Guillaume Morissette

I’m Trying to Reach You (Two Dollar Radio, 2012) is a novel by Barbara Browning about dance, performance art, YouTube, the blurring of art and life, the death of Michael Jackson, academic writing, lurking, other things. It’s written in a straightforward, casual manner, in a style that comes across as a hybrid of memoir, fiction, performance and citation/footnote. Browning’s past works include the novel The Correspondence Artist (Two Dollar Radio, 2011), an audionovel and two academic books. She’s also a dancer, teacher, poet and ukuleleist.

Browning’s book revolves around a dancer-turned-scholar struggling with money and tasked with transforming a postdoctoral thesis into a novel. The book frequently references itself being written:

I began copy and pasting from my dissertation’s abstract, but I was pretty sure the editors’ interest would begin the flag around the third sentence, when I began dog-paddling into the murky waters of “grammatological impossibility.” I pulled up the Microsoft Word Reference Tools to see if I could find a better phrase. […] The best replacement for “impossibility” seemed to be “ridiculousness.” I wondered if I should be trying to make this book sound more like a comedy.

The overall “tone” is, I think, both frank and comfortably self-aware :

But after all, even hamsters surely realize they’re not getting anywhere, and yet there must be something to it, because they keep going.

I was tempted to read the novel, at first, as mostly autobiographical and presented to the reader as fiction, but then the book contradicted my initial assumption that the narrator was female. The narrator and Browning seem to have similar backgrounds, but Browning also resembles, in other ways, the “YouTube dancer.”

This, I think, is possibly explained by this passage:

But Schechner has a somewhat different way of thinking about the “real” self in performance. He says that there is always a “peculiar but necessary double negativity that characterizes symbolic actions. While performing, a performer experiences his own self not directly but through the medium of experiencing the others. While performing, he no longer has a ‘me’ but has a ‘not not me.’”

I feel like Browning’s intent was, maybe, to “not not” be her characters, to be neither them or not them.

Prior to reading this book, I had very little knowledge of dance theory, so I found the citations and anecdotes scattered throughout the novel stimulating to read.

Sometimes he’d look out the window while he was teaching and see a big tanker moving by extremely slowly. He said sometimes when this happened, he’d try to time the particular exercise he was teaching to the time of the ship passing by. He said he never told his students that that was what he was doing. They just went along with his direction and danced very, very slowly.

I also enjoyed the scenes in which the narrator attends conferences and relays impressions to the reader.

I attended a late-morning panel on performance and new media. There was a guy who introduced himself as a “witch doctor” and he compared the manipulation of avatars in cyber-space to the use of voodoo dolls. That was a little disturbing.

Lastly, I liked how I’m Trying to Reach You’s academic focus was contrasted throughout the novel with text message conversations, with text messaging sometimes permeating certain scenes.

I knew that would make him feel a little better, and indeed, when I wrote that in a text he answered: “ :) ” - but in truth, my mind was elsewhere.

I remembered Cary Grant and the way he looked at Ingrid Bergman when he discovered that Claude Rains and his mother had been slowly killing her with poison.
:(

Overall, I felt engaged by I’m Trying to Reach You. I found it accessible, intelligent, and would give it “extra points” for its “meta” sensibilities. I felt intrigued by the YouTube subplot at first, then grew frustrated with it around maybe the midway point, then liked its conclusion. I would definitely read more books by Barbara Browning and/or more books written in a similar tone.

Public announcement: My second book, a novel currently titled New Tab, will be published by Vehicule Press in 2014. Vehicule is a well-regarded Canadian press with a strong track record and years of experience. I am very happy to be partnering with them for New Tab.

Around this time last year, my life was: taking two unsatisfying Summer classes for credit at Concordia University, unemployed, social life dialled down to a minimum, vast majority of my time spent writing/editing by the window in the kitchen of my apartment. At one point, there was a heatwave and my apartment was like the surface of the sun and it felt like I was some sort of work-from-home underwear model.

With New Tab, my goal was to write a book that was accessible, imaginative but grounded in reality, kind of funny but not ‘just’ funny, reckless, entertaining at the sentence level and emotionally available. I worked hard (some would say, ‘desperately’) on the content, tone, structure and themes of the book, and fine-tuned a few sections by trying them out at readings.

Later, I began to feel confident enough in the manuscript to start shopping it around. Since I don’t have an agent or anything like that, my first step was to email people from publishing houses who I had met in person, some only once and very briefly. I emailed the emails and received polite responses acknowledging my existence.

Then I waited.

It felt strange to have poured my entire self into a thing, only to let that thing sleep on my hard drive.

I began telling people around me that I was ‘shopping my novel,’ even though I felt like I had no idea what I was doing. I thought things like, ‘Am I doing this the right way? Or the wrong way? Or the right way, but not enough of what I should be doing to yield any actual, concrete results?’

At that point, my number one fear was for New Tab to end up in a pile somewhere, unread, invisible and forgotten about. In general, I assumed that the presses I was contacting received many manuscripts from Promising Up-And-Coming Writers every day. The hardest part, I knew, wasn’t even writing the novel, it was getting the right eyeballs to look at it.

Later, I received follow-up emails. Some of the emails apologized to me for still not having read my manuscript. ‘I am sorry,’ one email said. I could tell the email meant it. Other emails explained that the press wasn’t really looking for fiction at this point in time, but that it still wanted to have a look, maybe. Lastly, a few emails were from small presses expressing interest in publishing my manuscript as a book, which was good, except none of the presses were based in Canada, which wasn’t ideal.

As a writer, I sometimes feel like I have two identities, my Canadian literature identity and my internet literature identity. Sometimes those two identities touch and the end result is a little funny. Cale Weir, who I guess I know from Tumblr, saw me perform at a reading series in Toronto. Early in the evening, an older man whose name I forget read a poem which contained a line about cattle grazing the hills. It felt good to be able to look around the room and think ‘Tumblr’ and then ‘cattle grazing the hills’ as part of the same thought.

In the context of Canadian literature, my literary output is probably, I think, a little weird, but not unwelcome. I could have pursued an offer to publish New Tab through a small, non-Canadian press, protecting myself from a non-negligible amount of anguish, but I was worried that doing so would mean putting out a book that would be mostly ignored by Canadian media outlets. I decided to be patient and continue waiting, even though I had no guarantee that allowing more time to pass would lead to something.

Waiting, I kept wondering if there was a difference between ‘being patient’ and ‘not being pro-active enough,’ kept feeling as if the waiting was moving into different areas of my brain, doing hostile takeovers, organized sit-ins.

The waiting eventually did lead to something, and now, today, writing this blog post makes me feel like I am freeing my brain from the waiting.