Christa Bedwin's Blog, page 2
September 28, 2019
Lesson 2 of the Beyond Dusty Books course: foreign films and documentaries as research
Lesson 2: foreign and historical films and documentaries
So here is a really easy entry point when you want to start to get familiar with a period of history or another culture: historical and foreign films. And, for that matter, foreign historical films! Many of these resources can be had for free on YouTube, particularly from the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), who has dozens of wonderful series. There’s no way I could list all of their historical and archaeological offerings, but here are a few of my favourites.- Victorian Farm- Victorian Pharmacy- Edwardian Farm- Wartime Farm— these series have re-enactors living in the historical building and conditions of the people from each time. They’re very accurate about their details, and they discuss the joys and difficulties of living each lifestyle for a period of months. They plant crops using tools accurate to the time, make cheese, weave cloth, go to market, make food — everything you would do in daily life back then. Re-enactor Ruth Goodman says that the worst hardship really is how cold it always is in historical houses, even in all those layers of historical clothes!
Even Escape to the Country, a real estate show, is fun because it shows couples (usually) with real life relationships often touring quite old houses, and there are handicraft/agriculture/culture breaks between the house tours around Britain.
I loved watching Dangerous Beauty, about the inimitable Veronica Franco, while I was writing the Renaissance Venice part of Caterina’s Renaissance. Veronica Franco was a cortigiana honesta in her city — an honourable courtesan. That means that she was allowed to love men and not looked down upon for her profession. Can you imagine! She was a single mother to two or three children, and she was also influential in Venetian politics, even brokering some important peace deals with other countries (in the Renaissance, Venice was a country, not a part of Italy).
My hero and heroine met with Veronica in their travels, but having the movie to play in the background also helped to get me “in the mood” while I was writing. It was a gorgeous film to play over and over again, with romantic scenes in the canal boats, her intellectual salons, and the streets of Venice. I was able to buy the movie from YouTube for about $10, and can watch it any time I have wifi.
As you may have noticed, I also suggested the series Rome earlier in this class. This brings me to the point that, sometimes movies aren’t completely accurate in their historical detail! Of course, often, neither are print resources. Whether you’re writing a dissertation for a PhD or a novel, I think it’s always great practice to check in with more than one source for your facts, and at least movies get your imagination going! Just double-check details like whether your 17th century Scottish heroine really did have potatoes in that skillet over the fire. Hands up if you think she did?
Christa
September 2, 2019
Lesson 1 of the Beyond the Dusty Books course for STAR RWA, September 2019
Hello, All. I’m Christa Bedwin. I'm the only one I know of on the internet, so if you want to learn more about me, I'm easy to Google or find on Amazon.[I think I should add more detail since this is an intro, but not so relevant to this lesson at the moment: What I mainly write these days is time travel novels between two contrasting cultures: modern California vs. Enlightenment Era Edinburgh, modern west coast against Renaissance Venice, modern Toronto vs. Early Medieval Cornwall, WWII Arizona Navajo vs. 18th century exiled Acadian French mama, etc. I used to teach high school science, and I'm a technical editor, too, so I'm pretty rigorous about getting the historical facts right, and a professor I know this summer mentioned that my footnotes were entertaining. As a student once said about me... I am strict but fun -- one of my favourite compliments ever. Also, I was raised in the Rockies and have been to more than 40 countries. Enough about me for now, but I'd love to hear about you! Please say hello, maybe answer the question below too.]If you’ve encountered me before around the RWA or web somewhere, you might have heard me talk about the following blog post, about how my son and I travelled and volunteered through Europe and learned a lot of cool ancient skills for my historical writing, for free!https://www.heartsthroughhistory.com/... won’t belabour that blog post at the moment, but if you’d like to see some nice cat and handsome farmer / nobleman (a real nobleman, actually related to the Queen) photos, check it out. The essence of the post is different ways to think outside the box for book research, and in this course, we’ll explore some more ways. How can we make our research even more authentic by getting outside the book box, maybe even getting our hands dirty? And why should we want to? And… while I’m talking outside the box, I hope that the following isn’t too esoteric, but I had the following thoughts last night and wanted to share them as the introduction to the course. Have any of you ever been to Cirque de Soleil or Chinese opera or another show from another culture? Or even experienced some Very Unusual custom from the State Next Door? Please tell us about it!My son and I went to Cirque du Soleil last night (here’s a link to a quick 80-second clip of the show we saw, in case you’re not familiar with it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ig2gK...). I realized that what thrills me about Cirque du Soleil is exactly the same as the core message/principle of this class — layers and colours* and surprises and fireworks beyond the expected circus are what make Quebec’s Cirque du Soleil world-class… and also illustrates what we can learn and add to our stories by taking our book research beyond the English-language books and perspectives that we grew up with.Cirque du Soleil is a circus… but it’s a circus created by people who have a liberal arts education based on the French system: music, art, philosophy, multiculturalism, human rights…. they all come into it. And, of course, liberal doses of joie de vivre, sexual freedom, and love for the human spirit, as only the French can do it (in my opinion).A standard circus is based on making money and thrilling people, right? So the owners might collect rare animals and, in the past, unusual looking people. They’ll do a repertoire of standard amazing tricks and feats. Some people write their books that way, too, piling in whatever tropes and trends the marketing folks tell them will sell this year. They don’t particularly care about the quality of their tricks, so long as the playbill will sell the circus/ the blurb will sell the book.Cirque du Soleil, however, is a circus with integrity, bringing in all the colours and layers of French Canadian life — the cast is multicultural, picking and choosing from all the best that Quebec, Canada and the world have to offer, with, for a sampling, a chair stacker from China, a male acrobat tossing in a quick Middle-Eastern inspired bare-chested bellydancing routine. There’s a nod to the LGBTQ community: one handsome male performer gives a girl in the audience a flower. The handsome male performer who follows him outdoes him in stunts, and then takes the flower away from the girl and gives it to a handsome man a few seats along the row, with much flirtation.Likewise, healthy love between women is celebrated — the heroine of the show, though she dreams a little of love and romance with a man, spends more time dancing with herself (she has an angel self, a future self, a ponderful self…. what a wonderful way to illustrate all the many selves a woman is). And the women who act the selves/guardian angel clearly demonstrate loving, caring, body language between women — no puritanical fears, no sexuality about it, just that simple French body comfort that comes naturally. Anglophones just couldn’t produce this same show, much as we might like to. The culture is different. But we can watch, and learn, and profit from the experience.Since the show is in Canada, and on ice, of course we need a dog sled… but since it’s Cirque de Soleil, the sledder is on skis, and doing ski jumps during that sketch. And since we have no dogs in this show, and since the French have studied their Rousseau** and their Marx and their Orwell…. let’s have the people in their austere business suits pull the sled. The imagery of several technically stunning dance routines are also rife with social commentary on what the soul deserves and whether that’s a life in a cubicle, or perhaps something more colourful and free?And some of us want to write our books like that: With colours and layers that make the heart sing, that make the mind ponder. With surprises that are so intense that you actually cry a little (I did: 44 minutes in, on this show -- I checked my watch). With technical tricks and contrasts that simply make you gasp.And so that when the show, or the book, is over, our readers have learned something new, and want to read it/see it again because there are layers they didn’t catch the first time, or want to luxuriate in again. They’ve caught a detail they just have to read more about. Caught their heart on a character that they just can’t forget.If you want to write those books, or just think about them over the next month, then you’re in the right place. [If you'd like to sign up for the course, shoot me a message and I'll point you in the right direction.]
Today's footnotes and further resource:*Since this is a multicultural course, I’ve decided I just might spell in my native language — Canadian. Expect plenty more foreign words to cross your screen this month, but please feel free to ask about or question anything at all!**At the moment I have a spare French exchange student teenager in the house (a-ha! another way I study culture without going to the books)... meaning I could ask the boys "what's Rousseau's central tenet again?" and expect them to know the answer. Since they had it on the tip of their tongues but couldn't recall the specifics, quick googling happened to confirm what I thought I meant and will spell out to save you from another google, or incite you to do one: Rousseau believed that we are born with a basic nature in us (here, French student tapped his chest to show that our soul is inside), and that sometimes what we do for society makes us go against our soul... exactly illustrated at Cirque's Crystal by glass cubicles, ice dancers in black and white, and a beautiful brilliant, red-haired girl with a red scarf whose beauty and motion just calls to our souls.And just for some more foreign funny accents, but all in English, here’s a link to the all-free YouTube BBC podcast channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQ8rts-rIVQG5APBpE-aE7w
Today's footnotes and further resource:*Since this is a multicultural course, I’ve decided I just might spell in my native language — Canadian. Expect plenty more foreign words to cross your screen this month, but please feel free to ask about or question anything at all!**At the moment I have a spare French exchange student teenager in the house (a-ha! another way I study culture without going to the books)... meaning I could ask the boys "what's Rousseau's central tenet again?" and expect them to know the answer. Since they had it on the tip of their tongues but couldn't recall the specifics, quick googling happened to confirm what I thought I meant and will spell out to save you from another google, or incite you to do one: Rousseau believed that we are born with a basic nature in us (here, French student tapped his chest to show that our soul is inside), and that sometimes what we do for society makes us go against our soul... exactly illustrated at Cirque's Crystal by glass cubicles, ice dancers in black and white, and a beautiful brilliant, red-haired girl with a red scarf whose beauty and motion just calls to our souls.And just for some more foreign funny accents, but all in English, here’s a link to the all-free YouTube BBC podcast channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQ8rts-rIVQG5APBpE-aE7w
July 2, 2019
Living and Writing with Less Money and More Passion in Europe
Rocket yourself back into the past: Go WWOOFing to research your next historical novel!Table of contents: Out-of-the-Box Solution 1 How It Works 2 Other sample experiences 5Writing schedule: 14 But . . . 14 Other Organizations 15by Christa Bedwin
I have been writer and editor for twenty years. (I now write time-travel romances with my characters exploring various cool time periods and places in the past, mostly but not completely placed in Europe.)Even ten years ago I realized a big problem with the writing/editing career – too much time with the bum in the chair just isn’t healthy. An editing colleague died of an aneurysm at her desk, working on a late deadline, and I vowed to make my health a priority. (Sometimes I do better, sometimes I do worse, but the intention is always there!)As a single mom, though, budget matters. I pulled years of working all night on editing deadlines to make ends meet and feed my son and I. On top of this, I really wanted to homeschool my son when he reached his early teens… how to break out of the loop and feed my writer’s soul at the same time?Out-of-the-Box SolutionEnter WWOOFing, stage left. Fitness, budget, historical research, and teenager management all solved at once.
Here’s a picture of my hands after I’d washed them as well as I could, on our second week. No callouses yet, but at least you can see I was getting time outside! My hands were dry and cracked and I was happier than I had been in years.WWOOF is a worldwide organization of organic farmers who welcome volunteers. Depending on who you talk to, it stands for Willing Workers on Organic Farms, World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, or maybe Weekend Warriors on Organic Farms (this last one hints at local opportunities – you can find incredible adventures and inspirational exercise outside your daily box, right on your own doorstep).How It WorksYou sleep and eat for free in exchange for usually about a half a day’s labour – that leaves you the afternoons and a couple of days off per week to write, tour the area, get to know other WWOOFers, or just nap. On top of this, WWOOF is an organization of people who are committed to teaching others organic farming technologies, and, you guessed it, history writers – a lot of these techniques mean returning to the past.
That’s not to say it’s the easy life – it’s work, and the living conditions are often primitive, but it’s work that is so worth doing, satisfying, great exercise, and for learning about things your historical characters might do in their daily lives, the experience is second to none.WWOOF hosts take the time to do things right. You’ll meet artisans, committed organic warriors, builders, doers, growers, musicians, teachers… so many wonderful people. Real characters – strong and admirable people who you’ll find yourself modelling your characters after. Here are some WWOOF farmers learning about old methods of making charcoal in a burner through the Shropshire & Edges Permaculture Network.I met one woman on an ancient island who had an unlimited heart and space for adding wwoofers to her table and her home and finding us work in her garden. She was passionate about passing on organic living and growing methods, and ancient ways of life, from learning to use the willow trees and harvest their long, supple whip branches with the seasons, to how to use the compost from the composting toilets. She was by no means wealthy in terms of money, but she is one of the wealthiest people I have ever met in terms of endless resourcefulness and a thriving belief there was enough for everyone, with a little creativity. Her methods ranged from collecting food that grocery stores threw away to feed her animals to trading services with other islanders and both constantly giving and receiving. Surely this is how the ancients lived in survival economies.
I helped another woman in the mountains of Abruzzo who was the same way. She had hardly any money, but she is one of the richest people I have ever met! She had a house on a hill and food growing. People were constantly giving her things – in fact, it was a friend of hers who had sent me along to help – and she was just as quickly giving things away. Everything from food, to clothes, to building materials and furniture… and of course, Italian food. It was there that I had my first taste of carob pods, harvested straight from the tree and dried to keep year-round… now, definitely one of my favourite foods and one that I ate throughout our subsequent Italian and Croatian travels. If you ever get a chance, you must try them. They’re divine. Here’s what they look like straight from the tree. YUM. You’ll also meet wwoofer host pets – helpful dogs and fierce cuddly cats. Fluffy sheep and friendly horses. Irascible goats and curious pigs. Sweet poetry-singing chickens who help you with the weeding. All of these little people add so much flavour and sweetness to romance stories, woven in as comic relief or simple emotional sweetness. [Aside I’ve learned, if you make the pet a dragon, they can help solve a lot of plot problems too! But chickens, the dragon’s close relative, are also a sweet and delicious addition to a day of weeding the garden or as an emotional support. Alan Bradley gave Flavia de Luce Esmeralda the chicken for a pet.]
By the way, many of us writers need our cats, and would not travel long without them. No worries. You can bring your pets wwoofing to many farms. Here are our two cats, totally blissed out in the sunshine and warmth in a Victorian-era glass house. To answer what you’re thinking, the cats quickly adapted to the travel and to meeting and negotiating relationships with the other pets at our various destinations. The grey one you see here always tends to fatten herself up when there are dogs around. When we stay places with no dogs, she slims down! But she’s definitely the clan defender. In this photo, the cats are fifteen and eight years old, and the older black one still, at seventeen, behaves like a kitten when there are new adventures to be had – especially if it’s a new barn full of mice! Travel and exercise are good for writers’ cats, too.
WWOOF hosts also tend to be the people who keep heritage breeds – one of my favourite discoveries in recent years are adorable little Ouessant sheep. The lambs are literally cat-sized. (You can say it – I’m thinking it! Squeee!)
They originally come from a French island off the coast of Brittany called Ouessant island, and the story is that the menfolk were often away fishing, and so the women enjoyed having these smaller sheep, since they had to do all the work. (If you’d like to learn more about these adorable sheep, I poached these two photos from the following web page:http://www.wovember.com/2016/11/10/the-ouessant-sheep-of-france/Soon after I discovered Ouessant sheep, I rhapsodized about them in a chat with my favourite textile historian https://woollyhistoryofbritain.wordpress.com/ and her first reaction was that the black colour of those sheep would have been considered quite valuable in Medieval times, as black dye was formidably expensive in the past, but many people wanted black clothing.Then, in a future historical farm detail, an old sheep farmer somewhere in my travels (I really can’t remember where or when, but I remember the man!) explained to me that if you want to keep the sheep as black as possible, you need to give them little blankets or keep them indoors, as they tend to bleach out in the sun.Yes, I might have learned all those details on the Internet… but the story and the characters in your head develop so much more when you’ve had an opportunity to feed the sheep, participate in the spinning, speak to the people who are raising the animals, living the life, really doing the things that people did in the past.There are WWOOF organizations in most countries of the world, and you can join any one you like for a small annual fee and surf their listings of farmers looking for help. Just go looking on the internet and you’ll find wwoof.us, wwoof.ca, wwoof.fr, wwoof.it, etc.Other sample experiencesOther recent but very historical learning experiences that I’ve had recently with WWOOF hosts (and this isn’t all, but there’s only so much room on this page…)Making French goat cheese the same way it’s been done for centuries– incredibly simple, and incredibly delicious! Summertime entertainment on this French island includes storytelling evenings on a Saturday in the barn, all the adults and kids on haybales and quilts and the stories (in French) the same as they’ve been for generations. I still play Breton music at the pub with the farmer that taught me the cheesemaking at the pub, most Sundays. He also kindly organized for my son to spend a day with the local vet (as that’s my son’s career aspiration). Volunteering just gets you “in” on experience you never even know about as a hotel-staying tourist.Helping to restore an Irish castle – I absolutely loved limewashing the walls, the way humans have been doing to our homes for twelve thousand years or so! For a day or two I got to work with a young Michelangelo-grade attractive charming Italian man who would answer the deepest of philosophical questions really, really slowly, but so sweetly – he admitted that I got a lot more work than he did by the end of the day, but it was all so fun.We were preparing some of the old stables for a Buddhist retreat group from France’s Plum Village that would be coming to stay at the farm. We were so inspired and deliciously well-fed at that WWOOFing place that all of us volunteers showed up to work on our day off to help meet the deadline. Not at all because we had to, but just for the joy of meeting the goal and in respect for the owner and the crew… and because we were having so much fun despite the hard work, I guess![As a side note to learning about characters, when wwoofers are not well-fed, or feel less well-loved or appreciated, the amount of work they/we get done really drops off. It is not any bad intention of the volunteers, but I saw it happen in several different situations, and was clearly just a function of human nature. Doesn’t that explain so much about poverty through history, and why certain real and fictional characters have behaved the way they have? These lessons, absorbed through your daily meals and conversations, settle so much more deeply into your writer’s psyche than simply reading about them in history books.]My son had an opportunity to help repair and restore ancient farmhouse windows and to enjoy the company of good working men (any other single moms in the room will understand how valuable and irreplaceable this is) and to study their Irish accents (in other words, try to keep up and understand anything they were saying!). He’s turning into quite a comedian, my son, and the sense of fun and good “craic” he had with that Irish crew sure set a tone for our travels, and our humour and jokes often roll back to the sort of way we learned of talking there. Just being there, at the castle, part of the crew, interacting with people while we worked with them, was invaluable for his development as a characterful teen. And of course we have a whole new perspective on Irish characters and Irish speech!Here’s an example of some language problems we had with a friendly local who tried to speak to us in the pub one day. I understood that he was being friendly, but I couldn’t figure out why he thought we were just like two horses in a garden. Was that some Irish idiom? What did it mean? I asked around, but nobody seemed to know.
We were all in the pub a few days later and had the following exchange. You can see not just the fun trickiness of understanding a new language and culture, but also the poetry and play of Irish thought and conversation. No wonder Ireland’s full of writers!
My son also got to learn Buddhist philosophy from the Lord of the manor while helping him to prepare incredibly delicious and varied vegetarian lunches in the manor house kitchen (that’s right – he was chopping vegetables and preparing meals in a centuries-old stone-floored, wooden-countered kitchen, while I was outside working in an enormous, equally ancient high-walled garden). Here’s a picture of the garden. Conrad restored it from a bramble patch, but a hundred and two hundred years ago, it had twelve gardeners growing food for a huge number of people. There are also orchard trees inside the wall. (The wall is mainly to keep out rabbits – important to keep the doors closed!)My twelve-year-old son wasn’t too sure what to make of Conrad’s lectures on Buddhist philosophy and Buddhist ways of life, but we had great talks about those ideas gleaned over vegetables while we were weeding the garden or walking to town in the afternoons. Now, two years on, some of those ideas have definitely helped to form his framework of understanding of people in the world.And for me, the writer, I have another inspirational, generous, sexy, mysterious, can-do-anything, can-manage-employing-dozens-of-people, is-an-artist-and-invested-in-inspiring others, hero to model some future fictional hero from.And we definitely grew a root there in Ireland, too. Someone asked me about “putting down roots” once on our travels, and I realize that rather than loosen any of the strength of our root to home, living for a little while and getting completely stuck into the soil of various places has allowed us to put down more roots, giving the trees of our life more stability. We definitely feel a root of home there at Creagh Castle – a place where we have experiences and people we love and miss. A community we could go back to, roll up at the pub, and be greeted with open arms.They say that you should write what you know. You should write about your home. That’s definitely easier. But writers may be surprised to learn just how quickly you can sink into what may have seemed a foreign place, to start with. To understand and play with the language and the humour. To contemplate the lives of those who have lived and do live there. To feel, really feel, the atmosphere of a place in the bricks and mortar and stone and trees and soil.
By the way… if we ever doubted the rumour we heard in the local pub that our host was related to English royalty, the truth of it is proven to us over and over as we see his face on many portraits from centuries past in museums from Scotland to France. Our room at that farm was in the old dairy, used for centuries to milk cows and keep cheese (delicious Irish cheddar!) and milk – and yes, it was exactly as cold as a fridge in there, except when we had the fire going. We had glorious French doors onto a balcony overlooking a river valley that was just absolutely painted with flowers that spring. Across the valley was another large manor farm with ancient buildings, which led me to dream of relations between the people living on those adjacent hills over time. Did they love, or hate, each other? Both manors had been there for centuries, so I suppose they’d been through their cycles of both those options, through the generations.We didn’t have a car at the time, and that meant that we walked the mile or two to the pub in the village, often – an excellent opportunity to feel history in a way you never do when you go everywhere on wheels. In most periods in the past, most people walked. If you want to write the past, do that. We did. We walked ancient roads through enchanted flower-strewn forests and through muddy farm fields. This – really, no joke – was the walk to town.
And here’s a little stream we cross on that road, with holly and ivy actually growing together – something I never saw, growing up in the Rockies as I did.
It wasn’t even until we were leaving that I heard there was an ancient ring fort buried in the forest at the bottom of the drive. It was so commonplace to the people living there that they hadn’t thought to mention it.
At the bottom of the drive (this painting of the drive is by the castle’s owner, Conrad Frankel), there is a creaky old castle gate, and a real gate house (we met a man who was born and raised in that gate house on the way home from town one day, and in the course of our month there, we met his brother, too!)One Sunday, we took the ten-inch key and opened the giant door to the crumbling 15th-century castle and just went in and looked all around and dreamed and dreamed of the real medieval families who lived there. You can still see the remnants of the plasterwork and imagine the furniture and the fabrics and the lives in those rooms with the high corbelled ceilings and the giant, giant fireplaces… you can’t really get that same feeling in touristy castles. There’ve been so many people through, spreading their excitement and their energy around. But when you volunteer to help restore things that have just been quietly owned, lived in, crumbling for centuries…. for a writer’s spirit, this is gold.
Bottling apple cider made with apples from the farmer’s own orchard in Cornwall, and then using the natural yeast from the bottom of the carboys to patiently make absolutely delicious sourdough bread that week in our own wwoofer kitchen. Dave, pictured here, from Cotna Eco Retreat, and who is a sourdough expert as well as a cider expert, tells me that in the past, people made sourdough starter for bread just using the natural yeast found on the apple skins. All it takes is a little feeding and patience.While he was teaching me to prune the apple trees, I could hear the medieval church bells ringing from the church in the village just down the valley (you get a good view of the church from the horse field). That farmer also took me on a walk all around the neighbourhood (by which I mean the various fields and vales, with very few houses left), showing me homes that had been abandoned and telling me why that had happened for each. Showing me ancient footpaths that led straight to the church steeple – which we now couldn’t see over the trees, but you would have been able to see it a hundred and two hundred years ago. On that walk, he educated me about how in the past, when rural Cornwall was more densely populated than now, people made much more optimal use of the field areas than they do now, and in the hedges, there were not just hedgehogs, but all kinds of birds, all the trees that yielded firewood, the bushes that yielded the berries…I’m using knowledge gleaned during that visit to now write about my hero building his best friend an extension to his wattle-and-daub hut in post-Roman, Pre-Christian 5thCentury Cornwall.
Sara, pictured here with Dave, also had so many good stories to tell. She has a glorious yoga studio on the property, and, actually, her tale of her romance with Dave (they met in India) is something worth hearing. Something that gave me hope for my own romantic future…Want to bottle wine the traditional way in a little stone backroom of an ancient farmhouse? I did that in Tuscany, and helped weed tomato fields with the same farmer with glorious views of the ancient Neolithic settlement and ancient pope’s hideaway town of Orvieto. That host was also an incredible historical resource when I later e-mailed him to ask details about things I wanted my characters to do in his neighbourhood in Renaissance times, adding a wealth of detail about neighbourhood relations and inter-town arguments and battles that happened back in the day that I never would have gleaned online (as most of it would be in Italian).In Sicily, I helped a Sicilian stonemason build a wall out of very heavy (pessandra!) rocks (pietri) for a few days. Working with someone is a great way to work on a language, too. Being surrounded by hot white limestone really got me into the Italian mood. Then I went along to the coast of Sicily, slept in my tent with my cats by the sea, toured Ragusa province’s incredible Baroque towns, and finished writing my latest novel in cafés no more than 20 steps from the sea, where the coffees were excellent, Italian, and 80 cents.There was also a 17th-century Scottish castle with views from my room to the sea that were like paintings, and a 16th-century Irish farmhouse lovingly rebuilt by a fascinating romantic figure named Aidan. There were other homeschooling families, musical geniuses, donkeys and gardens and milennia-old-towns torn by war and communism… and so many characters to meet… but I have to stop some time! I will write here again, so if there is something specific you’d like to know about please ask me. [image error]Hopefully I have inspired you to give this type of historical adventure a try yourself. If you’d like to chat more about it, please find me through my website, www.christabedwin.com or on Facebook or LinkedIn (as Christa Bedwin).Writing schedule:A key to successful wwoofing is that you have to roll with the situation. You may not have the freedom to dictate your schedule all the time… and actually, I have found that this requirement to simply accept circumstances and do what you are asked to do is probably one of the most relaxing and rejuvenating states of being for the mind. It just takes the stress away from thinking all the time, and really gives you time to just be, to soak in the beauty of nature and the quirkiness of people, to relax our modern stressed minds, and to ponder and dream about plots and characters and settings and ideas.As I mentioned with Sicily, when I first rolled up there, I didn’t really have any plans aside from enjoying some time in that place, meeting people, and helping to weed gardens or build walls or whatever presented itself. I just let myself unwind.Then, when I did go to the seaside, 27,000 words finished my novel in a mere four days! Though I hadn’t really seemed to be working on my novel while I built walls or marvelled at Baroque architecture or tried to talk to the Sicilian neighbours about their milk cows that they’re driving back and forth from barn to pasture the same way Sicilian peasants have done for centuries, my head, peaced out and content in a historical way of living, gentle, with a rhythm instead of a schedule, as people lived in the past, delivered the words when the time opened up to do so.But . . .But I.. have kids… don’t speak the language… travel with my pets… don’t have a vehicle… have a disability… whatever your “but” reason is for not getting out there, rethink it. If you don’t really want to, if it’s not your bag, fine. I understand that this kind of opportunity is not for everybody.However, if you are feeling the pull, if you would really like to try, then don’t swallow any idea of “I can’t.” You can. Just as we all have different life circumstances, so too do wwoof hosts. There are wwoof hosts with children, who accept pets, who eat special diets, who speak English and Japanese and Esperanto… everything. The essential core of the program is that they can use your help to accomplish their work, and they are keen to teach you. As long as there is willingness, generosity, and good will on both sides, many hurdles can be surmounted.That’s really the message of this blog post: just relax into the history. Go find the people of this world who are preserving and living the past, and help them do what they do. Get your hands dirty with it. Help build. Help grow.In exchange for your willing labour with fascinating projects, you will receive a wealth of experiential knowledge and colour for your historical writing that is unmatched by anything you can beg, buy, or steal anywhere else.Other OrganizationsYou can get involved in real projects through other organizations and initiatives, too, of course.Eco-retreats where you get involved:Cotna eco-retreat, with Sara and Dave above, is just one of many ecoretreats that takes paying guests as well as volunteers. cotna.co.uk. These exist all over the world – wherever you want to find your history!Historical reconstruction projects to get involved with. Here are some examples of organizations:https://digventures.com DigVentures do crowd-funded archaeology where you can buy a day/weekend/week’s experience digging, cleaning, documenting finds, etc.Britain’s National Trust offers many historical volunteer projects.https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/find-an-opportunityIf you speak French, you can volunteer to actually help rebuild a 13th-century castle in France with only medieval tools and methods https://www.guedelon.fr/en/how-can-i-participate_95.htmlEco and animal rescue voluntourism is also growing – be a part of elephant sanctuaries in Asia, scientific studies of koalas in Australia, or turtle breeding in the Galapagos. That’s not as historical, of course, but maybe it ties into your novel about the love between two servants of a maharaja…Christa Bedwin grew up in the wilderness of the Rocky Mountains on a cattle ranch and started her career as a chemist and chemistry teacher. She now enjoys her life as a world-travelling freelance writer and editor, finding fascinating settings and experiences to help shape her historical time-travel novels. Occasionally but not always, funny wise dragons and/or magical realism leap into her books and her real life, too .She has travelled to almost fifty countries and has worked as a rancher’s daughter, logger, inspirer-of-women, casino girl, chemistry and math teacher, lime wall restorer, road works flagperson, coffeeshop baker, laboratory chemist, heavy equipment operator, security walker, oil company secretary, fundraising organizer, homeschooling travelling mom of teen, Mensa national newsletter editor, youth worker, ranch hand, jilleroo, construction worker, artist’s model, organic squash picker, yoga, belly dance, mantra, meditation instructor, and of course, writer and editor… what next?
I have been writer and editor for twenty years. (I now write time-travel romances with my characters exploring various cool time periods and places in the past, mostly but not completely placed in Europe.)Even ten years ago I realized a big problem with the writing/editing career – too much time with the bum in the chair just isn’t healthy. An editing colleague died of an aneurysm at her desk, working on a late deadline, and I vowed to make my health a priority. (Sometimes I do better, sometimes I do worse, but the intention is always there!)As a single mom, though, budget matters. I pulled years of working all night on editing deadlines to make ends meet and feed my son and I. On top of this, I really wanted to homeschool my son when he reached his early teens… how to break out of the loop and feed my writer’s soul at the same time?Out-of-the-Box SolutionEnter WWOOFing, stage left. Fitness, budget, historical research, and teenager management all solved at once.
Here’s a picture of my hands after I’d washed them as well as I could, on our second week. No callouses yet, but at least you can see I was getting time outside! My hands were dry and cracked and I was happier than I had been in years.WWOOF is a worldwide organization of organic farmers who welcome volunteers. Depending on who you talk to, it stands for Willing Workers on Organic Farms, World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, or maybe Weekend Warriors on Organic Farms (this last one hints at local opportunities – you can find incredible adventures and inspirational exercise outside your daily box, right on your own doorstep).How It WorksYou sleep and eat for free in exchange for usually about a half a day’s labour – that leaves you the afternoons and a couple of days off per week to write, tour the area, get to know other WWOOFers, or just nap. On top of this, WWOOF is an organization of people who are committed to teaching others organic farming technologies, and, you guessed it, history writers – a lot of these techniques mean returning to the past.
That’s not to say it’s the easy life – it’s work, and the living conditions are often primitive, but it’s work that is so worth doing, satisfying, great exercise, and for learning about things your historical characters might do in their daily lives, the experience is second to none.WWOOF hosts take the time to do things right. You’ll meet artisans, committed organic warriors, builders, doers, growers, musicians, teachers… so many wonderful people. Real characters – strong and admirable people who you’ll find yourself modelling your characters after. Here are some WWOOF farmers learning about old methods of making charcoal in a burner through the Shropshire & Edges Permaculture Network.I met one woman on an ancient island who had an unlimited heart and space for adding wwoofers to her table and her home and finding us work in her garden. She was passionate about passing on organic living and growing methods, and ancient ways of life, from learning to use the willow trees and harvest their long, supple whip branches with the seasons, to how to use the compost from the composting toilets. She was by no means wealthy in terms of money, but she is one of the wealthiest people I have ever met in terms of endless resourcefulness and a thriving belief there was enough for everyone, with a little creativity. Her methods ranged from collecting food that grocery stores threw away to feed her animals to trading services with other islanders and both constantly giving and receiving. Surely this is how the ancients lived in survival economies.
I helped another woman in the mountains of Abruzzo who was the same way. She had hardly any money, but she is one of the richest people I have ever met! She had a house on a hill and food growing. People were constantly giving her things – in fact, it was a friend of hers who had sent me along to help – and she was just as quickly giving things away. Everything from food, to clothes, to building materials and furniture… and of course, Italian food. It was there that I had my first taste of carob pods, harvested straight from the tree and dried to keep year-round… now, definitely one of my favourite foods and one that I ate throughout our subsequent Italian and Croatian travels. If you ever get a chance, you must try them. They’re divine. Here’s what they look like straight from the tree. YUM. You’ll also meet wwoofer host pets – helpful dogs and fierce cuddly cats. Fluffy sheep and friendly horses. Irascible goats and curious pigs. Sweet poetry-singing chickens who help you with the weeding. All of these little people add so much flavour and sweetness to romance stories, woven in as comic relief or simple emotional sweetness. [Aside I’ve learned, if you make the pet a dragon, they can help solve a lot of plot problems too! But chickens, the dragon’s close relative, are also a sweet and delicious addition to a day of weeding the garden or as an emotional support. Alan Bradley gave Flavia de Luce Esmeralda the chicken for a pet.]
By the way, many of us writers need our cats, and would not travel long without them. No worries. You can bring your pets wwoofing to many farms. Here are our two cats, totally blissed out in the sunshine and warmth in a Victorian-era glass house. To answer what you’re thinking, the cats quickly adapted to the travel and to meeting and negotiating relationships with the other pets at our various destinations. The grey one you see here always tends to fatten herself up when there are dogs around. When we stay places with no dogs, she slims down! But she’s definitely the clan defender. In this photo, the cats are fifteen and eight years old, and the older black one still, at seventeen, behaves like a kitten when there are new adventures to be had – especially if it’s a new barn full of mice! Travel and exercise are good for writers’ cats, too.
WWOOF hosts also tend to be the people who keep heritage breeds – one of my favourite discoveries in recent years are adorable little Ouessant sheep. The lambs are literally cat-sized. (You can say it – I’m thinking it! Squeee!)
They originally come from a French island off the coast of Brittany called Ouessant island, and the story is that the menfolk were often away fishing, and so the women enjoyed having these smaller sheep, since they had to do all the work. (If you’d like to learn more about these adorable sheep, I poached these two photos from the following web page:http://www.wovember.com/2016/11/10/the-ouessant-sheep-of-france/Soon after I discovered Ouessant sheep, I rhapsodized about them in a chat with my favourite textile historian https://woollyhistoryofbritain.wordpress.com/ and her first reaction was that the black colour of those sheep would have been considered quite valuable in Medieval times, as black dye was formidably expensive in the past, but many people wanted black clothing.Then, in a future historical farm detail, an old sheep farmer somewhere in my travels (I really can’t remember where or when, but I remember the man!) explained to me that if you want to keep the sheep as black as possible, you need to give them little blankets or keep them indoors, as they tend to bleach out in the sun.Yes, I might have learned all those details on the Internet… but the story and the characters in your head develop so much more when you’ve had an opportunity to feed the sheep, participate in the spinning, speak to the people who are raising the animals, living the life, really doing the things that people did in the past.There are WWOOF organizations in most countries of the world, and you can join any one you like for a small annual fee and surf their listings of farmers looking for help. Just go looking on the internet and you’ll find wwoof.us, wwoof.ca, wwoof.fr, wwoof.it, etc.Other sample experiencesOther recent but very historical learning experiences that I’ve had recently with WWOOF hosts (and this isn’t all, but there’s only so much room on this page…)Making French goat cheese the same way it’s been done for centuries– incredibly simple, and incredibly delicious! Summertime entertainment on this French island includes storytelling evenings on a Saturday in the barn, all the adults and kids on haybales and quilts and the stories (in French) the same as they’ve been for generations. I still play Breton music at the pub with the farmer that taught me the cheesemaking at the pub, most Sundays. He also kindly organized for my son to spend a day with the local vet (as that’s my son’s career aspiration). Volunteering just gets you “in” on experience you never even know about as a hotel-staying tourist.Helping to restore an Irish castle – I absolutely loved limewashing the walls, the way humans have been doing to our homes for twelve thousand years or so! For a day or two I got to work with a young Michelangelo-grade attractive charming Italian man who would answer the deepest of philosophical questions really, really slowly, but so sweetly – he admitted that I got a lot more work than he did by the end of the day, but it was all so fun.We were preparing some of the old stables for a Buddhist retreat group from France’s Plum Village that would be coming to stay at the farm. We were so inspired and deliciously well-fed at that WWOOFing place that all of us volunteers showed up to work on our day off to help meet the deadline. Not at all because we had to, but just for the joy of meeting the goal and in respect for the owner and the crew… and because we were having so much fun despite the hard work, I guess![As a side note to learning about characters, when wwoofers are not well-fed, or feel less well-loved or appreciated, the amount of work they/we get done really drops off. It is not any bad intention of the volunteers, but I saw it happen in several different situations, and was clearly just a function of human nature. Doesn’t that explain so much about poverty through history, and why certain real and fictional characters have behaved the way they have? These lessons, absorbed through your daily meals and conversations, settle so much more deeply into your writer’s psyche than simply reading about them in history books.]My son had an opportunity to help repair and restore ancient farmhouse windows and to enjoy the company of good working men (any other single moms in the room will understand how valuable and irreplaceable this is) and to study their Irish accents (in other words, try to keep up and understand anything they were saying!). He’s turning into quite a comedian, my son, and the sense of fun and good “craic” he had with that Irish crew sure set a tone for our travels, and our humour and jokes often roll back to the sort of way we learned of talking there. Just being there, at the castle, part of the crew, interacting with people while we worked with them, was invaluable for his development as a characterful teen. And of course we have a whole new perspective on Irish characters and Irish speech!Here’s an example of some language problems we had with a friendly local who tried to speak to us in the pub one day. I understood that he was being friendly, but I couldn’t figure out why he thought we were just like two horses in a garden. Was that some Irish idiom? What did it mean? I asked around, but nobody seemed to know.
We were all in the pub a few days later and had the following exchange. You can see not just the fun trickiness of understanding a new language and culture, but also the poetry and play of Irish thought and conversation. No wonder Ireland’s full of writers!
My son also got to learn Buddhist philosophy from the Lord of the manor while helping him to prepare incredibly delicious and varied vegetarian lunches in the manor house kitchen (that’s right – he was chopping vegetables and preparing meals in a centuries-old stone-floored, wooden-countered kitchen, while I was outside working in an enormous, equally ancient high-walled garden). Here’s a picture of the garden. Conrad restored it from a bramble patch, but a hundred and two hundred years ago, it had twelve gardeners growing food for a huge number of people. There are also orchard trees inside the wall. (The wall is mainly to keep out rabbits – important to keep the doors closed!)My twelve-year-old son wasn’t too sure what to make of Conrad’s lectures on Buddhist philosophy and Buddhist ways of life, but we had great talks about those ideas gleaned over vegetables while we were weeding the garden or walking to town in the afternoons. Now, two years on, some of those ideas have definitely helped to form his framework of understanding of people in the world.And for me, the writer, I have another inspirational, generous, sexy, mysterious, can-do-anything, can-manage-employing-dozens-of-people, is-an-artist-and-invested-in-inspiring others, hero to model some future fictional hero from.And we definitely grew a root there in Ireland, too. Someone asked me about “putting down roots” once on our travels, and I realize that rather than loosen any of the strength of our root to home, living for a little while and getting completely stuck into the soil of various places has allowed us to put down more roots, giving the trees of our life more stability. We definitely feel a root of home there at Creagh Castle – a place where we have experiences and people we love and miss. A community we could go back to, roll up at the pub, and be greeted with open arms.They say that you should write what you know. You should write about your home. That’s definitely easier. But writers may be surprised to learn just how quickly you can sink into what may have seemed a foreign place, to start with. To understand and play with the language and the humour. To contemplate the lives of those who have lived and do live there. To feel, really feel, the atmosphere of a place in the bricks and mortar and stone and trees and soil.
By the way… if we ever doubted the rumour we heard in the local pub that our host was related to English royalty, the truth of it is proven to us over and over as we see his face on many portraits from centuries past in museums from Scotland to France. Our room at that farm was in the old dairy, used for centuries to milk cows and keep cheese (delicious Irish cheddar!) and milk – and yes, it was exactly as cold as a fridge in there, except when we had the fire going. We had glorious French doors onto a balcony overlooking a river valley that was just absolutely painted with flowers that spring. Across the valley was another large manor farm with ancient buildings, which led me to dream of relations between the people living on those adjacent hills over time. Did they love, or hate, each other? Both manors had been there for centuries, so I suppose they’d been through their cycles of both those options, through the generations.We didn’t have a car at the time, and that meant that we walked the mile or two to the pub in the village, often – an excellent opportunity to feel history in a way you never do when you go everywhere on wheels. In most periods in the past, most people walked. If you want to write the past, do that. We did. We walked ancient roads through enchanted flower-strewn forests and through muddy farm fields. This – really, no joke – was the walk to town.
And here’s a little stream we cross on that road, with holly and ivy actually growing together – something I never saw, growing up in the Rockies as I did.
It wasn’t even until we were leaving that I heard there was an ancient ring fort buried in the forest at the bottom of the drive. It was so commonplace to the people living there that they hadn’t thought to mention it.
At the bottom of the drive (this painting of the drive is by the castle’s owner, Conrad Frankel), there is a creaky old castle gate, and a real gate house (we met a man who was born and raised in that gate house on the way home from town one day, and in the course of our month there, we met his brother, too!)One Sunday, we took the ten-inch key and opened the giant door to the crumbling 15th-century castle and just went in and looked all around and dreamed and dreamed of the real medieval families who lived there. You can still see the remnants of the plasterwork and imagine the furniture and the fabrics and the lives in those rooms with the high corbelled ceilings and the giant, giant fireplaces… you can’t really get that same feeling in touristy castles. There’ve been so many people through, spreading their excitement and their energy around. But when you volunteer to help restore things that have just been quietly owned, lived in, crumbling for centuries…. for a writer’s spirit, this is gold.
Bottling apple cider made with apples from the farmer’s own orchard in Cornwall, and then using the natural yeast from the bottom of the carboys to patiently make absolutely delicious sourdough bread that week in our own wwoofer kitchen. Dave, pictured here, from Cotna Eco Retreat, and who is a sourdough expert as well as a cider expert, tells me that in the past, people made sourdough starter for bread just using the natural yeast found on the apple skins. All it takes is a little feeding and patience.While he was teaching me to prune the apple trees, I could hear the medieval church bells ringing from the church in the village just down the valley (you get a good view of the church from the horse field). That farmer also took me on a walk all around the neighbourhood (by which I mean the various fields and vales, with very few houses left), showing me homes that had been abandoned and telling me why that had happened for each. Showing me ancient footpaths that led straight to the church steeple – which we now couldn’t see over the trees, but you would have been able to see it a hundred and two hundred years ago. On that walk, he educated me about how in the past, when rural Cornwall was more densely populated than now, people made much more optimal use of the field areas than they do now, and in the hedges, there were not just hedgehogs, but all kinds of birds, all the trees that yielded firewood, the bushes that yielded the berries…I’m using knowledge gleaned during that visit to now write about my hero building his best friend an extension to his wattle-and-daub hut in post-Roman, Pre-Christian 5thCentury Cornwall.
Sara, pictured here with Dave, also had so many good stories to tell. She has a glorious yoga studio on the property, and, actually, her tale of her romance with Dave (they met in India) is something worth hearing. Something that gave me hope for my own romantic future…Want to bottle wine the traditional way in a little stone backroom of an ancient farmhouse? I did that in Tuscany, and helped weed tomato fields with the same farmer with glorious views of the ancient Neolithic settlement and ancient pope’s hideaway town of Orvieto. That host was also an incredible historical resource when I later e-mailed him to ask details about things I wanted my characters to do in his neighbourhood in Renaissance times, adding a wealth of detail about neighbourhood relations and inter-town arguments and battles that happened back in the day that I never would have gleaned online (as most of it would be in Italian).In Sicily, I helped a Sicilian stonemason build a wall out of very heavy (pessandra!) rocks (pietri) for a few days. Working with someone is a great way to work on a language, too. Being surrounded by hot white limestone really got me into the Italian mood. Then I went along to the coast of Sicily, slept in my tent with my cats by the sea, toured Ragusa province’s incredible Baroque towns, and finished writing my latest novel in cafés no more than 20 steps from the sea, where the coffees were excellent, Italian, and 80 cents.There was also a 17th-century Scottish castle with views from my room to the sea that were like paintings, and a 16th-century Irish farmhouse lovingly rebuilt by a fascinating romantic figure named Aidan. There were other homeschooling families, musical geniuses, donkeys and gardens and milennia-old-towns torn by war and communism… and so many characters to meet… but I have to stop some time! I will write here again, so if there is something specific you’d like to know about please ask me. [image error]Hopefully I have inspired you to give this type of historical adventure a try yourself. If you’d like to chat more about it, please find me through my website, www.christabedwin.com or on Facebook or LinkedIn (as Christa Bedwin).Writing schedule:A key to successful wwoofing is that you have to roll with the situation. You may not have the freedom to dictate your schedule all the time… and actually, I have found that this requirement to simply accept circumstances and do what you are asked to do is probably one of the most relaxing and rejuvenating states of being for the mind. It just takes the stress away from thinking all the time, and really gives you time to just be, to soak in the beauty of nature and the quirkiness of people, to relax our modern stressed minds, and to ponder and dream about plots and characters and settings and ideas.As I mentioned with Sicily, when I first rolled up there, I didn’t really have any plans aside from enjoying some time in that place, meeting people, and helping to weed gardens or build walls or whatever presented itself. I just let myself unwind.Then, when I did go to the seaside, 27,000 words finished my novel in a mere four days! Though I hadn’t really seemed to be working on my novel while I built walls or marvelled at Baroque architecture or tried to talk to the Sicilian neighbours about their milk cows that they’re driving back and forth from barn to pasture the same way Sicilian peasants have done for centuries, my head, peaced out and content in a historical way of living, gentle, with a rhythm instead of a schedule, as people lived in the past, delivered the words when the time opened up to do so.But . . .But I.. have kids… don’t speak the language… travel with my pets… don’t have a vehicle… have a disability… whatever your “but” reason is for not getting out there, rethink it. If you don’t really want to, if it’s not your bag, fine. I understand that this kind of opportunity is not for everybody.However, if you are feeling the pull, if you would really like to try, then don’t swallow any idea of “I can’t.” You can. Just as we all have different life circumstances, so too do wwoof hosts. There are wwoof hosts with children, who accept pets, who eat special diets, who speak English and Japanese and Esperanto… everything. The essential core of the program is that they can use your help to accomplish their work, and they are keen to teach you. As long as there is willingness, generosity, and good will on both sides, many hurdles can be surmounted.That’s really the message of this blog post: just relax into the history. Go find the people of this world who are preserving and living the past, and help them do what they do. Get your hands dirty with it. Help build. Help grow.In exchange for your willing labour with fascinating projects, you will receive a wealth of experiential knowledge and colour for your historical writing that is unmatched by anything you can beg, buy, or steal anywhere else.Other OrganizationsYou can get involved in real projects through other organizations and initiatives, too, of course.Eco-retreats where you get involved:Cotna eco-retreat, with Sara and Dave above, is just one of many ecoretreats that takes paying guests as well as volunteers. cotna.co.uk. These exist all over the world – wherever you want to find your history!Historical reconstruction projects to get involved with. Here are some examples of organizations:https://digventures.com DigVentures do crowd-funded archaeology where you can buy a day/weekend/week’s experience digging, cleaning, documenting finds, etc.Britain’s National Trust offers many historical volunteer projects.https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/find-an-opportunityIf you speak French, you can volunteer to actually help rebuild a 13th-century castle in France with only medieval tools and methods https://www.guedelon.fr/en/how-can-i-participate_95.htmlEco and animal rescue voluntourism is also growing – be a part of elephant sanctuaries in Asia, scientific studies of koalas in Australia, or turtle breeding in the Galapagos. That’s not as historical, of course, but maybe it ties into your novel about the love between two servants of a maharaja…Christa Bedwin grew up in the wilderness of the Rocky Mountains on a cattle ranch and started her career as a chemist and chemistry teacher. She now enjoys her life as a world-travelling freelance writer and editor, finding fascinating settings and experiences to help shape her historical time-travel novels. Occasionally but not always, funny wise dragons and/or magical realism leap into her books and her real life, too .She has travelled to almost fifty countries and has worked as a rancher’s daughter, logger, inspirer-of-women, casino girl, chemistry and math teacher, lime wall restorer, road works flagperson, coffeeshop baker, laboratory chemist, heavy equipment operator, security walker, oil company secretary, fundraising organizer, homeschooling travelling mom of teen, Mensa national newsletter editor, youth worker, ranch hand, jilleroo, construction worker, artist’s model, organic squash picker, yoga, belly dance, mantra, meditation instructor, and of course, writer and editor… what next?
February 22, 2019
Lesson 5: The Costs of Venice's Beauty
Venice's beauty is unmistakeable. The white stone sidewalks, the sweeping arches. The mosaics. The age, the grace, the sheer heart-stopping beauty.
But just as we scratch today's billionaires and discover underpaid laborers backing up their fortunes, if you scratch the surface of Renaissance Venice's beautiful buildings and start to follow the trail.... where did all that money come from, anyway?
Slavery, mostly. The spoils of war, in other cases. Here are some interesting but terrible ways that people used each other in Renaissance Venice:
Aretino: One of the first writers to have most of his profits taken by his publishers! We all know how hard we work to write. Imagine doing all that and expecting money from it and not getting it (Aretino decided to find alternative forms of income by means of blackmail).
Murano glass: The famed glassworkers of Murano are craftspeople who have passed the traditions down their family lines for centuries, and apprenticeships typically started very young... but for hundreds of years they could not leave the island of Murano. Once you knew the secrets so jealously guarded for profit, it was considered sheer betrayal to leave. Betrayal so serious that the penalty was death!
Slave Ships: The battle of Lepanto in 1571 was the last great battle to involve triremes and other rowed battleships. Venice had partnered up with Spain and Rome to take on the Ottomans, and they won... but who do you think rowed all those ships? Many of those rowers were drowned, chained to their oars, if they were unlucky enough to be enslaved by a losing ship (unless, like my hero Massimo, you magically get transported through time -- that's a good way to avoid sudden death in a ship battle!).
Sugar: The Venetians captured the island of Cyprus and were so brutal as overlords that for a full century they didn't let locals have their own food gardens, so they'd have to rely on their overlords for food, and therefore be obliged to work the sugar fields. As the only people in Europe to have a ready supply of sugar for several generations, the Venetians turned enormous profit... turning white sugar into all that beautiful white marble architecture we now can see in this city.
Thank you for reading along today. There's so much more I'd have loved to touch on -- Venice's beginning as a few swampy islands, more on the book industry, the wonderful orphanages of Venice, more on the beauty of the courtesans and how they achieved that beauty (oh -- an answer to one of the last quiz questions: their favorite hair color was a reddish blonde, and they achieved it by wearing broad-brimmed hats to protect their complexions while their hair poked through a hole in the top. They added lemon juice and put their hair through the hat and sunned themselves to bleach it to that color), the Inquisition, the banking, the food, carpets, links to the Silk Road... just so much to enjoy.
Zara, I've never seen anything about poison darts and Venetians! Where did you hear that?
Christa
But just as we scratch today's billionaires and discover underpaid laborers backing up their fortunes, if you scratch the surface of Renaissance Venice's beautiful buildings and start to follow the trail.... where did all that money come from, anyway?
Slavery, mostly. The spoils of war, in other cases. Here are some interesting but terrible ways that people used each other in Renaissance Venice:
Aretino: One of the first writers to have most of his profits taken by his publishers! We all know how hard we work to write. Imagine doing all that and expecting money from it and not getting it (Aretino decided to find alternative forms of income by means of blackmail).
Murano glass: The famed glassworkers of Murano are craftspeople who have passed the traditions down their family lines for centuries, and apprenticeships typically started very young... but for hundreds of years they could not leave the island of Murano. Once you knew the secrets so jealously guarded for profit, it was considered sheer betrayal to leave. Betrayal so serious that the penalty was death!
Slave Ships: The battle of Lepanto in 1571 was the last great battle to involve triremes and other rowed battleships. Venice had partnered up with Spain and Rome to take on the Ottomans, and they won... but who do you think rowed all those ships? Many of those rowers were drowned, chained to their oars, if they were unlucky enough to be enslaved by a losing ship (unless, like my hero Massimo, you magically get transported through time -- that's a good way to avoid sudden death in a ship battle!).
Sugar: The Venetians captured the island of Cyprus and were so brutal as overlords that for a full century they didn't let locals have their own food gardens, so they'd have to rely on their overlords for food, and therefore be obliged to work the sugar fields. As the only people in Europe to have a ready supply of sugar for several generations, the Venetians turned enormous profit... turning white sugar into all that beautiful white marble architecture we now can see in this city.
Thank you for reading along today. There's so much more I'd have loved to touch on -- Venice's beginning as a few swampy islands, more on the book industry, the wonderful orphanages of Venice, more on the beauty of the courtesans and how they achieved that beauty (oh -- an answer to one of the last quiz questions: their favorite hair color was a reddish blonde, and they achieved it by wearing broad-brimmed hats to protect their complexions while their hair poked through a hole in the top. They added lemon juice and put their hair through the hat and sunned themselves to bleach it to that color), the Inquisition, the banking, the food, carpets, links to the Silk Road... just so much to enjoy.
Zara, I've never seen anything about poison darts and Venetians! Where did you hear that?
Christa
Lesson 4: a little poem about Venice to ponder
Everyone watched the boatmanTall and lithe and lean
His music made the city
Into everybody’s dreamBut the stories true worth knowing
Were not so plain to see
Behind every glorious window
Was a busy little beeThe women, the servants
At work in the houses
The rich take the glory
No-one sees the mousesVenice, most beautiful
Venice, most serene
Venice, most terrible
Built on broken dreamsOh the glory of her generals
(and the pain of those who lost)
Oh the wisdom of her merchants
(it was others who paid the cost)Every glorious window
Every impeccably crafted stone
Cost the blood of other people
It’s not beauty aloneAnd now there is Venice, most beautiful.
Venice, most serene.
Venice, so terrible, yet…
In everybody’s dreams.There is no Venice but Venice.photo by Grant Zelych, copyright 2015
Lesson 3: Literacy, Libertines, Lasciviousness, and the Lido (Renaissance Venice)
Venice has long been notorious for licentiousness. Young lords from many countries, including those English ones that we write so much about, went to Venice on their Grand Tours of Europe and enjoyed the wine, the women, and the song.
When Napoleon marched into Venice, he repeatedly commanded them to close their churches… but the churches weren’t in very active service, anyway! It is said that too much descent into pleasure in the 18thcentury is what finally led to Venice’s ruin. So devoted were they to enjoyment that not enough people were minding business affairs and the military, and they weren’t able to put up much resistance when Napoleon came for them. (Source: a puppet show I saw in Venice – some more long-winded sources below.)https://www.napoleon-series.org/research/government/diplomatic/c_venice.htmlhttps://www.introducingvenice.com/history
From the English perspective, Venice was the place they went to get drunk and sow wild oats. Byron was famous for having swum from the Lido to the mainland with a hangover.
But that was later. From the Renaissance Venetian perspective, the salons of the courtesans were not all about getting drunk and having sex.
They were places to enjoy pleasure and beauty, yes, but also intellectualism, business, and diplomacy. Salons were huge by-invitation-only parties where both women and men could discuss ideas, both frivolous and important. Veronica Franco, one of the most admired courtesans of her time, was known as much for her poetry and intellect as for her beauty and grace. In 1575 she published Terze Rime,a book with 17 of her own sonnets, and 8 other sonnets, which may have been by her principal lover, Marco Venier, or perhaps other authors.
https://dornsife.usc.edu/veronica-franco/poems-and-letters/https://the-eye.eu/public/Books/Poetry/Veronica%20Franco%20-%20Poems%20and%20Selected%20Letters.pdf
Here are a few quotes from her work, translated into English. As you can see, she was publicly allowed to be both brilliant andsexy.
“When we too are armed and trained, we can convince men that we have hands, feet, and a heart like yours; and although we may be delicate and soft, some men who are delicate are also strong; and others, coarse and harsh, are cowards. Women have not yet realized this, for if they should decide to do so, they would be able to fight you until death; and to prove that I speak the truth, amongst so many women, I will be the first to act, setting an example for them to follow.
—Veronica Franco 1546-1591”
“So sweet and delicious do I become,
when I am in bed with a man
who, I sense, loves and enjoys me,
that the pleasure I bring excels all delight,
so the knot of love, however tight
it seemed before, is tied tighter still.”
― Veronica Franco, Poems and Selected Letters
She also gained a great deal of political power and was able to introduce intelligent ideas into the way Venice was governed. She was considered an important ambassador in Venice’s international relations with France, and participated in important peace talks.https://www.jstor.org/stable/478573?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contentshttps://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/IWW/BIOS/A0017.html
So naturally… when a woman gains a lot of power, what comes next? Someone tries to take it away from her!
Lesson 2: Books and Beauty in Renaissance Venice
The opening scenes of "Dangerous Beauty" begin with a beautiful, mischievous young woman in the 1500s who loved books... and boys. Her eyes were wide open, enchanted with the world around her, curious. Unrestrained.
Many historical novelists write about historical England, particularly Victorian England, and a big focus is often how women weren't supposed to be intelligent, weren't supposed to read and learn and love... weren't supposed to fully be themselves. The honest courtesans of Venice did not suffer from those ridiculous restrictions.
Venice, in fact, might have been the best place in the world for a women who loved to read!
Though the printing press was invented in Germany, where it really took off was Venice. Why? Venice had the money! Money meant that publishers could afford to make the books to sell, but it also meant that there was a large population of people living in comfortable circumstances in beautiful homes who had the luxury of time for learning and reading.
Venice was still intimately tied to the east at the time, and here's a story of one earnest entrepreneur who took a shot at publishing the first mass-produced Koran. The holy men of Islam were not so impressed with the effort. Read here to find out why!
https://cbphilosophy.blogspot.com/201...
The courtesans of Venice, of course, were also encouraged to love men... but that's for our next lesson.
What's the oldest book that you've ever read? There are many images of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts available online... What do you love most about looking at them?
Here is a beautiful old video about book binding -- this is in Dublin in the 1900s, but watching the handmade processes will help you get a feel for how it was through the ages. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBd67qQy96k
Many historical novelists write about historical England, particularly Victorian England, and a big focus is often how women weren't supposed to be intelligent, weren't supposed to read and learn and love... weren't supposed to fully be themselves. The honest courtesans of Venice did not suffer from those ridiculous restrictions.
Venice, in fact, might have been the best place in the world for a women who loved to read!
Though the printing press was invented in Germany, where it really took off was Venice. Why? Venice had the money! Money meant that publishers could afford to make the books to sell, but it also meant that there was a large population of people living in comfortable circumstances in beautiful homes who had the luxury of time for learning and reading.
Venice was still intimately tied to the east at the time, and here's a story of one earnest entrepreneur who took a shot at publishing the first mass-produced Koran. The holy men of Islam were not so impressed with the effort. Read here to find out why!
https://cbphilosophy.blogspot.com/201...
The courtesans of Venice, of course, were also encouraged to love men... but that's for our next lesson.
What's the oldest book that you've ever read? There are many images of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts available online... What do you love most about looking at them?
Here is a beautiful old video about book binding -- this is in Dublin in the 1900s, but watching the handmade processes will help you get a feel for how it was through the ages. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBd67qQy96k
Lesson 1: Renaissance Venice
I am giving a course today to my historical writers' group and am sharing it here so others can enjoy, too.
1. Your part2. My intro3. First resource for the course
1. Hello! Welcome to Lesson 1. Today we'll be studying the Venetian Renaissance -- the first place in the world that publishing really got going after the invention of Gutenberg's printing press.
We would all love to hear you say hello and say a little about who you are and what you're most interested in learning about today! It's a quick little course, but I'll accommodate all the requests I can. Renaissance Venice offers us so many rich topics -- the book business, banking, the inquisition, courtesans, libertines, commerce, multiculturalism, and the history of Venice itself, even.
2. Me:
I'm your instructor, Christa Bedwin. I have spent several years in Europe immersing myself (and my son) in its various cultures and peoples and traditions, and I write time travel romances with protagonists from two different places and times. I love contrasting cultures. I always write the historical part as accurately as I can, not just with facts and events, but with how people really thought and felt at that time. Sometimes cultures in the past or in other parts of the world have completely different cultural assumptions than our own, and that's what I love and I think can help us live better, gaining that perspective. (And some parts of their needs and wants and goals are exactly the same as modern folks!)
In my paying work I've been a high school chemistry teacher, a chemist, a professional editor, a bellydance instructor, a baker, a logger, a jilleroo, and oh so many other things. Not uncommon for a writer I guess -- constant craving to live the lives of all my characters and try just everything from every angle! In my travels I've noticed that sometimes the hardest situations make the best stories later -- always a comfort at the time.
My first time-travel novel, Caterina's Renaissance, sort of grew out of a time that I was living on a west coast island and couldn't get a date. I've always sorted of wanted a "Renaissance man" -- one who's learned, but physical... compassionate, musical, artistic, scientific... After a trip to Italy, somehow I realized that the ideal boyfriend might be a man from Renaissance Venice. The commercial and cultural center of the world for a thousand years, it drew writers and poets, beauty and music and love and industry and invention, like nowhere else before or since.
There is nowhere else like Venice.
3. First Resource for this course:Dangerous Beauty, 1997, with Catherine McCormack a beautiful movie, which you can purchase or rent from YouTube or elsewhere online:Hopefully this link works for you:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amqmS...
It's a gorgeous, sumptuous movie with all the beauty of Venice and the Renaissance. It follows the true life story of Veronica Franco, one of history’s most extraordinary women and an honest courtesan who rose to extraordinary political heights simply on the power of her intelligence, grace, and character.I think it’s a lovely thing to have playing in the background to be “in the mood” for this course, if you have time.
1. Your part2. My intro3. First resource for the course
1. Hello! Welcome to Lesson 1. Today we'll be studying the Venetian Renaissance -- the first place in the world that publishing really got going after the invention of Gutenberg's printing press.
We would all love to hear you say hello and say a little about who you are and what you're most interested in learning about today! It's a quick little course, but I'll accommodate all the requests I can. Renaissance Venice offers us so many rich topics -- the book business, banking, the inquisition, courtesans, libertines, commerce, multiculturalism, and the history of Venice itself, even.
2. Me:
I'm your instructor, Christa Bedwin. I have spent several years in Europe immersing myself (and my son) in its various cultures and peoples and traditions, and I write time travel romances with protagonists from two different places and times. I love contrasting cultures. I always write the historical part as accurately as I can, not just with facts and events, but with how people really thought and felt at that time. Sometimes cultures in the past or in other parts of the world have completely different cultural assumptions than our own, and that's what I love and I think can help us live better, gaining that perspective. (And some parts of their needs and wants and goals are exactly the same as modern folks!)
In my paying work I've been a high school chemistry teacher, a chemist, a professional editor, a bellydance instructor, a baker, a logger, a jilleroo, and oh so many other things. Not uncommon for a writer I guess -- constant craving to live the lives of all my characters and try just everything from every angle! In my travels I've noticed that sometimes the hardest situations make the best stories later -- always a comfort at the time.
My first time-travel novel, Caterina's Renaissance, sort of grew out of a time that I was living on a west coast island and couldn't get a date. I've always sorted of wanted a "Renaissance man" -- one who's learned, but physical... compassionate, musical, artistic, scientific... After a trip to Italy, somehow I realized that the ideal boyfriend might be a man from Renaissance Venice. The commercial and cultural center of the world for a thousand years, it drew writers and poets, beauty and music and love and industry and invention, like nowhere else before or since.
There is nowhere else like Venice.
3. First Resource for this course:Dangerous Beauty, 1997, with Catherine McCormack a beautiful movie, which you can purchase or rent from YouTube or elsewhere online:Hopefully this link works for you:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amqmS...
It's a gorgeous, sumptuous movie with all the beauty of Venice and the Renaissance. It follows the true life story of Veronica Franco, one of history’s most extraordinary women and an honest courtesan who rose to extraordinary political heights simply on the power of her intelligence, grace, and character.I think it’s a lovely thing to have playing in the background to be “in the mood” for this course, if you have time.
February 18, 2019
Renaissance Venice Quiz: Cortigiana Onesta
Day 6's question is following along on the research difficulties of Day 5... a big difference between cultures can mean it's difficult to understand history when we read about places in a different language.
One of the places this annoys me the most is with the roles of women in various cultures. In Renaissance Venice, there were women called "cortigiana onesta." Who were these women, and why did this role not exist in England or America?
If anybody feels like "studying" early, here's a gorgeous movie placed in Renaissance Venice that you can buy or rent from youtube.
It's called Dangerous Beauty.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=amqmS98FhHU
One of the places this annoys me the most is with the roles of women in various cultures. In Renaissance Venice, there were women called "cortigiana onesta." Who were these women, and why did this role not exist in England or America?
If anybody feels like "studying" early, here's a gorgeous movie placed in Renaissance Venice that you can buy or rent from youtube.
It's called Dangerous Beauty.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=amqmS98FhHU
Valentine's Surprise
Here’s a nice little one-day story. A surprise Valentine that magicked up for me this year. So many cool little things in the day I had to share.
For many years now I’ve decided that Valentine’s Day is just about love, all love, and I send as much of it out as I can, instead of buying into the negativity that the many people for whom all the fairytale expectations aren’t measuring up to, are ‘supposed’ to feel. Such a relief to be allowed to let go of that negativity isn’t it? I am so glad I learned how to count all the joys — my son, my friends, generous wonderful bosses and clients — so much to be grateful for. But this year I was surprised with a Valentine romance, too!
My surprising Valentine I found him about 7 o'clock in the morning.
He posted on a friend's Facebook page (friend had noted that there was heart-shaped salami in Germany for Valentine’s Day) that he needed a girlfriend because then next Valentine's Day he could do up this lovely recipe he had found for stuffed lamb's hearts on skewers, or maybe artichoke hearts on skewers. So I sent him a friend request and said, ask and ye shall receive, but I'll have the artichoke hearts please.
So. Just like that he agreed to be my valentine, and didn't mind that I only wanted artichoke hearts and probably not the lamb hearts as lambs are so sweet. I said probably all the good bloodthirsty girls had been snapped up already. (I had surmised that he might venerate bloodthirstiness a little, at least in theory, because his Facebook page recorded that he has a re-enactment hobby as a long-haired Celtic warrior (I love long-haired men!)).
And then I noticed that he puts the same symbol on his face as I wear on my neck all the time. The triscale. Or triskell as he spells it in England. And then he said he has a triscale on his watch chain too, the one he wears every day. So that’s kind of neat for a surprise Valentine, that it happens that we wear the same exact symbol on our daily adornment.
We kept chatting on and off all day – it was difficult to focus on computer work with this delightful bit of fun going on! When he found out that I live in a town called Wolfville, he said that in Breton (except he calls it properly brezhoneg, as you would in the Breton language) Wolfville would be Kerbliez, settlement of the wolf.
Swoon. If you could pick a topic that I might find most romantic of anything to talk about right now, it would be the Breton language. One of my most favourite things last year was my study of Breton and of Cornwall and of Breton music. (I’m a writer, working on some books placed there, but also have been working on Breton music, because I lived in Brittany all last year). I moved back to Canada to suit my son’s needs, but my heart cries for Brittany and Cornwall nearly every day. Doing my best to be there, but maybe my sense of romance is still over there. The books I’m writing at the moment are all over there. Drustan doesn't live in Cornwall, but very close, in Exeter, in Devon.
At some point during the day I see a female has posted Valentine's endearments in the Cornish language on his wall, and I tease about there being competition and me having claimed him, but it turns out the lady is his mother. :) She asks, since "win" means friend in Cornish, has her son not told her something? (my name being Bedwin). Have to love a man's mother egging one on. :) In an intriguing ancient language one loves, no less.
So then somehow he tells me the names of some of his favourite songs that he plays on his lyre/sings, and tells me the history of the songs and we chat about Breton independence, another favourite topic of mine. And finds the sheet music to send me so I can practice them on my flute. <3 And sent me some videos of him playing/singing. Serenaded! On Valentine's Day!
And we trade ages as decimal multiples of (yes, I'm a math nerd) my favorite Breton number, tre-ch'wech, (he didn’t guess 18 though, when I asked if he could guess my favourite Breton number, he guessed 5, because “pemp” sounds funny, but I meant 3 x 6 for 18 IS funny and he agreed). I was much surprised to discover that he’s younger, not older, than me, since he has more grey hair than I do. But he says (ever the gentleman, my surprise Valentine) that it doesn’t matter, his ex was more years older than him than I am. And honestly I have several older exes in my own cobwebs but I've really been feeling that now, my partner is younger (and most boyfriends in recent years have been younger than me, and they've approached me, so why say no!).
Later in the evening, we even discovered that we have the same two favourite Scotch whiskies – Talisker and Lagavulin – and we shared a drink and some cozy time… albeit not in the same physical place together though by this time I really was thinking it sure would nice to be in the same room with this guy! I suggested the soundtrack of the Last of the Mohicans for scotch-drinking sound track and he said, wow, did you suggest that because you saw the video of me playing it? No, I said, I just had a feeling. So then he sent along that video. :)
We had a nice long debate over whether I can call my 5thcentury Cornwall character Eamon… I have to admit I have little leg to stand on with that one, and that Iseult (Isolde) also means white flower, so I toyed with the idea of changing my character Blodwyn to Isolde… but I don’t know, Isolde’s Redemption doesn’t really sound the same as Blodwyn’s Redemption. And I’m not sure that I buy the notion of changing Eamon to Jawon (all the names he was offering were
I was amused to note that when I looked up the distance between us Google earth showed not just our two locations, but also the curve of the Earth so I could get an idea of the scale of the distance between us. But you know, it’s not inconceivable that I’ll go to Brittany/Cornwall/Exeter this summer… I'd already been toying with the idea, in fact.
And then I was telling a friend about this extraordinary little tale and she said maybe it’ll turn out to be tonkadur and I said what’s that? And sure enough she’d looked up fate/destiny/fortune in the Breton dictionary. It sure was — because what a wonderful sign of alignment to be offered a Valentine who aligns in so many ways, and sweet awesome generous friends who get me!
It might just be a magical little moment out of time, one that made me really happy for the number of signs of alignment and the sheer joy of the fun of it or it could be something real, in time. Isn’t it interesting how little there can be, really, between something being just dreams on the internet or a changed way of life?
Years ago, I would have worried about what comes next. And what if this, and what if that. And this and that don't match. But now, I just feel delighted at the lovely, lovely day. Obviously a great sign of being on the path to better and ever better things in life. Isn’t it lovely to get signs like that?
For many years now I’ve decided that Valentine’s Day is just about love, all love, and I send as much of it out as I can, instead of buying into the negativity that the many people for whom all the fairytale expectations aren’t measuring up to, are ‘supposed’ to feel. Such a relief to be allowed to let go of that negativity isn’t it? I am so glad I learned how to count all the joys — my son, my friends, generous wonderful bosses and clients — so much to be grateful for. But this year I was surprised with a Valentine romance, too!
My surprising Valentine I found him about 7 o'clock in the morning.
He posted on a friend's Facebook page (friend had noted that there was heart-shaped salami in Germany for Valentine’s Day) that he needed a girlfriend because then next Valentine's Day he could do up this lovely recipe he had found for stuffed lamb's hearts on skewers, or maybe artichoke hearts on skewers. So I sent him a friend request and said, ask and ye shall receive, but I'll have the artichoke hearts please.
So. Just like that he agreed to be my valentine, and didn't mind that I only wanted artichoke hearts and probably not the lamb hearts as lambs are so sweet. I said probably all the good bloodthirsty girls had been snapped up already. (I had surmised that he might venerate bloodthirstiness a little, at least in theory, because his Facebook page recorded that he has a re-enactment hobby as a long-haired Celtic warrior (I love long-haired men!)).
And then I noticed that he puts the same symbol on his face as I wear on my neck all the time. The triscale. Or triskell as he spells it in England. And then he said he has a triscale on his watch chain too, the one he wears every day. So that’s kind of neat for a surprise Valentine, that it happens that we wear the same exact symbol on our daily adornment.
We kept chatting on and off all day – it was difficult to focus on computer work with this delightful bit of fun going on! When he found out that I live in a town called Wolfville, he said that in Breton (except he calls it properly brezhoneg, as you would in the Breton language) Wolfville would be Kerbliez, settlement of the wolf.
Swoon. If you could pick a topic that I might find most romantic of anything to talk about right now, it would be the Breton language. One of my most favourite things last year was my study of Breton and of Cornwall and of Breton music. (I’m a writer, working on some books placed there, but also have been working on Breton music, because I lived in Brittany all last year). I moved back to Canada to suit my son’s needs, but my heart cries for Brittany and Cornwall nearly every day. Doing my best to be there, but maybe my sense of romance is still over there. The books I’m writing at the moment are all over there. Drustan doesn't live in Cornwall, but very close, in Exeter, in Devon.
At some point during the day I see a female has posted Valentine's endearments in the Cornish language on his wall, and I tease about there being competition and me having claimed him, but it turns out the lady is his mother. :) She asks, since "win" means friend in Cornish, has her son not told her something? (my name being Bedwin). Have to love a man's mother egging one on. :) In an intriguing ancient language one loves, no less.
So then somehow he tells me the names of some of his favourite songs that he plays on his lyre/sings, and tells me the history of the songs and we chat about Breton independence, another favourite topic of mine. And finds the sheet music to send me so I can practice them on my flute. <3 And sent me some videos of him playing/singing. Serenaded! On Valentine's Day!
And we trade ages as decimal multiples of (yes, I'm a math nerd) my favorite Breton number, tre-ch'wech, (he didn’t guess 18 though, when I asked if he could guess my favourite Breton number, he guessed 5, because “pemp” sounds funny, but I meant 3 x 6 for 18 IS funny and he agreed). I was much surprised to discover that he’s younger, not older, than me, since he has more grey hair than I do. But he says (ever the gentleman, my surprise Valentine) that it doesn’t matter, his ex was more years older than him than I am. And honestly I have several older exes in my own cobwebs but I've really been feeling that now, my partner is younger (and most boyfriends in recent years have been younger than me, and they've approached me, so why say no!).
Later in the evening, we even discovered that we have the same two favourite Scotch whiskies – Talisker and Lagavulin – and we shared a drink and some cozy time… albeit not in the same physical place together though by this time I really was thinking it sure would nice to be in the same room with this guy! I suggested the soundtrack of the Last of the Mohicans for scotch-drinking sound track and he said, wow, did you suggest that because you saw the video of me playing it? No, I said, I just had a feeling. So then he sent along that video. :)
We had a nice long debate over whether I can call my 5thcentury Cornwall character Eamon… I have to admit I have little leg to stand on with that one, and that Iseult (Isolde) also means white flower, so I toyed with the idea of changing my character Blodwyn to Isolde… but I don’t know, Isolde’s Redemption doesn’t really sound the same as Blodwyn’s Redemption. And I’m not sure that I buy the notion of changing Eamon to Jawon (all the names he was offering were
I was amused to note that when I looked up the distance between us Google earth showed not just our two locations, but also the curve of the Earth so I could get an idea of the scale of the distance between us. But you know, it’s not inconceivable that I’ll go to Brittany/Cornwall/Exeter this summer… I'd already been toying with the idea, in fact.
And then I was telling a friend about this extraordinary little tale and she said maybe it’ll turn out to be tonkadur and I said what’s that? And sure enough she’d looked up fate/destiny/fortune in the Breton dictionary. It sure was — because what a wonderful sign of alignment to be offered a Valentine who aligns in so many ways, and sweet awesome generous friends who get me!
It might just be a magical little moment out of time, one that made me really happy for the number of signs of alignment and the sheer joy of the fun of it or it could be something real, in time. Isn’t it interesting how little there can be, really, between something being just dreams on the internet or a changed way of life?
Years ago, I would have worried about what comes next. And what if this, and what if that. And this and that don't match. But now, I just feel delighted at the lovely, lovely day. Obviously a great sign of being on the path to better and ever better things in life. Isn’t it lovely to get signs like that?
