“Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me Anyone else but me, anyone else but me, no, no, no
Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me Till I come marching home.”
Mother’s Day is just around the corner as I write this short story about mine. Ironically, it’s not the holiday that reminds me most of my mom. Except for the one right after her passing, when I stood in a Hallmark store picking out a Mother’s Day card for my mother-in-law and burst into tears, then hurried out the door to grieve somewhere privately. My mom wasn’t one for overly sentimental greeting cards. A simple love you for no particular reason, on any given day, was enough to make her smile. She also appreciated a shocking story, a sarcastic joke, a sharply recited limerick.
Once I caught her singing a bawdy tune about Buffalo Bill to my newborn daughter while rocking her to sleep. I reminded her how inappropriate that song was for a child and she said it won’t be remembered, anyway. I pointed out that we can’t be sure what babies remember and she added, “Well, I hope I’m remembered fondly.” I suggested she sing my daughter the one about sitting under apples trees that she used to sing to me as a kid. As a teenager too, until I begged her to stop. It’s a wartime song, but one she remembered fondly because her dad used to sing it at the top of his lungs if he’d had too much to drink. It’s a catchy tune, more silly than tender, yet it still gives me goosebumps when I hear it, which is next to never now. I have to go looking for it, and I did that when I flipped over the calendar to May and saw that past me had already circled Mother’s Day, lest I forget.
I read somewhere recently that music gives goosebumps to those who are hyper-sensitive. I’ve always been a sensitive type. More so than I remember my mom being. More like my dad in that way, I suppose. Sometimes when Mom’s humour got too risqué, Dad would tell her to quit pushing the envelope before she offended somebody or hurt their feelings. I miss hearing old sayings like “don’t push the envelope”. “Don’t step on my pink elephant” popped into my head the other day when someone was being a killjoy–another fun word rarely heard anymore. My dad often wanted things to be calm and perfect, including me. It was Mom who reminded us both that it was okay to be perfectly imperfect. To tell a bad joke to lighten an even worse mood. To sing a silly song too loudly, just for the heck of it.
To honour her memory, I chose the Mother’s Day weekend as the grand opening for my yarn store when I opened it in 2007. I spent a lot of time with my mom in the retail shops she managed over the years and I knew she would’ve got a kick out of me having a shop of my own. I also knew she was with me in spirit when I decided to close it fourteen years later. “Onward and upward,” she used to tell me after I’d made a tough decision or if my heart was broken. Onward and upward: another good, old saying. I’m sure it’s what I told myself that day in the Hallmark store.
Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree – a song made famous by Glenn Miller and the Andrews Sistersduring World War II. This silly stage version makes me smile.
“The horizon leans forward, Offering you space to place new steps of change.” ~ Maya Angelou
The above quote is from one of my favourite Maya Angelou poems “On The Pulse Of Morning”. I thought about it recently. It’s the sort of poem that once you read or hear it, the steadfast hope for humanity never really leaves the back of your mind. Like a song or a painting that continues to speak to you on a deeper level, even if you haven’t thought about it in years. Until you remember it out of the blue one day. Or, in my case, out of the pink.
I’ve become an early riser. I do think you can be an early riser, but not necessarily a morning person. I like to be left alone with first thoughts and very little conversation over a cup of freshly brewed coffee. This wasn’t always possible and now it usually is. In these bleaker mornings before the winter solstice, I get up to make coffee and bring it with me to my office, where I turn on only one lamp and sit in semi-darkness to write my morning journal pages. Or I open the folder of my novel to continue where I left off editing the day before. I feel the most creative before troubling world news or the day’s tasks have a chance to filter in, along with the first signs of light at the window next to my desk.
The other morning I looked up from what I was writing to see the entire room around me was bathed in a pink sunrise. I glanced out the window to discover an astonishingly beautiful sky, then rushed to the front door to stand outside, shivering in PJs to snap a quick photo before the perfect moment was gone. Then I went back to my desk, remembering Maya Angelou’s poem about the pulse of morning and new steps of change.
This year I wrote a second novel. All the way from the beginning to a more recent end. I can’t tell you what day I started or exactly how long it took me to complete over many months. I only know I wrote the last sentence before I wrote the first one. For once, the ending was clearer to me than the beginning. I didn’t feel the need to document the process this time, not in the same way I did the first one, as though I was looking for permission to pursue the dream again. To call myself a writer.
After so many years of not writing, I think rediscovery was the complicated journey I needed to take, treading lightly, carefully. I wrote that first novel and my initial blog posts here with a sense of wonder. A sense of this is who I was and this is who I am now. Every thought, every memory shared, was a hidden pathway back to the writer I held on pause for thirty years. Once I rediscovered words, I began to struggle with what next and what does any of this mean? Reconnecting with The Writer has reminded me that creativity, like most things in life, requires confidence. Along with the determination to block out excuses and doubts and obstacles I tend to put in place like a protective barrier whenever something begins to feel too impossible to accomplish.
One morning I wrote in my journal: Word by word by word. That is how a novel is created. That was how both my novels were created. The first one out of wonder that I still had it in me to string along sentences into a satisfying story with a beginning, middle, and end. The second was written with intention. Less wonder, more focus. I already knew I could take the meandering journey from beginning to end. Now I had to figure out the next steps. The way forward that sits in between finishing one journey and digging deeper to start another.
May the coming year bring new steps, new focus, new pathways between yesterday and tomorrow. Renewed hope and confidence.
“Lift up your eyes upon This day breaking for you. Give birth again To the dream.“
“If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” ~ Margaret Atwood
There’s something about the week leading up to the autumn equinox that makes me more aware of my surroundings than at any other time of the year. Late September feels like the beginning to something I can never quite figure out. It must be related to the days of sharpening fresh pencils and wearing new sneakers that pinch toes because they haven’t been broken in yet. Daylight has begun to shorten and yet the hours somehow feel longer. The other day I asked myself, Do I move forward or stay in the same spot?
Recently I went on a short road trip getaway with my husband to the West Kootenays. We usually do that in August once work has slowed down a little for him. A few days to do nothing except float in mineral hot springs and take long, meandering walks along the lake. Pure bliss. This year we decided to go in September, thinking it would be less busy on the roads and it was. There were moments when it felt like we had mountainous highways all to ourselves and it gave me, the passenger, time to look at beautiful scenery, listen to classic rock, and think about where I am in my novel. That’s the only downside about taking a break from writing. The momentum gets lost.
I’ve spent most of my life thus far squeezing writing in when I can or when I feel motivated to do it. After closing my yarn shop a few years ago, I found myself with a lot more free time and no heavy business worries to focus on. It was the same weightless feeling of a busy school year ending and summer stretching out with endless possibilities. For the first time in a very long time I was able to focus on myself. At first I took some time to do nothing, really. Just putter about the house and organize messes I never got around to doing while working full-time. That’s the thing about mess, though, it always sneaks back in. At least it does for me. And I’m A-okay with that now because there’s so many other things I’d rather do than clean and sort and organize.
My mother told me something a long time ago when I was a young mom trying to balance work and kids’ activities and household chores etcetera etcetera. She said, “Nobody is remembered with perfect housekeeper written on their headstone, and if they are, well, isn’t that a damn shame?” I thought that was hilariously ironic then because my mom always worked outside the home and kept a fairly tidy house, and she still cleaned mine from top to bottom whenever she visited and I never knew if I should feel insulted about it or deeply grateful. I’ve only just realized she did that to give me a free moment to myself. Age and experience had taught her as it has me that mess will always come back no matter how hard we work to stay on top of it. It’s time for yourself that escapes far too easily.
These days I catch up on chores when I can and when I feel motivated to do so–the way I used to do with my writing. I’ve been meaning to clean my oven for three months. Almost every morning I tell myself I should do it over the summer before I use it more often in the fall and winter months. Then I pour myself a cup of coffee and sit down at my desk to write. One summer day I decided instead to put on the air conditioning and roast a turkey dinner with all the trimmings for the entire family in honour of my son-in-law’s birthday. If I was going to clean the oven anytime soon, maybe I should really mess it up first. It still hasn’t been cleaned, but that unexpected turkey dinner was delicious and seemed well-received by everyone.
A day or so after we returned from our road trip, once everything had been unpacked and washed and put away again, I sat down to continue working on my novel and the only word I can think of to describe how I felt is numb. So I pulled out my writing journal to try to make sense out of it and saw the last time I wrote in it was back in July. I try not to look over past pages in my journal. In fact, I use a clip to close previous pages so the next time I open it I can focus on what comes next. Since July I’ve been working almost daily on my novel and haven’t felt the need to question where I am in it. It’s a pattern, or so my journal reminded me when I did look back. Sometimes I write because there is no other alternative. It’s what I must do before everything else. Other times what made sense to me last week suddenly feels like a load of rubbish. Yesterday I wrote in my journal: I have stepped away and now the inner critic has stepped in.
Usually it helps when I’m stuck to go back and read my first chapter to remind myself what originally excited me about the characters and the story. I tried it and that’s when the numbness set in. Along with the question of do I move forward or stay where I am? I decided not to change a thing until I know for certain it’s me the writer and not me the fixer who is in control. At this point it would make perfect sense for me to tackle that dirty oven. I did open it one morning and made a face at it before closing the door. Then I picked up my knitting and put a record on the turntable and lost myself in the mindlessness of knitting a plain hat in the round to let my thoughts wander as they did along mountain roads.
“If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much.” ~ Mary Oliver, How I Go to the Woods.
It started in the middle of summer with a pretty skein of yarn I had the itch to knit with and it ended with a soft and silky scarf to wear by late summer. I kept some notes and thought I’d share my simple “recipe” here, in case you’re looking for a similar scarf.
One skein of Sweet Skein O’Mine 100% silk boucle in the Oh Deer colourway. (300 meters/328 yards. 100 grams/3.5 oz.)
5.5 mm (US 9) circular knitting needle – 80 cm (32″) or longer.
Loosely cast on 12 stitches.
K2, KFB, knit to the last three stitches, KFB, K2.
Repeat this same row as many times as you feel like it. Then add one row of eyelets whenever you want to change it up:
K2, KFB, *YO, K2Tog*, KFB, K2 (Repeat from * to * across row.)
I had 226 stitches on the needles when I figured it was time to cast off and I had just enough yarn left to do it. Be sure to keep an eye on that because, depending on your tension, you may need to cast off sooner than I did.
Use a stretchy bind-off of your choice. There’s many helpful tutorials on Youtube. I used this simple one demonstrated by The Blue Mouse Knits.
Abbreviations:
KFB – (knit in the front and back of the same stitch) YO – (yarn over needle) K2Tog -(knit two stitches together).
Notes:
I placed a marker after the first K2 and one more before the last K2 to remind myself to increase.
Gauge isn’t important and it’s difficult to measure it over the boucle stitches. If you’re a tight knitter, you may want to go up a needle size for some extra drape.
The increases at the start and end of every row gives it an elongated crescent shape to wrap cozily around your neck. The approximate size of mine after blocking is 14″ wide by 70″ long.
Featherlight and airy! Perfect for anyone like me, who doesn’t like wearing a bulky scarf unless it’s below zero. The silk boucle yarn is a lovely texture to knit with. I’ve already started another one in a dreamy lavender. Wishing you a peaceful end of summer.
To feel closer to nature and the changing seasons, I highly recommend reading the poetry and prose of the late Mary Oliver.
“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” ~ Scottish proverb & nursery rhyme
I have a story that began last week and also a very long time ago. I wasn’t going to share it, but when I told a friend about it and saw her reaction, I realized I wanted to write it down to think about it some more. First I need to give a bit of backstory to (hopefully) help it make more sense for anyone who hasn’t read my previous posts about why I started writing again after thirty years. It’s complicated, but to keep it short: I now have the space and time in my life to allow the creative process to take over because that’s what it does for me. It completely takes over. In the space of a year I wrote a novel, and then I rewrote it several times more. Finally satisfied, I sent query emails to a couple of literary agents along with the first chapter. And then I started writing a second novel that’s a spin-off from the first one. About halfway through the second novel, I realized this story could not exist until I was truly happy with the first one. Confusing, I know.
It was summer by then and I decided to step away from my desk to get out of my head and spend more time outdoors. The younger writer I used to be would’ve told myself to quit overthinking the process and press on. This older version understands after living a long time that creativity is not a race to the finish line. It’s a marathon of uphill climbs. Something wasn’t working for a reason and I needed space to figure out why. By fall, I was itching to write again, but still not ready to revisit the two novels. So instead I read insightful memoirs about writing written by published authors. One of those was Stephen King’s “On Writing, A Memoir of the Craft”. I’d read it once before when it was published about twenty years ago and can’t remember what I thought about it then. This time, however, I found myself dog-earing pages and highlighting paragraphs to read again and again. Above all else, one idea of his particularly inspired me and I’m paraphrasing it here: if two separate stories aren’t working, try combining them into one. It was as if a light turned on in my imagination. And so begins a different (yet familiar) novel…
I borrowed a character from each of my two novels and I made them sisters. I made them my age. I took a lake from one story and a small town from the other and I relocated it and combined it under one made up name. The setting is loosely based on two places I spent a lot of time in during my late teens and early adulthood. Hope, B.C. where my parents had their retirement house, and on Cultus Lake where I spent many long summer days hanging out with friends. I made the two sisters complete opposites, telling their story from very different perspectives and outlooks on life. In other words, one chapter is told by one sister and the next one is narrated by the other one, and so on. In order to create and keep track of their unique voices, I’ve had to mentally envision them as Nice Sister and Mean Sister. Not their names, of course, just their attitudes. And not surprising, Mean Sister’s perspective has become the most fun to write.
It’s a story as old as time. Siblings who must confront a shared past while temporarily stuck together in the present moment. It’s summertime in a small, lakeside town. There’s a cast of quirky, secondary characters–the townsfolk–who have secrets and troubles of their own. The sisters grew up here, abandoned by their superstar mother in the early seventies so she could freely chase her rock and roll dreams. Then they’re reunited with her as teenagers in the late seventies to become her backup singers for one summer tour. Now in their fifties, the sisters are forced to reconcile the past in order to move forward in their present lives. And because this is written by me, there must be humour to even out the drama, and great background music to give it a dreamy, nostalgic feel. My comfort tunes, mainly from the sixties, seventies and eighties. The music that has shaped my own life and inspired me to dream. The first chapter begins at the present time, with Nice Sister about to take a shower when the doorbell rings….She answers it to receive an unexpected gift package from an unknown person. While this has no meaning right now, it does later on in my real-life story–which I will get to very soon, I promise.
Chapter five, at exactly 13,793 words, I mopped one of the sisters, figuratively speaking, into a corner and I had to wait for the floor to dry for the next scene to unfold in my mind. I was as stuck as she was. While staring at a blank page, the cursor blinking at me, I suddenly typed this from the character’s perspective: “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. My grandma used to say that, I think. Or maybe I’d heard it in a song.” My paternal grandmother did used to say that to me often when I was a kid. I’d tell her I wish I had this or I wish I could do that and she’d give me that horses line. It’s a Scottish proverb and a verse in a very old nursery rhyme. I had no idea why she was calling me a beggar because all I’d done was state the truth. My own sisters have said that as a toddler I used to tell them, “I wish I was a mouse so I could climb into your pocket and go with you.” A storyteller, even then. As for the song part, it was also familiar to me in a warmly nostalgic way, but I couldn’t place it. So I went on a Google deep dive, as the curious tend to do when avoiding work. This is what I remembered…
In seventh grade there was a song that played so often on local radio station CFUN that I ended up making a poster of it in art class. “Roxy Roller” by the Vancouver glam rock band Sweeney Todd. Nick Gilder was the front man of the band at that time. He left shortly after ST became successful to pursue a solo career–also a story as old as time. That was when local boy Bryan Adams, at only sixteen, became the front “man” for a short time and he’s featured on Sweeney Todd’s album “If Wishes Were Horses”. It’s considered a very rare album now because not many are still in circulation, or so I’ve discovered. Kind of niche, and only something Canadians, more specifically British Columbians that were teens in 1977 might still fondly remember. For reasons unknown, it’s nearly impossible now to listen online to Bryan Adams’ full version of “If Wishes Were Horses”. Trust me, I did the dive. Bryan’s voice was very different then and not at all the raspy, familiar voice of the eighties and onwards. He also had a solo disco song in his late teens that I used to dance to with friends called, appropriately, “Let Me Take You Dancing”. He had the voice of an angel then, although he may beg to differ now.
I decided one evening at around ten o’clock–the perfect time to make rash decisions–that I needed to get my hands on that old album again for the sake of my writing. Somehow it had written itself into my story and I needed to understand why. I’d already found one available for sale on Etsy that was being sold by a local seller in Vancouver. This person, a woman I later discovered, has very good reviews and a ton of used vinyl sales. It was reasonably priced. It was in excellent condition. It was local. I used to love it. All signs pointed to go! I paid for it and that was that. I was about to shut my laptop and go to bed to read when, almost instantly, I got an email notification from the seller. I thought about leaving it until the morning, but I wondered if there was a problem with the sale. So I read the long message and I was surprised by all of it. Astounded, actually. I decided not to respond until morning in order to process what I’d just read. I stayed awake for a long time thinking about it. About life, about being young, about how our best dreams rarely change, and how we sometimes take the long way to get to where we’re meant to be. And by two in the morning, how just one message can lead to a very long, restless night.
What the seller told me was that she laughed when my album purchase came in late at night because she’d just been coincidentally in my area shopping earlier that same day. It’s funny how life goes sometimes, isn’t it? Yes, it is, we agreed. We’ve had more email conversations since that first one and this is where the story turns from haha to are you kidding me? Turns out she is a writer and music lover like me, who recently started writing again after closing her business, also like me, shortly following the pandemic. She now lives in the very place I am currently writing about–Cultus Lake. We are around the same age and both grandmothers. We love books and vintage finds. She sells her found treasures online, I just collect mine. Oh, and by the way, she was Bryan Adams’ high school girlfriend right before he left to join Sweeney Todd to be on the album I’d just purchased.
I’ll let that sink in…
Early in the morning, two days later, I was getting ready to take a shower when the doorbell rang. A package was left by our Canada Post carrier on the doorstep. Sound familiar? Unlike my character’s gift package that I wrote about several weeks before this day, my gift package was from myself. The “If Wishes Were Horses” album. Tucked inside was a postcard note from the seller giving me her best wishes on my story and a few other personal tidbits I’ll keep to myself. For some reason I was nervous about playing the album, specifically that song. Was I expecting too much? Had this gotten so blown out of proportion that I was romanticizing it into something more than it is? The answer is, it’s everything I needed to hear at exactly the right moment.
When I finally sat down to listen to Bryan’s much younger, angelic voice sing the lyrics I believe he co-wrote at a time when he was probably hoping all of his music dreams would come true, it made me unexpectedly emotional and even more introspective. I thought about my own dreams at fourteen. I saw myself so clearly, listening to this same song. Maybe I was thinking about the singer, imagining who he was because nobody really knew him then. Maybe I was thinking about my grandma too, who used to say the same thing to me. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. I’d lost her at thirteen, yet here she was again in a song. Now, after thinking about it some more, I’ve come to realize that my younger writing self is reminding this current self to keep believing in the creative process, no matter how long it takes to sort the story out. That’s why I’m sharing it now, just in case you need a reminder to keep following your story.
If Wishes Were Horses, Sweeney Todd lyrics
“Come with me you can wish upon a star You can do all the things that you’ve longed to And you won’t have to wonder who you are You can be anybody you want to In a land full of promises and kings All your best laid dreams are for catchin’ You can have the world to tie up on a string Just close your eyes and imagine If wishes were horses Beggars would ride All dreams and desires would ride along side Worries and troubles would fall off behind If wishes were horses, beggars would ride
To a land far or near come along There’s an all new-round everyday glow Like the young girl sang in the song ‘Somewhere over the rainbow'”
If Wishes Were Horses (featuring Bryan Adams) Sweeney Todd – back cover photo of Bryan Adams
“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.”
“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
“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.”
“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.
“You never get over the fear of writing.” ~ Maya Angelou
One day I said to my husband of over thirty years, “Remember when I used to be fearless?” He’s known me since we were in our early twenties and he looked at me that day the way he has many times before–with total, absolute confusion. In hindsight, it does seems like a random thing to say while in the middle of chopping salad vegetables for our dinner. Truthfully, I’d been mulling it over for quite some time and he just happened to walk into the kitchen when I was ready to let those feeling out.
I reminded him of the time many years ago when I brazenly walked into the offices of a local newspaper with our toddler on my hip and asked to speak to the editor-in-chief. What I got instead was an assistant editor who should have been managing editor, but it was near the start of the nineties, when qualified women were still unfairly passed over for promotions like dodgy-looking shrimp at an all-you-can-eat buffet. She led me to her cubicle office, thinking, dreading I’ll bet, that I was there to complain about a recent editorial piece or wanted to share a gossipy news tip. Or maybe I came to beg her for a part-time secretarial job just to get myself out of the house. I don’t actually know what she was thinking, she never said. To her credit, though, she offered me a chair so I could put my daughter on my lap, and then she listened to me.
When I was done speaking, the editor asked why I thought I was qualified to write a freelance book review column without any prior experience. (Other than the fact I was a star reporter of my high school newspaper and had some college creative writing classes under my belt.) I told her that I read all the time, more so since becoming a stay-at-home mom, and that her newspaper was lacking in opinion pieces written from a young woman’s perspective. I remember staring at each other for an uncomfortably long moment as I bounced my child on my knee, radiating nervous energy. Finally she said something that I’m positive surprised us both that day: “Write me a sample book review and if it knocks my socks off I’ll give you a shot.” Not sure if I knocked her socks off, but I did earn my shot at a monthly book review column and other freelance work that I continued to earn for a few more years.
Now a bonafide newspaper columnist, I decided that I’d gained enough confidence to leave my first born in somebody else’s care for a few hours a week to take more college writing classes. To say I thrived in that environment as a mature, more confident student is an understatement. I loved every minute of it and didn’t take a single moment for granted. It didn’t bother me that most of my nineteen year old classmates called me Mom. They only ever did so with affection and, I like to think, a little admiration for sticking it out for another semester while expecting a second child.
During that time, I wrote fiction and poetry, short stories, and heartfelt pieces about new motherhood and my life so far. I was asked by an instructor to read one of those stories in front of an alumni audience in a large college auditorium. I was close to nine months pregnant by then and had to waddle down a long aisle and up several stairs to a stage. I still remember standing there, steadfastly, reading my emotional piece about fearing for my children’s future as the Gulf War continued to rage on far away and much closer to home a gunman had senselessly massacred fourteen female university students. My soon-to-be-born son kicked and stretched as I leaned into the podium to receive my shining moment of applause for the words I’d fearlessly written and shared from the very same heart connecting the two of us to life.
“You’re still fearless,” my husband told me while we ate that salad I’d made for dinner. I knew he meant strong about facing the hardest things over the years that needed to be either accepted or worked through. “Except for when it comes to my writing,” I said to him. “Why can’t I be fearless about that again?”
Where was the wannabe columnist who made up her mind one day she wanted a job she wasn’t qualified for? What about the woman in her late twenties who went back to college because she hadn’t given up on her dreams? The mom who discovered not only did she still have a lot to say, her writing touched another woman enough to make her cry in the front row of an auditorium. That writer never feared sharing what she wrote because she believed in every word. Even if her stories never saw anything beyond a cluttered desk drawer, she still kept writing them. She wrote for herself first. In fact, her only priority was telling her stories as well as she could.
We’re told so often to look ahead, to keep moving forward. Don’t look back! Focus on the road ahead. Sometimes looking back to who we used to be is the only way we can move forward now. Recently I sat down and started writing and I kept writing for over a year. Pages and pages until the story was done. I’ve rewritten that novel three more times since then because I believe in it just the much. Today I’m writing a second novel. The words keep coming and here I am, a grandmother now, happy to receive all those many words. Some days I dream about trying to get my novel published. Other days I’m content to leave the manuscript safely in a drawer. Regardless of the outcome, close to 90,000 words have reminded me there’s a certain fearlessness in staying true to yourself.
A Roaring Good Yarn 