Heart of a Peahen

The Year of Yes – Rachel’s version

2011-09-18T03:23:00.000-07:00

I began 2011 with an attitude of determination. My usual, but maybe squared.
I decided I was going after every reasonable idea and opportunity that came my way. And as these things so often go, the universe has lobbed so many soft pitches my way, I’ve been swinging ever since.
I was teaching one day a week and writing a few freelance articles last winter when I saw a notice that Statistics Canada was hiring people to work during the census period in the spring. I applied. I got a call asking me to go for a test, so I showed up and while I waited for the test to begin, one of the other applicants suggested Elections Canada as another temporary gig. So after the Stat Can exam, I went home and signed on to elections.ca. Got another call.
I worked as a poll clerk during the federal election in early May and was fascinated to see the process from a different point of view, to chat even for brief moments with so many people who were excited to be voting for the first time or the 20th time.
A week later, I started a temporary stint with Statistics Canada. I loved the team, loved the downtown location, and loved the work.
A couple of days after that full-time job ended in late August, I spotted an ad for a position at the University of Victoria. The new Centre for Social and Sustainable Innovation was looking for a half-time coordinator, someone who is all about sustainability and education and writing. My résumé practically wrote itself.
I started working on September 7.
My first journalism class was on September 12. And the second (did I mention I was asked to teach a second course this term?) started September 14.
And in Friday’s mail came a notice that I’m to report for jury duty next week.
I can’t wait to find out what’s going to happen next – because, you know, I’m going to have to say yes!

What's new

2011-09-11T10:06:00.000-07:00

I got a new job!
I'm teaching even more!
I celebrated both – and the advent of September – with a daytrip to magical Carmanah Valley!
Fodder and I are both holding our own in the healthy-weight department – and in fact he's still raising the bar for his fitness level!

And that's enough exclamation marks for now.

I'll post more details of the exciting new stuff later, but today I'll introduce you to a couple of the fascinating people and places I encountered this year:

LaConner, Washington is the site of the annual Tulip Pedal bike ride – and a whole lot more.

Alisa Smith is the co-founder of the 100-Mile Diet, but she's about more than just food.

A gardener's dream…or is it nightmare?

2011-09-04T01:20:00.000-07:00

Some people call it the wonder green.
The Saint calls it “not again.”
Kale grows fast and thick and in all seasons. Here on the wet coast, the purple variety is also used as wintertime ornamental foliage in window boxes and patio planters.
It’s nutritious, packing into a single cup 350% of an adult’s daily Vitamin A requirement, 90% of our Vitamin C needs, and 10% of our fibre.
It can be cooked any number of ways – steamed, sautéed, braised, layered in a casserole, pureed in a smoothie, dehydrated into chips that my cousin Tea swears are as good as Miss Vickie’s. Very young kale is lovely in salads.
I could go on.
But.
You knew there was a but coming, didn’t you?
The down side of kale is that it is so very prolific. Prodigious. Productive.
It sprouts fast and grows faster.
I’m still harvesting the first crop I planted very late this spring and the second is past the salad stage and heading for outright maturity. The third crop (what was I thinking?) is already two inches high.
I like kale. The Saint, witty comments notwithstanding, eats what’s put in front of him. Fodder had enough after the first bunch of the summer. My neighbours avert their eyes and pick up speed when they walk past our house.
You know why.
Kale is the new zucchini.

Fifteen minutes of…

2011-08-28T04:41:00.000-07:00

My friend Lee McKenzie is all heart. Not only does she write award-winning romance novels, she passed along the info about this research:
Taiwanese scientists studied more than 400,000 people for 13 years and their conclusion, published in The Lancet recently, is that 15 minutes will get you more than famous.
It'll get you an extra three years.
That's right. Just moving briskly for 15 minutes a day can extend your life by three years and even cut your risk of the big C.

So how about it? Isn't this is the perfect time of year to get in some practice?

I'll meet you on the sidewalk.

Endings

2011-08-21T01:44:00.000-07:00

When I was a little girl, departures made me so sad that I used to hide to avoid saying goodbye to guests.

I don’t hole up in the closet any more, nor cry (much), but still poignancy floods my chest whenever anything ends. On Friday, it was my job with Statistics Canada for the census.

Five or six days a week for three and a half months, I packed a lunch, put on grown-up clothes (no sweatpants, not even once!) and went to the office where I worked with, at peak season, more than 30 others.

It was a temporary job – we all knew that going in – and I suppose that made it easier at the end. Also, we’ve been bidding adieu to colleagues for weeks as the work tapered off and a mom went back to her kids; a student headed for Europe before term starts; someone else landed a more permanent gig…

Then a few of us were asked to stay for another five days. At the end of that, we were offered more work with the clear understanding that it was strictly one shift at a time, and that turned into another pay period. When it became obvious that the possibility of on-call four-hour stints was going to turn into another full week with some bonus hours tacked on, I wrote, “Welcome to the Hotel California” on the white board by the door.

Most of my coworkers were a generation too young to get the reference, but it made two of us laugh, so it was worth it.

And then on Friday evening there were just half a dozen of us entering the final data for Vancouver Island, packing up the last few thousand questionnaires, and sweeping the stray elastic bands and paper clips into boxes. Six of us logged off the computers for good and walked out of the building into brilliant evening sunlight that offered no cover, nowhere to hide.

I had to suck it up and say goodbye like an adult.

I’m going to miss my daily rides and walks to the heart of the old town. I will miss all the gardens I walked through on my lunch breaks. I’ll miss the colours of swarming tourists and hanging flower baskets.

I meant it when I told my colleagues that I’d love to hear from them any time; I meant it when I wished them all the best.

And I mean it: I will miss them.

Endings

2011-08-20T17:44:00.001-07:00

When I was a little girl, departures made me so sad that I used to hide to avoid saying goodbye to guests.
I don’t hole up in the closet any more, nor cry (much), but still poignancy floods my chest whenever anything ends. On Friday, it was my job with Statistics Canada for the census.
Five or six days a week for three and a half months, I packed a lunch, put on grown-up clothes (no sweatpants, not even once!) and went to the office where I worked with, at peak season, more than 30 others.
It was a temporary job – we all knew that going in – and I suppose that made it easier at the end. Also, we’ve been bidding adieu to colleagues for weeks as the work tapered off and a mom went back to her kids; a student headed for Europe before term starts; someone else landed a more permanent gig….
Then a few of us were asked to stay for another five days. At the end of that, we were offered more work with the clear understanding that it was strictly one shift at a time, and that turned into another pay period. When it became obvious that the possibility of on-call four-hour stints was going to turn into another full week with some bonus hours tacked on, I wrote, “Welcome to the Hotel California” on the white board by the door.
Most of my coworkers were a generation too young to get the reference, but it made two of us laugh, so it was worth it.
And then on Friday evening there were just half a dozen of us entering the final data for Vancouver Island, packing up the last few thousand questionnaires, and sweeping the stray elastic bands and paper clips into boxes. Six of us logged off the computers for good and walked out of the building into brilliant evening sunlight that offered no cover, nowhere to hide.
I had to suck it up and say goodbye like an adult.
I’m going to miss my daily rides and walks to the heart of the old town. I will miss all the gardens I walked through on my lunch breaks. I’ll miss the colours of swarming tourists and hanging flower baskets.
I meant it when I told my colleagues that I’d love to hear from them any time; I meant it when I wished them all the best.
And I mean it: I will miss them.

Interstitial adventure

2011-08-13T18:39:00.000-07:00

Saturday, 7 pm:
I drafted a post this morning and when I came to revise it just now, it was gone. It shouldn't have had any delusions that it was ready for the big world; a first draft is a gawky thing and rightfully unconfident. Nonetheless, this one has flown into the Maw of the Blogosphere.

I'm still intrigued by the idea that sparked it, and I've retrieved the shreds of morning pages from the recycling bin, so I hope to reconstruct the essay more tidily than I've reassembled the paper. Maybe I'll tackle it tomorrow. But not tonight.

Touchstones

2011-08-07T06:16:00.000-07:00

I wrote this essay nine years ago, but it remains so true to my experience. Or my experience stays true to it….
I was at a 60th-anniversary party yesterday afternoon with all the usual suspects. There was a new baby, a new fiancé, old men and middle-aged ladies (whose ranks now include me, which just feels weird). There were print dresses and, of course, there were lemon squares.

The Touchstones

2002

My younger cousin Tracey phoned recently to tell me about a plan she and five of her thirty-something single friends are hatching. It involves an RV trip to Alaska (where, apparently, men still outnumber women quite dramatically), a video camera, and lots of sociologically significant interviews in bars. As she talked I put on the kettle, took teabags from the caddy that was a gift from her grandmother when I got my first apartment, and dropped them into a pot my grandma gave me at the same time. Tracey was still talking when the tea was ready. I sat at my kitchen table and laughed helplessly at her descriptions and then dispensed advice on getting the stories – and believe me, there will be stories – published.

I picked up my cup and inhaled. The scent of orange pekoe tea winkled me back to my great-aunt Mary’s house – Tracey’s great-great aunt – sitting with half a dozen women and at least that many kids at her new round table with the fabulous black vinyl chairs that twirled.

Pink bathroom tiles, the smell of varnished wood panelling, the textured flowery fabrics of 1940s curtains, and green brocade chesterfields from the sixties. Flowered teacups, small girls carefully helping at parties, the sound of women’s laughter and the crackle of six conversations around one kitchen table.

Any of these details immediately evokes my grandmothers, second cousins, and a couple of generations of aunts. Living hours and a ferryboat ride away, still they were the solid backing to my ever-shifting world of elementary school and best friends, neighbours and new playground equipment. I spent summer weeks with them, learning the proper way to make a bed, eating Cheez-Whiz on white bread, and inventing aimless hot-afternoon games with my cousins. Throughout the year there were bridal showers and birthday teas. On the second Saturday every December for six generations (or is it seven?) the whole tribe creates the Family Party with long paper-covered tables splayed under pots of curried shrimp and lasagne, sour-cherry pie and brownies carefully crafted by the roomful of strong women.

They are almost gone now, those matriarchs, slipping away through old age or illness. Sometimes they go one by one but occasionally they leave in clusters, just like they did everything else. They went to dances together, planned weddings, had babies at the same time, played cards, and talked. Always talked.

“I saw Biddy Dennison in Ladner the other day.”

“Fran and Ruthie are going to Nova Scotia to visit Allen’s relatives this summer.”

“Barbara and Peter are getting married in May…. Yes, I know it’s very quick, but they’re determined…. Well yes, pregnant is another word for it.” With Tracey, as it turned out.

For more than 40 years, through my childhood visits, adolescent angst, youthful hubris, and adult growth, the print-dress phalanx stood behind me, supporting me with their common sense and constant interest. Now that their ranks have thinned I feel a draft at my back. I miss their lemon squares and criticism, birthday cards and timely practical gifts. I feel a little adrift without their solidarity, the certainty that no matter what happens, someone will pick up the pieces and love me until the fragments coalesce into something like Rachel once more.

New generations need them too, to provide certain (though not necessarily approving) acceptance, the continuity of old ladies and middle-aged women with lots of life experience and a tremendous willingness to share it.

My cousin Barbara is just such a woman. Now that we don’t have access to Grandma’s expanse of lawn any more, or Auntie Marg’s big house, Barb offers her condo common room for parties and wakes. Joan is a rock, always ready with a laugh for a ten-year-old’s latest exploit and unflagging enthusiasm for someone’s retirement-launching cruise. Standing and surveying the talking, hugging, laughing crowd at the last Christmas party, George’s wife Margaret said with admiration, “These women are amazing.” I stared at her for a moment. She shows up for every event with unfailing respect and interest while her beautiful small boys (born just a year apart – the mere thought exhausts me) entertain themselves and everyone around them. I don’t think she has any idea that she ranks in the top ten.

At my uncle’s funeral last weekend I noticed for the first time the new batch of print dresses. As my mother’s generation fades, getting greyer and thinner and more absent, my cousins are taking up the slack. Louise rolled her eyes sympathetically when I shared my 14-year-old stepson’s latest misadventure involving his foot, a hundred-dollar running shoe, and the wheel of a moving car. Barb listened to me fret over my demented mother-in-law. The difference is they’re not standing behind me. They’re bracing me up, but now they’re beside me, shoulder to shoulder. Daunting as it is, I suppose that means I’m one of them.

At the graveside I hugged Debbie while she restrained her sobs. I whispered into her hair, “Breathe. Makes it easier to cry.” Then it occurred to me, “And easier to laugh.”

When Doreen said pensively that she no longer puts flowers on her garden-loving mother’s grave, I thought, “There’s no need. You honour her every time you tend your own beautiful garden, and you passed the passion on to your kids.” Next time I’ll say it out loud.

I’m learning. I have very good teachers.

2011-07-31T04:02:00.000-07:00

“Wow. I haven’t seen one of those in…” The man’s voice trailed off. He was strolling past my campsite at Sooke Potholes and had paused to…admire is probably too strong a word…comment on my tent.

My mother bought the Taymor Trailmaster at a local hardware store and gave it to me for my first bike trip back in the mid eighties. The price tag didn’t include a fly, but when a lightweight tent with a waterproof floor rings in at $11 and Mom’s handing over the cash, smiling and saying “Thank you” is a no-brainer.

“I’ve had it for twenty-five years.” I beamed at it fondly. “It’s as good as new.”

Except for the dental floss. And the stick.

The yellow pup tent is just about as simple as they come: the classic triangular profile with a brown woven polyethylene floor that wraps about three inches up the walls and a ripstop nylon roof pitched steep enough to shed snow. At one end, two flaps tie over a zippered mesh door and at the other, a small net window allows some air flow when the cover’s rolled up. One aluminum pole (that breaks down into three short sections for easy packing) holds up the front, another supports the back, and a handful of pegs and a bunch of cords (which now include a shoelace and some dental floss) complete the original ensemble.

A brown nylon tarp makes a very serviceable fly, and a stick inserted in one broken pole section splints it to the next without affecting the overall elegance at all. Last but certainly not least, the entire kit weighs in at about a kilogram. Including the stick.

“It works as well as ever,” I amended.

“I used to have one,” the fellow at the campground said nostalgically. “I had to give it up when I could see the stars from inside.”

I nodded sympathetically, hopeful that my home away from home will be star-free for a few more years. Properly guy-wired, the tent has kept me dry from clearcuts north of Kispiox to sheep meadows in the Outer Hebrides. The mesh has foiled midges on Skye, blackflies near Smithers, and mosquitoes at Nimpo Lake.

While rainstorms and biting insects are, generally speaking, on no-one’s top-ten list, they were really not my mother’s idea of holiday material. Or a suitable work environment, for that matter. She liked indoor plumbing and embroidered cotton pillowcases.

But she was a mom, and since she couldn’t follow me around forever saying, “Stay out of the rain or you’ll catch cold,” she did the next best thing.

For a quarter of a century and counting, whether I was driving to Mexico, hiking the Juan de Fuca Marine Trail, planting trees in the Rockies or pedalling the gentle Galloping Goose Trail, I’ve carried the shelter Mom gave me.

On my last night at the Sooke Potholes campground, when I was tucked out of sight in my bugless reading room, a couple of girls on the cusp of adolescence wandered near my site. Their high-pitched chatter hip-hopped closer and closer and then, when they were only a few yards away, it stopped. The silence stretched from one second to two.

“Oh. My. Gawd,” one girl finally said, her voice steeped with horror.

I set down my novel.

“Look at it. I could never sleep in a tent like that.”

I picked up my book again and thought, “Kid, you should be so lucky.”

A lovely mind

2011-07-24T01:36:00.000-07:00

I've been working full time for Census 2011 for the past two and a half months. The work's been interesting, my colleagues are great, and I have to get myself downtown (and back) five or six days a week.

I vary my route to keep it interesting and as beneficial as possible from a fitness point of view, and one day I rode past this condominium under construction.

What great karma, I thought. Imagine living in a building where the very plywood sheathing is smiling.

And imagine being the builder who made it so.

Floribunda!

2011-07-17T03:51:00.000-07:00

The grass is greener.
Really.
My hometown is called the City of Gardens for good reason – we’re florid, loaded with gardens. But…
We also have a regular summer drought from July to September when lawns turn gold and crispy and hardware stores do a brisk business in watering wands. But…
This year our especially long, wet spring has led to a cooler, overcast summer so the grass is still lush. During rush hour on Thursday afternoon, Miss Jean Brodie and I startled two young bucks cropping greenery on a busy suburban corner. Yesterday morning the sky fell and gave the roses and geraniums another reason to sparkle.
So it’s true: every cloud has a silver lining – at least in Victoria.

The latest buzz in Victoria

2011-05-29T01:33:00.000-07:00

In the summertime, visitors come from around the world to enjoy Victoria's lovely gardens, pretty historic buildings and pleasant hum of activity.

The Empress Hotel has it all.

There are now ten gleaming white beehives in a quiet green corner of the garden, apparently so the hotel has its own supply of honey.

The scones at afternoon tea are going to be really something now!

New starts

2011-05-22T08:22:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I picked up my new spectacles and as I walked home, I reflected that I'll be able to read better with new lenses; I strode through the fragrance of cherry blossoms and the bumper crop of lilacs and thought ahead to the fruit and seeds that will form over the summer; and then I saw another kind of new start.
A bride's satiny white dress glowed against the backdrop of lush green shrubs and the glistening grey stones of an urban waterfall while the photographer arranged her pose, and her groom, dashing in black and white, held her bouquet of red roses.
A wedding is one of the loveliest of new starts, I think, right up there with the arrival of a child in the top-two category of life-altering-in-a-good-way events.
I must remember to tell the Saint that when our anniversary rolls around. Right after I remind him that no, June 6 was D-Day.

PS: am discovering the glasses aren't working so well. I hope the honeymoon is going better.

Gremlin's on a diet

2011-05-15T01:13:00.000-07:00

“Tell me four good things about yourself,” Maggie said to her boyfriend in the movie Love and Other Drugs.

He couldn’t come up with a single one.

At least, he couldn’t say them out loud.

I saw this in action at a communications workshop the other night. Each of the participants drew a word from an envelope and we were to use it when we introduced ourselves. In a room full of smart, hard-working women – there were probably 20 of us – not one of us managed to say that we were generous or patient or kind.

I didn’t manage, either. The gremlin in my head is always ready to snap off a chunk of my self-esteem.

Why do I care what that gremlin says? After all, it’s only me.

Maybe that’s why I care.

Part of me is saying I’m not as good as I want to be, or it’s saying that I’m not good at all, and as for the future, well, Abandon Hope….

And that takes me to a story about a man who explained to his grandson that two wolves live within him.

“One is a bad wolf,” he said. “It’s greedy and lazy, seething with anger and jealousy and regret.”

“And the other?” the grandson asked.

“The other is a good wolf, full of joy and compassion and great love.”

“What happens if they’re stuck inside you together?”

“They fight all the time,” the grandfather said.

“Which one will win?”

“The one,” Grandpa said, “that I feed.”

As of now, my gremlin’s officially on a diet.

I dare you to name four good things about yourself.

Homespun

2011-05-08T01:39:00.000-07:00

One of my oldest friends moved from our hometown to a smaller town last year and she's having a blast cruising the farmer's markets.

I think she has to come back to the old stomping grounds once in a while to justify all the swag she can't resist buying. Anyway, that's my theory because frankly, I'm not that great a hostess and when she came for a visit recently, she brought me the motherlode of hostess gifts: lavender bath salts, a salt bag for warming sore muscles, blackberry vinegar, two bags of nettle tea…and a skein of wool.

Is this a score or what?

There are so many beautiful colours in this yarn and the angora-wool blend gives it wonderful depth.

I knitted myself a pair of fingerless mittens. They warm my hands while I hunch over my keyboard, and they warm my heart, too.

Thousand-page journey, meet your new first step

2011-04-30T03:23:00.000-07:00

So you wanna be a writer? (This also applies to painters, photographers, musicians…)

“There are three rules for writing the novel,” said Somerset Maughm. “Unfortunately no-one knows what they are.”

In fact, though, we all know the first one: put your fanny in a chair, your fingers on a keyboard, and words on the page (or insert your art of choice here).

But it turns out that was the Old Wisdom; now scientists think there might be more to it than just, well, writing.

Along with helping your heart, muscles, and skin tone, exercise is now the front-running domestique in the marathon to a three-book contract.

Experiments over the past couple of decades have found that aerobic activity – either a short burst like dancing around the house for 20 minutes or long-term fitness from a regular program – actually boosts creativity.

One study used measures like colorful and rich imagery, unusual visualization, extending or breaking boundaries, and storytelling articulateness.

So “storytelling articulateness” is not how the average (or even bad) novelist would express it, but the message is clear: move that tush before you settle it in front of the computer. You’ll have more fun and a better tale.

And ultimately, you’ll have a trimmer tail too.

Happy Earth Day!

2011-04-23T03:33:00.000-07:00

I’m not generally interested in doing much math, but there are times when those arithmetic lessons come in handy.

Out of curiosity recently, I totted up how many kilometers I walked or cycled for meetings or errands in the month leading up to Earth Day.

Then I did a little Googlesearch, hauled out my solar-powered calculator and waited for a sunny day.

Counting only trips that had a specific destination, I discovered that me, my muscles, and Miss Jean Brodie (my bike, also in her prime) kept 40 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions out of the atmosphere. In a month.

If I keep it up all year, that could add up (if I’ve done the math right) to almost half a metric tonne of greenhouse gases that me and my car didn’t send skyward.

I know I’m not saving the world but I’m also not making things worse, and that feels good.

And the fact that all that activity – which I enjoy, by the way – keeps a cupcake or three off my tail? Well, I call that travel bonus points.

Heeding the call – of Twitter

2011-04-16T01:38:00.000-07:00

For a few months I’ve been paying lip service to Twitter but a couple of weeks ago I converted for real.

The command didn’t come down from on high. There were no angels involved unless you count Toni McGee Causey, which I sort of do.

Toni (if I may be so familiar) is a wonderful author and a great blogger. I share her post “Dear God the stick turned blue” in the humour class I teach to journalism students. More recently, her post on home towns had me weeping on my iMac.

Then she announced that she was going to sacrifice her Murderati blogs on the altar of Getting More Done in the rest of her life. I’m delighted that I can look forward to More Toni Stories, but I love her Murderati posts. They’re the reason I turn on the computer every second Sunday.

I was happy for her but sad for me, so I checked Twitter. And there was a little beacon of a TMC mini-post. That’s when I realized I could still get an occasional fix while I wait for her next book. That’s when I truly saw the light.

I can Follow (this is different from Stalking) people who entertain and enlighten me and they will entertain and enlighten me at intervals that range from hourly to daily or weekly. I’ll get the laughs I crave without having to go on my own quest; I’ll find delightful quotes without reading erudite books or even trolling quotation sites for hours; I’ll learn about the world while I remain hunched safely in my cave.

The corollary is, of course, that in turn I must create funny mini-posts, jot marvelous quotes from the books I read, and adventure out of the bat cave so I can share the fun with the people who have shown enough interest in me to click Follow.

Looking for the up-side…still looking…ah!

Create an image, be funny, impart an insight – basically tell a story in 140 characters. This is, like, the ultimate writing test: How much can you show with how few words?

And there’s the irony of writing, encapsulated in, well, 140 characters – I lovelovelove words, and I spend most of my time trying to pare them away.

Proud Dotter

2011-04-10T01:41:00.000-07:00

I posted several of Fodder's pen-and-watercolour sketches of France over on Calorie Neutral yesterday, and thought I'd share another couple here.

Beynac by Ray Goldsworthy

Because I think they're simply gorgeous.

Bicycle at La Borie des Combes by Ray Goldsworthy

The best gift

2011-04-03T01:04:00.000-07:00

"Watch out for Nana's flowers!"
Every spring, that's what I used to call after the kids running around in the undergrowth at my parents' cabin, where my mother's treasured white fawn lilies unfurled their petals, trilliums showed their tripartite faces, and Easter-tinted ladyslippers nodded in the wake of little sneakers.
Those kids don't charge around outside much any more. Instead, they slump on chairs inside the tiny cabin, their long legs and enormous shoes taking up most of the floor space, but the flowers, Nana's flowers as I will always think of them, are getting ready to pretty up the outdoors again.
So you can imagine how thrilled I was when my cousin Bee gave me a little volume she found at her favourite thrift store.
Wild Flowers of America, it's called. Jane Harvey wrote it, Irving Lawson illustrated it, and the Whitman Publishing Company printed it in 1932.
The book is small in every way: 3 1/2 by 5 1/2 inches; includes perhaps 100 flowers; and Jane's America extends only as far west as Minnesota.
It's charming. The illustrations are lovely and now that I think about it, its scope is big enough to beam some spring sunshine on some of my treasures – memories.

Two more of Nana's Flowers, a la Wild Flowers of America

Miss Jean Brodie hits the road

2011-03-27T01:30:00.000-07:00

My pétard is working well. I’ve hoisted myself onto it fairly regularly since I announced my intention to ride the 100-km route of today’s Populaire. The weather’s been good and rolling beneath flowering plum trees has done wonders for my state of mind. Best of all, I managed the hills – even the 12% grade – without embarrassing myself by grinding to a standstill and falling off while still clipped into my pedals.

Not that this has ever happened to me.

Ahem.

A couple of days ago, I did my final training ride and I wanted it to be as close to the length of the Populaire as I could get without actually totting up the mileage (those of you who read Calorie Neutral know my dislike of numbers that need pandering. Er, calculating).

I aimed for about five hours on the road but since I don’t wear a watch…well, I’ll be getting a watch soon.

From my place I headed south to the waterfront, then basically did a big loop and had a glorious ride, hills and all. I stopped once for a red light, then once more to pick up ten pounds of apples and eat one of my handy nutritious energy-boosting bars, and was home in four and three-quarter hours.

So today I’m out doing the ride for real. With a bunch of people who wear Spandex and whose bikes are probably not named Miss Jean Brodie.

Wish me luck.

Green maps. Who knew?

2011-03-20T01:23:00.000-07:00

“Victoria is the epicenter of green mapping in North America,” said Wendy Brawer, the New York-based founder of the Green Map System, at the University of Victoria last week.

She cited the dozen or so green maps of our region, which range from a teacher’s artistic rendering of the land, food and people of Vic West to the Shelbourne Corridor’s community-planning chart.

Along with a unique style, each map has its own theme or target users. Children, perhaps, or tourists. In one city, a group of binners created a map of local sources.

One of the beauties of the Green Map System is its use of universal symbols. Anyone can find a farmer’s market, for example, whether she’s shopping in Singapore, Stockholm or Santa Monica. The system is flexible, though, so mappers can customize or add symbols that express their communities’ special attributes. Like Victoria’s two dozen contributions to the icon collection include skateboards and osprey.

How cool is that?

Building my own pétard

2011-03-13T01:31:00.000-08:00

As I preached over on Calorie Neutral a while ago, one of the best ways to help oneself reach one’s goals is to make them public. Share them with a friend or two.

So, friends, here I am:

In two weeks, I’m going to ride the 100-km route of the Victoria Populaire as set out by the BC Randonneur cycling group.

To be honest, with a couple of days’ notice both my butt and my quads can cope (albeit slowly) for a hundred km. The thing that’s going to make this ride a challenge is that there are hills. Oh, I can walk up the 12.5% grade, no problem. It’s the 27.5% one that has me sweating before I even put clip to pedal.

I guess we’re going to find out a little more about me in two weeks. Can I train for and ride those hills? Or did I, she asks hopefully, read the map wrong?

And now for something completely different…

2011-03-06T01:48:00.000-08:00

A very flattering email landed in my computer on Friday morning: an invitation to apply for a teaching position at a local college.

“…we need to increase our staff of talented Instructors,” the note said. “Do you like to see others succeed?”

I sure do!

“Do you have great communication skills?”

My clients think so.

“Are you honest with a great work ethic?”

Absolutely!

This was looking better and better. I was stoked – a possible new gig, and apparently there were medical and dental benefits involved. For a longtime freelancer, those words were magnetic. Avidly, I read on.

“Are you passionate about cosmetology?”

Sadly, the extent of my knowledge of the beauty world is that there’s more to it than choosing blue-black mascara or none.

The registrar doesn’t know how I got on her email list but to be honest I don’t really care. It was fun to imagine what I might do with a captive audience and a wand of blue-black waterproof.

The Inner Boot

2011-02-27T01:52:00.000-08:00

Good for me

I scrawled those words in my morning pages this week and immediately wished them back in the pen, unwritten, even unthought.

I hadn’t meant them in a self-congratulatory way. I’d been writing about activities that are fun, intellectually stimulating, healthy – “good for me” in the way that omega-three fatty acids and a thought-provoking novel are.

Still, my own brain reared up and said, “Whoa there, little lady! Who do you think you are?”

I retain (barely) enough control over my mind to wonder “What the heck is that all about?” What do I gain by reining, repressing, censoring my own thoughts? Is that mean little beast in there protecting me somehow? If I were to say aloud, “This is what I did and isn’t it cool?” is anyone going to A) care and B) shoot me?

Not likely.

But boy, I’m quick enough to jump all over myself.

So here’s my new task this year. Instead of trying a new sport or voice lessons or an art class, I’m going to work on getting that inner boot off my neck.

Isn’t that cool? (Glances furtively around the room before stiffening backbone) Good for me!

A Friend

2011-02-20T01:41:00.000-08:00

A man I know died last week. He was a brilliant scientist, thoughtful writer, delightful raconteur, and character of rare determination. But to me, above all that, he was a friend.

“How often are we to die before we go quite off this stage?” wrote the poet Alexander Pope to Jonathan Swift. “In every friend we lose a part of ourselves, and the best part.”

Now I know what he meant.

Happy Heart Day

2011-02-13T08:10:00.000-08:00

Those of you who were here last Valentine's Day know that I don't really know my sweetie. I call him the Saint, after all. That should be your first clue.

So I think he's not romantic. I mean, this is the guy who, every spring, says, "So our anniversary's coming up."

Only it's really a question; he's just trying to be subtle about it.

"Yes," I say brightly.

When it's obvious that I'm not going to be any more help than that, he ventures, "The, uh, sixth, right?"

"That would be D-Day," I say.

So he gets around the whole concept of specific dates for special occasions by marking them in other ways. A few weeks ago, we went to Point No Point on the west coast of Vancouver Island for a couple of days of togetherness. And, apparently, photography.

He took pictures of driftwood wrapped in a Gordian knot of kelp

He shot the path to China Beach

And he was captivated by the most romantic bench

Happy Heart Day, Bryce and Emma!

Whoever you are.

Three-Way Win

2011-02-06T01:55:00.000-08:00

I lost a bunch of weight last year, which is all to the good from a health and self-esteem perspective, but there is a downside.

Clothes.

I hate shopping for them and even more I hate forking over loads of money for them. In fact, I can’t pay a lot without taking my credit card farther than I’m comfortable going, so for many years I have relied on a staple of the community: thrift stores.

There are a lot of these where I live and most of them support useful social programs, so I can even feel good about my frugal ways. But that’s a bonus. My primary payoff is that I get quality clothes very inexpensively.

Last week, for example, I picked up a luscious new brand-name softshell jacket for walking and riding – “And skiing!” says the Saint hopefully –

as well as a lovely, slightly dressy, Ann Taylor sweater.

Sleeveless! The last time I was comfortable showing my upper arms was…never mind, you’re too young to remember that far back.

I have even (shhhh!) bought gifts in thrift stores.

Last year I found a gorgeous retro glass jug as a wedding present for a friend who’s totally into all things 1950s.

More recently, I scored a handbag.

Do I need a purse?

No.

Do I want one?

No.

But this sweetie is a polka-dot Kate Spade.

Did I mention that my friend Lee McKenzie is a KS fan? And that the signature look for her brand of charming novels is polka dots?

And that, to my mind, makes it a perfect fit!

Reminders

2011-01-30T01:31:00.000-08:00

“The blade of the paring knife broke off right in the handle,” I told the Saint* sadly. “Can we fix it?”

“We can afford to buy a new one,” he said.

“But Auntie Marg gave us that one when we got married,” I said, my eyes filling. “I think of her every time I use it.”

And never more often than since I began my super-healthy new lifestyle which, to be honest, requires a lot of peeling and chopping.

I thought about her again, gone to that big kitchen in heaven, as I looked at the two halves of the Henkel lying on the counter before turning my attention to quartering a Granny Smith apple with my Opinel pocket knife. I think of my cousin Tea every time I use that, because it was a gift from her after a backpacking trip that included a collapsing tent, excellent sausage, and more cougar scat than I ever want to see again.

When I finished dissecting the apple, I threw the core in the compost.
It’s the best compost bucket I’ve ever had, complete with flowers and gems and multifaceted beneficial insects. See the pink ladybugs?

I think of our niece Enn every time I add to its stash, because she’s the one who made it for us…

*This is not a completely sarcastic nickname

The fortune of January

2011-01-23T00:40:00.000-08:00

The snowdrops are out!
Right on schedule, the little white and green blossoms have popped up in my neighbour’s yard to cheer our grey Wet Coast winter. They bring a smile to my heart because they’re so pretty and low-key – they don’t demand attention like the brighter, splashier blooms later on, but their very quietness gives them a dignity I love.
Also, they’re just so pretty.
But according to the Oxford Dictionary of Plant-Lore, cutting the flowers and bringing them into the house will bring bad luck.
“When a former husband brought me some indoors,” writes one source as recently as 1993, “we split up within days and were divorced…”
Maybe the fact that she wrote a former husband (implying there is more than one) should be a clue that it might not be the flowers that are at fault. Perhaps she should examine her own perseverance, or her taste in men.
Or maybe, as the fruitarians would have it (see Down on the Farm, Aug 29, 2010) the plants are meant to live out their natural span and we should only harvest them when they tell us they are good and ready. Although I would miss the point of flower bouquets if I had to wait until they’ve gone to seed and fallen over.
I must admit that I feel lucky that my neighbour leaves hers outside – where I can enjoy them!

Fits and Starts

2011-01-16T01:28:00.000-08:00

A personal trainer once told me that gyms are as busy in September as they are in January.
Last September, my local recreation centre seemed to be much busier than it’s been during the first part of this month but suddenly, late this week, the place filled and serious sweat began to flow.
Part of the reason might be that a nearby travel agency is sponsoring a weights-and-measures challenge.
“Your buy-in gets you weighed, measured & photographed before and after [the program],” the flyer says. “Along the way get newsletters with tips and hints to keep you on track and motivated. The participant with the greatest overall results will be awarded a Flight Centre credit.”
If a six-pack (no, not the beer kind) isn’t enough motivation, the chance of winning $500 toward a vacation might do it!
At this time last year, my friend Lee McKenzie joined a walking clinic to prepare for her new fitness aim: completing a 10-km walk. But she’s been putting one foot in front of the other for a few decades, so why would she need a clinic?
“I was in no shape to do a 10-k walk,” she says, “so I thought the clinic would be a good way to achieve my goal. I don’t like exercise classes but this was different. It really was motivational, it was social.”
There was also more to it than simply putting one foot forward and then the other. Guest speakers talked about nutrition, staying hydrated, how to be properly fitted for walking shoes, and more.
“There was a lot of information,” Lee says, “and that suits me.”
Her payoff also included finishing a five-kilometre event in March, then two 10-ks later in the spring.
This January Lee has signed up again, with her sights set firmly on a triple finish line: a brisk 10-kilometre walk, a satisfying sense of accomplishment – and a lot of fun.

Sea Lions and True Grit

2011-01-09T01:13:00.000-08:00

A friend who lives in Powell River went in search of sea lions this week.
“We started looking along the shore,” she emailed to me. “What we thought were rocks along the breakwater were very well disguised sea lions – awesome!!! And then every time we looked a little closer there were huge sea lions that used to be part of the dock or a rock…at one location there was a mound of them sleeping, probably about a dozen.”

She’s so lucky to be able to wander along the beach and, just by looking a little harder, find what she was looking for.
And yet isn’t that often the way? Once we slow down and peer a little more closely, we spot the elusive sea lion we’ve been seeking…or maybe even some other treasure we weren’t expecting.

In the movie True Grit, Mattie Ross seeks out Rooster Cogburn to help her because he’s got a rep for being determined and tough. By the end of the movie, we see that the one with real sand is…well, I don’t want to give it away.

What have you found lately that surprised you?

(photos by the ever-so-observant Spence Partlo)

An adventure!

2011-01-02T01:17:00.000-08:00

I'm really stoked about this coming year – I'm celebrating my fresh, healthy new start with a new blog and I hope you'll share the excitement with me!

In Calorie Neutral, I'll tell you my stories about losing weight (and keeping it gone), gaining energy (and keeping it), and doing it all with more fun and no pain.

I won't tell you what to do – there won't be a single "should." It's all about me (and my dad, and that's another story :)).

What I hope is that my stories will make you laugh and encourage you to find (or share) your own path to a life bursting with pleasure and wellbeing.

Saturdays are story days and on Wednesdays I'll share a fun link, a fantastic recipe, or an informative interview.

Please visit early and often. I'm looking forward to seeing you at Calorie Neutral!

Going too far

2010-12-26T01:48:00.000-08:00

“Be bold, be bold and everywhere Be bold…”

I’m tempted to inscribe this over my office door, as it was written over a portal in The Faerie Queen. Many of my favourite sayings (and I’m a sucker for a pithy quote) have to do with treating fear like the pariah I wish it were:
“Fear, the thief of dreams” said a T-shirt on a young man at an airshow 15 years ago.
“Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house,” said John Cheever.
To abolish fear from my life is one of my great dreams – and I am making progress.
I’m less afraid of phoning strangers, which is very helpful in my career since I routinely have to call people I don’t know and convince them to tell me things that I can then write down and publish for all the world to see.
I have no trouble speaking to a group now.
Sometimes I can even expose my foibles publicly, as I’m doing here, and feel barely a twinge of anxiety. Of course, I also convince myself that nobody is going to read my ramblings…
My wish for all of us in the coming year is to banish fear – to give it the cold shoulder, shove it aside, or climb over it until it’s so far behind that it gives up.

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go,” wrote TS Eliot.
Let’s see how far we can go during the next year, shall we?
I’m game if you are.

The Holidays versus A Vacation

2010-12-19T01:37:00.000-08:00

“I hope your Christmas plans and preps are proceeding apace,” I wrote to a friend recently, “and you can relax and enjoy the ‘holidays’ as if they really are a holiday.”

As you can tell from my snarky ‘holidays,’ I’m a little jaded about this festive time of year. The potential for exhaustion has me opting out of many of the normal – expected, in fact – activities.

I go to few parties and host even fewer. I bake just enough for the potlucks I do attend. I buy presents for one pre-teen, two teenagers, and an adult child…and only if I have a brilliant idea (I had two this year!) do I purchase gifts for any other grown-ups.

This is not because I’m cheap (although I am pretty frugal) or lazy (well…). It’s because all of the planning, shopping, cooking, decorating, wrapping, delivering, baking, shopping, cleaning and shopping pile on top of everyday life which for me, as for most of us, is quite full enough, thank you.

We still have to organize family schedules, put in the hours at the day job, pack lunches, cook dinners and launder clothes…and on top of all that we’re supposed to iron tablecloths, polish candlesticks, and make room in the freezer for twenty-two pounds of plucked turkey?

And for what? I’m not a capital-C Christian, so for me it’s not about the man himself, although I’m on board with a lot of his principles. But because this started out as a holy celebration, I’m miffed that it’s morphed into a shopping extravaganza. In fact, I bet if I were crazy enough to go to my local mall right now, I could probably find a 14-karat gold-plated statue of a calf…. But I digress.

To me, this festive season has lost its charm because it’s no longer a holiday in either the original sense or its more modern meaning of vaca…

Hold on a sec. Perhaps I’ve been looking at this the wrong way around.

A vacation is an emptying of normal life, leisure.

A holiday, on the other hand, is a celebration.

Cards and letters from friends far away; family around the dinner table, eating food planned, purchased and prepared with love; reminiscing about some awful camping trip or teasing Dad about his mis-spent youth; laughing.

I stand corrected; that sounds sacred enough for me, after all.

I wish you all a holiday season filled with whatever makes you happy.

He – or she – is back!

2010-12-17T10:19:00.001-08:00

The owl – Spotted, Barred, or possibly (though I doubt it, Barb) Screech – is once again sitting in the oak tree outside my kitchen window.
I hope this becomes a habit – or should I say habitat?

The more things change…

2010-12-12T02:53:00.000-08:00

I love other people’s conversations – they are one of the many reasons I’m grateful my friends are so interesting (and I mean that in the nicest possible way).
For example, when I arrived to visit my writing buddy Ken the other day, he was deep in discussion with a woman who introduced herself as Ann. I dragged over a chair and propped my chin on my hands to listen in.
“What was his name?” Ann mused. “Weismuller?”
My ears pricked up. I knew that name! He was Tarzan in the old black and white movies, right?
But Ken shook his head slightly and Ann agreed that she had it wrong and went on to talk about other people – composers and musicians apparently – with Germanic-sounding names that were way off my radar screen. Until they got to Mendelssohn.
“I recognize that one!” I’m afraid I said it aloud.
Ann beamed at me and began to talk about what a gentleman he was, even though his compositions made every musician in the ensemble work all the time.
“He added notes everywhere, just for the sheer beauty of them.” Her hands illustrated the point with little butterfly movements on a phantom sheet of paper in the air. “Very baroque.”
Felix Mendelssohn also helped rekindle the popularity of JS Bach’s music, which even I know is still deservedly going strong. Ann also pointed out that Bach had quite a sense of humour.
“He wrote a ‘coffee cantata’” she said, “that is hilarious and could well be put on today with the same sentiments. We humans have always loved our stimulants!”
With gratitude to Ann (who it turns out is a member of the Lafayette String Quartet) for the education (and the chuckle) and to Ken for introducing us, here’s a little of Francis Browne’s translation of the Kaffeekantate.

The narrator begins by hushing the audience so they can eavesdrop on a father who is trying to rein in his daughter’s excesses:

Dad: You bad child, you wild girl! Oh! If only I could have my way and get rid of coffee!

Daughter: Father, don’t be so hard! If three times a day I can’t drink my little cup of coffee, then I would become so upset that I would be like dried up piece of roast goat.

Dad threatens his daughter – no more walks or new clothes or ribbons for her bonnet – but the only thing that makes her budge on her addiction is sex. She’ll give up coffee, she promises, if he finds her a husband. (A word from a fellow addict: She’s lying.)

Now that I also know that Bach (and his two wives) had almost two dozen children, I wonder whether he wrote this musical (as my husband would call it) from personal experience and whether it was one of his daughters who was the caffeine junkie, or whether JS himself needed a steady stream of java to keep his energy level up.

On books

2010-12-05T01:00:00.000-08:00

I was first smitten by the art of the book in the early 1980s when I viewed the Book of Kells at Dublin’s Trinity College. I bought a little booklet about illuminated manuscripts, and over the past 30 years have pored over the images of apostles, of creatures mythical and (maybe) real and sighed at the talent, skill and perseverance of the monks who turned written stories into works of art.

Gutenberg did a wonderful thing when he developed movable type; for one thing, it made books easier and less expensive to produce so more of us could hold, own and read them.

Over the centuries, though, the art of the book has been slid aside in the interests of getting more books to more people.

While I have done my share (and then some) of buying, borrowing and reading inexpensive tomes, I still love seeing beautiful things that I will never touch or own.

Last week, I was delighted to visit a display of rampant twenty-first century creativity at an exhibit supplied and curated by members of the Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists Guild.

There are volumes with the art incorporated into the goatskin binding. There’s embroidery, marbling, calligraphy and paint. Whimsical pop-ups, colourful cutouts and handmade paper. There are boxes and scrolls, leaves and accordion files.

I’m thrilled that people are still making beautiful, brilliant books that do much more than contain stories. They are stories.

Spotted: Owl

2010-11-28T01:30:00.000-08:00

On a snowy day last week, an owl arrived and spent the who-who-whole day sheltering in the ivy draping my neighbour's Garry oak.

The description in my bird book suggested that this might be a Spotted Owl except that, according to Audubon, SOs are crow-sized. This was way bigger than that – 18 inches, I guessed.

Further research (ie reading the rest of the description) unearthed the info that Audubon thinks crows are 17 1/2 inches tall.

I'd like to know what Audubon feeds its crows.

On second thought, maybe I don't.

Patience pays off

2010-11-21T01:25:00.000-08:00

Years ago I belonged to a gym where several of Canada’s national rowing teams worked out. One afternoon one of the rowers was lifting a barbell with a lot of cast-iron weights stacked at each end. At the end of every lift, he had to set the barbell down and, contrary to standard gym etiquette, he was dropping them the last few inches. This made the weights clang together which is really noisy and unpleasant when it happens twelve times in a row, but what made my trapezius muscles climb right up my neck was that I knew it was going to start up again for his second set of twelve repetitions and again for his third.

So I asked one of the gym staff to “suggest” that he not drop his weights any more. She threw back her shoulders, raised her chin, marched over and made the request.

From the top of his six-foot four frame, he looked down at her five-foot one.

In the patient tone we reserve for children and idiots, he explained, “But it’s really heavy.”

I didn’t say anything because I was taught that patience is a virtue and nice girls don’t make scenes in public, but it just about killed me because for once I actually had a good comeback.

If it’s too heavy for you, I thought, maybe you shouldn’t be lifting it.

Fast forward to last week. Different gym. A middle-aged guy in the freeweight area was lifting a barbell with a lot of weights stacked on each end and then dropping them. Every. Single. Time.

I was up on the mezzanine and the noise of crashing metal ricocheted off the metal walls and pierced my eardrums like a skewer. Every. Single. Time.

After he finished a set, I opened my eyes and unclenched my shoulders, but I knew it was going to start again in a couple of minutes. This time there was no staff on duty to run interference for me, so I either had to go home or act like a big girl and ask him to stop.

I trotted down the stairs and crossed the floor.

As soon as I could make him notice me standing beside him, I said, “Excuse me. When you drop your weights, the noise reverberates through the whole gym and really hurts my ears.”

“Too bad,” he said, then as he turned to walk away, he tossed over his shoulder, “That’s the way it is.”

I don’t think my jaw hung open for more than a second or two before my brain delivered.

“Maybe you shouldn’t try to lift it,” I called to his mossy back, “if it’s too heavy for you.”

I think I blew a bunch of karma points, but it sure felt good.

I don't know anything about art but…

2010-11-14T07:51:00.000-08:00

When I was in high school, the Social Studies teacher offered a course called Civilisation. It followed the British TV series and used the companion textbook. We got a smattering of Vikings, Dark Ages, Renaissance…and I loved it.

When I made my solo jaunt to Europe a few years later in 1981, I visited Stone-Age sites, Iron-Age monuments, the British Museum…and discovered prehistory. I was fascinated.

Twenty-eight years after that, the eminent French archaeologist Jean Clottes gave a series of lectures in my hometown. I wrote about them briefly on this blog last September when I was still overwhelmed by the trove of information he’d shared.

Two weeks ago, I was once again overwhelmed. In fact (don’t spread this around) I cried. Nobody noticed, because it was dark, and also because they were all looking at the end of the beam of light from the guide’s lamp, which was shining on two mammoths someone had carved into the walls of Rouffignac Cave 17,000 years ago.

Freaking mammoths. God, they’re beautiful.

They’re also important.

The thing about prehistory is that, as far as we knew, people had no recorded language (although recent work by University of Victoria grad student Genevieve von Petzinger is challenging that). But still, we have to piece together the stories one clue at a time.

People created images such as those mammoths at Rouffignac and the aurochs at nearby Lascaux and the experts apply their knowledge, such as it is, and then extrapolate. There’s lots of room for assumption, cultural projection, personal agendas and egos.

When I visited the British Museum back in 1981, I bought a book called The Social History of Art by Arnold Hauser in which Dr. Hauser states: “In [the prehistoric] age of purely practical life everything obviously still turned around the bare earning of a livelihood and there is nothing to justify us in assuming that art served any other purpose than a means to procuring food.”

Fifty years after Hauser’s work, the archaeological world has changed its tune a little. Decades of study of many more sites using both old and new technologies have led Dr Clottes and others to conclude that the carvings and paintings so deep in the limestone caverns at Rouffignac, Lascaux, Chauvet and elsewhere were indeed a spiritual act.

Why else go so far underground, climbing rock chimneys and crawling through passages to reach sites where no-one else could see their work?

According to Clottes, the artists from these hunter-gatherer societies thought the caves were the world of the spirits and the deeper they went, the more they could access the supernatural.

As I moved into the caverns myself, it was easy to imagine people 15- and 40,000 years ago inching along the tunnels that fold and wind like the vessels that carry blood through our muscles, air to our lungs, children into the world.

How different that is from the mindset of the agricultural age, when men built upward, toward the sun. Notre-Dame Cathedral, Sacre-Coeur all white on its hill, the glass curtains of Sainte-Chapelle, all push toward the sky to thank or praise or plead to a god.

Either way, whether they’re painting a horse a kilometer underground or carving a chunk of stone for the façade of a church they’ll never see complete, people bring their best to art.

For that, I thank them.

How I Spent My Autumn Vacation

2010-11-07T01:23:00.000-07:00

For two weeks in late October, I reveled in the sensual delights of one of my very favourite countries – France.

The first week, in Paris, I rented an apartment on the Left Bank

strolled through the Jardin des Plantes, the Promenade Plantée, the Tuileries Gardens,

Ile St-Louis, and along the Seine

listened to Bach at Ste-Chapelle, Puccini at the Opéra Bastille,

and Gregorian chant at Notre-Dame

strolled through the Louvre, the Orangerie, and my favourite: the Rodin museum

Then I headed south for a completely different and equally wonderful week in the

Dordogne Valley

where I rented a medieval farmhouse

strolled along country lanes

visited ancient caves and medieval towns

shopped in local markets

and then enjoyed my purchases.

While there are a lot of stories (some of them amusing, mostly at my father's expense) for now I'll let the pictures do the talking and I'll just add

Á la prochaine!

Until next time.

All photos by the charming and talented Spence Partlo

Fiction III: Physiology of Phun

2010-10-31T00:01:00.000-07:00

"Writing is fun sometimes," Felix assured Pearl as they trudged across the wet parking lot toward Has Beans.

Pearl glared at him. She had become a bottom-dweller in writing's black hole, a hack. Everything she produced was crap and she'd rather clean her bathroom fan vent than sit down in front of a blank sheet of paper.

"Name once," Pearl challenged him. "One time that you grinned at your computer screen and meant it."

She pulled open the café's heavy glass door, letting go of the handle as she plodded through.

"I do it all the time," Felix said as he scooted in behind her.

Mike was already inside, at the end of the order line-up. When they joined him he asked, "Do what all the time?"

Twenty pairs of ears swiveled in their direction. Thanks to Mike's foghorn voice, all the café’s Sunday-morning regulars already knew many things about their little group, including that one reason Barb didn't have time to write was because she and her husband had sex every day. Now the patrons waited for more steamy details.
"I have fun," Felix said.

"Barb already used that excuse," Mike said. He and Pearl had confessed to envy; their reasons weren't nearly as creative. Or as enjoyable.

The line shuffled forward a foot as a blast of cool, damp air hit Pearl from behind. She checked over her shoulder.

"What are you talking about?" Barb shook her umbrella as she came through the door.

"I have fun writing," Felix said.

"That's impossible." Barb smacked the end of her umbrella and it collapsed obediently.

"You want to come to my house and watch me?"

Pearl thought about the four of them crouching in Felix's tiny apartment, the smell of mildew seeping under the door from the hallway and his upstairs neighbour Bud charging around, slamming doors and demanding to know where the fuck were his smokes.

"Prove it here," Pearl said. "Grab us a spot and we'll get your coffee."

Felix shambled off to loom companionably over a couple at a window table.

They quickly picked up their keys and mobile phones and left. They were probably finished anyway.

Mike ordered the coffees and went to collect them while Barb and Pearl selected the food that would fuel the good times ahead.

"Talk about Mission: Impossible," Pearl said as she paid.

Barb picked up two of the plates. "If we could get Johnny Depp to come along it might be fun."

Pearl was stilling grinning as she carried the other plates to the table.

"See?” Felix beamed at her when they arrived. “I told you it's fun."

"We haven't even got to the writing," Pearl pointed out, wondering why Mike was setting up his laptop in front of Felix.

Felix dismissed her grumpiness. "It's all part of the total experience."

"Where do you get that ‘total experience’ crap?" Barb dropped a slice of lemon loaf in front of him and when he started to answer, she said, "Never mind. Get to the fun."

Mike sat down, sliding the mug away from Felix’s wrist as he tapped at the keyboard.

“I just found this the other day and it’s totally sweet.” Felix reached for his cup and cradled it in both hands, making Mike twitch, as he read off the screen.

The medial forebrain bundle of nerves, which lies deep in the brain, is known as the reward centre, Felix explained. Doing something pleasurable activates it and makes people want to repeat the action.

"Writing does not stimulate my medial forebrain bundle." Pearl bit into her chocolate-dipped peanut butter cookie.

The trick, Felix explained, is to make yourself have fun.

"That sounds like one of my mom's old threats," Pearl said. "'If you don't stop that snivelling, I'll give you something to cry about!'"

"Exactly!" Felix beamed at her. He looked at the screen again.

According to neuroscientist George Stefano, he continued as the caffeine jockeys at nearby tables tipped their heads toward him, pleasure is the brain's way of subconsciously ranking what is most important to us. And physiologist Michel Cabanac believes pleasure is the transient result of closing a gap between what we feel and what we want to feel.

He raised his eyes and gazed brightly from Pearl to Barb to Mike. "So all we have to do is make writing more pleasurable than the alternative!"

"Thumbscrews, for example," Barb said.

The eavesdroppers leaned slightly away.

Pearl broke off another chunk of cookie and asked Felix, "So what do you rank writing against?"

"You know Bud?" Felix sipped his cappuccino.

They all nodded.

"He's very sociable. If he finds out I'm not writing, he comes to visit."

Pearl thought about it: thumbscrews, Bud, cleaning the bathroom fan vent. She licked chocolate off her fingers and picked up her pen. "All right. Stimulate my medial forebrain bundle."

Around the room, twenty pairs of wide eyes snapped in their direction.

Felix got this idea from Bonni Goldberg's Room to Write (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1996). He figured that since everybody loves a holiday, they were bound to enjoy this exercise.

The federal government, Goldberg says, has granted you one day to declare as a holiday. What will you name it? What is being honored? How is this holiday celebrated? Which businesses stay open and which close? What doesn't happen on this day? Be whimsical, cynical, humorous, serious, or outrageous.

Fiction II: Critiquing without bloodshed

2010-10-24T00:01:00.000-07:00

"He was a bank robber, wasn't he?" Felix set the pastries on the table and pushed one toward each of his fellow writers.

"He was an addict." Barb shoved pens and notebooks out of the way.

One thing they all agreed on, Pearl realized, was that when there was a choice between eating or stimulating their creativity, brain function took second place.

Pearl quickly slid a plate toward herself. "You didn't have to do this."

"I like to," Felix said. "It's part of my hospitable nature."

Mike rolled his eyes.

"Are you a chronic pleaser?" Barb’s question was a little muffled by her mouthful of éclair.

Felix seemed not to hear her. Instead he went back to her earlier statement. "Stephen Reid was a junkie?"

"Not when I met him," Pearl said. "At least, not that I noticed." 

"You didn't notice that guy passed out in front of the door when we got here." Mike forked up a chunk of walnut loaf.

The manager looked over nervously as Mike's booming voice carried to every customer in the place.

"I still say he was just tired," Pearl protested.

Mike's shoulders twitched.

"Anyway, that's not the point," Pearl continued before Mike got more wound up.

"What is the point?" Barb wanted to know.

"He had a good critiquing system," Pearl said.

"Stephen Reid the convicted felon?" Barb did not give up.

"Stephen Reid the writer," Pearl said. "He filled in for his wife in this creative writing course I took years ago, and when the time came to share our efforts, he suggested we use this critiquing thing." 

"Was it brutal?" Felix looked worried.

Pearl assured him it was very balanced. "Sometimes it's not even criticism.”

Barb rolled the hand not holding the remains of her éclair. "Tell us already."

So Pearl explained the most useful thing she’d learned in Susan Musgrave's creative writing class – from Stephen Reid.

“First he told us to choose a particularly good sentence or phrase or maybe a bit of dialogue and quote it back to the writer. Like, 'It is a truth universally acknowledged that a young man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife.' You could repeat that to Jane Austen as a nice bit of satire that made you laugh out loud.

“Then find something you can honestly compliment. 'EB,' you might say, 'your character work on Charlotte and Wilbur is brilliant.'

“Next, ask a question. This one makes the reader think. You can ask, 'What's Bridget Jones's motivation for sleeping with Daniel Cleaver?' or 'What's the symbolism behind John Coffey's name in The Green Mile?' You can ask about anything that puzzles you or about something that you believe the writer needs to think about some more.

“And finally you make a recommendation. 'Flush it' is not acceptable. 'Play with the similes and see if you can make them fit with your hockey theme,' would be better.”

Pearl looked around the table to gauge the reactions. Mike looked doubtful, Felix’s forehead had smoothed, and Barb’s lips were slightly pursed and her eyes narrowed. Pearl hoped she was considering the idea and not lining up a sharp comment.

"Let's give it a try," Pearl suggested. "Who wants to read first?"  

"No!" Mike bellowed.

The manager looked nervous again.

Pearl turned to Felix, but he was at the counter ordering more treats. Pearl raised her eyebrows at Barb, who said, "All right."

"Lab dog," Mike said.

Barb glared at him.

"Compliment.” He quickly raised his hands. “I admire your guts, letting us experiment on you." 

Pearl interrupted Barb's response to shove dirty dishes out of the way because Felix was on his way back with four cinnamon twists. With one hand Barb delicately brushed éclair crumbs off the front of her blouse as she took a plate from Felix with the other.

"Go ahead," Pearl told her.  

Barb read her short story about a woman who tries to paint but her two young kids think her paints are 1) tubes of icing, which they squirt onto bread before she can stop them, 2) face paint, which she has to scrape off their skin with a trowel, and 3) a sign that Mom is bored so they decide to entertain her. It was very funny and touching.

"That's not fiction," Mike said.

Quote, compliment, question, recommendation, Pearl reminded him.

"Okay," he said. "That's not fiction, is it?"

Fiction I: Muse Yourself

2010-10-17T00:01:00.000-07:00

As Pearl sipped her non-fat mocha, she looked over her mug at Felix and Barb and Mike. She’d met them a couple of weeks ago when she started taking a class to increase her creativity and they’d shown up too. The course was going pretty well and they all wanted to up the ante on their writing so they’d decided to meet once a week at the local coffee shop, Has Beans, to work on it.

This was their first session outside of class, and they’d agreed to bring a couple of pages to read aloud and discuss, but Pearl hadn't done the work. She was a communications specialist with a big outdoor-equipment company and once she’d churned out press releases, monthly reports, the internal newsletter and cheery updates for the website, she didn’t have much energy at the end of the day to put more words on paper. Hence the class to stimulate her creativity.

"I have a confession." Felix met their eyes in turn.

Pearl, Barb and Mike lowered their cups and leaned forward.

"I didn't have time to do any writing this week."

They slumped back.

"Me either,” Barb said. “The store's been crazy with half my staff off sick and then my son had a hockey tournament all weekend."

She looked at Mike and Pearl, who wondered if she should confess.

To what? Laziness? Dearth of inspiration? Before she could come up with a good excuse, Mike spoke.

"Haven't finished my room yet."

In class, he’d said that he had to have a proper writing room, painted stimulating colours and furnished with the perfect chair and desk and God knows what else.

Barb shook her head; Pearl knew she was lucky to scrape a clear spot on the kitchen table or pry a kid away from the computer for half an hour a week.

"Haven't found quite the right Aubusson carpet?" Barb asked.

"You're snide now," Mike’s baritone overwhelmed both the espresso machine and the stereo. "But you'll see."

"Maybe I need a different chair." Felix looked thoughtful. "If I'm more comfortable, I'll be able to write better."

"That's bull," Barb said. "Do you think Jane Austen was comfortable sitting in those damn eighteenth-century dresses in her family's parlour? And Stephen King, balancing a typewriter on his knees in the laundry room?"

"What I need," Pearl decided, "is a muse."

Mike the engineer sat up straighter, an acquisitive glow lighting his brown eyes. Felix nodded slowly and Barb rested her elbows on the table and raised her eyebrows at Pearl enquiringly.

Originally there were nine Muses, Pearl explained, women who were half memory, half divine.

“Sounds like a mom,” Barb said.

Even Mike cracked a smile.

They sang or danced, wrote lyric poetry or tragedy, discoursed on rhetoric or astronomy, Pearl continued. They made some people write, although not everyone did it well. One poor guy said that some of his neighbours considered him a poet but that compared to real writers he was just a goose honking among swans. But that was Virgil for you.

Virginia Woolf took a practical approach to inspiration. A room of one's own and £500 a year made a darn good muse in her opinion.

“I told you,” Mike said.

“There’s more to it,” Barb snapped. “You have to read beyond the title of the essay.”

Mike’s ears turned red but before he bellowed back, Pearl interrupted.

“My theory is that a muse is like Jeannie in the old TV show – or okay, the djinn in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves for you literary types.” She grinned at Barb. “Except instead of rubbing a bottle–

"You'd be better off drinking the Scotch," Barb said.

“–the Muse responds to the friction between a bottom and a chair.”

"You might be onto something." Felix’s face brightened. "I go to all the workshops and conferences and I've got every how-to book ever published and this is ringing a bell."

"Well, we're here and our butts are in chairs," Barb said. "Let's see if it works."

Rats, Pearl thought. The truth is, it wasn't the lack of a muse that kept her from creative writing. Nor was it a shortage of energy or even bad feng shui. It was fear: What if she couldn’t do it?

Felix pulled a paperback from his courier bag.

"I have this cool book," he said, letting it flop open on the table. "It's got the best writing exercises."

Pearl harrumphed. In the great Texas Hold-'Em game of life, the Muses had just called her bluff.

Well isn’t that just great, she grumbled to herself.

And, to her surprise, it was.

Felix's exercise, from Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin (The Eighth Mountain Press, 1998):
Being Gorgeous: Write a paragraph to a page of narrative that's meant to be read aloud. Use onomatopoeia, alliteration, repetition, rhythmic effects, made-up words or names, dialect any kind of sound effect, but not rhyme or meter.
Have fun with this, Le Guin urges. Don't aim for perfection, just put the words down as they occur to you. Then, if you like, read your piece aloud, either to yourself or to your writing buddies.

The Road of Life or The More Things Change

2010-10-10T00:01:00.000-07:00

One sunny day in 1985 when I was cycling in the Scottish Highlands, I was faced with a long climb along the side of a glen. The road was probably an old drove route for livestock so it wasn’t terribly steep but my quads didn’t care: all they knew was my relentless nagging to keep pedaling. They retaliated by starting to burn.

I forced them (and my bellowing lungs) to go on, and on, and on because I had looked at the map before I’d begun the ride and I knew what they did not: at the far end of the valley, at the top of the climb, was a place called Rest and Be Thankful.

As there was in every other village in England, Wales and Scotland, there would be a café where I would sit with a heavy china cup of strong hot tea the colour of chestnuts and pour in a swirl of cream. I’d split a scone (or two) and spread it with butter and strawberry jam and savour every rich mouthful because I had earned it, riding up that hill.

Meanwhile, I shifted down and ever downward, forcing my pedals around one revolution at a time, looking ahead at the slope that now seemed less like a gentle grade and more like a mountaineering route. But that might have been my quads talking.

I kept that tea and those scones (which had multiplied to three) firmly in mind and finally – finally! – I came to what had to be the last push. Surely there couldn’t be another hill beyond this curve.

And there was not. I had reached the top of the glen. As I sucked in huge gulps of clear air that rushed into my blood like shots of bubbles, I looked down at the silvery thread of a stream in the valley far below. I gazed at a loch at the base of the mountains ahead of me.

All that was missing was the village.

I checked the map. It was still there – and not marked “Rest and Be Thankful: visible every hundred years,” like some Ordnance Survey Brigadoon.

I hauled my bike across the road and leaned it against a bench, and before my quads could drop me onto it, I saw the sign. Rest and Be Thankful.

On the bench.

I have much the same relationship with the publishing world as I did with that road in the Highlands. Constant work, ongoing effort, digging for stamina, searching for the right gear/craft/story that will carry me to my goal: publication (oh, and money).

As part of my journey, last weekend I went to the Emerald City Writers Conference in Seattle and I felt like I’d finally found the granny gear. You know, the one that’s easy, that lets you ride almost comfortably into mysterious mountain ranges or home with a load of groceries.

The agent and editor panel on Friday night gave me a much better idea of the industry professionals than a website can. The workshops were informative – I learned something important in each of the eight I attended – and I usually laughed, as well.

And of course, there’s the all-important camaraderie and support of other writers. As Alyssa Day pointed out in her laugh-out-loud keynote speech (which also brought me to tears three times), the friendship of other writers is so very important.

Just as I craved afternoon tea in Scotland as a reward for my cycling effort, now I want publication as an acknowledgement of my writing effort. However, as authors tell me all the time, getting a book in stores is not the end of the road. It’s just the bench where they get to pause for a minute to enjoy the scenery and catch their breath.

In the same way I had to forego those scones in Scotland and instead appreciate the view and my own strength in getting to it, I might have to do without New York’s stamp of approval and simply enjoy the ride with my colleagues.

I'm glad they're such good company.

Big Damn Sidebar:

Here’s a smattering of what I learned at Emerald City Writers Conference, October 2010:

Ann Charles and Wendy Delaney: writers who are left-brain dominant are more likely to look at the fine detail in our own work and our critique partner’s, while right-brainers are more likely to be able to focus on the big picture of the story.

Robert Dugoni: Write a great opening sentence (that raises a question) for every scene; write a great closing sentence (that raises a question) for every scene too.

Kristina McMorris: Give agents and editors a reason to say Yes: ask if you can query them, tell them about your awards, and even get endorsement blurbs from other (known) writers before you query.

Theresa Meyers: in a query, include the same kind of information and power words that make compelling back-cover copy in order to intrigue an agent or editor even before you’ve got a deal.

Laura Navarre: Dark heroes (men or women) are often strong and compelling, although female dark heroes generally must show a caring, nurturing side in order to appeal to readers.

Deborah Schneider: Don’t just have a booksigning; have an event. It sounds like a party and people will show up.

Amber Scott: Make dialogue show the change in the person, like Jack Nicholson’s “You make me want to be a better man” in As Good as it Gets or Hugh Grant’s “I’m an idiot” in Notting Hill.

Banning books

2010-10-03T00:01:00.000-07:00

When I was 12 or 13 years old, I wrote horror stories. My mother came across one of the more gruesome examples and while she espoused many liberal leanings, now she was faced with a barely adolescent daughter who penned pretty twisted stories. Well, one that she knew of, and that was one too many. She called me into the den to have a chat.

We perched on the sofa across from the TV set, which was set in an alcove that was also stacked with loaded bookshelves. There were more bookshelves – six or seven, I think – on each side of the window.

“The story was very disturbing,” she said.

Well, yeah. That was pretty much the point, I thought.

“Your dad and I have decided,” she continued gently, “that we’re going to have to censor–“

I flicked a horrified glance across the ranks of shelves. Carrie, The Exorcist, Marathon Man. The Curve of Time, Little Women, A Man Called Intrepid. Goldfinger, The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper, The Hobbit.

“–your television choices.”

Was she kidding?

I could have laughed, I was so relieved.

So when I heard that last week was Banned Books Week, I checked out the US’s 10 most challenged books of 2009. The list includes To Kill a Mockingbird and My Sister’s Keeper.

When I told my sister, who had just finished Harper Lee’s novel, she gave me a “you’re joking” look and passed the information to her teenage daughter, who had just read My Sister’s Keeper.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” was my niece’s response.

I’m so proud.

So to the people who challenge a book’s presence on library and bookstore shelves, I say, “Yeah, let’s get all those stories out of there. Let’s get them in readers’ hands and minds, where they belong.”

Decisions, decisions

2010-09-26T07:26:00.000-07:00

Recently, a friend was offered a project. She wants to work, someone presented it to her: should be a no-brainer, right?

But her gut was not on board, and when you’re as experienced as she is (and sometimes when you’re not) it makes sense to listen to those inner rumblings.

In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell shows that what seem like split-second decisions or hunches are actually the result of a whole equation’s worth of clues, so I suggested to my friend that she come up with three reasons to take the job.

“Money,” was her prompt response and it’s a good, valid and necessary reason.

But it’s only one. Her belly was still waffling.

We pondered a little longer.

The lump sum would indeed please her banker and keep the pantry stocked for a while, but the work itself wasn’t as clearly defined. The client hadn’t delineated the scope of the job as clearly as the amount of money available for it and that made the dollar value less certain, less appealing.

There’s a scene in a novel by James Lee Burke in which a man is throwing pieces of hamburger bun (I think) for a stray dog. But he wasn’t tossing the food to the dog, he was making the dog run for every morsel, using up more energy to get the bread than he would get from eating it. The dog was starving, though, hungry enough to do the work anyway.

Luckily my friend isn’t that desperate. She has the luxury of weighing the value of running against the value for her life. So that’s what she did.

Would this project help her reputation or career? Not really.

Would it be fun? Nope.

Would it make her healthier? Be good for the environment? Save the world? No to all three.

I’m not generally great with numbers, but it seems to me that’s a lot of noes compared to one possible benefit.

Hunger is often enough motivation all by itself, but sometimes that hamburger bun really isn’t worth chasing.

In September

2010-09-19T08:19:00.000-07:00

In September, a teacher’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of how to get a point across. What I teach is a how-to of magazine writing, which boils down to story – what is it? how do we create it?

Most writers, I think, would love it if divine intervention played a large part but alas, for most of us that just doesn’t happen. What mostly occurs is some design and a lot of sawing and hammering.

A story idea is like an architect’s working drawings: are you making a hospital or a house, a stucco mansion or board-and-batten cottage? In other words, a novel, a poem or a magazine profile? Will it have a grand entrance or a tiny archway leading to an atrium?

Sentences are the lumber that we mill and cut to fit with other clauses and phrases. Depending on the site and the ultimate users, the wood might be spruce or bamboo or it might not be wood at all – bricks and stone work, too. Active verbs are the guns that drive events like nails into a two-by-four, connecting it to another piece of the structure.

And along with the materials and tools, there are conventions in building as there are in writing – and it’s up to each carpenter or writer to decide whether the rules are useful for her or his project.

Does this house need studs every 16 inches, like all the other houses in the neighbourhood, or would it be fun to put them every six – or 60 – inches instead? What does the house (or the carpenter) gain or lose by doing that? If a writer flouts convention by skipping the quotation marks or ending the yarn before resolving the crisis, what’s the benefit and the cost?

If the framework of a story isn’t sturdy enough, it’ll collapse sooner rather than later, just like a house. If a tale promises to be an Aztec pyramid but there’s a revolving glass entry, a reader won’t know whether to trust the writer and might move along to the next place, where the oak door at least matches the Tudor facade.

Stories enchant readers and listeners, but storytelling is not magic. It’s construction.

But every so often, the lucky writer feels a tingle and surge…

Lucky

2010-09-11T22:10:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, my friend Deirdre and I headed to a small town west of Victoria. This is the fourth year we’ve made this expedition together, and we were excited because on the weekend after Labour Day, Sooke hosts its annual fall fair and it’s a treasure trove.

In the adult section, there are glowing dahlias and picture-perfect pies, exquisite quilts and my second-favourite category: The Most Pathetic Produce.

But that’s not where we go first.

When we arrive, a rooster crows like a metronome behind the community centre, the smell of frying onions drifts out of the kitchen, and in the basement, Deirdre and I pick up pencils and clipboards and start what is possibly the most fun job I do all year: we judge the children’s writing competition.

Every entry is a marvel. Some highlight raw talent like a lighthouse while others display intense effort. There’s haiku and a French essay for each of three age groups. There are penmanship samples and original poetry; short fiction and essays; charming or quirky stories about camping trips real or imagined; and dark, brooding, hopeful poems by teenagers wrestling with life and death both personal and global.

Without exception, the entries show immense care – for the task, for friends and family, for the world. That kids from six to eight, nine to 11, and 12 to 14 put their hopes, dreams and fears on paper is, to me, magical. The Fall Fair is a chance for the next generation to tell its stories and boy, do they ever.

And I get to read them – how lucky am I?

Uproot your darlings

2010-09-05T01:29:00.000-07:00

Clearing weeds in front of my house the other day, I discovered a tree nursery.

You might think I’d have noticed it before because my yard isn’t very big, but there we are. The weeds were tall, the trees are small.

To be fair, I thought the weeds were really pretty – clusters of tiny white flowers about three inches across, nodding at the end of 18-inch stems with feathery foliage. It wasn’t until I was leafing through my plant book that I learned a) they’re not native and b) they’re poisonous. I headed straight out to uproot the swath of wild carrot and that’s when I found the nursery.

My first score was a very leafy six-inch Garry oak.

I also found a tiny arbutus with its soft, toothed leaves that remind me of a wary kindergartner the first week of school: tender and vulnerable but putting on a brave show of toughness.

And then I found a pine seedling, a single stem bristling with long needles and looking like the model for a Muppet.

All these future trees are in the same patch of dirt and they won’t all survive, much as I wish they could. There simply isn’t enough space for all of them, especially if that pine really takes off.

I’ve mentioned Julia Cameron’s morning pages exercise before, and Jennifer Crusie has a wonderful essay about taking out the garbage. This is my clearing-away-the-junk metaphor for writing.

Unless we rip out the weeds to let in daylight, fresh air and, heaven knows, fertilizer, the seeds that might have taken root don’t have much of a chance. And once we’ve got an assortment of idea-shoots, do we only allow one to reach the sapling stage or let them all grow and decide later which to cull and which to cultivate?

I’m almost certain that the pine is not native and while I’m not going to cut down the beautiful big Scotch pine that’s already there, I’m not inclined to encourage another one that will almost certainly shade out the native Garry oak and arbutus. So sooner or later the pine will have to go, but it’s just so charming, stretching its spindly green fingers up to the sun…. Well, you can see why my garden is full of volunteers.

In the same way, I’m seduced by a clever (or so I like to think) phrase, a delightful bit of dialogue and pretty description in my writing. Eventually, though, if I want anyone else to read the blasted thing, those little treasures might have to come out to leave the air and light for the things that truly belong in the story.

The roots tear at my heart every time I weed, but there’s always the payoff – the hope that one day I’ll have a garden of a book.

Down on the farm

2010-08-29T01:34:00.000-07:00

In the movie Notting Hill, one of my favourite romantic comedies, Hugh Grant’s friends fix him up on a blind date with a fruitarian who eats only fruit and vegetables that have harvested themselves.

“These carrots,” she announces at dinner, “have been murdered.”

I’m a long way from being a fruitarian. Since the first arugula leaf grew big enough to spot against the dirt, I’ve been happily chowing down on the produce from my allotment garden. Radishes and beets have been uprooted to feed my appetite. Mesclun mix has been relentlessly snipped and devoured. And for the last month or so, green and yellow beans have made their way onto my plate too. Well, a lot of them end up in me before we get to the plate stage, but only because they’re irresistible.

Then a couple of weeks ago, my husband came home after a solo foray to the farm. He put his hands on my shoulders.

“It’s about the beans,” he said.

My mind raced from images of rampaging blacktail fawns to the raven that had been hanging around suspiciously, clearly up to no good.

“The sunflowers…” His voice broke.

Oh no.

I’d planted them for their cheerful blossoms and to act as scaffolds for the beans to climb up, and it had worked beautifully.

The vines twined up the sturdy stems, reaching for the sky, while the sunflowers burst into a spray of blooms like fireworks about seven feet above the earth.

Had some wild beast gone after those bright blooms and tender little beans?

“The stalks…” He hesitated again.

“What?”

“They’re still growing, you know?”

I did know. They had managed to stay ahead – barely – of the steadily climbing bean vines.

He finally choked out the story. It turns out that the sunflower stems had not only grown up, but also out, and where a vine had twined as close as an obsessive lover, the expanding flower stalk had snapped the bean plant.

“It was just hanging there. Drooping.” He shook his head sadly.

There are mutterings amongst the neighbour’s peas of citing me for involuntary pruning, but they can’t charge me with murder.

I ate the evidence.

Smarter than the average bear

2010-08-22T01:00:00.000-07:00

I woke with a start, recognizing the sound that had awakened me even as I came out of sleep. I listened but there was nothing more. No grunting, no heavy breathing, no tearing plastic.

Outside my tent the campground was dark, even the starlight filtered out by the canopy of Douglas fir and broad-leaf maples. And silent. No kids, no barking dogs, no players dealing one last hand of Crazy Eights.

Lying completely still, I continued to listen. There would be something. The bear that had snagged my food bag off the bench of the picnic table would give itself away sooner rather than later and I didn’t want to draw its attention away from the tropical-fruit trail mix and Minute Rice. My mind raced back over my bedtime preparations. Had I purged all the food from my panniers before I brought them into the tent?

Rebars. Yes. Gatorade powder. Uh-huh.

Wait! Tea bags? Yes, they were with the bouillon packets. Whew.

What else was there? I ran through the list. It was all outside.

But my toiletries…. What had I been thinking? Ivory soap, unscented deodorant, okay, those weren’t going to be big draws, but my toothpaste was right beside my head! I couldn’t smell it, in its tube in the little zippered plastic bag, but a bear probably could!

I’d been sloppy because this wasn’t a wilderness site.

This campground was populated by RVs and car campers, picnic tables with tablecloths and bottles of mustard and relish, and propane barbecues on which large men cooked burgers. It had the same kind of garbage cans I had at home – suburban wheelie-bins, not bear-proof caches.

Still, something out there had just nabbed my breakfast, lunch and dinner and it could be a matter of time until it came looking for my organic fennel toothpaste for dessert.

On the other hand, wouldn’t any self-respecting bear head for those garbage cans redolent of meat and barbecue sauce? Of course it would.

I settled into my sleeping bag again, adjusting the pillow of clean T-shirts beneath my head. As my brain slowed, so did my heart rate and I drifted off again, only to jerk awake at the sound of my food bag hitting the dirt. Again.

My heart hammered as my brain whirred. I knew that sound. I’d already heard it once that night. Why was I hearing it again? Clearly the bear had, what…picked up the bag and dropped it?

Just like the last time, there was silence once more. No chittering raccoon, no snuffling bear. No paws padding over the hardpacked pea gravel. Nothing but my own pulse scampering through my ears for a hiding place in my head.

Garbage cans, remember? I told myself. Broiled chicken is much more appealing than toothpaste, and raw camper is way too much work.

I felt for the flashlight, carefully unzipped the tent door and flicked on the bright halogen bulb. No eyes shone back from the darkness, nothing skittered away, no gleam of white showed where the bag had landed.

I turned off the light and retreated. I wasn’t imagining things. The bag was gone. Something was out there. I lay in the dark, worrying.

When I woke up, dawn washed everything in a pale grey light. I peered outside and, sure enough, my food bag was not lying on the bench on the far side of the picnic table. Nor was it on the ground beneath, or anywhere else that I could see. There weren’t any bears, either, so I scooted out of my sleeping bag and slipped into my shoes. When I straightened up outside the tent, it took a few moments for my higher perspective to do any good and I finally spotted a flash of white.

Rounding the picnic table and jumping down the two-foot bank from my campsite, I passed a cedar tree in a couple of strides and was looking at my supply of Minute Rice spilled across the dirt like two cups of tiny beige droppings. The Gatorade was untouched, as were the Rebars and tea bags, but a twist-tie clutching a frill of plastic like an Elizabethan ruff was all that remained of the trail mix.

Like a wilderness CSI agent, I examined the shredded edges of the bags. The creature that had pushed, pulled and dragged a couple of pounds of food off a bench, across seven feet of campsite, over a ledge and another four feet around a tree was not a bear. But we knew that. Not even a raccoon. Knew that too. No dog, no whiskey jack.

The beast that had awoken me – twice – and trapped me in fight-or-flight indecision in the fragile protection of my tent, was a ravening pack of mice.

Decoration by Dad

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming

2010-08-15T01:28:00.000-07:00

Somebody left the door of the bat cave open and I've escaped.

I'm off having an adventure at the moment, but I'll be back next Sunday and I'll tell you all about it.

This one's for the boys

2010-08-08T01:21:00.000-07:00

Your name or mine?

She loves you madly and wants to have your kids. She also wants to keep her name. Understandable desire or red flag?

When John Westover got married in 1978, his bride kept her name. “She had a heritage and a life that pre-existed me,” he says. “I never saw it as a problem. In fact, I kind of liked it. She was holding her own ground, and that I liked.”

Historically, many Canadian women stop using their maiden names and start using their husbands’ when they get married. The tradition is still strong and many women, particularly younger women, still do. But what does it mean if your new wife doesn’t want to take your name?

There are probably as many reasons as there are brides: cultural identity, professional reputation, family ties, children from a previous relationship, or maybe her name is just shorter or easier to spell over the phone than yours is.

Or perhaps she looks at it the other way around: is there a good reason to change her name?

Would she love you more? Would you love her more? Would you feel more married?

Westover, a registered clinical counsellor, says that names haven’t been an issue for any of the couples he has worked with in his decades of practice. It’s generally socially acceptable for a woman to use either her original name or her husband’s and it isn’t a major problem for most people, although traditions still hold a lot of power.

Sometimes a husband’s parents are hurt or offended if a daughter-in-law doesn’t use their last name, feeling that she is distancing herself from them, refusing to become part of the family. Relatives on either side might not acknowledge her choice, referring to her by her husband’s name.

On the other hand some people, like Pamella Moore’s new mother- and sisters-in-law, don’t see why anyone would make the change. They wondered why she bothered.

Moore says that her decision to take her husband’s name had more to do with business than anything else. She and her husband Michael work together designing and building custom furniture, and it just made sense to her that they both have the same name. Before she and Michael married, Moore had used her former husband’s name for 16 years but didn’t feel that it belonged to her and she didn’t have any strong feelings about going back to her original family name. Names are surface things, she says, they don’t define who you are.

Michael Moore concedes that it would have felt a little weird if Pamella had kept her former husband’s name, but says that it was entirely her choice to take his name.

He points out, however, that it’s a lot of work to make the change: everything from her driver’s license to bank loans, from the name on her Social Insurance Number records to her library card, from the deeds for their house to credit cards and cheques, must be dealt with.

The logistics of making the change was one of the things that Gabrielle Leja considered when she got married. Her name held strong family and cultural ties for her, so she wanted to keep it, and the time and effort involved in changing all of her documents made the decision even more logical.

Leja’s husband Doug Lamb had no objections. He says that there were several factors involved with Gabrielle’s decision, including their different religions and the fact that they were both established professionally and socially before they got married.

While women may have any number of reasons for changing or keeping their names, men seem to have only one for accepting their choices.

“What did it matter what name she chose?” says Spence Partlo, who has been married for nineteen years. “I have her heart.”

Y Y Y

This article has also appeared in Groom Magazine

Killer Songs

2010-08-01T01:00:00.000-07:00

I got the diagnosis from my friend Alice Valdal.

Earworms, she said. Those songs that get into your head and, like a nagging cough or a bad boyfriend, won’t leave.

Now I have a name to put to the creatures that wind around in my brain like an eel in a reef, just a fraction exposed at any one time and the rest a mystery to be ousted only by much patient urging.

A few weeks ago, it was a couple of lines from Taylor Swift’s Love Story that possessed me. I finally had to track down the video on youtube so the fragment could find its way to its family and leave me alone.

Then, about two o’clock last Wednesday morning, Thomas Fersen’s Elisabeth moved in. I love this song – it’s got a serious tone that overlies the quirky story, but you have to listen to get the full picture. Did I mention it’s in French?

So I’m lying in the dark, trying to remember whether the erstwhile beau’s next line is “if I’m lying, may I turn into a toad” or if this is where he offers to become a mule.

After a long struggle I did manage to bury all the animals (along with the boyfriend’s hopes of reconciliation), but another Fersen character came to the funeral and I found myself despairingly sharing headspace with the manservant who gloomily recites his résumé to the police as they arrest his employer, Monsieur l’assassin.

These are (obviously) catchy tunes and clever stories but my French is simply too shaky, especially in the murk of three o’clock. So then the dilemma became whether it would be better to get up and listen to the song in the hope it would vacate moi, or whether that would anchor it firmly in place.

After a long fight, with first one side and then the other gaining the upper hand, I found the solution. I recruited Monsieur and his garrotte.

The earworm is now in deep hiding or a shallow grave and I can’t hear a thing except…is it…Here it goes again?

OK Go better watch out. Monsieur’s on my speed dial and he’s got a day pass.

illustration by Ray Goldsworthy

dba Dad

Why I love my iPod

2010-07-25T01:00:00.000-07:00

If there’s nothing going on outside my head to distract me, the voices inside my skull take over.

Recently I’ve realized that during these conversations (in which I play both roles) I project what I assume other people are thinking about me. What makes the whole thing even weirder is that I believe other people actually don’t notice me much, but this is coming from someone who’s having full-on chats across her corpus callosum so, you know, take it for what it’s worth.

At the gym, for example, if I haven’t noticed that my iPod playlist is finished, I suddenly find myself thinking at the guy doing biceps curls six inches from the mirror.

“You’re blocking the free weight rack,” I scold. If he’s 30 or 40 or 50, I add, “You’re old enough to know better.”

If he’s 17 or 23, I warn him, “I know your mother.”

“Don’t be so crabby,” they answer. “You shouldn’t even be down here. You need to be upstairs on the cardio machines, working off that belly.”

“I’ve done my time on the treadmill,” I snarl back. “Now I have to lift some weights so I can set an example for your girlfriend/daughter/neighbour over there who needs to eat something before she gets osteoporosis at 25.”

“Oh sure.” They eye the swag of my upper arm. “You’re a great example.”

Or if I’m cycling through town and a driver guns his motor and swings way wide to get around me:

“My butt is so not that big,” I tell him. “If you only realized that you’re just illustrating what a lousy driver you are. You don’t even know how big your car is.”

“F- you, lady,” they snipe and swerve right, forcing me to choose between slowing down to ride in their exhaust or jumping the curb.

I stretch out my arm, two fingers extended in a salute. The gesture incenses them even further and they jab one finger in the air.

“I have good karma,” I say smugly. “What have you just gained?”

They rev their engines in response and roar ahead to the red light.

And I carry on, my self-righteousness squirming just a little because deep beneath my oh-so-evolved cerebral cortex, way down in my lizard brain, I know that I’ve used a global sign for peace to piss off a stranger.

Except that’s not the way things work in this town, so as I pass them in the intersection I add, “Say hi to your mom for me.”

illustration by Ray Goldsworthy

dba Dad

Summer vacation 2000, Part Two: Composting Culture

2010-07-17T17:20:00.000-07:00

The brash, bottle-blonde proprietor was bidding a noisy farewell to two New York matrons while I waited to pay for my grilled cheese sandwich at the café in Kelsey Bay. Outside, sunlight bounced hard off the dock and shimmered on graphite fishing rods. Finally she turned her attention to me.

"Where are you going?" she demanded as she handed over my change.

"The Charlottes," I told her.

Her voice softened. “Everyone who goes there comes back changed,” she said. “Everyone has some kind of spiritual experience.”

That was fine with me. The Queen Charlotte Islands, also known as Haida Gwaii, are an archipelago of nearly 200 cloud-shrouded islands off Canada’s west coast and form a mythic backdrop to my life. The art and culture of the Haida people who live there have, in the last half-century, become legendary around the world. Thanks to artist and writer Emily Carr, I grew up with visions of forests guarded by totem poles, their eyes watching the sea for incoming storms or returning fishermen even as they composted quietly back into the forest. I imagined the silence, torn only by the myriad voices of ravens or rippled by rain dropping from leaf to leaf. On that hot, dry August day I couldn’t wait to get there, to let the damp green nourish my soul.

The reality, of course, was more…active. I rented a kayak from Cathy, a teacher at the local high school, and took advantage of the summer-smooth water to paddle past colonies of raucous seabirds. I hiked through forests waist deep in salal with sunlight pointing through the trees like God’s fingers. I pitched my tent on ankle-deep moss and fell asleep to the shushing of waves on a lakeshore. I saw clearcut mountainsides green with ferns and edged with enormous living trees whose bark had once been harvested to make rain-shedding hats and capes. I met mountain-biking ferry captain Gord Nettleton and his Jack Russell terrier Patrick who together cleared old logging roads and new singletrack on the jungly slopes of Moresby Island. I talked with Jim and Gail Henry, who run the gas station in Sandspit and, oh yes, in the evenings they go to the beach and feed bald eagles.

And there were ravens. They sat in trees along the roadsides, conferences of them, and like a construction crew taking a break talked loudly amongst themselves when I bicycled past. They sounded for all the world as if they were criticizing my technique – or perhaps my clothes. Learning not to be demoralized by birds was not the kind of epiphany I’d been hoping for.

On my way to look at historical displays in the museum at Skidegate, the scent of cedar drew me sideways, to a board and batten building. The open door faced the bay and two canoes filled the centre of the room. A man stood at a workbench under a window, noisily notching planks with a power saw while a woman with long dark hair and a younger man sat hunched on lawn chairs, paintbrushes in hand. And stacked floor to ceiling against two long walls were solid ranks of bentwood boxes.

In my urban world I’d seen them before – singly in galleries and shops and occasionally in some lucky person’s home. But here were dozens, hundreds, each one made from a single cedar board steamed and bent and then pegged together and painted with a moon or hummingbird, wolf or whale, kingfisher or raven. I felt like I'd walked into a back room at the Louvre.

What, I wondered, was this all about?

The woman looked up and smiled at me, then bowed her head to her work again.

“Ah,” my mind whispered. “Artists.”

The rest of me tiptoed past, careful not to disturb them. Sidling around the perimeter of the room I saw signs and notices. Repatriation project, they said.

When the saw stopped shrieking I shyly approached the operator, who seemed happy to talk. In the past, he told me, anthropologists, curators, and Indian agents had “collected” hundreds of Haida bodies – skeletons – and had taken them away. In museums or private houses around the world, they lay in cool metal drawers with their secrets and silent histories. Now their descendants wanted to bring home the great-grandfathers and cousins and inter them in the

warm damp island earth. Some, mostly from the museums in Victoria and the University of British Columbia, were already safely buried and now the Museum of Civilization in Hull, Quebec was prepared to release one hundred and fifty more. The boxes around me, painted with clan symbols, were to be their caskets.

I stared, speechless; someone’s aunties had been hauled from gently rocking kelp beds or the fragrant shelter of evergreen trees and bundled off to the wind and glass of Chicago, the snow and concrete of Russia. I managed to thank him for the explanation, and as I turned to leave he spoke again.

Would I like to paint a box? he asked.

I stopped. Burying a loved one is very emotional. The flow of feelings can leave us scrubbed clean of all the usual protections, like a berry without its bloom. I felt like one of the foreign elements that these grieving, happy, relieved families needed protection against. I worried that my clumsy presence might scratch something precious. And on top of that, my artistic skills were limited to knowing which end of the paintbrush was up.

On the other hand, when someone offers such an intimate experience, it would be churlish – and foolish – to refuse. Unhappily contemplating my shortcomings, I accepted.

Andy – the sawyer’s name was Andy – introduced me to Ann and Ken, the other two painters; he handed me a brush, a plastic plate with puddles of red, black and white paint, and a box with designs pencilled on two sides. When Ken marked tiny letters, R for red, B for black, within the spaces on the wood, a little of the tension left my neck. I sat on the floor near the doorway and drew the box between my knees. Tentatively I dabbed my brush into the pool of black and drew it over the clean yellow wood. It went where I put it. I heaved a sigh of relief and did it again.

An hour later my two-finned killer whale was breathing confidence into the right side of my brain. I started to enjoy myself. By the end of the day I had a decent-looking wolf as well, and smears of red and black on my fingers just like a real painter. I was as secretly proud of them as any kindergarten student.

My box – Auntie’s casket, as I thought of it – went on the pile along the back wall, adding to the mural of myth and history waiting to welcome the ancestors.

The next morning I again showed up at the work shed. There was no painting today, though. This time I was attending a going-away tea for Andy and the others who would tomorrow start their journey to central Canada to gather their ancestors, wrap them in button blankets made by their children, and bring them home.

I stood against one wall, watching and listening to carvers who pulled bears from centuries-old trees, women who kept an eye on the kids playing outside, and the elders who gently bridged generations by blessing the work of youngers in a language that was old before the aunties were born. If they noticed me at all, perhaps they wondered briefly.

“Who’s the tourist?” I imagined them thinking. “What’s she doing here, watching the chiefs and grandmothers open their hearts and pour their love on our travellers?”

Then Andy spoke. He thanked the elders for their guidance and their prayers. He thanked the community for its work and support. He thanked me as one of the visitors who had contributed time and energy to the process of Yahguudaangang, paying respect to the ancestors.

I stood frozen against the wall, desperately wanting to drop my head and stare at the floor, knowing if I did my tears would splash the dusty planks and everyone would see. I was startled, embarrassed to be singled out. But most of all I was moved by Andy’s grace. His gift of appreciation turned my hesitant efforts into humus. With his words he told me that just as the totem poles of old crumbled to feed the forest around them, so my cedar box silently composting in the Skidegate cemetery would nourish the roots of Haida Gwaii.

The bottle-blonde was right.

Summer vacation 2000, Part One: The Spa Holiday

2010-07-10T17:36:00.000-07:00

“You smell nice,” the cashier said without looking up as she slid my baguette and mesclun mix over the electronic reader.

I grunted and hoisted my dusty pannier onto the counter. “I don’t need a bag,” I said.

She looked up and her eyes widened as they travelled from the grimy gloved hand holding out a five-dollar bill to my sweat-stained T-shirt and helmeted head. I grinned, white teeth in a sun-pinked face, and she started to laugh.

“Really,” she assured me. “You smell fresh.”

I was on day four of a bike trip up Vancouver Island’s east coast during the hottest weather of the year. “Fresh” shouldn’t have entered her mind.

I ducked my head discreetly and breathed deep, curious.

I had long wanted to take a spa holiday. Great vegetarian food, pleasant walks in the woods, a massage every day, time for naps…the kind of vacation that would make me healthier by the minute, with precious little effort on my part. It would include great scenery, of course, and a comfortable bedroom, and the other guests (when I saw them at all) would be friendly but aloof.

What I got was a road trip. A few days cycling Vancouver Island’s back roads, nights between clean sheets in old-fashioned motels, a stint at a mountain-top resort…no, wait. That was Plan B.

Plan R, Reality, had morphed into two weeks with a tent and enough trail mix to pave the trail.

The first day, my sweetie and I left Victoria at the crack of noon and headed north. By the time we had our first break, waiting for the ferry at Brentwood Bay, the last knotted shoulder muscle had given in to oxygen-rich blood loaded with feel-good chemicals like serotonin and adrenaline. I sipped water and held my face up to the sun while I waited for the boat to take me across fjord-like Finlayson Arm.

The Malahat Drive between Victoria and the Cowichan Valley has an undeserved reputation for toughness and earlier in the year we’d proved it, so this time we decided to bypass the hill and take the ferry to Mill Bay instead.

The sun was warm, the sea sparkled, an eagle soared overhead. We stood on the top deck of the ship and looked at the sailboats in the marina as we pulled out.

“I like the Paradox,” Himself pointed to a lovely wooden craft. “But she’s a high-maintenance lady.”

“And you like your girls low-maintenance,” I said, smiling. I pride myself on being a low-m girl.

He grinned back. “Yeah,” he agreed. “I like Tupperware.”

Apparently I would receive no special treatment on this holiday.

From Mill Bay through Cobble Hill to Cowichan Bay we huffed up hilly backroads and swooped down again until the sun was far to the west. I needed dinner.

“One more hill,” my husband promised. “Then we can stop.”

He’s been saying that since I met him in September 1990, but this time it was true.

We got to the top of the hill and there below us was the little mill town of Crofton. Not what I’d have chosen for a four-star holiday, but my legs were willing to settle.

The last freewheel of the day is always the best because there’s no uphill afterward. Not until tomorrow and that doesn’t count.

We stopped at the grocery store to get dinner and directions and rolled the few blocks to the grassy, treed campground on the bay with resident kingfishers and a curious seal.

Once the tent was up and the new ThermARest mattresses unfurled, I took my new little camping towel (guaranteed to hold four gallons of water and squeeze dry in seconds) to the showers.

I pushed open the door and gasped. The gleaming white shower stall had a built-in bench. Now this was more like it! I turned on the taps and sank gratefully onto the seat. I rubbed the fine grit of salt off my limbs as the warm water sluiced over me, feeling dirt and sweat wash away. Afterward I rubbed down with the little magic towel and then pulled on shorts and a T-shirt. As I passed the mirror on my way out, I noticed that, instead of looking sunburned and weatherbeaten, my skin glowed.

We sat at our picnic table and watched the stars come out while we ate Hershey Almond bars.

The next day I lost my man early on and spent the next six hours desperately riding up hill and down dale in the blazing sun to catch him. I didn’t dare stop for long because he was ahead of me but didn’t realize it and thought that he was trying to catch me (don’t ask), so I just drank litres of water and ate a box of granola bars. By the time I found him, drinking coffee and reading his novel after a late lunch in a Mexican café, I was hot and exhausted.

We freewheeled down another hill and found a lovely waterfront campground. The owner had taken a bike trip through France once, twenty-five years before, and gave us a deal on the price. After another salt body scrub followed by a moisture wrap (aka a shower and a slather of moisturizer) I was ready for a dinner of canned chili, ramen noodles, fruit cocktail, and V8. Ginger tea and Cheez Pleezers to follow.

By the third day, we’d figured it out. We stopped for ice cream or fruit juice before we used up our blood sugar reserves. We ate fish and chips at a harbourfront café before retiring to our (of course) waterfront campsite.

A regular spa would have charged me for every massage. A regular spa would cost hundreds or thousands of dollars each for a long weekend, instead of the hundred dollars or so our holiday had cost us so far.

A regular spa might give me the illusion of better health – until I tried to hike up a hill or swim a lap. A regular spa probably wouldn’t provide Cheez Pleezers and Hershey Almond bars.

This story has also appeared in Adventure Cyclist and Focus magazines

Nothing less than gratitude

2010-07-03T19:19:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine completed the first draft of a screenplay recently, so I took her a little bouquet.

There isn’t much in bloom in my native plant garden at this time of year (and wildflowers often don’t make the greatest bouquets anyway), so I clipped some lavender, which is gorgeous enough to draw the hummingbirds, and added a few sprigs of oregano for greenery. It was a pretty little tussie-mussie and she can eat it too, if she gets hungry enough.

Only after I gave it to her did I wonder whether there was some subtext. Was I saying something beyond the obvious “Congratulations!”?

According to buzzle.com, apple blossom represents hope and good fortune, edelweiss is for daring and courage, and…oh dear. Lavender symbolizes distrust.

http://www.flowers-cs.com says that convolvulus represents humble perseverance – and doesn’t that sum up the writing process? Not to mention the traits required to keep morning glory under control in the garden.

Sweet basil is for good luck, thyme is for courage and activity – two other hallmarks of writers. The same site says that lavender is for constancy – a far cry from the distrust of the other site. That makes me feel better.

But whatever other herbs and flowers go into a bouquet, the plant that should be central in any writer’s tribute is agrimony. It’s been used to treat all manner of ailments and even wards off the devil, which is handy. However, along with its many physical and spiritual benefits, what it symbolizes is thankfulness.

And isn't that what we feel when we meet a big challenge? Whether it's painting a house or a portrait, finishing a race, or writing a story – we're glad it's over.

apple blossom photo by Josef Petrek, morning glory photo by Andrew Schmidt

Looking for meaning

2010-06-28T09:46:00.000-07:00

I’ve been going through one of my periodic career crises, when I wonder what I do exactly and why and whether it makes any difference to anyone, including me. Even while these events are happening, though, I write. I can’t help it. It’s what I do and ironically it’s also what triggers my question: isn’t there some other way to earn a living?

But as I say, I keep writing.

Then, when I was scrawling my Julia Cameron-mandated morning pages yesterday, I made a spelling error. I write, I wrote. I write. Then, I wright.

It looked wrong.

And no wonder. A wright is a person who creates things, fixes them.

Wheelwright, cartwright, shipwright, millwright…

Me…well, I create things. Heck, I create people. I compile information and events into pages and reams of stories and then I fix them and fix them some more.

So I wondered: Does write come from wright? Is it the Old English version of lite from light?

My Nelson Canadian dictionary says not. Wright comes from the Old English werg – work.

According to the Oxford English dictionary, write is from the same language, different root. Writan: to scratch, as in to score into wood or stone.

So which do I do? Conventional wisdom says that every story is a variation of one of very few (seven or ten or fourteen, depending on your source) basic plots; the differences lie in setting or period or other such details. If that’s true, then storytellers don’t create anything new, but you could say we fix, adjust, adapt the tales for different audiences. So that still makes us wrights and as anyone who has ever put pen to paper or two fingers to a keyboard will attest, scratching out a living as a writer sure feels like work.

Good thing it also feels, uh, right.

The Other D-Day

2010-06-20T00:01:00.000-07:00

My friend Judy is adding on to her house – or rather, a bunch of guys is doing it for her. So far, her biggest chore has been deciding whether to go for in-floor heating in her new bathroom.

Stressful for her.

But there’s an up side.

The day the excavators, dump trucks, diggers and drivers showed up to break ground, she emailed me with a two-for-the-price-of-one: a great Freudian slip that’s also a delightful new entry for the next edition of James Lipton’s An Exaltation of Larks.

Today, as I celebrate my dad and all the other wonderful XY chromosomes in my life, I wish everyone what Judy has: a backyard fun of men.

Helpful hint: Summer edition

2010-06-13T07:45:00.000-07:00

Maggie Ross has three sons and a daughter whom she raised to be functional, self-sufficient adults able to cook well-balanced meals and sew on buttons. But while they were learning these life skills, they squabbled. And argued and fought and bickered.

At home Maggie tolerated it (most of the time) but when they were camping, she wanted peace. So being a clever parent who understands the psychology of motivation, she resorted to magic.

After every meal, Maggie washed the dishes and the kids dried – without being asked. In fact, Brent, Craig, Deb, and Buddy grabbed tea towels and practically fought each other for the opportunity to help. Maggie's secret?

Whoever dried the "magic" dish got a chocolate bar.

Maggie used the magic dish throughout every holiday, and the kids never figured out which one it was – although, amazingly, each of them got it about every fourth meal….

photo by Peter Griffin

Piggybacking

2010-06-05T15:43:00.000-07:00

One of the first strategies I learned when I became a freelance writer is to leverage everything I do. One personal experience became an essay that I sold to Cottage Life magazine and then to three or four other cottaging magazines. The research I did for a newspaper article about harvesting landfill gas and burning it to create electricity led to an assignment to write about heating commercial greenhouses for Canadian Geographic and then for Greenhouse Canada, which led to yet other gigs writing about two different gas pipeline projects for the Journal of Commerce….

I call this piggybacking: using the research from one assignment to write and sell other articles, or simply re-selling the same story to more than one publication over time.

When I decided to look into how I might go about finding work overseas, I figured I might as well get paid for it, so I leveraged my efforts: I pitched the idea to the editors at Boulevard magazine. (I left out the self-serving angle.)

They liked the proposal, so I wrote an article about people of a certain age working abroad (although, alas, I haven't yet found my own job Out There).

Two of the people I interviewed for that feature, which will appear in the July issue of Boulevard, are Leah Norgrove and Ambrose Marsh, who went to Africa to help with palliative care education in Tanzania.

They had an extraordinary experience and they’re continuing their support of education for health-care providers in Tanzania with a fundraiser in Victoria in a couple of weeks. I’m putting their poster up here to give the event a ride just a little further along the information highway:

WWAD?

2010-05-30T09:31:00.000-07:00

Anne Shirley is one of my all-time favourite literary characters. I loved her when I was ten and four decades later, she’s still at the top of my list of heroes.

I think it’s because she never simply accepts the hand she’s dealt. Whether it’s being an orphan or taking the blame for getting her best friend drunk, Anne does whatever she has to to solve the problem. She asks for what she wants and, if nobody hands it to her (they rarely do, of course), she makes it happen herself.

I admire that drive and the pure spirit in which she implements it. She’s ambitious, sure, but for things that I can relate to: love, belonging, education, goodness.

She often fails, or thinks she does, but she keeps trying.

Her efforts aren’t half-hearted, either; she puts her whole heart and soul and mind into every one.

If I’d had a daughter I'd have been very tempted to name her Anne, but it's more direct simply to emulate her myself.

So when the going gets tough I now ask myself, "What would Anne do?"

I'm not obliged but…

2010-05-23T06:24:00.000-07:00

For the past week I’ve been revisiting my work.

In order to claim my share of royalties, I have to add up the word counts for all of my magazine and newspaper articles for each year from 1989 to 2008 and submit them to Access Copyright, the Canadian copyright licensing agency.

I combed through my files – hard copy and computer – and tabulated, year by year, the word count for each article in every publication for which I’ve ever freelanced.

There are stories on public art, reinforcing steel, and high-performance concrete. I wrote about mistletoe, growing Garry oaks from seed, and how to plant a Victoria-style hanging basket. I found essays on being a stepmom, eating Cheezies at the end of a long bike ride, and what makes a place beautiful enough.

Clearly, I’ve always covered a broad range of subjects. I haven’t written much about bridge construction or pipelines lately, but I profiled writer Yasuko Thanh in Torch and her Journey Prize-winning story “Floating Like the Dead” in Canada’s History. I reviewed Deepwater Vee, Melanie Siebert’s debut poetry book, for Canadian Geographic’s June issue. How Kevin Smith and Maureen Gordon have successfully taken their personal values to work at Maple Leaf Adventures gets airtime in the next issue of Harbour Air’s inflight magazine.

What my new stories have in common with the old is that I learn something from all of them. I can question interesting people about their expertise and passions and then I get to sit in a cozy room with a nice cup of tea and drive myself crazy trying to do them justice on paper.

It’s an impossible job. Who, except an occasional genius, can get it exactly right? Who can perfectly capture the essence, humour, generosity, and spirit of another person and, using only abstract symbols, convey it to strangers?

Not me.

I’ve had moments when I’ve come close, I think, and knowing that I’ve shone a little light onto a subject or made a reader laugh or acknowledged someone’s contribution to the greater good – those moments keep me going. I’m not curing cancer, but I can tell you about people who are.

And when once again my reach exceeds my grasp and I consider giving up, I have only to look at the quotation on my computer screen.

The Talmud, via a little yellow sticky note, tells me, “It is not your obligation to complete your work, but you are not at liberty to quit.”

So I make another cup of tea.

Back to the land

2010-05-15T11:01:00.000-07:00

I have a new garden!

Last year, I put my name on a waiting list for space in the allotment gardens on the grounds of historic Craigflower Manor and last week, my number came up. I am now the proud tenant of Number 82, a four-by-twelve foot plot of potential.

See the beautifully cleared section in the foreground of the photo? That’s not mine.

Above it, notice the garden with the minty shrub at the left-hand end? Also not mine.

What is mine, for the astonishing price of $24 a year, is the overgrown – and very green, I point out – mess in the middle.

I have plans. Big plans. Ambitious plans that involve beets and chive flowers and kale all winter long.

But first, I weed.

Tiptoe

2010-05-07T14:09:00.000-07:00

My cousin Tea calls me up every once in a while and says, “Hey, Rach! Wanna go–?“

Choose one: backpack the Juan de Fuca Marine Trail, cycle 200 miles in two days on the Seattle to Portland Ride, sit on a beach and drink mai tais.

Only she never offers that beach/mai tai option.

Most recently she said, “Hey, Rach! Wanna do the Tulip Pedal?”

I’ve wanted to check out the Skagit Valley’s famous tulip fields for years, and I was so relieved that Tea’s idea didn’t involve a 30-pound pack or 10,000 other people that I blurted, “Sure!”

She roped in her sister and aunt and we sent off our $25 entry fees to support child safety programs.

We met up in Tsawwassen on a Friday evening in the middle of April with our bikes, passports and all the enthusiasm you could ask for. Tea had come straight from work and hadn’t been to the bank to get any American cash but her sister Pea agreed to cover her so we piled into Bea’s truck and headed south.

Tea, whose partner is a chef and who is something of a foodie herself, recommended dinner at Boundary Bay Brewing Company in Bellingham en route, and with a glass of Washington State merlot and a plate of piping hot enchiladas in front of me, I decided this expedition was one of Tea’s best ideas yet.

On Saturday morning, we picked up our maps and T-shirts in La Conner, threw our legs over our trusty two-wheelers and headed north on the first leg of the 40-mile route. As we left the lovely small town behind us, we excitedly pointed out solid stripes of pink, red and purple across the landscape about a mile to the east.

“Tulips!”

“Yay!”

“Can’t wait to see them up close!”

But the tulips remained where they were and we continued north.

We saw an occasional cluster of yellow or red blooms in a tidy front yard, but otherwise it was all flat green farmland. Pretty, but no tulips. Then we got to Edison and promptly lost interest in flowers.

There was a bakery.

We crowded into the tiny two-table space and eyed the menu as if we hadn’t seen food for days instead of the hour and a half since breakfast. I decided on a latte and the merest sliver of a taste of what the others were having.

OMG.

Pea’s lemon verbena iced tea and white-and-chocolate cupcake decorated with chocolate chips were delightful. I think I moaned out loud when I sampled Bea’s polenta cake infused with lime. A crumb or two of Tea’s maple scone was not nearly enough.

Some time later, we rolled back to our bikes.

Swinging east on the second, short leg, we saw more beautiful countryside. Turning south, yet more. There was always a new vista: a red-tailed hawk hunting over a field, red-winged blackbirds amongst the bulrushes at the edge of a slough, green fields, ploughed fields, old barns.

The ride organizers had chosen a fantastic route: lots of scenery, only two hills (neither long nor arduous), and very little car traffic.

And also no tulips.

We made a slight detour (thank you, Tea) to Golden Glen farm to buy double-cream cheddar made by the Jensen ladies. They also make a lavender cheese that I think I must try next time.

Finally, when we were well along the southward leg of the route, we spotted a big band of colour.

“Yay!” we said.

With fresh energy, we pedaled closer. At last we’d found tulips!

We’d also found a parking lot and wardens with stop signs to control traffic so the thousands (okay, hundreds) of drivers and their passengers could cross the road to line up at the ticket booth: cash to the left, Visa and MasterCard to the right.

“I don’t want to pay to look at tulips,” I thought.

“I don’t want to pay to look at tulips,” Pea said.

“Me either,” Bea agreed.

Tea said, “I do.”

We had come all this way to see tulips, so she had a point, but we’d also had a beautiful ride and wonderful culinary treats and it seemed silly to ante up even a few dollars each to walk through some muddy fields.

The argument went back and forth, as they tend to do, and then…

“She’s got that look.” Pea said.

We turned as one and headed for the ticket booth.

“Tea still doesn’t have any cash, does she?” I said to Pea as we hauled out our wallets.

She shook her head.

“So not only do we have to go in, but you have to pay her way?”

The tulips were glorious.

Three syllables of happiness

2010-05-03T08:46:00.000-07:00

“Listen to this!” my husband exclaimed recently.

My head snapped up from my book. An exclamation from him usually signals something pretty freaking spectacular, like the sun rising in the west or an early start to ski season.

“To be happy, every human being needs love, a purpose, and something to look forward to,” he quoted from the novel in his hands.

It struck us both as one of those universal truths that you recognize right away – as soon as someone else says it.

Of all the people I know, the happiest are those who have all three things. Those with only two are restless, or worse; love alone cannot create happiness.

I know people in their 80s who are happy because they have good friends, they want to finish writing their books, and they’re looking forward to Christmas dinner with their families (or at least to Christmas dinner). I know people much younger who chafe at their lives; they don’t know what they want to do, so they can neither do it nor look forward to doing it.

In the books I read and the movies I watch – and in plays and music, too, for that matter – the stories usually exist because at least one of the three elements is missing.

The movie Revolutionary Road, set in the 1950s, perfectly illustrated for me what can happen when a couple of the puzzle pieces are missing. (Spoiler alert.)

Frank had a suburban life and a job he disliked, but no clear ambition, no dream except to go to Paris some day. His wife April had the love of her husband and children but her life’s goal – to be an actress – was shattered when she discovered on stage that she’s a terrible actor.

With that dream gone, she created a new one: the family would move to Paris, she would get a job to support them, and Frank would be free to discover hispurpose. However, when Frank got a better job, he decided that loving and supporting his family were, in fact, his purpose and what he looked forward to doing. April was bereft again.

Looking at life and stories this way helped clarify a few things for me. Like that hollow feeling when our chicks fly the nest and our purpose as parents changes drastically. The fear with which we face old age, when we’ll be jobless and we’ll think more about sore joints than smoking them.

Sometimes I’m a little shaky on my purpose, but I have wonderful friends and family and even on my most Eeyore-ish days I look forward to something: there will always be another fantastic story to read; popcorn makes every movie better; and my office window faces east, so each morning that I show up for work, there’s a sunrise.

Warning: Rant

2010-04-25T06:57:00.000-07:00

As I was chatting with a woman at a writers’ workshop this spring, I asked about her writing.

“Oh, I don’t write,” she said. “I used to, but I have a full life now.”

People say this kind of thing a lot at writing-related events and usually I just smile and nod because I can see it’s an excuse, even if they won’t. That day, though, I took offense at the implication that I write because I have nothing better to do.

We all make choices about how we spend our time and I admire my friends who tutor high-school students or know all the words to the songs on Glee or run marathons. I would not admire them if they paid to attend a marathon clinic and told the runners that no, they don’t train; they have full lives.

In a recent lecture at the University of Victoria, emeritus professor Bruce Howe said that it’s crucial for elite athletes to take responsibility for their own performance. They must understand their strengths and weaknesses.

Howe figures that 85% of the responsibility for his or her performance rests with the athlete and 15% with the coach, and as far as I can see, it should work the same for other activities: painting, playing music, heavy-duty mechanics. In the same vein, I think people should take responsibility for their choices, not make excuses and pretend that those of us who choose different activities have big Ls tattooed on our foreheads.

I don’t care what you do in your spare time (unless you’re Sharon Ashwood or Jennifer Crusie or Don Winslow, in which case I’d prefer you were working on the next book, thank you). I don’t care whether that woman at the workshop writes or knits or is raising grandchildren. However, it bugs me that she implied I write because I have nothing better to do. Frankly, the opposite is true.

I write because I have nothing better to do.

Floored by flowers

2010-04-16T08:31:00.000-07:00

On Thursday, I made my spring pilgrimage to Lake Cowichan, northwest of Victoria on Vancouver Island.

The object of my adoration is wildflowers –

white trilliums, dark pink bleeding hearts, yellow woods violets and the reason for this particular BC Parks Ecological Reserve: pink fawn lilies.

With a soundtrack of robins and the river flowing over stones, I tread the humus-soft paths of maple and alder glades floored with flowers.

It’s my annual miracle.

So not a gearhead

2010-04-11T07:50:00.000-07:00

I approached the metal implements cautiously, a set of Allen keys clanking in my hand. Thousands of people managed these things; hundreds of thousands. How hard could it be?

In the garage, I peeled the little rubbery patches off the soles of my new cycling shoes and inspected the slots and grooves. I fitted a steely little doohickey in and tightened it into place with two screws.

Easy.

I did the same with the second shoe, making sure the bits were pointing the same way. Then it was on to Stage Two.

It's all very well to spend a hundred bucks on shoes you have to assemble yourself, but they're no use without something to push against. The cleats were the male part – now I needed to replace my old pedals with special female ones that would accept the shoes and make them functional.

I grabbed a box-end crescent wrench, slotted it over the pedal axle. I pulled hard. Then I pushed. I thought about it, analyzed it, and pulled again. I changed position to get more leverage, applied my whole body weight, and still it didn't budge.

So I called my husband, hopefully. Silence. I called again. "Can you come down and help me?" I waited to see if the silence indicated that he hadn't heard me or that he had. He appeared. He'd heard.

The whole bike-enhancing exercise was in aid of a 2,000-kilometre trip I was planning – to ride the length of Vancouver Island, take the ferry to Bella Coola, traverse the Chilcotin to Williams Lake then Lillooet and return to the coast via the Pemberton Valley. I was excited about this adventure and had decided that such a long ride deserved proper footwear no matter what Thoreau said.

I found some at Reckless. I thought that was the name of the store; I didn't know it was a premonition.

My guy easily wrenched off my old pedals and tightened on the new ones. With my Allen keys I adjusted the tension of the clips. I practiced clicking my right foot in and my right foot out. In. Out.

Sweet.

I tweaked the clips once more and it was time to practice for real. My bike, whom I call Miss Jean Brodie, and I rolled out of the garage.

I clicked my right shoe in and pushed off. As I wheeled into the cul-de-sac, my left foot felt for the sweet spot and the shoe clicked into place. I felt the difference right away. The shoe, not my sole, took the pressure from my leg and transferred it to the crank. The pedal responded by moving faster, stronger. Jean and I circled the end of the lane once, then a second time, quickly building up speed.

I clicked out. No I didn't.

I tried again. I whizzed into another turn, cranking my ankle this time to pull out of the cleat. Jean held fast. I circled the end of the street, madly, vainly wrenching first one foot then the other. Around and around I zoomed and I wondered what I had done to come to such a pass, to wind up in one of the circles of hell right in front of my house.

"Honey!" I called. “Yoo hoo!”

But I didn't wait to see if he'd heard me. I simply bellowed his name over and over as I orbited and I only shut up when he caught Jean by the handlebars and wrestled her to a standstill.

He shook as I attempted once more to escape her clutches. By the time he leaned over to untie my shoelaces the whole neighbourhood could hear him laughing.

Metaphor Alert

2010-04-04T05:28:00.000-07:00

Five or six years ago, on my way home from a meeting with my writing group, I decided that I’d dabbled blindly long enough. If I was going to make any progress with this novel-writing thing, I had to change what I did or how I did it…. But I didn’t know exactly what to change about the writing or how.

So right then I detoured to the bookstore and bought The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron.

For the next three months, I faithfully worked through the exercises and then I adopted one of Cameron’s two main recommendations.

I tried the other, the weekly solo artist’s date, but although I can see the value in doing something fun and refreshing, I spend so much time on my own (as what writer doesn’t?) that it isn’t really a treat for me to do yet another thing alone.

The one that I have stuck with is the morning pages. Three sheets, handwritten, first thing every day. They can be about anything or nothing, coherent or not. The point is simply to put a pen on paper and write whatever comes out. This has always felt to me like hosing out the crevices of my mind, clearing away the gunk of petty worries and ugly thoughts and fears logical and otherwise – all the stuff that greases the wheel for the poor hamster trapped in there.

Writing morning pages is like rinsing all that muck down some subconscious drain or, as I realized when I was up to my wrists in cold water and slime this weekend, it’s like clearing the eavestroughs after a year and yet another storm have filled them with cast-offs from the surrounding trees: slimy old leaves from my neighbour’s oaks, and branches, cones and needles from the big firs in my own backyard.

It’s satisfying to unblock the conduits and feel ideas, like stagnant rainwater, flow. Some of them go down the drain, sure, but some of them make it to fertile ground and help seeds grow into trees, which eventually will shed their leaves into my gutters….

Clearly, I need to work on my metaphors. But hey, that’s just one more thing I’ve learned since I started taking my writing seriously.

Weeds or Wonders

2010-03-27T16:25:00.000-07:00

As this year's dandelions begin to bloom, I wonder – yet again – why I struggle so hard against them.

If I let nature have its way, both my dry shady back yard and the sunny, rocky front would be masses of brilliant yellow from March to October with no effort on my part. I could pick the leaves for salads, and even make wine from the blossoms. I could let the plants go to seed and have mini meadows of ethereal silvery globes.

And I’ve just raked up a moral dilemma, too. According to Cursing the Basil, a book of garden folklore, dandelions might be fairies. All these years I’ve wielded my spade in backyard pogroms when, instead, I could have had a garden full of magic!

Timid and shy and scared am I/of things beyond my ken

2010-03-21T08:28:00.001-07:00

I love The Sound of Music.

During my first bike trip 25 years ago, I ratcheted myself up the sides of Yorkshire dales and Highland glens singing Mother Abbess’s number when she exhorts Maria to Climb Every Mountain.

But when the movie first came out I was quite a little girl, and I had a crush on the teenage Liesl. I can still remember most of the words to her big solo.

Now, I’m not sixteen going on seventeen, nor am I innocent as a rose, but sometimes I’m still anxious about new experiences. However, it’s only by trying new things that we learn and give ourselves choices. Whether I want to do it or not, I know how to bake a loaf of bread, change a spark plug, and paint a wall. I can hem, split wood, and write a story.

But I was timid about fixing my bicycle. Oh sure, I can repair a flat and clean the chain and even, if pressed, tighten a cable or two. But after a Series of Unfortunate Events at my local bike shop last spring, I decided I really must be able to do more.

Recyclistas is a local bike cooperative that offers a three-hour Do It Yourself class on Saturdays, so yesterday I gathered my nerve and my grubbiest jeans and got into it.

The instructors were two young men with excellent teaching skills and, to my mind, quite extraordinary patience. They provided individual hands-on training for each of us four participants, all the while coping with a steady flow of cyclists who came and went with requests for advice or tools or bench space.

I – and by I I mean I – replaced brake and gear cables, adjusted the front derailleur, learned how my disk brakes work, and replaced the chain.

It took me about twelve times as long as it would have taken the mechanic/teacher, and still I feel so empowered.

No, never mind feel.

I am empowered.

So now I’m all about the Mother Abbess again.

The Giveaway Game

2010-03-13T17:42:00.000-08:00

I saw this exercise in action at The Writers’ Union of Canada symposium in Vancouver, BC on March 5, when presenter Betsy Warland got the hundred or so attendees to participate. It’s best done, I suspect, after one has done some goal setting and even a bit of navel-gazing.

So, either before a get-together or as part of a meeting, set yourself some goals: write a novel, weed the garden, vacuum the car. Make them SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Reasonable, and Timed.

Now for Warland’s game: divide a sheet of paper into two columns. On the right, note what you need in order to achieve your goals. On the left, list skills, assets, and expertise that you’re willing to share. Everyone in the group is filling out their own table.

What I have (and I’m willing to give away)	What I need

Warland did this exercise with groups across the country this winter and saw some remarkable results. The Toronto participants, for example, immediately set up an online group so they could create a network to share their skills.

At the Vancouver session, I watched as someone who needed a quiet place to write connected with someone who had a vacant vacation home; a couple of others who needed help figuring out their computers met people with teaching and technology expertise. There were pleas for help with housework and offers of marketing assistance.

I was struck by how efficient this was, and how quickly it worked. It would be very simple to set up a similar framework in any organization, like a writing group, professional organization, or students in a course.

Can you think of other situations this might work well for?

Mixed Farming

2010-03-07T04:24:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was pulling weeds in my front yard, which hadn’t got the memo that it’s supposed to be a flowerbed, not a lawn. As I ripped up grass and dandelions, I realized it could also be a kitchen garden.

The trailing blackberry is crawling all over the bearberry. The deer have snipped off some of the camas leaves, but the bulbs are safely underground. And if the blaze of blossoms is anything to go by, in a few months the red-flowering currant is going to produce a bumper crop of fruit.

The mix of plants in my front yard is much like the career of most writers. Few of us make a living just from sowing a lawn of words on the page. Instead, we teach or manage offices, shelve books in libraries or stores, and do 101 other jobs according to our skills and bills.

At The Writers’ Union of Canada symposium in Vancouver, BC on March 5, Betsy Warland called this “mixed farming.” It’s having a combination of jobs that feed and protect each other, she said.

It reminds me of early North American farmers, who planted squash that provided food and also shaded the soil around cornstalks, which provided food as well as support for climbing beans, which provided food….

So for writers, ideally each job/crop will nurture and protect the others.

For example, Warland is an author and provides one-on-one manuscript assistance to other writers and runs The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University, while her fellow presenter, Ross Laird, writes, teaches and is an addictions clinical supervisor for social service agencies.

Exposure in each area of expertise creates awareness of the other areas and leads to new clients or readers – or both.

So one of the messages I took away from the day-long TWUC event is that most writers cannot count on the monoculture of writing to feed ourselves. If we want to enjoy pizza, we must come out of the silo, dig some manure into the soil, and plant tomatoes, peppers and oregano. And, of course, keep weeding.

Let us eat cake

2010-02-28T00:01:00.000-08:00

As I promised last week, here's my explanation of four elements that affect how we perceive images – visual or written.

Please know that I am not an expert! Check out Jeff Curto's podcasts about Gestalt for a photographer's take on this.

Closure is our brains’ tendency to supply missing pieces – we recognize a human face, for example, even if the eyes are covered. The viewer completes the puzzle and in fact gets satisfaction from doing so.

In writing, this means that we don’t have to supply every detail of a person’s appearance or actions – we include just enough so the reader can create an image that will let her understand the story. For example, check out the opening of Susan Fox’s March 30, 2010 release, Love, Unexpectedly:

“What’s new with me? Only everything!” Nav Bharani’s neighbor Kat widened her chestnut brown eyes theatrically. She dropped her laundry basket in front of one of the half dozen washing machines in the basement laundry room of their apartment building, then hopped up on a dryer, clearly prioritizing gossip over chores.

The name Nav suggests the actor Naveen Andrews, so right away I assume that Nav is dark haired and handsome. Kat’s comment and her hopping up on a dryer suggests she’s young, agile, and lively. The author didn’t have to tell me those things in so many words; my brain filled in the blanks from the information she did provide.

Once something has directed our attention in a particular direction (a path or lines of perspective, for instance), continuance is our tendency to continue to look that way until we see something interesting. In Western society we read from left to right, so we’re more comfortable when the path draws us from left to right.

Structure does this in a tale. We place the most important element, the most powerful word or image, at the end of the sentence, paragraph and story. We seduce the reader into following us along the trail, tossing out crumbs as we go and all the while making them wait for the cake.

It can be as straightforward as this line from Love, Unexpectedly:

Even in the crappy artificial light, with her reddish-brown curls a bed-head mess and pillow marks on one cheek, Kat was so damned pretty she made his heart ache.

The beginning of the sentence sets up the reader’s expectation with the word even. We read on to find out even what? Next, the physical description lets us picture the setting and continues with the set-up: even though she looks a mess…what? Only when all that work is done does Fox deliver the powerful "she made his heart ache."

That’s satisfying – and enticing.

Our brains like to group things, and similarity of size, shape, and colour or value (lightness or darkness) are three visual categories the brain uses.

In storytelling, this works in the sense of style or voice. The terse sentences of a 1940s noir mystery novel create a mood for the reader; using them in a romantic comedy would contradict the light, generally happy tone of the story and the dissonance might rankle in the reader’s mind.

Parallel sentence structure and agreement are two obvious grammatical uses of similarity. If it aren’t there, readers are jolted out of the story as his brain tries to make sense of the awkwardnesses.

In the opening of Firefighter Daddy (July 2010), Lee McKenzie uses two different kinds of similarity.

Mitch Donovan hadn't been inside this second-grade classroom since…well, second grade. He noticed two things right away—the chairs were a lot smaller than he

remembered, and the teacher was much younger.

The first sentence uses repetition of words to create humour; it sets the tone for the book. The second applies structural repetition for rhythm; that makes the sentence flow smoothly.

Visually, proximity is often a more powerful way to group things.

Close edge creates visual tension; the closer items seem to be to each other, the more likely we are to think they belong together.

Images in which items are or appear to be touching can be stronger than close edge

but

overlapping items really look like they belong together.

However, in writing, close edge is a stronger technique than overlapping. We want to create tension in the reader and crank it tighter during the course of a story. That means the detective can’t match the criminal with the crime too quickly, the romantic hero and heroine can’t touch (or overlap) too soon. By letting the characters get close and then pulling them apart before they get what they really want, writers force readers to keep turning pages in an attempt to relieve that tension.

Sharon Ashwood’s Unchained (July 6, 2010) creates suspense by making the reader wait for each revelation.

Ashe stilled, straining to pick up the slightest whiff of Nasty Critter. A light breeze chilled the sweat along her hairline. Her heart hammered hard, but her thoughts were clinically calm. If you were going to kick the ass of anything bigger than a garden sprite, discipline was key.

We know the protagonist is hunting a bad guy, and Ashwood leads us through the chase move by move, letting us see just one enticing element of the story at a time. We get close…

Ashe dropped back to the counter just as the outside door swung open and someone walked in. In a flash, she aimed her gun in a two-handed grip.

Then she froze. Oh. My. Goddess. But she let her surprise last only a microsecond. Her eyes on the newcomer, she hopped to the floor. “What are you doing here?”

Captain Reynard gave a slight bow. “I am looking for you.” His so-English accent sounded like something off Masterpiece Theater, but that baritone voice was pure seduction.

…but he’s not the bad guy, so the hunt is still on. However, now there’s a new kind of tension in the story as well and while Ashe and Captain Reynard get closer during the course of the book, something keeps them apart: close edge but no touching, in the storytelling sense.

No matter what the genre, a tale always lies in how the characters travel their paths, and the readers' pleasure comes from being led along with them, one tasty crumb at a time, until we reach the resolution, the big picture…the cake.

Citius, Altius, Fortius

2010-02-21T01:00:00.000-08:00

My latest quest for knowledge is: why do images sell, but words don’t?

I think it’s pretty much an accepted fact that they do. The expression “a picture’s worth a thousand words” sticks around because it’s true. I’m a writer and I admit that I look at photos before captions. I judge books by their covers.

What is it in our brains that makes us do that?

I suspect that volumes have been written on the subject but, being human, I went straight for the pictures.

Victoria photographer Andrea Kucherawy explained that perhaps Gestalt theory holds some of the answers I was seeking.

“Our evolution and survival are based on visual clues,” she said. “Gestalt means that images are first perceived as unified wholes before they are seen as unified parts. In other words, we 'see' the whole before we 'see' the parts that make up the whole.

“A picture,” she continued, “is the unified whole of the parts of a story. We gravitate to the photo before the words because the message is perceived by the brain in split seconds, whereas when we read, the picture in our minds takes that little bit longer to form.”

In order to survive on the savannah, the steppes or the streets, we have always needed to be able to see what’s in front of us and process the information instantly. So the brain likes to get things whole and fast and that’s why we look at pictures first – they give us the image much more quickly than having to read words and build the image in our heads.

In other words, a picture is like a single plank that we can walk across to reach the other side of a stream, while written words – or spoken, I suppose – are like a pile of rocks. We can build a bridge and get to the opposite bank, but it takes a while.

Is our all-too-human desire for speed the reason that “swifter” is the first word of the Olympic motto?

Drat. There’s another question. Does it never end?

Next week:

According to Gestalt: Four elements to consider when composing images, and how they also apply to writing. Because everything relates to writing. Doesn’t it?

Save the date

2010-02-14T00:01:00.000-08:00

Amazon.ca has rated Victoria the third most romantic city in Canada based on sales of romance novels, sex and relationship books, romantic comedy DVDs, and Michael Bublé CDs. My husband, however, has this whole live-outside-the-rules, not-gonna-buy-into-the-whole-commercial-thing-unless-it’s-about-skis schtick, so at our house Valentine’s Day is often marked only by a kiss.

In contrast, I recently commented on the very pretty earrings and matching necklace one of my friends was wearing. Her husband, she said, has an account at the jeweler in the nearby town where they live and every once in a while he picks out something he thinks she’ll like. Just because.

I once worked with a woman whose husband gave her flowers on Friday. Every. Single. Week.

Me, I’ve stuck a little florist’s card on my fridge.

It’s been there so long that the words my husband once wrote on it have faded away. I keep that card in plain sight because it came inscribed with “I love you” and was tucked into a bouquet of flowers and when he makes those gestures, their rarity makes them doubly precious.

Not that I’m going to tell him that.

I like romantic gestures (and books and movies and Michael Bublé, too) and hey, I’m not afraid to make them.

When himself came home from work last Saturday, I had candles glowing on the dining table, dinner ready to serve and a DVD just a Play button away. It was his birthday and I think that deserves a celebration.

Today is you-know-what day and I found the perfect silk-screened card:

Again, love is worth noting.

And now I’ve found a new occasion to extend the string of lovey celebrations a little longer: La Fete des Baisers – Festival of Kisses – in Roquemaure, France takes place the weekend closest to Valentine’s Day. This year the dates coincide, but next year he’d better look out…I’m going to market the heck out of a local version.

I figure it'll be very popular with everyone who forgot why February 14 sounded familiar.

Amendment:

After I wrote and scheduled the above post, my guy came home with a big bouquet of red flowers, a bottle of Red Bicyclette wine, a tub of strawberry ice cream, and a slab of dark chocolate almond bark.

He got a kiss.

The hidden meaning of deer

2010-02-07T08:58:00.000-08:00

As I drove through the University of Victoria campus bright and early on Saturday, a stag with an unusually large rack of antlers trotted along the side of the road toward me for a hundred feet or so before turning aside and disappearing into the woods. It was an auspicious – or at least exciting – start to my morning.

I was on my way to the annual day-long Medieval Studies workshop and looking back, I’m reminded of the play (and movie) The History Boys, in which one of the main characters is a high-school teacher who believes that education is much more – and more important – than passing exams. He encourages his students to memorize poems from the First World War, to sing old songs, to perform risqué skits in order to practice the subjunctive mood in French.

That spirit, the passion for learning and sharing (although without the risqué skits), also drives the Medieval Studies event. Each year, I read the list of presentations and have no idea what I’m going to see.

Dr Marcus Milwright’s opening remarks yesterday, for example, rolled straight from “Hello, nice to see you,” into an illustrated description of why, across North Africa and the Middle East to the borders of China and India, the wheel as a method of transportation disappeared for centuries after the Roman Empire faded. Camels can carry surprisingly heavy loads and don’t need paved roads, you see, so they could move goods and people long distances without a lot of infrastructure.

The printed program contained, along with the bios of the speakers, a fourteenth-century recipe for venison broth. You never know when that might come in handy.

From art historian Dr Catherine Harding’s talk about menageries, I learned that Pope Leo X was so enamoured with the white elephant given to him by Portugal’s King Manuel that he wrote poetry to the beast.

Philosophy professor Margaret Cameron described the Aristotelian view of rational language (not simply communicative sounds) as the characteristic that separates human beings from animals.

And Dr Iain Higgins delivered one of the more shocking statements of the day: Aesop, he of generations, centuries and millennia of animal-based fables, might not have been a real person!

And I learned something else.

In French professor Hélène Cazes’s presentation on serpents, basilisks and dragons, she also let drop the tidbit that in the medieval world, a stag with antlers symbolized Christian regeneration. Now I wonder whether the presence of the deer on Ring Road that morning means that my soul is safe, or whether the deer’s turning aside means it isn’t.

Or was my seeing the buck and the recipe on the same day simply convenient?

Just because I acquire knowledge doesn’t mean I no longer have to think.

Life: Stories

2010-01-31T00:01:00.000-08:00

Sandra Martin is the chief obituary writer for the Globe and Mail newspaper and right now is also a visiting journalism lecturer at the University of Victoria, where she gave a public talk on Thursday night.

I invited a bunch of people to go with me to “From Last Rites to the Blog of Death” and each of them said, “I’ll pass.”

I thought, Well, of course you will. Everyone does.

So the evening wasn’t a dead loss for those who didn’t attend, here are a few tidbits I picked up:

Obituaries encompass all the other newspaper beats: crime, politics, fashion…. Depending on what the subject did with her life, what circles he moved in, any of these and more can form the context of a posthumous profile.

Unlike other kinds of journalism, when you write obituaries you never repeat yourself. (My thought: It’s a good thing that you don’t have to interview Paul Gross, yet again, about his latest movie?)

The immediacy and finality of the task of writing an obituary are terrifying. (I can totally see this, but my take on it is that, much as writers deny it, some part of us secretly loves this kind of pressure: having mere hours to create, craft and polish the story of someone’s life. It’s an easier adrenaline rush than, say, kayaking Hell’s Gate, and certainly safer – for the writer, anyway.)

My facetiousness aside, Sandra Martin was articulate and funny and made very good points about the value of a good last word for everyone involved.

In fact, I’ve used The Economist obits as examples of great storytelling in my magazine-writing course and here’s a bonus for you dear readers who stayed with me through this post: Sandra also taught me that the venerable English magazine has published a whole book of its favourites!