April 25, 2023

Gleanings

• I’ve previously shared with you that grief is my roommate, inescapable even when I’d rather live alone. In that moment in my basement though, I realized that my emotional house-mate had, in recent months, quietly moved to the lower level.
• The largess of Andrew Carnegie allowed for the construction of five libraries here in Essex County, and the one in Windsor was the first Carnegie Public Library in Canada.
• But this book, and Sashi’s brothers and friends who kept disappearing from the village, brought back not only the memory of that young man who disappeared from our office, but also the realization how war is never just black and white, never just good versus evil, never only the one narrative we hear. Because we never truly know how the everyday lives of people are forever changed and often erased.
• From author Deryn Collier comes a smart, charming postwar historical novel based on the true story of an aspiring writer who dares to dream big.
• For me, I decided to make a deal with the world. The deal is that I agree to believe everyone is trying their best, and I hope that they will believe I’m trying my best. No conditions. That’s the deal.
• Burr falls squarely in the tradition of The Southern Ontario Gothic, mining the unsettling territory where our wilder, more honest selves rub up against the veneer of suburban respectability that blankets us. It reminds me of the novels I read as a teenager just beginning to discover what literature could do, books by Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro that offered me the radical notion that the boring, bright suburban world I inhabited was as full of ghosts and desire and grief and decay as any other time and place.
• 7. I wonder if she even liked the dishes? If they ever got used? If the dress felt good on her body?
• And now I am being careful about what I wish for. Warmer days, yes, but not too hot (the ability of bees to both pollinate and to reproduce decreases in extreme heat). Nights without frost. The third planting of tomato seeds (better late than never?) growing to full size, heavy with fruit, the pans of them roasting with garlic, rosemary, quarters of onions, the beautiful mutilated world somehow surviving, surviving us.
• After much reflection, I’m now learning that the confidence, daring and joie du vivre that I felt in my Mum throughout my childhood was in part the result of a woman who didn’t compare herself, and didn’t bother too much with what others thought. She was herself, not a version she aspired to.
• Last night as I turned off lights and tucked kids into bed, I caught a whiff of lilacs. A neighbor’s lilac bush was blowing its heady perfume three doors over and two stories up, right into our windows. The evening air had grown chilly and the sky was not quite dark, so I closed the windows and drew the shades and thanked goodness for the millionth time that winter is over and that tomorrow could bring more lilac huffing.

April 18, 2023

Gleanings

• And then, “I ask myself constantly….why do you return again and agin to Woolf? It is because the text made me!” And isn’t that a moment of joy for us all, to be in the presence of such a wonderful engagement with a text.
• The objective of the exercise is not to look for life balance, but to look for movement towards the things you love, those things that uniquely define and delight you, then tilt madly towards them.
• Oh, right. Duh. Public schools are basically the most complex kind of community there could possibly be–a crew of people from different racial, religious, and class backgrounds, who didn’t choose one another, coming together with pathetically limited resources to try to care for one of our most precious, insanity-inducing assets: our kids. Some eggs are going to get broken with that collective recipe.
• There are some things I just can’t enumerate, like the peanut butter and honey sandwiches, cheese sticks, and protein balls we ate on the road. Or the long stretches of beautiful or non-descript highways we traversed. The patches of wildflowers on the roadsides. The few scary traffic situations we endured, and frightening bridges we drove over. The laughs and the catching up about family and friends from way back. The discussions about childhood in which my sister and I just don’t remember things the same. The times I just wished we were there already.
• And I wondered to myself, when did my need for validation transition into a desire for affirmation? It was an aha moment; I felt like I had discovered something new.
• It’s probably ridiculous, how much I love an HB/2. It’s simple. And it’s forgiving. I can be most creative, and try and be wrong countless times- until something comes out right, when I’ve got this guy in my hand
• Okay, so there’s the obvious impracticality of spilling mouth wash all over your vintage Guatemalan textile, but really, who doesn’t love to floss over a bustle of fancy fabric?
• In summer we will swim in the bay that is hung with mist. Small boys love the shore for the starfish, the crabs under rocks, the anemones pulsing in the tidepools. Looking up from the water, I’ll remember the lilies in their damp moss, the decades of seeing them, how the sea rises and falls, rises, falls, generations of ravens in the trees, and the oyster shells on the side of the path.
• If you are a bird person, it’s hard to have a favourite bird, but if I was pressed, I would have to say that Dark-Eyed Juncos are among my favourites. See what I did there though? I didn’t commit to having a favourite, but I acknowledged that Juncos are one of my favourites. See? Hard.
• Despite the algorithm that can apparently now predict language — I couldn’t predict the way that my heart would leap when I heard a friend call his teen son sweetheart on the phone yesterday, or expect a machine to know the feel of her heart thumping against my palm while cuddling on the couch, Blake’s howling laughter in the background.

April 11, 2023

Gleanings

• I think about the moment I found out I was pregnant and how I counted the years until my pregnancy would turn eighteen which felt like a hundred years from then and now it’s here. That people talk about empty nesting but not about this weird transitional in-between existential crisis of WAIT IT’S OVER. HOLD ON… WAIT, WHAT!? Like… for example, no one really talks about the funeral procession that is college tours.
• I cannot tell you what a gift that little message has been to me. A touchstone of sorts. A simple gesture that serves to remind that someone crazy enough to ride his bicycle from San Diego to St. Augustine, loves me. Now, how cool is that? Pretty dang cool!
• Now there’s a word – unfiltered – that seems like it could be a good thing. It conjures up being unshackled or uncensored, freedoms we value in some contexts. However, our echo chambers of social media and curated streaming services lull us into a false sense of security that everyone is going to unfilter their messages the same we we would. At least I did. But, as I recently discovered, being unfiltered isn’t always desirable. 
• Writing is my way of exploring and making sense of what I’m feeling in my heart.  Once it’s all committed to words, I do a little editing and then post about one in ten to my blog.  It is a privilege, being able to freely publish, but it is an absolute honour receiving all the feedback, the sweet (and snarly) comments and especially all the words of support and encouragement.
• I describe it like this to clients: You’re not just crossing unknown terrain, you’re creating the land as you go. And the first time across, the goal is to get to the end. Along the way you might drop flags in the ground, markers of places where you need to return and fine tune. Maybe add an oasis in this desert; get specific about the flora and fauna in this forest.
• And here I am, Sunday morning, ready to pull the covers over my head again. This time, not from a feeling of despair but rather a sense of deep contentment.
• I am the slowest moving tortoise, let’s call me a giant galápagos, but even the giant galápagos moves a couple of kilometers each day.
• Good writing has a lot to do with specific detail — it’s not just any blue cup that broke, it’s the blue pottery cup with the crooked handle that he found at the thrift shop and presented to her, down on one knee, when she was hoping for an engagement ring.
• When will I learn/ to trust what I see, what I feel/ what I know?
• My point is that the behavior is exactly the same! Assuming I am speaking to a fellow Old here: you did things for “likes” too! You brought the “right” book or stack of comics to be seen reading at lunch. You wore sunglasses when you didn’t need to, fished the band t-shirt out of the laundry, and went specifically to the graveyard with your sketchbook to smoke cigarettes.

March 29, 2023

Gleanings

• March… ah, March. It’s a month, a verb, a noun, … a promise.
• There are moments when one’s actual happening life feels fully integrated and aligned with one’s intentions and beliefs. This was that.
• If you know what “three on the tree” means, you’re no kid. And when you were one, there’s a good chance you lived on a farm. 
• When we allow ourselves to be fed single narratives by others, by people in power in the mainstream, then we are in danger of stereotypes and preconceptions taking root in our minds.
• As to my fondness for poetry, Mrs. Nelson always said that my preference was twofold; because I was a lazy reader – I could quickly read a poem and get right onto analysing it for an assignment or essay, and because I loved music so much – the cadence of poetry dovetailed into that passion.
• That’s my dream—to one day have that conversation with my children about when the country’s grown-ups finally pierced the veil, understood that we would never understand one another completely, but we could still agree on wise limitations that would save lives and our very own American souls.
• ‘Whose needs are you meeting by visiting your husband?’ My therapist asks me./ Today I can speak the truth she has known for much longer than I have. Mine. My needs. 
• Part of what I do when I lie awake at night* is fret about lying awake at night. (I’m fun like that.) 
• The other morning I asked my husband, did you not sleep well last night? He had been so restless. He informed me that I had spent most of the night ‘manipulating’ the blankets, pulling them off him, twisting them around me, and leaving him naked to the cold air blowing in from our window. And, he added, my snoring had been off the charts! Why didn’t you wake me? No, he said, you were clearly having a good sleep.
• I love all the kids, all of them, with all of the learning they still have to do, and all they have to teach us as they do. (especial love today to trans kids and the kids without a box. holding them to the deepest depth of my ability. how incredibly brave they are to make something new.)
• I can now tell my neurologist that I doodle. 
• I was remembering things more or less correctly but how easily I took for granted the actual fact that I was Greece. That I walked up the marble steps to look at the Erechtheion, the porch of the maidens, the wildflowers growing on the hill.
• I read that one of the most critical parts of any journey is the return home. That the journey asks, for us to gather up the medicine that we found along our way, and bring it back … not just for ourselves, but to our home, our community.
• Do you want to know what’s almost as magical as an animal friend that goes for a walk and comes home on her own? Plants that make little hard, dry seeds and then give them to you so you can collect them and make new plants from seemingly nothing the next year.
• I think what drew me back to thinking again about and wanting to re-watch RW is for what it teaches us about knowing. How things and information can move in and out of the light, how the way we know things is more fluid than we’d like, and how we’re continually trying to make sense out of what we see, and then act on that to the best of our ability (knowing that we don’t know everything).

March 21, 2023

Gleanings

• It’s taken me years to realize that fancy notebooks are stifling. Beautiful, but stifling. Because unless I write really slowly, I’m a messy writer. And slow, pretty writing isn’t helpful when you’re just trying to get ideas out.
• This being human is so unique… to have the awareness of the past and future, the yesterday and the tomorrow can wreak havoc on my heart.
• How often — will it be for always? — how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, ‘I never realized my loss until this moment’? The same leg is cut off time after time. The first plunge of the knife into the flesh is felt again and again.
• What makes for strong writing in math? I asked. Everything serves a purpose. It ties together. There’s not a lot of extraneous stuff. Importantly: there is clarity.
• I read in part because I like to. I also read because I write, and reading helps me learn. And I read because I enjoy stories, and people, and challenging ideas, and other peoples’ expertise. 
• I’m not sure I even knew my Yiayia wasn’t Greek until my teens, which given her terrible Greek accent and strawberry blonde hair shows how very up my own arse I was.
• When I went out to see if the crocus in the garden had opened yet, wanting a photograph, I saw the rhubarb unfurling. Looking ahead, I am thinking about crumbles, pies, jam with ginger, and compote to have with yogourt.
• This book is so ambitious which made it also bulky. This put off some who wanted it trimmed down, but I’m here for women writers who want to take up space. After so many years of impressionistic, slim novels, I’m finding something revelatory about bigger novels. They aren’t afraid to sprawl.

March 14, 2023

Gleanings

• I’m amazed at how grateful people are for doing such a small and frankly entirely selfish thing – I wanted company and put the word out.
• One of the things I’ve missed the most during our COVID isolation is the kitchen conversations with my friends — each one of them kind, loving, loyal, inquisitive, adventurous, and smart as all get-out!  We’d gather around the island, plug in the kettle, warm the pot, grab the cups, milk, spoons and biccies and settle in for an afternoon of solving the world’s problems.  Or at least taking a stab at solving our own.
• But I think the desire to create is more than that, more than just a legacy. It’s different parts of yourself coming together – your experience, your talent, your learning, your emotions, your thoughts, your imagination – in one expression. With your creation you say: this is a glimpse of who I am. It satisfies a piece of your soul.
• it feels like such a gift to witness others in their everyday ordinary extra-ordinarines. sometimes i feel like I’m intruding, like I’m gawking, peeking through a window into someone else’s world …
• I have been off work the past two days—well today is the second day—because I’ve not been feeling well, and while I probably could have gone in today, I’m glad I didn’t. I am learning, finally, at the ripe old age of 56, to allow myself the opportunity to slow down when I need to.
• So a title first and then a decision about what to do with the manuscript. I don’t have forever. None of us do. So I’ve become quite purposeful about tying up threads.
• The story is thin, but at that time I was still figuring out a lot about writing myself. I still am. I also didn’t know how serious R was. Next time–if there’s a next time–I’ll write a better story. And I’ll revise it before I give it to R.

March 7, 2023

Gleanings

• high need for closure.
• What’s courageous about the timeless combination of broccoli and pasta, Deb? It’s the cooking time. This broccoli is not al dente. It does not “retain a crunch,” “still have some bite to it,” or keep any of the verdant green hue it entered the pan with. And, even more audacious, it doesn’t wish to.
• May we follow his example and make our dreams come to fruition. So,we may not be tempted in the least to ride a bicycle and camp across the United States, but I bet there’s something for each of us. What’s calling you?
• Mark was very startled by the phrase “that’s a good-looking dog” when I first pointed one out on the sidewalk, but now he uses it too–it originated with my father.
• Like I said, I wasn’t asking for its input. I don’t need my phone to tell me how much I’ve walked or haven’t walked. Does my phone know that the sidewalks have been icy, the winds bitter and blustery? It should! It seems to know everything else.
• It’s more important to make good art than to garner a lot of attention on social media.
• simply because I want to cherish the sweetness (and ache) of this very fleeting now in which we travel with stuffed bunnies.
• We don’t know at the time that these ordinary moments will one day resonate in the way that they do. And that, in part, is what makes them so extraordinary.
• Just in general, it’s been valuable to challenge my preconceived ideas about the environment in which I work. It’s probably premature to use the term “post-pandemic,” but as spring 2023 approaches, I have a sense that many of us–individually and in groups–are looking around and within to see how our work in the world has changed in the past three years and what the future could hold.

February 22, 2023

Gleanings

• I loved this book because it acknowledges the unfairness of the world and the privilege of those who fall back on a shallow understanding of faith. But where I can get mired in despair over these truths, Vanessa is out there beating a path through these weeds for all of us.
• The story was titled Wankus Interruptus, and when I first read those words, centred at the top of the page, I paused. (Do you know this feeling? A fleeting fuzz of nostalgia. A whiff of emotion. In this case, the top note was humour.) The phrase was familiar. Why? And in the next second I recalled.
• If you pay attention to the world, you will love it more than you realized was possible. This love will break you down and build you up.
• When we walked the route to church or our cousins’ house, we passed by the slum where our ayah lived. There was a big gate that separated the area where the servants lived in cramped poverty. Sometimes the gate was open and I would glance in as we walked by, curious about the squalor that lay beyond, where there were children like me but not like me. We were worlds apart.
• Like maybe, even if we aren’t friends (yet!), we are neighbours in a spiritual suburb full of women trying to parent and work and be full human beings and sleep through the night. It’s not a bad place to live.
• That there’s still a piece of me (oh how it works so hard to keep me safe) … that thinks that there is a right and wrong way to get to that place, that there’s a right and wrong way for me to be, to feel, to act, to travel, look, to parent, to human, to live.
• And by the time I’ve done all these things to my outer self, my inner being is nodding and rolling their eyes and going: Yeah, yeah, ok. We’re not such a dirt grub. We clean up nicely, we make cool things, we’re strong, we really do like ourselves and others. Sure. Whatever. Let’s do this.
• I sewed and John healed and then I wrote about how the two processes were intimately connected, the threads overlapping and entwined. (In an older time, his incisions would have been sewn up after the surgery but now most surgeons use staples!)
• You’d think a cylinder would be easy but it’s often the simplest forms that are most unforgiving. As I am not a thrower, I know that my forms will never be as tight as they would be on a wheel, and nor do I want them to be. But cracks won’t do. ‘Practice makes good,’ is my new motto.

February 15, 2023

Gleanings

• Misogyny may have been force-fed to us, but we still ate it up. Realizing later it was making us sick didn’t change that.
• When I’ve gone on solo trips, people have said the same thing to me, “How brave of you.” I have not considered it bravery, merely a curious and adventurous spirit, and, honestly, a bit self-indulgent. Because I can travel, I do.
• Have I mentioned that I do not like anyone touching my feet? This guy, he is going to touch my feet. I wish they could put me under general anesthesia for this but it sounds like no.
• I so believe what Dan Savage said, that a love story has to be written and re-written, over and over again if it is to survive. A couple is not just a commitment in terms of sexual fidelity and household labor, but a commitment to an evolving idea.
• How can I possibly fathom what I’m making of my life, while I’m living it? What a comical task to set for oneself.
• Here’s a way to blog: you take a few things that are currently of interest to you, and then you start to ramble and see if they make sense together. Sometimes they really do! Sometimes it’s kind of a stretch….
• Kindness is a choice, a decision. It’s a conscious intention towards thoughtfulness, amiability and goodwill. I was ready to give up on ever having a map of the creeks, but then a sweet moment of grace happened, the kind that caused gratitude to explode in my chest, and just like that, my world was – is – wonderfully rosy. 
• I can have my spreadsheets and my 5-point book marketing strategy. I can do all that. But then I can also go out for a very quick ski and end up injured, off work and unable to type or do basic tasks for multiple weeks. Who knows how it will all go? NOT ME.

February 7, 2023

Gleanings

• I was lucky to travel to Ukraine in my 60s, lucky to meet far cousins, and to be greeted with bread and salt, with tiny glasses of moonshine flavoured with mountain herbs, and I am reading backwards to remember it all.
• With my next book, I want to strive bring down my expectations. This sounds like I’m joking, but I mean it. I think low expectations make for less disappointment. Also, it helps me to realize there are tons of writers feeling the same way about not making whatever list. It’s not just me.
• The only difference is experienced authors know the unconscious is also at work and, if we’re smart, we’ll lean into whatever gifts it might offer.
• Oh, and about that four-year-old friend, I strongly believe everyone should have one. I’d even go so far as to say, if I could give one gift to everyone in the Universe, it would be a four-year-old-friend. But know this, you will never get to be the teacher when you play school.
•  No, we don’t solve the world’s problems in any of our conversations, nor do we solve our own, but we always come away with food for thought.  Nothing is off the table.
• And this kind of reminded me why I’ve always loved good old fashioned blogging — the way you find things you wouldn’t have otherwise.
• For the flow will continue – you, her, these feelings, this moment, life … we’re already in the river we don’t need to swim against the current … release, allow, find yourself in the flow.
• I don’t actually have much to say about French Braid. I liked it a lot, because it’s the kind of thing I like.
• There really is a magic to playing with ideas and images and watching the piece transform itself from a collection of photos to a composite image. Something new and unexpected is created and if you work intuitively, eventually what you are thinking or trying to say emerges. I find writing that way as well. As long as you don’t try to force things, if you sit down to play with the words, then what you are trying to say eventually finds its way out.
• I’m way fantastic at self-deprecation, which needs work, surely.

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