Monthly Archives: April 2023

Writing Process: Restructuring “Paint”

Posted on by

I was never one for the story arc. While well-structured rising action, climax and denouement are certainly to be admired, the essence of story has little to do with craft.

Part Three of The Buzz Trilogy follows the rapid dissolution of the eponymous character.

The problem with much of story-telling is a blind adherence to the clever raconteur. In other words, it isn’t what the story is about as much as how it is told. “Stories” on social media have brought that to the fore, demonstrating that immediate gratification isn’t that gratifying in the end.

It’s the characters and dialogue, the little glimpses of what’s what, a truth of sorts, that makes a story worth anything. So what if the start is all wrong, the sequence of memories of the dead father askew, there is no flow and Davis is a jerk?

Yeah, back to the drawing board.

Who I say I think I am

Posted on by

I try to think about who I am and what I know, but I don’t know what any of that means. It’s a thing off in the distance, someplace that I thought I might have been, even convinced myself of that, and have now lost.

I know what I want to be. No, that’s a lie too. Even if I said that I knew what I want, or that I thought that I knew that, I wouldn’t. The more I think that I know the who and what, the more I’m further from it because I think that. It’s a façade.

Confidence is the thing, believing in those lies is what makes you that you in you. The deeper you get, the further you are from the same. A gosh-darned paradox!

And so…something else. Drugs and whores! No confusion there. Or all confusion. Signs of it all gone awry. At least it’s not a façade. Or the façade of facades. Good copy anyway.

Mad Cow is No Longer a Thing

Posted on by

I lived in Paris for five months in 1987, the year Mad Cow Disease (Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease) ravaged the UK and Europe. I returned to Canada in the summer of the same year and was told that I would not be allowed to donate blood because I was deemed a risk.

I returned to the blood donor clinic every year or so to be told the same thing again and again. My school frequently had blood donor clinics which I joined, to no avail, decade after decade, until I received an email a few weeks ago: Following updated guidance from the Food and Drug Administration, New York Blood Center announced revised eligibility regarding Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (also known as Mad Cow disease, CJD or vCJD).

And so, yes, it took the United States government 35 years to allow me to give blood again. Is there really anybody in charge of anything?

Fuck Pedagogy: Cutting Out the Sordid Bits

Posted on by

In the midst of the second draft of my teaching autobiography, Fuck Pedagogy, I am having to kill scenes that don’t support the theme of engaging students or knowing subject content. And so I axed this sordid tale from my student teaching days:

I became so relaxed in my teaching practicum that I went out late one school night to see a band, Snowpony at The Starfish Room in Vancouver. Not only did I stay to the end but was brazen enough to wander backstage after the show, sit down with the band and explain how they had to try to the oysters in Portland, the next stop on their tour, drunken advice I am sure they could have done without.

Lead singer Katharine Gifford of Snowpony

I woke early the next morning and looked out the window to see that my van was not there. Given that I was responsible for driving three other student teachers out to Maple Ridge for our practicums, this was a problem. I called everyone to say that my van had been stolen and that we would have to rent a car. I lay back down and only a moment later remembered that it hadn’t been stolen. I had left it at my friend’s house. In other words, I had done the right thing and forgotten that I had.

My van did not end up in the drink.

I picked everyone up and raced out to Maple Ridge, getting there just in time for my 8:30 class and announced the Free Write prompt (“I remember…”) before going down the hall for a long drink of water from the fountain. As bad as I felt, I had the revelation, as I returned to the class, that I could teach hungover.

“The Whale” Needs More Eating

Posted on by

There’s been chatter – both negative and positive – around Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale. While Brendan Fraser’s performance as the whale-sized man, Charlie, has been praised, the fat-shaming inherent in the story has been reviled. Neither claim is worth much discussion. The real issue with this film is how painfully the stakes for Charlie are established – heart pain while he watches porn – and maintained – more heart pain without the porn – until the climax where he pigs out like a crazy man.

Chowing doubly down

The film would actually have been improved with more of the gross eating scenes. It would at least have been a relief from the clunky story of Charlie reconnecting with his angry teenaged daughter. The only thing worth noting about this film’s narrative is an essay the daughter wrote about Moby Dick proclaiming that the excessive descriptions of the whale are only there to distract the reader from the author’s sad life. And so, yes, gross-eating = whale. And that’s about it.

Old School Reports Tell an Interesting Tale

Posted on by

As I write Fuck Pedagogy, I’ve had to go through my reports from middle and high school, which has had an odd effect on remembering who I was in their eyes.

In Grade 4, I was placed in “the superior range of ability.” In Grade 5, words such as “very good”, “first class” & “hard-working” were prevalent.

In Grades 6 & 7, words such as “disappointing”, “weak” & “carelessness” became the thing. I was sent to a boarding school for Grades 8 & 9, where the language improved again: “very good”, “excellent” & “extremely capable.”

That said, I hated boarding school and returned to Upper Canada, the initial place of my malaise and, while I didn’t start off terribly – “tried hard”, “applied himself” & “prepared & organized” – I quickly spiraled in my last three years to “allowing himself to drift”, “displayed no interest” & “a year of bumps”.

My overall final grade was barely 60% due to the fact that I was forced to take a class – Physics – which wasn’t required for graduation. I rarely attended the classes – opting to skate on the school rink instead – and ended up with a final of 26%.

There was a lot of talk about my attitude for this, but more than anything, it just made me realize how stupid adults really were..