January 19, 2021
Gleanings
- Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
- I was looking for something in Livesey’s book that would be an “aha” moment for me about creative writing as something that can be taught.
- I have learned to forgive my mom. I’m learning to forgive myself as well. It’s a layered process. I get the sense that mom learned to forgive me too.
- Truly, I did walk into his circle of friends, and he into mine, and those friendships have been one of the greatest gifts in our life.
- I grew up with Savoury Toast and it’s a life-long favourite to be turned to when things are tiring or overwhelming or a bit chilly out.
- the other source of inspiration was buying two new pencils. Yes, buying pencils actually inspired me.
- I don’t want you to wait. I want you to find a way to build writing into your weekly routine so that it provides sustenance and sanctuary for you in hard times, as well as in easier times.
- This morning the light is subdued by mist but I think it might be clear up the mountain.
- In the meantime, Roethke also said that if you can’t think, sing. And though I can’t sing, (not being modest) maybe you can.
- It’s a lot to ask, that stories drop into my hands from their perfect mutability in my mind.
- I suppose it’s a bit weird and somewhat selfish to think “Yay, you’re blogging again because life is shit!” but reading the blog was a true comfort and rediscovering it has felt a bit like reconnecting with an old friend.
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January 13, 2021
Gleanings
- But this year, the ritual of school drop-off has evolved into the most important social space in my life.
- If last year proved anything, it is that readers are devoted to the printed word and that booksellers, publishers, festivals, and other stakeholders are resilient and flexible in their desire and ability to continue getting books into the hands of those who want them.
- Does that tell you something? I just decided to do it. I was feeling desperate. I thought, Why have I done all these things for others, all these other things? I’ve written a chunk of this thing, but it’s not enough. So there was the chocolate bar bribe. There was the writing jar hack. And the desperation.
- Let’s not forget the surging river as the ice melts in spring.
- But whatever superpowers of fortune telling or planning that I lack, I’ve decided I make up for with the superpower of optimism.
- And while I didn’t plan out the book that would usher in a new year of reading for me, it turns out that I could not have chosen a better one to set the tone for 2021.
- 2020 was also the year in which I learned about mending, tending, and extending.
- I like post-apocalyptic literature as much as the next guy. Just not… now.
- Today I awoke with a happy sense of anticipation, resolved to live through 2021 bravely, gallantly; as an adventure.
- Yesterday a cousin sends pictures of alpine snow heavy on branches, mountains, rooftops, and me here in the rain feeling snow envy…
- I was always glad to see people out walking, moving, striding along, whether with a friend or alone.
- Once you’ve drunk tea from a handmade mug, no ordinary, mass made one will do.
- I once took apart an essay and put it together in a much better way, all while doing the backstroke
- We are here, I say to myself, what can we do with what we have?
- It’s not how many you read that counts. It’s that you read that counts – and it counts so very much.
- Anyway, I’d like to start a New-New Year’s tradition. Let’s not look forward, let’s fucking look BACK. Every year, on December 31st, let’s count our damn blessings.
- “2020 will begin on a high note,” I wrote at the end of 2019’s “Year in Reading” post. As far as reading goes, at least, I wasn’t wrong.
- It’s funny that they’re called English muffins because the only place we ever ate them was in Florida and Bermuda when we visited our grandparents.It’s funny that they’re called English muffins because the only place we ever ate them was in Florida and Bermuda when we visited our grandparents.
January 5, 2021
Gleanings
- If you’re swimming against the current, you’re acting with purpose. Effort can be clarifying.
- The question becomes, how do we keep the essence of our traditions, while allowing them to morph and evolve into something new?
- Even in the darkest dark, you will see, there is shimmering light ahead. Trust me, for I am a dreamer. I’ve missed you, too.
- COVID-19 has made me grateful that I’m a Psychrolute.
- Spread love, preach peace: Be a light.
- It’s all really about attitude and we all have so much to be grateful for.
- Is it an accident that two of my favourite books of the past year both address the concept of receiving or claiming credit? (No.)
- Try not to die before Armistice, okay?
- I’m in it for the practice. The process.
- I’m closer to the ground. And my spirit is closer to the sky.
- It was a painless process, not like the stocks, and I am a better person for it.
- If it’s so trivial, why do so many men become so enraged when a woman expresses the desire to be known as ‘Dr X’?
- I am all too aware that there are things my husband can do now, that too soon he will no longer be able to do. I am aware, but I am still not taking notes.
- The times have caused us to recognize privilege and abundance of resources that are not accessible to everyone because of the systems that have shaped us for generations – colonialism, capitalism, racism, and the patriarchy./ We can find ourselves holding all of that reality, all the hope for transformative change, all the despair and all the love, all the fear and all the joy, all at once.
- Sometimes I give myself really bad coffee jitters on purpose, just to feel something.
- We shouldn’t be deeply embarrassed if we play a wrong note; we should be deeply embarrassed if we play an entire concert in the pursuit of perfection, forgetting our true purpose: to connect with each other.
- Stitching the grammar of rocks into cotton, making a trail of ancient writing for a friend living so far away it might be another time, another epoch altogether.
- I don’t tune out the din, I am learning to be with it.
- And that is how Fred and I come to spend the better part of our first evening together in the bar of The Four Seasons Hotel, me drinking fine brandy and tea and eventually ordering a cheese plate and salad, bits of which I lovingly shove through the wires of his cage on the seat next to mine
December 15, 2020
Gleanings
- I felt the thrill of learning that this new-to-me author had even more titles in the library than Carolyn Keene!
- It took many years of negotiating before we were able to settle on a Chrismukkah mood board that met all of our needs; it remains a work in progress.
- “Lucky in cards, unlucky in love,” she’d say to us all, peering over her reading glasses.
- How to do you say “wind chime” in Czech?
- But it’s about flowers so every time my hand reaches to pull it off a shelf and place it in a thrift-shop-bound box, it whispers but I’m about flowers… don’t you want to know about flowers…
- What’s Christmas without kids? How often have I heard that?
- I love the “yin time” of winter. It’s a time to drowse and dream, to spin stories and commune with other writers, dead and alive. Rest. Refresh. Renew.
- The films are at their best when they channel what was best in le Carré’s novels: the moral ambiguity and the reality that even the best intentions can become degraded as a result of misplaced ideological faith or institutional corruption.
- The world is weird. A mile long lineup of people, six feet apart, in surgical masks. And there we were, singing Blondie songs, sharing stories, and trying to make it all feel less weird.
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December 8, 2020
Gleanings
- When a child is ill
- It’s okay to act out of character. In fact, you can’t act “out of character” because you’re not an invented character that has to make sense in a constructed narrative — you’re an organic, self-creating being.
- Though there were gifts under her tree for everyone, I now know that the true gift was the togetherness and happiness of everyone in our extended family, and knowing we were all well-loved. Those Christmases were very special to me then and now.
- I miss the connectedness to the world you gain from just being around strangers.
- 10 Holiday Gifts for Writers in 2020 (that aren’t books)!
- These days, I’m thinking a lot about civil twilight.
- The internet will give you so many windows and doors to open, chasing ideas that you might tell yourself are inspirational or aspirational, when really, you just want to be as original and seemingly free as Joni Mitchell.
- I’m so glad that I was finally given that shove I needed to pick up a Muriel Spark.
- But maybe that was the point. Maybe what they saw was a couple of 20-somethings with their first child, without a real clue what to expect, fumbling along, doing their best in front of everyone.
- C is for Christmas, and Covid, and Caregiving
- Kendi’s book serves as an invitation to take a walk with him. A heartfelt, effective invitation–that also addresses difficult subjects in clear and compelling writing.
- I love advent calendars! Growing up, we only had picture ones, chocolate, or sweets were unheard of.
- I did wear a tuque. And it was very cold. But also exhilarating, the water silky the way it is in summer. I felt every cell in my body rejoice.
- In the 50+ years we have been together I think there was only one year that our Christmas included only the two of us. That was Christmas 1972 and we were stranded in Fez, Morocco.
- We don’t find the diamonds without sifting through the stones.
- Juggling motherhood and any career can be a struggle, but there seems to be something about the role of artist that makes the combination more than usually problematic,”
- It’s just a laptop but in a way it’s a room of my own. I’m lucky to have it.
- …as if the ginger tea and cat’s eyes weren’t enough.
- I am trying very hard to enter my sixty-fifth year with my heart wide open.
December 1, 2020
Gleanings
- No matter the disasters and disputes of the day, we were happy together following Bilbo Baggins to the Lonely Mountain, or Jules Verne’s adventurers on their way to the centre of the Earth.
- I wanted him to sleep under symbols of the place that is part of him, even though he doesn’t live here. And when those constellations appear in the sky over his home in Ottawa, he can look at them and imagine them in a slightly different orientation thousands of miles west.
- This leaf feels like my grandmother’s hand. No wonder I can’t stop holding it.
- I try to have a schedule, but I’m extremely bad at keeping schedules. I have watched corporate blog after corporate blog go to crap, because there was a posting schedule where you had to write five posts a day. I think that everybody would rather just write when you have something good to say.
- Now that I’ve discovered the true story, I’m highly motivated and loving the writing process.
- At this time of the year the light at latitude 53 arrives to pool in surprising places in the house.
- Here’s our VERY RETRO Advent Love-to-Do-List for 2020!
- “We are solitary travellers, having crossed paths in the land of stories.”
- If we want to fully reclaim the witch, let’s make sure that we are not ourselves ignorantly engaging in practices that harm others.
- Should dictionaries be trying to present us with a less biased world than the one we currently inhabit—or is their real obligation to reflect the world as it is, and as it shapes our use of words?
- Then I looked at the food mixer and realised that’s at least twenty five years old and suddenly I felt old and had another of those tempus fugit in a flash moments.
- These are cold days. Perhaps not in terms of temperature. No frost, no snow, no thin skittering of ice on the water. But there’s a chill at their centre. A chill of not-knowing.
- Beauty should never be only about pretty flowers and shallow depth of field.
- With November, comes a return to drinking tea.
- I regularly come away from our silent (and often not-so-silent!) book club feeling ready to burst: with book recommendations, with revitalized enthusiasm for my reading (when it has flagged or been kind of muddled in recent months), with sheer joy at connecting and sharing with such an amazing, generous and eclectically inclined group of booklovers.*
- I can’t seem to muster the mental or physical energy to keep up with regular blogging right now (blame an excess of computer time for other purposes plus a spell of back pain – happily now subsided – making it particularly unappealing to spend yet more time at my desk!). But I also can’t stand to watch the pile of read books growing without saying something about them.*
*Last two picks feature Waiting for a Star to Fall!
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November 24, 2020
Gleanings
- Well, I just finished reading Pond, by Claire-Louise Bennett, and it was absolutely everything I’ve ever wanted in a book.
- Everything Will Be Okay. Also, everything absolutely won’t. Living with that understanding, that discomfort, is something I can do, but it’s incredibly hard for me.
- I love that we’re all so focused on figuring out creative ways to share, and to do the things we love, and to connect with people we love.
- Caregiving through Covid: the challenges of 2020 have presented a steep learning curve, and some days it feels like we’re all just making it up as we go along.
- I think the reason I haven’t posted in so long is because something CraAAazy happened to me between the beginning of the summer and now… I lost my need for outside validation.
- Couple that with the warmth and connection glowing from our device screens during this week’s “pop-up” (meaning somewhat spontaneously scheduled) silent book club zoom meeting and we know we’re going to make it through the swiftly descending darker days and nights.
- I opened A Writer’s Diary to see what Virginia Woolf was thinking in November, 1924
- workshops at the shelter: aka, what we write about when we write about avocados
- If it’s round and it comes on a plate, it is probably a dumpling.
- “Today is a gift. Open it up and take it for a ride.”
- What if we shared more stories, and fewer admonishments? (I’ve yet to see anyone change their mind because of an admonishment).
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November 17, 2020
Gleanings
- Gardening, I’ve learned, is an act of faith, hope and imagination.
- How do you wish to proceed? I know I don’t want to argue with the world. I want to learn to speak differently. I want to make a humble effort.
- I’ll be making this a lot, just for the pure joy of it (cinnamon buns as an act of self care) and how happy it makes the people around me- and it’s easily doubled if you want one for yourself and one to share.
- I don’t pray, that is not me. I ask my parents to pull some strings, wherever they are. If anyone can do it they can. I let the idea of a funeral suck me in occasionally but then I force it to go away. This can’t be where it ends.
- On Halloween we had a Hunter’s Blue Moon, something not seen since 1944. Think about it. In 1944, the world was still in the midst of a World War, the second in thirty years. D-Day had taken place, the Nazi forces were being driven back through the USSR, and slowly, Hitler’s War Machine was beginning to falter.
- What if the freedom and curiosity and occasional exhilaration I experience when I’m writing on my blog, for that matter, is also about finding my own way, using the tools that feel natural in my hands, making this site a self-portrait in words rather than a shelter from the uncongenial demands of “real” academic writing? What if feeling some comfort, pleasure, and ease in a particular kind of work means that it fits, and that’s a good thing?
- The work of these textiles reminds me of the word painstaking.
- The artist uses thousands of beads and semi-precious stones (agate, garnet, smokey quartz, lapis lazuli and pearls, to name a few) to create the appearance of mould on her decaying lemons, cherries, oranges and grapes.
- What if the world of books were one big dinner party? Or perhaps I mean some other metaphor—perhaps holding hands?
- “I like a sip of tea from time to time.”
- That’s how it goes. Things ebb and flow, they get worse and better — but there’s always a little crack of hope.
- On Saturday, we used up the last of our orchard-picked apples by making loads of my Chunky Caramel Apple Jam. It tastes like apple pie, with a kick! And serves just as well on a cheeseboard as it does on toast or loaded in a danish or dolloped in a thumbprint cookie!
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November 10, 2020
Gleanings
- I think of the form as endlessly open and capacious, willing to accept experiments, bars of music, instructions for grafting, soup recipes, the history of Ukrainian embroidery, the life cycle of a blue mussel, meditations on mortality, dissertations on historical events, dream diaries, and colour wheels. Anything else? Whatever a writer needs.
- I can’t imagine a more invigorating way to begin each day.
- When I posted it on FB, a friend commented that it looked like an Arthurian castle. It is a post-industrial castle.
- “The word diptych comes from the Greek root “dis,” meaning “two,” and “ptykhe,” meaning “fold.”
- Today, I’m focusing on people who are achieving impossible things for people they don’t know.
- Minor missteps aside, Self Care ends up as a surpassingly dark comedy about a consumerist society that continues to elevate an artificial ideal of women in the place of authentic experience or humanity.
- And sometimes you also need to curl up in a ball and take care of yourself. Here are some comfort read suggestions if that’s where you’re at right now.
- The company manufactured cutlery, scissors, cabinets, and other goods. And as it turns out, elegant folding trays so a small boy and the man he became can enjoy breakfast in bed.
- When expectations are low one really appreciates the little things; a blue sky (that always feels like a gift from the universe) and the homemade slice of cake your friend bakes you.
- True-blue, life-long friends make this life so worth living – having people around that love us for who we are, care about us, make us giggle, and make a point to reach out to us.
- I try to do the best I can, with the information and resources I have. I’m often wrong; I am thankful for so many second chances.
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November 3, 2020
Gleanings
- I’m Still Reeling From 2016. Am I Now Allowed to Hope Again?
- In this Year of the Weird, I’m coming to understand that pre-ordering can be a significant act of literary citizenship.
- I’ve been walking on this beach for three hundred years and have never seen stones this shape much less two,
- Last October, I started what may become a new tradition, recording my Octoberests, the seven most magical elements of the month!
- From start to finish, with two firings in between, a plate usually takes me about two weeks to make. And that’s just a plate. Imagine a teapot!
- It has no heroes and, surprisingly, not really any villains either, because those categories rely on absolute perspectives that are simply not sustainable.
- Tomorrow is Election Day. The past four years have hurt like hell. I wish I had words of comfort or inspiration to send out to the world, but I really only have a message of care. May we all take care, may we extend care, may we value the care we receive from others.
- On days when it’s easy to count far more than three blessings, this is a reminder of our great good fortune. On days when we’re struggling . . . this is a reminder of our great good fortune.
- If the pandemic has taught me anything, it’s that the answers in a crisis, as in ordinary life, change with the circumstances, require monitoring and reassessment, and must shift to take many factors into consideration. In other words: there are no easy answers
- Whatever happens next week, and I hope what happens will bring us before and into some great and formidable wedge of light, leaving us blinking and gasping, whatever happens, we will need to adjust our eyes.
- So, without further ado, as they say at the end of every episode of Writing Excuses: “You’re out of excuses. Now GO WRITE!”
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.
