Category: Writing
Thursday, Apr 23, 2015 | Big Thoughts, Confessions, Dream, Organizing, Parenting, Spring, Writing |
“There’s a big white flower behind one of the stumps, Mom, I’ll show you.”
Dream: I am at a long conference table set up in my mother-in-law’s back porch. Two women sit at the other end of the table, conducting an interview about art for live national radio, but I’m just here because it’s a convenient place to work. Earlier in the dream I spent way too much time anxiously trying to figure out why my children missed the school bus; the children are everywhere, all around the house, when I know they should be in school. So I’m sitting here, trying not to be too obvious or interrupt the interview, trying to work. I think that my work is writing, but when I look down, it turns out that my work is chopping potatoes. End of dream.
Things I’ve done since 5:30AM yesterday: ran with a friend, helped children practice violin and piano, made supper in the crockpot, washed three loads of laundry, meditated twice, blogged, edited an essay, answered emails, texted with friends and family, picked up and dropped off kids for piano lessons, worked on novel while sitting in car between pick-ups/drop-offs, visited with a friend while at piano lessons, attended a soccer coaching clinic, had tea with husband (talking soccer, hockey, and Fun Things We Want To Do), read books and newspaper, listened to radio (news and songs), slept, did strength exercises. Waited. Hurried. Tried not to fight with time.
I think of time in blocks and chunks and sections. I think of myself as travelling between these blocks and chunks and sections and trying to negotiate the transitions as smoothly as possible, trying to settle in wherever I’m at and not resist what’s happening. But sometimes it feels like what I’m resisting is time itself. These chunks of time, this careful measuring of hours and minutes, calculating these small openings and anticipating these sudden slammings-shut gives me a sense of urgency. A sense of urgency is very helpful when working to complete a big project. But to enjoy being alive, to relish it, savour it, swim with it, you need to be flexible, you need to let go of the sense of urgency in the moments when urgency would only serve to make you anxious or frustrated.
Because life is full of many many tasks and events and rituals that are long slow dreamy, unrelenting, without obvious beginnings or endings, mundane, repetitive, completely necessary, or completely unnecessary, often lovely — not projects. Not artifacts. Just unmarked rivering moments in the flow of time. If there’s a balance I seek, perhaps it’s between these two states of being: the urgent efficient ambitious project-driven state of creating something new; and the flow of life as it unwinds through its time, through its here and now, and being here, present and without the need to make anything of it.
xo, Carrie
Wednesday, Apr 22, 2015 | Backyard, Big Thoughts, Girl Runner, Good News, Spring, Work, Writing |
First, to the news: I’m pleased to announce that Girl Runner is going to Greece! The book has been picked up for translation by Thines Editions. This brings the foreign sales of Girl Runner to eleven languages, plus the US and the UK & Australia. I know. Astonishing, huh.
Every once in awhile it comes to me: thousands of people have read Girl Runner. Thousands of people have taken into their minds this story shaped by my mind. That is a staggering thought, and comes close to fulfilling what I’d hoped to achieve, in thinking back on my early years of hoping to become a writer. It was to be read. Those people who’ve read Girl Runner aren’t thinking about me, Carrie Snyder, they’re thinking about her, Aganetha Smart.
I think that gives me a certain amount of flexibility too, in terms of the choices I intend to make in my career, the projects I intend to pursue, their variety. I see myself as someone who can shape-shift to some degree, with a malleable voice, rather than someone who has a very distinctive style and voice and subject. I can use that in positive ways rather than seeing it as a weakness, but it’s a talent more readily used by someone who doesn’t have a big personal public profile. These stories come from me, but they aren’t me. Or more precisely, I am not them. I am just the mediator, in a sense, or perhaps the medium, the interpreter between worlds.
Ultimately, I’d like to be read because I send out into the world interesting, creative, curious, insightful, moving, maybe even life-giving stories.
It’s a lot to ask. Because it means I want my writing to be excellent. It puts the weight on the writing, and is my writing good enough? Is my thinking deep enough? I don’t honestly know.
For the purposes of achieving this goal, I’m challenging myself to direct attention and energy onto the books that I write, and to otherwise be at peace with my authentic, ordinary self when asked to appear in public. It’s my problem, not anyone else’s, is what I’m getting around to—I’m the one who has been dissatisfied, in the past, with my public performance or persona, always thinking that I should be more charismatic, more out there, more … well, more not myself. Recently, I’ve been trying to let go. And I’ve found myself surprisingly content with being adequate, average, competent at the jobs that are not within my main area of expertise. I’m not splendid or charismatic on stage, but what I can do is make people feel comfortable in the slightly awkward formal environment. My sense is that that’s something I’m able to offer, and that’s good enough. Forget trying to shine or, much worse, to outshine. It’s not who I am. I’m more of a cozy fire in the fireplace, a friendly candle on the table, a light in the window to show you the way home, here to make you feel comfortable in your environment.
So. Let go. Let go of chasing fame in any way, shape, or form. And keep writing for the writing in any way, shape, or form.
xo, Carrie
Friday, Apr 3, 2015 | Baking, Big Thoughts, Books, Family, Fun, Holidays, Lists, The Candy Conspiracy, Word of the Year, Work, Writing |
chalkboard family
Oh, the word WRITE. How I love it, on a day like today, after a week like this week, when my mind is rich with ideas and enthusiasm, and the joy that comes from working. Work that sometimes, truly, feels like play.
I think we fall into our themes. We can’t always understand them, or know why they’ve become the themes to which we’ve devoted our creative lives, but they’re there. If I am to identify the themes that have occupied me in projects past, and that are highly likely to continue to occupy me during the years to come—many productive writing years, oh Lord, please, grant me—they include the following: midwifery; abortion; pregnancy and birth; mothering; siblings; running; competition; feminism; activism; rule-breaking or unconventional behaviour; gambling and debt; small-time criminality and the huckster or the shyster; peace and justice; adoption; parentage; memory; forgiveness; gifts or gift-giving; music; fame/performance; horses; spirituality; love; friendship.
I’m absolutely bubbling over with joy at having all of these pieces of life to explore. And more, and more. (Where does The Candy Conspiracy fit into the thematic framework? Hedonism? Entertainment? Fun purely for the sake of fun? Yes, sometimes all I want to do is goof off and have fun–can that be a theme too?)
I’m listening to my eldest daughter play the piano. She’s practicing her songs for the Kiwanis festival later this month. The music is beautiful, though right now she’s going over and over a few rough patches. She’s got a batch of hot-cross buns rising on the counter and she was singing the song this morning, in her pyjamas. The other kids are off with Kevin at his office, helping him reorganize and rearrange, though it’s just as likely that they’re playing video games rather than lugging stuff around.
On Wednesday, we found ourselves with a free evening. Nobody had anything to do or anywhere to go. This is so rare on a weeknight that we all felt celebratory. After supper, the adults drank a beer and the kids each had a pop and we sat around the table talking and drawing. Everyone took a turn suggesting a subject to draw, and we had two minutes to try to draw whatever it was.
Above are our people, drawn on the chalkboard, which is where we started.
It’s Good Friday. I’m going to make paska this afternoon, a Russian Mennonite Easter bread, although I’m not Russian Mennonite. Eggs, spring, colour, sweet bread, new life.
xo, Carrie
Tuesday, Mar 31, 2015 | Meditation, Music, Word of the Year, Writing |
Breath; body; song.
What are the first three things that pop into your head, in answer to the question: what are you grateful for right now? These were mine, this morning. Oddly, each feels imperfect right now, reminders of frailty rather than strength. My breath is still raspy from the remnants of the flu. My body continues to be tired. Physically, I can’t do everything that I want to do, right now; or, more precisely, not at the level of my expectations.
Expectations. Can I let them go? On every front, in every way, in order to appreciate more deeply the experiences that open to me?
Lastly, song. Why song, I wonder? This morning’s violin practice was fraught with frustration, the child ignoring rhythm, playing quarter notes as eighth notes, and I shouldn’t mind so much, but as I strummed along on my ukulele feeling like an eccentric background musician, it was driving me around the bend. No patience. We never found our rhythm. (Side note: the ukulele accompaniment is her idea; mostly we like this practice time together.) So, song? I’m trying to write a character who is a singer, and I’m struggling just now. But then I turn on the radio and hear a song like this, and I’m stopping in a parking lot and pulling out my little notebook and writing down the lyrics: “When I grow up I want to be a picture of my mother holding on to me.” (Jenn Grant, from the 2014 album Compostela, track is called “Bring Me a Rose,” and you can listen on CBC’s music site, here.)
So, song.
Imperfect as breath, imperfect as body; evidence of promise, hope, connection, life.
xo, Carrie
Wednesday, Mar 11, 2015 | Big Thoughts, Blogging, Reading, Travel, Writing |
Well, this wasn’t what I meant to do this morning, while suffering from a sudden and nasty cold, and lying around the house in yoga pants feeling pitiful. But hey, in my pitiful yoga-panted state, I clicked myself over to Facebook to do one tiny thing — instantly forgetting what that was; still can’t remember! — and saw that a friend had posted the link to Part 2 of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Saga,” which would perhaps be better titled “Travels Through America,” freshly published in the New York Times magazine (I read Part 1 two weeks ago).
Here are two passages that jumped out at me, fitting, as they do, into my land and stories theory about power, conflict, and human connection.
“If there is something to be gained, if it is gainable, no power on earth can restrain the forces that seek to gain it. To leave a profit or a territory or any kind of resource, even a scientific discovery, unexploited is deeply alien to human nature. …
Not only is it alien to human nature to leave a profit unexploited, but discovering, inventing or knowing something without passing that knowledge on is alien to us, too.”
– Karl Ove Knausgaard
Read both parts of “My Saga,” if you like Knausgaard’s work. If you don’t, well, don’t bother; Knausgaard is Knausgaard. Either way, you might be forgiven for reading “My Saga” as close to self-satirizing. I found it at times hilarious, occasionally grotesque, Knausgaard willing to set himself up as a curiosity, as the inscrutable Other passing through an awfully familiar (to me) landscape, which he can’t or won’t even attempt to understand. Except he makes some interesting philosophical and cultural observations, and is himself a fascinating study in contradictions, having constructed his persona on the unlikely combination of personal reticence and abject confession.
Yes, I’m a fan.
I happened to be at the Vancouver Writers’ Festival last fall at the same time as Knausgaard, and he was one of the first people I saw when I arrived at the hotel where all of the visiting writers stay. We stood side by side at the front desk, he with one of his daughters, me with my tiny carry-on bag behind me like a favourite pet, on the very day that a lone gunman attacked Parliament Hill. I didn’t say a word to him. He seemed like a private person who wanted to go on a touristy excursion with his daughter, not someone who wished to acknowledge that the person standing next to him at the front desk of a hotel might have read his own hyper-detailed account of his life (I’d recently read the first and second books in My Struggle). Strange, wouldn’t it be? Or am I doing something similar here — on a much, much smaller scale — writing about my life and offering it up to anyone who happens along, yet also certain that I’m essentially a private person, deserving of privacy.
Anyway. I didn’t disturb him. Later, we took an elevator together. In silence.
I’m convinced “My Saga” is a classic piece of travel writing, even if it doesn’t tell a great deal about the land being travelled through; really, it’s about the human condition. How we’re shaped by where we’re born, and by what were willing to do, but also by what we can’t see or recognize, even within ourselves. Maybe most especially there. Writing is an effort to translate emotion and sensation and experience into shared language. This happens, when it happens best, not by explaining what we want to say, but by inhabiting it. So, in writing, a seeker may have more meaning to offer than a finder. A seeker, who doesn’t know what she’s looking at, exactly, might reveal more than she who is quite certain of what she’s found.
Here are links to Part One and Part Two of Knausgaard’s “My Saga.”
Back to my cold-fighting garlic-ginger tea.
xo, Carrie
Thursday, Mar 5, 2015 | Driving, Girl Runner, Kids, Meditation, Organizing, Readings, Work, Writing |
winter, uptown
This morning I woke at 5:54AM, realized my alarm hadn’t gone off, leapt out of bed, and somehow got into running gear with shoes on and teeth brushed before my running friend arrived at the door at 6AM. Good grief! It’s been that kind of week, with little margin for error in the schedule. But I suppose it’s also been that kind of week, with things turning out just fine even if the wheels aren’t turning completely smoothly. (And how about that–I need a mere 6 minutes to prep in the morning? I could be sleeping in!)
I’ve been working on my manners while driving. Driving = swearing, in my world. There’s something about being stuck in a vehicle, possibly but not necessarily late, behind other vehicles that are behaving in erratic nonsensical fashion that brings out a rage I rarely experience otherwise. My kids are very helpful, calling out my muttered curses. “Mom, you said the “H” word,” CJ told me yesterday as we sat at a green light behind a car whose driver did not seem to understand the meaning of green lights. Everyone was too politely Canadian to honk, of course. “I’m sorry,” I apologized to CJ. “I’m really trying to work on not saying bad words while driving.”
“I know what you should do,” he piped up, while munching a cookie. “You should meditate in the car.” This cracked everyone up when I reported it later on, no doubt everyone imagining Carrie sitting with eyes closed ignoring the traffic and breathing deeply; but actually, I did take a few deep breaths–eyes open–and it helped. It’s all about weighing what matters, and whether you really want to work yourself into a snit over [fill in the blank]. Usually, the answer is, big picture, I’d rather have a chat with my cookie-eating kid than be gripping the wheel, shoulders tensed, cursing the eccentricities of those who share the road. If only I could recognize that before I start swearing, not during. Connecting the dots between meditation and real life is the real challenge.
Speaking of challenges, yesterday definitely qualifies. Piano lessons, picking up kids from different schools at different times, writing on laptop in car between pickups. Home to eat take-out pizza fetched by Kevin, then up to the little kids’ school for their arts night, visiting with friends and neighbours, ducking out early, dropping little kids at home in care of their older sister who was distracted by her imminently due science fair project (the dining-room table covered in chopsticks, copper wire, batteries, and bouncy balls), and at last, getting changed and zipping over to Conrad Grebel College to read as the final guest in their Mennonite Writers Series. After all that running, what a surprising pleasure it was to come to a stop in the Grebel Chapel. I could not have felt more welcomed. The evening was a total pleasure, and something about the format felt as natural as if I were reading to my kids at bedtime (dressed in nicer clothes, wearing makeup, with a microphone pinned to my shirt). As I sat there at the end of the presentation looking out at this warm and generous audience, I thought, wow, this is a damn lucky life. Embrace it, receive it, savour it.
And then go home to tea and bed in such a happy state of mind that you forget to set the alarm, apparently.
Anyway … I’m reading again tonight at WLU, at Lucinda House, 6:30PM. Then I’ve got a little break in the readings, with more to come in April. I will keep you posted. And I’ll let you know how the car meditation is going …
xo, Carrie
