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.