An Investigation of Non-Cognitive Approaches to the Creative Writing Process

Penny Ann Verbruggen

Graduate Department of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto

© Copyright by Penny Ann Verbruggen 2017 An Investigation of Non-Cognitive Approaches to the Creative Writing Process Doctor of Philosophy, 2017 Penny Ann Verbruggen Graduate Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto

Abstract

Much research suggests that the writing process, as taught in public schools, focuses on essay writing and literacy skills development. Statistics published by the Education

Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) in Ontario suggest this focus on essay writing and literacy skills development is both warranted and effective; students consistently achieve or surpass provincial standards for literacy.

However, much extant writing research reinforces this narrow view of writing, which is weighted in favour of outcomes-based skills development. Data collected from the

Contextual Information (taken from the Student Questionnaire at the conclusion of the

Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test) reveal that students view writing as an assignment-driven, un-creative, and stressful activity.

Research into the process of writers writing creatively within the public school system is limited. Therefore, this narrative inquiry explores the creative writing process of accomplished, professional Canadian creative writers, and includes my own creative process as a published writer of narrative fiction. This study contributes to composition process theory and pedagogy by considering the process of creative writing, using a holistic framework. Data are collected from the narratives of three accomplished

Canadian writers: Margaret Atwood, Lawrence Hill, and Alice Munro, as well as from

ii my own writing narrative. These writing narratives include (auto) biographies, interviews, podcasts, and workshop notes.

iii Acknowledgments

Those fortunate to make the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, Spain quickly discover the gifts of strength in vulnerability, joy in adversity, and beauty in the grey mists that cloud the Pyrenees. Along the Way, pilgrims call, “Ultreïa.” It is a blessing of encouragement to keep the pilgrim moving forward and upward, both physically and spiritually.

This vignette describes my experience of the PhD journey. With the unflagging support and direction of my supervisor, Dr. Karyn Cooper, I realized strength, joy, and beauty in a process sometimes fraught with uncertainty and obstacles. My committee members, Dr.

Grace Feuerverger and Dr. Jack Miller, offered clarity during the early days of my clouded vision. Dr. Robert White and Dr. Carl Leggo suggested new avenues of discovery through their thoughtful questions and discussion. For your company along my journey, I am grateful.

What mother could fulfill a long-held dream without the love, humour, and calm of her children? God bless you Jessica, Jeremy, and Zoë for enriching my life always and forever.

Andrew, my husband and my inspiration, God love you for twice carrying my backpack on the road to Santiago, and then my spirit on the road to a PhD.

And my dear friends, who loved me as a sister, wading through the muck with me and celebrating at the end…know that your kindness was the breath of life that kept me moving forward.

“Ultreïa.”

Dedication

To Spirit

To the Writer

To Bob

v Table of Contents Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………ii Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………..iv Dedication………………………………………………………………………………....v Chapter 1: Introduction...... 1 My Story……………………………………………………………………………….1 Overview……………………………………………………………………………….2 Research Problem……………………………………………………………………...5 Chapter 2: Literature, Theory, and Research Questions...……………………………8 Literature Review………………………………………………………………………8 Composition Theories……………………………………………………………..8 A Broader Approach to Composition Studies…………………………………...11 Research Beyond the Intellectual Domain: The Creative Writing Experience.....16 Research Questions…………………………………………………………………...20 Theoretical Perspective……………………………………………………………….20 Definition of Terms and Context……………………………………………………..22 Mind-body-spirit balance………………………………………………………...22 Mind……………………………………………………………………………...24 Body……………………………………………………………………………...25 Spirit……………………………………………………………………………...27 Holistic Creative Writing Process…………………………………………………….28 Chapter 3: A Methodology that Matters.……………………………………………..30 Research Methodology and Methods…………………………………………………30 Scholarly Personal Narrative (SPN)………………………………………………….33 SPN Guidelines……………………………………………………………………….38 SPN Challenges………………………………………………………………………42 Concerns About Data Collection………………………………………………...43 What is Community? What is Culture?...... 44 Data Sources and Analysis……………………………………………………………45 The Writers…………………………………………………………………………...47 Other Voices/Other Writers…………………………………………………………..49

vi Chapter 4: Margaret Atwood………………………………………………………….51 Why Margaret Atwood?...... 51 Questions to Writers………………………………………………………………….59 Place…………………………………………………………………………………....60 Routines of Time……………………………………………………………………...63 Routines of Discipline………………………………………………………………...66 Preparations…………………………………………………………………………...73 Pen and Paper…………………………………………………………………….73 Desks, Typewriters, and Computers……………………………………………..75 Drink more water/Go to bed earlier……………………………………………...76 Ideas and Creating Empty Space……………………………………………………..78 Support and Passion…………………………………………………………………..80 Chapter 5: Lawrence Hill………………………………………………………………83 Why Lawrence Hill?...... 83 On Writing and Becoming a Writer…………………………………………………..86 The Nurturing Environment………………………………………………………..…87 Sub-text: The nurturing, UNsupportive home environment……………………..87 Passion………………………………………………………………………………..93 Courage……………………………………………………………………………….96 Imagination and Inspiration…………………………………………………………..99 Routines of Time and Place…………………………………………………………105 Gestation………………………………………………………………………..108 Writing Furiously, Listening, and Going Deep………………………………...109 Staring into Space………………………………………………………………111 Tools………………………………………………………………………………...113 Write What You Don’t Know……………………………………………………….113 Qualities of a Writer…………………………………………………………………114 Chapter 6: Alice Munro………………………………………………………………116 Why Alice Munro?...... 116 Becoming a Writer…………………………………………………………………..124 A Fine Balance………………………………………………………………………127

vii Early Years: Writing in the Slivers of Time……………………………………128 Writing in Later Years………………………………………………………….133 Conditions for Writing………………………………………………………………136 The Ideal Place………………………………………………………………….136 Writing at Home: The Particulars of a Writing Life……………………………140 Writer’s Block……………………………………………………………………….144 Inspiration and the “Gift”…...... 149 Chapter 7: Exploring the Creative Process………………………………………….151 Findings and Discussion……………………………………………………………151 The Starting Block……………………………………………………………...151 Passion for Writing and Teaching the Joy of Writing………………………………156 Recreating the Experience/Recreating the World...…………………………………158 Writing Truth………………………………………………………………………..163 Voice: defined and explored………………………………………………………...166 Audience: For Whom Do I Write?...... 169 Creative Patterns and Routines Amidst the Busy-ness of Life……………………...172 Creative Space(s)……………………………………………………………………174 Other Rituals of the Mind, Body, and Spirit………………………...………………176 Inspiration…………………………………………………………………………...178 Chapter 8: Implications and Reflections…………………………………………….180 Failure to Start……………………………………………………………………….183 Implications for the Classroom…………………………………………………183 Movement…………………………………………………………………………...186 Implications for the Classroom…………………………………………………187 Encouragement and Support………………………………………………………...187 Implications for the Classroom…………………………………………………188 Physical Space/Environment………………………………………………………..191 Implications for the Classroom…………………………………………………192 The Importance of Routines/Rituals/Patterns……………………………………….195 Rituals……………………………………………………………………………….196 Implications for the Classroom…………………………………………………198

viii The Uniform Voice That is No Voice……………………………………………….200 Implications for the Classroom: Change our Narratives, Change Ourselves…..204 Significance of the Research………………………………………………………...208 Opportunities for Further Research…………………………………………………209 Gender…………………………………………………………………………..209 Epilogue……………………………………………………………………………..210 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………213

Chapter 1: Introduction

To use your imagination is to use a gift of the gods. --Lawrence Hill

Chapter 1 describes my early interest in writing and the writing process. I present an overview of the educational problem, and articulate the educational research problem.

My Story

I keep journals, and know the value of journals to the creative process. I questioned both Drs. Conle and Feuerverger’s advice when they suggested I plumb the depths of my writing experiences through a journal dedicated to “writing” so that I might discover my thesis topic. However, my writing journal resulted in a collection of writing vignettes that revealed the power of words throughout my student life and beyond. Words, imagination, and story became my strength during uncertainty, my protection against loneliness, and my ticket to acceptance in an ungainly world where I struggled to find footing.

I jotted memories of filling a Schaeffer fountain pen from a bottle of blue ink that sat in an inkwell carved into the top corner of my student desk. We used fountain pens to learn cursive writing, forming graceful circular and oval loops across lines in our scribblers. Mistakes magically disappeared into a single drop of bleach and water from an eyedropper that was dabbed away with a rectangular white blotter. That fountain pen was a key to worlds I created from my imagination. The nuns, my teachers, and my friends enjoyed the tales that rolled from its scratchy tip.

While I struggled with mathematics, I excelled at language arts. I wrote poetry and holiday-themed pieces for our elementary school newsletter and stories for the high school paper. Much later, I wrote opinion pieces and reviews for the Brock University

newspaper. Although I was often chosen last for teams in the gym class, newspaper and yearbook clubs sought me out.

Fictional stories featuring strong female protagonist writers, including Harriet the

Spy and Little Women, interested me. Later, I would amass books about writing, writers, and the writing life. As a young girl, I knew I would be a writer and teacher “when I grew up.” Miss Varga, my favourite grade seven teacher, called me a writer one winter morning, as she sat with me before school started and “critiqued” the Nancy Drew-styled stories I carefully composed and wrote down on loose-leaf paper. With only a pen and paper, I could make people smile, laugh, and, occasionally, angry. Writing was life, and showing my friends how to write creatively while I played the teacher blended two great passions that I carried to fruition into adulthood.

Overview

In October 2013, I stood in the lighthouse at Fisterre, Spain, surrounded by the photographs of Nobel Prize winners who had made the trip to Cape Fisterre. This permanent exhibition called Un Mar de Xenios na Fin de Terra (A Sea of Genius at the

End of the Earth), served as a fit setting for the news that Alice Munro, a respected

Canadian author, had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

I am a writer. As a Canadian writer, I celebrated Munro’s stunning achievement. I am also a teacher. As a secondary school English teacher, I have taught, analysed, and critiqued Munro’s work in my English literature classroom. In response to Munro’s

Nobel Prize, my school’s English department would increase the Munro content in our courses of study, and students would be given more opportunities to write essays

examining Munro’s style, themes, voice, development, and canon of work as “uniquely”

Canadian.

I became suddenly agitated. I announced loudly in that quiet room, “When I return to the classroom, my students will study Munro’s work and write 2000-word essays on Munro’s work. But when will they be given an opportunity to write creatively like Alice Munro?”

My husband, a self-described non-writer, asked, “What makes you think your students want to be writers? Not everyone wants to write creatively. Unlike you, most people hate writing.”

And there it was. A “truth” I find both puzzling and alarming. Days earlier, somewhere along my 800-kilometre pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, I discussed writing and my passion for creative writing with many pilgrims, including a technical writer and his wife, a lawyer, both from Vancouver. They asked why I assumed people wanted to write if they didn’t need to. As far as they were concerned, writing was something you did because you had to. It was a work-related, or school-related activity.

In fact, they deemed the journaling I did during my pilgrimage as quaint and somewhat unnecessary. “Your smartphone camera will record your journey, complete with place names, dates, and times. I can’t believe you’re writing stuff down.”

During my 32-year teaching career teaching English in private schools, public schools, separate schools, and, most recently, a University of Toronto classroom, I have run up against mostly negative reactions to the act of writing. Secondary school students and highly educated adults dislike writing, are anxious about writing, and do not self- identify as creative writers. Most do not write for pleasure. Statistics from Ontario

(EQAO, 2014) and the UK (National Literacy Trust, 2009) support this observation. So how did we arrive at or create this culture of non-creative writers? Schools share much of the responsibility for the limited cultural view of writing as “functional and compulsory”

(Clark & Dugdale, 2009; Dugdale, 2009). As a career teacher, I have been guilty of promoting this outcomes-based attitude by advancing the essay’s uncontested supremacy as the writing genre of genres. The ability of Ontario’s students to write a well-organized, well-argued essay determines their placement in academic or applied English programs, which in turn influences their post-secondary university or college path. To be a “good” writer in high school is to be a good essay writer. Yet, many students, including those who excel at essay writing, hate to write, because they have wrestled with uninspired essay topics and essay writing throughout their intermediate and senior years. These students matured into the adults who “always wanted to write a book” but assumed they could not because they “didn’t know how to write creatively,” or they’d “always sucked at essays” or “never enjoyed writing essays despite writing good ones.” Long ago, the practice of writing in high schools became a disengaged, anxiety-ridden practice, produced for an audience of one, the teacher, often completed for a numerical grade. In an outcomes-based educational system, everything is viewed in terms of a product rather than a process.

Further contributing to the aura of writing as a workhorse activity is the stress on skill development. The general misconception about declining literacy rates amongst high school students, annually expressed as “kids can’t write these days,” resulted in standardized tests in Ontario (Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test) and skills- building models with a remedial writing focus. In preparation for the annual OSSLT, all

grades 9 and 10 students participate in skills preparation workshops. These test preparations and “mock test days” reinforce the idea that writing is the sum of its grammatical and organizational parts: sentences and paragraphs, thesis statements, topic sentences and body paragraphs, and point-proof-conclusion structures.

The stakes are high for grade 10 students, who must pass the test to graduate from grade 12 with an Ontario Secondary School Graduation Diploma. Fortunately, the statistics on literacy achievement in Ontario schools show that students are passing the

Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT) in steadily greater numbers and with higher scores. Yet, despite these improvements in literacy among Ontario students,

Ontario students are writing less frequently outside of the classroom. Contextual information reported by the Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) reveals declining numbers of students who write for purposes other than school-related tasks. Only 28% of females and 22% of males wrote “outside school for more than three hours a week” (EQAO, 2013). In 2009, the results were 33% of females and 29% of males reporting at least three hours of writing outside of school.

It appears the more writing savvy students become, the less they write.

Research Problem

Educators responding to a real or perceived need to improve literacy skills, and high school students who practise analytical writing using essay forms, promote a writing culture that treats the act of writing as a technical, joyless, uninspired, passionless chore.

The idea that writing is either a school- or work-based activity, a serviceable task, “in order to prep undergraduates to do term papers and essay exams for lit crit, econ, social relations or government” (Moffett, 1994, xi), is reinforced through essay drills, literacy

test preparation, and “writing for the workplace” courses. And, though we continue to give our students everything we assume they need to become critical thinkers and writers, we create anxiety and an attitude surrounding the writing act that often silences writers.

Research into writing composition and literacy is ongoing and extensive. The research includes: digital technologies and writing (Herrington & Moran, 2009; Peterson

& McClay, 2012; Schwartz, 2014; Warschauer, 2006, 2008, 2009), collaborative writing using digital technologies (Bledsoe, 2009; Zak, 2013), and literacy in second language instruction. The research continues to be fuelled by an interest in the technical processes writers use when writing, rather than process-oriented creative writing. The studies feed teachers’ manuals and remediation texts that concentrate on mechanics, including grammar, spelling, punctuation, and organization. The focus of composition studies has not been on other dimensions of the creative process that influence the writing experience, including: writers’ behaviours, rituals, tools, and environments. These variables, as they touch upon connections of the mind, body, and spirit of the writer, might be understood as holistic elements within the creative writing process. A consideration of the creative writing act across a mind-body-spirit dimension could provide additional ways of

“knowing” that students might require when beginning and sustaining creative writing, perhaps helping them become practicing creative writers, rather than literate non-writers.

Outside of the academy, numerous magazines and books authored by creative writers address subjects such as inspiration, writer’s block, and the creative source. The scholarly research investigating these subjects and their impact on writers’ engagement with the blank page is lacking. When acknowledged, as in an early Emig (1964) study of writing habits of professional writers and poets, they are later dismissed as “idiosyncratic,

at times puzzling, and often unreliable descriptions of creative processes” (as cited in Perl,

1994, p. 100).

Creative writing is a human activity. Our literature speaks to, reveals, and passes on the culture, the ideals, and the knowledge of humanity. The implications of a slow descent into a non-creative writing culture point to the slow extinguishing of humanity’s creative voice. The human being in the act of creative writing deserves to be seen and considered within scholarly research. I can accomplish this through research into the holistic elements of the creative writing act. By approaching the whole writer using a holistic orientation, it might be possible to gain insights into the creative writing process, and reshape the present culture of writing practice from one limited by its functional role into one that includes writing as an enjoyable, transformational creative process. This concern inspires and informs my research inquiry.

Chapter 2: Literature, Theory, and Research Questions

"This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another

until it’s done. It's that easy, and that hard." --Neil Gaiman

Chapter 2 reviews the literature on composition theories through a variety of paradigms. I include the work of writers and researchers who have examined the writing process from a holistic, spiritual, and non-cognitive stance. In this chapter, I present four research questions that inform this study, as well as my theoretical perspective. As there are no universally agreed upon definitions for the terms mind, body, and spirit, I define my use of these terms, and give the context for how each is considered throughout this research paper, as well as how mind, body, and spirit are integral to a holistic writing process.

Literature Review

Composition Theories

The timeline of composition theories moves through a number of paradigms: process and post-process theories, cognitive and expressivist process theories, feminist, post-structuralist, and social. Moving from a strict concentration on product to process,

Sondra Perl (1994) wrote: “Nineteen seventy-one marks the movement in the field of composition from an almost exclusive focus on written products to an examination of composing processes” with Janet Emig’s groundbreaking study The Composing

Processes of Twelfth Graders (p. xii). Expressivist process theorists, including W. E.

Coles (1967), Donald Murray (1985), and Peter Elbow (1973, 1981) argued that writing is a process of discovery, experimentation, and expression. In A Writer Teaches Writing,

Donald Murray (1985) expressed, “We do not know what we want to say before we say it; we write to know what we want to say” (p. 3). Writing as discovery is facilitated by

“freewriting,” described by Peter Elbow (1973) in Writing Without Teachers. W. E. Coles

(1967) designed written assignments for a student “to keep things open, to pursue an idea…to find himself in the act of expression, to become conscious of himself as becoming through the use of language or languages” (p.113). Gary A. Olson (1999) in

“Toward a Post-Process Composition: Abandoning the Rhetoric of Assertion” summarized key points of the process movement:

It emphasized that writing is an “activity,”…composed of a variety of activities;

that the activities involved in the act of writing are typically recursive rather than

linear; that writing is first and foremost a social activity; that the act of writing

can be a means of learning and discovery; that experienced writers are often

intensely aware of audience, purpose, and context; that experienced writers invest

considerable amounts of time in invention and revision activities. (p. 7)

Post-process theorists criticized the tenets of process theory on numerous grounds.

Lee-Ann M. Kastman Breuch (2002) expressed a post-process objection to “writing being characterized as a thing, whether that thing is process, grammatical systems, discourse conventions” (p. 130), as well as reducing the act of writing to a theory of mastery.

Kastman (2002) observed, “the value in post-process scholarship appears not to be the rejection of process, but the rejection of mastery” (p. 130).

Similarly, Thomas Kent (1999) explained, “post-process theory…endorses the fundamental idea that no codifiable or generalizable writing process exists or could exist...that writing is a practice that cannot be captured by a generalized process” (p. 1).

He suggested that post-process theorists “hold three assumptions about the act of writing:

(1) writing is public; (2) writing is interpretive; and (3) writing is situated” (Kent, 1999,

p.1). In other words, writing necessarily involves an exchange with others, is open to interpretation (and misunderstanding), and comes from “some position or some place.

Writers are never nowhere; they are ‘situated’” (Kent, 1999, p. 3).

The writing process is further divided along the lines of expressivism (Elbow,

1973, 1981; Hairston, 1982; Murray, 1985, 2009), cognitivism (Flower & Hayes, 1981) and social constructionism (Bizzell, 1982, 1997). Post-process scholars considered the five stages of writing described by process theorists, including pre-writing, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing (Emig, 1971; Flower & Hayes, 1981), and the three stages of pre-writing, writing, and rewriting (Murray, 1972) as recursive and overlapping.

All these approaches to composition theory treat writing as a discrete set of skills. There is little reference to the person, the human being at work amidst seas of distraction, worries, deadlines, and life.

The scholarly literature on writing serves many purposes and interests, and is driven by a desire to discover the intellectual process behind a writer composing text.

Process research fuels literacy theories and composition pedagogies that, in turn, inform curriculum design. Writing has become an outcomes-based activity, as educators plunge into the writing process waters intending to improve writing, raise literacy scores, and demonstrate accountability as writing teachers. Yet nowhere in the scholarly literature on composition do I locate the holistic inner and outer human experience of the creative writing process. I do not see the artist at work. Scholarly approaches to writing composition frequently remove writers from their world, habits, and habitats, and subtract the idiosyncrasies, eccentricities, and passions that influence the creative process. Writing

“so isolated and so specialized loses its grounding in emotions and the senses, in private

and social experience, in the body and the unconscious, in silence and intuition” (Moffett,

1994, xi). Composition theorists attempt to unlock the mystery of writing by demystifying the process. Could embracing those mysteries broaden our understanding of how writing happens, and make it a more enjoyable, less intimidating experience? Susan

Schiller (1997) wrote, “Composition isn’t taught this way very often. But when it is, people soon understand the joys and rewards of listening to intuition” (p. 40).

A Broader Approach to Composition Studies

With the exceptions of “freewriting” (Cameron, 2002; Elbow, 1973, 1981;

Goldberg, 1986; Schiller, 1997) and “flow” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Perry, 1999;

Schneider, 2013), phenomena that composition theorists and writers discuss comfortably, writing researchers focus on the stricter mechanics of writing. A satisfactory answer to

“What do writers do when they write creatively?” that encompasses the whole person is not often found within the science of composition theory. Fiorenza (2009) studied writing as a lived experience through author Brenda Ueland’s life and writing. Fiorenza found,

“Generally accepted models of writing and writing lives have tended to ignore or downplay the physical dimensions of writing acts as well as the relational ones” (p. 224).

These physical, relational, mental, and spiritual, criteria embrace preference, feelings, and intuition. And though formal composition theorists, beginning with Janet Emig (1964) and later Donald Murray (1984), do acknowledge the more holistic, unconscious, and relational elements in the creative writing process, their discussions of these elements appear outside their formal research.

Some researchers argue for the acceptance of less material ways of knowing when approaching the writer in the act of writing. In The Way of Story: The Craft and Soul of

Writing, Catherine Ann Jones (2007) addressed the division between matter and the spirit worlds, the knowable and unknowable. A broader understanding of what writers do when they compose must acknowledge the “unknowable.” Brand and Graves (1994) stated:

The greatest need for growth in composition studies lies now in the ways we

create meaning beyond what is currently considered acceptable knowledge. A

comprehensive view of composing conceptually and practically must include

these other ways of knowing—call them unconscious, automatic, ineffable,

inexplicable. (p. 5)

Schiller (1997) believed that listening to one’s intuition could be part of the composition classroom, resulting in a more enjoyable and insightful process for writers.

It is worth noting Janet Emig’s (1964) encounters with the unconscious at work amongst writing professionals. In Emig’s “The Uses of the Unconscious in Composing,” predating her famous case study of twelfth graders by nearly seven years, Emig wrote,

“All other writers of whom I know convey implicitly or explicitly not only awareness that there is an unconscious actively performing in all their writing, but a belief—more, awe—in its importance, efficacy, and power” (p. 8). In her very early work, Emig (1964) considered the roles of habit and ritual when summoning the “daemon” (p. 9). Moreover, she bemoaned the descriptions of the writing process in high school English texts on composition, stating that “these texts do not promise more than mere competency of product…no wisp or scent anywhere that composing is anything but a conscious and antiseptically efficient act. Nowhere…is there acknowledgment that writing involves commerce with the unconscious self” (Emig, 1964, p. 7). However, Emig (1971) later substituted her findings on the role of the unconscious, habits, rituals, and the daemon in

the writing process with more “credible” data collected using empirical methods for her dissertation and subsequent scholarly works. To satisfy the needs of the academy, Emig produced measurable outcomes from her research. Understanding the writing process became limited to what was measurable and codifiable.

Donald Murray, another composition theorist, was influenced by the unconscious in the writing process. In The Essential Don Murray: Lessons from America’s Greatest

Writing Teacher, editor Thomas Newkirk (2009) stated:

Murray was…obsessed with the knowable and the unknowable aspects of the

composing process…he collected the testimonies of writers...was fascinated with

the tools writers used—the right pen, the right-size notebook, and later, the right

word-processing program. (p. xi)

Similarly, I enjoy an unusual preference for handwritten manuscripts. As I write the pages of this inquiry on a canary yellow writing tablet using a blue Waterman ballpoint pen, I experience creation as my hand moves across the paper, forming each letter, shaping words. Is this how an artist feels when brushing the canvas with paint? Some describe my preference for handwritten first drafts as an eccentricity. Does this quirk (or behaviour or ritual) help me bring forth words on the page? Natalie Goldberg (2013), a

Buddhist author and teacher, insists upon handwritten drafts in her writing classroom, as

“(h)andwriting is the first physical way we learned to write. Hand connected to arm, to shoulder, to heart” (p. xi).

Close friends of Donald Murray described Murray’s near meditative and mystic approach to finding his material. Editors Newkirk and Miller (2009) of The Essential Don

Murray wrote:

Murray’s own process…allowed him to enter a state where he could be

responsive to the suggestions of writing itself...it was the mystery of composing

that ultimately attracted him….He would speak of “listening to the text,” or “the

informing line”….“Be patient, listen quietly, the writing will come. The voice of

the writing will tell you what to do.” (p. xii)

Yet, as much as Murray was attracted to the mysteries of composition, Murray went on, instead, to codify and publish what was “knowable” about writing. He is celebrated for his expression of a three-stage model of writing composition. Murray (1985) described how the process model was “helpful, for it gives teacher and student a common way of looking at writing” (p.10). Resorting to knowable, codifiable, and reliable data to facilitate a common approach to writing using a familiar scholarly vocabulary may be

“easier,” but it does not adequately address the creative act of writing or reveal the humanity of the writer in the act of creation. As such, a linear approach to writing does a disservice to both the writer and writing.

With the informal evidence collected from composition theorists recognizing the nuances of the unconscious and the mysterious at work in the act of writing, should formal composition studies begin to acknowledge and include these alternate focuses, using vocabularies and language capable of expressing the “unknowable” in creative writing practice? Writers, researchers, and educators within the field of holistic education are comfortable with the language and terms of mind-body-spirit research and practice. In

“Minding the Soul in Education: Conceptualizing and Teaching the Whole Person,”

Deborah Orr (2005) stated that, in holistic education, “we strive to teach the whole person as a human soul which includes mind, body, emotions, and spirit” (p. 87). Holistic

educators “believe that we must see the student as a complete human being which includes a mysterious, timeless quality (e.g., the soul)” (Miller, 2006, p. 101). Further, holistic educators use the vocabulary of intuition, creativity, mystery, as well as soul. In

Educating for Wisdom and Compassion, Miller (2006) addressed the relationship of timeless learning with the flow experience and mystery: “Timeless learning is…characterized by what Csikszentmihalyi has called the flow experience. Flow occurs when a person becomes fully immersed in an experience” (p. 9), and frequently these experiences are creative ones.

Frank Gruba-McCallister (2002) discussed “two ways of knowing and associated ways of being” (p. 78) in “Education Through Compassion: Cultivating our Mystical

Vocation.” He described education as one-sided, favouring discursive thought over direct knowledge “due to the predominance of the materialistic, positivistic, objective,

Newtonian paradigm in modern thought” (Capra, 1982, cited in Gruba-McCallister, 2002, p.78). He maintained that discursive thought “is based upon abstraction with an emphasis on language and concepts as surrogates for some dimension of experience. The emphasis…is on reason, linearity, and analysis…to manipulate or achieve control of the object of our knowledge” (Gruba-McCallister, 2002, p. 78). Gruba-McCallister did not underestimate the functions of discursive thought, but presented “direct knowledge” as another “mode of knowing” that recognized “a certain dimension of reality is ineffable or beyond words [and] is basic to direct knowledge” (p. 78). Thomas Moore (2005), a former monk, Jungian psychotherapist, and author of “Educating for the Soul” suggested that living in a “literal-minded, fact-loving society” made it difficult for us to appreciate

the language of the soul that resides in “poetic imagery and language” and tends “toward mystery and multiple levels of meaning” (p. 10).

Holistic educators and researchers write knowledgably, comfortably, and confidently about intuition, felt sense, embodied knowledge, metaphor, and creativity.

Could composition studies considered within a holistic framework advance investigation into the mind-body-spirit facets of this most human and creative act? Could this shift in perspective toward the mysterious and the difficult-to-explain help us to comprehend, describe, and appreciate the creative writing experience? Within the puzzling descriptions of individual acts of creation, can writers find soulful answers to their questions about composing? Graeme Harper (2013) wrote, “Creative writing is such an eclectic activity, drawing on more than word use and compositional practices…emphasizing the emotional and dispositional context of an undertaking” (p. 60). Decades of research devoted to and limited by writing paradigms, strategies, and sequences meant to unlock the mystery of creative writing without directly acknowledging or moving within the mystery have missed the mark.

Research Beyond the Intellectual Domain: The Creative Writing Experience

Books authored by successful writers on creative writing line bookstore and library shelves. Writers mine these works by famous writers for inspiration and ideas, techniques and advice. Graeme Harper (2010), an author who researches creative writing and writers, warned about the limitations of these author-on-writing pieces, as well as the perils of ignoring them. In On Creative Writing he stated that “human activity almost never can be reduced to a single plain of understanding…we cannot simply go through the pronouncements of creative writers and reconstruct the nature of Creative

Writing…yet, we cannot do without these either” (Harper, 2010, p. xiv). Within writing circles, authors speak of behaviours, rituals and inner sources of inspiration without any need for explanation or qualification of these abstractions. Writing audiences instinctively know. The intuitive nature of human beings responds knowingly to the unknown.

I do not reject existing scholarly research on writing. I object to what Moore described to Regina Paxton Foehr as the “overestimation of these quantifying, reductive, experimental approaches to human experience” (Foehr, 1997, p. 57), as these approaches often do not include experiences with intuition, archetypes, superstition, and the unconscious. Emig (1971), a respected pioneer of process theory, who did herself encounter the ineffable at work in her own writing experience, as well as in the writing experiences of published authors, felt compelled to exclude these findings in her dissertation as unreliable. Her commitment to scientific methods demanded she dismiss those experiences belonging to “the unknown.” This is a problem Thomas Moore addressed about the scientific method. During an interview with Regina Paxton Foehr on the subjects of spiritual empowerment and the writing process, Moore suggested,

“[Academicians believe they must] give you all these numbers and do tests and count heads and prove that what they are saying is right. But what poets can prove that what they’ve just said is right?” (Foehr, 1997, p. 57) Moore’s words allude to the multiple challenges facing a researcher investigating subjects outside of “acceptable knowledge” and employing non-scientific methods. When undertaking a study of the processes of writing creatively, the researcher is challenged by what constitutes “proof” within a creative context. Further, the language must somehow reflect those creative experiences

that touch upon the elements of mind, body, and spirit, including what is intuited. When the scientific method can be put aside, and a more holistic approach employed that harmonizes form and content, then perhaps, the poets can prove that what they say is right. This also justifies the collection of less measurable, less “credible” data that characterizes research into non-cognitive elements of the composing processes of creative writers.

Scholars have cloaked creative experiences, such as the flow experience, in the language of psychology that legitimizes them. But science struggles to advance an understanding of the myriad elements that creative writers consider important to their process. As a published writer and creative writing teacher, I value these contributions that poets and authors have made to creative writing research through their personal accounts of the creative writing process. Their experiences and explication of process serve as a complement to and broadening of existing composition research. Can new approaches to the creative writing act that consider phenomena beyond the strictly intellectual and linear processes of writing be a response to the growing number of blocked and uninspired writers in our school? What are some of these elements that fall outside of traditional cognitive studies of the composition process?

Contributors to Presence of Mind: Writing and the Domain Beyond the Cognitive write about silence as a way of knowing, learning, teaching, and being (Elbow, 1994;

Gallehr, 1994). Elbow discusses analogies between silence and freewriting. Both allow the writer to “clear a space for…voice…language and thinking that are grounded in actual experience rather than in convention or external authority” (Elbow, 1994, p. 15).

Gallehr examines the “complementary nature of writing and meditation” (Gallehr, 1994,

p. 22). He discusses the importance of concentration, detachment, and balance to both writing and meditation. Suhor (1994) also looks at silence in the pursuit of insights. (p.

33). As stated earlier, Donald Murray advocated for quietly listening to the text to allow the writing to come to the writer. “Be patient, listen quietly, the writing will come. The voice of the writing will tell you what to do” (Murray, Newkirk, & Miller, 2009, p. xii).

And Moore identified his writing needs for reflection and quiet in order to “think…and to let things happen and to arrive at a place where I’m receptive to ideas and words” (Foehr,

1997, p. 63). In a section of Presence of Mind: Writing and the Domain Beyond the

Cognitive titled “Wisdom of the Unconscious” researchers Graves and Becker (1994) explore the use of archetypes in the creative writing process, and Holman (1994) examines what roles intuition, insight, and inspiration play in the writing process. A third section, “Wisdom of the Body,” includes essays discussing kinesthetic and spatial intelligences in the act of writing (Klein & Hecker, 1994). Other chapters look closely at the roles of emotions and imagery in the writing act.

Julia E. Colyar (2013), an autoethnographer and writer, began “Reflections on

Writing and Autoethnography” with an episode of writing that resonates with me.

This is how I write: I am up early with a cup of coffee. The house is quiet

as I lace up my running shoes. I leave a note on the kitchen counter—“out

for a run, usual loop”—step outside, and pull my toque down over my

ears…. I set off along Islington with a recent This American Life playing on my

iPod…. I am not listening; I am writing. A right turn onto Royal York, south

toward the lake. I keep puzzling over this chapter. (p. 363)

When I discuss the complexity of creative writing with students, I do not limit myself to the technical, objective, academic language and findings of the researcher studying literacy, or EQAO (Education Quality and Accountability Office) skills testing, or paragraph writing. Like Colyar (2013), I use stories to reveal my personal, relational, and holistic experience of writing creatively. My hope is that this research, using a mind- body-spirit orientation, and an intense focus on the writing narratives of three Canadian writers, will plumb the depths of the creative writing experience and discover ways of writing that fall outside of the cognitive domain, which could possibly open new avenues to student writers for exploration of their creativity and voices.

Research Questions

As a published writer, researcher, and teacher of creative writing, I am curious about the complexities of the creative writing process. I hope to discover if there are elements of the inner and outer writing experience that can be shared, so as to transform the writing experience into an enjoyable and regular practice for students. My research questions grew out of these interests and concerns. Further to this, by reflecting on the creative writing behaviours and rituals with a mind-body-spirit orientation, I hope to understand how these behaviours may influence or give power to the creative writing act.

1. What do accomplished writers “need” in order to write creatively?

2. What roles do the mind, body, and spirit play in the creative writing process?

3. How are these mind-body-spirit roles the same or different across accomplished

writers?

4. In what ways might these findings be helpful to teachers of creative writing?

Theoretical Perspective

My qualitative study seeks to investigate the creative writing process within a holistic context. This inquiry balances composition studies that investigate the “non- cognitive” (Brand & Graves, 1994; Foehr & Schiller, 1997; Schiller, 2007) underpinnings of writing acts, with a holistic understanding of physical, emotional, intuitive, creative, and spiritual ways of knowing. The research literature in holistic learning and education comfortably navigates areas of intuition, creativity, mystery, mind-body connections, and spirit. Holism provides a vocabulary and language for the expression of these ideas as they may appear in my experience and research. For these many reasons, including a respect for the trinity of mind, body, and spirit within holistic research, as well as a freedom of language and expression of ideas within this trinity, I position the study of creative writing processes, including behaviours, needs, and rituals, within this framework of a holistic trinity.

Through a focus on the creative writing experiences of Margaret Atwood,

Lawrence Hill, and Alice Munro, using a holistic orientation, I hope to determine what roles the mind, body, and spirit play in the act of creative writing. This in-depth examination can be accomplished using a scholarly personal narrative approach (SPN).

Scholarly Personal Narrative (Nash, 2004) gives me licence to investigate and reflect on a lifetime of writing practice, during which I completed or continue to work on a number of writing projects including poetry, short stories, and this PhD dissertation. SPN also allows me to position the writing narratives of Margaret Atwood, Lawrence Hill, and

Alice Munro alongside my writing narrative. Do these three award-winning, mature, accomplished Canadian writers address what roles, if any, mind-body-spirit elements play in their writing experience? What do their (auto)biographies, memoirs, and writing

narratives tell us about the writing process? Do their writing processes and experiences of writing contradict or support the others’ experiences, including my own? By distilling the writing narratives of Atwood, Hill, and Munro with my own writing narrative, and emergent research in holistic and non-cognitive writing processes, can I discover new themes and patterns in the writing process?

Definition of Terms and Context

Mind-body-spirit balance

John P. Miller (2005) stated: “To link body, mind, and spirit is to seek the wholeness that is at the heart of holistic learning” (p. 235). Similarly, Ron Miller (1993) described four characteristics of holistic education. In the first of four characteristics, he addressed the mind, body, soul connection: “Holistic education nurtures the development of the whole person; it is concerned with intellectual as well as emotional, social, physical, creative/intuitive, aesthetic, and spiritual potentials” (p. 79). This mind-body- spirit balance is central to a holistic vision of education and the student as learner. As each element affects the other two, it is unadvised to consider an element in isolation. Yet, often as learners, teachers, and researchers, we attempt to partition the elements, then value one above the others depending on our field of study or orientation.

Although our increasingly industrialized and wired-up world continues to value and stress the intellect, challenges to the supremacy of the logical/rational/intellectual domain are in evidence. During the past twenty-five years, the spheres of medicine, business, education, pharmacy, and law have awakened somewhat to the holistic needs of the individual and the institution. This more balanced holistic approach is reflected in collective agreements that include: chiropractic and massage benefits, naturopathic care,

compassionate and parental leaves, and employee assistance programs for mental health counseling. Several institutions subsidize workshops through community colleges and universities for their employees to pursue interests related to their development as whole individuals. Many offer time for yoga practice and labyrinth walks. Flexible workweeks are more common. Students in elementary, secondary, and post-secondary schools may have greater access to counseling, chaplaincy, intramural and extra-curricular activities in an attempt to acknowledge their wholeness. Within medicine and pharmacy schools, students may be offered more opportunities during their formal studies to learn about humanity through philosophy, literature, art, dance, and fitness courses.

The past two decades have witnessed many changes embracing the individual as more than a functioning intellect divorced from the body and soul. And though these changes pay more than lip service to the mind-body-spirit balance, an imbalance remains.

This imbalance is most notable in schools. In education, the intellect dominates.

Intellectual currency determines grades, school placements, university and college acceptances, pay grades, IQ ratings, scholarships and awards. Tests of the intellect are measurable; the products are gradable; and statistics show accountability. In English and language arts classrooms, including the ESL classroom, outcomes-based skills are highly valued and heavily weighted in the curricula. Students in the third grade through twelfth grade are taught specific literacy skills and essay writing skills that satisfy (in Ontario) the provincial literacy requirements, the requirements of post-secondary education, and the general writing requirements of the workplace.

Boards of education cut arts credit programs more deeply because they are viewed as nonessential, optional, frills. The arts are viewed as comparatively un-academic, soft,

and un-scholarly. No mandatory arts credit is required among the top six courses required by universities and colleges for admission, unless the student applies to a post-secondary arts program. And while admission to a university or college requires a senior English literature course, its value is not in the aesthetic lessons provided by the literature. The

English course provides the training in academic writing skills students will use in post- secondary studies.

Achieving a mind-body-spirit balance is difficult in a scientifically-biased world.

In fact, worshipping the scientific intellect without moral, spiritual, and philosophical considerations has resulted in frightening developments in artificial intelligence. At a

Zeitgeist 2015 conference (Walker, May 14, 2015), Stephen Hawking said, “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” The mind-body-spirit balance celebrated in the philosophy of holism has never been more important to humanity. It is an integral element of my inquiry into the writing experience.

Mind

Defining the mind’s function separate from the mind-body-spirit trinity is challenging. Philosophers including Plato, Réne Descartes, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich

Hegel, and John Searle studied the nature of the mind; psychologists have debated the mind’s properties, functions, and relationship to the body (referred to as the mind-body problem). Canadian neurosurgeon and brain researcher, Wilder Penfield found “that our awareness (the mind) is not located in any particular part of the brain but, in fact, directs the brain” (as cited in Miller, 2007, p. 112). According to Penfield, the mind

“understands…acts as though endowed with an energy of its own” (as cited in Miller,

2007, p. 112).

It is not my purpose to enter the philosophical, psychological, or medical debates on the mind. First, I am not qualified in either medicine or psychology. My education in philosophy is not centered on the mind. However, as I do need a working understanding for this inquiry, I believe the mind functions in relation to both the body and the spirit.

Yoga practitioners, athletes, actors, and intellectuals frequently address the mind-body connection, and the importance of maintaining mind-body health and balance. I believe the mind is responsible for intellectual and intuitive thinking, although I will argue that spirit plays a part in intuition. Douglas Sloan sees thinking as part of a soul/spirit relationship that provides a “major avenue to spirit” (Sloan, 2005, p. 28). Imagination and imaginative energy may spark in the mind, but are nourished by spirit.

I cannot think of a time when body and spirit were not involved (together or separately) in critical thinking or imaginative thought.

Mind is integral to attention. In Maxine Greene’s many essays on aesthetic education, Greene discusses “attention” and the role it plays in producing and engaging with art. She stated, “no one can have an art experience without freely choosing to weave a circle of attentiveness around one’s self to pause, to be there in person before the painting, the dance, the performance, the concert, the play, the text (Greene, 2001, p. 137).

The mind is active in aesthetic and kinesthetic experiences and, as such, I will need to address the mind’s role as it works in tandem with the body and/or spirit in the creative writing process.

Body

“The body is very literal. It will show you as graphically as it can what you need to be aware of, which always has to do with taking better care of yourself and loving

yourself more” (Gawain, 2006, M21). The body knows what the body needs. To attend to the body, the usual needs come to mind: exercise, nutrition, hygiene, dental health, eye care, etc. But, as Gawain stated, we need to be aware of loving ourselves as we care for our bodies. What does that involve? If I feast on junk food because I am hungry, my body is fed. I am satisfied. But when I do not feed myself nourishing food, I do not love my body or myself.

What more does the body need in order to write creatively? What are the

“creature comforts” that the body craves in order be creative, productive, and peaceful?

Environment and personal space come to mind. When a writer can only compose in the silence of his empty room, while another craves the bustle of a coffee shop, we notice how habitat and environment become part of the body’s demands for comfort (Sullivan &

Harper, 2009). Of course, in addition to the body’s need for comfort, these examples also involve the mind and spirit at play. “Researchers theorize that body and mind constantly chatter back and forth biochemically” (Holman, 1994, p. 70). Again, I find it impossible to discuss one element of the mind-body-spirit trinity independent of the others.

Physical activities such as walking and yoga offer health benefits to the body as well as the mind. William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, Thomas Merton, and

Thich Nhat Hanh are writers representing creative thinking and production from the worlds of art, philosophy, and religion. As their lives and art demonstrate, walking is central to creativity and some forms of meditation. The link between creative activity and moments of flow are discussed in psychology, medicine, holism, and religious literature.

“Intuition, inspiration, and insight are not only accompanied by physical reactions, they are often stimulated by physical activity” (Holman, 1994, p. 71).

In my investigation of how we might acknowledge the body’s needs as they relate to the creative writing process, I will treat the needs of the body broadly. In addition to physical activity, I will consider the physical necessities of comfort within one’s habitat, environment, and surroundings.

Spirit

Spirit, from the Latin word spiritus meaning breath, is part of the mind-body- spirit trinity. As the terms soul and spirit raise red flags amongst those who fear religious crusades and evangelization, I present my understanding of spirit/soul within a holistic, non-religious context. The breadth of meaning behind the words “spirit” and “soul” defies simplistic definitions and descriptions. Ron Miller (1992) wrote, “No single tradition or terminology is capable of encompassing the myriad possibilities of this creative force” (p. 58). While there is no static definition of spirit, it has been variously described as “imagination, inspiration, intuition, kinesthetic knowledge, felt sense, passion for knowing, aha experience, archetypal energy, the collective unconscious

[emphasis in original]” (Foehr & Schiller, 1997, p. ix). It is “noncognitive but deeply known, inexplicable yet deeply felt…transforms us” (Foehr & Schiller, 1997, p. ix).

Using the term soul for spirit, Thomas Moore (2005) wrote, “soul is eternal, unique, contemplative, poetic, erotic, aesthetic, and transcendent” (p. 10). J. Miller (2000) stated,

“Spirit is the divine essence within…beyond time and space” (p.24). Writers such as

Isabella Colalillo Kates examined creativity as soul work, and Susan Schiller (1997, 2005,

2007) discussed spirituality as part of a holistic writing program.

What these descriptions share is a respect for the creative energy of spirit. As Ron

Miller (1992) summarized, “The essence of spirituality is a sense of reverence for the

mysterious, spontaneous, creative unfolding of life in nature and within ourselves” (p. 58).

Spirit is uniquely experienced and expressed by individuals. It is intimately connected to the body and mind, and can be known through meditation and yoga practices, which involve both the body and mind.

Holistic Creative Writing Process

Composition theories are frequently described according to movements and approaches within movements. These theories often overlap, and it is difficult to know when process theory began and when it ended before the post-process approach began.

Various incarnations of post-process theories including expressivist, cognitivist, post- structuralist, and feminist theories abound.

My research is concerned with an area of composition theory sometimes referenced as non-cognitive or beyond the intellectual or cognitive domain (Brand &

Graves, 1994; Foehr & Schiller, 1997). My literature review provides greater depth for an understanding of this approach to composition. For the purposes of a working definition,

I defer to the editors of Presence of Mind: Writing and the Domain Beyond the Cognitive and their lengthy inventory of terms comprising a non-cognitive approach:

affect, affect motivators, apprehension, attitudes, ideational fluency, emotion,

emotional intelligence, empathy, feeling, felt sense, healing and writing,

humanistic values, imagery, imagination, imagistics, insight inspiration,

intuition, kinesthetic knowledge, meaning beyond language, meditation,

memory, motivation, mystical experience, self, subjectivity, writing as therapy,

unconsciousness, values and their systems, and visualization. (p. 1)

The authors present the items on this list as other “ways of knowing that we experience and that influence written language but have yet to be legitimated in composition studies”

(p. 5). These terms belong to the holistic trinity of mind-body-spirit and, therefore, the holistic realm. These ways of knowing that are spiritual, “unconscious, automatic, ineffable, inexplicable” (p. 2) fit comfortably within a holistic perspective. Jack P. Miller quotes Dr. Susan A. Schiller in Creating the Joyful Writer: Introducing the Holistic

Approach in the Classroom, who uses a holistic approach to writing so “that students

‘should have the opportunity to use their intellect, their emotion, their spiritual side, their social abilities, and their physical skills; and they should have the opportunity to stretch their awareness of self, of community, and of the world’” (p. vii).

Chapter 3: A Methodology that Matters

Experience is, therefore, the starting point and key term of all social science inquiry.

(Connelly & Clandinin, 1994, p. 414)

In Chapter 3, I present my methodology and methods, as well as explain how they are appropriate to my inquiry. I address concerns about data collection. As the terms community and culture can be understood metaphorically, I expand upon the traditional definitions to include communities and cultures of writers and writing. I account for my data sources, and explain why the writers Margret Atwood, Lawrence Hill, and Alice

Munro were my choices for this study of the creative writing process. In the closing paragraphs, I account for the use of other writers’ voices of experience and creativity throughout my research paper.

Research Methodology and Methods

I used narrative research as my methodology (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Cole

& Knowles, 2001, Polkinhorne, 1988), within a qualitative paradigm, to address the research questions of this inquiry. My inquiry closely examines the writing behaviours of a small sample of accomplished Canadian writers, and narrative is “best for capturing the detailed stories or life experiences of a single life or the lives of a small number of individuals” (Creswell, 2007, p. 55). I discovered my research topic by journaling the writing experiences of my childhood to present day (reflexive and autobiographical); I examine those experiences, and investigate the writing experiences of three well-known writers who “either corroborated or refuted some of my own ideas about the act of writing” (Robinson, 2007, p. 88). I present my research findings through a broad writing narrative that weaves my process story throughout the writing process narratives of

Margaret Atwood, Lawrence Hill, and Alice Munro. Narrative methodology is appropriate for this inquiry as it allows me to begin with my “self” and my own narrative.

It also provides me the freedom to work with the narratives of a small sample of writers.

Narrative methodology also affords flexibility when irregularities in data are present (Galman, 2009). As I reviewed my documented writing experiences, I realized how aging, marriage, mothering, divorce, and illness affected my writing life. Of course, no writer is immune to the waves and undertows of living, and I anticipated that the writers of my inquiry had adapted their writing needs to the unique changing circumstances of their lives. Further, I anticipated there might be few consistencies in the routine of one writer to another. Therefore, I required a methodology for my inquiry that offered flexibility when encountering and understanding the irregularities of data.

Because humans are “patterned but not fully predictable beings” (Peters, as cited in

Holman Jones, Adams, & Ellis, 2013, p. 27), qualitative study expects that researchers will “embrace the contingencies of knowledge and the unique experiences of individuals—contingencies and experiences often disregarded in large-scale social scientific research projects” (Holman Jones, Adams, & Ellis, 2013, p. 27). For this reason, narrative qualitative study suited my inquiry.

I then had to consider a specific narrative approach for my investigation. Was I writing an autobiography, given my inquiry starts with my journal and recollection of writing experiences? Not strictly. Although my journal is the starting point for my broader investigation of published authors’ writings on their creative writing process, the focus of this inquiry is not exclusively my “self” and my epiphanies. Ellis, Adams, and

Bochner (2010) stated,

autobiographers write about "epiphanies"—remembered moments perceived to

have significantly impacted the trajectory of a person's life (Bochner & Ellis,

1992; Couser, 1997; Denzin, 1989), times of existential crises that forced a

person to attend to and analyze lived experience (Zaner, 2004), and events after

which life does not seem quite the same. (Ellis et al., 2010)

Additionally, some researchers continue to view autobiography as unscholarly, navel- gazing, inferior to the research of autoethnographers, who “demonstrate knowledge of past research on a topic and seek to contribute to this research. This characteristic…marks autoethnography as scholarship in contrast with writing that does not work to contribute to a scholarly conversation” (Holman Jones, Adams, & Ellis, 2013, p. 23). I feared that an autobiographical approach would not meet the scholarly demands of this dissertation, and I rejected a strictly autobiographical approach.

Autoethnography was another of the many narrative options available to me.

Initially, autoethnography seemed an appropriate methodology because the researcher’s self is included. Holman Jones et al. (2013) stated what “binds all autoethnographies is the use of personal experience to examine and/or critique cultural experience” (p. 22).

Ellis et al. (2010) accounted for different forms of authoethnography by considering

“how much emphasis is placed on the study of others, the researcher's self and interaction with others, traditional analysis, and the interview context, as well as on power relationships (Ellis et al., 2010, para.15).

My journals describe my “lived experiences” of creative writing, and I draw upon them to understand my act of writing creatively in relation to a culture of writing that spans hundreds of years. My research fits neatly within the definition of autoethnography

as a research approach “in which we as an author draw upon our own lived experiences, specifically in relation to the culture (and subcultures) of which we are a member (Allen-

Collinson, 2013, p. 283). However, the community of which I claim membership is not a literal one. I believed this more abstract and metaphorical view of “community” as in a

“community of writers” would push the boundaries of autoethnography. Therefore, I looked closely at other forms of narrative available for my inquiry.

My research focus is creative writing phenomena, so I considered a new direction in autoethnography called autophenomenography. Allen-Collinson (2013) stated that the focus of autophenomenography “is upon the researcher’s lived experience of a phenomenon or phenomena rather than upon her or his cultural or subcultural location within a socio-cultural context (more usually the locus of attention in autoethnography)”

(p. 293). Although I leaned toward this research approach, I found limited descriptive or explanatory literature. According to Allen-Collinson (2013), autophenomenography was first used as a term by Maree Gruppetta in 2004 to describe the autoethnographic researcher’s analysis of personal phenomenon rather “than of a cultural place” (p. 293).

And though Allen-Collinson (2013) suggested that, within this genre, “there is scope for a wide spectrum of representational styles, including evocative forms such as poetic representations and performative, audience-interactive presentations” (p. 294), autophenomenography is, as yet, more undefined than defined. Although the “insider” perspective on phenomena harmonizes with my interest in writers’ experiences of writing,

I struggled to understand my research within these shifting methodologies.

Scholarly Personal Narrative (SPN)

Scholarly personal narrative (SPN) is a recent form of doctoral dissertation and scholarly writing pioneered by Robert Nash in 2004 (Brookfield, 2013), and it is the methodology I am most drawn to. More so than either autobiography or autoethnography,

SPN allows me to conduct an inquiry and present my research in a manner that serves me as a storyteller, literature major, and writing teacher. Using story forms to present research has gained acceptance and a growing respect over the past twenty years. The phenomenologist Max van Manen stated, “the story form has become a popular method for presenting aspects of qualitative or human science research (van Manen, 1990, p. 115), and narrative inquiry “has shown the power of story to shape personal and collective history” (van Manen, 1990, p. xii). Narrative research effects change upon personal and collective histories, hence its importance and relevance as an approach to inquiry.

The power to effect change within personal and collective history is the result of the inward to outward movement of narrative inquiry. And while SPN enjoys a strong autobiographical element, SPN differs from autobiography in the outward movement the

SPN takes. Frequently, autobiographies are written for personal, private reasons, and are cathartic for the writer in the same way a journal or diary can be cathartic. Their subjects are epiphanies; the movement is linear and chronological. Cole and Knowles (2001) explain the epiphanies of autobiography as

events that turn lives around or…mark the passage of the years and tone,

tenor, and influence of a life. These are the events and circumstances to

which we return when reconstructing the past and making sense of our

lives. These are epiphanies. (p. 120)

But the scholarship is missing if the author’s inward gaze remains inward. The stretching outwards from the researcher to the community beyond lends scholarship to the study.

Therefore, as a narrative approach to life history, autobiography in its strictest sense is unsuited to the challenge of my inquiry.

SPN and authoethnography share many similarities in their approach to and presentation of research. Autoethnographic methods, according to Heewon Chang (cited in Nash & Bradley, 2011, p. 16) “bring cultural interpretation to the autobiographical data of researchers with the intent of understanding self and its connection to others.”

However, Nash and Bradley point out that the ethnographer is really an anthropologist first, “who must hew to a strict social science methodology in doing any type of self- writing” (p. 16). And, while SPN and autoethnography demand that the “self” play a role in the research as interviewer, investigator, interpreter and generalizer (Nash, 2004, 2011), the autoethnographer dodges foregrounding the “self” through “an ethnographic, interview-type, cultural methodology to the study of the self” (p. 16). The SPN writer puts the self of the scholar front and center. An SPN inquiry asserts, “the best analysis and prescription come out of the scholar’s efforts to make narrative sense of personal experience” (Nash, 2004, p. 18). In an interesting nod to SPN methods, Chang stated that

SPN writing was “one legitimate form that autoethnography might take” (Nash &

Bradley, 2011, p. 16).

The “self,” my “self,” is the starting point of this SPN inquiry. Following an examination of my creative writing process, I move outwards into an investigation of the writing experiences of the select Canadian writers of my inquiry, and continue moving back and forth between my experience and their experiences, comparing and contrasting,

with an intent to broaden knowledge in the field of writing composition. A successful narrative inquiry should operate on these several levels: the personal, the public and the educative, and its contribution should have “theoretical potential and transformative potential” (Cole & Knowles, 2001, p. 127).

The movements of an SPN, from inward to outward, as well as back and forth are hallmarks of scholarship in narrative inquiry (Wattsjohnson, 2009; van Manen, 1998), as well as SPN inquiry. Nash (2004) expressed the role of scholarship in SPN writing this way:

[SPN] urges us to think of ourselves as wise and loving people who, like the

ancients, have stories to tell that might help others to become wiser...our

personal stories contain within them the germs of many intellectual and

experiential truths…they become the means for conveying our wisdom. (p. 42)

Three truths of SPN scholarship emerge here. First, personal experience has value as scholarship; second, narratives serve as the means for conveying knowledge; and third, this knowledge is meant to move beyond the researcher, hence the “theoretical and transformative potential” that Cole and Knowles (2001) write about.

Max van Manen (1990) explored the value of shared lived experiences as research in Researching Lived Experience: Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy. He wrote about the “extent that my experiences could be our experiences” (p. 57), and that phenomenological authors use “the ‘I’ form or the ‘we’ form…to show that the author recognizes both that one’s own experiences are the possible experience of others and…the experiences of others are the possible experiences of oneself” (p. 57). The recognition of personal experience as both shared and universal makes narrative research

and SPN valuable as inquiry, and attractive to me. Narrative inquirers move beyond the experience of the “self” to educate and transform. The narrative serves as a tool for knowledge and transformation, and it functions as a storyteller’s medium.

Manipulating the back and forth, inward to outward movements of an SPN, I investigate my writing life, writing rituals, and themes “in order to draw larger conclusions for readers, possibly even to challenge and reconstruct older political or educational narratives” (Nash, 2004, p. 18). SPN writers aim to help readers “reexamine their own truth stories in light of the truths that [they] are struggling to discern in [their] own complicated life story” (Nash, 2004, p. 46). Thus, SPN self-inquiry is transformational for the author; as a research story, SPN encourages readers toward similar inquiry and transformation. This aspect of SPN is also what makes it a scholarly approach to research.

Brookfield (2013) examined two important elements of an SPN inquiry that include other back and forth movements between the research writer and text.

The first is the frequent use of research and theoretical literature to illuminate the

particularities of the narrative, to amplify and critique, and to offer multiple

interpretations, many of which are not embedded in the writer’s own telling of the

story…an SPN moves back and forth between individual narrative exposition and

theoretical commentary. The second is the continuous attempt to theorize

generalizable elements of particular events, contradictions, and actions. The

particular events in a narrative may be unique to the individual but they often

contain universal elements. (Brookfield, 2013, p. 127)

My inquiry makes use of the theoretical literature belonging to holistic education, holistic composition theory, non-cognitive process theory, and studies in creativity. I hope to discover “universalizables” (Nash, 2011) amongst the “events, contradictions, and actions”

(Brookfield, 2013) described in the writing narratives of Atwood, Hill, and Munro.

SPN Guidelines

An SPN inquiry is not without a unique set of guidelines; some belong to the aesthetic/artistic demands of writing prose literature, others are more methodologically related. This set of guidelines is helpful to the SPN researcher, but also useful as a means by which to evaluate the SPN dissertation. When a dissertation falls outside the familiar qualitative narrative genres, it is helpful to have criteria to judge the new genre against.

Cole and Knowles (2001) addressed the issue of criteria for the evaluation of life history research. They detailed eight defining elements that apply to a life study evaluation.

Some elements directly relate to aesthetics, while others are concerned with scholarship.

The eight elements cover intentionality, research presence, methodological commitment, holistic quality, communicability, aesthetic form, knowledge claims, and contributions.

(pp. 125-127). Similar criteria are seen amongst Robert Nash’s 2004 and 2011 evolving and tentative guidelines for an SPN, throughout which he acknowledges the artistic/aesthetic and methodological concerns of scholarly narrative inquiry. The ten guidelines from Liberating Scholarly Writing: The Power of Personal Narrative follow:

Guideline 1: Establish Clear Constructs, Hooks, and Questions

The central theme of an SPN is the construct, and the construct “integrates your material in some orderly way” (p. 57). The construct makes clear the inquirer’s ideology, perspective, agenda, and/or philosophy, and acts as a “conceptual guide that keeps your

reader focused on the overall point of your narrative” (p. 58). The “hook” is used in journalism circles and professional writing. It is similarly used in SPN writing as a means to hook the reader’s attention, and can include: provocative constructs, narrative arcs, and memorable characters, depending on the goals of the individual SPN.

Guideline 2: Move From the Particular to the General and Back Again…Often

The shifting movement of an SPN inquiry is back and forth between the personal and universal. The resultant writing is both “local and global” and invites the reader to

“make comparisons and draw contrasts” (p. 60). One major criticism the SPN writer must avoid is that of solipsism or navel gazing. Therefore, “every what needs a why. Every fact needs a hypothesis….phenomenon…a purpose….data need insights….Actions need reflection” (p. 59). This particular guideline is more directly related to methodology than aesthetics.

Guideline 3: Try to Draw Larger Implications From Your Personal Stories

This guideline is similar to guideline 2, but takes the SPN audience into consideration. Guideline 3 expects the inquirer to use narrative to explore “bigger educational, social, cultural, and political issues” (p. 60). The inquirer might be expected to write social critique, or develop a “social action statement, a code of ethics, a political commentary, or an educational policy” (p. 60) with an aim to broaden the reader’s viewpoint.

Guideline 4: Draw From Your Vast Store of Formal Background Knowledge

Guideline 4 invites the inquirer to draw upon personal professional knowledge.

Nash believes the disciplines can “organize, deepen, and upgrade personal stories” (p. 62),

as well as “provide the conceptual cement” (p. 62) for “intellectually sound, cohesive, and lasting” stories. (p. 62)

Guideline 5: Always Try to Tell a Good Story

Guideline 5 relates directly to the art of storytelling. It refers to the organizational elements of plot construction, including “characters, suspense, climax, denouement, and significant lessons” (p. 62). The SPN writer must also keep the audience in mind.

Guideline 6: Show Some Passion

This guideline connects to the art of telling a story and engagement. As academic writing is often “dispassionate” (p. 63), the SPN writer, engaged in the art of telling an educational (or sociological, or political, or religious) narrative, can allow passion to infuse the narrative and maintain the reader’s engagement with the story.

Guideline 7: Tell Your Story in an Open-ended Way

Instead of arguing a stand, viewpoint, or position, the SPN presents information that shows readers that other views of the world are possible.

Guideline 8: Remember That Writing is Both a Craft and an Art

Simply put the craft of writing is an unpolished first draft, followed by multiple revisions (the art) that result in a polished final work.

Guideline 9: Use Citations Wherever Appropriate

Related to methodology and scholarship, the SPN writer must use “proof texts” (p.

65) as support. The proof text lends scholarship to the narrative, and “provides a context, deepens your writing, extends its implications, grounds its insights and…explicitly acknowledges the contributions of others to your thinking” (p. 66).

Guideline 10: Love and Respect Eloquent (i.e., Clear) Language

Nash resorts to writers such as Margaret Atwood, Ralph Keyes, and Strunk and

White for explication of the difficult subject of “clear” language. Without engaging in a philosophical debate on language or what is meant by clear or eloquent language, the thrust of Guideline 10 is language free of jargon and unnecessarily complex sentence structures.

In 2011, Nash and Bradley published a revised set of guidelines in Me-Search and

Research: A Guide for Writing Scholarly Personal Narrative Manuscripts. Nash and

Bradley retained some of the 2004 list almost verbatim, and incorporated other items into the more broadly defined guidelines of 2011. Items were added. The 2011 list, including

Nash and Bradley’s explanations, follows:

Guideline 1: Make your voice distinct, candid, and uniquely your own.

Guideline 2: Make sure that you convey a clear sense of the major

themes/principles/beliefs running throughout your writing. Playwrights call this a

“through-line.”

Guideline 3: Don’t forget to tell some good personal stories.

Guideline 4: Remember, at all times, that me-search writing is the indispensable

source of re-search writing; and, when done well, it can even lead to we-search

writing as others read and respond to it.

Guideline 5: SPN writing strives for an ideal mix of particularity and

generalizability, concreteness and abstractness, practice and theory.

Universalizability is the key. SPN writing starts with the me, reaches out to the

you, and ends up with the universalizable themes that connect with the larger we.

Guideline 6: It’s okay, even desirable, to cite other authors’ works and ideas, as

long as those citations come from your heart and soul rather than as ritualized

padding from your head. In other words, be excited about and cite the ideas of

others only insofar as they provide scholarly support for (or, in some cases,

scholarly critique of) the important “through-line” points you are trying to make.

We refer to these references as “proof-texts.”

Guideline 7: Take some risks and depart, at least some of the time, from the usual

research writing formulas, rubrics, and templates.

Guideline 8: Keep telling yourself that you have a personal story worth telling and

a point about your subject matter worth sharing.

Guideline 9: Remind yourself…that scholarly writing can be fun, engaging, and

pleasing to write…not only for the writer but also for your readers.

Guideline 10: Strive for an academic rigor in your personal narrative writing that

is closer to academic vigor than it is to academic rigor mortis. (Nash & Bradley,

2011, pp. 27-28)

The spirit of these guidelines is compatible with my overall aims, as a creative writer and researcher, to conduct an inquiry and present my research within a compelling story that “strives for an ideal mix of particularity and generalizability, concreteness and abstractness, practice and theory” (Nash & Bradley, 2011, p. 27). SPN is a methodology that offers me an entry point into a culture of writers and writing practice I wish to investigate and understand from the inside. SPN treats the writing process as the lived experience it is.

SPN Challenges

SPN writers address challenges and concerns similar to those of autoethnographers and arts-based researchers, including: ethics (Nash, 2004; Holman

Jones et al., 2013), truth versus story (Nash, 2004; Nash & Viray, 2013), and “hard” scholarship versus “soft” scholarship (Nash, 2004). Additionally, SPN researchers must respect the heightened demands of aesthetics and literary conventions of a good story, including finding hooks or constructs, creating passion in the work, handling the minutiae of both art and craft of writing, and using clear language (Nash, 2004, pp. 57-70).

Concerns About Data Collection

I have struggled to find my place within various qualitative methodologies. Data collection methods characteristic of ethnography and autoethnography, often based on the field notes collected from researcher/participant observation and interviews, are not suitable to my SPN examination of the writing narratives of three prominent Canadian writers. Murchison (2010) described the data collection methods of ethnographers,

[t]he ethnographer collects data and gains insight through firsthand involvement

with research subjects or informants. With few exceptions, the ethnographer

conducts research by interacting with other human beings that are part of the

study; this interaction takes many forms, from conversations and interviews to

shared ritual and emotional experiences. (Murchison, 2010, p. 4)

As my inquiry does not benefit from “firsthand involvement” with writers, I do not fit the ethnographer’s profile. My inquiry examines the published/broadcasted interviews, literature, biographies, memoirs, and autobiographies of Atwood, Hill, and Munro, and I look for their “shared ritual and emotional experiences” (Murchison, 2010). SPN facilitates this method of data collection by reconsidering what constitutes data or “proof

texts.” SPN guidelines allow me to use and “cite other authors’ works and ideas, as long as these citations…provide scholarly support for (or, in some cases, scholarly critique of) the important, “through-line” points you are trying to make” (Nash, 2011, p. 28).

What is Community? What is Culture?

Margaret Atwood, Lawrence Hill, and Alice Munro create within a global community and culture of writers. Interpreting community and culture broadly, metaphorically, and in the abstract is another privilege not commonly afforded the ethnographer, who operates from an anthropological position. As qualitative researchers, ethnographers and autoethnographers “study things in their natural settings, attempting to make sense of, or interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them”

(Denzin & Lincoln, 2008, p. 4). But the Oxford English online dictionary defines

“community” as “group of people who share the same interests, pursuits, or occupation, esp. when distinct from those of the society in which they live” (“community,” 2009).

I apply this definition of “community” when I refer to a “community of writers.” Writers are part of a global community in an abstract sense, engaged in a fellowship of writing, with common interests and concerns.

Similarly, I choose to understand a “culture of writing” metaphorically. David

Bartholomae is quoted using the term in “Revisiting College Composition within a Local

‘Culture of Writing’” when he recommended that the University of Miami “should define and develop a campus-wide culture of writing” (p. 28). In an extension of the definition and use of the word “culture,” the Oxford English online dictionary defines “culture” as the “devoting of attention to or the study of a subject or pursuit” (“culture,” 2009), as well as the “[r]efinement of mind, taste, and manners; artistic and intellectual development.

Hence: the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively” (“culture,” 2009).

These are useful metaphors for my inquiry. By extending the definitions and applications of community and culture, I can investigate a metaphorical and abstract community of writers participating in an artistic, intellectual culture. The entry points are as varied as the representations and genres of their art: (auto)biographies, memoirs, texts on writing, broadcasts/podcasts, and published interviews.

Data Sources and Analysis

As my research questions show, this qualitative inquiry explores the creative writing process with a holistic orientation and is positioned within those composition studies that investigate the “non-cognitive” (Brand & Graves, 1994; Foehr & Schiller,

1997; Schiller, 2007) underpinnings of writing acts. Data were collected from various sources, including: (a) my experiential journals of the creative writing process, and (b) the narratives of a writing life and process revealed through biographies and autobiographies, memoir, literature, and published or broadcasted/podcasted interviews with three accomplished Canadian writers: Margaret Atwood, Lawrence Hill, and Alice

Munro.

Existing research regarding holistic writing practices (Foehr & Schiller, 1997;

Schiller, 2007/2014) acknowledges that writing is a uniquely human act and lived experience. Because humans are thinking, feeling, physical, and spiritual beings, these facets of the individual might play roles in the creative production of literature. Therefore,

I view this inquiry as a very human project. It begins with an examination of my unique experiences of writing creatively, and acknowledges and respects the non-cognitive

elements of the writing act. I explore the journals and notes specific to my creative writing process. I hope my experiences will provide insight into the creative writing processes of other writers. Cole and Knowles (2001) state, “The more we understand ourselves as researchers, the better able we are to…understand others” (p. 52). Further, my inquiry should gain power and momentum from my life-long curiosity about the creative act of writing. About the researcher’s passion and engagement in research, Coles and Knowles (2001) wrote:

We can be true only to…the inquiries in which we engage if we are passionate

about it, if our research is very much lined with our own interests….when we are

morally charged to do the work, that passion and commitment is likely to be

infused in the written text and other representations of experience. (p. 52)

This inquiry also makes extensive use of the narratives by Margaret Atwood,

Lawrence Hill, and Alice Munro specific to writing and their writing lives. Margaret

Atwood’s book on writing emerged from her lengthy career as an essayist, poet, and fiction author. Alice Munro is the subject of many biographies. However, Lives of

Mothers and Daughters, written by Munro’s daughter Sheila Munro, is an autobiography, which doubles as a biography of Alice Munro. Lives of Mothers and Daughters provides significant insights into Alice Munro’s writing life. It is an intense examination of a writer negotiating a life that marries a desire to write with the demanding and overwhelming circumstances of marriage, motherhood, and divorce.

Finally, my inquiry makes use of the public, published/broadcasted/podcasted interviews of Margaret Atwood, Lawrence Hill, and Alice Munro. Unlike Margaret

Atwood, who authored Negotiating With the Dead: A Writer on Writing, a book on the

act of writing, neither Lawrence Hill nor Alice Munro has published a book specifically devoted to the writing process. They have, however, given interviews over the years describing their writing processes and philosophies of writing, as well as offering advice to young writers. Following Munro’s Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013, Munro was regularly interviewed on subjects related to writing. Lawrence Hill served with the

Toronto District School Board from 2011 to 2013, and continues to conduct workshops throughout Ontario for students of creative writing.

A narrative analysis of their writing and the interviews they have given specific to the writing process allows me to investigate and understand their behaviours, actions, and activities related to the creative process, with my research questions in mind. I analyze and describe their various practices to better understand what influences the art of writing.

However, just as there is no prescription for living a life, my intention is not to discover or produce a prescription for writing from the narratives of Atwood, Hill, or Munro.

The Writers:

My inquiry examines the narratives of a writing life and process revealed through biographies and autobiographies, literature, and broadcast and podcast interviews with

Margaret Atwood, Lawrence Hill, and Alice Munro. My deliberations ran the course of gender, nationality, number, and experience. I selected three authors: Atwood and Munro are female. Hill is male. However, the gender imbalance is not an issue for my inquiry.

The role gender does or does not play in the composition process is beyond the scope of my inquiry. I sidestep the gender discussion by limiting my inquiry to the effects, if any, of environment, tools, ritual, pattern, and habit, etc. on the writing process.

A similar concern surrounded the choice of each writer’s nationality. All three writers chosen for my inquiry are Canadian born. Although their early experiences of schooling differ, (Margaret Atwood did not have formal schooling until the age of eight),

Atwood, Hill, and Munro were raised and educated in Ontario. It was important to me that the writers for my study were Canadian-born. This lessens discussion about the potential influence of nationality and schooling on the writing process, and achieves a small measure of balance. It was not my intention to select writers who were educated in

Ontario. I discovered this fact after I had chosen them for my inquiry, and began researching their biographical information. One might wonder about the possible effects of ethnicity on the writing process, given Hill is biracial and the child of American immigrants. However, the effects of ethnicity and race on writing process are also beyond the scope of this inquiry.

Age, maturity, and accomplishment were major considerations in my choice of writers. As of this writing, Atwood, born in 1939, is 76-years-old. Hill, born in 1957, is

58-years old. Munro, born in 1931, is 84-years-old. All three Canadian writers have reflected on their writing experience, and regularly give advice about the writing life and their individual processes. Their knowledge is solicited because of their experience and stature as Canadian icons in the writing world. Particularly after Munro received the

Nobel Prize for Literature (2013), she was regularly approached for her wisdom on writing, despite her reluctance to do interviews, citing failing health.

The value of Atwood, Hill, and Munro’s reflections on their writing processes comes from a lifetime of experience with the blank page and changing positions in life, as each writer navigates relationships, family, marriage, divorce, illness, and fame. They

stand knowledgeable and wise and experienced in their writing shoes. As mature writers, they offer insight and knowledge into a world they know well and can speak about with authority.

My choice of these writers should not suggest I favour them artistically above other writers, or have a preference for one over another. And readers of my inquiry do not have to agree with the aesthetics of any one of the chosen three. However, Atwood, Hill, and Munro’s success in the writing world affords each the privilege of position. Their many pages of literature and their awards carry clout in the global writing community.

They can and do speak with authority to the creative process they have each lived for more than fifty years.

Other Voices/Other Writers

I include the voices of many other writers throughout my inquiry. These writers’ words also serve as “proof-texts” (Nash, 2011, p. 27). “Proof-texts” provide the

“academic rigor” that Nash speaks of, but allow a research writer to maintain her story and voice. My identity as writer and researcher puts me in the company of other writers, and I draw upon the expertise of writers as the scholars in my field. In The Soul Tells a

Story, Wright (2005) draws upon people from the fine arts in her research because they

“have tuned in more carefully than most of us to the specific characteristics and stages of creativity” (Wright, 2005, p. 18), and she uses “primarily their terms in exploring the creative process” (Wright, 2005, p. 18). Acknowledging what writers say about their engagement with the creative process recognizes and respects their experience as scholarship, and provides me with the “proof-texts” I require for a study of the holistic elements in the process of the writing art.

I see this dissertation in concert with writers and researchers who extend the views of the field beyond their personal experience, into the classrooms of elementary and secondary schools, colleges and universities, and beyond the classroom setting. I hope to expand an appreciation and understanding of the act of writing creatively by exploring features of the process as it is lived, and as it has been lived.

Chapter 4: Margaret Atwood

“I started to write when I was sixteen because I loved it.” --Margaret Atwood

Chapter 4 explores Margaret Atwood’s creative process. I begin Chapter 4 with a section titled “Why Margaret Atwood?” in which I describe, in greater detail, my choice of

Margaret Atwood as a subject for this study. Chapter 4 describes Margaret Atwood’s creative writing process under the following subtitles: Questions to Writers; Place;

Routines of Time; Routines of Discipline; Preparations, including Pen and Paper, Desks,

Typewriters, and Computers, Drink more water/Go to bed earlier; Ideas and Creating

Empty Space; and Support and Passion. Each section and sub-section reflects specifics of

Atwood’s writing practice as she has discussed them in published interviews and essays devoted to the writing process.

Why Margaret Atwood?

Margaret Atwood has been part of my literary life, in some measure, since I was a fifteen-year-old student sitting in a grade 11 classroom. Canada, still warm in the afterglow of a Centennial Year birthday party we all celebrated in 1967, began to develop a self-conscious identity. In my small southwestern Ontario city, dinner table conversations about full silos, factory hires, and crops, now included what it meant to be a Canadian. Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau celebrated bilingualism. And in response to our growing awareness of a Canadian identity, schools made a little space on the shelves for dead Canadian poets, next to the volumes of British authors we studied.

Not once did I wonder if living poets walked among us.

Then, in 1973 my grade 11 English teacher, Mr. Rose, introduced us to Atwood’s

Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. The themes in Atwood’s book

excited me, though I remember understanding little of the material. I lacked background and meaningful experience with Canadian literature. I blame this on my Anglo-centric literature classes focused on poets, including Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Blake; and fiction and non-fiction writers including Dickens, Austen, and Eliot. I blame the inexperience of my questionable youthful reading. The result? I grew up with a great respect for Margaret Atwood. I grew up with an unhealthy fear of MARGARET

ATWOOD: a scholar amongst writers, a great intellect, an activist and inventor, and

Canadian icon-in-the-making. The respect/intimidation dynamic continues to the present day. Still, Margaret Atwood as a subject for this inquiry was an obvious choice. As of this writing, Ms. Atwood is 76-years-old, and has written a lifetime of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. She has the clout, wisdom, and experience to reflect on the creative process informing her literary prowess, and address it, as she does infrequently and reluctantly.

Atwood stated, “I hate writing about my writing. I almost never do it….Saying you’ll write about your writing is a social obligation. It’s not an obligation to the writing”

(Atwood, 1990/2005, p. 105).

Further, Atwood distrusts the attempt at recreating a lived experience of the writing process. Atwood stated, “Any memory you have of what you did at the moment of writing is just that, a memory. Like all memories, it’s usually a revision, not the unadulterated experience itself” (Hancock, 1987/2006). Atwood assumes that writers eager to study her creative process want the unadulterated experience, an experience that might be rendered dramatically through the literary devices available to the storyteller.

However, I suspect that many of us who are writers and researchers are interested in and

could learn from her memories of those creative experiences, however cleansed and spotty they may be.

I approached Atwood’s work cautiously for this inquiry. Can Margaret Atwood teach me about being a writer? About writing? Can I learn from her writing narrative? On the subject of writing, Atwood (2005) stressed she had “nothing to say about it” (Atwood,

1990/2005, p. 106). In a column written for the Cornell Chronicle by Michelle Spektor

(2011), Spektor reported that Atwood found it “impossible…to give general advice to young writers” (Spektor, 2011). Writers/artists are so busy “doing” they “don’t usually think much about how they do it” (Meltzer, 1995/2006, p. 181). In an interview conducted by Linda Sandler in 1976, Atwood was asked to comment on the difference between conceiving poems and novels. It was a process question and Atwood avoided answering it. She continues to believe that “observing [the process] while it was happening…would kill it” (Sandler, 1997/2006, p. 29). Nor was Atwood interested in observing the process “after the fact” (Sandler, 1977/2006, p. 29). She suggested that the answers to process questions could be discovered “from looking at the journals of some artists” (Meltzer, 1995/2006, p. 181). But in the mid-eighties, Atwood kept a “sporadic journal” of her writing process. After reading her own writing journal, Atwood claimed it was useless.

There was nothing in it about the actual composition of anything I’ve written over

the past six years. Instead there are exhortations to myself—to get up earlier, to

walk more, to resist lures and distractions. Drink more water….Go to bed earlier.

(2005, p.107)

Atwood did not define what she meant by “actual composition,” nor did she detail the criteria for “actual composition” she hoped to find amongst the pages of her journal; she judged her diary pages a disappointment. But the exhortations recorded throughout her writing diary might prove more relevant to understanding her needs as a writer and her writing process than she appreciates.

Atwood also admits to an ongoing superstition about analyzing her own writing process. In a 1972 interview with Graeme Gibson, Atwood stated,

There are a lot of things that I would just would rather not know about writing,

because I think that if you get too curious about it and start dissecting the way you

work and why you do it you’d probably stop. Maybe not. Anyway, that’s one of

my superstitions. (Gibson, 1973/2006, p. 8)

Yet, despite her superstitions and reluctance to examine the writing process, Atwood published a series of literary essays on writing called Negotiating With the Dead: A

Writer on Writing in 2002, and subsequently republished the book under a different title,

On Writers and Writing in 2015. The books are evidence she has examined writers, the writing life, and how writers view “their own activity and themselves in relation to it”

(2002, p. xvii), despite her protests that she has “nothing to say about it because I can’t remember what goes on when I’m doing it….Writing about writing requires self- consciousness; writing itself requires the abdication of it” (2005, p. 106). Ms. Atwood may very well be a writer who hates writing about writing, but Negotiating With the

Dead (2002) and the 2015 reprint On Writers and Writing suggest that Atwood does have something to say on the subject.

If I had hoped to glean any hints about the writing process from Atwood’s fiction, particularly Lady Oracle or The Blind Assassin, I must heed Earl Ingersol’s caution against this approach in his introduction to Waltzing Again: New and Selected

Conversations with Margaret Atwood:

The unwary interviewer who quotes Iris of The Blind Assassin on the subject of

writing, or particularly on the ability to write “the truth,” is likely to get reminded

very firmly that the words belong to Iris and are relevant to her character for that

specific moment; thus what Iris says should not be generalized for her character

and even more importantly those remarks should never be attributed to Iris’s

creator. (2006, p. ix)

As a writer, I understand the folly of confusing the author with a character. So, I do not examine Atwood’s fiction for writing advice.

Atwood is also evasive on the subject of writing when questioned directly by interviewers and student audiences. But the many interviews with Atwood over the years, covering the subject matter of her novels, activism, feminism, and creativity provide glimpses of her creative habits. Some of her routines and preferences as a creative writer are the result of her childhood spent in the bush in northern Quebec for six and seven months per year. Lacking formal schooling and living writing models, she announced she was a writer at the age of sixteen, and blazed a trail in the Canadian literary wilderness.

In interviews with Gibson (1972/2006), Gaiman (2015), Oates (1978/2006), Morris

(1986/2006), and Magee (2010), Atwood was knowledgeable and forthcoming on the subject of our creative capacity. Atwood reassured there is nothing unattainable, rare, esoteric, or mysterious about creativity. She points to the creative play of two-year-olds

in the sand; they “arrange something, they dig it out, they rearrange it, they take elements that they have and make something out of it” (Meltzer, 1995/2006, p.180). Citing and paraphrasing Dennis Dutton’s book The Art Instinct, Atwood (Atwood & Magee, 2010,

33:33) agreed the creative impulse is embedded within human beings, and the instinct to produce art is part of being human (Atwood & Magee, 2010, 32:37-34:57). Atwood explains how children before the age of five “talk, sing, twirl, dance, make visual images, tell and understand stories” as a result of the “programs we come with” (Emory

University, 2010, 34:00-34:45).

Atwood’s description of creative children at play is strikingly similar to her own experiences as a child growing up and spending “six to eight months of the year in the bush” (Hammond, 1978/2006, p. 55) where she spent much time reading. In fact, Atwood became an early reader so that she could read the comic strips (Atwood, 2011, p. 16) and

“drew a lot: drawing and reading were the main recreations available in the woods”

(Atwood, 2011, p. 16). She also maintains that humans retained this creative impulse into adulthood, and the evidence of this creativity is visible in YouTube videos made by adults, as well as the many dress-up opportunities that adults enjoy, including Mardi Gras and ComiCon conventions (Emory University, 2010, 34:55-35:35).

Rosemary Magee questioned Atwood in a 2010 interview about the “general cultural perception that we’re not interested in art…that Americans are not interested in art” (Emory University, 2010, 32:30-33:09). In response, Atwood suggested what has changed about art is our understanding of what comprises “art.” Further, this specialized definition of art might account for the fiction that people have turned away from creating art. Atwood explained how the creativity inherent to humans might find expression

through woodworking projects some adults do in their basements. These woodworker hobbyists respond to a creative impulse, but would not necessarily label their output “art.”

Atwood believes that people generally understand art as something that hangs in a gallery or museum, and is produced by “a specialized caste of people called artists” (Emory

University, 2010, 35:29-40:25). She asserts that our specialized society, so far removed from a “hunter-gatherer” society, now stresses the specialized nature of what we presently call “art,” but this does not mean that others outside this specialized caste of artists do not have the “interest, capacity, or involvement” in making art. (Emory

University, 2010, 32:30-39:00).

I understand multiple significances from this for my research and myself as a creative writer. Most important is Atwood’s belief, shared by Dutton (2009), that the creative impulse is common to humankind. It is not a mystical, unattainable, random gift assigned to some and not others. Nor are the origins of creativity “inheritance or socialization or a lack of something else” as Gabrielle Meltzer (1995/2006, p. 179) worded the question to Atwood in 1994. Creativity is present and available to all people.

In conversation with Rosemary Magee, Atwood spoke about the motivation to tell stories as an instinct common to humanity. There is proof that the arts, including the narrative arts, go back to the Pleisticene age, and are “encoded in our genes” (Atwood, 2011, p. 43).

Originally the ability to tell stories gave humans a “survival edge in dangerous environments” (Emory University, 2010, 40:29-43:20) due, in part, to the “protective, instructive quality of storytelling” (Emory University, 2010, 40:29). People told stories to warn one another about dangers in an unknown environment. The “others” could avoid trouble and death if they learned from the story instead of experience. In the face of

evidence for a tradition of arts and storytelling stretching back thousands of years, and present to all, Atwood’s oft-repeated question is, “Why do so many people give it up?”

(Morris, 1990/2006, p. 144).

In many ways, Atwood’s question is my question. Too many people have given up writing creatively. Atwood surmises they have succumbed to “intimidation…[f]ear of not being good. Lack of time” (Morris, 1990/2006, p. 144). But Atwood never gets beyond “wondering” at the reasons people give up on writing. It is not her interest or research focus. I continue to hope that something(s) could be buried in the writing stories

Atwood tells that will help people to continue writing creatively. Atwood is reluctant to speak directly about her creative process, but she reveals much about herself as a writer, her writing life, creativity, and the creative process through formal and informal interviews, and essays.

We learn that her creative process is more closely related to, or a consequence of the changing circumstances of family life and daily routines than anything she learned in school. Atwood (2011) speaks of her school years:

Our generation did do some writing in school, but it was in the form of essays, or

else grammar and composition. We were not encouraged to write fiction and

poetry, although we did read a lot of these. Should we be overtaken by the Muse,

we could always publish the results in the school yearbook, if we had no shame.

(p. 75)

In an interview with Karla Hammond (1979/2006), Atwood referred jokingly to a kind of

“dark period” (p. 66) between the ages of eight and sixteen when she did not write. She stated, “In fact, at the time, I didn’t really write anything except for school essays. At

sixteen I started writing poetry. I don’t know why I wrote; there certainly weren’t any role models around” (Hammond, 1979/2006, p. 66). Despite the lack of creative encouragement at school, and in the absence of living Canadian author role models,

Atwood chose to be a writer, a decision she announced at the age of sixteen. And after forty years of professional writing experience across a variety of genres, Atwood has much to say about the creative writing process.

Questions to Writers

In 1976, I attended a two-week Writer’s Workshop at the University of Toronto.

Poets PK Page and Diane Wakowski, and novelists Marian Engel and Alice Denham instructed in the poetic and literary arts. They read their works in the evening and answered questions from eager writers in the audience. Questions ranged in scope from the literature itself to the creative process behind the literature. Atwood describes this drive to “know” in the following way: “We’re greedy to know more. More of what?

More of everything, more of anything; more of how and why, more of how-to” (Atwood,

2005, p. 80). We wonder:

Where did the books come from—what part of your life? Does the writing always

flow, or do you struggle? Do you have to suffer to be an artist, and if so how

much, and what kind of suffering would you recommend? Should you use—do

you use—a pencil, or pen…? Are here any special foods? What kind of chair?

(Atwood, 2005, p. 81)

These questions were my questions. They are still my questions. If Atwood and others are correct about the creative impulse, then researchers can stop looking for a creative gene or genie that resides in some and not others, and look instead to influences and conditions

and situations in the creative writer’s life that affect the process and keep writers writing.

Researchers O'Shaughnessy, McDonald, Maher, & Dobie (2002) found:

Human beings have a need for reassurance and control that simple determination

does not provide. Writing rituals help meet these needs. The right pen, the lucky

clipboard, the same early morning hours…the usual posture, the routine

motions—foolish and inconsequential as they may seem to be—have the power to

provide patterns that enhance the act of writing. (p. 22)

With these various writing rituals in mind, I look for Margaret Atwood in the act of writing.

Place

In Ceri Sullivan’s (2009) introduction to Graeme Harper’s Authors at Work: The

Creative Environment, Sullivan posed the question: “The notion that if we get our human environment right we will all be more creative is a heart-warming one. Is it true?” (p. 1).

Harper’s book Authors at Work: The Creative Environment is a rare study of authors and their physical needs while composing. And on the importance of setting to the writer and writing practice, Oriah Mountain Dreamer (2005) wrote in What We Ache For: Creativity and the Unfolding of Your Soul, “Setting up a practice begins with finding a place. Often this is dictated by circumstances” (p. 101). Atwood has fielded the question of “the best place to write” in interviews with Peter Mansbridge (2013), Karla Hammond (1978),

James McElroy (1993), Ann Heilmann and Debbie Taylor (2001). On the occasion of

Margaret Atwood’s 75th birthday, Flavorwire contributor Elisabeth Donnelly collected

“quotes and notes” on Atwood’s writing process. On the subject of writing space,

Atwood said, “I’m not often in a set writing space. I don’t think there’s anything too

unusual about it, except that it’s full of books and has two desks” (Flavorwire, 2014). The reason for two desks and what is on them will be explored later. Unlike Charles Dickens who wrote standing at a clerk’s desk, or Ernest Hemingway who wrote at a stand-up desk,

Atwood joked with Peter Mansbridge that while she sits to write, after hearing that sitting

“can kill you” (The National, 2013, 1:33) she is considering “doing a Hemingway and getting a stand-up desk” (The National, 2013, 1:33-1:43).

When asked if Atwood needed to be alone to write, she recounted a story she has repeated for interviewers throughout the years. It is a good example of how childhood experience can shape or dictate our needs for physical comfort. As previously stated,

Atwood spent three seasons out of four with her family in remote areas of northern

Ontario and Quebec. She told Peter Mansbridge, “I spent quite a lot of my childhood in locations where there was no electricity…there would be a kerosene lamp, and everybody would sit around it doing their thing. I’m used to being in rooms with other people” (The

National, 2013, 2:57-3:15).

Yet, Atwood also needs isolation. In 1978, Atwood told Karla Hammond that her

“ideal place for writing is an isolated place” (Hammond, 1978/2006, p. 63). One of the reasons for the isolation is to remove herself from distraction. Writing is hard work, and

Atwood regularly jokes that she is lazy and does not like work. When writing is difficult

“I…do anything to avoid it, which means that in order to actually finish a novel, I have to isolate myself from all distraction because if it’s a question of choice between the work and the distraction I’ll take the distraction every time” (Gibson, 1973/2006, p. 2). Yet,

Atwood can find solitude within a group of people. In a 2001 interview with Ann

Heilmann and Debbie Taylor (2001/2006), Atwood stated,

I can write anywhere if I have solitude. I can be in a room full of people, it

doesn’t matter, as long as they’re not talking to me. Jane Austen wrote all her

books in the sewing room with hordes of people around her. I grew up doing my

reading and homework around a kerosene lamp, with other people using the same

lamp. (p. 252)

According to Atwood, the trick to finding the necessary isolation among a group of people, provided they are not interfering with your creative process is to create a mental space, or “mental cubicle” as a refuge. She explained how “you just learn to build a little mental cubicle and do it within that cubicle” (Heilmann & Taylor, 2001/2006, p. 252).

Atwood related a story to Peter Mansbridge that demonstrated her ability to work amidst a crowd of people. While working on her first published novel, Atwood held an office job.

Each day after Atwood completed the duties of her employment, she would then roll the manuscript of her novel into the typewriter and compose, pretending to look very busy at work. (The National, 2013, 3:14-3:28) Even amidst a busy workplace, Atwood could escape to her “mental cubicle” and write.

Atwood’s stories of writing in different locations and circumstances are helpful to new writers in a number of ways. They illustrate that: working space matters; the working space is not always defined by physical boundaries, as it can be a retreat into the mind, similar to a meditator in the act of meditation; creating a “mental cubicle” as a mental retreat demands a certain mental discipline, and is also a creative act. Or, sometimes the writer has to “go into a room and shut the door and say, ‘Go away everyone, because I’m going to write,’ and…get very annoyed at people who interrupt you” (Gibson, 1973/2006, p.8).

Routines of Time

3:00 a.m.

I edit what I have already typed onto my electronic page, and return to my yellow newsprint tablet to continue the longhand first draft of this Chapter 4. I am the only person awake in my home. The dishes from supper for six are still piled high in the sink.

My husband cooks; I wash and dry. 4:00 a.m. is my goal for finally rolling into bed with the dishes done, approximately thirty minutes before my son will leave the house for work.

At 3:00 a.m. no one troubles me. WestJet does not call to make me an offer, energy salespeople do not knock on my door, the bar dwellers have long since schlepped their way home over the icy sidewalks. Across the street, young Matt’s lights are on. At 3:00 a.m. I wonder if that qualifies us as “morning people”? I am a 3:00 a.m. scholar, poet, and writer.

A quick scan of interviews with Margaret Atwood spanning many years of her career reveals a flexible writing routine that is responsive to the circumstances of her employment, family demands, and age. In a 1978 interview with author Joyce Carol

Oates, and two years after the birth of Atwood’s daughter, Atwood explained, “My working habits have changed over the years, according to the circumstances of my life”

(Oates, 1978/2006, p. 48). Atwood summarized the many necessary adjustments she has made to her writing schedule from when she was a young university student, through various kinds of employment, to becoming a mother:

I didn’t have very regular habits as a student…During my years as a graduate

student, odd-job holder, university lecturer of the lowest order—up till the age of

about twenty-seven or so—I almost had to write at night, and would stay up quite

late….I became an afternoon writer when I had afternoons. When I was able to

write full time, I used to spend the morning procrastinating…then plunge into the

manuscript …around 3:00….Since the birth of my daughter…I still try to spend

the afternoons writing. (Oates, 1978/2006, p. 48)

Atwood’s 1990 interview with Mary Morris (1990/2006) for the Paris Review also touches on the effect motherhood had on her writing routine. Atwood stated, “I try to write between ten in the morning and four in the afternoon, when my child comes home from school. Sometimes in the evenings, if I’m really zipping along on a novel” (Morris,

1990/2006, p. 147). This sentiment is echoed in a 1993 interview with James McElroy

(2006). Atwood said, “[O]nce I had a young family, I couldn’t write until two in the morning anymore…and moved my writing to an earlier and less frantic point in the day.

By now I’ve grown used to earlier starts (McElroy, 1993/2006, pp. 167-168).

The writer must also allow for the effects of aging on a routine. Atwood had once been a habitual night writer. Heilmann and Taylor (2001/2006) interviewed Margaret

Atwood in 2001, and asked if Atwood still wrote during the night. She responded, “No, too old,” but she used to write through the night all the time because she “had a day job…had to work at night” (Heilmann & Taylor, 2001/2006, p. 251-252). She joked how she now uses the nights to sleep. In this connection, Atwood described her pattern in an interview with Heilmann and Tayler (2001/2006): “More like ten to twelve in the morning, and then sometimes in the evenings, but sometimes in the afternoons. I try to work in the morning. Morning is good. I’m awake (p. 257). In a January 2016 interview with Lauren Oyler for Broadly Meets, Atwood put it simply: “I get up. I have breakfast. I work” (Broadly, 2016, 1:09-1:11).

Many people recognize the time of day when they are most productive. It is convenient when the writer’s life circumstances and responsibilities mesh with this favoured time of productivity, but often the writer must move to a “plan B” to write.

Writers with families, jobs, and school demands must reconcile these routines with writing time; it is a complicated dance for the experienced and inexperienced writer, one that demands both the discipline of a routine and the flexibility to move with the changing circumstances that exert their own influences on routines.

It may be important to this inquiry to examine Atwood’s routines as a writer once she became a mother. Atwood discussed being influenced by the images of women writers she was exposed to as an English major while at the University of Toronto (and later Harvard), as a young woman. Many female writers served as tragic role models of suicide, early death, and reclusiveness. In her 1990 interview with Mary Morris for the

Paris Review (1990/2006), Atwood stated:

There was a period in my early career that was determined by the images of

women writers I was exposed to--women writers as genius suicides like Virginia

Woolf. Or genius reclusives like Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti. Or

doomed people of some sort, like the Brontës, who both died young. You could

fall back on Harriet Beecher Stowe or Mrs. Gaskell; they both led reasonable lives.

But then George Eliot didn’t have any children; neither did Jane Austen. Looking

back over these women writers, it seemed difficult as a writer and a woman to

have children and a domestic relationship. For a while I thought I had to choose

between the two things I wanted: children and to be a writer. I took a chance.

(1990/2006, p. 146)

Taking a chance on blending roles of writer and mother changed Atwood’s writing routines significantly. From alterations in her daily writing practice to a slowed-down production of published work, Atwood’s life as writer/mother told a different story of creativity. Atwood described the gap in her writing between 1976 and 1980 when interviewed by Heilmann and Taylor (2001/2006):

Atwood: …Lady Oracle came out in ’76, the year I had the baby, but I had been

writing the book meanwhile, and then there is a pause, there isn’t another book

until 1980, I think.

Taylor: So the baby did sort of interfere?

Atwood: You lose your brain, it grows back, your hair falls out, ditto….the other

awful thing—though it’s not that awful at the time—you don’t care! “I’ve lost my

brain, oh well, who cares, didn’t need that, I don’t need to write books.” (p. 251)

With Atwood’s characteristic humour, she acknowledged the impact becoming a mother had on her ability to think and write. Researchers have demonstrated the effect postpartum hormones play on cognitive abilities of mothers in the first year.

Routines of Discipline

A page from my writing journal:

I know I have to begin. The essay called to me all morning, so I made coffee. I cannot begin writing without coffee. I thought about the writing, and drained my cup.

“Just one more,” I think. “I work better with coffee,” I say to the walls.

The essay exists as an unfinished entity on my laptop. I’m not sure how to work through the next awkward section.

Beyond my window, a warm February day beckons. I grab my coat and purse, and leave the house on foot. Walking helps. I cannot continue writing without a mind- clearing walk. I’ve always known this. I can trust the walking.

Writers frequently struggle with beginnings. There is the beginning to a new writing project. And, once the project is begun, a writer must begin again each time she sits before the page to continue the writing. Writers find beginnings difficult for many reasons, including the surprising physical demands that writing exerts on the writer. We don’t associate physical demands with sitting at a desk laboring over a blank page. In a

2003 interview with Martin Halliwell (2003/2006), Atwood detailed the mental and physical challenges of a long-term commitment to writing a novel.

If you write a novel, you know that you’re going to be writing very hard for a

minimum of a year and a half. You know you’re going to get pains in your arms.

You know you’re going to get pains in your neck. You know you’re going to get

headaches. It is hard, physical work. And you know you’re going to become an

obsessive and wake up in the middle of the night and write things down on pieces

of paper that will be illegible in the morning….You know that once you have

started a novel a lot of willpower is going to go into it. You may have had the idea,

but then you are going to have to work it out, which means getting up in the

morning, sitting down at your desk and working. Somebody said, “one part

inspiration, nine parts perspiration.” That’s about right. (Halliwell, 2003/2006, p.

262)

Atwood’s words are not meant to discourage inexperienced writers from writing. In fact, when Graeme Gibson asked Atwood if she enjoyed writing, Atwood responded, “I guess

I would have to, wouldn’t I, or I wouldn’t do it” (Gibson, 1973/2006, p. 3). But Atwood points to a physical reality of the act of creative writing and creativity that people frequently overlook.

Atwood adds nerve, a kind of physical nerve, to the list of criteria necessary for writing. While Atwood does not usually address gender in the writing process as a feminist issue (she balks at being labeled a feminist), there is a suggestion that female writers still require a bit more nerve than their male counterparts. A much younger

Atwood had to contend with pronouncements that girls could/should not be writers. By

1990, she acknowledged that many things had changed for the better. Still, she stated there is “a lack of self-confidence that gets instilled very early in many young girls, before writing is even seen as a possibility” (Atwood, 2005, p. 106). As a result, Atwood adds nerve or courage to the writer’s needs. Although the conversation was specific to the issues young girls faced as emerging writers, Atwood did not mean to exclude male writers. Atwood used the general term “writer” when suggesting it took courage to create.

She stated, “You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer, an almost physical nerve, the kind you need to walk a log across a river.” (2005, p. 106-107). The warning, or advice, is directed to both genders.

In response to these challenges, writers consciously and unconsciously develop routines that allow them to move into a productive state of mind. Oriah Mountain

Dreamer (2005), a Canadian philosopher and creative writer, believes every author uses a particular routine unique to the writer to begin a creative project and then stay with it.

Dreamer developed a daily practice to help her move into a creative state of mind for writing. She treats the writing as “a practice…something you consciously do on a regular

basis by following a particular routine or structure that allows you to do it even when other things beckon or you simply don’t feel like doing it” (2005, p. 100). Dreamer writes daily, whether on a particular book project or in her journal. She asserts that this practice of daily writing “helps keep my creative muscles limber” (2005, p. 100) and is a

“structured way of starting your creative work [that] enables you, on the days when you really do not feel like doing the work, to stay present and keep moving one incremental step at a time into the process” (2005, pp. 100-101).

Although Atwood generally feels it is “impossible for [her] to give general advice to young writers” (Spektor, 2011), she regularly instructs young writers to establish their own daily writing practice. “Write every day if you can, no matter how awful you think it is. Just keep doing it” (Spektor, 2011). Ironically, Atwood admits to not always taking her own good advice. In a 2012 Ask Me Anything interview, Atwood stressed the importance of writing every day. “It could even be a shopping list. A letter. A journal entry” wrote Atwood on an Ask Me Anything SubReddit page, quoted by Zi-Ann Lum

(2014) for Huffington Post Canada. And, though Atwood recently admitted to not always writing daily, she tries “to write at least something, even if it’s a letter or a To-Do list, or a Reddit AMA…” (Lum, 2014). This is one approach Atwood uses to confront the anxiety she faces when beginning to write.

Twyla Tharp (2003), a dancer and choreographer, explained in her book The

Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life that habit enhances and augments creativity.

She wrote: “The routine is as much of the creative process as the lightning bolt of inspiration, maybe more. And this routine is available to everyone” (p. 7). At the age of seventy-four, Tharp no longer dances professionally; however, she choreographs and

writes, and maintains a strict discipline of going to the studio every morning and working through a number of dance exercises. Her approach to creativity demonstrates “that being creative is a full-time job with its own daily patterns. That’s why writers, for example, like to establish routines for themselves” (p. 6). This dovetails nicely with Atwood’s belief that creativity is not divinely inspired, but accessed through routine and habit in order to “dive in” and start writing. Having a discipline of writing or writing practice also lessens the frequency of the long stretches of “waiting-for-inspiration” types of procrastination and writer’s block. When quoted on the subject of inspiration, Atwood stated inspiration is “not a question of sitting around wondering what I’m going to write”

(Flavorwire, 2014).

Atwood’s ongoing fear of the blank page has resulted in regular periods of anxiety. When she described her days as a young writer, she included the many rituals she performed before finally getting to work. She wrote: “I spent the day having anxiety attacks, sharpening pencils, getting up, sitting down, filling coffee cups, going to lunch, phoning friends—all the things you do to avoid writing” (McElroy, 1993/2006, p. 167).

Atwood’s writing routine, before her daughter was born, included mornings spent

“procrastinating and worrying” followed by a “plunge into the manuscript in a frenzy of anxiety around 3:00 when it looked as though I might not get anything done” (Oates,

2006, p. 49). Since the birth of her daughter, Atwood is still intimidated by the blank page, but claims to make more efficient use of her time. She stated, “I’ve had to cut down on the procrastination. I still try to spend the afternoons writing, though the preliminary period of anxiety is somewhat shorter (Oates, 1978/2006, p. 49).

These actions recall dancer/choreographer Twyla Tharp’s reflections on procrastination and creative people. Tharp wrote, “Some people find this moment—the moment before creativity begins—so painful that they simply cannot deal with it….They procrastinate. In its most extreme form, the terror totally paralyzes people” (2003, pp. 5-

6). So it is during these periods of anxiety that the writer needs to have familiar strategies to see her through to the writing.

Of interest, here, to writers, experienced and inexperienced, is the widespread reality of procrastination. It may be motivated by feelings of insecurity and paralyzing worries that the writer and the work are not good enough. It can also be motivated by the

“nitty-gritty mundane” editing details of the creative process that seem mind numbing next to the inspiration that informed the story. Atwood complained to Graeme Gibson in

1972,

I don’t like the sort of willpower involved in making sure your sentences are OK

and that you haven’t repeated the same word about nine times on one page. That

sort of busy-work is editing. I enjoy the initial thing. I don’t enjoy the tidying up

very much because it’s like work. (Gibson, 1972/2006, p. 3)

For this reason Dreamer suggests, “All you need to do is develop a set of practices that can take you into your creative work, practices that have enough structure to help you do the work whether you feel like it or not” (2005, p. 109).

Procrastination is a reality in the writing lives of many creative people. So it is reassuring to read Atwood’s myriad ways of working through these periods of avoidance in order to arrive at the work. She compares “beginning” to write to swimming. “There’s that moment where you think: Do I really want to do this today? The water’s too cold.

And the other part of you says: “It will be good for you. You’ll enjoy it once you’re in.

Get in there” (McElroy, 1993/2006, p. 167). And then she dives in. But it never gets easier. And because it never gets easier, the writer must develop a discipline of regularly diving in and doing the work.

For Tharp also, the secret is adhering to a strict routine that becomes a habit. She wrote: “Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is a result of good work habits” (2003, p.7). Tharp’s unwavering daily ritual of preparing for the flow of creative ideas follows:

I begin each day of my life with a ritual: I wake up at 5:30 a.m., put on my

workout clothes, my leg warmers, my sweatshirts, and my hat. I walk outside my

Manhattan home, hail a taxi, and tell the driver to take me to the Pumping Iron

gym at 91st Street and First Avenue, where I work out for two hours. The ritual is

not the stretching and weight training…the ritual is the cab. The moment I tell the

driver where to go I have completed the ritual. (2003, p. 14)

Tharp’s rituals of hailing the cab and going to the gym, and Atwood’s rituals of sharpening pencils and filling coffee cups ready the writer’s body and brain for the creative work ahead. Rather than functioning as distractions that keep a writer forever from the work, these rituals signal the body that it is ready to work. Tharp suggests that rituals “replace doubt and fear with comfort and routine” (2003, p. 18), and “more than anything else…rituals of preparation …arm us with confidence and self-reliance” (2003, p. 20). And though Atwood has said on a few occasions that she does not have a routine, her description of optimal writing times, and her dedication to setting 1000 to 2000 words a day goals when working on a novel indicate that she does, indeed, have routines that help her remain creative and engaged while getting the job done.

Preparations

Journey is a familiar writing metaphor used by authors to describe their process

(Heard, 1995; Schneider, 2013;Vogler, 2007). It is a useful metaphor to my inquiry when understanding the many things writers do to prepare for their writing journeys. Like medieval or modern-day pilgrims, writers prepare their minds, bodies, and spirits for the creative journey ahead. They gather supplies; they train their bodies; they ready their minds. And, as writers begin their writing journeys anew every time they sit before the blank page, each beginning requires preparation.

Inexperienced, uncertain, and young writers who sense they have a story to tell, but cannot find direction from the oft-quoted and recommended stages of pre-write, write, revise, have much to learn from experienced writers’ tales of journey along the Way to a story. Writing supports, useful tools, physical exertion, wisdom, and mental conditioning are the subjects of writers’ narratives. Many of these experiential tales are found loosely scattered throughout interviews with Margaret Atwood and her writing narratives, which tell tales of her writing journey spanning more than sixty years.

Pen and Paper

It really is difficult today to find many writers who compose poetry or prose longhand. Television programs featuring writers as protagonists, such as Sex and the City, show the author busily typing manuscripts and magazine copy on laptops. The computer has made the writing and editing process much easier for writers. It is also kinder to the environment. In 1980, I typed my Master’s thesis on an electric Smith Corona typewriter.

Every change suggested by my Supervisor meant retyping the entire manuscript, resulting

in several hundred pages of bleached white paper landing in the local landfill. I did not, however, compose on the typewriter then, nor do I compose on the keyboard today.

I wrote my thesis longhand on a canary yellow tablet. I used a Parker 75 fountain pen with dark blue ink. I could not compose any other way. The keyboard of my electric

Smith-Corona typewriter left me cold and uninspired; yet, the machine was useful and necessary for typing readable drafts for my supervisor. This long-standing preference for handwriting with a fountain pen dates back to my childhood. I feel a connection to the material when I write creatively with a fountain pen (or, recently, my blue Waterman ballpoint).

Atwood is regularly asked if she uses a pen or computer to compose. (Years ago, the choices were pen or typewriter.) Atwood composes longhand, and then types the handwritten draft onto her computer. Do interviewers continue to ask Atwood this question because they anticipate Atwood will eventually move into the 21st century and compose at a keyboard…like nearly everybody else? Atwood’s explanation for her longhand first drafts has little to do with an experience of the spiritual connection of pen, ink, paper, and heart. In a 2015 interview with author Neil Gaiman, Atwood explained that she is a very poor typist, and this is the reason she writes with a pen. In several interviews over the years, she has accounted for her process of writing longhand as the result of never having learned how to type. She said she writes faster with a pen than on a keyboard. In a 1990 Paris Review interview Atwood explained:

I write in longhand and preferably on paper with margins and thick lines with

wide space between the lines. I prefer to write with pens that glide very easily

over the paper because my handwriting is fast….I have to scribble over it and

scratch things out. (Morris, 1990/2006, p. 147)

Not much has changed for Atwood, now in her mid-seventies. Big Think (Big Think,

June 14, 2011, 1:29) asked “What is your writing process?” Atwood responded with some crustiness that indicated her boredom with the question. “My absolute opening entry is always a handheld object with a point on one end. So, it’s going to be either a pencil or a pen” (Big Think, June 14, 2011, 1:30-1:42).

Still, Atwood’s response to Noah Charney in 2013 when he asked, “What is a distinctive habit or affectation of yours?” is revealing. She hinted at another reason for handwriting her manuscripts. The reason goes beyond just being a slow typist.

I don’t know whether it’s a habit or an affection. I usually start writing books in

longhand. I guess that’s a habit. I usually like to write with an implement that

flows. A Rollerball or a pen with ink in it. It’s the way it moves across the page,

that interests me. (Charney, 2013)

A remarkable feature of this statement is Atwood’s attention and interest in the movement of the pen across the page. It is, in some ways, similar to an artist’s interest in the brush and the brushstrokes on a canvas. It is also much closer to Goldberg’s idea that

“Handwriting is more connected to the movement of the heart” (2013). In the end, it doesn’t much matter how quickly the writer types. The brain works faster than fingers on the keyboard or fingers moving across a page. So the choice of pen over keyboard is deliberate and related to something in addition to/or other than speed. And it definitely helps Atwood’s creative process.

Desks, Typewriters, and Computers

In a recent interview with Noah Charney (2013), Atwood related the fact that, in the room she uses to write, she has two desks with one computer on each desk. Only one computer is connected to the Internet. This fact was communicated again in Sarah

Stodola’s new book Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors, along with an explanation for this quirk:

Despite embracing the Internet, though, Atwood recognizes the need to manage

one’s time spent on it. She limits her Twitter time to ten minutes per day, and

perhaps even more tellingly, she has two desks in the writing room she keeps in

her Toronto home, one with a computer hooked up to the Internet, one with a

disconnected machine. (2015, pp. 197-198)

Although Atwood maintains she can write anywhere, she usually writes at home at a desk.

The above anecdote is more important for its elaboration of her expressed need for a distraction-free environment in order to create. In a conversation with Peter Mansbridge

(The National, 2013), Atwood said she also keeps two typewriters in her home: one electric and one manual machine. The manual machine serves as a backup in the event of a power failure. It is difficult to place too much value on the typewriters in Atwood’s possession, as she writes her manuscripts longhand, and would necessarily type them into a computer to send electronically to a publisher. But if they serve as “backup,” they work as a comfort to her, and comfort enables creativity.

Drink more water/Go to bed earlier

In the mid-eighties, Atwood kept a journal of writing advice based on her writing experiences as they happened. She was later disappointed in her notes, finding only exhortations to herself to change certain elements of her daily routine. Atwood, who is a

keen observer of people and behaviour, and who frequently writes prescient speculative fiction based on her powers of observation, was dismissive of her unique writing needs revealed in the pages of her writing diary. Atwood is unclear about what she hoped to read in her diary about her composing process. But it seems to me that writing advice to the self about sleep needs, walking more often, and resisting the temptations that remove a writer from her writing are important bodily and psychic needs that need to be met for a writer to write. They were important enough for Atwood to record in her diary.

The requirements for sleep and physical activity while engaged in writing are negotiated throughout a writer’s life. As this inquiry has shown, changing circumstances of family and age have dictated when, and sometimes where, Atwood wrote. So what were, and continue to be, the needs of the body, mind, and/or spirit that Atwood talked about as part of a composition process more liberally understood?

In 2010, during a Creative Conversations workshop at Emory University, host

Rosemary Magee asked Atwood how she “nurtured the creative spirit and openness to the creative spirit in herself and others” (Emory University, 2010, 24:20). Atwood stressed the importance of available unstructured time. At the time of the workshop, Atwood bemoaned her immediate lack of unstructured time, due to overbooking.

Atwood also recommended that people walk more because walking helps brain activity, and “what is going to help your brain activity is going to help your creativity”

(Emory University, 2010, 24:45-26:00). Atwood told of people over many centuries who had found that the “mind will work for you when you’re not looking” (Emory University,

2010, 25:00-26:00). Further, she stressed if you have a deep problem and need answers, letting your mind work on the problem during sleep is especially effective.

In addition to walking and sleep as ways of nurturing the creative spirit, Atwood also stressed the need to practise one’s art. A pianist must learn music and do finger exercises to become accomplished. For a writer there is no substitute for “reading and reading and reading and writing and writing and writing” (Emory University, 2010,

26:05-26:30).

Ideas and Creating Empty Space

4:00 p.m.

I watch my four-blade wind spinner gracefully swirl in an autumn gust of wind. I need the right words for a line of poetry. The right words and the right rhythm. The wind spinner calms my monkey mind.

Andrew, my husband, returns from work. He pushes open the heavy glass door, and plops down on the wood stairs to remove his work boot. “Hey, you! I thought you were writing,” he mocks.

“I am writing.”

“From here it doesn’t look like a whole lot of writing is going on over there.

You’re staring off into space.”

On many occasions Atwood has addressed her need for uninterrupted time without distractions to write. She does not see this as something peculiar to writers, though. In fact, she works against promoting a romanticized view of “the writer” as being peculiarly selfish about carving out time for herself. “If you were a watchmaker and somebody interrupted you, you would probably be just as aggravated if you dropped your dial or whatever” (Gibson, 1973/2006, p. 8). In addition to a distraction-free zone,

Atwood described the writer’s need for empty space to allow ideas. It is a generalization

about writers she is willing to make because she believes listening and paying attention to the silence within the self is important to the creative process.

In a 1994 interview with Gabrielle Meltzer, Atwood reflected on the general busy-ness of modern life. She observed that people are “continuously occupied with many small details,” and place so much emphasis on a work ethic that dictates “every minute of our time has to be filled with the work that we do” that they leave no space for a new idea. Creative people need to leave empty space in their lives; therefore, part of their work “is doing nothing.” Atwood reminds that, “unless you have that moment of listening, unless you’re able to listen…You need silence within yourself in order to listen….Unless you can listen, you won’t hear anything (1995/2006, p.182). Atwood

(2002) wrote about the “vigil of waiting” in Negotiating With the Dead: A Writer on

Writing. In near religious terms, she stated, “art of any kind is a discipline…in the religious sense, in which the vigil of waiting, the creation of a receptive spiritual emptiness, and the denial of self all play their part (2002, pp. 96-87).

Listening to the silence and having time without distraction is very important to the creative process, in Atwood’s view. Meltzer (1995/2006) asked Atwood, somewhat humorously, about the possibility of people regaining their lost creativity by living in the silence of the desert for a period of time. Atwood responded seriously that it was “an old shamanistic technique…well-known to the prophets” and it would work (though it did not have to be the desert). The practice of fasting and isolation is an idea visited again during a discussion on creativity at an Emory University workshop. During a question and answer period with the student body, Atwood fielded a question about inspiration and

how to get ideas. She responded, “The old prophets and, indeed, shamans, used to fast in isolation, and you’ll get a lot of ideas that way” (Emory University, 2010, 57:52-58:15).

Creativity depends upon the writer being able to escape the daily rounds of chores, and noise, and distractions to make space for ideas, and listen to the silence where those ideas are whispered.

Support and Passion

Many times Atwood has wondered that, if the impulse for story is so strong and natural to humans, and so available to us, and once tied to our survival, why do so many people quit writing? Give it up? She raised this question in conversation with Joyce Carol

Oates (1978), Neil Gaiman (2015), and Mary Morris (1990). The answer is complicated, but often seems tied to the support young people often do not receive within their families, schools, and peer groups.

Before I examine how people can get in the way of writing, I suggest that

Atwood’s success is, in part, due to the support of her family during her childhood.

Atwood’s parents provided books, experiences, and permission to grow while she spent her childhood in the bush. “Rational debate was smiled upon, as was curiosity about almost everything” (2002, p. 8). Growing up during a time in Canadian literary history when there was no tradition of Canadian literature meant Atwood could unselfconsciously explore her voice. She had been writing poems, stories, and plays since the age of six, but it was not until she was sixteen years old that she knew she was a writer. She tells a story of composing a poem while walking across a football field.

I wrote a poem in my head and then I wrote it down, and after that writing was the

only thing I wanted to do….It wasn’t the result but the experience that had

hooked me: it was the electricity. My transition from not being a writer to being

one was instantaneous. (2002, p. 14)

Following this, Atwood showed the poem to her teacher, Bessie Billings. The teacher responded that the poem must be good, as she did not understand a word of it. Atwood agreed with Gaiman when he suggested, “It takes someone to say something like that”

(Gaiman, 2015, 30:40-30:50) to fan the writing fires.

Atwood’s passion for writing lends a momentum to her creativity. She hears the story that must be told. Despite her consistent fear of the blank page, despite the physical commitment she must make to the eighteen months required to see a novel through from beginning to end, despite the sacrifices she must make to family commitments, Atwood picks up the pen and begins again. Day after day. In a 1993 conversation with writer and editor James McElroy, Atwood refers to Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancient

Mariner” to explain how she experiences the urgency to write. She stated,

You’re going about your business and something grabs you and says, “There was

a ship.” You say, “But I have to go to a wedding.” And then they say, “No, this is

more important. There was a ship.” It has to be like that—otherwise, it’s just

connecting the dots…paint by numbers…doodling. (McElroy, 1993/2006, p. 167)

I want to know what happens to people who do not dream of being Writers with a capital

W. For those people, there is no ship, or terrible urgency to write. Would they have been happy as small w writers, writing journals/diaries/family stories, until something or someone got in the way? Atwood raised possibilities including insecurity, a lack of support, fear of failure, and a lack of feedback. In a 1972 conversation with Graeme

Gibson, Atwood suggested that those people with one book in them “got no feedback, and they gave up, and I would too” (Gibson, 1973/2006, p. 7).

Atwood’s inventory of reasons for giving up on an activity so important to our creative health might start a conversation about how to bring people back to the blank page. Of course, Atwood might caution against reading anything into her understanding of the writer’s process. She wrote: “It is our illusion that by knowing the answers to these questions we will know the central, the hidden, the necessary thing; that a writer’s power is to be found in the sum of such answers” (Atwood, 2005, p. 81).

Chapter 5: Lawrence Hill

“Life doesn’t feel right unless you try to seize it, make sense of it, and recalibrate it on a

page.”—Lawrence Hill

Chapter 5 explores Lawrence Hill’s creative process. I begin Chapter 5 with a section titled “Why Lawrence Hill?” in which I explore, in greater detail, my choice of Lawrence

Hill as a subject for this study. Chapter 5 describes Lawrence Hill’s creative writing process under the following subtitles: On Writing and Becoming a Writer; The Nurturing

Environment, Sub-text: The nurturing, UNsupportive home environment; Passion;

Courage; Imagination and Inspiration; Routines of Time and Place, Gestation, Writing

Furiously, Listening, and Going Deep, Staring into Space; Tools; Write What You Don’t

Know; Qualities of a Writer. Each section and sub-section reflects specifics of Hill’s writing practice as he has discussed them in interviews and workshops devoted to the writing process.

Why Lawrence Hill?

In May 2012, I sat in an audience of grade 12 Writer’s Craft students at the

Holiday Inn Convention Centre in St. Catharines, Ontario. The Niagara Catholic District

School Board (NCDSB) was hosting the second annual Inspiring Writers Student

Conference, a bold and costly initiative aimed at personalizing and extending the writing lessons of the classroom by introducing students to the wisdom of six writing mentors.

Lawrence Hill, author of the award-winning novel The Book of Negroes, gave the keynote address and fielded questions from students and teachers on subjects covering creative inspiration, skill development, and daily writing practices. The keynote address was followed by several writers’ workshops, two led by Hill. The first workshop was a

student workshop devoted to novel writing; the second, a teacher workshop devoted to teaching creative writing from Hill’s perspective as a novelist.

Until The Book of Negroes, I had little familiarity with Lawrence Hill.

Throughout my university undergraduate degree studies in English language and literature and later, as a high school teacher of English literature, I had read, studied, and analyzed the works of Canadian icons Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Northrup Frye,

Pierre Berton, James Reaney, and Margaret Laurence. These were Canadian writers with considerable years of writing experience; Lawrence Hill was a relative newcomer, and previously unknown to me. Atwood and Munro, two of the writers used in this inquiry, authored a large canon of work available to the literature teacher and student, spanning the genres of poetry, novels, non-fiction, and short stories. But the much younger Hill’s literary legacy seemed shallower. Although he had already published several books before The Book of Negroes, including Some Great Thing (1992), Any Known Blood

(1997), and Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada (2001), these works were relatively unknown. Hill addressed this in an interview with Mark

Medley for The Globe and Mail:

Believe me, I know what it’s like to have your book sell 10 copies. I think Some

Great Thing…in its first year probably sold 100 copies or something, and

probably got two reviews and was probably available for purchase in three stores

in the country. So I know what it’s like to write a book that meets a deafening

silence. (Medley, 2015)

Hill was a famously unrecognized writer on the Canadian writing scene who worked jobs as a journalist and political speechwriter to supplement his writing career. The Book of

Negroes (TBON) introduced Hill to fame, money, and the prestigious Commonwealth

Writers’ Prize in 2008. According to Hill, TBON also “sort of brought me into the schools” (“Celebrated writer encourages courage at TDSB”, 2010), where he continues to spread a message of embracing creativity.

On May 15, 2012, after much grandstanding by Niagara Catholic District School

Board (NCDSB) administrators, Lawrence Hill quietly approached the podium, sipped from a bottle of water, and spoke about writing, his early life as a writer, and his passion for the written word. I struggled to keep up with the wealth of advice he narrated through family stories and the rich descriptions of jobs that had supported him and from which he drew creative inspiration. Hill did not shy away from words like “passion” and

“inspiration” or “heart” and “soul.” Nor did he romanticize the writer. He recommended that writers organize their lives around jobs that will feed them and their families, as well as satisfy their craving for writing time.

In advance of Lawrence Hill’s keynote address, many of the eight secondary schools with the NCDSB had prepped students through an intensive study of The Book of

Negroes. Teachers anticipated brilliant questions about the novel from their Writer’s

Craft students. They would be somewhat surprised. Hill did speak about concerns of characterization, writing historical fiction, general craft-related issues, and writing a novel as a male from a female perspective. But the majority of questions from the student floor arose from a genuine interest in writing and becoming a writer. Hill did not disappoint.

After the critical acclaim heaped on TBON, Hill was in demand on the lecture circuit. In addition to the many book promotion tours he did for TBON, Hill also served

as a mentor to writers, sitting as writer-in-residence from 2011-2013 with the Toronto

District School Board (TDSB), and travelling throughout North America, sharing his philosophy of writing with student writers, graduates, as well as inmates in federal penitentiaries through his volunteer work with Book Clubs for Inmates. Lawrence Hill has not (yet) published a collection of essays on writing, but he works tirelessly as a writing guru and teacher to student writers. Hill recently accepted a faculty position in the

College of Arts at the University of Guelph. He will teach creative writing beginning July

2016. Hill’s passion for his art and sharing his wisdom as a storyteller make Lawrence

Hill an attractive subject for this inquiry. I look to Lawrence Hill for guidance, motivation, and support on my writing journey and in my role as a teacher of the writer’s craft.

On Writing and Becoming a Writer

Authors on the interview circuit following a book launch, or after receiving a prestigious award are frequently asked a version of the same question: At what point did you know you were a writer? Or, When did you choose to become a writer? Or, Why write? Hill traditionally answers the question by relating a story that goes back to his childhood and his desire for a kitten. I listened to Hill narrate his now familiar story in

2012, during the Inspiring Writers Workshop in St. Catharines. From his simple narrative of a common childhood wish for a pet, and the letter writing campaign that ensued, Hill touched on many truths of a writing life and process. After Hill’s keynote address and workshop, my students met with me to discuss what we learned about writing from

Lawrence Hill. I listened as one student after another pulled from Hill’s narratives of family life, working life, and volunteerism the many themes of writing that informed his

practice and calling as a novelist. Rarely does Hill indulge in a technical, how-to style instruction for how to be a writer. He tells stories; we listen and discover his themes.

This inquiry chapter begins with Lawrence Hill’s request for a cat. It is an appropriate place to begin, as it is the same starting point Hill uses when answering questions related to writing, nurture, passion, and inspiration. It is also a messy starting point. Although the cat story is short and entertaining, it also reveals much about the conflicts within Hill’s nurturing home environment, conflicts that pushed and pulled and worked against the writer’s passion.

The Nurturing Environment

Sub-text: The nurturing, UNsupportive home environment

1995: I have just published several poems in a thick Canadian anthology of poetry. On a writer’s high, I call my mother to share the realization of a dream. “Oh, Penny. I hope you’re not thinking of quitting your teaching job on the basis of a few published poems!” she says. “There’s no money in that sort of thing.”

2010: I hand out wrapped copies of my new book as Christmas gifts to my family: four of my short stories are included in this slender anthology of narrative non-fiction. “Is this all we’re getting, or did you buy us something?” They joke. No harm done. Mom puts her book, unwrapped, on the ottoman, away from her other gifts. When she leaves for the train home to Chatham, she collects her gifts. My book remains on the ottoman. “Mom,”

I call, feeling like a needy 52-year-old child, “You forgot my book. You could read it on the train.” Mom shuffles towards the door. She balances shopping bags filled with gifts.

“Oh, that’s okay, Penny. I’ll take it another time when I have less to carry. The book’s a bit heavy for now.”

Whenever Hill addresses the importance of a nurturing environment to his creative process, an irony underscores his examples. Hill narrates his childhood story of

“writing a letter to get a cat” from his reluctant father. Hill’s father bargained with six- year-old Larry, “If you can write me a well-worded letter with no spelling mistakes, I will give your request due consideration” (Sagawa, 2008, p. 310). The story ends well, and

Hill’s passionate letter writing is supported and rewarded with a cat. Hill cites this experience as the beginning of his lifelong passion for writing.

Hill tells many family stories about his supportive and nurturing parents and home life. Hill’s highly educated parents encouraged curiosity, reading, writing, and intellectual pursuits amongst their three children, all of whom became writers and/or musicians. But

Hill punctuates each story with the truth that his parents did not want their children to become artists. He believes that especially Black immigrant parents, but parents in general, “don’t want to see…kids become artists because parents are naturally a little conservative. They’re worried about their children’s future, and they’re sort of taking a conservative approach to encourage them to adopt traditional lines of work” (rookzTV,

2013, 0:37-0:50). These parallel and conflicting stories of parental support and discouragement are worth exploring, as they describe the circumstances that both nurtured and challenged Hill’s creative journey. In the end, from an environment that provided the raw materials for writing, but lacked any parental blessing, a writer emerged.

Hill is the bi-racial son of American immigrant parents. His successful Black father and White mother, both civil rights activists, emigrated from the United States the day after they married in 1953 in Washington, D.C. (The Author, n.d.) According to

Hill’s biography on Wikipedia , “the work of his parents in the human rights movement

and Black history greatly influenced Hill's work in identity and belonging as a writer”

(“Lawrence Hill”, n.d., para. 10). Hill’s parents encouraged their children to become

“educated, hyper-educated and hyper-professional to…escape the ravages, the discrimination, the segregation that [the father] faced…and to…mitigate against the possibilities of racism” (WGBHForum, 2014, 2:07-2:50). Hill believes it is quite common for Black immigrants to encourage their children to become doctors, lawyers, engineers, and architects so that these positions and education might protect them “from the economic, social, and racial vicissitudes they faced in the countries that they fled”

(Colgate University, 2015, 4:19-4:26). Hill stated his father was desperate that his children “become agile with pens and pencils, but to become lawyers” (Calgary Library,

2013, 2:20-2:30), because “the last thing immigrants are looking forward to in their sons and daughters is…to become a novelist” (Calgary Library, 2013, 1:40-1:55).

This story of immigrant parents and the great expectations they have for their children’s success outside of the arts is a familiar one, and it is a story Hill relates without bitterness. He joked,

Everybody loves a great book, a memorable film, or a seductive song. No

immigrant parent wants to see their own child dedicate their life to writing that

book, making that film, or composing that song. No sir. Let somebody else do that

and, please, just become a dentist! (HuronUC, June 26, 2012, 4:40-4:57)

Hill delivers several humorous versions of this story (Colgate University, 2015;

HuronUC, June 26, 2012; Calgary Library, 2013; WGBHForum, 2014; L. Hill, Inspiring

Writers Student Workshop, May 15, 2012), but tension lurks behind the comedy. Hill’s stories to student audiences point to the ongoing conflict he faced between his parents’

expectations of Hill for a traditional professional career, and Hill’s own passion for writing. And it is relevant to my inquiry to examine how Hill’s artistic passions were nurtured and simultaneously discouraged during his formative years.

Whenever Hill is asked about his mentors, he begins with his parents. It is an interesting starting point, given they hoped their children would seek careers outside the arts. He stated,

[M]y parents were mentors because my mother read to me religiously every night.

She would read poetry, and there’s nothing better really, nothing more beautiful

and more playful than nonsense poetry…it inculcates a sense of the absurd and

also a sense of language. (HuronUC, August 7, 2012, 2:12-2:40)

When Hill was three years old, his mother read A.A. Milne’s poem “Disobedience.” The experience shaped Hill’s lifelong appreciation for rhythms and sounds. He described the experience in this way: “Milne entered our imaginations through our ears by mimicking the sounds of our heart. When you read Milne’s poetry aloud, it feels as though you’re swimming in your own blood stream” (Calgary Library, 2013,16:16-16:29). He described

“Disobedience” as a “lovely, crazy, absurd, silly, playful poem, and it really…teaches the joy of language.” (HuronUC, August 7, 2012, 3:30-4:03). As an adult with an adult appreciation for rhythms, Hill stated about iambic pentameter,

Iambic pentameter, used in metric poetry and Shakespeare’s plays, is said to best

capture the rhythm of human speech. Its emphasis – an unstressed syllable,

followed by a stressed one…lodges in the mind and seems familiar to the ear.

Perhaps that’s because it’s also the sound of the human heart. It is the sound of

blood coursing through our bodies. (Calgary Library, 2013, 14:25-15:00)

Hill credits his mother’s devotion to reading nonsense poetry, verse, and Dr. Seuss stories aloud to him for instilling the love of language, a love of language that infuses and informs his novel writing.

Hill’s father also held a significant role in Hill’s development as a writer, even though his father did not encourage Hill’s aspirations to become a writer. The elder Hill’s ability as a storyteller influenced young Lawrence’s skills as a novelist, to a degree that

Lawrence Hill believes he was born to write. The Hill family regularly shared stories as a means of passing on family folklore, although he hesitates at calling these stories folklore.

He explained to Jessie Sagawa during an interview entitled “Projecting History Honestly:

An Interview with Lawrence Hill” that folklore was “just what your grandmother says” about family culture more than about family members (Sagawa, 2008, p. 309). Hill believes that much of the Hill “folklore” was actually invented, “wild unadulterated imaginings, in which my father or grandfather would tell stories about the man and the elements, nature and so on” (Sagawa, 2008, p. 309), and “that is what really interested me in the act of fiction writing” (Sagawa, 2008, p. 309).

These stories were passed on “in the sense of a griot” (Sagawa, 2008, p. 309), stories “[m]y father made up…rather than telling them. And he was a great oral storyteller” (HuronUC, August 7, 2012, 2:45-2:55). In an interview for the CBC with

George Stroumboulopoulos, Hill expanded on his father’s storytelling abilities: “[H]e knew how to withhold detail, deliver a good punch line, he knew when to give you what you needed to know and when to hold it back” (CBC, September 16, 2009, 2:50-3:00).

What was the result of these varied practices of reading poetry aloud and sharing true and invented stories of family culture amongst family members? Hill explained: “I was wired

to express myself creatively; I’ve been doing it since I was a child. Writing is the only kind of work that’s always excited every atom of my mind and body” (HuronUC, June 26,

2012, 5:15-5:26).

Hill’s parents provided a nurturing environment that inspired a passion, love, and respect for language, the sounds of words, and wild imaginings. As an avid reader and writer who frequently recommends young writers also “read, read, read” in order to expose themselves to language (Hill, Inspiring Writers Student Workshop, May 15, 2012),

Hill looks for beautiful language in the books he reads. He strives for beautiful language when he writes. He explained that, although he is not a poet, he “believes in beautiful language. I love all sorts of different kinds of writing. I like when I write, and often when

I read…a simple language, and one that concerns itself with how it enters the ear”

(WGBHForum, 2014, 21:35-21:49). Of value here to a new writer is Hill’s attention to the sounds of the words and their manipulation on the page to create magic. The focus is not grammar, spelling, and punctuation, or the technical side of writing. The focus is on the beauty and playfulness in language, and an attention to the sounds words make from the page.

I’ve always believed that writing…first enters your senses through the ear, not

really entering you through the eyes, coming in through the ear even though

you’re reading it privately. So I think it’s important to pay attention to the rhythm

and sound of language. I certainly was educated as such…I look for a sound that

sounds appetizing, that sounds enticing. (WGBHForum, 2014, 21:50-22:22)

During a workshop for students and teachers with the NCDSB in May 2012, Hill encouraged reading and writing as a means to creativity, and he credits his own success

to the gifts of literature he received from his parents during his formative years. “Give your children reading, and tell stories,” he said. “They are the greatest gifts to give kids”

(Hill, Inspiring Writers Student Workshop, May 15, 2012). He explained that these gifts, while first shared in the home, could be nurtured beyond the family.

Young people who are loved and are shown the love of literature and the love of

reading and the love of the cultivation of the mind…in their families, in their

schools, on the streets, in their community organizations, they move into [their

own creativity]. (“Celebrated writer encourages courage at TDSB”, 2010)

He argues, “The world needs artists” (Florescu, February 26, 2015), and fears if students are not nourished, “at home, or if they’re underestimated at school or if they don’t have the opportunity to be stimulated intellectually in their life, then chances are they won’t grow as much as they can” (“Celebrated writer encourages courage at TDSB”, 2010). In

2013, Hill continued this dialogue on encouragement and support. “If [students] are going to become artists, they should be encouraged rather than be discouraged. Accepted in the arts. Accepted, fostered, encouraged in all sorts of production…is necessarily going to encourage other people to step into the arts” (rookzTV, 2013, 0:56-1:18).

Much of what Hill accomplishes in student workshops and university lectures is supportive and encouraging. In one sense he is giving back to the writing community by serving as a mentor and sometimes teacher to young writers finding their way.

Passion

Graeme Harper (2012) asked in Inside Creative Writing: Interviews With

Contemporary Writers “What drives any of us to want to write creatively?...Could the words ‘passion’ or ‘obsession’ be applied to a long-term interest in creative writing?” (p.

40) Passion is a word Hill uses when describing what all writers need to write creatively and well, and he regales audiences with his story of how he learned the value of passion in writing.

When Hill regularly and humorously recounts his beginnings as a writer, he tells of being eight-years-old (sometimes he claims he was six-years-old) and begging his father for a cat he could neither afford to feed nor take to the veterinarian. Hill is asked to write his reluctant father a persuasive letter outlining the reasons he should be given a cat.

He explains the passion that drove the letter writing:

There is nothing like wanting something to lend a sense of passion to your writing.

I wasn’t just writing a letter in the abstract. I wasn’t just writing a letter to fool

around. I was writing because I wanted something. I had to persuade somebody….

I had to convince [my father]. Cajole him. Persuade him. (WGBHForum, 2014,

3:25-3:55)

Hill writes the letter and gets the cat. He jokes later that, much to his father’s dismay, a writer was created in that moment. “So, my father…actually drove me to the profession of writing by requiring all those letters of me when I was a boy. He made me a very passionate writer at a very young age, and I didn’t stop” (Sagawa, 2008, p. 310).

The cat story contains an important theme in Hill’s philosophy of writing: writing from and with passion. It is a theme he stresses during lectures and writer’s workshops.

In discussions, Hill returns to his early experience of letter writing for a cat, and speaks of its relevance to his practice today. He explained:

For me, the first act of writing was a highly political and highly selfish act....You

should be a bit selfish and political. And you should be looking for something

when you write. You should be looking to mine some passion. I wanted that cat,

so I took to that writing and I haven’t stopped since. (WGBHForum, 2014, 3:55-

4:13)

When Hill addresses audiences, he advises they listen to their artistic impulses. He stated,

“If you have a passion, go for it. Go for it with everything you’ve got (HuronUC, June 26,

2012, 7:08-7:14). He also cautions that to ignore one’s passion is risky.

[W]hen it’s in your blood, you’ve got to do it. And you ignore your passions at

your own risk….life looks a whole lot more interesting waking up at 16, 26, 36,

56, when you’re waking up with passion, and something you’re just burning to do.

Something that just lifts you up and moves you everyday. So I’m quite honoured

to be a novelist.” (Colgate University, 2015, 5:00-5:22)

Other words that pepper Hill’s lectures on writing include “heart” and “soul.”

Often, Hill refers to his novels as coming from his heart. This is easily understandable when he speaks of how he created Animata, the female protagonist of TBON, from his male perspective: he entered the female psyche of his daughter. For inspiration and deeper understanding of his character Animata, Hill imagined how his eldest daughter would feel, think, and behave in the circumstances he created in TBON. He explained, “I asked myself…to believe in the character I was creating. What if this was my own daughter? How would she have survived what Animata in the novel…has to endure?

How would she have kept going?” (Florescu, 2015) Employing such a personal touch and technique accounts for the heart and soul, passion and love Hill writes from.

Hill frequently refers to “writer’s heart” (Pearson, May 1, 2015). He suggested his heart was revealed in TBON, and that is what is autobiographical about the novel: “TBON

reveals…my soul and my heart, the way that it beats and the values that I have” (Sagawa,

2008, p. 312). His writer’s heart also affects how he enjoys each of his works equally. He cannot choose a favourite. This is because of the place each work of art comes from. He wrote:

[E]ach thing I do is a piece of my writing heart and soul and brain, and is part of

the mural…my life’s work….I can try to enjoy all my work and let it just stand as

being different expressions of my own creative soul. (torontopubliclibrary,

September 14, 2015, 39:00-39:25)

Student writers looking to Lawrence Hill for duplicable steps to writing success and fame might be surprised by the abstract advice to mine one’s life for passion. But it is Hill’s belief that “all artists are driven by a similar desire and passion to create” (Atkinson,

January 26, 2015), and it is this passion that will keep writers (Atkinson, January 26,

2015) creating every day. Hill likened the process to “sinking a pipe down into my…soul and looking to see what will bubble up that day” (The Banff Centre, December 2, 2013,

2:16-2:22), or “going into my own heart and seeing what’s in there and writing it out”

(The Banff Centre, December 2, 2013, 4:35-4:41). He believes that passion is a key element of the writing process and the writing life. “There is no better place to write but from a place of passion….You must write about something that is meaningful to you.

Otherwise, why bother?” (Hill, Inspiring Writers Student Workshop, May 15, 2012)

Courage

"It's a real act of courage to step into your own creativity," said Lawrence Hill to a gathering of students with the Toronto District School Board. “It takes a lot of guts”

(“Celebrated writer encourages courage at TDSB”, 2010). Hill speaks to student

audiences regularly about what it takes to be creative, to be an artist, to be a writer: courage. Writers and artists face a host of challenges ranging from self-doubt and parental censure, to knowing when to abandon a creative work in-progress. And Hill knows first-hand the courage it takes for young people to embrace a passion or follow a path that is contrary to parental wishes. Traditional professions appear to offer graduates a type of financial security that parents desire for their children. While Hill argues that

Black immigrant parents are particularly vocal about their wishes that their children enter professions in order to transcend the challenges their parents faced (Hill, Inspiring

Writers Student Workshop, May 15, 2012), he acknowledges that courage is required of all young people “to follow your…passions as a student and not to…let others, parents or teachers, direct you to a path that doesn’t work for you” (“Celebrated writer encourages courage at TDSB”, 2010).

Hill finds that university students tend to focus on the end result of their studies: the degree, the career, the dollars. The siren call of security is often more appealing than the uncertainty of living by one’s creative instincts. Lulled by the seeming safety of a degree, many students forego their creative calling to follow a well-travelled, traditional path. When asked, “Why embark on the road less travelled?” Hill responded that the routine paths do offer satisfaction in different areas of life. But these well-travelled paths are not for the artist who seeks to create something new. The artist must take risks and explore other areas (The Banff Centre, December 2, 2013, 1:10-1:47). He stated, “[I]f you want to create, going into a place where others haven’t travelled is more likely to offer you something rich, something unique” (The Banff Centre, December 2, 2013,

1:10-1:47). And taking the less-travelled road requires being brave enough to say to

concerned parents, “No, I’m not going to law school. I’m not interested in medical school.

I want to be a painter. I want to be a saxophonist. Or, in my case, I want to be a novelist”

(WGBHForum, 2014; Colgate University, 2015). Hill believes there is a greater risk to the self when refusing the call of the arts. Of his own experience, Hill discovered that life didn’t feel right when he was not writing. “I write to feel good. I write to make my life right” (Hill, Inspiring Writers Student Workshop, May 15, 2012). To do otherwise is to live in a state of unrest and instability.

While at the Banff Centre for the Arts in 2013, Hill was asked about his relationship with “going off the grid” (The Banff Centre, December 2, 2013, 0:25). In

Hill’s terms, going off the grid requires courage of the writer because the writer plunges into the unknown. It is an experience of vulnerability and exposure. The writer enters

“into uncharted territory that’s unsafe and…you don’t know what’s going to happen, and it can be explosive” (The Banff Centre, December 2, 2013, 0:43-0:53). He also elaborated on the idea of writers and madness. While it can be terrifying to live so much in the head, Hill feels that writers need to “plunge into the deep end of their own madness…obsessions, their own creative elan” (The Banff Centre, December 2, 2013,

0:33-0:38). The plunge into the darkness of the mind requires “faith that your own creative genius will steer you to something valuable on the page” (The Banff Centre,

December 2, 2013, 0:59-1:04) and is, of course, worth the plunge. But inexperienced writers without a history of production behind them could be turned away by this flirtation with madness, and shy away from the creative peek into the abyss. Perhaps this is what drove the late Jack Gilbert, poet and creative writing professor at the University of Tennessee, to ask a student who suggested she wanted to be a writer, “Do you have the

courage? Do you have the courage to bring forth this work? The treasures that are hidden inside you are hoping you will say yes” (Gilbert, 2015, p. 7).

Another challenge that must be met with courage is self-doubt. It takes great courage to expose yourself through your work, and to risk rejection after devoting years of effort to your work: “[L]et’s face it—you live for five years inside of your own head, with your own ideas, with no guarantee that anybody will be remotely interested, let alone buy it” (Florescu, February 26, 2015). For this reason, Hill’s father believed writers must have a “loose chromosome” (Florescu, February 26, 2015). More discouraging is the reality that experience and a publication history will not necessarily stop the crippling internal dialogue of doubt. Hill believes “most writers are plagued with self-doubt even after publication” (Hill, Inspiring Writers Student Workshop, May 15, 2012), but suggested a way around this contributing factor to writer’s block is to “believe in your own dignity and know that you have something to say” (Hill, Inspiring Writers Student

Workshop, May 15, 2012). Hill asserts that support from family, school, and community is crucial to building confidence in young aspiring writers. “I think young people have to have the courage to find what works for them to follow their passions” and find a voice

(Hill, Inspiring Writers Student Workshop, May 15, 2012).

Imagination and Inspiration

“Mr. Hill, where do you get your ideas?” or “Mr. Hill, how do you come up with ideas for your stories?” The questions to whom writers appeal for ideas, or how they tap into the wellspring of inspiration are common to writers. As a writer, I continue to be fascinated by writers’ answers to these general inquiries relating to the origins of creativity. After attending numerous writers’ workshops facilitated by poets and novelists

including Alice Denham, Anne Lamott, and PK Page, the answers, sometimes surprising, touch upon prayer and meditation practices that invoke spirit, God, or the creative energy of the universe. Hill said, “People who haven’t written books or haven’t tried creative writing might assume that we have a book, and it just spills out your fingers”

(WatchMojo.com, November 20, 2007, 0:55-1:00).

David Goicoechea, professor emeritus of philosophy at Brock University, and author of over nine books on philosophy and love, begins each writing session with a prayer to the “Inexpressible Creator” to “guide the beginning of our work, direct its progress and bring it to successful completion.” These appeals to a higher power resemble the practices of the ancient Greeks who summoned one, or a combination of the nine Muses responsible for astronomy, tragedy, poetry, music, dance and knowledge. D.

Dibbley (1993) of From Achilles Heel to Zeus’s Shield explained:

The Greek bards—including Homer…began their recitals by calling on the Muses

for inspiration….As a symbol for creative genius or inspiration…writers and

artists depend on their muse to give them the impetus to go on with their work,

especially in the middle of writer’s block or another dry period. (p. 138-139)

Homer begins the Odyssey by calling upon the Muse: “Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns” (Odyssey, line 1). Invocations to the Muse(s) can be found in

Dante’s Inferno (Canto II), Chaucer’s Troilus ad Criseyde (Book II), Shakespeare’s

Henry V (Act 1, Prologue), and Milton’s Paradise Lost (Book 1).

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything

Across Italy, India and Indonesia, gave a TedTalk in 2009 called “Your Elusive Creative

Genius” devoted to the logic of calling upon deities for inspiration:

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People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human

beings from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable

reasons. The Greeks famously called these divine attendant spirits of creativity

"daemons." Socrates, famously, believed that he had a daemon who spoke

wisdom to him from afar. (Gilbert, 2009, 6:20-6:50)

According to Gilbert, the Romans had their version of the Muse called Genius. She explained that the “Romans…believed that a genius was this…magical divine entity… believed to literally live in the walls of an artist's studio…and invisibly assist the artist with their work and would shape the outcome of that work” (Gilbert, 2009, 6:48-7:15).

She has embraced this version of inspiration, and feels it should be taught. Gilbert says, as a writer she writes, she shows up to do her job, and does the hard work; if the “divine, cockeyed genius assigned to your case decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed, for just one moment through your efforts, then ‘Olé!’ And if not, do your dance anyhow” (Gilbert, 2009, 18:35-18:52). Gilbert found a unique way to blend a writer’s work ethic with the classical concept of the muse or genius.

The ongoing conversation surrounding the writer and creative source is an important one. As evidenced from my brief account of the Greek Muses and Roman

Genius, the sources of inspiration have been channeled since antiquity. Writers continue to investigate ways of remaining in “sync” with their imaginations, agonize when they are blocked, and study the nature of creativity in order to better understand how it works from a psychological, biological, or spiritual viewpoint. Lawrence Hill is also deeply engaged in the dialogues on inspiration, imagination, and ideas. He challenges the more passive approach of sitting about waiting for inspiration to strike. Hill stated, “I think one

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of my chief responsibilities as a novelist is to disabuse aspiring writers of any notion they may have about the act of writing as a romantic process” (Atkinson, January 26, 2015). In his various roles as mentor to high school students, past writer-in-residence with the

TDSB, and respected speaker throughout North America on the subject of creative writing, Hill offers another alternative to accessing the imaginative life: he advocates work, travel, and volunteer experiences as sources of inspiration. On several occasions,

Hill has delivered this message of leaving our comfort zones for six months to a year, and expanding our insights into others and ourselves. He repeats,

I often tell young people if you really want to make your life exciting and rich and

interesting, just don’t think about the job or the dollar sign or the PhD or the MA

or whatever you’re going to study after high school. Think about volunteer work

overseas and you’ll never regret having done it. (CBC News, July 2, 2015, 4:25-

4:44)

So strong is his conviction in the imaginative insights available through travel and service,

Hill stated, “Without a volunteer life, I would have never imagined or written the books that have built my professional life” (Noble-Hearle, October 10, 2014). His numerous trips to Niger, Cameroon, and Mali, beginning thirty-five years ago with Crossroads

International, have had a creative impact on his life and work. “It has opened me up—I don’t think I ever would have written The Book of Negroes or other novels of mine, partially set in Africa, had I not worked as a volunteer several times over” (CBC News,

July 2, 2015, 4:18-4:29). He also said these trips, “opened up a creative vein that I have mined ever since” (Any Known Blood: An Interview with Lawrence Hill, http://lawrencehill.com/any_known_blood_interview.pdf).

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His experiences in Africa, living and working amongst people on African- designed community development projects, sparked an idea for The Book of Negroes.

Nearly bleeding to death in West Africa and eventually surviving by virtue of a blood transfusion in 1979 became the impetus for several books with blood as a motif and identity as a theme. In a metaphorical sense, volunteerism and travel serve as Hill’s

Muses, and he does not see his way through writing without these experiences. He credits his work with Crossroads International for opening “the world of writing to me, because all of my books touch down on Africa in one way or another. It opened up a personal connection to Africa, which I guess I was longing for” (HuronUC, August 7, 2012, 6:15-

6:28). Further,

[W]itnessing people living joyously in ordinary ways…with a tenth or a

hundredth of what we have in Canada…moved me to feel the energy and the soul

and the aspects of community that are so rich in many parts of Africa….It

changed me in terms of how I chose to write, ‘cause I was really just finding my

own way as a writer at the very time that I first started travelling to Africa. So it

helped me develop as a writer, and it helped shape my fiction. It helped light me

up with this sense of passion about the things that I’d like to write about and

explore, so it really changed me forever.” (torontopubliclibrary, September 14,

2015, 56:40-57:47).

Young writers and interviewers alike have inquired about the inspiration behind

Hill’s historical fictional novel, The Book of Negroes and what inspired the dystopian novel, The Illegal. Hill’s answers to questions of inspiration and the imagination point to his interactions with people from various jobs he has held, and to the volunteer work he

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continues to do with Book Clubs for Inmates, and with Crossroads International in Africa.

Hill does not invoke Muses, nor do they speak to him through meditation. And while he does prefer to go off and seek the quiet of a cottage to write, his approach to writing defies sitting around and waiting for inspiration to hit. His wisdom on inspiration and imagination comes through narratives of volunteerism, activism, and identity.

Hill also cautions audiences about waiting around for inspiration to hit. Instead, he spells the acronym GYAIC: get your ass in chair. It serves as “pointed and valuable” advice (Atkinson, January, 26, 2015) for writers who might otherwise be inclined to believe that the writer’s personal Muse dictates plot, or that characters in novels direct the story or tell the writer what to say. Hill recognizes there are writers who claim to have characters “take over” the plot. But he stated, “I can’t say I’ve had the experience of being led around the page by a character…it doesn’t feel that way….For me, it’s just sweat” (torontopubliclibrary, September 14, 2015, 51:10-51:23). He used the acronym

GYAIC in talks with NCDSB students and other interviewers about the writing process, and stressed that writing is hard work. Books get written during uninspired moments when the desire to give up is strong, and the only answer is to GYAIC and write. Several times during the writing of TBON, Hill worried he might not complete the novel. In an interview with Donna Bailey Nurse for The Ottawa Citizen, Hill stated, “I had to struggle and struggle to figure all this out. I sometimes wondered if I had the strength to do it”

(Nurse, February 18, 2007). But perseverance is a defining trait of writers. According to

Hill’s friend Oakland Ross, “Larry has really persevered” (Ashenburg, December 2009).

Finally, at a writers’ conference in St. Catharines, Ontario in 2012, Hill asked the audience, “Do you think Shakespeare waited for inspiration? Are winning Kenyan

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runners running on inspiration alone? Does the guy emptying trash cans and following the garbage truck down the street need to be inspired to get the job done?” The conference hall is quiet. The students are quiet. They do not think about writing in these ways. Someone raises his hand, and asks, “So, Mr. Hill, are you saying writers aren’t inspired?” “No, I’m saying writers don’t wait for inspiration to get started. They have a job to do. They have an action plan that moves them away from the nebulous. Writers write, write, write. They write when they feel like it. They write when they don’t feel like it, because they have to take care of themselves and others, if they have families. It comes down to GYAIC” (Hill, Inspiring Writers Student Workshop, May 15, 2012).

Routines of Time and Place

Graeme Harper (2012) wrote in Inside Creative Writing: Interviews with

Contemporary Writers that “[c]onsidering space and place is…of interest in understanding what stimulates and supports us when we’re undertaking creative writing”

(p. 100). Harper’s definition of place is broader than location, and can include: “the type of instrument we use to write” (p. 100); time, “[a]s a physical act creative writing has duration” (p. 100); and “cultural beliefs and historical conditions” (p. 103). Harper said,

“place and time are practically influential in creative writing. Place and time form part of a creative writer’s ‘habitat’” (p. 102); Harper (2012) also recognizes that the “creative writer who sits at home and explores an imaginary world, appearing to use only the barest of empirical evidence…is at least as common, if not more common, as the writer who sets off to explore the world through direct and recorded observation” (pp. 102-103).

That writing “form and genre contribute something…writing of certain genre actively encourages travel or relocation” (p. 102).

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I can examine Lawrence Hill’s process as a novelist and writer of historical fiction using Harper’s expanded and more comprehensive understanding of environment and habitat. Hill has spoken on numerous occasions about the overall benefits of travel to the writing process, as well as the travel required of him when he researches an historical fiction piece. When Maria Ien asked Hill about the importance of “changing location” to a writer, Hill responded, “I like to go away, and I do find that it shakes me up in a good way” (torontopubliclibrary, September 14, 2015, 52:55-53:00). These changes of location sometimes include an extended trip to Africa, such as the trips he had to make during the filming of TBON in South Africa. The changing circumstances of Hill’s life would often dictate the writing space. In the early years, and with a young family around him, Hill rented space above a Hamilton bookstore. In 2009, Hill’s family moved into an Oakville,

Ontario home with more space. However, family life continued to impact his writing:

“Somebody always needs to go to the doctor or to a hockey game in Sarnia or to karate or flute, and it’s not predictable” (Ashenburg, December 2009).

At other times, Hill finds peace and a lack of distraction by staying at a friend’s cottage. This “retreat” a couple times a year is helpful to his creative process, and serves to energize him, and ready him to write at home. Of these extended periods away, Hill stated, “I just go somewhere to be alone for five or ten days and write a great deal. And I do…those writing binges usually a couple times a year.” (torontopubliclibrary,

September 14, 2015, 52:44-52:52). It is a sentiment he repeats frequently when asked where he does his best work. He explained to Jason Purcell,

I get my best work done a few times a year. When I leave home, borrow

somebody’s cottage or go somewhere where I’m not involved with anybody or

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don’t have any obligations, or I don’t have to cook, and I can just work….For me

it’s a way to finish a project to go away somewhere, borrow somebody’s house or

cottage or go to some writing colony where I can be just all by myself and work.

(Canadian Literature Centre, September 16, 2015, 5:23-6:25)

Katherine Ashenburg, writer for Toronto Life, suggested that the undistracted period of writing, when Hill no longer needed to survive by writing political speeches, “contributed to the incantatory power of the TBON’s language” (Ashenburg, December 2009).

Today, Hill generally writes at home. And like so many parents who converted their children’s bedrooms into offices or studios, Hill stated, “as our children started moving out and going to university, the bedrooms started opening up at home, so I just took over one” (torontopubliclibrary, September 8, 2015, 52:10-52:18). But the periods of time spent working undisturbed in isolation continue to be a requirement of Hill’s creative process. Hill said of his alone time: “The biggest test is to go inside myself to be alone: no phones, or email, no friends, no applause, no fans. Just be alone” (The Banff

Centre, December 2, 2013, 4:16-4:28). It is interesting to note here, that though Hill says it is a “test” to go inside himself, in an earlier interview he spoke of the “protection” and

“comfort” going inward provided. Hill was asked directly, “How do you protect yourself?”

(The Banff Centre, December 2, 2013, 6:08). Hill indicated he “let his mind go wandering” (The Banff Centre, December 2, 2013, 6:11). On occasions when Hill feels uncomfortable, or blocked, or bored, he said,

I just sort of seal myself off from the world and go wandering in my mind

somewhere else. I find that very comforting. It usually leads me to something I

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can think about to do with the book I’m working on. (The Banff Centre,

December 2, 2013, 6:20-6:30)

Hill generally believes that writing is a solitary act, one that removes you from others. He joked, “at a certain point, hopefully before publication, you start to engage with people who can slap you to your senses” (torontopubliclibrary, September 8, 2015, 35:47-35:52) and help you relate to your everyday life again.

Gestation

Hill is candid about the number of years it takes him to write a novel, citing from five to ten or fifteen years of gestation before finally putting pen to paper. It is an extraordinarily long time compared to other writers who mull ideas for days or weeks before writing. Hill considers the gestation or percolation period as the time spent from first getting an idea to working it out on paper. During a recent reading of The Illegal,

Hill stated, “And it seems to me that any novel that I write ends up having gestated for fifteen years…until I got ready to write it” (Canadian Literature Centre, October 2, 2015,

2:53-3:02). In an interview with Steve Paikin, Hill again talked about his long period of percolation. He said, “I tend to be a very slow writer…most of the novels I’ve turned to have been novels that did indeed percolate for a couple decades before I went there” (The

Agenda with Steve Paikin, November 26, 2015, 2:12-2:21). And, “as usual for me, ideas seem to gestate a long time, so I’ve been thinking about this actually for decades, although finally only in the last five years I was able to devote myself to it” (The Agenda with Steve Paikin, November 26, 2015, 0:24-0:35).

Audiences composed of students and young writers might be discouraged by

Hill’s stories of decades-long gestation periods before commencing a writing project. It is,

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however, Hill’s process. He does not suggest that others take so much time to think over their ideas. Hill needs the time to get ready to write, to get comfortable with the ideas, to do the research, and to understand. The lesson for the writer might be to take the necessary time for ideas to mature before advancing to the page.

Writing Furiously, Listening, and Going Deep

In a 2009 interview, Hill was asked about jobs he’d held to support himself that had also contributed to his writing. His job washing floors at the Sunnybrook Medical

Hospital in Toronto provided Hill with many long stolen periods of reading time. Without explaining how, he believes the extra reading he did that summer advanced his literary career. This experience connects with Hill’s belief that writers must “read, read, read.”

Hill also tells of moonlighting in Gull Lake, Saskatchewan, as a train traffic controller in the 70s. Although he worked a twelve-hour shift, only three or four trains would pass through Gull Lake, leaving Hill with several hours to “write and write and write and play the guitar half the night. So, I got a lot of writing done and had a lot of solitude which writers need, as I worked alone” (CBC Books, March 5, 2009, 3:40-3:50). Solitude is a constant throughout Hill’s writing narrative. When surrounded by family in a busy house,

Hill left for an office over a Hamilton, Ontario bookstore to write. Twice a year, Hill finds isolation at a friend’s cottage. It is during these times away from distraction and family life that Hill “binge writes” up to twenty pages a day. Hill told Kevin Somers

(2009) in an interview for Raise the Hammer, "I can write for up to ten hours a day.”

Lawrence Hill is a self-described “on or off writer” with no set writing routine. In

2007, Hill spoke to Donna Bailey Nurse for The Ottawa Citizen following the publication of The Book of Negroes and The Deserter’s Tale.

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“My life is chaos….I wish I could say I have some nice organized system where I

get up every morning at seven o’clock, have my coffee and go to work, then work

all day and tuck it in at 9 p.m….But my life is nuts. We are a blended family of

five kids…I just worked on and off. (Nurse, February 18, 2007)

Hill told Kevin Somers (2009), "I write quickly, sloppily, but edit, edit, edit." Rewrites are, "Exhilarating." Somers (2009) describes Hill’s routine: He writes furiously, then goes back to it. (2009) It appears from his descriptions of busy family life, that Hill must carve out alone time to compile and creatively render the pages and pages of research for an historical fiction novel, or to reflect on years of experience and travel to imagine a dystopian setting for a fictional novel. He acknowledged, “It causes discomfort for my family, but it's very productive" (Somers, 2009). It will be interesting to see how the more recent changes to Hill’s family life will impact his writing time. The children are growing up and moving out, leaving Hill time and space in his home to create.

When Hill describes himself as a slow writer, he might be referring to the length of time it takes him to complete a novel. For when he speaks of the act of writing, he regularly claims to be a fast writer, a survival technique he learned from his several jobs as a journalist. The best advice Hill received as a young writer was to “write quickly.”

Writing quickly allows for ideas to come bubbling up without interference from the internal editor, and also helps prevent writer’s block. Hill narrated his experience as a young journalist learning how to “stop thinking, just write” (Shea, 2015) He said,

[T]his senior reporter came over and said, ‘Larry, for God’s sake, stop thinking,

just write.’ I was nonplussed in the moment—it seemed the height of idiocy. But

he was completely right. Today, I deal with writer’s block by trying to go fast and

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not to let my inhibitions and my critical mind take over the explosive creative

mind. By going fast, you don’t allow that criticism to catch up, you just plow right

over and just keep on going, baby, and see where you get to. After you have a

draft, you can go back and edit and change and cut and bring your intellect into it.

(Shea, 2015)

Writing quickly also serves the imagination. Hill regularly speaks of ideas coming up from his heart and soul. He realizes that writing slowly while worrying about others’ reactions to his work or whether he can repeat his past successes can stop his pen and shut down his imagination. He stated there is

an explosive, elemental aspect to writing that I try to capture in the first draft—

just…let it rip and not worry about reactions. Going fast helps a great deal in

terms of gaining access to your subconscious and just to let things come bubbling

up. (Shea, 2015)

This is advice he gives to student audiences everywhere. Its value is in the respect for the quick, explosive, unpolished nature of inspiration, followed by the intellectual process of refining and shaping the work. Hill describes these aspects of the act of writing as exhilarating.

Staring into Space

I drive over crunchy snow and ice in a Port Dalhousie parking lot, park, put my car in neutral, push my seat back, and look out over the dark harbor. The car thermometer shows -12C. I leave the car running and the heater on. Neil Peart wrote

“Lakeside Park” about this very place. I don’t see the ducks. I recall a passage from The

Catcher in the Rye: Holden Caulfield asks a taxi driver, I think, where the ducks go when

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the pond in Central Park freezes over. I unsnap the seatbelt, slide off my winter clogs, and pull my legs over the stick shift to rest on the passenger seat. Another car pulls into the lot; its headlights briefly illuminate the interior of my car. It drives slowly in a circle and leaves.

When I shift into first gear thirty minutes later, and view the gunmetal night of

Port Dalhousie in my rearview mirror, I am no closer to finishing my speech. But I feel better. Calmer. I know the idea will come in its own time. It’s always this way. I’ve learned to trust the quiet and my daydreams.

In What We Ache For: Creativity and the Unfolding of Your Soul, Oriah Mountain

Dreamer (2005) addresses the necessity of empty time. Empty time is unique to the individual. Dreamer explained it as follows:

Empty time is time to rest, renew, and replenish by following the impulse of the

moment. Empty time is time to slow down, to find the stillness and spaciousness

that allow us to stop all the doing and simply be. (p.127)

And Dreamer (2005) is convinced by experience, her own and those experiences of others, that resisting the silence results in dry periods. She wrote:

If there is one consistent thing that stops people committed to doing creative work

from doing it, it is this: a lack of necessary silence in their lives, an inability or

unwillingness to find and stay with the stillness, to regularly create empty time in

their day or their week. (p. 128)

Similarly, Hill stated, “Creative people need time to stare into space and see what bubbles up” (Atkinson, January 26, 2015). As previously explored, Hill must frequently leave his home to find this quiet time, at a cottage, a writer’s retreat, or a national park.

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He visits Banff regularly, and finds he can “re-centre himself and come back to the basics and remember what’s important…and what’s less important…to cast off the superfluous and focus on what’s meaningful” (The Banff Centre, December 2, 2013, 5:54-6:07). He also likes to explore his soul and be surprised by what appears on the page. He said, “I’m kind of stunned by what’s been lurking around in my own subconscious that I’ve somehow tapped into…and allowed to come rushing up like a volcano” (The Banff

Centre, December 2, 2013, 2:28-2:36).

Tools

Hill was asked, “What’s in your survival kit?” He responded, “Food, notebook, pen, a good notepad, and many, many sharpened pencils” (The Banff Centre, December 2,

2013, 3:36-4:12). Yet Hill does not state a preference for either longhand first drafts or typed drafts on a laptop. Katherine Ashenburg (2009), writing for Toronto Life Magazine stated, “Hill wrote his first story at 14, on his mother’s L.C. Smith typewriter. He loved the physicality of typing—smacking the keys smartly, slamming the arm at the end of every line—almost as much as the writing.” Hill’s typewriter was a constant companion.

An excerpt from his short story “Meet You at the Door” illustrates the fact: “On my left arm, balanced against my chest, was an L.C. Smith typewriter, heavy enough to be a weapon of war. Catapulted over a battlefield, it could have taken a man out (Hill, http://thewalrus.ca/meet-you-at-the-door). Whatever his preferred tool for composing, pen, pencil, or word processor, Hill is not superstitious about it.

Write What You Don’t Know

Unrelated to matters of time, place, and technicalities related to writing, Hill’s most recent words of advice to student audiences go against what many writers and

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teachers of writing believe: Write what you don’t know. Until recently, Hill bought into the instruction to write what you do know. It is writing prompt he, and many of us, are familiar with. Hill describes a situation where a teacher tells a class of elementary students to write about their recent holiday: write about what you did, what happened to you, what you know (Shea, 2015). Today, Hill considers this a disservice to writing students and disrespectful to the imagination, because writing what you know often disregards the imagination. Hill said, “To use your imagination is to use a gift of the gods”

(Shea, 2015).

The Book of Negroes required months of research on a subject and period of time he had little knowledge of, but Hill is relaxed about the research component of the writing process. Hill stated, “Anybody can do research” (Shea, 2015). He explained how he wrote TBON from the voice of an eighteenth century teenage girl: “[T]hat involved a lot of research and the rest I imagined” (Shea, 2015). Writing what you don’t know engages the intellect and the imagination. The intellect furnishes the research, while the imagination fills in the rest and gives life to the facts.

Qualities of a Writer

Hill is an established, successful writer and mentor to writers. His many years on the road, offering writing wisdom to students and young writers through workshops arranged by school boards and universities, and mentoring students in his role as writer- in-residence suggests he has thoroughly considered his own practice as a writer. Often the talk necessarily turns to the concerns of character creation and development, accurately writing history for an historical fiction, and how to create tension in a plot. But the text and transcripts of Hill’s interviews show what he believes are the qualities a writer needs

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to begin and sustain a writing practice. Writing requires compromise, perseverance, and maturity. Writing calls for courage, passion, and openness. Hill talks about writing as an act of empathy and morality; it is an act that calls for truthfulness. Truth is an ingredient of the writer’s art, particularly necessary when rendering life stories of others in works of literature. The writer has a responsibility to the truth and the lives illuminated by that truth.

Many of Lawrence Hill’s interviews with journalists, book reviewers, students, and educators serve as a meditation on writing and the writer. He is now a creative writing professor at the University of Guelph, where I expect he will necessarily provide technical information on story development and plot structures. But these are learned formulae, and Hill is a philosopher. He teaches through a philosophy of writing to keep the writer inspired, passionate, and true to the art.

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Chapter 6: Alice Munro

"It's certainly true that when I was young, writing seemed to me so important that I would

have sacrificed almost anything to it…” ~Alice Munro

Chapter 6 explores Alice Munro’s creative process. I begin Chapter 6 with a section titled

“Why Alice Munro?” in which I explore, in greater detail, my choice of Alice Munro as a subject for this study. Chapter 6 describes Alice Munro’s creative writing process under the following subtitles: Becoming a Writer, A Fine Balance, Early Years: Writing in the

Slivers of Time, Writing in Later Years; Conditions for Writing, The Ideal Place; Writing at Home: The Particulars of a Writing Life; Writer’s Block; and Inspiration and the “Gift.”

Each section and sub-section reflects specifics of Munro’s writing practice as she has discussed them through interviews devoted to the writing process and her success as a

Nobel Prize Laureate.

Why Alice Munro?

Alice Munro, as a subject for my inquiry, made sense early in 2013, before she received the Nobel Prize for Literature, and was lauded as a “master of the contemporary short story” by the Swedish Academy. I taught select Alice Munro stories to my grade 11 and 12 English students, and studied her narrative techniques in the senior writer’s craft classroom. Yet, when I discussed my intention to closely examine Alice Munro’s writing process for this inquiry, many people questioned the decision. Friends and co-workers suggested I consider writers with broader canvasses; Munro’s concentration is exclusively the short story. No one questioned my choice of Margaret Atwood, a writer whose reputation and critical reception overshadows Munro’s, and who possesses iconic status in Canada, as well as a substantial canon of published, award-winning poetry,

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essays, novels, speculative fiction, and non-fiction books. Although Alice Munro is not reclusive in a J.D. Salinger sense, she often shuns the spotlight, social media, and interviews; Atwood maintains a public profile through social media and a Twitter account, regularly engaging in discussions about literature and writing with followers.

During the 2010 winter session at OISE, I enrolled in Expressive Writing:

Practice and Pedagogy, a graduate course taught by Dr. Guy Allen. We wrote narrative non-fiction using a strict set of rhetorical devices and general guidelines for effective storytelling. One evening we briefly discussed influential novelists and short story writers.

Dr. Allen added, “One of the best writers in the world is right here in Southern Ontario.

Alice Munro.” No one argued with the professor, but I sensed resistance to Dr. Allen’s estimation of Munro’s stature in the literary world. Of greater interest to me was the number of writers in the class who had little familiarity with Munro beyond having heard her name somewhere. In 2009, Alexandra Alter wrote, “Alice Munro is often described as both universally adored and chronically underrated” (Alter, 2009). Munro’s reticence, combined with her strict focus on the short story form, and an ongoing unwillingness or inability to offer advice to young writers contribute to a devaluing of her wisdom, experience, and status as a writer of influence.

I expected that much could be learned from Munro, born and raised in small-town

Wingham, Ontario in 1931. She was a front-line, female writer who faced down challenges on historical, societal, and literary fronts. She lived and wrote through strict expectations for women defined by post-war Canadian society. These expectations, narrowly defined, determined her options as a young woman, wife, and mother. Sheila

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Munro, the eldest daughter of Alice Munro, wrote in her memoir, Lives of Mothers and

Daughters: Growing Up With Alice Munro:

It was the beginning of the fifties, that decade so notorious to later feminists, a

time when the curious logic of Freudian thinking permeated the culture. Yes, it

was good for a woman to be educated…more or less for the sake of her children

and to be a credit to her husband….Brainy, ambitious women, women who did

not accept the passive role with good grace, suffered from a ‘masculinity complex’

(Munro, 2001, p. 12)

Munro described to Louise France. in a 2005 interview for The Guardian, her sheltered life as a married woman:

I found it hard to be young. When I was married in my twenties, I hated being

regarded as "the little wife". You don't know what it was like then! I'd never even

written a cheque. I had to ask my husband for money for groceries. (France, 2005)

Further, Munro emerged onto the literary scene as an unknown female during the fledgling days of Canada’s literary identity. When Munro’s first collection of short stories, Dance of the Happy Shades, won the Governor General’s Award in 1968, Alice

Munro continued to be an “unknown” writer. Robert Thacker wrote in the biography,

Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives: “Munro recalls visiting a bookstore looking for Dance after it had won. When she asked for it…she was told by the owner that he did not keep those Governor General’s books in his store—they did not sell” (Thacker, 2005, p. 196).

Catherine Sheldrick Ross (1992), author of Alice Munro: A Double Life, reported,

“Dance didn’t sell well initially, or produce much in royalties—four years later, it had still not sold out its original print run of 2,500 (“Conversation” 62, cited in Ross, p. 65).

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It is difficult to know much about Munro’s writing process during her early years.

Munro concealed the fact of her writing from family and friends. Sheila Munro (2001) quoted her father, Jim Munro, about Alice Munro’s secrecy surrounding her writing. He stated, “Your mother always had a huge guilt feeling about writing because you kids theoretically were being neglected while she was trying to write” (Munro, p. 57). Alice

Munro likens this deceit to Jane Austen’s storied behaviour of hiding her writing. Austen knew the shame of female authorship, and would, according to Austen lore, listen for the creaking door outside her writing room, which gave warning of approaching guests. She would then cover her writing with her embroidery or sewing project. Ross (1992) stated in Alice Munro: A Double Life:

Like Jane Austen, who put an embroidery frame over her manuscript when

anyone came into the room, Alice protected her writing. She would lie, and claim

to be sewing sitting-room curtains rather than say she had to stay home to work

on a story. (Ross, p. 55)

Writers today might reasonably question why Munro felt compelled to hide her writing during the 1960s. Unlike Mary Ann Evans who published as George Eliot; the

Brontë sisters Charlotte, Emily, and Anne who published as Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, twentieth-century female writers no longer needed to publish using male names. However, there is a suggestion that J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, was convinced to publish using initials instead of her first name Joanne, to attract a young male readership to her books. Sheila Munro (2001) offered another reason for her mother’s clandestine writing activities, and it touches on the writing process itself. S. Munro explained, “the work she was doing being so important to her, the creative process so

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fragile and precarious…she had to protect it at all costs. Drawing attention to herself as a writer was the last thing she wanted to do” (Munro, p. 56). In 2012, Munro stated in an interview with Deborah Treisman (2012) that “the sort of open rule that women who tried to do anything so weird as writing were unseemly and possibly neglectful” resulted in her writing privately, and in the gaps between diapers and naps (Treisman, 2012).

Although the first Governor General’s Award did not significantly impact

Munro’s fame amongst the Canadian public, or fund her pursuit as a full-time writer, she realized positive effects of the literary prize on her family and on her self-identification as a writer. In Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives, Thacker (2005) quoted a 1986 interview with Munro and interviewers, Connolly, Freake, and Sherman, published in What

(September-October 1986), detailing her experience of winning the 1968 Governor

General’s Award:

It did a lot for my prestige in the family. I was living with my first husband when

I won the first one and my being a writer had never been…well, I think to that

point they were thinking of it as something I would get over. So my whole family

was very proud. My parents-in-law were proud. My father was astounded. And so

it did something for them, it did something for me. And it was after that I would

tell people I was writing, and that it was a thing which I did, which occupied my

time, and before that I would never mention it. (Thacker, 2005, p. 198)

S. Munro (2001) wrote in her memoir that the Governor General’s Award for Munro’s first collection of short stories earned her grudging respect from her in-laws. It was no longer shameful to be a writer. S. Munro (2001) stated, “It wasn’t until many years later that my mother’s career as a writer did become acceptable to them, after she won the

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Governor General’s Award for…Dance of the Happy Shades, in 1968. Being the in-laws of a successful writer…who published books, and won prizes…that was something… very acceptable indeed” (Munro, p. 20).

After the 1968 Governor General’s Award, Munro began to own her identity as a writer, and claim it officially as an occupation for government purposes. Ross (1992) wrote,

After this, she had to give up the ruse of curtain making and admit publicly that

writing was what she did. When the 1971 census taker asked for her occupation

and was poised to write “housewife,” she said for the first time ever, “writer.”

(Ross, p. 65)

As I begin this chapter, Ms. Munro is 84-years-old, and has authored more than fourteen original short story collections and compilations, and won many prestigious national and international literary prizes and awards, including but not restricted to three

Governor General’s Awards, two Giller Prizes, three O. Henry Awards, the

Commonwealth Writers Prize, and the Nobel Prize for Literature. She began writing at the age of 14 years, and has garnered wisdom and experience over a lifetime that now informs her reflections on her literary process. For these many reasons, Munro is approachable and desirable as a fit subject for this inquiry. However, her reluctance to address the writing process in the service of developing young writers is a concern I must raise. Unlike Lawrence Hill, who regularly speaks about the writing process through his positions as writer-in-residence, mentor to young writers, and professor of creative writing at the University of Guelph, Alice Munro shuns teaching positions. Like Margaret

Atwood, Munro has little to say directly about her writing process, or the writing process

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in general. Once employed as a writing instructor at York University (1973) and writer- in-residence at the University of Western Ontario (1974-75) Munro resigned both positions. She continues to assert that creative writing cannot be taught. Sheila Munro

(2001) wrote: “At Western she wouldn’t be teaching a class the way she had in Nelson.

She and the head of the English department agreed that ‘creative writing could not be taught,’ but she was there to offer individual support” (Munro, p. 237). When interviewed by BookBrowse, Munro stated, “It's not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different” (“A Conversation with Alice Munro,” n.d.).

However, Munro offered yet another reason for distrusting creative writing classes, and it is not related to cultivating creativity or creative writers. Munro commented on a “group mentality” that develops and informs the writing class, resulting in student writers who produce similar stories based on a successful formula. She discussed this with Alexandra Alter (2009):

When you get groups of people, one of the dangers is that you will get a kind of

story, a kind of work that is effective, and everybody in the class is doing the

same thing because there’s a powerful personality in the class. (Alter, 2009)

Munro is concerned that an original work cannot find a singular voice within the overwhelming group voice, and the work gets lost. This is a very different argument from

“creative writing cannot be taught.”

Munro also confessed to having difficulty when speaking about her own creative process. On the subject of writing, Munro sounds very much like her close friend,

Margaret Atwood, who also believes it is nearly impossible to advise young writers.

Munro spoke to Victoria Ahearn (2013) about her inability to address the writing process.

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I am just at a loss when it comes to talking about writing. I often think that I’m

not explaining it very well, because it’s not something I’m thinking about. It’s not

really a process I think about in an abstract way. I think about the stories

themselves. (Ahearn, 2013)

However, Munro occasionally advises writers to read as much as they can. And she encourages “people sitting down and writing and writing and writing and looking at their own work” (Alter, 2009). Ironically, these suggestions serve as advice to writers.

Additional clues to Munro’s process can be discovered through her accounts of writing amidst housework, intrusive neighbours, child-rearing and diapers, laundry in the time before automatic washers, and extended periods of writer’s block, occasioned by grief

(Munro lost a child one day after she was born), failing self-confidence, and the demands of publicity.

After the Nobel Prize, Munro endured a frenzy of interviewers seeking her reaction to the award, and hoping for insights into her private writing life. Very few interviews were granted. Prior to winning the Nobel Prize, Munro announced she was retiring from writing, permanently this time, in the wake of grief and illness, and hoping, finally, to lead a “normal” life. She had just survived the recent death of her second husband, Gerald Fremlin, in April 2013. Age and illness were taking a toll. Munro had coronary bypass surgery and chemotherapy treatments for cancer. Her frail health resulted in daughter Jenny accepting the Nobel Prize in Munro’s place. And while there appear to be many newer published and broadcast interviews with Munro following the

Nobel Prize, many of these articles and interviews are recycled and dated works enjoying a second life.

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Munro has feared and avoided “exposure” throughout her writing life. As a young woman, she “could never have imagined going off to Paris and declaring herself a writer the way Mavis Gallant did. For her that would have been sheer folly, a dangerous exposure” (Munro, 2001, p. 12). Charles McGrath (2013), wrote, “Ms. Munro is famously self-effacing and publicity-shy—traits that probably stem in part from old- fashioned Canadian modesty and in part from wariness, a wish not to be pinned down. In interviews she is…a little elusive” (McGrath, 2013). What exists is an historical treasure trove of the experiences of an elderly, extremely accomplished, intensely private woman’s journey as a writer through the changing demands of several decades. In the absence of any single book on writing for writers by Alice Munro, I rely on her scant words about the writing process. I also rely on daughter Sheila Munro’s (2001) lived experiences and observations of Munro as writer, and I hope to find usable writing nuggets amongst them.

Becoming a Writer

A writer’s origin story is usually of interest to readers of the writer’s work, and to new and experienced writers, alike. Found within the answers to “When did you know you were going to be a writer?” and “How did you know you were a writer?” or “How did you get started as a writer?” are guidelines to courage, developing a creative voice, and permission to write the world as the writer sees it. Alice Munro’s stirrings as a writer originated in her childhood desire to “correct” the ending to Hans Christian Anderson’s

The Little Mermaid by writing a happier conclusion. In many ways dissatisfied with the sacrifice of the mermaid’s tail for love, Munro sought to improve upon this worldview that demonstrated how great sacrifices for love were rewarded with tragedy. Munro

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talked about her origin story in an interview with Diana Athill for the International

Festival of Authors:

I knew that I was going to write. I just had to. I remember reading Hans Christian

Anderson’s The Little Mermaid…and how sadly it ends, and when I came to that

sad ending, I was appalled…I got up and walked out, and walked round and round

the house, making up a happy ending. So, I think that was the beginning of a

writing career. I knew I had to do something about…what I found in life around

me. I can’t remember when I didn’t make up stories. I don’t think I called it

writing. (Lightbourne-Lay, 2009)

Munro’s origin story is as familiar to followers of Alice Munro as the origin stories of Margaret Atwood and Lawrence Hill are to their readers. The epiphanic moment when writers know they are writers is frequently tinged with excitement and mystery, risk and purpose. Atwood described the experience as if a “‘large invisible thumb descended from the sky and pressed down on the top of my head’ and a poem was written” (Margaret Atwood: A Biography, n.d.). Eight-year-old Lawrence Hill’s passionate letter to his father, persuading Dad to give him a cat, was the moment Hill knew he was a writer, the moment he understood that writers must write from a place of passion, and the moment he knew his art put him in conflict with his parents’ vision for young Lawrence’s career path.

Answering the Call to writing was problematic for Munro. Readers, writers, and researchers learn much about Munro’s escape from isolation and alienation through her writing, which introduced a separate kind of isolation and alienation in order for Munro to practise her art. When describing Wingham, the hometown she lived in during the

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1930s and 40s, Munro stated during a Person 2 Person interview, “I wasn’t brought up in a community that thought creativity was normal” (tvochannel, 2015, 8:14-8:22). Writing was viewed as a meaningless activity, because it did not produce something practical that people could use. When Graeme Gibson (1972) asked Munro if writing was viewed as a frill in her southern Ontario community, she responded that writing was

almost a wrong thing to be doing…if I were hooking rugs though, it would be all

right…because you put the rugs on the floor and people walk on them, but what

do you do with books. In the community where I grew up, books were a time-

waster and reading is a bad habit, and so if even reading is a bad habit, writing is

an incomprehensible thing to do. (Gibson, 1972, p. 246)

Young Munro grew up with poor manual dexterity and was, therefore, not good at making practical, usable things. She described her childhood self as privileged to “a very different view of the world, and one that would bring me into great trouble and ridicule if it were exposed” (Gibson, 1972, p. 246). Munro’s escape from loneliness and alienation was Story. She read, and finally wrote stories, explaining how “the escape into making stories was necessary” (Gibson, 1972, p. 246). But declaring yourself a writer was not realistic. “Back then you didn’t go around announcing something like that….You didn’t call attention. Maybe it was being Canadian, maybe it was being a woman. Maybe both”

(McGrath, 2013). She found writing an “embarrassment. I was doing something I couldn’t explain or justify” (Twigg, 1978), but she continued to write as an act of courage and an exploration of truth.

Munro is passionate about the relationship writing enjoys with truth. She exhorts young writers to “find some truth that they want very much to express, and…get a chance

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to do it” (Lanningham, 2013). She explained, “You don’t write entirely for yourself…you get it down as near to the truth, and as near to something that is your truth and then you hope that it will reach other people” (Lanningham, 2013). She concludes that writing is

“the best thing you can do with your life” (tvochannel, 2015, 55:10), related to “telling the truth, as near as you can get to it” (tvochannel, 2015, 55:19-55:22) as well as

“tackling the experience of being alive as best you can” (tvochannel, 2015, 55:26-55:31).

And from these words, all writers can take inspiration and comfort.

A Fine Balance

It is very difficult to discuss Alice Munro’s work or her creative process without examining her life, much the same way a biographer would. Louise France (2005) stated,

“Her stories inhabit a world of compromise, where people do what they must in order to survive. Much like Alice Munro herself” (France, 2005). Almost without exception, questions about Munro’s writing routines, behaviours, and rituals are met with stories of

Munro’s domestic life. From the time Munro was nine-years-old and her mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease Munro became a constant caretaker, leaving “even less time for make believe” (France, 2005). But Munro did invent stories, frequently composing them in her head, not writing them out. Sheila Munro (2001) described the years when twelve-year-old Alice Munro became a significant caregiver to her mother, and the effect of this on Alice Munro’s creative process.

From the age of twelve she had been doing all the work at home because her

mother had Parkinson’s disease. She had been composing poems and stories while

she made the beds, or washed the dishes, or hung up the laundry. I think

housework and writing have always coexisted for her in a kind of uneasy alliance,

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the one balancing the other, the predictable routines of household tasks giving her

a respite from the immensity of the real work. (Munro, 2001, pp. 28-29)

Beginning with Munro’s reworking of the conclusion to Hans Christian Anderson’s “The

Little Mermaid,” Munro continued to make up stories and occasional poetry until she

“escaped” to the University of Western Ontario on a two-year scholarship, entering into a four-year English degree program. Munro describes her two years at Western as “the only two years of my life without housework” (Thacker, 2005, p. 94).

Upon reaching the end of her two-year scholarship funding, Munro married, left for Vancouver, and was pregnant within eighteen months. What followed was adulthood spent balancing the demands of family, work, and writing, with the added necessity of keeping the fact of her writing a secret. Just as Munro’s years in Wingham, Ontario, informed the substance of her award-winning short stories, similarly, her domestic life informed her writing practice. She rarely separates how she works as a writer from her roles as wife, mother, and caregiver. For this reason, my discussion of Munro’s creative process will be necessarily and strongly linked to narratives of marriage and motherhood.

Early Years: Writing in the Slivers of Time

Especially after winning the Nobel Prize, journalists around the world asked

Munro about the particulars of her writing process. As an eighty-two-year old woman commenting on a lifetime of writing, Munro’s answers reflected the demands and impositions of mothering on her writing time as a younger woman, when as “a housewife…[a] fairly regular housewife…[she] learned to write in the times off” (Nobel

Prize, 2013, 7:45-7:55). Later, she discussed the necessary complications of fame and publicity as she aged and became increasingly successful. In fact, Munro frequently cited

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the demands of motherhood as the reason she wrote short stories rather than novels. She explained:

[W]hen I was younger, it was simply a matter of expediency. I had small children,

I didn’t have any help. Some of this was before the days of automatic washing

machines….There was no way I could get that kind of time. I couldn’t look ahead

and say, this is going to take me a year, because I thought every moment

something might happen that would take all time away from me. So I wrote in bits

and pieces with a limited time expectation. Perhaps I got used to thinking of my

material in terms of things that worked that way. (Koval, 2013)

The quotation captures Munro in an historical moment of which many young writers today have little experience: a life before computers, a life before electric typewriters, and a life before automatic washing machines. The increased day-to-day domestic demands on Munro’s time with her growing family were a fact of Munro’s writing life, and a researcher must take them into account. Oriah Mountain Dreamer (2005) discussed the challenge of balancing a writer’s daily life with creative work in her book on creativity What We Ache For: Creativity and the Unfolding of Your Soul. Dreamer began with the conflict that pits a romanticized version of an artist’s creative life against a real life, and suggested how to cultivate a life of creative work:

We all have ideas about the artist’s life, the life of the poet, painter, composer,

performer, sculptor…but they rarely include scenes of the writer cleaning the

oven, the sculptor nursing a sick child all night, the composer doing laundry….

But of course the lives of artists are first and foremost human lives. The trick to

ensuring that our creative work is not left by the wayside amid the daily logistics

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of a human life is to leave the fantasies behind and integrate our creative work

into our daily lives. (Dreamer, 2005, p. 166)

The daily logistics of Munro’s early life dictated her process as well as the art form that resulted from the process. For this reason, her daily life figures into each conversation she has about process and writing routines, and often contains an apology for “not being a totally motherly woman…about wanting other things” (tvochannel, 2015, 25:34-25:46).

She tells of batting away her oldest daughter at the age of two, as the toddler approached

Munro at the typewriter. (McCulloch & Simpson, 1994; The Prague Revue, 2013) Munro explained, “This was bad because it made her the adversary to what was most important to me” (The Paris Review, No. 131, 2013).

Munro has accounted for her pinched writing time as a young wife and mother so often the narrative now sounds rehearsed. Cara Feinberg (2001) in conversation with

Alice Munro for The Atlantic wrote:

As a young author taking care of three small children, Munro learned to write in

the slivers of time she had, churning out stories during children’s nap times, in

between feedings, as dinners baked in the oven. It took her nearly twenty years to

put together the stories for her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades.

(Feinberg, 2001)

Munro retold a version of this story for The Paris Review, Summer 1994, No. 131. She remembered writing “Thanks for the Ride” because “my first baby was lying in the crib beside me” (J. McCulloch and M. Simpson, 1994). When asked about a specific time to write, Munro described productive periods structured around children’s naps. She explained how she wrote from one to three o’clock in the afternoon while her babies slept

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(McCulloch & Simpson, 1994). Once the children were in school and Munro was working in the bookstore that she and her husband owned in Victoria, B.C., Munro continued with a structured writing routine carved from childrearing, employment, and housework.

When the kids were little, my time was as soon as they left for school. So I

worked very hard in those years….even when I was working [at the bookstore], I

stayed at home until noon. I was supposed to be doing housework, and I would

also do my writing then. Later on, when I wasn’t working everyday in the store, I

would write until everybody came home for lunch and then after they went back,

probably till about two-thirty. (McCulloch & Simpson, 1994)

Munro recounted the basic structure of her writing day for Charles McGrath (2013), but revealed an additional requirement of a page quota. McGrath (2013) wrote how Munro,

“pursued her career with unusual discipline, faithfully completing her quota of pages every day while also raising three daughters and helping her first husband, James Munro, run a bookshop” (McGrath, 2013).

A significant fact emerges from the many predictable accounts of Munro’s days of writing, with children. The daily ministrations to house, husband, and children included a careful structure and strict discipline that allowed Munro into the writing process and to respect her process. Munro recognized the threats to creativity posed by random events, such as how “[a] child’s illness, relatives coming to stay, a pileup of unavoidable household jobs, can swallow a work-in-progress as surely as a power failure used to destroy a piece of work in the computer” (Feinber cited in Feeney, 2013).

Perhaps to counter the unexpected and random threats to creativity, Munro

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believed in the power of discipline and routine to conjure daily writing opportunities:

“You can always find time if you’re in control of your life,” she stated to Ramona Koval

(2013). Years after the children were grown and Munro had reflected on her early days as a writer, she more often resented the intrusions on her writing discipline imposed by bored neighbours. The housework was not what got in the way of her writing discipline.

She had been doing housework since the age of nine while caring for her mother.

However,

if you’re a woman in a house, you are sort of available to anyone who just…wants

to pass the time. The life of women at that time was…very formless; they were in

their houses, they did this work, but in the times that were empty there was often a

great deal of informal sociability…you know, phone calls…and you were

assumed not to have any special inner thing of your own. (Koval, 2013)

Munro had not yet “proven” herself as a writer, and continued to hide her writing from friends and family. Neighbours demanded her time and overturned the structures and disciplines she established to ensure daily writing practice. She stated, “I would never say to anybody…the thought of saying, ‘I’m writing this afternoon while the children have their naps,’ was impossible for me. It was a claim I just wasn’t strong enough to be able to make” (Koval, 2013).

When Munro had only one child, she would “put her in the stroller and walk for miles to avoid the coffee parties” (McCulloch & Simpson, 1994). This escape allowed her to think, compose stories in her head, keep her writing a secret, and honour the writing discipline that allowed her creative process. Today, Munro celebrates the freedom women have to write without making apology for it. She discussed the impact of this with

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an interviewer from the Nobel Committee, who asked Munro to comment on the importance of her example to women, as housewives who combined household work with writing. Munro stated,

[I]t is much more okay now for a woman to be doing something important. Not

just to be fooling around with a little game that she does when everybody else is

out of the house, but to be really seriously writing just the way a man would write.

(Nobel Prize, 2013, 11:57-12:20)

Writing in Later Years

As Munro’s children grew and were no longer “school-aged,” Munro continued to enjoy a disciplined writing practice. She had left her first marriage in 1972 and moved back to Ontario to find work and write. The jobs included teaching appointments at York

University and the University of Western Ontario, both positions she resigned before her year was completed. Despite a structured and disciplined routine of writing, Munro experienced writer’s block while employed by the universities. She stated, “the only things that ever stopped me writing were the jobs—when I was defined publicly as a writer and given an office to work in” (McCulloch & Simpson, 1994). Except for these occasional, but lengthy bouts of despair, resulting in severe cases of writer’s block,

Munro adapted her writing schedule to accommodate the changing circumstances of her life that no longer included dependent children. Routine, discipline, and structure were particularly important to her process in her elder years, as they now lent energy to her practice.

Munro adhered to a writing routine almost compulsively. In response to an observation that artists often work hard through to the end of their lives, Munro stated,

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“You may have to be a little more vigilant. It’s something I never would have been able to think of losing twenty years ago—the faith, the desire” (McCulloch & Simpson, 1994).

Munro compares her writing practice to her daily walk, setting a quota of three miles a day. Citing the protective quality of rituals and routines, Munro did not stop writing, even for a day. She stated, “You protect yourself by thinking if you have all these rituals and routines then nothing can get you” (McCulloch & Simpson, 1994). The rituals protect

Munro from a “draining away of interest in some way that you don’t foresee”

(McCulloch & Simpson, 1994). On some level, the routines are the motions that Munro goes through in order to stay committed and maintain faith in the importance of doing the work. They bring her into the process and energize her once she engages with the writing.

In many ways, Munro’s belief in the importance of rituals and routines to the writing process echoes other artists’ beliefs in the energizing power of ritual to the creative process. Support for discipline, ritual, and routine can be found in Twyla Tharp’s writings on the creative habit, in Oriah Mountain Dreamer’s belief in writing routines, in

Natalie Goldberg’s Buddhist approach to daily writing rituals, and Julia Cameron’s

Morning Pages to awaken and encourage the creative spirit. Until recently Munro described her writing practice as a morning commitment. She outlined her routine for the

Paris Review:

I write every morning, seven days a week. I write starting about eight o’clock and

finish up around eleven. Then I do other things the rest of the day, unless I do my

final draft or something that I want to keep working on then I’ll work all day with

little breaks. (McCulloch & Simpson, 1994)

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Louise France (2005) also described Munro’s morning routine as it was in 2005: “Most mornings, she’ll write for three hours in the dining room….She starts by sitting on the couch and writing in longhand” (France, 2013). Bruckner (1990) outlined a process that produced “handwritten drafts, made in notebooks two or three pages a day in three- or four-hour sessions and repeated rewriting on a typewriter for months or longer”

(Bruckner, 1990). A Bookbrowse page quoted Munro’s daily routine: “I write everyday unless it’s impossible and start writing as soon as I get up and have made coffee and try to get two to three hours in before real life hauls me away” (“A Conversation With Alice

Munro, nd). Munro claimed, “The serious writing is done in the morning. I don’t think I can use a lot of time in the beginning; I maybe can only do about three hours” (Awano,

2013). Munro’s agent, Virginia Barber, “would never call before 11 am, as she knew that was [Munro’s] writing time” (Allardice, 2013).

Strict discipline and adherence to routines are requirements of Munro’s creative process. They provided the mental preparation for the creativity that followed, and lent her creative act a kind of energy that Munro began to lack in her 80s. As Munro began to reflect on the effects of aging, she explained to McCulloch and Simpson (1994),

if I know that I am going somewhere on a certain day, I will try to get those extra

pages done ahead of time. That’s so compulsive, it’s awful. But I don’t get too far

behind, it’s as if I could lose it somehow. That is something about aging. People

get compulsive about things like this.” (McCulloch & Simpson, 1994)

That was twenty-two years ago. Recently, she affirmed that routine and private time sustained and comforted her in daily life (Awano, 2010). However, since 2013, and just a few weeks prior to winning the Nobel Prize, Munro announced her retirement from

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writing, citing a lack of physical energy due to illness, age, and the death of her husband after thirty-five years of marriage. In 2006, Munro told Lisa Allardice (2013), “I don’t think I can write any more. Two or three years from now, I will be too old. I will be too tired” (Allardice, 2013). Munro followed this 2006 announcement with another collection of short stories, Dear Life, in 2012. Sadly, she now appears to have permanently retired from writing, and has not published any original work since 2013. One compilation,

Family Furnishings: Selected Stories 1995-2014, was published in 2014, but contained no original pieces.

I have often chosen the present tense to discuss Munro’s writing practice in my research. As of this writing, Munro lives, and still entertains the remote possibility of another original work. The present tense avoids confusion that the past tense invites regarding Munro’s status as a living writer: Did she pass away? Does the researcher know something the rest of us do not know? Further, Munro has come out of retirement once before to publish original work. During an interview following the Nobel Prize, she intimated the possibility of yet another work, in a clear case of “never say never.” I think it is fair to suggest that additional stories will only be possible through Munro’s continued observance of the routines and rituals she established to energize her process during her lengthy writing life. And while she has not advised that young writers develop routines, disciplines, and rituals to open time for, and sustain a writing life, her example provides the impetus for others to imitate and develop their own routines to foster creativity and production.

Conditions for Writing

The Ideal Place

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In “Writing in Flow” Susan K. Perry (2009) wrote about rituals that allow a writer into the work, as well as those that end the day’s writing. Perry (2009) stated,

Part of the purpose of a writer’s ritual is to focus attention inward, which is

always made easier by eliminating distractions. Some do this by carving out a

sense of solitude for their writing time, whether that entails strict aloneness or

merely physically cutting themselves off from the activity around them. (p. 218)

Munro wove her writing time into the routines of her day, working while children napped or went off to school. She sometimes escaped to the bookstore she and her first husband,

James Munro, owned in Victoria, British Columbia, and wrote surrounded by books. Her routine demonstrated that silence was not as essential to her process as was an environment free from distraction. Munro’s daughter, Sheila Munro (2001), described a bittersweet scene demonstrating her mother’s desperate need to write free of distractions, but unable to find the necessary peace in the presence of a toddler. Sheila Munro (2001) captured the frustration and helplessness Alice Munro experienced:

As time went on my mother found the balancing act of writing and mothering

more difficult….my mother began to have second thoughts about how she would

manage. She had to write—not only to write, but to write a masterpiece—and

how could she possibly write a masterpiece with me dragging her fingers off the

typewriter keys or pulling the pencil out of her hand….she would fend me off

with one hand while keeping her other hand on the typewriter keys, the fragile

thread of her narrative slipping from her grasp. (Munro, 2001, p. 40)

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In a revealing anecdote involving her second husband, Gerald Fremlin, Munro discussed how distractions angered her and interfered with her process. Her frustration is palpable in the following quotation. She described how she might

spend the whole day in a very bad mood….If Gerry talks to me or keeps going in

and out of the room or bangs around a lot, I am on edge and enraged. And if he

sings or something like that, it’s terrible I’m trying to think something through,

and I’m just running into brick walls. (McCulloch & Simpson, 1994)

Although Munro usually writes from home, she did rent office space above a drugstore in the early 1960s, during a prolonged period of writer’s block, when Munro attempted to write a novel. Removed from children and the distractions of home life, Munro found herself at the mercy of an intrusive landlord who provided another kind of distraction.

Munro wrote only a single story called “The Office” during the months she rented the space. About her mother’s experience there, Sheila Munro (2001) stated:

There really was a landlord like that. My mother listened to his complaints, wrote

the story, and sat in her office for another four months without writing anything

more. She was waiting for some great work to burst forth and she saw the story as

an intrusion, as the landlord was an intrusion. (Munro, 2001, p. 90)

Alice Munro contributed another relevant detail to this story of writer’s paralysis in the rented office. She offered, “The landlord did bug me all the time, but even when he stopped I couldn’t work. This has happened anytime I’ve had a setup for writing, an office” (McCulloch & Simpson, 1994). Consistent through Munro’s writing narrative is her need for writing time free from distraction. But her ideal environment did not have to be away from the home. In fact, after reading volumes of material relating to Munro’s

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writing process spanning seventy years, I discovered that most of Munro’s writing is accomplished in her home. When she moved away from her familiar surroundings, she continued to meet with frustrations and distractions, and they frequently culminated in depression and writer’s block. Munro discussed her lack of productivity after being given an office at the University of Queensland in Australia, where she served as writer-in- residence:

I had an office there, in the English Department, a really posh, nice office.

Nobody had heard of me, so nobody came to see me….So I had all this time, and

I was in this office, and I would just sit there thinking. I couldn’t reach anything; I

meant to, but it was paralyzing. (McCulloch & Simpson, 1994)

In Authors at Work: The Creative Environment, editor Graeme Harper (2009) explored the “[h]uman actions, human understandings, human time, and human place” (p.

174) of author H. G. Wells as part of a larger discussion of creative environments. Harper concluded, “Wells’s creative environment…needs to be the place he is most likely to be found” (Harper, 2009, p. 176). Expressed another way, Harper (2012) wrote in Creative

Writing: Interviews with Contemporary Writers, “Habitats are not merely physical spaces, they also incorporate ways of behaving and ways of responding to that which is around you….A habitat is generally defined as a place where someone or something is mostly like to be found” (Harper, 2012, p. 102). Harper’s observation is helpful to an understanding of Alice Munro’s ideal environment for writing. Home is “the place [she] is most likely to be found” and she does her best work there, so long as other conditions of quiet and non-interference are met. Harper draws a very important conclusion that is worthy of any writer’s consideration when sorting out the “ideal” writing space.

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Writing at Home: The Particulars of a Writing Life

My husband is not a writer, but he is in love with one. He regularly offers to turn one area of our home into a dedicated writing space for me. I have many reasons (some say excuses) why the proposed changes are unacceptable: not enough light or too much light; too close to distractions or too far from what’s going on.

Some day when I’m a famous writer, and people ask about my writing routines, and ask to photograph me at my writing place, there will be no romantic, soft-focus pictures of a writer at her desk surrounded by neatly shelved books and stacked notepads.

The pens will not be grouped in an ornamental cup on a desk corner.

There is no desk.

My pens are scattered across the ottoman…the same ottoman my husband and kids use as a footstool. Occasionally one of the dogs chews a cheap ballpoint.

I sit on a couch and balance yellow notepads and papers and library books and coffee on the armrest and my lap. The television stays off until my husband and university-aged children return from work and school and mindlessly switch it on en route to the kitchen. As long as no one calls for a sandwich or yells that a cat has vomited on the bathroom floor and I should come and clean it up (because that’s what moms do) or begs me to drop everything and drive someone somewhere, I can keep writing and thinking and daydreaming to the music of my family. But when I do have to make sandwiches after cleaning the cat vomit and just before grabbing my car keys, I pack up a notebook, my ipad and car charger, and one of my favourite pens. I rush past the meaningless reality programme playing on the television and shout, “After I drop off Zoë,

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I’m going to Port Dalhousie and write for a bit. See ya!” Then I sit comfortably in my car, feet on the seat, coffee in the cup holder, and…write.

A sharp focus picture will reveal the ugly truths of my messy writer’s life amidst crumbs, and too many balled up, scratched up literary misfires. The non-writers I count amongst my family and friends want to build me a room of my own. Ironically, my

Virginia Woolf collection sits on the shelf, within reach of my couch. My loved ones don’t understand that I do not need “a” room of my own; I need room of my own. Room to work, think, dream, procrastinate and percolate. I can usually find room in the heart of the house. And for those times when the heart beats too quickly, I find room to write near the water at Port Dalhousie or the gardens at Mount Carmel. Room of my own is sometimes a car ride away.

These are the oft-repeated particulars of Alice Munro’s writing life:

Alice Munro writes sitting on a couch.

Alice Munro writes at a desk.

She composes on paper. She hand writes her first draft in notebooks before she types them. She writes with pens and pencils.

Munro uses a manual typewriter.

She uses a computer, but she’s terrible with it…especially since the cancer and chemotherapy. She stated:

I’m a terrible person with technical things. If I leave it too long, I forget how to

manage the computer and my husband has to come in and show me everything

again. Also, I’ve been ill, I’ve had cancer, and cancer treatment takes snatches out

of your brain.

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She enjoys a window view of her driveway from her desk in the dining room of

her “late-19th-century bungalow on a dead-end street that backs down to some

railroad tracks” in Clinton, Ontario. (McGrath, 2013)

She drinks coffee in the morning before starting to write.

Wingham, Ontario; Vancouver, British Columbia; Victoria, British Columbia,

London, Ontario; Clinton, Ontario. The address changes, the technology changes, the children grow and move out, but so many of the finer details of Alice Munro’s writing practice remain unchanged. I compared Sheila Munro’s (2001) description of her young mother’s writing space during the creation of Lives of Girls and Women (1971) to Louise

France’s 2005 account of Munro as an elderly writer. Sheila Munro (2001) stated,

The room in which she wrote Lives of Girls and Women was a laundry room, and

her typewriter was surrounded by a washer, a dryer, and an ironing board. In fact,

she could write almost anywhere in the house. I might find her reclining on the

couch writing in one of her spiral notebooks when I came home from school, or

scribbling away at the kitchen table when I came downstairs for breakfast. (p. 29)

Louise France (2005) wrote, “Most mornings, she’ll write for three hours in the dining room….She starts by sitting on the couch and writing longhand….She’ll type the first draft and begin the second version” (France, 2005). The forty years separating these accounts include similar descriptions of inconvenient or uncomfortable locations, such as the laundry room surrounded by laundry, yet made writer-habitable and friendly through the small touches of coffee and the comforting and welcoming tools familiar to the writer and her process.

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Munro was quoted by her daughter Sheila Munro (2001) in Lives of Mothers and

Daughters about the joys of being surrounded by her “stuff” when she finally had a room of her own in the Rockland house: “It was a great thing when I got the room upstairs at

Rockland. I didn’t have to tidy up—there was all my stuff in front of me. I had a nice view. It was a good room to write in” (Munro, pp. 204-205). The “stuff” included a

“round black tin she kept in a cupboard drawer” to keep her manuscripts. (Munro, 2001, p. 205). Munro’s spiral bound notebooks were also “stuff.” Sheila Munro described how the story “Images” began

as a poem in one of those spiral bound scribblers she kept. In her round loopy

handwriting, she envisioned “A man bare-headed like a speckled egg/Carrying a

little axe/A hatchet, which he swung like a toy/And he came on, gleeful, silent.”

(Munro, 2001, p. 205)

Interview after interview, Munro’s “stuff” appears alongside the little rituals of morning coffee and morning writing. Writing on a couch, typing at a desk. Composing by hand, editing by manual typewriter. Munro’s daily walks for exercise and clarity are reminiscent of the walks she took with her infant daughter, Sheila, to escape the housewives’ meaningless chatter. The material objects that are a mainstay of Munro’s practice, as well as the morning rituals of coffee and walks, ready the mind, body, and spirit for creative work.

Mason Currey’s book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work is an informal survey of the rituals of writers, painters, musicians, dancers, mathematicians, and scientists. Currey

(2013) included Alice Munro in his collection, emphasizing her ability to work during the little time available while children napped. Daily Rituals provides perspective on how

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creative individuals bring their art (and science) into being. Objects such as Munro’s spiral bound notebooks are the equivalent of the chemistry teacher’s white lab coat and safety glasses. When it is time to work, the individual suits up. We use the material things and actions, the uniforms and costumes, the ritual stretching and coffee preparations to signal that creative work is about to begin. The patterns ease the writer into the process, like a warm-up exercise. In fact, no writer in my research began from a “cold start.”

A writer interested in writing “like Alice Munro” might hope to accomplish that by emulating her coffee ritual, or using a pen and paper for a first draft, or even foregoing the desk for a couch. The real value of an examination of Munro’s rituals and ritual tools is the evidence the study provides for the effectiveness of rituals to the creative process.

Writer’s Block

Eric Maisel addressed writer’s block in Living the Writer’s Life: A Complete Self-

Help Guide. He titled his examination “The Hard Work of Not Writing” and explained the destructive impact of writer’s block on the writer. He wrote:

[T]he blocked writer is working phenomenally hard. For the person who wants to

write, not writing is terribly arduous work. As Fran Lebowitz remarked, “Not

writing is a big effort. When I started getting real work done, I realized how much

easier it is to write than not to write. Not writing is probably the most exhausting

profession I’ve ever encountered. It’s very physically wearing not to write—I

mean, if you’re supposed to be writing.”

Every blocked writer knows this, every blocked painter knows this, every blocked

songwriter knows this. Every actor who has stopped auditioning knows this.

Every potter avoiding her wheel knows this. Every singer not singing knows this.

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Not doing the work you want to do takes long hours—even long years—and

tremendous effort. (Maisel, 1999, pp. 9-10)

Maisel’s recognition that writer’s block can paralyze an artist for years will not surprise anyone familiar with Alice Munro’s writing life. And as multiple and varied the reasons for writer’s block, including impaired creative vision, lack of time, criticism from others, and the pressures to write for financial reasons or to follow up a blockbuster with another blockbuster (reputation), Munro added “identity crisis” to the list.

Citing an unwritten rule that all writers graduate from writing the short story to writing a novel, Munro felt pressure from her publishers and the public to write a novel.

In the early sixties, Munro expected that she might soon write a novel. She struggled against her personal and creative preference for the short story form to attempt a novel, with significant consequences to her health. Sheila Munro (2001) described the physical manifestations of stress in her mother:

After a time she stopped writing altogether and then she developed an ulcer….I

remember how she had to drink milk…and eat bland food….She started having

panic attacks, and she began suffering from a bizarre anxiety disorder where she

was actually afraid she would stop breathing, she literally couldn’t trust that one

breath would lead to another, and she was prescribed tranquillizers. (Munro, 2001,

pp. 86-87)

Alice Munro’s account of this period matches her daughter’s recollection. When an interviewer suggested the creative stagnation and resultant anxiety was the result of the demands of mothering, Munro countered with, “It was much more an artist’s problem than a specifically woman’s problem” (tvochannel, 2015, 29:25-29:33). Munro described

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this experience as confronting her creative limitations. She tried to write a novel, and after many false starts, began to question her talent and ability as a writer. She explained how this led to a complete loss of faith in herself and a total block:

What I felt increasingly from about 25 to 35 was that I didn’t have it in me. I

didn’t have the talent. I couldn’t do it. And I think when I was about 29, I was

completely blocked. So blocked, in fact, that I got sick, or so that I got anxiety

symptoms that were very strong. And it was just because I had realized that what I

wanted to do was so hard. I kept trying and it wasn’t coming out right….It was

much more an artist’s problem than a specifically woman’s problem….It was just

coming up against your limitation, what seemed to be your limitations.

(tvochannel, 2015, 28:24-29:38)

During this time of darkness, Munro coped with the help of anti-anxiety pills,

“transferring the problems of writing to the problems of being alive” (tvochannel, 2015,

32:20-32:25). Lisa Allardice (2013) talked with Munro about the Nobel Prize and

Munro’s anguished periods of writer’s block. Allardice (2013) wrote:

This sense of suffocation manifested itself in physical symptoms: “I can’t breathe,

I can’t breathe, I’ve got to take a tranquilliser,” [Munro] says….For about two

years, [Munro] “would write part of a sentence and then would have to stop. I had

simply lost hope, lost faith in myself. Maybe it was just something I had to go

through. I guess it was because I still wanted to do something great. (Allardice,

2013)

Munro began working at Munro’s, the bookstore she owned with her husband in Victoria.

Working at the bookstore helped Munro because the “writing ceased to be this all-

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important thing that I had to prove myself with….and then it became easier” (tvochannel,

2015, 32:54-33:06). However, writer’s block took a toll on Munro creatively, as she produced only two stories during the three years she worked in the bookstore.

Today, Munro enjoys the wisdom of afterthought. She struggled for years to write a novel and wrestled with an anxiety disorder because “I wanted to do what people wanted me to do, but it didn’t work” (Ahearn, 2013). Additionally, Munro referred to this period as a time when she believed she was butting up against her limitations as a writer.

Fighting to write the novel her publishers expected from her, and listening to the Laidlaw

“cautionary phrase” of her childhood, “You must recognize your limitations” (tvochannel,

2015, 29:45), Munro lost faith in her abilities. Because her art was “limited” to the short story, she believed she was a limited artist whose imagination had dried up. Mature artists

“moved up” to the novel in their careers, and as she could not write a novel. She had reached too far.

Munro understands that “every time you try to write something, you’re breaking through and you have to have faith in yourself. If you went around recognizing your limitations, you just wouldn’t try at all” (tvochannel, 2015, 29:54-30:06). This lesson, though not offered as advice to young writers, is understood as such. Munro lost faith in her writing as a result of attempting to be what she was not. She said, “I really couldn’t complete a page, and I probably couldn’t complete a sentence” (tvochannel, 2015, 30:14-

30:18). What Munro learned was the value of writing who and what you are. Munro found and accepted herself as a short story writer.

One other reason for Munro’s writer’s block was a lack of confidence occasioned by criticism and feeling unequal to other writers. Munro usually shunned relationships

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and friendships with other writers (Margaret Atwood is one notable exception). Her reluctance to engage with other writers was because she felt “at a loss when it comes to talking about writing” (Ahearn, 2013). She has often spoken about “feeling dumb” in the company of writers who can talk about their work. Munro explained, “I would have heard too much talk I didn’t understand” (McCulloch & Simpson, 1994). She worried about losing her confidence when being “with people who understood a lot more than I did about what they were doing. And talked a lot about it” (McCulloch & Simpson, 1994).

She added, “I think in a way that my confidence came just from being dumb”

(McCulloch & Simpson, 1994).

Munro’s lack of confidence when discussing her stories and process is related to an experience she suffered at the University of Victoria in 1964. Robert Thacker (2005) quoted from a draft of an essay Munro wrote about the incident more than twenty years after it happened:

[Munro’s] almost only contact with writers at the University of Victoria had been

limited to a painful session with a man who told me my work reminded him of the

kind of thing he himself had been writing when he was fifteen and had abandoned

with the first glimmerings of maturity. (Thacker, 2005, p. 191)

Sheila Munro (2001) recounted Munro’s experience in Lives of Mothers and Daughters, and concluded that Munro could not “write anything for about a year after that episode”

(Munro, 2001, p. 191). Alice Munro said, “I know what it’s like to have someone who seems to have ultimate authority, and to simply feel that you can’t do this anymore”

(Ahearn, 2013). Munro uses this incident to explain why she believes writing classes do not work. There is a greater lesson from her narrative for any teacher of a creative writing

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class. Instructors must find the balance between constructive edits and hurtful commentary. In Munro’s case, the hurt remains. The pain translates into a type of inferiority complex she feels around writers and intellectuals who can discuss their work within frameworks Munro does not understand. Her response was to keep to herself but keep writing.

Inspiration and the “Gift”

Munro does not speak romantically or abstractly about the origins of her stories or her talent. After wrestling with prolonged bouts of writer’s block, and seeking relief through anti-depressants and anti-anxiety pills, it is surprising to learn that none of these periods of writer’s block were occasioned by a lack of ideas. Munro took inspiration from the lives she observed, and stagnated when she attempted to present those stories in an artistic form unsuited to the stories.

She has said her work is inspired by “listening to how people talk to one another, and to their stories” (Awano, 2013). Events become emotional triggers that result in stories, “[a]s long as it’s getting at some kind of emotional core that I want to investigate”

(Twigg, 1978). She is surprised by what she finds when she begins writing the story:

“Often you just know something is there but you don’t know what” so she begins with the inspiring, inciting incident, but “I just have to wait for a person to form” (Bruckner,

1990). When asked if the environment she grew up in, surrounded by women who read and told stories, inspired her, she responded, “I don’t know if I needed any inspiration. I just thought that stories are so important in the world. And I want to make up some of these stories” (Nobel Prize, 2013, 4:30-4:44).

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Munro does not consider talent (her talent) a gift “given to her” (Nobel Prize,

2013). She stated:

I never thought of it as a gift. I thought of it as something that you could do, or

that I could do if I tried hard enough. But I always thought of the trying hard

enough. So if a gift, it wasn’t an easy gift. (Nobel Prize, 2013, 15:08-15:33)

According to Munro, inspiration and “gift” are born of observation, listening, and work.

These simple ingredients, available to all of us, combine to make magic. Munro would agree that ambition kept her pen moving throughout the years.

It was the only thing I ever wanted to do. I just kept on trying. I guess what

happens when you’re young has a great deal to do with it. Isolation, feelings of

power that don’t get out in a normal way, and maybe coping with unusual

situations…most writers seem to have backgrounds like that. (Twigg, 1978)

Many people have backgrounds like that. And we all have the ingredients to give expression to our voices.

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Chapter 7: Exploring the Creative Process

“…two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that to go on living I have to tell stories…stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world.”

~Dorothy Allison, 1995

Chapter 7 presents my analysis of the creative writing process of Margaret Atwood,

Lawrence Hill, and Alice Munro. In Chapter 7, I explore my own writing process interwoven with the threads of other writers’ voices of creativity and writing experience.

Findings and Discussion

The Starting Block

I have reached the penultimate chapter of a lengthy inquiry into writing. Why am

I so unmotivated? Why can’t I write this?

I indulge every distraction. I eat. I convince myself, “This is easy. Save it for tonight or tomorrow morning.” When the next evening arrives, I’ve done nothing more with my paper than reread the previous chapters. A temporary form of writer’s block overcomes me. Writer’s block is a familiar and unwelcome acquaintance, known by each writer I examined for this dissertation.

Failure to begin a piece of writing is a universally experienced phenomenon amongst writers. I/We suffer. I/We worry.

I am nauseous.

I love the blank page, and more than occasionally loathe it. Such as this moment.

Margaret Atwood forces herself to dive in, as if into a cold pool of water.

Lawrence Hill writes quickly to allow the creative mind over the critical mind. Munro relaxes into the writing, without trying to force it.

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Aha! My way into the chapter! Begin with the universal, overwhelming difficulty of beginning…

The hurdles to beginning a piece of writing are various. Writers often worry they are not smart enough. Alice Munro avoided the company of other writers throughout her long life, because she felt stupid and inferior alongside them. She was sensitive to criticism. Harsh words interfered with her creative process, and Munro stopped writing for months at a time. Lawrence Hill narrated an occasion when, as a young writer at The

Winnipeg Free Press, he was paralyzed by pages of scribbled notes and a looming publication deadline. He agonized over the wording of his story until an editor stepped in and advised him to “stop thinking and write!” Atwood stated that she would never have written a word if she had waited for perfection. Nobel prize winning author Gabriel

Garcia Marquez described periods of up to months spent working on an opening paragraph. The lore on writers challenged by beginnings is plentiful and illuminating: writers wrestle with beginnings. They fight with word choice, imagery, metaphors and similes, often questioning their talent, creativity, originality, and intelligence in the process. Beginnings are negotiated each time a writer faces the blank page, or a sentence left unfinished the night before.

Eric Maisel (1995) stated that beginning a piece of literature “entails a commitment” (p. 87), and is a “manifestation of strength” (p. 88). However, he described a phenomenon he called “weakened-mind anxiety,” which is experienced by would-be artists and seasoned artists regularly.

This weakened-mind anxiety, which prevents countless people from creating, is

experienced as fatigue, heaviness, a fog in the brain, depression, apathy, boredom,

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emptiness, dullness, stupidity, and a host of other knee-buckling feelings….Its

attack is doubly disabling because it saps not only strength but self-esteem: the

weakened would-be creator feels weak but also humiliated by his weakness….

This is the severe anxiety reaction that the would-be artist and the blocked artist

experience all the time. This is the blockage. (p. 88)

Maisel described various inappropriate responses to this anxiety. Writers weakened by anxiety do further damage through berating themselves, indulging in substance abuse, and falling back on “tried and true” patterns rather than attempting something original (p.

89-90).

Peter Elbow (1973) addressed the difficulty of beginnings in Writing Without

Teachers. He wrote:

Beginnings are hardest: the beginning of a sentence, of a paragraph, of a section,

of a stanza, of a whole piece. This is when you spend the most time not-writing:

sitting, staring off into space, chewing the pencil, furrowing your brow, feeling

stuck. (p. 26)

Elbow also discussed the anxiety that interferes with the writing process at the beginning.

Anxiety keeps you from writing. You don’t know what you will end up writing.

Will it be enough? Will it be any good?...Anxiety is trying to get you so stuck and

disgusted that you stop writing altogether. It is writing that causes all the anxiety.

Elbow’s response to this crippling anxiety is similar to Atwood’s advice to just plunge into the icy waters and begin. Elbow advised, “the only cure is to damn the torpedoes and write” (p. 27).

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The writers of my inquiry respond similarly to writer’s block: the solution appears to be a form of Elbow’s “damn the torpedoes and write.” Atwood compares “beginning” to write to swimming. “There’s that moment where you think: Do I really want to do this today? The water’s too cold. And the other part of you says: ‘It will be good for you.

You’ll enjoy it once you’re in. Get in there’” (2006, p. 167). Atwood continues to experience anxiety before beginning to write, but devotes less time to the anxious moments before she “dives in” to the work. The dive is a commitment to the act of writing.

Hill deals with writer’s block by employing a technique of writing quickly. This allows free flow of the “explosive creative mind.” He stated, “By going fast, you don’t allow that criticism to catch up, you just plow right over and just keep on going, baby, and see where you get to” (Shea, 2015). Hill’s method of writing quickly is also similar to Atwood’s “dive in” approach, and Elbow’s “damn the torpedoes and write.”

Lawrence Hill also believes “most writers are plagued with self-doubt” (L. Hill,

Inspiring Writers Student Workshop, May 15, 2012), but suggested a way through this contributing factor to writer’s block is to “believe in your own dignity and know that you have something to say” (L. Hill, Inspiring Writers Student Workshop, May 15, 2012). His emphasis on trusting one’s dignity and voice is similar to the moral mandate to write and change the world that Mary Pipher (2006) wrote about. Piper explained at length what good writing is and should accomplish: “We live in a world filled with language.

Language imparts identity, meaning, and perspective to our human community” (p. 14).

Therefore, any “form of writing can change the world. Your goal is to find the form that

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allows you to use every one of your talents in the service of what you consider to be your most important goals” (p. 27).

Alice Munro learned the painful lesson of finding and honouring the form that allowed her to use her talent in the service of telling stories. Disregarding her expertise for short stories while pursuing a genre she was ill equipped to write (the novel) resulted in her devastating and paralyzing experience with writer’s block lasting several months.

Munro began to question her talent and ability as a writer, and experienced a complete loss of faith in herself:

What I felt increasingly from about 25 to 35 was that I didn’t have it in me. I

didn’t have the talent. I couldn’t do it. And I think when I was about 29, I was

completely blocked. So blocked, in fact, that I got sick, or so that I got anxiety

symptoms that were very strong. And it was just because I had realized that what I

wanted to do was so hard. I kept trying and it wasn’t coming out right.

(tvochannel, 2015)

Munro’s description of the effects of writer’s block duplicate the list of self-destructive behaviours and thoughts outlined by Eric Maisel and Peter Elbow. Munro endured anxiety attacks resulting in bouts of breathlessness requiring tranquilisers. She stated, “I would write part of a sentence and then would have to stop. I had simply lost hope, lost faith in myself” (Allardice, 2013). Munro did not write for two years, until she came to realise her art was the short story, and then the writing became easier. (tvochannel, 2015).

Munro’s realization was also her way of listening to and honouring her self in her writing.

After numerous false starts beginning this chapter with its dedicated focus on the writing process, viewed through the lens of my own journey as a creative writer and

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writing teacher, I recalled Margaret Atwood’s Negotiating With the Dead. Her essays on writing take a literary turn, and afford her a way to creatively address a process she often insists cannot be described. It is an approach I use in this broad chapter on inspiration, passion, answering the Call of the Pen, and arriving at the page as an author, reader, and writing teacher. This literary approach is my beginning; it affords me a way in to my exploration of writing as a holistic, spiritual, and enjoyable practice. It allows for descriptive, narrated vignettes of my writing practice and teaching practice in my role as teacher of English language and literature, and creative writing. And, a more literary approach to my study allows me to embellish my insights with the words and experiences of known writers and student voices. As well, it is an approach that allows my self a way into this chapter.

Passion for Writing and Teaching the Joy of Writing

In a March 2010 edition of Professionally Speaking, Lawrence Hill discussed the impact of exemplary teachers on his writing career. Brian Jamieson wrote that Hill recalled the instrumental influence of his grade 12/13 teacher at University of Toronto

Schools. Mr. Gutteridge allowed Hill “to write short stories about issues rather than essays” (Jamieson, 2010). Hill believes that Mr. Gutteridge recognized “how long the incubation period is for a writer, particularly of fiction” (Jamieson, 2010), and provided

Hill with the time and opportunity to develop as a writer. Hill also remembered his grade one teacher, Mrs. Rowe, for her ability to spark learning through stories. Mrs. Rowe was a storyteller, and Hill stated that she was influential “not as an example of a spark to his own writing, but as an acknowledgement of the importance of teaching” (Jamieson,

2010). Unlike Lawrence Hill, neither Alice Munro nor Margaret Atwood says much

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about the schoolteachers who impacted their incubation and development as writers.

Munro began her formal schooling in the mid-1930’s. She is a product of a time that, according to Munro, considered reading and books time wasters, and writing an incomprehensible thing to do. Atwood’s first teachers were her parents, as she was homeschooled for many years in the Canadian bush. She often addresses the value of those years spent with her family in the woods, surrounded by books, conversation, and nature. Atwood began writing plays, stories, and poetry at the age of six.

During my school years, I was fortunate to have teachers who shared my love of writing. In the morning quiet of my empty grade seven classroom, before my classmates arrived, Miss Varga read my attempts at writing mysteries stories. She nurtured my love for writing in all its forms so that, to this day, I can still look at the blank page of a composition book and feel the butterflies of possibility fluttering within my being.

It is hard to say exactly what chord Miss Varga struck that so resonated with me.

At eleven years of age, I knew I wanted to be a writer and English teacher because of

Miss Varga’s example. Similarly, Margaret Atwood told of “a moment” when she knew she would be a writer:

I wrote a poem in my head and then I wrote it down, and after that writing was the

only thing I wanted to do….It wasn’t the result but the experience that had

hooked me: it was the electricity. My transition from not being a writer to being

one was instantaneous. (2002, p. 14)

Lawrence Hill shared the “moment” when he identified as a writer. After composing a successful, impassioned, persuasive letter to his strict father to earn a pet cat, eight-year- old Hill saw the power of the written word. Hill has stated on numerous occasions to

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writers at workshops and mentorship groups that his father created a writer in that moment. In each example, the epiphany and positive feedback (not necessarily support) from significant others in the writers’ lives resulted in Atwood and Hill’s self- identification as writers. That moment of awareness, borne of a passion for words, felt in the mind, body, and spirit is a powerful and life altering experience. Many authors, including myself, remember the time when we identified as Writers, when we knew ourselves to be Writers.

Miss Varga provided that moment for me. I called myself a Writer, and carried a special fountain pen reserved for special writing: special writing was usually creative writing. While I enjoyed churning out book reports and writing lengthy essays, my real passion was creative expression. In the creative writing class, it was okay to be bad at math and science. I could always turn my math phobias and failures into a story about a brave young girl who was capable of vanquishing the “math monster” . . . or the math teacher. I found my passion, my strength, and my voice in the writing class. I discovered that real magic was created by the stories I told and the poetry I wrote. I wanted to continue making magic.

Recreating the Experience/Recreating the World

I wish I could remember something specific from those early composition classes that would offer a key to developing the same lifelong love of writing in others. From an early age, I felt called to write. Eugene Gendlin (quoted in “Understanding Composing” by Sondra Perl) came closest to describing this embodied experience as “felt sense” as the “soft underbelly of thought…a kind of bodily awareness that…can be used as a

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tool…that…encompasses everything you feel and know about a given subject….It is felt in the body…it has meanings” (Perl, 1994, p. 101).

Maybe it was the opportunity to recreate the world, to correct endings, to be happy (at least) on paper that spoke to me. As a six-year-old, Munro’s desire to rewrite the world, a desire that motivated her physically and emotionally, compelled her to dramatically change the ending to Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid. It was also the “moment” Munro knew she was a Writer. Munro explained:

I knew that I was going to write. I just had to. I remember reading Hans Christian

Anderson’s The Little Mermaid…and how sadly it ends, and when I came to that

sad ending, I was appalled…I got up and walked out, and walked round and round

the house, making up a happy ending. So, I think that was the beginning of a

writing career. I knew I had to do something about…what I found in life around

me. (Lightbourne-Lay, 2009)

Lawrence Hill recreates history through historical fiction, which serves to educate and humanize. His writing process involves his whole self: emotions, physicality, intellect, and spirit. Hill explained how he looked to his relationship with his young daughter to imagine the character Animata (TBON) and write her slave narrative. Hill’s total imaginative engagement with his daughter’s life, and the life of his fictional character, Animata, a slave during the American Revolutionary War, was necessary for a deeply personal understanding of the word “slave.”

Hill explained a motivation behind writing TBON was a deeply human response to how the word slave had become a vacant, almost meaningless word that did not say anything about

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the person’s passions and loves and the way they walked and the things they said.

Did they walk around 24 hours a day thinking of themselves as slaves or did they

have a thousand other ways of thinking of themselves? But we call them slaves

today, looking back. (Nurse, 2007)

Working from his passion to reveal the person negated by the term “slave” involved

Hill’s holistic engagement with the material and the life of the “other.” The process transformed him just as his slave narrative became transformational for the reader.

The desire to recreate and make sense of the world through writing is explained by Gabriele Lusser Rico (1983) in Writing the Natural Way: Using Right-brain

Techniques to Release Your Expressive Powers. Rico, a professor of English who applied split-brain research to learning and writing, argued there is “a fundamental human desire for giving shape to experience, for expressiveness, for creating form and structure out of the confusion that constitutes both our inner and outer worlds” (p. 16). Jack Maguire

(1998) presented an idea of the writer creating order from chaos in The Power of

Personal Storytelling: Spinning Tales to Connect With Others. He stated that the writer

“creates a wholeness out of disparate parts: a beginning, a middle, and an end; characters, settings, and times; causes and their corresponding effects….the story is the act of breaking out of an inscrutable silence into intelligible meaningful language” (p. 14). In

Writing to Change the World, Mary Pipher (2006) described the cathartic benefits of memoirs and personal narratives, and identified the transformative powers unleashed by words on a page when creative writers

document their experiences to express outrage at injustice and unnecessary

suffering, and to help others to see and feel what can happen to people like

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themselves. They write to both bind up their own wounds and inspire others to

care. (p. 26)

Rarely have I begun writing a creative piece with a mandate to “express outrage at injustice and unnecessary suffering.” More often, I am compelled to write the experience, as opposed to writing about the experience. This is an important and necessary step in my creative process, and it points to a personal philosophy of writing creatively that others may not share. Writing the experience is a facet of the writing process that helps a story move past the moment it describes so that it can move outward to transform or inspire or educate.

Stories originating in suffering do run the risk of self-perpetuation. They remain stuck in the moment of injustice and continue the narrative as though caught in a continuous loop. These stories do not move outwards to inspire. Healing does not come from a wound that festers untreated. To accomplish this action of “unsticking” the narrative from the emotional experience it is linked to, I write the experience as if it were a movie playing before me. I achieve distance, and the distance keeps me true to the entire experience, and not just my emotional investment in the experience. It also allows readers the psychic space they need to: maneuver within my story, draw their own conclusions, see themselves and the universal in the tale, and encounter “the other.” I am observant of and responsible for the details of time and space, the nuances of behaviour, and subtleties of language. I am also responsible for my motivation to tell the tale. And so

I ask myself regularly throughout early drafts of a work, “What are you saying here?” or

“Why are you doing this?” or “What are you really doing with this?” More importantly, I

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ask, “Is this true?” The questions are important to my process, and ultimately important to the telling.

Maya Angelou’s powerful I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings comes to mind. Her work, spanning the genres of poetry, the short story, the novel and the essay, demonstrates the transformative and healing power of literature that Rico (1983),

Maguire (1998), and Pipher (2006) described in their work. In I Know Why the Caged

Bird Sings, Angelou (1969) documented her years of trauma and eventual triumph. She used poetry to give voice to her anger. Further, by recognizing the humanity of her oppressors, Angelou recovered her spoken and artistic voice. Angelou transformed her perspective on suffering and the oppressor after discovering the common ground of loneliness and pain with “the other,” thus rewriting her own narrative, as well as the narrative of her oppressors.

Atwood, Munro, Hill, Angelou, Amy Tan, Richard Rodgriguez, and so many others reveal the creative writer engaged in a sacred, highly personal act of re-formation, healing, and relationship. I see myself in them, and draw courage from them. These are writers who discovered and recovered their voices, created meaning from chaos, and defined themselves as individuals by writing through themes touching upon identity, ethnicity, gender, religion and spirituality, parenting, and the immigrant experience. They accomplished magic writing poetry, short stories, novels, memoirs, and non-fiction. They changed the world through their literature. I experience writing practice as a sacred act, prompted by an internal spiritual stirring, calling, and yearning to pick up my pen. It is often an uncomfortable and inconvenient gnawing at my imagination to write an uncomfortable, inconvenient story, to write my light, my hope and comfort.

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Writing Truth

The power of creative writing is a humanizing one with immeasurable holistic benefits to the individual that no rubric for essay writing can adequately describe. When we discover our truth, write our truth, and help to reveal another’s truth through the literature we create, we become more fully human. This describes a powerful transformation across the spectrum of mind, body, and spirit. Alice Munro appreciates the relationship writing shares with Truth. She exhorts writers to get close to their truth through writing so that others can be reached. Creative writing, enjoyed as an exploration and expression of Truth becomes, for Munro, life altering and “the very best thing you can do with your life” (tvochannel, 2015).

In “Creativity and the Heart of Shamanism,” Hal Zina Bennett (1999) described the work of the artist and shaman as being in this tradition of transformation. He wrote:

The artist embodies the demiurge of transformation and change in a way

that is very similar to, if not the same as, the shaman. They both recognize

that most human limitations are found … in the limits of human perception…

Creative and shamanic processes are both transformers. They provide the

magic that allows us to see the world afresh. (p. 10)

In a tradition of sage writers passing on what is known about the art, soul, and possibilities of writing, Rainer Maria Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet, Thomas Merton in regular correspondence with other writers and collected in The Courage for Truth: The

Letters of Thomas Merton to Writers and Echoing Silence, the Zen Buddhist priest Peter

Matthiessen in Zen and the Writing Life, and Thomas Moore in Thomas Moore on

Writing connected the art of writing to the spiritual and the sacred and the truth of

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ourselves and the world we inhabit. Terry Tempest Williams is quoted in Pipher (2006) on this sacred connection. She wrote, “With storytelling we enter the trance of the sacred.

Telling stories reminds us of our humanity in this beautiful broken world” (p. 175).

Bennett reminds us that shamans used storytelling to “transport spectators to a world beyond their everyday experience … thus freeing them to let in at least the possibility of a greater truth” (pp. 11-12). Bennett compared the writer and the shaman’s magic in the creative process. He explained how both the shaman and the writer affect the way we experience reality and truth. The “shaman does it with ritual; the writer does it by skillfully immersing us in another world….Shaman and writer both create the magic that allows us to change our minds” (p. 11).

Writers, like contemplatives and shamans, must be observant, reflective and meditative; they must listen to the stillness between thoughts. Feelings, emotions, and the imaginative forces that beckon from the dream world become a writer’s supplies. In

Indirections: For Those Who Want to Write, Sidney Cox (1947) says, “The point is that writers get their power from the much that they have felt, and they get their subject matter from perceptions made vivid by emotion” (p. 7). Atwood ends Negotiating With the Dead with a nod to the metaphor of the writer’s shamanistic role. Her quotation from social historian Carlo Ginzburg’s book, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath touches on the interconnectedness of all narratives. This is very important to a writer who tells the story from a matrix of stories. Atwood quoted Ginzburg:

To narrate means to speak here and now with an authority that derives from

having been (literally or metaphorically) there and then. In participation in the

world of the living and of the dead, in the sphere of the visible and of the invisible,

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we have already recognized a distinctive trait of the human species. What we have

tried to analyze here is not one narrative among many, but the matrix of all

possible narratives. (Ginzberg cited in Atwood, 2002, pp. 179-180)

When the writer allows for the “matrix of all possible narratives” (Ginzberg cited in

Atwood, 2002) and “the possibility of a greater truth” (Bennett, 1999) a door opens on experience and hope. It is an important shift in perception accomplished by the creative rendering of reality through writing. Writers, like shamans, use the spiritual tools of imagination to enter into the experience of another, and create a new experience from the event, as well as a broader truth. Hill fully realised the power of this relationship with the event, the other, and his fiction when he created Animata (TBON) and Keita Ali, the protagonist of The Illegal.

I, too, experienced this “matrix of all possible narratives” while writing “Tears”

(Verbruggen, 2011, Show 1141), a narrative about my mother’s visit during my battle with postpartum depression. The story began bitterly. I wrote an angry tale filled with resentment, and completed the story for a class assignment at OISE. The narrative was a failure until I recognized the story within my story that begged to be heard: my mother’s.

When I stepped back and listened to my mother’s voice within my piece, I realised her pain. I rewrote the story with greater focus on her words. When I shifted the focus from myself, the story clicked. The result was neither my story, nor her story. It became our story, and it touched readers and listeners in ways I will not pretend to understand.

Writing “Tears” became transformational for me through many rewrites, and only after allowing “the other” to speak through my narrative. My story collided against my mother’s story during the early drafts, and then meshed to create a greater, more

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meaningful narrative of understanding. It also helped me to become a more truthful writer, as I yielded my narrative to a broader one that included my mother’s voice. The broader narrative was also, I believe, a more truthful narrative.

Voice: defined and explored

I am often asked what I mean by voice. And even though many times I have said,

“You have a very good storyteller’s voice in this story,” or, “You use a very poetic voice in this piece of prose,” I find the concept of voice difficult to explain. Carl Leggo wrote about coming to terms with voice in “Autobiographical Writing and Voice: Five Echoes”

(2007). In the introductory paragraphs of his essay, Leggo explained, “I have advised my students in both high school and university classes: Write in your own voices, your personal, authentic, sincere voices. But I am not at all sure that I know what I mean by voice” (p. 120). Mary Pipher’s (2006) description of voice is not one you will read in a school textbook, but her poetic and spiritual description of voice resonated with me as a writer and writing teacher:

everything we are, all that we have observed, the emotional chords that are

uniquely ours – all our flaws and all of our strengths, expressed in the words that

best express us. Voice is like a snowflake – complicated, beautiful and individual.

It is the essence of self, distilled and offered in service to the world. (p. 42)

Pipher’s holistic definition of voice, including the spirit, the emotions, and the human, was also necessary to an understanding of what my participant-authors may have meant when they referred to voice.

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Atwood, Hill, and Munro address voice peripherally and abstractly. They also speak of voice in the context of their creative work. Margaret Atwood (2002) touches upon voice in Negotiating with the Dead. She indicated that voice is illusory.

And how many times have you read in some review or other that a writer has

finally found his “voice”? Of course he has done no such thing. Instead, he has

found a way of writing words down in a manner that creates the illusion of a voice.

(p. 48)

Atwood (2002) used simile to demonstrate the downside of a successful voice. She stated that voice magnifies at the expense of the individual.

But a book that appears everywhere at once acts like a megaphone. It magnifies

the voice while obliterating the human individual who gives rise to it, and the

writer is obscured by the image he himself has created. (p. 52)

She presents Byron as an example of an individual obliterated by a successful, magnified voice. The public identified Byron “with the Byronic figure of his own poetry,” and “he could never have lived up to expectations” (p. 52).

Lawrence Hill fields questions about the challenges of writing fiction using a female voice. In The Book of Negroes, Hill uses the first-person narrative point of view to deliver Animata’s slave narrative. The question students ask Hill about “writing female” is not concerned with developing a unique writer’s voice, and it begs for a “how to” answer. But Hill understands the power of the writer’s voice, and what can be accomplished through literature. Over the course of many years and several works of fiction and non-fiction, Hill has become an empathetic voice in Canada for issues of race, immigrants, and blood. When Hill was asked to consider a career in politics, he

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responded, “I have a lot of respect for politicians… they work extremely hard. But I feel I can do more as a writer than a politician” (Pin, November 21, 2015).

Alice Munro offers little direct advice to aspiring writers on developing a voice, but she is an example of the importance of staying true to oneself during the construction of a writer’s identity. Alice Munro’s voice was silenced for several months as pressure on her to write a novel increased. As long as Munro stayed focused on the short story form, her writing flourished, and she experienced fewer lengthy periods of writer’s block caused by attempting her writer’s voice using an unfamiliar form.

My experience writing this dissertation resulted in an experience similar to Alice

Munro’s. My voice strained, even within the more relaxed constraints of the narrative structure. I wrote, rewrote, and rewrote again, nagged by the many tortured conversations with my critical and judgmental internal editor. Often I just stopped writing. Peter Elbow

(in Rico, 1983) described a behaviour that eerily resembles this writing experience:

“People often lack any voice at all in their writing because they stop so often in the act of writing a sentence and worry and change their minds about which words to choose”

(Elbow, cited in Rico, 1983, p. 17). I second-guess myself one chapter to the next, and dilute my voice with a multitude of supporting scholarly voices in pursuit of an academic piece of writing.

However, at the age of fifty-eight, I have experimented with many writing techniques, explored many writing courses, and read voraciously for enjoyment and scholarly purposes. Those writing courses, the imitations and experiments in expression, and the totality of my life lived up to this moment have resulted in a writing practice that refuses to quit. I have also developed a Voice. I do not know what my Voice sounds like

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on paper, but others recognise it when they read it. In the end, my voice comes from having something to say, the passion to say it, and the courage to believe that what I have to say matters.

Audience: For Whom Do I Write?

“For Whom Do I Write?” All three writers featured in this dissertation are regularly asked about audience. It is a “writer’s” question. For myself, as a writer, the answer is dependent upon the particular piece I am developing. As a teacher, I have the responsibility to tell my students to know their audience. It is an instruction we teachers give throughout the high school years. Scorers for the Grade 10 Ontario Secondary

School Literacy Test judge whether or not the short and long answer essays are appropriate to the target audience. Discussions about audiences for essays are an easy lesson. Within the broad scope of creative writing, however, the answers about audience are harder to locate and not as definite.

Margaret Atwood considered audience in “An End to Audience” when she wrote:

“Who do you write for?” What the asker usually assumes is that I have some

particular audience in mind—women, say, or Canadians—and that I am trying to

slant what I say to appeal to such an audience, so they will buy more of my books.

This is not the case, I say. “Then are you only writing for yourself?” they say.

This also is not the case. It is hard, apparently, to grasp the idea that the writer

may be writing for other people in the sense of assuming a common language and

a human brain at the other end of his activity, but not for in the sense of trying to

ingratiate, flatter, harangue, or manipulate. (Atwood, 2002, p. 345)

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Lawrence Hill touched upon audience when asked about repeating the success of The

Book of Negroes. His answer suggests that he writes to please himself first:

I am not worried about whether the work I do for the rest of my life meets the

success I had with The Book of Negroes….I know everyone says it, but I do try

not to spend much time worrying about things I can’t control. I can control how

well I feel I’ve written, so to that extent I can control my own quality – that’s

what I work toward. Obviously, I want my work to find readers and to be

appreciated, but you can’t really do anything to make that happen. (Shea, 2015)

Alice Munro’s experience with her publishers’ and her audience’s expectations to write a novel resulted in a sterile period. Munro needed to disregard the outside pressures to write within the uncomfortable framework of the novel. Then her productivity and accomplishments grew. Audience can be an obstacle to the writer and creativity when the writer sacrifices her self to the demands of others.

So, for whom do I write? When I write creatively, I write for myself. I look at my experience, or the subject, or the person, and I write without a specific audience in mind.

But an audience is always on the horizon. Sometimes the audience is family. It is often when family is the audience that the writer first experiences a personal responsibility for the material and an awareness of “the other.”

Alice Munro speaks tentatively and cautiously with interviewers about the complicated relationship she shared with her mother, and the impact Munro’s relationship had on her writing while her mother lived. Aida Edemariam wrote in 2003:

in 1959, her mother died. Munro wrote a story called "The Peace of Utrecht",

about a woman returning home after her mother's death from a Parkinson's-like

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disease….It was a breakthrough: confronting the fact of her mother freed her into

autobiographical fiction (or "personal stories", as she calls them), into her

particular voice and material - though it did not free her from her mother, who

remained a fraught presence. (Edemariam, October 4, 2003)

My story “Tears” (Verbruggen, 2011, Show 1141) includes a painful memory that belongs to my mother. When I was offered the chance to read the story on CKLN, I worried how my mother would react to having her private moment shared publicly. I believe I treated her experience respectfully, but what would she think? The story

“Behind the Cedars” (2010) unveiled an unflattering portrait of my mother from my childhood. The story, published first in Bare Elements: A Collective Approach to

Narrative Nonfiction and reprinted in Showing the Story: Creative Nonfiction by New

Writers, was read on CKLN, and shared and studied in writing classes at OISE and

University of Toronto Mississauga classes. While there was little risk of my mother encountering the story in print or podcast, I began to question how others might view this woman they would only come to know through how I wrote her.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I do not struggle on an international stage with worries about audience reception, ideas, character, or philosophical stances. I am not a famous writer. But even as almost nobody cares what or how I write creatively, “the other” exists on the horizon, and I have responsibilities to “the other” while I enjoy the privilege of writing freely. “The other” is sometimes the subject, sometimes the audience, sometimes both subject and audience. “The other” whispers in my ear, reminding me that

I am not just writing for myself. And this respectful awareness of “the other” is part of a holistic approach to the writing process and the audience. Therefore, honouring the self

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and the other in the writing respects everyone included in the writing process and the product.

I entertain one other concern with respect to the relationship between audience and my writing process. As previously stated in this chapter, I write experience. I do not write about the experience. To accomplish this, I must watch the experience as it unfolds before my mind’s eye, as if watching a movie. This allows me to keep focussed on minute details of setting, behaviour, movement, smells, colours, and sounds. I must give full attention to the experience playing out. The moment I begin questioning the experience and how I present the experience out of fear that someone in the “audience” might dislike what I have written, I lose focus. The distraction colours what I see and what I say, and the writing becomes less honest and authentic.

What I understand and conclude from the experiences of my participant-writers is that the connection between story and audience is important. But I cannot allow my awareness of the audience to dictate the direction of my work. Each work and situation is unique. Audiences vary. The negotiation begins anew with each work of literature I begin.

Creative Patterns and Routines Amidst the Busy-ness of Life

Margaret Atwood writes nearly every day. Lawrence Hill writes regularly, but not daily. Alice Munro writes daily (perhaps not as much today, as she announced her retirement from writing in 2013). The writers in my inquiry enjoy a favoured time of day for writing. The time of day is often dictated by family responsibilities, employment demands, age, and health concerns. Atwood and Munro enjoy writing in the morning, although Atwood used to write long into the night. The demands of motherhood and a need for sleep forced the change. Wherever the participant-writers seclude themselves to

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write, each commits to a period of time dedicated to writing and writing-related activities that do not always involve putting pen to paper.

Dr. Guy Allen spoke about the importance of a writing routine to writing practice during a course in Expressive Writing: Practice and Pedagogy CTL1799. Arguing the value of a routine was a hard sell to adult students who continue to believe that artists and writers are free spirits working without boundaries, without rules, without a clock. We learned otherwise. Using the analogy of a picture contained within a frame, Dr. Allen described the frame as the routine: our daily writing practice, our commitment to the job of writing. He explained how important the frame was to the picture. The frame was the discipline that allowed the creativity within the frame to happen. The discipline included time to write every day, and a routine of free writing.

I was reminded of Dr. Allen’s picture frame analogy when reading Twyla Tharp’s

The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life. Tharp (2003) stresses the importance of routine to creativity. Specifically, she asserts the significance of making routine a habit to allow creativity. Every morning, Tharp practices her dance exercises in her studio, without fail. The strict discipline of her early morning routine aids her creative thinking as a choreographer. Tharp (2003) wrote:

Being creative is not a once-in-a-while sort of thing. Being creative is an everyday

thing, a job with its own routines. That’s why writers, for example, like to

establish a routine for themselves. The most productive ones get started early in

the morning when the phones aren’t ringing and their minds are rested and not yet

polluted by other people’s words.

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This is no different for any creative individual….The routine is as much a

part of the creative process as the lightning bolt of inspiration (perhaps more).

(Tharp, 2003, Back Cover)

There is something very unromantic about routine. The word discipline sounds anti-creative. For this reason, I might have argued years ago that I did not have a routine, and that the writing just happened wherever and whenever. I was a free spirit. Still…I recall too many all-nighters spent hunched over books at the kitchen table churning out another essay for my Anglo-Saxon course. Circumstances dictated the time. University classes and jobs consumed the daylight hours and some of the evening hours. After a late supper, I’d sit with my pages and begin writing. No one disturbed me as the clock wound down into the middle of the night. When people asked about my favourite time to write, I described the wee hours of the night. Of course, I could write during the day. But over a lifetime of all-night writing, I have conditioned myself to this routine, and it works for me unlike any other time of day. In order to produce a comfortable/acceptable quota of words and pages, I must honour my rhythms, and spend the night with my pen. I now respect that I do have a preferred time to write, and that committing to the night shift means I will finally produce something.

Creative Space(s)

Virginia Woolf published A Room of One’s Own in 1929. Woolf noted that, "a woman must have…a room of her own if she is to write fiction" (Woolf, p. 6). I attended a Learning Annex workshop with Anne Lamott in Toronto in 1999, when she spoke about the advantages of a “creation station.” Jill Krementz’s black and white photography book, The Writer’s Desk, is of peculiar interest to me, as it provides an intimate look at

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the writing habitats of famous writers, including John Updike, Amy Tan, Stephen King,

Joyce Carol Oates, and Ralph Ellison. Margaret Atwood writes at home at one of two desks. Each desk has a computer, but only one computer has Internet access. Atwood’s workspace reflects her need for home, Internet, as well as a workplace free of temptation and distraction.

Until Munro’s recent retirement from writing, she wrote at home. As a young mother, Munro used her typewriter in the laundry room. It was a creative space borne of necessity. Once Munro’s adult children moved away, Munro continued to write at home in the dining room and on the couch. She enjoyed a window view, and three uninterrupted hours of writing time. The time and space were sacred, and outsiders knew not to call or visit during Munro’s morning writing practice.

Lawrence Hill rented a space to escape the demands of children and everyday life.

He works at home now after converting one of his adult children’s rooms into an office.

However, Hill still enjoys yearly writing retreats to a friend’s cottage where he immerses himself in nature and solitude, and binge writes. The quiet of a national park feeds Hill’s creative spirit, and he writes in flow.

I do not have a room of my own to write, so I occupy a cushion on the couch in the living room. A daylight-quality light that does not stress my eyes illuminates my space. When I extend my left hand, I touch books by Gertrude Stein, John Steinbeck,

David Suzuki, Amy Tan, Tolkien and Tolstoy. My Virginia Woolf collection is one shelf down. Two plastic filing systems on casters containing two years of handwritten research notes are a bend at the waist away. My black leather ottoman, covered in file folders and library books, also serves as a coffee table and footrest. I did not start out to make one

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part of the living room uninhabitable. But, as I enjoyed the easy reach of books, pens, notebooks, and electronic devices, from the sloppy comfort of an over-stuffed couch, my family came to associate “that” spot with “mom’s spot.”

Other Rituals of the Mind, Body, and Spirit

O’Shaughnessy et al. (2002) examined the influence that patterns, rituals, and behaviours have on beginning and continuing composition. Writers readily identify rituals that help them “reduce writing anxiety, increase power and control over the process, and enhance fluency” (O’Shaughnessy et al., p. 22). Frequently, these rituals involve creating special environments for writing (lighting a scented candle, playing music, closing off a room), or engaging in action or behaviours that trigger writing

(beginning with meditation, a long walk or run), and using special “tools of the trade.”

On the surface, none of these rituals seem to have any direct connection with putting words down on the (electronic) page. However, writers find the rituals helpful to setting the stage for creativity and looking inward for insight and inspiration. Tharp wrote: “this, more than anything else, is what rituals of preparation give us. They arm us with confidence and self-reliance” (Tharp, 2003, p. 20). Alice Munro and Margaret

Atwood extoll the benefits of daily walks for health and to the creative process. Lawrence

Hill runs. While running long distances (although recently he has become a cyclist due to knee problems), Hill focuses. Running sharpened his writing while he imagined and composed the life of Keita Ali, the fictional marathoner and protagonist of The Illegal. In an interview with Paul Gains for Canadian Running, Hill stated,

I used running not just for exercise but for emotional calm and focus…It’s hard

to finish a run and be in a bad mood. It’s really a great device for coping with

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stresses in life, so I desperately miss it. After becoming a runner, nothing

compares. Even cycling, which is wonderful, doesn’t compare to the calm and

beauty of running. (Gains, 2015)

The meditative walk or run was mental, physical, and spiritual preparation for the creative writing that followed.

Both Munro and Atwood have spoken seriously about their morning coffee ritual before writing begins. Similarly, before I write, I prepare a cup of coffee. I have invented a ritual around the process that warms up my imagination and senses for the work that follows. As a young university student living in residence, I wrote essays and creative papers long into the night, fuelled by cups of instant coffee. I left the door to my residence room open so I could hear the chatter of my floor mates, and the clack, clack, clack of typewriters pounding out essays. That is a forty-year-old memory now, but a memory that brings me comfort and joy. The smell of coffee conjures that time of writing from 1976, and continues to summon me to the blank page today. When I take my writing on the road, to sit in my car away from the distractions of home, I have coffee.

And with my paper or ceramic cup of java, I have a way into my writing process.

The “tools of a trade” are important to tradespeople, hobbyists, athletes, and artists. Writers are no different. Lawrence Hill uses a combination of sharpened pencils and a computer. Munro and Atwood have distinct preferences for sharp pencils, pens, and ink colour. Atwood favours a Rollerball pen that allows for quick, smooth writing, and she finds the way it moves across the page “interesting.” Both Munro and Atwood handwrite their first drafts in notebooks. As a young journalist in his twenties, Lawrence

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Hill was rarely seen without his beloved typewriter. The participant-writers of this study are clear about what they need in their hands to write creatively, comfortably, and well.

When I write creatively, I handwrite the early drafts. My sterling silver Parker 75 fountain pen with removable bladder is one pen of choice. My blue Philéas Waterman ballpoint pen is another. I especially love the weight of the Waterman. But the smoothness of the Parker fountain pen as it glides across my yellow notepad inspires genius. I cannot imagine writing a love poem on a keyboard. How do I prove a path that runs from the mind through the heart down my arm into my fingers that hold the pen?

How do I prove that, for me at least, there is no path for spirit from the mind to the keyboard? Natalie Goldberg (2013) has no proof that the pen is mightier than the keyboard, but the pen works for her, as it does for me.

I write on tablets of yellow lined paper. White loose-leaf paper is costly, and I feel guilty wasting it on numerous wadded balls of failed efforts. Yellow lined newsprint is cheerful, cheap, and plentiful. It is perfectly imperfect paper. I can make mistakes on cheap yellow paper, and ball it up without guilt. Of course, this makes no sense. But I have never been able to write a good rough draft on white loose-leaf.

Inspiration

Alice Munro draws her inspiration from her young life in a small town, and the lives she observed there. Margaret Atwood is frequently inspired by what she reads in books and other media, and Lawrence Hill continues to be inspired by immigrant stories and social histories. The participant-authors have never suffered a dearth of ideas or inspiration. Although they each require solitude to write, they are engaged in life and draw inspiration from the lives around them. This loving engagement with life and

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writing finds expression in the conclusion of Pipher’s Writing to Change the World.

Pipher (2006) wrote:

The finest thing we can do in life is to grow a soul and then use it in the service of

humankind. Writers foster the growth of readers’ souls, and the best soil for

growth is love. Writing can be love made visible. In the end, one of our best ways

to change readers is to love them. We can create a world in which those who

know teach those who wish to learn. (Pipher, 2006, p. 225)

Incredible! Pipher weaves together the soul, humanity, the reader, the writer, and the teacher in one great act of love. I am moved to use her words because they vibrate joyfully in me with truth and beauty.

All life informs and inspires our work. Love infuses our words. We share the love.

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Chapter 8: Implications and Reflections

“How to teach rigor while preserving imagination is an unsolved challenge to education.”

~ R. W. Gerard

In Chapter 8, I conclude my research paper with a discussion of the many implications of my study for the classroom within the context of each of my four research questions. It is my hope that some of the suggestions will be realised during those periods when writing and creative writing are practised.

With so many forms of qualitative research available to the researcher, including narrative, scholarly personal narrative, ethnography, authoethnography, arts-based, a/r/tography, there is a need to ask, “What is good creative writing?” outside the realm of the traditional and formal academic essay, a form of writing that gets us only so far until we observe the absence of art/poetry in scholarly writing. Northrop Frye writes about this condition in The Educated Imagination quoted in Rico (1998):

listening to a speech by a high authority in the field, I know him to be a good

scholar….Yet his speech is a muddy river of clichés….The content of the speech

does not do justice to his mind: what it does reflect is the state of his literary

education….He has never been trained to visualize his abstractions, to sub-

ordinate logic and sequence to the insights of metaphor and simile, to realize that

figures of speech are not ornaments of language, but the elements of both

language and thought. (p. 193)

Frye’s philosophy of language and writing influenced the form of this inquiry. It seemed appropriate that my presentation (including language, literary devices, structure) of the research into the creative process of imaginative writing complement the material

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studied. Therefore, qualitative methodology using personal scholarly narrative (SPN) provided me a familiar and literary approach to the research and creative rendering of the findings. The research writing is analogous to a writer choosing the genre most suited to the theme, or a painter choosing the medium. The SPN format also allowed me a window onto my own writing process as I developed this inquiry, page by page. Each chapter presented a separate and unique demand on my creative process, and I raided my writer’s toolbox for help through the difficult sections, the prolonged times of writer’s block and uncertainty, and particulars of language to accurately represent the abstract concepts and concrete ideas of this scholarly paper.

Narrative inquiry was appropriate for a close examination of the writing behaviours of three prominent Canadian writers, and SPN allowed me to incorporate my own writing narrative alongside the writing narratives of Margaret Atwood, Lawrence

Hill, and Alice Munro. I attempted to discover what their (auto) biographies, memoirs, and writing narratives tell us about each writer’s writing process, and what broader wisdom can be learned about the creative writing process. Beginning with my “self” and my unique creative writing experience, I move outwards to include the select writers of this inquiry, and continue moving back and forth between our experiences, driven by the overarching desire to broaden knowledge in the field of writing composition. Successful narratives operate on the personal, the public and the educative, and their contribution should have “theoretical potential and transformative potential” (Cole and Knowles, 2001, p. 127). The movements of an SPN, from inward to outward, as well as back and forth are hallmarks of scholarship in narrative inquiry (Wattsjohnson, 2009; van Manen, 1998) and Scholarly Personal Narrative.

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As a published poet and short story writer, I have enjoyed a life-long interest in the complexities of the creative writing process, including the power and scope of imagination, the pools of inspiration, and the spiritual aspects of creative writing. Several months ago, I read a passage by K. Cooper (2015) in the Foreword to her book Five

Research Contexts for Understanding Critical and Interpretive Inquiry in which she asks questions that lyrically express the spirit that breathes through my more formally written research questions. During an interview with Maxine Greene, Cooper missed an opportunity to ask Greene why she was so fascinated with the sycamore tree just beyond the window. Cooper (2015) stated:

My missed question makes me think about the things we carry. What is it that

grounds us? Keeps us safe? Roots our imagination? What are the things we

reference or simply cannot live without? If I surveyed many people, would there

be similar answers to these questions?

I think that any act of imagination rests within the answers to some of

these questions. (p. 13)

My similar research questions, expressed another way, hoped to explore and illuminate the creative writing process, and potentially transform the writing experience into an enjoyable and regular practice for students. And so I asked:

1. What do accomplished writers “need” in order to write creatively?

2. What roles do the mind, body, and spirit play in the creative writing process?

3. How are these mind-body-spirit roles the same or different across accomplished

writers?

4. In what ways might these findings be helpful to teachers of creative writing?

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With these questions informing my inquiry, I selected Margaret Atwood, Lawrence

Hill, and Alice Munro, three prominent, award-winning Canadian novelists on whom to focus my researcher’s lens. I read published interviews, listened to podcast and taped interviews and lectures, and studied their memoirs and books on writing with an eye to their writing process, including their writing behaviours, rituals, and patterns. This concentration on the non-cognitive elements comprising the writing process is closely aligned with the mind-body-spirit spectrum belonging to holistic approaches and themes.

Failure to Start

Prolonged bouts of writer’s block begin with short periods of writer’s block, and many writers experience this paralysis at some point during their writing lives. Mature writers can and do help themselves through these dark, uninspired times. They access numerous strategies available to them in order to channel their creativity and regain their confidence. Sometimes, the strategy is as simple and blunt as Hill’s GYAIC (get your ass in chair). Inexperienced writers, such as the young students filling the desks of our elementary and secondary school classrooms, often interpret the many stagnant moments in writing as proof they cannot write. So they do not write. They do not write for enjoyment. They do not write in the service of a cause, often preferring to leave the writing to someone else who seems to have a knack for it. Because of their inexperience, they are perhaps unaware of the many strategies mature writers use to “break through.”

For these many reasons, schools could play a more influential role in the development of young people into relaxed and joyful writers by helping students to the various strategies of experienced writers, such as Atwood, Hill, and Munro.

Implications for the Classroom

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Eric Maisel (1995) outlined eight steps he believes strengthen “an artist’s desire to do work that is true and beautiful” (p. 90). Some of the steps easily facilitated by teachers in their classrooms include: growing friendlier with active aloneness; belligerently committing to starting; transforming yourself by beginning to manifest the qualities of an artist; learning to negotiate the walk to your work space, and better encountering the first hundred seconds in the work space so as to enter a working trance (p. 91).

In Writing With Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process, Peter

Elbow (1998) described freewriting as “the easiest way to get words on paper and the best all-round practice in writing that I know” (p. 13). Numerous benefits are realised by committing to a minimum of ten minutes of writing without stopping. Elbow stated,

Freewriting makes writing easier by helping you with the root psychological or

existential difficulty in writing: finding words in your head and putting them

down on a blank paper. So much writing time and energy is spent not writing:

wondering, worrying, crossing out, having second, third, and fourth

thoughts….Frequent freewriting exercises help you learn simply to get on with it

and not be held back by worries about whether these words are good words or the

right word. (p. 14)

Elbow (1998) described other benefits of freewriting, including: helping the writer learn to write in the absence of motivation; learning to write without thinking about writing; helping the writer discover ideas; and improving writing overall (pp. 15-16). As a means through writer’s block, freewriting without interference from the writer’s internal editor is effective.

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Buddhist writer Natalie Goldberg, and creativity coach/writer/playwright Julia

Cameron adopt and encourage similar approaches to writing. Natalie Goldberg (1986) outlined a series of Zen practices for writers in her book Writing Down the Bones:

Freeing the Writer Within. Beginning with “First Thoughts” Goldberg (1986) described

“the basic unit of writing practice…the timed exercise” lasting from ten minutes to an hour. The central rules of “First Thoughts” practice include: keeping the hand moving; not crossing out or editing for spelling, punctuation, and grammar; and losing control (p.

8). The aim is to “burn through to first thoughts…where energy is unobstructed by social politeness or the internal censor…where you are writing what your mind actually sees and feels, not what it thinks it should see or feel” (p. 8).

Julia Cameron’s approach is similar to both Elbow’s and Goldberg’s. In The

Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, Cameron (1992) described the

Morning Pages as “three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness” (p.

10) writing that is done every morning. These three pages are “simply the act of moving the hand across the page and writing down whatever comes to mind” (p. 10). A function of these three Morning Pages is to drain the brain of clutter in order to “retrieve your creativity” (p. 9).

Teachers might be advised to introduce freewriting and first thoughts and

Morning Pages to students as approaches to accessing creative thought. The result could be a material change in attitude toward the act of writing, greater confidence in writing ability amongst students, and a practice of joyful writing. The techniques outlined by

Elbow, Goldberg, and Cameron can be practiced in the writing classroom regularly without significant disruption to curriculum timelines.

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Movement

Atwood, Hill, and Munro each identify a need to walk (or run) as an element of their writing process. Walking practice is not reserved strictly for those periods of writer’s block. The daily walk is often helpful to clearing the mind, clarifying thought, and aiding creativity. Atwood’s writer’s diary revealed her admonitions to walk more.

Munro follows a strict regime of daily habits that include walking and writing in an attempt to ward off a “draining away of interest in some way that you don’t foresee”

(McCulloch & Simpson, 1994), and allow her easier access to her writer’s mind. Hill walks, runs, and now cycles to achieve clarity. Walking, or running, etc., is a process many writers use to connect with more sublime thoughts.

Throughout history writers have demonstrated the connection between creative thinking and movement. In “Who, What, When, and Where of Writing Rituals”

O’Shaughnessy, Mcdonald, and Dobie stated, “Dorothy and William Wordsworth

(sometimes with Coleridge in tow), roamed for miles in search of poems and prose, as did Henry James, Virginia Woolf, A. E. Housman, and Wallace Stevens” (p. 18).

Hemingway wrote in A Moveable Feast, “I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out” (p. 43). Merlin Coverley

(2012) examined the relationship between walking and writing in The Art of Wandering:

The Writer as Walker. The book is an historical account of philosophers, pilgrims, and writers, including Aristotle, Rousseau, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Whitman, and Blake. In the introduction to his book, Coverley (2012) wrote, “walking and writing are so clearly complementary activities. Indeed, [writers]…have also demonstrated in their own works

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the ways in which the act of walking provokes and engenders the act of writing”

(Coverley, 2012, Introduction, location 86 of 4867).

Implications for the Classroom

Opportunities during writing classes for walking and thinking can be incorporated into a writing period. Dr. Ranjini George Philip regularly incorporates walking meditation into her creative writing classes at the University of Toronto. Secondary schools could allot ten to fifteen minutes of a seventy-minute writing class twice a week for walking inside or outside the school, in the company of the teacher. With the teacher modeling the activity, students can be introduced to the benefits of walking to their creative and critical thinking processes. As a doable physical activity, requiring no special equipment or training, students can be guided to a means of channeling their inspiration, as well as experiencing a healthy physical approach to working through a problem.

Encouragement and Support

Margaret Atwood recalls the encouraging and amusing words of a supportive teacher who recognized Atwood’s talent as a teenaged poet more than sixty years ago.

Alice Munro believes her success is in part due to the support of two husbands who respected her right to a writing career, and created opportunities for her to write.

Lawrence Hill enjoyed a nurturing environment that was ironically unsupportive of his desire to make a living from writing. Perhaps for this reason, Hill speaks passionately about the need for families and schools to support and encourage young artists because

“The world needs artists” (Florescu, February 26, 2015).

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There can be no debate about the value of meaningful feedback and encouragement to writers at any age. Like Atwood, I remember the words of my grade seven teacher who nurtured my love of storytelling and writing. Through Miss Varga’s words, actions, and example, my grade seven teacher created a writer and influenced my teaching practice. As I reflect on the various ways my mentors have supported my writing dreams, practice, and development, and as I listen to Lawrence Hill encourage student writers through his workshops and lectures, I realise the importance of meaningful feedback and mentorship. Conversations about the strengths, edits, and opportunities of a piece of literature encourage and nurture the writer in observable ways.

In fact, labelling student writing as “literature” honours the work of the student writer, and reinforces the message that student writers can create literature at any age.

Implications for the Classroom

Writing experience across genres needs to be encouraged, supported, and nourished. It is not enough that our students become adept at literary analysis, always studying what others have done, without experiencing the joy of producing art themselves. It cannot be sufficient to teach poetry, short stories, plays, and novels as exalted art forms, yet only worthy as an object of study, without further legitimizing these forms by helping students see how they, too, can write poetry, plays, stories, and novels.

The writers of this inquiry who went on to write poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, experienced their “aha” moment from creative writing produced outside of the classroom.

Atwood wrote scripts and poems. Munro rewrote fairy tales and British novels such as

Wuthering Heights. Hill wrote his first story at fourteen years of age. Writing creatively, the work originating from a place of passion for each writer, was the “inciting incident”

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for a lifetime of writing. Yet, we often continue to teach writing using essay models.

High school students approach Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Lawrence Hill’s The

Book of Negroes, and Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women as essay writers and literary critics, not as creative writers, or potential fiction writers.

The state of creative writing in the literature classroom resembles the following scenario: After reading and analyzing a Shakespearean sonnet, students are sometimes given a chance to write poems. It is the kind of “toss off” assignment that reinforces the lesson that poetry is only worthwhile if someone famous has written it, or that high school students are incapable of greatness as a consequence of their youth and inexperience (It is worth noting that S.E Hinton wrote The Outsiders as a fifteen-year-old high school student; Canadian Gordon Korman wrote This Can’t Be Happening at

Macdonald Hall at the age of twelve; and Alexander Pope wrote “Ode on Solitude” at the age of twelve.) Longer pieces of literature, including the short story, are analyzed and critiqued as exalted, yet never attempted by student writers. Citing student immaturity, time constraints, and dominance of the essay as the writing genre of the English classroom, students are rarely given an opportunity to try their pens at any sort of extended creative literary work as part of the English curriculum.

The type of support for the writer that Lawrence Hill advocates can be accomplished through minor tweaking of the English curriculum at the Board or school level. As Susan Schiller (2007) writes in Creating the Joyful Writer: Introducing the

Holistic Approach in the Classroom:

It is time for writing instructors to bring joy back into the activity and for students

to unlearn any of the negative attitudes they may have developed due to

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conventional approaches…they should have the opportunity to use their intellects,

their emotions, their spiritual sides, their social abilities, and their physical skills,

and they should have the opportunity to stretch their awareness of self, of

community, and of the world. (p. xi)

The Ministry of Education already allows for creative writing as part of the English curriculum, and not just separated out as a course in the writer’s craft. The Ontario

Curriculum: Grades 9 and 10 (2007) and The Ontario Curriculum: Grades 11 and 12

(2007) state:

A central goal of the Writing strand is to promote students’ growth as confident

writers and researchers who can communicate competently using a range of forms

and styles to suit specific purposes and audiences and correctly applying the

conventions of language –grammar, usage, spelling, and punctuation….The forms

and genres explored may include essays, reports, short stories, poetry, scripts,

journals, letters, biographies, children’s stories, articles, reviews, précis,

explanations, instructions, notes, procedures, résumés, and advertisements. (p. 17,

both documents)

No English department would need to justify or apologize for the inclusion of more writing opportunities in genres other than essays, since the Ontario Ministry of Education acknowledges the exploration of writing using various forms. As Schiller wrote,

We do not need to cut or replace composition courses with creative writing

courses; we need to redesign composition courses so that creativity can dominate

the curriculum in a way that also invites objective data to function in a supportive

role. (p. 16)

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It might be possible to bring students back to the blank page joyfully and meaningfully if given some chance to find expression through more creative genres. This approach certainly worked for Lawrence Hill at University of Toronto Schools, when an insightful teacher allowed him to write stories about issues instead of essays.

Physical Space/Environment

Oriah Mountain Dreamer (2005) wrote in What We Ache For: Creativity and the

Unfolding of Your Soul, “Setting up a practice begins with finding a place. Often this is dictated by circumstances” (p. 101). My inquiry shows how the ever-changing circumstances of each writer’s life dictate the writing environment. Atwood and Munro continued to write at home after becoming parents. Hill sought outside writing quarters to escape the distractions posed by family life. All three writers require a distraction-free environment.

Atwood needs isolation to write, yet Atwood can find solitude within a group of people by creating a mental space, or “mental cubicle” as a refuge. This illustrates how the writer’s space need not always be a physical space to which the writer retreats. It can be a state of mind, as well. Munro has experimented with a number of physical spaces and environments over her lengthy writing career. Munro wrote in notebooks or typed her manuscripts in the laundry room. When Munro attempted to make a rented office her writer’s refuge, she was completely unable to write. Graeme Harper (2012) helps us understand why the home environment might be important to Munro’s creative output. In

Inside Creative Writing: Interviews with Contemporary Writers Harper wrote that habitats were not limited to physical spaces. A habitat could also be understood as that place where someone “is most likely to be found” (Harper, 2012, p. 102). Alice Munro,

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wife, mother, housewife, and writer is most comfortable in the home. Home is “the place

[Munro] is most likely to be found” and she does her best work there. Home is Munro’s

“ideal” writing space and habitat.

Lawrence Hill writes at home and yearly at a cottage for dedicated writing periods.

And similar to Atwood’s turning inwards and creating a mental cubicle to retreat to, Hill physically retreats in order to turn inwards and allow his mind to wander. Hill finds going inwards a challenge but also comforting, and a practice that provides him with answers to creative problems. This fits with Harper’s (2012) belief that “place and time form part of a creative writer’s ‘habitat’” (p. 102), and are “of interest in understanding what stimulates and supports us when we’re undertaking creative writing” (p. 100).

Implications for the Classroom

When O’Shaughnessy, McDonald, Maher, and Dobie (2002) investigated “how less-experienced writers begin and sustain the act of writing and what their stories suggest about effective classroom practice” (p. 18), they found that

[R]egardless of the specific character of a writer's “nest,” writers seem to agree

that they want to work in the same place regularly. By returning to a particular

room or to a specific table, the writer grows familiar with her surroundings. She

knows what to expect, leaving her free to focus on the work itself. (p. 19)

A teacher attempting to alter the classroom environment to promote creativity and encourage writing engages in a noble but unsure enterprise. As the research demonstrated, the writer’s “nest” is dependent upon the writer and the writer’s circumstances. In the case of students in elementary and secondary schools, the writer’s nest will usually be where the writer finds himself or herself outside of school. In this case, teachers should

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make students aware of the importance of creating a space or “creation station” amidst the hubbub of home life.

Within the classroom, the challenge is to create a space conducive to creative thinking that is also individual. Students do respond uniquely to the classroom environment, and no particular classroom design will result in identical creative responses from all students. However, the teacher can accommodate for the unique needs of a student within the classroom environment to facilitate individual learning. For example, students who crave a view of the outdoors to daydream might be encouraged to turn their desks to face the windows and the outdoors; whereas, students who must look away from outside distractions can turn their desks in a more suitable direction.

Student writers could have the choice of where to sit (alone or in a group, near a door or in the corner), how to sit (stretched out, feet up, on the floor, cross-legged), or not to sit at all. Often students prefer listening to music while thinking through a problem, creating a poem, painting, or designing. But just as no one classroom environment can be responsive to every student’s needs, teacher-selected music in the classroom will not satisfy every student writer. Also, for each student who needs music to work, another student cannot work or think effectively with musical distraction. Further complicating matters, schools often have strict rules about the use of personal devices such as iphones, ipods, etc. during class. A teacher should first negotiate how technology can be used in the classroom, and specify the use of earbuds or headphones to accommodate for the student who needs music to create, while respecting the student who finds music a distraction.

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Other ways to affect the classroom space can include lighting a candle at the beginning of the writing period and dimming or turning off the lights in the room while leaving the curtains open. Encouraging students to bring something from home that reminds them of writing, such as a pillow/blanket/favourite pen or picture can make the experience of writing in the classroom surrounded by other students more personal and comfortable. Another aid to writing can be food and drink. Unfortunately, teachers often confront school rules about food in the classroom, and Boards cite food allergies as the reason to forbid food at the desk. When possible, allowing for bottled water and some type of non-allergenic snack could ease students into the writing process.

Demands on teachers for classrooms that conform to some idea of the traditional classroom set-up, including rows, organized groupings or stations, and horseshoe configurations are frequently made in response to requests and expectations from different sources. Cleaners object to randomly scattered desks, as they interfere with the efficient clean-up at day’s end. Parents who have grown up with the traditional desks-in- rows design are sometimes sceptical of other seating arrangements. Teachers sharing classrooms with other subject teachers must adopt a seating plan that works for each teacher using the classroom. School administrators will require seating plans that generally meet all expectations, and minimize disruption. Faced with these very real arguments against individualizing the classroom seating plan, teachers must find quiet, unobtrusive ways for students to take responsibility for their private writing spaces within the classroom. No plan needs permanence, as often the writer’s own needs change from project to project, and with age. Students can be encouraged to quietly move their desks or chairs to a better place in the classroom. A few minutes at the end of the writing period

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can be used to replace the desks for the next class of students. If permitted, students can extend the classroom space to include the hallway. When weather and school regulations permit, student writers can be allowed to use the outdoors for walking meditations or writing. Within the rules dictated by the school administrators, students can find acceptable creative ways to make their writing space within the classroom more welcoming to their individual creative spirits.

The Importance of Routines/Rituals/Patterns

An opportunity for closer examination of the routines, the rituals, and the patterns that make up the how of a writer’s process was a major motivation of this inquiry.

Starting with my own process, I knew there were elements to writing not seriously covered in the scholarly materials I read related to the writing process. After reading many writing narratives of published authors, unpublished writers, and my students’ narratives from my English classroom, I was further convinced that each writer participated in “acts” that prepared for writing. These “acts” took on the shape of routines when practiced regularly, and were later endowed with the sanctity of ritual when the routines became symbolic of the writing act. The rituals were accompanied by an attitude that announced emotionally, spiritually, and physically that the writing act mattered and had begun. Regarding rituals, O’Shaughnessy, McDonald, Maher, and Dobie (2002) wrote, “the rituals… represent the conditions in which writers consider themselves to be most productive and successful” (p. 36) and go on to suggest that “classrooms should reflect their influence” (p. 36).

Recent publications have taken a closer look at the rituals of creative people, including writers, painters, scientists, and mathematicians: Process: The Writing Lives of

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Great Authors (2015); Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (2013); and The Art of

Wandering: The Writer as Walker (2012). Arts communities and creators recognize the importance of seemingly insignificant behaviours, materials, and props to the creative process. According to researchers O'Shaughnessy, McDonald, Maher, & Dobie, (2002),

“Writing well is not totally a matter of will and self-discipline. Human beings have a need for reassurance and control that simple determination does not provide. Writing rituals help meet these needs” (p. 36). Rituals can be behavior or time oriented. And, as the research shows, these behaviours are unique to the writer, and change with the writer’s circumstances. Stodola (2015) wrote that amongst literary heroes, “there are consistencies, [but] the writing process is largely unique, individual, and can sound very weird indeed” (p. xii). Many writers prefer to write early in the morning, often before the household wakens. Many writers prefer to stay up writing into the night, long after the household retires.

Rituals of time can also be of duration. Although Atwood recommends daily writing practice, she writes daily only when engaged with a writing project. Hill revealed a daily writing practice lasting up to three hours, but also describes himself as a binge writer, often writing up to twenty pages a day for as many as ten hours a day. Munro worked at her desk for three hours each day.

Rituals

I began my inquiry into Margaret Atwood’s writing process with the following quotation by researchers O'Shaughnessy, McDonald, Maher, & Dobie (2002): “The right pen, the lucky clipboard, the same early morning hours…the usual posture, the routine motions—foolish and inconsequential as they may seem to be—have the power to

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provide patterns that enhance the act of writing” (p. 22). Understanding the power of seemingly inconsequential behaviours and props to the writing process was instrumental to my inquiry, and very important to understanding the writers of my inquiry. Munro appreciated the power of rituals to her creativity, believing they functioned as a protection mechanism against energy loss (McCulloch & Simpson, 1994). Munro’s rituals bring her to the act of writing, and energize her process. Atwood indulges several behaviours to ward off anxiety before writing. She interprets her routines of sharpening pencils and making coffee as distractions and procrastinations, but these rituals signal the body that it is ready to work.

When it comes to putting words down on the page (paper or electronic), Atwood,

Hill, and Munro write in notebooks and on notepads. Hill, however, does not state a preference for either handwritten first drafts or computer-produced drafts. Atwood handwrites her first drafts on lined paper with margins. Now in her mid-seventies,

Atwood is computer savvy and maintains a Twitter account. But her preference is a

Rollerball for ease and speed of movement across the page. As a habit that has become a ritual over the years, there is also an aesthetic element to her choice of writing instrument: the way the Rollerball moves across the page interests her. This does not explain how the Rollerball facilitates writing for Atwood, but the way the Rollerball makes Atwood feel plays a role in her creative process.

Munro also prefers handwritten first drafts. Her distaste for the computer is widely known, and it is a hindrance to her creative process. Yet Munro’s difficulty with technical things is only part of the story. Munro was a published writer before the ubiquitous personal computer, but she preferred the pen to the manual/electric typewriter

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for first drafts. Many writers lack a reason for their preference for the pen, although

Atwood explains it is, in part, because she is a slow typist.

I have an almost spiritual attachment to a number of fine pens I use for writing: a sterling silver Parker 75 fountain pen, my blue Phileas Waterman ballpoint, and an old inexpensive Sheaffer fountain pen I have used since 1976. I do not fear the computer, and my typing skills are superb (I won a typing competition in 1971), but I always reach for one of my fine pens when writing creatively. Frankly, I cannot conceive of writing a poem or love letter or story on a laptop. Can I explain this preference for the pen? (And not just any pen, but the right pen for the moment.) I cannot. But I do swear by the magic and power a special pen holds in my writing process. And I do suggest to student writers they should try different writing instruments for writing, doodling, and drawing by hand.

I experience a spiritual connection between my heart, hand and pen, and heart is where I find my writing passion and inspiration. Atwood and Munro routinely prepare coffee before (and while) they write. What physical connection can there be between a coffee ritual and writing? Perhaps nothing that is proven in a lab, but mentally and spiritually the coffee ritual has become a pathway to writing.

Periods of quiet are important to Atwood, Hill, and Munro. Atwood discussed the importance of “empty space” to creativity. Hill also suggested silence and waiting as strategies for tapping inspiration. Munro recommended a practice of listening. Listening, for Munro, provides a channel to the inner workings of others, which ignites stories in

Munro’s imagination. According to Munro, inspiration and “gift” are born of observation, listening, and work.

Implications for the Classroom

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James Moffett (1994) stated in the Foreword to Presence of Mind: Writing and the Domain Beyond the Cognitive that schools “go about writing far too mechanically and impersonally,” (p. x). Isolating writing from “its grounding in emotions and the senses…in the body and the unconscious, in silence and intuition” results in futility

(Moffett, 1994, xi). Donald Tinney (2011) stated in “The Yogi in the Classroom”, that teachers, “particularly content-driven high school teachers, scoff at pedagogy that embraces the spiritual dimension of education or the language of the heart, writing it off as being touchy-feely, undisciplined, and based on emotions” (p. 96). Moffett (1994) argued we should not dismiss the “multifarious matrix” that is writing, which “includes the sources and resources of writing, reasons to write, and the circumstances that prompt and reward writing” (Moffett, p. xi). Further, Vinita Hampton Wright (2005) suggested in

The Soul Tells a Story: Engaging Creativity with Spirituality in the Writing Life that though “creativity involves transcendence” (p. 16) and “mysterious elements” (p. 18), it is “natural, and we are designed to work with it joyfully and fruitfully” (p. 18).

Teachers facing the pressures of demanding curricula and annual provincial literacy testing might balk at the imposition of additional writing strategies on their workload. Researchers O’Shaughnessy, McDonald, Maher, and Dobie (2002) found that

“some of the routines … are those least tolerated in many classrooms” (p. 36). Further, as some of the routines touch on the spiritual, such as routines of walking to access the creative spirit, or practicing waiting to allow inspiration to “bubble up,” Donald Tinney

(2011) suggested, “teachers…scoff at pedagogy that embraces the spiritual dimension of education or the language of the heart, writing it off as being touchy-feely, undisciplined, and based on emotions” (p. 96). However, as O’Shaughnessy et al. (2002) discovered

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from their study of “fledgling and professional writers,” there are several routines, behaviours, and patterns that encourage productivity in the composition classroom.

Atwood, Hill, and Munro were able to describe rituals that inexplicably aided their creative processes. Similarly, the young writers studied by O’Shaughnessy et al. identified rituals that helped “reduce writing anxiety, increase power and control over the process, and enhance fluency” (O’Shaughnessy et al., p. 22). Frequently these rituals involved creating special environments for writing, or using special tools, and indulging behaviours that might appear as superstitious, procrastinating, or wasting time.

O’Shaughnessy et al. (2002) suggested that composition classrooms need to reflect the influence that patterns, rituals, and behaviours have on beginning and continuing composition. Small changes to seating plans, allowing students to listen to music (if needed), tolerating movement within the classroom, playing with deadlines, etc., are unimposing, non-intrusive acts that encourage the act of writing. In computer-based composition classrooms, students might be encouraged to attempt brainstorming, rough drafts, or mapping using a pen or pencil.

Exposing students to the various practices of established published writers is a valuable experience that could offer less-experienced student writers possibilities

(perhaps) previously unexplored and new writing tools for their writing survival kits.

The Uniform Voice That is No Voice

The formal, analytical writing that tends to leave the writer out of the product describes most writing of the English classroom. This type of writing denies the personal voice. The supremacy of the essay genre presents a challenge to the personal voice in writing, as well as to writing in other genres. My students who regularly struggled with

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the demands of the formal essay would frequently conclude they were poor writers.

Citing their poor results on a recent essay, and convinced they could not write well, these students would not attempt to write for the school newspaper or yearbook.

When I was a teenager and high school student in the academic stream, I was taught to “write” using various essay formats, including argumentative, expository, comparison/contrast. While it was true that I flourished in those classes, others floundered. Not much has changed since the 60s, as students continue to write lengthy essays, with prescribed formats, and little opportunity to develop a voice on any subject of personal significance. Mary Pipher (2006) wrote about her challenge finding her writing voice in Writing to Change the World:

I struggled for years to find my voice. At first, I wrote in a self-conscious way:

I sat down and “committed the act of literature.” My anxiety about writing

caused me to write in a constipated, bland way that sounded clunky, pompous,

and effusive all at the same time. (pp. 42-43)

Peter Elbow, quoted in Rico (1998), explained the vibrancy of voice in Writing with

Power:

Writing without voice is wooden or dead because it lacks sound, rhythm, energy,

and individuality. . . .Writing with voice is writing into which someone has

breathed. It has fluency, rhythm, and liveliness that exist naturally in the

speech of most people when they are enjoying a conversation. (p. 138)

And on the subject of developing voice through expressive writing and storytelling, Rico

(1983) stated:

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writing is first of all an act of self-definition of what you know, what you

discover, what you wonder about, what you feel, see, hear, touch, taste…The

result of expressing your experience is a unique voice: yours. Your voice is

expressed in storytelling, . . . in sound, in feelings, and above all in the focus you

discover each time you write. (p. 16)

Pipher (2006), Elbow (1998), and Rico (1983) acknowledge that writing with voice has life and authenticity; writing with voice includes the senses and experiences of the writer. And, just as a reader brings himself or herself to a work of literature, a writer must “show up” to his or her writing. This, however, does not describe the current state of affairs in many writing classes at the secondary school level. Writing and writing classes can be laborious. Voice is expressed through the “objective” impersonal third person. This traditional, restrictive third person voice, robed in the clothing of academic language, gives a veneer of objectivity to the writer’s position on a topic.

Students should be allowed to develop unique voices within and beyond the boundaries of the formal essay. They may discover the joy of composition, of saying something, by attempting various forms of expression. Langdon (1962) found that her students wrote with confidence in her intensive writing program when they felt she believed that their thoughts were important enough to write down. (Langdon, 1962, p. 5)

Langdon (1962) wrote: “[G]iven, at last, the opportunity to write willingly and eagerly, their own private thoughts and fears and hopes … we have stood amazed at the beauty of the results” (p. 54). Sadly, when given a chance to write narratives in a formal setting, students often do not trust the process. Carola Conle, my research methodologies professor at OISE, addressed this issue in “The World in My Text: A Quest for Pluralism”

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when she wrote of her experience with pre-service teachers in her classroom: “[t]he telling of stories of experience needed to be legitimated among students whose academic success in previous years had often hinged on argumentative discussion” (p. 221).

Student writers deserve better and frequent opportunities to practice and develop their unique voices using the gifts of various writing genres. To do otherwise, is to often permanently “turn off” and turn writers away writers from the writing act.

Addressing the related issue of non-writers, William Stafford’s work Writing the

Australian Crawl is quoted in Rico (1998). He stated:

My question is “when did other people give up the idea of being a poet?” You

know, when we are kids we make up things, we write, and for me the puzzle is

not that some people are still writing, the real question is why did other people

stop? (p. 75)

Stafford’s question is my question. The question touches on a larger consequence: the loss of writers equates with a loss of voice in our communities and cultures. An answer to

Stafford’s question might be found in Matthew Fox’s study (2002) of creativity,

Creativity. Fox sees the modern educational agenda of North America, one that can be described as a recent European agenda and decidedly uncreative, as being at odds with the pre-modern African, American and Asian educational agenda, an agenda that embraced creativity and its values. In Creativity, Fox accounts for the reason North

American schools often fail to meet the needs of creativity and individuality of their students. He wrote:

I believe it is because the pre-modern cultures – African, American, Asian –

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valued creativity as being the heart and soul of education. Storytelling and

ceremony, myths that tell the great stories of how we got here and why we

are here and what, therefore, our common ethic can be – these comprised the

basis of education for tens of thousands of years for our species. The modern

European agenda is a recent agenda. It allowed us to conquer the earth and

subdue many peoples and cultures, but it did not teach us survival, that is,

sustainability, with the earth and her processes. It did not teach us reverence

or gratitude. It did not teach us wonder…. Indeed, it banished wisdom at the

expense of raw knowledge. (p. 201)

The values of this modern day European agenda are reminiscent of the utilitarian values belonging to Mr. Gradgrind, the school headmaster and man of “facts and calculations” in Charles Dickens’ Hard Times. Dickens was critical of an educational system and society that espoused facts at the expense of imagination and wonder; however, more than one hundred years after the publication of Hard Times, it would seem the utilitarians have gained the upper hand. The Industrial Revolution saw imagination lose ground, and today, as we continue to sacrifice the arts to budget cuts and arguments that favour the maths and sciences, the imagination continues to suffer.

Hal Zina Bennett (1999) wrote, “Living as we do in the scientific age, with its fierce faith that all events can and must be objectively verified or they do not deserve our attention, we’ve lost the meaning of magic in our lives” (p. 14). As the imagination suffers, perhaps, so too, do individuals and society.

Implications for the Classroom: Change our Narratives, Change Ourselves

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As a secondary school English and English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher,

I have also witnessed my students realise “the possibility of a greater truth” (Bennett,

1999) within their narratives. Many of my students rehearsed and cemented their personal narratives over several years. Their stories were painful and the harsh lessons of the stories seemingly inescapable. I asked my ESL students, many with excruciating tales of torture, separation, and loss, to look to the great stories of their cultures, especially those that described people pushed to the brink of despair, but for whom hope existed either for themselves or those who came after. From mythology, there is the story of Pandora.

Although Pandora released disease, violence and death upon the world, a living symbol of hope escaped from the box. The magic of her story rests within this wonderful symbol, and the story transforms from one of personal failure to a story of hope. Other sacred texts tell similar narratives of hope born of failure: a world destroyed by flooding is shown a rainbow; paradise lost, and salvation promised. I challenged my teenage writers to find the symbols of hope in their storied lives and render them creatively through narratives. The results were dramatic.

Some years ago, I taught three children of a large Iranian family. A mother and her four children came to Canada to live with the children’s aunt. The children’s father died in Iran at the hands of a negligent dentist. My class had just finished watching The

Forbidden Kingdom, a movie with a strong revenge plot. As a writing exercise, I asked my students to creatively respond to an idea expressed throughout the movie that revenge often comes back upon itself. I invited my student writers to use any genre. Shiva, one of the Iranian siblings, wrote a beautiful fairytale-styled story about a young girl who loses her father to a villain. The young girl seeks revenge upon the villain, until, after coming

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face-to-face with the wicked man, she is affected and surprised by his humanity. She chooses to forgive, instead.

I talked to Shiva about her story. After the composition process, she no longer preached blood for blood. She seemed more at ease allowing the Iranian courts to decide the dentist’s fate. She had transformed her own narrative of rage and revenge into a unexpected story of understanding and justice, thereby achieving a measure of peace.

Shiva “extended the circle of caring” to include her father’s killer, one of the bad guys who

can only be properly dealt with if we see them as people with needs, desires, and

ideals like ourselves. Ultimately, placing them outside the circle only will hurt us

all. When any humans are dehumanised, we all lose some of our humanity.

(Pipher, 2006, p. 224)

Writing the story helped Shiva work through complicated emotions; the final product incorporated her developing stand on revenge and her enlightened understanding of oneness with all humanity.

It is important here to include an epiphany I experienced as her teacher and reader of all my students’ stories. Student narratives affect my teaching practice as an artist and learner, as well as the teacher-student relationship. Pamela Post’s essay (2004) “The

Transformational Power of Stories: Hearing Another’s Truth Helps Me To Understand

Mine,” included in Educators Therapists & Artists on Reflective Practice (2004), stated:

My transformation comes in my willingness to listen with my heart. ‘It takes two to speak the truth – one to speak and another to hear’” (Thoreau in De Salvo, 1999, p. 213, in

Byers and Forinash, p. 34). Grace Feuerverger (2007) also writes about the

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transformational effect of story in Teaching, Learning and Other Miracles through her story about Mandy, a young girl who says, “Express yourself, Mrs. Feuerverger. You have a right to” (p. 60). Feuerverger wrote:

And I understood for the first time the power of a spiritual response to effect

change deep in the heart. Mandy’s words held out a vision of transformation….

My purpose here is to tell this story so as to allow us to be redeemed by Mandy’s

words. (p. 60)

Pamela Post (2004), a teacher of therapeutic writing, pointed out:

that compassion for myself and for others grow as I help them write their truth.

My transformation will continue as I evoke and witness the stories of others. The

work I do helping others helps me each and every time. (p. 35)

As an English teacher, I could easily have asked my students to write a traditional five-paragraph essay outlining their positions on revenge, using three fully developed points and a conclusion. Allowing my students to exercise their imaginations by creatively responding to the topic of revenge resulted in thoughtful expressions and engaged writing. It also helped them to discover a broader truth from the hardened stories they had told many times before. My students took care with their written work, choosing the exact words they needed to passionately communicate feelings and positions. Their work was authentic, personal, and sincere. Their papers were organised and their narrative voices were alive; this stood in contrast to the usual stilted, lifeless writing I often found in high school essays. Many of my student writers looked to their stories of pain, and created narratives of hope. They were the shamans, and their stories transformed me as their audience. Just as my stories, shared with students in the same

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circle of trust, moved them. In that safe and sacred atmosphere of the writing circle, teacher and students shared equally in the shamanic experience of altering reality and broadening truth through the magic and illusions of stories and poetry. Writing nearly fifty years ago, Margaret Langdon (1962) suggested, “[I]n this world of brainwashing, clichés, platitudes and lies, it is important that education should strive to encourage this honest self-expression” (p. 30). I believe some of us are still hoping for this almost fifty years later.

Significance of the Research

The many excellent studies in composition process theory (Bizzell, 1982/1997;

Breuch, 2002; Elbow, 1973/1981; Emig, 1971; Flower & Hayes, 1981; Hairston, 1982;

Murray, 1985/2009) have not widely acknowledged areas of composition writers themselves consider important to their process: motivation, attitude, insight, emotion, spirit, intuition, physicality, and courage. Janet Emig discussed the unconscious in the writing process in “The Uses of the Unconscious in Composing.” She acknowledged that writers are aware of the power of the unconscious at work in their writing process (p. 49).

The difficulty for Emig proved to be the unreliable descriptions of those creative processes” (as cited in Perl, 1994, p. 100). Perhaps much more could be learned about the composition process from writers’ idiosyncratic, puzzling, and contradictory descriptions of their creative process. Also, I felt it was important to use mature, prominent, published writers as the focus of my inquiry. Hopefully, their writing narratives, spanning generations of authorship, would more fully reveal the writer at work, and provide insight to complement and enhance existing writing theory.

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Therefore, this inquiry contributes to and expands upon existing composition theory: First, by valuing writers’ narratives of the creative process as fit subject for inquiry, and including their insights in the canon of research on creative writing process theory. Second, my inquiry develops the idea that a writer’s physical environment, including props such as lucky pens or a special notebook, can and should be manipulated to provide a comfortable and safe zone from which a writer can begin to create. Third, my inquiry explores the idea that writing is an act of courage, and as such, writers will require encouragement, support, and recognition from family, schools, and community.

Fourth, my inquiry expands upon the understanding of “support” to include opportunities within the English curriculum for writers to develop a creative presence and voice through writing across many genres in addition to the essay. Fifth, my inquiry expands the findings of O’Shaughnessy, McDonald, Maher, and Dobie (2002), to suggest that writers can also gain “confidence, competence, and control” (p. 36) from rituals, routines, and patterns, including physical activity, daily writing, freewriting, meditation, and periods of silence.

Opportunities for Further Research

Gender: It was beyond the scope of this inquiry to study the effects, if any, of gender on the creative process. It is notable that contextual information reported by the

Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) reveals that 28% of females and

22% of males wrote “outside school for more than three hours a week” (EQAO, 2013). In

2009, the results were 33% of females and 29% of males reporting at least three hours of writing outside of school. Is there a connection between gender and the creative process?

If so, what is it?

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Additionally, from my limited study of three accomplished writers, I found it interesting that both Atwood and Munro opted to write at home in the midst of parenting small children, while Hill spoke of his need to escape the distractions of family busy-ness, and rented writing space above a Hamilton bookstore. Atwood suggested she did not write a book, nor did she care about writing books, for a period of almost four years after her daughter was born: “Lady Oracle came out in ’76, the year I had the baby…then there is a pause, there isn’t another book until 1980, I think” (Heilmann & Taylor, 2006, p. 251). Munro felt conflicted about motherhood and writing. Jim Munro stated, “Your mother always had a huge guilt feeling about writing because you kids theoretically were being neglected while she was trying to write” (S. Munro, p. 57). There could be a need for exploration of the role gender does or does not play in the writing process.

Epilogue

When writing is taught in schools, what more can the teacher say, what more can

I say to inspire and encourage students so that they want to have their voices heard?

When Tona Pearce Myers, a writer and poet, edited a collection of essays on creativity called The Soul of Creativity: Insights into the Creative Process (1999), she did so in an attempt to understand the source of creative inspiration and its expression. Her research into creativity is described as a journey, and the journey “continues from darkness to the healing force of creativity” (p. xvi). Through the written contributions to her book, Myers discovers that “[i]n creating we bring forth life, and with life comes health. Every act of creating we complete brings life to our ideas, thoughts, and imagination, which fuels our existence even further” (p. xvi). Regarding the “action of writing,” poet John Fox’s essay

(1999) “Words from the Marrow” explains that “[b]y writing, you give life to what

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matters, you give shape to what you know. You find your voice” (p. 134). Fox also uses the analogy of a healthy immune system healing a wound to describe the healthful benefits of writing creatively. He states:

The act of writing creatively, of working on words so they say what you mean

and so the words do their work upon you, is similar to the action of the immune

system responding to heal a wound or disease, maintaining wholeness and

encouraging optimum well-being. (p. 137)

Pipher simply says, “Good storytellers heal the world” (p. 223).

It is uplifting to realise that so many writers from the academy, many who hold doctorates and are products of the same educational system that tends to grind out essayists and crush creative expression in any other form, use language that touches on the mystical, the magical, and the spiritual. Many of the writers featured in Tona Pearce

Myers’ book (1999) The Soul of Creativity are therapists and counsellors. Lucia

Capacchione (“Losing Yourself in the Divine”), Judith Cornell (“Becoming Fully

Brilliant”), Pat B. Allen (“Intention and Creativity: Art as Spiritual Practice”), and John

Fox (“Words from the Marrow”) consider creative expression integral to our survival as a healthy species. Joseph E. and Glenda M. Bogen’s “The Other Side of the Brain III: The

Corpus Callosum and Creativity,” quoted in Rico (1998), address the role creativity plays in human existence: “Creativity has not only made the human race unique in Nature: what is more important for the individual, it gives value and purpose to human existence”

(p. 279). Myers’ research-journey into creativity concludes “by looking at creativity as spiritual practice or prayer…. Many believe that in the act of creating there is a holiness – a spirituality” (Myers, 1999, p. xvii). Myers’ practice and study of art, writing, and

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creativity leave her feeling “inspired, illuminated, and uplifted” (p. xvii), three goals that would make admirable objectives in a lesson plan for a writing unit. All told, when the outcomes of writing include enlightenment of the self and others, discovery of one’s voice, healing the community, finding purpose and truth, and then passing that knowledge on, there should be no debate about the significance of creative writing in the classroom.

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