Charlotte Gill | author site & blog

Writing rooms

2008-06-13T11:30:00.002-07:00

Vancouver Int'l Writers Fest features my workspace this week as part of its ever-growing "office gallery."

My voyeuristic interest in the writing spaces of others is ongoing, especially those housing the Salman Rushdies and the Margaret Atwoods of the world. I want to see what really pimped offices look like. And also, are you people really that clean and organized? Or did you faff an afternoon away recycling and decluttering for the sake of the photo. Like I did:

Usually my desk is so strewn with books and magazines, accretions of dishware and junk mail, it overflows onto the floor like some kind of terrible glacial wave of paper detritus and procrastination. It trails out near the door in punch-hole confetti.

Go here for all the writing rooms and mini-essays that accompany.

Milkin' it

2008-05-23T22:34:00.002-07:00

"Eating Dirt" picked up a nomination for a Western Magazine Award in the Human Experience category. For all the finalists, clickety here.

Book weeds

2008-05-12T09:33:00.014-07:00

You may watch me eat these words, but I think Kindle is a stupid invention. A plastic tablet illuminated with blinky lights and scrolling text so that it looks like a book, but when you drop it in the tub, ain't no hairdryer in the world going to save your Jane Eyre. That aside, I've been devouring all the debate recently on digitizing books, and what it means for us content providers.

I just love the internets. Despite all the blingin' visuals, it's made for text. And it's basically free. Naked boobs aside, of course. I've never understood why people plaster their websites with copyright notices and all kinds of legal signage. I thought wholesale rip-off was the entire point of the internet. Cory Doctorow has an awesome little piece on why it pays to let your stuff float around on the tides. And also why you should never, ever give your books away online. Unless you're Jewel and can afford the pro bono sharing.

Internet users have short attention spans. The moment of consummation--the moment when a reader discovers your book online, starts to read it, and thinks, huh, I should buy a copy of this book--is very brief. That's because "I should buy a copy of this book" is inevitably followed by, "Woah, a youtube of a man putting a lemon in his nose!" and the moment, as they say, is gone.

I'm curious about downloadable audio books and if the same wisdom applies.

National Magazine Awards

2008-04-30T06:00:00.001-07:00

"Eating Dirt," last year's non-fiction piece about treeplanting, has been nominated for a National Mag Award. Also nominated from the pages of the Vancouver Review are Terry Glavin and Mark Mushet. Way to go VR!

Bathroom books

2008-04-29T14:27:00.015-07:00

I stumbled upon a NYT recommendation for a tome that seems destined for the toilet cistern lid. I'm quite chuffed with my own small but potent water-closet library, particularly with the most recent addition sent to me yesterday by Ma G, Do You Remember?: The Book That Takes You Back. I fear Ma G may feel slighted by the stowage of her recent gift in the bog, so allow me to share with you the esteemed titles with which it shares shelf space:

The B.C. Guide to Buying Rural and Recreational Property, John Ince.

Dessous: Lingerie as a Dangerous Weapon, Gilles Neret.

Every Person on the Planet: An Only Somewhat Anxiety-Filled Tale for the Holidays, Bruce Eric Kaplan.

The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint Exupery.

The Curious Sofa: A Pornographic Work, Ogdred Weary (AKA Edward Gorey).

Pushcart's Complete Rotten Reviews & Rejections, Eds. Bill Henderson and Andre Bernard.

canada gees mate for life, bill bissett.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Lynne Truss.

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, T.S. Eliot.

Doggerel: Great Poets on Remarkable Dogs, Martha Paulos.

And, in my own personal opinion, the piece de resistance of the collection, a very lucky find in a Kamloops remainder bin:

Clean and Decent: The Fascinating History of the Bathroom and The Water-Closet by Lawrence Wright.

I'm still on the hunt for a copy of Fuck, Yes!: A Guide to the Happy Acceptance of Everything by the Reverend Dr. Wing Fu Fing. A bit long for a bathroom book, it's true. You risk losing dinner guests between dinner and dessert. Not to mention the dreaded pink buttock ring. But I'm willing to suffer for a worthy edition.

What not to do when you've submitted your manuscript to an overworked editor at an understaffed publishing house

2008-04-02T11:21:00.000-07:00

Materialize.

(Via Maud.)

More from the India files

2008-03-31T13:21:00.002-07:00

Photos from the recent trip to India are now up.

For those with slow connections--it's a Flash gallery and a bit of a pig, sorry.

Use your browser's "back" button to return to this page.

Go here.

The Cellist

2008-03-28T09:09:00.007-07:00

Last year a friend read our pal Steve Galloway's new novel in manuscript form. When I asked for a report, this is what she told me: "Well," she paused to really think about how to phrase her response. "It's amazing." Her eyes got really big when she got to the last word, and I knew she wasn't embellishing or faking in any way. Since then I've been positively itching to get my hands on a copy, dropping hints at housewarmings and Thanksgivings and all that.

Yann Martel has sent an advance reading copy to our Prime Minister, along with this recommendation in his accompanying letter:

I'm sure you will hear about The Cellist of Sarajevo from other people than just me. It's set during the brutal siege of the Bosnian city of Sarajevo in the early 1990s. That story was in the news for years, yet I think most of us just took it in dumbly, wondering how people could do that to each other. Well, Galloway's novel explains how. It does the work of a good fiction: it transports you to a situation that might be alien to you, makes it familiar, and so brings understanding. That's what I meant when I said fiction is "whole-person". While reading The Cellist of Sarajevo you are imaginatively there, in Sarajevo, as the mortar shells are falling and snipers are seeking to kill you as you cross a street. Your mind's eye sees, your moral sense is outraged: your full humanity is being exercised.

Yet The Cellist is a directed and digested take on reality, it's not journalism. There is subtle intent woven into the realistic narrative of its three main characters. You will see that when you read the last line of the novel, which is magnificent.

Know what I think? Harper doesn't deserve it. No doubt it's languishing in the bottom of a desk drawer somewhere or maybe even (gasp) underneath the used yogurt containers in the blue box.

What am I talking about? Yogurt? Recycling? Our PM? When it snows in Vancouver in April!

(Via Quill).

At least the gravity still pulls down

2008-03-10T17:59:00.016-07:00

India, I just love it. If you've visited you may think of it, as I do, not as a country but like another planet--with plenty of delightfully logic-eluding shit happening on the surface. For example:

Why did I not take more photos like this? The mad thronging fun! The rat-hole hotel rooms! The cockroaches as big as my shoe!

Here are some more, all taken in Mumbai, until I figure out how to install the rest in the gallery.

Make like Zog and take what you are hungry for

2007-12-21T23:32:00.000-08:00

Book proposal for a pulling guide penned by wanking young cad. Hilarious, for all the wrong reasons. If you manage to cringe your way through to the end, please send a reader's report. (From Maud.)

New fiction!

2007-12-10T09:00:00.000-08:00

After a very long time away from publishing short stories, I've got a short short in the latest issue of The Walrus. It's part of a segment called Noir Canada:

The noir novel has long been a staple of urban American fiction. But what about Canada? The Walrus asked Canadian novelists to sketch their cities as grittier, sexier, and darker than you might ever have imagined . . .

Mine is set in Vancouver, naturally. See if you can guess the location.

More from the Vancouver Review

2007-10-31T10:34:00.000-07:00

Here are some more treeplanting photos from "Eating Dirt," courtesy* of The Vancouver Review and camera wizard Mark Mushet, who can see inside your soul with his lens.

The full text of "Eating Dirt" is available here in PDF form.

*Please note that these photos are embedded with delicate and complex subprograms, and they will spontaneously combust in a glorious eyelash-singeing display upon reproduction, download or any kind of subtle borrowing.

Impulse shopping

2007-10-28T22:55:00.000-07:00

Last week, a week so dreary and soggy and pigeon-grey I nearly threw myself out into traffic, I somehow managed to talk the mister into buying tickets to India in January. Twenty minutes of internet trawling, followed by a phone call to a bucket shop in Little India, two hours later: voila! Tickets to Delhi via Beijing on Air China.

We asked our travel agent if she had ever flown Air China. She shook her head vigourously.

"But theoretically would you fly Air China?" we asked.

"Maybe," she said. "But only if someone gave me the ticket for free." Then she added, "Suggest the vegetarian meal."

All right, then.

We've both been to India before, and we know it's busy, noisy, polluted. Nothing makes any sense, and time runs in every direction but the one you want it to. And we can't wait to get back there. We instantly agreed that we'd packed too hard last time. Now it's little more than a change of clothes, a toothbrush and flip-flops, and we'll make do.

Airline travel could be sufficiently demonized by the time our next vacation rolls around, and instead of Air China we'll be looking at steerage on some marginally seaworthy ocean liner. I've been looking to offset the flights and was appropriately bitchslapped by the calculations. 6 tonnes of CO2 each--that's double what we offgas just by living for a year. To offset it Gold-Standard style, it's about $200 each. That's 8,000 rupees, or truly an embarrassing assload of guilt money.

So, so old?

2007-10-24T00:13:00.000-07:00

Stephen Marche, author of Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, moved from NYC to Toronto. In a widely blogged Star piece, Marche highlights the differences between CanLit and the writing life south of the border :

Brooklyn is so, so young and Toronto is so, so old: It felt like moving from a frenetic day care to an old folks' home.

...

Literature in Toronto is something your smartest aunt does once she's cozied up in her favourite sweater. And the work therefore is less exciting.
The popular novels here are generally ponderous, draped in sanctimony over suffering and history, melodramas in exotic settings. One thing you are not going to get out of a novel on the Giller list or indeed the best-seller list is a good laugh.

A set of bronze balls, especially for the part about Margaret Atwood. No one likes to say it, but our books do tend to smell like day-old porridge. It's something I've heard murmured a hundred times before, and I can't say I disagree.

When my unpublished manuscript was making the rounds at various Toronto publishing houses back in 2002, I was somewhat surprised to hear my writing described back to me by various publishing professionals as "innovative" and "edgy." In my own mind my sentences seemed much less amazing. They echoed in a clumsy freshman way at least a half dozen American writers whose fiction I'd been reading for years. Lorrie Moore, Christine Schutt, et al. I realize that editors are extremely busy people who spend nearly all of their horrifically understaffed waking hours reading reams of print-out sent by people like me. People in publishing do not have the time to curl up with novels very often. But A.M. Homes? George Saunders? Almost no one I spoke to had read these books or even, in some cases, seemed aware of their authors. It felt like a giant chasm to bridge, this lack of shared language between the grotto and Toronto, like trying to sell a lemon meringue pie to someone who has never tasted a lemon. You have to hope they know a good pie when they smell one. I might be struck dead by lightning for writing that. I just hope it happens after my laptop arrives back from the shop, so I can erase all the bad things I've written about my sister.

At the bottom of Marche's argument is a divide between youth and establishment, up-and-comers versus Boomers. I've read it often enough, especially out here in realty-crazy Vancouver, where the gap tends to magnify in socio-economic terms. If Vancouver's artists and young talent flee the city for greener pastures, what will the landscape look like by the time the Olympics arrive? Since 2000, the overwhelming majority of my graduate creative writing class has fled to the suburbs, to other towns and provinces. I love Vancity, but next year, I'm going, too. What if our national literary scene worked the same way?

So, so old. What does that mean? I'm an emerging writer with greying hair, a cracked front tooth and a medicine chest full of anti-wrinkle products. Marche mentions other "young" writers Heather O'Neill, David Bezmozgis and Yann Martel (who by now must be over forty). I'm guessing old, as Marche means it, has nothing to do with age but with sensibility, a certain ossified settling. A lack of interest in the new, the foreign, in the exploration of uncomfortable territory. I read it somewhere that writers are like sharks, eating up the world all the time. We stop swimming and devouring, and we die. When my hard drive returns I'll find out who said that. I have this feeling it was an American.

(Via Q & Q)

Clean Dirt

2007-09-10T08:05:00.000-07:00

I wrote a treeplanting article called "Eating Dirt" not so long ago and who better to run it than B.C.'s very own Vancouver Review?

That is in fact me on the cover--albeit with the top of my head sliced off--posing in my very best treeplanter couture. It's tough to tell, but underneath those shin pads I am indeed wearing yoga pants. Who knew the secret to Vancouver's civic uniform, the lululemon ass bra, is a kind of indestructible fabric that resists a surprising assortment of wear and tear?

We took this photo and many others in the closest facsimile to a clearcut we could find within city limits, the blowdown sections of Stanley Park. For this shot I was styled by a very lovely professional named Cori with synthetic "dirt" and "sweat" packaged in jars and spray bottles.

"What's wrong with real mud," I asked her as she smeared a substance called Clean Grease down my neck.

"It doesn't show up for the camera," she told me.

Just then a jogger loped up on the path, visibly peeved that our production was taking up the entire width of route. "Oh, how Hollywood," he sneered as he trotted around us. That's what it's come to in Tinseltown North--I guess we're tired of making way for the cameras. Hmmm, maybe if they offered to take our garbage away...

He kicked off his loafers and threw his long ugly body out across the water

2007-07-31T09:09:00.001-07:00

The Banff Centre is situated at the base of Tunnel Mountain, a modest bump as far as Rocky Mountains go. It's also perched above the bustle of Banff proper, where it's possible to have all of one's maple syrup, fur garment and caramel corn needs met on streets named after furry creatures. At the same time, it's strangely difficult to buy Band-Aids or shoe laces or dish towels.

There's a popular walk between town and the Centre along the cliffy banks of the Bow River. I often go this route on a hot day expressly for the mist from Bow Falls. I'm also reminded of a George Saunders short story, "The Falls." A couple of tourists cascaded through Bow Falls by accident in a canoe just a few weeks ago. Since then I've wondered what it might have been like to stand powerlessly on shore, watching the imminent descent. This, of course, is the whole point of the Saunders story.

I've been told by a local guide that it's illegal to kayak Bow Falls, which is more a series of violently roiling rapids, but the occasional maniac will shoot through in the middle of the night, just to see themselves live through it.

What's not to love?

2007-07-26T09:23:00.000-07:00

Our favorite boozy perve is the latest to put the beats to The Fighter. A shirtless Jonathan Ames. Boxing gloves kiss. Sweat flies. Authors duke it out while Mangina and Fiona Apple look on. Really, with The Sadies show last night, it's all been more fun than my delicate brain could stand in 24 hours. Pants McLee, advise looking at these photos in more than one sitting. I see you tossed back on the couch with a face cloth over your eyes.

Pet Milk

2007-07-22T08:28:00.000-07:00

For the last week and a half I've been chewing away on a non-fiction piece at the Banff Centre. Marni Jackson is the Chair of the Literary Journalism program. Last week she gave a talk about writing as "mountain climbing," and since then I've been thinking about writing metaphors and how we use them to explain the process.

Being a fiction writer, I often think of literary journalism like this: different painting, same brushes. I'm writing a short story, only everything happens to be true. Or "true." Anyway.

Yesterday I dug up a short story called "Pet Milk," by the American writer Stuart Dybek. Though officially fiction, the piece reads equally well as memoir to me. It begins with a can of evaporated milk, sideslips into memories of a grandmother, then to a cocktail called a King Alphonse. I love this story because it's so unabashedly nostalgic. So steeped in nostalgia it's a study of nostalgia itself. Sounds like squeeze cheese, I know, but the story achieves its aim in the smallest sensuous details--the faintest scents, the most mundane objects. Formally speaking, "Pet Milk" works for me because its structure mirrors the content so well, in surprisingly few words. Images form and fall away just as memories do, each one replaced by another, nudging the story towards emotional resolution. The ending somehow manages to be expansive and intimate at the same time, which lifts the story out of pure sentiment.

I couldn't find a full-text version of the piece online, but you can listen to it here in 12 minutes. I clipped this from an interview with Dybek: "The important aspect of using autobiography is not recording what actually happened so much as believing that the material is a great gift worthy of being reimagined."

I'm not wholly convinced about the "great gifts" part, but I do have in mind an old treeplanter saying: "It's not the mountain you have to climb, it's the rock inside your shoe."

On top of Tunnel Mountain

2007-07-20T08:47:00.001-07:00

Evamy

2007-07-11T10:30:00.000-07:00

Here are some shots of my studio (do you see the ease with which I slipped that in?--my studio) at the Banff Centre, which is basically a Canadian Disneyland for artists. I've been bashing away at the keyboard for the last couple of days. Result: mostly crap. Must be the uber-deluxe quality of my surroundings--see "cubbies" below.

Just now I noticed at my elbow a kind of flash card for wildlife encounters, which has separate categories for elk, cougar and bears. If you are attacked by a bear, says the card, "lie face down with arms behind your neck and your legs apart." That's a new one--legs apart--seems kind of counterintuitive, especially for the guys. Maybe it's some kind of wrestling defense maneuvre, so you can't be easily flipped. Maybe these are Delta Force bears, more elite and skilled in their combat techniques than bears elsewhere in Canada?

Woe is me

2007-06-26T06:39:00.000-07:00

Sorry, people, the posts have been thin--I'm on a deadline this week. Here's an article that's been in my bookmark folder, "Day Olds," for some time now, with the intriguing title: "My Book Deal Ruined My Life." I found myself nodding in agreement through much of the piece (which could be more accurately called "How Writing Ruined My Life" ), as I tend to think of writing as an uncomfortable, tedious, all-enveloping process. Kind of like having a toothache--the intensity is localized, but damn, does it ever take over your whole life when you're in the thick of it. After I finished reading, I found myself changing my mind. Now I'm in agreement with most of the posts in the comments section, which could be summarized as follows: "Please, cry me a fucking river." A book deal is a book deal--headaches, marriage ruination or no--and I doubt anyone would return theirs to Customer Service when the odds are one to 20,000 against.

Go, Laish, go!

2007-06-01T12:13:00.000-07:00

Up north in the hamlet of PeeGee, Laisha awaits the arrival of her imminent bebe. I'm not a mom, but it seems like this would be a profoundly heavy thing, waiting around for your wee one to make the move. Good luck, Laish! Maybe as a supplement to those other methods you could try visiting the funniest mama in Utah?

In my opinion, the drug is ready

2007-05-31T16:23:00.000-07:00

Several U.S. states have passed into law the mandatory vaccination of adolescent girls with Gardasil, Merck's cancer-preventing, anti-HPV drug. I, personally, find the "Tell Someone" HPV ~~marketing campaign~~ public health infomercials pretty creepy. Brought to you, by the way, "by one of Canada's leading research-based pharmaceutical companies." That aside, if I were the mother of a teenage girl I think you'd basically have to scrape me off the ceiling if news like this came down the pipe:

Dr. John Blatherwick, chief medical officer of Vancouver Coastal Health, is so impressed with the scientific data that he'd rather not wait for health policy recommendations from a Health Canada Immunization Committee (due by the end of 2007) and would like to start a mass vaccination program for B.C. girls this September. "We've entered a brave new world in medical science," he says of the Gardasil vaccine. "The studies have been rigorous and I think it's ready for mass use."

What is it with these doctor-officials, always gooing all over themselves about these new drugs the way everyone else gets excited about new iPods and the Wii and whatnot? Blatherwick, you wacky funster, guess with all that schooling you never got around to actually reading the Huxley.

The Tyee has an article today featuring study results for the vaccine in question. Two interesting points:

The vaccine only reduced the risk of precancerous abnormal cells by 17 per cent, and that, in fact, people who are vaccinated might be at risk of picking up twelve other high-risk strains of HPV not covered by the vaccine.

Also, the mortality risk of cervical cancer is 0.2%, "making it the second lowest ranking cancer threat in Canada." I've read this stat in several other places, and I'm surprised it's not more widely publicized.

The shelves are full but there's nothing to read

2007-05-30T10:42:00.000-07:00

Not really, especially chez Pants, but sometimes I approach the question, "What to read?" like I'm holding the fridge door open in pursuit of the elusive snack. Hence, my love of Boldtype. Great reviews. Great design. Thank god it isn't a daily. I'd never get any work done.

Supercream

2007-05-29T18:58:00.001-07:00