Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer

Happy Valentine’s day from Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer!

Ephemera from the walls of my house. I think we found this behind a radiator.

Here is the back: To Ross J from Ross Y

Theresa Spence is Beautiful

I’ve been reading a lot of books about animals lately, namely Becoming Animal by David Abram and What I Don’t Know About Animals by Jenny Diski. In different ways, both books  discuss how we are and how we are not animals, and how we need to respect the ways in which we are animal, and also the ways in which we are not animal. The Abram book is a lyrical plea to engage more fully and deeply in nature – in the heartbeat of nature. Diski, more skeptical of nature, even as she tries to bridge an urban upbringing with a rural understanding, shows us her engagement with the simple of idea of being okay with no really knowing animals — accepting the difference. It’s interesting how different a take a British writer has from an American one. Diski’s approach feels more “I think therefore I am” and Abram’s more “I am therefore I am” (he reminds me of Thoreau in his writing, actually). I enjoyed both books very much and recommend them to anyone interested in humanity.

It was the Diski book that led me to this wonderful essay “The Animal That Therefore I Am” by Jacques Derrida. In this essay, which began its life, as much of Derrida’s work, as a conference paper (in this case given over ten days). The essay runs 160 pages, and begins simply because Derrida finds himself naked and ashamed when faced by his cat in his bathroom of a morning. He wonders about his shame in the face of his nudity before his cat’s gaze. Because of this wondering, he begins to probe the word and meaning of the word “Animal.” Derrida speaks of the word as a dangerous enclosure because it wants to hold all animals within it – because (as a general singular) it positions animals as one uniform category, and by doing this work, it also positions man above animal. Derrida argues that man has enclosed animal inside a word, a global and non-particularizing one that seeks by that enclosure to subjugate, for man’s own use and abuse, animals. Derrida then makes this stunning parallel between species and human annihilation/genocide:

“It gets more complicated: the annihilation of certain species is indeed in process, but it is occurring through the organization and exploitation of an artificial, infernal, virtually interminable survival, in conditions that previous generations would have judged monstrous, outside of every presumed norm of life proper to animals that are thus exterminated by means of their continued existence or even their overpopulation. As if, for example, instead of throwing people into ovens and gas chambers (let’s say Nazi) doctors and geneticists had decided to organize the overproduction and overgeneration of Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals by means of artificial insemination, so that, being continually more numerous and better fed, they could be destined in always increasing numbers for the same hell, that of the imposition of genetic experimentation, or extermination by gas or fire. In the same abattoirs.” (Derrida, “The Animal The Therefore I Am” 26)

He is speaking of factory farms, of course, but the extrapolation to the Nazi enclosures is remarkable. It’s interesting to know, too, that Hitler found his inspiration for concentration camps from “reading about Indian reservations in Karl May’s greatly popular Western novels.” (Victor Strandberg). Reservations, too, are enclosures, a way to keep a people separate from another people – a very strange idea, if you think about it for even one second. And especially strange if you think that in Canada, since colonialization, it is the colonial power that has enclosed, like animals, those people – the indigenous people – who are, or should have been seen as, and treated as, the HOST people of this land. In other words, we (as a democratic nation) have treated people, by our complicity, as if they were animals. We have enclosing them inside both an idea of what they are (not us!) and by actually enclosing them away from us.

It occurred to me that Theresa Spence is Derrida’s cat in the sense that, in calling his bluff, she is asking for a return gaze, for him to recognize that she is not a general singular “Animal” but a particular singular “Person” who requires a face-to-face meeting. She is demanding recognition symbolically for all enclosed peoples – she is asking Stephen Harper to SEE her and RECOGNISE her as a human being. She is also, by extension, pointing out a deep abiding racism – a racism that is genocidal. She is saying that Stephen Harper (Canada) is killing her people by this system of concentration camps (this experiment) and that she is willing to die as the one (particular) so that the many (general) will have her as a meaningful token going forward. She will become, and has already become, a martyr in a sense. And she has done this by pointing out to us that her hunger should be our hunger, that we haven’t enclosed everyone, that Theresa Spence is just one of many who has not been defeated by the experiment of reservations, and enclosure. The biggest problem in this strategy is that she is dealing with a Prime Minister who doesn’t feel shame. But we do. And we need to feel it deeply. The more deeply we feel that naked shame in the face of Theresa Spence’s call to recognition, the more the enclosure ruptures and the more human we all become.

New Novel News

This just in:

“Random House Canada publisher Anne Collins has acquired Canadian rights to an untitled novel by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer. The story follows a 14-year-old Vietnamese “Boat Boy” whose skill as a street fighter leads him and his severely deformed sister into the carnival circuit of mid-1980s Toronto. Publication is slated for spring 2014. Martha Magor Webb of Anne McDermid & Associates arranged the deal.”

If you are curious about this forthcoming novel, you can read a little about it here: The Next Big Thing Interview

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s Rules for Creative Writing Students 101

Okay, I’ve taught over fifty CW courses and mentored countless students, many of whom are now publishing. And each time I teach a course, the very same basic craft issues come up – seriously. There are roughly five errors that almost every student makes within the first two pages of their first assignments. I’ve corrected these errors about 976 times in my teaching career. Imagine how irritating this gets. But there is hope. If you read through these rules below, and actually employ technique to eradicate these problems from your writing, you will move from a crap writer to a writer with potential. Seriously. I can’t make you a great writer but I can help you to be a better writer REALLY QUICKLY.

1. Do not use qualifiers, superlatives or universal words. Do not use the words: sometimes, every, always, very, really, each, often and any word that tells me of someone’s habit. I don’t care about your characters’ habits. I want to see your character having a habit. Show me the fucking habit.

2. Do not use –ly adverbs. Try not to use them ever, so that when you really need one you will know that it is absolutely necessary. They tell. They are the devil spawn of telling. Also, they are usually tautological, as in “He ran quickly,” or “She yelled angrily.” Please stop using them.

3. Name your protagonist. Unless you are writing myth, and then NAME your goddamned character anyway. ‘He’ is boring. ‘Vladimir’ is fascinating. Trust me on this.

4. Format properly. 12-point font. Double space. Indent your paragraphs. Are you writing an email or a short story? Jesus wept.

5. Until you have written twenty stories that have been published, DO NOT USE italics. For anything. They are special. Italics have been enchanted by the faeries. They will fuck up your story if you use them. Only really really excellent writers who have been invited to take the special course in understanding hyperbole, irony, and winking at the reader, offered beneath a little-known mound in an undisclosed parkette and taught by Oberon and Titania, should even begin to consider using italics. I’m not even fucking joking here.