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Book & Author Dinner: Bonnie Burnard writes 2 or 3 hours a day, then revises for 10
Sunday, September 03, 2000 By Rebecca Sodergren, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Bonnie Burnard likens writing a novel to building a house. The first part -- devising the plot and putting the story on paper -- is like pouring the cement and erecting the structure.
Burnard will join novelist Tim Green, food writer Mimi Sheraton and memoir writer and Pennsylvania native Richard Wertime at the Sept. 27 dinner, which benefits the Greater Pittsburgh Literacy Council. The media sponsor is WDUQ-FM. Tickets are $35. To order: 412-263-1421.
Later comes revision, which the Canadian writer likens to "turning a vase from a 45-degree angle to a 30-degree angle on the table," making the internal, decorative changes that "make it absolutely your own."
The comparison shows how much she loves revising. During the plot-building stage, she typically writes only two to three hours a day, finding the work laborious. But she'll spend 10 hours a day on revision, refining the language and making the dialogue sparkle. " I don't want that stage to be finished, ever."
Her house analogy is especially apt because of the title of her first novel, "A Good House."
The book was well-received in Canada, where it won the Giller Prize, Canada's highest literary honor. It's being published this month by Henry Holt in the United States.
Burnard will be one of four writers to speak at the Post-Gazette Book and Author Dinner Sept. 27 at the Doubletree Hotel, Downtown.
She began writing later than most, starting at 33 after her youngest child was born. Intending to get a master's degree, she attended a Canadian university where a middle-aged female writer came to do a reading from her work.
"She looked like someone I might be -- an ordinary woman who happened to be a novelist," Burnard observed. Impressed with the woman's talent with students and seriousness about her work, Burnard was inspired to begin writing herself. Looking back on that period of her life, she figures that hearing that woman "answered something that was already in me."
She never got that master's degree, but she did spend nearly 20 years writing and editing several volumes of short stories. Early on, she did this "on the dining room table with a typewriter, in the midst of everything," surrounded by her children, D'Arcy, now 24; Melanie, 22; and David, 21.
Burnard has also taught writing, which she instead calls "working with writers, being with people and giving them a response to their work." She believes people can't really be taught to write fiction.
As one might guess from her earlier analogy, Burnard also loves to renovate houses. Her expertise in this area plays into her novel, yielding clear pictures of the town's buildings and especially of the house where the Chambers family, the central characters, live.
But the novel is more about the people than the building. Spanning 50 years, the book has 10 sections which follow the course of the family's life over that time in intervals of several years.
Burnard devised the structure based on her own life. Living in Western Canada for many years, she used to return periodically to Eastern Canada to visit the rest of her family.
"Every time I returned, I would be in a new narrative," she explained. "Someone had died, someone was divorced, someone's kid was in trouble. I was like a visitor."
By structuring her book similarly -- catching up with her characters after long intervals -- she was able to cover a long period of time without recording every detail in the family's life for 50 years.
Simply but beautifully told, the novel traces the everyday joys and sorrows, the family dinners, the teen-age romances and summers in a lakeside cabin. It also records the big events: Dad's fingers being blown off in the war, Mom's fatal cancer, daughter's jaw mangled in an accident, marriages, refusals to marry, babies, untimely deaths and senility in old age -- the delirious joys and hideous griefs that, at one time or another, befall every family.
"The ethic of the book is that I'm impressed by tenacity, that the people carry on, often with good humor and energy," Burnard said.
And now that she's on tour to promote her book, she's meeting readers who tell her how the book affects them.
"A lot of people have extended family and are in the midst of the same kinds of things," she said. Through this book, "I hope they see their tenacity acknowledged."
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