the writer reminds us about “… those reasonable accommodations that permitted long-term marriages to endure.” There is a questioning of failures that comes with age and sometimes a loneliness stashed deep below the lies people told themselves necessary as if “… sleep-walking through life, anesthetized.”
Children weave their way through every tale, conceived in honor or shame, lost and found and lost again, passed on, passed over, and always sparking the reader to question where in all these stories sits their own story. I found a small part of my own child-like self in every tale but mostly I felt compelled to alter the stark realities of Akerman’s haunting characters, too late to alter my own.
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March 31, 2011 12:02:45
Posted By Michelle
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It seems like a lifetime ago I had time to sit and collect my thoughts and update my blogs. I did a note-too-self, not in that resolution sort of way, that in 2011 I would make more effort to contemplate and write on a regular basis but it is only the end of March so easing into it I guess.
I did however finally, after a long winter of a few moves, business and home, manage to finally take some time to seriously write. After last summer’s amazing experience I last wrote about, and spending ten days in a monastery high on a hill with amazing collective energy of wonderful writers I was in awe of to be sharing the same space with, during the summer Sage Hill Writing Experience, writing seemed to be a letdown. Not that there was much time for it, other than some freelance work, in my unsettling winter of change.
It was as if the creative words, the novel I am so attached to and left in mid-story when I left Sage Hill last summer, was so much more worthy of an hour here or there, or quick notes and character sketches on too many pieces of paper thrown into a file waiting. Waiting for some respect to the hard work that got it that far last summer, and dedication to the hard work that it still needed to take it to the end.
Writing a novel, a fiction novel, I have discovered is not unlike anything I thought I knew how to do. Some days in the unwinding of the tale onto the page it becomes more like life than life itself. When this happens, and it will when you let a story come through you and onto the page, life has to take a back seat to the story. The story becomes life.
These past few weeks I had the blessing of getting to go to that place where the story can be life and life can disappear for a while. I had the privilege of a residency stay at Wallace Stegner House, in Eastend, Saskatchewan. An historic boyhood home of author Wallace Stegner, and the only place in his long life he truly remembered as being home in his uprooted history.
As I have been working on an historic fiction novel based on uprooted family history, Shunned, it is only suiting I would land here at Stenger House, alone, uprooted temporarily from life and getting to finally have not only the time but the perfect place to finish that journey.
I said this past while here at Stegner was like getting to go on vacation with the characters in my story and am happy to report we had a wonderful time.
As always remember to take the time, honor your story and give it the place to come forward. Your words, your tales to tell, are a gift. Not just a gift to the eventual reader, but a greater gift to the writer in the wonderful creative process of getting it to paper.
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August 9, 2010 06:45:13
Posted By Michelle
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I know that summer is not over yet but I can’t wait for fall to share my ‘what I did on my summer vacation‘ story!
Writers are by nature a solitary being and at times we can become very withdrawn and introspective while engrossed in writing work. Ask any writer what their dream vacation would be and most would lament for a space and place to be alone to write. My summer experience was for me one better than that. Not only did have a unique space and place but I had the rare gift of writer-types camaraderie.
As a successful applicant to the Sage Hill Writing Experience, I had the honour of sharing ten days with 30 other writers of all genres and specifically four other fiction writers, the Sage Sisters as we are now known, all work-shopping our novels. Under the direction of Terry Jordan (Beneath That Starry Place), we each shared a unique writing-life-altering experience. The knowledge gained, the direction and guidance in my own writing are beyond measure but the greatest gift was not only the honing of my craft but in the support and friendship from the ‘sisters’ and also from the faculty and support staff. (Terry Jordan and other faculty bios)
All that would have been more than enough, but for me the absolute best part of the entire experience was the solitude I and other writers at Sage Hill thrived in. The isolating setting tucked away in a monastery setting, hosted by Franciscan Friars at St. Michael’s Retreat perched above the town of Lumsden, 30 km NW of Regina in Saskatchewan’s picturesque Qu’Appelle Valley was worth the price of admission.
The quiet daily routine, simple surroundings, simple meals, limiting social and as little contact with the real world as one cared for, along with supportive retreat-mates all seeking the same made for an energy which lent to prolific creative juices pouring onto the pages.
I know my writing will forever benefit from this unique opportunity and encourage anyone who can seek out an opportunity such as Sage Hill Writing Experience to do so and treasure each and every creative moment. I know I have a renewed outlook on my writing experience thanks to this unique and amazing opportunity that my summer of 2010 gifted to me.
Thanks to instructor Terry Jordan, my Sage Sisters, the Friars and hosting support staff at the retreat and especially to the Sage Hill ED, Philip Adams, who performed his endless role of ‘everything to everyone’ with a kind, loving and comical heart making each and every day a pleasure to be there.
Did you manage to escape to any writing retreat/workshop locations? I would love to share the info with others - please leave a comment or email me.
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July 19, 2010 04:52:12
Posted By Michelle
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Life has a way of isolating certain times in our life and giving us back a snapshot in a can-
you-have-ever-imagined kind of way.
If someone had told me a year ago that I would be heading out alone, in the open road, in a
bright sunshine-yellow beetle bug, taking myself to a 10 day novel writing retreat I would
have thought they were insane. But here I am, sitting outside at the retreat, one of the most
pretty isolated on a hill places I have ever seen, with 10 days of freedom to work on my
novel under great mentorship in a workshop of 5 other equally thrilled to be here novelists.
When you allow yourself time to dream I do think that dreams do come true, small ones
along with big ones with only you as the only judge. I, like most people I know work very
hard and we get so self-involved in the frenzy of day to day life that we are all guilty of not
taking the time to be alone, be with one ‘self’ and be creative, no matter what your talent or
passion.
Writers are a typically bad bunch for not getting around to being creative. We let too many
things get in our way of physically and mentally sitting down to write. There is always
something that takes priority over writing and as writers we also often feed that bad attitude
that writing is not really a job anyway. There are many closet writers for that very reason, as
they do not want the flaky stigma that often comes with the mystique of a writing lifestyle.
I had to work very hard, professionally to juggle being gone from my self-employed life for
almost three weeks in the busiest of summer seasons. I also had to work very hard
personally to let go of all the things that give me excuses, or reasons as I like to call them,
to not be writing as much as I should or not writing what I really want to write.
Taking this time to firstly pull together the application and a manuscript in progress worthy
of a coveted half dozen spots in a highly respected writing workshop was a feat all in itself.
But surprisingly writers will always typically find a way to be not deserving of accolades or
accomplishments. Upon gaining entry I constantly second guessed the notification letter to
the point of almost not attending. When I got over that personal hurdle I then decided I
simply could not justify the expense of the adventure. That too passed.
I am a writer by profession and came to that role the long hard way through a career change
or two along the way and have had the privilege of covering many a great story in
magazines and journals over the years but finally the next ten days will be a long awaited
chance to at last be what I have wanted to be my entire life as far back as I can remember –
a fiction novelist. Even the word fiction is exciting to me. I have very few childhood
memories as mostly they are stashed so deep buried under the rubble of too many hard
ones but one I do distinctly recall is the day in second grade when the teacher explained the
difference between fiction and non-fiction and even then at only barely seven years old I
instantly had a place I knew I belonged in. I knew even back then that young that my brain
ran a constant reel of stories and observations that I dared not share with anyone but after
that single moment in class that it now had a real place to belong – I knew I was a fiction
writer!
I copied the word off the blackboard and later that night, secretly under the covers I printed
the words over and over and over on a piece of paper adding my name after each line and
secretly stared at it for days. One day when I was afraid my brothers would find it and tease
me tore it up in tiny little pieces and buried the scraps it in the earth and I remember saying
to myself out loud – “there! Now no one can steal that from me – I AM a “fiction novel writer”
just like the teacher taught us about.
It is afternoon one of ten more to come and I am already feeling a world away from my
hectic life and a stone’s throw from my writing life that I have missed so dearly. I am
breathing the most amazing fresh air in perfect temperatures and lovely sunshine and the
novel characters that have been trapped behind a busy life in my multitasking brain are
dancing around with joy and excited to be able to finally come out and play. It seems that it
was only days ago not decades ago that I came to realize I am a fiction writer …. at least for
the next ten days!
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