capacious hold-all

Leonard da Vinci Handbag

2012-01-15T07:34:00.001-07:00

An interruption to this blog hiatus, to point out this article on the handbag drawing / design by da Vinci. Yes, that's Leonardo da Vinci. Another article highlights that this drawing is a reconstructed fragment. I'd be curious to know just what that process might be.

Here's a beautiful video of the design brought to life:

At any rate, you can find me on my other blog more often than here. But I couldn't resist posting this gem.

The Asprey

2011-04-30T07:48:00.000-06:00

Margaret Thatcher's famous handbag has gone up for auction. You can read more about it here. The proceeds are going to charity apparently.

In other purse 'news' - did you read the Oprah magazine, poetry issue? Of course you did. Then perhaps you came across this:

"When I least expect it something strikes me. Just now, for instance, we were driving westward and stopped at the West Virginia welcome station, and I looked at the woman next to me who tucked her purse between her legs to wash her hands, and that little action triggered something in me—I suddenly thought of all the things we do subconsciously to keep things neat, and the way women carry purses around."
—Rita Dove

A messenger, a smuggler, a weapon, a battle cry.

2011-02-10T09:46:00.000-07:00

It's wonderful ain't it when two obsessions coincide? Admittedly I've let the purse thread drop from this blog, but I've been writing about purses in my current novel and constantly thinking about them. And well, the typing thing. The sound of the typewriter is in my head a fair bit, shall we say. I can tell you that I plotzed when I saw the above here. Which led me to the Kate Spade site where I saw her book clutch. Swoon! Meanwhile, a friend pointed out Willow Rector's site to me. She has a very lovely collection of handbags designed after women writers.

There have also been some purse references in some of the novels I've been reading lately and I thought I'd note them here. Blog as notebook? Why not.

From Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar:

Her college was so fashion-conscious, she said, that all the girls had pocket-book covers made out of the same material as their dresses, so each time they changed their clothes they had a matching pocket-book. This kind of detail impressed me. It suggested a whole life of marvellous, elaborate decadence that attracted me like a magnet.

From Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf:

This bag was no bag, this purse no purse, flowers no flowers, the fan no fan. All were the plastic material of love, of magic and delight. Each was a messenger, a smuggler, a weapon, a battle cry.

From Cynthia Ozick's Foreign Bodies:

A more conscientious guidebook, the one sequestered at the bottom of her capacious bag - passport, notepad, camera, tissues, aspirin, and so on - was not jaunty.

The purse as acute social marker - one that may suggest a whole life. The bag as the material of love, the bag as smuggler. And the bag as concealment device, capacious mode of sequestering.

More purse thoughts on the way. Soon.

I continue to type

2011-01-27T12:34:00.000-07:00

What more is there to do? I continue to type. And when I type I dream. I hear things. I find the process relaxing but only in a completely nerve wracking way. Typing is without. Without spell check and without Google a mere click away. YouTube is insanely far off. It's science fiction. Typing is humming. Typing is not like a box of chocolates. Typing is glamorous and tawdry. When I type I smoke cigarettes and wear high heels. I type when I'm nervous and I type when I dream I am typing. And that is all the typing for today.

More of the series: is here.

Type Baby

2011-01-20T11:19:00.001-07:00

I've never entertained the thought of putting a 'watermark' on my photos until, well, just now. Firstly, I'm just monkeying around with the camera, having fun. There are quadzillions of people who take their photography seriously and who are extremely talented. I see it on Flickr every day as I cruise through my contacts' photos. These are people who know what the buttons on their camera can do. Me, honestly, not so much.

I've also not wanted to watermark anything because it would mean, to me if no one else, that I thought I was fancy, which could lead me to start taking the whole thing seriously. And I really just want it to be fun. An escape of sorts. Goofing around, for sure. But then yesterday, I googled myself, something I don't do that often since it can be damaging to my fragile and dainty little ego, and lo and behold, people are posting my photos. Weird. Cool. And it seems like I'm being linked back to, so I don't have a huge problem with that. (If they hadn't linked back to me and credited me, I guess I'd never have found them). So, I don't know if I'll stick to putting my name on my photos. Maybe some of them? It's an experiment.

Well, speaking of fun. I've been thinking about the lines in the above photo for a while, and finally had some time to do the typing. Took me a few tries. Here it is on Flickr if you want to see it in a different format.

Okay, so it's interesting, other people linking to, maybe even copying your photos, on the web. Partly it doesn't matter to me that much because I have no hope of making money off of them, you know? And partly because my artistic ego is more tied to my writing. Not that I'm making a mint off of that either, ha. As my three faithful readers of this blog know, the book I'm hoping to get published is an experimental-ish novel about the possibility of a woman art forger. I'm deep into the writing of another book by now, but it's interesting how it's impossible to shake the previous obsession. All those years of thinking about what it means to fake something, what a fake is, and how this affects us as viewers, as consumers. Hmmm.

Last week I received a few books, one that I'd had on order for a while - A Closer Look: Deceptions & Discoveries. (This is the catalogue for the show at the National Gallery in London last fall). Then a book called, Copy, Archive, Signature: A conversation on photography, Jacques Derrida. Haven't had enough time to spend with that at all lately. The last is a copy of "in praise of copying" by Marcus Boon. If you look at the bottom lefthand side of the page on the Harvard site, you can see that it's possible to download the book for free. And I did contemplate doing that. In the end, somehow that felt just too weird. And also, the offering of the thing for free, made me want to pay for it even more.

So, that's all I'll say about books I don't have the time to read. Bad habit, right. But the three of them stacked together are my small offering to the gods of publishing. My book would look very nice intermingled. Just sayin'.

Come quickly! I'm tasting stars!

2010-12-28T16:08:00.004-07:00

And, I would add, sparkly, at times. At least I mean it to be, I pledge that it will be so this upcoming year, my head already full of New Year's foolish resolutions. My usual resolution follows the line by John Maynard Keynes, "My only regret in life is that I did not drink more Champagne." In fact, am doing my best to get a head start on this resolution by drinking pro secco, not being on a champagne budget. However it's a fine one, extra dry. Just the way I like it. And it is still rather like drinking stars, as Dom Perignon was said to have called out upon tasting champagne.

"Come quickly! I'm tasting stars!"

Whatever else 2011 will be, it will be a year to re-group, re-think, re-invent. My most important goals - to have one book accepted for publication, my strange and lonely art forger book, and to finish the other, my strange and lonely book about a purse obsessed woman. I picked up a book of Deleuze essays and found small signs. Do you know what I mean by small signs? Just some tiny clue that I'm not mad, or that I'm on the right path. For the current book,

"Style in a great writer, is always a style of life too, not anything at

all personal, but inventing a possibility of life, a way of existing."

Actually, it works perfectly for both. My art forger book, Hive, is all about the possibility of a woman art forger existing, possibilities. And maybe the second book, though completely unrelated in topic or design or even in language and style, is a continuation of the first. Of course it is. The Grand Obscurity of the Soul is about inventing a way of existing in a particular set of circumstances. A way of life. So. There. And thank you Gilles Deleuze for telling me I'm not entirely crazy.

Okay, and here is a short list of books that I've read, been reading, that maybe fall into the 'weird' category. This is my other goal for this year, to continue to seek out those books that are weird. Which I mean in the most flattering sense of the word. A word whose origin can be traced to a connection with destiny. The Possessed, by Elif Batuman. How Should a Person Be?, by Sheila Heti. Steppenwolf, by Hesse. O Fallen Angel, by Kate Zambreno. The Paper Garden by Molly Peacock. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, by Aimee Bender. Some of these books are not weird weird. Maybe just weird to me because I came upon them just when I needed them. The ending of The Particular Sadness still haunts me. Mainly I'm interested in the blurring of writer and narrator and story in many of these books. How we enter the stories of others. How we appear and disappear. How difficult it is to live with the unbearable, with the frailty of life, just that sometimes. In short, I felt in reading these books, all so different really, a connection with destiny. Though for me always, the weirdest most gorgeous book will always be The Stream of Life.

I mean, in Hive, I wrote for 5 or so years, or 10 depending on where you want to start counting, about a woman art forger, about what is real and what is fake, and yes, how the hell to be, to be real and not fake, even though we commit mad acts of fakery every single day, or at least most of us do. I do. I try not to. Also about fragility. From the introduction to my Deleuze essays, regarding the frail health of artists, "This frailty, however, does not simply stem from their illnesses or neuroses, says Deleuze, but from having seen or felt something in life that is too great for them, something unbearable, "that has put on them the quiet mark of death." " The frailty of my art forger, of all my current characters, this is central to the writing. My frailty is central to the writing. God I am frail, a frail writer.

Okay, and lastly a photograph of a teapot. Puzzle pieces. The blurriness of life. A whole other side of things. My daily escape into colour and light, if all goes well, it is daily. It does not always go well. However, today it did, indeed.

the atmosphere of happiness

2010-12-23T08:09:00.000-07:00

The nest is a lyrical bouquet of leaves. It participates in the peace of the vegetal world. It is a point in the atmosphere of happiness that always surrounds large trees.

~ Gaston Bachelard

Of course I return to nests in this season. The attempt to make one's own nest a point in the atmosphere of happiness. The home as a lyrical bouquet. I look forward today to cleaning, sorting, putting the house into some semblance of order. And listening to Joni Mitchell's Blue. And River. I've always found these melancholy songs to be a source of happiness.

What a strange and difficult year it's been in so many ways. We resolved early on though, R. and I, that we would make something of it nonetheless. One great thing about the poor art market and subsequently slow sales for him, is that he's felt liberated to paint exactly what he wants, to pursue subject matters close to his heart. So it's been a year of gorgeous book paintings. And other experimentations with things like crushed coke cans. And why not? You can tell he's had fun with these, coaxing the paint into these mangled contortions. Yes, they're crushed but still recycle-able. It's been another year of reinvention, always a good thing, albeit painful at the beginning, and the uncertainty ongoing.

As for me, my pledge to write most mornings, early, however mad and tired and fragile and weird it makes me for the rest of the day, has I think paid off. I have maybe written, in 100 word intervals, half a novel. Or so. It's difficult to tell when you're in the midst of it. My 2011 goal is to finish it. And today I think that's even possible. And meanwhile, also for me, these small escapes, excursions into photography. I don't try to analyze them, but I know the snapping makes me happy. A strange liberation, too, to make things, for nothing, no reason, other than for pleasure, to uplift my scrawny soul. To capture these insignificant moments. Nice capture, people say on Flickr. Yes. Which is really all about the light, a split second of light. The slant or scantness or abundance of it. So, for me, too, it's been a year about thinking about light, as a way of being. Noticing how the light enters our Northern suburban nest. Even on the greyest days, the shortest ones.

When I type I dream...

2010-12-11T09:11:00.000-07:00

I wrote a poem in my undergrad inspired by reading Kate Chopin's The Awakening in a women's lit class. The wonderful professor had brought in a CD of Chopin and for half the class we listened. THe poem was inspired by childhood dreams of wanting to play the piano. (I'm not really musically inclined). And then learning to type in high school, on an IBM Selectric I think it was. How liberating - to capture thoughts with such speed. I've since lost the poem, lost the longing to play the piano. I still like typing though. I think the line in the photo above probably says everything the poem was trying to say. Nothing too deep I suppose.

I'm often getting these ideas for series, then realizing that I have no time to carry them through. For example, I'd love to do a series of writers and the things, substances, they write with. Typewriters, computers, pens, pencils, certain types of paper. Those kinds of obsessions. The how and why and what of them.

I copied this quotation out in a tiny notebook this past week:

"It's not time we lack, but concentration." (Adam Zagajewski)

And you know, as much as I complain about a lack of time (and sometimes energy), I think this is true. It's the focus for things, the concentration.

For a few months now we've been rising at 5am. Rob goes to his studio, and I go to my study. It takes a while for me to wake up, be able to stare at the screen. I have a notebook I scribble things in, and I usually read a few lines of one of the books I call magical. Usually something by Clarice Lispector or Helene Cixous. Or Duras. I have until 7am, when it's time to wake up our daughter, make breakfast etc. The secret is not to look at email or facebook or flickr. I don't always succeed. The other secret is to look out the window into the dark. There's a lot that can be seen. My goal is to write one sentence a morning. I set myself small goals that I know I can reach. I concentrate. Most days I will write at least a paragraph. Maybe it's terrible, the whole narrative, the writing, everything, I don't know, but I do adore my characters, am happy living with them. Am happy pouring everything I am into this manuscript, early mornings, alone and fresh from dreams.

But back to typing. You know, I also love writing with a fountain pen. Ink. Choosing the perfect colour of ink for the season. (Summer was green, fall was amber, and winter so far is a smoky shade of blue). But I do like typing. Have created a set on my Flickr page to continue exploring this.

I've also always loved the act of writing. Moving hand over paper. Just that. You?

a refuter

2010-11-04T12:03:00.000-06:00

Again. More of the same. It's really just to get these odd bits out, so that one can go on with spilling, also known as writing. I go on dispirited, but with the conviction that it makes more sense than many other possible conditions. The psychic distortions, contortions, that go into my writing these days. In fact it's taken a long time to achieve these painful states, so I won't wish them away. I always am reading C.L. and it seems even more so now, more deeply. Which seems really odd I suppose. To keep reading the same books for years and years. Circling it, coming back, diving into different waves of the text as it swells and recedes. Well, I've been thinking about obscurity, which is reasonable given the working title of my novel. (Above).

"Consider the infinite freedom of the individual who is without fame and unknown; this is the kind of freedom the philosopher must guard for himself: that every day he may be someone new, a refuter of himself." (Rilke)

I don't mind being a refuter of myself.

Also. Have been thinking about how we see, always thinking about that. How we see ourselves. Thinking about blurriness.

About the length and breadth of shadows.

I was also going to talk about self-portraits, particularly those by women. I'm trying to write a portrait, in my novel. Apparently I scared some people with a self-portrait I posted on Flickr a while back. A lack of make-up was mentioned, which I think is funny, because I don't much wear eye make-up. Sensitive eyes and all that. But there is a sort of nakedness involved in this sort of picture maybe. It's not edited, not photoshopped. Nothing against photoshop, but there is a point when it becomes silly. Not real, even. Yes, definitely not real. Maybe I'm just saying that because I'm too lazy to learn how to use photoshop. Anyway, after taking these photos of myself, I dug up some paintings I did in my 20s from the basement. I painted a fair bit back then. I also painted when I was writing my first book - it seemed to me to be fraudulent to write about paintings, without doing it myself. The self-portraits I did actually amuse me quite a bit - but they're pretty scary to anyone else who has seen them. All of these different sides of myself - some are pretty zen looking, and others are really full of anguish. What I like about them is that they're pretty unadorned and raw. They're pretty ugly I guess too. It seems like I've been yelling this question out to the universe for a very long time - what the hell is beauty? truth?

Anyway, I've been looking at self-portraits on the web and in books. Rosalba Carriera, Alice Neel, Paula Modersohn-Becker and many others. Read somewhere in my wanderings (and now can't find it) the story of how Georgia O'Keefe was given a make-over by Elizabeth Arden and after went home to wash it off as quickly as possible. I've linked before to Diane Wakoski's poem "I Had to Learn to Live with my Face." There's something so totally shocking about the poem, and yet endearing and funny and kind of heartbreaking too. Looking at certain self-portraits, there's a similar shock that I've felt. A weird recognition thing maybe. Seeing yourself exposed in someone else's self-portrait?

I'm drawn to the confessional, no matter how out of fashion it is. Drawn to what is raw and strange and weird. The off-kilter, the obscure. As much as I love looking for beauty in the world, I'm terribly interested in what is ugly. The many facets. Clarice as she confronts the cockroach: "For now, the first timid pleasure that I feel is being able to say that I have lost my fear of the ugly. And that loss is a very great good. It is a delight."

a whole lot of randomness and etcetera.

2010-10-21T19:43:00.000-06:00

To begin with: etcetera etc. Which is a beautiful book about beautiful things beautifully and often surprisingly arranged.

I don't think the photos have much to do with the post. I've been rambling about it in my head for days, but really the crux of the thing is that I'm mindnumbinglytired. Not just physically but mentally. Which has something to do with the state of being a writer more than anything else. So I'm surmising. What it is - is that I'm tired of carving out these little spaces in time. It takes a monumental effort. I'm lucky if these sessions turn into 50 words of anything half decent. I'm not satisfied with what I'm writing but I guess I also know that I felt like this exactly last time out. It's a good thing to feel, because it means I'm going to go back and go back and keep bashing at the thing until it takes the shape I want. Years will pass. That's okay too. Having done this once, I know that it's worth it in the end. So, I'm in that constant state of complete and utter and somewhat weird and insane dissatisfaction and unhappiness about the work, while also feeling that I'm effingontosomething. Have you heard about the Happiness Project - book and blog? I like that whole idea you know, but it's so not for me.

Okay, some more leaves. Told you the pictures would have little to do with the post, though in part, what it might be about is sorrow, (are not leaves sorrowful in their bright glory?) and writing sorrow, and taking on that sorrow a little. Some days, a lot. And there's something about fallen leaves that kill me. So. Partly, I'm blaming my current frame of mind on Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse. Which I suddenly somehow knew I HAD TO READ. And weirdly, I was right. I'd read in the Gorgeous bio of C. Lispector by Benjamin Moser (Geez I give thanks for this book so often it really is brilliant) that she read Steppenwolf early on and it gave her the freedom, mentally, to "pursue her vocation, to describe the inner life." The last couple of weeks I've been slowly reading and re-reading this book and having my mind blown every time I pick it up, and have it take me into its wolfishness and spit me out each time. I'm telling you this is an exhausting sensation especially in its ongoingness. I'm not done with the book yet. I'm now going to read it up against The Hour of the Star and etc. (Etc, meaning the rest of C.L.'s works).

There are a lot of quotable bits in Steppenwolf, the most known I imagine is:

Not for Everybody! For Madmen only!

This reminds me of the preface to C.L.'s The Passion According to G.H.: "This is a book just like any other book. But I would be happy if it were read only by people whose outlook is fully formed."

But for me, this is the line that repeats in my head:

You have a dimension too many.

Meanwhile, the character I'm writing has this element, this destiny of having a dimension too many. She's dealing with a grave moment of sorrow. Or will be as soon as I can crawl to it, because that's what it feels like, I'm on my hands and knees crawling down a gravel road. Something like that. I don't want to take her there, I don't want to go there myself. But it's real. It's difficult. So that's the test right?

I feel like I could start a project called the sorrow project. No disrespect to the happiness project. Honestly. They almost go together if you think about it. The thing is that the more I write, the further along I get, the more I understand the depths of the revisions I'll need to do, the number of tunnels I'll need to dig - thousands.

Anyway. As soon as I finished the Hesse book, I had the idea that I had to re-read The Story of the Stone. (Above). Illusions, dreams, reincarnations, consciousness, the soul. For all of these ideas. Etcetera. (One of my favorite words, I think, etcetera). And it's weird, (also a favorite word), weird to be holding so many books in one's head at once, and that's not necessarily including one's own. It's also weird to have been a 'poet' and then write prose for so many years, invisibly, more or less. And not think of oneself as poet at all. And though I spent 7 years in university and a couple more in college, I'm not at all an academic. I'm respectful of all these things I'm not, you could say that. I feel like I'm in a very in between place. Neither this nor quite yet that. Which is excellent, but wearing too you know?

And lastly, randomly, the boots. The socket. Table legs. Well, paths. Travels, inward travels. The path of art. Moser talks about C.L.'s possible reading of Steppenwolf. "The path of art, and the independence it requires, is a terrible one, he seems to be warning the adolescent Clarice. But Haller also notes, "Those who have no wolf inside them are not, for that reason, happy." "

Those who have no wolf inside them are not, for that reason, happy.

We are so lightly here.....

2010-10-08T10:09:00.001-06:00

So come, my friends, be not afraid.
We are so lightly here.
It is in love that we are made;
In love we disappear.

(Leonard Cohen, Boogie Street)

Thinking about lightness, about flight, about who and what I love, about tenderness. Wishing for more time. Alas.

From Helene Cixous:

One can die from being unable to write in time
the book one has in one's body.

This is what writing feels like this week. A death.

So melodramatic. So true.

All of these fluctuations.

Yes.

The Mystery Does Not Get Clearer

2010-09-26T15:54:00.000-06:00

"The mystery does not get clearer by repeating the question,
nor it is bought with going to amazing places.

Until you've kept your eyes
and your wanting still for fifty years
you don't begin to cross over from confusion."

That's Rumi.

I've been yearning for amazing places, which actually is not like me. I'm usually quite content to stay in my room. Read about Dakini's Bliss this morning on Facebook, with thanks to Pema Chodron. I have a new name for the anxiety and rawness of emotions I've been feeling lately and this makes me happy.

When I've lost my nerve for writing, or just generally lost my nerve, I usually go to Clarice Lispector. This week it was The Passion According to G.H. "All you need to do is see the initials G.H. in the leather of my luggage to know that's me. And I have never demanded of anyone else anything more than the mere coverage of the initials of their names."

Do you remember when a person put their initials on suitcases? Monograms seem to be all the rage - I suppose they have been for a while. That impulse though - to put our initials on things - I find that interesting. To be known in that small way. It's something, I think.

The weekend was restorative. Filled with hiding, escaping, not answering the phone (sorry A.), baking, cooking, cleaning, gardening and even napping. We spent time together, doing nothing, reading, taking photographs. I feel almost human again.

I feel so blessed to have a kid who when you say, do you want to go and fly around the front yard with swaths of fabric so I can take photos of it, says, sure. She seems to get what I'm after right away. And she's also a great hand model. : )

Meanwhile, have had this song stuck in my head all weekend:

It's only life after all.....

up down up down

2010-09-21T11:45:00.003-06:00

After a week of going madly in all directions, ridiculous interruptions, and general despair at the absence of the muse, today - a decent morning of writing. The thing to do when mired down in bog of despond: read. Take photos. Take a walk. The photo above makes me wildly happy, who knows why. The colours, the silliness, the slightness of it perhaps.

A person should always read this bit from Woolf's diary when feeling a failed and stupid writer:

"A note: despair at the badness of the book: can't think how I ever could write such stuff - and with such excitement: that's yesterday: today I think it good again. A note, by way of advising other Virginias with other books that this is the way of the thing: up down up down - and Lord knows the truth."

So, yes, today I think my obscure book quite good again.

I repeat, up down up down. Reassuring somehow isn't it? Tomorrow it will be back to despair at the badness. : )

Interesting how I take more photos when the writing is going well. I also fill my diary up with more nonsense. Feathers and leaves are suddenly magical.

I read an essay by Christa Wolf on Ingeborg Bachmann this past week. Re-read. I'm finding I need to revisit all my old books right now rather than delve into anything new. What I love about this particular passage is that Wolf seems the perfect reader for Bachmann, and that too is reassuring. She says,

"When you get ready to read this prose, you should not expect to find stories, descriptions of actions, information about events; neither characters in the ordinary sense of the word nor loud assertions. You will hear a voice: daring and lamenting. A voice that suits the truth, that is: talking about what is certain and uncertain, on the basis of personal experience. And a voice that truthfully goes silent when it doesn't know what to say."

I could read this paragraph all day.

The Isolation of Writing

2010-09-09T12:13:00.000-06:00

What I've been reading (re-reading) lately: Friendship by Blanchot. It's strange, but I don't remember reading the part where he talks about Kafka, about the "uninterrupted writing" as an "unapproachable space." This dream of writing, alone, for months at a time, that's my dream too. I dream about it, but do I really want it? No, I don't. Yes, I do. Kafka (I've read his diaries too and also completely forget them) talks about entering the isolation of writing, not like a hermit, but "as a dead man." The completion of his books are resolved "in and by interruption (under the spell of the fragmentary)."

I've long been quoting V. Woolf's: "...for interruptions there will always be." What writer hasn't resolved to write in and by interruption? Anything else would be mad. Yet, hovering around me, that dream, the dream of a span of time, uninterrupted. Maybe it's the dream I want, and what I need is to continue to fall 'under the spell of the fragmentary.' Let's hope. Meanwhile, the resolution to write as a dead woman, uninterruptable in my fragmentariness....

And the red typewriter? It somehow belongs to the book I'm writing, to the character I'm writing. It came painted red, by a previous owner.

Meanwhile, I've borrowed it. Photographed it. And even made it into a greeting card etc. which you could purchase here. (My ImageKind link is also on the sidebar).

Meanwhile, listening to this album. Sweet lyrics.

And longing, LONGING, for this exhibit. Which is only up until end of January.

Summer Blur

2010-09-04T13:32:00.001-06:00

Oh, summer was a blur alright. A good blur, right up until the moment last week when my computer (after a few death throes) gave up the ghost. Turns out they don't call it the black screen of death for nothing. A person less in denial might have seen the warning signs and jotted a few email addresses down, saved a few more things to disc. So, you know, if you haven't heard from me, I'm not ignoring you, really I'm not. I just don't happen to have your email address committed to memory. Most of the people I know are on facebook, and they've heard me bleat via the status line about the whole computer death, switchover, and my learning curve on my new one, a Mac. There are definitely some things I need to wrap my brain around. I also need a get rich quick scheme, cuz, I sure hadn't factored in the price of a new computer to my summer budget.

So fall is here, the apples are ready to be picked. The kid is back in school. The writing can begin again. In my mind, after the labour day weekend, I'm going into hermit-mode for at least a month. I'm not the sort to go on writing retreats, in fact, have never been on one ever. Ever. Weird, isn't it? Sometimes I think I'm the only writer in the known universe to not 'retreat.' Nor do I wish to. Here's what I want. On my days off, Tuesday and Thursday, to hole up all day and write. And read and stare out the window and take notes and drink a gallon of coffee and stare out the window some more. This to me is heaven. (And sometimes hell, but who said being a writer was going to be fun, or a piece of cake, or layer cake....see photo below). If things work out I can even get a bit of time to myself to research and jot notes down on the weekends. I also plan on getting out of bed at about 5am every day, starting on, say Tuesday, so that I can write for an hour or two first thing. I still think of myself as a nightowl, and not a morning person, but this is what's available, so I'm going to take it.

All in all, though, it was a great summer. Great friends, great wine, great friends who brought me great wine. I can't complain.

Interestingly, I have a daughter who is crafty and also likes to cook. I'm not so crafty, and I don't like to cook, but because she does, we do. And really it ends up being a lot of fun. And since I like to eat, the cooking part is excellent. She did the narwhal embroidery above, and me, the silly tea towel below. The quotation is great, but who knows why I thought it would make a great t-towel. However, sitting at the table and chatting while we worked was really brilliant and I hope we do more of this. Beats the TV any day.

In conclusion, do not hurry, do not rest. Welcome to fall, cooler temperatures, more time and the pleasures of a routine. Happy writing to those of you who write. : )

And, one last photo, just because. Pretty colours and all that.

Sitting, Silence, Sanity

2010-08-14T09:23:00.000-06:00

Summer is winding down. The garden is certainly past its peak. I just want to sit quietly and take it all in. I need to be alone more, silent more. I sometimes feel like I spend the entire day scrambling, organizing, contriving, just so that I can be alone for a couple of hours in the garden (see photo below), and then half the time this is kiboshed by some unknown force anyway. During the week we rise at 5:30 or 6 and I've learned to head right to the spot above. I write in a notebook and also in my journal for at least an hour. This has mostly saved my sanity this summer, and I plan on continuing it in the fall, though I have so many notes, there will be a point when I need to work on the computer first thing.

Other summer sanity savers: Good books, mellow music, some wonderful movies, and most importantly, a rather ridiculous amount of wine.

I did read some excellent books this summer: a couple of novels and a book of essays by Siri Hustvedt were among my favorites.

Am currently loving this song.

But mainly, have felt too often like Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight.

Am happy with the increasing randomness of this blog. Once in a while I get a great idea for a project, or a series of interviews, and then I remember - I'm too damned tired and I'm writing a novel.

Meanwhile, I've finally figured out my 'comments issue.' The option to leave a comment has been there for quite a while, but you could only see it when you clicked on the post title. Long story short, I clicked the appropriate button, and voila, now they're visible on the main page as well. Also loving the new Blogger spam control which saves me from being spammed by people from overseas trying to sell purses in my comments.

Arrivals and Departures by Nina Berkhout

2010-08-10T12:06:00.000-06:00

There's nothing more grand than coffee in the backyard when your child is at a summer art camp. Unless, it's accompanied by a book of poetry written by a dear friend. To read Arrivals and Departures by Nina Berkhout is to be swept into a Rilkean sea, waves crashing, relentless and delicate, grief-filled and wise.

The pared down lines, the dangerous lull of the rhythmic waves that make up the poems, and the narrator's perfect distance, are utterly breathtaking in combination.

The Guardian of Your Soul is Near

2010-08-02T10:55:00.000-06:00

It is August. I'm exhausted. Feeling fragile. I've been having cravings for winter, the dead cold silence of winter. (This is obviously a form of madness). For alone. All these things will pass. When I'm not writing enough, I'm off-kilter. I'm falling apart.

Feathers often find me. I'm attuned to the sound of feathers falling. Usually they're white. I knew I had finished my novel, Hive, when I opened the front door and found a white feather. The novel ends with a white feather.

But this black one. It found me, I found it, it arrived, yesterday. I looked up the meaning on Ye Olde Web, and found this: "a black feather means the guardian of your soul is near." I looked no further. The primary character in my work in progress is interested / obsessed not only with purses and handbags, but with the philosophy of the soul. She needs a guardian for her soul. This black feather belongs to her.

that Loveliness was complete

2010-07-27T18:59:00.000-06:00

Quite some time ago I indulged myself, and bought this copy of the facsimile of Jane Austen's Sanditon. (I don't think this site existed at the time). I love having it, and at one time was so obsessed with it, that I thought I might write a book, somehow, about this manuscript, about how I was pacing around it, dreaming around it. I wrote several poems that I've abandoned, one of which I robbed from and used in my as yet unpublished novel about a possible woman art forger, Hive: A Forgery. I was mainly obsessed with the phrase, "that Loveliness was complete." In the Austen manuscript (as you can see in the note above) the line appears on the first page, at the bottom, but belongs with the text on page 32. I find this phrase terribly moving maybe mainly because of its placement, the way that it can be found there, mentally returned to its proper place in Chapter 3. It's just a moment of logistics, getting things down, a running out of room. I love this fragment from an unfinished novel, and I loved working on my abandoned poems. It somehow made sense to me to add this phrase and bits of my abandoned poem into Hive, which also contains fragments, brushstrokes, from an earlier version. I'd written about 100 pages, when I realized the voice was wrong, the telling of it was off kilter. I deleted this version, but had printed off about 5 or 6 pages that I though had moments. Out of the 5 or 6 pages, maybe 2 or 3 end up in the final version.

I took the book outside today, in the sun, after reading Bachelard's The Poetics of Reverie. (Another book I often return to). He writes,

"Often the dream of flight is a dream without wings."

I held the book up to the sky, dreaming of flight, dreaming my next book.

This is how reading is, and even more so, writing - a sudden take off, the sensation of lifting off, leaving earth.

(I've posted the set of photos from this aft on my Flickr page, here).

Purse Portraits

2010-07-15T16:00:00.000-06:00

It goes without saying, the writing life is pretty odd. The novel I'm writing (it seems odd to call it a novel, but maybe at 80 pages of prose and counting it's safe to say that it won't turn into poetry or transmogrify into a collection of essays) is the portrait of a young woman obsessed with handbags and purses. That's really all I feel like giving away at this stage. Wouldn't want to jinx anything. Although in truth, it's all likely to change anyway.

Writing a novel about a person obsessed, means that you get to follow their obsessions around a bit, try them on. I've got a whole shelf of books by now on purses and handbags. Books on vintage handbags, the history of handbags, how to divine a woman by her handbag, and my favorite book: Bags which is the catalogue for The Museum of Bags and Purses. Possibly it goes without saying that my character will at some point end up there. With some luck, this means that in the next year or so, I also will end up there. Wish me luck....bags of it, yes?

In the meantime, I'm mixing my obsession with taking photos, with my character's obsession with purses. The photos here are the result of a shoot this afternoon - a series I'm calling, "Purse Portraits." I mean, I'm just doing this to amuse myself, but also to think about purses, to really see them, these things that we just sling over our shoulder usually, casually draping a large part of pretty important and revealing stuff, and dashing out the door.

I'll leave you to them.

Conversation About Beauty

2010-07-10T08:44:00.000-06:00

Thinking about beauty, looking for beauty, contemplating such things as bird's nests and typewriters. "I see blue skies, I see butterflies." (There is Beauty in the World). Re-reading Elaine Scarry's 1999 book, On Beauty and Being Just. She talks about the 'banishing of beauty from the humanities" and the "political complaints against beauty." Not, she says, that beautiful things, stories, poems etc have been banished, but "that conversation about the beauty of these things has been banished, so that we coinhabit the space of these objects.......yet speak about their beauty only in whispers." Has this been true in the humanities since? I can't say, being quite out of the loop. That loop, certainly.

From Blue Studios: "I just didn't want beauty in my poetry: any hint was an invitation to a slippery slope of the feminine. Beauty was too nice, too expected, too complicit with what the feminine was in poetry, and by extension, what the female was." She goes on, "In any event I tried not to write beauty (rhetorical staginess, lovely images, and the mellifluous) but to write language, to write syntax, to write austerely. Or to compose a beauty so hard and selective, yet in intense visionary images, as to contain its suspect presence." (p. 220, 221). You can tell how much I like this book by all the dogeared pages in the image above.

In the novel I have recently finished, about the possibility of the existence of a woman art forger, I did want beauty in my narrative, in my forgery. (The subtitle of the book is, A Forgery). She is undiscovered, my forger. (An increasingly difficult feat as technology advances in forgery detection). Her motivation is in fact, beauty, the revelation of a mystical colour via secrets embedded in her forgeries. The best way for a forgery to go undetected? To be whole, beautiful. Fake busters, as they're called, experts in forgery detection, have a sort of sixth sense for knowing that something is odd, off, unfinished, off-kilter. So, in my narrative, beauty isn't hidden, but is what hides, or contains, a suspect presence. In my mind, the whole narrative hangs together only if the reader believes in the beauty of the narrative, in the beauty of the art forgeries and in their capacity to fool or take in the viewer.

It's an odd place to be in. Having one book behind you, not yet published, and working on the next. It's necessary to sort through in my mind what it was I thought I was doing in the previous book, to be aware of how it's infringing on the one in progress. Even though they're two completely different works, there is communication between them, if that makes sense.

Meanwhile, although I've stopped checking my Google alert for art forgery, things will come to my attention like this show at the National Gallery in London, titled Close Examinations: Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries. Of course, I'm immediately intrigued, especially by headlines such as "A Blonde's Dark Secret." And though my research has taken an entirely different turn for the book in progress, how could I resist the catalogue for this exhibition??

Suddenly Born into Color (Rumi)

2010-06-28T06:47:00.000-06:00

"Inside this new love, die.

Your way begins on the other side.

Become the sky.

Take an axe to the prison wall.

Escape.

Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.

Do it now.

You're covered with thick cloud.

Slide out the side. Die,

and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign

that you've died.

Your old life was a frantic running

from silence.

The speechless full moon

comes out now."

~ Rumi

Listen...

2010-06-24T14:55:00.002-06:00

Thinking about listening today. Have you read the essay "The Art of Listening" by Brenda Ueland? It is an art, listening. "Listening is love," she says. The backyard today - wild with birdsong. Then a lawn mower started. There was noise from the highway we live too close to. Noise from the construction of the overpass, also nearby. Fountain trickling. It's possible to concentrate on the water when one is in the correct frame of mind, and ignore the traffic. It is. It's taken me 11 years to come to that particular silence though.

Well, listening. Have you seen the defunct listenbird blog? I guess graffiti has been outlawed in this town so well, there's no longer listenbird graffiti.

I hope this kind of listening really goes on. Sceptical.

I took some time to breathe in my favorite book this very morning. To absorb the sadness of flowers. Oh, I have more to say about the sadness of flowers. But that will have to wait.

Will you take a look at the page I made on ImageKind? If you like some of the photos I've been taking lately, you can have them turned into greeting cards and the like.......Here's the link, and also one on the side bar: ImageKind.

An Impossible Standard

2010-06-13T08:07:00.000-06:00

What am I in this instant? I'm a typewriter making the dry keys echo in the dark, humid dawn. I haven't been human for a long time.

(Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life)

And this week? Has been a week of abundance, blooms. Offerings. Good showers of rain followed by the mystery of light on clean, new leaves. The littlest birds singing the prettiest songs. The world green (and yes, disarming). But I did not write enough, or type enough in the dark humid dawn, or read enough and so maybe that is why there were also moments of profound loneliness. If loneliness is the right word.

I won't forget that there have been small lovely moments lately, such as learning that the sublime Ariel Gordon has included Calm Things in her list of night table recommendations. I heartily recommend her first book of poetry, Hump. I've had the pleasure of hearing her read poems from it on two occasions, and can tell you that it is in turns tender (in an anti-sentimental fashion), witty, surprising and bold.

Re-reading Blue Studios by Rachel Blau Duplessis. Arrested, once again, by this: "I try to write so that if a single shard were rescued in the aftermath of some historical disaster, that one shard would be so touching and lucid as to give the future an idea of who we were......It is, of course, an impossible standard but not the less compelling for that reason."

What are you going through? (Clutching a big white purse in her left hand)

2010-06-08T10:15:00.001-06:00

from Simone Weil's book Waiting for God:

In the first legend of the Grail, it is said that the Grail (the miraculous vessel that satisfies all hunger by virtue of the consecrated Host) belongs to the first comer who asks the guardian of the vessel, a king three-quarters paralyzed by the most painful wound, "What are you going through?"

This is a question I try to ask, that I've been working through, around, that the characters in the novel I'm writing at the moment, ask or refrain to ask each other. A simple question that is most difficult to ask, to arrive at. I'm re-reading the really brilliant, god-send of a book, Why This World: A Biograpy of Clarice Lispector by Benjamin Moser. To write what she wrote, what did she go through? This is the question that seems to permeate the biography.

Near the end of the book Moser talks about an interview conducted near the end of her life, February 1977. From Moser, "The footage is difficult to watch. With her famously penetrating gaze, Clarice stares straight at the interviewer, her face an almost immobile mask. She sits in a drab leather chair, clutching a big white purse in her left hand and a Hollywood cigarette in her right, burned hand. Smoking incessantly in the middle of a giant gray studio, punctuating the interview with long, pregnant silences, she answers the question in her strange and unmistakable voice."

I wish I could speak Portuguese, but it's magical to hear her voice, that alone. Moser, thankfully, includes quotations from the interviews in his book, in translation. In talking about the reception of The Passion According to G.H. she notes the discrepancies in understanding. She says, "It either touches people, or it doesn't. I mean, I guess the question of understanding isn't about intelligence, it's about feeling, about entering into contact."

It all comes down to this, I think, to the question of understanding. To feeling. And as for one's writing, it either touches people, or it doesn't.

Me and My Gin.....

2010-06-05T08:09:00.001-06:00

Why Make Ugliness?

2010-06-01T14:48:00.002-06:00

"With such riches, why make ugliness? I've always felt like a depositary of these gifts, responsible for them. One must overcome one's own dejection, suffering, and doubts, and buckle down to the immense job of painting, which is a baptism, an immersion in God's beauty."

(from Vanished Splendors: A Memoir, Balthus)

A day of oddness, rejection. These are not necessarily unhealthy moments. They can solidify one's position. For example, I am firmly on the side of loveliness.

So. Here's to overcoming one's dejection, rejection, doubts. To the lost and to the found.

"Oh, my love, things are very delicate."

2010-05-30T08:09:00.000-06:00

I am interested in the balance of life, in how to balance the creative life. I am interested in unbalanced lives. I'm interested in work, in creating space for writing, for art. I'm one of those people who want to disappear into the work, remain hidden. Jane Hirschfield talks about Descartes motto: "He who lives well lives well hidden" in her book, Hiddenness, Uncertainty, Surprise. (I keep bringing this book up, don't I?). She then quotes D.W. Winnicott on "the dilemma of childhood": "It is a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found."

I wonder how we find those books we need. It's a mysterious process. Sometimes you read about them in other books that you find and love. A friend gives you a book, wordlessly. You stumble upon it on your strange forays into the web that is the internet. You're drinking wine outdoors late at night with friends in the early spring. A book is mentioned, scrawled onto a napkin. Or, you're in a bookstore, a library, and the book literally falls off the shelf before you. This happens, I assure you, it does. Maybe you're reading a blog and you come across a brief reference or read a short excerpt.

You could say I'm trying to justify these completely indulgent, rambling posts to myself, where I might talk about the weather (it's snowing outside this morning, and snowed yesterday whereas for the last two weeks we've been drinking wine and eating cheese in backyards in the evenings), and where I might tell you what I've been reading.

The week began, you see, with Mary Oliver. Dream Work.

"What is the name

of the deep breath I would take

over and over for all of us? Call it

whatever you want, it is

happiness, it is another one

of the ways to enter

fire."

and

"Mostly, I want to be kind.

And nobody, of course, is kind,

or mean,

for a simple reason.

And nobody gets out of it, having to

swim through the fires to stay in

this world."

I've been mulling over: happiness, kindness, all of the various fires we swim through, attempt to enter, find, spark. That happiness is one of the doors to the fire - isn't that a brilliant thing to know, to think about? as we go about trying to balance the creative and the mundane. I needed this week to read Oliver's lines on kindness - just so simple and true, bare writing. What is kindness? how? I sat with these lines and scrawled them into my own diary and tried to absorb them, and apply them to situations and conversations. Interesting to read poetry this way. Just to live with a few lines for a week. Or more.

I moved from Mary Oliver to my beloved Clarice Lispector. The Passion According to G. H. It seems a leap, a jump, from Oliver to Lispector. I don't know that it is. I've read this book several times, and frequently dip back into it. Yesterday it snowed, and the flowers that we had planted in terra cotta pots needed to be moved indoors. The whole time we moved them in, the line from Lispector, "Oh, my love, things are very delicate" kept repeating in my head.

So what have I been been trying to get at here? A sort of thinking out loud. About. The creative balance - trying to strike it. Entering the fire, while remaining happy, practicing kindness, recognizing how delicate things are. Well, mostly I just have the question, you know, how? How to remain hidden, how to be found? How to be kind? What is kindness even? What are you going through? In what ways are you delicate? Oh, my loves....

Pre-Existence of the Soul

2010-05-21T07:46:00.000-06:00

Once in a while life aligns, the universe cooperates - so that I have several days in a row to write. For three days I didn't have to go to work, had no errands of significance to run, the groceries were stocked up, and I had no appointments, unexpected emergencies or mini-crises crop up. The phone did not ring much either, and when it did it was pretty much good-ish news. This sort of run can only happen, say, twice a year, maybe three times.

What can I say, but that this was bliss? I awoke early, wrote. Then the breakfast, dog walk ritual. Then back to the computer for most of the morning. But there was also time to sit in my window seat in the afternoons, drink diet coke, read, dream, scribble in a notebook. I had time to follow strange paths, read about the pre-existence of souls. In one book I read about the various incarnations in film and on stage of the Bluebird of Happiness. I found the original on Project Gutenberg. I watched snippets on YouTube. I downloaded the Betty Carter version of the song. Who knows if any of this has anything to do with the book I'm writing.

I also took photos, which seems also to have nothing to do with what I'm writing. But I do know that it sharpens my senses, rights my equilibrium. To look at blossoms, the way they look through the bars of a birdcage hung in the tree. I have a feeling that everything you do, see, that you are, will seep into a book that you spend a long time writing, revising.

One of the books I dipped into was Fanny Howe's The Winter Sun. I like what she says about revising: "One way to understand your own condition is to write something and spend a long time revising it. The errors, the hits and misses, the excess - erase them all. Now read what you have rewritten out loud in front of some other people. They will hear something that you didn't say aloud. They will hear what was there before you began revising and even before the words were written down. You won't hear anything but the humming of your own vocal cords."

Today is the re-entry back into the world, back to work. It's painful. There is truly a tearing sensation, as I'm being torn from my real work. This is fine. I'm not one to waste such moments. I'm resolved that this condition will be dormant, buried, humming, in some layer or other of the narrative I'm writing, even though you won't hear me describe it.

Green Again

2010-05-16T08:22:00.002-06:00

The garden is coming to life. 5:30 am the birds are singing. I try to remember to ask myself every morning, what is it that you love? (Rumi: "Let the beauty we love be what we do.") Today, thinking about blessings, blossoms, hidden things, green things. About those things that blur. About how we see things, about the blurry edges of the world, about uncertainty. There are groups on Flickr devoted to bokeh, afficionados of the blurry background, of a pleasing sensory confusion. I find this heartening.

It is heartening that so many people are seeking, noticing the various effects of light, trying to capture these moments, to breathe them in a little, to still things, to witness. I'm reminded of this quotation by Sven Nykvist:

Light can be gentle, dangerous, dreamlike, bare, living, dead, misty, clear, hot, dark, violet, springlike, falling, straight, sensual, limited, poisonous, calm and soft.

I've been re-reading Jane Hirshfield's Hiddenness, Uncertainty, Surprise. She quotes Cavafy: "From my most unnoticed actions, / my most veiled writing - / from these alone will I be understood." How to hide, how to be understood, both at once? I'm sure I don't know.

I've been reading Lorri Neilsen Glenn's Lost Gospels. A glorious book. One that I might not have found, had I not been a part of the Edmonton Poetry Festival. When I agree to read, I know it's going to be difficult. I'm a shy person. I know there will be anxiety, odd amounts of stress and in short, I am pained by it. Sleep will be lost. I can laugh about it, but the difficulty and discomfort is real. I also think that shyness is an important place to speak from, read from and write from. It's not to be wished away.

I keep reading one poem in her book over and over, "Faith."

Uncertainty is the truth,
says the ajahn; sit and wait
for nothing to grow
but the small fire in your ears
which you can feed with anything you find nearby:
birdsong, perhaps, or the echoes
of trouble. Desire. Until the smoke
has cleared. Until everything goes.

The old country of awareness
has no record of your name.
Your name. You could do well
to give that up, too.

I'm glad I left the suburbs to hear Lorri read, glad that I emerged from my hiddenness, my suburban hermitage, for this poem that reminds me to feed the small fires, to give up my name. To find this poetic voice that is both so wise and gracefully uncertain.

Spring, I think, is a good time to think of uncertainty, about those things that can be given up. About faith. It always takes me a while in the spring to believe in green again, to feed the fires with it. To re-learn how to see it and to adjust to its many hues and variations. Also, to get over, to forgive, its long abandonment. To slightly recall.....

"...and always we have forgotten our former states,
except in early spring when we slightly recall
being green again."

(Rumi)

A really long post about ekphrasis, my reading at the Ed. Po-Fest, and ending in a big glass of wine.

2010-05-05T17:15:00.001-06:00

I've been promising to bore a few friends who weren't able to make it to the See This / Hear Me: Visual Poetry reading that was part of the Edmonton Poetry Festival with a vague re-enactment of my own portion of the presentation that night. It was probably one of the coolest readings I've been a part of and the other readers were beyond brilliant: derek beaulieu, Daniel Scott Tysdale and Jolanta Lapiak. A real honour to stand up with them and I encourage you to seek out their work.

So. Here goes. Some of this comes from the actual presentation/reading, and some comes from conversations before and after, over big glasses of wine.

Because I've been writing and thinking about art for over a decade, not to mention living with an artist for about twice that amount of time, I thought it would be appropriate, if not completely and totally self-indulgent, to look at some themes that persist in my work, and continue to interest me. Although ekphrasis is a term that most poets are familiar with these days, I remember using it while writing my first book, All the God-Sized Fruit, and always having to define it, to assure people I was not coughing: ekphrasis. Gesundheit!

Of course, I'm interested in the how of seeing, and I'm interested in the gestures of painting, the actual movements of brush, in the mud and muck and slobber of paint, and in the communion of colour. The image below is a photograph I took recently of the palette of my partner, Robert Lemay. To me, it's very cool that this rather abstract looking substance can turn into quite a realist painting through mixing, pushing, dabbing, daubing, buttering and etc.

I'm also interested in modes of ekphrasis, in picture theories and in what W.J.T. Mitchell calls the gap between word and text. I'm interested in finding ways around, or through, the understood competition between painter and writer (see the title poem in All the God-Sized Fruit for an earlier working through) in the ekphrastic mode. I could go on about Mitchell's Picture Theory I suppose at length, but hey, I had time constraints the night of the reading, and as for right now, there's a glass of vino waiting for me at the end of this blog post. (I try not to drink and blog these days...)

I've had the following quotation by Mitchell rattling around in my small brain for a decade now, and feel now it's a good time for the reveal:

“...we still do not know exactly what pictures are, what their relation to language is, how they operate on observers and on the world, how their history is to be understood, and what is to be done with or about them.” (W.J.T. Mitchell, in Picture Theory)

I myself am still thinking about all the ways in which images / pictures operate on observers. Honestly, what is to be done with or about them?

Meanwhile, another topic I've been occupied with is that of fraudulence. Also forgery, authenticity, and copying. The first poem in my first book (ATGSF) is about an art forger, and I've just finished a novel-like book about the possible existence of a woman art forger. So obviously, I'm also interested in getting away with things, but also with transparence and how we show our indebtedness to those from whom we thieve/borrow or to whom we allude. The image above is from a village in China, Dafen, where they produce famous works to order.

I think this one is mainly just me trying to work in a photo of myself standing in front of a Gentileschi painting at the Met. A really great memory. Okay, true that, but I was looking over my past work and thinking how I hadn't even SEEN an Artemisia Gentileschi painting when I wrote that first book I keep talking about and how I wrote an entire series of poems about her. I only saw this painting last year. While putting together this presentation for the Po-Fest I began toying around with this idea I've had for a while, where I write a whole book of what I call 'gesture poems' - where I translate paintings in a more abstract sort of way. Taking them back to the palette so to speak. I wanted to write a gesture poem about the above painting, so I went to the Met site and started looking at this painting inch by inch, zooming in and then printing off select zooms, details, or whatever you'd like to call them.

I mean, is that not amazing?? You can do it too, just go to the Met site and zoom away. I spent a whole day looking at this painting when I should have been preparing for this presentation thingie or writing a poem. When I wrote that first book, having black and white images reproduced in the book was a BIG damned deal. Huge actually. I could write several blog posts on that process but I have a feeling the effect would be acutely soporific.

I couldn't help thinking through this intense and lovely day of procrastination about the ways in which technology changes how we approach an image, or an ekphrastic poem or passage in a prose work. We know that when we're vieiwing a painting at the Met we can go home and check it out inch by inch online. We can almost always very quickly look the image up after reading an ekphrastic poem. But part of what ekphrasis was originally for, I think, is that it would allow the listener to shut their eyes and SEE the image, envision what isn't there - something they're not likely to have the opportunity to see. You know, back in the day before WestJet, Google and airmiles at the grocery store. I mean, I seriously don't have any answers. Lord, I barely have time to write this crazy blog post before my daughter gets home from her yoga class. And you should know, I broke down and am now having a glass of wine.

The rest of the presentation by me, was a reading, where I read my shrimp woman poem from ATGSF with the image I'm talking about on the screen behind me. There is a whole bunch of name-calling that went down in the contemporary criticism of the painting (which I'm sure would be much easier to track down now than it was in 1997 when I wrote the dang poem). So, that's what that poem was trying to subvert/soften, goof around with.

Then I read "Passages of Red" from Against Paradise which is about Titian's red drapery. If you think about it, it's really a sort of gestures poem....I had been thinking about the process way back when.

Then I read a poem from my latest book, Red Velvet Forest, a poem called, you guessed it, "Red Velvet." It's mostly about this painting, below, painted by my partner, Robert Lemay.

I ended by reading a poem titled, "Notional Ekphrasis: Painting of Woman Sitting in a Museum Writing." I like the whole idea of notional ekphrasis - describing a painting that you've imagined. What I'm doing in this is fooling around with Mitchell's Picture Theory. You know I was so nervous the night of the reading I probably didn't even mention that. I was trying to embed his formulations of ekphrastic hope/fear/indifference and whatnot into the poem. I thought it might be a good opening to that book I might write about the gestures of painting. I actually think it's more of an essay than a poem when I look at it now. The other question is, is it too long to post here? But I'll give it a whirl and say arrivederci and head to my big glass of wine now.

The essay/poem:

Notional Ekphrasis: Painting of Woman Sitting in a Museum Writing

Still. She sits, she stations herself. First in a hum a milling crowd. Before she had stood. This distance. That. Stood in the corner off to the side. Left. Returned. Is transfixed. Now sits elbow on crossed knee, back curved. Encounters, recognizes, hears hidden echoes. On the chestnut leather bench. Medium Firm. Posture. She thinks about her posture. Back not so straight as she’d like. Squints. Thinks wrinkles, crows’ feet, blinks, smooths. Alone now. Docent vacates. Can see a sleeve, a leaning against the threshold. Feels harmless, assessed. Thinks about wombs ports dominions. She raises her arm slightly. Strokes air alone, daub dab swish. Filled brimming with honeysuckled ekphrastic hope ecstatic. Secretly she had wished, wishes, she could paint. That she could merge with colour, Venetian pink, alizarin crimson, turmeric, common madder, verdigris. Takes out small leather bound notebook. Pencil point on paper. Rests. She gazes. Raises an eyebrow. Discerns, is ironic, melts, quavers, envies. Is pulled. She wonders what the painter kept, held back. The painting the paint the colours the brushstrokes – in turn violent and soothing and incomprehensible wild – the image enters her skin. Speaks to her. Begins a mute quarrel. She resists holds back she engages responds soaks up sensuously she understands. Shudders sparks breathless bliss. Closes her eyes, leans back, lips apart, listens, feels the sparks, the rhythms of intimate gestures. No, yes, now, leans in drowns in a din of colour, delightedly smitten, chosen to receive, to be astonished in this exact way. She is conscious, tranquil, she ponders the symptoms of Stendhal’s syndrome. Remembers Achille’s shield, remembers destiny, sincere trembling. Thinks about the unutterable order of things, their eloquent circuitry, of picture theories, of shift and turn, of representin’, of representation, of suturing text and image. The quarrel becomes louder, tense, she meets it she praises lingers languishes in deception juxtaposition translation replication. She gives and gives. She distorts, desires, invents. Battles struggles. What are limitations? Verklempt, she envoices, ventriloquizes gives voice. Critiques flatters falters is afraid. She fears collapse. Overcomes. Wades into illusion quill to lip. Truth? Reality? Souls revealed? She battens flattens returns to battle to antagonism she speaks to, speaks from, knows secrets knows silence embraces limitations enters the gap the convex mirror the rabbit hole the old duck-rabbit conundrum, hears vases talk, jars talk, pipes disclaim. Phantoms the gap between language and image. Is ambivalent. Has failed. Aesthetically. She sits in the site of minor yet glorious aesthetic failure. Wind knocked out of her. Deflated where before she had been elated. Ekphrasis as fraudulence, full knowledge of that, sunk, drowning, shuddering. She sits a sham without words beyond words pretty as a picture. Waits, hope, a lesser hope returns. She sits with beauty with truth with eye of the beholder, she’s been operated upon by images, been under surveillance, been invisible, just yesterday she bought the latest shade of lipstick. But now she sees an excess an interarticulated impatient moment. She collects unravelments excess with butterfly nets, looks over her shoulder. Fight gone out of her replaced with questions theories possibilities sensations interpretations conversions reconfigurations captivations awe. Stands. Takes one last sturdy look around the room, drinks of it, closes her notebook, takes it with her.

Shrouded or Shuttered. Fluctuations and Obligations. No Assurances. And the Shape of the Heart.

2010-05-04T11:07:00.006-06:00

Am fluctuating between Coldplay and Chopin this morning, watching the spring snow fall while I sit at my desk - that privilege. Wandering through poems by Neruda, the Dhammapada, and Woolf's diaries. Underlined this by Woolf: "I feel I can use up everything I've ever thought." This is from her entry of Monday, October 15th. She also records that she wrote her 100th page of Mrs. Dalloway the same day. That she is maybe writing 50 words a morning.

I love details like these, coming across them. As for me, I wrote my 6oth page this morning, and I'm proceeding at a similar pace. Very happy if I can write 50 words, 4 or 5 mornings a week. I also have notebooks full of plot outlines - mostly abandoned. Also, possible endings, scenes, quotations, words. This quotation from Woolf's diaries, Saturday, November 1st entry: "If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it? Truthfully?" This, I find, is what I'm most interested in attempting to do.

I have been thinking about love, friendship, about how it's possible to fall in love with your own fictional characters, and maybe this is why I have lately become obsessed with the shape of hearts. Finding them everywhere. Looking. Thinking about Neruda's 'shrouded heart.' (in other translations I notice it's a 'shuttered heart'). About obligations. To the self, to the soul. Half of the week I'm the one cooped up, the other half, I seem to be the one 'listening to the sea', 'drawn on by my destiny.' I tell you, it's quite confusing.

The thing is, I'm feeling like I can use up everything I've ever thought in this new obscure novel of mine. It's glorious and terrifying. And I'm likely quite deluded. From White Ink by H. Cixous: "To allow oneself to write is a monstrosity." and "It's, for example, to think oneself born to write or capable of writing...no-one in the world, unless you make yourself a god, can assure you of your capacity." I find this is somehow reassuring - the fact of no assurances.

A Few More Odds and Ends

2010-04-18T14:01:00.001-06:00

When I begin writing a new book it takes a while but eventually my study subtly transforms. One pile of books becomes another pile of books. The books I have on my desk, the ones I need closest to me, change. (Although The Stream of Life by C.L. is always always there). The music I listen to changes. There is a little less dust on the shelves as I wander about nervous and ecstatic and strange, moving this, arranging that, dusting dusting. I change photographs in the frames I have hanging to the left of my desk. And recently, I had the idea to hang my small purse collection over the very old red velvet chair I have in the corner. In short, the clutter morphs.

What I love is sinking into a new project. Conducting obscure research. Filling out ILL forms. Tracking down odd bits of information. Taking note of everything that pops into my head. Last week I was describing the attire of one of the characters and I found myself thinking about Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face, the 'interpretive dance scene' and pretty soon I was watching this. All in the name of research.

I keep thinking I need to change something, change myself. But maybe I'm just going to let things happen, you know, just like this room changes, one small stack of books at a time. I'm looking for something honest (inspired by this post, I think). What happens when you give yourself permission to fling, really fling, that mass of odds and ends without looking them through? Sounds so simple but it's crazy difficult.

Lately I've been trying to look at the world around me as closely as possible. To attend. And part of this, for me, means taking photographs. I'm not bad, but I'm not great. Ten minutes on Flickr looking at the amazing images that people post puts me in my place. But it is immensely gratifying. I find the process sparks me, opens me up for writing, puts me in the right creative groove. I've recently discovered Flickriver which is a nice space to show one's photos. I don't own photoshop (would like to - and learn how to use it) so these are all mostly un-edited.

One last flinging: I'll be reading this coming Friday, April 23rd at the Edmonton Poetry Festival. I was feeling like a fraud, reading at this event, because I haven't written anything poem-like in say, 5 years. But I was moved by this invitation to write a sort of essay/ekphrastic poem and am looking forward to airing it out on Friday. I'm also looking forward to listening to many of the visiting poets and seeing them in person rather than just on Facebook!

How Fragile We Are

2010-04-18T09:31:00.002-06:00

Thinking of showing this blog some more love.

Of how fragile we are.

Thinking about re-invention. About creative excess. About images, text. About revealing things, too much, too little. About what is meaningful, real.

I'm thinking about turning the comments back on.

I'm still thinking about purses. Handbags.

More.
Soon.

Most Economical with Energy

2010-02-20T15:13:00.001-07:00

Well, a few words on not blogging. Or maybe more precisely, on avoiding the internet. It's impossible, isn't it? But I'm trying to put it at the bottom of my list, rather than let it take over. The whole internet thing has occupied my mind, sometimes in fruitful ways, but I'm trying to be mindful of those times when it is less than fruitful, and especially when it infringes on creative thinking.

I was introduced to someone recently who said, Oh, you're that prolific writer! Hmm. That comment started me off on a train of thought, which reminded me of a book I love - White Ink, which is interviews with Helene Cixous. I've quoted from it before, (complained about the whole prolific thing before, too). And even this quotation in particular: "Oddly enough, I notice that fecundity is often a cause for reproach. I've always found it extraordinary that fecundity or fertility is often something critics accuse certain people of." She goes on, "Fecundity is the creative person's natural state. The more pertinent question is that of what inhibits it?"

So, yes, I was finding that the combination of Facebook, blogging, engaging, reading other blogs, and generally noodling around too much on the internet was eating into my writing time. I recently found this post by Noah Richler (via CanCult) on time, and that took me back again to the Cixous book. Richler says, "Don’t waste precious time answering e-mails or surfing the web for headlines or a bit of permissible peeping first thing in the morning." (Remember when it was just the email that sucked time away from writing? I used to be pretty decent at leaving it until afternoon and must remember how to do that - maybe I should read this).

Cixous on why she doesn't use the internet: "I need to retire, I need silence in order to write - and yes, I need information, but selected information, and for that I prefer the pace of books, which are at my body's speed."

Here is what I have been doing while attempting to minimize (failing, too) my internet use. Consistently writing every morning. Sometimes rising at 5am when I can't sleep anyway. Even if I only write for an hour before getting ready for work. When circumstances intervene and this doesn't happen for days in a row, I begin to lose the thread, the clay hardens. I become miserable, desperate, agitated. Pathetic really. I know that I write more, better, the more I am able to avoid the internet.

And yet I don't want to completely give it up. Would that even be possible? I like my FB friends, I like reading blogs. I get most of my news from the internet. So much of my research related to the current project is web based. At the same time I'd be scared to death to find out how many hours I've logged on this machine (aside from the writing part) in the last few years.

I honestly have little willpower when it comes to the internet but am trying to remedy that. I'm hitting the log-out button, and often just power the computer down. Have been re-reading my favorite obscure books, writing with a pen as much as possible. I've been giving the ILL (interlibrary loan) system a work-out. And, I've posted this quotation above my desk: "Work, work!...Don't waste a moment...Calm yourself, quiet yourself, master your senses. Work, work! Just dress in old clothes, eat simple food...feign ignorance, appear inarticulate. This is most economical with energy, yet effective." (7th c. Chan Buddhist master Hongren).

Okay, so this has mainly been a reminder to myself, an explanation of sorts, as to why I've been blog-avoiding. But I also wanted to remind myself of the cool connections, links and lovely bits one can accumulate on one's blog. So here's one that relates to two of my obsessions: purses and books.

from the Judith Leiber Handbag gallery

Limbo

2010-01-07T15:05:00.000-07:00

I've been mulling over the direction that this blog might take, including ending it. Interestingly, I've recently noticed that a few blogs I follow have posted their last posts in the last week or so. Even when not posting regularly, which I've not been, there is a sort of pull - blog-guilt, if you will. Meanwhile, Facebook is taking up entirely too much time. (You can imagine what my new year's resolution is with regards to FB...) I turned the comments off here a while back because I was getting spammed with ads for purses, go figure.

For now, I've decided to put the blog into limbo - it's here, but for the time being will only be rarely added to. I have one manuscript searching for a publisher, and two books that I've begun researching. (I'll see which one emerges as the larger obsession). What I'm finding is that I'm not reading nearly enough! So many wonderful books calling to me - most of them from the to-read piles on the floor of my study!

I'll still be checking in on my fave blogs. I've also started posting pics on Flickr. Have always found the process of taking photos to be helpful to my writing process. Hope you have a productive year doing the things that inspire.....

Luminosity of Souls

2009-12-12T08:15:00.003-07:00

Look carefully around you and recognize

the luminosity of souls. Sit beside those

who draw you to that.

(Rumi)

Olympia Le-Tan's Book Purses

2009-11-29T08:19:00.004-07:00

Olympia Le-Tan's embroidered book purses/clutches are too divine for words.....

These images were taken from here. Some more can be seen here. And more here. A tiny interview with her here.

Can you tell I'm plotzing here? Also fantasizing about turning Red Velvet Forest into something like this myself. (If only I'd learned how to sew....the embroidery part I think I could fake). And we actually still have the piece of red velvet that Rob took used for the image in his painting which is in fact the cover of the book. How cool would that be?

I think I read somewhere that these lovelies go for around 2000ish Cdn...so am definitely just fantasizing. The also wonderful Rebound books are suddenly looking affordable though.

A Series of Small Waves

2009-11-29T07:58:00.006-07:00

"From the top of the page to the bottom, from left to right, from one line to the next, I drew what resembled a series of small waves. Seven waves, then three, a little further on eight, followed by ten or so; in the end I just followed the movement of my hand without counting, but making sure that I had different shapes of varying sizes." (Helene Dorion, Days of Sand)

I talked about this passage from Days of Sand in a post many moons ago. Couldn't help think about it again, as I scribbled, filled a page with loops, to get used to the weight and line and flow of my new and lovely pen. A Faber-Castell Ambition in Pearwood. Pure pleasure - the feel of the nib moving across the surface of paper with a fair amount of bite.

Taken by the Urge

2009-11-17T13:03:00.007-07:00

"Suddenly, I am taken by the urge to collect all the warm bread to be found in poetry." (G. Bachelard)

As for me, I'm suddenly taken by the urge to collect those moments in a text where a writer reveals various obsessions or attunements with the materials with which she writes. I've started to jot down quotations in a notebook - will see what patterns emerge. (This could take years...) Would dearly love to expand an essay I wrote ages ago, called "Try." (You can see it here on page 51 of the Garneau Review).

Since I began working part-time in a beautiful stationery shop my obsession with paper, pens, ink, notebooks, journals and etc has deepened. I've been collecting links to all sorts of sites run by people who are even more obsessed than I am and thought this would be a good place to share some of those intermittently. Of course, in the back of my mind I'm thinking 'blog project.' Would love to get writers to talk about their mode of getting their thoughts down. Are you qwerty-averse? paper shy? Hooked on Moleskines? An Inkophile? A typewriter addict? A fountain pen lover?

My current journal (still in decent shape even though I spilled half a glass of red wine on it) is pictured above, along with my Lamy Al-Star fountain pen (fine nib) and my favorite Lamy black ink.

Raw and Loose

2009-11-10T13:42:00.004-07:00

A person oughta google herself from time to time I suppose. I've been neglecting to do such things lately, and then there's the 'what you don't know can't hurt you' aspect of it all. I'm not surprised that Red Velvet Forest hasn't much been reviewed. In fact, I can't say I'm sad that the usual people who hate my books have left it alone. A hearty thank you to them.

I was pleased though, I admit, to see these short few lines this morning (though they're from way back in September as it turns out) by Jennifer Still in the Winnipeg Free Press. Mainly because this is precisely the kind of reading/reader I was hoping would find RVF.

Suffice to say it made my day to read this:

"These are poems that read with an intense privacy, as diary entries, raw and loose, written as if never to be seen."

Yes, I Thank You

2009-10-31T09:29:00.003-06:00

Why is it that at certain times I am drawn to this book of interviews, Woman to Woman - Marguerite Duras and Xaviere Gauthier? And I admit I know exactly what I'm drawn to - the 'wild and scraggly' parts of the interviews, those parts that Gauthier chose to leave in that others would have likely edited out. She says, "we know we are taking a risk in leaving them exactly as they were said." She allows us to know that the telephone rang, that a dog outside barks for some time and there is a worry that on the tape it will have drowned out their voices. There are pauses for wine to be poured, books to be leafed through and cigarettes to be lit. There are interruptions. In between the interviews they make jam. More than once, the tape runs out and then noticed, and an attempt is made, the conversation is reconstructed. We know it is not as intense as the original but we are grateful for what we have.

I am grateful for this sort of insight: "It was much later that I moved on to incoherence."

and

"I'm in an abominable state of doubt..." (Duras).

Equally so for these types of exchanges:

"XG: Could I have another cigarette?
MD: Of course."

or

"MD: Would you like a glass of wine?
XG: Yes, I thank you.
[interruption.]"

Life, as always, intervenes. Voices are drowned out by barking. Words go unrecorded, are lost. A friend of mine once suggested that she should write a book of the interruptions she experiences rather than what she was attempting to write. When I become more weary than usual of the interruptions (for interruptions there will always be...), I like to return to these polite exchanges. Would you like a glass of wine? Yes, I thank you.

Humming, Hanging

2009-10-04T09:25:00.002-06:00

This photo sums up how I'm feeling these days...humming, hanging, auming, longing. Not quite in between projects, but almost. Not really wanting to finish, wanting to finish but unable to find the time, the proper mental space needed. Wanting to start the new project, feeling my way slowly into it. As fragile as a glass hummingbird, hanging, on the cusp of winter.

Riot of Blue

2009-09-26T09:05:00.003-06:00

I discovered this late breaking riot of blue in the neglected backyard yesterday...followed by thoughts of Joni Mitchell.

White Feather, Blue Skies, Yesterday Morning Revisited

2009-09-24T11:49:00.005-06:00

Found this on my front step yesterday morning as I collected the newspaper. Went inside with it and listened to a few versions of Blue Skies while thinking about the symbolism of the white feather, its arrival. Still letting it sink in. Walking with the moment of the arrival of the white feather, humming Blue Skies through the day. Most partial to versions by Ella and by Susie Arioli at the moment.

Shy

2009-09-20T10:36:00.004-06:00

A number of years ago I wrote an essay titled, Shy which was published in Prairie Fire. I've thought that at some point I'd like to expand it into a book, but at present that seems a long way and several books off. However - I was delighted to notice (thanks to the magic of the Facebook status line) that this is a subject other people are also interested in. Naomi Lewis tracked down my essay from PF (I apparently neglected to transfer it from my last computer as it died a slow death a year ago) and asked if she could use it for an anthology she's planning. Sounds fascinating!

Here is the call for submissions from her website:

I am compiling essays, stories and poems for a literary anthology about shyness.

I’m amazed by how surprising, even unpredictable, it is who does or does not consider themselves shy. And each person who claims shyness defines it differently. Even psychologists can’t agree on what shyness is; some call it a personality trait, synonymous with introversion, or introversion’s dark side, and some see it as the warning sign of a mental illness. Millions of children and adults are medicated for social anxiety disorder – a disorder that’s only existed since the 1990s. Is shyness a flaw to overcome? Is it a gift? Does it stem from fear, from a preference for solicitude, or, as Freud claimed, from narcissism? Do we embrace it or try to beat it down, and how does it affect the decisions we make, the directions our lives take?

October Events

2009-09-20T10:12:00.003-06:00

Even though September is slipping through my fingers, and I'm making wild pacts with myself to say no to everything that crosses my desk for the next several months, I'm looking forward to some lovely events that will take place in October.

The first is the 20th Anniversary show my partner, Robert Lemay, is having at Wallace Galleries in Calgary. Hard to believe he's been showing there for 20 years! The opening is October 3, from 2-5 pm and we'll be there. If you're in Calgary I'd love to see you....

As for me, I'll be giving a brief reading at LitFest this year in Edmonton at the PEN Writers Cabaret, October 15, at 7 pm. Details here. I'm looking forward to reading alongside and hearing Myrna Kostash, Su Croll, John Paul Himka and Tony Cashman.

I'll also be reading in the Canadian Literature Centre's Brown Bag Lunch Series at 12 noon, University of Alberta, Arts and Convocation Hall Building on October 21. I'll be reading a little from each of Calm Things and Red Velvet Forest and a small excerpt from my work in progress.

A Summer in Purses

2009-08-30T08:26:00.005-06:00

We splurged our Airmiles this summer on a quick trip to Vancouver to see Vermeer's Love Letter etc at the VAG. Divine! All those years of being gouged at Safeway paid off. We also took in Granville Island and this cool shop where I found the purse above.

The next two are from another 3 day trip to Jasper. We go every year and always manage to pop into this store. A couple of great finds this time!

So yes, a brilliant summer, all in all, but also an exhausting one. Winter is more suitable for hermit-souls, perhaps. The only way I could squeeze in writing most weeks was to get up at 6am and write before going to work. Lots of delicious late evenings in the backyard with wine, G & T, books, friends...so not complaining, but by now am in a pretty zombified state and counting the hours to that first day of school...

Anthologies de Sacs

2009-08-30T08:07:00.003-06:00

From the Project: Anthologies de Sacs by Nathalie LeCroc. LeCroc is painting the contents of 1001 handbags which will then be published in book form. I like what she says about cheating in this article. I would definitely be a cheater. You?

A few more samples here.

Blogging and the Creative Process - A Short Interview with Kimmy Beach

2009-08-16T08:31:00.008-06:00

Kimmy Beach's fourth collection, in Cars, was published by Turnstone Press in 2007. She has read across Canada and in the UK. Kimmy was the 2005 International Guest Poet for the Dead Good Poets Society in Liverpool, UK, where she launched her third book, fake Paul, onstage at the Cavern Club in Mathew Street. Her second book, Alarum Within: theatre poems has twice been adapted as a full-length stage play. In 2008, Kimmy served as the first Writer-In-Residence for the Parkland Regional Library. She's working on two collections: Band Box at the Last Chance Saloon and The Last Temptation of Bond. Kimmy lives in Red Deer with her husband, Stu.

SL: Your blog Hora Sfakion: Returning to Crete is relatively new though you've blogged before. Can you tell me how this latest blog came into being, your thought processes that led to its inception? What are your present goals for this blog?

KB: I'm not sure that I have a goal in mind for it at this point, other than giving myself a way to think about this place as a real, grown-up adult. My travel journal from the time (1983), though very detailed, is an immature teenage venture into another world, with all the black-and-white, judgemental observations that characterize adolescence. I decided that if I began an online journal before I left (and maintained it while I'm there), it would focus my thoughts and mixed emotions about returning to a place I've not been for nearly thirty years. I thought for most of my adult life that I would never return there, and now that I am, I'm faced with the absolute certainty that things will not be as I remember: an eighteen-year-old sitting in tavernas all day and night, drinking Ouzo, eating raw chickpeas, not sightseeing, playing Backgammon, and flirting with the local boys. Some of those boys are still there and are as middle-aged as I am. There is certainly going to be a new dynamic this time around as my husband is traveling with me and it thrills me to be able to show him this village that meant (and means) so much to me and in which I truly grew up and figured out what I was capable of doing.

In terms of possible goals, I suppose I could say that I need to find out what not to write about when it comes time to complete the book I'm returning there to finish. Part of my reason for keeping this sort of "looking back" journal now is that I know that I don't want to write a "looking back" type of book in the end. I learned from the brilliant nonfiction writer, Kirsten Koza, that work that takes place in a certain era (or in a certain year) should stay there. No lessons, no nostalgia, but only passionate adherence to the time frame in which the book is set. That worked well for me with in Cars, and part of what I think I'm doing with the blog is getting all the "I remember when" stuff out of my system, so that I'm not tempted into it in the later writing.

SL: Though maybe it's early to be asking this question, I'm interested to know what avenues have been suggested that you might not otherwise have pursued because of the creation of this blog? Has your blog already evolved from what you originally envisioned for it?

KB: In a way, it's evolved from what I envisioned at the beginning, as I really had no idea where I was going with the first couple of posts. Things begin to suggest themselves, however, and a comment would trigger me; I've found I'm just going with them. My photos from that time - which I've just finished painstakingly transferring from slides to scanned images - have been a great help to me. I'm planning a new entry on a 5-year-old girl my girlfriend and I hung around with quite a bit. I've seen pictures of her online and she is now a woman in her early 30s. I have several pictures of the two of us playing together that I'm eager to show her. I'm certain she won't remember me, but I could be surprised.

Since I didn't start with an overall vision of it in the first place, I'm giving myself permission to go all over the place within the confines and boundaries I've set for myself: the stuff I'm working out as I plan to return. Once I'm there, I'm hoping that the blog will continue as a journal of my time there as I'm living it, with (I suspect) liberal sprinklings of "Man, Stavros sure has aged!" as if I, magically, haven't.

SL: How has your previous blogging experience come into play in the design of Hora Sfakion?

KB: My other blog is a fun one called "The Wine and the Are" in which I dissect the truly terrible fashions on The Young and the Restless (which I've been watching as brain candy for thirty years), and advise all three of my readers what wines to enjoy with which terrible fashions. Though I still like it, all of my Wine and Are friends have since moved away, so it's a bit of a lonely enterprise. I may let it go the way of all flesh, though I've really enjoyed reading over the old posts.

What that silly blog taught me is that I had the ability to sustain a fun, interesting blog with a specific topic. I think that's the trap a lot of bloggers fall into: what now? So they become mish-moshes of anything and everything, or at the very least, completely stray from what they set out to be. I set out with Hora Sfakion deliberately making sure I didn't do that.

As to the design, my Mac account includes a built-in blogger program with templates already designed for me. The research into what looks appealing, what should go where, and so on has already been done. I don't have to know anything about it or design anything myself. I drag and drop my pictures, type in my text, and hit "Publish." Nothing could be simpler. I prefer it to the designs at eblogger, frankly, and I have all the same capabilities as I would have there. Technology frustrates me. Hence, the Mac stuff was (clearly) designed with me in mind.

SL: You often hear how necessary it is for writers to have a blog to promote their work and there are likely dissertations being written as we speak about how writers create identity via their blogs. How important are these things for you or other writers do you think?

KB: I know people who think that blogging is a waste of time which could be better spent on one's own "real" writing. I disagree, and I see the Crete blog as writing. Having a not-very-well-defined idea exactly what form the finished book I'm returning to Hora Sfakion to write will take, I'm open to anything, and at this stage, writing about the upcoming return seems to make the most sense to me. If anyone is interested in reading it, that's a bonus, but really, I'm doing it for myself. I debated even going public with it, but in the end, I reasoned that there may be a few people in my world who might really enjoy the regular posts I'll make from the town itself. In all my nearly forty-five years, of the hundreds of people I've met, only two others (not including my travel companion or the people I met while there) have been to this town. It's a unique, exotic place, and I decided to publicize it with that in mind. I know that I would enjoy a friend's blog about an exotic locale to which I would likely never travel. I loved Ryan Land's Africa blog (which I'll mention in depth a bit later) for that reason.

As to promoting my work, the most I do on the Crete blog is add an unobtrusive link to my main page where readers can, if they like, find my books and more stuff about me. Since I assume that the people looking at my blog are primarily my friends and fellow writers, I would suppose that most of them know I'm a writer. If others stumble onto my blog, they can click the link to my main site. I'm not really interested in promoting my books on this particular page of my site. When a book comes as a result of my trip to Crete, I will of course promote it here, however. That only makes sense. Occasionally, I'll see something like "Pullman, Washington" on my site metre and wonder who that might be. So I suppose a person could sell a few books this way, but that, truly, is not my aim.

SL: What blogs do you follow? Do you see any trends on the CanLit blog scene (if there is such a thing)? Where do you situate your blog in your mind's eye in this virtual landscape?

KB: The idea for this blog was initially planted by our mutual friend Ryan Land's excellent Africa blog which he maintained while he and his family were spending a year in Ghana. I liked the focus of the blog: "Here's what we're doing, and here are the pictures to prove it." Not too personal, certainly not confessional, but a well-written account of his family's life in an unfamiliar place. I want to be like Ryan when I grow up. I followed that blog with great interest.

Aside from that, my blog tastes are broad and varied, and I don't read CanLit blogs more regularly than anything else. I check in on yourself, Brenda Schmidt, Heather Zwicker, Tracy Hamon, Heidi Greco, and certainly others for the CanLit angle, but there are many non-literary and local blogs I really enjoy as well. I spend a lot of time at The Atheist Experience, as well as the total mind candy of Cuteoverload.com and Sexy People. What sets these blogs apart from the vast and truly mediocre wasteland of the blogosphere (a word I really don't like) is that they're about something. Heidi claims over at her blog that it's about anything and everything and goes all over the place. I would disagree and say that there are three main themes on her blog: conservation, art (in all its forms) and berry picking (in all its forms). The blog claims to be random, but it's clearly not.

If there is a "CanLit blog scene" as you suggest, I don't spend a lot of time exploring it. Often blogs will pop into my field of vision from a link at your or (say) Brenda's site and off I go. If I like it, I follow it. If it turns out to be a "what I ate for breakfast" or a TMI (Too Much Information) blog, I stop going there. Content, interest, and quality writing are what keep me. Bore me, or talk to me about nothing but breakfast, and I'm gone.

As to where I situate myself among the bloggers, I'm not sure at this point. I try not to pigeon-hole myself in my published work, and perhaps I'm going for the same thing in my online work as well.

Just When I Was Wondering What Kind of Handbag V. Woolf Would Have Carried....

2009-07-20T14:24:00.005-06:00

Read about the new "Woolf" handbag on Blogging Woolf and would be remiss if I hadn't posted something about it. Handbag or pockets? Thoughts?

From the London Evening Standard, on Emma Watson, the new 'face' of Burberry:

Dangling off her arm are a bevy of cute accessories, from hot male models du jour Tom Guinness, Charlie France and Douglas Booth to Burberry's Woolf bag, a capacious suede tote with embroidered overlay costing a cool £1,095. The collection is inspired by Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury set.

Well, at least it's capacious. Really, I think they should send me one.

and then once you get started wondering, wandering....

Here's a link to a Woolf book handbag on Etsy. (Photo above).

Call for Submissions - How to Expect What You're Not Expecting

2009-07-20T14:00:00.002-06:00

Lisa Martin-DeMoor has sent out a submissions call for an anthology she's co-editing, titled How to Expect What You're Not Expecting. Wonderful idea for an anthology!

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer - Author of Perfecting - Guest Post

2009-07-16T07:07:00.010-06:00

Shawna Lemay gave me quotes from my own novel Perfecting, and they became the viewfinder through which I commented on the book. I am very pleased to have the opportunity to look at the work in this way. It was provocative, the purse being a trigger for my own way in to the text. Unwittingly, the quotes seem to line up into a compressed novel however elliptical and elusive. The quotes worked like interview questions, so you may read them as such.

p. 11 "She been walking so long, hadn't talked to another soul in days. She carried that big, floppy leather purse."

The purse in my novel Perfecting was imagined out of the hold of childhood memory. I was born in 1965 and, although the story’s inception had many roots, one was a deliberate need to investigate the time of my beginning consciousness, so the era of peaceniks, Vietnam, Cold War politics, and hand-tooled leather purses. I wanted the book to span, temporally, 1972 to 2004; politically, the end of Cold War; geographically, Canada/USA; thematically, perspectives of family and religion. It is a lot to ask of a novel, I suppose, but I get bored easily, and the project, once I started, did become necessarily more complicated.

The novelist’s job, of course, is to make the reasons for writing the book its undercurrent. I did not want the above motivations to be apparent, but to be felt and experienced by the reader. In other words, no one ought to be conscious of any of the above reasons, but certainly reviewers have noted some. A priest who reviewed the book for The Catholic Register wrote: Perfecting is St Augustine’s worst nightmare come true. This made me very happy.

p. 13. "Martha pulled the purse onto her hip, folded it down, and held it close. She had the lure in her other hand."

There was an unabashed attempt to formulate something that felt epic. For this purpose, I read or reread various texts: Gilgamesh, Beowulf, the Shahnameh, the Old Testament, Parsifal, Song of Roland, Kalevala etc. I was interested in the texture of the epic because it seemed to inform the structure and tempo of the writing.

Martha was a difficult character for me. In earlier versions her clarity was dissipated by a lack of motivation. She was lost inside her damaged self. This made her very difficult to apprehend. I really needed to pin her somehow to something. It made sense that she should mirror Parsifal, the young naïf who is brought up outside of civilization, and whose initial exit from his shrouded upbringing leads him into all sorts of misadventure. Yet, he is a grail seeker, a goodly, though stumbling, knight. Martha, too, became in my mind a peacekeeper: a kind of peaceful soldier. The gun in her purse, on the one hand, and the Biblical lure, drawing who knows what terrible fish, in the other, factored in my mind as an analogue to any number of iconic artifacts. There are certain scenes in the book that work like tableaux in my mind, and this is one of them: it is a snapshot moment, or a long slow shot where the camera would hold and pull slowly away. There were filmmakers who influenced this book – Bergman was one, Herzog, another.

p. 58 "Martha pulled her clothing off in Hattie's little house, sitting with her face to the window, her reflection sharp in the glass. She got her purse up onto the bed, groped around for the gun, and sat there, her ass pressing into the soft coverlet, looking at the gun as if it could tell her anything at all."

In fairytale and folktale, the reader comes across many tropes, and the purse is one of them. The purse, or wallet, is usually magical in that it can recreate meals or refill with gold. In short, it can fulfill dreams, dreams that often turn nightmarish for the dreamer. It is a vessel that empties and fills, like a bladder or a womb. There is always something portentous about a bag. It hides. It holds secrets. It holds possibilities. And for the owner, it protects what is hidden, and maintains the secret. In this case, it holds a gun.

p. 134 "The purse, which she'd been clutching the whole night through, as if the idea of a gun, loaded or not, could protect her, she let clunk to the floor at her feet."

The gun Martha holds is a reproduction of an original John Browning handgun, heavily engraved. Browning was a Mormon convert, who made the guns the Mormons used to protect themselves and their beliefs as they fled and/or confronted their detractors across America. I have always found it particularly intriguing that the Mormons were initially persecuted largely for the fact they were abolitionists, and not, as most believe, because of their pluralist (polygamist) tenets. The reason the gun needed to be Mormon forged has to do with the play of religion, ideology, and war in the novel. As well, and perhaps more importantly, Mormonism was especially interesting to me because it is uniquely American, created as a response to the native population in North America. America, as seen through the lens of Mormonism, is a simultaneous Eden. The inclusion of Mormonism in the novel’s fabric also points to early American communism, and therefore became an important link between Communism and early American ideology.

The gun in the purse is a handy analogue for Martha gaining power; she has a gun and is thinking about buying ammunition for it. It is also the metaphoric key to the real story of Curtis, the man who has sheltered her within his religious ideology for most of her adult life. So, it holds her future, and loaded or not, it holds the decision that will be her fork in the road.

Also, if the purse is a stand-in for womb, and keeping in mind Martha is barren, her impotence is further defined by the empty pistol. In short, the gun in the purse can be seen in Freudian terms, and therefore as a kind of weirdo-Kathryn-Kuitenbrouwer-in- joke. It is an instance of the author amusing herself. Like I said, I get bored easily.

p. 196 "Martha leaned over, fussed with her leather bag, getting something out and then securing the bag good. There was a pull string and then a latch, and she tied the one in a double knot and latched the other and shoved the bag under the seat. Aubie got to thinking what else besides memories might be in that bag but decided to save that thought."

and

p. 266 "Martha told herself she would not cry in front of these men, whatever they might now do to her. Her mind went to the gun in her purse. She was finding it troublesome to breathe. She grappled with her purse without any clear intention and said, 'What do I want from you? I just only ever wanted to solve Curtis, and maybe I just did.'"

The gun Martha carries turns out to be the sister gun to Aubie’s. This is not something Martha knows, but the reader does. The symbol leather hippie bag (and all the corollary aspects of hippie that might hold: peacefulness, handmade, natural etc.) gives way to the potential of the gun (potential evil, protection, fear, freedom), and in terms of story, Martha is not ready to reveal her secret, nor is she entirely ready for the answers it might give to her questions about Curtis. In other words, she is keeping the gun a secret for her own sake. She’s afraid of what is real.

p. 269 " 'What's in that purse, lady?'
'It isn't your business,' she said. It came out so solid, even though she knew it was his business."

The gun in Martha’s purse, which is the gun Curtis used to shoot his half-brother, is one piece of a larger puzzle in the book, as well. It ties up to Aubie’s gun, to the MANPAD in Pakistan that this shadowy Cpl Michael Dama is buying and selling, and, therefore, to the war rugs that Dama is exporting and selling through Aubie. The small story of how Curtis shot his half-brother was something of a parallel in my mind to larger world events.

The questions I was asking myself as I wrote the book were: how did the events in Vietnam relate globally to the events in Afghanistan/Pakistan in the 1980s and how did those events precipitate 9/11 and the events that followed? What is the central aspect of the fear of communism? What is protection as seen locally as opposed to as seen globally?

The gun imagery was a way to form a matrix inside the novel connecting these visually. The MANPAD, or Stinger, was a US weapon designed specifically to shoot down armoured Russian helicopters, and it is essentially the reason the Mujahedin conquered Russia. Once the US pulled out of Afghanistan, once they’d propped up the Taliban in those early days, mistakenly viewing it as a stable governing force, and a potential oil ally, things went wrong. The Muj were largely rogue soldiers the rest of the Middle East had been happy to expunge from their own territories. The Muj ‘army’ had nowhere to go, nothing to do with their particular skill sets, and they weren’t that keen on giving the guns back. The US tried futilely to buy them back, but many of the guns are still unaccounted for. To me, the guns became a symbol for a particular type of naivety. A type of naivety that is slightly tinged with racism: We’ll get the little brown guys to fight the war, and they’ll be so grateful we helped them out. The Americans greatly underestimated the will of the hill-tribe people, and the complexity of the mess they left behind; they were assuming a particular reciprocity. As it turned out, there was reciprocity: the Muj were using the US just as much or more than the other way around. Seen in this way, the events in Pakistan and Afghanistan are the detritus of the end of the Cold War.

I am not suggesting that the novel is an allegory. It is not meant to be. It is really a story with another story as its undercurrent. It was my hope that it could be read fairly superficially and still work as a fast read. The sword proves, in this scene, to be double edged for Martha. She has loaded the gun and is confronting her nemesis – Curtis’s patriarchal dragony father. Instead of giving her power, the loaded gun takes some of it away. It shifts her from the divine to the mortal. It gives her groundedness and reality, and so she loses the spiritual perspective, the ethereal, the godly. It is a fall from grace – seen from the perspective of a Believer – and a deliverance – seen from an atheistic perspective. It was important to me that the ending bent in both directions, that it question without a clear answer.

p. 270 "Martha was holding her purse so close she'd formed sweat on her shirt. She'd held on to the Browning for so long, and it was still there in her purse, a weapon, with a weapon's power. She was mortal..."

The nice thing about the purse in the novel, as it turns out, is that it holds the entire story. There would be no story if Martha had not found the gun, and engaged with it as her central problem/need. In this way, the purse is like the book, a handy container for story, a way to transport the material of the story and – one hopes – the reader!

Blogging and the Creative Process - A Short Interview with Sina Queyras

2009-07-06T14:54:00.007-06:00

Sina Queyras is the author most recently of the poetry collections Lemon Hound (2006) and Expressway (2009) both from Coach House Books. She edited Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets, for Persea Books (2005), and continues to serve as contributing editor for Drunken Boat where she most recently edited a folio on conceptual fiction with Vanessa Place, and a folio on Visual Poetry with derek beaulieu. Lemon Hound won the Pat Lowther and a Lambda Literary award, and an excerpt from Expressway recently received Gold in the National Magazine Awards. Her work has been published internationally in journals and anthologies. She has lived across Canada, in New Jersey, Brooklyn and Philadelphia and Montreal where she currently teaches. She keeps a blog, Lemon Hound, which BookThug will publish a selection of writing from in 2009.

Capacious Hold-All: Lemon Hound, the book, came out in 2006 with Coach House, but the blog started in May of 2004. Can you talk about the ways in which the book and the blog intersected at the beginning and the ways in which you separate the poetry you write from the blog? How entangled do the two processes become?

Lemon Hound: The processes are indeed entangled. I am not one to compartmentalize so the thinking in one area very much leaks into others.

CH: Your first post questions, wonders:

(Sunday, May 09, 2004)

Now she is blogging. Now she is sitting on the black couch listening to the sirens wail and the rain fall. Now she is thinking of oysters. Now she is wondering why this is worth sharing. Now she is thinking how decipher what is worth reading? Who is to say? Sifters. She thinks we have become a nation of sifters. We dial up and sift through the wreckage. And what is the use of adding one more paragraph to the motherload? She supposes that soon she will find out.

CH: How far have you moved away from this first post, or is this the nature of the blog - this continuing questioning, deciphering, sifting?

LH: This post was written while I was working on and thinking about Lemon Hound the book. Being May I can say that I had likely just finished teaching and was finding my way back to the manuscript itself, which Coach House accepted sometime during the following spring of 2005 if I recall correctly. But during that silence I was editing Open Field. So yes, sifting is very much at the core of the book, and the anthology, and it is at the core of what I do here on this blog I think too, wanting to find a fresh way to compose, wanting, through composition to emphasize different aspects of words, sentences, narratives, notions. I am more interested in questioning, opening up, than I am offering some kind of master equation and then defending.

CH: Times passes. In September of 2005 you consider ending your blogging 'adventure' but resume in November of that year. How important was that lapse in blogging? What did you learn from it? In what ways do you see women shaping the (literary) blogosphere in say, the last year or two? Heartening or disheartening?

(Sunday, November 27, 2005)

Back in September I posted a note that said I was likely going to end my blogging adventure. Clearly I have decided not to. There are a number of reasons why, but the most important one may be, dare I say it, a question of gender. Tired old dialogue that it is, I notice there are not enough women engaged in the discussion of poetry and poetics. Over and over again the voices seem to be male, shouting out about this or that school or lineage…deciding what is important and what not in such confident and reductive tones as to shut out the more cautious, or considered voices. Where, one might ask, are the women? Are there still more men writing than women? I think not. So why are there more men’s voices out in the world than women’s voices? I have my theories. Look to the deletions, the hesitations, the reflective responses…the women are still out there thinking, their voices not quite up for the often bombastic and instantaneous responses.

LH: In general I find things quite disheartening. There are women out there blogging, yourself among them, but these voices are marginal, no offense, I include myself in that description. The dominant bloggers are still men, the dominant discourses are still shaped by men, mostly white men by the way. Asher Ghaffar pointed this out in his recent interview with Rob McLennan. The over-riding core of whiteness, even in the avant garde poetry world, and in the lyric world, and in the discussions by journalists, and in the critical world, is very obvious, and very dull indeed.

I periodically take screen shots of the G&M list of authors, usually five white men all in a row. The National Post book bloggers are all men, most of the regular G&M reviewers are male. Most of the literary journals are edited by men. The "new" Canadian Notes & Queries for example--Dan, John, Alex, Zachariah, Carmine--sound familiar? There are a few women editing--Anita Lahey, Kim Jerrigan, and Jenny Penberthy over at the new and awesome Capilano Review, for example, but largely it's men that are doing this work: men who expect to have a voice in literary discourses, and men who are expected to have the voice.

I don't have a problem with the NP blog, in fact I like it very much, and I appreciate what the G&M does, and the Quill & Quire. But the fact that things can be so homogeneous, so conservative, that we can still be in a discourse where there is little self-awareness about the limited perspectives these conversations perpetuate is disheartening. Canada a cultural mosaic? Not in the literary world. I'm not sure it will ever change. I don't think people want things to change. I mean if not now, when?

CH: The discussion of art, photography in particular, has played a big part on your blog. You often post your own photographs as well. How do you see the photographs operating in terms of the way they might shape or personalize a blog, reconfigure the space, add or relieve tension to the text that has gone before or after?

LH: I love visual art, particularly photography, and I miss New York most for this reason. Visual art has always been completely bound to my writing, but New York really allowed me to play my fantasy out, to investigate the overlap between art forms, to trace the similar strands of inquiry in sculpture, installation, video, paint, so yes, it's certainly adjacent, or woven into how I operate in the world. I have occasionally thought I would try to see the blog only as a space for visual arts, both the discussion of and publication of photos etc., but again, it is all bound, all connected, so that seemed impossible to do.

CH: You have a book coming out that has been developed through the blog. Can you describe the process, how the blog shaped the book, and also how the book has shaped the blog?

LH: It would not have occurred to me to publish a book from the blog. Kate Eichorn approached me with the idea and the publisher in place. I am very grateful to her for that. She is an awesome force in publishing and totally gives me hope for the future. Of course now the book seems logical too, and I'm very excited about the project. There is so much to consider though, not only the selection but how it will be organized, how the page will look, and what it does that is different from the blog form. In a way I think blogging is already an outdated mode. My blog feels like an 8-Track cassette sometimes, you know, trying to fit it into a DVD slot.

What's next? If it's any comfort, I don't think we have any idea what's next. Kindle? I don't think so.

Blogging and the Creative Process - A Short Interview with Tracy Hamon

2009-07-05T11:36:00.009-06:00

Tracy Hamon was born in Regina, Saskatchewan and still resides there. She holds a BA Honours in English from the University of Regina and is a MA candidate in English with a creative thesis at that institution. She works part-time as a barber/stylist and is the Colony Coordinator for the SWG. She is currently serving on the board of the Sage Hill Writing Experience and is the director of the Vertigo Reading Series. While her work has been published in numerous literary magazines, Thistledown Press published her first book of poetry, This is Not Eden in April of 2005, and was a finalist for two Saskatchewan Book Awards that same year. More recently, she was short-listed for the 2007 CBC Literary Awards for “Standing at the Window,” a section from a manuscript of poems based on the expressionist painter Egon Schiele. Her second book of poems, tentatively titled Some People Eat Cars, is forthcoming from Coteau in spring 2010.

SL: Could you talk about the relationship between your blogs - Manageable Imaginations and The Plural Hoe - and the poetry you're writing? Can you describe the interplay?

TH: While my main blog, Manageable Imaginations isn’t a critical review blog, or predominantly a poetic blog, it’s a space where I can work out my concerns with writing and the world (large and small). I very rarely put my own poetry on this blog; I prefer to create conversations about poetics, about writers that interest me, and about theory that interests me (I have a great passion for discussing the topic of “prairie writing” and the community of prairie writing). In finishing one degree and starting another, I’ve often discussed writing assignments, sharing what I’m doing in classes. In the past six months, I’ve been posting interviews with poets about their books (I do plan to do more, I’ve just not had time). I’m the kind of writer that needs to keep writing to be productive, and writing a blog is a good way to generate ideas.

The idea, at least in theory, is that the other blog, The Plural Hoe, is a place where I can go to write experimental material—to explore numerous forms and conventions—in the blog format. My two blogs don’t compete with each other at all, and often a poem can stem from a blog post (or even someone else’s blog post). Although my creative blog is similar in style to a workshop blog, feedback from people isn’t necessary; however, I’m always interested in what people have to say if they do comment. What I’m going to do with the poems is unclear, and it isn’t something I worry about right now—I’m just going to keep writing them and will see what I’ve built whenever there is an end to the process.

SL: WJT Mitchell said that "in what is often characterized as an age of "spectacle," "surveillance," and all-pervasive image-making, we still do not know exactly what pictures are, what their relation to language is, how they operate on observers and on the world, how their history is to be understood, and what is to be done with or about them." I know that you're interested in ekphrasis, and have written pretty extensively about it and also written ekphrastic poems. Does thinking about and playing with images in this way change the way you develop your blog posts? I know that since blogging, my handwritten journal has actually changed shape. I now choose unlined journals and integrate drawings and photographs into the whole. Has blogging changed your writing in any measurable way?

TH: I’m a visual person, whatever that means. I jot down the things I see/hear/think (okay, not everything, but close) in little books all over the house (in my purse, in my car). As my relationship with images and text shifts and evolves, I’m pleased to see the blog hosts advancing their product, making it simpler and easier to link and to upload photos and videos. The ease with which I can upload photos, allows me to incorporate more visual elements on the blog, esp. on The Plural Hoe, where I can use the image/text to relate to the self-portrait. Sometimes I can just share an image, which is a good way to maintain contact with others via the blog (or so I think). In a way, I guess much of the blog experience is a form of the self-portrait, in the medium of text (and often image). I don’t think blogging has changed my writing, but it’s an integral part of the writing process. It provides another medium to work out (The Plural Hoe) and think/play through (Manageable Imaginations).

SL: What strategies have you developed to keep the blog "manageable?" and can you talk about how you developed the blog and how it has evolved?

TH: An editor once coined my imagination as unmanageable (imagine that!). While I was confused about why an abundance of imagination was unmanageable, the comment inspired me to experiment with the blog format as a place to exploit (or use up) some of that uncontrollable creative energy. I started a blog and called it Unmanageable Imaginations (I remember spending all day on the email with Brenda Schmidt trying to figure the blogging world out). Unfortunately, my beginner blog was deleted from the blogosphere due to some unwanted abusive comments. In trying to manage the situation, I realized that I liked writing on a blog for whatever reason, posting for the few people that did read it, and that regardless of one reader’s harassment, I wouldn’t let someone drive me away from the space I’d created. Therefore, I deleted the original blog, altered the name, the host, and continued to blog under the name of Manageable Imaginations.

It’s interesting now to write about this, to see the how one person’s intrusion into my life created something more “manageable.” One of the biggest changes, I have to admit, with the bad experience of the first blog, was amending what and how I related to the web world. For the longest time on Manageable Imaginations, I hid the blog from public consumption. I tried to keep the personal out of my posts, and still very much do to a certain extent, though as time went on, I realized that what I do is so much a part of who I am, that it’s impossible to keep “me” out. Once I began to feel more secure in my space, I included more “me,” eventually bringing the blog back into the public sphere.

SL: In what ways has the community you've developed via the blog had an impact on your creativity?

TH: Tough question. I think blogging carries a ricochet effect in it’s own community. For example, doing this interview, makes me realize that my writing is read, to some extent and that there IS a community, which as a “prairie writer” (she says tongue in cheek) is important to writing. The support of a community, no matter how small is vital to my writing. And as for my own process, even today, answering these questions led me to write a final report and draft some work; all this writing settled me down to write, albeit none of it poetry, but words are words, and writing is writing, and hopefully, one thing leads to another. I guess by continuing to do what I like to do with the blogs, and feeling confident with the small community I’ve built, I’ll post sporadic occurrences/thoughts/theories, experiment with some poetry, and maybe write some plain ol’ dribble.

What if Gertrude Stein had Blogged by Tracy Hamon

2009-07-05T11:21:00.007-06:00

As I prepared questions to send to Tracy Hamon for my series of short interviews on blogging and the creative process, I remembered reading a post she'd written called "What if Gertrude Stein had Blogged." I dove back into her blog The Plural Hoe and found the post. I asked Tracy if I could re-post it here and if she could write a little intro to the piece. So here's the intro, which I think says a lot about the way writers are inspired by other writers' blogs, followed by the poem.

Tracy Hamon: The Plural Hoe (which I openly admit to not having posted on in a long while---I blame work, work, and more work) stemmed from a comment made in a post on another blog, by Lemon Hound. In the blog post, Lemon Hound talked of blogging, and asked “What if Gertrude Stein had blogged?” I carried this question in my head for a few hours (maybe a day) until I’d worked myself up into thinking that the idea of Gertrude Stein blogging might be a good idea for a creative blog. I have a fondness for the modernist women, having studied them at some length in university, and of course, being a person driven by an unmanageable imagination, I dove in and created a creative blog.

A Blog

A well. An inked mountain. Inky swell. Hanging of the hat. Headspace; the rest coming. An opening. Daybreak sliced back in peelings. Sewing into what has been hidden. A needling in. The weeded container of what sprouts in rows. A garden. A rose hipped in the nose of morning. Line of dew. Dropped. The plural hoe, digging through. Dug. Dust. A spot underneath. Rubbed away. Running away. Carried on the backs of furrows.

(Tracy Hamon)

Try

2009-06-29T07:49:00.003-06:00

An essay titled, "Try" that I wrote for a book history class I took from Ted Bishop during my MA has been published in rob mclennan's Garneau Review. It's a great issue, full of Edmonton favourites - Alice Major, Catherine Owen, Jenna Butler, Lainna Lane, Douglas Barbour, Trisia Eddy, Christine Stewart, and Paul Pearson.

Red Velvet Forest Launch

2009-06-29T07:20:00.004-06:00

Please join me on Tuesday, June 30 (7:30 pm - Audreys Books, Edmonton) for the launch of my book of poetry, RED VELVET FOREST. We shall take a walk through a particular reddish, darkening forest, while sipping pomegranate liqueur and leaving a small trail of red velvet cupcake crumbs....

Blogging and the Creative Process - A Short Interview with Michael Bruce Adams

2009-06-25T10:27:00.005-06:00

Michael Bruce Adams has written or co-written 23 feature length screenplays. His body of work also includes short film scripts, television series templates, and technical articles on screenwriting and filmmaking. He is a sought after Script Consultant and Story Editor with clients in the US, Canada, Africa and Europe. Michael is currently writing and directing the feature length documentary, “Kulka: The Final Round”.

His produced writing credits include the feature film “Reach For Me”, (Best Feature and Best of Festival, Lake Arrowhead Film Festival), produced in 2008, and as Story Editor for the feature film “A Shine of Rainbows”, produced in 2008, and Script Consultant for the television movie “Taken in Broad Daylight”, also produced in 2008.

After studying Biomechanics and Psychology at the University of British Columbia, Michael sacrificed a career in Advertising to follow his passion; screenwriting. To build a practical foundation for his craft, Michael immersed himself in the study of story theory and structure, and their application to screenwriting, an education he considers an ongoing commitment.
To gain practical filmmaking experience, Michael joined the production side of the industry in 1994, first as a Production Assistant and Assistant Director, then as an Assistant Cameraman, where he had the honor of working with acclaimed cinematographers such as, Dean Semler, Mikael Salomon, Maryse Alberti, Peter Menzies Jr. and Bill Roe, and directors John Mctiernan, John Curran, Phillip Noyce and Martin Campbell.

The invaluable ‘on-set’ filmmaking experience he gained on over 120 film and television productions including; “Dark Angel”, “The ‘L’ Word”, “Elektra”, “I Spy”, “Beyond Borders”, “Walking Tall”, “The Thirteenth Warrior”, and “Miracle”, allows Michael to contribute to projects not only as a writer offering imaginative solutions to creative challenges, but as a practical collaborator with years of production experience.

Michael remains active in the technical side of the industry by publishing technical articles on screenwriting and filmmaking (actioncutprint.com; Your First Draft: Breaking Free of Structure Paradigms, Getting Started as a Screenwriter, and Notes on a Year as a Working Screenwriter, Canadian Society of Cinematographer News, Feb. 2008; Painting in the Dark: The Rebellious Adolescence of Digital Cinematography).

Michael Bruce Adams’ blog on the making of the feature length documentary “Kulka: The Final Round” is called Glenn Kulka Documentary Journal.

SL: Can you talk about the ways in which the blog has affected your process in the making of your current film?

MA: I can tell you unquestionably that the blog affects the creative process for “Kulka: The Final Round” in wonderful ways; it allows me to explore ideas ‘on paper’ before shaping them on film, it allows me to experience the emotional affect of certain subjects prior to shooting, it allows me to tie in experiences and ideas that I may not, on the outset, have naturally included in the film, and most importantly, the blog allows me to express ideas and opinions that I know do not have a place in the film itself.

As creative people, we often battle an urge to over-do. We over-write scenes and dialog, we make huge statements in the execution of our craft that can sometimes overshadow our themes… we self indulge. The blog allows me to exercise those urges in a format that is cathartic, and that means I won’t be tempted to try and force those ideas into the film. This is especially important for a documentary film where the goal is to let the subject and the story reveal themselves organically.

SL: When you mentioned that using the blog has suggested ideas that you might not otherwise have pursued, it reminded me to browse through a book that I think you’ve also read – The Conversations: Walter Murch and the art of Editing Film where Murch is interviewed by Michael Ondaatje. He talks about developing a ‘photo-board system’ and finding ‘provocative’ visual juxtapositions and he also says that “there’s an incredible richness that comes from the unanticipated collisions of things.” Can you describe any particular collisions that have come out of your process of using the blog so far? Would you compare the blog to Murch’s system?

MA: Murch’s ‘photo-board system’ has had a huge influence on all my writing. Even when doing dramatic screenwriting I will storyboard or photograph images that inspire a scene or a theme or a character, almost to the point where I will create an image outline for a film. You can still use this process with documentary filmmaking though in a much more reactionary way. The blog is a natural extension of this process.

Let’s say you go into a documentary having done extensive research on your subject and your subject’s world, you’re going to have a certain set of images, sounds and words that inform you as the filmmaker in regards to the story you are trying to tell and the way you are thinking of telling it. Yes, it’s a documentary and yes, you are creating a set of preconceived notions about the film and yes, those things aren’t supposed to work together… but we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t have some idea of what we are after as storytellers.

The real gold in documentary work is when your subject takes your preconceived notions, flips them upside down and slams them back in your face. The blog becomes your emotional and reactionary outlet when this happens, and as a result, it becomes the template for organizing concepts and ideas when the shooting is done. So in a sense, the blog becomes the emotional imagery building blocks of Murch’s ‘photo-board system’.

SL: In the same book, Murch talks about how when he writes he lies down and when he edits he stands up. One of the things I’m very interested in is the relationship between word and picture, image and text and those tensions that occur between them. How do you navigate the various roles that you’ve taken on to make this documentary? What strategies have you developed to explore that tension between word and picture? Is the blog part of that preliminary exploration?

MA: This is a great question because I had always hoped that I would have enough money to hire a great Director of Photography for the shoot, but I ended up having to shoot almost all of it myself. Without realizing it, this dilemma has created a ton of creative tension in me, most of it positive and useful. It forced me to be always conscious of tension in the frame as opposed to finding the ‘most beautiful’ image, which I do not have the skills to find anyway!

One of the concepts that I have always envisioned for the documentary is to constantly layer images and sound, and as much as possible, offer conflicting and confrontational pieces within any given moment, I feel the subject matter in this case demands it. This has provided a conscious motivation to create tension on screen between layers whether they are word, image or multiple layers of each… or sometimes the absence of one or the other.

The blog entry I have received the most feedback about is hands-down the one from March 29, 2009 entitled “Sunday Morning Comes the Dawn”. This is the only blog entry I posted without an image supporting it and this was a conscious choice because I wanted the reader to experience the post as they would a mystery novel, with the full powers of their imagination helping to create tension for me. So the absence of elements is always something I think about as well, black space, white space, silence and dissonance all play a massive role, in very subtle ways, to create tension for the audience.

The blog helps reinforce those concepts by challenging the blogger to maintain interest using only the tools and palette they choose to work with. My blog is quite simple; words and still images, but I’m trying to combine them in different ways to see what impact each has; images that juxtapose or complement, narrative in first or third person, bad writing with ridiculous, indulgent description, and hopefully some good writing with carefully crafted sentences.

SL: There’s always an excess that one is left with at the end of creating a work of art. The blog can be a way of documenting that excess too. One of my favourite writers, Helene Cixous, has said about notebooks (which share some things with blogs), that “it’s rare for someone to manage to keep within the narrative the spontaneous, frothy quality of the notebooks and diaries.” I think blogs can convey a rawness, a frothy quality, that can be useful to my creative process. But I also keep a notebook which is indispensable to my process. What other tools have you used besides the blog?

MA: Film is all about excess! Documentary in particular breeds excessive capture; hours and hours of footage, thousands of stills, hundreds of songs and sounds… the real work is to sculpt and edit these excesses down to an essential, visceral story. Obviously with all that material it’s easy to get sidetracked so most of the tools I am developing are about organizing and flagging all that stuff. The primary tool for me is the typed transcripts I am doing of all the interviews and descriptions of images for all the footage. All these go into a binder that I have organized into a rough outline. To this I add screen grabs of key images and storyboards of things I need to find or create. Then I highlight the key bits of dialog I really want to use, add music cues, etc. What I end up with is a visual script of the film, with all the resources at my fingertips. Mind you this is all definitely moving away from “frothy” and fully into a right brain world!

I guess when I am doing dramatic (fiction) stuff my favorite tool is the short story… and these are fully frothy! I’m not so much interested in journals or personally driven blogging when I’m doing dramatic stuff because I like to keep myself in the world of my characters. A journal drives me back into my own reality, my physical restrictions, right brain responsibilities.

Short stories allow me to work out challenges with characters or a story by using the other world and imaginative powers of my characters… it’s extremely liberating! I just give the challenge over to my characters to solve and write out how they deal with it in a story. Eventually the characters will find a solution, and in the process I gain new insights into the characters' psyches. Of course, you need to have developed your characters and done your research to be able to do this… but to me, you can’t get to the truth of your story and your characters until you’ve done your homework anyway.

SL: The blog enriches the creative process in many ways, but would you say that there are any dangers or risks to blogging? Have you ever felt that maybe you revealed too much, or worked with certain elements too early in the creative process?

MA: I’m not too worried about over extending in a blog. The danger for me is switching back and forth from right brain work to left brain work. If you are blogging as a marketing obligation, you will constantly be fighting the responsibility, the demand on your time, the draw into your own reality that posting represents. If you can find a way to use the blog as an enhancement of your creative process, or at least be aware of when the blog is interfering with your creativity, I think you can find a balance.

I think the other danger of blogging would be making public declarations that aren’t eventually backed up. Again, when we are marketing, we tend to stretch and bend and declare in order to create interest. It is my personal belief that if we choose to communicate publicly then we have a responsibility to maintain personal integrity… a blog is a piece of art and should be handled with that kind of care, that kind of truth. Take a look at what’s happening on things like Twitter right now… not much truth and integrity being tweeted right now, mostly just a bunch of self serving garbage… in my humble opinion.

SL: What will happen to the blog when all is said and done? Will you allow it to stand, to remain in cyberspace after you’ve finished the project? I’m thinking also of practical concerns – is the blog useful as a form of publicity? Will you refer to it at a later stage of your creative process?

MA: I think for “Kulka: The Final Round” the blog will remain as a document in some form. We will certainly use it as another product for marketing, but understanding that a blog on its own is not a fantastic marketing tool. The blog is excellent for marketing certain aspects of the film like the depth of the material, the care with which it is handled, so we will certainly direct people to it. But we have to be respectful and understand that not everybody has time to read pages and pages of material just because we ask them to… better perhaps if we can direct people to specific posts within the blog, and if they are interested in reading on… wonderful. It comes down to energy cost benefits; if you could spend all your time making a fantastic blog that everyone would want to subscribe to… number one, you wouldn’t have any time to work on the project you’re hyping… number two, you’d be better off making a full-on website.

I think the real value of a blog is very similar to a journal, except that with the electronic access today’s technology provides, the traffic we can drive to a blog mind blowing. But like a journal, a blog’s greatest value is in the fact that you are, with some regularity, communicating; taking time to record thoughts, fears and dreams for others to see.

It is the process of becoming vulnerable, and nothing could be more important, because vulnerability and trust… are the key elements of hope.

Blogging and the Creative Process - A short interview with Ariel Gordon

2009-06-23T09:24:00.009-06:00

"Logged"

"Fodder"

"Lightning"

(All photos - Ariel Gordon)

Ariel Gordon is the Winnipeg-based author of three recent small press poetry chapbooks. She is a regular contributor to the Winnipeg Free Press' books section and, each September, is Blogger-in-Chief of HOT AIR, the official blog of THIN AIR (i.e. the Winnipeg International Writers Festival). Her first full collection of poetry is slated for publication with Palimpsest Press in spring 2010. When not being bookish, Ariel likes tromping through the woods and taking macro photographs of mushrooms.

Capacious Hold-All: Can you talk about the ways in which your blog has affected your creative (writing/painting/photography) process?

Ariel Gordon: Posting first/second draft poems on my blog has become a part of my process. Which is not to say that every poem I write goes up on the blog, but I see it as another way of saying “this is what I’m doing/thinking/feeling.” A few months after starting my own blog in 2005, a friend and I started a group blog called the May Day Poetry Project. Participating poets commit to a writing and posting schedule over the month of May and, although it isn’t required of them, comment on each other’s work. It’s a fleeting but immensely satisfying community but is getting almost overwhelming in terms of the number of poets. This past year we had fourteen poets take part, which meant writing my own poems but also reading - and thinking critically on - five or six other poems a day. I will admit that I don’t get the same kind of feedback on the poems I post to my blog on a day-to-day basis as I do when May Day-ing, but I can’t seem to break the habit. Or maybe it’s that May Day reinforces my thinking around the posting of first drafts…

In terms of my photography, I don’t think I would have pursued it so doggedly if I hadn’t had a forum like the Jane Day Reader on which to post pictures. It was important to “do something” with the photos - beyond shooting/processing/saving them to my hard drive – in the same way that it’s important to publish poems here and there: to be in dialogue with other people via the work.In terms of the ways that the photos and poems have cross-pollinated each other, I’ve often wistfully thought that I should write a series of poems to “go” with the photos but have come to the conclusion that they’re separate processes. I’ve said what I need to say with the photos already, so writing poems to them feels extraneous.

But when I’m at a scheduled writing retreat or out-of-town workshop and find myself unable to likewise schedule a spurt of writing, I will often pick up my camera and go see what’s under the trees. (And work editing the material I brought with me and read, of course...)

But if I’m shooting, I somehow don’t feel like I’m wasting my time.Sometimes I’m able to do both. And then I feel full nearly to bursting with satisfaction. Ripe, even…

CH: Has blogging suggested ideas that you might not otherwise have pursued?

AG: Not that I’m aware of, but I think it would be hateful if I was able to trace all my fragmentary thoughts/ideas/feelings back to a source. I’m too self-conscious of process as it is…

Blogging has given other people ideas about me that were useful, in that they considered me for opportunities that they might not have otherwise…For instance, when I proposed to THIN AIR, The Winnipeg International Writers Festival that they should do a blog and that I should be Blogger-in-Chief of said blog, all I had to do, in terms of establishing my credentials, was provide them with a link to my site.

HOT AIR was pretty overwhelming: this past year, between myself and the four other contributors, we were responsible for 125 posts in little over a week. To make matters better/worse, I decided to I use a few more bells and whistles on HOT AIR than on my own blog: a flicker stream, group twittering, posting photos from my phone, doing a time-lapse video of opening night, etc., etc. But it was good to stretch my tech-muscles, to talk to other writers and have a good excuse to attend as much of the festival as possible.

Another possibility suggested by blogging is that I’m thinking on doing a print May Day anthology at some point…I think it would be interesting to try to translate my administrator role on that blog into that of an editor.

CH: One of the things I’m very interested in is the relationship between word and picture, image and text, and those tensions that occur between them. How do you see this playing out on your blog?

AG: I’m one of those uppity words people that has ideas about what things should look like but no skills with which to make those ideas flesh. So having a blog (and limited HTML coding ability) has allowed me to play with visuals a bit. I can change the template as often as it seems needful, I can include all kinds of images in individual posts, I can change the spacing of the posts themselves, all of which is very fiddly and very satisfying, when it works.

It occurs to me too that playing with the look of the blog is much like playing with the look of a poem on the page. All of that said, I’m vaguely suspicious of images. They’re too easy, too direct versus the imaginative leaps of images-in-text.

CH: The blog enriches the creative process in many ways, but would you say that there are any dangers or risks to blogging? Have you ever felt that maybe you revealed too much, or worked with certain elements too early in the creative process?

AG: Like most teenagers getting naked for the first time, I don’t worry about the dangers. I mean, if someone is determined to steal my work, they can do it almost as easily from lit mags and/or books.The one time someone reprinted my work without permission, he credited me, so I found out. And after I enquired as what was going on, he got barraged with similar enquiries from other writers and subsequently stopped his mostly-well-meant (I think…) thievery.

I use my blog to connect with people, to engage around aspects of my writing life and specifically to share work-in-progress. And I’ve set up the blog to reflect those aims, posting reviews I’ve written and writing news and first drafts of poems.I’m conscious, when blogging, of posting a variety of material. I think a blog that was all early poems or all photographs or all braggart-y writing news would be extremely boring.

There’s also some crabby/reverent non-fiction and photos around extra-curricular activities like mushrooming but that’s what makes the blog tick. That’s what makes my blog MY blog.

But I will note that I set boundaries for myself when I reluctantly started blogging back in 2005. The blog is a ‘work’ space. That means that I don’t ‘journal’ on my blog about “how that wretched M is making me mad” or “how nobody appreciates my writing, boo hoo,” or, specifically, post photos of my daughter.

I’m not an especially private person, but I was really firm on that: there will be no pictures of my daughter. I suppose because that’s the holiest of holies when it comes to my private life but also, isn’t it enough that my first book is mostly pregnancy and mothering poems and the second, so far, mostly about parenting?

One benefit to blogging is that I have a presence on-line if an editor or fellow writer or someone who reads my work somewhere and wants to find out a bit more about me, quick.

Also, if I’m neglecting my writer friends, they can check the blog to see what’s up, even if it’s complaining (which is probably what I’d be doing if I were corresponding with them specifically…).(I had to create a tag called ‘complaining’ because I was kvetching so much…to clarify, given my previous comments on not journaling on the blog, it was mostly during periods when I was too busy to write or blog to any great extent and I briefly noted it on the blog.)

To sum: blogging has made me more fearless but also more certain of my boundaries.

Blogging and the Creative Process - A Short Interview with Marita Dachsel

2009-06-18T13:12:00.011-06:00

Marita Dachsel

Photograph by Sheryda Warrener

Capacious Hold-All: Can you talk about the ways in which your blog has affected your creative process?

Marita Dachsel: Before I had a writing blog, I had a mommy blog. I started it when my eldest was just a few weeks old and other than the odd poem it was the only writing I did for the first few (many) months of his life. When my first book, All Things Said & Done, was published, I started what I had hoped to be a book blog. I posted the occasional bit of news--readings, reviews--but mostly it was ignored. Not long after my second child was born, I found I simply didn't have time to enjoy life with my children, be a mother, keep up my blog(s), and work on my own "real" writing. It was a no-brainer that blogging had to go.

I still read blogs, both the parenting and writing kinds. I've never been terribly active, more a lurking wallflower, but I missed being part of the community. In the fall of 2008, over a year since going on blogging-hiatus, I developed a reason to blog again. Merging my mothering-world and my writing-world, I began laying plans for my Motherhood and Writing Project--a series of interviews with writing-mamas.

I find this series invigorating. I'm constantly inspired by the women I interview. I'm connecting with people I wouldn't have had the chance to if it weren't for this project. I'm working on a brand-new top-secret project with Ariel Gordon, a fabulous poet and someone who is transforming from an online friend to a real friend. This would never have happened if it hadn't been for blogging. And because of the Motherhood and Writing project I've been asked to sit on a panel for a screening of the film Who Does She Think She Is?, a film about motherhood and creativity.

I don't think blogging itself has directly changed my creative process, but it has opened up opportunities for me. It has also made be reachable to strangers. For example, this past year my poem Mrs. Torrance was part of Vancouver's poetry-in-transit program. I've had people email via the blog to comment on the poem. This wouldn't have happened if I hadn't been so accessible.

C: Has blogging suggested ideas that you might not otherwise have pursued?

M: I suppose I wouldn't have attempted my Motherhood and Writing Project if I hadn't had an existing blog begging to be filled. My guess is that blogging is like anything in life, you never know from where inspiration is going to come or to where ideas will go.

C: One of the things I’m very interested in is the relationship between word and picture, image and text, and those tensions that occur between them. How do you see this playing out on your blog?

M: The only pictures I have on mine are ones the interviewees send along to illustrate their interviews. Ideally they'll be representative of what mothering and writing looks like in their lives, but sometimes it's simply a headshot. I rarely post photos of my own. My mommy blog was all about photos of my life, they didn't need to seep into the writing one, too.

C: The blog enriches the creative process in many ways, but would you say that there are any dangers or risks to blogging? Have you ever felt that maybe you revealed too much, or worked with certain elements too early in the creative process?

M: I think there are many dangers. The first is, obviously, that any time spent on the blog could (and should?) be used creating. I would much rather write poetry than blog posts.

Another hazard is that if you're google-able, you will be found. My first book of poetry didn't get many reviews (whose does?), but in one of the few reviews I did get, the writer had obviously googled me, found my family blog, and spent a good portion of the review reviewing my life. Let me quote the opening paragraph: "Literary couples are odd couples, or so it's said. Vancouver's Marita Dachsel, author of this volume, may disprove the rule, given how exceptionally normal her marriage to Kevin Kerr appears. Their family website depicts costumed toddlers, grandma's Prince George backyard videos, and two married writers--serious, talented ones--acting halfway normal. Heartening odd, that. It's also cheering that said spouses are a poet and playwright, respectively; it shows mixed marriages can work."

Not surprisingly, it was soon after a receiving a copy of this review from my publisher that I slowed down on writing about my family.

My Motherhood and Writing Project is ideal for me because it's a finite time (2009), I don't spend much time on it (the interviewees do most of the work!), and it's on a set subject. I'm not sure what I'll do for 2010. I have a couple of ideas simmering, but I may simply do nothing.

Blogging and the Creative Process - A Short Interview with Brenda Schmidt

2009-06-17T10:11:00.006-06:00

Spruce Grouse

Photograph by Brenda Schmidt

Capacious Hold-All: Can you talk about the ways in which your blog has affected your creative (writing/painting/ photography) process?

Brenda Schmidt: Living in a northern mining town in Saskatchewan has its advantages. Here I have the space and time to concentrate on my work. Thanks to the digital age, I cannot imagine living anywhere else. Gone is the craving for a writing community. Thanks largely to blogs, I am part of it. Gone is the-grass-is-so-much-greener-in-big-urban-centres fantasy. Thanks largely to blogs, I now know better. Once the craving and the fantasy began to subside, I felt so much lighter. This lightness has had a positive impact on my work. I set up my first blog, Alone on a Boreal Stage, in 2005 prior to the publication of my second book. I wanted to increase my visibility with the hope that my books would find more readers. However, I soon found myself worrying about other things. I wanted to entertain the reader of my blog just as I would if they were sitting at my table. I wanted to be a good host. To engage. To play. Play is vital to my creative process. Play means all kinds of things, as the OED points out, but here I'm thinking of play as free and unimpeded movement. In many ways, the blog feels like a canvas that can't be resolved. It keeps calling for another brisk stroke. A bit of light here. A warmer shadow over there.

C: One of the things I'm very interested in is the relationship between word and picture, image and text, and those tensions that occur between them. How do you see this playing out on your blog?

B: Over the years I've become increasingly interested in the appearance of each post and the blog as a(n expanding) whole. I focus on both its content and composition. On the weight of each word and image. On the juxtaposition of the post to the one below and the one that might follow and the overall tone. I treat the blog as I would any work-in-progress and revel in the interactive element and how it feeds the process. I now think of blogging as an emerging art. An art of emergence.

C: Has blogging suggested ideas that you might not otherwise have pursued?

Culvert Installations is one example of a project that I pursued because of blogging. The blog format allows me to go my own way. No exhibition proposals. No deadlines. No acceptances. No rejections. There is great freedom in that. So right now I'm pursuing my thinking with images. I suspect writing will follow. It usually does. Select Hops is another. It's a collaborative linked creative nonfiction project that Gerald Hill proposed last year. A project like this could be done privately by email or letter. However, the public nature of our exchange has a more conversational quality. It's as if we're sitting on coffee row, trading stories and trying to one-up each other. Writing a post for Select Hops usually leads to other writing, so it's a valuable process for me. The comments section on my blog is invaluable. Comments matter, whether playful or serious. Reciprocation matters. Playful banter elevates my mood and that in turn elevates my creativity. Some posts on Alone on a Boreal Stage have received comments with great reading suggestions. I'm grateful to those who have shown such generosity. Other posts have led to vigorous email exchanges. The suggestions and feedback have opened many doors and helped me and my work grow.

C: The blog enriches the creative process in many ways, but would you say that there are any dangers or risks to blogging? Have you ever felt that maybe you revealed too much, or worked with certain elements too early in the creative process?

B: I'm sure a quick google would yield countless articles on the general dangers of blogging and ways to avoid them, but I imagine the risks to the creative process vary a great deal. For me, there's nothing like the joy that accompanies a creative free fall. I've been enjoying that again more often of late. I've also been increasingly protective of my time. I've learned that the creative process needs to be protected as much as possible from outside interference. My blog allows me to both connect and disconnect at the same time. I can put stuff out in the world and walk away if I like. That's incredibly freeing. Normally I don't post new work to my blog unless it was written for blogging purposes. I have posted the odd new poem in the past and once received an email response with excellent editorial suggestions. For the most part, however, I don't post work or discuss my projects in any depth as I prefer to let them sit privately for a long time so they can take on whatever shape they take. And that's not what my blog is about. My blog really is a work-in-progress itself. I want to give it the same space and respect as I would any other project. I want it to grow into whatever it will be. We'll see where it goes.

An Instinct for Confidence in the World

2009-06-15T10:09:00.004-06:00

I've talked before about how I came to Bachelard's The Poetics of Space after writing Calm Things. I've since been often drawn back to it, keep finding myself in this book. This past month I've watched a couple of nests, two very different nests, being formed in the utility corridor where I walk the dog. The photo above is a crow's nest. Seems a brilliant place to build. Solid metal tree, out of harm's way, though a bit noisy to be sure, right beside the highway. At first I thought that kids had formed the one below (they've built treehouses in the stand of trees at the other side of the field), and maybe they've had a hand in it. But one morning, earlier than usual, I saw a man arise, and grab his large bag, and walk out. We said hello to each other. I haven't seen him since. The pictures perhaps don't show how carefully trees have been arranged on one side into a lean-to type of affair. All through the strip of trees there, smaller trees have been pushed over and broken, so this was made without any tools of any sort.

What would Bachelard think of this kind of nest, home, abode, intimate space? He might be inspired to feel confidence in the world in examining the crow's nest. And the other?

"And so when we examine a nest, we place ourselves at the origin of confidence in the world, we receive a beginning of confidence, an urge toward cosmic confidence. Would a bird build its nest if it did not have its instinct for confidence in the world?"

Bachelard also says, "The nest is a lyrical bouqet of leaves. It participates in the peace of the vegetable world. It is a point in the atmosphere of happiness that always surrounds large trees."

There's something peaceful in this nest in the small stand of trees in the utility corridor, something lyrical in the arrangement of twigs and branches. I can imagine lying down on the gathered leaves in the corner of this large nest, in its cool and shade, and listening to the birdsong and traffic hum, the wind in the leaves above. To arrive at such a nest must always be a complicated process, though. And there's no doubt about its precariousness, its fragility, this small, ground level nest, so close to a busy highway. Is it abandoned now? Soon it will become overgrown with wild roses, difficult to access, the shopping cart forgotten. Or maybe kids will use it as a hide-out or fort for a while until they're too old for such things. They'll take the wood from it, and build a treehouse nearby, and this interim, make-shift home, will disappear in that way.

Capacious Project - Shawna Lemay

2009-06-07T08:02:00.003-06:00

I would love at some point to collect and publish the Capacious Project. And add to it as well! But for now, I thought I'd post my own 'purse piece.' This was first published by The Society, the magazine out of St. Peter's College in Saskatchewan.

Do Not Overdo the Bag
or
To Pursue and Peruse the Purse

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace any thing, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. - Virginia Woolf

The diary as a purse, a capacious hold-all. Or as a desk. Deskpurse. Let us not over think, not overdo, let us fling our odds and ends, let’s do it without looking them through, careful and nonchalant. The purse a diary, a place to stuff and zipper, still, those censoring angels. A test and a temptation, not unlike an accident – to spill the bag, to show contents, dwellings, the treasured scattered sprawl and patient sticky grunge of life. If I pour out what’s inside, give it a shake or two, and place the skin of it, the husk, the outwards of my inward, beside it, would you read the innards like a tea-leaf reader would? The guts and gizzards, the disruptive depths and darkness. My flingings and fonds. How to divine the accumulation, detritus, secrets, the stuff of circumstance with which we sally forth?

My pretty portable archive, my unconcealed weapon, my sturdy personal lost and found. Unafraid of theft, I sling my purse, I take it up rather than the sword, I arm myself, it clings to me, it swings from me. The purse, after all, takes flight, alights, is mightier than the sword. It’s in the bag, whether you call it belly, womb, paunch, vessel, gullet, black hole, nest, the heavy burden to the bruised portal of ourselves, our tranquil, intimate and far-off selves, we carry, relentlessly, courageously, absent-mindedly. Or maybe I’ll call it handbag, clutch, reticule, pouch, pocketbook, balantine, sac, postal bag, duffle, rucksack, messenger, grip. Workbag, evening bag, dance bag, saddlebag, Kelly bag, carpetbag. Backpack, chatelaine, baguette, hobo, satchel, petite portmanteau. Bracelet bag, lunchbox, boudoir bag, miser bag.

Is your bag a beauty factory? a shield? a companion? Does it transform, transport? How much power does your purse pack? Is it a status symbol, a fad, a trend? A fake, a copy, a rip-off, a knock-off? Does it clutch and snap and clasp? Does it thump and flap and spend? Does it keep its secrets? Know when to spill? Do you carry it, lug it, tote it, or schlep it? Do you travel light? What does the bag know? It reminds me that I know nothing. The purse provokes lists. What do I carry? Lists. The list of things I carry, stuff, secrete, stash, begins with lists. Grocery lists, eggs, butter, cilantro. Lists of office supplies, notebook, Faber Castell pen – superfine, sepia. Lists of books I hope to acquire, always changing. All these lists of needs, wants.

And then, purse lists. A list of alternate or additional uses: stake out territory such as a table in a bar, seat in a movie theatre. In old movies, spill partial contents at the foot of dreamboat in hopes he will kneel to help pick up. A well-stuffed purse is excellent at bridal showers where that game is played, objects called out and whoever can produce the most from the depths of their handbag, wins. A list of words to describe: beaded, brocaded, embellished, worn, crushed, creased, bruised, embroidered, crocheted, studded, feathered, fringed, bejewelled, sequined, gilded, rhinestoned, mosaiced, modpodged, decoupaged. List of possible materials: velvet, silk, crepe, recycled plastic, newspapers, books, leather (all varieties of hide), plastic, canvas, tortoiseshell, metal mesh, straw, wicker, papier-mâché, lace, mock croc. A list of words used to advertise handbags: vintage, flimsy, fancy, slouchy, ornate, cheap, cheeky, flamboyant, chic, humble, durable, bulky, sleek, chunky, iconic, functional, luxurious, formidable, reliable, handy, strappy, smug, witty, thrifty, monumental, classic, coquettish, modest, elegant, discreet, graceful, clever, coy, natty, extravagant, vital, delicate, glamorous, retro, eccentric, cartoonish, staid. A list of things not to do with your purse: forget it on the roof of the car, leave it in plain view in the car, hold it loosely in the mall, carry large sums of cash, set it on the floor of the restroom (you’ve seen that email going around about purses and germs haven’t you?), leave the zipper open and then pick it up awkwardly dumping all the contents, this common candor, forget to move your wallet from evening bag to everyday bag discovering this only when at the grocery store check-out with a week’s worth of groceries including vast amounts of frozen items. And, as Winnie says, in Beckett’s play, “do not overdo the bag, Winnie, make use of it of course, let it help you...along, when stuck.”

These lists are my secret unreachable, remote, somnolent plot and in amidst the quivering lists, there happen to be things. Useful things, things that comfort, things to mull over, treasures in the depths in which to lose oneself. My hand reaches, reaches in. Finds. Into the trembling breath of the bag, the bag breathes in and out, sighs in silent splendour with each unclasping, unzipping, unsnapping, unfolding, unflapping. And things, things endure, escape me, are elusive and clamorous and fragmentary.

A map of Venice, postcard of the (maybe) Vermeer Girl in the Red Hat, mandala to colour, nautilus shell cup, silence, a nearly ripe pomegranate, bronze skeleton key, catalogue to the Museum of Purses and Handbags in Amsterdam, Norman Bryson’s Looking at the Overlooked, Dahlia Ravikovitch’s The Window, The Stream of Life by Clarice Lispector, a French loaf, squares of Ghirardelli espresso chocolate, Faber-Castell pens, embroidery floss, sequinned Venetian mask, peace prayer of St. Francis of Assisi, photos of Chloe, lozenges suitable for lolling on the tongue while reading poetry, floral perfume, cornflowers, patch of green grass, curl of birch bark, lemon scented candle, beribboned bundle of cinnamon sticks, box of long matches, fragile anguish, patience, an exultation of cinnamon hearts, sheet of beeswax, suspicion, uncertainty, complicated version of hope, imperturbable exuberance, cocoa powder stained recipe for red velvet cake, various definitions of feminism, tubes of paint, manifesto and its multiple revisions, a clear path untrodden, jar of jewel-toned glass tesserae, thrilling ambition, case of champagne, tin of powdered sugar dusted hard candy, a complicated embrace, a crazed vision, escaped thought, the word on the tip of my tongue, miniature statue of Nike of Samothrace, inconsistencies, hummingbird feather, leap of the tiger, chipped teacup, fan, charm, a bit of bramble, a ramble, digital camera, narrow and devastating vial of beads, limoncello, diadem, a juicy oozing pear with an awkwardly elegant stem, Sanditon by Jane Austen to remind me of the unfinished, thread from the Lady and the Unicorn tapestry, a reliquary to hide-display something beautiful I once spit out the glittering sheen of, broken strand of silver pearls, iron dragonfly paperweight, a snapshot fairly close-up of my changeable mismatched eyes superimposed against a snowy backdrop, letraset, one scuffed ruby slipper, graham wafers, white silk scarf and big owlish prescription sunglasses, cool glass of water, various lipsticks chosen because of their names dream for example, a lump of lapis lazuli, another picture this time of the angel wing I once found inhabiting a snowdrift, crumbs(pound cake, cupcake, morning glory muffin, dense bread), a wedge-shaped core of darkness, a muddy bird’s nest, a beehive (humming), a bird cage (door flung open), an exhaustive answer, a Hallelujah.

Agressively Pleated With an Enchanting Clasp

2009-06-07T07:42:00.006-06:00

A recent find on the discount shelves - The Handbag: An Illustrated History. Full of wonderful photographs and scads of quotations, like this one from Carol Shields: "My mother's handbag was big and black and aggressively pleated, with an enchanting clasp in the form of two parrots. The bag's richly dark interior held the mingled fragrance of perfume and leather - calfskin probably - and a cotton handkerchief dabbed with "Evening in Paris" wadded in one corner."

The bracelet on the top of the book is one of those perks of working in retail. I'm always interested to learn how other artists/writers support themselves, how they balance the day job with the work of making art, not to mention the rest of life. A good article on the subject here.

Dahlia

2009-06-01T18:43:00.004-06:00

I'm rather fond of this photo of a dahlia I took yesterday in the garden. It's reminded me (this is how my mind works these days) to dig a book of poetry out of the teetering pile of books on the coffee table - Hovering at a Low Altitude by Dahlia Ravikovitch. You can read the title poem here.

The Purse in Art - Two Examples

2009-05-31T07:39:00.005-06:00

Public Purse - Simon Perry
Bourke Street Mall

Melbourne

Pigeons gather around this purse sculpture by Simon Perry. Visitors can perch on the public purse, permanently closed, and yet quite vulnerable, out in the open.

James Collinson 1825-1881
The Empty Purse (replica of `For Sale') ?circa 1857

And here is The Empty Purse, a painting that can be found at the Tate. A 'moralising scene.' But one so full of rich colours and fabrics and beautiful objects. Type in "empty purse" on Google images and this is what you get today. Credit advice, ads for loans, and even a little Chaucer.

Look What Came in the Mail Yesterday....

2009-05-26T06:58:00.003-06:00

Whistlejacket by Deborah Butterfield, Jasper Avenue

2009-05-17T08:19:00.009-06:00

This is Whistlejacket by Deborah Butterfield on Jasper Avenue, Edmonton. I removed the crushed diet coke can from the jaws right before I snapped this photo. I suppose that's one way to interact with public art. The "under video surveillance" sign has been mangled somewhat, but the sculpture, made from found steel, is no worse for wear. I've long admired Butterfield's horses and have spent hours looking at this book on her. Jane Smiley says this in the intro: "I have never met a horse lover who did not gasp at the truth of Butterfield's horses."

Running errands yesterday we dropped into the coffee shop next to the sculpture. I've been asked a few times lately while shopping, where I'm from, or "are you from here?" Maybe when you spend a lot of time alone in your room you start to look like you're from somewhere else. While we were taking these shots I heard someone say in a surprised tone, tourists! That's an Edmonton thing I think. I mean, we like it here, but can't help but be surprised anyone would find much to recommend it. In fact, we're pretty hard on ourselves, so it would seem.

Notes and News

2009-05-11T18:28:00.009-06:00

- Susan Olding, author of the extraordinary book, Pathologies: A Life in Essays, recently interviewed me for her blog Proved on the Pulses: On the Essay and its Literary Cousins.

- I'm thrilled to be leading an online workshop called The Passionate Lit-Blog through St. Peter's College, July 12-14. More information here.

- I've been thinking a lot about how blogging affects my creative process. Look for several short interviews in the upcoming months that look at the ways in which blogging inspires and enhances the creative process as well as its potential to hamper and block.

- Looking forward to heading to Calgary on the 23rd of this month for the Alberta Literary Awards Gala. My book, Calm Things, was shortlisted for the Wilfred Eggleston Award for Non-Fiction. Winners will be announced and awards presented at the Alberta Literary Awards Gala on Saturday May 23, 2009 at the Hotel Arts in Calgary (119 – 12 Avenue SW) as part of The Writers’ Union of Canada and the Writers Guild of Alberta Limitless Sky Conference.

- And lastly, why not, a fun link: Spell with flickr.

Red Beaded Purse Painting

2009-05-02T07:45:00.005-06:00

Red Beaded Purse, by Robert Lemay

I've been bragging up the birthday gift I received from my partner, Rob, on Facebook. Couldn't resist. It's hanging to the right of my desk now (yet unframed) and it takes my breath away every time I look at it. This painting of my red purse is going to inspire me for years to come. Not only that, I think it's the perfect sidebar picture for Capacious Hold-All. You'd almost think I planned it.....

This morning I got to thinking about the power of red purses, and thought I'd pop up a few red purse related links.

I love this website called Purse Stories. Here's a link to a moving story called, A Salute to Women with Red Purses by Alice Pasupathi.

A selection of red purses at It's All in the Bag. More here. There's even a red Pantone (19-1763) change purse.

In the Japanese story of the magic purse, the purse is red.

The red purse book, Danger!

And then there's Anna Karenina's little red handbag.

I guess I missed red purse day on April 25.

A Route of Evanescence

2009-04-24T14:37:00.013-06:00

A green flower on the ledge in front of my kitchen sink. The hummingbird below hangs in the window above the ledge. In this way I have managed lately to think toward what is green, what hums. I have managed to ignore the skiff of snow that we awoke to one morning, the sleet on another afternoon.

Did you know that there are websites devoted to hummingbird poetry?

A Route of Evanescence
by Emily Dickinson

A Route of Evanescence
With a revolving Wheel -
A Resonance of Emerald -
A Rush of Cochineal -
And every Blossom on the Bush
Adjusts its tumbled Head -
The mail from Tunis, probably,
An easy Morning's Ride --

I'm too easily distracted this morning, following a google labyrinth, after searching "Emily Dickinson" and "hummingbird." Sometimes the mind is a green flower, at other times, it follows the route of evanescence.

Came across this book in my flittings, though - which I've put on my summer reading list: A Summer of Hummingbirds by Christopher Benfey.

*

What I meant to write about today had more to do with library books, than with hummingbirds. The difficulty with library books is that I can't dogear them, or write in them. Particularly difficult is refraining from underlining things in them. And then there's the fact that the two books I've been reading this week appeared as holds at exactly the same time and I know other people are in queue for them. So the experience of reading them has a short of rushed quality about it.

The two books? The first is Reborn: Journals & Notebooks 1947-1963 by Susan Sontag. She hadn't meant for these to be published, so strange feelings accompany my hurried reading. Do the entries feel more real? less staged? more raw? We're told by her son in the introduction that she might have burned these given the chance. Reading this book is reading without permission, is reading with quick glances over the shoulder, is reading without getting caught, is reading a work saved from the flames. Mid-way through the journals: "Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one's private, secret thoughts - like a confidante who is deaf, dumb, and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person; I create myself." How incredibly intimate this is. I stopped cold here. I couldn't read on. Days pass. I did read on. I'm operating, you see, under the restrictions of a due date.

I've only half-read The Comfort of Things by Daniel Miller, a professor of Anthropology at University College London. I want to slow down my reading of this book. overdue charges may be incurred. A rather lengthy quotation from the prologue: "This book is the story of thirty people, almost all from a single street in South London. They are selected from one hundred individuals and households studied over seventeen months by myself and Fiona Parrott a PhD student in my discipline of Anthropology. It is also a book about how people express themselves through their possessions, and what these tell us about their lives. It explores the role of objects in our relationships, both to each other and to ourselves. We live today in a world of ever more stuff - what sometimes seems a deluge of goods and shopping. We tend to assume that this has two results: that we are more superficial, and that we are more materialistic, our relationships to things coming at the expense of our relationships to people. We make assumptions, we speak in cliches, but we have rarely tried to put these assumptions to the test. By the time you finish this book you will discover that, in many ways, the opposite is true; that possessions often remain profound and usually the closer our relationships are with objects, the closer our relationships are with people."

Suffice to say, that after reading the portraits in this book, one will never walk down one's own street quite the same way again. The approach taken is one that is utterly compelling and utterly humane. The portraits say as much, really, about the author as the subjects. As is his stated goal, Miller does indeed richly convey "something of the warmth of this humanity" found on a single street in South London.

These Voices are Birds, It's Like a Sound of Wings

2009-04-19T08:53:00.010-06:00

Pigeon Purse by Debra Gavant

I've been thinking that those books we're reading, re-reading, wanting to read, say as much about us as anything else. One of the books on my to-read (to buy) list, is Karen Solie's Pigeon. (I was reminded of this when I came across the above purse...). Others:

Want to read: The Marram Grass: Poetry & Otherness by Anne Simpson, Fountain Pens: History and Design by Giorgio Dragoni

Reading: The Winter Vault, by Anne Michaels

Re-Reading: White Ink, by Helene Cixous, Woman to Woman(interviews), by Marguerite Duras and Xaviere Gauthier, Script & Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting, by Kitty Burns Florey

It's interesting to me how the books we're reading or want to read, sometimes prompt the re-reading of books on our shelves. What was it that has made me want to pick up the Duras interviews again? I know part of what attracts me to them is their rough and real quality. I am attracted to the square brackets. A telephone rings, a dog barks incessantly, the tape runs out, there are malfunctions, accidental erasures, a long silence is recorded, wine is sipped. There are digressions and sentences that trail off. Gauthier talks about the decision to leave them "exactly as they were said." In the afterword, there is a discussion of how Duras' comments on 'voice film' is intriguingly parallel to what goes on in the interviews. She says, "So they spoke in all directions...like birds, these voices are birds, it's like a sound of wings. They speak in all directions. I also had to...choose, from all that they were saying." This reading of several books at once, this listening to voices, from all directions, those moments that exist in square brackets, too. These voices that one absorbs, flutters and flaps and hops steadily toward. Yes, they are birds. I do hear the sound of wings....

Beaded Bag on the Keiskamma Canada Blog Auction Today

2009-04-07T06:58:00.003-06:00

Check out this link and consider putting in a bid! The workmanship is gorgeous on this beaded bag and the money goes to a great cause. Read more about it here.

The More Pertinent Question

2009-04-05T08:40:00.004-06:00

A little while alone in your room

will prove more valuable than anything else

that could ever be given you.

(Rumi)

It's been spring break this past week. Which means more interruptions than usual. Still, I managed a fair amount of writing, reading, thinking. Jotted down a lot of ideas in various notebooks. Sat in the red velvet chair, where I do my best jotting. I dipped into books by Lilburn, Cixous, Rumi. Maybe it's the onset of spring, the melting snow, but I feel like I'm bursting with ideas. (Won't jinx it by saying much more). Maybe it has something to do with reading the right combination of books at the right time....

...praise and wait for something to take you in.

(Tim Lilburn)

We become what we attend to. Perhaps the books will be animals coming toward us out of the forest.

(Tim Lilburn)

Fecundity is the creative person's natural state. The more pertinent question is that of what inhibits it. Why does one get periods of broken productivity? What causes these interruptions? Productivity, it has to be said, has no reason to be broken except through adverse, exterior circumstances.

(Helene Cixous)

The Edible? Handbag

2009-03-29T09:28:00.003-06:00

And for something completely different:

More here.

St. Pete's - Lingering Thoughts, a Few Photos

2009-03-28T14:29:00.006-06:00

Is it possible that I'm still re-grouping from a mere 4 days in Saskatchewan, five days later now...All those things that need arranging ahead of time, and then coming back to a full inbox, a rather large to-do list, and well, all the usual. I feel like I haven't written forever, and now it's spring break, which makes that difficult to squeeze in as well. I loved St. Peter's, the college, and was inspired by all the great readings, especially the one given by Tim Lilburn. It was wonderful to re-connect with beloved friends, and to make new ones. But I'm a serious homebody and was also reminded how difficult it is to throw these sorts of trips into a life that is already (always) precariously balanced.

I was delighted to see the desk in my room at the Abbey. It reminded me of this, for one thing.

Anyone who has been out to St. Peter's falls in love with this double hedge around the graveyard.

What a cool bookstore - Between the Pages in Humboldt, where I read from Calm Things. One of the warmest and friendliest crowds I've ever had to a reading.

The reading at St. Peter's College took place in this amazing room, which was full to the brim. I read first, then Tim Lilburn, followed by contributors to The Society. It was a great night - a fabulous mix of readers. I can't remember when I enjoyed a reading more. (Maybe this was because I went first, and could then sit down in one of those supremely comfortable chairs and concentrate on everyone else's words...)

The Society (available at the college bookstore) is a beautifully produced magazine, whose contributors this issue include: Bert Almon, kimmy beach, Dennis Cooley, Myrna Kostash, Robert Kroetsch, Tim Lilburn, Dave Margoshes, Susan Musgrave, Joe Rosenblatt, Allan Safarik. There is an abundace of visual art sprinkled throughout which makes for some very interesting juxtapositions. My own contribution is titled, "Do Not Overdo the Bag," taken from the play by Beckett, Happy Days. At some point I'll post that piece here - it's my take on the Capacious Project, as you may have guessed.

Readings - Saskatchewan

2009-03-20T10:04:00.004-06:00

I'm heading to Saskatchewan tomorrow for the Pelican Bay Arts Collective's Annual Poetry and Literary Festival. More details, here. I'm particularly looking forward to the launch of The Society at St. Peter's College, and hearing Tim Lilburn read. I'll be reading from my contribution to The Society, which is titled, "Do Not Overdo the Bag" - a line taken from Beckett's play, Happy Days. I'll also be reading from Calm Things at Between the Pages in Humboldt, along with a poem or two from my forthcoming book, Red Velvet Forest.

How the Day Escapes

2009-03-18T12:12:00.012-06:00

How does the day, each day, seem to escape from me? Why so little time left for reading, writing? What am I doing with my time? Some precision is required. When I require precision I begin to make lists.

Yesterday, for example, I spent: walking the dog, blogging, checking facebook, emailing, running errands including buying a typewriter for my 10 year old (she's not allowed on facebook and this seemed a good consolation prize), answering, connecting, questioning, responding, staring blankly at screens, waiting, filling, emptying (in boxes, out boxes), clicking on emoticons, sending, receiving, overpunctuating in hopes of unflattening sentences on screen, hyperlinking, doodling, staring out the window, backing up files, driving, photographing, yearning, (and photographing yearning) listening to the tapping of keys, to a bird singing through the gray and snow, looking at small things caged, opening the door to the small cage, thinking about how after being interrupted constantly the space one finds oneself in afterwards holds a strange humming, more answering, more emptying, checking, checking, ignoring, noticing, phoning, waiting, sipping wine, cooking, baking, cleaning, tapping, blinking, connecting, craving spring, craving a typewriter of my own, forgetting what a terrible typist I am, organizing, searching, surfing, researching, making notes, revising, uploading, printing, scheming, praying to a variety of gods, thanking same, watching Star Trek (TNG), reading this blog and that, commenting, meaning to comment but too tired, writing in diary, doodling in diary, nagging, cajoling, assembling, at some point, sleeping.

But this, too, is imprecise.

And maybe why I have the craving to have my own, working, typewriter. (The carriage on the one below needs repair). I want to hear the sound of the key flying up, rising to meet the page, and that satisfying moment when it connects.