Assignment Open

My Return

2011-09-20T20:58:00.001-07:00

It's been awhile, I know. I don't know what made me stay away.

But an old mentor dropped by to say hello today, and to give me a proof copy of her book, and seeing her made me feel inspired, because while I've looked at the books I've written and thought, "Ugh," and shoved them into drawers, she looked at hers and thought, "This could really be something, if I worked at it," and then she worked at it.

I should do that.

I haven't read hers yet, but I have a feeling it's going to be good. I asked her to sign the inside, and she wrote, "Thank you so much for helping me discover my passion," because, I suppose, I did - I egged her on when she said she wanted to write. And then she went ahead and wrote me under the table. Holding her signed book in my hand, self-published but getting ready for bigger things, I resolved to follow her example.

So, to begin, I'm going to post a new poem. Then, I'm going to post a short story, a whole one this time, in instalments. I'll edit it and everything. After that, we'll see.

Spark

A simmering, a shimmering, a shimmying of the soul as it shines beneath the jazzlights of the stars. You are.

You are you are you are you are you are you are.

Real.

And skirts are swirling in the desert of the night that you once knew as barren.

StoryWonk Collage

2010-09-30T21:13:00.000-07:00

With some snippets of dialog and lyrics from the soundtrack.

Haiku 11

2010-09-14T22:20:00.001-07:00

The cave mouth appears.
The place where darkness meets light
Is where we are born.

Barbados Scrapbook

2010-06-19T18:51:00.000-07:00

Creative Flow

2010-06-15T21:01:00.000-07:00

I presented this speech to my Toastmaster's club to fulfill the requirements of Project 4: How to Say It.

Redecorating your bedroom can help you draft a compelling business proposal, and concocting a new recipe for rice pudding can help you write a better speech.

Sounds ridiculous, right? But what if redecorating your bedroom were the sort of activity that for you induced a feeling of calm concentration? What if painting walls and chipping away at old flooring were the sort of thing that, for you, made the hours feel like minutes?

The feeling I'm talking about is called Creative Flow, and people experience it when they are truly creatively engaged in any activity, whether it be fixing a car or composing a sonata. Engaging in a seemingly trivial activity, if that activity is something that brings about Creative Flow for you, can help you achieve it in the parts of your life where it matters most.

The term "Creative Flow" was coined by a cognitive scientist named Mihalyi Czikszentmihalhyi. He’s one of the world’s leading researchers in the field of positive psychology. He describes Flow as "being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost."

Since Czikszentmihalhyi, a lot of other people have written about Creative Flow. In his book Free Play, composer Stephen Nachmanovitch talks about how it’s what lets urban planners find new ways to manage sprawling cities. It’s what leads doctors to come up with brilliant diagnoses, and it’s what leads entrepreneurs to come up with breakthroughs in business. And it’s something I’ve been struggling to achieve in my writing for a long time.

The reason for that is that an important characteristic of Flow is a lack of self-consciousness. You literally have to lose yourself in whatever you’re doing, but I couldn’t do that, because every time I sat down to write, in my head, I heard the voice of a particularly nasty TA I had in journalism school. She’d say things like, “You know, this is really boring.” Almost the entire time I was writing my novel, she was sitting on my shoulder, hissing at me.

Artist and writer Julia Cameron talks a lot about such blocks in her books The Artist’s Way and The Vein of Gold. To help people get rid of them, she assigns a series of tasks which usually have no direct relevance to anything in real life, and very often, those tasks are what many people would consider childish: things like making dolls, collaging, or painting plaster masks. What they have in common is the goal of silencing the inner critic. For me, though, the thing that worked best to silence the inner critic wasn’t any of those exercises. It was scrapbooking.

I discovered my love of scrapbooking by accident. I wanted to give a gift to my boyfriend’s parents to thank them for taking me to Barbados with them, but I couldn’t think of anything to buy. When the trip ended, though, I had a bunch of great photos of their family, so I decided to make them a scrapbook. I was excited to have what I thought was a pretty good gift idea, but I what I didn’t anticipate was that scrapbooking would help my writing.

But I found that selecting the patterned paper, tracing stencils, sprinkling sparkles and mucking around with layouts induced in me that state of relaxed focus I’d been lacking. I lost my sense of self-consciousness, because my abilities as a scrapbooker had very little to do with my actual self-concept. And because scrapbooking is so far removed from anything in my nasty TA’s field of expertise, the voice in my head that sounded like her had nothing to say about it.

When I sat down to write the morning after a solid night of scrapbooking, she was still keeping quiet, and I was able to feel that same sense of flow.

In a book called The Talent Code, Daniel Boyle describes what happens to the brain during the development of a new skill. It just so happens that engaging in any creative activity helps build neural pathways on the right side of the brain, which makes it easier to be creative in other areas of your life.

For me, scrapbooking was both a way to silence the inner critic, and a way to practice engaging in the creative process itself. For you, the thing that induces creative flow might be different. It could be building model airplanes or baking or tinkering with your car. Whatever the activity, if the critical voices are yammering away inside your head and making it impossible to lose yourself in work you thought you loved, I’ve found the best way to shut them up is to get up and do some other joyful thing.

Deep Winter

2010-02-10T21:44:00.000-08:00

The city shivers in its heatless smoke.

A man on a couch stares up, forearm on forehead
And remembers himself
In an airless room,
A useless pencil in his hand,
Merciless words blurring.
He sees his future as a curtain torn from its rod.

A girl breaks off a piece of herself
And offers it;
A coal, it clatters, rolls
and glimmers out.

Surface Tension

2009-11-04T07:17:00.000-08:00

Rising and falling on flexed and unflexed toes
you know the water is cold
but you’ve already come to the end of this concrete wall,
remainder of a storm-wrecked boathouse.

You know
it will feel like something has been torn from you
and you’ll be nothing

but in that space, the water moves

Once small, then nothing, now everything
shattered and reassembled, more perfect.

Years later, pen poised,
terrified
you know there is another need for breaking
and what breaking brings

Haiku 10

2009-11-03T07:03:00.000-08:00

To escape yourself
pry each of Fear's fingernails
from your naked back

Haiku 9

2009-10-11T23:04:00.000-07:00

Can't dismount this horse.
Get thrown - it's the only way.
Hooves pound on gravel.

Haiku 8: For the Discouraged

2009-09-10T09:22:00.000-07:00

Steel is made this way:
burned and beaten. Only then
can it be a sword.

Story Snippet 2: Johnson's Grave

2009-08-30T18:55:00.000-07:00

This is fiction:

Johnson was a fat man, but still somehow handsome. It was hard for me to imagine him rotting away down there when he used to be so substantial. But there it was - the layer of grass resting over the still settling dirt, its brown seams proclaiming that yes, this one was fresh.

"I didn't really know you," I said out loud, surprising myself.

Johnson was a good boss. He always seemed so cheerful. At least once a day, he'd clap me on the shoulder and tell me what a swell assistant he thought I was. But in the note he'd left when he hung himself, he'd instructed that there should be no funeral, and that I was to make all the burial arrangements, and inherit all his things.

He'd only hired me a month ago.

"Why me?" I'd asked, but no answer would ever be forthcoming, or so I thought. I turned the Rolex in my hands. It didn't seem right that I should have it. He'd always worn the thing, and it would never suit my slender woman's wrist. There was no man in my life to take it. I could sell it, but I didn't need the money anymore.

My fingers rubbed the inscription under the watch face. "For Danny, with all my love," it said. No mention of who it was from.

I tossed the watch onto the grave and walked back towards the cemetery gate. I turned around for one last look and saw the silver glinting. Only then did I notice the magpies cawing in the poplars that swayed nearby.

Haiku 7

2009-08-20T20:14:00.000-07:00

One thing about storms:
they make a space between now
and the time before.

Haiku 6

2009-08-19T18:14:00.001-07:00

Hear the night crackle?
It's telling you to wake up,
give air to the flame.

Rhyme for Wasted Potential in 5-7-5-7

2009-08-19T13:41:00.000-07:00

No diamonds? No beer?
No proposal or career?
No babies? No friends?
No holidays or weekends?

You wanted the world;
Watch your dreams: in smoke, they curl.
Heeding your voices,
You made all the wrong choices –
Your beating heart knows,
They said, where happiness goes.

They lied. Now, it’s time:
Make limonade from sour lime.
You are, after all,
Made to climb up, and to fall.

Haiku 5

2009-08-19T07:21:00.000-07:00

Dragonfly trapped, in

a gardenless courtyard - can't

see the way out: up

Story Snippet 1: The Postman

2009-08-15T22:13:00.001-07:00

I've got a bad habit of starting stories and not finishing them, so I've decided to post some beginnings. Suggestions and comments are welcome.

There are days on Lake Waskaganaag when the loon calls and nobody listens, but they're usually at the end of tourist season. In summer, the little shops with their hand-painted signs are overrun with curious Americans and Albertans. In winter, grey mist settles on the lake, and voices echo on the mountains behind it.

But people still live there. There's Marjory at the general store, Cal who runs the farmer's markets, and of course, Wesley. The postman.

Wesley moved to Lake Waskaganaag to escape thoughts of his wife. She'd had a miscarriage and, when she'd recovered, he'd come home one day with a bouquet of roses, hoping to try again. He'd found her riding his next door neighbor, Fred.

So Wesley had gone traveling for awhile, hitchiking through the mountains until he came to Lake Waskaganaag, where he was soothed by the quiet and the people. That was in February. Snow had laid thick on the peaked roofs. The only women were matronly and kind. When girls got old enough, they left, so there was no one there to remind him of his wife.

When summer came, he took a second job giving canoe tours from the Cedarwood Hotel, and he had no time anymore for grief. At night, he pulled out the spiral-bound album that contained the beginnings of a stamp collection, and thumbed through it, examining with a magnifying glass the small, bright pictures. They were never very emotional, these pictures. They were always very orderly and safe. They presented a view of the world as he would like it to be: everything in its place and assigned its proper worth.

Epiphany on the way to Scarborough

2009-08-13T19:44:00.000-07:00

An ad on the subway:
a perfume called Zen,
the picture, a jack-in-the-box geisha
red arms upswept in long gloves
ribbons spurting like blood from her wrists
tied in a little knot around her golden torso—
curiously disembodied, an impossible S-shape.
Zen.

There is the word, but not the peace
that comes when desire disappears
so the littlest things widen the eyes
(the subway climbing above ground).
Compared with that darkness
an ordinary day with its trees and grass
its lower middle class postwar homes
in the poorer suburbs
and scarcely maintained parks
seem true and complete.

The city gives way.
Butterflies defy traffic.
In the meridians,
Weeds confuse themselves with flowers.

Crawlies

2009-08-12T22:12:00.001-07:00

On the roof the other morning, I saw a red-bodied dragonfly. I went downstairs to get my camera, and when I got back, it was gone, but in its place I discovered a whole world of other bugs - all in a plot about 3 metres squared. Click on the little green leaves to take a look.

Haiku 4

2009-08-11T06:35:00.000-07:00

Maybe battle is
too strong a word; it's more like
a tightrope, each day

On Passion

2009-08-09T09:39:00.000-07:00

Passion is the claw we use to grasp at life. Passion is the candle we have to shelter. I feel it burning in my chest some days, and those are the days when life seems most real, most worthwhile, most vivid and touched with beauty. On days when there is passion, I notice things. I bathe in the air and breathe it deep. In my heart I imagine a hand shielding that small light.

Anger and sadness can be made into a fuel for that light, turning it into a blaze that purifies. Fear is the airless room that snuffs it out.

To be frightened and restless is to be at war with yourself, tempted to curl up in a corner, but jittery as a crack addict while you're there. Sooner or later, the craving overcomes the fear, and you're forced back out into the world.

Passion makes me reach for things. Passion makes me run. Passion quiets the incessant voice and amplifies the silent one, the one that says, "You can; You have to."

Passion is worth more than any object, because without it, life is meaningless. Passion is risky - to abandon yourself to it is to create the possibility of loss. Because we don't always achieve what we set out to do. Our lovers will sometimes leave us. And when fear slips under passion's door like the snake that sneaks into the garden, it poisons everything. But only if you let it.

It's easy to take things too seriously- lightness makes life better

2009-08-08T14:03:00.000-07:00

It's never enough to love your shoes,
easy to hate everything else
to slam the door
take shelter in your dark well
things crumbling, you pull your hands away
too early
seriously-
lightness doesn't like your grasping, and it
makes no sense to push at shadows
life doesn't wait-
better ignite

Goodbye Toronto

2009-08-08T06:44:00.001-07:00

My little love letter to the city. It's about 3 min. long.

Haiku 3 and 1/3

2009-08-06T19:26:00.000-07:00

Fragile, all of us
Every morning, a battle
Each day, a new scar
(each day, a new spark lighting)

Haiku 2

2009-08-04T07:38:00.000-07:00

Tricky balancing

On joy's knife edge, focusing

Only on this, here

Why Bailing is Necessary

2009-08-03T10:57:00.000-07:00

I met a guy at the library the other day who was depressed about his future. I tried to find out what his hopes and dreams were, thinking maybe if we could find out what his passion was, he could chase after it and he would be happier.

But he wouldn't admit to having one. "That's all you people care about here," he said. Freedom, following your dreams and all that crap. In China, he said, people do things that actually make sense. That's why he was studying to be an actuary, he said. Because he was Chinese. For those of you who don't know what an actuary is (I didn't), according to dictionary.com, it's the guy at the insurance company "who computes premium rates, dividends, risks, etc., according to probabilities based on statistical records."

Now, I'm sure that, of the billions of people who live in China, there are at least a few who have followed their dreams. But maybe he has a point. Maybe "dreaming," or at least, how we choose to dream, is cultural. And maybe it isn't actually a given that it's a good idea to follow your dreams.

The way is murky. There are no maps - only, it sometimes seems, dead-end trails strewn with the bodies of failures. For awhile, I thought maybe I was one of them. But for some reason, I seem to keep getting up after I fall - maybe it's all those horseback riding lessons. If you got thrown and refused to get back on, they'd kick you out and tell you to never come back. If you didn't get back on, the horse would learn that throwing people was a good way to get out of doing things it didn't want to do: an unacceptable lesson. Maybe life is like that, too. You have to keep getting back on, or it'll learn that it's OK to throw you.

That's why, I guess, at one of those times when the search for employment felt like getting hacked off at the knees on a daily basis, I wrote a little poem:

On Failure:

Failing is a useful skill; I do it very well

And those of you who never do can all just go to hell.

For those who win and never lose break easily as glass;

More glory comes in victory from falling on your ass.

Yes failure is the sweetest pain of building up the sinews,

For when you find your weakest self, the strength appears within you.

So bring the mud and rotten fruit, the ridicule and laughter--

They'll compost into rich, dark dirt for the garden I'll make after.

Outta Luck? Sew Be It.

2009-08-02T07:48:00.001-07:00

Sherry Maynard, a slender young woman dressed entirely in purple except for a pair of zebra-print pants, pushes black and yellow cloth through a sewing machine.

She’s been drawing outfits for years, she says, but it wasn’t until she saw Project Runway that she realized designing went hand-in-hand with knowing how to sew. Now, clients will take her more seriously, she says.

Fatima Goldstein, an interior designer, is learning for practical reasons, too. She wants to be able to custom-make pillows and curtains for her clients because it’s cheaper than hiring others to do it. Today, she pins a pink, yellow and black ribbon to the collar of a bright pink shirt, while her classmate Talia Regan, a freelance writer, chalks a hemline on a vintage plaid skirt.

“I’m always buying these random things that I never end up wearing, but that I have some kind of vision for,” Regan says. Now, she knows how to turn those visions into reality.

In a recession, people look for ways to improve their skills, says Dilys Tong, who teaches the class at Sew Be It, her Toronto sewing studio. Ironically, though she’s teaching the women a practical, money-saving skill, Tong begins the class with a story about her own erratic spending.

She stands in the middle of the room wearing a pleated tweed miniskirt, a chunky pink sweater she made herself, and a teardrop diamond ring that sparkles as she speaks.

She made the mistake of going into Holt Renfrew’s shoe department on the weekend, just to look, she says. “There was this one pair, it was so beautiful you could have sex with it, OK?”

The edge of the price sticker was folded over, but it seemed to say $750. She bought the shoes, three-inch black open-toed satin stilettos with big black blossoms on the heels. “I can do $750,” Tong said to herself as she signed the credit card receipt. Then, she saw the amount she was signing for—about $2000, $1750 before tax.

“You’re taking them back,” her friend said sternly as they left the store.

“But my legs! My beautiful long legs! It’s cheaper than plastic surgery!” she cried.

Back in her sewing studio, she rationalizes, “I’m trying to keep the economy going, and spend our way out of the recession.”

Owners of sewing-related businesses like Tong’s are finding themselves better able than most to spend their way through the recession, because the past few years have seen a burgeoning in enthusiasm for the craft. More and more, people are looking for ways to make and repair clothes to save money. Sewing machine sales are spiking like they haven’t since the Second World War, and sewing classes are bulging at the seams.

Books like Make Do and Mend, a WWII British primer on how to lengthen the life of clothes and household items, are more popular than ever. Meanwhile, TV shows like Project Runway have lent sewing a newfound glamour.

There are only six women in this class, which, for Tong, is a full group. They range in age from mid-twenties to mid-forties. Most classes have one man in them, she says.
She likes to keep her classes small because it lets her give a lot of one-on-one attention to each student, but she’s seen enough demand that she has just opened another location.

Tong says her business has grown steadily since she opened Sew Be It in 2005, and the economic downturn has merely added momentum. “I don’t know if it’s the recession, or just a changing value system,” she says. There may be even more to it than that.

****

There is a healing aspect to putting something together, even something as simple as a dress, when it seems like everything else is falling apart. I experienced it when I was 17. I made my own grad dress because it mean that with $100 and some help from my mom, I’d be able to wear a violet satin off-the-shoulder gown designed by Badgley Mischka. The alternative was a cheap polyester knockoff from the mall.

What I didn’t anticipate was the solace the month-and-a-half long project would bring. The whirring of the machine as I stitched a seam, the graceful curve of the boning that held up the bodice, and the depth of focus required to get just the right crease in the hem took my mind away from the petty social dramas of high school.

Now, the recession is bringing people dramas of its own, and Lincraft, an Australian house wares store, has reported a 30 per cent increase in sewing machine sales over the past year. The John Lewis department store in England has seen an increase of 45 per cent.
****

“This is a busy store,” whispers Terry Smith, a student in a sewing class taking place on
a Sunday morning at Yarn Forward and Sew On.

Customers crowd into the Ottawa sewing, knitting and craft shop to question the staff, finger the wool, and run their hands over the new sewing machines the way people do with the hoods of new cars. Some of the machines cost almost as much. One, the Husqvarna Viking Designer Diamond, sells for about $7000, but other models go for as little as $100. The most popular machine, according to Jo-Ann Raven, one of the store’s owners and its resident sewing machine expert, is the $350 Husqvarna Emerald, which can do 60 different kinds of stitch. The machines in general have been selling like crazy, especially over the past couple of years, Raven says.

I don’t know it yet, but I’m about to buy one myself, although not from the store— from one of the students gathered around the table in the middle of it.

Her name is Anna Sundin, and she sits primly in a burgundy sweater vest and wire-rimmed glasses. She’s a middle-aged lawyer and long-time sewing enthusiast, and she already has a machine she paid $500 for ten years ago, but she has decided it’s time for an upgrade. She has bought the $350 Emerald, and offers her old Janome to me for $50.

I haven’t sewn since I left my parents’ house nine years ago, where I used an antique Singer built into its own beautifully carved sewing table.

The machine Sundin hefts onto the desk at her home office a couple of weeks later is encased in less lovely but more practical yellowed plastic. She takes me upstairs to show me some of the things she has made.

There are several sets of warm beige, brown and burgundy curtains, autumn-inspired throw pillows, and closets full of clothes. She pulls down a beige and brown-flowered sheath from a hanger on her bedroom door. “It has a princess seam,” she says, pointing to lines curving in towards the waist. One of the things she likes about sewing, she says, is it lets her modify the shapes she cuts from the fabric to fit her own generous frame.

But the main reason, as she explains it at the Yarn Forward class, is that it requires the use of so many different faculties. “It’s a mind thing, but it’s also a sensory thing,” she says.

She likes the feel of the fabric running through her fingers, the sight of the colours, and the challenge of bringing into being what began in her imagination.

All that can have a grounding, comforting effect, which is why, Raven says, sewing is an activity people tend to turn to in times of stress.

It’s not that way for everyone. Maureen Novak, a stay-at-home mom and one of the students in Tong’s class, says her tendency towards perfectionism actually means sewing sometimes increases her stress level. Still, she adds, “There’s always psychological benefits with anything creative. You just have to be disciplined enough not to let it make you crazy.”

The search for new creative outlets has a lot to do with sewing’s heightened popularity, as does the increased prevalence of a more “back to basics” mindset, Raven says.

She pinpoints the beginning of the most recent trend to September 11, 2001. “People have been cocooning,” she says, “possibly because people are starting to think more of their families, their home.”

But, she adds, looking over the vibrant green frames of her glasses, she’s been around long enough to see the sewing trend come and go. “I know I’m old, because it’s popular again,” she says.

In the last lesson of the day, the “free-stitch,” Raven pushes the cloth around the needle as if the needle were a stationary paintbrush and the cloth a moving canvas, tracing leaves, hearts and daisies. Then, the students give it a try.

“I totally suck!” Smith laughs. As her leaves and flowers become knots and scribbles, her expression makes me think of a kid careening around a go-cart track— thrilled, exhilarated, focused, determined.

****

In 1963, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique kick-started the women’s movement. The book lumped sewing in with all the other drudgery of postwar suburban women’s lives. Sewing’s association with domesticity continued to give it a sinister, oppressive cast until 21st century feminists started using it as a way to escape the mold of mass-produced clothing.

Devon Dagworthy, a friendly-faced young woman with chin-length chestnut-coloured hair who custom-makes bows in a Toronto ribbon store, says for her, sewing is empowering. “It’s very nice to be able to just take control of something you’re doing,” she says.

She just finished a corset-making class where several of her classmates exchanged stories about their grandmothers’ horror at their desire for restrictive undergarments, she says. “They were like, ‘I fought for so long not to wear these things!’ But now we’ve moved beyond fighting not to wear corsets, so we’re allowed to wear them again.”

She also says sewing and buying locally-produced, handmade clothing is becoming a trend among people concerned about the women who, in many parts of the world, still toil away in sweatshops for pennies a day. Hand-made items are now stealing some of the cachet that used to attach itself to brand names, she says.

****

On a sunny spring Sunday in downtown Toronto’s fashion district, fabric stores are so crowded it’s difficult to maneuver, and thrift stores are almost as busy. Value Village has reported a 10 per cent increase this year in sales and foot traffic in its Canadian, American and Australian stores.

I’m on the hunt for clothes I can go job-searching in. Starting from scratch can be cheaper than buying new, but it still means paying for fabric, thread and patterns, which, depending on what you plan to make, often amounts to about $30 for an outfit. An even cheaper option is to find something secondhand and modify it, which is what I'm about to do. I settle on a hideous knee-length black polyester skirt with lace panels. It looks like something an Amish woman might wear in a fit of rebellion, but when I’m done with it, it will be a sleek, high-wasted pencil skirt, minus the lace. At least, I hope it will.

Sundin’s machine mystifies me, and it takes an hour before I even figure out how to thread the thing. Once it’s threaded, it refuses to pull the fabric through, and stitches over and over and over in the same exact spot until the thread has knotted into an infuriating little ball.

The battered manual is practically indecipherable. It’s too late to demand my money back from Sundin; I’ve taken the machine to Toronto, and she’s back in Ottawa. I’ve spent my last $13 on this ridiculous skirt, and the bank has refused to raise the limit on my credit line. There’s only one thing left to do: call my mother. When she was 17, she made her own prom dress, and she stood over my shoulder when I made mine. As a seven-year-old, I tore a hole in the sleeve of my costume the night before the school play, and woke up to find it lovingly repaired.

“There should be a little set of teeth under the needle,” she says. “Maybe it’ll work if you change the setting on those.” It does.

With a vicious-looking little tool called a stitch-ripper, I tear out the lace panels and pull apart the seams. The sound of snapping threads is strangely satisfying. Then, I pin the skirt back together and pull it through the machine, which, properly adjusted, purrs like a big, happy wildcat. Slowly, the fabric takes a new shape, and as it does, for a little while, the bank, the credit line, the job search and the $13 all seem to fall away.

Monarch on the roof

2009-07-31T11:09:00.001-07:00

Monarch on the roof
Originally uploaded by Blue Princesa

In the garden on the roof of my apartment building.

Bioemotional Geography

2009-07-31T06:59:00.000-07:00

Aorta, atria and ventricles:
labyrinthine limestone caves
sediments stratified and
scarred as karst topography
deep as ocean trenches (teeming with undiscovered life)
layer upon layer laid on bitter coal
made precious
by pressure and heat.

White Water

2009-07-30T09:49:00.001-07:00

Over 50 great stores, services and eateries, the signs proclaim,
shopping sure does work up an appetite

but in the food court they look less hungry
than wildly alone
each swirling in his or her own little vortex of fear

the family talking finances over foil-wrapped tacos

the street youth asleep in his chair

the single mother with her spiky hair and cup of coffee
working up the courage to

PROMOTE HERSELF

just a little more

the sounds of voices mingling over the air conditioner’s rush
like a coming waterfall

and we are kayakers, one and all.

Haiku 1

2009-07-28T21:14:00.001-07:00

Beauty's nature is
Sky reflected on towers,
Twilight's warm pavement.

Overnight to Marrakech: A Reconstruction

2009-01-31T13:40:00.000-08:00

As told to me by Ms. M.M. herself:

Monique had grown up near the water, but she’d never felt waves like the ones that rocked the boat on the Strait of Gibraltar. Her redheaded companion, Rory, struggled to hold down the contents of his stomach.

They pulled into Tangiers harbour, and Monique found herself crushed amongst the bodies of 200 passengers pushing off the boat with their suitcases, babies and baskets of produce. The air was thick with the smell of rotting fruit and meat, and heavy with a sticky heat. It would smell even worse in Marrakech.

They walked across a tarmac full of shipping containers and climbed into a taxi. Rory sat in the front and Monique sat in the back and looked out the windows, straining to see the city flying by in the dark. All she could tell was that it was more modern than she had expected. No dirt roads.

Still, they’d been told Tangiers was a place to pass through, not a place to stay. It was too full of men like the one they’d meet when they arrived at the train station.

The small, bearded man rushed up to the cab. “Oh, I’ll help you with your bags. I’ll help you with your bags,” he said, grabbing them in his wiry arms and rushing off before they could say yes or no.

“Go! Go! Go!” the cab driver said, as Monique fumbled with her cash. They dove into the crowd after the little man, who led them to the ticket booth, then the train, where he thrust out his hand. “20 euros!” he demanded. There wasn’t time to argue, so they gave him 15 and boarded the train, where the ticket man told them the baggage grabber would have settled for as little as three.

Dejected, they plunked themselves down in an empty compartment and the train rattled away from the station. At the first stop, two men joined them. One was six feet tall and about 300 pounds. Sweat had soaked through his white cotton robe and dripped down his forehead. The other was short, skinny and shifty-eyed. Both were bearded. The big one was jovial and made small talk in broken English, asking Rory where he was from and where he was going. The small one kept quiet.

Both of them ignored Monique, until the middle of the night. She’d been slumped back against the hard plastic bench doing her best to fall asleep, but it was difficult. Rory breathed deeply and rhythmically, twitching every so often. She opened her eyes.

The fat man was staring at her, hard. He gave her a smarmy smile.

Suddenly afraid, she elbowed Rory’s head, but he didn’t wake up. The little man glanced over, and went back to looking out the window. The fat man continued to stare. She crossed her arms and huddled against the side of the cabin and closed her eyes, but hunger and fear kept her awake for the next hour. When she opened her eyes again, the fat man had stopped staring, and Rory had woken up.

“I’m just going to try and get an hour’s sleep, if that’s okay,” she whispered. “Can you stay awake?”

“Why?” he asked.

“I just think it’s a good idea.”

“Okay,” he said. She dozed. When she opened her eyes again, Rory was snoring. Her Indiglo watch said 2:30 a.m.

The big man was lovingly stroking the little man’s hand.

When they saw her gaping at them, the men jerked away from each other. The big man resumed his staring. Furious at Rory for having fallen back asleep, she got up to use the bathroom, a foul-smelling hole in the bottom of the train. When she returned, she decided the men posed no threat. They were secret lovers, and that was all.

She leaned back against the bench, fell asleep, and woke up to the sunrise washing the desert in red.

A Profitable Sadness

2009-01-26T20:18:00.000-08:00

It was their vulnerability that drew her. In Heidi Conrod’s paintings, the black-haired, uniformed children ride a seesaw, play tug-of-war, and tap on red drums, but their faces are haunted and accusatory.

“I’m very interested in that age, the whole psychology of children and the loss of innocence, and, you know, abandonment and isolation,” she says in an interview at her Ottawa studio.

Now, some critics are flinging accusations of exploitation at Conrod. She’s one of two non-aboriginal artists whose recent depictions of children in residential schools have angered people like Steven Loft, curator of Aboriginal Art at the National Gallery.

The other is Sarah Hatton, who distances herself from Conrod in a letter to the Ottawa Citizen posted on her blog. Hatton writes that her own work is not exploitative because she consulted residential school survivors; Conrod’s work is exploitative because she didn’t.

“Reproducing images without consultation with those actually affected is essentially plundering the experiences of others, and is a form of voyeurism that is difficult to defend,” Hatton writes.

Conrod, a slight blonde, sees the situation differently. “I don’t feel like I did anything wrong. I still stick by my work, and I still feel like I came from a good place,” she says.

“If anything, I feel like I’m bringing the cause, I’m speaking about the cause. I’m opening a discussion, and I feel it’s something that needs to be talked about and not swept under the carpet and not dealt with.”

She runs her hands through her hair as she talks. She wears a large silver ring with an iridescent stone on her right hand, and a filigree wedding band on her left. A Smart Set tag sticks out on her rainbow crocheted scarf.

She seems shrunk by her surroundings, a dance school-turned art studio shared by four other artists. Every wall is stacked with paintings in several different styles.

In one corner, a handsome middle-aged man sits with a happy-looking golden retriever by the window of a country house. In another, bare-skinned women twist, recline, and make sad, thoughtful faces. In another, black-robed figures march, their heads surrounded by rainbow halos.

Conrod’s corner is full of children. It’s a new series, with safer subjects: her friends’ kids. In photographs tacked to the wall, they look both wise and wounded. The likenesses in the canvasses on the floor are not exact, but you can tell who is who by their expressions. In one, a beautiful brown-haired girl stares out with luminous blue eyes.

Conrod’s medium, encaustic, adds depth with layers of paint and beeswax. It’s an ancient form, used by the Egyptians in portraits of mummies.

“It really captures the light, I find, and reflects the light,” she explains. She used it to paint the First Nations children, too.

“There’s always talking about profiting from other people’s sadness, and yes, I mean, that’s what I do,” she acknowledges.

“I’m an artist, and that’s how I’ve decided I’m making a living. You know, I don’t make a lot of money, but I do have kids. I do have to pay the bills, you know, when it comes down to it."

The Ottawa Citizen article in which her critics aired their grievances quoted only academic sources, which Conrod says reflects the elitism of public galleries. “There’s always a bit of a feeling, you know, selling work is maybe a bit crass.” She half-smiles.

The media microscope has analyzed Conrod before. A few years ago, she painted a soldier who’d died in Afghanistan as a little boy in military uniform. His girlfriend’s friend bought it for her as a gift, but before she could receive it, someone stole the picture from the wall at the Dale Smith Gallery.

The story appeared on TV and in the newspapers. A few days later, the painting arrived back at the gallery via Express Post, with a note that said, in shakily written French, “Je m’excuse.” I’m sorry.

“I just thought it brought a very human side out. I mean, we all make mistakes, and you know, try and do our best,” she says.

“It’s kind of what my art is about. Being human.”

2009-01-21T19:05:00.001-08:00

The trick to tying skates is getting the tension right. You kick your leg out and haul the laces upwards, but not too tight, or halfway across the frozen lake you’ll feel as if you’ve stepped into a fur trapper’s toothy clamp.

So, on the benches in the white dome tents outside Mexicali Rosa’s, the skaters pant and frown as they ready themselves to face the undulating, cracked and pitted ice. It crunches beneath their feet. They inhale the blank scent of midwinter, and their breath mists around their pink-cheeked faces.

One of them, a young woman in a baby blue snowboarding jacket, notices a spot of red blooming against the white ground.

“Oh my god! Is that a thong?” she shrieks. “Is that yours?” she asks a handsome man in navy blue track pants.

“Yeah,” he confesses, “it’s mine.”

They glide away, laughing, and the tiny lace panties lie abandoned in the snow, with only a pile of empty boots for company. Row upon row of yellow and orange kayaks rest upturned on the nearby restaurant patio, the little piles of snow capping their hulls a reminder that, despite the cabana-like building and the discarded frilly underthings, we are not, in fact, in Mexico.

2009-01-14T14:57:00.001-08:00

I struggled for an hour to keep my eyes from popping open last night before I realized I'd been mentally composing the script for my Island Caretaker audition video.

I climbed out of bed and wrote the thing, planning the shots I'd take: skating on the frozen canal, snorkeling in an indoor pool, hanging upside down from a tusk on the wooly mammoth statue outside the Museum of Natural History. I fell back asleep to the thought of warm salt water, and woke up to a wind chill warning on the radio.

As I walked to school my breath condensed and froze on the faux fur fringing my hood, making it look like I'd been breathing snow.

Please, Australia, hire me.

2009-01-13T19:31:00.000-08:00

I saw a story tonight on CBC's The National about a "job" posting for the position of "island caretaker" in the Great Barrier Reef. Responsibilities include exploring the wonders of the landscape and blogging about it, maybe taking a picture or two.

"What a coincidence!" I thought. I'd be perfect for that. I'd better start practicing.

The thought of spending six months surrounded by hot sand and crystal water is especially appealing given my current environment, a busless Ottawa buried in snow.

Walking home is like making out with an abominable snowman who's forgotten to shave. I trudge across a frozen lake, snow whipping at my face so fast it scratches like sandpaper. The bus drivers are on strike.

Please, Australia. Hire me.