Creek Paths

There was a creek beside our house, and a bit of forest, and a path. We called the whole place the creek path. It wasn’t big – razed and paved, it wouldn’t have fit more than a couple rows of townhouses  – but it could feel endless.

The trick was to find spots where the wrong things (telephone wires, the aluminium siding of Mr. Harris’s garage) did not have to be cropped out of the view. There was already so much to edit out: the looming house that was my home, the angry grandparents inside, parents gone so long they could never come back, even after they came back.

In the right spots, I could believe I was in the wilderness of children’s books, that bountiful wildness in which streams run clear and cold, foxes pass by shelters, and children can fend for themselves.

One year in university, I lived in a thicket of high-rises overlooking a plain of strip malls. In between the high-rises and the campus was a wide leafy gully through which a creek and a path meandered. I roamed around down there, my head full of the Wordsworth and Coleridge. I envied them their vast Lake District, their glades and deep glens where the eye would not have to crop out municipal signposts or hydro poles.

Then I went to Bhutan, where it was easy to step off the road and see nothing but trees and mountaintops, hear only birds and the wind in the grasses. I walked up to peaks and looked down into valleys and there was nothing I wanted to delete from the view. But there were still things to be edited out: from the south came news of uprisings, stories of imprisonment, rumours of deportation.  Ancestral voices prophesying war.

There is always something to be edited out. 

Walking in Toronto’s green ravines now, I want to erase the city from the edges of my view, silence the whine of traffic and leaf-blowers.  I always feel a small sadness when I emerge from a ravine onto a sidewalk: all creek paths end in pavement.

It’s deep-rooted, this desire to be in the woods, but maybe it’s more than nostalgia for the friendly forests of my childhood.

Maybe it’s a 10,000-year-old longing to return to our home in the wild.

More likely, it’s a most recent wish -- for the world not to be as crowded, hot, or small as it is, a wish to believe we have not ruined it, after all. 

Writing Schedules

I have four months of no teaching ahead of me, and I'm not good with unstructured time. Random research on writers' schedules has yielded the following:

Stephen King: Writes from 8:15 a.m. until just before noon every day.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Wrote from morning to night and and smoked six packs a day while working on One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Tea Obreht: Wrote The Tiger's Wife at night, getting up at 5:00 in the afternoon, writing until 2:00, then driving around in the dark.

I don't smoke or drive, so I'm gonna go with the Stephen King schedule.

***

Today in the mail: a royalty cheque, a cheque for editing an educational text, and a cheque for my son from his grandmother. I don't have to wait for my son to open his card to know which cheque is the biggest.

The reasons I write are mysterious to me, but I'm quite sure that none of them is about money.

Corrigendum

The remedy for marking-induced Repetitive Brain Injury is not, as posted on April 18, coffee. The remedy for marking-induced Repetitive Brain Injury is alcohol, taken with television, followed by sleep.

Occupational Hazards

When I am teaching, the main occupational hazard is Cement Neck, resulting from what I can only guess is a tendency to lecture with my shoulders up around my ears. Remedy: ice pack, hot water bottle, massage therapist.

When I am marking at the end of a semester, the main occupational hazards are Repetitive Brain Injury and the desire (to quote my sister) to gouge out my eyes with a grapefruit spoon. Remedy: coffee.

When I am writing, the occupational hazards are numerous and ever-changing. Below are two of the most common.

Occupational Hazard # 1: I Can’t Sit Down and Start

If I could sit down, I could start, but I am paralyzed by a powerful aversion to the chair, the desk, the laptop.  And if I overcome the aversion to the chair, it is replaced by a powerful aversion to what I’ve been writing. I don’t even want to look at it. 

Me to self: Arrgh! My eyes! The goggles do nothing!

Remedy: Pomodoro Technique. Under this method, named by inventor Francesco Cirillo after his tomato-shaped kitchen timer, you work in 25-minute spells, with 5 minute breaks in between.

Self to me: Come on. Just sit down. It’s only 25 minutes. Anyone can sit for 25 minutes.

It’s a trick, but I always fall for it.

Occupational Hazard # 2: The Sudden Sinking Feeling

This hazard is the sudden sinking feeling that _________ -- fill in the blank with whatever. 

Examples: 

• the sudden sinking feeling that I can’t really write
• the sudden sinking feeling that I forgot to pay the hydro bill and am about to be cut off
• the sudden sinking feeling that the twitch in my leg is a blood clot
• the sudden sinking feeling that I have gained eight pounds in three days and must go to the gym, immediately

Anything will do.

Yesterday, for example, I had the sudden sinking feeling that the novel I’ve been working on, about a woman who runs a speakeasy during Prohibition, is not actually the novel I should be writing.

Me to self: Oh my god. I’m writing the wrong novel.

A better novel occurred to me, about a woman who has to remake her life after her poisonous mother dies. It had all the marks of a superior novel: would not require tedious historical research, felt more uplifting, had clearer, more compelling character arc, etc.

Remedy: Close old novel file. Open blank document. Save as: New Novel.

Ah, the allure of the unwritten novel: it’s all in your head, radiating promise and perfection, ignorance and bliss. You don’t yet know what you don’t know. But the moment you lay down a few sentences, you start to see empty spaces to be mapped, arcs and tangents to be connected, brick walls to be collided with. Repeatedly. It’s going to be just as much work as the old novel, only you aren’t even close to being ready to write this one.

Self to me: Oh my god. Now you're really writing the wrong novel.

Remedy: Get up, go to kitchen. Open fridge, close fridge. Sit back down. Close New Novel file. Open old novel file. Set timer. Start.

To recap: 

Occupational Hazard # 1: I Can’t Sit Down and Start.

Remedy # 1: Sit Down and Start.

Occupational Hazard # 2: That Sudden Sinking Feeling

Remedy # 2: Ignore Sudden Sinking Feeling. Sit Back Down. Start.

Galore = Newfoundland's One Hundred Years of Solitude

Michael Crummey's Galore is a work of genius.
That is all.

End of the Year Reading

End of the year writing has not gone so well (unless "spinning my wheels" and "wrestling with phantoms" and "second-guessing every second word") can be classified as writing that is going well), but the reading has been excellent:

1.  Marina Endicott's The Little Shadows, a skillfully plotted and finely written novel about three vaudeville sisters.

Google searches after: vaudeville etymology, Buster Keaton, the Talmadge sisters, Alexander Pantages, Tin Pan Alley.

2.  Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a collection of essays about California in the 1960s. The opening of the title piece sounds eerily current:

The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-service announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers....

Except it is "the cold late spring of 1967." Has the center not been holding for 40 years?

Google searches after: Summer of Love, the Diggers, Haight-Ashbury, hippie, STP, psychoactive drug, LSD.

3.  The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson, a novel about the son and daughter of performance artists who used their children as props. Descriptions of art in fiction can be tedious, but Wilson's descriptions of the Fangs' awful pieces are utterly compelling.

Google searches after: performance art, happenings, art intervention.

4.  The History of the World in 100 Objects, by Neil Macgregor: short illustrated pieces on human artifacts, from an Olduvai Gorge chopping tool to the credit card. Perfect iPad reading.

Google searches after: too many to list. Ongoing.

Christmas Orange

I broke up with Christmas in 1989. It was my first year teaching in Bhutan, and I went to Kathmandu with another teacher over the winter break. On December 25 we ate rice and dahl and went to the Kumari Temple. The only tinsel in sight was around the picture of Ganesh in the hotel lobby. In the dusty courtyard, I sat across from an amber-eyed owl in a cage and drank chai and thought about my family gathering for Christmas dinner in Sault Ste. Marie. I was away from home for the first time. I was not sad in the least. I was in Nepal, under a banyan tree. I was in love with everything.

Years later in Bhutan, Christmas and I got back together. We had a tree and presents and dinner with a handful of resident Canadians and other expats.  I felt no religious connection to the holiday whatsoever, but December in Thimphu is cold -- the sun drops behind the mountains at four o’clock and night falls suddenly – and it was a lovely thing, in the dark heart of winter, in a remote, landlocked Himalayan kingdom, to search for canned cream to make homemade Bailey's, and then gather for a traditional Christmas feast.

I was reminded of my grandmother’s stories of Christmas in the 1930s. She said they always got new stockings, a book, a bag of hard candy, and an orange. As a child, I had been horrified by the last item, unable to understand the rarity of a Florida orange in Northern Ontario in the Depression. But in Bhutan, I got it.

In Thimphu turkey was out of the question, but roasted chicken and mashed potatoes were possible. Someone brought Swiss-made cheese and Red Panda beer from central Bhutan; someone else made shortbread cookies. There was French wine from the Duty Free, and oranges from Southern Bhutan. There was even (alas) fruitcake.

When I returned to Canada with my five-year-old son, we continued to celebrate Christmas, but the stores swollen with merchandise made me queasy, and Boxing Day just seemed like a clarion call for the Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Now, Christmas and I are amicably divorced. I look forward to the season as a time of rest at the end of term, a chance to sleep in, read and write.  I put up some lights. I buy some presents. I have dinner with whatever family member I am visiting. But I never feel much of anything for the day itself, except relief when the swelling of everything goes down, and yesterday, as I stood in the grocery store listening to a soulful rendition of “What Child Is This,” I wondered why this was. A lot of unreligious people still manage to love and look forward to Christmas. I thought about the warmth of a feast in the cold dark of winter, and the pleasure of anticipation, the longing for things you could only get once a year. I wanted to be moved by that warmth and anticipation, but I was standing amid towering tins of shortbread and overflowing bins of cheese and crates of oranges, all of which I could buy with equal ease in July.

It’s hard to have a feast in a culture of excess.