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An
Interview with Fred Stenson
(excerpt)
Rags:
You’ve been the director of the Wired Writing Studio for seven years,
an online program “designed to be a twin of the five-week studio,”
offered at the Banff Centre each spring. Can tell us more about it?
Fred:
It
consists of two weeks of residency at Banff in the fall, and another twenty
weeks of on-line. Each participant (of 22) is teamed with one mentor, with
whom they will work for the full period on one book-length poetry or prose
project. To keep the sense of community that develops among the writers in
Banff going through the winter, we have an on-line discussion forum where
news is exchanged and topics are discussed.
Rags:
So in other words the online program makes it accessible to those writers
who are unable to attend a five-week residency at Banff. What about the web
itself? Will it prove to be a paradigm change for or an adjunct to written
communication?
Fred:
The Web is already the writers' best tool, in my opinion. A better thing
could not have been designed for writers: quick access to a host of facts,
and, beyond facts, to things like opinion, accent, human quirks and
obsessions
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Rags:
You write in several genres -- historical fiction,
social/political commentary, and of course humour. How do you organize your
writing projects?
Fred: The variety of
my work has suited the kind of grasshopper mind I have. Frustration sets in
when a project becomes very long, and I have other ideas I can't get to. As
said for the previous question, I have depended on the stimulation that
comes with variety to make more variety.
I started
writing humorous fiction. That was not a wide enough field to make a living
in, so I branched out wherever I could find a fit. This led into documentary
films (education, historical, industrial, nature).
I've
done over 140 documentaries, starting in 1976. They have been all over the
place in subject matter. The ones I look back on with most pride include:
Landscapes, a film series about Alberta's landscape regions that won several
awards in the early '80s; Ranch Cowboy, an hour about the tribe of career
cowboys on ranches, hosted by Ian Tyson; World of Horses, 27 episodes about
different horse occupations, narrated by movie wrangler John Scott; The
Great March, a History TV feature docu-drama about the North West Mounted
Police march west in 1874,
The breadth
of subjects in the documentary business gave me many subjects I could write
about in fiction--which led to non-fiction books and historical fiction.
Then, it was back to humour in magazine form. But it was film
and documentary writing provided much of the income that allowed me to live
by my writing alone. But currently, it is my fiction writing (historical
fiction) that is my daily work. I feel fortunate to have the chance to write
fiction every day. Fiction is what I do full time now--at present, as
opposed to forever--and this is a gift. Earlier in my career, the fiction
(which did not pay for itself) was often done without recompense.
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