A decade in Toronto - 7

Che and Mahrukh on our weekly bus ride

Che in his new glasses

Immigration is all about losing one’s identity and gaining a new one. It is about finding oneself in a new environment, making friends, trusting strangers. Often, this process is not easy. In our case, we came to Toronto without knowing anyone here. So, we had no choice but to trust strangers. And, in retrospect, it’s worked out well.

In the middle of the Sheridan program, Joyce Wayne recommended me to Antanas Sileika, the dean at Humber School for Writers, to volunteer for its week-long intensive writing program conducted annually in summer. My co-students never forgave me for what they subsequently described was "blatant favouritism." 

The program was to commence in July at Humber’s picturesque Lakeshore Boulevard campus. I dressed in my best official suit to meet Antanas, but by the time I could reach the campus, a brief but intense rainstorm drenched me to my bones.

Antanas welcomed me to the program and placed me in an all-women group led by author Isabel Huggan. I Googled her name and went to the Amesbury library to borrow Isabel's linked short story collection The Elizabeth Stories. Reading it before meeting her made my interaction with her easy. My new acquaintance with Canadian literature – thanks to having browsed through the two volumes of Canadian literature in English that Joyce had insisted all her students at Sheridan buy – also helped.

The Elizabeth Stories is a fine collection of short stories. Isabel was pleased that I’d read it and liked it. Her group, which I assisted, comprised seven women, all working on their manuscripts and all deeply engaged in the process of creating. Isabel’s approach to writing was introspective. And she also gave me my writing mantra: “All writing is rewriting.”

The one session that remains etched in my memory even though nearly a decade has passed by, involved remembering a favourite photograph from one’s life and looking for what is missing in that photograph.

With the Humber Summer Workshop group

The exercise took all the participants in different directions, and many of them teared up when describing their experience of talking about their favourite photograph and then for the first time ever looking for what was missing in the photo. I guess Isabel’s purpose for conducting this exercise was to make all the participants understand the importance of unburdening one’s emotions and be true to oneself.

There were several simultaneous sessions going on at that time conducted by illustrious authors. They included Wayson Choy, Martin Amis, and Nino Ricci. I couldn’t have celebrated my first anniversary in Toronto any better. The Humber School’s summer workshop was perhaps instrumental in many ways in determining the course of my life.

I’ve written about the experience on this blog as well in the Canadian Immigrant experience. 

If you’re interested in reading more, please click on these links:

Mahrukh at 1440 Lawrence Ave W

Becoming a writer

The Laughing Buddha

All Writing is rewriting (Canadian Immigrant column)

All Writing is rewriting (GAB blog post)

Humber School of Writers Summer Workshop

2009 was turning out to be an extremely fruitful year. My interest in writing had propelled me into a new world and I was making new friends all the time. I signed up for several author groups on email and went to a session of Writers and Editors Network at a nice little traditional tavern in Islington.

Jasmine D’Costa was the president of this association. She is a banker from Bombay and has devoted her life to creating literature since she immigrated to Canada. Jasmine’s collection of short stories was published in May 2009 and it was tremendously well received. 

Over the years, she has consistently encouraged many of us newcomers with aspirations to become writers. She published extracts from my novel as short stories in two volumes she edited.

(Read about Jasmine here: Asian Writers; I used the term ‘Asian’ to describe South Asian writers, without realising then than Asian in North America only meant people from the Far East or South East Asia).

At Jasmine’s event at WEN, the main speaker was Robert Morgan, the publisher of BookLandPress. Subsequently, Robert held a workshop on publishing at the Runnymede branch of the Toronto library. Yoko and I participated in the session (Robert Morgan’s tips for writers).

I learnt that BookLandPress conducted an annual novel competition, which was decided on the basis of the first 50 pages of the manuscript. I decided to build my short story into a novel, by giving a backstory to the four main characters.

I fished out an incomplete manuscript that I’d started several years ago in Bombay when I decided to write fiction after reading my friend Richard Rothman’s collection of phantasmagorical short stories. In a small way, I was instrumental in egging Richard to get his stories published.

Robert’s BookLandPress didn’t accept my submission, but that was only to be expected and by now, I was serious about working harder on my fiction. I got Mahrukh to edit the short story that I’d been working on for several months now and submitted it to the Diaspora Dialogues, a Toronto not-for-profit that promotes creative expressions in diverse people, for the short-form mentoring program.

I submitted the short story (The New Canadians) in May 2009 without any expectation of being selected for the mentoring program. But I was pleasantly surprised when I got an email in June 2009 informing me of my selection. It was a moment that I’d been waiting for. 

The Diaspora Dialogues group 

I was among a select few aspiring writers selected by Diaspora Dialogues for the mentoring program; the list included a great group of creative people who have gone on to become acclaimed authors Leslie Shimotakahara and poets such as Michael Fraser, and among them was Dawn Promislow, who is today a dear friend.

Helen Walsh, the head of Diaspora Dialogues, has since then been a constant support in all my efforts to become an author. On several occasions, she has provided me with a platform and put me before an audience. She got Diaspora Dialogues to audio record my blog about my first Christmas in Toronto; she selected me as a speaker at the fantastic Spur festival that she organises annually; she got me interviewed recently when she relaunched Diaspora Dialogues.

And, of course, she’s also had an indirect role to play in the publishing of Belief, but I’ll talk about that later. Julia Chan, then at the Diaspora Dialogues, was also extremely supportive.

I remember when my submission was under consideration at Diaspora Dialogues, I was reading The Assassin’s Song (2007) by MG Vassanji, which I’d borrowed from the Amesbury Park branch of the Toronto library. It is one of the finest novels that I’ve read, and in my humble opinion, one of Vassanji’s best. The In-Between World of Vikram Lal (2003) and The Book of Secrets (1994) got him the Giller Prize. 

Serendipitously, Vassanji was to be my mentor. Mahrukh declared, "Allah only listens to you!" (Needless to say, that assessment riled my atheist sensibilities comprehensively, but for once, I wasn't complaining).

Not entirely unexpectedly, Vassanji turned out to be a tough mentor. He was a Guru in the true sense. I consider him my Guru even today; a status that, I’m sure, he’d find deeply embarrassing, if not entirely offensive.

He’d little patience with niceties, clear, incisive and blunt in his comments. And I was the eager student.

Here’s an extract from the first email I got from him: 

“This story, to be honest, is in the ‘good immigrant’ or ‘grateful immigrant’ mode. It has a message about citizenship. But it is not realistic; it does not dig deep into human motives and behaviour. This, of course, is how I see it. It is the kind of story that may find a place in a community or government magazine. I don't know what you have in mind.”

My interaction with him started in July and continued till September 2009. By then, the story had metamorphosed into a completely different being, vastly improved, with much depth, nearly all the excrescences removed, or at least so I thought. 

In a later episode of this memoir, I’ll write about how he made me rewrite this story, which had become the first chapter of the novel, more than 17 times, and even after that remained dissatisfied.

Read about this unique experience here: Write Stuff (Canadian Immigrant column)

By October 2009, I’d to submit the completed story to Diaspora Dialogues for consideration in its annual short story publication – TOK: Writing the New Toronto. I wasn’t sure whether it’d be accepted, considering there were so many good aspirants. It seemed a long and agonizing wait although it was only two months before I learnt in mid-December from Helen that my story was accepted for TOK 5: Writing the New Toronto, the collection was edited by Helen.

2009 was turning out to be a year that I’d remember forever. Thanks to Joyce’s efforts, I got an internship in Ontario government’s ministry of community and social services. It was a temporary job that held the promise of being turned into permanent after some years. I was out of the internship within a month.

Mahrukh in her Medix uniform

And, it was now Mahrukh’s turn to go to school. She decided that she’d do a program in social work and joined Medix College in October 2009. I’d never seen her as excited as she was when she began her program.

Mahrukh has always remained an unassuming person, who shuns any sort of limelight, and never pushes herself upfront to let the world become aware of tremendous and varied skills. She’s highly educated, has remarkable editing skills, and is a natural people’s person; one of the most affable persons. For the first time, she was determined to get what she knew she deserved.

Of course, she can be completely horrible with me when she gets mad, but that’d be true in any marriage that has lasted two decades and more, and one shan't talk about it now. 

Che at his school concert

Che was already a Canadian and was talking like one. When we told his school teacher that he was now speaking with a Canadian accent, she corrected us and said, “No, he’s losing his Indian accent.” Sometime later that year, he also had to start wearing glasses, at approximately the same age as when I’d had to wear glasses. But, of course, Mahrukh blamed me, claiming that it was my preference for warm lighting in our home that'd caused our son’s weak eyesight.

Finally, we’d commenced our process of settling down and setting our roots in Toronto.

Agata Tuszyńska

AgataTuszyńska

Last month I went to hear Antanas Sileika talk to AgataTuszyńska about her newly released memoir Family History of Fear. Tuszyńska is a Polish journalist, biographer, and poet.

She was in Toronto at the Harbourfront Centre’s International Festival of Authors (IFOA) to promote the English translation of the book that was originally published in 2005. The memoir is about her peculiar and painful growing up when her Jewish side was deliberately and rather forcefully hidden.

Tuszyńska was born to a Jewish mother Halina Przedborska, and an Orthodox Christian father, Bogdan Tuszyński. She has devoted considerable time and effort to record the rapidly vanishing Jewish presence from Poland’s mainstream. Her works include a biography of Issac Bashevis Singer (Singer: Landscapes of Memory), a controversial biography of Vera Gran (The Accused), for which the subject dragged the author to court,  

Sileika, author of three novels, including the highly acclaimed Underground, is a polished interviewer. His seemingly innocuous questions to Tuszyńska invariably resulted in soul searing responses.

“I wasn’t allowed to openly say that I was partly Jewish,” she said. To resolve this contradictory identity, she decided to write a memoir.  Some of her friends were aware of her identity, as was her late husband, too, and was a vociferous supporter of Tuszyńska attempt to record her life. “To come out of the closet, so to speak, about my Jewish identity was important not only to me, but also to so many others like me,” she said.

She had to face prejudice, even from her father, even as her mother would quietly assure her that Tuszyńska was indeed a Jew. Her parents were famous, her father was a sport journalist, and a historian with an illustrious career, and her mother was also a journalist.

They separated when she Tuszyńska was six. She recalled, at that young age, she wasn’t willing to accept this separation, and would leave her dad’s shoes outside the door to show the other children that “he was still with me.”

Sileika asked her why she wasn’t as evocative describing her Polish heritage as her Jewish heritage, and that post-war Poland wasn’t a terribly happy place, but that period in the memoir is of happy times. Tuszyńska said both her parents were socialists, who were determined, like most of that generation, to build a new Poland. Of course, their aspirations were throttled by the overbearing presence and overarching control by the Soviet Union.

Tuszyńska’s mother never spoke about her mother (Tuszyńska’s grandmother) for many years, but then opened up to her daughter to tell her about her grandmother’s tragic death in October 1944 (Poland was liberated in January 1945).

Tuszyńska explained that in the memoir she created her grandmother’s character from her purse, which was the only thing that Tuszyńska’s mother had saved. What the purse contained was both shocking and revelatory. Everything thing in the purse was false: the documents, an envelope with a stamp that had Hitler’s face, and a photo of Jesus Christ. She was ready to escape the ghetto, but the Nazis had other plans.  Tuszyńska said it is ironic that the only proof of her grandmother’s existence is the false papers. Her husband, Tuszyńska’s grandfather, survived the war, but never spoke about the tragedy.

Marriages and unions where religion and race come together are fairly commonplace these days, especially in Canada, where immigrants from across the world live together to create a unique Canadian identity that valiantly attempts to rise above the narrow confines of faith and colour. And yet, each of this union is unique and has its own moments of little glories and major crises. Each is worth a book, at least.  

Image: http://www.agatatuszynska.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=54&Itemid=5

Inspire - Toronto International Book Fair

Hindi Writers' Guild

Anindo Hazra & Ted Goossen (seated) with other participants

Sheniz Janmohamed

Inspire – the first Toronto International Book Fair was a major success, both in terms of the participation of authors, publishers and readers.

The three-day festival saw some big name authors discuss their work, they included the perennial favourites such as Margaret Atwood, and also rising stars such as David Bezmozgis.

The festival attracted 400 authors, and thanks to my friend Meenakshi Alimchandani, who was part of the organizing team, I had the privilege of being associated with the festival, facilitating the readings of Canadian South Asian authors.

The authors who read at the South Asian kiosk included Cheran, Cheryl Antao-Xavier, Kumkum Ramchandani, Braz Menezes, Farheen Khan, Samreen Ahsan, Vicky Bismillah, Kwai Li and Fong Hsiyng, Meena Chopra, Tula Goenka, Jasmine Sawant, Sheniz Janmohamed, Anindo Hazra, Pushpa Acharya and the Hindi Writers’ Guild led by Shailja Saksena. Eminent diplomat and author Navtej Sarna also read from his works, but at a different venue at the sprawling Metro Toronto Convention Centre.

The festival gave me an opportunity to meet and make friends. I met the suave Antanas Sileika, who gifted me a copy of his novel Underground; and I also met the enterprising Robert Morgan of Bookland Press.

South Asian panel
{l to r: Jasmine, Anosh, Manjushree, Anirudh, Priscilla (at mike)}

The main South Asian event at the festival was the collaboration between Inspire and the Jaipur Festival. The panel comprised AnirudhBhattacharyya, a veteran journalist-turned novelist; Manjushree Thapa, novelist; Anosh Irani, novelist; Jasmine D’Costa, novelist; Priscilla Uppal, poet, moderated the readings.

Anirudh read from his debut novel The Candidate, which is a breezy satire on the crazier than Rob Ford world of Indian politics. Anosh Irani read from Dahanu Road, and Jasmine D’Costa read from her collection of short stories Curry is Thicker than Water. Manjushree Thapa read from her new novel  Seasons of Flight.

Here’s an excerpt from Manjushree’s novel:

Being Nepali

An American woman, a schoolteacher, earnest and frizzy, once came up to Prema and asked, ‘Mind if I ask where you’re from? Originally, I mean?’ But when she heard the answer she just stammered, unable, perhaps, to admit that she didn’t know where that was.

Most Americans did better. They would say, ‘Oh’ or ‘Wow’ or even ‘Cool’ and nod in a friendly manner. Sometimes Prema would help them out by adding, ‘It is near India,’ or ‘Where Mount Everest is’ or ‘You heard of the Sherpas?” so that they might say, ‘Geez, that’s real far,’ or ‘I could have sworn you were Mexican / Italian / Spanish,’ or ‘You speak very good English.’ And then she would smile: ‘Thank you.’

Every now and then, though a response would stop her. One day, a woman on the bust heard her say Nippon and expressed her disgust at the practice of eating raw fish: ‘That’s like eating you-know-what!’ she exclaimed. Another man, a dark-skinned grocer, South Asian himself, baffled her with, ‘Aren’t you usually from Pakistan?’ It was Prema’s turn to stammer. She had also learnt that to the foreign ear, the country’s name could sound like ‘nipple’. More commonly, though, what Americans heard was Naples, as in: ‘I love pasta,’ or ‘My husband and I went to Rome for our honeymoon, but we never made it to Naples.’ 

Friday Nights with Diaspora Dialogues

Friday Nights with Diaspora Dialogues – the just-concluded series of three literary nights in April – featured readings and performances from Toronto’s brightest writers and artists. This was the sixth year that the series was part of the Toronto Public Library’s annual Keep Toronto Reading Festival – a celebration of books and reading in Toronto.

Antanas Sileika

The last reading of the series (April 29) featured two writers who have supported me in so many different ways to fulfill my dream to become a novelist – Antanas Sileika and Joyce Wayne.

Antanas is the artistic director of Humber School forWriters and author of the recently released Underground. It’s a “story of a troubled romance between Lukas and Elena, two members of the underground Lithuanian resistance movement in mid-1940s.” He read an excerpt from the novel where Lukas shoots a room full of Soviet workers.

Joyce founded the Canadian Journalism for Internationally Trained Writers program at Sheridan College. I met her at the College in 2009, and she is my well-wisher, mentor and friend. Her story When Belle Walked Along Spadina is in TOK 6:Writing the New Toronto (each year the TOK cover gets better). The story is “about a little band of hapless Eastern European immigrants who end up spying for the Communist Party in Canada during the 1940s. It is about how brutally Canada treats its political dissidents.”

Other writers, poets spoken word artists who made the evening memorable included Adebe DeRango-Adem, Jacob McArthur Mooney, Angelica LeMinh. 

The program concluded with a reading from Rebecca Applebaum's Complex (Karl Ang, Serena Parmar, Lisa Codrington and Araya Mengesha; directed by Tara Beagan). 

Of course, all my friends at Diaspora Dialogues were also there, and it’s always a pleasure to meet them. For me (and I’m sure for many others), Diaspora Dialogues is home.

Images: 

Richard Johnston's pen sketch of Antanas Sileika from http://antanassileika.ca/?p=530 (the sketch was originally published in The National Post on April 16, 2011 along with Philip Marchand's review of Underground. Read the review here.)

Jewels & other stories

A few months after I started this blog, I discovered that it’s easier to write about book launches than to write about books.

To write about books, you've got to read them. Reading requires time and patience. I don’t have either.

Moreover, writing about the books is fraught with awkward situations, especially when you know the writers.

Attending book launches and writing about them is  easier. Of course, I realise that nobody’s fooled into believing that I read all the books I write about.

The launch of Dawn Promislow’s Jewels & Other Stories was just about the most sensational book launches I’ve attended in a long time. 

Type Books at Queen Street W, the venue for the event, was packed. 

• Nurjehan Aziz was there. Aziz’s TSAR Publications has published Dawn’s book. 
• My mentor MG Vassanji was there. It’s always an honour to meet and talk to him. 
• Most my writer friends were there – Yoko Morgenstern, Joyce Wayne, Michael Fraser, and Leslie Shimotakahara.
• Antanas Sileika of Humber School for Writers and Olive Senior, poet, writer and Dawn’s mentor were there, too, along with probably many others whom I don't know. 

Dawn explained why she wrote these stories, read a passage from her book and answered a few questions.

To read Dawn’s interview on Open Book Toronto click here: Dawn's Interview.

I hope everyone who was there bought a copy of the book. 

For those who couldn’t attend or couldn’t buy, here’s your chance to do so. Click on this link: Jewels & Other Stories. 

Image: http://dd.maytree.com/index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=301&Itemid=30

Becoming a writer

It’s been a while since I wrote here.

I’ve been busy giving finishing touches to the first 50 pages of my novel. I’ll be entering my manuscript (only 50 pages) in a competition run by the Canadian Aid Charity and the BookLand Press.

Re-writing 50 pages is no joke, and I don’t even know whether it is any good. But I’m determined to participate. I figure I’ve nothing to lose.

The worst that can happen is that the organisers may reject my manuscript. That wouldn’t be unusual.

I’m reinventing my writing career in Canada. And the last year or so has been interesting and enriching. Rejections and acceptances are part of this process.

After I came here, I spent the first six to seven months in Canada without having to write. Now, I’ve never thought of myself as a great writer or even a good one, but I’ve been writing for a living for a larger part of the last two decades.

So, when I didn’t have anything to write after I came here, I wrote a short story to enter into a competition that would’ve paid for a writing course.

I must thank Susan Crangle, a communications professional, who edited the story and gave me key inputs. I didn’t win the competition. But learnt a few things from her.

In May, I entered the same story – with a few more re-writes and edits (this time Mahrukh helped me) and sent it to Diaspora Dialogues, an institution that is doing impressive work in enabling newcomers express themselves creatively.

I was selected for the mentoring program where I’d be working with an established writer to improve my short story. I’ll write about that in more details when the program concludes. See my profile here.

Then Joyce Wayne nominated me to participate at the Humber School of Writers’ Summer Workshop. There I got acquainted with the suave Antanas Sileika, who runs the program at Humber.

I assisted Isabel Huggan, an extraordinary writer and teacher. I learnt from her, too. ("All writing is rewriting," she said.)

A few writers, poets and playwrights from Diaspora Dialogues met last week at Central cafe in Mirvish Village. One of the participants – Michael Fraser – organises poetry readings here. He calls it the Plasticine Poetry Series.

We had a great time. I requested Jasmine D’Costa, author of the critically-acclaimed Curry is Thicker than Water, who was also there at the readings, to join us and give us publishing tips.

I met Dawn Promislow and subsequently read her a couple of her short stories.

I was at Mirvish Village again earlier this week. This time for an unbelievable event – the launch of the 32nd annual international 3-day novel contest. Barbara Zatyko and Melissa Edwards power this incredible event. (Thank you Dawn Boshcoff.)

Last year’s winner Jason Rapczynski read from his novel The Videographer. Several veteran participants from earlier competitions narrated their experiences, of sleep deprivation, generally losing control and doing silly things.

The contest began in 1977 in a Vancouver pub when a few crazy writers decided to emulate Jack Kerouac and complete writing a novel over a weekend. Apparently, Voltaire wrote Candide also in three days.

The tradition is now an established literary event and this Labour Day weekend, many writers from across the world will try to complete a novel in three days. This is an international event. So, anyone anywhere can participate.

I know of at least two people in India who should participate. They know that I know who they are, so I won't name them.

I’m going to participate and write another novel because the basic rule of the 3-Day novel contest is that you have to start and finish a novel between September 5 and September 7. I can't continue writing the one that I'm already writing.