by JULIET WATERS

“It is not my experience that society hates and fears the writer,” Annie Dillard writes in her classic writer’s companion, The Writing Life, “or that society adulates the writer. Instead my experience is the common one, that society places the writer so far beyond the pale that society does not regard the writer at all.”

It would be unfortunate if someone were to confuse Dillard’s book with the recently released anthology Writing Life: Celebrated Canadian and International Authors on Writing and Life. Not because one book is better than the other. If you’re interested in the subject of what it’s like to make a life and a living from writing, both books are full of great advice, anecdotes, bitterness and solace. But if you can only afford to buy one, keep in mind that all proceeds from the anthology go to PEN Canada.

This human rights organization exists mainly to protect writers who have been imprisoned in oppressive regimes. To some readers it might seem appropriate that writers should have to donate time and money for the luxury of whining about how hard it is to be a writer in places where you aren’t imprisoned, merely ignored. But it’s clear that successful writers do suffer. Fortunately, they tend to have a sense of humour about it.

The writers in Writing Life appear alphabetically, ranging from Margaret Atwood and Russell Banks all the way down to Marilynne Robinson and Jane Urquhart. Most echo Dillard’s experience, and no matter how well known they are in literary circles, most are forced to suffer the indignity of indifference and ignorance. Marilyn Bowering, who has won or been nominated for almost every national literary prize, and some of the most prestigious international ones, still has to suffer through an interview with a newspaper columnist who insists on returning the conversation to the same point: “You’ve been writing for many years, but this is the first time I’ve heard of you. Don’t you feel all those years were a waste?”

On the other hand, some writers would probably prefer being ignored to enduring the endlessly polite and disorganized rituals of the cross-Canada book tour. Lynne Coady regularly prepares for the horror of promotional appearances by getting drunk the evening before and giving the following speech to whoever she happens to be living with:

“Greetings, morons. Thank you for inviting me to your shitty little (town, library, festival etc.). I can’t express to you the loathing I feel gazing down at all your pasty, slack-jawed faces. My hotel room looks out over the parking lot and I haven’t gone to the bathroom in two days because the organizer thinks ‘lactose intolerant’ means ‘put cheese on everything.’ Please, please, everybody. I implore you: go to hell. Because you suck VERY MUCH...Now gimmie money.”

Some writers manage to turn things around. Eden Robinson remembers being booed by an auditorium of Grade 8 students. “Out of spite, I read the most gratuitously violent, curse-laden segment in my book. To my surprise, I was cheered. No one had ever given a performance of mine anything more enthusiastic than a golf clap...Some of the kids stayed behind and we talked and I signed their notebooks. It was the first time I felt like a real author.”

And then there’s Alice Munro, who claims here that she made a decision in July 2005 to give up writing. This seems mostly because she can no longer balance the task of writing with the demands of an adoring public who keep the phone incessantly ringing. But it’s also because she’s getting old. When you’re old, says Munro, “You can’t just let go and Be a Writer, all temperament and bad habits and Screeching Genius, like in the old movies. Not that I ever did (I don’t recall any of those geniuses being women), but the notion used to be in the back of my mind that someday I might try.”

Writing Life: Celebrated Canadian and International Authors on Writing and Life Ed. by Constance Rooke, McClelland & Stewart, pb, 449pp, $24.99