Lesson
47
Finding
time and space to read and write
We will not likely see such a
time-and-space Pause button in the near future, but I’m able to imagine it more
easily after reading Bachelor Brothers’
Bed and Breakfast, the 1994 Leacock Medal winner by CBC announcer Bill
Richardson.[1]
An idyllic, Pause-button place “located on one of the islands that populate the
Strait of Georgia, between Vancouver Island and the mainland,”[2]
the B&B gives guests space to disengage from pressures, relax utterly, and
read. Hector and Virgil, the bachelor proprietors, take turns documenting
stories about their guests and celebrating written words in their journal-like
book.
Helen, one guest who returns to the
B&B every year, rereads Treasure Island because her first husband carried
the name of the central character, Jim Hawkins. He went off to war and his
death immediately after their wedding. Other notes, lists of books,
mini-reviews, and the brothers’ random thoughts make up the rest of the book.
Many of the Leacock medallists muse
about writing and make allusions to great literature. But Brothers comes closest to the format I want for my account of my
year of reading humour. It blends the readers, their anxieties, and their
experiences with the literature in a way that makes you want to read more
books.
It also shows you how to write them.
In imagining the B&B for himself,
Richardson creates not only a place where people can enjoy books, but also a
space where two men can live together as life partners,[3]
dress up as roosters, collect flowers, play musical egg cups, use moisturizers,
cook, keep cats, and feed birds without their other orientations defining them.
Part of being themselves involves
finding time to write their book. They, like many other writers, real or imagined,
have busy lives. The B&B can be a dawn-to-dusk drone of domestic duties:
“cooking, cleaning, mending, marketing.” But the brothers compartmentalize the
day and get it all done.
“The satisfying and consuming rigours
of housekeepery rarely allow us time for reflection or inward looking,” Hector
says. “So, of necessity, these little accounts of our goings-on are set down
late at night when the dust of the day has settled; or first thing in the
morning, before it has been stirred up.”
In writing these reviews, I
experienced a bit of a breakthrough when, like Bill Richardson’s Bachelor
Brothers, I decided to commit to writing every day in a different way. Instead
of setting dispiriting goals of quantity or quality, I resolved to sit at the
keyboard for at least sixty minutes, trusting that I could always squeeze out
an hour from my day even if it meant getting up early or staying up late, and
that this would translate into progress. It was hard at first, but eventually
it became much easier to find the time, sit down, and put the universe on
pause.
Writing Exercise
Two sisters work as
long-haul truckers driving eighteen-wheelers. Describe their lives and how they
each manage to find time to write while on the road.
[1] Richardson earned a master’s degree in library science
at UBC and worked as a librarian for a while, but he had his greatest impact as
a promoter of books and literacy through CBC radio: Bachelor Brothers’ Bed and Breakfast segments aired on the Vicki Gabereau Show in the early 1990s.
Later, CBC gave Richardson his own arts and letters program to replace hers. A
nice bio from his publisher can be found at
http://www.annickpress.com/author/Bill_Richardson.
[2] The fictional B&B sits in
a green valley near the Well of Loneliness coffee bar, the Rubyfruit Jungle
service station run by New Age lesbians, and other Gulf Island-style amenities.
[3] Richardson left this issue to the imagination, as well
as the possibility that the fictional fraternal twins, with “few superficial
resemblances” and a paternity that is difficult to corroborate, may have
invented their own narrative to live their lives in peace. The closing chapters
explore male bonding, the cultural and culinary intricacies of baking a
fruitcake, and the inspiration of Liberace, who took “his mellifluous and
unabashedly fruitcake voice” on a prideful visit to the rougher side of
Vancouver.