Thea Lim is the 'story doctor' as Wilfrid Laurier University's Edna Staebler writer-in-residence
Award-winning author will be giving lectures and workshops during the winter term
Thea Lim is perhaps best known for her debut novel, An Ocean of Minutes, but for the next few months she is going to be serving as Wilfrid Laurier University's Edna Staebler writer-in-residence.
The award-winning author will be giving lectures and workshops during the winter term and will generally just hope to inspire other writers in their craft.
Thea Lim joined CBC Kitchener-Waterloo's The Morning Edition and host Craig Norris to talk about her new role.
The following has been edited for length and clarity. Audio can be found at the bottom of the page.
Craig Norris: What are you going to be doing in this role as a writer-in-residence?
Thea Lim: Basically I'm on campus to talk stories. So, I'll give a talk about my own writing. I'm going to give a few workshops, and I'm also available one-on-one for anybody who wants to talk about their creative writing.
My focus is primarily fiction, but folks can come to talk to me about their fiction, about their poetry, about narrative non-fiction, about screen writing. I'm basically just there to be kind of the story doctor.
Norris: What was it about this role that made you want to take it on?
Lim: Well, I like to joke that the older I get the one thing that I can still manage to believe in is the value of telling a story. And I think that if anybody is trying to do that, I'll always want to offer help.
Storytelling, human expression, art making are things that make us human, that we've been doing since the beginning of time. And it's worth doing, even if it's only for yourself, even if it's never to share with someone else.
Norris: Later this month you're going to be speaking about boring worlds, the storytelling power of the mundane. Explain that for us. What's exciting to you about the mundane?
Lim: I like to joke that my work sits at the intersection of infrastructure and emotion, and while that actually sounds very boring, I'm here to say that there's a lot of drama that happens within the boring if we pay attention to it.
So, my last novel, An Ocean of Minutes, was a time travel novel that tried to imagine what would it be like if time travel was real, if in order to time travel, you had to get visas and paperwork the way you do for air travel right now. And what if you face the same kind of discrimination and exploitation that we associate with people travelling great distances for work right now. And then currently I'm working on a detective novel, but what it's really about is how bad it feels to have a job.
So, I'm really interested in taking genres that people associate with the pleasure of the fabulous and poking them a little bit and looking at the kind of boring undercarriage in order to understand how the true infrastructure that we live under in our world really does shape our emotions and our interpersonal relationships. Because of course, that infrastructure so often formed by government policy, by stakeholders, by people who make decisions, whether or not we are aware of how much those policies and decisions, which sometimes can seem far away, affect our intimate lives. So as a writer, I feel like that's kind of part of my job, to open up a space for us all to think about that.
Norris: Do you ever find writing mundane?
Lim: Of course. Torturous. I think from great writers to writers who are just starting out, there can be nothing more full of despair and dread and boredom than that page that just sort of isn't bending to your will. But I always say, if it feels bad, keep going. You're doing it right. In part it's the difficulty that's the reward.
Norris: What drew you to writing in the first place?
Lim: I always joke that I tried to get away from writing because it didn't seem like a stable job. I think I moved around a lot as a young person, like so many Canadians, and I could always find myself in books, even when those who were around me didn't seem to share my experiences. And so then they wanted to join the stream of connection. But like I said, it's not the most stable job. So, for many years I tried to find outlets for writing that I could make a living off of. Like writing for not for profits, or even sort of writing online. Turns out you can't really make much money from writing online either.
I was lucky to sort of eventually really hit it big. I guess it's just random luck that my last book did go somewhere. So, I feel very lucky in that way. And I always say I'll give it another year, you know, I'll keep trying to be a writer for another year, hopefully I can make it last.
Norris: What do you hope your time being a writer-in-residence will mean for the Laurier community?
Lim: As a writing teacher or writing mentor, you always hope that people will take the things you say and action them and go off and create amazing things that they find very fulfilling and that their readership will find fulfilling. But I also think, as I was saying earlier, that part of the gift of art making is that it's worth doing. Just to do it, even if all that I do is give a workshop and somebody comes to that workshop and we have that moment of connection, focusing on something that's worth doing for itself. Just spending that time together I think is worthwhile and I think has sort of a curative effect on us when we live in a time that's obsessed with deliverables and metric.
Norris: Is there anything else that you're working on right now that you can tell us about?
Lim: I've been working on a series of essays for The Walrus about algorithms. I think everybody's thinking about algorithms, algorithmic literacy as they think, and how algorithms shape our lives. Just like in my fiction, I'm interested in looking at how algorithms shape our emotions and specifically how they're doing that by transforming the way that publishing and art making work. So much of art making now our audience is the algorithm. So if you think about things like Spotify, you think about things like good reads. It's no longer reviewers or even human beings that artists are creating for, it's the algorithm who decides how we get to the top. So I'm working on a series of essays for them about that. And then I'm also working on my detective novel. And for years I've been threatening to write some children's books, so we'll see if that actually happens.
LISTEN | Thea Lim is Wilfrid Laurier University's Writer-In-Residence:
