Genrealities

3: Some genre writers are not born

This is the ill-advised part. This is where I blow any chance of winning a Hugo, Nebula or Stoker, never mind a Booker or Giller.

I was the first of my father’s family to graduate university. His pride was short-lived. I let slip I wanted to write. I might as well have told him I’d booked a ticket to Bangkok for sex reassignment surgery. “Gottenyu! A writer? A writer? Who’s going to hire you as a writer? Tell me who, goddammit! Who?”

He worried I’d end up like him. Frustrated. Disappointed. Penniless. Not tired of living so much, just tired of being the subplot of a Jolson movie.

My mother, meanwhile, urged me to give optometry a try. “Look how well your cousin Jerry does.”

Neither knew to ask whether I’d be pursuing literary or genre. Not that I would have had the answer. Despite the formidable influences of Richler and Blaise, I believed writing was writing. Literary or genre did not matter; I’d skip between the two as inspiration dictated. I could be Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon one week, Richard Matheson, Robert Silverberg and Ray Bradbury the next.

And so I begin to write. Short stories. Novels. An apocalyptic SF novel. A porn novel. A coming-of-age novel. Pieces for Mad and Harpoon. All are rejected.

I roll carpets at Eaton’s warehouse. Cut broadloom. Drive a lift truck.

I write gag lines for cartoonists and make my first pro sale to an illustrator in Puerto Rico. He sends me a cheque for $1.50. The bank charges me $10 when it bounces.

I write university term papers for seven bucks a page. Engineering. Law. English. Philosophy. I sell short features to the Montreal Star and Vancouver Sun.

I get married. Have kids. Take a fulltime job as a copywriter at an advertising agency. But it’s temporary, you understand. Only temporary.

Career highlights are many, especially the personalized rejections. A personalized rejection is almost as good as an acceptance.

The editor of Harpoon returns Know Your Asshole Better with an encouraging note: “We’re doing a farting issue next if you’d care to contribute.”

My porn novel, The Mammary Recordings, earns a handwritten reply: “While we found your novel amusing, our readers will not. Please limit the plot of any future submissions to the main character hopping from bedroom to bedroom, sex scene to sex scene. Please, no humor.” Wow! They found it AMUSING—enough to keep me going for months.

Rejection, of course, is not limited to publishers and editors. Life in Henk is my tragicomic coming-of-age epic. It is about growing up in a functionally dysfunctional family in a small town in the late 50s, early 60s. I give the manuscript to my older sister to read. She had wanted to be a writer, but eloped at 18 and had babies instead. She is both concise and incisive: “What am I supposed to write about now?” I decide it best to write a serial killer novel next.

Wait! It gets worse. I’m at my urologist. Yeah, urologist. Cripes! Even he has published a book—Private Parts by Yosh Taguchi, MD. And mid-point of my digital rectal examination I hit rock bottom: I ask if he might put a good word in for me with his agent.

My urologist’s agent does not reply. No Canadian agent does. And I accept, at last, my father was correct. Who would want to hire me as a writer?

Until one Christmas Eve. The phone rings. The caller is Virginia Kidd, an American literary agent, and she loves Henk and she wants to represent me and I’m thinking maybe there’s more to this Baby Jesus thing than I’ve been led to believe. She wants every damn piece of fiction I’ve ever written. And within a month, she sells one story to a UK fantasy anthology, Destination Unknown, and another to Fantasy & Science Fiction. And soon word comes down that a major publisher is about to put an offer in on Henk and my wife and I stay up the entire night, excited by the prospect of dream becoming reality… Alas, the offer never happens. The editor is apologetic. Virginia is angry. And I proceed to write a short story about a boy who finds a tiny human skeleton in a bug jar. A few months later, Ellen Datlow selects it for the Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror.

The science fiction, fantasy and horror writers I know were passionate readers of the genres before they began to write in the genres. They were fans. Huge fans. And still are. I read a lot of SF growing up, but I never lived and breathed the stuff. I still don’t. That’s not to say I don’t like to write it; I simply didn’t set out to write it.

So why did I become a writer of genre? Isn’t it clear?

Because nobody else would have me.

4: A painful truth

I have a wife and three daughters. All are avid readers. Literary, big name stuff. In Canada, at least. Ishiguro. Munro. MacLeod. Franzen. Roth. Atwood. Mistry. Shields.

They often discuss the books they read. And love.

The only genre fiction they read is mine.

I have never heard them discuss anything I have written. Never.

I have requested they stop talking about books and authors when I am around. They laugh. They think I am kidding.

5: Stranger in a strange land

Have I gone about this the right way? What does CNQ expect of me? Why did its editor, Alex Good, contact me? I do not write essays. I am a not a literary deep-thinker. I do not belong in CNQ. This is a prank, right? CanLit Punk’d.

I’ve gone through the last issue. The short story one. The erudition intimidates me. Worse, I now find myself using erudition in a sentence. Jeez, two sentences.

I have never read CanLit superstars Alexander MacLeod, Guy Vanderhaeghe or Michael Ondaatje. I have never heard of CanLit heroes Mark Anthony Jarman, Audrey Thomas or Douglas Glover. Not that I expect they’ve heard of me. Do they read Fantasy & Science Fiction? Occasionally? Ever? Stephen King called the magazine “the gold standard for short fiction in America”, though it’s unlikely he garners much respect in these pages. Kirkus claimed it “eloquent, scintillating, often sublime”. I know Margaret Atwood isn’t a fan, otherwise she’d abandon her crusade to sever speculative fiction from science fiction. Is anyone buying that load? She’s a savvy marketer, sure. Still, I resent how her defensiveness puts me on the defensive. Kurt Vonnegut never made me feel this way.

CNQ is wordy. Does literary critique demand no less than fifteen sentences per paragraph? Where is the pacing? The white space? The exclamation marks!!?? Would a larger font kill them?

Nasty, too. Like some high school clique. Mutual admiration society one sec, mutual denigration the next. They rip into their peers like it’s Black Friday at Walmart. There’s so much nitpicking going down, it’s a wonder the pages don’t scab over. What am I doing here? I fear for myself.

“I know it sounds whiny, but if you’ve never gotten a bad review before, you have no idea what a unique kind of heartbreak it is. And I’m not talking about getting constructive criticism from your seventh grade English teacher…. I’m talking about a complete stranger telling other complete strangers that something you’ve been carrying inside you for months is stillborn.” —Brian K. Vaughan, The Escapists (2007)

The Escapists? It’s a graphic novel. Okay, a comic book. Oh, that’s going to go over well around here. The point is, you’d never catch a critic of genre fiction behaving the way your CNQ piranhas do. Is genre, as a group, not more humane, empathetic and respectful of one another’s craft?

“Of the three slightly longer, independent short stories, Michael Libling’s ‘Pheromitey Glad’ I found to be a sophomoric, unfocused and an ambling attempt at arch cuteness, which failed miserably. It just didn’t make any sense on any real level, and was difficult to read with all of the cUTe spellings… Sometimes literary experiments work, sometimes they don’t. This one totally failed for me.” —Dave Truesdale, SF Site (1998)

Oh, man. Is that what I’ve done? Delivered another “sophomoric, unfocused and ambling attempt at arch cuteness”? Perhaps if I say something nice…

With a name like Canadian Notes & Queries, I expect it to be about as action-packed and provocative as Stephen Harper’s sex life. But the irreverence surprises me. The frequent shots at the Giller Prize are fun. So, I’m not the only one who finds CanLit stultifying. “Murder, stillbirth, war, suicide, scalding, genocide, another stillbirth” (as critic Ryan Bigge sums it up) have a place in genre, too. A big place. But we do not as a matter of course take the angst-ridden poems we wrote as teenagers and expand them into novels. We do not ramble on all mopey-dreary about our pain for 400 frigging pages without throwing a little action into the mix, an appealing character or two and a plot. (Come to think of it, there’s not much difference between literary fiction and porn; plot is secondary to both.) Most of all, we do not measure the quality of our writing by the extent of its inaccessibility.

Still, if I stick around for an issue or two, I might even learn something here. Maybe I have more in common with these CNQ guys than I think. Perhaps I do belong in these pages. Well, once every 42 years, anyhow.

I wonder. Has CNQ done a genre issue before? What’s that about? Are they slumming it? A My Man Godfrey sort of deal? Should I expect to be rolling my eyes?

Okay, maybe I shouldn’t have brought up that Margaret Atwood thing. Is it too late to take that part out? I mean, who am I to—

Addendum

For more, loosely related to the above, check out Ramon Kubicek’s interview with me. Note the photo of the young feller that accompanies the interview. You might also note that since this essay was originally published, HOLLYWOOD NORTH: LIFE, LOVE & DEATH IN SIX REELS (by me!) has been published, with another on the way in 2023.