Play, play, play
No, I haven’t eaten lunch yet. Yes, it’s almost 2PM. Yes, this is a common occurrence when the working hours of my day (i.e. when the kids are at school) get away from me. No, I should not be blogging right now. Yes, there are excellent leftovers in the fridge! Yes, I’m looking forward to eating them shortly. (Potato soup and cornbread, if you’re wondering.)
Yes, I came here specifically to share with you a couple of things.
Yes, I’m going to do that now, before microwaving that soup! (It was delicious last night, and I love leftovers.)
Item # 1: As a last-minute addition to my schedule, I will be leading a writing workshop at this weekend’s Wild Writers Festival in Waterloo. Here’s the link if you’re interested in attending. [There is a temporary problem with the link, but the Wild Writer folks are looking into it, so please check back if it doesn’t work right away.] Also, please check out the rest of the program, some of which is completely free to attend. If it didn’t conflict with my own workshop, I’d be going to hear Tasneem Jamal’s panel (free!); and before I even knew I’d be leading my own workshop, I’d already signed up for one with the amazing graphic artist, Meags Fitzgerald. (Even though I can’t draw! Eep!)
Item # 2: While cooking the soup and cornbread yesterday, I listened to a recent On Being podcast. I had to keep pausing to take notes. It’s an interview with Mary Catherine Bateson, who is the daughter of Margaret Mead, and who grew up aware of herself as an “observer/participant.” She is also the author of “Composing a Life,” and like the title of her book, so much of her thinking resonated strongly with me.
I leave you with two separate but linked ideas that I scribbled down between peeling potatoes, both from the wise mind of Mary Catherine Bateson:
“One of the things we press on [our children] is competition. Because we have so much bought into the idea that competition is a law of nature, and the only source of creativity. And incidentally that is not a true biological fact. There is competition as a part of the evolutionary process, but there is a tremendous amount of cooperation also involved, even at the cellular level.”
“Play is a very important part of learning.”
xo, Carrie
PS I would like to take time to parse these ideas, and to explain how I intend to integrate them into my current state of mind and being, but it’s now 2:02, and yes, a person needs to eat!
Discernment
Discernment is something Mennonites are expert at; in fact, Mennonites are so good at discernment that it sometimes seems it’s code for clearly we don’t all agree so let’s keep discerning in perpetuity so as to never make a decision. Given that this is my cultural background, perhaps it makes sense that I enjoy process so much. But I do also like to come around to decisions now and again. That said, discernment is rather brilliant, in my opinion. What it does is allow a decision to unfold slowly, with voice given to many different opinions and angles; it’s a process of listening as much as speaking.
This post is a continuation of my thoughts from yesterday’s confession: that I don’t like being the speaker at the front of the room.
I’ve been trying to discern why.
It isn’t that I don’t like being in a leadership position. In fact, I enjoy taking the lead, to which my younger siblings could attest. But there are different styles and types of leadership, and the leadership I prefer to practice is the kind that asks questions, that operates in relationship, that collaborates with, that is creative and responsive and in the moment. I want to ask questions. I want to hear stories, I want to hear and try to understand other perspectives. I want to see my small ideas opening up small ideas in someone else, and I want to be opened up too; I want to learn too.
It’s the reason I like reading and writing short stories, the kind that end in a questioning, open way that unfolds into the reader and the reader’s experience, rather than telling the reader what the answer is. Resonance. That’s what I’m looking for, in everything I do.
Yesterday evening, off I went with my eldest son to coach his soccer team. I was as tired as I’d been all day. There wasn’t time to eat supper. But when we got onto the field, the hour flew by, my exhaustion vanished. I love coaching soccer. I don’t love it because I’m an expert. I’m not. I love it because it’s a creative undertaking, and because I find myself, in this role, engaged with the kids on the team: trying to figure out what will motivate them as individuals, assessing their levels of interest and skill, and asking them to push themselves in small ways—for each player this will be different. I also love it because it’s fun. We’re meeting up so they can play a game.
I think we all need to play. We should all be doing something every day that feels playful, just for fun, something that lifts us out of the ordinary. Something we don’t have to do for any reason other than it makes us happy.
When teaching is going well, it’s for the same reasons. It’s because we’re engaged in a creative enterprise together. Writing and revision should feel playful. I know this won’t always be the case, and writing is work, no doubt about it, but for me—and what I want to share—is that writing, especially fiction, is play. You get to live inside your imagination like you haven’t had permission to do since you were a child. You get to explore whatever interests you. You get to ask questions and wonder and roam freely around your own mind, making it all up, drawing from the back of your mind “perishable moments you hadn’t even noticed that you noticed.” To paraphrase Lynda Barry.
And that’s about where I’ve gotten in my process of discernment. Expect me to release a mission statement in the next decade or so.
xo, Carrie
P.S. Read this, from the New Yorker (wish I had a subscription!): an inspiring and moving essay by George Saunders about his own creative writing teachers. (Side note: how the heck did Tobias Wolff have time to help parent three children, work full-time leading graduate classes in creative writing, thoroughly read every submission to the program, and write and publish his own books?)
P.S. 2 Here’s how I started this morning. I slept in until 6:45. Then I listened to this song and did kundalini exercises for about half an hour, while the older kids started their day too, but before the younger two got up. It was a good start and I feel much more rested. First discernment decision: I’m limiting my 5AM exercise to no more than three times per week; I’m open to dropping to even less if I’m still really tired. I will reassess in six weeks.
Confession
Confession: I do not enjoy standing at the front of a room, listening to myself talk.
I do, however, enjoy standing at the front of a room, listening to others talk about a subject I’ve opened up for them: this is the method I’ve been using in my class, asking the students to break into smaller groups and discuss a subject, then return to the larger group to share their thoughts, and I love how ideas begin to flow, to cross-pollinate, to deepen, and I am simply a facilitator, responding to the discussion, but not imposing my will upon it. I am not there to be the expert. I am not an expert. This is not to downplay my experiences, simply to state the facts: I have no advanced degrees, no areas of speciality. I am a human being, alive to the world around me, I am a parent, attuned to my children’s needs as best I can be, I am a reader who loves language and the structuring of ideas in many forms, and I am a writer who will never be convinced that accomplishment matters—my own accomplishment, that is. What is accomplishment? It sounds so final. I am interested in process.
I am always willing to examine a problem from a different angle. I am willing to change my mind, based on new evidence, or a new argument.
I want to play and be playful, no matter how old I get.
And so my goals are changing before my eyes. They are changing as the year progresses, this year in which my focus has been WRITE. When I woke up this morning, early and exhausted, I thought that this past year has not been about WRITING at all, but about the after-effects of having written. I wrote, I published, and I am living the part that comes next. And I do not love it. I do not even seem to like it, most of the time. Even while I pour myself into it, even while I work to make the most of what has been offered to me, I only find myself growing wearier and wearier, drained, exhausted, perhaps even depressed. Lost. Uncertain. Bereft of a clear goal to call me onward; a steady dull and dulling march that I continue because I don’t know how to stop.
Here I am.
What comes next? How do I access my passion once again? How do I reset my routines, alter them, even minutely, to feed the life I want to have? If I can’t name that life, can’t see it, how can I make changes to my routines in order to step toward it?
Here is where my imagination stalls out. What do I want?
I want to write challenging stories: stories that challenge me, conceptually, that push me in a new direction.
I want …
Do I want to train for a race? Do I want to teach more classes? Do I want to change careers? Do I want to study yoga or meditation more deeply? Do I want to spend more time with children? Do I want to coach more soccer? Do I want to go on a writing retreat? Do I want more quiet writing days or weeks? Do I want to host more friends for dinner? Do I want to sponsor and host a refugee family? Do I want to make more music?
Oh, what small voice is calling me?
Why can’t I hear you, small voice?
xo, Carrie
A new day in Canada
I’m not going to write in detail about Canada’s federal election last night, other than to say that I heard the news about a new government being voted into office as I was driving home in stormy weather from Grimsby, Ontario, after reading to a packed house, along with Peter Kavanagh (author of The Man Who Learned to Walk Three Times). (Side note: That the Grimsby reading series could pack the house on the same night of the Canadian federal election AND the Blue Jays’ first home game in their best of seven series is an enormous tribute to the organizers. For the occasion, I wore my lucky jeans and t-shirt, which I’ve been wearing for the last three Jays’ victories — and when I don’t wear them, they lose, which means I have to wear them again tonight, even though tonight I’ll be coaching my eldest’s soccer team for the first time and the jeans and t-shirt are decidedly un-coach-like garb! Superstitions are so inconvenient. And yet so alluring to a certain personality-type. Busted. That’s me, clad in the same jeans and t-shirt for days on end, thinking it will change the outcome of a baseball game. But they won last night! They won! So …)
This photo dates from last week when the Jays clinched their best-of-five series. It marked the second time I wore the lucky shirt/jeans combo. And look at how they won!
Where was I?
Here.
Here I am, on a dull fall day in October, relieved to know that a new government will be setting the tone in Ottawa, a new government will be speaking for Canadians on the world stage. To be perfectly candid, I burst into tears when I heard the news on the radio, driving along the wind-whipped Skyway, alone in my little car. I burst into tears because it felt like the end of an angry and fearful man’s government. It felt like Canadians were saying: enough with the fear and anger—we want to be united not divided. Politicians disappoint, and I’m not naive; there are disappointments to come with this new government. But I’m also not willing to be cynical about the difference tone can make, at the highest level of leadership: if you think Canada is not a racist or xenophobic country, check out some of the letters to the editor in the Globe and Mail over the past few weeks, opinions unleashed and legitimized by the fearful, angry campaign run by the guy who is now our former prime minister. I burst into tears because the guy who won last night said: A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian.
Maple leaves collected by me and CJ on our walk home from school yesterday.
Now to see those words put into policy. Now to see the reversal of the damage done.
xo, Carrie
Why does this post have no title?
Anonymous hotel room, Victoria, B.C.
I’ve got no business writing a blog post at this moment in time. My to-do list is half a mile long, and to mix metaphors and tumble into cliche all at once, I’m not keeping my head above water. Sinking. I’m definitely being pulled under. But I’m oddly buoyant. (Awkward; cliched language; where are you going with this? Do you know? I think it’s important.) But enough with the emotional play-by-play. I came here to write a post, and I’m going to write a post, dammit! It’s going to be random and scattered and must be completed in under 15 minutes, so here’s what’s on my mind…
Super-prettiness, Victoria, B.C.
* This awesome quote, in honour of the Blue Jays winning in Texas yesterday, from the pitcher who took one for the team:
“It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you don’t care who gets the credit.” — R.A. Dickey, knuckleballer, philosopher, absolutely bang-on
Location of morning run, Victoria, B.C.
* This very small thought of the day: Right now, I am a teacher and a public speaker, not a writer. I miss being a writer. That is why it was so gratifying to receive notice from my UK publisher, Two Roads, that The Juliet Stories has just been published there, along with the paperback version of Girl Runner. Better yet, if you’ve got a moment, read this glowing review of The Juliet Stories, which compares the book to books by some really fine, really smart UK authors: Ali Smith and Eimear McBride. Nicest of all, my UK publisher sent flowers to celebrate the occasion.
* This breathless recap of my weekend to catch us all up to right now: Flew to Victoria on Friday. Spoke at the Victoria marathon on Saturday. Raced the 8km run on Sunday. Flew to Toronto immediately after that. Arrived around 9:30PM, was met at airport by family, who had spent the weekend with Kevin’s family. Woke up yesterday and decided that yes, I did have the energy and desire to make Thanksgiving dinner for family! Watched Jays game. Was read off to sleep and literally tucked into bed by CJ (who is 7). Woke up this morning, recognizing that I am a) swamped with marking, despite having worked on marking all weekend; b) behind on emails; c) late to meet a deadline for my next children’s book (!!); d) worryingly looking at a to-do list of tiny but important and unrelated tasks that is expanding at light speed.
Which is why I’m blogging, obviously. Not on any to-do list. Fun. Relaxing. Keeps me sane. Thanks for being here, Blog.
xo, Carrie