High Time

Posted on September 5, 2017 by doradueck

High time for me to show up at my blog.

High time? It means “the time that something is due (bordering on overdue)” and alludes, I learn online, to the warmest part of the day, when the sun is highest in the sky. Which, gauging by my watch, is more or less this moment of writing, though the air is filled with smoke from British Columbia’s numerous wildfires and the sun is hidden and the light has an eerie cast.

In the steady turning of time from low to high and round again, H. and I have reached and passed a year here in Tsawwassen, and are still pleased to be here. We’ve also just reached and passed another year in our marriage, to 43, and are grateful for that. Continue reading →

Mom, 95 today

Posted on March 25, 2017 by doradueck

Reposted from Facebook, for the record.

This woman, my mother, is 95 today. Recently I came across something I’d forgotten, a line in a journal when I was 18 and she 46: “Mom and I went out into the bushes by the ball park to look for lady slippers…” It took me back to the person she was long before her current immobility and cognitive decline, never bound to domestic duty but curious, “let’s go see”, still linked by this delight in nature to her childhood spent on a Manitoba farm with its similar excursions into the woods… So grateful for her!

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Words will be wanted

Posted on March 13, 2017 by doradueck

I was so ready for this. For this weekend. A festival of women writers called “Growing Room,” put on by the ROOM journal collective.

I’ve been happy in our move, I can certainly count the ways I like Tsawwassen, but I was unusually excited about the opportunity to be in the middle of writers again. Never mind that I wouldn’t know anyone. Or would have to plan and plot my getting there on a map. I was reading at the launch of ROOM’s latest issue (below) on Saturday evening, since it contains a creative non-fiction piece of mine (“Notes Toward an Autobiography”). Why not spend the day at panels and workshops? Why not spend the next day too? Just to hear the familiar vocabulary of writers’ talk. Just to hear them read, even complain, about their work.

Why not indeed? And a rich two days they were. A highlight: a panel on writing about trauma with Evelyn Lau, Christine Lowther, and Sonnet L’Abbe. Another: a panel on “rewriting the stories we tell about our bodies” with Lorna Crozier, Francine Cunningham, Nilofar Shidmehr, and Juliane Okot Bitek. Continue reading →