A New Leaf
by Patrick Lane

Can one ever really begin again? As a writer, much less a person? After having worked so long in one tradition, what’s it like to switch gears mid-life and begin again, with a new life, and in a new form? Can those who’ve spent a lifetime leaning on a crutch ever walk a straight line alone?

Canadian literary icon Patrick Lane takes us on a generous and moving tour of his inadvertant, but very successful memoir, There is a Season — recently released in the US as What the Stones Remember — where it began, how it developed, and what kind of life it’s had since he finally let it go.

The book began with me dying. I could say it began back in 1960 when I first began writing, but that would be a clever fancy, the “craft so long to learn,” etc. Rather, I should say the book started in my front hall on October 24, 2000 when I lay on my belly thrashing like a beached Cut-throat trout, my mouth full of blood and the crystal threads of vodka, but even that wasn’t the beginning of the book, but the end of forty-five years of drinking. That moment is now almost exactly five years ago, and writing it down here brings back all its visceral pain and fear. Three days after I collapsed I went into an addiction treatment center, stayed for seven weeks and came out just before Christmas that year. I was fragile as a thread of spun glass, my body through the worst of the detoxification, and I was facing a fear unlike any I had known before. I was a writer, I told myself in a shaky voice. I had published twenty-odd books since 1966. But now I was sober and I was afraid that I might never write again. A lifetime’s obsession with words might have ended with my getting clean. Sober, who would I be?

I didn’t want to take a chance, writing poetry or fiction. What if I couldn’t? What if the creative urge had left me? What if what I wrote was less than what I had done before? What if the Black Romantics had been right and all my writing was predicated on some alcoholic derangement? I felt like a mole pushing his face through the dark earth. Maybe my writing life was over. I remember going down into my garden and sitting on a stone bench, my body and my mind both fragile and afraid, my ego a dust necklace at the end of a broom. But it was on that stone that my memoir began. I sat there and set myself the task of writing about my garden, something safe and without any risks attached. I told myself I would write month by month for a year and document the seasons from January through to December. I also told myself I would name the living things in the garden, plants, birds, animals, and insects. It wouldn’t be poetry and wouldn’t be fiction. It would be non-fiction, something I’d done little of before.

The strange part was that I never once thought I was writing a book. I was simply writing, exercising my creative muscles, keeping myself alive. I was naming things: an orb-weaver spider, a raccoon, a rufous-sided towhee, a day lily, and a Douglas fir. Things, right? As the writing progressed, small memories crept into the text. A Rufous hummingbird tipping a penstemon blossom back with his thin beak so he could drink the nectar brought back a moment up on the North Thompson when I was in my early twenties working in a sawmill. Like all memories it was simply a moment suggested by the bird and the flower, a thing lifted up out of the past, myself as a young man down by the North Thompson River on Poplar Flats watching a hummingbird drink from a wild tiger lily. That moment became part of the text, and so the past began to weave itself into the present. A tree frog’s croaking call from under a rhododendron leaf became a hyla’s cry from Coldstream Creek up in the Okanagan Valley when I was seven years old. The moments wove themselves into a web, the past and present becoming the rough weave of a burlap sack left hanging from a hook in a root cellar. Even now, writing this, I can smell the choke of the burlap, the must of old potatoes still clinging to the rough threads.

I thought I was simply writing pages about my garden. Then, sometime in late October that year, I realized I was writing a book. It was a great surprise to me. What started out as an exercise in creative therapy had become an artifact. At the end of December I was back where I had started in the heart of a west coast winter and I had written four hundred and twenty-three pages. By that time I had told my agent I was writing a garden book and she asked to see the manuscript. She read it and sent it out to various publishers who all rejected it. Only one of them showed an interest. Ellen Seligman at McClelland & Stewart said she loved my sentences and they would take the book if I was willing to make changes. They offered a very small advance and I took it. I’m a poet after all. Any advance bigger than five hundred dollars to a poet is huge. Dinah Forbes, who became my editor, read the manuscript and told me to build more stories of the past into it. She told me the garden was a metaphor for my life and the aspect of memoir enhanced what I’d written. It never occurred to me to write a memoir. For me, the past was a fleeting motif in the book, small asides and nothing more. The manuscript was about my garden, not my life. Still, I thought it was a good idea. I went into the manuscript again and began to write about my early life. Initially the images in the garden had seemed to trigger my deepest past, my childhood and young manhood. I’m not sure why. Perhaps that distant past was the most present in my mind as I had written, those memories being more vivid and particular than any others. I read through the first chapter and whenever part of the text sparked a particular memory I wrote it down. I didn’t choose from among many memories. I chose the one that was offered by the tenor of the narrative. An image of a moonstone would startle me into my nine or twelve or three-year-old self, and I would write that bit of my life down. When I was finished eight months later, I’d written an additional four hundred pages. My manuscript was now more than eight hundred pages long.

I sent it to my editor and two weeks later she wrote back and told me to cut five hundred pages. She said no one would be interested in reading an eight hundred page book. It was now the end of July in 2004, three years after I had begun. I had never written anything longer than a hundred pages in my life. Behind me were four failed novels, each of them having foundered somewhere at the bottom of a scotch or vodka bottle. Now sober, I’d produced a huge, ungainly book. Not only had I never written anything that long, I’d never had to shrink a book of prose. This was all new to me and, naïve as I was, I began.

The cutting started in early August of that year and four weeks later I had chopped the book back to three hundred and thirty-five pages of text. I was utterly ruthless. Chunks of the garden and hunks of my life were left strewn on the floor of my office. I delighted in dragging my pen across page after page of words. I made great X’s through paragraphs, spirals through sentences, scribbles through pages. I was tired of the book and tired of writing prose. I wanted the book done and out of the way. I wanted it finished and in four weeks it was. I sent the new, truncated manuscript back to Dinah Forbes at McClelland & Stewart and she was delighted with it. After that, she suggested only minor changes. I was happy to comply. Taking a sentence out of a paragraph, deleting an adjective, correcting the Latin name of a shrub or bird, adding a line or two to a memory seemed simple things to do after that long month of August when I deleted almost five hundred pages of words.

And so the book came out the following August. It received some remarkable reviews and was nominated for several prizes, including The Charles Taylor Award for Non-Fiction. I attended the ceremony in Toronto with my wife, surrounded by publishers, agents, and the various media, and I didn’t win. I was utterly mortified by the whole process and swore that I would never go to another such torture chamber again. And I didn’t until the new British Columbia Award for Non-Fiction was announced. I told them I would not be attending. They told me to please come. I told them I no longer attended such events. They begged me to change my mind. After much pleading by them I began to think they wanted me there for a reason so I reluctantly went to Vancouver and was awarded the $25,000.00 prize. I was pleased I got it, angry at my miserable ego, and decidedly a little richer, given I had applied for a national grant and a provincial grant that year and had been turned down for both. My income that year, because of the prize, was a few thousand above what is generally called the poverty level.

The American publisher, Shambhala, bid on the book after being presented with the manuscript by McClelland & Stewart’s agent. It has been released there under their new imprint, Trumpeter Books, with the title, “What the Stones Remember.” Shambhala thought the Canadian title, “There Is A Season,” was a little tired. Who was I to argue? I was happy they were publishing it, and more than that, I was pleased I was with an American publisher I could respect. I’d read many of their publications and was a little awed they chose to do my memoir. The editor there, Emily Bower, suggested a number of minor changes, all of them crucial, and other than reverting to American spelling and measure, the book is almost the same text as the Canadian one. They’ve treated me with respect and have done everything they can to publicize the book. What more could I ask?

Now I begin my travels in the States doing appearances, an exercise in extreme self-mortification, according to my agent. After all, I’m a Canadian writer who is relatively unknown down there. And I hate traveling. Airports, planes, and hotels don’t hold a fascination for me. I’ve seen as much of the world as I want to see in this life and sitting up in bed in a generic hotel room in a Canadian or American city watching reruns of Law and Order or DaVinci’s Inquest is not what I want or need. Still, publicity is the grease that sells a book and I go south to do what I’m told. Something nice though, the Barnes and Noble bookstore chain has chosen, “What the Stones Remember,” as one of their “Discover Great New Authors” series and the book will be featured in all 850 of their stores.

What is most exciting is that I will be briefly in Mississippi and my publisher has arranged an extra day so that I can go to Oxford and visit William Faulkner’s grave. He was an early hero of mine back in the Fifties and Sixties, a drunk like myself, but someone who never dried out and quit. Still, he’s one of the great writers in my personal pantheon. He died in 1963. I was living in a cheap aluminum trailer up the North Thompson when I heard of his death and I thought then and still do that a world died with him. I’ll go to his grave and say a small prayer for him and also for the other writers I’ve known who’ve died of drink. I’ve buried half-a-dozen in my life, friends and compatriots, fellow travelers in the writing trade who caught the disease of addiction early on and never quit. We were all once young together back when the little toy dog was new. There are only a few of us left now.

As for the book? Well, it’s had an interesting life so far, not least the thousands of emails and letters I’ve received from people who’ve read the book and found the metaphor of the garden and my life and the healing from alcoholism close to their lives and the lives of those near and dear to them. They tell me the book has helped them and for that I’m grateful. The book began with me dying. Today I’m alive and, I think, writing better than I have in many years. I’m a grateful alcoholic and a grateful writer. Sounds strange to say that, but you would have had to have lain there with me on that floor puking out your life in blood and booze to fully appreciate the transformation I’ve gone through. Forty-five years of drinking and drugging. Grateful? That doesn’t begin to express my feelings about it all.

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Patrick Lane is one of Canada’s most respected writers. His critically acclaimed memoir There is a Season has just been released in the US under the title What the Stones Remember. Visit Patrick Lane online at http://www.patricklane.ca