WORDS
AT LARGE
An interview with Ryan Knighton
Posted October 25th, 2006.
Ryan Knighton teaches contemporary literature and creative writing
at Capilano College in Vancouver, British Columbia, and served for
two years as editor of the literary magazine The Capilano Review. He
has contributed radio monologues and documentaries about blindness
for CBC Radio's Definitely Not The Opera. His latest book, Cockeyed
(Penguin Group Canada), is a memoir about going blind.
Why did you decide to become a writer?
Because, well, when I found out I was going blind, I immediately
understood that my career as a forklift jockey would be very short,
if not terminal. I didn't read a lot as a kid, but when I went back
to school at a community college, I must have been at just the right
age to discover literature. My first love wasn't reading the books
I was assigned, though. It was writing about them. The reading came
later. I suppose it's the old conundrum: which came first, reading
or writing? In my case, writing. I had more control inside that verb
than, say, inside verbs such as "driving".
Has
your condition affected you as a writer? If so, in what way?
Besides the above, I can also say that blindness has made my writing
more like wrought speech than anything I'd call lyrical prose or
something like that. In part this is because I use a computer voice
synthesizer. It reads my writing back to me, and because of its
ugly, mechanical tones, I'm always trying to make it sound more
human, more like a person speaking to me. I'm also more drawn to
the textures of a sentence's diction because I write more by my
ear than by my eye. Why vomit when one can yark? Why write about
a job's decency when it was really just so cherry?
What books or authors have most influenced your life?
Poets mostly. Poetry taught me how to listen to language. That mode
uses a slower sense of time and attention and pays more homage
to what the mouth and ear are doing with words. I am deeply indebted
to the poetry of George Stanley, for one. Prose came later, and
it came back to my world through my first audio books. I simply
didn't have the eye power to read fat volumes about dysfunctional
families or the Canadian experiences of landscape. But when I finally
turned to audio books, well, the company was endless: George Orwell,
Ethel Wilson, Will Self, too many to name. But it was the memoirs
of Jim Knipfel that really did it. His books gave me permission
to pursue sentences about my own experiences. I also owe much to
Stan Persky and Brian Fawcett who reassured me that blindness could
be about more than its pathology, and could be of interest and
use to the sighted, too. I'm very lucky. Many writers helped me
go blind in a way I never imagined possible. It became a perspective,
not simply a condition. From that, blindness gave me a different
world to look upon, and to write about.
What are you reading right now?
Student essays. Hoo boy. Sometimes they're akin to the experience
of losing sight all over again. That is, I often feel after reading
a dozen or so that I've been wearing somebody else's prescription.
It sort of hurts. I know that the essays refer to some world out
there that I'm familiar with, but everything is often just on the
other side of sentences that make phenomenon blurry, general and
smeared. But that's where the job begins. Showing them how to pull
the world back into focus. The snap of the right word.
What advice would you give to writers starting out?
Stay away from workshops whenever possible. They easily cultivate
a dependency. The temptation for immediate feedback is strong,
and it's toxic. Basically, in my experience, writing is something
you do alone for the most part. Community and exchange are definitely
aspects of it, but are small in comparison. Writing is a verb first,
a noun second. Better love the act more than anything else, more
than publishing, more than praise, more than saying you're a writer.
Writing is where it's at, whatever the mysterious "it" is.
Are you working on any books or projects right now that you'd like
to share with us?
I've made mention here and there recently about a couple of projects
that I'm noodling around with in my mind, but I've decided to shut
up about them. A book is easily talked away. My mouth can easily
poach the pleasure out of the writing, so I'm going to keep quiet
for now. What I can say is that Scott Smith and I have a documentary
film in the works called "As Slow As Possible," which should
be on the film circuit next Spring. The film has something to do
with me, with travel and with the longest song ever performed. I'll
leave it at that.
Describe your writing process.
I only draft in the morning, never after noon, and only allow myself
to edit after lunch, only if I promise myself to go to the gym
by four. As you might guess from that, I'm pretty disciplinary
with myself. I also impose a daily word count I must draft, usually
around five hundred words, which is nothing Herculean, but it adds
up quickly to a heap of raw material to sift and shape. Writing,
for me, is a chase to surprise myself, to either phrase something
unanticipated, think of thoughts I'd never thunked before or, best
of all, sneak up on a laugh. If I make myself laugh, or my brain
feel clear or my throat choke a little, I feel I've done the job.
I hope I have. I assume readers won't be so far from my experiences
that I'm the only one plugged in to what the words are doing. I
hope not, in any case.
Do you ever suffer from writer's block? If so, how do you overcome
it?
I'm likely tempting a brutal, humbling case of it, but so far, no,
I've never had writer's block. In fact, I've even said I don't believe
in it. My suspicion is that writer's block is really a distracting
caption for stage fright, which is really a fear of failure. Too
much ego is involved if that's the case. It may also be a condition
specific to a western leisure class. I mean, if you're in prison,
or sentenced to death, or living in exile for holding certain political
views, writer's block isn't affordable, I suspect. I prefer to think
of writing as work, not the consequence of spotty inspiration or
secret genius. It's work and the work gets done. Some days the work
goes better than others, that's all. But even on the bad days, the
job is to have two hands on the keyboard and hope the keys go down
in the right order. If they don't that's just more work to do tomorrow.
Just you watch. Now the muses are gonna punish me something awful
and I'll be left eating my words for having said that. Eating words
for a lack of anything else to do, that is.
What, in your opinion, are the most important elements of good writing?
Humour, for sure. Sentences with good legs, too. When I'm reading
a good writer, I'm usually as interested in their sentences as
I am in the story, if not more. More curiosity than posture is
nice, I think. Surprise, without question. And, well, something
like truth, but, as the poet said, truth told slant.
What was it like to consult on Don McKellar's adaptation of Jose
Saramago's novel Blindness?
Ah ha. Somehow this tidbit of information got itself all blown out
of proportion. The straight skinny is really this: I sent Don the
first draft of my book (an unforgivingly long draft) because I knew
he was adapting Saramago's novel. I hoped he might enjoy it since
wee were working on some similar turf. Turned out he liked my book
very much and, typical of his generosity, in return he sent me a
draft of his screenplay. We had a few long discussions about it,
really comparing our senses of the novel. Turned out we have a very
similar take on it. The only other thing we did was visit a blind
camp together. My wife and I took him to the same blind camp I visited
in Cockeyed. My thinking was it might be useful for him to see thirty
blind folks moving together, speaking to one another, all that sort
of staging stuff, so he cheerfully came along and shot a bit of footage
for reference. I really don't want our relationship blown out of
proportion though. The film is his, the adaptation all his, too.
And, having read it, I can say this much: it's pretty spectacular.
And then there's this. Having the company of somebody as astute as
he is, having him lend some attention to my book and talk about blind
guy stuff with me in a way few sighted folks can, well, that's been
a hell of a pleasure, and he has helped me think some things through.
Hard to find folks who've thought about blindness that much. Saramago
certainly has. Don, too.
©2006 CBC
No portion of this article may be reprinted without permission from
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