The rhythm of writing a monthly blog post often means that I skip over important events in my life. Last month, I wrote my post before departing on my mini book tour to launch the second edition of my short story collection Heaven Has Eyes. I thought that I’d write about it this month, but as I begin now the trip already seems firmly in the past. We dodged a snowstorm and flew to Boston for a few days, and then to New York, spending a whole week in total the Eastern United States with temperatures fluctuating between -10 and -15°C. Vancouver was much warmer when we returned, with cherry blossoms already lured out by the spring-like weather, and I gave a final reading at Green College. A big thank you to my hosts: Brookline Booksmith, Singapore Unbound, and Green College, and to the writers who facilitated my sessions or dialogued with me: Shubha Sunder, Diane Josefowicz, and Theresa Muñoz. Gaudy Boy, my publisher, only obtained North American rights, and thus the new edition of the collection, with its four new stories, isn’t distributed in Singapore. I am told, however, that it can be ordered in Singapore via Amazon and other online bookstores in the US, and Epigram continues to sell the first edition of the collection.
Looking forward, I find myself caught up in a variety of interconnected projects to do with life writing. I’m facilitating a new Guided Autobiography group, this time with emeritus faculty from UBC in Vancouver. We started last week, and I’m experimenting with a shorter commitment of six, rather than ten weeks of writing together. Although GAB is often thought of as an activity for older adults, I’ve largely worked with younger adults until now: this will be the first time I’ve worked with this form of life review with a group of people who are mostly older than myself. Vancouver is a place of migration, and UBC’s history in the last fifty years is of expansion from a provincial university to a major international research institution. It’s thus perhaps no surprise that none of the participants are originally from the city, or indeed from Canada: they have rich life trajectories spanning five continents to explore in the next month or so.
Preparing for this Guided Autobiography group, I attended one of the monthly GAB chats organised by the Birren Center. The Center’s now become a central resource for Guided Autobiography, and I’ve great admiration for Cheryl Svensson and others who helm the organisation, and make training, research, and ongoing discussions of GAB possible. The chat, which featured a presentation from Lily Bengfort and Leigh Morrow, was about the uses and abuses of AI in GAB, and it raised important questions about the use of generative AI in particular. Few people would object to using something like Perplexity for background research to reminiscence, and indeed even Google searches now produce an initial AI-generated summative response. At the same time, I think very few in the GAB community would support the use of generative AI to write the weekly stories that we share in the group: they are proxies for a form of internal work that shouldn’t be short-circuited. The difficulty is in the use of AI for what lies in between. Group participants, for instance, may want to write in another language rather than English, especially if writing about a time in their life or area of their life set in the world of another language. Would it be reasonable practice for someone to write in one language and then use AI to translate it into English? My judgment in the past has been that this is fine, as long as the writer reviews the AI-generated text and edits to make sure it feels their own. Others in conversation disagreed: participants should do their own work of translation, which I personally felt would impose a double burden in terms of time on someone who lives at least partially in a non-English speaking world.
The discussion also made me realise how, philosophically, I have a different view of the purposes and effects of life writing from the consensus within the GAB community. GAB originated at the University of Southern California at a time when humanist notions of the self and a drive towards personal autonomy were ascendant. These notions still inform much popular psychology today, both in in North America and increasingly worldwide. Words like “authenticity” and “self-realization” dominate conversations; Birren wrote of GAB as the “midwife” to the birth of an authentic life story. On one level none of this matters: GAB as a practice still works, and the deep listening it encourages does not need to be theorized. On another, I do wonder whether such an understanding of the purpose of life writing places us in a bind: it contributes to an arms race of selfhood in contemporary society, rather than a necessary questioning of the notion of self.
Here’s a metaphor to aid thought. Once or twice a week, my partner and I cycle around the sea wall in Stanley Park. It’s a beautiful forty-minute bike ride, starting with the Coal Harbour Marina, offering views of the inner harbour and then, having passed under the Lion’s Gate Bridge, the mouth of Burrard Inlet, the Salish Sea, and, on a clear day, the mountains of Vancouver beyond. Sometimes we’ll see a seal bobbing in the water, a cormorant drying its wings on a rock, or flocks of sea ducks, Barrow’s goldeneye and greater scaups, rocking on the water, the leading edge of the mass of birds folding as they dive below the surface. The sea wall is solid, faced in stone, and the mobility and views it affords are beloved by the city’s inhabitants, and of tourists that visit. The project took over half a century to complete, much of it built by master stone mason James Cunningham whose work commemorated in a plaque not far from Third Beach.
Stanley Park, of course, has a hidden history of displacement, its Indigenous and Kanaka inhabitants moved to create a space of leisure. Yet there’s also something else about the sea wall. In times of global heating and climate change, its solidity is something of an Achilles heel. High tides and storms increasingly damage it, necessitating constant and increasingly frequent repair. It’s now a rare experience not to see holes in the path, or missing coping stones, during our rides. There have been a number of proposals to replace it with a more flexible structure, such as a boardwalk, or to allow managed retreat and to construct a path at a higher level. None have come to fruition, and so the repairs continue.
Perhaps the sea wall is like the model of self that notions of authenticity, self-esteem, and self-realization attempt to shore up. Life writing can, of course, work in this way, attempting to produce monumental lives. Or it can be more like the proposed alternatives: a space of exploration, of re-storying, of structures that have a use in the present but can quickly be repaired, reassembled, rebuilt in a different way. Moving from one mode of selfhood to the other is difficult: it first involves disassembling what has been built up. In a world in which an arms race of self-fashioning continues, and indeed is often fostered by therapeutic practices, it’s important for life writing to maintain its provisionally, it openness to change, its questioning of the construction and continued refurbishment of monumental, authentic selves.