David J. Forsyth's Blog: Books, page 2

The Latent Power of Books

I've seen the wonders of the world and listened to those who live upon it. I've learned its secrets, laughed aloud and cried real tears, and all that by simply reading books.

Insight

Insight

I’ve been working on a novel for almost three years now, and I feel my readers deserve an explanation as to why I’m taking so long.

It’s not that I’m lazy or unmotivated. The manuscript that I’m currently writing is about several generations of my family. As a consequence, it is part biography based on genealogical research and part historical fiction because so many details have been lost to time. While writing, I frequently encounter aspects of history about which I am ignorant, i.e. the early twentieth century passenger ship boarding process in England. Obscure issues such as this may sound trivial, but one can’t tell a story well without a thorough understanding of the characters’ experiences. At such times, I’m compelled to leave the writing of the narrative and research the unknown issue, sometimes for an hour, or even longer if the subject is complex.

It’s not unusual during my research phase to discover some interesting historical fact concerning another aspect of the story. Once again, I interrupt what I’m doing to cut and paste my discovery into a resource document. Then, concerned that I will mistake the pasted text as my own words at some later date, I immediately set about re-writing the account to avoid plagiarising someone else’s work. Having done that, I title the piece and file it away in my “resources” folder, before returning to my research. Once I’ve acquired an understanding of the previously unknown “boarding process,” I return to the manuscript. Now, with the passage of time completely indifferent to my progress, I begin writing again, only to discover within a few lines that a map or other image is needed to augment the narrative.

Off I go again, searching for a suitable image or putting together a map, explanatory diagram or chart. These distractions are so frequently encountered that it seems as though every hour of writing entails several hours of supplementary tasks.

It’s important to me that the finished book accurately represents the lives of my ancestors, but I also hope to ensure that the narrative fits comfortably into an historically correct backdrop. Is it any wonder the work progresses slowly?

Less Than Serious

My grandchildren know the name 'Shel Silverstein,' because I have four of his books, and I've read his poetry to them on many occasions. If you're familiar with his work, you already know he wrote a lot of nonsense, but it's the créme de la créme of nonsense as far as my grandchildren are concerned.

I, on the other hand, tend to write rather serious poems, fifty-one of which were recently published by Rock's Mills Press under the title "Footnotes" – poems of loss, the passage of time, and mortality.

Occasionally, however, the late Mr Silverstein's work inspires me to write something just for fun. Here's one I scribbled out this morning that will likely never be published outside of this blog.

Orange and Purple

Some people make claims that just aren’t true.
Perhaps they just lack imagination.
I’m often told what I cannot do
In a given situation.

They say that nothing rhymes with “or-ange,”
But Angela, the maid, would disagree.
She’s often told to, “Sweep the floor, Ange.”
And that’s a rhyme – you must agree.

I’ve heard that nothing rhymes with “pur-ple.”
My wife and I were pulling taffy.
I pulled it first, then it was her pull.
Does that not rhyme? – sounds fine to me.

Footnotes Excerpt

The following lines are excerpts of two poems from Footnotes, my most recent book, published by Rock's Mills Press, 2020.

Crumbs on a Yellow Plate 2007

A yellow plate and plastic fork,
In trash-bag tossed,
Tell nothing of the past nor her
Brief life, now lost.

Instead a few sweet crumbs upon
The plate remain,
Remnants of what no longer is.
We share the pain.

Jack's Last Day 2020

He was a little man, but a ball of fire,
And I am surprised at the weight of his coffin.
Then I realize how many hopes and fears,
And how much courage and pain lie within.

Footnotes

For more than sixty years, I’ve felt the occasional need to write poetry for no discernible reason. I suppose it was simply my way of venting; getting things off my chest, because the works are all associated with events, memories or ideas about which I am passionate.

Until recently, I never shared my poetry with anyone, not even my wife whom I married fifty-five years ago. Many of the poems have disappeared over the years, some of which undoubtedly deserved their fate, but I was satisfied with most of the survivors and even proud of a few.

I suppose it was inevitable, given my age, that I would begin thinking seriously about my mortality. To that end – pun intended – I had my will updated, pre-arranged my funeral, and purchased a burial plot. Then, less than a year ago, I decided to search the nooks and crannies of my office to gather the surviving poems together. Some were handwritten among stacks of papers in my office closet, while others were typed and stuffed into a filing cabinet. The majority, however, were Word documents that had been written on computers no longer in use, but which had been transferred to the laptop I was using at the time.

Because the meanings of some poems might escape my heirs, I added footnotes to a handful of the works. Ultimately, I assembled fifty-one poems and, on a whim, sent them off to my publisher – footnotes and all. To my surprise, he asked me to write footnotes for every poem and advised that he intended to publish the entire collection. Over the next several weeks, I wrote footnotes, designed a cover using on one of my own photographs, and signed a publishing agreement with Rock’s Mills Press.

Various titles occurred to me as the work progressed, but none of them seemed quite right. Then it suddenly occurred to me that "footnotes" not only described the words beneath the poems, but each of the poems served as a footnote to my life.

So, on October 1st 2020, my third book, Footnotes, “poems of loss, the passage of time & mortality” will become available. Copies can be obtained at Amazon, at Rock’s Mills Press, and through my own website, www.davidjforsyth.com.

In Pursuit of a Dream

The following article was written for "The Sailboat Cruiser," a free online magazine at https://www.sailboat-cruising.com

From a very early age, the idea of sailing to exotic ports on my own boat intrigued me. It was a romantic notion based on my love of Robert Ballantyne’s novel, The Coral Island. As you might expect, Ballantyne’s book featured coconut palms, parrots, sandy beaches, and tropical trade winds. Of course, life is not all palm fronds and gentle breezes, but the pursuit of a dream can, in itself, be a great adventure.

My quest began in earnest at a work-related seminar wherein the presenter talked about achieving goals. He used an analogy. “You can tread water and wait for something to happen, or you can swim toward shore.” I was more than half-way to retirement, and had done nothing to convert my dream into a reality. I was treading water!

“Begin,” said the presenter, “by making a list of all the things you can do to reach your objective.”

I started my list with, “read about the sailing adventures of others” and “identify the desirable features of a suitable boat.” Then I wrote positive affirmations on post-it notes and stuck them up on the bathroom mirror. Two of my three children were in college at the time, and we still had a mortgage to pay, so I couldn’t afford to buy a boat, but I walked to a nearby bank on my lunch hour and opened a savings account which became known as “the boat account.” It grew slowly at first, but I found new ways to save, and each time I was tempted to buy something, I asked myself ... “Do I want this more than a sailboat?” Most often, the answer was, “No!”

It took a decade to acquire the funds for the right boat, but in the interim, I learned what I had to know about cruising. I enrolled in the local sailing club’s thirty-hour “basic keelboat” course, read everything I could find about sailing and sailboats, and kept adding to my list of things I could do to reach my goal. I rented twenty-four-foot Sharks from the sailing club, signed up for a live-aboard course, and crewed on a local Alberg 30 for a retired ship’s carpenter. He was ill-tempered and abusive, but he had a wealth of knowledge based on his service with the Blue Funnel Line. I studied navigation, obtained a marine radio license, and attended boat shows from Toronto to Annapolis, Maryland.

When I eventually acquired my own twenty-nine-foot Alberg sloop, I spent years refitting her while sailing in the Great Lakes. To further my knowledge of cruising, I crewed for other skippers on passages from Toronto to Newfoundland and Labrador, and from Fort Lauderdale to Maine.

Two weeks beyond schedule, following years of preparation, I set out for Sydney, Nova Scotia with the intention of crossing the North Atlantic to Flores in the Acores. From there, along with my long-time friend and only experienced crewmember, I planned to sail to the UK. Fate had a different agenda.

At Quebec City we had a mechanical problem that cost us a week and several hundred dollars. At Matane, three weeks behind schedule, my crew learned of an urgent family matter and disembarked to return home in haste. With my plan in tatters, my wife and I sailed the remaining 400 nautical miles to Sydney, put Alice Rose up on the hard, and returned home.

My friend, now consumed with a family member’s health issues, was an integral part of my cruising plan. During the winter, while Alice Rose huddled in a boatyard beneath a tarpaulin, I confronted the fact that my dream was irretrievably lost.

The following spring, I returned to Nova Scotia, and with the help of several friends, each willing to crew for a period of a week or two, I sailed my masthead sloop home via Halifax, Boston, New York, the Hudson River and the Erie Canal.

I had dreamed of cruising warm tropical waters some day, but had been confined to the frigid North Atlantic, where the sea is Too Cold for Mermaids.

Looking back over those years of cruising, I do not regret the loss of my dream quite as much as I cherish the adventure of cruising that 2,500 nautical mile loop aboard my twenty-nine foot sloop – and the pursuit of my dream.

Who Are You?

I’ve spent 50 years peering into the past, seeking ancestors and becoming familiar with the details of their lives, and though I’m often frustrated with the complexities of the process, I thoroughly enjoy the hunt.

Every family has a number of stories waiting to be unearthed in an archive, a cemetery or a parish church record somewhere. Here is one of mine. My great-great-grandfather, Thomas, was born sixty miles from Dublin and emigrated to London, England at the beginning of the potato famine in 1845. The 1851 census provides the names of his wife and children, along with their ages, but it also introduces an unanticipated mystery. Who is the seven-year-old female identified as his niece? Since her surname is the same as his, it could only be the daughter of his brother, yet no brother had been discovered at the time.

Several years passed before Thomas’s brother, Patrick, emerged from the millions of London’s archived records, and it was only through perseverance that the names of his wife and four of his children were gradually acquired.

One of the records obtained in the process was Patrick’s marriage certificate of 12 July 1840. For 180 years, that document held a secret which continues to impact his descendants today. Where the bride and groom would normally have signed their names, there are only Xs – both Patrick and his wife were illiterate, incapable of even signing their names. So, how does this affect their descendants today?

Well, each time Patrick and his wife registered the birth of another child, they were asked their surname and replied in what was likely a thick Irish accent from the perspective of an English registrar. As the birth of each child was registered a year or two apart, four separate officials interpreted what they thought they heard, and each one recorded the surname with a different spelling. Today, their descendants legal surnames are spelled variously as Garty, Garby, Garety and Garratty.

Still working on my 3rd book, but in the interim . . .

Candle Light

I am but a flame, born of a spark long past;
Once bright and hot, and fuelled by molten wax.
With disregard, I burned through youth.
Shortly will I flicker before a chill north wind,
Weakly clinging to the fragile wick of life.
Near the end, I will shrink to an ember –
One final gasp of smoke as I extinguish.
Where once I glowed, there will be naught but carbon,
And a memory of once-brilliant light.

David J. Forsyth

Focus & Persistence

Why is it that after a year of working on my third book, I’m still nearer the title page than 'The End'? Admittedly, I have allowed other projects to distract me from time to time, but that’s not the sole reason for my lack of progress. For one thing, my story is based on the lives of real people, and I have a responsibility to truth that demands a great deal of research – endless hours of research. Then there are the trivial, unavoidable interruptions integral to daily life; other peoples’ needs. Oh, how I wish I could hunker down in an isolated cottage on a windswept headland overlooking the sea, or rent a forgotten cupola atop a remote riverside home. As a husband, a father and a friend with commitments to others, the idea seems rather selfish, so I resist the temptation. Perhaps all I need is a little more resolve and perseverance.

Still, in my view, writing is a solitary rather than a collaborative process, and though I regularly associate with other writers, enjoy their company and learn a great deal from them, I find isolation is the key to my best work.

I’m proud to be a member of the Canadian Authors’ Association and I belong to an informal literary group known as the Third Thursday Group – which, by the way, meets on the second Thursday of the month, but I don’t wish to write like them. Each of us have our own style, our own approach, and a unique way of telling our story. Some feel critiquing one-another’s work will improve the quality of our writing, but I’m concerned that in the end, our manuscripts will become indistinguishable, a homogeny of the collaborators’ perspectives and approaches.

Don’t misunderstand me; I’m not advocating ignorance. If we are to offer our readers something of value, we must explore the conventions of grammar and style; study literature and language. Then, with the tools we have assembled, the collective knowledge of our predecessors and our contemporaries, we must shut the door, turn off the phone and focus.

MEET HAMILTON AREA AUTHORS

I, along with copies of my books, will be at The Waterdown Book Fair, more accurately known as the “Waterdown-East Flamborough Heritage Society’s 28th Annual Book Fair” on Saturday October the 20th 2018. I’m looking forward to meeting you and discussing your reading interests. If my books aren’t suited to your tastes, don’t be discouraged. A number of other local authors with a diverse array of genres and writing styles will be there with me. Drop by for a chat and perhaps find the perfect read for those cold, snowy days that are surely lurking just beyond today's falling leaves.

The Book Fair will be open to the public between 9:30 am and 2:30 pm in the Fellowship Hall of St. James United Church, 306 Parkside Drive, Waterdown, Ontario, Canada.

I look forward to seeing you there!