Five Years a Writer

A Post a Day in May 14/31 The confession: I didn't exactly follow my own advice from the other day .  The what if : What I did today.   The other day, with my early-morning cup of tea in hand, I almost tripped over the row of shoes by my desk that I had left there, as a way to kick-start my closet-clean-out whirlwind. With those shoes there, staring me in the face, it was more a matter of continuing the task rather than starting from square one. I set my tea aside and got to work.  Bedroom closet: after I tore through some shelves and a small closet in the basement that had become dumping grounds for an alarming variety of things. I pulled everything out, sorted through the sundry items, and organized them into keepers, give-aways, and garbage. By then I needed coffee. I basked in satisfaction at the order I had created, and, coffee in hand, took myself into the bedroom to deal with the closet there.  Again, I pulled everything off the hangers and shelves and onto t...

A Post a Day in May 13/31 I have many fond memories of my undergrad degree experience at the University of Alberta (1978 to 1982) — some of them even related to my formal learning with professors in classrooms. But most of my memories relate to the learning I did on my own through long conversations with friends over coffee at the Java Jive; through writing for The Gateway student newspaper; and by wandering through the stacks in the library and coming across books as if they were breadcrumbs leading me to ever-expanding vistas of knowledge. The starting point for a visit to the library was usually an assignment, often a research essay that required digging into a topic via a question, set by the professor, that I barely understood. Help! My first stop would be at the reference desk, where the friendly librarians were always happy to help a hapless undergrad find her way to the right section of the card catalogue and, thus, thanks to the Dewey Decimal System , to the right section in ...

A Post a Day in May 12/31 There are clothes and then there is fashion. For many of us, there can be tremendous tension between the two: what we want to wear versus what we are expected to wear because of who we are — or are seen to be.  An offhand comment during a conversation with a friend a while back sparked Val, my partner, to begin writing down some of her earlier memories of being a girl growing up in the 1950s and then a young woman studying sciences at university. The excerpt below is from her work-in-progress titled ‘Crinolines and Work Boots’, which is growing to include way more than clothes but clothes got it going, so here is a bit of Val’s backstory… ——— Val about age 3 or so, long before the jeans incident, but already showing her style Crinolines and Work Boots by Val Paape an excerpt It was the mid-sixties when I transferred to the University of Illinois and had enrolled in a Zoology course called “Natural History of the Vertebrates”.  Having chosen to m...

A Post a Day in May 11/31 I am not a numbers person, as my erstwhile colleague, Darlene, would attest. She did the budgets in our marketing department, while I did the writing: a perfect partnership. But even I can grasp the relationship of the number 80 to the number 20: 80 is bigger, 20 is smaller. Apply that as a principle to explain something and it becomes evident where one’s effort or focus should lie: on the 80 part. Right? In fact, it’s a principle — the Pareto principle, which states that “for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes”. It’s named after an Italian economist who determined that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population [ source ]. Today, the principle is applied in many areas, including in business (80% of your business will come from 20% of your clients) and in sport (20% of players result in 80% of points scored). The other evening on the news, I heard it used in relation to a person’s wardrobe: The woman being inter...

A Post a Day in May 10/31 Speculation is fun, and I have, after all, shaken Carl Bernstein’s hand, so here's how I think the leak from inside the US Supreme Court might have happened.  LOCATION: Washington, DC DATE: Mid-April 2022 SCENE ONE: A women’s washroom, in the basement of the US Supreme Court Building, One First Street, NE, Washington, DC Nasty Woman 1: “I don’t think I can do this much longer, knowing what’s at stake.” NW2: “You think you’ve got it hard? Think of me, right in there with her, having to feign support for what she’s writing!” NW3: “We went to law school to change the world, but not like this. We have to do something, but we’re not the ones with power here. We witness and support, but we’re not in charge.” NW2: “Right, sure. Not of the writing or the thinking, but I’ve had an idea brewing in the back of my mind…” NW1: “…and we do have access in ways that no one else has, because of our clerking duties.” NW3: “I don’t have the nerv...

A Post a Day 9/31   I got up later than usual on Saturday and quickly got entangled in emails. You maybe know how that can happen? Before I knew it, it was past 11 and I’d not yet done anything more than tap away at my keyboard — and drink several cups of tea and coffee. The pace of the day seemed set: slow and meandering. But then I remembered that Val had said the previous day that she was anxious about the state of her laptop, which had been acting up (not working at all). So I suggested that she fire it up to see what happened — no waiting for the perfect zen moment; do it NOW.  And BAM!  — j ust like that, the pace of the day shifted. Val set up her laptop and, amazingly, it fired up as it should (technology is nothing if not unpredictable); she connected the backup drive and, 30 minutes later, her system was safe, her data secure.  As Val was waiting at the desk, I got it into my head that it would be lovely to have some of the warm spring air blow th...

A post a day in May 8/31 Long before our mothers take on that most central of roles in our lives, they have had the starring role in their own lives. Hard as it can be to think about Mum or Ma or Mother (or however you name her) as a person in her own right, with her own life before we existed (!), every mother has that. And, if we’re lucky, she shares stories of that ‘before time’ with us — either around the kitchen table or maybe the campfire or, as is the case in my family, in the form of written memoir. This spring, my mother, Anne, participated in the Spark Your Writing course I co-facilitated, and she was, indeed, sparked to continue with her memoir writing. Over the four weeks, she produced more than three thousand words, well on her way to telling the story I have long been begging for: How did you meet Dad? My siblings and I grew up knowing his version of the love-at-first-sight-in-the-university-cafeteria story, but Mum’s version is not yet fixed in family lore. And, while th...