Interview with Candas Jane Dorsey - Writer in Residence

Exclusive Interview with Candas Jane Dorsey

Early this summer, the Vicious Circle (Whistler’s Writers Group) announced that Candas Jane Dorsey would serve as the 2008 Whistler Writer in Residence.

Dorsey will be installed at the heritage Alta Lake House in Whistler for a month from September 1st through to September 30th and will meet weekly with ten writers in one-on-one sessions and weekly workshops.

The Vicious Circle had the chance to check in with Dorsey and discovered that strangers have tattooed her poetry on their body parts, that she bids on thesaurauses at auctions, and she thinks the reason for bad writing making it into print is more attributable to cock-ups than conspiracies.

Read on…

Q: You've said that starting to write is the most difficult thing for you. What does that look like? How do you get started?

Put my butt in the chair, but fire up Word instead of a computer game.

Q: Are you superstitious? Do you knock on wood, refuse to talk about a work in progress for fear of stalling it, have weird little rituals or worry about jinxing yourself?

I'm not so superstitious, but I have learned one or two things over the years. Refusing to talk about a work in progress, for instance, is not a superstition but a safeguard. As Dorothea Brande wrote in 1934 in Being a Writer, the subconscious doesn't care what form the creativity is expressed in, only that it gets expressed. For many writers, talking about it is a surefire way of not writing it. If a person is a writer like that, it's better to be silent.

Also, I know enough now not to show my work to anyone else until it passes a certain point, because unless it has passed that point, showing it dissipates the creative energy the same way talking about it does.

That doesn't mean that people should be shy about joining this writer-in-residence programme -- that delicate point is very early in the process for most of us.

Just remember that you need 20 pages ON PAPER. As Natalie Goldberg's Zen roshi said to her, "Thinking is thinking. Writing is writing."

*******

Another topic. Writing is an individual art. What works for one person doesn't work for another. And we've already discussed the difficulty of getting going. Annie Dillard in one of her books has a very funny description of writing in a cold office, with a clothespin on her little finger to remind her that she put the kettle on to boil (so that it won't boil dry while she is in the creative trance), spreading out her drafts on a long table and walking around and around -- she says she walks miles completing a book. If one needs to take one's lucky sock puppet, one's blankie, the thesaurus that belonged to James Tiptree Jr (which I just missed buying at auction once...the one that got away), and the cat and get locked into a shed in the garden in order to force oneself to write, well, if it works...

People often tut-tut because Colette's husband locked her in her writing room and she had to slide a certain number of pages out under the door before he would let her out. But Derek Tangye, an autobiographist living in Cornwall, had his wife lock him in a windowless stone studio that had once been a granary and nobody noticed. Colette's husband was indeed a brute, but that's because he published her work under his own name and stole her money, and I think physically abused her too, not because he helped her do what was necessary to get the writing done.

I don't have locks on my writing room. Actually I don't even have doors on it. But sometimes I've wished that I could find a workable force that would get my butt in the writing chair more often. If it turns out to be some superstition, I'll embrace it for its end effect, not its content.

Sometimes students ask if it gets easier. I usually say no, it doesn’t get easier to actually cross that threshold, but after a while one has a shelf of proof that not only can it be done, but that one has done it: A weight of experience that helps enhance the inertial effect. Inertia used in the scientific sense: "a body at rest, absent of other forces, tends to remain at rest; a body in motion, absent other forces, tends to remain in motion...": we do what we have to do to keep the writing body in motion rather than at rest.

Q: You're coming to Whistler to stay in a cabin for a month. What do you expect? What are you packing?

I'm packing up all my cares and woes -- oh, wait, that's a song.  Wish I could give a racy, quirky answer, but really I'm just packing my computer and peripherals, a few pretty things to remind me of home, some reference books, and some walking shoes. The rest will come to me: ten writers, some workshops, and time for my own writing.

Q: What is Edmonton like as a home base for writers and artists?

Lively, exciting, full of festivals, and cold in winter. But not as cold since global warming.

Q: Do you think the place a person writes has an influence on the material?

Absolutely. Place is like weather. You can't have none.

Q: What are your five favourite books of all time?

Oh, gosh. The answer this week? Crab Village by Julie Clark. A Short, Sharp Shock by Kim Stanley Robinson. The Sword in the Stone (well, I guess the whole of The Once and Future King) by TH White. Moonwise by Greer Ilene Gilman (and looking forward to her second tour de force, Jack Daw's Pack), A Chance Child  by Jill Paton Walsh. noboby owns th erth by bill bissett. The Kissing Man by George Elliott (and yes, there are two ls and two ts, it's a Canadian, not the other one). Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay. Always Coming Home by Ursula LeGuin. Dahlgren and The Motion of Light on Water by Samuel R Delany. Chaos by James Gleick. Birdbrains by Candace Savage. Resisting Adonis by Timothy Anderson. Picnic on Paradise by Joanna Russ. The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light by William Irwin Thompson...what? Is that more than five? Oops.

Q: What are you reading right now?

Hell Bay by Sam Llewellyn, Shake Hands with the Devil by Romeo D'allaire, Double Blind by Michelle Bulter Hallett, Touchstone by Laure R. King, How To Find and Keep Good Tenants...  

Q: What kind of celebrity do writers enjoy?

The intelligent kind who do good works in Africa and Los Angeles. We don't like the Britney Spears kind.

Oh, wait, do you mean are we celebrities? Well, on some days of the week in months with an R in their names, and if we hold our mouths right. Usually, that and $3.50 will get us a specialty latte.

It's best when we are revered because someone loved our books. I enjoy that kind of celebrity. I don't enjoy the kind where someone says "Gee, you're a writer! You make lots of money doing that?"

Someone in New York City has a line of my poetry tattooed on her arm. I enjoy that too, in a weird kind of way.


Q: If you could be the Queen of the World for a time, what would your first decrees be?

"Okay, everybody, shut up and be nice to each other. No more hitting. Right, now about the food: learn the share lesson. Quit spending the Mesozoic's carbon tax savings account. Read more books and think more. Pay attention to homeless people. Don't act stupid." Sort of the same thing one tells five year olds...

Q: What do people get out of writing workshops?

A sense of community and common misery, er, common cause. Someone who knows what they're going through. A deadline, so some writing HAS to get done.

Q: You've written a huge range of work, from poetry, to journalism, to television scripts to reviews, to mainstream and 'slipstream' fiction. What is slipstream?

Slipstream is stuff that bends genre. People hate that, so they had to give it a name of its own so they could feel comfy about it.

and do you have a soft spot for a particular genre?
I don't have a soft spot for any one genre over another. Like gender, I think the concept of genre is overrated.

Q: You started a publishing co-operative... do you think that DIY approach is a growing trend to watch, given what's being said about Generation Y and the accessible  technology that makes it easy to self-publish, record a rap song, and edit a film, all on your laptop?

The Books Collective wasn't DIY in one sense, because we mostly published other people's books, not our own.  We simply realised that there was no barrier to anyone learning how to make excellent books. We were fed up with the lack of a certain kind of press in our area at the time (1992) and we hated what I call The Small Independent Literary Press Deathwish Cover. So we united against these detriments, and ended up using over 100 ISBN numbers over 14 years, as well as buying a backlist when we acquired the Tesseract Books imprint in 1994. I can't say that every book we published turned out as we hoped, but part of learning to walk, run and then do a quadruple lutz jump is spending some time falling down too. Practice makes, if not perfect, at least an effortful reach for very good...

DIY is fine in its place, but it has to be DIY like the music biz does it: indy artists get the best producer and studio band  and studio they can, and strive for excellence. I don't support DIY when it's used as the last recourse of the lazy and the shoddy writer. I believe that publishers are writers' friends, and though the system is imperfect, it serves as a way of filtering out incompetence and poor quality results.

And when it fails to do that (and we all have our pet peeves for bad writing that has made it into print) it's accidental. As Hanlon's or Heinlein's Razor (there is much argument over the coiner of this) has it, " Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." (The British version, supposedly coined by Sir Bernard Ingham, is "Cockup before conspiracy.")

I very much like Eleanor Arneson's premise in The Daughter of the Bear King that the primary struggle in the universe is not between Good and Evil but between excellence and shoddiness. I am against shoddiness wherever it occurs, and unfortunately it occurs more than it should in self-publishing.

If everyone who took the DIY approach could recognise excellence and then would strive for it, looking for all the allies and hired helpers they needed to make it so, then we could unconditionally support DIY in literature. Remember that many of the literary greats were, in essence, self-published, but they didn't use that as an excuse for mediocrity.

More about Candas Jane Dorsey…

Candas Jane Dorsey writes speculative fiction, mainstream fiction, and poetry. She earns her bread as a freelance writer, editor, and teacher of creative and professional writing. For fourteen years she was a publisher of literary and SF titles, then went back to grad school to relax! Now officially a Master of something, she continues to write books. Her novel Black Wine (Tor, 1997/1998) won the Tiptree, Crawford and Aurora Awards. Her short fiction, Vanilla, (NeWest, 2000) won the Howard O’Hagen Short Fiction Award in May 2001, and her second novel, A Paradigm of Earth (Tor 2001/2002) was shortlisted in 2002 for the Spectrum Best Novel Award and the Sunburst Award for best Canadian fantastic fiction. Her other books include Machine Sex and other stories (Tesseract, 1988; short fiction), Leaving Marks (River, 1992; poetry), Dark Earth Dreams (Tesseract/Phoenix 1994; short fiction and audio CD)as well as three earlier books of poetry, this is for you, Orion rising, and Results of the Ring Toss, all published in the 1970s by bill bissett's blewointmentpress. She has co-edited four collections of speculative fiction, the most recent being Land/Space: prairie speculative fiction. Her most recent award is the Alberta Centennial Medal for achievements in arts and culture, an honest-to-goodness medal, on a ribbon, that comes with the instruction it is "to be worn at the left of your other medals"!


More about the Whistler Writer in Residence…

The Whistler Writer in Residence program was launched last year with Paulette Bourgeois of Franklin the Turtle fame. Ten writers worked on their short story and novel manuscripts throughout the month. Participants declared the residency a huge success and a wonderful learning experience, praising the opportunity to work so intensively with an instructor/editor, the detailed and high quality feedback received and the month-long format which gave many opportunities to the participants to follow up with the instructor/editor to ensure the feedback was understood and incorporated.  

Writers at any stage of development are invited to participate in the 2008 residency, which includes four one-on-one sessions with Candas Jane Dorsey specific to the participant’s own work, plus four weekly workshops on writing during the month of September, for a $250 tuition fee.

Interested applicants should contact Stella Harvey with questions or an expression of interest at stella25@telus.net. Manuscripts to be reviewed (no more than 20 pages to start) will be required by August 10, and new pages can be added for review each week.

Stella Harvey, Director of the Whistler Writers Festival and Writer-in-Residence Program says, “There are very few opportunities out there for a writer to work on his or her craft, and enjoy the editing advice and support of working with a professional writer and editor for a month. We’re very excited to be able to offer this program again right here in Whistler.”

The Writer in Residence program is the latest addition to the annual Whistler Writers Festival. The Festival takes place this September 12-14, and offers more than fifteen workshops under several different streams for writers and readers at all levels of practice, with guest writers in addition to Candas Jane Dorsey that include Wayne Grady, Mel Hurtig, William Deverall, Nancy Warren, Carrie Mac, Shaena Lambert, Leslie Anthony, Susan Reifer, and Rebecca Wood Barrett.