August 1st, 2008 writerspice
Last year, around this time, Jason and I headed to the Quebec City region to toodle around the nearby island of Ile d’Orleans for a story I wrote for National Geographic Traveler (March 2008).
While in the area, we were also able to attend early August’s New France Festival, a five-day extravaganza that turns the city’s already historic downtown core into a true image of the 17th century, with costumed crowds, acoustic music and booths selling authentic food-stuffs.
Yesterday, my story on the event came out in Toronto’s NOW Magazine – giving me a great excuse to post this picture.
I may look more-or-less like a sophisticated lady-in-waiting, but truth-be-told, I’m still indebted to a stock photographer from Vancouver who lent me his camera bag safety pin to hold the whole contraption together.
I love dressing up, but by the time I got back to Chateau Frontenac and stripped off my itchy, bulky and unflattering petticoats, I was pretty thankful to be a woman of modern times (minus, of course, low-rise jeans and “empowering” pole dancing lessons)!
Posted in Other Places in Canada, Recommended, Writing Life | 2 Comments »
June 20th, 2008 writerspice
Last week at this time I was somewhere in southeastern Michigan.
I say somewhere because usually on the last day of a press trip (which it was last Friday) my brain is so addled that I’ve no idea where I am. And to try to remember a whole week later? Forget it.
So, thank goodness, I say, for the 109-page-itinerary which tells me exactly where I need to be and when and is now sitting beside my computer, a handy tool for completing my report and pitches. It says I was in Mount Clemens. And in fact, I should remember that because the Anton Art Center and the cute downtown itself were among my faves.
But it’s a whole other week now. And with lots of check-marks successfully colouring in my to-do list, I’m realizing that it’s nearly time to climb out of the office chair I’ve been stuck in all week, roust out the cucumbers that have started sprouting in my compost bin, plant them properly in the garden and go get a movie for an evening – (dare I say it, a w-h-o-l-e weekend) – of blissful relaxation.
With another trip coming up in a few days and a list of assignments lined up and waiting to take me far into July, I’d say I deserve it. But regardless of all that, I just better take some time for myself, because lately I am feeling quite a lot like Ollie as he is in this picture I took moments ago, up too early, burying himself away from the world (yes, his skill at using pillows is legendary in our family), more than ready for his own weekend of naps.
Psst. Check out my updated clippings page, with some links to newly published stories.
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June 3rd, 2008 writerspice
Last year I spent some time chatting with a few local farmers to produce an article about the importance and ease of eating from the fields in the county I call home. Called Think Fresh, Eat Locally, the article is in the May/June issue of Simcoe Life magazine.
With my ever-burgeoning interest in growing food and using wild edibles and herbs (my newly-planted veggie garden is sprouting and a batch of mullien from a neighbour’s driveway is drying in the dehydrator as I type), I poured my heart and soul into this piece.
Unfortunately, in the print issue, it ran with the wrong byline.
Although this has never happened to me before, it is a fairly common occurrence for lots of writers (a few colleagues were quick to share their own tales of woe when I released my sorrows in a forum).
But do me a favour. Should you live somewhere within Simcoe County and come across the magazine, take out your pen, cross out the wrong name and write mine in. That would make me feel a whole lot better.
Chef Doug Porter puts together some locally-grown greens at Collingwood’s Simcoe County Restaurant (photo by Lauren Carter)
Posted in Food, Going Green, Issues, Ontario, Recommended, Seasons, Simcoe County, World, Writing Life | No Comments »
May 27th, 2008 writerspice
This past weekend, J. and I embarked on a bit of a staycation.
We still drove three hours to get there, but by creeping along in our fuel-efficient car, we only used about a half tank of gas (the starter went and J. had to replace it in our B&B’s driveway and then the emergency brake kinda caught fire as we were picking Ollie up at the kennel, but, hey, you can’t have everything!)
I’m still working on pitches and stories from the excursion, so can’t say much lest I give my ideas away, but suffice it to say we were in the St. Jacobs area. Unfortunately, we didn’t make it to the market (sources tell me that the 130-year-old Kitchener Farmers’ Market is even better, with more reliably local food and less crap), but Saturday afternoon found us in the village, a first time for both of us.
We wandered around a pottery shop in a renovated silo, sat quietly in a replicated meeting house in a museum dedicated to Mennonite culture and explored a hundred year old broom-making shop and antique store (where I coveted an ornate Victorian twine dispenser made of iron – must be all the Jane Austen I’m reading lately).
St. Jacobs reminded us a bit of Elora, that other once-sleepy Ontario village that came to fame and is now lined with expensive boutiques and crowds of bussed-in tourists eager for the authentic.
Both towns seem a bit like how I would imagine the Southwestern Ontario pavilion at Epcot Centre and over rhubarb-strawberry squares at the bakery, we wondered what the Mennonites think. In the museum, we learned that they were first nick-named “the quiet in the land” when they arrived in the late 1700s. It must be strange for such private people to have to run their errands in a town crowded with people wishing for a glimpse of their black wagons rolling down the road.
We didn’t see many horse-drawn wagons. Mostly we saw buses lined up in the wide parking lot a block from main street and lots of cars, one from Florida. But on the way home we stopped at the Kissing Bridge, the province’s last remaining covered bridge, and as I was snapping photos, one came by. I surreptitiously took a picture – not the greatest one, but you get the idea – before we continued on our way, driving down back country roads with dust around their edges, to wander our way home.
Posted in Ontario, Recommended, Writing Life | 1 Comment »
May 14th, 2008 writerspice
This morning I jumped out of bed at 7 a.m., realizing we forgot to put the garbage out.
My husband took the dog for a walk as I scurried around the house, sweeping every paper receipt, toilet paper roll and stray ice cream container (hey, it’s been a hard week) into the recycling bin. The garbage was easier – tied the bag up, plastered my neon orange city-certification sticker on it and rushed it out to the curb just as the truck was pulling up.
It’s funny the things you never think about when you’re a long way from home, living out of your backpack and steadily disposing of any accumulated waste as you go (or shoving it in your journal to be either scrap-booked back home or thrown out a decade later). I probably desperately need a vacation, but that’s what I was thinking as I breathed a sigh of relief, poured a cup of tea, fired up the computer and entered my Gmail account.
Needless to say, it was nice to move from a meditation on garbage (and, believe me, I could talk a bit more about that if I had the inclination…) to the news that my blog made Travelhacker‘s list of the top hundred travel blogs.
I’m up there with such esteemed bloggers as The Lost Girls, three twenty-something New Yorkers who just, well, took off, Slow Travel, a blog by writer Ed Gillespie who took a flight-free trip around the world, writing columns for the Guardian along the way, and Nerd’s Eye View, where she’s written a great post about how to keep your travelblog alive when you’re not traveling… NOT on the list: talk about the monotonous chores that bind us to home.
Oh, well.
Posted in News, Recommended, Writing Life | 1 Comment »
May 8th, 2008 writerspice
Busy, busy, busy. Working ten-hour days this week, while the world outside shifts between grey skies and sunshine, edged in cold and warm, air weighted in moments with humidity. Off to Uxbridge tomorrow for an assignment, while another lies all over my desk like an exploded bomb.
In the midst of it all, bum sore from sitting on the hard chair, shoulder aching from moving the mouse too much, I take a break and wander over to Flickr, to look at some of my friend A.’s photographs.
They make me happy – these moments she snaps – how she can stop the everyday rush and grab the beautiful, the humourous, the graceful, the elaborate, the simple image out of the obliteration of time and freeze it into something extraordinary.
She certainly has the eye.
Posted in Art, Pretty Pictures, Recommended, Writing Life | No Comments »
April 30th, 2008 writerspice
I don’t know if it’s because I recently finished re-watching the final season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or all the bad news lately but if ever there was a time when I was tempted to grow a long, white beard and hoist a sign on the street corner, this is it.
The end, I told Jason this morning, is nigh.
I know, I know, it’s my own damn fault. As mentioned last week, I’ve started writing a post here and there for Celsias.com, a gig that’s keeping me increasingly invested in the chaos steadily creeping across the world.
My first piece was on Bill C-517, currently in the House of Commons, to enforce labelling of Genetically Modified Foods (for those of you Googling, as I was unsuccessfully, to find the date of the final debate and subsequent vote, it is May 6th, with voting on the 7th – had to call my MP for that information, as the issue hasn’t made even a squeak in recent mainstream media).
This led to a teary-eyed viewing (the last scene is a killer) of The World According to Monsanto (pour a stiff drink grab the bottle and stay away from all sharp objects for the duration of this film) and the compilation of an epic amount of information to try to convince my MP to vote in favour of the bill, despite his opposition. After all that, exhaustion set in.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not apathetic. I care. I’ve even been a tireless activist. In fact, for a long time I was out there standing against stupid environmental ideas like Adams Mine, getting people to sign a petition for free Toronto transit on smog days, running a neighbourhood newspaper, organizing peace rallies and lots of other stuff. But after awhile, I realized that I could feel my soul pooling on the floor beneath me. And I decided I needed it, all to myself. I had no quiet corners. And, practically speaking, it is, in my experience, impossible to be a writer without them.
So now I just write. Every now and then I leave the house. But for the most part, I am in my chair, trolling the net for the latest in travel, environmental and other news. Practicing my craft. This solitude is probably part of my problem vis-a-vis the whole end-is-nigh thing.
When I get out of the house, it’s nice to learn I’m not alone. This past weekend, J. and I went down to Toronto. We spent Friday evening and Saturday morning with friends. It was a great time; so nice to reconnect with people we hadn’t seen in a long while and just to hang out in the city.
Over local organic beer, I found myself talking about GMO foods. Quickly, my friend Lina’s boyfriend put his hand up. “I’m too worried we’re going to run out of water,” he said. “I can’t really go there.” The next day, my friend Phil interrupted the start of my sermon over diner eggs and homefries on the Danforth. “I’m on peak oil,” he said. “Sorry.”
Maybe I could have an end-is-nigh party, I thought.
This weekend, Jason and I are going to rent some, um, funny movies.
I’m going to try to remember how to laugh.
With that on the agenda alongside the first sail of the season and the opening of my mom and stepdad’s joint art show at the quaint Coldwater Gallery (if you’re in the neighbourhood…), it should be a fine last weekend should the hellmouth decide to stretch itself open anytime soon.
Photo by Jason Cartwright
Posted in Contemplations, Going Green, Issues, Writing Life | No Comments »
April 28th, 2008 writerspice
On April 17th, a poem of mine went up on the League of Canadian Poets Poetry Without Borders blog, a project that is publishing a poem a day by writers across Canada. This one of mine is from a new collection I’m working on, writing a poem every month using the etymological meaning of each month’s name. The one the LCP published, in their online celebration of National Poetry Month, is March.
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April 22nd, 2008 writerspice
Lately my interests keep moving towards food – how it’s produced, where it comes from, the costs in creating it, the sometimes hidden science behind it, the often invisible threats to our health that occupy many of our supermarkets.
Don’t get me wrong. It isn’t that I’m obsessed with my own health. It’s that I like a good mystery and food making in this day and age is rife with them.
Last week, for example, I spent a good two hours trying to find out exactly who supplies the organic fruits and vegetables to one of Canada’s main grocery chains. Do they come from California or Chile and what are the actual costs of buying organic in this way?, I wondered, imagining exposés a la Mother Jones. I rooted around in Google for awhile but never did figure anything out before setting it, still steaming, on the back burner.
As of today, I’ve combined my interests in this area with an increasingly bitter-sweet love of travel (have you seen the price of gas?) and started writing for Celsias, a wonderful blog out of New Zealand that covers everything from our country’s ban on BPAs to the current food crisis to the foolishness of biofuels (dubbed ‘the great biofuel hoax‘ by ecologist Eric Holt-Giménez).
My first post went live today, on Earth Day. How appropriate! I thought I’d let y’all know before I jump on my newly refurbished bike to head out for work – an act that may or may not prove insignificant in the grand scheme of things, writes Michael Pollen in this excellent article, perfect reading for the day.
Photo by Lauren Carter
Posted in Food, Going Green, Recommended, Writing Life | No Comments »
April 21st, 2008 writerspice
A few weeks ago, bloggers Peter Davidson – a fellow Canadian currently writing out of Shanghai, China – and Julie Schwietert – a prolific writer who splits her time between New York, Mexico City and San Juan – asked me and a few other travel writers how we decide whether to pitch or to blog.
The collected answers – in an article for The Traveler’s Notebook called Travel Stories: Knowing When to Pitch to an Editor and When to Blog – make for some interesting reading, especially for newly emerging travel writers trying to make a go of it while both blogging and pitching and selling work.
It seems to me it must be a tougher go nowadays. I’ve often wondered how things would be different for me, if I was starting out now and not when I did, in the days just preceding the Internet, when being published meant carefully writing a query letter, affixing a stamp and sending it out with sample writing clips enclosed.
Part of what drove me to learn to write a query and craft those first pitches was the urge to see my name in print. These days, it’s so easy to satisfy that need for gratification, and instantly, too. It makes me wonder if I would even bother learning how to craft a query and pitching editors if I was just now beginning to write.
If I was in the early days of writing freelance, I might just start a blog, or four, and find another way to make a steady living.
Don’t get me wrong, I realize that there are lots of new opportunities for writers these days and if it weren’t for the Internet, I wouldn’t be living in a small city nearly a two-hour drive (during rush hour) from Toronto. I’d have to be in the big city. I’m thankful for that, but it is also hard to know how exactly to capitalize on the new reality of lots and lots of words for, seemingly, less and less pay. Or, even, for free.
There are some great ideas out there, and certainly writers are doing it, including those interviewed for Julie and Peter’s story. Blogging can build your reputation, Abha Malpani pointed out. It can also help you gain a readership, including a literary agent, says Kelsey Timmerman, blogger at whereamiwearing.com in another discussion, at WorldHum, about how important blogging is for a travel writing career.
Lots of interesting perspectives and important questions keep coming up in this debate, an important one as advertising profits for traditional print media continue to shift into the online world.
But what I’m wondering is what does it mean for a conventional career as a writer?
Can we make it?
Yes, blogging attracts attention and does result in getting gigs but are those jobs enough to put a turkey – or tofurkey – on the table every now and then?
Posted in Contemplations, Issues, Writing Life | 1 Comment »
