by Mary Ann Moore | Feb 9, 2021 | A Poet's Nanaimo
I wonder if anyone reads this blog? (I think people do, they just don’t always leave comments!) A blog is like a notebook or journal but in a public form unlike the many notebooks I’ve kept through the years that no one else sees. The writing is different here as there is the expectation of readers whereas all those notebooks and journals I’ve filled are written with no one else in mind but me. I’m not planning to donate them to a university archives or leave them to my partner or children.
Among the notebooks are daily journals, travel diaries, many notebooks of reviews (for myself) of books I’ve read, notebooks that list books I’d like to read, visual journals with collages. I’ve got a perfect bound journal given to me by a friend in 1988 in which I describe things I’ve let go of. You’d think the book would be full as I’ve let go of many belongings since 1988 but alas, I didn’t always write about them. I think it’s a good idea though: writing about the importance of any object before letting it go. Really, it’s the memories of an object that are important rather than the object itself.
This blog may become that sort of letting-go type of journal in the weeks to come as the Chinese Year of the Ox which begins on February 11th is a Metal year. A Metal year is one that “represents a clean, pristine, even shiny environment in feng shui.” It’s time to “clear out, pare down, and simplify,” my We’Moon 2021 calendar says. I’m feeling in need of paring down. Among the things to clear out will be many handwritten notebooks and journals.
Notebooks and journals are records of our lives. We many want them when we’re unable to remember one friend told me. We also may use them to write a memoir or poetry as many poets turn to their notebooks for inspiration.
“I couldn’t live without my notebooks,” Rita Dove, who received the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, once said. “I collect them like fetishes: my favorites are black-and-red bound notebooks that come in a variety of sizes from the People’s Republic of China.”
I wonder if Rita still uses her different notebooks at the start of each writing day, copying several entries onto a sheet of lined notebook paper “just to see how they work together.”
“Poems evolve slowly in spurts and sputters, on these college-ruled pages: a small stack of notebooks is always at the ready for browsing. For me, it all begins with a notebook: it is the well I dip into for that first clear, cool drink” wrote Rita Dove.
Other poets and writers keep notebooks too. Dorianne Laux in an essay entitled “Daily Doodles” says she was compelled to write from an early age as she wasn’t allowed to speak in the presence of her physically and sexually abusive father.
In looking back into one of her old journals, Dorianne realized: “There I was, a voice speaking to itself, a mind revealing itself to itself, a person coming into the world. I see now that I wrote to understand who I was, to become a witness to my life and to capture, without benefit of a camera, a certain slant of light.” (from Writers and Their Notebooks edited by Diana M. Raab, University of South Carolina Press, 2010)
Dorianne has students in her M.F.A. workshop keep a journal. No one will read what they’ve written but they’re required to write for an hour each day.
In the January/February 2021 “inspiration issue” of Poets & Writers magazine, some writers have described “the smudge and the scrawl” of their notebooks. Aimee Nezhukumatahil, author of four poetry collections and an essay collection, says “I worry that in this age of multitasking we forget what it means to look, really look, at something and to not rely on electricity or batteries to record it. Journaling helps me hold these moments like a hand pressed to my heart.”
In the image that is shown of Aimee’s journal, she has noted that Toni Morrison has passed away and there are “the earliest lines of what would be a poem, also a year later, that started with the mystery of not knowing how whale sharks give birth. Without this record of what I questioned and watercolored, I would have surely missed this sorrow and curiosity. I would have missed all this wonder.”
It was my Great Aunt Cec (pronounced “cease”) who kept scrapbooks and journals of her travels. That would have been where I first saw collections of such ephemera. I love to keep such mementoes myself, reflecting back on travel or even a daily excursion by creating a collage in a sketchbook or journal.
In the Poets & Writers feature, another poet, Mark Wunderlich, says: “My notebooks are also collections of ephemera – postcards, museum tickets – and these pin my work to a specific place and time. He writes in his own library with its sixteen-foot ceiling where he uses a ladder to access the upper shelves. His poetry books are behind him so he can reach back or climb the ladder to get what he wants. “And so this room is a place in which the poems I write and the poems I read and love are in a kind of sustained and ongoing dialogue.”
Mark also mentions binders where he keeps drafts of poems. Yes, I also have shelves of binders but that’s another topic for another day. Something else to let go of.
Novelist and short story writer Samantha Hunt says: “Everything I write starts in a notebook. Computers are nonprivate spaces, and I need to feel alone in order to think and write.” Samantha keeps her notebooks all together in one bookcase. “I like the thought of them mingling at night. When I return to thoughts recorded decades earlier, I’m surprised to find that my obsessions have changed little over the years.”
Samantha also notes someone who died: “September 2003: Johnny Cash died today.”
“A computer could never contain the sense of texture and treasure found in a notebook,” she says.
When I’m listening to a writer speak about their work such as Lorna Crozier or Gregory Scofield giving the Ralph Gustafson lecture at Vancouver Island University, I make notes. I even make notes if I’m watching a video of a writer being interviewed or during a podcast such as Padraig O’Tuama reading a poem. (It was one of Padraig’s podcasts that introduced me to the work of Aimee Nezhukumatahil.)
Because I consider myself a kinesthetic learner with a need to keep a pen moving as I listen, it was interesting to read Kay Ryan’s essay entitled “Notes on the Danger of Notebooks” (from Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose, Grove Press, 2020)
“You don’t have to worry so much about them [memories], in other words. And you will find that you experience a new availability of energy when you give up trying to preserve what preserves itself. You are relieved of a false and debilitating humility and can enter into a roomier frustration, a more generous appreciation of loss.”
An intriguing take on the subject, don’t you think?
Kay Ryan says: “I think we should try to do something, try to make something new, try very hard to write a poem, say; desire very much to articulate something that doesn’t yet exist, something we don’t yet know; try so hard that currents are created in the electric broth of what is not lost but not kept either, currents which draw to the mind the bits of the not-lost and not-kept that join together through the application of great mental force, extreme mental force, in some new and inevitable sequence appropriate to the new realm of the neither lost nor kept. It is incredibly stable when done right.”
“Remembering is not the negative of forgetting. Remembering is a form of forgetting,” Milan Kundera says, as quoted in Kay Ryan’s essay.
Forgetting
Kay Ryan
Forgetting takes space.
Forgotten matters displace
as much anything else as
anything else. We must
skirt unlabeled crates
as though it made sense
and take them when we go
to other states.
As compelling as Kay Ryan’s opinions are, I am still fascinated by writers keeping notebooks and by those that have been published such as by Anais Nin and Virginia Woolf.
Joan Didion wrote an essay entitled “On Keeping a Notebook” and Brain Pickings featured excepts from it. Beware, looking will lead to read more about writers and their notebooks. Here’s a link to the article.
I like to keep records and that’s what many of my notebooks are. Records for whom I wonder? Do I have a need to look back at my reflections, lists, beginnings of poems? Dreams perhaps are useful to look back at if I want to work with them whether to analyze or write a poem. Mostly though, I’m not sure that I want to look back unless I think I’ll end up with a memoir like Sei Shonagaon’s Pillow Book in which the tenth-century Japanese “court lady” who lived in the Heian era, wrote of her likes, dislikes, events as well as lists of “Embarrassing Things” for example.
It’s the fact that all the journals and notebooks take up so much physical space in boxes and on shelves that has me wanting to shred, compost and/or burn. And to blog!
I will continue to write for myself as I have since I learned to write. It’s the writing I do in the moment that has the most value to me rather than the looking back. If I’m to let any of those old journals go, there may be some dipping in to lift a line for a poem.
by Mary Ann Moore | Jan 31, 2021 | A Poet's Nanaimo
“Nothing’s changed. Everything is different,” said Linda, Sarah’s hair stylist when she came to cut Sarah’s hair in our courtyard garden one day when the weather was milder. She meant things continued to be different and in that way nothing had changed. (Or it could have been when she came inside; our only human visitor in many months.)
“Different” became our way of life in 2020 and has continued to be so. I continued to write and to do that in community. While we had to stop meeting in my living room in the spring of 2020, the Writing Life women’s writing circle continued via email. It was a practice that sustained us through the toughest days and continues to do so. While we acknowledge and honour losses of people and ways of life, we also honour the emotions surrounding those losses.
In the spring of 2020, a Nanaimo circle of women as well as women in a circle “from away,” thirteen in all, wrote on their own at home and shared their writing with the group via email. I responded to all of them and felt busier than usual.
“Calling Your Spirit Back” was the theme of the Writing Life circle based on a poem of Joy Harjo’s entitled “Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet” (from Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, W. W. Norton, 2015).
On Facebook I saw someone post a message that was something like “Hey you introverts, put down that book and tell we extroverts what to do . . .” It felt that even though my connections were via email, it was an extroverted sort of activity to connect to the women in that way. I would send them notes that included poems, resources and writing practice prompts. The mandala to the left by Sarah Clark is entitled “Come to Centre.” I use it in the notes to denote each writing practice prompt.
Last spring, was a time of quiet when some people began working from home and continue to do so, shops were closed and streets were empty. For some, work got busier putting protocols in place such as at the grocery store. (Thank you for being there and all that sanitizing inside and out!) Frontline workers including my daughter who is a nurse and my son-in-law who is a police officer in Ontario were more at risk in their daily work. Some people’s livelihoods ceased to support them and they found new ways to share their products, skills and talents.
It seemed a good time to approach the writing circle “from away” with the theme of writing as a practice of self-compassion. For the April to May circle, I used the phrases “A House in the Rain, An Umbrella in the Sun” from another Joy Harjo poem. The phrases are from “Perhaps the World Ends Here” which is about a kitchen table. Here is an excerpt:
At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.
Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.
(included in The Woman Who Fell From the Sky by Joy Harjo W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1994)
In the summer, when it was okay to meet outside, there were a few small gatherings of the writing circle women. When the Writing Life circle began again in September we met in one of women’s large living room. (Thank you Diana!) Our theme was “Inside the Treasure House” as I had been thinking of various museums with their unique approaches to specific collections. I realized each person is a treasure house.
There is a gift inside you
Do not let it gather dust in a far closet
Tanya Evanson wrote in “Blood and Honey” (included in Nouveau Griot, Frontenac House, 2018). (Tanya is now known as Tawhida Tanya Evanson.)
When we set out to write, we don’t know where we’re headed. That’s why it’s good to have some rituals in place to ease the anxiety whether in the writing circle or writing on ones’ own. The November circle, “Destination Unknown: Ritual as Road Map,” acknowledged that unknown destination as well as the importance of ritual and ceremony. The circle started in person for one week and then we switched to email and Zoom. One of the writing circle members, Carol, suggested “ritual as road map” one day and I wanted to explore that theme. We had a look at various rituals and ceremonies including one’s own “tea house practice” and the hours of a monastery day.
I very much appreciate what the late Richard Wagamese had to say in about ritual and ceremony in his book One Drum: Stories and Ceremonies for a Planet (Douglas & McIntyre, 2019:
Ceremony is a way to allow our emotional energy to encounter the wonder, the awe and the reverence that comes from an encounter with the divine, the sacred. It is a road to the true nature of our selves.
In the circle, we tried our hand at writing a glosa as each week I like to look at a different poetic or creative nonfiction form. The glosa is a way of having a conversation with another poet’s poem. This is the first stanza of Patrick Lane’s “The Garden Temple” which is a glosa in which each of the poem’s stanzas ends with a line from P. K. Page’s “The Answer” (which is also a glosa):
No one comes to this garden. The dawn
moves through the bamboo beside the bridge.
It’s quiet here and I’m alone. The small nun
who led me has drifted behind the screen
and I’m quiet as I watch a slender mallard
drift on the pond into first light. She is two birds,
one above and one below. Night and day,
and night was long again. You are far away.
Tell me every detail of your day.
(included in In Fine Form 2nd edition, edited by Kate Braid & Sandy Shreve, Caitlin Press, 2016)
During the early days of the pandemic, I wrote some poems and two of them were published in anthologies of “pandemic poetry.” I wasn’t paid for the poems as is often the case with anthologies and there’s other writing I do that is not paid or pays very little for the amount of work done. I realized that I write for the love of it. There are explorations and discoveries made. I am continuing with my writing as a spiritual practice. I am part of a community of poets and writers when I correspond with them and share my work.
With one essay I wrote for a literary journal, I had the expertise of an editor who helped me improve the essay. While I won’t be paid a large amount, the editor volunteered her time making suggestions and that was a huge gift to me. There are many gifts to writing and tuning into one’s self and something larger than ourselves.
All of those musings and acknowledgements led to the theme of the circle now taking place which is ‘Writing for the Love of It.” I made a couple of collages on the theme as I like to see what the images have to tell me. I came up with some aspirations from those images such as:
May I seek direction and solace from the moon, my ancestors and muses.
May I become bold and brave in a circle of wise witnesses.
May I honour ceremony.
May I consider what complements my writing such as symbols, games, photographs, the garden.
May I embrace peace, pleasure and delightful harmony.
I’ve appreciated being able to stay connected to the women of the writing circle whether through email and Zoom. It’s good to see one another’s faces and to share our writing in this way. To some it is a lifeline. I still create a ceremony with the ringing of the ting sha and having us all take three deep breaths with thanks to Thich Nhat Hanh: one to let go, one to stay here and one to surrender to what’s next. I read an opening poem. We pass the talking piece so each woman has an opportunity to “check in” and let us know how they’re doing. In terms of Zoom, when the yellow border lights up we know it’s time for that woman to speak and the rest of us will listen without interruption. After reading and writing together, we do a “checking out” followed by a closing poem. We attempt to sing together or say the words:
The circle is open
but unbroken
merry meet
and merry part
and merry meet again
by Mary Ann Moore | Jan 6, 2021 | A Poet's Nanaimo
When I saw on Facebook that my poet, writer and writing mentor friend Susan Olding keeps a running list of books she’s read, I figured I could admit that I do the same. She categorized her 2020 reading list and has been posting the lists separately. Thank you for the inspiration Susan! Susan credits poet and professor Tanis MacDonald with her inspiration – a poet I haven’t seen since my Toronto days but I’m glad we remain connected through various poetic threads.
Last year, I was happy to support local bookstores including Windowseat Books in Nanaimo; Fireside Books in Parksville; and Salamander Books in Ladysmith. There are several more to support including Well Read Books in Nanaimo (where I donated books) and when it’s okay to travel out of our area again, it will be worth the trip north and south to check out independent bookstores.
Sarah ordered books from Russell Books in Victoria and it is possible to order online from other independent bookstores. In some cases, you can order directly from the publisher such as House of Anansi where I ordered their Heartfelt-Reads Bundle including Emily Urquhart’s memoir which I’ve noted below in the “memoir” category.
I was glad to continue to support fellow writers and publishers through several reviews I wrote. You’ll find the links below.
And there was our local library open again following the spring closure so we could request books online or have a gaze along the one aisle of books that are available.
I usually have a few books on the go at the same time as I read different things at different times of the day. Poetry is usually for the morning. While I continue to read individual poems, these are some of the poetry collections I read in 2020:
This Wound is a World: Poems by Billy-Ray Belcourt; Summer Snow by Robert Hass (a review should appear in the next issue of the Pacific Rim Review of Books); Collected Poems of Bronwen Wallace (my review will be in the Winter issue of herizons magazine); and All Our Wonder Unavenged by Don Domanski who died in September, 2020.
Arleen Pare had a new book released in 2020 and I wrote a blog about Earle Street, which is the name of the street Arleen lives on in Victoria, B.C.: Earle Street. I was pleased to join Arleen and other poets on a Zoom launch of her book with Planet Earth Poetry.
With thanks to Padraig O’Tuama for introducing the poetry of Jane Mead to me and several others when we met him in the Fall of 2010 in Nanaimo. I appreciated reading To the Wren by the late Jane Mead. My review is at Story Circle Book Reviews.
Diana Hayes, a poet on Salt Spring Island, is now a publisher as well with Arc of Light from Raven Chapbooks, a beautiful hand-stitched and assembled chapbook by Lorraine Gane. Here’s a link to my blog: Arc of Light.
A recent review I did is of of a fine book of poetry entitled Odes & Laments by Vancouver poet Fiona Tinwei Lam. It’s at Story Circle Books Reviews, here.
A couple of books fall into the poetry/memoir category including Haiku in Canada by Terry Ann Carter of Victoria. This is a link to my blog about it.
Every Day is a Poem is a very sweet book by Jacqueline Suskin who has composed over forty thousand poems for people, improvising on a standard typewriter though her project, Poem Store. It’s available from Sounds True. Alas, I didn’t write a review as I had to stop somewhere with my review writing! The book will be an inspirational resource.
In the late afternoon when I want to take a break from typing at my computer, I dip into a book of non-fiction. In 2020 I read Austin Kleon’s three books including Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad; To Speak for the Trees: My Life’s Journey from Ancient Celtic Wisdom to a Healing Vision of the Forest by Diana Beresford-Kroeger; Make It Scream Make It Burn, essays by Leslie Jamison; The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s by Maggie Doherty; Daily Rituals Women at Work by Mason Currey; and Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose by Kay Ryan.
I wrote a blog about Why Bother: Discover the Desire for What’s Next by Jennifer Louden and one about The Power of Daily Practice by Eric Maisel.
My review of Women Rowing North: Navigating Life’s Currents and Flourishing as We Age by Mary Pipher is also in a blog, here.
The Bloom Book is a wonderful book about the healing power of flower essences by Heidi Smith. My review is at Story Circle Book Reviews.
If you have any trouble with the links to my reviews at Story Circle, go to the website, look under Book Reviews, then Review Team, where you’ll find a list with links to the books I reviewed this year. When the new website was created, my over one hundred book reviews over many years, didn’t make it.
In the Art/Inspirational category I felt uplifted by the beautiful life story and colourful art work of Tammy Hudgeon, a Gabriola Island artist, in Tender Brave Spirit.
Sarah Chauncey is a Nanaimo writer who worked hard to see her first book birthed into the world. My review of P.S. I Love You More Than Tuna by Sarah Chauncey with illustrations by Francis Tremblay is at Story Circle Book Reviews.
Fiction is for the evening hours when I read detective fiction (and one psychological thriller) including Louise Penny, Val McDermid, David Baldacci, Clare Mackintosh, Michael Connelly, Sara Paretsky, Denise Mina and Alan Bradley. I was happy to read a novel featuring fictional character Olive Kitteridge in Olive Again by Elizabeth Strout.
I wrote a blog about Five Little Indians, by Michelle Good, a beautiful novel about five residential school survivors.
I also read The Gin Closet by Leslie Jamison; The Testaments by Margaret Atwood; The Historians by Cecilia Ekback; and Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty.
Nanaimo novelist and short story writer, Carol Windley, was kind enough to answer my questions regarding her novel Midnight Train to Prague which I wrote a blog about.
I was delighted with Reproduction by Ian Williams, recipient of the 2019 Giller Prize and appreciated reading The Good Liar by Nicholas Searle before I watched the movie.
Rosalie Knecht has written two novels with her character Vera Kelly: Who is Vera Kelly? and Vera Kelly is Not a Mystery. I enjoyed both and reviewed the latter for Story Circle Book Reviews.
Maternity and Other Corsets by Siobhan Jamison was a good read and I reviewed it for herizons magazine which will appear until the Spring 2021 issue.
While Memoir isn’t fiction, it can read that way if done well. There are so many approaches to memoir; I find it a fascinating form of life writing.
I reviewed Rebent Sinner by Ivan Coyote for herizons magazine’s Summer issue. In my review, I wrote: “The prose is as alive on the page as when Coyote performs their stories on stage. Along with the longer pieces are short segments Coyote refers to as ‘literary Deritos.’ Whatever the length or form, Ivan Coyote always describes transformational moments of connection.”
I also read Year of the Monkey by Patti Smith; Every Little Scrap and Wonder: A Small-Town Childhood by Carla Funk; Thunder Through My Veins by Gregory Scofield; Educated by Tara Westover; All We Knew But Couldn’t Say by Joanne Vannicola; and The Age of Creativity: Art, Memory, My Father and Me by Emily Urquhart.
I was so looking forward to reading Lorna Crozier’s memoir about her life with Patrick Lane: Through the Garden: A Love Story (with cats) and wrote a blog about it.
My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland is such a unique approach to memoir. I loved it! This is a link to my review of it: here.
I have a stack of books to read this year including poetry , fiction, memoir and biography. And I keep a little notebook of books I want to watch out for. It looks as if all I did during 2020 was read but I did do other things through the midst of it all including writing “pandemic poetry” and will have to write a separate blog about that.
