New home for my writing - find me on Substack

Hello everyone,

I've moved my writing over to Substack. All of the posts on this blog now appear over there as well.

I made this change because I was subscribing to several people's Substack newsletters, and it seemed like a very user-friendly and congenial place to share my own and others' work. A personal blog can feel a bit like an island, whereas Substack has a more communal feel to it.

I'll keep this blog active for the time being just in case something changes in future -- but for now you can find my Substack newsletter-slash-blog by clicking here. And please subscribe if you'd like!

Jeannie

Two new poems: "Climate" and "On finding a stone..."

 

 I have been fortunate enough to have two poems published this week. Oddly enough, they were both accepted during the same week back in February, and they appeared in publication only two days apart.

The first one, "Climate,"  appears in Stone Circle Review, a lovely new journal run single-handedly by editor Lee Potts.

I started writing this poem during one of the many gloomy, rainy days we had this past winter. (Did you know this was Ontario's darkest winter in over 80 years?) It began as more of a gripe than anything else, but the process of writing it really got me thinking about the bigger picture of what is happening to our planet.

Here's the first bit of the poem:

I hate winter rain, how it soaks
dirty snow heavy, sluices beneath ice
dams at the curb, how it seeps,
weighs....

(read the whole poem HERE)

 

  image courtesy of Stone Circle Review

 

The second of the two is called "On finding a stone to put in your father's casket" and appears in River Mouth Review. It's very fitting that it was published so close to the one-year anniversary of Dad's death. My brother Errol and I were the ones tasked with the stone-finding mission the morning of Dad's funeral; it's something I will never forget.

Here are the first few lines:

Morning of the funeral, you drive out
to the farm. Best not to disturb

the new owners, also the lane
is muddy and rutted, so you pull in

off the road...

(read the whole poem HERE)

 

image courtesy of River Mouth Review
(this is not the stone we picked up at the farm)

Something the darkness can't take

I never thought I would like murder mystery TV shows, but I've discovered I do.

After enjoying seven seasons of Grantchester, about a vicar who helps the local police inspector solve murders in a village near Cambridge, England, I've recently been watching Endeavour. Set in Oxford, England in the 1960s, it's an excellent series that focuses on Endeavour Morse, a moody young detective working with his mentor, Inspector Thursday, to solve complex murder cases. 

(Hmmm... two shows about university towns with lots of murders... considering I live in a university town, should I worry? Or should I just get busy solving crimes?)

In an early episode, Morse is rattled by a psychopathic murderer whom they have just captured. Before he is taken away, the killer makes pointed comments about Morse's painful past and how the two of them are alike: brilliant but lonely.

As they stand on the roof of a college building after catching the killer, Morse asks Inspector Thursday how he does it -- how he can leave his work at the front door when he goes home to his family at the end of the day.

 image from Endeavour, "Fugue"

"'Cause I have to," replies Thursday grimly. "A case like this'll tear the heart right out of a man."

Then he says, "Find something worth defending."

Morse says, "I thought I had found something." (He doesn't elaborate.)

"Music?" Thursday asks, referring to Morse's love of opera and classical music. "I guess music is as good as anything. Go home, put your best record on -- loud as it'll play -- and with every note, you remember: that's something that the darkness couldn't take from you."

 image from Endeavour, "Fugue"

I've thought about these lines a lot since watching this episode. They remind me a bit of Sam in the movie depiction of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Two Towers, urging Frodo to hold onto the fact "that there's some good in this world... and it's worth fighting for."

I noted that Thursday doesn't say, "Find a cause or a project and put all your effort into it." There are definitely times when we need to throw ourselves behind a worthy cause. But not everyone is in a position to pursue a big project, become an influencer, blaze new trails, fight big battles. I think the deeper point is that anything beautiful and meaningful, anything you love (even something that's been misused, as the killer in the Endeavour episode had misused music by basing his crimes on scenes from various operas), can be a force that resists darkness, that can't be destroyed by the evil in this world.

I was going to continue this post with a list of things that might fit this description. Music. Poetry. Birds. Sunsets. Sunrises. But to be honest, it sounded a bit feeble. And anyway, Thursday says "music is as good as anything" -- as if it doesn't even matter that much what the thing is. So there doesn't seem to be any point in making a list.

Then today I read this paragraph in poet Maggie Smith's fantastic new memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful:

What now? I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.* But here's the thing about carrying light with you. No matter where you go, and no matter what you find -- or don't find -- you change the darkness just by entering it. You clear a path through it.

And it hit me: yes, we need to find something worth defending, something the darkness can't take away ... but we also are something the darkness can't take away. Just by being truthfully, genuinely ourselves we make a difference. Who we are can be an act of resistance to the forces that seek to destroy and divide. We can fight the darkness by being the carriers of light that we already are, and by letting our light reveal everything -- and everyone -- that is good and beautiful.

I find that well worth pondering. And I love it when the things I'm watching and reading, whether murder mystery or memoir, come together to tell me something.

*"I am out with lanterns, looking for myself": line from Emily Dickinson

Five Minute Friday: STORY

 

I'm linking up with the Five Minute Friday community, writing for five minutes on a given prompt. This week's word is STORY.

I haven't been writing much in 2023 so far. The main reason is that my mother-in-law became ill with cancer in the fall and died early last week. At her funeral last Saturday, my brother-in-law and nephew got up and spoke about her devotion to her family, her deep faith, and her independent, adventurous spirit.

They also shared stories of her funny ways -- such as the time she went to a thrift store and unwittingly bought back the same pair of white pants she had donated months earlier. 

That anecdote got quite a laugh. I particularly appreciate that my mother-in-law actually told us about that in the first place. Some people would be too embarrassed to have anyone else know they'd done something like that. Not her. 

Telling someone else's story is a big responsibility, especially when they're not there to defend themselves or raise their hand and say, "Wait, that's not right -- they were black pants!" (They weren't. They were definitely white.)

I've been talked about in another person's publicly told story, and I have found it hard, painful work to separate their need to tell their own story in their own way from my desire to be depicted accurately and fairly. As Barbara Brown Taylor says in An Altar in the World,

"...encountering another human being is as close to God as I may ever get -- in the eye-to-eye thing, the person-to-person thing -- which is where God's Beloved has promised to show up.... The point is to see the person standing right in front of me, who has no substitute, who can never be replaced, whose heart holds things for which there is no language, whose life is an unsolved mystery. The moment I turn that person into a character in my own story, the encounter is over. I have stopped being a human being and have become a fiction writer instead."

Ultimately we can't control what others say. We can only live our own story with as much honesty and integrity as possible and try to respect that "unsolved mystery" in everyone else we meet. My mother-in-law was not perfect, but she loved us and we loved her. She can never be replaced, but we honoured her as best we could as we commemorated the end of her earthly story.

me with my mother-in-law, Audrey, on March 1, 2023 (six days before she died)