by Mary Ann Moore | Mar 20, 2023 | A Poet's Nanaimo
The title of Julia Cameron’s new book, Write for Life: Creative Tools for Every Writer (St. Martin’s Essentials, 2022) resonates with me as I lead women’s writing circles called Writing Life; we write from life and create writing lives for ourselves. And I’ve written a book I consider a writing companion and guide called Writing Home: A Whole Life Practice. I see writing as a (whole) life practice and as Julia Cameron does, I consider writing a spiritual practice.
Julia Cameron’s Write for Life is called “A 6-Week Artist’s Way Program” as it relates to Julia’s The Artist’s Way published in 1992. I so appreciated that book and have read several of her books since in the Artist’s Way series as well as other books she has published on the theme of creativity.
I still have my original copy of The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Perigee Books, 1992) and enjoyed seeing what I had written in pencil all those years ago in answer to the questions posed. I had marked in pen the portion at the end of the book entitled “The Sacred Circle.”
Julia wrote: “Drawing a Sacred Circle creates a sphere of safety and a center of attraction for our good. By filling this form faithfully, we draw to us the best. We draw the people we need. We attract the gifts we could best employ.”
I didn’t begin women’s writing circles in 1992 but I did gather with other writers regularly to write and share our work. I attended writing workshops when I could including a two-week retreat in North Vancouver called West Word IX. It was a women’s writing retreat, the last one in the series as it turned out, and I was in the fiction group led by Lee Maracle. I value solitude and I very much need to gather with others writers to write together and to share our work.
The two main tools of The Artist’s Way are Morning Pages and Artist Dates. Julia refers to both in Write for Life with an emphasis on Morning Pages. “Walking for Creative Health” is also added to this new book as well as to her books since The Artist’s Way. “Twice a week, or more often if you’d like to, take yourself on a solo phone-free, dog-free, friend-free, twenty-minute walk,” Julia suggests. You could walk out with a question and return with an answer.
Artist Dates are taking exploratory adventures on your own to have fun. Julia suggests once a week, two hours at a time, to give yourself some renewed energy and inspiration.
Since Julia began the practice of Morning Pages for herself, she has published more than forty books. It’s a practice of three pages of longhand writing on eight-and-a-half-by-eleven inch paper done each morning. The pages are “strictly stream of consciousness” Julia points out. You keep your hand moving and write down anything that comes to you.
The first page and a half is pretty easy and the second page and a half a bit more difficult as you keep writing. Those pages contain “pay dirt” Julia says.
Something added to Writing for Life is The Daily Quota. At the end of each chapter in the six-week Write for Life program, Julia asks if you’ve reached your “doable daily quota for your writing project.” She suggests two pages for prose and three pages a day for screenplays. She doesn’t mention poetry but I have sometimes taken on the challenge of writing a poem a day, particularly during April, Poetry Month, using a line of another poet’s poem to get me started.
If you want to complete a particular writing project, Julia says: “The key to productivity is regularity.”
In her first chapter, “Priming the Pump,” Julia refers to having supportive and safe companions she calls “believing mirrors.” As for a room of one’s own as Virginia Woolf proclaimed as a woman writer’s need, Julia suggests Morning Pages as a safe place to vent.
Julia has “writing stations” in her Sante Fe home so she writes in different forms in different locations. She makes notes on the couch in her exercise room for instance and writes prose in her library.
I was a fan of Julia Cameron right from the start, all those years ago, as she sees writing as a spiritual path. She says: “. . . as I retired from my ego’s need to be a brilliant author, my writing became more clear. No longer aimed at being impressive and brilliant, it aimed instead to be forthright.” Julia came to believe “that honesty and authenticity could capture my reader’s faith.”
She still has a reader in mind but not for those Morning Pages which Julia says “is like sending a telegram to the universe . . . Although we may not call it that, we have sent a prayer.”
In Week One, “Priming the Pump,” Julia deals with what could be stumbling blocks for writers: perfectionism, the inner critic, procrastination, and the “dailiness” of writing. There are “tasks” at the end of the weekly chapters and related to perfectionism is a series of lines for you to complete. They all begin with: “If I didn’t have to do it perfectly, I’d . . . “
There are also suggestions for dealing with your inner critic and “blasting through blocks.”
In the short essays in the book’s chapters, Julia usually describes the weather in Sante Fe and/or her state of mine. In “First Thoughts” included in Week Two “Begin Where You Are,” she describes the full moon with thick clouds obscuring it and the fact her dog Lily is restless. Although this is part of Julia’s essay, it could be something you could write in your Morning Pages. She does say: “My Morning Pages track the weather.”
I think beginning the day with writing what’s going on for you leads well into whatever writing project you’re working on. It could be that those feelings make their way into your piece of fiction, poetry or prose and it has all started with you. And as Julia says, with Morning Pages “we jot down our ideas. We do not strive to ‘think them up.’ “
I’m all for celebrating your achievements which is the subject of Week Six of Write for Life. You may want to take an all-day Artist Date as you may have a first draft of your writing project or are approaching that stage. If you dare to show your work to anyone at this stage, you can ask them to focus on the draft’s strength’s. That’s Julia’s suggestion and it’s a good one: “Tell me what works, and why.” As she says: “It is my experience that focusing on strengths amplifies those strengths. Focusing on weaknesses amplifies those weaknesses – not what you want to do.”
As I mentioned, there are questions and prompts among the “tasks” at the end of each week. For instance in Week Three, “Trust Your Process,” Julia suggests numbering one to ten and writing “What I’d really like to write about is . . . “ You could choose one topic from your list and write about it.
Under the heading of “Writing to Metabolize Life,” Julia suggest listing five emotionally charged topics or moments from your life and writing about one of them for five minutes.
While there are prompts such as the ones noted above, Write for Life isn’t going to give you ideas for keeping your memoir moving forward for instance. You’re going to have to rely on your Morning Pages for that or other guides that ask specific questions. Write for Life is a companion for the process of writing and honours one’s daily practice of writing for yourself with a view to writing something that you can later share with others.
If you haven’t read The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, I’d recommend starting there – or returning there. It’s the sort of book that you can read and follow over and over again.
And while I’m at it, I’ll let you know of my own writing guides.
The first two are presented in a digital format, available from the International Association for Journal Writing (IAJW). (Please note IAJW prices are in U.S. funds.)
Writing as a Spiritual Practice: Your Own Tea House Practice
Have a look for a description and to order here.
Writing to Map Your Spiritual Journey
Have a look for a description and to order, here.
The following is a 344-page book in soft cover:
Writing Life: A Whole Life Practice
You can have a look and purchase here. The price of $75 Canadian includes postage in Canada and a free copy of my poetry book: Fishing for Mermaids.
by Mary Ann Moore | Feb 20, 2023 | A Poet's Nanaimo
I have written in a journal, on my own, for many years and I’ve written in community in various settings with others for a long time too. One setting in which I haven’t written with others is in a jail. We do have a jail in Nanaimo, B.C. where I live but the fear of being behind several locked doors prevents me from suggesting writing circles to the Nanaimo Correctional Centre.
Tina Welling has been going to the Teton County Jail in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where she lives, since 2011 specifically to offer journaling workshops. She has written about her experiences including the insight she gained in her beautifully written book: Tuesdays in Jail: What I Learned Teaching Journaling to Inmates (New World Library, 2022).
I pictured one room with a circle of chairs but that’s not how it was always set up for Tina’s Tuesday journaling workshops with the inmates. If in one room, there was an armed guard present and often two rooms were used that were adjoined by a metal grate. Tina also met inmates confined to maximum security, one on one, in a grated locked down room with no chance of physical contact. In that case, it was the only chance they got to talk to someone during the week.
For people judged for their outward actions in the world, Tina gave the inmates a chance to examine their inner lives. As she said in an interview with her publisher: “Writing with pencil and paper engages the body, the mind, the emotions. Putting language to thoughts and feelings brings them from the unconscious where they can work us to our awareness where we can work with them.”
One of her own wise quotes is: “What we bring into the light, we can work with. What remains in the dark, works us.”
Tina spoke to the inmates on various topics including the abandoning of oneself and mentions a man called Isaac in her interview. “We discussed how easy it was to confuse generosity with giving ourselves over to others.”
In her book, Tina writes that she realized it was imperative for her personal growth that she spent time in solitude. That meant she would sometimes respond to social invitations occasionally by answering: “ ‘I have another commitment.’ And that meant a commitment to myself.”
The inmates were given small notebooks and small yellow pencils such as are used by golfers. Writing prompts designed and given by Tina were meant to help the inmates name their feelings and face them. If there can be an advantage to incarceration, as Tina says: “When all alone in a jail cell, a person can discover who they are when not defined by friends for work or reputation.”
While there was some discussion in the workshops about upcoming court dates for instance, the workshop focused on the emotional pain felt by the inmates. For many, violence was experienced in their early home life long before the inmates became the perpetrators of violence themselves.
The surprise that emerged over the years for Tina was that she and the inmates had a lot of characteristics in common. “It’s just that they had been arrested and I had not.” In the workshops they discussed “self-esteem, anger, forgiveness, compassion for ourselves and each other, personal power, co-dependency, and so much more.” Tina says she “went into the jail workshops and came out changed, every time.”
After several years of seeing inmates at weekly journaling workshops, Tina was seeing her “own issues, my own stopping places, or as Jungians call it, my shadow” reflected back to her. She asked an inmate called Gerald that she met alone with: “Would you say you abandon yourself in any way?”
A tear-filled session followed and when Tina was in bed that night she thought of the ways she had abandoned herself. “Not maintaining my boundaries, overriding my emotions, saying yes when I meant no.” She thought to herself the same words Gerald had said out loud: “Damn, journaling class is rough.”
Tina refers to several inmates she worked with and she describes her own “belly of the whale” period. During that time, she began “a lifetime spiritual practice;” she wrote “seriously;” and she “became a lover of the natural world.” These three are the “pillars” of her life now. When Tina began the journaling workshops, she didn’t really know herself she says, just like many of the inmates who attended them.
On Tuesday evenings, through six locked doors in the jail, Tina Welling took her stack of index cards. Each card had a quote that could offer some-in-the-moment wisdom. She wanted to tell the inmates: “Your real life lies beneath your life situation.” She didn’t use the word “soul” but felt it was the soul of each inmate that she spoke to, “that core spiritual self.” The workshops took place in a situation, Tina feels, that the Sufi poet Rumi described: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing / there is a field, I’ll meet you there.”
Author Photo by Ryan Dorgan
Tina shares so much of her own wisdom and each chapter is a pleasure to read. She names the inmates who attended the journaling workshops and shares her own feelings and insight. Over seven years, Tina figures she saved thousands of dollars by not going to a therapist and rather working towards personal understanding in the journaling workshops.
In 2020, the jail was closed to the public due to the pandemic. Tina created a workbook of fifteen lessons each of which poses five questions. Some of Tina’s favourite quotes are included. I particularly like this one by Hafiz: “I wish I could show you / when you are lonely or in darkness / the astonishing light / of your own being.” The workbook is included in Tuesdays in Jail.
Tina also wrote a book entitled Writing Wild: Forming a Creative Partnership with Nature (New World Library, 2014) which I also highly recommend.
I want to say bless you Tina Welling for your work in the world and sharing your insights through your writing and the witnessing of uplifting sessions every Tuesday in jail.
If you’re curious about further approaches to journaling, I suggest checking out the International Association for Journaling Writing (IAJW). I’m on the Journal Council of the IAJW with a couple of my writing resources available for sale. A membership offers many perks including discounts on writing tools and courses. And there are many free resources too. Here’s a link if you’d like to check it out here.
by Mary Ann Moore | Jan 13, 2023 | A Poet's Nanaimo
Dr. Sharon Blackie wrote about menopause in her latest book book Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life (New World Library, 2022), and described it as “a time between stories, when the old story fades and a new story is waiting to emerge.” (See my last blog about the book.)
As a young woman in my late thirties, I had a hysterectomy which meant I didn’t go through the “time between stories” as Dr. Blackie refers to that particular time in a woman’s life, at least not in the way she is referring to it. I had though, definitely embarked on a new story.
At this time, more than thirty years later, I’m reflecting on the final chapter of Hagitude: “The Valley of the Shadow of Death.” Dr. Blackie says she had never been “particularly preoccupied by death. Not until now.”
Dr. Blackie was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma – “one of the most aggressive hematological cancers, centered on lymphocytes: infection-fighting cells in the immune system.” She wasn’t frightened by the “life threatening nature of the illness itself” but by the toxic chemicals her body would have to endure for six months. She immersed herself in the lessons the illness had to teach her, seeing the lump on her neck not as an “evile alien invader” but as part of herself.
I can relate as I had a lump that was on my shin that I thought odd but not alien. It was diagnosed in the summer of 2015 as Spindle Cell Sarcoma. Although my body had to undergo CT scans, MRIs and the like, I didn’t have chemotherapy but rather radiation followed by surgery.
“The Guest House” by Sufi poet Rumi is a poem that Dr. Blackie includes in the last chapter of her book. The “guest” of cancer whispered in her ear: “If you want to live, you’re going to have to learn to walk hand in hand with death. If you’re going to write about elderhood as a big initiation – here’s an invitation for you. Don’t waste it now. It’s time to slough off another tough old skin.”
Among the lessons learned and gifts recognized by Dr. Blackie was kindness from people near and far as she had decided to go public with her diagnosis and treatment.
I received flowers from friends from afar including Sarah’s, my partner’s, former partner. I spent five weeks in Victoria, B.C. for radiation treatments and came home on weekends at which time I’d write a blog. I remember one faithful follower as being my poet friend Bill Cunningham who lived in Florida. He would send me an email in praise of poetry and offer me poems of his own along with his own heartfelt insight. Bill died of cancer on January 12, 2021.
The second gift Dr. Blackie received was slowing down. Dr. Blackie cleared her calendar several months ahead of treatment as her “sole focus was on recovery” and working on Hagitude if she could.
I loved clearing my calendar. It seemed to come at a time when I wanted to do that anyway. Part of the lesson is to do that before any sort of illness forces you to, to learn to create boundaries and say no.
The third gift that Dr. Blackie recognized as the most profound was “the opportunity to know and to befriend death.” She says “a key benefit” of a life-threatening illness is the “absolute necessity of forensically auditing your life.”
It’s a time to realize what’s important and if one survives, to continue living but in a new way as a transformation has taken place.
“And in this fallow time — in this ultimate place between stories – space is finally cleared for new growth,” Dr. Blackie says. It’s a clearing time, not a time for “new goals and new agendas.”
At the end of the “brutal but restorative treatment,” Dr. Blackie had new insight and had reacquainted herself with delight, “with the pleasure of time and space to simply be.”
It may sound strange to those who haven’t gone through treatment to hear some of us speaking fondly of the time we were required to rest. I thought I could skip back to Ontario possibly between radiation treatments and surgery, a period of about three months. The doctor said no, it was a time to rest. I went with that.
The challenges of a life-threatening illness are similar as we approach elderhood. Actually, I’m there now. Hagitude is to grow old seeing all there is to see in terms of an aging body, the likelihood of a serious illness, the inevitability of death with “clear and open eyes.” It’s time to “let the inessential fall away, and focus on the essence of who we are.”
And who are we? I do love the notion, and actually it’s based on ancient beliefs going back to Plato, that we have a calling in this life. James Hillman in his book The Soul’s Code declared: “Each person enters the world called.” This means we have a purpose and as Dr. Blackie sees it, our calling has “much more to do with ways of being in the world, rather than ways of doing” such as an occupation.
This final chapter in Hagitude, “The Valley of the Shadow of Death,” was to me the most important chapter in the book, the one that especially resonated with me. “We are always going to encounter paths that align us with our calling; the world never gives up on us,” Dr. Blackie says. Opportunities keep coming my way to offer writing circles in the community for instance. And in this very full and fulfilling life, I would also like to remember those times when I can simply be.
by Mary Ann Moore | Jan 2, 2023 | A Poet's Nanaimo
“Hagitude, hags with attitude” Dr. Sharon Blackie says in the prologue to her latest book Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life (New World Library, 2022), as she refers to Cailleach , the Old Woman, in the Gaellc languages of Scotland and Ireland.
Dr. Blackie is a psychologist “with a profound affection for Jung and his successors” as she says, as well as a folklorist and mythologist. She explores how the “wonderfully vivid and diverse archetypal characters in our fairy tales and myths might help us to recreate a map of what it is to become a good elder.”
Rather than simple entertainment, “stories are spells; they change things,” Dr. Blackie says. There is a potential in the archetypes “to become something you couldn’t have imagined before you began to grow old.”
As Kim Krans says in The Wild Unknown Archetypes Guidebook that goes with the cards I used for a New Year’s Day card spread, archetypes are patterns, are universal, are timeless, are infinite, contain both light and dark, use image and “they insist on the imagination” moving us “from the literal to the mythic.” Archetypes “prefer potentials over answers, collaboration over convention, dynamism over singularity and inclusion over rejection.” You can see how archetypes are a profound aid to our creative experience of life, even and especially, as we age.
STANDING ON THE THRESHOLD
The Alchemy of Menopause
In a chapter entitled “The Alchemy of Menopause” in Hagitude, Dr. Blackie reflects on menopause making note of pharmaceutical companies and how they market hormone therapy. She sees menopause as “the beginning of a whole new journey – a challenging but ultimately fertile journey across the threshold of elderhood.”
Menopause is “a time between stories, when the old story fades and a new story is waiting to emerge.”
One of the characters Dr. Blackie introduces is the Henwife. While the stories many of us grew up with involved wicked stepmothers, the Henwife is an “integrated member of the community” who gives advice in the realm of “women’s mysteries.”
Someday Your Witch Will Come
Beautiful drawings by Natalie Eslick introduce each chapter. The illustration for the chapter entitled “Someday Your Witch Will Come,” is a witch with a wrinkled face, long hair, a tall black hat, holding a cat. There are three illustrations from the book on the Hagitude site. Have a look here.
Archetypal figures, usually associated with the work of Carl Jung, include the Great Mother, The Witch, The Trickster, the Hero.
The Wise Old Woman, another archetype, could be Grandmother Spider to Native American peoples and in the Gaelic tradition, she would be Cailleach. “In the Slavic tradition, she’d be the dangerous old woman of the woods, Baba Yaga – and so on.”
Dr. Blackie refers to these archetypal characters as “keys – capable of unlocking the imagination, opening the door to the dark, cobweb-laden room which houses the mysteries of our inner lives.”
“The Medial Woman” is the sub-title of the chapter about the witch and she is one of four key female archetypes: the Mother, the Hetaira, the Amazon and the Medial Woman.
The Mother nourishes life while the Hetaira “refers to a class of highly educated women in ancient Greece who were trained not only to provide sexual services to men, but also to provide them with long-term companionship.” The Amazon “excels in work and skills that are usually perceived to be the domain of men.”
The Medial Woman doesn’t “define herself in relation to others.” Medial Women are visionaries, psychics, healer and poets and Dr. Blackie gives the example of Hildegard who was “no ordinary nun.”
Hildegard of Bingen was born in Germany in 1098 and became a nun as a young teenager. She wrote of her visions completing five books as well as composing seventy-seven sacred songs. Hildegard saw the Divine as female as well as male and wrote: “Every creature is a glittering, glistening mirror of divinity.”
Each of us has our own “unique inner imaginarium” Dr. Blackie says and “each of us identifies with different archetypal characters, stories, and landscapes at different times in our lives.” Those characters “provide clues to who we are and who we might become. They provide clues about our path in the world and about the nature of our unique calling.”
The Alchemist is one face of the Medial Woman and Hildegard represents another: The Mystic. A third face is the Witch. We have come to know witches as healers and medicine women and we’ve heard, they were executed in the millions during the witch trials in Europe “from the early fifteenth century through to the late eighteenth” century.”
Dr. Blackie’s research has found that midwives and herbalists “were rarely charged.” She says “around forty to sixty thousand people were legally put to death for the alleged crime of witchcraft” which would have been committing acts of evil in the name of the Christian Devil.
I was surprised by that number and obviously need to be open to learning about more recent research. I’m remembering the work of Barbara Ehrenrich and Deidre English in a book entitled Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers that they first published in 1973 about the “demonization of women healers.” A new edition was released in 2010.
Dr. Blackie refers to the “solitary old sea witch” in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, “The Little Mermaid,” and wonders about her backstory as in the Disney version, the old sea witch became cast “as a straightforward villain.” The old sea witch’s story is like that of many other older women “whose stories no one will ever know.”
There are no aging mermaids in the stories we’ve read and Dr. Blackie asks: “Where are the mermaids with hagitude?” There’s a challenge particularly for me who has been drawn to stories about mermaids for a long time. And it’s true, none of them have been old. Does an aging mermaid still gaze into a mirror while reclining on an ocean’s rock? I think so although maybe not to see her beauty so much as to see how every line helps her to fit her life’s many many pieces together.
A Radical Beauty
In her chapter “A Radical Beauty: Kissing the Hag,” Dr. Blackie says she was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s disease, an autoimmune form of hypothyroidism. She was also diagnosed with a kind of “radically aggressive inflammatory arthritis.” She had been relocating back to Britain from Ireland at the time.
I appreciate Dr. Blackie sharing her own life experiences in her book. She makes note of other aging women writers such as the late May Sarton who wrote in her published journal, At Seventy, about her aged face being a more accurate reflection of her inner self.
Dr. Blackie sees this fresh awareness as “what it means to kiss the hag: to recognize and to be able to embrace the deep, radical beauty of the person inside, regardless of the nature of the superficial external mask.”
THE HOUSE OF ELDERS
In a section of Hagitude entitled “The House of Elders,” Sharon includes interviews with elder women (note: “elder” rather than “elderly”) who express qualities she refers to as “hagitude: a comfort with the unique power they embody, a strong sense of who they are and what they have to offer the world, a strong belief in their necessary place in the ever-shifting web of life.”
Sharon Blackie has written some wonderful books that I refer to often including If Women Rose Rooted: A Life-Changing Journey to Authenticity and Belonging and The Enchanted Life: Reclaiming the Magic and Wisdom of the Natural World.
She says that her writing, at its heart, is “a way of trying to change the story, of weaving the possibility of a better world into being through the power of words.” The books she writes are “born out of a yearning to help people reimagine themselves and the world around them in more beautiful and functional ways.” Dr. Blackie’s books are born out of a deep desire to help women particularly to “reclaim our unique and necessary power” and make a difference in the world.
“That word-weaving and story-weaving is how the archetype of the Old Woman Who Weaves the World is reflected in me,” Dr. Blackie says.
Dr. Blackie notes women writers who opened her up to possibilities such as Virginia Woolf, Marilyn French, Anais Nin and Doris Lessing. She could mention many more, as most of us could. “These women writers not only changed my life – they helped me to imagine it,” she says.
Tricksters and Truth-Tellers
In her chapter, “Tricksters and Truth-Tellers: Holding the Culture to Account,” Sharon tells of the fourth-century BCE temple of Demeter and Kore in Ionia. Amongst the ruins were earthenware figurines identified with Baubo. She’s the old woman who approaches Demeter in the myth of Demeter and Persephone and lifts up her skirts and displays her genitals.
On each of the Baubo-like statues found, “the head and female genitals are merged together, with the vulva on display immediately below the figurine’s mouth, blending into her chin.” That helps to explain the image on the cover of Hagitude which doesn’t look like a very old woman but she could be in mid-life. Under her chin is not a leaf as I first thought but could be a vulva, in keeping with Baubo, the joker and Trickster.
In her discussion of gender identity, Dr. Blackie includes wonderful quotations by Jan Morris who was for most of us, the first transgender woman we had heard of. She had been a father to four children and then lived as a woman for the second half of her life. She and her ex-spouse lived as domestic partners until Morris died in Wales in 2020 at the age of ninety-four.
Jan Morris said: “In my mind [trans-sexualism] is a subject far wider than sex: I recognize no pruriency to it, and I see it above all as a dilemma neither of the body nor of the brain, but of the spirit.”
In her memoir, Conundrum, Jan Morris wrote in celebration of women including those past menopause “no longer shackled by the mechanisms of sex but creative still in other kinds, aware still in their love and sensuality, graceful in experience, past ambition but never beyond aspiration.”
The Wise Woman
In the chapter entitled “The Wise Woman: Deep Vision,” Dr. Blackie says that “the role of the elder woman as visionary isn’t always an active ‘out there’ role; sometimes it’s associated with a quieter, more inward-looking aspect of elderhood . . . “
While this image is seductive, leaving one’s strivings behind, Dr. Blackie isn’t ready to take to the “solitary cave” although for a writer that is an ideal place. She still wants to teach which requires her to be more visible in the world. As she wisely says, “For me, the trick is to discern what my heart and my body are telling me at any given time, so that I can always find the necessary balance between these two polarities of internal and external work.” To that I can definitely relate.
LEAVING THROUGH THE HOLE IN THE SIDE OF THE HOUSE
The Valley of the Shadow of Death
Dr. Blackie writes more about the body in her chapter “The Valley of the Shadow of Death” in a section entitled “Leaving Through the Hole in the Side of the House.”
As this blog has become rather lengthy, I’m going to write a separate blog about the final chapter which really resonates with me as it’s one in which Dr. Blackie tells of her diagnosis of cancer and the treatment of it. As I discovered inconvenient blessings when I had cancer, Dr. Blackie also received many gifts.
by Mary Ann Moore | Dec 1, 2022 | A Poet's Nanaimo
That’s a very catchy cover and title for Margot Fedoruk’s memoir published this Fall by Heritage House. The cover illustration is by Setareh Ashrafologhalai who also designed the book’s interior.
Margot, who lives on Gabriola Island, B.C., has lived in several places in Manitoba, Alberta and British Columbia and has had several diverse jobs and trainings in her life. One of her BAs, with a major in Creative Writing, is from Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo.
She has written some beautiful passages about her life from its early years in Winnipeg through to her years on the West Coast and she includes recipes throughout her memoir. The food prepared from those recipes as well as friends, certain family members, and her own fortitude have seen her through.
The introduction to Cooking Tips for Desperate Fishwives describes an event that is meant to have readers wanting to know more about this couple (which it does!): “The night I ran over Rick with my car, I was over four months pregnant with our first daughter.”
Rick, her husband who is a West Coast urchin diver, was okay and as earlier that evening before their argument Margot had made vegetarian lasagna, it’s the first recipe included in the book: Killer Lasagna (Garlicky Vegetarian Lasagna).
The memoir then goes back to Margot’s early life growing up in a Jewish neighbourhood in Winnipeg. She writes of her Ukrainian Little Baba, her father’s mother Antoinette Zapotoczny, who after marriage became “plain old Anne Fedoruk.” Anne’s husband was William Fedoruk who ran a store called Ideal Produce.
Margot’s maternal mother Neura was known as Big Baba to differentiate her from her other grandmother. Neura was married to her third husband, Meyer Zahn, a Polish Jew, known to Margot as Zayda. He was Margot’s favourite grandfather.
One of Big Baba’s recipes was for blinchikis or blintzes which can be filled with honey, jam or cottage cheese and strawberry sauce as Margot describes in the recipe.
Margot had a younger sister Tanya and after their parents divorced, their mother was involved with other men: Clancy and then Ronald whom she married.
The book’s chapter titles are catchy too such as “Travel Tips for Anxious Children” in which Margot describes a trip she took to Disney World with her father in 1976.
Margot’s mother Ella died of ovarian cancer and as if that wasn’t devastating enough for the two girls, they lost the family home to Ronald.
Having earned a degree in environmental studies, Margot started a physically demanding job of tree planting in northern British Columbia. She writes: “We piled into trucks called Crummies and were driven to a logging camp about thirteen kilometers away [from Prince George]. I was mesmerized by the BC landscape. The trees were taller, the flowers more vibrant than back home in Winnipeg. The clouds touched down on the curve of the highway, our truck hurtling through the layers of the stratosphere.”
Margot met her future husband Rick who was also tree planting as it was his off season from urchin diving. “Rick did not look like someone who would change my life. He drove an orange VW van with a picture of Sid Vicious taped to the window.”
She returned to Winnipeg where she lived with her sister Tanya until Tanya was nearing her high school graduation. Margot then moved to Vancouver where she lived in a bachelor apartment off Robson and worked as a waitress at the Penthouse Nightclub.
Margot surprised herself when she contacted Rick through his mother in Fort McMurray, Alberta. Rick got in touch the next month from Victoria. He had been “living in a motel and diving around Sooke Harbour.” They started dating and Rick made weekend visits to Vancouver between dives off Vancouver Island.
It was on one of her visits to Victoria that Margot knew she was in love. She and Rick were “out on the dive boat called The Seeker and [Rick] laughed and pointed at a startled duck skimming the water with its wings. This was where I fell in love, out on the ocean on a cramped aluminum boat on a clear sunny day.”
They rented an apartment in Victoria and Rick continued with his diving career. And so began the many nights when Margot would hold her breath until she knew Rick was safely ashore.
At this point in the book, in a chapter entitled “Tending to Love,” it’s 1994 and Margot travels to Haida Gwaii, B.C. to work as Rick’s “dive tender.” She wasn’t very good at the job but it meant they were together.
Margot gave birth to their first daughter Hailey in Victoria. Having taken a resident care aide course at Camosun College, she got a job as a nurse’s aide “which involved shift work at the nursing home, Mount St. Mary Hospital.
The first time Margot and Rick lived on Gabriola Island was December 1999 when their daughter Chloe was just under two weeks old.
Margot had taken a magazine writing course and on Gabriola, at night, “took writing classes from the library, learning how to write children’s books, which I illustrated with pen and ink. During the day, I taught children’s art classes at the Women’s Institute Hall. I took any job that allowed me to bring Chloe along.”
Although Rick enrolled in a boat-building program at the Silva Bay Shipyard, he was always drawn back to diving and the amount of money that sort of dangerous work pays.
Margot writes further of Big Baba, Neura Litvinov, born in 1917. She flew to Winnipeg to see her when Big Baba attempted suicide.
“A few months later she was found hanging in her bathroom from the metal curtain rod.”
Margot taught her daughters to make “homemade perogies or the delicious meat-filled dumplings we called kreplach, served boiled with butter and plain mustard. I felt a flutter of pain when I looked at my oldest daughter, who loved to wear sparkling jewelry and bright flowery skirts – she reminds me so much of her. My youngest daughter’s graduation dress was embossed with brilliant, beaded seashells like those dress-up clothes I played with in Big Baba’s cool basement on those long winter days in Winnipeg.”
Included is a recipe for Russian Pelmeni referred to by Margot’s family as kreplach, “traditional Jewish dumplings, which are normally stuffed with ground chicken or beef.” As she writes: “Like many things in our family, recipes have been mixed up and borrowed from other world cuisines.”
One of Margot’s more lucrative paying jobs was housecleaning on Gabriola. She also took up soap making and other crafts she could sell at the Gabriola Farmers’ Market.
Her Starfish Soap Company required the making of “thousands of bars of soap to sell to tourists and a growing list of island customers.” She found she could use nettles from “the marshy area at Whalebone Beach” for the tops of homemade pizza as well as for geranium and lavender nettle shampoo bars.
A recipe is included for Wild-Crafted Stinging Nettle Pesto as well as for Starfish Soap Company’s Famous Pink Himalayan Salt Bars.
Before his recipe for Rick’s Easy Spicy Chicken Wings, Rick offers his perspective about coming home with his dive bag full of stinky work clothes. He mentions a T-shirt Margot bought him “because wearing it makes me not so homesick. She doesn’t know that it’s hard for me to leave. Sometimes the homesickness feels unbearable.”
Margot’s photo: Vital Image Photography
After years of Rick working away from home and coming close to breaking up on several occasions, he and Margot moved to Calgary where he could work for his cousin’s electric company. Margot “enrolled in an online office administration course.”
She had taught herself to type” with excerpts from classics like Franz Kakfa’s Metamophosis or J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.”
Rick couldn’t stay away from his work as a diver though and Margot cried “don’t leave!”
“It was like the night of the killer lasagna all over again, but this time it was Rick who was pushing for change.”
They moved back to Gabriola Island “also known as Petroglyph Island, with over seventy rock carvings scattered across the island.”
In a chapter entitled “Shade of Towering Cedars,” Margot writes of “walking a trail in Sandwell Provincial Park with Chloe, who has lived on Gabriola Island for most of her eighteen years. We were headed to find an ancient Snuneymuxw cave burial site near the cliffs.”
Vancouver Island University (VIU) Elder-in-Residence C-tasi:a – Geraldine Manson has written a book that looks at the history, stories and meaning behind the petroglyphs on Gabriola Island and in the Nanaimo area.
The book, Snuneymuxw History Written in Places and Spaces: Ancestor’s Voices—An Echo in Time, was written parallel to a project at the Gabriola Museum and helps to share the background of the images. It’s available there and through Strong Nations Gifts & Books.
“Some of these images are considered spiritual and continue to be used in sacred ceremonies,” Geraldine says.
As with others in Nanaimo and area, Margot went to London Drugs to buy a marriage licence. She was fifty-three years old and had never been married. “After twenty-seven years it might really happen,” she writes.
The wedding was a surprise to Margot and Rick’s daughters although having people over for Christmas Eve was something new.
As for Margot, she writes: “When I retell the story of our wedding, I love emphasizing the surprise aspect of the event, how Chloe and Hailey never suspected a thing – because maybe I had, in fact, surprised myself at how much I had wanted to marry Rick.”
Their honeymoon was in Campbell River where they stayed at the Ramada Inn. Rick left for the dive boat every morning and didn’t return until twelve hours later.
Back home on Gabriola, Margot reflects: “There are times when Rick is gone, and my emotions ache at the base of my throat – like the sharp spines of a fish. I wish for a goddess of storms; a benevolent woman listening to the prayers to take mercy on desperate fishwives, who peers down from the clouds with a compassionate face. Like Little Baba’s Mary. I imagine she understands the late-night murmuring of women waiting at home for their men. I pray for Rick to be heading home safely down the highway with his dive bag full of damp clothes, pungent with the scent of diesel fuel and sweat. This goddess for fishwives. . . . is the saint of desperate fishwives, non-denominational, wise, all-knowing, and a good cook to boot.”
In her chapter entitled “Like a Fish to Water” from which the above passage is taken, Margot includes a recipe for Sea Urchin Fettuccine with BC Spot Prawns.
In the epilogue to her memoir, Margot reflects on a “Day Minder 1991” that her late father gave her. In it are scribbled notes and “a hodgepodge of recipes.”
She writes: “it is an ancient artifact that tells the story of what our family ate, and how we entertained ourselves with complicated recipes to keep from going mad on long rainy days.”
Included in her notebook and in her memoir is Pizza Dough for the Bread Machine, a recipe Margot made at least once a week. It calls for a cup of water or a cup of beer if you have it. Margot says: “I would use the tinny Lucky beer from a can in Rick’s dive bag, which I would find rolling around between his wool socks.”
by Mary Ann Moore | Oct 7, 2022 | A Poet's Nanaimo
No, this isn’t a blog about money. It’s about rest.
The quote is from Virginia Woolf who wrote in her diary on February 16, 1930: “I would like to lie down and sleep, but feel ashamed. Leonard brushed off his influenza in one day and went about his business feeling ill. But as I was saying, my mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way.” (Love Letters: Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, Vintage Classics, 2021)
We haven’t learned much since then about rest (Virginia died in 1941) and sometimes it’s illness that has us realize the benefits of rest. And when you take the time to be idle, without being ill, there are indeed many gifts. People often feel guilty when they stop and so push through pain and fatigue as Leonard Woolf did, brushing off his influenza in one day.
Recently I went to see a new physiotherapist (new to me) as my back had clenched up. This was nothing new but I did want to have some advice and support for moving forward and continuing to spend time at the computer writing as well as facilitating Zoom writing circles.
John gave me some exercises for my shoulder and hip and some strengthening exercises for my back. As I’ve worked at a typewriter and computer for about 55 years, my back is definitely in need of support. Ultrasound treatment was helpful and the best advice I received was to lie down four to five times a day for fifteen minutes at a time with my neck supported on a rolled-up towel.
This new practice is my form of meditation. I don’t attempt to read or do anything during these fifteen-minute stretches on my bed. I only do it twice a day now although more often would, I’m sure, be very helpful.
Asha Frost who is a member of the Chippewas of Nawash First Nation in Ontario has had a struggle, in the past, with allowing herself to rest even when diagnosed with Lupus. In her book You Are the Medicine, Asha includes a story of “Why Bear Began to Hibernate.” Bear has a message for us:
You are worthy of rest.
Listen to the messages from your body.
Magic is birthed from the void.
The Great Mystery moves through us, even when it appears that nothing is happening.
Taking a walk around the property where we now live, Sarah and I see many signs of Nature preparing to rest. The little Garry Oak planted this year has brown leaves already knowing in its young state, the need to rest for the winter. The poppies now have bare heads and the alum have shapes like satellites. The leaves of the cottonwood tree are drifting to the ground to crunch underfoot. The Virginia Creeper is a vibrant red, a final performance before resting.
I’ve read essays by modern day essayist Rebecca Solnit who sometimes posts on Facebook. She recently had something to share about rest saying “ creative work too benefits from rest and respite. As a writer I benefit greatly from leaving the work alone and coming back to it fresh, as one does with a relationship; pause, stoppage, inaction, inattention can all be wildly generative, and if they’re not that might be its own kind of fruitful that cannot be measured.”
She continues by saying: “Take refuge in that beautiful stillness in which everything is happening in all the ways that nothing is happening in busyness. Everything happening in the depths, like deep water under a reflective surface, a lake reflecting clouds with schools of fish in the depths. Seeds germinating underground. Sitting still as zazen or just daydreaming or watching clouds is an act of revolt against the shouts that we should be doing something/do more/do more faster that are all around us. If you find that nothing is hard to do, it’s exactly because it’s this kind of revolt against the production/consumption juggernaut that is a kind of war against rest, depth, and the earth. Inaction might be another face of peace in our times with stillness the ceasefire in which spring comes again.”
It’s true that the work and the creator of it benefit from rest and stillness with “everything happening in the depths.”
Poet Jane Hirshfield in an interview with Christian McEwen for her book Sparks from the Anvil: The Smith College Poetry Interviews, says she praises silence rather frequently.
“I praise what happens within silence and the unsaid. And I praise not knowing, abiding in question rather than leaping to what may be a too-easy answer. I also often speak about transition in poetry. In fiction or playwriting, that is absolutely common. But in poetry workshops, it’s relatively rare. I asked my friends about this when I began teaching it, and no one had ever said a word to them about transitions in poetry. For a transition to happen, you need a gap, a little sabbath. I sometimes feel that all wisdom, all newness of insight and experience, lives in the hinges – of poems, of a life.”
So along with the respite we need and the rest the work needs, Jane is referring to transitions made in “a gap, a little sabbath.” Poetry has those “hinges” visible on the page in spaces between stanzas, sometimes between words. Jane is referring to the hinges of a life as well and it’s in those still places that we connect to our own story, our own wisdom and insight.
And prose writers too have used space for readers to take a pause, a rest during to reflect on what we’ve read and perhaps to recall our own story. For example, memoirs by Abigail Thomas are made up of vignettes which sometimes take up only half a page. I’m thinking of one example: Safekeeping: Some True Stories From a Life (Anchor Books, 2000) in which Abigail has written about pivotal moments in her life including the death of her second husband. As the book’s description says: “This is a book in which silence speaks as eloquently as what is revealed.” Sometimes the passages of prose are as brief as one paragraph on a page. And this is a writer who is fond of napping with her three dogs.
Betsy Warland’s Bloodroot: Tracing the Untelling of Motherloss (Inanna Publications, 2021) broke new ground when it was first published in 2000 by Second Story Press. There is a lot of white space and as Susan Olding notes in her foreword recalling her first reading of the book in 2008: “The space had presence and weight. The space made room for what cannot be said.”
In Chantal Gibson‘s endorsement of Bloodroot, she says: “Read the text. Read the white space. Read the silences in between.”
In the passage by Rebecca Solnit quoted above, she begins: “If you’re sick or injured and healing or growing a new life inside you or just worn out, please notice that that thing known as ‘doing nothing’ is when you’re doing the utterly crucial and precious work of growing and healing and restoring. This also goes for everyone who’s just worn down, exhausted, dispirited, and who’s not that right now? I’m not the Nap Ministry but I’m for the power of rest and the holiness of respite and the you that is your cells and circulatory system and all those inner workings that are so mysterious and necessary and regenerative if we let them be.”
I first heard of the Nap Ministry which “seeks to dismantle white supremacy and capitalism by embracing rest as a form of resistance” in Hannah McGregor’s book: A Sentimental Education (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2022). The Nap Ministry is a project created by Tricia Hersey, “at the intersection of Black feminist thought and disability justice,” who is known as The Nap Bishop, Hannah says in her chapter entitled “Caring Ferociously.”
The late poet Audre Lorde linked self-care to warfare in her 1988 essay collection A Burst of Light. She was living with cancer at the time. “Overextending myself is not stretching myself. I had to accept how difficult it is to monitor the difference. Necessary for me as cutting down on sugar. Crucial. Physically. Caring for myself is not self-indulgent, it is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare.” (As quoted in A Sentimental Education.)
As Hannah McGregor says, Lorde was writing “specifically about self-preservation as a Black lesbian feminist, the refusal to be either forced to live or allowed to die.”
As I thought about rest, many resources came my way hence all the quotes above. And I thought back to the Fall of 2015 when I had an extended rest with cancer treatment and surgery. Having radiation treatments on my shin didn’t prevent me from walking all over Victoria for the five weeks I was there. My form of rest was not needing to accomplish anything while allowing my body to heal.
While some may feel guilty resting, others of us love what we do and so press on regardless. We tend to take our bodies for granted until they complain and we have to take breaks even from the work we love.
Poet and philosopher David Whyte says: in his book Consolations: “We are rested when we let things alone and let ourselves alone, to do what we do best, breathe as the body intended us to breathe, to walk as we were meant to walk, to live with the rhythm of a house and a home, giving and taking through cooking and cleaning. When we give and take in an easy foundational way we are closest to the authentic self, and closest to that self when we are most rested.” (Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, Many Rivers Press, 2015).
It gives one pause to think about our authentic selves as being realized when we are rested.
Kim Rosen, another poet who has learned hundreds of poems by heart as has David Whyte who inspired her, published an essay in August on “The Paradox of a Purposeful Life.” She quotes poet Naomi Shihab Nye who writes:
No, I was not busy when you came!
I was not preparing to be busy.
That’s the armor everyone put on
to pretend they a purpose
in the world.
From 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (Greenwillow Books, 2005)
The pandemic which began in the spring of 2020 forced us to rest (if we weren’t frontline workers). Now we may have to make that decision for ourselves. We don’t need to be busy and productive to value ourselves as it is in fact in the silence and stillness of rest that we can appreciate all of who we are. I believe it was my wise friend Andrea Mathieson who said stillness is the place of balance that inspires.
