Like a kind of female D.H. Lawrence, Smart was as famous for the story of her life as for her book. She always claimed to have lived a great love affair. The primary story, which she delighted in recounting in interviews, was that in 1937 at the age of twenty-four, she walked into a bookstore on Charing Cross Road in London, picked up a book of poetry, and began to read. She was immediately overwhelmed. She checked the biographical blurb. The poet’s name was George Barker and he was the same age as she was. She instantly knew he was the HE, the catalytic experience she needed to get her life as a writer started. (Her first candidate had been Lawrence Durrell.) Without seeing a photograph of Barker, she let it be known that she wanted to meet and marry him. She wanted to have his children. She set out on her hunt. In the course of my research, I actually met people who recalled Smart tearing around London asking how to meet George Barker. The masterpiece she came to write was based on her love affair with Barker, whom she finally met in California in 1940.

The question for me as a biographer was why did she find this autobiographical anecdote so compelling that she continued to tell it to most interviewers even forty years after the fact? This is where an act of historical imagination is required of the biographer. This was 1937, a time when women were still heavily constrained by conventional expectations, particularly regarding relationships between the sexes. In Smart’s anecdote, she was the initiator and the romantic. I would say that, to her, this flinging of herself into romantic extremis, what she might have called leaping into the arm of the infinite, was an act of courage. To really live, Smart always said, you had to have a large appetite. And she had male models to follow. Falling in love with the muse and writing love poetry had always been the male writer’s first assignment.

I knew Smart as a friend. While living in London in 1979 I had searched her down. Her name had appeared in the , under the heading After thirty-four years of silence, she had finally published her second novel, . I wrote to her as a fellow Canadian, and she invited me to visit her at her remote cottage The Dell in Suffolk.

It was winter, and I can still remember how desolate her cottage seemed, adjacent to an empty gravel pit whose landscape was strewn with frozen pools of water and interrupted by huge cranes rising like pterodactyls. Smart stood at her gate waiting for my taxi. She was disheveled in mackinaw and gumboots. She would have been sixty-five then. My first impression was that she was incredibly lonely, but I would soon discover that her home was open to everyone, like Grand Central Station itself—the taxi driver was invited in with the passenger.

We talked about writing, about Canadian literature, and about the imagination required to love a man. But I particularly remember asking her one question. I asked her why the man in her novel with whom the narrator had fallen in love hardly seemed to have an identity. He seemed to me faceless. Of course he has no face, she replied. He is a love object.

I was too young then to realize that Smart was telling me she understood the nature of her romantic obsession. She had come to recognize her collusion in what she called all that pricy pain. She had stranded herself in obsession. Romantic obsession is autoerotic, a projection onto the other of all that is most valuable in the self and that one longs to claim. Such passion serves as a catalyst to get one’s life started or to kick start it again when it stalls. When the romantic projection is ripped away or dissolves, the other standing there is almost always a stranger. The great Australian novelist, Christina Stead, used to say that every love story is a ghost story. Still, the story of romantic obsession now feels like it comes from another age. It is hard today to think of romantic love without irony. No man can easily live the persona of the romantic artist. No woman writer could ever be so alone. There are new narratives.

But the story of Smart’s life as a writer interested me deeply. It was a story of silence. Smart had experienced a painful writer’s block of almost thirty years between books. How had she lost her sense of herself as a writer—that obsessive compulsion the artist feels to write? Once she had hoped to be as good as Emily Brontë. What had happened to the writer’s necessary ego, which she had had in large enough measure to write a masterpiece like ? Puzzled by her own paralysis, she asked in a poem: is there a difference between the muse, his and hers? Is ego a prick to the muse? ( ).

In one of our conversations she told me that when she was young she had felt the maestro of the masculine sitting on my shoulder, telling me I would never be good enough. Smart left Canada in 1943 and did not return for forty years. At the London literary table, she said, the male writers allowed me a seat at the table, but they would never talk to me one on one.

The central issue for the pioneer female writer in the 1930s and 1940s was one of confidence. Where was it to be found? When was published in England in 1945, it was issued on war-rationed paper and was printed in such small type that it was only forty-five pages long. It got good reviews, including one by Cyril Connolly. Then it sank like a stone. Smart had no one telling her just how good a writer she really was.

I fell in love with the genre of biography and so decided to write a second biography. This time I wanted to counter the narrative of silence and write about a woman writer who had achieved a successful career. I chose the Canadian poet Gwendolyn MacEwen, born a generation later in 1941, because she had been so productive, writing over twenty books in thirty years. But I soon discovered she had confronted another problem. I discovered MacEwen had lived her life under the weight of secrets. She had separated her friends into different pockets of her life. No one knew the full story.

Gwendolyn MacEwen was a great poet who died at the age of forty-six in mysterious circumstances. Some people suspected suicide. How was I to write about her?

We believe the roots of a lifetime are hidden and entwined in childhood. A biography begins its archaeology there. In my first chapter the address of MacEwen’s childhood home, I offered a meditation on the very notion of a house.

The houses we are born into are always more than domestic architecture. They are mental spaces that define the power dynamic of the world we enter unwittingly; those houses will surface repeatedly in our dreams and we will reconstruct them throughout a lifetime. Thirty-eight Keele was the first universe fate offered Gwendolyn. It was complex and full of secrets. ( 3)

The essential secret at the core of MacEwen’s childhood was that her mother suffered periodic bouts of mental illness. Neither her father nor her aunt and uncle, with whom the MacEwens lived, would speak of this shameful secret. Gwendolyn and her sister Carol only knew that from time to time their mother disappeared from home. When they asked why, they were told, You are too young to understand.

In writing , I was deeply aware that I was entering the lives of real people. The first person with whom I spoke was MacEwen’s sister Carol Wilson. On our first encounter, I sat across from her in her small-town Ontario kitchen and examined her face. Eight years older than her sister, she looked exactly like MacEwen would have looked at that age. Carol described how, in 1950, when her family moved to Winnipeg, she and her sister witnessed their mother’s attempt to commit suicide by slashing her throat with a razor. Carol recounted the story to me in a halting voice full of pain. This is not easy for me, she said. She still wondered whether Gwendolyn, who had been nine-years-old at the time, had seen what had happened in the bathroom that night.

On one of my visits, Carol handed me a sealed envelope, on the back of which Gwendolyn had scrawled her name in large childish letters. Carol told me it contained a pencil. Gwendolyn had saved it because it was the pencil with which she had written her first poem when she was ten. She also told me that Gwendolyn changed her name. The family had always called her Wendy, but at age twelve, she insisted that her name henceforth would be Gwendolyn. She said she thought one day she might be important and Wendy was not the name of somebody important.

The astonishing thing is that, out of the pain of this childhood, Gwendolyn MacEwen was able to construct such a powerful life for herself. For her, it seems that art was a way to make sense of life. It required training, discipline, love. And she had a remarkable mind, perpetually in gear.

I went to libraries and searched through city directories to locate the many places MacEwen had lived. I found her letters in writers’ archives across the country, echoes of her lost voice. I consulted the Mormons in Salt Lake City to trace her genealogy. I phoned Edinburgh searching for details about her father’s life. I wrote hospitals for files. And I tracked down many of the witnesses who shared, however peripherally, in her life.

The story grew. After quitting high school just one month shy of her graduation, she wandered the streets of High Park until she found a small chaider, or Hebrew school, and walked in asking them to teach her Hebrew. She was a brilliant autodidact. If she was to know the Bible, the Zoar, the Gnostics, she must read them in the original language. Unsupervised by parents whose lives were disintegrating, she roamed the back streets of Toronto late at night. Once, when she was at the Wah Mai Café on Queen Street, the police raided. As they hauled in the prostitutes, they inquired about the kid in the brown corduroy jumper. Gwendolyn told them she was there because she was training to be a writer: I’m just a page now but one day I’ll be a book ( 34). Poets, she said, are magicians without quick wrists ( 12).

In dialogue with the multiple voices swirling through my biography, I created my version of Gwendolyn MacEwen. It is the portrait of a woman of astonishing creative depth whose very mystery leaves one breathless.

After I published , much to my surprise, I received an extraordinary number of letters. Many people identified with the tragic life of Gwendolyn MacEwen. I was moved that they would take the time to write, and that so many told me they had gone out and bought her poetry and were reading her entire work. But there was something disturbing me. Some people began to ask why I identified with dark, self-destructive, romantic female extremists. But that was not how I saw either Gwendolyn MacEwen or Elizabeth Smart. They were writers of remarkable courage who had succeeded against the odds, as all writers must, and the difficulties of their lives had come from where most difficulties do: in large measure from the patterns scripted in childhood. Theirs were individual stories and it was risky to use their lives to generalize about the Ur-pattern of the artistic life.

I remembered Margaret Atwood once commenting that there is no common pattern to artists’ lives. The only thing that writers have in common is that they write. I found myself thinking of writing a book about Atwood. Would that be possible? And why would I presume to write a biography of a living writer in mid-career? I had two motives. First, this would be another kind of story, a narrative about a woman who had managed to take control of her artistry and her life. And, secondly, she would be there to talk back. This intrigued me. I was sceptical about the way many biographers claim to know the motives of their subjects after they are dead.

I decided to write a portrait of Margaret Atwood’s early career. My book would be about confidence, about how you find the courage to believe in yourself as an artist. It would be a cultural history. It would also be about the creative process itself.

In my head I thought of this book as a not-biography. There would be no intimate journals or letters as sources. These were still in private hands, though Atwood allowed me to read her restricted files in the Thomas Fisher Library that houses her papers, and we had a lively email correspondence. I also knew that people would be guarded and protective of her. Why, then, write the book? I wanted the third version of the female artist’s life. Elizabeth Smart had been trapped in silence—after her masterpiece she had lost her nerve as a writer. Gwendolyn MacEwen had been deeply damaged by the secrets behind which she hid. Margaret Atwood had produced a brilliant and extensive body of work and was content in her life.

I knew this would be as much a biography of an era as it would be the record of an individual writer’s life. Atwood came of age as a writer at a time when the currents of feminism and Canadian nationalism met. She was central to that period in the late 1960s and early 1970s when Canadian writers established themselves in the national imagination. Compelled by Northrop Frye’s suggestion that the Canadian writer was not so much engaged in the pursuit of personal identity (Who am I?) but rather cultural identity (Where is here?), they were engaged in articulating the myths and landscapes that have shaped our culture.

In the course of writing my previous biographies, I had experienced the nostalgic, elegiac feeling of following after. The subjects were gone and had left only their words behind. Writing about Margaret Atwood was, of course, completely different. I was driven by curiosity and intrigue, and found myself saying, Ah, so that’s what it was like.

On one of my many journeys, I trekked down to Harvard, where Atwood had gone to graduate school, and visited the Lamont Library, where, as a female student, she was not allowed to work. Apparently it was felt that the presence of females would distract the young male students. And I saw where Founder’s House, her graduate residence at Radcliffe, had once stood. I thought of her description of the sexual perverts who, like aphids, had scaled its walls. In Boston, she would later say, she learned about urban violence. And I thought of the costume party she and her friend Jim Polk had organized at Founder’s House.

According to Polk, they announced it as a Roman orgy: she went as Cleopatra’s breast, wearing a birdcage covered in a flesh-coloured towel, and he went as the asp. Later, however, she would stage a more significant rebellion. As I walked through Harvard, I saw what Atwood would come to make of that intimidating institution. It would provide the locus for the fundamentalist dictatorship in her novel .

While I was writing these three biographies I dreamed of my subjects: Of Elizabeth standing at the end of my bed like a vengeful presence saying, You’d better get it right. Of Gwendolyn entering my kitchen by a hidden door and offering me a gift. Of carrying a desiccated fragile child through a war-torn European city, knowing it was Margaret Atwood’s child, and that I had to save it. The child was my book. I made it to the train station and the child was still alive. In my own personal mythology, each of these dreams gave me permission to write my books. They meant that the books would come from a deep place. My conscious and my unconscious mind, the place where the inspiration comes from, were in sync.

Looking back, I now consider these biographies to be a trilogy: they are essentially about the creative process and about how you find the confidence to believe in yourself as a writer.

I have been asked to discuss creative writing programs. In the old days, there were very few creative writing programs. Many of the writers directing programs now have not themselves been students in creative writing workshops. That was largely because they weren’t available when they started out as writers and they weren’t necessary. (I will speak of English-Canadian writers, though a similar narrative could be told about Quebec writers.) The writing community was small and mutually supportive. To counter their individual isolation, the writers set up small publishing companies—Contact Press, Talonbooks, House of Anansi. These were not just publishing houses but ateliers, workshops where they discussed, vetted, and nurtured each other’s work. Margaret Atwood, Dennis Lee, Gwendolyn MacEwen exchanged and read each other’s manuscripts. They offered criticism and support.

Elizabeth Smart had no such community. At least a part of her silence was caused by this vacuum. She once remarked to me that when she began reading Alice Munro and Margaret Laurence, she heard something of her own voice in their style and concerns and mused about what might have happened with her writing had she stayed in Canada. England in the 1950s was not a nurturing environment for women writers. In an interview, Elspeth Barker, Elizabeth’s friend and George Barker’s fifth wife, told me, rather shamed-faced and with some lingering shock, that as a young woman with artistic aspirations in England in the 1960s, you wouldn’t be caught dead reading a woman writer. Great writing was done by men. By contrast in Canada, Atwood remarked that the writing community was so small and beleaguered that even women writers were welcomed.

So, there was artistic support,but what about social and financial support? Both Gwendolyn MacEwen and Margaret Atwood benefited from the mutual exchange of manuscripts and the support of friendship, but Margaret Atwood confided to me that, had she remained a poet and not turned to writing fiction, she would have either been as poor as Gwendolyn or have become a university professor to support herself. Having no money was a huge factor in the isolation and loneliness of MacEwen’s life. I remember one of her lovers, Ruben, telling me an anecdote about MacEwen in the mid-1980s when she was financially struggling and was denied a loan by her bank. She went home, collected her books, marched back into the bank and banged the books on the counter saying, Here. I’ve written these. I just want my money.

In our culture, books are dealt with, like everything else, as consumer products. The reward for writing a book and its success are measured entirely in monetary terms. But books, except perhaps formula books, are not produced as products, and there is no relationship, except perhaps that of luck, between the energy and thought put into a book, and the return the writer receives. Every writer hopes they might win the literary lottery and produce a book that sells, but that is not the motive driving a book’s creation.

We need to acknowledge that writers live in a different cultural paradigm: we live in a gift-giving, as opposed to a commodity, culture. This is a term I came across years ago, thanks to a fascinating book by Lewis Hyde called . Margaret Atwood had directed me to its existence.

We are so deeply inside consumer culture that we cannot imagine a cultural paradigm other than that of private property. How could we live if we did not own things and collect things which serve as barricades against the way life can assault our equanimity without warning? And so we accumulate and accumulate until the lust for accumulation becomes an end in itself.

But in a culture based on the gift—giving without assurance of return—and there are numerous ancient, particularly Aboriginal societies who have followed this paradigm—giving, in itself, creates a cycle of return. In a gift-giving culture, when you give, you create a moral debt that will be paid back when the circle of giving completes itself.

In viewing culture as a gift, a special relationship to the world is established. And this, in fact, we are beginning to understand. We are beginning to understand that if we do not acknowledge nature as a gift rather than a commodity to be owned and exploited, we destroy our sacred relation to nature and thereby destroy ourselves. Creations of the imagination are also gifts that must be thought of as part of the gift-giving paradigm.

We writers were seduced for a while into believing we could speak of culture as a product. We could speak of cultural industries, adopting the commodity model, and asserting that we contributed to the general monetary economy and should be rewarded. But books are not products that earn a market reward. They are works of art that are essential to our collective human experience, and society, for its mental and spiritual health, should sustain their creation in the sheer principle of self-interest.

Our society believes it is free of any responsibility for the writers in their midst. Writers, like anyone else, have to work on the market model. But the network of support, the circle of sustenance the writer lives within, has to be based on a different paradigm. Writing is much more than a solitary writer in a room. It is a living, breathing network of creators whose work and input is so much larger than the product produced that it sustains what Hyde calls the erotic life of property: property not as a product to be consumed but to be passed on as a gift that enlarges the life of each recipient in the circle that receives from and sustains the gift-giver.

Forgive me if this seems abstract, but unless we change the paradigms by which we live—whether this is our responsibility toward others or toward the environment that sustains us—we are lost. And without the emotional and spiritual pleasure that art, and particularly books, give us, we are also lost.

The products of modern culture are just that: products. They are increasingly irresistible and feed our lust for addictive adventure. This can equally apply to reality shows, whether on television or in books, or violent action films and the books on which they are based. What, you ask, has this to do with creative writing programs? It is quite simply an explanation of why they have become an essential defence, or at least one of the defences, against the collective philistinism that surrounds us.

Cultural change is driven by ideas. There was a time in Canada when it was believed there was almost no English-Canadian literature. In the early 1960s, you could count on one hand the number of books published in Canada. If you were a Canadian writer, you believed you had to go elsewhere, to another country, to write. You had to substitute a foreign landscape for your own landscape because you were told that no one could set a novel in Toronto or Calgary and find any readers. How things have changed!

Writers in the late 1960s and early 1970s like Gwendolyn MacEwen and Margaret Atwood had a collective project: to create a vibrant Canadian literature. They set up their own small presses and they began to establish Canadian literature programs in the universities. It took only two decades for everything to alter profoundly. Look at the strength and diversity of Canadian writing now.

Now, we have a new project: to reconnect writing with the culture at large. One way is to sustain and grow the creative writing programs that have begun to be established in the last decade in universities and colleges and communities that can network with the public to bring writing to public attention.

The same mentality that berates writing programs, dismissing them with the statement like, You can’t teach writing, profoundly misunderstands what writing is and what a creative writing program is. Creative writing programs are responses to the increasing isolation in contemporary culture. They are networks of support. They are part of the gift-giving paradigm.

It is not easy to set up a publishing house now. It cannot be done from an attic on Spadina or a back alley in Vancouver. But I see creative writing workshops as a new incarnation of the old atelier model, a way of establishing communities that provide the essential support each new writer needs. It is hard to believe in yourself as a writer; it is hard to sustain the confidence to continue. This, the workshop provides.

The workshop is an atelier, and the director assumes the role of editor rather than that of teacher. No relationship is quite so intimate and intense. Enormous sympathy, tact, diplomacy, and shrewdness are required. And a sense of humour.

People who come out of creative writing programs become not only writers but readers and publishers of small presses, zines and e-magazines, as well as initiators of creative experiments in new media that can give imaginative content to the new vehicles like Facebook and LinkedIn that are out there begging for content that moves and inspires people.

In writing biographies of Smart, MacEwen, and Atwood I learned that writing is certainly about talent, the love of language and story, but it is also about stamina. There needs to be a community that says that writing is essential and that provides collective support. Because there will be a moment when, as a young writer, you will ask yourself if you have the will to continue. When you are in the throes of a writing project, you will find yourself asking: Why do I do this to myself? The answer must be: Because I love it. It’s my conversation with the world.