“Did all this really happen over a single month?” I ask Stephanie. “Or am I just more aware these days?”
We’re packing her car up after my week-long Tin House writers workshop in Portland. I look and feel played out.
“Nope,“ she says. “That was a shitload of change.”
Almost all of the 200 writers have left, flying back to busy places like New York, London, and Los Angeles. The books and banners are packed up, the speaking stages disassembled, the dining hall emptied. This whole college campus is a literary ghost town.
I feel like the last kid to be picked up from summer camp. Lingering and liminal. Hoping to feel one more feel, long after the magic has gone.
A Month of Multitudes (in order of occurrence)
At the same time two teenagers in my life took high school degrees, I graduated from my therapeutic treatment centre after a whopping nine months. The next day I took a midlife guys’ road trip to Kelowna with my pal, author Steve Pratt. There, I finally reunited with my daughters, an emotional advent only time and sobriety could allow. I moved back home, disoriented and grateful. Writing residencies were offered, and essays were readied for publishing. A big interview then another. Stephanie’s first Calgary Stampede. A visit with my heartbroken parents. Then, in Edmonton, the crushing yet joyous celebration of life for my big brother, who left us too soon. And just 20 hours later, I arrived in Oregon for a week of intense author workshopping. And for more emotional flux, I was in the memoir cohort, meaning I worked with heartrending personal stories every single day.
I’m spent just typing that.
Was there any time to even celebrate or grieve? Process, retain, or feel? Maybe its all still waiting for me. When I least expect it. And can no longer avoid it.
How to describe what it’s like to hug your daughters after more than a year. Or to lose a brother in the same wisp of time. I don’t think I have the words. Or the desire, the need. I hold both momentous crossings in a place safe from evanescence.
But I’d like to share a couple of the many thousand imprints from Greg’s celebration of life. It was a masterclass in how to be joyous, to honour, and to come away inspired from such a devastating life event.
From a University of Alberta theatre stage — decked out like his family’s home patio haven (complete with his pizza oven) — I learned more about my big brother that afternoon than I have in decades.
It’s a testament to Greg’s international reach as a researcher and educator and his capacity as a father and friend. My nephew shared one specific family in-joke, in which every ladybug they’ve ever encountered over the years was named “Speedy.” At this, my mother pulled an old ladybug key out of her purse and showed me, amazed. And it really did feel like the audience lit up with their own personal insect connection. Since his service, we see ladybugs — Speedys — everywhere, and in everything.
Greg lived his life with genuine vigour and curiosity. This could be inspiring, intimidating, tiring, and contagious. In what would be his last month, when I was dithering about whether to cancel my writing residencies in order to stay close, he texted me: “Are you kidding?! Go suck the marrow out of this Portland opportunity and write, write, write!”
So that sent me south, to hopefully do him proud.
Tin House Summer Workshop
My manuscript — about the rip current of liquor and finding peace inside a stigma — landed me in the 10% of applicants chosen for the prestigious event. Upon hearing the news, I was stunned stupid. Then I felt validated, proud. Then, susceptible to bouts of celebratory diarrhea. Such are the stages of good news.
I wrote most of the manuscript from the trenches: inside my room, inside recovery, inside a treatment centre. Maybe it was that isolation or perhaps my proximity to the truth that resonated with the publishing house. I didn’t have to conjure up faraway memoir memories — I just had to wake up and live it.
Tin House was a week of intensive programming in the intense heat, with zero breathing room between workshops, lectures, agent meetings, readings, and filling my face-hole in the dining hall. It took place at SE Portland’s Reed College, an almost cartoonish conception of what an archetypal American campus looks like to a Western Canadian: ancient, with noble buildings of brick, majestic trees, and students buzzing about, electric with potential.
My heart rate drops dangerously low every time my teacher-wife tells me about her day at school. So I’ll take my own cue and spare others my academic enthusiasm, only to say that I ate up every last nerdy tidbit about meta narrative, in-scenes, reflective arcs, literary devices, and how the old tenet “show don’t tell” can be turned on its head.
In a small cohort of writers from places like Pittsburgh, New York, Seoul, and Winnipeg, we dove into each other’s work, supported one another, and watched as our mentor, Jeannie Vanasco, found the missing pieces to our jigsawed stories.
On only day two, much like summer camp, I was sad it would soon be over. Too many things in my life were simultaneously ending and beginning. I wanted to stay forever.
A Note About My Dorm Room
I suppose I expected a dolled-up writer’s residence, lit by a fireplace, complete with a library, leather chair, and choice of quills and inks. I had just left a treatment centre — nine months of sleeping on a bargain mattress in a spartan room — to open the door of my Portland dorm and find the same bargain mattress in the same spartan room.
I chose to embrace the familiarity over the irony.
The first night, with the summer heat smothering my dorm room, I gave up trying to keep my thin sheet fitted to the mattress, and just raw dogged it. My entire body wet with sweat, I spun around that vinyl mattress in my sleep like I was on some sort of nocturnal slip-and-slide.
I’ve always preferred coed groups. Especially coed treatment centres, where the energy is much more balanced and feminine than the testosterone-heavy bromosphere of a men’s facility.
Which is why, after months living with only men, choosing a Tin House dorm house was a no-brainer. On the form I was sent, out of all-male, all-female, and gender-neutral, I naturally chose the last. Desperate for variety, I somehow thought gender-neutral meant coed.
My floor was a blast. All-night poetry readings in the hallways, fantastic music, and creative writers in rainbow skirts. It probably confused people, after yapping about my wife and kids, I’d say goodnight, then walk straight into the queer house with my LGBTQ housemates. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Permission to Write
I was told by prominent podcaster Tony Chapman in a recent interview that I have a serious case of imposter syndrome. But doesn’t everyone?
The Tin House Workshop is stacked with best-selling authors, big league educators, and peers who are published. So my default setting was a gee-shucks Canadian just happy to be part of something remarkable.
It took only a few hours to cut that shit out and accept that I was invited for a reason.
My mentor relayed things about my writing that set me free and greenlighted me to create. My readings resonated. Writers connected with my literary voice. And I gave myself permission to be a writer.
The short focus lens I had on my provincial writing community now seemed minor. It was as if my Canadian snow globe cracked open and I was liberated to witness how my words, and the words of my peers, contributed to something larger; that even if our work is never read, storytelling is a noble way to spend one’s time, to rise above the detritus of global events and add to the enduring human experience.
Of course anyone would roll their eyes at a group of writers sharing their vulnerable memoir manuscripts under a tree on campus. Stories of trauma, battles with cancer, dysfunctional upbringings. Summer days well spent.
Yet there was a creative joy and collective awe around our storytelling. For me, just beginning to process my brother’s passing and regaining my daughters’ trust, the chance to listen and laugh through heavy stuff with these people was sometimes more vital than the writing lessons themselves.
On the second day of our workshops, nine of us sat around a picnic table near the library building, excitedly discussing something like scene structure. It was the same day my daughter sent me a special song. And a Portland-based ladybug, undoubtedly named Speedy decided to share my coffee mug.
And I thought…isn’t life just so goddam pretty sometimes.
Bravo!
Wow, what a month! I'm just so happy for you and for your family. My son and daughter-in-law attended Reed, so I'm familiar with its special vibe, which I'm sure was magnified by a collective of writers from around the world. Gathering with people who come with the common desire to grow and support others is so impactful. Thank you for sharing your journey!