Writer’s Block with Jacob Wren

All Lit Up: Why do you write?

Jacob Wren: I have answered this question before, and thought I would share the same answer again:

I write because I’ve always enjoyed reading more than I enjoy life, and always enjoy life more because of certain things I’ve read. I write because I can still read books that were written hundreds of years ago (my favourite: The Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Jan Potocki, written between 1805 and 1815) and hope that someday, by some miracle, people will have the same opportunity with mine. However, so many books are currently being produced that it is extremely unlikely very many of them will survive, and even more unlikely that my books will be among these few. I write because it is a way of turning my despair into something other than despair. I write in the uncanny suspicion that there are others out there in the world who love reading unknown books as much as I do. I write because I don’t know what else to do with myself. I write when I’m not dancing. I write because no one has ever suggested I have a talent or aptitude for anything else. I write because literature must find new ways to be political and new ways to be literature. I write because, at some point, when I was much younger, someone must have given me implicit permission to do so. I continue to write because, sometime around 2002, I got an email from someone I didn’t know saying she had found my first book Unrehearsed Beauty in a used bookstore in Brazil, and I had absolutely no idea, or way of knowing, how it got there. I write because books travel in strange, unexpected ways. I write because I still have the pure fantasy that someday I will compose a sentence that is completely and utterly joyous.

ALU: What are you working on now?

JW: I seem to be working on a trilogy of novels that’s not exactly a trilogy. Maybe not a trilogy at all, yet all of the books are loosely structured around questions concerning the desire for utopia. Apart from that they don’t share any settings or characters. The three books are: Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim, The World Ends in Our Desires and Desire Without Expectation.

I guess, more specifically, I’m working on the third installment Desire Without Expectation. I’ve been working on it for about two years and already it’s gone through so many false starts and dead ends. My first idea was that it would be a detective novel set in a world without prisons. Also, that the book would be a cross between a poem and a novel. Over time this idea evolved into a more diary-like exploration of my chronic health problems, which also included me trying, and failing, to write a detective novel set in a world without prisons. Writing about my health issues brought me toward writing about faith (or how an unbeliever might approach faith.) How when, in my early twenties, my chronic pain first became severe, I looked for some sort of spiritual poetry or approach to help get me through. How “when things take a turn for the worse there often arises some newfound desire for belief (or hope.)” This led me to the question of conversion experiences, how was it possible for someone to believe one set of things and then, quite suddenly, end up believing an entirely different set of assumptions? And how maybe, if I could have a conversion experience of some sort, it might give me a greater inner strength to deal with the ongoing chronic pain. Also, bringing in larger political questions, how “the world needs to change and I can’t help but feel that in the end it will be changed by people who believe, who possess a great deal of conviction.”

Then I decided all of this wasn’t working, set it aside, and started again from scratch. Once again, I’m attempting a cross between a poem and a novel. Many of the previous themes are still present but more beneath the surface. In the new version, an unnamed narrator is drawn from one difficult collective situation to the next, in a kind of confused spiritual quest, following a possible string of secret messages that may or may be a lost artwork celebrating the necessity of treason. “A story about a soldier who, when ordered to fire at the enemy, instead turns around and shoots his commanding officer dead.” I’m not certain if this new version will continue or, not so long from now, I will once again set it aside and start from scratch. Unlike the other two books, this one is more a 50/50 split between utopia and dystopia, a split I find intriguing. As well, most of my previous books haven’t had quite so many false starts, which possibly means I am in some kind of artistic crisis, or possibly means nothing at all.

I usually write in cafes. However, on this occasion I am having a drink.

ALU: Have you experienced writer’s block? What did you do about it?

JW: My approach to writer’s block used to be: never try to force it. For years this approach seemed to work quite well for me. When the writing was flowing I would write, and when it wasn’t I would wait. Sometimes I would find myself waiting for years. However, I’ve realized in the recent past I’ve been trying to force it slightly more often. I think it began with my book Authenticity is a Feeling, that I wanted to have finished for PME-ART’s twentieth anniversary in 2018 (since it was a book to celebrate PME-ART’s twentieth anniversary.) Then I also somewhat forced my next book, to have it ready for an editor in New York who I thought wouldn’t be at his high-profile job forever. However, shortly after sending it to him he was fired in a pandemic-related mass layoff, so I now feel I rushed that book for no reason, though in the end I think the velocity with which I wrote it served the book well. And then I wrote another book during the pandemic, mostly because I had more free time on my hands than usual and thought I would try to put it to good use. (These are the first two books in the “trilogy that is not a trilogy.”) I’m not sure all this “forcing” has led to any greater writer’s block, but it definitely changes something about how I think of writing. It also might be connected to some sort of mid-life crisis through which I feel I’m starting to run out of time. Come to think of it, this might also have something to do with all the false starts and dead ends I currently find myself in working on Desire Without Expectation. Also, as everyone now seems to know, I am extremely addicted to social media, so perhaps the main writer’s block I experience is trying to pull myself away from social media long enough to actually write.

ALU: If you had to describe your writing style in just a few words, what would they be?

JW: My writing mixes politics, ideas, provocations and the literature of an unreal world, a world both the same as, and utterly unlike, our own.

ALU: What question do you wish someone would ask you about your book?

JW: It often seems to me that all of my writing is about the relationship between art and politics. So, I don’t know if I wish someone would ask me about that, but it’s surprising to me that I don’t get asked about it more often. And I might reply with this quote from Hannah Arendt’s The Crisis in Culture: “The conflict between art and politics…cannot and must not be solved.” (It’s not lost on me that my answers to the earlier questions are considerably longer than my answers to these later questions. I think perhaps I started out too strong and have now run out of steam.)

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About Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim

What are the best ways to support political struggles that aren’t your own? What are the fundamental principles of a utopia during war? Can we transcend the societal values we inherit? Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is a remarkably original, literary page-turner that explores such pressing questions of our time.

A depressed writer visits a war zone. He knows it’s a bad idea, but his curiosity and obsession that his tax dollars help to pay for foreign wars draw him there. Amid the fighting, he stumbles into a small strip of land that’s being reimagined as a grassroots, feminist, egalitarian utopia. As he learns about the principles of the collective, he moves between a fragile sense of self and the ethical considerations of writing about what he experiences but cannot truly fathom. Meanwhile, women in his life—from this reimagined society and elsewhere—underscore truths hidden in plain sight.

In these pages, real-world politics mingle with profoundly inventive fabulations. This is an anti-war novel unlike any other, an intricate study of our complicity in violent global systems and a celebration of the hope that underpins the resistance against them.

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Jacob Wren makes literature, performances, and exhibitions. His books include Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed; Polyamorous Love Song (finalist for the Fence Modern Prize in Prose and a Globe and Mail best book of 2014); Rich and Poor (finalist for the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and a Globe and Mail best book of 2016); and Authenticity is a Feeling. He is artistic co-director of the Montreal-based interdisciplinary group PME-ART. Wren lives in Montreal.