Great Lakes Writers Workshop

Keynote Address delivered 06/23/06 at Alverno College

Shauna Singh Baldwin

On Being a Writer

It’s a great pleasure to be invited again to speak at the Great Lakes Writers Workshop. I last spoke here in 1998 when I had written only two books. Congratulations on another great turnout.

When I was asked to speak to you about being a writer, I felt a little anxious, because it’s a label I don’t apply to myself unless I’m actually creating or editing. That may be a reaction to meeting a number of people who enjoy “being a writer” or thinking about being a writer, but would like to do without the scribbly part.

Workshop organizer Nancy Krase said, “Just tell them what it’s like.”

Well, what it’s like depends on whether it’s non-fiction or fiction. It depends on how much your agent loves your book, your rapport with your editor, and whether your publisher is first-tier or small press. It even depends on what is going on in the world when your book is released.

So far, my writing has been shaped by my interest in the collision of cultures. I've been interested in questioning shared assumptions and received wisdom about culture and history – all we believe to be "normal."

My first book, A Foreign Visitor’s Survival Guide to America was written on evenings and weekends. Five publishers expressed interest in the outline, and I pre-sold the idea to a travel publisher in New Mexico. My coauthor and I had a very clear sense of target audience and no doubt that we could finish it. We would trade 5.25 inch floppy disks back and forth till we were in agreement on a chapter. When it was published in 1992, I was delighted enough to announce it on a newsgroup. At which point I received emails “flaming me” from as far away as Australia for “wasting bandwidth” by daring to advertise on the internet. My, how times change!

A year later, while on a peace mission in Hanoi, I was paged in a restaurant – I dashed to the phone, thinking something terrible must have happened in Milwaukee. But it was only the Foreign Minister of Vietnam calling to ask for a copy!

Success makes you confident, but not necessarily wiser – before A Foreign Visitor’s Survival Guide to America had sold out its 10,000 copies I ventured into fiction. English Lessons and Other Stories was about Indian women in my three countries (India, Canada and the USA) The stories came easily and without a lot of research. And the collection was soundly rejected by 34 – count them 34 – US publishers. But it was accepted by a Canadian publisher who still keeps it in print, and a publisher in India. An Italian translation will be published later this year. Most unusual, as conventional wisdom says short stories are a tough sell. I’m always pleasantly surprised to find readers discussing the stories and really engaging with the characters.

To reproduce what is verifiable is journalism. But to fabricate, invent, create worlds, and above all entertain means becoming comfortable with ambiguity. I found that writing Fiction takes chutzpah. Fiction woke me to the power of description, metaphor and symbolic language. It made me so much more aware of living. It’s like goading a mongoose and a cobra into battle and staying with them to see who wins. It’s addictive.

I soon found new voices talking to me – two women in colonial India, married to the same man. They were telling their story, a story that needed a larger canvas, more points of view. Though the story was based on my grandmother’s life and memoir, I found it almost impossible to outline the story. I could only feel with my characters, grow with them, see them in their setting, feel their passion. Whenever my scribbling stopped, I’d read with double consciousness, monitoring my own response for sparks of inspiration.

What the Body Remembers required interviewing, coordinating research trips to India and Pakistan and a lot of help from Milwaukee Public Library’s Interlibrary loan librarians. It required an agent, who put it up for auction. Publisher response was tremendous, and the novel has been translated into 12 languages. It won the Commonwealth Prize for Best Book in the Canada-Caribbean region and is now in ninth printing in Canada.

That’s the good news.

In the US, What the Body Remembers was published by Nan Talese of Doubleday, but after great reviews in the New York Times and Washington Post, the company mistakenly destroyed 2812 hardcover copies that U.S. booksellers had ordered in time for the holidays. My agent protested on my behalf, but Talese’s promises to relaunch the novel with much publicity when it was released in paperback, were unenforceable. Book store base orders on an author’s past sales. So Doubleday’s unfulfilled orders effectively killed the US edition. And it killed publisher interest in future novels by Shauna Singh Baldwin in the USA.

At first I thought my lesson was: a writer should bow down to a powerful editor. Could it be I shouldn’t have disputed that Talese’s proposed cover art for a 20^th century novel was from the 17th century, or been so vehement against adding a glossary to a novel? But today I take a very different lesson from the experience: if I had agreed to make the changes Nan Talese wanted, perhaps many more books would have been sold – and, with them, my soul. I think of the fate of James Frey, another Nan Talese author who said he had allowed himself to be persuaded to sell fiction as non-fiction. So here’s the real lesson, not immediately evident to me when I learned my books had been destroyed: Be true to your subject. Be true to yourself.

My second novel The Tiger Claw is a work of biographical fiction inspired by the life of Noor Inayat Khan, codenamed Madeleine. Noor was a heroine of WWII, a Sufi Muslim woman who worked for the British SOE and was landed into wartime France as a radio operator. Her story had been told and retold many times since 1952 with flagrantly orientalist interpretations and embellishments.

I didn't want to manipulate Noor or exoticize her. In my opinion, she had been betrayed too often, by too many writers. To imagine her was not enough. To write from her point of view, I had to set aside my own faith and my self. I had to become her. She knew very little of what we now know about her times.

I related to Noor as a hybrid person, a reluctant warrior, and someone who had crossed borders of nationality and religion – I discovered her beloved was a Parisian Jewish man. Her voice began speaking immediately, though I never had anything written in her own words.

But voice was not enough to carry a novel. I had to learn about Islam and Judaism and reconcile very different interpretations of the events of WWII by the English, the French and colonial Indians. The structure of the book eluded me for months until I realized it needed three time lines. Researching Noor’s life and family took me to India, England, France, and Germany.

By this time you may have inferred I have a very patient, long-suffering husband, willing to travel to the Khyber Pass or to Dachau. Writing fiction would be impossible without his encouragement and willingness to put up with my obsessions. And with my being paid for a book once every 4-5 years. It would also be impossible without other writers who tell me to have faith, and who challenge me to move deeper into my unconscious. But you know that – it’s why you come to conferences like this one.

The Tiger Claw was first published in Canada in 2004. It has been published in Dutch and released in India. Interestingly, though it was a finalist for Canada’s Giller Prize, it has not been published in the USA. Maybe it’s because the protagonist is a Muslim woman who did everything a terrorist does, but worked for the Allies. Maybe its because of the unfulfilled orders and consequently low sales figures for What the Body Remembers – the market success of a book can be affected by many factors.

But if you’re a professional, you let your agent worry about those things and write the next book. You remind yourself that Stephen King wrote seven novels before he was ever published.

I’m now working on a book of short stories called The Distance Between Us. And a new novel. I take inspiration from writers like Rabindranath Tagore, Joyce Carol Oates and Ursula le Guin, who have written so many books. Some of their books resonate with readers, some are forgotten. But they kept creating.

Whenever I’m asked to write a review, I realize how much easier it is to criticize and destroy than to create. To write fiction the writer must expand his or her own soul. From the miracle of requiring the storyteller and later the reader to shift points of view, fiction offers us a chance to better understand others and become more human. Fiction asks for discipline, imagination, logic, impersonation, endurance, conflict, paradox, psychology, history, economics, philosophy, research, and the re-feeling of the writer’s emotions.

Do you sometimes wonder why we do this to ourselves? For me, it’s because it feels like I’ve conquered the seven seas once I’ve completed a book. When the editing of first pages, second pages, and copyedits are past, when advance reading copies are distributed to booksellers, when cover design discussions are history and that first copy of a small book arrives in the mail, I realize what a miracle of luck it takes to bring a book into being.

When you hold a work of art that you’ve created in your hands, you will feel that many people made it happen – relatives and friends who may be your first readers, your editor, agent, subagent, publisher, publicist, and the English teacher who gave you an A for the annual summer vacation essay. Your acknowledgments can’t name them all.

So call me a genuine writer when I’ve written thirty or forty books or when my last computer crashes. Till then I’m an author of four, with two in the scribbly stage. I put one word after another and see where they end up. I channel and impersonate characters until deeper narrative flows. Sometimes I teach at workshops like this one, sometimes I take classes from other writers – it depends on what my work requires. I’m always in the process of becoming a writer, as I learn from the craft, learn from the process.

If I have any suggestions for you today, they are: be true to your subject, and trust the writing process.

May your writing expand your soul and make you more human. May it teach you what your unconscious knows already.

Thank you.