An essay I wrote too many years ago is coming out in print this fall. Lost track of how many revisions. Was definitely mortified looking back at the first draft. Kind of elated to allow you to read it now. I hope you’ll find something of yourself in my words.
More Than a Garden is featured in the anthology Bad Artist, released October 1st but you can preorder at your local bookstore anytime (which helps boost both morale and sales ).
For those of you who would like a copy early, join me for a drink at the Toronto Launch:
Toronto
Wednesday, September 25, 2024
7:00 pm
Danu Social House
1237 Queen St. W
For friends on the east coast there will be a Halifax Launch and I hope to be there (work dependent) but even if I’m not, if you want to talk to people about making art and doing it badly, here’s the details:
Thursday, October 17, 2024
7:00 pm
Bus Stop Theatre
2203 Göttingen St.
Other fun news:
I’m teaching a writing workshop with Jane Silcott, Creating Atmosphere, on Friday, September 27th from 1 – 2:30 pm EST through the CNFC (which I am also President of but don’t talk about enough but I do believe it’s a great collective for anyone looking to connect to other creative non-fiction writers and gain resources). I would love to see you there, not too many of you though, because last time we taught, there was a Zoom room of 75 people and I like when I can see your faces on one screen. Sign-up details here.
I meant to write in springtime when everything was bursting confetti, generosity everywhere. That season flew by in a flash, yellow finch streaking gold in flight. July was travel. A trip with my sister to revisit Dad’s roots. We stayed in Gros Morne with our 93-year-old Nan. She lives at the southernmost tip of the Great Northern Peninsula in the house she was born in. From the dirt road, we could see the level green mounds of the Appalachian Mountains and nearer the Atlantic calm on one side of the estuary, force and wave on the other. It wasn’t until this trip that I understood the love of nature my parents instilled in us. My dad’s appreciation for larger landscapes, trees, mountains, and water, mixed with my mum’s attention to flora, the delicate shapes and vibrant colours, moss mounds and grasses. These were all part of our familial education.
When I moved to Halifax it was my intention to visit Nan, as the ferry out of Port Sydney isn’t too far. Then pandemic. Isolation or death. I couldn’t risk getting her sick, so I never went. Four years later, my sister and I returned together.
The trip was breathtaking and also at times heart-wrenching. Wilderness and SOS zones are not what I’m used to in urban life. A nice cup of coffee was hard to come by in our first week, but we had plenty of oatmeal raisin scones and molasses buns to make up for it. I packed my espresso stove stop. In coastal life, there are other luxuries. When we returned to my Nan’s after a night in Lance Aux Meadows, she had two large stainless-steel bowls filled to the brim with lobster and crab. Butter warm on the stove, “eat up.” In the morning homemade partridgeberry jam on toast.
I faced the woman I was when I was last there—a mid-twenties arts administrator engaged to her fiancé. Of course, there’s more to it than that, but I had gone there for a family reunion thirteen years earlier, engaged to be married, and in Newfoundland being a wife and a mother is probably the highest praise for a woman. I was well on my way to success.
On this return, I was not the same woman. Not fulfilling the role so easily carved out for me. The glint and sparkle around delusions of love faded from my eye. A sharp depth to replace the twinkle. A fierce force that rose in me when I entered my thirties, which I keep ablaze each day, as best I can, had replaced it.
Childhood pains and groans surfaced on our travels. I was sick to start off and then my sister was sick. We travelled every few days and we saw places on the Island we had longed to visit but had never seen. As kids, our trips to the island were always to the west side, mountains and fjords, shellfish and sand dollars. Somehow our parents managed to drive from Ontario to the ferry terminal, cross it and then drive another four hours to Nan’s with two small children and a dog multiple times. This was our family vacation, visiting Dad’s home. We loved it. We knew nothing else. Much like Dad never felt poor despite having no running water or electricity until high school. There was a remoteness to his life that I only began to understand fully on this trip. His family was part of the resettlement program after communities were abandoned by government assistance. This was in the fifties and sixties after Newfoundland became part of Canada. The only original building still standing on the part of the land he was born in is a lighthouse my family were the keepers of. Though Dad was in an isolated community, it was not impoverished. Care and the natural world were in abundance. This was home for him, and it was rich. He knew nothing else.
So, with a desire to see more of this place we’d been many times, my sister and I drove to the eastern side of the island. We ate oysters and Parisian gnocchi (probably the best gnocchi I’ve ever had) at a new spot called Rabble, drank beers over spicy drunken noodles at Namjim in Bannerman (thanks for the recos Ceilidh) and walked around the colourful streets of St. John’s. The architecture much like parts of England and Ireland. The hills like San Fran.
By the time we reached St. John’s, we were tired. Driving in four-hour stints and sick and not sleeping in our own beds. Travel is different than vacation. Travel is eyes open, hearts open, hands open. Travel is restless and ruthless and always epic. This was travel.
By the time we reached Bonavista the clouds lifted, and the fog parted. The sky was all sun. We saw humpback whales moaning and breaching inches away from our boat, a mother and calf followed us all morning and a school of dolphins played between. Whales, especially humpbacks, have always softened me. Their mammoth bodies and slow movements calm my otherwise stormier side. As if a great love has wrapped me in a heavy blanket. The screams of the male calling as the mother and her calf descended into the dark water. Their cruising in an unhurried way makes you stop still. Makes you notice. Their steadiness unworried by our interruption and the way they make their heaviness look like levity. The salty smell of sea and kelp. This was our beginning there. We watched the sunset over the idyllic coastal town with a friend who lives there now. We walked under pink skies that didn’t have to compete with concrete. We drank tea while the sky became neon orange and it was as if we were in the Mike Gogh paintings we had witnessed in St. John’s. We visited puffins. Thousands of them hobbling and gliding around a random rock chosen as home. “They are joy” we screamed, “JOY!” We squealed WEEEEEE as they dove from the cliff face, skimming the ocean to join their puffin pals. I wanted to scoop one up and snuggle it like my cat. I wanted to burrow my face into its feathers. How weird and cartoonish they look.
The trip was illumination and wonder. I didn’t realize the significance of it all until I returned home. Though, I had planned to visit Nan in her ninetieth year while completing my MFA, to study my family history then. To write more about it. Life had other plans. I visited Nan in her ninety-third year. I didn’t study as I thought I would, I crossed a threshold with my sister to parts of childhood we’d forgotten. I received answers to questions I’d missed asking, didn’t know to ask. I got to know my sister more, in a new way, and I also got to know myself more. I left knowing the vast landscape of Newfoundland is inside me but so are the tall deciduous trees of Ontario and the buzz of the city. That I’m that unusual combination of my mother and father, that when Dad married a mainlander all those years ago it set in the two of us sisters a different path from the longer lineage of women on that island. Some part of us, a steady current of wind running against the ocean and not with it. Some part of us diving into the wreck. The trip came at a perfect time when I needed it most. It came before some big family changes. Good ones. Exciting and thrilling new starts and yet change requires adjustment. A shifting of dynamics and expectations. We went on quite the hero’s journey together and it only drew us closer to the women we have wanted to become all our lives and are becoming. There were seashells and rocks, fossils and beach glass, healing conversations and saltwater swims, long laughter into the night, too many moments of “that’s so special” to everything that struck me, tears and toil, survival and sweat and raging onward with so much awe, so much beauty now inside.
I didn’t mean to write entirely about the trip. I wanted to write about the self and time. How it passes and can feel like a blink. How I carry the self I was when I was stary-eyed and getting married but I’m also not the same self. I am larger now. Whale-like in experience. In early August I was on Lake Huron with my friend Hannah. After a day in the sun we watched the Diane Von Furstenberg documentary, “Woman in Charge.” (I cannot recommend enough). Diane was utterly and unapologetically herself. She was not for everyone. She walked through the world knowing it would be okay to buck against societal conventions and structural expectations. The documentary opens with her sitting in the sink in a shirt dress applying make-up saying “I don’t know why people say how old are you? They should ask, how long have you lived?” She’s applying mascara and her wrinkled legs are well on display, her age marks, victory laps, “I don’t know why people want to remove their wrinkles, I have always loved wrinkles, they show a person’s story. Why would you want to erase your life? Your story? I don’t want to erase anything from my life.”
I keep thinking about this, not erasing anything from life and how I don’t want to erase mine either. I entered my thirty-eighth year in August. I’d like to be asked how long have you lived? Over and over. I think about my ninety-three-year-old Nan and how she can still bend herself under a bed to plug in a lamp or paint a birdhouse yellow or crack a lobster with her bare hands or make potato cakes at eleven at night for her family, passing out the hot browned squares with pork fat crisped at the centres to each person sitting around the bonfire. She has lived many lives, more than even ninety-three and she is her story in wrinkles, and I love this. I am learning from her. I am learning from my parents. I am learning from those before me always and I am also forging some other path, a road not taken by women in my lineage. This is a current against going out to shore. Wind over the ocean with no waves.
August was mostly design, recovering from a freelance trip to Kenora, and then spreadsheets for my work with the local flower collective. I taught at ASCFG with my friend Jo, owner of White Oak. We taught a crowd of almost a hundred growers bouquet work. It was silly and fun. The main lesson—choose fewer varieties of ingredients and more of the same thing to showcase the flowers you’ve chosen, which reminded me that in life like in great design or great style, you can’t have it all, you can’t do it all. One choice to say yes to something is a choice to say no to another and that’s okay. Good actually. It makes what you have selected stand out. I taught flowers. I sorted flowers. I cleaned flowers. I made bar pieces and installations and arrangements, then tore it down and did it all over again the next week. I dreamt of flowers. My acidanthera bloomed. So did the tiger lilies and monarda. I pressed roses into my journal and made plans for September.
A writer friend DM’d and said the sweetest thing in the midst of all the mid-summer madness
“Yooo funny question, but I’m wondering how you “found” your personal style. Always love your fits (!) and would love to hear any tidbits of advice, or how you discovered what works for you 🙃”
This was coming off my dive into Diane Von Furstenberg and her wrap dresses. I went upstairs to one of my random stacks of books and pulled out a dusty copy of I Love Your Style by Amanda Brooks. I opened its worn pages, read by a younger version of myself, early twenties handwriting, and noticed the forward written by Diane. The piece opens with, “Personal style is accepting who you are.” I had written a response back before finding the book.
“Oh I love this question and thank you. So I read this book in my twenties…can’t recall title but I will go hunting for it later and send the name. Something about fashion versus style. It’s an easy read but it helped me to distinguish what I was drawn to and how to express without pressure of what’s going on around me. I’d also say so much of what I wear involves a pop of colour and edge with a timeless silhouette. I like good materials I feel nice in. That sort of thing. This is long. Sorry. Mostly a lot of trial and error. I went through a phase where I bought more minimalist wear, but it was too boring, not bohemian enough for me.
Another trick is I go through my closet every year or so and just give myself permission to get rid of things that don’t make me feel good or fit strange as I grow older, or that I haven’t worn at all that year. Is this helpful? It’s hard to say how I discovered it…”
So I wrote that and now I’m thinking about how August, psychically, was really about pairing down. Whether in design, style, art, career, life. I’m trying to do less so I can do more of what I desire but as someone who likes to suck the marrow out of life and experience everything, this is not so easy. The art of winnowing things down so other things stand out is a practice. It’s choosing a simple tomato salad with a drizzle of olive oil and fresh mozzarella, a sprinkle of basil, when in tomato season. It’s not slathering the tomato with too many spices, too many flavours, because that tomato is so sweet, popping with flavour.
I think I’m writing this to myself mostly. To begin, as the air chills and the trees start to turn a little golden, to remember where it is I want to take my life and what I hold with importance in my heart. To give those things the time and care they deserve. In love, in dress, in home as much as in work. To remember that a new life will cost giving up an old one but erasing nothing.
