Eraudica

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An early short story of mine, published in Toronto a long time ago...

Where do you get your ideas from?

It’s a common question put to writers, especially from those who don’t write, and who don’t fully comprehend how someone can whip up a novel or short story out of thin air.

There isn’t a standard answer to this, of course, it’s different from writer to writer, from project to project. Some people are blessed with vivid imaginations and do have ideas just pop into their heads out of nowhere. Often, though, writing is a kind of confessional, a therapeutic, cathartic expression of something held very deep. That’s the case with this story (and incidentally, it’s connected to a couple of the poems in Lost in You, which shows you how much this experience affected me).

I’ll try to be brief - many years ago, I had a male friend I adored. We were both writers (he was a poet) and although we weren’t best friends, we connected on the level of writing and, to a degree, the fact that we both had some issues with depression and feeling different than others around us. After high school, we briefly reconnected again as adults, through a mutual friend. My friend was engaged, and he invited me to the wedding. We went to a couple of poetry readings together, when one of his poems was published by a journal that I had sent his poems to. My poem wasn’t chosen, so it was an awkward night, watching my friend up on stage and talking to the editor who had to face me, the rejectee, and try to be diplomatic.

For a couple of months, we actually wrote letters to each other - real letters, not emails. They were probably pretentious and overly dramatic, but I looked forward to every one. One letter of his, written after a long silence from me, consisted of one line, typed in the middle of the page, like a poem. I hope you’re well; I miss your sense of humour.

Around that time I went across Canada in a Greyhound bus to see my cousin in Victoria, B.C. At each stop I would write funny postcards and send them to my friend. Then he wrote a poem, the first line of which read “You sent me postcards from the Prairies…” and well, I was over the moon, and convinced something was going on here.

Something magical, something worthy of a romance novel. Was he trying to tell me something? Was he falling for me? It became clear through our letters back and forth that he regretted his marriage, that they had only married because they shared a child, and that she didn’t understand his poetry or even him, in any significant way. He was never inappropriate with me, but I could feel his unhappiness. Combined with the subtle things he would say to me, the fact that he wrote a poem about me…well, you can imagine that my vivid imagination went off like a firecracker.

And fizzled. He wasn't trying to tell me anything. I was just a friend to him.

This story was born out of this experience. The only part of this story that actually happened was: I did take a bus trip across Canada (Canadian dollar coins are called ‘loonies’, in case you didn’t get that reference, from the etching of a loon on one side), I did send him a few postcards, and I did go to his wedding. He did not marry someone willowy and aloof, he did not move to Vancouver, and he most definitely did not take my virginity on his basement floor. I never thought I was pregnant by him. I was not on that bus chasing after him, holding onto the one last thing that could possibly keep me in his life.

But I think - I hope - you can get a sense of how I felt about all of this from what came out in this story. I took the somewhat prosaic reality of being friend-zoned and turned it into this story.

Writing can be a powerful window into a person’s soul. Think about this the next time you read something that strikes you as profoundly personal, or coming from a place of experience and bittersweet wisdom. Sometimes an idea just pops into a writer’s head and we go with it (Spye vs Spye never happened to me in any way, shape or form), but sometimes there’s a glimpse there, a sliver of truth, a peek behind the curtain. Without this way of expressing it, I don’t know where I’d be.