Birdsong in winter to silence the inner critic IN

Conversation

Renée Hartleib is an author, writer and writing mentor based out of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her greatest passion is to help others connect with themselves and bring their creative dreams to life. Her new book, Writing Your Way: A 40-Day Path of SelfDiscovery, brings that wisdom to the page.

Daniel Lillford is a professional actor and playwright who has been working in the entertainment industry for over 42 years. He has had more than 35 productions of his plays performed around the world. Ghost Breezes, his first collection of short stories, was published by Moose House Publications.

RH: I just finished reading the first story in the collection. Wow! The factory farm really came alive with all those amazing details. I found it also profoundly sad and quite moving.

I know that you are an actor and also a playwright. I’m curious how you came to writing short stories?

DL: Glad you liked “The Chicken Catcher.” I concentrated on playwriting for so much of my life that there seemed little time for anything else. One of my bugbears as a playwright was the absence of one-act plays performed in the theatre. Writing a one-act play is perhaps the hardest of all disciplines for any playwright to master.

Writing short stories requires much of the same technique as writing short plays. In many ways, all I have done is to describe more of this and that, particularly the environment.

Andrew Wetmore, the editor from Moose House Publications, put out a call for a volume of local short stories in 2019, and I entered my story “The Course” into that one, and it was accepted. Andrew asked me at the launch if I had more stories. I did.

I’m a third of the way through Writing Your Way, nodding along with many of the chapters. Especially the inner critic one! That little bastard has a lot of explaining to do. When you sit down to write in the quiet of the morning, using a pencil/pen, do you listen to any music, or is the morning silence enough?

RH: I almost always write in complete silence. If I’m writing in a place where I need to drown out the sounds around me, I will put on headphones and play music, but never with words. Sometimes in the deep winter, I go to YouTube and search “bird song” and listen to birds chirping and calling for a few hours. It always lifts my spirits and reminds me that spring will eventually return.

Most of the personal writing I do is by hand, including the writing I do in a biweekly writing group. There are five of us and we meet at the absolutely gorgeous Agricola Street Books in Halifax, taking turns creating writing prompts for each other. It seems to generate writing that comes straight from our hearts.

But nostalgia and intimacy aside, I have to admit that I type much more quickly than I could ever write. I’m so grateful I took typing classes in Grade 10. Knowing how to type has certainly made my job much easier!

What about you? Where do you find your inspiration? And the burning question: what’s next? A novel, perhaps?

DL: I know of no other writer who seeks out birdsong in the dark of winter for hope and inspiration, but it makes

Writing Your Way

Renée Hartleib HeartWrite Press

Ghost Breezes

Daniel Lillford Moose House Publications

so much sense to me, for all those things you mentioned. I know I get enormous pleasure out of watching the birds on our feeders here when I’m writing in the kitchen.

I’m a naturally curious soul and I hope I go to the grave still pondering life on this wonderful old planet, and beyond, too. Growing up on Jersey, a small island in the English Channel, the smell of the sea was never far off. I miss it when I’m away from it for too long. Somehow just being small beside the sea puts me in my place.

I prefer to write in our kitchen here, looking out on the Annapolis River flowing through the bottom of the garden, mostly for the light. But I have always been able to write almost anywhere. So long as I have a pencil, a notebook, a sharpener, I’m set. I’ve written on beaches, in the car, in parking lots whilst waiting for my children to finish school and a crowded Italian restaurant in Melbourne was a favourite place when I was younger. I’d sit next to the kitchen at the back listening to the mayhem, the yelling, orders being shouted, the hustle and bustle of waiters and focus quite happily on my work.

I stream BBC Three most days as I potter about between chores and scribbling. And Yorkshire tea. Essential! Classical music remains a necessary part of my process. I sail better, as if the music is propelling my little boat wherever it needs to go.

As for the biggest challenges of the writing life… Well, making a living out of scribbling comes first. All the stuff I’m absolutely useless at, like finding a literary agent. I’d much prefer to write a play or a short story than deal with all that malarkey. I’m not a businessman.

Another volume of short stories is almost complete. As for writing a novel, I never say never, but I really do love writing short stories. I love the discipline, the clarity and the time. And of late I’ve been really enjoying bringing characters I like back into other tales. It’s enormous fun, and my world appears without horizons.

How about yourself, Renée, what are your writing challenges?

By the way, I’m quite jealous of your Grade 10 typing class. I still type with two fingers.

RH: My most productive time of year is from January to May or June. I usually take four to five weeks off in the summer to spend time with my partner and our kids and to visit my sister in B.C. She lives on an island and it takes two ferries to get there! Remote and wild and beautiful and absolutely fabulous for recharging my batteries. In the fall, I usually focus on “business” stuff, as I make my living from the professional writing, editing and writing mentoring I do.

I’m working on another non-fiction book, but I do also write fiction and have had a handful of short stories published. I aspire to write a novel (one day!). I carry small notebooks with me that get filled with these scribbled-down ideas, but they are sometimes hard to read or understand when I come back to them!

I’ve struggled with both practical and emotional/psychological roadblocks. My livelihood is centred around writing and words, but in order to write the things that are close to my heart, I’ve had to learn to set aside time for myself and my own writing. I’ve also had to grapple with a fierce inner critic who often wants to stop me in my tracks and cautions me at every turn. One gift that I give myself every year is to go on a one-week solo writing retreat. There is nothing more effective at stopping the noise and the busyness.

For inspiration, I turn to the poetry of Mary Oliver and memoirists like Cheryl Strayed, Joan Didion, Ann Patchett, Sue Monk Kidd, Dani Shapiro and Sharon Butala. I love the short stories of Alice Munro, Isabel Huggan and Alistair MacLeod. And some of my fav novelists are Barbara Kingsolver, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Rohinton Mistry, Jeffrey Eugenides, Anthony Doerr, Richard Ford and Elizabeth Strout. I think you would really like Elizabeth Strout because, like you, she writes stories with shared characters. Daniel, whose writing inspires you? And when did you start writing?

DL: I started writing at five. I have a very clear memory of sitting down in the family kitchen and thinking I should write a pirate story. I still remember the first line I put down: “A shot rang out in the night.”

I was no doubt influenced by R.L. Stevenson’s Treasure Island, which was the first book that really coloured my imagination and transported me into another realm. Writing didn’t really become serious until I had my first play performed. And after three productions, I then thought I could call myself a playwright.

The writers I come back to again and again are Graham Greene, H.E. Bates, Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, Muriel

Spark, Iris Murdoch, Oscar Wilde, A.A. Milne, Kenneth Grahame, Somerset Maugham and Walter Macken.

Was there a teacher who encouraged you to write when you were at school?

RH: Her name was Mrs. Rutter and she was my Grade Six teacher. I vividly remember her calling me to her desk and telling me about a writing contest that our city newspaper (the Windsor Star, of Windsor, Ont.) was holding for kids. She encouraged me to write a story and submit it. I received a second-place prize and had my story, with my name on it, featured in the paper. It was the seed that has led to everything I’ve done as a writer.

Also, my mother read to me constantly, got me a library card at age two, and special ordered books from overseas. She was an extraordinary parent for an introverted kid who loved to read and wanted to be a writer.

Thanks for all of this! It’s been lovely to get to know you.

DL: I hope you still have your first library card. That was a special gift from your mum. Those small markers of time in our lives really do make the difference when one reflects on the journey. Best of luck with your book and your writing. ■

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