We love hearing from our contributors how their work in our pages began. A contributor to our most recent issue, Elyse Durham, lets us know the impetus behind her short story “The Canadian” (read an excerpt here):
Elyse Durham: When I first started writing, I thought that being a writer meant being chained to one’s desk for fifteen hours a day. And there’s some truth to this: no work will ever get done unless I’m actually sitting in my chair, working.
But being chained to one’s desk is not sustainable, and it’s not even really possible to do. Writers, despite whatever urban legends you hear, have to make lunch. They have to clean the bathroom. Sometimes, they even have to leave the house and go to the optometrist and buy groceries.
They also, every now and again, need to play.
I do not have an ideal disposition for a writer. I like checklists, and schedules, and itineraries, and discrete processes with obvious beginnings and ends. (A mentor recently encouraged me to spend more time noodling around, warning me that my tendency to be “too goal oriented” has potential to harm my work.) Writing, as any creative endeavor, is open ended. Writing requires a lot of exploration, taking one step forward, four steps back, and one is never really sure when one is finished.
Perhaps to counteract my many shortcomings, the universe bestowed me with a gift: a chronic illness that often requires me to rest for long periods of time.
It was because of this mixed blessing (and the subsequent need to—horrors!—sometimes lie on the couch, doing nothing) that I happened upon Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen, a documentary from 1965.
The documentary was filmed in grainy black-and-white—and it was fascinating. It chronicled Cohen’s early years, touring Canada as a lauded poet.
I didn’t know Leonard Cohen was a poet. (I didn’t know he was Canadian, either.) Legendary lyricist and songster, sure. But here he was, in a sweater and a sport coat, enrapturing Toronto audiences with his spoken words. Here he was, standing in a hotel room in his underwear, drawing in the window condensation. Here he was, younger even than me, his infamous eloquence not diminished for it.
Even more shocking than seeing Leonard Cohen in his underwear was discovering, through the documentary, that he spent most of the 1960s living on a Greek island.
This piqued my curiosity. What on God’s green earth did it look like to have young, mysterious, poetic Leonard Cohen suddenly appear on a Greek island and stay?
With that, the idea for my short story, “The Canadian,” was born. (The Cincinnati Review graciously published this story in Issue 16.2.)
I had wanted to write about Greece for some time. My husband had studied abroad there, and I had once taken two planes, a bus, a ferry, and a taxi to surprise him for a visit. But this wasn’t the story I wanted to tell. The story I wanted to tell had something to do with the island itself, the hypnosis it induced in me. The story I wanted to tell was about the land, and encountering it, for the first time, as an outsider.
Leonard Cohen, another outsider enraptured by Greece’s pleasures, became a way for me to enter this story. Watching the documentary let synthesize my desires (writing about Greek life), my experience (sneaking away to Greece to surprise my husband), and my imagination (what did it look like when Leonard Cohen lived on a Greek island?). Without the open-ended exploration of watching the documentary, “The Canadian” never would have happened.
When I decided to watch Ladies and Gentlemen…, it wasn’t to find ideas. I didn’t lie down in front of my TV and press play and say, “I shall now be inspired.” This would have been creative suicide. If anything, I was just trying to give my brain and my body a break, to engage in something without a particular outcome in mind, to take my mentor’s advice and noodle. If we weren’t adults, we would call this phenomenon “play.” Maybe we should call it that again.
Elyse Durham is a fiction writer and journalist from Detroit. Her work has appeared in Christianity Today, The Cincinnati Review, and America Magazine. She is currently a student at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
(To read Durham’s short story from Issue 16.2, head to our our online store!)
