by Shawna Lemay
I had come to the forest to look for the small and new green thing hiding inside me but kept finding feathers, resting elegantly in the crooks of branches, on a tuft of grass, and amid last year’s leavings.
My relationship to the forest is one of need. When I feel that no one cares about me, that they have more regard for others, the forest cares for me. I come to the forest worried about my posture. When I’m trying to feel less awful I cling to it.
When I’m in the forest it’s mine but I know it belongs to others in similar indecipherable ways. Some of the traces of these beings are subtle, a broken branch across a trail, or a wayward sapling woven with other saplings to clear the path. Some of the traces are more violent, trees pushed down or broken off and stacked to make shelter. Shopping carts and small tents appear and disappear. The forest sustains wounds but the trees and undergrowth are wily, healing themselves, thickening, and in certain areas the wild roses have been deployed. At times I see it as a small laboratory for chance observances. At other times it seems a sign of things to come. When I walk through these maimed and maltreated trees, I’m also walking through the expanse of my childhood forest, which was large enough to become lost in. I’m pretending.
I also pretend this is enough for me, that it will do, because I have an imagination. But there is also a fear, not of wolves, or men with axes, or that I’ll be tempted by gingerbread, but that one day this is all that will be left.
Writing is Easy
***
I’ve been thinking about creative incubation, about how one’s needs evolve through time. Or, our needs evolve, but also remain the same. Or, maybe our lives evolve and we become wilier at meeting the needs of creative incubation.
I’ve always needed my own room, silence, and time to meditate myself into a writing trance. To do this I need some hours before I come to the page, sometimes over the course of a few days, when I read and sometimes copy out lines from work that is relevant to what I want to write, whether rhythmically, or formally, or because of the subject matter, or because I feel attuned to the same frequencies as a particular author. So, the minimum: time to read, and re-read, and sit with, and stare out into space, holding a sentence or two belonging to someone else in my mouth.
Before sitting down to write, it’s helpful if I’ve taken a long walk, and cleared my head of the voices of others. Photographing things on a walk sometimes helps with that.
Here’s the truth of it:
It’s good if you haven’t for some time been in contact with anyone who depletes you or who gives you things to worry about or who makes demands on you or makes you feel lousy or who tells you everything but listens to nothing. With luck no one you love will become ill or require hospitalization. There will be no obligatory functions. No one will write you a flaming email or have a baby or a hernia or need a drive to the airport at an early hour. No one will guilt trip you or make you feel like writing is stupid or that your writing in particular is stupid. Nothing will break down and you will not receive an unexpected bill. You will not be afflicted with insomnia. Your car will purr like a kitten and you will not be rear ended in a parking lot.
You will listen to the right music. No old friend from junior high will call you up out of the blue and want to get together for coffee to talk about their novel that they’ve been working on for ten years. The traffic sounds will be minimal. The weather nice, but not too nice. Your allergies will not flare up. The weeds in the garden will not suddenly proliferate. The birds will sing, but not too loudly. You will be happy, but not too happy. There will be a good stock of wine in the pantry, but not too good.
You will be well rested. The phone will not ring. You will remember to turn off the email and block all the social network sites. You will have had enough time alone, not too much time alone. The neighbor’s cat will not have disappeared and they will not be opening the door and calling its ill-conceived name plaintively. Your dog will not eat a sock or swallow whole the sandwich in the Ziploc bag left at the bus stop by some teenager.
It’s a wonder, really, that anyone makes it to the page at all. But, you know, once you get there, writing is easy, as has been said. You just open a vein and bleed.
Cupcake, Tiger, Dove
***
Midway through writing your book you begin talking to it and calling it sweetheart names. My little darling, cupcake, tiger, dove. Simultaneously, you begin to imagine the rejection letters you will receive for it. We regret to inform you that we will not be accepting submissions until three years hence. Some editors are more personal and will wish you had written a book similar to the one you have written but not quite, and will encourage you to rewrite and resubmit at which time they will not remember you. Others will ask that you cut your lamb chop in half. Still others will suggest plumping it up. Or. If you ever expand on the themes you have hinted at on page 37, I would be inclined to look at such a manuscript. Although your manuscript is exactly the sort of manuscript I should like to publish and really should publish it is not the sort of manuscript that will sell and therefore I cannot publish your manuscript. Not once is your book spoken about with any affection, but at least the rejections are composed in a style to ease your regrets.
National Poetry Month
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The poets who have been passed over for readings and festivals and awards are having secret meetings in bars and libraries and coffee shops. We don’t have to comb our hair or wonder what to wear to poetry readings. We don’t have to clap politely or practice reading our poems out loud to the dog and we don’t have to think about projecting or being funny or entertaining or being a good sport when the bookstore forgets to order a copy of the poems we spent three years writing. We remind ourselves that to be a poet in the spring is a decrepit blessing. We remind ourselves that we have time to do what we love, we remind ourselves how good it is to let ourselves go a little wild, a little frowzy. We work, we listen to birds, we watch the leaves unfurl, we witness the quiet jubilation of the trees awakening. We are enkindled.
Book Club
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Rarely do they ever like the ending. Titles, dubious. Half of the people love the book and the other half don’t though may be swayed. There is difficulty in remembering the names of characters. Everyone wishes for the author to attend the meeting until they read the book. Those who don’t like the book often will not attend. Once I attended a book club meeting where my own book was discussed. One person forgot I was there and said why she didn’t like it and then sort of apologized. More disconcerting was the person who said nothing the entire time.
Chairs and Writing
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When I can’t write at the kitchen table, I sit in the gray velvet chair I found one Thursday morning at Winners and which is in the corner of my study. And when I can’t write there I try the chaise longue upstairs, which is covered in gray blankets because of its threadbare state. If that doesn’t work and it happens to be summer, I will sit outside on one of the weathered teak chairs that when purchased, we said of them, “they will last forever!” From here, I move to my desk and the slightly uncomfortable chair. I like all of these seating arrangements equally but I have to admit sometimes I abandon chairs and lie down on my bed and take a nap.
Summer Reading List
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The first summer reading list is said to have been compiled by a librarian at the Boston Public library in 1894 for The Boston Globe newspaper. There have long been those devising lists of light and breezy books for idlers, silly romantics, and beach readers, and others who moralize about those who read them, it seems. I worry less about what is light and what is heavy. Having a summer reading list means I will also have to make a winter reading list and so I begin by worrying about which books will keep me warm and which ones will cool me off. I make the list hoping I’m going to read all the books. Knowing some of the books will be bad and I’ll have to abandon them half way thr
ough. Some of them will be less bad than boring and I’ll read them wondering if there is a point when they will stop being boring and start being rewarding so that I may revise my opinion as I read. Other books will be immediately fantastic and captivating and I’ll want to tell my friends about them even before I finish the first chapter. Some of the books will be astonishingly good and might change my life and some might inspire me to write. The worst books are the ones so exquisite they will make me feel like I should quit writing my own books. These are also the best books. I dream of the season where I read nothing but this last sort of book. But even in my dream I can’t decide if it’s spring or fall. Am I moving toward winter, or summer?
Minor Ghosts
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I want to adopt the tone of European poems in translation. Cynical and wry, wise and sorrowful, but with that sprig of unspoken hope. But what right do I have to say things like, “I don’t think one ever recovers from life.” Even my ghosts are minor. Part time workers, above minimum wage, they belong to a decent union. My ghosts are silent, and gaunt, and look on with tenderness and a mild regret. They don’t even have their own ghosts. Every few weeks they indulge in flowers, tasteful bouquets tied with raffia, wrapped in colourful tissue paper. They don’t see any point in inhabiting poems and only once in a while take the time to copyedit them.
Superstition
***
I was writing in my diary this morning about having not written anything when I suddenly wrote something. I wrote that I haven’t written anything in months and so this means I’m not a writer. I only feel I can call myself a writer when I’ve quite recently been writing. To other people, of course, I go on saying I’m a writer. That is, if anyone asks, which they usually do not. It’s easier than explaining these sad feelings of failure and hope intermingled with doom. It’s easier than explaining my superstition that by not calling myself a writer, the writing might come back.
Even a remarkably small patch of writing makes it possible to call myself a writer.
All Summer Long, Flowers
***
Now is the time to gather and bring in flowers, now is the time to love your life as poor as it is. To search for radiance. To tell yourself stories about how utterly gorgeous your life is, no matter how difficult.
Nearly the end of summer, feels like fall. There are many poems about this time of year, and I dog-eared a few earlier in the season, but can’t find them now. Poems about the way summer breaks you down. Poems saying, it was enough and it was not enough. I want more. I can’t take any more. Poems about the slow opening of sunflowers, and then the way they droop and how heavy they become, how gloriously frayed they are at the end.
“There are always flowers for those who want to see them,” said Henri Matisse, and I do, yes I do.
A sunflower seed I planted in a pot at the beginning of summer has steadily climbed toward the sky, a spindly 8 feet tall. September now, and I have hope that it will yet have time to bloom.
All summer long I take photos of flowers, photos anyone could snap. I take them because flowers touch me and speak mystery. I’m especially fond of dahlias, begonias, and roses, each with unique petals. The shape, the opacity, and textures, are all so different from each other.
I take them to remind myself to pay attention and to intensify my knowledge regarding the limitations of my understanding of light. I’m trying to understand aspects of the natural world without words as a means of breaking into my subconscious.
I live in a city that’s been called ugly by several famous writers. And I live in the suburbs where the houses are a bit too big and the garages are in front of the house. Because of this backdrop, I have to get in close with my camera, and in the summer most of the photos are of flowers in my yard. Early mornings neighbors might see me outside barefoot in my pajamas and gray housecoat, leaning over a yellow-centered begonia.
I think of Merton’s description of the “great work of sunrise.” The sacred work of noticing the sunrise, and all it finds and rests upon and moves through. My spindly sunflower, for example.
How can you inquire after your own place in the world, asks Merton, if you’re not awake to this? If you don’t first cry out to this beauty and daily miracle. A willingness to be perceived as odd and to know that not everyone will like you or what you make and to be okay with that can be a late arriving gift.
I witness the sunrise and its affects on the trees and flowers in my backyard for years and I compare the refinement and sometimes regressions of my seeing it in that space. At the same time I observe the movement of connections among people we know and between us, as well. How through time we move closer to, and then further away from each other. Unexpected kindlings, and unexpected distancings.
It’s as difficult to get to know you in the same way as it is difficult to understand light and flowers.
I struggle with what might determine accuracy of sight and whether there are correlations between how we know each other and how we see ordinary details of things. I photograph flowers as evidence of having cried out. When I read about a flower in a novel or a poem I underline the passage. The abundance of literary flowers reassures me and I feel less nervous about existing.
All summer I have looked intently at bees snuggling blossoms, but I’ve also thought about their lives in between flowers. Who sees them in flight? They’re difficult to notice in the air but we know them by their arrivals.
Because the snow can begin falling anytime, I collect some of the remaining flowers from my garden and bring them inside where I assemble the year’s final bouquet. There are sunflowers, red poppies, a pink dahlia, a geranium, green hydrangeas, and that one late blooming rose. I press flowers in books even if they’ve been there all along. I wonder if there are books without flowers, without the mention of a single flower but this distresses me, and I continue to place rose petals between pages. Who would write an entire book and not mention a single bloom, a single petal?
All summer long, flowers. And all winter long the path through the garden is inward. A time to learn to be awake to the flowers within. What is there to fear? I’ve come to understand the soul is a flower with which to bless the world.
Jenny Holzer’s Truisms on Movie Theatre Marquees
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A question behind the Truisms: if you had one opportunity to say something on a marquee, what would it be?
If I Had One Opportunity To Say Something On A Movie Marquee, What Would It Be?
***
Align yourself with the poetry of the everyday.
Or, no. Wait, wait. It would say this:
F L O W E R
Acknowledgements and Dedication
***
I’m immensely grateful for the support of the Edmonton Arts Council.
With thanks to Lee, Barb, Kimmy, Nina, Annette.
Thank you to my brilliant editor and publisher Aimée Parent Dunn, fabulous copy editor Ginger Pharand, and talented cover designer Dawn Kresan.
This one is, as always, for Rob and Chloe, who show me how to flower every day.
Author Bio
***
photography credit: ROBERT LEMAY
Shawna Lemay is the author of the bestselling novel Rumi and the Red Handbag. She has written six books of poetry, a book of essays, and an experimental novel. All the God-Sized Fruit, her first book, won the Stephan G. Stephansson Award and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Calm Things: Essays was shortlisted for the Wilfred Eggleston Award for Non-Fiction. She writes the popular blog Transactions With Beauty. She lives in Edmonton.
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