musings

I have a creative spirit within me. She lives, she breathes, she hopes, she wonders at. She is an integral part of my being.

Being a woman and a writer in this world, I have experiences every day that feed my creative spirit. Going to the grocery store, hearing snippets of conversation as I push my cart through the vegetable and fruit aisle. A mother talking to her small boy as he walks beside her, gnawing on an apple.

Sitting in a coffee shop where two women at the next table are planning a trip to Paris together. They are grey-haired. One has a cane leaning on her chair. Why Paris? Are they long-time friends? I hear snippets of their conversation that tell me this is a dream they’ve followed for a long time.

Sometimes my own imagination takes the experiences in a day and begins to unravel what-ifs that become ideas on a page. The part of me who is at play is my ever-present curiosity, giving her/it spaciousness and room to wonder.

My own subconscious can whirl my mind into a place of magic, enamoured by a character who appears from the mists of memory or imagination, walking into my life  as though she’s been waiting for me to notice her. Emmaline Cartwright was that character — she lived and breathed her way into my novel, Tell It True, a professor of North American colonial history. Now she is a woman who others discover as they read her story. That’s what my creative spirit wants to do: give form and shape to the imaginations and possible dreams of readers.

Lately, another quality of experience has been fostering my creative spirit.

I lived in Central Oregon for nearly fourteen years. The reasons I moved there from my Ontario town all those years ago is a story in itself that can be told later. Suffice it to say, I experienced a new life filled with story, and writing, and love.

And… I experienced the mountains, the snow covered Cascades, the Three Sisters sitting not far off in the distance. Each day I sat to write, they greeted me.

Living near those mountains fed my creative spirit. They created a sense of solitude and aliveness, and provided a sanctuary for my visionary soul.

I left those mountains four months ago and made my way back to Ontario, and, now… I have lush woods outside my window. Soon there’ll be trilliums laying a carpet under the trees. These woods, like the mountains, nourish my creative spirit. The steadfastness of the trees wait as I sit with my story. They don’t ask me to rush, get it done. It’s early spring, the buds are there within the branches with assurance they will become leaves. Like Emmaline Cartwright, characters and their lives are within me, waiting to become story.

My creative spirit couples with the solitude of the mountains, the assurance of the trees, and together we create story.

When my husband Jerry died, I wondered if I’d ever see the stars again, laugh in outbursts that he called seismic, wonder at poetry. And… a poem found me…

What Fire comes to Sing in You

This blessing wanted to open your eyes to the joy that lives in such strange company with sorrow. Wanted to make sure to tell you lest you forget, that no matter how long it seems absent, no matter how quiet it becomes, joy has never been far from you, holding a space of celebration, watching for you, humming as it keeps vigil. Look -your life a candle this day a match. Strike it and see what blazes, what fire comes to sing in you.

From The Cure for Sorrow, by Jan Richardson 2020.

Grief became a fire singing in me because I discovered grief has a bond with memory. And memory has a pact with my creative spirit.

One day last week I decided to wander, something I hadn’t done, it seemed, for years — not wandering through a forest, or a garden, but a street where bookstores and coffee shops welcomed me. Where dogs lay with an aura of contentment, at the feet of their women friends, where tables and shelves covered in piles of used books sat at the entrances of bookshops, the way they might at Shakespeare and Company. My wandering became a walk into the past, to those times when my husband Jerry and I had traveled to our favorite place in the world: Paris, France. 

I let myself go to that place of memory. Our apartment on Rue des Rosiers where we stayed that December 2012 in Paris. We were in our seventies, married six months, and Paris welcomed us like thirty-year-olds.

My memories are inextricably linked to the love we shared and they are my companion in loss. Thus the memories of Shakespeare and Company on Rue de Buchêrie in Paris came into view as I wandered through my hometown last week. 

Memories of Jerry, sipping on French coffee as he sat in the outdoor cafe with ultra strong, just the way he liked it, and with me wandering through the aisles of shelves at Shakespeare & Co., books falling off piles, stairs leading to more rooms filled to overflowing. All the memories of that time were there as I wandered on the street in my hometown, memories touching my skin, surrounding me, giving me Paris.

My grief, in all her colors of sadness, confusion, and perplexity, found a memory of Paris and unexplained buoyancy on that ordinary street in my hometown, where a bookstore with a coffee shop called out to me. 

I wonder, if I pay attention to my creative spirit and grief asking me to notice, will I continue to wander? Will I come upon possibilities only imaginable because memory has given me new eyes, and a renewed commitment to life?

I can see Jerry’s grin, and I can hear him…

“Good job, Mil.”

Today I wandered unexpectedly into my past. I was attempting to tidy my writing office, a room which sits on the second floor of our house and looks out to the Cascades Three Sisters Mountains.

 I set out to rearrange boxes of research articles, old manuscripts and short stories I’d written twenty years ago. Not wanting to lose them, I placed the short stories close to my desk in a file box marked possibilities. Who knows? There could be the essence of a new novel within those pages. 

However, in the midst of my ‘so-called’ clean out, I discovered a file of educator magazines – including, lo and behold, one in which I’d published an article in 1997.

I’d forgotten about my first foray into writing for publication, and I sat down and to read through my article once again. It was titled Tough Times, Resilient People. I’d written this piece inspired by a greeting card that had sat on my desk for a few months…the words on the card spoke to me at the time I bought it, and from then on, I’d kept it within my gaze.

At that time, the phrases on the card resonated for me for all the vagaries of life. Now I realize they speak through me as a writer, and in this way, through my characters. 

The words said:

“I get up,
I walk,
I fall down,
meanwhile I keep dancing.”

Twenty-eight years ago, I wrote the words below in my article:

“Gain the courage to reveal hopes and take on possibilities even in the midst of unrest; regain and nurture a sense of curiosity-hold and nourish your ever-present capacities for resilience and creativity.”

When I wrote these words I was an elementary school principal, into my thirty-sixth year as an educator. And now, in my life as a writer, I call upon those same capacities within myself and my characters: Martha and Anna in Out of Place, Casey in Those We Left Behind, Bridget and Sophie in the Shelter of Each Other, and soon, Emmaline and Kate Robinson in Tell It True.

Remarkably, each of these women represent the ideas and the values I wrote about in 1997. Could it be that I’m still writing about human qualities that give us a way forward?

 Just as these women in my novels find their way through the complexities of the unknown, through chaos that can bring despair and ultimately resolution, I find my way as a woman enlivened and a writer inspired.

Writing gives me a kind of saving grace – the link between resilience and the creative spirit.

Tell it True, my new novel (coming soon!), is fiction.

Jeannette de Beauvoir quotes a journalist friend in her piece entitled “Is Fiction a Lie?”: “Reporters write about facts, novelists write about truth.”

I wonder, though, when does fiction become truth?

Truths about being human—loyalty, courage, betrayal, forgiveness, hope, despair, misunderstanding, outrage, joy—all can be conveyed in the ground of a story.

All that it is to be human is written into the story of 21^st century Emmaline Cartwright and 18^th century Kate Robinson, fictional women living in real worlds where real life happened in real time.

Emmaline Cartwright is a professor of North American Colonial History—a fictional character, to be sure. Yet she has feelings and life moments that I as an author and a woman know about, and that I’ve experienced. I hope readers will say, “I understand. I’ve been there.”

Emmaline arose from my imagination, and she quickly became real. The truths revealed about her despair, her restlessness, her unrealized life, and her hopes all coalesce to become someone readers might know, or understand from somewhere inside themselves.

But what of Kate Robinson, a Loyalist woman living during the American War of Independence, who unravels her life and transforms the predictable into the unpredictable? How much can we as readers, currently living our present-day lives, relate to her, a fictional woman living in an era we only read about in history books?

Historian and Loyalist expert Janice Potter-MacKinnon writes, “While it is common to lament the fact that women are often denied their rightful place in history, it is only rarely that historians have the opportunity to trace the process by which this occurs. The Loyalist women who left the frontiers of the American colonies in the late 1770s and 1780s, and were resettled in what is now eastern Ontario, offer historians such an opportunity. Patriot and British records show the significant role these women played in the American Revolution on the Northern Front.” (While the Women Only Wept: Loyalist Refugee Women in Eastern Ontario. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003.)

So my writing work is cut out for me: to write the story of Kate Robinson living in a turbulent time, making life-changing decisions, and also to, as accurately as possible, put my reader in her 18^th century shoes, grounded in her times.

Emmaline Cartwright finds herself in the depths of Kate’s story. Time separates these two women, but the truths of themselves they hold as women entwine their stories.

The theme of life as an ongoing truth-telling expedition underlies my new novel, a novel that revealed for me truths about my own journey.

To be continued…

It’s 1784. The war of independence is over, and Kate Robinson has decided it’s time to go. Her home is a farm in Tryon County, New York State, but it no longer feels like home. Kate is a Loyalist, later to become part of United Empire Loyalists in Upper Canada.

Kate is a character in my new novel, but she is also someone who has lived within my imagination for the last three years, if not well before that. She grew from my desire to know more about these people called Loyalists who left America to trek north to Nova Scotia and Upper Canada.

Crown land in Canada was typically allotted according to which Loyalist regiment a man had fought in. But Kate did the unheard of: she left with her three children – Charlotte, Molly and Alexander – with no husband accompanying her. She traveled north to a Loyalist resettlement that ultimately became present-day Ontario. Roughly 10,000 refugees went to Quebec (including the Eastern Townships and modern-day Ontario). Nova Scotia (including modern-day New Brunswick) received three times that number: some 35,000 to 50,00 Loyalist refugees.

The Loyalist story has intrigued me for years, throughout high school senior history into my undergrad Canadian history courses. Not until three years ago did I venture forth to mine the fascination I have had for that period of Canadian history.

Accompanying me in my journey (and equally engrossed in the story of Kate) was Emmaline Cartwright, professor of Colonial North American History at an Eastern Ontario university.

These two women across time – Emmaline in 2012, a history professor fascinated with the Loyalist story, and Kate in 1784, a Loyalist herself – were the characters who drew me in to write this novel. From that point, research and imagination stepped in.

I’m an intuitive writer, which means I put pen to paper or fingers to keys and let the characters begin to tell their stories. I write in chapters and, as I move along, I make notes about fact checking and research. Some days I feel untethered, meaning my logical brain wants a destination – those days, I set time aside find an article, read a section of a book, research the era, just to satisfy that voice who needs a path. Often, when I go to the research, a surprise piece of information will fall into my lap that enhances my character’s story.

I’d written about five chapters, all belonging to Emmaline, when I discovered Kate. I shifted into a dual timeline, and Kate appeared on the page in 1784. She was writing in her journal.

Throughout the process, I’ve met (Zoomed) with my coach Jaclyn on a regular basis – her encouragement to follow my intuition has been a lighthouse. Our ways of writing and ways of being complement one another, which is a crucial part of my writing life.

I’m a later-in-life author…which is a whole other topic I’ll come to next time. Let’s just say: If you are yearning to write and you’re wondering, “Am I too old to follow a passion?”

Do it. Today. Emmaline and Kate are a testament to my foray into my older years as a writer/author. Their story is called “Tell It True.”

I overheard someone in a restaurant say, “Humans are difficult.” I wonder, are we difficult? Possibly. Sometimes. Or are we enclosed inside our own worlds searching out common threads that will connect us beyond our own skin, and give us a sense of belonging?  

Do the stories in my life carry shades of kinship to your life stories? 

There is a story in all of us, because we are story-makers, and some of us, storytellers.

As I write another story, another novel, it’s clearer to me now, more than I’ve ever experienced that I need to tell stories, and that those I write are coming from deep within me. How does that make me any different from anyone else who lives a life, feels a story? It doesn’t. But my story is coming from where I live. My story holds particular people, particular ways of being inside a personal world that creates my unique being, just as your personal being is creating your unique self. No one, not one person has the same combination of events, the same coming together of experiences, the same colour of hopes, the same invention of a day, the same quality of regrets and yet, we all want to find the threads of connection, among us, whether with families, with friendships, with the check-out person in the grocery store. And…we want someone, someday to witness the essence of ourselves, and understand the remarkable bravery of being who we’ve chosen to be.

What disparities we experience. 

Yet in the midst of my words as I sit here, surrounded by nature, I experience such connection and paradox.

Might it be that creating a novel about two women — Emmaline, a history professor in 2012, Kate a Loyalist woman in 1791 — who live in different eras, has opened a channel for me as a writer and a woman where I feel that the kinships with the past  are possible, that a human closeness can be  entangled within differences of times, of eras, of experiences — even though we are difficult humans.

Kate and Emmaline’s lives are my unique creation; their creation a composite of me.

“Whatever inspiration is, 
it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’”
— Wislawa Symborska

When I was thinking about the novel that would become “The Shelter of Each Other,” several things happened out of the blue.  

My paternal Grandmother, Gran Wilson, drifted into view.  I started looking for her on Ancestry.com and instead of reading only information about date of birth, date of death, I decided to dig further. To my wonder I rediscovered the family that, for all these years, I believed had been her adoptive family. While they did eventually adopt her, at eleven years old, she was actually a domestic in that household. 

The story of Bridget Blackwell is not my Gran’s story, yet she came into view in the same way this detail of my Gran’s life appeared. The unknown became the known — a little girl living on a farm, apparently as a domestic, without family of her own. I put together some of what I was learning about Gran’s life. Born in 1880, she was a domestic at 11, a mother of four children by the time she turned 26, and a widow at 36. She was a woman who wrote on her marriage certificate, by parents’ names… ‘don’t know..’  Was she the seed of inspiration that revealed a ten year old Bridget ?  

 Do I know the answer to that question? Not in truth. But I do wonder — if I’d never brought to light the uncovered fragments of Gran’s story, would Bridget’s story be different? Would there have even been a Bridget?

Inspiration? Gran? Maybe. 

Or was Bridget and her story already there, waiting?

In whatever manner she appeared into my life, the inspiration which gave her life is a mystery. Rather like the act of writing.

As an author of fiction and as an inveterate storyteller, I know that stories are like gossamer. They are made up of ideas emerging from my experiences, threads of possibilities. And yes, imagination. 

Brenda Ueland writes that “Imagination sometimes works slowly, quietly.” My italics.

I was well into the story of Bridget’s unfolding life when I realized my longing to tell her story could be a generational longing emerging from the dreams and hopes of my eleven-year-old Gran.

When does inspiration happen?

Slow down,
pay attention,
be brave.
Write about it…

(Riffing on Mary Oliver*)

*Instructions for living a life: 
Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
Excerpted from the poem: Sometimes. Red Bird.  Boston, Beacon Press, 2009 p.37

Who is this muse and why is she dancing like a five year old with a secret to tell?

When she settles, why do words appear on the page, words that eventually become story.

Here’s what I think: 

I believe the muse lives deep within me — where my dreams appear, where intuition holds the capacity for insight. Muse will not let me rest, particularly when I’m about to give up.

I’m an older woman writer who coaxed  my muse out into the light a few years ago.

She’d been waiting patiently.

She has illuminated the essence of the creative spirit within me, allowing me to sit patiently (sometimes) in the mysterious anticipation of not-knowing. She’s helped me trust in my decades of experiences, encouraged me to wonder at the stories I know lie within me, applauded my occasional exuberance, and affirmed the grace of my sadness.

The muse (my muse – dare I name her as mine?) has cleared the way so I might write stories fed by generations of women before me. 

When I’m thinking about the writer I’ve become, I seek out the wisdom of friends. I don’t always know these friends as physical beings, but I have their words and thoughts.

One such unknown friend is Stephen Buhner, author of ‘Ensouling Language’. In his chapter about The Imaginal Realm, he writes:

“There’s a part of us that knows that other world. A part of us that lives partially within it. And there are opening movements in all story forms that serve notice to the dreamer inside us that we are leaving this world now and traveling to another.”

I traveled to my character Casey’s world when she spoke these words in the epilogue of Those We Left Behind:

We are born vulnerable and exquisitely delicate. We may live our days seeking a place of wholeness. Feeling “less than,” we may aspire to be loved in all the wrong places, by all the wrong people, for all the wrong reasons. Until that day when we turn back to ourselves, feel the strength of our own spirit, uncover our own stories and move into our lives.”

As I reread that piece, I know those words arose from some place within me, fed by a moment in time, when my creative spirit – my muse — and I were telling a story together.  

I showed up and so did she.

As the author of The Shelter of Each Other, I remember looking at the photo of my grandmother, one that sits on the corner of my writing desk.  That photograph and old family stories that I heard as a child prompted me to wonder how life was for her. She died when I was four years old, thus I have fading memories of stories told mostly by my mother.  I’m now in my eighties and when I began writing this novel I wanted somehow to honor the parts of her that lie within me. My grandmother is not the heroine in my story; however, she represents an idea for me, of how women’s generational stories can be  inextricably linked.

An important character in The Shelter of Each Other is Sophie Watson. She represents the “wise person” I choose to believe we have in all of us. Sophie takes on the promises that each woman, openly or silently make to one another. In many ways she is the promise of constancy throughout the unanticipated and the stunning events that life offers up.

I look over at the picture of my grandmother there on my writing desk and I feel grateful for a creative spirit who is alive and well in me, fostered in time, in some way by her.

* * *

The Shelter of Each Other is soon to be released!

When thirty-year-old teacher Meg Blackwell embarks on a renovation project at the old family farmhouse, she discovers letters and photographs that begin to unravel the fabric of her identity.

As she investigates a tragedy that originated in one man’s twisted desire for recognition, Meg realizes that she isn’t who she thought she was – and that she’s inextricably linked to three generations of women whose creative gifts carry them through the darkest moments of their lives.

The Shelter Of Each Other is the story of how these three women come to revise and reshape themselves, and of the creative spirit itself, which contains the power to nourish and sustain, and sometimes, to break us.

The novel takes us from Ontario, Canada to Scotland to France and back again.

The seed of a story that takes place in a time that was, begins in our imagination, or does it?

My new novel began  somewhere in the midst of my imagination, a real life story from a family’s past — and the mystical things that can happen if we pay attention to what the ghosts are telling us.

I discovered historical fiction when I was eleven years old, lying on the living room floor reading the titles across my mother’s bookcase. Why I pulled out a novel called Raintree County, I really don’t know. It was a thousand-page book that began before and after the American Civil War. 

What drew me, I believe, was the scope and depth of a story beautifully told.

Now here I am, years and years later, listening to a time that was and writing the story  of the imaginary people who might have been there.

Here is my story of collaborating with ghosts, and writing a novel called With Every Goodbye We Learn.