“Neither Far Out Nor In Deep” – Robert Frost nails it

 

 

During these pandemic days of summer, I'm living a safely isolated life on a shore, near water.

Safe. Isolated. Away from my safely isolated kids, my newborn grandson, my close family and friends. Being careful and responsible. Sigh.

 

Living an isolated life means you have a lot of time to think about things, especially during a period packed with so much fear, so many unknowns. When listening to or reading the news is like submitting to a daily bludgeoning. When it feels like there’s no end in sight.

 

Yes, it makes you think. Sometimes too much.

 

Right now, the best place for me to think is near water. What is it about staring out at unknown depths that helps me find comfort? Maybe it’s the feeling of permanence along with change – waves, tides, horizon, sky. Day in, day out, but every time I look, the scene transforms.

 

“The people along the sand,” wrote Robert Frost, “All turn and look one way. They turn their back on the land. They look at the sea all day.”

 

That’s me. Staring out at the sea and wondering when this fraught pandemic time will ease back into something approaching normal – or, as I like to call it, The Beforetime.

 

“They cannot look out far. They cannot look in deep,” Frost wrote. “But when was that ever a bar to any watch they keep?”

 

Lots of questions, and few answers, but people just turn away from “the land” – a stark, unchanging reality – and keep looking, hoping, believing that the answers are out there.

 

Or in the context of pandemic times, that we’ll learn to live safely with the virus, find a vaccine, kick its butt, get on with “normal” life and leave this “land” behind us.

 

Until then, like Frost’s “people along the sand”, I’ll turn my back on the land, do my part, and keep watch for something better.

Writing, basketballs, and rain on a tarp

Outdoor office - and just on the other side of that
hedge are basketballs....

There was a debate on CBC’s "The Next Chapter" recently about whether it’s better to write with music playing in the background or not. Some writers can work while a musical sountrack plays in the background, and some can’t.

I can’t.

Well, not completely true. I can – if the music doesn’t have words, and if what I’m working on doesn’t require the streneuous stretching of my creative muscles.

A friend of mine writes to jazz. I know another writer who has the CBC French station Espace Musique playing (she doesn’t understand French, so it’s all just a tapestry of lovely cadences and music to her).

But sounds of any sort are a problem for me. They have to be just right, or I’m distracted. At their worst, sounds can irritate me. Forget any kind of productive writing when the dog is barking, for instance. Or – my favourite – when the neighbour kids start bouncing their basketball on their driveway, just a few metres from our open windows, or the deck, where I love to work in the summer.

Basketballs – they are symbolic of the intrusion that unwanted sound makes into my writing life. They’re bounced by people, and I like to write in solitude. They make a repetitive, reverberating, rhythmic pattern of sound not unlike the maddening drip of a leaky faucet or, as I like to describe it, Chinese water torture.

And it is torture for me. Bounce, bounce, bounce. 

I can feel anxiety rising every time I’m enjoying the natural sounds of my back deck, and I hear the neighbour’s door slam.

Someone has come outside.

Nothing, then…

Bounce, bounce, bounce, clunk (ball through hoop). Bounce, bounce, bounce, clunk. Over and over.

And over. And over.

But I’m the first person to say the sounds of kids playing are good sounds (Hey, I’m a mother, after all). So as much as I would like to stand up on the edge of my deck and holler over the cedar hedge “Can you please give us a break over here?”, I don’t. Of course I don’t.

Instead, I shut up and went looking for an app.

No, not an app that yells at kids over the hedge. It’s an app that allows me to mask the annoying sounds around me with soothing natural sounds. That’s what it’s called – Nature Sounds.

And the Rain on a Tarp track is perfect. Percussive enough to cover the bouncing basketball, and familiar enough to invoke the sounds of rain on a tent roof, camping, solitude, nature.

It's a fabricated natural world, of course, but it works. Be gone, basketballs! Or that loud TV. Or traffic. Or people talking. Rain on a Tarp allows me to retreat to my own writing space, with a soundtrack that supports rather than disturbs.

A tent roof, camping, solitude, nature...

The good, the bad, and the ugly: Reviews that help or hurt

A few months ago, I went looking for people to review my books.

It was a bit scary, because a long time ago, my first novel, Wild Dog Summer, was trashed by a reviewer in a highly-respected journal of children's literature. It was a terrible review - paralyzed me for weeks! - but I got over it, and my book continued to resonate with young readers and their teachers. In fact, the publisher continued to print and sell Wild Dog Summer across Canada for ten more years. During that time, many envelopes stuffed with enthusiastic reader responses arrived in the mail.

So does a review really matter? Well, yes, I think it does. A review gets readers' attention, for better or for worse, and after a few years of being less than noticed, I figured it was time. I put the word out on this blog and in the Twittersphere: I'm looking for reviewers.

CM: Canadian Review of Materials, a publication from the University of Manitoba, agreed to review my two novels, Wild Dog Summer (now re-issued by my own imprint, Pugwash Publishers) and The Toymaker's Son. The review appears in the current issue, and while the reviewer didn't gush, she certainly picked up on the important themes in the books and pointed out their goods points. And their bad points. Unfortunately for me, the "Recommended with reservations" falls far short of my expectations.

This isn't a completely sad story, however.  I was also approached by Sarah Butland, a writer, blogger and reviewer from Moncton, New Brunswick, who wanted to interview me and review The Toymaker's Son for her blog.

Sarah is a writer herself, with a particular interest in promoting literacy, writing, and a love of reading. Her website is full of prompts, suggestions and information for kids, parents, writers - anyone who gets a buzz from the written word.

Here's Sarah's review of The Toymaker's Son, and here's the interview (which includes my strategies for avoiding procrastination, views on how to hook reluctant readers, opinions of school reading lists, my 92-year-old uncle's description of the role of e-books...and more).

Thanks for the opportunity to talk about my writing life, Sarah!

So the good (getting some positive attention), the bad (reviews not meeting expectations) and the ugly (Recommended with Reservations): such is the life of a writer. Imagination, talent, discipline, and a very thick skin required.