Extras: The People in Your Neighbourhood

More stuff, because I like you people

Every time I hit a new milestone, I write an Extras column as a thank you to all of you for subscribing and reading.

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The strange dichotomy of writers is that many of us are introverts and yet we need a writing community. But what does a writing community look like?

In my head, I picture some modern version of Paris in the 1920s, with a bunch of writers meeting at the bar after having scribbled in their unheated garrets all day, to talk and drink and chat and drink and laugh and drink and basically be like some version of Friends if Central Perk served booze.

But the reality of my life is that even if such a place existed—which it does not—would I actually go there?

There’s the practical issue of childcare, taking the kids to dance class, swim class, playdates, recitals, birthday parties; making Hallowe’en costumes because how did I become this person? and the class treats I promised to bake in a spate of mom-guilt because evidently you can never do enough.

There’s the fact that as much as I may joke about alcohol, I drink very little, that I sleep a lot better if I don’t drink, that my days go a lot better if I’ve had a good night’s sleep and that sleep is hard to come by at the best of times.

There’s the fact that I’m cheap, that paying for an overpriced drink so that I can stand around not talking to people and then go home to sleep badly seems like a shit deal, plus I have a hard time hearing people in noisy places like bars which makes anything resembling conversation difficult, and then there is the Covid of it all.

There’s the fact that I sometimes struggle to leave my house, a tendency that has worsened since the pandemic began, please no one tell my therapist lest she lecture me on my pattern of isolating myself, my house is comfy, okay?

There’s the fact I’m frequently awkward around people. Not always—once in a while the stars align and I’m charming as fuck—but not long ago, I ventured out among a literary crowd, and I was largely tongue-tied, and thus took a nascent online friendship with real life potential, and killed it dead, going from “Hey, Sonal seems cool!” to “um, I guess people are different in real life.”

The reality is that if such a place existed—which is does not—I’d spent much of my time thinking about going and then not going, and then on the off-chance I did go, I’d spend the night sitting in a corner awkwardly nursing a drink and wondering why I came to watch other people enjoy a writing community.

Years ago, when I was in the process of rebuilding my life and also discovering writing, I would try to tell as many people as possible that I wrote so that I could find other people who wrote. This of course was very awkward, because then people would ask me about what I’d published and then I’d say “nothing yet” and I’m pretty sure many of those people dismissed me as a pretentious asshole of some kind. But how else could I find writer friends?

Still, all this awkwardness netted me one friend who wrote, who then married someone else who wrote (two friends!) and then they had babies, moved out to the suburbs, had even less time to write and we lost touch. (Zero friends.)

Not that I was writing much, since as much as talking about writing with another writer helped energize me to want to write more, and helped me feel like I legitimately deserved to do this, this wasn’t quite enough to push through the resistance and fear and then-undiagnosed ADHD to actually make writing happen in any kind of consistent way.

At the time, I was looking for a critique group, and given that I had no one else, I wasn’t picky about who I traded stories with. I wanted deadlines. I wanted to get better. I was still in that stage of writing where I thought any feedback was good feedback. I was new at this, surely I sucked terribly, and any kind of response could only help. But I found no one.

I did better taking writing classes, since the deadlines made stories happen and I got feedback within the class itself. But I knew I couldn’t take classes forever. I did my best to be personable and reach out to people, but no writing group magically formed from it. This is possibly due to the Toronto-area problem of never wanting to make friends with random people lest the person you are talking to is selling something, is slightly off-putting but clingy and will be impossible to passive aggressively remove from your life later on, or worse, is only being polite and didn’t actually want to get coffee sometime and is now super-embarrassed for you.

Eventually, though, I connected with someone in another class and voila, I got myself into a writing group. Deadlines and feedback, here I come!

Except my brain knew quite well that these were optional deadlines, and so my writing was a lot more miss than hit. Also writing groups are tricky. We’d have streaks when everyone could meet regularly, and then streaks when no one could. People would drop out, and we’d all scramble around trying to find other writers we knew (in my case, no one) to bring in, but new people meant new scheduling challenges. Still… for a while, this is what sustained me. It had to, because I had nothing else.

This group led me to classes with Sarah Selecky, who at the time was teaching out of her dining room in Parkdale. Again, I did my best to be personable, although after working all day in a stressful job with my stressful parents and then driving from the north-east end of the inner suburbs to the south-west side of downtown through stressful rush hour traffic, “being personable” looked a lot more like “using words to speak.”

But it felt very much like I was joining a class of people who were in a different plane of existence. I’d offer to drive people home, but it seemed like most people lived nearby, and I wasn’t anywhere close. I remember one person raving over Sarah’s recent short story in The Walrus, which is a fairly significant Canadian magazine I had never heard of. They talked about apparently well-known authors I didn’t know anything about, even though I thought I was well-read. I read a book that was widely deemed ‘hilarious’ but failed to find anything funny in it.

All of them were white, but this wasn’t something I paid much attention to, since non-white people in writing classes—even somewhere as diverse as Toronto—were still somewhat rare, and my expectation was always that I would be the only one. I hadn’t yet learned about structural racism, nor how it played out without any particular person’s direct intent.

Instead, I quietly listened in and gathered little bits of info—writers to know about, magazines to be aware of, opinions that were generally accepted—so that I would not look like an idiot in some future writing community that I might one day be a part of.

I didn’t share much of my writing with people in my life, although I did try. I started with my now ex-husband, showing him the very first short story I’d completed in years. His reaction: “It’s short.”

Later, when I was single, I shared a story with someone I was seriously dating, who then took it as an encoded message about him and got pissed off. It had nothing to do with him. The fact that he made this story about him should have been a sign.

Sharing work with romantic partners no longer seemed like a good plan.

My friends showed little interest in reading my work, perhaps because I showed little interest in sharing it, lest they think it was terrible. One did ask about seeing some of my writing after I applied to the MFA program, which I interpreted as her finally realizing that I was serious about writing and might even be good, although to be fair, it may be more that I talked so little about writing to non-writers that she didn’t know I was still doing it.

I sent her nothing, although she asked twice, since she’s a person of strong opinions and little ability to hide her feelings. I am already steeling myself for the day she’s able to buy my book.

I did eventually share work with a different friend, who had impeccable taste in books—she’s always my go-to for recommendations—but more importantly, she had the ability to explain why she liked something in a way that was specific and genuine and sincere. That is, I had no suspicion that she was only saying something nice because we were friends. And she loved reading my work.

Every writer needs a friend like this.

My father once read a story I’d published. “I read your article,” he said. “Oh?” I replied. That was the end of the conversation.

My now-husband is a scientist, and oddly enough, there is a lot of similarity in the scientific process and the creative process, such as spending a lot of time working on something while having very little idea if it will work.

I don’t share my work with him until it’s ready for publication, although I did ask him to fact-check a story about a mathematician. Still, it’s helpful that I can talk generally about process with him, especially since we share a home office, but it’s not the same as talking to a writer.

I’ve never shared any writing with my mother, but this hasn’t stopped her from giving me writing advice anyway.

I failed to get into the MFA program the first time I applied.

This hit hard, since I’d told everyone I was applying, sort of my own public coming out as a Real Writer, except I was rejected, which meant I had to tell everyone I was not good enough to be a Real Writer.

The very kind rejection email suggested applying again, since rejection was part and parcel of a writer’s life. My writing group commiserated and suggested the same. I knew this to be good advice, but I was unable to take it. I had no energy for it.

If me-now were talking to me-then, I’d tell me that this rejection stung so much because I was using acceptance to the program as validation for being a writer, and this is why the rejection hit so hard, and why I had no energy to try again, but also I didn’t need permission to be a writer.

But I had no one to tell me that.

I took another class with Sarah Selecky. It forced me to start writing. Since it was a practice class with lots of prompts, I was generating new stuff. About midway through, we were to read a draft of a completed story made from one of these prompts out loud. I had a migraine that day, but I had actually finished a piece about my terrible now-ex-boyfriend—for a change, this was actually about him—and sent it to Sarah to read out to the class. She told me that she’d laughed and enjoyed it.

This was enough to make me think that maybe I was good enough to be a Real Writer. Maybe I could apply to the MFA again.

I re-read the rejection email and realized that the non-fiction part of my portfolio was weak compared to the fiction part, and most likely, that had been why I was rejected. This rejection was not about whether I was good enough overall. It was that some of the writing was not yet ready.

On the last day of class, which was in fact that last class Sarah ever hosted at her house in Parkdale, we were asked to bring in a completed story inspired by something we’d done in class, and read some of it out loud. Therefore most of the class skipped that day, leaving me and two other people. Ah. Other writers had trouble writing too, even with a deadline. Who knew?

I read some of mine out loud, and got a lot of positive feedback. I re-applied to the MFA with this story and the ex-boyfriend story, among others.

I decided to ignore that fact that everyone else in those classes seemed to have some sort of inside connection with Sarah, or at least, had known and read her writing in fancypants magazines I’d never heard of, and emailed her to ask for a reference. I was genuinely surprised that she remembered who I was despite having just taken a class from her, and that she was enthusiastic about giving me a reference, and also gave me some advice about who else to ask.

Could it be as easy as asking? It had never been that easy before.

I had nothing on my writing CV upon entering the MFA program. I had published nothing. I sent out pieces from my portfolio, in the hopes that I’d have something accepted by the time the program started. I needed proof that I belonged to the Real Writer club. What if this year, only exceptionally bad writers applied and I was only kind of okay amid the truly terrible?

I send a story to The Toronto Star short story contest. I didn’t win. I didn’t expect to win, because the nice thing about having zero success is that you have zero expectations.

One of the judges was Jessica Westhead, who emailed me to say that the winners were picked by consensus, which is why I hadn’t won anything, but in fact, my story was her favourite, she loved it, and it had made her cry.

I entered the MFA program and met my new and sometimes very accomplished colleagues having published nothing, but I had made Jessica Westhead cry, and in some ways, that was better. Publishing in literary magazine was still something I desperately wanted, but as cool as that could be, someone read my story, connected with it, and had feelings about the imaginary people in my head. I’d successfully performed the magic trick.

It’s been more than a dozen years since that contest and that email, and Jessica and I are now friends, and I only just learned that she actually advocated with the other judges and the contest people to be able to get in touch with me and tell me that she loved my story.

Like, this was not a standard thing for this contest, which in retrospect is something I should have realized long before now, since even those rare contests that offer feedback to the shortlist, don’t offer feedback like Your story was my favourite, I loved it, I cried.

She went out of her way for me.

The MFA massively expanded my writing community, and even if there had been nothing else, the program was worthwhile to me for that alone. With that community came knowledge, references, referrals, professional advice and also a place to grouse. I listened as people talked about magazines, writers, websites, contests, conferences, retreats, residencies, grants… things that I had no idea about before. But most of all, with that community came legitimacy. I belonged. We had all of the same struggles with writing, all the same fears and hopes and worries and joys. These were my people.

By the time I graduated, what I needed from my writing community had changed. I didn’t need to be reminded I was a writer, because that was something I now knew on a bone-deep level. I wasn’t as hungry for feedback from anyone willing to give it. I was more selective now.

What I began to crave was more like the kind of conversation one might have had around a water cooler back at a time when people went to offices that had a communal water coolers to gather around. “How’s that TPS report coming, Bob?” “Oh, you know how it is.” “Sure do.”

Or at least, the literary gossip, the kind of very low stakes drama that occasionally spills over into social media. Did you hear about the bad art friend kidney donation story? Let me tell you what a friend of a friend said.

It can be lonely to be a writer, and not simply because we usually work alone.

You spend so much time in the unknowns, with nothing to guide you but your own instincts and belief in what you are doing, pouring your heart and soul into something for years of writing it, revising it, trying to find an agent, trying to find a publisher, editing, promoting and then you start all over again from the beginning with the blank page and your own mind and all the unknowns, like you’ve never done this before.

There’s no year end performance evaluation, no presentations where someone might say “Great job! You’re on the right track”, no metrics by which to judge whether or not you should keep going. A publication contract, a review, an award—these are few and far between. More importantly, they are not so much an evaluation of our writing as they are luck and connections and persistence, even though it can feel like an evaluation on whether or not you have any business being a writer, no matter how much you know in your heart that this is the thing you are supposed to be doing.

There are no promotions, and success isn’t guaranteed, and there is no steady upward career trajectory, because there is no trajectory. Outside of this weird writing world, nobody knows that.

In the middle of every project, you will become disheartened, and think about quitting, and still, you eventually figure out a way to keep going, based on nothing but your own internal sense of wanting to do it.

You already know that rejection means very little about whether or not you are any good as a writer, and yet, repeated rejection has a way of wearing on you. If you have nothing but your own instincts to trust in, it’s so easy to beat up on yourself for not having more commercially successful instincts. What if your instincts are nothing but lies you tell yourself because you don’t want to face the truth, that this is not going to happen?

You are a matchmaker, trying to find someone to fall in love with your book, commit to it, and give it a home. But the process is opaque and slow, unbelievably slow in this era when you can instantly find an answer to any question, and yet “Will you publish this book?” takes six months or more to answer, and comes some polite words but no real explanation.

In the meantime, you get to endure well-meaning questions like “When can I buy you book?” as if the writing of it was the only time-consuming part.

Even if you find a match, you will most likely be entirely unknown and unread outside a small circle of mostly writers, and you will still have to keep your day job.

But you keep doing this, you keep wanting this, and who else understands, who else can buoy you up, who else can buy you a sympathetic drink, who else will promote your work, who else knows the ups and downs of the process, who else can help you find another way to make it work, but other writers?

The best thing that came from my MFA was my friend Kim McCullough, who is my go-to person for everything from literary gossip to amazing essays to craft thoughts to general reassurance, and most importantly, swearing profusely at the poor taste of literary magazines and publishers and agents who have the gall to reject our work.

Not all of my MFA classmates understood that it’s not a competition. Not all writers understand that it’s not a competition, or that success and favour can come and go, or that publishing a well-known book (or even a little-known book, or no book at all) does not give you the right to be a terrible human being. As I write this paragraph, my mind immediately recalls dozens of small stories about writers who are awful people, some very successful and some not so much, although I shan’t say who. Perhaps I will find my next nemesis among them.

I’m on my second writing nemesis, the first being someone I outdid so long ago that they are no longer worthy.

The current nemesis is actually a sort-of friend, who’s writing is very good yet still irritates me, and so I secretly focus all my writerly envy upon them, so that I can free up all my kindheartedness and generosity for others.

Because there are days when things are harder, and when it feels like other people have it easier—and perhaps they do—and to exist within a community means that we have to figure out something to do with the less-than-communal feelings. Not every writer is good at this, unfortunately. But this is also part of my conversation with Kim, as I know everything goes straight into the vault.

Still, over time the sense of friendship with my nemesis, that idea that we’re all in this together, and most annoyingly their genuine goodwill towards my writing has been snuffing out the flickers of irritation. I’m thinking of switching nemeses to someone much more deserving of my secret ire.

It’s easy to treat writing with a scarcity mindset because the money is scarce, success is scarce, the opportunities are scarce. But when you treat these as a resource to be hoarded and kept away from others, who shores you up when that belief in yourself wavers? Who opens the doors so you can wedge a foot in? Who can you trust for advice?

The truth is that while it’s genuinely much harder—and maybe even impossible—for most of us to live off writing income, an abundance of books are published every year. Scarcity is a myth created by looking at the money part of it, and supported by looking at the time part.

The juries for the grant committees who can give you money to write a book are other writers, as are the juries for residencies and awards. And other writers know literary agents and publishers and editors and reviewers and bookstore owners and book publicity people and this entire ecosystem that exists to support writers, is in turn supported by writers. And some writers become publishers and some publishers become writers and in short, we are all in this together.

But as much as this has been helpful and as much as I have leaned into networking to help get my book out into the world, this feels like a mercenary approach to community. I can’t not mention it, because this is a real and vital part of writing community, but to me this has the gritty unpleasantness of finding sand in whipped cream. You can’t just be nice to people in your community because you want them to help you. I mean, there are people who do, but it’s shitty.

For me, it’s that I can connect with people who understand what I do, and why, and what it takes to keep doing this, and who will not ask me stupid questions like “Are you still working on the same book?” or “What do you mean you don’t know what your book is about?”

As much as F Scott and Hemingway and all those other dudes established the myth of the lone writer in the garret, those guys all helped each other. (If only they’d been as generous with Zelda.) We all do better when we help each other, or at minimum, not stand in each other’s way.

Established writers know this. They’ve lived it. They’re still living it. It’s why Jessica and Sarah and Kim have been so encouraging and helpful when I was a wee baby writer, and have continued to be supportive in so many ways ever since.

As I have slowly made more connections within the writing community, I have found that people will go out of their way for others in this industry all the time. There is so much advice and wisdom and support, available for the low, low fee of not being an asshole.

It was genuinely different for Hemingway and F. Scott and all those jazz age writers hanging out at the bar after they crawled out of their unheated garrets.

Not so much the writing part of it, but publishing is slower and harder now, and you can’t eke out a living selling short stories to magazines. That’s why those guys didn’t spend their days in an office, writing TPS reports and looking for sympathy by the water cooler, writing in stolen moments.

There is no bar where all the writers gather night after night, where you can drop in and hang out and find yourself swept along into the writing community. This is in some ways fortunate, because there is also no childcare.

Being a new writer is hard, because you know nothing and no one. Who on earth will tell you that all of this doubt and confusion and not being quite sure what you’re doing is normal? You are doing it right. You deserve to keep doing this.

But there’s nothing for it but to reach out, and keep reaching out, and to find those people who can be the people in your neighbourhood, even if they are not the people that you meet but the people that you text message when you’re walking down the street.

And that may mean leaving the house, or joining that class, or sending your work to that contest, or participating in that reading series, or going to that book launch, or that writing festival, or anywhere else there are writers, even if you feel like you don’t belong because everyone seems to know about all these fancypants magazines and such that you’ve never heard of. It means asking instead of assuming you’ve been forgotten, and going out of your way for a writer you love, and saying thank you, and enduring the awkwardness of telling people “Yes, I am a writer.”

It means remembering that the goal is not publishing, the goal is a writing life, and publishing is a part of that, but so is community, and there is an abundance of community out there.

At minimum, it means not being an asshole.

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Readers, if you made it this far, thank you. Let me know what struck a chord with you, and what that chord was.