Yes, they said. I could study the accordion.

We happened to have a full-size one in the hall closet. How handy.

My only experience of it at that point involved a vague memory of watching the bellows expand and contract one Christmas as my older sister oom-pah-pahed her way through “Silent Night” and the cat peed on the royal-blue velvet lining of the carrying case.

Lessons were Saturday mornings at the something-something school of music uptown. My dad would idle the car in front of the building just long enough for me to slide the case off the back seat and then, giving the Oldsmobile some gas, he’d holler, “Have fun!” — and drive away, honking and waving.

The case was too heavy to lift so I’d clunk it up three flights of narrow stairs, and drag it to the music room where a pale and crumpled instructor would be waiting to hear my latest rendition of “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes.” Why he never leapt out the window I can’t imagine.

An hour later my dad would be back, sitting in the car, in excellent humour and smelling of cigars and coffee.

He never said where he’d been and I didn’t ask.

Sitting on the edge of my bed, strapped to that beast of an accordion and facing an aluminum music stand, I slogged through several levels of books — orange, purple, yellow — until one horrible day the pale, crumpled man announced there would be a recital in which all students of the something-something school would perform. I was assigned “Brahms’s Lullaby.” Memory goes dim at this point except for the nausea I felt each time I practised Brahms and imagined playing it in front of hundreds, possibly millions, of people. And I still see the book open to the page (a picture of a bassinet swinging in a tree); I still feel the fingers of my right hand poised over the vertical keyboard while my left searches among dozens of bass keys for the indented C Fundamental that puts the rest in perspective.

Sometime before the recital I begged (the pale man? my parents?) to be excused from playing, and after much drama on my part they agreed. This effectively put an end to any future as a concert accordionist; and the urine-scented case, along with my music stand, was retired to its place in the closet.

It was a relief not to see it, and after a while it was all but forgotten.

~~

My parents and my sister have since died, my mother most recently, and while clearing fifty years of memories from her house I am shocked to find an envelope of receipts my dad kept from my lessons — $6 each. It means he must have come inside the store to pay, and for some reason I can’t explain, this insignificant fact is jarring and draws me back into a sense of mystery about those Saturday mornings. I realize I’m still curious about where he went after he dropped me off.

We lived near the Welland Canal and I used to picture him there, on a bench in fine weather with a fat cigar, eyes closed in the sunshine or open and watching a freighter make its way through the lock. But maybe he sat on a stool at the corner diner instead, charming a waitress named Anne-Marie as he ate pecan pie. Or maybe he went home. The funny thing is I was a kid who never hesitated to ask questions, and my dad and I talked about everything, so I wonder what stopped me in this case. It’s that “what” that niggles.

At the back of my mother’s hall closet I find the old music stand, much flimsier than I remember, but no accordion, and then a few years later my “great-niece” — the granddaughter my sister did not live to meet — tells me one day out of the blue that there’s an accordion in her basement, that her grandma used to play it. I don’t tell her I used to play too. I don’t want to dilute the few stories she has about her grandmother. But it’s not just that. I feel immediate discomfort at the mention of it. Again, I wonder why.

Whenever I try writing about this, I do so in fragments, quirky at best, but always sensing a deeper layer I can’t name … The loss of my sister? The mystery of how my dad spent that hour? Surely not the trauma of Brahms?

I’d like to leave it there, quirky and fragmented. I tell myself it’s a waste of time to poke around any further and I almost believe it, but then I’m reminded of the rule in writing, how when you get to that place where things are uncomfortable and you’re tempted to stop, that’s exactly when you need to keep going. At least if you want to find something worth finding.

Geez, I hate that rule.

And so, while I haven’t a clue what’s connected to that crazy old accordion, I’m willing to strap it back on, clunk my way up that staircase, and wave goodbye to my dad again and again (seems I didn’t escape after all when I ditched the recital) until I find that oddly shaped key, the C Fundamental, the one your finger fits into automatically, the one that puts everything around it in perspective.

♦     ♦     ♦

CARIN MAKUZ spends long hours writing short fiction. Essays too. Occasionally these words are published in journals and magazines, broadcast on CBC Radio, or win prizes. All of which brightens her days immensely. Despite years of accordion lessons and a brief fling with the guitar, she is not musical. A novel remains under construction. Oddly, a piano features prominently.

Carin can be found thinking out loud at Matilda Magtree.

“But art is poultice for a burn. It is a privilege to have, somewhere within you, a capacity for making something speak from your own seared experience.”

~ Molly Peacock

In The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany (Begins Her Life’s Work) at 72, poet Molly Peacock savours the vivid intersections of her creative life and that of eighteenth-century British artist Mary Granville Pendarves Delany. Part memoir, part biography, the book reconstructs Delany’s life from hundreds of letters the woman wrote to her sister in the mid-1700s.

Fascinated with Delany’s artistic legacy — a late-life collection of botanical “mosaicks” titled Flora Delanica — Peacock examines their shared experiences: twice married, the second time romantically to men they’d known in youth, childless, charmed by botanical art, and both thriving artistically in their times. It’s the story of the lives of two women from very different centuries.

Peacock, recognized for unflinching and sensual poetry, seems an unlikely candidate to link intimate poetic modernity to a three-hundred-year-old story of a woman from a minor branch of the British aristocracy. It demands a leap of faith, but one I’m glad I bridged.

By happenstance, in 1986, she viewed Delany’s “mosaicks,” rare, layered paper botanicals on loan from the British Museum to New York City’s Morgan Gallery. The meticulous collages, an art form invented by Delany, captured Peacock’s imagination. Two decades passed before she wrote a biography of the obscure artist, which required an investigation of cultural influences in Delany’s life that led to her exceptional and prolific creativity beginning at age 72.

And where does Peacock place herself in this story? What threads connect her to the collages of botanical dots and squiggles layered onto dramatic black backgrounds? Peacock herself had attempted to paint botanicals years before she became acquainted with Delany’s work, and it’s clear she feels awe for the older woman’s persistence and skill. The more she researches Delany’s letters, the stronger grows the bond that transcends time or place.

“The flowers are like dancers,” she writes. “Like daydreamers. Like women blinking in silent adoration. Like children playing. Like queens reigning or divas belting out their arias. Like courtesans lying on bedclothes. Like girls hanging their heads in shame. Like. Like. Like.”

The Paper Garden is a window through which Peacock allows us to view women’s roles in the eighteenth century and the effects of patriarchy and strict family values. Peacock introduces just enough historical research, political manoeuvring, fashion, philosophy, and hints of lusty gossip to portray a fascinating and sometimes brutal period before the Industrial Revolution and Victorian standards changed the world forever. She exposes the survival modes of an impoverished branch of an aristocratic family, forging connections to the power elite through association, friendship, and marriage. Evident is Peacock’s wonder and respect for Delany’s determined independence, which mirrors her own, but in a century when few safety nets existed beyond social connections.

Peacock teases our curiosity about Delany’s circumstances. She was born in 1700, and had a respectable upbringing. Her family’s Jacobean allegiances, and their hopes for another Stuart King, die with the Acts of Settlement, which require a Protestant ascension to the throne. James Stuart, their choice, is a devout Catholic. The crown passes to Queen Anne’s second cousin who becomes George I. Now the disappointed Delany family must find favour wherever they can.

Delany’s fortunes are entrusted to her powerful, meddling uncle, Lord Landsdown. He forces her into a politically advantageous, but loveless marriage to a titled, selfish, drunken squire (Pendarves). Pendarves is 60 years old, and Mary at 17 is a miserable bird in a gilded cage.

When after nine years the despicable Pendarves dies, leaving his wife with a pitiful inheritance, Mary Granville Pendarves plots for years to gain an appointment to the Georgian court as a lady-in-waiting. During this period she befriends famous composer George Frideric Handel, satirist Jonathan Swift, and painter William Hogarth. Their influences encourage her artistry and solidify her acceptance into widening circles of influence.

Popular coffee houses flourish in eighteenth-century England. Kew Gardens attracts international botanical specimens. Jacobites are thrown into the Tower of London. Captain Cook’s around-the-world voyage is financed by Delany’s acquaintance, the Duchess of Portland. Independent and industrious (but impoverished), Delany develops womanly needlework skills, both as craft and dress design. She plays the spinet, paints, writes, and enjoys the latest pastime of shell-work. Perhaps jaded by one failed marriage, she spurns potential suitors, even the handsome and worldly Lord Baltimore. She writes hundreds of letters to a beloved sister and pursues gardening as a serious hobby. Her acute powers of observation develop into devotion to detail.

In midlife, the self-sufficient widow reacquaints with a male friend from her youth, Patrick Delany. She falls in love with this Irish cleric of modest means and marries for a second time. They relocate to the Irish countryside, where the seeds for her happy, unexpected legacy are planted in fertile soil.

They had been married twenty-three years when Patrick dies, and Delany moves in with the Duchess of Portland, a wealthy sponsor of Kew Gardens and an enthusiastic collector of plant specimens. Delany’s story might never have been told had it not been for the fact that in her early seventies, the widow picks up her scissors, tweezers, and a scalpel, and creates an unusual floral culmination of her life’s work by pasting thousands of pieces of coloured paper to black backgrounds. She often made her own paper, dying it in the hues found in nature.

What in Mary Delany’s long life of disappointments, hard work, and happy second chances does Molly Peacock find to relate to? In her words:

“But art is poultice for a burn. It is a privilege to have, somewhere within you, a capacity for making something speak from your own seared experience.

“A multitude of vectors brings us to the moment where we are, and where we love, or cough, or say the wrong thing, or fail, or feel our fate in what we fear, or to a moment where clarity descends, and we understand the world simply from having observed it. Uncontrollable events hurtle toward us until the very moment of our deaths, yet in each instance figuring out how to go on, even on to the next world, repeats the confusion of youth. Of course we need our role models long past adolescence.”

One of the tributes Peacock pays Delany is the choice of book jacket, cover art, and paper stock: thick, glossy pages showcase the “mosaicks.” Every chapter begins with a full-page reproduction of one of Delany’s flowers. I couldn’t resist placing a magnifying glass over them, knowing that some of the flower heads comprise more than two hundred pieces of paper, the lines blurred by the artist’s exquisite skill. Delany sometimes pasted original dried and pressed leaves and petals to create the overall affect, a technique known today as mixed-media collage.

Molly Peacock’s skilled storytelling, her pen a paintbrush, brings Mary Delany’s lively experiences into this century. Deftly weaving their two stories, the author reveals somber lessons, reminders of our vulnerability to the challenges that arise with a long life, our shared fears, the transcendence of our triumphs, the measure of what we make of our talents, how we learn from others, our connectedness, our humanity.

♦     ♦     ♦

The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany (Begins Her Life’s Work) At 72 was published by McClelland & Stewart Ltd. in 2010.

MARY E. McINTYRE  is a writer living in Stouffville, Ontario. She blogs at Washburn Island: Memoir of a Childhood and Camera Combo.

I have put them, standing upright, in a box adorned with images of tulips, my favourite flower, and I’ve been staring at them for two days now, afraid to open them.

And I know why.

§

When I decide to write my memoirs, I begin working on a timeline of my life, filling in events as I recall them. I realize my journals might be valuable, so I plan to go through them and add more memories.

I have kept a journal for many years, but I am not sure exactly how many. I keep them in one of the many boxes I have collected. One weekend, I flip open the lid of a box made of woven twine and there they are, sitting on a turquoise and rose-coloured silk scarf. Six of them. I put them in order but, strangely, the order is off. One of them covers periods that I wrote about in some of the other journals, and there are also some big gaps.

Did I really go such long periods without writing? Why does one overlap the others? It feels like something is missing but I can’t quite put my finger on it.

The first journal I open is the one that does not make sense. I read the first page, and then I remember.

In 1998 I started writing in this separate journal. It was a few months after my son went to live with his father. As was routine at the time, he had been spending alternating weekends there. It was just days before Christmas, and a few days more before his 13th birthday, that my son left me, and he did not return for two years. I had no contact with him while he was gone, so this journal was a collection of notes to him, and my way of dealing with the emptiness and loss.

I flip a few more pages and realize the reason I kept a separate journal was that I wanted it to be positive messages to him and not about the grief I was going through not having him in my life. The other journals were for writing about that pain.

I keep adding to my timeline and suddenly I have four pages of events and memories, and the journal entries are triggering more. But something is still missing. Significant events in my life that I remember writing about are conspicuously absent from these journals. Is my memory failing?

There must be more, but what did I do with them? Did I throw them away by accident, or in an impulsive fit of rage or sadness?

This thought reminds me of the time ten years ago that I spent with Patricia just weeks before she died. As a friend, she was my soul-mate. My heart aches just thinking about her. She was diagnosed with colon cancer in October of 2003 and died in May of 2004 — five months later than expected.

She had destroyed all of her own journals because she did not want anyone to read them. I wish I could have read them. But I understand her motive. I’m not sure I would want anyone to read some of the dark inner thoughts I’ve written in my journals.

This triggers yet another memory. I remember writing in my journal about time with her when she was very ill. But among these journals there isn’t one that covers the end of 2003 to the beginning of 2004. There are definitely more journals! Somewhere.

It’s midnight on a Sunday. Time to go to bed. I’ll search for them tomorrow.

§

At work on Monday, I can’t stop thinking about the journals. Late in the afternoon I remember suddenly that one of my favourites was an expensive one, deep red with gold etchings, that I had purchased in a specialty gift shop on a golf weekend in Collingwood with three girlfriends. I recall writing about that weekend, but that journal was not in the box either.

At home, after a busy day at the office, I put my feet up on the coffee table and wonder, once again, where the hell those journals could be. The coffee table is a bamboo cube. I bought it at IKEA years ago and had a glass piece cut to fit on top. It serves double duty, coffee table and . . . extra storage. Oh my God!

I take the glass off the top, flip open the top, and see another pretty box. I lift the box out and remove the lid and there they are: eleven more journals.

§

I have been keeping a journal since 1996. I now have sixteen of them. Each covers a period of about six to eighteen months. I certainly wasn’t consistent in writing in them.

Now what?

Well first, of course, I have to organize them, because that’s what I do when I want to avoid something. I put them in order and leave them in the box on the floor by the couch.

They stay there for a week.

Then I use stickers to label them — little white rectangles, each with a big colourful circle next to it. I write in the white rectangle the dates each journal covers. The plan is to then number them 1 through 16 so that I can easily refer to them.

I haven’t written the number in the circle yet because I think there might be one more journal somewhere. I’m just not sure.

§

And so here they are, standing upright, in the pretty box patterned with tulips, and I’ve been staring at them for two days now. I’m sure there are lots of joyful entries, but for some reason emotions bubble to the surface that are rooted in the sad memories I know are also in there.

Still, along with the painful memories of Patricia’s passing, there are many happy memories of spending time with her before she fell ill. I know I wrote about how broken and empty I felt when my son left. Do I really want to revisit that pain? But I have also written about the special bond he and I have. The many, many late-night heartfelt chats. I want to revisit and savour those intimate moments, now, with the benefit of hindsight.

I’ve done a lot of healing and I’ve experienced a lot of joy. Everything I’ve written in my journals is a part of who I am today — and I like who I am. I want to remember, and write about, how I got here.

And most of all, I want to deliver on a promise I made two years ago to my now 28-year-old son — to write a memoir, even if it’s for his eyes only. That journey starts with finding the courage to open up these journals and let every entry take me back. And I will.

♦     ♦     ♦

I was born in Toronto, and now live and work here. I love my city. I’m trying to figure out how to paint and write full-time. Until then, I’m grateful for my corporate job. I’m working on writing my memoirs because my son asked me to.

Mary Catalfo will participate in Spice Isle Writing & Yoga Retreat, in Grenada, April 7 to 14.

Garden at Westminster Cathedral, London, created from bomb crater, 1942

“Those craters, which introduced me to the pain of life, which taught me about the un-solidness of ground, also became a portal to my becoming a writer.”

~ Kyo Maclear

On the eve of my marriage, in August 1998, my father gave me a beautiful lacquer box with a black and white photo inside. It showed my father from behind peering out over a lunar landscape. Written on the back were the words:

This is a very historic photo of a time of horror and happiness. In September 1969 I traveled from Hanoi to the border with the South — the first television correspondent to do so. What I saw no one in the West at first believed, countryside bombed so totally that it looked like the craters of the Moon. When I returned to Hanoi (traveling at night to hide from the bombing), I vowed I’d do a television history of Vietnam some day to “repair” the damage. That same day in Hanoi I received wonderful news that forever altered my life: a telegram from Mummy saying you were on your way!

My husband thought it was a lovely but strange wedding gift. On the one hand, there was the photo — black marks of bomb impacts on the ground. On the other hand, there was the refined lacquer container, subtly inlaid with mother of pearl, a reminder of my father’s simple and exquisite taste. Devastation and beauty. Horror and happiness. After years of observing my father, however, I didn’t see it as strange at all. Intense maybe, but not — in the out-of-character sort of way — strange.

In the months and years after our wedding, I kept going back to that box. It seemed, in that manner of certain keepsakes, to offer some basic truth: life is a paradox, a combination of contrasting elements.

Do we not all have a box somewhere? The box that goes by different names — identity, the past, childhood — but which speaks to our emotional inheritance?

§

My father has always been drawn to life’s craters. As a war reporter and later a documentary filmmaker, he made a life of doing what most people avoided — he rushed towards disaster. A child of the Blitz, he faced forward when others would have looked or run away.

He chose war because it allowed him to step into a meaningful narrative. He chose war because it was a good story and it held a sense of camaraderie and because he felt he could make a difference. Or maybe he chose war because he saw in the brutal act of fighting a clear-cut expression of the brutal act of living. (In war, someone is always losing something. In war, the strongest survive.)

Not long ago, I read about a documentary called Under Fire: Journalists in Combat. When the filmmaker, Martyn Burke, was asked why he thought his subjects felt compelled to keep putting themselves in harm’s way, he replied that he didn’t know: “none of them ever gave me a real answer that I could hold onto…. There are all the answers that are true — that it’s important, that it brings us news from places we need to know about, that there’s an adrenalin high and more — but there’s this unknowable personal component that’s still floating around in the ether and has not been bottled and examined, and may never be.”

It’s this “unknowable personal component” that continues to fascinate me when I meet people who put themselves in the line of fire. It’s the elusive backstory and motivation, not yet “bottled and examined.” I don’t know if I’ll ever know all the reasons why my father chose war but I do know that the choosing had lasting effects. It sculpted aspects of his personality and certainly shaped his view of human nature. In tacit and unspoken ways, it created a tone and syntax for my childhood.

§

Of course, I did eventually discover that there were people who didn’t see life the way my parents did — that is, shadowed by probable disaster. When we moved to Canada, I became best friends with a girl whose parents were hippies and they behaved as though life were a sunny alfalfa field. They had a pet rat and bred rabbits, which we spun around on a turntable, and they made their own granola. I had never eaten granola before. I had never seen a family do chores together so happily. I suspected my friend’s parents — delighted with life, fearless and unanxious, readers of Sunday morning funnies — were of a different species altogether.

Eventually, I stumbled into homes that had a more familiar quality. As if by magnetic force, I was adopted by the few Jewish families in my neighbourhood. On our quiet WASPy street, it was comforting to align myself with the minority. I suspected that these parents read the world news section first. I recognized the emphasis on education, the quest for excellence, the more-than-average fears (of illness, of loss).

§

My parents did what they could to shield me, to give me some other kind of childhood than the ones they had known. They raised me in Canada, bought me toys and holidays and swimming lessons, and sent me to good schools. My father, who only achieved a grade-school education, put me through university with a passion it took me years to appreciate. He never wanted me to suffer the self-doubts of not having enough education. He wanted me to believe that I could do anything to which I set my mind.

When things were going wrong in my life — when I had been dumped or suffered a loss — it was comforting to be around him. We didn’t speak about things directly but I knew he knew. He knew we all have our emotional wars. We all experience small-scale disasters. A few years ago someone pointed out that my dad seems to thrive in times of crisis. “He really comes through when you need him.” It’s true. I think it’s his empathy but I also think it may have something to do with his notions of newsworthiness. In my father’s worldview, happiness is a non-event. It’s irrelevant. He once joked that only callous, stupid people are happy, and I know, at some level, he believes it. And not just him. Try to talk about happiness with any veteran war reporter and he or she will probably laugh in your face.

§

The bottom line is that I grew up with a great sense of contingency. My father taught me to prepare my mind for the worst. Disaster is always lurking! But he also made me unafraid to enter the unknown. Those craters, which introduced me to the pain of life, which taught me about the un-solidness of ground, also became a portal to my becoming a writer.

A year or two ago, my father, now 83, announced that he was thinking of making another documentary about Vietnam, this one about the Ho Chi Minh Trail. It turns out that war is good for biodiversity because it keeps development away. Four decades after U.S. warplanes plastered the trail with bombs, a remote untouched corner of the trail near Cambodia is now a sanctuary of endangered wildlife. Tigers prowl imperiously down tracks where weapons-laden North Vietnamese trucks once rolled. Elephants shepherd their young past giant bomb craters to drink at jungle watering holes. And rare apes call from treetops that used to hide communist forces from American pilots. Defoliated forests have grown back. In other areas, villagers have transformed the bomb craters into fishponds, micro-lakes filled with groundwater and rainwater that provide sustenance to the Vietnamese people. It will be a story of recovery, he tells me.

The lesson I have learned from my father is that life ceaselessly combines the hard and the soft, ordinary horror and random happiness.

§

My father and I share many things, but above all we share a common trait. Our work is very personal. This is different than saying it’s autobiographical. We have our own ideas about what makes a good story. He has survived without much inclination towards introspection. He is vocally suspicious of psychology. He has a “leave it be” attitude to the past. I am of a generation that believes in picking things up and examining them. We tell ourselves the stories we need in order to live and get on with it. We write because we’re curious. We write to overcome ancient feelings of inferiority or emptiness that might otherwise dog us. We write because it makes us feel alive and possibly even happy.

♦     ♦     ♦

KYO MACLEAR was born in London, and grew up in Toronto. She is the author of two novels: The Letter Opener and, most recently, Stray Love, both published by HarperCollins Canada. A dual British-Canadian citizen, Kyo is also a visual arts writer and the author of two critically acclaimed children’s books: Spork and Virginia Wolf. Her newest picture book, Mr. Flux, will be published in April.

(The paperback edition of Stray Love was released today, March 19.)

Freda is currently writing her memoirs.

Jane Ann Robinson (nee Telford)

“I grew up hearing her mantra, ‘Well, dear, things have to be some way and they’re this way so we best get on with it.’ I know that advice has stood me in good stead over the years.”

Granny was short, ample bosomed, and had a great lap. I remember that, and more.

She had such an influence on me growing up that it had long been a dream of mine to try to trace her steps and see for myself the places she lived and worked in Ireland (at that time Ireland was not divided; it was all part of the U.K.) — from grand estates to a guest house she owned and operated with her daughter, my aunt Dody.

In 2010, thanks to one of my sons, Mike, I realized my dream.

My husband and I had moved our family, including Aunt Dody, to Canada in 1977, five years after my mother passed away. It was the time of “the Troubles,” and although one gets used to the challenges and can live with them, we wanted to give our sons, ages nine and eleven, a wider view of the world. I had visited Ireland often since moving here, and 2010 was to be such a year. But this time, Mike suggested we go together. He and his wife Kate were going to England to see Kate’s mum for a couple of weeks in August, and he and I could stay on another week and go find some of the places Granny had lived. Would I like that?

Would I! I could hardly believe my ears. Over the years I had pieced together Granny’s movements after moving from England back to Ireland shortly after 1900. Now I would get to spend a week combing that beautiful island, and with my son.

§     §     §

I was the fourth of six children, and when each of us was about to be born, my aunt Dora (“Dody”), who was ten years older than Mum, would leave Granny and come to stay with Mum for a few days to look after things. But by the time the youngest was due, because of her arthritis Granny couldn’t be alone, so she suggested to Mum, “Come here and bring the two youngest with you.” I was six years old, and my sister Ann was two.

Granny’s home then was a Victorian three-storey terrace house in a seaside town in Northern Ireland. It was here that Helen was born in October of 1946. A couple of weeks later, Dad arrived to take us all home, but Granny said, “Why don’t you leave Freda here until Christmas and get yourself settled.” We had always spent Christmas with Granny and Aunt Dora, and we did so again that December, but afterwards, Granny said, “Why don’t you leave Freda here until Easter.” So I stayed on. And when I went home for Easter, Granny said to Mum, “Why don’t you let her finish out her school year,” so I returned once again!

Granny was like a mother to me, although I also had a close relationship with my own parents. I lived with her and Dody (who never married) while going to school and eventually attending Stranmillis Training College for teachers in Belfast. I was 18 and living in college residence for my first year in 1958 when Granny died at age 89.

§     §     §

As I think of Granny, warm memories come flooding back. Like all houses of that era hers had bedrooms with fireplaces complete with mantelshelf. In the mornings when I was small, she would point to a wrapped “sweetie” sitting there and tell me that the little “birdie” had brought it for me. I asked, “How does the birdie get in?” because the windows were kept closed in the winter. She answered, “It can come down the chimney.” Even at six years old I was a bit skeptical, until one morning when I woke up and noticed bird poop on the window. “I suppose that happened as the birdie was on its way to the chimney!” said Granny. She and I kept this up long after we both knew we were playing a game.

Granny taught me to play cards; we would play for hours. We played board games as well. And she taught me to knit. She also gave me my love of reading. She had a quick wit and was a wonderful storyteller. She knew so many Irish sayings and turns of phrase. When I read Maeve Binchy now I can just hear Granny in my head. She took joy in the simplest of things in life – I guess that’s because she didn’t have much.

§     §     §

Though Granny rarely talked about her life, I know she had had it hard. She was born Jane Ann Telford on a farm in Ireland in 1869, the eldest of nine children. In the late 1880s she moved to London to find work. My grandfather-to-be, George Robinson, moved there for the same reason. They met while working in a big house in Weston Green in London. She was a parlour maid, and he a coachman and blacksmith. They married in 1892, and Dody was born there the following year. But my grandfather had angina and by 1901 they had moved back to Ireland for his health. His first job there was in County Wicklow.

My grandfather worked on several large estates owned by the landed gentry, who were usually from England and only came to live in Ireland at certain times of the year. When he died suddenly in 1907 in Tipperary, Mum was just four years old and her sister Dora fourteen. There was nothing else for it but for Granny to find work where she could keep her children with her. That meant returning to service in the “big houses.”

The Rock House, Claggan, Ballycroy, County Mayo

She moved first to the west of Ireland and worked as housekeeper to General Clive, whose estate was in County Mayo. She lived in The Rock House when he was in residence, but when he wasn’t there and the house was closed up, she moved to one of the workers’ cottages. In the 1920s, during the Irish Civil War, she worked as housekeeper for Lord Leitrim at Lough Rynn Castle in County Leitrim, and lived in the castle. (Granny remarried there in 1923 – and, according to my dad, what a disaster that turned out to be!)

The next I know of Granny is that by 1932 at age 63 she had left her husband and rented an old Victorian house beside Queen’s University in Belfast and was taking in students.

Four years later, her rheumatoid arthritis got so bad that Dody gave up her job in Derry to take care of her. They rented a house in Bangor, County Down, a seaside place, and started up a guest house. This was the first real home for either of them. And it was there I came to live with them when I was six.

I continued to live with Aunt Dody till I married in 1964, and my husband, children and I brought her with us to Canada in 1977.

Over the years, I heard snippets about life in Ireland in those days from Aunt Dody and Mum and occasionally from Granny herself. Common to all three of them were comments on what it was like to live in the west of Ireland with nothing but the sound of wind howling in the trees, the rain dashing on the bedroom windows, and the roar of the sea. It all sounded so bleak.

How I wish I had asked more questions.

§     §     §

In preparing for the trip with Mike, I created a timeline from 1901 to 1946, the year I went to live with Granny. I researched all the places to see if they were still around and in what form.

Lough Rynn Castle, Mohill, County Leitrim

We chose not to visit them chronologically. In fact we started with her last place of employment, Lough Rynn Castle, in Mohill, County Leitrim — now a five-star hotel. As we drove along the winding road to the hotel I remembered hearing Granny talk about the three-mile road running through the estate. She was there during the Irish rebellion and witnessed many disturbing events. There was no farming then — just bush and gardens around the castle.

Sitting in the drawing room of the hotel, looking out over Lough Rynn, I wondered what thoughts had run through her head. She was always pragmatic, after all. I grew up hearing her mantra, “Well, dear, things have to be some way and they’re this way so we best get on with it.” I know that advice has stood me in good stead over the years.

From there we went west, to where she had worked as a housekeeper to General Clive. His 38,000-acre estate was in Claggan, Ballycroy, County Mayo. It was his “holiday place for hunting, fishing and shooting.” Claggan is almost as far west in Ireland as you can go, opposite Achill Island – very remote even now. Driving along these narrow country roads with hardly a house in sight, the ocean on one side and the mountain on the other, I can only imagine how bereft Granny must have felt. She would have been grieving the sudden loss of her husband and the life they’d known – and what must it have been like to come to this desolate place where her employer only lived three weeks of every year and she was alone with the children for the rest.

Little had changed in the hundred years since she was there, and I pictured my mum as a little girl running through the fields and along the shore. Knowing her as I did, I could feel her loss and her pain.

We found the other estates where Granny had worked, five in all – including those in Newtownmountkennedy in County Wicklow, and Templemore in County Tipperary — but none affected us as much as this place.

§     §     §

Freda and son Mike on their Irish road trip in search of Granny

A year after this journey, at a family gathering, Mike surprised me with a wonderful gift – a hardcover book titled Finding Granny. He created it online using Shutterfly and it’s full of photographs and anecdotes from our trip.

As I look through it now, I picture us travelling down country roads, getting lost, asking directions, and not quite understanding the dialect. On one road, so narrow it was impossible to drive any faster than 20 kilometres an hour, Mike pointed to a speed limit sign: 80 km. “Do you think we’ll get caught for speeding?” he said, and we laughed.

I was so grateful to have had my son with me on this slow, meaningful journey, a more emotional one than either of us had anticipated. I felt joy at being able to fulfill my dream of retracing Granny’s moves. Through it I felt a greater connection  to my grandmother, my mum, and my aunt. It was like stepping into their world of one hundred years ago.

Finding Granny is a precious reminder of that experience.

Sandra Shaw Homer liked the idea, and surprised me by sending in the following engaging short reminiscence, which I’m now sharing with you. A writer and resident of Costa Rica, Sandy was guest speaker for my Namaste Gardens writers’ retreat in 2012.

Perhaps Sandy’s recollections will in turn trigger memories in you. If so, well, don’t just think ′em; write ′em!

Credit: Image Courtesy of The Advertising Archives

Bicycle Summers

Katie Smith lived about a half-mile down the road on the other side of the bridge that spanned the widest, darkest pool in the creek, and she was just my age. We lived on our bicycles when we were 12 — that is, when we weren’t building snow forts to protect us from Bobby Benner’s ice-filled snowballs or creating our imaginary garden on the sandbar downstream.

The Benners lived in a log cabin at the end of the dirt road that angled away from the pool just before the bridge. I only saw the inside of that cabin once — perhaps on a chilly Halloween night — and I remember the white plaster starkly outlined against the old black logs — who knew how old that place was? — and a smell of generations of endless woodstove winters. I thought at the time that it would be interesting to know those people better, but Bobby Benner, being older than Katie and me, was our enemy and constant tormentor.

The only time we were safe from him was when we were skating on the pool, all our parents huddled around the bonfire on the bank, smoking cigarettes and sipping whiskey out of dented flasks that they kept mostly hidden in their pockets. When a child fell down, a parent would come waddling out onto the ice in well-stuffed rubber boots to haul him or her upright. Sometimes the adult would skid and fall, and then it was mayhem.

Katie and I attended the sixth grade at Macungie Twsp School. That’s what it said in big letters right across the side of the red brick six-classroom building. My mother thought this was funny, and so we always called it the “macungietwispschool.” Only later did I learn what a “township” was. This was rural Pennsylvania, and most of children were farm kids, not always regular attendants.

Right across the road from us was the Lichtenwalner place, century-old house, bank barn and outbuildings all facing each other like circling wagons. This made it convenient to get from one place to another in winter weather. From the Lichtenwalners we bought our eggs, and once I was invited for a hog killing. The screaming impressed me, and I left before the butchering began. I think I had been invited by David Lichtenwalner, a couple of years my senior, who had a crush on me. But I had already been taught to be a perfect snob.

In rainy weather, Katie, my younger sister, and a small neighbor boy named Lyn and I played in our own bank barn. In Pennsylvania Dutch country a bank barn is simply one built into a slope, with the stables for livestock at the semi-underground level, and a cavernous dusty space above, reachable by an earth bank at the back (or a trap door and ladder from below). The base of our barn was built of fieldstone, the storage space above of wood and the roof slates hauled a century past from some nearby river. In haying time, that storage space would fill with carefully stacked wire-bound bales of hay. In summer it would empty and nothing remained for us children to do on a rainy day except scamper up and down the ladders and across long-smoothed, hand-hewn 12-inch wooden beams, playing tag with a basketball. Our mother never knew.

In spite of the fact that it wasn’t a mile from our house to the school, county school board regulations required that I travel to and fro by bus. And, for the most unfathomable reason, the bus would turn right at the Lichtenwalner place and wander around the countryside until it got to Katie’s house (the next-to-last stop on the 45-minute run) and finally mine. Being the last ones off the bus gave us many opportunities to cement our friendship and “make plans.”

Although, we got into an argument once, and we were still of an age to feel we needed to settle it physically. I jumped off the bus right behind her and pulled her to the ground, pummeling her as best I could, with her elbows fending me off. Even though her mother was outside in seconds, screaming and pulling us apart, I already felt how absurd it was to be physically fighting with my best friend, and I wanted to laugh. It was only the one time, and we made up, but was the damage ever undone?

Bicycle summers. Those are what I remember best. We could go for miles on those back-country asphalt roads, the sun high, the sky a breezy blue, the dusty, sharp smell of corn, alfalfa and hay rising from the fields on either side of us, sitting high on our saddles, or leaning forward in a make-believe race, no one to worry about where we were going or what we did. That was freedom.

♦     ♦     ♦

SANDRA SHAW HOMER has lived in Costa Rica for more than 20 years, where she has taught languages and worked as an interpreter/translator and environmental activist. Between 1997 and 2000 she wrote a regular column, “Local Color,” for the English-language weekly The Tico Times. She became a Costa Rican citizen in 2002. In a previous life she headed her own public relations firm in Philadelphia and wrote occasional articles for the local business press. Her writing has appeared on a couple of blogs, notably Living Abroad in Costa Rica.

Chris as a child: cover photo for “Just a Face in a Crowd”

Having been asked to share the story of my writing life, I should start off by explaining (though I know this is not what she had in mind) how I got involved in one of Allyson’s memoir writing courses, for that’s where the inspiration — the confidence — came that was to result in my memoir, Just a Face in a Crowd.

Sorry to say, the only answer I have to the question of how I learned of her course is a brief three words long: I don’t remember. But I’m so glad I had that experience!

So too can the inspiration for a piece of writing often be forgotten. Do I remember that childhood journey to the zoo, or just the subsequent part of the visit when I was stung by a bee and rushed to hospital? Do I remember the joy at three years old of seeing my mother again after thinking I had lost her in the Christmas shopping crowds? Or the sight that followed of her terrified, tearful face as she smacked me for “running away’?

The snapshot in time that often constitutes a memory can be buried deep, or reappear so briefly that the writer wonders whether to broach the story at all. Then, on starting to write it down, the memory and imagination begin to blossom and bear fruit. Oh yes. That bee-sting. While writing about that, and about a resultant lifelong fear of flying insects, I may recall the smell of the doctor’s office, and how, afraid to ask for the bathroom, I wept with embarrassment on wetting my knickers.

And so it goes on. Suddenly I am writing a memoir.

I began writing years ago when the progression of my MS rendered me unable to continue to teach or pursue my favourite hobby, painting. My coordination deteriorated, and I became fatigued just getting my materials ready. I had to fill the time and exercise those creative brain cells, so, I wrote using an old electric typewriter. I’d tried writing memories down before, and kept an intermittent journal, but because of my inability to travel about to do research and check accuracy, I soon abandoned the idea in frustration.

Then the computer entered my life along with its miraculously light keyboard, followed by the Internet. I was able to find out, or check up on, anything I wanted, without moving from my chair. I found that writing memoir woke my imagination — that it was possible to invent believable characters and plots. (While working on a story it’s sometimes hard to separate reality from the other thing!)

Most of my learning has come from online courses, workshops, and library books, and of course from writing every day. That daily discipline has been essential. (Long e-mails to good friends count towards this commitment.) Only when particularly unwell do I allow myself off that hook.

Allyson’s online course at the time was through Ryerson University in Canada. What a blessing the Internet is to those of us with health and mobility limitations! There were students from far-flung locations, and some of us quickly became good Internet buddies outside the writing process.

Was I the only student from the U.K.? Another three-word reply, I’m afraid. However I DO know I wasn’t the only one with shared memories from wartime, for some had immigrated to Canada carrying their memories with them. The crash and rumble of the blitz, as described by one student, sticks in my mind. As I remember, the piece she contributed began with a strong memory of a piece of knitting, unravelling as it dangled on its needle. It fluttered and swung from the second storey of a house that had the whole front wall missing, exposing what remained of a sitting room. The writer mused on the possible scenario played out over the previous and subsequent hours, the feelings, the sounds; she speculated on the effect of the trauma on the inhabitants. (If the writer is reading this, why not get in touch?)

What a pain in the neck I must have been to Allyson, insisting as I did, like an overearnest schoolgirl, that the work I sent up wasn’t critiqued sternly enough! She was being too kind in her comments, I said. Her patient reply took me many years to fully understand. It was the process of memorizing, of recall, that mattered at that early stage. Getting into the habit of writing regularly, getting the words down was important, the quality of the writing but a small part of that process as yet. Learning the “nuts and bolts” was to happen gradually or come later. She was so right.

It’s only now, with my own memoir in printed form and distributed to my family, for whom it was intended, that I comprehend her approach.

I’ve had years of experience in coordinating a few small, local writing groups since. I am, I must admit, a poor acolyte of my tutor, but retain very firm and warm memories of her place in my writing life, treating the members of “my” groups as she once treated me.

I still write — does anyone ever stop completely? — but the depredations of illness and aging now limit my output. My first book, published privately, was intended for my three children and six grandchildren. They knew nothing of my past, my being sent to an institution (called an orphanage in those days) because my dad died when I was nine, and Mum lost his pension and fell ill, and couldn’t cope. I had always viewed this with inappropriate shame, but writing it all down laid that particular ghost. I have no other ambitions to be published, and I’m sure that’s just as well: I’m no star of the writing firmament! But perhaps I’ll assemble about twenty short stories into an anthology, so that my years of writing shorter pieces will not have been time wasted.

I enter competitions and enjoy the occasion prize, but it is newsy e-mails to good friends, and short stories, and “homework” for workshops that keeps me happily occupied. Meanwhile, I attend local workshops, when health permits, and this keeps me in touch with what others are writing. Approaches have changed over the years, and it’s easy to become locked in what becomes a dated style.

I hope I’ll be able to write till I’ve only the energy left to breathe — and then I shall have to content myself with reading, or listening to, the works of others.

I never dreamed back when I sat down at that electric typewriter that someday I’d set myself the task of writing a 70,000-word memoir, and eventually complete it. Or that my granddaughter’s class, studying the Second World War, would read parts of my book as history brought alive, and that she’d be proud to loan her copy around. What a gift to last forever Allyson gave me in that course all those years ago.

♦     ♦     ♦

Excerpt from Just a Face in a Crowd: A patchwork of memories, Chapter 1:

“Sometimes a memory stutters, like a flick-book. It starts in excitement, accelerates, hesitates; it can chunter to a top before the episode is completely revisited. Or we remember being somewhere specific, perhaps, doing some particular thing. The details of preparing, arriving, completing the activity, are insubstantial or disjointed. Memories can slink, wraiths from a mist. Then we grasp them, struggle to hold onto images, sensations, significance. Try to pin down a particular sensation and, diaphanous and elusive, the memory drifts away, faces disembodied or forms without face. A sound or a scent, it may be, that brings a memory scuttling back; maybe the acrid tang of a smouldering cigarette end, the loathed flavour of sweetened milk, the sound of laughter an excluding room away. Even a word, pronounced in a certain way, will jolt a past image into focus.

My fourth memory is evoked by a place-name. The family — the lap-filling baby, my six siblings ranging from turbulent eight to eighteen and smoked-wreathed Dad — all vanish from mind on that precious day Mum buttons only my shoes and says, “We are going to Penge.” …

 ♦     ♦     ♦

CHRIS HAZELGROVE is the author of Just a Face in a Crowd: A patchwork of memories. She lives in the historic city of Winchester, U.K. She has three adult children and six grandchildren, and one husband, who knows how she likes her tea.

Tree-hugger, avid memoir reader, nature writer, talker to stray dogs and cats, gardener, CNN news junkie, serious recycler, walker, birdwatcher, lover of storms and laughter, Pilates aficionado, and doting granny, she’s embracing aging and working up the courage to let her hair go grey.

1.

The chimes of my grandmother’s clock were the background music marking the passing hours of my childhood days. Now the clock stands on the mantel of my home in Santiago. Its plain wooden case has a delicate tracery inlay of lighter wood below the clock face, which bears Roman numerals and, in tiny print, the words “Made by The Sessions Clock Company, Forestville, Conn. U.S.A.”

The ring of the chimes evokes my distant family home, the marble-topped table in the living room where the clock stood, the view of Red Hill from the window behind, and my mother bending over to wind the clock with its brass key. I do the winding now — when I remember.

2.

As an only child, I was my father’s frequent fishing companion. One day, years later, I discovered in an old cigar box a black and white photograph of us fishing at an inlet of San Francisco Bay. We both wear baggy blue jeans. I am five years old and hold my father’s fishing pole, its tip pointing out over the rippling water. My father stands close behind me, watching, a smile on his face. There were other father–daughter fishing excursions as I grew older; my favourites were in a rowboat at Lily Lake in the Sierra Nevada in the silent dawn, when the trout were biting.

3.

The Andean peaks I see from my window never cease to awe me, but I hold a place in my heart for the hills and forests of northern California where I grew up. Years ago, a month before my father died, I bought a redwood seedling, encased in a plastic tube, and smuggled it, hidden in my parka, past Chilean customs agents. I wouldn’t attempt that deed now, but that was before the word biodiversity entered my vocabulary. I planted the seedling in my city garden, thinking of it as a memorial to my father. Now, the sight of the towering tree’s full needled branches transports me back to the place I left behind. It is my companion as I push my roots deeper into this foreign soil.

4.

Each time I travel, I want to immerse myself in the landscape so that later I may remember the feel of it. I cannot resist bringing a memento back with me, and, as I walk along, rocks slip into my pocket as if by their own accord. They contain rich geological information, but I lack the knowledge to decipher it. The scientific terms that I learned in geology class at university have slid into lost crevasses of my memory. Turning over in my hand a smooth russet oval, I no longer remember its origin. But other stones carry clues in their shape, colour, and texture: the shiny black basalt from the rim of a crater on Easter Island; the porous, feather-light stone found floating in a Patagonian lake near the Caulle volcano; the thin, striated shale gathered from the banks of Glen Alpine Creek near Lily Lake; the smooth, oval ones, white speckled with black, like bird eggs, from Italy’s Elba Island; and the rough chunk of sediment bearing a sand dollar fossil imprint found on a wind-blown Patagonian plateau. My rocks comfort my nature-starved spirit and take me back to those wild places.

5.

I inherited a small, ochre-coloured chest that had been in my family home in a nook by my bedroom door. Its seven slim drawers held an assortment of household items: piles of greeting cards, tablets of sheer airmail paper, a rainbow palette of spools of thread, scissors, a hem-measuring stick. What makes this chest so special is the scent that wafts from its interior — the smell of my childhood bedroom, of wood, books, paper, and pencils. Often as I pass by, I open a drawer, bend down, and breathe in deeply. It evokes not only a visual memory, but something deeper, subconscious, a communion with the past — with the small room where I read the Wizard of Oz series, listened in bed to the owl hooting in the night from the eucalyptus tree, wrote in my diary about my latest crush, and tried lipstick for the first time.

6.

My oldest friend Paula gave me a silver fruit knife, bought at an antiques shop. She fashioned a felt bag for it with a tag that read, For a sterling friend. She explained that I was to use the knife as a letter opener. Paula, overwhelmed by her life’s vicissitudes, seldom writes now. We see each other only once a year during my visits back home. But when I take the letter opener in hand and read her dedication, I am reminded of her enormous creativity and sense of humour, and know we are always in each other’s thoughts.

7.

His smooth, olive hands bore no ring. His appearance gave no clue as to his age or job. Exchanging smiles and “Buenas tardes,” we settled back for the long flight from Barranquilla, Colombia, to Mexico City over the jungles and mountains of Central America. He introduced himself as Alfonso from Ecuador and explained he was returning to the Mexican village where he worked as an anthropologist and priest. I’d been visiting the Colombian barrio where I’d served as a Peace Corps volunteer. We soon became absorbed in conversation, sharing thoughts and experiences like two people on our own planet. When the sky darkened, he pointed out the glimmering stars, saying they reminded him of The Little Prince. As I hadn’t read the book, Alfonso related the encounter of the little prince with a fox, who explains how the boy can tame him by being patient and returning at the same time each day and moving slowly towards him.

Too soon, the captain’s voice interrupted, announcing our approach to Mexico City. In the terminal Alfonso and I embraced. I don’t remember our parting words.

Weeks later, a thin, brown package, bearing a Mexican postmark, arrived at my apartment. It was a Spanish copy of The Little Prince. Inside was written For Suzanne with the affection of your friend, the fox, who always feels responsible for you. I hope we’ll meet again someday. Alfonso. 1970.

*     *     *

What are your seven treasures? If one of Suzanne’s brings to mind a special memory, please share your story below.

Explore more guest posts in the Seven Treasures series here.

Attending writing presentations and workshops is a major part of my writing life, with the focus, until recently, on editing, character building, dialogue, and plot. But with amazing new printing possibilities and fast-changing distribution patterns so available, the days of the nurturing publisher are disappearing. Getting “out there,” grooming an audience to buy your book, is more and more your responsibility as the author.

Author Farzana Doctor

The auditorium was full for Farzana Doctor’s recent presentation at North York Central Library “Getting Yourself Out There: Self-Promotion for Emerging Writers.” Farzana is the library’s fall 2012 writer-in-residence.

I usually scribble madly in presentations, but in this case she provided skeleton plans to fill in; these corresponded to PowerPoint slides summarizing her suggestions. Topics included the line between self-promotion and being obnoxious, and how to develop a mailing list. She also shared the promotional schedule for her novel Six Metres of Pavement.

Her message was simple. It’s up to you.

You have to start building the platform from which to launch your book long before it is completed. This ensures that when publication day arrives, you are prepared, with a profile, public persona, and product with which to woo the world.

You must use everything available, plus imagination, to endorse yourself, she advised. No one will think you big-headed — that’s a concept from last century. For authors, self-centredness is “in,” and the tools for building your platform are in place: e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, Web and blog pages, and book trailers.

Don’t be shy. Build a following.

She stressed you need to be whimsical. Use photos, fliers, cards, video clips, marshal friends into promo squads, build relationships by volunteering at literary events, join writing organizations (examples in Canada include Professional Writers Association of Canada, The Writers’ Union of Canada, and The Writers’ Community of Durham Region) and local writing groups. You need to be supportive and generous to others, to share, and to pass on news. (No one asked, But . . . when do we write?)

For people like me, raised to mind my own business, never blow my own trumpet, and expect failure — and one consolation is that I’ve never been disappointed — self-promotion is a real challenge. Adapting to and using social media is fascinating, yet repellent. Nevertheless the scenario shift must be faced. If you want to write and sell a book, you need to build that platform and mount it with a loud hailer, now.

Yet listening to Farzana’s suggestions I realized I have been on the right track promoting myself and my memoir, Home First. I network. I was involved in founding two writing groups, one in Chile and one in Toronto, and I organize writers’ retreats at Los Parronales, my home in Santiago. These days I post more frequently on my Los Parronales blog, and also on the Santiago Writers blog, The Tuesday Prompt, and I continue to send short stories and poems to competitions and anthologies.

Farzana challenged us, before we left, to approach three people and introduce either ourselves or our current project with a 30-second “elevator speech.” Throwing caution to the wind, I honed my bio, not easy when life and work are intertwined and complex: “I’m a writer who published a memoir last year titled Home First, and I’m working on a sequel. I reached that point thanks to attending writing groups and retreats. I now host an annual residential workshop in Chile.”

Rather than pitching to a fellow participant, I made my way to the front of the room and presented my blurb to Farzana herself. Then, thinking I might as well aim high, I handed her a brochure for my next retreat.

*     *     *

SUSAN SIDDELEY, author, poet, workshop host, mother, wife, friend, Santiago Writer, Parliament Street Writer …

♦     ♦     ♦

Note from Allyson:

Also on this topic, read “Yes, You CAN Tell People: On Writers and Self-Promotion” by Dinty W. Moore, reblogged from Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog:

“A graduate student here at Ohio University had a nice literary magazine publication recently, and when I asked him for details, so I could share his good news with others in the program, he e-mailed back, ‘I’m not really one for self-promotion (makes me feel a little icky).’

“I hear this often — ‘I don’t like self-promotion’ or ‘she’s so self-promoting’ — as if it were a horrible literary transgression to make the results of one’s considerable effort known and available. Why is it shameful, after having worked very hard at something, and had some success in seeing it to publication, to then tell folks? I don’t get it….” Read the entire post here.

Morgan Holmes (photo: Stuart Lowe)

I pay my bills by working as a freelance writer/editor. Usually, that entails me hewing and sanding language about others’ thoughts and interests. A hygienic business, for the most part — subjects kept safely distant, taut, and orderly. But this Seven Treasures project: it required trekking through much bramblier and overgrown woods than I expected. My words here carry the cuts, scrapes, and burrs that prove I made the journey (even if I’m not sure where I’ve arrived).

1. “Into the Primitive”

This is the first object winking at me from my dusty cabinet of curiosities: Jack London’s The Call of the Wild — 7 3/4” x 5 1/8” x nearly 14/16”. Unabridged. Illustrated. Published in Wisconsin. According to my mum’s note written on the flyleaf, I received this “as a prize for spelling in grade 2, June 1974.” The cover art is blue midnight, wintery northern-spruce forest, and snarling jaws: clearly for boys only! I musta wept some lonesome-critter tears that summer.

2. My Little Friend

Another maternal inscription. This time, not literal. He stands barely 2 9/16” tall. Mostly creamy grey, with traces of yellow and blue paint in the creases of his long coat and belt. This is Dopey: the seventh dwarf — my mum’s tiny figurine from the late 1930s or early ’40s.

We moved out of my childhood home when I was 15 and most of my toys vanished. Not certain how. But Dopey stuck around ’til I unearthed him years later from a wooden whisky box lurking in a spidery corner of my grandparents’ cellar. He’s my talisman. We’ve been on some top-notch rambles together.

3. Ducks Are People

My father fell ill when I was 15. He passed away seven years later. Memories of dad as a vital person are the ones I strive to hang on to. Best of all: down at the lake — floating, tinkering, smoking, napping.

Among the few trinkets that came to me when he died is a green metal pin-on button (rusty on the back) — 2 1/8” across. In the centre there’s a white cartoon silhouette of a smiling duck, with the words “Love a Little White Duck” slung around the circumference. I can’t recall my father ever wearing this button, nor do I even know where it came from or what the message means. But at least it’s clear this mysterious bit of paint and tin was something that made him laugh enough to keep.

4. Rhymes with Memory

I couldn’t have just one book amongst my treasures. This next one measures 4 3/8” x 6 5/8” x 1 1/8”, and, like the volume before, it too was a school prize. Forty-three years before I howled with Jack London, my grandfather received Arthur Quiller-Couch’s redoubtable Oxford Book of Victorian Verse for “general proficiency” in form IVB at Ashbury. Its 1,023 pages are thin, serious tissues, but the volume itself is sturdily bound in faded scarlet morocco.

I read Hardy’s “Darkling Thrush” from this little book at his funeral. It bolstered me to speak those old rhymes and to rekindle, through “the growing gloom,” my granddad’s “happy good-night air.”

5. Uisge Beatha

Here’s one that’s cheerier (about time). Throughout my childhood I was absorbed by nature’s mysterious creatures and corners, blathering vigorously to whatever adult would listen about uncanny forest footprints, the ghost of Anne Boleyn, WWII fighter planes that vanished around Bermuda, and scaly beasts that reside in watery caves. But it used to drive me nuts (still does) when I would hear about so-called scientific missions to “find” Nessie. So bullyish and so wrong to disturb her misty Scots solitude!

When Auntie Margaret passed away, I pocketed from a shelf in her home a ceramic figurine of the enigmatic creature herself. A smiling wee lass (4 15/16” nose to tail) sporting a jaunty tam and a belly full of Beneagles, my Nessie paddles blithely, undisturbed, across the surface of her grey-green loch.

6. Joie d’Hiver

Within about a month of decamping to Montreal in late summer 1989 I fell hard for another new transplant named Dennis. Around the same time we met, Den learned that he had taken second prize in that year’s Labour Day weekend novel competition sponsored by Arsenal Pulp Press. The even better news contained in that letter was that Arsenal’s editor so admired the manuscript he invited Den to rework it for publication.

Now, when I thumb through the resulting book — Dog Years — I time-travel back to that long, sub-zero St. Lawrence winter where I was kept warm by two entwined intensities: a new relationship and Den’s powerful word-alchemy.

7. Resinous

Organic last: in places a thumbnail thick, shaggy, craggy, grey-brown bark surrounds the pale creamy-orange heart of a half-circle fist-and-knuckles fragment of silver maple.

Throughout my childhood, that ancient dragon stood on the west side of my grandparent’s place. He shaded my bedroom from summer’s late-afternoon sun, made room for all my scrappy birdhouses. The tiniest puff of breeze and every branch would snap to life with glinting, quaking, argent-green eyes.

I was down south at university when he was felled. I recall the knee-buckling drift I felt when I returned home one holiday to find his space empty, the illumination switched off. A few limb-shards lay scattered in the ragged mid-December snow. I retrieved one. Twenty years on and those woody rings preserve my friend’s sharp, spicy aroma.

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MORGAN HOLMES grew up on the igneous shield of Northern Ontario. He spent most of his 20s in Montreal, and since then has found himself skirting Lake Ontario’s lowland shores. A freelance writer and editor (www.wordmeridian.com), Morgan also teaches continuing-education courses at Ryerson University (Shakespeare in Performance, The Art of Promotional Writing). When off the clock, he likes to spend time on wordless pursuits — his top three being piping, hiking, and canoeing.

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