Writing by the Seat of My Pants

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair,

wrote Mary Heaton Vorse. Dorothy Parker once quipped,

I hate writing, I love having written.

They are both writers, of course. Published writers who got their witticisms written down for people like me to quote in posts like this. I get the first statement. I don't do it often enough, but I get it. I can't totally relate to the second quote. I enjoy writing when there's something coming out of me. I enjoy organizing my thoughts and seeing where the ideas lead. It's like walking along a path I haven't walked before. I don't know what's around the next corner and I know I won't find out unless I start walking (the process, applying the seat and writing something down). I enjoy sermon and article writing. I'm enjoying writing this.

However, writing something more substantial is on my retirement bucket list. I have three or four such possible "projects" hanging over me at the moment. "Having written" only a very few thousand words in a couple of them, I am a long, long way from "having written" any of them. They all seem absolutely huge and complex and beyond me. I don't know what possessed me to think I was capable of writing anything beyond an email message, sermon, blog post or an essay. And the irritating thing is that it's all my own fault. Nobody forced me to take them on.

It doesn't help having friends like Fred Stenson who has actually written and had published several novels. I've read them all AND his short stores and posted about his two latest novels here. Wonderful, complex, multi-layered, engaging stories that have beginnings, middles and endings; not to mention actual pages, covers and flyleaf's. And then there's Glen Dueck here in Medicine Hat who has just published his first novel, Joanna. It's the story of the one of the women who provided for Jesus and was mentioned a couple of times in Luke's gospel (8.3 & 24.10). I am in awe of the kind of commitment and application required to get that work done while pastoring a church for a day job.

Now I am retired I have to face up to the fact that I can no longer use work as an excuse for the lack of pants seat application to the chair and the Macbook to the lap. In the meantime, those projects, which I never should have mentioned out loud, loom and taunt. Sigh. This post is probably nothing but a ploy by my endlessly devious and panicked inner aspiring writer to avoid writing something—anything—down for one of the projects in that bucket. Double sigh.

This Lent, perhaps, the time has come for me fast from unapplied pants seats.

"Who by Fire": a Novel by Fred Stenson—a Biased Review

I like the bon mot and the turn of phrase that's just so. There are always some tasty ones in Fred Stenson's books. Who By Fire is no exception. I've read them all. I still remember his grass baked to a "thirsty tan" in The Trade (I know exactly what that looks like, that's exactly what it's baked to in Medicine Hat by mid summer). Here are some of my Who by Fire favourites, with some biased-by-friendship thoughts and memories attached, in a bit of a stream of consciousness review.

A work dynamics expert dropped by weekly with a box of doughnuts, from which they fed like a peewee hockey team. (p30—page numbers from the Kindle version)

Fred and I began our friendship while feeding at Denny’s on 16th near Calgary's Foothills Hospital in the August of 1980. We’d just been hired by ACCESS Television—he as a writer, me as a Producer/Director—a bit of a peewee production team of two at the time. Our boss was on holiday for the month so we had nothing much to do except enjoy long lunches and conversations together over Pattie Melts. Those conversations included stories of his childhood on the Stenson family farm near Pincher Creek. I could hear the echoes in Who by Fire. 

Fred also fed on pancakes at Phil's for his writing at the time—longhand in black ink from fibre tipped pens in school exercise books. I don't know where and how he does it now but I'm pretty sure keys are involved.

To earn his daily bread, in addition to his television and fiction writing, Fred also did a fair amount of work for the oil patch. I remember being impressed that he would abandon his more casual, television writer attire to suit-up, tie and all, for his meetings with those clients. I can see the grist those days provided for the Who by Fire oil and gas industry story mill.

The engine kicked off easily but he sat for a while in sympathy for the engine parts, beating in their taffy. 33

Fred and I had a taffy moment or two in our collaborations. Times when clients weren't as impressed by our capabilities as we were. Times when making television programs felt like running through molasses.

I ached for Who by Fire characters Ella and Tom and their children as their relationships beat in the taffy of the circumstances Fred describes so well.

Behind the bar, a guy with a face like an open wrench was yelling. 36 

On the street outside, the air was so cold it breathed like metal. 38

Who by Fire is about what happens to ordinary people and their relationships when they are subjected to an open wrench faced industry producing air that breathed like metal.

I happened to read Who by Fire during Advent. The Daily Office readings of the season can be dark and full of the cries of prophets with the Biblical version of open-wrench faces and metal-breathed judgement. This verse caught my eye one morning:

For a burning place has long been prepared; indeed, for the king it is made ready, its pyre made deep and wide, with fire and wood in abundance; the breath of the Lord, like a stream of sulfur, kindles it. (Is 30.33)

Sulphur features heavily Who by Fire. Not that I'm suggesting that sour gas plants are necessarily an expression of God's judgement, but when humans, including oil and gas people, break bad the breaking can be very bad indeed. The Bible calls that kind of breaking "sin." We moderns don't much like the word any more, but acknowledging sin and putting it right is what makes guilt that leads to reconciliation a good thing.

Speaking of guilt and reconciliation, I appreciate the way Fred portrayed the Catholic Church in this book. As an almost Catholic cleric (we Anglicans are Catholic but just not Roman) I am somewhat sensitive to how she is portrayed. Many writers, both print and media, succumb to the temptation to take the cheap shot. Fred's treatment is fair, realistic and respectful.

The stream sluiced along below him, brown with its burdens. 325

Any novel or work of art comes brown with the burdens of history and the life of the artist. Who by Fire is its own such tea. There was even a reference to Moby Dick in there. Bill's sister, Donna, appears at his door unexpectedly and tells him he looks like Queequeg. That made me smile because way upstream and many years ago I can remember Fred announcing he'd read somewhere that a writer can learn deep things from reading a particular classic over and over again giving it a chance to get into his bones. At one time Moby Dick was the classic for Fred. I wondered if the reference is because of it.

The wind started up in the night and blew fiercely. Morning arrived with a bend in it. On days like this along the mountain flanks, things blew down and things blew up. School buses fell over sideways. Roofs de-shingled themselves like a card trick. Sometimes people went crazy and did things they would never have done otherwise. 330

Fred grew up in that wind. It blows him along still. Who by Fire is evidence of that and a good read.

UPDATE: my calendar has just reminded me that it's Fred's birthday today!!

The Great Karoo by Fred Stenson

It feels good to be able write that I've just finished a novel written by a friend of mine. It's not the finishing that feels good, mind, it's that it's written by a friend.

Fred and I toiled for a time at ACCESS in Calgary while it was still more educational than network or broadcast; a sort of poor-man's National Film Board. That was back in the early 80's. He wrote them, I produced and directed them, we suffered and rationalized our way out of the resulting post-mortems and critiques together.

The Great Karoo is a remarkable achievement. I really don't see my friend, Fred, in it. It's like it comes out of a life and experiences I didn't know Fred has had. Mind you, it's been more than twenty years since we worked together so I've missed a lot.

The horses in Karoo constitute characters in the book. I cared about Dunny and Blue almost as much as the people. I am impressed by Fred's knowledge of horses. I've never seen him on or even near one, yet he seems to know how they work. Mind you, I'm so ignorant of them (they're way too high, in my opinion) that he could write anything and I'd accept it, I suppose.

Fred has a lovely turn of phrase which I very much enjoy and to which I look forward when I embark on a Stenson read. An example, from Fred's The Trade, he writes of a landscape which had been baked to a "thirsty tan." I can see that and feel it. I experience it every summer in Medicine Hat. Lovely.

Here are my favourites from Karoo:

When the sun dunked in the crags, the blackened cliffs split into rough knuckled fists whose beating had strewn a boulder field below. (p65)

Prose with a granite chin.

In one scene he described how disturbing the African night wild life sounds were:

It was all just the animal world moving and calling to itself, but it was hard not to feel it was meant for you. (p70)

And this:

Thousands of wagon wheels climbed out of the cups they'd pressed into the ground overnight. (p437)

How did that wonderful image come? Has Fred actually watched that happen, or is it the fevered imagination of the novelist?

Finally:

Jeff believed he could make the war do tricks but finally couldn't even get it to kill him. (p480)

Rich. My friend Fred, the novelist. Good job.

The Great Karoo is published by Doubleday Canada.