November 21, 2023
Gleanings
- I do love to inject a bit of novelty into our Advent. And I’ve loved creating a new Yule Log for ELEVEN out of the past THIRTEEN years I’ve been posting here on SSJ (and, before that, on The Lunchbox Season). That’s a top-ten list and a bonus! But I hereby proclaim, “Eleven yule logs is enough.” My work is done in the tree-like cake department. They’re all my babies and they’re all my favourites. And I don’t need to build my catalogue up to a dozen log-cakes, let alone a baker’s dozen.
- This is one of my favourite things about the novella form: the way that worlds are created with just enough carefully crafted elements and strong imagery to bring them alive and to gain your trust, and the rest is on you. Novellas just don’t have the time or the space to hold your hand. I find myself loving that.
- That what we must do is awaken our own creativity, generosity, and create small islands of sanity when we cannot stop the insanity that is occurring elsewhere.
- My Significant Other tends to get depressed around his birthday. And he’s had a hard year. Last year’s birthday was spent in the hospital and this year is a significant milestone so I decided that we needed to celebrate. Really celebrate.
- I did have a minute of thinking, “hmmm, I never even tried this on before today, it would be terrible if I were allergic to yak hair and found out during a six-hour meeting.” But if the yak hair did give me a terrible rash at least I would be sitting with fifty dermatologists, and maybe some of them have cutting-edge creams in their carry-ons. (The denouement: no issues! Me and yak hair sweaters are best friends.)
- I quilted rivers all over the quilt, trying to echo the routes, the oxbows, the chaotic systems of those days. I listened to the news and quilted, hoping to find a way to see something positive in what had happened.
- I read that Bening trained relentlessly for a year to hone her stroke, and averaged four to eight hours in the water, day and night, in all kinds of weather conditions. She was adamant that she would swim every stroke in the film. Nyad was obsessive and single-minded in her pursuit of her goal, and Bening was obsessive and single minded in pursuit of hers. “We build these cages for ourselves in our brains about what we can and can’t do,” Bening says. “We get so used to that, that we sort of even forget that they’re there.”
- It is poisonous stuff, though, and—to bring Amis back into it—there’s such a sense of gleeful bad boy “look at me” about the whole thing, with all the metafictional cleverness deployed as back-up in case the whole “I’m only joking” excuse isn’t enough.
- There was a sense that the tree itself knew it had become a danger and the space it left was given like a gift, not only to the bee balm and juniper, lilac and witch hazel that have barely survived in its shadow but to me, personally. Its stumps invite me to weave ribbons around them and carve them with Cohen’s words.
- i feel that veil is thin, yes, and it is the grey boundaries between past and future in which i feel myself becoming a flock of birds. the neither here nor there, an inability to be present for it.
- Start with the darkness, the unknown hour. Roll over. Squint to see if the glimmer of light could possibly be the beginning of the sun rise. Notice the well-worn thoughts about not getting enough sleep and the old stories from days gone by that still want to dictate how this day with little sleep will go.
November 8, 2023
Gleanings
- It used to be that I could envelop her with my love; now I have to wrap it around her, more like I do with her dad or a dear friend. The physicality mirrors the emotionality—that she is still able to find solace in my love, but that it is slowly, slowly becoming more like accompaniment than absorption.
- Is “take a penny, leave a penny” my Roman Empire?
- Now more than ever, living ubuntu challenges us to search for our similitudes, to find and preserve humanity – that common thread that is woven into the fabric of each of our lives, connecting us.
- There was a time (yesterday, and a century ago) that all three of them were attached to me like barnacles and the local playground was an extension of our home. Every mother thinks (read: hopes/dreads) that life might stay that way forever, that one day a plaque will go up next to the swings that reads, “she was a good Mum and she swung really high.” Lucky for all of us, it doesn’t
- And yet, for me, this is the allure of eavesdropping – not knowing the whole story and crafting my own version of the interaction I am witnessing.
- My goals for my career have changed, and the deflation is far less than it once was. I have a strategy of having extremely low expectations for my work’s success in the world while having all the hope and optimism that writing requires. I think it’s some kind of detachment I’ve cultivated to survive all this pain. I’ll always write. I love to write.
- The lifeguards laughed at something. Outside the leaves were falling. I turned at the deep end and pushed my way through the blue water. Each song a palimpsest, the empty pool a reminder.
- Later that day, maybe it was the heat from the water thawing me a little but I became aware I was sobbing incoherently standing under the shower-head, shaking, close to falling down. Instead of calling 911, I called a friend.
- Why do I get to live in such abundant peace while others are burying their children? There are days when I could be entirely sunk by that thought alone, feeling sick with the privilege of my safe, warm little house with its overflowing cupboards and soft beds. It is bitterly unfair.
- When mostly, I am coming to embody and realize that life, life is what is always happening right here, right now. And that life is often slow, quiet … boring, ordinary.
- So I’m reading. And the one thing I can do is share what I’m reading. Things that have helped me think things through, make sense of what can’t be made sense of. Here we go.
October 25, 2023
Gleanings
- The bottom line is this: I don’t want to pretend to know more than I do or care less than I do. I want to live in this world awake, gentle, fierce, thoughtful, realistic, other-oriented, intentional, standing up for the least structurally and materially powerful. I don’t want to be pressured into performance or assuaged by box checking.
- I told him how I used to ride in the backseat of my Dad’s car every Sunday night listening to Neil Diamond, how Diamond is my Williams. It’s funny how music weaves its way into a soul, how twenty, fourty years later, we listen to the music from our childhoods and remember.
- As it turns out, the secret to loving yourself is to observe any emotions that surface, no matter how uncomfortable—sadness, fear, guilt, shame, anger, hurt—and just… hold on and brace yourself for this, because it’s kind of revolutionary… Let yourself feel them.
- All the energy being spent on attacking and unfollowing and disparaging each other online can and should instead be spent validating our own feelings and giving ourselves the space to move through them.
- I will continue to talk to strangers.
- I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately in my quest for nicer times – and in my quest to be a better pal/human. Then I figured YOU might be thinking about this kind of stuff, from time to time, too. So in the name of nicer times and more friendly friendship (or family-ship!) here’s a list of things that might be slightly less jarring than the age-old ‘Cheer up!’
- Watching one tiny body bag after another being carried from the annihilation in Israel and the Gaza Strip has cut me to the very marrow. Every night watching the news I feel gutted. All life is precious and finite, but the massacre of children in their kibbutz homes and armageddon at the Al-Ahli Hospital are overwhelmingly soul-wrenching. Childhood innocence stolen by hatred. The promise embodied in those wee souls forever unfulfilled. It’s so much worse than heart-breaking.
- All of this mothering has been calling me more and more inward, into myself, to take responsibility for what’s mine. To feel, to heal, to be. To carry what’s mine to carry.
October 17, 2023
Gleanings
- I learned the word, Weltschmerz this week, which in German literally translates as, “world pain.” It’s a feeling triggered by the inexplicable pains and evils of the world, when our ideals of how the world should be collide with the darkest of realities.
- Look At Me offers no such consolation, especially if you recognize anything of yourself in “Little Orphan Fanny.” Fanny is a tortoise to the end, but her only victory is having the last word.
- What a gift. This completely changed my internal rules of engagement — from expectation to empathy, from pointing the finger externally to checking in with my own self.
- The next day at work, they asked us to play Nimrod before our concert in honor of Viv. I understand the sentiment behind this, but I don’t think the people who made this decision fully thought it through?!? Like, have you ever tried to play a brass solo while you were ugly-crying?!? I prepped in the bathroom beforehand by making myself a giant scarf made of toilet paper, and you bet I needed it. I wonder what Viv would have thought of it all—I’m pretty sure she would have laughed, with a very subtle eye roll.
- Why bittersweet, I wonder, not sweetbitter? How did this compound noun come to be created in this order, putting painful first and pleasurable second?
- Does this inevitably lead to passing judgment and evaluation on people? Do I consider a seamstress less admirable or valuable than a poet? Yet, there are people who evoke admiration even though I have no desire to do what they do: Firefighters, doctors, nurses, teachers.
- Jack and steam – forever linked by their common attributes of invigoration, restoration, and danger.
- Memory is wild and memory association is wilder, still. I think I will always associate Stop Making Sense with Ric and 1984, but I was really glad I got to experience it again, almost forty years later, with Chuck. And I think Ric would appreciate that, too.
- The ping of an incoming email. A friend, who ends her note with, “You are brave and good.” I hope she is right. I hope that I am brave and that I am good. I’m grateful that she can see those characteristics in me, especially on the days when I cannot.
- Now here’s a store novel that is not twee or earnest; it’s funny and mostly realistic, with mentions of working conditions of regular women, and the perils that face single women in the 30s.
- As women gather more years we become disinterested in trying to live a perfect life as defined by popular theories and philosophies. Freed from those expectations and efforts, we’ve acquired a new freedom, a stronger self-confidence and greater contentment. Instead, our passions are directed at nurturing and enjoying our relationships and friendships, at hobbies and sports and at activities – travel, theatre arts, volunteerism. Our energies are focussed on living an intentional and thoughtful life.
- This morning it’s raining and I’m inside, quiet, wishing I had my mother here to talk with, to offer her the gift or curse of this story to in a way that was loving. So much was withheld from her in her life, particularly during her childhood; she was marked by it. She was a good mother, maybe better than I deserved, because I wasn’t always much of a daughter, or at least not the daughter she might have wished for. Nearly a hundred years ago she was wrapped in a blanket and handed off to a household in Halifax where she was considered a boarder. One name was dropped and forgotten, until now.
- The thing about the plot of an ordinary life is that it’s only revealed slowly and partially even to the one living it!
September 26, 2023
Gleanings
- The thing about the plot of an ordinary life is that it’s only revealed slowly and partially even to the one living it!
- This thinking always brings me to the same place: if there were no sweltering Augusts and frigid Februaries would I appreciate September as much as I do?
- During my brief period in acquisitions, folks would send me ideas and ask me if they should write them and unless they were really love stories about invertebrates and fruit, I said yes–I’d love to see it, but what I couldn’t say is, sounds promising, but how good a writer are you and how hard are you going to work on this? Because that’s what really matters.
- Instead, today is the time to celebrate human resilience. We can swim in the darkest waters but with time, those waters become clear again. It’s gradual to be sure. But it happens, even when you think it can’t and even when there is a pandemic thrown in to beat you back down.
- So … how to apply the blue zone lifestyle to one’s own, given the environment in which we live? How to live a relatively simple, healthy, active, stress-free life amidst modern amenities and technology? Is that possible?
- Instead of creating a Bucket List, I’m creating a Teacup Tally. A gentle guide to keep me from letting the weeks slip by without having enough fun.
- Production editors are the quality control of the publishing world. They manage the later phases of publication, starting from the copyediting stage right up to sending files to the printer. They apply deadlines, enforce quality standards, manage a team of copyeditors and proofreaders, and (meticulously) review content and provide feedback.
- We felt closer to the living world then. Closer, tied to its weather, its caprices, its inconveniences. It was easier to wait out the storms, the loss of power, because there were fewer gadgets. No computer, no cellphone, no heat pump, and we didn’t care as much about hot water for daily showers. Once, after a week without electricity, we went to the local pool, which did have power, to swim but mostly to use the showers. Our clothing smelled of woodsmoke.
- In a world, that doesn’t recognize the humanity of our cycles and seasons, that assumes, because it’s a Tuesday in September at ten in the morning, you should be at your optimum, just the same as a Thursday in May at three in the afternoon, it’s hard to allow ourselves the space and grace to ebb and flow just like nature, the nature that we are.
- Sometimes joy comes from the oddest places. And they’re not really that odd, they’re just not what we advertise as the joy makers, the things we should celebrate. And often, I wonder, if the things we should celebrate are oversimplified. The traditional milestones we hold out for, for ourselves and for those around us. We have them in the back of our minds, that tiny chest of clipboards, one per person in our lives.
- If you read this blog, you might know that I love a good Golden Age detective novel (particularly if it happened to be penned by Dorothy L. Sayers or Margery Allingham)…
- Long after Doug moved in to long-term care and I walked by myself, I’d stop and look over my shoulder. Even though I knew he wouldn’t be there. I thought this would be a habit for life. That I would never stop pausing, looking over my shoulder, making sure he was there.
September 12, 2023
Gleanings
- Eyes to see what’s right in front of me. Eyes that don’t turn away. Eyes that are connected to the heart, not the stories of the mind. Eyes that see the sacred, the holy, the reverent in all of it. Eyes that dance with wonder and curiosity. Eyes that meet what’s here, now. Eyes adjusted to the bigger story, the mystery.
- I often wonder at the origins of a person’s bookish habits, The What and How of what we keep and Why. And, our love of books to begin with, is it a nurture or nature thing, the fact of growing up with many books or almost none, of being read to daily or never being read to, that makes a difference or is there some other mystery involved?
- It’s actually amazing, how people are surviving, shining, in amidst all the trauma. And yah, sometimes we’re just trying our best, too, trying not to end up buried and gone. Trying to use our souls as best we can, remembering the good qualities of those around us. Doing what we can with what we have, remembering to give what grace we can.
- For years, I mocked this love for sameness. Until I woke up to discover myself with a daily egg on toast, just one element of a tightly choreographed morning ballet that is best not interfered with. The walls of my small comfort zone (CZ, I’ll call it) sit on a foundation of DNA.
- The marginality of women and women’s words in the OED is another illustration of Jenni Nuttall’s point that advances in knowledge don’t always represent progress for women. As lexicography became more “scientific”–more systematic, more fact-oriented, more rigorous–it also became more male-dominated, and more masculinist in its assumptions about what did or didn’t belong in dictionaries.
- Back in June, I set a few goals that pointed toward a changing horizon. Softer, maybe, and calmer and gentler and as beautiful as the view across the lake from the sunset deck at my stepsisters’ cottage. The sky at sunset is always different but familiar, different but known, different if you take time to sit and savour it each evening. Otherwise, you might believe you’d see the same sunset and sky over and over again, and you might be bored by what you think of as repetition. But it’s not repetition, it’s texture and nuance and depth. It’s a groove, not a rut, as my friend Lisa says.
- To age wisely is to be willing to unlearn as well as learn. September can be a month not only for learning new things, but unlearning what no longer serves us. Or others.
- You might say that in attempting to solve the mystery of my own family through fiction, I blurred the line between reality and family legend even further. I do hope my ancestors will forgive me.
- Maybe it’s just one of the gifts fiction can offer us—a temporary respite, a refuge. It’s not that there isn’t trouble and heartache in the story Lara tells her daughters, but while they listen they are safe and loved. There’s definitely room for novels like that in my reading life.
- We’re still the very same people we were in Northumberland, but now we’re looking forward to having many more new experiences and passing many more milestones here in Essex County. Turns out, no matter how many miles we move, nor how much time passes, nothing changes, really. And that’s a good thing!
- The first time I read Beatrice and Barb was when I was going through the submissions pile on my desk. It’s a mystery to me how it landed there — but am I ever grateful that it did! I knew right away that I wanted to sink my teeth into the story. I always try to listen to that voice — that eagerness to start working on a manuscript. I sent you an email to say that I loved your story, and we met for coffee to talk about my editorial notes … and the rest is history!
- After the hurricane I promised myself I would never again take for granted the joy of turning on a tap to fill a glass with drinking water. I am promising myself now that I will never again miss the opportunity to smile at people – loved ones and strangers – or to kiss someone I love.
- Poignant, funny, horrifying, moving, smart, enraging, absurd: these are all adjectives that came to mind when I sat down to write this review of Alicia Elliott’s brilliant debut novel And Then She Fell. It’s a quick and intense read, with incredible, chatty, and hilarious chapter titles and a thoroughly amazing prolonged climax that I absolutely will not spoil for you, even though I am dying to write about it.
- I love writing. And I needed to take a break from it this summer so I could remind myself who I am writing for.
- When you spend 18 hours on a train with the small group of people with whom you were waiting for it arrive, you get to hear their stories.
June 27, 2023
Gleanings
- We aspire towards the observation of little things, the magic in the smallness of everyday. We debate not losing our power and staking a claim to it. But there are times when all we need is to become small ourselves and watch the world go by as if it has no need of our presence.
- I don’t know whether I’ll need it in the same way; nor what new or changed goals it may meet or fulfill. I don’t know. I do know that I still love to write in order to find order in the dissonance of experiences. I still love to write to untangle the muddle of my mind. I still love to write to record and reflect and come closer to understanding the world. But it’s just one way of knowing and doing and being. I’m discovering other ways now, too.
- If I’m being honest, not precisely is where I land most of the time, even when I deliberate for weeks and finally tire of my own waffling and just pick something.
- For now, I will take my extra time to enjoy my children, without regret. We drive down country roads, listening to music and talking. Sometimes we play a certain song (Unwritten) and laugh. It might feel silly, but it is good for our souls. The three of us singing loudly (and horribly). The message loud & clear. We are ridiculous, we are alive. Things aren’t perfect, but they are pretty good. I’m always writing my book.
- The bustle of the morning is over and the day holds so much potential. I’m also not near the mid-afternoon crash yet or the evening anxiety.
- And so I think we just need to keep training ourselves to see beauty, and sharing that, and maybe somehow it translates down the line into something good. It can’t hurt to try, anyway, right?
- Stitch by stitch, I wish they knew all the places this blanket travelled, all of the tears it has absorbed, the dirt and crumbs and germs it has acquired, the specific, soothing smell. The nurturing, the comfort, the anxious moments when it is pulled away for a bath. The love.
- Sometimes, around 4 p.m., particularly if the day has been busy, I think to myself, In 3 hours you will be reading! I’ve never watched much television and so after dinner, after dishes, I head upstairs to arrange 4 pillows behind me and I get into bed to read. This time of year the windows are all open and I can hear the evening chorus–robins, Swainson’s thrushes, western tanagers, and others.
June 14, 2023
Gleanings
- We forget that we are also entitled to acceptance. We are entitled to evolution. We are entitled to true healing, which often means escaping the initial story and writing a fresh one that is less about our pain and more about the full spectrum of experience (you notice I didn’t say heroism…another trap of a story).
- In my writing life, in my writing career, it felt like waiting was the primary state of being. What if the waiting is over and I’m just floating on my back down a beautiful wide peaceful river?
- There used to be a time, so long ago that if you’re under a certain age you likely won’t remember, that air travel was glamourous.
- I’m often challenged regarding my sense of what’s “on the way home.” More than an actual bucket list, I’ve envisioned a life free to swerve and bend the map and the calendar for stops at beaches, cute mountain towns, hikes, and retreat centers.
- Due to down time whilst recovering from some injuries, today was my first outing in a long while, and Wheatley welcomed me back with open arms. Well, at least with wide-spread branches.
- I’ve been re-training my brain these last couple of years to remember all the things I LOVE, and to try and spread that love. But once in a while it’s good to CONSIDER THE OPPOSITE and to also have that comedic distance. So it makes me laugh a bit to consider what I hate once in a while.
- To allow the whole of it, be a part of it, to not see things as right or wrong, good or bad, better or best, but to make room for all of it. To delight in difference, be open, and listen for the next true for us decision, willing to shift and change as it comes.
- Lately, therefore, I’ve come up with a little game I call “Poetry Serendipity”: every time I go up into the stacks of the university library, I take different routes on my way to and from whatever section I am specifically visiting and, as I wander, I scan the shelves for names I recognize or (more random and risky, but also more fun) for those tell-tale slim volumes that you just know must be poetry collections.
- Some mornings I don’t look up as I walk down to the water. But this morning I’m glad I did.
- It’s at this time of the year that my camera roll is chock full of flowers. The peonies on Brunswick, the poppies on Howland, Irises, lilacs, and wisteria. Some flowers are easier to photograph than others. The translucent quality of a poppy’s petals is hard to capture when too much sunlight is pouring through it. All the beautiful detail gets erased by the sun.
- But that does not begin to describe what I am leaving behind. My head is swirling with so many little moments. The ringing of the doorbell and a neighbour on my doorstep in tears, asking for a hug. Going to check the mail and finally returning two hours later, having stopped for several conversations. Laughing as a friend climbs through a window because her three-year-old has locked her out. Remembering my children avoiding neighbours on Hallowe’en because their displays were just too creepy. Fighting the removal of the basketball hoop that neighbours felt was too noisy. Grateful for the flowers and hand-drawn cards left at our door by children when our old dog, Tucker, died.
- think scalpel, not sledgehammer
May 30, 2023
Gleanings
- if you spend a lot of time imagining a person’s reaction to a present it’s probably a sign that the present is mostly about you, anyhow.
- And again and again I keep revelling in the reaction of people as I say, “I appreciate you.”
- If you’ve ever wondered what booksellers have in their beach bags, wonder no more!
- and though overall I am still disappointed in it as a revision of Dickens’s novel, as its own novel Demon Copperhead is, I think, actually pretty good.
- I want the names of everything. The bees in the first tomato flowers — Bombus vosnesenskii, the yellow-faced; the Swainson’s thrush I heard as I went out for my swim–whit, whit; the long roots of Rumex acetosella, sheep’s sorrel, I keep pulling from between the pavers in the greenhouse. The rough-skinned newt, the Pacific tree frog (sometimes the chorus frog, once Hyla regilla, now Pseudacris regilla, though nothing about the frog has changed), Rosa ‘Félicité Perpétue’ by the front door, where the tree frogs lie low in the damp earth.
- As my children and I stood at the intersection of Dupont and Davenport, it literally felt like it was raining petals. I resisted the urge to pull out my phone and video the whole wild scene. Some things are better experienced with the eyes.
- But the thing I ran into when my kids left me, once again, with a basket of overpriced strawberries on their last legs — fruit they’d asked me to buy but then mysteriously lost interest in eating when it was presented to them at breakfast — and I decided to instead turn strawberries into strawberry-ade, so to speak, was that every lemonade recipe I’ve already published contains steps I lacked inclination to do.
- But I am most intrigued by Radha’s question in the book, describe the scent of your mother.
- This, my friends, is a book that will pull back a curtain and show you something incomparably lovely, and then while you are gazing at it in awe, punch you in the stomach.
- Critique works when we’re playing together, when we like and admire each other’s unique gifts, when there is an equal exchange of energies.
- Although helmets have ruined that feeling in my hair, I felt the cool breeze on my face as I tooled around the quiet streets of Weston. There’s not much left of that farmgirl flying fearlessly over gravel. I’m a bit wobbly and weeks from feeling confident on roads with actual traffic but it felt terrific!
- It is a testimony to Donna Tartt’s brilliance as as a writer that when I was in the book I rarely thought “There is no reason for sane people to behave like this,” but later I would be mulling it over, or trying to describe it why I liked the book so much to Mark, and couldn’t string it together.
- The world is full of questions, but art doesn’t hand you the answers. It makes an offering.
- As ever, the only real secret to creativity, is to work, to be creative, to be obsessed, to look at art, to read. You never hear of any successful artist talk about their secret being to go to cocktail parties, or art shows or poetry readings. (Though those can all be lovely things).
- That’s the thing about wonders. They’re fleeting, ever changing. Nothing stays the same, especially me. But when I look, I can find one or two, or seven delights. Today’s wonders bring me joy or peace.
May 16, 2023
Gleanings
- Tranchese believes that the media’s frequent and unbalanced usage of alleged/allegedly since 2012 has subtly changed the way it’s interpreted.
- May is the month for memories and small moments, for topping up your joy tank.
- That’s a lot of energy to expend and baggage to unpack while I am just trying to eat my goddamned lunch in the one hour I have to myself in the workday.
- Fellowship Point is like a Barbara Taylor Bradford novel if it were written by Elizabeth Strout.
- Hers was a voice that made us want to do what she was doing.
- As I survey the landscape of my life, I can see that my fascination with symbols has deep roots. Tarot. Sigils. Witchcraft. Tattoos. Literary analysis and Coen Brothers movies.
- After such a long stretch working at my kitchen table, I’d forgotten what a commute can bring about, a shift in mindset, an unfurling of ideas, a transition.
- Up there, where someone has painted SCRIBE? That’s where I met the editors who published my first story in 1992.
- I don’t understand flight, I don’t know anything about velocity or lift or speed … but I do know there a is full moon on Friday and that it’s magical to look up and revel in the moon’s shining beauty while soaring high above the clouds, and that beauty is a worthwhile lens through which to view life.
- I think a lot about my boat of calm, and how I’ve had my moments where I was not calm. But I’ve also had a couple of deeply profound signs / interactions of late that tell me this might be one of the most important things I can do. And maybe a lot of appearing calm is acting? But because it’s a practice for me, a long one, I feel like my calm-acting has been worth something, too.
- The forest, it turns out, is an excellent teacher.
