You're Invited to the Book Launch for My Debut Novel, When We Were Ashes

You're cordially invited to the book launch for my novel, When We Were Ashes, published by Goose Lane Editions! If you like the cello, I hope to have a cellist there, too!

When: Wednesday, October 2, 2024 at 7 p.m.

Where: Black Bond Books at 4118 Main Street, Vancouver

Feel free to invite friends and family, too. All are welcome!

If you'd like to purchase When We Were Ashes, it’s available from Amazon.ca, Indigo-Chapters and Goose Lane Editions. My novel goes on sale September 10th.

Take care and hope to see you there!


Peace Shall Return—Reading Ben Okri

In Ben Okri’s astonishing story “And Peace Shall Return,” an alien cartography expedition explores earth twenty thousand years from now, when our planet finally shows signs of “quiet regeneration.” There’s plenty of anthropological commentary about humanity—us on us, as such stories give authors free reign to do. Near the story’s end is a passage so brilliantly stunning, it’s hard not to quote it in full:

“From all the evidence we have, they seem to have worshipped things. They seem to have been oddly limited in their philosophy. Their images were of themselves, and they saw everything only through themselves. Unlike older civilizations we have encountered in the universe, civilizations that died out hundreds of thousands of years ago, this one showed, in the magical interlude of its existence, no especially astonishing conception of the universe, of the almost infinite possibility of it all. They seemed, on the whole, a rather parochial and tribal species, bedeviled by ideas of race and gender. Not for a single moment during their relatively short history did they grasp themselves as part of a universal order. This sense of nobility entirely eluded them as a species.”

It’s also difficult not to read that passage and feel very small, feel as if our species had grandly messed up on a cosmic scale. But Okri’s observant and critical aliens make very clear that that doesn’t have to be so. There’s a “universal order” out there, a “cosmic nobility” that we could plug into if only we rose above our own “passionate identification with what was smallest in [ourselves],” as Okri writes a little later. 

Can a writer (or anyone else for that matter) connect to that universal order, connect to what is greatest in us?  Express that connection in words, if needed? If so, how? I think of novelist Doris Lessing’s Shikasta; Rilke and Eliot’s poetry; Rumi and Saadi’s mysticism, among others. There’s hints of a cosmic nobility threading through our species, but how to know it, focus it for our planetary betterment, strengthen it as a way to avoid perhaps our epitaph?—“They thought themselves dust, and to dust they returned.” Okri’s alien cartographers leave earth on that dismal note—not without sorrow, they add—to continue on their mapmaking journey to planets that “once bore witness to the serenity and the magnificence of being.”

That could be us.

PS—You can read Okri’s story in Short Stories of Apocalypse published by Australia’s Emergence Magazine.

Writing With Your Unconscious

I've been meaning to read Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio for a decade. A used copy of his short story collection has sat on my night table for the better part of three years, but there was always some other book that captured my eye and interest. The other night, I began with the brilliant introduction to Anderson’s collection by Malcom Cowley. I stopped a few pages in: "[Anderson] couldn't say to himself, 'I shall produce such and such an effect in a book of such and such a length'; the book had to write or rather speak itself while Anderson listened as if to an inner voice."

Cowley's quote here confirmed something new I've been trying with my fiction over the last two years. Getting out of the way of the book writing itself. In my first drafts of my earlier stories, I used to go back each day and re-write the previous day's work: fiddle with paragraphs and sentences and punctuation. I'd stall, sometimes not writing anything new for days. Just revising and revising before I felt that I could go on. It was like some strange, compulsive ritual that I had to do to appease some almost parental part of me. Much later, I realized that my I was the problem—my always worried, semi-perfectionist I who just had to write something nearly perfect before I could continue with the project. 

Now I'm experimenting with worrying and thinking less, keeping the momentum of the narrative flowing no matter what. How? It was something the Afghan writer, Idries Shah, once said of his own writing technique to produce dozens of books over his lifetime: just keep your fingers moving on the typewriter keys, keep typing words no matter what. I tried this for my latest novel. I wrote where the story wanted to go and not where I wanted to take it; I kept my fingers moving on my keyboard as fast as they could go. By the end of the first eight months of the pandemic, I had an 80,000-word draft. And it wasn’t half bad. 

The technique here isn't new. For decades, writing teachers have been calling it "free writing." What is new for me (besides practicing it) is the idea of surrendering my writing to some other part of myself. I thought, "Well, if my unconscious mind can keep my heart beating, my lungs breathing, my legs walking without me falling flat on my face, maybe it can do the writing, too. Better than me." The only way I've found to let my unconscious do the writing is to avoid thinking as I write: to keep my fingers moving on the keyboard, word after word, despite my endless impulses to stop and correct what I’ve written. The revising, the rewriting—that comes after.  

And now back to Sherwood Anderson...