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.
October 27, 2020
Gleanings
- This is a collection of previously unpublished short stories ranging over the earlier years of Madeleine L’Engle’s writing career, now gathered by her granddaughter.
- In these very weirdest of times, where the ordinary feels extraordinary and precious, where we are forced to be creative and innovative in navigating life in a world that presents very real challenges to our physical, emotional and spiritual health, it was a good day.
- I want to find a way to be brighter, make the best of this situation.
- Sprinkles are entirely optional, of course, but we could all use more sprinkles these days.
- As soon as I finished reading this I thought: I want to read it again.
- October here is like a painting.
- Any literary genre is open to distinctions in readers’ taste, but arguably none more so than the horror genre.
- I could have spent the afternoon reading but instead I washed my husband’s body while he braced himself on his walker, helped him back into his bed, arranged the soft flannel sheet over his legs.
- The togetherness, tradition, self-expression.
- “Sometimes in the world of people who write or people who make media there is just this expectation that everything is on the table, especially if you’re two women who make media, that we’re supposed to just share our pain and everything that’s going on in our lives but that’s not fair and it’s not true…”
- I keep telling myself, I need a winter plan, a plan to get through, no matter what. I need some new winter mantras. (Quietly, quietly).
- Did you know that there’s a whole world out there beyond Harper Collins and Penguin?
- What to do when life takes a non-peachy turn
October 20, 2020
Gleanings
I am so happy today as I read through the blogs on my Blog Reader. So many people who’ve taken my course this year have updated their blogs this week. Some of my faves (Elizabeth!) updated theirs twice. Such a pleasure to see all the good people out there in the world making good work and sharing their ideas. And this reader sure appreciates it.
- Sure enough, the more I thought about birds, the more they began appearing in everything I read.
- However if, like me, you don’t think/respond well when put on the spot, or if you’re a people-pleaser and your go-to response is agreement, consider adopting a personal pause.
- When you start prioritizing your writing time, the people around you might not like it very much. (They won’t like it at all.)
- Words are like seeds and when healthy ones are sown, those seeds grow into something greater.
- And then the word Heal comes to me and everything settled. That’s what this time is. Calm. Quiet. Light, is what I imagine for the winter.
- Reading: Pachinko and Persuasion.
- I’m always torn between, hey look everyone it’s me over here, and also trying to fade into the woodwork.
- I am not very good at being nocturnal. While I love the moon, and the stars, and the uncanny call of the owl behind my house, I must admit that my mood often sinks with the sun.
- When it’s light out, the trees brilliant gold and deep orange, the house finches busy at the work of opening maple seeds, I am ready for anything. But when the weight settles, I pick up my quilt and stitch free-hand spirals into the sashing between the log-cabin blocks.
- We’d always end up among the trees, in their shade, in their splendour.
- The first thing I don’t like about this book is that she (Gertrude Elizabeth Blood), calls herself Lady Colin Campbell
- Fortunately, not all best laid plans automatically go awry, either. We didn’t get to meet as we’d anticipated, but we did get to meet in ways we’ve come to expect and enjoy…
- The perfect time to eat it simply never came. Note to self: It never will.
- I unfold each scrap of paper before I throw it in the recycle bin, just in case I find a note. Because even in our era of emails and texts, Doug wrote me notes. I haven’t found one in his winter clothing yet, but I might, and I’ll savour it and save it.
- October is Breast Cancer Awareness month and, for me, it is doubly so.
- I used to think that the ache would disappear, that the hurt would fade but seventeen years later I’ve learned that grief is a journey without a real destination.
- Rioux makes the case that the book is important to all readers as a story that explores female identity in ways that still continue to matter.
- WE USED TO HAVE A ROOF OVER OUR HEADS, moan the butter sticks. WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR ROOF. The shelf is fine, I tell them. You’re safe on the shelf. NOOOOO they whine oh butter. Have you considered meditation?
- And so this sign in all its simplistic splendour really spoke to me as something that was, if not completely attainable at the time, at least something to strive toward. Simplify, it said. OK! I said. Let’s give it a shot.
October 13, 2020
Gleanings
- To me, the thrust of the novel seems rather to be “how many intended kindnesses can lead to mistakes.”
- One of the silver linings of Covid, is seeing how imaginative and resourceful people can be in times of challenge.
- Poetry has the capacity to lead us through our lives, giving us courage to step over the thresholds, to push the creaky gate on the hinges that are our own bodies thinking, remembering…
- When you feel yourself getting defensive, when you have an urge to argue with what you’re hearing, why not take that as an invitation?
- I’m still here – which is exactly where I want to be.
- This is nature. This is life. Perhaps, in some ways, we’re not so different to a Chinook.
- What I want is the complexity and powerful possibilities that a poem or poetic language can give us.
