June 8, 2021

Gleanings

• We should be upset. But what are we going to do?
• Poetry is demanding, too. It is a door through which we enter the needed work of making language toward new meanings.
• One of the (many) things I found alienating about “Ferrante fever” was the tendency to declare that Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet had captured something essential, even universal, about “female friendship,” as if there is any one version of it.
• And then in the Fall, with the wind pushing me along the beach on my 43rd Birthday, I surrendered. This isn’t what I want my 40s to feel like. I have mountains to climb, rivers to swim. Finally, the leaf let go of its branch.
• I crave adventure. And the minute I start having an adventure, I can’t wait for it to be over.
• One used to have to walk single file along certain stretches of the path, but a few seasons of social distancing have made it wider. What you see here is the work of many feet.
• Here is my almost-summer wish for us: I think we should bring a pan of freshly-baked, thick, buttery, crisp on top, and plush with a flavor that absolutely reverberates with corn underneath, to your next park/picnic/potluck.
• Once I discovered some contemporary authors that I loved, it was like falling down a rabbit hole into new worlds.
• For me, I’ve always found pleasure simply in how a book fits in the hand…
• The creek’s perpetual motion, its burbling over the occasional rock and the pebbly creek bed never fails to captivate me.
• These days I feel like we’re all that annoying childhood moment of being in the backseat of a long car journey whining: “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? How about now? Are we there yet?”
• I’m deeply in love with the ephemera in my life.
• And while it is possible to slowly untangle this kind of writing, I wonder if it needs to tangled in the first place.
• How well do you know your dog?
• I Can See Myself Being Invisible
• We each had our version of Snuggle Puppy that we just assumed was more or less how everyone sang it. But we were wrong!
• “The way that colonial violence impacted me in particular was by way of disconnection,” Abel says. “Growing up without my dad’s presence in my life, without Nisga’a language, the Nisga’a culture, and also without being on traditional Nisga’a territory. That was all this gaping hole in my life.”

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June 1, 2021

Gleanings

• But this time, I got caught up in a sense of hope and promise. It seemed impossible not to.
• It was a Joyspotting day again and nothing says joy to me like a wild daisy.
• When you swim regularly, you need it. You need the feeling of your aging body in water, you need the buoyancy, the silkiness as you reach out your arms to propel yourself forward and back.
• I’m quitting the pandemic to attend to the hum of the universe, to get back to universe mind.
• However, heartened and emboldened by my new paper doll, and by Julia Berick’s introduction that insists that Franny and Zooey holds up very well indeed, thank you very much, I have embarked at long last on a re-read. And I still love it. Phew.
• There is so much I wish I’d known when we started; there is so much I have learned. 
• Stepping outside of ourselves and reaching towards other people and beings, especially by trying to be useful to them in some way, is a powerful antidote to capitalism that brings the relief of contentment.

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May 25, 2021

Gleanings

• It’s amazing to me, that over a few short weeks, our city has turned from grey to green.
• Then there was the asparagus itself. It seemed magical. That it could grow in such sandy soil. That it came and went so quickly—just a few weeks in May and June. But most of all because every day we would pick the same field.
• Some mornings I feel as though I am hovering between this world and another and I don’t have the words to say who I am.
• So Constant Nobody is about power, duty, identity, and love and functions as a hybrid of espionage, feminist, historical, and literary fiction. 
• I make it sound very innocent don’t I? If I told you that there are scenes both of blueberry picking and blueberry jam-making, that the cast is almost entirely female, and that much of the novel consists of the inner workings of a 54-year-old woman’s mind, you might be left with a certain kind of impression. Reader, you would be wrong.
• I didn’t plant a lilac at our first home because I knew we would likely be leaving, but here, I thought, here is where we will stay. Here is where we will raise our family, here is where we need a lilac tree.
• Understanding someone doesn’t mean we must agree with their worldviews or convert to their ideologies or repent for our own beliefs.

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May 19, 2021

A Lethal Lesson, by Iona Whishaw

To be reading a new Lane Winslow book is one of my favourite states of being, and the best thing about this series, whose eighth and latest instalment is A Lethal Lesson, is that it just keeps getting better. A little out of season this time—the story is set at Christmas and one suspects that it might have come out last fall in an alternate universe in which contagion doesn’t roam the land. But oh, still a treat to be back in King’s Cove, whose vicar turns up at the Christmas Even gathering at the end of the book and reports that his flock at King’s Cove is the most exciting of all his parishioners, “with your resident detective Miss Winslow…and the inspector established here now, and murderers and would-be murderers turning up all the time. Better than a fictional English village!”

And it’s true! Whishaw’s story has a meta-charm as her characters compare the situations unfolding around them to what might be expected to happen within the pages of a book. The situation here being a rather curious one—the outgoing school teacher has been found with a head injury, her cottage ransacked, and the incoming teacher has disappeared altogether. Does one of the women have something to fear from her past—or even both of them? And more importantly—who is going to preside over the school in the meantime before the case is solved? Why, Lane Winslow, of course, with her Oxford education, and while she doesn’t have much experience of children herself, she’s surprised to find how inspiring she finds their company, which surely pleases her new husband, Inspector Darling, who’s putting out some not subtle suggestions that he’s interested in them having children of their own.

I absolutely love the modern sensibility of these novels, of their feminism, sense of justice, their anti-racism, their progressiveness, which somehow never seems out of place in a tiny BC hamlet in 1948. Darling proposes, “Let’s say she displayed what some might have termed dubious morals and incited locals…” to which Lane gently corrects him, “No, let’s not say that. We are making her responsible for being harassed, very unfair under any circumstances…” But it’s never preachy or pedantic, and Whishaw continues to use her murder mysteries to explore the limitations on women’s lives and freedom that were contemporary to the period, and which are not yet so far away in the rear view mirror.

May 18, 2021

Gleanings

• I hear the mantra, “This, too, shall pass.” Somehow, by the lake, it’s easier for me to believe it, to remain hopeful.
• Can light still change us? Can beauty? Can a seagull perched on top of a TacoTime cactus after rummaging through the trash show me something that I need to know?
• When I was younger I wanted to change the world, I think we all did. Now that I am older I am content in knowing that maybe, for only a few moments, I have made a difference in someone’s life.
• I started writing Pocketfuls as a personal creative project when I was home raising two young boys, and writing about parenthood there gave me the skills, the personal connections with other writers (who shared expertise and resources with me over the years), and the confidence to believe that I could write books.
• These May mornings are gifts…
• Perhaps the greatest proof of friendship is that, even in the midst of some pandemic gamesmanship, some awkward silences and some selfish or uncaring comments, our love and respect for each other survives, is even, eventually made lovely again.
• And Rhonda Douglas shares 7 online writing workshops, including mine! (Thank you, Rhonda! Sign up today!)

Do you like reading good things online and want to make sure you don’t miss a “Gleanings” post? Then sign up to receive “Gleanings” delivered to your inbox each week(ish). And if you’ve read something excellent that you think we ought to check out, share the link in a comment below.

May 11, 2021

Gleanings

• The restorative qualities of being in nature, or “green space,” are well documented, but researchers have only recently begun to focus on what changes when water is part of the picture…
• …you don’t have to agree with everything he says but the point is to go on thinking about things, perceiving things, however desperately, to go on looking deeper at the world and how it works
• I’ve been making focaccia a lot this year…
• We have a new table in our kitchen. It’s not really a table and it’s decidedly not new, but it’s a surface we’ve recently unearthed and put back to use.
• For nearly 40 years I’ve come up our driveway to see the wisteria blooming in May and each time I’ve felt overcome with its beauty.
• Finally, there is also nothing like being welcomed to a team where you know absolutely no one, and the next thing you know, you’re bonding over books and authors and food and beer and music, and then just like that, you’ve made some lifelong friends.
• And as I have written before, understanding is not an agreement, or forgiveness or an apology.
• Here then, a celebratory list of the newsletters I’m glad to sit down with…
• I miss exposition, linearity, confidence that the novel as a form is robust enough to be “traditional” in these ways and still new.
• She worked and taught and dreamed mathematical dreams, and I am grateful to have seen that, every day, at home. Even though she yelled at me often about the inadequate sharpness of my pencils, I know she did it from love. As mothers do.
• There’s a kind of magic that happens in the gloaming; a glorious solasta before the sun dips below the horizon.
• The rhubarb was so tantalizing, I selected a few stocks to bring home for pie or a cake. Once home, not feeling like making pie crust, I thought of my mom and her favourite rhubarb cake.
• Barometric pressure affects me but there isn’t much I can do to control that…
• Cinnamon buns are perfect — they don’t need disruption, nobody needs a fresh new take on them, and they don’t need refining.
• I emptied my wallet today for the first time in well over a year and I felt like I was sifting through another woman’s things

My next blogging course starts on June 1 and it’s LET’S GET TOGETHER, a low stakes, low cost, HIGH FUN community experience. Hope you will join us!

May 4, 2021

Gleanings

• If you observe and you plan, in other words, if you adjust and you trust what the data shows, you can send a rocket ship to Mars.
• Seven Things You Don’t Need to be an Artist
• My kitchen table holds a small bouquet of flowers that have brightened each of my days in the past week.
• I probably shouldn’t complain when Mother Nature is showing off so beautifully but oh, what a labyrinthine year it’s been…
• It breaks my heart when people refer to him in the past, though I understand why they do. He is not the person we used to know. And past imperfect is the correct choice, alas, for many of his loves and hobbies…
• A moment in which most things feel possible; the moment in which I haven’t yet dropped anything irrevocably today and I can maybe pick up some of yesterday’s things. 
• Delight is not a respite from our troubled world but a direct and more mysterious engagement with it.
• I think that is what I like so much about soup. It is, by its very nature, a dish that you don’t have to apologize to.
• In 1990, I arrived at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, having no idea that the greatest gift of that seven-month fellowship would be the start of a lifelong friendship with Elizabeth McCracken.
• I have been thinking about Carl Sagan and his passion for science.
• I’m remembering how we learn to be parents—and thinking about what it means to offer love and support, when someone’s parenthood is new.
• Instead, she owns these actions and their role in her life. Many of them were physically harmful, all of them were attempts to lessen spiritual pain. And all are part of her, part of what she has fused to create herself—a complicated woman and skilled writer.
• What a wonderful thing to be at a point in your life when you can do something like this, unapologetically, and so beautifully.
• But we have no choice but to begin again. To roll out a fresh slab. Smooth out the bubbles. Wrap it well. Be patient. Cross our fingers. And our toes.
• So there you have it. The Curious Case of Janet Dailey and the Missing Author.

My next blogging course is coming in June. It’s called LET’S GET TOGETHER, and it’s a low cost, low stakes, high fun opportunity to dip your toes in the blogging water. I hope you’ll join us! Register today!

April 27, 2021

Gleanings

• Knowing what scientists still want to learn shows us how far we’ve come — and how far we have left to go to solve the mysteries of SARS-2 and Covid-19.
• I read Christa Couture’s memoir, How To Lose Everything, last night. It’s remarkable. And what I did afterwards was count everything I hadn’t lost, everything I was grateful for, and I ran out of fingers.
• There seemed to be a sense of collective action, generational solidarity and palpable joy at the opportunity to get the vaccine — and a sense of pride in rising to the occasion and in being a generation that firmly believes in science.
• Perhaps that’s the central challenge of being an artist: staying true to our work, even when we’re not certain that anyone will see it, or listen to it or read it. Having no guarantee that what we make, makes a difference.
• By all means tell me that you like it, and better yet tell me what you like about it, but I don’t enjoy replies that sound as if they are correcting my “mistake.”
• Something magical happens when seasons meet, like a gust of hot October wind lifting Autumn leaves off the pavement.
• I know I write the same things every year, how I go out to the garden and the apple tree is just beginning to bloom…and I know that there is a kind of sameness to my posts. But honestly? Is there a way to say how you forget, almost, over the dark winter days and nights, how lovely apple blossom is when you see the first tight clumps begin to open…
• I call it our house by the sea, but in this season of snowmelt, it’s our house by the hills.
• Find some space where you’re full aware that you’re not an employee, but rather luminous bits of the sun.
• So now it’s like, holy crap. How are my boyfriend and I ever going to last if we have to plan getaways around my damn PMS? How are we ever going to live together?!? Will I need to build my own 1-person PMS hut behind the main house and outfit it like a bunker, but it’s purpose is the safety and survival of people on the OUTSIDE?!?
• I want to behave virtuously and generously. I’d like to become wise. I do believe in the principle of developing skillful qualities and abandoning the unskilled but it’s proving to be a lengthy process. It is a goal. It is motivation.
• I’m finding that making things helps. Last week I made a cake, an entirely unnecessary cake, but one H. would have liked and one I could share, not to mention eat slowly myself.
• So there are always words – even when I struggle to find them. 

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April 20, 2021

Gleanings

• Since the winter stay-at-home orders there has been some enlightenment on my part; whilst my emotions are spontaneous and indocile, my emotional reaction, how I process, is most definitely within my dominion.
• If you are anything like me, you have heaps of cookbooks and some of them may not have had a turn around the kitchen for quite some time. The Cookbook Circle reminds us to grab those bookish wallflowers and let them shine.
• This is one my favourite photos of my father.
• Daffodils open like unexpected suns.
• My children hide behind a bush; there goes our shady Mum, nicking flowers off trees again.
• I thoroughly enjoyed all of those things, but what I really loved about this book was its Golden Age-esque intelligence and complexity.
• “annual popular illustrated magazine dealing with Post Office questions, designed to extend public understanding of postal service, lightly written articles 2,500 to 3,000 words on Post Office matters…”
• I imagine they used a mason jar for preserves but also to save their coins.
• I do love a good seasonal read to really wallow in the unique characteristics of whatever time of year I happen to be experiencing. I think I would hate living in a place that didn’t have seasons.
• I have to write from a place of utter curiosity and an openness to hearing the layers of stories that are in any one story,” Echlin says. “It’s not just one story.”
• Maybe it’s worth something small though to yell out, yes I am dealing with the new dark parts of my soul! I honestly don’t know if this is true.
• Who needs to ask questions, when all the questions you’ve never even thought to ask are already being answered? I understand: And that’s my job, as advice columnist, at your service.
• “We came for the bookstore.” That’s what we used to tell people when they asked why we moved here.

Do you like reading good things online and want to make sure you don’t miss a “Gleanings” post? Then sign up to receive “Gleanings” delivered to your inbox each week(ish). And if you’ve read something excellent that you think we ought to check out, share the link in a comment below.

April 14, 2021

Gleanings

• Squill is the common name for several species of Scilla and, ‘though by no means the earliest spring wildflower it has, perhaps, the most dramatic impact. T
• Streets are the biggest placemaking paradox, at once sites of immeasurable joy and delight and unspeakable violation.
• Last spring, when the weather warmed but the virus still raged out of control and playgrounds and parks were closed, I dreamed of a folding lawn chair.
• I miss speaking Serbian. / Since mom died, with a sense of vague unease, I am realizing I might be the last generation in my family to understand this language – anything from jokes and movie quotes to prose, poetry and song lyrics, might be lost for the generation I birthed.
• But here’s the truth revealed by the pandemic, in case I’d missed it: Change happens, no matter what. Time holds us to this promise.
• Does any of this really matter, though? Would we not expect media coverage of such an anachronistic institution to be, itself, anachronistic?
• And it was good to get out of the comfort zone, too, to let the dog make the decision, to be the follower for a change.
• When John cut the board we’re using to size, it was as though it was fresh cedar, the scent so spicy and beautiful that I remembered everything about the day it was made
• Sometimes when a time for something passes, it really passes and we can’t get to that initial moments of joy and happiness./ It changes into something else. Something more settled perhaps.
• This morning I was pleased to start the dishwasher, feed the cats, and otherwise start the day because it meant that my very unsettling dream of getting an abortion on a cruise ship had ended.
• So much of what might previously have gone on indoors, now happens outside.
• If my noting that Donoghue is efficient and competent seems like damning her with faint praise, well, you aren’t entirely wrong.
• I often was told my work was “too girly.” Now I embrace all of this but for a long time, I turned my anger inward, and wished I could “write like a man.” 
• Missing or broken shelf pins in less-than-perfect cabinets are just a fact of life in old rentals and having lived in my fair share over the years, I’ve found simple replacements to be perennially useful.
• Your work can’t be rejected if you never submit anything. And, related to that, your work also cannot be accepted if you never submit anything.
• My uncle died, and Covid spread like wild-fire in my family in Iran…
• Those weren’t just a bunch of mistakes, I told them. They were the writing I was doing on the way to making a polished story.
• Everyday, in my head, while I walk, I am writing drafts.
• Wuxia, for the uninitiated (like me), is “a genre of Chinese literature featuring the lives and adventures of Chinese martial artists” (Leong)
• What I’m missing is the lovely, irritating, noisy, hateful, endearing throng of humanity in all its variety.
• In Mandarin, “chǎo miàn” means “stir-fried noodles.” It’s always made in a wok, and it’s still the best and quickest from one, says McKinnon. But the sheet pan makes it easier in a different way, in that we can add ingredients and walk away, letting the oven give the noodles their signature crisp, while we… break up a fight over Legos, or pour a glass of wine. (The latter, please.)
• I’m buoyed by the idea of a methodology of wonder and I want to sit with the idea of responses to questions rather than answers, how profound that is.
• And it’s also true, because both/and, that (as I have said before here, recently): spring is exhausting. 
• None of this is permanent. Life, like the seasons, shifts, evolves and moves on. Cherry blossoms drift settling at my feet; eagles soaring like bold kites against blue skies; songbirds busy at living; chubby buds preparing to burst their delicate petals; daffodils bend and fade while tulips pierce their sword-like bodies from the warming soil bed.
• When my excuses ran out and when, as Martha Reeves sang, there’s nowhere to run to, baby, nowhere to hide, I felt motivated and found the tiniest modicum of courage to get started. 

Do you like reading good things online and want to make sure you don’t miss a “Gleanings” post? Then sign up to receive “Gleanings” delivered to your inbox each week(ish). And if you’ve read something excellent that you think we ought to check out, share the link in a comment below.