I’m possessed by the yearning for one, a good one, that will sew smoothly and thread easily because I’m a beginner in this as in so many other things. I’ve always wanted a sewing machine and I’ve owned three that didn’t do.

My first came as a kid. It was a toy though you could rotate the handle and a needle made a real stitch. But it wasn’t a real sewing machine and it came with strings attached, nasty ones. I bought the second with a Christmas bonus I got as a young adult. It was used and solid and stolid. All it did was sew a straight stitch. A friend of mine who’d sewn since she popped out of the womb tried to teach me to sew. It went moderately well in retrospect but I was too impatient and gave up, donating the machine to the use of her girl guides.

My latest machine came only about 4 years ago. It was new but cheap cheap cheap and it rattles like a cheap car. While a car that rattles can still get one from point A to B, threading this sewing machine is a sweaty mystery, and when finally threaded, it bunches and pinches and tosses up threads. It is not my friend.

I want another sewing machine. I visited a store, where I was asked to believe a certain quantity of bs, though I actually liked the feel of the husqyvarna emerald 116. Still and all, I really want a good used machine that has metal parts inside, sews likes a dream and will last forever.

I want to make things. A story is something out of nothing and God knows that it is so hard that there is a special word in Hebrew for taking the chaos and void and making worlds, different from the regular making out of stuff. And yet that’s a wonder in itself. I crave a sewing machine. I ask the universe to open up and show me the one.

Or you can recommend your favourite.

So here I am, watching the astonishing spectacle of a beautiful, cultured nation turning itself into a corrupt petro-state. Canada is slipping down the development ladder, retreating from a complex, diverse economy towards dependence on a single primary resource, which happens to be the dirtiest commodity known to man. The price of this transition is the brutalisation of the country, and a government campaign against multilateralism as savage as any waged by George Bush.

Our dear PM, Mr. Harper, has sold his soul to the tar barons, folks. For them he’s going to screw Copenhagen. What’s happening to my country? Full story here.

Fly, originally uploaded by David Guidi.

And from Lu Chi’s Wen Fu (The Art of Writing), 300 CE:

Writing is in itself a joy,
Yet saints and sages have long since held it in awe.

Bright winds spread luminous wings, quick breezes soar from the earth, and clouds arise from the writing brushes.

h/t Sandra Gulland

What reason do you have to be grateful for books?

There are so many reasons, where do I begin? As a young kid, fairy tales were my first literary love, a metaphor for experiences I couldn’t name but could feel: the trial of good and evil, of helplessness, loneliness, abandonment, wandering in the dark, concealed identity, offering hope in the magic and power granted to the smallest and youngest of heroes, ending happily. And in essence that is still what I love most in fiction: truth expressed, darkness faced, light found.

Then there is the world of non-fiction, everything I could want to find out in words and pictures. Really it’s a miracle. All I have to do is go to the library and the world is there before me. And there is challenge: ideas, thoughts asking me to grow and reconsider and integrate new information. In practical terms: I learned to knit from a kid’s book on knitting. What else can do all that while I’m still in my pj’s?

Is there any author for whose existence you are especially grateful?

There are too many to list, but I’ll start with I.L. Peretz who wrote “Bontsha the Silent” and thereby taught me the piercing power of irony and the use of magical realism when I was eleven and didn’t quite get it but read the story over and over. Stephen Levine introduced me to Buddhist concepts with Healing into Life and Death, especially the section on inviting one’s demons in for tea and seeing them transform into suffering children. I’ve written here about Up Front by Bill Mauldin. And of course I can’t leave out L.M. Montgomery or Louisa May Alcott who were my companions in childhood with their heroines who wanted to be writers and succeeded.

What positive aspect does reading have in your day?

Reading connects me to others and when I choose wisely it connects me in the best way. Fiction brings me into a community of writers, even if I don’t know them personally, who are all engaged in the same work of making art, speaking truth, enlarging understanding, bringing love and light into the world. The same is true of blogs, with the added benefit of keeping me current in the many areas that interest me: literature, science, psychology, feminism, art, the environment and more.

What good things has reading taught you?

Again too many to list, but I would say the most important thing is that we are not alone in this world, and the meaning of that on many levels.

Is there any particular book that’s special to you?

I was looking around my bookshelves to answer this and realized I hadn’t mentioned poetry. I was reminded of this by The Norton Anthology of Poetry, which I’ve been dragging around since I was in university, and that reminded me of Mary Oliver who is my favourite poet overall though I love this line by May Sarton: “Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!” It’s from a poem that encapsulates everything I could say about writing:

Now I Become Myself

Now I become myself. It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
“Hurry, you will be dead before–”
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!

What are you most happy to have read recently?

Everything! Every book that I finish is a gift. I try to keep up with blogging about them, but often I feel so full hearted with what I’ve just read, it seems like too much work to translate the thought, emotion, and plain gratitude into words, at least for a while, until it all sinks in and settles. But I love this opportunity to think and write about my love of books. So thank you Litlove for starting this meme. In browsing my shelves, I just came across The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales (edited by the inimitable Angela Carter who taught me about nerve), which I’ll start reading aloud to my eight year old.

Counting blessings sounds like a platitude, but recent studies by Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough found that recording reasons for gratitude once a week improved health, exercise and attitude toward the future, but had no significant influence on the frequency of positive feelings. However counting blessings daily also made people feel happier and sleep better, both among healthy students and adults with neuromuscular disease. (Full story here.)

Do any of you keep a daily gratitude journal? I am going to try it for the rest of this year. That’s only a month and a bit. And then I’ll see what happens.

The AGO, or the Art Gallery of Ontario, is in the vicinity of Chinatown, where my younger daughter and I had lunch after we visited the art gallery on a p.a. day, which stands for professional something, a day that the teachers have meetings and do important things and so did my children, the older one accompanying A (dh in case you don’t know) to the university to sit in on the classes he teaches.

The AGO isn’t the Louvre, I admit it. But it’s my art gallery, the one that I have a family membership to. And we saw wonderful, inspiring, lovely, beautiful, intriguing, thought provoking art.

These were my favourites:

William Kurelek’s “Reminicences of Youth,” for the cleverness and humour of it: a young man daydreaming, painted on wood to look like a sepia photograph, and his memory of a snowy day on a large canvas with colours more vibrant than you can see here.

J.E.H. MacDonald, “Snow Flurries Algonquin Park,” which I can’t reproduce because the beauty of the dark colours can only be seen in the original. But it reminded me of the startling beauty of Monet’s “The Thames at Westminster Bridge.” If you visit Toronto, go and see it.

A hilarious (to me) sculpture of Queen Elizabeth by David Ruben Piqtoukun, an Inuit sculptor who suffered through residential school, but later found himself as an impressive artist. Some of his sculptures are here.

It was a wonderful day: the beauty of the art, the sunshine as we walked, the good food at my favourite Chinese vegetarian restaurant, my daughter’s hand in mine.

View from the Ago window

Where we ate

And to prove it's Toronto...the CN Tower

These are next on my list, a collection of prize winning novels delivered to me by Random House, which publishes my books in Canada. (In the U.S. it’s Scribner, Headline Review in UK, Bertelsmann in Germany, Mouria and Meulenhoff in Holland, Longanesi in Italy, Matar in Israel, Ulpius-haz in Hungary.)

Thank you Randy!

I grew up in a house that didn’t value the work of hands, deeming it lower class. The adults’ skills in this regard varied, but the important thing was that whatever skills they possessed weren’t passed along to the next generation. Intellectual work was valued, not for itself, but for what it could garner in status and in possessions that spoke of that status. This was the instruction: Never do it yourself; buy or hire. There was more instruction and graver: to work with hands is stupid; if you are stupid, you will fail, and if you fail you will starve, beg, be homeless or live in a hovel unless you die first. Alone.

When I was a kid, I often had a yearning to make something, but I had no instruction for that and no supplies. No paints (my beloved and cheap paintbox had been left behind in the old house when we moved), no coloured pencils, no paper (unless I wanted to use the white shelf paper that curled), no scissors, no kits, one ball of yarn (I can’t remember where it came from; I was eleven and it was pink and scratchy), certainly no nails, wood, saw or hammer that I was allowed.

I remember the toolbox in the furnace room, small drawers of hardware, mysterious, untouchable. In a low cupboard in the kitchen there were balls of darning thread and a big needle. I wanted to learn how to darn socks. My mother said forget it, throw out socks when they have a hole in them. My father was reputed to be handy, but I have no evidence one way or another since I was shut out of it and so were my siblings. There were no living plants in the house. As my parents’ fortunes increased, they acquired silk flowers.

This past Saturday, I took a workshop on power tools for women. It was put on by a tool shop and conducted by two women. I expected to love it but instead I was terrified from start to finish, keeping my feelings to myself and doing what had to be done at each stage. The workshop was well organized, and the instructors wonderful. My terror was absolutely no reflection on them.

We got to use about a dozen power tools, half table versions and the other half portable hand held versions of the same tools: saws, jig saws, drills, routers. It was safe, all the tools (top of the line) with guards, the instructors standing close. And I was terrified, picturing blood flying, thinking how much longer? How many more cuts, grooves, holes do I have to do? The saws buzzed, the smell of wood dust stayed with me even after I got home.

I made a toolbox. I’m proud of that toolbox even though I had to get help for the very last screw. My right hand shakes. It’s benign, hereditary, a tremor that is sometimes absent, sometimes barely noticeable but under stress it gets worse and I just couldn’t do that last, final thing. The drill kept slipping and after the second round gouge, I asked one of the instructors to do it for me.

She looked at the two small indentations, like eyes, like snake eyes in the wood, and she considered how to fix it. No, I said. I don’t mind them. They’re the imperfection that make this box perfect.

The day was arduous, not because of the tools or the other women, who were delightful, or the instructors who were funny, solid, grounded and smart, but because I was breaking the rules of my childhood.

Those rules are tracks upon the heart, deep and ingrained. To replace them requires this: lift a freight train off the tracks, hold it in the air with one hand while laying new tracks with the other, and then place the train down, ready to travel. It took that much effort and I was sick to my stomach scared, but I rode the top of the train.

I made a toolbox with snake eyes. I sanded it until it felt like silk. In my house there are no silk flowers. There are plants with roots in soil, watered and misted every day. My daughters have tools of all kinds. They have power in their hands.

Proverbs 31: 10-31
A woman of valour who can find? Her worth is above rubies…She seeks wool and flax and works willingly with her hands. She is like merchant ships; she brings food from afar…She gives food to her household and a portion to her maidens. She considers a field, and buys it; with the fruit of her hands she plants a vineyard. She girds her loins with strength, and makes strong her arms. She stretches out her hand to the poor; yes, she reaches forth her hands to the needy…She is not afraid of the snow for her household; for all her household are clothed with scarlet… Strength and dignity are her clothing; and she laughs at the time to come… Give her of the fruit of her hands; and let her works praise her in the gates.

Light Echoes from V838 Mon , NASA

This is Hubble’s view of a stellar flash that suddenly appeared, with no explanation, in January 2002. And just as suddenly it disappeared. It isn’t a supernova or a nova, what it is–nobody knows. But it’s beautiful and astonishing and it is in our own milky way, about 20,000 light years from here. (More detail here.)

♥, originally uploaded by ƒαитαѕєα Ǥιяl ;; ÿααααω XD.

I like the composition of this photo, the close in detail. It’s such an old-fashioned image to western eyes, the cufflinks, the cigarette. But I know nothing about it, not even the title, because it’s written in, I believe, Arabic.

When I was five, my family moved to a new neighbourhood. It was May 1st and I was in kindergarten, starting at a new school, where the 12 year olds looked to me about the same size as the teachers, and I wasn’t sure which was which in the schoolyard. My stuffed animals and paints were left behind in the old house and I was bereft.

However, while walking on my new street (alone, as kids did in those days, even at five and a half), I saw a kid standing in her front yard. She had short dark hair, dark eyes and tanned skin and I wasn’t sure if she was a boy or a girl, so I asked her. That was the beginning of a lifelong friendship, albeit with disruptions and detours.

In high school we went our separate ways, and when I was nineteen I left home permanently, moved about 500 km (350 miles) and went to university here in Toronto while my home province was debating leaving the country. The bus stops here were strangely designed. It was bewildering.

In the city of my birth they were round signs with numbers printed on them; in English speaking Toronto, they were white poles with the words “bus stop” painted on them. I couldn’t figure it out for a while. Not to mention that buses went up and down the long streets they were named for instead of the circuitous unpredicatable paths I was used to. But other than that, Toronto the unpretty felt like home and gradually, like the bus routes, my life found a clearer and more rational path than I’d grown up with.

I ran into my childhood friend in the first week I was at York University. She was living in the same dorm several floors above. We met, we parted, she moved to Winnipeg, perhaps the coldest big city in the world, in the middle of Canada. (According to Wikipedia, Ulan Bator in Outer Mongolia may beat out Winnipeg for that privilege).

Many years later, I’m still in Toronto. She moved back here some years ago, and lives around the corner from me. I know she’s a girl. She’s also a fabulous musician. But that’s not the end of the story. My children’s French teacher is a plump, pleasant faced white haired woman approaching retirement. Many years ago, when she was a young teacher in a city 500 km (350 miles) away, she was my friend’s favourite grade school teacher. How did we all end up here, within a ten block radius, our connection moving on to the next generation?

It’s the karmic net. Somehow we are connected I believe, perhaps with ten others, perhaps with ten thousand–and no matter where we roam we will bump into them in our net. Make it a good one. Make it a shining net of stars.

where stars are born, Nasa

And another writer taking a good long time to write a good book: nine years between Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer and The Lacuna.

About research, she says:

The research was daunting: It felt, in the beginning, that I was undertaking to move a mountain with a teaspoon…[T]he lion’s share of the work happened here in my study. I sat and read for years. Everything written by Trotsky, Diego Rivera, and Frida Kahlo, and everything written about them. Thousands of newspaper and magazine articles documenting everyday life in the U.S. during World War II, and then the postwar freeze-up. Old photo collections…But I loved the surprises. For example, I learned that contrary to popular belief, the continental U.S. was attacked during WWII. The New York Times ran photos of the aftermath. The Japanese sent a submarine up the Columbia River and deployed a floatplane bomber, with the goal of setting the Oregon forests on fire and throwing the country into a panic. But the plan was rained out.

Full interview at Goodreads here.