transition

Today is the last day of my residency. I've packed up all the papers and books, taken down the drawings my children made for my walls, found a safe place to transport the now brittle, but still red, maple leaf that I picked off the ground the first morning I was at the university after my Mother-in-law had died. I still need to wipe down the shelves and the desks, but this is it, this is then end of my time here.

No deer sightings today, but a few eager leaves have already turned and made their way to the ground. It's sunny and warm, but there is a briskness in the air that means autumn, that means school, that means new adventures.

I am incredibly grateful for my time and space here at the Centre. I hope to be back somewhat regularly for their Coffee Talks and afternoon lectures, but I know it won't be the same. Nothing ever is.

Our family is gearing up for the Saanich County Fair this weekend, which mostly means hours waiting in lines for rides, but it's a good time and my kids love to be whipped up and down and round and round. It's become tradition, ending our summer at the fair, despite this uncertain September with the teacher's strike still ongoing. This is the year of the never-ending summer.

One of my first tasks in September will be to come up with a new way to get writing done. Figure out times and spaces, but I'm looking forward to whatever that might look like. I wrote a lot during my residency, and after this break, want to get back at it.

Just for fun, this is what I wrote:
1. edited "What Can't Be Packed Away" essay for The M Word
2. wrote and edited "What I Need Is a Wife" essay for Telling Truths, Storying Motherhood
3. wrote approximately 20 new poems (most were sonnets, strangely enough)
4. wrote first draft of a novel
5. wrote notes and bits and pieces for a longer essay (eventually book length?) on death, grief, and legacy

I'd like to get back to the poetry soon, as I think I might have enough for another manuscript now. It will take a lot of crafting and editing to make it ready, but I think I'm a lot closer to it than I thought I'd be, considering Glossolalia was only published last year.

And of course, the novel. The first draft was fun and fast, but it'll be this next draft that I'll really have to work hard. I want to push up my sleeves and get dirty.

I'm going to close this down now, take my box and bags to the car, wipe down the room, and return my keys. I hope I won't cry until I'm back at the car, but I'll be wearing my sunglasses just in case.

"storytelling is intrinsic to biological time"

"This story has everything a tale should have. Sex, death, treachery, vengeance, magic, humour, warmth, wit, surprise and a happy ending. It appears to be a story against women, but leads to the appearance of one of the strongest and cleverest heroines in world literature, who triumphs because she is endlessly inventive and keeps her head. The Thousand and One Nights are stories about storytelling--without ever ceasing to be stories about love and life and death and money and food and other human necessities. Narration is as much part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood. Modernist literature tried to do away with storytelling, which it thought was vulgar, replacing it with flashbacks, epiphanies, streams of consciousness. But storytelling is intrinsic to biological time, which we cannot escape. Life, Pascal one said, is like living in a prison, from which every day fellow prisoners are taken away to be executed. We are all, like Scheherazade, under sentence of death, and we all think of our lives as narratives, with beginnings, middles and ends. Storytelling in general, and the Thousand and One Nights in particular, consoles us for endings with endless new beginnings. I finished my condensed version of the frame story with the European fairy-tale ending, 'they lived happily ever after', which is a consolatory false eternity, for no one does, except in the endless repetitions of storytelling. Stories are like genes, they keep part of us alive after the end of our story, and there is something very moving about Scheherazade entering on the happiness ever after, not at her wedding, but after 1001 tales and three children."

from "The Greatest Story Ever Told" in On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays by A.S. Byatt

doing the work

I've been writing. Like really writing. Not editing, not doing research, not answering emails or hustling or blogging. I'm on a spurt and it's been great. I'm hoping to keep my head down and the eye on the prize (a finished first draft) by the time the residency is over. If I don't get distracted, it will happen.

Strangely, I have to thank the conversation I've posted below. Out of all the many books these women have written, I've only read Elizabeth Gilbert's most recent, The Signature of All Things (which I absolutely loved). I love how strong these women are, their friendship, and how they treat writing as work and just get it done.

Now I need to read Ann Patchett and more of Elizabeth Gilbert. If you can suggest which of her fiction I should start with, I'd be grateful. (I do plan on reading her This is a Story of a Happy Marriage soon.)

If you haven't watched this conversation, please take the time to. It's inspiring and entertaining.

Words Thaw

I'm honoured to have been asked to participate in this year's Words Thaw, a symposium at UVic that is billed as an “intellectual icebreaker at the cusp of spring.”

In addition to attending events all day, I'll be sitting on the panel The Inner Life of Our Words: Writing and the Human Spirit. The copy for the event is:

Is there a relationship between poetry and the inner life? And if there is, what form or direction—or directions—does this relationship take? Can writing and reading be a useful, even insightful tool to probe the spiritual life (or lives) of the self, of another person, of a community, or even of an age? With moderator Andrew Rippin as their “guide,” poets Marita Dachsel, Tim Lilburn, and Jane Munro, each approaching the inner life of our words from a unique perspective, talk about how poetry can be a catalyst to discovering and expressing not only “what we know,” but about “what we want to know.”

I'm hoping to listen more than speak, as I'm very much looking foreword to hearing the others' thoughts on this. It's such a wide subject and I know we're going to approach it in different ways, so it should be an enlightening and exciting conversation.

As a lead up to Words Thaw, Stephanie Harrington recently produced a podcast based on a conversation we had a few weeks ago. She's clearly talented as she took my 30+ minutes of babbling and crafted it into a concise six minute podcast. You can listen to it here.

expectations

This is a picture of my desk at the Centre this morning. I've just returned from Coffee Talk (Nazis in film, banality of evil, colonialism, Wag the Dog, Downton Abbey, amongst other subjects today) and have to buckle down, git'er done. I'm doing my talk The Voice in Your Head tomorrow afternoon (if you're in Victoria, please come!) and to be honest, I'm starting to freak out.

I haven't done much planning yet, and I need to. It's a big deal this talk. I'm to present for 40 minutes and then be open to questions from the audience for another ten minutes. If you read the description, I'm to be reading from and talking about the project I'm here to create. Unfortunately, I don't have much. I don't really have anything I feel comfortable reading from just yet. So now, I've got to figure out a Plan B.

I have ideas--read from Glossolalia, talk about the creative process--and these sounded/felt good until this morning, when the panic set in. I like to do readings. I'm comfortable and confident reading from my work, especially Glossolalia, but this isn't to be a normal reading and the crowd is used to academic presentations. I feel like a failure for not having the work I had hoped to have done.

Okay, enough procrastination. Send good vibes my way. I'm off to figure this beast out.

a beginning

Today was my first full day at the CSRS, the first day that I felt in my position as Artist-in-Residence (AiR). I had hoped to have started the day with a little blogging but with my bum knee (long story short: camping, slipping, pain, swelling, ripped ligaments, knee brace, hobbling) I was slow in unpacking books, setting up my space. Just as I was to open to blogger, I heard the sweet bell that rings the community to Coffee Talk, an hour long discussion period for members of the community (and this could mean you, too, all are welcome) to come together for an hour every day. Sometimes the discussions are open, sometimes they are about a set subject, and other times, like today, they centre around visiting guests or a specific presentation.

I found my first Coffee Talk interesting. Patricia Vickers and Glyn Ramkeesoon introduced us to their methodology in working with people overcoming trauma, specifically the work they do in BC's Indigenous communities. (You can see their site here. Conversation was rich and I had many questions, but unfortunately I missed the opportunity to ask any, as I had to duck out a few minutes before the end as I was meeting a student to chat about the upcoming course I'm teaching. Yes, you read that right, I'm teaching a class at UVic this fall--Advanced Forms and Techniques in Poetry. I'm very excited and have been prepping this course pretty much the second after it was confirmed that I'd be teaching it. It's a big class in scope and size. I haven't decided whether or not I'll be blogging about the class at all or not. I guess we'll see.

My first full day as AiR felt too short. Six hours was not enough to do all I wanted to do, but oh what a gift it was to have the time and space to get things done. I can't tell you how excited I am to be part of the community at the CSRS and to start creating there.

Poetry in April

As you probably know, April is Poetry Month both here in Canada and in the U.S. For the last three years, I was heavily involved with the Edmonton Poetry Festival and because we are now in a different province, I had a much less poetry-frenzied month. While it looked like a fun time, I think I needed to miss it this year.

Instead, my BFF and I pledged to write a poem-a-day. The caveat was that the poems didn't have to be good, it was just about generating raw material. And, dear reader, we did it. A lot of my poems were mediocre at best (I wrote a love letter to my favourite brand of beer, to give you an idea), but it was exciting to be in a creative space where I didn't have an agenda. I have been working on Glossolalia in one form or another for six years now. That's a long time in the world of 1840s Mormon polygamy, let me tell you. Writing just to write, just to see what words and images arise, just for *gasp* the fun of it was incredibly liberating. I'm definitely going to do this exercise again.

So, Poetry Month 2012 for me was not the manic month it has been in the recent past, but it was very productive and fun in its own quiet way. Tell me, did you do anything poetry-wise this April?

Residency

Friends of mine bought a beautiful home on a few acres on the Sunshine Coast a couple of years ago. They are now hoping to turn a small cabin on their property into an artist's residence. If that wasn't exciting enough, next week they are hosting a round table/think-tank with artists from various disciplines to talk about what artists across the disciplines need and want in a residency.

Because my friends run The Only Animal theatre company, the invited group is a little more heavy on theatre/performance artists. I believe I'm the only one representing the literary arts.

Now, I've done two residencies which were wildly different--three weeks in East End, Saskatchewan at the Wallace Stegner House and five weeks as part of the Writing Studio at The Banff Centre. I know what I need out of a residency, but as I'm the voice for the poets/novelists/etc out there, I'd love to be able to come more prepared than simply saying what I would like. If you'd like to put your two cents in (while they're still available), please comment below. I'd love to hear what you think.

finding the path

I'm writing this from the Wallace Stegner House. I had never been to Saskatchewan before, despite my husband's strong connection to the province, and I feel very lucky to have had this opportunity. I was supposed to have been here for just over three weeks, but we left as a family part-way through for a few days and returned. Then the boys left and I've been here alone for nine days. They will arrive tonight and then we leave on Saturday. Today was my last full writing day for a while.

It has been difficult being away from the boys. When I was in Banff last May, I was surrounded by peers, so if I was sad or feeling sorry for myself, I'd leave my room and force a hug on someone or share a pitcher while bemoaning the Canucks. In Banff I was lonely, but here I've been alone. For the first time I was given a glimpse of what old age might be like. Your spouse is gone, your children live far away, and you have no more friends left. It's terrible.

The people of Eastend have been lovely, especially Ethel, the amazing woman who runs the residency program (and who is also great a catching bats!). I know there are great people and experiences everywhere and that's one of the bonuses of doing a residency. But I've decided that I won't be doing one like this for some time, not when the boys are so young. All I need is a room with door and a desk. I don't need to be in another city or province, at least not right now. If I go anywhere for an extended time, it will be with my family.

The writing, however, has been great. I think I may have finally finished the final poem in my new manuscript of poetry and I have been working on a novel. It's a novel I started before I becoming a mother, but abandoned soon after I found out I was pregnant with my first child. After the foggy years in the trenches of early motherhood, I now feel like I can go back to it, but of course I'm a very different person now than I was then. It's changed completely. Some of the characters are the same, some of the themes and settings are the same, but everything else is different. Even since I've returned to it, I've had to strip it back and restart three times. Like I told my friend Laisha, I've written over 50,000 words in the last few months, but I still haven't got past 17,000 in a draft. I'm there now and I think (knock on wood) that I have finally found the story. It feels good to know that I'm on the right path.

The Price of Me

I have a terrible habit of keeping FB open on my computer all day. I check it much too often when I have a down moment from the slog of trying to keep house and mother two young boys. I know I should turn the effing thing off and either spend those moments between laundry, cooking, dishes, diapers, refereeing and be with the boys. It's why I gave up my other "mommyblog" [gag]. And when I don't use that time with them, I should have my computer open to Word and use that time to write. Even if it's just a line, I really need to grab what time I can get.

That said, yesterday a friend posted on FB a link to an article which was based on this post which is a top ten list of things that aren’t as cheap as you think. If you don't have time to read it, scroll down to the number one item. It was both surprising to me and not. I think anyone who has spent anytime as a primary caregiver will pipe up with a 'hells ya'. It's hard, undervalued work and I find it interesting that in the statistics he used, if this work were paid, it would have been half of the world's output in 1995. Again, not that surprising. What did bristle me, however, was the label he used: women's work. The feminist in me raged telepathically to him. I'm not going to try to recreate it; I'm sure you can come up with your own. Here's a good place to start: women + work ≠ 'women's work'.

Ugh.

I go through waves of blog reading and my reading list has changed dramatically since I first discovered ye olde blogworlde. When my first son was a newborn I devoured many, many mommyblogs. I think they were my stories. Now, I only follow a few and none of them are just about parenting anymore. I grew bored of irony and cynicism or conversely the rainbows and unicorns of others' daily lives. Eventually I discovered lit blogs, specifically Canadian lit blogs. I try to keep up, but I don't. I'm always behind and gap out and consequently don't understand the private jabs and public politics. I've started reading them a little less, too. However, I recently followed links to find some new(ish)-to-me blogs that feel like home. Canadian writing mothers who aren't afraid to write about writing or babies or birthdays or books. I've mostly been lurking, but they are great. They feel like home. Have I finally found my online tribe?: Pickle Me This, Meli-Melo, and Obscure Can Lit Mama.

In my previous post, I wrote about the auction to which I had donated my poetry. The auction is now over and I'm thrilled to report that my four-pack went for a whopping $120! I still can't believe it. I had honestly thought that I'd have to get my husband to bid for it. And to top it off, it's going to someone I don't know.

A New Beginning

Well, six months sure flies by. And here we are: 2010. A new year, fresh starts, a blank page. It feels good, doesn't it? Or does it? Truthfully I'm ambivalent about the new year. There are things that happened in 2009 that I'm not ready to let go of yet and some things I wish had never happened.

Here on ATSAD, 2009 was the Year of the Writing Mother, a project I had always envisioned to run its course over the year. Although we are now in a new year and I neglected to post a word in the second half of the year, I'm not quite ready to let it go yet. I've decided to go with the Chinese calendar and let the new year begin in February. I have interviews with four fantastic writing mothers in my possession and will be doling them out between now and the Year of the Tiger.

Except it won't be the Year of the Tiger in my sliver of Blogland. 2010 is the Year of the Wife.

Over the last few years I have been working on a new collection of poetry told from the points of view of the polygamous wives of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church. I'm very close to finishing my manuscript and have started to find the wives homes in literary journals and a beautiful chapbook. I'd like to share a bit of my work with you this year as well as the work of some other very talented friends who have also explored wives in their own writings or readings. This idea is still very much in its infancy, but I'm pretty excited to see where it will go.

I hope you'll drop in occasionally to check up on me and the wives. I can't offer my standard tea with warm blueberry scones, but I hope to have some engaging discussions and writing to make the visit worth it.

Happy Poetry Month!

Yeah, I know, it's over today. Like everything, I'm coming late to the party.

It was a busy month for me, with my husband working long, long hours for the first two weeks, then a trip to Vancouver, then the Po Fest, and now I'm in Banff. To write. Alone.

I now have time (time!) to do things like enjoy the fabulous archive of over thirty poets reading at Seen Reading and I've also began to read some of the interviews with poets over at the National Post blog.

I'm also excited about diving into all the poetry books I bought over the last month. (If you're interested, you can see the list here.)

On the mom-side of life, I have been asked to contribute to a new blog for Canadian mothers. My second post, a short one about poetry for children, can be found here.

I'm now four days in to Banff, four days away from my boys. It's hard, but it has also been freeing in a way I find unsettling. I won't go into it now, but I'm sure any of you readers who are both mothers and writers can understand. Kevin will be bringing them to Banff on Mother's Day and we will be together as a family for the week.

In celebration of that day, I'm going to have a small give-away. I have briefly mentioned before that I am having a new chapbook published. If you'd like your very own copy, please leave a comment on this post and tell me something, anything to do with motherhood and writing--your favourite writing mama, a quote from one of the interviews, a poem about creativity, anything. Comments will close at midnight on Mother's Day and I'll draw the name later in the week. The chapbooks are very beautiful and are a limited edition of 100, all handsigned and numbered by moi.

Welcome!

My first full-length book of poetry, All Things Said & Done will be published this Spring by Caitlin Press. I thought this blog would be a good way to letting people know about book news and events. My publisher and I are currently working on some dates for April and I will post what is confirmed soon. As well, I'll be doing a Northern BC tour with the very beautiful and talented Gillian Wigmore this May. Again, when the dates and venues are confirmed, I'll post them here. We may even blog during the tour if I decide to bring my laptop and we can pick up some hot wireless action.

If you have any questions, or would just like to say hi, please do so. In the meantime, you can check out a couple of poems that are in the book here and here. Also, this is neither poetry nor in the book, but just another piece of published writing of mine on the web that you might enjoy. Thanks for stopping by.