Writing Life: Celebrated Canadian and International Authors on Writing and Life

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University. She is the author of several books, including The
Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret
Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

In Writing Life, 50 substantial Canadian writers discuss what writing
means to them, and how it challenges, directs, and redirects their
lives. In her excellent introduction, Constance Rooke helps readers to
imagine what it means to be a writer: “What are the writer’s
responsibilities? What are the greatest challenges, miseries, and joys?
And what lies at the heart of the author’s need to write?”

All writers borrow and reshape what they have taken. In “Five Visits
to the Word Hoard,” Margaret Atwood acknowledges that her essay is
both a tribute to Robert Bringhurst’s excellent translations of the
Haida poet Skaay as well as to our Anglo-Saxon poets, who used the word
to signify treasure.

In “Some Thoughts on Writing,” Alistair Macleod observes that he
always liked to discover new things, and one road to discovery was
reading about the thoughts, worries, and observations of others. His
university courses on literature sparked ideas for writing his own
stories. He takes pleasure in learning that other cultures very
different from his own have read his work in translation, and comments:
“This may well be what ‘the writing life’ signifies: that it is a
life of communication which helps us to recognize the great within the
small, and makes us feel less lonely than we are.”

Alice Munro’s catchy title, “Writing. Or, Giving Up Writing”
suggests, as the reader soon discovers, that the frequency of telephone
calls when she is writing makes her very nervous. She remains puzzled as
to why she continues to write, and continues to find that activity
“irresistible.” In “Writing Lives,” Rosemary Sullivan describes
biography as “an act of revenge against death, a rebellion against the
impossible fact that life can disappear so easily.” In short, she
concludes, “Biography is an elegiac art; it is a gesture of
remembering.”

Proceeds from Writing Life will go to support Pen Canada’s work to
help writers in prison throughout the world and to defend freedom of
expression.