Pay it Forward Blogfest

I don't know how I get sucked into these things. I woke up this morning with no intention of joining any blogfest, then Stephen Tremp mentions I got mentioned on Laura Eno's website and I see my pal Laurita Miller is doing it and, hell, I'm nothing if not a cool-kid wannabe... so.

HELLOOOOOOOOOOO PAY IT FORWARD!

(Man, I can't stop thinking of Kevin Spacey's iron-burnt face and Twister Helen in her tight-ass jeans looking for bottles of hooch in the kitchen light and that kid, that poor sad-faced little kid who did a bunch a sad-faced movies and then disappeared into kid movie star notoriety. I'm bad at names. And way too lazy to google 'em, cause really, who the hell cares?)

So here's the deal: I mention three blogs I really really like. And then you go visit their blogs and give 'em a follow, because you will love them as much as me, I promise. Then off I go like Red Riding Hood with a pic-i-nick basket and a Yogi bear in tow, off to visit as many blogs as I can muster. If you feel the need to get sucked in, here's the link to the linky list: http://alexjcavanaugh.blogspot.com/2011/09/paying-it-forward.html

Here's the hard part: narrowing down my favourite blogs to just three.

One of my favourite blogs, very, very favourite ones, doesn't have a lot of followers, doesn't get a lot of traffic and doesn't really care. My Great White North may have eschewed popularity but its purveyor, Deb, embraces humour, photography and a love for Muskoka, the rugged, beautiful place we both call home. Give Deb a chance to win you over. She will, I promise. Since I've been blogging she has become a friend and an inspiration. You can visit her blog here: http://mygreatwhitenorth.blogspot.com/

Lake Muakoka from the vantage point of Deb's deck.
Photo by Deb or Dave at My Great White North.

If there's anybody who can make me laugh out loud, it's Siren. I've mentioned Siren Song a few times because I can't get over how crazy-funny she is. Her latest thing is posing dead, dessicated frogs (or maybe they're toads – it's hard to tell they're so mummified), photographing them and putting words in their mouth through cartoon bubbles. Ridiculous fun but scathingly, cuttingly sharp at the same time. Yesterday she blogged about her Halloween display of zombies. Gotta love her. You can visit her blog here: http://sirentist.blogspot.com/

I feel a little lax about blogging lately, if truth be told. I'm trying to write a novel (hahahahah - how ostentatious does that sound!) and all my extra time that I used to devote to blogging and writing short stories is now devoted to novel-writing. I'm no Laura Eno or Stephen King. Every chapter comes down onto the page encased in blood. So I apologize for being distant - it's not that I don't love you all... because I do. You know I do. Blogging has changed my life, gave me the confidence to write this book, this tome, this blood-spattered albatross around my neck.

Seagull Cottage by Shelagh Duffett

I have one more blog to mention and it's one I think you'll enjoy. Shelagh Duffett is an artist living in Nova Scotia, Canada and she blogs at Alice in Paris Loves Art and Tea. This blog puts a smile on my face with its colourful whimsy, the chatty conversation of its host and its remarkably happy paintings. One of these days I'm going to dust off my credit card and buy one of her paintings, just because they make my heart smile. Shelagh blogs here: http://aliceinparislovesartandtea.blogspot.com/

One of the things I most enjoyed over at Shelagh's blog was her posting of this simple song. Take a minute and enjoy... it will make your heart smile, too. I promise.

Memoir Writing

Other than blithering on about Margaret Atwood, I haven't talked much about the North Words Literary Festival in Muskoka (Sept. 30 - Oct. 2, 2011), but I want to. North Words was one of the most inspiring, most fun, most fabu-lishus celebrations of the written word I have ever been to.

This year I signed up for a full day writer's workshop, the Margaret Atwood speech and an authors' forum but there was more I would have enjoyed, including a live book club, readings, and breakfasts with well known authors. Next year, for sure, I want to buy a weekend pass and go to every darn thing they've got.

When I signed up for the writer's workshop, I was more interested in the morning presentation (how to find a publisher and an agent) than I was for the afternoon (memoir writing). I only signed up for the afternoon session because I already had to book a day off work and, what the hell – lunch was included. And you know me, it's always about the lunch!

As a former newspaper columnist and a blogger, I thought the memoir writing workshop couldn't teach me anything new. I thought it might be leaden lessons for a bunch of old ladies who want to know how to write their boring life stories – boy, was I wrong. I mean, yes, the room was full of old ladies, including myself, as well as young ladies and some men of various ages; and yes, they wanted to learn how to write their life stories – but they were anything BUT boring.

The workshop was led by Cori Howard, an award-winning journalist who has written for some of the top newspapers and magazines in the country. She is the editor of the best-selling anthology Between Interruptions: Thirty Women Tell the Truth About Motherhood. Cori started The Mommoir Project to teach and inspire mothers to find their voices and inspire the confidence necessary to believe the mundane details of their everyday lives matter – and make compelling stories.

She started out by reading a few memoirs to us, including Lit by Mary Karr. The segment she read absolutely stunned me – I need to read the whole book asap. Yes, it was first person. Yes, it was a memoir, but it read like a finely crafted book of fiction, and the prose was undeniable – hard-edged, poetic and magnetic in its appeal.

Cori then talked about finding a moment, or a scene, from our own lives and how to write about our lives from the perspective of that scene. She gave us a half an hour or so to write something and then some of us read our stories out loud.

I was obnoxious – I know, hard to believe. But I was so excited about what I had written down that I started waving my arm in the air when she wanted to know who wanted to read first. Picture Arnold Horshack from Welcome Back Kotter and you get the idea. Other people were also excited to share what they had written and everyone was excited to hear what they had read. Laughter rang out through the Huntsville Public Library as funny bits were read. Tears were shed at other parts. By the time the afternoon was done, everyone felt a new closeness as well as a confidence that, hey, we could do this.

Cori's right – everyone does have a story to tell. Many stories, actually. All it takes is a little direction and inspiration to get them on paper.

Because I really am like Horshack, here's what I scribbled down:

It’s a wonder I don’t fantasize about the Maytag repairman. Not someone who goes ga-ga over a man in uniform, perhaps that’s the reason; maybe it’s also because Gordon Jump is the actor who is playing the latest Maytag man in the TV commercials, and I can’t think of Gordon Jump without thinking about the dumbass character he portrayed on WKRP in Cincinnati.

No, it’s not the Maytag man that keeps me coming to the big white boat of an appliance hulking in the back corner of our little log house. It’s the dirty socks and underwear that seemingly breed in the washing machine’s presence. My husband and two sons are veritable factories of filthy laundry.

Diesel oil, road dust and gasoline on Dave’s once-navy-blue work coveralls, the ones with “Angelo” on the embroidered nametag because, when he started working at the Huntsville Chrysler dealership three years ago, the woman who ordered work clothes ordered the wrong name. I don’t know how she mistook Dave for Angelo, but she did, and while she has been promising for three years to get Dave his own name on his own shirts, it hasn’t happened yet.

So I wash Angelo’s coveralls, and hoodies out the yin-yang from Angus and Sam. It’s all they want to wear. Hooded sweatshirts, even in the sultry thick of a mid-summer day. The hoodies belonging to Angus, who is 14, come back to me and the Maytag smelling vaguely of goat. It must be a teenage thing, this heady goaty aroma, a mixture of B.O. and, gawd, I don’t even want to imagine what else. I remember my boyfriends all smelled the same way. When I was 14, I thought it was sexy. Not so much, anymore. Sam, who is still only 11, has hoodies that smell clean, like fresh air, like sunbaked sand.

I inhale this 11-year-old hoodie fragrance, so beautiful it should be bottled, because I know that some day soon, it will change. I am tempted some days not to wash it, to put it away in a bottom drawer, to keep it as a sweet vestige of a time before everything changes, for good, and forever.

Just wondering

I always cry on my birthday.
Do you?

I'm Alive

Barely.
Everything hurrrrrrrrrrrrts.
This was the best Thanksgiving. The weather was fantastic. I mean, middle of July fantastic, except that the temps got down to zero Celsius at night but the skies were blue and the sun was shiny and the leaves in Algonquin Park were at their most fabulous.
But oh, I am a hurting unit. Three solid days of biking and hiking has jellified these old bones and now I am salivating at the thought of a hot bath and a handful of extra strength Tylenol.
Tomorrow marks the end of my 50th year and I have much to be thankful for as I say good-night to another Thanksgiving Day. A year ago I couldn't have imagined myself biking all over one of the most beautiful places on earth in my baggy-assed sweat-pants, looking for moose and bear, and passing 11-year-olds in a single bound.
I have so much to tell you about but it has to wait, it does. I just wanted to let you know I'm alive and well and looking for the heating pad.
And tomorrow?
Tomorrow I eat cake.

Meeting Margaret Atwood

Those eyes. Those dazzling clear blue eyes; maybe blue; maybe grey. Maybe both.

I can’t stop thinking of Margaret Atwood’s eyes.

When you see a photograph of her, on a book cover or the internet, you notice them right away, because you can’t help it. They’re stunning.

But when you meet her, and she’s sitting down only a couple of feet away, signing a book, it’s her eyes that draw you in. Those eyes, the ones that stared back at you from books since high school, now trained on your own imperfect self, and you think, when you can rustle up a lucid thought, “I am in the presence of Greatness.”

Rarely do you live in the moment, despite Oprah’s constant urgings to do so. But last night I did. Two minutes. Or so. The stage lighting at the Algonquin Theatre in Huntsville, Ontario, shutting out the hundreds of people lined up behind me, books clutched to their hopeful chests, like schoolgirls, shutting out their distractions, pooling Canada’s greatest writer, Canada’s most iconic author, and me, in a shroud of stillness.

“For Cathy,” she began writing in the book I had just purchased, “In Other Worlds,” her newest book, so new it won’t even be officially released for another week.

I wanted to ask her something.

“With best wishes,” she continued to write.

I leaned forward. She was just finishing “Margaret” when I blurted it out.

“Did you ever doubt your writing?” I asked, because that is what is in my own writer’s heart. “When you were starting out?”

She signed “Atwood,” with a messy flourish, and turned those amazing eyes up to meet mine.

I was struck by her resemblance to one of Canada’s most beloved prime ministers, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, her curly hair, her clear, almond-shaped eyes; but also to my friend Mark’s mother, Mary Champion, a historian, a woman of intelligence. I was struck by the feeling that I knew her, that I had always known her, yet I knew nothing at all. Most of all, I realized that I was meeting a living legend and what I really wanted to know was, what is it like being this legend, this icon, this Atwood person?

Instead, I listened to her answer.

Our gaze locked for a moment. She seemed to choose her answer carefully, or maybe she was just sizing me up. Her voice was measured, throaty, as remarkable as her eyes, actually.

“No,” she said. “In those days I worried mostly about who was going to publish it.” At least I think that’s what she said. And she said more, of course, all kinds of interesting things about the publishing world when she was beginning her writing career. It’s just that, as soon as the words left her lips, as soon as they reached beyond the pool of stage lighting, they were as lost to me as if they had never been said.

And then, oh then, I interrupted her.

I did.

I can’t believe it.

I actually interrupted her, in mid-sentence, to say something inane about the many people who were lined up behind me, and not wanting to take up too much more of her time, but would you mind having a photo taken with me for my blog?

I am such an ass, sometimes.

There was a split second where my ineptness seemed to startle her. Then she asked me to come behind the table and stand beside her. As Dave took two photos, I joked about making me look skinny. She joked back (she is very, very funny), then she asked me what my blog url was, and wrote it down on a yellow sticky note. She wondered if I would let her know when I posted the photo, and my heart did a fast soprano trill, and I told her I followed her on Twitter, and how much I loved her Tweets, how funny she was.

“I’ll tweet you when it’s posted,” I said.

“That would be great,” she replied.

(Me and Margaret Atwood. Talking about Tweeting each other. Un. Bee. Leeeeavable.)

Before I left her side, before I stood up straight and walked off the stage into the chilled evening of the last day of September, before all that, I whispered in her ear, with such grave reverence that it almost brought me to tears, “It was such a great honour meeting you.”

I straightened up and those incredible eyes met mine one last time.

Then the next person came up and I walked away.