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Touchstones and Vision, Obsession and Getting it Right

Clearwater Lake, Manitoba (Near the pumphouse)

I've heard it said by very well-known and published authors (being published does not mean you are well-known, and I imagine the reverse is also true) that place cannot be a character in a story.
Maybe not, maybe so, but I know that place (an airport community on a lake in Northern Manitoba) is so important to my story that I am now stuck on the fact that I need certain events to occur in a specific setting...the problem is, I can't make the action work. So I have really awkward sequences and scenes where my characters act in an unlikely fashion just so they can end up WHERE I need them to be. It's like literary contortionism. Light on the literary.

So when I'm stuck, I go to my "story box" and pull out some touchtones and it seems to focus me.  The first year I worked with Peter O. at the Fernie Writers' Conference, he was all hepped up on Twyla Tharp, the American choreographer. When she gets an idea (for example, Movin' Up, her Billy Joel show) she takes everything that speaks to her, obsesses her, and throws it in a box.  Ticket stubs, pictures, info on the Vietnam War, Billy Joel's music... Then she drags it out and sifts through it, looking for inspiration.

So of course, I came home and started a box. I have thrown a lot of "stuff" in there over the past year and a half. I have a bottle of purple sand,

Purple Sand

My old driveway-house was to the left

some old pictures from when I lived in The Pas in the 80's, some recent pictures of the street where the houses used to be. I have a copy of a government report on the murder of Helen Betty Osborne, a First Nations girl murdered up there in 1970. Printouts of airplane info, ATV info and Churchill train schedules. The book Night Spirits about the relocation of the Dene people to Churchill. Instructions for making Tamarack decoys.

 Pictures of the lake in different moods.

Pioneer Bay (both)

 Quotes I like. A list of songs each character likes, both from their past and their present. Also from their future!  Notes from people who have critiqued-FWC groups, Peter, Angie, Marcelo. A picture of the whiteboarding my writing group did when I was still trying to organize into short stories...Letters from SH.



My story has changed, become more distilled and directed, but at the same time, it's more nebulous and unfocussed. This box of stuff feeds the obsession I have with this story about place. Maybe that's why the narrative has come in fits and starts. Now I just need to channel it into a coherent vision and get it right. I can go days with my head down, working away, then look up and find that it's not working.

Which is where I am today. It's what I'm avoiding. Back to the box...
klm

Special thanks to Darcie this week for pulling me back from the edge... ;-)

Song of the Week - Fair by Remy Zero ... just for the line "Tonight, the sun shall see its light"
Book of the Week - (agh who has time to read) Let's just pick the Marilyn Bower issue of Prairie Fire.

Just breathe...out

For my writerly and creative friends...

Empty buckets are on my mind, lately, thanks to Darcie's blog post about writers needing to "fill their buckets"...

I have used the analogy with a few friends of mine (not all of them writers-we all need our buckets filled). Maybe some writers just do the kind of navel-gazing that makes us more aware of the need. Many people know something is missing and are not sure how to find it.

To follow through with the bucket idea-if you need to fill it up to give you the life and experience that you crave, that you need, to exist, to write, then it stands to reason that the writer's creativity comes in the process of emptying that bucket (Sometimes through a slow leak, sometimes through a gushing gash).

This also comes up in the expressions we use when we write-"tear my hair out" is one I hear quite often. I've been known to say "I bled out all over the page", or, on tough days, that my story is being "ripped from me". That feeling of being emptied, drained, is obviously fairly universal. I know sometimes I finish a day of writing feeling like I've run a half-marathon (I've never run a full, but I know how I felt after the half.)

Anyway, it probably says too much about me that I have thought so much about it. But this morning as I did my wii yoga, I realized that taking a breath is a lot like filling the bucket.

It seems obvious, that taking a breath would fill you with energy and life, with oxygen. With inspiration. Giving you what you absolutely need, giving you something to draw on. "Take a deep breath" we tell people who are upset. But they can't hold it, they need to breathe out to find comfort.

Exhalation, is not just our bodies getting rid of CO2 and clearing the crud.

In the yoga I do, we exhale on the stretch; in weightlifting, on the lift-on the toughest part of the movement. In boxing, you blow out on the punch. In labour, it's not the inhalation that helps with the pain, it's the (many) exhalations. Breathing out lets us push forward, improve, break through.

That's where the strength comes from-breathing out. Which you cannot do without breathing in. We are conditioned to see only breathing in as the renewal, as starting over-but maybe that's just because you need to do that to find the power you look for.

Without the inhalation (aspiration, in French, interestingly) there is, literally, nothing.

Fill the bucket.

Breathe.

Write.

Book of the Week: No Fixed Address - Aritha van Herk

Song of the Week: Slower Dear - Bob Schneider

Gifts

Gifts

My husband bought me a jewelry box for Christmas this year, even though we'd made a deal not to get anything for each other. It's a huge monstrosity, and I never thought I would even come close to filling it.

This morning, during one of my few and far between fits of organization, I decided to gather all my bits and pieces of gold and silver and fill up the box...

While going through the junk drawer in my dresser (my writers' group would love this, after the last writing assignment I gave them-what's in your character's junk drawer?) I found an old Valentine card from my husband (another thing we agreed not to give...). I knew immediately it was from the year after my daughter was born-she would have been almost a year old.

The card originally read "I'm so glad you're a part of my life" and T. had scratched out the "I" and "my" and replaced them with "We" and "our".

I had to stop, because it brought home how hard he tried to hold things together the year after my daughter was born and I went through such terrible depression. It seemed he took every opportunity to get me to engage, to see us as a unit. He took over everything-cooking, cleaning, child care, making sure obligations with family and friends were met.

It also made me aware of just how much that time is still a part of me, of my sub-conscious. My consciousness. It's still part of my story, and I tell it the way some girls tell their bad-boyfriend stories to their new loves. If you are going to be my friend, you need to know just how crazy I can be. It came out recently(as a bit of an off-hand joke-I can do that now) , at a party where I met a mom who some would say is a bit of a local celebrity. Her reaction? "Well, you better never let your daughter know you felt that way."

I think it was meant as a joke, but maybe not.

So I thought about that as I sorted through my "jewels." I never really thought I had much, but I have some really beautiful pieces:

• The vintage locket my grandma sent me through Canada Post (!) complete with tiny pictures of her and my grandpa.
• The glass pendant I bought in N. Manitoba this year-the one with the two blues that remind me of the lake I write about
• The charm bracelet I received when I was 5.
• The sapphire ring T's granny gave me twenty years ago-the one her dad bought her mom with the money he earned in the trenches of WW1.
• My Italian charm bracelet with all the goofy charms my kids have given me - best mom, a Tweety Bird for my daughter, a rainbow for my son. Polar bears, and angels.
• The silver Celtic knot my friend Peggy bought me.
• The angel pin T's dad always wore on his shirt to remind him of T's mom.
• The emerald-green dragonfly choker T bought me a year after he gave me that Valentine. (I guess to celebrate getting better?)

So, gifts. And depression. Well.

I remember my doctor, trying to convince me that meds were the answer, told me that some of her post-partum patients said that depression was like seeing things in black and white, then medication helped them see in colour again. I thought that was a pretty good metaphor, for a science major.

But for me, it was more like I was missing only one colour. So things were just a half-twist from normal. It wasn't that all colour was gone, just one was. Like all the blue would be missing, or all the red. I always knew I was messed up, and I knew there was an answer, I just didn't know how to make that one colour come back. Seemed harder, somehow.

So I took these two pics, over two years apart of Lizard Creek at Mount Fernie Provincial Park.

And it made me think of that black and white thing.

Take a look.

Same creek. Different perspective. Both are actually in colour, but you can't tell, because all that lush green is dormant. So maybe depression is more than black and white. Maybe it is winter. And "hang in there, buddy, summer will come!"

There's something to this, and I think after 5 years of being called to write about that time, I may be ready to start. I am sure it will make its way into my fiction eventually, but what is percolating now is non-fiction, for sure. I just need to settle on my angle.

And when it is done, it will be something I can show my daughter, because there will always be winters to get through. And maybe part of it is seeing the beauty in winter, but I think knowing that the change of season will come is important, too.

And the gifts, the jewels in my life are a good place to start. I appreciate the gift my daughter is. She is even more precious for the rough start we had together.

You don't know what you have until you untangle it from the costume jewelry, or until you dig it out from a junk drawer. Or until the snow melts and the creek starts flowing again.

Song of the Week-When it Don't Come Easy - Patty Griffin

Book of the Week- A novella, actually- Translations of April by Heighton. (Found in On Earth as it Is)

Keep a Weather Eye...

on the Horizon....

Things that I wish I were a good enough writer to describe...

- The exact colour of Clearwater Lake the first time you see it...you never forget.

- The smell of a Regina mid-winter date, snow-filled streets, a stroll around Mackenzie Art Gallery (no, I mean around the building, outside, on the stairs and ramps), Phantom of the Opera posters, and oh my little Honda makes it through the drifts! (The ice is thin, come on dive in...Sarah McLachlan-that makes 4 Mc/Macs)

- The weight of air on skin-while sitting in the Third Beach sand, reading Steven Heighton (The Ecstasy of Skeptics, indeed!) leaning on a giant log, watching surfers on English Bay.

- The feeling the sound of Billie Joe Armstrong's voice evokes - but only on certain songs- Holiday/Blvd of Broken Dreams combo, 21 Guns, Working Class Hero, When I Come Around, Longview...(hmmm mostly the ones where he says fuck, I see)

- The coolness of Captain Jack...Why is the rum always gone?

- ah, love...

- quiet loveliness of a handsome man, in jeans, bare feet in flipflops, almost-uniform blue shirt, sideways on a bench, leaning against the raw brick at Freshies', reading the Herald, longish blond hair in a little ponytail, strands escaping to caress fair cheekbones-you will see him somewhere, in a story, sometime.

-The fast, pukey sensation of driving Corvettes and Ferraris without ever leaving the room...

-The embrace of gratitude for good friends...

-The emptiness that cradles my inability to paint these pictures for you, in three-dimensions, with full colour and scent, sound...tastes.

"I walk a lonely road..."

K

Book Choice-Kiss the Joy as it Flies - Sheree Fitch

Song- 40Dogs by Bob Schneider

Who Says You Can't Go Home

Bon Jovi says you can, but what happens when the home you had is not there?

I headed up to The Pas, in Northern Manitoba this summer to see the place where I lived for two years. It is a place that made an impression on me, which seems to be quite beyond my mom. I can't tell you the number of times she asked why I was going back to "that place," a haven for flies (horse and black) and mosquitoes that use your arm for a runway.

The short answer is to do research for the stories I am writing, but the long answer is quite a bit more complicated.

Living up there was difficult at times...for all the reasons you would expect: I missed my friends, my grandma; it was cold; the bus ride to town everyday was brutal and boring. But it was also hard to fit in. My memory is fuzzy, but it seems to be full of the strange things my town friends would do...I couldn't seem to figure out how to step lightly.

Luckily I lived at the airport, where I did have good friends, and lots of fun. I snowmobiled, curled, cross-country skied, explored the woods and the lake to my heart's content. It seems now that I had unprecedented freedom to roam. I had boundaries, but I was rarely checked up on.

The lake is one of the most beautiful I have ever seen. It ranks right up there with Moraine Lake in Alberta. Moraine Lake is static though, calm, dark blue. Clearwater Lake changes, sometimes within seconds from a bright, calm and calming crystal blue to dark, angry indigo. It's untrustworthy in a way.

Maybe the allure didn't hit me until I heard about the now (in)famous murder of Helen Betty Osbourne. How could such a horrible, despicable event happen on the shores of such natural beauty? How could so many know what happened, who had done it,  and yet not feel they could say anything?

To look back at the place through a lens like that has to make it more interesting. And to return now, where our little airport community has been disbanded and scattered to the wind, leaving only driveways that lead nowhere, broken sidewalks strewn like tombstones and trees that delineate empty lots...well the whole thing just begs to be looked at, turned over, analyzed.

It was hard realizing this was one place I've lived that I could not show my kids. Like Hadrian's Wall in England, or Castle Campbell in Scotland, what was there, is now gone.

A gas station-convenience store-pub now stands on the loop where we waited for our bus. Bags of empty beer cans sit out behind the building on the very place my friend's dad used to park his big Suburban.

So many people say "you can never go home again." In this case, it is too true.

Book of the Week: Well, kind of on a break from reading...an old favourite- On Earth As it Is by Steven Heighton (especially Translations of April)

Song of the Week: "Til I Am Myself Again -Blue Rodeo (Or one from my The Pas Era-Jessie's Girl)

TIme are a-changing...

Timing is everything...

I have taken a leave this year to work on my writing, to try and focus on maybe earning some money through this hobby of mine. Spent a week of my summer at the Fernie Writers' Conference, working on manuscripts and learning all I could.

On the 4th day, my husband gets an email that the powers that be are selling off his department at the Big Oil Company where he works. Now we are in wait and see mode-will he lose his job? Will it be now or later?

Things are starting to move a bit on the writing front. (I have my first paid book review job and my manuscript went over pretty well at the conference. I am heading up this week to do research on my book.) Lots of forward momentum, so of course, something has to block that.

The word "opportunity" is a bit of a joke (no, it really is a joke) in our house...kind of the way a 6 year old talking about "appropriate behaviour" is a joke) It's a catchphrase, a cliche. But I guess we do have the opportunity to make some changes now. The big thing for me is uprooting my kids. Of course we can sell our house and take the money we made in the ultimate land of golden opportunity, Alberta, and head back home where we could live a pretty nice life...lots of money, lots of writing time, family...

But we kinda like it here.

So who knows what is going to happen. Even if he does get laid off, we will have time to decide. I moved a lot as a kid, so I know my kids will probably be fine (my writing instructor, Peter, would call me on that probably-first because it is a dreaded adverb-weak writing! Second, because of what it implies-that they probably WON'T be fine) but still, lots on my mind.

To be perfectly honest, not having to depend on a land-raping corporation for my livelihood might be just the thing.

As my mom always told me, be careful what you wish for.

Book of the Week: Open Arms by Marina Endicott

Song of the Week: Eat It by Weird Al Yankovic (as discovered by my kids-oh the joys of YouTube)