Forever Wala Love

What's the connection between being an astronaut and being a novelist? I hadn't really thought about it until I talked to the astronaut-turned-writer Chris Hadfield about his new thriller Final Orbit. Every week on the podcast bookends, I sit down with today's best authors for candid conversations about their writing, inspirations, and lives. You'll get to see the world through the eyes of your favorite writers, and they might even take you to outer space too. Bookends with Materia Roach is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. So there is a new book out right now. It's called "Bread Alone." What happens when we run out of working-class writers? It's an anthology of essays edited by Kate Pasola where working-class writers raise the question, "Who gets to have a career in writing?" I'm Elimina Bimai-Mood. This is commotion. Nico Stratis is here, Katherine Hernandez is here, Deborah Dundas is here. Hello to all of you. Hello. Hello. It's nice to have you here. Listen, this book sort of made me sort of want to ask the question. I just want to understand where we are in this country, in Canada. When it comes to understanding all this, Deb, I'll start with you. Who gets to have a career in writing? People who know how to get into the industry and get their stuff published. People who have the resources. To write, the resources are time and money. Those are the ones who are most likely to be able to write in this country. Writers make from their writing only about between 10 and 12 thousand dollars a year. That's true for Canada, for the US, for the UK. That's sort of a benchmark sort of averaging across. So if you don't have the rich benefactor or you didn't marry well or you don't have a family trust, then you've got to work however many jobs to actually be able to afford this. Which of course takes away some of the time you have to write. We know writing for an hour or night is fine. There are so many people recommend that. But when you're doing something creative, I'm saying, okay, I'm going to go and sit down and think for this hour. It doesn't work like that. Those are the things that make the most difference. And connections. Who do you know? Publishing, traditional publishing is hard to get into. So that much depends on who you know. Which I think partly is why self-publishing is taking off like gangbusters because there's no mediation. I want to come back to a couple of the themes that you just raised there, especially the idea of resources and also the idea that when you just show up after having worked a whole day, you don't just walk up to your computer and go, I am now at my most creative and I'm ready to sort of generate all of these ideas you need space and these things sort of need a little bit of time. Nico, you've been a professional writer for around 10 years or so, but recently said in an interview, quote, I have a job that I just still don't feel like I deserve because I didn't go to school for it and never came up as a writer. You know, I'm a glass worker from the Yukon. What business do I have being a professional writer? You're asking a few questions in that quote there. What stories did you learn about class that made you believe, you know what, I don't think I belong here in the world of professional writers. You know, I so I grew up in the Yukon and yeah, you know, I'm a third-generation glider by trade. My dad is my dad is 72 or so. I apologize for saying my dad's age on the air in case I got it wrong, but you know, he still works in a glass shop. My grandfather worked in a glass shop. It is a trade that I was born into and when I was in high school and when I started to show that I was falling behind and failing, I had teachers that would tell me, if you don't succeed here, you will end up working like your dad. As if going into a skilled trade was a threat or it was a mark of failure of some kind and I eventually did. I didn't really fully graduate from high school. I went to trade school. I became a journeyman in my early 20s, but I was often told to my face that the job that I was doing was something that was beneath everybody else. That was performing labor because I hadn't succeeded. People often told me that my job was what I did when you don't graduate from high school. So, you know, and I really ever expected anything from me. In fact, whenever I showed any sort of sign or hint of intelligence, people were almost surprised because my job was manual labor. You know, like I can lift a sheet of glass, but can I think? I mean, I often question that even now. So now I have this creative job. My job is I sit at computer and I conjure words. I sit and think. And A, it feels really bad because my job used to be I work for 15 hours a day and then when I get home, I'm covered in blood and dirt and I lie in the floor and my body feels really bad. And now a hard day is like, well, I had to write 2000 words today and I got 1700. And it feels kind of fake, but also like so often because I didn't come up as a writer and I don't have an education and I've published author and I've done all these things. I don't feel like I've earned it because I was told repeatedly that I didn't deserve to have anything more than working a labor job because it's all a failure like me had earned in this life. First of all, you guys have 1700 words in a day. You don't have a good day. You have to just show up and flex on all of those like this. But I'm interested in that notion that idea that performing labor is a sign of failure. This idea of inheriting that sort of idea. Was that something that was explicitly said to you? Was that something that you sort of picked up through as most as by watching other people and how they sort of treated the idea that you have to perform labor for living? I mean, it's both things, right? You know, think about the central conceited movie Goodwill Hunting. Well, we're supposed to like, it's so surprising that the guy who is a janitor can also solve a complex math equation because we don't allow both things to be true, right? You can either work with your hands or you can be smart, but you're never really allowed to be both. And because I was told repeatedly that I was never allowed to be both, I sort of absorbed that. And once you start carrying that weight on your shoulders, it is really hard to shake that off. I've been a writer for a long time. But every day, I'm like, "Ah, but somebody's going to find out I'm a fraud sooner or later." Because I don't have that. I don't have an MFA. I didn't graduate from my school. Yeah, you think it's going to be like a writer, police, who show up and go like, "Ah, excuse me, this has been an error." Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, this writing award that you were nominated for six times in one once, we're going to take that back. That's a real anxiety. This is a real anxiety sort of looms in the room. Catherine, let me turn to you. Your novels largely center working class people. Your first novel, Scarborough One, Many Awards was made into a movie. I want to play a clip of you. I want to play this clip of you at an awards show. You're presenting, you're speaking to the nominees at the writer's stress awards in 2019. If you're a shortlister, can you place a hand on your heart and listen to my voice? It's okay if I don't win. I am not a loser. Although, it would be kind of nice to win and make rent and not have to return this dress. Catherine, first of all, I love that speech that you were giving. But more importantly, I love the juxtaposition of the idea of the gathering at this fancy gala where people are there to say, we are here to celebrate the glitz and glam with the literary world, but also you're trying to get something else across. What are you trying to get across there? Well, first off, I can you if I could make these really nervous shortlisted authors laugh, it would really help them feel present for this momentous achievement. Secondly, there's a reason why these authors were nervous. Many of us live on the razor's edge of survival being paid very little to create our work as Debra was saying. And winning a prize in any artistic field, it feels like winning the lottery. You have a better chance at making ends meet and continuing your life's work. And I know this first hand just, you know, just before Scarborough was published, I was in precarious housing. I was operating a home daycare. I was living hand to mouth and to go from being working fast for person stretching for spare change just to buy a dozen eggs to hobnopping with the ruling class at Gala's. It was and it is like seriously discombobulating. Do you want to talk a little bit more about that because I feel like that's an experience that maybe people don't hear enough about. What has been your experience navigating all of these industry type events with the tags still on on your dress? Well, I remember one member that comes to mind is that like I was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Awards and all of the shortlisted authors were going to do a reading and I went up to do my reading. And I told the audience like on the mic, I was like I'm having a bit of a difficult time adjusting because not three months before I was changing diapers at the home daycare I was operating. And I made a joke and I asked the audience if they needed to go poor pee before my pee. Everyone laughed. It was like, you know, good laugh. But there's like, you know, this cognitive cognitive dissonance there because I am being lauded for creating work about people navigating broken systems by some of the very people in tuxes and in evening gowns where benefiting from these broken systems. Right. So even now, during these events, I find myself, I'm often, you know, hanging out in the fringes of the room with like the catering staff or the code check hearing about their lives. And these are diligent working class folks ensuring that we're having an enjoyable evening and they ground me. They tether me to reality so that I'm not lulled into this myth that the predatory capitalism tells us which is some lives are more important than others. The thing that connects your experience and Niko's experience, I feel, is this notion that class is actually always in the room, always in operation, even when people are sort of trying to ignore it as much as possible. And and and and and class is like, there's a sense that being working class is actually the threat in the room, the sort of the Hey, this could happen to you at a moment's notice. Deb, you literally wrote the book on this. You wrote a book called On Class. Why do we avoid talking about class, do you think? What's a thing that prevents class from becoming visible in these conversations? >> Both Nico and Catherine have brought up exactly what it is belonging, cognitive dissonance, shame. Am I wearing the right thing? Am I doing the right thing? Am I saying the right thing? It's not a milieu where used to being it. So I talked about some big gala in my book. One of them was an art fundraiser. I was invited because of being in the media, my role at the star. There were the richest people in the city there. Then there were all the writers there and some middle management. It is the most bizarre confluence of people because you've got three different parties going on. Sometimes people will talk to each other. At each table, there's a writer. Some of the rich people, some of the middle management is like all of them. They're all looking at each other and going, "Huh, what do we say to each other?" [LAUGHTER] They're awkward now. With my book, it was interesting because I started talking about class with them because that's what I was there to do. I've been at that same thing without being there because of my book. It's a completely different experience because I was there as one of the middle management types as opposed to as the writer. Being there as the writer was completely different. There's a certain degree of respect to get as a writer, whether they like what you've written or not. My table was very simpatico. That was greater. They pretended to be whatever. It was pleasant. It was lovely. Then two of them actually emailed me. The next day I said, "Did you know that in your book, there's a story about an event exactly like we were at last night?" [LAUGHTER] Yeah. How mysterious. I wonder how that got there. I'm curious. So they got a whole different perspective on the event that they experience as part of the elite. Of course. It was quite interesting. It must be a fascinating vantage point for you, Deb. You're now the opinion editor of the Toronto Star, but for a long time you're the books editor of the Toronto Star. That means you get to see first hand the stories that do get published in the stories that aren't. Whose stories get published and whose stories don't? How do you think class plays into the editorial and publishing decisions of the books that we do end up actually getting? As Nico said, she wasn't supposed to be able to write. She wasn't supposed to be able to think. People are dismissed because of their education, their stories, their whatever. They're not celebrated. They're not brought into the fold. And said, "Here, you need resources to write. Here they are. Same thing happened to me in high school. So you don't get stories from working class people as much because they're not encouraged." So then there are those who actually make it through like Catherine. And she has to pass by not only that, but also the gatekeepers in publishing. And gatekeepers sound like a really, you know, Wizard of Oz type of word. Here we are keeping people away, but they make the decisions as to what's going to get published based on what they think is going to sell, what they relate to as well, how the storytelling is done. So there's a bit of a homogeneity sometimes because I went to a conference once and here in Toronto publishing conference. And I actually tweeted out, "Why are all the people in this conference white ladies with brown hair and ponytails?" Right? You have a certain homogeneity. That's getting better, I think. And that's particularly amongst the big publishers. It's getting better now, but they decide. One person, one writer I know was writing about his experience as a poor kid. And the editor said, "Well, this doesn't sound the way the 12-year-old would talk." He's like, "Okay. Well, how is a 12-year-old who has had to take care of his father, take care of the bills, do this, and do that supposed to talk?" Of course he knows that stuff. That's his life. But to her, it was unrealistic. Okay, I think that is a good place to pause. We'll be right back after this break. Hi, I'm Jamie Pusson and I host the Daily News Podcast, Frontburner, and lately I'll see a story about, I don't know, political corruption or something and think, during a normal time, we'd be talking about this for weeks. But then it's almost immediately overwhelmed by something else. On Frontburner, we are trying to pull lots of story threads together so that you don't lose a plot. So you can learn how all these threads fit together. Follow Frontburner wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Elimine Abdelmahmoud and this is "Comotion." There is a new book out right now. It's called "Bread Alone" edited by Kate Pissola. It's got all of these essays by Working Class writers. Deborah Dundas, Catherine Hernandez, and Nico Stratus are all here. Nico, how do some of the barriers we've been talking about inform the kinds of Working Class narratives that we actually end up getting to read? It's a problem that we see a lot of, where, often with Working Class stories, you want them to fit into these two poles of whether it's inspirational or you're supposed to look at how sad this person's life is or whatever. Working class people are a spectrum of people, too. People that are working class that have different backgrounds, that have different access to things and all of these ideas. So often, when we talk about Working Class stories, they are supposed to be this thing that really makes you think as opposed to something that is letting you see somebody who is alive in their own way because we don't really like to think of Working Class people as being alive. We like to think of them in service of other people or better people or something that you can look at and feel like, well, thank God that isn't me or something you can look at and be like, well, they made it. They're not fully fleshed out. The middle is harder. I remember when I was watching the bear and I remember tweeting out like, they should do with the bear, but it's in skill trades and somebody replied to me and said, well, the problem is that nobody thinks a plumber's life is interesting. I said, this is exactly the problem. You think that people that work with their hands don't have an interesting enough life. This is a problem we will continue to have until we start to imagine those could be bigger. Those stories that exist in the middle could be just as engaging if not more so, but they don't exist in this place where you can sort of give them a prestige. Oh, you can give them. There's like a certain penache to do the kind of stories that break through. The kinds of stories that Nico is talking about, the kind of stories that do end up getting made, those quite often actually that narrow band of, you know, quite often seen as sort of like, hey, here's inspiring work that is sort of the overcoming hardship. Why are those stories so desired by the middle and upper classes? Why do we sort of see at least that narrative created over and over again, do you think? Well, in short, it's to celebrate our supposed resilience, but not to push for sincere and sustainable change. If you consider how the ruling class remains cultural gatekeepers, Deborah was talking about, you know, you think about who are heading the foundations, who are the folks who have the ability to actually attend a funding jury. And remember, in order to be part of a funding jury, you actually have to be able to take the day off, a couple days off sometimes from your day job in order to attend it. And they're the ones who are making the decision as to who's getting the money to do the art, right? If you look at artistic leadership in any art form, TV executives, right, we're not looking at working class poor folks. We're rarely looking at any diversity whatsoever. We're looking at people who will most likely feel discomfort if they are challenged to consider all the reasons why the working class poor even exists because they should it, that people should never have to struggle like that. So it's this conundrum writers are often put in. We are, we're expected to create material that sparks conversation or, you know, dare I think titillates the ruling class with our suffering, but we are admonished for pushing for action, rage and grief. Katherine, let's push this back to you and your work, but in that case, if you, how do I put this, if you sort of exist in a world where you're like, I kind of know what stories they want from me. I know the stories that people are going to. So go with the, yes, that's a working class story that I kind of expect. How do you navigate in terms of like having the background that you have? And then also knowing the kinds of stories and you're like, give us more of this Catherine. And then you go, no, that's not the thing that I'm going to do. How do you, how do you navigate that difference? Hmm, you know, like I knew right away that if I could move so quickly into being middle class. that I could easily move back into poverty in the blink of an eye. If I did not fall in step with the expectations that the ruling class has for me, right? And that's a real possibility right now with this right wing backlash on diverse writers. So you learn the hard way that when you're often the only brown woman in a room fighting for a seat at the table, when I have literally been told to soften my approach at calling out these inequities, my career continues to pay the price. This is the truth. So I guess for me, the question, like instead of saying, you know, like how do I navigate my career? Like I could reframe this and say, like am I navigating my career? Or am I navigating my humanity? And for me, in this time of great dehumanization, humanity wins hands down. You know, I am a storyteller. I will continue to tell stories, even if my writing, even if I'm like writing just like on the side of the wall or on like the skin on my arm, I'm going to continue telling stories, whether or not the ruling class wants me to and good luck trying to stop me. - I certainly wouldn't ever try to stop you. That has not succeeded for anybody else. Do you want to talk a little bit about the costs to you in terms of, because you said there's been a cost to your career in terms of the stories that you've chosen to focus on. Just want to give you quickly a moment to expand on that a little bit. If you'd like. - Sure. I mean, I definitely being both in books and in film, I think that there is, I remember, so imagine writing a book called Crosshares, which is about, it is about a resistance that fights against a, fights against a fascist regime in Canada, putting people who are QT BIPOC, the elderly and the disabled into work houses after financial and environmental collapse. Sounds pretty familiar, right? That book is not the most, that book was actually like a huge financial failure. But it is a very, like I've received so many messages from people from the United States going, "Whoa, how did you know that ice was going to exist?" - Right. - I saw the writing on the wall. It's not like if, you know, like ice is obviously, it's following this well-worn pattern of fascism, right? And I saw the writing on the wall. I knew it was going to happen. I wrote the book. I didn't understand that it was a book that was very difficult for people to read because I knew writing it that I was like, I want to issue a warning. Is that, was that book popular? No, absolutely not. What off the books that people really like is that they want to be told nicely about how, about what kind of change needs to be had for these kinds of struggles to exist, to stop existing. I know that that, when people think that it's quite radical to hear that, it's like, I just don't feel like, as we're meeting the twilight of our existence as humans, that we are, that we have any time to play nice. And my art, the art that I create is a nice, I'm not a nice brown woman. And so it's hard for people to digest that. And I kind of, at this point, I really just want to be able to die with dignity with, you know, as we're facing again, the twilight of our existence. I want to be able to be a dignified artist right up until the very end. I think there's something about being able to weave in the reality of being a working class person, the reality of just the world into your work, that sort of gives it that honesty and that stability. So Nico, I want to give you the last word here. So many working class narratives aren't actually made by working class people. As a lot of people in the industry seem to sort of cosplay being working class. What do we lose when working class people are not involved in crafting those narratives? - I mean, we lose a lot of, like, just like we've been talking about, like, we get a distorted view of like, well, what are the needs of the working class? What are we facing? What are we up against? What is, what is bearing down on us? You know, the minute that the people that have, like, then on the ground perspective on those ideas, aren't the ones telling the stories, and are instead people that like to say they're working class with their parents, pay all their bills or whatever, you know, we start to lose perspective on like, well, what are we up against? What are we fighting against? What do we need? Where are we? Who are tailing stories that we need to hear and why? Like, when those things start to wash away in the river, all's where left is with sand and nothing, and it's just like, you know, we need to have people that are telling complicated stories about, you know, existing in these, in whatever we want to call them margins, which is where most people are living now. With the resources they need and the support, they need to be able to tell these stories and know, if I tell this story, I'm not going to go away afterwards. I'm going to be able to tell more. I'm going to be able to talk about it. I'm going to be able to have a stage and a microphone and continue this conversation so that it doesn't go away. You know, and without that, I worry that our material conditions aren't going to improve because we're going to assume that they're fine because the people that, for whom it's already fine, are the ones telling the story. I think that's a really good place to leave it. I really appreciate your insights. I just unfortunately had a time. I could talk about this for another hour or so, but in the meantime, I really appreciate you guys being here. Thank you so much for your time and for your thoughts. I really appreciate it. Thanks again. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Nico Stratis is the author of the dad rock that made me a woman. Deborah Dundas is an opinions editor of the Toronto star. She's also the author of the book on class. Catherine Hernandez is an author, screenwriter, and the showrunner for the unstoppable Jenny Garcia. That is it for the podcast today. This week, commotion was produced by Stuart Burman, Thai calendar, Jean Kim, Jane Van Kuverden, Jess Low and Nicki Manfredi. Our new producers are Vanian Wattabjian, Emilia Agpah, Julia Whalen, Ray Mona and Sabina Wex. Our engineer is Sam Hashmi, and also I want to say thank you to the crew that helped put together our Hamilton live show earlier this week, especially around day Williams and Chris Jackson. Our director, Daniel Grogan, John Perry, is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Bayza Saifa. I'm Elamin Abdelmahmoud, and we will see you on Monday. [MUSIC] For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca/podcasts.