September 21, 2021
Gleanings
- And while the abortion storyline is fast-paced and enthralling, what really propels the novel in all its facets is Wall’s impressive facility with language.
- i have spent money, i’m not going to lie, but there are several bottles lying around that have been used for about a week and then forgotten. looks like i’m just going to age
- The difference is that I am now focused outwardly rather than on myself, as I begin to explore how to bundle up my wisdom and experience to benefit others.
- OK, yes? but also, no? Not no to every claim, not no to anger at patriarchy, but no to wanting to be yelled at about it for pages, especially because I already basically agree.
- Do you make a hoard of summer memories to keep against the cold ahead?
- For some of us, the sky is as important and vital as water.
- And yet, if one essential premise of short stories is that they are different in nature from chapters in a novel, it’s hard to see how the thirteen self-contained pieces in The Most Precious Substance on Earth don’t qualify.
- Through this I’ve come to realize that picnicking is one of my favourite things to do — I prefer it to dining in a restaurant any day. And the Chill Buddy has been a reliable and consistent dining companion.
- if you leave a wrestling show and your throat isn’t hoarse from screaming at the heels and screaming for the faces, then either you or the wrestlers have not done their jobs.
- Once I called Canada home, it stuck.
- I am continuously taking pictures of “paths” in nature.
- I’ve been writing occasionally this year (okay, actually a lot) about how Pyjama Writing has transformed my practice.
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September 14, 2021
Gleanings
- My heart goes out to Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend with the swollen testicles.
- I feel helpless and lost and angry. Screaming into a pillow would feel great about now, and I might do that later, but as a balm, this morning when I got back from a walk around the neighbourhood, I made cookies.
- what does it mean to be fake? to be unreal? to live inside a different and brighter world, where good and bad are clear and immediate?
- I hate being a data point on someone’s learning curve.
- This is the story about a woman who has so far made it through the pandemic relatively unscathed but who has been changed by now in more ways than she will be able to set down in a simple blog post on the internet.
- Today I am delighted to be writing about Margery Sharp, who has somehow flown beneath my radar for far too many years. And this in spite of her being the author behind one of my favourite childhood movies—The Rescuers.
- What if the decision is one to experiment? To play? To fear, and do it anyway? Heck, to fail?
- James is back on campus this week for the first time since February 2020. He returned to a time capsule covered in a layer of fine dust. On the wall above his desk he found print-outs of a newly minted three-year-old and a kindergartener just learning to ride a two-wheeler and no pictures at all of the baby who hadn’t been born and is now marching herself into daycare.
- The beast in Red X – a barghest, a mythical creature that traces its origins back to northern England – is the spirit of a 19th-century homosexual now haunting Toronto’s gay village, where a succession of people have disappeared without a trace.
- I didn’t expect to find myself sitting in the Urgent Care department at the Hotel Dieu Hospital a mere three days into our arrival in Kingston. Who would?
- It takes character to wait well—not usually my strong suit.
- Flowers and poetry, wine and celebration, sweeping and polishing. These are ways we remember our dead.
- In fact, simply having the piano in the house is a source of incredible pleasure.
- I went sailing for chrissakes. The kids were left to fend for themselves for dinner. Can you even believe that? Guess what? They were totally fine. And I was even better than that.
- How wonderful to exclaim “I exist like this and I’m actually quite ok with it!” Such a simple sentence and yet for so long, so impossible to utter.
- Everything is connected, isn’t it? The hearths uncovered on Orkney, their spiral pots broken.
September 7, 2021
Gleanings
- When I set out on my walk, I hadn’t expected to find Bertrand Russell and Judith Krantz curled up together.
- In a way I think of frogs as my familiars. I don’t mean this in a New Age way, or maybe I do.
- I debated googling “how to swim in waves”, but strapped on my orange tow float, and went straight into the water, remembering how much easier it is to let the waves carry you, instead of standing and having them crash into you.
- But there is something I’m beginning to crawl towards, a small crack embracing and flowing with the beauty of the imperfect chaos of life, a reminder of life’s cyclical patterns, an inner orientation of being with what is, versus controlling or perfecting it … noticing and marveling at the wonder of life, and that there is never an arrival, that all things, especially cleaned counters, are impermanent and fleeting.
- And I am and it is, but why the need to explain away a pretty serious injury? Why minimize the trauma just because, well shit it could have been worse?
- Thirteen years ago today, I bought the convertible VW bug an early 50th birthday present to myself. I fell in love with this car the moment I saw it. A mid-life crisis? Maybe. But my motivation was driven more by the fact that I no longer needed to ferry my girls to softball games and I now had the time and the means to head off on road trips.
- There it is again, the idea to start small. All you need is a little inkling, a little idea.
- I’ve been trying out new things. This past year and a half, this pandemic year, staying home has stretched me further. Take my painting endeavours – Please! (Sorry, bad joke).
- Every day the light is different. It illuminates this then that.
- in my head i’m calling people cocksuckers a lot. i’ve also had the kids today for ten days straight with no break and so i think i need a literal quiet moment and also a much larger reorganization of my entire life.
- It made me realise the horrible cycle an exhausted mind and body will find themselves in and struggle to get out of. It made me re-think reaching out to the therapist a friend recommended the other day. I was interested because honestly, who couldn’t use therapy after the last 18 months, but turned away because I figured I was fine. I think my body has been trying to tell me otherwise.
- So, yes, I’m taking them as sign and symbol, my perfectly wonderful twenty-four jars, of the fabulous years we’ve had and the many good things to come.
- They had come by once, they might come back again.
- Regardless of the outcome of Election 2021, on Tuesday morning, 21st September, the politicians will all disappear — some home to pack for their Ottawa residencies, others to resume their former lives. The rest of us will still be here in the trenches, slogging through the same mire, trying to find solutions to impossible problems, trying to get the necessary assistance for our vulnerable.
- But The Mimifesto has become one way I measure—and capture—time. Here are a few others.
- Keeping in line with my inadvertent summer theme of fantasy novels, I recently turned the last page on A Deadly Education, the first book in Naomi Novik’s projected Scholomance trilogy.
- But what if we all just started planting a LOT of flowers, metaphorically speaking? What if we filled up our metaphorical walls with ART?
- That night, in the middle of the night, the refrigerator began working again, but for how long?
- Sounds of summer have already begun to transition into those of autumn.
- It will get dirty and it will fade and I don’t have a perfect plan for keeping it clean except, perhaps, to take it down from its hooks should I have the need to deep fry a batch of beignets. Good thing the objective here isn’t perfection and there’s a donut shop down the street.
- Her Name Was Margaret is a compelling, unputdownable and strangely optimistic book for many reasons, not the least being that Davy shows us there IS a way out, a way both humane and economically viable. For that reason alone it’s must reading.
- One of the things I love about travelling is coming home.
- It’s the time of year, I guess, or the time of my life, or maybe my eyesight is fading. Or maybe this is how I will see the world for the next few years as I write this novel. This novel? I’m going to leave the question mark there for now.
- Because for all the talk these days about blogging being over, it remains, for me, the best form the internet has come up with for the kinds of things that I value about the internet.
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July 6, 2021
Gleanings
- Some mornings I sit at my desk and open A Writer’s Diary as a kind of divination. What was Virginia Woolf thinking nearly a hundred years ago, or eighty?
- This wasn’t the first time I’ve eaten in a restaurant alone, and I’ve never been self-conscious about it, but this time I was, and I think it’s because in fact, I now mostly eat alone.
- It was the best kind of rejection—personal, encouraging. It was handwritten for Pete’s sake. I was so mad at myself. I should have framed it. Instead, I lost years. It took me until my 30’s to unravel all of those toxic stereotypes about artistic genius and understand that what matters is doing the work and being willing to put it out there.
- I’ve gathered some stardust into a novel, flawed and imperfect though it is, and I hope to be able to share it with you someday.
- I need to make a list of things that I’m not going to do. And feel contentment seep in, with the release of the niggling feeling that I should be doing these things.
- Something opened up in me as I began swimming, and I remembered what I’ve always known—that I am most myself when I’m swimming. I started being able to think again.
- I thought Whereabouts really beautifully captured the paradox that isolation is not, or at least not only, about being alone.
- Think of a letter as a tack on a chair. You might pick one off, and ignore it. But next time, you’ll look twice before you sit down.
- Like many teens, summer was (is) a time to earn some money during the day and hang out with my friends on the weekends and evenings, spending our earnings on trips to the mall, bottles of Clearly Canadian, and coke slurpees. But my first summer job, ended up including a course of antibiotics.
- One evening last week the most awe-inspiring and spectacular sunset occurred.
- WHAT is this life if, full of care/ We have no time to stand and stare?—
- Sweat peas are one of my most favourite flowers. They’re so delicate. This is the season to stuff a jam jar full of them. Pinks! Lilacs! Scarlets!
- The point is, sometimes what was working fine doesn’t work so well anymore. Maybe it will again, someday, and maybe it won’t. The thing is, I want to be open to other options.
(Gleanings is going in summer holidays! Will be back at regular speed in September and maybe sooner here and there…)
June 29, 2021
Gleanings
- And then, every so often, I discover another way of looking at things which seems to make the process of reframing a titch less difficult.
- It’s the first Sunday of my two week vacation and I had to make a list. Vacation time should mean No Lists Required but we are where we are and I am who I am.
- Difficult to say. I’ve never had much of a poker face and my days of tolerating the senseless monologues of idiotic men are over.
- I figured that just because something can’t be used for its intended purpose, doesn’t mean it can’t be used.
- Meditation takes many forms and for me, it was a peaceful interlude in Jobe’s Woods, observing, contemplating, puzzling, desperately trying to conform the order of my life, to figure out my creative next steps.
- For the time being, one very small way I take advantage of the heat outside the window is by brewing large jars of sun tea.
- I realize we all get different things out of poetry. What I get from this one is how it pairs the banal of the everyday with the nearly sublime of being alive with a peaceful heart.
- But I’ve seen the waving hands of those who will: other writers, who know the value of company in tough seasons. And I’ve grabbed hold.
- The sands are always shifting, right? And sometimes, they’ll bring you right to the oasis. Sometimes. They can. And why not?
- Cornbread means many things to many people.
- Often these days, I discover older women in books who I would like to get to know.
- I was lucky to be born in a family where writing and literature was celebrated, so I had no shortage of support and encouragement from my family.
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June 22, 2021
Gleanings
- I’m always afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing, of offending inadvertently, and it’s easier to stay quiet. But although words can hurt, the right ones can help, and I suppose that’s one reason why I feel compelled to speak up now, in spite of howling Hakken-Kraks and MS speech and “cog probs.”
- For the past fifteen months, I haven’t thought much about the past or future. I haven’t often allowed myself to reminisce, no “gee, remember restaurants?” or “oh I can’t wait to”s.
- And to this day I don’t know why. I don’t know what that triggered for her to stop talking to me and I just knew that I couldn’t be the one to call first and all these years later (my kid will be eleven this fall) I still regret not getting over myself and just calling her the next week to say I’m sorry or what happened or why did that upset you so much that you simply ghosted me.
- If we want to move towards a better world, it behooves us to take a moment to consider our words.
- There will be spots that wear and spots that don’t and that’s the beauty of denim isn’t it? We’re not even supposed to wash our jeans.
- I like renting rooms, even though I have a lot of bad hotel/motel/B&B/Airbnb memories. Faulty plumbing, drunken patrons, saggy bed, thin walls, all-night traffic, NO BEDSIDE LAMP FOR READING.
- You are worthy of your creative dreams and the time you need to pursue them.
- Now, don’t get me wrong: when you tell me I have spinach in my teeth, I will nearly faint from shame.
- Fifteen years later I’m taller (whoops, no), have more time on my hands (yikes, no), smarter (not always), and a much better cook (ding ding ding!), and over the last few months of making friends and family suffer through rounds and rounds of ice cream sandwiches, I have finally created the last classic ice cream sandwich recipe I hope we will ever want or need.
- Since those days on LiveJournal and then MySpace and then the early days of Facebook when you had to be a university student to have an account, I’ve been sending feelers out trying to find ways to claim space, to stretch a little and find myself in the world around me.
- Now it’s 3:24 and I can’t sleep, filled with hope that maybe life is not returning to normal exactly but that it’s taking a new form that just might be lovely. Sea breezes, fish tacos, conversation with old friends, and the sun coming out at exactly the right moment.
- oh boy. its here. they all arrive home in the next three hours and they won’t leave again until august.
- In my job as a mediator, not only I attempt to embody the teachings of my ancestors but also rely upon the poetry of giants whose words instilled the importance of kindness in me.
- I feel a pang deep in my stomach. Father’s Day will always suck for Filip.
- Well, Sufferance is a different kind of book. It is a strange mix of corporate thriller, small town politics, Indigenous history, and a hit of the Dead Dog Café. But it works.
- And in these early morning sessions, the 1000 words just flowed out of me and onto the page.
- Returning to Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a sort of revelation for Thompson, who had acquired a PhD in the interim and was, by her own reckoning, much more informed about literature and history than she had been in her early twenties. “I realized that the book was actually a political book,” she says. “It was making a political statement.”
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June 15, 2021
Gleanings
- A damp day, too wet to work outside, and my writing stalled for a couple of reasons: why not gather petals and make some jelly?
- I’ve been thinking about the Greyhound bus a lot lately.
- Very often, I wake in the night. I’m not sure if it’s because of my age, my brain, my hormones or a heady mix of all of the above, but wake in the night I do.
- The syntax and vocabulary of racism bleeds into Canadian Media and conversation from American politicians, law enforcement officials and activists yet far too many of us engage with morbid curiosity rather than acknowledgement, commitment and action out of a very real fear and loathing for what is happening in our own country.
- With their inherent contradictions, 10-year-olds are a fascinating bunch.
- I’ve taken oodles of photos in my yard this spring. I can’t seem to help myself and I don’t apologize.
- But there it is. I am just old enough to feel the satisfaction of one less dead branch hanging over my tent.
- At one point I had a hefty, three-ring binder type thing with pages and pages of CDs. Remember those?
- Dogs are often labelled as “aggressive” or “anxious”, when in truth they’re actually fearful, responding to a threat the only way they know how.
- Summer books are almost too easy. This is one season that abounds with books.
- You do your work. You show your work. And you stay true to your vision. No apologies. No regrets. Okay, you can have regrets, and you can make art out of them. Onward.
- But it is not our actual townhouse that is home. Instead, it is the breeze that blows the trees outside our bedroom window, snuggling in bed with my husband enjoying our morning coffee, chatting with our neighbours over the backyard fence, and greeting our children with hugs when they come to visit.
- It’s the act of the storytelling itself, the bravery, the light, the humour, the small beautiful truths. It’s as Richard Van Camp says, a soul sigh.
- There’s so much more to the day than laundry and chickens.
- I hope someone knows what your favourite sandwich is. I hope you smile when you open it up. I hope you also get chips or a pickle to go with. I hope your sandwich is a deep comfort to you.
- What I want to do now to move away from the ugly mechanisms that are at play in the world. I don’t mean I will turn my back entirely. I won’t. But right now I want to think about my own work and the solace it provides me when I wake, sleepless, and come down to my little study at the edge of the forest.
- I’m just four chapters into The Old Wives’ Tale and I already feel that I owe Arnold Bennett an apology. I never should have taken someone else’s word about him—not even (maybe, especially not) Virginia Woolf’s.
- I laughed out loud when I heard that Donald Trump quit his blog because no one was reading it.
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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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