David Foster Wallace- 1962-2008

Following the series of recent reflections on writers and depression, and on the tough time I’m having coping with the suicide of a dear friend last Thanksgiving, the news of David Foster Wallace’s suicide slapped me across the face. His father said he had battled depression for several decades. Wallace, author of Oblivion and Infinite Jest and much, much more, was that rare breed who has a genius for both math and words. He had a dark humour and a deep wisdom within his human confusion. I’m so very sorry that he couldn’t take it anymore.

When I was a little girl who decided I was going to be a writer, it might have been worthwhile for someone to tell me, “Writers end up killing themselves.” No way, no way, no way. It is true that Wallace joins an unbelievably long lineage of writers who committed suicide: Hunter S. Thompson, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway, Arthur Koestler, John Kennedy Toole, Gertrude Bell, Anne Sexton, and so on. I wish David Foster Wallace, and everyone else who suffers from depression, total peace. If you just couldn’t take it anymore, I understand and wish you rest. The lingering question, though, is what we’ve lost and cannot know. There are those who come back from the brink and go on to do the most important, world-changing work of their lives. Johnny Cash comes to mind- he crawled out of the cave he went into to die, and comforted the rest of the lost world until he was an old man. Rev. Troy Perry slit his wrists and crawled into the tub to float into oblivion, but failed at his quest. He went on to lead the world in establishing freedom and equal rights for gay and lesbian people, and created a progressive, love-based faith where people could learn to love themselves and others instead of practicing hate. Your contribution may not be so huge, but is no less important: your friends, your children, your work mates may need your kind of wit or sarcasm or kindness. You do not know.

Rest in peace, Mr. Wallace.

for David Foster Wallace

It’s hell to lose another teacher to despair,
and trite to say his memory will live on, though that it will.
Cliche to say that this cruel world just isn’t fair
but some of us won’t make it up and over yonder hill.
In my own tawdry gloomy struggles with God and man
with a knack, perhaps; no genius, but still a fan,
I wrestle, too, with the cosmic joke, Divine Comedy, the Infinite Jest
and I hope that you have found relief and rest.

Lorette C. Luzajic

www.thegirlcanwrite.net

The Cure for Depression: a melodrama of depression, madness, and the writing life

The tidal wave of darkness that totally floored me a few months back shows no sign of lifting. It lets up for a moment or two, and then floods in with a vengeance. I cannot take the weight of the sorrow. I did my best to accept my burdens with dignity and thought I’d made it. But now I’m facing something I can’t fully explain. All the years I spent ‘dealing’ like a good little girl have come undone. The depth of where I am is so incredibly far from light and hope that at some moments I wonder if I even exist, if I have finally unraveled.

Eight of Swords by L.C. Luzajic

I feel unhinged when I’m unable to pull it together and find my familiar toolkit- brash, sassy confidence, in small and sporadic but useful doses. None to be seen. I roll with the punches, more or less, I like to think, and though I seem to attract a great deal of chaos, I’ve always been kind of Tao about the whole of it, accepting my fate to bear witness to the wilderness of the human heart. I’m a rollercoaster of bipolar emotions- this is no secret so don’t call the paper! My friend Dimitri and I used to kvetch about the baggage fleet we had with us on our journey- bags, lots of ‘em, pink, frilly, cherry-scented Louis Vuitton. Garcon!

I’m unraveling these days, found myself crying on a stoop on Davenport Road today, and looking back at my impulsive seesaw life, and at myself sobbing in the street, I saw that I had more than a few things in common with Britney Spears- everything except her thighs and her money.

There was a brief light in this embarrassing public display of affliction- a woman on a bicycle stopped by, discreetly and without obtrusiveness, and asked if everything was all right. I was touched. But right after that, the tide took me in deeper, as I wondered how it is that a total stranger could see that I was hurting, but my closest friends have failed to notice? And that some of them never gave a damn about anyone but themselves and have betrayed me? And then I went right on feeling sorry for myself, wondering how it is that the dead friends call more often than the living.

Oh, trust me, I know: I analyze too much, stay awake puzzling together what went wrong. Often I come up with a big fat blank, and the truth looms impossible and stark: people just suck, really suck, even the very best of them, and in the long run, no matter how much you might care, it’s every man for himself. If I croak tonight, how long would it be before anyone noticed? How long would it be before anybody comes to feed the cats?

Good Lord, is this the mid-life crisis already? Hmm, I don’t know. Whether it’s a particularly bad flare-up of the umpteen mental diagnoses I share with my family members, unresolved grief, a brand new kind of madness, or simply defeat and despair after too many sorrows to bear, the situation is…critical.

It’s manifesting in the most irritating ways- poorly timed crying jags, temper tantrums, entire buckets of triple chocolate ice cream. Worse, “I see dead people.” I see them all the time. The other day I saw a dozen or more Zoes crossing the street all at once. I even waved. It was nicer to see her like that than to find her when I’m home alone, opening my closet to look for a shirt, and there she is, hanging among my peach-knit shawls. That’s the thing about losing someone to suicide. You can make as much damn peace as you want with it. But you can never get the macabre ending out of your head.

heading to the wake for zoe

When I was a kid, my dad used to drive for miles to avoid any passing trains. We were kids, we liked to see trains. But Dad would turn the car around and drive in the other direction, and Mom would start crying and crying. Later, I was old enough to understand why. Uncle J. jumped in front of one when he couldn’t take it anymore. Mom didn’t want to spend her whole day thinking about her brother. There were things to do. You can’t always just walk around sobbing. You have to occasionally make room for joy instead of just hurting. So you avoid the big triggers. You manage your life around them, and for the most part, you’re okay.

Thing is, lately I’m not okay, and though I know I will be- I’m a strong girl- right now I’m walking around like an open wound. More than two thirds of my support team is six feet under, and the dirt is still fresh. And practically everything I look at or see is a fucking trigger.

Regardless of how this horrible darkness happened- circumstance, or genetics, or both, I’m a person who feels everything. I could feel the pain of complete strangers. My therapist called it ‘empathic.’ Less kindly observers would call it overly sensitive. Sitting on a bus, I could feel the next person’s emotions and their life story would suddenly reveal itself. People came to me with their problems, as if I could do fat lot about it. But come they did, heaping their sorrows and crimes and chaos upon me. And I was s thin-skinned, as Mom would always say, “Toughen up, you thin-skinned ninny!” Indeed, I was practically transparent. You could see through the skin and watch my beating heart. I’m nothing but a bundle of raw nerves. Everything hurts. The only thing I could do to keep the pain at a dull roar was to write it down.

Marko, the crazy sailor I married, was one of the biggest believers I’ve ever had in my writing. I’m grateful to have a few believers, both my parents, and my childhood soul-mate Japey, who, yes, is also fucking dead. I know my dear friend Sal is out there somewhere overseas, reading this and anything else he can find, and trusting more than I do that I’ll “make it.”  And then there’s the crazy Canadian eccentric, Crad Kilodney, and we’ll get to him later.

Marko’s infamous comment- “Girl, you are a good fucking writer,” – spurred me to the name The Girl Can Write. And losing him made me certain I never wanted to waste another day working in a mall, working anywhere at all but at my desk, writing. And though I worked hard at my writing since I was five, I have never worked so hard as I have in the past three years since I found his dead body on the kitchen floor. Stephen King, one of the most prolific and amazing storytellers of all time, who also writes about ghosts, said writing is a lonely business, and you need to have support. I’m grateful that I had someone who hung on to my every word.

happy times

King also said a writer should write for four hours a day and read for four hours a day. So I’ve been pretty much writing for eight and reading for six, trying to make up for lost time, trying to stay focused, trying to cheat death by doing everything I can to keep my spirit alive. I’ve been producing like a fiend, fine-tuning, branching out, trying new things, reworking, working, playing. There are several novels on tap, another collection of poetry under way, several full-length nonfiction treatises on the backburner, and umpteen projects that think outside the book. I’ve got short stories on the go, and dozens of these inspirational, personal experiences with literature or pop culture that my fans seem to want the most. I’m writing, writing, writing.

Despite the productivity and creativity I’ve proudly embraced in recent years, learning important tasks like how to write when you don’t feel like it (and hoping one day to learn other important tasks like how to focus on one project at a time and how to alleviate stress by finishing things way before the deadline), well, for all that, I admit that a big part of my current episode of depression is fear of flying.

You see, in the beginning, it was enough. I was a league ahead of the many, many ‘writers’ around me. There was nothing to fear. So many called themselves writers. They were going to write a book some day. One day when they had time. I never had this embarrassment. Whether I was stuck in kindergarten class, or stuck in an affordable rental crack house, or stuck in retail hell, or stuck on the side of the street begging your spare change, I was writing. I never had to be shy about calling myself a writer. You could argue whether or not it was good writing, but from my first seahorse poem, age five, to my first co-produced zine in second grade, The Sunshine Peanut, to age 12, when I began publishing, I was writing. I was doing a lot of other things, too, that I should not have been doing, or that I should have been more focused on… but when Margaret Atwood was autographing my copy of The Blind Assassin, and gave me that seething, freezing look she’s famous for giving- I’d been rude enough to thank her for her inspiration on my writing- I did not have to wither away because I was ‘posing’ as a writer. I was a writer. A published one, too. Sure, not many had heard of zines like Canned Phlegm or Minus Tides. But whatever- I’d appeared alongside frigging Burroughs and Bukowski- how’s that for chick lit? Eat my shorts, you boring bastards!

Following all that was the sheer high of quitting ‘the real world’ and pounding the keyboard in real time, not stolen time. It was twin terror that forced me to quit my ten year plus reign as one of Canada’s best booksellers- yes, I have a ‘certificate’ -that’s not something I would make up! While I had to occasionally use food banks though I was working full time, I loved the bookstore. I am so grateful for all that reading. But my physical health was very bad and I had to take a medical leave of absence, and at that same time my husband passed away. Needless to say, I had a nervous breakdown and it was absolutely impossible to go back to work full-time. And so I began to work at home, harder than I’ve ever worked before, in between shitty odd jobs. My heart got a bit better, but that takes forever. My body bloomed from the rest and the retreat from stress and from finally some real and treatable diagnoses. In three years, I’ve written more than I have my whole life before.

Somewhere in the schemata, tragic though it might be, I can even fit the quatruple-duple-zuple whammy of all the close friends dying these past few years. Oh, it hurts, believe me, everywhere I look it hurts. Not just trains, but, well, everything. Every thing I look at might remind me. Hospitals. Sofas. Closets. Baby toys. Love’s Baby Soft Spray Cologne. Abba. No matter where I look, something reminds me of AIDS, of cancer, of addiction, of suicide. Cars are okay, though. So far, miraculously, I have not lost anyone to a car crash! Statistically, I’m going to, and I wonder who will be next?

And while it’s true that I mourn, I never for a second take for granted those I love left living. Every single day I pray for you, think about you, thank God for you. And I spend a great deal of time in abject fear that you will die. Morbid? Maybe. But there aren’t enough candles in my chapel to go around each week when I go in. If you die, too, I will have to start bringing my own. (I could make my own film, “Sixteen Candles,” very different from the original.)

But yeah, you see, even in this tragic deathtrap that I seem to walk about in- my first published story by the way was Meet Me at the River, a story about death by a 12 year old girl- oh, and my first literary award in grade eight was for a poem called Marching to the Grave- I’m not making this shit up-you see, my theory is that everyone dies, so it’s actually not that unusual if it happens. And for whatever reason, total strangers write to me and tell me that I give them comfort with my crazy blend of morbid yet rapier wit when I talk about grief and loss. I have long believed that writers to some extent are channelers of the worlds we cannot see. I am a scribe, an instrument, one who gives the spirits their two cents worth. I freeze in time what has happened today by making a permanent record. One day, I will be dead, and this rambling piece about my mid-life crisis will still be floating around on cyberspace. Even my dad, who does not like such vague ghostly poetry talk about spirits (unless it is securely grounded in the poetry of the King James Bible) told me that my biography will be called A Life of Death. Awww, thaaaaaaaaaaanks, Dad.

But I digress….as usual. The crisis that’s materializing now is that hellish one that every writer must go through. For some, it underlies the whole of the writer’s life. Usually it comes in chewable doses that I can masticate and move on from. Lately it’s been a tidal wave. It’s hard to explain exactly what the crisis is, but if you read the following paragraph very quickly, and let it run around in your head over and over on high speed and high volume, you’ll get the general idea:

Is this any good? Why is it even important? Does anybody really read this stuff, and if so, why does it matter? Who says your thoughts are worth the trees? Shouldn’t you be out helping people? Why didn’t you study plumbing? Will the computer bill get paid this month? Next month? How will I work if it’s unplugged? What about the rent? You can’t stand anything you wrote before 2002- who says you’ll think this is worth the while in four years today? What if carpal tunnel cripples me? Do you really have anything original to say? Does it matter? Do I matter?

Yep, for all that brazen confidence I occasionally exude, I’m truly an existential worrywart. That little tape above, the one that zooms along on fast-forward and repeat, well that’s just part of a crippling terror that grips me in the night. And it goes something like this: WHAT IF I DON’T MAKE IT?

Sure, I’m blessed to have a voice all over the Internet, and in so many journals and magazines you open. Whatever. SHOW ME THE MONEY. I’m thrilled that Quarry Magazine listed me as part of a stellar lineage of Canadian writers topped by Atwood and Ondaatje, a torch I’m apparently carrying forth. They featured me on the cover and never sent the cheque. And I am incredibly honoured to be lauded by my spiritual teacher, Thomas Moore.

But I’m still scared that they might cut off my cable, and I need it to work online. I’m really scared I’ll have to get this tooth pulled if I can’t come up with the reconstruction fee. I’m not sure I can even come up with the extraction fee! I’m scared of running out of cat food.

It’s all very terrifying. WHAT IF I DON’T MAKE IT AS A WRITER? It’s the only damn thing I’m good at…and while I thank God for my gift without false modestly, let’s face it, I’m good, but not THAT good. I’m not BLOWING the rich publishers away, evidently. What will become of me if I don’t hold out for the long haul? Reading and writing are the only skills I have!

Crad Kilodney’s book, Putrid Scum, is quite possibly the most brilliant account of these fears. His entire life was the slow-track of the writer’s crisis. Early in the book, he sagely states that the very worst thing that can happen to a writer is early publication in a national magazine. This gives that poor sod false hope, and instead of moving on to a more sensible fate- say, becoming the cable guy, or a chiropractic assistant- the writer will believe in himself. Yeah, why the hell did I have to win that damn contest for Meet Me at the River, for crying out loud?

and sometimes a scar is just a scar by L.C. Luzajic

Then Crad goes on to say that every writer has a crippling philosophical struggle he must contend with. His, as is mine, is over the negligible importance of his perspective. You see, I’m flattered, trust me, that a few of you are amused or even touched, but in the scheme of things, are my comments on the literary life or why I love Johnny Cash really of any tangible importance in a world where children are dying of starvation and war? The most important job in the world is growing, serving, and selling food or water, in my mind. That shit job at Food Basics is, well, back to basics. The real stuff. Fuck me and my fucking intellect. (Yes, yes, for the most part, I know the word is what made civilization. That the word is spirit. In the beginning was the word and all that. I’m describing to you THE CRISIS, not the whole meaning of my life.)

It’s a bit of a tragedy that Putrid Scum got panned, but Crad Kilodney was pretty used to his books getting panned. Still, this one is so brilliant that no one should call oneself a writer until they’ve read it. So that they know what they are in for, all of it’s possibilities. Not everyone writes earth-shattering, world-changing literature that makes them rich. It’s more likely going to be something like Crad describes throughout this marvel.

For example: “In any case, happy or not, we are most of us destined to go to our deathbeds stupid and bewildered about life. Each generation repeats this proves: it has learned nothing from the previous generation and will have nothing to impart to the next.”

Or this: “It’s a great mystery how a life can divagate all over the map of possibilities, and it may be my bane as well as my consolation to believe that everything in my life is meant to be.”

“Books gathering dust. Me turning to dust. A whole life destined to become dust. And I thought of tall the book warehouses I’d worked in, with stacks and stacks of books gathering dust,” Crad muses. Continuing, he really gets to the heart of the crisis I’m trying to describe. “It must be a tremendous advantage to have such control over one’s emotions, but how could I become like that without becoming an entirely different person? It seemed to me that people were ruled primarily either by their hearts or by their heads, that this trait was fixed early in life, and that one could only alter the heart/head ration a little bit, if at all, as one got older. I envied people whose intellects were in control of their emotions, because they weathered the storms of life more easily; yet at the same time I often felt annoyed or repelled by them. They seemed unnatural somehow. I put out the light and got under the blanket. What is the correct way to be? How do you change what you are? What will become of me?”

Yep, I’m definitely one of those emotional ones, though I like to think my intellect has some fortitude here and there. I laugh now to think that when Crad drifted by fate into my life- as my mentor, but I didn’t know it then- that I told him in no uncertain terms that his bitter attitude had no place at my dinner table. His jaded comments about people from other genders, orientations, countries, and age brackets were all fine and dandy within his literature, but at a time in my life where I was learning to change that heart/head ratio, that little bit, I had to surround myself with people who didn’t mumble “burn your feminist books” or “what have the poor ever done for you?”

No mumbling, I told him. I’d impressed Mr. Kilodney in a story I did about his work because, as he said, there were no typos. In a world where most Canadian writers, publishers, and editors were lowlife idiots, my article had been refreshingly free of error.

I do not want to point out, looking back, that the little Idea Factory story actually DID appear with one (not very noticeable) typo. Oops. But it’s too late. It is nothing less than ‘meant to be’ that the most eccentric writer in Canadian history is my mentor. He hates this word, bristling at it, a man who doesn’t even think he’s a good writer. His work “is what it is,” he said when I asked if he thought it was good. He says my work is at least his equal if not superior, but ….well, I can’t agree. Crad’s already weathered the storms, and he’s also written over thirty books, whether or not you or I or he thinks they are good. And in some small way, a smiling light goes off inside his bitter head when I use the word, but I only use the word ‘mentor’ because it is true. I am not one to flatter.

I postponed an intellectual dinner hobnobbing with Mr. Kilodney this week because I was critically depressed. (You see, the story does all tie together despite my digressive habits.) I confessed to him that I’m in treatment at the loony bin, that I’m crying all the time, that I see dead people, that some people have hurt me so much I can’t believe they can live with themselves, and that no one ever bloody well rescued me when I needed help. That I had to figure shit out all by myself, that I’m in pain, that I’m not sure who to trust, and also that I’m not at all certain that a current project, which is moving painfully slowly, will ever see fruition, and I just can’t face it anymore. I JUST CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE.

The Valium wasn’t working, needless to say, and there was nothing ‘the professionals’ or anybody out there could say to the, well, the skeletons in my closet, eating me alive. No one, that is except for my dear Crad.

His email was not very wordy. When he’s not mumbling bitter expletives, he is a man of few words. He told me that I could read the entire Bible in a year at a rate of only four pages a day. This was very practical advice to someone drenched in creative and emotional chaos. I knew right then and there that the cure for this project’s incompletion was continuing consistency, and so I was already on the right path.

As for the rest of it all, no one has a way with truth quite like Mr. Kilodney. “The cure for depression is television,” he stated frankly. And he’s expecting me for dinner and sitcoms on Wednesday.

Lorette C. Luzajic’s poetry book, The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos, reflects on the weight of love and grief. Visit her site, www.thegirlcanwrite.net, for more cheerful selections.

The Astronaut

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I Survived the Three Day Novel Writing Contest

I have joined the ranks of the brave and the insane and entered my very first Three Day Novel Contest.

While you played volleyball and BBQ’d chicken legs or eggplant strips on the beach, I was holed up inside for the whole of the Labour Day Weekend.

This entire year for me has been an exercise in the theme ‘focus.’ Focusing is not my strong point. My strong point is generating a thousand ideas, starting a zillion new files, and then leaving the concepts undeveloped on the backburner. My strong point is working on a hundred things at one time, putting in a day or a minute here and there. Eventually, you get something. But imagine if I focused on ONE AT A TIME!

Partly because I needed some excitement in my less and less exciting life, partly because I wanted to practice my focusing techniques, and partly because I wanted to avoid the holiday weekend excesses for which I have a penchant, I entered the Three Day Novel Contest.

Surely the process itself was far more interesting than the actual results- in my case. But I’m hooked. Sadly, I’ll never be at that beach BBQ where the Barenaked Ladies play for free at Labour Day, ever, ever again.

The rules are very simple, so that entrants don’t get confused. You write a novel over three days. Saturday at 12.01 you can begin, and Monday at midnight you must stop. A skeleton outline is permitted, and you can mull over the thing in your head all you want beforehand.

Friday night I went out to paint the town red with the spectacular Maevey, whose featherweight pink summer camisole would be muse enough for anybody. Yes, dear, it IS a hot summer night- but those are also pajamas….needless to say, I didn’t make it home for the Cinderella mark, but nearly- it was ten after twelve.

Of course, if I’m still awake, Seinfeld is on from midnight until one, so I decided to relax a bit and perhaps ponder the storyline of my novel before getting down to the grind. I fell asleep before King of the Hill could interrupt the focused flow of my novel writing, ha ha ha.

Saturday morning, fresh with zeal and …well, really, I still hadn’t thought of anything. I had the character and the title in my head all summer, but nothing happened to him. For a man who spent most of his life in a lunatic asylum, he was really rather a bit of bore.

Sometime around mid-morning, I decided I really needed a place to put my clothes. I keep pulling them out of the closet to find what I need, then the cats use the pile as a bed before I push them back in, which means I have to launder them to get rid of the cat hair. I’ve been thinking about getting another dresser for awhile, because the shelf scenario is not working the way I hoped it would when I moved in.

Yes, I did know about the cat hair slash clothing situation for more than a full year. But I was not particularly inspired to do anything about it. Not until now, when I have a novel due in three days and haven’t even started yet.

But I surmise that a bit of fresh air and sunshine will be just what the doctor ordered, and I hit a few yard sales in the neighbourhood, idling around on my bike. Exercise is good, right? Right. I strike gold when I find a rickety dresser, made out of wood not Ikea, and clean, standing on the curb. It takes me a while to drag the thing to my place, and then go back for the drawers. All that dragging means I loosened the top piece- the one that holds the thing together- and so I have to hunt for a hammer and nails, in that same disaster closet.

Now that the living room is cluttered with a bunch of drawers and pieces of wood, which the cats think of as a new jungle gym, I have just the kind of peace of mind I need to sit down and get started on the novel. I’ve made goals for each day- fifty pages. So far I have – the title.

Surely a little bit of fuel is what a writer needs. I’m pretty wired from the dozen coffees I’ve had on an empty stomach. But I don’t feel like cooking. That would distract from the flow! Hmm, do I feel like sushi- the cats vote for sushi, but I don’t feel like forking over 20 bucks when I already have a fridge full of good food. I open it, with a mind to toss together a quick salad or something.

Hmm, well, I decide I better stock up on good options. It’s going to be a long haul, this contest! So I hop back on my bicycle and head to the supermarket. It’s late afternoon by now. Maybe they have cream of broccoli soup on tap. I put two dozen pieces of fruit and fresh vegetables and cold cuts into my cart, then head to the check out. I see the line ups- except the express lane- are miles long and the people have mountains in their carts. So I abandon my cart in the ice cream aisle and opt for Triple Chocolate- that’s right, three kinds of chocolate ice cream in one, kind of like Neapolitan but without the strawberry and vanilla, which no one ever wants. I always wondered why anyone orders Neapolitan instead of just getting chocolate. You can’t beat chocolate.

I zip home with my carton of the good stuff, and when I get there, realize I still have no food, and haven’t had anything but caffeine all day. There’s a mushy banana- so I slice it up on top of a bowl of chocolate ice cream. It’s time to put the pedal to the medal.

Well, I’m inspired. I’ve eaten three bowls of triple chocolate ice cream and my stomach is sore, but damn, my first paragraph is good. I get down half of the first chapter- four whole pages- before I decide that the title is all wrong. And I think I need a bit of time to think about the direction the project is going…I can’t just let the characters lead me blindly around. I have to steer this ship!

Thank God there are two hours of Criminal Intent in a row. Usually Saturdays suck for television, and usually that’s great, because folks, I am not the kind of girl you generally find home alone on a Saturday night. My heartthrob detective Goren is just about to go undercover on a death defying sting operation when I notice my phone light blinking. Now of course I’d turned my phone off for the weekend- no distractions! But it can’t hurt to see who called. And to just call them all back and let them know how the project is coming along.

So you get the picture. And your concluding wrong, my friends, wrong, wrong, wrong. You are concluding that I did not finish my novel, that I started something again that I wouldn’t finish, that I didn’t organize my ideas in time…yes, and these insights into my nature were part of the process, because next time I’ll be making use of the Saturday. As it turns out, I awoke at six on the Sunday and the Monday and wrote stealthily through. The novel has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and even a few surprises.

Now, it might be the shortest entry they receive- but I doubt it. There has got to be at least one that didn’t make it to the fifty page mark. And it might be the worst novel they receive, but I doubt that, too, because despite my honest assessment that about 55 of my 65 pages are sheer filler, I think the beginning and the ending and the heated dialogue between the ghost and the boyfriend who is jealous of the ghost are pretty good. I mean, I’m not expecting my long short story to win the Novel Writing Contest, but I completed my literary rite of passage! For 31 years, writers and martyrs have been participating in this crazy thing, and I’ll be doing it again.

Next year, I’ll know to have something a little more solid for a story idea than ‘a ghost who lives in Toronto.’ And I’ll have it flushed out in my head before the start on Saturday. Next year, I’ll have a fridge with some ready-made chili and soup, and I won’t be watching any Law and Order (or the Sunday afternoon two-hour Madonna special- or the Day Diana Died special- but at least that was on in the background while I was typing.)

I can tell you that my carpal tunnel pains are raging, and that I bawled like a baby when I hit the epilogue. And in my possession was a hugely imperfect 65 page mess, with a clever title and a good opening paragraph. “What will YOU think up under pressure?” the contest advert asked. Now, at the other end of it, I had something, something I dreamed up, radically different from any project I’d ever worked on, a completely alien invention. Part Margaret Atwood, part Twilight Zone….It doesn’t matter that the book- or booklet, as it were- is kind of cheesy and lame. No one’s expecting perfection in three days except me. What mattered is the 72-hour kick in the pants the contest promised, and it was. “A trial by deadline” they warned.

My book may not win, and it may not become fodder for an after school special, and it may not even end up a short play in the Fringe Festival next year. But I’m damn well sure my focus has improved a million-fold. And that it’s going to be a breeze to whip up stuff that I don’t necessarily think is worth writing but have to anyhow. All the assignments on my desk top do not seem daunting after forcing my way through writer’s block like that. It was grueling torture and after that sugar crash I thought I was dying. And I’m going to do it again and again and again. Which means, yes, that you all get stuck with my annual novella.

You’ll get to read it in the new year, after the winners are announced. I know- you secretly can’t wait to see what my twisted mind dreamed up on chocolate and espresso…

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency Series is Number One!

http://calitreview.com/64#comment-23369

A stellar article. I can’t say it better than the writer and the writer!

“What a thoughtfully written piece with such interesting questions! Wonderful! One of my most treasured belongings is the autographed first installation. Smith was visiting the bookstore I worked in. My boss knew I was crazy for the series, and he gave me a copy to be signed by the author.

Each and every book in the series is a treasure. Absolutely original. If there’s anyone out there who hasn’t treated themselves to these, I urge you to take a quiet few hours to begin the series. You’ll read every one, and feel more peace of mind and contentment in life.”

visit his site!

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Rushdie and Me

There are few I would consider marrying, but I’ve long been certain that Kramer could be the next one. We would be giant, over the top, demi-intellectual goofballs together. The sheer amount of merriment that would ensue sure beats the melancholy underworld I’ve been living in most of my life. Kramer could meet me halfway. Little Miss Chatterbox and Cosmo. Kramer’s oddball beauty just might be everything I’m looking for in a man. He could make New York fun. And I suspect that his depth is considerable, despite a surface veneer. He hides his true genius and creativity, and yet, what you get is what you see. The key to Kramer is in not trying to figure him out. The joy of him is that you look back and realize that everything he says is true, no matter how crazy it seemed at the time you first heard it.

Yes, yes, I’m fully aware that Seinfeld’s kooky neighbour does not actually exist, and that’s a big relief because I’m in no hurry to get married again. And much as I’d hoped for it in adolescence, I want nothing less in life than to move to Manhattan. Fictional or not, Kramer and I spend a lot of time together through these newfangled, magical wonder boxes- turn on; dispense laughter. And Kramer never loses the ability to surprise me. One day he comes home from the sauna and tells Jerr- Bear he saw Salmond Rushdie, of all people, taking a steam.

Now, a conversation with Kramer might be exactly what Rushdie needs in life. The man, though wryly funny, could use more belly laughs. It can’t have been easy, becoming the poster child for offending Allah, just by writing a book. I sure hope that if any of my blustery words weren’t always as reverent as they ought to be, God could handle my outburst. I’m pretty sure we are supposed to study and learn and question our world, not just reach for what we’ve been told, and I’m pretty sure God doesn’t need armies on earth to censor our explorations if they veer from the truth- then every single one of us must be taken down. The cosmic world is a little more flexible than some adherents of faith think.

But that bit of fuzzy logic didn’t occur to the Ayatollah of Iran, who certainly drew attention to a newly successful author, an ordinary looking guy named Rushdie. He put a fatwa on Rushdie’s head for blasphemy. It’s ludicrously arrogant to think that no one should ‘insult or malign Muslims’ and that anyone has the right to kill for doing so. How can we seek truth if we cannot discuss it, and in discussing it, may offend some players? The book that caused this furor was, of course, The Satanic Verses, and the poor writer, now a popular award winner, went into hiding, fearing for his life. I guess by this principle I will also be executed, then, for portraying a pic of Georgie Bush with a lump of white paint by his nose and the caption, “I inhaled.”

I had a hard time myself, having read hundreds of books that defamed my childhood faith of Christianity, seeing what was so offensive here. I’ll give anyone’s faith its due, but true faith means having ethics, and the beginning and ending of ethics is always ‘thou shalt not kill.’ But here’s what caused the world of terrorism to erupt- the title, for starters. It allegedly implied that the Holy Koran’s verses were the work of the devil. (What was so devilish was that these verses, which in historical allegory were withdrawn after their first transcription, encouraged intercessory prayer to three pagan goddesses of the Middle East. The crescent moon, strangely, may still evoke the namesake of Allah, in Allat, the moon goddess….) Additionally, the prophet Mohammed’s wives appeared here in a brothel and the name of a Mecca-like place translated to something like ‘ignorance,’ which was deep sacrilege to the faithful. The list goes on, but surely by these standards, Christopher Moore, who wrote Lamb, about Christ’s adventures with Bif and Maggie and a zealous evangelist, had better head indoors.

Indeed, there were endless death threats and multiple bombings of bookstores, assassination attempts on publishers, and more. I thought the prophet Jesus warned us that we would be persecuted in his name and would have to stand up to all kinds of offense, including Moore’s very funny novel. We were instructed to turn the other cheek, however, not to bomb and murder wherever we didn’t like something.

Rushdie’s prolific career started in 1981, pretty much after he threw in the towel. Born in Bombay to a Muslim family, his first work was a sci-fi experiment. He says he wrote three other novels that “mercifully weren’t published.” He was also working in advertising and questioned whether he should just move on from writing. “Maybe I’m just pretending to be a novelist,” he told a mesmerized audience last night (June 9, 2008) at the Danforth Music Hall. He said this following a reading from his new novel, The Enchantress of Florence. Sitting there, all I could think was, wow, must be nice to be out! Indeed, Rushdie got tired of staying in, and eventually the fatwa was lifted, but fresh upheaval and new threats haven’t driven him back in.

Thankfully, after tossing up understandable concerns about becoming a writer, Rushdie promised himself that he would never give up. Midnight’s Children came out 6 years after Grimus, and it blew everyone away. Rushdie won the first lot of more than 25 of the most prestigious literary awards in history. A few years later, the uproar over Satanic Verses meant a career of death threats and chaos. But Rushdie doesn’t talk about all that, even when an audience member asks him about Islamic terrorism today. Instead he tells fledglings like me frankly “there are enough books.” If we are wondering why we want to be writers, then don’t be writers. The only excuse, he says, for becoming a writer, “is that you can’t avoid it.”

Now you’d have to be pretty imaginative to come up with any possible commonalities between an unknown pop culture and vitamin writer like myself, and the recently knighted Mr. Rushdie. I’m not even a fan, really, though I intend no disrespect in saying so. The lavish plots and painstaking historical details, the majestic span of human endeavours and dilemmas, the depth of the characters are all astounding things, and so, Rushdie is my teacher. But I confess to finding the going difficult and convoluted, and I find that his ‘magical realism’ lacks the kind of resonance and natural flow I find in Allende or Marquez. I suspect two things here: one, I’m just not smart enough to really absorb the reading and its contexts, by one who is generally regarded as a genius. And two, just plain old personal taste.

Still, I was pleasantly surprised to find that we nonetheless had a few things in common. Sal’s dry humour, which I think underlies a great deal more of his writings than is perceived, reigned clear. While there is certainly an inflated aspect and also something of a defeated one showing in Rushdie’s persona, there is absolutely an earthier charm, a faint silliness, and a sure grip on how comical the absurdities of the world are. There’s even something vividly gracious about a man who doesn’t scoff for what must be the 2144th time he is asked “how did you become a writer?” and “what are your favourite books?” I appreciate humour, more and more, as one of the most important ways of bearing life’s bullshit. I think Rushdie would agree.

Second, I’ve always thought Rushdie’s work a little wordy, and to be frank, most of those who know me find me rather wordy as well. I admit I go on and on. I edit quite a bit out, trust me, and I’m still left with an extraordinarily verbose verbiage. I cannot say in ten words what I might say in four thousand.

I decided to embrace my wordy weakness and named my other blog Little Miss Chatterbox. Minimalism may be the trend for distracted modern audiences, but a quick overview of literature assured me I’m not alone. Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, Alexander Pope, now these are not exactly the most terse writers I’ve ever read. James Joyce, Shakespeare, Rushdie, me- well, we all tend to digress a lot.

“Stories are what define us,” Rushdie says, in defense of humans prone to loquacity. “We are the only creatures in the world who have developed the curious habit of telling each other stories.” This, he says, is an amazing way we have of making sense of ourselves. Certainly, it’s a technique he uses. “I go forward by going sideways.”

The real question here is what the million-dollar man was doing with Kramer in the sauna when there was a price like that on his head. When Kramer asked his name, the writer in the towel said “Sal Bass.” Jerry wasn’t so sure it could have been Rushdie, but Kramer knew that the ‘sal’ part was too much to be a coincidence, and that the ‘bass’ part alluded to fish- you know, to Salmond! Foolish hilarity ensued.

See, the uber-elite literati pooh-pooh television, but I think we take great joy in TV shows and in movies for the same reason we give importance to literature. Rushdie himself enjoys the occasional acting foray (though it was actually Sal Bass and not Rushdie who played Sal Bass/not Rushdie in the Seinfeld episode.) These are our stories. I’m not the only one who views life as Seinfeldian. The meaning of life is, quite literally, the reason of the show. It’s a show about nothing, and so, it is about everything.

Now, Rushdie’s a remarkable man, and while I was honoured to learn from his passion and experience during this terrific reading and interview, it still holds true that I wouldn’t care to run into him in a steam room. He may be smarter and have a better job than Kramer, but he’s a bit formidable, blustering, just through with his fourth wife, and well, not all that good looking. Kramer, on the other hand, has an offbeat quirkiness that makes him look hot with a cigar in an old-fashioned jalopy, despite the pompadour and trademark leggy clumsiness. I’m also pretty sure that Rushdie would find my work and my life too breezy, too girly, too soap operatic, with too many talismanic trinkets lying about. Despite his penchant for writing magic, he doesn’t believe in it, and I do.

But I digress.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

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Home Alone: thoughts on the writing life

February has just slipped out from under me, and I know sooner or later I will have to leave the house.

Sure, I’m anticipating long and curious city walks in spring’s fuzzy glow. I’m dying for midnight coffees near Bloor and Brunswick, where the conversations of the assorted revelers nearby fill my notebooks. I want to be a lady who lunches, to go someplace with Elle and our girls, to pound them back and show off our vintage clutches. Oh, yes. I can feel the thaw. I will even go dancing, I’ll wear red lipstick and a smudged mole. I could definitely enjoy something with the banjo tonight, or something with gin.

But it’s still freezing, and so it didn’t take much persuasion for me to commit to another evening home alone. The truth be told, this all by myself stuff is spectacular. This past winter has been paradise. Like most people, urban home solitude is an expensive commodity, and I’ve always had roommates. I’ve lived with the fabulous and the fey, I’ve lived with thieves and vampires, I’ve lived with people whose name or face I might not recall upon passing. I’ve lived with lovers, with squatters, with addicts and mental patients and freaks of every assortment, with senior citizens and junkies and crazy Indians. I’ve lived with the elfin, the initiated, the converted evangels, the con men. With hippies, and the pierced and the prodded and the brilliant and the travelers. I lived with prison types and with festive fags of every stripe.

And I tell you, from the banker to the monk, human beings, each in their own way, are stunningly insane.

Those who know me know I love nothing more than a crazy person, and that I use the word so liberally it’s annoying. I love people. I love crazy people. I love being a crazy brilliant writer in the big city. But in my ascent to nearly middle age, that proverbial hill that shortly I’ll be over, I’ve finally found living arrangements on my own. It’s pretty nuts, I’m telling you, because all I do is write. It’s like I’ve been waiting for this winter my whole life and didn’t know it. I’m downloading, and it’s coming through my fingertips into the keyboard.

It doesn’t matter tonight that all week long except for Thursday when I had a root canal I did nothing but write furiously and endlessly- that’s still exactly what I feel like doing tonight. Dinah Washington’s elixir diction and bell-clear blues swerve sensually through my brainwaves. I just popped open some French Cross, the cheapest pink wine I could find. There’s salami and oranges. This is luxury. My girl Maeve described it best: she said that you can’t always be spilling open and over but you have to be there if the muse appears. You had to coax it, provide it with a portal. If you were out in the middle of a crowded subway or a nightclub, you might not hear her.

Seems it works. Close the door, pour a glass, the floods rush through me. I ride the crest of that surge of confidence, that thrill in life that can only come from a sense of your work, of your contribution. It’s still tempered with its see-sawing worldview, the one that forgets potentiality and experiences fear instead. Of what possible self-indulgent use could a bunch of poetry about my weird moments possibly be to anyone else on this planet?

That’s why famous writer Ariel Gore reminded me about William Carlos Williams said: “It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”

visit the writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net
order her poetry collection, The Astronaut’s Wife, through indigo or amazon online