Five Years a Writer

Back in another lifetime when I was searching for my first house to buy, the real estate agent, Cheryl, urged me not to attend open house showings for properties beyond my financial ceiling. “You’ll only torture yourself by looking at places you cannot afford but would like to live in,” she said. “Limit yourself to showings within the range of your money and you’ll end up with a good place to live that won’t bankrupt you.” Good advice indeed, and I ended up with just such a house. It suited me well, until it was time to move on.  I often think of Cheryl’s advice in relation to any number of things, including, most recently, new year’s resolutions: Make ones that give you what you need, maybe stretch you a bit but don’t break the psychological bank, as it were. Resolutions should match your ability to achieve them. Otherwise why bother? They will only ever be fantasy, never motivation. Other people’s standards or expectations are beside the point. Know yourself and design your resol...

The best way to start a new year is to wake up. Thereafter, any activity will do. Engage in this year with eyes open, heart open and mind open and there’s a fighting chance that you’ll make it through the 365 days with some learning, some fun and some rewards. At least, that is what I am hoping for as 2023 begins its spin around the sun. As last week’s post explained, I like to choose a word or two as a hook on which to hang my approach to a new year. Sometimes the word comes to me after serious contemplation, sometimes it arises spontaneously, and sometimes I rely on the crutch of a social media trend to kickstart my process. So it was this year. This photo maze (left) was making the rounds on Facebook and I played along. I looked at the grid of seemingly random letters within which are hidden actual words, and the first four words my eyes focused on were LESSON. LOVE. CHANGE. SELF-CARE. Argh, I thought. Not exactly words I would have come up with myself. So, I looked again. This tim...

At both our house and cottage, we use hooks to hang our clothes. Sure, we have closets, but hooks keep the clothes handy by where they’re needed and, added bonus, we can see what is available within easy reach. This habit of clothes management is not sophisticated, but it works. I plan my day’s outfit (a term I use only loosely for my sartorial style) by what’s still on the hooks and not yet dropped into the laundry basket. As I have been pondering the end of this year and the beginning of the next, I have realized that my planning for the coming 12 months is not dissimilar to how I plan for the day’s clothes: I use a hook. I have a broad objective. And I’m prepared to pinch hit with what’s available, as needed. The hook is a word (or several, maybe) that guide me in the broadest sense. I don’t want to be tied into a master plan that can’t be amended along the way, but I equally don’t want to wander through time without any sense of direction. For 2022, I chose the word ‘plan’, meanin...

I don’t much like the dark. My mind conjures endless bad things that might be, could be, likely are, lurking in its depths. Give me a light, even a sliver of light, and my breath comes easier, my pulse slows down, I can deal with the lesser dark that that sliver of light creates. So it is with the winter solstice: In the northern hemisphere, every December 21st brings with it that teeny tiny sliver of additional light and the promise it holds. I wrote last year about how, incrementally, the light returns to our days after we mark this point in the year. With each year that passes, I appreciate this day more. And, as the years pass, I am learning that light comes into my life in many different ways. Yes, the sun, of course. But also an act of kindness brings light into my day. Or a meaningful exchange with someone well known or not so familiar to me. A laugh brought on by smart humour. Or a moment of joy from the power of music to move me. All these experiences can bring if not actual...

Let’s play school for a moment.  Today’s assignment is to answer the question, Who are you?  You’re welcome to treat it as a deep philosophical consideration or as a superficial ‘cocktail party’ game. Regardless of how you approach the question, though, I am willing to bet two things: One, it’s not that easy to answer. Two, your answer will shift and change — if not quite with the wind, then with the time, the place and the person asking the question. Oh, and also, there is a word limit: no more than 65 words, please.  It’s challenging to encapsulate ourselves in a mere few words. Sure, we can offer a slice into our identity with just one word: Teacher. Wife. Father. Sister. Lawyer. Doctor, etc. But that tells the world only a role we hold or a relationship we have relative to another person. What does that one word actually say about us as a person — a wholly formed, fully complex person with history and credentials and experience and longings. Not much, right? Not nothi...

Today, a moment of silence to honour the 14 victims of the 1989 Montreal Massacre:  Remember their names . Work to end violence against women .  ———— I had such a good thought the other day on my walk that it was almost brilliant: Writing is like making sausages. What a perfect way to open this week’s post on the writing process. But then I googled the phrase, just to see what might come up, and discovered that, far from original, the idea of comparing some process with sausage making goes back two centuries and brings up more than two million hits — including countless ones relating writing to sausage-making . Oof. And there, dear reader, you have the foundational fear of every writer: Our idea is un-original. Our other ideas have already been thought of, been written about. Go back to the drawing board. Start over. Again. Oof. And so we do. Precisely because no idea is wholly new, we dig deep to weave our own originality into it through the words we put on the pag...

About a month ago, memories of my father listening to music came flooding back to me. They were triggered by having had delivered to our house the sound system on which Dad would play his CDs. (It had been taking up room in Mum’s suite and she was happy to gain the space by sending it along to us.) Dad loved classical music, often playing Bach, Vivaldi or Mozart at a volume the rest of us did not necessarily appreciate. But he persisted and he enjoyed every note. In among the boxes was also a pottery container with a wooden lid. This item brought to mind memories of my mother cooking. Mum used it to hold salt and it always sat on the counter beside the stove: She would flip open the lid, dip in with her fingers and add the pinch or two of salt to whatever she was making. While I’m not sure that Mum loved cooking as much as Dad loved listening to music, she was a wonderful cook and prepared countless delicious meals that her family and friends enjoyed with good conversation around the t...