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.

Stories and compassion hold us together

According to my calendar I’m supposed to be working on a grant application this morning, but it’s my first day off in eleven days. Summer has been like this. My work, feast and famine. All the artists I know live this way, struggling to gather their bounty while it’s available to store away for the sparse months. Like pulling up garlic, bulb after bulb. Except the storing is getting harder. Cost of living up. Rent wars. Real estate impossible. Gig economy. No benefits. No paid personal days. Must be available and online always. Anyways. Creatives know how to flow with the rhythm of seasons and if they don’t, they learn. I will likely still get to the application, just not today. I’ll have to squeeze it into twilight hours either over stovetop espresso or a martini. Always a candle.

I threw open the blank page like I threw open my sheets to run toward my desk this morning. Giddy at the thought of what I’d find within myself. On my way, a pile of unfolded laundry sat by my bedroom window—clothes draped over the wardrobe. I considered making the bed and folding it all. Getting it out of the way before I can do what I really yearn to. Then some quieter quickening in my mind begged me to ignore it all. Go write.

There is always something else to do, someone in need, something seemingly more important than words on a page. The garden needs weeding and watering. Dinner made. Invoices sent out. Emails responded to. Kitty litter changed. Gathering with friends. A run. A swim. House cleaned. In the flurry of the hotter seasons, I knew it would be difficult for me to get to this place. Writing. What I didn’t anticipate was the longing I’d feel for a space I missed. The shape an arrangement of words makes inside of me is something nothing else can emulate.  

 In my apartment entrance hangs a photograph. The view from my studio flat in Palermo, Sicily. A view into a time passed. I remember waking in the morning and opening the shutters, to a cluster of sandstone buildings overlapping with terracotta roofs, cast-iron balconies, and striped curtains—red and cream, yellow and cream—blowing in the wind while jeans hung out to dry in the already hot sun. I was there for a week after central Italy. Alone to write and think. To mend and restore from my marital separation the year previous. Still, very much in the phase of disintegration of a former self, I found I was left with instinct, more a soft animal skin where I relied on my physical senses more than anything. I put an espresso on and sat at the small humble wood desk. Bedsheets unmade beside me. A large black and white photograph of two men close in a crowd, a green sconce and a shelf of books on the wall. The morning light filtered in through the narrow kitchen. I opened my notebook and recorded the days before, what I’d seen and heard and felt. The bumpy flight full of turbulence. The woman beside me crying in Italian. Words I couldn’t understand. A brief moment of intimacy between us when she pressed her hand into my left leg as the plane rolled up and down, left and right in the sky over the Tyrrhenian Sea. Perhaps her way of calming herself. Grasping at humanity. Once we landed the woman assured herself nodding, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” with a smile.

I thought about how to describe experiences at times and then didn’t at others. One of the quotes I’d scribbled in the front of that notebook was from Barry Lopez:

“Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.”

 Somehow the details of where I was and what I was doing mattered. The story was forming inside me. Putting the scattered pieces back together in a new form. At the Palermo airport, a man named Mr. Caraciolo waited for me with a sign that read Jessica Payne written in crayon. I spoke piccolo (little) Italian and he spoke little English. He had gentle eyes and thoughtful gestures. He took my bag, paid for parking and drove me to Piazza Sant Anna Al Capo where we unloaded my belongings and had to walk to the flat from there. The streets were busy. Tanned bodies blurred under the yellowish glow of streetlights. My suitcase bumped along the cobblestone as I dragged it. Once inside I said goodbye to Mr. Caraciolo. I was alone in the dark then. Tired, with only a few hours of sleep. I decided to make tea. Took the electric kettle and set it on the gas stove. The plastic bottom began burning, with flames and smoke. A cord attached. The rubber melting on the burner. I threw cold water over everything, putting it out just in time. Crying, I called Mr. Caraciolo, while I simultaneously looked up how to say I’m sorry in Italian. When he answered I said, “Mi displace, Mi displace,” over and over. He returned to the apartment right away. Laughing and relieved to see I was okay. He raised his hands at the sight of me defeatedly hunched over in a chair by the stove and said, “God is good.” At that moment I couldn’t reason with him about belief or god, will or my own stupidity. There’s no time for that when lost in translation. “Yes, god is good,” I replied pressing my hands together in prayer wondering why I’d done this. I promised to replace the kettle before I left or leave money for one. He hugged me and patted my shoulder as if to say take good care and left me again, alone in the smoky room, quite late.

 Morning broke and the space was bright. A golden glow across the buildings and over the floors. I emailed the owner, apologizing profusely for the kettle and requested to stay an extra night. I already loved the flat. No plans of where to go after. I looked around at the photos and paintings and wood art on the walls. I dreamed about gooey aubergine and nero d’avola. The salty sea on my skin. The sun. The opera.  

 I wrote, Palermo is the city of colour and flavour.

I want to try granita, cannoli, cassata, arancini, swordfish caponata.

I noticed a card with a map to the Capo Market and a number to call if I wanted to take cooking lessons. As I walked towards the Capo, I called the number. Gabriele picked up with an excitable Buongiorno. He had time on Friday to teach me some Sicilian dishes.

I’d fill the studio flat with a feast.

I did.

 Cooking with Gabriele Nov. 10th 2017 Palermo Sicily

“When you cook taste everything,” began Gabrielle.

 That day in the small kitchen we made

Antipasti: Caponata (Vegetarian and with Swordfish)

Antipasti: Sardina Becca Fico

Primi: Busiate – Pesto di pistachio, Gambero rosso di Mazara

Secondo: Orate al Cartoccio Con Potato Carciofi e Erbe Artichochio

The Caponata recipes are in the subscriber newsletter, but I will leave you with a mix for the bread:

Take chilli peppers, sundried tomato, olive oil and garlic and put them in a small bowl with a little oregano. Mix. Sprinkle with almonds. Spread over a slice of fresh bread.

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.

Think Of Yourself As The Planet

Bodies. Thinking a lot about them. Especially as I people watch on my winter walks. The clumps of friends in red and pink snowsuits, groups moving like birds, a man walking alone on the snow packed path at the edge of the lake taking a picture with his phone, a woman lets her dog off leash, and kids skate in Woodbine Park. All this while water precipitates into clouds at the horizon line. Water in many forms in one place—solid, liquid, gas. We are nature I chant to myself often. Ever since I experienced a mixed-media art installation at CCCB Barcelona in 2017 with Kim Stanley Robinson’s exhibition prologue, Think Of Yourself As the Planet, to an ominous track dubbed over videos of jellyfish, forests, pulsing waves, skyscrapers, computers and his words — “so when you’re talking about your planet, your talking about your body. And remember, a fever can kill you.”

I sat on the floor by myself watching this over and over before getting up to walk through the rest of the installation titled: After The End Of The World. My head was light and full. It was all very intense, somber. I wanted to do more than farm flowers, stupid flowers, and make arrangements for weddings, dumb love. I was going through a divorce. Everything felt urgent, immediate, and then I went and ate fish with a glass of white wine, alone and felt happy and guilty.

After reading the latest article in emergence this morning by Melanie Challenger (I’ve since added her book How To Be Animal to my reading list for this year. The list grows like a fungus), I listened to Infinite Universe by Beautiful Chorus. Their beat only in love through my ears. Then the ambient lull of Hibernate by Eskimotion. Thinking I should listen to these on mushrooms and not while drinking coffee. These contradictions live inside me.

Carmen Maria Machado also discusses bodies and what it means to be human in her genre-bending memoir In The Dream House. She looks at queer relationships and holds them up to a prism—within our own individual identities is our humanity—our propensity towards love and cruelty. She unpacks this through reflecting on her younger self, psychological abuse and a specific harrowing relationship in her adulthood. I’m only halfway through but I like her short flash nonfiction prose and see myself in her work despite our differences in experience.

My final MFA residency finished just over a week ago. Emotions moved as if I were a teenager again. I did a reading. This means I read an excerpt from my work in front of my classmates and faculty. The first time I did this I thought I was going to pass out. The more I do this doesn’t change my fears or the sweat which forms on my palms as I read, it only helps me remember I won’t die from reading my work aloud because I’ve done it a few times now and I haven’t died. This helps. My colleagues and faculty also say really profound and kinds things about my work. I tuck their comments into a folder on my laptop so I can read them when the critic gets loud —you’re have nothing to say. Why do you write these sad intimate stories about desire? You know nothing. You’re too serious, be funnier. You’re trying too hard, be easier. Your not doing enough, try harder. There are better writers just give up. Blogging is so early 2000s, there are cooler platforms now. Writing for free means you’re not a writer.

Something I think a great deal about lately is my boundary on the page. What I’m comfortable reading publicly, especially as a narrative nonfiction writer, and what I’m comfortable with people reading in the privacy of their own home. They are different. These boundaries. In the same way what I post on SM is different than here on this blog, is different from what goes into my newsletter (free fitful note for subscribers), is different from what’s in an email or text to a friend. I am learning about myself in this, the lines for my work. Letters between performance artist Marina Abramovic and writer Elena Ferrante discuss art in public and private in a much more articulate way than I can at the moment. Perhaps some of the most arresting ideas happen in the spaces between people, through inquiry and the unknown.

What I’m most proud of from our residency was how I pitched my story(ies) to the editor and agent I was paired with. We pitch our writing in person and this is unusual because normally it’s done in a letter, not face-to-face. Looking at someone in the eyes and sharing a work-in-progress is unnerving and vulnerable. I didn’t like it. Still, I did it. I didn’t try to cater to the marketability of my book for a particular press or agent, I stuck with the book I want to write, trusting it will find the right home, eventually. The exercise is mostly to learn about the publishing industry, to inquire further.

This morning I sit writing in our living room and looking out the West-facing window where the sun will set. In winter I can see the yellowish orb dip because the trees in our yard are only branches. Naked. The CN tower is visible on a clear day. When the sunbeams turn orange the scene looks like those crayon pictures I made as a kid. A layer of colour with a layer of black crayon on top and then scraping the wax until the colour pokes through past the dark silhouetted trees.

As I read the essay On Death and Love in emergence I thought of our space from two sides, the west window and the east window. How the light glows differently. There were many unformed formed thoughts, a reeling stream of consciousness and so I end with this because I want to. That’s the only reason really.

A space from two sides.
Sunday morning. Into evening. Grateful for this home. The light. A small world we’ve made here, especially as going into other spaces, being together socially, is still threatening. Catching up on some reading I like to call “research” to feel as though I am not procrastinating. Learning, again and again, about the evolution of humanity and how we think we’re the most important on the planet because consciousness only belongs to us and not the other animal bodies or sentient creatures or any other living thing. Learning about how the female body reminds us of mortality. More on this. Reading about death, actually Death, and reflecting on my own encounters with it, why we try to outrun it. On grief and how mine marks where I’ve loved and love, love love. Thinking on the adolescent Robin that died in my arms in the height of summer, a day after my 35 birthday, as a moving truck pulled away in the back alley. More on that too. Reading about destruction, apocalypse, holocaust, environmental collapse and still rationalizing, “but we are mostly good with a bent towards cruelty right?” And as I read the thoughts pass— I should unfollow people on Instagram to declutter my social media. What is for dinner? Should I put this on SM? Is my underwear inside out? This next to how it felt to hold the Robin, which let out a final breath…In.My.Arms. The silence after. Pure silence. The brain, which we still know so little about. My home, which I am attached to. All this on a Sunday morning.

Really though, Melanie Challenger’s essay on death is fascinating, moving, and eloquent. She knows things and articulates them beautifully.

Somehow this Death reading reminded me of going to church as a girl and then again as a young woman, the awareness of it always there with communion but then cushioned with ideas of an afterlife I could never quite cling to. The ignorance of the importance of the finiteness of life. Too many ofs in that last sentence. These words towards the end of the article hum the loudest now,

“perhaps it’s neither here nor there how we think about death. Perhaps the work that must be done is in how we think about life…perhaps we might place a little more faith in our bodies.”

And Kim Stanley Robinson’s words, “People are persistent. Life wants to live.”

So now that I have written this. Put words here. I’m getting back to life. Selecting seeds for my garden this week, hoping I’ll have enough to save for friends, planning the spring balcony, inviting neighbours over for drinks, finishing a school assignment, calling my parents to say hello, checking the mail for a gift from my sister, revising my manuscript, watching Ozark balanced with PEN15 and many winter walks.

Things to do if stuck indoors and feeling feverish:

• buy a pastry, like a pistachio brioche or something small from a bakery nearby

• get a coffee or tea-to go from your favourite café

• walk outdoors and look at what you love in nature and then think about how you are also nature and beautiful too

• watch the light change

• hug a human in your bubble, a furry pet or if without another animal, a pillow and yourself

• see if an art gallery is open near you, go and look at art with a mask on and really look at it while you feel your breath. I am going to view Anonymous Was A Woman this week with a friend. If there are no art galleries make something, even if it’s a doodle on the page of a book, a collage, a basket

• dance, dance and more dance. Movement of any sort really. My classes have been stalled as anticipated so I’m moving and grooving in the living room.

Joy Despite Everything

The sound of a bus screeches its wheels in the distance on Queen St. Some kind of construction thuds, traffic hums and someone locks their car door—honk. All while house sparrows chirp in the cedar hedge beside the front garden. Nattering in love. I like seeing their fat feathery brown bodies fluttering about.

They were in branches and brambles as my sister and I walked around Ottawa this weekend too. A chorus of comfort during the winter months. Whenever I hear house sparrows I think they sound like close friends or family, all talking over one another, excited to get the next word in. A delight only presence allows

I know this is a chickadee and not a sparrow but I haven’t developed the sparrow photo yet.

Today is the winter solstice, the last of the darker days before the light begins its quiet return. I am burning incense and a patchouli candle while my cat Rosemary sleeps on the couch. Sunlight streams across our Christmas tree. The twinkle lights are left on at all hours of the day because this season is full of tender-heartache, that Charlie brownie feeling of being afraid of everything, something amiss next to all the hustle and gift-buying, yet receiving a parcel from a loved one can make all the difference. So there’s this flurry of emotions, all mixed together. Somehow this has become the overall sensation of this time of year for me. It marks losses in my life, people who are no longer in it and yet it also marks the freshness of new faces and the consistency of my family of origin. The traditions I’ve kept and the ones I’ve let go of to make space for something new.

I didn’t write here last month because I was handing in pages to my writing mentor. I spent most of this term working on the structure of my book and I must say this is the most difficult part of the process for me. The structure currently looks like many tattered fragments. I spent weeks writing into the void, trying to arrange these raw pieces into a three-act structure with a narrative arc. Something Cambellian. This is not the shape of my book though. For better or worse it looks more like something I’d make, wild and moving, vivid.

Perhaps like the blue sparkly squiggle I made when I was three. An ornament my mother hangs on the tree every Christmas. It’s string and glue and blue glitter. That’s it. The shape a mangled swirl and for whatever reason when I look at it I think, yep, that’s so very me.

This month I am finishing Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar, which is haunting and eloquent. Her writing is taut. Every sentence sharp. I’m amazed at this debut. For contemplations I’m reading Mary Oliver’s Dream Work and Marcus Aurelius Meditations. I read Zadie Smith’s Intimations in the early fall to which she went to Aurelius “in need of practical assistance” during the early months of the pandemic. Her essays are beautiful, sad and hopeful, with some sturdy wisdom. I liked Peonies of course, and A Provocation In The Park articulated things I thought a lot about this year.

As my sister and I walked around Ottawa this weekend celebrating what we called '“Sismas,” a lurking familiarity filled the air. A fear that we may be swept by another large wave of this virus with no end in sight and more uncertainty. The feeling was bleak and I pushed it away trying to be present. Still, it was there in the clouds, which covered the sky on the night of the full moon, in the stroll of strangers and underneath the snow.

We each bought a copy of Aurelius’ meditations and opened it with a couple cappuccinos at Little Victories overlooking confederation square. I stared at the chronology, which opens the book—200, 100, B.C./A.D., 100, 200. Thinking on time as linear and liminal.

“What is A.D. again?” I asked feeling stupid.

“After death.” She said plainly.

“Right. Like Christ’s death.”

Snow fell outside, a floating fall.

“Yeah exactly.” She said, left eyebrow raised.

“It’s wild that we measure time by Christ.” And I thought of the biblical stories we were raised with and our plans to celebrate the full moon with candles, incense, tarot and martinis.

“I know.” She said widening her sky blue eyes, “I think it’s going to change.”

 The hairs on my arms became static. The world spinning as the solstice approached. The days darkening. Each snowflake different but made of the same stuff. The virus unknowable again. Unsettling.

Even Marcus understood, “The world is maintained by change—in the elements and in the things they compose.”

While I wasn’t blogging, I was dancing between writing. I’ve taken up a contemporary class on the Danforth. It’s the first time I’ve danced in a group setting in over a decade. In class we wear masks and sweat through them but it doesn’t matter. My teacher said to me after my first class back, “you’ve danced before.” My cheeks turned pink, “yes.” Dancing was something of a savior for me in youth. The movement a life-force, which helped me sort through a myriad of emotions. I don’t know if this class will be in person in 2022 so the months there means more now. The moments I lengthened sinews and skin with muscles tightening while music played will help me get through whatever is next. I’ll dance in our living room if I have to.

As the year comes to an end and all that surrounds seems uncertain again. I take comfort in carnal things, smearing butter on bread, flowers on the table, my cat stretching her limbs on the carpet, my partner’s hand at my waist or flipping through his Spotify recommending music (Crywank’s Momento Mori and Flatland’s EP). My sister’s laugh as she sips milky coffee, my mom’s voice on the other end of the phone, the weight of an axe in my dad’s hand as he chops wood for cold months, the stars in the night sky, books read and unread on my side table and the movement of my body as I dance.

I pay attention to what’s inside these carnal things, soul. There’s a painter whose work I am taken with named Antonia Showering. Her paintings make me think about higher selves and all the colour beyond our thin skin. Soul people touching, kissing, washing their hair in rivers, bathing in lakes and forests, arms linked on shoulders like mountains. The colour blends into the backgrounds, as if everything is animate. Something in her visuals reminds me what I feel when I meditate.

I am not a stoic. Nowhere close. Too many feelings but I value stoicism. I especially like that there’s part of me, which observes all my unruly thoughts and wayward moods. Aurlius writes in Book Two 1. “We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like two rows of teeth, upper and lower.” I cried when I read this small paragraph in the coffee shop because it’s true. But what happens when working together is best done apart?

I don’t really know how to end this post. I’m not sure I even want to put it here. I will though and I hope it adds to all the dark and light each of us is carrying around.

In winter, when my sister and I were kids, my dad would make an ice rink in the backyard. Sometimes he added water to whatever water fell from the sky, smoothing it out for a good freezing. The ice was dark like the night sky, always. Solid and sturdy. This was when we lived in the semi-detached bungalow. The corner lot my parents bought in the cul-de-sac. The rink formed around the trees and my family would go out and skate on it when the weather was cold enough to see our breaths. Clouds with every exhale. My mom loved it. I can picture her laughing and spinning, teaching my sister to skate backwards. My dad shooting a puck through two tree trunks pretending it’s a net. Me chasing our dog Misty, trying to grab her tail as I glided behind her. Childhood wasn’t always so idyllic (I wouldn’t be writing memoir if it was) but this is the love story, which came to mind as I walked by the pond in Woodbine Park at sunset this evening. Ice sheets with cracks like glass breaking. Leaves stuck between water as if pressed in a book.

The clouds leaked light.

I thought of my family.

This world of love my parents worked so hard to make, like a backyard rink. Despite the foibles and struggle.

I can imagine my dad working factory shifts and his worries about the 11% interest on the mortgage in the eighties. My mom running a home daycare to help while she made us chocolate chip pancakes in the mornings. They gave us what they could and to me it’s better than any parcel I’ll receive under a tree.

As I wrote last solstice, the layers we carry with us this time of year is shelter for what’s to come. Folded into our sleeves and socks.

While the light dims, we wait. Hold faith and each other. Hold life. We have been here before, through long iron nights. Now is the lambent hum, it is faint and quiet, before the bright return.

What comes to mind now is from Sally Rooney’s Normal People, “Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything.”

So may there be moments of joy despite everything this season.

Merry Winter Solstice!

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Summer Play and Not Quitting, but Stopping

When writing I light a candle. Sometimes a taper, a scented one or a tea light. If I don’t have a scented one I light incense too. I’ve made this a ritual for my process, a sort of artistic soul tool to enter into the unknown. Writing can feel as though I’m crossing into the dark and I like to carry a light and comforting scent with me. I find it helps calm any unidentified fears and push beyond the initial barriers, in case I discover any monsters or pains or unresolved images. I imagine a brain surgeon with his scalpel and I suppose a candle has become an instrument for me as much as a ritual.  Perhaps I like to have a flame with me because my great great grandfather was a keeper of the light on the west coast of the Great Northern Peninsula in Newfoundland. He was the lighthouse keeper helping to warn ships passing in the night to navigate them through fog, sleet, storm and darkness. I do this for myself now, for my work in the world.

The other night I watched the sunset over the North West Arm, a place I found immediate solace in after arriving in Halifax last May. Watching the luminescent sphere slowly dip below the clouds spread a deep calm as the sky lit up like sherbet. Whenever I watch a sunset now I can’t help but think of Cheryl Strayed’s mother’s words in Wild: “There’s always a sunrise and always a sunset and it’s up to you to choose to be there for it,’ said my mother. 'Put yourself in the way of beauty.”

These words always make me think of choice and perspective, how utterly vital both are.

A commencement speech for George Saunders’ students at Syracuse called Congratulations by the Way sits on a desk in our dining room. I picked it up one morning this month and read it through over coffee. We are starting to sound like cult followers of George in this household. He seeps into so many of our conversations as a point of interest that we can both share in this time where we’ve been each other’s everything, when no couple should ever be each other’s everything.

Where I haven’t had as many in-person friendships I’ve enlisted literary friends, as I used to do in times of loneliness before the pandemic. George has become a great literary friend. I like calling him by his first name, as if he’s been here because in a way part of him, his books, have.

As I’ve worked away on this post the past couple weeks I had a note here that said: Tell a meandering story now, one with the Rilke quote you like and a few other things, about fear of being cribbed and anger and rage and jealousy all that stuff. And then share George’s wise words. I’m not going to tell the story about being cribbed or what it felt like here. I’ll save that for another time or maybe never. That’s one of the joys of being a writer, deciding what to reveal and what to conceal and exerting control over that. Rilke’s words were this: The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.

Yes, this is where I am. I have seen and heard and now it’s time to continue pinning down those images and memories and thoughts in scenes. The ones that lurk in the back of the mind, the ones stuck under the skin, the hot ones, the fiery ones.

The bit in Saunders’ speech that I haven’t been able to shake was this:

“err in the direction of kindness. Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial. That luminous part of you that exists beyond personality—your soul, if you will—is as bright and shining as any that has ever been...Clear away everything that keeps you separate from this secret, luminous place. Believe that it exists, come to know it better, nurture it, share its fruits tirelessly.”

Before I moved to Halifax I used to go on silent retreats North of Toronto at a place called Loretto Maryholme. I started going every year for a few nights after I was introduced to it by a friend of mine, Sonya, who runs a retreat called Nurture and does a great many other things. I was teaching the art of floral design and foraging at her first retreat. What I didn’t know about Loretto is that it was on the lake I grew up swimming in throughout my youth. My place of unrest and toil and so much goddamn suffering. It was only twenty minutes from my parent’s home and around the corner from my first-real-high-school-boyfriend. I’d spent so much of my time in that area and yet I didn’t know about this place of solace and retreat. I remember thinking, if only I’d known, I could have come here to think and be and get to know myself better when I felt like an amorphous blob.

Here’s the thing about if-only statements—they are not about reality. They are hypothetical. Same with I should haves. They are about a version of you that could only get to where you are without the past version going through everything it’s taken to arrive where you are now. Past me only knew what she knew. So to judge her choices, by the standards of what she knows now, with all her knowledge and wisdom and talent and craft, is unfair and extremely unkind. I was busy losing myself in youth and I don’t think I wanted to be found then. More on that in the book.

On my first trip to Loretto I was teaching and facilitating. It was an incredible experience but I wanted to go back and be self-led with no expectations and not as a helper. I wanted to see what I’d find out in silence. So I went every year from 2014-2018 and stayed in blackbird cabin with a screened in porch overlooking the lake nothing but a hotplate to cook on. Five years I did this. I went away alone, intentionally entering into stillness with myself, to remember myself home to my body and understanding my selfstory (a Lidia Yuknavitch term), which was and is crucial to my process. It’s something I’ve taken with me, into my life, the importance of time carved out to listen to myself—my needs and wants.

It was at Loretto where I penned in my journal. I’m a poet. I’m a writer. I’m an artist. I knew it in my bones and rejecting it, telling myself to be something else wasn’t working. When I admitted this to myself and accepted it an ease settled on my shoulders, my back knots cracked and relaxed. This wasn’t without a wrestle or a dark night overlooking the lake with just me and the wind and the silence and my fragility. But then I would wake at first light and go outside and see what was growing in the garden plots, walk the labyrinth in the woods and after go down to the dock for a swim.

In the spirit of summer and a little more leisure time between the great upheavals happening over this way with the move back to Ontario, I’ve decided to take a break from the blog and fitful note. I want to spend as much time outdoors swimming, gardening, eating on patios and walking through the woods as I can and then exploring Toronto when I arrive there in August. So any writing that will get done in between this warm weather play will be devoted to my book. There’s a ton of rewriting and revising to do before my next term starts up in the fall and I’ve only just cracked the pages of that first draft since spring residency ended.

Last Tuesday I found out I was going to be a published author in an anthology called Bad Artist. It’s a project that’s in the works and I have no details about it other than my work will be included but I do know it’s going to be a material thing with some very interesting writers all discussing their art practice through words. On this same day, I returned from a walk and my partner said he heard the most beautiful bird singing in the linden tree. He recorded it and I used my birding app to find its name—northern flicker. It’s a rare bird that’s part of the woodpecker family but instead of pecking at wood for food, they dig in the earth. As they eat they dig out beats that sound like tribal drums and they sing their happy song loud and long and freely. Not only is their song unconventional, so is the way they nest—often in abandoned roots that they fix up properly. In this way, they symbolize resourcefulness and ingenuity. Their wings are like flickering flames, yellow and red blazing fire. Air and fire, working together. It’s a bird that seems to have found its sacred cadence. I felt that listening to its music and it gave me a reminder of my life song.

I’ve just started reading Art and Fear by Bayles and Orland. They write, “basically, those who continue to make art are those who have learned to continue—or more precisely, have learned not to quit…Quitting is fundamentally different from stopping. The latter happens all the time. Quitting happens once. Quitting means not starting again—and all art is about starting again.”

Isn’t this beautiful and true, in both art and love? And because I believe love is one of the greatest forms of art. The making of it too requires stopping and starting again. It’s an incredibly generous and courageous act to continue to make art and love despite accolades, thresholds, doubts or rejection. Energy into the day-to-day ordinary stuff of life.

So I celebrate becoming a soon-to-be published author but I note that arrival is the thief of process.

Being validated by a publication or other writers and editors is wonderful. I screamed with delight when I read the email expecting yet another rejection. I am thrilled still to be working on this piece. It’s what so many of us artists want—to be seen and heard and to tell our stories through a medium of our choosing.

When I’m stuck or feel that there’s loose threads, Bayles and Orland say to find a way through the fear, don’t worry about the loose thread, let it be there, that unresolved issue, carry it forward past the point of arrival and into the next work, “carrying with you the seed crystal for your next destination.”

For the artist the goal becomes making the art—in my case writing these days, and then sharing and starting the process again and again. This requires initiation. There’s a temptation now that I’m done my first term, my first draft and work being recognized to see this time as complete, and the impending fear of reaching the end of the MFA and not having a finished perfected manuscript and then what?

Then continue. Make friends with artists and writers along the way. Generate a space to share works in progress, think of this as the destination. Think of this desire to make beautiful, meaningful, emotive art as good and necessary and nurture that.

As someone who can wallow and whine and get frustrated with my work and struggle with perfectionism or get jealous of the successes of others, I have to tell myself this regularly: No one is going to do the work for you. The world may be against you, capitalism, patriarchy, ableism, someone trying to crib your ideas etc, but at the end of the day, you have to stop the vent session and the worrying and go use your weapon. Your weapon is your art! Make it. Put it out into the world. Make more!

This requires a ton of self-forgiveness and self-motivation. Forgiveness for all the times I hid or made things quietly and tucked them away for no one else to see. For all the times I felt I wasn’t good enough and inadequate to even begin and for all the times I felt like I was too much, too sentimental, too emotional, too fierce, too soft. Motivation for the times when no one is recognizing the work and there’s no home for it yet. Instead be like the flicker and make nests from abandoned roots.

While travelling through Valle De Bravo in 2017, designing in Mexico for La Musa De La Flores, I met an older man named Bernardo. He was thin with long silver hair, a sunken face, sharp jaw and thoughtful eyes. He was wearing a denim shirt against a painted red wall, looking like a retired seventies rocker who owned Chaos Cafe down the road from my airbnb. He would have wanted me to say he looked like Donovan or someone from Spooky Tooth. My spanish was terrible and I was lonesome in between the work. He knew english a bit and so we chatted when I’d order cappuccinos sprinkled with cardamom. He told me to listen to To Sing For You when the achy loneliness set in my ribcage while travelling alone.

One evening watching the sunset over the lake together he asked, “do you believe in yourself?” And I looked down at my feet, kicking up pebbles and said, “I’m working on it.” The sound of the water lapping, he faced me, “well hurry up, the world needs you.”

This tension of doubt and belief co-exist together as a part of the artist’s life. The sense that perhaps it will never be what is imagined and even if it is, will people care? So to make it and continue, the artist must believe in themselves, devoted to the process and to oneself in that process.

Bernardo passed away just before the pandemic but his words live on in my heart. He was a guardian of the light when I needed one and we all need those along the way, especially when we aren’t lighting our own candle.

More than learning how to write a book, I’m practicing believing in myself and learning how to be in the world, putting myself in the way of beauty and creating a writing life. This was what I was learning first during my stays at Loretto, then with my botanical art business, during my travels and now in my MFA. After my graduation, I will need this flicker too.

If you’re curious about the anthology Bad Artist, below is the call that was sent out to writers. Think of it as what would be on the back flap of the book:

Bad Artist is a collection of essays that aims to offer philosophical ruminations, tips on creating, and practical advice from artists working in unconventional conditions. By abandoning creativity’s unhelpful partner, productivity, Bad Artist instead explores ways we can be creative within – and despite – our material, familial, and social circumstances, all while challenging the conventional literature on time management.

See you in September and thank you as always for reading and being here.

White Combs and Sweet Honey From Old Failures

My garden is likely full of chocolate geraniums in bloom, peony buds with ants working away at their green caps, irises bearding, roses starting to flush, and the dangling white earrings of solomon’s seal.

I haven’t been there for some of the magnificent micro changes that happen in May and I wonder if my poppies are taking this season.

While travelling I worried I would miss Lily of the Valley, but I didn’t. It was popping up in front yards all over Toronto and Hamilton. My partner’s mom had a patch growing in her yard. I harvested a bundle and placed them in her bathroom.

I want this to be a short post. Mainly because I’m on a mini-vacation, visiting my sister in Ottawa now and trying to stay away from a computer screen or anything else that beckons. My sister turned 31 on this visit and though we couldn’t go out dancing or frequent art galleries, we’ve found our own way of celebrating through ordinary moments like cooking together, walking through the city, or scootering like we did yesterday, getting coffee to-go, reading and writing side-by-side. My sister is also a poet and writer. One of my favourite poems written by her is titled home and hangs in my room above my dresser. She’s a wordsmith, deep thinker and extremely sentient like the flowers, very in touch with trees, emotions, the silken soul stuff. As a girl I was always in awe of the way she tended to her surroundings, artfully nesting in her space, another world created by things she loved and cherished. I’ve learned this art of atmospheric aesthetics from her, curious to be let into her space growing up, what magic seemed to sprout from it.

When we were small I couldn’t imagine a future where we’d become best friends, the gap in age seemed impossible back then, eight and four so different. I was a mean child at times and pushed her away in the years when she may have needed a friend in me. I wish I could go back to those moments and look around with all I know now and see what she was up to then. I wish I’d paid more attention to that spirited girl in love with beauty. In our thirties the gap doesn’t feel so far. We often get asked if we’re twins or people mistake her for being the older one. We go along with it, laughing to ourselves.

My time here has been spent witnessing her life. I’ve enjoyed seeing her take up space in a city that so suits her. We’ve mostly been outside under willow trees, tearing off pieces of baguette and dipping it into the softest cheese from France (something like a Reblochon but to be honest I was too busy spooning it into my mouth to take notice of its name). It was a raw-cow’s milk cheese, washed-rind and smear-ripened and we sat next to Patterson’s Creek lapping it up in the sunshine.

The night I arrived there was a super-flower-blood-moon-lunar-eclipse, which is almost too much to write out. We went for a walk along the canal together and found it hanging low in the sky, tucked behind old homes with cloud wisps floating in its path, the pinkish glow didn’t appear until the early hours the next day but it was a large face looking back at us, the first lunar eclipse since 2019.

Eclipses are said to mark a crossroad of a new beginning and there have been many of those lately. My sister started her own private practice, my partner submitted his script to Sundance, I finished the first draft of this book I’m writing. A messy, shitty first draft at that, but it’s hefty and bound and so beautiful to hold. I wrote into the heartwood, a Betsy Warland term as my mentor pointed out. Wrote down the bones and gave it shape. I couldn’t be more proud of this raw rough and beating thing I’ve made. Betsy warland writes that “between the writer and the page is a magnetism more compelling than any other relationship” and I can say I felt this pull and bond as I returned to the manuscript over and over this year. Still do, as there’s much more to be revised and rewritten. I’ll need tenacity though. This first draft was accomplished because of the parameter of protection I put around my concentrated writing time. Yet, I often found myself writing into the fractured hours and slits of time, gathering the bits to make sense of what I’d written.

I let my sister flip through it on this visit and she was stopping in parts, laughing and then in the next welling up. I’m not sure if it’s because she’s my sister, that’s likely, and not necessarily a judge of the writing objectively, but since it’s a sort of love letter to my family, it was warming to experience.

As my partner and I make plans to move back to Ontario, I can’t help but feel it’s appropriate to have such beautiful glowing signifier from above. During a full-moon such as this one you’re supposed to let go of limitations, self-imposed restrictions or anything else keeping you small, in order to welcome more expansive possibilities for life. My sister and I stood there, staring at the golden reflection ripple on the river, talking to the moon as if it were god, “I’m afraid of—“ and we spoke out our fears and let them roll off our tongues into the night.

I don’t know if the moon heard but it felt good to let some shit go after such a challenging and at times debilitating year.

One of my fears was around my writing. I’ve come this far, how will I keep going? The truth is the writing life always depends on ourselves.  No one will do the time management for you. No one else will take care of putting the words on paper or know how they need to be shifted about on the page to sing. Writing is a solitary art form and being away in isolation gave me permission to hide away in my green cave. I will need this permission as I return to the bustle of a large city and the world begins to open-up again.

In a poetry of self-compassion course I took with David Whyte this month he said, “you can be better at the way you travel but you can’t travel in the way that someone else travels.” This has stayed with me, not only as a traveller but also as a person who’s had to find her own way in life and make peace that it doesn’t often look like those around me. I’ve come to listen closer now and notice the thoughts in my mind, you are living like a teenager in your thirties. You don’t own property. You have no children. What are you doing? Who do you think you are to call yourself a writer? A poet? An artist? And then I listen to someone like David Whyte speak about when he began referring to himself as a poet and his aunt said to him, “well you must think highly of yourself” followed by that insidious Irish shame, “the likes of you.”

We all have a version of this, a judgemental voice leering over our shoulder. Who is that voice in your life? I don’t think my situation is unique, but I am aware of what my gremlins say and then I try to smile at those thoughts wryly and with a bit of humour. Often with a dose of honesty, affirming their half-truths, as all good lies twist up the truth. While I was making my way through this draft I found myself faced with all my failures and mishaps, disappearing into the dark pit as writing friend calls it and many days I didn’t know how I’d climb out. I stopped trying to climb and gave myself a tender look, the way I would one of my dearests. Then I looked around at my surroundings, at the memories and mistakes and wrote from the pit, from my old failures and somehow as I did this, the bees were making white combs and sweet honey from them and it was no longer the dream of a book but a book.

We’ve been renting this big old house by the sea this year and spent most hours in a day within its walls. It’s the place I’ve called home though it’s felt like an extended writer’s retreat the entire time. From the first day when we arrived, I knew we’d only be visitors here. So I’ve lived in the liminal space, waiting out the pandemic, uncertain of when or where we’d go next, or if we’d even be going together. If there’s anything I’ve taken from this year it’s how very tenuous and unpredictable life can be, but this has only made me more fervently devoted to my loved ones and compassionate towards my way of existing in the world.

Before I left for this trip, I sat in my office, the room that will always be the place I wrote my first book, and I began structuring the chapters. It was overwhelming at first, so many pages, vignettes, stories and questions but I moved with the work in an intuitive way, leaving some things out and putting in pieces I didn’t expect. A skill I honed as a floral designer was suddenly useful for the book structuring process. The book’s form is entirely different from the way it began and yet, it has a narrative arc now and the pieces I’ve chosen seem fitting for how it’s all unspooling.

It’s absurd to me that the current ending will likely not be the true end. It’s close, but as my sister and I sat in her living room, going over the draft together, I realized that a thread running through the tapestry is leading me somewhere I couldn’t have anticipated. This is the beauty and surprise of memoir writing. How does a writer know where to end? Where to begin even?

Once I know I will write more about that. For now the words are rearranged and as I revise and craft, I see the work come alive, a heart of its own really and I’m trying to trust it.

I’ll miss the friends I’ve met in Halifax dearly and of course the ocean with its sandy beaches, slippery seaweed and stoney shoreline. I will miss the freshness of salt air and dipping my feet into muddy water. I will miss this old house with its big windows, radiators and hardwood floors; the sconces, chandeliers and wood fireplace. I will miss watching the sunset on the long side porch and the cry of gulls just beyond the neighbour’s yard, but I am going home, to the place where I was born, to write out the truest ending.

Things I’ve watched or read (or am reading) this month and recommend:

Girlhood by Melissa Febos (this is by far the most brilliant book I’ve read all year. It’s a triumphant, tender self-reckoning and I can’t put it down.)

Bo Burnham: Inside by Bo Burnham (It’s a vulnerable expressive masterpiece with social commentary through electro-pop that experiments with forms. I laughed and cried and didn’t know what it was, a total trip. It’s extraordinary.)

Shithouse by Cooper Raiff (a heartfelt coming of age film that’s so well written and gives all the awkward warm fuzzies.)

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh (I’ve only just begun but I already feel very invested in the narrator’s voice. Moshfegh uses her protagonist to show how necessary alienation can be and I’m sure there will be resonance after living in a pandemic.)

Mare of Easttown by Craig Zobel (I will not spoil anything, but if you like a dark mystery and a mother-daughter complex to provide levity, watch it.)

A Stone You Never Put Down: The Secret Languages of Grief by Carol Smith

Last Night As I Was Sleeping by Antonio Machado, translated by David Whyte & Robert Bly (See translation below.)

Last night, as I was sleeping,
 I dreamt –blessed illusion!–
that there was a spring breaking out in my heart.
 I said: Along what secret aqueduct are you coming to me, Oh water, water of a new life
 that I have never drunk?

Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt –blessed illusion!– that there was a beehive here in my heart.

And the golden bees
 were making white combs

and sweet honey from my old failures.

Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt –blessed illusion!– that there was a fiery sun here in my heart.

It was fiery because it gave warmth as if from a hearth,
 and it was sun because it gave light and brought tears to my eyes.

Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt–blessed illusion!– that there was god
 here in my heart.

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

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.

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.

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

 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Selected Film 2019: Family, Home and Gardens

“It seems to me that man’s inclination toward light, toward brightness, is very nearly botanical—and I mean spiritual light. One not only needs it, one struggles for it.” John Cheever