Back to Where I Started..reflections on the writing life

 Seven books, many short stories, a dozen radio plays, three stage plays and countless articles, blog posts and various other work behind me and I am still writing, still engaged, but the publishing landscape has so changed I feel like I am back at the beginning, struggling to make a meaningful story but also tell it in a new way and then find a virtual or actual outlet to publish it because the least thing a writer needs is readers.  In the beginning I would check the mail to see if there was a response to a story I submitted. The walks to various rural  mailboxes, in the Yukon, on Galiano Island, now in Gibsons. The moment of anticipation as I ripped open the envelope. Writers told stories about papering their studies with rejection letters. There was even a kind of hierarchy: the standard printed, Thanks but it's not for us. But maybe a personal note at the end of one. I was thrilled to see actual handwriting from "The New Yorker" on one of those. Better was, Try us again. Best of all, We are pleased to....Now it's easier. I only need to check email, or the impersonal Submittable site.

 My goal was always to publish and after many rejections that started to happen when a story from what would become my first book was accepted by the long running literary journal Prism. Five more stories were published or broadcast, in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K, before that first book Suburbs of the Arctic Circle appeared from Penumbra Press. My publisher entered it in a competition, the Literary Press Group's Writer's Choice award, and it won. Our public broadcaster CBC commissioned me to adapt several of the stories for radio. I was happy, this is how a writer's life was supposed to proceed, and when the publisher of Who's Who in Canada offered me a listing, I declined. How crass, I thought. Hah! Raised a Catholic, accustomed to nuns talking about vocations as something holy, I thought my vocation of writing to also be something holy, and probably more fun, the way writers think of fun. I didn't think of it as a career, like the boring opportunities shilled on high school career days.Continue reading here

More Murders than Missouri

 With 64.54 murders per 100,000 residents, St. Louis had the highest murder rate of any major American city in 2019. Something like16, 500 people were murdered in the whole U.S., up 11 per cent from 2010. There are about 5 homicides per 100,000 people in the States, 2 per in Canada.

On any given day, though, if you add up all the cable TV and streaming series, so many of which offer crime detective shows, there are many many times more murders, usually of women. The Swedish series I have been watching, "Beck", for example, has at least one murder per episode. The crime usually opens the show and the rest of the hour and a half is devoted to solving it. This is where the characters come forth, the frumpy Beck, the short-fused handsome Gunvald, and various other regulars. I like their stories. Beck has a daughter who is the single mother of his grandson for whom he babysits when the daughter has a conflict.

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Falling Coconuts

It's only mid February of a new-ish year and already Canadians have been warned that no amount of alcohol is safe to drink. Then came the warning about heavy metals in dark chocolate. Add these to a growing list of foods and beverages that are bad for one's health, and to the implication that if we all do the right things, we might live forever.

I read both these pieces of health news while relaxing on a patio in a small town on the West Coast of Mexico. In the early morning, outside my gate, families loaded onto a single motor scooter, dad or mom driving, usually in flip flops, sometimes with a baby in a chest pouch. School-going kids were dressed and neatly groomed and no one wore a helmet.

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About Franzen's Crossroads

 I chose Jonathan Franzen's Crossroads to download for my trip to Mexico, not just because it would keep me occupied for a while...yikes! A twenty-four hour audiobook? But because I had the choice of either taking it when became available on my library site or returning to the waiting list. I'm glad I took it.

What an achievement, both the writing, the narrating and yes, the listening. Twenty-four hours is a long time to listen to a book, even if one doesn't do so all at once. But hand it to Franzen for keeping another writer, me, not only interested in his story but also in his mastery of novel writing craft.

In the interview that concludes the narration, Franzen said that to move plot along each character has to need something. Need something in every scene and those needs, sometimes met, often not, really propel the story. He said he spends 75 % of his time on character and his brilliantly complex characterization is the satisfying result.

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About Franzen's Crossroads

In the Neighbourhood of the Stars

 Reclining on our camp chairs, looking for meteors in the jet December sky, we considered who might be twinkling up there, because in some cultures people believe that when a person dies they ascend to the heavens and become a star. When you look up and find that bright point, you are reuniting with your loved one. It's a comforting thought and one we cannot affirm or deny because we are still alive.

But what if it's true, we wondered? What if when you die you become a star? Will you be aware of it, will you be able to communicate with other stars? Are star clusters the equivalent of cities or neighbourhoods where everyone more or less knows one other. Hey, it's been so long! Is it always this hot? Because we must remember that stars are essentially burning out fireballs. The light we think we see from stars may be the echoes of light, strange though it is to use a word generally associated with sound to describe something visual, strange as in synesthetic. Everything is so vast, so inconceivably far away that it might as well be eternity, heaven. It is common to glance up when we think of the direction a departed one has taken

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.In the Neighbourhood of the Stars

Where they Sat

My Samhain/dia de los muertos altar is getting crowded, even though I limited the honourees to just those close ones who joined the othersiders in the last five years. As I visited with them over a couple of nights, it was instinctive to think of them sitting around my table for the many dinner parties we enjoyed here. Richard first, then Brigid, then Geoff, then David, Susanne and sister Kay the same year, then Maggie, and at the last minute --that is before this day of celebrating the dead--Jane, Maggie's cousin who lived in Savannah and wrote for the Savannah Morning News. Both writers, we hit it off when we first met at Maggie's. Then Jane, with her partner Carmela, put me up when I visited Savannah for the first and probably only time. We met here a few times after that and corresponded several times a year. Our most recent correspondence concerned Maggie's choice to die, in late June.

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Magdalen Islands, Les Îles de la Madelèine

 I was pleased to see the first of my in-development collection of stories published on the Fairlight Books (Oxford, U.K.) page. The story was inspired by a trip to the Magdalen Islands pre-pandemic.

Such a unique place, and such an interesting history. Dérangement is one of the stories that link the Basque, Breton, Irish and Acadian cultures at different point in history. You can read the story here :Dérangement

Finished!

 It took awhile, but I finally finished reading Ogla Tocarzchuk's giant The Books of Jacob. As the photo shows, I dogeared many pages and marked down notes on my observations throughout so I wouldn't forget where I read something pithy or insightful. 

Coming to a new book by an author you respect and admire brings certain unacknowledged, perhaps, hopes. I don't like to read too much about a work, be it a novel or a play, in advance but rather come to it fresh, to see for myself what I think, and a novel this size sailed me through many peaks and troughs. The unfamiliar place and character names continued to frustrate me. I wish there had been one of those charts showing characters and their relationships like you can often find in other works of historical fiction. It's the same sort of frustration I experienced as a teenager when I first started reading Russian novels. In Jacob, namechanged often too as people moved from one place to another and switched religious affiliations. If I were to read the novel again, which I likely will not, I would keep a running list of main characters.

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Book Report

Although I have spent my life reading and writing stories, I now and then question why I do it. On rare days it seems such a so-what way to consume hours and hours. Unlike nurses, I am not healing anyone. Unlike plumbers, I'm not fixing anything. At best I might be providing temporary distraction/entertainment for the people who read my books, just as the authors of books that I read provide temporary distraction/entertainment for me. But also more. Because I am a writer I read as a writer and the books that stick with me are ones that teach by example, by their brilliance of conception and craft. I think it was George Saunders, in his oddly titled A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, who said that to read, to write is to say that we believe in at least the possibility of connection. When reading or writing, we feel connection happening, or not. That's the essence of these activities. And by connecting, we make the world a better place, wrote the author of  the brilliant Lincoln in the Bardo, and countless other works. Did he also say that fiction is essential? I hope so. Someone did, and, despite my occasional doubts, it has been for me. What I think fiction does is to organize life in the direction of meaning, even if only as a posed question.

So I read and write every day and talk about books with friends and exchange books with them, which is how I came to know three books of the Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk that have been translated into English. My longtime friend and colleague, the poet David Zieroth, reads and (possibly) writes more than I do. He even publishes a chapbook series (Alfred Gustav Press). He also haunts used bookstores. Was it there he discovered Olga's mysterious Flights? It is a unique exploration of journeys, fragmentation and the human body, and I must read it again because it defies expectations and demands close attention. Partially because of its fragmented style, it is not an easy read. The next book of hers that I read, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, is not only original, it's also funny, a sort of thriller, a page turner in a way that Flights was not.

Continue reading at https://burnsmar.blogspot.com/2022/02/book-report.html

Broken, part 1: Ketamine

For a time that is blessed and terrible you are exposed as if peeled to the diaphanous membrane around all there is. The bubble that has enclosed your individuality dissolves. Visions pin you to the table. You are speaking but does anyone hear? You are trying to tell them about the tormentingly brilliant black and white squares that make a floor and angle up the wall like a distorted room in a fun house. It isn't fun.

Then he appears. He stands or is present on the right side of the room, in the long tan duster you used to think so pretentious, reassuring you, once again offering rescue from a perilous situation, those that later made funny, self-deprecating stories. Encouragement. He should know. He died seven months before and described the images he was seeing those last few days, told you that he was going to say things that might not make sense to you but made sense to him. If this is really the antechamber to the next world, it will be okay he seems to be saying and you think, well I have always talked about death as something we must accept not fear. I can resign myself, but sadness accompanies the thought. A regretful, oh well.

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Broken, part 2: How it Happened

How fast everything changes. Roll out the cliches. Seems you have to be reminded. Annual house swap. Your Vancouver friends settled into your old cottage on the Sunshine Coast while you enjoy the city without having to take the ferry back and forth. Last year he was with you and you drove him to some of the places you used to frequent in the early days when you lived in the city. This summer you are here on your own, lying in a narrow bed in a small dormer room upstairs. There's an open window at nose height. The back garden is a riot of dahlias, late summer tomatoes, profuse Swiss chard and so much basil that you can smell it from your upstairs window. The sky in the east is blushing a soft pink. If you snuggle here long enough you may see the sun appear. But no. An habitual early riser. Coffee to brew, mail to check, lists to make. A writer friend is coming for lunch in the garden. What to do for dessert? Was it the coming day that distracted? Or morning light entering a staircase landing-height window that appeared to level two pale-carpeted stairs so that you missed the one above the landing, tried to right yourself, couldn't, felt yourself tipping and said outloud, oh shit, it's happening. No witness to describe it, but later you think you must have pinwheeled over the last five steps onto the yoga mat you'd spread on the carpet the day before. One second, two? And life yaws irrevocably.

Head seems ok but you are sickish, nauseous. You lie still for a moment. Can't be too bad. Hands hurt. The left more than the right but it will be okay. Just have to wait a minute. You don't notice the gash on your leg until you get up without using your hands and immediately move to the couch because the nausea hits again when you are upright. The ottoman is white. Oh no, is that blood dripping on it? The left hand is puffy, distorted, but the right doesn't seem too bad. The laptop is set up in the kitchen and you poke at the keyboard with your right index finger to ask Dr. Google what to do about an injured wrist. Advice? Don't wait long to get it assessed. Meaning x-ray, meaning... you could take a taxi to an urgent care centre? Which one would be closest? Which offer shortest waiting times? Which the least risk of Covid exposure?The garden at the cottage

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Broken, Part 3: Surgery and Beyond

A week after the fall, your friend Peter drives you and your car onto the ferry home and you don't dwell on the accident and how you are feeling but talk about music, about plays, about the man who died earlier in the year, who wrote songs Peter played with him at various venues around town. It's a pleasant and unremarkable trip except for a bathroom stop. When it comes time to pull up your underwear you need help. Is anybody there, you call? It's an odd request, you admit. The only other occupant, masked as you are so that you wouldn't recognize each other even if you were to meet again, laughs and just does it. It has to be the funkiest duty she performs all day.

A few days at home connecting with those things that express your individuality, the radio tuned to your favourite Quebec classical and jazz station, your books, your favourite reading chair, the view of the Salish sea out the front window, your older daughter who books off her job to stay with you until your granddaughter arrives from the Netherlands the next day, calls from friends, siblings, fresh clothes, your own bathroom with the new bidet installed by your son-in-law. A neighbour is driving into the city on Monday and will take you back to Colin and Ethel's, so that's done. Arranged. You are asking many favours these days, including another stay at the garden cottage, another superb seafood meal, plans for Colin to drive you to the hospital the next day. The best thing is that no one makes you feel beholden. It’s humbling.

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Broken, part 4: Recovering

You’re trying to get better and exercise is a big part of it. You practice no hands yoga, you practice the routines the physiotherapist gave you. The left hand is still weeks behind the right. Sleep is still interrupted by pain. Life feels permanently changed. You have entered a phase that could be the last chapter. Not that you are going to die from this, but you are going to die and each year before that ultimate experience you are going to be growing older, your body is no doubt going to become more vulnerable. As if his death, earlier in the year was not enough to remind you, your accident has underlined the fragility of existence with a fat stroke of a fluorescent marking pen .

One thing to intellectualize, another to feel. It’s taking a long time. The autumn rains have set in. Bone pain resonates. Seven weeks after you can’t rely on sleeping comfortably. You are past the need for hydro morphone, but does extra strength Tylenol even work anymore? You’re taking less, only at night. Trying cbd during the day, with uncertain results.

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Where will I be sleeping tonight?

The last few days of his life he lay in a hospital bed in front of a window that looked out to the Salish Sea. Predictably deteriorating and yet it was still surprising. At times she thought he had been holding back his awareness of what was happening to him. He had tried everything to stave off the inevitable. Perhaps he thought that acceptance might speed its arrival.

But who knew, because he was not a man who revealed much about himself. In songs he wrote, maybe, in plays, but seldom directly, unless she pressed him. By the last few days, in his weakness and concern, he revealed more.

Where will I sleep tonight, he asked the morning of the day the doctor was going to come to help him to the other side. The middle place, I think, she told him, and he seemed okay with that vague explanation. He wanted to know what would happen to his clothes and when his dear ones expressed desires for various items and assured him that the rest would be donated to his favourite thrift store, his face wrinkled with dissatisfaction, having failed to communicate his meaning. What would happen to the clothes he was wearing when he died, is what he meant.

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Music and Memory

As Marcel Proust famously established in his Remembrance of Lost Time, smell and taste commonly trigger involuntary memories. For me, though, it is just as much, maybe more so, music that does that. When Debussy's "Claire De Lune" plays on my classical station, I see the dark blue cover of the sheet music propped on our family piano, my dad's long, freckled fingers on the yellowed keys, the pipe in his mouth.  I credit my dad and his brother, a priest, for instilling in me my love of classical music.

It stuck with me even during my hippie years, so that when I hear Tchaikovsky's Pathétique Symphony, I see myself entering the door of the apartment where I lived at the time in California, after having hitchhiked to the nearest record store to buy the recording as a treat for myself, though there wasn't much money left from my waitress job for things like that. Tragically, and yes it did feel tragic at the time, I had lit a cigarette and hastily set it down in what I thought was an ashtray to run out to the courtyard where my toddler had followed the departing babysitter. Instead of the ashtray, the burning cigarette had landed on my brand new lp and burned a depression into the vinyl before I could play it through once!

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Life wild and (mostly) courteous

Although I fall into the age group that is most vulnerable to this virus that's ravaging 2020, the pandemic has been relatively easy for me to handle. I have stayed at home more than usual, but where I live makes it possible to carry on a social life, on the beach, on patios, and going to the store just once a week, as soon as it opens, decreases risk of infection from other shoppers. I feel for those who are living in cramped quarters in cities, whose children and mates have been home more than usual. More than that, the folks who actually contracted the virus, suffered, and in the worst cases died.

I haven't totally escaped the side effects of Covid. Though rare, there have been some days when uncertainty is a big grey cloud enveloping the world, near and far and I don't know what to do with it. Worse for my university-age grandchildren who don't know what's ahead, in the short or the long term.

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What does a picture sound like?

 During these months when I have often doubted the point of any artistic effort, I was invited to participate in the Vancouver New Music Society's One-Page Graphic Score project, an opportunity for a synesthetic experience about which I was completely ignorant until the first Zoom workshop when Giorgio Magnanensi introduced we eight "composers" to the tradition of graphic scoring and some of its most brilliant practitioners.
What a lift! What a pleasure to collaborate!
The result, after several days of thinking, trying (how does a writer who can't draw make a graphic image?), trying some more--the process possibly more exciting than the result-- is Currents of Our Imaginary Ocean.

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Quarantined in Paradise

A couple of weeks after the lockdown began in earnest where I live, things were feeling weird. Then they got more so as people in our small community were tested, not for the virus itself, but for their tensile strength.

A short lived but intense neighbourhood controversy blew up over whether or not to keep our community dock open. This is a structure we support with modest membership fees, that volunteers work to keep maintained, the place where, every summer, there is a community jump off that kick starts the potluck picnic on adjoining decks. In the summer, I swim from the dock every morning I can, neighbours moor kayaks along the side, and those with bigger boats load and unload there. A few of we moon worshippers gather on summer nights for magical moonlight swims. Close the dock?

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The Smell of Grapefruit

The smell of grapefruit, halved and sectioned, coffee brewing, bacon frying at one in the morning. Just home from midnight mass, a bottle of Jim Beam on the counter for Mom and Dad and their friends, the Christy's, who joined us most Christmas eves for a middle of the night breakfast. How many years did that routine continue? In memory, childhood stretches longer than it took to fall asleep once we were chased upstairs, because it wouldn't be long until Santa came.

Even when we knew it wasn't the white-bearded icon making those rustling and banging noises downstairs, we believed. There had to be some kind of Santa, something inexplicable at least. One year, after all the presents were opened, for example, some sort of magic allowed a disappointed girl to notice that, from under the sofa's dust ruffle, the corner of a wrapped box protruded; to work it forward and find her name on the label, and discover the skates she had dreamed of owning, for gliding across the ice on the rink across the street, hair flying behind, making frosty figure eights.


What shatters that spirit for so many? The contemporary composer Nicole Lizée recounted her memories of things broken, wires that shorted out, bubble lights that leaked toxic fumes.

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Geoffrey Smedley, continued

On February 22, 2018, Geoffrey Smedley celebrated his 91st birthday without his dear wife Brigid, who had died of cancer seven months before at the age of 70. On the table stood the card she had written him for his 90th... "My darling and ponderous Geoffrey," it began. Their dog Oscar would die a couple weeks after the birthday, but Geoffrey continued/continues.

Continuing was something he thought about a lot, and something we discussed often, the physical boundary of the body and the limitlessness of spirit/mind. A year ago today, on May 9, 2018, he woke remembering a dream he told me about when I picked him up from the Stormaway passenger ferry around noon. "I dreamed that all my sculptures were fully and brilliantly realized, that they had reached the limits of what they could be."

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