Eat to Live, Live to Eat: in which the columnist attends the Gremolata launch celebration

My mom’s cookbook collection is vast, spanning centuries of information, and bringing her garden and indeed, the whole globe, right into her kitchen. It wouldn’t be a surprise to find a spiral recipe collection put out as a fundraiser by the ladies of Latvia, or a guide to insect cookery around the world. There is for sure an entire volume on what to do with your Ontario zucchini harvest, a rare English translation of Romany gypsy cookery, and Tony Chachere’s amazing southern American swamp food guide, complete with recipes for raccoon, possum, and gator.

I’m forever sifting through this stunning wealth and jotting down interesting ways to stuff an eggplant, or learning the nutritional content of the oyster and how it got there. I dreamed of having a food library just as vast, but reality was in the way: my tiny urban dwelling, while perfectly adequate, is not a sprawling farmhouse. The kitchen is about three feet by three feet. And so I must be choosy with my cookbooks, to fit them onto the one shelf that they share with my coloured mixing bowls and the coffee maker.

I don’t know the exact science behind the birth of Malcolm Jolley’s Gremolata Magazine, but I bet it’s not that different from me sitting at Mom’s, grazing through her cookery library, washing fresh earth off of the tomato harvest, stirring something simmering and garlicky, and sipping some amazing Niagara wine- from grapes grown across the street. How can we bring this experience into the city? How can we connect the most sacred substance we know of- food- with our newfangled technologies?

Why, with Gremolata dot com, of course: “Our business model is simple. Provide superior content and the ability for people to connect and interact with it. We embrace technology and incorporate it with the traditional values of classic journalism.”

Gremolata is that portal that magically marries modernity to a total emphasis on our local heritage, yet somehow manages to be armchair travel to all corners of the earth. It is a vast library of cookbooks. It is a place to tune in to what’s worth watching on food television. It’s a place to meet the people who grow, prepare, and eat our food. It skims the headlines of the world news, letting us know what we need to about the one topic on which every human being depends entirely. It helps us shop for wine. Yes, there is a time and place for the pages of a cookbook, complete with pumpkin pie stains of past Thanksgivings. Yet the techno-gifts of today’s world are not in competition with these savory saving graces. They can keep us in touch with joy.

Indeed, the five year old web magazine- which as of yesterday evolved into an interactive gathering hub for chefs, writers, relatives and other people who eat – has a very simple and pure soul. Its entire mandate, while dressed opulently in gourmand experiences and contrasting philosophies of what food means, is bare bones basic. “The greatest moments in our day and our life can surround the simplest of pleasures.”

We eat. We drink. We are merry.

What is ‘gremolata?’ Well, technically, it’s a concoction of garlic, parsley, and lemon peel that accompanies a heavy Italian meal such as veal shank. But its meaning transcends its ingredient listing and suggests notions like ‘on the side’ or ‘to go with perfectly’ or ‘a little something extra’ or ‘a morsel.’ The much courser word ‘shmecks’ is a bit off, but not entirely, and the Louisiana “lagniappe” is just about perfect, except the southern ‘little extra’ is not necessarily food, and not necessarily lemon and garlic. Gremolata conjures ‘the simplest of pleasures.’ There’s a vast world of meaning that goes into what we put into our bodies. Our world, our health, our cultures are all dependent on the fact that we need to eat and how we do it. Lucky for us creative humans, we don’t simply run out, grab a bird or a berry, and be done with it. We mix, combine, experiment, and gather together.

Last night hundreds gathered together in celebration of Gremolata’s new direction, which has evolved from a stricter magazine format with scheduled issues to an ever-building and totally interactive portal. The evolution is thanks to our Jolley founder and his colleague James Geneau. The launch was held at Hart House at the University of Toronto, where the church and academia-architecture was a spirit not lost on me. Upon entering, I surveyed the scene before me, and it was one of total joy. There were food lovers of every ilk, totally relaxed, a sea of garnet wines, and laughter. Gremolata celebrates the heritage of the earth right where we are, and dozens of incredible Ontario food producers were sharing their magic with us.

Malcolm Jolley

James Geneau

(In turn, the launch also honoured The Stop Community Food Centre. The Stop is a sustainable ‘food bank’ and education project that grows and gives real food, engaging those who need their services in learning and social involvement. A dazzling 100 percent of food used by the Food Stop comes from local farming. It was worth going just to learn about this amazing place, because I confess with embarrassment that I have never heard of it. It’s not that long ago since I’ve used food bank services, and I always lamented how the crappiest of the crud is what was donated for the poor. The Stop thinks outside the can, and though I would never shun the generosity of an emergency meal, a project like this can help people in a whole different way than just the critical need today. Please visit www.thestop.org to learn more about this incredible food centre.)

The Stop Community Food Centre

The Gremolata experience yesterday was like an edible re-enactment of Thanksgiving- the real one, where we are thankful for our food, not the one where we steal it from those generous enough to share. Is there anyone who does not secretly loath Christmas, preferring Thanksgiving? It’s all the good stuff of the holiday- food, family, and heritage- and none of that consumerist gift crap and heinous mall music. While I once enjoyed Hark the Herald Angels sing as much as anyone did the first forty-eight renditions they heard, I could happily go the rest of my years without ever, ever humming Deck the Halls or White Christmas against my will again. The meals aren’t that far off- turkey, cranberries, and at my house both red and white sauerkraut. I always loved the insignia of Thanksgiving, even if our kindly kindergarten teachers did leave a few massacre details out of the friendly Indian stories. I loved the idea of sitting with a feathered chief, learning how to get the eggplants and corn and pumpkins out of the earth and into the cornucopia!

The autumn harvest couldn’t be a better time for the Gremolata launch, because in its essence, the ‘magazine’ is all about Thanksgiving, all year long. Food and family. Local harvest. Global traditions. Gremolata.com is a cornucopia of friends sharing food.

Some of the food we shared last night caused me to run out of adjectives. Divine, inspiring, succulent, spectacular, delicious, intriguing, bold, charismatic….

This summer, Caplansky’s opened a deli menu at The Monarch Tavern (12 Clinton Street, Toronto). Last night they shared what was by far the best-smoked meat I have ever put into my mouth. Ditto for their crisp, salty pickles. I’ll be making a trek across town on a regular basis for this stuff- possibly even today!

Now, pickles are one of my favourite weaknesses. And so I stopped by Forbes Wild Foods to try something weird- pickled milkweed. WOW! Forbes Wild Foods (www.wildfoods.ca) is as local as you can get. Our ‘ancestors ate wild crafted foods’ that grow freely in their habitats, and ‘do not need watering, fertilizing, cultivation, or spraying.’ What, you mean you just go outside and pick stuff that’s there and eat it? Yes, exactly. Forbes harvests the foods by hand and only uses items that are in abundant supply from Mama Nature! So, what does that mean- dandelions? This imaginative food source sells fifteen or more types of dried wild mushrooms. How about wild rose petal syrup, or birch syrup? Fiddleheads, daisy capers, cloudberry compote…this is seriously radical stuff, taking the meaning of ‘all natural’ down to its purest essence. Why not try one of their gift baskets this Thanksgiving or Christmas?

Soiled Reputation offered ‘temptations from the garden.’ I indulged in about seven types of heirloom tomatoes- purple ones! You can read more about Malcolm Jolley’s visit to this awesome farm (http://gremolata.com/Articles/322-Soiled-in-Stratford-Antony-John-and-Friends.aspx). They grow vegetables throughout the winter, making ‘local produce’ possible all year long.

Finally, I can’t depart without mentioning the Arvinda’s line of spice rubs and seasonings. The most horrible part of going gluten-free- besides, of course, living without beer- was the surprise presence of gluten in nearly every spice mix on the market. While I’m quite adept at mixing my own spices, when you’re trying out other cultures, you can’t just assume your Canadian hand is as skilled as the ones that have made it since time began. For example, Creole or Cajun spice blends were a staple of my chicken making for years, and now I miss them. Arvinda’s impressive line of curry and masala mixtures is entirely gluten-free with no additives! They are totally affordable, and available widely (Sobey’s, for example, or check in with them at www.arvindas.com. The cook in a rush is not always a lazy cook, and even if we’re pressed for time, we deserve to enjoy and serve a delicious menu. I’ll have one of each of these blends on hand from now on for those hasty but tasty occasions.

Of course you will all gather with me from now on, to share and experience food the Gremolata way. (In case you didn’t know, I’m the Gremolata Spice Girl! Don’t miss my column, introducing the history, magic and flavour of one spice at a time. I also cannot resist the urge to plug the extensive article selection by the offbeat and amazing Ivy Knight.) If you’re new to Gremolata, you can be sure your life is about to get richer, more abundant, more connected to the earth, and to others. Yum!

The Spice Girl

www.gremolata.com

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at Gremolata, or at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

David Foster Wallace- 1962-2008

Following the series of recent reflections on writers and depression, and on the tough time I’m having coping with the suicide of a dear friend last Thanksgiving, the news of David Foster Wallace’s suicide slapped me across the face. His father said he had battled depression for several decades. Wallace, author of Oblivion and Infinite Jest and much, much more, was that rare breed who has a genius for both math and words. He had a dark humour and a deep wisdom within his human confusion. I’m so very sorry that he couldn’t take it anymore.

When I was a little girl who decided I was going to be a writer, it might have been worthwhile for someone to tell me, “Writers end up killing themselves.” No way, no way, no way. It is true that Wallace joins an unbelievably long lineage of writers who committed suicide: Hunter S. Thompson, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway, Arthur Koestler, John Kennedy Toole, Gertrude Bell, Anne Sexton, and so on. I wish David Foster Wallace, and everyone else who suffers from depression, total peace. If you just couldn’t take it anymore, I understand and wish you rest. The lingering question, though, is what we’ve lost and cannot know. There are those who come back from the brink and go on to do the most important, world-changing work of their lives. Johnny Cash comes to mind- he crawled out of the cave he went into to die, and comforted the rest of the lost world until he was an old man. Rev. Troy Perry slit his wrists and crawled into the tub to float into oblivion, but failed at his quest. He went on to lead the world in establishing freedom and equal rights for gay and lesbian people, and created a progressive, love-based faith where people could learn to love themselves and others instead of practicing hate. Your contribution may not be so huge, but is no less important: your friends, your children, your work mates may need your kind of wit or sarcasm or kindness. You do not know.

Rest in peace, Mr. Wallace.

for David Foster Wallace

It’s hell to lose another teacher to despair,
and trite to say his memory will live on, though that it will.
Cliche to say that this cruel world just isn’t fair
but some of us won’t make it up and over yonder hill.
In my own tawdry gloomy struggles with God and man
with a knack, perhaps; no genius, but still a fan,
I wrestle, too, with the cosmic joke, Divine Comedy, the Infinite Jest
and I hope that you have found relief and rest.

Lorette C. Luzajic

www.thegirlcanwrite.net

The Cure for Depression: a melodrama of depression, madness, and the writing life

The tidal wave of darkness that totally floored me a few months back shows no sign of lifting. It lets up for a moment or two, and then floods in with a vengeance. I cannot take the weight of the sorrow. I did my best to accept my burdens with dignity and thought I’d made it. But now I’m facing something I can’t fully explain. All the years I spent ‘dealing’ like a good little girl have come undone. The depth of where I am is so incredibly far from light and hope that at some moments I wonder if I even exist, if I have finally unraveled.

Eight of Swords by L.C. Luzajic

I feel unhinged when I’m unable to pull it together and find my familiar toolkit- brash, sassy confidence, in small and sporadic but useful doses. None to be seen. I roll with the punches, more or less, I like to think, and though I seem to attract a great deal of chaos, I’ve always been kind of Tao about the whole of it, accepting my fate to bear witness to the wilderness of the human heart. I’m a rollercoaster of bipolar emotions- this is no secret so don’t call the paper! My friend Dimitri and I used to kvetch about the baggage fleet we had with us on our journey- bags, lots of ‘em, pink, frilly, cherry-scented Louis Vuitton. Garcon!

I’m unraveling these days, found myself crying on a stoop on Davenport Road today, and looking back at my impulsive seesaw life, and at myself sobbing in the street, I saw that I had more than a few things in common with Britney Spears- everything except her thighs and her money.

There was a brief light in this embarrassing public display of affliction- a woman on a bicycle stopped by, discreetly and without obtrusiveness, and asked if everything was all right. I was touched. But right after that, the tide took me in deeper, as I wondered how it is that a total stranger could see that I was hurting, but my closest friends have failed to notice? And that some of them never gave a damn about anyone but themselves and have betrayed me? And then I went right on feeling sorry for myself, wondering how it is that the dead friends call more often than the living.

Oh, trust me, I know: I analyze too much, stay awake puzzling together what went wrong. Often I come up with a big fat blank, and the truth looms impossible and stark: people just suck, really suck, even the very best of them, and in the long run, no matter how much you might care, it’s every man for himself. If I croak tonight, how long would it be before anyone noticed? How long would it be before anybody comes to feed the cats?

Good Lord, is this the mid-life crisis already? Hmm, I don’t know. Whether it’s a particularly bad flare-up of the umpteen mental diagnoses I share with my family members, unresolved grief, a brand new kind of madness, or simply defeat and despair after too many sorrows to bear, the situation is…critical.

It’s manifesting in the most irritating ways- poorly timed crying jags, temper tantrums, entire buckets of triple chocolate ice cream. Worse, “I see dead people.” I see them all the time. The other day I saw a dozen or more Zoes crossing the street all at once. I even waved. It was nicer to see her like that than to find her when I’m home alone, opening my closet to look for a shirt, and there she is, hanging among my peach-knit shawls. That’s the thing about losing someone to suicide. You can make as much damn peace as you want with it. But you can never get the macabre ending out of your head.

heading to the wake for zoe

When I was a kid, my dad used to drive for miles to avoid any passing trains. We were kids, we liked to see trains. But Dad would turn the car around and drive in the other direction, and Mom would start crying and crying. Later, I was old enough to understand why. Uncle J. jumped in front of one when he couldn’t take it anymore. Mom didn’t want to spend her whole day thinking about her brother. There were things to do. You can’t always just walk around sobbing. You have to occasionally make room for joy instead of just hurting. So you avoid the big triggers. You manage your life around them, and for the most part, you’re okay.

Thing is, lately I’m not okay, and though I know I will be- I’m a strong girl- right now I’m walking around like an open wound. More than two thirds of my support team is six feet under, and the dirt is still fresh. And practically everything I look at or see is a fucking trigger.

Regardless of how this horrible darkness happened- circumstance, or genetics, or both, I’m a person who feels everything. I could feel the pain of complete strangers. My therapist called it ‘empathic.’ Less kindly observers would call it overly sensitive. Sitting on a bus, I could feel the next person’s emotions and their life story would suddenly reveal itself. People came to me with their problems, as if I could do fat lot about it. But come they did, heaping their sorrows and crimes and chaos upon me. And I was s thin-skinned, as Mom would always say, “Toughen up, you thin-skinned ninny!” Indeed, I was practically transparent. You could see through the skin and watch my beating heart. I’m nothing but a bundle of raw nerves. Everything hurts. The only thing I could do to keep the pain at a dull roar was to write it down.

Marko, the crazy sailor I married, was one of the biggest believers I’ve ever had in my writing. I’m grateful to have a few believers, both my parents, and my childhood soul-mate Japey, who, yes, is also fucking dead. I know my dear friend Sal is out there somewhere overseas, reading this and anything else he can find, and trusting more than I do that I’ll “make it.”  And then there’s the crazy Canadian eccentric, Crad Kilodney, and we’ll get to him later.

Marko’s infamous comment- “Girl, you are a good fucking writer,” – spurred me to the name The Girl Can Write. And losing him made me certain I never wanted to waste another day working in a mall, working anywhere at all but at my desk, writing. And though I worked hard at my writing since I was five, I have never worked so hard as I have in the past three years since I found his dead body on the kitchen floor. Stephen King, one of the most prolific and amazing storytellers of all time, who also writes about ghosts, said writing is a lonely business, and you need to have support. I’m grateful that I had someone who hung on to my every word.

happy times

King also said a writer should write for four hours a day and read for four hours a day. So I’ve been pretty much writing for eight and reading for six, trying to make up for lost time, trying to stay focused, trying to cheat death by doing everything I can to keep my spirit alive. I’ve been producing like a fiend, fine-tuning, branching out, trying new things, reworking, working, playing. There are several novels on tap, another collection of poetry under way, several full-length nonfiction treatises on the backburner, and umpteen projects that think outside the book. I’ve got short stories on the go, and dozens of these inspirational, personal experiences with literature or pop culture that my fans seem to want the most. I’m writing, writing, writing.

Despite the productivity and creativity I’ve proudly embraced in recent years, learning important tasks like how to write when you don’t feel like it (and hoping one day to learn other important tasks like how to focus on one project at a time and how to alleviate stress by finishing things way before the deadline), well, for all that, I admit that a big part of my current episode of depression is fear of flying.

You see, in the beginning, it was enough. I was a league ahead of the many, many ‘writers’ around me. There was nothing to fear. So many called themselves writers. They were going to write a book some day. One day when they had time. I never had this embarrassment. Whether I was stuck in kindergarten class, or stuck in an affordable rental crack house, or stuck in retail hell, or stuck on the side of the street begging your spare change, I was writing. I never had to be shy about calling myself a writer. You could argue whether or not it was good writing, but from my first seahorse poem, age five, to my first co-produced zine in second grade, The Sunshine Peanut, to age 12, when I began publishing, I was writing. I was doing a lot of other things, too, that I should not have been doing, or that I should have been more focused on… but when Margaret Atwood was autographing my copy of The Blind Assassin, and gave me that seething, freezing look she’s famous for giving- I’d been rude enough to thank her for her inspiration on my writing- I did not have to wither away because I was ‘posing’ as a writer. I was a writer. A published one, too. Sure, not many had heard of zines like Canned Phlegm or Minus Tides. But whatever- I’d appeared alongside frigging Burroughs and Bukowski- how’s that for chick lit? Eat my shorts, you boring bastards!

Following all that was the sheer high of quitting ‘the real world’ and pounding the keyboard in real time, not stolen time. It was twin terror that forced me to quit my ten year plus reign as one of Canada’s best booksellers- yes, I have a ‘certificate’ -that’s not something I would make up! While I had to occasionally use food banks though I was working full time, I loved the bookstore. I am so grateful for all that reading. But my physical health was very bad and I had to take a medical leave of absence, and at that same time my husband passed away. Needless to say, I had a nervous breakdown and it was absolutely impossible to go back to work full-time. And so I began to work at home, harder than I’ve ever worked before, in between shitty odd jobs. My heart got a bit better, but that takes forever. My body bloomed from the rest and the retreat from stress and from finally some real and treatable diagnoses. In three years, I’ve written more than I have my whole life before.

Somewhere in the schemata, tragic though it might be, I can even fit the quatruple-duple-zuple whammy of all the close friends dying these past few years. Oh, it hurts, believe me, everywhere I look it hurts. Not just trains, but, well, everything. Every thing I look at might remind me. Hospitals. Sofas. Closets. Baby toys. Love’s Baby Soft Spray Cologne. Abba. No matter where I look, something reminds me of AIDS, of cancer, of addiction, of suicide. Cars are okay, though. So far, miraculously, I have not lost anyone to a car crash! Statistically, I’m going to, and I wonder who will be next?

And while it’s true that I mourn, I never for a second take for granted those I love left living. Every single day I pray for you, think about you, thank God for you. And I spend a great deal of time in abject fear that you will die. Morbid? Maybe. But there aren’t enough candles in my chapel to go around each week when I go in. If you die, too, I will have to start bringing my own. (I could make my own film, “Sixteen Candles,” very different from the original.)

But yeah, you see, even in this tragic deathtrap that I seem to walk about in- my first published story by the way was Meet Me at the River, a story about death by a 12 year old girl- oh, and my first literary award in grade eight was for a poem called Marching to the Grave- I’m not making this shit up-you see, my theory is that everyone dies, so it’s actually not that unusual if it happens. And for whatever reason, total strangers write to me and tell me that I give them comfort with my crazy blend of morbid yet rapier wit when I talk about grief and loss. I have long believed that writers to some extent are channelers of the worlds we cannot see. I am a scribe, an instrument, one who gives the spirits their two cents worth. I freeze in time what has happened today by making a permanent record. One day, I will be dead, and this rambling piece about my mid-life crisis will still be floating around on cyberspace. Even my dad, who does not like such vague ghostly poetry talk about spirits (unless it is securely grounded in the poetry of the King James Bible) told me that my biography will be called A Life of Death. Awww, thaaaaaaaaaaanks, Dad.

But I digress….as usual. The crisis that’s materializing now is that hellish one that every writer must go through. For some, it underlies the whole of the writer’s life. Usually it comes in chewable doses that I can masticate and move on from. Lately it’s been a tidal wave. It’s hard to explain exactly what the crisis is, but if you read the following paragraph very quickly, and let it run around in your head over and over on high speed and high volume, you’ll get the general idea:

Is this any good? Why is it even important? Does anybody really read this stuff, and if so, why does it matter? Who says your thoughts are worth the trees? Shouldn’t you be out helping people? Why didn’t you study plumbing? Will the computer bill get paid this month? Next month? How will I work if it’s unplugged? What about the rent? You can’t stand anything you wrote before 2002- who says you’ll think this is worth the while in four years today? What if carpal tunnel cripples me? Do you really have anything original to say? Does it matter? Do I matter?

Yep, for all that brazen confidence I occasionally exude, I’m truly an existential worrywart. That little tape above, the one that zooms along on fast-forward and repeat, well that’s just part of a crippling terror that grips me in the night. And it goes something like this: WHAT IF I DON’T MAKE IT?

Sure, I’m blessed to have a voice all over the Internet, and in so many journals and magazines you open. Whatever. SHOW ME THE MONEY. I’m thrilled that Quarry Magazine listed me as part of a stellar lineage of Canadian writers topped by Atwood and Ondaatje, a torch I’m apparently carrying forth. They featured me on the cover and never sent the cheque. And I am incredibly honoured to be lauded by my spiritual teacher, Thomas Moore.

But I’m still scared that they might cut off my cable, and I need it to work online. I’m really scared I’ll have to get this tooth pulled if I can’t come up with the reconstruction fee. I’m not sure I can even come up with the extraction fee! I’m scared of running out of cat food.

It’s all very terrifying. WHAT IF I DON’T MAKE IT AS A WRITER? It’s the only damn thing I’m good at…and while I thank God for my gift without false modestly, let’s face it, I’m good, but not THAT good. I’m not BLOWING the rich publishers away, evidently. What will become of me if I don’t hold out for the long haul? Reading and writing are the only skills I have!

Crad Kilodney’s book, Putrid Scum, is quite possibly the most brilliant account of these fears. His entire life was the slow-track of the writer’s crisis. Early in the book, he sagely states that the very worst thing that can happen to a writer is early publication in a national magazine. This gives that poor sod false hope, and instead of moving on to a more sensible fate- say, becoming the cable guy, or a chiropractic assistant- the writer will believe in himself. Yeah, why the hell did I have to win that damn contest for Meet Me at the River, for crying out loud?

and sometimes a scar is just a scar by L.C. Luzajic

Then Crad goes on to say that every writer has a crippling philosophical struggle he must contend with. His, as is mine, is over the negligible importance of his perspective. You see, I’m flattered, trust me, that a few of you are amused or even touched, but in the scheme of things, are my comments on the literary life or why I love Johnny Cash really of any tangible importance in a world where children are dying of starvation and war? The most important job in the world is growing, serving, and selling food or water, in my mind. That shit job at Food Basics is, well, back to basics. The real stuff. Fuck me and my fucking intellect. (Yes, yes, for the most part, I know the word is what made civilization. That the word is spirit. In the beginning was the word and all that. I’m describing to you THE CRISIS, not the whole meaning of my life.)

It’s a bit of a tragedy that Putrid Scum got panned, but Crad Kilodney was pretty used to his books getting panned. Still, this one is so brilliant that no one should call oneself a writer until they’ve read it. So that they know what they are in for, all of it’s possibilities. Not everyone writes earth-shattering, world-changing literature that makes them rich. It’s more likely going to be something like Crad describes throughout this marvel.

For example: “In any case, happy or not, we are most of us destined to go to our deathbeds stupid and bewildered about life. Each generation repeats this proves: it has learned nothing from the previous generation and will have nothing to impart to the next.”

Or this: “It’s a great mystery how a life can divagate all over the map of possibilities, and it may be my bane as well as my consolation to believe that everything in my life is meant to be.”

“Books gathering dust. Me turning to dust. A whole life destined to become dust. And I thought of tall the book warehouses I’d worked in, with stacks and stacks of books gathering dust,” Crad muses. Continuing, he really gets to the heart of the crisis I’m trying to describe. “It must be a tremendous advantage to have such control over one’s emotions, but how could I become like that without becoming an entirely different person? It seemed to me that people were ruled primarily either by their hearts or by their heads, that this trait was fixed early in life, and that one could only alter the heart/head ration a little bit, if at all, as one got older. I envied people whose intellects were in control of their emotions, because they weathered the storms of life more easily; yet at the same time I often felt annoyed or repelled by them. They seemed unnatural somehow. I put out the light and got under the blanket. What is the correct way to be? How do you change what you are? What will become of me?”

Yep, I’m definitely one of those emotional ones, though I like to think my intellect has some fortitude here and there. I laugh now to think that when Crad drifted by fate into my life- as my mentor, but I didn’t know it then- that I told him in no uncertain terms that his bitter attitude had no place at my dinner table. His jaded comments about people from other genders, orientations, countries, and age brackets were all fine and dandy within his literature, but at a time in my life where I was learning to change that heart/head ratio, that little bit, I had to surround myself with people who didn’t mumble “burn your feminist books” or “what have the poor ever done for you?”

No mumbling, I told him. I’d impressed Mr. Kilodney in a story I did about his work because, as he said, there were no typos. In a world where most Canadian writers, publishers, and editors were lowlife idiots, my article had been refreshingly free of error.

I do not want to point out, looking back, that the little Idea Factory story actually DID appear with one (not very noticeable) typo. Oops. But it’s too late. It is nothing less than ‘meant to be’ that the most eccentric writer in Canadian history is my mentor. He hates this word, bristling at it, a man who doesn’t even think he’s a good writer. His work “is what it is,” he said when I asked if he thought it was good. He says my work is at least his equal if not superior, but ….well, I can’t agree. Crad’s already weathered the storms, and he’s also written over thirty books, whether or not you or I or he thinks they are good. And in some small way, a smiling light goes off inside his bitter head when I use the word, but I only use the word ‘mentor’ because it is true. I am not one to flatter.

I postponed an intellectual dinner hobnobbing with Mr. Kilodney this week because I was critically depressed. (You see, the story does all tie together despite my digressive habits.) I confessed to him that I’m in treatment at the loony bin, that I’m crying all the time, that I see dead people, that some people have hurt me so much I can’t believe they can live with themselves, and that no one ever bloody well rescued me when I needed help. That I had to figure shit out all by myself, that I’m in pain, that I’m not sure who to trust, and also that I’m not at all certain that a current project, which is moving painfully slowly, will ever see fruition, and I just can’t face it anymore. I JUST CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE.

The Valium wasn’t working, needless to say, and there was nothing ‘the professionals’ or anybody out there could say to the, well, the skeletons in my closet, eating me alive. No one, that is except for my dear Crad.

His email was not very wordy. When he’s not mumbling bitter expletives, he is a man of few words. He told me that I could read the entire Bible in a year at a rate of only four pages a day. This was very practical advice to someone drenched in creative and emotional chaos. I knew right then and there that the cure for this project’s incompletion was continuing consistency, and so I was already on the right path.

As for the rest of it all, no one has a way with truth quite like Mr. Kilodney. “The cure for depression is television,” he stated frankly. And he’s expecting me for dinner and sitcoms on Wednesday.

Lorette C. Luzajic’s poetry book, The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos, reflects on the weight of love and grief. Visit her site, www.thegirlcanwrite.net, for more cheerful selections.

The Astronaut

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I Survived the Three Day Novel Writing Contest

I have joined the ranks of the brave and the insane and entered my very first Three Day Novel Contest.

While you played volleyball and BBQ’d chicken legs or eggplant strips on the beach, I was holed up inside for the whole of the Labour Day Weekend.

This entire year for me has been an exercise in the theme ‘focus.’ Focusing is not my strong point. My strong point is generating a thousand ideas, starting a zillion new files, and then leaving the concepts undeveloped on the backburner. My strong point is working on a hundred things at one time, putting in a day or a minute here and there. Eventually, you get something. But imagine if I focused on ONE AT A TIME!

Partly because I needed some excitement in my less and less exciting life, partly because I wanted to practice my focusing techniques, and partly because I wanted to avoid the holiday weekend excesses for which I have a penchant, I entered the Three Day Novel Contest.

Surely the process itself was far more interesting than the actual results- in my case. But I’m hooked. Sadly, I’ll never be at that beach BBQ where the Barenaked Ladies play for free at Labour Day, ever, ever again.

The rules are very simple, so that entrants don’t get confused. You write a novel over three days. Saturday at 12.01 you can begin, and Monday at midnight you must stop. A skeleton outline is permitted, and you can mull over the thing in your head all you want beforehand.

Friday night I went out to paint the town red with the spectacular Maevey, whose featherweight pink summer camisole would be muse enough for anybody. Yes, dear, it IS a hot summer night- but those are also pajamas….needless to say, I didn’t make it home for the Cinderella mark, but nearly- it was ten after twelve.

Of course, if I’m still awake, Seinfeld is on from midnight until one, so I decided to relax a bit and perhaps ponder the storyline of my novel before getting down to the grind. I fell asleep before King of the Hill could interrupt the focused flow of my novel writing, ha ha ha.

Saturday morning, fresh with zeal and …well, really, I still hadn’t thought of anything. I had the character and the title in my head all summer, but nothing happened to him. For a man who spent most of his life in a lunatic asylum, he was really rather a bit of bore.

Sometime around mid-morning, I decided I really needed a place to put my clothes. I keep pulling them out of the closet to find what I need, then the cats use the pile as a bed before I push them back in, which means I have to launder them to get rid of the cat hair. I’ve been thinking about getting another dresser for awhile, because the shelf scenario is not working the way I hoped it would when I moved in.

Yes, I did know about the cat hair slash clothing situation for more than a full year. But I was not particularly inspired to do anything about it. Not until now, when I have a novel due in three days and haven’t even started yet.

But I surmise that a bit of fresh air and sunshine will be just what the doctor ordered, and I hit a few yard sales in the neighbourhood, idling around on my bike. Exercise is good, right? Right. I strike gold when I find a rickety dresser, made out of wood not Ikea, and clean, standing on the curb. It takes me a while to drag the thing to my place, and then go back for the drawers. All that dragging means I loosened the top piece- the one that holds the thing together- and so I have to hunt for a hammer and nails, in that same disaster closet.

Now that the living room is cluttered with a bunch of drawers and pieces of wood, which the cats think of as a new jungle gym, I have just the kind of peace of mind I need to sit down and get started on the novel. I’ve made goals for each day- fifty pages. So far I have – the title.

Surely a little bit of fuel is what a writer needs. I’m pretty wired from the dozen coffees I’ve had on an empty stomach. But I don’t feel like cooking. That would distract from the flow! Hmm, do I feel like sushi- the cats vote for sushi, but I don’t feel like forking over 20 bucks when I already have a fridge full of good food. I open it, with a mind to toss together a quick salad or something.

Hmm, well, I decide I better stock up on good options. It’s going to be a long haul, this contest! So I hop back on my bicycle and head to the supermarket. It’s late afternoon by now. Maybe they have cream of broccoli soup on tap. I put two dozen pieces of fruit and fresh vegetables and cold cuts into my cart, then head to the check out. I see the line ups- except the express lane- are miles long and the people have mountains in their carts. So I abandon my cart in the ice cream aisle and opt for Triple Chocolate- that’s right, three kinds of chocolate ice cream in one, kind of like Neapolitan but without the strawberry and vanilla, which no one ever wants. I always wondered why anyone orders Neapolitan instead of just getting chocolate. You can’t beat chocolate.

I zip home with my carton of the good stuff, and when I get there, realize I still have no food, and haven’t had anything but caffeine all day. There’s a mushy banana- so I slice it up on top of a bowl of chocolate ice cream. It’s time to put the pedal to the medal.

Well, I’m inspired. I’ve eaten three bowls of triple chocolate ice cream and my stomach is sore, but damn, my first paragraph is good. I get down half of the first chapter- four whole pages- before I decide that the title is all wrong. And I think I need a bit of time to think about the direction the project is going…I can’t just let the characters lead me blindly around. I have to steer this ship!

Thank God there are two hours of Criminal Intent in a row. Usually Saturdays suck for television, and usually that’s great, because folks, I am not the kind of girl you generally find home alone on a Saturday night. My heartthrob detective Goren is just about to go undercover on a death defying sting operation when I notice my phone light blinking. Now of course I’d turned my phone off for the weekend- no distractions! But it can’t hurt to see who called. And to just call them all back and let them know how the project is coming along.

So you get the picture. And your concluding wrong, my friends, wrong, wrong, wrong. You are concluding that I did not finish my novel, that I started something again that I wouldn’t finish, that I didn’t organize my ideas in time…yes, and these insights into my nature were part of the process, because next time I’ll be making use of the Saturday. As it turns out, I awoke at six on the Sunday and the Monday and wrote stealthily through. The novel has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and even a few surprises.

Now, it might be the shortest entry they receive- but I doubt it. There has got to be at least one that didn’t make it to the fifty page mark. And it might be the worst novel they receive, but I doubt that, too, because despite my honest assessment that about 55 of my 65 pages are sheer filler, I think the beginning and the ending and the heated dialogue between the ghost and the boyfriend who is jealous of the ghost are pretty good. I mean, I’m not expecting my long short story to win the Novel Writing Contest, but I completed my literary rite of passage! For 31 years, writers and martyrs have been participating in this crazy thing, and I’ll be doing it again.

Next year, I’ll know to have something a little more solid for a story idea than ‘a ghost who lives in Toronto.’ And I’ll have it flushed out in my head before the start on Saturday. Next year, I’ll have a fridge with some ready-made chili and soup, and I won’t be watching any Law and Order (or the Sunday afternoon two-hour Madonna special- or the Day Diana Died special- but at least that was on in the background while I was typing.)

I can tell you that my carpal tunnel pains are raging, and that I bawled like a baby when I hit the epilogue. And in my possession was a hugely imperfect 65 page mess, with a clever title and a good opening paragraph. “What will YOU think up under pressure?” the contest advert asked. Now, at the other end of it, I had something, something I dreamed up, radically different from any project I’d ever worked on, a completely alien invention. Part Margaret Atwood, part Twilight Zone….It doesn’t matter that the book- or booklet, as it were- is kind of cheesy and lame. No one’s expecting perfection in three days except me. What mattered is the 72-hour kick in the pants the contest promised, and it was. “A trial by deadline” they warned.

My book may not win, and it may not become fodder for an after school special, and it may not even end up a short play in the Fringe Festival next year. But I’m damn well sure my focus has improved a million-fold. And that it’s going to be a breeze to whip up stuff that I don’t necessarily think is worth writing but have to anyhow. All the assignments on my desk top do not seem daunting after forcing my way through writer’s block like that. It was grueling torture and after that sugar crash I thought I was dying. And I’m going to do it again and again and again. Which means, yes, that you all get stuck with my annual novella.

You’ll get to read it in the new year, after the winners are announced. I know- you secretly can’t wait to see what my twisted mind dreamed up on chocolate and espresso…

The Strange Glamour of Stevie Nicks

The slate and charcoal sky over Hamilton’s pre-dawn is the first breathtaking sight on the drive north to Manitoulin Island. The dazzling display of electrical excess re-stars the night skyline. The sludgy lake is a dark streak, hollow and endless, a gaping maw beneath the strange architecture of the steel sky.

Here, under the grey dawn, on the car radio, I hear the faraway strains of Gypsy.

Lightning strikes, maybe once, maybe twice….and it lights up the night…

Ahh, Stevie Nicks.

I’m an old fan. Through out the years, Stevie’s offerings have wavered in the strength of their material, but her fantastical dreamworld has always been an undercurrent of my psyche.

Stevie Nicks- her horsey ordinariness is eclipsed by the mythical glimmer of madness and ritual. Eighties style, of course, all castle moats and hairspray.

But who can refuse the spell of her dusky voice, and the far-reaching, dizzy-sad spiral of her poems?

The characters she knows are all Tarot and cocaine. They exist in a hazy mirage, a mythic alternative to the daily routine of offices and Burger King. You think of deep night highways and deserted gas stations, and the summer radio. Baby, I’m just thinking that the rooms are all on fire…every time that you walk in the room…

Hard-hearted cynics may find plenty of watered-down country to sneer at on Stevie’s newer material, but it’s hard to find fault with Rock a Little’s seamless gravity, and I’m sorry to say, but it’s hard to have Fleetwood Mac without Ma Nicks.

I recall with clarity the first time I heard the lyric, poet, priest of nothing, and how I shivered under the exquisite truth of those words. Stevie was like an older sister, who had been through it already. She faced the challenges of emotion with dignity and toughness, but still she honoured the human heart and its mad tangles, acknowledging with sadness and grace the depth of human feelings.

Motal Goddess by Dead Dollie Candy

You say I have everything, well, I’m living on dreams and chains…but I sing for the things money can’t buy…I Sing for the Things is one of my all time favourite Stevie smashes. When a ballad takes your heart and wrings tears out of in the middle of the supermarket, that’s something else. Have you ever been in love, Stevie asks with that choked-up voice of hers. Have you touched the soul of someone? Did the fear inside you make you turn and run? She looks right into your deepest fears and says, me, too. You want to start writing poetry about someone you could never forget. Your fingers ache for the relief of a pen, your feelings fly forth like water, you are falling, falling, spilling, tumbling, it’s all just coming out of you now.

It all goes back to Gypsy, of course, when I was much younger than the Rock A Little velvet torch glam era. The first strains of Gypsy were somehow among my first memories of being found. A strange and lost little girl who didn’t fit in at church or school, fascinated by magic and poetry, I spent countless hours in the town library browsing dusty, thin poem volumes, watching the words dance on the page. Trying to share the discoveries I found there wasn’t easy. Everyone else wanted to play T-Ball or watch television.

Gypsy was my first conscious realization that perhaps mine was a mythic, not a misfit, life. So I’m back to the velvet underground, back to the floor, that I love, to a room with some lace and paper flowers, back to the gypsy, that I was… Here was where I came upon a profound sense of belonging, where my melancholy and sense of doom at age ten fit. In the world of bratty kids picking on the freaky little Lorette girl, Stevie Nick’s autobiographical song seemed to be my own biography. Why, I, too was an old soul! I was slippery and inexplicable, tied with scarves and beads and earrings, a traveler from the sky. I was a gypsy! I was destined for a life of sadness, not because I was some kind of freak, but because it was my fate.

In adult perspective, of course one looks back and knows they weren’t so alone in feeling alone. But Stevie let me share a world of music and ghosts, of long, flowing skirts and hoop earrings, of crushed leather boots and a mystical beauty. For this song to come out of the radio and tell me that difficult but great experiences lay ahead for the gypsy made the first markings on my psyche of madness’s glittery allure. Well, lightning strikes, maybe once, maybe twice, and it lights up the night…

Most of the stories in Stevie’s songs are about herself, about the different facets of a nomadic, intuitive soul. Giving a parallel complexity to the women drawn to her music means a sisterhood of sorts, a coven if you will. The church blasted Nick’s for her references to witches and goddesses. But before the old age became new, before everyone and their Shi Tzus had incense and crystals in their décor, before academics brought up some of the hidden truths surrounding the wise women’s history of erasure, before it was in vogue to know your goddesses, Stevie was talking about it and living it. Her songs showed her knowledge that life is tough, unfair, and heart-breaking, but full of magic. Her lyrics understood the beautiful appeal of the lost, the mad, the strange. They showed the soul’s breakings aren’t cut and dried, that people are complicated, good and bad at the same time.

And love, of course, is the backbone of Stevie’s songs. With all the passion in the world, she sings of its multiple layers, of the signs and portents that enchant the soul. With so much loss, she survived, yet retained her feelings. Not jaded, but smart. Tough, but tender. Leather and lace. Love is a dark and dangerous road, she admits in her works, but to deny the highs and lows of it is to deny the very layers of your own identity. Love isn’t a safe and happy slice of cheese, but a risk, a surrender, a purging. Love will lift you up and love will let you down. Love will bind you and free you. In Silver Springs, she writes, Time cast a spell on you…you won’t forget me…I know I could’ve loved you, but you would not let me… How eloquent, this acknowledgement of that peculiar strain of grief when you just have to accept that something can’t be, not for any reason to do with you.

With that understanding comes the paradoxical knowledge that one day, that person will understand what they lost, and the real grief lies there and then, still to come. …the sound of my voice will haunt you; you’ll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you… A friend of mine, much older, once told me during a love-loss of my own, that “they always come back.” She warned me that by that time, I would be even sadder, because the hole I felt right now wouldn’t have their shape anymore. But for that person, the sense of me would still be a huge empty hole, and they would seek to fill it, and never be able to. I wouldn’t be the person who wanted them anymore.

I forgot about her words until much later, when I noticed that the people who had wounded me with Cupid’s darkest arrows had begun to surface, full of regrets and needs. Yet for me, the days I had lost in tears over them seemed like someone else’s TV sitcom.

This was the same lady who told me that sometimes it will be us to play the cruel one, and that it isn’t intentional, it’s just the mythic web of dark and light that constructs the universe. That we would lose people we love very much to the underworld of our own emotions.

These are the things I am thinking about as the car rambles further and further north. It begins to rain, sheets of water crashing against the windshield, and the pines at either side of the road are swinging ominously. Mother Nature, the Giver and the Taker.

I’m reminded of another, perhaps rarer, Stevie Nicks song that appeared on Tusk, called Storms. Here she sees that her wild heart, the wilderness of her own self, has contributed to the losses love brings. Every night that goes between us, I feel a little less, she confesses. But how to part, how to explain the poignant truth that you just couldn’t keep something? So I try to say goodbye, my friend, I’d like to leave you something warm…but never have I been a blue, calm sea…I have always been a storm.

Lorette C. Luzajic www.thegirlcanwrite.net

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