en route to argentina

Two different trips. Two very specific reasons for travel.

Here, in Oregon, I’ve spent my days sifting through some fifty years of my uncle’s writing, reading his travel journals, his letters to his mother, his poems and the work he’s already done on his book about the Manitoulin. In between slow, cane-assisted walks to and from the dinner table and his chair-bound naps, we’ve talked about writing, his life, his memories, how to finish his book and also compile a collection of his poetry, all with pretty regular sparks of his famous wit. Yesterday, he gave me a book by Mary Oliver, my favourite poet, that she’d signed.

Being here with him makes me think of the courage that it takes to stare that final journey in the face. As we’ve been sorting through the pages, I’ve been watching Uncle Clive look back on his life, his accomplishments, his time of being on this earth.  

Tonight I leave for my next trip, flying first to Toronto and then to Santiago, Chile, before my friends and I hire a car (complete with tire chains) to drive into the mountains. Just over the border, at Punta de Vacas, Argentina, I will join good friends from Hungary and several thousand other people who are following the Siloist path. Together, we’ll spend three days clarifying the direction of our futures and the meaning in our lives, a process that always involves others and what is also best for them. I’ll also be taking lots of notes about both the mind-blowing scenery and the spiritual expansion for two assigned stories, one for the Georgia Straight, another for Geez Magazine.  

This trip comes at a good time. While in Oregon, a realization has deepened in me. And it’s simple, really. This is all we have: this time, this place, this intention. 

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oregon or bust

My mother’s brother, my uncle Clive, is a writer.

As a kid I knew him as Unc, the gregarious, adventure-loving uncle who’d come sweeping in from the south, from his life as an American. He was accompanied by his wife, Linda, who speaks with a charming and delicate Southern accent and our cousins, Caitlin and Sean, each the same age, more or less, as my older brother and sister, who would put me to bed in our Aunt Mary’s pink room with terrifying tales of haunted houses and my long-dead grandpa’s wooden leg thumping up the stairs.

Despite our national differences, it felt like we all belonged together, occupying the many rooms in the big red brick house in Shallow Lake, a small village at the base of the long, rocky finger of the Bruce Peninsula that my uncle watched vanish in the rearview mirror back in the 1950s when he left for the U.S., never to return to Canada to live.

Now he lives in Oregon. He’s had a long career as a university professor and has published essays, poetry and fiction. He’s won awards. In 1985, he strapped on his hiking boots and walked from the Missouri River to Salt Lake City along the Mormon Trail, engaging people in conversation on the way, thinking and talking about this thing called the American Dream, what it meant for him and what it meant for those who tried to find it on that dusty, difficult journey long ago. The result was Following the Wrong God Home, the twelfth volume in the Literature of the American West series, published by the University of Oklahoma Press.

My uncle is now in the midst of working on a memoir and biography of Manitoulin Island. The largest freshwater island in the world, the Manitoulin is a large hump of rock and trees that curves out of Georgian Bay. There, my great-grandfather once manned a lighthouse and my grandmother and grandfather spent their first married winter crafting a quilt. Long a drifter across the United States, Unc calls the island his spiritual home.

He had a stroke a couple of years ago. One that’s taken a lot of the life out of him and changed him from an adventure-loving creative contemplator to a near-invalid. It’s hard to watch. Still, he’s got that mind – the quick- thinking brain that’s so much like my brother’s, now stifled so you have to watch for when the glimmers come through.

Today, my mom and sister and I are heading to Oregon to spend some time with him. On my part, I’m hoping he’ll do what he’s never done before, what’s hard for any writer – let me in on the half-done work and the rough drafts. I’m hoping I can help him edge towards completion and come closer, both to that island and the whole solid body of the rest of his life’s work. In his office there’s a ripe crop of unpublished poetry, fiction, interviews he’s recorded with writers like Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Bly and many more. I hope he opens the gate and lets me in, to help him with the harvest.

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fiction friday

This is Jill, Mr. Brody said, smiling. He lowered his arm to his side. She’s come from Toronto. Please make her feel welcome. And he looked at me. I don’t know why he looked at me. Sarah and Jessica were whispering in the back row, their heads together, their syllables snapping like tacks tossed on the floor. I almost pointed at myself. Me?, I almost mouthed, if only to find confirmation, to see Mr. Brody vigourly nod his head and silently answer back. You, he’d pucker. Instead I crossed my arms and looked at the scarred surface of my desk, the cover of my red math binder stained with names of bands I liked and lines from poems that came up in English and obscure facts about far away places that our Geography teacher liked to give us. Did you know, he’d say, eyes wide behind his glasses, his hair shining silver as he leaned his skinny body towards us, that cork comes from Spain. There’d be a dull silence. He really wanted us to care. My secret was that I did. A few moments later, after we’d gotten on with the lesson, I’d quickly jot it down: cork from spain. I lifted my eyes from those words to look at Jill, her green eyes pocketed in dark eyeliner, her hair obviously dyed, a heavy black colour that made it look like it’d been rubbed with coal. She snapped her gum. She scanned the room like a hawk, looking from a distance, her eyes bumping over the blonde boulders of Sarah’s and Jessica’s snickering heads. I watched her. Then I tore a tiny piece off a piece of half-used in my binder. She’s arrived, I wrote in pencil, before shoving it into the back pocket of my jeans.  

***

I saw some girls entering a high school the yesterday. They were all wearing black and one seemed dressed like a Puritan – long skirt, high leather boots. The Nuns, I thought, as I sped on by. The words kept coming back to me all day. The Nuns, I reminded myself, buying mini-toothpaste and tiny deodorant for my upcoming travels. The Nuns.

But I didn’t write it down. And this brings to me a problem that I have with my brain. It doesn’t keep things. It’s like a refrigerator left open so everything quickly withers away to nothing and then disappears into strange stains and smells. 

I know I should write things down. After all, writing things down is what I do. Anne Lamott recommends carrying around index cards to jot down those memories that come flooding back to us or those images that randomly pop in our brains. Useful for further material, she says. Valuable stuff.

Like, the Nuns. 

My novel – more approriately called, at the moment, a-random-collection-of-writings, some typed up and some simply scrawled into three spiral-bound notebooks - is about highschool, about figuring out who one is, attempting, like Houdini, to unfasten the chains while you’re shut inside a trunk and feel like you’re drowning. I’m trying to work some humour in there too.

So, how perfect the Nuns would be!

But I haven’t quite figured out how. Nor have I tried. Writing prose has fit in fourth this week to planning an intro meeting for the Centre of Cultures, getting ready for my back-to-back trips to Oregon and Argentina and pitching editors about said trips.

However, it’s in the full exercise of writing practice that these quick thoughts really flourish. Jotting them down is just storage. Working them with the pen, messing them up, taking them out of their container and tossing them around, well, that’s when the real magic happens.

I should really get on that someday.       

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one man’s junk – vince’s, actually

One of my first major publications was a piece for the Globe and Mail’s Facts and Arguments section. It was an essay about diving dumpsters - specifically the one behind the supermarket near my house. We were finding food, all kinds of it: loaf after loaf of delicatessan-style bread, pounds of butter, lots of veggies, and even, one day, a mushroom lasagna.

Dumpster diving is still a way of life for many and I commend them for it, but I’ve hung up the habit. These days instead of looking for second-hand food (I mean, really, how easy is it to find organic carrots and tahini tossed out?), I hit the thrift stores for second-hand treasures.

The latest trips I’ve taken to the Goodwill across town have opened up a whole new interest – oddly, in ceramics. First, there were the mushroom salt and pepper shakers that I couldn’t resist:

After that, it was love at first site with this thing… I mean, really, does this objet d’art not whisper some story about free love and hallucinations of diamond-studded skies? And not only is it adorable, it’s also a piggy bank!

One man’s junk is another man’s treasure, they say. I’m not a man, but I sure know what they mean. This pleasingly-retro item was made using a mold, my potter sister-in-law informed me. She was there when I squeeled in delight upon spotting it. And it wasn’t created anonymously. In fact, Vince crafted it in 1974, as the scrawled signature on the bottom attests.

And now, in keeping with the great cycle of discard and claim, it’s mine. It’s your turn: what was your greatest second-hand find? (answer by clicking Comments at the top)    

Posted in Just For Fun | 8 Comments »

goodbye, ms. callwood

I wish I’d known June Callwood better.

In the late ’90s, early ’00s, I crossed paths with the acclaimed writer and social activist when I worked at TERLA (The Electronic Rights Licencing Agency, sadly defunct). She was chair of the board. Every now and then she’d pop in on business or just because she was nearby. 

She wasn’t like anyone else. There was something intense about her, focused. At the same time, though, her iron was softened by a real concern and care for human beings and a great sense of wit. There I was, a self-absorbed, angst-ridden young woman who sat outside the Executive Director’s office, unhappy in a 9 to 5 life. 

“You must be in love,” she said to me one day, after seeing some new brightness in my face. I was sort-of in love, more like obsessed, more like gripped by an inappropriate guy. Startled, but happy to be drawn out of myself, I grinned and nodded.

Weeks later, at a board meeting, she quietly pushed the agenda toward me, pointing at Pierre Berton’s last name. I’d spelled it with a U, instead of an E. I could have been shamed but I wasn’t. She was simply educating me, clearly and compassionately, with no note of annoyance at all.

In the last years of her life, June showed everyone who exactly she was. Gracefully, with courage, she brought death back into common currency. Rather than racing to live, struggling to find the cure, climbing aboard the chemotherapy circuit, she accepted her impending death for what it was: a natural end for a woman who has lived a long and very valuable life.

“I believe in kindness,” she told George Stroumboulopoulos on The Hour, when he asked her what she believes in if she doesn’t believe in God. “Great consideration for one another. That’s what’s going to change the world.”           

Even though I didn’t know take the opportunity to get to know her, her spirit and kindness touched my life. I am certainly not alone. She left a huge legacy of compassion and necessary attention to the rights of the weakest.

As June herself would say, this is something to celebrate, not to mourn.  

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introducing fiction fridays

This is where I come from. Outside the world shifts from an explosion of colour to nothing, a landscape void of anything but blue, grey, white and a kind of half-dead brown. The lake slowly slips into hiding, its riotous self tucked under a blanket of ice. You don’t hear it moving, not like the small lakes. Those smaller lakes groan and snap and sound like they’ll crack right in two and draw anyone on their edge – small dogs, rabbits, me, gazing north – into the big black maw. But that doesn’t happen. Well, not like that. It happens for snowmobilers, of course. The ones who plummet through a skin not thick enough to hold them. That happens. Once, maybe twice, a year.

* * *

I am not just a pedlar of words. Occasionally, when not gripped by the terrible anxiety of what-it-is-to-write-fiction, I do catch myself, um, writing fiction.

This task is probably the hardest thing I do. And being that it is the hardest thing that I do, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it. Thinking about it, of course, is easier than actually doing it. Doing it means not thinking. Doing it means letting go and letting the thing happen. I’ll stop now. 

For awhile I tried writing for an hour every day before launching myself into the hustle, hustle, hustle that is freelance writing in the early days of a doing this full time. After awhile I got too busy and stressed to continue. I’ve now decided to try Fridays. One whole day dedicated to working on this wee bit of a novel that I fancy myself writing.

I know!, I thought. Fiction Fridays. After all, who can resist such pleasing alliteration. And, of course, part of this project is to share my progress with you, gentle reader.

This is the sixth novel that I’ve tried to write. It has come out in bits and pieces (such as the excerpt above), often illogically connected, that are nevertheless driving towards a final form.

A few weeks ago I came across what felt like an ending and now I am typing all of these handwritten chunks into the computer to sort through them, attach them in places, and, mainly, figure out a little bit more what it’s about.  

As Anne Lamott says in Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, ”Very few writers really know what they’re doing until they’ve done it.” The point is to keep doing it. And that’s what I’m going to do – with you along for the ride. 

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the importance of poetry

It may be the cruelest month, but it’s also National Poetry Month.

Readings echo across the continent (make sure you go to that link above to find out where they are in Canada) and people who live and breathe the written word blog about the importance of poetry and why it matters.

To American poet Robert Peake, poetry is one of those noble causes that get a month dedicated to them lest they be buried beneath the everyday drone of bad news, bitchy comments on who wears what and all sorts of noisy video games. 

Poetry, he says, is a bit like taking our vitamins. We don’t enjoy it. We do it because we should. Or, rather, all too often, we think about doing it and then forget.

Once upon a time, poetry, with its sharply focused lens pointed squarely at human ills and societal chasms, was a necessity, a common discourse. These days, however, it’s simply not. Ignored and unappreciated, the poetic form is “an awful lot harder to sell than medicine or candy,” says Peake. Having published a collection of poetry, I can attest to that last part. Until some film studio buys the rights, I’ll just have to survive on celery and thin cuts of tofu. That’s what keeps me going anyway.

But in what has become regular work for me for Take Note, the front-of-the-book section of The Writer, I recently came across an interesting development in the world of poetry that will, I hope, do what vitamins are intended to do: instil some health in an otherwise ailing people. 

These people being the ones who define Muslims and Arabs using only one word: terrorist.   

To be released in August 2007, the book Poems from Guantanamo: the Detainees Speak is being edited by attorney Marc Falkoff. Some two dozen poems are in the book, all by former inmates and current residents of the famous American detention centre in Cuba.

The poems give a unique view of who these men are – full of disillusionment with America as a beacon of human rights and hope that God will help them, says Falkoff. “What you don’t see much of is rage or hatred,” he says.

In one poem Ibrahim al Rubaish talks to the sea surrounding his prison, ending with “boats of poetry on the sea; a buried flame in a burning heart”.

For him, poetry is much more than vitamin. It is a transferential force, a way toward freedom.

Hopefully many, many people will read this book and find the same thing: a way out of the prison of today’s assumption that the other with the dark face can only be evil.   

This is why poetry matters.     

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green christmas, white easter…

…that’s just wrong.  

Snow squall warnings. An inch or so of the white stuff. Will it never end?

As a merry Easter and a joyous Long Weekend to all who celebrate this particular holiday, a sign of hope from my friend Julie:  

 

The earliest, odd-looking beginning of rhubarb in her backyard garden. Soon enough, she says, it will be made pie.

Fresh produce at the Farmers’ Market, swimming in the lake, barefoot in the backyard… What are you looking forward to most of all?

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not-so-sweet deal

Buying honey is a no-brainer. See the word Canada on the label, put it in your shopping cart, and feel good about supporting, if not a nearby farmer, at least one from the same country.

Right? Not necessarily.

Last year, a story I wrote for Simcoe Life about local beekeepers introduced me to a whole mess of complexities around the honey industry in our fair country (and this situation has fuelled two other stories so far for Better Farming and another trade mag).   

Standing in the honey house at Tannenhof Farms, I listened as beekeeper Adi Stoer gave me the real dirt.

From him, I found out that that container of honey on the grocery store shelf that says Canada No. 1 in big, black letters may not be Canadian at all.

Take a closer look at the fine print and you might see something like this: Product of China. A blend of Canadian and Argentine honey.  And that blend might contain only about five percent Canadian – the rest imported.

Who knew?!

As you might expect, the problem with this situation is multi-layered. For one, cheap honey is flooding the market, resulting in prices so low that many of our Canadian beekeepers can barely get by.

Another concern has to do with food standards. Recently we all witnessed the tragic deaths of several pets, fatalities caused by a contaminated ingredient from China.

“As imported Chinese wheat takes the blame for the recent deaths of dozens of American pets, new concerns have risen over the safety of Asian-grown foods imported to the United States for human consumption,” a PR Newswire article begins.

Alberta beekeeper Bob Ballard agrees. “The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) has very high standards for Canadian beekeepers while Chinese honey floods the market with no checks and balances on it,” he recently told me. In the past, some hive antibiotics that are banned in Canada have been found in imported honey, causing recalls. 

I might have bought that honey. Who knows. Before I did this story, I remember furrowing my brow at a relatively cheap container of honey, wondering why it cost so much less than the others. I couldn’t figure it out. It said Canada. It must be Canadian. I couldn’t find the small print. So, shrugging my shoulders, I lowered it into the cart.  

After talking to Adi, I felt gypped, betrayed, tricked. And that’s exactly the problem that a lot of honey producers have with the way the labels work now.

Currently changes to the labels (among other honey issues) are under consideration by the CFIA. This is a good thing, says the Canadian Honey Council and other interested parties (some, albeit, with a wee bit of cynicism).

What the smaller beekeepers would like to see is pretty simple: words that make it clear to the consumer exactly where the honey is from, so that they can make an informed choice. After that, leave it up to them to choose their honey.   

In this age of overused fossil fuels, struggling farmers and contaminated imports, is it really too much to ask that people be given the chance to make choices that might actually benefit us all?   

Posted in Food, Issues | 5 Comments »