Interview

Writer in Two Voices

Interviewer & Interviewee by Sheldon Oberman

Oberman: How old were you when you began writing seriously?
Sheldon: My writing was always "serious" to me but I think it could only be taken seriously by others when I was in my late twenties. I was alone on a train to Toronto and had private time to myself in a way I hadn't for a number of years. An absolutely clear day and a half - I began recalling a childhood incident that led to my writing a fictional story called, Money

. Oberman: Did you take any formal training?
Sheldon: I did some freelance journalism, some theatre, especially improvisation. I was, I still am an English teacher so I work with language. And I like to tell stories. After a few years of writing I wanted to know if I should pursue it. I was accepted to a summer course at Banff headed by W.O. Mitchell. I expected an editor to appraise my work. Instead they told me to put everything away and write new material. No second drafts. No planning. Spontaneous. It was like a boot camp for writers. They called the method Free Fall. For six weeks we wrote as continuously as we could, steering towards material that held our interest. Selections were read aloud each day. We learned how to find our material and our voices.

Oberman: How did the Free Fall method work as compared to formal training?
Sheldon: It worked for me - not for everyone. It directed me to use experiences and sensual details that moved me. Childhood memories tend to be most vivid - that's when senses are fresh and we observe most fully. Writers often begin with those elements and use them to deal with unresolved issues. I suppose that's one thing that happened in This Business With Elijah. I created an experience that let me understand a difficult time in my childhood and then resolve it. That's not to say the story is therapy.

Oberman: It sounds like you were trained to write specifically from your past.
Sheldon: Free Fall could just as easily work for sci-fi or murder mysteries. Mostly it was a method to secure the source of my own creativity. It taught me to avoid being critical at the wrong times. So I don't get writer's block at the early stage of creating a work. I know I can sit down and keep writing until I find something of value.

Oberman: Do you ever find a complete story?
Sheldon: Sometimes. And even then I often write another twenty drafts. I distrust the Myth of the Masterpiece Revealed - the idea that the writer suffers until he or she spontaneously gives birth to a complete and perfect story. What generally happens is that I'll get a fragment that interests me - a bit of dialogue that shapes a character, an interesting object that suggests a setting, an action that leads to a plot.

Oberman: How did you write This Business With Elijah??
Sheldon: A bit of a miracle. I'd been at Banff for about three weeks. It got rather lonely and I went through some painful self examination and then Bang! I found myself writing a vivid memory of going to my grandparents' home for Passover. It forms the middle of this story. I was excited to find that way to explore my life. I remember going back to the field that night to lie down and getting a clear impression - almost a hallucination of my grandfather who was long dead. He was sitting beside me as I fell asleep. The emotional and technical strength of that piece also convinced me that I could be a writer. I found themes I cared about - life in the marketplace, the struggle to overcome the oppression of material need, of family expectations, the disruption of generational values, the hope for some sort of transcendent relief it shaped me and many people on that street, and I suppose, many people everywhere.

Oberman: When did you complete the story?
Sheldon: The opening and the ending came about five years later. I've done a number of drafts since. It took me ten years to develop the skills to complete it. Of course, I've written a lot of other stories during that time and only a few were so autobiographical. This Business With Elijah opens a collection of fifteen stories about that block on Main Street all interconnected rather like a novel.

Incidentally, there was no Mr. Werner in the early story. I had to "remove" my actual grandfather to have Mr. Werner take on that role.

Oberman: Was there an actual Mr. Werner?
Sheldon: There was a caretaker of our block who could have been Mr. Werner but I had little association with him. The caretaker, my grandfather and a thousand others created Mr. Werner. He is a person I wished I knew.

Oberman: But you grew up on Main Street over your parents' store. That is your street.
Sheldon: The setting is both real and fictional. Details are changed to give the same effects with different information. Even those relatives are not spedfically mine. But believe me, the truth about my family is generally more bizarre than the fiction. However, I can't say I saw any prophets.

Oberman: Do you get help writing this story at later stages?
Sheldon: I went to a writer's colony in Saskatchewan. I'm in a group with other writers. There's also a good colony here in Manitoba as well as writing courses. I just wasn't in a position to take them. I like feedback. Some people don't.

Oberman: What about getting help from friends and family?
Sheldon: I never show my work to anyone I want to continue loving. At least not until it's in final draft. An incomplete work is a confusing landscape. They may be encouraging, of course. But they may be just as encouraging if I took up ballroom dancing or needlepoint. I don't ask anything from them other than some well placed "oohs" and "ahhs."

At the last stage, I like to go to experienced readers who will tell me if the language is clear, if the characters are well drawn, if they were moved or bored at any points.

There are some stages where no one at all should see the work - not until I've taken it as far as I can at that point. A critical word can damage incubation.

Oberman: How do you resolve writing about people you know? Margaret Laurence wrote about a whole town, Neepawa.
Sheldon: And she got out of that town as fast as she could. I choose to stay here. But also write what I choose. That doesn't mean I can publish it all. There are options. I can wait for everyone to die. I can alter or disguise it. I can also show it to the people who might have been models. Chances are they won't even recognize themselves. Bruce MacManus apparently modelled a character after me in a play. I can't tell which one it is and he won't say. I suppose my vanity protects me from figuring it out. Let's face it - everyone wants to be written about but no one likes how it turns out. I learned that as a journalist. No matter how favourably people are described they still have an unpleasant sense of being translated, altered by the printed word. It's like primitives believing a photograph steals their souls. Maybe there's some truth to it.

Oberman: So what do you do?
Sheldon: Generally the problem solves itself. Facts become too restrictive. I veer off on a tangent, creating a tangential world, tangential situations. I touch the biographical only occasionally when I need some grounding and then I'm off again. The story becomes real in itself, not as a description of something else. That family meal never happened not as described. And yet it may also describe a Portuguese family meal or a business luncheon or a meal in a school lunchroom. The same elements may be present.

You can say everything is biographical-even the most bizarre horror or sci-fi thriller in some symbolic way. It's equally true that nothing is biographical. All writing expresses an imagined world-even front page news. Everyone understands that except the lawyers who want to sue for libel.

Oberman: Can you define the short story to use as a model?
Sheldon: The definitions have all been blown open. Write whatever you want. However, use models of stories you admire and read them until they sink in. If you want to write short stories, read short stories. Too many people want to be writers but don't happen to like either reading or writing. It's the lure of the celebrity. That's an ego problem that can block good writing until it's overcome. It's a problem in the whole society. Everyone knows about writers but few people ever read them.

Oberman: Do you have a specific meaning you wish to communicate?
Sheldon: With what people come away with I can't restrict. Of course, there's specific conflicts and resolutions at the core of the story, definite themes. But one fellow, a shopkeeper came up to me, a year after I had read a story called City Butchers. He told me how vividly he remembered Mr. Stein obsessively shaking the door of his shop, testing that it was locked. That was a small detail about a minor character but it meant a lot to him. The fellow was a shopkeeper. That didn't mean he didn't understand the rest of the story but it became significant through this detail. Everyone finds a different entrance into an event depending upon who they are and for what they look.

Oberman: Does this mean you won't tell us the meaning of This Business With Elijah?
Sheldon: It means a generic explanation satisfies no one. I'll discuss it differently with every person. The meaning keeps shifting subtly for me as well, each time I enter it, each time I change. Besides, a good work is always greater than the intentions of the creator.

Oberman: Why do we need fiction?
Sheldon: In real life, we seldom get to tie everything together. To solve all the problems. I had to solve some things later in my life, even through different people. What I didn't get from one person, I may get from another. What I missed in one moment of my life, I may find in another moment. Real life is all sorts of loose ends, constantly being tied up to other loose ends. Sometimes the wrong ones. Sometimes, not tied up at all. Writing fiction and reading fiction gives me the drama I need. At least indirectly. Maybe that's obvious but it's still worth repeating. That's what makes fiction more true than real life.

One thing though is to know more than you say about the environment of the story. And especially about the characters. know them from the inside. I've been them all. I'm now, at forty-two equidistant in age between Lenny and Werner, the two major characters of the book. I've been Lenny's mother, father, been all those neighbours on Main Street, even acted like a big Baba - plenty of times, plenty of ways.