I’m preparing for a new course I’m teaching starting January, a creative non-fiction with emphasis on creative and a lot more open to memoir, personal essay and experimental essay than a journalism course. So I’ve been reading a lot of old favourites and trying to decide what to put on the syllabus, trying to remember the pieces that have made the most impact. The most impactful pieces not only stay with a reader but they inspire you to do something — if you’re a writer, that something will often be writing.
I’m not going to give my list away here but I will share (only) three pieces that are interesting for different reasons.
Thanksgiving in Mongolia is a beautifully written, devastating personal essay that is one of those pieces of writing that made me stop reading, get up, open the window to get some fresh air, pace around for a second before I was able to finish. (It has also inspired my own short story, Funny Hat, that ended up in one of the anthologies of Best Canadian Short Stories.) I don’t know how consciously I look for inspiration in other people’s writing — or TV, or weird stuff on VICE tv, or Wikipedia — but from talking with other authors, we rarely do read something and don’t automatically think “this would make such a great book” and also, instantly regret that we don’t have all the time in the world and money to write it.
Cat Person is fiction. But I teach it in non-fiction writing sometimes because it’s a piece of fiction that has brilliantly captured something too real, non-fictional — so brilliantly indeed that people didn’t believe it was just made up. It’s a small-big story, and many women (and some men) will shudder with recognition when reading it.
I was trying to find the essay that I published, that made my old professor reach out to me and ask me to come and teach writing all those years ago. It’s funny to read your own writing and try to recognize yourself when you’re almost unrecognizable to yourself in it. I haven’t written for The Walrus since that story, I think I maybe shocked myself a little bit by it. I’m debating putting it on the syllabus but at the same time, what better way to teach people writing from the heart but through showing them your own battle scars? And by battle scars, I don’t mean the content of that story so much, I mean how too confessional it seems now, and how too too much. Anyway.