One evening last week I attended a poetry reading. Four local poets read, but it was Joanne Epp’s evening in particular, as she launched her chapbook, “Crossings,” a lovely collection of 17 poems in two sets: reflections on a train trip and on places in Saskatchewan.
We stay close to the ground
so the wind will not blow us away. (from “Wild Strawberries”) Continue reading
Yesterday I completed what I promised to do when I applied for and got a Manitoba Arts Council grant last fall – and only one day beyond the five months (December through April) I’d projected! What I promised was a “near final draft” of [tentative name], a novel in which [one sentence description]. It exists now, a manuscript of some 114,000 words, and needs a rest. As do I, to take some distance so I can see what “final” may involve, and to gather energy for the steps beyond that, which include others deciding what I’ve got and if it’s any good. In the meanwhile, I’m deeply grateful to MAC for the financial support and affirmation, and for the powerful motivation that external expectation provides! Continue reading
When Gregory Orr was twelve years old, he killed his younger brother Peter in a hunting accident. He screamed, then he cried, but he got very little help with his grief and guilt, not then, not later. His identity and his brother’s seemed eventually to merge “into a single tangle,” the two of them “inextricable” in his thoughts.
Orr tells this story in The Blessing: A Memoir, which I mentioned in my previous post. (He was speaker at the Mennonite Writer/s VI conference in Harrisonburg, Virginia.) The difficulties and shame – the mark of Cain, as he saw it – that seized his life because of this event were compounded by his mother’s unexpected death when he was fourteen and his father, who was charming but unreliable and addicted to amphetamines.
Orr sought various ways through his despair, including involvement in the civil rights movement, with its potential martyrdom. This brought him no relief but nearly to the end of himself instead, and barely holding on. Continue reading
Borrowing Bones 