Five Years a Writer

I am just about the least ‘on trend’ person you can imagine, but I have caught the Wordle wave and am enjoying the daily spelling ride it offers. I have come to start my day with this five-letter word game that involves some luck and also a good amount of mind-engaging deducing. I play it on my laptop, but enjoy noodling out the options with old-fashioned pencil and paper.  My results are not going to bring an invitation from Mensa, that’s for sure, but I’m not in it for anything so grand. I simply like chipping away at those five blank spaces until I land on the correct arrangement of vowels and consonants and — like a TV game show — the spaces flip over, all green now, to reveal — ta da — today’s word. And then, of course, I post my result to Facebook, because part (most?) of the Wordle wave is about sharing one’s solo effort into the larger community. Not for spoiler effect as regards the day’s word, but for the fun of seeing who took how many tries to get that word. ...

  I love the medium of radio; I am a radiophile. I listen to CBC, Canada's national broadcaster, live and I listen to it at my convenience through the CBC Listen app . I love radio's immediacy and its capacity to harness our listening in the moment, for the moment.  The short soundscape here reminds me of why it is such a magic medium.  Come with me (literally), through the magic of radio and my local morning show, on a nano vacation: Ignite your  imagination! ——— Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation. Photo by  Stephan Eickschen  on  Unsplash

The art teacher came up to my desk, leaned over my shoulder and said, “Amanda, that’s what they get mental patients to do!” — a comment that did not exactly build my confidence as an art student. (Nor was it a high point in the field of teaching, shall we say.) We had been given carte blanche in art class that afternoon so I was experimenting by dropping wet paint onto a sheet of paper, folding it over and smoothing my hand across it. I found the resulting abstract shapes of colour quite appealing. The art teacher did not. Oh well. I had no aspiration of a life in the visual arts at that time. But fast forward five decades and I find myself wanting exactly that and, while getting closer to being able to say ‘I am a collage artist’, I also hold back from saying it with gusto. Could my reticence go back to that one experience in middle school? Can I really still be stumbling on that man’s ill-judged comment? Maybe, but I think the notion of being a Creative, that is, someone who spends...

“For dessert we had fresh raspberries and cream,  for we cannot scrimp every day.” This is the only line I remember from an essay that I read more than two decades ago.  The topic was losing a job and learning to live with much less money. The lesson was that it is soul destroying to live only in the grey zone of budgets and frugality. The point is that we must have something to look forward to, something to brighten the day, something that brings flavour and colour and satisfaction to our life, if it is to be worth living. This is good advice as we near the 2-year mark of the Covid era, with its restrictions and strains (in every meaning) and fears: Let us walk carefully through the coming days (or weeks and months), but let us do so not always on tip toe, on edge, in perpetual rejection of all things bright and light.  Let us occasionally, at least, be bold in our movements and wide in our embrace. Let us put some raspberries and cream on our table — whatever that migh...

Updated with live link; see below It starts with an idea. If you’re lucky diligent, the idea grows and morphs and attaches onto other ideas…and so it goes, until you have something worth writing about. It starts with a blank page. If you’re lucky diligent, the page becomes populated with words that grow and morph into sentences and paragraphs…and so it goes, until you have a piece of writing.   It starts with one reader. If you’re lucky diligent, that reader, over time, multiplies into others…and so it goes, until you have many readers, some of whom are friends, some of whom you don’t know and are not even related to.  The more you nurture ideas and fill blank pages with words and send them out into the world of readers, the better chance you have of being read and of finding more readers.  Self-evident, of course, so what’s the point? There are three:  One : Ten and a half years ago, I had a personal essay published in The Globe and Mail, which was a lovely unpla...

As the year draws to a close and the darkness of the days begins to lift a tiny bit, I hunker down and try to tidy up the loose ends of 2021, so that I can begin 2022 with a clean slate. Ha! Fat chance, as the loose ends far outnumber the days that remain. Oh well. I’ll just carry on, because, one by one, the to-do list items do get crossed off, just maybe not as quickly as I might like. But, eventually, each box does hold that lovely tick mark to show completion. And, anyway, what is time but a construct that we can understand from a variety of perspectives if we open our mind to them. Take your pick from just these three — Mathematical explanation by Keith Devlin, Dean of Science at Saint Mary's College of California, in Moraga, California, and Senior Researcher at Stanford University:   “…Most of us think of the time produced by our clocks as time itself. Yet the only thing natural about the time produced by clocks is that it is originally based on a complete revoluti...

DATELINE: Winter solstice 2021 No matter how you cut it, we are moving through some dark times these days. But, today marks a turning point, if only astronomically speaking. In the northern hemisphere, December 21st marks the winter solstice: the longest night and the shortest day…and hereafter, the days get longer and the nights get shorter. More daylight is coming: Hooray! Sure, it comes only minute by minute, but come it does. Look how those minutes add up, week by week (Winnipeg, MB data): Dec. 21, 2021: 8.09 hours of daylight + 1.28 sky = 9.37 hours total Dec. 22, 2021: 8.09 hours of daylight + 1.28 sky = 9.37 hours total (no change yet) Dec. 29, 2021: 8.15 hours daylight + 1.27 sky = 9.42 hours total = 5 minutes more  January 5, 2022: 8.28 hours daylight + 1.26 sky = 9.54 hours total = 12 minutes more January 12, 2022: 8.48 hours daylight + 1.23 sky = 9.72 hours total = 18 minutes more January 19, 2022: 8.75 hours daylight + 1.21 sky = 9.96 hours total = 24 minutes more Janua...