Tag: books

writing life

Nonsense

Sue

“Maybe later today I will carve poetry into the riven bark of the weeping willow in the garden of my childhood home. I might go to the shore, smash my hurt on the rocks and watch my tears become the ocean. Perhaps I will sleep in the forest and wake to a world of talking animals. I might gather with others around a fire telling stories of seeds and bones buried deep – or fill ancient caves with laughter and song. Or I might just be here, quietly at my desk, sipping tea, waiting for the sun to rise. This is the writing life.” ~ Beth Kempton, The Way of the Fearless Writer: Ancient Eastern Wisdom for a Flourishing Writing Life

“New year, new you.” How many times have we heard that repeated since the start of the month? Soon enough it will fade to the background like an insect’s droning buzz– ignored until it’s finally gone. I stopped writing Morning Pages for several weeks. What became a habit for an impressively long time suddenly became a nuisance. And I’m okay with that. I think at some point most creative thinkers want to take a step back to focus on something other than a reason to create. Or at least the time and space to create other things without reason.

I set aside my writing and reading to revisit sketching, doodling, and dabbling in truly sublime metallic watercolour paints. I reconnected with my old friend knitting whenever the mood to play with yarn happened to strike. Creatives hear all the time that they must push through a lack of motivation to keep honing their craft, that a lack of motivation equals laziness. I used to believe it, but this current version of me disagrees. Then again, there’s no pressure in my current life to create for a living. I’m not supporting myself or a family with my writing and thank goodness because I would be terrible at it. Completely unreliable. I have deep respect for anyone who does so on a daily basis.

Drawing and painting is not the sort of creative outlet I’m particularly good at and knowing that provides the freedom I had as a child to dive right in. I’ve always loved playing with pencil crayons and crinkly paper and pretty stickers. Long before I knew I was a writer, I felt the urge to make things out of scraps without any kind of purpose other than the pleasure of holding those creations in my small hands. We somehow lose that feeling along the bumpy way, don’t we? Why wouldn’t we when we’re fed catchphrases like “new year, new you”?

Somewhere between the start of the year and today when I reopened my Morning Pages notebook, I decided the old me is doing just fine, thank you very much. The first sentence I wrote was well, hello, you, as though welcoming myself back to a comfortable room. Then I proceeded to handwrite two pages of jumbled thoughts. Sometimes hiding within a jumble of nonsensical sentences is the sliver of a story. Sometimes it’s just pure nonsense. Thinking about nonsense eventually made me look up the dictionary definition of the word. Here’s some synonyms: absurdity, babble, baloney, bunk, claptrap, craziness, drivel, folly, foolishness, gibberish, madness, mischief, rubbish, silliness and trash. Of all those words mischief is the clear standout. Nonsense equals mischief. Mischief equals fun.

In the process of creating something out of nothing the room can feel overly crowded at times. The walls need a moment to shift–to allow fragments to escape and others to remain. These are the quiet days when I walk with my head down to clear the space of what’s unnecessary. Other days I walk with my chin up to take notice of what’s happening around me. How the air smells like a fresh new season and the shadow on a boulder resembles the profile of my grandmother’s cameo brooch. How weak sunlight on the ocean tells a completely different tale in winter. This is how I know I’m slowly coming back to The Writer. The distinct feeling of imagining outside of myself. I have only to open my eyes a little wider and listen a little closer for the story to unfold.

First and foremost I’m a bookworm and as such I highly recommend the book I quoted from at the start. This is my third time reading it and I think any kind of creative person, not just writers, will discover something profoundly beneficial to take forward into a new year. Chapter One, titled “Quietening”, begins with this Japanese Proverb, “When embarking on a great project, start where you are with something small.”

Quietening. That’s a standout word too.

  • Beach Walk in January

writing life

Morning Pages

Sue

“No matter what your age or your life path, whether making art is your career or your hobby or your dream, it is not too late or too egotistical or too selfish or too silly to work on your creativity.” ~ Julia Cameron from The Artist’s Way

Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity was recommended to me by a writer friend when it was first published in the early nineties. At the time she had teenagers and I had toddlers and I remember thinking, I barely have a thought that’s my own! How can I possibly fill three notebook pages every morning with whatever is going on inside my head? But I’ve always liked a challenge and I wanted to be more creative and less task-driven, so I borrowed my friend’s well-used copy of the book. Essentially it gives you exercises and a long pep talk to help you overcome the beliefs and fears that can inhibit the process in whatever creative medium you’re pursuing. Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? I gave it my best shot for about a week, until the pages began to fill up with to-do lists and doodles, Dear Diary-like entries, and maybe a rant or two. It was the right book, it just wasn’t the right time for me to fully engage with it. When the thirtieth anniversary edition of this same book recently found its way back into my hands, I casually flipped it open to read the inside flap and the first sentence I read is the one that’s quoted above. Then I thought, I need this right now.

So I read it, cover to cover this time. And I quickly learned that I don’t need to explore every aspect of it. I don’t need to do every exercise and keep consistent creative check-ins. What I have been trying to do, though, is write daily Morning Pages. Julia Cameron capitalizes the two words throughout the book to stress their importance, I suspect, and now I find myself doing the same with a kind of reverence for the practice because I’m seeing positive results. What are Morning Pages? Here’s some quotes about that from from the book: “Three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness…These daily morning meanderings aren’t meant to be art or even writing…They might also be called a brain drain.” In more modern phrasing, it’s basically a brain dump. A way to clear the mess on the floor to get to the comfy furniture. I’ll be honest, I rarely fill three pages. Usually two, sometimes less. I don’t force the process, or at least I haven’t so far. Writing is hard enough without adding the pressure to perform on command.

In the beginning I wondered why longhand writing and not a keyboard now that we live fully in a digital world and not suspended in 1992. Here’s what I think: a written sentence can’t be deleted. Sure, it can have a line drawn through it or if in pencil erased almost invisibly from the page. Just the process of putting a line through a sentence or a word made me rethink wanting to get rid of it in the first place. It might be important, I considered, maybe even the truth of the matter. According to Julia, “Morning Pages get us beyond our Censor. Beyond the reach of the Censor’s babble we find our own quiet centre.” Something else occurred to me. What if one morning happens to be particularly busy? Should I write Night Pages instead? Once I became fully engaged in the routine, I realized mornings offer the freshest insights and I should probably get up a half an hour earlier to stick with the program. By nighttime our weary thoughts have become clouded by the day’s experiences and the many injustices of the world. The morning is full of creative possibilities waiting to unfold. The following paragraph is the uncensored ramblings I wrote in my notebook on the first morning.

“I tried reading The Artist’s Way when the book first came out thirty years ago. I was writing a lot then. So many ideas kept coming at me from all directions and I needed advice on how to organize them all. Not as many ideas come as easily to me these days, and here I am again, a little lost, looking for some kind of direction. A similar scenario, only this time, thirty years later, I have more time and energy to focus on writing. My younger self had very little time to sit alone with deeper thoughts and imaginings. I was raising a family, working, keeping up the house, and worrying about the diminishing health of ageing parents. I used those precious snippets of writing time wisely and efficiently. I scribbled ideas and dialogue on wrinkled grocery lists and old receipts. I was focused whenever and wherever inspiration struck. In those days I had to get ideas written somewhere before they left my mind for good. There was no other choice; get it down or forget about it. I have decided what I lack at the moment is the creative discipline I had at thirty, and again more recently when I wrote a novel in just a little over a year’s time. Discipline yourself. Just get the words down, even if they’re garbage. Somehow it feels more important than ever to sort out the direction I want to go. After pouring myself into that more recent novel, I realize now, with time and distance from the work, that I repeated many of the same mistakes I’ve made in the past when it comes to trying to get my stories published. I know what those mistakes are and I’ve allowed the Censor to block future work because of them. So here goes. Day one of Morning Pages. Let’s see what I have to tell myself. I hope it makes some sense.”

Whoa. That is a lot of rambling to process. While The Artist’s Way encourages you not to reread your stream-of-consciousness thoughts, I don’t see the point of a brain dump if you don’t do some careful excavating of it later on. So what is my main takeaway here? Well, it’s not a coincidence that I lost the drive to write around the same time the agent rejections came in. But is it really a rejection when you hear nothing back at all? It feels a lot like being ghosted before you’ve had the chance to meet someone in person. We used to call it being stood-up for a date. Current industry standards say to give the email query letter and first chapter submission about four to six weeks for consideration. If you hear nothing back within that time frame then assume it’s a no and feel free to submit elsewhere. Typically, literary agencies now receive thousands of fiction manuscript queries a week. One or two of those a month might pique interest and get a response–other than the automated received and thanks for submitting notification. Don’t call us, we’ll call you. Or not. The odds are solidly stacked against writers long before we work up the nerve to press the email send button. To be fair, so far I’ve only submitted two agent queries over the span of several months before making the executive decision to give myself time to reevaluate the process. I know myself very well at this point in my life–both the person and the writer. It’s not the fear of rejection holding me back now, it’s the niggling feeling that something isn’t right. Maybe this isn’t the novel I am supposed to put out into the world. Maybe it’s a steppingstone to the writing I can be most proud of. I’ve already proven to myself that I can do it. I can start at the beginning and keep on going page after page until I finally type The End. And I can keep editing and rewriting this same book until I have nothing left to add and nothing more to say. But is that what I really want to do?

In the rom-com movie You’ve Got Mail, after Tom Hank’s big-box bookstore owner character gradually puts Meg Ryan’s small bookstore out of business, he pithily tells her, “It’s not personal, it’s business.” Then Meg (aka Kathleen Kelly) famously informs him, “All that means is that it wasn’t personal to you. But it was personal to me. And what’s so wrong with being personal anyway? Because whatever else anything is, it ought to begin with being personal.” I didn’t get back into writing all these many years later expecting to get published. I suddenly felt compelled to write again and so I did. I spent hours creating characters that I grew to care a great deal about along the bumpy road from points A to B. Now I feel protective over them and fret about how impersonally they’re being received. In real life when we walk into a room full of strangers we don’t expect to be instantly liked by everyone. I suppose we start off hopeful about finding a comfortable connection with a least one person of like mind. Realistically, there has to be some kind of personal interaction to decide whether we want to get to know somebody better or if we don’t. Silence just feels so impersonal to me. Like Kathleen said, it ought to begin with being personal. According to published authors and publishing insiders, you’re supposed to keep submitting query letters to dozens of agents at one time in the hope that a single reader might (fingers crossed) see a spark of something promising in chapter one and ask to see the entire manuscript. Honestly, it’s daunting right now for me to even think about doing that over and over. How do you put something like that out of your mind and push forward on a new project?

Which brings us back to the start of Morning Pages, and before that, how I spent most of this past summer. For a few months I stopped focusing on writing and editing and email queries, and instead reread many of the novels that inspired me to be a better writer, first as a child and then as a young adult. I read Victorian classics too, solely for the joy of reading beautifully written prose, while at the same time getting lost in familiar adventures with what feels like old, trusted friends. It seems to take me twice as long to read the classics compared to contemporary novels because I keep pausing to reabsorb meaningful phrases and dialogue. These are my comfort reads, the kind of dramatic, atmospheric novels that had me rushing through chores all summer like I used to when I was a kid, just to get back to the story again. It was the best thing I could have done for myself, this reconnection to the stories that inspired me as both a reader and a writer. The magical writing that continues to be a source of inspiration for me today. I’m a firm believer that everything falls in place once you’re ready to sit down with yourself enough times to be open to receive the message. So that’s what I’ve been doing most mornings now that autumn is here. I wake up a half hour earlier, make coffee, empty the dishwasher, and feed the dog. Then I open my Morning Pages notebook and sit down quietly with myself until light finds my office window to remind me the day ahead is already unfolding with new possibilities.

“Improve your own writing by reading the work of people you admire.” ~ Oscar Wilde

reading

Book Talk: High Fidelity

Sue

“Sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forward, so you feel nostalgic and hopeful all at the same time.” ― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

I’ve been on a reading binge lately. This tends to happen more in the summer when it’s light enough to relax on the porch with a book after dinner. Lately I’ve had the urge to revisit both contemporary and classic novels I read a long time ago. Not sure why exactly, though I’ve been doing the same thing with music so maybe it all comes down to age and nostalgia. A couple of weeks ago, I came across Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity while browsing the shelves of the same bookstore I used to work at when this book was released in the mid-nineties. I stocked the fiction shelves then and no doubt kept restocking this one at the height of its popularity. Nice that it’s still there.

The narrator Rob is thirty-five, a little older than me the first time I read it, and we had similar taste in music and I suppose we still do. Rob owns a failing record store in London, which reminds me why I never watched the movie version of the book. In the movie John Cusack owns a record store in Chicago. The main appeal of this novel for me is that the characters and setting are delightfully British. Rob’s longtime, live-in girlfriend Laura has just left him and he is both miserable and relieved about it until he begins to search a little deeper for the reasons why all of his relationships have failed so miserably. For once he can’t seem to find refuge from his problems in his huge record collection or by working in his store. Even his two offbeat employees and quirky customers have begun to infuriate him more than normal. The premise reminds me of Hugh Grant in the movie Notting Hill–the way Hugh’s character only stocked travel books and would grumpily chase out visitors who came in asking for popular fiction. Rob does the exact same thing if a customer has what he considers bad taste in music. Since High Fidelity (the novel) came before Notting Hill, is it safe to assume Hornby’s character Rob was the inspiration for Hugh Grant’s reserved bookstore character? Interesting…I hadn’t made that connection until now.

One day Rob takes a hard look around and notices this about his business, “The shop smells of stale smoke, damp, and plastic dust-covers, and it’s narrow and dingy and dirty and overcrowded, partly because that’s what I wanted–this is what record shops should look like, and only Phil Collins’s fans bother with those that look as clean and wholesome as a suburban Habitat–and partly because I can’t get it together to clean or redecorate it.”

Like Rob, I’m not a fan of Phil’s band Genesis, so this paragraph made me chuckle and it probably did in the nineties, too. It also effectively shows us that the state of Rob’s store mirrors the current state of his mind. While he tries to sort out the reasons why Laura suddenly dumped him by visiting former girlfriends who did the same to him over the years, he meets a free-spirited, female American recording artist, who’s just moved to his neighbourhood and performs often at the local pub. In my imagination I kept picturing the character of Marie as a young Joni Mitchell. I wanted much more of Marie’s background story! What about her romantic hopes and music dreams? Why doesn’t any of that matter when her character is pivotal to the plot? Anyway, Rob and Marie begin a casual relationship, and while it seems it’s what Rob has always wanted–no strings, no commitments–he soon realizes that the things his ex-girlfriend Laura wants (marriage, kids, stability, soft rock music, etc.) aren’t quite so terrifying to him anymore. Can he get Laura back or is it already too late? (No ending spoilers here.)

Rereading this book was a different, more thoughtful experience. Rob’s snarky attitude and self-absorption certainly irritated me now, although I found myself laughing all over again at his sarcastic observations about pop culture and some of the music that came out of the eighties and nineties. I still admire the way Nick Hornby wrote this book–with unflinching, biting honesty. He doesn’t turn Rob into a likeable guy as the character searches for deeper self-awareness. He keeps Rob grumpy, neurotic, and reluctant to change. I still rooted for him, though, because change at every stage in life is hard. I like to think even Rob in his later years would find his younger self irritating and sometimes cringy. Like reading a stream of consciousness page in an old tattered diary penned a lifetime ago. Before we discover we’re not the centre of the universe.

It feels like a mellow Joni Mitchell kind of afternoon as I write this post. I’m not sure if Rob the record store owner would chase me out for asking for this amazing album, but I wouldn’t hesitate to debate him (or anyone) about the genius of Joni’s songwriting. That’s the beauty of the albums we treasure, each song is a marker tucked between the pages of some of our fondest memories.

Rob asks us this, “Is it wrong, wanting to be at home with your record collection? It’s not like collecting records is like collecting stamps, or beermats, or antique thimbles. There’s a whole world in here, a nicer, dirtier, more violent, more peaceful, more colourful, sleazier, more dangerous, more loving world than the world I live in; there is history, and geography, and poetry, and countless other things I should have studied at school, including music.” 

reading

Book Talk: The Best Of Everything

Sue

“It was funny, she thought, that before she had ever had a job she had always thought of an office as a place where people came to work, but now it seemed as if it was a place where they also brought their private lives for everyone else to look at, paw over, comment on and enjoy.” ~ Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“The Best of Everything” by Rona Jaffe was published in 1958. Jaffe herself worked at a publishing house in her early twenties that was the model for the fictional Fabian Publications in this story beginning in 1952. She relied on her own background and her young life experiences to write the novel in her mid-twenties, but also interviewed many of her peers about their individual experiences working at the time as secretaries and assistants in New York City. The result is a well-developed and portrayed cast of twentysomething, female characters: Caroline, April, Gregg, Barbara and Mary Agnes, each with their own ideals, career pursuits, dating mishaps, and dramatic struggles within sexist workplaces, while appearing to live glamorously in crummy apartments with only big dreams and no money to show for it.

The novel was long out of print until, rumour has it, Don Draper was seen reading it in his pyjamas in an episode of “Mad Men”. Perhaps that’s what prompted Penguin to eventually reissue it as 65th-anniversary classics edition. It’s the gorgeous cover art (by Michelle Thompson) of this particular edition that caught my eye and reminded me that I’d read it in my teens, twenty or so years after it’d been published. I didn’t have any lasting memories of it until I picked it up again just last week and found myself hooked from the first paragraph: “You see them every morning at a quarter to nine, rushing out of the maw of the subway tunnel, filing out of Grand Central Station, crossing Lexington and Park and Madison and Fifth avenues, the hundreds and hundreds of girls. Some of them look eager and some look resentful, and some of them look as if they haven’t left their beds yet.”

Strong imagery for anyone who has ever had to commute long distance by transit in the wee hours of the morning, just to make it to work or school by eight or nine o’clock. For a brief time in my late teens–at the start of the eighties–I commuted by bus to downtown Vancouver five days a week from way out in the burbs to an office job I needed but hated. There wasn’t rapid transit in my area quite yet and this was not my dream job. Thankfully, I soon found an office job closer to home; also not an ideal situation, but it paid the bills a little better and prevented me from getting up every weekday morning at 5 on the dot. One time while commuting that very long way to the downtown core, I managed to get a spot in a bench seat that ran sideways and faced the open aisle at the front of the tightly packed bus. I used to fight to stay awake, terrified I’d miss my stop and end up alone in the far side of the city and, even worse, late for work. It always got harder to sit upright once the bus reached the freeway and there weren’t regular stops to jolt passengers out of their restless, forward head-bobbing.

On this particular morning, I’d stayed out too late with friends the evening before and therefore only had myself to blame when I woke up suddenly on hands and knees in the middle of the aisle. I was too shocked to be embarrassed at first, until I saw others around me snickering and pointing. Dazed and also dying a little inside, I struggled to get up off my knees in a suit skirt and heels. A kindly, older gentleman rose from his seat to help me up in the speeding, swaying bus and I still remember what he said, “Don’t sweat it, honey, we’ve all been there before.” Now I still can’t be sure if he meant on hands and knees dying of embarrassment or so exhausted in the moment that the only way was down. Regardless, it’s a fitting statement for how I felt while reading this novel again–we’ve all been there before.

And if we haven’t been there before, then that’s probably due in part to women like the friends group in this novel, who struggled and fought professionally to be taken seriously or paid even half as well as their male co-workers and superiors. At the time there were only two ways out of that particular rat race, either over it by getting married or through it by sheer guts and tenacity. I couldn’t put this book down. Yes, I cringed at some of the outdated language and viewpoints, but I felt empathy for each of the characters in a strong, emotional way I haven’t found lately in some of the newer fiction I’ve been reading. I doubt I felt so emotionally invested when I first read it years ago. I think it may have been considered a scandalous kind of read once upon a time. This time it was like looking at an authentic black and white snapshot, one you stare at in amazement, thinking how mature and sophisticated young people seemed back in the day. Like they had it all figured out. One chapter into this book and you remember (or realize) they didn’t and circumstances could be truly heartbreaking for everyone involved.

Note: highly recommend the Penguin Classics black and white edition, published in 2023. Not only is the cover lovely, the introduction by Rachel Syme is rich in background information about the book and includes a foreword written in 2005 by the late Rona Jaffe.

reading

Book Talk

Sue

Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I don’t often read fantasy novels, so I didn’t expect to like this book as much as I did. I was pleasantly surprised to discover the author lives in my neck of the woods, on Vancouver Island.

It’s a cute, cozy fantasy about a young, introverted Cambridge professor named Emily Wilde, who embarks on her toughest field work yet: collecting data during the harshest part of winter about the illusive faeries residing on a remote Scandinavian island. Emily is writing the world’s first encyclopedia of faerie lore. She’s a genius scholar, engrossed in her life’s work, and doesn’t have time to make friends with the quirky human townsfolk, who seem to have more secrets than the Hidden Ones themselves. With only her dog Shadow for companionship, she gets straight to work, fighting the frozen elements at every turn. Things are moving along fairly well until her handsome and mysterious academic rival arrives unexpectedly all the way from Cambridge to offer his assistance in her research.

Wendell Bambleby (love his name!) is the bane of Emily’s existence. She suspects he’s trying to ride the coattails of her hard work, since she already knows he’s lazy, yet insufferably likeable to everyone except her. It isn’t long before he’s charmed the townsfolk and at the same time muddled all of Emily’s research. Exactly who is this strange, enigmatic man and why is he determined to take care of her? This becomes the biggest mystery of all–will they remain scholarly rivals or is there something magical going on between them?

The pace was slow-going for me at first, but quickly picked up once Wendell arrived on the scene and the characters became more interesting and their witty banter entertaining. I didn’t know this is the start of an ongoing Emily Wilde series, which would explain why the pace was slow at first and the ending felt rushed. A light, whimsical story to read before bed. Now I’ll wait patiently for the second book.

I finished it last night, while my reading companion loudly snored. Will I have time to squeeze in one more book before the end of February? I decided to include this book review as a blog post rather than just as a sidebar link to my Goodreads account. Please let me know if you’d enjoy seeing Book Talk as a regular short feature here. I read a variety of fiction and nonfiction and always enjoy chatting about books.

Happy reading! ~Sue

View all my reviews

reading

Somewhere Else

Sue

We were walking toward the fountain, the epicenter of activity, when an older couple stopped and openly observed us. Robert enjoyed being noticed, and he affectionately squeezed my hand. “Oh, take their picture,” said the woman to her bemused husband, “I think they’re artists.” “Oh, go on,” he shrugged. “They’re just kids.” ~ From “Just Kids” by Patti Smith

I’ve been reading Patti Smith’s memoir “Just Kids” about an early time in her life during her relationship with famed photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. It’s a short book and I could probably read it in one sitting, but I’ve been taking my time because it’s one of those captivating stories that can’t be rushed. It wants to be pondered, with entire passages read and then reread. Their meeting is a chance encounter that happens shortly after Patti moves to New York in the late sixties to pursue her dream of being a poet and artist. These are the years before Patti became a singer-songwriter icon, a prelude to her fame. At the time, Robert Mapplethorpe was also a struggling artist and their different yet similar worlds collided one day when she was working in a shop and sold him a particular necklace she coveted for herself. When I wrapped it and handed it to him, I said impulsively, “Don’t give it to any girl but me.” I was immediately embarrassed, but he just smiled and said, “I won’t.”

Patti and Robert lived together on and off for several years. They were the definition of starving artists, working at low-paying jobs to survive, while fearlessly creating their art during a turbulent time when art, music and politics were at war with each other and sometimes free thinkers were violently assassinated. For a brief time, the two of them found a home at New York’s infamous Chelsea Hotel, where they formed friendships with other artists, poets, actors, musicians, writers and the many lost souls living there. Some residents were already well-known by the late sixties and early seventies, some died while chasing their dreams from the rooms of that hotel, and others, like Patti and Robert, became famous later on.

Ironically, their individual successes were reached by way of the very mediums they avoided at the time. Patti wanted to be a prolific poet, not a songwriter. It was others who encouraged her to perform, to sing the words she wrote in her notebooks. Robert created collages out of other people’s magazine photographs and claimed to not have the patience to take his own photos to depict his provocative art. Their love story was profound, tumultuous, often joyful, and also heartbreaking. We already know they didn’t stay together forever, but even over time and distance, they continued to support one another, calling each other their star, “the blue star of our destiny”. Early in the book Patti described Robert in one foreshadowing sentence: I thought to myself that he contained a whole universe that I had yet to know.

Patti & Robert at the Chelsea Hotel, NY – photo credit unknown

While Patti and Robert were in their early twenties, chasing their creative dreams in New York, I was a young Canadian child living in the suburbs, running around the neighbourhood with my friends, and also hiding myself in my bedroom for hours with stacks of library books. At the same time I scribbled my thoughts into composition notebooks that eventually formed my own long, rambling stories. “Just Kids” has brought me back to the beginning of my creativity. I didn’t take Patti’s starving artist route in my later writing years. I never really wanted for anything. I grew up comfortably, never going to bed hungry or feeling unloved or yearning to escape. But, like Patti Smith, I was a daydreamer and many times felt misunderstood. She said of herself, I was a dreamy somnambulant child. I vexed my teachers with my precocious reading ability paired with an inability to apply it to anything they deemed practical. One by one they noted in my reports that I daydreamed far too much, was always somewhere else.

I was always somewhere else, too. My paternal grandmother taught me how to read long before I went to school by reading with me all the time. Early on I discovered how to lose myself in a story. We read storybooks together first and then children’s classic novels. Once we completed a book, she never asked me if I enjoyed the story. She always asked me how it made me feel. I didn’t know it at the time, but what a gift she gave me in that simple question. Thinking about that put me directly into the story and set the course on how I view writing today. I observe all art with feeling. I can’t listen to music without thinking about what the lyrics mean to the songwriter and to me. I can’t look at a painting and not wonder what the artist was going through emotionally at the time. I always look beyond the layers to somewhere deeper, somewhere else.

I feel fortunate to have grown up at a time, and in household, where books and movies, art and music were discussed at length. There wasn’t an outside world of knowledge for me to Google. My opinions and interpretations were always my own and I was often encouraged to share them. Patti and Robert’s story has made me long to relive the hours I spent discussing a novel with another bookworm friend over many cups of Red Rose Orange Pekoe tea. How one single observation made me reread chapters because I was convinced I’d missed something important. I feel nostalgic for long ago car rides, trying to decipher lyrics in a song on the radio because I’d always heard it one way, while another passenger heard something else. How many times have I sat in a car in the dark, shivering, as I discussed and dissected a movie just seen in a theatre with a sibling, a best friend or a boyfriend? Countless times. Wondrous times.

These days I–and maybe we–consume and don’t take the time to reflect before we move onto the next interesting thing. I’m reminded of my husband’s grandfather, who lived with us for a short time when we were first starting our lives together. He’d yell upstairs to me from his downstairs suite whenever his failing memory couldn’t provide an answer he needed, usually from a book he read a long time ago. We shared a love of literature and poetry, and maybe we understood each other a little better than most. Kindred spirits. If we’re lucky, we get to meet a few of those over a lifetime. I’d always dig deep to try to remember whatever he was asking because there was no internet then, no external way of fact checking on the spot. I soon grew to understand he wasn’t really searching for an easy answer, anyway. He was looking to relive the experience, the feeling a particular story once gave him. It was his way of asking me to come downstairs to talk about it with him without telling me that’s what he needed. Companionship. Understanding. A brief moment somewhere else.

As this year comes to an end, I once again find myself surrounded by stacks of books, notebooks, and manuscript pages. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I find myself here again. Back at the beginning, to the daydreamer I used to be. I rediscovered this year it’s an important part of me and I’ve been missing that key to myself. December feels like the perfect time to savour Patti’s words–her voice calling up from downstairs, reminding me to take more time to let my mind wander and ponder before moving onto the next interesting thing.

It occurred to me looking around at all of your things and your work and going through years of work in my mind, that of all your work, you are still your most beautiful. The most beautiful work of all. ~ Patti Smith, “Just Kids”

Just Kids by Patti Smith

reading

July & Joni

Sue

I’ve looked at life from both sides now, from win and lose and still somehow, it’s life’s illusions I recall. I really don’t know life at all. ~ Joni Mitchell, Both Sides Now.

The first song that springs to mind when I think about life in the early 1970s is “Both Sides Now”. Originally recorded by Judy Collins, the song was written by Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell and, in my opinion, should only ever be performed by Joni. If you listen to it now, then listen to Joni sing it and you will hear the clear poetic difference in how she feels her own words.

The meaning of this song for me represents childhood slipping away. Hearing Joni sing it always makes me teary, and it shifts my mind back inside long ago summer days spent zipping along the streets of suburbia with neighbourhood friends. Black Cat gum and brand-new white Keds, grass-stained within hours of taking them out of the box. A pocket transistor radio strapped with hair elastics to the plunging handlebars of my sparkly purple Mustang banana-seat bicycle, tinnily blasting the top ten CFUN summer hits in my wake. The earthy tar smell of hot black topped pavement melting in July. Hopscotch, kick ball, and red rover. Flimsy roller skates that tighten around shoes with a special key that I wore on a string around my sun-warmed neck. For me, all of this nostalgia and more are in the lyrics of Both Sides Now. Even the opening line “rows and flows of angel hair” is a tender reminder that I’d first misinterpreted it as bowls and bowls of angel hair. Perhaps I’d been hoping pasta was on the supper menu that evening.

Although Both Sides Now is Joni’s song of my childhood, my longtime favourite has always been A Case of You from her iconic album Blue. It’s rumoured to be written about her break-up with either Graham Nash or Leonard Cohen. I like to think it’s about Cohen because it doesn’t get more Canadian than that. The opening verses are heartbreak wrapped in biting savagery and I adore it:

“Just before our love got lost you said
I am as constant as a northern star
And I said, ‘Constantly in the darkness
Where’s that at?
If you want me I’ll be in the bar’

On the back of a cartoon coaster
In the blue TV screen light
I drew a map of Canada
Oh, Canada
With your face sketched on it twice…”

Recently I came across an article written about a new novel that’s loosely inspired by the early rise of Joni Mitchell’s career and her love affair with singer James Taylor. Of course I had to read it! Songs in Ursa Major by Emma Brodie (publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021) begins in the year 1969 at a fictional folk music festival where we are first introduced to local singer Jane Quinn and her band the Breakers. Jane and the band are the last-minute replacement performers on the main stage after the headline performer, folk singer Jesse Reid, is injured in a motorcycle accident on his way to the festival.

“James Taylor” by Joni Mitchell from her book Morning Glory on the Vine

Jane and Jesse develop a relationship while he is recovering from his injuries that first begins as a shared love of songwriting and quickly develops into a passionate, often torturous love affair that spans many years. The story follows Jane’s rocky ride in the 1970s music industry and her deeply personal relationships with Jesse, her band members, and her family. All of this unfolds around her desire to be recognized for her talent and still remain in control of her career at a time when women’s opinions were the least heard in a room of male executives.

The heart of this novel is a love story, but the backbone for me is a young woman’s search for the illusive balance between self-fulfillment and obligation to loved ones. I read Songs in Ursa Major in one day because I had to know what becomes of Jane from the first pages when she steps barefooted onto the stage and her life instantly changes. I related so much to this feisty character and her determination to remain true to her young self.

I kept thinking about Joni Mitchell’s country-inspired hit You Turn Me On I’m A Radio while reading Jane’s story. Music industry execs want Jane to write catchy hits for the radio instead of honest music inspired by her life experiences. Joni’s response to the same request in her career famously mocked her recording label manager with these lyrics:

“I’m a broadcasting tower
Waving for you
And I’m sending you out
This signal here
I hope you can pick it up
Loud and clear
I know you don’t like weak women
You get bored so quick
And you don’t like strong women
‘Cause they’re hip to your tricks
It’s been dirty for dirty
Down the line
But you know I come when you whistle
When you’re loving and kind
But if you’ve got too many doubts
If there’s no good reception for me
Then tune me out, ’cause honey
Who needs the static
It hurts the head…”

The complete lyrics are here.

Untitled (and my favourite drawing) by Joni Mitchell: Morning Glory on the Vine

Another book I enjoy immensely is Joni Mitchell’s Morning Glory on the Vine: Early Songs & Drawings (publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019). In 1971, as her groundbreaking album Blue became a commercial success all around the world, Christmas came along and Joni struggled with what presents to give her nouveau riche friends. In the end she decided to give them each a handmade book filled with a collection of her songs, poems and drawings that she called “The Christmas Book”. The edition remained private amongst friends until it was recently published, a present to all of her fans.

There have been many creative influences in my life and sometimes hearing a song or reading passages from a poem or book reminds me to be thankful for those brave souls who put their whole hearts into words, even knowing that some might not understand a single word of it.

Joni Mitchell says it best in a letter to her friends, “Well I know you can’t really knock something till you know it–inside and out–all sides. And I find that then, when you understand it, it’s hard to knock it. You just feel it–laugh or cry.”

reading

The Feel of a Book

Sue

“Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.” ~ Virginia Woolf

Call me old fashioned, but I love the feel of a book in my hands. I also love the scent of new paper, so maybe that’s where the story starts for me, with fresh paper and an invested grip. I aways begin a novel hoping that it will draw me in immediately and keep me thinking about it long after the last page. Sometimes, depending on how I’m feeling, it’s enough just to draw me in, providing hours of pure escapism and not a lot of required thinking to fully grasp the concept.

In April and May I read a lot of different types of books because I suddenly found myself with spare time and only enough energy left to turn pages and absorb words. There have been many periods throughout my life when I’ve stuck my nose in a book to escape the reality of what was happening around me. There have also been times when I’ve felt so much sadness that I couldn’t bring myself to feel anything more, not even someone else’s lighthearted imaginings.

Lately I’ve been showing up every day for the escapism. I haven’t liked all the books I’ve read, but I did finish each one and took time to ponder all of its parts; plot twists that worked for me and the elements of the story that left me feeling meh. A long time ago, before the days of internet and massive bookstore chains, I wrote a book review column for a small local newspaper. Publishers would mail books or galleys to me. I would read them all the way through, whether I liked them or not, and then I’d take the time to reflect and write honestly about them. Nothing more was expected from me than my honest opinions.

I had a toddler and then a newborn during the time I reviewed books. Life was busy, but for this I dug deep and powered through my exhaustion. I read while my children napped and I wrote at my kitchen desk for hours after they went to bed. My editor was a woman and she gave me the opportunity after I brazenly walked into the newspaper offices one day, carrying the toddler on my hip, to tell anyone who’d listen that the paper needed a book review columnist and I knew I could write it. To her credit she not only listened, she invited me and my child into her office to look at samples of my writing. I’m not sure where I found the chutzpah to do something like that. Could I do it now? Doubtful. It was at a time when face-to-face interaction was the norm, and I possessed just enough steely determination to search out a comfortable balance between new motherhood and personal fulfillment.

I was paid very little for my column and I loved every minute of writing it. Occasionally I would receive via my editor typed or hand-written letters from a disgruntled author or a vehemently disagreeing reader. I never received any positive fan letters, which stands to reason because often people only let you know what they’re thinking when those feelings are so strong they cannot be contained. I learned a few things about how to read while reviewing books:

  1. Being in a certain frame of mind can mean the difference between holding a book lovingly for hours after reading it and wanting to hurl it across the room in disdain part way through.
  2. Sometimes a book needs to sit with you before you can form an honest opinion.
  3. You will learn at least one thing about yourself from every book you read.

My Reading Notes: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid is my favourite recent read. Evelyn Hugo is not a particularly likeable character and yet I liked her very much. Evelyn is flawed and ambitious, and driven to succeed to the point of carelessness. Even at times while I questioned her decisions, I still found myself rooting for her and hoping she’d find her one true love. The old Hollywood glamour took me back to comfortable childhood afternoons spent watching classic movie reruns with my parents. The many plot twists are surprisingly believable and thought-provoking. A captivating story that I find myself still pondering weeks later.

writing life

Tell Your Stories

Sue

“…What if you wake up some day, and you’re 65, or 75, and you never got your memoir or novel written; or you didn’t go swimming in warm pools or oceans all those years because your thighs were jiggly and you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It’s going to break your heart. Don’t let this happen.” ~ Anne Lamott

I rediscovered this quote recently while I was working through some hard decisions. I’m happy that I did because I’ve long admired Anne Lamott’s work and it was something I needed to see at just right the time. It’s interesting the way that happens sometimes. One moment you’re minding your own business, just trying to work through a nagging problem, then out of the blue someone or something speaks directly to your heart and it helps to prompt change.

The first book I read of hers, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, was recommended to me years ago by a writing instructor. Every creative person should read this book. Anne has a way of cutting through the murk and mess we create as humans to help uncover the hard truth of what’s really holding us back from doing what we want to do. I’m sure the reasons are different for every person.

I decided right there in the middle of a stressful time that I had to read Bird by Bird again. Not surprising, I couldn’t find my old dog-eared copy from the early 90’s so I ordered a new one. Rereading it I discovered that while many references are outdated, I still find it to be profoundly inspiring, and that some thirty years later one of my reasons isn’t the same because I no longer fear telling my truth.

When I was younger and I wrote a lot, at the far back row in my mind sat the audience. I could even visualize them; some had blurred faces because I didn’t know them well, while others came sharply into focus because I knew them too well. I was careful to the point of rewriting myself into a corner whenever I plotted fictional stories, just on the off chance someone close to me might catch glimpses of themselves in my characters. To this day I’m not exactly sure what I was worried about. Perhaps that I might inadvertently hurt or offend someone I love with the sharp edges of my writing? It seems rather silly now, as do most fears, given time and maturity.

Maybe it’s my age or maybe it’s life experience, but I’ve come to understand that the truth as I see it will never perfectly match someone else’s recollection. With that knowledge also comes the freedom to unfold my version the way I believe it happened. It’s impossible to create without adding the flavourful seasonings of thoughts and experiences collected, bottled and stored in our minds every day. It doesn’t matter if the “audience” is kind or not, or even if they wag a finger in disapproval from the back row. It only matters that we take what we need from storage, all the messy bits and pieces, and shape them exactly as we wish. Recently I’ve started writing a novel. It’s not a memoir, it’s purely fiction. But yes, some parts of the characters do resemble someone I know well: me.

I’ll leave you with a photo of “radical silliness” taken by my daughter in January 2020 while we were swimming in the ocean at Turtle Bay, Oahu. And another favourite Anne Lamott quote: “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better”.

life

The Merriam-Webster Definition of Yarn

Sue

 1: a continuous often plied strand composed of either natural or man-made fibers or filaments and used in weaving and knitting to form cloth.

2: [from the idiom spin a yarn “to tell a tale”] : a narrative of adventure: a tall tale, a roaring good yarn.

Well, hello. Welcome to my first blog post. Glad you found your way here. Truthfully I’m not sure what I’m even doing here, but it’s not unusual for me to jump into something and figure it out as I go. So here goes….

I should probably start by telling you a little about myself. I won’t get into the entire history of my life thus far because I’m a woman of few words unless I’m comfortable chatting with you or I’ve enjoyed a few sips of wine or approximately half a beer. Since it’s early morning as I write this, one or two cups of coffee is as strong as it gets.

My name is Susan and I’m known mostly as Sue. I used to be a writer, a book reviewer, a bookseller, and until about a month ago a yarn shop owner. Yes, somewhere along the way I got off the track of books and tangled up in the wonderful world of wool. As mentioned earlier I’ve been known to jump in and out of interests. Only this time my business owner preoccupation stuck around for a solid fourteen years.

I’ve had many other paying jobs since the first babysitting gig. Most of them were terrible and just a means to pay the bills. None of them are worth mentioning. I was really never good at working for other people. I suspect that growing up the youngest of seven children gave me a strong dislike of being told what to do. It’s also the reason I discovered early on that books, paper and pencils can provide a comforting escape from the chaos and conflicts within large families.

I attribute my early love of reading to my literary-loving paternal grandmother who lived with us until I started school. Mostly she was there to help take care of me because I came along later in my parents’ lives when they both had full-time jobs and all the other kids were many years into school. Some were even senior high students. I was definitely a surprise baby, but fortunately a welcomed one.

Childhood favourites shared with Grandma

My British-born grandmother read with me children’s classics only and my parents didn’t care much about what I read, as long as I wasn’t out in the neighbourhood causing trouble. My mom, however, read almost everything I wrote from an early age and fully accepted my fictional friends as being as important to me as the real ones. She was my first captive audience and she died far too soon. I lost the creative drive to write along with her, but that’s a long story for another day.

Now I’m the grandmother. Which, of course, means that I’ve raised children of my own. Not alone, thankfully. I’ve managed to muddle through all of that married to their dad for over thirty years. There comes a time in your life when you realize you’ve actually done the most growing up right along with your children. Being completely responsible for human lives keeps you standing on high alert at all times, ready to slay dragons with a spatula if necessary. It can be exhausting and frightening and exhilarating all at the same time.

Becoming a grandparent is the blessing for those years of heavy lifting. I know that sounds greeting-card corny, but I can imagine all of you grandparents nodding because it’s true. In my mind I don’t look like my grandparents did. Dare I say old? Certainly all of mine were well into their senior years by the time I made my late debut.

Fifty-something is not old. Still, I don’t seem to know as much as my grandparents did. Or maybe that was an illusion and all along they were just like me: curious enough to keep learning. That thought provides the perfect segue to why I’m attempting to write this blog.

I’m here to find my writing muse again. I feel that I have much to say about being creative and curious. Recently I’ve been closing one chapter of my life and starting another, so it seems like as good a time as any to jump into something new, yet old and familiar. I’ll probably talk too much about books I’m reading and projects I’m knitting. There may even be some waffling about the trials and tribulations of finding my elusive writing voice while I try to plot a novel. Eventually I’ll figure out how to properly add photos.

If you’re still here reading this to the end–thank you and I hope you’ll visit again. If I lost your interest way back at the start, well, that’s fine too. No hard feelings.