I adore this new house I’m renting, high on a limestone bluff, dawn spilling into the kitchen, afternoon light pouring warm the wooden floors to mellow gold. From where I write, in front of a large glass plane on a landing at the top of the stairs, the tips of maples sway unfurling pale shivery leaves. In a neighbour’s yard, a massive magnolia proffers pink cups to confetti. Scent of lilacs. Fresh cut grass. Tulip petal drops. I delight the wild apple blossoms mingle invisible with the domestic, united by honeybees and songbirds. And love.
I’m three weeks into sabbatical time. It’s wonderful. Long project writing progresses; I’ll provide a brief update on that. But first, a response to a recent prompt to write about a dream, unedited (the response includes the passages of reflection and the recent dream surfacing an older dream):
This morning I dreamt my good friend E, divorced with three daughters who lives on Wolfe Island, came over to my house to inform me he would be moving the house I have just rented to a waterfront property he owns near his own house. I wasn’t sure. I worried the current owner of the rental house might object. But the bulldozers and cranes were outside. My own daughters were yelling at me to get with the program. I was wearing my pajamas still and the kitchen was piled with dirty dishes.
I said, I want to see the property first. And it was a tiny piece of lawn the lake might swallow in any flood, a spit of land too near the ferry terminal, bordered on one side by marshland and a field of cattails. A giant old weeping willow wept toward the lake, threatening to uproot in the direction of its longing. E said to me, his hand up in the air to halt the operations, get the workmen to turn off their machines, “It won’t work. The foundations don’t match.” And I said, “Yeah, I want the windows to face east/west to maximise the sun.” He replied, “Yeah, it just won’t work.”
Now as I write this, I can’t help but read the metaphor of trying to match the homes we make separately together in one relationship. The foundations don’t match, there is the threat of flood and the fetidness of marshland, and I see myself as the weeping willow, clawing to be free of foundations or being rooted.
This brought to mind another dream, an ancient dream I had about Steven Heighton, the poet, now dead. He died too young, in his prime. In that dream we stood on opposite sides of a low-ceilinged room. It was morning and the light poured into the room making the warm wood floors gleam and glint, almost blinding. There were a few people hanging around, speaking softly to each other. It was some writing event that had yet to begin. I was eating a golden delicious apple, chomping great juicy bits of it as I turned its flesh in my hand. I caught Steve Heighton’s eye from across the room and perhaps my attraction to him was obvious because he strode toward me with those long spider legs of his, crossing the room with energetic intent. He strode up to me and kissed me, pressing his body entire up tight against my own. I could feel his erection against me through his black jeans and my own clothes. I worried and was a little ashamed I had chunks of golden delicious apple he was moving around in my mouth with his own tongue, but the kiss lingered on. I thought, Oh no…he’s too earnest! That was the word, a warning, my body declining the desire on offer. And then the strangest thing, because the kiss continued, I fell, golden delicious apple and all, into his mouth and moved through his throat into a dark universe of glowing stars, floating there in space, comfortable in the vastness, the emptiness. It was beautiful. Before waking to a feeling of disappointment about Steve being too earnest to take on as a lover[1].
But why this particular memory of a dream from so long ago? Because in this new house, I recognise it, the warm gleaming glow of morning and afternoon sun on the wood flooring. It’s the floor of my earlier dream. The golden delicious dream. I live with this glorious floor now. Right now. And writing about these two dreams, dreamed over a decade apart but connected together here on these pages, I think it must be something about bright foundations, a steady plane to stand and be held by. And the apple…well, the apple, it’s delicious and golden and a key to a much wider universe.
So. The Long Project.
I started at the beginning. From scratch. Again. Yes, I have a lot of copy written toward this book length work already. A lot. But now that I know (ish) the story’s backbone[2], I needed to set it up from a slightly different angle. I also needed to figure out a sort of cadence…a sense of the pacing for how information is offered to the reader as well as playing a bit with transitions between…chapters. There are (roughly) eight sections to this book; within each section, there are chapters (their number will be variable) which hang together (associatively, loosely) around an idea (theme? Not sure about this yet).
Released from my day job, I’m keeping Monday to Friday working hours for Long Project writing. I’m at the desk by seven and I write till lunch. Then I go for a walk, huffing up Fort Henry Hill, and then I settle into writing adjacent work (reading), before winding down by four (my evenings continue to be crammed with other routines: gym, volunteer work, meeting friends, etc).
I try to begin each day reading poetry. These last weeks, Lucille Clifton. I say try because, caffeine in hand, after one poem (with Clifton, I often weep), my gaze drifts from the page and I find that some indeterminant time has passed and I’ve been staring out the window as spring reveals herself. But Clifton’s lines…a word, or a line, or a thought…drive me to my own writing and I set off from the place I left off the previous day.
The first two weeks of this I found that by 10:30 a.m. my brain, for this particular writing anyway, was pretty well fried. Granted, I was recovering from the move to this new house and the agony of transitioning my work portfolios to colleagues terrified to receive them. The last few weeks of work I’d delivered several briefs to executive decision makers and, unfortunately, I suffered dreadful anxiety attacks for several of them[3].
The writing those first two weeks was also…tightly wound. I’ll try to explain this. It’s an issue I’ve struggled with for years (aka, whipping my words to pheasant under glass when really chicken will do). And I was trying to figure out a technical solution(s) to fix it.
Here’s an example: “Catching dad in flagrante delicto ought to have been conclusive, but affairs are complex: I was supposed to rage at him, reject his paternity, in a parenting sense, yoking myself to cultivated ideas related to monogamy and swans mating for life, except now, deep in my own decades long marriage, hanging together by a connected bank account, little else, I envied, even applauded, the sex—so flaming hot my shadow in the doorway remained unnoticed, so raw, so rutting animal, so human, so just.”
This sentence is a whole story. It’s great as a stand-alone. But when placed alongside other sentences that are just as informationally dense, zipping back and forth along a historical timeline with only minimal time stamps or inserting abstract conceptual narrator intrusions without sufficient contextual signals…well, the reader’s mind is taxed (not to mention my own, trying to write it). Throw in a few movie line quotes and the whole thing slides sideways very quickly.
I bulk my sentences with A LOT of propositional material, and it comes at the reader as “too much too fast”. I need to learn how to insert some pauses, some breathing spaces. When I tried to do this intentionally, I could “sense” a textural difference, but I didn’t understand the actual writing technique I’m using/doing (this may seem strange to read, but it’s true).
My daughter, Willa, provided an explanation that helped me make sense of the quandary. She said the “stream of consciousness writing” needs to be interspersed more frequently with “scenic” writing (which she said, for me, is poetic and lyrical). Another friend who is a great reader of my stuff described it this way: your writing is cognac and caviar when sometimes it really needs to be a light wine. This made me laugh. Pheasant under glass and caviar…and the truth is, I don’t keep that up…it’s arbitrary, the writing devolves into truck stop diner dishes reliably and quickly.
So. the prologue, and the first two chapters of section one, are “staccato”, zooming the reader across space and time and hopping inside and outside the narrator’s head and assaulting the reader with dizzying knife points of “illumination” like a cleaver spiked disco ball gone rogue (see what I mean?).
By week three I started to settle and slow the writing of moments down (scenes, narrator reflections, furnishing contextual information to allow a reader to follow where we are in time and place). I’m rereading Douglas Glover’sessays on elaboration, as well as Brooks Landon’s Building Great Sentences and Nina Schuyler ‘s How to Write Stunning Sentences (that sentence example above was born of practicing through a Tessa Hadley sentence that Nina had pulled apart for reconstruction). I’m also skimming through random books pulled from my bookshelf, opening their pages to allow my eyeballs to land where they will and glean inspirations and examples.
Now, with this gift of time, I’m balancing working through these exercises with generating chapter drafts. It’s slow and steady work that I hope will support accumulation (and absorption) of these skills.
I’m trying too, to be less…how do I say this? Less selfishly indulgent toward my own writing pleasure and trying to write with you in my mind, allowing only a few sentences of refined flavouring, like this one: “I tasted a fresh oyster tipped from its opalescent shell and paused to tend to the texture and the primordial taste flooding my tongue, it slipped and splashed sea spray, churning its own tide, a magnetizing moon that bloomed a briny fluorescence, pulled the tails of whales and sent anemones tickling the clefts of corals.”
My plan is to keep progressing forward (if I stop and twiddle and fix and play too much, I’ll never get a manuscript draft completed…I’m aiming for Xmas). My plan is also to integrate existing drafts into the narrative spine, editing them into this structure as those pieces start to “fit” into the right place.
And Sunday is getting on here and the girls are visiting and I am being a terrible host by sitting here typing away madly to try and get this posted while they make their own breakfasts and clatter around the kitchen discussing what they will wear to their convocations (next month)[4]. I will try to remember to do my hair and maybe wear a little mascara and sigh through my closet for something presentable…enter the real world instead of lingering this delicious place of imagination.
[1] I never knew Steven Heighton personally, though I’ve read a lot of his writings. Kingston is a small place, and I would see him from time to time. When he ran, striding the sidewalks of downtown almost on tiptoe, his gaze often turned to take in his own reflection in the shop windows.
[2] See previous blog post outlining the planned ring structure of the novel.
[3] For one of these briefs, I actually had to stop in the middle of presenting, saying, “I’m sorry, I need to pause, I’m having trouble breathing.” Immediately, two of the physicians who were part of the briefing texted me to ask what was going on, no doubt suspecting a stroke or something. I managed to pull my shit together, an extreme battle of will, forcing myself to pull air deep into my lungs and counting seconds intentionally to slow my exhale. In another brief, when my name was called upon to speak, my body began trembling so violently and my breath sucked up up and far away, I knew I wouldn’t be able to perform…so I texted my back up colleagues, my manager, sorry I can’t do this, please take over…but they didn’t read my messages in time as they were listening to the ADM talking his way along a tangent. By the time attention was turned my way again, I’d moved through the episode, and I delivered the presentation perfectly (thinking all the way through it: what the fuck is going on with me?!). Anyway, it was dreadful…cortisol hangovers are really dreadful. An aside: I was asked to read at a public reading again this summer and I’m not sure I can do it. I explained the anxiety I’ve been having, told the story of how and when I developed it twenty-three years ago when I was pregnant with Willa, and the organiser said, well, that story is great, why don’t you read that one? So now I’m considering integrating performance art, reality show style, into a public reading. It’s in July…maybe I’ll feel up to it by then.
[4] Here is Willa’s website which features her thesis project. Yes, I’m very proud of her.
Process Peace 