Up in Ontario

A Tribute to Stephen Osborne

Lynn Coady's biweekly column examining the arts life on Canada's left coast appears in today's Globe and Mail: Feting a city's cultural Geist. In the article, Lynn celebrates the contribution of Stephen Osborne to writing and publishing in Vancouver and calls attention to the recent announcement that Osborne will be receiving the first ever Vancouver Arts Award for Writing and Publishing. The article is excellent, the celebration for Osborne is fully justified, and I am quoted.

As you may or may not know, Osborne mentored me for a year in a program called The Writer's Studio from Simon Fraser University. The time I spent with Osborne and our group - since the program aligns each mentor with a cohort of 6 developing writers - proved invaluable to me. When Lynn was preparing to write her column and asked me what I remembered about working with Osborne, here is what I said:

On Stephen Osborne as teacher and mentor

The first time I met Stephen Osborne was at the Word on the Street festival. He stood behind the tables of Geist/Arsenal Pulp Press and surveyed the crowd. Some folks called to him and he stooped forward and spoke to them in hushed tones over the cover of a book. A mutual friend introduced us and I bought a copy of his collection of stories, Ice & Fire: Dispatches from the new world. He offered to sign the book for me and I replied that, "No, I might want to sell it again." Jesus what a heel I was. That line seemed funny in the split second that it took to think it and say it and it has never seemed funny since.

By the time I started in his group in the SFU Writer's Studio program Stephen Osborne had either forgotten what I said or blocked it from his memory. In that group I was to learn that Osborne was generous with his time and spirit and thoughts. He was a superb mentor. Of course he was scatterbrained sometimes and he had an ongoing feud with my answering machine, but when our group of six met every week he listened to our work and considered our stories and offered suggestions. He was tough when writing was weak and he demanded that students try to realize the potential of their work. He provided a working example of what it was to be a serious writer engaged with the world around him. When he saw a woman in our group with her herbal tea he told us with delight that, "real writers drink coffee."

To my eyes it seemed as if Stephen Osborne had spent his whole life preparing and dedicating his mind to writing. He stayed up late into the night puzzling over the construction of a sentence. He walked the streets open to the possibilities of the world, waiting for the realism he passed to provide him with a sign of some meaning. Then, without preening or embarrassment, he shared with us these things that he had discovered about writing. He was committed to the wonder of the world, and so he was discovering how to write and be a better writer at the same time as we were.

It was Stephen Osborne's grasp of the craft of writing, of the simple words on the page, that provided me with the means to understand how to finish the novel I was working on. He taught me that to make your words speak and live on their own, the writer has to intimately understand the mechanics of sentence contruction, grammar, rhythm and meaning. He also taught me that in writing a first novel I was doing two things: writing the novel and learning to be a writer. His insights allowed me to cut through all the literary crap that I had learned in university English and provided me with access to the storyteller's voice to tell my story. He explained how stories had to live in the ear and the imagination to resonate with a reader. He broke me of the habit of trying to stage direct the characters of the story.

Since he has moved on to another group of students, and my novel, Up in Ontario, has been published, we have had less contact. Every now and then we exchange emails. I read his column in Geist as soon as it lands on my desk. His presence floats through a community of committed writers and editors in Vancouver like a character from one of his stories.

When I got to know Stephen Osborne, it took me some time to figure out what I would call him: Stephen, Mr. Osborne, Steve, Osborne. I started out calling him Steve since that's how he had been introduced to me at the book table at Word on the Street. The I found that he seemed to encourage 'Osborne,' since that was how he signed his emails, and that seemed to be what his friends called him. But his partner Mary called him Steve, or Mr. Steve, so, as I said, it took me some time to settle on what to call him. So far I call him Osborne.