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.
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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.
May 13, 2019
Gleanings
- I wasn’t so much addicted to the spectacle as to the ongoing certainty that the next click, the next link, would bring clarity.
- She was not a brand. She was a warrior in a cardigan.
- But men themselves also need to think more carefully about how they behave in public spaces.
- But here’s what I notice more and more often… this focus on the ‘want’
- I marvel that we can swim up and down in harmony: overtaking, capitulating, motioning to pass with a silent frantic wave, smiling a nod of thanks between gasps and tumbles.
- When I wake in the morning, I am no longer waking to darkness.
- This is my neighbour’s plot. Rhubarb and raspberries so far. He will have tomatoes that should win a prize by August.
- I pulled my suit on the other morning at the pool, only to find the top band had entirely unattached from the rest of the suit.
- The oak table became Mum’s worktop and her most valuable tool…
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.
May 6, 2019
Gleanings
- I don’t mind hearing the word, bravo, but nor do I need it.
- Make no mistake, there is no charity in stirring hatred against your neighbour whatever language they speak in their kitchen. It is a stingy and self-serving ploy to separate us from each other. It puts everyone in a great danger.
- I am in that river of consciousness now, at this point in my life, deep in its waters, sometimes chilly and in danger of losing balance in the current, sometimes so utterly joyous that I have to pull myself back to the shore by force of will.
- But I’m a woman, so I’ve always been aware that what I like is not what everyone likes.
- The urge to leave a mark on a wall, in the sand or on on the radiators, as I once I did, is so instinctively human.
- I think the marvellous is there at all times, and we just have to be in the correct state to peer into the cracks of the universe.
- Yes, I felt porous, the generations coming to rest in my cheekbones…
- If we pour some tea, put on our favourite music, and come to our work saying, “I’m a bit nervous,” it always seems to open up, doesn’t it?
Giveaway alert! I’ve got a copy of Gladstone Press’s GORGEOUS new edition of Mrs. Dalloway up for grabs. You can enter via my Instagram or Facebook pages. If you don’t do either social medium, drop me an email and we’ll sort it out.
April 29, 2019
Gleanings
- Women have a long history of swimming: it’s been socially acceptable for us to be athletes in the pool and open water for much longer than in other sports.
- To me, India’s cells are like starlight —a hint of the brightness that was my child.
- Kiwi-strawberry walked so flavors like green tea and hibiscus could run.
- It’s time to bust these common menstrual myths.
- It’s pretty fierce this love in our house sometimes…
- Podcasters are regularly criticized for what they have to say, but women are also being attacked for how they say it.
- Out went the elaborate meals, and in came the pizza, frozen enchiladas, and instant ramen.
- I’ve read some weird stuff since getting into literature in translation last year.
- I think that when we consider things quite opposite to what is expected, we stay freer and more open to breaking rules. Which is something else we should consider.
- The clutter might not bring me joy, but I’m not an overly joyful person, so that’s okay.
- Good old Jake Addison.
- She says it isn’t magic but I’m not sure any of us believe her.
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April 23, 2019
Gleanings
- Maybe this failure has left a space for something new
- We know our children so well, their every mood and whim, each and every freckle on their cheeks. So, to see them out in the world is precious, because it’s a perspective we rarely get.
- I found myself hovering between the twilight of a life and the exciting beginning of another, brimming with light, song, spring, migratory restlessness.
- I am so grateful to all the people who motivate me to make, who celebrate the mistakes, are inspired by them, even, and who choose to bring my heartfelt creations into their homes.
- Once the shoot appears, you don’t abandon it and binge watch Deadwood (though I do recommend that latter). You tend it, adjust what needs to be adjusted, water it, care for it, sing Flock of Seagulls’ songs to it.
- Search widely, write courageously, and be open to possibility.
- So I’ve been baking bread, off and on, for a very long time. I’ve grown and learned a few tricks along the way.
- You will find writers who will argue quite fiercely for what an essay is or isn’t. I’m more interested in what it can be.
- April was showering in earnest today, but it did not deter sufficient numbers of readers from carefully bundling up their books and reading devices and meeting for our largest gathering of silent book club devotees to date…
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.
