Is it time to break camp? The daily question from our camping days—whether to stay longer at the current site or to push on further into the lake—should hang over every writing desk.

All of the thunder of self-judgement—This is great, This sucks, I’m great, I suck—and yet softly behind it, year in year out, the gentle small rain of discoveries in the work room: Maybe like this? Yeah, that works.

Dredging memory to let now flow into then. Long, long race of the mind to catch up to what the body knows.

There will always be unexplored corners, but I think I have largely exhausted what I can write by sticking close to my own experience. To keep going, I will have to venture farther afield. Am I willing to do so? From the start I’ve been proud, even vain, of the sheer hard work I am capable of. But not in all aspects of writing, as I now learn. In some areas I’m lazy. So enamoured of the close-at-hand that I am not always aware how much it has shaped my grasp.

As writers, we gnash our teeth over dry spells. Yet as conversationalists we know that some of our finest moments are when we hold back and achieve silence.

I have been frustrated time and again by writing. But I have never been frustrated while writing.

What do I miss when I’m not writing? It’s not producing writing. Having things to share, to send. To define myself with—see, here’s my poem, my story, my book. That is a loss, but not the major one. What I miss is writing. The activity itself, and how it changes me. How I notice more, remember more. Connect things up more. Clarify them. And feel more solid within myself, as if I’m filling from the inside. As if an excited needle is busy finding scraps I hadn’t found a use for—didn’t even know were there—and is knitting them together. A working toward wholeness. On behalf of wholeness.

I feel lighter when writing. But also more solid. More of a piece. What might be an image? A bench of shards for kintsugi, lacquers and powders, tools. Afterward, the same stuff, but packed together soundly. The lessness of coherence. Of shape. But that is not the feeling inside. Inside, it feels like tingling space. A helpful thinning.

Interesting when you turn your writing inside-out and ask yourself what isn’t in it. Which parts of life it doesn’t attend to, either because you, the writer, don’t attend to them, or because, even though you do attend to them, occasionally or frequently or even obsessively, you’ve never found a way to put them into your writing. You realize how partial a view any piece of writing is. A sliver of positive black created by the exclusion of almost everything.

Can it be a coincidence that as I have felt more sane, less driven, the urge to write has felt less overpowering? A part of life, not life itself. I feel, not without trepidation and sadness, half a century falling away. Like a booster rocket? Like a moulted exoskeleton? What will I be without it? Where will I fly?

Such a hunger these days to escape mythologizing. Including even the mythology of de-mythologizing. It feels crazed at times. Like deserting every home I find in favour of the open air.

Writing is my house. A turtle’s shell. A hermit crab’s found lodging. A hobo’s camp. My old declaration, half a boast: I’m a renter, not an owner. Finally catching up to what that means. Coming into possession of it.

Away from writing, I’m prone to feeling vulnerable and exposed. Like I’m missing an important layer—or several layers—of skin. But when I’m writing—whatever the topic, however well or badly it’s going—I feel bulletproof. No sense of impending danger or fragility. Vigilance can return to what it once was and always yearns to be again: loving attention.

Sometimes I think of writing as a journey out of coldness, whose first step is often a journey into coldness, to take its measure and extent.

Strange bloodlessness of many authors’ emails. Like musicians who’ll sing onstage but not at a family picnic.

Allen Ginsberg said somewhere that most writing would improve if it had more of the charm of the author’s conversation. I agree. But writing might also be considered all of the ways someone uses words. Quips, jokes, asides, lists. Chat, memos, notes, emails. Lectures, directions, instructions, arguments, pleas, vows. Total verbal life.

The best coaches in sport tending not to be the most gifted players, rather the role players, the bench players who, not blessed with transcendent ability, had to make a study of the game—is it too pat to extend this to writing? Looking back, I think it bears out. Themselves are what the brilliant have to impart. It is the worthy strivers who have practical nuggets to share, often very generously. Or does it depend on what you’re primed to hear? That Karl Marx look-alike at the chess club, in front of whom we lined up to get our personalized checkmate, a dozen brilliant strokes we revered without comprehending. He indulged us for a while before waving us away. “Play little bit better guy, ’jes little bit,” he would growl. Someone who beats you eight times out of ten—in ways you might understand, in ways that might spur you on. He was a genius, we agreed, but mad. Learn from each other?

Urban spaces have spurred creative juices most reliably. Being in nature has brought peace but not liberated energies.^[1]

What size of word-pattern is most natural to you? As a reader, as a writer. At what scale can life be expressed? This changes with mood and circumstances, but an individual stamp often shows itself early and persists over a lifetime. With due allowances for exceptions, it has analogies with the fields of scientific study. The haiku writer, like the quantum physicist, attends to the tiniest particles of experience, relishing how these open onto cosmic depths. At a larger grain, the story writer, a kind of chemist, is concerned with relations among elements: how they combine, form compounds, combust, change state, dissolve. At the broadest level of resolution, the novelist-biologist studies not just individual organisms but the ecosystems and epochs in which they live and create shared histories. Originality is often hybridism: one sensibility writing as, or inside of, another. The story as condensed novel (Borges). The novel as lyric poem (Sebald). When you switch genres, you feel your focus switch, as with pupillary changes due to drugs or light levels. It’s not the same street you see when writing a poem, story, novel. Not the same room, not the same flower. I have made excursions into chemistry and even—stretching—into biology, but I think at heart I have always been a physicist.

The writer is not the work, but it’s impossible for the writer’s personal flaws not to find their way into the work as flaws in kind. Not in the writer’s best work, which lifts clear of neurosis (even when neurosis is the subject), but in their more usual run. The work x-rays the person, and the bones of character show up white amongst the black. The difficulty I have in trusting people has complicated, to a lesser or greater degree, all my relationships. Analogously, in writing my tendency is to surround a point, not trusting in the reader who could “get it” from a hint. I have trouble believing in, or at times even imagining, such a reader. (Strangely, since I am one.)

The small triumphs of editing are moral as well as aesthetic. Cutting one line or even one word, or substituting a better one after endless deliberation and pages of scrawled attempts—and thereby moving yourself a pinstep from the bigotry, narcissism, hard-heartedness—name your vice—that the original exposed.

Tastemakers speak as if excellence is in short supply. But excellence is everywhere you look (provided you’re not just looking under your own nose).

The long hard journey from clumsy to artful, the much shorter distance from artful to merely suave. Like Mr. Fever’s warning in shop class, almost sixty years ago, about the danger of over-sanding: losing not just rough edges but something of the core.

That literature is a force for moral betterment: a claim of ghastly smugness that over a lifetime I have not seen a shred of evidence for.

[I’ve removed the entry that was here because I’m no longer sure I agree with it. It seems to confuse a mood with a thought, and an attitude with an aesthetic. I wish I had the computer chops to set this inside a neat box like the placards we used to affix to walls when I worked in an art gallery to denote paintings that had been removed for repair or to examine their authenticity. Visitors leaned in with interest to read these notices and often approached staff to ask for more detail. I had the impression that they welcomed this evidence of a gallery-in-progress that owned up to its missing pieces rather than trying to hide them. I wish opinions about art—opinions generally—were more liberally sprinkled with such placards.^[2]]

Is my writing a symptom? Is anybody’s? Lindsey would say it’s the wrong question. She would say (I can still hear her): Look at what you do. Regardless of state of mind, regardless of mood. And what I do is write. Gushingly, without sleep; stagnantly, in upright coma; flowingly, with a steady hand. The writing—trying to write, waiting to write—is constant. That’s the what. That’s you. What changes is the how.

How to get back to freshness when I’ve strayed from it. That’s all I’ve ever really cared about. Getting back to that pure excitement of discovery—of being a leading edge—in those precious instants before it becomes something you can succeed or fail at. It’s not a return in times of crisis, or once and for all. It’s a perpetual return, a perpetual homecoming. (And an addiction? Yes, absolutely. With all of an addiction’s costs.)

At a certain point it became paramount to me to understand my life better. To try to make things that were not just beautiful but useful for living. Beauty and pragmatics made a more self-conscious alliance. And I felt how an ethical aesthetic—perhaps, indeed, a lesser one—could be born of desperation.

To write superbly but not live sanely would be less than a Faustian bargain. It would be hell in advance.

Nothing matters but the perfection of words on the page sounds like the resolve to build a perfect room inside a ramshackle house, or even a pretty great room inside an okay house, to achieve which will require limiting traffic between The Room and the rest of the house, since you can’t have crap drifting in and out of an ideal space. It’s a valid aim, and not infrequently an achievable one. It’s just not mine. Not anymore, if it ever was. I need to be able to go freely from room to room, trying to keep them all habitable. Though it sounds like realism, sometimes I wonder if I haven’t harnessed myself to an even loftier ideal.

Yesterday I read three chapters of a memoir, found it slipshod and boring, then began again this morning and found it very good. This evening, I read a little-known short story from sixty years ago and was surprised to encounter the exact premise of a novel written thirty years later which had delighted me with its originality. I might have put it down to coincidence had I not read, a few weeks ago, an old essay by the novelist extolling the story writer’s imagination. It happens all the time these days: an imp leads me through the House of Judgement, parts a curtain, and shows me a roulette wheel of mood and ignorance.

Le mot juste. A necessary faith for the writer—while writing. Like the athlete’s necessary dream of the perfect game, which every game shatters but without which no good game is possible. Joyce’s boast that he could justify every word in Ulysses. Undoubtedly he felt he could. But the reader understands that hundreds of its words could be changed without damage, or with gain.

Wondering how a lifetime of work in words might change how one perceives the world. Not just in the social sense of language “working towards” (the group, the shared and shareable view), but even at the neural level (Hebb’s rule) of what gets reinforced through long, mostly involuntary, practice. Language, by definition, moves primary perception out of the raw—the wild—towards the shaped, the coherent, the communicable. It seems plausible that a lifetime of using language, especially literary language, would lessen the ability to even register what is shapeless, incoherent, incommunicable. It would domesticate perception. So what? you might say. Good riddance to incommunicable chaos; let’s tell stories of the settlement. But a few, while also telling stories of the settlement, will always feel driven to go out to the edges of habitation and peer into the feral dark beyond.

Follow the energy. Which sometimes leads away from shape, at least temporarily. (Intolerance of chaos → premature shape →loss of energy)^[3]

I can’t fully revise something until I’ve “seen” it on a mental page. A pattern of black and white—margins, spaces—like a Franz Kline. Then I can adjust the words to fit the shape it already has.

Payment other than joy is chump change.

First-person fictions that over a skeleton of facts lay a flesh of wild invention. Third-person fictions of extreme, sometimes supernatural events that are transcriptions of actual events seen through a magic lens. Memoirs that are polygraph ready, as true in every detail as memory can supply. Memoirs that are half reportage, half imagination. Writing in all these modes, and more, has exploded my sense of the usefulness of genre. Back in the day, I used to buy these plain European editions—I can’t recall the publisher—which had only the title and author’s name on the cover. No genre, no synopsis, no blurbs. No way to relate the work to the author’s life even if you wanted to. We should try that as a re-set.

Write every day. For some it may be good advice. But for me the discipline to be learned was closer to its opposite. My nature as a writer was always to push forward at speed, disregarding obstacles. (“graphomanic” was my inevitable blog handle.) When I found myself spinning in sterile circles I would redouble my efforts, like someone lowering a bucket into a well even faster after he’s heard the scrape of dry stone. It wasn’t until my late thirties, at Heather’s urging, that I began to see the importance at such times of simply stopping. At least for a few days, sometimes for as long as several weeks.

The impression, not of passing on meanings after the event, but of being present at the moment when language reaches out to thought. Gestures at—in raptures even grazes—the ungraspable.

Reading my early work, I feel embarrassed. A common humble-brag, especially by older writers of some renown. Do we outgrow our younger selves, so that their concerns and feelings seem naïve; or do we “ingrow” to a smaller circumference where those former reachings can barely be glimpsed let alone understood?

Saying something because I have something to say. Saying something because I need to be heard saying something. Hard to know sometimes which impulse is uppermost, or in what way they’re mingled, since the second sometimes facilitates the first. Something worthy of notice is often helped into being by a craving for notice. And humility can curb not just vanity but excellence.

I have authored countless stories, in speech and in writing, but I now feel I am awash, we are all awash, in stories; I crave story parsimony. Just the necessary, the invincible, stories. The handful of stories without which a good life is impossible.

Today, very unusually for me, I spent the first part of the morning discussing banking and a building contract. My impatience and frustration at being kept from my writing desk was not just boredom with these matters and annoyance at the spurious complexities of business. It was more visceral, verging on panic. The reaction of someone being kept from his refuge, like a cave creature forced blinking into fluorescent lights. I groaned with relief when I could finally close the door, like a monk allowed to return to his walled herb garden.

^[1] One reason for this could be that when I’m out in the country I’m usually on vacation, taking a break from my normal activities including writing. I imagine that if I lived there writing would find new channels to flow in.

^[2] Sometimes we put the doubtful work back up with a note to let visitors weigh in. In that spirit, here is the original entry. The danger not just of glib words but of glib situations. Actors colliding with high drama on sets of utter convention. I think this is partly why reading or writing stories of bourgeois domestic realism increasingly feels not just empty but distasteful to me. At best they seem evasions, at worst alibis for the status quo. When the actual world becomes a flimsy backdrop for crises of “relationship” enacted in front of it, the tears evoked come close to complacency, and sentimentality and cruelty are outed as bedfellows. Being repeatedly “seared” or “devastated” by things stands in for trying in even a small way to come to grips with them.

^[3] I find this even at the phrase and sentence level. Revising, I feel a deep satisfaction in bringing clarity out of thickets of confusion, while wondering at times whether I am abandoning richer possibilities still hiding in those thickets.

1997—2023

“just the writing on the page”

In accepting my first book of stories, John Metcalf said something that’s always mystified me. I’d written to publisher Tim Inkster asking if I could submit the manuscript to Porcupine’s Quill. Tim wrote back that John was the editor for the press and that on the strength of Calm Jazz Sea I was welcome to send the stories to him in Ottawa. Tim, as I would later learn, was an accomplished poet in an earlier incarnation, so a poetry book was a good way to catch his eye. It was the first inkling I had that you really needed a way in. Blasting stuff in all directions and hoping a Max Perkins would fall in love with it—well, maybe it still happened occasionally, but it was an extreme long shot. John responded quickly that he was very impressed with the stories, “as you knew I would be.” That was the phrase that flummoxed me. It seemed to imply a sureness of presentation that I didn’t see how I could possess. I was, after all, 42, with a trunkful of unpublished stuff; with a psychiatric rap sheet as long as my razor-scarred arm; and with next-to-no knowledge of the Canadian prose scene or John’s place in it. Did I seem more confident than I felt? Did I have more confidence than I knew? These are not really questions for John, but someday I still hope to ask him.

When Aquarium came out, John invited me to his reading series at a bar in Ottawa. The audience was mostly self-generated: John and his wife Myrna, Heather and I. Another writer John had edited, Mary Borsky. A Canada Council person, recording—a professional touch, like the flyers, John had arranged. And a middle-aged man directly in front of me, sitting at the bar, sideways. He was very drunk. His head sank lower and lower during my forty-five-minute reading. His slumped form, just over an arm’s length away, was relaxing to read to. It was just the tiniest step up from reading to myself, like a warm soft rock I draped my story over. After, during questions, his head came a little way up. “That image of X halfway through, did you mean….” It staggered me. He’d been listening. There’s just no telling.

“I’m no use to you if I’m not honest,” wrote John, rejecting a manuscript. John was right in that case, and helped me to let go of a project that had no future. Ever since, his words come back to me whenever I’m wondering how much, and what kind of, honesty might be useful.

After reviewing the blueline proofs for The Syllabus and emailing a few corrections, I tore them up and threw them out. Tim informed me that they were the publisher’s property, not mine. Downstairs, the garbage hadn’t gone out yet, so we were able to retrieve our bag. Dumping it on the living-room floor (luckily, it was free of the effluvia that had coated Jimi’s scraps), Heather and I worked at reassembling the pages jigsaw-fashion, joining them with clear tape when we’d made a match. It took us several hours—a good time. Laughing at the jagged seams, like raw sutures, the toothy gaps where no match could be found. Frankenproofs, we called them. A lovable grotesque, which was hard to give up and mail back.

Three books in, I made my only attempts to acquire an agent. Not really knowing why I was doing it, but thinking it might be the “next step.” (Doomed by this half-heartedness alone.) Much work to polish the samples and cover letters. The polite ones came back quickly. And then, a bit later, came a strange one. It was from a prominent Toronto agent and it was handwritten under her personal letterhead. After ridiculing my opening scene, she spoke of the long apprenticeship necessary for the writing craft (I was 48) and advised me to make a thorough study of “grammar rules.” I had to read it over several times to be sure I wasn’t dreaming. It reminded me of Isaac Singer’s crackpot stories of Yiddish literary circles, rife with deluded grandeur and weird hostilities. But weird or not, the words were plain. What had prompted her to reach into the slush pile to perform this gratuitous drive-by? As I stared at the shapely blue letters, disbelief ebbed away and I felt a growing lightness and strength, surely the exact opposite of what she had intended.

Serving one time on a Canada Council grants jury, I queried what I called the “reno project” applications. “A doctor married to a lawyer? Why does he need grant money? It’s probably for a new deck.” The facilitator smiled. “Consider just the writing on the page, Mike.” I also flagged the brazenly lax: “‘Stories about families.’ Seriously?” “Consider just the writing in the sample, Mike.” “It’s a good story, sure, a prize-winning story, but the prize was twenty years ago.” “Consider just the….” “Yes, but if the sample’s all that matters, why ask for a proposal, a publications list, a bio?” It became a bit of a routine, as these things will: Artistic Probity Guy. The facilitator and the other two jurors chuckled at my scruples, but I felt sure the Council would appreciate them. Wasn’t I looking out for the taxpayer? Protecting the Council’s rep? I was confident I’d be offered the gig, or another like it, again. But I was never invited back.

Brightly dead was how I felt both times I was on TV. The orange faces. Which I saw again with Trump’s “bronzing agent.” The flitting, dead-air-phobic eyes. The surreal dirtiness, snack bags and pop cans and greasy dust around the cables at the cameramen’s feet. Total neglect of everything not in frame.

life-writing

2005 brought changes. On the last day of 2004, I started seeing a good new psychiatrist, Lindsey, after many years out of treatment. After a prose decade, I began writing poems again. In the first three months of the year I wrote about 150 of them. Then things slowed down. Lindsey suggested I keep going with it. That made no sense to me. Why write if you didn’t have to, if something wasn’t burning to get out? Try it as an experiment, Lindsey suggested. She was very practical, always suggesting some small lever to pull and see what happened. I followed her advice, managing to write a dozen more poems that month. They were bland and workmanlike, I thought. And it had been a grind to produce them. Okay, Lindsey said, and we went on to other things. A few weeks later, she asked me to evaluate the poems I’d written so far. I went back through them. From the January-March gush, I felt there were maybe 20 good poems; and from April, to my surprise, there were actually 4-5 good ones. Not as many, but of course a vastly higher hit rate. One in three as compared to one in seven. This was a dizzying concept to me, unguessed despite my having written for twenty-five years. That performance and feeling about performance—mood—could be so at odds. That something of value could be produced, not just by ecstatic scribbling, but by showing up and plugging away. The evidence was undeniable, but I had trouble believing it. Resisted it on some deep, perhaps a cellular, level. We talked about it through many sessions.

Why create except from ecstasy? remained my credo even so. But the experiment had put a little shim of space between my beliefs and actuality, which was the purpose of all of Lindsey’s pry bars.

And then, in my fiftieth year, I began to write about mental illness more directly than ever before. It was as if someone who had been sitting in the room all along, silent but affecting every conversation, cleared his throat and began speaking. Telling of terrible wounds and confusions, but also of love and hope, battered but still strongly alive, still desperate to be heard. Dan Wells, my new publisher, gave all of it a hearing.

Now, twenty years later, I see that writing about mental illness, if it is honest, must proceed until it reaches a dead end—the place where “illness” can go no further and must retrench and qualify itself, disentangling the certitudes of pathology from the more delicate and equivocal facts of who you are and how you need to live, and how those can diverge, sometimes profoundly, from who others are and how they need to live. That exploration is likely endless. The route to pathology is short and well-trodden, the paths back from it vast and meandering.[1]

“I can only be so well.” It was a suspicion that grew as I made more progress in thinking about my mental health and how best to manage it. Lindsey found it downbeat, but I thought it was simple realism. If I was living with a serious mental illness, which no drug treatment had allayed, there was likely a ceiling—though I hoped it was a high one—to how well I could manage it using the huge toolbox of strategies I had found and would go on finding. This obviously extended to writing, since writing well depends on clear thinking and my illness impacts, sometimes severely, my ability to think clearly. It impacts judgement, which is indispensable. (The fact that there is plenty of bad judgement among writers doesn’t change my own situation. À chacun sa folie.) I’ve tried, for the most part successfully, not to let this recognition depress me. Knowing the initial conditions of a house needn’t stop you from trying to enlarge and improve it, though it does remind you that there are likely limits to those renovations.

In October 2016, those limits smacked me in a big way. After several years of increasing stability, my silent partner cleared his throat again and loudly asserted his inalienable rights. Heather and I took the train to Windsor, where I was to read from my recently published novel The Adjustment League, along with John Metcalf and Leon Rooke. It was the start of what was to be a mini-tour of three cities along the 401 highway. As the evening progressed, I regressed, increasingly aware of the fragile disquiet that can precede a major break. At such times, all stimuli become amplified and extreme, and rooms of people, in particular, begin to bark and swirl like a carnival midway. I got through the reading, but all night long in our hotel room, I was rocked by terrifying hallucinations, both auditory and visual. What I mainly remember of that kaleidoscopic hell was a repeated storm of screaming body parts. At first light, Heather phoned Dan and told him that the tour was finished, for me. Dan drove right over, and at the sight of his face, full of sympathetic concern, I fell, weeping and mumbling apologies, into his arms. There was still the train ride to get through. Sitting in our seats behind John and Leon, I felt so ashamed and broken. The next night’s reading was at Leon’s Toronto home. Heather went in my stead and, despite her own serious difficulties reading in public, took it upon herself to present a few pages from my novel. With the kindness of people’s messages, and rest in lamp-lit rooms, I rallied over the next few days, skirting the worst. I felt chastened by this close call, almost…corrected. As if I had been yanked back on a chain after straying too far, reminded that public appearances take me to the limits of my capacity, and sometimes a little beyond. At the same time, it was a kind of validation. It confirmed that the quiet and careful habits by which Heather and I live in our apartment—which we jokingly call “the delicate web” and “the monastery”—are not a preferred “lifestyle” but rather as necessary to my survival as insulin to a diabetic.

Life-writing is a phrase I hear often in writing circles these days, but it has a broader meaning for me. Learning to live with serious mental illness has been supremely daunting. The amount of grit and flexibility and humour and stamina and intuition and analysis and imagination I’ve had to bring to it is something I’m very proud of. But it’s only relatively recently that I’ve begun to recognize it as a creative, even an artistic, achievement. The most sustained and impressive of my life, I have no doubt.

clocklessly

Cracked Fountain. Even after I’d given up on the novel, I still loved the title. Mental illness was in there, of course, but so was wild exuberance. The fountain was constantly running because the crack—in the base? in the bowl?—would never allow for a stable circulation.[2] Like the spring I loved visiting as a boy, excited to realize it was a crack in the earth, some lake far below—which I always saw as blue, not black—leaking upward through the rock and soil. Day and night, day and night, for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years.

I prefer to write in the morning, but since jobs and other circumstances often make that impossible, mostly I just churn ahead clocklessly, plugging the current project into any spare holes I can find. Regular writing haunts include: parked cars, food courts, public benches, bus or subway seats, high-rise lobbies, and waiting rooms. Morning is best, but after midnight is also okay; so are 2:45 p.m., 8:10 p.m. and the hour before sunrise. Things come together fast, except when they never do. Be With was written in eight days. Another eight for light revision. Medopolis has been filling binders for fourteen years now, thousands of pages, and might be further from completion than at any time since its first six heady months.

My anxiety about literary readings is not helped by the fact that I’m also bored by them. There’s a staleness to that way of presenting art that few performers can rise above, and none completely. Much better are discussions, Q&As, any format that encourages a general back and forth. Best of all were my semi-annual visits to Sharon English’s[3] writing class at U of T to talk about writing process (Sharon was already covering the specifics of craft). It was a mecca of maybe, no dogmas allowed. Lively round tables about flow, un-blocking, recruiting the unconscious, befriending chaos. About experimenting to learn your own metabolism as a writer and the practical ways to help it: adjustments to space, location, schedule, physical movement, writing media, personal relationships, feedback (amount and kind and timing)…. All the changing minutiae of how. How to put yourself into position to receive what might be given. Follow the energy was our mantra. It may lead you down blind alleys but it will never lead you astray.

“Process guy” was my nickname in those classes. Whenever a literary conversation lingers too long on the hushed contemplation of made things, including my own, I feel myself begin to freeze from the inside out. But the instant it turns back to the hurly-burly of making the thaw is underway.

Can you be too much in love with process? I’ve wondered it from time to time, looking around this room of massed scraps. The binders and boxes of Medopolis pieces, 200-page chunks, 300-page chunks, 600-page chunks, variant plans, fragmentary transmissions by its telepathic scribes, internal studies by future students, 50,000-year kalpas of repetition…and the suspicion sometimes, pushing up like a grass blade through the concrete of How can I ever finish this, to whisper greenly, There is no finish, this is it…. The pride in sheer volume, the trunks of finished and set-aside manuscripts, at least equal to the shelf of published books. Elation of the unfinished, the unfinishable. The failed. The flawed. The partial. The alive.

Q Street

Q Street (says a sketch in my notebooks) is the place where quantification rules. Where only numbers matter. How many sales? How many fans? How many likes? Many bestselling authors never live there. Many unpublished authors never leave. For anyone it is a dismal address. The food on Q Street is bad. The water is bad. The very air is bad. The place has a terminal case of the vapors. “Stay off Q” is wise advice, but futile, since all must visit there sometimes. When you go, pack food from home and return as soon as possible.[4]

“You’ve published twelve books!! Why have I never heard of you?”
“I couldn’t say.”

It’s weird to hear of writers getting fan mail. (Some of them even speak of the difficulty of keeping up with it!) I’ve received maybe a dozen such messages over the years, most of them preludes to requests to read the fan’s own work.

My lifetime average of books sold is 300 copies per title. (Frank Miller’s Thermopylae comic, 300, had special resonance.) 300—is it a little or a lot? Looking up at the bestseller list, I hear dark laughter. But I remember, from long ago, my dad’s bemused question after reading a published poem of mine: “Do you just sort of think this stuff up, Mike?” “Well,” I said, “yes, I do.” And we shared a laugh. Viewed from that angle, getting 300 people to take an interest in stuff you just think up might qualify as a minor miracle. It’s like the time I worked out my lifetime wage for writing to be $3.10/hour (most of it coming from grants). Is the figure derisory? Or is it, rather, a generous stipend to be paid year in, year out, for something you would have done anyway, for free?

And yet, the lurking shame still visits when listening to authors talk about the writing numbers. Hearing at a party how one novelist “decided to live on $20,000 a year”—and feeling a dismal wonderment, since I would have considered even a tenth of that to be a jackpot year.

Here is a better measure I’ve been using since long before I was conscious of it: Since I love writing and want to keep doing it, anything that helps me do so is good. Anything that doesn’t is bad. It’s simple, and easy to test empirically: After X occurred, was I more or less likely 1) to write with enthusiasm?; 2) to write at all? Things that strike out on #1 go on probation. Things that strike out on #2 go straight to the top of the jettison list.

Which is how a decision not to track closely your public reception can come about—or, not a decision exactly, but a drift that arrives at somewhere definite. Not because everything you encounter is bad, far from it, but because the bad outmuscles the good and you don’t want to give it the lengthy downtime it sometimes takes to recover from.

Conversations about online “presence” quickly become overblown, when often it comes down to timing and temperament. I was formed as a writer in small rooms with limited gadgets, just a transistor radio at first, and later a TV, and only in the mid-1990s a computer, after I’d already been writing for a decade and a half. So I’m apt to find the online world loud and distracting at best, assaultive at worst. The shallowing and fracturing of my thoughts as I scroll and click is not unlike what I experienced on the neuroleptic tranquilizers I was given. Additionally, I’m prone to feeling overwhelmed by stimuli, capsized by a too-muchness even in ordinary situations. That’s when I need to give myself the cure of a corner chair and a single lamp—the chapel of less, as I call it. So the mall of more feels not just unalluring, but dangerous.

When my twelfth book, Sleep Is Now a Foreign Country, was published, I made the decision not to read any reviews. It was partly an experiment. Eavesdropping on public opinions about myself had always felt somewhat unreal and dispiriting, even when the opinions were favourable. It seemed to dissolve in remoteness what I wanted to keep close. (This, like other aspects of my writing practice, owes something to publishing my first book at age 41, when my habits were already settled.) A couple of the reviews were raves, apparently, and friends urged me to read them. When I didn’t, they thought this showed iron discipline, but I felt little temptation. It was as if my “vow” was simply catching up to where I already lived, which is perhaps how most resolutions, the successful ones anyway, occur. What I had instead of reviews were several long private conversations about the book. So—nothing lost, and very much gained.

I can’t remember the last time I Googled myself. It might have been almost a decade ago. That feels like a victory, especially as I didn’t have to work at it. The habit had me for a while and then it waned. Then died. Fell away like dead skin.

chasing emptiness

John Metcalf once described my writing as “essentially poetic.” What I took him to mean was that, even when I’m writing prose, I tend to proceed by images grouped by suggestion more than by explicit meaning. That’s certainly true. Even when I’m working hard to connect the dots, I’m always resisting the urge to blast spaces back between them. At its best, this can result in a field of charged particles. At its worst, it tries to build a Rome with tweezers. Conversely, when I turn back to writing poems (less and less often these days), I frequently apply the flatter and more direct methods of prose. Vigorously plainspoken, at their best. At other times, like cameos carved with an axe. I’ve wondered if these counter-currents are contrarianism or perversity—but I really don’t think they are. They’re just a result of triangulating between the kinds of things—rough-hewn but not obtuse, keen but not hermetic—I like to read myself.

Looking back, I see clearly the writers who influenced my own writing at different times. Not always my favourite writers, some of whom were too different to imprint me directly, but writers whose style seeped into my own while I was under their spell. The process never needed to be conscious. Their voices and ways of doing things were simply so seductive that they blended easily with my own to form a sort of hybrid. This blending was paradoxical. Some pieces that were more idiosyncratically my own struck me as more successful, but some of the hybrids seemed more original, since the borrowed voice skewed into new territory when it met my own. Where I had to strike out more independently was whenever I wrote most directly about altered mental states—in The Syllabus, The Lily Pond, The Adjustment League, Be With (Mom’s dementia), and, especially, in Sleep Is Now a Foreign Country. The closer I came to other-ness—encountering it, being it—the more I had to evolve my own methods. Sleep, the closest evocation of the other-world, was my most deeply imagined work. It called on all the modes of language (and image—the three photos are key) I’d used elsewhere and fitted them together to make a whole, like the scissor-and-paste collages that were my earliest experience of art.

One editing experience I’ve never had and always coveted was the one (perhaps rare unless commercial potential is scented) where the editor says, “Well, this is sure a hot mess, with X, Y and Z dead wrong with it, but it shows great promise and let’s work together to salvage it.” My experience has been entirely binary—either YES! with six tiny changes at the proofs stage, or NO. As a self-editor, I’ve been stuck in the same (bipolar?) binary. In the later stages of editing, I’m skilled, but not when it comes to wholesale restructuring and re-visioning. I listen in admiring wonder when good writers I know, K.D. Miller and Sharon English for example, talk of recasting or removing main characters, cutting whole storylines, switching POVs, etc., as I might listen to someone self-diagnosing lung problems and figuring out new ways to breathe. If something isn’t alive and thriving from early on, I’m seldom able to raise it from the dead, despite heroic and even self-pummelling efforts to do so (efforts, however, that amount to extensive renovations rather than a new foundation). Eventually I just write something new. And it’s always seemed wasteful not to be able to rewrite more productively.

Writing peaks for me in moments of elated emptiness. Unconsciously that’s what I crave and chase. Times when I know I’ve scoured the well down to stone and, for a glorious scooped interval, have absolutely nothing to say or do. Presenting books, I’ve often found that feeling of stunned depletion. Sitting with Heather for two hours in the car after a reading in Hamilton, sipping tea in the dark, too drained to drive. Those sessions after The Lily Pond and Be With, scheduled for an hour but expanding to two or three, sharing tears with strangers, thinking, This is not a book-experience but thank heaven a book-experience could arrange it. Transaction doesn’t appall me, I’m not a poverty monk, but it falls so short of encounter that I shy from it instinctively—like a mouse from an electric field, or a fish from overly acidic water. Hearing authors talk of agents and contracts and advances, I don’t think they’re wrong or venal or petty, I just feel a pang of removal, an immigrant’s sense of coming from a different world. Coming from that long stint in lock-up and another five years of total disability, with mini-breakdowns and rooming houses and grunt jobs in between, I feel it already as a vast privilege to be at liberty, nibbling snacks someone else has paid for, presenting a book I wrote but that someone else printed—what more could be needed or asked for? What could be missing?

Whole books were written without any hair-pulling fits, with just an excited grapple forward every day. With moments of frustration, sure, but mostly with joy. Be With was like that. So was The Adjustment League. Even The Lily Pond. Even Sleep Is Now a Foreign Country, which readers called “terrifying” but which I described to a correspondent, a little idiotically but also accurately, as “fun” to write. Most of them—all of them, now that I think back on it—were enormous fun to write. Fun that entailed baffling difficulty, like the stumpers in a book of puzzles, but which likewise delivered regular jolts of joy and discovery. How to say it is always an absorbing conundrum, whatever it is. When will we retire the myth of writing as torture, wearing our Sturm und Drang as a badge? Are we afraid to locate our self-worth in play? Or are we afraid that those outside, trying to peer in through curtains of mystique, will rise up if they know how deeply pleasurable life is inside these rooms?

gratis

“Can you talk a little about why you wrote this book, and how?” A radio host asked me this after my fourth book, Contrary Angel, but a version of it gets asked in any interview. It’s not a bad question as far as it goes, and I imagine my answer, whatever it was, wasn’t bad either. But whatever you say to make decent radio, the real answer to “why” is always I don’t know, and the real answer to “how” is always By luck. How else? You can’t give yourself your brain, your heart, your teachers, your friends—the ability to make something, the urge to do so, and the leisure in which to try. All these things just come to you, gratis.

Chasing emptiness. All of the labours of making are to reach that still circle where for precious instants you know that nothing can be made, only given. And then given away.

Today.
Another fresh chance
to make sense. Another fresh
chance to feel and say what is.
Another fresh chance
to be.

[1] In fact, as I said to a friend recently, in my own mind it’s been years since I gave a medical name to the states I experience. A diagnostic label felt necessary, and helpful, for a time—a shorthand, for myself and others—but then it began to feel not only unhelpful but wrong to let the sheer lines of pathology replace the delicate mesh of actual living. Now, it is all just who I am. Still—it is hard to be just who you are. Especially when you are suffering deeply, which is a state that induces not just weakness but, often, shame. And it is hard to subsume a huge class of interrelated experiences without some sort of simplifying rubric, at least if you are going to do so without resorting to endless fine-grained glosses. Which is why, in this and other writings, and in many conversations, I still refer to myself as a mentally ill person. “Illness” asks for mercy when there is not enough self-possession to claim respect for difference.

[2] Since all fountains need pressure, to be fountains (“The fountain retains its identity only because of the continuous pressure of water.”—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception), a cracked one needs water constantly added to prevent the loss of pressure that would cause it to lose its identity, to cease being a fountain.

[3] Sharon, a novelist and story writer, writes beautiful essays on her Substack Nirvania about recentering our attention on the natural world and its cycles.

[4]A nasty feature of all online platforms, including this one, is the way they constantly present you with your “metrics”—how many followers, how many likes, how many subscribers. These get shoved at you in ways that are very hard to ignore, and impossible to ignore completely. They even graph them for you! Naturally they do: they are gears in a mechanism designed to turn all relations into profit. As such, they want you to equate value only with what can be measured, and success only with measures that go rapidly up. They want you to stay on Q Street.

They’d pay us even less if they knew how much fun we were having.

—Unnamed Poet, Tim Hortons, 1982

April, 1979. Ten minutes after my discharge from St. Joe’s psychiatric ward, I was writing again. It felt so easy. Like turning a tap. Words stirred in me as I crossed the hospital parking lot, spring sun glinting off the puddles. A block down James was the Sunrise Restaurant. Over coffee I opened the red book with the hard pebbly cover. Riffled past pages of tiny script and drawings, ending a few days after my admission. Leaving two facing pages blank—let that stand for those years—I began again. The poems came happily. Like hungry little fish waiting just under the surface. Anything served: the waitress with the mole, the stains on the placemat, the serene guy in the corner, the bushy racing clouds. Farther down the street the one-armed vet was still at King and James, same greasy bomber jacket draped with chains. He used to hurl abuse my way, and he had no better opinion of me now. He got himself a poem too.

Returning at first to my parents’ house, I spent my days in the rare books room of the McMaster University library, copying out poetry collections by Charles Bukowski. None of his books were easy to find back then, but these were the early, ungettable ones: Crucifix in a Deathhand, At Terror Street and Agony Way. Reproducing them was a two-step process: printing out the pages by hand, since the books could not be borrowed, being careful to capture the eccentric typography and spacing. Typing them out at home and putting them in decorated Duo-Tang folders, making actual books of them. An arduous job that was sheer monkish bliss. It was more than veneration of Bukowski’s poems, though I did venerate them then (the best of them anyway—even to a super-fan he was wildly uneven). It was writing, making books. Words travelling down my fingers onto paper, binding the paper into sheaves. But it was more than that, even. It was a way, after eighteen months on a psychiatric ward, of edging back into the world. Of making a burrow that is a portal back into life. Maybe like one of those chambers you enlarge in a snow tunnel, delicately scraping crystals from around and above you, until the daylight from the surface surrounds you in a radiant glowing room, its ceiling so thin the slightest touch might poke through it. Bukowski was one of the last things I remembered from Germany in the summer I became psychotic. He was a big thing there, long before he became a hit in North America. Building his books to make a personal library was like rebuilding the before-time, setting the bricks where the building had been razed, but to a new pattern and specification.

Soon I had a place of my own, with a mattress on the floor and a multi-coloured rug made of carpet store samples I duct-taped together from the back. I wrote poems, sometimes several a day, and sent them out to the little magazines then proliferating. I mailed them out in batches of ten, the maximum most mags would consider, and the maximum covered by the postage including my SASE[1]. Many came back by return mail, almost all within a month. Typically there was just a form rejection. I would examine the pages carefully, looking for blemishes that meant they had to be retyped but that also suggested they’d been read. A coffee smear was propitious. I was determined to stay ahead of the inflow. If thirty poems came back, I sent at least forty out. As the number of returnees increased—to fifty, sixty, seventy—my work increased to stay ahead. Banging them out on my portable Smith-Corona, I got discouraged at times, but never for long. Landing the rare poem—miracle of the missing page!—was an elation I could ride for days with a feeling like I was sailing. Writing twenty to thirty new poems a week, I was sure to overwhelm the house odds. And when, two hundred poems in, I landed four at once, I quickly did the math and realized I’d have a decent manuscript to send out within one thousand poems (I was expecting to up my hit rate a little, with experience). It would take maybe nine months. Easy peasy.

Payment was mostly in contributor copies. Occasionally a $10 or $15 cheque. I made sure not to dilute those funds by mixing them in with grocery or laundry money. Art monies weren’t to become “general revenues.” I turned them back into fuel at the Sunrise or Timmies, buying myself a lunch over which I added a couple new poems to my stash to replace the published ones.

Submitting so much meant a constant hunt for new addresses, which I got from the back pages of magazines in Book Villa. Other local poets would do the same, sometimes three or four of us in a line at the long rack, collecting the names of little mags that often came and went in the space of a few issues. The proprietor knew what we were up to and would roust us if he saw us with pen and paper. So you’d memorize as many addresses as you could hold in your head and go outside to scribble them down. Get a coffee somewhere and come back after a plausible interval to collect some more. Sometimes you’d have to re-do one if you forgot part of it or transposed bits of one address into another. If you got too ambitious and overloaded your memory, you’d end up with gibberish, no clean leads at all. Coming away with five or six new destinations was a good night.

I became known as the writer in the attic. Sending out my nine-by-twelve brown envelopes, getting them back in bunches. Bernie, alcoholic like all the supers in those years, also had emphysema, which put pregnant spaces around his words. “You sent out,” Bernie wheezed, “little books. The little…books came…back.” Bernie calling my nine-by-twelves “little books” made me realize—why not? I wrote the ten poems, chose them, sequenced them. A little book. Sure, absolutely. It became a kind of game to see how far I could scatter them around the world, like throwing huge boomerangs of thought. And I made larger chapbooks of twenty or thirty poems that I bound with covers of pastels and collaged bits of found objects—string, buttons, bus transfers, insect wings—and kept in a shrine-like painted crate. Certain poems, paired once in a sub, might stick together for a while. “The Rabbit Screams” and “Ant Colloquy” took quite a few rides together. And then, after many international sojourns, their partnership would be disbanded—maybe they were unlucky together and needed a new travelling companion. There was a sense of alchemy, of somehow bewitching the recipient by a canny blend. Soften them up, say, with a couple of sedate monologues, then slam them, three poems in, with something truly hallucinatory: “50 Oil-Impervious Sheets” or “Grunion Diary.”

Venom came in from afar. “Mostly this is shit,” scrawled a straight-shooter from California. Also from the Eureka state, a response slip with a letterhead: Honest craft we salute. Asswipe we so identify. My slip was blank, with Asswipe circled. “NO!” in blood-red caps, like a Manson signature. It was weirdly invigorating. The dark had all this snarling.

I began to suspect my superpower might be scar tissue and the ability to take a punch. A Rocky of Verse.

Poems fell out of me night and day. They got scribbled in notebooks and on napkins and placemats and even around the margins of dollar bills[2]. Some forgotten scraps literally fell out of shirt or jeans pockets when I was at the laundromat (“oh, hello…not bad!”). Many I wrote at my on-call and part-time jobs[3], mumbling them into shape and stealing moments to jot them down. In toilet stalls. Behind machinery. On loading docks. In alcoves out of the supervisor’s line of sight. In that halted freight elevator when I was weekend janitor at the YMCA, sitting in the back corner with my knees drawn up while the super raged and strafed his flashlight down from the slit above, then up from below, mystified that it always jammed exactly at the midpoint between floors, and only when I was in it, and that I found a way to get it going again soon after he started bellowing.

There was amused respect for dog fuckers in most workplaces, as long as you weren’t the one picking up the slack they caused, and as long as they were spending their stolen time in approved ways. Sleeping (one guy at Stelco had a well-made nest of cardboard lined with rags). Scanning porn. Smoking cigarettes. Scribbling in notebooks wasn’t legitimate dog fucking. It was “weird.”

One of my self-treat places was Lorenzo’s, where I’d get a coffee in the late afternoon to go with one of their muffins that tasted like Christmas pudding. A local businessman, Boersma, who dressed in a three-piece suit and owned three buildings next to mine, would come in around 5. His newspaper was waiting at his place and his dinner was brought without his having to order. He had a monthly tab, which seemed the height of luxury. It was rumoured that he’d won the lottery, simply because none of us had any idea how else wealth might be generated. Over in the corner, I’d be stretching my coffee refill and writing poems, sometimes about Boersma.

Another Book Villa activity was scoping out the magazines that had rejected me, deriding the poems they had published. Leafing through: “you’ve got to be kidding…seriously?...sucks… sucks!!.…” This kind of self-solacing went on a long time before I realized what should have been obvious right off: if this was what they truly liked, and my stuff was actually different from it, why would I expect to have a chance with them? That was the other side of sucks.

Bernie disappeared one day and the new super, Jimi, loonier and a little younger, played ball hockey with his cats in the dirt lot out back. He gave me my first editing job, asking me to help him jigsaw back together a bunch of stained and smelly paper scraps with numbers and words written on them. He’d fished them out of the garbage because he thought they were shooting notes for a porn film the downstairs tenant was making on the premises. They were. Jimi hoped to lever the auteur out of the building with the help of them. Collaging the coffee-egg-jam-stained bits into coherent sex acts had been delicate work, and I asked if I could have the Sade-Schwitters thing when he was done with it. Jimi shot me an appalled look and, spluttering about “perverts” and “legal evidence,” stomped back downstairs to his cats.

Well ahead of schedule, six hundred poems in, I landed a collection with a poetry press. I called it Black and White Pictures after a Rainstorm, after one of my better early ones. We settled easily on the contents, I sent in a bio, an author photo I thought was cool. Soon, they said, they’d send a cover mock-up and a pub date. Done! The ease of publishing astonished me—after all the preliminary work, just an exchange of a few courteous letters. It felt like stepping from semi-shadow into full sun. Then…eighteen months dragged by without a word. Now, my letters went unanswered. Finally I got up nerve to call them. I knew the answer couldn’t be good, but as long as I hadn’t heard it yet it hadn’t happened. The publisher’s wife said he was in the garden, she’d get him. My heart sank at the word garden. It brought lord of the manor visions, flagstone paths, flower beds. I couldn’t see myself in a scene where people ambled around their garden. A long silence. A big garden. Then a voice saying, “Yes, I’m sorry…we’re unable….” Something about funding. It shocked me into non-submission for twelve years. The Rocky of Verse, knocked flat by a feather.

(17 years later)

Kitty, at Brick Books, phoned to chat about publicity for my first collection, Calm Jazz Sea. She ran through a list of elements that might perk up my bio. Was I, by any chance, gay? No. Native? No. How about heritage, ethnicity—any kind of interesting mix? Not really, pretty much straight-up WASP. I wasn’t young, either. Or old enough, on the other hand, for some kind of late-harvest spin. We shared some laughs about it, Kitty was always good-humoured. “Sorry, Kitty, I’m afraid I’m just a straight white male in early middle age.” (With a history of recurrent psychosis never even occurred to me.) “Well,” she chuckled, “we’ll work with what we’ve got.”

My first public reading—or rather, second; fifteen years earlier, at the finale of the Hamilton Poetry Contest, I’d recited my winning poem about a goldfish dying in a bowl—was at the Rivoli, on Queen Street. From the spotlit stage there was only blackness. That helped, but I was still terrified. Nervously, I cracked a joke. Silence. Then, from the black, the tinkle of ice in glasses. The sound crystallized the comic binary: I killed/I died. I was dying. And learning. Be funny, if you can. Don’t try to be funny. A couple of readers later came the headliner, Alistair Macleod. He gave a masterly performance, reciting the first five minutes of his story from memory, like an ancient bard, and only then opening his book as he continued in a deep, slow, resonant voice. So that’s how you do it, I thought, knowing I would never do it that way.

One day near the end of the last century, I read a review of a poetry book in a little magazine. At one point the reviewer said, “Sometimes he tries too hard to be wise, which works about as well as trying to be taller.” Good line, I thought, chuckling at it. Then remembered after a second that I was the “Barnes” in question. It was still a good shot. It was just hard to make the jump from being a reader to a readee. Part of me, even then, wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to.

[1] Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope. Or, for foreign destinations, the pricier combo of self-addressed envelope plus International Reply Coupon. The only way to be sure your poems had been received was to pay for them to be sent back to you. Increasingly a relic in the age of digital submissions.

[2] If micro-script around the margins didn’t suffice, there was also considerable pale space between the Coat of Arms and the Queen, and on the Queen’s neck and shoulders. Also in the landscapes on the back, especially the skies. If the scribbling wasn’t too egregious, the poem-buck still worked as legal tender after you’d copied the lines into a notebook.

[3] My rent in the early 1980s hovered around $200/month, and my wages around $3.50/hour, a little more or less in both cases. With groceries and other expenses, I calculated I could live on about 15 shifts a month, and often unplugged my phone when I’d reached that to avoid the 6 a.m. call from the supervisor. Postage for the submissions was my largest monthly expense after rent and food. I knew many people in similar circumstances, living in their own apartments on near-minimum wages. It wasn’t considered remarkable. The sheer unlikelihood of someone managing that now is a measure of how much ground ordinary workers have lost.

A year and a half ago, I spent a few weeks setting down memories and reflections from the forty-five years I’d been writing by that time. Although I was 69, almost the age when P.D. James, echoing Samuel Johnson, said it was “time to be in earnest,” I didn’t have in mind some kind of nearing-the-exit summa. I just had the urge to take a long look back.

Doing so was fun, and a bit mysterious. Like going back to the start of a shoreline walk, seeing things I’d seen before but not in the same light, spotting new things that must have been underfoot all along, and finding at the end that I’d somehow moved farther around the lake.

Cracked Fountain is in four parts, which I’ll present over the next four posts. Here is an overview:

(I) A Rocky of Verse—the harum-scarum comedy of my first 17 years as a writer, from the first wild outpourings in 1979 to the publication of my first book in 1996.

(II) Glimpses and Green Whispers—vignettes and reflections from 1997 to 2023, years in which I published 12 books across a range of genres, and found my way to a new subject, or rather an old subject I had not expected to deal with directly. It takes a hard look at the realities of publication, which like most writers I had hungered after, but which, when it arrived, was a more ambiguous gift than I’d expected, one that made difficult and sometimes impossible demands on my spirit.

(III) Gleanings—short notes on what I’ve learned about writing, the struggle to keep it fresh and real, the mysteries it keeps churning up, the dialogue between the penned and unpenned self. Since all opinions on art are provisional, if I feel differently about some of the points now than I did when I wrote them, I’ll say so in footnotes.

(IV) Clear Lake—a final look back at what swimming in this ink for almost half a century has meant to me.

I may add a coda about this recent Substack venture, which has restored some of the immediacy and homemade-ness I enjoyed so much at the start of writing and sometimes regretted drifting away from. Writing for me has been a continual effort to wriggle free of restraints as soon as I felt them tightening around me—restraints of expectations (my own and others’), of form and genre, of success quantifiers, of self-definition….

That coda, plus any footnotes I add throughout, will bring Cracked Fountain up to date from the piece I wrote in late 2024.

This is not a how-to of writing. Craft guides abound, and I wouldn’t be much interested in writing one even if I felt I could. On the other hand, it’s not not a how-to. The how-to I’ve been most focused on is how to get unstuck, again and again, in order to dwell as long as possible in the realm of exuberance. Freedom may be the most ungeneralizable of topics, but watching how someone else tries to wriggle out of binds can be instructive, and even inspiring. I have always found it so.

For that reason, if anyone reading this knows a writer, especially a young writer, they might pass it along to, I hope you’ll consider doing so.

The path of things is silent. Will they suffer a speaker to go with them?[1]

[1] Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet”

On the ward there was Jari, teetering down the T-shaped corridors between his canes. “Fly or die,” the winged being had told him that night on the Skyway, and when he recounted the story, hunched over his handgrips and peering up at you, Jari seemed, without ever insisting, to be asking you to agree that he’d been double-crossed. In a curious way, his disgruntlement marked the beginning of his recovery, though his legs would never be right.

Sheila had the room across from Nick’s, and she used to appear in the middle of the night standing naked by his bed. She never shook him awake or made a sound. Just waited with her hands straight at her sides for him to open his eyes. Which, given the drugs he was on, must have taken all night sometimes, or never happened at all. If he did wake up, he would see blood smears on her face and body. The smears looked fresh though he couldn’t see blood flowing. And she’d tell, in clipped phrases like telegrams, of another visit by the winged devils who raped her. After a dozen disastrous drug trials, they got her on one which at least turned the tables on her attackers. Now she appeared, still naked and bloody, but it was the devils who were taking the beating. She could rip their wings right off, which made them frantic. Sheila’s face and breasts were scored with deep scratches, and Nick imagined her adversaries flailing with their wing stubs, like umbrella struts stripped of fabric. Now who’s whimpering, Sheila said.

Corinna made a couple of miraculous escapes from the Bubble Room, which was supposed to be escape-proof. Each time, a couple of hours after she’d been locked bellowing behind the plexiglass nipple, she showed up, calmly smoking a cigarette, in the common room. She never said how she’d got out; Nick never heard her talk about anything except baseball and cigarettes. It was a Filipino nurse, who’d been on those nights, who said she had to have “flown through the walls.” The nurse moved down to a medical floor soon after.

Why flown? Nick thought one day some weeks later. Why fly through walls if you can just pass through them walking? And this, like Jari’s sense of unfair dealing, signalled the start of a slow improvement.

Off the ward, flying was still king. People were reading Carlos Castaneda and other books on shamanism, all of which featured multiple occurrences of flying and levitation, often with specific instructions on how to attain those powers. A friend of Nick’s had a baby and swore he would be home-schooled. If a child was kept free of indoctrination by society, which was run by the Trilateral Commission, it wouldn’t lose any of its natural powers: flying, telepathy, telekinesis…as brainwashed clones, we couldn’t even imagine most of them.

Whatever drug someone had been using the night before, the stone was always described in terms of weightless soaring. I was flying—on pot, angel dust, acid, speed, coke, hash, magic mushrooms, or the awful-tasting peyote buttons that looked like, and may in part have been, dried animal turds. Even on a friend’s Lithium prescription or a dozen beers—I was flying.

The woman Nick moved in with had a recurring dream that intrigued but frightened her. In it, she left her body—she saw it lying there sleeping, with Nick’s body beside it—and floated straight to the window and through it. There, with herself hovering in the air beyond the glass, was where the dream always ended and she woke up. It was partly this dream that moved her to contact Lila, the psychic. And soon she and Nick were hosting psychic evenings at their apartment, their own readings free if they brought in three or more other people.

Nick was sceptical at first. But seated in the bedroom with the door shut, his knees almost touching Lila’s as she spoke in a halting rhythm, in a voice not quite her own—he felt his scepticism waver. Lila said the winged advisor standing right behind him—No, not an Atlantean, but related to that race—was telling her that Nick should quit his job as a dishwasher and devote himself to writing, or—she hesitated to relay this but the advisor was insistent—something terrible would happen to him. Nick felt a chill, and something bulky grazed his shoulder. The fact that of the several hundred poems he had written, just six had been accepted by magazines, one for a five-dollar payment and the rest for contributor’s copies, didn’t seem important at the moment. He was flying. And whatever other gifts she possessed or didn’t possess, Lila made people fly. People floated out of the bedroom glowing with altitude.

One Sunday during a February thaw, puddles slicking the ice and snow, Nick picked his way down to Bold Street where Simon, the middle-aged super for three adjoining walkups owned by a local millionaire, usually had pot for sale and always had good coffee on the stove and cookies or brownies a tenant had baked. He gave some people bargain rents and overcharged others, cutting any side deals he could, especially with broke young girls. The owner didn’t care as long as month-end added up. Simon also wrote poems, and liked to talk poetry with Nick. He thought Nick’s poems were too academic, though a few of them had potential. Simon called his own poems “street raps.” Poems about making a fried egg sandwich after you’d been dumped, or putting your own dog down rather than pay a vet. Artless in rhythm and word choice, filled with misspellings and grammar mistakes, they spilled out of one of the landlord’s legal-size envelopes, printed in all caps on scraps of newspaper or the backs of utility bills. Though Nick had a low opinion of them as poems, they had details—the dog’s bloodshot eye, the egg sputtering in margarine—that stuck in his head. Trying to be straight with himself on certain after-midnight walks, he admitted that they made his own more sophisticated writing seem callow. And callow was the last thing he thought a writer should be.

On this Sunday, Simon had no coffee or chat to offer. Nick found him standing on the doorstep of his building in his housecoat and slippers, flicking with a broom at some shards on top of a snowbank. The housecoat was grey-and-black, like Simon’s receding hair, and his skinny legs below the housecoat were a sunless white. He looked like a giant crow, painted the colours of the overcast, melting day. The shards, some standing upright in the snow, seemed too perfectly flat and clear to be ice. Looking up, Nick saw that the fourth floor window pane was gone. Where the other windows reflected cloud and branches, this one was just dim space.

Someone flying in their sleep? Nick said as he came up the walk.

Simon didn’t turn from his ineffectual sweeping, poking with the broom so he wouldn’t have to leave the cleared step. He could put it that way, if he’s smart, he said.

The tenant, he said, was up in St. Joe’s with a broken leg and collarbone. Anyone less stoned probably would’ve been killed. A cop was waiting outside his room to question him when he woke up.

Soon after this encounter, Nick’s poems began to feature small flows of water, streams and rivulets and trickles, and small frightened animals. Flying was far away from these poems, except when he saw a jet go overhead and wondered if it was carrying some of his poems to a distant editor. He was sending them out in batches of ten, at least five batches a week, to addresses all over the world that he found in The International Directory of Periodicals.

Flying in other forms still kept finding him. At Simon’s, a girl named Muriel turned to Nick while Simon was fixing coffee and told him she could fly. Muriel, who had green eyes and a voluptuous body, must have been flat broke. As soon as she found a boyfriend with a job, she moved out of Simon’s. I can fly, she said to Nick, just as you’d say I can type or I can speak French. She paused to make sure Simon was still rattling mugs and cutlery. I’d never tell him, of course. Of all the flying claims he ever heard, this was the one Nick found hardest to dismiss. Muriel’s beautiful face and plain, unboasting voice would come back to him decades later. I can fly. She wasn’t a reader, didn’t seem at all imaginative or eager to impress, showed no signs of craziness, and was always sober (which she argued about with Simon, who would have preferred her high on something).

Nick bought a bass guitar and began jamming with a group of people on Saturday night. Sometimes a dozen people came out. They bashed out Neil Young and Dylan and CCR: “The Needle and the Damage Done,” “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” “Proud Mary.” Sometimes someone would know a song with more difficult chords and would play it solo while the rest listened impatiently, tapping on their instruments. It was wildly fun, even though all the songs tended to approximate to the same din. There were too many instruments, they never took a few moments to plan an arrangement, and everyone played as if they were still alone in their own apartments.

The drummer was lucky because he had no other drummer pounding at another tempo. He was sleeping with Britney, narrow-eyed and blonde and skinny everywhere except her breasts, which she showed off in low-cut T-shirts. She had a guitar and could chord better than most of them, but after the first night she seldom took it out of its case. Her fingernails were bitten down to ragged stubs and during the sessions she’d sit on a stool beside the drummer, gnawing at them. Britney was married to a man paralyzed from the neck down. She spoke of the stress and exhaustion of living with a quad, of the quantities of care a quad required, of quad disability forms—and the sound of this word in her mouth, quad, was incredibly ugly in Nick’s ears, as if her husband were a rock or a stone. As one half of the rhythm section, he stood near the drummer during songs, but during the long pot-smoking breaks he’d move to the other side of the basement.

One night, though, for some reason, he found himself sitting right next to Britney. Her hand was on his leg and he was refilling her glass and his own from a mickey of Jack Daniel’s. Across the room, Nick’s girlfriend was listening to the only real musician among them, a handsome blind guitarist, sing “Wild Horses.”

Britney was telling him about a quad’s dreams. How they dreamed about walking and running and making love, like anybody. And how Roy—her husband’s name, though she could talk about him a whole night without saying it—paid his dealer to mix up potions that would facilitate long dream-filled sleeps he could escape into. It was tricky, because the mixture had to knock you out but let the dreaming mind play. Proportions of downers and mushrooms worked best so far.

Before he finally stopped talking to me, Britney said—and Nick, topping her up, thought, What took him so long?—he’d tell me of these amazing dreams, so real, and in vivid colour, of hiking and swimming, cycling, even mountain climbing. But then the dreams started to come less often. Or just be fleeting glimpses. Changing the drugs would help for a while, but then would wear off. One of the physios told him this was normal. The mind was catching up to what the body already knew. And in the long run, this was good.

But one day—it was one of the last real conversations we had—he told me that he’d had a dream he just had to tell someone before he forgot. The PSW was late and I was feeding him. In this dream, he said, he was walking again, not just for a moment, but slowly and along a long road. The thing was, though, he was the only walker on the road because everyone else was flying overhead. The sky was nothing but pathways full of zipping bodies, some flapping, some with their arms outstretched like Superman. They clogged the sky. For a moment I thought he was going to cry, but he didn’t. Quads get past that stage. They have to. He told me that as soon as he woke up he knew what the dream meant: that he was in his grave and watching all this on a screen underground. We scheduled an extra session with his therapist that week, and it was the next day that he told me he knew I was seeing Kaz and that although it had been rough to realize at first, he understood now and was okay with it.

For a few moments, nobody said anything. Not Nick or Britney or Vivian, the girlfriend of another jammer who’d been listening nearby. Nick imagined they were all seeing the same thing: Roy underground, watching people flying on a television in his coffin, or not even a coffin.

Then Vivian said, That’s about the lamest excuse for cheating I’ve ever heard.

Britney’s small eyes popped open like she’d been poked. After a second, she laughed. So did Vivian and Nick. Laughed in long, looping cycles, which seemed about to die out and then started up again, like the endings to “Layla” or “Hey Jude.” They were all getting older.

a cloudy day

doing puzzles

while the cat stretches

I don’t own a cat. I enjoy watching them in other people’s homes, but am very allergic to their dander. On the day I wrote this I was experiencing extreme brain fog, such that the morning puzzles I like to do over coffee made no sense to me; I could barely make out the letters and numbers, and my brain felt like porridge. But that difficulty, like my clogged sinuses, is absent from the poem. The only “cloudiness” is in the day—which was sunny.

“…write the song after the tracks are made.”[1]

To become a better stalker.

Hello ruby in the dust.[2]

Not to chart a Mississippi—neither by charm nor design will the river be known—but to tap the creeks and streams that nourish a vast watershed.


The Human Sunrise 

Old man and woman hugging each other at the corner of Eglinton Avenue and Oriole Parkway.
	Not some perfunctory hi or bye, but really clinging. Melded together. White hair. Pine-twist fingers. Only moving to get a tighter grip on each other’s back.
	Thirty seconds. Forty. A long light.
	Grief? My first thought. But when they finally pull apart a little, they’re smiling.
	Drive off feeling halfway drunk, so moved and blessed to have seen it.


Our Cures 

Falling asleep finally to soft, intermittent rain. Waking when it becomes harder and more regular.


Home

The old musician returning time and again to a handful of familiar chords, melodies, rhythms. His aural home. How gradually the listener finds a home there too. The deep hospitality of that.

[1] Paul Simon, interview about Graceland
[2] Neil Young, “Cowgirl in the Sand”

It captures how I often feel, stationed at the gates of Unwell, waiting for the Messiah of Right-mindedness to arrive. The work is certainly steady.

(Dunkleosteus was an undersea horror that flourished about 350 million years ago. Several metres long, it had bony armour plating that formed its head and jaws. Its blade-like jawbones worked as a self-sharpening guillotine, honing themselves as they snapped open and shut. They opened so swiftly that a small vacuum was created in front of them, sweeping prey inside. Fossil evidence indicates that its diet included others of its own kind.)

skating out beyond the point

out where the sturgeon leapt in summer



Fish continuing to live their lives under ice have always held a fascination for me. Helping a man empty his fishing nets one winter, I was astounded every time, after trudging across the blank white of the frozen lake and cutting, with an auger, two holes through the thick ice, to see the gill net come up brimming with pickerel, whitefish, carp, and, sometimes, large sturgeon. As a boy, I fished in the summer in shallow lakes that were only seven or eight feet deep in their centres, and I used to imagine, during the winter months, when the ice was four feet thick, the various kinds of fish, too sluggish to feed on one another, huddling in the small lens of water left to them. The sturgeon was also a marvel of summer. On the most airless July days, the stillness would sometimes be disturbed by a loud splash, and if you turned fast enough, you might catch the long body of the sturgeon smacking back into the surface amid rings of ripples. Fishing once, I turned at a sound and was shocked to see a skinny gray-white man standing on the water just behind the motor. It was a huge sturgeon, all six feet of it from tail to snout just an arm’s-length away, where it hung for a shining instant before crashing down sideways into the river, soaking me.  

your last breath
in ninety-three years

including nine months
you breathed for me



Powerful dream of Mom last night. Outdoor and indoor. First, helping her climb a small dirt-gravel slope. Watching her try unsteadily. Her clunky brown lace-up shoes. Moving to take her arm and help. A small rise, a metre or so. Like a railway embankment. The dirt dry. Then we were indoors, she needed to use the toilet, and I was asking someone behind a desk—like a lobby clerk—if we could use the washroom behind. Staff toilet maybe. Hesitation. Then grudging permission. Behind the desk with Mom, short corridors, small rises of stairs—more climbing—maze-like—funhouse, old wooden floorboards, like a dimly remembered house from early childhood. The door to the small toilet. Asking, a bit awkwardly, if she needed me to come in with her. Her smiling, no, thank you. She would struggle rather than cause embarrassment. The desk person had given me some puzzling round object that might be necessary to use. Though it turned out not to be. Uncertainty in the dream what exactly it was, hard even to picture now.
	Waking with the sense—positive—that, two years after her death, I am still processing all the years of her decline and my care of her. Helping her up the dirt rise. Into the small room at the end of the maze. But that she would make it on her own, at the end. And was grateful for the help.