I recently realised that this blog was, in many ways, therapy for me while I tried to finish my thesis to earn an MA in French Language and Literature. Now I have returned here, this time with a “Major Research Project” for an MA  in English Literature.

The therapeutic value of this blog occurred to me when I was trying to remember what writing was like last time. I’m reasonably certain that I wrote the whole thing in a fugue state, because apart from some of the things on this blog, I cannot really remember the writing process itself. Granted, I had just moved back in with my parents, I was working a full-time job, and I got engaged not 20 days after my defense–I was somewhat distracted.

This time, I’m actually enjoying the writing process, observing myself while I go through it. Having several months to research and write a 40-page paper (mercifully short) is a luxury, and not working full-time while doing so seems utterly selfish. That, and I feel like I actually learned how to write an essay this year. Not that I didn’t know before, but that I remained almost intentionally ignorant of what I was doing, afraid to look at it and realise that what I was doing was wrong, or lazy.

I expect that there are many similarities between this kind of academic writing and  various kinds of creative processes, and so I want to share some of my “findings” and hear from other people about their own writing styles, their own creative processes.

1) I can’t tie myself to one place. Wherever I’ve lived, I’ve always had a desk, and wherever I’ve lived, that desk spends 75% of its time as storage. I need to go from desk to floor to living room to café to kitchen, changing it up whenever I feel like I’ve stagnated or I’m getting too distracted.

2) My favourite place to work is actually the kitchen table, because working there requires me to clear my stuff away at least once a day. I find that this really helps: re-stack, re-shuffle, re-organize. I often find things that I’d forgotten, or discarded, that are now of use to me. The kitchen also often has really great lighting in comparison to the rest of the house, as well as an easy and close supply of tea or coffee.

3) Don’t depend on your outline as a concrete plan. Make an outline, then try to start writing with it. Then change the parts of your outline that don’t work. Then write again, then update your outline. This back-and-forth process helps me to see the bigger picture.

4) When outlining, use as many methods as possible. This advice came to me from my current supervisor as well as a prof that I am working with as a research assistant. Use cue cards and thought maps, spread these out on the floor, rearrange them, colour-code them, translate them into different formats (lists, etc). Again, it helps you find things that you didn’t see before.

5) Talk to other people, especially people outside of your field or discipline. Meet with a writing group: even if you only see them a few times during the process, you’ll be accountable for having something to say. I was afraid to talk about my research with anyone while I wrote my last thesis, and I suffered for it. This time, I bug my husband at least a couple of times a day to run ideas by him and try to figure out how to explain what I want to say.

5.5) Don’t think that you need to use anyone else’s schedule or routine. If you try it and it works for you, that’s great, but if not, keep trying new things while you write.

Of course, this might not work if you’re writing 4 term papers on a deadline. As I said, having the time to observe all of these things is something of a luxury. That said, the more you learn about your own writing process (and how to maximize your time), the better you’ll feel about writing.

Now, hopefully I can keep taking my own advice when I start my PhD next year.

So: what have you learned or observed about your own writing/creative process? What do you wish you had known earlier?

P.S. I really need to update everything to do with the garden because we have a jungle on our balcony now.

The back of the neighbourhood, visible from our balcony.

Husband, plus homemade skirt.

The only good pictures are balcony pictures.

I felt like I should write something because it has been a long time, and because there is rain outside that hungry little plants are drinking up. There were three marigolds up yesterday, ten this morning, twelve this afternoon. In the face of such fecundity, I ought to be able to offer a few words. Lots of things have changed since last February, but lots of things remain the same. For instance, I have learned to crochet and sew in the last 6 months, but I still haven’t finished knitting that massive green blanket. On the whole, then, there is balance.

The most frequent topic of discussion in our household (that was something I couldn’t have said last February!) has lately been “the future.” More specifically, what does it mean to know what you want? what does it mean to have direction? and what does it mean to be happy? I am, on the whole, very happy with intermittent periods of stress to help me appreciate that happiness. But if I have one design, I have six: I want to stay in a big city where I can walk everywhere; I want to live on a farm; I want to teach far away; I want to move closer to family. A few years ago, Jane correctly observed that it sucks more to have lots of good options. When there’s a bad option, or several, there is generally a clearer indication of which option you have to take at the time. I can’t remember if she was talking about ice cream or about life choices.

To come: something about living in Toronto; something about working as a doula/working at being a doula; something about things I’ve been making; a picture of that moose I wrote about in the last post.

Also, because I am ridiculously proud of the balcony garden that Basit and I planted a week ago, I have added a page called “Garden Journal.” I will try to confine my superlatives about Toronto soil and climate to that area.

This morning, sitting in the kitchen after breakfast, my companion started to yell: “OH! OH! OH! OH! OH! OH!” My confusion was quickly cleared up when he followed that up with: “MOOSE! MOOSE! TWO OF THEM!” There were two moose, a female and her calf, wandering up the driveway and into my backyard. After brief consultation, they used a snowbank to clear the fence into the neighbours’ yard, whereupon the mother jumped a second fence and the calf stayed in the yard, not quite tall enough.

Within minutes, there were two “Peace Officers” and their cars parked outside of the house, standing on the driveway, quickly followed by two individuals from Fish and Wildlife, plus their trucks. They milled about for over an hour, eventually shooting the calf with a tranquilizer gun, netting it, and hauling it carefully onto the back of one of the trucks. The mother was picked up in another neighbourhood.

It is a strange feeling, seeing two moose in your backyard. They are huge. Taller than fences, with spindly-looking legs, lanky with a clumsy gait. The snow has been falling steadily for days, and their two-toed prints seemed enormous in comparison with the tire tracks and bootprints. And what a shock for the animals. Suddenly the world you are wandering is sectioned off, blocked in the strangest places. Walls and fences and cars with only decorative trees in stark contrast to stands of poplars and open, rolling grasslands. The way is no longer clear, and street signs, pavement, imposed uniformity all seem hard and ridiculous when you look at it like that. And the sad thing is that I had forgotten that.

I had forgotten how sharp these contradictions were. I had forgotten how artificial this is, or despite a quiet awareness I wasn’t thinking about it enough. A world so awful in comparison that we have to tranquilize the animal and release them elsewhere to get them out of it: they are in danger in our world, and, if we aren’t smart about it, we are in danger because we don’t know how to act around these animals. Like tourists on the side of the highway to Jasper, who idle their cars and run towards the grazing wildlife. They are objects.

We must get used to the idea of recognizing hierophanies absolutely everywhere, in every area of psychological, economic, spiritual and social life. Indeed, we cannot be sure that there is anything–object, movement, psychological function, being or even game–that has not at some time in human history been somewhere transformed into a hierophany. It is a very different matter to find out why that particular thing should have become a hierophany, or should have stopped being one at any given moment. (Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, 11)

I cite this not to talk about or comment on religion, but as a brief comment on loss of meaning. How an animal, a plant, a tree, becomes an outsider to our context. Which plants can we eat? What can we build, and with what? The world makes less and less sense to us. All of the things sheltering and supporting us right now are at the same time dangers to us. Houses collapse. Pavement ruins watersheds. Etc. I don’t mean to be a tiresome old crank bemoaning the old ways, but seeing that huge moose loaded onto the back of a truck to be brought back to a place that it understood underscored the separateness of these worlds, the artifice of what we have. Not that artifice is always negative, but I can’t find the moderation.

I hope to be hopeful.

“Courting Forgetfulness”

It’s hard to know what sort of rough music

Could send our forgetfulness back into the ground,

From which the gravediggers pulled it years ago.

The first moment of the day we court forgetfulness.

Even when we are fully awake, a century can

Go by in the space of a single heartbeat.

The life we lose through forgetfulness resembles

The earth that sticks to the sides of plowshares

And the eggs the hen has abandoned in the woods.

A thousand gifts were given to us in the womb.

We lost hundreds during the forgetfulness of birth,

And we lost the old heaven on the first day of school.

Forgetfulness resembles the snow that weighs down

The fir boughs; behind our house you’ll find

A forest going on for hundreds of miles.

Robert, it’s to your credit that you remember

So many lines of Rilke, but the purpose of forgetfulness

Is to remember the last time we left this world.

(Robert Bly)

Noor spotted this. One day, I would like to have eyes as keen as hers.

Click on the picture for the full-size picture, and click again to zoom.

Goodnight, all.

Here is what happens: at the top of a hill, I gauge my chances of success or failure. This has little to do with the grade of the hill and is instead based on the curvature of the tracks. Sometimes I do make it successfully, still standing at the bottom of the hill. When I do fall, it is typically because one ski, as skis will, jumps the track, and at that point I do all of the wrong things. I lean towards the jumped ski, in a misguided effort to control it, at which point the other, stable ski, says “Hey guys! Wait up!” and starts coming to join me and the errant ski. Sometimes I can come back from this point, sometimes not. This is when a calmer part of my brain does a quick inventory of standing obstacles. This is usually the point where my consciousness checks out for a few seconds, until just after impact, when it is safe to come out and assess.

But I’m getting tangled up in the details. I have a sore, stiff thumb from crashing into and halfway over a fence this evening. It is one of those nights, those nights that I can’t get over, where the hoar frost absorbs sound and reflects light so that trees stand like ghosts in orange fields, their meaning briefly altered to your eyes. The ground loses shape, you lose perspective, and the wells of things that usually don’t hold much except gravity are defined by the frost and by the snow. In that context, sudden impact seems impossible.

The initial slam isn’t pain, it’s just impact, just a simultaneous nod to every body part that must later be accounted for. When this happens, it is a surprise each time, like being jolted awake. Then each of these parts start to report. You take note that you are halfway over a fence; that your skis (and legs) are crossed. Which parts of you are up and which are down.

I’m not saying that it hurt that much, nor that I “understand” pain. But I think that this is the way that I react to suddenness. A blank out, and then an inventory.It seemed relatively profound, hanging there, on the fence. After that, you deal with latencies – sore digits or quiet bruises, adjusting small things. Motion; stop; restart. The way, maybe, I read a sentence that catches my breath.

Taking stock,

February was a Jeffrey Foucault and Kris Delmhorst double-bill with Basit, and May was the East-coast premier of Arvo Pärt’s latest symphony, as well as Pierre Boulez at Carnegie Hall with Jack.

The music and the company, in each case, was exceptional. Of the books that I read, Annie Dillard’s The Living was my favourite.

My father figured out what was wrong with my spinning wheel and finally made it spin.

I moved a total of four times. I went to the US for concerts three times. I defended my MA.

I can’t really think of too many other things to say. I have heard people say, “Thank goodness this year is over,” and “Thank goodness this decade is over,” as though we can contain misery by binding off a year. It wasn’t all misery; it wasn’t all joy. These things don’t come out so cleanly.

Soon, when I’m finished with other responsibilities, I want to write about the Edmonton Symphony’s performance of some early Beethoven works on the weekend.

I’m walking on moon beams
and staring out to sea

“Men have definite feeling about and reactions to makeup and if your face looks noticeably different, he will become frightened and disoriented.”

There you have it, ladies.

Shortbread in the oven and 10,000+ plus words in a document in front of me. The light in November is something I have not seen in a long time – something I remembered without really thinking about it specifically. I hope that every place I live has this, or that I remember to find it. Maybe what I have been missing are windows.

This made me start thinking about other things, mostly Brussels things: the time we each bought a package of cookies at the Del Haize and ate them all. The orange plastic patio furniture visible out of the kitchen window. The feeling of door handles, the variations of all the different kinds of stairs in that apartment, the time a friend tumbled down the stairs so hard that they left hideous bruises all over her elbows. Lighting a gas oven. What the terrain looked like flying into Norway. Things like that. These are the kinds of things that you think about when you are regrouping.

Later, I will thing about the treacherous first cement step leading down to the patio at the hot-water flat, and how Pantouffle purred while he was eating. Somewhere else again, and later, I will think of the sunlight in November through the thin branches of the lilac bush, and how it made them seem translucent.

Last night, Megan and I had a visit from a little boy who is, to date, my favourite trick-or-treater. He looked about nine, and was dressed as Spock, complete with rubber Spock ears. He could not have found two people more receptive to his costume, and as we oohed and aahed, he told us that “Not enough people appreciate Star Trek these days.” He was carrying a tricorder, a communicator and a phaser, all of which he excitedly pulled out to show us even after his friends had moved on to the next house. Good on you, kid. Own it. We gave him lots of candy (sorry parents).

On this last day of October, I will tell you that I have this cousin, and this cousin of mine is pretty fantastic. I say this blind but savante, because though I can’t remember having met him, I read him. I want to show you this. I hope he will not mind.

“The Body October”

October is a transition zone moving over

the valley corridor. The roadway,

lit by trees as they shed their skin, is still.

 

Factory air leans for it cannot leave the ground :

strange herald to the marriage of orange and grey.

October winds in the cool light, lifting the clouds

 

from the shelf, showing no rain, or rain defined

as a crystal lattice, observable in the sound of it

on October nights. This is the beginning of the year

 

in palindrome, a hinge in the present opening

all of us to a list of years, taking from then to now

and translating it perfectly. Like placing a ruler

 

against everything, the measure in the hands

of the silent draftsman. Its sky drawn in

as granite flecked with a month of migration.

- Michael deBeyer

His first book of poetry found me through an uncle in Maastricht, where Dad and I were staying in July, 2004. I had finished all of the books that I had space to bring, and so, in the ridiculously large room allotted me, I read whatever Cees could lend me under the scratchy wool blankets there. One night, there was the most fantastic thunderstorm. It left everything soaked and spongy for days afterward, it sounded as though it could easily cleave the sandstone hills of that area into pieces.

I am making post-writing resolutions right now: learn to quilt; learn to crochet; learn to sew; get Kindermusik certification; take more Spanish lessons? Or maybe another language?; get to know the people in my office better; finish Battlestar Galactica; go lots of places; apply for the next degree; grade 10 piano? or just more lessons; play music with other people; get better at explaining myself.

I am holding off on writing about the performance that I witnessed (I think witness is a good word here; I am too ambivalent about it to say that we merely “observed”) on Thursday night, but want to write a few more “real” pages before I do.

My sister once offered snacks to one of her friends asking if she wanted “homemade bread” (bread that I had baked) or “real bread.” So what is this “real” writing, anyways? The writing that has quantifiable worth, according to the credits that I pay for, I think.

Here is more from Michael, for those curious: one, two, three. The last link should be to the book from which the above poem is taken, Change in a Razor-Backed Season.