Lilian Nattel's Blog, page 13

Buddha’s Flowers on Christmas

Click to enlarge

I saw the day come into the sky this morning and waited for my family to awake. There was peace and there was joy, like the songs, like the face of the cloth bag monk. You can see him on the table to the right with the flowers and oranges, which did not fit into stockings. He is the happy guy as we call him, an incarnation of Maitreya, who is a future Buddha who will come to the world in human form to lovingly bring enlightenment. All cultures have these stories. We all need them. They bring hope in the face of pain, past or present.

For my children this morning there was surprise and delight: a blessing as A and I basked in it. I made French toast for breakfast–I the non-cook in the family. Listening to Handel on the radio, I made fruit salad with berries, a winter luxury, and French toast, served with maple syrup from Nova Scotia, where resides a very special friend who sent it to me and my family. Thank you!

Filed under: Personal, Uplifting Tagged: Buddha's Christmas

The Sun Keeps Rising

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The world ain’t ending folks. View from my kitchen while getting kids their breakfast.

Filed under: Miscellany

Sea Plane and Reading

WWII military supply plane

That is the interior of the sea plane that took me from Vancouver to Gabriola Island. As the only passenger, I got to sit in front.

I thought the ride would be scary. Instead it was a stroll through the sky. A magical row below the clouds and above the ground, where toy cars drove along toy roads. A rope trailed from the right wing, later used to secure the plane to the dock the way you’d tie up your rowbot.

Gabriola Island is a verdant haven for artists, musicians, writers and others off the coast of B.C. between Vancouver and Vancouver Island. The library is newly rebuilt and I was privileged to be the first author reading there. It was delightful, the library packed with an intelligent and enthusiastic audience. And treats. What can be better than books, talk, and brownies?

Tofino Air

Thank you Gabriola Island’s Friends of the Library and Tofino Air!

Filed under: CanLit, Fun, Literary Tagged: Gabriola Island

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera

Portrait of Diego Rivera and Malu Block and Frida Kahlo de Rivera by Carl Van Vechten

(Click photo to enlarge)

I am drawn to survivors whose spirit pushes through trauma to emerge in a life affirming way despite it all. In Frida Kahlo’s case, that emergence is a fireworks of colour and imagination. She survived polio at age 7, being speared through her chest by a pole in a bus accident at age 18, subsequent body casts, surgeries throughout her life, and miscarriages. She began to paint while incapacitated, and her art is at times painful, funny, beautiful, but always vivid.

I recently saw an exhibit of her work paired with that of her husband, Diego Rivera, at the Art Gallery of Ontario. He was a master technician, but for me his most interesting work were his still lifes, vivid in colour and texture, painted when he was a young man, some fifteen years before his marriage to Frida. He was 20 years older, the more prominent artist in his time (being male helped), hired to paint murals for communists and capitalists alike. (Rockefeller had his own mural destroyed when Rivera refused to paint over the portrait of Lenin within it.) The murals are propaganda and about as imaginative as propaganda is ever allowed to be.

Frida Kahlo’s imagination was unlimited by politics, but her rendering of it was subjected to physical limitations: pain, incapacitation. Maybe that’s why many of her paintings were small. She is famous for her self-portraits, the unibrow and the mustache, which she exaggerated in her paintings. (Because of playing with gender? Because of the hirsuteness of the indigenous and Latin branches of her family rather than the German?) They were striking, but I am still haunted by Kahlo’s “A Few Small Nips”, which she painted in reaction to her husband’s affair with her sister. (Both of them had multiple affairs, but presumably this went beyond the pale.) What I liked best were the rich and humorous still lifes like “The Bride Frightened At Seeing Life Opened” (click to enlarge):

The Bride Frightened At Seeing Life Opened

These images give the barest hint of the originals. For me, what stood out were the intensity of her work and her life, the passion, the rebellion, the colour. It makes me want to write. It makes me ask myself how do I write?

What matters most? What colour, what life, what vividness is there within to bring to bear in the world?

Filed under: Beautiful Tagged: Frida Kahlo exhibit Art Gallery of Ontario

Hanukah Last Night

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Do you see the blue lights? And the evanescent ball hanging out with the plant? Who can say whether they are optical effects or angels?

Filed under: Beautiful, Personal Tagged: Hanukah lights

Draft One Done!

Cottontop Tamarin by Michael Gäbler

You may have noticed that I’ve been blogging less and less of late and the result is…drum roll please…the completed first draft of a New Book. Yes, folks, there is life after Web of Angels.

The floundering that follows every book I’ve written has passed, and I’ve swum to a new shore. As is my habit, this one is entirely different from what I’ve done before. But you’ll have to wait to find out what it’s all about. For now all I can say is that it’s fun.

The manuscript is in my agent’s hands. I am off to Vancouver to read at the Jewish Book Festival at 8 pm tomorrow. On Thursday, I’ll be reading at the library on Gabriola Island at 6:30 pm.

I plan to return with photos and a blog post about my adventures in the west!

Filed under: CanLit, Fun Tagged: writing process

Inspiring Ted Talk: Peace

I remember first coming across the Facebook Page that this talk is about, but I didn’t know the context, how it got started, or how it evolved. The video went fast–I didn’t want it to end. Watch this. It’ll make your day better:

Filed under: Uplifting Tagged: desiging a vision of peace, power of social media

The Next Big Thing: What I’m Working On

Goddess Durga by Joydeep

Thanks to Lauren B. Davis for tagging me on this great questionnaire for writers. I have to confess that I’m participating in this more because I want to hear what other writers are doing than wanting to write about myself–but I will do my best to wrestle the questions to the ground.

I know you’ll forgive me if my replies are a bit, let’s say, idiosyncratic.

What is your working title of your book?

I can’t tell you yet because it’s too far from complete. I usually file my work under the names of the protagonist(s). Web of Angels was filed under “All and S,” The River Midnight was filed under “Blaszka,” (the name of the village), The Singing Fire under “Nehama & Emilia.”

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I was snuggling with my children, watching a video, and I thought, “Oh I want to write a book that has this wonderful feeling.”

What genre does your book fall under?

I leave that up to others to decide. The whole genre thing is immensely confusing to me. It’s a bit like sexuality–I think it falls on a continuum but our society is uncomfortable with slippery categories and prefers to box them.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

I’d rather tell you who I’d pick for Web of Angels. Jodie Foster to direct and play Sharon, Alec, Lyssa, Callisto, Ally, and the Overseer. I think she’d have the skill and talent for it.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

A smart comfort read.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

The inimitable Dean Cooke represents my work.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

You have to realize that I flounder around a lot before I find my story. I always want to be writing, and so during the last 2 years, during the publishing process and flurry of post-pub promotion for Web of Angels, I have several times thought I was working on a book or several books, only to put them aside for something else. But I think I’m onto something this time. I’ll have a 1st draft ready in a few weeks, which will represent about 6 months work. That means nothing though because the first draft of Web of Angels took only 3 months. The next 9 drafts took years, and when all was said and done, there were eight years between Web of Angels and my previous novel.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I don’t know–I just write what I have to write. Then other people answer that question for me.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I’ve wanted to write a fun book ever since I finished my first novel, which was rather a reach for a first novel and exhausted me. But there were other stories calling to me. Perhaps this is a gift from God, dessert after the hefty meal of Web of Angels.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

It won’t come in a brown wrapper and readers will be able to leave it on the table without gasping if their kids pick it up and curiously flip through it.

Now it’s my turn to tag other writers. I ought to be able to find several, but everyone I’ve contacted has either done this meme or isn’t ready to do it yet. So I’ve tagged just two and am really looking forward to their posts!

Alison Gresik

Karen Connelly

Filed under: CanLit, Literary Tagged: the next big thing meme

Multiple Personalities: We on the Inside; We on the Outside

I’ve been intensely living with the Power of We for about 8 years, so it is karmic that today is Blog Action Day and the theme is The Power of We.

Children survive the unimaginable by developing a multiple, instead of a singular identity. As “we”, they can live, function, control the effects of trauma, and become creatively adapted adults. That, bare bones, is the seed that turned into Web of Angels.

But the we is not only internal, because in every case, without exception, the people I know who are multiple got some form of sustenance from kind words here and there in their lives from a neighbour, a friend’s parent, a teacher or a coach. And in this way, all of us, even without any knowledge of what goes on behind closed doors, can save a child.

I am reminded of how we impact each other so often while talking about Web of Angels in different communities across Canada, in the many people who come up to me afterward to share a personal experience, in the emails that I’ve received from people of all walks of life, singletons and multiple.

I would like to say that the Power of We is the power of love, but there is a caveat–for the greatest danger to loving behaviour lies in the mob, in group think, in mindless following.

There is a lesson to be learned from D.I.D. (dissociative identity disorder). One thing it teaches is that every part or alter or personality is necessary. Each one brings a gift. Each is a shining facet of the whole.

And that is the inoculation for mob action or group think: the Power of We balanced with appreciating the value of the individual. In that balance, is a civil society where light and love can flourish.

Filed under: Interesting, Uplifting Tagged: #bad12tags, #powerofwe, blog action day, dissociative identity disorder

Searching for the Canadian Voice – Imprint

Last week I was at the Kitchener Writers Festival, where I was interviewed by a delightful young woman, Catherine Vendryes, who is an English Major at the University of Waterloo, a slender spectacled smart girl, armed with steno pad and digital recorder. I loved her questions. Here is her write-up:

Lillian Nattel, bestselling author of Web of Angels, could not be more supportive of striking out to live your dreams. She took the Record Author’s Stage and told her tale of achieving her dream of being an author, the long way.

“As a young adult, I became depressed and what do you do when you’re depressed? You become an accountant,” she explained cheekily. After living in the world of accountancy for 10 years, she quit as soon as her first book sold. Web of Angels is her third book and turned into a bestseller after just one week on the market.

After her talk, Nattel had some sound words of advice.

“If you have a dream, pursue it. If there is something that is creative within you, do it. And don’t let anything stand in your way or stop you,” said Nattel. “Yes, you have to pay bills. Yes, you have to make a living, but make [your dream] your priority. Don’t give up on it because that’s what makes you alive.”

An ambassador of Canadian literature, Nattel could not have described the Canadian scene any better.

“It’s different from readers, as well as writers, in other countries. I think that it’s really diverse, it’s exciting, it’s innovative, it’s fabulous,” said Nattel.

Searching for the Canadian Voice – Imprint.

Filed under: CanLit, Fun Tagged: Kitchener Writers Festival