With Brush and Pen, Readings and Conversation with Anita Rau Badami, Lorna Goodison, and Diane Schoemperlen: A Mutually Reinforcing Cycle

My whole life I've been interested in connecting things that don't appear to belong together. I wanted to create something out of the details and objects jostling around in my mind, to ring words out of my visually intense environment. Visual art always seemed the natural response when I strained at articulation. I was introduced to collage early on in elementary school and was compelled to arrange images to convey my desired meaning. Eventually I began oscillating between image and text, prompting an interest in how the visual and verbal function together.

Reading through The Kingston WritersFest program a few weeks before the festival, I came upon With Brush and Pen, Readings and Conversations with Lorna Goodison, Anita Rau Badami, and Diane Schoemperlen, all writers who have a parallel practice as visual artists. I can't describe how excited I was to be in attendance at this event.

All of the writers agreed there's something visually present in all language, a feeling under words. Anita suggested that “ all writing should be painterly,” and that there is a, “mutually beneficial dialogue between literature and painting.” It is interesting to observe how each writer came to this dialogue between image and text: Anita recently returned to school to study fine arts, while Lorna Goodison started out as a visual artist and studied in New York at the Art Students League, and Diane Schoemperlen is self taught and has been making collages for many years. Their different approaches at different times seems to be evidence for the flexibility of experience and creation. These writers have taken up the invisible dialogue between the visual and verbal, and incorporated it into their work. It is a process of capturing, internalizing and expressing.

A member of the audience asked, “ what do you want people to look at first, the illustration or the text?” Each writer agreed it doesn't matter. It is not the approach that matters but the affect. I'd further this by acknowledging that one art does not consume the other— it is a movement. The Roman poet Horace wrote in his Ars Poetica (13 B.C) the dictum “Ut pictura poesis”— “as is painting, so is poetry.” I think he is describing the movement of artistic composition, the performance of singular parts acting as a whole in the absence of a frame. The edges may not align exactly, but we can scissor them to meet in ways that expand our understanding of creation.

International Marquee with J.M. Coetzee and Paul Auster: “The Miraculous Strangeness of Being

A few years ago Paul Auster sent J.M. Coetzee a letter proposing they correspond to each other in an open ended dialogue on subjects that interested them, “ let's strike sparks off each other,” he said. And so, a few years later here I am sitting in the balcony of the Grand Theatre in Kingston watching as Coetzee and Auster take the stage. They each sit in their respective arm chairs, Auster puts his glasses on as Coetzee smoothly removes his own spectacles and places them on the table.

Lord Byron wrote, “letter writing is the only device for combining solitude with good company.” Surely this describes the sampling of work Coetzee and Auster read. The first subject they explored during their reading was friendship. Coetzee observes, “male friends tend not to talk to each other about how they feel. If you do not tell your friends how you feel, how can they know? Friends can exist in this ambiguous state for years.” Paul responds by sharing his experience of moving away from a boyhood friend. And how when he talked to his little friend on the phone, he felt what he could only compare to the way he felt speaking to girls he liked as a young man. He continues, “Before our erotic lives are formed we do not make the distinction between love and friendship..” Paul says that he believes that, “we always loose the friendship of those who loose our esteem, and the best and most lasting friendships stand on admiration.” Coetzee then introduces marriage and relationships with is observation that, “ A man takes a woman to bed to be friends with each other. A man cannot be friends first because there's too much unspoken in the air.” With the introduction of women Auster offers that friendship outside of marriage is too static and polite. Marriage is above all a conversation, a continual work in progress.

Coetzee introduces a new letter on the “fittingness or unfittingness of names.” He relates, “Your name is your destiny; your name speaks your destiny. Only on your deathbed will you know what it is to be your name.” Auster responds that like a number, a name can evoke a whole archaeology of your past. There is so much in this discussion that I admire, namely their stark honesty. Their words enveloped like a tight embrace, allowing me as a listener to slow into contemplation.

Their collaboration investigates the apparitional relationship we have with others and our customs. They delve into the regular movement of our lives, of our memories and brings their ideas and discourse to a wider audience. Their enquiry cuts deep into the things that most define us, and the ways in which we seek to define ourselves in relation to others. Coetzee and Auster have created a volume of work that establishes letter writing as genre unto itself, like poetry or novel writing.

Little Comrades Book Launch: “The Rough Voyage of Childhood”

The June 26, 2012 launch of Laurie Lewis's Little Comrades was, hands down, one of the largest turn-outs I have witnessed for a book launch. The room was packed; there wasn't even space to stand, so people collected outside in the lobby of Kingston's Marine Museum. This memoir, the first of several, details Laurie's unique childhood growing up in a Communist prairie family and her experiences moving alone with her mother to New York during America's anti-Communist postwar years.

Despite coming from a family of writers, for many years Laurie didn't write. At least not until she took some creative writing courses with Carolyn Smart. After receiving positive feedback from students and Carolyn alike, Laurie found herself scribbling away.

Laurie's publishing debut at the age of 80 reminds me of something Annie Dillard said while discussing the craft of memoir, “The rushing of time wakes you...It rages beside you, down its swollen banks, and when it wakes you you're so startled you fall in. When you wake up, you notice that you're here.” Time, like a raging river, can swell beyond its banks, and certainly with age comes a multitude of life stories impatiently waiting to be told.

You can find great things when entering someone's historical landscape. For me, reading a good memoir generates the realization that we are all history makers; when we entered this world, life was already ongoing and out entrance will shape what happens next.

Laurie mentioned that she hopes her book will provide a window into a historical period, and surely this honest, fiercely intelligent narrative does. André Malraux suggested,“It could be that one of the most important functions of art is to make men [and women] aware of the greatness they do not know they have in themselves.” Laurie's story is bursting at the seams with greatness, and I'm looking forward to reading more.

(This post, now modified, first appeared on the Kingston WritersFest website in 2011)