Category — After Hours

The other day author Nina Killham typed in the words “fear and writing.” It was one of those days and among her findings was a post by blogger Jennifer Louden who nails a daily fear for most of us:

“I have to know what my thing is and talk about it in very clever ways and be different than everybody else who does my thing or else I will starve /never matter / and be alone for the rest of my life, shut out from the brightness and goodness of life.”

“I know, that’s a powerful, believable, seductive story,” she writes. “I also know it’s a lie.”

The need to name and succeed can paralyze us. It keeps us from picking up the pen, the phone, the racket, the whatever. But as Christians it’s possible to live without fear. In fact, it’s implored of us. We are called into the dark to follow. We are led to new things without name. We are promised hardship, trials, and hard-won rewards. Yet success is seductive. Adoration, alluring. Recognition, rewarded.

I planned to begin this post with a line from J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey: 

“I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.”

I’ve been meditating on these words for the past month. They came to me from a friend in Winnipeg. I haven’t yet met someone who wants to be a nobody. I am no exception. Even as a new mother I find it difficult to say no to opportunity though I have the perfect excuse. 

But we’re not called to success, certainly not to every shiny proposition. It takes courage to blend in the shadows. It takes work. It’s counter-cultural and Biblical.

I know a lot of people that read this blog are ‘somebodys.’ People who lead organizations, professors, and CEOs. I also know some of you are artists, students, freelancers (like me) and everything in between.  

Our culture is masterful at teaching us how to ‘get there’ but where can we learn to leave, to bow out, to persevere in quiet?

Casey Downing tackles some of these questions in his recent article “Notes on Leaving the City.” He is preparing to leave New York, noting Joan Didion’s public exit from the same city in 1967. Her essay Goodbye to All That begins:

“It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.”

Downing echoes her words:

“Suddenly we weren’t quite so young or quite so entitled. Suddenly the paradise of New York was preparing to cast many of us out. Were we unworthy? Where did we go wrong? This was something that no one had prepared us for.”

Maybe Downing and his friends weren’t being cast out. Certainly a city cannot bestow worthiness. How could he and his friends have been better prepared for the end of their stay in the city of dreams? How can we?

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Originally posted on the Cardus After Hours blog.

:: This post appears on the After Hours blog today. 

Do one thing every day that scares you. - Eleanor Roosevelt, US diplomat & reformer (1884 – 1962)

It’s a quote I’ve been quick to recite but slow to practice. Except for last night when I stepped up to the microphone for the very first time and read some of my poetry aloud to a room of perfect strangers. Some of them fairly famous strangers. 

I was sure I read too fast. I stood at the podium wishing I’d edited just a little bit more. I fumbled over a line. My palms were sweaty.

I felt utterly alive. 

I sat down. Diane Tucker stood up. Her words flew. Lines: weighty, pressing, playful. Not one of them hitting the floor. It made me want to get up a hundred times more so I could read like her. One day. 

When was the last time you chose to do something that scared you?

Make It Productions has stepped up the craft fair circuit. They’re not alone. The handmade revolution has taken North America by storm in the past five years. They DIYers even wrote a book about it.

I grew up within the walls of a fully operational art gallery. I shared my bathroom with clients perusing oil canvases and iron toilet paper holders. Family trips were spent visiting current and prospective painters and potters, equal parts bonding time and sourcing ventures. At the age of 14 I was on a first name basis with some of Vancouver’s most prominent artisans. (On an aside, my high school boyfriend was often mistaken for an artist in attendance at gallery openings. It was his safety pin earring and five o’clock shadow, I think.)

It’s obvious, then, that buying handmade is second nature to me.

Buying art can be expensive. I have been blessed to have many creative friends (and a gallery owner mother) who have filled my shelves and walls with gifted work, but you don’t need to ‘know someone’ to be surrounded by the same. 

Fairs like Make It bring us affordable, high quality art. They’re in major cities everywhere. At a show last weekend I discovered the stunning work of Calgary-based photographer Amy Victoria Wakefield. I bought an original as a birthday gift for a friend and took home a couple of her prints. At the same show I picked up two hand-stitched journals and a large hand-printed poster by Edmonton-based Bird on Wire, all for under $30. I’ve framed the poster and its clean black and white lines now lean atop my writing desk. I met the women who crafted these pieces. I praised their work. They smiled and told me stories. Now I see their faces in my home.

Art carries memory. 

I have a favourite piece of art. It’s a small painting of the Fathers of Confederation my husband and I chose to take home from our honeymoon in the Maritimes. It hangs in a hallway where you’d likely miss it. It’s not the prettiest picture but, every time I pass by (about two dozen times a day, en route to the baby’s room) I am reminded of this first moment as husband and wife.

Do you have a favourite piece of art? (A clay bowl your child made in art class twenty years ago, perhaps?) If so, what is it? Does it carry meaning? Does it too have a face?

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Posted yesterday on the After Hours blog.

How do you do it all and keep time for creative pursuits? 

This was my first question for an occupational therapist mother-of-two I befriended earlier this week, who also happens to paint professionally. It spurred a half-hour discussion as our six-month-olds happily swung, unaware in the brisk March air, nearby.

My friend Brian Harskamp, Director of Development at the Hamilton-based think tank Cardus, is a brilliant cook. When, I wonder, does he find time between his work, civic involvements and other extracurriculars to peruse St. Lawrence Market and other local grocers for just the right ingredients? 

Me? At this stage it’s a three hour window every second Sunday, sitting in a lakeside arts centre in the company of six others, penning lines of poetry. I usually polish off my bi-weekly creative stint circling the perimeter of the lake on an early evening run. The rest of the time I scribble lines on scraps of paper as they come to me. Post-its. Backs of envelopes. Napkins. At the end of the day I write them in my journal or, more often, paste them in, ready for an article or a piece of yet-to-be-written prose. Sometimes I escape to a coffee shop between 6 and 7am to sit alone and read and journal. The occasional evening, after the dinner dishes are done, my husband is at his laptop and my daughter is tucked in bed, I scribble ideas on canvas (in pastel) for painting at a later date. 

So, dear reader, I’ve been wondering: When do you find (or, more accurately, make) time to create? 

[Adapted from this week's post on the After Hours blog]

His name is Remi, we are having a love affair, and my spouse knows about it. 

He is a Remington Portable. A archetypal typewriter manufactured in the mid-1930s. His ruddy grey body sits squarely in the centre of my coffee table, the focal point of our living room. And rightly so. As a writer married to a bibliophile, words are central in our home.  

And now more than ever. As new mother I have never been so keenly aware of language. Word by word I am naming my daughter’s world. Raffi songs are sung by heart, daily chores are narrated, and tastes, colours, sights and sounds are animated for her sheer delight.

My daughter teaches me each day that, when it comes to words, it is all about the delivery. For instance, plainly announcing “We are going for a walk” receives no more than a glance, while sing-songing the same line results in a mess of wild baby giggles.

Typewriters have a similar effect on me.

It doesn’t matter what words fall into Remi, he makes them beautiful. It’s this beauty, and the love of sending and receiving letters, that inspired my friend Marisa and I to co-found the Vancouver Letter Writing Party last fall. Each month a growing number of us gather for no other reason than to type. Letters are written, brimming with minutiae, and they are beautiful.

These words want to be read. They are climbing up, off of the paper, begging to be stamped, sealed and sent.  

When was the last time you wrote a letter — typewritten or otherwise?

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This post originally appeared on the After Hours blog.