Don't Burn It

Easing into the New Year, reflecting on the last one.

2023 was quite the year and now we’re into 2024. Seems like I slipped over the line more than crossed it. Somewhere in the night with ice on the ground, there was a light dust of snow and the moon was a waning gibbous. People cheered in their houses, muffled screams and muted shouts of glee. When we passed the houses with parties there were people standing around their television sets. Some jumping, others still, but they were all hovering close to celebrate this illuminated new year. People stood in front of the glow of TV sets holding drinks. Kissing.

 

We stood under the glow of the moon. Kissing. We walked and laughed and talked about how we loved the muted sound of shouting.

 

January is a month I tend to post a blog. Last year I wrote a few after January but not many. The year was full of flowers. Full of standing on ladders and twisting bind wire. Full of processing and stripping stems and processing our lives while we did it. Full of filling buckets and organizing and quickbooks invoices and all sorts.

 

I didn’t read or write as much as I would have liked to. The year was one of living more than thinking about living. The manuscript I began in my MFA evolved slightly. It’s all very slow. I’ve written another chapter and revised older ones. I’m not sure I like what I have anymore. I’m a year older and a bit different from the woman I was when I began. A writing instructor said to me recently take the idea as far as you can take it. Weeks later I was talking to Dianna at her gallery and she told me a story about her daughter. How her daughter made a short film and by the end she hated it because she was looking at it too closely. Editing it all the time. She gave it to her friend to get rid of and her friend entered it into a contest and they won. Dianna went on, if you want to burn it pass it off to a friend first. Tell them to burn it for you. They won’t. You might even win.

 

I passed a short story to a writing friend. He didn’t burn it.

The manuscript will be read by someone else this year. I won’t burn it.

 

A winter with rain. So much rain. Water spills from the eaves now and we have no snow. Only a few days of snow in the city. In Dundas on Tuesday, at Hannah and James’ new house, there were piles and piles of snow entering their gardens and the forest. We sat by the fire and talked for hours. We walked through the pines together mid-day between work. Hannah said James says staring at the green instead of a screen is good for the brain and he’s right. I felt tree bark and looked up at the pines swaying. Roo ran on ahead of us and then in circles. This was the clearest and best part of my week. City life is all hustle and rushing. It was always this way but it’s even more so now that groceries are triple what they were a few years ago. Loblaws steals.

Walking through the pines, Hannah and I talked about the pandemic and how it likely affected us more than we admit to ourselves. We gaslight ourselves and say keep going, you’re fine, don’t be a baby about it all. We talked about how our mid-thirties are the cusp of mid-life and in these years, we were supposed to be building towards something, taking all the energy of our youth, and harnessing it towards our great success so we could feel somewhat settled in the forties. A nice fit body we can live into. Great hair. A career we love and make good money from. Status. Respect. We were supposed to feel ahead of Sisyphus’ boulder. So far ahead that we wouldn’t feel the weight of it crushing our backs. Instead, I am in physio for nerve pain in my neck and back. I injured my rotator cuff after my RMT told me to start physio. This forced me to spend last Saturday in a clinic waiting room instead of yoga. I put a heating pad on and use volteran and do small exercises daily that seem like nothing. The slightest movements to strengthen my core, my neck, my arm, they’re all connected says my physiotherapist. He showed me a diagram of the human anatomy on my phone. The nerves were between the spaces in the neck bone and showed up in orange, the orange moved from there to the clavicle down the shoulder and arm. See.

My body is stiffer with age. I’m trying to loosen.

 

I blame these years of international unrest and confusion and loss. I blame the way I type lying down, neck cranked. Back hunched. My middle thirties were meant to propel me forward, now they are a blip. I find myself forgetting they even happened. Of course, they did happen, but three years are like one in my mind marked by a time of border patrol and vaccines and fear and isolation. Many days on the couch. I don’t like blabbing on about this because no one wants to talk about it anymore and I understand. I’d rather press on into the future too, but I had to put this down. This failure feeling.

 

When I walk outside alone, I heal a little from all the times I thought I was unsafe. The earth is there beside me.

 

In 2023, I went headlong into many jobs and rarely thought about the past and couldn’t really write because my mind was only on whatever was directly in front of me in the present. I know the present is supposed to be good, but it was bad for writing. My therapist says I like to look in my rearview mirror a lot and it’s true, I do. I’m a writer. Is there a world where stories are more joyful than tragedy? Just something I’m thinking about. Last year my life extended outward beyond the reaches of the house. Beyond my desk and garden. The places I became most accustomed. I went from unemployed MFA student to four jobs, acting president of the CNFC and teaching writing workshops. Some days I have no idea if there will be any room for my writing. I am by nature at my best late afternoon into early evening, writing into the sunset hours. This doesn’t work now so I am training myself to be a morning person. I write from 8-10am with a group online with our cameras off. I don’t know the other writers at all. I see their pictures or names in squares and then I’m off and typing away. So far, I’m undecided if it’s working. I’m going to keep it up though, like the exercises for small unused muscles. Like telling my nerves I’m safe and can keep going.

 

My life was surrounded by seasonal flowers again and I forgot how rich I feel with flowers on the table each week. I took a job working for The Local Flower Collective. I missed the world of flowers and my friends within it. I freelanced on the side and made strange botanical creatures. I sculpted arrangements with calla lilies drooping towards the floor, anthuriums as black as night, and jasmine garlands draped over moss. I brought more colour into my wardrobe and sported green clogs. My poem F I R E W E E D was in my friend Rebecca’s art show. There were visits with family and friends out east. Oysters and ocean, sunsets and marsh trails. My parents visited me in Toronto. We ate everything on the menu at Dotty’s. Train rides to see my sister. Negronis and reading side-by-side. The feeling of being known and liked by a sibling. Morning runs by the lake and a quick swim to cool down. Dinners with Brooks at Gio’s and sharing crespelle or pappardelle. Always the meatball with foccacia. Rose (my cat) curled up on my lap as I try to type something good. Something worth sharing.

 

In winter, my season with flowers came to a close and I started at Queen Books where I work as a bookseller and events coordinator. I help people find authors they might like based on books they’ve enjoyed. I talk about new releases and give short reviews of staff picks. I curate and highlight writers I love and talk about literature all day. I stock shelves and make sure books are in the right order. I learn what kids are reading in middle-grade and flip through board books with pretty illustrations. I help writers promote their work. I listen to authors discuss process. I take notes. The job is joy and I often leave feeling full after a shift, not empty. 

At the end of winter, I will teach a course to MFA students in the fiction and nonfiction cohorts at King’s with one of my writing mentors Jane Silcott. We are teaching about creating atmosphere. Jane lives in BC so we share excerpts we like through email.

I do not want to be so exhausted this year that by the time I reach my laptop to write all I can do is answer emails. But with shifting between many jobs, I imagine this will be difficult.

 

Some notes to live by then:

Write first thing instead and do not check emails.

Become a morning writer even if it takes thirty minutes to warm up. It’s like this with exercise too, or else you injure your rotator cuff.

Do one or two things for yourself before the day begins, before other people need you because the needs of others never end and it’s easier to see another’s needs sometimes more than it is to see your own.

Incorporate more colour into your wardrobe. You loved those incandescent green clogs.

Spend less time on screen, more time in green.

Don’t burn it.

 

Some Books that made my pick list in 2023:

Stoner by John Williams 

Tonight I’m Someone Else by Chelsea Hodson 

Really, Good Actually by Monica Heisey

Daughter by Claudia Dey 

Thirst for Salt by Madelaine Lucas 

Couplets: A Love Story by Maggie Milner 

Outline by Rachel Cusk (almost done trilogy but this one stands out) 

The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg

300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso 

 

One of the perks of working at a bookstore is access to ARCs (advanced reader copies). I have a stack beside my desk and have already started First Love by Lilly Dancyger. She makes me want to hold my friends tight and reminds me they’re the great loves of my life.  

 

Most Anticipated Books for 2024 so far:

All Fours — Miranda July

Alphabetical Diaries - Sheila Heti 

Banal Nightmare — Halle Butler 

Beautyland — Marie-Helene Bertino 

Good Material — Dolly Alderton

Liars — Sarah Manguso 

Martyr – Kaveh Akbar

The Princess of 72nd Street— Elaine Kraf

Writing On Writing

Essay as appeared in University of King’s College MFA Alumni newsletter September 2023

When I was nineteen and living in a basement apartment in Vaughn, I submitted a poem to an anthology. It was accepted. Then published. My boyfriend in fine arts at the time was so proud while I studied geochemistry and shrugged. I never bought the book. I don’t even have the poem anymore. The computer I was using had a hard drive I didn’t save. In fact, I don’t have any of my undergrad assignments. All that writing lost. Did it even happen?

 

Nineteen is an amorphous time full of longing and angst. I remember learning to make masala chai tea in a pot with milk and listening to Sarah Harmer sing Lodestar, the darkness reigns take off your things, more than I recall the words I scribbled down on scraps of paper. I also can’t seem to forget the futon and the boy who broke my heart (I’m still writing about him). I didn’t even keep a notebook then. I wasn’t a writer. I didn’t think I would be, but I couldn’t stop observing, feeling, describing. I couldn’t stop writing my life down.

 

I wasn’t afraid of running out of ideas then. I wasn’t afraid of what would come out or who I would hurt or worse—betray. I didn’t concern myself with trespassing. I took a step and then another. I was more concerned with touching something real than achieving something from the words.

 

This brings me to the post-grad blues and fretting over whether I’m a legit writer.

Am I legit when I’m published? Then I was at nineteen so why don’t I feel it.

Am I legit when I’m in a revered magazine?

Am I legit when I’m the author of a book? Or does it take two? Or a NYT bestseller.

We all know writers are those who are writing but an author has readers.

So, am I legit with readers? I have those.

 

I don’t know the answer to this.

 

I’ve had to stop asking these questions and get back to work because when I started out it began as a hunger to express myself. To write my world down.

 

To be a writer is to sign up for a lifetime of rejection with a few sprinkled moments of success. To be a writer is to write and to continue despite the literary hurdles, losses, shortcomings, and disappointments. To write in slits of time between a busy work schedule. To write on the train, in line at the grocery store, on a walk, weeding the garden or making tomato salad.

 

The post-MFA blues happen. Maybe you didn’t get the book deal you hoped for. Maybe you didn’t sign with an agent. Maybe your book deal fell through. I’m here to tell you it’s okay. Your manuscript still matters, it’s still in process. My manuscript isn’t finished but I carve out time to work where I can because I must.

 

As one of my writing mentors taught me—go slowly and accept yourself. Study your sentence for quality. Clean beloved sentences. Take your time on the right arrangement of words. Wait until you achieve a level of clarity to say what you mean. At least try.

 

Not all writers have the same circumstances, so not all writers have the same path.

You Don't Have To Believe In Yourself Or Your Work

“Do you believe in yourself?” asked Bernardo.

I paused a moment as the sun set over the valley, “I don’t think so. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to do here…in Valle I mean.”

He looked at me with dark growing eyes, “Well hurry up. The world needs you.”

self-portrait while moving in a pandemic

Last year at this time snow covered the ground and Woodbine Park’s pond was frozen over. Parents cleared the ice with shovels and carried their kids in snowsuits to benches, laced up their skates. Children laughed loudly, drowning out sticks slapping the ice. Sand and layers of crusty snow protruded into the lake forming inlets of slushy water. A sparkle settled over everything.

 

This didn’t ensure we’d have a good year. It was not foreshadowing for what was ahead. It was simply a snowy January full of forts and soggy mitts drying out on radiators. What followed was a year with highs and lows like every other. Some lows worse, I must admit, and some of my highs didn’t quite match the mournful parts but I had a steady stream of love, decadent dinners, small trips, literary friends in the form of books and the consistency of cat cuddles to colour my days. When I reflected back on 2022 I saw my life stretched out, a painting on canvas, and the traumas were smudges and smears, large brushstrokes of darker shades in a corner here, or a smaller mark there. They were not the entire painting. They were texture and layers within the colourful, intimate image of my life. Some swooshes seemed to appear with movement from past years, while others were entirely new, almost neon in tone. In my mind, the brushstrokes appeared as if Jenna Gribbon were painting them and Maria Berrio set the images down in her complex collage style. Time travel was evident from one corner of the painting to another.

 

This January has mostly been grey and dark and damp. More like November never ended. If the air weren’t cold, I’d be fooled to think it was spring, brown world, muddy ground, herbs still green under slush. Until today. Snow. Big fluffy flakes. Icicles dangling like teeth from eavestroughs. I smiled to have something different. As I look this over now pale sun filters through my skylights, dyes the white mounds lilac and rose, casting a cool glow over everything. Outside undisturbed heaps lie atop tree branches, mailboxes and car mirrors.

 

I like the snow now. Have learned to like it. I didn’t always like the cold. The ice. As someone who was averse to the winter months and had plans to move to California someday to escape, I took it upon myself last year to start cold dipping in Lake Ontario. I need the water. I am more fish than woman sometimes. A Selkie history perhaps. My first plunge felt like daggers against my skin, breath gone on the wind, limbs shaking, shivering uncontrollably. The buzz of the thaw though heightened all my senses, awakened me to life in ways warmth didn’t. By my second dip I was hooked. I try to go weekly, often at sunrise because I like watching the fiery globe lift above the horizon, how it lights up the dawn while my breath forms clouds. Wild swimming in frigid open waters is my way of being close to the earth in months with frozen ground, where nothing is soft.

I am not going to prove how valuable my year was, how much progress I made in life or evolution as a human being. I’m not sure there was any form of a new me, which took shape. No closer to my essence than I was in childhood.  I read the short story Birthmark by Miranda July and then read it again. I finished her collection earlier this month, which I should have read in my twenties. Last summer, when I was in Manhattan with my partner, I picked up July’s bright banana yellow copy in Strand. I love her absurdist humour and the awkward discomfort she’s able to generate through her narratives yet still imbue tenderness. The two characters in Birthmark are unsure, insecure of their love, because they found each other later in life, after the stains of their earlier lives were erased. In the case of the protagonist, she lasered her port-wine-stain, erased it from one whole cheek. Her right cheek. It was almost half her face—the stain. She had it removed long before she met her love.

 

The protagonist was both “ugly and too lovely to bear,” depending on the angle at which she was looked at. After the laser work she was free to begin the stage of her life where she was “beautiful, except for nothing,” which of course didn’t last because she was aware of the lack of ugly, the lack of her story.

 

July writes, “Over time she knew more and more people who had never seen her with the birthmark. These people didn’t feel any haunting absence, why should they. Her husband was one of these people.” She married someone who never knew her with her port-wine-stain and because of that, when she saw a couple loving each other, one with a port-wine stain and one without, she resented her relationship. She felt their love wasn’t big enough to hold such ugliness.

 

Until the moment when there was red everywhere and the stain reappeared from her right eye to her jawbone in a purplish red. To which her husband responded by falling to his knees for fear she would not let him love her this way.

 

All I kept thinking about was the recreation of self. Sometimes it’s to help transformation along without losing oneself. Then I wondered if that’s even possible. I thought of Jungian shadows and the ways relationships can get tangled up in empty rooms and lost conversations, ego-projections instead of sincerity. I considered friendships that have been through many iterations of the self and still continue despite ongoing becoming. Then there are those relationships that form later, once the reinvention has taken shape and the new identity in place, where there’s the feeling of being known and not known at the same time. There are also friendships that don’t make it through transformation; ones where they only want to see a person as they were and not as they are now. Is there room for the old and recreated self? Or is there only self? The story has stayed with me—the brevity of it, the warmth, the haunting quality. I liked it.  

Originally published in the Paris Review but there’s a pay wall now. You can read it for free here.  

I was hoping to look back on the year and have a Top Ten Book list to offer you. Instead I have snippets of thoughts and books I enjoyed. I’m not even sure I read ten new books last year as I spent most of my time observing, writing, with friends, flowers, sitting under stars or on rocks, making fires, swimming in lakes and rivers, collecting debris and feathers from The Spit. I filled myself with elemental knowledge. I reread older books I love: Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger, Just Kids by Patti Smith, Felicity by Mary Oliver, How Should A Person Be by Sheila Heti, All We Saw by Anne Micheals.

 

In May, I graduated and received an MFA in creative nonfiction. A very joyous time. Proud parents and relieved friends. If you want to work on a manuscript and become part of an incredible community of writers, I can’t recommend it enough. I travelled to Halifax, ate lots of seafood and celebrated every night. From June on, I worked with florists I know (and adore), designed and planted gardens. My world became external, always moving, making with my hands more than my head, which felt good after two-years of study. My body was ready to lift heavy buckets, rig-up botanical orbs (or work my personal-life shit out on snake art, thanks Jo:), sculpt large pieces and dig my hands in the dirt. I couldn’t sit solitary at the desk. I had to touch the earth, feel the flowers, their velvet petals.

Books became something I picked up in transit or at the beach. Reading an excerpt here or there. Having room for the economy of a poem. There were many books I began and didn’t finish. Permission to stop reading—a gift I gave myself. The books I did read though connect to the season I read them in: that book where the cover is stained from melted snow, another for the fertility of spring, the swimming months were all about friendship and selfhood, and when the trees turned gold every word was on love and desire.  

 

Writing became something I did anywhere I could. I wrote in bars, on beaches, at my desk, in bed, at my friend’s dining room table, on my parent’s couch, in cafes, on the streetcar, on the train, on a plane. It was not time I carved out perfectly where I was disciplined enough to write so many words a day, for so many hours. The only rule was: work wherever you are. This writing was more of a rewriting as I’m officially in the revision phase. I don’t know what’s ahead or how long it will take me. I found myself plagued with shame because I hadn’t found my way in the literary community post-grad (whatever that means) and instead was writing on the go to a design job downtown, or in slivers and slits of time between installing hanging installations and gardens. editing other’s work.

Editing is rewriting as David Grann eloquently put it in a lecture at King’s winter residency a couple weeks ago. The fear that editing will take the life out of writing isn’t true. With editing more of the narrator is saturated within the text whereas revision is much more substantive, it’s about shaping something. Plotting. My way of dealing with the fear of losing the life-force of a fresh piece is saving it as an original, then seeing how the piece evolves with each draft. Comparing it to the way the words were arranged to begin with. If I’ve overdone it. I go back.

 

All month one of my life quotes has been rolling around my head. A quote I return to every now and then. The first time I read this quote I was fourteen, in grade 9, writing an essay on Martha Graham for dance class. Martha—the mother of modern dance. Her style and technique reshaped contemporary movement. In those years, the ones of my youth, my parents attended a very religious church where dancing was seen as a sin. I argued church leaders and took elders on in debate as a scrawny pre-teen and when words weren’t heard, I began using my body to make my point clear. I danced. And danced. And danced some more. Movement to music was electric to me.

 

For my essay I signed Agnes De Mille’s The Life and Work of Martha Graham out of the library. Studying Martha was like opening a window in a room of locked doors. She had already died by the time I discovered her work and yet there I was skipping class to pour over the pages of her choreography. I became obsessed with her subversive ideas. I felt akin to her spirit. It was like this with Isadora Duncan too. They became guides and muses.

While studying Graham, I came across her famous quote,

“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

Keep the channel open, and then you do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware, and then later this again, keep the channel open.

The instruction doesn’t include self-belief or knowing entirely what you’re doing with your work. It comes with being aware of the urges that motivate and to look for divine dissatisfaction and blessed unrest. To be comforted by not having to believe in your work, or yourself because most days fall somewhere on a spectrum between self-doubt and belief. It seems what matters is staying open to life, aware of self, motivations, and nudges towards vitality while recognizing the stirring restlessness experienced along the way is quite normal. It’s part of this life force, this quickening.

 

Books I Enjoyed In 2022:

Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux

Good Girl by Anna Fitzpatrick

Pure Colour by Sheila Heti

Funny Weather: Art In An Emergency by Olivia Laing

No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July

The Carrying by Ada Limon

Midnight Chicken by Ella Risbridger

Normal People by Sally Rooney

Ghosts by Dolly Alderton

Where Things Touch: A Meditation on Beauty by Bahar Orang

(It turns out I did read ten books)

How to see your life as a painting in a year:

  • Light a candle

  • Get a pot of tea or carafe of coffee. Pick your favourite pug, Put it on a side table and pour a cup. Drink.

  • Open a notebook. Use your phone to go scroll images you took in each month. Write point form notes about the year from January-December based on the emotions and memories the images evoke. Note varied things you found amusing, sad, beautiful, worth celebrating, laughing or crying at.

  • Not everything will exist there, and that’s okay. There will be people and moments missing. Note those gaps too.

  • By the end of this you will have a painting of the year in your mind. Not single events but thoughts. A whole strip of moments layered together by images and your remembering.

  • Perhaps what you see will be more textured, more vibrant, more open to the channel.

My Peace, My Stillness

“We are all a sun-lit moment come from a long darkness, what moves us always comes from what’s hidden, what seems to be said so suddenly has lived in the body for a long, long time.” — David White

(Listen to Olafer Arnalds album Some Kind of Peace while reading)

Writing my first book is like this, an unspooling of stories lived in the body for a long, long time.

The sun rose over Greenwood Park this morning and I had this thought while it broke and flared beyond burnt maples, I won’t apologize for my peace, for my stillness.

 

I woke earlier than usual to have a long distance phone chat with a friend, something I started doing during the pandemic—my attempt to make time for people I love from a distance. At this junction in our lives, she has two kids and lives in NS, I am writing a book and live in Ontario. We experience different demands daily but we make time for each other, her voice and inflections a familiar steadiness. We listen to each other’s sorrows and joys.

 

When I went away on my solitary retreat to a beach house in September, it reminded me of something I forget sometimes—I like my own company, I can take care of myself quite well, I’m allowed to go gently at my own pace. No matter where I am or who I spend time with, I won’t forget myself. I did too much forgetting for too many years. Solitude helps me remember.

A childhood refrain was, “slow down, Jessica.” I would move so quickly sometimes that I’d fall going up the stairs, tripping over my feet trying to get to the next place. Writing was like this for a while, so many words, so fast and all at once, tripping over sentences.

 

Now I go at a snail pace, practice slow reading, study syntax and diction, take in the prosody. Not as in a hurry with the work. Staying with a thought for longer until it shows me more. Writing a scene and then looking at it for a long while until I see it from another angle. Asking questions some of us spend our whole lives avoiding, then waiting for the answer. Time. This takes the time it takes.

Patient stamina is what’s needed to separate the value of my work from the external praise of approval. The attention seeking mindset, a result of the attention driven business model of big SM companies. Of course I want encouragement and crave validation, but that’s never what makes me feel as good as knowing I’ve given my time to my creative process. I am not ready to start querying, soon but not yet, and have known this since I began. My manuscript is in progress in the truest sense and writers, no matter their success or publication history need to try to separate their work from the gaze of others. All artists do. This kind of stamina requires cultivation of solitude. Taking care of an arts practice is taking care of one’s interests.

 

To become a memoirist is to sustain a long gaze into the soul of oneself. To look inwards without looking away when something lurks in the shadows. It’s not easy and it’s not pretty. There is horror then beauty when the light cracks.

As I attempt to make meaning and find clarity out of what is incomprehensible to me, I find myself in need of steadiness. The same thing over and over, like morning coffee, or sun salutations. Routine is what writing this book is becoming. I used to think poetry came on the wind, a message from the outer world and I was responsible for pinning it down if it came to me. This is still true sometimes; we are guided by a force larger than individual will yet it is also true that using our will to tend to what’s given is the only way something is ever made.

This fall my work consisted mainly of revisions and re-structuring scenes. To do this I set a goal of showing up for book specific writing and revision an hour a day with a weekend off. My weekend could be an actual Sat/Sun or it could happen two random days mid week. I treat the manuscript as if it’s my job, a job I wake up for everyday. I’ve been telling myself if I can do this for other people, for another person’s creative vision, a boss or a prof’s deadline, than I can do this for my own deadlines. This work is quiet, a gentle stretch. The revisions consist of choices like “A or The” and ridding sentences of excess. Sometimes entire sections are thrown into the dump bin, goodbye precious darlings.

 

I trick my mind. I say to myself “just write for one hour and then you can run an errand to the pharmacy, boil those potatoes, hop on zoom or water the plants.” Then I find myself working longer, an hour turns into two and then four or eight and suddenly I’ve given my manuscript a full day’s work.

Because this is my debut book, I need dedication. Being in the middle now, I feel myself wanting to put off the difficult decisions needed to shape stories into cohesive work. There’s an entire section I thought I could gloss over. Give two or three paragraphs to and then I met with my writing mentor, and she asked me to expand a section later in the narrative. This was our exchange:

 

Me: “I don’t want to give that person room on the page.”

Wanda: “By not writing about it you’re giving room to them in your life still, worrying about them and what they think. Write your story.”

 

I left our conversation knowing what I had to do. Tell the truth. The truth always wants to be told. Then make it literary, not the other way around.

Yesterday was my day-off. We went to the last farmer’s market of the season. After, I brought the balcony plants indoors; swept and prepared my outdoor spaces for the cold months. Our home is all green now—scented geraniums, marigolds, begonias, rosemary, savoury, patchouli, Aztec herb, parsley and purple flowering oregano.

 

I will not apologize for my peace, my stillness

In a writing workshop with Lisa Moore last month she alluded to pretentiousness before giving me commentary on the short scene I’d written. Was she judging my appearance? This rubbed me the wrong way. I love Moore’s work, but she doesn’t know fuck about me, I thought. The prompt was: 2 characters who are in conflict about something that neither of them state outright, we only have access to their internal thoughts. Both of them flashback five years and you must change POV 3 times. All this within 15 minutes. Part of the scene took place when I was 19, my friend T reminded me of this time of life while out for dinner with her and H.

 

We were at the Comrade sharing warm olives, grilled bread, manchego with honeycomb, deviled eggs and tuna tartar. I was sipping a naked and famous, T recalled the first time she visited my basement apartment the year we met, 2005. The apartment with the cold tile floors, no art on the walls, muted light from two small windows, a rickety futon in the living room, a half-filled bookshelf, a desk from Ikea and clothing to fill two suitcases. T said, “I was looking inside your bathroom cupboards and thinking she buys her own tampons, has her own space, god she’s so independent.”

 

I was then; hyper independent, trying to find my way in the world, working split shifts at a chain restaurant while completing my undergrad. I’d study in the morning before doing a fourteen-hour shift, wolf down a meal that was comped by my boss because I hit all the sales targets for the night. I did this because I didn’t know how to cook and groceries were expensive. I referred to myself in self-deprecating ways, “I have a black thumb. Only nuts and beer in the fridge.” What T found out later was I was yes independent and fucking lonely. Sad and lonely, hating myself day and night, exhausted from betraying myself over and over in relationships, not one ounce of self-respect, but trying to survive, trying and learning.  

Loneliness is not solitude. Solitude is spacious, loneliness is empty. I cultivate solitude in my life now to befriend loneliness, the empty, to ask, “What do you need from me?”

There’s been a lot of thrashing about in order to arrive in this home, back in the city where I was born. The woman in the basement apartment is almost unrecognizable to me now, yet she brought me here. She’s gorgeous and tired and so very lost, that past self. I wake up now looking at the way the light fills this home, skylights face sky blue, sun beaming down on the walls and banister. Plants and green everywhere, art and pottery fill the rooms. Full bookshelves, so many books piled on the floor. A window faces east, morning sun and west, sunset. I eat biscotti from the farmer’s market and drink my morning coffee and read. Then write.

 

I take my partner’s Robert Frank photography book, The Americas, and open it to a black and white portrait of a woman in Hollywood I like. It sits on the desk in our entrance. I keep my Georgia O’Keefe book open on the wood chest we use for storage. Flipping through her oil paint scenes, cliffs and hills, flowers and rivers. I leave my laundry basket in the hall with unfolded towels until folding them isn’t a distraction. I attend a writer’s group every week, well almost. My front yard has beach stones in it, a path for my feet. My neighbours know my name and I know theirs.

 

I am lucky. Beloved. Grateful. Dare I say, blessed?

 

I will not apologize for my peace, my stillness.  

All images taken on my Nikon FM2, Ilford 400, from my time at The Timberlost Beach House, space created by Lauren Wilson.

“We are all a sun-lit moment come from a long darkness, what moves us always comes from what’s hidden, what seems to be said so suddenly has lived in the body for a long, long time.” — David White

I flew a plane once so I can write this sentence

“Our moods do not believe in each other” — Emerson

Portrait, 33, August 2019

Portrait, 33, August 2019

This is a picture of me before flying a plane because I wanted to remember what an aerial view can do for perspective. I tend to need that this time of year because I get sad. I flew a Cessna at sunset over southern Ontario two years ago for my thirty third birthday. It was a gift from my partner; one that I cherish. My instructor said, “You have a natural way with flying,” when I took the wheel. He probably says that to everyone.

 

The sad begins right as August comes to a close with the turn of the air. The breeze becomes a bit sharper and the leaves slowly begin to shift to those golden hues. The Autumn equinox is today. It marks the time when the northern and southern hemispheres trade places, and for a while we begin to receive a little less light and warmth. I think the inevitability of this is what brings the sad on.

Of course Autumn is beautiful; often it’s most glorious right before the leaves drop. With that signal though, beneath the beauty is death—a dying season.

 

Because I am sensitive, I feel this shift in a strong way. Always have. There are new beginnings and fresh starts, especially for those of us returning to school. And there is something that lingers behind change, a loss of something. A letting go of what was for what is becoming. Last year at this time I was in hospital. I wasn’t sleeping and my mental health suffered. I was angry about some things in my life and the rage made it feel like I was dying. I was diagnosed with complex grief. There’s a lot to say about this, which may take a long time to find words for. Some of them will likely be in my book. It was my partner’s love, my sister’s words, my friend’s care from a distance, my parent’s patience, my writing mentor and faculty’s encouragement alongside the assistance of a health community that got me through.

Writing all that just now was scary but not writing it, is scarier I think.

 

Summer went quickly with a cross-country move back to Ontario. I spent most of July packing and then most of August unpacking and freshening up our new home. I planted a herb garden and began sheet-mulching the front lawn. I brought my perennials with me and they are sitting in the backyard waiting to be tucked in for winter. I sat on patios and met up with people I hadn’t seen in months, some fifteen months. Colleagues in my MFA program that I had only ever met on zoom. I ate a lot of delicious food, mostly tomatoes on toast. All I want in August is market tomatoes with salt and pepper over sourdough toast slathered in butter. Often with sharp cheese. Tomatoes any other time of the year feels like a hoax.

 

With all this transience, I knew I would feel as though I missed some of the languid days summer provides. It’s a very external season, we all tend to prioritize time outside, in the woods, at the beach, on a balcony. Friends gather for dinner parties on patios or we travel about visiting siblings. We try to pack everything into the warm months here because we know how short the long days are and we find time to rest.

 

I think the weight I feel is that I know we are moving into a more inward season, and perhaps after almost two years of a pandemic, I don’t want to. I want the external stimulation and fun loving warmth of sunshine and beach life for a little longer. That said, these lines from a Danielle Doby poem were sent to me by my sister while I was in Hospital and they still hold true:

“the aching/ has her teachings / and when we get quiet enough / we hear its stories / the answers have always been / buried deep within / the shadows of our ground

come softly / sit quietly / and lean in closer

do not be scared of the dark

of your dark

it is where your growth lives

in time / your eyes will bloom / again

give yourself / permission / to be where / you are

and / to still be loved / for it”

Knowing all this, I planned a solo getaway for myself mid-September. In my last post I mentioned that I used to do this every Fall and stopped. Well I decided to take it up again because the time away, alone, helps me prepare myself for this change. It’s part of taking care of myself. I sink a little deeper into my skin, move slower, allow myself to watch the trees rustle, the fire crack, feel the forest floor beneath my feet, eat whatever I want when I want (well depending on what I’ve brought with me) and sit in front of the sunset every evening to witness the glow clip below the horizon line.

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There’s a nagging that I have as a thirty-five year old with a blog. The nagging is that this is stupid—a blog. Unnecessary and that it lacks meaning, but I don’t know how to find meaning other than to give thoughts time, work things out with words and introspection. Pay attention to ordinary moments, which I suppose is what children help with, observing time passing. I noticed all the parents posting cute photos of their kids going off to school in new outfits with captions like “another year” in early September. And I don’t think I want children, even though lately it’s on my mind. What woman, mid-thirties, doesn’t have the question of children on their mind? At least if I had a child the questions of whether I will or will not have one, would be done with. Instead I live within the question mark for now. My neighbour says, “Freeze your eggs. That’s what I’m doing.”  

I do want to mark time with what I make, to fashion meaning. The thing with long projects is they blend into years.

Maggie Nelson’s advice for writers working on long projects is this:

“Fortitude. Yeah, fortitude. Also, one of my good friends and mentors gave me the best advice I’ve ever gotten about this. He said, “Remember, your feelings about the work don’t determine the value of the work.” You can feel frustrated, disgusted, agitated, hopeless, every day, on and off, but you can’t necessarily believe all your moods. You just have to keep on working.

Yeah, not believing in your moods. That’s a quote from Emerson, I might add. “Our moods do not believe in each other.” Which is one of my favorite quotes because when you feel despair, despair doesn’t believe in joy. And that can be very hard as a writer. If you feel like you open up your files and everything looks like shit and you’re upset, that mood is going to make you want to invalidate your whole project. You just have to get kind of Buddhist about it and recognize all that is weather.”

An interview with Rachel Cusk by Tonny Vorm gave me comfort that I will eventually learn, with age, how to construct book ideas in a more thorough way before beginning, but that is not where I am. Instead I’m in the middle, learning my process, looking for a form for my book. In search of a shape for it. What is literary form? Cusk says “it’s a vessel that comes from something real, something in life, some juxtaposition or shape.” As a former floral designer I should have a keen eye for form but in the world of words I’m finding it hard to sort out what vessel, or structure will best suit the stories I’m trying to write. Cusk’s honesty in discussing literary imitation as an emerging writer was helpful. At the beginning, she said, because of her academic background she found it important to have a strong literary form over a personal voice. I think I’m perhaps in the opposite experience where I have a voice I’m working with but looking for shape. I’m grateful that I pushed academia out of me, all the jargon, in search of something more tender and intimate, no matter the sentimentality, but every material thing needs a configuration.

 

I adore what Cusk says about her sister in this interview, that she was always with a book and that she may not have followed her path had it not been for being with her. It’s the same with my sister, she always had her nose tucked away in a book, and I was looking over her shoulder, “what are you reading? What are you reading?” It’s still this way, only now we ask each other, in tandem. Sisters can become a complementary relationship instead of a competitive one, with effort, like anything else that’s wonderful.

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The main thing I took from the interview was that will can override this thing we call talent. That desire is powerful. This is freeing. Desire is something we can know. Determination, agency, drive, these are things we can control (to an extent). Discipline is something we can practice and is crucial for completing a body of work. The more I sit with my pages and write notes to myself and try to make sense of them, the more I see how rigorous it is, that to be with them, live with the work, everyday, at least a little, is important. It’s a slow, snail like process. I was much better at floral design, I think. Then again, it was instant gratification mostly. Not like a book at all.

I was writing here every month and I’m not sure I’m going to continue in the same way. I didn’t mind disappearing for a bit to spend less time on a screen. More life, less scrolling. With the extra time I didn’t pick up my manuscript like I thought I would and revise it and figure out what comes next. I did do a lot of thinking. I only just began to crack its pages this week. The doubt crept in the more I left it and so I carried it around with me, with all my other books, as if it belonged to the pile, but I never opened its pages.

 

In my early twenties, I worked with nonprofits and spent a lot of time trying to convince people with money to give theirs to social causes, un-housed youth and the arts. To support space for art makers and marginalized communities. To fund communal art, that we often freely enjoy, daily, like murals or poems or songs, so it could continue to exist. My undergrad degree is in International Development and that was engaging for a time until I realized I wanted to stop developing and I didn’t want to move to a place for a long time and conduct participatory research (since that is likely the most ethical way to do anything, come alongside people rather than change everything). I discovered that I wanted to travel purely in a selfish way and only for myself and not to help anyone. So I did that and worked at nonprofits in Toronto. I found it difficult to make art though while working administratively advocating for art makers.

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With climate change, and poverty and a pandemic and racism and indigenous communities without clean water in Canada, nothing I’ve been able to say to myself regarding the work I’m doing seems to matter much. The above list is vitally important and some days I haven’t known why it is I’m even writing this damn book. Is it worth doing, is a valid question. Especially since it’s an excavation of my self, a chiseling away. Does something as invisible as heartbreak matter?

I suppose I write to prevent people from self-harming, to let people know they are not alone and to help those who feel they are in the wrong place know it’s not too late to change that. Sarah Manguso articulates this better in her afterword for Ongoingness:

“It was while reading a letter from a childhood friend who continues to provide health care to people in underserved communities that I realized the jig was up. If I was never going to place malaria pills into the hands of the destitute, I needed to get my act together. I had to be sure I wasn’t keeping anything from the world that might help it along. If the point was to write things that prevent people from committing suicide, the least I could do would be to read my own diary. Just in case.

 

I realize how grandiose that sounds, but when your job is to think and write about yourself, the stakes start to appear artificially, comically high. And they must, for without them, I wouldn’t write at all. I’d spend the day reading the internet. I’d be about half-done now.”

In a freewrite session with the writer’s group I attend every Saturday, I wrote this in August: After this month of moving house, back to Toronto, the noise and smog of this city I love, all I want is quiet, my mornings where I don’t check any screens. Where there is silence and my partner doesn’t thump around on the phone with clients and no one rings the doorbell. I don’t want the distraction of other voices on twitter, the politics, all the obtrusive opinions on Instagram, covid-warning emails from the university, flashes and flags of fury, the troubles of the world a montage across my screen. What can I do? Worrying about what paint colour goes in my bathroom seems unimportant when women aren’t free in Afghanistan. When the world can still spin backwards in history and Benjamin Moore’s November Rain cannot calm or soothe the pain.

And I stand by this. November Rain doesn’t matter and yet it did. It is good to be informed, and it’s hard to know what I even think when everyday there’s a new and urgent tragedy, requiring immediate attention. I’m sure you’re wondering if I voted. I did. It just wasn’t posted on SM and is that okay? Can we stop performing so much? There is a world outside the boxed screen where many people do things without telling other people what they do or what to do. Sometimes painting a bathroom and making home is necessary amidst a world in crisis. How is it best to care for this world? This is a question I ask and often go to literature for I suppose. I would like to add something to the literature. If I can.  

So I will still write here, but in a more spontaneous way, hence this coming to you after the full moon during the Autumn Equinox. It’s a blog, a place for informal diary like musings and I hate the pressure to produce on a certain day. If you want to know when I’ve written you can subscribe to my fitful note, I will only send a letter when I’ve posted. And if you find it annoying you can unsubscribe or do what I do sometimes when my inbox is too full—trash before reading. Especially if you don’t find any of this inspiring, helpful, insightful or amusing. With that though, I think consistency is important, so I will try to write monthly, just not on an exact day.

Portrait, 35, August 2021

Portrait, 35, August 2021

Despite the sadness this time of year, I always feel very grateful too. Grateful for the full moon the other night that I shared with my partner on our upper balcony overlooking the city, grateful for the darker days where I will be cozy with tea and blankets, baths and candlelight. Grateful I am able to write, make art and continue to do so. I will get back to the manuscript now, remembering “our moods do not believe in each other.”

 

This last picture is me on my thirty fifth birthday. With two years from the one in a plane. I am not in flight but I am lighter and more content. The perspective of all that’s below and behind, all I’ve gone through, gives me strength every day. These two pictures mark time before the pandemic and now living in and through it. Courage is maybe the word I am looking for. They both, in a way, remind me of courage. To fly a plane and to laugh within such uncertainty—courage.

My partner told me about this image he saw floating around on the internet yesterday while we were in bed reading. It was of three rocks in separate containers. The rocks were grief. At first glance it looked as if the rocks were getting smaller in each container. But that wasn’t it. The rocks were the same size in each and it was the containers that were getting larger. We are the containers, the vessel in that metaphor. The size of the grief doesn’t dissipate when something tragic or traumatic happens, but we grow and our perspective of it changes.

Some things I read/am reading:

 

Ongoingness by Sarah Manguso — riveting and though a tiny book, more like a novella, there’s nothing small in her thoughts.

 

Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland — helpful for the ordinary artist, not the genius artists, whatever that means.

 

If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland — it’s a bit dated but she has some really illuminating things to say about voice.

 

Poetry by Anne Carson, specifically What I Think About Most and The Beauty of the Husband — slowly making my way through her work

 

Interviews in The Creative Independent, which I find interesting, specifically by Thora Siemsen or Maddie Crum (there’s a great new interview with Maggie Nelson about her latest book On Freedom published by Graywolf here, which is where the quote above comes from) And yesterday I read a review by Crum in The Baffler, on Simon de Beauvoir’s lost novel, Inseparable, that was released this summer with a foreword by Margaret Atwood. I quite liked her thoughts. Especially her commentary and critique of whether the publication of this lost novella was a “posthumous publication cash grab, an attempt to repackage a duly dismissed project in order to profit from 2010’s enduring literary buzzword, “female friendship,” now as sheeny and salable as the nineties’ “girl power?” Still, in my book I write a lot about female friendship, so I mean, I guess I will use that to my advantage if it’s still buzzy by the time this beast comes out.

 

Sally Rooney’s Conversation with Friends (I read this sometime in July I think) and then her latest, Beautiful World Where Are You, which also tells the story of two Irish couples. It grapples with success, nostalgia, love and desire. The title is taken from a Friedrich Schiller poem in which he worships a mythic past where divinity was part of ordinary life. I like the letters between characters Alice and Eileen despite the pushback, especially her quandaries around Christianity and her uncensored questionings. I find them fascinating as someone raised reading the bible and who no longer does, unless to find a passage that my mind recalls for some strange reason out of nowhere. Ultimately, Rooney finds meaning in sex and friendship, amidst the chaos of our world and I think it’s beautiful without sounding too trite. The first person omniscient narrator is a bold creative choice and I find it refreshing that she chose to experiment as a writer instead of sticking to old tricks. Above all the essayist epistles between Alice and Eileen ruminate on interdependent relationships and love’s responsibilities. They are what I needed towards the end of summer, and much of what I think about; I’m sure many think about. Rooney is an immensely talented writer, but more than talent, is her honesty that shines through in her fiction and her clear dedication to craft. My heart is a bit cracked by it, only mid-way through.

Without surprise, the world might turn into something quite different

It is the prickling air that wakes us up…

And we imagine dreamily
How the whole house caught in a bird-cage of lightning
Would be quite delightful rather than frightening;

And from the same simplified point of view
Of night and lying flat on one's back
All things might change equally easily Elizabeth Bishop

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It’s the end of national poetry month and I didn’t read much poetry. Poetry, I’ve said before, is slower and words ask for more attention. This morning it was raining though and I went to Elizabeth Bishop’s Intimate, Low-Voiced, Delicate Things and read her words. The title makes me think of flowers. The fritillaria, narcissus, hyacinth and muscari bursting from their bulbs in neighbourhood gardens, some patches cropping up in unlikely places.

Fast appealed to me instead for most of the month. After I sent my final chapter in for review, I wanted to devour bad tv and read fiction quickly. I was craving narratives that stayed with a character for a long time. Story, which lingered into the core of a thing. I’m finishing Sally Rooney’s A Conversation with Friends. She’s so adept at capturing the interior psyche of a character and she has this acute ability to make car rides or sitting on couches epic dramas full of heartfelt tension.

 

Lately I’m very aware that everywhere I look someone is trying to sell something and that most people with a SM page or website or online platform is usually directing me to something happening that involves participation or purchasing. I don’t like the pressure this brings.

 

I am afraid that if I don’t post to my grid I won’t be real and that is terrifying and absurd. I am afraid that if I don’t share my own private writing there, I can’t say I’m a writer. I’m worried that if I stop sharing stories online in video form or erase my SM pages that I will no longer exist and that the people I follow or who follow me will no longer reach out. This is not the world I grew up in, but this fear of being forgotten is definitely not new.

 

I grew up in a world of worms on sidewalks after rainfall, capturing frogs from ponds, eating rhubarb from my mother’s garden, stuffing my small chubby face into lilac blossoms and drinking in their fragrance. I danced around playing dress-up in my mother’s shoes, tore my jeans so they frayed and biked to Becker’s behind the farm fields near the cul-de-sac. I watched my sister climb the red maple. I spent time carrying stones around in my t-shit pouch, hoisting them like treasures to inspect their strata. I pinched my ears with clothespins as if they were clip-on earrings to know my skin was mine.

 

If I didn’t share the sausages and grapes I made the other night do they exist? They sizzled in white wine and I brought the fatty fennel pork to my tongue.

 

I post less and less and I gain less likes. The algorithms don’t like it. Making my instagram profile private gave me a little power to turn people away or let them in and that makes my numbers decline but I like the power more.

 

Today marks the day we moved from Hamilton to Halifax, a year already. I’ve never been so aware of my need for connection and so I find myself scrolling a lot but it’s never what I want. I see people being “active” online and I think about how I wrote nothing wasting time there. That I walked into my bedroom aimlessly and when I got there wondered why I was there. Was I going to brush my hair, again? Look at my reflection, again?

 

Someone in my mentor group last term said “you seem like a very private person.” And when this was said I got prickly and shell-like. I covered the sticky squidgy inside. “Yeah, I guess I am,“ I replied. Then I went on wondering how I will ever sell a book or make it in the hustle. I know that’s not the point of writing, but I do want to share what I’m working on with a reader. This space between reader and writer is sacred.

 

Sometime during this month I thought, I’m not sure I want to be found. I’m not sure how I’d feel if I knew my book was being published tomorrow. Maybe there’s a secret part of me in the close place next to my ribs that wants to remain unknown.

 

I oscillate between this thought and knowing I will have to get better at putting work into the world to be a writer. Then I work this out with friends, probably over-sharing to my people. When I received my final grades for this term my colleague said, “brag to me,” and I picked the skin around my thumb, then dug my nail under the blue shellac polish, letting it lift up before breaking it off. Now I have half-painted nails.

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April 22 was earth day. Another opportunity to let people know online that you are paying attention, I did this. I made sure people knew how much earth means to me. The garden and the natural world has been balm for me through difficult times. It’s saved me over and over in moments of distress. It’s taught me about impermanence and that being close to death is often what brings about an undeniable awareness of life. Its rhythms help me know that everything passes and changes and shifts. That no feeling is final, but we need all the feelings — the sad. The happy. The fear. The hope. The doubt. The courage. The disappointment. The relief. The love. The grief.

 

Dawn always follows a dark night but the dark night gives us a sky lit with stars.

 

I thought I was writing a book about my love affair with nature and though that’s still part of it, it’s so much more than that. The love affair is a sliver to a much larger story, one deep in my marrow with sunsets and scars, sagging and splits, stars and squish. It’s a story as old as time itself (okay maybe that’s too far). Still, I can’t wait to share it with you.

 

In April I refilled the bird feeder. I, like Ada Limon, have also become concerned that the birds are too dependent on the feeder now. I fill it, it empties. I fill it again. They are “more human than bird” as she says, in their desire to be made whole by something from outside. Insatiable. I am like them and though I don’t want to be (I’d like to be content). More often than not I’m ashamed to admit my ravenous appetite. There are the rare moments, when I roll out my yoga mat, light some candles and incense, take deep long breaths, feel the air filling my belly and as I twist ringing out my internal organs, tension is released and I feel there is nothing more I need to add to myself. I savour these moments. It happens when I’m lost in writing or arranging flowers or immersed in a recipe or seeding the garden. I forget about my self, my worries or efforts, and I find myself taken up into a sort of good disappearance, moving to a communal rhythm.

 

I spotted a blue-throated black bird — a common grackle in the rhododendron bush, during my morning coffee. He was stunning at first until I realized why he was likely looming about, to devour the other bird’s eggs. Prowling around my yard on the hunt for the blue eggshells in a Robin’s nest perhaps.

 

I didn’t like this grackle even though it was striking and I shooed it away.

 

Over brunch my partner and I discuss the puffy stomach of robins. We discover they are not that way because of pregnancy; they are fat because they’re cold and fluffing their feathers helps with warmth. I don’t know why I’m mentioning this, other than I had no idea. I’ve always assumed otherwise, a stupid naturalist.

 

When earth week came I found myself writing in my journal, “what is this fucking book?” I went outside and put the bird bath together and sat it beside the lilac tree, hoping that would help me know.

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And then, sitting on the beach next to my friend colleague, feet in the sand for the first time this season, I dared to utter the words I wrote in my notes just a few weeks back. A possible new title for my book. The shape and form of it in the words. It’s not the book I set out to write and it’s not the poetic clever title I thought I had. I didn’t want to speak the words out loud because then they would be real and this would be the shift in direction I need to take the manuscript where it seemed to be going. A real, “ah hah” moment. Then, I said them and I proceeded to explain what it is, I pitched my book, effortlessly on the sand to my friend and she exclaimed, “I LOVE IT!” Then that night on the other side of the computer screen with my sister, I told her too. I read her my pitch, this thing that just flowed out of me like water and she cried, happy knowing hope tears. And she said, “that’s so much more expansive and so much more like you.”

 

Over dinner in my hyper state of whimsy, I sat across from my partner and said, “I think I finally know what this book is about and it’s not at all what I would have set out to write, but it’s what I’ve been writing.” And I told him and his eyes flashed, proud beams, the championing solid kind that is his love for me, and he said, “That’s your book. That’s it!”

 

I did not proceed to write much after this epiphany. There’s a clearer project description blossoming and some more notes to myself in my phone. I did however begin to see threads in my stories and connections. In my writers group I wrote a very tender piece about powerlessness and will. The beginning of a longer chapter, I think.

 

Out on a hike the day I wrote that piece, I was overcome by the flutter of the silvery blue butterfly. That’s not just its description, but its name. I spotted a few flying around over mossy stones on the treaded path we took to Tea Lake. My partner walked on ahead of me while I followed the flicker of blue, only available to the eye when its wings were open. Otherwise the silvery spotted body blends with the terrain.

 

There’s something about this concealed decadence. This internal glow of silvery blue flashing when in flight that caught my attention.

 

I spent a lot of time walking the Salt Marsh Trail this month. It’s one long path with ocean on either side and something about how clear the sea is there and the knowing of where to walk has been comforting. We almost ran over a male ring-necked pheasant driving home as it scurried across the road, tail like a sword.

 

Yesterday was warm enough to open all the windows in the house. I put laundry on the line and took all the herbs I’d brought inside over the winter back outside. The dirt from the plants had built up around the windowsill so I cleaned them and the house smelled fresh like lemons on my tongue. I seeded hollyhocks, larkspur, calendula, borage, coreopsis, cosmos, godetia and poppies. I raked a seed mix mailed to me by The Seed Saving Project, where I saved and donated sweetpeas to them last fall. This surprise bundle my gift in return. As I did this, a red-bellied woodpecker swooped down from the oak tree to my feeder, swinging on it happy and full. A welcomed startle. I’m naming these birds and flowers because naming matters, in writing and in life.

 

The new direction of my book surprised me. It came to me quietly with a note I left in the margin of a book I was reading. It was almost so low-voiced that I ignored it. Even when I utter the title now, there’s something common about it, which reminds me of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem and her question that I find myself so drawn to lately: “Why shouldn’t we, so generally addicted to the gigantic, at last have some small works of art, some short poems, short pieces of music […], some intimate, low voiced, and delicate things in our mostly huge and roaring, glaring world.”

What pleases you?

“He said that the difference between the male and female modes of thought were easily illustrated by the thoughts of a boy and girl sitting on a park bench, looking at the full moon. The boy thinks of the universe, its immensity and mystery; the girl thinks, “I must wash my hair.” When I read this I was frantically upset. I had to put the magazine down. It was clear to me at once that I was not thinking as a girl thought; the full moon would never as long as I lived remind me to wash my hair…I wanted men to love me, and I wanted to think of the universe when I looked at the full moon. I felt trapped, stranded; it seemed there had to be a choice where there couldn’t be a choice.” – Del Jordan, Alice Munro

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 Moody and brooding, I walked down to the North West Arm. It’s a walk that has comforted me throughout this pandemic, as freedoms are stripped daily. I cannot trust my emotions lately, which is a difficult place to be while writing a book. I need them to inform an older self, her patterns, her intuitions and frustrations.

 

My writing mentor gives notes “so many beautiful passages here and so many juxtapositions of words,” and she pokes “make this more explicit” and then prods, “say more about how the narrator felt…that can be infuriating, that he wasn’t getting it.” When I read her notes, I know she is right and I only see the latter, ignoring the compliments, honing in on the deeper work. I stick to the surface in this chapter I submitted because I fear what I might find if I’m honest. I’m afraid of the rage and the anger. Sorrow is easier, an acceptable emotion.

 

In winter I suddenly wanted a child. I’ve never before wanted a child the way I did around the New Year. Not even when I was married. I considered that if I don’t have one, I could be betraying my body as a woman. I looked around at families, huddling close together, these tiny bodies of and not of their parents. I watched friend’s bellies expand and carry life and I think it’s a miracle. I marvel over it like when I look at the full moon. Something fleshy and formed, something meaningfully evident. A heartbeat underneath a heartbeat. I have a pile of tattered fragments I’m piecing together and as I write this I’m aware that wanting a child to feel I’ve contributed something meaningful to the world is not the best reason, though it felt very real to me for months. The encroaching feeling gets stronger as my body prepares for its monthly bloody release. The lining sheds. An egg drops. Tissue discarded. My body aware of what my mind refuses to do.

 

My angst around children has since passed. I think it turned up because the freedom I value and basked in with my choice to live a child-free life, was stripped from me this month last year. I’m sure there are biological reasons too. The clock as all women know is real. The animal body evolved to procreate, I feel this pull beneath my skin. A tussle under my flesh soil. I know I am grappling with this decision more than I ever have. Still, I wake up some days unrecognizable and wonder if this decision will ever feel settled in me. Maybe being eighty percent okay with a choice is enough. Or even sixty percent. Does it feel this way if you have children too? Is it part of the human condition to doubt?

I imagine a woman who hasn’t chosen children who wears an IUD, passes her prime, and is always slightly aware of the choice she didn’t make. Another woman with one child is asked or advised, “Have another. One isn’t enough.” Or the woman with two children who feels divided. I imagine a woman with three children with little time and space, questioning her choices as she gathers her littles. What of the woman who can’t have children and wants them and the woman who didn’t feel she had a choice? Does the lack of will ever feel like a gift? To be a woman is powerful, giver and taker of life, like earth, like ground and water.

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This month I juggled the usual adult administrative tasks: a cervical exam, an obligatory dental visit (I now own a sexy night guard), a call to my phone provider to deal with the long distance charges I racked up because my good friend moved to North Carolina and I forgot I didn’t have a plan for that. I gathered all my T4s and receipts to embark on the dreaded tax season. It’s not enough that March is the longest, most muddy erratic month, cold and windy with sunny days that spike temperatures, teasing you. It’s like a terrible relationship where one person plans this gloriously romantic meal with your favourite wine, wooing you out to a patio to stare longingly into your eyes under the stars and then disappears for weeks saying they need space only to do it all over again, tugging on your heart. That’s March!

 

For some reason I’m hyper aware lately of how much of my brain is devoted to meal planning and prep. I’m not even that good at it, as I’d much prefer to buy whatever is in season at a market and make something up spontaneously the day of (I miss this terribly). We order in when I am in a funk. Still, I find myself worrying at breakfast what we’ll have for dinner and then I wonder if this is the most interesting thought I’ll have all day.

 

I’m unorganized. My receipt piles and T4s sit atop my bookshelf, beside my laptop on the desk, they’re also saved in my email somewhere. I woke in the middle of the night recently thinking about scrivener. You can only write a book with scrivener, I thought mid-dream. I still don’t have it. Instead I write in my iphone’s notes, I scribble questions and one liners on cue cards, I stick quotes on my corkboard, I have too many tabs open and the starts of stories sit on my desktop. One thing I have stopped doing to myself in my thirties is trying to make myself into someone I’m not. This is my messy way.

 

To counteract the annoying admin and daily monotony, I sought out purple. It started when I made myself a purple martini by mixing periwinkle gin (Compass Royale) with dry vermouth. It’s the butterfly pea blossom from the clitoria ternatea plant that gives this gin its distinct colour. Yes, the Latin of this plant comes from “clitoris” as you suspected when you read it. The shape of the flower much like a woman’s genitalia. All I can think is PLEASURE! This gin is pure bliss. I topped my purple martini with cerignola olives in all their buttery goodness. I also tried it with a lemon twist. The lemon intensified the purple. All of this a reason to love adulthood.

 

I hunted down purple. I picked out variegated hyacinths for my table, fat and dripping with fragrance. I ordered the Bulwark Thai Purple Mist cider when we went out. All of this purple felt extraterrestrial and playful amidst the masks and sanitizer. I would have bought a purple freezy if it were warm out. All this violet, inside and out. All this violet lighting up the sky.

 

Purple is joy and I’m starting to follow that trail. This month I read a LARB article that knocked me over. I whispered yes to myself at my desk. Sophia Stewart’s words familiar. She articulated something I have not been able to about the pressure to be serious in the literary world. In that spirit, I signed up for Molly Wizenberg’s class called ‘Taking Happiness Seriously.” Somewhere before entering into my MFA, I lost my funny. Articulating wit on the page and writing out sunnier emotions, proved challenging. I turn to other, more seasoned memoirists for help exploring the varied hues of feeling.

 

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My friend mailed me a copy of Caitlyn Moran’s More Than a Woman, which I’ll read as Spring spreads green and chartreuse across the lawn, spouting in our gardens. I’ll laugh as buds strain and pop on the tips of naked branches.

 

Another friend got married this month. It was painful to be so far and not there by her side. Instead I attempted presence with distance, something I’m becoming skilled with loved ones scattered all over. We zoomed the day before and I watched as she cleaned flowers beyond the screen. “Which ones should I use?” She asked hovering the phone above the buckets, “those tall lavender and peach stock. The bushy line flowers.” I said trying to explain the ones I meant. “I would just make you do this if you were here,” she went on, stripping the leaves off the deep purple veronica.  I made her a chapbook with a bridesmaid speech that I would have delivered with a toast had I been there. Stuffed a couple hand-dyed silk ribbons in the twine. I learned the art of craft and hand-made gifts from my mom, all her scrapbooking. My mothering energy goes to my friends now. Distance. Pandemic. None of us know how to be. All we can do is try.

 

I finished George Saunders book and it was everything I needed to keep trudging through my work. Intelligent and silly and freeing. His concluding method: “go forth and do what pleases.” I took an online master class through CityLit with him and we read more Chekhov, The Lady with the Pet Dog, which some people think is about love and being changed by it. I’m not sure what I think yet but the way Saunders pulled it apart in thirty minutes immediately shifted my initial reactions—reinforcing the power of pedagogy to inspire new thought.

 

Sadly, Earnaux stopped being for me at this time on p.57.  I believe it’s important to mention because too few writerly people admit when a book remains unfinished, especially when it’s well received. Maybe I will return to it. Maybe I won’t. That’s freeing too.

 

I picked up Alice Munro’s The Lives of Girls and Women instead as we celebrated International Women’s Day. I’ve escaped into the touching and funny life of Del Jordan. I find myself having a reckoning with my own girlhood as I read it and that makes me excited to pick up Melissa Febos new book of stories. Today’s excerpt in the New York Times cracked me open. “You choose it, and it chooses you” Febos writes.

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To end March I watched my sister successfully defend her Master’s Thesis over zoom. I held back tears, full of sibling pride. I remembered her when we were small, her chubby limbs and peach fuzz, me dragging her around as my living doll. She was brilliant, exquisit and humble as she spoke with assurance about her research.  “Your work is pioneering” the psychologist with the rad glasses said.

Walking back from the park, atop the stone wall, growing out of brown leaves spouted bright yellow crocuses. The first patch I’ve seen this year. Their violet stripes across sunshine petals, erect and huddled together. They took me out of my wayward mind for a long exhale. When I returned to my house, I saw more, white with purple stripes, lavender pushing forth, violet cups scattered with the hum of bees, their woolly plump bellies powdered with pollen. My mood shifted observing the euphoria.

 

Nothing stays the same. Everything changes. We morph and evolve and move in seasons. I ask myself what pleases you? I notice growth.

Purple Martini Recipe

2 Oz Compass Gin Royal (if you can’t get Compass gin you can order Butterfly Pea Powder here and dissolve a little in your gin of choice)

1 oz Dry Vermouth

A squeeze of lemon

Shake over ice. Pour into a lovely coup glass or your favourite glass. Twist a lemon peel around your pinky finger and add it to the top.

** For those of you that don’t drink alcohol, you can still enjoy the pleasure of the purple drink. Mix butterfly pea powder with anything really. Use it as a tea, pop it in your smoothie, mix a bit with kombucha, or add it to San Pellegrino with lemon. If you really want to make a martini though, Seedlip makes beautiful non-alcoholic distilled spirits.

Travel Log: Film from 2020 in Oaxaca

I miss travel. I miss red snapper freshly caught and fried over fire and tortillas with chili oil. I miss crowds at sunset and music in the streets. I miss sweaty bodies, taxi rides and dancing with strangers. I miss vegetable markets and flowers sold roadside. I especially miss the possibility of it all.

These were taken just over a year ago. We ventured down to Oaxaca right before the world shut down and haven’t left Canada since.

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That strange straggly way in us

Voice, it’s difficult to encapsulate.

 

Publishers, editors, agents, all say voice is what they look for when a manuscript pops up in their inbox or slides across their desk. Listening to them discuss voice in my winter residency, none of them offered a singular definition of it. I suppose because there are so many selves in each of us, that when we finally pin down that strange straggly way in us, which holds all of them, it’s impossible to explain how it is done. Or what it is exactly.

 

I’m reading George Saunders’ latest book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. It seems everyone is reading it. My partner read it first, praising his master class lessons from the couch next to me over coffee. Four Russian writers I’ve always wanted to read are now available in slivers, packed into one book. Slowly, I make my way through.

 

The second chapter touches on voice. If you only read the book for this one chapter, on Turgenev’s The Singers and Saunders’ lecture-essay on The Heart of the Story, then you will have added gold to your literary toolbox. He writes about voice as becoming a writer “capable of producing the necessary level of energy,” and by this he means, a living breathing text. One where people want to follow along, finish, until the end.

 

He goes on,

 

“This writer may turn out to bear little resemblance to the writer we dreamed of being. She is born, it turns out, for better or worse, out of that which we really are: the tendencies we’ve been trying, all these years, in our writing and maybe even in our lives, to suppress or deny or correct, the parts of ourselves about which we might even feel a little ashamed.”

 

When I read this my eyes ballooned with tears. I don’t want this to be my voice, my embarrassing, unruly, uncomfortable parts. No. Not that place.

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I think that’s why I’ve called it that strange straggly way in us. It’s like that one bent tulip in the patch growing beyond the garden’s edge. It may also be because I read Adrienne Rich’s poem Upper Broadway this morning and her first lines startled me, the leafbud straggles forth and later this is faith.

 

Straggle (Verb) – to stray from the road, course, or line; to wander about in a scattered fashion; ramble. Move along slowly, typically in a small irregular group, so as to remain some distance behind the person or people in front. (Noun) – an untidy or irregular arranged mass or group of something

 

I liked straggle. This idea of a strange straggly voice sauntering behind all the others, observing them, reporting, at a distance, with experience. I also liked it as a noun, this irregularly arranged mass of voices, of all of oneself telling a story in an untidy, glorious way. There’s something very human about this image for me.

 

It’s an amalgamation of our insides, all of what one’s experienced, thought, repressed, alchemized with our outsides: interests, what we read, listen to, watch.

 

After my last post a friend wrote me, she said, “I feel like your writing is really coming into its own.” Into its own. I read again to myself. This, a great compliment, as I feel I’m coming into my own. My thirties have helped.

 

Writing this manuscript is like entering into the dark woods, walking through brambles and tangled vines to get inside, then once inside, noticing, moss, fern, dew and many paths to walk. I’m trying to reach a clearing, a sunlit lake beyond the canopy of trees. A secluded, tea coloured, spring fed lake. Swimming in that lake is like no other place. This is why I’ve gone to the woods and though I know I will get lost along the way, distracted, I continue on, plodding and when I come to the lake, I trust I will have a map to explain a way there and a way out.

 

Unearthing the strange straggly way in us is tough because it requires knowing ourselves. Something I’ve struggled with most of my life. It means pushing past the person we’ve constructed to please others or keep the peace or fit in at the party. Writing is a continuous learning about the self and it helps us take shape in the form we were always meant to inhabit.

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The “I” in memoir is used to explore the complex people we are beyond the page. It’s a character with a voice and like all characters; the “I” is fallible, fragile, with friends and foes, histories, belongings, aspirations. One way to capture this voice in memoir, as Sue William Silverman says is to write from two songs, the song (voice) of innocence and the song (voice) of experience (she took this from William Blake). As I write, I notice what a writer offers a reader is well beyond reportage. Sure, the telling is important, the specifics, the details. Their concreteness grounds us. Though, what a reader returns to a text for is what the writer has mined for them through experience and time devoted to articulating that experience. The emotional labour and honesty, is the gift. The reader, often myself, wants to be pulled out of the mire, wants relief, a glimmer of truth.

 

Another term for this is the double perspective—the voice of the narrator and the protagonist—there are two voices here, working together, in conversation. They are as Phillip Lopate says “two different creatures” yet in memoir these voices are both you, a prior and present self. Modulating a divided self on the page is no easy feat. And again, I think it’s even more than a divided self, I think the truest voice rises forth from the multitudes within, or as Saunders puts it ‘When we “find our voice,” what’s really happening is that we’re choosing a voice from among the many voices we’re able to “do…’ how brilliant and terrifying!

 

In two months time I will finish the first term of my MFA. All of this mostly completed alone, in my writing cave, painted Windsor Green by Benjamin Moore for anyone wondering. My mentor will no longer hold my hand, scanning my submissions, approving of it in places, nudging me to dig deeper in others. There will come a time where only I will decide what’s included and left out. I’m reluctant to let go. I cling like a child to a mother’s slacks.

 

Likely, I will ask a good friend or my partner to be a first reader through the months without my mentor. Someone who knows me well and won’t let me get away with showing off or half-truths.

 

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On the inside flap of Annie Ernaux’s The Years is written, “the voice we recognize as the author’s continually dissolves and re-emerges…the narrator eschews the “I” for the “we.” How very controlled and thoughtful this decision was for Ernaux to use first-person plural. She’s telling a story of a different time, where collective life is inextricably woven with private life, hence the pronoun we.  

 

My book is a mess. Its tense is all over. My voice, I’m sure dissolves and reappears, not for the controlled reasons like Ernaux but because I’m hesitant, trepid in moments and then bold and blunt the next.

 

It’s okay that my voice isn’t polished. Writing a first draft begins with getting it all down, the beautiful and the ugly, like laying out the ingredients for an arrangement of flowers. In my case often using too many words. Then comes the discarding, shaping, and clustering—giving space for the light to seep through.

 

I’m assured, by Saunders words. Assured that I cannot get away from myself. My voice. Assured that no one can be me, tell my stories in the strange straggly way I tell them.

 

I continue on.

The I put on the page, not as round as the I writing

“I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.” – Joan Didion

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I am writing. Daily. Not publicly and I’ve been conflicted about this.

Inhibited by guilt, especially now that I have more time. My devices distract me, I blame the scrolling — a pseudo connection.

There’s advice in my program around building platform, the importance of newsletters or blogs. Identifying with your community.

All of this feels inauthentic and strange.

A little gross and imposed and unnatural.

Yet, I think about writing to you. The you that is out there peeking into another’s life, as I do on occasion, to try to find some guidance or solace or assurance that I’m not alone in my wandering.

 

This is whom I’m writing to here. Or, at least, trying to.

 

There’s conflicting opinions, around the publishing industry asking if you have a blog, which tells all there is to tell, then why write a book at all? There’s no mystery left, you’ve given away the content for free.

 

So which one is it? Write publically to generate a platform? Or don’t write and hope someone likes your work enough to publish it?

 

This worries me and it doesn’t. Ultimately I believe writing to be an intimate and personal choice. The medium where the words are put down, influences the words themselves. For instance, when I write in my journal, I write with pen and paper, to express and feel my way through the world, unfiltered. Liberated. I write without hindrance or concern, as it’s a place to help me sift through the mire. As I’m working on this manuscript, I am writing, yes for myself, but also with an audience in mind and about a particular time period. For this I type on my laptop. There’s a lens that I use with this technology that forms the words differently. I am trying to articulate something, craft it. Revising early drafts with an editor’s eye. Filling in gaps. Mending and patching where there are holes. The diction and syntax changes when I handwrite and when I type or thumb around on my phone. When writing an article for a deadline, it alters too. I become more calculated. Often driven by word count and subject. Focused. Sometimes I like this kind of writing, as it’s clear and direct, no room for meandering or steering off track. My sentences are precise. I say it how it is.

 

Blogging though, or writing here to you could take many forms. It could be instructive or silly or casual glimpses into my life. It could be story or poem or image. It will always be only a piece of me. The I put on the page, not as round as the I writing. I ask myself why do this?

 

I don’t have an answer other than, I enjoy the generosity of others when they allow me into their consciousness.

 

I’ve had many iterations of blogs over the years and all of them have crumbled or gone up in flames or I’ve taken them down because that version of my past self is embarrassing, disappointing or both. Or in some cases it was time for an end. I’d like to try again here. I don’t know how often I’ll write or exactly what I’ll talk about. Most likely I’ll share a recipe, a poem, a book I’m reading, an excerpt that struck me, a gardening tip, a movie I liked, a TV show I’m devouring, a creature I saw on a walk or some flowers. Probably some writing tips or craft notes. If you like to geek out about writing and reading, you can do that here with me.

Social media has become a place where flash blogging happens. I miss the longform though and I miss a place that’s mine to put it.

 

Today after coffee and reading a couple essays in Ross Gay’s Book of Delights (my friend mailed me her copy of this book and it’s even more delightful reading it with the moon postcard she scribbled in as bookmark. Her handwriting joy.), I went for a hike in Point Pleasant Park. This is my regular route now that I live in Halifax near the northwest arm. I try to visit the ocean as much as possible, one consistent pleasure during this time. The ground is slippery now. Snow is melting and patted down by walker’s feet, more ice than powder. Glossy trails. I walked slowly and as I passed the break in the woods where trees part and the ocean opens up, a crowd of dogs scampered past me. Tails wagging, tongues out, smiling and sniffing and friendly. I found myself grinning, took a picture for my sister and sent it off, “thinking of you.”

 

I eat a lot of small oranges and toast with peanut butter lately. Winter comforts. The first thing I made for myself when I got in the door was sourdough toast slathered in butter, peanut butter and topped with blueberries. Then went to work on a piece I’m writing for a friend’s podcast. It’s short and a challenge and something different from the writing I’m doing in my MFA program at University of King’s College.

 

Before all this, I ran a flower business. My life was beautiful, fraught, abundant, exhausting, breathtaking, stressful and one of the most memorable seasons of my life. After this seven-year stint of growing flowers, working in events, a divorce, family crisis, throw in some other tumultuous experiences, travel, and soul searching, I decided to stop working as a florist and pursue writing.

 

I kept telling myself that one day, after my business was sustainable and stable, then I would let myself take time to write. Until I realized that energy doesn’t die, it just shifts form. I could take all the energy and resources I’d been pouring into my business and put it towards my interest in literature. This wasn’t easy. It was terrifying to leave the farming community I’d come to think of as family and to stop bringing joy to my neighbourhood through flowers. It wasn’t a smooth transition. I went backwards for a while before I could move forward. Took up bartending to pay the bills and ward off my credit, but something else began to happen too. An opening.

 

A poet friend of mine introduced me to a professor who allowed me to audit his English Lit classes. I learned for free, practiced my craft and built a portfolio. I did this while waiting tables and shaking cocktails. A year later, I moved across the country. We did not know that we’d be moving in a pandemic when we settled on an apartment (we signed the lease on our last trip, from an artist retreat in Oaxaca). This new unknown, a city we weren’t familiar with, plus the added stress of an international crisis, was very much like our drive out here. Long. Arduous. A dark iron cloudy night. The fog, a haze around us. Thick rain pelting the windows. Only able to see a few feet in front.

 

It’s scary to willingly enter into uncertainty. It’s even more scary to have it thrust upon you. To realize that all the norms, structures and societal rules can crumble away in an instant.

  

Things that have helped me through these unknowns:

Making the bed: I do this every morning. I know some of you are wondering so what, but there was a time in my life when I didn’t give a fuck about bed making.

Meal planning: Only a few a week but still, cooking helps me feel in control of my life. Cooking happens more often when I have the ingredients in my fridge. Hence, planning.

Walking:  I walk for short stints between writing. Or one long brisk walk in the morning before I dig into a few hours work

Phone calls: I call my friends and we talk for hours. We do this while I’m on one of my long walks, or prepping dinner or cleaning the house. The voices of those who are dearest to me are solace in this distance.

Incense and lighting a candle: The fragrance of something soothing and woodsy calms my mind. Sandalwood and frankincense a favourite. Or the latest vanilla my sister gave me. The flicker of a flame (a tealight even) animates the room in cold months, making it less lonely.

Humour: Specifically Schitt’s Creek, then the documentary on Schitt’s Creek and youtube videos of the entire cast

Poetry: When I can’t sleep I read poetry. I also like to read it when I wake. Poetry is read slowly, like a meditation. On my bedside table right now I have Adrienne Rich’s Dream of a Common Language and David Whyte’s Pilgrim

Watering Herbs: I brought a few of my garden herbs in for the winter. Some have died. I still can’t believe basil has outlived thyme. They sit in my kitchen window and I water them before I make a second French press in the morning.  

Medication: I suffered a bad bout of anxiety and depression in the fall. This is a personal story for another time. I take medication now. Please don’t let stigma or fear prevent you from asking for extra help if you need it. Send me an email if you are struggling too and have no one to talk to, happy to share part of my path.

 

Peanut Butter Toast with Blueberries:

Sourdough from a bakery is ideal but really any bread you like will do

Toast it, slather with butter

Top with Adams All Natural Peanut butter, smooth (it has the perfect amount of salt)

Scatter blueberries

Eat with steaming coffee or tea.