August 19, 2020
Gleanings
- It has taken me more than 40 years, but the singular achievement of my life may be that if I am attacked by a serial killer on a deserted Lovers Lane, I almost certainly will have had dessert.
- But the problem with a system in which crumbling infrastructure is held up by good tape and great staff is that it has no room to give. It’s already at breaking point.
- last year’s monarch recovery is a beautiful example of what people will do with clear instructions and when motivated by something they love.
- My faith is essential, it is fundamental to my equanimity and COVID-19 has changed nothing in that regard.
- The chapter ‘The History of Molecatching’ might be my favourite except that all the others are my favourite too.
- We have many of her tablecloths, each more beautiful than the last, and I understand something of how she tried to keep the lines of family communication open between England and Canada in the days before easy telephone calls and emails.
- This is not a fancy thing, and I am not trying to convince you that it is novel.
- every now and then a freight or a passenger train goes by on the tracks above the community garden. And it is good.
- I trust that when I make choices that are authentic to me, only good things will result.
- I’m extremely reluctant to give anyone advice about anything of late, but I can tell you a few things that are working for me, what’s getting me through these uncertain days.
- This blog is like a corkboard on which to post thoughts, observations, whatever is front-of-mind right now. It acts as a public journal, an I WAS HERE scrawl on the wall.
- Also, I needed an excuse to share this recipe for compost muffins, so named because you can toss just about anything into them
- So I don’t announce to strangers, “yes, my work is excellent, wouldn’t you agree?” but I don’t say, “it’s worthless, burn it,” though the culture sort of urges me to do the latter and my heart a little of both, depending on the day.
- Suddenly, wooden benches and window sills, the Chestnut Tree in my neighbour’s garden, all looked different. Everything came into focus. “
- Once you invert it out of the baking pan, you end up with the flan on top and the cake underneath. I’ve read that this is because the cake, as it rises in the oven, becomes lighter than the flan layer, so the flan sinks and I, a non-scientist, based on little more than liking the sound of it, have concluded that it makes total sense.
- One reason I relished Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey so much is that the novel could easily have been a disaster.
- How to revise your novel: part 1
August 11, 2020
Gleanings
- An oral history of Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet
- Dear ladies who are fearful and hostile to trans women
- I’ve had this habit of organizing my instagram posts around a monthly hashtag of my own devising.
- I didn’t need to think of what I was writing as publishable or formal. It was hugely liberating and continues to be.
- Wandering inspires creativity. Indeed, wandering is creativity.
- I wasn’t surprised to find this boulder since we were in Louise Penny territory. Obviously a mystery.
- It’s been lovely getting reacquainted with blogs again.
- Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet and Judith began with a fragment…
- But a society, and certainly a democracy, eventually dies when everything becomes politics.
- This is, among other things, a story about language and power.
- It’s not even mid-August but the air has a little thread of autumn running through it.
- 25 Things I Love
- …usual reading tempos were returning
- A marriage is an interesting ecology unto itself.
- I tapped on the shop door and they let me in.
July 21, 2020
Gleanings
- Acknowledging the fact that adults and kids feel with the same passion and intensity, even if they read on different levels, is central to both the composition and reception of Lobel’s books.
- Why can’t everyone be perfect, like me? The world would be a much easier place to navigate, right? Maybe there’s a reason I stayed single for 48 years.
- if you seek out pockets of happiness, you’ll be better able to weather the other registers, the inevitable truths of the less pleasant and trickier spheres.
- One Camera One Lens One Year Starts Now
- I am here because someone a long time ago said I could be and made it that way.
- They weren’t “escapist,” exactly. But they were horizon-broadening, in the best possible way.
- What I have loved the most, are all the trees that surround us.
- I love blogs. Always have. Always will. I love that they are a little capsule away from the business of social media and that you can dive in and find out lots more about the blogger in a very focused way.
- It did take a long time but last night it was as though nothing bad had every happened.
- It is safe to say that my interest in family history research was borne of boredom.
- It seems radical to wonder if we could despise less and love more, right now.
- I felt I was writing my way through the pandemic, yes, and part of what I was learning was patience.
- This morning I went to my place of worship.
- I love to begin mornings with something beautiful.
- For me, there is always both/and when I think about rabbits on the beach.
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July 7, 2020
Gleanings
- One of the goals I set for my epic 2020 to-do list? Make more preserves and pickles than last year!
- I think if we really go deep and allow ourselves to answer those questions, the world would be a better place.
- All I know is that I feel beleaguered – by these strange and difficult times, and by people who are making it worse.
- Despite outside influences, my attitude toward dandelions sashayed as if in a dance.
- There is the constant ongoing slightly absurd persistent splendid fact that you are required to make something beautiful.
- She’s good– very good, even! It’s just that she’s always good in exactly the same way, sometimes even in the exact same words.
- You’re walking and your eye yanks at your brain and says, Hey look, look again, look closer.
- Swimming, the swallows light on the surface of the lake, I want to tell that young woman to linger in the garden, linger among the vines and leaves.
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.
June 30, 2020
Gleanings
- We white people, who have the privilege of not being treated badly for our skin color, are being called to create new stories for everyone.
- The work I’m doing is my business and I have to think hard—constantly — about how to effect change and uphold my values
- Strawberries pretty much steal the show…
- “Oh my god,” I thought to myself in shock, “what am I doing? I don’t even know this guy and in just a few hours I’m going to marry him!”
- But watching these clouds parade across the sky, was a ritual which brought into my body, through my eyes, a sense of possibility as endless as that blue sky….
- So anyway, that’s me and masks and I’m just going to have to embrace it like everyone else.
- Writing is not the only work.
- I am never quick to clear plates, because I find this stage of a meal thoroughly satisfying.
- Six nags and mottos to embroider, when I master the satin stitch.
- Cruel systems surround us. Unless we’re cut by them, we can stay blissfully unaware.
- There is a specific kind of rain that warms my cockles. It’s the steady, light as the wing of a hummingbird, and flows in a gentle, easy way.
- You never knew, eavesdropping on Mildred’s stories, what you might hear, but it was guaranteed to be good.
- If, during these sheltering at home times, you’re lucky enough to have a garden, I’ll bet you’re embracing it.
- Swimming this morning, I wondered, where does the word “lake” come from?
- The chamomile is posing against the black currants that I’m looking forward to.
- I really admire Vivian Maier’s photographs, in particular her black and white self-portraits.
- The thing about posting photos of yourself through time, is that you really begin seeing yourself, and seeing yourself differently.
A handful of posts here are from writers who took part in my June blogging experience. They have been amazing. My next course offering is coming in September, and registration is open now.
June 23, 2020
Gleanings
- People’s relationships with their dads are on such a huge spectrum, and they are both complicated and simple.
- And like Lionel Shriver delivering a keynote in a Sombrero, every beat of his book twanged false.
- it was so very wonderful to gather some of our silent book club friends to finally, companionably, utterly luxuriously enjoy our reading on the grass, in the gorgeous shade, in each other’s bookish company once again.
- From him I learned …that when things are especially crummy you should be very pleased because there’s nowhere to go but up and that the patio in a summer rain is a fine place to dance.
- Because for me, how I walk through the world is the thing. This is what living is.
- It’s late in human history. Is it too late? You can’t say.
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June 16, 2020
Gleanings
- It may be a little faint, but I can still feel the pulse of my city.
- I think if we just each quietly did something positive… this can be something.
- Caitlin Moran has a new book on the way.
- It wasn’t until the late 1920s that technologies in dance photography evolved to allow photographers to capture their subjects in flight.
- I don’t need a pandemic to stay home and notice the minutiae of daily life
- Another recent insight: it’s possible to be grateful and nauseated at the same time.
- These are beautiful times and I am lucky to be alive right now.
- Fact is, I’ve already been down this diversity road to nowhere.
- Who wants to eat a good supper should eat a weed of every kind.
- Even before the doorbell rang, through the side window, I could see someone holding flowers.
- When I was fourteen I got arrested often.
- Whenever I decide to buck a trend and do something my own way, I yell “I’m going rouge!” with gusto.
- Almost every time I go to make something that involves my sewing machine I have to go to the YouTube video about how to thread the bobbin.
- When you’re a writer, most of the time your work is invisible.
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.
June 9, 2020
Gleanings
- If you’re not a person of color, please read this.
- I should say: I never intended to become a spy.
- What does a story about a verandah in the1930’s have to do with COVID19 social distancing?
- The firehose of love for mothers left me in the dark…
- Between walking and sitting, between exploring and absorbing, this generation is shaping themselves to guide the future.
- I see glimpses of a great awakening in these times, and I hope it’s true.
- Death is weird. The ultimate fake out.
- Letter from a white home, to other white people
- I am not great at metaphors, but I think living through 2020 is turning out to be much like that vine.
- I love coincidence because it makes us see patterns that aren’t there. I’m pretending this is part of some grand plan I’d unconsciously made for myself.
- So yes, say something, but also: Pause. Know when to listen.
- When I am swimming, the water ruffled by wind, no one else on the shore but my husband wrapped in a towel, it could be any summer, any lake, any morning.
- In praise of heroes…
- 7 books by Black poets I think you’ll love
- So that’s how my week is going–how my weeks are going, as they blur together, weirdly ephemeral and indistinct but also somehow relentless, a foggy procession through time.
- We talk about our culture because we are white and it is important to talk about whiteness, and what it means in the world: it means that we are safer, and we are heard, and that we always have the benefit of the doubt.
- On notice
May 26, 2020
Gleanings
- It’s time to resist the siren call of pie season and make a galette instead.
- At my desk, in the night, I was thinking about rumours.
- Having the decision made for me by circumstances hasn’t changed everything about how I feel about teaching online, but it has made a lot of those feelings irrelevant.
- What I know about kitchens, is that we make them work, even when they don’t make sense.
- The world is opening up, meaning that we’ll have to see each other again. Get to see each other. My bad.
- And yesterday, I was reminded that all writing starts somewhere, and a sense of wonder–both in the sense of “awe” and in the sense of “curiosity”–is a great starting point.
- when I do get the urge to sew, and when I’ve gotten out all of the things, I binge like a run-on sentence
- Probably I would have melted down by now, but it’s the flowers keeping us going.
- Do you keep a book on your breakfast table and read it in the morning?
- A diary of the mundane and (some of) what we ate.
- what do you think will happen?
- I realize as I do this that I am more interested in the process than the result.
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May 19, 2020
Gleanings
- In one of those ironies you might not even notice if you were swimming three times a week and driving to Edmonton, flying to Ottawa, the flowers have never been lovelier.
- As we speak, my mother is dying.
- What is even better than regular mail you ask? Why, book mail of course!
- What is going to happen to our whole lexicon of (germ-infested) interpersonal body language and gesture?
- What did you think? That a weeded garlic bed would somehow act as a charm against the dark?
- The novel worked for me as a reader, even if, when I sat back to think more about it, it hasn’t proved quite so satisfactory for me as a critic.
- My views are drastically altered, but I must accept it. Gradually, I will. I’m embracing the brightness and the new things out my window.
- In a world that’s on its head, it’s reassuring when we can count on a season to send an evening that is beautiful, and wholly familiar.
- I think we owe it to men to start telling them the truth.
- She wrote about women writing, living in the suburbs, having small children, in a way that gave me hope and acted in some ways as caution.
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.
