Thaisa Frank

I haven't really been able to focus properly on writing since Luke was born. And since Luke just turned three... well, it's time to get back to it. I tend to make too big a production out of the exercise. I make it much harder than it has to be. Seven or eight years ago when we were living in San Francisco, I took some workshops with an amazing writer and teacher called Thaisa Frank. There are a lot of things I miss about San Francisco but Thaisa's classes are at the top of the list. This evening, once Luke's asleep, I'm going to open up her book Finding Your Writer's Voice -- it's my favourite book about writing, hands down, and I've read a lot of them -- and get inspired.  Here's a bit of what she had to say recently in a blog post entitled On Writing to  Strangers:

The reader, however, is a special kind of stranger--a fellow traveler who is giving you the gift of time. This stranger wants to escape and be entertained but also wants to accompany an astute observer who will be honest about some aspect of life--often more honest than people around them. Even when we consider Kafka (the creator of the first known fairy tales of modern life) whose characters spoke endlessly (and fruitlessly) to intimidating strangers, his own voice was the voice of a vulnerable stranger reaching out to readers.

It's not an accident that there are so many stories about travelers who have heard--or who tell--amazing things to people they just met and will never see again. Most of us have had these experiences in colloquial settings--usually slightly urgent and surreal situations where there's a sudden common bond and a high guarantee of future anonymity. It's happened to me when a subway stalls, or people are milling the streets during a blackout. We usually talk about the immediate situation, then about mundane parts of our lives. The longer the situation lasts, the more likely we are to tell an intimate story.

These anonymous situations create strange confessional booths. They exist with a sense of dislocation and are populated by strangers who are trustworthy precisely because we won't ever see them again.

However, the writer faces a challenge that strangers in a blackout or a stalled subway don't face: the situation doesn't begin with a common bond. The fact that the reader has bought the book or read the first sentence is a fragile connection. And the story is the only interface--a little like a floating screen that can intrigue, compel or baffle the reader.

To create a common bond, the writer must write to the reader as one would write a letter, and not for the reader, as one would write a paper in school. The writer must also be able to step back, and, at times, write from a distance, yet with the intention of wanting connection.

This is a special sort of connection. From the beginning of time, writers have forged a singular language of intimacy, much of which is nurtured by the fact that writing involves the meeting of two strangers.

As a corollary, then, I want to make another radical proposition: Writing to a stranger creates a special form of intimacy.

The writer is forced to create this intimacy precisely because the writer knows language is the only vehicle for connection and this language will reach a stranger in an unknown time and space. This means writers must be determined to connect and imbue their words with a power and a vector that will come alive in the imagination of a stranger. (One might say that prose and poetry exist in a renegade time and space, away from immediate public exposure.) The privacy of this meeting between the writer and the reader means the writer is free to show parts of lives that people rarely reveal, like loneliness, family secrets, leave takings, astounding reunions. In this sense alone, fictional and poetic forms are singular vehicles for revealing strict confidences.

Read the whole thing here. And you can read a few of Thaisa's own stories here on her personal site, which looks new.

Comments

[Sara O'Leary]

I was just looking at the details for a writers workshop in your area (vaguely) ... my pal Maddie is going to be teaching & she's great. I'd be happy to go and do the playwriting with Daniel MacIvor - love his work.

The 2008 Great Blue Heron Writing Workshop (July 1-5) at St. Francis Xavier University invites mid-level writers to engage in small-group sessions in one of four categories: fiction, playwriting, poetry, or magazine writing and creative non-fiction. This workshop offers a supportive atmosphere in which participants learn from established writers.

Daniel MacIvor - Playwriting

Bob Bancroft - Magazine Writing & Creative Non-Fiction

Anne Compton - Poetry

Michael Crummey - Fiction

Madeleine Thien - Fiction

[kate]

I'm going to check out her work. Thank you!

[Steph]

She's terrific, Kate. I'm glad you're going to check her out.

And Sara, that sounds so tempting, especially since you'll be there. I haven't read Madeleine Thien's work yet but I know she's been very successful. But my mom's (who lives in BC) is coming to visit us then! Have you ever been to the one at UNB?