Struggling in the jolly season.

1 Reply

‘Tis the season to be jolly. Whatever you celebrate, whether it be Solstice or Hanukah or Christmas, or anything else (including the arrival of so many extra cookies and treats) I hope you are able to find peace and contentment in the season. I’m struggling.

Maybe you are struggling too.

Many of us are keeping the holidays very differently than we used to. Some are back to big get togethers, but I suspect there is friction, a little cognitive dissonance gnawing at the edges of whatever is happening.

Me? We’re keeping a quiet holiday. Just the three of us. Daughter arrived a week ago before the storms made travel almost impossible and worked ”from home” from our home until Friday. She had been isolating the week before, tested negative (as did all of us) and we are all in it together now for another couple of days.

We are not joining the big family gathering 4000 miles away for two reasons: we were just there in November and my desire to be indoors in a large group is zero. So we had our visit in November and somehow, miraculously, managed to make it back without getting sick. We took all kinds of precautions, but we were also lucky. 

I’ve been called a fear-monger on the socials. Ok. Yes, I am fearful of catching a disease we still know hardly anything about. The likelihood of getting long covid is twice that of being hurt in a car accident. If anyone is really interested, I’ll try and find the source for that figure. It stuck with me. I’m not so good with the memory stuff right now because I have a brain injury. 

So yeah. I’m being careful. My ”recovery,” such as it is, has been too hard won. And incomplete, even now, almost seven years later. I can’t go back. And SARS-CoV-2 causes brain damage (among so many other things).

I miss entertaining. I used to have big parties. Big holiday things. Big non-holiday things. But those days are over for now. And I’m grieving. Much and all as I do not want to be at the family gathering, I miss the family gathering. If that makes any sense. I even miss shopping. And I hate shopping. I miss things I hated in the before times. I miss the before times.

And I’m worried about those who are gathering. Will it be another superspreader Christmas? I want to be wrong. You have no idea how much I want to be wrong.

And even though I’m safe and cozy here with my beloved husband and daughter, and so grateful, I feel a pall over everything. Sometimes I feel absolute fury. Other times I feel merely disappointed. Oh, how I’d love to be wrong. But I’m not. I want to yell from the rooftops about what it takes to keep safer, how it’s not actually that hard, how it’s worth it. But no one wants to hear that. Tonight they want to party like it’s 2019.

Ok.

So the jolly season is not so jolly for me. I’m grateful. I’m warm and loved and privileged to have a turkey in the oven as I write. But there’s an edge to it all. I’m worried sick about people who have had SARS-CoV-2 three times. Two times. Once. I’m worried about those who pretend that’s not what they have. Or had. Yeah, maybe it’s not. But maybe it is. I’m worried we aren’t testing, tracing, tracking, learning. I’m worried that public health officials have abandoned their posts and debased their positions. I’m worried.

Like all of you, I’m doing my best. So ’tis the season.

Patterson House Book Tour Update

Leave a Reply

It has been a joy to tour around Canada with Patterson House. Thank you to everyone who came out to events and a special thank you to everyone who joined me as a presenter including Aritha Van Herk, Rayanne Haines, Sandra S.G. Wong, Fran Kimmel, Katherine Taylor (twice!), Elizabeth Adilman, Judy Rebick, Sally McLean and Theresa Kishkan. What a wonderful experience to be with you all! And thank you to the venues and hosts — Shelf Life Books in Calgary, Glass Bookshop in Edmonton, Studio 106 in Victoria, Another Story Book Shop in Toronto, The Beaches Branch of the Toronto Public Library, Flying Squirrel Motorcycle Club in Toronto and Massy Arts/Massy Books in Vancouver. You were all so welcoming and helpful!

Talking with readers about Patterson House has been a real treat for me. The characters have been in my own head for such a long time that talking about them now feels gossipy and fun. I love it when people tell me they couldn’t put the book down and stayed up way too late to finish it. What a compliment!

Although the book tour is over, I’ll continue to talk about Patterson House at book clubs and with whoever else wants to talk to me about it! I have a couple of interviews coming soon with Women Writers, Women’s Books and one that will be out soon in the Beaches Metro Community News. These are my people! When people from the Beach tell me I got it right, I feel very complimented.

Here are a few photos from the tour.

Photos from events along the way.

Patterson House a Calgary Bestseller

2 Replies

Thanks so much to the Calgary writing community and readers for making Patterson House a bestseller two weeks in a row and for pushing it to the #1 spot this week.

I started Patterson House in Calgary. Both me and the book were nurtured by a whole bunch of writing classes and teachers. I took classes through Continuing Ed at the University. I went to a women’s writing week at U of A too which was excellent. Inge Trueman’s writing group and several writing retreats at Strawberry Creek (thanks Brenda, Tena and Rudy Weibe, and Astrid Blodgett and the Alberta Writers’ Guild) helped me too. And I had a really good week at Banff with Joan Clark as my mentor. There are many other Alberta-centric writing experiences too! I got to try sections out because Rona Altrows and others hosted ”Writing in the Works,” which allowed writers like me to read in public, and test the reception of work in progress. Such a gift!

Thank you Calgary!

 

Impact wins Trade Non-Fiction Book of the Year

1 Reply

We are thrilled that Impact: Women Writing After Concussion has won the BPAA’s Trade Non-Fiction Book of the Year! It was a highly competitive category with four other exceptional books shortlisted. Any one of us could have won and it’s truly an honour to be in such good company. Here is a look at the shortlist.

Thank you to the BPAA and to the jury. We also thank all of our contributors who bared their souls in Impact. I am grateful, as always, to my friend and colleague and co-editor, Elaine Morin. Our thanks also go to the University of Alberta Press who believed in this book from the moment the proposal first crossed their path.

Finally I thank our many readers who have taken the time to contact us and tell us what Impact means to them. There is nothing better than getting these notes. As more people face neurological problems as a result of Covid, I fear that Impact will become even more relevant. I can’t say all brain fog is the same, but there are similarities and I think we can help each other.

What I have learned through this experience is no matter what is going on for you, you are not alone. There is always a community that can help you. I really believe that.

Upcoming Event in Victoria about Impact: Women Writing After Concussion

Leave a Reply
Cover of Impact: Women Writing After Concussion

Save the date! September 13 at 7pm, Tracy Wai de Boer and I will be at Books and Shenanigans 347 Cook Street, Victoria BC in conversation with Susan Olding about Impact: Women Writing After Concussion.

Tracy and I will both be reading from our work in the anthology and we are looking forward to a great conversation with both Susan Olding and the audience! Susan is a wonderful memoirist and non-fiction writer—a perfect person to talk about this anthology.

Coincidentally, Susan Olding’s most recent book, Big Reader, is short-listed along with Impact for the Book Publishers Association of Alberta’s Trade Non Fiction Book of the Year.

The awards will be given out September 16 in Calgary, just a few days after our event.

Please join us. Many thanks to Books and Shenanigans for hosting.

Abortion: Everything Old Is New Again

1 Reply

As Roe v Wade is overturned in the US, it’s hard not to ponder what this means for reproductive rights in Canada, and of course, for our fellow humans south of the border.

Cover of The Abortion Monologues, three women and a child standing together
The Abortion Monologues

I have a substantive body of work about abortion and frankly, I always hope I will never have to return to it. I want our rights to bodily autonomy to be secure. They never are. Nothing is. There’s always some patriarch, some autocrat, some fascist, ready to upend democracy and any social progress we have made to assert their will. The will to power. So here we go again.

My play, The Abortion Monologues, is out there and I offer it free of royalty payments to reproductive rights organizations and equity seeking groups who want to produce it. Get in touch. (Seriously, get in touch. We’ll still need to do a contract.) My old blog associated with the play is archival now. But it’s still there, and aside from some language that I would now make more trans inclusive, it’s still pretty spot on. You’ll find a lot of info there.

We’re going to have to step up our work again. That is, I am going to have to step up my work again. I hope you will join me. Without doubt, my next offering to the world, Patterson House, is pro-choice. It’s clear what happens to women who don’t control their bodies or their choices.

There are those in Canada who would send us backwards. We are a long way from Pierre Trudeau saying, ”The state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation.” I’m not even sure his son Justin would make such a bold statement. And that new Pierre is a threat to all of us.

Feminism is a theory. Feminism is an ideal. But feminism is also an action. It’s time to take action. As my friend Marnie reminds me, we can’t just hope for the best. Quoting David Orr, she says, ”Hope is a verb with its shirtsleeves rolled up.” So take action. Roll your sleeves up. We need you.