Writing editorials

Posted on November 14, 2009 by doradueck

It’s Saturday and I’ve finally got a reasonable draft of my last editorial hanging on the line.

For anyone who doesn’t know, I’ve been working this past year as interim editor of the MB Herald, a 36-page monthly magazine, print run 16,000, which goes into the homes of members of Canadian Mennonite Brethren churches. For some years I worked as associate editor, and then I “retired,” to do my own writing projects, but in January 2009 I returned to fill in while editor Laura Kalmar was on maternity leave. I’m wrapping up my term with the December issue, which is underway; Laura returns for the January issue.

I’ve enjoyed being back for the year, except, I’d have to say, for the editorials. Many kinds of writing, there’s a structure or strategy about them, and once you figure it out, it’s not so hard. But I’ve never quite figured out the formula that would get me easily through an editorial. In our particular magazine it sits near the front, so it often acts as an introduction to the issue’s theme, but it’s also expected (I assume) that one might have an opinion/position of some sort on some aspect of the topic, and now and then about other things as well. The bits of advice I’ve picked up from other editors is that it should express a view but also be open-ended. Or something like that.

Good editorial writing may be a gift, or a temperament. Fellow editor Doug Koop (ChristianWeek) doesn’t seem to find it hard and does a great job, and I always admired the rolling through still firm style of former MBH editor Harold Jantz.

In the editorial on the line, I’m weighing in on the recent MB study conference held in Saskatoon. I opined (a word I’m using in honour of another editor friend who was fond of it) that it was a good event but we need to address how our having too little time talking together in a large group setting relates to the value we say we put on “community hermeneutic.”

The trouble with editorial writing is I have to figure out what I think, and it has to be “true,” not just there for effect. It has to be what I’m willing to commit to saying. What I think about a matter is the hard part and I can only write my way to it — but it involves too many starts and stops and procrastinations and re-writes and then revisions. This quote from one of writer Flannery O’Conner’s letters says it best: “Like the old lady, I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again.”

Eventually I’ve been happy enough with most of them. But now the last one’s on the line, almost ready, and I’m glad.

(Re. hanging on the line: this is one of those little writing tips I’ve learned along the way. Once you have a draft of something you have to find a way to see it freshly when you come back to it. It helps to spread it out on the floor or table, or hang it up, and maybe read it backwards — last page first, I mean, and so on. It also helps to switch the column widths from draft to draft, or change the font.)

33 years ago today

Posted on November 13, 2009 by doradueck

I don’t generally write much about my children, nor about the mothering role — especially now that the three of them are grown and I’m off-duty. I figure it’s not their fault their mother is a writer, which often means using what happens personally for the work of words, but I try to leave them out of it. They can tell their own stories.

But “mother” is a role/name/fact that’s a huge part of my life, and today I’m celebrating the day it began. It all started 33 years ago today when the little fellow, pictured left at 3 months, was born. (He gave permission to post the photo.) I don’t think you can ever imagine at the time what it will be like to be bound up with another person for the long haul the way a mother is, but you discover it — through joy and difficulties — as you go, and I can say this for sure, the child who started it and his two siblings who followed (whose baby photos I will post on their own birthdays, if they let me) have definitely, definitely been worth it all. (Especially now that I’m off-duty.)

(Happy birthday, S! And also, D., who launched another woman on the mom adventure this day too.)

Ich bin ein Berliner?

Posted on November 11, 2009 by doradueck

I don’t know when I’ve seen a single category of my internet homepage, Arts & Letters Daily, here, as full as now with its collection of articles reflecting on the fall of the Berlin Wall, 20 years ago on Monday. 1989, it announces, was the biggest year in world history since 1945.

Checkpoint Charlie poster

Twenty years is not so long. Even the relatively young among us will surely remember it. Two of our kids brought home the famous Checkpoint Charlie poster — of the young soldier jumping to freedom — from their student exchange trips to Germany. We drymounted them and the image of freedom’s leap hung in their rooms until they left, a memory, perhaps, of their first short travels away. One of the posters got taken along, the other lies in the childless room, turned store room of sorts, the poster slightly warped but now also a memory of our children’s presence in our house, and the way they decorated their space.

I remember the fall of the Wall, of course, but looking back in my journals of Nov. 1989, I don’t find a word written about it. My only excuse is that I was in some excitement and tremor of my own, as my first book had just been released.Still, you’d think I could have mentioned the Wall. It’s the nature of personal journalling, I suppose. I do know we were all rather taken with Mikhail Gorbachev.

Of a day nearly a year later, Oct. 3, 1990, however, I have notes. I was sitting in the public library, Henderson Branch, overwhelmed by the official re-unification of the two Germanys that day, and jotting lines trying to make sense of why it mattered to me, why I was so happy.

I wasn’t alive in 1945 when the Enemy was humbled to just proportions… when corpses formed Babels of perversity… when photographs were made of naked men / hands clutched to cover circumcised shame in the moment just before they died… In books and television and history lessons of all kinds, I had had images and words to educate my shock, determined I would look but never comprehend it …

Remembering the awfulness, the evil of it, how, as quotes from Nazism, A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts, 1919-45, Vol. 1, remember it, how Germans called the Fuehrer “Lord,” their “creator and preserver, the protector.” They actually said, “every flower… blooms in gratitude to him…” Quotes about Kristallnacht, and laws about everything that was newly forbidden: Jewish, that is. Surely they were pagans…

Far from that time and place, I grew up with Gentle Jesus and the children, his kind and undivided face… And in my youth, reading A.M. Klein, echoing his wrath, his double deuteronomies…

Here’s the thing. My very first language was German. [But I assure you it means nothing.] By school time, though, it was only English that we spoke. My mother had no qualms to sing, “There’s Always Be An England.” I kept a scrapbook of the royal family. I’d grown up thoroughly Canadian, absorbed the British-centric country of my childhood.

Hadn’t I?

So why, in light of my hatred of, in light of my resistance to this Germany and what they’d done and the division they’d surely deserved, why the tears of happiness, watching jagged lumpen shapes of West and East, separated twins of history, re-form… the atlases of unredeemed history redundant at midnight…

Was it a kind of forgiveness then? Two now one, when a thousand pieces scattered would not have been too many?

I insist it was an accident, that I heard my first truth in their language… Gott ist die Liebe [God is love], and over and over the crucifixion story, in German, until my mouth was splintered… gagging on Seven Last Words

until the Eighth:

Congratulations!

It still seems complicated. Country and language and what they mean. And also champagne… sparkling everywhere / inside me / over vestiges of walls / across the burial pits of slaughtered Jews.