The Writers' Collective

Chandra: Finding time for writing is a challenge for just about everyone. And finding the balance between writing and making a living is a challenge for just about every writer that I’ve ever met.  Sometimes the two coincide in happy ways.  It’s a cliche to talk about how much you learn from teaching, and it’s not always true; sometimes the energy and focus that teaching requires leaves you too tired to dredge up your own images and words.  But often, the kind of energy and excitement that flies around the room in a workshop or course is exactly the kind of nourishment that I’m hungry for.  Engaging closely with students as they risk and play with creative energy, with words and ideas and their own emerging, raw voices can be incredibly rejuvenating, and helps me remember and reconnect with those places of creative energy in myself.  And if you’re attentive and make room for it (and carry a notebook with you everywhere you go), there’s always time to at catch those small images and lines – on the bus, before sleeping, waiting in endless store lines, with morning coffee.  Write them down, let them roll around in your mind and your notebooks, and then find the time to chase them all the way through wherever and whenever you can.

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Chandra: Not sewing.  Embroidering.  I have no idea how to sew.  But I’ve embarked on a second (or third or fourth or fiftieth – hard to keep track sometimes!) career as a crafter.  I call my creations “Head in the Oven,” and right now I’m focusing on the collisions between nostalgia, traditional notions of domesticity and femininity, and pop culture.  Translation:  I’m embroidering vintage aprons with both 80s pop lyrics (“Whip it good;” “Pour some sugar on me;” etc.) and smart alecky comments by smart alecky women (“Too f**king busy – and vice versa” – Dorothy Parker (sorry had to bleep that one – i feel like such a censor!)).

I had a very dark and difficult year last year, and the kind of emotional rawness and dredging that writing requires of me was completely outside of my capabilities, while I was deeply in the middle of chaos and loss and heartbreak.  But I needed to create something, and I needed my hands to move.  Engaging with the tactile world in that way – with thread and colour and texture and playfulness – was exactly what I needed.

Everything inspires me, often in the strangest and most unexpected ways.  It’s partially why I’m so excited to engage in this particular workshop – tracking and getting your fingers deep into the stickiness of those places of inspiration and process is deeply exhilarating and endlessly interesting to me.  The sparks and fires are everywhere, everywhere.

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Chandra: I don’t really like to talk too much about forthcoming projects-in-process; I don’t even really like to call things ‘projects.’  I find if I figure it all out in advance, talk about it too much, I’m not interested in writing it anymore.  And also, looking back, I’ve learned that my best writing happens when I’m compelled by something that I can’t stop engaging with it, while also feeling like I have no idea what I’m doing – no idea what to call it, how to describe it, what (if anything) it’s going to turn out to be.  That place of utter compulsion and confusion is, for me, where the really generative things happen.  So, what am I working on?  I have no idea how to tell you about it.   That being said, I do have some creative non-fiction about to be published and some upcoming readings (where I will probably test-drive some of the new things that I’m trying to write).  I’m also extremely excited to be co-coordinating a Human Library project, in conjunction with the Winnipeg Public Library, and funded by the provincial Multicultural Secretariat.  It’s a fantastic project that promotes dialogue and seeks to break down barriers, prejudices, and stereotypes.  It’s been enacted all over the world, and I’m thrilled to be part of its Winnipeg inception.  For more information on the project, check out www.humanlibrary.org, and watch for it to happen here in Winnipeg this March.

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Chandra: I didn’t attend very many writing workshops, mostly because I couldn’t find them.  I did take a couple of courses with Catherine Hunter while I was a U of W student, and the things that I learned from her were absolutely invaluable.  I tried, as much as possible, wherever possible, to read poetry, to listen to poetry, to meet other people who wrote and who were interested in critically engaging with their own and others’ work.  I got involved with a small literary zine that we ran as a collective for a few years.  I organized readings in various places, which allowed me to meet other writers, listen to their work and words, and help to create spaces where people could speak and risk and engage with readers and writers.  I did some volunteer work with literary organizations and journals.  I read as much as I could.  And I wrote and wrote and wrote, trying to understand what I was trying to say, how I was trying to say it, and how to do it better, more precisely, more resonantly.

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Chandra: Absolutely impossible to answer.  I can’t even choose a singular favourite colour, never mind one favourite book!  Favourite in which way?  For which reason?  In the morning, the afternoon, or in the middle of the night?  The one I remember most?  The one I most wish I’d written?  The one I would take with me on a very long train journey?  The one I would gift to a new lover?  The one that makes my heart sing, or the one that makes me weep?  The one I wish the entire world would read?  The one that changed my life because I found and read it at the exact moment that I needed it most?

I could go on. Impossible question!

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Kate: I know but thanks for trying! And thanks for chatting Chandra!!!

Katherena Vermette