Western Magazine Awards Foundation

Western Magazine Awards Foundation The Magazine School TMS 2011 Bringing outstanding writing, design and photography to the classroom

Western Magazine Awards Foundation • An annual awards program recognizing excellence in Western Canadian editorial work and design. • The Magazine School TMS 2011 is a project of the Western Magazine Awards Foundation. It provides classroom material to instructors and professors.

Gold Award Best Article – B.C./Yukon – BC / Yukon

Finalists • Charles Campbell, Den of Inequity, BCBusiness • Jim Sutherland, What Now Terry Hui?, BCBusiness • Eve Joseph, Intimate Strangers, Malahat Review • Tristin Hopper, He'll Go to the Depths of Hell, Up Here • Paul Carlucci, Three-Prong Blues, Vancouver Review

And the winner is: Intimate Strangers Eve Joseph Malahat Review

Other awards for “Intimate Strangers” • Malahat Review’s2010 Creative Nonfiction Award • Creative Nonfiction Collective’s 2011 Reader’s Choice Award

The Malahat Review • “Essential poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction” • Quarterly literary journal published by the University of Victoria • Aims “to discover the most promising of new writers and publish their work alongside the best established writers” Click here for Malahat Review website

Lives in Victoria, B.C. • Author of two books of poetry, both nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Award: The Startled Heart (Oolichan Press 2004) and The Secret Signature of Things (Brick, 2010) • Recipient of the 2010 P.K. Page Founder’s Award for poetry • Holds a bachelor’s of social work and a master’s in counselling from the University of Victoria • Worked at a hospice in Victoria for 20 years Author Eve Joseph: poet and counsellor

Story setting: The hospice “Derived from the Latin hospitium, meaning both ‘host’ and ‘guest,’ hospice is an idea as well as a place. When I looked up the root for ‘hospitality’ I misread ‘friendliness to guests’ as ‘friendliness to ghosts,’ and thought that was not entirely inaccurate. It has been said, by those who can see, that the dead walk the corridors holding hands: mothers with daughters, brothers, grandfathers, wives waiting for their husbands, and others nobody knows who are just there waiting.”

Link between poetry and her work “Writing poetry was the closest thing I had found that was similar to working with the dying in that both demanded everything of me, not my schooling, but who I was, what I knew, what I’d done, what I felt.” − Eve Joseph

On working with the dying “In order to do the work, it was necessary to call upon everything: weeks spent at sea; the arrivals in new ports at dawn, the departures; books I had read; strangers whose lives intersected with mine; roosters that crowed at noon and rifles that fired at midnight to bring in the New Year; the grain elevators where my brother shot squab and the trains that arrived at the yards with their golden cargo; the war stories my mother told me; a song, one night, rising from a burnt church.”

Writer reflects: Poetry to prose “I was still in hospice and wrote my first book of poetry, and I tried in poetry to write about death, and for me it just doesn’t work. Poetry veers more towards the sentimental, because it’sso precise. Writing about death needed more room. It needed its own space. It needed elbow room, needed to push things out of the way.” − Eve Joseph

From poetry to prose “We love, most, the ones that haunt us: grandfather, brother. Those others I swore never to forget. Leave me alone. I am tired of being death's confidante.” − Eve Joseph, from The Startled Heart

Metaphor as the way in A conversation with her good friend, the late P.K. Page, one of Canada’s foremost poets, gave Joseph guidance on how to write about death. “I said to her [Page] that metaphor, which is the engine of poetry, is the language of the dying; and she looked at me and she asked,‘Have you written about that?’I said no, I hadn’t, and she said‘You must.’”

Defining metaphor A metaphor is “a figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance, something used, or regarded as being used, to represent something else.” Click here for full definition and attribution

Metaphor from “Intimate Strangers” “Imagine the dying as test pilots: figuring out the best way to recover from spins, breaking the sound barrier, flying straight toward the sun, bailing out when the plane is going down.”

More metaphor “The twenty-eight year old woman, who slept beneath the stars at the Bay Pavilion, had a rare form of bone cancer. In the days preceding her death, the bones of her ribcage were so brittle that one or two broke whenever she rolled over. For pain she was on a morphine drip with breakthrough doses given subcutaneously through a butterfly in her upper arm. I was new to the work and horrified to learn that our bones could snap like twigs. The counsellor who met with her every day listened to her talk about what it was like to be trapped in her body; together they explored how each bone that broke was an opening: the cage cracking was the only way the woman could fly free. She used morphine to try to get on top of the pain and metaphor to try and understand it.”

Poetry informs counselling “Metaphor is the essence of the experience explained . . . Metaphor gave me a way to hear, both the dying and poetry. I had my MA in counselling, but I never found anything as helpful in working with the dying as I found poetry and literature.” − Eve Joseph

Experience explained “Many people, in their last days, speak of one thing in terms of another. Metaphor, the engine of poetry, is also the language of the dying. Without metaphor how could we understand the man on his deathbed who tells you a yellow cab has pulled up to his house and says, even though it has the wrong address, he’ll go anyway? Or the woman who asks where she will live when they jackhammer her street?”

Structuring the essay “I found out early that narrative doesn’t work. It demands a beginning and end; it demands a story. I couldn’t do it in terms of writing about death. It became clichéd, it felt sentimental. I needed a way for it to be tough, for the stories to stand without sentiment, just authentic, just the truth of them.” − Eve Joseph

Finding a way in Joseph read the essays of Annie Dillard, and others who write in a fragmented style. “It was that the personal could be offset by the impersonal, so the story of my brother could be offset by a story about nomads travelling across the desert. That the factual could be offset by the mythological. So it gives it space, it gives it room to breathe. It takes it away from being precious. A lot of writing on death, to me, is precious.” − Eve Joseph

The writing group “My writing group is very casual. We send each other work before we meet so that we can have a chance to look it over. Everyone then says their bit when we get together. “We don't have any hard-and-fast rules. They are all bright women, often with very different opinions on a piece! I find just having the group makes me write more.” – Eve Joseph

The poet says, “I can’t write prose” Joseph’s writing group told her “nonsense, yes you can.” Patricia Young encouraged her to submit to the CBC Literary Awards. Joseph’s essay was short-listed for non-fiction, which encouraged her to keep working on it. “The thing I remember them saying was ‘more, more, more, more, more,’ because I tended to not put myself in it at all, and they wanted me in it. “‘You have to tell this story in a way where you’re present.’ That helped me start to remember things and put myself in without it being about me.” − Eve Joseph

Patricia Young’s advice “There was this absence of Eve at the beginning. We all kept saying, ‘But Eve you have to put yourself in it. Why would we care?’ It was a real tug of war.” − Patricia Young, poet and fiction writer

Dede Crane’s thoughts “We needed to know what inspired her inquiry into this subject, see the genuine motivation behind her writing. As she wrote, the more she revealed, the more she remembered.” − Dede Crane, fiction writer

Advice taken: Story lead is personal “When I was twelve my brother was killed in a car accident. In 1965, the year Allen Ginsberg introduced the term ‘flower power’ and Malcolm X was shot dead outside Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom; the year T.S. Eliot died and Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ was on its way to becoming a new anthem, death was regarded as a taboo subject. Not a lot was known about grief; in particular, not much was known about what to do with a kid whose brother had suddenly died on the other side of the country.”

Story evolution • Patricia Young says that in early drafts Joseph’s brother was mentioned just briefly. The group encouraged her to tell more of this story. She says many, many versions began with what is now the second section of the essay: “The hospice where I worked for over twenty years has been paved over and is now a parking lot.” • Young says the lead about Joseph’s brother “immediately makes it personal. I’m still kind of shocked that she has ‘I’ in the first line because Eve is so anti-I.”

The author describes her brother “I was fifteen years younger than my brother. He left home when I was just a kid. I remember his black hair and chiselled cheekbones and the way he bounded up the stairs three at a time. When he was a student, he took me to the room he rented near the university and showed me some empty cages that were built around the outside of the house at ground level. The cages, he told me, were for the gorillas the circus no longer had any use for.”

First experiences with loss “Our first experiences with loss shape us in ways we don’t understand at the time. I had no idea, when I studied social work and went to work at a local hospice, that I was trying to site grief through the scope of my past experience. I needed to find my way out of the basement.” − Eve Joseph

Piece of advice #2: Edit references Joseph’s writing group encouraged her to use references more sparingly: “Eve is very well read, and the references she brought in – the poetry and the others – were very apt and very interesting, but it took away from her own voice, a wonderful one, and very distinct.” − Carol Matthews Carol Matthews

Use of references in “Intimate Strangers” “In some strange way we needed death’s presence on our visits to the dying. There are no words in English to explain this; the closest, in Spanish, is el duende, the spirit of evocation. ‘The duende,’ wrote Federico García Lorca, ‘is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought.’ Working with the dying is not solely a question of ability but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation.”

More references in “Intimate Strangers” “A friend of mine, who works with the dying, says she does the work in a state of constant forgetting. ‘It is not enough to have memories,’ wrote Rilke, ‘you must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait for them to return.”

Prompting memory and association • Joseph starts the 12 sections of the essay and paragraphs with short sentences: “It is a complicated thing to be employed to help people die.” “I was fifteen years younger than my brother.” “Many people, in their last days, speak of one thing in relation to another.” “Each of us brings our own beliefs to the work.” • The author comments:“Those kinds of sentences lead you into memory.”

Other influences on “Intimate Strangers” • Joseph’sThe Startled Heart is a book of ghazals (a Persian poetry form) about death and dying. “It’s not narrative, it’s not linear, it moves by couplets, and it moves by association.” • She quotes John Thompson, a Canadian poet: “The ghazal allows the imagination to move by its own nature, discovering an alien design, illogical and without sense, a chart of the disorderly.”

Story theme leads to title “It is a complicated thing to be employed to help people die. On one hand it is a job, a way of paying the mortgage and supporting a family; on the other, people who work with the dying are doing the work that was traditionally done by families. Tolstoy wrote, in War and Peace, that if a relative was sick, the custom was to seek professional care; but when a loved one was dying, the custom was to send the professionals away and care for the dying within the family. These days, the dying are most often cared for by intimate strangers.”

Title: “Intimate Strangers” Story deck: . . . the sun will die in its sleep beneath a bridge and trailing westward like a winding sheet – listen, my dear – how softly night arrives. – Baudelaire

Transcending a narrative Joseph came across Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields (Knopf, 2010), which reinforced her process in writing the essay. She quotes him: “The task is not primarily to think up a story but to penetrate the story, to discard the elements that are merely shell or husk, and give apparent form to the story, but actually obscure its essence. In other words, the problem is to transcend the givens of a narrative.”

Submission to Malahat Review David Leach, associate professor of creative nonfiction in the University of Victoria's Department of Writing and president of the Creative Nonfiction Collective, chose “Intimate Strangers”from 188 entries to receive the Malahat Review’s 2010 Creative Nonfiction Prize.

David Leach’s judging notes “(‘Intimate Strangers’) is an essay in the most fundamental sense of that much-abused word: a spirited attempt to discern the unknowable, a brave sally into a dark thicket of our shared experience, and a careful sifting of the author’s travels through the land of the dying. In twelve compact “stanzas,” the essay illuminates one of the great mysteries of the human condition with a supple and often incandescent array of imagery, insight, allusion, even humour– and a daring lack of sentimentality. It’s a work of poetic prose that can rest comfortably alongside the classic writers of the genre, from Michel de Montaigne to Annie Dillard.”

Use of imagery “In one of the rooms facing the courtyard, cherry blossoms blew in through the open window and fell on a sleeping woman. I remember looking at her pale skin and black hair and thinking she looked like Snow White in a Red Cross bed. Her window, like all the others on the unit, was kept slightly open to allow the spirit to leave.”

Imagery in “Intimate Strangers” “The reality is somewhat different. When we scattered my mother’s ashes off the dock in front of the Cannery Seafood Restaurant on Burrard Inlet they didn’t lift in an ethereal manner; rather, they turned a luminescent green as they sank in the water and swirled downwards. It appeared as if my mother had turned into a fish and left us abruptly with a flash of her new emerald scales.”

Defining allusion In literature, an allusion is an “implied or indirect reference to a person, event, or thing or to a part of another text. Allusion is distinguished from such devices as direct quote and imitation or parody.” Click here for full definition and attribution

Allusion in “Intimate Strangers” “It was not unusual, when I worked with a nurse on the palliative response team, to be called to see a patient at home in the middle of the night. We would spot the house a block away by the light glowing from one of the bedrooms; most often, there was an oxygen sign on the door with a red line through it to indicate no smoking. Blood of the lamb, only this time signifying the house had not been passed over.”

Passage continues “Time slowed, the way it does in crisis, the neighbourhood slept on. Death was a presence that shared the night with us; not the grim reaper or the black angel, not the rider on his pale horse or Allah’s Azra’il. It was something quieter than that. It was in the rocking branches and in the voice serenading; it entered us from the soles of our feet.”

Humour in “Intimate Strangers” “Of course, things don’t always go as planned. One afternoon we were called to the home of a man who was extremely restless. His wife, who had not slept for days, was beside herself. While the nurse drew up a syringe of haldol, I spoke gently to the man telling him it was okay to rest: ‘you can rest now,’ I said. He looked at me and lay very still; his wife, overjoyed, couldn’t thank me enough. I felt good, even a bit smug, until he motioned his wife over and asked her to call their lawyer. ‘Why?’ she wondered. ‘Because,’ he said, pointing at me, ‘that woman just arrested me.’‘Whatever works,’ I thought to myself, ‘whatever works.’”

The ending “I left hospice after two decades. For a long time, it was not just work; it was a calling. Not a religious call, although one can’t do the work without a deep sense of the mystery that surrounds the dying; rather, it was the thing I did that made me feel most alive. Like writing poetry. Hopkins referred to the state of being aware, responsive, and open as the taste of the self. A state, paradoxically, in which we are fully present at the same time we disappear. To work with the dying was to enter the darkness without a map of the way home. It was to merge, briefly, with something greater than ourselves; to accompany them as far as possible and to stand alone under the stars they disappeared into.”

“I think the process of writing, the experience of writing, is smarter than we are.” – Eve Joseph

Credits • The Magazine School TMS 2011 is a project of the Western Magazine Awards Foundation. The WMAF, along with its community partner RBC Royal Bank, is committed to the celebration of excellence and the development of tomorrow’s magazine industry professionals. • The WMAF acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Periodical Fund of the Department of Canadian Heritage toward project costs. • The Magazine School TMS 2011 content was prepared with the assistance of Janice Paskey and Mount Royal University students Justine Rodrigues and Laura Wershler, and with the generous co-operation of the winners of the 2011 Western Magazine Awards. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Periodical Fund (CPF) of the Department of Canadian Heritage towards our project costs.

Western Magazine Awards Foundation