What a fun first launch for Headlight 24 at the beautiful De Stiil bookstore in Montreal!
After several difficult trips to Emergency with my husband recently, I was especially happy to return to ‘normal life’ for the evening.
Huge thanks to Headlight 24’s dynamic editorial team, and to sound editor Miranda Eastwood who did a fabulous job on the audio of my poem “Unsafe in Large Doses”.
A heads-up: the second launch will take place 31 August, 2 pm, at Concordia University’s 4th Space.
I’ve just started Emily Urquhart’s ‘Ordinary Wonder Tales,’ a collection of essays woven from her personal stories, her studies in folklore and everyday wonders.
Her first essay springs from a haunting she experienced as a child in France. It instantly reminded me of my own haunting story. (I’ll leave you to read her story in her book.)
Many many years ago (nearly 50!) my husband and I were guests in a very old, very picturesque, very cosy, thatched cottage in Suffolk.
In the middle of the night I woke to feel a little body snuggling up between my husband and myself. I peered down the bed. Nothing there. Just a dream, I told myself.
The following morning, out on a walk with our hosts and their other guests, I surprised myself by asking if there happened to be a ghost in the house.
A quick uncomfortable glance between our hosts.
“A small being, a child or perhaps a dog. It wasn’t scary,” I said to reassure them. “It was just…there.”
Turned out, yes, the house had a ghost. They didn’t know what kind of ghost. Like me, they guessed a child or dog. “But we’ve told it not to go into that room,” one of them said. “We’ve been very firm that it’s not allowed in there. If it must haunt, it can come into our room.”
“It’s up to the storyteller to believe or doubt their experience.” Ordinary Wonder Tales p.23
I have another haunting story from Suffolk, although it’s not really mine, from a year or so later, when we had our own little cottage.
Our next door neighbour, a very elderly lady who lived in an old old cottage, told us over tea one afternoon that the day before a gentleman dressed in the Jacobean style (ruff, doublet, puffy trunk hose, stockings) had passed through her sitting room as she drank her tea. He paused to bow courteously to her before continuing on his way. She showed us the spot on the wall where he’d exited.
“Haunting narratives are dual stories because one listener might hear it as true while the other understands it to be fiction. It’s a question of perception…” Ordinary Wonder Tales p.21
This lady also told us that once, years before, the local undertaker had parked his hearse (complete with coffin and body to be ready to take to the church for burial the following day) on the other side of the lane from our two cottages. Come morning, the hearse was still there, but coffin and body gone.
Somehow my collection of postcards managed to escape the downsizing purge.
Until, that is, towards the end of January when I found out about International Correspondence Writing Month. Aha, I thought, now’s the time! Sending one postcard a day for the month of February would make a nice little dent in my stash of cards.
My postcards are full of memories of course. Dozens from the Spanish Riding School in Vienna from a summer spent in my father’s family home in the Vienna Woods about 50 years ago! I insisted on going to watch the horses and riders rehearse every morning. A box from when I worked in Bogotà, Colombia in the ’70s. Another box full – two – from ten years of working my way around the world. I’m not sure I ever left a gallery or exhibition or stately home and garden without postcards!
I’ve never been a good postcard writer. You’d think it would be easy to fill such a small space, but I just sit and stare at that little white square. Maybe that’s why I have so many.
I managed to send eleven before I burned out on my February project. A postcard a day was too intense and took too much time away from writing my novel. To be fair to myself, there were also major distractions because of family health issues.
Mulling over old memories was fun of course. What I especially enjoyed was how certain postcards would suggest a friend who might enjoy receiving it. Old friends who maybe had shared the occasion when I bought the card, who I hadn’t seen in years. More recent friends because I knew they’d be interested in the image on the card. And thinking of one friend naturally leads to thinking of another…
I’ll try again next February. If I could manage every day of the month, it might only take me fourteen or fifteen years to empty the boxes!
Downsizing is not for the faint of heart. You have to deep dive into boxes, trunks, suitcases, cupboards. It’s exhausting. But sometimes you unearth forgotten treasures.
Today I found my Serbo-Croation/Austrian grandmother’s Moldavian gardening coat.
It’s worn through in places, but the embroidery is so gorgeous I can’t bear to throw it away.
It was passed on to me by an American cousin. The coat had been an important part of her hippie wardrobe back in the day.
The problem is, one may not want to throw it away, but what on earth do I do with it?
The time has come to downsize. Who knew we had so many boxes and bits and pieces tucked away? What a brutal job going through them. What to keep? What to let go? The decisions are overwhelming.
So I start with an easy one: lacrosse stick (c.1962?)
I can think of no earthly reason to keep my lacrosse stick. I can’t even think why I have it. I definitely didn’t bring it with me to Canada from England all those years ago. Probably my mother brought it over later when she was downsizing from the house she’d lived in for 50 years and wanted to be rid of it.
I played in the school’s 2nd eleven. Lax, we called it. I don’t remember actually enjoying it that much. It seemed an awful lot of bother to run all the way down the field and back again after a little ball (unless of course the boys at the next door grammar school happened to be lounging around beside the fence). “An animated tree stump,” one of my mother’s tennis group complained after I filled in for a missing member. Who would have thought I’d end up spending much of my working life teaching dance and movement!
A quick check online tells me that lacrosse sticks have long since changed beyond the point when anyone would find this one of any use. In any case, parts of the gut have shredded.
The stick reminds me of the smell of the games shed at the back of the school: a mix of sweat, vaseline which we had to rub into the leather thongs, and linseed-oiled wood. It reminds me of the sinking feeling as, accidentally catching the ball, seeing a certain girl in my class pound towards me and knowing there was no escape from a sharp rap over the head or the knuckles, of the phys ed teacher yelling at me: “MOVE!” And, horror of horrors, of the post game communal showers.
I imagine I played because of my older sister. On my first day of high school, the principal looked down at me from her then terrifying height and said “I hope you’re going to be just like your sister.”
My sister the brainy student, the lacrosse star. She was even the proud possessor of (oh my heavens!) a posture girdle, a long braided band in the colours of whichever school house you were in (gold, jade and two others I forget now) that you tied around your waist so the tassels rippled over your hip and down your thigh.
A posture girdle meant you not only walked with your back straight, eyes on the horizon, but that your shoes were clean and polished, your hair tucked away tidily, that you did not roll your skirt up at the waistband or let your socks drop over your ankles or let your straw boater slip to a jaunty angle. Oh how I longed to be like my sister and strut through the school with a gold posture girdle rippling over my hip and down my thigh.
Early on in the lock-down for covid-19, the owner of the little local grocery store noticed I was rushing round his store and practically jumping into the freezer or bakery rack when other shoppers came too close.
He told me to relax, slow down. “You must surrender,” he said. “What will be, will be.”
“I’m not ready to surrender,” I told him. “I’ve a novel to write.”
Working on my first novel has been a godsend during the lock-down. The thought that I might die before I finished it gave me new focus and drive, but there came a point when I found I needed some outside energy…especially for developing the back stories of my secondary characters.
Developing back stories is always a slow business for me. So much to explore beneath the tip of the iceberg!
There are plenty of writing prompts available online, dozens of questionnaires to use when interrogating fictional characters. They just don’t do the trick for me.
Then through the ELAN newsletter (Quebec’s English Language Arts Network) I discovered Jesse Stong’s Writers’ Warm-Ups at Playwrights’ Workshop Montréal.
Jesse’s Writers’ Warm-Ups are speedy (15 minutes) and energetic, and the prompts are terrific. He breaks them down into bite-sized, ‘get to the meat of it’, no over-thinking segments which always spark some kind of useful information or insight about a character. I especially love the Meryl Streep-inspired prompts!
Jesse twins each Warm-Up with a charity. If you donate, you can send him what you’ve written and he’ll give you feedback. How great is that?
Live-streamed every Monday and Friday at 10:15 a.m., but if you can’t make those times, you can catch up on Jesse Stong’s Warm-Ups later, as I do.
I never knew there was a United Nations International Mountain Day until I started researching mountain eco-systems for the novel I’m working on.
Almost one billion people live in mountain areas, and over half the human population depends on mountains for water, food and clean energy. Yet mountains are under threat from climate change, land degradation, over exploitation and natural disasters, with potentially far-reaching and devastating consequences, both for mountain communities and the rest of the world. http://www.un.org/en/events/mountainday/
The theme of the 2018 International Mountain Day is #MountainsMatter….for water, disaster risk reduction, tourism, food, youth, Indigenous Peoples, and for biodiversity.
Did you know that mountains provide “between 60 and 80 percent of all freshwater resources for our planet”?
The FAO is asking all those who enjoy (holidays? skiing? snowboarding? mountaineering?) or depend on the mountains (that glass of water?) to join the call to specify why mountains matter at #MountainsMatter.
These photos are all from Banff. I had the great fortune to participate in a writing residency at the Banff Arts Centre in 2014.
For the last few years two friends and I have been meeting at different metro stops and exploring the artworks in the stations before heading out to investigate the area around them. Montreal has 68 stations so there’s plenty of exploring to do.
Last Friday we went to Continue reading
Last summer, inspired by Thursday Doors master Norm 2.0’s post, we decided to drive the King’s Road (route 138) to Quebec City en route to Charlevoix rather than the much much faster autoroutes 40 or 20.
I insisted we start right from the beginning of the King’s Road. This meant creeping along rue Sherbrooke through the city and past some rather desolate areas in the east end of Montreal where the oil refineries used to be. It took us an hour and a half to get off the island.
The Moulin de La Chevrotière was most definitely one of the loveliest sights on the King’s Road (which is full of many lovely sights). Continue reading
One afternoon my husband disappeared. It seemed he had vanished from the face of the earth.
I eventually tracked him down in the Trauma Centre at Montreal General Hospital where he was lying on a board in a neck brace, one eye completely closed, lip swollen, beard caked in blood, face covered in bruises and cuts. The injuries from his fall on the ice led to complications that eventually meant we had to cancel our upcoming trip to the U.K.
My sister, obviously worried that I might become depressed after all the stress and anxiety and cancellations, forwarded me a link to an article about happiness and how to achieve it…positive thinking, controlled breathing, meditation… Yeah, yeah. Sure.
For me, there’s no better way to get back to a happier, airier frame of mind after periods of stress and worry than sorting my overloaded bookshelves.
That 1947 Encyclopedia Britannica is just gathering dust. A lot of dust. Two shelves’ worth of dust. We rarely (never) refer to it but keep it because it belonged to my husband’s parents. We have other things of theirs that we enjoy. Time to bid it farewell.
But what to do with it?
And with those books I know I’ll never read again?
And all those literary journals? I used to leave them in cafés around Montreal for others to discover, but kind baristas would keep them and return them to me the next time I went in.
There’s the local church bazaar of course, but that doesn’t happen until November. If I’m to find my happy feeling, I have to get them all out now.
So, off I go with the novels to the hospital’s Book Nook that I discovered during a break from the Trauma Unit when searching for a latte. The literary journals make their way to another Book Nook (Take a Book, Leave a Book) – this one in The Hive Café Co-Op in the Hall Building of Concordia University.
And the 1947 Encyclopedia?
Turns out no one wants an old Encyclopedia.
Put it in the recycling, I’m told.
Recycling? Really? Must I?
I hate the thought of any book going into the recycling.
But one volume a week, into the recycling bag it’s going to go.
Susi Lovell 