Writing Life Constance Rooke (ed.) McClelland & Stewart ISBN 978-0-7710-7625-1 paper, 450 pages $25 (CDN)

Writing Life is the third collection of essays put together and published to raise funds for PEN Canada.¹ It follows the very successful Writing Home (1994) and Writing Away (1997) and gathers within its covers an impressive lineup of contributors — described in the subtitle as “Celebrated Canadian and International Authors” — who this time address the broad theme of “Writing and Life”.

The full list of fifty contributers is printed almost invisibly (spot varnish on cream) on the front cover and more legibly (and more conventionally, in black) on the back cover, marching alphabetically in small sans serif type from André Alexis to Patricia Young, proceeding by way of Atwood, Bowering, Crummey, Drabble, Heti, Manguel, Munro, Ondaatje, Thien and Winter (among many others). It is difficult to imagine any reader being unable to find at least one or three favorite names among such a crowd, which makes the book almost impossible to resist.

As Constance Rooke notes in her introduction, the anthology “gives us many points of entry into the writing life, into what it means to do this sort of work or to be a writer.”

What kind of life does a writer have, and what are the connections between time spent in the act of writing — that intensely private part of the writing life — and all the rest of one’s time? To what extent is the writing life different from or similar to other lives? How do writers feel about promoting their work, public readings, and literary prizes. How does one write life? What are the writers responsibilities? What are the greatest challenges, miseries, and joys? And what lies at the heart of the writers need to write?

If that sounds a bit nebulous and nose-in-the-air, don’t be put off: there are some wonderful nuggets in here: historian Margaret MacMillan reveals that she read Black Hawk comic books when she was growing up — hey! me too! — and gives as her models George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, and P. G. Wodehouse; Susan Musgrave draws upon the various things said about her in the media to construct an amusing mock biography (“Musgrave pauses as she shelves the endless files of press clippings about her life and times”); Lisa Moore describes how the chaos of family life is inextricably entwined with her writing process:

These are some of the crimes you have committed lately: You have offered to play hide-and-seek with Theo, and when he has gone to hide, you do not look for him. You have promised ice cream if he will just watch one more hour of television so you can write. Just give me another half-hour in my study and I promise you’ll never have to choke down another carrot as long as you live.

The clincher for me was the conversation between two favorites, John Berger and Michael Ondaatje, with Berger at one point attempting to pinpoint the moment at which a story begins to take (literal) form from the ether:

The story in my mind is absolutely not verbal. There are no words for it at all. Nor is it visual, it’s not a series of shots or a painting. It has something in common with music in the sense that it is complex and can be held in the head like a whole musical composition, although it can never all be there at any one given moment. I haven’t any words for it. It is perhaps in a way geometric, but it’s not, because I think that implies an incredible precision. Perhaps it is algebraic in a way, but it’s much more chaotic than that; and the strange thing is that, for a long, long time when writing, I check it against this inarticulate, totally amorphous thing, and it can say with certainty, “no, what you’ve just written is false” or, occasionally, occasionally, “yes, perhaps that’s not too far away.”

Buy a copy of this book; buy two copies and give one away as a gift. That way you will not only enrich two reading lives, but you will support the efforts of PEN Canada; you can’t go wrong.

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