People Who Make a Difference
We all have them: those souls who, going about their daily lives, doing the best they can, change ours. Some of you who know me well have heard about this one before, but today, I felt like telling the rest of you about him. When I was a kid, the week before back-to-school meant riding our bikes over to the elementary school to check out the class lists taped up in one of the windows to see whose class we were going to be in. On that fateful day right before the beginning of grade five, a look at the lists left me quaking. This man, the stern, strict, terrifying vice-principal of our school, was to be my teacher: To say he didn’t suffer fools is probably an understatement. He had the kind of look, an old-school vice-principal look, that could quell misbehaviour without a single word, and we were all scared of him. But what none of us knew until we started getting to know him in his class was that he was passionate about language. He pulled it apart and put it back together and taught us to do the same. And while we worked, he played classical records on a scratchy old record player, too. I loved it. Loved knowing how sentences worked, loved understanding the rules and how I could bend them to my will once I knew what they were. I was mostly alone, I think. Other kids grumbled and groused about grammar lessons, but I revelled in them. Thirty years after being in his class, I still have my grade 5 grammar notebooks tucked away somewhere. That year changed me in ways I didn’t realize until much later. I became an English teacher, one who taught against the tide, closing my classroom door and, very unfashionably at the time, teaching my students the language to talk about this language of ours. I like to hope there are at least a couple of people out there who write better emails, at least, because I taught them how sentences work. When I moved on from teaching and became a writer, what he’d given me became even clearer. I play with language because I love it and because I can, and I can, at least in part, because all the stuff I’d picked up from being a bookworm made even more sense after he showed me why it was the way it was. For ages, I’ve been meaning to tell him. He’s getting old, and I didn’t want to leave it too late. When I missed last year’s reunion, I thought I’d talk to him at the retirement of a mutual friend this past June. He missed it for health reasons. Suddenly not leaving it too late became a bit more urgent. But I was a chicken. So much easier to run into him somewhere and seize the moment than create one out of nothing. But today, I was thinking about Judy Blume. (howzat for a non-sequitur?). She’s been a theme in my world this week, popping up at least four different times unexpectedly. And that got me thinking about the first time Amanda Palmer made me cry, at her show in Vancouver last year when she sang this: And I decided that if she could sit on stage and tell Judy and all of us, too, I could call Mr. Rawlins. So I did. This morning. When my books find a publisher, he’ll be there in the acknowledgements. I hope he’ll be around to see that, but I don’t know if he will be, so I told him today. I don’t know what he thought, but I’m glad I made the call. Share...
First Day of School Blues
It’s the first day of school here in BC, and my girl is off to her first hour as a grade seven, king of the heap here, where grade 7 is the last year of elementary school. She’s torn about back-to-school. Excited to see her friends and to be back, but sorry to see summer end and to have to get up to an alarm again, something of which neither of us is fond. While the easier work scheduling for me during the school year has its appeal, I am SO not ready for the summer to be over. Yes, I struggle to fit in as much work as I need to during the summer holidays, for sure. But I loved this summer. Loved going to sleep and getting up on my body’s schedule rather than an externally-imposed one. Loved balancing work with sitting on patios, having fun outings with my family, spending time with our best friends, and taking mini trips around our own area. Loved lazy afternoons reading and busy ones exploring. We played tourists in our own town and relaxed on a Gulf Island and did all sorts of other things, too. Summer was late in arriving after an almost non-existent spring here, and I’d happily take another month of setting our own agenda, exploring our world, and not worrying about having to be anywhere or have our family time interrupted by homework or school-night bedtime. Here are a few glimpses of what our summer looked like. One or two of these are from my terrible camera phone, so please excuse the quality. How was your summer? Share...
Chacun son goût
My next door neighbours are a couple in their eighties. They’re the best possible sort of neighbours to have in lots of ways. They’re quiet, friendly, warm, and exactly the sort whose home we happily watch when they’re away and who do the same for us. They’re also interesting people. They’re into everything from helping refugees to getting lots of exercise to writing poetry and self-publishing it for their families. They’re computer savvy and independent, and over the years, we’ve talked lots about books, because they’re avid readers. Until now, we’d only mentioned titles and authors to each other, but after a recent visit, I offered to lend her a couple of books I thought she might enjoy. I picked two: one I liked with a subject I thought would appeal to her, and one that ranks as one of my own favourite reads this year. I didn’t tell her anything about the books when I dropped them off. This morning, she brought them back. The first she liked well enough. She found the topic interesting, as I thought she would, and the writing solid. The second, a book I loved, she didn’t like at all. With an eye to making future suggestions she’d enjoy more, I asked her what she didn’t like about it, and she said she didn’t like the writing, that it got a bit better as she went along, but she just didn’t like it and didn’t really know why. She doesn’t mind reading outside her usual areas, she said, but likes good writing, first and foremost. (The implication, I suppose, was that this book wasn’t it.) Then she asked me what I thought of it. This book had me hooked from the beginning, and I think it’s beautifully written. She was very surprised when I told her it’s one of the best books I’ve read this year, and that I like the writing style, the characters, all of it. It was a very good reminder that reading is utterly subjective. One person’s favourite read is another’s wasted reading time. The variety of books available at any bookstore should be reminder enough of that, but it’s easy to forget, especially when you’re looking for someone to love your baby enough to publish it or if you get a poor review. So next time your work gets slammed in a review or you get one of those “not right for me” rejections, remember that that one was my neighbour, but the next one may be me, hand-selling your book to everyone I can talk into buying it because I loved it so much. Share...
Albums You Haven’t Heard Lately
I don’t know about you, but iTunes has certainly changed the way I listen to music at home. In the car, I’m usually a radio girl, so things are much as they’ve always been during drive time, but at home, listening to my own collection, shuffle has become my default setting. It’s different: I never know what’s coming next and the variety makes things interesting. And besides, in many cases I have only one or two songs by an artist, the ones I downloaded because I particularly like them, something I used to dream of being able to do when there was only one song I wanted on a $16 CD and my choices were buy it or don’t. But even with mostly positive change comes loss. Just as we’ve lost something of the joy of photography in not having to develop all the pictures on a roll of film to see the entirety of what we found worthy of our limited exposures, seeing the whole rather than the carefully-selected parts, I’d lost touch with the pleasure of listening to whole albums at once. The other day, I drove to a friend’s house on a winding mountain highway. Along the way, my usual radio stations still came in, but with lots of static. Anyone who’s ever driven anywhere beyond the range of a radio station with me knows I Can’t Stand That. It bothers me beyond any reasonable reaction. It’s been ages since I drove alone into a static zone (ie with no one in the passenger seat to take charge of searching for good reception while I concentrated on the road), so I reached over and hit the CD button on the stereo. The only time I ever use the CD player in the car is on a road trip. I knew there were long-ago-inserted disks in the CD changer in my ten-year-old car, but had no idea what I’d be listening to. What came on was an old Mary Chapin Carpenter album, Come On Come On. It’s the only CD of hers I ever owned. It was one of those random purchases years ago, because something about it appealed to me. Between the drive up to my friend’s house and back home again that day, I listened to it from start to finish, leaving it on even when I could easily have switched back to my default radio in the city. I was struck by how much more I enjoyed the whole than the individual songs that pop up from time-to-time on my iTunes shuffle. I’d forgotten the work that artists put into choosing the order of songs, the mood, the overall feel of their albums. I’m glad Mary reminded me. What are some of the albums you loved that you haven’t listened to from beginning to end in too long? Share...
Memorable Reads
Read anything good lately? I’ve been making a bit of a dent in my TBR pile. That’s not to say I haven’t added more to the pile as quickly as (*cough* more quickly than) I’ve taken some out, but still… The past few months of reading have brought a mix from meh to marvellous. Nothing I didn’t care to finish, which is a nice bonus, and a couple of excellent ones with characters and stories that have stayed with me, clear in my memory, long after putting them down. That’s rare, and I appreciate it. Here are a few, chosen for being memorable enough that they came easily to mind when I was sitting on my patio thinking about what I’d read recently: The Self-Preservation Society by Kate Harrison This is the second of Kate’s books I’ve read. In the first, Brown Owl’s Guide to Life, she impressed me with her handling of multiple points of view and a flashback timeline, too. This one has a simpler structure, but is also well written. It’s a little bit silly and a I’ve no idea how well she handled the medical subject matter, not knowing anything about brain injuries, but as a summer read, it was fun and I appreciated that the main character resisted changing. Don’t we all? Mariana by Susanna Kearsley Regular readers of my blog may remember the kudos I gave Susanna for her The Winter Sea. I loved this one, too. Within a few pages she had me absolutely hooked, and had my writer wheels turning trying to figure out how she’d done it. Once you’ve read it – not before – you should check out the lovely video Susanna has on her blog, sent to her by an Australian woman who reads Mariana over and over and over again. The Last Letter from Your Lover by Jojo Moyes I’d been eyeing this one for awhile, and finally bought it a couple of weeks ago. I had a feeling it would be something special, and it is. Definitely one of the best books I’ve read in a very long time. Jojo Moyes does a beautiful job with both the parts set in the early 1960s and the present day. Not unusual for my recent favourites to be British women’s fiction. (Yes, Susanna is Canadian, but her publisher, Allison and Busby, is in London.) I tend to love books that would fit handily in the soon-to-be-nonexistent “strong romantic elements” category of the RWA Rita awards, and many of the books I love best have been nominated for the British version, the Romantic Novel of the Year award from the Romantic Novelists Association. What’re your favourite recent reads? Share...
Reading Idiosyncrasies
I know people who always have several different books on the go, sometimes one for work, one for the car, one for home… I am not one of those people. When it comes to reading, I’m a serial monogamist, one book at a time. Reading my one book at a time today, I realized something else I do when I’m reading. Often, right in the middle of an emotionally-charged scene, especially an absorbing one, I’ll put the book down, sometimes even mid-sentence, to do something menial. Today, for example, I put my book down to lower the sun umbrella on my patio. It wasn’t something I needed to do in that moment, and I realized that it’s a habit I have, putting books down in the middle of their best parts to give me a few extra minutes to absorb the story and not let the scene rush by too quickly. Does anyone else do that? What are your reading habits? Do you read more than one book at a time? Zoom through the good bits or try to slow down and savour them? And then there’s the whole question of dog-earing or using a bookmark… Share...
On Being In Between
There are so many things that came to mind when I wrote the title for this blog post. I think we spend so much of our lives en route from one place to another, one stage to another, one goal to another, that “in between” is a fairly common state of being for most of us. But the in between I want to talk about today is being twelve. Remember twelve? Not a little kid anymore but not yet a teenager. Twelve, it turns out now that my own kid is there, is just as challenging today as it was when I knew just how many months it was until I was officially a teen. This post, though, isn’t philosophical, but practical. because there are two areas in particular that we’re finding even harder than they were when I was twelve: clothes and books. I’m hoping maybe someone out there has some suggestions. Like her friends, my twelve-year-old has her own sense of style. She knows what she likes and is very clear on what she doesn’t. The problem is, there is almost nothing for her to choose from, and not in a picky way, but a literal one. Style-wise, she’s too old for the kids’ stores, and what little might be appropriate of the stock in stores geared to young adults is almost all too big for her still. We can spend an afternoon shopping and find nothing for her to try on that’s even close to right for her, let alone anything to buy. (We did just this yesterday.) The tween market is huge, and they have money to spend. They’re outgrowing their clothes faster than we can keep up with, especially given the lack of stock to choose from. Why are retailers missing out on this goldmine? Or maybe it’s us. Please tell me we’re missing something and you know of a great place to get age-appropriate, well-fitting, cool clothes for girls that won’t bankrupt us. Anyone? Books are another issue. My girl is a reader. She stays up later than she should nearly every night because she gets lost in a book, and there’s nothing she likes better than a lazy weekend morning when she can stay in bed reading for hours. A trip intoVancouver inevitably includes a stop at the “good” Chapters, where she can usually find a book or several. But it’s becoming harder and harder to find books for her the more she depletes the available stock. Here’s the thing: she doesn’t like fantasy. Have you looked at the teen shelves lately? Admittedly, she’s a bit picky about her books (aren’t we all?). But what she most likes to read is contemporary fiction about girls her age or a bit older than she is. Not historical or mysteries or fantasy or magic or, heaven forbid, vampires. She’s outgrown and/or read most of the contemporary stuff in the 9-12 section, but isn’t quite ready for the teen contemporary fiction with protagonists who are finishing high school, having sex, dealing with grown-up stuff. She’s read a few that skirt the edge of that, but isn’t there yet. She chooses her own books and put down at least ten at Chapters yesterday after reading the back because they felt “too old”. She does occasionally branch out from her favourite genre. She loved Hunger Games and Eric Walters’s We All Fall Down. But what she’s drawn to in the bookstore is Susin Nielsen’s Dear George Clooney, books by Julia DeVillers and Joanna Philbin to name a couple I can think of off the top of my head. She likes series about dancers and camp and that kind of stuff. Any thoughts on great contemporary young teen fiction that might suit her? Thanks for any thoughts you may have on this! Share...
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