September 23, 2019
Gleanings
- We must be brave enough to change the things we can.
- I dared to trust, to try something that was ever-so-slightly beyond me…
- On Mondays we talk about cancer.
- But really, in a still life, who every really notices the table?
- For me, noticing the good things – however tiny – has been a sort of hook into the world when I had been feeling like I was drifting.
- Hosting a dinner party, or brunch, or lunch, or happy hour is a magical thing.
- Some people said, It must be like a death! It was nothing like a death. It was like burning a cake.
- Okay” is one of my favourite words.
- The satisfaction is almost entirely in the process, the weighing and testing, and I know that the resulting work is never quite what I thought it would be.
September 16, 2019
Gleanings: The BLOG SCHOOL LAUNCH DAY EDITION!
- But, in blogging, I found my own purpose.
- June to September
- 9 books about trees
- One of the most enlivening side effects of these movie marathons is that I get so involved in the dream vision of movies that it becomes a lens that transforms the everyday world.
- The years of dithering and backtracking as I wrote the novel now felt like a blessing that allowed its completion to sync up with this moment-within-a-moment.
- I had gone in looking for a mystery that featured trees.
- Writing is gathering.
- Feeling a bit shit? Well maybe some of these things will make you feel a wee bit less so?
September 9, 2019
Gleanings
- Your responsibility is what you can control.
- So, if I’m getting this correct, the universe is telling me to be generous
- Blogging about my teaching prods me to reflect on it rather than just get through it and move on; I think it has made me a better teacher as a result.
- One can’t think too much about the idea of a dozen almost naked bodies sharing a large, be it chlorinated, bath tub.
- Let’s generously share our history, our knowledge and experiences, the lessons we’ve learned and our hopes for their futures.
- The main thing I learned about baking this summer is that many things are cake.
September 16 is one week away, which means one more week for you to receive 15% savings on Blog School: Pickle Me This with discount code “early bird”. Find out more here…
September 3, 2019
Gleanings
- What would happen if we claimed our expertise, and if we claimed our power? What is it that you know? What happens when you share that joyfully with the world? How can we be great and kind and powerful and mindful and joyful and decent?
- Nature is astounding. Human nature is confounding.
- There’s so much to see and discover in her world of trees…
- One day somebody is going to be sorting through my debris and wondering what some of it meant.
- This is how it was in The Long Ago Days of The First Radishes.
- It helps to be alone for a huge chunk of the day, in a silent cabin, on the edge of the ocean.
- So today, I’m here to tell you: INHABIT YOUR NATURAL STATE.
- I’m grateful daily that I can work wherever I find myself.
- I’ve been on some amazing journeys to far off places (from my armchair) so far this year.
- But any day, any weather is a good day and fine and acceptable weather for a silent book club meeting.
- I can attest to the value and impact of the Shine Theory.
- There’s still a place, a quiet place, for the books that don’t aspire to Big.
- If I could let go of the idea that I should know, I might actually learn a great deal.
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August 6, 2019
Gleanings
- What is new is that I have decided, at the age of 60, that I am a goddamn knockout. Like Dorothy at the end of the film version of The Wizard of Oz, I had the power I sought all along.
- Just as “home” will always be the spot on the map where I am not at the moment, class is the same: one foot in each world, at home in both, never completely belonging to either.
- And reading continued to do its deep and secret work: it created for us a place each day where we could talk about things. How seasons change.
- Libraries are vibrant and fluid places that help us to adjust to the world and their doors must be kept open to everyone – for free!
- We’ve had a good long marriage, the still life painter and me.
- One of the things I love about concerts, theatre, lectures, any large spectacle, really, is taking in the audience.
- That ambivalence makes The Tortoise and the Hare more interesting…
- Along the way, there are a few rueful mentions of disappointments and reading gone astray … but it is all enchanting to listen to, and such a privilege to have shared.
- In fact, living here, along a beautiful country lane miles from the bustle, it’s quite easy to be in denial about just about anything…
- Classic Mennonite Elderberry Pie
- When life hits me hard, one of the first actions I take is to buy movie tickets.
- A narrative is purposeful and directed, but the news confuses me.
PS Big News: The Blog School website is live and our official launch is September 16! Learn more…
July 15, 2019
Gleanings: Special Summer Edition
- “I had this tremendous urge to see giraffes roaming free.”
- “I want to say that I think selfies are potentially beautiful and ridiculous and fun and ultimately sublime attempts to capture your own soul when others have perhaps failed.”
- I want readers to understand that women are highly complicated and complex individuals — and that humans are very contradictory.
- That morning, Georgia found out that I was the tooth fairy.
- How like motherhood to occupy the margins, even while the image depends on you, depends on the hand you firmly hold against the force of a door that wants to close.
- What is a photograph of an ordinary person? That’s my question.
- I am definitely a sucker for a well-designed and beautiful book cover and this one might be the most beautiful I’ve ever seen.
- Begin with humility, I told the group in my workshop. Your ignorance is an uncovered manhole and if you’re not careful, you’ll topple in.
- One day, my baby will wear an enormous tutu and dance around the kitchen to Blondie.
June 17, 2019
Gleanings
- Amelia Bedelia turns passive aggression into a kind of art.
- Sharing and generosity are at the core of our values and at the core of my art. Sharing, giving and generosity is a central tenet of my life. It’s tied to love, respect and compassion. It’s tied to justice.
- I expect the process of writing a novel might just involve a lot of thinking you are unworthy.
- The first day of outdoor swimming in Toronto is truly my favourite day of the year.
- ‘taxi!’, by helen potrebenko
- There’s some science behind the appeal of comfort reads, it turns out.
- And then I started thinking about community and about belonging.
- So after all the white and drabness of the other season, suddenly we arrive at summer.
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June 10, 2019
Gleanings
- Jennifer Weiner created the perfect reading nook. No one used it.
- Whatever we do next, as adults of our species, will determine everything.
- Women, can two or more of us get together without mentioning our bodies and diets? It would be a small act of resistance and a kindness to ourselves.
- What does it mean to be “the village” — to not just long for connection with other people but to actually show up and build those kinds of relationships and, along the way, create community for yourself and other people?
- What a gift is this life, the tawdry glamour, the writing, the body that I’ve been given and that has taken me this far.
- As the years tick past those early days, parenting life becomes less visible, doesn’t it? I suppose you are meant to know what you are doing by then?! Imagine that! Because we’re just winging it like way back when.
- So yes, we’re uncomfortable with the notion that genocide can happen within our borders, in our communities, on the long highways of our country, in its rivers where so many young women were thrown…
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June 3, 2019
Gleanings
Whew! A bumper crop of good things to read online this week (or “on the line” as my youngest daughter said to me today when she was trying to explain something she’d seen on the internet). Gleanings was on hiatus last week while I was on vacation, which means I’ve got even more than usual to share this time. Thank you, as always, for reading!
- First, I stumbled upon a Chuck E. Cheese training video from the 1980s when I was procrastinating on my master’s thesis.
- I was already in love with notebooks and spying before I met Harriet, but she made that okay.
- How Claudia Kishi Inspired A Generation Of Asian American Writers
- What are children to do when they realize that the adults in their lives are making it up as they go along.
- This year I even considered scaling back the unicorn party as a sort of white flag gesture.
- What my mother likely hadn’t considered until that moment was that my books, and my Anne books in particular, were the constants in my life.
- You want to be building community, so that when you need to access community, community’s there for you.
- This is what it looks like to have a feminist husband.
- What I’ve learned from being vulnerable is we are not alone, we are all different, and we all desire to be accepted and accept ourselves fully in this journey we call life.
- it’s the swim cap, it gives me a facelift
- What are your indelible words?
- My goal is to make this summer all about having fun in the water.
- Holy cow. Can you even believe an amazing baker is whipping up ’embroidered’ cakes?
- nanaimo ice cream bars (!!!)
- I have learned the hard way that this is a lesson that everyone comes to in their own time–if a friend is fretting endlessly about what to wear to a party, “What makes you think everyone is going to be looking at you?” is not an immensely helpful thing to say.
- Over the years we’ve lived here, I’ve grown to love the homing pigeons that live a few doors down.
- I’d be a faster reader if I read one at a time, I imagine.
- It’s a bit of a shame that the in-between has not really had its time to shine, isn’t it?
- I’m especially glad that I can keep the old and useless and rejected in use a bit longer.
- If any of the eyeballs in your manuscript make sparks or are steely or artless, I would further invite you to try to make that happen and ask someone to tell you exactly what you’re doing with your eyes.
- Women acting collectively in open and angry defiance can change history…
May 21, 2019
Gleanings
- That’s what theoretical and ideal thinking abstracted from lived experience does, and it does it on purpose. Which…is why the anecdote has the capacity to do radical knowledge work.
- I wrote the first line of each chapter first, to get an idea of what it could be about or what might happen. It was like a poem because at that point, the novel was so distilled.
- Rage works. It takes time and numbers and a willingness to express it, but it is among the most reliable catalysts of social and political change.
- She made being human into an art.
- When I planted the clematis, I wasn’t thinking about the future.
- The placement of the park benches aren’t accidental.
- No one wants to stress out over waffles – even the Liège kind.
- I knew nothing about blogging and didn’t know how to start but I did want to write honestly about our ordinary days here at home that, in the context of the times, were surprisingly enriching and satisfying.
- Each small thing offered, in this world in my mind, is actually a really big thing.
- When people are close to us through their stories – around the dinner table, over Netflix or through blogs – it becomes impossible to put people into groups out of fear and hate, despite the horrors others may be trying to push into our ears.
- Her dual loyalties, she says, have led to an interest in translation.
- When I look at certain photographs I am immediately transported back to where it was taken.
- And this, really, in a nutshell, is why I blog.
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.
