Baby, use your damn critical thinking skills, inside and also outside.

Pour one out for mortality

You might have predicted you’d see me round here this week, given the news. Between #metoo, and the conversations that have ensued all over your social feeds and mine, and then the expected-but-still-so-sad death of Gord Downie, it’s been—well, it’s been a time.

One might hope to be more articulate than that about it, but here we are. I ground my teeth so hard part of one snapped off. What more is there to say than that?

A few weeks ago, I was sitting around on a Friday night with Kev and his brother and his brother’s girlfriend, and we were having some drinks and light conversation about people we know who have serious, even terminal illnesses. “He’s going to die young,” my sister-in-law said about a guy we all know. “She could die anytime,” Kev said about a good friend of his.

I could feel my fingers twitching. When I have deep thoughts about death, I tend to save them up for my friend Maggie, who knows what time it is in that respect. We have regular Grief Summits, during which we talk about our sad feelings, raise a glass to our dear departed, and eat a lot of candy. I really wanted to text Maggie, but decided it would be rude to start texting in the middle of our little gathering. So instead, I dropped a truth bomb.

“I just want to put in a word for mortality, here,” I said. A moment of understanding flickered across Kev’s face—he knows who he’s married to, after all—but I pushed on regardless. “We’re all gonna die, and none of us know when. It could happen right now. Or tomorrow. Or the next day. You’re gonna die,” I said to my sister-in-law, “and you’re gonna die,” I looked at Kev, “and you’re gonna die,” I nodded to my brother-in-law, “and I’m gonna die. It’s coming for all of us.”

There was, as you might expect, a beat of silence. I took a sip of my drink. I definitely should have saved that one for Maggie, I thought. And then, as if I had indeed saved it for Maggie, the conversation rolled on.

And hey, I get it. Most people are not interested in contemplating the reality of our time here—that it is likely short, and certainly uncertain. That all we have is this moment, it’s gone, this moment, it’s gone, this moment, it’s gone too. This is not Friday-night-drinks conversation. Unless you’re me and Maggie, that is.

I’ve written before about my feelings around Gord Downie’s public performance of what a graceful exit looks like. The grief has rolled slowly this week. I’ve listened to Night for Day in its entirety most days. I had a deep cry over that Peter Mansbridge interview from last year, which I’d found myself unable to watch when it first aired, and barely able to watch two days ago when I finally did. I’ve been simple in my grief. I’m not thinking about it much. Just letting it wash over me. Letting those songs wake me up in the middle of the night, playing on my brain radio so loud they disturb my sleep. Yeah, I’m sad about the loss of an artist I admired, one I grew up with, one whose songs and performances have meant so much to me since I was a teenager (ask me sometime about the time I saw the Hip at Molson Park, and Gord set his boots on fire at the foot of the stage during “Boots and Hearts,” what a time.), and I’m sad about my brother, with whom I saw the Hip so many times, and I’m sad about my dad, who was the kind of guy I think Gord was. I’m sad about my sadness. I’m sad it all ends, no matter what, it all ends the same way. I’m sitting with and in that, lately, and you know what, it’s okay.

It’s okay because it’s true, and because even though I can only look at it head on for a few minutes at a time every day, that looking informs the way I do just about everything else. I’m not afraid to die, but I would prefer not to do it with a lot undone. So I am digging in as best I can. And I am luxuriating in the moments I spend with Kev, really pausing in those moments to just love him as hard as I can. I am working to be a good person, to be the kind of person my dad was and hoped I would be. I am trying to notice when I am clenching my jaw or grinding my teeth so that no more flakes chip off. Some days are better than others, you know? But I carry on with will and determination, and, I hope, grace too.

And I have been listening to this song and laughing to and at myself. Sometimes, I note it to myself wryly: I thought you beat the inevitability of death to death just a little bit.

Just a little bit.

All about that bass

I’ve  been not writing. There are reasons. I’m knee-deep in a non-fiction project with a short deadline. I’ve been sewing madly. It’s gardening season. I’m mentoring a writer, and prepping for an interview series, and a hundred other things. These are legitimate reasons. Also, writing is hard, and I reached a point with my story earlier this year where I was stuck and trying to force it, and then my back spasmed and wouldn’t stop and, well. Here we are.

But I’ve been up front with myself about needing to write non-fiction at the moment, up front about the requirement to just put Good Birds aside for now. It’s been a relief, honestly, to be writing something that doesn’t need me to make stuff up. In fact, making stuff up would be the opposite of the goal right now. And it’s been just fine. I have a lot of enthusiasm for the non-fiction project. It’s a book, and it’ll be good to have another one of those under my belt. Especially, as I say, one I don’t have to create out of nothing.

A few days ago, though, I took Good Birds out for a spin. My gang of Wednesday writers and I were scheduled to read from works in progress at the Central Library, where we gather to write (that is, to complain bitterly about writing) each week. I was terrified contemplating reading from this work in progress. This book I do not understand at all. This book I have been forcing, and thinking about, and trying this and trying that and still coming up so short of where I want to be. Still, I chose an excerpt—one that includes the very first paragraphs I wrote of this book—and I tried not to barf.

Once I was at the lectern and reading aloud to the full room, I kind of dropped right into my story, and all my nerves faded away. As I read the excerpt I remembered what had been so exciting to me about the story in the first place. I felt the simplicity of what I’ve written, and the way it bobs along.

After the reading, some of us were talking about how we feel we’re not smart enough to write the projects we are writing. I mean, I feel this very deeply. I am sure it’s true. I don’t see how it can’t be true—of myself. But those other writers, they are some of the smartest, most intelligent people I know. There’s no way they’re not smart enough to write what they’re trying to write. For a moment I considered that there’s a possibility, an outside chance, at least, that potentially, maybe, I am also perhaps, maybe smart enough to write Good Birds. I’m saying there’s a chance, that’s all. I tucked that thought away. It’s a new one, and I’ll need to spend some time with it.

The next day it occurred to me that the excerpt I had read was written before I started thinking so goddamn much about what I’m trying to do. Back when I was just feeling my way through my story, patting around to find the shape of my characters. Back when I was using my intuition, instead of exhausting my intelligence. Hmm, I thought. I tucked that away with the possibility that I might potentially be not too dumb to write this book.

Then I went to see Amelia Curran and Erin Costelo, songwriters who typically give me a lot of feelings. I stood on the hard concrete floor at the Marquee feeling feelings and then suddenly, I had this kind of fizzy trancy feeling I get when I’m about to know something about writing. “I just need to go in a straight line,” I thought. “I need to stop complicating everything and just go in a straight line right off the back of the excerpt.” I stood with that for a bit, and then I could feel the next tiny bit of story coming down. I headed outside to type up a few sentences and email them to myself. I felt a kind of euphoria I haven’t felt in a long while.

That night, I dreamt all night that I had become a bass player. And not just any bass. Double bass. The big guy. I cursed this unwieldy instrument. It kept flopping out of my hands, crashing discordantly to the floor. I couldn’t control the sucker. “Why, why, why did I become a bass player,” I wailed. I woke myself up, despair and dread forming a knot in my jaw. In the middle of the night, I had a thought clear as the chime of a triangle: that’s about my book. I have turned it into a double bass, when really what I need to play is violin. Something compact I can carry in one hand. Something with a sweet, high, singular voice. Stop Complicating Everything: The Stephanie Domet Story.

When I was in kindergarten, my teacher recommended I be put into the “slow” grade one. Being as it was the nineteen seventies, there was such a thing as the “slow” grade one, and you could be put in it without your parents even being notified. After a few weeks in which I was no doubt bored out of my mind, the school finally called my mother and said, we want to put Stephanie in the “regular” grade one. And so, mornings I spent in the “slow” grade one, then in the afternoons, I crossed the hall to room 101, the “regular” grade one. In room 101, they were growing beans in paper cups on the windowsills. There was a gerbil. They were learning long words like “because.” They did math. They were all so much smarter than me, and I knew then that I would never, ever catch up.

Forty years later, I am still worried I’ll be sent back to the slow grade one.

I don’t need to prove that I belong. I don’t need to be an intellectual writer. I just have to write what I am here to write. And if that’s a simple story that just goes in a straight line right off the back of the very first few sentences of this project I ever wrote, so be it. Play that violin. Leave the double bass alone.

May, be.

I wasn’t sure what May would hold this year. You never can tell. May does what it wants, dancing you madly up and down the thermometer, bringing everything to the point of bursting with life, and then crushing it all overnight with unexpected frost. May, as I have written ad nauseum elsewhere, is a complicated and storied month. I have learned not to presuppose how May will go.

This year, as the day approached, I searched myself for some kind of feeling. And I felt—nothing. Which was intellectually interesting to me, but also was a terrible portent. There’s no way I’d get away with feeling nothing, and anyhow, I don’t think feeling nothing is a particularly strive-worthy goal. In fact, feeling nothing is pretty much the opposite of what I want for myself, always. Still, I thought, maybe this will be one of the easy years. I could stand that.

There was, though, some rising anxiety that seemed to be unattached to anything real and concrete and point-to-able. Some aggression that seemed to be unrelated to any actual feelings or circumstances in which I found myself. A deep exhaustion I blamed on allergies, but which nagged me with its completeness. A persistent spaciness that had me making stupid mistakes while driving and sewing yesterday. Try not to hit that pedestrian, rip it up and start again.

Still, I thought, I don’t really feel much of anything.

I wonder if I am marked for grief. I know for sure I am marked by it. At the farmers’ market yesterday, we went to get fish from our usual guy. How are you, I asked, as I usually do. He shrugged as if it didn’t matter at all how he was. Then he said, I’m sorry, I’m grumpy. Well, not grumpy. Angry, maybe. But not exactly angry. He gestured with his hands in the empty space between us, as if he wanted us to move on, but then we didn’t. Grumpy, he said again. But, inside. Then: I lost my wife, you know. And I thought, did I know? Do I even know your name? And I said: I’m so sorry. And he said, oh, well. And I asked when and he said December 20. And I thought but didn’t say, ah. Five months. To the day. It’s seventeen years tomorrow for my brother, I said, so he would know I was a fellow traveller.

And then I asked for a pound of haddock and as he bagged it up, he told me how suddenly it had come upon his wife. She was sick for eighteen months, then she was gone. She had just retired. They had planned to travel and do so many things, and they never got to do a one. She loved to garden, and so this time of year is hard, he said. But then, all the times of year are hard. She would talk about the beauty of what was in bloom and he never paid much mind, would kind of pshaw it away, and now he wishes he had those moments back so he could sit with her and appreciate that beauty. I’d like to punch cancer in the face, he said, and I could feel the skin around my eyes grow wet. Right in its stupid face.

Seventeen years for your brother, he asked, and I nodded, and he said, I can see you still feel it, and I nodded again. It’s different every year, I told him. The first year is the worst, because it’s all new. Do something different at Christmas. Go to Toronto, or Mexico, or anywhere that isn’t where you usually go. Because it’s going to suck anyway, but it will suck worse if you try to make it like it used to be. I didn’t tell him it’s never going to be that way again, because obviously it’s never going to.

I got my fish and I got out of there, and I stood in the hallway at the farmers’ market and cried and cried. How could your wife, who has just retired, die five days before Christmas? How could your brother, who has barely begun his life, die before his second-born is even a year old? How can it be five months? How can it be seventeen years? How can I feel nothing one minute and everything the next? How can time keep passing? What is this life and how are we to live it?

You’ll know now, my fishmonger said, if you ask how I am and I say I’m grumpy, you’ll know. And I’ll know about you, he said, if you say you’re grumpy.

I am trying hard to find the sense in all this. The perfect bow with which I can wrap up a perfect package of insight. It doesn’t make sense, and it won’t, and I’ve known that for every minute of the last seventeen years. It was the first lesson I learned in the new country of my grief. I don’t envy my fishmonger the territory ahead of him. I’m grateful for what I’ve learned, and glad I have any kind of insight to pass along to newcomers to my land. But I would trade it all, every bit of it, for one more day with my brother.

We can’t go back, though. The things I want I cannot have. And so, I come back again to the decisions I’ve made in years past: a renewed commitment to live as hard as I can, to do all the things to the best of my ability, to take care of the earth, to appreciate the glimpses of my brother I see in those around me, to quit dicking around, thinking I have lots of time, to appreciate the time I do have. I’d like to think I could have learned these lessons some other way. Still, what I have is what I have. The grief, the joy, the knowledge, the love, the memories, the resolve, the opportunity, the day, this minute, that’s all. May’s message is simple this year: be. Enough.

Time flies and other cliches that turn out to be true

Back in January, I told you about how I finally unlocked the secret to a daily writing practise, which turned out to be a lot of intervention and advice from others, along with some good old fashioned sitting the hell down and getting to it, and not a moment too soon, as part of my work in February included teaching a course on writing and procrastination, the aspect of writing in which I feel the most qualified. I was high on my writing practise and what it was yielding. It was great.

And then I hit a rough patch with my story, where I tried to force it to go forward when what it really wanted to do was keep on spreading out to the sides, and the writing practise became less great, though it remained steady. And though my imagination was tapped and my mind was really longing for a break, my sense of…what, shame, maybe? about my laziness kept me chained to my desk, trying to grind out my story.

Not, it turns out, an optimal way to approach art.

And since my mind is kind of an asshole sometimes, my body has to get involved to get my attention. This time, it did so by putting my mid back into spasm. It was very terrible. I thought it was from gripping my pen too tightly (why am I so intense, I whined to Kev. Why can’t I just let go? Why indeed.), as if that would do it, but when I explained my situation to the first of many body workers who saw me during the awful early weeks of March, telling her that for about a hundred and twenty minutes a day, every weekday, I’d been sitting on a slowly deflating yoga ball, with my notebook on my knee, curled over writing by hand…It became clear that this was a case of abject stupidity, rather than artistic intensity.

It’s funny how that goes. You think you’re one way, but then you get to a mirror and see that you are in fact another way altogether.

And so, I was forced to take a break. Forced to stop forcing it. Forced to acknowledge, once again, that my body is not just a kickstand for my brain. That it is, in fact, the place in which I live.

This is a frightening place to be, for many reasons. I am in deep fear of losing the thread of my story, along with my daily writing practise. My back is better now, but long periods of sitting and writing can still cause a flare up of pain. The reality of the paid work I do is that it also requires long periods of stationary writing time. As does sewing, the past-time that brings me the most joy right now. I really, really want to keep sewing. I also really, really want to keep making money. And I really, really want to keep writing my book. And I really, really, really want my back to not hurt like that anymore. So. These are competing desires, in many ways. (The irony that the bulk of the money I earn is in service of a biomechanist who preaches a doctrine of regular nutritious movement is not lost on me, not for one little stationary second, thanks for asking.)

One of the other body workers I saw during the Great Back Spasming asked me about my emotional state. Oh, I said, I’m pretty good. There’s nothing really going on. Although…I have been writing, which as a way of stirring up shit. Then she asked about my confidence. Again, I was cavalier to start. I generally have rather a lot of confidence. Too much, even. Although…I have been outside my comfort zone every day of the last fifteen months. Huh, she said. Huh, I said.

And so, this time has also been an invitation to consider my relationship with praise, and what “doing a good job” actually looks like for me in this new incarnation. There’s a mental work out. It involves a lot of positive self-talk about stuff I know I’m good at, like making a risotto that can make even the toughest critic cry in gratitude, for instance. It makes me feel like a dope. But it doesn’t make my back hurt, so there’s that.

I’ve also been spending a lot of time contemplating this photo:

I mean, come on.

I would say this was taken in perhaps 1976. I really don’t know what to make of myself here, and how exactly it’s connected to confidence, my emotions, writing, my back spasms, body-as-brain-kickstand, praise, grinding it out, and so on. But I’m pretty sure it is. This was back in the day when my Italian grandfather was giving me and my brothers the same basic haircut, and I was still toothless from a neighbourhood Evel Knievel incident gone horribly wrong. This was also back when I thought I might grow into good eyesight, just as I would some day grow adult teeth. Somehow Chris and Jeff are smiling proportionately to the occasion, but I…I am really somewhere else altogether.

I think I’d like to go to there. I may have to go sideways to arrive, instead of forward. That’s never been my preferred route, but preferences can change. I hope.

Owl be sure to tell a whale of a tale

The goal for January was daily writing on Good Birds Don’t Fly Away. The goal has been elusive. Which is to say, I have in no way been creating the conditions that would allow me to meet that goal with ease. Or even with effort. Instead, I have faffed around, wasted time, complained about how writing is so haaaaaard, sewed two sweatshirts, one pair of leggings, and a dress, started a kitchen renovation, binge-watched Nashville season four, and most of Schitt’s Creek, read a couple books, and a stack of magazines, and eaten a lot of cheese and crackers.

In some ways, all this procrastination can be considered research, for the course I’m teaching next month through the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia, called Getting Out of Your Own Way So You Can Just Write. When they asked me what I wanted to teach on, the one aspect of writing in which I feel truly expert is procrastination. Consider the first half of January my field research in that case, and the second half… is also field research, for overcoming one’s natural urge to do as little writing as possible because, see above: writing is so haaaaaard.

I would love to tell you that I magically found my own way from the first bout of field research to the second, but, as usual, it takes a village to pull this writer out of torpor and into productivity.

Pictured: Village.

First of all, as always, the poet Sue Goyette intervened to tell me what’s what. She did it a number of times, gently, in person, and when that didn’t seem to have the desired effect, she sent me a card in the mail. An invitation to my own writing. Thoughtfully written, it invited me to consider the conditions under which a story living in the wilderness might consent to come spend a little time with me in a clean well-lighted place. I carried the card around for a full week before I was ready to create the conditions necessary for work. That little owl kitchen timer I’ve had for a while, procured at the suggestion of Jessica Marsh, and never employed till this morning. The Pomodoro method was seconded by my pal Mackenzie, who additionally offered the strategy of making a little tick on a piece of paper every time one is tempted to turn one’s attention from the matter at hand. The coffee is, I think, an obvious helpmeet. The sharpie, again, is an old friend. The grey notebook was given to me by, I think, my aunt, or perhaps my mother. Someone who’s long seen who and what I am, in any event. The notion of handwriting was brought to the fore for me by Joel Thomas Hynes. Fallsy Downsies was written entirely by hand. Good Birds Don’t Fly Away will be a hybrid, I think. A week’s worth of hand-writing followed by a day or two of typing up. The pile of already-printed-on-one-side paper comes courtesy of my work at Propriometrics Press, which also affords me the time to get my own work done. Not pictured: Kev, who understood intrinsically when I announced, I am getting out of this bed in seven minutes, and then I am going to write, and so left me alone to do just that.

Things that helped: I wrote about my intention to write, and about what I would need do to in order to create the conditions that would make writing happen. Then I did the things on the list (pay some bills, write some invoices, tidy my writing room, drink some water so that I feel well-rested, go to bed at an appropriate time to achieve the same result). Then, I actually came into my writing room, set the timer, and did the things. And you know what? It totally worked, you guys. I totally wrote. Next step: Do it again tomorrow, and Monday, and every weekday going forward. Thanks, village. This one’s for you.

Three sixty five

It’s been a year. I regret nothing.

No dress rehearsal

I have a pent-up bunch of things to tell you, things to write about. I have been busy living, which is good, and also busy writing, which is very good, but I have not been busy writing about that living here, which is less good. So, in true Virgo fashion, let’s start with a to do list, an agenda for this post.

1. Novel-writing breakthrough delivered courtesy of a day at the beach and a long, sunset drive home down a familiar highway
2. The generosity of performing the Inevitability of Death publicly; the way the public responded
3. What I Did on My Summer Vacation, aka a weekend at Make.Do.Camp

So, to start. I have been struggling, this year, with Good Birds Don’t Fly Away. I have shown up for my writing as regularly as I can right now, I have written thousands and thousands of words, and I have moved no closer to knowing what I am doing and what this book wants to be. I was having secret terrible feelings that perhaps my days of writing long-form fiction were behind me. That maybe two novels were all I would get. More than a lot of people get. Not enough for me, but maybe they were going to have to be. These are not thoughts I was able to articulate to myself or anyone else, until July 22. That day, I swam in the ocean to the point of exhaustion with my niece and my nephew. Had supper at their cottage in Hubbards with them. Drove myself home along highway 103 as twilight did its golden thing in the rearview mirror. Reflected on an experience of grief-by-proxy I’d had earlier in the summer, and the questions that experience raised about who has the right to grieve what. Felt a quiver of energy. Imagined a shining triangle of story gently descending from the sky to my conscious mind, fitting into place with the other bits and pieces of Good Birds I’d assembled, and becoming a linear narrative, with grit, conflict, surprise, and heart. All the things you’d hope a novel you were trying to write would have. It was a couple weeks before I was able to get back to my desk to explore a new character who could carry these questions and experiences, but I felt a buoyant peace such as I haven’t felt about my writing in months. It’s a relief to report here that things are now going pretty well with the new guy, who is fascinating to me and will, I hope, be fascinating to you, too. It was totally gonna suck to admit that this novel wasn’t going to happen, since I quit my job in a pretty showy way to write it. Phew.

Speaking of grief-by-proxy, I have wanted very much to write about Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip, though I am not sure what’s left to say about the collective experience of love and sadness and hope and resilience in which many Canadians engaged through the summer. What I want to say is that Downie’s grace and generosity gave me a place to put all my sadness about all the sad things I’ve ever felt sad about, so that I could sort through them and feel them deeply, in a uniquely communal way. What more can an artist hope to do? And to have the opportunity to stand in front of people who love you, being exactly who you are meant to be, to stand in front of tens of thousands of people and give them what you have to give, and receive from them so much love. To be seen, truly. What more can an artist ask for? May we all have the opportunity to do this, in some small way. May we all give each other this opportunity. I appreciated, too, the nudge to dig deeply again into songs I have loved and put aside. To once more engage with Scared, and Nautical Disaster, and Escape is At Hand for the Travelling Man, and Fireworks. I appreciated the chance to look down a row of strangers and see them all rocking out, all in. And of course, the constant reminder of the summer: No dress rehearsal, this is our life. Indeed it is.

Which brings me to Make.Do.Camp. A transformative experience, which is not the kind of thing this cynical correspondent is used to reporting, but there it is. Seventy-two hours at Big Cove Camp on Merigomish Harbour, alongside eighty mostly-strangers, letting our defences down. There was art and conversation and politics and campfires, saunas and stars, an impromptu talent show and a big dancey dance party. We were without our phones, without an internet connection all weekend long. No one died from disconnection. If anything, we all came more alive. I know that’s cheesy, but it’s no less true for all that. I kept an analogue Twitter and Instagram feed going in my notebook all weekend. I’m more earnest on analogue Twitter than I am anywhere else. There is no performative aspect to analogue Twitter, therefore no snark necessary. I sat in the grass and listened to the wind ruffle the leaves. Had I had my phone, I’d have reached for it and missed what was really going on. For a person who prides herself on noticing, I sure do choose disconnection on the regular. I am grateful for the invitation to consider the way I use technology. I wasn’t sure, before I went to Camp, whether it was for me. Now, I can’t imagine who it’s NOT for.

It’s been a summer of giant feelings.

It has been glorious to be free to feel those feelings, to take them to the beach and dunk them in the cold north Atlantic, and to buy them an ice cream cone on the way home. I have spent days just reading, the way I used to when I was a kid. I’ve read more books this summer than I did all of last year, and maybe the year before that, cumulatively. I have been able to think deeply about the ideas in those books, and the ideas in my head. I have stared out the window. I have stared into the garden. I have stared at the ocean, and at a couple of lakes. I’ve been with people and without them. I have begun building the life that was always just out of my grasp while I was working for someone else. That building is life-long work, and I am glad to be thusly employed.