{"id":145,"date":"2011-04-11T21:52:59","date_gmt":"2011-04-11T21:52:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue9\/?page_id=145"},"modified":"2012-03-01T16:53:36","modified_gmt":"2012-03-01T16:53:36","slug":"round-table","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue9\/round-table\/","title":{"rendered":"Roundtable"},"content":{"rendered":"

Motion Sweeter Far than Rest<\/strong><\/h1>\n
Poet, Amatoritsero Ede, in conversation with novelist, Antanas Sileika<\/em><\/h6>\n

Amatoritsero Ede<\/strong>: First, congratulations on your latest novel, Underground <\/em>(Thomas Allen, 2011). In how far can one say that this work is a probing of your identity and questions of self-knowledge, especially being the last book in what seems to be a trilogy with Lithuania as setting?<\/p>\n

Anatanas Sileika<\/strong>: I do not probe my identity so much as use the defect of my fractured identity to give me access to material unavailable to others. By \u201cdefect\u201d I mean that I have been lost most of my life. I am a castaway in paradise, living better than most of the rest of the world but regretting the loss of the past. I was raised in a strange mixture of alternating melancholy and delight by parents whose own pasts were sealed behind the iron curtain. They were subject to dark moods during their whole lives for what they had lost, but they delighted in the country they had found. My mother adopted North American ways as fast or faster than the native women. She knew how to use layaway plans to furnish her house, how to use canned cream of mushroom soup to make a casserole, and how to demolish a poor defence lawyer if she ever had to take the stand to describe the chemical processes by which street drugs were analysed by the feds for the police. As a chemist, she had no doubt about scientific facts and no hesitation in upholding the truth of them in the face of smiling bastard lawyers. Life in Canada was harder for my father, an older man who never learned the language properly. But he was confident within limits, maybe even beyond his limits, and made jokes as a way of getting by, even with his atrocious English, learned from other construction workers.\u00a0 As a child I was occasionally wounded by my family\u2019s immigrant status, but my older brothers were excellent, tough sportsmen, who taught me that you fight to win, and you don\u2019t whine at injustice. In short, our immigrant family prevailed, but I have nevertheless felt unmoored my entire life \u2013 an anglophile lover of Canadian literature whose focus of attention, whose subject matter, whose obsession is mostly European. If I am better anchored now it is because my son was a soldier in Afghanistan and he had wanted his ashes to lie in a military cemetery in Ottawa if he had died in battle. He did not die in battle, but I am slightly less uneasy in this place now, the once potential burial ground for my son. But I am still broken. I am neither here nor there. The great advantage of this life, this defect, is that I can hold Europe in general and Lithuania in particular at arm\u2019s length \u2013 just the right distance for clear focus. What I see in Lithuania is not some sort of particularity; quite the opposite \u2013 I see the entire world, the entire universe. I have access to that place by knowing about it very well, but I am not really of that place. Very many dramatic things happened there in the recent past, so I can use Lithuania to reflect on the universe of the twentieth century. I became I fascinated by the twentieth century, the turbulent century that cast me on this Canadian shore. I wanted to explore the human condition in time and geography, not my identity. First, I wanted to explore the growth of the suburbs as I did in Buying on Time<\/em>. (By the way, I love the suburbs. They are hell to get in and out of, but most people go there for peace and find it. It amazes me that so many people think in clich\u00e9s of the superiority of gritty urban life when most Canadians live in some kind of suburb. We have not even begun to understand the suburbs yet because we are still sloshing around in a mental fog of Father Knows Best<\/em> meets Desperate Housewives<\/em> meet Revolutionary Road<\/em>.). Second, I wanted to explore the growth of images in art and cinema and the death of religion, which I did in Woman in Bronze<\/em>. I wonder if we moderns are really pagans, worshipping the golden calf or if we have really found a new way to live. Third, the twentieth century was greatly about war, so I had to address that too, but how? I had great difficulty working my way up to Underground<\/em>. I started with a Holocaust massacre, and then I tried to write about war straight up, but the first event did not belong to me and the second one was too well known. My Lithuanian background gave me access to an aspect of WW2 that is new here, in the West. I could write about the war after the war, the secret war that took place in the forties and fifties against the occupying Soviets. What a gift to me, as a writer!\u00a0 I use Lithuania to illuminate the human condition in the twentieth century. My parents\u2019 exile conferred a gift on me. My defect of unbelonging has become the instrument I use to explore the human condition.<\/p>\n

A.E:.<\/strong> In growing up, you rejected the name, \u2018Tony,\u2019 at some point and insisted on \u2018Antanas,\u2019 would you say this was a foreshadowing of the importance of self-definition in your work as an adult?<\/p>\n

A.S.:<\/strong> I barely knew what I was doing when I did that. Maybe you\u2019re right: It was a kind of preparation for the life I am now living, I believe. As a child, I loved the British Empire and Kipling, Conan Doyle, E R Nesbitt, H G Wells. I also loved the language of the King James Bible, even though we were Catholics and went to church in Lithuanian. I wanted to speak like Churchill. I wanted to \u201c\u2026fight on the beaches, \u2026 fight on the landing grounds, ..fight in the fields and in the streets,\u00a0 \u2026 fight in the hills; we [I] shall never surrender\u2026\u201d But whose battle would I fight? Kipling\u2019s battle was long over and discredited. Churchill was alive, but an old man, someone who might still, it was true, roll up his sleeves and show his scars and say, \u201cTomorrow is Saint Crispian.\u00a0 These wounds I had on Crispian\u2019s day.<\/em>\u201d The English language and cadences of the King James and Churchill gave me my weapon. But my battle was not here. It was somewhere else. I armed myself with English, or more accurately, was taught to love the language by my excellent teachers, and then I took that language to talk about a place that was far away. And to talk about that place, I had to wear the name of far away too. \u00a0And I was such a snob once I changed my name! I would not respond any longer to \u201cTony.\u201d Even now, there is a colleague at work who knew me in my childhood and uses the old name insistently.\u00a0 But the young man he calls after disappeared a long time ago.<\/p>\n

A.E.:<\/strong>How do you see yourself \u2013 as a Canadian writer, a Lithuanian-Canadian writer, or a Canadian-Lithuanian Writer?<\/p>\n

A.S.: <\/strong>I am a Canadian writer. English is my instrument, Lithuania is my tune. But the things I write about here are well known there already, so my audience is here.<\/p>\n

A.E.:<\/strong>Paris was part of your journey to writer-hood. Like the main character of Jean Paul Sartre La Nausea, Antoine Ronquentin, who roamed Paris trying to self define against his environment, was Paris for you an effort at self-definition as a writer, against the nausea of Canada?<\/p>\n

A.S.:<\/strong> Like my heritage, Paris was an accident that served me well. I went to Paris not for self-definition but for love. I was profoundly attracted to a Canadian woman who decided to go to Paris to study art at the \u00b4Ecole Des Beaux Arts. At first I thought I would only visit her, but I ended up marrying her there and living as a student of French language at the Sorbonne and a teacher of English in Versailles. At the same time, I became involved with a group of expatriate writers publishing a literary magazine out of the second story of Shakespeare and Company<\/em>. Paris was the dream of the boy who could not play hockey well. Where I grew up, for all the peace of the suburbs, the measure of success lay in sports, so indeed, that measure of me was nauseating because I could never measure up successfully. I was sick with self-loathing in all sports activities. Downtown Toronto was a relief from that, but Paris was better still, all culture and joie de vivre<\/em>. I learned many things in Paris. Among them: how not to stare at the nude model who sat on the dais in my wife\u2019s art school class; how to use the rules of politeness to smooth human interaction (such as holding a door open for someone twenty metres behind me in the metro); how to eat an artichoke; how to argue a philosophical position; how to make canard \u00b4a l\u2019orange<\/em>; how to wear a scarf; how to drink wine; how to get by well on very little money, and many, many more things that made me the adult I remain to this day.<\/p>\n

A.E.:<\/strong>Paris has served an important inspiration for many an expatriate writer \u2013 James Joyce, James Baldwin, Rene Maran and so on. Its famous Latin quarter has provided a home for a meeting of international literary minds from Europe, America, Africa and Latin America. The literary importance of Paris is reflected in Walter Benjamin\u2019s referring to it as the \u2018cultural capital\u2019 of the 19th century. It is also a \u201cliterary capital\u201d in David Damrosch\u2019 recognition of its excellent publishing infrastructure. How did Paris influence your writing?<\/p>\n

A.S.:<\/strong> Although I had written for a year in a parking lot shack back in Canada, Paris was the place that really taught me to write. Each day I prepared my English lessons on the train to Versailles, and on my way home I wrote my stories and then polished them on weekends. I took these stories to the editors of Paris Voices<\/em>, and then, later, with those same editors, I read the stories of others, searching for that indefinable spark that showed talent. Because we were young, we wanted a formula that could be applied to all literature, but soon we realized the spark was not subject to the hard rules, like the rules of my chemist mother. I got into the production of literature in Paris and got my hands dirty. I even folded by hand the signatures that became the pages of our journal. I worked the guillotine that trimmed the edges. I hawked the journal in bookstores. A turning point came in Paris when a Canadian journalist named Boyd Neil asked me who my favourite Canadian writers were and I did not have any. My ignorance was revealed to myself. I was appalled at myself and needed to do something about it.<\/p>\n

A.E.:<\/strong>Would you say literary journalism \u2013 I refer to your time with Paris Voices<\/em> and Descant<\/em>\u00a0 \u2013 was a useful apprenticeship towards becoming a writer?<\/p>\n

A.S.:<\/strong> My literary journalism therefore continued in Canada. I returned and bought every single literary journal for sale in the old Long House Bookstore<\/em>, which specialized in Can Lit. I read them all and chose two I thought I might be suitable for: Descant<\/em> and Exile<\/em>. I wrote to both, and Karen Mulhallen at Descant<\/em> wrote back. She agreed to take me on. There I learned under the tutelage of Russell Brown and Donna Bennett how to read closely. I carved a suckling pig for a celebration attended by Denis Lee and Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje. We laughed and drank a great deal. Karen asked M T. Kelly to take me under his wing, and he introduced me to the readings at Harbourfront, then run by Greg Gatenby. I learned about the culture of writing in this country. And because of Descant,<\/em> I could branch into writing literary journalism for other places, such as the Globe and Mail, CBC radio, and later television and other journals. As well, I branched further into nonfiction writing, which turned out to be a lot of fun because it permitted me to express my whimsical side.<\/p>\n

A.E.:<\/strong>You manage a writing school. You never took a creative writing degree or course as far as I know. And neither did many a first class writer. Do you think it is possible to teach someone to write?<\/p>\n

A.S.:<\/strong> I did indeed take two creative writing courses in university and I would have taken more had they existed. But, oh dear. This is one of the few questions that I find irritating. I always turn the question around to ask why we ask it of writing when we ask it of nothing else. We teach art, music, hockey, physics, and many more things. Why should writing be impossible to teach? Is it because we believe God speaks through the pen of a writer? But how can we believe such a thing in godless times? We don\u2019t even believe in muses. Maybe we believe in talent. But there are plenty of hockey schools and not many Wayne Gretskys. Should we eliminate the hockey schools?\u00a0 Let me ask the question: why should writing not <\/em>be possible to teach?<\/p>\n

A.E.:<\/strong> Definitely we cannot eliminate hockey schools and so on. One can easily argue that hockey and literature are different in the sense that writing, creative writing that is, is a very subjective activity. I do agree that teaching the writing as physical inscription should be possible \u2013 that is teaching the physical, grammatical aspect of writing, the forming of sentences and their joining together, the details of plot, characterisation and so on; types of poetry and its different forms; so from a purely formalist aspect, yes. But some argue that it takes much more to make a creative writer. This is what the dissenters mean when they question the teaching of writing. They think teaching writing is trying to domesticate the creative spirit, and there are those who think that you cannot make a writer out of someone who does not already have the talent in some form or the other.\u00a0 Surely you do expect some talent in those who come to writing school?<\/p>\n

A.S.:<\/strong> But I continue to protest the question. If we eliminate sports, let’s ask how a writer different from an artist or a musician. Of course one teaches the formal aspects and of course the end result is not the same as a Coke bottling plant where every drink comes out tasting the same. It all depends on the luck talent, and persistence of the writer (artist, musician). But how is this writerly experience different from anything else? Why should writers alone be self-made geniuses?\u00a0 Is this not a romantic conceit? And why do we cling to it when we have cast off so many other romantic conceits? Where do most jazz musicians learn their music now? At school. So do most gallery artists. Furthermore, the myth of the uninfluenced genius is dangerous because it leads us to believe that some sort of raw, \u201cnatural\u201d talent exists in the wilderness, or that writing schools domesticate genius. The opposite is true. Most writers chosen by Granta for a 2007 \u201cbest new\u201d came from writing schools. I see a few hundred writing school applications every year and the quality of them has been rising. I think it is because of a high school course called “Writer’s Craft”. Occasionally a wild young person approaches me (invariably male) to show me his startling new manuscript, something he wrote without reading anything because he did not want to be \u201cinfluenced.\u201d I have never seen one that was close to publishable. Peter Carey addressed the myth of the wild genius in his novel, My Life as A Fake<\/em>, based on a hoax in an Australian literary journal. A couple of academics faked a \u201cnatural\u201d poet and let him be discovered by a journal desperate to show unvarnished genius. The journal editors still believed in lone wolves, and this romantic belief led to their humiliation when the hoax was revealed. Literature is a conversation. One can enter it by reading a great deal and practising in solitude or by going to school. The same is true of music, by the way. Of course you can do it alone as long as you are connected to the conversation. You can learn almost anything alone, but most people learn with the help of manuals, teachers, and samples. I therefore repeat, why should we keep asking if writing can be taught? Of course<\/em> one cannot teach genius. You cannot teach someone to be Renee Fleming or Constantin Brancusi, but each of them went to school. Arguably, the lone genius is easier to find in the world of art, where someone like Basquiat can appear. But he was studying images around him. The same conditions do not prevail for literature because literary texts do not “lie around” as images do in society. \u00a0Of course you don\u2019t have to<\/em> go to writing school (but you do have to read a lot). I recently completed a study that showed 51% of writers published in prose in Canada in the last two decades did not go to school. But flip this number over. 49% of published writers did<\/em> go to school. By my very rough estimation, about 5,000 students have gone through our writing school in the last nineteen years. Of those, over 280 have gone on to publish books in the traditional manner. Many more have self-published or published articles. That’s what, about one in seventeen or eighteen who has published? Now ask any publishing house how many over the counter submissions are published. I suspect the numbers are far, far worse.<\/p>\n

A.E.:<\/strong>Does teaching or overseeing the teaching of writing enhance or interfere with your own praxis as writer?<\/p>\n

A.S.: <\/strong>The conflict is not so much between teaching and writing; it is between solitude and the hurly burly of society. Everyone knows you need solitude to write. You must not get distracted. Doris Lessing says you must be slightly bored to write.\u00a0 Some writers are reclusive, inhabiting this private space all the time. I am not one of them. Once I have been alone for a few hours, I need to step out into society. I want to drink wine and talk and laugh and go to the marketplace to find excellent fish to be cooked at home. I want someone to eat that fish with me. But there are a couple of dangers in working a day job in the same world as the one I inhabit when I write, of being involved in both writing and teaching it, in criticism. One of them is that I am constantly aware of the \u201cbuzz\u201d value of every writer. I am like a publicist in this respect. But being aware of buzz is not healthy because one keeps measuring one\u2019s own buzz value. Let\u2019s face it, most writers buzz for very short periods of time. I have just come out with a new novel so I have seen myself in half a dozen newspapers and as many blogs.\u00a0 But a year from now, others will be in those pages. Also, many writers, especially ageing writers, are in danger of getting embittered because they see others rising above them. This sort of bile is a stench I have whiffed at many literary events. One must try very hard not to smell bad oneself. One tries to take the high road, but one finds one\u2019s own flesh is as weak as the flesh of others. Luckily, most embittered writers cannot stand the \u201cliterary scene\u201d any longer and drift away. On the other hand, because I have to blog for my writing school, I am desperate for material and I post about who is doing what at literary events. We really need a Samuel Pepys of the literary scene here. I\u2019m not that person, exactly, but all societies are amusing and literary society is so full of striving that it is particularly funny. But each writer is different. I have a weakness for narrative well-told. I would like to write a novel, but I would also like to read yours if you have written one. Therefore, when I go out into society, I am having fun. When I tire of it, I retreat to my solitude.<\/p>\n

A.E.:<\/strong>A writer is also a reader \u2013 first. What do you read \u2013 beyond research material for ongoing projects?<\/p>\n

A.S.:<\/strong> First, research material does eat up a vast amount of reading time for a historical novelist. My last novel required about fifty or sixty books in Lithuanian and maybe a dozen and more in English as well as countless magazine articles. These are all nonfiction, and much more relaxing than fiction. Nonfiction does not have the complexity of subtext that fiction does, but it still takes time to read. Second, I must stay on top of Canadian writing because it is my territory. Therefore I read or at least scan enough of Canadian novels to stay aware and I read the novels of my friends with great delight because I love to see\u00a0 what they are up to \u2013 Joe Kertes and Wayson Choy in particular. I want to read everyone who works for me, and since that is about twenty-five writers, it\u2019s hard to keep up. I want to be aware of and even try to read our former students, often a dozen published for the first time each year. As you can see, my reading load is already impossible. I am more often scanning than reading. But I continue to look for books that will make me fall in love with them. I think of Barry Unsworth\u2019s The Songs of Kings<\/em>, Peter Carey\u2019s My Life as a Fake<\/em>, David Mitchell\u2019s Cloud Atlas<\/em>, Rachel Kushner\u2019s Telex from Cuba<\/em>, the vastly underrated Nino Ricci\u2019s Testament<\/em>, Shirley Hazard\u2019s The Great Fire<\/em>, Tom Rachman\u2019s The Imperfectionist<\/em>s and many, many more.<\/p>\n

A.E.:<\/strong>It was just election time in Canada. How do you think literature can be a tool for political education in an indifferent electorate?<\/p>\n

A.S.:<\/strong> To affect an indifferent electorate you would need to mobilize an engaged readership. This can happen with books such as Lawrence Hill\u2019s The Book of Negroes<\/em>, a novel whose success is astonishing and heartening. I think novels do change people, but the people\u2019s voting pattern is not necessarily directly involved. Wayson Choy illuminated life in Vancouver\u2019s Chinatown and Judy Fong Bates the isolation of small towns for immigrant families. Will those novels make people vote in a particular way? Perhaps not, but they can help to develop a consciousness out of which sound politics can grow. But you do that by getting the potential readership interested, not by saying that reading is good for them. Reading as a duty makes me shudder.<\/p>\n

A.E.:<\/strong> Is it possible to say that the average Canadian\u2019s seeming apathy in the Canadian political scene makes it justifiable to claim that the average Canadian reader is politically unconscious?<\/p>\n

A.S.:<\/strong> In my extended family, political views are quite different from one another. We can talk Canadian politics in heated and uncomfortable debate or let politics slide and enjoy the turkey on the Thanksgiving Day table. I think many Canadians want to let politics slide for fear of uncomfortable debate. Quebec is not apathetic if it votes for the Bloc. That action may seem wrong-headed to Anglophones, but it is not apathetic. We have intense regionalism too. Is apathy always bad, or is it worse to have wrong-headed people filled with passionate intensity?<\/p>\n

A.E:<\/strong>The characters in Underground cannot be indifferent to politics. Coming from an immigrant background in which citizens have to be political, willy-nilly, and as a father who has a son in the Canadian military, what is your reaction to Canadian politics?<\/p>\n

A.S.: <\/strong>To continue my previous response, both Nazis and Communists believed in politics. Engagement in and of itself is not good enough. One must be humane as well. This quality of humanity is what makes Norman Davies first, the late Tony Judt second, and most recently Timothy Snyder fresh in their insights on Eastern Europe. Furthermorene\u2019s engagement with politics is coloured by what is at stake. Because so little seems <\/span>to be at stake in Canada, many people are unengaged. This may be a shame because I see a rising tide of populism and anger. Why did we become so angry? Are we afraid we are at the end of times and soon there will be shortages of everything? The question should not be \u2018Why are you getting so much?\u201d It should be, \u201cHow can I and my family get the same?\u201d How to arrive at that destination will spoil many Thanksgiving Day turkeys. As to the question of the military, I have written elsewhere that I have become a fatalist. Every generation produces young men and some young women who choose to be warriors. The rest of us decide where they will die.<\/p>\n

A.E.:<\/strong> Thank you for taking time off your busy schedule to talk to MTLS.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Motion Sweeter Far than Rest Poet, Amatoritsero Ede, in conversation with novelist, Antanas Sileika Amatoritsero Ede: First, congratulations on your latest novel, Underground (Thomas Allen, 2011). In how far can one say that this work is a probing of your identity and questions of self-knowledge, especially being the last book in what seems to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"authorpage.php","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-145","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue9\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue9\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue9\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue9\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue9\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue9\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/145\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":880,"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue9\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/145\/revisions\/880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue9\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}