Kate Inglis's Blog, page 11

Maybes and fortunes and books on the way

I'd like to sit with my leg squashed up against someone else's leg, you know? Closer than you tend to sit with people who aren't your gorgeous and willowy editor. But not as a balm against loneliness. Balms have little to recommend them unless it's anti-inflammatory compounds. PEOPLE 4 HIRE. WE DO BY-THE-HOUR. I know how much that sounds like prostitution. But the last time I checked, prostitutes didn't know how to even price "standing with her in front of a slowly poaching egg" or "one very firm and unmoving grip around the arch of the left foot for a period of no less than six minutes".

These are strange and excellent days, veering wildly from one to the other. I really would pay for an hour. Maybe two. Then you'd have to go. I don't know that there's room for anyone to stay. I don't know that there's anyone, that apparently rare composite of not-dull and not-crazy. Which is sad, maybe? I don't know. I can't decide. Live by yourself long enough—especially when you work from home—and autonomous luxury bleeds into odd habits and self-isolation. Sometimes it's bliss. I pick up the phone and my voice won't work and my mom thinks I just woke up, but I didn't. I just haven't spoken out loud in several days. I work and work and work. I bathe in the smoke from the fire pit, standing in my little woods listening to the rush of the creek. My car hasn't moved since last week so I think I should put on something that has a zipper and go into the city and I do, and I wander, still not speaking, though not unpleasantly.

I am the third or fifth or seventh person in almost every room. Thoughtful people buy six Feist tickets and I scurry off with one, orphaning a single straggler to Kijiji. I sit in the dark in an auditorium of people with their arms over the backs of each others' chairs. She is amazing. She plays The Circle Married The Line and I think about slippery decades and cry, and then I think about Norton Juster and smile. Then I come home again, and work, and write, and wait for the boys.

I imagine, perilously (damned fool imagination) that I can forecast those decades. I know how they accelerate. I know that in a measure of that many years—a measure by which we say It can't be, but it is! like how it's been almost twenty years since I graduated from university—nothing may change. If that's the case, it will be a continuation: I may be 50 instead of 40, and marvellously lucky and unlucky at the same time. Nothing may change. Everything might.

That's me on my brother's couch in Calgary, waiting for Cheryl. I had shot her second book, A Month Of Sundays, a couple of years ago, and the time had come for her third—a yet-untitled quilting book on original design. I got on a plane with a four-hundred pound bag and landed with family, disappearing every day to check off shoot after shoot on an excel spreadsheet that first seemed wildly optimistic, as it always does. We got through it all. We always do. We wrapped just in time for Chinese takeout and a race to the airport with thousands of images to edit. Nothing will happen, at least not demonstrably, for a year or so. Then her book will appear next summer, populated from my camera, a time capsule on real paper.

A time capsule. Like stacking the wood for next winter. Right now it's unseasoned, heavy and wet. It doesn't make that hollow, musical clunk when you throw it. You may as well try to set fire to a fistful of bog. I haul armfuls of the dumped cord into a neat pile and can't help but wonder: where will I be when I burn to this point, to that point? The next time I touch this piece, this one right here, it might be next February, maybe. Either everything will be the same or it won't. The next time I see the images I took in a tangible way, finished, this trip will have been a long time ago.

Cheryl's little baby (no longer a little baby), is Nikolai. I call him Nickles. I growl at Nickles. I grab his legs and stuff my fingers into all the ticklish places. I eat his toes. He squeals. We shoot all day and into the evening, with Nickle breaks and download breaks here and there.

It's more strenuous than you'd think. I am in charge of making it beautiful, of doing justice to another artist's vision, and it's heavy. My camera. My wrists! Noodle arms. Constant tension and mind chatter and keeping all the mechanics straight to do a good job. As soon as the camera lowers I get a little spaced. Focal range and the broken tripod connector and this lens, or that one? My shoulders hurt. Light bounces around and makes surprises. Back into the car and off to the next shoot, and the next, and the next. Styling and setup and model releases. I lay on my belly on asphalt and yell at one person or another, cheerfully, coaxing, herding. That she trusts me to capture it all is still an overwhelming honour. It's a three-legged marathon. With reflectors. We hurry together. She peers at the LCD screen and nods or questions, then steps back, and we put all the moving parts together one way or another. We laugh a lot.

We see so much, travelling from scene to scene—wild horses and urban art and rolling fields and mountains. It's a tender time, with Flight of the Griffons sitting by the thousands in a warehouse in Quebec, ready to ship, and libraries and schools here and throughout the west booking readings (much of the story is set in Alberta). To have been there right now, out west where it all happens... the prairies and the big sky know already what I've written. It felt like they have an opinion. It's humbling, terrifyingly so.

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I am sitting with my legs dangling over the edge of a very high drop. Soon, I will go west again with the Griffons in my hands. It might have helped me, right at this moment, to be in the service of someone else's high drop rather than my own.

As distractions go, Calgary was cotton candy. Cotton candy and the sweat of a dozen stevedores. One shoot was in the studio of fashion designer Paul Hardy, just for the location, an immersion into wildly grand and soft and flowing things. I had never touched a three thousand dollar dress before. He was sitting on a velvet couch as we left, and I gushed something about how I 'pawed everything'. I didn't know how else to express it, how moved I was by this kind of textile art. I didn't want to be the country-living ass who went LOL! THREE THOUSAND BUCKS! as though I don't think it's worth it. It is. Can you imagine that kind of drape, and the skill it takes to make pliable sculpture? As opposed to the back wall sale at a franchise full of plastic hangars and factory cast-offs. There is nothing wrong with either end of that spectrum. It's how we speak without words. Creativity is free.

I was wearing a pilled-up, bagged-out, near-disposable $14 jersey knit dress from H&M. I don't mind. I wandered back and forth among the racks gasping and sighing. Life is curious. Artists make it more so. Books and high drops and photographs and dreams, glorious shimmering dreams that seep into my wood pile for all the maybes and fortunes of this time next year.

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April come she will

It's been a winter of almost total hibernation. The wind tore my screen door off its hinges and blew a foot of snow into the shed. But now everything is happening, all at once, and the winter feels like bigotry. It is doomed, and it knows it.

Now for what's next: lists and mulch and manuscripts, because god knows I'm behind. Now that Flight of the Griffons is on the presses, I'll start editing this fall's picture book with Nimbus—a book of monster poems for 4-8 year olds called If I Were A Zombie. And I'll keep fussing over a growing posse of literary rejects because hope is a warm doughnut, ultimately empty but sweet enough to keep you from drifting off at the wheel. Then it's the beginnings of something big—the next gulag, if I'm worth anything at all.

The prospect of another novel, especially one that may digress from piracy, makes me feel like an infant all over again. Wailing! Acid reflux! Fits and spurts and blowouts and exhausted, tear-stained, falling-into-a-flushed-heap flounces. Someday, people are going to stop turning the word 'writer' into an adverb but until then, whenever I see it, repeated infancy is the only definition that comes to mind.

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I'm going to Calgary in a couple of weeks, hired to shoot Cheryl Arkison's next book as a follow-up to A Month of Sundays, the most epic and excellent week of photography in my life so far. Getting on a plane again after these land-frozen and head-frozen few months feels as improbable as a thaw. My camera is a dog, generally obliging and good company that doesn't ask for much. It will feel like play (if a marathon is play) and then I'll come home to a box of hardcovers waiting at the post office. Gonna stuff my face right in there on any page. There is no more potent drug.

Then it's the book launch, set for Saturday, May 24 at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic on the Halifax waterfront. We'll have music and readings and Swedish yelling and possibly a live stream of it all—it's going to happen right here, in this space, after four years of writing and rewriting. Four years. I keep staring at all that teak and canvas of the Small Crafts Gallery, all those female swoops and curves, at ribs and bows and masts mere feet from the harbour, and it feels right. Air, land, or sea, all ships are cousins. One blesses the other.

It's going to be the greatest day ever, with banjo. I'm so excited. I'll hope you'll be there, or tune in from far away. More here in the coming days and weeks, plus whatever treats from the book I can sneak away to show you. Res upp.

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The windshield wipers are pushed up so they won't freeze to the glass and a robin just landed on the tip of one, staring beady-eyed at what we both hope is the great giving-up. The field freezes and unfreezes. It's snowing but it's a spineless snow, sugar on top of defrosted mud.  There's life under there. The robin took off and the wiper blade twanged like a plucked string.

Everything's coming alive.

 

Generally hongzhi

They barrel down the street, backpacks swaying as night gives way to winter grey. Ben found ice. Ice! he yells. There is something about the two of them this morning. Knotty bedhead, mittens damp with yesterday's slip into the creek. The schoolbus pulls away in a cloud of exhaust and I walk home along the edge of the field, looking forward to tea and a fire, cycling peacefully through love; death; toast.

Marriage or parenthood change us as we expect them to, within fair boundaries, most often pleasantly so. You become a couple and there are more elbows and feet. You laugh at the same stuff. You suffocate a little. There is laundry. You say 'we'. He sees welts on your neck from absent-minded scratching and he says You're doing it again. It's nice that he does that. You have a failsafe chili, three soups, a hot dip. Everybody likes the same crackers. You never buy Farmers' milk. Only Scotsburn. You are changed in whatever way is your way. You are merged, both hard work and ease.

Walking to my home along the edge of a field feeling soft and distant and curious: Liam's death was unchartered. The ground hummed and the wind had hands. Six years later, there's a fondness, almost, for the only time in my life that I've ever been genuinely strung out. A decade ago I'd watch from the bus as junkies staggered across East Hastings Street in Vancouver. I'd sit compressed in the manner of public transit, chin in my hand, and follow them until I couldn't anymore, taken away by green lights and vanishing lines. Was he pulled or pushed here? ... What does she see?

They'd hang on to street posts while inanimate things talked back. In them I saw an amplified awareness of all that was menacing, the ghosts and demons and sorcery denied to unaltered states. I saw feet of either four hundred pounds or feathers, a ground of frozen molasses and fly paper, buildings made of fists. And something else that was, as much as it was killing them, exquisite.

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I need a hurricane cap for the stovepipe in the shed. Water from the last northeaster blew in and trickled through, leaving a puddle on the slate and splatters of rust on the woodstove that need to be scrubbed off with steel wool and rubbed again with blackening paste. The back windows need glazing, priming, two more coats of paint. I need mulch for the garden; the electrician for a back door light; insulation for the dining room; dad's iron fork to rip out sod and make a bed of soil along the back of the house; more trips to the greenhouse; a better axe to chop the scrap wood for kindling.

I love this list.

I take apart a stack of photo albums, removing their contents in favour of one box. I look at how small I was, yet I didn't know. I held nothing in because there was nothing to hold in. I imagine telling that girl what was to happen. She wouldn't believe it, but she wouldn't believe that list, either.

I love it so much.

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I wondered if I should explain the past year's news reporting here (what I am doing, what I did) as compared to crafted thought or emotional exposure, but I couldn't stand to even try. The only meta discourse I'm comfortable with is when somebody goes onto a football field and lines up tiny salted caramels into giant words that say DO YOU LIKE SALTED CARAMELS, and then I eat the S, the A, the L, the T, and the E, but then it says DO YOU LIKE D CARAMELS and now it looks grammatically ridiculous, so I have to eat the D too.

Karen Maezen Miller: I just haven’t wanted to say anything for awhile. That’s not true, I’ve wanted to say a lot, but I haven’t said what didn’t need to be said. ... 'The motto for becoming genuine: nothing is gained by speaking.' — Hongzhi

It has been delicious.

 

April 30, 2014

ISBN #9781771081320 because life is the most fantastic thing.

 

Day job

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When I'm not writing about pirates or ghosts or three frogs with a guerilla banjo, I'm writing about beehive activism, goat cooperatives, and rooftop farms in Brooklyn. Thanks to Whole Foods Market, Dark Rye is born. It's an online magazine featuring pioneers and all manner of sustainable excellence and entrepreneurialism and fantastica from all over the world. It's the most colourful, most decadent byline ever.

I write and I giggle and I write. This is my living. Gratitude and a handlebar moustache.

 

How to be a good parent

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New at Canadian Bookshelf: late nights, deadlines, and piracy

At Canadian Bookshelf, Book Madam Julie Wilson interviews me about the creative process, naming characters, the truth of what feeds fiction, and productive insomnia:

[image error]When you graduate from wanting to working, you say, 'I am going to flesh out this idea and write the whole thing down, and rewrite it, and rewrite it again, and rewrite it unendingly, and I'll have no real assurance of when it'll be good enough, but at some point I'll pitch it to someone who will decide if I'm delusional or not.' The optimism and the ego-bruising, unsexy work needed to follow through feels unending. But once Penelope dangled the carrot, I trotted stupidly forward, not thinking too much. That's what worked for me. ~ KI

 

the end and the beginning

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I've sent the sequel manuscript to Penelope. It required a backhoe. It's a big one - The Dread Crew came in at just over 37,000 words. Flight of the Griffons, as a complete first (second, technically) draft: 56,925. We'll either have to chop almost half the story, or... maybe... I don't know. Could it be good enough to be two books, or does that wish make me the most self-indulgent author in the history of self-indulgent authors?

We'll see. For the next month or longer, I'm banned. No edits, no mulling, no additions, no tweaks. The story is in my editor's hands and from there, we'll figure out what to do with this heavyweight of a creature, perhaps set a deadline, and look forward to line editing and production.

More when I know more...

 

peek

I've been writing, just not what I should have been writing.

The sequel, and Missy... she's more comatose than waiting. I'd say 'poor love' about her but she'd find that tiresome. She'd slap my knee in that way that says I'm not poor and I'm not your love. Do something. 

I have been. Doing something. Not the right thing, but I've needed to wander.

I wrote a book, a little one, and I want to exist beyond all hope. I want it so badly. I need it to be set to paper and illustrated and bound. It's important. I've submitted it to the loveliest publisher, one insisted upon by a dear and illustrious friend, and I've gotten the loveliest postcard back with the loveliest Don't you dare call, write, email, or otherwise beg until at least six months are up and so I'm trying to forget I ever wrote it.

But it's hard. The Canada Post tracking slip is all balled up on my kitchen counter and I keep staring at it and thinking about voodoo and hitchhiking.

I can't tell you what it's about except to say that it's for younger kids, and for artists who struggle, and for younger kids who have an artist in them who's destined to struggle and wonder about things like worth and value and time well spent.

See? Therapy. Wishes. Shooting stars. Rocks etched up and skipped into the sea. Tossing and turning and yeah, I know. The wandering's up. Missy needs her end, and so I forget about the mail and get back to it.

 

when I work

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Courtesy the remarkable Oliver Jeffers.

The witching hour, somebody had once whispered to her, was a special moment in the middle of the night when every child and every grown-up was in a deep deep sleep, and all the dark things came out from hiding and had the world all to themselves. ~ Roald Dahl, The BFG