February 9, 2022

Blog School: BOOST

I’ve been teaching Blog School Courses online for more than two years now, and never knew exactly how to respond when people who’d completed my courses expressed interest in a “Part Two” version of my FIND YOUR BLOGGING SPARK course (which I also teach in a guided version called MAKE THE LEAP). Because my most fundamental tenant of blogging is that the writer has to make her own way, be bold and dare to blaze a path instead of trailing in somebody else’s footsteps.

But sometimes every blogger can benefit from a good creative boost, which is why I’m putting BOOST together, a “Part Two” kind of, as in we’ll get to work together again, but really this time you’ll be making your own way and I’ll be on the sidelines cheering you on.

Cost will be $400.

What you get:

• A one hour one-on-one call with me where we talk about your blogging goals and develop strategies to meet them.
• Written feedback from me on one post per week running for five weeks (Feb 28-April 1)
• A group of supportive and inspiring writers to learn from and respond to via a Google Group Forum
• Optional spotlight on the Blog School Blog and my social media to introduce your work to a wider audience

February 9, 2022

Notes on what is (hopefully) the final weeks of a plague

In the last week, I’ve booked airline tickets and concert tickets, though I’m still not ready to write any of these dates on the calendar. And even the dates that are on our calendar—for engagements much less monumental and crowded—are written faintly in pencil. We keep talking about jinxes. The last time we were supposed to fly to England was March 16 2020, and everybody knows what happened after that. I am sure I’m not alone in imagining the very act of imagining the future might be something of a risky endeavour.

*

I’ve been thinking about freedom, about what freedom means. How empty rhetoric really can be, The possibility that freedom really could be another word for nothing left to lose, because these seem to be sorts of people who’ve been employing the term a lot lately. Thinking about what freedom is once its been thoroughly drained of meaning. The idea of anything being “for freedom,” in particular an 18-wheeler truck parked obstinately in a city block whose driver is quite certain he has the right to demand a democratically elected government be overthrown. I’m remembering a comment by Elamin Abdelmahmoud on the Party Lines Podcast last year in response to the idea that Albertans have a particular affinity for freedom as opposed to the rest of Canada, and Abdelmahmoud dared to disagree, because surely all of us like freedom, every single one of us.

*

(I also think that freedom is a buzzword standing in for something darker, something sinister. That woman who writes cookbooks about glowing said she couldn’t stop crying as those trucks drove across the country, and that finally the world was waking up, and I just don’t trust anybody who’s pining for a revolution because, well, I’ve studied the twentieth century and revolutions never really worked out well for anyone except scary men with weird beards and people who run prison camps. For people who seem to spend so much time worrying about creeping totalitarianism, I am surprised these dots aren’t being connected.)

*

It seems like a weird time to be pitching a fit about Covid restrictions. See my first line about airline tickets and concert tickets. Even if vaccine requirements were your sticking point, if the trajectory we’re currently on continues, these are likely to be lifted as well, which will be a sweet relief, I tell you, because being screamed at about kindness and inclusion by people who refused to be vaccinated in a global health crisis really might just be the end of me, and the sooner I can never think about this ever again, the better.

*

I like everybody better when I don’t have access to a ticker-tape of their every waking thought.

*

For the last five days, an average of around 50,000 people been vaccinated in Ontario every day, a total of more than 700,000 people across the country. (You can find all those numbers here!) I don’t share these numbers in the spirit of “there’s more of us than them” (although I think this is probably the case) because I think that us-ing and them-ing is a terrible trap.

We’re all us, even if we disagree, and figuring how to make that work is how you build community, strengthen society. (Holding a city hostage with your very large truck is not how we make that work, however, in case anybody was wondering.)

The idea that some people’s interests matter more than others is such a dangerous one. (The idea that any of us are morally superior to those who disagree with us is just as bad.)

*
I continue to be strongly resistant to the use of the term “folks.” I mean, I hate it. It’s awful. And it doesn’t matter to me if it’s a right-wing populist saying folks or anyone else who’s saying folks. I don’t like the word “folks” because it’s not supposed to mean “people”, it’s supposed to mean “my kind of people.”

I am really really trying to be someone who says, “It takes all sorts,” and actually means it.

Especially since I think this is fundamentally true.

February 8, 2022

Gleanings

• The trauma plot, Sehgal writes, “presents us with locks and keys.” But humans are not doors to be unlocked with full understanding waiting just beyond the threshold.
• My fear with the Bernina is less setting the machine on fire (though it has crossed my mind!) and more general “breakage” paranoia. Still, I do like the idea of taking care of this new family member.
• The top came out lumpy, so I poured over a citrus-scented glaze and sprinkled on rose petals and lemon zest and decided it looks delicious enough. This is what actually happened and it’s also a metaphor for my winter survival tactics.
• If you’ve felt that inner impulse inspiring you to pick up a pen and write, then I believe you have a vocation, or a calling, if you will, to write.
• *Funny that every time I typed surfing in this post I would type surfacing instead. That works too.
• And after at least a year of feeling like my art wasn’t moving in a direction that made me happy, I decided to shush those voices that told me to ignore the whispers of enchantment.
• Some are a wake-up call, some are thought-provoking, some are humorous, some are poignant, and most are bold truths.
• I love Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s books Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life and Textbook Amy Krouse Rosenthal. If you’ve read them, you undoubtedly love them, too. And if you haven’t I don’t want to spoil them for you because they are under the category “books that delight and uplift.”
• In friendship, we walk the questions together. We feel less alone.
• Rightsizing doesn’t mean downsizing your living space or your closets or even your body. It means making choices that align with your needs, values and vision for yourself, rather than chasing after the elusive ‘more’ or ‘when I have …[enough free time], [more money], [more space], [a better job]’…fill in the blanks, you get the idea.
• Despite all of this chaos in the human world, nature simply goes about its business creating, growing, making new leaves, making new plants out of nothing and just generally being miraculous.
• I want to be stronger, yes, but just as soft.

February 7, 2022

The Cure For Sleep, by Tanya Shadrick

“How I began to spend my time that season would enlarge my life in a way I would only understand later, looking back. At the water’s edge that very first day when I stepped out from the hidden and habitual along with my clothes, I couldn’t know that even a middle-aged mother swimming laps in a small town can send ripples through the universe. But it did.”

Tanya Shadrick’s memoir The Cure For Sleep: Memoir of a Late-Waking Life is a story of becoming, of wonder, awe and possibility. It’s a story of life after death, of creative fulfillment after motherhood, of fierce determination, and the triumph of artistic expression and human connection. Triumph that comes against the odds, for Shadrick grew up accustomed to hiding on the margins, shy and uncomfortable with her place in the world, the working class daughter of a broken marriage, rejected by her father, growing up in the shadow of her mother’s difficult second marriage. Shadrick makes it out of her hometown, however, attending university, where she falls in love with a boy who’s as comfortable retired from society as she is, and they make a life together whose foundation is books and ideas, questions and conversation. And then soon after the birth of their first child, a medical emergency after complications, Shadrick comes as close to dying as one can while still being able to tell the tale, and a vision in this moment causes her to re-imagine her place in the world, to find a way to live more boldly and grow through connection with others.

Shadrick writes about early motherhood as an expedition in a way that delightfully recalls Maria Mutch’s memoir Know the Night, challenging notions of maternal instinct as these were feelings she had to conjure by practice. After having told the story of her “First Life,” she begins to live her second one differently, venturing out to meet other mothers and finding connection there, the inverse of such a tiresome cliche, and together these women support one another and find new ways to make a village. Shadrick eventually leaves the security of her administrative job at the university she attended to begin collecting stories of people living out their last days in hospices. She also starts swimming during the hours she can find for herself, which proves most inspiring, and she eventually becomes an artist in residence at the swimming pool, writing what she calls “laps of longhand.” All these experiences leading Shadrick to become known by a woman called Lynne Roper, whose notes and diaries, after Roper’s death, are edited into a volume called Wild Woman Swimming, longlisted for the Wainwright Book Prize in 2019.

How does one build a life? How does one become an artist?

(And most pressing: what does one wear for such an occasion? Shadrick would recommended a headscarf and an apron.)

If you’ve ever been a human, you’ll intuit that Shadrick’s path is not straightforward. That her success does not extinguish her pain and longing that resulted from her father’s rejection. That her long and beautiful marriage does not continue without the complication of Shadrick falling in love with somebody else. That achieving one’s goals does not always (or ever?) deliver happily ever after, and a wife, a woman, a mother, is forever becoming, which is the best possible outcome, even if it means that such a thing as satisfaction is always out of reach.

I ordered The Cure For Sleep from the UK after following Shadrick for some time on Instagram (swimming connections, I think) and coming to appreciate her artistic vision, and the memoir was everything I’d hoped it would be. Rich and literary, complex and thought-provoking, challenging and absorbing at once.

February 3, 2022

Ted Lasso and the Internet

The other day I stumbled onto a Reddit thread. I don’t usually visit Reddit, but I was searching for information about a gift card fundraiser my Member of Provincial Parliament was running for local families who’d lost their homes in a fire, and someone had posted the flyer on Reddit, others following up on how the fundraiser sounded like a scam (which it’s not, since I’d been emailing my MPP directly about it) and it just occurred to me how everybody on the internet always knows everything all the time, especially when they don’t, and maybe this is the very worst thing about the internet altogether (which is saying a lot).

This idea underlined during the brief moments I’ve spent—before I sensibly manage to pull myself away—reading comments on posts about obnoxious right wing protests, how little chance those commenting (on either side!) are giving themselves or those who disagree with them to listen and learn, to think and consider. How nobody is curious, and how those who support the protests are prone to knee jerk defensiveness, which results in things being irrevocably stuck.

I’m thinking too about how years of writing on the internet has reprogrammed my brain so that I’m consistently taking up the pose of expert, how I can barely know anything without considering turning those ideas into a listicle of life hacks.

And how even movements that began with best intentions—like women owning their authority and using “Dr” in their Twitter profile if they possess such a title, but how that’s led to a whole bunch of “Doctors” peddling misinformation about vaccination. (I’m looking at you, Member of Parliament for Haldimand—Norfolk.)

How nobody is asking questions, unless they’re “just asking questions,” and we know what that’s all about.

How nobody is ever asking questions that they don’t (think they) know the answers to already.

Which brings me to Ted Lasso. (Do all journeys eventually arrive at this place?)…

(Read the rest of my post at my Blog School blog…)

February 1, 2022

Gleanings

• Making meaning of this pandemic is a very human response, but maybe it can also become a bit of an addiction, another way to control, and build an identity around how you’re doing it right while so many are doing it wrong.
• Reading does it again, gets me through, keeps me going, makes everything so very good, especially when I get to share it with someone amazing.
• We reach out, we spend time with each other, we ask questions, we lift each other up; and THEN we create. And the sharing of this creation empowers others to create. We give so we can give, so we can give.
• They shouldn’t let just anyone drive on our street.
• Maybe what I’m really trying to get at with this post is that we still need the tactile, the movement of pen or pencil over paper, we need the brush daubing and sliding through that paint, we need to get our hands a bit dirty or spill a bit of ink.
• Then I dug out this old picture of myself with a group of friends taken 40+ years ago, I don’t know the exact year. Did we know how beautiful we were then? And what if we knew then what we know now? Would we have made different choices? Would we have appreciated ourselves more, compared ourselves to others less?
• A bedcover, yes, but also a record of how I felt about the floods, the rivers, the state I find myself in as an aging woman, attentive to my own heart-beat.
• Isn’t it amazing to consider all of the millions of moments, decisions and details of not only our lives, but of previous generations, that have led us to sitting together, sipping tea and sharing stories on this very day?
• “What exactly is the cloud and how does it work?” I asked. And he admitted that he wasn’t quite certain himself.
• Tookie’s journey would have been enough for a story, but add in the bookstore haunting, her intriguing fellow employees and their stories, the vital role of books, and of course the appearance of the Pandemic and months of panic and isolation, as well as the explosive political moment of Black Lives Matter, and this book is bursting with deep ideas to explore.
• She’s right that grief is lonely, and that in the face of it, our words often fail us. She’s also right that “no matter how anarchic and wretched the grief may be, a poet will have gotten there first.”
• How do we know when it’s too late? I guess that’s what I’m wondering. I’m wondering what I can do right now, and how, and with whom.
• She could have skipped the event, but no one would have known why. She could have stood on a podium and ranted, but I expect she would have been largely ignored. Instead, she threw the prime minister a powerful glare that sent a clear message.
• Between one thing and another, I never made it to the cinema in the Fall, and now that they’re shut again, it’s all I want to do.

January 31, 2022

To Hold This Falling-Apartness

“We are at a time when old systems and ideas are being questioned and falling apart, and there is great opportunity for something fresh to emerge. I have no idea what that will look like, and no preconceptions about how things should turn out, but I do have a strong sense that the time we live in is a fertile ground for training in being open-minded and open-hearted. If we can learn to hold this falling apart-ness without polarizing and without becoming fundamentalist, then whatever do today will have a positive effect on the future.” —Pema Chodran, Welcoming the Unwelcome

In September I wrote about the end of (my own) political contempt, about the way my ideas had shifted in the last few years politically speaking, my awareness that responding to political polarization and enmity with more of the same was only serving to make a bad problem worse and definitely wasn’t making anything better. I don’t know what the answer is to our current political divide, but I definitely know that digging in my heels, and burning bridges, and dying on hills, etc. isn’t it.

I will not meet rage and fury with rage and fury, because I am absolutely finished playing such a self-defeating game.

Instead, I take a deep breath, summon my inner Pema, and breathe out a genuine wish that those furious and foolish-seeming people on Parliament Hill (the ones who seem to be comfortable standing in the company of extremists and hatemongers; I’m going to imagine there is a distinction) and all those keyboard warriors who are sympathetic toward those protesters will somehow find relief from their anger and start looking for more meaningful ways to engage with their neighbours and their communities.

I will continue to direct my attention and efforts towards connecting with real people in my own community, instead of playing the unwinnable game of online arguments. (The game is rigged, you know. Engaging with bad content just boosts bad content. And listen, I’ve had to learn this the hard way.)

I remind myself that one news story is not the whole world and while egregious behaviour was taking place this weekend, all across the country there were people doing great work to get people vaccinated, to support their neighbours in need, and others were meeting friends, immersing themselves in nature, supporting local businesses, that most truckers were out there doing their jobs and keeping things going, and first responders were showing up, and nurses and doctors were continuing to do their jobs under such harrowing conditions as they’ve done throughout the last two years (although I am so happy to hear that Covid hospitalization rates are continuing to fall) and that from coast to coast to coast, people were doing things like visiting the library, and planning their gardens (because spring is on the horizon) and roasting marshmallows around a campfire with friends (that was me!).

None of this is to minimize the harm of what’s going on, but it’s definitely an effort not to maximize it. Attention is a legitimizing force, and I’m not playing that game either.

January 28, 2022

All Is Well, by Katherine Walker

The premise of Katherine Walker’s debut novel, All is Well, hooked me immediately: Christine Wright, former special forces agent and a recovering alcoholic, is settling into her near career as church minister when things go wrong and she ends up with a body to dispose of.

There’s a novel I’ve certainly never read before.

There’s also the sentient candlestick with ties back to Julian of Norwich, the excellent women who do the behind-the-scenes work at the church, the deranged vegan nurse with a daughter named after pate, the military policeman who’s intent on bringing Christine down, and all of Christine’s own demons resulting from childhood trauma and a military operation in which three members of her team were killed.

I loved this book, which is heartfelt and hilarious. A little bit screwball, and more than a little mystical, kicking at the margins of plausibility, but it works, it’s so novel, and so cleverly executed. No matter how determined Christine is to be at a remove, to not let anybody glimpse her vulnerability, Walker writes her character’s way right into the reader’s heart and the emotion is real, if everything else becomes something of a farce as the church community begins to grow and change, manifesting into something extraordinary under Christine’s tenure, in spite of all her attempts to stay under the radar.

No doubt this is a novel wholly imagined but informed by its author’s experiences in the Royal Canadian Navy and as a graduate student in divinity, which results in a really thoughtful foundation to this comic novel. This is one of those “fasten your seat-belt and hold on” novels, because it all moves pretty fast, but All is Well is also a book that’s rich in meaning, about trauma, and healing, and the possibilities of redemption.

Don’t miss it.

January 28, 2022

The Present

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about being in the present, on noticing what is happening without judgement or value. I went to a routine check-up on Wednesday and ended up getting (what is likely to be) a routine biopsy on my neck, and I really worked hard to lean into the moment. To consider what was interesting about being brutalized in such a physically uncomfortable fashion. I’ve been working very hard to exist in the present moment rather than my mind rushing me recklessly into a thoroughly unknown future, whether with dread or even just excited anticipation. Yes, I am looking forward to summer, but in the meantime, I want to be here right now. I even want to be okay here right now, instead of waiting for some hypothetical moment when everything is easier and different. I am tired of looking for light at the end of the tunnel instead of being present where I am.

And I’ve been thinking a lot too about perceptions. I just finished the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman, which I loved, and which is about all this. How social media “systematically distorts the picture of the world we carry in our heads at all times. It influences our sense of what matters, what kinds of threats we face, how venal our political opponents are, and thousands of other things…” I was walking home from my medical appointment on a cold but very sunny Wednesday and feeling good, and wondering how that sense is informed by the fact that a month or so ago I was feel really bad, and just the relief of not being there anymore brings on a buzz that’s kind of like bliss. How much my picture of the world is influenced by things like that, and by hormones, and if I’m hungry, and the flow of traffic, and how happy my child might be at any specific moment. By the fact that I’m off Twitter, and I’ve muted anybody’s stories on Instagram who posts about Covid, and that the sun is out, oh my goodness, is there anything else that matters as much as the fact the sun is out?

January 26, 2022

Why I Talked to My Kids When I Was Struggling With Mental Health

In mid-December, when I hit my omicron wall and my mental health crumbled, it was important to me that my kids knew what was going on.

And not just because there was no hiding it. I’m not stoic at the best of times, but when the stakes are high, there’s no disguising my feelings. And I knew that any effort to keep from them what I was going through was only going to seem strange and mostly likely create far more alarm than merely acknowledging reality ever would.

So I told them. I said, “This isn’t your problem, but you need to know what I’m going through. I’m having a really hard time with my feelings and I need help and support to get better. And fixing me is not your job at all, but I need some understanding from you for that to happen.”

I told them I’d be calling the doctor and finding different ways to manage my stress. I told them, “This is what’s happening, and I’m telling you because you deserve to know and because I know you’re smart enough to get it.”

They were smart enough. And I was grateful too for the example I was setting for them, for de-stigmatizing mental health struggles and talking about these as I’d do with any other health issue. I was showing them what reaching out for support looks like, and I was also hoping that I’d eventually be able to show them that these things do get better. They would see that admitting that you need help can be what strength looks like, and I was also giving them the opportunity to rise to the occasion and be the kind and loving people that they are.

It’s a delicate balance. I am a parent and they are my children, but our relationships are still built on love and mutual respect, and these relationships are reciprocal. And yet at the same time, it’s not their job to take care of me. I don’t ever want them to feel the responsibility of that, or to worry that their own needs were being neglected as I was focusing on my own well-being. (I am fortunate too to have the support of their dad, and my family, and our community so that there is room for me to to focus on both.)

In order for me to be able to properly take care of them though, I had to take care of my own self first, and they understood that.

It helped that my fallibility was not news to them, and I was building on years of imperfection—my mental health crisis was really just more of the same!

I think some of the greatest lessons we teach our children involve showing them what it’s like to be human and to live with humans, for better or for worse.