Category: Goal stats (for real)

Passion Progresses

Suzanne Biro

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. 

With the girls visiting, I offered my bed to Nadine and Willa and slept in the living room. Lillian, who is staying with me for a few weeks, commands her own room. It was like sleeping outside beneath a canopy of trees, looking up from this pillow. Slept…okayish…that analyst couch is fucking hard.

A Collaboration

Suzanne Biro

“I like the way we make our dreams happen.” Lori Richards

I’m delighting in the astonishing culmination of a collaborative art venture with my friend, artist, Lori Richards. Our creative works—Lori’s paintings  and my writing—are exhibiting together for a short time at Wall Space Gallery in Ottawa. She generously invited me to write prose poem (like) pieces towards her paintings and I leapt at the opportunity[1].

The vernissage (new word for me, it means a preview of an art exhibition) was last weekend but we dreamed the idea—a wish—to combine and show our art works many many years ago. The exhibit is called Seedbed.

Lori and I walk together almost every week.  As our feet pound the leaf and petalled paths, the sidewalks, the pavement or the snow, we recount, gesturing to the winds, drawing models in the air with our fingers, the celebrations, the frustrations, the lamentations and the longings of creative process. Despite working in different mediums, our practices are very much aligned. Lori is a professional artist. She has been, and continues to be, a steady champion of my creative writing as I squeeze it in as best I can round my day job[2].

Leaping is the right description for the approach I used for Seedbed. I’ve written ad nauseum (emphasis on nausea) about how crippled I am when it comes to pushing my creative writing out into the world (submitting for publication). I didn’t have this issue in the past…it developed over the last few years …I don’t really know what it’s about, but I feel like I’m about to break through my own barriers[3]. I think I’ve been saying that for a year or so. Sigh.

For this project, writing prose poem-ish pieces for each of Lori’s seventeen different paintings, I wanted to practice less preciousness with my writing. And I wanted to experience (force myself) to let go of them as is. I created a few rules for myself to keep the creativity light and fun:

  • Gaze at the painting, but only for a short time
  • Use stream of consciousness writing (I wrote freehand for most of these in my notebook, and the pieces, as they were being written, often included arrows and connecting lines)
  • Adhere to first instincts (as in, whatever words or images pop up, write them down and don’t tinker very much or at all)
  • As soon as a piece feels finished, send it to Lori as “done”

This phase of development and creation worked relatively well, though I was surprised by the writing emerging. The pieces are whimsical and, in several cases, nonsensical. But, adhering to my own rules, I let them be.

Do look at the paintings at the gallery website – my reproduction here fails (dreadfully) to capture the vibrancy of colours.

There was only one pairing of works where the process was reversed, where my writing inspired Lori’s painting. Interestingly, (or maybe the better word is fortuitously), this became the title pairing in the exhibition: Lori’s seedbed painting and a breathy paragraph of my own that floated to me the week I made the decision to leave my marriage. Though Lori thinks of the Seedbed series as beginning January 2024, I feel it began closer to the creation of that garden focused paragraph in the fall of 2023. It was then Lori created her first “bed painting” (several paintings in Seedbed include an image of a bed). This first painting felt (feels) emblematic for me, for what I was/am moving through. That painting now hangs in my bedroom.

It has been wonderful experiencing the generative iterations of the series since. There have been additional bed paintings created beyond the exhibition submissions…they continue.  I feel magically connected—in a way I can’t articulate—with each painting as they appear. The closest I can come to explaining my feelings is with the word blossoming.

And I wasn’t nervous in the days or hours leading up to the vernissage. The gallery’s curator displayed the works beautifully. She and the staff also produced a lovely brochure of a selection of paintings with their ekphrastic accompaniments. Both Lori and I were expected to speak briefly about our process and collaboration, and I planned to read two very short pieces[4]. But when I arrived at the gallery a cold panic sloshed in my stomach[5]. The gallery space filled quickly, bodies tumbling inside from the frozen February afternoon. I’m told there were 80 people but they all sort of blurred together blobbing round while I smiled and nodded and prayed the wine I was drinking would kick in. It didn’t.

When it was my turn to speak, I accepted the microphone with grace. I stumbled on the word ekphrastic (it is very hard to say)….garbled gravel in my mouth…my heart thrashed against my rib cage and leapt the base of my throat, but then, deep breath, pause. Reading my own words, my body calmed and settled from the very first sentence. My voice steadied and held. I’m told I was poised. I wish I could say I recovered soon after the short performance, but I felt rather sick with the adrenalin hangover for the remainder of the day and into the evening.

Still, it has been an accomplishment. And a progression. In the days since, I’ve felt delighted with the experience. And (perhaps?) even a little awe for the courage it took to leap.  

[1] Ekphrasis is a written description, real or imagined, of a work of art. Another dear friend, Barbara Ponomareff, who I met years ago when I offered to carpool us to a wonderful (and remote) writer’s retreat, has published several exquisite ekphrastic works in The Ekphrastic Review.

[2] I’m blessed with continuing encouragement from so many people; you know who you are, I sing your adorations for sticking around, thank you.

[3] Intend to write about “next level writing” in the March blog post, so, stay tuned. Also, I promise to curtail the whining and actually get some pieces submitted.

[4] Another dear friend, also a weekly creative-conversation-while-walking companion, Carolyn Smart, very kindly suggested which work to read. And I’m tickled to learn that painting, Pink Room with Moon, sold to another Canadian poet on the strength of an Instagram promotional post even before the show was launched. So many collaborators throughout the whole process… why do we ever believe we work in isolation?

[5] Threatened a colonic…wholly inelegant I know. Vomiting might have  been preferable. But the body chooses its own exit strategies. I managed to keep uh everything intact (emphasis on in).

Seedbed introduction (Lori in the background and Tiffany, gallery curator, to the let).
Seedbed reading
Pink Room with Moon reading

Do the work

Suzanne Biro

I submitted a piece for publication this month.  It was hard for me to press the submit button.  Sharing my writing has become harder in the last few years. It could be because a lot of the works are fragmented and unfinished but I’m discovering it has more to do with a fear of revealing myself on the page.  If I’m really letting myself sit with this truth, it goes deeper: I’m afraid of discovering my self, or a part of my self, that maybe I don’t like so much or that doesn’t align with the idea of my self I have so carefully, painstakingly, curated. 

The piece I submitted met the word count and the publication style and pulled in some pretty good phrases and layered in some pretty good ideas.  It felt good while I composed it. I pulled from a number of earlier writings and wove them round a theme. The piece was born of intellectual exercise—my constant crutch—not a dreaming.  But when I read the piece over again, with the help of loved ones’ feedback gently opening my eyes to what I had placed on the page, the dreaming, the subconscious, was revealed there…blurry, almost like a feeling of being on the cusp of discovering…something.  And I balked at working more deeply with the piece. It was clear the writing was simply a door into another room, an unfamiliar room. I am stuck on the threshold. 

But I wanted to meet the submission window, so I fixed up the easy bits, wrote a cover letter, uploaded it, and hit the submit button.  

Now I’m actively ignoring the whole thing. I could say I’m just taking a break, but no, I’m actively ignoring that piece now.  The knowledge I am afraid is haunting me. 

Two writings pinned to my wall are helping me to turn toward the work:

A poem:

Our Real Work

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Copyright ©1983 by Wendell Berry, from Standing by Words. Counterpoint.

And a quote I can’t find the orginal source for but taken from Twitter (?) attributed to Claudia Rankine: “You do the work and in the end the world will need it or not.”

Do the work I will.

Craft & Art

Suzanne Biro

This week, I received a package from my sister.  She lives in Old Crow, a community of about 250 people. A Vuntut Gwitchin community.  Old Crow, (Teechik in Gwich’in) is a two-hour flight north of Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory.   

I gasped when I removed the box’s lid.  Inside: a beautiful pair of slippers.  The slippers are made of moose leather and decorated with white rabbit fur round the ankle.  They are intricately beaded with a flower pattern.  The slippers are infused with the wonderful scent of woodsmoke.  I held them to my face and inhaled deeply. I imagined the woman’s hands, the sharp needle, the glass beads, the stitching together, a warm room with snow steaming off parkas and boots while the night sky—a round-the-clock reality at this time of year—wheels round, constellations glowing, aurora borealis crackling.  It’s amazing to smell a place that is over 6000 km away from where I stand.  

The slippers were crafted by Neta Arnold.  My sister also laboured to make a pair of her own, in a sewing circle, under the mentorship of women, including Neta, in the community.  My sister’s beading started in September and took four months to finish.  The stitching together of leather pieces, another few months.  What we now slip onto our feet are truly works of art, crafted with care, beauty and utility.  

When I slipped them on, the slippers were stiff, but with my body’s warmth they softened and hugged my toes, heels, ankles. A perfect fit.  They feel magic.  

Unlike art, the word craft acknowledges the effort, the utility, of objects created.  Unlike art, craft is both a noun and a verb – a thing and the making of the thing, but also the “trying” to make the thing.  Craft acknowledges continual effort, continual dedication, continual improvement.  In this way, the word is accurate and precise, more closely covered in the sweat and tears and joy of process.  

One of my favourite online literary magazines, one I frequently turn to for solace, for solidarity, for technique, to improve, is called Craft.  

The slippers wait for me each morning beneath my writing desk (an old table).  When I slip them on, I feel the beadwork, the hand-stitching at the seams. I am reminded how dedication, time, persistence and care shape art.  I am grateful for the lesson.  I am grateful for warm feet.

First Post is forthcoming…

Suzanne Biro

Lots of reading to start you off on “about” pages already….

Plan to post once a week…

Incidentally, the idea for this blog (note: a product and also a process) materialized a month or two ago. Then it took me a good long while pondering whether there would be sufficient content to carry it forward.

It took a couple of weeks to write the static page content…half of that was just thinking about it and jotting down ideas and lists (I use Evernote for this…and my notebook…two places I try to keep consistent instead of collecting tiny triangles of paper with my “brilliance”[1] scrawled all over them (illegibly).

The “about me” page took a solid 5 hours to write. That was followed by roughly 2 hours (if I add it up) of re-reading and moving words around. Then I spent a good evening’s worth of time tensing my shoulders up to me ears and second guessing the whole idea and wondering whether I’m a narcissistic freak!? I did the same in bed, tossing and turning and kicking the cats and making the dog bark until the early hours of the dark morning. Then I thought, Plan B Man: Fuck it. And here we are.

[1] inner critic notes: loud guffaw!