I want to write fiction but it keeps getting interrupted by reality

 I want to write a fiction but it keeps getting interrupted by reality (a fictional reconstruction of reality) a few short essays in which I write about my life as it has been and as it is and maybe even how it shall be

Also known as my living memoir in which I write about today and attempt to make a connection to something from the past.

All my life I have tried to write. I’ve written terrible fiction and I’ve written mediocre poetry. Nothing ever seems to launch beyond the writing of it, and I have destroyed more than what remains.

This is what I have now; I have Google Docs. I have voice to text. And despite my previous “failures“ of writing, I still have the desire to write, to communicate, to record. There’s nothing I can do to stop that drive to write down to express and so I’m giving this a try.

Dedicated to Enheduanna, the mother of authorship

I read about the idea of contributory lineage in Sophus Helle’s book Enheduana. Helle describes the process of the creation of an author’s image as the collective contributions of the authors, editors, singers, and scribes who transmit and transform the work. Helle writes about translator Ranjit Hoskote, who refers to this process, referencing the poet Lal Ded, as contributory lineage, in which a writer “emerges from a textual tradition that she played only one part in creating” (Enheduana, 133), and Helle adds to Hoskote’s concept of contributory lineage when he adds that readers “are part of this process…” (133). 

February 1, 2026

It is, as the heading above notes, February 1, 2026. Yesterday I turned 72; today it is full moon. The paragraph immediately above about contributory lineage I wrote maybe two or three years ago. As I return to this document now I’m thinking about this idea of the contributory lineage in which a writer emerges from a textual tradition that she played only one part in creating; the paragraph goes on to say that readers are part of the process of contributory lineage.

As a result I think it’s appropriate that I am experimenting with this idea of a living memoir, that instead of relying on “editors and singers and scribes”, I’m creating in this raw format, my own memoir complete with flaws and outright mistakes and directly to you from my often hesitant and awkward voice. I have largely given up typing and have moved over to using my voice to text. Since the early days of voice to text things have changed, and the number of errors that are generated are much less; I do have to go back and edit what I’ve transcribed.

So while this may sound no different to you than any other kind of writing, I am asking you to follow along while I create this experiment in writing and communicating. For me, the experiment is to connect any present moment that may appeal to me to some event from the past. Maybe not even an event. Memory, person, storm, water, air, emotion.

What part any reader may play to my contributory lineage remains to be discovered.

Lal Ded, also known as Lalleshwari, was a Kashmiri mystic (1390-1392), the creator of vatsun poetry, meaning speech, and her writing among the early compositions in the Kashmiri language. 

Here is a link to some of her poems: https://medium.com/sanatana-dharma/the-poems-of-lal-ded-69d57d1cede9

In his introduction to The Complete Poems of Enheduana the World's First Author, Sophus Helle suggests that “history can make the present strange”, and that “authorship is not a fixed feature of tales and texts, but a practice that arose at a specific moment in time” (xiii). 

And so I need to ask: which textual tradition am I emerging from?

I can’t put this off any longer. More accurately, I have put this away, this being the act of writing. You must be a writer, those taller people said to me when I was small of stature and mind. That is what I did, late at night and early in the morning, when the world around me had become withdrawn and incomprehensible. No one, it seemed, was capable of explaining to me those changes, and so I was left to explain them to myself. This, I have come to understand, is the birth of the artist, the unfortunate soul whose childhood is besmirched by some unspeakable tragedy which leads to fractured relationships untainted by truth-telling. When the world within the home becomes unspeakable, the child attempts to speak. When reality is shrouded in mystery, fiction demystifies.

I used to write, all the time, and recently, after a major move and downsizing, I ripped all the pages out of my  journals, separating the covers from the decades of frenzied scratching. In one box not far from where I now sit, are the torn out pages, representing four decades of private writing, mostly poetry and fiction and random aphorisms. In another room, even closer to where I sit, is a two foot high pile of journal covers, scarred by the rending of their contents, and varied in the messages they once promised, each cover representative of a mood I was in when I bought the journal, or the character of the person who gifted me the journal. 

With the pages of handwritten poetry and prose in one room, and the pile of covers in the other, I find myself caught in the middle. My plan is to burn the pages and keep the journal covers. But why would I do that, I ask myself, as I lie in my newly acquired bed, the outline of the journal covers shadowed by the night. Why would I not also burn the covers? 

About a decade ago, I wandered listless through the home I shared with my husband. Not just once, but I would find myself at the duskings of many days wandering from room to room, looking for something to do. There was nothing to do. None of the books on the shelves beckoned me, my desk did not encourage me to sit and write. I had not written for several years; this did not startle me, but it did, finally, lead me to question the one assumption I had held about myself since I was a child, that I am a writer. And, at that time, a writer who was not writing. 

I recall the exact moment that it occurred to me to pretend that I was not a writer. I don’t recall the day, or month, or even year that that happened. But I do recall the experience of my inner voice saying to me, in pretty much these exact words: What if, Anne, what if you are not a writer? What if your way to create is something other than writing? 

My inner voice was not usually in the habit of initiating conversations, but was rather a ready participant in most things that I chose to introduce. I would ask it questions, most of which began with the phrase “what do you think about X”, or “do you think I should”. So I was startled that moment when it reached out from its deepest Platonic Form and led my thinking to where I would not have taken it on my own. I think I was wearing a grey housecoat, a synthetic thing that I had bought from Costco and which fell close to my feet. I remember stopping the wandering through the rooms of my home and feeling a combination of excitement and relief. What if, I thought in response, what if I am not actually a writer, and not a writer who is not writing, but if I am some other sort of artist who is not engaging in that art. And that I am not engaging in the creation of that art because I have not yet started. What would that art be, I further asked myself, if it is not writing? 

It might have been that moment when the writerly manifestation of my Platonic Form self shrivelled away, leaving room for some other, more legitimate form of expression to arise from the realm where the creative urge floats, waiting for the opportunity to be released. If it was not exactly that moment, it was at least close to that time when I stopped telling myself I was a writer who was not writing, and began telling myself that I was a creator who had not yet found their form of expression. 

February 1, 2026

And so a few years after the wanderings, I found myself retired from work and at age 66, going to art school. I completed all the required courses for my two year diploma over five years, and although I didn’t get awarded my diploma because I refuse to show proof  of my required English courses, having taught English at that college for 25 years before becoming a student, I did go on to apply to do an MFA at Emily Carr. 

I was accepted. I start in the fall of 2026.

“Do you really need to ask?” 

“You want me to write about something that has the title of “I want to write fiction but it keeps getting interrupted by reality”?

“Exactly.”

This morning my usual routine is interrupted by having to write this. I have an 8:30 am ceramics class. I usually eat a high fibre fruit-filled oatmeal breakfast. This morning I can’t bear the thought of oatmeal, so I have heated up a bowl of the borscht that I made two days ago (a massive batch of Ukrainian Borscht, a recipe chosen from the internet in recognition of the war and in partial apology for the Canadian government’s recent blunder of inviting a Ukrainian Nazi collaborator to a dinner honouring the visiting President Zelinskyy). But I can barely eat the borscht because of some deeply embedded sense of what is “right” and what is BREAKFAST.

Fast forward to October 5, 2023. Last night. I could not sleep. I kept hearing that voice, the one I hadn’t heard for fifteen years, the one who used to urgently prod me awake, or accompany me on walks, narrating my thoughts back to me, suggesting that I should be writing them down. After suggesting fifteen years ago that perhaps I was not a writer who was not writing, thereby leading me on a quest for discover just what kind of creative I truly am, that voice receded for those fifteen years, and when I reached into the Platonic Realm for some help from the pure form of Anne, I was greeted by other manifestations, ones that were much more gracious and helpful and encouraging. Yeah, one of them would say, you don’t have to be a writer. You can do other stuff. Why don’t you find out what it means to live your whole life creatively? What does it mean to make every decision, every move, based on whether that decision contributes to a creative life? And ever the obedient imperfect manifestation of the perfect form, I tried to answer those questions.

But last night the writer’s voice returned, saying to me “I want to write fiction but it keeps getting interrupted by reality”. And I lay there, in dialogue with this old friend for a few hours, and, although I knew who it was and what it wanted, I asked “what do you want?”

Is that it is wrong to eat borscht for breakfast? The thought is interfering with my ability to enjoy the borscht, a thick combination of carrot, beet, potato, cabbage, onion, garlic, and crumbled sausage. Surely this is a healthy start to the day? Surely I will not suffer for not having eaten my oatmeal?  I am now going to be late for my class, but how can I not respond to the voice that awakened me several times through the night; how can I not welcome the return of the friend who I thought had walked out of my life forever?

WHY WOULD I NOT ALSO BURN THE COVERS?

With the pages gone, the covers suggest new possibilities. I can rewrite everything; I remember none of it, so the rewriting is the newly written. I won’t even know if I’m writing the same things again. The covers, ramshackle on the top of my dresser, represent renewal.

THE DETESTATION OF FICTION

It has been years since I’ve been able to successfully read fiction. That has been a disappointment to me, because I began my life by consuming fiction as efficiently as sharks eat krill. I could not get enough story. I craved story and followed up the completion of one fiction by immediately beginning another. My love of reading story was matched by my love of writing story, and as I recall, each story I read inspired me to write one of my own.If I had no story, I would merely write words, turquoise ink spilling across the page from my fountain pens, the crafting of each letter a sensory pleasure, the sense of creation.

These days, if I pick up a novel or short story and it sounds too much as if it is a story trying to be told, I put it down, patiently closing the cover and curious about why I become so infuriated if I perceive the presence of an author. I want to plead with the writer to stop making up things, and truth, I think, is enough of a story itself without having to make things up. I don’t know why I feel this way. But story agitates me. I know this agitation is not about stories, or story-telling, but that it is about me. I have to ask myself why I become so angry if the storiness of story becomes so apparent that as a reader I know that I am reading a story, and that that story is not true. What has happened to me? 

February 1, 2026

Now, I think, how ironic that as a visual artist, I feel that my art must be telling a story. There must be a narrative. The narrative must feel like it has time in it that there’s some movement; when I look at art I am looking for that narrative movement, some sense of a story beyond the artefact itself. In my own attempts at art, I feel as if the story I am telling is somehow true, if not factually true, it is a truth. I like to have figures in my art, or in the case of sculpture, I like the sculpture to be a figure of some kind, a living being. But not just for the sake of it being a living being but a living being expressing something about being itself. I am creating fictional characters in visual art to express fact. I cannot do the same in writing. I tried for so many years to do this in writing to create fictional characters and scenarios to say what I felt I had to say. But it took too many words and always felt as if I was never getting anywhere, that I was not getting any closer to saying what I had to say.

I think part of that experience was that I was trying to write about what cannot be expressed in words. How do you write about the ineffable? Better, I find, to express it in images, in lines, in colors.

LIVING IN THE LIMINAL SPACE BETWEEN FICTION AND FACT

There have been times in my life, in my working life, when I have heard people explain things. In their explanations, they begin with facts, and at a certain point, they slide into fiction. Fiction appears to be used to fill in the gaps where fact breaks down. Fiction is the lie. Fiction is the glue that binds together facts that do not otherwise bind. I love a good story until the story is used in this way, to connect facts. This is a dishonest use of fiction. The obverse does not appear to be dishonest. That is to say, fiction requires fact in order to be comprehensible. But then when fiction uses fact, I wonder, why fictionalize fact when fact will do? This is a partial answer to why I cannot read fiction. 

But I can. I can read fiction. I last month read a novel by Amos Oz, a brilliant novel entitled Judas, in which the main character Schmuel Ash is preoccupied with Jewish views of Jesus. I was so captivated by this novel that I read it twice. I was startled by my interest in the novel. In the fiction. Why, I had to ask myself, do I find this novel so compelling, especially since I have been spurning fiction for several years now? The short answer, maybe, is that Schmuel’s preoccupations, as well as those of his employers Gershom Wald and Atalia Abravanel, range from the recent political events in Israel to the more distant past, and their concerns, although aligned, are also in conflict with one another. The three characters communicate, but their communication is characterised by sparring as they manoeuver through their enmeshed personal and political webs. As I write these sentences, I’m maybe starting to understand why I loved this fiction. The characters are made up, yet their words, their concerns, their contradictions, disagreements, their need to externalise the struggle to understand their personal identity as it has been influenced by, formed by, the political reality of their lives in Israel and the religious reality of Judaism as portrayed by Christian story-telling about the role of Judas in the success of Christianity: all these things, these facts and interpretations and questioning of facts, form the meat of the story. There is no claim to truth in this novel; truths are in conflict with one another as the characters exchange ideas, ask questions of themselves and of one another. 

Do I generally experience fiction as being an attempt to create a coherent world, a world in which one protagonist is searching for the truth, usually successfully? Are novels too conservative, too concerned with the internal consistency of their created worlds that nuance is left behind in favour of creating a round character? 

What I often experienced while reading Judas was a sense that I did not know the details of the historical events and people that the characters were referring to in their conversations. I had no easy way of knowing or learning how true were their versions of history. At the same time, because within the novel they disputed one another, I knew that all of their versions were true, or none of them were true. Personal histories interacted with political history so that all versions are true, and in all versions being true, none could claim the truth. 

Story was used as a vehicle to present fact; because when we are reading something called a story, or a novel, or fiction, we know that it is not factual, we enter into a world of possibility. But in this novel, the facts, which are contradictory, are best expressed within the fictional vehicle, and as a reader I experience the pain, frustration, and manipulation of characters who inhabit a deceitful political world that has created their pain, frustrations, and manipulations. The manipulations cannot have been explored in a work of non-fiction, or fact, which demands the historian take a position, or at least present the facts and counterfacts and then create a coherent and factual narrative which makes historical and/or political sense. Only in the world of fiction can the nonsense of fact be forgrounded by putting the effects of facts into the lives and mouths of characters, whose persona emotional responses form part of the analysis of the facts. 

So often I pick up a work of fiction and nothing of interest comes out of the characters’ mouths. My sense is that they are consumed with their own subjective experience lacking context. The stories they tell repeat stories that have been told. Is this why I no longer like fiction? Until Amos Oz’ Judas, a fiction that gathers the fictions that have posed as facts and puts those fictions in the mouths of fictional characters attempting to come to terms with their identities in mutable contexts. 

The heading for this section, Living in the Liminal Space between Fiction and Fact, suggests to me, as I re-read it, that I see myself as living in such a liminal space. I’m not sure that I can describe that for myself, but I know it when i see it, and such stories excite me because they reinforce my sense that the stable self is a fiction. Put another way, there is no truth to what a self is. 

Earlier I wrote about the Platonic Form of the self. If I were to be a contemporary platonist, I would say that there is the possibility that there is an abstract, non-existent, yet perfect self, and that every action within a life is an energetically driven kinesthetic version of that abstract, non-existent yet perfect self. 

I am not a philosopher. I do not know what i mean by “energetically driven kinesthetic version of that abstract, non-existent yet perfect self”. 

HOW DEEP DOWN THE PLATONIC RABBIT HOLE DO I WISH TO GO?

MEDITATION

My meditation practice lurches around from consistent to unpredictable, but most of the time I resort to meditation when I have time, which is counter to what I’ve read you should do, which is to take the time whether you have it or not. 

My most recent acquaintance with meditation began within the past week, when, struck down with a cold, I was holed up in my suite and had run out of the pleasure that I get from my usual solitary pastimes of cooking, reading, drawing, painting, listening to podcasts. What should I do, I asked myself, feeling alert but not well. I remembered that I like to meditate, so I set myself up on my bed, propped up my back with pillows, crossed my legs, placed my open hands palm up on my knees, set my alarm for 20 minutes, and closed my eyes. 

Oh yes, I thought, as I fell relatively rapidly into that familiar state of mind. Here it is. I have attended two ten-day silent Vipassana retreats, and have never, as recommended in those retreats, managed to meditate for one hour twice a day. For a while after my marriage ended and I lived alone in the big house I had shared with my husband, I meditated once a day for an hour in a room that had a stone fireplace that I painted light-ice-blue. We had installed an insert stove years earlier, but when the marriage ended, so did the wood-burning, and I had converted the room into a retreat, including putting in a temporary wall to prevent drafts swirling around my back while I sat. 

I had learned to meditate at the Vipassana retreats, but had read about different types of meditation, different attitudes to take while sitting, various goals to achieve while sitting, and when I sat for the first time in years just the other day, all those possibilities entered my mind, and I went into a temporary panic as I tried to remember what I was supposed to be doing, how I was supposed to be meditating. Eventually I landed in the body-scan, the technique that leads to a calming of my whole body, and all thought is replaced by the activity of putting my focus on scanning, and, eventually, the activity of scanning is replaced by the hum of motionless scanning and peace that lasts until the alarm reminds me that time exists. 

The benefit I get from meditation is that final experience, the “motioness scanning” when I am no longer moving my attention throughout my body from top to bottom and back again, but am merely experiencing all of my body all at once, and the scan is no longer a looking into experience, but an experience of feeling the whole of my body emitting its presence. 

It sounds ridiculous to write about here, and maybe what is more significant is not that experience, but the result of the experience, which is, I think, to calm the few jangling nerves I have, or set to rest any lingering concerns from my life, or to reassure myself that constant activity is not necessary. 

But not all meditation reaches that state; sometimes meditation means that many thoughts drift through my consciousness: problems, ideas, concepts, questions, all things of interest that I take note of for later. This experience of meditation does not provide the same degree of relaxation as the one I just described, but it does help me to discover new things that are important to me, as they arise out of the mist of a well-lived day. Or a day of lying, sick, in bed, waiting for the virus to move through my body and leave me be. 

CONSENSUS BUILDING AND STORYTELLING

Consensus building, I think, is a form of manipulation masquerading as kind regard and witnessing; but all that kind regard and witnessing is done to the end of nudging the outlier into believing that they have been heard, that they matter, their opinions matter. But in consensus building, the story of the outlier is merely listened to and then tucked away safely out of sight, like book paragraphs that do not contribute to the narrative at hand. The outlier, unlike a cut paragraph, which feels nothing, leaves a consensus building exercise feeling slighty sullied, but isn’t sure why. Not until later does the outlier understand that their input has been used as evidence that wide consultations have occurred and consensus reached. 

Outliers have minority voices. Poets are outliers. Philosophers are outliers. They both think in long streams of time reaching back and forward and sideways, both capable of picking of threads of ideas that don’t belong, but yet, which do. These are the ideas, often, that drive them to speak, these unseen yet seeable truths, and they bring these ideas to the consensus table and are patienty listened to and thanked. The story of the outlier is a story with no beginning and no end, a story of contingency, a story of possibility, a story that can go in any direction at any time. The story of the consensus builder is a pre-determined story with a pre-determined outcome: how do we get there, they ask. The outlier questions the desireability of where the consensus building wants to get. The consensus builder, pretending to be otherwise, has one story. 

GOD AND CHRISTIANITY

TEACHING AS AN ACT OF COLONIZING

When I first started teaching college English, I was an enthusiastic advocate for “correct English”, and although I avoided the hallway conversations (and later email threads) that shared the semantic foibles of students, I was unquestioning in my belief that “correct English” was a core life skill. I carried that belief into restaurants where I perused menus for misplaced apostrophes, or signs that read “Closed for lunch, Sorry for the inconvience”. I was certain that my superior language skills were needed, as evidenced by the mistakes that were around me in daily life. “Please except my resume as application for the position of clerk”, read one covering letter submitted in an assignment in a business writing class. And silently to myself, I responded, “okay, I will except your resume”, and mentally tossed the resume into the trash. 

Business Communication was, and probably remains, one of the core skills taught in colleges. Apparently the study of the humanities has diminished over the past decade, and instead of studying Literature or History or Philosophy, students are turning to business courses in an attempt to get the jump on on the job market. Motivated by money and cynical about ideas or ideals, students throng to schools of business to learn how to make the big bucks. Even I, mid career, wondered if I should “do” an MBA, as I could see that within the academy fewer academics were becoming Deans, that turning learning into discrete units that could be monetized was taking precedence over the focus on individual student development that a liberal arts education presumably provided. 

I was an out-fashioned kind of gal when it came to learning. In 1972, I  dropped out of journalism school before I had even begun, having been relegated to a “qualifying year” of study before being admitted in journalism. I had been an eager and successful student throughout my childhood, the youngest of three who by the time I got to school, six years after my older brother had started, was miffed at the lack of homework. How am I to learn anything, I asked my father, if they don’t give me homework. I wanted to be hunched over a desk in the evenings, demystifying the secrets of the universe. How else to do that but through study at home after a day in the school yard?

Despite my enthusiasm, by the time I got to my late teens and having been extruded from a conservative and pedagogically narrow curriculum (courses in art and music were not available at any level), I found myself at a university 10,000 times larger than the largest school I had ever attended, and although I had been a clever enough girl in school, the pace and expectations were beyond my abilities. Uncomfortable with feeling stupid, I retreated into late night pot smoking and pizza hoagie eating, the latter of which were delivered to my dorm room by bitter young men. It was one such late night hoagie that led to me experiencing my first ever bout of food poisoning, where between episodes of purging from both ends into the toilet, I experienced visions of millions of transparent square boxes of various colours. I thought I was dying. 

My first attempt at a university education was a dismal failure, and I left after two years of not attending classes and hoping that somehow I would miraculously pass the final exams and thereby the courses without having done anything else. I was deluded by my previous experiences of being “smart”, and had no idea how much work being truly smart truly was.

Within two years of leaving university, I had married and within three years, my first child was born. I was ecstatic.I felt that I had made it in the world.

Here I’ll skip over two decades of life and rejoin myself as a teacher of college English at the end of 40 or so, 1988. I was just completing an MA in English Literature, and the local community college was looking for English teachers. “I can do that”, I told myself, and I needed a job, and so started to teach college English. Jettisoned from the world of Lacan and Kristeva and Cixous, and trying to finish writing my MA thesis with the dubious title, very postmodern and deconstructive, entitled Retrogressing Eve: The Ideological Subject which I JUST this moment googled, and there it is, available online through the University of Calgary, and for those who are interested, here is the link: https://prism.ucalgary.ca/server/api/core/bitstreams/2c6cf130-9c9d-4a43-9ef2-f015eb384ec9/content. 

Luckily this is the only record remaining of my time as a university student; I had returned in 1982 just after the birth of my daughter, and by 1990 was completing my thesis, the proof which is embarrassingly online. 

DEATH

I’m not afraid of dying, or of being dead. I just don’t want to die, not yet. I learned how to die when I was a child, maybe 8 or 9. My older brother had grim comic books with WW1 soldiers coming back to life out of swamps, or strange creatures walking, mud-covered, out of swamps. I do recall there being many swamps in these comics, and starved for something to read, I would read these comics, filled with death and terrified young men with ravaged faces and bootless feet, desperate to escape the circumstances of their deaths and willing to do anything, including sucking the life out of the living, to be able to themselves live again. This is what I recall. All these dead beings emerging from swamps, their eyes desperate with the longing for life, took its toll on me, and, concurrently realizing that there was no escape from death, I began to resist it. Resist death. Resist the thought of death. How would I die? Would it hurt? When would I die? I lay awake and cried in my bed and my mother opened the door just enough that a sliver of light fell across my face and I told her that I was afraid of dying and she said “that’s what you get for reading your brother’s comics” and closed the door and I lay alone in my bed, really feeling so very, very alone and, realizing that I was going to die, and that I didn’t want to die, and what was I to do? I knew that I could not ever fall asleep again with this terrible fear that had gripped my heart, and that a life with no sleep would be no life at all. I had to figure out how not to be afraid of death. 

I decided that I would face death right then, that night, in my bed, by myself. So that’s what I did. 

I pretended that I had died, I pretended to dig a deep hole in the earth, I pretended to be lying in a coffin, I pretended that my coffin was lowered into the deep hole in the earth, I pretended that earth was shoveled over top of the closed coffin, and I lay there dead in the dark of my deeply buried coffin, and I lay there waiting to see what would happen. But nothing happened. I was alone, silent in my silent coffin, where no light entered, no sound entered, and I lay there, my thoughts and I and this great deep silence, and I learned that death is peaceful. 

This did not mean that I lived a life of risk-taking, or death-wishing. It has meant that I have lived a life devoid of the fear of death. 

MATERNITY LEAVE AND DAYCARE IN THE 70s

BACK TO FICTION AND FACT

THE DETESTATION OF FICTION

It has happened again. I seldom read words on a page any more, as my eyes have cataracts bad enough to make the world slightly grey but not bad enough to be peeled away. And one eye has something called a “epi-retinal membrane”, which impedes focus. Both of these things are treatable, but only when they get extremely bad, and not being able to read does not count. So, a few years ago I started relying on audio books, and maybe that is when I started to become agitated with the sense that I was “being told a story”. There was, and still is, something about a story that is aware of its own sense of “storiness” that causes me distress. This distress is different from the distress I felt when reading Anna Karinina. I was sitting on a ferry between Vancouver and Vancouver Island when Anna threw herself in front of the train and died; in my distress,I threw my copy of the novel into the Strait of Georgia, for what would be the point of this novel without Anna? But this is not the type of distress I am talking about when I read much fiction. Today I had just completed listening to Jon Fosse’s The Other Name, a ten hour listen at 1x the recorded speed. I want to read more Jon Fosse, and more Amos Oz, but I felt I should take a break from these authors, to save the pleasures I derive from their styles for another time. I decided to listen to John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, an audiobook that was immediately available through my library. 

I’m still trying to recover from a series of invading viruses, and am also trying to resist the temptation to do things because one moment I may feel well enough to do something. It’s those “well enough” forays into the world that seem to set me back, so I’m consoling myself with reading and writing and cooking and generally staying away from the world other than to pop out to pick up some more garlic, a common ingredient in most of the soups and stews I’m consoling my sick body with. 

It was mid afternoon, just a few hours ago, actually, and I started listening to The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and I had an immediate negative reaction to the fictional techniques that were used to let me know I was entering a fiction. These techniques seem ever more glaring after reading Jon Fosse, who in The Other Name seems to leave behind everything and leave us with the repetitious thoughts of the main character, and although the nine hours it takes to listen to the novel is shorter than the 48 hours or so that the novel’s action spans, those nine hours slow down time, slow down action, become a meditation on what really happens in our thoughts as we go through a day. When I finished The Other Name and moved on to The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, I was struck by the sense that I was to believe that the main character, Bruno, and his sister Gretl were clever young children whose perceptions are also clever, at the same time as their conversations were dim-witted and ignorant. The family have moved to a house beside Auschwitz after their father has had a dinner with “the Fury”, and Bruno and Gretl are portrayed as so naive that I cannot but be reminded that I am reading fiction. Nothing in this fiction has enough reality in it to make it good fiction; it reads instead like a fairy tale, but about the Holocaust. If I were on a ferry, I would have thrown the book in the Strait of Georgia, but I am at home, lying sick on my bed, listening to this book on a library audiobook app on my phone. I might be tempted to drop this in the toilet. 

So, John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pajamas turned out to be an unfortunate choice, despite the fact that I had loved The Heart’s Invisible Furies, also by Boyne, but not, as The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, having been made into a movie. 

I’m still sick; I have to stay away from friends and family until I no longer risk coughing in anyone’s face. I’m not ready for another Jon Fosse or Amos Oz (and the number of their works in audio format is limited, so I must mete out my listening). I also have something by George Saunders called Lincoln in the Bardo and by Natalie Haynes A Thousand Ships. Will the density of fictional techniques. 

I have to say that I think it is my failing that makes me so reactive to fictional techniques. I will admit that right here. I don’t know why I have this reaction, but I know that I want to feel that the fiction has poured out of the author and the author has stepped aside, the narration is almost invisible

THE NATURAL WAY OF THINGS AND COMMON SENSE

THE DOGS OF SAMARA

I had been in Samara only a few days when Elena asked me how I was enjoying things at the hostel. I told her that my bed was very comfortable (without mentioning that only if I put on the mattress on the floor and slept that way was I comfortable) but that I was frequently awakened by the howling and yapping and snarling of wild dogs outside my window. 

“Ah!” she said, “That is a beautiful thing! It is like living in a village, where wild dogs are common. It should give you a good feeling.”

I didn’t know how to respond, not because I didn’t agree with her, but because I could see that she thought that I had been complaining, which I had not been. I liked the snarling wid night dogs of Samara, and would come to like them even more as the days and weeks of my stay passed. I came to appreciate the wild dogs, although not to the point of befriending. No. The wild dogs of Samara could be nobody’s friend. 

I didn’t need to explain myself to Elena, as she had already rushed off to perform some function in her role as a mid-manager at the university where I had come to study Russian. She was in charge of international education, and I was one of three current international education students on the campus. I shouldn’t have been surprised by that, had I been more curious about why it was so easy to secure a spot as an international student at the university, and for such a low cost. The university’s response to my inquiries had been quick and surprisingly uncomplicated and unbureaucratic, at least compared to the responses from the other universities I had applied to. 

This easy-to-secure seat as an international student studying the Russian language is the reason I found myself living on the tenth floor of an empty student “hostel” on the grounds of the Samara State University, surrounded day and night by several packs of wild dogs who competed for the garbage that spilled from the unmaintained bins behind my hostel, but visible from my tenth floor window. 

Dogs. I’m not sure when or where they slept, because it seemed to me that they were always active. Every morning from Monday to Friday I walked the 500 metres from the hostel to my teacher’s office through deep trenches of snow, like tunnels with no ceilings, so I could see the grey sky above. The building had sharp edges that howled with the wind on nights when the dogs were silenced by the wind.   

Hornby Island

Whatever I may be feeling at any time is an artifact of the moment. Each moment is discrete from every other moment and a feeling can become a memory, lost or a specimen saved. 

House finch. Cowbird. American Goldfinch. Rufus-sided Towhee. On the wood-and-wire of fence, snatching seeds furtive and mindful engorged. I feel clumsy by comparison, each foot larger than a rosy finch, too large even for the low sitting bird bath with its cool fresh water. 

Metaphor and analogy. I prefer new words. The words “like” or “as” or “is/are” are approximate, misleading, sometimes wrongheaded. Nothing is like rape. Nothing is like war. These things that make us want to compare them to other things already in existence, they need their own words. We can make new words. There is nothing preventing us from creating new words to describe new concepts except the fear of not being understood. Maybe it will take centuries for new words to be understood but what does that matter. Our words and images are breadcrumbs. But not breadcrumbs; they are not experienced as breadcrumbs are, and if there is not an adequate analogy to say what our words are, then a word that means exactly what it describes is needed. 

Not relaxing but settling into my body as 

organism, releasing it from my mind, any sense of purpose or intent so that it can just be, and be just. This is helped by the sun and the breezes soothing my skin into believing in its own identity as merely an organism of the animal family, and as low on the chain as possible. My skin may twitch at an insect but my hand will not slap it away. 

I’m finished with the outside of things. No more attribution of pretty and ugly or any aesthetic in between those extremes of judgement, but now a kind of sensing of life behind it all, life claiming its existence and me a redundant witness. 

How to be an Organism

A lilac inspired activity is for a sunny day during the month of May. Find some lilac bushes in bloom and lay a shawl or blanket in their midst. Lie on your back and let go of all the muscles that have been working to keep your body structure together while you were erect. Listen to the sounds in your body until you no longer hear the clicking and clacking of your bones settling into their preferred relationship to the ground beneath you. You will increasingly notice the sounds around you and the scent of lilac. Let yourself stay there for as long as it takes for your mind to start thinking about getting up. When it does start to think about getting up, stretch instead. Stretch whichever part of your body signals to you to be stretched. Keep going. Stretch however you feel. Don’t worry about balancing your stretches or getting at all the muscles. Do this until you are finished. Lie in whichever position you want to in and wait. At some point you will decide to do something else. Do that. 

If it is May and warm and blooming lilacs, there may also be tulips. Feel the freedom of watching how the sun falls across the petals. Notice the tulip’s life stage and think about how unconcerned it is about its own beauty. 

Curated by time and love

Art is a relationship among a person, nature, and time. 

Time stalls, stays in one place, recedes into non-existence when met with stillness, and the motion of the universe builds time's illusion, a seduction of purpose that lures us, challenges us to seek meaning and purpose. 

But most of us are human observers and actors, trying and failing to participate in nature. 

I attempt and fail to reach a state of being an organism. Frantic, I reach out for the tools of creation, trying to make my own nature. This is my curse. 

Here is something interesting about Sumerian and Babylonian cultures, according to Sophus Helle. In those cultures, he says, people were represented concurrently by their bodies, names, children, stories about them, and images made to depict them (Enheduana, 118). And those images were not intended to be an accurate depiction of the person, but a means of giving them “a new medium of being” (119). 

Helle cites Zainab Bahrani The Graven Image: Representation in Babylonia and Assyria, 2003. 

Puppet Making

A year ago I spent a large amount of money to register in an online puppet-making course. For a variety of reasons, one of which was that I didn’t have an adequate stable space to work in, I wasn’t able to do any of the work. So I stopped, but lurked in the FB group and watched the others as they progressed and asked questions. I couldn’t bring myself to attend the live weekly Q&A sessions. 

Fast forward to two weeks ago when one of the most active participants posted about his interest in The Epic of Gilgamesh. Since I don’t know anyone else who has really paid much attention to this poem, I was excited to read of his interest, so I commented expressing my interest. My comment turned into a dialogue which resulted in me rejoining the course activities and I am now officially one of the course “tortoises”, and on my way to purchasing a scroll saw and a coping saw. More on this later.  

How to Vote

We were sitting in my brother’s living room, a tidy collection of comfortable furniture. My brother was sitting in his usual favourite chair, a tall-backed Lazy-Boy type chair, but of much better quality and purchased specifically to accommodate his extreme height. His computer was on his lap, and he was engaged in strata business, something he had taken up since retiring 10 years earlier. My sister-in-law sat in her usual swivel rocker, and I stretched out on the butterscotch-coloured leather couch, grateful that it was permissible to put my feet up, wrap myself in a blanket, and pull a cushion or two to prop up my head, having an aversion to sitting in chairs. It’s not so much a psychological aversion, but a physical one, and my body screams at me every time I am directed or expected to sit upright in a chair. My back hurts, my legs hurt, my arms don’t know what to do with themselves, “as if you were born for a harem”, said my father one time, decades ago, when I indicated my preference for lounging over sitting. My mother’s comment had been to click her teeth at me, her usual way of letting me know that she had my number, she knew what I was on about. 

Neither of them thought much of me. “Just a rebel”, my father would say, shaking his head in disbelief that his daughter would opt to be so, well, from my point of view, so independent. “I’m not a rebel, Dad,” I’d say to him many times over decades, “this is just how I think”. “Yes, well, that’s rebellious”, he’d say, and what he meant was that I didn’t think the way he thought, and so that meant I was a rebel. 

From my point of view, I was thinking against the way he thought, but as I grew up and the world, my world, got larger than the conversations around our dining room table, I started to have opinions. I thought it was a good thing to have opinions, because that meant I’d done some reading, and maybe some talking, and listening to the radio, and had thought about things, and had my ideas about them, and I thought that was a good thing. What I hadn’t counted on was that when I tested those ideas at the dinner table, I learned that those ideas, which from my perspective had formed out of my own investigations, were actually rebellious, and not exactly tolerated in the family home. 

Maybe people who set out to rebel are happy to be called rebels, but that was not my story. I felt the moniker somehow diminished my growing sense of myself, that my newfound opinions and attitudes were reduced to folly by that attribution, that I was seen as taking positions merely in opposition to instead of out of my own reading and thinking. 

I had not learned to detest sitting in chairs from books; rather it is something that I gradually learned about myself over time, when people started pointing out to me that I always draped my body in strange positions not naturally intended by the designs of chairs. This mostly involved, and still does, when a chair is the only option, putting one foot up on the chair, with the other on the floor, or forcing my legs into a lotus position between the chair’s arms, or using one arm to lean my back against, and the other arm to prop my legs behind my knees. But mostly I sought out couches and sofas and chesterfields and used blankets and cushions to prop up the various parts of my body in ways that meant I wouldn’t wriggle and squirm in discomfort. “What are you?” My father once asked me, “a marionette without strings?” 

So, while my brother and sister-in-law sat in their respective places of comfort, I lounged on the butterscotch-coloured leather couch, one eye on the Victoria inner harbour and the other on these two people who had more recently become a larger part of my life. 

I live a three hour drive away from them, and had unadvisedly signed up for a ten week course in their city, which meant that once a week I drove the three hours to attend the course, and then stayed with them that evening for dinner and an overnight before heading home the next morning. I say unadvisedly because while when I was younger, even just ten years younger, a weekly drive of a six hour return trip would have been, in fact was, easy. For a few weeks in my early 60s I headed down on a Friday morning for a one hour voice lesson, then turned around and drove back home. I thought nothing of it. 

But a decade later, and having just turned 70, I found that a three hour drive required at least two stops, one to stretch and one to stretch and use a washroom, which made it a four hour drive. And then i was not comfortable driving in the dusk, or the dark, as I hadn’t yet had my cataract surgery, and night vision was deceptive and sometimes even a little bit scary, even psychedelic. So, having sought no advice about the viability of sustaining a weekly jaunt to the city for ten weeks in a row, I paid my money and drove down the first week. By week 8, at which point i had made just four of the eight classes, for various reasons related to the weather, my health, my brother’s health, my sister-in-law’s health, she said to me on the phone, “well that whole idea went to hell in a hand-basket, didn’t it.” It was a statement, not a question, and I found myself, despite feeling a bit disappointed that my intentions had not result in my desired outcomes, feeling NOT that the whole idea had gone to hell in a hand-basket, but had actually led to outcomes I could not have imagined or planned. 

But on the day in question, the morning after the last class I had attended, I was sitting, no lounging, on the couch, stretched out and drinking a relaxed cup of coffee and having a conversation with my brother and his wife. When I get together with my brother, I always want him to tell stories about his childhood. I am always astonished when he does so, because it becomes so clear to me that despite the fact that we grew up with the same two parents and the same older sister, our memories and experiences are radically different, as if we had been in two completely different households, in completely different times. I suppose this can be explained by the fact that he is older by six years, and he is a boy, and despite the fact that we grew up at a time when children were sent out in the morning with the instruction to “return when the street lights go on”, leading to all kinds of activities that our parents never heard about or would have suspected, my brother’s stories are much more filled with danger than mine, or perhaps the types of dangers were different. His stories are filled with explosions and .22 rifles and sheath knives and beatings. Mine are filled with me venturing beyond the street in front of our house, ignoring, for very good reason, the instruction to “never cross the street”, as if crossing a street was the greatest danger possible, or more specifically, as if staying on the side of the street that my house was on would afford me safety from anyone with nasty intentions towards me. And, I told myself, wandering on that street in front of my house, “I can turn some corners and NEVER cross a street and get back home”, and by the age of four my world expanded exponentially without crossing a street, that is until I became seduced by a public service announcement on the radio for public libraries. 

But the morning in particular that I am writing about here is not related to crossing streets, it is related to voting. 

“Hey, Don”, I said, taking a sip of my coffee. “Did I ever tell you about the time when our mother told me how to vote?”

My brother, as he often does, had a look on his face as if to say “do I want to hear this?” He is himself a masterful story-teller, and has the gift of spinning out a story to be at least ten times longer than it needs to be, using voice intonation, rhetorical strategy, and imprecations to his audience to “no, no! Keep listening! This is great!”, and he is as such, I think, a bit intolerant of others’ stories. I think he wonders, will she be as good at telling a story as I am? Will her story grab my attention? Will it be worth my time? 

I think that day he was feeling magnanimous towards my offer of a story, so he shook his head almost imperceptibly. And honestly, from my perspective, I thought he would find the story funny. I thought he would get it. So I started.

One time, I said, when I was first married to Brian, we had his parents over to dinner. We lived in a housing coop in Ottawa, not far from Mooney’s Bay, and our young son Brendan was about three years old, and an only grandchild, thus far, for Brian’s parents. Brian and I were in our mid 20s, and Brian had seamlessly slipped into the liberal sensibilities indirectly taught to him by his parents, not being someone inclined to spend much time questioning much of anything at all other than he wanted to be content and comfortable and not have his physical being interfered with by anything too emotional or physically strenuous or psychologically challenging. 

It was in the weeks leading up to a federal election, and on the front lawn beside our carport I had agreed to install a sign promoting the local NDP candidate. Anyone with a penchant for research might discover that it was a provincial election; to be honest, I don’t really remember, but the year was probably 1978 or 1979. I watched from my living room window as my in-laws drive up into our driveway and get out of the car. My mother-in-law, always grim-faced and fore bearing of her angry-faced and fore-boding husband, walked towards the front door, but her husband, my father-in-law, walked across the front lawn, grabbed the NDP sign, and threw it onto the ground. He wiped his hands to get the remnant of communism off them, and proceeded into the house. 

Despite my status as the family rebel, I had been raised to be polite, so I greeted them warmly, sat them down in the living room, and then walked out the front door and out towards the election sign, while they watched, I knew, from the living room, which overlooked the front lawn. I picked up the sign, poked the metal prongs back into the grass and, wiping my hands from a job well done, I walked back to the house. 

And served dinner.

Nobody said a word. 

That was not much different from any other time we had had them for dinner. I think perhaps I was not liked by my in-laws; they had raised their son to be a good boy, and he was, a good, sweet boy. But none of them ever said anything to each other, so of course they did not know that when I met him he was on probation from having been arrested for possession of marjuana (which from at the time of this writing, 2024, feels a bit quaint), and upon him telling his probation officer he was getting married, his probation was cancelled and his hand given a good handshake by his probation officer, and he was wished good luck. So in their company, he just agreed with his parents about just about anything and everything, and everyone was happy, or at least not challenged in their perceptions of reality. 

Dinner was uneventful, at least as far as I recall. The grandparents doted on the grandson, they went home. 

The next day, however, I received a phone call from my mother.

”What happened last night?” She asked me. 

“What do you mean?” I responded. At the time, I probably knew what she meant and was being disingenuous; at the same time, I thought, my father-in-law had illegally removed an election sign and I was within my rights to replace it.

”What party was the sign for?”, my mother asked.

”NDP”. I answered. That seemed simple enough.

”How does Brian vote?”, my mother asked. I was silent. I didn’t know. While I was off attending meetings and rallies, Brian stayed home, listening to the Eagles and the Doobie Brothers and rolling himself joints. I did not see him as political. He did not see himself as political. 

“I don’t really know” I said finally, “but probably Liberal”. 

There was silence on the other end of the line, and after a while, my mother said, and she meant it with no irony, “you should always vote the same way as your husband, otherwise you will cancel out his vote”. 

I’m pretty sure I must have scoffed, which was a reaction I frequently had to my mother’s life instructions. It really must have been awful for her to have had a scoffing daughter; there was nothing she could tell me that had not already been addressed by something I had read in my prolific reading habit: it was the 70s, after all, and I had rising tides of feminism, the brutalities of the Viet Nam war, the Quebec crisis, 

This is not exactly how I told the story to my brother that day. I told this story, but without the asides and explanations that I use now to tell the wider story. Nevertheless, my brother’s lower jaw fell when I told him about being told that i should vote the same way as my husband.

”OUR mother said that?” He was incredulous. “You’re making that up.” 

“Yes, and no. Our mother did say that and no I am to making it up.” 

He was quiet for a while, and I’m not sure which part he didn’t believe, or what, in his own mind and his own experience of his mother, our mother, would have made him incredulous. 

I wanted to tell him. I wanted to say that that’s one of the main differences between being raised a girl and being raised a boy. Of course he would not know that our mother would have that belief because it never would have arisen in his life. 

Anyway, that is how I learned how I am supposed to vote, but because I am a rebel, the lesson never really took. 

LIBRARY BOOK

I’m not sure this is the correct heading for what I am about to write, but the reason for writing this entry is a library book that I’m currently reading. I’m a recent re-convert to library books, physical ones, audiobooks, and ebooks. During my working years I became increasingly unable to read physical texts, words on actual paper pages, and that was grief-inspiring, as reading had been an important part of my childhood, pretty much from the moment that the letters had stopped looking like random black marks and had formed themselves into words that told stories. 

I was marked for being a reader early on by a public service announcement that I heard on the radio every morning while I ate my breakfast. Toast with jam or grapefruit heaped with white sugar without which my mouth would pucker and I’d cry with frustration at the grapefruit bitterness at odds with my mother’s need to have me eat a “good breakfast”. 

A bright spot that interceded in the war between my mother and me was the public service announcement for my local library. What was this thing, i thought, this library. It was a place where adventure awaited, an exciting world of pirates and romance, and even at four years old, this type of world appealed to me more than the long boring days spent at home alone with my mother while my older brother and sister went to school, returning later with their own tales of what they had learned. 

“Just down the street from where you live, and around the corner”, said the lady on the radio. That is where I would find the adventure I sought, where I imagined I would not have to eat half a grapefruit with the sections pre-cut so that all I needed to do was dip the serrated and pointed spoon down the side and scoop out the piece of bitter food loaded with sugar. 

Right now I’m reading a book called Clear, by Carys Davies. I’m not exactly sure how I decided to order in this book, but it might be because it is set in Scotland and the writer, while Welsh, currently lives in Edinburgh. My father was Scottish, and I was raised on the fairy tales and legends of rural Scotland. On Sundays my father played the pipes and drums on the hi-fi and marched around from living room to dining room to kitchen, to the rhythms of “Scotland the Brave” or “Scottish Soldier” or “Flower of Scotland”; sometimes a tear or two fell from his eye when “Amazing Grace” came on, but I was never to learn the source of his sorrow. I’d have to say that now I understand that there is sorrow in any life, and shedding a tear to the playing of bagpipes is something that I do in my own life, like one of Pavlov’s dogs. 

So I suspect I selected Carys Davies’ book because despite my Scottish heritage, the only Scottish writers I’ve read were Irvine Welsh and Ian Rankin, and it felt time to move on from the grittiness of Scottish city streets to something rural and gentler. Did I read a review, and think, “ah, this will be the one to jar me out of the seamier side of Scottish life”, and so I ordered it from the library. 

As so often used to happen when I read fiction, as soon as I started to read Clear I wanted to start writing. Not fiction. I can’t write fiction, but while reading Clear I started to think about a family story, one passed down from my father, but one not verifiable. In the novel, the main character, John, travels to a remote island to evict its sole inhabitant as part of the Scottish Clearances. But what immediately grabbed me about the fiction was the fact that John was a minister of the newly created Free Church of Scotland. 

On the back jacket of Clear, the writer Chloe Aridjis describes the novel as a “miniaturist gem”; I wasn’t disappointed in this description, as the novel, in 183 pages, manages to portray two very different men from different backgrounds and through character study finds the way through to portraying a believable loving relationship between them. The Free Church of Scotland was a conservative break-off sect of the Scottish Church, itself already conservative in outlook but having been caught up in a system of patronage under the control of Scottish landowners. Ministers who broke away, about one-third of the ministers of The Scottish Church, objected to this type of control and patronage, mostly because it was indicative of earthly interference in the affairs of God. John Ferguson, the main character in Clear, was one of these breakaway ministers, desperate to make a living in the months after his having left the church. 

This fictional glimpse into the time of what was called The Great Disruption in the Scottish Church reminded me of a family story. Like most of the family stories I carry in my memory, this one is from my father’s side of the family, and involves not my father, but my grandfather and great grandfather. As the story goes, my grandfather and his sister and parents attended the Scottish Church. His father, my great grandfather, took great exception to the fact that the local church he attended was planning to hold a jumble sale on the grounds of the church. A vote was held among the parishioners, and, likely because the parish was needful of funds, the vote favoured the holding of the sale, and my grandfather, outraged that any commerce was going to take place on the church property, stood up in the middle of the church service, directed his wife, son, and daughter to pick up the pew they were sitting on, and carry the pew down the road to the Free Church, where he from there on forward, gave his weekly tithe and said his devotions. 

Whenever I think of this story, I am reminded of how deeply conservative my family roots are. My great grandparents lived in rural Scotland, they were farmers, they lived in a farmhouse with a dirt floor. That dirt floor was the same dirt floor that my father and his brother lived in just two decades later after this story in the mid 1920s. Of course there are a couple of missing decades during which my grandfather, out to make his way in the world from the north of Scotland, found himself working in Geneva and living in a small boutique hotel where he met and married the daughter of the Austrian couple who ran the hotel. But that’s not part of the story I’m telling here and now. 

The question I ask myself now is how I came to be a “rebel”, albeit a non-rebellious rebel, in a family of such conservatism. It’s not just my father’s side that has such conservative roots; my mother’s family of origin is also conservative, although slightly less so, and tainted, according to my Scottish grandfather, by the fact of their being North Americans. Or, as he saw it in the 1940s when my parents married, my mother was seen as “American”, and my grandfather did not like Americans. 

I feel compelled to consider the idea of epigenetics. I recall when the idea first started to be bandied around, and many responded with disbelief; I can’t say I was an immediate believer, but I didn’t dismiss the idea either. 

My older sister seems to be the carrier of the gene for religious conservatism. A long-time Presbyterian, she told me a few years ago that many members of her church had broken off into their own independent group and were currently trying to find a place to hold services. “Oh”, I said, “why did they do that?”, thinking that she would be one who would stay with the original church. She seemed unwilling to answer me, but maybe her pause was more about choosing the correct words and after a few seconds said it was because of the changes in the Presbyterian church, certain policies around who could be a minister. “Ah!” I wasn’t sure what to say next, but asked her if she was part of the leaving group or the staying group. 

“The leaving group”, she answered. 

“And what percentage of the congregation left?” I asked. 

“About 75%”. 

Sometimes I wonder why it is that I became the family rebel. I’d like to find the ancestor who laid that genetic groundwork. I imagine it might have been one of my grandmothers, or great-grandmothers, a free but tempered spirit whose initial attempts at thinking for herself were quickly and firmly discouraged by whichever form of Presbyterianism or Calvinism. There are a few candidates about which I know a small amount of information: my maternal grandmother, my paternal grandmother who died of the flu in 1925, or my paternal great-grandmother who spent her life farming and slowly going blind. I don’t feel that I know enough about any of them to make an informed analysis. 

Despite my assigned role as family rebel, I feel as if that is a misnomer. At worst it was a gentle admonishment of my tendencies to think for myself, to observe the family system around me and say “not for me”. 

June 3 2024 Diary Entry

I’m spending a fortune getting materials for the sculptures I’m making. Today I realized that the Roma clay I’m using has sulphur in it, which means that I can’t use the silicone brush on product to make a mould; for some reason silicone and sulphur don’t mix. So, last week I ordered some silicone mould making product called Rebound 35, and I won’t be able to use it with the sculptures that I’ve made with Roma clay. So now I have ordered 8 pounds of Chavant clay, which IS sulphur free, and of course that just means that I have to make more sculptures using the Chavant, which I guess isn’t a bad thing. But still, it’s a lot of money. 

I also need to find out how to make moulds of the pieces that have been made with the Roma clay. Then do I buy even MORE product so I can make the moulds, or do I do what I had originally intended to do, which is to use the sculptures I’m making this summer as maquettes for water-based clay sculptures that i make in the winter? 

As I write this out I can see it is not much of a problem, as problems go. 

A quick digression, and I think I have discovered that Smooth-on has a silicone product that is made with tin instead of platinum, and that the silicone will cure over the clay with sulphur if it is made with tin…so, that problem is much more easily solved than most of the problems in the world. 

October 11, 2024

I’m in Tuscany. I came here for a sculpture course at La Meridiana, but on day 1 I tested positive with Covid and so have been in isolation ever since. I am sick, too sick to sit up for very long, but not too sick to write. 

I feel boxed in. As if my attempt to get better at sculpting with clay has been thwarted. And that there is some sort of message for me in there. Not only can I not stand long enough to sculpt, I can’t sit long enough to sketch. Only when I’m lying down do I feel close to normal and the only thing I can do while lying down is tap out words into this document on my cellphone. Oh, and I can read, listen to music. So this is the box I am in. I had tried to climb out of the writing box for many years, now, and feel as if I have been put back into it. 

I don’t want to be sick. No one wants to be sick, but I know there are ways to live a life not blessed by wellness, and right now it’s my task to find my way to living while impeded by this wretched virus. 

My dreams are filled with rushing water and fluttering wings. I’m on a ship from which a small child has fallen, and the ship has turned around to look for the child, but the water is turbulent and cold. It might be too late. A large black bird flies over our heads as we stand on the decks, our eyes peering into the water to find the child. But we have all lost our way: the bird, the child, us on the deck. How many times must I have this dream? It seems to circle through my dream life as darkly as the black bird that circles the ship. 

October 11, 2024

When you set off on a journey, you never quite know what that journey is going to be about. When I think about setting off for this journey to Greece in Italy, originally the plan had been for me and my good friend Judith to head out together and spend two weeks on Crete, a few days in Athens and then we were to split up so that she could go to visit relatives in London, and so that I could come to my sculpture class in Italy. After two weeks, we were to meet again in Florence and our trip together through Tuscany and then down to Rome and then home for a total of six weeks. It all seemed perfectly rational when we put the plan together and we started making reservations and sending money and imagining the best for ourselves for this trip.

About a month before we were to leave my friend heard from her younger sister that she was sick, very sick. And as soon as my friend told me this, I knew that she wouldn’t want to leave the country. That she wouldn’t want to be far away from her sister. I knew that even as good friends as we are that the strength of the bond between her and her sister would be greater and so I said to her I know that you want to stay home and I want you to know that you have to do that, knowing that I am not going to be angry with you. I’ll be disappointed. But I won’t be angry. And this change will not affect our friendship.

And so that’s the way it has been and I found myself a month before having to leave also having to make a adjustments. I was prepared to go on my own. I was prepared to have those two weeks before and after my class as solo travel and at that point, I thought well, I had expected this journey to be the journey of a friendship, and I guess in many ways it still is the journey of our friendship because we remain friends. The difference is now that the journey means that we’re going in completely different directions in a kind of parallel journey.

I was lucky enough to have two different friends who were enthusiastic about joining me for each of the two week periods before and after my course. That meant that Lynda joined me for the Crete and Athens portion, and Laurel will be meeting me in Florence when I’m finished my course. These unexpected changes in the journey make the journey no less, only different.

I’m in touch with my friend who is staying home with her sister, accompanying her to her radiation and chemo treatments, keeping her well fed with a high fat and high salt diet. it feels as if we’re talking to each other from two very different worlds. And we are talking to each other from two very different worlds. One of the things that I know about cancer treatment, and probably about treatment of just about any kind of illness, is that connection to loved ones and feeling loved by loved ones is one of the greatest predictors of eventual good health. Assuming that is that the cancer is not pushed beyond the limits of love.

Right now I’m sitting in the yard of the small apartment I’m staying in while I’m taking the course in Tuscany. but I need to correct that previous sentence because although I am technically taking the course, I am not in the course because soon after arriving, I developed Covid and have been in isolation for the past five days. So my journey has shrunk, this part of my journey has shrunk from being the expansion of my experiences with making sculptures with clay to being a diminution of my world so that I am confined to these three rooms: a bedroom, a bathroom and a kitchen. And then there is the outdoors and that’s where I am right now sitting in the yard of my apartment looking around me and what can I see? To my right is a Rockwall, and although I don’t know much about rocks, they look volcanic to me, or at least their conglomerate rocks with puckered with deep and shallow holes that may have been worn away by rain. Within those rocks are several different kinds of plants and scurrying during the heat of the day across the surface of the rocks are Italian Wall lizards. 

  

To my left is a shrubbery that hides a rabbit proof fence that keeps the yard self enclosed, and safe from the sorts of varmints that might want to come in. It may be a Laurel and in front of me is the door to my apartment and if I walk through that door from the backyard, I go into a small dark and cool place where I can sit at a table, on my bed, have a shower, prepare a meal. I’m not completely isolated here. in the same building are at least two other apartments, each with their own entrance and each entrance on a different face of the building. the building is built into the side of the hill so the other two entrances are on two different levels. This means that I never see anyone else but what I do see are cats. The cats lurk along the base of the shrubs that line the yard; the shrubs not only protect the yard, but they also provide shelter for the cats. Shelter from the rain when it comes, and shelter from the sun when it comes. I didn’t notice them immediately, but the longer I stay here the more aware I’ve become of their hunched shadows under the shrubs. Any approach on my part will lead to either hissing or darting away from me. Or both. They don’t wish to befriend me, but two of them do like to climb the rocks on the rock wall and get high above me and look down, and watch me.

I woke up this morning and was quite aware of the grief that I was feeling because I’m missing the course that I came here to do. I’ve spent the past four years working on various art modalities and had really wanted to expand my experience and skills making clay sculptures. I heard about this course more than a year ago and immediately put down my €900 deposit knowing that this was the course that I wanted to take. I’ve waited patiently for the past 14 months to be here and now that I’m here I’m not able to take the course. Needless to say, this has led me to examine my goals and wishes. And of course, I still have to pay for the whole course because here I am. Living in a apartment in Tuscany, having my lunch delivered to me every day. But I have no connection to what’s going on in the course and I’m really aware that so much of what I learn when I’m taking a course is learned just by being around people as they’re working and talking, watching the presentations, listening to others’ experiences of art and in art. And all of that is just not there for me. This morning when I wrote about this, I felt profoundly sad and I guess this is really when I started this section, this is what I mean by saying that the journey i said I would be going on is not necessarily the one that I am on. In this void that I am living in at this moment, I am having to re-examine my reasons for coming here in the first place. I’m also desperate maybe to find some sort of alternative meaning or some sort of alternative outcome that can take the place of having developed New skills and made some new friends from around the world. Nothing is occurring to me. Maybe it’s too soon.

I guess one thing that is happening because of this is that I am turning to writing. I turned my back on writing. I turned my back on writing 15 years ago maybe because I wasn’t writing. Or when I wrote, I would get a headache or I would get frustrated. I just felt that I couldn’t write and at some point I just suggested to myself that perhaps I am not a writer

Now, sitting here this afternoon in a location that seems completely out of time and space to me because I can’t interact with the location in any way, other than to be in it, I am a part from any kinds of art-making materials. So I asked myself, what do I have? What do I have in front of me to work on? What is this particular journey about?

The only answer to that question was that I have my little cell phone with me, and I have my voice, and I have my desire to communicate. I have this never ending never diminishing desire to put something outside of myself that is both part of myself, but also not me. Like Cindy Sherman, I want to erase myself by putting an alternative version of myself into the world. Unlike Cindy Sherman I’m using words and not pictures. But I wonder if these alternative versions are really who we are, as if we’ve absorbed everything and expelling again, like human mollusks. 

So this part of the journey, then is not about sculpture, it’s not about clay, it’s not about connecting with other people, it’s about a return, or what the Greeks call nostoi. And it’s not a return to a place, but it is a return to a part of myself that I turned my back on long ago because I felt I was giving it too much attention. What do I feel right now? I feel like I was giving the writing part of myself the wrong kind of attention. I feel like I was trying to write outside of who I am, but I was trying to write about things in ways that would be interesting to other people, that I was trying to be literary, but I was trying to be something other than who I am. And right now, today, I feel that the writing that I did when I woke up this morning and the writing which made me weep with grief is actually the writing that I should be doing. It feels correct to be deeply honest and to be representing the parts of myself that remain hidden by my day-to-day privileges.

I’m not even sure what I mean by “day to day privileges”; that just came out of my mouth and it sounded like it might mean something so here it is.

This is part of what I wrote this morning:

“It’s 10° out and sunny. I’m feeling better this morning than I did yesterday but I’m still feeling a bit sick. I can tell that I feel sick because the thought of doing anything like thinking feels like too much, but I’ll try to sit out in the sun again today as soon as it warms up a bit. Yesterday John said that he would show me how to make the sprig molds that are part of this course. I hope I can come away with something from being here. I’ve been looking at photographs that the students have sent through our WhatsApp group and I’m really missing a lot 😔.  I had really hoped that this time here would provide me with enhanced skills making larger pieces and using a different method, and while I was present for the initial demonstration, I haven’t been able to practise what we are here to do. I have to admit that I feel some sadness about this. I’m also aware that when I do rejoin the group I’m going to be so far behind and that will be difficult to manage emotionally as I see everyone else with finished pieces or partially finished pieces. Somehow I’ll have to prepare myself for facing this reality. For the past few days, I have been pretending that I am in a sanatorium in Tuscany to heal. And in a way that’s true. But that’s not really why I came here in the first place, so my imagination has been able to help me through this, but I know that if and when I’m better enough next week to rejoin the class, I’m going to be off schedule and probably just wishing that the week would be over. If I think about it too much, it makes me really sad. I guess that’s enough for today because I’ve just made myself cry. That’s not such a bad thing because isn’t that what writing is supposed to be about? Telling the truth of every moment? Not just about how wonderful everything is, but also being realistic about the quiet times. The between times.

Interestingly enough, to me anyway, are the ways in which I’m keeping a routine in my life while I’m away. One of those ways is to read Heather Cox Richardson’s daily letter. I love what she does in each of her letters, looking at and writing about something that’s happening in the United States today, and providing historical context for the current affair. Her writing is mostly devoid of morality or moralizing. Instead, she focusses on fact. Her letters are consistent and readable and reader friendly. I can’t quite describe it except to say that often when I read political commentary, there is so much in the background that I’m expected to know that I don’t know which means that I don’t really understand what I’m reading. Heather Cox Richardson‘s approach seems to anticipate the challenges of stepping into an ongoing conversation without really knowing what has come before in that conversation. In my books that makes her a brilliant writer and a true communicator. I come away from reading one of her letters feeling as if I have learned something about the present and about the past at the same time. If I were a writer, I would be a writer like that.

Another thing I am doing to keep myself grounded is the writing of these letters, these emails. In the writing of these letters, I recognize how important it is to me to have you in my life. Of course this is a group email so maybe you’re wondering well does she mean me when she says you, and of course, the answer to that question is yes. I feel some sort of closeness or connection, each unique, which I feel compelled to acknowledge. 

My intention when I started to write these emails was to keep myself accountable to being aware of my self and my surroundings. I didn’t want to make Facebook posts because I knew they would be a mere fraction of my experience and ultimately stupid and shallow. Which is why I just put cat pictures on Facebook while I’m away.

So whether you like it or not, I’m sending you these emails because I care deeply for you. And I want you to know who I am. I think I am not very good at doing that in person.”

I’m not going to send this out. It feels too raw. Too emotional. People don’t like this sort of thing. They send you discrete emails, asking you “are you okay?”. I don’t know. Is anyone? I’m just mining every thought because I have nothing else to do, no distractions to divert my gaze away from the shadows on the wall. 

Last night John dropped by with a bottle of Prosecco which we drank while we sat at an outdoor table in the declining light and he showed me how to make a sprig mold with sculpy clay and olive leaves.

 The couple of hours we spent together was the longest I’ve spent in another’s company since I descended into Covid isolation, and as dusk grew to dark, our conversation deepened. I felt emboldened to ask him questions, as if the shroud of darkness erased me from my voice, and we became two entities in the dark, aware of one another’s energetic presence but oblivious of one another’s physicality. 

I’m going to answer your questions Anne, he said, but you can’t tell anybody, and I’m only telling you because we’re here, in the dark, in Tuscany. 

And that’s as much as I can say here, about my friend John, my Covid isolation friend. 

I started to read The Book of Alchemy by Suleika Jaoud. I was attracted by the swirl of bright colour on the cover and the word “alchemy”. I’ve always ( frequently, off and on, over the years) been fascinated by the possibilities and impossibilities of alchemy, and thought I’d give the principles another go. Of course these days, and most days up to now, I’m most interested in metaphorical, not physical, alchemy, and feel that in art-making I’ve experienced the magic of alchemy; in writing, less so. In relationship, somewhat. In all these things, I need to show up, unencumbered by fear or hesitation. And if I plunge deeply and asking, at first, what’s the worst that can happen, the answers always seem quite harmless: if anything bad or uncomfortable happens, I stop. Cut losses. Re-begin. My life so far, at the time of writing this, seventy-one years, has taught me there is no disappointment that stops everything forever. 

And so I plunge into a painting, or drawing, and have many that I have crumpled into recycling bins, burned, painted over; I also have some that I hang on walls around me, or give away, or store for some undefined “later”. This doesn’t seem much different from the writing that I’ve done over the years. Much has been recycled, burned, lost. Some has been rewritten into digital documents, just in case I might want to read it again. Some remains uncopied and pressed flat into plastic totes, saved with photographs, postcards, and other memorabilia from times I vaguely remember, lifetimes long ago released into a cauldron of nostalgia to be alchemized, perhaps, into a coherent narrative that I may think of as my life. 

I was always afraid when I wrote, always constrained by the need to write “literarily”, always one degree away from a real voice, afraid of the imagined criticisms of the mandarins of literary merit. Do I hear those voices now, as I write this? Not so much. Like my self-critiqued poems, stories, drawings, and paintings, those voices seem to have dried up and cracked into tiny, light-as-air fragments, tossed into a passing winter storm, and I see them now taking their own journey into a prevailing wind. 

So, do I hear those critical voices outside myself when I draw, or paint? Not so much, although occasionally they howl around the corners of my home, tearing at shutters, begging for space in my small studio. I can hear them out there, but their voices are not clear, like the mumbling frustrations of spurned succubi. In response, I spread the “wrong” colour of paint with a palette knife across my canvas as if I am spreading butter on warm toast and feel such deep satisfaction at the gesture, the resulting marks that I’ve made, that I remain mostly unmindful and uncaring about whether the painting actually looks “real”. I couldn’t find those gestures in writing, and in fact, found the small and mostly pinched graphic format of writing to be so constricted, always that it was missing something.

Ideas are always a temptation for me and I’m often easily lured into long meditations fertilized by a new idea, a meditation accompanied by excitement and hope. The excitement is related to the prospect, the possibility of having found a key to the truth, the hope is related to the relief that may come when I no longer need to look. 

But wait. This luring and baiting, the clamping down of my teeth, the mastication, tasting, even swallowing — these things are the fruit of my life, the heartbeat that tells me I am alive. I will no longer wish to find the truth, but will jump from truth to truth, feeling each truth like a stepping stone across an infinite pond. 

That feels better. An accumulation of taste, texture, sound, colour. Ahhhh!

From yesterday: Nathan’s face, his chin  propped on his hand, elbow on the counter, smiling with his eyes as we talked. 

From tomorrow: I will recognize something in someone I meet for the first time. That recognition will bring me some joy. 

A few random plans: pick up my painting from the studio, paper-making workshop (how will that impact my painting?), life drawing on Saturday, pottery sale, gym on Sunday morning. Change sheets. Do some important paperwork. 

Sometimes I open this file, see all the words that I’ve written and the bright white space below. I tap out the words into a google doc using my right forefinger, which I think is more efficient than handwriting and does not result in hand spasms.tap tap tap. Backspace, erase. No record remains of what I’ve written and removed. No scratching out, writing over. No cross outs, just these small crisp black- on-white letters, words, sentences, paragraphs. I have not gone back to the beginning of this document to read over what I’ve written. I’ll do that “at the end”, although at this point I have no sense of when that end will come. Will it be like a painting, when I recognize the end when I have a particular feeling of completion, when a joy arises inside of me that says “there! You’ve said what you wanted to say! You can put down your brush and move on!” 

But this writing project does not feel like that, unfortunately. This project feels to me like I’m tapping out coded messages from the inside of a tunnel along which I’m scurrying, or dragging myself, sometimes running and sometimes resting, my eyes closed in the stillness and silence of my underground reclusion. Are my tappings like Morse code, sos signals from within this pupae to the outside? 

Living out loud. 

February 19, 2026

I’m working on a painting that’s called step away from your heart. What do I mean by a painting? well in this case I mean a canvas that I am making a drawing on of a very large heart that fills the canvas and in front of the heart is a female figure. At this point, the heart is made of black and red and brown and pink and the figure standing in front has blue skin and a yellow/green outfit.

At this point, I am using pastel. Chalk pastel. The figure standing in front of the heart is as big as the heart and in fact she has to tip her head to one side in order for it to fit within the canvas. I like to make things that fill the canvas that spill over outside the edge of the canvas, as if the canvas itself isn’t large enough to enclose the figures that are within it.

My intention for this painting, as I call it, even though it’s a pastel, is to create a representation of someone being told to step away from their own heart, to leave their heart behind and, and what? What comes after the leaving of your heart behind?

The painting is hanging on the wall just in front of me. I’m sitting on my bed and looking at it which is something I often do while. I’m working on something as I like to work on it for a little while and then hang it on the wall where I can look at it without working on it necessarily, and I start to see the movement in the peace and then I start to decide what I need to do next to either enhance the movement or stop the movement or enclose the movement I’m not quite sure how else to describe that. As I’m working on this piece, I’m imagining the next piece which will be called step away from your heart with your hands up and I think at this point it will be related to this painting automatically, but I’m not sure maybe I should start it now or maybe I should wait until I’m finished this one. I’m not sure. I’m at the stage here where I really don’t like this piece. It feels incomplete which of course it is incomplete so it’s a good way to feel. And I’m also afraid that wherever I take it will just be a big mess so it’s the place and time while I’m doing something where I feel really discouraged and almost hopeless and helpless and why do I bother kind of things and then I have to remember that I bother because when I push through this when I’m able to not let those voices convince me that there’s no point then usually I end up with something that has given me some sort of release or pleasure as I’m telling myself the stories that I tell while I’m making a painting. As for a process at this point, I’m using pastels and my intention is to at least partially cover the pastel with paint, but I’m not sure if that’s going to Happen. I have really tight spaces and painting seems to take more space although I have managed to paint in my little studio if I shift things around and maybe it’s time for me to get rid of things from my studio so that I have more space just for painting and printmaking.