In This Issue
His Heart's in the Write Place
Near-death experiences give author new perspective in his writing
BY TERESA PITMAN
 |
| Award-winning author Wayson Choy is writer-in-residence this semester at U of G. Photo by Martin Schwalbe |
Outside the writer-in-residence office in Massey Hall, drama students shout, scream and thump across the room, then burst into applause. Wayson Choy ignores the drama beyond the walls of his small white-painted room. He's too busy translating some of the dramatic events in his own life into stories that reach a diverse audience across Canada.
You want dramatic? Choy's current work-in-progress is a memoir about his two near-death experiences in 2001 and 2005. It also explores the appearance of two ghosts seen only by a restaurant hostess in Vancouver — and how that forced him to re-evaluate his take on reality.
As U of G's writer-in-residence this fall, he will be dividing his time between writing this newest book — titled Not Yet — talking to U of G classes and meeting one on one with students and other members of the University and local communities who are interested in writing.
Choy achieved national fame by telling stories about growing up in Vancouver's Chinatown during the Second World War. His first book, The Jade Peony (1995), spent six months on the Globe and Mail bestseller list and won the Trillium Book Award and the City of Vancouver Award. Paper Shadows: A Chinatown Childhood (1999) won the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction and was shortlisted for several major prizes. In 2004, he published All That Matters, a finalist for the Giller Prize. In 2005, he was inducted into the Order of Canada.
Surprisingly, Choy's success as a writer came later in life. A graduate of the University of British Columbia, he spent most of his career teaching English and communications at Humber College, beginning in 1967. During a sabbatical from Humber in 1977, he returned to UBC to attend a creative writing program and ended up winning a contest for a short story called The Jade Peony, which he wrote for a course taught by Carol Shields. He didn't think much more about the story until 15 years later, when a publisher approached him to turn it into a book.
Despite the success of The Jade Peony and — four years later — Paper Shadows, Choy continued to teach at Humber. “Teaching is still my first love,” he says.
So why did he finally give it up? In 2001, he had an asthma attack and a heart attack and spent 11 days in a coma. When he recovered, he decided to retire from teaching and give writing his full attention. At the time, he thought he was close to finishing All That Matters, but his near-death experience led him to rewrite almost the entire book. “Things deepened. I understood things differently.”
It was worth the rewrite because the book was a Giller finalist and brought him increased recognition. More important for Choy, it expressed his new perspective. He writes to know and understand.
In 2005, he had a second near-death experience: a heart attack and quadruple bypass. He seems to have taken that in stride, too, but emphasizes his gratitude to NDP politician Tommy Douglas for making universal health care available.
Those two near-death experiences are the foundation of the memoir Choy is now working on.
He says it takes him a long time to write a book. “I incubate a lot, then suddenly things happen.”
But even when he begins to write, there's no guarantee the pages will survive to the finished book or even the second draft. Choy says he often writes hundreds of throwaway pages before he gets to the real heart of what he's trying to say.
“The secret of good writing is always in the rewriting. Amateur writers buy into the idea of their first draft being perfect, but real writers know how essential rewriting is.”
Although he's taught creative writing most of his life, he believes no one can teach creativity — only the craft of writing. But the craft is very important. His students would often come to him ready to share their brilliant story ideas, and Choy would stop them and pronounce his rule: “You can tell any story you want if you have the craft.”
Beginning writers often brush aside the idea that they need to learn skills, he adds.
“People will say: ‘Oh, I know I can't spell,' as if spelling would solve their writing problems. But they'll write a sentence and think the sentence says everything, because it's all in their head. They'll say it's dark, and if we ask them to explain how dark, what kind of dark, it takes them a paragraph's worth of words to explain it. Finally they say: ‘Oh, the reader will know what I mean.'”
A real writer is hungry for craft, says Choy. “Some students, if I told them they needed to learn to use the semicolon, would just blank out. They don't want to know. But others will say: ‘Yes, I need that, give me more.' In the same way, painters need to know how to use all their tools, the different brushes, the colour scale, how to create perspective — or they're just dabbling.”
His goal in working with potential writers is to help them discover if they really want to know the craft. If not, he hopes to teach them to become “ideal readers” who respect and understand good writing.
“I write for my own ideal readers — the readers who want to know and who want to explore and expose what is true, and who won't emotionally and mentally turn away from participating with the writer in the discovery of what is true. My ideal readers are those who are awake or who are waking up and need to know something that connects them to others.”
There are more of those ideal readers out there than you might think, Choy adds. “I think people are hungry for serious narratives. They're used to TV sitcoms and detective novels, but they also crave books that speak more deeply, sometimes without even knowing they have that craving.”
Choy is enthusiastic about being at U of G this semester. Writing is a solitary activity that can feel lonely in a primitive kind of way, he says, but being connected to the literary community is an antidote to that loneliness. “I get inspiration from talking to people about their writing.”
Students and others in the community who would like to inspire Choy (and learn a little of the writer's craft) can make an appointment to meet with him on Tuesdays and Thursdays by calling Michael Boterman at Ext. 53147.
On Oct. 17, Choy will give a free public lecture at 5 p.m. in lower Massey Hall. In the talk, titled “A Writer's Progress,” he will discuss Not Yet and how his heart attacks have influenced his writing.