Five Years a Writer

This Thursday, December 21st, is the shortest day of the year, and thank goodness for that because these short winter days with the dark early mornings and early dark evenings have been sapping my creative energy. I need the glimmer of more light to rekindle my spark for the new year coming.  Maybe you feel the same, or maybe the changing seasons and the greater or lesser amount of daylight makes no difference to you. No matter how your internal clocks chimes, we in the Northern hemisphere will all soon be enjoying increased daylight in incremental measures — and, if you are like me, we will revel in every single second of that renewed light. For it brings us closer to warmer temperatures and longer days outside and, thus, greater internal energy to enjoy what those days can offer.  In the meantime, I will hunker down, burrow into the current longer dark hours, and embrace what creative e...

  Photo by  Boston Public Library  on  Unsplash I had submitted the article about a year ago, so didn’t immediately compute the import of the email’s subject line: “Beyond 9 to 5 story submission”. The title rang no bell in my cluttered mind and the sender’s name had me reaching for the delete key, as it was unknown to me. Thank goodness cautious reason kicked in and I opened the message: It was informing me that my piece on the six lessons I had learned during my first year of retire ment would be published. Yay! Which, after some extensive editing by me to make it the appropriate length, it was. This past November. In the subscriber- and print-only magazine  More of Our Canada  (a Reader’s Digest publication). The issue landed in my snail-mail mailbox in late October. Holding the issue in my hands was novel, as everything else I’ve had published in the last while has been online only, which is equally lovely but far easier to share. How could I circu...

  Suddenly it’s the final month of the year, the days are rushing by, each one bringing us closer to the holidays — whatever that means for you. December is a month of too much going on, too many expectations, and too little time to do it all with grace and charm.  Well. That’s my experience, anyway.  I remember this month from my full-time teaching days: The term is coming to an end, assignments are piling up — all needing to be graded; students are anxious about marks; Chairs are fierce about today's deadlines being met while also planning for the next term; and somehow in amongst all that are personal preparations for the holidays that fight for attention. I would feel bad for my colleagues with young children for whom the magic of the season NEEDED to happen despite all the requirements of the parents’ jobs. For them, saying NO wasn’t an easy (realistic) option.  But for me now, this year, this season, saying NO is at the top of my list. I have no boss ...

The task was to consider a story in list form. What could be told if the standard story structure was eschewed for a leaner form? The idea arose from (what research told me is) the American writer Susan Sontag' s iconic love of lists. She wrote , "Nothing exists unless I maintain it (by my interest, or my potential interest). This is an ultimate, mostly subliminal anxiety. Hence, I must remain always, both in principle + actively, interested in everything. Taking all of knowledge as my province." And, "I perceive value, I confer value, I create value, I even create – or guarantee – existence. Hence, my compulsion to make ‘lists’. The things (Beethoven’s music, movies, business firms) won’t exist unless I signify my interest in them by at least noting down their names." Her lists include these two :       "Things I like: ivory, sweaters, architectural drawings, urinating, pizza (the Roman bread), staying in hotels, paper clips, the color blue, leather belts...

...spring will come again... Doing something once is good, but when that one time is the first time we have done it, our results can (usually) benefit from some critical feedback. This goes for just about anything we tackle in our lives, and it goes especially for writers -- this writer doesn't always like it, but she knows more often than not it's true: critique improves the work.  When I submitted my first 101-word fiction story to an online site, I waited months for a response. When it came, it was NO. The editor's feedback stated the timeline was problematic and the emotions were unclear. Harrumph, said I. Closed the message and sulked for a bit.  A while later, I went back to the story and looked with a clear eye and open mind at what I had written. I had two responses: on the emotions, the editor misread the story despite the blatant clue it closes with, but on the timeline, I could grant that greater clarity could be presented with a re-write and different structur...

In this bleak November, when we see so much yet often understand so little, let us do this one thing: Be the best we can be. Be who we are. Be ourselves. This presumes two things, of course: One, that who we are is good not evil and, two, that we know who we are. I’ll leave discussion of the good versus evil option to others more philosophical than I, but the ‘knowing who we are’ is right up my alley. Knowing who we are is not the easiest of undertakings, but it is essential, in my view, to living the life we want to live. Otherwise, we represent Oscar Wilde’s famous quote: “One’s real life is so often the life that one does not lead.” But how do we know what our “real” life is? How and when do we discover this?  It is not the easiest of undertakings, necessarily, for it can take a lifetime to know ourselves. But the more we ask the question, the better chance we have of discovering the answer. I continue to work on my identity of/as writer in my Third Act by cultivating my craft, ...

Numbers are not my thing. I prefer words. I can corral them better, and I understand clearly how their relationship one to the other delivers on the page what I want to achieve for the reader. But, every now and again, numbers are useful. And, as last week’s “Life Sketches in Words” class included the homework to prepare an activity report on my ‘work’ today (with work having any meaning, connotation or context I might wish to give it), I have prepared an activity report on my writing. First, the numbers: I have had 15 pieces of writing published in the last 23 months. By my (wonky) math, that’s about 65% ‘success’ rate, meaning…what? I’m not sure what that percentage actually demonstrates, so I created the graph below with pretty colours that map my publication record in a straightforward way, showing that July 2023 was a banner month with three pieces published — a one-time feat I'm sure, likely not to be repeated.   My record is made up of the following individual pieces, eac...