Reconvening

Since I was last here, I slowed down freelancing work, although I have had some interesting contracts on occasion.

Instead, I've been focusing on publishing others' work. While it's been incredibly rewarding and instructive, it's time I return to focus more fully on my own projects.

There've been many creative inspirations over the past handful of years, but the most noteworthy remain in a stack of notebooks and mish-mash of scraps of paper, and a few hopeful entries and submissions.

Current creative projects (working and parked) include:

• a novella, for which I've completed the third draft, but now wonder if it wants to be a full-scale novel
• a site-specific musical play, with a first draft of the book and half of the lyrics/score 
• a slow-growing collection of stories, which I continue to work on and hope to turn into a manuscript 
• two screenplays that could be resurrected in some way, and the idea to turn at least one of them into a series (TV or web) has been on my mind

There are other ideas percolating and steaming away, and for this I am very grateful. So many ideas and potential directions…

But focus and prioritizing in a fertile creative space is what will bear the better product. 

It's an exciting place to be: at the gateway to a project's conclusion. And it's difficult to resist the temptation to touch everything all at once!

In the coming weeks and months, I aim to report on the progress I'm making, as well as reflect on the many things that continue to inspire me.

Updating

The past few months have been filled with updating my skills and editing my story collection.

I'm still writing over at the CWC every couple of weeks, including a series detailing my experiences in a Master Fiction workshop with Nancy Lee.

For the past month, I've been taking a photography course with the very talented Kathryn Mussallem.

Next up, tending to some slightly neglected script projects that could use a bit of water and encouragement.

Lately

The past few months have been filled with courses taken. I've been stocking up on all kinds of motivation:

*Creative Magazine Writing, with the inspiring Daniel Wood;

*Master Fiction Workshop, with another great writer, Nancy Lee;

*Women's Chorus, with the lovely new mama, songstress Miriam Davidson.

And looking down the road, I see a Digital Photography course in my future, and a summer full of travelling and writing.


Inspiration may be a form of superconsciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness - I wouldn't know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self- consciousness.
~ Aaron Copland

Inspiration does exist, but it must find you working.
~ Pablo Picasso

Overloaded

My pal Tony, over at the CWC posted this great piece today. In it, he muses:

"You reach a certain age, and you begin to wonder how come you never paid attention before, why you never noticed that with each change of season, your life becomes less and less about living, and more and more about something else."

Then I just popped over to The Tyee, and found this great post from James Glave, in which he writes:

"I want my experiences and places and purchases to feel honest, comfortable, deliberately human-scale, authentic."

These subjects are also on my mind of late, and I wonder: Is a collective western-world shift occurring?

The view from here

As a short person, I’ve always been aware of my surroundings and how things are not made for me: office chairs never fit, cupboards are always too high; items I want at the supermarket or the library always seem to be on the shelf I am just inches shy of reaching.

Perhaps because I come from a highly wheelchair-accessible city, or because I have many friends with limited mobility, when I travel I’m often conscious of a city’s lack of accessibility. For instance, last spring in Montreal I was deeply disappointed by how wheelchair unfriendly the city is; only becoming aware of it whilst hauling some cumbersome luggage from the train to the metro.

But Kevin Connolly’s recent photo project has me reflecting on some things I don’t regularly think about. Connolly, a 22-year-old Montana artist and athlete was born without legs, uses a skateboard as his main mode of transport. His perspective from his close-to-the ground camera lens, documenting how people look at him, is a reminder of what we often don’t consider:

"Aside from the enjoyment of working on a challenging photo project, I also got the chance to skateboard some pretty crazy locales. Tokyo and Zurich were probably my favorites due to the immaculate sidewalks. However, most of Europe posed a problem that I hadn't considered upon leaving: cobblestones. Those evil little buggers…tore my skateboard apart and created a terrible racket anytime I would go anywhere… I've never seen such nasty cobblestones as those in Romania."

(Image: Kevin Connolly)

Les inspirant langues de Tomson Highway

The strongest aspect of English for me is that it’s the world’s foremost intellectual language, it comes from the head. The French language comes from the heart, it’s an emotional language. And Cree is a visceral language, it comes from a third part of the human body, a part that’s forbidden to be talked about in English. It’s the garden of joy, of pleasure, from which the English language was evicted 4,000 years ago — to put it in theological terms. It’s hysterical. When you speak Cree, you laugh all the time. Every syllable is a kick in the arse. So when I want to laugh, I speak Cree. When I want to make money, I speak English. When I want to make love, I speak French.

The full interview

A story for the year of the rat

You wouldn't want me, standing here, to tell you, would you, about my friend the poet (deceased) who said, 'My heart has followed all my days something I cannot name'?

The Door, by E.B. White

Bees

Photographer Adam Makarenko's miniature/photo bee projects are mesmerizing.

Recently awarded the American Photo of the Year, "[i]n this project, Makarenko created a detailed imaginary world -- a 'pseudo garden of Eden' he calls Langstroth Range, located in Canada's Yukon Territory."

A grey mood

There's a certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons--
That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes--

~ Emily Dickinson (No. 258)


Renowned Vancouver architect Arthur Erickson said of his favourite medium: "Concrete is the marble of the 20th century." His creations are anywhere from fascinating to confounding to starkly beautiful. But his contributions to this city, one socked-in by grey for much of the year, sometimes simply overwhelm.

It's the 21st century, is our future to remain grey?


***

The Gray Areas of Jasper Johns
By Carol Vogel

February 3, 2008

ONLY one artwork hangs in Jasper Johns’s all-white Caribbean home here. It’s a nearly nine-foot-tall canvas in three sections: a harlequin pattern that cascades down on the right, a series of colored circles on the left, and a montage of gray encaustic brush strokes in the center. Two overlapping wooden slats are attached to the painting.

Full New York Times article

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts ~ Bertrand Russell

Don't argue with happiness

Man is the artificer of his own happiness ~ Henry David Thoreau



I am a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy ~ J. D. Salinger


North Americans just cannot seem to get enough. Of anything. So many laughed at the face, their own face, as they saw themselves in Super Size Me. We tsk at the excesses of others who drink, drug and dance too much. And yet.

We can't seem to get enough happiness.

The backlash toward Jerome Weeks, from those angered by his Salon article on doctors' over-prescribing antidepressants, points to a similar sort of guilt-driven indignation, and inability to read a message clearly.

Weeks clearly notes that there are those who legitimately need medication, that he is not trying to undermine its importance in some people's lives. Yet a maelstrom of but-buts once again welled, from folks who would formulate their protests before hearing out, or fully reading, the argument.

Happiness has become the most recent in inexplicable commodifications of the human condition. And we're hooked. Funny thing is, no one's ever been able to define it, so how can it be boxed, sold and prescribed?

I saw a production of Tom Waits' Black Rider last night, and I'm now thinking of these Waits/William Burroughs words from 'Crossroads', about selling out something integral for some temporary kicks:

Now, George was a good straight boy to begin with, but there was bad blood
In him; someway he got into the magic bullets and that leads straight to
Devil's work, just like marijuana leads to heroin; you think you can take
Them bullets or leave 'em, do you?
Just save a few for your bad days

Well, now, we all have those bad days when you can't shoot for shit.

The more of them magics you use, the more bad days you have without them
So it comes down finally to all your days being bad without the bullets
It's magics or nothing
Time to stop chippying around and kidding yourself
Kid, you're hooked, heavy as lead

The inner sleuth

One spring, maybe a thousand years ago, a wallet that'd been stolen while I was on Christmas holiday, arrived in the mail. The postmark named a city in BC's interior I'd never been to, thousands of miles away from where the theft had occurred, and hundreds of miles from where I was then living. The wallet, mostly intact except for the missing $200, was accompanied by a note detailing the Good Samaritan's dog's retrieval from a rose bush. I knew who had stolen the wallet, though had no proof, but I had to see that person every day for the rest of the trip knowing he had gotten away with it. That someone had taken the time to package and send the found wallet to me, though, helped reaffirm my faith in the kindness of strangers.

And as I searched my wallet contents, wondering how it had finally gotten back to me, I considered how there's something sort of fun in the sleuth work, tracking down an individual based on the few clues available, as this article attests, about the kindhearted New Yorker who went to great lengths to return a lost camera.

Beah's latest battle raises many questions

Recent reports that some facts in Ishmael Beah's memoir, A Long Way Gone, are being challenged concerns writers and readers everywhere.

The complexities of the situation are well-delineated on Ben Peek's blog and over at Booklist Online.

The suggestion that Beah may have been exploited by his publisher; that the Australian media has a history of calling out book liars; the distinction between journalist and memoirist; the accusation of misquotation; the uncomfortable debate about degrees of tragedy... And many other prickly concerns.

I'll reserve any judgment for now while the story unfolds. From what I've researched, though, The Australian is a formidable opponent, so Beah's battle will likely not be a cakewalk.

Photo Samples

Here's a handful of photography samples. I'm looking forward to developing my skills, through practice and more formal learning. As I come across more of my favourites, I'll post them.

'to a movement of legs and hooves'

Thinking of Robert Creeley tonight led me to The Poetry Foundation.

It's been too long since I posted.


The Rescue
by Robert Creeley (1991)

The man sits in a timelessness
with the horse under him in time
to a movement of legs and hooves
upon a timeless sand.

Distance comes in from the foreground
present in the picture as time
he reads outward from
and comes from that beginning.

A wind blows in
and out and all about the man
as the horse ran
and runs to come in time.

A house is burning in the sand.
A man and horse are burning.
The wind is burning.
They are running to arrive.

A fiction-writer's non-fiction crisis

My pal Andrew Tibbetts, over at the CWC, is having a 'crisis of faith' about his fiction writing. His post is also a very good review of The Best American Essays 2007.

It's also sparking some discussion about non-fiction writing in general, with a mention of Ken McGoogan's recent Globe and Mail piece on the subject. Over at Canadian Magazines, D.B. Scott summarises the article (for those who missed it and don't want to pay to read it in its entirety), and Kerry Clare has a thing or two to say about it over at Pickle Me This.

Trying to weave in and out through fiction and non-fiction can be a bit of a challenge for writers, but I am surprised such hard lines have been drawn between the two.

McGoogan's argument for a third genre, as such, reminds me of Marge Piercy's 'third gender' suggestion in Women on the Edge of Time, and the controversy that incited.

I'm looking forward to reading more about this from writers of both genres.

Brooklyn Savings

The ceiling of the Dime Savings Bank of Brooklyn, located in the middle of downtown Brooklyn, took me by surprise. Outside, across the street from fast-food restaurants and discount retailers, the engraving atop the entranceway is a reminder of a past when a dime meant something, the era of "Buddy, can you spare a dime," wing-tips and sharp-looking hats.

When I entered, though, I was hardly prepared for glamour of days-gone-by banking.

Seemingly unchanged since its opening, the fine hand-crafted wood and tiled fixtures, and the shiny brass and copper detailing, all herald a time when banks were symbols of prosperity and potential. All the way up to the top, to the inspiring ceiling. If you click on the photo, you'll get a much better sense of its splendor.

Inside one of the most beautiful banks I've ever seen, I waited patiently for the security guard to finish his phonecall discussing a concern about someone at one of the entrances, then I shyly asked to take a picture of the bank.

He was a sinew of a man, and his well-trimmed grey hair suggested he could have been one of the dapper men who banked here during its heyday. After sizing me up, all 5 feet of me, he diplomatically, but sternly, said: "You know I ain't allowed to do that, but one picture. One. I'm gonna walk away now, and don't know nothing about this."

Choosing that one photograph to take was difficult, but I settled on this one, wanting to honour the generosity of the security guard.

Then I withdrew some cash from the ATM, took one final look around, and returned to the reality of the day.

Shout-out to Deb Ng

The list of links to jobsearch sites, on the bottom right of this page, is thanks in part to Deb Ng over at freelancewritinggigs.com, in particular this post. Many of them I already had, but a few are new to me. Deb does a great job over there and I wanted to give credit where it's due. Thanks Deb!

A place for reflection

This is a photo I took in the WC of a New York cafe. It is the smallest, cleanest and most trippy WC I can recall. It certainly adds a whole new meaning to the idiom, 'A place for reflection.'

A work in progress

Please bear with me. I'll try to post only my own photographs here, but it is currently a challenge. Blogger is not co-operating with my upload requests, so I'm limited to what I can offer. In the spirit of full disclosure, though, the first photo is a ManRay image and the group photo on the right is a famous Josephine Baker photo. These, obviously, are not my pics.