Canadian novelist

My writing teacher was not especially enamoured of my writing.  Sacrificing clarity through muddy stylistic choices, was, I think, what she said.  She could not imagine that the lack of clarity was intentional, that a writer would want anything but a wide open Saskatchewan skyline that revealed everything with complete clarity.  I wanted to tell her that God hates Saskatchewan, but it's only a theory and I have no concrete evidence (of God or of God's geographic preferences).  It was a wobbly fog that obscured her skyline first, because she could not unravel what this meant.  Fog could be grey, fog could be cold, fog could be heavy.  But it simply would not wobble for her, no matter how long she looked at it.  It wobbled for me, I told her, and she let it go.

But we were back in deadlock the next day when I wrote that I was trying to understand the lipstick that had bled into the lines of the Husky House waitress' mouth.  Understand was the wrong word, she said.  It wasn't even a stylistic choice, it was just simply an error.  I wanted to tell her about the funeral that morning, how Jesse had whispered to me during the service that Ghost River was alive, I wanted to tell her how it felt to ride the C-train in funeral clothes, so she could see why the day ended with me staring at the waitress' lipstick-stained teeth and trying to understand the way the lipstick bled into the lines around her smoker's mouth.  But all those pieces would only make things less clear, not more clear.  I crossed out the offending sentence and wished Joyce Carol Oates was my teacher instead.

I told her, once, conspiratorialy, about the reams of writing with which I do nothing.  Oh, she said.  I have published everything I have ever written. 


*