My parents, Sylvia Mary Leadbeater, who was born in a thatched cottage in an English village, and Jacob Gordin Kaplan, born and raised in New York, met on November 23, 1944, in Oxford, England. They were both twenty-one. Mum, beautiful and six feet tall, was working at nearby Bletchley Park helping to crack German submarine codes; my handsome father was a G.I. being trained in Oxford before shipping off to a MASH unit on the continent.

They met at a Chopin concert and, although their backgrounds were highly dissimilar, they discovered their mutual love of classical music; Sylvia played the piano, and Gordin the violin. They spent their first date in Oxford listening to classical records, where they heard a piece beloved by them both: Mozart’s G Minor String Quintet. The following week they met again for two romantic days and nights in London, fell in love, and wrote to each other through the war and at various times after. My mother kept almost all their letters and Dad some — a huge packet. They were both vivid writers.

I’m currently sifting through crumbling sheets of paper, trying to figure out, in the years just after the war, where they were, geographically — in Germany, France, London, New York — and emotionally. There’s a lot of push and pull, my mother writing flirtatiously about all the men interested in her, Dad hinting at his own adventures with the opposite sex. Yet a powerful warmth and fondness flows between them.

Part of what makes this work hit close to my heart is that at various times, it’s clear I came close to not being born. As Sylvia and Gordin inch toward each other and then retreat again, I’m aware that at any moment, something could have gone wrong; they could have fallen in love with someone else or simply lost touch with each other, and I’d be toast.

But as you see, I am here to tell the tale.

One such dangerous juncture, I found out, came in 1946. They corresponded all through 1945, but by 1946 they’d gone their separate ways. Dad spent half the year studying at the Sorbonne on the G.I. Bill and having a grand time. My mother told me, “He stopped writing to me, the rat. He was getting screwed in Paris.” She meant it literally, not figuratively. What pleasure it must have been, to be a lusty young G.I. in France, a nation profoundly grateful to the Yanks for its liberation. He obviously took full advantage.

In the fall, he sailed back to New York, to live with his parents on W. 79 and start a master’s and then a Ph.D. at Columbia. She meanwhile had left England and was working with U.N.R.R.A., the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, resettling refugees in northern Germany. They lost contact for the whole of 1946; I cannot find a single letter. My life hangs in the balance.

Then I pulled something heartening out of the bag. Blessedly, in Manhattan in December 1946, my Jewish father bought a Christmas card. The sentimental black and white image is titled “The Village Church,” an American church with a high pointed steeple, a couple in a horse-drawn sleigh riding up to it through the snowy woods. This is obviously a tribute to Sylvia’s childhood in a village where her father was the choirmaster of the local church — a church dating from the thirteenth century with a square Norman belltower, but never mind.

Inside, a sweet, somewhat tentative note: “Every time I hear the Mozart G minor Quintet I wonder what became of Sylvia - did she marry her RAF man, what is she doing now, are her sister and brother-in-law coming to the States?

Do you suppose there might be any way of finding out?“

Though his letters in 1945 were far less formal, he signed the card “Gordin Kaplan,“ as if she might have forgotten who he was. After that thoughtful note, Dad addressed the envelope to “Miss Sylvia Leadbeater, 36 Gledstanes Rd., London W. 14.” But my grandparents’ flat was not at 36 Gledstanes Road, but 26.

Someone scrawled at the bottom of the envelope in brown ink, “Not known at 36.” And that might have been that. Someone, however — the post office? No, it looks like my grandfather’s writing, so perhaps the letter was delivered down the street to him — wrote, “200, U.N.R.R.A H.Q., B.A.O.R.” Which Google tells me stands for “British Army of the Rhine,” England’s occupying forces in Germany.

Sylvia received the card on January 1, 1947, replied with a long letter on January 2, and their epistolary relationship heated up again. In the summer of 1947, he came to do research in France; they reunited for a few romantic days and nights in Paris and fell back in love. Hooray!

But as I make my way through their mail, I note that although through 1947 and 1948, they write with great affection and even longing to each other, at the same time, he mentions flings in New York, and she a man called Jock in Germany, who’s not just a beau but a fiancé. Jock is not “the RAF man” to whom she’d been engaged through the war and whom she’d dumped, but, I learn, a Scottish Major working with her at UNRRA. Happily, she got rid of Jock too, and I smile to read her angling, in letter after letter, to come to the States. She wants to visit her sister and brother-in-law, who had indeed immigrated and were living in New Jersey. But most of all, she wants to see if things will work out with her Yank.

The flurry of letters negotiating the visit and making plans result at last in her sailing from Southampton on the Queen Mary in December 1948; I also inherited her battered brown suitcase with a big L and CABIN CLASS stickers on the side. Not long after her arrival, they moved in together; she got a job at the British consulate at Rockefeller Centre while he finished his Ph.D. In August of 1949, they went travelling in my grandfather’s borrowed car, and friends they were visiting in Chicago teased that they should get married.

“How ‘bout it, Sylv?” said Gordin, in what my mother always bemoaned was a flippant proposal. Nonetheless, they married on August 31 in the Chicago registry office, Sylvia wearing a shiny mauve dress she’d sewn herself. Eleven months later, their adorable firstborn daughter made her appearance, and that fall, thank God, the three of us moved to Canada for good.

Sylvia and Gordin separated in 1956 after my mother fell madly in love with someone else — oh, the hundreds of agonized letters from that misadventure! — and reunited in 1957. Later she had another passionate affair with much more mail, also stuffed into the red bag, whereas Dad’s affairs were discreet and letter-less. Yet despite all, they remained devoted to each other, and their last years were blissful. After 39 years of marriage, my father died of cancer in their marital bed, held in my mother’s arms.

Mozart’s G Minor String Quintet remained their musical touchstone. Einstein, who adored Mozart, once said, “Mozart’s music is so pure and beautiful that I see it as a reflection of the inner beauty of the universe.” My parents agreed, and so do I. We played the sublime, melancholy Quintet at my father’s celebration of life in 1988, and, twenty-four years later, at my mother’s.

What a saga. What a rare privilege to unfold dusty pieces of paper and meet my youthful parents for the first time; to follow at least part of their journey and trace my own role in their rich, absurdly complicated lives. What I’ve been reading has helped me understand a great deal about the events and personalities that shaped my childhood.

“Do you think there might be any way of finding out?” he wrote. For me, now, there is — in this unexpected confrontation with the past, envelope by envelope, word by word by word.

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When Mum died, I inherited a big red bag stuffed with letters, and finally I decided to confront whatever was in there. As I opened one faded envelope after another, I was thrilled to find correspondence between Gordin, an American G.I., and the British code-cracker Sylvia, both twenty-one, after they first met in 1944; in the post war period, 1945-48, as they navigated their long-distance relationship; in the mid-fifties when they separated for a few months, and more. There are also letters to them from their own parents and key others, including my mother’s lovers both before and after her marriage, and her few sporadic attempts at a diary.

I am going through these treasures one by one, reading and transcribing; I intend to make a book about my parents’ lives told almost entirely in their own voices, from old missives and other dispatches from that time.

That’s what we writers do. Either in fiction or in nonfiction, we poke about people’s inner lives and expose them. That’s why someone once said, “It’s a cursed family that has a writer in it.” A dear friend of mine objects to this work I’m doing. “If I found letters my parents had written, I’d destroy them. They’re private!” he cried.

Yes, they are private, or they were. But to me the inner lives of my mesmerizing, difficult parents are mysteries to be solved, and the letters provide valuable clues. They were not secretive, closed people; my mother, in particular, told me almost everything about her feelings, her sex life, her past. And she left all these letters with the rest of her things. She knew me, knew I’d find them, that I’d be interested. I am sure she wanted me to read them, because they show how ferociously she was loved by her lovers, and also, in his own way, by my father.

Though to tell you the truth, I’m pretty sure Dad would not want me to read some of what he wrote. One letter from him to Mum, in which he made a cruel comment about my six-year-old self, made me cry. But his comments also explained a great deal.

This process, of opening letters and the dusty boxes of other papers Mum left behind, is like being a detective. I’m trying to figure out who my parents were before and after they met, and of course after my own appearance in the drama of their thirty-nine-year marriage. I’m sure most people would like to understand their mother and father better, but not everyone has access to their young selves, their authentic voices on paper, year after year.

As an example of what can be uncovered, recently I found a small piece of paper that opened up a new avenue of thinking.

I’ve always asserted that my freewheeling anti-establishment socialist father never owned a suit — too bourgeois. He wore sports jackets but never a matching jacket and pants, at least, in my memory. But the other day I opened my mother’s book of poems by Rupert Brook and found, tucked inside, a piece of paper. Oh, the joy of random bits of paper; you never know what they’ll reveal.

This one was a bill, dated October 19, 1956, from “McCombie Bros. Ltd, HIGH CLASS TAILORS established 1890,” at 495 Oxford Street in London. It’s made out to Mr. J.G. Kaplan, it’s for a “Suit 3 Pce” with an extra pair of “Trousers,” and it cost the enormous sum of nearly 30 pounds, which was worth $82 CAD at that time. A huge amount for my father, whose annual pay as a university professor was around $3000. $82 was well over a week’s salary.

Why would a man who normally lived in corduroy pants and checked shirts order an expensive three-piece suit from a bespoke London tailor? It’s so uncharacteristic.

The date is the clue, says the detective. In July 1956, my parents, little brother, and I, aged five, moved from Halifax to London, England to begin my father’s sabbatical year; the plan was that he’d do research at a London lab, and my mother would reconnect with her parents. Dad rented a small house for us in Golder’s Green. In August, a scientist called Hugh, my father’s colleague and good friend back at Dalhousie University, appeared at our house and was welcomed by my jovial dad, who left the next day for a conference in Brussels. “Take care of my family for me, Hugh!” he said cheerily, as he left.

Unbeknownst to him, my mother and Hugh, who also was married with two children, had fallen madly, desperately in love in Halifax, and now Hugh swept the three of us away to a seaside resort. My father returned to a dark, empty house with a note on the mantelpiece.

It’s a complicated story, but in any case, my parents separated. In October, Mum and I were living with her parents in Baron’s Court; Hugh was living nearby, waiting for my tortured, indecisive mother to make up her mind, leave my father, and join him for good. Dad and my brother were still in the rented house. Hugh, although a biologist like Dad, was a wealthy WASP from an old Montreal family. He worshipped my mother and bought her expensive gifts: a Jaeger-LeCoultre watch, a gold cigarette lighter. I found a photo of him looking suave, wearing a dark jacket with gold buttons and a cravat.

My guess, looking at this bill, is that Dad, whose family were immigrant Jews from Eastern Europe, wanted to polish his image, to have something classy to wear, in order to compete with Hugh. If so, this bill gives me a new view of my handsome, loudly confident yet perhaps secretly insecure father, who was furious at my mother’s betrayal but also wanted his wife back. And she did come back. By mid-January 1957, Hugh was in Halifax and would soon pack up his family for a move clear across Canada, to Vancouver, and my family in London was tentatively reuniting.

Can I verify the hunch about what this bill represents? I cannot. But what other explanation can there be? Dad didn’t need a three-piece suit for his work in the classrooms and labs of Dalhousie, and certainly not in the ban-the-bomb movement where he spent a good deal of time. So that’s my story and I’m sticking with it.

There are other mysteries to be solved or guessed at, with juicy clues in the trove of letters. But you’ll have to read the book to find out what they are. There’s so much material, I haven’t even put together a rough draft yet. But I will.

My folks were both good writers, and in the end, theirs was a great love and adventure story. I think, I hope, this book of letters will be worth the time and effort. And if nothing else, it will answer a lot of questions for me.

Stay tuned.

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On my way back into Toronto from Pearson one Thursday late afternoon, I was appalled, once again, at the gridlock that is Toronto traffic. Paris is phenomenally forward-looking, with many separated bike lanes, superb and extensive public transit, more and more pedestrianized green space. Madrid has several enormous, beautiful parks full of leisure amenities for its citizens. Toronto has none of these things.

So at dawn the next day, Friday, as my jet-lagged brain absorbed its first coffee, I sat to write an op-ed essay expressing my dismay and anger at the mismanagement of my city by our dinosaur premier and his henchmen. I sent it to the Toronto Star, which has occasionally printed an op-ed of mine but far more frequently has ignored what I send them.

And yet, she persisted.

This time, an hour after sending, I received an email: they were buying it and would run it on Sunday. And incidentally, the editor was a former writing student of mine.

The piece generated 70 comments on the Star website, and more when I posted it on FB. Even if people disagreed, they were thinking about transit and green space and bike lanes in Toronto. I was hugely chuffed.

Today I wrote an impassioned letter to three Toronto members of parliament and the federal transportation minister about blocking jets at the island airport. And I will keep writing to them and to others. They say every protest letter a politician receives represents hundreds of silent people. They do pay attention.

Never downplay the possibility and importance of expressing yourself and getting the word out there. Your opinion matters.

Op-ed in the Star

Link to article here.

Letter to Dr. Danielle Martin, M.P.

Dr. Martin, welcome to Canadian politics. As the representative of the riding closest to Billy Bishop Airport, I hope you are a courageous politician as well as a savvy one.

Today P. Poilievre came out in favour of jets at Billy Bishop. If anything tells us it’s a hideous idea, it’s the support of both Premier Ford and PP.

Perhaps you’ve been ordered to keep quiet on this issue. Perhaps P.M. Carney is going to bend to the will of the wealthy business people of Toronto and the noisy premier of this province. Certainly he’s busy with other things. Perhaps he just doesn’t care.

We care.

This city has myriad problems and is already almost uninhabitable with gridlock, construction, a forest of high-rises blocking the lake. I had an op-ed in the Toronto Star last Sunday about our abysmal transit and lack of green space, as opposed to Paris, which is inspiringly forward-looking.

We have far too few places in this city where citizens can be in nature and tranquillity. Ford is doing his best to gut what’s already here, at Ontario Place and now elsewhere on the waterfront and the islands. Once we lose those spaces, we will never get them back.

I urge you, I beg you, to use your voice to support the citizens of Toronto and block this retrograde provincial government from further destruction of what little green space there is. Start with blocking noisy, polluting, invasive jets at our small island airport.

We are in desperate need of a federal champion. Please be that person.

Thank you.

best

Beth Kaplan

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In the writing workshop I run every July in my garden, the ground rules are: I give prompts, and participants write for the allotted time without stopping. Writers are often astonished by what emerges. Sometimes it can be a truth they don’t even want to admit, but there it is, pushed out because of the lack of the usual filters, the speed of the pen scrabbling across the page.

When there’s time, I do the exercise with them, and I too am amazed at what turns up, things I would not normally take the time or have the courage to acknowledge. Here are a few examples of what surprised me, written without stopping, allowing whatever wanted to pour out to do so.

The prompt: At night, I ...

Two minutes.

“At night, I think and make lists. This is what is needed. Oh my god, how could you forget that? The pad of paper, scribbles – call A, I write. Email P. Apples, I write. Window in basement. Find missing earring – under the desk?

And lists of worries. What about Anna, will she ever go back to school? Will Sam ever even start higher education? No, they’re fine. Relax. Breathe. Let the shoulders and the jaw go. Breathe. Put the pen down. Close your eyes. Breathe. Everything is fine.

The kitchen light is burned out. Call K.”

Prompt: a past love

Eight minutes

“He is outside when I wake up. I don’t know where he is, just that he’s not inside the very small house, his house. I’m alone, in his bed.

I am 24. His name is Brian. He has long sandy hair, a beard and moustache, rides a motorcycle. I am an actress, and he is the soundman in one of the theatres where my troupe played. When we all went out to the bar after the show, he singled me out, wanting to talk. He was fun and interesting. He was one of the nicest men I’d ever met.

He comes in, stamping his feet to get the mud off. His absurd funky dear little house is in the middle of a lettuce field. He has gone out to pick blackberries, which he stirs up into a sauce. Then he makes pancakes and pours the blackberry sauce over them, with lots of butter, and brings them, with a mug of coffee, to me in bed.

I’m touched. How incredibly sweet. At the same time, I’m worried about all that butter. I struggle with my weight.

One weekend, he takes me camping on his motorcycle; we lie under the night sky and he names the constellations. He waits for me in the evenings when the show comes down. I am loved and cared for.

Soon I can’t stand him. I’m desperately in love with a fellow actor, stunningly handsome and very cruel. He won’t come near me, but he sleeps with my housemate who tells me all about their trysts. I adore him abjectly, like a beaten dog. We work together daily, and now he comes to the apartment to see her, so I am in constant pain, sharp, agonising.

Brian is too nice, much, much too nice. He is an idiot. I break up with him.

“It’s just not working for me, Brian,” I say.

Prompt: 5 things you learned, and 5 things you did not learn, from your mother. Take one of those and develop it further.

Ten minutes.

“5 things I learned from my mother:

1. that you can get very far by being beautiful, charming, lively and mesmerising to men

2. that the cello is a difficult instrument to learn as an adult

3. that you should stay in school and not leave to join the war, even if the war is where the men are

4. that women are your enemies, out to steal your man

5. that women who work outside the house neglect their husbands and children

5 things I did not learn from my mother:

1. that women are the greatest friends in the world and worth hanging onto

2. that life and relationships can be simple and joyful, easy and honest

3. that reading is vital

4. that flirting with every man you encounter is not a good way to fix a troubled marriage

5. that people in a lower socio-economic bracket can be smart, interesting and valuable

My parents were snobs. Each in a very different way, from extremely different backgrounds, but both snobs, especially Mum. My 85-year-old mother and I go to a shabby mall near her suburban apartment. She looks at the milling crowd. “It’s like a scene from … what’s the name of that director? Italian?”

“Fellini,” I reply. I know the routine.

“Yes. It’s a scene from a Fellini movie,” she says, gesturing to the fat man in the backwards Yankees baseball cap, the skinny East Indian woman dragging two crying children, the black kid slouching along in drooping over-sized jeans. There’s nothing abnormal about this scene, but to her it’s grotesque. Why? Because these people are poor, and not British. Because it’s not 60 or 70 years ago. Back then, in England where she grew up, people walked smartly along. They wore nice tweed clothes that fitted, and they spoke properly. At least, in her sweet memory, they do, and everything here is an unfortunate reminder of where she is not.

During my childhood when we lived in Halifax, I realised much later, we had very little connection with our fellow Haligonians. We mingled with a select few, mostly my father’s colleagues at the university and in the peace movement. My mother had almost no friends of her own, but that was not so much because she felt superior to them all, though she did, than that she could not make friends with any woman who was remotely attractive or interesting. Her only two friends were both English, of course – her doctor’s receptionist, big-hearted and very round, and a small, skinny lady who played the recorder with Mum and was possibly a lesbian. Both women my father would assuredly not try to seduce.

What gave her a sense of superiority? She grew up in a village, her family as poor as only the British lower middle class can be — yet, because her parents were teachers, her father the local school’s headmaster, they were a cut above their neighbours. They had no peers in the village, the farming and factory villagers below them, the titled people in the manor, the earl and his lady, far above. Mum has retained that sense of isolated specialness ever since.

During my marriage, Mum and Dad came to visit the home of my in-laws in a small town in central B.C. My father-in-law, one of the kindest, most generous men on earth, was a mechanic; his wise and powerful wife worked at Bell Telephone. They lived in a split-level suburban bungalow, with orange shag rug, distressed La-Z-Boy chair, and a Woolworth’s mountain scene illuminated by a special light. My parents entered like anthropologists visiting a newly discovered tribe. They didn’t say anything condescending, they were perfectly polite and friendly, but I knew what they were thinking. I was ashamed they’d probably never been in a house like this; that they could not help being patronising.

I was ashamed to realise that when I first entered that house, although I would do anything to deny it, I had probably felt exactly the same way.”

________

When I began writing, I’d not thought about Brian for decades, yet there he was. After reading what I wrote, I wanted to find him and apologize. I wanted to confront my parents, both dead, about their snobbism and question my own. I wanted to stop myself from ceaseless fretting.

What else is lying beneath the surface, ready to burst out when you begin to write?

If you’re stuck, pick a prompt, set a timer, and start. Do not hesitate. Put the pen to the paper — always do this on paper, not on a computer — and let whatever emerges emerge. Free the mind, the gut, the hand.

Don’t stop it, don’t edit it, just write. Let it out. And marvel.

A few prompts:

- List your favourite words. Write about one of them.

- How did you survive your crazy family?

- List the things you consider taboo. Which can you write about? Start.

- Something you’ve lost.

- The turning point

- a ghost

- an enemy

- a disguise

- the best teacher, the worst teacher

One two three go!

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And no one has. I’ve been an inveterate letter writer, and more lately emailer, texter, and social media poster, ever since. But I’ve also done another kind of letter writing, not just to friends and family, but to strangers. I write critical letters to let people know what I think they’ve done wrong; I write letters of concern; and, most importantly, I write letters of praise.

PRAISE

“March 11, 2021

Dear nurses, especially Eva, Gowri, and the night nurse on March 9-10:

I was brought to your floor, Room 22, at 1 a.m. on Tuesday March 9. I’d been diagnosed with a ruptured appendix.

Every single nurse I saw was kind and helpful. I was in pain and terrified; no one had told me what the plan was for my body. You set up the drip and kept me alive. Every time I asked to see one of you, though I’m sure you were extremely busy, you came to answer questions or bring me something. I was very grateful for your kindness, patience, and expertise.

St. Mike’s fixed me in two days. Thanks to your care, the antibiotics did enough that they were able to release me on Wednesday afternoon with a prescription for more antibiotics and painkillers. It was like a miracle.

Because of Covid, the world talks all the time now about heroic frontline workers. I’ve now met some of you. I watched skilled professionals working incredibly hard under difficult conditions, yet still able to be kind, to listen to and comfort people who are frightened and sick and demanding.

I apologize if in any way I made your job harder. I didn’t mean to seem ungrateful. Because let me tell you, I could not be more grateful now.”

CRITIQUE

There are so many, it was hard to pick, so here’s a short one:

“To the City of Toronto Noise Enforcement Unit:

I live next to a small condo complex. Twice a month, once a week in the fall, their landscaping company arrives with not one but two of the biggest gas leaf blowers in the business, to clear a very small condo courtyard and driveway. The noise is beyond deafening. Neighbours many houses away have complained they can hear the blast. The detritus is blown into my yard, and who knows what the fumes are doing?

There is no need for machines so hideously invasive and noisy in the downtown core. Or anywhere, for that matter, but particularly here, where properties are small. The huge machines are simply to make sure the workers get it done fast and move on, for the convenience and profit of the landscaping company and to the utter misery of anyone within earshot and breathing space.

This is noise pollution of the highest order. Like many other jurisdictions around the world, it’s time Toronto took the mental and physical health of its citizens seriously and ban these unnecessarily loud pollution machines.”

This was written in 2023; the situation has not changed. Well, I tried. Always worth a try. We’ll get there.

AND FINALLY, A STORY ABOUT A LETTER OF CONCERN.

For ten years we lived under the same roof. But not in the same house, and not in the same world.

They lived on the other side of the wall dividing our semi-detached Victorian brick homes. Before them, the house attached to our north side was owned by an absentee landlord. A diversity of neighbours rented there, most of them terrible. The worst were three gay men who hosted noisy parties two or three times a week. I would rise wearily at 3 a.m., get dressed, and march in through their open front door to beg them to turn down the music. “Come join us, darling!” they’d cry, dancing.

So when the landlord finally sold the house to a pregnant young couple, it was a great relief. The new neighbours kept to themselves, civil but distant. They brought home a baby daughter, then two years later a son. They had loud voices and so did their friends, especially when they drank, which was often. But they were solid parents; at least she was. I could hear her clearly, constantly, through our mutual kitchen wall and over our mutual backyard fence.

I could also hear that he was growing increasingly angry and insecure, always questioning her decisions and putting her down. He had a nasty temper and bellowed at his kids in a brutally loud voice. Still, I was shocked when it started, the late-night screaming. They began to fight regularly, after drinking; it was impossible not to hear their slurred, enraged voices. Their bedroom was on the other side of the wall from mine, and the battles, mostly at four or five in the morning, often woke me up.

I was horrified when the family proudly showed me their new puppy. If they could hardly keep themselves afloat, how would they train and walk a puppy? The answer was simple: they didn’t train it, and they didn’t walk it. The little brown lab grew into a big brown lab that rarely left the backyard. The dog’s face poking through our fence, desperate for contact, made me want to cry. But although their pet was neglected, he wasn’t hungry, and they didn’t hit him. I learned to be grateful for that.

One night the fighting was worse. There was the usual crashing; I was used to them throwing things at each other. But this night, something so heavy was thrown or pushed against our mutual bedroom wall that framed pictures on my bookshelf fell off and broke on the floor. The thick rage in his voice was terrifying. I did not sleep. What should I do? Was this any of my business? No. But surely doing nothing would be wrong.

Early the next day, I did what I cannot stop myself from doing: I wrote a letter. I wrote them that undoubtedly they’d heard terrible things from my side of the wall. I was not judging them, I said, though that was a lie. I said I could not help but hear their fights and was concerned, not so much about them, but about their children. If anything happened and I’d remained silent, I would not be able to forgive myself. So the next time they had a violent fight, I wrote, I was going to call the police.

Trembling, I put the letter into their mailbox, wondering if he in his rage would come after me. Shortly after, the phone rang; it was their number. I didn’t pick up. He sounded drunk already. “I got a problem,” he mumbled to my answering machine, “and I got to fix it. Thanks for your letter.”

For a long time, I heard no more fights. When we ran into each other on the front porch, our greetings were as minimal and polite as they’d always been. And then there was hammering and the smell of paint; they were sprucing up the house. They picked up the piles of dog dirt littering their backyard and tried to plant impatiens in the dust at the front. The house sold very fast, though they arranged for a long closing, so their kids could finish school. The screaming began again, but now I was able to ignore it. Another neighbour told me they were moving to separate houses.

A few weeks before they left, I started feeding their cat, whose ribs were sticking out. I ran into the husband on the porch; laughing, he picked up the cat, which now spent the day lying on my doormat waiting for food. “I’ve taken to feeding her,” I said, choking back the words “because it seems you aren’t.”

”Oh, she’s a devil,” he replied, chucking the cat through their front door. When they left, after a decade living side by side, we did not say goodbye.

Recently, eight years later, my phone rang. It was her. She introduced herself. “Beth, I just had to call and tell you,” she said quietly, ‘that John just died. Of cirrhosis. We’d been divorced for a long time. I just thought you should know.”

Surprised, I wondered if in her mind, we were still somehow connected. And I realized that we were. “Thank you for thinking to tell me, Lisa. I’m so sorry,” I said.

And I was.

******

What do you think? Should I mind my own @#$#@ business?

Here’s a note I received back from a hospital director to whom I wrote a letter of gratitude after the birth of my first child. Letters matter.

“Dear Family:

What wonderful people you must be to write such a beautiful letter expressing your thanks for the efforts our staff made at the time of Anna’s birth.

We do try our best to meet the needs of our patients, but sometimes because of limited resources or unrealistic requests, we fall short of meeting their expectations. The recent criticisms in the press certainly lowered the morale of our nursing staff, who take pride in their work, and a letter such as yours will do much to renew their enthusiasm and dedication.

We look forward to seeing you again at the birth of your second child.

Thank you again for taking the time to write us. May little Anna grow up to be as nice as her parents.”

She is nice, but she’s not a letter writer. She is a do-er.

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It took me a few decades to get Canadian citizenship. I just always felt Canadian, though with a healthy dose of American impatience.

A decade ago, like most American dual citizens living in Canada, I learned to my horror that — despite never having lived or worked in the States, with no financial dealings there whatsoever — I was supposed all my life to have filed U.S. tax returns. A friend in the same position told me she’d decided to “fly under the radar,” hoping American authorities would not check her tax status when she visited there. But I didn’t want my children to have to wrestle the American government for their inheritance, such as it is, after my death.

So I began the journey of renouncing my U.S. citizenship, which eventually cost me, a writer not far over the poverty line, over $10,000. I had to pay an accountancy firm to file six years of back tax forms — owing nothing, of course, a complete waste of money — and then shell out over $3000 cash for the Americans to release me. But when I was preparing to renounce, in the summer of 2024, it looked like Kamala Harris would win the American election, and Pierre Poilievre would win in Canada. I almost decided not to go ahead, assuming things would be much better in the U.S. than Canada for at least the next four years.

Luckily I did go ahead. Because as we all know, a malignant narcissist man-baby won in the States, and a smart, decent grownup in Canada. Now I am genuinely, 100%, forever and ever, Canadian.

And at this moment, I’ve never been more grateful to be so, watching Mark Carney strong, clear, honest, and eloquent at Davos, lauded around the world. What a superb speech. I marvel at the way Canadians, during the 2025 election campaign, changed political allegiance according to what they saw; predictions about a Conservative win were so sure, and yet many citizens switched their vote to elect Carney with a miraculous near majority. Sensible, pragmatic, wise.

And then there’s the phenomenal Heated Rivalry series on TV — are we Canucks leading the way or what? The international hysteria around the show reminds me of Beatlemania; at this dark time, as in December 1963, the world desperately needed something lovely and has relished the phenomenon of talented, handsome young men who care for each other. Shot in Ontario, almost entirely Canadian, a series about tenderness, trust, diversity and inclusion, and real true love. Featuring our fierce national sport, the warbling cry of the loon, and more than a smidge of hot gay sex. Could we enjoy it more?

My parents loved their adopted land, but they never stopped revealing their roots. Dad was always a bit too big and noisy in Canada, most comfortable in New York surrounded by family, telling jokes with Yiddish punchlines. My mother kept her cool British reticence and caution and accent. But both, like me, were proud to take on their new citizenship.

I am a child of immigrants and an immigrant myself, all of us glad to have made permanent lives in this magnificent country, which had and has its flaws, yes, but has not invaded another country, keeps a peacekeeping force instead of a nuclear stockpile, enjoys universal healthcare, albeit underfunded, a sturdy, if fraying, safety net, and gun control. Canadians have a fundamental sense that we must all look after each other, although a few premiers aren’t getting that at this time. Even right now, hunkered down in a polar vortex with gale-force winds and another snowstorm pounding down, I know I live in the best country on earth. And my children do too.

Thank you to Senator McCarthy for forcing my family to make the most important move of our lives. To our despairing, disgusted, terrified American friends, family, and allies: come on up. Take it from me: you won’t regret it.

What you’ll find is cheesy poutine, a stupid Canadian wolf bird, and peace, order, and good government.

This essay first appeared in Alice Goldbloom's Substack, Postcards from a Canadian.

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Re Nick Reiner, I’ve seen this movie before. A kind, thoughtful woman called Kathleen Hatcher came to my memoir writing class at then Ryerson. She wrote about her love of quilting, her work, and her three beloved children. But mostly, she wrote about the heartbreak of her son Colin, who struggled with drug addiction, homelessness, and violence. She wrote about packing sandwiches and a thermos of coffee and going to Yonge Street night after night, looking for him. Later, when we reconnected, she told me he was much better, and she was happier than she’d been in a long time, had made many quilts.

And then, in February 2021, I opened the newspaper to see her face. She’d been murdered by Colin.

How to comprehend an act so senseless and vile? I go with what Neil Young has been quoted as saying (though it may not have been him) about the Reiner murders: “Don’t give me that corporate spin about ‘fate.’ Rob and Michele weren’t safe. They were living in a war zone in their own living room. We all saw the scars. We saw the battle they fought for that boy, Nick. They gave every piece of their souls, burned every candle they had to save him. But sometimes... sometimes the damage is just too deep to fix.”

“I see the cameras and the news anchors dancing around the truth. You want to talk about the ‘struggle’? You want to talk about the demons? Fine. But what about the parents? Who’s gonna sing the song for the ones who tried to stop the bleeding, only to drown in it themselves? I’m not here to judge—we’ve all got rust on our souls—but I am here to protect the truth of my friends. They shouldn’t be remembered as victims of a tabloid story. They were warriors of love who fought until the lights went out.”

You were warriors of love, Kathleen, Rob, and Michele. May we learn one day how to handle the tragic, destructive demons of male rage, drug addiction, and mental illness.

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I didn’t want to just delete these unpublished pieces, so I decided to share them with you.

Short pieces are now known as flash nonfiction. Google defines flash nonfiction as “a literary genre of very short, compressed narratives that are powerful, meaningful, and often revelatory. Typically under 750 words, it focuses on a single, intense moment to explore a deeper human experience, using concise language to create a significant impact.”

All good memoir should “create a significant impact,” but sometimes that’s harder to do in few words. Here are two of my attempts. They’re what I call My Smalls.

The Photograph

457 words

I look at this photograph, taken almost forty years ago, of a good-looking man in a kitchen with his two small children. There’s a dribble spot on his sweatshirt. He must have hated that. He hated mess, was the neatest man on earth, perhaps because he needed control. Since he’d not been able to control much during his childhood, he firmly controlled the neatness of his clothing and his desk. Spotless, always.

But then he had to contend with a wife and children who made messes. This was difficult.

The woman who took this picture is thirty-five-years-old, married to this man, mother to the little ones. She is struggling to do a good job. Although she has no idea what she’s doing, she’s trying her best to support her beloved young husband, who is thirty-two and a workaholic, a man who cannot give enough at the workplace and so has little left to give when he gets home.

She has a toddler son and a four-year-old daughter who is a force of nature. She could not adore these children more, goes weak with love for them, for him, for the whole setup — unimaginable, her, the outsider girl who hardly dated and then only the wrong men — here she is, married to a beautiful successful man with two beautiful children in a city where her husband is running a big local theater.

And she, former actress, has left work and friends behind, is trying to finish her writing degree, is trying to finish a thesis about her great-grandfather, is trying to figure out what has happened to her.

She is so happy, she can hardly believe it. But her voice, breathy and high, does not sound like her voice. Her friends notice, but she doesn’t. The man is annoyed with the chaos, the mess, the noise. It does not occur to her to ask him to help. He’s making the money; she’s doing all the rest. This kitchen is her domain. There is nothing better. Just look at what she has. What luck. What joy.

There are dishes in the sink, clothes to wash, groceries to buy and cook. There’s that drool spot to dab from his sweatshirt. His face is peaceful, and he is looking at his children. But he is not really there. He’s getting ready to go back to the office, the place that makes sense to him, where he’s in charge.

In the photograph, there’s a bib apron tacked to the wall behind him, a humorous gift to the wife from an old friend in France. “Bonne à tout faire,” it says. “Victime de son amour pour le patron.”

The wife has fastened it to the wall rather than wearing it.

“Maid who does everything,” it says. “Victim of her love for the boss.”

The lament of the downtown cyclist

685 words

One sunny Saturday, a friend proposed that we ride our bikes from my central Toronto neighbourhood down to the lake. I was horrified. City streets were too dangerous! I used my bike only to meander around quiet local side roads. But we went.

That was thirty years ago. That day, I discovered the pleasure and freedom, mingled with terror, of city bike riding, and have been doing so ever since. Fourteen years after that first ride, when my children finally left home, I sold my car. I couldn’t afford to keep it just for me; the family that bought it, newly arrived from Bosnia, needed it far more.

I’m now 74 and ride most days, except in the worst weather. I do still miss the car, especially in February. Every day when I get home from an excursion, I’m grateful to have made it back alive. But still I ride.

A car hit me once. I was cycling through an intersection when the light turned yellow, and an elderly driver turning left smashed into me; she hadn’t even seen me. I wasn’t wearing a helmet but luckily did not hit my head, did have contusions on legs and arms and wore a sling for a while. I’ve been more careful at lights since, and wear a helmet. I’m a defensive old lady rider now, slow and careful.

So the downside of biking is possible injury and death. Also being cold and wet in winter, hands and toes freezing, and unable to carry heavy or bulky things — big bags of birdseed or plants. I rarely get to visit friends or shops in far-flung parts of the city. That’s it.

The benefits of riding far outweigh the negatives, except if I end up being injured again, or killed. I love getting exercise in fresh air. My turquoise Norco, made in Canada, is silent and non-polluting; the only fuel it requires is muscle and breath. I can jump on at the last minute to head somewhere, knowing parking at the other end will not be a problem, or traffic either, as, passing steaming lines of cars, I sail along the bike lanes installed by the city for my safety. I use them all the time: Bloor, Danforth, Wellesley, University, Dundas, Adelaide, Richmond, sections of Gerrard. There aren’t nearly enough of them, and most are not, in fact, safe; few sport actual concrete barriers, and in any case, they’re often blocked by delivery trucks or by construction. But they’re much better than nothing.

Because of gridlock caused by the lack of reliable transit, the explosive growth of the Uber/Lyft industry, and construction taking over streets, drivers are frustrated and angry. There’s been a huge increase in speeding and other dangerous illegal behaviours, like running red lights. Riding is now far more risky, and that’s not factoring in the exponential increase in other vehicles — fast delivery motorcycles and electric bikes and scooters — that feel free, completely unregulated, to charge along in lanes supposedly reserved for bicycles.

But now our provincial government, whose first job, you’d think, is to keep their constituents alive, is going to rip out some of our bike lanes. They aim to pacify their motorist base, who, tucked safely inside their thousands of pounds of metal and glass, are willing to accept a few cyclist deaths if they can get home three minutes sooner. The issue of inadequate transit remains unaddressed. If only our premier would visit Paris, which has a phenomenally efficient transit system, but has also created an impressive network of separated bike lanes on many roads. New York, London, Vancouver, and Montreal have done the same.

Each bike, goes the thinking, is one less car. Surely fewer cars is the goal?

I want to continue to ride, because, along with the printing press, the toaster, and the remote control, I think the bicycle is among mankind’s greatest inventions. But now, I see I was wrong. The bicycle, and bike riders, are problems to be eliminated.

According to the province of Ontario, we cyclists, wobbling along on our slender two wheels, are Public Enemy #1.

I sent the bicycle piece to the Toronto Star op-ed page, to no avail. So, readers, where do you think these flash pieces could have gone, if anywhere? Any ideas?

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I am not alone in my ardent admiration for this man. British journalist Caitlin Moran wrote recently, “When pop stars get famous, what they do is they bang countless teenaged girls, do a ton of drugs, and behave like an asshole for ten or fifteen years. What Paul McCartney did when he got famous was marry a single mother from New York and move to Scotland where he learned to thatch his own roof and make his own bread. He rebelled against what successful men are supposed to be like. He saw being a husband as an art, being a father as an art. He saw a joy in ordinary life.

I could base a small and beautiful religion on the teachings of Paul McCartney. I think he’s one of the wisest people who’s ever lived.”

Me too, Caitlin. Me too.

A few months ago I wrote an op-ed about an upcoming concert and sent it to two sections of the Globe and Mail. No interest. Because I was busy, I didn’t send it out anywhere else. One of the jobs of a freelance writer is to keep on top of the marketplace, the venues for our kind of writing, and to keep sending and pitching, pitching and sending. This, like marketing, is one of my least favourite parts of the job. Margaret Atwood does not have to figure out where to send her writing. The rest of us do.

But who needs the Globe? Happily, I have this Substack and can now share the piece with you.

As those beloved boys sang, “With a love like that, you know you should be glad.”

My life as a Paul girl

In mid-November, I’ll be going to Montreal to spend a few hours with one of the great loves of my life. I’ll sit in a packed arena with fans of every age and demographic, and for the tenth time, I’ll watch a phenomenal musician and his superb band. I will cry. I always do. Because the man and his music rip open my ribcage.

In January 1964, after hearing my friends in our Halifax school chatter on about an exciting new British group, I decided it was time to listen for myself. I was thirteen, the youngest in my grade nine class, way behind my classmates musically and socially. But on January 14, after my parents went out to a Ban the Bomb meeting, I rushed to twiddle the dial of our big brown radio from CBC to the CHNS hit parade. What burst out of the speaker was “She Loves You.”

The song stirred my blood, as if I’d been waiting for just this sound to wake me up and flood me with energy and confidence and passion. When the music ended, I was transformed — no longer a kid, now, just like that, I was a teenager. I rushed to call my friend Lea, a Beatlemaniac for two months already. She told me the good news: though one of them was married, the other three were single! Hope for us!

A few weeks later, I brought home my very first LP, “With the Beatles.” Slipping the big black disc onto my pink portable record player, I didn’t know I was about to embark on a love affair that would last over sixty years. But when Paul McCartney began to sing the ballad “Till There Was You,” I heard a clear voice, soft, sweet, pure. My insides dissolved, and I knew. Every teen then was intent on choosing their favourite Beatle. Lea had picked John, but he seemed sort of hard-edged, and anyway, he was married. I was a Paul girl.

For months after, I obsessed about my Beatle, even as my family moved that summer of 1964 to live for a year in France. All I wanted was to be home in Halifax with my records and my friends, and instead I was stuck in a Parisian suburb where I knew no one and had only a tiny transistor radio. What kept me company that difficult year was writing romantic stories about me and Paul. He was my boyfriend, helping with my arithmetic homework, then my fiancé singing to me as we roasted marshmallows by the fireside, then my husband driving us around in his sleek Aston-Martin. In one story, he’s in hospital dying of pneumonia, but when I reach under the oxygen tent to hold his hand, colour floods back to his pale face, and he starts to revive. The doctor’s jaw drops. “It’s a miracle, Mrs. McCartney!” he exclaims.

I saved Paul’s life. Fantasies of him, that year, saved mine.

In June 1965, I was ecstatic to learn the Beatles were coming to Paris to play two concerts in one day. I attended both, held in a surprisingly small venue where the house lights were left on, and the audience was mostly older boys. At the afternoon show, I was seated a few rows from the stage, waving a big picture of Paul, when I caught his eye and he smiled and nodded down at me, right at me. He did. I wrote in my diary that if I’d died at that moment, it would have been at the pinnacle of my short life.

I was fourteen, and he had just turned twenty-two.

But a few years later, Paul mania faded for me. I dated real boys, finished school, launched a career. The Beatles broke up. I believed the weighty music pundits who said Lennon was the true creative force, McCartney the lightweight crooner of silly love songs. Paul in his unfortunate mullet gave concerts in cities where I lived, but I never went.

Then in 2008, it was announced that to celebrate the 400th birthday of Québec City, Paul McCartney would give a free concert on the Plains of Abraham. Why not, I thought, at age 58, indulge in a little free nostalgia? So I went, to the concert of a lifetime. Paul spoke his halting French, waved the flags of Canada, Québec, and England, and, for nearly three hours, sang one incandescent song after another. I sang along, weeping with joy, engulfed in a crowd of two hundred thousand blissful fans doing the same.

I was hooked again, glad to realize how wrong I’d been about my idol — to realize, as I read more about the Beatles, that Paul was the one who’d worked to keep the group together, the indefatigable genius always daring to try new things. I started when possible to attend his concerts — in Vancouver, Ottawa, Montreal, twice in Toronto. At one, I treated myself to an expensive sound check ticket, where my seat for the show was in the third-row centre. I was so close, I wanted to call up to him and remind him we’d nearly met once; to thank him for what he has given us all in his long career, the gifts of music and memory. But I didn’t.

My friends don’t understand my nearly lifelong love for a man who doesn’t know I exist, and whose voice now is certainly not what it was. I say, it’s enough he has written a hundred sublime songs: Hey Jude, Let It Be, Blackbird, Eleanor Rigby, Penny Lane, Here, There, and Everywhere, Yesterday, Maybe I’m Amazed, so many more. Let alone that he’s a fine man, a stellar husband and father, an animal-loving vegan, a concientious citizen of our planet. It makes me proud that at the age of thirteen I chose so wisely and so well.

I’m going to Montreal in a few weeks because I need to see him once more, perhaps for the last time. He’s 83 now, and I am 75. How much longer, my beloved Paul, can we go on meeting this way?

P.S. My first memoir All My Loving: coming of age with Paul McCartney in Paris tells the story of that year in France.

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Merilyn and I got to know each other in San Miguel in February and again in Kingston this fall, when I taught a memoir workshop and did a reading at both festivals. Not long ago, her publicist sent me an advance copy of her recent memoir, Walking with Beth, the chronicle of her deep friendship and walks with Beth Robinson, who’s thirty years older: when the book begins, Merilyn is seventy-one, and Beth is 100. They walk or at least talk every week when possible, speaking about many things, including art, love, aging, friendship, the different stages of life, and, inevitably, death. When Merilyn presented the book at the Kingston WritersFest in September, Beth, who is now 105, was not only there, she bounded onstage to a prolonged standing ovation.

I recently spoke to Merilyn on Zoom about the book and her process as a writer.

I began by congratulating her on the instant success of this tender, thoughtful, beautifully written book; amazingly for a Canadian memoir, it hit all three key bestseller lists at once. She credits the media blitz her publisher set up for her, including a CBC documentary, but also feels this book came out at exactly the right moment, that it’s a “poster book for intergenerational friendship,” a subject of increasing interest. She believes many young people are part of the “maker revolution”—making crafts, recycling clothes, baking — and that includes friendships over generations. The “silo-ing of our society” is unfortunate, she feels. “In Mexico, there are often four or five generations living in the same house. We don’t honour elders as they do,” she says, “and as we used to.”

I tell her the pace of the book, begun at the start of the pandemic, feels like a walk, deliberate and meditative. That wasn’t done purposely, she says; the book at first had no real structure. She wrote each chapter individually, then, in her big studio in Mexico, she threw all the chapters on the floor and walked among them, looking for the shape. Sometimes, she notes, a topic would return, giving the book in the end a circular feel, not unlike life.

Beth Robinson worked as an art therapist, held important volunteer positions, and has published several books herself. She is a positive woman; although she’s been a widow for decades and lives on her own, she keeps busy, immersing herself in her passions. She regularly meets friends of all ages— “a steady rhythm of shared connection,” Merilyn calls this in the book — and creates collages and art installations; her social life and art keep her alive to the world. She lost her only daughter a few years ago and is still grief-stricken, although Merilyn reports on Beth’s comforting ritual; she lights a candle in a lantern every night to feel her daughter’s presence. “She’s one of the most present people I’ve ever met,” says Merilyn, who calls her friend “an icon of possibility” for everyone she meets.

Imagination and creativity, Simonds suggests, might be the secret to thriving in our final decades, and certainly, Beth is proof of that. As they walk, she and Merilyn share their passionate love of colour, dance, art, nature, words, gardening, travel, and more.

Simonds herself goes through a nightmare time in the book, afflicted with a rare, excruciating condition called Giant Cell Arteritis; we watch a strong, independent woman cut down, bewildered and terrified at her sudden lack of health, autonomy, and memory. She usually does not write about deeply personal matters, but felt she couldn’t leave her illness out of the book — because “being there for each other is an important component of a good friendship.” Beth noticed Merilyn’s vulnerability and pain and stepped up without being asked. Our culture, the writer notes, doesn’t often validate that kind of thoughtfulness.

I tell her I’d enjoyed her books Woman Watching and A New Leaf; the latter shows off her exceptionally detailed and in-depth knowledge of gardening. “That comes from curiosity,” she says. “I’ve accumulated a lot of knowledge over the years, just by being curious. That’s an important trait to develop as a writer, and as a person.”

I ask if she taped her conversations with Beth and others, since they’re reported with vivid accuracy. “I never taped,” she says. “I’m lucky to have an extraordinary memory. I’m the family archivist. That’s why it was so dreadful during my illness, when I had steroid-induced dementia.” But that, she declares with relief, is gone now.

I point out that Beth comes from a well-known, important family, her father Lorne Pierce a fabled Canadian editor, her mother a renowned collector of Canadian glass, her great-aunt a noted feminist and suffragette. Yet Merilyn doesn’t bring up Beth’s familial connections until well into the book. “I did that deliberately,” she says. “I didn’t want her to be thought of as just a daughter, an appendage, someone of privilege.”

How does she choose the format and subjects for her books, which span such a wide array? “The material eventually tells me what it needs to be,” she says, “essays, fiction, creative nonfiction. I go where the material takes me. But I’ve realized that all my books revolve around what interests me most: extraordinary ordinary people.” She is already working on a new book, and sure enough, it’s about an extraordinary ordinary man. “He has a grip on me,” she says. “I’ve never written in a man’s voice before. Maybe it’ll be fiction.”

“I never think about the eventual reader,” she says. “My contract is with the material. My job is to get that material on the page in a way that’s honest and true. Selling it to readers is the publisher’s job.”

I mention that these days, unfortunately, selling their own work is also very much a writer’s job. She reminds me that writers should keep the needs of writing and those of publishing separate, that “publishing is a different world. Write what you need to write. Keep it to yourself,” she says. No one, not even her husband Wayne, a fellow writer, reads her work until she has finished. “It’s so delicate at that stage, like a child. I don’t want suggestions. When I’ve taken it as far as I can, Wayne reads it. And then it goes to my agent and then to an editor. I love the editorial process, I love my ür-editor Anne Collins,” she says.

Does she have a writing routine? “I believe in the unconscious. I’m a morning writer, I get up and right into my office, spend four or five hours there. Then a walk. Then I do research into what has come up. An important tip I learned somewhere: I never stop writing at the end of a sentence or a chapter; that makes it hard to pick it up the next day. I stop midway.”

She writes the first draft by hand in a notebook, on the right side of the page so she can use the left side for edits and additional notes as the draft progresses. Then she transfers that draft to the computer. Eventually, she prints it out and makes notes on it by hand. “Remember,” she points out, “writing comes from the right side of the brain and typing from the left. We need both sides.”

After over an hour of intense talk about all this and much more, it’s time for Merilyn to get to work. I’ve been frantically taking notes, gleaning wisdom for my own writing process. I love the passage in the book, where Simonds brings up the Japanese concept of ikigai.

‘“Ee-kee-guy. It’s like an all-encompassing concept of work— what you are good at and what supports you financially, but also what you love to do and what is good for the world.” …

(Beth says) “Every day, at every age, you wake up, your eyes open, your whole being opens, and off you go!”

I grin. “That’s ikigai!”’

To encourage my own ikigai, I’m going to print out several quotes from this fine, evocative book and keep them above my desk:

“To be an artist is to believe in life. The soul cannot thrive in the absence of art.” Henry Moore

“The passionate heart never ages.” John O’Donoghue

“Friendship is the art of holding a mirror to each other’s souls.” Aristotle

“Anyone who writes is a seeker.” Louise Glück

“I look for happiness, and I find it.” Merilyn Simonds

Thank you for the inspiration, Merilyn and Beth. May your ikigai flourish, and your passionate hearts never age.

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I’m writing, yes: a blog maybe once a week, every so often posts on FB and IG and sending out this Substack and a Mailchimp newsletter. I’ve had two letters to the Editor of the Toronto Star published recently, of the four I’ve crafted and sent, and also an Op-ed essay. I’ve written emails of praise or complaint to various places, including yesterday to the CBC protesting an insensitive interviewer. I respond, often instantly, to the scores of emails that pour in.

I’ve been editing clients’ manuscripts and doing workshops, classes, and webinars on memoir writing.

But I’m not working on the next book, the one about how I survived my upbringing with parents both spectacular and impossible. Why am I stuck? Why have I been stuck for over a year?

My last book, the memoir-in-essays Midlife Solo, was launched in early 2024. A lot of time and effort went into trying to get that book noticed — speaking engagements, posting and boasting on social media, tracking down book clubs, urging readers to recommend to friends etc. — marketing chores every writer has to embark on these days. The book has had stellar reviews from readers — 91% five-star reviews on Goodreads — but these have not translated into books flying off shelves. Despite my efforts and the enthusiasm of the few who’ve read it, sales have been slow.

As were the sales for my first book, a hefty biography, and two previous memoirs. The only book of mine that has done fairly well, and that in a limited way, is True to Life, the textbook for my writing courses. How-to books are easier to sell.

So, my internal monologue says, why go to the enormous effort of writing a new memoir that almost no one will read? Good question, no?

Especially because there’s been discouragement in other ways. Recently I worked hard on a longform essay that meant a great deal to me; it told of finding out, long after her death, about an abortion my mother had when young; of the difficult choices countless women, including me, have had to make. The piece was edited by a few clear-eyed writer friends and an actual editor before I entered it in a prestigious Canadian personal essay competition. Six months later I received word: thanks but no thanks. And shortly thereafter read that the competition longlist consists of fifteen essays. Fifteen essays on the longlist, but not mine.

It was like a body blow. I know competitions are subjective, about personal taste. People whose honesty I trust said my essay is powerful and moving, but obviously it was vetted by someone who didn’t like it, perhaps didn’t like the subject matter or my style, plain language with few similes and metaphors, no prize-winning flourishes. I’ve noted before, with other rejections, that my style is not appreciated by competitions.

Does this sound like self-pity? I’m sure it does, and I apologize. My job does not involve going to work at dawn to flip burgers or sit in a cubicle or drive a bus. My job is sitting at home in my sweats thinking and scribbling and revising, and then trying to interest readers. There’s a lot of competition out there for people’s eyes and minds.

I wrote once that finishing the manuscript of a book is like climbing a mountain and arriving, filthy and exhausted, at the summit, to be confronted with a long series of closed doors. The job is to knock on those doors, persuade them to open, keep shoving and pounding, often for many months, until at last one opens. Some are good at this pushy, confidence-wrecking part of the job, and some, like me, are most emphatically not.

And in the end possibly no door opens. The options are self-publishing, or putting that manuscript away and starting another. That also is the job.

But I realize there’s something else getting in the way of my focus — the current desperate state of our world. I’ve lived through bad times before: the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam war, the reigns of the vile, destructive Canadian politicians Stephen Harper and Mike Harris. But nothing, nothing like where we are today, with the complete disintegration of the rule of law to the south, the rise of fascism, the celebration of racism, sexism, misogyny, cruelty, selfishness, greed, and worse. Daily witnessing the slaughter of the innocents in Ukraine and Gaza and elsewhere. Wildfires, floods, and extinctions, the planet erupting due to the climate catastrophe.

All that, daily in my inbox, and in yours.

So sitting at a desk, probing memories — how does that help? Is writing memoir a self- indulgent waste of time when I should be doing something, anything, more useful?

But wait. I teach that memoir matters because when it’s well done, it touches something universal in us all; about us all. Homo sapiens are narrative animals; we need stories. We writers tell our stories for those who do not.

And I need to remind myself that support for my own stories does appear unexpectedly. Only a few weeks ago, a journalist with a celebrated podcast emailed that she’d discovered Loose Woman at a second-hand bookstore; it spoke profoundly to her about dealing with life’s big changes, and she wanted to interview me for her podcast. That memoir, published in 2020, raised my hopes when it was a finalist for an independent book award, but it didn’t win, and the book sank. Now, five years later, an important reader. Jaw-dropping. It happens.

People write to me regularly about an essay or book that reminds them of their own lives. A recent connection made me cry: a B.C. woman read my essay about a childhood best friend I’d lost touch with and searched for in vain, and wrote to tell me she’d known my friend at the end of her life and would be happy to tell me about her. We had a long talk on the phone, and my anguish was put to rest. A huge gift. One of many, as a result of what I do.

Dear readers, I guess we writers keep at this crazy work because it’s what we must do, because it’s who we are. I started writing at the age of six and assume that I’ll keep translating my thoughts to words on a page until death or disability stop my hand. Yes, it can be hard to keep going without a breakthrough or the attention of an agent or winning an award or even a sense of the book-buying world’s general approval. It does give a boost when someone out there signals appreciation.

But in the end, appreciation or not, we do what we do. The work will be there after we die. Who knows where in future it will land, what it will mean?

And so it’s sure that soon, very soon, I’ll go up to my office and begin that book. I will start to climb the mountain. Maybe this last year has been a rest period, storing up strength for the journey. Or maybe it’s just been procrastination and cowardice.

Whatever; it will end. Yesterday, crossing my fingers, I sent the rejected essay to a fine literary magazine that has published me twice. And right now, I’ve spent much of this overcast Saturday sitting in my kitchen, the sleeping cat at my feet, writing and rewriting, figuring out what to say and how to say it.

So here it is, my gift to you. I thank you for your gift to me — your eyes on the words. This is our bond, our covenant with each other.

Onward.

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“In recent years, I’ve read a lot of memoirs from women of my generation who feel stuck in specific ways: single, childless, consumed by work, and disillusioned with hook-up culture. My guest on this week’s program is the author of the first memoir I have read about breaking free from that pattern — and the story of how it happened is as moving as it is surprising.” -Tara Henley

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Maybe you can relate? I certainly can; I used to be just as filled with self-doubt. Luckily, I kept going.

My student, S., wrote:

Hi Beth,

I’ve come to a point in my life where I’m not sure I have what it takes to be a “writer.” I hardly dare call myself one because I lack discipline to write every day and don’t have any long length work completed, except for my poems. I know as our teacher that you encourage us and support our writing regardless of our individual levels and skills. But one thing this class has brought up for me is a feeling of “Do I have what it takes to be published?”

I’m not sure if it’s the other things in my life that I am coping with at this time (wounds still) that are making me so unsure, but it would really mean a lot to hear your feedback as a professional, hearing my writing as you have. Please be brutally honest. While reading my exercises in class, it feels like my voice always sounds the same, the descriptions, the words all the same … and I wonder if I were to ever write a longer piece if it would hold a reader’s attention.

My last question is, how do you know where to start? Do I just keep writing small pieces and then put them together to tell one bigger story … or do I plot out a plan of stories that I would like to tell, the theme etc.? This is my dilemma when I think of the bigger picture.

Thanks for your time Beth and sorry to bother you with my baggage.

S.

Dear S.:

Rest assured, S., many, if not most people have the same baggage, the same questions when they start writing. Why bother? Am I wasting my time? Am I making a fool of myself? Who’d want to read THIS?

To set your mind at rest: First, many writers don’t write every day, and almost all struggle with self-discipline and finishing things. I marvelled to read in Virginia Woolf’s diary how extremely insecure she was about a novel of hers about to be published — and that novel was Mrs. Dalloway! Insecurity is built in to this work. Good writing is hard and requires risk and vulnerability, tenacity and courage. No wonder student writers hesitate and sometimes step back.

I believe everyone has interesting, even beautiful and vital stories to tell. But they need to do the work: to figure out their most essential stories, trust themselves to commit them as honestly as possible to paper, and learn the craft and technique to tell them with skill, so readers will be engaged and understand what’s at stake.

The issue at the beginning of a writer’s journey isn’t being published. It’s figuring out how to access the most important material, and how to tell it powerfully and simply and fluidly and well.

It’s learning to tell the truth, your truth, uncovering the tales only you can tell.

You write for yourself first, to explore where you’ve been, who you are, what you’ve experienced and learned, what you’re still trying to figure out. And then perhaps you share that with a few others. And then – who knows? Anne Frank wrote for herself, and her book became one of the most famous and consequential books in the world. But she wrote because she had to write.

A book of stories happens story by story; what matters is to start anywhere. Start anywhere, let them come, keep them in a binder, rewrite and rearrange and add and rework, and eventually – there’s a book of stories, to publish or not as you see fit.

As for planning it all in advance versus crafting one story at a time and seeing where it goes … it’s up to each individual writer. Some need an outline and a clear direction before they start. Others just plunge in. There’s no right or wrong way to get going. The only wrong way is to let indecision and the critical inner voice block you from starting.

And if your words all sound the same, that doesn’t matter in the early drafts. But when you’ve finished a solid draft, you could do a search to be sure you haven’t repeated words. I have favourite words I use too often, so have to check to be sure they haven’t snuck in there multiple times. In later drafts, I spend a lot of time replacing boring, generic words with more vivid, descriptive words. That brings the prose to life. You want your words to help readers see, hear, smell, feel, along with you.

To conclude, I can’t say to you, S., you are a wonderful writer and will be published. That’s meaningless. I can say, you have key stories to tell, and if you do the work and stick to it and focus and dare and learn and keep trying, if you write and edit, edit and write, you will leave meaningful words behind. When you’re ready, you can get them published somewhere. But that is not the primary goal.

And something to consider: self-publishing is often the way to go these days, as going through a publisher is time-consuming and usually pays almost nothing. When you’re ready, get your material professionally edited and copy-edited, and then you can produce and market your own book. Once it’s bound, it’s there forever. A hundred years from now, someone can pick up your book and start to read. Isn’t that the dream?

Do not be silenced. I ask student writers who are full of self-doubt: how is the world a better place if you are silent?

The great painter Alice Neel, who after a lifetime of painting was only discovered late in her sixties, said, “You know what it takes to be an artist? Hypersensitivity and the will of the devil. To never give up.”

Bon courage, as the French say. The inspiring writer Anne Lamott says what’s needed for writing is “radical self-love.”

“Trust and surrender,” she says.

Trust and surrender. Onward. Happy writing.

Best,

beth

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Born to Blog

In our email exchange, she suggested we share and promote each other’s work, which I’m happy to do.

Her latest Substack essay, below, is about the conundrum posed by our diaries. Anne, and many other thoughtful and protective diarists, would prefer that their children not read about difficult, dark times in their mother’s life, and so they destroy those diaries.

But all my own diaries from age nine — stacks of notebooks — fill suitcases and file cabinets and boxes, and, packed with neurosis though they are, I will keep them. My children know I’ve had hard, crazy times, and they know I wrote it all down, often not just in diaries, but in essays and books, which they mostly don’t read. I’ve told them they can decide what to do with the diaries after I die: dance around a bonfire, or donate them to a library where people can research the incessant outpourings of a twentieth century writer. I won’t care; their work for me is done — relieving pressure, keeping me company, helping me work things out and understand.

And importantly, providing a trove of authentic information for my writing. Both my early memoirs, All My Loving, about the years 1964-65, and Loose Woman, about 1979, mined the diaries from that time, bringing me back to myself at 14 and 28, helping me recreate a long-gone voice and thoughts.

But I understand and respect those, like Anne, who want to spare their children the truth about how chaotic and confused their mother’s mind could be.

Here’s Anne’s piece. Please consider subscribing to her Substack so you can follow her journey.

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As the guest who’d known her the longest — we met as teenagers — and of course as a writer, I’d been asked to speak, and had spent time going through our many years of emails to each other. In my talk, after listing the huge diversity of subjects we’d discussed, I said that our friend was a wise, generous Renaissance woman whose calm common sense had guided me, and I’m sure many of them, through a number of crises, and ended, “I know I speak for all of us here when I say our conversations have just begun.”

My friend and others said they loved the speech. It’s something I know how to do, tell the story of a life; find concise words to celebrate a beloved. (See the essay on Eulogies in this Substack.)

A few days later, I posted about the joyful party on Facebook, with a few of the pictures I’d taken, and also posted a blog about my activities of the past week, with a mention and pictures. As I do.

Someone saw the FB post and wrote to wish my friend a happy birthday. Surprised, she went to Facebook, which she never does, and found my post. She was horrified, and so was her partner. “I wish you’d asked me before posting. It was a private party,” she wrote to me; it was not for public consumption. She asked me to take down the post immediately.

Of course I did, and went to my blog to remove the mention there too. I apologized to them both. But my posts are automatically sent to my followers, so this one had already gone out. I had to inform my friend about that.

I’m sure my misstep won’t damage our long-term friendship. I wrote to her, “So many people post birthday pictures on FB, it didn’t occur to me you’d not want to appear there. And it’s so automatic to me to chronicle what I do and where I go, I forget to be careful when others are involved - although, through my thousands of blog and FB posts, very few people have complained about being incorporated into the saga.

I appreciated what happened so much, the effort that had gone into making your party spectacular, it didn’t occur to me you’d mind me telling about it.

 My whole life goes in the blog and on FB. It’s a crazy way to live, but it’s the way I live. But I realize the people who know me have not signed up for that,”.

I apologized again and will never post about someone else on FB without asking. But what I thought and did not say is: there’s a price for being close to a writer. We do mine our lives and the people in our lives for material; as Nora Ephron said, “Everything is copy.” I wrote a good speech my friend loved, but then I wrote something she felt invaded her privacy.

When you befriend a writer, there may be aspects you don’t like as well as aspects you do. Think of what David Sedaris has written about his family’s objections to appearing, over and over, in his work, illuminated and even caricatured by his brutal humour and honesty.

Still, this is a cautionary tale; we writers should not be heedless of others with our words, our posts. We should remember that some of us live our lives right out in the open, and some of us emphatically do not. I encounter strangers all the time who know a great deal about me from my memoirs and essays and posts — including these Substack ones. It doesn’t bother me at all. But for others it’s an incomprehensibly public way to live.

My very best friend strongly disapproves of the openness in my writing and talking. She herself never talks about private matters; although her dearest friend, I know absolutely nothing about her inner life. She’s shocked by the fact that I inherited a bag of letters after my mother’s death, and not only did I read and transcribe them, I’ve written an essay about one, in which I discovered that after a tryst with the man who’d later become her husband, my young mother had had an excruciating abortion. To me, this event in my mother’s life is a moving and illuminating fact I hadn’t known about a woman who told me almost all her secrets. But my best friend was appalled I’d make public someone else’s distressing, personal, and private experience.

“She left the letters,” I said. “She knew I’d read them. And anyway, this can’t hurt her, she’s dead. It’s an important story about a key event in countless women’s lives, including my own.”

My friend said if she found letters of her mother’s, she’d immediately destroy them. Inconceivable to me. There are mysteries to be solved.

I speak often in class about my two children: my daughter who’d spend not one tiny minute writing down her thoughts and feelings or even sitting still to reflect on her past. If she posts on FB or IG, it’s almost always about one of her far left causes. My son, neurotic like his mother, has inherited the introspective musing journal gene. He writes things down, talks openly about his issues, tries to figure things out.

I’m not saying one way is better than the other. As a memoir writing teacher, however, I’m grateful so many people are willing to do the hard, painful, vital work of making sense of the past on paper. I tell memoir students you don’t have to PUBLISH the writing you do about your life, you just have to get it out and down. You can keep it to yourself, if you wish, or at least the parts that might negatively impact others. But I do not believe in secrets. I think they’re corrosive and damaging to the soul. I believe in releasing them into the air.

There are not many secrets I’ve kept from my readers. But there are a few.

I assure you: there are a few.

PS And even this essay — do you think it’s invasive? Where are you on the spectrum of public or private?

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I agreed to appear and thought hard about generosity, kindness, thoughtfulness. Times when someone has unexpectedly come through for me and others. And I kept circling back to one person: my neighbour, Jean-Marc.

Jean-Marc is simply the soul of generosity. A vigorous sixty-seven, from a big Acadian family in New Brunswick, he was close to his lively mother until she died, not long ago, at the age of 100; he speaks frequently to his siblings and still has friends from kindergarten. A gay man in a long-term relationship, he loves women and children and to cook, feed, and take care of everyone. When an elderly neighbour with little money was callously renovicted from her basement apartment, Jean-Marc found her other places to live, helped her move again and again, and to this day is one of only two people who visit her regularly. He brings food and good cheer.

For me, one moment is embedded in my heart. The evening after a fire ravaged part of my home, I was sitting desolate in the rubble and char, hands grey with ash, trying to see what I could salvage, when through the chaos came JM holding a tray: a hot dinner and a glass of white wine.

But it’s something he did only a few days ago that I want to tell you about. For many years, JM has had a business informing students and other travellers about living and working overseas. It’s been an uphill climb for this solo entrepreneur, selling first a huge book and now a website crammed with information about every culture on earth.

Last weekend, he went to a big conference in Toronto. Three years before, an American organization in an affiliated field had decided to hold their annual event for the first time outside the U.S. This gathering was attended by a fifty Canadians and 1200 Americans.

But as we Canucks all know, the situation between Canada and the U.S. has changed drastically since January of this year, as the current American administration, for some incomprehensible reason, targets their northern trading partner with unjust tariffs, threats, and insults. JM knew almost all the Americans at the conference would be mortified about what their country is doing to ours. He’s outraged himself, as is everyone we know. He told me he was sleepless for two nights, wondering if he should do something at the conference — express his anger, for example; emphasize to the Americans why Canadians are furious.

He said he returned to his core values: valuing openness, difference, multiculturalism, international travel. And he knew what to do. Walking in to the conference holding a hundred small Canadian flags, he went up to a small group, held out his hand, and said, “Welcome to Canada! Please know, the friendship between our countries will endure,” and he gave them a Canadian flag.

My friend did that for three days, speaking individually to at least five hundred American attendees. Many hugged him, some, he said, with tears in their eyes. Others tried to apologize for their president’s actions and expressed relief and gratitude to hear what he had to say. He told me by the end of the conference, most of the exhibitor booths had his Canadian flag on display, and he heard over and over how much his words and actions had meant.

One man bothered to stick out his neck and make a difference. Singlehandedly, he brought warmth to a small corner of our cold, bitter, divided world. That’s how it’s done.

God knows, there’s so much wrong on our planet, especially right now, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan; the growth of authoritarianism, even fascism, in many countries; the heedless smashing of so much of importance and value. It’s excruciating that we are in many ways hurtling backwards.

What can we do? We can start by working to make a small difference in the lives of those around us. We can be choose to be generous.

Sometimes, all it takes is to stick out your hand to a stranger and smile.

P.S. And sometimes, what a writer like me can do is recognize goodness and celebrate it with words. Jean-Marc was nearly in tears when he read this and has proudly shared it with family and friends.

That’s my tiny contribution, for today, at helping to make the world a more generous place.

What goodness have you noticed today? How can you celebrate it?

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I took courses in creating scene, in social media management and marketing for writers, in “Personal essay as an act of generosity,” “Creating suspense in literary memoir and fiction,” and “How to write a winning nonfiction book proposal.” The talks were mostly instructive and inspiring, although one or two were less so. To tell the truth, I’m not sure I retained much of what I learned in the workshops. What I remembered afterward was being surrounded by — and making contact with — others passionately interested in the written word, in the process of translating thought, feeling, experience, and memory to paper or machine. Plus sunshine. It was thrilling.

Post-Covid I applied to teach there myself and was chosen for this year’s conference, to teach a course was entitled “Tackling your memoir: Seven essential steps to courage and craft.”

My time in San Miguel was once again marvellous. I met lots of interesting people, including two literary agents and a fellow teacher of memoir writing with whom I sat for an hour under the trees, exchanging notes and ideas. I taught my course to thirty people in a tent, sold some books, and heard a series of terrific keynote speakers, including brilliant Canadians Margaret Atwood and John Vaillant.

If you’re interested in specifics, I’ve put the details of what happened there and what they said on my blog from February 13 to 18.

There are lots of great organizations dedicated to writers and writing, and these often produce conferences. Over a decade ago, when I discovered the Creative Nonfiction Collective, I couldn’t wait to join. I managed to arrange a trip to visit friends out west and flew to the annual CNFC conference, held that year in Banff. It was hard, walking into a room full of nonfiction-writing strangers, but I was immediately at ease. One writer I met there has become a close friend; although she lives in Vancouver and I in Toronto, we Zoom when possible every Friday to share our professional, and sometimes personal, woes and triumphs. Eventually I joined the board of CNFC and also the conference organizing committee, forging other deep friendships.

Finding colleagues — cheerleaders for our sometimes lonely creative struggles — is invaluable.

Most countries, provinces, and cities have their own literary festivals and conferences, and sometimes, it’s worth travelling further afield, even as far as Mexico, to find encouragement and support. Attending is expensive, no question, the San Miguel conference especially so. But it can be an investment in a writer’s literary future — and sanity.

And if you’re lucky, you’ll take home nuggets of wisdom like this one, from Atwood: “The power of purring! It’s been proven that if you have a migraine and put a purring cat on your head, you’ll feel better. How you get it to stay there is the problem.”

We ink-stained wretches are a solitary bunch. It’s a rare treat to be surrounded by others pursuing the same elusive goal of literary excellence. I recommend it.

And now, back to strapping that cat to my head.

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By 2005, instead of writing in the journal as soon as I awoke, I’d go to my office, word-process, print, and stick the notes in the book. Most of the time, although I know I have vivid dreams each night, I don’t remember them when I wake up. So the few I do remember, that have stayed with me on the journey from sleep to wakefulness, I’m interested to note. They give me a portrait of what’s going on deep inside, and what they reveal astounds me. Many of the dreams are weird, and many are anxious: I’m doing something wrong, I’m to blame, some disaster is about to happen. 

I tell my students almost never to include dreams in their writing. No one cares about your dreams, I say; they’re meaningful only to you. I include one in my memoir Loose Woman only because it caused me to rethink an important decision and ultimately changed my life. Some dreams are vital. 

So I share the ones below with trepidation, in the hopes they’ll trigger an opening to your own subconscious. And if you do not have your own dream journal, I urge you to consider one, even if it won’t be as splendid as mine.   

Re what’s below: For the 1977 opening night of Cruel Tears, a musical that starred a trucker, the cast was driven to the theatre in an 18-wheeler. Miscast and under-rehearsed, I suffered through one of the most traumatic openings of my career. Except for ten weeks back onstage in 1995, I haven’t acted for nearly thirty-five years, and yet vivid, terrifying theatre nightmares have continued ever since. 

The second dream involves my son, Sam. 

April 8, 2011

I was chatting with a young man — he had a glass of wine and I said, I’m glad I don’t have one, because I’m performing later and it wouldn’t be good. Then felt guilty because he also was performing later and perhaps he thought I was being judgemental. 

Drove to the performance in a huge truck. It was a Noel Coward play. But I was, as always, in a total panic; I couldn’t remember my lines, had no idea even what the first scene was. And, of course, I couldn’t find my script, though I scrabbled through everything on my dressing table.

I rushed to the men’s dressing-room — the British actor Robert Shaw and I were the leads, so he was making up in the dressing-room with the other men — and asked them if they had a script, but no one did. They were amazed, obviously, that I would be asking such a thing on opening night. Of course, I felt terrible, guilty, lazy — I hadn’t done enough work, hadn’t learned the lines properly, as they had. 

Feeling sick with terror, I rushed back to my own dressing room and remembered — ah yes. I ran out, climbed into the truck, and there was my script, near the steering wheel. I began to read feverishly, to remember the first scene which was between me and Shaw. I should be in costume — the first scene was in a bedroom, banter between spouses, I needed an elegant pair of pyjamas and silk dressing gown, nowhere to be seen. There were no costumes in my dressing room. I looked at my watch — it was 9 o’clock, the minute when the show should open, and I had no makeup on, could not find my costume, and didn’t know my lines.

Usually in this kind of dream, the show goes on and I discover I DO know my lines and have been blaming myself needlessly. Here I was torn: part of me was sure I’d do fine once I started to work; part of me was sure I hadn’t done enough preparatory work and would ruin the production and be humiliated. In this one, though, I woke up before going on stage. 

I awoke riven, sick with tension. 

July 16, 2009

Just had such a powerful dream, I’m still in its thrall.  In the dream, I had a premonition that I absolutely, 100% believed — I’d been told, or I just knew, that if Sam went on a particular journey, he would have to fight a wolf and he would be killed. He had to accompany a woman with a baby carriage through the woods — yes, believe it or not, Little Red Riding Hood be damned — and at a certain point the wolf would appear and kill him, and the woman would come to inform me. I had seen it happen in my mind. 

So I did my best to dissuade him from his journey, begging and pleading, but he went anyway, as I knew he would. And at a certain point, I woke up in bed (in the dream) hyperventilating, screaming. It was the exact moment; I knew he was being killed. I screamed, “Sam!” over and over and jumped out of bed. It had happened. I was devastated. I threw on a coat — it’s funny because in the dream, there was a little sidebar element about coats, it was winter and I was looking for a coat with a hood and couldn’t find it and wondered, where’s that black coat? And a little voice was saying, You have too many coats. So there was a Goodwill element to this dream also.

I put on a brown coat without a hood and went out and prowled the streets. I tried to call Sam, but as happens when I am terrified in dreams, I opened my mouth and my throat was so constricted with terror, no sound came out. But I forced a sound and finally could call, “Sam!” No answer. I was on West 94^th Street, Uncle Edgar’s street in NYC. Rounding the corner towards home, I saw a woman in bright blue with the baby carriage standing near my door, one side of her blocked from view by a building. I ran toward her with dread, knowing what she had to tell me — and as I got nearer, there, beside her, was Sam.

It was a moment of the greatest joy, perhaps, that I’ve ever had in a dream. He looked older, a bit battered, and looked at me as if to say, “I know you had to have your dream, and I had to make my journey.” I threw my arms around him and hugged him, felt the strength in his broad chest, and woke up to the light of day with my heart pounding and my throat dry, knowing that this dream had been a great gift.

It’s hard not to feel that it’s ridiculously clear — that my son will grow up and find a partner and make his journey through life, that I will be afraid for him as I always have — why have I feared so much more for Sam than for his sister? Because he’s my baby? A man, shadowing Dad’s polio and too-early death? I’ve lived with this terror since he was a baby, that he was vulnerable. So somehow this dream was telling me that he will be all right on his journey. 

I will let my fear go and let him go. 

If I hadn’t written down these dreams, I wouldn’t remember them, and I think it’s important that I do remember. They’re a signal, no? About what’s lurking, deep inside? 

Do you remember your dreams?

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But, it occurred to me at 3.30 a.m. last night, as interesting ideas tend to do, what use are all those excellent words shut up in Documents? I should share them, pass on to you what I think is vivid, excellent writing, or sometimes advice about how to live. My reading ranges widely, mostly nonfiction but not always. 

The first document I reread from the folder, to see if it held up, was by my favourite nonfiction writer, E. B. White. He’s best known as the author of Charlotte’s Web, a glorious book with the most resonant last lines ever: “It’s not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.”

E.B. — known as Andy — was celebrated in his lifetime as a writer of short nonfiction pieces and essays for the New Yorker and other periodicals, the best of which were gathered into anthologies. The one I annotated, One Man’s Meat, was a gathering of his work during a time of grave crisis for the world: 1939 – 1943. He and his wife, the acclaimed editor Katharine White, were living on their farm in Maine; he was mailing his pieces in to the New Yorker. 

I’ve just read The World She Edited, by Amy Reading, a biography of Katharine which shows that the couple, well-regarded and successful, were also astoundingly neurotic, with constant illnesses that sound more or less genuine on her part and hypochondriac on his. And yet despite his fears and breakdowns, Andy’s crystalline writing is filled with grace and wisdom and wry humour. And some of it is remarkably prescient. 

These are just the briefest excerpts, to give you a taste. 

One Man’s Meat

E.B. White

July 1938.

When I was a child people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waist deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad. 

August 1938

There are hours and hours when a writer’s time isn’t worth the paper he is not writing anything on. 

December 1938 (On improvements in train travel suggested by the Pullman Company) 

Travellers, I will admit, differ temperamentally, differ in their wants and needs; but for me the Pullman Company will never improve on its classic design of upper and lower berth. In my eyes it is a perfect thing, perfect in conception and execution, this small green hole in the dark moving night, this soft warren in a hard world. In it I have always found the peace of spirit that accompanies grotesque bodily situations, peace and a wonderful sense of participation in cosmic rhythms and designs. I have experienced these even on cold nights when I all but died from exposure, under blankets of virgin gossamer. 

June 1940

Today joined a society called Friends of the Land, as at my time of life a man should belong to a club so that he will have somewhere to sit in the afternoon. I am going to put an old chair out by my compost heap and shall go there whenever I feel sociable and friendly toward the land. Membership cost me five dollars, which is the first time my high regard for earth has ever cost me a nickel; but these are expensive times. 

Am writing this on the fourth day of the Battle of France, as the announcer calls it, so there will probably be no continuous thought from one paragraph to the next. I am not able to write on a single harmonious theme while jumping up frequently to hear whether freedom is still alive. I don’t think I would lose my nerve if I were directly engaged in war, but this radio warfare makes me edgy. I suspect I joined my club only because I was rattled. When I am composed I feel no need of affiliating myself with anybody. There is a lot of the cat in me, and cats are not joiners. 

November 1940

For a number of years past I have been agreeably encumbered by a very large and dissolute dachshund named Fred. Of all the dogs whom I have served I’ve never known one who understood so much of what I say or held it in such deep contempt. When I address Fred I never have to raise either my voice or my hopes. He even disobeys me when I instruct him in something that he wants to do. And when I answer his peremptory scratch at the door and hold the door open for him to walk through, he stops in the middle and lights a cigarette, just to hold me up. 

When a glass of wine is poured a wine fly appears promptly — but I never see him at any other time and wonder where he keeps himself in the meanwhile and what he does for a drink. 

April 1941

There is a stanza in Robert Frost’s poem “Two Tramps in Mud Time” that describes an April moment when air and sky have a vernal feeling but suddenly a cloud crosses the path of the sun and a bitter little wind finds out you, and you’re back in the middle of March. Everyone who has lived in the country knows that sort of moment — the promise of warmth, the raised hope, the ruthless rebuff.

There is another sort of day that needs to be celebrated in song — the day of days when spring at last holds up her face to be kissed, deliberate and unabashed. On that day no wind blows either in the hills or in the mind, no chill finds the bone. It is a day that can come only in a northern climate, where there has been a long background of frigidity, a long deficiency of sun.

Whenever I tell about spring, or any delights that I experience, or the pleasant country, I think of a conversation I had with a friend in the city shortly before I left. “I trust,” he said with an ugly leer, “that you will spare the reading public your little adventures in contentment.”

December 1941 (America has entered the war)

To hold America in one’s thoughts is like holding a love letter in one’s hand — it has so special a meaning. Since I started to write this column snow has begun falling again; I sit in my room watching the re-enactment of this age-old phenomenon outside the window. For this picture, this privilege, this cameo of New England with snow falling, I would give everything. Yet all the time I know that this very loyalty, this feeling of being part of a special place, this respect for one’s native scene — I know that such emotions have had a big part in the world’s wars. Who is there big enough to love the whole planet? We must find such people for the next society.

October 1942 (about a concert raising money for war bonds) 

After the band had performed, a young Jewish soldier stepped forward and played a violin solo. For him there could be nothing obscure about war aims. It was a war for the right to continue living and the privilege of choosing his own composer when he played the fiddle. He played solidly and well, with a strength that the Army had given his hands and his spirit. The music seemed to advance boldly toward the enemy’s lines.

Here, for a Nazi, was assembled in one hall all that was contemptible and stupid — a patriotic gathering without strict control from a central leader, a formless group negligently dressed …, a group shamelessly lured there by a pretty girl for bait, a Jew in an honoured position as artist, Negroes singing through their rich non-Aryan throats, and the whole affair lacking the official seal of the Ministry of Propaganda — a sprawling, goofy American occasion, shapeless as an old hat. 

It made me feel very glad to be there. And somewhere during the evening, I picked up a strong conviction that our side was going to win. 

November 1942

Monday. Noticed this morning how gray Fred is becoming, our elderly dachshund. His trunk and legs are still red but his muzzle, after dozens of major operations for the removal of porcupine quills, is now a sort of strawberry roan, with many white hairs, the result of worry. Next to myself he is the greatest worrier and schemer on the premises and always has too many things on his mind. He not only handles all his own matters but he has a follow-up system by which he checks on all of mine to see that everything is taken care of. His interest in every phase of farming remains undiminished, as does mine, but his passion for details is a kind of obsession and seems to me unhealthy. He wants to be present in a managerial capacity at every event, no matter how trifling or routine; it makes no difference whether I am dipping a sheep or simply taking a bath myself … His activities and his character constitute an almost uninterrupted annoyance to me, yet he is such an engaging old fool that I am quite attached to him, in a half-regretful way. Life without him would be heaven, but I am afraid it is not what I want.

This morning early, after I had milked and separated, I managed to lose my grip on the bowl of new cream as I was removing it from under the spout and lost the whole mess on the floor where it spread like lava to the corners of the room. For a moment my grief at this enormous mishap suffused my whole body, but the familiar assistance of Fred, who had supervised the separation and taken charge of the emergency, came to my relief. He cleaned up a pint and a half of cream so that you would not have known anything had happened. As charboy and scavenger he is the best dog I was ever associated with; nothing even faintly edible ever has to be cleaned up from the floor. He handles it. 

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Born to Blog

It’s like a pressure build-up, that’s the only way I can describe the need to chronicle. In the past, the cause could sometimes be extreme, like childbirth or fury or grief or the heartbreak and euphoria of love; most of those not for quite some time, thank heavens. More recently, it can simply be an event to examine or an idea to mull over. When something hits, I deal with it by writing it down. I am a person who needs to transfer life experience from gut, through brain, down the arm to paper. For nearly fifty years, to a diary.

I started keeping a sporadic but constant journal in 1959 at the age of nine, with a gold lamé one-year diary with tiny lock and key. There was no set routine. Long periods, months, went by when I didn’t write at all, and sometimes, during especially fraught times, I wrote several times a day. If I want to find out where I was at almost any time through the span of my life, I can dig through and find out; it’s all there. My past is stored in dusty boxes under the bed.

And other people’s pasts too, since my family and friends — and lovers and enemies — are also chronicled. I sometimes go to anniversaries or birthday parties carrying an amusing excerpt about someone else. 

I’ve paid a price for my diaries. People who live with a diarist know that private words are concealed somewhere in the house and sometimes hunt for and read them. A few in my life have been hurt by what they’ve read, and I’ve been hurt by their pain and anger. I learned to be careful where I store the things. There’s even a clause in my will about dealing with the diaries after my death; my kids can make a giant bonfire in the backyard and dance around the burning pyre, or they can publish them, the chronicles of a well-examined life. I won’t care about my diaries after I’m dead. Their job is done. 

People wonder why I need them. Aren’t you so busy writing, they say, you’re not actually living? Don’t hang onto the past, don’t dwell; let things go and move on! In most lives, after a momentous event, happy or sad, frightening or wondrous, the impulse is to register it and, yes, move on. Perhaps tell a trusted friend, or write an email or call a family member, and then move on. And then there are diarists.  Moving on is not something we do. We live our lives like everyone else, and then we live it all again, on paper. 

Or online. In 2007, I started a blog. Only rarely, since then, have I written something just for my eyes alone. Mostly now I share my thoughts and experiences with whoever reads the blog — my public diary.

Why do diaries and now blogs matter? They bring comfort and sanity, thoughtfulness, truth, therapy, companionship, insight, friendship. They mean taking time to ponder, process, remember. We diarists make sense of life by keeping track. As events go whipping by, we can hang on, slow time a bit by taking note. I continue to chronicle because I don’t know how to live any other way. I cannot take a trip without recounting it.  I cannot go through a life-changing or even just an interesting experience without noting it. A businessman friend told me he has written in his journal every night since he was nineteen. “I need to feel my life has some meaning,” he said. “That makes sense to me, all those binders, side by side.”

Yes, diaries can spring from pain. Lonely or isolated children, or adults who’ve suffered, are more likely to need to figure things out than those who are busy playing soccer or bridge. And thank God for that introspection, as many of our great writers started as lonely children with a pencil and paper. Now, science has proven that keeping track of experiences and thoughts is good for our psychological and even physical health. I think it’s a lucky family that has a chronicler, the person with the travel notebook, the letter writer, the family eulogist, someone who keeps the family stories and most likely the family photographs and mementoes as well. 

I used to envy Carol Shields, the rare female author who managed to have a good long-term marriage, a big family, and a very successful writing career — a trifecta that did not work out for me. Then I read an interview with her, in which she said the one thing she regretted most in her life was that she’d never kept a diary. 

One for the win over here, my friends. 

I never understood why I’ve had this particular writing bug since childhood, until one day my mother gave me a thick envelope. “Thought you of all people would appreciate these,” she said. Inside were stacks of small notebooks that turned out to be the travel diaries of both my grandfathers. My English grandfather recorded all his trips in meticulous detail, starting with his visit to us when I was a year old, during which my father contracted polio and nearly died, an event barely mentioned in his pages. My American grandfather wrote about an exotic tour through Europe with his new girlfriend after my grandmother’s death. Best of all was an impressive journal my father kept of a work trip to China — his contacts and speeches, the sights he was seeing, the food he was eating, the books he was reading. 

So it’s a gene, I think — the diary-writing gene. My daughter, the girl whose birth I wrote about, is too busy to chronicle and in any case, doesn’t have an introspective bone in her body. My son, on the other hand, figures things out in notebooks. He has inherited the gene.

Here’s a diary excerpt from 1964, when I was a florid fourteen:

I want to be a Writer. I want to be able to put down, on paper, new and breathtaking thoughts.  I want my reader to be captivated in the spell my words are weaving, that won’t leave him until he’s finished devouring my book. I want the world to quietly salute me, eyes blinded with tears as the truth of my words stings! Or the beauty of my words touches! Or even as the simplicity of my words enchants!

But I don’t have an original thought in my frivolous head. My world is too dominated by the Others, whose judgement I fear. Will I ever have a beautiful, simple or even truthful thought? I doubt it – even if I became a hermit, I would be afraid of something. I’m a moral and social coward. I could maybe write fanciful, sex-filled love stories, that only sex-starved schoolgirls (like myself) could enjoy.

Oh, will my dream ever come true?

My love, this is your writer self answering you, sixty years later. It’s not quite how you envisioned it, but yes. Yes, your dream came true.

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Born to Blog