New Author Site
Hello all. In order to promote my upcoming book and to (eventually) be a hub for promoting any published works I do between now and then, I thought it best to have a standalone author site created: mattcahill.ca. This task was handily undertaken by Ingrid Paulson, and it looks great.
Eventually I will start adding pages to the site, to flesh it out (so that it is more than just a page, but an actual “site”).
The question currently stands: what will happen to this here blog? I’m not sure. The more I focus on writing gigs, the less time I have for blogging, and yet – paradoxically – I have more things to blog about because potentially I have more gigs. In other words, there is still a need for the blog, so imagitude will stay where it is and perhaps be linked-to from the author site at some point.
Big News
I’ve been sitting on something pretty big for the last while. Rather than tell you in my own words, I will use one of the rare opportunities in my life where a press release does the talking:
Wolsak & Wynn senior editor Paul Vermeersch has acquired North American rights to Matt Cahill’s debut novel, Someone Else and You (working title). The story is about a man whose life changes irrevocably when he volunteers to take part in a secret society’s time-travel experiment. Kelvin Kong of The Rights Factory arranged the deal.
So yes. This. Huge news.
It’s been a very long road, and while it is not yet over (not by many miles more) I’m grateful for the opportunity to have something of mine released into the public. One less writer polishing his stones, wondering whether to keep bothering.
This would not have been possible without representation from The Rights Factory, specifically my agent (extraordinaire) Kelvin Kong. I look forward to working with everyone at Wolsak & Wynn, particularly my editor, Paul Vermeersch.
Onward and upward. Hugely excited.
Kensington Market Essay in BlogTO
For those who don’t live in Toronto, there’s been a lot of discussion about my neighbourhood, Kensington Market, in the news. Much of it is about preservation vs development. I offered to write an op/ed for BlogTO and they published it today. I’m quite pleased that they kept the essay intact (you never know what an editor’s going to do sometimes). You can read it here.
It feels good to work on my non-fiction chops, and even better when something gets published.
Away
I’ve been terribly busy for the last three years: work, school, new career, new work. No complaints except that my non-academic writing has suffered considerably. I believe I’ve only squeezed out one, maybe two short stories during this time. Of course, the bevy of my attention was on revising my novel (and whatever energy I had left was spent on the subsequent one).
With respect to this here blog, I’ve been unapologetically negligent. I’ve had no choice. Blogging’s great, but it’s the odd man out when it has to compete for creativity-expenditure with other areas. For one thing, it doesn’t pay. Another drag on its sail is the competition that social media plays. Between posting stuff on Facebook and Twitter (between which I don’t consider myself a fanatic contributor), little is left for blogging and I think there’s a problem with that.
Twitter ends up being a Post-It Note for ideas which never get developed. You tell yourself: if I just jot this idea down I can come back to it later. The problem with this otherwise workable concept is that in Twitter-land what you post takes the form of its own singular effort – it’s a public communication unto itself which fulfills a basic function which makes me, the author, forget about what it was I was hoping to say (or develop the idea of) later.
And Facebook is just a mess of “seen this” and “done that”.
And so I come back to blogging, for now, to say firstly that I’m still here. Secondly, to say that I feel there is room for this format, out-dated and seemingly formal compared to Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Soon (I think) I will be able to get back to saying things of note and interest.
Photo: Le Parc de Buttes Chaumont
Photo: Teddy (Howland & Barton)
About Blame, Shame, and the Sacred Altar of Individual Responsibility
[This originally started out as a post on my psychotherapy blog, but became so lengthy and opinion-laced that I figured I’d put it here.]
One comment I hear, particularly in op-ed sections of newspapers, is that as a society we are becoming “soft” (ostensibly because we are beginning to encourage children to discuss their emotions throughout public school life, and not just when they get in trouble or are victimized). Within this same argument is the contention that, thanks to people like me (mental health professionals), everything that is perceived to be wrong with the individual is to be blamed on other people or institutions. Thus, the contention is that individual responsibility is somehow being sapped of its strength.
I see no need to blame anyone for anything. If a client’s parents were too strict when they were growing up, it’s enough to explore it (and its effects) until such a time as the context of those events have a present-day meaning which will allow the client to lead a healthy, durable life and move on. My interest is with the client: their health, their well-being. I have no use for encouraging, casting, or redirecting blame. That is not within the philosophy of the modality of psychotherapy that I am trained in. It is certainly not within my personal philosophy. There’s not much to be gained from vilifying people and things.
Something to note is that many forms of victimization carry with it, primarily, shame (though other feelings may follow closely, like anger). The shame of not being able to avoid the caretaker who struck you. The shame of not being able to speak out about the racial discrimination you experienced in school. The shame of being sexually preyed upon by a coworker. Shame is a very deep hole to climb out of. Just talking about shameful experiences can retraumatize some clients – that is, put them right back in the original emotional context which first scarred them.
Survivors of abuse often feel responsible for their victimization, regardless of how little agency they had at the time they were victimized. In other words, if we are to talk about blame then we should talk about victims of abuse walking around blaming themselves. One of the tasks of therapy is to move the finger of blame away and to look at what has happened to a client with clarity, without an agenda. Then and only then can the process begin of assisting the client out of that deep hole I previously mentioned; assisting by paying close attention, sharing, talking. The client does the heavy work and I’m there to help in every way I can.
I cannot think of something which better defines individual responsibility than someone recognizing that something deep down within them needs to change, and undertaking the time and effort (and pain, and, yes, in the case of working with a therapist, money) to rework their understanding of themselves, to lift themselves to a higher point of view – and all that this entails both in the therapeutic space and in the outside world.
If by “soft” critics mean weak, then the individual who helps herself is not “soft” – she is not weak. She does not blame herself as she once did. She has taken control of herself and has worked hard to build awareness, and through awareness resiliency.
Author Author
I am represented by a literary agency now and, without going into great detail, my novel has undergone some major changes. Mainly structural. The story hasn’t changed, most of the plotting is still intact, no new characters. But some major changes were made and these changes happened very quickly, and as a result I don’t think what I surrendered (because no experienced author would willingly call any work “done”) was the best effort I could have made. And so, when I realized the extent to which the book needed first-aid, I told my agent to hit the brakes – stop distributing the book and ask those publishers who have not yet read it to not, please and thank you.
I’m writing this from the perspective of someone who has just finished, if finished may be used about any art form, a necessary revision. I am relatively new to this – not writing, but revising. There is an art to revision which is as unique as the art of writing itself. This may sound alien to many, but to fellow writers – novelists especially because of the weight of material we are burdened with – this is a necessary conversion: the realization that you cannot know everything, do everything in your first, second, or even seventh revision. And that potentially great ideas not only require blending with the rest of the work, but the time and space to be seen again with fresh eyes and, if need be, changed once again.
When you don’t respect the process – of writing, of revision (because the two are intertwined like the snakes on a caduceus) – you risk damaging your gains. I ended up not happy with what went out under my name and I am not the first nor will I be the last reluctant person to go through this sometimes necessary experience. I have spent the past four months rejigging, reconsidering, reaching deeper, and sometimes just removing clutter. I worked on my laptop, and after that I had the manuscript printed so that I could look at it like a real book, so that I could see what you can’t easily see on a computer screen. I’ve switched and changed, shortened and lengthened, pared-down and elaborated for clarity.
I think it’s ready now. If not “done” then “done enough”. Or, at the very least, I’m done. And, corny and cliché though it may sound, lessons have been learned.
The Pause Button
I don’t believe our identities ever settle, to become static. This isn’t to say that they fly willy-nilly like laundry in a windstorm. There are two great wheels: the one inside of us and the one outside. Both move forward regardless of our individual philosophies.
The outside wheel is time. It is the inevitable movement of progress, the passing-on of events, linking like the teeth of a sprocket on a bicycle chain. Whether we stand still or keep moving, this wheel keeps turning.
The inside wheel is our own development: our learning, the expansion of our comprehension of things, as well as our personal growth. It also keeps moving, again, whether we stand still or move.
Development is growth, and growth is sometimes painful, especially when we suspect we have been travelling on a path which does not intuitively serve our needs any longer. The temptation can be strong to “hit the pause button”; to stop looking at how the outer wheel affects the inner wheel, the learnings contained within their interplay. I’m not sure if it would be fair to call this wilful ignorance, but some would.
I’ve known people, particularly those from school, who seem to have “hit the pause button” at some point in their late teens or early twenties: they dress the same, they obsess about the same music, they ask the same questions they asked at that age – it can seem as if they are exist in a still photo of a past universe. I speculate that they see the larger wheel, the world, turning (one cannot wilfully blind oneself from seeing this), but don’t wish to acknowledge that the inner wheel, identity/personality, still turns and evolves also.
It makes me sad, and yes I realize that is a judgement. I don’t wish to categorize people since we live in a society which already puts such an emphasis on a divisive winners/losers binary. It makes me sad because I have a relational tether to those who are in this way: I know what it’s like. It’s also quite common.
I could speculate all day about whether this is fear-induced, shame-induced, whether (from a psychoanalytically informed perspective) there is a concern about narcissistic rupture at play in this. All I know is that it exists, and that the temptation for some to “keep things the way they are”, regardless that this is kind of impossible, has a strong lure.