Writing from the whole self, for the whole self
Writing can bend our brains and make our backs ache sometimes, but it shouldn't hurt.
Last night I attended an event at the Vancouver Public Library central branch to celebrate Joseph Kakwinokanasum as this year’s Indigenous Storyteller in Residence. I met Joseph at a week-long writing retreat back in 2021, when we both “tapped the stream” at Hollyhock on Cortes Island with Betsy Warland and Shaena Lambert.
Joseph shared many insights on writing his debut novel, My Indian Summer (highly recommended read), his Cree connection to storytelling, and how it’s all shaping the direction of his next book, which he’s writing in a very different style of fiction.
Something that really struck me in particular, and which I am still mulling about in my head as I write this, was his candid acknowledgment that his first book was initially intended to be memoir but he decided to make it fiction. This was because he just didn’t like spending time in that memoir manuscript. It was too difficult and overwhelming and retraumatizing. Why do that to himself? So he took a new angle, came at his lived experience at a slant and found new ways and genres and formats with which to tell his story - his many stories.
As I sat there looking at Joseph up ahead on the stage, with my partner Jason to my right and Betsy and Shaena to my left, my mind flooded with memories of that spring retreat on Cortes Island. I was surrounded by support inside and out.
That retreat was my first experience being immersed in such a way, working alongside fellow writers with dedicated time to work on my project, my memoir about navigating a mix of identities as an immigrant to Canada. It helped me connect with other writers in profound ways as well as with myself, as a writer. By the end of the retreat I’d discovered the mechanics of my practice, gained confidence reading my writing in front of a group, and had also been invited to join a writing group (who would a year later be the first to read an early draft of my memoir). To say the least, I got a lot of out of that retreat and it’s a huge part of why I am where I am today with my book - readying it for publisher eyes.
The resounding feedback I received the following May from that first beta group of readers though, aside from incredible accolades and many a sprinkling of compliments, was this:
It’s huge. It’s all there, but it needs to be reigned in. There’s just too much in there - and it makes it lack affect.
This is what I’m grappling with as I work on my latest revision.
When I got the feedback, I was gutted only for a split second though. Quickly that little hole inside my stomach was filled with a wise, all-knowing YUP. I knew it was all true. I hadn’t found a direction for the thing.
The effect of wanting to write about it all was that I made it about nothing in particular. My life has definitely had plot. But a book isn’t just plot. You need the story to echo.
So, as I sat last night at VPL listening to Joseph, I reflected on my own feelings about ‘spending time inside my manuscript.’ I remembered the feelings I had at Cortes and the hunger I felt for sharing my story; how day in and day out, I woke at the crack of dawn, when the sky and ocean were the same colour blue, ready to pop open my laptop and keep going. On that retreat, I’d gotten my first taste of an embodied experience of what it feels like to enjoy writing. To feel good writing. When so much of writing and revising this book has felt like a slog, it was such a gift to be reminded of that feeling.
More importantly, it’s a feeling that is still alive in me when I spend time in my manuscript - or rather, on certain sections. As I continue to revise and re-read my draft, and think about which parts to cut away and which parts, as Betsy says, “have a pulse” I need to follow, I am also reminded to acknowledge the parts that just don’t make me feel good. It’s so important to discern how I am feeling - in my body - as I write and work on my memoir. What is the state of my heart? My stomach? My whole self?
Because, I admit, there are times when the opposite feelings come up - where it feels pretty crappy to be inside the thing; what I’m starting to realize is just how in my head I am in those times, escaping the bodily discomfort by solutioning and reasoning and cerebrally fighting to keep the text, the chapter, the storyline, what-have-you. When I read certain parts of my draft, I can feel it in my bones, that I am forcing a thing. And it doesn’t feel good. I am completely disconnected from my heart and my gut and the whole being that is me.
What listening to Joseph last night has made me acutely aware of is the importance of following my body. I must honour how it feels as I work on this next draft and to use those feelings as my compass.
I’ve also learned that what I’m working on is a book. It is a single work, and a single story. It is not the whole of me. To trap myself in a one-book mindset is to limit myself as a writer. It is to deny the fact that what I am working on is a body of work, I have just yet to have my debut :)
Thanks, Joseph, and Shaena and Betsy, for the lovely conversation and thought-seeds last night. And thanks, Jason, for always staying curious about my #writinglife and joining me on this ride.
xx
Vish