The Path Through Biography, with Merilyn Simonds
How does one end up writing a biography?
In the case of Merilyn Simonds, she was asked to write one by her friend Louise de Kiriline Lawrence. And though Merilyn didn’t like or read biographies at the time, she agreed.
It left her with two tasks: searching through years and years of records, and figuring out how she was going to structure this biography. A conventional biography just wouldn’t do—Merilyn needed to be intrigued by the path she chose to follow in the telling of Louise’s story.
The Path Through Biography, with Merilyn Simonds
Listen to learn:
- Merilyn’s unique approach to writing a biography
- How to organise records and research for your writing
- About the use of language at the sentence and paragraph level
- About moving from shorter to bigger writing projects
Here’s a sneak peek…
[05:20] What bothers me about biographies is that sort of know-it-all stance. “I know this person from birth to death.”
[06:54] And the research is often so fantastic, right? Such gems that you can't bear to leave them out. And of course you should.
[12:51] Oh boy. I fought, I fought and fought and fought, and neither one of them would back down. And I thought, “oh, shoot. Okay, I'll give it a go.” And of course they were right.
[14:45] I didn't want to start there. I mean, because to me, that feels so predictable, so conventional, it didn't intrigue me. So how could it intrigue a reader?
[17:55] I know the story has gripped me. What I don't know is how I'm going to enter it. The story is just a big heap of material, and you can walk all the way around it, and you can push at it from various sides, and you don't know how you will make the path through that material that will be interesting for you and also interesting for the reader.
[27:46] I think you're right. I think it's contemplative. It's very contemplative, and it requires a kind of stillness of heart.
[34:06] And that's not to be discounted. Part of book writing, part of the reason people don't manage it, is because they can't manage the cycle.
[35:11] Never, never. I always end up doing 15 drafts no matter what I try to do to prevent that. And so I think book writing takes stamina.
Links from today’s episode:
Woman, Watching: Louise de Kiriline Lawrence and the Songbirds of Pimisi Bay, also available on Amazon (US and Canada), and at Indigo
Scrivener
The Path Through Biography, with Merilyn Simonds: The Resilient Writers Radio Show -- Full Episode Transcript
Intro:
Well, hey there, writer. Welcome to The Resilient Writers Radio Show. I'm your host, Rhonda Douglas, and this is the podcast for writers who want to create and sustain a writing life they love.
Because—let's face it—the writing life has its ups and downs, and we wanna not just write, but also to be able to enjoy the process so that we'll spend more time with our butt-in-chair getting those words on the page.
This podcast is for writers who love books, and everything that goes into the making of them. For writers who wanna learn and grow in their craft, and improve their writing skills. Writers who want to finish their books, and get them out into the world so their ideal readers can enjoy them, writers who wanna spend more time in that flow state, writers who want to connect with other writers to celebrate and be in community in this crazy roller coaster ride we call “the writing life.”
We are resilient writers. We're writing for the rest of our lives, and we're having a good time doing it. So welcome, writer, I'm so glad you're here. Let's jump right into today's show.
Rhonda Douglas:
Welcome back to another episode of the Resilient Writers Radio Show. I'm really excited to have Merilyn Simonds with me today. So, you may know Merilyn Simonds already. She's the author of 20 books, most recently Woman, Watching: Louise de Kiriline Lawrence and the Songbirds of Pimisi Bay released in May, 2022.
Merilyn was born in Winnipeg, but grew up in Brazil where she acquired a taste for the fabulous. She published her first book in 1979 at the age of 29, and since then, her work has been anthologized and published internationally in eight countries. She writes in a wide variety of genres, personal essay, memoir, travel, literary fiction, such as the novel, The Holding, which was a New York Times book review editor's choice, and creative nonfiction, including The Convict Lover.
And her new book, Woman, Watching is an innovative memoir-biography of Louise de Kiriline Lawrence, an extraordinary self-trained ornithologist who became one of Canada's greatest naturalists and nature writers. Welcome, Merilyn. Thanks for being here.
Merilyn Simonds:
Oh, it's a pleasure to be here, and pleasure to talk to you again, Rhonda.
Rhonda:
I'm loving the book. I'm not quite finished. I think I've got maybe 80 pages to go, but I'm really loving it and I am super curious as to how this book came to be in the first place. How do you decide to write a biography of someone else? Can you tell us the story of how the book came to be?
Merilyn:
Well, I never seek out books. All my books have happened to me as opposed to me finding them. And in this case, I knew the subject, Louise de Kiriline Lawrence, and I wrote an article about her. I knew her when I was in my late thirties, early forties, when I was just starting to write. I had just published my first book when I met her, and so I wrote this article about her, but I'd known her for about 10 years, and she loved it, and she was, my goodness, how old was she at this point? She was easily 90, maybe 92.
And so she was thinking legacy, and so she said, “will you be my biographer?” And I said, “oh, sure,” not really having any idea how you write a biography, and I don't like biographies. I don't read them. And then she died shortly after that, and I was stuck with my promise, which I kind of ignored for many years, and every so often it would come back to sort of when I was having a lull thinking, “oh, I'm supposed to write that biography.”
But of course, I don't do very much that's conventional. I love playing with form. It actually wasn't until we started living in Mexico half-time that I started to think more deeply about bird migration, because we live in the mountains in Mexico, in the wintering grounds of a lot of the birds that we see up here in the spring raising their families.
So, I started thinking about migration, which made me think about her and made me think about how I go back and forth to Mexico, just like the birds do. And I grew up in South America, I ended up here in Canada, and she grew up in Sweden, and travelled all over. I mean, she lived in Russia for a while, and Denmark, and then she immigrated to Canada and went back and forth to Sweden, and I thought, “okay, a hook for me is the movement. I can enter this story through our mutual movement.”
And then I decided I didn't want to write a conventional biography. What bothers me about biographies is that sort of know-it-all stance. “I know this person from birth to death.” Well, of course nobody does, right? I think because I'd known her in person, I was reluctant to pretend that I had had access in some personal way to her whole life.
I decided to let the bones of biography show, as I like to say, so that when I have an ethical dilemma in the book, I share that and I talk about the whole process as I'm going along. It sort of opened up the process for me, too. I'm an intuitive writer. I don't plan things out. I write the first draft, which some people call the “puke draft.” I call it the “done draft” because it's like it's given to you.
Rhonda:
Yes. I love that feeling.
Merilyn:
And so I just wrote right through it and found the form, and then did the research to fill in the form, so to speak.
Rhonda:
Oh, I love that. That is actually also how I teach research when I teach it. It's like, write the story first because with it driven by the research—
Merilyn:
You do all the research first. Oh, absolutely. And the research is often so fantastic, right? Such gems that you can't bear to leave them out. And of course you should, because not everything belongs in every story.
Rhonda:
And she had such a fascinating life. I was not expecting to find myself in the Russian Revolution. I was like, “what? I'm supposed to be reading this biography of an ornithologist in Northern Ontario.” How did you work with all of that material? You had a lot of papers and letters. You must have had a ton of research.
Merilyn:
Well, I did thousands of letters. She wrote to her mother every Sunday, typewritten, single spaced, four to six pages, so thousands of pages, every Sunday for 40 years from 1918 to 1958. And then she had massive correspondences with every bird scientist in the world, friends. She was born in 1894, died in 1992, but the years when she was doing most of her ornithological work was in the thirties and forties, really forties, fifties, and sixties.
She didn't have electricity, she didn't have a phone. There's no internet, clearly, but there was mail delivery twice a day in the little village of Rutherglen. The train stopped twice a day, 10 o'clock in the morning, three o'clock in the afternoon. So everything was in letters, and it was full of personal detail as well as technical details.
I found out that during the war, she had to save her sugar ration tickets for two weeks to get enough sugar to make a pie. I mean, little details like that really kind of bring a person to life now.
Rhonda:
Wow. And so you had thousands and thousands of pages. What is the process of going through that and deciding which of the moments are most significant to make it into the book and what to leave behind? How did you do that?
Merilyn:
Yeah, it's hard. I mean, this is my 20th book. I have gone through various ways of attacking massive amounts of research. And so what I do now, and what I did with this book, it may change for the next one, who knows.
What I did with this book is I used a program called Scrivener, and I am a big Scrivener fan for this kind of book, because, for those of your listeners who don't know Scrivener, this is a program that is having the ability to open unlimited word docs at once, and to move between them really quickly. It's all in one app, and you can have all these separate files within the app.
I used to function with 20 word docs, opened at once, and trying to gather information, which was horrible. What I did with Scrivener was, I started reading through her letters, and I come to a comment about her first husband, Gleb, the Russian husband who died in the war. And so I'd open a little file and Scrivener called “Gleb,” and I'd put in the quote.
And the next paragraph, there'd be something about a bird she'd seen. Okay, well, then I opened a file for that bird and put it in there. And so I went through the letters like that, kind of.
Rhonda:
So sorry, did you have a file for the specific bird?
Merilyn:
Yeah, in some cases, especially the ones that she did big studies on. And so I guess what was going on in my mind is, I was sort of picking out the comments that I found particular to her, and in that process, clumping them together into what I thought might be the things I'd be interested in writing about.
And of course, some of them I didn't write about at all. And then certain people had their own comments. And so the scientists had their own comments, personal comments from her mother, comments about writing.
She wrote a lot about the process of writing and how difficult it was. She was such a perfectionist. So then I was left with 40, maybe, 40 or 50, different topics in Scrivener. Then I sort of decided that, and this was a mistake on my part because you make mistakes in organising from the get go.
I decided that her time in the Russian Revolution and her time as nurse to the Dionne quintuplets were so big and so powerful that I didn't want them at the beginning. I wanted them at the end so that she could be introduced as a birdwatcher. And then once she was introduced there, I would mention them very slightly and then more fully later on when she wrote about them, because she wrote about each of those things.
This is a big mistake because my agent, when she read the manuscript, said, “no, no, no, no, we need to know her first.” And then the editor who bought it said, “you know what? There's only one thing wrong with this book and that is that you've got to move Russia and the Dionne quintuplets up to the front, because we have to.”
Rhonda:
I'm so glad you did that. I loved that.
Merilyn:
Oh boy. I fought, I fought and fought and fought, and neither one of them would back down. And I thought, “oh, shoot. Okay, I'll give it a go.” And of course they were right, because you get to know what a strong person she is.
Rhonda:
She’s amazing.
Merilyn:
Oh, yeah. How resourceful and resilient and principled, unwavering and thoughtful in everything she did. So you get to know her, and then by the time she sees her first and becomes obsessed with birds—oh yeah, of course she does, because that's the kind of person she is.
Rhonda:
And I'm a sucker for a love story, and hers, it's so sweeping across history, kind of big moments in history. And so at that point, you watch what she goes through in that love story—not to give too much away, because it’s absolutely fascinating and people should buy the book and read it—but to read that piece of it, and then you feel so tenderly towards her as a character. You then want everything to go exactly perfectly. And of course, she's living in Northern Ontario, and so it doesn't.
So, you’re a bird watcher, and your partner Wayne's a bird watcher. Was there anything about your own bird watching that came to bear as you were writing the book?
Merilyn:
Well, I had trouble figuring out where to start it and how to start it. I did not want to start with her as a baby and her first words being “caw, caw” instead of “mama.” She was imitating birds from a young age. I didn't want to start there. I mean, because to me, that feels so predictable, so conventional, it didn't intrigue me. So how could it intrigue a reader?
I was still going through the research when I found that she had seen a very bizarre bird at her feeder. They're called leucistic. It's a bird that does not have its usual markings, but instead is all one colour, with either very pale—so, I've seen a white robin, and that's a leucistic bird. I immediately called Roger Tory Peterson and asked him if that was a robin, and he said yes, and he explained it to me.
And then not too long after that, I saw an all-yellow evening grosbeak. Grosbeaks usually have black wings and white bars on their wings, and black on their head and stuff. But this was like a giant canary, big bird. And I was reading her diaries and she saw a bird like that. And I thought, “oh, isn't that interesting?” So I looked through my diaries, and of course I have diaries for every year of my life back to the age of seven.
I looked up my diary for that year on that day, and I saw the same bird at my feeder. And we were separated, well, as the crow flies, probably about a half an hour through the woods from each other. So I thought, “well, maybe that's the place to start,” because it immediately says, this is going to be a different kind of biography. It immediately introduces me as a character as well.
And I didn't want to overwhelm the story, but I thought I wanted it to be personal. And I figured the only way to be personal is to say, in some oblique way, that I knew her. And so that's where I started. It allowed me to think about the confluences in our lives and what she meant to me. And it kept her in my mind as a human being all the time, instead of as the subject of a biography.
Rhonda:
That sounds really important actually, to maintain that living connection, if you like.
Merilyn:
Yeah. And it could have gone the other way. If I started with the research or if I started with her family life stuff, she wouldn't have been in the forefront for me as a person. And every book is so intuitive. I mean, at least for me anyway. When I start doing the research, I usually don't know what the structure is going to be. I know the story has gripped me.
What I don't know is how I'm going to enter it. The story is just a big heap of material, and you can walk all the way around it, and you can push at it from various sides, and you don't know how you will make the path through that material that will be interesting for you and also interesting for the reader. And that's all structure is, right? It's just a way through the material.
Rhonda:
Yeah. What is it about playing with form that you find so much fun?
Merilyn:
I do. I really love it. I dunno. I mean, the two things about writing books, really, for me, is form, which does not have any words attached, and language, like the actual feel of words in my mouth, individual words, and those are the things that I really love. That's what keeps me writing. I don't know, maybe I'm easily bored.
Rhonda:
Lemme mix with this and see what happens.
Merilyn:
Yeah, I’m always looking. I'm not consciously saying, “okay, I am going to defy convention and do this in a unique way.” It's not like that at all. It's just, I'll have this material and I think, “oh, how could I shape this?” And I try a couple of things, and it's always the thing that I haven't done before.
Other people might've done it, but the thing that I haven't done before that engages me. And a book takes at a minimum two years for me, it tends to be three or four years to write. So, you have to stay interested. And sometimes it's a character. But even with my first literary book, The Convict Lover—
Rhonda:
It's the first book of yours I read. I loved it so much. You know how you read a book and you love it so much that you still have the feeling in your body when you read it?
Merilyn:
Oh yeah, I do. I call that “staying read.” The book has stayed read. And for that book, my big decision was, I had all these letters from the convict, and I couldn't bear for the reader not to read those letters. I didn't want to extrapolate from them and retell the story. I wanted those letters right there.
And I guess it's very much the same with this book. I wanted her voice to be heard. I wanted the convict's voice and Peggy's voice in that story. I wanted their voices to be heard. I guess I've often thought that I lack the appropriate amount of ego to be a good fiction writer. The thought that, “oh, well, I'm so important I can tell this story.”
Rhonda:
Yeah, exactly. “I'll just make up anything. It'll be great.”
Merilyn:
“Who cares, right, because I like playing God,” but I actually don't. What I like is bringing forward these other voices, and it's ordinary people's voices that I am interested in and people who aren't known, whose stories aren't known, and who would disappear into the dustbin of archives if somebody didn't come along and write about them.
Rhonda:
And I love that you did this because she's such an extraordinary woman. It's in some ways, a very feminist act to just root these women in history and give them their own story. And in this case, such a fascinating one. Just amazing.
And also this book, it's so lyrical. The love of language comes through. I think there was something about a bird rising from a feeder, I think you said like a wisp, “until finally the gilded bird rose like a wisp of pure sunshine and disappeared among the trees.” The poet in me just went, “ah.”
Merilyn:
It's really funny because when one of my books came out, The Lion in the Room Next Door, which is the book that I wrote after The Convict Lover, I was at a festival in England, the Hay-on-Wye Festival, and I can't remember who else was with me. There were two writers, and then the founder of the festival was interviewing us, so he started with me saying, “so you're obviously a poet. Tell us about your poetry.” No. I have written one poem in my entire life, and I will never show it to anyone.
Rhonda:
But the love of language is obviously there. And that's as beautiful in fiction and nonfiction as it is in poetry, obviously.
Merilyn:
It is. And I value the music of language really, really highly. And when I teach, I spend a lot of time just on the sentence. How do you craft it so that it starts well and flows and ends well, and the different kinds of sentences that do different kinds of work within a paragraph, and the paragraphs within the chapters within the book as a whole. I love the jigsaw puzzle of that. There's so many elements to writing that are obsessive touch points for me.
Rhonda:
And it keeps you going, right? It keeps you engaged in it because so many writers get caught up in the considerations about the marketplace. Will I find an agent? Will it get published? And you just can't. I mean, I'm sure you don't have a career writing books, thinking about that.
Merilyn:
No, no. Because publishing is separate, completely separate, and has different rules and different interests than writing. And you have to finish the writing without publishing in mind.
I do think of the reader, but I've learned to do that in a way that works because it can also be challenging and counterproductive to have too many people sitting on your shoulders when you're writing. That's not good. So, I usually tell people they should just open their office door, shoo everybody out, close it. But I do think of readers because I am of the school that I don't think a book is finished until it's read.
And I'm always surprised what readers bring to a story that I didn't know I was putting in. For this book, for instance, I've had, surprisingly to me, I've had a lot of correspondence from young women in their early twenties who finished school during covid and they understand isolation. And here's a woman who isolated herself for 50 years and accomplished something remarkable. And they find great inspiration in that. I never would've expected that.
Rhonda:
No. So, that's not what you were thinking of. Who was the reader you had in mind when you were thinking of a reader for this book?
Merilyn:
It's interesting. I was thinking of Louise.
Rhonda:
Oh, okay.
Merilyn:
Yeah. She was a great reader and she loved language. She spoke five languages. English was probably her third language out of five, but she much preferred writing in English over every other language because of its flexibility. I mean, I've always thought of English as kind of a mongrel language, but she loved its flexibility and its richness because of that.
Rhonda:
Five languages. How amazing.
Merilyn:
Yeah, I know.
Rhonda:
So, I have a question that's something that has struck me in the last few years. I'm a very casual bird watcher. I've got a feeder in the tree that's outside my window, and I am very casual about it. I went to the Banff Center for the Arts when Don MacKay was there, and of course he's a big bird watcher. And he'd take people who were interested with him. And so I went with him a couple of times, and it was really just—I was working on poetry at the time, and I did find a great connection between the still, patient, or impatient, at times, observing and the practice of writing poetry.
But I just have to ask, what is it with Canadian writers and birdwatching? I feel like there's some kind of rite of passage, so many Canadian writers are just obsessed with birdwatching. And I feel like I've just got so many friends now who are into birdwatching. What is going on with the connection between writing and birdwatching?
Merilyn:
I think you're right. I think it's contemplative. It's very contemplative, and it requires a kind of stillness of heart.
And I think in a way, writing requires the same thing. It requires you to be open to watch and be focused, but at the same time be open to what's happening in front of you, or in the case of writing, inside your brain. And that's a bit of a neat trick. And I think the two things really complement. I mean, I've been birdwatching since I was seven, and when Wayne and I got together, he started birdwatching and now he's surpassed me in many ways because what I'm interested in in birdwatching is behaviour.
Rhonda:
Okay, I totally get that.
Merilyn:
I don't need to see a new bird every time I'm birdwatching. I just want to stand there and watch the robin get the worm and try to figure out why it's tilting its head and what kind of sound it's making and why. And isn't that the same thing we do when we sit in a cafe and overhear the people around us and jot down notes on the dialogue? It's those observing skills that are so important.
Maybe as a culture, now that you mentioned Canadian writers in particular, as a culture, although we are 93% an urban society now, we aren't that far from the natural world. A huge proportion of us still go out into the woods in the summer to cottages, to camping. I mean, the amount of interaction with nature, I think in this country is quite high. And it's probably similar to places like Sweden where everybody has a cabin out in the countryside. And in that countryside, the most visible moving objects are birds, right? You don't see a fox very often. You hardly ever see a bear. You see a lot of mosquitoes, but they're not that much fun to identify.
Rhonda:
No.
Merilyn:
But it's mostly birds, with colour and song and all of those things. I mean, I don't think it's any surprise that watching birds is kind of symptomatic of being in the countryside, which is something Canadians really seem to love still, even though they live in cities.
Rhonda:
Yeah, true enough. True enough. Actually, reading this book, I thought, “oh, what did I do with my bird book?” I had the Birds of Ontario book right at hand in order to identify anything in the feeder. And I realised I had begun to take the birds at the feeder as my due. I put up, and they just come and they go by, and when I first did it, it was like a little miracle every time. And then that sense of it being a little miracle left. This book brought that back for me, and so thank you for that.
Merilyn:
Oh, that's great,
Rhonda:
So, 20 books, whoa. That’s a big deal.
Merilyn:
They kind of creep up on you, really.
Rhonda:
For folks who are listening to this, I mean, I love that. For me, that's what being a resilient writer is all about. Just keep it on, keep it on, and getting the writing done, telling the stories.
Going back to your first book, what was that like for you? Can you kind of take us back there and think about what that changed for you? I mean, you got to meet Louise.
Merilyn:
I have to remember what the first book was.
Rhonda:
It doesn't say?
Merilyn:
So, the first book was a book called The Art of Soap Making, and it was a how-to-book. Now, Annie Proulx and I share a kind of back-to-the-land experience, and her first books were also how-to books about growing lettuce, about building a house, before she published her first book of short stories. And after that, her novels. And so the Art of Soap, I was living in the woods, back to the land, it's 1979, I guess, and I have a son who's allergic to everything, including soap. And so I start making soap. And as well as telling people how to do that, how to make soap, the first half of it is all the history and the people who've been important in soap making and how that whole thing evolved.
Rhonda:
Would you ever have thought, in 1979, you just never would've thought, “oh, and then I'll be a writer who writes 20 plus books in my lifetime?”
Merilyn:
Well, probably not, but I have been writing since I was quite young, and I did that to hopefully earn some money living in the woods. But my intention was always to write short stories, to write novels, to write larger books, which I did, eventually. So I guess in a way… I don't want to diminish those few early books, though, because they were my journeyman books. They were what taught me what it feels like to put a hundred thousand plus words together, one after the other.
And that's not to be discounted. Part of book writing, part of the reason people don't manage it, is because they can't manage the cycle. I mean, you start out with this fabulous idea, “oh my goodness, I'm going to write a book about this. Oh, it's so great. It's going to be the best thing ever.” And then you start writing, you get about halfway through and you think, “what was I thinking? I can't possibly do this. It's way beyond me.”
But you push through and you push through and finally, “oh my God, I'm done. I'm done.” And that cycle has not changed through 20 books. I always start completely obsessed. I always get discouraged in the middle and think, “really, I've bitten off more than I can chew.” And in the end, I'm pretty pleased with the end result. I always go through 15 drafts, as much as every time I start out thinking, “okay, four drafts, I can do this in four drafts.”
Rhonda:
This will be the easy book. This is my easy book.
Merilyn:
Never, never. I always end up doing 15 drafts no matter what I try to do to prevent that. And so I think book writing takes stamina. It's the marathon of the writing world. I think those early books taught me that and taught me how to settle in to a pile of material and let it tell me the best shape, sit with it.
I often read in a subject for a year before I start writing. I didn't with this book because I knew the person and knew the area quite well, but with other books I would just read, especially if it has a historical setting, I would just read in the subject area for a year to get myself grounded in a way. So that kind of thing, working with Scrivener, which is a more complex program but highly effective, I think all of those things are not difficult. They are difficult, but they're not taught. You don't know those things.
And that's why it's so different going from a short story to a novel. I mean, they're completely different genres. A novel isn't just a long short story. It's completely different. And the same with flash fiction. Flash fiction isn't just a poem where the lines are filled out. It's completely different. Long-form writing is its own animal, and I think it takes a while to be able to manage the amount of time and the kind of emotional cycles you go through.
Rhonda:
Yeah, very true. I think it's the biggest thing really, if you want to finish that book and get it out to the world. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for this. Thanks for the book. I really enjoyed it. And thanks so much for being here to talk to us about it today, Merilyn, appreciate it.
Merilyn:
Well, who doesn't like talking about writing.
Rhonda:
Right?
Merilyn:
All day long.
Rhonda:
Thanks so much.
Merilyn:
Thank you so much.
Outro:
Thanks so much for hanging out with me today and for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed today's episode of the Resilient Writers Radio Show. While you're here, I would really appreciate it if you'd consider leaving a rating and review of the show. You can do that in whatever app you're using to listen to the show right now, and it just takes a few minutes. Your ratings and reviews tell the podcast algorithm gods that “yes, this is a great show. Definitely recommend it to other writers.” And that will help us reach new listeners who might need a boost in their writing lives today as well. So please take a moment and leave a review. I'd really appreciate it, and I promise to read every single one. Thank you so much.
