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

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.

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.