Ryan Turner

On Sunday, May 22nd, I’ll be reading at Obsolete Records on Agricola as part of the Long Live the Queen music festival. It’s at 1pm. Come on out.

I’ll be discussing various aspects of fiction with my Hungry Minds fiction workshop cohorts: Shandi Mitchell, Sue Goyette, Sheree Fitch, Stephen Kimber, Stephens Gerard Malone, Valerie Compton and Donna Morrissey. It’s happening at the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia this coming Thursday at 7pm. Only $5 at the door.

Today I finished a first draft of the complete manuscript. It’s been a long and arduous journey, and there’s still a long way to go, but I have my first group of readers sifting through it. When they’re through, then come revisions and a smaller group of readers and then further revisions. And yet I know I’ll wake up tomorrow and be unable to hold myself back. I’ve spent most of the last eight years carving out these precious bits of time, and invariably the attraction of the process, the ritual, is too strong for me to resist.

I just finished The Love of a Good Woman for the second time, and now I’m into Summertime. I read Disgrace six months ago. It’s taken me all these years to discover Coetzee, though I wonder if I would have appreciated his work before, when I was twenty or twenty-five. It’s incredible how much taste changes, how much time shapes my view of what is good writing, and I wonder if this is a process of maturity that will level off, or if in twenty years I’ll find myself struggling to grasp what it was that engaged me about the books I love now. There aren’t many books I truly love or writers I fully trust. I tend to enter a book like a child starts out on a frozen lake, both hopeful and cautious, anxious to give myself over, for that moment when I can trust it with the full weight of my body.

He decided to get a gift for Milla. It would be a thank-you for all she’d done for him. For decades he’d stolen, but he couldn’t recall the last time he’d given something away. In the city, he parked and took Voshgorodskaya Street past two large greenhouses and the state garden. On a side street he remembered the potters and ceramists with their dusty displays in shopfront windows. He crossed at a light and ducked beneath the sea of awnings. At the far end was a philately shop. It was a place he’d frequented when he’d last lived in Kiev. The thing about a stamp is that it’s a passport to anywhere. He passed the metal display case with the bronze magnifier, the stacks of triple-ringed binders, two pairs of stamp tongs like the tools of a thief.

He crossed the room and descended the corkscrew staircase. It wasn’t stamps but currency that had most intrigued him. In grade school, he’d kept a book of bright flags aside pastel denominations. Money was pink and gold and yellow-brown. It had pictures of Ephesus. The face of Ataturk. He remembered a woman picking cotton on the Angolan kwanza, the temple of Confucius on the Vietnamese dong. Entire worlds abstracted. Life as symbols or charts of numbers. The power of the pound and the deutsche mark. He imagined men in restaurants on Wall Street tossing loose change into fountains, their amused tales of absurdity: thirty million Nicaraguan cordoba worth one American dollar. The Hungarian pengo worth less than a single grain of Saharan sand.

He recalled the days when he’d first gone to Switzerland. It had seemed strange to him when people first talked of money in terms of tens and twenties. He’d been used to the dinar, to the Turkish lira. In Yugoslavia, inflation had run rampant, from being worth a half of an American dollar fifty years earlier to having set the world record for the least valuable currency in the world.

He approached the white-haired man standing at the counter.

I’m looking for a gift for someone. It’s a Swiss franc, he said. The obverse should have a Giacometti.

The man cleared his throat and disappeared into another small room and from there into a closet. The rooms themselves like Russian dolls. When he returned he held a plastic sheath with a line of banknotes. He didn’t have the Giacometti.

I have Arthur Honegger, he said. Le Corbusier.

In his first winter in Geneva, Darko had given him a book about Swiss art, and The Fin had set it inside a kitchen cupboard with a cookbook and the mail that kept arriving for a man he’d never known. It was halfway through the second winter, when a storm had surged and the power gone out, that he’d gotten around to opening it up and turning the first page in the light of a candle. He read of Paul Klee and Albert Anker, but what had drawn his attention were the elongated and slender sculptures of Giacometti that seemed “to tremble on the edge of movement.” Years later, after his infatuation with the artist had fully bloomed, he’d read a book by David Sylvester that he felt described them best: “They are insubstantial, fragile, their surface looks as if it might have been corroded merely by exposure to light. And they stand there like petrified trees or the tapered columns of Persepolis.”

In mid-December I spent a week in Williamsburg, New York City staying with Chris Tarry, a musician-friend I met at the Banff Arts’ Centre in May. It was my first time in New York at Christmas, and it was well worth the storm-filled 17-hour drive. I go to New York every year, and each time it’s as though I’m encountering a whole new city. I spent most of my time in Brooklyn (in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, then Brooklyn Heights). We found an amazing little chocolate factory called Mast Brothers where they hand-wrap each bar right there as you walk in. We also stumbled on a second-hand shop that had thousands upon thousands of personal photographs. An old woman on a beach with her dog. A group of girls at a high school graduation. An old man rocking his sleeping granddaughter (perhaps). The photographs seemed to span every decade and contain people from every possible walk of life. My main question (which I never asked) was where the pictures all came from. Why people would want others to come across these private moments in a pawnshop on sale 10 for a dollar was a mystery. I felt both curious and guilty as I stood at the very back of the store, the aisles of which were so crowded with crates and garbage bags blocking more crates and more garbage bags they were nearly impassable. The photographs filled Rubbermaid containers and dresser drawers. Some had spilled out over the creased linoleum of the floor around me. There were books and records and video games and a million old magazines. I could have sifted through the mess for days.

The shadow-branches of the nearest tree are flailing in the window.  I’m at my writing desk in the spare bedroom. Beside me is the lamp with the dimmer that I do my best to conserve. It’s the perfect light with a strange tube-bulb that I know I’ll never replace.

I’ll be reading on the Main Stage at 1:30pm at Word on the Street in Victoria Park on Sunday. It looks like it’ll be a beautiful fall day.

Shandi Mitchell’s Virgo party was a combination of campfire songs and apple pie. One of the guitar players had not only brought a bagful of shakers and tamborines but a strap-on headlamp to read the book of song lyrics he’d painstakingly assembled. Shandi showed me the riverfront writing studio she and her husband share. It’s an amazing space that still smells like wood, and I thought, I could build one of those. First all I need is a river.

After a couple great days of writing (I’m getting close to completing the third chapter of my novel, which I’m figuring is about half way), I was excited to see that I’ve made the ReLit shortlist with six other authors. I celebrated with a trip to Lawrencetown Beach, where E and I battled the waves until sundown. All in all, a good day.