Some Great Thing
Page 27
“There still remained the small matter of earning a living while carving out time to write.”
I sold my soul to the devil and started writing freelance speeches for anybody who would pay for them. I wrote speeches for the head of the Addiction Research Foundation in Toronto, and for officials in private companies. I dashed off a three-hundreddollar speech for a man to give at his own wedding—he paid me cash to ensure that nobody knew he’d hired me to give him the words to say to his wife at the altar. But mostly, I wrote freelance speeches for senior bureaucrats and ministers of the Ontario government.
I didn’t feel proud of the work. In fact, I was disgusted with myself for writing speeches for people for whom I would never vote. But I kept on with it because it allowed me to stick with my plan. I would write a handful of speeches—which paid infinitely better than freelance journalism—and then for a few months live off my savings while madly writing fiction. And when the money ran out, I would repeat the cycle. I reassured myself every day that it was okay to keep at this wild creative dream and live like a student while other people my age were establishing themselves in careers, starting families and setting themselves up in houses.
“I kept at the freelance speech writing for many years. It was like working to feed a habit—and my habit was writing books.”
Four years after I had dropped out of journalism, and the same year my first child was born, I managed to finish Some Great Thing.
I kept at the freelance speech writing for many years. It was like working to feed a habit—and my habit was writing books. It got me through the rewrites of Some Great Thing, which would finally find a publisher in 1992, and through Any Known Blood, and the first half of The Book of Negroes, until finally I climbed further out on my precarious limb and chose to forgo freelance work and live on savings so I could work full-time on finishing the novel.
Over the years, I’ve thought often of the many sorts of jobs that writers take on, striving to make a living while ensuring there’s enough left in the tank to keep writing with fire. In his big-hearted book On Becoming a Novelist, the late American novelist John Gardner speculated about the various ways that writers could make a living while practising their true calling. You could become a teacher, he said, but quickly rejected that option. Teaching, he claimed, would burn you out. You could become a journalist. But no, he concluded, that approach would cheapen your writing. The very best way to survive as a writer, Gardner suggested, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, was to live off your spouse. It’s too bad we can’t all do that. But to my way of thinking, ultimately it does not matter exactly how you make your living. What matters is that one takes the time to write. The greatest success an artist can achieve is the regular practice of his or her passion. If you can’t go after the very thing that you were born to do, you witness the withering of your private dreams, and you suffocate.
“If you can’t go after the very thing that you were born to do, you witness the withering of your private dreams, and you suffocate.”
For those who struggle to make it in a creative field, my wish is that you find enough work to live with dignity and enough space to give yourself over to your artistic drive. It’s a risky way to live, I know. But for those who were born with a “loose chromosome” (as my father used to say) and who simply have to dance or sing or make music, or paint or sculpt, or write, it’s the only way to live.
Web Detective
www.cbc.ca/manitoba/features/criticalmasse/
Listen to audio downloads of six episodes in the series “The Future of French in Manitoba” (2003), broadcast on CBC Radio One’s Critical Mass.
http://archives.cbc.ca/politics/language_culture/clips/3627/
View online this 1964 news clip from CBC’s Digital Archives, “Manitoba’s French Minority,” for an earlier perspective on the province’s language issues.
http://www.nfb.ca/film/road_taken/
The National Film Board presents the fascinating documentary The Road Taken (1996), directed by Selwyn Jacob, a look at the experience of Canada’s black sleeping-car porters from the early 1900s to the 1960s.
www.historycooperative.org/journals/ llt/47/02mathie.html
“North of the Colour Line: Sleeping Car Porters and the Battle Against Jim Crow on Canadian Rails, 1880–1920,” is an illuminating article by Sarah-Jane Mathieu, published by the History Cooperative.
http://winnipegtimemachine.blogspot.com/
Winnipeg-based photographer and documentary producer George Siamandas traces Winnipeg’s and Manitoba’s history through dozens of short essays and photographs. Read, among others, “Thomas Greenway: The Premier Who Banned French in Manitoba,” and “Billy Beal: One of the First Blacks in Manitoba.”
www.lawrencehill.com
Visit Lawrence Hill’s site for news about the author and his work.
To receive updates on author events and new books by Lawrence
Hill, sign up at”
authortracker.ca
About the Author
LAWRENCE HILL is the acclaimed author of The Book of Negroes, which won the commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and CBC’s Canada Reads; the novel has also been published in a full-colour illustrated edition. his other works include Any Known Blood and Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada. Lawrence Hill lives in Hamilton, Ontario. Visit him at www.lawrencehill.com.
To receive updates on author events and new books by Lawrence Hill, sign up at authortracker.ca.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
Also by Lawrence Hill
Novels
Book of Negroes
Any Known Blood
Non-Fiction
The Deserter’s Tale: The Story of an Ordinary Soldier Who Walked Away from the War in Iraq (with Joshua Key) Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada Women of Vision: The Story of the Canadian Negro Women’s
Association
Trials and Triumphs: The Story of African-Canadians
Film
Seeking Salvation: A History of the Black Church in Canada
Copyright
Some Great Thing
Copyright © 1992 by Lawrence Hill. © 2009 by Lawrence Hill
Creative Services, Inc.
P.S. section © 2009 by Lawrence Hill Creative Services, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © JUNE 2010 ISBN: 978-1-443-40043-5
Published by Harper Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
Originally published in a trade paperback edition by Turnstone Press: 1992
This Harper Perennial trade paperback edition: 2009
is a registered trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
HarperCollins books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use through our Special Markets Department.
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East, 20th Floor
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M4W 1A8
www.harpercollins.ca
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication information is available
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
> 25 Ryde Road (PO Box 321)
Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East – 20th Floor
Toronto, ON, M4W 1A8, Canada
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1
Auckland, New Zealand
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
77-85 Fulham Palace Road
London, W6 8JB, UK
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
10 East 53rd Street
New York, NY 10022
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com