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Are the mental habits of the memoirist conducive to happiness? Do we risk distancing ourselves from our experiences by writing about them? Is it possible to abstain from self-narrativization?

We all self-tell to varying degrees. Literature would be nothing without the great generosity of writers who have divulged, examined, and dissected their lives in the hopes of sharing some tangled and illuminating insight. But is there a price to pay for standing back, for mining slivers of meaning from the residue of an experience?

Patti Smith, author of the memoir Just Kids, argues that the writer can never enjoy the equanimity of the non-writer. “You never can be normal,” she says. “You go into church to pray, and you start writing a story about being in a church praying. You’re always observing what you do. I noticed that when I was young going to parties. I could never lose myself in a party unless I was on the dance floor because I was always observing—observing or creating a mental scenario.”

Woolf was a writer whose work epitomized this state of perpetual self-examination. From The Waves to On Being Ill, everything she wrote feels like a flood of revelation and reflection. It is rare to encounter such fierce intelligence and, yet, almost pathological self-awareness. I know of few other writers who have put as much faith in writing as the path to self-understanding, who have so bravely explored the writer’s consciousness and the “violent moods” of the soul. As her biographer Hermione Lee noted: “She is always trying to work out what happens to that ‘myself’—the ‘damned egotistical self’—when it is alone, when it is with other people, when it is contented, excited, anxious, ill, when it is asleep or eating or walking, when it is writing.”

While it may be true that in telling stories we risk objectifying our experiences, I think Woolf’s most significant legacy was to show that, at its best, writing could also re-immerse us in our lives. The very phrase “moments of being” emerged from her belief that there are moments in which an individual experiences something intensely and with awareness, in contrast to the states of “non-being” that dominate most of an individual’s life, in which life is “not lived consciously,” but instead is embedded in “a kind of nondescript cotton wool.” For Woolf, it was the quality of attention and wakefulness intrinsic to a conscious writing life that could take a mundane activity (such as walking in the woods) and make it extraordinary.

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Given how much of their waking life our children spend at school, shouldn’t it be an impossibly magical and wonderful place? You might have your own ideas about what would make a school great (more green space, sustainable architecture, free nutritious lunch programs), and I would readily agree, but to my mind a crucial aspect would be this: a redefinition of merit.

Where I live, the public schools assign letter grades at the end of each term. By grade one most kids are being ranked and filed into categories of lesser or greater achievement, sorted, as education writer Alfie Kohn has described, “like so many potatoes.” These detailed report cards, the ministry of education contends, are necessary for “growing success.” After all, don’t grades motivate students to work harder and hence learn more?

I appreciate that for some people this fixation on goals and evaluation may seem benign or even desirable, but not in my family’s experience. I have never witnessed anything more distorting of my children’s learning and self-esteem.

Excerpted from an essay that appears in the May 2012 issue of Shambhala Sun.

(Drawing by Patrick Dunaway)

The beautiful French edition of Virginia Wolf arrived this morning. I couldn’t be happier with La Pastèque’s exquisite production and Fanny Britt’s translation.

I have always wondered about the left-over
energy, the way water goes rushing down a hill
long after the rains have stopped

or the fire you want to go to bed from
but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down
the red coals more extreme, more curious
in their flashing and dying
than you wish they were
sitting long after midnight

—Adrienne Rich (from “For the Dead”)

“I want every children’s book editor and also every primary and middle school teacher and librarian in America to read this book. It is the antidote to plodding, plot-driven, two-line synopsizable, anti-imagination books. Ounce Dice Trice can be read cover to cover, back to front, middle to end, upside down, any way you like.” —Daniel Pinkwater, NPR

As a child, I remember my father whirling around the world. I seldom knew where he was going. But I knew the news would take him there. I also knew that of all the countries he visited, it was Vietnam that stole his heart. He made his first trip there in 1959, more than a decade before I was born, and continued to revisit on and off over twenty years. He was the first Western television reporter to show the bomb damage to civilian areas caused by American raids (“a countryside bombed so totally that it looked like the craters of the Moon”). In 1969, he broke the news of Ho Chi Minh’s death to the world and was the only reporter invited to attend the funeral. A year later he was the first reporter to interview American Prisoners of War. “In prison cells replete with Christmas trees for the extraordinary occasion, for the first time a few of the POWs are allowed to tell of their conditions and their sentiments.” These interviews caused a stir in the United States. In 1972, he saw the first US air strike on Hanoi. In the late 1970s, he obtained exclusive access to film from Hanoi’s military archives and began work on a comprehensive TV documentary on the war in Vietnam. Dien Bien Phu, My Lai, Khe Sanh… I grew up with the Vietnam War scrolling in the background. I have often wondered what it was like for other children of war reporters.

As a war reporter and later a documentary filmmaker, my father made a life of doing what most people avoid—he rushed towards disaster. He faced forward when others would have looked or run away. For reasons I never fully understood, war beckoned my father. Perhaps the brutal act of fighting was a clearcut expression of the drama of living. Or maybe it allowed him to step into a meaningful narrative. War is a good story. Someone is always losing something.

A few months ago, I clipped an article about a documentary called Under Fire: Journalists in Combat. When the filmmaker, Martyn Burke, was asked why he felt his subjects felt compelled to keep putting themselves in harm’s way, he replied that he didn’t know: “none of them ever gave me a real answer that I could hold onto…There are all the answers that are true—that it’s important, that it brings us news from places we need to know about, that there’s an adrenalin high and more—but there’s this unknowable personal component that’s still floating around in the ether and has not been bottled and examined, and may never be.”

It’s this “unknowable personal component” that continues to fascinate me when I meet people who put themselves in the line of fire. It’s the elusive backstory and motivation, not yet “bottled and examined.” In the end, I think it’s our fictions (the stories we dream up) that allow us to we get closest to these mysteries.

(My drawings of men and women who reported from Vietnam.)

Last week I spoke with CBC’s Michael Enright about Stray Love and my experience growing up with a foreign correspondent father. (The segment aired on March 25, 2012.)

I looked at the bookshelf in my study this morning and found Anne Carson sitting alongside Charles Schultz. I have no idea what they were doing there together, but I would like to think they were having a fruitful conversation. (They both like to draw. They are both observant and funny.)

There are picture books of all kinds on my “grown-up” shelf. Some I pilfered from my children. Some I bought for myself. Some are a little beyond me but I figure I’ll grow into them.

Lately unaccompanied prose feels bereft to me. Perhaps it’s all the time I have spent in the company of my young sons, who believe a book without pictures is a travesty. (Why not just make a book without a binding, or page numbers?)

In the belief that grownups need pictures too, I’ve assembled a selection of adult-friendly visual reads.

Here it is.

1.
A few weeks ago, I spent several afternoons at a book morgue, otherwise known as The Monkey’s Paw secondhand bookshop in Toronto. It was a refuge of sorts. I had been feeling slightly down about writing and wanted to linger in a place of pure bibliophilia. Like many novelists, I tend to experience an existential crisis every time I finish a book. Why bother? Why engage in such an intangible and self-involved vocation when I could be doing something more tangibly and socially useful? (i.e., stopping a pipeline, regrouting the bathroom.) Why write longform narrative in a world that prefers to live swiftly and episodically?

In the past, this soul searching has lodged itself in the personal-neurotic realm. But lately it has ballooned into a broader crisis about how much less novels matter to the mainstream than when I started writing.

I don’t want to sound self-pitying or ungrateful (I’ve been very fortunate) but the work of writing novels — literary fiction no less — just seems an increasingly weird and arcane thing to be doing with my time. It’s fairly obvious when I look around that fewer and fewer people I know and love are reading books. (And, here, I’m not referring to people who are opting to read books on screen over print — I’m talking about reading books period.) They don’t see the point. They’d rather be watching Downton Abbey or clicking through obscure indie news sites. They would prefer to be resting in Supta Baddhakonasana or sitting on a meditation cushion at their neighborhood Sangha. Or hanging out with circus friends in the park or blogging at their local coffee joint. You get the idea. They are drawn to culture, just not the culture of reading books. And to my dismay, this lack of books does not seem to have left a yawning void in their lives.

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