A Writer's Life 📚 Barbara Black

Transcript

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Welcome listeners to A Writer's Life.

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I'm your host Heigebohm, the author of the novel Secrets in the Shadows.

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A Writer's Life is a place where I'll be in conversation with fellow writers.

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We'll discuss all things writing, they'll read from their latest works and we'll explore what happens beyond the pen in A Writer's Life.

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It's gonna be a page-turner.

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I just know it.

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Pull up a chair and join us.

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Pull up a chair and join us.

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I'm recording on the traditional ancestral and unceded territory of the Squamish Nation.

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There's a character who has a tongue transplant and ends up it doesn't work out too well and he can't speak and his words come out very strangely and he's frustrated and he goes to a speech therapist but then he sounds like the speech therapist who has this kind of uppity East Coast American accent.

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Welcome listeners to another episode of A Writer's Life.

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Today I'll be in conversation with Barbara Black and I'm just going to dive right in.

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Hello, barbara, and welcome back to A Writer's Life, thank you.

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Let's kick off by diving into some nostalgic territory.

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What was one of your favorite childhood vacations with your family and what made it stand out as memorable to you?

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We used to go to the Okanagan, to West Bank, and I just loved it there because we stayed in a.

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I thought this was very special.

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We used to tent, but when we were a bit older we stayed in the little cabanas I don't even think those exist anymore generally and it was right by the lake there was a playground and I just loved being there.

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It had a huge one memory that sticks with me.

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It had a huge sort of like merry-go-round.

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It was just massive.

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Usually they're, you know, they're pretty small, but it was massive like this giant industrial disc Maybe that's actually what it was and you could fit tons of kids on it.

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So there'd be like, about you know, 10, 12 kids on it all at the same time, you know, just running along with it, jumping on it, jumping off it.

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I just that was just a kind of a weird thing that I'd never seen anywhere else since and I loved it.

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And so I guess those, yeah, yeah, those really stuck with me.

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Those memories.

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Okanagan was always nice and hot and I remember we would be driving in the car and there would be a certain point where I could smell the hot pine trees and I loved that, like yeah, that was like oh, we're there, we here.

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Now we're in the Okanagan.

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Ah, barbara, that was wonderful.

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Thank you for that.

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You're welcome On to your latest accomplishment, your new book Little Fortified Stories no doubt it is a page-turner Published by Caitlin Press in 2024, out in stores now.

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You have a lot of short stories in there on microfiction.

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Could you enlighten us on what microfiction is and what inspired this captivating collection?

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Well, microfiction is 300 words and under generally.

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Some people describe it as slightly more, slightly less, but generally it's 300 words and under.

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And so there are some pieces in my collection that are that short, and when they're bigger than 300, they're generally called flash fiction, and so I have a lot of those and the flash fiction is usually from 300 to about 1,000 to 1,500 words.

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So I have micros and I have flash in there and I also have sort of hybrids.

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I have some dialogues.

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I have some dialogues.

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I have some uh list stories.

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That's the great thing about this kind of uh short, short fiction is what I call it is.

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It's a it's experimental.

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There are rules, there's sometimes people stick to the rules about story arcs.

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Um, even the smallest change at the end is required, and I, many of my stories are like that and some of them aren't.

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So I like it for that experimental quality it has.

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And you asked about how it came about.

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How it came about was that I was in Lisbon for a literary workshop with Disquiet and I went to the port center, which was way up on the hill but still in the main part of the city, and I was sampling ports and I was sitting there and I had a line, a character voice come into my head and I had this tiny book that they'd given us as a complimentary thing.

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And I thought, this tiny book, you know what am I?

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I'm never going to use it, but that's all I had.

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So I wrote in it a very, very short story and then when I looked at it, I went, oh, this story has like the quality of the port in it.

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It had, you know, it was talking about dark fruit and you know colors like garnet, and I thought, oh, this is really cool.

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And so I, on my off time during the workshop, I would go up there and test I had white port, which is beautiful, I didn't even know there was such thing.

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Up there.

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And test, I had white port, which is beautiful, I didn't even know there was such thing.

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And, uh, started writing more stories based around those fortified drinks, which is what port is.

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And when I got home I decided to continue it and I so I added more spirits being, you know, gin and rum and scotch, and was doing a little sipping, I wasn't, you know getting drunk while I was doing it Drunk on words maybe, for either a character, voice or just a sentence would come into my head.

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That was just I knew it was perfect, and then I would just write off that.

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So I have a lot of other spirits in the collection and once I kind of was done with that concept, I also added eggfrastic works, which are writings from visual art or photography, and a couple of other sections, one on my ancestry.

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So that's how it all started.

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I haven't read all of it, but what I have read I really enjoyed.

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Oh good, kudos to you.

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Your book cover super creative.

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Can you share a bit about its creation and significance?

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It's a story in a in the section called Ancestral Fabrications and what that is.

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It's stories based around my ancestry, but because the records are a bit slim, I have fictionized many of them.

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Some are based on actual, true things and in fact there's a funny one that sounds like I made it up but it isn't One that my grandmother's mother locked her husband out of the house because he was drinking and he had to live in the backyard in the shed.

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I said what's actually?

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That was actually true.

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They thought I had made it up.

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So one of the stories in there is called the Jaeger family theater and so this collage is based on that story and it's about a girl who's in a family called the Jaeger family, which is my Swedish side.

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My Nana's originally name, original name, was Johansson, but her father or grandfather changed it because they were Johanssons and there were, like you know, 2 million Johanssons in Sweden.

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So he changed the name to Jaeger and the story is about a girl in the Jaeger family.

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It's a little bit surreal.

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A lot of my stories are a little pushed, a little bit out of reality and she is doing a ritual that they do in the family, where they're on a sort of a stage and they have a song they've been given and her song is from the Jaeger clan and the Jaeger is also a bird of the north, and so she has a song that she sings.

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It starts with Kriya, which is like the sound of the Jaeger, and so in this picture this is her sort of performing that right and calling out sorry, calling out that song, and she talks about her family.

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It's narrated by this girl, so that is how it came about.

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And you designed that.

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You put it together as a collage.

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It's nice Bits of this and bits of that from magazines and the frame is an actual metal frame that I collaged on top of.

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It's fabulous.

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I loved it.

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Well done.

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In one of your blog posts you mentioned your childhood experience with temporary topographical amnesia.

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Could you elaborate on that intriguing aspect of your past?

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Well, I didn't even know it was a thing and that it had a name until I was an adult, when I was a kid.

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In that blog I'll just explain it, since people haven't read it In that blog I talked about when I was quite little, probably even like six or seven I remember walking to school and suddenly the street I was on which was right where my house was it was very close by, I knew it well everything kind of went blank.

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All the things were there visually, but they had no meaning, they had no memory.

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I didn't really know where I was, know where I was.

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It's like I lost my you know, like an amnesia episode, and everything just looked generic.

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It was a generic street, it was a generic house and it doesn't last very long.

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But when you're in it it seems like it's lasting a long time and I would just keep walking and then, you know, maybe half a block, it would all come back in.

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And as an adult I don't get it when I'm walking, but I still get it when I'm driving, and it's usually a straight street and it's usually in the same places.

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There's a place that I drive that goes toward UV, uvic university of victoria, and I often get it there and I think I'm at ubc, because I just go to ubc and I think, and uh, you just last a few seconds if I turn left and turn right with my head, uh, it sort of breaks it out and I'm like okay.

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I know where I am and I'm at.

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It doesn't happen very often.

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It may be because I overthink too.

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I'm thinking too much while I drive.

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I was like that as a kid.

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I even wrote a little story that said, oh, I guess I was thinking too much.

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It was like grade two or something.

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So that's what that syndrome is all about.

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How did you find out about it?

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I don't know.

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I think I typed in what the symptoms of it were and it came up as an actual thing and that's how I discovered it.

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It's kind of interesting in a way to have had that experience, because you realize that everything you do and see is based in memory or it's making a memory, and when you strip all of that out it's sort of frightening.

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But it's also interesting because now you know that everything has meaning.

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Wow, that was interesting.

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Let's shift gears now into your journey as a writer, from your humble beginnings to where you find yourself now.

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I started writing probably in high school.

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I did write, I did like writing stories, and I always got remarks from the teacher, you know, oh, your story was very good.

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And I look at them, I go really, the other ones must have been really bad.

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But I was imaginative, I always had a good sense of language.

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And I do remember writing a story.

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In grade three we were assigned to write a story and we had a few days to do it and I did it right away, of course, and she thought it was great, so she posted it.

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And when the whole assignment was finished and people put their stories up, oh, I think I read it out loud to the class too, and everyone had their stories up and a lot of them sounded like my story.

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I thought that was well, I guess it was flattering.

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So, um, story writing.

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And then when I went to, uh, high school, I had these um binders, these, uh, the coiled binders, the eight by 11.

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And I I was, you know, you know you're a teenager, so you're writing all your thoughts and your secrets.

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And I was experimenting with language a lot, but mostly in sort of gobbledygook, like just making sounds.

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But I did write in it a lot and I got bored in class.

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So I would be writing in it sometimes and the teacher didn't know.

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Except for once In my French class.

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I was writing and I had my head down and the class kind of went silent and the teacher said, barbara, what are you doing?

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And I just said, oh, I'm writing in my journal.

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And she said, well, can you put it away now?

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So I wrote into university with those and got a little bit more sophisticated with what I was doing, trying to write short stories, and then the writing just went away as a personal activity.

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But all the jobs I had were writing.

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I worked at an ecology center and I wrote all the texts there and I had all contracts.

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I was mostly a freelancer.

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I worked at a newspaper and I was freelancer and I did anything.

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I did government contracts, but it wasn't creative writing.

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I was writing.

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I was writing.

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I was a book reviewer and I was a theater reviewer, but I wasn't writing in my spare time because it was my job.

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So years went past and I, in age 40, I thought I kind of feel like I have a book in me.

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Nice, I did, but it took another several years for that to happen.

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In my 50s I started writing and it's been great.

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It doesn't pay as well as some professional writing, but yeah, I've really enjoyed it.

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I've really enjoyed it.

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And here I am now.

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I have one book out and one coming out Wonderful.

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Yeah, you write poetry as well and you have been published in quite a few anthologies, correct, yeah, I do write poetry.

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It's harder for me, but I do write poetry as well and I'm in quite a few anthologies for that.

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And then more lately I've been doing entering flash fiction contests and yeah, and having doing well there were there any standout moments or challenges you encountered while penning this collection?

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yes, you should ask spill the beans.

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Spill the beans, I will well, when my publisher, when the music from a strange planet had, you know, had been out and and done, well, my publisher said do you have another?

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Do you have something else you know, going, I said, well, I have this manuscript, you know.

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It's like you know, short, short fiction and it's kind of, I don't know, two thirds done or one third done.

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And she goes okay, great, you know, I'll take it.

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I said, well, oh, okay and um, and then I immediately got writer's block, like within months, and I've never had that my entire life, and it was.

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A lot of people told me that that's common when you put out a book and you might need a rest period.

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So they were very great.

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The publisher was very good and she said she did you, you know.

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She kept saying okay, you know, just take it easy.

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And so that was a serious struggle with, uh, I.

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I tried to make myself right for a while and I tried different ways and then I, and then I just decided I'll, you know, I'm just going to leave myself alone and who knows what processes might be going on while I'll be doing other creative things.

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I just did I went and looked at art and I still kept art and writing in my life, but I just wasn't doing it.

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And I actually have a story in my collection those with the loss of their lexicon and it's about me and I didn't know when I started writing it I was listening to a piece of music, actually, which was a very haunting, um, kind of music in a different language, and I wrote this story and it's about a woman who stands on in the town square against a brick wall and she sings to people passing by.

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But I noticed I walked past, or the narrator, who actually is me.

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I didn't know that at the time.

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The narrator walks by and hears that she is singing my songs and by my songs really I mean my words and and I hear her doing that.

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And finally I ask her why and she says oh, because when you walk by, I see your words behind you and they want to be sung and so I sing them for you.

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That story just came out of my subconscious.

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I didn't really know what was going on when I wrote it and then I went oh, oh, that's, that's really neat.

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Yeah, Fabulous.

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You got to just love those moments right when you're reflecting, and the clarity of that is so yeah.

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I do find there's a lot of subconscious content while I'm writing a book.

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The first book was the same.

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You write it and thenughters, and it's just great how those come into your work.

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It's what you're working on on a different level when you write, and it does leak in, for me anyway.

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Yeah, well, that brings me to my next question Are there particular themes or subjects that consistently captivate you, or perhaps ones you consciously avoid?

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Hmm, ones I consciously avoid that I don't know.

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But I do have themes of well.

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As I mentioned, mothers and daughters.

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I have a piece that's called that that I'll read, and I have a dream that I actually had about my mother being in the our old house and coming there.

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And there's another one that has has my mother in.

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It's a very strange one.

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It's more about a mouth that's speaking um, that one's very dark, not dark, but it's lyrical dark, and I have a few about that address climate change in in an oblique way, not an obvious way.

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I have one where I'm writing about an oyster catcher which I have here near my house, down by the ocean, and how it's sitting on a rock but the tide is coming up and I know that it will be inundated soon, and I'm at the same time thinking about, oh, how high is the sea going to go when the climate changes?

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Because I live very close to the ocean only half a block and so that's a sort of subconscious concern for me.

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So that's.

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There's another story I wrote in Sardinia when I was sitting up on a hill and there were just these beautiful, fragrant bushes in bloom and I didn't hardly saw any bees and I thought that was unusual, or, you know, maybe it wasn't, but to to me.

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I know that they are declining, insects, and so, uh, there's a story a man and his daughter, and they have an area they sequestered where they're trying to save all these insects, um and uh, and plants, because, uh, they're disappearing in the world.

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That's another thing.

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Artists, creativity I think that comes in a lot.

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And language, I seem to be very I wonder why.

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I'm very interested in language, and I have one about how language came about.

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That's a very cheeky story.

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And I have another where a woman is, she's kind of frozen for some reason, and a strange figure comes to her and offers her something that looks like tongues, which she puts in her mouth, and this also sounds like a writer's block as well.

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And in that one she starts, the snow around her starts to melt and she feels words coming from below in her body and coming up.

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So that's, in several stories there's language.

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Oh, there's a character who has a tongue transplant and ends up it doesn't work out too well.

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Ends up, it doesn't work out too well and, um, he, he can't speak and his words come out very strangely and uh, he's frustrated and he goes to a speech therapist but then he sounds like the speech therapist who is this kind of uppity east coast american accent.

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So he gives up and he trades his.

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I'm telling I'm telling away these stories, but that's okay, people will forget.

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And he trades his.

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I'm telling I'm telling away these stories, but that's okay, people will forget.

00:24:27.200 --> 00:24:38.011
He trades his tongue, he moves to the wilderness because he's embarrassed and he trades his tongue with another wild animal a wild animal.

00:24:38.011 --> 00:24:44.566
I'll just say Not, so I don't reveal everything and then he just doesn't speak anymore and that animal has his tongue.

00:24:44.566 --> 00:24:48.885
Yeah, my fevered brain.

00:24:48.885 --> 00:24:50.971
That's awesome, I love it.

00:24:52.941 --> 00:25:04.376
Can you discuss any specific literary or philosophical influences that have shaped your exploration of the human condition and the natural world in your writing?

00:25:06.401 --> 00:25:18.195
Oh, my goodness, I won't be able to think of the author's names right now, but lately I've read two books about plants and plants sentience.

00:25:18.195 --> 00:25:28.079
One of them was about plants sentience not, you know that they can, like, perceive things, but they can feel things that you'd be surprised.

00:25:28.079 --> 00:25:29.541
But they can feel things that you'd be surprised.

00:25:29.541 --> 00:25:34.148
And another one was about plants helping to solve crimes.

00:25:34.148 --> 00:25:37.974
They do that with insects, but they can do it with plants.

00:25:37.974 --> 00:25:38.575
Now too.

00:25:38.575 --> 00:25:46.633
What was growing there or what's unusual that's growing there that shouldn't be growing there, and how that's related to there being a crime or someone buried.

00:25:46.633 --> 00:25:49.829
So I found that totally fascinating.

00:25:49.829 --> 00:25:51.426
I love plants, I love plants gardener.

00:25:51.426 --> 00:25:57.971
Those were great and influence from what actually?

00:25:57.971 --> 00:26:08.067
I'd like to mention a book I just bought yesterday at one of those books and it is so fascinating.

00:26:08.067 --> 00:26:17.781
It's's called the Work of Art and it's by Adam Moss and what it is.

00:26:17.781 --> 00:26:22.250
It's all about the creative process and I already feel really fascinated by this book.

00:26:22.250 --> 00:26:23.333
It's super thick.

00:26:23.333 --> 00:26:43.074
It's about that thick and he interviews artists and writers, musicians, musicians, playwrights, about their creative process and, um, it's really fascinating and it it um kind of gives, makes me, event validifies.

00:26:43.074 --> 00:26:50.932
You know how I approach things, because sometimes I see advice to writers know, do this and write out an outline.

00:26:50.932 --> 00:26:52.894
And I don't work that way.

00:26:52.894 --> 00:26:55.084
I'm a very instinctual.

00:26:55.084 --> 00:27:05.404
Often I hear things in my head and then write them down and it's just fascinating to see the process people go through.

00:27:06.125 --> 00:27:25.771
I read one about a visual artist who had to design a giant sculpture out of sugar from a sugar factory and she just didn't know where to go and she spent I don't know quite a few months just thinking about what is sugar, what does it do, what are the history?

00:27:25.771 --> 00:27:36.885
There's the slavery and she ended up with a bust, us almost sphinx-like bust made out of sugar.

00:27:36.885 --> 00:27:38.990
I forget how the sphinx thing came into it.

00:27:38.990 --> 00:27:54.556
She got to there through this whole convoluted but, you know, interesting process of drawing and reading about sugar and I just yeah, it's the most fascinating book, very, very good.

00:27:54.596 --> 00:27:58.871
I recommend it and I have only read about four of the interviews so far.

00:27:58.871 --> 00:28:14.948
There was another one about a woman who had her third miscarriage an artist as well and she had a painting where she was bending down and tending to a plant, because that's what she did after her miscarriage an artist as well, and she had a painting where she was bending down and tending to a plant, because that's what she did after her miscarriage.

00:28:14.948 --> 00:28:18.583
She went back to touching plants and what the painting.

00:28:18.583 --> 00:28:23.644
She realized what it really was was she was bending down to a baby.

00:28:23.644 --> 00:28:27.132
She finally realized that that's what the painting should be.

00:28:27.132 --> 00:28:34.253
So I've just found that I'm not writing right now because I just put the book out.

00:28:34.253 --> 00:28:39.031
So I like reading about those kind of processes.

00:28:41.462 --> 00:28:42.827
I find it really interesting too.

00:28:42.827 --> 00:29:00.614
Last year, I started teaching online writing courses and I find it so fascinating with all the different writers that I'm guiding their processes and they're so different and there isn't you got to do this way or that way.

00:29:00.614 --> 00:29:14.445
You really want to be open to exploring how you want to express yourself, and each piece that you write has its own way of wanting to be written or told yeah, just be open.

00:29:14.445 --> 00:29:17.288
It's not just one formula.

00:29:17.288 --> 00:29:21.685
As humans, we are creative, so allow that to unleash.

00:29:21.685 --> 00:29:24.532
You know, open up to your own creativity.

00:29:26.002 --> 00:29:27.469
Yeah, I love that.

00:29:27.469 --> 00:29:29.207
Yes, I definitely go by that.

00:29:29.207 --> 00:29:32.101
I don't want to say rule that idea.

00:29:32.101 --> 00:29:38.344
Yeah, that's what I did in this, for this, for this book, and I.

00:29:38.344 --> 00:29:55.951
One thing that's kind of cool is that when you don't, you haven't found the way in to that piece of writing using the structure which they do a lot in.

00:29:55.951 --> 00:29:57.511
There's a lot of prompts in.

00:29:57.511 --> 00:30:20.313
I have a list story in my um collection about saint barbara, and that is because when I wrote it I was like this isn't, it's not working.

00:30:20.313 --> 00:30:21.301
It's not working.

00:30:21.301 --> 00:30:24.511
I can't get all these weirdnesses to go together.

00:30:24.511 --> 00:30:47.834
And then I realized, well, why don't you separate them and fragment them instead and let them contradict each other and one will be about, you know, a future and one one will be in the past or whatever, and it was all about saint barbara we used to celebrate her as a kid oh really, I didn't know that.

00:30:47.913 --> 00:30:52.568
I didn't think people even were familiar that there was a saint bar Barbara.

00:30:52.568 --> 00:30:53.691
There you go.

00:30:53.691 --> 00:30:54.853
I'm not a saint, by the way.

00:30:59.920 --> 00:31:09.953
How do you approach the creative process in your writing and what strategies do you employ to nurture and expand upon your ideas?

00:31:09.953 --> 00:31:13.422
And you've been talking a bit about that, but can you expand a little bit more?

00:31:17.167 --> 00:31:18.329
What strategies do I use?

00:31:18.329 --> 00:31:43.193
Well, when I'm writing, I do really like ekphrastic writing from art, and I have a section in the collection that has those kind of stories, Because, for one thing, I just love art, I'm very interested in art, and it does activate your brain in a different way when you're working from a visual.

00:31:43.193 --> 00:31:45.645
I really like that.

00:31:45.645 --> 00:31:57.729
I usually do pick kind of unusual ones too, that you, you know you can go somewhere, maybe a bit surreal, and so that is something I really enjoy.

00:31:57.729 --> 00:32:18.269
I listen to music a lot too, and there are quite a few stories in here, whether I say it or not, in the back, and the references that I wrote while I was listening to music generally, instrumental music and music that's not from my culture, that I especially am successful with that.

00:32:18.269 --> 00:32:21.750
I don't do it at home, but I do it when I cafe write.

00:32:21.750 --> 00:32:32.773
So I have headphones on because you know people are talking and I go into this envelope of sound and and that a lot comes out of that as well.

00:32:34.323 --> 00:32:48.974
Um, what other other strategies would be, as I just was saying, structures, um, which are really popular in flash fiction, and um, they, you'd think, oh, that's like restricting you, isn't it?

00:32:49.556 --> 00:32:50.637
But no, it's not.

00:32:50.637 --> 00:33:33.074
It's like when you write poetry and you have to write a sonnet, sometimes, um, having um restriction makes you more creative and it and because you can get lazy, not lazy you can get sort of stuck in a rut of a certain style of writing in prose or in poetry and when suddenly you can only write a story that doesn't have the letter A in it, or a sonnet or something just really really has a lot of rules about how you do it, you can come up with very interesting language or different ways to come into the story or to different language.

00:33:33.074 --> 00:33:40.605
Because you have to use different language because of that restriction, it makes you more creative.

00:33:40.605 --> 00:33:48.049
Yeah, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it's just I can't write this on it, but that's very helpful too.

00:33:48.049 --> 00:33:52.308
And, of course, reading others' works too, that's helpful.

00:33:52.308 --> 00:33:54.336
I have certain writers I like.

00:33:54.336 --> 00:33:59.912
I like strong voices and they are like my companions to keep me going.

00:33:59.912 --> 00:34:08.998
You know when I'm, when I'm stuck, or just to keep keep the momentum going when I'm writing, especially like a manuscript.

00:34:09.148 --> 00:34:25.554
Yeah, keep the momentum going when I'm writing, especially like a manuscript Reflecting on your early adulthood what's a decision you made that significantly impacted your path, and what lessons did you glean from those experience or that experience?

00:34:36.099 --> 00:34:36.601
the decision I made.

00:34:36.601 --> 00:34:40.268
One that comes to mind was when I went to university I had trouble deciding what I wanted to do and not one of those people.

00:34:40.289 --> 00:34:42.420
When I was you know 15, I'm like I'm gonna be a writer.

00:34:42.420 --> 00:34:43.262
I never said that.

00:34:43.262 --> 00:34:44.706
I never said I'm gonna be a writer.

00:34:44.706 --> 00:34:48.987
I did writing, but I didn't think I'd be a writer or an author.

00:34:48.987 --> 00:34:54.507
So so when I went to university, I started out in theater, as I loved theater.

00:34:54.507 --> 00:35:04.414
I did theater in high school and outside of high school and I just thought, you know, if I do this, I'm going to be unemployed all the time.

00:35:04.414 --> 00:35:08.126
You know, in between jobs which is funny, because I became a freelance writer.

00:35:08.126 --> 00:35:09.708
Jobs which is funny because I became a freelance writer.

00:35:09.829 --> 00:35:21.184
However, at that stage I thought, okay, I did that for two years and then I thought, no, I don't think this is it.

00:35:21.184 --> 00:35:22.045
I did well in it.

00:35:22.045 --> 00:35:29.146
But then I switched to education and I did that and I had the worst teachers ever were when I studied education, which was very sad.

00:35:29.146 --> 00:35:37.465
I was looking into special education and just regular education.

00:35:37.465 --> 00:35:42.369
And then I actually went to SFU and did two terms for that and I was writing.

00:35:42.369 --> 00:35:48.648
I realized at one point that the lesson plans I really liked writing the lesson plans.

00:35:49.702 --> 00:35:51.230
I love writing lesson plans.

00:35:51.230 --> 00:35:52.135
What is that?

00:35:52.155 --> 00:36:05.751
I love doing, that I know, and I went I like it more than teaching, I and I was doing well at the teaching and I finally told the, the teacher, I think I'm gonna drop out.

00:36:05.751 --> 00:36:08.702
She was devastated because of course then she didn't have time off.

00:36:08.702 --> 00:36:11.811
But but she said you're doing so well?

00:36:11.811 --> 00:36:15.650
And I said I just don't think I am meant to be a teacher.

00:36:15.650 --> 00:36:30.679
And that was when I decided I was going to switch to English and I moved to Victoria, went to UVic and squeezed as many English courses as I could into two years because I'd already done two years of university.

00:36:30.679 --> 00:36:43.472
And that is how long it took me to sort of feel the writer within and pursue, you know, studying English and writing.

00:36:45.382 --> 00:36:46.768
Nice, nice.

00:36:46.768 --> 00:36:56.900
Well, great decision because it's given us, given us, as the reader, great works to read, so that was a great decision.

00:36:57.000 --> 00:36:57.844
Oh well, thank you.

00:36:59.501 --> 00:37:05.713
What's something about you that most people wouldn't guess just by looking at you or reading your work?

00:37:08.023 --> 00:37:21.048
Oh boy work, oh boy, hmm, just by looking at that they don't know that I can actually say publicly yeah, I can admit to.

00:37:21.048 --> 00:37:24.460
Well, they might not know that I ride a motorcycle.

00:37:25.762 --> 00:37:26.784
Okay, there we go.

00:37:26.784 --> 00:37:28.347
What kind of motorbike do you ride?

00:37:29.309 --> 00:37:34.262
It's a Triumph Street Triple RS Cool, and it's quite speedy.

00:37:34.262 --> 00:37:44.869
Well, when I'm on it it is, and it's beautiful around the corners and I love it because when I ride, I'm in the physical world.

00:37:44.869 --> 00:37:57.268
There's no words, I'm not thinking, especially when you ride a motorcycle, you want to be thinking about traffic ideas, but not off in your head, and I just love the physicality of it.

00:37:57.268 --> 00:38:12.746
And the wind, excuse me, and the wind and everything is just more vivid when you're out in the air, moving through the air, and you can smell.

00:38:12.746 --> 00:38:16.710
And you can smell exactly, exactly.

00:38:16.710 --> 00:38:25.021
You know you're riding and you're like, oh, farm nearby, and oh, I can smell the, you know the early cherry blossoms now, and it's.

00:38:25.021 --> 00:38:29.932
You don't realize that you don't have that in a car until you do have it.

00:38:29.932 --> 00:38:33.208
When you ride the motorcycle, you're like, oh, I'm missing all this when.

00:38:33.248 --> 00:38:33.989
I'm in the car.

00:38:34.452 --> 00:38:40.371
Yeah, I think a lot of your senses become heightened, mm-hmm.

00:38:41.773 --> 00:38:57.623
Yeah, and I'm hoping well, I am going to do a motorcycle trip in August in um Chilcotin and it's partly adventure riding, which I have not done, I've just done a tiny bit of that.

00:38:57.623 --> 00:39:09.172
So it'll be go, you know, gravel roads and maybe going through some streams and back roads and, yeah, looking forward to that nice, nice, that sounds fun.

00:39:10.155 --> 00:39:13.000
Shifting gears no pun intended.

00:39:13.000 --> 00:39:15.023
Wait, what was that?

00:39:15.023 --> 00:39:17.268
I didn't quite get shifting gears.

00:39:17.268 --> 00:39:20.836
Oh, no pun intended, right, right.

00:39:20.836 --> 00:39:34.096
As a child, what was your favorite way to spend a rainy day indoors, and do you find yourself drawn to similar activities or comforts now in your adult life?

00:39:35.380 --> 00:39:59.054
I would say probably playing piano would have been something I would do on a rainy day, and in fact sometimes I skipped school on the day my mother went and volunteered and I played piano like all day almost.

00:40:02.181 --> 00:40:04.465
No, trying to get you to practice.

00:40:04.465 --> 00:40:07.913
Stop practicing and get to school.

00:40:08.802 --> 00:40:10.726
Well, you know, I was school was school was.

00:40:10.726 --> 00:40:15.907
You know I knew I could miss it because it was kind of slow for me sometimes.

00:40:15.907 --> 00:40:17.291
So I'm like I'm just gonna skip out.

00:40:17.291 --> 00:40:21.929
And that was when you could skip out, like I was a good student, so they didn't question it.

00:40:21.929 --> 00:40:24.463
But nowadays you wouldn't get away with that.

00:40:24.463 --> 00:40:26.626
I don't think so.

00:40:26.626 --> 00:40:28.809
Uh, that's one thing I do Now.

00:40:28.829 --> 00:40:29.891
You said a rainy day.

00:40:29.891 --> 00:40:46.643
If it weren't a rainy day, I would be outside looking at minutiae of like insects, little ants, you know, in the stairs and you know, projecting myself into their small worlds and playing outside.

00:40:46.643 --> 00:40:54.490
We lived right on the edge of Lynn Canyon and it was bush, it was all bush, and so just playing in the bush was fabulous.

00:40:54.490 --> 00:40:56.768
I can't say I do that very much now.

00:40:56.768 --> 00:41:03.724
Insects I'm still into that, especially with my garden and piano playing.

00:41:03.724 --> 00:41:14.389
I go through phases I have not played my poor piano for when I had like writer's block, you'd think I'd be doing it, but I almost dropped a lot of my.

00:41:14.389 --> 00:41:21.849
I didn't do collages, I had like a creativity breakdown, but I hope to go back to that.

00:41:21.849 --> 00:41:35.791
I was playing jazz tunes and just for myself and Nice, let's circle to your story Stitching.

00:41:36.239 --> 00:41:39.690
What inspired this particular piece of storytelling?

00:41:40.181 --> 00:41:45.293
Well, it might surprise you, but it was a memory from my 20s.

00:41:45.293 --> 00:41:53.911
I had a boyfriend who lived in kamloops and I went to um.

00:41:53.911 --> 00:42:21.034
I went up there to visit him while I was working for the summer and we went to his grandfather's house this is going to seem like a very wayward way to get to it, but it will make sense and we went to his grandfather's house and, um, I was not told he had a certain condition at the time and we were sitting in the living room and he was talking and while he was talking he just stopped and what it was?

00:42:21.034 --> 00:42:21.882
Narcolepsy.

00:42:21.882 --> 00:42:24.126
He had narcolepsy, but I didn't know.

00:42:24.126 --> 00:42:25.047
I found out.

00:42:25.047 --> 00:42:27.472
I said to my boyfriend, after what?

00:42:27.472 --> 00:42:28.101
Why was?

00:42:28.101 --> 00:42:29.449
Was he just falling asleep?

00:42:29.449 --> 00:42:35.389
He said no, no, he has narcolepsy and I don't know how I I guess they just remembered that.

00:42:36.472 --> 00:43:16.788
And that's what is happening to this woman who is sitting in her chair and um stitching, and except that I don't know what happens when you go, when you fall asleep, when you have narcolepsy, if you have dreams, but she actually has a kind of dream, or even I don't know if you could call it like she's actually there in the place, but of other women doing different things, doing different things, and she experiences the things that they are experiencing when she's in that state, non-conscious state.

00:43:16.807 --> 00:43:28.409
I don't really know how it came about that story, but, um, I do know that the first character, um, who's um, is based on virginia wolf.

00:43:28.409 --> 00:43:34.887
The other people are not based on certain people, but I don't know how that got in there.

00:43:34.887 --> 00:43:39.059
Maybe I was reading about her and that's how it came about.

00:43:39.059 --> 00:43:58.161
So it was sort of like a frame of a memory and it's always stuck with me and I was writing about it in my little writing book and I think I even maybe tried to write a story, but it was the one about the grandpa and it didn't work, so it became about a woman.

00:43:58.943 --> 00:44:17.168
so there you go last time, when we spoke on our first time we met on our on the podcast you mentioned, you were collaborating with a composer in Vancouver, katerina Gimmon, on flash fiction piece set in Victorian times.

00:44:17.168 --> 00:44:19.152
How is that project progressing?

00:44:19.152 --> 00:44:20.782
Oh, it's um it.

00:44:20.961 --> 00:44:21.704
It came together.

00:44:21.704 --> 00:44:28.342
Yeah, it was a challenge for me as a writer because I had never written, you know, for opera.

00:44:28.342 --> 00:44:30.907
Uh, so it was a different approach.

00:44:30.907 --> 00:44:46.925
You need to be more simple in your words, you need to to um, convey emotion, those simple words, and you need to know how the character might speak in a different way than the other characters.

00:44:46.925 --> 00:45:04.333
But I did get some help from katarina too on that and was spots where she felt you know, can you, can you, um, you know, have more of an arc here so that she goes up to a higher level of emotion and down, and it was a real learning experience.

00:45:04.333 --> 00:45:14.114
Uh, we did, um, I did get performed by the arado ensemble in vancouver and it was not staged.

00:45:14.213 --> 00:45:18.690
it was, uh, sung on stage but uh, it was acted, but we, you know, we didn't.

00:45:18.690 --> 00:45:23.927
It wasn't like a theater, yeah, or an opera setting and uh, it went over very well.

00:45:23.927 --> 00:45:25.570
It was very.

00:45:25.570 --> 00:45:31.210
I don't write a lot of comic things, which is funny because I'm just totally a clown in private.

00:45:31.210 --> 00:45:34.429
There's one thing people might not guess about me I do voices.

00:45:34.429 --> 00:45:36.949
I'm, you know, goofy.

00:45:36.949 --> 00:45:45.773
So it was fun to do just this totally slapstick kind of comedy.

00:45:45.773 --> 00:45:49.568
I'd like to try it again, actually.

00:45:49.719 --> 00:45:52.521
And people really did enjoy it and the singers were great.

00:45:52.521 --> 00:45:56.932
There were four singers and their acting was great.

00:45:56.932 --> 00:45:58.076
It was put on very.

00:45:58.076 --> 00:46:07.643
They didn't have a lot of time for rehearsal because that was just the way it was and they were all pros and they just blew it out of the water.

00:46:07.643 --> 00:46:08.887
It was great.

00:46:08.887 --> 00:46:15.009
And Katerina's music was great too, and she knows how to write comical music too.

00:46:15.009 --> 00:46:16.652
Oh good, she's super talented.

00:46:16.652 --> 00:46:24.025
She's really going up in the ranks right now in the choral world literally world.

00:46:24.025 --> 00:46:25.385
She's all over the place.

00:46:25.385 --> 00:46:28.469
So I was very grateful to have that opportunity to work with her.

00:46:28.909 --> 00:46:30.523
Nice Was that videoed?

00:46:30.523 --> 00:46:31.467
Is it on the net?

00:46:31.467 --> 00:46:34.019
I can't yeah.

00:46:34.161 --> 00:46:36.329
I think it is Okay, it is.

00:46:37.315 --> 00:46:40.264
Yeah, I'll Google that and maybe put a link to it.

00:46:40.264 --> 00:46:44.193
Okay, here's one.

00:46:44.193 --> 00:47:01.000
How do you view the relationship between creativity and the human experience, and what do you believe is the ultimate purpose or significance of storytelling in the grand scheme of existence?

00:47:01.902 --> 00:47:08.423
holy cow wow, um, um.

00:47:08.423 --> 00:47:46.601
Well, I think the great thing about writing is reading I world, whether you know whether it's fiction or whether it's nonfiction, you can expand your knowledge of ideas or people or emotions.

00:47:46.601 --> 00:47:57.458
You can see yourself in the writing, and it's a way we share our human life with each other.

00:47:57.458 --> 00:48:23.996
Writing and art, it's a way we illustrate the short time that we have here and are gone, have created those forests and they kind of live on as well, because they've, you know, painted a picture or they've written a book or they've made a sculpture or etc.

00:48:23.996 --> 00:48:24.157
Etc.

00:48:24.157 --> 00:48:40.380
So I think it's a super important part of our human existence to be articulating or illustrating our experiences.

00:48:42.661 --> 00:48:48.829
Nice Last one Spring upon us.

00:48:48.829 --> 00:48:51.597
Are you finding solace in the garden?

00:48:51.597 --> 00:48:57.177
Any new story ideas sprouting alongside your plants?

00:49:00.784 --> 00:49:49.710
Well, there's not much solace in the garden at the moment because I have made for myself a much too big garden and the weather has decided to be freezing, cold and rainy and unpredictable, and I have lost some very nice plants from, I think, just the temperature, uh, ranges of having warmth and then really, uh, quite cold, and it shocked some pretty hardy plants, um, and just I had giant formiums, which are from new zealand, these things with sort of spear-shaped leaves that are very long and they were like the, the exclamation marks of my.

00:49:49.710 --> 00:49:53.994
I had three huge ones in my garden and they all look just awful.

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A Writer's Life 📚 Barbara Black

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