I often quip that the reason short stories are so well
received in Canada is because we are used to a short growing season. Although
with a large garden at my home in Ottawa and gardens spread over three acres in
Osceola (about 115km northwest of Ottawa) and volunteering to work in the peony
gardens at the Central Experimental Farm on Thursday mornings, I have come to
realize that the gardening season is longer than most people realize.
All this digging in the earth and constant weeding,
weeding, weeding, simply interferes with allocation of writing time. At least,
my creative writing, which is mostly poetry and occasionally short stories. I
still manage to crank out articles and press releases for various newsletters
and societies for which I volunteer any time of the year. I can do this quickly
and with little thought as I worked in communications for a good deal of my
career and learned to hone this skill. All this is to say that my season of
scripting, weather dependent, extends from late October to late April. A
typical day is getting up between 7 and 8, having a large cup of strong tea and
a light breakfast and then fire up the computer and hitting the keyboard.
When I retired, I thought: Great I will have all the free time to write. When working, I had
only the evenings and weekends, so I would schedule that time as I could for
writing. I learned to shut out the noise and distractions of family home life. But
being freshly retired, it was so easy to procrastinate: Oh I will work on this tomorrow. (“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow”, as Macbeth utters in his
soliloquy.) It took me about a year finally to say to myself: Buckle down and get to work. That means
not going onto e-mail or other social media distractions, not answering the
phone and staying focused on the task at hand.
Although sometimes I start off in the morning with writer’s
block or trepidation on whether I will write anything, once I start working on
a poem, which often starts with a line that springs to mind, the creative side
of my brain comes into force and lines take shape as an initial piece. Once I
have a draft, I look at what it is attempting to say, what its central theme is.
I sit at my computer and let my imagination go. I play around with words and phrases
that relate back to that strand. When I wrote by hand, a thesaurus was always
close to hand. Now I simply use that mechanism on the computer, along with the
Encarta Dictionary. I freefall among the information there. Sometimes a word I
am looking up will trigger in me other words, different images. I also Goggle
and let my imagination roam randomly. This is the part of writing that I love.
It is a puzzle I am slowly piecing together, shaping, polishing and bringing to
the surface.
I work solidly until 11:35 – at least until the snow flies,
which demands 11:15. I leave for a noon-hour fitness class. Riding my bike or
walking the 2km provides me with time to mull over what I have worked on that
morning. Once in fitness class, I cannot workout and explore things creatively.
But when I am heading homeward around 1:15, back on the bike or walking, I
immediately slip into that meditative, inventive state.
I have a light lunch and usually a 20-minute nap. One thing
about creeping decrepitude, i.e. aging, is that energy levels suddenly flag
through the day. But once revived I go back to writing until early evening.
Night time creative writing rarely happens as I find I am mentally exhausted. I
need a break from the wave lines humming in my brain. However, as a news junkie,
I don’t mind. I am addicted to the evening news and The National to keep up on
the absurdity of our modern political world.
I do frequently use a moving office. This is when I take
the Greyhound bus or Via Rail train to Montreal to visit my son and his family.
Lady Gregory, the Anglo-Irish poet, playwright and activist, once wrote that
she found the forward motion and rhythm of the train stimulated her creative
process. Bringing my iPad or laptop with me on the transport gives me an excellent
tool for writing. I have two and a-half hours of solitude and arrive at the
Central Station in Montreal with one, sometimes two drafts of poetry. The
return trip allows me to work on the draft(s) as I wend my way back home. Or
even, the beginning of another poem. I will fashion these in the days to come.
I do have an office I use at home and when I am in it, the
world is shut out. Mind you, my office is not pristine and uncluttered. Being a
Virgo, I do favour order. However, my office is a refuge and even though every
day I swear to myself that I will clean up or straighten up the paper that
accumulates, I never seem to get around to it, except occasionally when I can
no longer stand it. My office, like my poetry, is a work in progress. And
anyway, the magical writing of poetry is much more fun than shuffling, filing
or shredding paper.
Being retired, people often ask me why I do not go south as
a break from winter. For me, this is the season of creativity. There is a
certain security in being homebound, among familiar things. Yes, Ottawa winters
can be cold, snowy and way too long, but they also offer the option to hunker
down indoors and fuel the creative fires. If I were in a warmer climate, I
would want to be out and about exploring that country. I simply prefer to be
home and free to dig around in the ingenious allotment of words.
Blaine Marchand's award writing has
appeared in magazines across Canada, the US and Pakistan. He has been active in
the Ottawa poetry scene since the 1970s. His chapbook, My Head, Filled With Pakistan, was published in November 2016. He
is currently working on his seventh full-length collection, Where You Dwell, and a collection of
short stories, Nomad. Poems have
recently appeared in the League of Canadian Poets’ Heartwood anthology, the forthcoming Mansfield Press’ Another Dysfunctional Cancer Poem Anthology
and Lummox Press’s Tamaracks: Canadian
poetry for the 21st century.
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