the end just might be nigh

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 »

better late than…

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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last call for sugar shacks

Maple syrup season is almost over, which means that the sugar shacks will soon be closing their doors.

Luckily, this spring, the members of my family who are based near Shaw’s Sugar Bush (watch the video about how do what they do), a 104-year-old maple syrup farm down the 14th Line, near Orillia, finally followed through on what has become an on-again, off-again tradition. Last weekend, we gathered for pancakes soaked in the sweet gleaming gold from our region’s special trees.

In the barn-like restaurant, we sat at a long table beneath historical photographs and watched the staff steadily serving French toast, sausages, maple baked beans, maple tea, spiced apple cider and other tasty elements of Canadian cuisine. After committing that classic eyes-bigger-than-the-stomach sin, my nephews, my sister, her husband, my mom, my step-dad, Jason and I wattled wandered out back to leisurely work off at least a fraction of those big buttermilk pancakes.

Tall, grey maples stood over a carpet of dead leaves, spotted with bunches of pale purple, white and yellow flowers, the first colour of the season.

We stood back as a team of Percheron horses pulled a wagon past us, following a 1.6 kilometre loop through the trees, roped together by the green tubing (they don’t actually use buckets anymore) that collects the precious sap. My nephews ran ahead and, in a moment of sugar-fueled-Indiana-Jones-adrenaline that only small boys and mothers with threatened children can muster, actually jumped on the wagon…

As the morning steadily promised to be a glorious day, J. and I said goodbye to go home and work on our garden and get busy refurbishing our thirsty canoe, in preparation for other eagerly-awaited warm-weather adventures.

Shaw’s is open for one more weekend. Visit their site for a menu and more information.

Photos by Lauren Carter

Posted in Food, Ontario, Orillia, Seasons | 1 Comment »

relevant reading – and writing – on earth day

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 »

the blogging debate

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 »

an end to wine woes

Just like I could never understand how equations fit together back in Grade 10, all the facts and figures of wine labeling elude me. What does it all mean? There’s the type of grape, the location and, among all that, the name of the winery (I think) and does any of it really matter?

For me, a trip to the wine store involves narrowing in on the bottles that are giving out extra AirMiles. I never ask the sales staff. I just grab a bottle and slink over to the cash register, eager to escape.

But wine has been appearing a bit more for me lately. First, an assignment to do a profile about a company building wine cellars and now, the arrival of a new release of Red, White, and Drunk All Over: A Wine Soaked Journey From Grape to Glass, a highly readable and compassionate book about the broad world of wine by award-winning Canadian wine writer Natalie MacLean.

Divided into an assortment of adventures from vineyard-hopping in France to a friendly and indulgent wine-soaked dinner with writer Jay McInerney (of Bright Lights, Big City fame and, more recently, Bacchus & Me), the book brought me out onto dusty earth, inside the crowded aisles of a neighbourhood wine store in San Francisco, to the tables of fancy restaurants (from a sommelier’s perspective) and right inside the contentious debate of scoring wines.

Me, a veritable ‘ignoramous’ (as my mother used to say), as far as talk of wine goes.

But this is the great thing about MacLean. She wants to blast the intimidation factor around choosing wine, pairing it and even tasting it right out of the water.

Near the end of the book, during the description of a warm dinner party with friends, she gives elaborate advice on pairing wines with food (without always going for the old school white-with-white-meat and red-with-red-meat) before gently putting it back in the court of the person who will actually be drinking the stuff. “First and foremost,” she writes,”drink what you like. Think of wine like clothing: most of us choose it based on comfort, not fashion. So pick wines you like to drink, not because they get high scores.”

By the time I read this invitation to trust my own tastes, I’m already armed with lots of new knowledge and the finish of a few hearty laughs.

Throughout the book, MacLean puts herself on display to cast a more human light on her profession. She even spins a hilarious story involving choking (and, um, coughing and spraying) during a professional wine tasting. This willingness to share some of her more embarrassing moments – and to work for a day in a wine store and serve snobby diners as an undercover sommelier – nicely flavours a book that dishes out enough information to turn a trip to the wine story into fun exploration rather than agony.

And there’s even lots of advice on deciphering those elusive labels. During her day-long job in New York City’s Discovery Wines, she gives a boat load.

Some words can simply be ignored, she writes. “A novice buyer might be … seduced by fancy label terms such as reserve, proprietor’s reserve, vintner’s blend, and cellar selection. While these may sound good, they don’t necessarily mean anything at all in most New World regions. They’re not regulated…”

And others can actually help: “…the more specific the place name, the better. When a region in narrowly defined, quality guidelines and laws are more stringent, so it’s less likely that grapes from good and bad vineyards will be blended.”

These are just a few samples of a lush crop of practical wisdom and compelling narrative. For the rest, you’ll just have to buy the book. I’m way too busy putting my new knowledge into action. Bottoms up!

For more information – and a nifty wine-pairing tool – check out Natalie MacLean’s website.

Photo by Lauren Carter

Posted in Food, People, Recommended | No Comments »

This morning I loaded a mix of Yo Yo Ma and Danny Michell on my MP3 player and walked Ollie, our dog, up the hill to an old pioneer cemetery, stuck in a quiet corner a stone’s throw from a gas station and busy grocery store. In the east, the sun was climbing the sky over the slowly sinking skin of the lake and this is what I found:

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lots of work for low pay

The New York Times recently published a great article about the perils of the blogging sweatshops that have formed in the new reality of writing for the Internet. In a word, death. It seems a few tireless bloggers have suffered coronaries possibly caused by the incredible stress of being ‘on’ all the time, in order to do the job and get paid for it.

In the article, one blogger “says he sleeps about five hours a night and often does not have time to eat proper meals. But he does stay fueled — by regularly consuming a protein supplement mixed into coffee.”

For me, this article couldn’t have come at a more perfect time.

Over the last few days, with one of my main markets having temporarily dried up, I’ve been surfing for work. As usual, there are lots of places looking for writers willing to write for peanuts. One job, posted on a Canadian Craigslist page, offered $7.00 an hour to start. In the skewed reality of writing for the web, this might not seem so bad, when so many of the blogging jobs offer a measly $3.00 to $5.00 per 250 word post. Still, it contains an irony.

On March 31st, the minimum wage here in Ontario, Canada went up to $8.75.

Just imagine: the lucky writer who gets that job will be making less than the pre-teen at Tim Horton’s.

With this new industry developing online, I wonder a lot why our main associations for freelance writers seem to stay mainly fixated solely on all-rights grabs at print publications instead of addressing the reality of workers churning out hundreds of articles for measly pay.

And other writers seem to think this is primarily a personal decision of weighing priorities, but to me it’s way more than that. It’s an industry issue. If that server at Tim Horton’s died of a heart attack because of the stress of having to serve coffee 24/7 in order to make enough money to live, wouldn’t someone assess the situation?

Wouldn’t something change?

Posted in Contemplations, Issues, Writing Life | 4 Comments »