Colours in Her Hands / new novel by Alice Zorn

Here is the information for the launch: https://pulpbooks.ca/events/660420240924

If you can't come, please get the book from your local indie bookstore or library. If they don't have it, ask for it! They should. 

Or order it directly from Freehand Books who will happily send it to to you. https://freehand-books.com/product/colours-in-her-hands/#tab-description

If you must, order it from Amazon.ca, Amazon.com, Amazon.de, Fnac... It is available! 

Reviews for Colours in Her Hands: 

"A moving meditation on love and art and the creative passions and impulses that are so much greater than anyone's disabilities and make us our best selves. An achingly real, compassionate and at times hilarious read, Zorn's novel shreds how we label people and art practices to show how deeply we and they are one. Heartbreaking, uplifting—brava!" CAROL BRUNEAU author of Brighten the Corner Where You Are: A Novel Inspired by the Life of Maud Lewis

"Alice Zorn has placed a singular woman at the heart of a vibrantly coloured world in this beautiful meditation on art and those who make it." CLAIRE HOLDEN ROTHMAN author of Lear's Shadow

"Mina is in my top-ten list of memorable fiction characters. It is fascinating to watch her make sense of the world through her embroidery and fairy tales. . . . a meticulously crafted novel." H. NIGEL THOMAS novelist, poet, essayist, and the 2022 laureate for the John Molson Prize for the Arts

first story published / a new novel

Up there, where someone has painted SCRIBE? That's where I met the editors who published my first story in 1992.

It was an apartment, not an office. Drafty and cold, minimally furnished with sidewalk leavings. I remember cigarette smoke. We sat in the kitchen. Stephen Evans and Keith Marchand had started a magazine called errata. On the masthead they wrote, "An IBM or Macintosh format disk is appreciated." That's how long ago 1992 was. 

I had typed my story, revised it as well as I could, and sent it off into the world with an SASE. How often have I done that since? Only now it's online via Submittable. I keep track of what I've sent where in a little notebook. I'm still using the same notebook. 

I've googled Stephen Evans and Keith Marchand + writing + publishing, and get no hits. Where are they now? I only met them that one time and I don't think errata made it past the first few issues, despite their enthusiasm for keeping it going long enough to be able to get government grants. 

When I go to the Jean Talon market or textile shopping on St. Hubert, and walk home along St. Laurent, of course I glance at the modest building where two guys whom I didn't know, who weren't friends or family, told me I'd written a good story they wanted to publish. Validation from the world, small as it was. That meant my words existed--for real!

How funny that all these years later SCRIBE shouts from the wall. FAVOP too, but I don't know what that means. A name? 

The words weren't there a couple of months ago when I last walked past. What are the chances that someone involved with writing or publishing lives there now? Maybe those brick walls radiate vibes that someone felt should be advertised. They would have needed scaffolding or ropes to do it. 

I've never stopped writing, though I am slow. Life gets in the way. I rewrite more than I write. The public aspect of being a writer in today's world gives me the heebie-jeebies. I have no playlist I want to share publicly. And yet, in my slow fashion, ignoring a heap of rejection letters that should have discouraged anyone sensible, I continue to write since it's what I most love to do. Characters and their stories absorb me.

And so: I will have a new novel coming out with Freehand Books in the fall of 2024. I'm happy. I raise my glasses to SCRIBE.

solidified narrative / one way to recycle paper

What does a writer do with all those draft pages? That assumes you write on paper as I do. 

I can but don't like writing first draft on the computer, because I can't stop rereading what I've written, second-guessing myself. I move forward more efficiently when I write first draft longhand. And although I can write with ballpoint or rollerball or pencil on newsprint, I have my precious routines about using a particular format of hard-cover notebook and my Lamy fountain pen, even though the Lamy leaks unless I use a certain ink (not Lamy). 

For a writer, what's important aren't the tools but the words--except that I'm also a human animal who likes her creature comforts. I like the smoothness of ink and nib when I'm writing on good paper. I like the bound notebooks because I only write on one of the facing pages and keep the other free for notes and arrows.  

After a couple of hours, I dictate what I've written into the computer. From then on, I print pages of hard copy that I revise--again, by hand. I revise a lot. When I hear people boast that they've done five revisions, I have no idea what they mean. That would be me getting started. I use a lot of paper, but too many hours of looking at a computer screen give me migraines, and too many hours of typing aggravate my hands. Paper is a luxury I allow myself. When it's filled with sentences and scribbles, I dutifully drop it in the recycling bin.

And now R has begun making paper. A friend gave me a few sheets of paper she'd made and he was so pleased with the effect when he painted on it--how the paper took the paint, how the paint bled, how vividly the colours dried--that he decided to make some himself. He set up a table in the far corner of the cellar behind the water heater.

He needed a secondhand blender, a screen and a shallow tub. The blender took a while to find because they seem to get snapped up immediately in Montreal. For a few weeks we stopped at Renaissance, l'Armée de bon salut, the Good Shepherd, etc. He finally found a blender in a thrift shop on our recent visit to family in Ontario. He made the frame and screen he needed from a window screen I spotted in sidewalk garbage. Ditto the tub. He's set himself up in a far corner of the cellar. 

This is one of the first pieces he made.

I have a dim memory of watching an artist years ago, cooking torn rags in a cauldron. Now it seems one speeds up the process of making pulp by buzzing it in a blender--and that the easiest way to get pulp is by using old paper. 

Except R doesn't want to use old envelopes. He's asked for paper from my recycling bin. He wants story ideas. He says he's making "solidified narrative". 

He's been adding different bits to the pulp for texture and colour. This one has parsley. It's the paper he used for the Pink Flamingos up top. 

Why Pink Flamingos? No idea. That's his story. I had my chance when I wrote words on the paper.

 Here he's adding dried Xmas cactus flowers...

place names / my version

Of the many places where I have set fiction, I am delighted to have my short story, "Our Ladies", which takes place in the Gaspé, published in the current issue of Prairie Fire. https://www.prairiefire.ca/current-issue

Ladies is a word that has fallen out of fashion--with good reason--but the title is a nod to the many places in Quebec called Notre Dame de [whatever]. Our Lady of… It is not a nod to the religion that named them, except in an ironic sense as I believe is made clear. 

The story is set in a village called Notre Dame des Quatres Douleurs. Our Lady of Four Sorrows. A fictional name for a string of houses in a landscape of hills and sea that I assure you exists. Place--physical, social, cultural--plays an intregal role in my writing. What is a character without place? Even if it's a place as small as a room or a country where the character does not feel she belongs. I am interested in the relationship--whether rootedness or tension--between character and place. It's fitting that this story appears in an issue exploring Roots & Routes.

When writing, I have sometimes used real place names, sometimes invented names. I don't have a rule about this. Even when I use a real place name, it's likely that I've manipulated the layout of the streets. Zadie Smith has a note in the Acknowledgements of her novel, Swing Time: "North London, in these pages, is a state of mind. Some streets may not appear as they do in Google Maps." Other writers of fiction have similar notes on the copyright page. For a writer, this makes sense. You use what you need for the narrative. A novel is not a photographic picture. 

However, I have discovered that some readers struggle with this. It has nothing to do with intelligence or level of education. A friend told me once that her father, who was a college professor, had grown up in Newark, New Jersey where Philip Roth had also grown up and set his fiction. Her father was angry that Roth had made up details about Newark. He didn't "get it right". In vain she tried to explain to him that Roth was writing fiction.

While I was writing the novel Five Roses, I debated using the name of the Montreal neighbourhood where I imagined it taking place. There are so many objectifiably recognizable markers. The Lachine canal with its history, the FIVE ROSES sign that marks Montreal's southern horizon, cycling by the St. Lawrence River, the dépanneur on my street corner, so many scenes that I documented, photographed, and used as source material. That was where my characters, albeit fictional, lived--in the Pointe aka the Point aka Pointe St-Charles aka Point St. Charles. 

When I began working on the novel, I had lived in the Pointe for 10 years. Long enough, I felt, to be able to describe it. Certainly as a newcomer. I never pretended to be someone with great-grandparents who dug the Lachine Canal.

Six years later Five Roses was published. I met with a generous response from readers who found that my portrayal of the Pointe was just and who appreciated the novel.

But there were also those who objected. They challenged my right to set a novel here. One belligerently asked why I hadn't told the "good, old stories"? The hardscrabble toughness of life when the factories closed and neighbours helped each other, the horse-drawn delivery carts, the family of the West End Gang driving up and down the streets at Christmas with a flatbed truck handing out gifts for children. Hadn't I heard those stories?

Indeed I had. But they weren't my stories.

Another neighbour--another sidewalk confrontation--said I wasn't allowed to make up stories about where she lived. 

But I live here too now. 

Writing fiction in the realist tradition is a balance between consensual reality (assuming a common ground can be found), the emotional/ethical truth of the story, the imaginative process. I don't write about a place unless I feel I know it well enough to adopt the point of view I've chosen. And as a writer, yes, I claim that right. 

The Gaspé is a landscape I've been visiting for almost 40 years. The protagonist of this story, "Our Ladies", is seeing it for the first time. It was delight to experience it with him.

We were last in the Gaspé in late September and early October. Moose-hunting season had just started so we weren't able to walk in the woods. We stayed by the shore. Mountain ash trees were heavy with berries. We saw a flock of snow geese, who don't normally fly so far east when they're migrating, wheel from the sky to land in the river. The sight and sound was so magnificent that I didn't even think of pulling out my camera until they had almost all landed. 

Even when I return to Montreal, part of my heart stays behind with the waves and the hills. 

"The Land of Clouds" / new story

I'm very happy to have a story published in the current issue of The New Quarterly. It's set in Oaxaca in Mexico where I stayed for three weeks in 2017. 

Working on travel stories in this last year while we haven't been able to travel has helped keep me sane. It's my writerly version of taking a trip. 

You can read it here: https://tnq.ca/story/the-land-of-clouds/

 

in dumpling we trust

A dim sum diner, I know, but the sign makes me think of dumplings I've had in Austria, that comforting staple you can make with bread, potatoes, herbs, browned onion, smoked bacon, even plums and apricots. If it's round and it comes on a plate, it is probably a dumpling. 

You make bread dumplings by ripping old bread into little pieces. If the bread isn't old enough, let the pieces dry out. They have to soak up eggs, milk, a bit of oil to make a dough. Add parsley, nutmeg, whatever chopped herbs you have on hand. You shape balls about the size of a small orange. My Tirolean aunt shapes the whole mass into a single ball that she wraps in a tea towel, boils, and serves in slices. It's called a Tea Towel Dumpling. Serviettenknödel. Some dumplings have fillings. The German word for dumpling is Knödel, though different regions have their own pronunciations and pet names. Ditto across borders in Slovenia, Hungary, Slovakia, Czechia, Poland, and maybe even wider afield. 

Did I ever tell you what happened when I wrote a short story about plum dumplings? I had a character, an old Austrian grandmother who still believed the anti-Semitic propaganda she'd learned as a young woman. I modelled her on my oma whom I only met a few times, but each was memorable. The best was probably in her late 80s when I introduced R. She didn't trust anyone who wasn't Austrian but I had been born and grown up in Canada, and presumably I hadn't been able to find an Austrian to hook up with. She stumped across to him, hand raised to measure the span of his forehead, which he gamely withstood. Her verdict? Gut! Have children with him. Another time she asked me with some disdain if I had ever met a Jew. I told her that I worked in a hospital that served the Jewish community. I had once had a boyfriend who was Jewish. I had friends who were Jewish. She screwed up her already considerably wrinkled face and asked how I could stand it. They smelled. This was astounding coming from a woman who held that you risked pneumonia if you took a bath--and so didn't.

In the early 2000s I decided to write a story in which a fictional Austrian oma came to Montreal, where she was charmed by her granddaughter's Polish Yiddish neighbour. They met when they were sitting outside, taking the sun on side-by-side, wrought-iron balconies. I knew they would be able to understand each other more or less because I can understand Polish Yiddish more or less. I wanted them to have a meal of dumplings. 

I had already written the story when it occurred to me to confirm that my Polish Yiddish gentlemen would be familiar with plum dumplings.

As it happened, there was a patient at the hospital who was Jewish and Polish. His wife frequently approached the desk to find out when he might be going for a test or to have me tell the nurse he needed pain medication. She was nice and I asked if she would mind a personal question. Did she know what plum dumplings were? I had my eyes on my hands as I described how they were made. A whole plum was wrapped in dough that was made from cottage cheese. The dumplings were simmered and then rolled in browned, buttered breadcrumbs. Only then I looked up. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. She said this was the last meal her mother had made for them before they were taken to the concentration camp.

I was appalled that I had awoken a traumatic memory. I was freaked out because that was what happened in my story when the granddaughter makes plum dumplings to serve her oma and her Yiddish neighbour.  

I apologized but the woman told me she was glad I'd reminded her of how her mother used to make plum dumplings. She hadn't thought of it for a long time. She thanked me. 

So yes: In dumpling we trust.

Things that jump over the fence in the night

I don't need a pandemic to stay home and notice the minutiae of daily life because I already spend a good deal of time at home by myself scribbling words.

One small observation is how the people who live across the alley on the second floor have lights strung year-round over their balcony. The lights aren't kept on all night, but they're shining when I get up at 6:30 on a winter morning. Snow, no leaves on the branches, cold brick, looped strings of lit bulbs. It's cheerful, yeah, on a dark winter morning, the sun not up yet.

I have only ever once, a few years ago, seen anyone on the balcony. A girl of about eight years old playing by herself. At the time I wondered if she had a bedroom window that faced the balcony and the parent or parents strung lights so she wouldn't… I don't know… be afraid of the balcony at night. Or maybe so she would see lit smiles through her curtains.

The girl would be a young teen by now. I've never seen her again. Maybe she was only a visitor, sent outside to play while the adults gossiped.

And anyhow, a person doesn't need a kid to do things that might seem childish or needlessly reassuring and cheerful, says me who does not have a child, yet keeps a heart-shaped stone, a magic spool of gold thread, and other tchotchkes on her desk.

The lights aren't as visible through the leaves. I'm not as likely to notice them in the summer, but they're still there.

Yesterday R said that one of the lightbulbs was on the ground by his bike in our yard. That would entail a trip from the balcony, along the ground or through the trees--leaps across branches--over the neighbour's fence, then across the alley and over our fence. Under the fence is possible, too, at strategic points.

An adventurous squirrel or raccoon? To what end? The tiny, inner-city backyard that we think of as ours becomes another place at night

Last week we were gifted a large blue flip-flop.

writing gesture and body language

Since last winter I've been revising short fiction set in other countries. Increasingly, especially when working on a story set in the 80s or 90s, I wondered if I was writing historical fiction. No ATM machines. Having to wait for news from home by asking at the American Express Office if a letter had arrived. (A letter as in handwritten pages in an envelope with stamps in the corner.) Sitting in the December sunshine in a park because it was warmer than the unheated room we were renting. Being able to travel on $20/day. Not having to stand in line to get into... well, just about anywhere if you travelled off-season.

In these past... how long has it been? Two months? I'm starting to wonder if I'm writing FANTASY fiction. People drove or got on planes to arrive in a place where the climate and customs and language were different? And then they might share a hotel room with a stranger. I don't mean sex. Just, hey, are you looking for a room, so am I. Wanna share? Not to mention racy little details like touching a person to get their attention. Sharing food. Lending a sweater. Tickling a child that isn't yours and blowing a raspberry on her stomach. All that spit! What a world of potentially germ-infested interactions!  

What is going to happen to our whole lexicon of (germ-infested) interpersonal body language and gesture? From now on, is it all going to be about distance, masks, gloves and face shields? How do you do tone of voice through a mask?  

While pondering that...

The tulips are from our very small backyard where I coaxed some tulips to bloom. I would have liked to leave them outside, enjoying the sun and refrigerated temps of the past couple of weeks. But after the squirrels bit a few heads off, I decided it was a nicer end to come indoors and get blowsy in a vase than to be chomped at the neck. Nicer for me at least. 

I have not yet been able to get into our community garden. (Soon, but not yet.) This is what I can see from the street. Purple marks my rhubarb. I have a couple of black currant bushes and can see my winter garlic too.

   

fiction / real life / Canada Malting

In 2016 I published a novel called Five Roses. I set certain plot developments in what I imagined as a guard tower or watchman's cabin atop the abandoned Canada Malting complex on the Lachine Canal.

Not so long ago I was out for a walk. Given the times, given that we are keeping our distance, given that more people than ever are strolling along my usual routes by the river and other green spots in the city, I've been tromping along backstreets, down alleys, through what others might call the uglier parts of town. Which is fine because I like the patina of rust and decay of post-industrial settings.

These are times, too, when if we venture out, we should be taking the less-travelled road. (Nod to Robert Frost.)

What a surprise to see Canada Malting from a distance--and my old cabin gussied up as if someone had set up house high atop the city. Including what looks like a window box with plastic flowers in a glassless window.

finishing a manuscript

I took a break from blogging because I was deep into the final edits of a manuscript. I've now done what I can do with it and sent the pages away.

Slowly I've been getting around to all the things I let pile up. Top on the list is clean my desk. Lots of scraps of paper with sentences, scenes, details that were cut and that I never did figure out where to put but was loath to throw away. They've now been swept into the recycling bin. I don't write in pencil so I don't know why there are drifts of eraser rubbings. Or maybe that's what dust looks like when it's been left to accumulate and gets shoved around. I believe I only use one pen--a fountain pen--though there are dozens of pens and coloured markers when I finish picking them all up.

My desk is a boardroom table that I inherited from a friend when he left Montreal. The shelf structure up top is adapted from the design of the desk I used at the Banff Writing Studio in 2007. I was working on a novel with nine points of view. The shelves helped me keep the paper narrative chunks separate. I came home and asked R to build me something similar.

The shelves look sparse now but I've packed away the notebooks and research material I was using. Before long they'll be full again as I start toying with ideas for what I want to work on next. There are already a couple of notebooks and folders. A tantalizing book with "object-based research" in its subtitle.

For a while now I've been wanting to sew some pockets inside my knapsacks. They're never the right size or where I want them. Easier to add them myself. I cut up squares of funky upholstery material, silk, velvet, corduroy.

A friend gave me one of his mother's sarees since she cannot wear them anymore. He thought I might make myself something with the silk, but it's very fine and I worried that my sewing machine would chew it. Ideal would be as little stitching as possible. I backed it with cotton to make a duvet cover.

His mother made the best flaked shark curry. Once we spent a morning alone together when I'd been there overnight. She was unsure what to give me for breakfast. She had no bread. We finally settled on sliced mango.

Dr Alphoneyous Nitpicker needed a new beard since he will be exhibiting paintings at an upcoming group show in October. Originally from Greenland, Dr Nitpicker had an illustrious career as a surgeon and short order cook at the Hospital/Snackbar at the University of Gimli, Manitoba. He's now put his scalpel aside and left Gimli in order to live in Montreal and paint. He is known for his many inventions including a barbecue that also works as a respirator in the ICU, as well as his chickenless nugget machine. The chickens feed chick peas into it. (I am not responsible for Dr Nitpicker. I only make the beards.)


I haven't gone through my filing cabinets for years and thought I would try to thin them. Among the stack of folders I found two would-be novels that I wrote in the 90s. It's been interesting to read them and see what I thought made a story when I was younger. They're mostly interconnected character studies that progress along a faint narrative arc. One is set in Toronto in the mid-80s, details taken from when I lived there as a grad student and later worked in restaurant kitchens on Queen St West. The writing reminds me of the places and the people I knew then. Annex apartments, restaurant kitchens, bars, Queen St W in the 80s, trying to teach bored students who hadn't read the material. I may end up keeping all the folders for nostalgic value.

Another task I'm slowly getting to is painting my very small sewing room. You would think a small room would take no time at all to paint but there are two doors and one long window and wood trim around the ceiling and baseboards. The ceiling is 11' high so there's a lot of climbing up and down the ladder. Rolls and rolls of masking tape. I'm painting the walls pale winter straw. That was the colour I was looking for. The paint name is something else. The pic is before I started.

The list of things-to-do is still longer. Eventually I'll hear about the manuscript I sent off.

"a thousand words" / Sharpie vs camera

I take pics with my tiny snapshot camera because it's fast and easy and I like to. I refer to images when writing to help me reimagine a place, find the words to describe a scene or an object--figs growing, the hug of a tight skirt, a hot water radiator such as I used to have in an apartment thirty years ago.






A camera is fast and easy, but I envy people like R who have the facility--and decades of practice--to draw. The lines of a sketch are more expressive than the flattened image taken by a camera. The camera doesn't discriminate. What to do about all the extraneous visual disturbance that ends up in the frame? (Don't tell me about photoshop. I can't be bothered.) I like that the pencil only sees what it wants to.

I say pencil, though I think lately R has been using predominantly pens. That was the case recently in Mexico when he ran out of the German pens he likes to use and we began the search for new pens. Mexico City has at least one humongous stationary/school/office/art supply market. Venues and stalls are packed tight together. Aisles both curve and cut angles. Some are broad, some tight--when several concessions have been squeezed into a space. The maze was so confusing that when R decided to return to where he'd bought a pad of paper to buy another, he couldn't find it again.


R doesn't like designated art supply stores because he finds them overpriced, but this one caught our attention because of the mannequin in the window. Waxed moustache, shaggy mutton chops, fedora, patterned shirt, white trousers (pressed!), barefoot. I don't know if it was ironic. Note that R does *not* look like this. Not even ironically.

In Guanajuato we visited several stationary and paper stores. R found a pen that seemed promising and bought several, but when he was out and about, sketchbook open, the pens didn't work. They cost enough that it was worth going back to the store. The woman there calmly took the pens, one by one, and they worked for her. Ah... because you had to be at a table and hold the pen perfectly perpendicular to the paper--which isn't the case when sketching outdoors.


In another store he was urged to try a thicker marker pen--actually a Sharpie. He liked the thicker strokes but could finish a Sharpie within a few hours. He did spend a lot of time sketching. Got up every morning at 6:30 and headed off into the cold dawn streets. We were in the mountains. Temps dropped to 2C at night. He only returned at 9 when breakfast was served. I stayed in bed, made myself tea, read. Sometimes he took his paints and pots of water.

Here's one of the Sharpie sketches. I'm pretty sure the dump refers to the hotel and our room.

R finally--happily--found pens he liked in the Mexican equivalent of Bureau en Gros aka Staples. I don't recall what the store was called in Mexico but the employees wore the same red shirts. He liked those pens so much that he returned two days later and bought the whole stock.

(He did the same when we were in Vienna a few years ago and he found the shaving cream he discovered on a trip some years previously in Berlin. He bought every tube of shaving cream in the pharmacy, not knowing when he'd find it again. We've looked and it can't be bought online. It's not a fancy or expensive shaving cream, he just likes it.)

Since I'm very particular about the tactile feel of the notebooks and pens I use, I understand his quest for a pen that has a certain tip and glide and feels good in his hand--although I've learned from experience not to expect to find the paper I like en route and usually bring what I might need with me.

I don't travel with my fountain pen because it's magic and I'm terrified of losing it. Mind you, I felt that way about my previous fountain pen that I had for twenty years and that finally leaked so much that my fingers were stained blue and it couldn't be repaired, not even by the fountain pen wizard in the pen shop in the Cours Mont Royal. I survived finding a new pen and with time it has become equally invested with magic.

Sometimes I wish I could draw and R tells me anyone can draw. Yeah, well... I don't know how to get angles or foreshorten or control what I'm doing. He says Matisse didn't concern himself with foreshortening either. Just draw. Follow the line on the page.

Drawings, painting and photo courtesy of my favourite travelling companion, RA.
More artwork here:
https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipMBh5FWdXqTzEzWHHpxQC9LunHm8qQN6uyw1OiJm_MiSURLNA-xGbU-UAC_jSNiTg?key=TUk0ZVI2SXlfOEwyYkI4elozbW9jMUhZVUJyRlJR

my most necessary writing exercises

Whether or not you celebrate the upcoming holidays, this is the time of year when the North Pole begins to tilt toward the sun again. Those minutes of daylight we lost incrementally from October through November and December--until we were waking in darkness and eating supper in darkness--will slowly seep back again. That's worth celebrating.

I'm looking forward to staying home this year, hanging out with my favourite guy, going for walks, cooking, having wine, eating.

Our tree is decorated with ornaments from my childhood--small, rusty-around-the-edges, crusty-with-glitter, 1960s gewgaws. Also a few ornaments that might or might not belong on a tree but friends have given them to us over the years. A broom, an angel, a heart, a wooden boat...

While home, I won't be working as hard but I'll be revising a manuscript, since I'm at that stage when taking a complete break would mean having to go back to the beginning to pick up the momentum again. So it's better to keep working, if only a few pages of revision a day.

And when I write, I do my writing exercises. They're not the kind that need a computer, paper or a pen. In fact, anything but.

One is a sideways stretch a FB friend recommended. My neighbour in the Gaspé got me doing forward bends, arms hanging to the floor. I have a routine of neck stretches, including the all-important chin tuck because writers suffer from "writer's head"--that peering-at-the-page/screen posture. I have a yoga mat beside my desk and lie there and knot my legs. Since I don't notice how quickly time goes by--I'm STILL working on same fucking paragraph!--I set the alarm to go off every hour. That was on the advice of a physiotherapist. I don't always stop every hour but mostly I do. I have a standing as well as a sitting desk and divvy my workday between them. It could be age, it could be the cold climate, it could be a propensity to creakiness, but in my experience writing is *not* the best activity for the body, and so I do what I can to compensate.

Another exercise is the long walk I do mid to late afternoon when I go see what's happening in the city, maybe meet a friend, sometimes take a few pics. In the one of the Lachine Canal above--can you see?--someone got onto the slushy ice to scrape letters. To spell what, I don't know but it must have felt worth risking breaking through. ??


I like walking at sunset, in dusk and darkness, so I don't mind that the days are short in winter. I especially like when it's snowed and the snow reflects light into the air. But I equally look forward to the days getting longer and walking in daylight again.

There's the writerly wisdom I have to share at the end of 2018: it's not all about words. Take care of your body.

Here's a mulberry tree in holiday dress. Joyeuses fêtes et bonne année!