Tuesday, 25 August 2009

Earlier this month I worked with my editor to prepare “Perfect Red: The Life of Paraskeva Clark” for publication. Many people do not realize the importance of an editor in writing a book, but I worked as a book editor for many years and learned to appreciate the benefit of a good editor to a writer.

When you are immersed in researching and writing, especially in a project that stretches over a number of years as does writing a biography, you are so intertwined with what you are doing that most of the time it seems impossible to look at what you have written from any other perspective than your own. To have another person, an experienced editor, read your writing and comment on it is an extremely helpful process. An example of this is what happened to me on the last chapter of my book. I was discontent with the way I had written that chapter, but I was stuck and could not think of a different approach for the conclusion. (One thing I learned again is that the most difficult parts of a book are the beginning and the ending.) I asked my editor, Ruth Bradley-St.-Cyr, for some suggestions, and her questions and ideas helped me look at the chapter in a different way.

We did the editing for Perfect Red totally on line. Ruth would send me her work by email, and by using the tracking and comment features in Microsoft Word I could see exactly what she had changed or added, and then I could respond to that and send it back to her. This was my first experience with electronic editing, and to my surprise it worked really well (I’m a paper lover and my Joyce Wieland biography published in 2001 was paper all the way).

I enjoy the editing process because it is a creative, collaborative effort. The editor might suggest something, and simply this other point of view releases my thought process so that I can think about I wrote in a new way. What I then write is not necessarily what the editor suggested - it might follow on the editor’s idea, but it might be something totally different, but I could not have written something new without her input.

So today I honour all good editors who make good books better!

In January 1983, I sat on a backless bench at the Art Gallery of Ontario watching the film, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Lady. The feisty old woman in the documentary fascinated me. I jotted down some notes and stuck them into my files. Paraskeva Clark (1898-1986) now had her own folder in the top drawer of my filing cabinet.

Fast-forward to the year 1999. About six months before completing a major project of researching and writing the biography of Joyce Wieland (Joyce Wieland: Artist on Fire, 2001) Paraskeva began sitting on my shoulder and wouldn’t leave. I could not stop thinking about her. I discovered that her papers were housed in Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, and I also learned that there were many people who knew her who were available for interviews.

This is how I began my years of exploring the life of Paraskeva Clark, a scrappy, gutsy artist full of contradictions. My book on Clark, Perfect Red: The Life of Paraskeva Clark will be published in November by Cormorant Books (www.cormorantbooks.com).

Recently I read an article about biography by Terry Eagleton in an old Harper’s Magazine (November 2007) - “Buried in the Life: Thomas Hardy and the Limits of Biographies,” a review of two Thomas Hardy biographies, one by Claire Tomalin and one by Ralph Pite.

Eagleton says that everyone must be born and almost everyone has to be educated, oppressed by parents, plagued by siblings, and launched into the world...” and so on. And at the end of all this we expire, he says. Using this template, he points out that biographies are based on biology.

When I read this, at first I thought he was totally knocking the genre. As I read on, I realized that what he is asking for is biographies that do more than just tell what a person had for breakfast, because for example, what Jane Austen had for breakfast “throws exceedingly little light on the fiction.” He makes a case for doing more than just giving a “blow-by-blow record of “what happened just after noon on July 21, 1889, and then what took place two hours later...” because this kind of writing means “the art gets buried in the life.”

Eagleton made the case that a good biography portrays the times in which a person lived. I agree, and this is what I love about reading biographies. Years ago I read Kathleen Barry’s Susan B. Anthony: Te Biography of a Singular Feminist about this courageous woman who was a leader in the United States in the nineteenth century women’s movement. This book gave me a picture of nineteen-century American culture. It is a good example of a portrait of a person that expands to encompass the world in which she lived.

Over the years since the publication of my Joyce Wieland: Artist on Fire (2001), I have been working on the idea of selecting Wieland’s drawings and journals in the archives at York University where I did my research. Called Joyce Wieland: Writings and Drawings 1952-1971, this volume will be published in November by Porcupine’s Quill, a small press in Erin, Ontario, which is about a twenty-minute drive from my home. Erin is a lovely little town and the presence of Porcupine’s Quill gives it a special charm - not to mention the wonderful bakery in the same block.

I made selections in which one can see how Wieland's identity and her thinking, especially about the world of art, developed in an era when few women were working as artists, a period of time when female artists were not taken seriously. Almost all of the writings and drawings in this new volume - cartoons, sketches, journal entries - have not been published or exhibited before. Wieland’s strong stance as a feminist and a Canadian citizen who was engaged in the world around her run like a thread through her work, and all with a great sense of humour.

30 June, 2009

I had a holiday near Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia. That area is a high-energy geological wonder. The explanation given in the brochures about the area tells us that the bedrock was formed 380 million years ago when two ancient continents collided. This collision created such heat and pressure that parts of the continents melted and formed a molten mass under the surface of the earth. The magma cooled over time to form igneous rock granite. The millions of years of weathering and glacial activity resulted in the surfaces of rock on which the hundreds of tourists walk when they visit Peggy’s Cove.

One can walk through the barrens of the area on designated paths among the low-growing greenery. The residents of the area urge us tourists to respect the terrain and not trample around on the growth that covers the surface of the soil. The carnivorous pitcher plant is one of the flowers that totally captivated me. All I could see at first was a deep burgundy coloured flower on a tube-like stem that curved at the top so that the blossom turns to face the ground. It wasn’t until later, when a local resident told me about the leaves, that I saw the foliage low to the ground. The leaves collect rain water, insects fall into the water, drown and - yummy! - the plan has its dinner. The plant slowly digests the insects. Amazing!