Collage I created March 16, 2024 in an art workshop facilitated by hiba ali at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre.
My favourite professor in undergrad taught neurophysiology, biological psychology and behavioural neuroscience of motivation. I have a distinct memory of his explaining how the size of the human brain is governed by the restricted size of the birth canal (technically, it’s referred to as the obstetrical dilemma) . Surprise, turns out it’s a little more complicated than that. Much neurodevelopment continues during the postnatal period and neuroplasticity is lifelong. But beyond this, our brains sufficiently evolved to invent machines with super-fast processing speeds and computational abilities. At this point, most of us have adopted palm-sized prosthetic brains in the form of cell phones, and with them, we have access to more information we could filter, sort or ever hope to synthesize, especially across diverse subjects.
This is what I was thinking about last week when I attended a webinar providing an overview of Google’s Notebook LM, a new AI application launched in December 2023, that basically functions as a virtual research assistant. Let’s call it an(other) extra brain [1].
Yes, I’ll be one of the early adopters, especially for my day job. But I’m also interested in how the technology could become a tool to support creative process. Though, to be sure, a tool used with caution.
A swift summary: LM stands for language model and the application uses the conversational question functionalities of ChatGPT, BUT allows you to curate a discrete library of your own source documents for the AI to search through. So, any question you ask will draw an answer from ONLY the documents you have provided, personalizing sources to a particular project, erecting a knowledge barrier you can control and thus greatly reducing inaccuracies and hallucinations [2].
The application currently integrates Docs, PDFs, txt, and pasted text using the cut and paste function. There’s promise websites will be able to be imported soon. Likely, the import of images, PowerPoint and even Excel sheets will be functional in the not-so-distant future.
An older collage I created December 2022.
I often use the search and find function in documents to locate phrases and key words. This is especially important when reviewing legislation and evidence reports under tight timelines, but I also use the function in creative writing to locate word repetitions, check misplaced homonyms, homophones, homographs, get rid of weasel words[3] etc. But this function has only been possible in one document at a time. I’ve used qualitative analysis software to support analyses and syntheses across interview and focus group transcripts, as well as multiple word documents. Using qualitative software, a considerable amount of time (time in which your brain actually feels like it’s turning to mush) is used to manually “tag” words and phrases in every source transcript or document to a category in order to code the text data. This can take weeks or even months, depending on how much text makes up the project and the theoretical approach you have chosen to apply. Once all of the text data is coded, THEN you can go in and query the dataset for analysis using your coding structure. The capabilities promised by Notebook LM will (almost) eliminate the coding step, allowing a researcher to jump right into querying the data for patterns and moving forward from a super advanced starting line.
Imagine this application for:
summarizing systematic research reviews (practically this is very similar to conducting qualitative analysis)
understanding legislation changes over time or creating a bylaws database that could be posted to municipal websites to support citizen Q & A
referencing medical symptoms and best practice guidelines – could this replace a visit to a family physician, linking a person directly to a pharmacist or triaging a health issue to an allied health care worker for virtual assessment and confirmation, at least for common non-emergency ailments?
Discovering patterns across historical documents or novels or essays or groups of poems or across all these different types of documents
Bringing disparate subjects together to spark different ideas, say climate resilience strategies, poetry, child development, hip hop song lyrics and how long to cook an egg [4].
My daughter Willa made this collage last week procrastinating school assignments. She is much better at collage than I am and has created some truly stunning combination of images. I love the mum and child flower heads in this one. This collage inspired me to sign up for the workshop, a welcome oasis of calm following the move into my new (to me) physical space. Another one of Willa’s at the end of this post. Thanks Willa!
The collage at the top of this post is a good analogy for the possible repercussions Notebook LM threatens related to creative licensing and copyright. I pasted the collage together from bits of cut out magazines and art books as part of a fantastic afternoon workshop facilitated by hiba ali, The Studio x Open Secret: Activating Dreamscapes. The images I used came from artists’ works and photographs from books and National Geographic magazines and I’ve cut and reassembled them without any credit to create my own artwork. Where should the line of creative appropriation, cultural appropriation, or plagiarism be drawn in these new digital spaces and the “new” creative works produced using these tools? [5]
Attending this collage workshop in the same week as the webinar kind of blew my mind – an ocean of virtual playgrounds to swim in. It’s also a little frightening, the control to create frames of knowledge that might hold sway an illusion of authority for many. I’m (somewhat) comforted to learn (also this week! my goodness) the word set boasts a Guinness World Record with the most senses of meaning (430!) of any other word. Other sources award this honour to run with more than 600 senses. Perhaps the english language will retain sufficient nuance an AI might never master (wishful thinking). BUT, language combined with gesture, intonation, facial expression, raw instinct etc. may give AI a run for its money (I hope).
Once we created our collages in the art workshop, we uploaded them to a digital art exhibition “world” space where we co-created together and were able to manipulate the images, integrate a variety of additional media (sound, text, links, gifs etc.). This application is New Art City. It reminds me of the game Minecraft my kids used to play when they were younger. Here’s a link to what I created playing [6] in the New Art City application with my own collage and the virtual gallery space: https://newart.city/show/souxs-virtual-creative-space-space-1.
All this virtual creativity at your fingertips for a song. To be sure, what we create as our real world is built from layers of many worlds—perceptual, spiritual, cultural, relational, linguistic, so many others—and, of course, virtual [7]. Jouer le jeu as they say in French, play the game. But the digital space is really an out of body experience; sometimes we might just have to communicate the old-fashioned way, you know, via email or phone or (gasp!) face to face. Especially when virtual platforms are an invitation to experiment interacting multidimensionally. Like I said, you’re welcome.
[1] Sorry Canadian peeps, the experimental version is only available to those living in the US. Canucks are still waiting to test drive the application.
[2] The information returned is less likely to be made up by the machine… hallucinations are complicated, I’m not going to try to explain them.
[3] From Matt Bell’s Substack, No failure, Only Practice, Exercise #14: Hunting Weasel Words.
[4] I know, weird, but you get what I’m suggesting.
[5] I don’t know the answer to this at all but it’s an interesting question and I would value a discussion.
[6] Other applications that I didn’t use but leave here as reference: Photopea, a free online photo editor; Free3D, free three dimensional models; Creative Commons, “an international nonprofit organization dedicated to helping build and sustain a thriving commons of shared knowledge and culture. Together with an extensive member network and multiple partners, we build capacity, we develop practical solutions, and we advocate for better open sharing of knowledge and culture that serves the public interest.”
Serendipitously, when I texted Willa to get her permission to insert her flower head collage in this post, she was working on this larger collage as part of a school assignment (not procrastinating this time ha ha, it’s for a final project about the mutual oppression of women and nature, although she had intended a textile applique but ran out of time). The photos in this work are from a woman’s beauty guide book from the 1980s, The Complete Beauty Book, an interesting, admittedly sexy visual commentary to be sure.
Certainly not as beautiful as Dante’s Dream , but for all that I love, drawn on my birthday.
This is a long read. Self-indulgent. I couldn’t help it. Some footnotes to keep the reader interested. Hopefully.
In 2019 I attended a writing workshop at Omega in Rhinebeck, New York (I write about that here). Several workshops ran in parallel, taking the better part of each day. The week I was there, an inordinate number of white women wore flowing, white, loose, muslin tunics with all their hair tucked up and disappeared beneath white turbans: the Kundalini yoga uniform. No one used the words “cultural appropriation”. I didn’t either.[1] Out loud. In the evenings, round robin sessions were offered where people might try other workshop topics. Yes, I tried the Kundalini session. It’s not for me[2]. But one must remain open to new ideas, stretch the mind, (and the body), and so it was I found myself one evening in a session with a celebrity psychic medium. It was an interesting session[3], but something the facilitator said really stuck with me: “Everyone can do this [be a spirit communicator – really?], it just demands a lot of practice, and the practice is paying attention, first, of course, but also trying NOT to make meaning out of the images and senses you are receiving, just report them as you receive them”. Like, if you’re a celebrity psychic medium, don’t puzzle the images together – that’s for the detectives looking to solve cold cases or the families who are trying to communicate with deceased loved ones. Huh. Okay.
But for writing, we need to make meaning of the images and the words and phrases that flow from them. The trick is not to solve the puzzle too soon.
With writing, I practice letting the images and even the silly ideas make it to the page. The result is that I now have a lot of blousy first drafts and half formed ideas lying around waiting for revision at some point (which feels like some distant sunrise cresting a dark horizon)[4].
It occurred to me[5], riffing off of last month’s post about writing and energy (slaps forehead), that what I need to practice more intentionally is READING the energy in my own writing. My own writings are trying to tell me something. The story is communicating through me (just as the energy to split wood effortlessly using an axe must travel through the body)…maybe I’m just the filter the story moves through to be born. I’m sure I’ve read this before…it’s only now I’m understanding it pragmatically.
So, with a spirit of nakedness, I’m using a recent response to a writing prompt[6] as a way to work through how I’m trying to read the energy in my own writing….while remaining sufficiently loose in interpretation and open to other ideas (before locking the story meaning down, aka, solving the puzzle). This is a first stab at explaining this process…
I wrote the piece in a quick, mostly relaxed, twenty-five-minute burst before I had to go to work. I have retained all the spelling mistakes, the lazy repetitions, the character name of Jo spelled two different ways, as well as the story’s devolution into stream of consciousness writing. I thought I would have time that week to fix it up before posting it to my workshop group. I didn’t. I posted it as is with the caveat about its devolution into imagery and all else.
And here’s the interesting thing—and why I’m choosing to write about this process here—when people responded to the piece in the workshop, each one indicated they had connected [more? best?] with the stream of consciousness sections: the writings that arrived subconsciously, those aspects of my shadow self, frolicking forth from dream territory. Hmmm. A sign like that can’t be ignored.
This post will necessarily be long to show my process. First, the piece unmarked, followed by the piece again with my thoughts and interjections marked in BLUE about what the writing might be trying to communicate through me.
The Red River swelled beyond its banks again, as it did every year. This year it attained new waterline records, bursting the city’s levies, its fluid tongue flicking the sand bags right and left like a prize fighter spitting chicklets in a fight to champion the world.
Mary and Joe arrived in separate vehicles, she a canoe, he a kayak. Mary tied the canoe to a lilac; Jo roped the kayak to iron railing leading up the front steps, now submerged. Each used their own spare key, twisting the front door lock a foot above the waterline. Each shouldered the door against the heavy water to enter their daughter’s split level. The house in the chichi neighbourhood had promised a view of the river. In this respect, it had overdelivered.
“She picked the wrong week to travel to Los Angeles.”
Mary sighed. She hadn’t wanted to start clean-up efforts with an argument. She stood in a foot of cold water that pressed against her knee-high rubber boots. Sloshing across the kitchen, her rubber pants rustled loudly as she fought to stay upright. The linoleum was slippery wavering beneath so much grey water, dotted here and there with soggy receipts and plastic bags ballooned into jelly fish. She and Jo rarely saw each other. They confined their spite to Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner tables. Without grandchildren, and now without their son-in-law (sandbagger), or their snooty daughters-in-law (good riddance), those dinners sunk before any plates graced the table.
Jo continued, “I thought she was in California.”
Not unusual, such misinterpretations. For too many years Mary excused these oversights, chalking them up to hearing loss. Too many rock concerts. Too many engines revved to screaming in the garage. After the divorce, she’d faced, brutally, what she hadn’t wanted to: he just didn’t give a shit. Content if given a hot meal every evening, if potato chips were snack ready, if clean underwear stacked in the dresser drawer, Jo cruised life. He erupted a stormy passion when things didn’t go his way. The family vibrated his tensions, always on the Joe program. And his own children just hadn’t been interesting enough for him.
“No, she’s in France, Anjou. Ville-sous-Anjou, like the pear.”
Mary’s heart sunk then realising the fridge, out of power now for three days, the vegetable crisper beneath the water line, would have to be dealt with. A rotten job (inwards she laughed, bitterly). She scanned the kitchen trying to remember where Lizzie kept the box of garbage bags, spray containers of cleaners, a mop bucket Mary might use to bail water. Where the hell could she bail the water to when the waterline lapped the window ledges, the river kept swelling? It was hopeless.
“This is hopeless,” said Jo. “Didn’t I warn her not to buy waterfront?”
Mary let his question hang, snuffing the old argument before it ignited. Doomsday prophecies, climate change, the water rising to take us all, tidbits he scraped from the internet, scrubbed, polished and hurled at listeners as if they were his own. Millionaires blasted the skin of the earth, their arcs of triumph going limp when they descended, backwards. In the end the laws of gravity, of inevitability, drown us all.
“I mean these days?” he pushed, “what the hell was she thinking?”
“Hell” said Mary.
She watched the look of confusion cloud Jo’s face. Honestly, he was so slow sometimes, she was glad she’d chosen not to see the end of the world with him. Yet here they were, sporting galoshes and yellow rain pants, knee deep in water wavering and rolling optical illusions.
Insert distraction that momentarily reconnects this couple – Saxophone – a boy playing their favourite song perched on the roof next door – the song they danced to at the engineering formal in fourth year – blue moon
Things floating: paper receipts, plastic bags, loose photographs (wedding?) – flood of pressure water build up – breaking banks – crashing shores, people waiting to be recused in the crooks of trees. Cars and boats and whole tree trunks, chesterfield, the deer, it’s snout bobbing above the waterline, antlers rotating with the spinning current, it’s bony legs and knees hoofing helplessly the fluidity, as if were running, running, pulling the belief of Santa’s sleigh, soaring the cold milky way vacuum, light years ahead, or behind.
From its path, the river would always find a way, seeping up through the layers of sedimentary rock, cracking the limestone shelves, eroding the granite walls salt shaker – grains of salt, crystals messenger feels like a warning shouldn’t ignore.
Deer swept along in it torrent, spinning, the antlers whirlpool, their legs kicking, trying to find a purchase as the reindeer of santas sleigh try to paw at the stars. Muddy – silt that when this all drained away they would excavate the kitchen tiles as one might an archeological dig, looking for the mystery they believed buried there, but only finding shards of animal bones, and indeterminate rock.
Here it is again, with my own thought interjections in BLUE and peer feedback noted in ORANGE (with permission). I’ve focused peer attention to the subconscious elements they honed in on (they provided lots of fantastic grammar, spelling and rearrangement suggestions; I have not supplied those here).
The Red River
[I was thinking of the Red River in Manitoba which, I discovered, had a flood warning in early January…but the word “red” kind of vibrates here (shimmers? it’s like my body shimmers) when I read it, so I know there’s something else there to be discovered. I don’t know what that something else is in this case (sometimes it takes me ages to figure these things out[7]). Red is my favourite colour…also the colour of blood and poppies…so, noted, and left to sit. For now.]
swelled beyond its banks again, as it did every year. This year it attained new waterline records, bursting the city’s levies, its fluid tongue
[I liked this combination of words to depict that imagery]
flicking the sand bags right and left like a prize fighter spitting chicklets in a fight to champion the world.
[here, the river is personified…and it’s fighting to “champion the world”…this resonates with the phrase later in the story re: the end of the world, and words such as “inevitable” and “drowning”]
Mary and Joe
[usually when drafting I just choose the first names that come to me as placeholders…the story, in later development, when I understand what it is trying to tell me, will warrant research for specific names that fit and shape the story on multiple levels. Another little puzzle I love. But, can’t help but notice the completely unintentional biblical reference to Jesus’s parents here.]
arrived in separate vehicles, she a canoe, he a kayak. Mary tied the canoe to a lilac; Jo roped the kayak to iron railing leading up the front steps, now submerged.
[Just seeing this now, as I work through this exercise – Mary’s boat is tied to a flower while Joe’s boat is tied to an iron railing, sunk cement steps – something living versus something non-living and immovable – a good comparison of opposites to exploit maybe…and as I reread this reflection again, deeper darker personal feelings]
Each used their own spare key, twisting the front door lock a foot above the waterline. Each shouldered
[“shouldered” vibrates for me, I don’t know why]
the door against the heavy water to enter their daughter’s split level. The house in the chichi neighbourhood had promised a view of the river. In this respect, it had overdelivered.
[noted: humour that twists, subtly, the house into kind of a character…weird].
“She picked the wrong week to travel to Los Angeles.”
Mary sighed. She hadn’t wanted to start clean-up efforts with an argument. She stood in a foot of cold water that pressed against her knee-high rubber boots. Sloshing across the kitchen, her rubber pants rustled loudly as she fought to stay upright. The linoleum was slippery wavering beneath so much grey water, dotted here and there with soggy receipts and plastic bags ballooned into jelly fish. She and Jo rarely saw each other. They confined their spite to Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner tables. Without grandchildren, and now without their son-in-law (sandbagger)
[this word, sandbagger, is an example of trying too hard to make meaning in the story too soon; I feel this as a niggling annoyance, one I too often bypass, thinking I know better than the story does],
or their snooty daughters-in-law (good riddance), those dinners sunk before any plates graced the table.
[ugh all this has to go]
Jo continued, “I thought she was in California.”
Not unusual, such misinterpretations. For too many years Mary excused these oversights, chalking them up to hearing loss. Too many rock concerts. Too many engines revved to screaming in the garage. After the divorce, she’d faced, brutally, what she hadn’t wanted to: he just didn’t give a shit
[uh, there’s more here – and a strong feeling of avoidance, even disgust? – need to crack this open – put my head into the jaws of this lion].
Content if given a hot meal every evening, if potato chips were snack ready, if clean underwear stacked in the dresser drawer, Jo cruised life
[interesting word choice, “cruised” in the context of a flood – pay attention].
He erupted a stormy passion when things didn’t go his way. The family vibrated his tensions, always on the Joe program. And his own children just hadn’t been interesting enough for him.
“No, she’s in France, Anjou. Ville-sous-Anjou, like the pear.”
Mary’s heart sunk then realising the fridge, out of power now for three days, the vegetable crisper beneath the water line, would have to be dealt with. A rotten job (inwards she laughed, bitterly)
[there’s me inserting myself – and I might be quick to hit the delete button here but must reflect my own behavioural patterns before I do: I often make a joke when I’m uncomfortable – an effective avoidance or distraction technique – so, what am I avoiding here? I do know, in this case, and it has nothing to do with this story, so it will be chucked in revision – probably the whole fridge bit. Not all my jokes are avoidance driven].
She scanned the kitchen trying to remember where Lizzie kept the box of garbage bags, spray containers of cleaners, a mop bucket Mary might use to bail water. Where the hell could she bail the water to when the waterline lapped the window ledges, the river kept swelling? It was hopeless.
“This is hopeless,” said Jo. “Didn’t I warn her not to buy waterfront?”
[the repetition of thought between these two characters, one internal, one external, and the way they follow one after another, illuminates a connection between them, even if they don’t want to see it].
Mary let his question hang, snuffing the old argument before it ignited.
[fire references noted – may be a good counterpoint to flood – fire and flood – disasters, apocalypse, possibly another biblical reference].
Doomsday prophecies, climate change, the water rising to take us all, tidbits he scraped from the internet, scrubbed, polished and hurled at listeners as if they were his own. Millionaires blasted the skin of the earth
[wound, violence, heat],
their arcs of triumph going limp when they descended, backwards. In the end the laws of gravity, of inevitability, drown us all.
“I mean these days?” he pushed, “what the hell was she thinking?”
“Hell” said Mary.
[Hell used twice, no, three times – another biblical reference? WTF?! When I was drafting, it was at this point I understood I had no idea where this story was heading, and I wouldn’t be able to wrestle it into a story shape before work]
She watched the look of confusion cloud Jo’s face
[maybe this is my story’s way of letting me know I’m confused. I don’t need the story to tell me that, I know already].
Honestly, he was so slow sometimes, she was glad she’d chosen not to see the end of the world with him. Yet here they were, sporting galoshes and yellow rain pants, knee deep in water wavering and rolling optical illusions.
[I’m drawn to the words “cloud” and “end of the world” and “water wavering optical illusions” – it feels like the natural world asserting itself …not just background, not invisible, but a living, breathing character in this story… a largesse the couple remain oblivious to, even when they attend to the deluge of information (note: deluge is another word for flood) they miss seeing the world for what it is, even when they’re knee deep in it]
[I was struck by this…Is this marking a change in Mary?]
[here is where I allow myself to record the images that arise, without trying to puzzle them in place]
Insert distraction that momentarily reconnects this couple – Saxophone
[Weird. Specific. Can’t be ignored. No idea what it means. Yet. But I like the image and opportunity to introduce sound]
– a boy playing their favourite song perched on the roof next door – the song they danced to at the engineering formal in fourth year – blue moon
[again that niggling feeling that blue moon is a cheap first attempt at something deeper….at the very least a different song (first impulse), but still, don’t dismiss too quickly because blue moon is synonymous with “rare” and should not ignore the connotations of sadness with “blue” and the moon, well, the moon…what can I say? There’s too much…].
Things floating: paper receipts, plastic bags, loose photographs (wedding?)
[interesting that level of specificity inserted here, a wedding photo…feels important…but maybe not for this specific story…my own feelings bleeding in here. Note, instead, an opportunity to place a subtle symbol of the meaning of this story (once I figure it out) as an image floating by the couple’s rubber boots. But maybe a wedding photo does fit…remain open!]
– flood of pressure
[feel a heat with the word pressure]
water build up – breaking banks
[note the double meaning of banks – river and money – and how these two meanings rhyme, conceptually – capitalism and destroying the earth to support it]
– crashing shores, people waiting to be recused
[love this inadvertent spelling mistake of “rescued” – a Freudian slip perhaps that warrants attention and questioning, especially in a context of climate change and an earth battling to be acknowledged and restored, perhaps once humans have been purged from its skin (as referenced earlier with millionaires) makes me think of excusing oneself from apocalyptic judgement…biblical reference again…so weird]
in the crooks of trees
[crooks – connotation with thieves but also I love how it describes the elbows of trees…that’s not quite right, I’m tired, but I kinda like the thought of trees having elbows].
Cars and boats and whole tree trunks, chesterfield
[I just love the word chesterfield],
the deer, it’s snout bobbing above the waterline, antlers rotating with the spinning current, it’s bony legs and knees hoofing helplessly the fluidity, as if were running, running,
[ah, the deer. The deer motif shows up for me along multiple planes: the page, over and over, in dreams, and at least once a week I see them out the window, often in a cluster of three. Of course I looked this up.]
pulling the belief of Santa’s sleigh, soaring the cold milky way vacuum, light years ahead, or behind.
[Santa’s sleigh?! good grief …flying deer …more like silly beliefs, suspension of disbelief….why light years ahead or behind…I don’t know].
From its path, the river would always find a way, seeping up through the layers of sedimentary rock, cracking the limestone shelves, eroding the granite walls
[river as character again]
salt shaker – grains of salt, crystals messenger feels like a warning shouldn’t ignore.
[something …probably not salt related…maybe just trying too hard …superstition of throwing salt over left shoulder…again, don’t know].
Deer swept along in it torrent, spinning, the antlers whirlpool, their legs kicking, trying to find a purchase as the reindeer of santas sleigh try to paw at the stars. Muddy – silt that when this all drained away they would excavate the kitchen tiles as one might an archeological dig, looking for the mystery they believed buried there, but only finding shards of animal bones, and indeterminate rock.
[like the imagery here of the deer spinning and swimming legs not being able to touch the ground, feels disorienting.]
[…really uncomfortable with the deer running helplessly in the water so I think there is some pay dirt there–not sure about Santa–but perhaps there is something there in the connection between a childhood belief and the beliefs (in marrying Jo)]
[ there is some real magic in the stream of consciousness paragraphs towards the end and the imagery is unsettling and just fits the situation so well that I wonder if it makes sense to sew some of that in as part of Mary’s observations of the problem.]
[As I read this, i had a sense of Jo floating by the main character in their marriage and never seeing her let alone becoming invested in her emotions or feelings. I think this is the heart of this flash.]
[Whoooooaaaaaaa!!!!]
[1] I was captivated by this and couldn’t help but wonder how many might be pocketing jade eggs up their yahoos. Yeah, it’s a thing.
[2] I nearly fucking died trying to do all that rapid breathing while pulling “my foundation” tightly into my core. I worked up a sweat doing it too! I was far more fascinated by the English woman on stage facilitating the session (white muslin tunic, no hair, white turban). She had the poshest English accent I’d heard outside an Oxford quadrangle and she was looking daggers at her partner as her staccatoed breaths pumped the mic clipped at her breast. He was a much younger, absolutely gorgeous (and shirtless) Caribbean man with shining dark skin and dreadlocks, and he was racing after their daughter, probably six or seven years old (small white muslin tunic, wild hair, white turban an unravelling ribbon), trying to catch her as she screamed her way round all the seated hyperventilators (us) and literally crawled up the walls to run along the windowsills. This delighted me no end.
[3] We were put in small groups and sat cross legged on the floor. We stared for a few minutes at a photograph of a well-dressed woman with haunting eyes seated on a white couch, then “reported” what we received. Having spent the whole wonderful week drawing and writing, I was feeling pretty relaxed, so I started, “I dunno, I see a baby’s rattle, a red sports car and an empty cradle.” The curly blond-haired woman sitting across from me, wearing an I-love-NY cropped t-shirt with its neck scissored wide so that it slipped to expose one of her pudgy shoulders and a purple bra strap, goggled at me and said “Whoooooaaaaaaa!!!!” I laughed hysterically by how easily I’d convinced her of something from my imagination. Though, it transpired the photo was of a wealthy woman whose husband had kidnapped their infant daughter, the pair never to be seen again. I didn’t think much of this at the time, more interested in getting an ice cream before the shop closed for the night.
[4] I am terribly undisciplined when it comes to revision…if I’m honest it’s because I have been afraid of the demons I’ll see there. I’m working on this.
[6] spin three different digital “wheels of fortune”, one for setting, one for characters and one for narrative point of view, then spit out a story <800 words. I got: a flooded kitchen, a divorced couple, and close third person. I resisted drafting a story given my recent separation and walking away from a kitchen I designed and adored and fed so many wonderful people in. I’m trying not to be materialistic, but I can’t help grieving the kitchen loss. Of course, this comes through in the writing, the marriage breakdown, and it feels…shitty. And I kind of feel like an asshole. I’m working on this, greeting my shadow self. Next month, I’m moving to an apartment downtown Kingston, a block behind the central library and walking distance to the university libraries. Despite this fantastic access to knowledge, I’ve prioritised packing boxes and boxes of books, tearily packaging them up these February Sunday afternoons at the farm. A dreadful process. I don’t know how I’ll fit all the books in the apartment. Maybe I’ll sleep on them, hoping to absorb their wisdom through my skin.
[7] I’ve noticed a pattern in my own thinking when I’m trying to read the vibrating word energy I feel there, and I’m wrestling with this discovery too: first, I read and respond through a “heart break” lens (unfortunately) – my interpretation is clouded by past hurts and sorrows. It usually takes me a day to work through this. Next, I’m able to flip 180 degrees on the initial interpretation and consider its opposing possibilities. Finally, after pleasurable reflection time, I settle into the relief and wonder and gratitude of multiple puzzle pieces dropping into place.
Rising to the challenge of learning new tricks, I’ve taught myself to split logs with an axe. [Insert vinyl record scratch – wait…what? Connecting chopping wood with creative writing? Can it be done? Can she do it? Yes. Yes, she can.]
We’ll bounce back to the axe. First, let’s chew over energy. I’m referring to the energy[2] transferred between writer and reader via words.
But that’s not exactly what I mean, not quite right.
Pause. Think.
I mean the deeper sense (yes, that’s it) moving beneath (between?) the words, infusing the communication with vibrating vitality that travels, magically, across time and space to touch a reader right in the feels[3]. This is the goal. It’s fucking elusive.
Poetry is good at it, yes. We know it when we read it, receiving the energy as a hit to the heart, a pinch in the gut, the diaphragm kicking up an exhale, tearspill from the eyeballs, etc. Songs, and music too, deliver emotions beyond words. But to create that infusion of energy as a writer? Well, that’s a whole different thing.
Gonna try and unpack the what/how here. Actually, I only get as far as trying to describe what this is like…I suspect the figuring out how to do it is a lifelong quest.
I’ve managed this feat of transference a handful of times. Always by accident [read: I have no idea what I’m doing…I just know when I’ve done it…some of the time]. The first time was in grade six when the teacher, Mr Pritchard[4], asked me to read my creative writing assignment aloud to the class. As I read—a passage filled to the brim with beauty and love and flowers and shell necklaces and turquoise seas and gorgeous Tahitian women with naked breasts—I felt a hush descend in the classroom. I felt every ear tuned to my voice, felt the beauty travel from within my body outwards to all the other kids who had stopped squirming at their desks and listened, captivated. It was a magical moment. But, tinged with shame I’m afraid because I’d plagiarised (ish) – I lifted the scene straight from the 1984 film, Mutiny on the Bounty, with Mel Gibson (who, yes, I swooned for in grade 6) and Anthony Hopkins (who terrified me). I’d transcribed the scene depicting the tall ship making landfall, the radiant “Natives” canoing the surf to greet the voyage weary sailors, shower them with strings of orchids, promises of paradise. Despite “stealing” the imagery, I felt the energy my writing created and its impact, and with these, the promise of its power…
Other times I’ve managed this feat: after reading my work at a poetry reading strangers approached me and I sensed they wanted to touch me, though they didn’t dare (so strange); in a message of condolence to a friend following his father’s death (a friend I have great admiration for and, at one time, was deeply attracted to…does this matter? It may); impressed in various email exchanges; sometimes in texts…actually, texts often have a lot of energy coiled within them, a kerpow sort of split and splintering humour I adore.
Some observations for when the energy transfer actually works (because yes, this is for posterity, so, be honest[5]): I have to be in the act of free writing, meaning, I can’t be directing the writing with my thinking (brain must be put on pause); I have to be relaxed; I have to be thinking about the person I’m writing to, or about, (or specific people)…not an abstract concept of “audience”; I have to be calm and unrushed but also focused; I have to “turn off” any questioning, i.e., second-guessing (the inner critic must be silenced). The feeling, when this is all flowing—because all these conditions must be met at once, simultaneously—is that the energy moves through the body onto the page. Where does it originate? This is a great mystery – from within? From without? Both? When it’s all flowing and the energy infuses the words…it feels… effortless.
And immensely satisfying.
Back to chopping wood. Though I have lived in at least two houses heated by woodstove, I’ve never been the person wielding the axe (or the splitter; I’m always the stacker and I’m afraid of chain saws or any loud power tools). The woodstove at this house is not for heating, it’s more of a vanity woodstove, ha ha, but damnit I wanted a fire. The logs, beautifully stacked just outside in the breezeway, were too big to wedge in the stove. Plus, I needed kindling. An axe lay at the ready, propped against the pile. When I first grasped the handle[6], I envisioned its blade wedged in the flesh of my foot, arterial blood spurting all over the place (I’ve cut the dickens out of my finger[7]). Not a good way to start. I raised the blade and tried to keep my eyes from shutting when I brought it down on a propped-up log. My body was tense and that tension transferred to the wood. The bit (of the blade) bounced wildly off the log’s end. Somehow, after repeated attempts and ricochets, I bruised the shit out of my fingers (not sure how that happened but it did). My initial swings were tentative (weak, timid). Slowly, I managed to figure out how to get the bit to bite the wood. But then I got the blade stuck and spent way too long, swearing a blue streak, extricating it. I got increasingly frustrated and yes, I wanted to cry. Maybe I did cry. But I wanted a fire! Frustrated and spent and not giving a shit anymore, I mustered a strength that began in the soles of my feet, travelled like a wave up my legs, through my torso, along my arms, the length of the axe’s handle. I raised that goddamned axe high above my head, creating a lever of beauty embracing momentum, gravity, tracing an arc, letting it fall to bite its mark on the log’s end, splitting it instantly, the two pieces of wood flying apart with an edifying crack. Physics! (I shouted out loud). Once I got the movement and the attitude down, I’ve been able to split logs with ease. Key: the energy must travel, as a wave, through the body, through the axe, to the wood. When the movement flows this way, the log splits without effort. Brute strength is unnecessary, even counterproductive; energy moves with elegance. Exactly the same way it can flow through writing.
Now all I have to do is figure out “the movement” that invites the energy to move through…
Speaking of quantum physics (we are, aren’t we?), in a recent workshop I was challenged to write a flash narrative integrating quantum physics. In workshop, my piece was one of fifteen to “win” feedback from a SmokeLong senior editor (who knows, maybe only eight of us entered). To be clear, this piece DID NOT (at all) succeed in the energy transfer thingy I’ve been writing about here, but it was fun and quick to write and, following some, ahem, contest overseer requests to change the original piece and make it more appropriate for a general reading audience[8], I submitted it, for fun, to the Quantum Shorts competition. It’s up, for a short time (till March?) on their website for reading.
Let’s end on a far more eloquent description of the energy travelling through words (gawd Suzanne, an axe?! How crude.) with the last section of a poem titled, The Other Tiger, written by Jorge Luis Borges:
We shall seek a third tiger. This Will be like those others a shape Of my dreaming, a system of words A man makes and not the vertebrate tiger That, beyond the mythologies Is treading the earth. I know well enough That something lays on me this quest Undefined, senseless and ancient, and I go on Seeking through the afternoon time The other tiger, that which is not in verse.
[From Dreamtigers, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Harold Morland]
[2] Do I mean emotion? The energy of emotion? I’m still thinking about this, whether they are one and the same or whether they are similar yet texturally different…still, something that moves, that has momentum, sharing that etymological root (Latin movere “move, set in motion; Sanskrit kama-muta “moved by love”). Certainly relational, not necessarily a bidirectional relation, pluridimensional.
[3] This is not a new idea. Not even close. Here’s Rumi’s continuing commemoration through mille-fold Instagram and FB unicorned affirmation posts, “Words are a pretext. It is the inner bond that draws one person to another, not words.”
[4] An aside: Mr. Pritchard—my mother, with kiwi candor, called him Mr. Prick Hard (Mum! You can’t say that! Don’t worry zanny, he can’t understand my accent! But mum, you’re speaking English!)—was an evangelical Christian. I delighted asking him to explain what I postured to be a genetic impossibility, all of us descendants of Adam and Eve, I mean come on, we’d all have, like, six eyes and no legs. Or maybe six legs and no eyes, more like. I think this must have been after my reading aloud to the class, I’m sure I was never called on again…anyway, I was disappointed he didn’t oblige an argument, simply told me to take my seat.
[6] New learning: an axe has all sorts of parts to it, many named, incidentally, after parts of the body: belly, throat, shoulder, butt, cheek, beard etc. See here, but then, check out the website landing page – hilarious, depicting a stunning combination of free flowing alcohol, people weaving around wearing animal masks while winging axes at targets chalked on a plank wall. What could go wrong? Oh, there’s pizza too. All good.
[8] I was asked to remove the swearing. So, I changed ‘fucking’ to ‘flaming’, removed ‘fucking’ from the footnotes, (it appears I am addicted to using footnotes – is it irritating? Let me know) and changed ‘fucker’ to ‘boneshaker’ which I like even better because of its loose allusion to oral sex. Which, incidentally, the contest people didn’t ask me to clean up for a general audience and I delight that it hangs out there to tease some unsuspecting general audience member. Ha ha.
[9] I’m trying to slow down. It’s been …an emotional few months. To help calm myself, I’m practicing drawing these small beauties, found thingies picked up on walks. Feels good. I listen to music, gorgeous song, when I draw. I have always signed artwork with Soux, a spelling I claimed as a young teen, exercising some initial sense of autonomy I lost along the way (though, high school friends still address me using this spelling).
May have blown my readership with last month’s post in terms of length and, uh, girth. So, this post promises to be synoptic. But I do appreciate the feedback readers provide, face to face, on the phone, through emails and texts, etc., thank you. The elegance and precision of a two-word response most impressive…well played.
As I write this, a woolly mist smudges the St Lawrence to the sky, shifting Wolf Island’s shore and every other geographic anchor to the imagination. The chipping sound of chickadees loop the staghorn sumac, garland the cedar hedges; beloved swallow song put to winter’s bed.
Grateful too, for having vaulted the winter solstice and tumbling this season of epiphanies.
Reflecting this past year’s writings, I’m struck (and so deeply touched) seeing my words spark and stir creative pursuits for others. I’ve delighted reading my own words reflected in others’ poetry and prose, my own words transformed into paintings and artworks, my own words recited back to me in conversations. It has been (is) the most beautiful tribute to my continuing creative work. Also, a sober reminder of the responsibility to package the raw, wonder-filled gifts of the world in the best way I can, because love travels, as it should, pirouetting and somersaulting across the universe. It has been a slow learning but I’m gaining confidence in my writing and beginning to trust the whisperings of my heart, that it reaches you.
Here’s to a holiday season, the coming new year, brimming with joy, delight, forgiveness…and the timeless unspooling of love – Cin cin!
Shall we start with a blowjob story? Sex always gets everyone’s attention. Pleasure: a cardinal motivation. But let’s delay that gratification, and, fair warning, this post won’t end with the orgasmic gasp you’re longing for (don’t we all?). Let’s leverage the promise though; foreplay is fun, and entertainment is, after all, the goal here. Well, that and writing my way to understanding my writing process—the steps I’m taking—to improve my writing…at least that’s why I’m here. Why are you here?
[And, if your immediate reaction to that question is insolence (!) (moral indignity?), that’s not my intention—please see an earlier post regarding my tendency toward blunt written communications lacking the (necessary?) subtle tonalities of delivery—here’s the signpost (pink neon!): I ask this question with a spirit of curiosity, a shy and genuine curiosity, and heaps of gratitude that you’re here reading my words (heaps! really, your continued attention is pulling me through a bunch of turmoil, so, thank you). And yes, you can put shy and blowjob together in a sentence or a paragraph, it’s an alluring combination, but I digress.]
Another pleasure of mine, and, I realize, essential to my writing process, is to read across multiple and diverse texts in one sitting, toying to find a connection or thread of meaning between them. For fun. It helps me relax. Weirdly. I do it at work and at home and can credit (some) creative breakthroughs to this fetish – this blog post, for instance. I had a vague desire to write about metaphor this month but needed more to, you know, fluff it up.
Recently, a friend texted “Don’t cull [your] state of mind; express it in all its confusion. Put the tornado in the typewriter…” So, my favourite peeps, this post is a flavour taster, leading you through my convoluted thinking that landed on sharing a very private short story publicly.
a web site on “warm data”, broader contextual information as opposed to the simple numbers of (disconnected) statistical information
Jung’s 1925 lecture #1 about developing his theory of the unconscious in which he inadvertently exposes himself as a real dick with his disparaging comments about the poor teen (his patient!) who fell in love with him. Calm down Jungian fans, I’m among you, I even practice his active imagination approach. But still, I feel for that poor girl, unrequited love, the scent of bitter almonds and all that…that lecture may have been the inspiration for David Cronenberg’s film A Dangerous Method
the introduction in The Situation and the Story, a book by Vivian Gornick offering a stunning distillation of the necessity of crafting a persona to relay a story about a situation… reminds me about an earlier post and a poke in my ribs to revive a larger writing project I’ve been avoiding (why have I been avoiding it? resisting it? why?)
my daily horoscope app: “Falling in love is good for the universe” and “Forgiving someone doesn’t make you a doormat” and “You are the most elaborate and sweet dessert” (can you tell I’m swinging by a thread here?)
Following this interstitial pathway (is this a bad habit? does this signal a lack of discipline? is this the chaotic consequence of consuming too many fickle fast-food-like-social media-servings? I’m not sure…) over the next few days, I read:
an excerpt from Descartes’ Dream by Phillip J. Davis and Reuben Hirsh relaying how Descartes imagined being presented with a melon (!) – a metaphor which moved him closer to developing Cartesian (mind-body) dualism somehow…what a muck of things that has led us through…(see “warm data” above)
A poem, Love After Love by Derek Walcott (tears, tears, tears…I need to get back to that larger writing project)
A book review of ‘The Poetry of Derek Walcott’ by Adam Kirsch where he discusses Walcott’s associative freedom in his application of metaphor (I know, I know, I’m trying your patience now. Stay with me. We’ll circle back to my earlier promise, and I’ll throw in a ghost to boot! Keep reading)
An epigraph credited to Michael Ventura in Randall Brown’s Pocket Guide to Flash Fiction that I’ll quote from shortly, but noted the reference was incorrectly cited as “The Talent in the Room” when it should be “The Talent of the Room”…perhaps a trifle, but in this context changing “of” to “in” twists the foundational communication of Ventura’s essay…
And then, wrangling myself to the task of writing a monthly blog post, I reread some earlier notes and quotes I’d taken down about metaphor and can’t help but insert these beautiful descriptions from Alicia Ostriker’s A Meditation on Metaphor in By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry edited by Molly McQuade, “The sharp, honeyed burning point of course is that the pleasure we take in metaphor is a pleasure of consent, an agreement that the distance between two things is cancellable because of their likeness, whereby each illuminates some inner truth belonging to the other.” And “The implication of every metaphor is that the world is a multidimensional web of connections between animate and inanimate, larger and smaller, past and present, which await discovery.”
And I got to thinking, again, about my continued resistance to revisiting earlier drafts of writing. I’m pained to admit my fear here must be something deeper—far deeper—than simply failing to “write well”. Instead, it has to do with facing what those drafts, written partly through stream of consciousness, partly through dream, partly through half sleep, exhaustion, desperation, and yes, sometimes elation, might reveal about myself, through metaphor, that I’m afraid to know or discover.
And that’s when Ventura’s essay really pierced me, articulating my anxieties with pinpoint accuracy:
“Crazy as a writer would define it: too unbalanced to work. If you can still write, then how crazy can you be?
Plenty crazy, is the answer. The room can become a hole. Your talent of the room, your ability to be there with all your soul, can overwhelm you…
The room, you see, is a dangerous place. Not in itself, but because you’re dangerous. The psyche is dangerous. Because working with words is not like working with color or sound or stone or movement. Color and sound and stone and movement are all around us, they are natural elements, they’ve always been [in] the universe, and those who work with them are servants of these timeless materials. But words are pure creations of the human psyche. Every single word is full of secrets, full of associations. Every word leads to another and another and another, down and down, through passages of dark and light. Every single word leads, in this way, to the same destination: your soul. Which is, in part, the soul of everyone. Every word has the capacity to start that journey. And once you’re on it, there is no knowing what will happen.
Locking yourself up with such things, letting them stir, using these pure psychic creations as raw material, and deciding, each time, how much or little you’re going to participate in your own act of creation, just what you’ll stake, what are the odds, just how far are you going to go – that’s called being a writer. And you do it alone in a room.”
Which rounds us (finally!) to the promised short story, a true one, lightly edited from its original 2020 draft created in a workshop with Leigh Hopkins responding to her prompt to write a 1000-word sexual scene that merges with a death scene. It’s my first, and, to date, only sex scene I’ve written (I think…will have to blow my hard drive searching for what’s beyond memory). No title. A short commentary will follow (gawd this post is too long, with apologies).
~
R had a reputation for the biggest cock in school. That’s what the boys called it with a cocktail of admiration and jealousy. They teased him in locker rooms, school halls, the cafeteria. He took it in stride, comfortable in his skin, his abilities. He captained the football team, the soccer team and hockey. He was good at track and math. I’d noticed his smile three years earlier and vowed to capture and kiss his mouth.
On a school night, the time of year when the dark descends velvet and cool and early, we lay in his bedroom in the dark with the door closed. His parents were asleep down the hall. We were sixteen.
His penis was large. Very large. Though, at the time, I had nothing to compare it with. His penis was my first penis. I still dream of it today, occasionally, though, not as much as I’d like to. It wasn’t so much its length that was remarkable, but its girth, wide like the branch of a tree. That night I locked my lips around it and slid up and down its length slowly, the smooth hot hardness of it against my lips, brushing my molars. I thought of how a snake might easily unclick the hinges of its jaw to accommodate. My own jaw could do no such thing and the cramp of holding my mouth to receive started in. His hips squirmed beneath me as I changed position, running my tongue up from the base to the tip, the spongey tip that squished so soft against my lips. He moaned and caressed my hair. He was always gentle, patient. He worried about hurting me, but I craved the feeling of him entering me. The insides of me ached and yearned.
I tore a little every time we made love. It stung; a silver, piercing point of pain mixed with the pleasure of being filled. The sensation rippled from between my legs and a satisfaction, a feeling of being whole and complete, warmed my body, my soul.
The doctor suggested, after handing me blister packs of freebie pills, he could cauterize my perineum with liquid nitrogen. At sixteen, I asked whether scar tissue might not interfere with childbirth, you know, in the future. The doctor looked confused. Confused enough for me to say, no thank you, not today. I love that girl at sixteen. Sometimes I wonder where she went.
In R’s bedroom my lips and tongue explored the length and width of his penis, my fingers caressed his scrotum. I pulled the moans out of him, every moment adding to my own desire, the slippery ache between my thighs. Every moment made me feel in control. The feeling moved into me of just how powerful I could be. How I calmed this athletic boy to complete submission beneath me. How I’d done it with the flick of my tongue, my wet lips, my heat. The sensation of power made the hairs on the back of my neck rise. The power coursed through me, palpable. I sat up. We faced each other about a foot apart, and I smiled, the power shining out of me, luminous in the dark.
Suddenly, I knew I was scaring him. And it felt good. I liked scaring him. His fear gave me power. He moved his hand to swat the air between our faces saying, Stop! Stop that! Loud and frightened. Then, as if a switch flipped off, the power left me. I felt cold and a deep and sudden knowing moved electric through my body, a fear unlike any other quickened my heart and lifted goosebumps along my limbs. I knew with such certainty I needed to stop R from telling me what he had just felt—worse, what he had just seen. A knot of premonition hardened at the back of my throat: if he kept speaking, I’d see what he’d seen. I reached across the shadowed space between us and mashed my palm against his lips, but he said, Your smile. Your smile, stop smiling.
And then it flipped and glared at me, hovering between us. I’ll call it an apparition… a face comprised of light and dark. I never think of it as a ghost. Only a face…no body attached…a face of shadows…radiating a terrifying expression. The depressions where its eyes should have been so dark they were hollow. It smiled horribly with a mouth full of teeth, so many pointed teeth, lips curled to convey what I can only describe as sinister.
It played with us, whatever it was, having fun. A fear I hadn’t known possible filled me and I squeezed my eyes tight against it. I couldn’t speak. As I write this now, the air is light in my head and my ears feel blocked, pressured. I’m trembling over thirty years later.
Since, I’ve believed humans exist with other planes or dimensions right round us. That it’s possible evil exists and waits for the ready and willing. That the dark side is there waiting, beguiling. I’m not a religious person; this has nothing to do with all that.
R scrambled to turn on the light. Then we woke his mother. The story pales in the retelling. But I believe to this day if I ever see that face again, the fear will take me. I’ll die. I avoid shadowy twilight spaces. I walk cautiously each day knowing the choice is there.
For a long time, I felt terribly guilty and responsible for creating such a monster, whatever it was. For a long time, I believed I had made it with my power and blowjob proficiency.
I don’t believe that now.
Now, I think whatever that was, a spirit? An alien? It doesn’t matter. I believe it passed through me and played my emotions like a kitten with a tangle of string.
~
So, it’s not just my metaphors and it’s not just my words I’m frightened of; it’s stretching the skin of reality till I’m marooned or mad. Did I create that demon? Does that dark capacity reside within me? Will my writing reveal—unleash—an unmanageable wickedness? I suppose some might find my fears and anxieties absurd and certainly questionable. For too long I’ve been afraid of the dark. These days I pad around this beautiful housesitting space in the gloaming, reveling the splash of waning and waxing moonlight glancing the St. Lawrence River. For the very first time since that experience at sixteen, I’m wondering whether I forejudged the apparition, and I question my fear of it all. And, for the sake of my writing, I’m ready to play.
Let’s begin with these lines from a poem by Carol Ann Duffy, “Prayer”.[1]
So, a woman will lift/her head from the sieve of her hands and stare/ at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.
A friend calls these massive blooms the floozies of the garden. They are taller than me and have overtaken the tomatoes this year, which means fewer tomatoes to process (a small blessing, one I’ll curse in Feb).
I went to listen to a friend play in a band (he plays guitar). It was an afternoon event and the day was gorgeous, hot blue sky, tree leaves colouring up red and yellow. There were lots of friends there and many people who I hadn’t connected with in some time (since pre-pandemic). In one conversation, a former colleague announced his recent retirement and our talk rounded to creative writing. I admit that anecdote, erroneously attributed to Margaret Atwood, about the brain surgeon who says to a writer that when they retire, they’ll take up writing, to which the writer quips that, when they retire, they’ll take up brain surgery, popped into my mind. The guy is (well, was) a physician. But it’s important writers lift one another up. Writing is hard enough without tearing each other down. So, I offered up some writing (and reading) resources I’ve found helpful and then we landed on the topic of workshopping. He leaned back in his chair and said he’d tried workshopping—his tone was unmistakable; the exercise was beneath him—and he’d been disappointed to discover that (his words) “99.95% of workshop participants are women”. Long pause of silence. I began to form a response, but not before he buried himself further by saying his writing needed…here, he finally noticed he was speaking to a woman and corrected the wording I could see so clearly in the thought bubble hovering atop his (inflated) head (his writing is far more important and serious – intelligent! than what women write about), to say the workshops could never sufficiently improve his writing. I turned to his wife (also a physician. Does this matter? It does. I have a chip on my shoulder when it comes to physicians…story for another time, but I acknowledge my bias) and I agreed, it’s true, the workshops and writing classes I have attended are comprised, mostly, of women. I think it must have to do with women not feeling they have a voice in other aspects of their lives. Great swaths of generalizations painted here, but this was party small talk. The physician’s unblinking wife encouraged her husband, explaining he ought to think more about the issue because women read and buy books more often, and if he hoped to publish, it’s an issue worthy of his consideration. I downed the glass of shit wine I was drinking and flitted off. But the conversation and the question (why mostly women?) gnawed at me.
Last of the summer flowers maybe, before a killing frost.
The conversation with the physicians continued to grate because it poked (stabbed?) a few of my deepest insecurities. How I’d turned my back on pursuing an arts career in favour of science because I thought I’d be taken more seriously (as a woman) and, let’s be honest, because it paid better. But the deeper wound is that I find myself actively resisting the writing that bubbles forth most naturally in my creative writing practice: marriage and motherhood.
This is hard to write: I silence my own voice because I don’t believe it’s valuable enough.
It’s frustrating to know I’ve allowed myself to be shaped (so effortlessly) by cultural and social norms related to traditional gender roles. It’s an embarrassment. It begs the question: who from (and why?) am I seeking validation? The easy answer is “the system” – but it’s a system that continues to devalue the importance (skill, patience, persistence, compassion) of raising children, a system that reduces love and relationships to sex (and shout out to my more marginalized peeps of the LGBTQ2S+, most often heteronormative sex). As part of the system—as a woman I am—we don’t do enough to support each other to write about domestic subjects or write about our friendships. Is writing about friendship without the tension of sex or attraction a downgrade? Too boring? A lot of cognitive dissonance here. The harder answer is that yes, I do need to push through the noise and systemic pressures to value my own writing and anchor validation from within as opposed to without. It’s hard. And I know, a harried summary of such a complex issue is short on explanations. I could sing this pearl of an offering[2], but in the spirit of bare sincerity, I’m often afraid the conversations are out of my league. I’m working on bravery. Another work in progress…
This week I wrote a poemy piece in workshop (yes, a workshop comprised of mostly women) about what it feels like to walk up to the podium to read one’s poetry. My writing inspired one of the other women in the workshop to create a collaged art piece in response to a particular phrase I had written. I won’t share it here because she would like us to try publishing our two pieces together, but the art work is beguiling and unique, and the gesture made me teary. Really, it’s the ultimate compliment.
I think this must be the goal for creating art: to make something so beautiful it inspires further beauty in the world.
So, I lift my burned gaze from the sieve of my hands to tend the lyrics of my heart.
[1] This stunning image (that word ‘sieve’ does so much work) are lines from the poem “Prayer” by Dame Carol Ann Duffy. She is the first (and only!!) woman to hold the post of British Poet Laureate in its 400 plus-year history and was appointed in 2009 for a ten-year fixed term. You can listen to her read this poem here. Interestingly, when I read the poem for myself it sounded very different from her reading. Perhaps I interpret it differently too. Regardless, it’s a gorgeous poem. I love how the image embodies this post better than my own words could ever do.
[2]“One Heart” is from the Leftover Cuties 2013 album “The Spark & the Fire” – http://www.leftovercuties.com – also, a striking album cover.
Super spicy Habaneros harvested need to be handled with care (the mask and gloves and slicing outdoors depicted in the drawing above) when preserving.
Do we have a choice about the subject of our creative work? In a recent interview with Francesca Steele of Write-Off podcast, Tessa Hadley said, “There is no choice about what you write…an interesting discovery…no, it isn’t a choice, you just have to find the thing that is yours.” They were discussing the writing of domestic fiction, of which Tessa Hadley is considered a modern master. For some thoughts about domestic fiction as a genre, read this reflection by Soledad Fox Maura at Lit Hub. Also, must mention Tessa Hadley’s stunner of a short story in a recent (July 24, 2023) The New Yorker. You can listen to her read it here too, “The Maths Tutor”.
A few years ago, I would have disagreed with Tessa Hadley, believing that of course a writer could choose their subject. But now, after years and drafts attempting to write something with Meaning (capital M) about Big Important Issues (climate change, poverty, the impacts of war, attachment theory, to name a few), I do agree with her.
It doesn’t matter what I try to write, the stories of my family—growing up, as well as my experiences in a long-term relationship and raising my own children—bubble to the surface. I’ve wasted a lot of time and energy resisting this writing, or at least trying to hide it behind a Big Meaning facade. But I’m starting to make peace with the themes my writing presents: raising kids, marriage, cooking, being raised by parents with mental illness and addictions. It is who I am, how I have become the person I am, and, importantly, provided my foundation and lenses for my viewing of the world. It’s this inner voice—unique for every person—that readers will connect to if I can get it to the page. I’m only beginning to trust my own voice (that it’s good enough).
Coupled with this challenge is another: when I choose to centre my family life in my creative writing, the refrain from trusted readers is often that it’s too much all at once (I’m paraphrasing, but this is the gist of it). One dear friend explained reading my stories or poems feels almost like an assault to her senses. She really means this kindly, and I accept it that way too, but I’ve struggled to understand what I might do differently. There’s so much strangled emotion waiting and wanting to spring out. I don’t know how to tell these stories in a way a reader might absorb them with any pleasure or entertainment at a pace that engenders empathy as opposed to shock, or worse, pity.
The last few months of writing flash pieces, narratives that follow a “story arc” but are less than 1000 words, have been generative and instructive. Flash, as a form, focuses an emotional moment. There isn’t room for much else. In some of the pieces I’ve generated—over 26 unique story drafts since the beginning of May (woohoo!)—I’ve practiced approaching some of my family stories using different perspectives, angles, and styles. I’ve discovered the flash form might be a method for me to “break up” the emotions and the moments in a way that is softer on readers, easier to digest, provide some white space and pause for breath. That way, several flash pieces assembled could become a kaleidoscope (of different focal points, different angles, etc.) of “what happened”, layering texture and meaning by using not just simply concentrated content, but a strategic sequencing too. An arrangement where the spaces in between could provide much-needed rests and pauses for recovery. A working theory anyway, I’m now trying.
When I went to elementary school in the 70s and 80s, it was vogue, fashioned after curriculum direction in the UK, lessons on grammar and syntax be removed from the curriculum with the belief (not proven with time) the lessons would simply assimilate through reading, exercises in comprehension (meaning making), and natural conversation.
And a science focused career further limited my exposure to language construction (blunted it more like. Punted any raw, sensual subjectivity, the glorious immersion of being human in a living world, to a cold field of disconnection and distanced objectivity, but I digress). The result: I must always look up the definitions for parts of sentences (adverb (?! yes, it’s true), gerund, participle), the application of verb tenses and rhetorical terms (these never stay in my head, it’s a completely foreign language). I’m only recently (last couple years) conscious of the conceptual gymnastics syntax enables one to perform.
But my lack of education is not what I want to write about here today. Instead, in the way of shimmery near-rhymes, I want to describe my process learning to use syntax as a way to mine my intuition. This practice (nascent) is cultivating my writing, slowly, slowly, so slowly, making it, if not more beautiful, certainly more textured, possibly (hopefully?) more complex.
Importantly, the practice disciplines thinking. Alters perspectives. Allows the mind to become supple. Open.
There’s a June Jordan quote tacked on the corkboard in front of my writing desk that captures this sentiment so much better, “The syntax of a sentence equals the structure of your consciousness.”
By intuition in this context, I mean what the subconscious mind is telling you, learning to trust it knows so much more before your conscious mind does. Responding to writing prompts, I put my pen to paper and let the words fly. In this way, something surprising, often beautiful—an image, a metaphor, a sensory cue—always rises to the surface (usually only at the very end of the exercise). Often, I’m left with a slightly baffling fragment and no clue as to how I might proceed or stick it together with another section of text (and attempts to force it really botch the whole thing up). This is when applying syntactical techniques may be used to open a window for creativity (and intuition) to breeze in.
Here’s what I mean (so floaty in the abstract mind space, my apologies, let’s get grounded). Syntax is simply the arrangement of words and phrases to create [a] well-formed sentence1. I’ve been practicing how to write sentences, gratefully working through exercises posted so generously by Nina Schuyler on her Substack Stunning Sentences.
Nina’s exercises break sentences into their component parts, grammatical and syntactical, and she sequences and names the parts so they may be followed as a template to slot in your own words and thoughts. I work through Nina’s exercises each week (well, I try to keep up). I’m too shy to post them there (and I don’t always succeed in my attempts, often capturing only 3/4 of the layered pieces that make the whole), but the practice is so helpful to me.
Start with a base clause: grind the meaning of the sentence down to its essentialness, who is this about (subject), where is it taking place (setting) or what is happening (action). And then, by erecting layers of structure (syntax, grammar, rhetorical techniques), complexity of meaning, depth, a resonance imbued with life and rhythm is, architecturally, revealed.
The layers of structure move a reader through the writer’s thinking and meanings using, as Francis Christensen’s 1963 essay, A Generative Rhetoric of the Sentence explains, levels of abstraction or generality, movement (directing the reader’s eye to earlier or later parts in the sentence). Christensen’s theories enriched John Erskine’s. Here’s a quote of Erskine’s that I love, from a 1946 essay, The Craft of Writing, quoted in Building Great Sentences by Brooks Landon:
“What you wish to say is found not in the noun but in what you add to qualify the noun. The noun is only a grappling iron to hitch your mind to the reader’s…The noun, the verb, and the main clause serve merely as a base on which meaning will rise. The modifier is the essential part of any sentence.”
Circling back to intuition and tying it in with Nina’s exercises, working through the sentence templates (grammatical, syntactical, rhetorical) I am forced to feel my way through the possibilities of how the original thought (could be the stripped down base clause) might expand. From my own free writing, I can select an image, a metaphor, a sensory cue, an action, extract it from my draft and let my intuition, carried through the templates, show me what my mind senses before I really even know.
In a recent post to The Red Hand Files, Nick Cave responded to a question about creativity, being stuck, and art making, which again, explains this better than I can:
“As a songwriter, I have come to understand that the more I try to make art that somehow reflects what I perceive myself to be, or the identity I wish to project upon the world, the more my art resists. Art doesn’t like being told what to do. It doesn’t like me getting in the way. When I attempt to impose my will upon it, the work becomes diminished and art takes its better ideas elsewhere…[Art] insists that we retract our ego, our sense of self, the cosmetics of identity and let it do its thing. We are in service to art, not the other way round.”
Practicing this way is very slow. I sit and think a lot more (imagining) before attempting to fill each sentence component on the page. I switch to pencil for these exercises – there’s a lot of rubbing out, a lot of cross outs too. It feels a lot more like how I feel when I write poetry…the process of intentional writing I apply to poetry. It taxes the brain, but in a good way, a way that alerts you, wakes you to deeper meanings on offer.
But there is a richness of material being laid down. Suddenly every word (or component) opens so much more potential for something larger, more meaningful, more complex. It shows me what I’m thinking, before I even know myself. And this feels exciting. And pleasurable.
How classes on reading comprehension were ever severed from syntax instruction I will never fathom. Subject for a different rant.
Slowly, slowly, slowly I am learning. No longer gasping for breath, a fish out of water, just a process of learning to swim. And the education, though painful at times, is a joy.
Small beauties culled from a pre-pandemic notebook – I was drawing instead of writing when attending a writing retreat. Small beauties, simply because I love them.
1 Discovered syntax etymology is from the late 16th century, via French or late Latin from Greek suntaxis, from sun- ‘together’ + tassein ‘arrange’. What a delightful riff on the warmth of a sun.
It’s been a slow dawning, learning that my narrator—even when I’m writing my own memories, writing about my self, my thoughts, my feelings—needs to be someone playing a role, a dramatic one. Who my narrator will be (because, yes, this is very future, I haven’t figured it out yet) is distinct from point of view (how the memories are relayed to a reader using perspective, what the narrator’s relation to the story is) and distinct from the tenses of verbs (when, in time, the person of the verb is “doing” “verbing?”). Confusingly, the narrator may be what is referred to as “voice”. Perhaps the terms are interchangeable, I don’t know. Maybe something to unpack in a later post. But thinking of the narrator as the person who tells the story, helps frame many writing decisions within a larger composition, from the sentence level to the whole.
An attempt to explain what I mean and where I want to go with this:
I’m five months into challenging myself to a “just get it down on paper!” exercise. For the first time, I tracked my progress, in number of words, and the time devoted to the task, in minutes. I had wanted to get to 70, 000 words (book length). Surprise! I haven’t hit that target. These last few weeks, I’ve laboured emotionally to make peace with this and move on. See the graphical display of progress here:
Some observations from tracking:
Most important: quantity in number of words does not equal quality. Not even close. More on this shortly (and yes, a link back to who the narrator is for this work…I’ll get there).
The shape of the line for the time put in, for this specific progress snapshot, follows the same shape of progress for the number of words. This could lead one to conclude (repeating the religious mantra): time put in = productivity out (measured in number of words). This is a misleading conclusion for creative writing because again, it ignores the quality of the writing (and all the measures of quality we can come up with, things like comprehension, emotional resonance with a reader, use of imagery, compositional techniques, sentence variability, word choice, structural approach, etc. The list is endless. Endless!).
There were stretches of time (weeks) showing zero output for both measures. Practically (qualitatively) this was because there were weeks I was away on vacation and didn’t work on the project and one week managing my grief after making the very difficult decision to have one of our pets put down. Gutted. But other weeks I did work on writing, just not this specific project. Instead, I wrote a short story and two flash pieces, plus a few posts to this blog. The chart doesn’t capture this. I recorded this separtely with notes and making myself reflect about the progress I made each week (with an intention to start fresh the following week).
Can’t ignore the downward trend depicted in the chart. I started off “well” in December – lots of time and words to begin with, then the lines gradually slide, tilting towards the x-axis to confirm my progress has slowed and stalled.
Another bit of context not captured in the chart: I started tracking for this project after writing just over 20, 000 words already. So, my actual word output for this project is just over 50, 000 words. Not bad. In quantity. At least the pages confirm I can create a book-length work (well, novella maybe).
If I focused on only these outcome measures, measures that confirm it takes me 5 months of creative writing time to reach an equivalent work week I put into my day job, I’d plunge into a depression too deep to climb out from. Instead, I learn what I can from this exercise and pivot.
What I’ve alluded to already with the differences between quantitative and qualitative measures, is that quality matters far more than quantity. I’ve also discovered the draft I’ve completed, chasing after the number of words down on paper, was written for myself. All 50, 000 plus words! I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t help calling it my Vomit Draft. I’ve got the memories and (some) feelings and the cultural references I wanted to fold into the piece named and listed, but I haven’t packaged my writing in any shape or form a reader would be engaged with. “I” am not my audience. I need to carve a narrator to reshape how the stories are told, a narrator who will engage an audience, a narrator who performs that work. In making this choice, I will change the quality of my writing. My hope is to transform the raw emotions and memories into something funny, something entertaining. So, the work shifts now, with intention, towards understanding which part of my self I can call on to become that narrator. I want a narrator with the following qualities:
Someone who is funny
Someone who is humble
Someone with compassion
Someone who works to understand other people’s perspectives
Someone who isn’t whiney
Someone without a chip on their shoulder (ha, ha, better get my surgical tools)
Someone who forgives
Someone kind of cool (?) (I can see my kids cringing)
Someone with charisma
Someone with audacity (this is the hardest)
Note: all qualities impossible to measure with numbers.
I’m back to the beginning with this project…and will take the time needed to create this role, this persona. I foresee a lot more time sitting at the writing desk, puzzling to reveal this narrator in the rendering of every sentence. Kick in the bum to tracking words, I’m done with that.
My passport was declined the maximum three times at the new scanning kiosks at Canada customs. I left the wave of Canadians passing with ease through the machines to find a customs officer in the flesh, “Where are you coming from?” Looking me up and down, a middle-aged woman travelling alone, he was confused. “Mexico City” I handed him my passport. “And you didn’t travel in Mexico?” “Yes, I did, but not by plane. By bus. And taxis.” “It’s unusual for a Canadian (he paused here but did not say ‘woman’) to travel like that, from Mexico City.” Given the circumstances (trying to re-enter my country with as little friction as possible), I opted for the simplest, also the most honest, response, I said, “I’m glad to be back.” “I bet” he said.
I hadn’t travelled alone; I met my sister in Mexico City. She had flown from the Yukon. We travelled the two weeks together, visiting her favourite places—Mexico City, Tepoztlan, Acapulco. She’d lived and worked a whole decade in Mexico and returned to Canada five years ago. Her Spanish returned fluid, fluent, the moment she landed. She had asked me to visit so many times when she lived there, but my kids were small, I didn’t have the money, couldn’t secure the time away from work…so many excuses. Even when her partner died suddenly, in a dangerous town just north of the Belizean border where baggies of cocaine wash up on the beach and the people carry machetes and several sport missing limbs, I couldn’t go down there, to help her through that horror. My husband outright forbade it. With good reason, really. This trip was long overdue. And we didn’t have any epic blowouts or even anything more than mild disagreements. Maturity counts for some things. Acquiescing my movements to the pace of a cigarette smoker helped: walk a little ways, smoke break, walk a little further, smoke break.
Dropping into another culture, another climate (several climates really, because with every move we made the temperature, the way the air moved and touched my skin, the scents on the wind, changed), surrounded by a language I didn’t understand, kickstarted my mind. Thoughts, sensory experiences, sparked and fizzed. Released from the demands of work, of family, of regular life, I settled into being, allowing my tongue to bend around the new language, a different grammar, novel tastes.
I didn’t write much. Jotted a few fragments, impressions. I collected flowers—Jacarandas from the purple blossoming trees, bougainvillea, frangipani, others I didn’t recognise—pressed them between the pages of my notebook. I carried my pencil crayons but never drew anything. I didn’t quite feel settled enough. We were on the move. There was too much to look at, take in, make meaning of. Everything was fantastically loud: competing car radios, shop front music blasts, horns, bells, the screeching of brakes, the barking of dogs, the crows of roosters, birdsong, people yelling, begging, singing, whistling, babies crying, children laughing, and Mexican style fireworks which really sound just like cannon blasts. They made me jump. Every. Time. One expat suggested the fireworks—long baton-like sticks held in front of a person as if carrying a flag, gun powder stuffed in the top end and lit—as Mexicans reclaiming the fear they’d felt when colonial conquerors landed with their real cannons in centuries passed. Maybe.
It felt good to get my brain buzzed. To slow down. To simply feel.
I read four books, two by Mexican author Elena Poniatowska (an émigré from France). Her writing is gorgeous and, I imagine, even better in their original Spanish (the short story collections I read were translated by George Henson and Elizabeth Coonrod Martínez). Here is a good and very recent overview of her life as a writer, from The Washington Post, written by Kevin Sieff.
Amidst the concrete, the gates, the walls frothing barbed wire, shards of glass, the flowered vines spilled forth, the flowers rioted, the birds swooped and sang. In a place where even the laundry hung to dry on the rooftops is caged, there is art on the walls and parades of people celebrating. I spent my time ingesting it all. Feeling full.
Process Peace 