On Writing #62 : Angie Abdou

The Writer & The Bottle

Angie Abdou

I’m nearly at the end of my first meeting with a psychiatrist when he leans towards me and says “Please quit drinking. It’s bad for your body. It’s bad for your brain. And it doesn’t help.”

I am flooded with instant gratitude.  “Thank you,” I say. “Yes. I know. Thank you.”

I have known for a long time that I should drink less, but I couldn’t seem to get any support for the idea from those closest to me. My husband, my friends, my family – they all think that me drinking is a fantastic idea. I’m “fun” when I drink.  Super duper crazy fun.

Drink! Drink! Drink! It’s our society’s ceaseless chant. Keep in mind that I am forty-six years old. Middle-aged. Long past the undergraduate years of keg parties and chugging contests, but the vast majority of my social engagements still hinge on excessive alcohol consumption.

My husband insists that I don’t have a problem. I don’t pass out. I don’t puke. I don’t get drunk and disorderly. Or at least I haven’t done any of those things in decades. “You’re not an alcoholic. You can quit drinking any time,” he says, “You don’t get withdrawal symptoms. Trust me, Ang, you don’t have an alcohol problem.”

All he says is true, except maybe the last part.

I do have a problem with alcohol.

My problem with alcohol is I don’t like it. I don’t like the way I’m already thinking of my second glass of wine when I’ve only just poured my first. I don’t like the way I crave a martini to bring me down after an on-stage performance. I don’t like the way I crave a few glasses of wine to bring me up after a particularly scathing review. I don’t like the way three glasses of wine leave me debilitated by hangover for most of the next day. I don’t like the power we give to alcohol by making it front and center of every single social engagement.

I don’t even like how much I like it.

After that appointment with the psychiatrist , I quit drinking for a couple of months, but I did so very privately. In a bizarre inversion of the alcoholic with vodka bottles stashed in the glove compartment, I hid my not drinking. I’d order myself a little mocktail at the bar or drink fake champagne to celebrate my new job or pour a mug full of near-beer when friends were over for a barbeque and hope nobody would notice. I slunk around with my pretend drinks, acting as if abstaining from alcohol was a shameful act.

No profession gives its practitioners license to drink quite like writing does. Ernest Hemingway, Dylan Thomas, F Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouc … heavy-drinkers, all of them. Not only does being a booze sodden wreck not interfere with literary talent, the myth goes, but it actually enhances it. And alcohol is not merely tied to the late night literary festival revelry, but an integral part of the writing process itself. “Write drunk. Edit sober” is the famous advice, plastered on coffee mugs and t-shirts, and almost always misattributed to Hemingway.

Admittedly when I think about the drinking I’d miss, it is  the drinking with writers. Dancing late into the night after the Banff Festival. Swimming under the moon at the Wolfe Island Festival. Sharing after dinner martinis with Herman Koch and Claire Cameron. “So this is how we’re doing it,” Herman said, as Claire and I ran to fetch the third round of martinis and we all settled in for a late night.

Seriously – martinis with Herman Koch. How glamorous is that?!

Maybe I could still drink on those nights? I could save alcohol for literary festivals. I could be a hospitality suite drinker. Remember: I don’t pass out. I don’t puke. I don’t get drunk and disorderly. I have no withdrawal symptoms.

Besides, writers are supposed to drink.

But, that’s the line that gets me.  I don’t want to support that myth. I don’t want to romanticize alcohol. Not anymore. Go into any bar late at night and eavesdrop on the conversation.  Alcohol does not produce wise words. It does not produce beautiful words. It produces idiocy, aggression, tedious repetition, inability to listen, sloppiness.

My good friend is an addiction counselor, and he surprised me by insisting that abstaining from alcohol is not always the answer. Yes, some people must quit drinking entirely. Others might commit to never consuming more than two drinks in an evening. Others might restrict (moderate) drinking to special occasions. I’m still working out what exactly a healthy relationship with alcohol looks like for me.  But for now I can say this: I’ve never written drunk. I’ve never even written hung over. Drinking has nothing to do with my writing.  Without booze, I can still dance with writers in Banff, swim with poets off Wolfe Island, and discuss writing late into the night with the likes of Herman Koch – best of all, I’ll even be in shape to draw on all that inspiration and put pen to paper the next morning.

Angie Abdou has published four books of fiction. Her first novel The Bone Cage was a Canada Reads finalist. Her most recent novel is Between (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2014). It will be released in the US next month and was recently listed by the Library Journal as a Top 13 Indie Pick for Spring 2015. Angie is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Athabasca University.

We Who Are About To Die : Derek Beaulieu

Dr. Derek Beaulieu is the author or editor of 16 books, the most recent of which are Please, No more poetry: the poetry of derek beaulieu (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013) and kern (Les Figues press, 2014). He is the publisher of the acclaimed no press and is the visual poetry editor at UBUWeb. Beaulieu has exhibited his work across Canada, the United States and Europe and is an award-winning instructor at the Alberta College of Art + Design. He is the 2014-2016 Poet Laureate of Calgary, Canada.

Where are you now?
Right here in calgary.

What are you reading?
Rereading Meiville's KRAKEN at night, Garreta's SPHINX, Bononno's new translation of Mallarme's UN COUP DE DES, lefebvre's THE MISSING PIECES and Tardos and O'Driscoll's new edition of Mac Low's THE COMPLETE LIGHT POEMS … and a stack of other things as usual.

What have you discovered lately?
That bulldogs aren't so bad after all.

Where do you write?
My desk in my kitchen, at my parent's house, at higher ground coffee in calgary…

What are you working on and have you anything forthcoming?
Several projects as Calgary's Poet Laureate, an anthology of calgarian experimental fiction and poetry (co-edited with rob mclennan), a book of essays (forthcoming from If P then Q in manchester), a suite of visual poems…

What would you rather be doing?
There's something better?

On Writing #61 : Carolyn Marie Souaid

Lawyers, Liars & Writers

Carolyn Marie Souaid

I come from a family of lawyers. Successful lawyers. Movers and shakers with an extraordinary list of accomplishments. Having graduated first in my class, it’s no wonder I was expected to follow in their footsteps. Join “the firm,” as it were. I applied and landed a scholarship. But something was niggling at me, making me feel uneasy. Even before starting I was ready to quit.

One afternoon, while I was still wavering, the lot of them sat me down in my grandmother’s dining room, at the far end of her long, intimidating, mahogany table to urge me to continue the family tradition. The summer heat was oppressive. “Law will open doors and guarantee you a decent future,” they explained. I glanced up at the crystal chandelier. “Get the degree. Then you can do whatever you want.”

That fall, I entered the Faculty of Law at McGill University.

At the welcome orientation, the Dean told us to have a look at the people sitting to our left and right. Eyes aglitter, she announced that one of us would be gone by the following year. When I blinked, it was already midterms and everyone but me was ensconced in a study group. As my classmates worked toward their bright futures in corporate, tax and international law, whatever would make them briefcase-loads of money, I pondered a somewhat less glamorous (but more meaningful) career in Legal Aid. I envisioned talking to my disheveled, down-and-out clients through protective glass, eyed by a pair of surly prison guards.

“What do you want to do that for?” asked the other students. They screwed up their noses. In their eyes I could see they had handed down their verdict: mine would be a waste of a good education. 

My heart was elsewhere, of course. While the rest tucked themselves away in the library, cramming, ripping pages out of reference books – yes, they actually did that – to keep rivals (like me) from the answers to the assignments, I was in the Leacock Building attending lectures by renowned playwrights and novelists. (Waiting for coffee in the cafeteria line, who but I could boast having Edward Albee’s signature on the inside cover of my Property Law textbook?) 

All my life I had dreamed of being a writer. I wrote constantly. In the early 70s, after watching an earlier generation of kids turn on, tune in and drop out, I began writing an ongoing saga for my neighbourhood friends, a soap opera style novel about a group of rebellious teens living together on a commune. I filled my story with all the juicy things that a budding writer, all of twelve, thought readers would go for: drugs, romance, suicide, a smattering of F-words. Once a week, the kids would join me on my front lawn while I read out a new installment. I was in my element. Their attentiveness to my words, characters and plots gave me a glowing sense of accomplishment.

My other joy, poetry, I kept private. Nature poetry, love poetry. The poetry of dark despair. I was an unhappy adolescent. It was the perfect outlet.

Just before I graduated from high school, I was doing a little spring-cleaning in my bedroom and ran across all my old writing, the soap opera, the poetry of angst. Suddenly, it was a source of embarrassment. I decided that it had to go. All of it. There could be no living record of it. My ego puffed up, I might have imagined scholars a hundred years from now rummaging through my unpublished works, discovering all that mediocre juvenilia. Maybe I realized it wasn’t what I wanted to be remembered by. With a clear head, I piled all my notebooks on the sidewalk, lit a match and watched the lot go up in flames. I threw the ashes down the sewer and decided that I would wait until I had something better to write about. Even if it took years.

Three months into law school, I couldn’t stand it anymore: To my writer’s ears, the word “lawyer” sounded too close to another word. Lawyers are liars, I concluded. They lie to win their cases. (Or at least to manipulate the facts in their favour.)

In December, I got up my courage. I didn’t forewarn my parents: I didn’t want the counsel of our family lawyers. I didn’t want to be talked out of it. Just like that, I marched into the Dean’s office and announced that I was quitting. My gaze was already fixed ahead— looking to all the books I would write. I imagined the burgeoning joy of watching a poem take root and then blossom into something of beauty. Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed the hardship, too, the romantic image of the poet toiling in a cold, dark garret. The rest was still veiled, of course: the unavoidable, constant struggle to make ends meet.

Now that I have experienced it, now that I know what it is to live on a shoestring while I create art for a small – almost negligible – readership, I take comfort in the knowledge that I’m not the first writer whose path veered from law to this difficult, less-travelled one. Victor Hugo studied but never practiced law. I think it’s fair to say he wielded more justice in Les Misérables than he would have in the courtroom. Back in the 14th century, Petrarch went against his father’s wishes and abandoned the profession too. His sonnets have freed more hearts and minds than his courtroom pleas ever could have. And after ditching law and heading off to Madrid in 1919 to pursue his dream of being a writer, Federico Garcia Lorca wrote poems and plays that speak more powerfully and eloquently than any summation he might have penned.

Others have had the discipline and good fortune to do both. Here in Montreal, in my own backyard, F.R. Scott and A.M. Klein did it, although Klein, as a lawyer, made a good poet. Leonard Cohen, on the other hand, dropped law altogether. It turned out to be a good decision.

In my own case, I believe I did the right thing as well, though it’s too soon to know whether there will be a literary payoff, meaning posterity. I prefer to remain humble. And hopeful.

Lawyers. Writers. We are as close and as far away as we can possibly be from one another. Like lawyers, writers are liars too.

But we lie to better weave a story, to tell the truth about the world we live in. Or at least to manipulate the facts in Truth’s favour.

Carolyn Marie Souaid is a Montreal-based poet and the co-author of Blood is Blood, which was awarded a prize at the 2012 Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin. Her seventh book, This World We Invented, recently appeared with Brick Books. She has just completed her first novel.

On Writing #60 : Priscila Uppal

On Creative Health
Priscila Uppal

Many of us know how to keep our bodies fit, even our minds fit, but…How do we keep our creative selves fit? What does it mean to let our creative muscles atrophy?
            I’ve been interested, for some time, in the connections between physical and creative activity. This interest took me straight to the Vancouver and London Olympics where I competed in my own marathon poetry event, writing and publishing two poems per day. The goal was to bridge the gap between the artsies and the jocks and to encourage participation in both worlds. We have a great deal in common, from discipline to passion to pushing boundaries and taking risks. Afterwards, I led workshops for Canadian Tire Jumpstart. Many kids left camp saying their favourite sport was Poetry.
            Just as our metabolisms slow down, so too are we at risk of letting our spirits down by ignoring our creative lives.
            I was recently shockingly diagnosed with a very rare type of cancer called synovial sarcoma. This cancer has no known risk factors, but tends to strike young, fit and healthy people who are not at risk for other cancers. I call it the Kick in Your Face Cancer. On Sept 11th, I underwent an extensive operation: 8 hours, 3 surgeons. Much of my abdominal wall was removed, replaced with a biologic mesh and my right thigh; and then because my runner’s thighs apparently had no fat, grafts were needed from my backside.
            My incredible medical team, led by the aptly named Dr. Wunder, thankfully believe the surgery was a success, and although one must expect a very long recovery period, I’ve been told that my healing process is “astonishing.” I went from a walker to crutches to a cane in two days instead of weeks and months. They attribute this to my very high level of fitness before the surgery.
            But I wonder if this is the entire story. In fact, I wonder about stories. I’ve written about illness and health for much of my life. I’ve read non-fiction, fiction, poetry, plays, about various illnesses, including cancer. I’ve watched dozens of movies on the subject too.
            Post-surgery surgeons, psychologists, social workers and researchers asked me endless questions—everything from pain and appetite levels to questions about family or work support. All were obsessed with my bowel movements. I am even part of a study where I spend hours recognizing shape patterns and repeating lines of numbers interspersed with  hundreds of questions, asking everything from: Do you feel your life is unfolding as it is meant to unfold? To Do you say sexually inappropriate things? (Of course I do, I’m a writer, that’s my job.) Questions about physical and mental health—extremely important—but I was never asked any questions relating to my creative health. (Have you read any books that are helping you understand what you are going through? Are you keeping a journal? Can I suggest an interesting novel or funny film?)
            Much more than medical articles, art has helped me understand that I am not the only person suffering in the world and that there are many ways one can approach, understand, combat, or be comforted through an illness. And expressing myself through art has been as an effective painkiller as morphine (in my case more so, since morphine just made me nauseous). Why is our creative health virtually ignored by our medical system when it can be such a strong factor in how we deal with illness?
            Just as many doctors are now empowered with prescription pads to prescribe physical activity to make patients more accountable—I would like to see what changes could be made in people’s lives if they were given prescriptions for their creative health too. For instance, read one poem three times per week. Or, as part of your follow-up, bring in a poem that you’ve written about what you’re going through.
            I’m still in the process of recovery, but I know that what I’ve experienced will show up in all kinds of ways in my future creative works because creative health is integral to my healing process and could be to others. I would like to see a medical system and an educational system that understands the vital role literature and art can play in this process.

Another Dysfunctional Cancer Poem

My body and I have now entered that phase
of relationship where all the quirks and ticks
that used to tug at your heart are sources
of irritation and argument. The monotony of being
with you, day in and day out, going through the motions.
We are now that couple no one wants to
see in public, whose shopping bags hang like broken
promises. We blame each other’s childhoods and
draft unacceptable separation agreements.
The hot tears and intermittent flowers are
the worst, the notes of distant affection,
the vague plans for future holidays. I am no
longer the love of your life. I have the black
eyes to prove it. Our pleas for forgiveness
are hollow. We live for the possibility of thrashing
it all out for the umpteenth time, falling asleep
exhausted and sore, but side by side.

Priscila Uppal is a Toronto poet, fiction writer, memoirist, essayist, playwright, and a Professor of English at York University. Among her critically acclaimed publications are ten collections of poetry, most recently, Sabotage, Traumatology, & Ontological Necessities (Griffin Poetry Prize finalist); the novels The Divine Economy of Salvation and To Whom It May Concern ; the study We Are What We Mourn: The Contemporary English-Canadian Elegy; the memoir Projection: Encounters with My Runaway Mother (Writers’ Trust Hilary Weston Prize and Governor General’s Award finalist); and the collection of short stories Cover Before Striking. Her work has been published internationally and translated into Croatian, Dutch, French, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Korean and Latvian. She was the first-ever poet-in-residence for Canadian Athletes Now during the 2010 Vancouver and 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic games as well as the Roger’s Cup Tennis Tournament in 2011. 6 Essential Questions, her first play, had its World Premiere as part of the Factory Theatre 2013-2014 season and will be published by Playwrights Canada Press in 2015. Time Out London dubbed her “Canada’s coolest poet.” For more information visit priscilauppal.ca