Ari B. Goelman

I spent all day yesterday driving from Vancouver to Nelson, BC on the first day of the B.C. Book Prizes Kootenays book tour.  Bryan Pike and Kathryn Para picked me up at about 7:10 a.m. and we drove to Chilliwack for our first school visit.  Bryan is the tour organizer, driver, promoter, and the possessor of a great (and eclectic) music collection that provided the sound track to day 1 of our road trip.  Kathryn is the author of Lucky, one of the finalists for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Both were lovely travel companions, who were extremely tolerant of my near-constant questions, peppered with the occasional anecdote about my children.  (What’s that?  What do you think that is? Hey, what are those mountains called?  Let me tell you something cute / smart that my child did the other day.)

I spent much of the day wishing my cell phone network extended throughout the province so I could ask my cell phone questions, and stop harassing my fellow travelers.  For instance, here are some questions that occurred to me:

• Where exactly is Nelson?  Turns out it’s in the Western Kootenays, or (in terms that our friends to the south would understand) — just north of where Washington State meets Montana.  If we had driven straight it would have been about a nine hour drive.  With stops it took us about fourteen hours.
• Why does Princeton, BC have so many motels and short term residences?  Does this have something to do with mining?  (Probably not – a brief Google search has suggested that Princeton’s main business is now the sawmill, so I’m guessing the motels and such cater to loggers.)
• What are these mountains called that we’re driving through?  (The first bit were the Cascades.  Still not sure about the second bit, as Wikipedia claims that the Cascades end with Princeton, BC.)
• Is it just me, or do the hillsides in the interior of BC, where the Okanagan meets the Kootenays look a lot like the green, tree-scattered, hillsides in the Settlers of Catan?  (Definitely yes.)
• What’s that big smokestack surrounded by huge mounds of gravel?  It looked like a cross between a power plant and a cement factory.

In the course of the day we drove through forests, over mountains, past bits of deserts, rivers, creeks and frozen lakes.  We saw quite a few grazing animals, including sheep, cows, deer, and llamas.  Here’s a photo from the parking lot of the high school in Princeton where Kathryn presented.  (Kathryn has been presenting at the high schools, while I do the elementary or middle schools.)

The view from Princeton, BC

Yesterday I presented at the Vermilion Forks Elementary School in Princeton, and the Bernard Elementary School in Chilliwack.  Here’s a photo Brian took of me with some of the students.

Ari & students, post presentation

I had about a hundred students at each school events.  Both events were lively and enthusiastic and the students asked a ton of great questions.  Both were pretty big assemblies held in schools’ gyms, but somehow the acoustics worked – maybe because the students were good at listening to each other’s questions (and my answers) quietly.

I went to sleep last night still pondering some of their questions, in particular ‘what inspired me to be a writer?’  I get that question at every reading I do, and each time my answer changes.  Not because I’m a liar, but because there’s a lot of different true answers to the question.

Today, we will only do about 4 hours of driving, visiting schools in Nelson and Creston, before arriving in today’s destination of Fernie.  I’m going to try to post again tomorrow.

November has been a busy month for me — I’ve done events for The Path of Names at six schools, one book store and one symposium at UBC’s Green College.  (All while teaching three courses, etc. etc.)

I finished up my November events today with a morning reading / interactive event with  the fourth graders at Vancouver Talmud Torah (part of Vancouver’s Jewish Book Festival).  The students were everything you want in your audience: smart, engaged, interested, and filled with good ideas.  So engaged, in fact, that I forgot to give out bookmarks at the end, as I was too busy trying to answer any remaining questions.  Doh!  If any VTT people read this, let me know and I will drop off a thwack of bookmarks with you.

The highlight for me, as usual, was when I got to the parts in my presentation where I asked, ‘what do you think was going on here? / what do you think will happen next?’   I love hearing what students  think is going to happen.  Either they’re pretty much on the money (in which case I  congratulate myself on doing a good job foreshadowing) or their suggestions are totally different than what actually happens (in which case I generally think, ‘you’re right — that would have been cool…’)

I’m writing this in part, because I told the students today that I sometimes show school groups pictures.  We didn’t have the computer projector today, and quite a few students seemed interested, so I promised I would post some of the pictures I would have shown.  Here are two:

I usually put these up on the computer projector and then say, “This first picture is a map of Camp Arava in The Path of Names (drawn by the extremely talented Julie Esris).  This second picture is an aerial photo of the camp in Pennsylvania where I grew up.  Do you notice any similarities?”

Other pictures I post are very slightly different versions of the book’s cover, and some pictures of me as a kid at camp.  When I show students the picture below, I ask them to try guessing which camper is me.  I don’t think I look that different, but apparently I’m wrong.  What do you think?

It seems to me that you start getting a particular line of advice from a very early age.   Not just about writing, about everything:  focus on the process, not the outcome.

I remember a grade school teacher very early on instructing us, “Don’t ask each other what grade you got on the test, ask ‘what are you learning?'” The idea being, she wanted us more concerned with the learning process, and less concerned with the outcome.  Naturally, we ignored her, though maybe we kept our voices a little lower when we turned to each other after each test.

Similarly, when I was a kid playing soccer, my coach (like every kids’ soccer coach ever) told us something like:  ‘it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.’  Naturally, we ignored him, too.

I think there are at least two reasons this advice is so universally ignored:

a)      They obviously don’t really mean it.  If our math teacher didn’t want us to care about the grade we got on a test, why bother grading them? (Instead of just, say, telling us what we did right and what we did wrong on each question).  As far as playing soccer, honestly, if it’s just about how you play the game, why do people keep score?

b)   Even more importantly (as a reason to ignore this advice) is it’s so darn hard.  It’s so much easier to care about the outcome than to focus on the messy, painful, process.

The thing is, as a writer I’ve found that I have to dig up that stupid advice and listen to it.

It didn’t come up much before I published THE PATH OF NAMES.  I liked writing, so I wrote. The outcome…  Well, there wasn’t any outcome aside from the writing itself.  Sure, I occasionally published a short story, but the money and attention I got for that were so miniscule that they didn’t ripple my writing stride.

After publishing a novel, though, suddenly there were all these outcomes out there.  People were buying and reviewing my book. THE PATH OF NAMES has received generally good reviews, but not quite good enough for me (e.g. I haven’t been acclaimed the new genius of middle grade literature).  I got some attention for it, but not quite enough (e.g. I wasn’t immediately offered a three movie deal).  Worse, when I sat down to write my next book, I had a lingering concern about how people would receive my new work.  It didn’t exactly get in the way of writing. More precisely, it got in the way of enjoying writing.

So I have had to gently nudge myself back into focusing on the process, and not worrying about the outcome too much.

I’m not aiming to achieve the Buddhist ideal of detachment.  (Although, listen, that would be awesome.  Forget writing, people would come study at my feet.  I’d probably be on Oprah.  If Oprah still had a show.  Forget Oprah, I’d have my own talk show.   Yeah, and a line of magazines.  And look, here’s a picture of me standing on my head.  Could an unenlightened person do that?)

See, what I mean?   It’s hard to stay focused on the process.  But you pretty much have to try.  And you don’t necessarily have to stand on your head.  Though, I don’t know, it probably doesn’t hurt.

p.s.  Oprah fans — please understand I was just joking when I wrote ‘Forget Oprah.’    Never forget Oprah.

Rich, I’m going to be rich I tell you.

July is over and there’s very little trace

of it, though the Bastille fell on its face—

and August’s gotten orange, it will drop on

the edge of the world like a worm-eaten sun.

-Frank O’Hara

The other night, I was putting my daughter to bed and she asked me, “Why is it so dark?” She’d gotten used to the long summer evenings  we get up here past the 49th parallel.  But here it was, 8:30 and already mostly dark.  The leaves are falling, the ice cream truck’s tinny song has a little edge of desperation.  Somehow, the summer is almost over.

I had big plans for my blog this summer.  Just as a for example — I was going to blog every day for three weeks starting June 30.  (June 30 being the first day of camp in The Path of Names.)  The idea was that I would blog every day that The Path of Names has Dahlia at summer camp.  My blog entries would hilariously evoke the summer camp experience, interweaving with the events in The Path of Names.  I also had ideas about inviting my friends and readers to write about their summer camp memories, striking while the nostalgia was iron hot.

And here it is, August 19 and this is my first blog since (okay:  this is embarrassing) …  May 13.  More than three months.  In my defense, I’ve been busy.  Busy working on a new book. (Although not enough, never enough).  Busy chasing and being chased by my children.  Busy preparing for the fall semester of teaching.  Pretty much everything except blogging.

I did write two blog entries for other people.  One for the Nerdy Book Club (which you can find here) and one for the Scholastic ‘On Our Minds’ blog (which has yet to be posted.)

During my long silence, I’ve been reviewed by three of the big daily newspapers in Canada and most of the publishing industry’s review journals.  That has been super fun (and, okay, occasionally a little mystifying).  You can find a selected list on my website here.

Also very fun: I’ve received a bunch of pictures from my friends of their kids reading The Path of Names.  See below.  And, no, I can’t believe that my friends have kids that old, either.  Not when I’m barely turned thirty.  (Okay, thirty-five.  Thirty-seven max.)  Anyway, allegedly none of these were staged.   In that light, I’m especially a fan of the one taken in the super market.

Well, five in the U.S.  For some reason The Path of Names is coming out on April 30 in Canada and on May 1 in the U.S.

In the meantime, I’m keeping busy grading final exams, cleaning up after my sick babies, and posting the flier below, inviting people to my Vancouver book launch on May 8.

The good people at Scholastic Canada designed the invite on my behalf, and I love it.  Not least because it contains the phrase ‘An Evening With Ari Goelman.’  So by implication, I will be spending an evening out.   Unless the idea is I go to the bookstore and clean up after sick babies.