Shy Read online

  Published by

  The University of Alberta Press

  Ring House 2

  Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2E1

  www.uap.ualberta.ca

  Copyright © 2013 The University of Alberta Press

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Shy : an anthology / Naomi K. Lewis and Rona Altrows, editors.

  (Robert Kroetsch series)

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978–0–88864–670–5 (pbk.).—ISBN 978–0–88864–743–6 (epub).—

  ISBN 978–0–88864–744–3 (Amazon kindle).—ISBN 978–0–88864–745–0 (pdf)

  1. Bashfulness—Literary collections. 2. Canadian literature (English)—21st century. 3. Canadian essays (English)—21st century. 4. Canadian poetry (English)—21st century. I. Altrows, Rona, 1948–, editor of compilation II. Lewis, Naomi K., 1976–, editor of compilation III. Series: Robert Kroetsch series

  PS8237.B38S59 2013 C810.8’0353 C2013–904967–3

  C2013–904968–1

  First edition, first printing, 2013.

  First electronic edition, 2013.

  Digital conversion by Transforma Pvt. Ltd.

  Copyediting and proofreading by Lesley Peterson

  Cover design by Alan Brownoff.

  Cover image: Carroll Taylor-Linhoe, Red Dog, 2002, Oil on metal, 25.4 x 25.4 cm. Collection of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. Used with permission.

  A volume in the Robert Kroetsch series.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be produced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written consent. Contact the University of Alberta Press for further details.

  The University of Alberta Press gratefully acknowledges the support received for its publishing program from The Canada Council for the Arts. The University of Alberta Press also gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) and the Government of Alberta through the Alberta Multimedia Development Fund (AMDF) for its publishing activities.

  To our fellow shyniks everywhere, in admiration and solidarity.

  In memory of Shirley Limbert.

  Contents

  Foreword

  NAOMI K. LEWIS & RONA ALTROWS

  Acknowledgements

  Sometimes a Voice (2)

  DON MCKAY

  Silentium

  STEVEN HEIGHTON

  On Shyness and Stuttering

  ELIZABETH HAYNES

  The Shy

  DAVID VAN BUREN

  I Couldn’t Reveal

  ELAINE WOO

  Say Water

  NAOMI K. LEWIS

  affect Thrum

  NATALIE SIMPSON

  that animal

  WEYMAN CHAN

  Creepmouse Manifesto

  SYLVIA STOPFORTH

  Fisher Woman

  VIVIAN HANSEN

  The Culture of Shyness

  ALEX BOYD

  Under the I

  DHANA MUSIL

  High School Shyku

  LORI D. ROADHOUSE

  Young Expressions

  EVE S. KRAKOW

  My Dear X

  ELIZABETH ZOTOVA

  Change Room

  BRUCE MEYER

  Cloak of Invisibility

  MADELAINE WONG

  Shy and I

  SYDNEY SHARPE

  Shades and Shyness

  ARITHA VAN HERK

  Secret Self

  ELIZABETH GREENE

  Disturbing the Universe

  ELIZABETH GREENE

  On Mingling

  JENNIFER HOULE

  Good for Olivier

  RONA ALTROWS

  Insecurity

  MICHELINE MAYLOR

  How to be shy

  KERRY RYAN

  Shybrightly

  SHAWNA LEMAY

  Stage Fright

  CASSY WELBURN

  As I Stand Up Here Reading, Fear Holds My Hånd

  CAROL L. MACKAY

  Are You an Introvert? Take This Simple Quiz

  JANIS BUTLER HOLM

  a more blissful orbit

  STUART IAN MCKAY

  Women Friends

  BRIAN CAMPBELL

  Shy—10 Ways

  RUSSELL WANGERSKY

  Drunk Judgement

  STEVEN HEIGHTON

  When Love Was Grey & Timid

  I.B. ISKOV

  Redder Than a Canadian Sunset

  SHIRLEY LIMBERT

  Laundry Duty

  MIKE DUGGAN

  to the red-haired girl on eighth

  WEYMAN CHAN

  Common Loon

  JEFF MILLER

  Crosswalk

  JENNIFER HOULE

  Watching My Lover

  LORNA CROZIER

  Other People’s Agony

  BEN GELINAS

  It’s Okay that Late at Night

  WADE BELL

  Amongst the Unseen and Unheard

  DEBBIE BATEMAN

  Contributors

  Permissions

  Foreword

  NAOMI K. LEWIS & RONA ALTROWS

  WE EMBARKED ON THIS ANTHOLOGY PROJECT with an assumption: that shyness was a single authentic way of being in the world, and a damn good way at that. Then, as submissions rolled in, writers set us straight with the complexity of their work. Shyness, it turns out, grows slipperier the harder we try to hold it down. Some of us know we’re shy only because everyone says so; others know we’re shy though the world tells us we’re not. We’re told, explicitly and implicitly, that our shyness can and should be “overcome.” So sometimes we move to the centre of the room, and sometimes we like the attention. Sometimes we wish with quiet rage that gentleness were enough. Sometimes we choke—important, unspoken words jammed painfully in our throats.

  Long have the shy been misinterpreted and misunderstood. Enough. Through the essays and poetry in these pages, thirty-nine writers recall, lament, and celebrate our own experiences with shyness. We define “shy” in a million shifting ways, and find that, while shyness may be painful and raw, it may also bring empathy, sensitivity, humour, a keen appreciation of subtlety.

  Shy: each contributor to this anthology has a distinctive take on how it feels and what it means. Shy: voices still and struggling; well-meaning teachers hammering at child-shells; high-school hallways cacophonous with extroverted ghouls; stages bright-lit and microphones like guns in our faces; parties buzzing with small talk; workplaces demanding the exposed self nine to five; love shaking the bent cage of the heart; the usually boisterous dumbstruck. As editors of this volume, we had hoped to find a place for quiet, careful voices to sing and holler, but you will also find whispers; cries of triumph and despair; nervous giggles of the overwrought; frustrated sighs; easy laughter of those newly comfortable in their own skins.

  We offer these essays and poems with no more assumptions, but with these hopes: that our fellow shyniks will find a familiar strain, that the never-shy will understand their quieter neighbours a little better, and that readers will find these pieces as striking, funny, and surprising as we do.

  Acknowledgements

  Shawna Lemay’s essay nudged the idea for this anthology into being, and Laurel Boone, Jason Markusoff, Sydney Sharpe and Sydney Schwartz provided much-needed advice. I was Writer-in-Residence at the Calgary Public Library throughout the bulk of this book’s editing, and found there time, space, enrichment, and encouragement, especially from Marje Wing. Rona Altrows came on board eagerly, with her keen eye, warmth, and experience. Thank you, all.

  —NAOMI

  Thank you to Naomi K. Lewis, for inviting me
to co-edit, and for being such a joy to collaborate with. The journey with Naomi and our Shy contributors has satisfied me deeply. Thank you to Bill Paterson, my companion and consultant in all things.

  —RONA

  We are both grateful to Cathie Crooks, Peter Midgley, Lesley Peterson, and everyone at the University of Alberta Press, and Jonathan Meakin, for their expertise and encouragement. Our contributors’ brilliance and diligence, and their patience, ensured that this book became more than we’d dared to hope. We thank everyone who sent us essays and poetry about shyness—so many moving and fierce pieces we did not have room to include.

  This project was supported by a grant from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.

  Shy

  Sometimes a Voice (2)

  DON MCKAY

  Sometimes a voice—have you heard this?—

  wants not to be a voice any longer and this longing

  is the worst of longings. Nothing

  assuages. Not the curry-comb of conversation,

  not the dog-eared broken

  satisfactions of the blues. It huddles in the lungs

  and won’t come out. Not for the Mendelssohn Choir

  constructing habitable spaces in the air, not for Yeats

  intoning “Song of the Old Mother” to an ancient

  microphone. It curls up in its cave

  and will not stir. Not for the gentle quack

  of saxophone, not for the raven’s far-calling

  croak. Not for oh the lift of poetry, or ah

  the lover’s sigh, or um the phrase’s lost

  left shoe. It tucks its nose beneath its brush

  and won’t. If her whisper tries

  to pollinate your name, if a stranger yells

  hey kid, va t’en chez toi to set another music

  going in your head it simply

  enters deafness. Nothing

  assuages. Maybe it is singing

  high in the cirque, burnishing itself

  against the rockwall, maybe it is

  clicking in the stones turned by the waves like faceless

  dice. Have you heard this?—in the hush

  of invisible feathers as they urge the dark,

  stroking it toward articulation? Or the moment

  when you know it’s over and the nothing which you

  have to say is falling all around you, lavishly,

  pouring its heart out.

  Silentium

  STEVEN HEIGHTON

  Tyutchev, 1830: an approximation

  Don’t speak. Stay hidden and withhold

  all word of your thoughts, your dreams. Sealed

  in the soul’s cosmos, let them sail

  like stars, through private skies, then fall

  from sight before the dawn, unmarred.

  Savour their arc. Don’t say a word.

  How can your heart pin down the phrase

  by which it might be grasped? We lose,

  in translation, the worlds we know.

  Say a thing and it turns untrue

  and leaves the deep spring’s face sound-scarred.

  Drink from the source. Don’t say a word.

  Learn to live in the self’s retreat—

  a cosmos forms there, where the light

  can’t force its way and where no sound

  drowns out the spell of singing mind

  and leaves it dazzled, deaf, unheard.

  Take in the song. Don’t say a word.

  On Shyness and Stuttering

  ELIZABETH HAYNES

  The legitimacy of my voice, wherever I am, seems a question. In New York and then New England, I have been surrounded by people who do not talk quite as I do. I tend, like a foreigner, to resist dropping consonants…; I pronounce words as they look in print….Yet we all, in a world of mingling clans, exist in some form of linguistic exile, and most people don’t stutter.

  —JOHN UPDIKE, from “Getting the Words Out,” Self-Consciousness

  WHEN I WAS NINETEEN, I left my small British Columbia town to attend the University of Victoria. I moved into residence, a co-ed hall, where there were alternating floors of boys and girls. My roommate, Avril, was a solid, lumberjack-shirt-wearing girl with punk hair and a brusque manner. She was studying Russian, and her side of the slab of wood that ran across the end of the room by the window and was our desk was always piled with weighty tomes. She wasn’t in the room much. She didn’t talk to me much.

  I remember sitting at the desk with my little radio tuned to CFOX, reading Candide or La Peste or Le Malade Imaginaire, my French–English dictionary beside me, the laughter of my floor-mates’ “studying” in the lounge echoing down the hallway. I’d done well in my classes in my first year at Cariboo College, even won the French essay prize (Racine’s collected works) for an essay I wrote, the title of which I can’t recall (was it on Sartre’s No Exit?). In Kamloops, I spent weekends writing English essays with titles like “Symbolic Naturalism in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck,” and “The Human Predicament as Dramatized in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame,” burnishing sentences for my velvet-suited hippie English prof, on whom I had a crush.

  Late one night as I was burnishing a French essay, Avril came into our room. She asked me a question. I can’t remember what the question was. I can’t remember what I answered, but I clearly recall her saying, in a scornful voice, “Why are you always stuttering?”

  I’ve always been shy, but I didn’t and don’t consider myself a person who stutters. When I was younger, however, I often had the sensation of tightness in my chest, of squeezing out the last words of a sentence. These breathing problems happened when I had to read aloud or answer a question in class and, especially, when I had to give a presentation.

  I’d been willing to venture the odd comment in my college classes in Kamloops, but I clammed up at UVIC. I was intimidated by the fluency of my fellow French conversation students, many of whom had been in French Immersion or had spent summers in Quebec. I had been looking forward to taking a fiction-writing class with Audrey Thomas, because as a twelve-year-old, I’d taken summer camp with her. She’d liked my stories, then. She’d said I wrote good dialogue. But I was one of the youngest in her UVIC class, so I sat silently, listening to the older, worldlier students explain their motivations and themes (in case we’d missed them). They wrote about drug addiction, death, and divorce. You were supposed to “write what you know,” and I didn’t know about any of those things. I can’t remember what I wrote about. Childhood, maybe? I do remember going to an end-of-the-year party at Audrey’s apartment. I sat at the edge of the group, acting out a classic example of Joseph Sheehan’s “approach-avoidance” theory of stuttering (both wanting to talk and not wanting to talk in equal measure), wondering how long I had to stay and when I could leave without being rude.

  “I still feel Elizabeth needs much encouragement to give her a true feeling of confidence in her own abilities. She has done delightful and original work. I think she may always find it hard to have confidence in her own abilities,” wrote a former teacher on my report card. My prescient kindergarten teacher. She went on to say I might have trouble with transition to grade one but that “a sympathetic teacher recognizing [my] ability should be able to overcome this.”

  I apparently made the transition to grade one well. I liked school. I was recommended to skip grade two, but at the end of the year we moved to Vancouver. In Vancouver, it turned out I wasn’t to skip a grade. In fact, I was enrolled in a special remedial arithmetic class which involved learning to count in fives and tens with blue and orange coloured rods and cones—something all Vancouver children mastered by the end of grade one, evidently. And though I was crazy about reading and books, I was acutely aware of being in only the “second highest” reading group there.

  I had a babysitter I loved, though, who taught me French. She made me a book with magazine pictures, the corresponding words carefully labelled in French. I practised saying those words over and over.

  At the
end of grade two, we moved to Kamloops. Encouraged by my grades three and four teachers and my mom, I started writing stories. Mom subscribed to the Saskatchewan newspaper of her childhood, the Western Producer. It featured a children’s creative writing section to which I regularly contributed stories under the pen name Kami, after our town’s rainbow trout mascot.

  At home, I played with my younger sisters and the neighbourhood kids, but I would also often sneak off to find a quiet place to read and write. When I was ten, we went to Gabriola Island for our summer vacation. I found a big, hollowed-out rock on the beach, which I could line with towels and pillows to make a cozy nook. Paradise, I thought; no pesky younger sisters to bother me and a stack of Nancy Drews to read. When we visited my aunt, uncle, and seven cousins in their old stone house in Prescott, Ontario, I discovered many of the rooms had window seats that could be lined with pillows and blankets. If I pulled the velvet curtains closed and was very quiet, I could read and write for hours, undisturbed.

  After my year at UVIC, I transferred to Western Washington University in Bellingham to study Speech-Language Pathology. This was my dad’s idea. He thought I could combine my love of words and languages with a profession that would allow me to “make a decent living.” I rejected his other ideas—high school English or French teacher—out of hand. Teachers had to speak in front of people, whole classes of hormone-crazed teenagers. I could barely talk to one person at a time. And though I secretly wanted to be a journalist, I didn’t think I’d be able to interview strangers, especially strangers who had just been in a car accident, or were injured or in pain. I also wanted to be a novelist, but knew, from my dad, that down that path lay penury.