On
Having a Haunted Writing Process
Emily Ursuliak
When
I look at all of my major writing projects, both fiction and poetry, I notice
one big commonality. They are all based around real people who are no longer
around to tell their stories. My writing process has become haunted.
Exploring
a character is what interests me the most about writing and there’s something
about that exploration being centred around a real person that makes it more
intense and intimate. By choosing to write about someone real I enter into a
unique kind of relationship with them. I will never be able to meet this person
or speak to them, but I have duty to collect everything I can about them to be
as true and respectful to them as possible.
For
the novel I’m currently working on, about Victorian artist Elizabeth Siddal,
there is very little material to be found from her own perspective: one letter
she wrote that somehow survived when her husband burnt all of her other
correspondence, and her poems and paintings too. But these few slivers are not
enough for me to imagine her life. I have to rely on the way others saw her:
lovers, friends, family, even enemies. I take their words, and facts laid out
by biographers, and try to get a sense of who this woman was. I’m not the first
person to be drawn to write about her, but others’ approaches have romanticized
her, or allowed the more “famous” men around her to take over the narrative. I
want her life to dominate the text with all of the ways it challenged the
gender norms of the time and with all the brutal, dark moments that other writers
have shied away from.
My
first collection of poetry, Throwing the Diamond Hitch, is a lot more
personal in that the two main characters of the poems are my granny and her
best friend Anne. Both of them were very dear to me when they were still alive.
I started reading the travel diary the two of them had written together in 1951
as a way of remembering my granny. Both she and Anne has such a witty, wry way
of capturing their adventures and the people they met. My first instinct was
that the moments of the diary that really stood out needed to be poems. Why
poems and not fiction? I’m not sure, but that’s what my gut told me, so that’s
what I did. Writing the poems felt like a way of both honouring my granny and
also having a conversation with her, and the challenges of making both her and
Anne into a characters were interesting. I had known these two women in real
life, but not when they were in their twenties, which is when the trip took
place. And while I had all this primary source material to draw from, I don’t
think I can ever say that the women that appear in my book are actually Anne
and my granny, they’re these strange sort of partial duplicates of them.
I
still think about my first literary theory class as an undergraduate. We were
learning about Derrida and his concept of différance. Everyone hated Derrida. I
felt like I was having this huge eureka moment. His concept around the space
between the signifier and the signified in language is something I think about
often. For my current work it makes me think about that space between what the “reality”
of a person’s life was, and how a writer ends up condensing and translating
that into a narrative. We are never really going to be able to write the
signified. There’s something really painful about that, but there’s an endless
possibility inherent in it too.
Emily Ursuliak’s first book, Throwing the Diamond Hitch, is soon to
be released by the University of Calgary Press. She also writes fiction and
hosts a literary radio show called Writer’s Block on CJSW 90.9fm.
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