Chelsea Bolan

  • All Is Fair…

    At the Hugo House Literary Series in April, novelist Andrew Sean Greer introduced the story he wrote for the prompt (“All is Fair in Love and War”): “I haven’t read this piece,” he said. “Not just aloud—but at all.”

    Earlier, my friend Erin Fried and I were talking about how some people can offer up what they write as soon as they write it. For National Poetry Month, friends of hers wrote a poem a day and posted every single one online. Erin was exasperated. “How can they do that?” she asked, meaning: Why can’t she? For so many of us, it takes a while to feel a piece is good enough to show others. That’s normal. But it made me wonder how much of that is perfection of craft, and how much is fear about how it will reflect us: If the piece isn’t good enough, then neither are we. I agonize over every bit of writing before I put it out there—even this blog post. But what if, just for a while, I didn’t?

    For one, it might be really fun. As Andrew Sean Greer read, he was as surprised and amused at elements of his story as the audience was. It was also revealing—Greer could only be himself, the act of writing exposed. Weird turns he took in his story and didn’t remember taking made for a kind of crash performance where anything could happen.

    It struck me as rather brave. When I mentioned this to him after the show, he said he could to do it because he’d just turned in a novel he’d been working on for years. It felt so good to work on something that wasn’t the novel, he said—it was like going out and having wild sex again. “Not that I know what that’s like,” he added. “I’ve been married for 20 years now.”

    I just completed my first novel, The Good Sister—it is at the printers’ as I write this—so I can understand a bit of what Greer is talking about. I do feel release as I begin embarking on a whole new project open to limitless possibility. However, I still find myself bound to shoulds—“marching orders,” as writers Ryan Boudinot and Aimee Bender call them. Some kind of boss in you says you should write about one thing, while your heart is aching to write about another. The boss’s voice is really loud; I end up succumbing too often.

    This time, though, I’m putting up a really good fight. The writing is really fun, and I aim to keep it so. The agonizing can—and will—come later.

     

  • Burn (or Bury, or Eat) This

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    Pieces of a torn up story. Later, I reconstructed it.

    When he was thirty, artist Richard Kehl said he burned everything he’d ever done. All his artwork—up in flames. Not only was it liberating to burn things, it was the only way to see with “beginner’s eyes”—and we must always see with beginners eyes, he said.

    As someone who saves just about every draft of everything she writes, this struck me with both horror and seductive intrigue. I wondered what would happen if I burned all my many boxes of papers—drafts of poems, stories and novels, and in some cases, the original works themselves. But I couldn’t imagine ever doing it. What if I lost something vital in there that would never return to me? But, too, what if these kept boxes were keeping me from moving into deeper, richer territory as a writer?

    In a KUOW interview, novelist Jonathan Evison talked about how he buried his first novel attempts. He wouldn’t disclose burial location or anything about these novels, only indicated that they were really bad and that they needed to be buried, rather than another method of destruction. He found the effect cathartic, clearing the way for his first published novel.

    Sandra Cisneros, when asked at a reading in Seattle what advice she’d give a beginning writer, said that one should write the truth, write all the things one doesn’t want to write or even think about, then tear the papers up into tiny little pieces—eat them, burn them, or let them float down the river.

    Tempting as that is, I find myself grateful for those writers who at least kept some of their raw drafts. To see their processes, mistakes, bad lines and titles is comforting. Even those considered our very best have often begun on shaky footing. I remember seeing an exhibition at the National Library in Dublin of W. B. Yeats’s early drafts of poems and feeling heartened by his struggles to find the right word or line. He began by failing.

    Early drafts are also works of art in their own right, with marginalia and strikethroughs and rewrites between the lines. I love seeing the draft destroyed with ink and reconstructed anew, constantly shape-shifting to find its true self. It’s enough to keep me creating, writing—and seeing with “beginner’s eyes.”

  • The Private Life of an Article

    Dan Smith and Claudio Sotolongo find a poster by Darwin Fornés in a shop in La Habana.
    Dan Smith and Claudio Sotolongo find a poster by Darwin Fornés in a shop in La Habana.

    I’d never really written an article before, and as I was writing what became “The Miracle of Saint Lazarus” in the Seattle Weekly, I found it a challenge to stick to the truth. What is the truth, anyway? We are constantly reinventing what we saw, what we heard, what really happened. Thankfully, I kept crazy notes and we recorded interviews and conversations, and my friend Daniel Ryan Smith took over 4,000 photographs—so usually there was something I could check my writing against. I was amazed how many things I did get wrong. I mixed up who said what, the colors of shirts and locations in Havana; a coconut shell became a baseball cap. It made me question all my memories, all the things I absorbed as truth, and made me wonder—did any of it really happen that way? Likely not.

    In an article, as in memory or in the many stories that make up our lives, events and details are arranged in a way that makes a better story, not necessarily how they happened in life. Some details are brought out while others are tossed into the ditch altogether, and moments and meetings with people that stretched out over days are strung into one narrative.

    But what I found most fascinating about writing a piece of non-fiction is that while the story seems to live in a frame, its tendrils are already extending out of that frame almost as soon as it’s written, seeking new soil, new stories. It’s a living, breathing being that has its own life.

    In the time between the publication of the article in mid-February and now, designer Idania del Río’s shop Clandestina finally opened; designer and tattoo artist Roberto Ramos opened a tattoo poster exhibition, and designer Darwin Fornés is moving forward with a new exhibition of posters for the Havana Biennale, a collaboration with designers from Seattle and from Havana, partially inspired by the Seattle Weekly article. This exhibition, he wrote in an email from Havana, will consist of cartoon characters from the US (which in the past were seen by the Cuban government as a dangerous ideological influence) and cartoon characters of Cuba. He said that “all of them together will look like a only one looong poster, like el malecon habanero.” They are working hard, he added, to get official permission to post the posters in some public spaces—which is a really big deal.

    So Cuban artists, too, keep pushing themselves and their art out of their frames. The story never ends—it only keeps expanding.

  • The Miracle of Saint Lazarus: Death and Rebirth in Havana’s Poster Scene

    In January, longtime friend, curator, and graphic designer Daniel R. Smith and I went to Havana, Cuba, to talk with poster designers.  After 7 interviews, 2 print shop visits, and a tour of Havana’s Superior Institute of Design (ISDI), we collaborated on this article for the Seattle Weekly. There is so much more to say about Havana, but for now, let the article speak for part of our experience there.

  • Old Growth Northwest Reading Series, Vol. VII

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    Tonight I’ll be taking a break from book editing and will be reading as part of Old Growth Northwest’s Reading and Open Mic series at the Rendezvous Jewelbox Theater in Seattle at 7pm.  I’ll be opening up for Doug Nufer (check out his self-interview in The Believer Logger) and Michelle Peñaloza (a fellow Poetry on the Busses poet).  Though the poster for the event is reminiscent of a boxing match, I won’t be fighting them.  At least, if they try to fight me I won’t fight back.  We’re just all going to get along instead.

  • In the Place of Silence wins the Prize for Best New Fiction!

    Me with my agent, Dean Cooke, and the Editorial Director at HarperCollins at the prize announcement
    Left to right:  My agent, Dean Cooke, me, and Jennifer Lambert, the Editorial Director at HarperCollins, at the prize announcement on Granville Island. (Photo: UBC Creative Writing)

    At the Vancouver Writers Festival they shortened the shortlist and announced the winner of the UBC/HarperCollins Canada Prize for Best New Fiction. And guess what?   It’s me.

    This is an incredible honor. This means that not only do I have an agent, but I also have a book deal with HarperCollins Canada. The book is slated to come out in Spring 2016.

    I wrote this novel as my thesis for the MFA degree at the University of British Columbia seven years ago, and it’s amazing to me that it has finally found a home. There’s lots of work ahead—I have just begun digging into the editing process—but I’m excited for the chance to work on this book again, to make it the best it possibly can be.

    Below are the judges’ comments on the novel:

    Chelsea Bolan’s In the Place of Silence is a compelling and vibrant novel set in contemporary Mexico, where old paternalistic customs still hold sway. When a young girl is banished from her home, the reverberations are deeply felt in an already fractured family. Bolan portrays, with deft skill, a mother’s anguish, a sister’s desperate search and a father’s hypocrisy, alternating these distinctive narrative voices to build toward an ultimate revelation. Moving from the shiny resort towns of the coast to the most dangerous streets of Mexico City to the furtive, undocumented lives of illegal immigrants over the American border, In the Place of Silence is an engaging, beautifully realized novel, and a fascinating exploration of betrayal, steadfast devotion, and the ways in which our own biases can harm what—and who—we love the most.

     

  • HarperCollins Canada/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction

    Incredible news!  The manuscript for my first novel, In the Place of Silence, has been shortlisted for the HarperCollins Canada/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction.  It’s been seven years since I wrote the book as my Master’s thesis in grad school, and the possibility of it finally getting out into the world seems extraordinary to me.  We’ll see what happens:  The winner will be announced on October 24.

  • Borderlands and Loss

    Borderlands_40Out of Austin, Texas, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review has released issue Number 40—and I’m honored to have one of my poems, “Let Them Light,” be a part of it. This issue, as well as my poem, is all about loss. We are always losing, every moment of our lives, whether it’s someone we love or something we hoped for, or the small failures of every single day. The poems in here confirm this. But they also reveal what can be gained or recovered—be it beauty, a quiet revelation, or something simply appreciated. Thus the meditative photographs of agave by Joel Salcido, documenting tequila production in Mexico, to help assuage the loss.

  • Old Growth NW’s Anniversary Party

    ognwanniversaryCelebrate literary non-profit Old Growth Northwest‘s first year this Sunday, June 8 (yes, that’s tomorrow) from 4-6 p.m. at Vermillion Art Gallery in Seattle!  Created by a group of super-smart, inspiring individuals, we’ll raise a glass to all they’ve contributed to Seattle’s literary landscape:  an array of sliding scale writing workshops across the city, Voices Behind Bars, Gay Romance NW Meetups, a reading and open mic series, as well as two literary journals.  And remember, that’s only been in a year.  What will they do in coming years?  With your help, everything!

    At Vermillion tomorrow they’ll also debut Writing on the Wall, a projected installation of over 200 works of poetry and flash fiction (including a dozen or so of my poems); there will also be raffles and reveling and readings.  I’ll be reading alongside some incredible writers:  Andrea Speed, Terra McKeown, Nick Schwarzenberger, Susan V. Meyers, Laylah Hunter, and Katherine Hervey. I’ll present a piece I wrote in response to a prompt they provided when I read back in December—bearing the bad first attempts and wrong turns recorded in my notebook to show how I finally arrived at the poem.

    This organization is doing great things for this city.  Help them do more great things.  Give them money.  Buy a ticket to the party.  Bring a book for the book drive for the prisoners in their Voices Beyond Bars program.  Give them more money.  Support them as they support and encourage writers, readers, and the literary arts in the Pacific Northwest.

  • Blueprints of a City of Literature: Addendum

    Ryan Boudinot has announced that he is not just donating all royalties from Blueprints of the Afterlife—he’s donating all his royalties from all his books for the rest of his career to the Seattle City of Literature budget.  He’s also donating any foreign sales to publishers in Cities of Literature to those cities’ organizations.

    At the AWP conference on Saturday, Ryan read part of the UNESCO application for his portion of the Hugo House Writers in Residence reading. The opening placed Seattle geographically within the world and traced the long line of the region’s storytelling traditions, reaching back through centuries.  So beautiful was the excerpt that the next reader, the amazing Karen Finneyfrock, thanked Ryan for making her cry over an application.

    You can hear more on March 12 at Town Hall.  It’s going to be awesome.