I think the best sound in the whole wide world is laughter. I was going to narrow down to toddler laughter which bubbles up and out of little people bodies as the best of champagnes, but really, it’s any laughter expressing unreserved joy.
I’ve been crying a lot. I used to worry that if I ever started crying, I wouldn’t be able to stop. If I opened the sluice gate, an ocean of tears might wash me away. So, I didn’t cry. At least, not often and never deeply. But now I do. Grief feels soggy. Heavy. The way a body feels waterlogged after a full day of lake swimming, skin sponging the tang of seaweed, fish scales. I’ve felt, at times, as I move through these days, that I’m sunk beneath a wobbly surface. Laughter pulls me up splashing. Up and down; the way life moves.
Grief, like creativity, is a process. Six months post leaving my marriage I’m …still processing. But the grief—which doesn’t erupt a monstrous geyser in the way I feared, instead[1], it’s discreet weepings I indulge then pack up and away, get on with the day—has illuminated my writings. Allowing myself to cry has also allowed myself to see and understand some of the reasons I’ve resisted revising my own pieces…I wasn’t ready to see the pain I (unknowingly) layered there. By pain I guess I mean sorrow…regret…shame. Seeing it now feels…embarrassing. It’s so obvious. Like, decades of obvious.
Crying improved my (re)vision; laughter, goddammit, is gonna help me process embarrassment. Kind of feels like answering the front door in the nude. Would I do this? Maybe. It’s important to push my creative practice from its pillowed comfort towards the perilous shadows. The only way I’ll learn and grow.
A recent Saturday afternoon found me staring down the barrel of a good cry. I was going to write too…I seem to be able to do both these things at the same time, a curious dexterity that won’t earn me any trophies. A friend texted she was running a creativity workshop, something to do with comedy. Few people showed up, would I join her? I read the text through watery shimmers and worked to compose a polite decline. But my hands refused to send the message. My fingers deleted my crafted decline three times before I twigged I wasn’t entering the right response. So, I typed I’d put a game face on and be there.
The workshop included drama and improv games, the kind of theatrical exercises that involve the whole body and breath work and screaming out your chosen name[2]. The kind of exercises that, had the bartender offered to give me a public enema instead, I would have enthusiastically accepted[3]. I will say that I traded an afternoon of crying for laughter (and embarrassment) and I had a lot of fun. Unfortunately, some of this was caught on camera, which I leave here for your enjoyment with the caveat that I look much better when I let my hair down and sport moonbeams. I even ended the afternoon singing a karaoke song[4]. Invitations: can’t fault an old broad for sounding boundaries[5][6].
It started as a low laugh, skipped stones tingling my throat, expanding rings with every exhalation, a laughter that brought the rain clouds down, had me surfing the troughs to the crests[7].
Keen eyes will note I am the ONLY one laughing in this most bizarre of situations. For context: the woman with the tambourine is performing interpretive dance while the woman on stage sings a parody of Snow White’s (in Snow White’s voice) feelings of oppression from society just because she leads a polyamorous life living with seven very short men. The workshop was in the Royal Tavern, one of Ontario’s oldest bars, dating back to before Confederation, once owned, for a short time, by Canada’s first Prime Minister, John A. Macdonald, a man purported to drink from a water glass filled with spirits when he stood to speak in Parliament. Having stood on the stage, I kinda get his methods.
[1] Ok. Not entirely true. I did experience some epic wailing sessions. Interestingly, the worst of them brought on by reading a most beautiful passage in the novel Foster, written by Claire Keegan, where the little girl protagonist gazes across a field topped with dozens of flitting white butterflies. The scene hauled up an image of my own (no longer) vegetable garden, the golden light of late August lighting up the cabbage moths like confetti, hovering the flower blossoms, circling the globes of fire red tomatoes. The grief took me then, a clenched fist to the stomach that had me gasping for breath and buckled my body. I mourn losing the garden.
[2] Aloura. I have no idea why that one popped from my mouth. Desperation I assume.
[3] Probably exactly what you need Biro, such a tight ass.
[4] Yes, of course this was after two IPAs, the only way to really get the pickle out of Miss Stress’s bum. I sang Journey’s song, Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin’, which I must assure you retains only surface significance with its glancing reference to crying. This was the first time I sang karaoke…I hit a few flat notes in the first phrases (dreadful, but the show must go on) and managed to warm up and belt out the sense of revenge the song requires to really hit it home. I dislike the too many na-na-na-na-nas at the end and left the stage long before those were completed. People had more patience in the 70s.
[7] I’ve returned to working on my longer form project, pulling out old sections of writings, collaging them together, stitching in some humour and even exploring my dark. Feels good to be moving again. Recent epiphany: I’m actually living the life I’ve always dreamed of …like, right now. So, resolve to stop crying and get on with shit. Embrace joy.
Certainly not as beautiful as Dante’s Dream , but for all that I love, drawn on my birthday.
This is a long read. Self-indulgent. I couldn’t help it. Some footnotes to keep the reader interested. Hopefully.
In 2019 I attended a writing workshop at Omega in Rhinebeck, New York (I write about that here). Several workshops ran in parallel, taking the better part of each day. The week I was there, an inordinate number of white women wore flowing, white, loose, muslin tunics with all their hair tucked up and disappeared beneath white turbans: the Kundalini yoga uniform. No one used the words “cultural appropriation”. I didn’t either.[1] Out loud. In the evenings, round robin sessions were offered where people might try other workshop topics. Yes, I tried the Kundalini session. It’s not for me[2]. But one must remain open to new ideas, stretch the mind, (and the body), and so it was I found myself one evening in a session with a celebrity psychic medium. It was an interesting session[3], but something the facilitator said really stuck with me: “Everyone can do this [be a spirit communicator – really?], it just demands a lot of practice, and the practice is paying attention, first, of course, but also trying NOT to make meaning out of the images and senses you are receiving, just report them as you receive them”. Like, if you’re a celebrity psychic medium, don’t puzzle the images together – that’s for the detectives looking to solve cold cases or the families who are trying to communicate with deceased loved ones. Huh. Okay.
But for writing, we need to make meaning of the images and the words and phrases that flow from them. The trick is not to solve the puzzle too soon.
With writing, I practice letting the images and even the silly ideas make it to the page. The result is that I now have a lot of blousy first drafts and half formed ideas lying around waiting for revision at some point (which feels like some distant sunrise cresting a dark horizon)[4].
It occurred to me[5], riffing off of last month’s post about writing and energy (slaps forehead), that what I need to practice more intentionally is READING the energy in my own writing. My own writings are trying to tell me something. The story is communicating through me (just as the energy to split wood effortlessly using an axe must travel through the body)…maybe I’m just the filter the story moves through to be born. I’m sure I’ve read this before…it’s only now I’m understanding it pragmatically.
So, with a spirit of nakedness, I’m using a recent response to a writing prompt[6] as a way to work through how I’m trying to read the energy in my own writing….while remaining sufficiently loose in interpretation and open to other ideas (before locking the story meaning down, aka, solving the puzzle). This is a first stab at explaining this process…
I wrote the piece in a quick, mostly relaxed, twenty-five-minute burst before I had to go to work. I have retained all the spelling mistakes, the lazy repetitions, the character name of Jo spelled two different ways, as well as the story’s devolution into stream of consciousness writing. I thought I would have time that week to fix it up before posting it to my workshop group. I didn’t. I posted it as is with the caveat about its devolution into imagery and all else.
And here’s the interesting thing—and why I’m choosing to write about this process here—when people responded to the piece in the workshop, each one indicated they had connected [more? best?] with the stream of consciousness sections: the writings that arrived subconsciously, those aspects of my shadow self, frolicking forth from dream territory. Hmmm. A sign like that can’t be ignored.
This post will necessarily be long to show my process. First, the piece unmarked, followed by the piece again with my thoughts and interjections marked in BLUE about what the writing might be trying to communicate through me.
The Red River swelled beyond its banks again, as it did every year. This year it attained new waterline records, bursting the city’s levies, its fluid tongue flicking the sand bags right and left like a prize fighter spitting chicklets in a fight to champion the world.
Mary and Joe arrived in separate vehicles, she a canoe, he a kayak. Mary tied the canoe to a lilac; Jo roped the kayak to iron railing leading up the front steps, now submerged. Each used their own spare key, twisting the front door lock a foot above the waterline. Each shouldered the door against the heavy water to enter their daughter’s split level. The house in the chichi neighbourhood had promised a view of the river. In this respect, it had overdelivered.
“She picked the wrong week to travel to Los Angeles.”
Mary sighed. She hadn’t wanted to start clean-up efforts with an argument. She stood in a foot of cold water that pressed against her knee-high rubber boots. Sloshing across the kitchen, her rubber pants rustled loudly as she fought to stay upright. The linoleum was slippery wavering beneath so much grey water, dotted here and there with soggy receipts and plastic bags ballooned into jelly fish. She and Jo rarely saw each other. They confined their spite to Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner tables. Without grandchildren, and now without their son-in-law (sandbagger), or their snooty daughters-in-law (good riddance), those dinners sunk before any plates graced the table.
Jo continued, “I thought she was in California.”
Not unusual, such misinterpretations. For too many years Mary excused these oversights, chalking them up to hearing loss. Too many rock concerts. Too many engines revved to screaming in the garage. After the divorce, she’d faced, brutally, what she hadn’t wanted to: he just didn’t give a shit. Content if given a hot meal every evening, if potato chips were snack ready, if clean underwear stacked in the dresser drawer, Jo cruised life. He erupted a stormy passion when things didn’t go his way. The family vibrated his tensions, always on the Joe program. And his own children just hadn’t been interesting enough for him.
“No, she’s in France, Anjou. Ville-sous-Anjou, like the pear.”
Mary’s heart sunk then realising the fridge, out of power now for three days, the vegetable crisper beneath the water line, would have to be dealt with. A rotten job (inwards she laughed, bitterly). She scanned the kitchen trying to remember where Lizzie kept the box of garbage bags, spray containers of cleaners, a mop bucket Mary might use to bail water. Where the hell could she bail the water to when the waterline lapped the window ledges, the river kept swelling? It was hopeless.
“This is hopeless,” said Jo. “Didn’t I warn her not to buy waterfront?”
Mary let his question hang, snuffing the old argument before it ignited. Doomsday prophecies, climate change, the water rising to take us all, tidbits he scraped from the internet, scrubbed, polished and hurled at listeners as if they were his own. Millionaires blasted the skin of the earth, their arcs of triumph going limp when they descended, backwards. In the end the laws of gravity, of inevitability, drown us all.
“I mean these days?” he pushed, “what the hell was she thinking?”
“Hell” said Mary.
She watched the look of confusion cloud Jo’s face. Honestly, he was so slow sometimes, she was glad she’d chosen not to see the end of the world with him. Yet here they were, sporting galoshes and yellow rain pants, knee deep in water wavering and rolling optical illusions.
Insert distraction that momentarily reconnects this couple – Saxophone – a boy playing their favourite song perched on the roof next door – the song they danced to at the engineering formal in fourth year – blue moon
Things floating: paper receipts, plastic bags, loose photographs (wedding?) – flood of pressure water build up – breaking banks – crashing shores, people waiting to be recused in the crooks of trees. Cars and boats and whole tree trunks, chesterfield, the deer, it’s snout bobbing above the waterline, antlers rotating with the spinning current, it’s bony legs and knees hoofing helplessly the fluidity, as if were running, running, pulling the belief of Santa’s sleigh, soaring the cold milky way vacuum, light years ahead, or behind.
From its path, the river would always find a way, seeping up through the layers of sedimentary rock, cracking the limestone shelves, eroding the granite walls salt shaker – grains of salt, crystals messenger feels like a warning shouldn’t ignore.
Deer swept along in it torrent, spinning, the antlers whirlpool, their legs kicking, trying to find a purchase as the reindeer of santas sleigh try to paw at the stars. Muddy – silt that when this all drained away they would excavate the kitchen tiles as one might an archeological dig, looking for the mystery they believed buried there, but only finding shards of animal bones, and indeterminate rock.
Here it is again, with my own thought interjections in BLUE and peer feedback noted in ORANGE (with permission). I’ve focused peer attention to the subconscious elements they honed in on (they provided lots of fantastic grammar, spelling and rearrangement suggestions; I have not supplied those here).
The Red River
[I was thinking of the Red River in Manitoba which, I discovered, had a flood warning in early January…but the word “red” kind of vibrates here (shimmers? it’s like my body shimmers) when I read it, so I know there’s something else there to be discovered. I don’t know what that something else is in this case (sometimes it takes me ages to figure these things out[7]). Red is my favourite colour…also the colour of blood and poppies…so, noted, and left to sit. For now.]
swelled beyond its banks again, as it did every year. This year it attained new waterline records, bursting the city’s levies, its fluid tongue
[I liked this combination of words to depict that imagery]
flicking the sand bags right and left like a prize fighter spitting chicklets in a fight to champion the world.
[here, the river is personified…and it’s fighting to “champion the world”…this resonates with the phrase later in the story re: the end of the world, and words such as “inevitable” and “drowning”]
Mary and Joe
[usually when drafting I just choose the first names that come to me as placeholders…the story, in later development, when I understand what it is trying to tell me, will warrant research for specific names that fit and shape the story on multiple levels. Another little puzzle I love. But, can’t help but notice the completely unintentional biblical reference to Jesus’s parents here.]
arrived in separate vehicles, she a canoe, he a kayak. Mary tied the canoe to a lilac; Jo roped the kayak to iron railing leading up the front steps, now submerged.
[Just seeing this now, as I work through this exercise – Mary’s boat is tied to a flower while Joe’s boat is tied to an iron railing, sunk cement steps – something living versus something non-living and immovable – a good comparison of opposites to exploit maybe…and as I reread this reflection again, deeper darker personal feelings]
Each used their own spare key, twisting the front door lock a foot above the waterline. Each shouldered
[“shouldered” vibrates for me, I don’t know why]
the door against the heavy water to enter their daughter’s split level. The house in the chichi neighbourhood had promised a view of the river. In this respect, it had overdelivered.
[noted: humour that twists, subtly, the house into kind of a character…weird].
“She picked the wrong week to travel to Los Angeles.”
Mary sighed. She hadn’t wanted to start clean-up efforts with an argument. She stood in a foot of cold water that pressed against her knee-high rubber boots. Sloshing across the kitchen, her rubber pants rustled loudly as she fought to stay upright. The linoleum was slippery wavering beneath so much grey water, dotted here and there with soggy receipts and plastic bags ballooned into jelly fish. She and Jo rarely saw each other. They confined their spite to Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner tables. Without grandchildren, and now without their son-in-law (sandbagger)
[this word, sandbagger, is an example of trying too hard to make meaning in the story too soon; I feel this as a niggling annoyance, one I too often bypass, thinking I know better than the story does],
or their snooty daughters-in-law (good riddance), those dinners sunk before any plates graced the table.
[ugh all this has to go]
Jo continued, “I thought she was in California.”
Not unusual, such misinterpretations. For too many years Mary excused these oversights, chalking them up to hearing loss. Too many rock concerts. Too many engines revved to screaming in the garage. After the divorce, she’d faced, brutally, what she hadn’t wanted to: he just didn’t give a shit
[uh, there’s more here – and a strong feeling of avoidance, even disgust? – need to crack this open – put my head into the jaws of this lion].
Content if given a hot meal every evening, if potato chips were snack ready, if clean underwear stacked in the dresser drawer, Jo cruised life
[interesting word choice, “cruised” in the context of a flood – pay attention].
He erupted a stormy passion when things didn’t go his way. The family vibrated his tensions, always on the Joe program. And his own children just hadn’t been interesting enough for him.
“No, she’s in France, Anjou. Ville-sous-Anjou, like the pear.”
Mary’s heart sunk then realising the fridge, out of power now for three days, the vegetable crisper beneath the water line, would have to be dealt with. A rotten job (inwards she laughed, bitterly)
[there’s me inserting myself – and I might be quick to hit the delete button here but must reflect my own behavioural patterns before I do: I often make a joke when I’m uncomfortable – an effective avoidance or distraction technique – so, what am I avoiding here? I do know, in this case, and it has nothing to do with this story, so it will be chucked in revision – probably the whole fridge bit. Not all my jokes are avoidance driven].
She scanned the kitchen trying to remember where Lizzie kept the box of garbage bags, spray containers of cleaners, a mop bucket Mary might use to bail water. Where the hell could she bail the water to when the waterline lapped the window ledges, the river kept swelling? It was hopeless.
“This is hopeless,” said Jo. “Didn’t I warn her not to buy waterfront?”
[the repetition of thought between these two characters, one internal, one external, and the way they follow one after another, illuminates a connection between them, even if they don’t want to see it].
Mary let his question hang, snuffing the old argument before it ignited.
[fire references noted – may be a good counterpoint to flood – fire and flood – disasters, apocalypse, possibly another biblical reference].
Doomsday prophecies, climate change, the water rising to take us all, tidbits he scraped from the internet, scrubbed, polished and hurled at listeners as if they were his own. Millionaires blasted the skin of the earth
[wound, violence, heat],
their arcs of triumph going limp when they descended, backwards. In the end the laws of gravity, of inevitability, drown us all.
“I mean these days?” he pushed, “what the hell was she thinking?”
“Hell” said Mary.
[Hell used twice, no, three times – another biblical reference? WTF?! When I was drafting, it was at this point I understood I had no idea where this story was heading, and I wouldn’t be able to wrestle it into a story shape before work]
She watched the look of confusion cloud Jo’s face
[maybe this is my story’s way of letting me know I’m confused. I don’t need the story to tell me that, I know already].
Honestly, he was so slow sometimes, she was glad she’d chosen not to see the end of the world with him. Yet here they were, sporting galoshes and yellow rain pants, knee deep in water wavering and rolling optical illusions.
[I’m drawn to the words “cloud” and “end of the world” and “water wavering optical illusions” – it feels like the natural world asserting itself …not just background, not invisible, but a living, breathing character in this story… a largesse the couple remain oblivious to, even when they attend to the deluge of information (note: deluge is another word for flood) they miss seeing the world for what it is, even when they’re knee deep in it]
[I was struck by this…Is this marking a change in Mary?]
[here is where I allow myself to record the images that arise, without trying to puzzle them in place]
Insert distraction that momentarily reconnects this couple – Saxophone
[Weird. Specific. Can’t be ignored. No idea what it means. Yet. But I like the image and opportunity to introduce sound]
– a boy playing their favourite song perched on the roof next door – the song they danced to at the engineering formal in fourth year – blue moon
[again that niggling feeling that blue moon is a cheap first attempt at something deeper….at the very least a different song (first impulse), but still, don’t dismiss too quickly because blue moon is synonymous with “rare” and should not ignore the connotations of sadness with “blue” and the moon, well, the moon…what can I say? There’s too much…].
Things floating: paper receipts, plastic bags, loose photographs (wedding?)
[interesting that level of specificity inserted here, a wedding photo…feels important…but maybe not for this specific story…my own feelings bleeding in here. Note, instead, an opportunity to place a subtle symbol of the meaning of this story (once I figure it out) as an image floating by the couple’s rubber boots. But maybe a wedding photo does fit…remain open!]
– flood of pressure
[feel a heat with the word pressure]
water build up – breaking banks
[note the double meaning of banks – river and money – and how these two meanings rhyme, conceptually – capitalism and destroying the earth to support it]
– crashing shores, people waiting to be recused
[love this inadvertent spelling mistake of “rescued” – a Freudian slip perhaps that warrants attention and questioning, especially in a context of climate change and an earth battling to be acknowledged and restored, perhaps once humans have been purged from its skin (as referenced earlier with millionaires) makes me think of excusing oneself from apocalyptic judgement…biblical reference again…so weird]
in the crooks of trees
[crooks – connotation with thieves but also I love how it describes the elbows of trees…that’s not quite right, I’m tired, but I kinda like the thought of trees having elbows].
Cars and boats and whole tree trunks, chesterfield
[I just love the word chesterfield],
the deer, it’s snout bobbing above the waterline, antlers rotating with the spinning current, it’s bony legs and knees hoofing helplessly the fluidity, as if were running, running,
[ah, the deer. The deer motif shows up for me along multiple planes: the page, over and over, in dreams, and at least once a week I see them out the window, often in a cluster of three. Of course I looked this up.]
pulling the belief of Santa’s sleigh, soaring the cold milky way vacuum, light years ahead, or behind.
[Santa’s sleigh?! good grief …flying deer …more like silly beliefs, suspension of disbelief….why light years ahead or behind…I don’t know].
From its path, the river would always find a way, seeping up through the layers of sedimentary rock, cracking the limestone shelves, eroding the granite walls
[river as character again]
salt shaker – grains of salt, crystals messenger feels like a warning shouldn’t ignore.
[something …probably not salt related…maybe just trying too hard …superstition of throwing salt over left shoulder…again, don’t know].
Deer swept along in it torrent, spinning, the antlers whirlpool, their legs kicking, trying to find a purchase as the reindeer of santas sleigh try to paw at the stars. Muddy – silt that when this all drained away they would excavate the kitchen tiles as one might an archeological dig, looking for the mystery they believed buried there, but only finding shards of animal bones, and indeterminate rock.
[like the imagery here of the deer spinning and swimming legs not being able to touch the ground, feels disorienting.]
[…really uncomfortable with the deer running helplessly in the water so I think there is some pay dirt there–not sure about Santa–but perhaps there is something there in the connection between a childhood belief and the beliefs (in marrying Jo)]
[ there is some real magic in the stream of consciousness paragraphs towards the end and the imagery is unsettling and just fits the situation so well that I wonder if it makes sense to sew some of that in as part of Mary’s observations of the problem.]
[As I read this, i had a sense of Jo floating by the main character in their marriage and never seeing her let alone becoming invested in her emotions or feelings. I think this is the heart of this flash.]
[Whoooooaaaaaaa!!!!]
[1] I was captivated by this and couldn’t help but wonder how many might be pocketing jade eggs up their yahoos. Yeah, it’s a thing.
[2] I nearly fucking died trying to do all that rapid breathing while pulling “my foundation” tightly into my core. I worked up a sweat doing it too! I was far more fascinated by the English woman on stage facilitating the session (white muslin tunic, no hair, white turban). She had the poshest English accent I’d heard outside an Oxford quadrangle and she was looking daggers at her partner as her staccatoed breaths pumped the mic clipped at her breast. He was a much younger, absolutely gorgeous (and shirtless) Caribbean man with shining dark skin and dreadlocks, and he was racing after their daughter, probably six or seven years old (small white muslin tunic, wild hair, white turban an unravelling ribbon), trying to catch her as she screamed her way round all the seated hyperventilators (us) and literally crawled up the walls to run along the windowsills. This delighted me no end.
[3] We were put in small groups and sat cross legged on the floor. We stared for a few minutes at a photograph of a well-dressed woman with haunting eyes seated on a white couch, then “reported” what we received. Having spent the whole wonderful week drawing and writing, I was feeling pretty relaxed, so I started, “I dunno, I see a baby’s rattle, a red sports car and an empty cradle.” The curly blond-haired woman sitting across from me, wearing an I-love-NY cropped t-shirt with its neck scissored wide so that it slipped to expose one of her pudgy shoulders and a purple bra strap, goggled at me and said “Whoooooaaaaaaa!!!!” I laughed hysterically by how easily I’d convinced her of something from my imagination. Though, it transpired the photo was of a wealthy woman whose husband had kidnapped their infant daughter, the pair never to be seen again. I didn’t think much of this at the time, more interested in getting an ice cream before the shop closed for the night.
[4] I am terribly undisciplined when it comes to revision…if I’m honest it’s because I have been afraid of the demons I’ll see there. I’m working on this.
[6] spin three different digital “wheels of fortune”, one for setting, one for characters and one for narrative point of view, then spit out a story <800 words. I got: a flooded kitchen, a divorced couple, and close third person. I resisted drafting a story given my recent separation and walking away from a kitchen I designed and adored and fed so many wonderful people in. I’m trying not to be materialistic, but I can’t help grieving the kitchen loss. Of course, this comes through in the writing, the marriage breakdown, and it feels…shitty. And I kind of feel like an asshole. I’m working on this, greeting my shadow self. Next month, I’m moving to an apartment downtown Kingston, a block behind the central library and walking distance to the university libraries. Despite this fantastic access to knowledge, I’ve prioritised packing boxes and boxes of books, tearily packaging them up these February Sunday afternoons at the farm. A dreadful process. I don’t know how I’ll fit all the books in the apartment. Maybe I’ll sleep on them, hoping to absorb their wisdom through my skin.
[7] I’ve noticed a pattern in my own thinking when I’m trying to read the vibrating word energy I feel there, and I’m wrestling with this discovery too: first, I read and respond through a “heart break” lens (unfortunately) – my interpretation is clouded by past hurts and sorrows. It usually takes me a day to work through this. Next, I’m able to flip 180 degrees on the initial interpretation and consider its opposing possibilities. Finally, after pleasurable reflection time, I settle into the relief and wonder and gratitude of multiple puzzle pieces dropping into place.
Rising to the challenge of learning new tricks, I’ve taught myself to split logs with an axe. [Insert vinyl record scratch – wait…what? Connecting chopping wood with creative writing? Can it be done? Can she do it? Yes. Yes, she can.]
We’ll bounce back to the axe. First, let’s chew over energy. I’m referring to the energy[2] transferred between writer and reader via words.
But that’s not exactly what I mean, not quite right.
Pause. Think.
I mean the deeper sense (yes, that’s it) moving beneath (between?) the words, infusing the communication with vibrating vitality that travels, magically, across time and space to touch a reader right in the feels[3]. This is the goal. It’s fucking elusive.
Poetry is good at it, yes. We know it when we read it, receiving the energy as a hit to the heart, a pinch in the gut, the diaphragm kicking up an exhale, tearspill from the eyeballs, etc. Songs, and music too, deliver emotions beyond words. But to create that infusion of energy as a writer? Well, that’s a whole different thing.
Gonna try and unpack the what/how here. Actually, I only get as far as trying to describe what this is like…I suspect the figuring out how to do it is a lifelong quest.
I’ve managed this feat of transference a handful of times. Always by accident [read: I have no idea what I’m doing…I just know when I’ve done it…some of the time]. The first time was in grade six when the teacher, Mr Pritchard[4], asked me to read my creative writing assignment aloud to the class. As I read—a passage filled to the brim with beauty and love and flowers and shell necklaces and turquoise seas and gorgeous Tahitian women with naked breasts—I felt a hush descend in the classroom. I felt every ear tuned to my voice, felt the beauty travel from within my body outwards to all the other kids who had stopped squirming at their desks and listened, captivated. It was a magical moment. But, tinged with shame I’m afraid because I’d plagiarised (ish) – I lifted the scene straight from the 1984 film, Mutiny on the Bounty, with Mel Gibson (who, yes, I swooned for in grade 6) and Anthony Hopkins (who terrified me). I’d transcribed the scene depicting the tall ship making landfall, the radiant “Natives” canoing the surf to greet the voyage weary sailors, shower them with strings of orchids, promises of paradise. Despite “stealing” the imagery, I felt the energy my writing created and its impact, and with these, the promise of its power…
Other times I’ve managed this feat: after reading my work at a poetry reading strangers approached me and I sensed they wanted to touch me, though they didn’t dare (so strange); in a message of condolence to a friend following his father’s death (a friend I have great admiration for and, at one time, was deeply attracted to…does this matter? It may); impressed in various email exchanges; sometimes in texts…actually, texts often have a lot of energy coiled within them, a kerpow sort of split and splintering humour I adore.
Some observations for when the energy transfer actually works (because yes, this is for posterity, so, be honest[5]): I have to be in the act of free writing, meaning, I can’t be directing the writing with my thinking (brain must be put on pause); I have to be relaxed; I have to be thinking about the person I’m writing to, or about, (or specific people)…not an abstract concept of “audience”; I have to be calm and unrushed but also focused; I have to “turn off” any questioning, i.e., second-guessing (the inner critic must be silenced). The feeling, when this is all flowing—because all these conditions must be met at once, simultaneously—is that the energy moves through the body onto the page. Where does it originate? This is a great mystery – from within? From without? Both? When it’s all flowing and the energy infuses the words…it feels… effortless.
And immensely satisfying.
Back to chopping wood. Though I have lived in at least two houses heated by woodstove, I’ve never been the person wielding the axe (or the splitter; I’m always the stacker and I’m afraid of chain saws or any loud power tools). The woodstove at this house is not for heating, it’s more of a vanity woodstove, ha ha, but damnit I wanted a fire. The logs, beautifully stacked just outside in the breezeway, were too big to wedge in the stove. Plus, I needed kindling. An axe lay at the ready, propped against the pile. When I first grasped the handle[6], I envisioned its blade wedged in the flesh of my foot, arterial blood spurting all over the place (I’ve cut the dickens out of my finger[7]). Not a good way to start. I raised the blade and tried to keep my eyes from shutting when I brought it down on a propped-up log. My body was tense and that tension transferred to the wood. The bit (of the blade) bounced wildly off the log’s end. Somehow, after repeated attempts and ricochets, I bruised the shit out of my fingers (not sure how that happened but it did). My initial swings were tentative (weak, timid). Slowly, I managed to figure out how to get the bit to bite the wood. But then I got the blade stuck and spent way too long, swearing a blue streak, extricating it. I got increasingly frustrated and yes, I wanted to cry. Maybe I did cry. But I wanted a fire! Frustrated and spent and not giving a shit anymore, I mustered a strength that began in the soles of my feet, travelled like a wave up my legs, through my torso, along my arms, the length of the axe’s handle. I raised that goddamned axe high above my head, creating a lever of beauty embracing momentum, gravity, tracing an arc, letting it fall to bite its mark on the log’s end, splitting it instantly, the two pieces of wood flying apart with an edifying crack. Physics! (I shouted out loud). Once I got the movement and the attitude down, I’ve been able to split logs with ease. Key: the energy must travel, as a wave, through the body, through the axe, to the wood. When the movement flows this way, the log splits without effort. Brute strength is unnecessary, even counterproductive; energy moves with elegance. Exactly the same way it can flow through writing.
Now all I have to do is figure out “the movement” that invites the energy to move through…
Speaking of quantum physics (we are, aren’t we?), in a recent workshop I was challenged to write a flash narrative integrating quantum physics. In workshop, my piece was one of fifteen to “win” feedback from a SmokeLong senior editor (who knows, maybe only eight of us entered). To be clear, this piece DID NOT (at all) succeed in the energy transfer thingy I’ve been writing about here, but it was fun and quick to write and, following some, ahem, contest overseer requests to change the original piece and make it more appropriate for a general reading audience[8], I submitted it, for fun, to the Quantum Shorts competition. It’s up, for a short time (till March?) on their website for reading.
Let’s end on a far more eloquent description of the energy travelling through words (gawd Suzanne, an axe?! How crude.) with the last section of a poem titled, The Other Tiger, written by Jorge Luis Borges:
We shall seek a third tiger. This Will be like those others a shape Of my dreaming, a system of words A man makes and not the vertebrate tiger That, beyond the mythologies Is treading the earth. I know well enough That something lays on me this quest Undefined, senseless and ancient, and I go on Seeking through the afternoon time The other tiger, that which is not in verse.
[From Dreamtigers, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Harold Morland]
[2] Do I mean emotion? The energy of emotion? I’m still thinking about this, whether they are one and the same or whether they are similar yet texturally different…still, something that moves, that has momentum, sharing that etymological root (Latin movere “move, set in motion; Sanskrit kama-muta “moved by love”). Certainly relational, not necessarily a bidirectional relation, pluridimensional.
[3] This is not a new idea. Not even close. Here’s Rumi’s continuing commemoration through mille-fold Instagram and FB unicorned affirmation posts, “Words are a pretext. It is the inner bond that draws one person to another, not words.”
[4] An aside: Mr. Pritchard—my mother, with kiwi candor, called him Mr. Prick Hard (Mum! You can’t say that! Don’t worry zanny, he can’t understand my accent! But mum, you’re speaking English!)—was an evangelical Christian. I delighted asking him to explain what I postured to be a genetic impossibility, all of us descendants of Adam and Eve, I mean come on, we’d all have, like, six eyes and no legs. Or maybe six legs and no eyes, more like. I think this must have been after my reading aloud to the class, I’m sure I was never called on again…anyway, I was disappointed he didn’t oblige an argument, simply told me to take my seat.
[6] New learning: an axe has all sorts of parts to it, many named, incidentally, after parts of the body: belly, throat, shoulder, butt, cheek, beard etc. See here, but then, check out the website landing page – hilarious, depicting a stunning combination of free flowing alcohol, people weaving around wearing animal masks while winging axes at targets chalked on a plank wall. What could go wrong? Oh, there’s pizza too. All good.
[8] I was asked to remove the swearing. So, I changed ‘fucking’ to ‘flaming’, removed ‘fucking’ from the footnotes, (it appears I am addicted to using footnotes – is it irritating? Let me know) and changed ‘fucker’ to ‘boneshaker’ which I like even better because of its loose allusion to oral sex. Which, incidentally, the contest people didn’t ask me to clean up for a general audience and I delight that it hangs out there to tease some unsuspecting general audience member. Ha ha.
[9] I’m trying to slow down. It’s been …an emotional few months. To help calm myself, I’m practicing drawing these small beauties, found thingies picked up on walks. Feels good. I listen to music, gorgeous song, when I draw. I have always signed artwork with Soux, a spelling I claimed as a young teen, exercising some initial sense of autonomy I lost along the way (though, high school friends still address me using this spelling).
Shall we start with a blowjob story? Sex always gets everyone’s attention. Pleasure: a cardinal motivation. But let’s delay that gratification, and, fair warning, this post won’t end with the orgasmic gasp you’re longing for (don’t we all?). Let’s leverage the promise though; foreplay is fun, and entertainment is, after all, the goal here. Well, that and writing my way to understanding my writing process—the steps I’m taking—to improve my writing…at least that’s why I’m here. Why are you here?
[And, if your immediate reaction to that question is insolence (!) (moral indignity?), that’s not my intention—please see an earlier post regarding my tendency toward blunt written communications lacking the (necessary?) subtle tonalities of delivery—here’s the signpost (pink neon!): I ask this question with a spirit of curiosity, a shy and genuine curiosity, and heaps of gratitude that you’re here reading my words (heaps! really, your continued attention is pulling me through a bunch of turmoil, so, thank you). And yes, you can put shy and blowjob together in a sentence or a paragraph, it’s an alluring combination, but I digress.]
Another pleasure of mine, and, I realize, essential to my writing process, is to read across multiple and diverse texts in one sitting, toying to find a connection or thread of meaning between them. For fun. It helps me relax. Weirdly. I do it at work and at home and can credit (some) creative breakthroughs to this fetish – this blog post, for instance. I had a vague desire to write about metaphor this month but needed more to, you know, fluff it up.
Recently, a friend texted “Don’t cull [your] state of mind; express it in all its confusion. Put the tornado in the typewriter…” So, my favourite peeps, this post is a flavour taster, leading you through my convoluted thinking that landed on sharing a very private short story publicly.
a web site on “warm data”, broader contextual information as opposed to the simple numbers of (disconnected) statistical information
Jung’s 1925 lecture #1 about developing his theory of the unconscious in which he inadvertently exposes himself as a real dick with his disparaging comments about the poor teen (his patient!) who fell in love with him. Calm down Jungian fans, I’m among you, I even practice his active imagination approach. But still, I feel for that poor girl, unrequited love, the scent of bitter almonds and all that…that lecture may have been the inspiration for David Cronenberg’s film A Dangerous Method
the introduction in The Situation and the Story, a book by Vivian Gornick offering a stunning distillation of the necessity of crafting a persona to relay a story about a situation… reminds me about an earlier post and a poke in my ribs to revive a larger writing project I’ve been avoiding (why have I been avoiding it? resisting it? why?)
my daily horoscope app: “Falling in love is good for the universe” and “Forgiving someone doesn’t make you a doormat” and “You are the most elaborate and sweet dessert” (can you tell I’m swinging by a thread here?)
Following this interstitial pathway (is this a bad habit? does this signal a lack of discipline? is this the chaotic consequence of consuming too many fickle fast-food-like-social media-servings? I’m not sure…) over the next few days, I read:
an excerpt from Descartes’ Dream by Phillip J. Davis and Reuben Hirsh relaying how Descartes imagined being presented with a melon (!) – a metaphor which moved him closer to developing Cartesian (mind-body) dualism somehow…what a muck of things that has led us through…(see “warm data” above)
A poem, Love After Love by Derek Walcott (tears, tears, tears…I need to get back to that larger writing project)
A book review of ‘The Poetry of Derek Walcott’ by Adam Kirsch where he discusses Walcott’s associative freedom in his application of metaphor (I know, I know, I’m trying your patience now. Stay with me. We’ll circle back to my earlier promise, and I’ll throw in a ghost to boot! Keep reading)
An epigraph credited to Michael Ventura in Randall Brown’s Pocket Guide to Flash Fiction that I’ll quote from shortly, but noted the reference was incorrectly cited as “The Talent in the Room” when it should be “The Talent of the Room”…perhaps a trifle, but in this context changing “of” to “in” twists the foundational communication of Ventura’s essay…
And then, wrangling myself to the task of writing a monthly blog post, I reread some earlier notes and quotes I’d taken down about metaphor and can’t help but insert these beautiful descriptions from Alicia Ostriker’s A Meditation on Metaphor in By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry edited by Molly McQuade, “The sharp, honeyed burning point of course is that the pleasure we take in metaphor is a pleasure of consent, an agreement that the distance between two things is cancellable because of their likeness, whereby each illuminates some inner truth belonging to the other.” And “The implication of every metaphor is that the world is a multidimensional web of connections between animate and inanimate, larger and smaller, past and present, which await discovery.”
And I got to thinking, again, about my continued resistance to revisiting earlier drafts of writing. I’m pained to admit my fear here must be something deeper—far deeper—than simply failing to “write well”. Instead, it has to do with facing what those drafts, written partly through stream of consciousness, partly through dream, partly through half sleep, exhaustion, desperation, and yes, sometimes elation, might reveal about myself, through metaphor, that I’m afraid to know or discover.
And that’s when Ventura’s essay really pierced me, articulating my anxieties with pinpoint accuracy:
“Crazy as a writer would define it: too unbalanced to work. If you can still write, then how crazy can you be?
Plenty crazy, is the answer. The room can become a hole. Your talent of the room, your ability to be there with all your soul, can overwhelm you…
The room, you see, is a dangerous place. Not in itself, but because you’re dangerous. The psyche is dangerous. Because working with words is not like working with color or sound or stone or movement. Color and sound and stone and movement are all around us, they are natural elements, they’ve always been [in] the universe, and those who work with them are servants of these timeless materials. But words are pure creations of the human psyche. Every single word is full of secrets, full of associations. Every word leads to another and another and another, down and down, through passages of dark and light. Every single word leads, in this way, to the same destination: your soul. Which is, in part, the soul of everyone. Every word has the capacity to start that journey. And once you’re on it, there is no knowing what will happen.
Locking yourself up with such things, letting them stir, using these pure psychic creations as raw material, and deciding, each time, how much or little you’re going to participate in your own act of creation, just what you’ll stake, what are the odds, just how far are you going to go – that’s called being a writer. And you do it alone in a room.”
Which rounds us (finally!) to the promised short story, a true one, lightly edited from its original 2020 draft created in a workshop with Leigh Hopkins responding to her prompt to write a 1000-word sexual scene that merges with a death scene. It’s my first, and, to date, only sex scene I’ve written (I think…will have to blow my hard drive searching for what’s beyond memory). No title. A short commentary will follow (gawd this post is too long, with apologies).
~
R had a reputation for the biggest cock in school. That’s what the boys called it with a cocktail of admiration and jealousy. They teased him in locker rooms, school halls, the cafeteria. He took it in stride, comfortable in his skin, his abilities. He captained the football team, the soccer team and hockey. He was good at track and math. I’d noticed his smile three years earlier and vowed to capture and kiss his mouth.
On a school night, the time of year when the dark descends velvet and cool and early, we lay in his bedroom in the dark with the door closed. His parents were asleep down the hall. We were sixteen.
His penis was large. Very large. Though, at the time, I had nothing to compare it with. His penis was my first penis. I still dream of it today, occasionally, though, not as much as I’d like to. It wasn’t so much its length that was remarkable, but its girth, wide like the branch of a tree. That night I locked my lips around it and slid up and down its length slowly, the smooth hot hardness of it against my lips, brushing my molars. I thought of how a snake might easily unclick the hinges of its jaw to accommodate. My own jaw could do no such thing and the cramp of holding my mouth to receive started in. His hips squirmed beneath me as I changed position, running my tongue up from the base to the tip, the spongey tip that squished so soft against my lips. He moaned and caressed my hair. He was always gentle, patient. He worried about hurting me, but I craved the feeling of him entering me. The insides of me ached and yearned.
I tore a little every time we made love. It stung; a silver, piercing point of pain mixed with the pleasure of being filled. The sensation rippled from between my legs and a satisfaction, a feeling of being whole and complete, warmed my body, my soul.
The doctor suggested, after handing me blister packs of freebie pills, he could cauterize my perineum with liquid nitrogen. At sixteen, I asked whether scar tissue might not interfere with childbirth, you know, in the future. The doctor looked confused. Confused enough for me to say, no thank you, not today. I love that girl at sixteen. Sometimes I wonder where she went.
In R’s bedroom my lips and tongue explored the length and width of his penis, my fingers caressed his scrotum. I pulled the moans out of him, every moment adding to my own desire, the slippery ache between my thighs. Every moment made me feel in control. The feeling moved into me of just how powerful I could be. How I calmed this athletic boy to complete submission beneath me. How I’d done it with the flick of my tongue, my wet lips, my heat. The sensation of power made the hairs on the back of my neck rise. The power coursed through me, palpable. I sat up. We faced each other about a foot apart, and I smiled, the power shining out of me, luminous in the dark.
Suddenly, I knew I was scaring him. And it felt good. I liked scaring him. His fear gave me power. He moved his hand to swat the air between our faces saying, Stop! Stop that! Loud and frightened. Then, as if a switch flipped off, the power left me. I felt cold and a deep and sudden knowing moved electric through my body, a fear unlike any other quickened my heart and lifted goosebumps along my limbs. I knew with such certainty I needed to stop R from telling me what he had just felt—worse, what he had just seen. A knot of premonition hardened at the back of my throat: if he kept speaking, I’d see what he’d seen. I reached across the shadowed space between us and mashed my palm against his lips, but he said, Your smile. Your smile, stop smiling.
And then it flipped and glared at me, hovering between us. I’ll call it an apparition… a face comprised of light and dark. I never think of it as a ghost. Only a face…no body attached…a face of shadows…radiating a terrifying expression. The depressions where its eyes should have been so dark they were hollow. It smiled horribly with a mouth full of teeth, so many pointed teeth, lips curled to convey what I can only describe as sinister.
It played with us, whatever it was, having fun. A fear I hadn’t known possible filled me and I squeezed my eyes tight against it. I couldn’t speak. As I write this now, the air is light in my head and my ears feel blocked, pressured. I’m trembling over thirty years later.
Since, I’ve believed humans exist with other planes or dimensions right round us. That it’s possible evil exists and waits for the ready and willing. That the dark side is there waiting, beguiling. I’m not a religious person; this has nothing to do with all that.
R scrambled to turn on the light. Then we woke his mother. The story pales in the retelling. But I believe to this day if I ever see that face again, the fear will take me. I’ll die. I avoid shadowy twilight spaces. I walk cautiously each day knowing the choice is there.
For a long time, I felt terribly guilty and responsible for creating such a monster, whatever it was. For a long time, I believed I had made it with my power and blowjob proficiency.
I don’t believe that now.
Now, I think whatever that was, a spirit? An alien? It doesn’t matter. I believe it passed through me and played my emotions like a kitten with a tangle of string.
~
So, it’s not just my metaphors and it’s not just my words I’m frightened of; it’s stretching the skin of reality till I’m marooned or mad. Did I create that demon? Does that dark capacity reside within me? Will my writing reveal—unleash—an unmanageable wickedness? I suppose some might find my fears and anxieties absurd and certainly questionable. For too long I’ve been afraid of the dark. These days I pad around this beautiful housesitting space in the gloaming, reveling the splash of waning and waxing moonlight glancing the St. Lawrence River. For the very first time since that experience at sixteen, I’m wondering whether I forejudged the apparition, and I question my fear of it all. And, for the sake of my writing, I’m ready to play.
In the past, a shift in how I viewed the world happened quite literally. I travelled to New Zealand over twenty-five years ago and discovered a large world map with New Zealand at its centre. Up until that point, my education and experiences about what the earth looked like and where the continents were located in relation to one another was depicted with two views (remember, this is before Google maps). The first was on a globe whose axis tilted away from my body and fastened to a stand. The attached points of axis bisected the north and southern poles, focusing spinning attention to the northern hemisphere (Europe, Russia (USSR), North America, half the world’s oceans). If I had to find New Zealand, the country where my mother was born, I needed to bend upside down to see it.
The other world view was a flat, two-dimensional map, the sort that gets tacked up on bedroom walls or ceremonially unrolled to obscure the chalkboard at the front of classrooms. On these maps the Americas (North and South) are rendered on the left-hand side and Europe, Africa, Russia, Asia, Australia (and New Zealand) on the right-hand side. The Pacific Ocean is split (so one doesn’t quite appreciate how vast it is) and the Atlantic Ocean takes over the middle ground.
On the map I discovered in New Zealand so many years ago, the two tiny islands commanded the middle space and suddenly I appreciated how far away the country really is from most of the other continents, floating there in a large blue pool (the Pacific Ocean). In the NZ maps I was stunned to discover how close Russia and Alaska are to each other (the western tip of Cape Prince of Wales in Alaska is 88.5 kilometers (55 miles) from the Southern point of Cape Dezhnev in Russia – if I were driving this distance across the Bering Strait, it would take me less than an hour!). And with this realization my mind moved through a reshuffling of Cold War history and Canada’s shared responsibility with the US for continental air defense through NORAD (North American Air Defense Command).
Of course, with Google maps available at our fingertips these days, my naive view of geography and related epiphany is outdated. My point is that I had accepted these two views of the world “presented” to me without questioning the perspective (and possible motives) of their presentations. I’ll get back to this thought shortly.
Another map and another example. This time focusing on the north-east region of North America (Ontario, Quebec, the Atlantic provinces, the states along the eastern seaboard, the southern shores of the great lakes, lining the Mississippi River and other confluences and tributaries – the water here is important). This map, a map free of border lines (province, state, or country), depicted the diversity of Indigenous languages with coloured circles of concentration. Sometimes the colours overlapped, indicating mixed languages in regions, but on that map (a simplified version from the picture below), it was instantly clear how Indigenous languages mirrored waterways (water being an essential human resource). Again, I experienced a mind-bending reshuffling to appreciate how cultures depend and thrive in relation to land and water. But also, how superficial country (province and state) borders are. Crayon lines drawn by Kings and Queens, heads of state. Crayon lines our loved ones fight for and die on. Crayon lines that shift and move, depending on which resource they’re circling, gold, uranium, olive groves, copper, waterfalls, coal, legislation, policy, justice, freedom, the list goes on.
What does this have to do with creative writing practice? Well, a lot actually. It’s a bit of a conceptual leap, yes, but bear with me. The way we carve categories in the world around us, be they continents, countries, or the way we name the world with words, impacts the way we “see” the world, how our perceptions are influenced. Words matter – they determine how we think.
“Culture shapes language because what matters to a culture often becomes embedded in its language, sometimes as words and sometimes codified in its grammar. Yet it is also true that in varying ways a language may shape the attention and thoughts of its speakers. Language and culture form a feedback loop, or rather they form many, many feedback loops.”
“…the more we ask empirical questions about language and its many loops in all the world’s languages, the more we will know about the diverse ways there are to think like a human.”
“When our ways of thinking and knowing are rooted in the actual soil of our actual communities…we are called out into the world where we meet, in every bodily sense, the consequences of our own actions. Non-human nature becomes present, aware, vocal, integral to our being. We find ourselves living not in the midst of our abstractions – nation-states, linguistic group, political party – but as members of a living, breathing, often suffering, body of relations.”
For these reasons (and others – this post is too long already), I have started to learn Anishinaabemowin with the Kingston Indigenous Language Nest. I would like to better understand how Indigenous Peoples of the land on which I learn and live name and view the world. I want to expand my worldview.
I would be remiss if I failed to name an additional world view shift I am making. This month, I made the very difficult but courageous decision to leave my marriage. Quite simply, I want to be independent. This is the language I have been using. I do not feel I am leaving my husband…we are bound to one another through our children and the life we have created together, both in the past and the one we create in the future. Our relationship shifts – it is my hope we remain friends who love each other. It is a painful separation. I am blessed to be surrounded by people who love and hold me, keep me floating. Writing my way through is helping. Also art. And songs. And lifting the Dahlias from the soil to overwinter. I’m not sure what garden they will be planted in next year, but they are waiting in the dark. Kind of like me.
I have been learning names of animals in the Anishinaabemowin classes I began. We learn as children do, with songs and games. It’s fun. The other night, I discovered a gray tree frog in my kitchen. It’s the first time in close to twenty years of living in this house that I have found a frog within. Agoozimakakii is the Ojibway (a dialect of Anishinaabemowin) word for tree frog. Phonetically it is pronounced: ah-goh-say-mah-kah-ki. Today I am leaving this house, this home…when I looked up the spiritual meaning of finding a tree frog in one’s house, I discover it’s “a symbol of transformation…In some Native American traditions, the frog is seen as a guide who can help individuals transition between different stages of life.”
I had a hard time catching the poor wee thing, the heart shaped tree frog slightly smaller than the palm of my hand. She was fast and strong, and she hopped from my hands several times, landing with splats on the linoleum. Finally, I cupped her in my palms and placed her back outside under our exquisite moon, its light making our skins glow.
Be brave – Aakode’ewin. In the Anishinaabe language, this word literally means “state of having a fearless heart.” So, this is how I step into this new-to-me kaleidoscopic landscape and learn to name the world.
Let’s begin with these lines from a poem by Carol Ann Duffy, “Prayer”.[1]
So, a woman will lift/her head from the sieve of her hands and stare/ at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.
A friend calls these massive blooms the floozies of the garden. They are taller than me and have overtaken the tomatoes this year, which means fewer tomatoes to process (a small blessing, one I’ll curse in Feb).
I went to listen to a friend play in a band (he plays guitar). It was an afternoon event and the day was gorgeous, hot blue sky, tree leaves colouring up red and yellow. There were lots of friends there and many people who I hadn’t connected with in some time (since pre-pandemic). In one conversation, a former colleague announced his recent retirement and our talk rounded to creative writing. I admit that anecdote, erroneously attributed to Margaret Atwood, about the brain surgeon who says to a writer that when they retire, they’ll take up writing, to which the writer quips that, when they retire, they’ll take up brain surgery, popped into my mind. The guy is (well, was) a physician. But it’s important writers lift one another up. Writing is hard enough without tearing each other down. So, I offered up some writing (and reading) resources I’ve found helpful and then we landed on the topic of workshopping. He leaned back in his chair and said he’d tried workshopping—his tone was unmistakable; the exercise was beneath him—and he’d been disappointed to discover that (his words) “99.95% of workshop participants are women”. Long pause of silence. I began to form a response, but not before he buried himself further by saying his writing needed…here, he finally noticed he was speaking to a woman and corrected the wording I could see so clearly in the thought bubble hovering atop his (inflated) head (his writing is far more important and serious – intelligent! than what women write about), to say the workshops could never sufficiently improve his writing. I turned to his wife (also a physician. Does this matter? It does. I have a chip on my shoulder when it comes to physicians…story for another time, but I acknowledge my bias) and I agreed, it’s true, the workshops and writing classes I have attended are comprised, mostly, of women. I think it must have to do with women not feeling they have a voice in other aspects of their lives. Great swaths of generalizations painted here, but this was party small talk. The physician’s unblinking wife encouraged her husband, explaining he ought to think more about the issue because women read and buy books more often, and if he hoped to publish, it’s an issue worthy of his consideration. I downed the glass of shit wine I was drinking and flitted off. But the conversation and the question (why mostly women?) gnawed at me.
Last of the summer flowers maybe, before a killing frost.
The conversation with the physicians continued to grate because it poked (stabbed?) a few of my deepest insecurities. How I’d turned my back on pursuing an arts career in favour of science because I thought I’d be taken more seriously (as a woman) and, let’s be honest, because it paid better. But the deeper wound is that I find myself actively resisting the writing that bubbles forth most naturally in my creative writing practice: marriage and motherhood.
This is hard to write: I silence my own voice because I don’t believe it’s valuable enough.
It’s frustrating to know I’ve allowed myself to be shaped (so effortlessly) by cultural and social norms related to traditional gender roles. It’s an embarrassment. It begs the question: who from (and why?) am I seeking validation? The easy answer is “the system” – but it’s a system that continues to devalue the importance (skill, patience, persistence, compassion) of raising children, a system that reduces love and relationships to sex (and shout out to my more marginalized peeps of the LGBTQ2S+, most often heteronormative sex). As part of the system—as a woman I am—we don’t do enough to support each other to write about domestic subjects or write about our friendships. Is writing about friendship without the tension of sex or attraction a downgrade? Too boring? A lot of cognitive dissonance here. The harder answer is that yes, I do need to push through the noise and systemic pressures to value my own writing and anchor validation from within as opposed to without. It’s hard. And I know, a harried summary of such a complex issue is short on explanations. I could sing this pearl of an offering[2], but in the spirit of bare sincerity, I’m often afraid the conversations are out of my league. I’m working on bravery. Another work in progress…
This week I wrote a poemy piece in workshop (yes, a workshop comprised of mostly women) about what it feels like to walk up to the podium to read one’s poetry. My writing inspired one of the other women in the workshop to create a collaged art piece in response to a particular phrase I had written. I won’t share it here because she would like us to try publishing our two pieces together, but the art work is beguiling and unique, and the gesture made me teary. Really, it’s the ultimate compliment.
I think this must be the goal for creating art: to make something so beautiful it inspires further beauty in the world.
So, I lift my burned gaze from the sieve of my hands to tend the lyrics of my heart.
[1] This stunning image (that word ‘sieve’ does so much work) are lines from the poem “Prayer” by Dame Carol Ann Duffy. She is the first (and only!!) woman to hold the post of British Poet Laureate in its 400 plus-year history and was appointed in 2009 for a ten-year fixed term. You can listen to her read this poem here. Interestingly, when I read the poem for myself it sounded very different from her reading. Perhaps I interpret it differently too. Regardless, it’s a gorgeous poem. I love how the image embodies this post better than my own words could ever do.
[2]“One Heart” is from the Leftover Cuties 2013 album “The Spark & the Fire” – http://www.leftovercuties.com – also, a striking album cover.
Super spicy Habaneros harvested need to be handled with care (the mask and gloves and slicing outdoors depicted in the drawing above) when preserving.
I very nearly botched the possibility of any relationship with my now husband the first time he asked me out, replying to his tentative request to take me to dinner with an audible exasperation—I’m embarrassed to say it, but an almost-admonishment— “What took you so long?!”
Much later he told me how, in the dead seconds of silence that followed my blurt, he very nearly turned heel and walked away (a fuck that, if there ever was one). My reaction stopped him cold. I can only think he must have caught the note of elation in my voice, noticed the sparkle of mischief in my eyes, the play blossoming my grin.
Some context for my blunder: Months earlier he’d attempted to ask me out but our conversation was interrupted, and, despite an alluring notoriety with women, he was timid with me. His notoriety prevented me from asking him out. Not only that, but his notoriety also made me mistrust him…he was too attractive, too confident. I resorted to using a tactic I’ve come to refer to as ‘the mixed barb’, an unexpected, lightly teasing, droll divulgence, testing him against himself. Communicating this way—a skill sharpened in a childhood home where moods shifted precipitously from rainbows to menace—has served me well, personally and professionally. Quick jabs shaded with humour fast reveal the contours of people’s personalities, offer a glimpse of their shadow selves, delineate boundaries, expose what they’re willing to put up with – and what I really mean when I say that is, testing whether they’ll put up with me.
Though this works well face-to-face where intonation and gesture, pitch, and facial expressions shoulder the palanquin carrying my royal intentions, I’ve discovered the strategy collapses in my writing. For example, my royal intentions from that last sentence was meant to be read with layered notes of self-deprecation, irony and superciliousness. Did I fail there? Likely.
George Orwell suggested, “A thing is funny when—in some way that is not actually offensive or frightening—it upsets the established order. Every joke is a tiny revolution.”[1] For speaking and writing more information is needed to furnish a joke, but also, words in general. “An alteration in tone or pitch can be the difference between …fighting words and a statement of love, using the identical phrase, such as “You’re really something,” a completely meaningless statement without a tone or context to support it.”[2]
Peter Elbow explains vocal variety thoroughly when asking us to “Consider how many musical resources of intonation or prosody we can use when we talk. There is pitch (low to high); volume (soft to loud); speed (slow to fast); accent (yes or no); intensity (relaxed to tense); timbre (breathy, shrill, nasal, and many more); pausing (long and short). Note that these are not binary items, for in each case there is a full continuum between extremes (e.g., between low and height, slow and fast). There are glides and jumps. Also, there are patterned sequences. For example, tune is a pattern of pitches; rhythm is a pattern of slow and fast and accent. We change meanings by using subtle or not so subtle pauses or small intensifications or lengthenings of a syllable. Combinations of all of these make a rich palate we all use to paint meaning.”[3]
Robert Pinsky simplifies this beautifully: “It is almost as if we sing to each other all day.”[4]
But how to get the audible features of speech to the written page? I suspect the answer to this question requires a lifetime of exploration. Perhaps it’s even THE ANSWER to writing well (musically, entertainingly, clearly, compassionately, provocatively, etc.). Robert Frost thought so, “The tone-of-voice element is the unbroken flow on which the others are carried along like sticks and leaves and flowers.”[5] So, today’s post is simply this quest’s beginning.
More Frost: “What we do get in life and miss so often in literature is the sentence sounds that underlie the words. Words in themselves do not convey meaning, and to [prove] this… take the example of two people who are talking on the other side of a closed door, whose voices can be heard but whose words cannot be distinguished. Even though the words do not carry, the sound of them does, and the listener can catch the meaning of the conversation. This is because every meaning has a particular sound-posture; or, to put it in another way, the sense of every meaning has a particular sound which each individual is instinctively familiar with and without at all being conscious of the exact words that are being used is able to understand the thought, idea, or emotion that is being conveyed.”[5]
One way to get audible intonations to the page is to write in directions for how the reader ought interpret the words.
In Longshore Drift, a short story published in Granta, Julia Armfield employs this directing technique two ways: in text direction and by cueing the reader using italics. Here are three examples excerpted from the story (colour coding mine):
“There are warning flags along the wrack line: sharks – swim at your own risk. The threat is actually minimal, basking sharks being liable to give you little more than a bump on the knee, but the effect of the signs is still an odd one. There are no barriers, the water is open, creating the sense of a curiously lackadaisical approach to public safety. Danger, but do what you want, we’re not the police.”
‘Fair enough,’ she nods, and while her tone is light Alice feels she can detect the faintest note of mockery. ‘Mustn’t be bitter with my litter.’ ‘Fair enough’, this stock phrase, its cringing detachment. The sudden removal of camaraderie and Alice clawing after it.”
“The boys cluster like geese. One of them, wet-lipped with a tongue piercing, asks Min what she’s doing selling ice cream on such a chilly day. What’s a nice girl like you doing in a truck like this.“
A whole story might revolve around the differences between what is said and what is meant. Here’s the first paragraph of a micro story written by SJ Sindum, Mother, published in The Cincinnati Review (again, colour coding mine):
“My mother tells me to be careful. I’m twelve years old, and we’ve just moved to a city outside of Boston. We live in an apartment complex that my white fiancé, twenty years later when we visit, will call “shit housing.” I walk to school every day, a two-mile stroll along a busy road, and my mother tells me to be careful. What she means is, keep your head down, keep walking, don’t talk to anyone, I’m sorry.”
Each paragraph of Sindum’s story ends with similarly directed subtext, stretching implied intonation with deeper emotional resonance. A good example of Charles Baxter’s comparison of subtext to “the ghosts moaning from beneath the floor.”
“Reading is telepathy (literally “feeling from afar”). A writer’s magical transference of thoughts, ideas, and emotions—the context, text, and subtext— to the reader across space and time.”[6]
And I want to slide that observation (riffed from a more beautifully written version by Terrance Hayes (see the footnote)), alongside another stunner: “Meanings are not in words, they are in people.”[7]
So, another (ongoing) lesson for me: lavish sprinkling of humour in my writing, without judicious written expansion to convey my specific thoughts, ideas or emotions, fails to cue and direct the reader to my intended meaning, whether a playful poke in the ribs, the softening of a chiding remark, or taking the piss out (as my mum used to say, meaning, to bring someone down from their [self-perceived] lofty position). Unless the reader is intimately familiar with my quirky (snarky, often cynical, occasionally lewd) sense of humour voiced in person, my written inflection is flipped on its back. Wrestler style.
[2] Baxter, Charles. The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot. Graywolf Press, 2007.
[3] Elbow, Peter, “5. Intonation: A Virtue for Writing Found at the Root of Everyday Speech” (2010). Emeritus Faculty Author Gallery. 34. Retrieved from https://scholarworks.umass.edu/emeritus_sw/34
[4] Pinsky, Robert. The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.
[6] I love these beautiful lines by Terrance Hayes from the preface of his book, Watch Your Language, “Reading is a mix of telepathy and time travel. It’s a magical transference of information, knowledge, and mystery: the context, text, and subtext of a reader’s life.” But I’ve stolen those sentences, fiddled the words and ideas and repurposed them to my own ends here. Not as elegant as Haye’s sentences, to be sure, but landing a slightly different meaning.
Hayes, Terrance. Watch Your Language: Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry. Penguin Books, an Imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2023.
[7] Elbow, Peter, ‘Intonation: A Virtue for Writing at the Root of Everyday Speech’, Vernacular Eloquence: What Speech Can Bring to Writing. New York, 2012.
Do we have a choice about the subject of our creative work? In a recent interview with Francesca Steele of Write-Off podcast, Tessa Hadley said, “There is no choice about what you write…an interesting discovery…no, it isn’t a choice, you just have to find the thing that is yours.” They were discussing the writing of domestic fiction, of which Tessa Hadley is considered a modern master. For some thoughts about domestic fiction as a genre, read this reflection by Soledad Fox Maura at Lit Hub. Also, must mention Tessa Hadley’s stunner of a short story in a recent (July 24, 2023) The New Yorker. You can listen to her read it here too, “The Maths Tutor”.
A few years ago, I would have disagreed with Tessa Hadley, believing that of course a writer could choose their subject. But now, after years and drafts attempting to write something with Meaning (capital M) about Big Important Issues (climate change, poverty, the impacts of war, attachment theory, to name a few), I do agree with her.
It doesn’t matter what I try to write, the stories of my family—growing up, as well as my experiences in a long-term relationship and raising my own children—bubble to the surface. I’ve wasted a lot of time and energy resisting this writing, or at least trying to hide it behind a Big Meaning facade. But I’m starting to make peace with the themes my writing presents: raising kids, marriage, cooking, being raised by parents with mental illness and addictions. It is who I am, how I have become the person I am, and, importantly, provided my foundation and lenses for my viewing of the world. It’s this inner voice—unique for every person—that readers will connect to if I can get it to the page. I’m only beginning to trust my own voice (that it’s good enough).
Coupled with this challenge is another: when I choose to centre my family life in my creative writing, the refrain from trusted readers is often that it’s too much all at once (I’m paraphrasing, but this is the gist of it). One dear friend explained reading my stories or poems feels almost like an assault to her senses. She really means this kindly, and I accept it that way too, but I’ve struggled to understand what I might do differently. There’s so much strangled emotion waiting and wanting to spring out. I don’t know how to tell these stories in a way a reader might absorb them with any pleasure or entertainment at a pace that engenders empathy as opposed to shock, or worse, pity.
The last few months of writing flash pieces, narratives that follow a “story arc” but are less than 1000 words, have been generative and instructive. Flash, as a form, focuses an emotional moment. There isn’t room for much else. In some of the pieces I’ve generated—over 26 unique story drafts since the beginning of May (woohoo!)—I’ve practiced approaching some of my family stories using different perspectives, angles, and styles. I’ve discovered the flash form might be a method for me to “break up” the emotions and the moments in a way that is softer on readers, easier to digest, provide some white space and pause for breath. That way, several flash pieces assembled could become a kaleidoscope (of different focal points, different angles, etc.) of “what happened”, layering texture and meaning by using not just simply concentrated content, but a strategic sequencing too. An arrangement where the spaces in between could provide much-needed rests and pauses for recovery. A working theory anyway, I’m now trying.
It’s been a slow dawning, learning that my narrator—even when I’m writing my own memories, writing about my self, my thoughts, my feelings—needs to be someone playing a role, a dramatic one. Who my narrator will be (because, yes, this is very future, I haven’t figured it out yet) is distinct from point of view (how the memories are relayed to a reader using perspective, what the narrator’s relation to the story is) and distinct from the tenses of verbs (when, in time, the person of the verb is “doing” “verbing?”). Confusingly, the narrator may be what is referred to as “voice”. Perhaps the terms are interchangeable, I don’t know. Maybe something to unpack in a later post. But thinking of the narrator as the person who tells the story, helps frame many writing decisions within a larger composition, from the sentence level to the whole.
An attempt to explain what I mean and where I want to go with this:
I’m five months into challenging myself to a “just get it down on paper!” exercise. For the first time, I tracked my progress, in number of words, and the time devoted to the task, in minutes. I had wanted to get to 70, 000 words (book length). Surprise! I haven’t hit that target. These last few weeks, I’ve laboured emotionally to make peace with this and move on. See the graphical display of progress here:
Some observations from tracking:
Most important: quantity in number of words does not equal quality. Not even close. More on this shortly (and yes, a link back to who the narrator is for this work…I’ll get there).
The shape of the line for the time put in, for this specific progress snapshot, follows the same shape of progress for the number of words. This could lead one to conclude (repeating the religious mantra): time put in = productivity out (measured in number of words). This is a misleading conclusion for creative writing because again, it ignores the quality of the writing (and all the measures of quality we can come up with, things like comprehension, emotional resonance with a reader, use of imagery, compositional techniques, sentence variability, word choice, structural approach, etc. The list is endless. Endless!).
There were stretches of time (weeks) showing zero output for both measures. Practically (qualitatively) this was because there were weeks I was away on vacation and didn’t work on the project and one week managing my grief after making the very difficult decision to have one of our pets put down. Gutted. But other weeks I did work on writing, just not this specific project. Instead, I wrote a short story and two flash pieces, plus a few posts to this blog. The chart doesn’t capture this. I recorded this separtely with notes and making myself reflect about the progress I made each week (with an intention to start fresh the following week).
Can’t ignore the downward trend depicted in the chart. I started off “well” in December – lots of time and words to begin with, then the lines gradually slide, tilting towards the x-axis to confirm my progress has slowed and stalled.
Another bit of context not captured in the chart: I started tracking for this project after writing just over 20, 000 words already. So, my actual word output for this project is just over 50, 000 words. Not bad. In quantity. At least the pages confirm I can create a book-length work (well, novella maybe).
If I focused on only these outcome measures, measures that confirm it takes me 5 months of creative writing time to reach an equivalent work week I put into my day job, I’d plunge into a depression too deep to climb out from. Instead, I learn what I can from this exercise and pivot.
What I’ve alluded to already with the differences between quantitative and qualitative measures, is that quality matters far more than quantity. I’ve also discovered the draft I’ve completed, chasing after the number of words down on paper, was written for myself. All 50, 000 plus words! I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t help calling it my Vomit Draft. I’ve got the memories and (some) feelings and the cultural references I wanted to fold into the piece named and listed, but I haven’t packaged my writing in any shape or form a reader would be engaged with. “I” am not my audience. I need to carve a narrator to reshape how the stories are told, a narrator who will engage an audience, a narrator who performs that work. In making this choice, I will change the quality of my writing. My hope is to transform the raw emotions and memories into something funny, something entertaining. So, the work shifts now, with intention, towards understanding which part of my self I can call on to become that narrator. I want a narrator with the following qualities:
Someone who is funny
Someone who is humble
Someone with compassion
Someone who works to understand other people’s perspectives
Someone who isn’t whiney
Someone without a chip on their shoulder (ha, ha, better get my surgical tools)
Someone who forgives
Someone kind of cool (?) (I can see my kids cringing)
Someone with charisma
Someone with audacity (this is the hardest)
Note: all qualities impossible to measure with numbers.
I’m back to the beginning with this project…and will take the time needed to create this role, this persona. I foresee a lot more time sitting at the writing desk, puzzling to reveal this narrator in the rendering of every sentence. Kick in the bum to tracking words, I’m done with that.
It is always useful to try to trick my thinking out of usual habits and patterns of thought. My brain is lazy and too often follows the path of least resistance to finish a task. When writing, this laziness leads to cliches and shallow (one dimensional) observations that do nothing to pique the interest of a reader (or me, the writer, for that matter). Also, I prevent wider interpretations, deeper meanings, messages from the subconscious, before they have a chance to arise. Mind maps are a quick and (relatively) easy way to provoke (and see) expansions of meaning and the connections between them.
It is best, when creating a mind map, to relax and clear your mind…think meditation or yoga practice here. Sometimes it is good to set a timer for these exercises – 10 minutes tops – otherwise it could keep unfolding. That’s okay too…just follow your intuition on this one.
On a blank piece of paper, in the middle of the page, write a word or phrase you are wrestling with (or select one at random from the middle of a book, a dictionary, a cereal box, it really doesn’t matter…sometimes the most banal source will yield the richest ideas). Circle the word or phrase. Relax (yes, I keep having to tell myself this). Look at that word/phrase and allow your mind to drift and dream. Write down the images and associations as they come, anywhere on the page…as the associations are written down, they spark additional thoughts and images. Write these down too. Enjoy it. When the images start to wind down or the timer goes off, stop. It’s good to get up and walk away from the desk for a minute or two: make a cup of tea or gaze out the window. I’m usually too impatient though and dive into the next step, which is to look at what has been rendered on the page and start to draw lines of connections between them (often I do these steps simultaneously too). Very soon, the lines become tangled and cross each other. This is okay. At this point I realise there’s a lot more to think about than I had originally thought but I can now see avenues of exploration I might move through.
Mind maps are good to use as a writing prompt when facing an intimidating blank page. But they are also great tools for deepening existing writing: maybe an interesting image, or a provocative object, or a weird description or phrase has surfaced in a draft…but it doesn’t feel right—it nags—it doesn’t quite hang together with the sentiments (paragraph) around it. Trust the nagging/curiosity feeling. Copy the image/object/phrase onto a blank piece of paper to use as the starting node in a mind map.
Mind maps might also be used as art making device, subbing in a sort of shorthand thinking for how a work of art might be built. Theo Anthony, an American film maker, uses mind maps to work through generating ideas and connections, but then takes this one step further by planning his shots (camera type, lighting, angle, sequencing etc.) according to the nodes on his developing, evolving, project-based mind maps. In a way, this allows a lot of technical planning (to be on location, to select film equipment, etc.) without the creative constraint of a complete storyboard. His process, using mind maps this way, retains a flexibility, and enables resonances and surprises to illuminate organically. In a way, it’s as if he provides the operational support for the art, image, and beauty to reveal itself through the making.
Process Peace 