Tag: process

Tune(s) Up

Suzanne Biro

Thank you for your many messages. They guided my approach—which I’ll summarize below—revising A Marriage: Framed (CNF <2500 words) AND showed me to trust my own words and my own process. Your belief helps me believe. A blessing.

There was a lot of tinkering (ink -er-ing) trying to take this story to top level writing technique. I continue to tinker. Top level is…a dream, a ceaseless chase. And yeah, the chase really is a lot of fun [Insert: series of horn blasts and voice signals and Tally-ho! Here we go!].  

Last month, I posted my experience pruning A Marriage: Framed, taking it from 3770 to less than 2500 words. The process was fascinating because as I cut the words down, the focal point shifted, a spin that forced the painful emotions at the heart of my 27-year relationship with my ex to surface. Emotions I’d suppressed for decades.

Struggling to understand and move those emotions out of my body onto the page transformed them into “an object” (a writing piece) outside my body that I can interact with and control. I’m less “imprisoned” by my emotions, if that makes sense. I feel almost as if the rewriting of the draft I completed last month was a “therapy” draft. The story moved from being deeply subjective to objective, enabling me to turn to tackling the craft and technical aspects in the writing with a cool(er) and practiced distance[1]. This latter process, I’ve discovered, is essential to move the emotional therapy draft through a series of systematic style techniques so the artifact might approach a work of art. 

I wrote about my nascent practice and understanding for how to work with the subconscious as part of creative writing process in a post last March. Today, I want to build on that earlier exploration with some concrete examples because I’m trying to understand and practice tangible methods for working with less tangible materials. Silence. Air. Thoughts. Dreams.  I was thinking about how a musician works with the silences between notes to modulate pitch and tone, melody and harmony; how a sculptor carves a block of stone to encase a shape of air.  And my mind slid from that image to a memory of being captivated by a sculpture of Leda and the Swan when I was in Italy last fall.

I was rushing through the monumental halls on the second floor of the Library of Saint Mark in Venice in order to see the Mappa Mundi before the gallery closed. Speedwalking past innumerable marble busts, I stopped abruptly, struck by the unique portrayal of the infamous myth, an erotic story about the god Zeus, disguised as a swan, seducing the Spartan Queen Leda. The question about the nature of the seduction, whether coupling between the two was consensual or not, revolves the ages. This specific statue, its image, its energy, has stayed with me because of its beauty, yes, but also its ambiguity …for me, this sculpture is tangible object and emblem of desire-resistance all at once. Leda and the swan are carved to their moment of intercourse and Leda seems, at least to my eyes, both taken by surprise, as if she’s not quite ready to take on a god (she pushes the swan away) and surrendering to her attraction and desire at the same time.  

Roman variant of a possible Attic original of the mid 1st century BC Giovanni Grimani collection, 1587

I hadn’t appreciated why this sculpture has enchanted me for more than a year, until today, when, sifting my thoughts for something concrete (well, marble in this case), this memory surfaced. By embracing the complexity of the original myth and removing the layer of Greek mythology, I choose to think of this sculpture as a symbol of unification between spiritual and human worlds. When creative writing, I feel the spiritual world, or divine might be a better word, is a part of (or accessed via) the subconscious. The vibrating energy I can feel as I draft using stream of consciousness writing (read: writing without thinking too much) is intuition. Intuition is much like a tuning fork. I’ll try to explain this shortly.  

I’ve missed many of the signposts from the subconscious in my writing drafts—they arrive as words, resonances between words and as sensory images. I’m learning how to identify them and practice how to work with them and preserve them to create a net of story words that communicates something beyond words: feelings, energy, magic. Art.

Here’s an elegant and far more beautiful articulation for what I’m trying to say:

“Story form is an object, a translucent, shimmering thing with words tacked to the surface of its swirling involutions. The words glitter with their own reflective colouration; in them you see the momentary reflections of other words. Wires as thin as gossamer connect the words with more words on distant parts of the structure where they set up new colonies with flags, banners, replicas, and maps of the whole. Spin the form and the same words appear in flashes, the eye registers their rhythmic insistence[2]. It is wonderful and miraculous to watch.”

Excerpt from the essay, Anatomy of the Short Story, in The Erotics of Restraint, by Douglas Glover.

 Tune Up Techniques

My revision was guided by generous writers and readers who offered their love and attention and time to enhance my piece. I’ve said it before; creatives work in community. I’ll write more about that in December. My learnings I write here derive collective wisdoms of too many people to name.  Thank you.

Ideally, or shall I say, if this were easier, I might have started revising the Macro aspects of the piece—story, plot, characters, setting, points of view—then moved to the more Micro levels of paragraphs, sentences, rhetorical devices, syntax, diction.

But that’s not how it worked in practice.

There were the metaphors and the patterns and the desire-resistance tensions and the images that slid to occupy both macro and micro levels and, most important, all the space vibrating between. That’s the art object space, the space of Leda-swan. It’s an easy space to get lost in and an easy space to miss.

My tune up process was messy, not linear. Nor did it happen in steps, though describing the process here necessitates a sequential recounting. Revising was pressured by the word count cap, 2500 words max. The restriction served the writing in many ways by forcing disciplined compression (of words, sentences, images and ideas).

The process felt like persistent twisting, moving around and up and down and through the piece, working to understand my intentions and meanings, then shifting sections here and there, and tweaking here and there, and slowly, slowly, slowly, the piece contracted round an essential essence of tight emotional communication, complete with shimmery swirly resonances, into story art (ish…I’m still practicing).

Working with Vibrations

Ok, first, two indispensable applications I think I’ve failed to post on this blog, probably because my use of them is so integrated with my writing process I’ve neglected to emphasise my reliance on them[3]:

  • Word Hippo (thesaurus, word tools, etc.)
  • Online Etymology Dictionary – I love how they write on their site (my bolding),  “Etymonline aims to weave together words and the past, answer common questions, and sow seeds of serendipity.” Sowing seeds of serendipity is exactly why and how I use this site. It’s a creativity generator.

Choosing the right word requires deep attention to what it is I want to say (what I intend a sentence to mean), the connotations I intend to (try to) control in readers’ minds, but also how I wish to communicate it. Choosing whether the flavour of communication should be sweet or bitter, whether the texture of communication should be hard or soft, whether the sense of communication might be cold or hot.

Here’s an example. In the original longer draft, I had an entire paragraph describing the situation where the husband explains he won’t allow his wife to attend the funeral of her friend’s dad. When I cut that paragraph down to convey its essential meaning in one sentence, I wrote, “[He] embargoed my attendance at a male friend’s dad’s funeral believing my intent was seduction.”

Ok, that word embargoed practically leaps off the page with melodrama and elevated (snobby) language. Instinctually I disliked it, but it captured the essence of meaning I was after, which was restriction or “not permitted”. The vibration of my distaste of the word (in this context), even though it had the right meaning, signalled—and I should explain, this feeling is super subtle, very easy to ignore if I’m not paying attention—there might be a deeper meaning.

I sat with the word quietly and patiently and questioned it, exploring its alternative meanings. The idea of ownership surfaced to consciousness …which is a concept I’m exploring in the larger piece. The subconscious offered “embargoed” up…but the flavour (snobby) and timing of it wasn’t right…I didn’t want to introduce the idea of ownership so early in the piece (this sentence comes in at paragraph two). I wanted “ownership” as a concept to build slowly through the piece, mimicking the way the wife experienced this revelation over time.

So, I fiddled with it. I ended up using the word “barred” because it conveys the meaning of “not permitted” and extends it into an implied image (physical bars) introducing the connotation of “prison” without it being overt. It’s also a soft, quiet word in the mouth, so a reader might glide past, carrying its meanings without tripping on them (embargoed is practically a foot stuck out in front of a running reader). The sentence became, “[He] barred me attending the funeral of my male friend’s dad believing I intended seduction.[4]”

This is what I mean when I describe intuition as a tuning fork. It’s the vibrating intuition that guides which words and phrases bring the meaning and feeling and senses and sounds to coalesce in tune with the piece as a whole.

Another example, this time at the sentence level. In the therapy draft I wrote:

The kind of love that made me bump into walls, sliding glass doors and fail to recall what street to turn down to return to my own student house. The kind of love that made me forget to eat, made my skin glow, made me sing greetings to strangers.

I liked the repetition of “kind of love” because of the rhythm it introduces as well as the way it draws attention to the listed descriptions and also, the super subtle question injected by those words “kind” and “of” placed side by side, implying “sort of” …as in, this is the way the wife loved but was it a sort of love? A half in/half out love? I know, tenuous.

Also, “made my skin glow”…vibrated (intuition tuning fork struck)…what did I mean by this? I meant our lovemaking made my skin glow. An opportunity to align that idea with the larger story, which does circle and explore sex. Compression, and playing with the sound and syntax, reshaped it to:   

A colliding into walls, strike sliding glass doors kind of love, amnesiac love, missed meals, abandoned panties kind of love that made my skin glow.    

Working with energy

I wanted the reader to feel the same crescendo of energy and collision-like impact as I had experienced with the real event. So, I needed to recreate it. For this story, I wanted to begin with a quiet energy of curiosity that moved, incrementally, to build momentum through the piece toward a detonating end.   The best way to describe this is by comparing it with music. This tune,  You Look Like Trouble, by Lisa LeBlanc, embodies the energy arc I was after for my piece (and I’ve drawn what I mean in the graphic below).

But how did I do that? Well, I practiced what Summer Brennan refers to as the controlled release of energy by considering the way energy builds up and is released. I felt my way through this intuitively, and my attempt to describe it here is underdeveloped. Mostly, I feel, it was a conscious effort to pace story events, laying out the information that keeps a reader interested and curious and engaged, building on story events so they acquire more and more meaning, modulating sentence length and sound to align with intended meaning as I went (as described above). Layering information.

But also, this short piece is intense. More than one reader described it as a run instead of a walk. As the tension ratchets up with information layers (about who these characters are, their behaviours individually and in relationship), I deployed a technique I use often in my writing (and uh, life), the use of parentheticals and narrator intrusions to break the tension and release the energy.   

Here’s an example of this technique: This tragedy seemed particularly attractive (saviour complex? Fuck. Maybe.).[5]

Working with Metaphors and Imagery

I think of metaphor and imagery as working with dream. For me, this is the most prominent language the subconscious surfaces in my creative writings. The therapy draft revealed many. I adore working with metaphor and image and I avoid letting any go…I feel they’re a kind of magic, the spirit world made manifest with text on a page. But the therapy draft made visible, perhaps for the first time, my subconscious tendency to insert a metaphor or an image as an avoidance technique. Instead of forcing myself to move deeper into painful experiences, I throw up a metaphor and skate right past it. Once this was pointed out to me (thank you Barbara!), I could see where I’d done it, soft bodied ego protecting itself. So, I spent some quality time with my pain and worked to describe it clearly, straightforwardly, in scene.

Quite naturally, after I’d rewritten those pain sections, the imagery refined throughout the piece and miracle of miracles, the ones that remained hung together associatively. In this story it’s repeated imagery of sunlight and storm. I worked to sprinkle this imagery through the piece, augmenting associatiions with words resonating the same sounds and meanings, and tried to follow the energy arc by beginning with sunlight and ending with a lightening strike.   

And I tried to get some beautiful sentences in. There are a few I really like. Playing with sentences had me waking in the middle of the night to puzzle them through. Here’s one that didn’t make it into the piece, but I leave it here for your pleasure and song.

And what is love? Laughter donning roller skates, heedless of the hill[6].

[1] It’s important I make a distinction here. Even though I’m bandying the terms “objective” and “distanced” and “cold” and “systematic”, which raises “scientific method” connotations, the process for moving into technical tune up MUST (MUST!) retain an open heart and keen attention to the body warming when the vibrations of instinct ping. The process is slow and methodical. I know I’m on the right track when I’m delighting in the discoveries (the right words slip into the right place; the sounds; most of all, when unexpected injections of humour are revealed).

[2] I love the way the movement, “Spin the form”, resonates with the words “colonies” and “replica” and “maps” in the previous sentence to deliver an image (implied) of a spinning globe, a twirling world, disco ball like with those flashes.

[3] I used to use a visual thesaurus as well, but default to word hippo these days. Before that I used a heavy hardbacked Oxford thesaurus I “borrowed” from my housemate in second year university. Sorry Jeff, it’s still on my bookshelf.

[4] Also shifted words around to improve difficulty comprehending “male friend’s dad’s funeral”. Thanks Stacey! We decided the passive might be okay in this instance, a sacrifice for clarity.

[5] I am fretting over the punctuation here. I think this is right.

[6] I woke at 1:16 am thinking this question: and what is love? In half sleep, the words/image (as one) arrived: laughter, roller skates. After a trip to the toilet, more words: back to the hill. Later that day I played around with the words a bit to come up with this line…a line I’m happily hooked on because it feeds me, nurtures me, continues to shimmer. Sparkle. Delight.

Leda does love him. She shares his dreams.

Melanzana musings

Killing the Phantom

Suzanne Biro

Okay. I’ve scrapped much of what I drafted for this post. Instead, I’m pasting in a few extracts of random jottings, conversations, and responses to writing prompts in the last month or so[1]. Some chaotic thoughts, shredded remnants of what I’d originally intended to write, follow. And this is a long post, so grab a mug of something and settle in.   

Ready?  These are drafts [she wailed loudly to cover up her delicate vulnerability ha ha]! Fuck it, here goes.

In response to a prompt to write 400 words about the origin of my name (558 words):

My name, my first name, Suzanne, means Lily or Rose, an unintentional connection when naming my own two daughters: the eldest with the name of Lillian, the younger with the middle name of Rose. All of us blossoming.

My own mother chose my name, naming me after her favourite cousin of many. I do not know what made Suzanne my mother’s favourite cousin, but I imagine it might be because Suzanne was kind, that perhaps, unlike the other twiggy branches of the family tree—even the trunk of my mum’s own mother—banished mum when she fell pregnant out of wedlock. She was forced to endure the pregnancy in secret, to endure the betrayal alone, to endure the abandonment of the man she had loved not just with her body but also her soul to create the wee soul swimming in the womb of her body.

Mum was sent to hide her pregnancy on a remote farm where the five kids who lived there threw rocks at her while the farmwife, their own mother, watched and said nothing. Perhaps she encouraged her children in the methods of this stoning. This stonewalling.  

To name is to categorize. Bastard. Whore. Slut. And the name stuck. Not on the outside of mum’s skin but worming deep in her mind, free floating the very cells of amniotic fluid the foetus hiccupped down and in, down and into their own cells. This is the way of water. It trickles incremental with the power to erode granite. Walls of stone.

Suzanne, when I met her in New Zealand, visiting when I was twenty-three, was a gentle quiet soul. She kept a canary in a cage in her kitchen who she spoke with each morning, coaxing his song. His name was Bird. He was who he was. Plain and simple and straightforward and beautiful. I marveled the amazing synchronicity of Suzanne’s movements when one day she stepped into the garden with a pair of scissors glinting the dawn. She clipped a stem with a few leaves of milkweed, brought this inside and placed it in an open mason jar. She held the jar up, a jewel in the light, to show me the chrysalis hanging the fork between leaf and stem. The chrysalis was chartreuse with a tiny necklace of gold, specks of dark between the golden granules. A monarch chrysalis, she said. But of course, I knew, for my mother too, continents and oceans and seasons and days and nights across the planet also brought monarch chrysalides inside and kept them in open mason jars to marvel the wondrous metamorphosis, the miracle of worm become butterfly.

As the butterfly formed, cocooned within, the chrysalis darkened to black. Then it cracked, splitting open from gold shoulders down to tip, the walls of the chrysalis transparent as glass, smashed open with the power of wings within. And the butterfly unfolded to hang beneath a milkweed leaf, to dry its wet wings to a powder coated blaze of fire colour. When it started exercising, fanning for flight, my mother and Suzanne stepped into their gardens with their wide-open jars to witness the transformation that is flight. That is freedom. And the flowers blossomed all round. And in this way, I learned how we and everything in this world are all connected. And not just by how we are named[2].   

One paragraph’s worth of writing toward the long project (386 words):

The condom broke. This is how I imagine it years later from the benign safety of a different generation. A generation—only a couple of decades—where, when the condom broke, sliding out from my own slippery insides to reveal its terrifying tatters dripping loosened semen on the insides of my thighs, a Sunday morning I recall, I looked up my physician’s name in the phone book and called his house and his daughter, who I knew was in grade three, answered, and he took an inordinately long time to come to the phone, probably summoned from mowing the lawn or some other mundane morning task, while I waited, dripping the vestiges of lovemaking onto the coffee table in my eighteen year-old boyfriend’s living room, the marble chess pieces strewn round my naked ass where they’d been knocked sideways to the floor, knight to queen (!), which was, I realise with hindsight, probably better categorized as fucking instead of lovemaking, fun fucking where, even when the marble bishop stabbed my spine’s base, my voice climbed the heights to climax fast and shuddering, and, when my doctor who had been my doctor since almost before memory, finally answered his telephone, I, ever polite, apologised for disturbing his personal peace and calmly, rationally, explained my situation, omitting, of course, the unnecessary details of the coffee table, the chess board, its marble pieces gone flying,  but supplying the dates of my last period, a riveting estimation of my ovulation window and talked through a risk benefit analysis of heading to the hospital emergency to request a morning after pill, a pill I knew from friends’ experiences of bleeding a hemorrhaging volume of blood down the shower drain, the running water drowning the sounds of wailing hearts and cramp pain, I really preferred to avoid, but only slightly less than an unwanted pregnancy at age nineteen (I would be entering university in the fall), my physician and I agreed, I might forego it. This time.  He reminded me I ought get back on The Pill. I’d used oral contraceptives since aged sixteen and discontinued them by aged seventeen, deciding they “made me squirrely”, and not in the sexy way. Condoms would have to do. But, alone as a contraceptive with wildly rambunctious sex (gawd that feels good!), they were risky[3].

Random lines from notebooks[4]:

  • I don’t want to be a whore; I want to be a whore and so much more. (2025)
  • If I were to create an avatar, I’d give myself a unicorn horn. I wouldn’t necessarily strap it to my forehead. (2019)
  • Internalized misogyny – IM – good nickname for a dildo. (2024)

In a coffee shop:

“Suzanne, stop flirting with the barista.”

“I’m not flirting with him; he’d know if I was flirting with him.” [Young Irish barista blushes bright pink.]

Speaking with a friend:

Me: “Well, she is a widow…”

Friend: “Yeah, but she isn’t a failure; a death is different than a divorce.[5]”

Sentence practice in paragraph form, playing with narrative distance[6]:

Camilla is holding her sorrow in, squaring her shoulders, dreaming not of the lovemaking that landed her here, discussing “the solution” over tea with her mother and G’s father, his stern eyebrows, not of the electricity that sparked her lips when she first kissed G at the back of the lab, thinking not of the fetus hiccupping the amniotic fluid bubbly within her, the baby who has not yet quickened. It shouldn’t be a conversation between four people. It doesn’t matter if the fifth person, the baby, might also have a voice. She hadn’t really heard G, when he said the condom broke. He turned away. He hadn’t met her eyes. He’d reminded her of a sheep, caught in the barb wire of a fence.  The roundness of his naked shoulders, the muscles rolling beneath the heat of her palms, the dry sweet scent of crushed straw beneath, the way his body slipped so easily, becoming part of her own, his moist breath huffing the whorl of her ear, how two bodies become one, she’s not remembering it now. There are rules, love does not govern them, the laws and the systems and society’s expectations and the differences for men, for women—any notion love might prevail or triumph to hold a creation together. The baby will be born, surrendered to another family, and Camilla’s own development arrested there, at age twenty-three, the moment she’ll never forgive herself for, the pain of giving her baby away, the heart beating at the center of her liquid addiction[7].

I’m sure I’ve written this before: it often happens a particular piece of writing lands below my eyeballs at the perfect time. I mean, at the perfect time to teach me something I need to learn, at the perfect time I might finally be able to understand a work of writing or perceive it differently from a previous reading, at the perfect time to crack my eggy thinking open.

This time it was Professions for Women, an abbreviated version of a talk Virginia Woolf gave to a branch of the National Society for Women’s Service on January 21, 1931. To add a little context to this inter-war period date, two million women in the UK had replaced men in traditionally male jobs during WWI and they had only secured the right to vote in 1928, three years before Woolf delivered her speech. These facts feel like distant history, but this is not at all long ago.

A synchronicity: also read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie with book club this month, set in the inter-war period, though, written in 1961 from a woman’s perspective and of women experiences and I laughed out loud a lot while reading it. Muriel Spark writes funny. An exploration of the fine line between nurturing and grooming; how thought and action might be manipulated. The creeping insidiousness of fascist and/or religious ideologies into malleable minds, how might it be achieved[8]?  

Why this little history lesson?  I was struck by the optimism and agency of women, the possibilities and independence, Woolf  commented on, opening to them at that time, women in their prime (!)…and struck… in a kind of devastating way, [here, I crave a distracting paragraph about waves of feminism, or better, gender and sex politics, or best, something raunchily erotic about how much I enjoy sex[9]] because I feel we’re falling—failing—backwards. [Huh, this subject is also an avoidance, a path too easily followed.]

Okay, [wince], here it is (took paras and pages to get here): because reading Woolf’s speech, I recognized how, in my own marriage, I was (am?)—embarrassingly so[10] —what Woolf named the Angel in the House. I was (am?) that selfless, sacrificial woman whose sole purpose in life is to soothe, flatter, and comfort men, but also …everyone else, other than myself, while raising a family with efficiency. And my experience of being that woman was to become invisible. It is partly what I’m exploring through the writing of the long project. A small part; I’m far more interested in how experiences of shame, betrayal, cruelty shape…not just a life, but relationships. And not just within a lifetime but crossing generations.  How legacies of pain endure and continue to shape…behaviours, choices, how and who we love. Also, thought. But wait, what “Jean Brodie” groomed me to be the Angel when I was born into a generation and country where women experience more choice and more access and more autonomy and more agency than any other historically?  These ideas are related; I’m exploring them, using my life as the sacrificial lamb (and suddenly I’m thinking of mint sauce).   

Most recent writing of the long project, evidenced by the extracted examples of writing practice above, has been attempting to write the story of how, in the 1960s, my mum “surrendered” (this is the wording used at the time) two different babies for adoption. Two different fathers. Two different countries with different sets of laws. I have two brothers in addition to the one I grew up with[11].

Each time I’ve tried to enter and write the scenes circling mum’s experiences, I slide into writing my own instead. I’ve allowed myself to drift, trusting the process of writing, following where it takes me. I’m both bewildered and grateful to report the imagery arising out of these seeming tangents bring to light very strong images to crack open my thinking about mum’s stories (the bishop!). But the writing has been very slow and very hard to sit with and real work to get it to the page. I’ve been trying to understand why[12]. And Woolf’s speech calls out and answers my pained confusion[13].

“Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.”

Woolf ‘s speech talks about how she managed to kill The Angel. And I believed I’d killed her too[14]. But Woolf continues her thinking, naming the Angel differently, accurately, as The Phantom. And I’m going to mash up some of her sentences here, which I’m sure is a very grave sin, to elucidate my own understanding…think of it in the same way as rap sampling:

“It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. She was always creeping back when I thought I had despatched her. Though I flatter myself that I killed her in the end, the struggle was severe; it took much time… To speak without figure she [the woman writer] had thought of something, something about the body, about the passions which it was unfitting for her as a woman to say… The consciousness of…the truth about her passions had roused her from her artist’s state of unconsciousness. She could write no more. The trance was over. Her imagination could work no longer… women writers…are impeded by the extreme conventionality… control the extreme severity with which… freedom… [is]condemn[ed] in women… telling the truth about my own experiences as a body… The obstacles against her are still immensely powerful–and yet they are very difficult to define. Outwardly, what is simpler than to write books? Outwardly, what obstacles are there for a woman rather than for a man? Inwardly, I think, the case is very different; she has still many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain…”

So…my Writing Resistance…it’s this haunting…the phantom in my bones, it’s the air I’m breathing, it’s part of me…this belief that what I write, the experience of being a woman, a mother, a daughter, a wife, cannot be said, or is uninteresting, or has no value. As Wool says, “the aims for which we are fighting, for which we are doing battle with these formidable obstacles…must be perpetually questioned and examined.”  I’m interested to learn how my beliefs settled into my cells, forming my selves, and influencing all the choices I make in this one precious life[15].

[1] Why? Because I think it’s important to show one another our first draft writings…it’s a nakedness to be sure …my thinking is naked and vulnerable, not to mention my writing skill level (uh, shallow) BUT I find in these first draft writings, they’re authentic, real…something from the collective subconscious has washed through my body of embedded experiences and sprinkled the page with tiny glittering tidings, the shells of ideas, memories, feelings I can pick up and pocket to explore with deeper curiosity.  I’ll try to signal these vibrations I feel from my drafty writings using footnotes.  The collection selected to post here illuminates how my thinking is circling around similar ideas as I struggle to fold them into being a part of the long project (book length work in progress).

[2] This piece was lightly edited when I transcribed it from my notebook where it was written by hand. I’m still stunned by how it unfolded to these images, these resonances, written in a fast flurry of < 30 minutes. The vibrations, for me, emanate from the words “stone” and “wall” signalled by the repetition…but also the metamorphosis …an encasement (cage), a transformation, a freedom. The metamorphosis is both literal (butterfly) and metaphoric (what is hinted at with the baby in the womb and the cells and the genetic legacies being gulped there…but also…that caged canary…what is he doing there? Random thought: canary in the coal mine…).

[3] The vibration here comes at me as if it the text flashed pink neon: the bishop chess piece, piercing the narrator’s spine. This image appeared in the quick writing, it’s not a specific memory at all…but it’s one of those glittering grains illuminating a pathway, a gift straight from the subconscious, a guide toward something brewing in the larger work.  My mum’s experience of giving two babies up for adoption in the 1960s is not the central subject or theme of the long project at all. But it’s helping to form those ideas, and her history is part of it all …this blog post reveals more to me about what it is I’m exploring. Glad you’re here along for the ride. Really.  I need hand holding. And encouragement, however tenuous it may be.

[4] I like how these lines hang together. No pun intended.

[5] This was meant as a joke; we laughed hard because many women (and not men) have made me feel like I’ve failed a most important task: marriage. And note, I have/do/trying to squash… felt/feel/feeling like a failure (IM at work).

[6] Practicing with Nina Schuyler using a paragraph and sentences from Rita Bullwinkel’s novel Headshot.

[7] With this last sentence, Nina said to be cautious here with this level of narrative distance…ask myself, have I lifted too far out of the story and summarised too much, given away too much, when this might be better as information meted out with scene and story? And I understood, in a way I hadn’t quite grasped before, how this is also another way of exploring the difference between showing and telling…and how that choice can be deliberate to move the story along, or drop into a moment of character or narrator reflection, or create authorial intrusions, or create a clue as to what might be coming later in the story  … many techniques to be employed by this method…and I think I often default doing this, pulling myself out of story to this high level bird’s eye view summary, especially when the scene or the subject matter might require sitting with emotional discomfort, getting it onto the page…and this means I cheapen the experience for a reader, when it’s much more exciting or entertaining  to get in close and personal…to experience together. Still, I love this movement, playing with psychic distance, that it can be done across sentences within the same paragraph.

[8] Monstrous recognition this pattern of history is repeating.

[9] And I must clarify something here: when I write about misogyny, sexism, the patriarchy, feminism, etc. I am NOT writing against men, and certainly not an individual or specific man. I LOVE MEN. I am writing about ideas and ideologies and I’m far more interested in how these ideas shape human lives and human relationships. It’s difficult to write and talk about these ideas because the shrill voice of the masses are salivating and ready to burn the witch at the stake or tar and feather the feminist or accuse her of becoming a raving lesbian, as if this were something bad, or a hairy man hater …we need to talk about these ideas outside the confines of categories. They’re interesting. [edited out: a long diatribe repeating the same idea and without any academic level of feminist theory because I’m a neophyte in this respect.]

[10] One of my dearest and oldest friends when I announced I’d left my marriage, said, “we couldn’t understand it, you were like some goddamned Little House on The Prairie woman out there [on the farm].”  This hurt of course….the collective “we” …how much had my life been discussed?…but also, the truth of it – I verily (ha ha) believed, stupidly, I could do it all: raise my children well and healthy; grow my own food; develop a professional career; maintain a creative art practice; be a kind and supportive partner; be a dutiful daughter-in-law; be an honourable daughter and sibling. Maybe I was able to do it all, at least for a little while. Like, three to five minutes?

[11] And our family reunited with both brothers …and the most fascinating discovery for me has been that despite being raised in three different countries, in three different families, we share the same ways of moving our arms and hands when we speak, the same way we place our bodies in space. I love that gesture is something inherited. Unfortunately, we also share the same addictive tendencies to alcohol …or perhaps this is simply a symptom of living with pain of similar origin…

[12] Skip this extra-long footnote if you don’t want to read my whining. No? Fine then. I’ve also been tired and sensitive and overwhelmed and vulnerable and weepy this last month worrying about my job. After five years of remote and hybrid working, the Secretary of Cabinet announced all public servants will be required to report to their headquarter office (a new term btw to skirt the possibility staff might satisfy their required in-office days at a ministry building closer to where they live). The decision significantly impacts people who struggle to balance raising children or caring for elderly parents with their workdays, roles more often shouldered by women. The decision unnecessarily costs the tax-payer with the sudden and inane administrative burden to, one, fit workers into offices that can’t accommodate all staff five days a week (much real estate was sold off since the pandemic), and two, adjudicate the thousands of requests for alternative work arrangements flooding managers and directors inboxes, decimating, possibly even arresting regular duties re: policy making. There are close to 70, 000 public servants in Ontario and the announcement has us all whipping a hurricane of negativity and competition (not to mention a turbid froth of distraction). On the heels of several disappointments since spring (three colleagues sparkling with intelligence, kind and dedicated mentors, have left their jobs; weathering the policy oppression tentacles from the south successfully supressing equity focused language and progress in the north (I feel this personally, as an erosion), my “professional” role feels fucking flattened.

AND (worst) my story, Measures, accepted for publication…was later declined. The editor requested confirmation the story was unpublished. I confirmed yes, the version on offer was unpublished, but, I explained, earlier drafts of the story have been posted, and broadcast on my personal blog (this one). So, they chose not to publish it.  Cue the loud whining: really what I want to do is read books and sit and think and write all day long…well, with breaks to feast and f…make love.

[13] There is much in Woolf’s speech that resonates for me; this post can’t contain it. Never mind. I’ll revisit her ideas and imagery about the unconscious in the future.

[14] The decision to end a marriage of twenty-five years, a relationship of twenty-seven, is…fucking hard. Ultimately, what gave me the courage to make the leap was a moment, a strike of lightening moment, when I understood with utmost clarity [insert the scent of burning ozone], that if I wanted to continue to grow my creative writing practice, I would have to leave. If I stayed, my writing practice would have been undermined and suppressed.  It is hard for me to reconcile but my writing was perceived as threatening and seditious.

Awake, I see, there is no way to unsee.

As Woolf explains, “I turned upon her [the Angel] and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her…Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing.”

My divorce certificate arrived last week. I’m proud we managed this in just under two years following my decision to leave. I made concessions. I’m proud of this too. Money has never been my motivating factor; pleasure is (wink). Oh, and joy. Really, my lodestar is love.  

[15] It is hilarious to me how Woolf writes about what she decided to do with the money earned from her first “professional” publication: “I bought a Persian cat with the proceeds.” After much deliberation and speaking with Lillian and Willa about the possibility I might have to live in their garden sheds when I retire, I have decided to buy myself a year off work, a self-funded sabbatical, so that I can experience what it is like to focus on my own creative work. Also, with no expectations of output from the year. Simply the ability to focus without my mind divided across professional policy work and artistic practice.  My leave of absence request has yet to be approved, but the wheels are in motion. I plan for my leave to begin spring 2026. It feels absolutely right.

Japanese anemones outside the apartment this week.

Being Batty

Suzanne Biro

Three a.m. I woke to a whispering. A rhythmic pulse of shushing fabric trawled me from dreams forgotten. The apartment was hot. I don’t have air conditioning.  I prefer not having it; I’ve always disliked the assault of hot humidity when leaving an air-conditioned building. The ceiling fan above the bed is quiet and sufficient (except when daughter #1 visits and, sharing my bed[1], whinges about hellfires and my inept ill-considered concern for guests: Just get one of those portable units you stick in the window! It’s ridiculous!). I prefer screened windows open to natural night sounds and breezes. The chords of storms. The stroll-bys of marijuana, tobacco. When I woke, I lazily surmised the beating shadow flittering round the ceiling fan was a bat. A big one[2].

My immediate concern was that the bat would eat the apricot jam I’d made earlier in the evening and left, mostly jarred, save the small bowl uncovered, to cool on the countertop. This lot of jam, made with Niagara apricots and summer clover honey, was the second batch of apricot jam I’d made. I’d fucked up the first lot and I’d done it stupidly, using a candy thermometer to tell me when the sugar reached “the right temperature” instead of relying on my senses (taste, touch, scent) to signal I should have removed the jam from the heat when it bubbled ambrosial[3]. Instead, I ended up with a stiff, dark, apricot paste and what I’m now serving as a variation of membrillo (quince “cheese”). No doubt someone Spanish made this same mistake, though probably absorbed by lovemaking in a back room instead of forcing a scientific bead to the mercury and allowing the sugar to boil past the soft state to paste. Served with great fanfare (yes, this helps with resurrections) and Manchego, it’s an impressive combination.

I’m a bit of a perfectionist. As a child, my father bought me beautiful tubes of artist acrylics so I might paint a good-sized canvas he intended to gift as a wedding present. I painted a grade five rendition of the view from our rented bungalow on the lake. And I fucked up the waves. The foamy crests were ugly little blobs of titanium white over a scraping of ultramarine and phthalo green. The figures of my siblings and I, playing on an ancient swing set, were cartoony flat renditions, garishly accented with slashes of primary colour. When I presented the painting to my father, he said it wasn’t good enough and I’d have to try again. He was also annoyed he’d need to purchase a second canvas[4].

Oh right, the bat!

I ripped the duvet from the foot of the bed and, crouching beneath it, sweated and cursed I didn’t have a partner to share this Chiroptera[5] inspired nocturnal inconvenience, and I stretched my arm out, thin-skinned, vampire vulnerable, and turned on the light. The shadow disappeared. I shone a flashlight into the dark corners of the bedroom, behind the massive wall mirror, the picture frames, the paintings, the gorgeously tiled fireplace with its stopped-up chimney—had it entered there? suddenly I was far less enchanted by the architectural beauty and romance of the fireplace—and surmised the bat had left the bedroom. I clicked the door shut and leapt back in bed, pulling the sheet over my head (I hadn’t looked under the bed or the dresser…surely bats fly higher up instead of lower down[6]) and forced myself to sleep in the sauna. The bat returned. We played peek-a-boo until dawn. It became invisible in any light.

A jazz singer, a marriage counsellor and a soon-to-be-divorcée run into a bat…

Guests for dinner that evening included Chantal who has a most marvellous singing voice, and writes songs and composes music, and Peter, who was my marriage counsellor for ten years before he retired. Since leaving my marriage, he has become a dear friend[7]. Peter is really a poet and enthralled by Dante’s Divine Comedy. Once, to my delight, as I had not heard it before, he recounted the Arthurian legend of the Green Knight. Prophetic in many ways.  

A jazz singer, a poet and a writer run into a bat…    

But wait, what did we eat[8]? This is important because pleasure is important. Pleasure feeds the soul. And the conversations that feed the mind, the threads of politics, philosophy, the meaning of dreams, the ways of creativity, the dissolution of relationships due to disability—humans in mismatched states of disempowerment, development, drive, desire, death (ha!)—weaving frustrations, a few glistening tears, giggling, sorrow, grief and laughter, ignite best over a long drawn out meal, al fresco to begin and ending with mellow flames spluttering softly in the pools of melted wax atop candle stubs in the dining room.

We ate: a block of my apricot inspired membrillo with a wedge of sharp Manchego; slick, salty olive oil preserved Italian anchovies served with sweet butter on sliced sourdough I’d baked that morning (the trick for these snacks, one I’m smitten by since discovering their salt-sea-fat combo when I travelled to Italy last year, is layering an anchovy fillet atop a voluminous smear of good sweet butter…no skimping! – must be a good sized shelf of butter, like a plank, to shuttle the fish on the bread to the pirate of your tongue); toasted almonds; salmon roasted with butter and fresh thyme; a warm salad of quinoa with market vegetables (corn, zucchini, red and yellow peppers, red onion) and, because I can’t help but gild the lily, a ball of creamy burrata torn into bite sized pieces.  

The bat reappeared during dessert[9]. It swooped through the chandelier passing back and forth between the kitchen and the living room. Earlier in the conversation, Peter explained how, for decades, he’d been tasked by his mother and aunt to rid their cottage of bats when they made their annual indoor appearance at some point in the first two weeks of August. I handed him a wastepaper basket, tasking him, at aged seventy-six, again. Of course, accompanying the meal, there had been a good amount of wine. When Peter chose the ricketiest chair in my apartment to stand on to reach the bat—it  was resting on the stained glass window in the living room after we’d exhausted it trying to catch it mid-air (Chantal was armed with a laundry basket)—the chair skittered beneath him, he lost his balance and fell, scraping a good section of skin from the top of his right arm[10].  

Turns out when you leave a marriage, a first aid kit isn’t one of things you pack. Probably because the wound, in that instance, is permanent; no amount of plaster or gauze can soak up the blood sacrificed.

Chantal, imploring me with her eyes, suggested everyone should go home and Peter should attend to his wound properly. This was sensible advice. But the bat hung upside down on a blue square of coloured glass above the sofa. There was a long moment of shifting glances sliding the triangular space between us: pleading, earnest, insisting. I retrieved the step stool from the pantry and Peter, the torn skin of his arm open and raw but no longer bleeding, trapped the bat in the wastepaper basket and handed it down to Chantal’s waiting arms (she had been steadying the step stool)[11].

We walked the bat two blocks down to the lake and released it beneath the orange light of a massive apricot moon hovering the horizon.

Speaking of “try again”, one of my creative nonfiction flash stories has been accepted for publication in Lost Balloon, date TBD. The piece accepted, titled, Measures, is one I reworked many many times. I wrote about my approach to re-drafting it as part of an earlier blog post. I also read the piece at a public reading and used the experience of reading it—what I felt from audience reactions—to re-craft it[12].

Preparing for another public reading this month, I read a short story, The Point of Departure, to Chantal, to practice, but also so that she could help me with my performance, my delivery. I’ve re-written this piece a number of times too and have written about its revision process here.

Chantal made the astute observation that an audience needs time to absorb the imagery and ideas of a written piece…pauses and silences help.  Written composition can (should?) incorporate “resting” components as a mental break for the reader, the same way music and song are composed.  After reading the piece to her, she complimented it and then expressed a good deal of frustration about the work being too short….”it needs to open out, be explored. Don’t waste it on a short art piece.” I explained the flash form …that I liked the compression and ambiguity flash pieces force. We argued back and forth (cordially). She, explaining how invested she is in the husband and wife characters, wanting to know what happens and what happened to them, saying this is only the first chapter of something longer; me, explaining that the same story is being explored in the long project, but that it can co-exist in this form, as a flash piece. We agreed to disagree. I’m pleased to know her interest in the characters is so strong.

And though Chantal provided excellent stage directions for improving my public reading, the following video confirms I’ll need to try try again.  I was nervous again and it was another very hot day and I had forgotten my water (again) and I stumbled through and my back was hurting and I’d taken some Tylenol for the pain which left me decidedly stoned and and and…  

The title is missing from the video, but it is, The Point of Departure.

[1] With its wool mattress topper? No, it’s not hot at all. Ha ha ha ha!

[2] Later, I identified the species as the ingeniously named Big Brown Bat.

[3] It seems I’m presented with this lesson over and over and over again. Sigh.

[4] My sister, Nyree, when I recount this memory over lime margaritas last week, remembers differently: YOU were the one, Suzanne, who refused to accept the first painting, wailing about how it wasn’t good enough, NOT dad! The truth, like all truths, lies somewhere along the spectrum between these two memories. I do recall it was the boy next door, five years older than me, who, with patience and kindness, sensing how I was in love with him, taught me how to blend colours directly on the canvas to great effect.  Painting two sufficed as a wedding gift.   

[5] a name of Greek origin meaning “hand-wing” – isn’t that beautiful?

[6] Logic in the wee hours of morning is…non-existent.

[7] It’s not as linear as the sentence implies. And it sounds like the punchline to a pretty good joke about Peter not being a very good marriage counsellor, but the reality is that I credit him for helping me to stay in the marriage for as long as I did, which, ultimately, was best for our daughters (my primary concern). The long project explores and unpacks my decisions, trying to understand the source of witchery that hijacked my brain. Some people call these hormones.  It’s a long story and I’m learning how to write it.

[8] I can hear Nyree’s voice, a line from the movie The Couch Trip: “DO we eat it, or DID we eat it?” in reference to a plated something that looks like vomit. The whole quote, she confirms through text, is a scene where Dan Akroyd’s unhinged character, posing as a renowned therapist (he’s really an escaped patient from a psychiatric ward), is hosting a radio call-in show. A woman caller says, “my husband comes home, no matter what it is, he says, ‘Do we eat it or did we eat it?’ I think he’s learned it in the army, I’m ready to bury an axe in his head!!!” Akroyd answers, trying to get a word in, “Ok. Well…if you…look at it like…zip it up lady! For starters…stop cooking for him!”

[9] The ingeniously named Gooseberry Fool.

[10] “Just a flesh wound!” Peter lamented his “old man skin”, calling it friable. Indeed, it bled badly and looked like it had been fried.

[11] For added entertainment, our bat trapping was not unlike this visual (though, I think with slightly less swearing. Maybe.)

[12] I have recently learned that the use of an m-dash is a dead giveaway for having used AI to generate written content. Also, the semi-colon. I don’t use AI for any of my creative writing. I do use it for professional work. I have a lot of opinions about AI …maybe one day I will write about them but presently I can’t be bothered. Basically, an essay would boil down to: AI will not become a sentient being; humans will become (already are?) machines…a far more dangerous and destructive force.  This opinion is neither unique or new.

Neuroindulgence

Suzanne Biro

Quick preview: this is a long post, steering (dragging?) you, dear reader, through personal memories and thoughts related to books I’ve read, coupled with an embarrassing but brief writing draft, followed by tottering, slipshod connections toward a conclusion I’ve reached before. I can’t promise return on investment. But there’s repeating reference to naked breasts. Female ones, even. So.  

Home now after two weeks away. One week in BC moving daughter number one from Victoria to Vancouver for a summer internship, followed by a week working in Toronto, staying with daughter number two. A delightful day in the middle where I hugged one daughter in the morning and the other in the evening. Trees fluffy with spring blossom. Out west, the sweet scent of budding Black Cottonwood mingled with brine. In Toronto, Eastern Red Buds branched hot pink; spent and ragged-edged magnolias flowered the sidewalks.  Despite the beauty, spending time with the girls, the relief it’s finally spring, travel disrupted my writing routine, making me edgy and irritable. This morning I’m up at 5, determined to recoup the energy and time necessary for the task[1].

And though I didn’t write while away, I read. I’m mid-way through deep reading an essay I’ve intended to analyse for years, The Fourth State of Matter by Jo Ann Beard. It’s one of several pieces of writing I pulled for the trip, selecting a diversity of works to understand their structural elements and track emotional movements therein[2]. I’m trying to slow my reading sufficiently to understand where and why and how my water works turn on, where sentences spark to fan the embers of my humour, igniting laughter[3]. I thought I’d start with pieces that elicited obvious emotional reaction for me when I first read them.  As always, I underestimated the time such close reading requires, hence my half-way point through the analysis of Beard’s essay. The folder of works I carried across the country and back remained unopened, mostly. And as always, I picked up books along the way…

An interesting observation: I had completely forgotten Beard’s essay is about a school shooting. Like, completely forgotten!!! Instead, the lingering images and feelings I retained from the essay were how the narrator loves and cares for her dying dog. I remembered she carries the aged collie up and down stairs and endlessly washes soiled blankets to place fresh, dried ones beneath the incontinent animal. It’s the love and devotion and grief and longing captured in those images that I remembered[4].

And that got me thinking about the selective and specific memories of book length works my brain holds onto. Is there a pattern to them? Are they all images?  Are they predominantly feelings? What makes them memorable for me?

This brief sample list is poor representation of my rapacious yet superficial reading habit; I read widely but not deeply[5]. I’m working to improve deeper reading. Now, I always read with a pencil in hand, underlining passages, scribbling notes in the margins, extracting sentences, passages, into various notebooks, feathering pages with coloured post-it flags.  And, if I’m honest, it’s only when I write through analysis, i.e., not think through it, that I really get a sense of the mechanics and the magic, hence the indulgent footnote #4 (it’s more for me than for you ha ha).  

This list is the “top of mind” list …I’ve limited myself here deliberately. See? this is me not going to my bookshelf to divine more of my memories conjured off their spines.  The clumsy imprecise rendering here is also deliberate…these are the fuzzy bits retained. Sometimes the only bits. Maybe this betrays a sieve-like brain …or worse, a brain-like sieve.  

  • Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel – scene at the dinner table where the protagonist, forbade by her mother to declare her love to a young man who we know loves her back but is betrothed to her eldest sister, cooks her unrequited passion into a spectacular dinner of dishes, including rose petals (!), the whole family share. But it’s the middle sister who “eats” the cooked in love, becoming so consumed with heat and lust and passion, she rushes from the dining room, somehow loses all her clothes in the process, runs across a field in the dark and her naked body, hair streaming wildly, is hoisted by welcoming arms onto a horse ridden by a passing _______ …can’t remember this detail …soldier? Bandit?  Some kind of handsome outlaw anyway. He happens to be riding by with his gang. This scene makes me feel…envy.
  • Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez – the protagonist (though, maybe this is a side character?) goes out of his way to eat asparagus every day so that he may smell its telltale odorous byproducts every time he pees. Oh, and a pet parrot that blurts out inappropriate phrases (swearing?) and lives half in and half outside the house[6].
  • The World According to Garp by John Irving – Garp frying onions, building the mirepoix, to make spaghetti sauce which attracts a woman neighbour to his door, inside his house and eventually into an extra-marital affair[7].  Sigh. It always starts with an onion.
  • The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz – the mother’s sly smile, her wig askew after she fakes a fall and injury, a smile like a tiger’s smile (I likely have this detail wrong) after successfully tricking and luring her teen daughter back to her on a boardwalk in a very public place.
  • The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje – when the beautiful Sikh bomb diffuser shows the nurse a wall mural in an ancient church. Lots of candles[8].
  • All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr – spectacular book! I loved it. But I mostly retain an image of seashells sparkling on the walls of a seashore cave that is fast filling with the tide? Good grief.  
  • Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy – Vasilly scything the wheat fields alongside the peasants. Amazed I remember the character’s name. I love this scene…the movement of all the people, men and women, working together as they harvest their way up the hill of wheat (or is it down?). Vasilly’s satisfaction with working his body this way. Seem to recall he’s depressed a lot, how his physical exertion is a balm.
  • For Whom The Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway – a side character’s name, Pilar, and characters hiding out in arid, treeless, boulder strewn mountainside cliffs….waiting….waiting …waiting.
  • Industry of Souls by Martin Booth – this is my favourite novel…I’ve read it several times…I don’t know why it endures as a favourite…perhaps it’s the structure, a gentle moving back and forth in time as the protagonist, a man in his eighties, must decide whether to stay or leave Russia, whether to return to England. I love how the character moves around the small village he lives in, saying goodbye to all the friends he has made (for some reason, an image of golden light and lazy bees rises in my mind’s eye here). The visits tip the protagonist’s memories and readers follow his thoughts back in time to when he is a prisoner in the gulag, Siberian labour camps.  A few scenes stick out in memory: one where the male prisoners are found by female prisoners and they pair off in various semi-private mine shafts to make love; another when the prisoners dig a mammoth from the permafrost and eat it; and the most enduring clear image of a man who decides to take his own life by stripping down and sitting down in a snowbank to freeze to death (this happens at a train station).  
  • The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy – the scene where the mother character takes her children to a clothing store and they’re crammed in one of the back change room stalls where they overhear the storekeeper women making fun of the mother with nasty comments about the beautiful magnolia (?) flower she wears in her hair…it’s the bit where the mother’s face falls, she’s humiliated but endures this in silence…it’s an image, I feel, connecting to the fall from innocence…this scene always makes me cry.
  • The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck – travelling in cattle cars across great deserted and desert-like fields, tumble weed bumbling by yes, but the scene I remember is the one where the young woman (who lost a newborn?) unbuttons her blouse to breastfeed an old man who lays on a roadside, slowly dying[9].
  • The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck – the scene where the wife of the landowner/farmer pauses the hard work of crop raising to breastfeed between rows of plants, her milk gushing forth and spilling all over the soil …weirdly, this memory is retained because I felt the author had no clue about breastfeeding, describing the milk letdown as happening from one breast at a time.

Okay. I remember others but I’ll resist (more) self-indulgence and stop here.

Reviewing the list I didn’t really see a pattern, in any technical sense. Sure, could boil these down to “imagery” but they don’t quite slot into that category (asparagus pee?). But yesterday, thinking about Beard’s essay and the dog who can’t help but pee inside, I suddenly connected it to a short piece of writing I drafted earlier this week in response to a writing prompt. Perhaps reading Beard’s essay was a subconscious nudge to write this response, drafted during a12 minute timed write. I’ve transcribed it here, resisting the incredible urge to edit it. The writing prompt was, “write about shame”:

Probably most of us walk around with shame ballooning inside our bodies…a water balloon weighing us down, threatening to burst and make a horrible puddled mess, one shame bursting on the next. And I don’t want to talk about my big shames tonight so maybe a simple story about a little one. I used to wet the bed when I was little. But not so little this might be acceptable. I was well into my grade two year and still failing to rise from deep sleep to get to the toilet in time. The shame would wake me though, wet and warm, gathering at the back of my thighs and knees, pooling beneath my buttocks. My mother trained me not to wake her so I changed the sheets on my bed in the dark, remembering to layer a thick bath towel folded in case it might happen again.

I went to my first sleep over in grade two. It was spring because my friend and I were allowed to sleep in the camper pop up in her driveway. Of course my mother had phoned my friend’s mother before I arrived because I could read the curiosity and the pity on my friend’s face. I’d chosen to wear my favourite pajamas, Little Dollies I think they were called, a pair of short bloomer-like shorts with an A-line tank top, frilly bits round the hem. My mother had instructed me to wear a diaper. Cloth in those days. She’d pinned it to fit me before I’d left home then folded it in my bag till I’d need it at night time. At night time I changed in the bathroom, dragging the thick diaper cloth up the length of my legs to rest at the hips. The safety pins were capped in pink and they jutted visible beneath my pajama bottoms. When I met my friend in the hallway she looked me up and down. No words passed between us but it was pity I read, again, on her face. My shame coloured my cheeks red.

The next week, when we played barbies, she and her sister stole my red barbie boots, knowing I would never argue for my rights to them, the shame a lever they now knew how to pull.   

Soooo…reviewing my remembered novel scenes after connecting my writing response with scenes from Beard’s essay, closer scrutiny does reveal a pattern…but a pattern unique to me[10]. The scenes in the list evoke an emotion (or series of emotions in relation to one another) that ties in with my own emotional experiences …and they are less literal connection, more emotional resonance, pinging off in ways also unique to me.

The process of identifying the emotional resonance between these remembered scenes and my own experiences, is analogous to reading through my own draft writings to gather fragments where I detect emotional vibration/heat, and learning to thread them together, piecing them in a way that leads a reader through the repetitive rise and cascade of my personal emotional experience.  I have come to this conclusion before, but writing through these scene memories in this post, I’ve progressed a key learning: how and what a reader connects to and remembers is as unique as a fingerprint. Before now, I’ve understood this theoretically; now I understand it practically. My job, as a writer, then, is to infuse my writing with as much emotional authenticity as I can, knowing it will touch every reader differently and never knowing, or ever being able to truly predict or guide, how or why. This eases my anxiety about connection. Somewhat.

Thank you for reading.

[1] I’m trying to make peace with my energy levels declining with age …or is it that day job work siphons too much from me?  I don’t know.  I haven’t risen for 5 am writing practice for over a year, slipping my wake up to 6, then 6:30 am, believing I’ll get to what I need to in the quiet evenings. But I don’t. I’m knackered by then and/or I continue trying to fit it all in, experiences I mean, by attending webinars, learning a language, volunteering and meeting friends…all essential to living a good life, yes, but leaving too little room for creative work. So, 5 am wake up begins again. Creative work is priority.

[2] Writing I carried across Canada and back, in addition to Beard’s essay: Report from the Bahamas by June Jordan (have done a deep dive on this one in the past, warrants another); Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace (I was delighted to discover his judicious-footnote-use – a compadre); The Race Goes to the Swiftest by Barry Lopez (in my packing haste I thought this was his essay about sexual abuse, but no, that essay is Sliver of Sky; The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick; Two Hearts by Brian Doyle; Onion Heart by Rupert Dastur; Triangle by Larry Brown; A Story About The Body by Robert Hass; a Substack post, American Letters 5: Swim to Shore by Alexander Chee; pages 14-18 of Midnight’s Chicken by Ella Risbridger. Listing these here, I realise my idiocy, believing I might bend time to accommodate such deep study in only a week of vacation while moving Lillian between apartments, visiting my sister and her partner in Squamish, and my uncle in long term care, not to mention the time change and travel days. Still, carrying writing around…there’s a comfort in it, a sense of optimism, of potential, the eternal hope it will just absorb through my skin.

[3] I always return to Douglas Glover’s rubrics for structural analysis, as well as his emotion writing exercise. Really, DG’s words are never far from my mind.

[4] The essay is an exploration, and I would go so far as to say “an artifact”, of the experience and impact of trauma. An essay composed of fragments, culling moments from across a swath of time, laid out non-linearly with subtle-to-the-extreme time stamps—accomplished technically using brief switches in point of view and super brief tense changes. The use of mostly present tense despite different time points, creates the sense of disorientation and disconnection for the reader. The form mimics the experience of what it feels like when life as you know it is blown to pieces. Trauma is ever-present even when it happened long ago. It’s a stunning work of art.

I burst into tears with this scene: when the narrator, post-shooting event, directs a stranger to the classroom where the chalk writing of one of the dead remains on the chalkboard. The stranger loses her composure seeing the chalkboard, but that’s not where I cry…I cry reading the subsequent scene (accomplished simply with a new sentence) when the narrator returns to the empty classroom, “an hour later”, the stranger gone, and notices the smudge of palm prints on the chalkboard, “I can see where she laid her hands carefully, where the numbers are ghostly and blurred.”. Again, the form (this time the use of an image) delivers the meaningful impact: an image of loss …a body and soul once present has been erased…the image depicts the intimacy of the relationship the stranger shared with the person who wrote on the chalkboard before being killed, now reduced to a word, “ghostly” …there was connection through touch, through relationship, and the smudge is the image of the stranger’s hands attempting to re-touch, to re-connect with the body and the relationship now disappeared. Life, joy, love: fragile, vulnerable and ephemeral as a prof’s chalk writing. An image of deadline in its most literal sense.  Devastating. Also, spectacularly beautiful and precise. When I read writing like this, I suppress the wailing urge to toss the pages to the air, collapse in a foetal position and give up. But here I am, still writing.

[5] I ought confess that for the first year and a bit after leaving…a partner of 27 years, the home we built together, a garden I loved… I had trouble reading…concentrating, focusing, was very difficult…of course I read, but in snippets…and shorter works…it’s only in the last few months I’m regaining my reading stamina.     

[6] I also remember part of the first line of this book, a handy phrase to trot out when literary types play that game at dinner parties where they test whether you are sufficiently read if you dare to suggest you might also be a creative writer.  Bitter almonds seem to satisfy them. Oh, and unrequited love. A pervasive literary (and life) theme it seems. A secret password of sorts. That parrot technique is a great idea.

[7] I first read Garp as a teenager and this scene of him cooking spaghetti sauce—my absolute and enduring favorite food, despite all the wonderful things I’ve had the opportunity to taste—fixed a desire to love a man who would cook for me and love me back the same way (but without the affairs). I’m still hoping for such a man. Like Garp, he will also have to be a writer I think, as well as a spectacular lover. An aside: last week I pilfered my copy of The World According to Garp from Willa’s bookshelf and delighted reading a good chunk of it on the train home to Kingston.  And I hadn’t appreciated at all when I first read the book way back when, how much of it is about writing and becoming a writer. Reading it again is a delight. There’s a line comparing writing a novel to long distance running which particularly resonates (like Garp, I also ran cross country in high school; it’s endurance).

[8] I adore Ondaatje’s writing …but I admit, for this specific scene, I think the movie version scores higher for the romance factor.

[9] Remembering this scene, I wonder if it also imprinted on Irving’s mind, serving as the model of a similar, though far more sexualised scene, in The World According to Garp. I think so.

[10] Thank you, Captain Obvious (eye roll). My ex-husband always complained I was slow…perhaps this is what he meant.

A Kiss of Life

Suzanne Biro

Poems float to me again. This hasn’t happened in a number of years. I’ve had phrases arrive but then it’s like the valve shuts off and word flow stops. If I force a phrase toward a poem, I butcher it. Poems feel ethereal, fragile. I choose the word float intentionally…it’s as if the words butterfly by, out the corner of my eye, or rather, my ear. I think I hear them instead of see them. Perhaps this varies because sometimes I visualize an image. I’ll have to pay closer attention to this experience to describe the process accurately here. Regardless, if not caught and written to the page the poem keeps moving and leaves me behind. 

So, three poems in the last two weeks or so. The relief accompanying them, that they float to me at all, is palpable; I hadn’t realised how much I miss them. These latest poems arrived when I felt most depleted, when I was most physically and emotionally exhausted…not so much in a state that I’d given up, more that I’d given in…surrendered. I worry about this. How to invite the conditions of open receiving without the physical and emotional exhaustion[1]? I don’t know.

The following poem arrived during a lunch break last week…the first lines always feel the strongest, the most tangible, then I wrote the lines spooling from there until I could tell I was twisting my own meaning into them.  Instead of forcing my own thoughts into the piece, and because I needed to return to the office, I left it alone. A couple of days later, an image, tangentially related, kept entering my mind when I thought about the piece. I interpreted this as a sign the two aspects/concepts wanted to be woven together in the one poem.  I completed the following draft over the weekend[2].

Here’s where it gets interesting. This poem, I discovered, also communicates information about my long form writing project (and process) I hadn’t quite understood prior to writing the poem. I’ll try to explain.  Last month I printed out the long form project (a book length work, very much in progress) and promised myself I’d read it. I haven’t. Instead, energized by the idea of working physically with pen and highlighters and paper instead of messing around in digital files on my computer, I used index cards to list different scenes associated with different characters. One side of each card listed scenes from the distant past, the other side listed scenes from a recent past. The long form project is, for the most part, creative nonfiction with several people. Sitting there, looking at all the characters on the desk in front in me, I realised I don’t have a card for myself[3]. One could (I have) dismiss this discovery, subsume the idea I’m the persona, the narrator, in this work, so, naturally, I’ll find my way into each of the scenes…somehow.  But I’m fooling myself. Sitting there with all the cards on the desk I realised (duh) two things. One, this project is more about my own experiences and thoughts and reflections, and these aspects aren’t integrated (much) in the current draft[4].  Two, the voice I wish to narrate this project requires what I refer to as my audacious voice …and that voice my friends has taken a fucking vacation.  And despair, despondency, desperation—all the dis- words of negation—set in fast. I put the project aside. Again.

Then this poem floated to the page with its battle cry of a title and emphatic last line to confirm, with a flood of relief, my audacious self will revive.

[1] I’ve also received poems in states of extreme emotion.

[2] It’s important to express my gratitude here. In my last blog post I’d lamented missing the spring chorus of frogs I don’t hear living in the city. A few days after publishing that post, a friend messaged to offer me his cottage for the weekend. Serendipity. I spent the glorious gift of a solo weekend in the woods reading (The Forty Rules of Love by Eilf Shafak, a romance toggling back and forth between Rumi, a chorus of characters, multiple POVs, in the 1200s, and a current day woman who falls in love with a writer (who is writing about the relationship between Rumi and Shams of Tabriz, also Sufism) then leaves her “perfect” marriage of twenty years for true love.) It rained most of the weekend which was also a gift because it provided the excuse to lounge in the screened in porch (which felt like a treehouse) and just read (and sleep) instead of canoeing my way round the lake. Unfortunately, I only heard a single peeper and a bullfrog; mating season suspended at this point of spring becoming summer. Instead, I endured the chainsaw to the eardrum that is the “song” Waterloo by ABBA blasting from a cottage across the lake. The universe does have a sense of humour. I prefer this song. I did enjoy the loons and the whip-poor-will night calls and the rose-breasted grosbeak’s day song. I did not manage to see those birds (I really wanted to see the rose-breasted grosbeak as I haven’t before) but did trace the phoebes and vireos amidst the wet leaves.  

[3] When I first wrote this sentence I inadvertently wrote “cared” instead of “card”.  

[4] The crazy thing is, I know I’ve discovered this before and even written about it here…and here…and then, I guess, I just…forget?  Frustrating …and embarrassing…but also, human. Process is not linear and, apparently, the learning doesn’t build upwards from any previous achieved foundation….the whole thing seems more like dancing across quicksand.

Greeting when the Shadow Knocks

Suzanne Biro
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.  

[5] I am a slow learner.

[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.

Thank you for reading.

Seeing my Writing Mistakes

Suzanne Biro1 Comment

Reading a book earlier this month, I failed to get past the third chapter. To me, the writing…well, sucked.  

The book, a national bestseller, nominated to a national “must read” list, was published by one of “the big three” publishers. A work of creative nonfiction, a memoir, I wanted to like the book, I wanted to learn from it. I was fascinated by the book’s subject. I wanted to follow the narrator’s journey, proclaimed and promised on the cover. I wanted to experience the narrator’s challenges surmounted, the accomplishments reached, but every time I tried to read the sentences, my mind lifted from the page. I couldn’t connect. 

Recognising I was going to give up on the book (always a sad moment of relinquishment, disappointment, even a sense of failure on my part, I know, dramatic, but true), instead of tossing it aside, I thought, why can’t I connect? What is it about the writing—specifically—that prevents me, the reader, from following the narrator on their journey?

Reading with these questions in mind I discovered a few issues:

  • The scenes were rendered swiftly – yes, with sensory details (check), but significant events were introduced but never elaborated, never opened or expanded.  As a reader, I craved knowing more. How could I relate without being given the opportunity to experience those events?
  • The story felt one-dimensional. The scenes, the events, the descriptions, the temporal and geographic aspects of the writing, were all there. The grammar was sound. The language was logical. Missing were the narrator’s thoughts and reflections.  I couldn’t feel or know the narrator on the page because they weren’t there.  It was as if the narrator stood off to the side and, like a zombie, or a robot, recounted the events without feelings or emotion.
  • The worst and best ah ha moment: I make these mistakes in my own writing.  

Reading bad (okay bad isn’t the right word – shallow? simple?) writing I recognized: 

  1. I summarise instead of expand action. This deprives a reader from moving through the experience with the writer. I realise too, that this type of writing is exactly the opposite of what I’m required to do in my day job. I’ve been trained to remove myself from reports, research papers, briefing notes, etc. to focus the scientific evidence and let “it” speak from a perspective of unquestioned authority. Note the disembodied sense of that approach to writing (objective, not subjective). 
  2. When I write “myself” onto the page, I’m like a paper cut-out of myself – my thoughts, reflections, ideas, interpretations are often omitted – there is a lot of action and description and even dialogue of others, but I am missing myself – why can’t I drag myself into my creative writing? Aside: – interestingly, I presented my thoughts and scathing reflections when I used to write an earlier blog complaining about marriage. So….I can do it, but, why don’t I?
  3. Answer: I’m trapped in the “seriousness” [mis] conception of art making. I’m working to develop confidence to express myself freely in “real” creative writing.

Serendipitously, I read a craft essay written by Karen Babine in Craft Literary Magazine this week that elegantly explains why some nonfiction writing fails to connect and how a writer might work to engage their reader better. I find books or essays or podcasts land in my lap exactly when I need them, or, as with Karen Babine’s essay, I can absorb them for the wisdom they convey. I recommend reading her whole essay (it is excellent!!), with fantastic links for further reading. Karen Babine also edits Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, another excellent learning resource.

Here is a sketch I made for myself, words copied from Karen Babine’s essay, to help me “see” and guide my own writing. 

Facts into Fiction

Suzanne Biro

In the fall, I was writing personal essays.  Well…they were less essays and more fragments of thought, ideas, fits and starts recorded on paper.  But I strung them together. Discordantly. I forced the paragraphs to conform. To what?  I wasn’t sure.  Never a good sign.

The deep questioning I was trying to work through (thought I was working through?)…the essaying…wasn’t working.  The process was deeply frustrating. I forced myself to the writing and it resisted by clenching up. I couldn’t figure out what lay at the heart of my exploration.  Again, I’d fallen into my habit of going at the writing with my head instead of my heart. I thought…instead of felt. 

Then the holidays and the requisite relaxing of routine, reinforced with another public health lockdown as Omicron rapidly spread.  And New Year’s Eve I became symptomatic. It was two days before my scheduled booster (which I cancelled) and 6 months post vaccine number two when immunity wanes. It hit me hard.  Not dire, but unpleasant and uncomfortable. I released the writing routine to reading. And healing. And then, after stumbling across Douglas Glover’s (DG) essays (I write about that here), I worked through some intense studying of the craft of writing mirroring his methods. This was healing too. 

DG posted an exercise on writing emotions, and I challenged myself to write a fictional scene following his prompt. It flowed easily and felt fun.  And here’s the weird part…when I studied what I had written in those 1-2 paragraphs, I recognised the seeds of exploration I had wrestled with in the fall.  I still didn’t understand them…but I could see the concepts there. 

I flipped back to writing fiction.    

The writing progresses differently compared with how I have written in the past. Instead of sitting down to a timed write (30 minutes is my usual go to), and writing scenes from beginning to end, I’m writing in fragments untethered from a narrative timeline. 

I’ll try to explain how these arise.  I seem to be toggling through two different approaches. And they complement one another. 

First, as inspiration, I read other writers – stories, novels, poems or essays – I choose a book from my shelf almost randomly and thumb through the pages letting my eyes rest where they get caught. I pay close attention to how the words pile up there on the page and then I work to copy the syntax or concept or the work a line or paragraph is doing (techniques) for myself, using my own words for my own emerging story. This gets the engine of writing going.

Second, I let myself sit and relax and try to let my mind go blank…and the images that move with the story appear. I write them down.  Sometimes it’s a phrase or a word, often it is a picture. Sometimes it is a mood or feeling…these are harder to write down.  Sometimes I write most of a scene and what I think I’m going to write about I never get to.  Instead, it’s something related but tangential. 

I toggle back and forth between these methods (I stop to wonder here…perhaps this is how other writers write and I’m only discovering this now because I’m so dogmatic and literal I’ve never relaxed enough to do this? Maybe. Probably. Ugh. But the ability to do this relies on gaining an understanding of how to read for specific craft techniques instead of reading for meaning (symbolism) and I have DG to thank for pointing this path in way I can finally understand).   

There is a lot less knowing about how it will unfold (gasp! I have to release control!)…and I flip back and forth between liking what I have written and extreme anxiety about whether it’s working. Sigh. But fragments and phrases float to me throughout the day and I jot them down in my notebook, feeling them, receiving them as the precious gifts they are. 

And here’s the thing, writing through fiction this way I have come to understand what I was exploring through essay in the fall—but didn’t quite get there—coming at it slant has illuminated meaning and a story line to tell it. For the first time I feel how it ought to come together to share the experience with a reader.  This is a huge step forward for me.   

Once the material and the order of it is fully drafted, I’ll shift into a similar but third approach, which is to study what I have written, try to understand the work each paragraph/section is doing for a reader ( in service of the story), then turn back to my bookshelf to study techniques again for how to do it better. Feels good to follow a path.    

Writing Groove Part 2

Suzanne Biro

{Part 1 may be found here}.

I move through rituals.  The routine movements coaxe the muse from the nether regions and help the lines of words unspool my thoughts, travel the length of my arm, cross my wrist, tickle my fingers and draw along the page of my notebook.    

I light two candles to begin.  This is supposed to symbolise an activation, but really mimic the action of lighting a fire under my bum.  Though I love the glow illuminating the page, I love the sound of the match flaring, the scent of sulfur and smoke most.  I love the sandpaper drag of the match head against the striker, the deep hollow shake of the matchbox with wooden sticks clicking away inside. I love the white magnesium ignition and the brief ripping sound in the air that quickly silences into a steady flame.  I love the way the heat travels closer to my fingers in the long pause before the wick accepts the fire.   

I crave the smell of melting bee’s wax with its hint of meadow flowers and honey. Sometimes I remind myself about the work it takes the bees to make a candle’s worth of wax. This is a comfort.  Also, a reminder that writing a small amount each day will grow and build into something…not necessarily something bigger, but I do hope sweeter. At least, something formed. 

I listen to music while I write. (Though, through these summer months I prefer the bird’s morning chorus, the subtle intensification of song that follows the waking dawn).    Listening, a part of my brain becomes occupied – a cognitive necessity—and the muse tip toes out less fearfully.   

Here’s a small selection of recent artist favourites:

  • Garth Stevenson albums Flying and Voyage (the deep and haunting sounds of his double bass are so beautiful)
  • Nils Frahm – albums Music For The Motion Picture Victoria, Empty, All Encores, Trance Frendz…others
  • Hilary Woods – album Colt 

Over the years, I’ve collected writing tricks. Writing is trial and error.  Trial and error.  Trial and Error.  Process. 

It’s the magic I doggedly pursue.  The magic = words and phrases that drop together on the page…that work together perfectly…that surprise me so much I don’t believe I wrote them, instead, some creative spirit breathed through me for a moment I was lucky enough to have a pen in my hand and paper before me to catch them.   

The magic happens rarely. Like a gambling addict, I show up each day and try not to lose more than I have to spend. Of my self.  

Writing tricks get to the magic reliably…sometimes faster. 

Recent tricks:

I write questions on little squares of paper. I use red paper because it’s my favourite colour.  The questions relate to the piece or project I’m working on.  Some of them could be a prompt to dig into sensorial aspects of the piece e.g., what does a bed sheet smell like?  Some questions are meant to dive deeper into character: why would my character believe in an afterlife? Some questions are conceptually abstract or even philosophical: Is education culture?

All the squares are tumbled into a small cloth bag and shaken vigorously.

Each morning I pull one out at random—it’s important I don’t know what’s coming—and set a timer for 30 minutes and write.  The rule is to write without second guessing, without cross-outs, for the full 30 minutes.  A writing sprint. I am often surprised by what’s uncovered using this technique.

If I’m disciplined, I’ll transcribe the handwriting into a digital file on the computer Often, I’m not disciplined. The writings pile up. Sigh. Process.  But 30 minutes of writing regularly generate 700-1000 words. And usually one phrase or word or sentence that is magic, that I’ll use when the pruning happens later.  

Present Time & Process Time

Suzanne Biro

Adapting to this new way of living.  We all are.  Home now, I’m learning to inhabit altered intersections of time and space.  Following various veins of social and news media, the cry of despair and boredom can’t be ignored.  But it isn’t my own experience.  

I suspect it isn’t for many people, continuing to work so very hard to keep supporting the planting of food crops, vital food chains, addictions services, police services, online education,  delivery services of all kinds, old and emerging, policy work at every level of government,  shifting arts and entertainment strategies, and of course, health services of every sort, from long term care homes to paramedicine to emergency departments and intensive care units to public health units.  The list is long. I’ve missed too many I’m sure.  

And people continue to do this work from their homes, as they can, attending virtual meetings and using VPNs, with their children and partners and extended family members to care for, in the same, increasingly restricted spaces. And some people are working from a home where they are completely alone. And some people don’t have a home to go to.  

The cry of despair and boredom wailing from the internet is hard to ignore, hard to sympathize with, and also, hard to believe.  But the internet is never a good representation of universal truth is it?  Except to say that humans love cats and pornography the world over.   

More problematic is the internet’s shriek of boredom paired with another pressure: to be creative.  The message has been clear: use these yawning weeks of time to finally work on the projects we’ve always wanted to.  But if spare time is a myth for so many, then creatives need recognise the promise of creative productivity, in the time of coronavirus, as what it is: a wispy curl of mist on a receding horizon. 

Instead of choking ourselves on the smoking embers of our creative fires, so suddenly doused by the pandemic, we need to forgive ourselves.  We need, instead, to be present and engaged.  Creatives need to witness.  Creatives need to experience.  

Before now, communities lived through disruptions not unlike this one: other disease outbreaks; weather related calamites; earthquakes; tidal waves; wars.  People suffering those situations were similarly stunned by their forced submissions. More so, by the tragedy of lives lost. Right now, we are in crisis. And crisis demands attention, vigilance and focus. 

In time, and with distance from the here and now, as with the slow turning of the seasons or the harvesting of meaning from memory, art will bloom again. 

Forgive ourselves for not forcing what cannot happen right now. The spark of creativity glows in all of us.  It will fire again, in a time which is different for each and every one us. Process—the way we make meaning of our experiences by creating something new, something that moves through us as synthesis—is as unique as our fingerprints.