Thank you Carol
In May I participated in the inaugural Carol Shields Symposium on Women’s Writing: Festival of Voices at the University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg.
When I was asked to participate in this event, my first thought was how often Carol Shields’ name comes up in discussions in the courses I teach in the UBC creative writing MFA program or in conversation with the writers I mentor privately.
I teach fiction in the optional residency arm of the UBC program, which means our workshops are on-line and our students are working, living and travelling all over the world. So I’ve been delighted to realize from my student’s comments the reach of Carol’s work and life on writers all over the globe. I’d like to share just a couple of these comments from our writers in the UBC program before I talk about Carol’s influence on my own writing.
Jamie Sharpe said: “One of my best book finds is a hardcover copy of Small Ceremonies, with Shields' inscription: In memory of/ a small ceremony/ Toronto 1977.
Jamie said, “When things are dour I pull it off the shelf, read the first two lines ("Sunday night. And the thought strikes me that I ought to be happier than I am."), and remind myself to take pleasure in the small ceremonies like writing, or the hundred coffees that punctuate my day.”
And this comment comes from Jane Warren:
“I have fond memories of Carol Shields. She came to read and speak to our writing class at U of C in the late 80’s. She read from The Orange Fish and then spoke to our small group about writing and process and the writing life.
“Carol was so very generous with her support. I was chuffed when she went out of her way to speak to me and quietly offer support and encouragement. Over the years when things have been slow and plodding and difficult, I have taken great heart from that memory and her generosity.”
It’s these two sentiments that I hear from writers over and over again: writers tell their stories about Carol’s generosity in offering them and other writers support on many levels. But even more often they talk about how, and I’m quoting another of our students, Claudia Mangel, here: “her careful exploration of "domestic" themes has been a great inspiration...” to their own writing.
That has certainly been the case for me, and it was a sentiment that came up again and again over the symposium weekend: how Carol’s writing inspired women in particular to explore the domestic, and the domestic detail, in our writing, as she did in her own.
Carol called domestic life “the shaggy beast that eats up 50 percent of our lives” and recognized its importance by writing about it and in the process, as so many have pointed out, turned the mundane into the extraordinary.
As a young writer I had wanted to pursue the domestic in my own writing but didn’t feel that I could until I read Carol Shields work. Seeing my own mother’s and grandmother’s lives reflected in her writing allowed me the freedom to just go ahead, to sit down and write from the stories of my mother and grandmother’s generation, and from my own, to make use of subject matter and details that I might have otherwise passed over, like recipes and the how-tos that Carol used in her own writing.
Her writing also gave me inspiration for structure. Carol, in her mid and later career was a great experimenter and I found encouragement there to experiment early in my own career.
If, following Carol’s lead, I was allowed to write of the domestic then I could look to the details of domestic life and incorporate them into the structure of the novel itself.
I could use the scrapbook, so important to the lives of my mother and my grandmother’s generations, as a template for the structure in the novel, as I did in The Cure for Death by Lightning, and I could use the index that’s found in any cookbook within that novel.
When Carol wrote The Stone Diaries and included photos in that book – which one critic called a “A kind of family album made into a work of art", I realized I could do the same, and used my own family photos at the heads of chapters in my own work. Later I incorporated photos of everyday kitchen objects in my writing, again elements of the domestic. Like so many other writers, I would not have felt I could do any of this before reading Carol Shields. Her lasting impact has been not only on the subject matter we chose to write about, but on the structure of the writing itself, how we chose to tell the tale.
I didn’t get to know Carol personally, though, like a great many writers and readers, I did come to feel that I knew her through her novels.
And as I mentioned at the start, I also felt I came to know her through her reputation as a person who supported others, particularly young writers, in so many ways. Her example is one I, and a great many writers I know, have tried to follow as we mentor the next generation of writers.
More importantly for me personally, I read and heard in her interviews how she wrote while caring for a large family. In one interview she said, “I don’t think I would have been a writer if I hadn’t been a mother…I wanted to construct something that contained some of these feelings that I had, some of these discoveries or revelations.”
I’m a mom of a blended family of four so I think I understand something of what she meant here. That she wrote of these discoveries and revelations of family life was encouraging to me: it meant that I could too.
When I start to lose patience over the constant stream of interruptions to my work that come from domestic life I remind myself, and I do this daily, that Carol Shields did all that she did and raised five children too. She found a way to make the writing important. And then she found a way to make those domestic concerns not only important, but powerful and entertaining in her writing.
I wish I had had the chance, or taken the time, to tell Carol all this before she passed away.
But maybe I can say it now: thank you Carol for paving the way, for opening doors, and for giving us a model to follow. You helped us to not only acknowledge but to celebrate the small ceremonies that make up the bulk of our lives.
When I was asked to participate in this event, my first thought was how often Carol Shields’ name comes up in discussions in the courses I teach in the UBC creative writing MFA program or in conversation with the writers I mentor privately.
I teach fiction in the optional residency arm of the UBC program, which means our workshops are on-line and our students are working, living and travelling all over the world. So I’ve been delighted to realize from my student’s comments the reach of Carol’s work and life on writers all over the globe. I’d like to share just a couple of these comments from our writers in the UBC program before I talk about Carol’s influence on my own writing.
Jamie Sharpe said: “One of my best book finds is a hardcover copy of Small Ceremonies, with Shields' inscription: In memory of/ a small ceremony/ Toronto 1977.
Jamie said, “When things are dour I pull it off the shelf, read the first two lines ("Sunday night. And the thought strikes me that I ought to be happier than I am."), and remind myself to take pleasure in the small ceremonies like writing, or the hundred coffees that punctuate my day.”
And this comment comes from Jane Warren:
“I have fond memories of Carol Shields. She came to read and speak to our writing class at U of C in the late 80’s. She read from The Orange Fish and then spoke to our small group about writing and process and the writing life.
“Carol was so very generous with her support. I was chuffed when she went out of her way to speak to me and quietly offer support and encouragement. Over the years when things have been slow and plodding and difficult, I have taken great heart from that memory and her generosity.”
It’s these two sentiments that I hear from writers over and over again: writers tell their stories about Carol’s generosity in offering them and other writers support on many levels. But even more often they talk about how, and I’m quoting another of our students, Claudia Mangel, here: “her careful exploration of "domestic" themes has been a great inspiration...” to their own writing.
That has certainly been the case for me, and it was a sentiment that came up again and again over the symposium weekend: how Carol’s writing inspired women in particular to explore the domestic, and the domestic detail, in our writing, as she did in her own.
Carol called domestic life “the shaggy beast that eats up 50 percent of our lives” and recognized its importance by writing about it and in the process, as so many have pointed out, turned the mundane into the extraordinary.
As a young writer I had wanted to pursue the domestic in my own writing but didn’t feel that I could until I read Carol Shields work. Seeing my own mother’s and grandmother’s lives reflected in her writing allowed me the freedom to just go ahead, to sit down and write from the stories of my mother and grandmother’s generation, and from my own, to make use of subject matter and details that I might have otherwise passed over, like recipes and the how-tos that Carol used in her own writing.
Her writing also gave me inspiration for structure. Carol, in her mid and later career was a great experimenter and I found encouragement there to experiment early in my own career.
If, following Carol’s lead, I was allowed to write of the domestic then I could look to the details of domestic life and incorporate them into the structure of the novel itself.
I could use the scrapbook, so important to the lives of my mother and my grandmother’s generations, as a template for the structure in the novel, as I did in The Cure for Death by Lightning, and I could use the index that’s found in any cookbook within that novel.
When Carol wrote The Stone Diaries and included photos in that book – which one critic called a “A kind of family album made into a work of art", I realized I could do the same, and used my own family photos at the heads of chapters in my own work. Later I incorporated photos of everyday kitchen objects in my writing, again elements of the domestic. Like so many other writers, I would not have felt I could do any of this before reading Carol Shields. Her lasting impact has been not only on the subject matter we chose to write about, but on the structure of the writing itself, how we chose to tell the tale.
I didn’t get to know Carol personally, though, like a great many writers and readers, I did come to feel that I knew her through her novels.
And as I mentioned at the start, I also felt I came to know her through her reputation as a person who supported others, particularly young writers, in so many ways. Her example is one I, and a great many writers I know, have tried to follow as we mentor the next generation of writers.
More importantly for me personally, I read and heard in her interviews how she wrote while caring for a large family. In one interview she said, “I don’t think I would have been a writer if I hadn’t been a mother…I wanted to construct something that contained some of these feelings that I had, some of these discoveries or revelations.”
I’m a mom of a blended family of four so I think I understand something of what she meant here. That she wrote of these discoveries and revelations of family life was encouraging to me: it meant that I could too.
When I start to lose patience over the constant stream of interruptions to my work that come from domestic life I remind myself, and I do this daily, that Carol Shields did all that she did and raised five children too. She found a way to make the writing important. And then she found a way to make those domestic concerns not only important, but powerful and entertaining in her writing.
I wish I had had the chance, or taken the time, to tell Carol all this before she passed away.
But maybe I can say it now: thank you Carol for paving the way, for opening doors, and for giving us a model to follow. You helped us to not only acknowledge but to celebrate the small ceremonies that make up the bulk of our lives.
posted by Gail Anderson-Dargatz at
11:30 AM
