March 15, 2024
Routine Interrupted
This message is coming to you from outside of routine in a variety of ways, the first being that it’s not due until the end of the month, but I’m spreading things out so that, going forward, my Pickle Me This Digest (a monthly compendium of my blog posts) arrives in inboxes mid-month, my essays come at month-end, subscribers don’t get end up forgetting about me, or getting fed up with all my newsletters arriving at once.
Because it’s not been long since my last Pickle Me This digest, this newsletter is shorter than usual, which is probably for the best since—also outside of routine—it’s March Break and my children are on holiday. I’m fitting my work into half-days and adventuring with my kids in the afternoons. We’ve been to see the Nature’s Superheroes Exhibit at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington, to Leslieville for Queen East shenanigans (including a visit to Queen Books!), and to the Aga Khan Museum for the Night in the Garden of Love exhibit (it was so great—and so easy to get to on transit from the 100A bus from Broadview Station!). We also went to see The Mighty Ducks at Paradise Theatre. It’s been the perfect combination of low-key and FUN. (My specialty is stay-cation visits to places that are never crowded… ever since that one time I went to the Science Centre on a PA Day, a day that will live on infamy and that my daughters will be addressing with their therapists well into the next century…)
The most essential element of my routine being interrupted, however, is that I received this message in my email inbox last Tuesday:
It turned out that a light fixture crashed down from the ceiling over the pool deck, shattering glass all over the deck and into the pool itself. (Thankfully no one was hurt.)
Notices of pool closures “until further notice” have destroyed me in the past (as I wrote here, I blame that on a period of precarious mental health and having recently read The Swimmers, by Julia Otsuka), but I’m in a fairly stable place these days and also have a closed-pool contingency plan, which is the nearly brand new and incredible Wellesley Pool, just twenty-some minutes away from my house by public transit. That I’d be working half-days, however, meant I wouldn’t be able to swim during the day (which is my usual plan) and so I resolved to get up early and head west on the subway before sunrise*…even though this is the week the clocks have sprung forward so it’s even earlier than early. (I have never been a morning person.)
*Okay, about fifteen minutes before sunrise, but still.
I love swimming, but I’ve never had occasion to discover if I loved it enough to wake up before sunrise and take a ride on the subway. My usual pool is very conveniently situated halfway between my house and my child’s school, which means I pick her up every afternoon with my hair wet (this is why they invented hats!) and I don’t have to go out of my way to swim at all.
But it turns out that going out of my way, as I have this week, has not just wonderful, but even magical? Leaving the house while the sky is indigo (though it gets lighter and lighter with every passing day—the sun rose three minutes earlier today than it did on Monday). Getting on the subway when everything is still quiet, the city buzzing with a calm and quiet hum. All the most terrific communal aspects of public transit without the rush hour stress and fuss, humans at their most wonderfully human, today with spilled milky coffee spreading across the train floor like a Jackson Pollock painting, passengers engaged in a delicate dance to avoid it. And then a walk down Sherbourne Street, which is never dull, and arrival at a pool where anybody who wants to is welcome to swim for the free. The water is much cooler than at my usual pool, and it’s been refreshing, along with the swimming itself, an investment of energy that always pays back in dividends, the goodness I feel in my body for the rest of the day.
It has been wonderful and magical to discover a little surplus time in my day, especially during this season of daylight austerity; to realize that a little trip across the city is closer than I think; to connect with a neighbourhood and people who are new to me; to find out that I really do like swimming that much. I really do!
And I look forward to a return to my regular routine on Monday when the pool is scheduled to open again (fingers crossed) but I’ve enjoyed my time outside it very very much.
February 26, 2024
Reading and Writing
If you receive my newsletter (February edition went out last week!), then you already know that I’ve had a rich and fulfilling month in terms of reading and writing, and creating. And if you don’t receive my newsletter, well, you’re now officially up to date, since you’re already here on my blog and my newsletter is a digested version of my blog posts and book reviews anyway. EXCEPT for my new creative project of writing a long form essay every month, of course. (Last month’s was about the delights of rereading Danielle Steele—have you read it yet?) I have taken exquisite pleasure in writing these pieces, and my next one will be arriving in inboxes on THURSDAY. It’s called “In Praise of Pieces: Commonplace Books, Friendship Quotes, and Our Bookless Book Club” and I’m really excited to share it with you. As with last month’s essay, and like next month’s, these essays will be available for all subscribers, and thereafter for paid subscribers only. As I wrote in my newsletter, “I entered into this enterprise with the lowest expectations, with the intention of finding a different way to be online and channelling my thoughts and ideas into long-form projects whose composition seemed like it might help to further mend my brain after more than a decade of fragmentation on social media. And let me tell you, it has felt so good to write these longer pieces, so rich and satisfying. And it has felt even better to have so many of you become paid subscribers to receive these pieces.” Thanks to everybody who has read, shared, or supported. Challenging myself in this way has been so satisfying. It has also meant that I got to spend part of last week rereading Katherine Heiny’s EARLY MORNING RISER, because my March essay is going to be all about her work and what it means to me.
If you’re not on my newsletter list yet, you can sign up here.
January 31, 2024
Ritual
This week, for the second year in a row, my friend and I met for afternoon tea during the final days of January to celebrate having made it through the darkest season. A ritual that’s come about quite naturally—last year we wanted to have tea together and both appreciated how nice it had been to have something to look forward to when the sky was grey and the earth was frozen. I made a point of making it happen again this year because she picked up the bill last time and I wanted to return the favour. And this time we pondered where we’d like to be next year when we do it again, how far we’ve come since last year when we’d sat in that same purple room.
A measurement of how I’ve come is that I didn’t post about the experience on Instagram, which for some people might be unremarkable, but not for me, who had begun to feel that if something hadn’t made it to my grid, it hadn’t actually truly happened, that the post itself was more important than the moment that post commemorated. Especially for afternoon tea, whose aesthetic that Instagram was created for, the algorithm rewarding accordingly.
And I haven’t always felt like this, in fact for a long time it was just the opposite. For a long time, it felt like Instagram actually inspired me to pay attention, to watch the light, for spots of beauty. And yes, there is something shallow-seeming in the Insta aesthetic, in the pursuit of it, but the end result was that there were always tulips on my table and I kept going to beautiful places, and my life was richer and better for those experiences, and others.
But last year I began to feel like I was living my life outside of time, that I was rarely in the moment, and I’d have to check my grid for confirmation of how and what life was, rather than feeling it in my bones. And even when I wasn’t online (I never use the internet on holiday), I felt like my mind was far from present, as though it was always steps behind me, never catching up. I felt as though I were performing my existence, going through the rituals, and the whole thing did look pretty good in photographs, but I didn’t feel great. The meaning drained right out of everything, empty rituals, things I had to do because those were the things I always do.
In the month since I’ve stepped back from obsessively documenting the minutiae of my existence, I’ve felt so much better. Although not always—there have been moments of panic. There’s been FOMO. I got a new hat and it felt weird not be performing my consumerism of a local small business. How weird is that, to perform hat-wearing instead of just, um, wearing a hat? I went to give blood on Saturday for the first time in 20 years and knew I’d be compelled to perform blood-donation, though it turned out not to be issue because my iron was too low. I think a lot of all this started in the pandemic too because performing good citizenship and (hopefully) setting an inspiring example for others had, literally, become a matter of life or death, and then it all got tangled up on my own weird and garbled sense of goodness and virtue. And yes, I always knew the basic truth, which was “ACTUALLY NOBODY CARES,” but then that was hardly a really comforting thought either then, was it?
If a woman has afternoon tea, and no one hears about it on Instagram, did it actually even happen? But it did, and I’m not so evolved that I can restrain myself from writing about it on my blog, but then, what else is a blog for?
January 25, 2024
The Writing is the Point
I texted my husband a few months ago with an idea I had for a new novel. He replied with a comment about how he was excited that I was excited about writing something new. “I bet you are, ha ha,” I wrote back, because he’d been the one to console me through my months of post-publication ennui, but he affirmed that he really meant it, because he knows that writing is a thing I do, even if it’s not a wise thing, and certainly not a financially lucrative thing, even if publication itself is not a destination that delivers me much in the way of satisfaction and contentment. And that is why I love him, and this is what love is, I think, someone who gives you permission to make bad choices that are the right choices, because even though they might know better, they also understand.
Towards the end of December, I was feeling paralyzed creatively, any confidence I’d felt in my abilities and expertise totally zapped by how hard it had been to publish my latest novel. I felt like a fraud. It was painful, and dispiriting, and I’m so grateful for the long break I took over the holidays, to retreat from the FOMO of the online world and take solace in actual real life people (to quote a certain Anna) and a huge pile of books, to feel my soul grow back, and begin to feel creative and inspired again.
In 2021, I hadn’t been without a project in years. I started Mitzi Bytes in 2014, I started Asking for a Friend in 2015, published Mitzi Bytes in 2017, and started Waiting for a Star to Fall in 2018. That makes for almost a decade with something creative waiting in my back pocket, an easy answer to the question, are you working on something new? Plus there was a global pandemic still going on and, though I didn’t know it at the time, I was well on my way to a mental health crisis that was going to break my brain, so it’s not so surprising that I was having some trouble thinking up a new idea for a book.
Somehow I broke through that pressure, however, and started writing a novel about a woman who has just left (exploded) her marriage and who begins a new life in a Toronto rooming house, a novel about a character I’d envisioned as a modern day Barbara Pym heroine. I had a framework for the novel, 12 chapters, each one taking place over a month, the entire novel the course of a year. The trouble started, however, when I’d reached 70,000 words and wasn’t even six months in, plus the problem of there being no plot. So I abandoned that project, and decided I would write a thriller, but then that fell apart, and then I fell apart. Speaking of paralyzed.
Imagine my surprise, however, when I reread the modern-day Pym book a year later…and realized it was really good? (It was really good because, though my crippling self-doubt of last fall would tell me otherwise, I’ve figured out a thing or two about writing novels, and also because I started writing it under the influence of Katherine Heiny, whose work has taught essential things about enlivening fiction and highlighting the absurdity of everyday life). I decided to abandon the 12 chapter framework, broke the chapters down into smaller pieces, conceded that a literary arc could be possible in a six month period, and just fell deeper and deeper in love with Clemence Lathbury and her world.
Last year I set to revising the manuscript, in between edits and revisions on Asking for a Friend, preparing for that book’s publication, and working with manuscript consultation clients…and I didn’t get much done. Something was missing, and I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t have the focus. Maybe there’d been nothing there there after all? But the bits of dabbling I was doing over the fall suggested otherwise. At the end of December, as I recovered from a difficult season and prepared to start creating again—remember, I had this idea for another new novel, this one a family saga—I set a goal of first getting Clemence’s story into fighting form by the end of January, if such a thing was even possible. Was it possible?
But reader, I did it! Yesterday I added the final link in the thread that had been missing from my narrative, and today I read the final chapter and the epilogue, and was just absolutely dazzled by the ending, which I’d forgotten altogether, and I was properly impressed with myself for pulling it off. I begin working with manuscript consultation clients for the next two months, but will commit to a read-through in April, after which point I will likely (!) send it off to my agent. The prospect of which terrifies me to no end, because while I think that my agent will like it, and that it’s the best book I’ve ever written (so fun! so smart! so full of humour and light!) I’m also the author of three poor-selling novels, which is not a stellar track record, and the deeper on gets on that path, the harder it becomes to change course. Sigh.
But right now, I’m choosing not to focus on that, instead to celebrate my win of getting to this finish light, amidst global crises, and mental health breakdowns: I have written another novel and I really really love it. I am also having fun putting together my new newsletter, and I’m recording the first interview for my new podcast tomorrow! And at some point in the next few months, I’m going to start writing that family saga, and maybe I won’t be able to pull it off, and maybe no one’s going to want to publish it even if I do, a challenge I’ll face if and when it arrives, but in the meantime I will do what I do, which is write, because I love to write, because the writing is the point.
January 15, 2024
One-On-One
Yesterday I sat on my couch beside a friend who scrolled and scrolled through the vacation photos on her phone, two weeks in Japan, and it occurred to me that I can’t remember the last time I partook in such an activity, and also how much it fulfilled me. How different it felt to see her trip and hear her stories, rather than just aimlessly scrolling through them on my own social media feeds, how such a thing stands for everything I’m yearning for right now, one-on-one contact, live and in person. I have found existing so much on a virtual realm overwhelming and confusing as I try to make sense of my connections to others, what’s required of me, and what I should expect in return. I am having the unsurprising revelation that maybe human beings are not meant to have 3700 friends—who knew? So going back to basics, and grateful for the ability to share meals together, visit in our homes, have conversations over tea and coffee, all those things that until 2020, it never would have occurred to me to take for granted. And how completely they can fill my soul.
November 7, 2023
Ideal Reading Experience
In the New York Times Book Review interview, there is always a question about one’s ideal reading experience, and this weekend helped me to articulate what mine is, though I think I’ve know it for a while. My ideal reading experience is a day with 25 hours in it, particularly if that day features golden sunlight filtered through what’s left of the leaves on the trees. When I linger in bed first thing, picking up the book from my bedside (my phone so far away it’s unthinkable), and I read and read, and then finally have to head downstairs and confront the task of cooking breakfast…at which point I realize that it’s an hour earlier than I thought, and so back to bed to go, actually finishing my book. This pattern continuing throughout the day, always just a little bit ahead of where I’m supposed to be. Right up until bedtime when it’s 9:34 according to the clock in my kids’ room and I’m hurrying the small one up to her top bunk, and if I’m lucky I’ll get an hour or so of reading in before my own “lights out” at 11pm. Except it’s 8:34, and the rest of the evening is laid out before me like…like… a hammock? Cozy suspension, such a terrific indulgence. I’ve just opened a new book and I love it, and I read and read and read.
June 29, 2023
Tis the Damn Season
Blogging will be intermittent for the next two months as I get busy going outside and doing stuff. I am wishing you much of the same!
June 19, 2023
Invincible
You can’t go chasing summer, is the thing I keep thinking, but instead you just have to wait, and it comes on like a wave, a wave of green overtaking the garden, and of heat, and crowds, and traffic, and too-muchness, extremes. In summer I get to head out of town and reset my equilibrium, days away from city and noise and the online world, when everything I read is printed on paper, and I’m longing for that peace right now, but not the way I was a year ago, when I felt like I’d come so far, but I still was so broken. Like I’d never be able to withstand too-muchness again. Six months of recovery after my brain broke, and I thought it would always be like that, struggle and hard. So it was especially a relief to ease into summer in 2022, to find peace and stillness after so many months (and years) of tumult. Though, of course, as an anxious person, I was worried about that, asking my therapist what she thought of the fact that I was doing so well, almost like riding a bike with no hands, like, wasn’t this reckless. “I’m not using any of my tools,” I told her. “I haven’t picked up Pema Chodran in weeks. Like, what if I forget everything that I’ve learned?”
And in response she told me the very best thing, which was just to steep myself in this moment, to close my eyes and breathe it in deep and absorb everything about it, imagine myself wholly immersed, which wasn’t so hard, because I spent so much of the summer immersed anyway, literally, which meant something really profound to me, to be deep in the water, at eye level, and a part of the world in such a fundamental way. There was something about pickles, preserves, about bottling summer, and I decided to lean in and do that. The photo accompanying this post like talisman of all that, and I had it printed as an 8’11 and framed up on the wall, and it’s my phone’s wallpaper too, summer summer, deep summer. And it worked—in the fall I was still marvelling at how I was carrying summer with me, that ease, that inner warmth—maybe this was what Camus was talking about? I was carrying it still through the winter, and then the spring, that peace, a sense of being steady, okay. Even as the seasons were shifting all around me, as seasons do, and the ground was moving too, and there were floods and fires and earthquakes and plagues, not to mention school fun fairs and silent auctions and elections and travel and my health card and drivers’ license were about to expire, and everyone kept getting pinkeye, and it lasted for weeks, I was still steady. I’ve never known anything like it.
And now here we are again on the cusp of another summer, which has arrived almost like pinkeye, “You again?”. And I keep tracing the distance from there to here, which hasn’t been an uphill climb at all, just a gorgeous, steady walk, so much easier than those first six months, which felt impossible. You can’t go chasing summer is what I mean, but you can live in it, and let it carry you and give you faith, and help you float. It is possible to float.
May 9, 2023
Reading Good
I’ve been trying to solve the mystery of why my reading life has been especially rich and fruitful in 2023. Like, rich and fruitful beyond my own usual very high standards of what constitutes a rich and fruitful reading life. Partly it’s quantitative—I’m currently reading my 75th book of the year, which is the most books I’ve ever read by this time of year since I started keeping track in 2018. And this is partly because I got my first iPhone in November, which charges from my laptop downstairs, which means that my phone is far from bed and almost never the first thing I reach for in the morning. On many days, I read instead, and those half-hours definitely add up to something. But part of the quantity is qualitative too, because it’s the release of wonderful absorbing novels that have kept me going, big releases from Eleanor Catton and Rebecca Makkai that more than lived up to the hype, and books I only picked up because of all the hype (Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, and Lessons in Chemistry) and I was so glad I did. But it’s not all been hype—I’ve loved rereading Elizabeth Strout’s back catalogue on the coattails of Lucy Barton, and picking up a 1990 short story collection by Joan Clark, and continuing to discover William Maxwell. Part of it is that I’ve found my own personal influencers, readers like Lindsay Hobbes and Lauren LeBlanc whose recommendations tend to satisfy. I’ve also been using the library more than I have in years, partly to keep up with the influencers I just mentioned without going bankrupt, taking months to finally get a book into my hands…but then I have to read it right away once I do because there’s more holds behind me and it can’t be renewed (this is the situation with Aleksandar Hemon’s The World and All That It Holds, which I’m reading right now upon the recommendation of my friend Julia). I don’t feel overwhelmed by all that I still need to read, or all I’m never going to read, or all the books that other people are reading, because I feel confident in my own personal reading trajectory (and glad too that it’s not just made up of all the things that I’m being told to read, or that everybody else is reading so I’ve got to do it too.) I think part of the richness and fruitfulness is also that I, for the first time in a really, really long time—like maybe even a decade?—am feeling relatively steady on the ever-shifting ground of reality, and I’m not even afraid to say that for fear that reality is going to come now and knock me over, tempting fate. I’m feeling good, and so I’m reading good, which is a sentence I’m going to leave right there, never mind the grammatical atrocities being committed. But then, as I always wonder, could it be instead that I’m reading good so I’m feeling good? (Certainly, for me, a poor reading streak and feeling terribly have often coincided.) Which comes first? How does one ever know, or begin to untangle it all? This is one of those existential questions that, it’s likely, I will never understand.
April 14, 2023
It’s All Happening
It’s all happening! Not just spring even (though spring is happening too—there is forsythia in bloom in my front garden!) but everything else, the weekends filling up like in old times. And I’m running two community events in the next three weeks, as well as supporting another one in June, and while I may have reached the “crying because I’m frustrated and no one will help me” and having periodical hissy fits stage in the organization process, in general I am doing okay, which is a big deal, because when I was having a really hard time with my mental health last year, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to take on these sorts of responsibilities again. I have a much harder time with stress these days, sometimes my anxiety turns on out of nowhere, and a year ago I was still was suffering so much, but since then I’ve rebuilt so much of my mental strength, and it feels really good. I’m proud of just how far I’ve come.
And something else good that happened to me last week was sitting down to write a little piece for our neighbourhood’s community gardeners e-newsletter. I’m at a moment in-between with my new novel nearly ready to go to print, and another novel that’s still in progress but I’m not stressing out too much about getting that next draft done, and I’ve taken a break from doing manuscript evaluations (though I’m returning to that delightful work next month!), which means that I’m temporarily between deadlines, as they say, and finally had a moment to devote to writing something for the Harbord Village Gardeners, which I’d been meaning to do for months now.
And it felt so great! To write and write and to get to the end, so richly satisfying. I’ve been writing my novel since 2015 and while getting it out there finally will be incredible, it’s still a long and complicated road to take, but this was different, and it had been so long since I sat down to write something like an essay (or a story). A creation I can (metaphorically) hold in my hand, and I was so pleased with myself, and pleased with the result. Looking forward to sharing it soon.
