A Week on Sunday (no. 12)

Thoughts on Thrifting

I took time last weekend and this one to visit thrift stores in Winnipeg, which I hadn’t all last year. First I get overwhelmed. Then I remind myself that it’s fun. 

And it really is! I make a game of quickly going through each piece of clothing on a rack, testing feel and design and checking the label to see if I’ve guessed the quality right. 

I have rules: an aversion for some brands, an exception for cheaper fabric or un-fancy brands if the item looks brand new, an aim for classic cuts (no shoulder holes), colours (I don’t care for purple), materials (is that wool?), and a dismissal of store categories (I browse across size, gender and type of clothing).

I now have more 5 more pairs of pants I didn’t a month ago… I found a belt making me retroactively happy I didn’t buy the one at the Bay - the store that is now closing, that has sprung a slew of pink and white 15%-off sale signs like a field of clover in spring. 

Thrifting takes the weight off of shopping for new clothes, and quirky accessories, like this scarf I could unwind from my neck and read if I was ever bored, let me be playful without feeling frivolous.

Thrifting is a pastime. As I comb the racks, I feel people around me. I’m conscious of picking through items that unknown others have dropped off, I’m spending time considering what I could wear, what I like enough, really enough to try, to buy, what others would think of my choice, what my choice says about my style… What is my style… Is everything all vanity… 

The counterpoint is this: that by taking time to examine clothing, I’m learning… I’m not only teaching myself brands, materials, quality, I’m noticing what people donate; I’m looking at items that have been assembled an ocean away, advertised in a store, purchased at some point, worn or stored before being passed along and processed and hung on these squeaky hangers for my benefit. Sometimes, the thought of all that inspires a kind of gentle reverence for clothing, for the journey it took to land in this neutral wall, bright fluorescents building. Mentally, I bless the people who were part of that journey… the lowly workers in particular. More often than not, I leave feeling grateful for the experience.

Baking

This week, I got compliments on the Banana Bread Blondies from King Arthur Baking Company. They have a generous list of free recipes and this one is a keeper. Not only is it easy to make, but it uses bananas in an unusual way…

Cooking

In other news, I made Smitten Kitchen’s “Meatballs Marsala with Egg Noodles” this week. I had a craving. But also, I keep notes and record the meals we’ve had week to week, year after year. I’d tried the recipe for the first time last year and noted “kids don’t care for the sauce.” But I made it anyway, and curiously, the kids’ opinion has changed from a year ago. They could not recall disliking the sauce. I take this as tastebud maturation!

Writing (for a Blog)

This series of blog posts by Tracy Durnell, titled “Mindset of More”, has been gently thought-provoking and I enjoyed reading through them… This other post by James Horton, “The Non-Writer’s Guide to Writing A Lot” could seem to contradict Durnell by its title, but in fact it aligns well, since Horton says “Write for joy” and Durnell writes “it is more rewarding to treat writing as atelic, meaningful in itself.” I think Matthew Gallaway expresses this in a way I relate to when he writes:

blogs in my mind are still the best means of subjectively capturing the world around us in a manner that's best suited for the internet

and

I still like to blog, and I have no plans to quit. It's a place where I can write a few words and share some pictures that for whatever reason mean or meant something to me. It's not about making money or even trying to, which is itself an act of #resistance in our sadly money-obsessed culture. And while I sometimes question the meaningfulness of my work, I never question the meaningfulness of others who are doing the same thing, which would dictate that (if you took my neurotic insecurity out of the equation) the work is meaningful to someone, even if (stay with me here) that someone is me, or a past version of me.

(Also, I liked this post of his about opera.)

Postcards

Spring, while it is greenery and asparagus for people south of us, is fields of frozen half-melt and quiet hopeful plants.

As it moves along, inch by inch, snow turns to puddles that freeze.

Can you spy a fox?

It drove Enzo crazy. He howled wildly as I pulled him along and the fox watched, as if amused, sitting down even, as we passed.

Then, a new snowy landscape on Friday morning…

Friday Five

Welcome to my little spot on the web, where, like a bird on a blade of bluestem I cheerily chirp in comfortable invisibility. Ha! This week brings more thoughts on writing, the foundational joy of these weekly dispatches, and… some fall colour! Cheers!

1 Writing

I like listening to writers talk about writing because I crave all their voices and experience in the silence of muddling along. For example, I nod along with Alexandra Shulman when she says “I’m somebody who never knows what I’m going to write ever until I start writing it. […] I write it down and then once I’ve written down wherever I get, then I go back and try and turn it into something that’s a bit more ordered.” It makes me think of Joan Didion’s expression: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” But do you see how Shulman’s statement is a little more raw, a little less literary? In the yellow glow of my black desk lamp, I more often feel like Shulman, a little humbled by my inability to draw up a plan and follow it. It’s in the glare of sunlight through a café window, joking with a friend over lunch that I can venture to be Joan Didion-like, just “writing to think…”

Or, for another example, I like how Jon Ronson said he needs “months to write”, that being a columnist wasn’t something he liked because his brain just didn’t work that way… “I’m very slow.” And while this might seem like an unflattering quote, such confessions are deeply reassuring for people whose creativity has a matching way of working itself out.

Slow percolation and spontaneity … I wonder if it’s related in a way to Carson Ellis’s own observation on the subject of narrative storytelling, when she tells Debbie Millman that she wishes she “felt more comfortable with it and better at it” but that she freezes when “faced with the challenge of making up a story, even if it could be about anything. Like you’re telling a story to a three-year-old with no expectations, the bar is very low, and I still feel kind of frozen by it.” I too get the same feeling.

Perhaps the fun of listening to this kind of “shop talk” is the excitement of a kind of pattern recognition, whereby I find in the professionals things I’ve begun to notice in myself and it’s a boost to my confidence. 

2 Breath

The ideas in this book have recently taken over our thoughts and modified some of our habits… I originally heard about the book on the podcast “People I Mostly Admire”. James Nestor’s writing voice is nice to read and he has a kind tone. Steve Levitt remarked on this in his podcast, saying “you came to book writing somewhat late” and then noting the success of his books. Nestor answers that for him, writing has been an outlet, “what I would do to feed my soul at nighttime and on weekends.” I find it inspiring that this kind of attitude toward writing imbues a reader’s experience of the book itself.

3 Eating

I made doughnuts from scratch for the friends and family festivities at our house Halloween night. It was a little chaotic… Christian had to serve supper on limited counter space while answering the door and being cheerful while the dog howled so I could concentrate entirely on managing dough and hot oil. But! They were a SUCCESS! I followed Sohla El-Waylly’s recipe in Start Here to the letter, and the outcome was plush and crisp and perfectly sweet. I learned about proofing dough - comparing the right amount of proofing to a handprint on memory foam was effective - and used coconut oil for frying as she recommended. Having our whole house smell like it was doused in coconut-scented sunscreen seems like an extra perk of the recipe. Wow.

Photo credit.

4 Research

I’m doing this little side-project for fun and it involves these directories that get bigger and bigger along with Winnipeg’s population growth. They’re called Henderson Directories and they list an individual’s name, their occupation, place of employment and address. They also list house owners by street. These tactile sources of data amaze me. They’re also a poor subject of conversation, of the “did you know” type. 

Research makes me think of Tyler Virgen’s post “The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge”. I really like this blog post. It begins small, leads to a little goose-chase and lots of sleuthing, contains self-doubt, has moments of humorous refocusing, plunges into dusty archives, contains newspaper clippings and delivers a satisfying ending. If I were a professor, I’d dedicate a class to this blog post, just for the illustration of research it provides.

5 The view

It’s so colourful this time of year…

I feel like milkweed makes a flamboyant show in the fall compared to the demure dusty-rose of its summertime flower clusters.

In case you were doubting the above statement…

The river recedes from the shore, going so low as to reveal new islands and the perfect profile of a duck.

Today, a row of willow looked like this, still leafy:

Happy Friday!

Friday Five

1 Podcasts

There are podcast episodes that stand out because someone makes a point that stays in my mind long after the subject has changed. The Decibel, for example, interviewed Justine Hunter on the subject of lost fishing gear from a once busy Canadian industry that is now hurting wildlife and the efforts deployed to retrieve it. A worthy story that rings a tiny bell of optimism, but mostly what I retained is how Hunter framed the effort… On the podcast she says

To me, this is also a reminder that the abundance of our oceans has been depleted and cleaning up some of these messes, to me, is just like a little penance that’s due.

It’s as though she’s reminding us, having herself experienced how big and how amazing the ocean is, how some of its beautiful animals are suffering, that the inconvenience it’s now costing us to retrieve gear from a time when we benefitted so much from the ocean’s bounty, is a way of recognizing nature’s majesty and asking its forgiveness for our too hurried, too greedy attitude. I find it a heartening attitude. (Episode here.)

Second, is Canadaland… Jesse Brown is in favour of safe injection sites. The issue is in the news, Brown talks about how politicians spin the problem in their snappy-sensational-making soundbites and then takes the listener on a little journey to another perspective, thanks to a thoughtful interview with Derek Finkle. I really enjoyed this episode because it felt like I really learned a lot in a short time. Nice work! (Episode here.)

2 Department stores

This week I finished reading Bruce Allen Kopytek’s book titled Eaton’s: The Trans-Canada Store.

It’s the latest read in a fun little side-project into colouring-in my mother-in-law’s life story, which included seven-years’ employment at the Eaton’s store in Winnipeg in the 1950s. The book ends inevitably with the store’s demise and Kopytek writes:

Some employees offered their experiences over the last few turbulent years in hindsight. They admitted that the store became terribly shabby […]. More than one claimed that Eaton’s abandonment of its core customer was critical to its failure. The youth group that the store sought was not only fickle, but it also didn’t have tremendous amounts of disposable income, and what’s more, it never really identified with Eaton’s like its former customers did. (pp 386-7)

Its hard not to see in this a kind of pre-mortem for The Bay at the St. Vital Mall where my mother-in-law every week has us park the car, where we pass through broken doors and where she browses styles she dismisses (cut-out shoulders, shiny puffer jackets, neon shirts) as bizarre.

How many more years will this one limp along pretending that marketing can substitute for care, when I’m pretty sure there are a lot of older women that would be pleased with a crisp white polyester-blend button-down, with short sleeves for summer. And an extensive petites section. 

3 A lemon dessert

This week, I made Amy Thielen’s Lemon Nemesis for a lemon-loving birthday-celebrating lady and it was a hit even among the less-lemon-loving guests. It was also my first time using a blow torch - go me! If the dessert sounds intriguing (here’s Thielen’s description: “This giant lemony ice cream cake—from its salted butter-cracker bottom to the racy lemon custard middle to the swirled toasted meringue on top—corrals all three of my personal temptations into a single dessert. It is my nemesis. My lemon nemesis.”) the recipe is wonderfully available online. (See it here.)

4 Robert Caro

On the occasion of the 50-year anniversary of the publication of The Power Broker, the Daily aired an interview from the Book Review podcast with Robert Caro, its author. At one point, he discusses the writing, and Caro says,

I believe that if you want people to read a piece of non-fiction, and if you want it to endure, the level of the writing, the prose, the rhythm, the word, the choice of words, getting the right word, is just as important in non-fiction books as it is in fiction books.

Were I an audience in attendance at the recording of this interview, I would have stood up and cheered, would it not have caused an interruption - I want to hear everything Caro says about writing… I also am really really enthusiastic about his point of view on the subject.

5 The view here

Fall is turning leaves into potato chips on my morning walk. Its ombré colour treatment on this baby tree is also pretty nice.

Happy Friday!

Friday Five

Welcome to five things this week featuring things online and offline I’ve been enjoying…

1 Shot and Forgot

This is such a fun TikTok channel, animated by an enthusiastic host, Dan Rodo, who, by using the visual media of pictures, compressing hours of historical sleuthing into a fast-paced trail of crumbs, one-clue to the next, puts the excitement of research on display. Kudos to him!

2 About writing

Perhaps it is true for most writers, that seeing someone else braving the usual impediments to writing inspires their own writing... A post on Marginal Revolution lead to Jake Seliger's blog and then to Bess Stillman's substack which is the kind of thing that can happen now in this online world. (I remember once visiting a local cemetery where a woman's gravestone had a Youtube link. It was an oddly satisfying way of scratching the itch of a "who was this person?" question, even if only superficially.) I particularly appreciated Bess Stillman's three-part series on writing, the first of which is here.

3 Halfways (Bubble tea places list)

Before summer had even started and the kids had come out of a place with a disappointing experience of bubble tea, my daughter declared that we had to have an "authentic" bubble tea experience. I embraced this project idea, made a list of 20 bubble-tea-offering businesses in Winnipeg, put them on a map, and made a booklet for evaluations. We are halfway through, and even though the summer is winding down, we'll likely continue these random visits. I feel as though the focus on a single experience is both unexpectedly fun and surprisingly educational. Our stops are included among other summer activities and memorialized on the fridge, we've learned a lot about bubble tea, tracked down addresses in the city in areas we wouldn't normally visit, and discussed drink quality and tea place ambiances we wouldn't otherwise, were it not for this mini-project.

A list of places we've tried so far: On Tap Frozen Dessert Bar, Xing Fu Tang, Panda Crepe, The Alley, Icey Snow, Khab Tapioca, Boba Paw, Chatime, Happy Lemon, Dynasty Café.

Christian and I have been to KHAB Tapioca on Pembina three more times, just by ourselves and even invited visiting family members to try out bubble tea there. A close second, ambiance and taste-wise, is the nearby Panda Crepe. The kids were unanimous in liking the drinks from Dynasty Café which offers a small menu of basics. And Xing Fu Tang had a cool fortune-telling cabinet that entertained us as we waited for our orders.

4 Double Fine PsychodYssEy

My siblings turned me on to this Youtube series which Tom Faber describes in the Financial Times this way:

You might expect a documentary of this length to be exhausting or indulgent, particularly when it’s about something so technical, but it is a riveting watch. [...] Here are the mechanics of human creativity, the brutal realities of the gaming industry and the passion and heart of the people who choose to do it anyway.

Recently, watching episodes 12 and 13, I especially liked Tim Schafer's thoughts on how creativity is about momentum (around the 4 minute mark on episode 13). It's not that it's especially insightful but that you get to see what it looks like to put an idea like "creativity is an endless process you should do everyday of your life" into an exercise called "Amnesia Fortnight".

5 Summer’s progress here

There’s this particular tangle of thistles that I like to photograph against the sun after supper and they’ve been a steady marker of the season’s progress… (taken July 26th, August 2nd, August 16th)

The plants going to seed, and those seedheads emptying and turning brown are the visual aid helping me along this ever-forward thrust of time. Summer’s early exuberance gives way now to days gathered like last-minute berries plucked and put into over-full baskets as we leave the field behind, taking a store of fine memories.

Happy Friday!

Writing

Because I'm in the middle of a lengthy draft, I'm extremely attentive to what people say about writing. For example, on the Ezra Klein podcast, the host and guest were discussing the use of A.I. in writing, Ezra explaining:

But almost always when I am stuck, the problem is I don’t know what I need to say. Oftentimes, I have structured the chapter wrong. Oftentimes, I’ve simply not done enough work. And one of the difficulties for me about using A.I. is that A.I. never gives me the answer, which is often the true answer — this whole chapter is wrong. It is poorly structured. You have to delete it and start over. It’s not feeling right to you because it is not right.

Maybe, taken out of context, this quote doesn't mean much, but I like how it exposes the kind of things I struggle with.

The guest (Ethan Mollick) in his answer said:

And I think a lot of us think about writing as thinking. We don’t know if that’s true for everybody, but for writers, that’s how they think.

It was a fascinating episode on A.I.

It reminds me of this part in Virginia Valian’s essay “Learning to Work” wherein she explains how she taught herself to tackle her thesis writing by committing herself to work on it for 15 minutes a day.

The first rule was that the fifteen-minute period had to be spent solely in working. My feeling of accomplishment depended on having a chunk of time that I did not fritter away in any way. I also had to learn that losing myself in my work was not dangerous. Most important, I noticed that I tended to stop working the minute I hit a difficult problem. Working in fifteen-minute chunks meant that occasionally I hit such a difficult problem in the middle of the required fifteen minutes and had to learn how to deal with it. Sometimes it simply required a little more thinking; sometimes it meant I would have to read something or talk to someone; sometimes it meant a lot more thinking. What I learned, though, was that I could deal with problems and didn't have to give up whenever I encountered them.

To me, it’s not the 15 minutes that matters so much (although I do find it very helpful to think about). It’s that encountering a “problem” and learning how to fix it, is just as valid a use of time as writing 250 words unimpeded. It has helped me dispel the idea that I was failing my productivity goals if I hadn’t set an impressive word count at the end of the day. Writing is dealing with problems. Dealing with problems is the hard work of thinking.

Friday Five

This week's roundup of ideas center around a theme: that of travel and exploration as a metaphor for my studies. It is inspired by the audiobook I just finished, titled Lands of Lost Borders by Kate Harris, and the subsequent connections made across podcasts, websites and other books.

1.

It all begins with longing. When Kate Harris set out to bike along the Silk Road, she did so in response to an intense longing to explore. It is a theme that comes up more than once in her book. For example, she notes the irony in noticing posters in Asia with a scene that looks like it is set in Canada: 

Across the tent, tacked to its supportive beams, a glossy poster caught my eye. It featured juicy-looking burgers, golden french fries, bowls of cherries and oranges and ice cream and foamy milk shakes, all spread on a red and white picnic blanket in a lush forest next to a waterfall. I'd seen similar posters all across western China [...]. They fascinated me, not just for the torturously improbable feast they portrayed, food that was the stuff of fantasy, unavailable for thousands of miles, but for the odd familiarity of the scene. For all I could tell, the posters showcased woodsy, rural Ontario, where my own bedroom walls had been tacked with posters of mountains and deserts, of horizons picked clean by wind. We were longing right past each other. (Chap 2)

In Susan Cain's most recent book, Bittersweet, longing is an important aspect of bittersweetness. She writes:

Most of all, bittersweetness shows us how to respond to pain: by acknowledging it, and attempting to turn it into art, the way the musicians do, or healing, or innovation, or anything else that nourishes the soul. If we don't transform our sorrows and longings, we can end up inflicting them on others via abuse, domination, neglect. But if we realize that all humans know - or will know - loss and suffering, we can turn toward each other.

This idea - of transforming pain into creativity, transcendence, and love - is the heart of this book."

2.

We are all plagued by the desire to be original. When I began my research, I hoped I was cutting a new path that would lead to new discoveries. Instead, the more research I've done, the more historians I've found who have laid tracks parallel to my own. I think this means two things: the first is that it is human nature to want to stake out one's individual merit, and to have hubristic ideas about it. It is better to discover oneself as part of a community. Secondly, venturing out with a project in mind is a good and necessary part of one's personal development. Again, Harris writes about this in her book, with the example of Alexandra David-Neel: 

Refreshingly, David-Néel knew herself just fine, and what she was searching for, if anything, was an outer world as wild as she felt within. She didn't even have the luxury of a blank literary or geographic slate when it came to Tibet. Dozens of Europeans had already been there, from diplomats to missionaries to soldiers. They'd drawn maps, written reports, even owned real estate in Lhasa. That none of this deterred the Frenchwoman was deeply consoling to me, a hint that exploration was possible despite precedent, that even artificial borders were by definition frontiers, and therefore worth breaching as a matter of principle. (Chap 1)

And in her book’s conclusion, Harris writes:

But exploration more than anything is like falling in love, the experience feels singular, unprecedented and revolutionary despite the fact that others have been there before. No one can fall in love for you, just as no one can bike the silk road or walk on the moon for you.

3.

Distractions and procrastination. I'm writing through the results of the research, working through another chapter, and sometimes, as much as I like writing, I am seized by the desire to escape it. I start thinking that the story of the small town would better be communicated in a graphic novel, or an interactive website. Or what if what the world really needs right now is a comprehensive map featuring every travel writer's journey in the books they wrote? That way, I reason, if you wanted to travel vicariously without any of the discomfort, you could pick a place and see the books written about it!

Such digressions of thought are like desert mirages, and they're a normal part of writing. They do sometimes lead to interesting rabbit holes though... I discovered the website Wikimapia, for example, and Richard Kreitner's article titled “The Obsessively Detailed Map of American Literature’s Most Epic Road Trips” on Atlas Obscura. (He also wrote a book with selected works of fiction and their settings around the world.)

4.

On the subject of writing. Travel writing, as a genre, isn't easy to pull off, as Tyler Cowen writes in a blog post titled "Why is most travel writing so bad?" Rory Stewart, on a podcast episode of Always Take Notes, is also critical of some aspects of the genre. 

[...] it absurdly inflected with a strange form of decadent asceticism, it too often relies on essentially mocking foreigners [it's] very very unaware of the actual political context of people's lives, it's anthropologically primitive, it has no real interest in the actual structures of society

Then again, every genre has its weak spots and examples of poor execution. Criticism is instructive (preferably when one isn't the subject of it!).

5.

Finally, a balance between history and the present, between thinking and doing. Thanks to Tyler Cowen's recent podcast episode I learned about Paul Salopek's years-long project of walking across the continents. The premise is fascinating, and Salopek uses his talents to highlight "slowing down and finding humanity." In one of his recent dispatches, he writes about human migration. And there was this line: "History—as scribbled by smug homebodies—often assigns these wandering souls a glib label: losers." I wonder if he's highlighting a tension between people who stay at home and people like himself who choose to venture out to see life "on the ground." I don't think one should exclude the other... Rory Stewart (back to that episode on Always Take Notes) marries both aspects.... the walking and the history: 

[...] you access communities that you can's access except on foot, and you're walking at the same pace as everybody else. [...] Walking therefore exposes me to the landscape but [also] to the human components and history of the landscape. Things make sense for me as a historian by walking: the distance that Alexander the Great had to walk, or the Genghis Khan's army had to walk makes sense to me [...]. 

It's been a thought-provoking week! Pictures taken this week while walking the dog are on Instagram.

Happy Friday!

Reading and writing (forever!)

I must constantly trick myself into writing here, as if it were a high-wire act I was only performing for myself. I like getting to the end, having spent time fully concentrated in the act of balancing vague feelings and concrete words. I also like finding how other writers manage… top of list is Craig Mod’s recent interview for Every.to in which he says of his newsletters: “I think of them as my public sketchbooks.” Fantastic! Welcome now, to this here post, on this here blog, which happens to be, “my public sketchbook”!

Shall we discuss reading fiction? Lets! because recently, two books have mentioned it. There’s Claire Messud in Kant’s Little Prussian Heand and Other Reasons Why I Write (2020):

“We must struggle to change our institutions, but our resistance to the depravity and depletion of these times must go beyond that. It must also occur in our souls.” (p 108)

and

“Art has the power to alter our interior selves, and in so doing to inspire, exhilarate, provoke, connect, and rouse us. As we are changed, our souls are awakened to possibility - immeasurable, yes, and potentially infinite. If ever there was a time for art, it’s now.” (p 109)

And there’s George Saunders in A Swim in a Pond in The Rain (2021):

“There’s a certain way of talking about stories that treats them as a kind of salvation, the answer to every problem; they are ‘what we live by,’ and so on. And, to an extent, as you can see by this book, I agree. But I also believe, especially as I get older, that we should keep our expectations humble. We shouldn’t overestimate or unduly glorify what fiction does. And actually, we should be wary of insisting that it do anything in particular.
(…)
“So, trying to stay perfectly honest, let’s go ahead and ask, diagnostically: What is it, exactly, that fiction does?
”Well, that’s the question we’ve been asking all along, as we’ve been watching our minds read these Russian stories. We’ve been comparing the pre-reading state of our minds to the post-reading state. And that’s what fiction does: it causes an incremental change in the state of a mind. That’s it. But, you know - it really does it. That change is finite but real.
”And that’s not nothing.
”It’s not everything, but it’s not nothing.” (p 382-3)

Then, to this end, Saunders makes a little list of fiction-reading benefits:

“I am reminded that my mind is not the only mind.
”I feel an increased confidence in my ability to imagine the experiences of other people and accept these as valid.
”I feel I exist on a continuum with other people: what is in them is in me and vice versa.
”My capacity for language is reenergized. My internal language (the language in which I think) gets richer, more specific and adroit.
”I find myself liking the world more, taking more loving notice of it (this is related to that reenergization of my language).
”I feel luckier to be here and more aware that someday I won’t be.
”I feel more aware of the things of the world and more interested in them.
”So that’s all pretty good.” (p 387-8)

Ah… Saunders… this description is delectable. I’m sorry… my appreciation for this book borders on fandom, but I can’t help it. It’s like ordering a meal at a restaurant and being so perfectly satisfied, you’d kiss your fingers, because the chef was married and because this is an acceptable form of flattery in Europe, even if you’re Canadian.

But food is also fortifying. So let’s end on writing advice. There is plenty in Saunders’ book, but this one is at the end. Saunders quotes Robert Frost, who, after listening to a long and complicated question about writing, answered “Young man, don’t worry: WORK!”

Saunders writes: “I love this advice. It’s exactly true to my experience. We can decide only so much. The big questions have to be answered by hours at the desk. So much of the worrying we do is a way of avoiding work, which only delays the (work-enabled) solution.
”So, don’t worry, work, and have faith that all answers will be found there.” (p 387)

Keeping a blog

Writers are constantly prey to self-doubt, I mean, dare I even count myself as one of the group? It takes little for this to flare up… This American Life ran a segment about an entertainer who daily learned and memorized a ballad, recorded and posted it to Youtube, a habit that has lead to there being more than 1000 videos posted to his account. The story felt deflating.

Then, on cue, to revive my drooping spirits, to make a case against the futility of effort, I read Cory Doctorow’s post, “The Memex Method” shared on Tyler Cowan’s blog. Here are five things I especially appreciated:

1. “The genius of the blog was not in the note-taking, it was in the publishing. (…) Writing for a notional audience - particularly an audience of strangers - demands a comprehensive account that I rarely muster when I’m taking notes for myself. (…) Writing for an audience keeps me honest.”

2. “Blogging isn’t just a way to organize your research - it’s a way to do research for a book or essay or short story or speech you don’t even know you want to write yet.” (This is mentioned by Austin Kleon too).

3. “(…) if the point of writing is to clarify your thinking and improve your understanding, then, by definition, your older work will be more muddled. Cringing at your own memories does no one any good. On the other hand, systematically reviewing your older work to find the patterns in where you got it wrong (and right!) is hugely beneficial - it’s a useful process of introspection that makes it easier to spot and avoid your own pitfalls.”

4. “There’s another way that blogging makes my writing better: writing every day makes it easier to write every day.”

5. “As a blogger I’ve enjoyed the delirious freedom to write exactly the publication I’d want to read, which then attracts other people who feel the same way.”

Three little encouragements

Sometimes, just by chance, you are listening to something, like a routine podcast on your podcast feed, and something is explained in a meaningful way. Recently, for me, it happened when Chani Nichols was describing to Debbie Millman the paradox she felt of needing to write and the intense self-doubt it unleashed. (See here). About 37 minutes into the podcast, Debbie Millman had asked: “I understand that when you first started writing you would literally be doubled over in shame and pain and self-doubt, but it also felt like something you had to do. Where did that pain come from?” Nichols answers the following:

I think that (…) when there’s a lot of neglect or you feel invisibilized by family or culture that when you bring yourself into form by writing something or acting something or building something or making something that other people can see and that you’re giving it out to them, there’s a way all of a sudden for me, I become more real. I’m defining myself by writing these things and putting them out. For me being somebody that was so low on the priority list of the adults in my life, it just brings up the feeling of having been left and denied and betrayed and abandoned. And so it’s this weird thing, it’s like I’m actively trying to heal this and bring myself into form and bring myself into the world and yet my experience of being forgotten and invisibilized becomes more pronounced as I do that. So it is [an] experience that comes in tandem; there’s like this “yay, I put something out” and a feeling of releasing of creative spirit from myself or creative energy into the world and yet all of my survival mechanisms, “stay small, stay quiet, stay invisible so that you don’t get harassed or something bad doesn’t happen,” like there’s so much chaos in the world and my life that I just had to keep everything as small and still as possible. So it’s just all that – and trauma response I think of being more present in the world.

I’m also fascinated by the story of Robert Walser on This American Life. He was content with this simple motto: “to be small and to stay small.” (See here).

Indirectly, it relates to this little scene that Emily Carr relates in her autobiography Growing Pains. She writes:

We discussed Georgia O’Keefe’s work. I told of how I had met her in the gallery of Mr. Steiglitz.

I said, “Some of the things I think beautiful, but she herself does not seem happy when she speaks of her week.”

Miss Dreier made an impatient gesture.
“Georgia O’Keefe wants to be the greatest painter. Everyone can’t be that, but all can contribute. Does the bird in the woods care if he is the best singer? He sings because he is happy. It is the altogether-happiness which makes one grand, great chorus.”

Please don't trample my heart

You see, the thing is, the less you do, the less you feel like doing. The moment I stop writing is the very moment paralysis begins. When I’m head in the books, like I was this summer, biking to university and reading and taking notes, my mind was full of thoughts and ideas and I ran about like someone with a basket trying to catch them all. I felt alive.

I’ve read Rufi Thorpe’s essay twice. The first time, it was a relief to recognize myself in the servitude of motherhood. How often I have felt this way. The second time, more recently, I was happy to find in its conclusion the word ‘worthwhile’. Here is this giant tension between art and motherhood, between selfishness and selflessness and I have not escaped. Instead, here I am, so lucky to feel it, to know it, to read women who put a name to it.

No one likes being forced to go slowly, to hold back, to be trained in patience and steadiness. Today I face the tyranny of toddlers who dictate the morning walk, or the trip to a park, and I abandon wish list to-dos, I consciously let go. Being at home is not a bad job. My bosses don’t berate me. The stress is slight and self-imposed. I could go on finding productivity in shopping sales, chopping ingredients, and hopping around, but I soon miss the quiet development of thought. I start to daydream of an empty house, me and a cat, an end of day meal, a materialized husband, and an uninterrupted conversation. For now, all I have are small packets of time like islands of respite upon which I build stories and good habits by the sliver. The days and the course through them don’t change much, but I figure that this is exactly the lesson I need right now. It is slow and the repeated efforts are incremental but already I can see that when I look back the view has changed.