At the end of Laurie Lewis's previous memoir, Little Comrades, it’s 1952 and young Laurie is newly married in New York City. Love, & All That Jazz—both books are published by Porcupine's Quill—picks up shortly thereafter when Laurie meets the brilliant, Manhattan-cool, and dangerously charming musician Gary Lewis. It's the time of Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and Zoot Sims, and Gary’s life sinks into a sleepless, drug-and-alcohol-fuelled oblivion. Laurie chooses to leave, reporting Gary to the authorities and escaping back to Canada with her child. Love, and All That Jazz continues into the next stage of Laurie's life as a declaration of independence and an exhilarating antidote to defeat.
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Julie Wilson: Hearkening back to your 30 years in book production and design, what makes a book well designed to your hand and eye?
Laurie Lewis: I guess I am still a bit of a book nut, in love (or at least potential love) with the book as a three-dimensional physical object, not simply with the flat surface of each page. I care very much about the typeface—its size, spacing, placement on the page—but I care just as much about the quality of the paper, the kind of binding, the general heft and feel of the book.
JW: Is it the same architecture that makes for a well-designed pack of smokes? In Love, & All That Jazz, you mention a past love of Marlboros. Hard or soft pack?
LL: It must have been hard pack, but it was the clean red colour that I liked and of course, the absence of bad drawings of animals like camels. Even better than Marlboros (did I really say that?) were Dunhill, in an elegant square, red, hard-edged box. Again, the physical object.
JW: You published your first memoir, Little Comrades, at the age of 80 years old after the deaths of your mother and then, your husband. Did you know it would be a memoir?
LL: I really didn’t have the sense of waiting for them to be out of my life, and I don’t think I had any sense of the passage of time, although I did have occasional “escape fantasies.”
I began writing “stories,” yes, but I had no idea what to do with them or if they were worth anything. Earlier, I had shown my mother one of those early stories about my father, my brother, and so on. She said, “It wasn’t like that.” She said nothing at all about the quality of the writing, which I took, insecurely, to mean that she was kindly refraining from comment.
Occasionally, though, I’d send something around to a journal. Nothing was ever accepted. But then I had a story accepted by Contemporary Verse 2. That was a big day for me. I think it was 1998, then nothing else for years, perhaps because I wasn’t writing and I wasn’t submitting. That’ll do it! But I began again, and the publication that finally read my work and liked it was Queen’s Feminist Review here in Kingston. It was a blind jury, and they accepted eight pieces. Not really “poetry,” but little story-poems. That was in 2007, I was 77 years old. That was the event that gave me a little confidence and incidentally introduced me to some of the wonderful women in the Kingston writing community.
But it was Mark Abley, at a nonfiction workshop at Banff, who gave me the sense that I had something worth saying and that I knew how to say it.
JW: In the book, you single out a photographer who watches you and an old friend visiting in the park for the first time in 40 years. She's watching a different moment in time play out, under a different bias. Is that part of the attraction for you as a writer and memoirist, that you pick the moments you want to play out, and then to what degree each is unpacked further? You never considered, for instance, approaching someone to write your biography.
LL: What seems to interest me is story. That was how I began to write—just isolated bits that I saw in memory. Although both of my current books are officially considered memoir, what I wrote—primarily—was a collection of individual stories about events. There’s definitely the sense of “unpacking” them, yes, of opening them up. I am fascinated by the way memory works. Memoir allows more room to be personal, more flexible, than biography, and I do seem to like the form.
JW: Your connection to Gary was instantaneous. There is an effortlessness to how you describe the steps you took to be together, a certainty that's at once romantic and unsentimental; yet, you don't describe it as "love." What was it?
LL: I don’t know. I have no idea what it was. Perhaps it’s just that the word love is altogether too simple. Perhaps it was a sense of coming home, although I didn’t think about that at the time, perhaps because the “home” in my childhood was not a safe place, and certainly was not a place I would have wanted to be. But to be in a psychic space where you are completely accepted as is . . . that was what I felt with Gary, and probably what he felt with me—until I had him busted, of course, and then that’s probably why he felt so betrayed by my actions.
JW: You began to notice Gary’s drug and alcohol abuse not long after you became a couple, a time of "lovely, artsy New York in the mid-fifties," rooftop gatherings with writers, photographers, actors, and musicians the likes of Miles Davis and Lenny Bruce. Hip was a community mindset among this group. Could you be straight and hip?
LL: The times were different then. The words were different. Hipness, at that time, didn’t necessarily place you in the druggy mindset but implied, I believe, a broad ethical base without artifice. That was a kind of key: the lack of artificiality, and a way of looking at the world.
But the entire concept of hip is rather polluted now. In a recent Globe & Mail column, Sarah Hampson referred to a hotel with its “hipper-than-thou” attitude, along with three or four other references to versions of hip, uber-hip, hipsters throughout the section. Perhaps we need a new word. It’s quite possible that there is one—a word that only the truly hip know.
JW: From the opening of Love, & All That Jazz:
"The bench where we sat then, hunched into our coats against a cold San Francisco wind, had been moved. About ten feet east. It seemed an omen. You can’t get back that moment. I thought about moving the bench back to its proper place, about sitting at the left side of it and conjuring Ira to take his place at the other end."
Could this pertain to the craft of writing memoir, not being able to get back to a moment?
LL: Oh, I love this! Part of memory is perhaps trying to get back to the moment. There’s no little door that opens to reveal the cupboard in which our memories are kept. I ask my memory to look at something—usually at something quite specific, some little bit of a memory. Sometimes there’s not much there, but I look around regardless, and then ask it again later. In the meantime, my darling brain has scrounged around its neurons and assembled a bit more of that particular stew, like a helpful librarian, perhaps, and definitely a conjuror.
The first story I wrote deliberately is one in Little Comrades called “Pink.” I was five or six years old and a doll carriage wounded me and blood came out of my leg—a traumatic event for a young child. As I began to write about it, more of the situation unravelled for me, along with the implications that I, as an adult, could now see in that situation.
The other thing I am now finding—at 83 years old—is that once I have fully written something I have no further interest in looking at that particular memory; it becomes a door I can close. I think this is a useful tool of writing as therapy, although that was never my intent when I wrote either of these two books.
JW: After Gary was incarcerated, you rebuilt your life in Canada with your daughter. Resiliency is a word that springs to mind when I think about your ability to anchor yourself in some moments and bounce back/out from/of others. It's complex, improvisational, at times, quite violent and virtuosic. Sticking with a motif of musicality and jazz, was that period in your life just noise or was there a throughline?
LL: What an interesting notion! Yes, there was certainly an element of creativity about it, of resilience and response to stimulus that could be called jazz-like. I thought of it more as a dance. I remember saying, in one particular period of financial uncertainty, that I would need to do a sprightly dance. There was a lot of improvising, a particular skill that single parents develop, a real need to pay attention to the other players in one’s life, and to respond creatively.
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Laurie Lewis is a Fellow of the Graphic Designers of Canada and is Editor Emeritus of Vista, the publication of the Seniors Association in Kingston, Ontario, and director of Artful Codger Press.
Laurie began her career in publishing with Doubleday in New York in 1961. She returned to Canada in 1963 to join University of Toronto Press, where she worked in production and design of UTP publications, becoming Head of Design at U of T Press. During her 30 years in publishing, she also taught book design in Guyana, the Philippines, and at Ryerson University in Toronto. She moved to Kingston, Ontario, in 1991, where she founded Artful Codger Press.
Her written work has been featured on CBC and has been published around and about, including Contemporary Verse 2, Queen's Feminist Review, and Kingston Poets' Gallery.
A chapter from an early draft of her first book, Little Comrades, was shortlisted for the 2007 CBC Literary Awards in Creative Non-Fiction.
Learn more about Laurie Lewis by visiting her official website, www.laurielewis.ca.