May 30, 2023
Gleanings
- if you spend a lot of time imagining a person’s reaction to a present it’s probably a sign that the present is mostly about you, anyhow.
- And again and again I keep revelling in the reaction of people as I say, “I appreciate you.”
- If you’ve ever wondered what booksellers have in their beach bags, wonder no more!
- and though overall I am still disappointed in it as a revision of Dickens’s novel, as its own novel Demon Copperhead is, I think, actually pretty good.
- I want the names of everything. The bees in the first tomato flowers — Bombus vosnesenskii, the yellow-faced; the Swainson’s thrush I heard as I went out for my swim–whit, whit; the long roots of Rumex acetosella, sheep’s sorrel, I keep pulling from between the pavers in the greenhouse. The rough-skinned newt, the Pacific tree frog (sometimes the chorus frog, once Hyla regilla, now Pseudacris regilla, though nothing about the frog has changed), Rosa ‘Félicité Perpétue’ by the front door, where the tree frogs lie low in the damp earth.
- As my children and I stood at the intersection of Dupont and Davenport, it literally felt like it was raining petals. I resisted the urge to pull out my phone and video the whole wild scene. Some things are better experienced with the eyes.
- But the thing I ran into when my kids left me, once again, with a basket of overpriced strawberries on their last legs — fruit they’d asked me to buy but then mysteriously lost interest in eating when it was presented to them at breakfast — and I decided to instead turn strawberries into strawberry-ade, so to speak, was that every lemonade recipe I’ve already published contains steps I lacked inclination to do.
- But I am most intrigued by Radha’s question in the book, describe the scent of your mother.
- This, my friends, is a book that will pull back a curtain and show you something incomparably lovely, and then while you are gazing at it in awe, punch you in the stomach.
- Critique works when we’re playing together, when we like and admire each other’s unique gifts, when there is an equal exchange of energies.
- Although helmets have ruined that feeling in my hair, I felt the cool breeze on my face as I tooled around the quiet streets of Weston. There’s not much left of that farmgirl flying fearlessly over gravel. I’m a bit wobbly and weeks from feeling confident on roads with actual traffic but it felt terrific!
- It is a testimony to Donna Tartt’s brilliance as as a writer that when I was in the book I rarely thought “There is no reason for sane people to behave like this,” but later I would be mulling it over, or trying to describe it why I liked the book so much to Mark, and couldn’t string it together.
- The world is full of questions, but art doesn’t hand you the answers. It makes an offering.
- As ever, the only real secret to creativity, is to work, to be creative, to be obsessed, to look at art, to read. You never hear of any successful artist talk about their secret being to go to cocktail parties, or art shows or poetry readings. (Though those can all be lovely things).
- That’s the thing about wonders. They’re fleeting, ever changing. Nothing stays the same, especially me. But when I look, I can find one or two, or seven delights. Today’s wonders bring me joy or peace.
May 16, 2023
Gleanings
- Tranchese believes that the media’s frequent and unbalanced usage of alleged/allegedly since 2012 has subtly changed the way it’s interpreted.
- May is the month for memories and small moments, for topping up your joy tank.
- That’s a lot of energy to expend and baggage to unpack while I am just trying to eat my goddamned lunch in the one hour I have to myself in the workday.
- Fellowship Point is like a Barbara Taylor Bradford novel if it were written by Elizabeth Strout.
- Hers was a voice that made us want to do what she was doing.
- As I survey the landscape of my life, I can see that my fascination with symbols has deep roots. Tarot. Sigils. Witchcraft. Tattoos. Literary analysis and Coen Brothers movies.
- After such a long stretch working at my kitchen table, I’d forgotten what a commute can bring about, a shift in mindset, an unfurling of ideas, a transition.
- Up there, where someone has painted SCRIBE? That’s where I met the editors who published my first story in 1992.
- I don’t understand flight, I don’t know anything about velocity or lift or speed … but I do know there a is full moon on Friday and that it’s magical to look up and revel in the moon’s shining beauty while soaring high above the clouds, and that beauty is a worthwhile lens through which to view life.
- I think a lot about my boat of calm, and how I’ve had my moments where I was not calm. But I’ve also had a couple of deeply profound signs / interactions of late that tell me this might be one of the most important things I can do. And maybe a lot of appearing calm is acting? But because it’s a practice for me, a long one, I feel like my calm-acting has been worth something, too.
- The forest, it turns out, is an excellent teacher.
May 2, 2023
Gleanings
- It’s no picnic, that’s for sure: the unexamined life may not be worth living, but (as I have often thought myself in recent months) surely in many ways it is an easier way to live.
- Blue Portugal & Other Essays is a book I’ve been writing all my life, through all the years that have led to this one, stitched from scraps of beauty and difficulty and love.
- The year is now 2023. Books have been published. Regimes have changed. Children have entered and nearly completed middle school, gray hairs have sprung, betraying, and I believe — I mean, I’m absolutely utterly certain — that this is the final iteration of what I consider to be the perfect homemade hash brown patty….
- What is the relationship between nature and each of these walkers? Is there a melding of purpose and experience, a common recompense on some level? Have any of them met the soul walking upon the path? How aware is each walker, of just how interconnected they are to this woodland? In the simplest of terms, the trees give off the oxygen we breathe in, and absorb the carbon dioxide we exhale – a true symbiotic partnership that has spanned centuries.
- It is what my brain has been like this month. Just flayed, spread out and incapable. (looks like a flower, but carries a whole lot of teeth) while my body does all the things necessary: kids are mostly fed, laundry is done and even folded, sports are attended, jobs are attended, my brain has been uninvolved.
- I share my words with you. You provide me with your thoughts and wisdom. I sit with your words. And I am rewarded with more learning, insights, and additional pieces to the puzzle.
- Do I recommend it? Only if you enter into the experience of reading it with a sense of generosity and curiosity, as if you’re conducting an experiment. Which, come to think of it, isn’t a bad way to begin reading any book: with generosity and curiosity.
- For me, fourteen years ago when I was desperate to move on from the thing that had consumed my energy for almost a year, meeting an active, healthy person who had done the treatment and gone on to live a good life, inspired me. My hope is that my story in some way inspired them. They certainly inspired me. Out there playing pickleball when they’re still dealing with pulling gauze out of their chest. Now that’s impressive!
- I am sad to report that I have exhausted all of the available fiction by Iona Datt Sharma. But I am overjoyed to have found them in the first place.
- All day, it was like looking through a small microscope, a zoomed in experience of the world. Seeing just a piece, a small part of all of this, of all of us.
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.
