My Answers to questions given to all the panelists in preparation for a session on “When Women Write”: a TIFA event held at Harbourfront – May 29, 2019

How do you think, and feel, about the label “woman writer”? Elaborate.

It depends who is doing the labelling. If the term “woman writer” is being used by men to suggest that I cannot speak for or appeal to an audience that includes dudes, that my work is limited in scope or subject matter just because of my DNA, then I reject it. The term then becomes patronizing, like “authoress” or “poetess” – a sub-category or minority group which assumes that the default term “writer” is always male.

If the term “woman writer” is being used to make connections between my writing and that of other women, then I welcome it.

What do you think it means to be “a woman writer”?

I think it means that I have to try to speak from a position that is not central to the canon and that I have to resist some of the traditions of that canon which might find their way into my writing as uninterrogated habits of vocabulary or outlook if I am not careful. I’ll give you some examples that I noticed, with some shame, when editing my last novel, The Discovery of Flight, for the press. One of the protagonists is a 12-year-old girl keeping a journal in anticipation of her Bat Mitzvah. She is constantly questioning religion. In a few places she referred to God as “he”. I went back and changed all those references to the name “God” or the pronoun “they.” Another time she used the word “mankind”. I changed that to “humanity”. It didn’t feel right, or authentic, for a contemporary kid – an outspoken feminist – defaulting to patriarchal language. But I had done so, through seven drafts of the novel, without noticing until the pressure of publication made me scrutinize every word. (My feminist press didn’t notice either, by the way.)

Another protagonist in the book is a hawk. During that final edit I noticed the hawk saying something egregious as well – she said she would be back “in an hour”. Obviously, hawks don’t think in hours! I changed that to “when the moon rises.” I think these changes are analagous – they come from unconsciously adopting the dominant point of view: that of a male human being.

What (if any) are positive aspects of being a woman writer?

I know a lot of kickass women!

What (if any) are negative ones?

Social pressure and familial expectations that l am still meant to be a domestic goddess. I am supposed to put my husband and children first. I have been chastised by all kinds of folks whenever I complained about not having time to write. My husband is a career glassblower. NO ONE ever suggested that he should put us ahead of his art.

On the other hand, I was also criticized by childless colleagues when I inadvertently quit academia by staying home with my children for too long. So there’s that too.

Did you have any woman writers as role models when you first began writing? Do you now? Do you think this is important?

The poet Denise Levertov was my teacher in university back in the early 70s and remained my mentor and friend. I doubt I would have had the confidence to persist with poetry without her example and encouragement. When I moved to Toronto at the end of that decade, I fell in with a lovely group of poets including Carolyn Smart, Bronwen Wallace, Mary di Michele, and Roo Borson; later friends included Rhea Tregebov and Martha Baillie and, most importantly, British writer Helen Dunmore. Finding like-minded peers has been hugely important for me.

How does being a woman writer intersect with other aspects of your identity (ethnic, racial, sexual, religious, etc.)?

Though I try to include other positions and identities in my work – including, for example, a hawk – I feel most comfortable speaking as a heterosexual Jewish woman. I suspect that writing fiction that is overtly Jewish has limited my audience, however. For example, when The Tale-Teller, my picaresque fantasy about life in 18^th-century Quebec came out, it was reviewed in the English Canadian press as though it was worthy but boring History and therefore of limited interest to anyone who wasn’t Jewish. This was not the case for the French translation, interestingly enough. It was embraced by the Quebec press as an imaginative riff on 18^th-century philosophy. I was thrilled to be read in the intellectual context I had intended.

Do you think there are any differences between how women and men write (in terms of both the writing process and the books themselves: themes, styles, etc.)?

I suspect that when Daddy is in his office writing no one interrupts him. Mommy makes sure of that! Also, when Daddy submits a book, it isn’t pigeonholed as “men’s fiction”; it is simply seen as “fiction.” Incidentally, I have noticed that the same male critics who used to call my poetry “domestic” before they had kids are now writing poems about fatherhood, and they get praised for increasing their range -whereas I was scolded for “limiting” mine by writing about the exact same subjects.

Is there anything distinctly “female” about your writing?

I only write with quills dipped in menstrual blood. Or, failing that, bright pink ink.

Do you think your career as a writer would be different if you were a man? If so, how?

I can’t prove it, but back in the day, when I could never get even one English course to teach at U of T (even though I had a PhD from there and had taught there for years, because the department claimed to be saving those courses for their grad students to teach), Al Mortitz always got courses because he had pals – men his age, serious manly men with tweed jackets and fake English accents who had gone to American universities – in the English Department. He had the gravitas they were looking for. That is, he had supreme self-confidence, a deep voice, and a beard. I had none of these things. I am not blaming Al for this, by the way. The prejudice is systemic.

On the other hand, I think my career would have been different if I’d flattered such men more, or flirted with them, or been cuter, or more helpless. Alas, I was neither a man nor a “feminine” enough woman.

Do you think being a woman writer affects any of the following?

• Your creative process / the act of writing
•  Yes because of domestic expectations, obligations, lack of time, constant interruption
• The likelihood of your books getting reviewed
• Yes, obviously, see CWILA!
• The likelihood of your getting invited to write book reviews
• Perhaps – I have no idea because no one has asked me for years. Being old is nearly as bad as being a woman when it comes to such things, and I am both.
• The likelihood of your getting invited to speak on panels and at conferences
• I suspect so. For the same reasons – female and old.

Have been at home writing a new book of poetry and editing, remotely, as I always have done. Feel so privileged to be able to continue my work during the Covid pandemic. Sending strength and love to all my friends and colleagues. May we find serenity in these fraught times and learn what we need to do to build a healthier world.

Very excited about this project! Our family used to listen to audiobooks on long car trips to the grandparents in New York and in Montreal. They are such a fabulous resource. I actually recorded my first novel, The Violin Lover, for the CNIB, but I think a professional actor will do a better job than I did – if only because anticipating what was coming, I made mistakes or even edited my own words, requiring an embarrassing number of takes!

From the Ottawa Poetry Newsletter,

Wednesday, February 22, 2017

On Writing #123

“An Infinity of Blues:  Art as a Form of Attention“

Before I learned to write I learned to draw and, to some extent, I still see the former as a more nuanced and sophisticated version of the latter. Making art is a way of representing the world to yourself; of looking closer so you can see what’s really there. The eye as microscope; the page as time-machine. Sharpen the focus. Slow everything down. Then copy what you see as accurately as you can.

There’s a radical honesty required from both writing and painting because copying what you see, not what you are supposed to see, challenges convention. To write what you feel and think, not what you are supposed to feel and think is even more subversive. This is how art frees the constrained and vindicates the powerless. It turns the bystander into an activist.

I cannot remember a time when I wasn’t a bystander; when I didn’t feel apart from things, observing them. I suspect this is typical of anyone drawn to the arts. A person fully immersed in the world isn’t compelled to scrutinize it, but if something or someone has flung you out of the centre to the periphery you necessarily inhabit a space of exploration. This is frightening but also liberating, which is why we continue to make art despite loneliness, frustration, lack of response, and lack of remuneration.

Until I went to university, the visual arts were just as important to me as the literary ones, but then I moved into my head – a space even smaller and more cluttered than a library carrel – and writing took over. There no longer seemed to be any way paint and charcoal could represent the honey and vinegar of reality; only language, parsed into metaphor and allusion, quotation and dislocation, could build a second world with anything like the variety and terror of the first. Words have been my medium ever since. I have worked as an English professor, a creative writing instructor, a mentor, and an editor; written poetry and fiction for adults and children, scholarly essays and dissertations, and book reviews. For recreation, when I wasn’t hungrily devouring other people’s books, I played Scrabble and Boggle and did cryptic crosswords. I even read Roget’s Thesaurus for pleasure! I was completely besotted with language.

Part of this intoxication was childlike: I loved playing with the sounds and textures of words. And part of it was more adult and urgent: if I only learned enough, maybe one day I could write something true. Daily life hurt; it made no sense. But literature would save me, if only I could write my way in to the truth and then out again, to offer it to others.

(painting of my brother David, from a photograph taken by my sister Lisa)

Then in September of 2015, exhausted by literary disappointment and juggling family demands, employment, too many illnesses and deaths, I took a break from writing and went to art school. And in drawing and painting and sculpture I’ve recovered the joy of making stuff not as a path to “the truth” — which I no longer believe in — but as an end in itself. When a model is posing in the middle of a room and twenty people are working at easels in a circle around him you invariably get twenty versions of “the truth,” each dependent on the painter’s height, angle and acuity of vision, hand-eye co-ordination, native skill, learned technique, quality of pigments and brushes, knowledge of other painters’ work, emotional state that day, life experience …. In the art studio it is immediately obvious that everyone’s view is partial, as is everyone’s ability.

This is something writers too often forget, but remembering it would help us be more generous not only to others, but also to ourselves. There is so much vitriol among reviewers of Canadian poetry these days. Maybe it is fueled by the reviewers’ own frustration at trying to make work that is not only authentic to their individual experience but somehow revelatory of a larger “truth”, not merely well-crafted but somehow canonical. What if we relieved ourselves of that burden and acknowledged that the task is impossible, and that none of us will ever get it right? Would that make the poetic enterprise more enjoyable?

For me it has.

Studying the laws of perspective, gradation, and shading, mixing pigments to emulate the colour wheel, trying to understand spatial relationships — all of this is bringing me back to poetry with renewed faith and energy. I’m no longer worried that I’ll never write anything great, I just want to write something good. I can never capture everything I know about a person when I paint their portrait, but if the subject is recognizable and my own feelings come through, I’m happy. The past few years of incessant feuding in the Canlit scene and of my style of writing falling out of favour made me doubt that was sufficient. But art has always been my way of paying attention, and that attention connects me to the world and makes that world liveable. Without it there is just clutter and noise; conflict and appetite. With it, cobalt, pthalo, indigo, ultramarine. An infinity of blues.

LISZTS | 11 Canadian Novels That Classical Music Lovers …
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I visited so many dear friends and met so many wonderful people on my mini-tour of the west coast, but the highlight of the trip was a pilgrimage to Cathedral Grove – one of the last stands of old growth forest on Vancouver Island. The fact that I was reading Richard Powers’ magisterial novel, The Overstory, during my travels, definitely contributed to the portentousness of the experience. Here’s a photo that may give you some idea of the sublimity of the Douglas Firs there, just outside Port Alberni.