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Trust
Madeleine Thien
Quebec City, Quebec
It is more than ten years since I took
my first course in the Creative Writing Department at the
University of British Columbia. That was September, 1994,
and I was enrolled in a non-fiction class taught by Andreas
Schroeder. I remember that, during the first class, we
workshopped an essay by Marilyn Dumont, the poet and activist.
Her writing was so fine, as pure and clean as air. I was
twenty years old, an English literature major, and I was
overwhelmed by the quality of the work, and by the confidence
of the writers around me; I had to sit on my hands to prevent
them from shaking. The windows looked east and, as we sat
together, the room darkened until we were sitting in twilight.
When the class was over, I walked out, stunned. I felt
that click that I’d always imagined, when your life turns
over, then sets itself in place.
The department sits on the top floor of Buchanan Block
E, and consists of a long hallway that branches off into
classrooms and offices. When workshops are underway, all
you can hear is the ebb and flow of conversation, the occasional
burst of laughter. In my memory, people loiter in the hallway
for hours at a time, taking part in a conversation that
continues as students come and go.
In 1995, when I was officially accepted into the undergraduate
program, I submitted a story I had written over the summer.
In the story, “Simple Recipes,” a young woman
recalls how her brother is savagely beaten by their father.
The discussion in the workshop was heated. On one side,
were those who wanted to defend the piece in its entirety:
the writing, the style, the intention. On the other, were
those who pleaded for greater meaning. “As I read
your story," one
woman said, “I kept asking myself why. Why are you
doing this? Why are you putting me through this? What are
you trying to say?”
Afterwards, I went to the bathroom and locked myself in
a stall. It shocked me that words I had written could live
so vividly, that they could reach across the divide and
take root in another person. I had always written instinctually,
and stories were a kind of coming up for air. “Simple
Recipes,” at that time, was raw. It was an outpouring
of emotion that had yet to find its shape; that was, in
many ways, meaningless. Each year, for the next five years,
I rewrote the story from memory. The question of “Why?” stayed with me. I felt as if I were watching the same landscape
over many seasons, learning to see the finer details, and
also the core that remained, year after year, draft
after draft.
This is what it was like, then: twelve people seated around
a table, turning the pages of a story. The worst was when
people had nothing to say, when they stared down at the
pages or scuffed their feet restlessly. The best when the
discussion became so fraught that they talked about your
characters as if they were alive—sparring with them,
bumping up against the solidity of their form.
My teachers, George McWhirter and Keith Maillard, and my
classmates never told me how to fix something or get it
right. Instead they told me, plainly, what I was doing,
what existed on the page. They told me things so precise,
things about my stories and poems, that I felt as if I
wandered those hallways with my heart in my hands, exposed
and pumping.
I live in Quebec City now, faraway from the writing community
I had grown to depend on in Vancouver.
After years of working clerical and odd jobs, writing is
now my primary occupation. Back in 2003, I sent a draft
of a novel to my editor. It was as if, throughout the novel,
she tapped open tiny doors, entry ways that I could choose
to enter or pass by. Open one door, and the structure,
the momentum, the weight of the book would shift ever so
slightly, and the novel, like a dwelling, would change.
I thought of the novel in the way that mathematicians describe
the Koch curve, a figure that contains “infinite
length in a finite space.” So, out of every doorway, another
doorway; the walls of the house are set, but the richness
within is limitless.
Now, the final manuscript is almost within reach. I spend
long days at the computer, working on a line or paragraph.
I’m waiting for that moment of pure articulation, a sentence
or word that feels precise, ordained. In Vancouver, I used
to sail in the waters off Jericho Beach. This part of writing
reminds me of sailing, the feeling of releasing the sheet
of a catamaran, how the mast unfurls in the shape and weight
that the structure demands.
Ten years ago, my teachers in the Creative Writing Department
approached my work, meeting me partway along the hallway,
knowing that what I brought to them was unfinished, words
still trying to find their form. I had come from a home
in which we had lived from hand to mouth for so long; fiction
was a luxury in my family, a foreign thing. In hindsight,
I’m astonished by the fullness of my luck. Stepping into
the world of writing, I was met by teachers who embodied
a great generosity of spirit. They never presumed to know
the answers because they understood that writing is a journey
of its own. Each sentence is a way of clearing the path,
and each book sets one in a new direction. They taught
me to open my eyes and look around, to perceive the landscape
in which I stood, and finally, to trust myself.
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