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Candas Jane Dorsey and Crab Village
126 Plays4 months ago
Mark and Joe chat with the Canadian poet and science fiction doyenne, Candas Jane Dorsey.
Candas is well-known in Canadian science fiction circles for her work as a novelist (Black Wine, A Paradigm of Earth) and editor-in-chief of The Books Collective, which included River, Slipstream and Tesseract Books.
The conversation begins around one of Candas's favourite childhood fantasy books, Crab Village by Julia Clark. (We all have one of those, right?). "I reread this book about every decade, and it holds up really well," she says.
What follows is a fascinating conversation about how we discover books, how children engage with literature, and the incredible effects that can have on the unfolding of a creative life.
For more information, check out the show notes for this episode.
Re-Creative is produced by Donovan Street Press Inc. in association with MonkeyJoy Press.
Drop us a line at [email protected] to tell us what you think of this episode... or any other.
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Transcript
Introduction and Opening Thoughts
00:00:10
Speaker
Hello, Mark. We're off to a good start. We are off to a great start. So I've got a horrible question for you today. Horrible. Oh, I love those horrible questions. I eat really good, like really tough. So it's another science fiction theme question.
Science Fiction Question
00:00:24
Speaker
I think it's appropriate. If you could only choose one thing to pursue in reality, and one of them was faster than light travel, And the other one was time travel. Which one would you pick? I think you know the answer to that question already. I think I do, but i i know sure I'm not sure. it I'm still not sure if I'm sure what I want in this one. Well, I gotta, I need some clarification. Is the time travel ah and into the past or into the future or either? It's either. there
00:01:05
Speaker
Oh, well see there, like it, that just makes it even easier. Of course I'd go with the time travel. Okay. Yeah. Cause I don't need to go fast. I'm like a slow person. Yeah. But that, that, but that does mean you're kind of stuck with like this one planet. I like this planet. Okay. But you know, there's all those other planets out there. Yeah, I suppose. Okay, so what's what you
Moral Considerations of Time and FTL Travel
00:01:28
Speaker
what's your answer to the question? I have no idea. Actually, i think my i I think mine is the same answer, but I think it's for different reasons. I think mine is because I'm more interested in in human beings than anything else, which is very chauvinistic, but I think that's true. And I also kind of believe that there might not be other
00:01:48
Speaker
human-like cultures out there. I'm starting to wonder about that Fermi paradox and I'm starting to think that maybe there's a reason we haven't heard from anybody. so But at the same time, I love the natural world so I can only imagine how amazing it would be to be able to visit other worlds and see what those ecosystems look like and see what those planets look like. and But I guess it's ah it's a bit of a roll of the dice, isn't it? Because yeah, you could choose faster than light travel only to discover that there is nothing else out there. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Whereas with time travel, there might be nothing. I know there's other things to visit. Yes. Yeah. There might not be anything after a year or two, but there's the past. That's true. The future might be really gross or not much fun to visit, but yeah, there's always like all the stuff in the past.
Introducing Guest: Candice Jane Dorsey
00:02:38
Speaker
So anyway, I thought this might be a question that our guests would appreciate.
00:02:41
Speaker
Well, let's find out. Candice Jane Dorsey, welcome to our podcast, Recreative. Thank you. I'm glad to be here. I did actually have to time travel to get here, you you realize. I got my days mixed up and I had to have the very slow kind of time travel where one minute equals one minute and I finally caught up. but I think I'd answer time travel also because ah the other things could end up getting invented, like faster than light travel. Somebody could invent that in the future and I could go and see them. but But in the meanwhile, yeah, it would be fascinating to just be able to kind of pop in and out of anywhere. Now, as long as it didn't sort of I didn't have to be on fire to do it like Gully Foil and Alfred Bester's. Oh, yeah. Yes.
00:03:31
Speaker
i would I would not mind that. The thing that I really want though, I want long life. That's what I really want. Not necessarily at my age. Like if they invent it now, they better also invent a way of rolling back the degeneration. Rejuvenation, yeah. never right But I remember hearing someone say like 40 years ago, oh, I don't, you know, I never want them to extend human life because like, what would I do? I'd be so bored. And I just oh my god can't imagine. come on No, no, no, no. At that time, which was 30, 40 years ago, at that time, I already had a list of like four life, well, no six lifetimes worth of things I could do pi instead, that that if I had those lifetimes, yeah and of course, it wouldn't be like
00:04:21
Speaker
we know how it works in our own lives. The things that we did 50 or 40 or 30 years ago, they're not fully remembered necessarily. They're part of our history and they gave us some expertise, but they also gave us memories that come in and out. That doesn't really matter. We did them. It was fun. And so if I had to have a lifetime where I became an automotive mechanic, which was one of the things I thought was great, or learned to play the piano or hu you know learned other languages, right? It wouldn't really matter if I had like the sum total of my whole eternal life behind me. I think I would just be living a life where I could sort of trust that unless I did something really stupid and went off a cliff sort of thing, that I could have some time to just do all the stuff.
The Concept of Immortality
00:05:10
Speaker
And in the ensuing decades, of course, I've added to that list. so
00:05:15
Speaker
I could be pretty much ah could be pretty much well occupied for about five, six centuries just to catch up, let alone whatever happens during that time. Now, the only caveat is that I don't want to be this old and this creaky for like the rest of eternity. And the second one is we better darn well save the planet and the human race so that I'll have someone to talk to. yeah and's It's somewhere to live. and Would you want immortality or just that extra five or six hundred years? Yes, sure. um okay Well, I mean, if it's hypothetical. My caveat would be it would have to be optional. As long as I could be immortal, but like I can always decide when I've had enough.
00:06:05
Speaker
You could do the cliff that she mentioned. Yeah, and even immortality, like you're not even not bulletproof. Or at least I mean, in science fiction, right? Sometimes people are, and they read, you know, whatever, but certainly something, your brain, your brainstem, something got destroyed, you would end it would end you. But, you know, I've already lived my life in a way that I want to avoid remorse. So I just have to be a little careful not to do any, I mean, I wouldn't be doing any rock climbing anyway, because that's just not not me.
00:06:36
Speaker
Although you never know, 500 years from now I might get the courage out to climb a small rock. No parasailing over live volcanoes, that kind of thing. know Stuff that's irreversible, because I remember Altered Carbon, like it's, it's, you gotta work pretty hard to get totally wiped out in that, in that series.
Candice's Creative Journey
00:06:54
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. In that book, yeah. Okay, so tell us about your life so far that you've managed to live so far. Tell our listeners who you are, what you do. Who am I? Well, that's an interesting question in the wake of COVID and with a not completely horrible but kind of nasty case of long COVID. I would say that I've had to confront sort of who I am and one of the things I am is a person who writes books who isn't at the moment able to write much.
00:07:23
Speaker
because, you know, spoon theory, there's only a certain number of spoons that I can ah use in a day. um But since I was very young, the writing thing has been has been a preoccupation, maybe an obsession, something. ah So i've I've always done it. um And I've written some books that people seem to like a lot. And one of them, Black Wine, the first novel, which won a bunch of awards, is now back in print and ah for the first time as an audiobook as well.
00:07:54
Speaker
So people can now go back and get black wine. It was out of print for quite a while. I also discovered in in a storage space I have, I discovered a full box of the original tour hardcover edition with the beautiful cover. o So oh wow no people can also apply privilege to me to to buy a copy and get it signed if I can. You know, get my spoons together to mail it but I was gonna say that's a good use of your spoons, if you can do that. yeah But I mean I'm really ah Betsy Mitchell has this imprint in the States and they brought it out and then.
00:08:33
Speaker
ah Somebody else made, ah I have a great agent, his name's Wayne Arthur Sentiment, and he he ah sold it to an audiobook publisher as well. So I'm really pleased it's back in the world. And then I wrote and another book, a so a sort of science fiction, Near a Future Utopia, Dystopia. mild though, a Canadian dystopia called a paradigm of Earth. And what interests me is the degree to which the things that I kind of predicted might happen in Canada are happening in Canada, including this this swing to the to the hard right and so on. So it came out in about 2000, so what, 20 some years ago now. and
00:09:14
Speaker
And I just reread it. It holds up pretty well. I've done a lot of short stories. I also ran a publishing company, Tesseract Books. We bought it from the original founders and sold it on. And so we had it for about nine years publishing Canadian science fiction and fantasy. It was part of a bigger company we had for 14 years called the Books Collective. So I've done the publishing part. I've made my living as a writer and editor. So i'm kind of I've kind of done all the things. And a few years ago, I actually got back to some visual art roots that I i had been doing visual art in my early 20s.
00:09:53
Speaker
It kind of got put aside for for this literary community work and art and making books and and so on. And and I just i wanted to know what it was like to make a thing without um having to worry about whether it would sell or whether it would you know enhance my my reputation or be part of my career or whatever. And so I i kind of went back to the painting. It was about 15 years ago. and And so I've done a fair amount of of visual art since then of different kinds and sold some, not a lot, um but it's it's it's not really, I mean, I love to sell it because it's beautiful. I'd love to see it on people's walls, but it's it's mainly to get back to that core creativity thing. So I did that. and And then a few years ago, Wayne became my agent and he instantly started to, um
00:10:48
Speaker
uh do his job really beautifully so I ended up with these three mysteries that I had written published by ECW Press and the last ones came out last year and um and they're a bit different but also a bit the same I mean I always have some preoccupations that I try not to be too doctrinaire about like social justice and and the way people get along with each other and relationships and and alternatives to heteronormativity and so on. So those things are also all in there, but they're not speculative, although a little bit crept in. In the third book, there's actually ah a speculative element called smart paper.
00:11:32
Speaker
that of course we all know it sort of exists but it doesn't really exist and in this book it exists and becomes ah an important plot device. Those are already out. Oh, they're already out from ECW there. They're all named after and wait nursery rhymes. So, The Adventures of Isabel. What's the Matter with Mary Jane? And the last one is called He Wasn't There Again Today, which is quotes from that little man who wasn't there, but too many people have used the first line of that nursery rhyme as a title, so I went with line two.
Influence of Childhood Reading
00:12:06
Speaker
So that's what I've been doing for the last umpteen years and and a few other things besides. so And if you hear any barking in the background is my tiny little dog who who um takes his neighbor Yeah, he is adorable. But he takes his neighborhood watch duties extremely seriously, consider himself the neighborhood watch captain for this block and ah pretty much any magpie that flies by the window, any shadow or, or you know,
00:12:38
Speaker
ah You know how sometimes you get the shadow of an airplane that goes over your right? Yeah from a great height That's enough to say to say to that airplane. He has opinions. So if you hear his opinions We'll just you know assume that somewhere in the background He's doing part of the show. That's right. Absolutely. Yeah, I think you tell me you told me earlier his name is Joffrey, right? His name is Joffrey Tana he he came from Ukraine. He has a little passport to say so and And yeah, he sees sir he's cute. He's a Pomeranian since we're doing this, and you know, sort of on the radio, as it were. He's a little red, sable Pomeranian and cute as a button. Well, we could put a picture of him up on the show notes. He weaponizes cuteness. So that's why. He's really adorable. He really is. yeah
00:13:30
Speaker
So now the next question then is, is have you done your your homework, which hopefully it wasn't a lot of homework, but the the conceit of the podcast, picking a piece of art that inspires you and you haven't told us in advance what it is, so we have no idea, ah but we're we're curious to find out. Okay, well, yes, I have picked have picked probably the first book, call it a fantasy book that I ever read, and I was quite young. I'm one of those people who could read very young and went to school knowing how to read, and but into grade one I remember a kid saying,
00:14:09
Speaker
um you're cheating and even then yeah even and I went into great fun early I was four even then I knew that you can't cheat you can either read or not read and I could read but in any case so I was reading sort of above my age limit really early but um there was a a store a book and record store that went out of business. And so there was this whole period in somewhere in the middle sixties where my parents were going every weekend to this place and getting their like 10 cent, 20 cent deals.
00:14:45
Speaker
and they bought me this book called Crab Village by Julia Clark and it had a coloured front piece and it had line drawings by someone named Bernard Brett. But I didn't, you know, I was not paying attention to the names so much then. Crab Village apparently, and and I can't find out nothing about Julia Clark, like nothing. But apparently, these little stories were read on the BBC. but I didn't find that out until many, many years later.
00:15:22
Speaker
but basically this little girl is sent off to stay, Lucy is sent off to stay with her aunt maybe, ah Miss Toby in a place called Cobble House on Coppin Street in Crab Village. And Crab Village is on the sort of Dover Coast, the smuggling coast of England. I was gonna say, this has gotta be an English book. Yeah, somewhere. With those names, yeah. And she's staying there for the the whole summer. So in the first the first episode, she kind of arrives.
00:15:59
Speaker
but So she's been she's had all of the requisite things. Her parents are somewhere else. She's there for the summer. It's a strange place. It's all full of yeah sense of wonder. But then things just small magic realism almost things start to happen. So she she sees a picture on the above the mantle piece of a sailing ship and she's she's sick in bed and the sailing ship sails to the edge of the picture and ah the mice unload a cargo of tobacco and peppermints and put them in the two jars on the side of the fireplace and then the ship sails back out, right? Things like that happen. And I just thought it was amazing. There's a ah mermaid who who comes to town and and and falls in love with the
00:16:56
Speaker
the the carved figure outside the the chip shop and they opened an ice cream stand together just so many like just wonderful and of course it was all strange to me anyway because it was it was England so not only was it England but it was like or England sort of like John Crowley's yeah in Egypt was not the real place it was the book place the place in the book but it really um opened up for me just this whole idea of like I had already understood that you could be absorbed in reading and you know people would have to wake me up like call me twice for dinner kind of thing already but this this was like completely immersive amazement and I had to have been when I think about it like seven or eight I couldn't have been much older
00:17:49
Speaker
just because of how long I've had the book and so on. And the one I'm holding in my hands is actually one that I that i got online as ah as a ah lending copy. And also because it was in a slightly different edition that actually had the front door right on the bakrum. So I was just, you know, I managed to stop myself from going down the collect every edition of Crab Village ever. rabbit hole but Can you describe the the cover of of the one that you have there?
00:18:25
Speaker
Yeah, it's so it's a picture of Arabella and Arabella's best ices and the the the beach a crab village with the little ah changing houses where people change to go on the beach and in the background, the mass of the ships. And that's what's also in the color drawing on the paper cover of mine. And and in mine, my mother has has written my name in her sort of best copper plate printing. She was very interested in calligraphy. And so, so there is my name, but you can still see the the pencil mark that it was 10 cents. and Wow. And so
Family Rituals and Literary Impact
00:19:10
Speaker
That's a long time ago now, but I reread this book every about every decade and it holds up really well. And and what's interesting is that I went to the library to try to find like, because we went to the library every Saturday, it was actually great. We'd go, it was a sort of the early kind of mall which didn't have wasn't enclosed it was just a strip mall and at the end of it was the Dominion store and the Dominion store baked fresh bread bread every Saturday so we would go to the Dominion store and get fresh bread and we'd go to the library which was across the street and so we'd come home with fresh bread fresh fresh baked white bread but the crusty kind and
00:19:50
Speaker
books and so the first the first hot loaves we'd slice them and put butter and sometimes butter and brown sugar to melt on them and then sit and read our books all afternoon and so you know so it was great so I already understood sort of how the library worked and in fact I had a little battle with the library because kids were only allowed to take three books out on a child's card and I could get rid of three books the next day. So my I would assemble a stack and then my parents got them over to the children's side and they'd check all my books out on their card as well as their books and we all go home with like the the big books would be on the bottom and then there'd be a double stack of the sort of regular size you know nine by six by nine or five and a half by eight and a half type book and the whole stack would be like
00:20:41
Speaker
18 inches tall and we'd all we'd all have our books and we'd we'd set to reading them. you know and And so I went to see if I could find more books. like like that book. And the interesting thing, and I'm also, you'll you know here your listeners can't see this, but I'm i'm holding a book by another clerk, a woman named Catherine Anthony Clark, who was a British woman who came to Kootenai Lake, BC, and then moved to the Saanich Peninsula. And she she was writing in the
00:21:18
Speaker
Like 1962, this book was copyright, she was writing first, she was pulling First Nations themes. And in each book, the kid would meet either by time travel or in the real world would meet an indigenous child their own age. and something would happen where they would go on adventures. And when I reread them, ah they're a little more period in terms of the the view of indigeneity, but they also hold up not too badly. And I realized that there's some real darkness in it. The kids are are that
00:21:51
Speaker
that are the protagonists are going through tough times, dark times. So one of them actually I think has an abusive father but her last name was Clark. So I came to these books because I was looking for more Julia Clark and you know gradually I also sort of expanded to to find like more and more of of a certain type of book. And I i realized, I identified it partly by how how the drawings, like how it was illustrated. So some of them were like E. Nesbitt or Elizabeth N. Wright. So E. Nesbitt was fantasy, but Elizabeth N. Wright's books were just about these kids who lived in up in in upstate New York and and things happened, had adventures.
00:22:38
Speaker
and but they have the same kind of internal illustrations and so on. So clearly there was there was a kind of aesthetic, ah an actual sort of, sorry if it was food, you'd call it a mouth feel, right? um But the piano time to my eight year old self. And, but, you know, ah that really opened the door to the fact that anything, anything at all can happen in a book. And and I swear that in some ways, ah you know, there's a part of me that's still really living in Crab Village and really wanting
00:23:10
Speaker
to have that that ah mystery and amazement. and And so the whole idea of the sense of wonder that we talk about in in speculative fiction, I mean, to me, I was feeling that in that book. And yet that book is is not in the canon. Nobody even knows about it except me, as far as I can see. I mean, I did find it on on like eBay or something, but I can't find anything about the author, really. um So it was this and yeah little turning point, this tiny hinge and nobody else's sense of wonder hinges on that, that I know of. And yet it was it it opened that that huge door. know For me, it was an author by the name of Edward Eager who wrote a similar books. Yeah. Half magic stuff. Yeah. I know that I have one too. Yeah. Yeah. ah The pride in Chronicles, uh, Lloyd Alexander.
00:24:11
Speaker
Taren, the pig keeper, Lloyd Alexander, I think his name was. Taren, I still have the books, actually. I've still got them. I love them that much that I'm like, I'm never leaving. Like, I can't read them now because the if I open the book, the page is just going to explode out of the out of the paperbacks. But I don't know when he wrote them, but I think they were old when I read them. um It was Taren, the pig keeper, and he's got to keep this pig of he's in charge of this oracular pig and It's all interwoven with Welsh mythology. Oh, it blew it same thing blew my mind wide open to all these things. Yeah. And interesting to me that most of these names are in the first part of the alphabet, because I wore I started at the children's section. And I tried to go all the way through, but I never I never got probably passed about
00:25:06
Speaker
M or N, right? I never got to the end of the alphabet. So by the time that I was sort of on the later part, I was older. I was quite a bit older and I was interested in in different books but also my father was big science fiction guy and he used to binge watch Doctor Who before we knew what binge watching was when he was um in his old age. he There was Doctor Who on like from one in the morning till six in the morning and he'd sit in his rocking chair and and with his feet up on this footstool he'd made out of a stack of telephone books and he'd watch Doctor Who all night, right?
00:25:48
Speaker
and ah So he would buy all these books and...
00:25:54
Speaker
I remember the name of a movie with Keanu Reeves and it's like Station 13 or something like that. Anyway, I remember reading the book that that was eventually based on. It was about how basically somebody cottoned on to the fact that they were living in an advertising simulation. Oh, it'll take me a minute to I mean, maybe the book was called Station 13 anyway. um But I remember reading that because my dad had it home and it was like three decades later that the movie came out. And I thought, I remember that. And there was a ah particularly striking image that stuck with me from that book. And I probably read it when I was like 11 or something. Yeah, but you know, it was those are the days when books were mostly all you had. And television. Yeah, that's true. Came in my
00:26:52
Speaker
junior high school years. And I remember there were only two channels. So I remember that we all knew the TV Guide by heart and yeah kind of negotiate which thing we'd watch. And ah the man from uncle was on and then then Star Trek came on. So I watched. I figured that would come up. Yeah. Like a week a week at a time. And we and everyone in the family would watch whatever was being watched. But Well, it was yeah in the 70s, it was kind of the same thing. like There was three networks plus PBS and I guess the CBC, but most of the programming was like not fantasy or science fiction or imaginative in that way. It was like you know police procedurals and stuff. so
00:27:40
Speaker
Yeah, i I kind of lived in books too when I was a kid, like my brother and I did anyway. We had the same sort of ritual. We didn't have the bread, which was a great addition, like I wish we had the bread, but we went down to, it was really exciting because we would go down to um the main library on Queen's Ave in London, Ontario. And it's just it's a beautiful it was a beautiful library and they had a huge children's section. and Mom would just let us go range and but Same problem. Mike would always get yell get yell at the librarians because he could only get out three on his own. And I assume that was because of the baby boom. I assume there were sort of too many children to to let them have unlimited books so the library would be empty on the children's side. Well, we weren't boomers, so I think it maybe got codified after yeah ah to the boomers were gone. Yeah, this horrible thing called the summer reading group.
00:28:34
Speaker
in which you all your ah your books got noted down and you had a little flag on this map. And it was a map of something different every summer. And you'd move forward. But the kids who could move forward most were the ones who went to the library every day. yeah Because you could take out three books, read them, bring them back, take out three more books. But we only went to the library once a week. So i never I never won the summer reading group, you know, I had an immense amount because it had to be those three kids books. I couldn't add the adult books or, you know, any of that. It had to be. yeah It was out on my card. And, ah you know, i so I still feel this kind of mix of.
00:29:17
Speaker
It's so fair. You still get nostalgia for that crusty hot buttered bread? Oh my god, yes. I guess that was the bit. No, it's the cinnamon on it. And I get nostalgia for the different libraries because there were three libraries that we went to. And one of them, I think Edmonton had a Carnegie library. It was this beautiful old red brick building. When we went to it, the I could so go up into a balcony and look out these big huge two story windows with curved tops and see the river valley. And you could see if it was storming, the storm would come down the river valley. And and it was just, it was a beautiful, beautiful building course. It it got leveled in the.
00:29:57
Speaker
heritage clear-cutting period that started in Edmonton in the 60s and the new library was sort of mid-century modern and not nearly as interesting, but on the south side there was another red brick library, the Strathcona Library, and in that one the kids section was out at the front door and down in under and into a side door and it was in the basement. So in theory you were supposed to wait there for your parents to come get you and not come into the main library. But we still had to have the thing where they would take out all the books. And then there was a ah small young adult section in the main floor. So when you gra when you got old enough that you could be trusted in the grown up library and be quiet, you could go to this little corner.
00:30:41
Speaker
And there was there was a book that I used to take out all the time and it wasn't anything special about it. I do have a copy now and it was basically, you know, kid goes to boarding school, gets wrongly accused of something bad, gets cleared, lives happily ever after kind of thing. but it was, you know, it was notable because it was supposedly from my age group and it was in the big library. So there was this little section and it was just one sort of one row of books in this corner by a window. So I loved that library. And the one that was across the street from the from the Dominion store where the bread was was a kind of mid-century modern library. It was one floor. The adults were over on one side and the kids were over on the other.
00:31:27
Speaker
um And it's still there. So the the last two are are still there. Luckily, the one in Strathcona got declared in historic site and they couldn't mess it up. But um but now, I mean, now the mid-century modern libraries are are now heritage libraries. They're older than 50 years old, you know, and it makes me feel kind of old. I have got to hook you up with one of my colleagues. She teaches a course in reading in the Library of Information Science program, and she would love to have you come and talk to her class. She would just blow their minds. They would love it.
00:32:06
Speaker
any Any time, really. i yeah I've been lucky enough.
Teaching and Literary Experiences
00:32:10
Speaker
I'm a sessional instructor at Grant McEwen University here and in the Communication Studies program. So and I only I try really hard only to teach one one or maybe two courses a year. But three years ago, I was I was sort of given this course at the last minute called Print Culture Studies. And it is awesome course. And what I the person who designed it did a beautiful job. And then what I did is add experiential stuff, people coming to the class. ah Ted Bishop, who wrote the Soul School Life of Ink, has come to the class and made ink with my students. And and you know they grind the oak gall. And and fully cut it and and and then they write with straight pens with their own ink that they just made.
00:32:54
Speaker
And of course, none of them have ever done any part of that, including the straight pens. And they just, it's great. And we go on a couple of field trips, we go to ah a place that has a letterpress and they set type and actually like print something. Oh, wow. That's so cool. And it is cool. yeah i We talk about reading too, like the process of reading and and they have an assignment that's basically a reader in information it's called in which they have to look at their own reading and how they began to read and then they have to read a book and bring a whole bunch of you know info to it and and talk about the process that they went through when they read the book and it is really great. By the end of the class they're all really much more excited readers than they were when they started because of course they're all college students and the only thing they have time to read is the stuff for their courses.
00:33:50
Speaker
So they've put their own reading on hiatus for like maybe three, four, five years. and so And so the thought that they can like actually get back to what they think about reading is big for them. That just reminds me of how I was such a terrible undergraduate student because I was, yes, I mean, I actually read everything that it was assigned to me, but I was also reading other stuff too. yeah You have to read fast to get away with that. And if you're not exactly a fast reader, ah the world of reading
00:34:25
Speaker
has a different landscape. I think, you know, when I was in my 20s, and I was going to the library, I could read four books a night. Not like great books, like it took me three days to read Margaret Lawrence's The Diviners. But it, you know, the kind of books that that are easier to read, I just went through them like, like candy, you know, and, and That's a different kind of aspect than when you have to choose the book you're going to read for the next week or month, right? That is true. So getting back to the Julia Clark books, so you read those um and they had an enormous impact on you.
00:35:07
Speaker
One book. Oh, you read the one book. One book. The other part was accidental and was a different person altogether. Yes, yes. but the Okay, so then your adult life became mostly about books. You had a parent company which did book related stuff. You ran a publishing company for nine years or so, wrote many books. Is it a direct path then between that one book to your later life in books? um Well, I came from a book reading family, so ah we were all reading.
00:35:41
Speaker
Like that's that oh i was her regular activity. Like nobody in my family ever wanted to get up, do exercise, take a walk, climb a rock face, none of that stuff. Our idea of a good time was to hang around the house and and read books. And if we got yeah fresh baked bread with butter and brown sugar on it, that was ah a bonus. But and my mother, um you know, she was She was a kind of reluctant, ah reluctant homemaker. She did it all well, but basically as quickly as possible and delegated as much as possible so that she could lie on the couch and read a book. And so that was that was our our entire family life. So when I was little, like my mother had a story that she told on me and I don't remember this, but we're all sitting around and what I have and I'm like preschool, I'm a little kid and maybe two, two and a half, three, somewhere in there, probably not three yet.
00:36:38
Speaker
And what they've given me to hold is one of these little leather bound Victorian editions of classics, right? So it's a tale of two cities. And it's about probably you know three and a half by four and a half inches and covered in kid leather with gold binding. And and the others are reading their books and I'm going through this book and I only know like four words basically there's a lot of thes and ahs and they makes it but then at a certain point apparently I just sort of yelled I found mother I found mother and I had found the word mother somewhere in table of two cities and that was like
00:37:21
Speaker
I got it. I got it. Those words. I mean, my words are in here. But, you know, I would say I was probably two and a half. And my mother tells this. I don't have a memory of that. But I have a memory of her like telling the story. And I also had to have a memory of having these weird reading tests in school where you're supposed to two read ah to your limit and and already in elementary school somewhere around grade four they were saying oh you're reading at a first year university level which of course didn't mean that i was a first year university intellect it just meant i could really read i could read like yeah yeah you can read quickly and absorb and did you retain stuff as well or it did but i remember reading the age of fable reading output quote marks around air quotes
00:38:09
Speaker
the age of fable when I was in grade three and saying to my teacher I read this this book called the age of fable I didn't read the book what I did was I skipped through for all the parts that had narrower margins because those were the actual fables and stories right and mythology and those were the bits that I read because the rest of the stuff It wasn't that I couldn't necessarily have read the words, but the ideas were not were not that interesting. and And likewise, I remember being in a hospital when I was like seven and the library cart came by and they offered me a Nancy Drew book to read and it was sort of too hard for me.
00:38:50
Speaker
not necessarily because I couldn't read all the words, but it was ah sort of the wrong shape of book. It didn't have enough illustrations. it didn't The story was longer. And so intellectually, I wasn't. ready, if you can believe it, for an answer. But I could read it, but I couldn't right right get it. right And I have a number of examples in my mind of sort of sitting, I remember sitting behind the rocking chair. There was a, my mother had repurposed a china cabinet into a bookshelf and it it had, the rocking chair was in front of it, which of course was terribly perilous if you sat in the rocking chair and you didn't
Reading Complexity and Brain Development
00:39:27
Speaker
make sure it didn't hit the glass doors. But anyway, that's another story. So I'm sitting behind the rocking chair, going through the books in this in this thing, I come to something called Forever Amber, which was apparently quite salacious in its time. And I'm reading it. And I can remember there being bits that just did not make sense. And they tended to be sort of the sex bits. But, you know, my mother's friends would say, oh, you know let that child read anything. is Well, they're not going to understand it. until they're ready for it and she's absolutely right. Like later came back to that book and thought oh my goodness that was in there. So what I remember was more descriptions and writing and carriages and what they were wearing and so and then later the actual book caught up to me. and But I think to go back to to Joe's question that one of the things that they talk about in the literature about print culture is that
00:40:23
Speaker
is that reading and print change your brain. Yeah, that's true. And, and that oral culture forms your brain a certain way. Print culture forms your brain a different way, even written, like the fact that there's a written language changes your brain structure. So if you start really young, I think you can't help having the kind of brain that really is about is's about writing and language, like language in writing. And um for me, ah i also I also had a family of musicians who were, in in one case particularly,
00:41:10
Speaker
um ear trained musicians, not not people trained musicians. So there was the oral culture, the music, and my and it was the the the nineteen early 1960s folk boom in those days. So I know a heck of a lot of old folk songs, some of which are quite inappropriate for my culture, but at that time everybody was learning everything. So um you know I know Black work songs that were collected by John and Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger's collections of of songs of struggle and and um civil disobedience from around the world. and
00:41:50
Speaker
you know, and also puff the magic dragon, right? so So all these songs were in my... So there was a ah big area of orality and memory. And then there was this reading area, which was silent reading, which is actually one of the steps. Like when you move from orality to reading, sometimes there's a step in the middle that is reading aloud, right? And then there's reading and moving your lips, and then there's silent reading. and And at the point where you go to silent reading, you're actually reading in a different part of your brain. So then, so there's all this stuff going on to form the the bookish person, if you will. And I think it's really interesting that I sort of couldn't help also writing because there were books that I hadn't read that, you know, stories that I wanted to tell.
Creative Reflection and Milestones
00:42:40
Speaker
But in in much later life, I had a
00:42:44
Speaker
I had a year like last year, um, hit a milestone birthday and decided to spend the year thinking about mortality and, and life and how, you know, what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, which is a lot shorter than it used to be. Yeah. When I had those thoughts and when I was 20, what do I want to do with the rest of my life? It was a huge fan of possibility spread out now. it's much narrower and it's shorter. And if I live as long as my dad did, I've got another 11 years. If I live as long as my mother did, I have another
00:43:20
Speaker
25, 30 years, right, because she lived very long. I have to figure out sort of what I'm doing. And so I started asking myself like how central to my identity is actually like being a writer or writing, which are two different things, of course. And the answer was that that there was something that impelled me to write for many decades And now I think my subconscious is more picky about what it gets impelled by. So there are stories I could tell, but that that push isn't there. So part of what I'm doing right now is waiting for the pushy story.
00:44:01
Speaker
that it's going to, it's going to be the thing I want to spend the next two, three years on because those are precious years. And I don't want, I don't want to use them trivially, but I've got, you know, you gotta be careful when you start getting picky like that to, to not, not edit yourself out of existence as a writer. So, you know, it is a struggle. I love that idea though. that you can wait for the right story before you have to start writing. I mean, i because I do sometimes struggle with the idea that I just have this compulsion to write. I sometimes describe it as like you always have homework.
00:44:43
Speaker
Right. Whenever you're doing something like I mean, you know, I'm watching a movie and I'm really enjoying the movie or I'm playing a video game and I really enjoy it. But i and the there's a part of my brain that's going, you know, you could be using this time to work on the thing that you you say you want to write. So why are you doing that? And so I love the idea that it's possible to go, you know what, I'm just going to wait for the story that I really want to work on. I love that. But then that competes, doesn't it, with the the notion that you need to be sitting down and working for when inspiration strikes.
00:45:18
Speaker
Well, it does, but I think after, sorry, go you go ahead. No, I'm just going to, I was just going to tell an anecdote. Uh, I remember Judy Merrill, she had had a novel on the go for like decades and she decided at a certain point, I'm never going to finish this and not only that, but that's okay. I quit, right? Wow. Yeah. And she said, it's the first time since I was 18 that I don't feel guilty. Yeah, there you go. That's what I'm talking about went on to start writing her memoirs, but that felt like a step forward to her, but she had gotten rich. She had closed the door on that kind of deep and abiding guilt ah of, you know, I'm not writing enough. I'm not writing right this minute. I'm doing these other things instead. It's just like yeah a life filled with this underlying sort of
00:46:10
Speaker
You know, like on the on the health monitors when you're watching Dr. House, there are things going on. And the bottom line is always like the guilt line, right? You always have. You're so right. It's always there. But Joe, I think actually after a certain point, I do believe that, ah you know, I i think the 10,000 hours idea has been thoroughly debunked by now, but I still like it as a metaphor. I think once you've put in your time and once you've got your skill set, I don't think you have to be constantly honing that skill set. I don't think you can let it sit for too long, but I think you can let it sit for a while and then come back to it and pick up the tools and go, yeah, I still know how to do this. yeah It's not a problem. And yeah another interesting thing that happened when I started doing the visual art and I have a friend who's a visual artist who might talk with about this stuff all the time. Anyway, I did not have angst.
00:47:05
Speaker
When I started writing, there was all that you know creative angst thing happening, right? None. And I said to my friend, i am I doing this wrong? Because I don't have ah don't have creation angst. And we came to the the the hypothesis that I already had my angst. I had it because of writing. I had it because of how old I was. And now that I was you i was of a certain age and doing this thing. It was new, but it wasn't new. Like the idea that you could sit down and be completely free floating was no longer a scary idea, right? And that was such, that was so welcome. And I have a joke I tell my writing students about
00:47:49
Speaker
So the first time this happened, i was I was with a partner then, a different partner, and um I was having that, you know, oh, I can't do this. Oh, writing so hard, I can't write. And my partner pointed to the shelf where a very small but still significant amount of writing was sitting and said, you can't say that anymore. look. And my joke is that that my angst went away instantly because I realized I had to recalibrate, but then I had to go out the next day and buy all new angst.
00:48:24
Speaker
That's great. But now I don't actually care. I have so few fucks to give at this point. yeah Well, that is one of the beauties of getting older, right? about Yeah. you know Your fuck-o-meter is low. It's low. Oh, yeah. And I mean, out in the world, no. and And I say lots more of the things that are in my secret heart than I used to. But also, I just don't I don't want to suffer from my art anymore. I did that. I had it. It achieved what it had to achieve. And now let's just do the art, you know. Yeah. I have come around to the the idea that and more and more I just do what my heart wants to do. Yeah. As opposed to what I feel like I have to do. Absolutely.
00:49:14
Speaker
And that's sort of as it should be, because especially when you get to a certain age, your heart is actually fairly well educated. That is to say, it's not making stupid choices. When you do what your heart says when you're 18 or 20, your probability of error is much higher. But frankly, you know, that's right but at all of our ages, which are somewhat different, but you know, we all have the white hair to show for having lived certain length of time. We've made a lot of mistakes that are are that we don't want to make anymore. And we're smart enough to turn around and walk the other way when we see no trouble coming. So yeah I think
00:49:58
Speaker
When we listen to our heart as an older person, our heart is speaking to us much more effectively, if you will. Yeah. And it behooves us to listen because, you know, give it the credit. It worked hard for that. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I was in a meeting the other day. I was like, you know what? I used to not listen to my intuition, but I kind of listen to it now because it's usually right. ye Well, intuition is internalized knowledge, like I, yeah, I don't believe that we receive the wisdom from some wins. We get it from, you know, the coagulation of all the things that happened in our lives, and we internalize it. And then we we apply that and we call it intuition. Okay, it's intuition, but that's what it's from. And so we we understand. It's it's it's a trustworthy.
00:50:54
Speaker
ah It is. It has become trustworthy as we educate like our subconscious and ourselves. You know, that so sort of leads to an interesting problem when when you're teaching writing, which I do a lot. That's how i you know I've taught a lot of sort of continuing education type writing courses to keep body and soul together. And you have to be able to speak from your wisdom, but also go back to the place where you were vulnerable and say to those new writers, this will happen later.
Writing, Literacy, and Capitalism
00:51:27
Speaker
Like don't worry about it now, it'll happen later, but still encourage them to keep writing. And sometimes I wonder if I have encouraged too many people to write, but I think that what happens is that if they don't want to, they stop.
00:51:42
Speaker
And if they really want to, they do it. And you can't tell which is which when you meet them in your introduction to creative writing class. You just can't tell who is going to be the driven one and who is going to be the one with all the skills in the world who just doesn't care. Like, OK, so I can do this thing, but I don't want to. It's, you know, yeah right. And that kind of thing says, OK, it's not it's not a core thing that we're driven to do. Great, fine. Now you know that. ah too So let me let me ask you then about that, about encouraging writers and teaching writers with the the current state of of of publishing and how difficult and demanding it is and how so few writers it seems these days are are making a ah living at it. What do you think about that? is Should we be encouraging people to write despite this situation?
00:52:37
Speaker
Well, since I've been teaching print culture studies, I've actually come up with a different answer than I would have said five years ago. And i've always I've always said that there is this we're we're in the midst of this peculiar experiment in universal literacy. We have never had that. We have never had this large a percentage of basically literate people. And so I always wondered what that was doing to the proportion of writers and the impulse to write and so on. And and now I have sort of more data for that from people who actually study this kind of thing. And and they look at you know who was literate in 1700.
00:53:21
Speaker
50 in England yeah and how do they measure that and who was reading books and where did the books come from and so on so there's actual empirical data but the thing that that I feel is that the even like I started out in this field slightly over 50 years ago which seems like a really short time when you lived it, but a very long time when you say it out loud. And everything was different. I mean, the way books were printed was different. Newspapers existed and were printed on you know with lead plates on big machines. and
00:53:58
Speaker
and um I have been through in those 50 years, like the the adopting and then discarding of a whole bunch of actual technologies. I've also been through this process where more and more people can read that there are more and more people in the world. So not just more and more people can read because that's just arithmetic, but they're also they know how to read at a higher level. So that's kind of I don't know what logarithmic or whatever. Anyway, what that means is there's this huge demand
00:54:29
Speaker
for things to read. And the way that that demand is getting met is really different than it was when I started out in publishing. And to a certain degree, I can no longer, I no longer claim the expertise. Like if if I'm teaching a writing course, I often ask my agent to come in and give a little session or something to say, here's more of what it's like now. And I know people who are making their whole living self-publishing and selling online. And almost none of their books actually become physical except print on demand. That would have been just unknowable when when I started. And the only thing that when people printed their own books, it was called vanity publishing and everyone thought it was a bad thing. Now it's it's mostly a good thing. But it also, ah oh, that I can get into this. ah It's also about capitalism because
00:55:25
Speaker
one of the things that has been happening over the last number of years, and it was predicted by futurists and economists that there was going to be a larger uploading of profit to a smaller number of people. And it was going to be this large, over-educated, underemployed underclass that was doing in essence what we now call the gig economy. and keeping themselves busy with cultural pursuits the rest of the time when they weren't working. And this was the big sort of ideal that was being talked about in the 1980s, 1990s. Now it happened, right? But what we what we sort of didn't understand what that would look like is
00:56:07
Speaker
The responsibility for keeping all this machinery going has also now devolved onto the individual. So traditional publishing used to take on that job. It took on both the gatekeeping job and the production job. Now the gatekeeping is done by the individual reader a great deal more, and they have to filter through way more texts that are available to them online to say, what do I want to read? And it's also done by the individual writer who has to produce everything about their book if they're going to self-book. So there's been this this downloading and it's not that different from the downloading that comes when we go to a store and we have to use the self-checkout. It's the same process, same sort of process of late stage capitalism that is happening to us all.
00:56:55
Speaker
And so in so to go way back to your original question about encouraging writers, I totally believe in encouraging writers, but i and i I want them to understand the world they live in, not the world I grew up in or you grew up in or whatever. That's that's now just nostalgia. Like for them, they hear me tell my story. It's like, oh, you are old and have a cool story. But then they go off to their writing life and it looks quite different. The only thing that's the same is that middle part about actually doing the writing.
00:57:28
Speaker
So I can still talk with great expertise about writing and editing. But as far as the the the world that they live in, they're going to make it and it's going to be different. and I'm not sure that we are even qualified to say how it's going to be different. And I sort of stopped caring because I thought, it's not my job anymore. like I am now in the old end of the spectrum. I used to be in the young and then I was in the middle expertise part. Now I'm just in the old and I can continue to do certain things. but
00:58:01
Speaker
You know, look at Margaret Atwood. She's really smart, really good writer. Write about some things, wrong about others. She puts out a statement about this thing or that thing. It's a statement from like the elder states person. But it may or may not actually reflect what's happening in the lives of people 60 years younger than her who are trying to to write and be artists. So, you know, so we have our job as old and it's different than the job that that people have when they're youths. And and I'm kind of content with that and partly because my students, who are most of them in between 20 and 25 years old,
00:58:46
Speaker
And they are a really good generation. About 10, 15 years ago, when I started teaching at the college, 15 years ago, I guess, there was this really self-centered generation going through, and I honestly feared for the planet. But in the last, say, you know five, six, seven years that I've been teaching again there, I have been just universally impressed with how how much we can trust them.
Optimism for Future Generations
00:59:15
Speaker
So I'm just letting go and and you know I'll give you what I can give you, then you just take it and run with it because but but those they care, they are socially aware, they believe in social justice. I i have been really impressed.
00:59:31
Speaker
But those 35 to 40-year-olds, you don't you can't trust them as far as you can throw them. No, absolutely not. That's been my experience too. No, I'm kidding. No, we're not entirely wrong. I mean, who's running the world right now in a lot of places where we live are self-centered people in that age group who believe that what is best for for the planet or the society or the culture or the city or the province is best for them personally. and they don't get, but they they're disconnected from that the task of empathy. But the good news, yeah, so the good news is we just need to wait for the 20 to 25 year olds to age up into that, and that other age bracket, and and then we'll be fine. Well, luckily they're a big generation, so we should be okay. Yeah. Well, gee, you know, Candace, we could we could talk to you for forever, and I hope we get the chance to it to talk to you again, actually, because I think there's much more that we could talk about.
Conclusion and Future Conversations
01:00:28
Speaker
Mark, any final thoughts or questions before we... No, I have many thoughts, many questions, but I think we just defer it to round two. Well, how do you go back? I think so. Well, it's been great fun. It's been a delight to have you. We can go anywhere and the wisdom of just starting with one question and then going, explode. Absolutely. Yes. Candice Jean Dorsey, thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you so much for inviting me. It's been a wonderful conversation. Thank you. Wonderful to meet you too.
01:01:26
Speaker
Recreative is produced by Mark Rainer and Joe Mahoney. Technical production of music by Joe Mahoney. Web designed by Mark Rainer.
01:01:35
Speaker
Show notes and all episodes are available at recreative.ca. That's re-creative.ca. Drop us a line at joemahoney at donovanstreetpress dot.com. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks for listening.