Thursday,
April 23, 2020
Edmonton,
Alberta
8:55
am I come in from drinking a cup of
coffee in our building’s back parking lot and look at a clock (the yellow
kitchen clock). It’s good to sit outside listening to the city, smelling it. I
don’t know why I stopped doing it. Jeanette Winterson writes about the vitality
of liminal space, about preferring to leave her doors open and to sit in the
doorways, half in and half out. And whenever Dylan and I go for a walk in a
rich neighbourhood, the houses I point out are the ones with big porches,
rooftop balconies, best of all the outdoor walkways between the individual
buildings that compose very modern houses. The most I can do is to leave the
windows in our apartment wide open all summer, and take my morning coffee in a
communal space designed for vehicles. But it is better than the routine I’ve
had all winter, of waking up and sitting down at my computer.
9:10
am Sitting down at my computer. Writing
this diary. Checking my email. Train has sent me the bios of the artists
included in the upcoming issue I’ve had three poems accepted to. I’m in
wonderful company. One of my undergrad English professors has sent me an email
about corpse pose and her thoughts on isolation. Dylan and Ranger
come in from the morning walk. I figure I should drink some water and eat
something.
9:50
am Make the bed, make oatmeal, think
about whether to have a shower and what to do with my hair, talk to Dylan, take
photos of my desk, eat oatmeal, type this, check my phone.
Joanna
is posting on Instagram about the new Aunt Rachel poem she’s just received. I
suppose I need to back up to explain this. At the end of November, I released a
chapbook called Aunt Rachel Says 13 Poems, a collection
of monologues spoken by a fictional character and written over the course of
about a year and a half. I thought I was done with them. Then, three weeks into
the quarantine, I wrote a new Aunt Rachel poem and decided to send it out as a
kind of apocrypha to the chapbook. People seem excited about the prospect of
real mail.
Dylan
asks me if “think piece” was a term before the internet. I don’t know. I do
know that I don’t like to do one thing at a time. As usual, I find myself with
nine or ten projects I could choose to work on (in addition to the laundry that
will send me to my in-laws’ house as soon as I can get my shit together). A
novel about 7,000 words away from a complete first draft. A short story
collection I’m revising for the third time. A new story called “The Murder
House” I’d like to polish before sending out. A Super 8 documentary about
Dylan’s 29th year, which just needs a few tweaks to the sound design. A
documentary about Open Apartment (a salon I’ve been hosting for about five
years), which we shot last summer and which I haven’t touched since. A grant
application, due Monday, for a play I want to write with my friend Bevin. Notes
to make on Dylan’s new script. An article on investing fees for the bank I
contract for. A story about a failed threeway I wrote in the fall that probably
needs a second, complementary narrative thread to make it work. But today I am
determined to finish a treatment to send to the feminist pornographer Erika
Lust, who runs a program through which female directors can apply to have their
own films produced.
10:20
am I read “What Makes Life Worth Living and Nature’s Beauty as a
Lifeline to Regaining Sanity” on Maria Popova’s
brilliant blog (post-blog?) Brain Pickings. Dylan asks me what my
favourite Wislawa Szymborska poem is, and I think about it and then read him
“The Century’s Decline.”
The Century’s Decline
Our twentieth century was going to improve
on the others.
It will never prove it now,
now that its years are numbered,
its gait is shaky,
its breath is short.
Too many things have happened
that weren’t supposed to happen,
and what was supposed to come about
has not.
Happiness and spring, among other things,
were supposed to be getting closer.
Fear was expected to leave the mountains
and the valleys.
Truth was supposed to hit home
before a lie.
A couple of problems weren’t going
to come up anymore:
humger, for example,
and war, and so forth.
There was going to be respect
for helpless people’s helplessness,
trust, that kind of stuff.
Anyone who planned to enjoy the world
is now faced
with a hopeless task.
Stupidity isn’t funny.
Wisdom isn’t gay.
Hope
isn’t that young girl anymore,
et cetera, alas.
God was finally going to believe
in a man both good and strong,
but good and strong
are still two different men.
“How should we live?” someone
asked me in a letter.
I had meant to ask him
the same question.
Again, and as ever,
as may be seen above,
the most pressing questions
are naïve ones.
- Translated by Clare
Cavanaugh
and Stanislaw Baranczak, from View With A Grain of Sand, Harcourt, 1995
11:05
am Getting my shit together. Brushing my
teeth, braiding my hair, putting on makeup, packing up the laundry in an old
sheet, loading the laundry and the compost into the car, listening to Waxahatchee’s new record while driving
ten blocks to the house Dylan grew up in, where I feel more welcome than just
about anywhere. Even during quarantine, Gwen sanitizes the laundry room so her
kids and their partners can avoid apartment laundry rooms and public
laundromats, and Trevor makes Costco runs on behalf of the whole extended
family. Last week he brought me a massive bucket of sour soothers.
11:20
am I start the laundry. Gwen has left me
a cup of magic elixir tea and a tiny orange on the dining table where I usually
set up.
12:17
pm I spend an unholy amount of time
uninstalling Adobe programs from my laptop, which has been limping along with a
full memory for months now. Text with Dylan and Joanna and Laura while waiting
for the uninstallers to do their thing. Also clean up my desktop. Check on the
laundry. Eat the orange, and a granola bar I brought with me. Rinse out a muddy
towel we’ve been using to wipe Ranger’s paws all winter. Change the laundry
over. Trevor comes downstairs for lunch and we talk about the seats for the
plane he’s almost finished building, which I sewed covers for last week.
They’re in place, they fit, and apparently they’re extremely comfortable.
1:32
pm Finish draft of treatment. Does it
make sense? Is it hot? I don’t know. I’ve worked from a scribbled outline made
weeks ago, but it hasn’t taken as long as I expected today. I still have notes
to make on visual style and references, potential performers, sound design,
etc., and there’s still a load of laundry that hasn’t gone into the dryer. I’m
super hungry, and also a bit cold.
1:50
pm So I take my journal and an apple
outside. It occurs to me that it is possible to sit on a threshold here, half
in and half out, so I do that, my legs on the deck, my shoulders in the
livingroom. I come in and check on the laundry. Gwen comes down and pours me
more tea and tells me what is in this week’s Costco haul. She’e especially
delighted about the large pineapple. We commiserate about the apparent citywide
lack of full-fat yogurt; she can’t find it anywhere.
3:20
pm Finish notes on treatment and send to
Dylan with a caveat: “I think it could still use some work (I feel like it
comes off as simultaneously pretentious and amateurish in parts), but I thought
I would see what you think!” Seconds later, I text Dylan to ask if he’s had any
dinner inspirations. I put the last load of laundry in the dryer and hang up
the delicates.
3:35
pm This Lisel Mueller poem appears on
Twitter and it says what I was trying to say, writing about sitting outside
this morning:
There Are Mornings
Even now, when the plot
calls for me to turn to stone,
the sun intervenes. Some mornings
in summer I step outside
and the sky opens
and pours itself into me
as if I were a saint
about to die. But the plot
calls for me to live,
be ordinary, say nothing
to anyone. Inside the house
the mirrors burn when I pass.
- from Second Language, LSU Press,
1986
3:45
pm I edit this diary.
3:52
pm So hungry. Dylan agrees we should
make pizza tonight.
4:09
pm Gwen brings me some trail mix and we
talk about some policy documents she’s just written for her World of Warcraft
guild. I copy the Lisel Mueller poem into my journal.
4:35
pm Pack up the clean laundry and all my
work things, empty the compost into Gwen and Trevor’s garage set-up, put the
laundry and our allotment of Costco groceries into the car, drive home
listening to Waxahatchee again. It’s so surprising and gratifying to hear Katie
Crutchfield coming into her Southern sound without fear.
4:55
pm Home. The new
Wares record is waiting in a cardboard sleeve on my desk. I
cut it open. Dylan puts it on. I rinse out the compost bucket. He puts the
groceries away. Time to start the pizza dough in the big, blue, beautiful
enamel bowl.
5:20
pm Ranger and I have a nap on the couch
while the Wares record plays twice. It’s good. Semi-conscious, my dog and I are
proud of our city, glad to live here, for the moment, in spite of everything.
6:50
pm We assemble a kitchen-sink pizza (a
tomato-anchovy sauce from another day’s pot roast, potatoes, broccoli,
mozzarella). It goes in the oven. I do the dishes, drink a lot of water, update
this diary. Dylan reads Lawrence’s The Rainbow.
7:00
pm Dinner. Dylan and I get into a long
discussion about my treatment.
8:32
pm Exhausted. I get into the bathtub
with Lucy Maud Montgomery’s journals, which are schoolgirlish and tedious at
this point (1894) and are making me pine for Plath’s relentless analysis and
speculation and self-examination.
9:45
pm Out of the bath, I feed Ranger, take
some vitamins, brush my teeth, and take Ranger out for a last walk around the
block.
11:40
pm I spend over an hour shifting between
Instagram and Duolingo, caught in a low-key war between myself and another
German language learner who’s online, both of us trying to knock each other out
of the #5 spot for the week. I impulse-order a green boiler suit. I text Dylan, who’s at
the studio. And then it’s back to the land of no clocks.
Lizzie
Derksen is a writer and filmmaker from Treaty 6 Territory. A recipient of the
2018 Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Emerging Artists (Alberta), she has been
described as combining “curiosity, intellectual
boldness, independence of mind, emotional sensitivity, and a sure sense for the
rhythms of words and sentences with an aversion to sentimentality and
fashionable notions.”
Esther
Spellicy in the Main Game, a collection of three short stories, was
published in 2019 by With/out Pretend. Other recent work includes Aunt Rachel Says 13 Poems, a self-published
chapbook, and words in Poetry is Dead, Funicular
Magazine, The Vault Zine, and on CBC Television.
Lizzie’s practice encompasses poetry, short fiction,
creative non-fiction, journalism, voiceover narration, dramatic and
impressionistic short film, pornography, and documentary. She is writing her
first novel.
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