February 23, 2026
Gleanings
- In a log cabin quilt, the red represents the fire at the centre of the home. This morning ours is burning warmly, wood cut and split and stacked in the woodshed by the grandfather who loves to show his grandsons how a house is built. How the beams are built up of long lengths of 2x12s spiked together, the joists crossing them.
- It seems symbolic these days, to simply make a mark, a human mark on a piece of paper.
- This wintering of life is my chance to go deeper, slow down, fan the embers of latent desires of my youth that I didn’t have time for while rushing from train to office desk to school pick-up to grocery store to kitchen.
- This is the language I grew up with, spoken by my parents to each other and to me, although I almost always answered in English. Still, most of my childhood memories come with German subtitles.
- I’d rather be “cringe” and sincere than “cool” and detached. I’d rather celebrate the fact that we are capable of feeling something for one another in a world that often feels designed to keep us apart.
- “Rules are rules: Cold but piercingly sunny days require grapefruit cake.”
- My chief take-away from that course was that, to be successful, one has to choose a location, walk into it quietly and with as little fuss and noise as possible, settle and wait.
- “Physical books have always been my best friends, and the wisdom and characters within them have guided me when human beings or humanity disappoint. I do think my reading practice serves as the perfect antidote to the noise and performance of social media.”
- This morning, I
track my day, searching
for it. A “holy moment” –
one amidst a thousand
of them to be sure.
And there you are,
a tiny moment. Maybe
three minutes in a
day filled with over
a thousand,
waking ones. - How do I turn off my thinking mind? Actually, I’m an expert — I’ve learned all kinds of strategies by necessity, because writing doesn’t thrive when thinking, if thinking is equated with panic or rumination. Thinking seems like the opposite of trusting, of going with the flow. Thinking spirals. To turn off the thinking mind, you need to get what’s inside, out — by drawing, sketching, making music. Even talking is not the same as thinking.
- There’s something quietly radical about gathering with strangers and neighbours, opening our books and simply being together. No pressure to perform. Just the shared understanding that reading, even when done alone, doesn’t have to be lonely. Sitting with other people absorbed in their own worlds somehow creates a connection that’s hard to describe but easy to feel.
December 10, 2025
Gleanings
- each song filling the blue space as I swam my slow kilometer and I kept waiting for one song that I haven’t heard in years and it wasn’t on the list so when I came back home, I found it.
- Joining the silent book club helped me reconnect with the genres that brought me joy before the days of university and seminary. I’ve enjoyed a biography of one of my favourite actors, reread a novel that piqued my attention as an elementary school kid, and now I’m reading the classic Jane Austen novel Pride and Prejudice in anticipation of trying my first murder mystery novel The Murder of Mr. Wickham!
- What if you cherished yourself, I asked my reflection in the bathroom mirror at school, one day last month. It knocked me out.
- I hear this often from these old ladies, a resigned sigh, “but …” they say shortly after sharing their grief, “what can you do?” Perhaps in resignation, perhaps a genuine question, perhaps mostly, the deepest of surrenders, a daily, moment to moment knowing that we can’t escape. No matter how hard we try or how advanced we get or how much we choose to distract ourselves, there’s nothing we can do … it, all of it, all of Life, must be lived.
- Winter always brings a special serenity to woodlands. For me, tramping along forest trails during winter, snow on the ground muffling my footfall, is a deeply spiritual, personal experience. I’m slowly learning to embrace that quietude, and engage in some cold weather forest bathing (Shinrin-yoku). I always look for a sheltered area in the sun, but where the breeze is hindered, a cosy spot with a stump to sit on, all the better to relax and observe nature.
- This is a really entertaining read. There are some dark themes, and some sadness and exhaustion that permeates the pages, but it kept me reading. The look at 90s music, the cost of fame, misogyny in the music world, the world of street art, and the drive toward musical life especially in Jane — it’s all intriguing and slots together really smoothly. With this tough, hard world, I would have loved to see Jane more powerful and less forgiving overall. But it’s a perfect rock n roll story if you’re in the mood for something both nostalgic and edgy. There is a lot to think about, including the ending, and it made for a satisfying read.
- I’m giving you a free pass on everything I also need a free pass on. For example. When we’re friends IRL but you never comment on or acknowledge anything I do online. I give you a free pass because I know the algo is horseshit. I know you want to be invisible sometimes. I know that you’ve seen my stuff to death. I’m giving you a free pass on staying home when it’s cold out and dark. I’m giving you a free pass on saying awkward things and things you don’t mean to say that just pop out of your mouth. I’m giving you a free pass on the French exit, the Irish exit, the Canadian exit. I’m giving you a free pass on forgetting to bring a hostess gift. I’m giving you a free pass on not wanting to do anything that costs money because who has that lying around? I’m giving you a free pass on getting back to me within a week or two and then burying my email and even accidentally deleting it because that can bloody happen.
October 8, 2025
Gleanings
- My mom is not the kind of person to say, “Oh, a letter addressed to someone else; not my circus! Not my monkeys!” Which is good, because I’m really nosy and would like to know why Ethel hid the letter, and why Ethel was in jail, and also what happened to Ethel, period.
- I think if you get too obsessed with wringing the most value out of every moment, you’re pretty much guaranteed to fail to spend your time wisely.
- ‘Though I have walked this forest trail countless times, entering Kopegaron on Thursday morning, it all felt new and fresh and intoxicating — like returning to a beloved and enchanting world. My senses were immediately engaged — inhaling the peaty, earthy, and resinous arboreal smells; and feeling the unyielding, textured and deeply furrowed bark of the huge old trees, and listening to the myriad bird calls happening high above my head. As nature’s peace worked its magic, I felt reverence, contentment and immense gratitude.
- When I sew, I follow a line. My needle finds it in the fabric. It meanders, it spirals, it stretches out like a road on a map, like a river in a landscape. When I see some of the brush work in these paintings, I feel a kinship, across thousands of years. It is a wonderful thing to make a mark, to leave a trace — of thinking, of ceremony, of an encounter with mystery.
- It was there for the taking — the very thing that had sparked my envy. There are trails near the library. I didn’t have to be anywhere in particular. I actually did have the time (self-pity wasn’t a reliable source of information; it rarely is). I could just go for a walk.
- My sister gave me Joy Sullivan’s Instructions For Traveling West for Christmas, and “First, you must realise you’re homesick for all the lives you’re not living,” has become my new mantra. But I struggle. I can so easily picture a parallel world where Doug is well, and he and I are living happily ever after. Where he was joining me on this walk, meeting our friends, Tiff and Amy, exploring our favourite rooms of the V&A together.
- A very good thing is old-timey (and sometimes even modern British) cookbooks referring to “goat’s cheese.” It most certainly is not the goat’s cheese. It is cheese of the goat, sure. But the goat didn’t make the cheese, didn’t even know CHEESE WAS A THING at the time of their being milked. (Yelled through a megaphone: IN THE TIME OF THE GOAT’S MILKING)
- I used the term AI Sloppola recently and was applauded. It’s getting harder and harder to escape the stuff. I’m not sure what the solution is, but I think books, reading, art, literature, music, human creation is obviously part of it. To keep our mental health, I think we’ll be visiting book stores more, libraries maybe, museums, art galleries, live music. I say that, but I also realize I live in a total silo of artists, writers, book and art lovers. So I’m not sure. And I’m not sure what to do about any of it, especially as we all navigate the traumosphere.
- If I were properly reviewing, I would reread the novel until I could explain better how the parts hang together. Big words like “belonging” or “identity” feel relevant but also too general.
September 24, 2025
Gleanings
- “You don’t get the wisdom before you’ve lived it, you don’t get to jump ahead and think you can know all there is to know!”
- But is there a “there” there? Isn’t that old saying true, that the grass really IS greener? Wherever you go, whatever mountain you summit, you get a new view—a new destination, even if it’s not a higher mountain. Just, you know, more road. Someplace you’d rather be.
- In spite of everything or because of it, to be splendid, to not squander our gifts, to keep our joy, to use our imagination, to live urgently enchanted, to share poetic excellence, to practice our practice, to love and be wholehearted and divinely blissfully stupidly human — this is our task.
- What we really need to do, instead of switching off, is to find ways to care and stay tuned in. We need to manage this tuned-in newsy flow sensibly, while still hanging onto our health and (general) happiness and warding off overwhelm. I think we’re all grappling with this.
- The key, it seems to me, is to focus on shaping a life that you love and feel is a good-faith effort towards responding with urgency and congruency to the times we are living in, but not getting lost in the details or a sort of brittle perfectionism that ultimately alienates you from others, and even you from yourself.
- I know, I know. When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. Look around, use logic. I know. But I went straight to zebras; I always go straight to zebras. I thought, THERE IS A GHOST IN HERE AND IT THREW MY GUITAR ON THE FLOOR.
- I happily left almost ten years ago and did the (hardest) work to entrench myself in a new place, in the same ways because I always had the feeling I needed to keep moving forward. It’s a hard thing to explain, but I had the sense I wasn’t finished growing and I needed a bigger pot, so each opportunity that came to move to one, I took it.
- Looking “away” from “news” on social media does not mean you’re “burying your head in the sand.” It means you’re engaging with human beings instead of road-raging avatars.
- There are four of us in this relationship, a kind of wild alchemy with no one in total control. And the outcome can be glorious and disastrous.
- This wasn’t community service. It was me getting high off the rush of being the useful expert, of being helpful to strangers on the internet, like the service writer/editor I once was. The very overfunctioning “I can help” behaviour that landed me on leave in the first place, now dressed up as “community care.”
- Time to pull out the winter blankets, the warm coats, though the sun is shining. How cold the water was as I swam my lengths, arms reaching forward, then back, my torso not quite straight. One of my last.
- Today, I’m distracted and very very tired. I hate this predictive text — in very faint letters, if I’m not typing at max speed or if the word is long, some AI program embedded in this app will add in the letters that it believes should finish my word or thought. And mostly it’s wrong! Even when it’s right, I perversely (personally, it just wrote!!!) want to write something different, original. I need to turn this feature off. It is not serving me or my imagination.
June 25, 2025
Gleanings
- One of my photography passions is wildflowers; they fascinate and charm me. All of them — even the simplest, most humble dandelions. Especially the dandelions.
- There are less and less … both dances, and people of that time. I look around the room, and can’t help but think it is inevitable, before this too, is gone. The man now alone with his guitar and laptop was once a part of a band, widows dancing with widows, some barely shuffling their feet and yet, here we are, the young so delighted by the old, the old enlivened by the young.
- And honestly, that’s my favourite thing about travel: the way that even the most foreign of experiences can remind you of something familiar.
- Writers, thinkers, listeners, see-ers, who insert themselves into the subject at hand. For me that brings an immediacy, an authenticity.
- I trust my imaginative plane as much as some people trust their god, or their tarot, or their psychic. I do. So, as I float about… what does it mean that i can’t stay still, that my foundation is afloat? Is it bad? Is it the world? Has the utter crazy of the global and national scene just knocked my roots from under me? The hope that is a usual tether has been snipped and I’m off.
- It turns out that being a real friend means doing something incredibly hard and, in a way, unkind: confronting Nicola with the truth. “Wake up,” Helen finally says; “You’ve got to get ready.”
- When Judith’s peonies, poppies and Irises are all in full bloom (and her red door is flung wide open to let the breeze in on her jewel of a home) it is a sight to drop-your-Metro-bags and behold. I learn so much about gardening –– about human nature –– by observing people in their gardens.
- We need beauty to help us weather out the storm.
- ‘Welp, I read the internet,’ he’d sometimes tell me around 10 am. “Got anything else for me?”
- But watching the bear, who was no doubt the offspring of one of the original bears — a child, a grandchild? — I realized that the orchard is remembered, in the way the beautiful old crabapple tree is remembered by successive generations of those same bears. It’s not what I expected but it’s something sweet.
- Baiting with Tolkien, luring Whippets named Rapunzel, and other ways to make friends.
- It occurs to me that we writers should emulate lighthouses and shine our lights without prejudice or favour, just keep putting our beams out there. If it guides some away from the treacherous shoals of life, all the better. If it helps other readers keep their own boats on course, comforted to know another kindred spirit is out there, has been through these same storms and survived, that’s all good too.
- It felt like life was curating the perfect evening.
- I have a terminal case of wanderlust. But even as the scrolling and research heightens my anticipation, once I arrive, alone, in a foreign city, I’m often struck by the question: Why? Why did I haul myself in a cramped seat across the ocean and plunk myself down, alone, in a strange place. What am I doing here?
- I also think it’s essential for an editor to be connected to the world at large, because the publishing industry is a mirror for society.
- The funny thing about bookshops is that their most regular patrons are the ones who aren’t short of things to read at all!The double-stackers, the hoarders, the ambitious lunatics, I love them dearly.
May 6, 2025
Gleanings
- Yesterday, enroute to the opera, we paused on the walkway leading off the ferry to watch 3 seals sunning themselves on rocks. It was a low tide. The ferry was right on time. On the muddy shore, a pair of geese with their goslings dozed at the edge of the water.
- It’s not just about choosing between glass half empty and glass half full perspectives: I think it really matters that we not turn our grimmest anecdata into the dominant narrative.
- My kink is making salad dressing with the last of the mustard in the jar, or a cup of tea in the jar to use up the dregs of the honey. These are small but satisfying actions, that ensure precious resources literally don’t go down the drain.
- The fringe tree and wisteria –– les pièces de résistance –– are the last to awaken, with a spectacle of long white streamers and violet blooms so beautiful that it’s a wonder we’re in Toronto and not Monet’s garden. The only thing now left are the anemones, and they won’t appear until late Summer when the whole garden is so verdant and alive that it’s hard to imagine that all of this beauty was ever underground. I watch it all unfold like a piece of music that gradually thickens and intensifies as instruments enter one by one.
- The digital sphere is horizontal, when what people crave is the vertical or deep engagement. As artists we are all about the vertical. I can’t help but think about how we all keep being fed this stuff we don’t really want.
- I met a friend on the way in (a friend from the outside world, not the pool) who told me that the pool wasn’t too crowded, and her beautiful child told me that water was great, and they were both right.
- This isn’t a story about church. Heaven knows, I’m not the one to tell that story, at least not today. This is a story, maybe, about grief and love. About life, and death, which, I suppose, is really what all stories are about.
- “To what purpose?” It’s probably just a fancy way to say “why??” but it has the advantage of *feeling* new. So when I find myself NOT throwing something away (like instructions for something we no longer own), I ask myself this question. And when the answer is “for collage or another art project” I ask again, for a couple of reasons. First, “interesting” instructions appear with some regularity, so all I have to do is either wait or check the recycle bin. And second, I haven’t made a collage since the pandemic lockdowns.
- While I’m always excited to read Lindsay’s work, I’m especially intrigued by this particular book, as it deals with a dynamic that hits close to home—the challenge of trying to make art while navigating the foggy, panicked, exhausting days of early motherhood. Though my kids are older now, and finding the time and energy to write no longer feels quite so impossible, the difficulties of balancing creative and care work never totally go away
- I only cried once, but it was almost from happiness. Or maybe it was from sadness. Or maybe both. The thing about grief, made visible, is that it’s made up of all the things a human can feel.
- My almost-might-have-been-brilliant career foundered on the dreaded shoals of non-confidence, from within and without. I cannot tell you how many times my manuscripts have apparently gone missing in large Ontario publishing houses. I am the freaking Queen of the Lost Manuscripts. This is not a business for the faint of heart or thin of hide and by then, I possessed both. What, I ask, would Pierre Berton do?
- On this spring morning in Wheatley, with the woods flush with snow-white Trilliums beginning to bloom, the park looked and smelled like hope and joy to me.
- I feel strongly that we can’t solve gendered polarization online. The online world is a tricky place for all of us, on the left or right, because we are unable and unwilling to step into the one another’s spheres, and what we see from the “other side” often entrenches us even further in our beliefs.
- The bear is a bear; the bear is Grendel, embodiment of our oldest and deepest fears; the bear is cancer; the bear is nature. They are all, in their own way, wild – and the wilderness is not somewhere else, separate, held back or “conserved” within inside the arbitrary boundaries of a park.
March 26, 2025
Gleanings
- “The battle for American decency happened to be here this year,” Sherman Burgoyne wrote to a distant sympathizer. “We fought it and won. Next year it may be in your part of America, and I’m counting on you to stand true.”
- She seems allergic to earnestness, this woman, but also addicted to shock, or attempts at shocking. We get it: you’re cool, you swear, you don’t conform.
- The older I get, the more I fall out of love with efficiency. I’ve struggled enough mentally to know that many of the experiences that are most edifying and healing for me are slow and full of friction
- Little by little, as the frequency of my syncopes has decreased, I’ve begun to feel my innate rebellious sovereignty return which is, of course silly in anybody as old as I am. But what is the use of being a willful and cantankerous old hag if I can’t be silly on a whim? I’m now happily anticipating hiking and photography in the solitude that has always been so dear to my heart.
- Most things I create are an amalgam of stealing and dreaming. I like to think of our brains as containing one of those moving carousels filled with images captured over time; one never knows what images will show themselves when and how we will distill them into the things we create.
- Where are you right now? What is possible? Because the goal of life, not just art, really is rapture — dropping into that eternal now.
- And so living well, and living in community, and living with others, and taking care of your people, and even not your people, is not just self-care in order to keep fighting. That was the 2016 idea. It is actually inseparable from resisting their big project.
- There used to be a little book shop in Toronto, near the corner of Yonge and Eglinton. This was back in the early 80’s. I lived near enough to ride my bike over on a Saturday morning. The shop was above a bakery and I may or may not be imagining that you were allowed to take your goodies upstairs and sit on one of the couches or at little tables (my imagination also recalls a fireplace) and browse the bookshelves.
- In the end, Picnic at Hanging Rock is more than just a tale of a mysterious disappearance. It’s a colonial artifact, shaped by Lindsay’s own privileged background and the broader societal structures of the time.
- Watching Oscar sprinkle some cochineal bugs on my palm, crushing them to a carmine paste, adding a little lemon juice, which turned the paste orangey-red, then adding some soda, which turned the paste royal purple, I thought, I can do this. Not well, perhaps, and maybe I’ll make a mess. But I am drawn to the work and will spend the nicer weather making my workshop and then seeing what happens.
- Dear smut writers: I do not want to police your language, but just know that I’m always going to hate “intimate folds.” The vulva is not origami.
- It’s easy to send an observation, a compliment, a thank you out into the ether. It might make just the difference to someone, and might also collectively help to redeem our online commons at a time when we especially need to share beauty, kindness and respect for each other.
- We make connections, we lose connections. We make gains, we lose pieces of ourselves. We create ripples that go out, and we never know if they reach someone. And they never know if their ripples touched us.
- My ghosts are all over this place—that’s one of the cool things about living in the same city for such a long time—and one of them lives in the Central Branch of the Regina Public Library. She went to see the Writer in Residence there about a decade ago, clutching a half-baked manuscript that needed two more years of edits before an agent would take it seriously, basically to ask if she was any good at this writing thing or if she should quit.
- What is true for both of these men—my sweet, fading father and the monster in the White House—is that they can do nothing to avoid dependency. It came for us in the beginning and it comes for us in the end. And if you stop fighting it, if you surrender to it, it can become a final exquisite experience of just how much you are loved—flesh and bone, the laughter and lightness of giving up the ghost, deserved, not earned, just because you are a human living inextricably with other humans.
- So take a news break. Spend time with people who fill your cup and see how long you can go without talking about the latest headline. Better yet, link arms with people working to make things better, whatever form that might take for you. Find the helpers—they’re there if you pay attention.
- Oh how our individual lives and living isn’t as much about us as we’re led to believe, sandwiched as we are between a past and future unknown.
February 19, 2025
Gleanings
- What caretaking teaches us is that there is no grand or permanent utopia, only tiny, fleeting, and intimate ones
- i am saturated in colour, the rosy or yellow or sky blue buildings, the cup I bring back from the market, filled with pineapple and mango, dusted with chile, the houses tumbling down the hills above Oaxaca, red, pink, emerald green.
- wish i could teach the value of small things to other people. there has to be a crack somewhere so i can get in, so i can show this. just a sliver.
- One of our regular big-order customers comes to pick up six hardbacks, which means the pressure is off for the rest of the day because that sort of sale is more than I might take the whole day. This is less a comment about what a great sale it was, and more a comment on how modest our takings are.
- But words — they’re not hard, not to me. They’re malleable and slippery and musical. They are the material of play — or one of the materials, and one of my most reliable. We dance together. Words dart under the surface and burst through it, carrying an image, a roar, a need.
- So why bring up uncertainty? Because in Victorian Women Writers this week we are finishing up our work on Villette, and more than once in class I have acknowledged my own uncertainty about what exactly is going on in this strange, brooding, gripping novel.
- I’m trying to bring gentleness into my interactions with loved ones and strangers as a kind of resistance to brutality.
- And so, if you find yourself spinning, wondering what more you can do beyond donating to a cause or contacting your government representative, here’s a little primer to get you started…
- What can you say about a famous 1970 novel, that nowadays gets remembered more for its nostalgic fashion than literary merit? That it was brief. That it was stocked with characters from central casting. That it made everyone cry. Including me, many times.
January 29, 2025
Gleanings
- High on the list was the need to dust.
- I often think about the way, way back. During the times when they didn’t know, or maybe they did. Times when the settling in of the darkness, the long nights, the waning sun, the short days, the cold, would have induced fear, uncertainty, not knowing. Maybe they feared the darkness was permanent, that the sun, the light, was dying. Maybe they didn’t know if a ‘January’ or a ‘July‘ would come. Long before times when they had lights to turn on when the sun went down, when they couldn’t jump ahead to the next thing, when they simply had to sit and be in the dark.
- This is probably different for everyone, but for me, the 50,000 word count mark is a giant sigh of relief—actually, let me break it down for you, because I have a minute, and you have a minute (I bet), and I like writing about writing.
- Anyway, no jealousy, you always gotta banish that stuff. Does you NO good whatever. Instead, as always, do what you can with what you’ve got. Share that. Dream more dreams. Shine where you are.
- So to that end, here’s my wish for all of us this week: that going forward, we consider ways we can engage in active resistance based in militant nonviolence, we express love rooted in justice, and we remember that kindness is a power move.
- There’s nothing like a natural phenomena to bring a city to standstill and to turn our attention to the sky, to each other, and to ourselves. Even ones as everyday as sunsets feel like an invitation from the universe to pause and pay attention
- So, I went to the mountains. And as I stood in the thin air, the dry snow underfoot, with the wind pushing against me—finally, I found the woman who would climb a mountain in my story. I understood how it gave her shape.
- I’m going to stash a bunch of things I’ve written here, and see if the utterly disconnected can be connected, because webs webs webs you know.
- Edith Wharton was born 163 years ago today, on January 24, 1862, in New York City. I’ve been rereading her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1933), enjoying her descriptions of the books she read when she was young. Forbidden to read a novel without her mother’s permission, she writes that the “wide expanse of the classics, English, French and German” stretched before her instead, and she “plunged at will” into “that sea of wonders.”
- You are capable of less than you thought, but also more—in some strange, ineffable way. You are soft and weepy and sturdy as a tree, all at the same time. You are someone who learns by attraction and by necessity because you are human, just like everybody else. And that feels far less lonely than trying to pretend (even to yourself) like you’ve got it all under control.
- But Doomsday Book is not just a historical novel, and though at times I wondered about the value of the time-travel framing, by the end I appreciated the layers Willis had added through it. The most obvious one was just the point that, for all our advances in science and medicine, we are not immune from catastrophes, including ones caused by mutating viruses. A more subtle and thought-provoking one was the interplay between the science fiction aspects of time travel and the religious beliefs of the 14th-century people Kivrin encounters, especially the priest, Father Roche, who tends Kivrin in her initial illness and then labours beside her as one by one the others around them fall victim to the plague—until his turn comes as well.
- Down the hallway to the right was a thickly carpeted staircase with a fish tank tucked against the wall by the bottom stair. It was filled with shiny, darting Neon Tetras and other tropical fish and it hummed and bubbled in a very comforting manner. Beside the fish was the regular lounge room door and a bathroom beside that. We watched telly and ate meals in the regular lounge room, uncles and aunties, grandparents and parents and all of us kids together in various configurations, saying grace and sipping soup.
- one of the things I love about the pool is that it is where I can always find my inner life.
- Goodnight Moon is really a work of experimental poetry — a fact that’s largely unacknowledged culturally (and not just because of picture books’ general low literary standing). Goodnight Moon’s ubiquity has desensitized us to its strangeness. We take this book for granted. It’s part of the background, the bright green wallpaper of an American childhood.
- To summarize, that is how I spent yesterday. I took care of myself.
- how the light returns after a particularly dark time, little by little (see 9), and how clear the stars and planets are on the cold nights. We are stardust, maybe 97%, and this is our moment.
- Because it’s Fitzgerald writing I didn’t expect any goodness to be rewarded, or for the powerful and selfish to do anything but succeed in their bullying. And, well, I was right. I do find her quite bleak and cynical a lot of the time. Even though her writing is sharp, crisp, acidic and never sentimental, which can be refreshing. She has an eye for the ways in which people reveal who they are, and the ways in which privilege corrupts. The insularity of this small town, and the ways in which those with connections rule the roost, even if they are unworthy of it, is finely drawn here.
- As the cold and darkness have descended, the stalwart readers of our silent book club groups have turned in particular earnest to books to warm and brighten the way through … And yes, I said “groups” because between two meetings this past month – one virtual and one in-person – we had representation from all of midtown, east end and west end Toronto and also Mississauga, all neighbourhoods that have groups and venues in their locales. It’s wonderful how these groups intersect – and our reading and reading lists are the better for it.
- And so we live, all bumping into each other with our needs and judgements, rules and opinions, sufferings and irritations and joys.
- I wrote SPIDER because I DO like mischief, tricks, surprises, comedy, and biggish ideas that I feel kids are more capable of enjoying than many adults might assume.
November 20, 2024
Gleanings
- I’m enamoured with the language of small repair and I think that there’s instruction embedded in it from the “how-to” and right-to-repair world in how to live a life. I think of all the tiny repairs to my household just in the last year. I think of the still lifes I’ve made and used scotch tape and sticky tack to hold them in place. I think of the ways things fall into disrepair, that language, too: things fray, give up the ghost, they buckle, collapse, blow, crack, are torn, lose surface tension, become weathered, they fold, sour, unravel. They might fall (a cake, a bridge, a gate). There are kinds of repair: alterations, mending, rebuilding, filling, patching, re-wiring, re-jigging. We overhaul, darn, stitch, refurbish, fix, freshen. We can repair, and repair again.
- Because your house is the home of a quiltmaker and woodcutter, there are warm quilts for the bed and a woodshed full of dry fir and cedar for the fire. You keep replenishing both.
- Window display is still very much advent calendars because we’ll be selling those until the end of the month at which point we’ll fashion all the leftovers into a giant advent paper man and ceremonially burn him with a mince pie inside as an offering to the festive god (Santa) in exchange for good trade throughout December.
- It’s all real—the depravity and the life-affirmation, the distrust and the ride-or-die-ness, the shallowness and the deepness. Don’t let the Internet and all its tentacles (headlines, polls, social media, streaming, algorithms etc.) pull you out of your real, beautiful life and make you feel homeless. You are home among your people and your dreams, no matter what the “state of the world.” And the only way I know to make the “state of the world” less heinous is to trust what deserves trust, to ground on solid, relational ground, to start from there and then move outward.
- It’s when two swimmers move in tandem, like a choreographed dance that I am most amazed. Stroke on stroke, breath on breath; two perfectly synced flip turns. I leave feeling a small bit awestruck by what the human body can do.
- No amount of moving to the country and ignoring the news is going to make any of this change, so it’s everyone’s responsibility to work towards the world we want.
- A short book gives me the chance to travel to another place, be inside the mind of another person, or to learn about something new, but all from the comfort of my couch.
- There are dozens of fucked up things happening globally right now and this issue is not the most pressing, I know—not even close. But if I see another ChatCPT prompt presented as art, news or media, I will probably snap.
- You know that thing, when people ask if you were an animal, which animal would you be? Well, after much strenuous, existential, and deep thought (aka not that much thought at all), I decided if I were an animal, I would be a penguin. An Emperor penguin, to be specific. You wanna know how I came to that conclusion?
- When she opened the door to the fridge repairman, she didn’t foresee all the doors on the other side.
- I eventually decided that I just wasn’t cut out to be a novelist and focused on writing non-fiction pieces, usually about music. But then during the early lockdown days of 2020 I found myself daydreaming all the time, telling myself stories that I ended up thinking I could turn into a romance novel. I’d been reading romance novels for years; I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me to try to write one. It took being stuck at home with my two young kids in that stressful, uncertain situation for weeks on end for me to think, ‘What’s the opposite of this?” And the answer to that question turned out to be a romance story about young cute people living in New York. I ended up kind of desperately throwing myself into writing a book and sending out one chapter per week to a group of friends. That was the book that eventually got me my agent, but it didn’t get picked up by any publishers.
- In this world where mostly what I’ve been thinking and wondering and feeling lately is, pardon me, but “what the hell is going on?” again and again, I’m always so surprised when I remember … it’s always just the moments, isn’t it?
