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• This is a collection of previously unpublished short stories ranging over the earlier years of Madeleine L’Engle’s writing career, now gathered by her granddaughter.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.

October 6, 2020

Gleanings

• I mean, how hard can it be? I had an idea, a story arc and time. All I needed to do was turn on the tap and it would flow out. Right?
• We made friends, we built a life—a good life—together, we have a language-for-just-us and code words and in-jokes. 
• On Wednesday night I read the final chapter in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to my youngest daughter—thus closing the chapter on one of the major post-diagnosis goals I had set for myself.
• What a joyful thing. Evoking a response, a thought, interpretation, connection through your own expression.
• “October, baptize me with leaves! Swaddle me in corduroy and nurse me with split pea soup. October, tuck tiny candy bars in my pockets and carve my smile into a thousand pumpkins. O autumn! O teakettle! O grace!”
• My truth is that the quiet, almost eremitic hours I spend in the forest, are sacred and essential – how I am able to find peace in this time of high anxiety.
• Every day my walk is the same. And entirely different.
• But when, like most of us, I ran low on white flour in April, I used whole wheat instead and discovered that the recipe wasn’t just as good as it was with white flour, but better.
• And thinking about archives at the same time because I was already lamenting that I’d never done the thing that I’d always thought I would do: keep a regular reading journal, keep track of everything I read, and when, and what I thought. I was disappointed in myself beyond words and then, man, I realized that if only I’d done the same thing with the quilts I’ve made over the past 35 years…
• The Voyage Out soon began to spill into other areas of my life.
• “I’ve trained myself to do many different things in small segments over the course of the day…..Yesterday I began by making a butternut squash cake for our meeting, then I worked on my kintsugi.”
• Sometimes you have to kill all your darlings. Throw the whole book out and start again from scratch.
• What I found most disturbing about the book is that I know Mattie Rigsbees.
• Just as a cook needs to learn to diversify in the types of foods and the differences in spices, cooking methods, and ingredients used, so too should a photographer embrace their own diversifications.
• Sometimes, writers of dark fiction blur the lines between horror and the psychological thriller.
• This year, I took a different kind of breather, challenging myself to walk 300 kilometres, or an average of 10k per day. On twenty-nine of those thirty days, I walked.

September 29, 2020

Gleanings

• I’m not calibrating my movements to the chattering and growling of rancid beasts anymore.
• I wonder how long it will be before two strangers sit side by side at the cinema sharing in the experience of being alone.
• “We, as a society, don’t value the process of activities, we just value the outputs. Maybe it’s the process that is the crossover between writing and craft,” Dr Burns suggests.
• It is kind of difficult to be a woman sharing a poem about reproductive rights, which are evidently important to me and many people that have uteruses in this city and in this province and to be shut down and told it’s too political, which is often the case when you’re discussing issues like this — it’s really difficult.
• Socks, knitting, Buffy. Fall is here as far as my family is concerned. 
• The satisfaction of painted particulars.
• The consequences of our choices, deeds, words are unpredictable, outcomes uncomfortably beyond even our best guesses.
• So much of [the] satire depends on shaming its victims; the author appears frustrated when his method encounters a subject that is incapable of shame on any level.
• The bears remember and return. They’ve been doing this forever.
• I shall be a tree tourist in Alberta
• I have always been extraordinarily lucky. I am shy but have managed to surround myself with the most extraordinarily wonderful friends for my entire life.
• But what about those books that you eagerly anticipate? When you wait patiently for them to appear as “ready for pickup” in your library holds, and you hurry home with them and then you are not nearly as enthralled with them as you’d thought you’d be? There has to be a German word for that kind of let down. 
• Brittney Cooper is indeed eloquent, and lets the rage fly. I learned so much. 
• Well, it’s that time of year again. The time when I reread Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes.
• Every day that I was waiting for change, budding of leaves, longer light, I was also aware of a beauty that I had never noticed.
• Wait, what? All this time, and I still haven’t shared the history of the #wyrdshed? No better time than in the midst of isolation….
• It got me thinking: what else about myself (or the world–but let’s start small) could I wonder about?
• My hands shook, big deal, on good days I could just imagine it away and for decades I pretty much did.
• I love how the city has been everybody’s playground this summer, inviting us all outside to walk or talk or read or pray.
• A millimetre to the right and it might never have happened.
• We’d navigate the front steps (not easy with a giant pram, but you quickly sort it out and manage it quickly) and then roll into the shop, hearts pitter-pattering with excited anticipation.
• I am honoured to be with someone who sees me in a way that I can look back at who I was. I recognize myself.
• Documenting our lives, through whatever medium you chose, ought to bring us closer to our lived experiences, our loved ones, and ourselves instead of creating tension, anxiety and competition.

September 22, 2020

Gleanings

• There’s safety in a bowl of spaghetti
• A mistake-free performance could only happen if it were so unambitious as to be, frankly, boring.
• Now that we know how precious cheese is, don’t let it go to waste!
• Christmas, Halloween, birthdays galore, our house was that home where you knew you could bring your best friend’s cousin to and she’d just fit in.
• A message from the past to the present: be careful how you move between the cedars and firs.
• I aspire to read more books that I actually end up reading.
• Even knowing all of this, it wasn’t until I read Fangirl that I realized that I could tell the world how much I loved fanfiction
• I’m not against protesting, not one whit. I am opposed to perversity and spite.
• I do not need a pandemic to let me know I’m mortal.
• My grandmother wasn’t even born a Zorn, but a Wolf. She came by her name too.
• Somewhere along the line, I internalized the messages that I was broken and in need of fixing at the same time as not being able to rely on anyone but myself to meet my needs.
• Because I do a lot of my seeing with a camera, I often see things at least twice.
• Knowing what to remove, what to take down, what to edit out is as essential to completion as invention itself.
• That sense of accomplishment follows me throughout the day, which is important when so much of regular life is temporary.

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September 15, 2020

Gleanings

• It’s been one, very small, dull-silver lining of the pandemic: My children have been roaming the neighbourhood, without me.
• There is something bewitching about keeping a record of the little details in life, those things that probably culminate in patterns, and may otherwise go unnoticed.
• Most everyone I know is tired of hearing that I am a librarian’s daughter. Especially the non-readers. What can I say? I’m lucky.
• These are the people on whose doorstep I can arrive with no notice. These are the texts I’ll reply to as soon as I see them, and the phone calls I’ll answer even if I’m in tears and letting other calls go straight to message. 
• Ever since I got my fancy-pants bundt pan, I have been making one cake with more frequency than any other.
• With hints of autumn in the air and tickling the leaves, it felt like this might be our last chance to meet in the park.
• And that all these lessons take at least two decades to absorb.
• Imagine not knowing what hummus is, it seems impossible!
• The world needs a lot of things right now, but it also needs places for us to exercise that muscle of infinite reception. Libraries, for example. Schools. Art galleries.
• Despite the obvious challenges ahead, sitting in Daddy’s chair I found myself in the cradle of his infinite love, which is perfect, non?  
• How to revise your novel: part 5
• A quiet novella is a kiss of death if you think of literary ambition as a living thing.
• You know, I prefer the kitchen to the living room, really. The kitchen is all about the promise of cooking something up … and the living room? It’s about winding down.
• Begin with endlessly sorting your bookshelves. Keep, donate, keep, donate….
• it’s not a photograph until it’s printed

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September 8, 2020

Gleanings

• Hold on to this moment, I remind myself.  And I do.
• Dearest book lovers, we are in great peril.
• My point is that both books are solid and substantive. They require attention and care. I’m grateful that the writers shared their extensive knowledge with me. 
• how necessary it is to have these two books situated cheek by jowl on the shelf
• I know I’ve said this before, but I think it’s worth repeating that keeping up with other people’s blogs has been a great source of intellectual stimulation and comfort for me over the past few months, so thanks as always to everyone whose bookish thoughts help make the internet a better place.
• I swam and thought of my grandchildren in this damaged beautiful world and when I came out to dry myself off, my face was wet with what might have been the lake and might have been tears.
• Did I clean out the tupperware cupboard like I was going to? No. Did I throw out all my day planners from when I was a stage manager in the 1980s? Yes, but it took a lot of energy. Did I write some words? FUCK YES.
• Making myself read (or otherwise experience) all of Shakespeare in a year was a way of getting myself out of a reading comfort zone.
• Historically significant times are not exactly the most restful to be living in.
• This ability to acknowledge that we hold multiple truths simultaneously, it’s learned through life experience and growing up, and time spent as a human being.
• Every time I blow the fluff off a dandelion I think of grateful bees.
• I am so glad I still keep a blog / website / or whatever the heck you prefer to call my little space here on the Internet. Do I have a heartwarming story for you today…
• I would never have become a writer if it had ever depended on my prowess typing.
• Living in Northumberland County, so very rich in agricultural lands, finding abundance is dead-easy.
• But of course, really, we all need to slowly, carefully, gently, humbly, grandly, and with great compassion, care for our own dear little crumbly old souls.

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September 1, 2020

Gleanings

• Throughout my youth, my community remained a mystery to me. As an adult, I’ve been trying to decode its realities through writing fiction
• Without his hold to drape around my shoulders, to shore me up, I sank into hot, wordless grief.
• While “cynical spreaders” are in the minority,their reaction to public-health advice and rules is far from original.
• There’s nothing quite as satisfying as opening my notebook to a clean, blank page and, with little thought, letting the words pour out – no editing, no spell-check, just spontaneous expression.
• I swear it was my lemon pudding that induced a marriage proposal by my now-husband.
• Music is magnificent. What it stirs in us, the people and places it connects us to, it’s ability to lift us up, inspire us, teach us and transport us to another space and time.
• It’s very likely your prologue, beautifully written though it might be, is unnecessary.
• As I swam at 9 a.m., I realized that all summer the cedars have been my guides
• Is there anything more fun, as a reader, than recognizing as you read how much fun the author was having?
• But this summer in particular, as plant-based diets are on evermore agendas, I’ve seen so many creative uses of corn…
• I think that even defiantly placing a vase of flowers in the room in which you work at this time is not nothing.
• We’re weathering the same storm, but our boats are very different.
• In bookish terms, our “new normal” is a hybrid of online and offline opportunities to continue to boost and share our collective love of reading … something that has helped, in no small part, to navigate the many “new normals” with which we’re all contending.
• Late summer is the best time for baked fruit desserts like cobblers and crisps, but one of my favourites is the lesser-known pandowdy
• It’s funny how a book reveals itself to you when you least expect it, when you’re searching for a particular kind of read and something else, something nearly the exact opposite of what you think you want ends up being perfect.

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August 25, 2020

Gleanings

• Some mornings, I use Virginia Woolf’s diaries as a form of divination.
• When you love things, and get passionate about something, you are doing good things for your brain, and good things for your resilience bank account, I imagine.
• Full disclosure, I make the “more kindness” goal every year and it’s one goal I know for sure I improve upon as time goes on.
• I like linear, predictable processes.
• One of the best wisdoms I’ve received is to, “say yes when you mean yes, and no when you mean no.”
• My park really does offer one pretty vignette after another, everywhere one looks! Everything was lush and green. Vibrant and flourishing.
• I think I live in a magical place.
• Potato chips used to be a spontaneous, grab-a-bag-at-the-corner-bodega thing in our household; now with grocery delivery they are more of a staple so I can be ready for spontaneous firepit nights.
• It’s a very challenging time for so many, and I count myself lucky that my tricky bits are not too hard to navigate.

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.