Smart Art

Right after yesterday's blog post about meeting the curator, inspired by my own determination, I called another curator I had been told about by the fabulous Zara Contractor. A little schedule juggling and I was able to meet them both in a slim two hour window in two different parts of town before they headed to their afternoon meetings.

Through sleet and snow I drove (I'm not being dramatic, people; I'm in Vancouver), just me and my little black rental Fiat. The first interview was so successful I nearly cancelled the second. Thank God for my aforementioned determination.

The first curator worked at the Emily Carr University Gallery on Granville Island, where some of the best local art gets made, exhibited, and sold. With her twenty-five years of experience in the Vancouver art world, she gave me an incredible overview of the art scene outside of the Vancouver Art Gallery which, being a plebeian, was all I had known before (and relied heavily on in my novel). A nice little coincidence was when I discovered she had been one of the founding members of Artspeak, which as you all know was my original destination today and where I headed next.

At Artspeak, I realized that persistence really pays. It was there, thanks to an incredibly helpful curator who spent nearly an hour answering my haphazard questions, (and, it must be said, her co-worker, the artist who helped me figure out how to use the voice recorder on the ipad I pilfered from my hubby) that I found the pulse of the Vancouver art scene.

Now, like any good writer, I have to stare into the distance as the sun presumably goes down behind a thicket of clouds and the rain continues to fog up the coffee shop windows and think about what it all means to me and to my book.

Working Vacation

Avid readers recall from a previous blog entry my main character is breaking into the world of curating, a world I know squat about. You may also recall last year I happened upon a wonderful curator in the Bay Area who spent her lunch hour filling me in on my two page list of questions. It was a good start but I always knew I had to check the Canadian scene.

Last week, I scoured the Vancouver Art Gallery's website and left a message for the chief curator, hardly believing my own ballsiness as I did. She called me back within hours and with shaking hands (she was CHIEF curator), I made frantic notes as she graciously answered as many questions as I dared ask her. She spent eleven glorious minutes on the phone with me but she left me with about 150 more questions than I'd had before.

It's a tricky business, this: on one hand, I can't learn an entire profession in a month or two or six, on the other, I have to. I could look up a a university website for the curator program, but I don't care if Theory of Composition is a prerequisite for Theory of Space. I need inside knowledge, salacious tid bits, scandals, you know, the good stuff.

I'm in Vancouver this week, supposedly on vacation. My first afternoon here, I googled local galleries and started cold calling.

Tomorrow at noon, I have an interview at Artspeak in Gastown.

Phid Back

My last post may have been a little different from the rest but man did it make for some interesting comments and discussions. For the record, it took me over a month to write it for the very reason many of you reacted so strongly to it: it was so serious and I'm usually upbeat on this blog. But as the great Meera Syal titled her 2005 BBC mini series, Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee. Shit happens. As the Americans say, it is what it is.

In writing this novel, the line between fiction and myself is blurry at the best of times. It works both ways. I use so much of my own experiences in the writing:  vivid childhood memories, the aesthetics that I experienced last year in Karachi, some of my own neuroses (those are particularly fun to evoke and splatter onto the page). But on the flip side, some of the scenes I've created have come alive to me. I feel like they've really happened- like in the real world. When I go to Vancouver, I can tell you where Katya and her mother had a huge fight, the exact spot at Kits Beach where she ...oops, that was close. You'll see.

Similarly, the line between fiction and reality in that last blog was a wavering one. Everything was essentially true: it's been a rough ride. But I will confess that as I wrote that last image of me and my frost bitten hand, etc, I was sitting in my backyard among my fully bloomed roses with the California sun beating down on me. Sometimes, it's fun to be a drama queen.

Then there's the feed back I've received (sorry about the title, but ever since a certain someone called  me Phinomenal, my name has been too much fun to play with). The comments within the blog, the personal emails assuring me everything will be okay. I've even heard from third parties about what some of you said. Even though a writer is supposed to write only for herself, for her art, not for fame or accolades, it feels good knowing there are so many of you out there with me on this roller coaster.

I took a week off over the holidays, packing away all evidence of my writing life. The most strenuous thing I did was tackle a new knitting pattern. That blog was actually very cathartic; it felt good to get it all out and leave it all behind.

Yes,  it's only been three working days of 2012 but I feel recharged and rearing to finish this mother- this novel (you're all so sensitive, I don't know if you can handle a potty mouthed Phi).