From a letter to me dated October 20, 1985:
Thank you for your kind words about Various Miracles, especially “ferny head,” because that was a phrase I had to defend when my editor, over the phone, wanted it out—thought it meaningless. (Fath [my father, Donald Shields] agrees.)
This book, Startle and Illuminate, covers how my mother went about writing, and what she thought about how others might write better. I am also often asked how, with five small children, my mother found the time to write.
When my mother graduated in 1957 from Hanover College, a small liberal arts school on the Ohio River near Madison, Indiana, she was already a promising writer, and had, as it happens, merited her college’s top writing prize. However, she did not receive it. Instead, she was asked if she would mind if the committee gave it not to her, but to the young male student who had come in second. He would, after all, have to earn his living, and the prize would help him to do so. My mother, aged twenty-one, agreed—blithely as she told the story, although I do sometimes wonder. She was about to be married. She knew she would have children—she went on to have five inside the next ten years. What use would a writing prize be to her as a young wife and mother? Or so she thought. Timing may not be everything, but it is a lot. The mid-1950s was a time when women were treated, as the author Anne Fine has put it, much like a “pleat in the economy, taken in and let out as circumstances change.”
“Time” was the theme of the convocation from Hanover College, the address delivered by a popular math professor. What he said to his young and eager audience on that bright June day was this:
Tempus fugit. Time flies.
My mother remembered it as a warning that, unless the graduates before him seized the moment—in fact seized every moment—their lives would get away from them. Their days and years would be eroded, erased, wasted. Thrown away through carelessness … lost. As a result, in the years that immediately followed, my mother said,
years in which I might be changing diapers, washing floors, driving children here and there, sewing, shopping, cooking meals, writing thank you notes, weeding the garden, reading a little poetry on the sly … those words would occasionally come back to me: “Tempus fugit.”
Then her life changed. Slowly at first, but significantly. In 1962 after we moved to Manchester where my father was doing postdoctoral work, the British magazine The Storyteller accepted a short story, the first publication for which she was paid. The Storyteller was a monthly magazine sold mainly in train stations to travellers. The British Broadcasting Corporation also bought a short story from her. The story, “For Business Reasons,” was broadcast in March of 1962.
Carol wrote these stories in the moments she squeezed from her busy days raising her family. Back in Canada, starting in the mid-1960s, she also wrote and published poems. In 1976, when her youngest child was eight and she was forty-two, she published her first novel, Small Ceremonies. She went on to publish a number of collections of poetry and short stories, as well as more novels, plays and non-fiction.
But how did she find time, Terry Gross of NPR’s Fresh Air asked her in 2002.
“Everyone asks me this,” Carol said.
But I didn’t have a job. I didn’t write until [the children] went to school, and I didn’t write on weekends and I didn’t write in the evening. None of this was possible. But I used to try to get that hour just before they came home for lunch, 11 to 12. You know, got all those socks picked up, etc. and then I tried to write a couple of pages. That was all I ever asked myself to do. Then sometimes, in the afternoon, before they came home from school, I would get back to those two pages, and maybe have a chance to do them over again. But I really only had about an hour or an hour and a half a day. This was how I organized my time, that I would give myself one or two pages a day, and if I didn’t get to my two pages, I would get into bed at night with one of those thick yellow tablets of lined paper, and I would do two quick pages and then turn off the light. I did this for nine months, and at the end of nine months, I had a novel. I could see how it could be done in little units. I thought of it like boxcars. I had nine boxcars, and each chapter had a title starting with September, and then October, November, December, so it was a very easy structure for someone writing a first novel to follow.
What I learned from my mother about the art of finding time is this: find any time that you might happen to be able to muster, and structure your task so that it fits into that time in a way that allows you to finish what you want to achieve. Years later, I wrote my own first two novels in part on a laptop at hockey rinks. That was the time available to me. (Not incidentally, the purring, glowing warmth of my computer softened the dim, cold arenas where house league hockey games are played. Other parents would kindly alert me if it looked likely that whichever child was playing at the time might be about to do something that I should attend to so that I could comment on it later.)
There may not be a perfect time, and there may not be as much of it as we would like, but if we can find some bits of it, and organize them in a way that makes sense, then we may be able to turn those scraps and moments into something enduring—a poem, a story, a memoir, a novel. The days cannot be stretched, but they can be shaped.
In part from my mother’s experience, in part from my own, and in part from observing other busy and successful people, particularly creative people, I have seen over and over that the nature of time requires that we consciously shape our goals, and that we take up the things that are most important to us—our friends, our work, our families, our art—and fold them like origami into the time we have; or alternatively, that we bend the time we have to those important tasks.
It helps if we start by reframing our perspective of work as overwhelming, and of time as inherently limited. When we come from a mindset of scarcity, life will feel scant. When we come from a perspective of plenty, we encounter life as abundant. Time is like this too. We should treat it as precious and profuse, not inadequate. The reframing has to do with changing challenges—such as where to find time—into advantages, such as, how will I make the best use of the time that is demonstrably available to me?
Each second, each hour, each day, week, month and year of our existence is, after all, a miracle. And each, as that math professor urged, is to be seized. But time is not in fact fleeting or sparse, not if we treat it as expansive and abundant and as generously given to us to spend as we choose.
It helps, as I mentioned, to think of time in a structured way. One way is to consider time and the tasks that fill it as boxcars, the metaphor my mother thought of when constructing her first novel. Have you ever been stuck at a railway crossing while a train went by, seemingly endless, passenger car or freight car after tanker car, the looked-for caboose never quite coming into sight? Perhaps especially in North America, who has not been stuck like this on the near side of the tracks? Time is like that train. This moment connects to an almost endless chain in past and future. The days are expansive. The train is long. The caboose is still a ways away. When we shape our time or work or both—into boxcars, or whatever segmentation works best for you—we find that we do have the time we need to start, create, write. Not every day. Not every year. (My mother said she lost a year every time our family moved.) But we have more control over time than we often allow ourselves to believe.
In a commencement address that Carol gave to the class of 1996 at the University of British Columbia, she reflected on the anxiety that had been planted by that math professor’s advice.
Time was hurrying by. Brushing past me. I could almost hear the flapping of the winged chariot. My little life was left behind in the dust. I was standing still or so I thought. The words Tempus fugit, whenever I paused to recollect my graduation day, spooked me, scared me. I was persuaded that I had failed, because I was not filling every day with accomplishment. I was not pushing forward and making the most of my allotted time on earth.
But by 1996, likely much earlier, Carol had achieved an important insi
ght. Time was precious but it was not fleeting. She had raised a large family. She had published dozens of books. She had travelled. She had read. She had sustained a long marriage and empowering, delight-filled friendships. She had talked and laughed and shared ideas with thousands of people as friend, mother, teacher, mentor. She had written letters, scrubbed floors, dried tears, wrapped and unwrapped presents, picked flowers, baked pies, argued, danced, slept, wept—experienced that full range of what life has to offer. Her conclusion?
Tempus does not fugit.
Here’s what she told the students that day:
Time is not cruel. Given the good luck of a long healthy life, as most of us have, we have plenty. Plenty of time. We have time to try our new selves. Time to experiment. Time to dream and drift. Time even to waste. Fallow time. Shallow time.
We’ll have good years and bad years. And we can afford both. Every hour will not be filled with meaning and accomplishment as the world measures such things but there will be compensating hours so rich, so full, so humanly satisfying that we will become partners with time and not victims of it.
Most of us end up seeing our lives not as an ascending line of achievement but as a series of highly interesting chapters.
We might not have the good luck of a long healthy life. My mother didn’t. She died on a beautiful summer day thirteen years ago, a few days after her sixty-eighth birthday, of breast cancer that had metastasized to her liver and elsewhere. Some of us won’t make it that far. Some of us will see the other side of a hundred; so save your pennies, just in case—they might have to last you a long time.
All of us can and should live in time fully but without the anxiety of it running out on us. We created time. The physicists tell us it exists as a flow, to the extent it does exist, only because we serve as a point of reference. In that case, there is no reason for us to be its victims. I like my mother’s formulation very much—we should instead assume our rightful role as partners of time. We measure, slice, dice, sell, count up, monetize and commodify time, but in doing so we are conscious actors, making decisions about how it should be used and spent.
An image of this partnership came to me when I was reading Helen Macdonald’s remarkable book set in and around Cambridge, England, called H Is for Hawk. This memoir tells of the difficult, painstaking conditioning of a hawk by Macdonald, who has suffered a near collapse after the death of her beloved father, a photojournalist.
In falconry, or its hawk equivalent, austringery, neither owner nor bird is a victim or master of the other. They become partners. You see a falconer or austringer holding a falcon or hawk on a gloved hand joined by a creance, the long light cord used to tether a bird during training, and you understand how they work together, toward death—because falcons and hawks are birds of prey after all.
As my mother’s daughter, I see time in that way, that same linked partnership, the bird on our arm ready for flight, toward death, yes, but while we are tethered together fully alive and calling on each other to live fully in time—intelligently, fiercely.
The last bit of advice I directly received from my mother may have been given about two years after her death. I was booked for an early morning television interview at the start of a tour to promote my first book, The Sad Truth about Happiness, and was waiting in the wings of the set, about to walk on to join the host. I was jetlagged. Nervous. Anxious about my three small children at home. I felt a light pressure on my shoulder and I had an impression of my mother’s voice in my left ear.
“Be serene” was what I heard.
I am under no illusions about ghosts or spirits, but I know it to be true that sometimes the mind delivers comforts or reassurance that feel poised on the far margin of reasonable explanation.
We hope this book finds its way into the hands of other grateful writers, perhaps also at a time of need, who will have the great good fortune, as we have had, to hear and be encouraged by that same voice.
* Anne Collins, who edited Dropped Threads, remembers it receiving mixed reviews until Shelagh Rogers featured it on an hour-long coffee klatch on CBC’s This Morning. Two days later, the book sprang onto the bestseller lists and stayed there for over forty weeks.
COMING TO KNOW MY GRANDMOTHER THROUGH HER WRITING
BY NICHOLAS GIARDINI
I DON’T RECALL MY GRANDMOTHER AS A GIVER OF ADVICE. I remember walks outside, mosquito-bite kisses, cups of tea, interesting conversations that left me with lingering questions, hugs that lasted a long time, and love. My grandmother clearly loved all her grandchildren and I felt lucky to be among them. She died when I was eleven years old so I was too young to have a perception of her as anything other than a grandma—my grandma.
It wasn’t until a few years later, when I entered high school, that I began to read my grandmother’s stories. I came across the first story in the middle of one of my English class anthologies. I had always understood that my grandma was a writer, but I had felt too young or too daunted to try to read her books. That first short story I came upon was all it took to make me braver. I skipped the assigned reading that day and instead read my first Carol Shields story, “Weather.” And was hooked. That year I tore through my grandmother’s bibliography. (I read indiscriminately at the time, of course, spacing out her novels with sci-fi and the novels of Stephen King.) I started with Unless. I laughed at the funny parts, cried at the sad parts, and cringed through the sexy parts. In reading, I developed a separate and new perception of my grandmother as an author.
My mother, Anne Giardini, proposed this book project to me on Mother’s Day in 2013, although I doubt this date had any significance for her. My mother thinks about her own mother daily (hourly?) and I suspect she had been thinking about this book for some time before she shared the idea with me. I was living in Ottawa and finishing my undergraduate degree. My mother told me that Carol’s papers were housed in Library and Archives Canada in downtown Ottawa—dozens, perhaps hundreds of boxes of material shipped there over many years. My mum imagined a book—this book—that featured my grandmother’s writing advice, in her own words. Would I be interested, she asked, in going through the fonds in the archives and seeing what I could find?
Several weeks later, my mother came to Ottawa for work meetings. She carved out some hours with me and described, in detail, what she was envisioning. Her ideas went beyond a single book of writing advice. Could we establish a writing prize? Hold a contest to pair Carol Shields’ poetry with art pieces? Establish an annual Daisy Goodwill Flett Day during which women who were absent from the centre of our collective lives might be honoured? My mum was focused, ferocious, and determined, a side of her I wasn’t often privy to. Her excitement stirred my enthusiasm and I was immensely compelled to discover what the collection actually contained.
We filled out some forms and waited a couple of days, after which I was astonished to receive permission to enter the archives and see the Carol Shields materials. I felt the same thrill of potential discovery I had felt when that high school anthology fell open to the words: “By Carol Shields.” Thanks to the help of skilled staff, I found the material well organized and easy enough to go through. Catherine Hobbs, the archivist who has been responsible for processing and organizing the material since 1997, walked me though what was available. She showed me the finding aids that she had prepared and advised me to be meticulous in recording what I found and where I found it. I had never been particularly organized, but, for fear of letting my mum (and Catherine) down, I kept careful track each day I spent there.
Finding aids are like a restaurant menu. I picked out everything that I thought would be useful or interesting. I was able to order up letters, essays, drafts and magazine clippings, some with pen notes jotted in the margins and some covered in highlighter. There, in the literal and figurative margins, I began to build what felt like a personal connection with my grandmother. I began to see who she was and how important she had been to many other people, even loved by them. On my first day in the archiv
es, as I greedily thumbed through the available materials, images of my own mother from my childhood kept coming to mind. Still. Distracted. Gazing lovingly. I hoped that in addition to the advice I was seeking I would find something that could help me understand the origins of that kind of love.
I requested anything I thought could be interesting and what I found slowly humanized my grandma. My notes from that time are littered with paragraphs and turns of phrase I enjoyed. One of the first letters I read was from Arlette and Bill Baker, written in 1994. They had read a travel article Carol had written and invited her and my grandfather, Don, to give them a call or drop by if they ever found themselves in a particular part of France. The Bakers had never met either of my grandparents. The four became friends, and, after the deaths of Carol and Bill, Don and Arlette began a lasting relationship. One that began with that single letter.
I read the response to an “audacious” request from Toronto’s Book City. Book City had written for permission to put Carol’s profile on a shopping bag as part of a series on Canadian authors. My grandma wrote a polite note declining the invitation.
I found letters of congratulations from fans and acquaintances. I hadn’t before considered how many people actually take the time to write to authors. It seemed that my grandma had a talent for making people instantly feel at ease. My favourite of these comes from Bonnie, who wrote to my grandmother shortly after The Stone Diaries won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995:
I have had a couple of excruciating evenings in T.O. this past year, wishing I was young and beautiful, or outrageous, or above it all; anything but what I am. Having someone look above my head to see if there is someone more important to talk to is like a return to some terrible childhood. Although it’s not the real champions who do this.… And I distinctly remember a solid gaze from you during a reception a few years ago at the Globe Theatre in Regina. I would guess you have looked at many people this way.
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