Monday, November 3, 2008
The Shirtless Writing Life
This morning - over my first of three cups of thick, black, espresso coffee, beginning the Monday grind of the University Grad student in the lonely throes of his thesis - I found the globecampus section of the Globe and Mail, which focuses on the campus life of the average undergrad student. Interesting. But even more so for the fact that they had linked to two bloggers - Ian Wylie and Jennifer Gardy - both University students, but somehow proactive enough to land a blog column with the Globe. A sweet deal with great exposure. That was enough to light the proverbial fire under my proverbial butt.
Rather than waiting until you've sprouted grays in your nether-regions and dishing out your wisdom in toothless hindsight, I know there are sackfulls of young writers in exactly my predicament who want to use their youth and the unique experiences that come with discovering the 'real world' as fodder for their writing.
Just as the typical life of a University undergraduate carries enough interesting moments to fill a blog worthy of the Globe, so this writing life - which I'd like to consider a few fractional points above average - should hopefully garner some marginal audience that will at least give me the satisfaction of "being read."
For those of you who stumble upon this secret-campsite-of-a-blog -- a little about me.
I'm currently sitting with coffee breath, shirtless in my jogging pants in front of a monstrous computer screen, 60 pages from finishing my second novel The Tiger-Wolves Stop to Drink.
I've been funded by the Canadian government to write this book as my Master's thesis in Creative Writing at the University of Toronto. (second coffee is brewing...)
While trying to finish this book comes with its own set of frustrations (lack of inspiration,
motivation, that contagious self-doubt of the writer, etc.) I've planned to return to Burma in December to finish research and untangle my cranial wiring that inevitably starts to short-circuit from day after day of going to work directly beside where you sleep.
So another welcome to Backpacker Fiction!
My writing deals mostly with the backpacking scene of Southeast Asia (Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia etc). While living in Japan teaching English, I had a ton of opportunities to travel to this region and the area has served as my muse for two novels and close to a dozen short-stories ("Crawling with Thieves" can be found here at The Southernmost Review; "Les 3 Chevaliers" will be coming out in LWOT soon - fingers crossed, but I've posted it in the previous entry). With the exception of The Beach by Alex Garland, the S.E. Asian backpacking scene hasn't really been explored through fiction - let alone literary fiction. (That sound pretentious enough to need its own blog entry!).
My guess is both that the traveller's scene lends itself too well to traditional travel-writing, as well as is disregarded due to notions of drug-fueled beach parties or a lack of meaningful interaction with the local people.
In my undergraduate days, I fed my imagination through collections such as Bad Trips by Keath Fraser, The Gringo Trail by Mark Mann and The Fortune Hotel ed. by Sarah Champion. But finding one of these collections was like finding a needle in a chic-lit haystack. A lot of other travel-writing was too soft, too granny-ish, too focused on trying to paint exquisite pictures of sun-drenched landscapes instead of slamming the reader in the head with say, a child prostitute approaching you in Phnom Penh - the country they would like to see instead of the country in front of them. But these collections gave me a new perspective on how to write the experience of the backpacker and have the reader truly enter into those different worlds. (drinking second cup...)
So that's my round-about mandate.
Meanwhile, this is my attempt to begin a writing career in times that seem preoccupied with this financial crisis.
If you like, follow my journey through this blog, but like any good traveller, I can't promise it will lead you to specific enlightenment. But that's the magic: You will always find it on your own.
Check back semi-daily.
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