Writing on Transit
Emily Ursuliak
I have a confession to make: I’m a public transit writer.
There are far more glamorous places I could take my notebook out to. I
fantasize about going to Vendome, a café over in the Sunnyside area of Calgary
where a lot of local poets can be found, but instead I find myself scribbling
while riding a bus or the c-train. There’s nothing sexy about writing on
transit. If I was sitting in Vendome I’d have a cappuccino in front of me, I
could admire the carefully contrived “rustic charm” of the place, there would
be erudite conversations hovering in the air. Instead, the seat next to me has
what appears to be gum fused to it, and the drug-addict couple two seats over
are screaming about why one of them spent their rent money on getting a fix.
When I’ve told other writer friends about writing on
transit they find it odd, or even vaguely impressive. “How do you do it without
getting motion-sickness?” they ask. I blame my cast-iron stomach on the years
of conditioning I went through as a rural kid in central Alberta. Every morning
I rode a yellow school bus for an hour through winding gravel roads in the
countryside where I grew up, and there was very rarely a moment that I wasn’t
reading a book for that whole trip. It’s not like I don’t get motion-sickness,
but I think this rigorous conditioning as a child is what makes me less
susceptible to it. It’s like a way more mundane version of the physical
training that astronauts go through.
So why write on transit if it’s not glamorous, and if
there’s a risk of motion-sickness? Because I spend a hell of a lot time on it.
I didn’t have a car when I moved to Calgary, and didn’t really see the point of
getting one when I had my university-enforced transit pass. I had to spend long
stretches of time sitting in a confined area. I’m a writer. Why wouldn’t I use
that time for writing?
Soon I began associating my time on transit with writing.
It became the easiest place where I could escape from the distractions of the
internet on my computer at home. Writing on transit helped me get out of a lot
of slumps when I was working on my master’s thesis. If I was having a bad
writing day I’d force myself to get on the c-train and I’d sit there writing
from one end of the line to the other until I’d worked out the problem I was
having.
Riding on transit gives you a different perspective of the
city you live in. In a car you’re shut off from people, you don’t have to
confront the narratives of others. You can attempt to block people out on the
train, or the bus, but it’s a lot more difficult. What interests me about
writing in these spaces is that I’ve learned to embrace interruptions.
Occasionally a passenger nearby will pull me out of whatever I’m working on. In
the past I used to be annoyed by this, but now I embrace it in my writing. I
take a break from the work at hand and write a portrait of that person.
Characters I’ve encountered riding transit have begun to find their way into
pieces of short fiction I’ve started recently, so their impact on my writing is
undeniable.
Now that I’ve completed my studies at the University of
Calgary I’m considering buying a car next fall. There’s a lot of ways in which
it would make my life simpler, but I worry about how this will affect my
writing. Will it be as easy for me to find the right space in my life to set
aside for my work? When I started my master’s degree I had this lofty goal of
developing a writing schedule: a certain number of hours I’d have to spend
writing each day. I’ve learned to accept that I don’t work that way. I’m
terribly sporadic, and what might work for me for a certain period of my life
might change again just as quickly. What remains constant is the addiction I
have to writing, the notion that my sense of well-being is very closely intertwined
with how much time I dedicate to scribbling in my notebook. This is what I
place my trust in.
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