studio - behind the scenes

Memoir writing

Is that what I’m doing? I’ve collected many stories from many people – about my father, about the ranch – and am puzzling about how to get at the truth when it’s different for everyone. It’s like having a pocket full of nickels. You put your hand in and they all feel the same, but when you pull them out and examine them, you see slight differences in age, lustre, abrasion, sometimes country of origin. The oldest of them have twelve edges, twelve angles! But you have asked for them and they’ve been proffered with the expectation that you will take them at face value. Getting below the surface is the challenge! I am more accustomed to “Ars Poetica”, writing that is “Dumb/As old medallions to the thumb”.

a cross country writing retreat

Via Train 2 between Kamloops and Jasper

Blue River Dawn – a diversion

When I first raised the blind in my sleeping cabin the darkness outside was complete. One and then two logging trucks slid past in the distance, like jeweled ships. Slowly the grey serpentine form of the train became discernable, meandering along the Blue River through the black and white landscape. The candy coloured train signals came and went. The train’s yellow headlight is dimmed by the dawn. Now I see that the clouds have come down to meet the mountains.

slow art

….really slow! Two years ago I finished my altered-book-poem-setting on the Montreal Massacre after working on it off an on for eight months (almost a baby!) Two years ago was the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I started sketching ideas for an assemblage-poem-setting about Peace. Two years! It just seemed so much easier to drag out “off and on” during the pandemic. Time became ropey, like toffee, or sludge. But now, I am taking advantage of writer’s block by making a serious start to this project, hoping the physical piece and the accompanying poem with inform and inspire each other. I am going to reread some Theatre of the Absurd as research (what could be more absurd than war and peace and war and peace and…) If anyone has a dusty volume of Beckett, Ionesco or Genet I’d be happy of the loan.

the cause and effect of writer’s block

these white butterflies
how to write about them
without killing them

A study in white-for Hiroshima.

Twenty years worth of journals are a double-edged razorblade. Looking back, some cut, some shine. Ten years ago I wrote, “Here is a blank page, waiting for whatever I turn it into. This would be a good way to expunge the “me” from my writing, as Anne Carson said on Writers and Co. She was studying John Cage and attention to one thing…the colour of blue of the lines on this page? November grey blue. Slate. Sharp as the sound of true chalk on true slate. The colour of blue on lined paper varies, but not the maraschino cherry red margin line. What if I write only in the margin? Marginalia on a blank page”

And “All that comes up (visually) is the empty-mind-room of yesterday morning’s not-dreaming-sleep. There was something indescribably attractive about that waking dream state’s familiar emptiness. It was grey-blue-green. That’s all. Maybe it was more a feeling than an image. Maybe it was something between the two.”

Ten years later I am again working with white, with absence, this time fabric, prototyping a setting for a poem (yet to be written) with fabric instead of paper. It’s been two years I’ve been off and on this piece about the hibakusha, the “explosion-affected people” of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and their dead compatriots, reduced to white outlines on the ground.

but is it art?

I went to The Workroom in Toronto, looking for something else, of course, and spied a Merchant & Mills pattern (from Britain) for a woman’s boilermaker suit. I had 6 yards of fabric that I had retrieved from my late aunt’s place, that she had bought at, yes, Simpson’s….

…buttons from an old trenchcoat, linings from an old shirt…

…all I was missing was a boiler to make. However, I do have 2 acres, busy with biting insects, that are in constantly call out for sculpting and shaping. So my new suit, materials $0, labour $2,000+, serves the art and beauty of my garden palette.