TToT: Wave Form Audio – Drop and Drag, #10Thankful #RoaldDahl100

“Don’t analyze. Don’t analyze. Don’t go that way. Don’t live that way. That would paralyze your evolution.”

Analyze – The Cranberries

I love autumn and am glad when the days cool off from oppressive summer heat waves. Lots of waves. Waves at the beach this past summer. Waves of fear that I am making wrong choices or not making choices out of fear to begin with. There are audio waves too, I’m learning. Letting that wash over me.

September has arrived and I feel a lot of pressure. I feel tense a lot. I feel the turmoil going on everywhere around me, in this giant and complex world. I try to find my place in it. I try to not allow things I have no control over to drive me to even more stress and distraction. Such anxieties are common, universal, and I can get through and keep moving forward.

And so, here I am, I will try not to analyze everything and I am more thankful than ever.

I am thankful for the perfect title for an essay I’m working on.

It was provided by one of my brother’s friends on Facebook.

I know. I know. I need to finish writing the entire essay, but I get inspiration and a direction to my essays if I have the right title to begin with.

This one is just so perfect, so fitting, and then I took his idea and I ran with it.

I am thankful I have started to learn a new song on my violin. It’s a special one, something I’m learning for someone special who’s on the way, before we know it.

This required I start playing a new string, the D string. Up until now I was only playing on half of my strings, E and A, but now I need to learn to move my fingers over just a little more and to hold my bow on a slightly differing angle.

I am thankful to have such a smart niece, one who seems wiser than her nearly six years on this planet and who knows how and when to ask the right questions.

Okay, so she may have done that thing where you answer a question with another question, but when you have something important to ask, I say go for it.

I am thankful that we got the second episode of our podcast all done and recorded.

All we need to do now is a little bit of editing. We were aiming to keep Ketchup On Pancakes at sixty minutes, which episode one just magically seemed to be. This one’s looking more like seventy minutes, but we think we can cut it down a bit more before we release it.

We just need to research more about podcast platforms and how it all works.

I’m thankful, especially, that we got one segment in particular completed.

We decided to read one of the short stories I’d previously written on my blog, as more of a dramatic reading, and you don’t realize how difficult that is until you keep messing up words.

It took about eight or nine takes to get through the small story with the least amount of mistakes throughout. We were both reading from our braille devices and you can actually hear our fingers moving across the dots as they pop up, as we move through the lines. We decided we like that sound in the background.

I am thankful for awareness for pain.

It’s something I don’t talk a lot about on my blog. The stigma and judgments are out there and sometimes I feel like people don’t want to keep hearing about it.

September is Pain Awareness Month and I do believe that anyone living with pain should not have to hide away. I know that must sound contradictory, but I do believe fear of judgment is often what it boils down to.

I am thankful and grateful because I actually have a pretty wonderful support system, where others do not. I do want to bring this silent suffering out into the open.

I have found some things that help and that work to make things bearable, but I thought it worth mentioning at this time.

I am thankful for even more awareness of a different kind.

Whether it’s the awareness of feminist issues or disability awareness, this week I was reminded a lot and heard from those speaking out and up.

Rick Hansen Interview – CBC’s The National

Again, people fight it. They become angry and defensive, on both sides, but if you’ve never experienced something yourself, I would hope there would be compassion and a little understanding for something someone else may have gone through to make them feel they need to say something or do something.

There are some who say they don’t want to identify themselves as feminist. That probably means, once again, they haven’t had many problems with something, be that a woman who has lived a somewhat privileged life and has had no reason to feel the need to fight for something.

I don’t care what you call it. I call it feminism and people freak out. I use the word equality and it’s pointed out that nobody has total equality with everything. I just speak from my unique experiences. I’ve been lucky, but I’ve also felt extremely limited in the world. I am taking steps toward empowerment, but it’s not as easy as it might seem.

I am thankful for a relatively stress free visit to a school for the blind in a city not too far from me.

I did not go there for my education. I went there this week to check out some computer equipment, to see about getting some new technology.

A lot of that is now becoming more accessible with the introduction of Apple products. They don’t require, for the first time, extra software or programs to make things square. It’s all built in.

But there’s still the braille readers and they can be thousands of dollars. Here in Canada, in Ontario where I live, there is a governmental program which helps out with the cost.

I am thankful my nephew made it through his first full week of school.

We ask him if he likes school, if his teacher is nice, and we get mostly “yes” to our questions.

He’s probably wondering why we are so curious. Things are more likely to come out at more random moments, like the rocks from the playground he kept bringing home in his pockets, or the little girls who are likely a few years older than him and who help him with his backpack when it’s time to get off of the bus.

It’s both exciting and anxiety inducing. He’s getting so big. All the children in my life are.

I am thankful for the connection made possible through WhatsApp.

It’s how my friend living over in Ireland sends family back here in Canada photos and videos of her one-year-old daughter.

I am honoured to be added to such an exclusive group. She includes descriptions of the pictures when she sends them so I know what’s going on in them.

Oh, and, Happy Birthday Mr. Dahl, who would’ve turned 100 this week.

My grandfather Roald Dahl, the magician

This article written by his granddaughter in The Guardian made me miss my own grandfather, who never published a book, but who was a magical storyteller himself.

“I will not pretend I wasn’t petrified. I was. But mixed in with the awful fear was a glorious feeling of excitement. Most of the really exciting things we do in our lives scare us to death. They wouldn’t be exciting if they didn’t.” So says the boy hero of Danny, the champion of the world.

What I Learned In 2015, #JusJoJan

Again, I am combining my prompts and link-ups. I am nearly through the month and

Just Jot It January, #JusJoJan.

Also, I was lucky to get in first to get to co-host with a couple lovely blogger ladies on another weekly event I’m starting out with, as I liked this week’s sentence starter a lot after my enjoyment with last week:

If I Were a Crayon…

Hopefully, by combining these two very different blogging projects, one a weekly and the other more of an every-day-for-the-entire-month kind of a thing, perhaps I can introduce two separate sets of writers and bloggers to each other’s work.

The word today is “serendipity” and I can say I learned something that fits that. I learned the true meaning of the word in the year 2015.

I didn’t much like the film of the same name, not sure if I believed in fate, but if you want to call what happened to me an act of

serendipity,

I would go with that.

What did I learn in 2015?

Hmm.

I learned what it felt like to have one of my dreams come true. I learned what it felt like to be able to cross off one of the top items from my bucket list and it all started off rather by luck and coincidence.

I had it all ready and waiting. I’d joined a group of indie writers on Facebook in the idea to write short stories and combine them in a charity anthology. I had a story written by the end of 2014 and I was going to get it published with the rest of them..

As 2015 began things took a turn and I no longer found myself included in the project. It wasn’t the right fit, but what to do with the story I had all ready, written, and waiting?

I guess you could call all the time I spend on Facebook a bit of a time suck, or else, in this case, it became a surprise and a timing thing. I just happened to follow a writer on Facebook who was an author for a small press in the UK. She was put in charge of getting a group of writers together, to submit romance themed stories for an anthology.

I saw the call on her page, messaged her, and in less than a month she was accepting my story. I knew what I was likely lucky enough to have found for myself when I arrived at my thirty-first birthday and first blogging anniversary. I was dying to announce this. I didn’t. I held back because it was so fresh, yes, but also because I was afraid something would happen, again, and nothing would come of it. I was unable to let myself go there.

I was getting my story published, in more than a small group’s idea on Facebook, but backed by a publishing press.

It’s been my dream to be published and to see my words in print, in a book, for a long time. Was this real?

By the summer it was really happening. Little Bird Publishing would be publishing the anthology.

If I had gotten my story published with that first opportunity I would have missed out on this one. If I had already given my story away, promised it to a book, I wouldn’t have had a story ready for this publication.

I call that positively serendipitous.

So, perhaps you thought I might get to the end of this and say that actually I learned that being published would turn out to be not all it was cracked up to be, that I would learn how things you dream of for so long aren’t really usually as wonderful as you think…well, you’d be wrong.

🙂

I kissed the book, held it close, couldn’t stop smiling and even possibly slept with the book next to me for weeks. Possibly.

I am co-host with two bloggers, hosts of the prompt “Finish the Sentence Friday” this week:

Kristi Rieger Campbell of

Finding Ninee

&

Vidya Sury of

Vidya Sury – Collecting Smiles.

If you want to join and find out about the prompt for the coming week, the place to go would be:

Finish the Sentence Friday on Facebook

To read more fabulous posts, to find out what other writers and bloggers learned in 2015, visit the linkie here:

http://www.inlinkz.com/new/view.php?id=602928

Finally, the blogger to come up with the final Thursday’s prompt word for the month is:

JT Twissel

and rules of which are found

right here.

Thanks JT for going with “serendipity” as the word because it really fit with the biggest thing I found out/learned from the year 2015 and maybe the story will be made into a movie itself one day soon.

Hey! You never know.

September Streams and Dreams Come True, #SoCS

SoCS

September almost qualifies for this week’s prompt, but not quite. So, instead, I will write about how my September is going, so far.

Not bad. Not bad at all.

***

I am watching only the fourth episode of the new Late Show with Stephen Colbert. His guest is writer and author Stephen King. I am listening to these two brilliant guys, Stephen speaking with Stephen, as they discuss writing. I am left to contemplate writing: Stephen’s and my own.

Now, what makes me think I should even bother with the contemplation of my name and his in the same sentence?

This week I can finally refer to myself as an author.

I have read many things about writer VS. author. What makes someone a writer? What makes them, me an author? When is it okay to call myself the first or the second?

King has written dozens of books. His newest book of short stories is being released in November. What an astounding catalog of writing the man has produced. He writes. He is an author.

My first short story to be published is out now, in print. It was finally placed in my hands just the other day.

I will never forget the feeling. I wonder how that feeling has changed, for Mr. King, from the first time to all these stories and years later.

I contemplate what being a writer means to me. It means that I write. I don’t just talk about it, but I put my money (words) where my mouth is/are.

I can string sentences together, words, correctly spelled…you get my drift.

It doesn’t yet feel natural to me, fiction that is. Writing comes very naturally. All so uncomfortable, unnatural, even though it feels, at the same time, like I’ve been doing it all my life.

I contemplate with confusion.

I hold the book in my hands, flip through the pages, turning to where I perceive my words to be, as I’ve been told how many pages in, my story can be found. I can’t see my own writing. I am told it is there, but any book could be handed to me, anyone telling me the words are mine. I would never know if it were true or not.

So it’s only there when I believe them, when I believe it and let the reality wash over my heart and my mind.

I don’t know, can’t possibly stop contemplating what it must be like to have the kind of creative and artistic success that Stephen King has had.

I don’t know how many more times I will experience my own publication, as I did in the month of September, in the year 2015, but I will never forget this week. Never, as long as I live.

***

September and this week’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday, inspired by:

http://lindaghill.com/2015/09/11/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-sept-1215/

Linda’s blog and the writing prompt, “temp”.

Jean Louise the Silent: My Review of Go Set a Watchman, Part One

“It’s always easy to look back and see what we were yesterday, ten years ago. It is hard to see what we are. If you can master that trick, you’ll get along.”
–Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

I thought I’d heard it all, as far as negative news since Go Set a Watchman’s release, until I read this of course:

Disappointed by Go Set a Watchman? Sorry, that’s the risk inherent in fiction. – The Guardian

A bookstore actually offered to refund the price of the book, if someone wasn’t happy with its contents.

What?

John Mullan and The Guardian are correct. How many theatres will give me a refund if I don’t like the movie I’ve just seen on their screen? This is a ridiculous thing for a bookstore to do. I don’t care how many complaints they received.

I wanted to start my review off with this story because it illustrated the unique craziness circling around the release of Harper Lee’s first book in over fifty years.

No matter how funny, touching, or smart a book is, there will always be someone who didn’t see those things in its pages.

I saw it all and more.

I am the first to admit I was unnerved and hesitant when I first heard of GSAW’s existence. I worried that this was some greedy scheme and that the aging author might be unaware of its upcoming publication. I thought long and hard about whether or not I could even read it. With so many unanswered questions about the road to this release, I would hate to find out Harper Lee was completely unable to consent to her pre-Mockingbird manuscript being published after so long.

Big News For Harper Lee Fans Everywhere

This would be the only reason I might want my money back for this book.

Then I wondered at so many people’s determination to not take part in this phenomenon. They assumed Lee must be incapable of making this decision, of having any competent ability at all. Her stroke, blindness, deafness are all reasons for contemplation and caution, of course; however, I let my curiosity get the better of those doubts. I would shake her hand and tell her how much this book touched me personally, give her the money directly, if I could.

“Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.”
–Dr. Jack Finch

***

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

I first discovered to Kill a Mockingbird, as required reading, when I was in high school. I read it again last winter, wanting to see if my feelings might be different after more than fifteen years, and in preparation for the summer release, just in case I decided to join the crowd.

It’s a Sin to Kill a Mockingbird

I did not take the book to heart, that first reading, like so many have. For a lot of people, To Kill a Mockingbird is near and dear to their hearts, with the messages it speaks. It is a snapshot of America in the 20th century and before. It was fiction that illustrated what it was like, race in the south.

As a white girl living in Canada, at the turn of this new century, I hadn’t encountered a whole lot of the racial issues so many others had. I could relate on the question of equal rights for all, being born with a visible disability, and so that I knew something about.

Admittedly, I found the book to drag in spots. It felt like short stories woven together. I did enjoy the childhood point of view, main character Scout’s toughness, and father Atticus and his admirable attempt at freeing an innocent black man from the injustice that was so much a part of the south at that time.

Dusty Old Books

Those are the things that stuck with me over the years. It was never at the top of my list of favourite books, but it left its mark. When I heard this was happening, I wanted to reread TKAM so I could make that connection a fresh.

GO SET A WATCHMAN

Note: possible spoilers may be ahead, but I try to avoid this in my reviews, as I don’t want to discourage anyone from reading. However, my ultimate goal is to intrigue the reader, just the right amount, to get you to give the book a chance, to sell it to you on its brilliance and poignancy.

“INTEGRITY, HUMOUR, AND patience were the three words for Atticus Finch.”

Would they still be applicable after finishing Go Set a Watchman?

I, too, was nervous at what version of Mr. Atticus Finch I would find in the pages of this newly unearthed manuscript, but I was highly curious and reading on to find out.

There’s a lot going on when this story begins, with all the news articles, the NAACP, and the white supremacists.

Miss Jean Louise (Scout) Finch must decide “if she can’t beat em or join em” either, when her community is held up, south against her new northern place of residence. Her father has been held to impossible standards, ever since he became her world when she was left without a mother, as a small child. Now she sees her perfect role model as a man, someone with faults and weaknesses, but still with the strong conviction he’s always held.

The climactic scene between Jean Louise and Atticus is powerful and a different sort to what any reader may have been used to from To Kill a Mockingbird. She is no longer a child and Atticus is revealing himself to her, while still desperately pleading for his daughter’s understanding and compassion.

***

Surprises on reading:

**I was taken aback by its length. When I got to the end I automatically thought, is that all?

I thought that, not in any “thank goodness that’s over” sort of way. It was the complete opposite of that, actually. I wanted the sageness to continue on, a few pages more.

**I was stunned by some invisible club of the sort I’d heard of with readers of Mockingbird. I have felt it about very few books over the years.

Scout’s Back with a Bang!

Scout is charming and loveable, even though she is now an adult. There’s a glimpse of the strong child she once was, especially with the flashbacks Lee had planted throughout.

“She was a person who, when confronted with an easy way out, always took the hard way.”

She is tough and headstrong, but it’s obvious, adult Jean Louise can still get herself into the craziest predicaments, even when she isn’t trying.

**My main shock comes on hearing about the death of Jem from the same illness which took Atticus’s wife. This, I fully admit, I had not been expecting. I wondered how this might effect my enjoyment of the rest of the book. I wondered why Lee had chosen to kill off one of the Finch children.

Okay, so that counts as a “spoiler”, does it? Oops, but please do read on.

🙂

I will try not to do it again. Promise. But you knew that one already, right?

**I was pleasantly surprised by the frequent passages filled with humour and wit. I actually laughed out loud a few times, which I honestly did not do with TKAM, but Jean Louise (whether as a child or an adult) is always saying the shocking thing, improper southern lady behaviour, or she’s standing out and accused of not holding her tongue.

Whether it’s the incident where she gets herself folded up in the train’s wall-mounted bed, only half clothed. Or else, on her return to Alabama and the play fight between Jean Louise and Henry (her suitor) which resulted in the two of them ending up in the river, fully clothed.

“Right now I’d just as soon push you in as look at you.”

Would the town of Maycomb be able to resist the spreading of rumours and passing along of gossip, which entailed them being naked in that river?

In one flashback, there’s the instance where Scout, still struggling with her perceived farewell to being a tomboy and struggling with being a young woman, walked around for days, believing another girl’s story that being French kissed lead to being impregnated. Or one flashback in particular, of a teenage Scout, where her underwear ended up high on a school billboard, with Henry coming to the rescue in a big way.

Other flashbacks, scattered throughout, brought a little piece of Mockingbird to this new tale and make the absence of Jem a little bit easier to swallow.

These flashbacks, such as a pretend revival and a baptism, resulting in Scout ending up in her neighbour’s fish pond and being caught by real life clergymen, make the perfect melding of past and present.

Well loved characters, mentioned only in passing in Watchman, such as Dill Harris bring To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman together rather nicely when flashbacks are included as they are.

It was wonderful to discover Harper Lee’s humorous side, with Jean Louise as the central component, which is a nice alternative to the more serious sociological writing she shares, with Atticus as the moral barometer for so many.

Will Atticus fall from grace? Does Jean Louise find a way to live harmoniously in Maycomb, Alabama?

“I can take anything anybody calls me so long as it’s not true.”
–Atticus Finch

Stay tuned for Part Two.

TToT: So Long and Thanks for the May Memories

Wow! May comes to a close, and what a May it was!

Not so sorry to see it go, honestly, as certain events have made it hard for me to be thankful at all.

However, as much trouble as I’ve found it to be sometimes, I still want to find

The Silver Linings,

where I can. That is why, even though I struggled a little bit this week, to find ten things I still had to try.

TEN THINGS OF THANKFUL

Monday: For, although Monday mornings often receive a bad reputation, this week mine started out anything but.

I spoke to the author in charge, who informed me that the anthology of short stories (of which mine is included) is to be released on June 15th.

This surely started out my week on a positive note and (by announcing this on my Facebook timeline) I hoped to spread a bit of early Monday morning, start of the week cheer. Hoped my excitement might be contagious.

For spaghetti.

Normally I don’t always enjoy this most commonly known pasta, but I had a lovely family dinner.

My sister made it and I enjoyed each part: noodles (perfect consistency), just enough sauce and it tasted like the perfect flavour of tomato, and the meatballs were just right as well.

Tuesday: For music.

Specifically, music created by my brother and the title of this song, recently recorded by him, caught my attention:

https://m.soundcloud.com/brian-kijewski/decade-adrift

I am thankful for the way music brings people together and for the gift it has been in my younger brother’s life. This is evidence of his talent and his creativity and that makes me happy.

Wednesday: For thank you notes, but more specifically The Tonight Show’s Thank You Notes:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?list=PLykzf464sU9-IFE2ZBbUyfbi6_uNBQavD&v=teDXiuI9jSw

They make me smile. His delivery is so on point. He has been doing this bit for years. Ingenious idea, in my opinion and I thought it was perfect for Ten Things of Thankful.

Wow. Why is coming up with ten things to be thankful for such a challenge? It shouldn’t be this hard, should it?

😦

Can I list a few of these things twice?

Thursday: For one of my new favourite App’s for my iPhone.

Don’t you just hate it when you hear a song and you can’t place it? You can’t, for the life of you, remember who sings it or what it’s called.

Well…Shazam it!

Shazam lets you take a quick recording of any song that is playing. Then it immediately identifies it for you. You then have the choice to play a clip, the video, learn the lyrics to the song in question – all in one place.

For comedian Nick Offerman.

I found an interview with the Parks and Recreation actor, on a Canadian program:

Check it out here.

His outlook on life and surprisingly goofy giggle made my day.

Friday: For the chance to help others.

With my blog, I have the chance to not only share my own writing, but to hopefully help share other people’s writing too.

Happy Birthday! – Something Missing by Hazel F. Robinson

It feels good to help someone who has been helpful to me.

Saturday: For central air.

As the weather, in Canada where I live, as it’s still a mix bag of temperatures, I am only needing air conditioning on certain hotter days. I am still grateful to have it, on the muggiest of days, one of the good and lasting things that resulted from a partnership that is no longer.

Wait. I think this last one can count as two things. Can’t it?

Oh, okay. Here’s one more.

For the end of a particularly challenging month and the ushering in of the month of June tomorrow. I have high hopes for what next month has in store for me..

How I Celebrated World Book Day 2015

What was I doing here?

It felt like a strange fish-out-of-water state to be in, but there I was.

I’ve already jammed so much into less than a week over this first week of March: a visit to Ottawa, seeing my aunt in her new home, and last night I visited Lucinda House.

I have wanted to write about all these things and more, but it all feels like too much for me to focus in on any of it.

My original statement today applies to all of these, but I must find a way to narrow it down somehow here tonight.

And so, as I asked myself once more, for the umpteenth time in less than a week:

What am I doing here?

I realized, so many times since March began that I have been weighed down by discomfort, but often the most important and valuable experiences in life will do this.

***

On World Book Day, 2015, I sat in an old house, now a part of a university, but in the moment it almost felt like I was transported back one hundred years.

Just being in an old house like that, surrounded by a room full of mostly women and reading to each other…

Wrong or right, I pictured the one scene from Gone with the Wind, where the ladies are tensely awaiting the return of their men.

The husbands were off, somewhere, taking justice into their own hands to defend their women.

As they were doing this, to make things safer, the ladies sat with their knitting as one proceeded to read aloud to the group.

Yes, the strangest thoughts come into my mind at the oddest of moments.

Yes, I can admit that, but being that yesterday was World Book Day and Sunday is International Women’s Day I had both books and women’s issues on my mind.

Of course, there were a few guys in the room this time, which made them the minority in my particular case.

Recently, I heard there was going to be a reading going on from a blogger I follow. I have been trying to read more Canadian and local literature lately. This particular blogger and writer does readings around the area and I wanted to show my support to her, to thank a female writer of books, something and someone I greatly admire.

I have been reading her blog for a while now, but I wanted to have the chance to put a voice to the words, an actual voice to the writer’s voice I have come to know so well on her website.

The evening started off on, what I can admit wasn’t the best note when I showed up in the middle of her reading. Not a great first impression to put forth toward someone I admire for the work she does.

I know what it must be like to be in the middle of speaking about that kind of hard work, a person’s life’s work and one’s passion and to have people walk in right in the midst of that.

I apologized upon meeting her, at the end of the evening, for doing this. She was quite gracious about it, but I made sure to let her know I did not intend to be at all disrespectful. I wanted her to know how much I really did want to hear her read from her newest novel, to meet her after reading so much about her life all these months.

She was great and she even made sure to signed one of her books for me: just one Carrie to another Kerry.

🙂

I am not a people person. I am not naturally outgoing and felt awkward all evening. This started, after walking in and hoping to be quiet while removing all winter items of clothing and taking a seat in the room, trying hard to disrupt the reading in progress as little as humanly possible.

I had been dealing with my issues with being arround old buildings all week long, facing them head-on.

First, through spending time in secondhand stores and old jails in Ottawa…to this particular evening, in an old house.

I could hear the age of the house I was in with every creek the floors made under my own feet and under the feet of the authors who shared their readings throughout the night.

I heard the floorboards make that signature creaky old house noise with every side-step each speaker took while standing at the front of the room.

I felt out of place. This was mostly a university setting, on a campus, attended overall by professors and literature students.

The professors were older and the students were younger. I did not feel like I belonged there; hovering, by myself, somewhere in between these two demographics.

As I stood in the kitchen, I felt a little less awkward getting a drink and some fruit because I had a brief break from having to feel like I fit in with those of academia out in the other room.

Suddenly, one of the only few guys in attendance spoke up to a few early-twenty-something female students. Apparently I wasn’t quite as alone as I’d first thought.

There was a hint of flirting I detected in his voice and also a hint of his own awkwardness, as he spoke to these young women. He was a poet, yet not a university student like they were. He clearly loved literature, or he wouldn’t have been there at all, but in his voice and in the words he spoke was obvious his own feelings that I too had been feeling.

Apparently, we all had our own version of the fish-out-of-water feeling going on.

I didn’t want to feel any pretension or any inadequacy. I didn’t want to feel like the act of writing and sharing that writing with others, female or not, was at all frivolous or pretentious.

I didn’t want to feel like it could have been one hundred years ago: either because of what women chose to do back then was treated less than at that time or even still today, in my own mind. I wanted to feel like what I was doing was worthwhile.

So why then did I feel like I was having to justify my own reasons for being there to myself or to some unnamed observer?

As I listened to others read aloud to the group I thought about my own writing and that need to write I feel pressing on my soul, stronger and stronger all the time.

I felt the discomfort of the words Carrie read from the pages of her own novel ring true in my own life. It all felt way too universal, these feelings, as she read a segment where her female protagonist is more than one hundred years old and living in a nursing home. I felt her words touching a nerve still much too raw in my own heart, after visiting a female family member of my own just the other day, currently living in just such a place.

This was perhaps only some fictional character in a book, but it was real to me and those I love, and more than likely to the writer/reader/speaker herself.

I did not get a chance, due to my high level of awkwardness in social settings, to let her know just how much her words had affected me. I don’t think I could have put it into words there and then, even if I’d wanted to. I am barely doing a coherent job of that here and now.

Next, I listened to the way the professor in residence went on to read her poems, which she had turned from academic, scientific journals and articles she’d come across from others, into the most beautiful lyrical, literary writing of her own making.

She had written about the type of symbiotic biological relationships that go on in nature, and something about pollination, the sorts of relationships I’d written about on visiting the creatures at the aquarium that opened in Toronto a few years ago.

Then she read us a poem she’d composed about the way different bee colonies fight for supremacy (not all creatures choosing to live such a symbiotic existence alongside each other.

Finally, I listened to some of her young creative writing students stand up in front of a bunch of strangers and lay it all out there.

They spoke about going out on their own for the first time and about unwanted attention from the opposite sex.

They shared short stories/poems about things I could hardly relate to, such as homelessness and living and surviving out on the streets.

One of the girls had even coined herself:

“the unofficial poet of the bus”,

as the place she’d found time or inspiration to write had been on Greyhound trips.

From the pain of lost love, the pressure to try and live up to society’s pressures and norms, and horrible tales of experiences with crackers and bedbugs…all terribly relatable to me or stuff made up of my worst nightmares.

This was all with such truth and vulnerability that I had to stop myself from physically shifting in my seat with discomfort. It made me really focus on the glaring obviousness of revealing things so real and personal in such a public manner, to a living room full of strangers.

It made me wonder if I could do that. Could I share things just as private and personal? Would I have the same raw nerve and guts?

How much of it was about themselves personally and how much of what they were speaking was about someone else?

I wondered who the one girl was referring to when she spoke of broken promises and one-sided love. Did the person she’d written about know she had done so and was, at that very moment, divulging so many intimate details that likely only the two of them had yet shared?

Then I imagined myself up there and how I would myself handle the nervousness and all those people staring and listening so intently. I could imagine, amongst all that, at the same time a huge rush that must be produced from doing something so freeing and open-ended.

It’s interesting to observe those listening around me in a situation like that. I suppose, to show that they are being heard and have had some kind of a positive effect, some people feel like it is only polite to produce even some small noise of appreciation, a murmur of awareness.

I shifted my eyes and attention: from the one speaking to us all about their writing, around to my fellow listeners, and back again.

I think it’s happening more and more as I feel I have lost more sight, but often, as in cases such as last night, I feel more and more self-conscious about where it is I am looking. It seems like I have less and less to focus my limited vision on.

This simply added to the feeling I often have, again like last night, where I feel both invisible and like I am standing out horribly in a group of people. The only way, I’ve been told I can possibly eliminate this, is to keep repeating this again and again.

I suppose this is why I read and why I write.

This all played back to the fact that I wasn’t sure I belonged there at the author’s readings, or literary evening, or whatever it is you want to call what last night was.

How important was what we were all doing there last night and the work and the time and energy people put into revealing such stories about ourselves?

I wish I could have held off to write all this down until I was certain I could place each point I wanted to make into its proper day’s blog post, with the correct topic, on the appropriate and the best day for each.

However, I waited this long before posting on my blog this week, not because I didn’t have enough things to write about or enough to say, but because I’ve simply found I’ve had too much.

I can always find enough topics to write about, even if I wrote for one hundred World Book Days. The same goes for International Women’s Day a couple days from now.

***

I did find myself sitting in my nephew’s bedroom the other day, watching him pulling his books down and tossing them this way and that as I pondered my relationship with books and why I love them so much.

Then, I thought about the same questions last night as I held my newly signed Carrie Snyder original in my hands all the way home from the reading.

I miss sunny mornings in the library when I was a kid, surrounded by the innocence of children’s literature. I sat and held a copy of a Grover storybook for much too much time the other morning and I capped off World Book Day holding a book from a local, Canadian author for my collection, thinking that I may not be able to read print books like I used to as a child, but that on a day like March 5th, they are no less valuable and meaningful to me now than they were to me back then.

Maybe I will find the courage, because that is what it is, to read my stuff in front of a group of my peers some day.

And maybe I will have books of my own to give to someone requesting them, who may just have come out to meet me and to hear my words on a World Book Day in the future, just like I did for Carrie last night.

For more on Carrie Snyder check out her website below:

http://carriesnyder.com

Happy World Book Day and International Women’s Day to you all.

NANOWRIMO 2014: Priorities, Goals, and Motivation

Okay, so in case it has skipped anyone’s notice, we have arrived at the end of November.

This means that the month of NaNoWriMo is nearing its finish.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this either, but I missed last week’s Fiction Friday, my usual post here and I did it for a reason.

Not for the reason I wrote about in my previous NaNoWriMo edition of Fiction Friday:

Rebellion.

Not for the cool, wild, hip concept of being a rebel.

🙂

But more like avoidance…avoidance of returning to the place I was at last year at this time.

The reason why I avoided writing any sort of update last week was I knew then and I certainly know now that I will not be reaching fifty thousand words on any novel, not this time.

I did it on my first try, but I guess I’ve learned that, in writing as in life, my priorities can sure shift, only one year on.

In author/writer Alana Saltz’s latest blog post,

What NaNoWriMo Has Taught Me About the Writing Process,

she writes about her own experiences, over the past handful of years with this writing challenge.

It is a helpful thing to me, to read about someone as successful as her, and how the same ups and downs (although not wanted or welcomed) can happen to anyone.

Alana says the two things that made the difference for her, the year she completed the challenge, were focus and a lack of distraction. these two go hand-in-hand, in a big way.

Last year I had distractions, sure, but I was highly focused on getting the novel I had been storing in my head for years down in actual words.

I don’t know where to go with it next and I do know I love the writing I am doing now. this means I didn’t want to give up all the focus I use for blogging multiple times a week, for this huge novel, that has not moved out of the first draft stage since I wrote it one year ago.

Will it have a sequel or will I keep writing?

What do I want it to be and to mean?

I definitely have my share of distractions at this point.

I have discovered that I love blogging, that I find it highly therapeutic in my life right now. I can’t say I feel that way about my novel-in-progress at this time.

In this day of technology and with the advent of ebooks, I hear authors saying all the time that it does no good to have one book, but what counts is to write one and then another and another, until you can build momentum.

As for the points made by Alana, this is my take on it:

1.
Motivation

I am motivated, but apparently not to grab the reins of the story I started last November, and run full-speed ahead.

I am motivated and I set goals all the time with my blogs, every week and month. I keep a fairly steady schedule of posts, present and future. I live by certain deadlines all the time with a blog and now a second one, especially when I am guest posting and hosting guest posters. It is imperative. People, not only me, expect this.

2.
Community

I do not have this, quite as much, with NaNoWriMo. There are no local NaNo groups, at least none I have discovered readily.

As for a community, I have found this in the blogosphere and I like it.

3.
Distractions

I am distracted constantly, my mind constantly wound up. I feel a sense of focus and calm when I am blogging that I couldn’t give up nearly enough to return to the novel that I started while still a part of the life I used to live and am not living in the same way anymore.

4.
Determination

I am determined to make something of blogging and more recently, with travel blogging. This is where I am right now and, although I may regret putting more and more time between myself and the novel I started, right now I must live in the present and future and not allow myself to return to a past I can’t afford to reexamine at this time.

The problem, for me, is that I don’t know if I have more than one novel in me, if I even have this one and the ability to finish it to any real end.

In an extremely uplifting video I came across earlier today, as I was thinking on how I was going to end off my lack of a completed NaNo goal for the month, what I wanted to say here, author Alina Popescu made some valid points:

NaNoWriMo14 – The Deadline Menace – Video on YouTube

I am a writer, like she discusses, whether I write novels, short stories, memoir, reviews and interviews, or travel articles.

I AM A WRITER.

I have discovered I like writing, in a way I did not understand one year ago, and I will follow this path, wherever it may take me.

All I know, at this point one year on, is that I have things inside me to say: about love and relationships, about heartbreak and moving on, about the movies and music that are my inspirations, and the people and places that move me and teach me so much.

Now that I have discovered this world of blogging, and most recently travel blogging, I needed to put all my focus on these things because they are getting me through.

I guess I didn’t really think anyone who might happen to read this would really care that I could not pull off fifty thousand words in a month, two years in a row.

Really, I am the only one I owe any explanation to, whether in my own head or heart. This post just helps me lay all that out, for the record, because maybe next year I will return to this post and start again with Till Death…

I am not giving up on that dream of publishing a story of fiction, but perhaps I am not meant to be mainly a writer of fiction at all.

Living in the present of November 2014 I am a blogger and I like that title and the feeling that gives me.

The Great Fitzgerald and the Banning of the Book

“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and the Damned

This Day in Literature: writer Francis Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota

He is one of America’s best loved authors of the 20th century. His life was marred by turbulence and tragedy, not ever really receiving the kind of recognition or status he might have liked. He was able to make a living, whether from short stories, his handful of novels, or Hollywood scripts. His life was simply brought to an end much too soon.

Fitzgerald represents America in the 1920s and the jazz age and the start of a fleeting materialism, pre-Great Depression era materialism..

He rose to fame quickly and this fame ended too soon, with his premature death in late 1940 from a heart attack.

He wrote his greatest novel, “The Great Gatsby”, when he moved from the U.S. to France in 1924-25 when the novel was published. France was surely thought to be a much more conducive environment for creativity.

His love story with Zelda is one for the ages, being refused his proposal until he could support her. He returned to her after the publication of his first novel, “This Side of Paradise”, and they were married. They had a daughter, Francis, his name sake. He went on to battle depression and alcoholism and her depression, required treatment in a mental insitution. I am highly curious about their relationship and I am sure there is much to it that is unknown, but how much of it could have just as easily been written into one of his extravagant stories?

I do not know about him like some probably do, but when I finally got to reading Gatsby last year (in preparation for the Leonardo DiCaprio film to arrive in theatres), I felt a strange thing; I had an odd sense that I was meeting Fitzgerald, or a certain version of him on screen. Leo played Gatsby, but to me he could just as easily have been Fitzgerald himself. It can’t be an accident and I am most likely not the only one to see it, likely because he put some of himself into his characters. What was autobiographical and what was purely fiction and a snapshot of the times?

I may have the unpopular opinion here and I mean no disrespect to the long-deceased writer, but the movie brought The Great Gatsby to life for me in a way that the book itself did not. I was stunned into silence by certain lines and passages in the novel, but overall the movie made a stronger impact. This is not usually the case for me.

(The movie came out before I started this blog, but I will be writing a backtracking movie review of The Great Gatsby here soon, but on this day I will focus specifically on Fitzgerald himself.)

Of course if it weren’t for F. Scott Fitzgerald, the man, there wouldn’t be any story to be brought to life by Leo and others. I can only say that his greatest novel, “The Great Gatsby”, represents a certain early decade in the century of my birth, one that seems so far in the distance for me and yet not so far as to be unimaginable.

I thank F. Scott Fitzgerald today for writing that story of grandeur and excess of the rich in 1920s society, with one mysterious man named Gatsby.

***

Also, This Week in Literature: Banned Books Week!

Out of all the books I have read or hope to read I don’t believe many or any of which are considered banned books. I would be interested in hearing thoughts on this from anyone else.

I know the issue of censorship is a complex one. I also know how lucky I am to live in Canada, a place where I am free to read whatever the hell I want. I know too that if a book is controversial enough I can’t say I would be so open, but the need for a week like this is intriguing to me. I hope to investigate it further in future years.

Have you read many “banned books” or how do you feel about the term or the act of banning any type of literature?

Review of Interference by Michelle Berry

Today I am pleased to welcome to the blog, author of short stories and novels, Michelle Berry. She is here to promote her latest, Interference, published this month by ECW Press, and I was honoured when she agreed to also let me interview her about her books, this one in particular, and about writing. I knew I could use this opportunity to learn something about writing from an expert in her field.

***

1. Did you always want to be an author? Did you write as a child? I grew up in a house full of literature and art. My mother is an artist, my father is a now-retired English Professor. So I always wrote. I didn’t know I wanted to be a writer. It was just part of me. Part of who I am. I wrote a lot as a child — journals, diaries, stories, even novels. My father and I wrote (and I also illustrated) a children’s book called, “Sailing the Deep Blue Sea” when I was about five years old. It’s quite catchy.

2. What was your first break in your writing career? I would say the first “break” was when Turnstone Press accepted my first short story collection. I was about 7 months pregnant AT the time and thought I’d given birth that second as I jumped up and down screaming. I first published in high school, though (a high school anthology called, “Unicorns Be” )— so that was my first publication. And before Turnstone Press I did publish in quite a few literary magazines (“Perhaps?”, “Blood & Aphorisms,” “The Malahat Review,” etc), so I got a lot of “first breaks.”

3. How do you handle the rejection that goes along with being a writer? I’m still trying to handle it. There is always rejection. Always. No matter how much you publish, how famous you are, how well-received you are, etc.. I’m sure Alice Munro still writes stories that need editing and aren’t immediately loved the minute they are finished. Maybe. I think. I handle rejection by getting first really sad and mournful (“No one loves me,” “I’ll never write again.”), but then I suddenly become angry (“What do they know anyway?”) and that’s what fuels the desire to keep writing, that’s what fuels the work, that’s what makes me a better writer. Writing is all about rejection and loneliness. I tell my students this, but they don’t believe me. They think it’s all chocolates and feather boas.

4. Where did the idea for this novel come from? It creeped up on me. It’s loosely based on quite a few things in my life. My daughter was the same age as Becky and Rachel (characters) when I was writing it, there is a big tree across the street from me, the school had sent home a letter saying that someone was stalking children in the neighborhood, I do play women’s house league hockey, my husband and a friend were going through cancer and treatment, etc.. But it’s one of those things where I combined all that was going on and heightened it, morphed it, faded it, played with it. I wrote around it and through it. Created a story. Used my imagination.

5. What is your daily writing routine? Lately I’ve been teaching so much (I teach online at U of T, online at Humber College and in-class at Trent University), that I don’t have much of a routine. But I usually try for an hour or so a day of good writing — or at least one or two days a week. Last year I rented an office for six months downtown and I would teach Monday to Wednesday and then do nothing but write for eight hours a day Thursday and Friday. It was wonderful.

6. Which character from Interference is most like you? Which one is least like you? Most like me: Maria (sadly, I don’t want to be like her — but she has all my faults — a bad back, kind of ornery to her husband (sorry!), clean freak, worried all the time). Least like me: Dayton (stylish, beautiful, but damaged). Although, to be truly honest, all of the women are a mesh of me — Trish’s behavior when she ducks behind the couch when there is a knock at the door (me!), Claire’s thoughts on death, on cancer. Even Ralph wandering through the snow in his slippers — he has a bit of my melancholy.

7. What is your experience with the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council? I’ve had a few grants over the years. They do a wonderful service. I’ve been on juries for them. Love them both.

8. I have seen a lot of debate on what makes someone an author and when to call them a writer. Do you see a difference in the two and when would you say it’s appropriate to use either one? Yes, I’ve been hearing a bit about that lately too. I’m not sure what I think. I always thought of myself as both author and writer and used the terms interchangeably. But I think “author” is becoming a hoity-toity thing to be these days (not sure I agree with that). I don’t know. I’m both, I guess. I am the author of books that I have written and the writer of books that I have authored. How’s that?

9. How would you define literary fiction as a genre? Good question. My students never seem to understand what literary fiction is — to me it’s fiction that leaves more to your imagination than any other genre writing does. So things aren’t explained and told and shown with such detail. It is subtle and intelligent and often has underlying meaning all through. But it can also be fun and wild — it doesn’t have to be stodgy at all. I consider my fiction to be literary. I don’t go into detail about scenery and appearances. I don’t tell you that a character is feeling blue (I hope), I try instead to show it through how that character moves and talks and acts. I try to give the reader a scene or situation he/she can interpret in his/her own way.

10. Community is the setting of this novel. What sort of neighbourhood did you grow up in and did that come into your writing of this fictitious neighborhood? This is more my neighborhood now rather than the neighborhood I grew up in. It’s an amalgamation of the street I live on presently and of the neighbors and community around me now. Sort of. But it’s fiction.

11. What does the photo album with the circus postcards in main character Tom’s childhood basement illustrate about Tom and his character or the themes of this book? I debated having actual “freak” photographs in the book. But it didn’t work (too costly to do and might seem gimmicky). Tom learns a lot about appearance and about how we all see the world through those postcards and his interest in them. I guess I was trying to say that we all judge all the time, we have our own opinions and views — but we aren’t always right. There are many sides to every issue. People we think are scary because of their appearance, might not be the scary ones. They might be the good ones. Tom sort of sees this by the end of the book — the old saying, “don’t judge a book by its cover.”

1. You teach writing and have had success with short story collections and novels. What would you say to anyone hoping to have a career as an author? Don’t do it! No, just kidding. It’s an infuriating business as you are always scrambling to find freelance or teaching work in order to pay for the time you need to write the book. Because of this you never have time to actually write. But I guess the two best pieces of advice I can give are:1. Be a reader. Read all the time. Read the kinds of books you want to write. And think about how they are written and why they were written and what they do for you. And then write. And, 2, write because you have to. Don’t write to get published or “be famous” or — hilariously — “to be rich.” You might as well decide to be a famous actress at the same time. Write because your story is important to you, because it’s all you can do not to write. Because you need to write more than anything. And then get a paying job!

***

I thought “Interference” refreshingly unique (letters and emails sprinkled throughout), starting with a letter home from the school to the parents. Throughout the novel more letters and emails are sent and received. A Cease and Desist order from Build-A-Bear Workshop and the women’s hockey team announcements. There are angry and threatening messages from one spouse to another. A question is posed by a son to his parents about the past. A short correspondence takes place to the director of the men’s shelter and one to a woman who volunteers for an organization driving cancer patients to their appointments.

Michelle Berry’s “Interference” is what good literary fiction should be, a gripping contemporary literary fiction story which forces the reader to think about the deeper questions in life and the things that ultimately interfere with the status quo.

She poses these questions in terms such as: “We’re all a little strange. We’re all different.”

“Life is not fair; life and death.”

“It’s good to have something to look forward to.” This line really did sum things up nicely for me.

I pondered all these things as I was introduced to the people and the families living in and around the neighbourhood of Parkville.

On Edgewood Drive the story opens. A man and his wife rake leaves on an autumn day, while their twelve-year-old daughter plays basketball with the neighbour girl across the street. Berry puts us directly in the mind and thoughts of Tom and his prejudices are laid bare almost immediately when a stranger with a hideous scar across his face wanders into the yard, offering to help rake.

Tom is influenced strongly by being a husband, a father, and a son and has seemingly forgotten himself in the process. I was automatically drawn in by Tom’s memory of an old album full of faded postcards of circus freaks, high up on a shelf in his grandfather’s basement. Does this memory mean anything more or is it simply an example of the sort of judgement that goes on by people against others who are different, in neighbourhoods and towns everywhere?

The man with the terribly disfigured face. The creepy bald man in the brown suit. The still stranger in the dark hoodie watching the schoolyard that only Tom’s daughter Becky has seen. The teenaged boy sitting up in the stands every Wednesday evening who watches the women’s hockey league play. The slow boy who acts inappropriately and hangs around the playground at the school after hours.

Pedophile rings and child porn. Someone is stocking around backyards and peering in windows. Kidnapping and cancer scares. The unpredictable and spurned husband who could show up at anytime.

I see it as the kids vs. the adults in a way. Children vs. adults. Men vs. women. Husbands vs. wives. Each group has their own battles, issues, and things going on that they don’t or can’t necessarily talk to anyone else about.

The women of the neighbourhood interact different with one another during their Wednesday night games and in the dressing room than they do off the ice and during their interactions in their homes and with their spouses, children, and next door neighbours, back on Edgewood Drive.

Just off this idyllic street the ones on the fringe peer in on suburbia and can’t help looking in on what they could have had and probably never will. I was constantly on edge to see who would survive through the winter unscathed.

Michelle Berry provides a glimpse into all kinds of people and she leaves me to wonder how things aren’t always what they seem at first glance. I wanted the residents of Parkville to learn something about their neighbours, themselves, and those different, but no less deserving of a little understanding and acceptance and I came away from reading this novel having learned something about those things myself.
That, to me, is the mark of a well-thought-out and touching view of humanity wrapped up in a well-crafted literary fictional package.

***

Interference Blog Tour Schedule:

Monday, August 4: Laurie’s Not the Worst

Wednesday, August 6th: Obscure CanLit Mama

Thursday, August 7th: Cozy Up With a Good Read

Friday, August 8th: Feisty Little Woman

***

I want to thank Michelle B and Michelle M for giving me a chance to take part in the blog tour.
Michelle Berry’s Interference is published this month by ECW Press, Toronto. Check it out

Here,

or

on Amazon.