True Stories: I Fell for a Fictional Character in My Own Play.

Check it out!

Having trouble envisioning a 1000-mile dogsledding event? Here’s a fantastic video that my colleagues on the photo/video crew made at the start line:

I’ve written about the Quest before: I had a short essay in the October/November issue of Up Here magazine about my time at the Slaven’s Roadhouse dog drop station last year (unfortunately the piece is not online), and I also wrote my last Vela story about mushing and the Quest.

Messing With Memoir is an essay about the author’s efforts to revise her out-of-print memoir, years after she’d written it, and the ethical issues she grappled with in doing so. Here’s a taste:

I was a much better writer now. Why let that raw, earnest, adverb-friendly, long-sentenced version of myself linger? With e-books and Print on Demand (POD) as a garrote, I could quietly, efficiently off her. In her place I would seat that wiser, more skilled self.

But was it ethical? I had never heard of anyone tampering with their memoir. A memoir is not only an account of your life, it is specifically an account of your remembrances of your life. So now I would be telling that same story fifteen years later. I was re-remembering a memory.

Even more important, a memoir is a reflection of who you are at the time of writing. But now I would be peering backwards at myself from a new vantage point. Isn’t there a different author (older, wiser me) now? And haven’t I now changed my main character by writing her with this new hand? Did this matter?

Touching on the same theme in one of his “Daily Rumpus” emails a few days back, editor Stephen Elliott wrote about “the only true rule of memoir”:

You cannot knowingly tell a lie. In other words, you can be wrong, you can write things you consider to be true that other people consider to be untrue. In fact, it’s impossible to do otherwise. Most truth is not factual; most truth is subjective. But to state a something as fact when you know it is not, ie. I spent this much time in jail, is to break the cardinal rule.

I think that gets it about right.

I’m on a tour of Southeast Alaska by state ferry, drinking local beers, eating halibut, taking absurd quantities of photos. More to come when I get home.

Jones first came on my radar with his incredible profile of Roger Ebert a couple years back. Here’s the story of how he got into journalism. It begins with a big-name former journalist – the Headmaster of his graduate school residence – taking note of his writing and setting him up with a job interview, and ends with Jones landing a gig as a sports writer at the then-brand new National Post.

(Incidentally, Jones started that job at almost the exact same time that I, a self-righteous 16 year-old, scrapped plans to go to journalism school because I didn’t want to work for Conrad Black, who then owned the Post and almost every other paper of note in Canada. By the time I finally circled back around to journalism in my mid-20s, Black was a convicted felon, newspapers were generally considered to be a dying breed, and Jones was a regular at Esquire.)

Here are a few takeaways, of sorts, that Jones offers at the end of his story:

How can you make it, too?

• Write a lot, but for nobody but yourself
• Meet an influential authority figure who inexplicably decides to champion you to other people of influence
• Interview a founding member of blink 182
• In the meantime, finish your thesis on hockey arena design
• Graduate just when hundreds of jobs in your chosen field (totally unrelated to your education) are about to open up
• Have a terrible job interview and produce no physical evidence in your favor but somehow get hired anyway
• Make sure your first story has lots of grammatical errors in it
• Become so unwanted that you don’t count as a living person on any kind of employment form
• Write about a kid who nearly dies because of a freak sports accident
• Don’t bitch when you’re so broke that you’re living with two other dudes in a crappy apartment that smells like Parmesan cheese, but happily has a bakery downstairs that serves mushroom gravy in a bowl of mashed potatoes in exchange for very little money

Like I told you at the start: I really have no idea.

You can find a whole heap of Chris Jones stories over at Byliner.

Also, worth noting: My post on Jon Krakauer’s origin story — Jon Krakauer: “I Wanted To Pay The Fucking Bills” — is this site’s all-time most popular page. SEO lesson? Name-dropping + cussing. It works.

From June on, though, things started to look up. Jim, Mike and I announced that World Hum was back on its feet. I published an essay I’m still really happy with, Stilettos in Paris, and I attended the inaugural Oxford American Summit for Ambitious Writers (look, ma, I’m ambitious!), and spent an inspiring few days in Arkansas, meeting other writers, eating bacon and plotting world literary domination.

In the fall, my friend Sarah Menkedick invited me to write for her new site, Vela. My first essay there, In the Bush, is my first real stab at a longer narrative, and I’m pleased with the result. I also landed my first assignments with Up Here, one of my most-desired bylines. My first story for the magazine appeared in the October/November issue, and there’s lots more to come in 2012 – one of many reasons why I’m looking forward to the new year.

My year in reading was more uniformly successful. Maybe (probably) because there were long stretches where I didn’t have a ton of paying work to do, I read a lot in 2011. I wrote about some of my favorite travel-related reading in a year-end post at World Hum, but I also read a lot of non-travel nonfiction this year, and even some fiction. The best history book I read this year, Battle Cry of Freedom, was worth all the time it took — it’s a monster tome, a single-volume history of the American Civil War that manages to be remarkably readable, considering the ground it has to cover.

But my most memorable reads this year were essays, not books. Here are four that stuck with me, in some cases even months after I first read them:

• Punched Out: The Life and Death of a Hockey Enforcer by John Branch, in the New York Times.
• I’m Gonna Need You To Fight Me On This: How Violent Sex Helped Ease My PTSD by MacMcClelland, in GOOD.
• “Heavenly Father!” “I love you all!” “I love everyone!” “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!” “I love all of you!” by Luke Dittrich, in Esquire.
• My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant by Jose Antonio Vargas, in the New York Times.

I’ve started playing around with Byliner, and if you’re interested you can find lots more of my favorite essays and journalism on this “Recommends” page.

Happy New Year! And bring on 2012.

I’m going to give you the only possible advice any writer can give you: if you want to be a writer, write something you would like to read. Growing up in Fort Smith, my grandparents were medicine people and didn’t speak a word of English. We had some of the best storytellers in the world come to our house. I was raised in a time when families still visited with families. When we had company, my mom would say ‘you boys, come listen to how the world really works.’ We were never sent away.

Nobody is talking about Fort Smith. Nobody is talking about our mullets, nobody is talking about our hickies, nobody is talking about our fistfights in snow and nobody is talking about how we can two-step to anything. Growing up, I had a good eye. I was nosy, I was bossy and so I said ‘I want to start writing down the magic of the North and the romance of the North and the treachery and the heartache.’

I had the chance to see Van Camp read here in Whitehorse last spring, and in addition to being a powerful writer he’s also a wonderful performer. Strongly recommended, should he ever roll through your town.

It’s about the time I spent working in the Yukon backcountry this past summer. Worth noting: it’s extremely difficult to write about a life-altering experience without actually calling it “life-altering.”

I’m excited to have my first story in Up Here, one of my very favorite magazines. Bonus excitement: The story is illustrated with a cartoon that was commissioned just for the piece (another first for me) – and it pictures yours truly sitting on the can. Pretty cool, right?