Category: Blogging
Tuesday, Aug 5, 2014 | Blogging, Books, House |
Welcome!
I am posting to you from my new home in Blogland! If all has gone according to plan, the transition has been seamless and you’ll find yourself here even if you’d gone looking for my former address. If I’d moved houses in real life, the same could not be said. This is much easier.
As with all moves, I expect there to be a few glitches as I figure out the plumbing, so to speak. I welcome your comments and thoughts, and hope you’ll feel just as much at home here as you did in the old blog. If you take a look around, you’ll see there’s more space now, rooms upstairs for events listings and news and information about my books, and the pictures are bigger, but the light feels the same to me. And the colours. And the faces. Just look at those faces.
Plus, I’ve brought along ‘most everything from the old place. All posts and photos are here too, going right back to the beginning. You can still subscribe via email, if you don’t already. Recipes and books-I’m-reading-now can be found in “Extras.” Packing up and moving all those boxes was easy too: my brother Cliff did the heavy lifting. (His company 10AM.ca does great work, if you’re considering a digital renovation, redesign, or move.)
So c’mon in. Keep your shoes on, we’re not fussy (even if we’re dressed up in this post; trust me, this is not the new normal). Stay awhile. And please come back and visit again soon. I’m really excited to share the new place with you. (Enough with the extended metaphor! Enough, I said! Okay. Stopping now.)
xo, Carrie
Monday, Jul 14, 2014 | Backyard, Blogging, Fun, Kids, Play, Summer, Swimming, Work |
Top ten travel locations so far this summer
1. the point at Seeley’s Bay, Ontario
2. soccer field(s), Fooey’s team
3. soccer field(s), Albus’s team
4. soccer field(s), AppleApple’s team
5. Silver Lake camp
6. Kingston, for tournament, with siblings, cousins, aunt and Grandma
7. Swimplex, Nepean, with cousins, aunt and Grandma
8. Ottawa
9. en route, from somewhere to somewhere
10. our house; swim lessons; friends’ houses; backyard
Top five reasons I’m blogging less this summer.
1. I’m out and about with the kids all the time. And I’m swimming at lunchtime.
2. I’m prioritizing writing work in those spare moments not populated by children and their summer activities (and mine).
3. Blog-time is going largely toward building a new web site to house this slightly long-in-the-tooth blog.
4. Summer. Have I mentioned summer?
5. See above. And below.
last day of school, June 26, 2014Tuesday, Apr 22, 2014 | Big Thoughts, Blogging, Books, House, Photos, Work |
We spent the Easter weekend on the farm where Kevin grew up, and his mom still lives.
We helped her begin to sort through and organize the rooms, the closets, cupboards, drawers, nooks and crannies. This is no small project in a house that’s been home for nearly forty years.
I boxed up books to give away, many of which had been bestsellers at some point in the past four decades, already out of date, out of style; some were too musty even to donate. It was an odd conflation of realities, having just spent several days at the British Library, where I pored over printed texts that were four or five centuries old. By what random chance did those books survive? Nothing I read in the BL would be considered great or lasting literature, though some was popular in its time; survival over the centuries was a matter more of being kept by generations of someones who were not like me, I guess, as my instinct is to purge, rather than to cling to, at least in a general sense.
The work got me thinking about how transitory and brief are our lives on this earth. Consider my files of manuscripts in our attic. I wonder, should I burn them now so as to spare my children having to decide what to do with them, some day? What’s precious, after all?
I come home thinking that what’s precious is today.
But today is also ephemeral, which is why we keep so much, trying to keep what can’t be kept. We’ve all got our means and methods, our junk drawers, our shoeboxes. I say this as an inveterate collector and curator of the daily now, in the form of this blog, knowing that what I’m compelled to do is only fractionally more lasting than the day itself, and then only because it freezes and distorts the complicated layers of each beautiful breath and heart beat into a small, glancing story.
I come home thinking that it’s really really important to pay attention to what you’re pouring your life into. I think: don’t worry about whether or not you’re making things that will last. Don’t worry period, actually. Make and do the things that bring you and those around you some daily sense of being loved and cared for. Be as alive as you want to be, while you’re here.
Friday, Jan 31, 2014 | Birthdays, Blogging, Exercise, Girl Runner, Kevin, Organizing, Photos, Sick, Winter, Word of the Year |
How to use the restless minutes and hours between activities scheduled and unavoidable:
– finish / write new story
– write 15 mins / day on any subject that comes to mind [project title: The Woman Formerly Known As]
– blog but keep it short: limit time spent writing to ten mins, see what you can produce
– read and don’t feel guilty
– research popular print culture and mysticism
– limit FB visits to time when out and about (entertainment)
– start tapping into new characters, era, and place, testing the waters
[the above is an actual note actually sent to self, as typed into phone on Wednesday, January 29th, while sitting in the car in a parking lot with a few minutes to spare between a stop at the library and picking up daughter for piano lessons]
:::
A few notes on where I’m at, today, on this last day of January.
– I’m waiting for comments on final revisions to Girl Runner. Next steps will include copy editing, cover design, and publicity planning. Not there yet.
– My author photo has been taken (by the wonderful Nancy Forde, my friend and neighbour!).
– I’m prepping to drive to Windsor with my swim girl for a weekend meet, hoping to get there ahead of the snow that’s on its way.
– Yes, our swim girl has cut back on swimming, but only marginally; I’m just happy she’s so happy to be swimming again. Yes, we’ve cut back on the number of meets we’re attending. This is a big one, and we both wanted to go. We’ll continue to assess her overall schedule on a weekly or even daily basis, making changes as needed.
– I’ve renewed my access card to the local university libraries, and have been through the stacks to find books on popular print culture (16th century, specifically).
– I went to boot camp this morning, and my body felt perfectly normal. (Hurray!) My mind, I’ll confess, remains foggy, but that could be all the quiet thinking it seems to want to do right now. My mind is stuck in winter-mode: hibernation.
– I’m still on antibiotics.
– Our oven still doesn’t work, but the part has been ordered, and the manufacturer is paying for it, not us.
– I’m reading Caitlin Moran’s How to be a Woman, and wondering why it’s taken me so long to discover her.
– I’m sitting down as I write this. Need to work my way back onto the treadmill desk.
– I’m meeting with my word-of-the-year friends on Monday. Until then, the word remains under wraps, as I’m suffering from my usual last-minute change of heart.
– Kevin and I spent most of yesterday together, and checked out wood stoves … and came around to thinking that what we’re really looking for is a gas stove, as originally planned. It’s about half the cost, and a whole lot less fuss once installed. I’ve decided that I may be someone who admires people who have chickens and wood stoves, rather than someone who aspires to have chickens and a wood stove, if you know what I mean. It pains me to type that last sentence out.
– This post has taken me exactly ten eleven fourteen seventeen TWENTY-TWO (uh oh!) minutes.
Saturday, Jan 25, 2014 | Big Thoughts, Blogging, Books, Reading |
A little more on Christian Wiman, I think, having finished the book this morning. (I mentioned this at supper and Albus said, “Doesn’t it usually take you a really long time to finish a book?” and I went, huh? And then oh! Finished reading a book, not writing one. Yeah, that I can do in a morning, though this book took me every morning of this week, and I could likely sit down and read it all over again and find all new material that chimes true, and differently, a second time around.
Then I went and looked up Christian Wiman online, to see, rather morbidly, whether he was still alive (he spent seven years writing the book, and during that time was undergoing treatment for incurable cancer, so my compulsion to know wasn’t completely out there). He is. I found an interview he’d done with a very kindly looking man named Bill Moyers, whom I’ll admit I’d never heard of. (On a side note, I suspect I would enjoy watching more of Moyers’ interviews.) (On another side note, this must have been a “watch random videos” day, because I’d started my morning with a lecture by Brene Brown, whom everybody but me probably already knows for her work on vulnerability; and I liked it, too, and her message about how to be with people in need, but it didn’t speak to me in the same way that Christian Wiman’s book did, maybe because I didn’t have to work as hard to claim to understand what Brown was saying. Maybe I like working hard to figure something out, like the insights are more earned and therefore more personal to me, more personally valuable for being more challenging.)
Where was I?
Oh, the interview with Christian Wiman. Two things. One, the interview is worth watching if you like to hear poets read their own poetry. He reads several. Two, the part where he says that he doesn’t feel like a poet. He says it’s only when he writes a poem that he feels like a poet. He added that it’s different to write prose, and maybe that’s partially true, but I know that I feel the same way about writing fiction. I don’t feel like a fiction writer during the in-between times. I don’t even believe that I can do it — except when I am.
Tonight I am sitting beside an indoor soccer field. I can write this, it’s true. It doesn’t feel like a struggle, more like a pleasure. But it’s simply a record of where I’m at. It lacks structure and larger purpose. It isn’t meant to last. But even as I write that, I wonder, what the heck is? Isn’t it presumption to think it, that one might ever work on something meant to last?
And yet.
Wednesday, Jan 1, 2014 | Blogging, Kids, Writing |
We ended the year on a low-key note — so low-key that I spent most of the evening holed up in my office working on revisions. “You’ve been doing this a long time,” observed a kid wandering in to see what was happening. “You know what I’m like when I get going,” I mumbled, adjusting my ear plugs. Kevin brought me two beers and a cup of chai tea to offer sustenance. I didn’t stop till I was through the whole book. I think, I think, it’s ready to send back to my editor. I hope that isn’t the chai tea talking.
As the evening progressed, I could hear my family playing Settlers of Catan nearby. Later, they retired to the basement to watch old family movies, not to be confused with episodes of Modern Family, which were interspersed when a certain almost-teenaged family member couldn’t stand to watch another video of himself “making sand” by banging two rocks together or whisking down a slide into a wading pool filled, rather oddly one would think, with mud rather than water.
It was 10PM when I removed the ear plugs, shut down the book, and joined my cozy family.
It was a long and peculiar year. It ended as it should have, I think.
With mere seconds to spare before midnight, we raced upstairs. (We chose CBC radio’s countdown, which was swell right up until it got to 3-2-1 and there was a pause of blank air followed by the dum-da-dum musical chime indicating the news was coming up, whereupon a newscaster launched directly into all the bad headlines of the moment without sparing even one “Happy New Year” to help the listening public transition between subjects.) We hugged and toasted with champagne and ginger ale. The energy dwindled rapidly and people drifted toward activities that made them happy. I, for example, took photos.
CJ played Pokemon.
Albus sighed that the evening could have been better, had it contained the playing of more video games.
AppleApple snuggled on the couch with her imaginary cat, Stella, not to be mistaken for her imaginary snake, Norbert.
And here is the Fooey sequence, which covers a time-span of about ten minutes.
:::
This post, to launch a new year, seems to call out for reflection and resolve, and I’m not really feeling it today. Here is what my writer friend Sheree Fitch posted on FB yesterday: “This year, I unresolve. I cannot solve nor be resolute. So I will just keep trying to unresolve: to let go in all ways. Yes, it hurts and is soul-scary. A little fear is not a bad thing.”
(I agree: a little fear is not a bad thing. Fear is what I burn when I’m writing. Anxiety is the terrible underbelly of a project underway and … ok, I’m only seeing it now … unresolved.)
Life is unresolved. It is underway. It is unpredictable.
Watching those home movies last night I said to Kevin, “My God, we were living in chaos. How did we stand it?” After I’d repeated this observation several times, he finally replied, “I think we’re actually still living in chaos.” And I had to look around and admit this is true.
So I guess that’s how we stand it. We’re in it. It’s happening. It doesn’t look like chaos because it makes so much sense. It doesn’t feel like fear because it fires invention and change.
I would like to make resolutions this year, but I can’t think of any not already underway. Run more, read more, write lots. Publish. Be ambitious, be humble, be professional, be kind. Take care of my family, my spirit, my body. Be a good friend. Become a better teacher.
I can’t seem to think big, today. I’m thinking daily. I’m thinking practical. I’m thinking waste not, want not. How do I want to spend my time? That’s an important consideration, of course, but it’s not just about getting to do what I want. It’s also about not wasting time wishing I were doing something else, when engaged in activities not at the top of my priority list. (Driving the kids; cooking supper in a terrible rush; standing on the sidelines at soccer practice.)
Use everything.
Okay, there’s a resolution for the unresolved. I’ll take it.
But first I have to ask: Use it for what?
For light. For entertainment. For love. For health. For connection. For being silly. For questioning. For reminiscing. For stories yet to be written. For wondering. For curiosity. For building strength. For discovering resilience. For practice. For learning. For rest. For comfort. For creativity. For silence, for stillness, for emptying out.
This year I will finish some projects and start others. I will forget more things than I remember. I will wax and wane, tired and energetic, up and down, lost and found, certain and uncertain. I begin by rearranging my bookshelves, sending the kids to grandma’s, and forgetting to eat lunch, again, because I’m writing. (This.)
