Startle and Illuminate: Carol Shields on Writing ed. by Anne Giardini (review)
- Startle and Illuminate: Carol Shields on Writing ed. by Anne Giardini
Imagine the rejoicing that would ensue if another novel by Jane Austen were discovered. So it is when previously unpublished writing by any beloved author is released. Carol Shields's daughter, novelist Anne Giardini, and her son, Nicholas Giardini, edited Startle and Illuminate: Carol Shields on Writing, published by Random House Canada in April 2016 and dedicated to Donald Shields, "husband, father and grandfather," with an appropriate quotation by Carol as epigraph: "I've always believed fiction to be about redemption, about trying to see why people are the way they are."
Startle and Illuminate contains fourteen essays by Shields, most of which have never before been published: "Myths that Keep You From Writing," from an untitled, undated paper; "Boxcars, Coat Hangers, and Other Devices," from a 1997 paper; "To Write Is to Raid," from "Crossing Over," an unpublished 1990 paper; "Be a Little Crazy; Astonish Me," from a 1990 lecture in Trier, Germany; "What You Use and What You Protect," from an undated paper titled "The Subjunctive Self"; "Pacing, Passion, and Tension," an undated paper titled "On Avoiding Standards"; "Where Curiosity Leads," drawn from an undated paper entitled "Others" and a 1997 talk titled "Gender Crossing"; "The Love Story," an undated paper; "The Short Story (and Women Writers)," a 1994 talk; and "Writing What We've Discovered—So Far," an undated paper titled "The New New New Fiction." Other, previously published essays are sometimes given new names that lead us to read familiar essays with new eyes: "Narrative Hunger and the Over-flowing Cupboard," previously published in Carol Shields, Narrative [End Page 210] Hunger, and the Possibilities of Fiction, edited by Edward Eden and Dee Goertz, is retitled "Open Every Question, Every Possibility." "Writers are Readers First" was originally titled "A View from the Edge," first delivered as a Harvard address in 1997 and originally published in Carol Shields and the Extra-Ordinary, edited by Marta Dvořák and Manina Jones.
The fourteen essays are introduced by a foreword by Shields's friend and fellow writer Jane Urquhart, who declares, "This book is a treasure" (xii), and by two engaging personal pieces entitled "Generosity, Time, and Final Advice" by Anne Giardini and "Getting to Know my Grandmother" by Nicholas Giardini, who first encountered his grandmother as a writer in an anthology of short stories in a high school English course.
The essays are studded with little gems—appropriate quotations from Shields's novels and biography of Austen interpolated by the editors. Each essay also concludes with a convenient checklist of bullet points, a précis of the points made in the essay.
A brief account of the direction Shields takes in each of the fourteen essays will assist readers and aspiring writers in selecting the most valuable to themselves.
"Writers Are Readers First" emphasizes the connection between reading and writing and confirms that, for Shields, learning to read was the magic sesame that opened the world because "reading shortens the distance we must travel to discover that our most private perceptions are, in fact, universally felt" (6).
"Myths That Keep You From Writing" debunks the old saws, including "Writing is performance," "All fiction is a form of autobiography," "Write about what you know," "Have something to say," "Write for the market," and "There's a novel in everyone" (16–17), and questions the necessity for a "myth structure" and the belief that "All good stories have already been told," while agreeing that "Writing is hard work" and that "Fiction can be regarded as one of the purest forms of truth telling" (19).
"Boxcars, Coat Hangers, and Other Devices" illustrates Shields's rebellion against traditional rules regarding fiction, including the unity of vision, in favour of replacing conventional plot with innovative structures that she employs in her own novels.
"To Write is to Raid" acknowledges the writer as thief or scavenger. Shields advises writers to raid first and revise, or disguise, later. She emphasizes the importance of writing carefully to capture an experience accurately and recreate it...
