Hello, everyone! Before I get into the main thing I want to share this week, I have a few bits of news.
First, I’m thrilled to be one of the guests of honour for Can*Con 2025, here in Ottawa next October. My fellow guests of honour (so far) are Premee Mohamed and Stephen Kotowych, two people I like very much and whose work I admire.
I was recently interviewed by Jamie Portman for an article that ran in Postmedia papers across the country; it seems to have only appeared in print, so far, but you can read it here if you like.
On Nov. 30, I’ll be in Montreal for an in-person conversation (mostly in English) with Guy Gavriel Kay and Mathieu Lauzon-Disco, at the Joie de livres booth at the Salon du Livre. Tickets are quite reasonable. We’ll also sign books afterward.
Those of you who’ll be in Ottawa on Dec. 10, please come out to the Spaniel’s Tale, where I’ll be one of four authors doing an event to mark the launch of The Topography of Pain, by Ivan Lesay.
It’s hard to believe that my writer-in-residence position at the University of Ottawa will be wrapping up in a few weeks. You can listen to the inaugural episode of their writers in residence podcast, featuring me being interviewed by Ashley Deng. Many thanks to Suyi Okungbowa, Jonathan Degan and Gabrielle Dorr for making it happen.
I mentioned in a previous newsletter that part of my writer-in-residence work was a free workshop here in Ottawa, in collaboration with Artengine. It was an amazing night; we had a full house (sorry if you ended up on the waitlist) and a mix of artists, technical and nonfiction writers, fiction writers, poets and more. It was precisely the kind of community connection I wanted to do, and it also gave me a chance to share some thoughts I’d been keeping notes on since I got the acceptance to the position. I thought a lot about what focus I could bring to the position of writer-in-residence, from my perspective as a historical fantasy author. One concept kept coming up: imagination.
We spent most of the workshop doing group and solo exercises and discussion on that theme (including a fun shared creation involving my typewriter). But I started with about 20 minutes of just sharing my own perspective on the imagination and why it matters.
What follows is an edited version of my notes for that talk. It’s a bit longer than my usual newsletter length, so by all means skip it if you like, but I thought it would be nice to share for anyone who’s interested, or who wanted to attend the workshop and couldn’t.
Notes for “Playing With Ideas”, a workshop in Ottawa, Nov. 18, 2024
Instead of listening to me talk about imagination today, you could ask some chatbot using a large language model to generate something on the same topic.
It would then perform the task it is designed to do, which is to compose something that sounds plausible. It cannot communicate what it thinks on the subject, as it does not think. Since language is communication, it is hard to imagine why you would bother.
And since the ability to think – not only to reason but also to imagine – is central to our humanity, we all lose something every time we choose not to do it.
The imagination is a faculty, one that helps define our humanity both as individuals and in collectives. It has the power to transform us and our communities.
In his novel Baudolino, Umberto Eco wrote, "imagining other worlds, you end up changing this one."
Imagination is the work of transforming ourselves and our world.
The process of imagining is a transformative experience. It isn't the writer's job to impart the story to the reader, like plugging in a cable or taking a pill, but to ask the reader to participate.
Have you ever had the experience of reading something you weren't really ready to read, then coming back to it years later and finding that this time, it clicks?
For me, it was Terry Pratchett. The first time I read one of his books, in my 20s, I didn't get it at all. I thought the humour didn't land, it was silly, it was slight. I now hold the opposite opinion, but as a reader, you have to come to any story with the tools and the readiness to do the work.
Once I was ready, years later, it transformed me in many tiny ways. His witches have helped me to deal with the reality of being a woman of middle age. Not a week goes by in which I don't think about Granny Weatherwax.
She gives me a model, a possible shape I can pour myself into, which makes the advent of old age slightly less terrifying. I wasn't ready to do that when I was 25.
The ability to imagine is the ability to change. An experience is not a piece of information that we file away. The human memory doesn't work like that. It's not a filing cabinet. Every time we remember something, we recreate that experience in a really complicated dance of neurons. An experience literally changes the brain in our heads to turn us into a different person. Experience is transformation.
Imagination isn't just about the act of empathy, about putting ourselves in the position of another. It can conjure a reality that does not exist and has never existed before.
Gretchen McCullough, the linguist and author, sometimes points out on social media examples of the truth that language enables us to understand sentences never said before by the human species.
Some examples she has quoted from headlines include:
"Italian art conservators smeared a bacteria-ridden gel over Michaelangelo statues to clean up stains left by a rotting Medici corpse"
and
"Cocaine in the River Thames is Another Problem Eels Don't Need, Says Expert."
This is what language can do. It can create infinite weird combinations that have never been created before and yet, once created, feel as if they have always existed as potential, in some backstage of our collective subconscious.
We should not take that for granted. We should not demand that writing or reading leave us precisely as we were before. The purpose of writing is to enable the reader to imagine something they would not have otherwise.
We change ourselves as we change the world, and the two processes are inseparable.
I can give you an example of this from my own writing life. I'm currently working on a novel called Mercutio, which is about one of Shakespeare's greatest characters.
The idea had been percolating in the back of my mind for years, as I've always been fascinated with him since the first time I saw John McEnery's portrayal of him in the 1968 film of Romeo and Juliet.
I wondered what Mercutio's own story was, before he came into Romeo's. One day I realized that in the time Shakespeare was writing about, Mercutio might have met the poet Dante Alighieri, and all of a sudden, the novel started to grow in my brain.
I knew that this potential novel existed, and I knew what it should be, in a wordless sort of way–trying to explain it fully to someone else would require actually writing all of it first, like making a 1 to 1 map of a territory.
A novel is not just the idea for a novel; it is every word of the novel.
So it would be just as easy to write the book as to explain how to write the book to someone else, even if that someone else existed who wanted to write it.
But how could I get the chutzpah to write a novel riffing off the material of Shakespeare and Dante, two of the greatest writers who ever lived? How could I write Mercutio, of all the characters, this great, charismatic wit? Who do I think I am?
Like many people, especially women, I have an intimate relationship with imposter syndrome. If I were going to wait to believe myself truly worthy of writing any story – I would be waiting forever.
So I take a sideways approach. When it came to Mercutio, I asked myself: OK, if I were going to pretend to be the sort of writer who could pull this off, what would I do?
Well, first of all, I'd research. I'd read everything I could about the play and its sources, about Dante's works and sources and peers, about Italy in the 14th century. I can do that. I can read.
I'd take my time over every sentence, writing and rewriting until it read like the kind of sentence the sort of writer who could pull this off would write.
And this is how, bit by bit, you turn yourself into the sort of writer who can write the sorts of things you want to write. You imagine what you would need to do, and then you do it. Of course this is only possible when we have the time and energy to do the work, but the work is what matters. Imagination is a skill. It's a muscle that we can exercise.
There's a quotation from Octavia Butler, the great science fiction writer, that I have encountered many times online, although I've never been able to find the source. (There are some sources cited on the internet, but I spent an afternoon tracking them down and found that the quotation is not actually in any of those sources, so, don't believe everything you read on the internet.) But the quotation is very much in line with what I know of her philosophy and it's a beautiful one.
It goes: "Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself."
The power of that sentiment! That we can determine who we will be. Through our imaginations, we shape ourselves into what we choose to become. Writing is an act of choosing: this way and not that way.
In other words, it's a way of exercising freedom.
Individual self-determination is antithetical to authoritarianism. The authoritarian instinct is to lay down rules according to the perceived immutability of the human condition. All people are either this or that, us or them.
It is imagination that allows us to think outside of those boxes.
That isn't to say that authoritarianism doesn't tell stories. It absolutely does. But the stories told by a state to control its citizens are intended to become canon, unquestionable, accepted.
To return to Umberto Eco, in his essay Ur-Fascism, he wrote that one feature of fascism is the insistence that "truth has been already spelled out once and for all."
An authoritarian narrative does not create space for anyone to create oneself.
It demands that everyone think and imagine in unison, like the children bouncing balls on the planet Camazotz in Madeleine L'Engle's novel, A Wrinkle in Time.
Authoritarians fear the human ability to create something new, something unpredictable. Authoritarians fear diversity, which is what you get when you allow humans to all develop their individual imaginations.
When we talk about the imagination being highly individual, it isn't just the content or the result of the imagination, but how the imagination works.
I recently had a conversation with several other writers about what exactly is happening in our subjective experience when we draft a scene in a novel or a short story.
Some writers see a movie happening before their mind's eye, and their job is to copy it down before it vanishes.
I am not one of those writers. For me, if I visualize anything, it tends to be the actual words on the page, in black and white, as if my imagination were a typewriter.
Others in the group said they don't visualize at all; instead, they hear the words as they write them.
At least one writer said he sees a comic book – not a movie, but a series of stills.
Not only do we imagine different things from each other, but we imagine differently. The notion of imagination is inextricable from the concept of the self.
To imagine is human and to imagine is individual. Alongside the fact of our birth and the fact of our death, it is one of the very few things we do alone.
And yet, our imaginations feed into and draws from a vast pool of collective imagination, in a process so seamless that it's almost impossible to imagine what our imaginations would be like if we were solitary creatures.
It strikes me that so many of us, when we're trying to describe our subjective, individual experience of imagination, reach for analogues in works or objects created by other humans: typewriters, films, comics.
Not only do our individual imaginations create our selves, but our collective imagination shapes our individual imaginations. We understand our own experience through the mediating influence of the creations of other people.
The human imagination constantly creates and recreates humanity, and it also constantly creates and recreates our environments.
Italo Calvino wrote a short story called The Count of Monte Cristo, a reimagining of the novel by that name by Alexandre Dumas. In Calvino's story, Edmond Dantes, the prisoner, tries to imagine how escape might be possible – including the possibility that he is being written into a story by a man named Alexandre Dumas.
The final lines are: "If I succeed in mentally constructing a fortress from which it is impossible to escape, this conceived fortress either will be the same as the real one—and in this case it is certain we shall never escape from here, but at least we will achieve the serenity of one who knows he is here because he could be nowhere else—or it will be a fortress from which escape is even more impossible than from here—and this, then, is a sign that here an opportunity of escape exists: we have only to identify the point where the imagined fortress does not coincide with the real one and then find it."
It's a wonderful idea: escape from all our prisons consists in imagining how they might be otherwise.
An essay by Susan Griffin tells a story about the surrealist poet Robert Desnos, in the concentration camp, suddenly reading the palms of the condemned men around him, giving them imagined futures, which so shook the guards that they did not go through with the execution that day.
Of course we cannot deny the brutal reality around us, but if we want to create a world without genocide, or anthropogenic climate change, or rape culture, we begin by imagining what that world would look like.
This is frequently one of the functions of speculative fiction. In Waubgeshig Rice's novel The Moon of the Crusted Snow, an unspecified apocalypse cuts an Anishinabeg community off from Canadian society and the rest of the world. The community transforms itself into what it needs to become to survive – and in the process, this story contributes to a possible model for the real future.
Imagination is a way out, a way forward. It is crucial that we maintain that faculty, keep it sharp, to deal with the challenges of this century.
We imagine ourselves as an infinite number of individuals, in opposition to the fascist insistence on sameness.
We imagine communities that serve those individuals well.
As Granny Weatherwax said about the theatre, in Terry Pratchett's novel Wyrd Sisters, it was magic that "was commanded by ordinary people, who didn’t know the rules. They altered the world because it sounded better."
I love that – they altered the world because it sounded better.
So how do we begin? Between the possible and the impossible? We begin by being ordinary people, by being utterly human, by not knowing the rules. By refusing to be led by algorithms, programs or parameters set for any reasons that we do not choose for ourselves.
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