Five Years a Writer

This is a tale of four ears, two minds, one set of earbuds with microphone, and several assumptions. I’ve been working from home since mid-March 2020. Val and I live in a small house, in which we have knocked down several walls to create an open-plan living space. There is no private office on the main floor; nor is there, come to think of it, a private office on the lower level, aka, the basement. Therefore, I have been using a back corner of the living room as my office space and it has been going swimmingly — until recently, when I took on a short-term teaching contract that required me to, well, teach online. Not just work online, but actively teach a group of students through the screen. What’s the issue, you ask? Well, noise, actually. Before, a simple workday of desk work and meetings was a non-event; Val and I both just went about our business in our small house, managing around each other’s schedules. But when I began the teaching contract, noise became an issue. Specifically,...

The art I create at my collage table is largely personal and of the moment. I have been marking my journey into retirement from full-time work for more than three years and, over that time, I have amassed a goodly number of pieces — some purely visual, others a combination of words and images. Some I have shared with others, some I have posted here on this blog, but many others are simply on my shelf. And that’s fine for me and for my art.  However, there is a place in this world for very public displays of art — art so profound and creative it must live outside. Indeed, it is intentionally designed to take up public space and to say to the everyday person who encounters it, ‘Stop. Look. Think. Feel the experience of this display, of what this represents.’  Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan , Winnipeg-based performance artists, are involved in this very kind of  public art project , designed to pay tribute to the LGBTQ2+ community and, specifically, to the survivors and the...

I heard the interview in Feb. 2019. I made this piece in July 2020, and I am putting it all together in my day-to-day life in 2021. One line in the notice stopped me in my tracks: “Sadly,” it read, “she was diagnosed with cancer on the day she retired; she died ten months later.” My heart stopped, my mind reeled. “How tragic,” I thought. And then, “Thank goodness that is not my story. Phew!” I have left full-time work to pursue productive engagement with my interests, at a self-managed more leisurely pace. I have planned for this and I am privileged to be able to fund it. Some might call it following my passion, but that is a phrase — and a construct — I do not like. Passion is for the bedroom; fulfilment is for the everyday. And that is what I am after: Satisfaction, every day, in the doing of things I enjoy and am good at. No more corner office. No more grand title. Just a solid sense of my evolving self as a writer and community educator — who is also a visual artist, and who...

I heard the heavy breathing well before I was pulled into the scenario. As I became aware of the noise, I realized it was not so much heavy breathing as it was very deep, very rhythmic breathing — like a person might do if they were trying to avert a panic attack. Then I felt the tap on my left arm.  “Excuse me, sorry…(gasp)…to bother you…(gasp)…but…” The woman, looking straight ahead as if focusing somewhere in the distance, was extending her right hand to me, all the while moving her left arm slowly, rhythmically, from up by her head, down, along her body, in time with the breathing she was clearly — I now had my eyes wide open — trying to control.   In an instant I realized she was panicking. She needed to be connected to someone who wasn’t. I reached out and grasped her right hand with mine and used my left to form a vice-like grip around her right wrist.   “It’s alright,” I said. “It’s ok. Just concentrate on your breathing.”   She wrenched her head around and ...

Louise Penny (L) is the international best-selling author of the Three Pines mystery series; I shook her hand at the 2018 Bouchercon  mystery readers & writers conference. Hillary Rodham Clinton was Secretary of State in the Obama administration from 2009 to 2013. She won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College vote in the 2016 US presidential campaign. I have not (yet) shaken Clinton's hand.  Some books are classics to be kept on our shelf for all time. Some are quick reads for distraction, then passed along. Others are of the moment in which they're written and for that reason alone a must-read. At least for me.  Such is the case with the blockbuster book co-authored by Louise Penny and Hillary Rodham Clinton, published on October 12th. They call it  "a cautionary tale" for our times. I call State of Terror  a rollicking plot of a political thriller that kept me turning the pages to find out the next twist in the story. And what a story it is — nuc...

The other day, I was roasting cauliflower at a high temperature and I put a baking dish into the oven at the same time to warm up to put the veg into once it was done. Big mistake. I pulled it out to fill it with the roasted cauliflower and an almighty CRACK ing noise announced the end of that nice white baking dish. Damn! I knew better than to take that risk. Some risks are worth taking, others not so much. The trick is to know the difference when you’re facing that moment of decision-making: To forge ahead and plunge into the darkness or to slow down until the sun comes up? To jump on board the unexpected option that comes your way or to be patient and wait for the one you had planned for? And so on.  Of course, we don’t always know it’s a risk we’re facing. Sometimes it’s simply what’s in front of us and naivety gets us through it. At least it did me, back in the late ‘70s. I was not yet 18, when I spent about three months in Paris, staying with friends of friends, speaking Fren...

I saw the two of them up ahead and promptly ducked into the next lane to detour far and wide around them.  So it goes with people sometimes, don’t you find? They were perfect at one time in your life and then, at some other time, they no longer are. For whatever reason — sometimes we know full well why, sometimes it’s a mystery to us. If we’re lucky, over the course of our life we collect a core of ‘chosen family’ friends around us, who remain with us as cheerleaders and challengers through thick and thin, good and bad, easy and tough times. If, along the way, we lose a few, due to the quirks of personality or warts of hurtful shortcomings (on one or both sides), then I think that makes us normal fallible humans. Certainly I am that.  I am still learning the complicated lesson of accepting no more than my share of the blame, of letting go (with both hands) when there is clearly no appetite for rapprochement, and of having the generosity of spirit to meet head-on those wi...