Author: carin

stars, eggs, editors, and other bright lights

~ carin ~ 14 Comments

Must be the way the stars are lined up. Or something. February’s darkness and promise of light? The way the snow crunched under my boots this morning? A perfectly poached egg?

Whatever it is, I’m full of the joys today.

Could be that I’ve begun serious revisions on the ms with the help of a freelance editor—whose help I should have enlisted moons ago. But one has to be ready, there’s marinating time, other things to be written and (thank god) published in the interim. Other games to play.

‘Games’ as in both politics and pure fun. The first is a given, everyone’s up to their necks in that, but the second, the play, the lightheartedness that allows for pleasure in the ‘process’—that sometimes gets overlooked, shoved aside for later. And when later never comes Jack turns into such a cranky pain in the butt.

And yes, I know, I know, the sky is falling over publishing, and true, the industry may not be perfect and the work may sometimes feel like dancing in cement and no one understands us or treats us with respect…wah wah… but jeezuz, would you really rather be doing anything else?  

Here’s what I’m saying: there’s altogether too much grumbling out there.

My ears and eyes hurt from it. I’m thirsty for positive thinking. Maybe we could look at the problems as opportunity?? A new world to embrace, even be enthusiastic about, rather than cynical and bitchy. Some very novel things happening on this front, as revealed over at Book Madam.  More of that please. Constructive action, not whinging, is what we need.

Let’s talk about what works, celebrate the good stuff—because it’s happening out there. Just maybe not to the naysayers. Or not at the moment. Or maybe it’s happening and they’re just not seeing it because they want what the other kids have. Wah.

So much is perspective and, granted, on another day in another mood, I might not be writing any of this. But today I’m feeling (annoyingly?) perky.

Truth is much of my current perky joyful positivity has to do with good news received by two writerly friends in the space of just a few months. 

No one is more surprised at how their success has added a zing to my own spirits.

The first is Steven Mayoff, whom I met at a workshop a few years ago on the beautiful shores of PEI and whose short story collection Fatted Calf Blues was not only short listed for the ReLit Award, but went on to win the PEI Book Award. The second, a former Humber classmate, Darcie Friesen Hossack, whose (also short story collection) Mennonites Don’t Dance has just been short listed for the Commonwealth Prize.

Egad. I should be knotted up with envy and bitterness, no? Both Darcie and I had work nominated for the 2009 Journey Prize, neither of us made the cut. She went on to make a book. I’m still revising. I should be asking myself: why am I still revising? But oddly, I’m euphoric rather than frustrated. Could be symptoms of a mania, but actually, I think it’s more honest to god joy that maybe the sky isn’t falling. That good things— yes they do!—still happen.

The bonus is that when they happen to really good people, it’s impossible not to be thrilled.

And revelling in the success of others, it seems, is not only good for the soul, but for the writing. An inspiration and a happy reminder that anything is always possible.

As for me, sir, I’ll take my pleasure anyplace I can…

~

scene(s) at minus twenty

~ carin ~ 3 Comments

A ginger-haired guy with a wild beard, wearing a blue plaid lumberjacket, black toque not covering his ears, grey backpack, sneakers, riding a green bike. Surely to god he must have gloves, but I don’t notice. I just sit there at the red light watching, thinking he must be nuts— why ride in sub zero?  Then later I see a guy in a grey hoodie with something white and thermal looking underneath, also on a bike, and I think: hmm, maybe there’s something in this.

—A mouse runs across the front porch. A rare thing in winter and I wonder why this one has ventured from its nest—a nest I picture from some childhood book as being pink and pillowy, stitched together from nibbled bits of towel left outside in summer and filled with sparrow feathers, dust and mop fluff. Must have run out of cheese. There’s no other reasonto leave such a nest.

—A dog, a kind of long limbed beagle, gallops unleashed down the sidewalk holding a quart container of chocolate milk in its mouth. I can’t tell if it’s full or empty or frozen. It doesn’t seem to matter.

—Outside the library a mother pulls two toddlers in a wagon with one hand while with the other she holds onto a child in a lemon coloured snowsuit. She lifts each in turn into a minivan, straps them into seats, then hoists the wagon through the back door. The wind blows hair all around her face and her cheeks are bright red. She isn’t wearing gloves. You can’t fasten tiny people into buckles and straps with gloves.

—At the nursing home I see the woman I always see who visits her mum the same time I visit mine. She’s often carrying a basket of wet laundry, which she once told me she takes home to hang on the line, to give it that fresh scent, the kind of smell nursing homes tend to run short on. But it’s minus twenty today so as we pass I say: You’re not going to hang that outside are you?

And she says: Of course I am. I’m from Saskatchewan. 

 

sunday things

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Lazy morning, Jake The Cat curled up in bed beside me, washing his face and both of us listening through sunny open window to birdsong and neighbours chatting.

Peter delivering a pot of tea.

A new book to read, begins like this:

“Saturday night, midwinter. The farmhouse has been dark for hours and the crew has all gone home. We light a fire and open two bottles of our friend Brian’s homemade beer, and as I wash up the milking things Mark begins to cook for me, a farmer’s expression of intimacy…. Humming, he rummages through the fridge and comes out with a pint of rich, gelatinous chicken stock and a pomegranate, the latter a gift from my friend Amelia, who brought it up from New York City.

“…. The steak he has broiled medium rare and sliced thin across the grain and drizzled with a red wine reduction. There is a mix of leek, carrot, and kale, sautéed in butter and seasoned with juniper berries, and next to this, vibrating with colour, a tiny pile of this year’s ruby sauerkraut, made from purple cabbages. We are out of bread, but he found a little ball of pastry dough in the fridge, left over from making a pie, and he rolled it out and cut it in triangles and cooked it in a hot skillet, and voila, biscuits. But the unlikely star of the plate is the radish….The variety is called Masato Rose. Creamy white with shades of green on the outside, and bright pink on the inside, they are about the size of an apple, and, when you cut them, they look like miniature watermelons. These are a favourite appetizer served raw with a little sprinkling of salt. They look so fruitlike the biting taste is always a surprise, a disagreement between the eye and the palate. Tonight, Mark braised them in stock, which hardly dimmed their brilliant colour but mellowed out their flavour. He added a dash of maple syrup and balsamic vinegar, and at the end tossed in a handful of the tangy pomegranate seeds, the heat bursting some and leaving others whole to amuse the tongue. This is why I love my husband: given these opposites to work with, th earthiest of roots and the most exotic of fruits, he sees harmony, not discord.”

—from The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love, by Kristin Kimball (Simon & Schuster, 2010)

~

remnants

~ carin ~ 1 Comment

Until last year I had a whole cupboard full of fabric, bits of things from the sewing I used to do—couldn’t bear to part with any of it because, oh I don’t know, maybe my passion for making culottes and drapery would re-ignite at any moment?? Not likely. Apart from the occasional pillow slip (and then only if I happen to find really great fabric) I leave the sewing to my newest best friend, a tailor named Pam.
So it was easy letting it all go—everything, that is, but one bolt of white damask I’d salvaged when cleaning out my mother’s house a few years ago. She’d bought it when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was still living at home; I recall chatter (arguments?) between her and my dad about the price, the quality, was she nuts? It was the only time I remember her buying something non-essential. I knew from the start this wasn’t just fabric.

She made a round tablecloth for her kitchen table and, years later, when I had a place of my own, a small square one for me. Despite its supposed exquisiteness, I didn’t like it much… but what could I do? It was The Damask, the crown jewels of our family. I thanked her and dragged it around to every place I lived.

For her part, that was all she did with it. The rest, metres and metres, was kept tucked away for—as it turned out—ever. Price tag still in place ($47.50). Too precious to use. An act of insanity that I realize I’ve perpetuated. At least once a year I consider pitching it but have never been able to get past its mythology. Or maybe it was how hard she fought to defend her right to buy it. Those were the days when women had to defend such things.

In any case, this year I’m on a serious de-cluttering mission, which includes not only chucking the stuff that’s easy but the stuff that’s hard. 

The Damask must go.

Because it’s not just a bolt of fabric, it’s a nefarious force attracting other remnants—it’s already attracted a small collection of fabric ends from a vest I had Pam make for Peter this Christmas (scraps I’ve kept in case he burns a hole in it with a cigarette even though he doesn’t smoke and even though he has a closet full of clothes that have never been burned by any object, lit or otherwise).

Okay. The vest remnants I’ll pitch.

As for the other—

Last year my mother had a stroke and now sleeps 24 hours a day in a nursing home, in and out of dementia, past giving a flying fig about The Damask or anything else. Perfect time to get rid of it—who would care?

Oddly… me, as it turns out.

True, I don’t want it in its lifelong form: neatly folded and yellowing, an irritant being shuffled from one place to the next. Nor do I need another tablecloth. But my perpetually sleeping mother—well, it suddenly occurs to me that she could do with a crisp new duvet.

In a damask cover of exceptional quality.

~

this is not a review: close to spider man, by ivan e. coyote

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Somewhere in Ivan E. Coyote’s collection Close to Spider Man ( 2000, Arsenal Pulp) Coyote describes the Yukon sun shining bright but ‘heatlessly’ and then wonders if that’s even a word. Not that it matters because the way it’s presented, it becomes one and it sticks and the next day when I’m skiing on a bone chilling morning in the sunshine of a blue blue sky, I think how very heartlessly  it shines. And I know that every time I encounter that particular kind of day I’ll remember Coyote’s reference and even though it was to a northern sun, specifically, the way it was presented it, it applies, generally, to all suns.

Coyote does this a lot. And not just with large objects in the solar system, but with teensy details right here on terra firma where stories cover pretty general ground—childhood, family, neighbourhood, school, first love, friends, being misunderstood. And while these subjects resonate universally, they’re actually specific to a girl growing up in a small northern community, with the mind, body, spirit, soul, of not merely a girl, but also a boy.

None of which, in the reading, ever feels strange. The beauty of Coyote’s writing is its straight-from-the-hip truth, which over and over again takes the specific and makes it general so that the reader forgets there are differences. At least long enough to see the similarities.

One beautiful scene has Coyote giving the eulogy for a beloved grandparent. When the attending priest mistakes ‘her’ for a guy and suggests s/he join the priesthood, Coyote is tempted to straighten him out with a one-liner but opts instead to respect the dead grandmother’s high opinion of the church and thank him for the compliment.

The circumstances may be unique and the situations unusual, but at the heart of everything, Coyote manages to remind us, we’re all dealing with the same basic stuff: kindness, respect, compassion, decency.

Or their opposites.

In No Bikini  Coyote accidentally passes for a little boy at swimming class by wearing only a bikini bottom—and for purely practical reasons keeps up the charade because… “It was easier not to be afraid of things, like diving boards and cannonballs and backstrokes, when nobody expected you to be afraid.”

In Three Left Turns  Coyote is six years old when a little girl, thinking Coyote is a boy, wants to kiss. Coyote wants to kiss the girl back but feels it’s wrong unless Coyote admits that she’s not a boy. It doesn’t end well—all the more heartbreaking when you think a six year old is already aware of society’s narrow (and punishing) rules on who to love.

Coyote, whose work includes five story collections and a recent novel, self describes as a kitchen table story-teller. I love the quality of “ordinary” in that. That even though the stories… about gender roles, how they develop, how judgments are passed, and the pressures we put on one another, knowingly or not, seem directed at an element of society that is seen as ‘different’, we soon recognize ourselves in the difference.

The hope is that maybe from there we can begin to see the similarities.

 

 

perhaps special powers

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“My friend Cody, the legendary creature with painted nails and black ringlets that reach halfway down his back. It is rumoured that he is a hermaphrodite, that he possesses extra plumbing, perhaps special powers. I have never asked him, because it is none of my business, and Cody has never inquired about the bulge in my own pants. He is a creature of immense grace and beauty, and that is all I need to know.

“I take Frances into the cafe where Cody works, to introduce them to each other with all the pomp and circumstances reqiured when in the presence of royalty.

“”Cody, I’d like you to meet my godson, Frances. Frances, this is Cody.”

“But Frances doesn’t acknowledge Cody, or his ringlets, or his fingernails at all. Something else more pressing has caught his attention. He reaches his small hand up to caress the fabric of Cody’s silver velvet shirt, tight and shimmering over his slender torso. Frances smiles in wonder to himself and his mother places her hand on my shoulder, and laughs like a leprechaun.

“”That’s my boy,” she says, and for a second I am unsure whether she is referring to Frances, Cody, or myself, but it doesn’t matter, because we are all where we belong. Home.””

—from ‘Red Sock Circle Dance’, from the collection Close to Spider Man, by Ivan E. Coyote.

art lesson

~ carin ~ 3 Comments

In a recent round of POCALOGS to my young niece, I sent a postcard of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers—with a question, which, if answered correctly would win her a prize.

The question was: what is an unusual or interesting fact about the artist?

Her answer (painstakingly googled no doubt) came by email.

his name is vincent van gough and interesting facts about him are
He Suffered from Schizophrenia and Other Mental Health Problems.

Then a minute later, another email—

and he only had one ear.