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review: non-fiction

Rawi Hage contributes an essay about the exiled writer?s obligations to his homeland and his new land.The Globe and Mail

Introducing this collection of literary essays, Jared Bland suggests that writers are artists burdened with a particularly coarse clay. "A pianist plays notes to make art, but must use the words 'window seat' or 'gluten-free alternative' to make an airline reservation; a painter … cannot speak to his child in watercolours." But the writer's material is language, omnipresent in all our lives.

Interesting point, but many would consider language more gift than burden. I remember a newspaper arts editor who had an unofficial hierarchy of interview subjects: Writers were at the top; they could be trusted to speak intelligently about their work, while painters and dancers sat mutely at the bottom. Artists may be their own worst critics, but a higher standard is expected of those of them who wield the pen: Writers should be able to write about writing.

Approaching Finding the Words with those expectations, I found the collection occasionally frustrating and occasionally invigorating, even exhilarating. Only half the participants have risen to the occasion with wonderfully perceptive essays on the practice and politics of writing; perhaps such unevenness is to be expected in a project to which the writers are donating their services in an effort to raise money for PEN Canada's work defending freedom of expression.

Some of the writers come at the subject obliquely with family stories of literacy and silence. Here, Heather O'Neill sets the bar high with the opening piece, a delicious tale of her father's illiteracy set in a lovingly evoked Depression-era Montreal. But as examples of this approach pile-up - David Bezmozgis's family argues about Israel at his grandfather's shiva; Martha Kuwee Kumsa recounts the history behind her grandmother's alienation - you have to wonder if this collection is just going to be a series of stories about human communication, and if it is, would you not rather be reading Alice Munro. It takes Rawi Hage writing about the exiled writer's obligations to his homeland and his new land to show how the themes of family and writing can be sewn delicately together.

Another approach is to complain about the things that surround writing these days: Karen Connelly is amusingly grumpy about the Internet and e-mail; Linden MacIntyre and Stacey May Fowles are preciously self-deprecating about winning the Giller Prize and publishing a first novel with a small press, respectively; Guy Gavriel Kay neatly rebuts the efficacy of the new Twitterdom in advancing careers let alone literature.

Several writers respond directly to PEN's human-rights agenda with pieces about totalitarianism and imprisonment. Again, the only ones that stand out make the link with writing: Globe and Mail journalist Stephanie Nolen simply and effectively tells how she went to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and, despite many warnings that shamed rape victims would never come forward, found herself surrounded by so many women who wanted to give testimony that she ran out of paper. More complicatedly, Richard Poplak explains the importance of the South African politician, writer, linguist and orthographer Solomon Plaatje who, in the early 20th-century, translated Shakespeare into Setswana and tried to warn the British against the first stages of apartheid.

And a welcome few just tell us about their writing. Michael Winter theorizes that an early job in the St. John's courthouse writing radio scripts on legal issues turned him into a novelist who works fiction as a kind of con game. Emma Donoghue explains the link between her own son's speech and the language she created for the five-year-old narrator of Room. And, in my favourite piece, Steven Heighton waxes poetic about empty stretches of unproductive time that we might call boredom but which he judges to be as crucial as dreams for literary inspiration. Without a lot of nothingness how can any writer ever find the words?

When Globe and Mail arts writer Kate Taylor is at a loss for words she takes a nap. Her new novel, A Man in Uniform, was recently nominated for the Ontario Library Association's Evergreen Award.

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