For the past few nights I’ve been waking up at 1:13 a.m. In the spare room, I’ve kept a sort of vigil – reading, thinking, crying, making lists of things I have to do, trying to make plans. If I’m lucky, I’ll write. On Saturday night, I re-wrote the whole plot line of my current […]
I’ve been returning to the roots of writing practice lately. To the book I bought and cracked open as I was crossing the Georgia Strait between Tsawwassen and Vancouver Island on my way to Salt Spring Island, circa 1993. Back then, as I read the first pages of Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg, a pair […]
I’m stuck on Chapter Four. Partly because I’ve spent the past five days working to eradicate some of the beige that covers every wall (well, except for bathroom’s combo of ’80s aqua and stark white and the kitchen’s half-and-half neon yellow and, again, stark white) in our new-to-us home. All the while, my mind’s been […]
Coffee in a blue and orange pottery mug. The indigo sky pushing at the cold window glass. J. emptying the dishwasher. The dog dozing at the top of the stairs, waiting for his first walk. A dream drifting on the morning peripheral: a goat pestering me, persistently biting and tugging the sand-coloured wool sweater I’m […]
Create a character, I said last night, during a class I’m teaching called Write Your Heart Out! (from Joyce Carol Oates’s advice to writers). A picture of feet was up on the screen. Red converse sneakers, legs in jeans, gender-neutral. Paint what you can’t see. Follow the pen into backstory, emotions, relationships or simply a […]
Seven skeins of Malabrigo Rios, luxurious merino yarn, in shifting shades of indigo, copper, violet and deep greens. That’s what I bought myself for Christmas last year, with a gift certificate my sister gave me. As any knitter knows, seven skeins is a lot of yarn. It’s a sweater amount, which is what I wanted. […]
The other day, I was talking with a friend about showing up. Just past blue Monday, in a frigid winter that’s kept us inside for days, some mornings the best that you can do is stumble over to your desk, sit there, and wait. Not for the green thrust of spring. Not even for epiphanies. […]
J. and I have been journeying. Right now we are crossing the top (actually more like the middle) of Ontario. Yesterday after some messy snow along the route into the north we turned west at Cochrane and drove from town to town, Kapuskasing to Hearst to Longlac. This morning, we’ve traveled through Thunder Bay and […]
Yesterday morning, I drank my coffee in the South Pacific. On the island of Tahiti, to be exact. During a game of haru raa puu which led to a dramatic and moving conclusion for Miss Alma Whittaker, who nearly drowned, but fought the ocean’s grasp before arriving at an epiphany that made me cry. All […]
So, it’s been a bit of a rough week, and I’ve got nothing to complain about. Apart from being closed up in my countryside cloister due to a broken-down car, great things have been happening. I’ve pretty much filled my pilot course (one spot is left, in case someone wants to nab it over the […]