Monthly Archives: September 2019

About My First Blog: A Re-post

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(Whilst learning about blogging and even more, how to be consistent in and around real life, today I’m resorting to re-posting my not-so-famous first – and only – post from my also not-famous one-post-blog that I started over two years ago – on June 9, 2017. )

(Also – could there be more dashes in an intro?)

          I’ve always been one for good beginnings, for auspicious dates. I like to start projects on meaningful days. And this blog, my newest project, I hope to be both meaningful and auspicious.

          Today I am forty-nine and 9. Nine is my favorite number. I was born on the ninth day of the ninth month. So I am three months from the Big 5-Oh. It is a good day to start my blog, my blog that has existed in my head for oh, probably more than nine years.

          I’m not even sure if blogs are cool anymore. But I’m about to be fifty and cool might be a moot thing at this point.  I set June 9 as my expiry date, the day I NEEDED to finally get this baby off the ground. And so, without further ado, I begin with:

NINE REASONS WHY I’M STARTING THIS BLOG

1. I have always wanted to be a writer. I have memories from my childhood of swinging back and forth dreaming about being an author. I’m not sure whether I care anymore about being an author. It’s not really about getting published now. I just want to write. I write, therefore I AM a writer. Ta-dahhhhh! Magic.

2. That not-caring-about-being-an-author-crap being said, I’d like to give it a shot. Some of my best friends are authors. Not actually, just that I have discovered sooooo many writers that get me. I’d like to try be that for someone else.

3. Therefore, this blog will be great practice. Because the only way you get good at something is by doing it. And I’m hoping for accountability here. I’m a good finisher, so if I start something, I will probably finish it. And because blogs aren’t meant to be finished, I hope to keep writing till I’m dead. Did that make any sense?

Four. I need a dang place to dump all the stuff going on in my head. I don’t just think about things, I am constantly writing about them in my head. In that sense, I feel like I’ve had a lot of practice. Buuuuuuuut… without actually writing things down, I’ve lost a lot of thoughts. And I have a sneaking suspicion some of them were good.

Cinquo. I love the feeling of my fingertips on a keyboard. Is that weird? Can I get an amen here from anyone? So sometimes I don’t write on my computer for awhile and then I have to bang out an email or something and my fingers say YESSSSSSSS!!!!! So I owe it to my fingers. They’ve been good to me all these years, pointing and scratching my head and scooping up cookie batter. They complete me.

Le Six. I love words. Let me say it again: I LOVE WORDS. I would be dead (in my soul) without words, without The Word, without reading and ‘riting. This will be my homage to all things encased in random arrangements of the letters of the alphabet.

7. It is good to be known. I’m an introvert – surprise! No, seriously, some of you who actually know me may not believe this because you think I’m all outgoing and stuff. Which I can be. But given the chance I will choose the quiet company of myself (or my husband, the one person in the world I can be alone together with). This does not always serve me well. People are important. Relationship is important. But you only get there if you share, if you GET KNOWN. And the written word is the most manageable (read: controllable!) way I feel comfortable with disclosure to the world at large.

8. Because I have an expiry date. At least, here on earth, which is my only chance to impact eternity. And turning fifty feels like expiry is all the more looming. I mean even if I live to be 100, that’s only 50 more years to do all the things I want to do and write about them!

Niner. (Rhymes with finer, diner, opiner, miner, whiner…I could go on….) Because this could be fun. Playing with words and ideas. Bouncing them outta my head and onto the page.

About September

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It is with great sadness that I enter into the last week of September. September is my month. My favorite. Always has been. Always will be. (I will never understand Green Day.)

I don’t think it’s just because I was born in September, although there is some alchemy there: I was born on the 9th day of the 9th month, thus also begetting my favorite number. I am all about the number 9.

September is the new January, or so Gretchen Rubin says in her book Happier at Home. With a flip of the calendar comes a return to schedule, to school and to sweaters and socks.

Even so, there’s still the chance of those welcome leftover days of summer sneaking in. Last Sunday, Rick and I walked in downtown Edmonton towards a open-air market and a gallery tour on 124th Street. The sunshine was perfect – perfect in temperature and perfectly lighting up the colors of autumn all around us. It was the kind of day in which you congratulate yourself for being outside. Driving back home to Vermilion later that afternoon, the fields along Highway 16 heavy with felled swathes and populated with thousands of geese, it felt like time was standing still. A perfect September day. A gift.

For me, school always starts in September. Even if the calendar messed up somehow and our presence was absurdly requested on August 30 or something, everyone knew that brains didn’t really engage until after the Labor Day weekend. I still feel like I should be in school come September. I loved school when I was growing up – or at least the Utopian idea of school. Every September started out in an amnesia-like stupor, with the month throwing its spells of beauty at me and every year I believed that this year would be the greatest ever. But alas, there was always physics and bullies and soggy sandwiches – none of which I could ever blame September for. It was probably October’s fault.

If there was any angst when the school bus dropped me off, solace could be found in the September garden when the time of the tomatoes arrived in full force. I’m with Julia Child: nothing beats a tomato sandwich on white bread with plenty of mayo and salt and pepper. Menu planning was easy – corn on the cob, cucumbers in vinegar, more tomatoes and new potatoes rounded out September birthday meals.

Because September is our family’s birthday month – not just mine, but three of my six siblings were also born in September, plus nieces and nephews and cousins. So many birthdays that my mom often would economically give my son, born the day before my birthday, and me one card to share. There was just an abundance of birthdays. Hallmark, and Mom, couldn’t keep up.

I will enjoy the rest of the month as it comes – even though today it’s windy and wet. I will pray for good harvest weather but I will enjoy the last dregs of my favorite month, next weekend’s commitments taking me down those same roads that took me to school. I know it will be good because September hasn’t let me down yet.

About Writing: An Old Book Review

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Nearly twenty years ago, I went to my first writer’s conference. It was a heady event for me, never having gone to one before, but doubly so because I had scored an anniversary event for Inscribe Christian Writers. Some pretty heavy hitters were in the lineup: Janette Oke, Maxine Hancock, Phil Callaway, Linda Hall. And they were all good – I still have my crib notes of their writing advice.

I met many other great people/writers that weekend and one of them (Elaine Froese – I know you’re still out there!) sent me home with a book recommendation that turned out to be life-changing for me.

“Don’t worry about the new age-y parts,” she advised. “Just read it and do what she says.” She, of course, being the Julia Cameron, creativity maven.

“I just finished Week 4,” she said. “I’m heading into the ‘reading deprivation’ assignment – and I’m not going to listen to the the radio or anything when I’m on the combine this week – just to see what happens.” Sounds eerily like a modern-day media fast.

Something about Elaine’s bold endorsement intrigued me and I soon got my hands on my own copy of The Artist’s Way. A personal copy is ideal because trust me, you will mark it up. My book is filled with highlighter, underlines, stars and my scribbled answers to her questions, often dated as I have gone through the book several times, so it’s interesting to see what’s changed and what has stayed the same.

Basically, The Artist’s Way is Cameron’s twelve week (an homage to AA’s 12 Steps?) paradigm-busting, creativity-boosting, writer-unblocking program. But it’s not just for writers or artists: Cameron asserts that everyone would benefit by submitting to the rules and the tools – bankers, hockey players, maybe even the odd prime minister (or president) could find some clarity.

The tools are simple, and yet oh-so-hard to get done: The Morning Pages – vomiting up 3 pages of stream of consciousness writing every morning and: taking your artist on a weekly Artist Date – a field trip for your inner child that will “fill the well”, replenish your head and heart with the images, smells, sounds, tastes and textures necessary to create freely and originally.

I was never a perfect student of The Artist’s Way. I never completed an entire twelve week run of morning pages and I stood up my inner artist more times than I’d like to count. But every page of Cameron’s seminal work has great words, excellent questions, and inspiring quotes – doing your homework even half-fast will reap benefits for your creative freedom, in whatever way you choose to express it.

About Writing: It’s Not Too Late

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I have read a lot of books about writing. A lot.

Case in point: in the center of the above image is the stack of books about writing and creativity that I own, have read (sometimes twice) and have marked up all the brilliant bits. On the left, the smaller stack represents a few of those I have yet to read or finish. And on the right, those are the books I have written.

OH YEAH. THERE ARE NONE OF THOSE.

The writing process is very easy to read about. It’s also easy to enjoy the perfect fruit of someone else’s labors when you sit down at the table with an Agatha Christie mystery, a Mary Karr memoir or even a Calvin and Hobbes Treasury. The actual writing? That seems to be the alchemy of some other gifted, bewitching and lucky person.

I have discovered, it’s not really that magical, after all. When the books tell you to sit your butt in the chair every day, to show up at the laptop without fail, that the muse arrives when you do, there’s something so obvious there that they don’t say it for fear of sounding redundant.

If you don’t write, nothing gets written.

In other words, sit down and write. (Unless you’re Thomas Wolfe. At 6’6″, he wrote on top of the refrigerator. You get the point.)

Okay, okay, so writing a bunch of words on the page does not a book make. There’s re-writing, editing, submitting, crying, conditional acceptance, re-editing, re-re-writing. And even after all that, it’s a crap shoot – well, so I’ve been told.

Because I haven’t really done all that other stuff. Oh, I have started to write a lot more, but it’s all just a words and words and words in a Word file, right now.

So I started this blog because it’s part of the advice that many seasoned writers give. 1. Write the words. 2. Put them out there. However, whenever.

(This is where I insert the apropos Wayne Gretzky quote about missing 100% of the shots you don’t take.)

The NHL ain’t taking me – at my age and, let’s face it, with this (female) bod, there is no hope. But I can still work with the metaphor. There are many things that age does not preclude me starting: knitting, sky-diving, travelling, moving…and writing.

My new mantra that I’ve been whispering to myself lately is: It’s not too late. All I need is my laptop, a Wayne Gretzky bobble-head and a very short refrigerator.

No, seriously. Butt in chair, write the words. It’s not too late.

Yay, me! I started a blog!

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Okay, so…this blog.

I have been blogging in my head forever. It takes me a million years to feel comfortable enough to actually do something that is so steep on the learning curve. But I want to do this more than anything…hmm, let’s see…are there any other hyperbolic generalizations I can add?

But really, what am I doing here and what do I intend to add to the blogosphere?

I intend to write about the things that are important to me. I want to write about writing and journal-keeping, about reading – and especially reading about writing or even reading about reading. Stories about stories, reading, writing – these things make me happy.

I want to write about life, memory, faith & family and about how they interweave in my head and in the physical world that I occupy.

No doubt stuff about getting older and our empty nest will make its way onto the page. Because that’s where I am. And to my surprise, though I’ve grown up and changed and (hopefully) matured, what I love and think about most of the time is still the same. Books, journals, family, memories, stories. And humor. Hopefully, I can make you smile. Smiling is my favorite.

Writing is my proof of life and my saving grace.

So, yeah…this blog.

Bonnie 2.067

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We Canadian babies born in 1967 are known as “Centennial Projects”, coming into this world in the year of our country’s 100th birthday.

I’m not sure if it’s because of this, but when I turned 50 a couple of years ago, the number 100 entered my mind – as a “goal”, a target per se. I have a tendency towards melancholy on the eve of any birthday but the night before my fiftieth I had a good cry to boot, knowing that youth and young adulthood and even middle age were now behind me.

I woke up the next day, already 50 years old, all my life having recognized that the turn happens in the middle of the night – I was a four-o’clock-in-the-morning-baby. The first thought (well, the first one after acknowledging that I wasn’t dead yet) was: “I have every intention of living to be a healthy 100-year-old. So yeah, I’m only halfway there!”

Think about it! What can I get done in another 50 years? Omigoodness…I could actually read all my favorite books again. I can travel to far-flung places like Egypt and Moosejaw. I can eat anything I want…well anything without dairy or gluten or other inflammatory, cancer-causing, dementia-inducing properties. (Right?) I can choose to watch an entire season of Friends in one sitting on Netflix…OR NOT. Because what’s that they say about fashion? If you lived through it the first time, you shouldn’t repeat it? Yeah, same goes for me with Friends. Been there, done that.

The point is, I want to look back and remember all the good things and even mull over what the bad things cost me or taught me. But I don’t want getting older to be a death sentence where I stop trying new things, stop growing, stop learning. If anything, getting older has hammered home that what won’t kill me will only make me stronger (or, at the very least, won’t kill me), that with great risk, sometimes comes great reward (sometimes hard knocks just learn you real good for next time) and above all you are alive until you are dead. So dammit, keep on swimming, Dory. (Which reminds me, I never did see Finding Nemo 2. THAT goes on the to-do list!)

And so, this blog. Before I turned 50, I said I was gonna start a blog. I had a false start (my not-so-famous one-post blog) and it has taken another two years to start again. Life is too short not to do the thing that I’ve been wanting to do, which is write. Or more specifically, put my writing out there. You know, use my outside voice. You can listen if you want to. It might get loud.