Category — Writing

I met her in a farm house. Followed her through the wildflowers. Past the cross in yard — her husband’s grave I’d later learn — up the wooden stairs and through the doorway where the scent of fresh-baked bread embraced us like a hymn. We settled in the sitting room. Books, blankets, pottery — blazing raku, fresh from the kiln — scattering the windowsills, the shelves. I let my fifteen-year-old shoulders fall from the weight of holding my city-self together and kicked off my shoes.

We began to talk. She passed me the journal where here words lay stained on page. Grain. Like the Albertan butter fields clamouring all around us outside. Here, miles from Hythe, the closest one-street town, my adolescent heart held court with a real live poet.

Her name was Dymphny. A name that sings. The daughter of a potter friend of my mother’s we were visiting the summer between grades nine and ten. For 1,200 kilometres my brother and I enjoyed a private symphony from the upholstered back bench, a yellow sport walkman for each.

A steady stream of Frente!, Counting Crows, and Cranberries flooding my eardrums.

“Oh, my life is changing everyday… In every possible way”

Knees tucked uncomfortably against the grey minivan door, eyes set on foreign fields, my pen scratching instinctively along the lines of a dollar store notebook. Angst-filled love poems, prairie snapshots, fits of inspiration, filling the page.

And here, Dymphny. Her poem, a confession. Painting the starkness of afterbirth. The coolness of sheets. The blue of her dressing gown. The child aborted.

Without naming regret, painting the avalanche of devastation on a white paper page.

I took a copy of the work, creating next year’s final art project around an image of a child in womb — a black and white sketch — surrounded by a flurry of colour, children of all colours and ages flourishing around this loss child. I carefully copied Dymphny’s words on the back of the poster board. I kept that collage until well in my twenties.

Her words that day, words from a young widow, words from an artist child:

“Never stop writing.”

And the carry of her voice has never dwindled.

And two weeks ago the Literary Review of Canada notified me that my poem, days end, will be published in a future issue of this distinguished Canadian journal.

And today I am reminded that dreams can come true.

The days with a new son are blurring into one.

First, his birth: marvel, a rush, completely bowled me over. His face, an orbit, encircling us with new love. Then, his sister’s midnight scare. Stopped breath. Gasping: “Mommy, help. Mommy, help me.” Me a mess of tears, fears. Nursing to health a child drenched in sweat, her airway betraying her, mere days after her brother’s birth. Me, sitting on the couch nursing newborn as my husband braves the ambulance ride with our first baby. Sobbing for what might have happened had I not heard her: had the air conditioners been on, the doors closed, muffling her cries from bedroom next door. I’d woken to nurse babe and heard the stirrings I’d otherwise miss. This is our miracle.

Now, two children roaming these wooden floors, healthy. And me, sent to rest week after week. The bleeding keeps coming. Cabbing to emergency, waiting in rooms with a woman swallowing needles, man cursing at children. Full moon, they said. Husband at home laying toddler to bed, feeding infant by bottle. Slowly now, it is subsiding, but my world circles round a room, a house, a three block radius. I can’t walk further for the pain of it. And I am tears and laughter and more tears as I struggle to find moments with my sweet girl, my devoted man. And I hold a babe in arm all the day.

And today we had a party in our front yard to celebrate two years of life, of memory, of firsts — steps in the Bowen House, ice cream cone with Grandma, words, airplane rides — and over plates of cupcakes and gummy bears spilling on grass, the pain of it all slips away.

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Joining with Emily, at imperfect prose, today.

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I feel I should explain exactly what happened. Madeleine caught croup and a spiked fever in the middle of the night had her gasping for air. That was the cause of the 9-1-1 call and our midnight scare. I had complications with bleeding after Thomas’ birth and had to be on bed rest for a couple of weeks. In the end everything checked out and I didn’t need any surgery, thank God.

Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”

— Mary Oliver (by way of Sabrina Ward Harrison ♥)

“One of the many things I dislike about being a grown-up is the compulsion to have a purpose in life.  People are forever asking you why you are doing whatever you happen to be doing and before long you succumb to the need to supply an answer.”

- Michael Lewis (Home Game)

Last week’s ‘word for thought Wednesday’ was delayed by the arrival of our newest bundle, a son!

Thomas Patrick Hart arrived in a hurry Wednesday afternoon after a previous day of slow contractions (Madeleine and I even went for a swim in our neighbour’s pool on Tuesday but it didn’t help speed things up.)

Thomas was born during Madeleine’s nap, one hour after our midwives arrived, in our brightly lit living room.

My mom spent last week with us — cooking, cleaning, hanging art, planting flowers, generally being an angel — so she and Madeleine were able to come downstairs and meet Thomas minutes after he was born. After taking a bath at noon on Wednesday (a good check to see if it speeds things up or down) my contractions sped from 10 minutes apart to 2 in the span of 30 minutes. Fast labours are a mixed gift: afterwards I had a major case of whiplash. But we are back on our feet, with endless help from my amazing mom, and we are a happy, happy, happy clan.

Here is a link to a video of Madeleine and Thomas.

(Oh, and the book pitches were mailed in advance of baby’s arrival. Thanks for the encouragement, everyone!)

“I hate it when people say: ‘I’m spiritual but not religious. That’s like saying, ‘I’m emotional but not a psycho.’ It turns religion into a dirty word. Religion simply means re-ligion: to reattach to the God you feel separated from.”

- Susan E. Isaacs, author and comedian

Last year I pitched a story to UPPERCASE magazine — a profile of my creative hero, artist/author Sabrina Ward Harrison. It was a thinly veiled attempt to meet Sabrina, whose work I have followed for close to ten years. As luck/fate (read: GOD) would have it, the pitch turned itself into much more than a phone interview.

I was sent to Prince Edward Island for a three-day sojourn with six other women to create alongside Sabrina at an old waterside hotel called the Highlands. (You may remember I faced a little trepidation as prepared for this trip.) The historic home and adjacent town dance hall, where we did our making, has housed royalty and the likes of Reverend Billy Graham. Each room was brimming with island minutiae and stacks of old LIFE magazines — a writer’s dream. Angela Ritchie, founder of the Whistler-based ACE Camps, and a creative mastermind in her own right, was the organizer of the retreat. I had the good fortune of interviewing her when I was back in Vancouver last week.

The fruit of the trip — Watchful Reverence, in UPPERCASE issue 10 — arrived at stockists and doorsteps days ago.

An excerpt:

“It’s the steady calm of the island air whistling through the birch trees. It’s the burst of plover, finches, and jays that begin their daylight calling at 4:30am, beckoning us to do the milking… I am sitting on the front stairs of the Highlands main house. Here four crooked trees congregate like an outer hearth. The twisting white-worn branches are the sort you’d find in the Haunted Wood of Anne of Green Gables’ imagination. The beaked chirps, caws and whistles blend into a symphony of spring. Behind me seven girls chatter on around the breakfast table: preserves, balkan yogurt, fresh-baked muffins, boiled eggs, brimming between. In the old adjacent dance hall Sabrina, dressed in a vintage polkadot dress, is readying for the day’s making.”

It was an absolute gift to meet Sabrina and a joy to work with Janine Vangool, tireless publisher/editor/designer of the magazine (not to mention mother to an on-the-run toddler.)

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If you are interested in reading the complete article you can order single copies or subscriptions to this beautiful publication at: http://shop.uppercasegallery.ca/collections/uppercase-magazine-1\. It is available in print only.

You, God, are my truest self.

The place I can sit unhurried.

You are the vast earth, ocean, star, hill invading my skin like night wind.

You are the birth place, the open passage, announcing life.

You are the hope dismissing my ‘whys’ and calling my eyes to the two darkened sky birds circling grey sun.

You are the voice saying: “rest, find rest, sweet spirit. Believe with the fierceness at first. Draw ear to my belly, my black mouth, and look.”

A Song of Jean

by SIBYL RUTH, 2008 winner of the Mslexia Poetry Competition

Let my tongue and keyboard both proclaim the power of Jean.

For in the meeting house, Jean gets to her feet often and ministers
with a voice that is a clanging gong.
She drives away false peace, awakens us.
Teach us not to fear becoming caught in the long diversions of Jean’s thoughts, lost in the ring road of her speech.

When appointed hour is done, may we engage Jean in conversation
and not run away from her in the lobby for some invented reason.

Let us acknowledge the aging of Jean
who doesn’t enjoy being eighty
but wishes to go on as she did at thirty.
Allow us all to accommodate Jean’s fury,
listening with tenderness to her shouts and rants
Jean’s demands for help. Her refusal of help that’s offered.
Those cries of No. No I can do it. I can manage.

May we make time to watch over Jean
for she mislays her spectacles, her watch, her keys, her purse.

Help us to worship the Spirit that shaped the hands of Jean,
hands that once tied knots, hammered tent pegs, peeled thousands of potatoes.
Jean’s hands now in their fleecy gloves, their knobbly, twisted, arthritic fingers,
hands that can no longer do buttons, whose buttons are done wrong.
frantic hands that keep on searching bags and rattling papers.

Jean has been diminished, yet we shall magnify Jean’s name.
Lead us to esteem properly the engine that is Jean’s body
the darkness of her teeth.
the hairs of her head, white and coarse as dune grass
her stertorous breath
her bent back
her slumped chest.
Also let us praise Jean’s black-handled stick that likes to slip from her grasp and hit the floor with a great clatter.

May we remember always the muchness of Jean’s mind
Her mind that carries those seas from which we crawled in the beginning
that holds those caverns which shall open to receive us at our end.

May glory and honour belong to Jean, and every day that remains to her be blessed.

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for all of us will grow old

a blessing for those we love whose hands now flow blue

for my grandmother who lies again in hospital bed with fractures

The other night I woke up at 3 o’clock in the morning with an idea: give up the internet for a year. While the thought came in the flicker of night, it has been gestating for more than a year. It began during the research and writing of “In with the Old,” an article for the New York-based journal The Curator, and set for republication this summer.

In it I wrote:

There’s no question that technology has overrun our lives. Over the past century, the world has welcomed technological ‘progress’ with arms wide open and we’re living with the clicking, dinging, anxiety-inducing deluge of it.

But a creative backlash is underway, helping human beings cope with the avalanche of data that passes in front of most of us every day through the use of computers and cell phones.

Slow food, the back-to-the-land movement, and groups like letter writing clubs are being formed by a new subculture: the 21st century luddite, wielding fountain pen and notebook, and some checking e-mail from the public library a mere hour per week.

Rebecca Dolen and Brandy Fedoruk [owners of a computer-free paper store in Vancouver, called Regional Assembly of Text] think this movement is more than a blip on the technological continuum.

“We started the letter writing club right off the bat because we wanted to have an ongoing community event. There have been a few hardcore regulars but 80% are new people each month. We started with five to ten people and now regularly have 20 to 30.”

There’s a universal sense that something must be done to rope the nodes in. But what? We can’t all pack our bags and head for the hills, or can we?

I’ve been growing increasingly uncomfortable with the role the internet plays in my day-to-day life and the impacts it is having in our society at large.

Last week I watched a CBC documentary called: “Are we digital dummies?” In it there is a scene where a priest is conducting a blessing service for smart phones. Here is a man dressed in holy vestments calling on the God of the universe to bless a Blackberry. I had a visceral — absolute bodily repulsion — to the scene unfolding before my eyes.

While the benefits of the internet are numerous: Skype and photo sharing, for example, it is mixed with an ever-dominating persistence for our attention, and it is this I find unsettling. The centrality of internet technology in our daily lives makes me squeamish and I feel I need to figure out why.

I have suspicions. I think the internet makes me lazy, as a thinker, a writer, and a friend. I think the internet allows me to emotionally disengage, enabling me to pass the time with ever-ready filler: mundane, contextless information via newsfeeds, Facebook and Google Reader.

The truth is, I am both bored and obsessed with the web.

It is my hope to complete higher education in the area of media studies, particularly looking at new media’s impact on our understanding of citizenship. During this season with young children I am able to do little to move towards this dream. Completing this year-long fast from the internet would allow me to conduct first-hand research while staying at home with my children. It will also hinder the amount and kind of work I am able to complete as a self-employed writer. Thus, I am seeking out a publication or two that would be interested in chronicling this journey. I am offering to submit a regular column by snail mail or couriered USB, as I will not be accessing email.

I anticipate this fast as an opportunity to enliven my real relationships and filter out the extra. I know it will be an enormous adjustment in my day-to-day life, but I also expect it will be a life-giving exercise. I know it will be a huge change for my family, in particular not seeing pictures and blog posts appearing online. Instead I hope to send a regular update (with lots of pictures) by mail, pick up the phone and have Michael organize Skype dates with grandparents and the kids. I will not allow our children to suffer the loss of grandma and grandpa face time on account of this fast.

Spiritually, I hope this fast will open my ears and my eyes to God’s voice and the world around me, and quiet the hum of my online life.

I welcome all of your thoughts (and thank those that already shared on facebook.) If I go ahead I plan to begin January 2012.