Between the legend and the literal... New Orleans

 There's the Pearl River swamp, with turtles and alligators, a statuesque heron and some fetching racoons, but the tour boat captain baits them with marshmallows to entice them to pose. There is the Elysian Fields Avenue Walker Percy wrote of in The Moviegoer, but at the corner of Elysian Fields and St. Claude, which used to be Bon Enfants,  where Percy's character Binx Bolling considers an African American walking out of a church on Ash Wednesday and wonders why the man is there, I saw no church. Instead, at this lyrically named intersection there are gas stations on three corners and an auto supply shop on the 4th. Of course no one says a novel, or a legend, for that matter, has to be true to fact.

Music doodles, blasts, trills, thumps, sings, swings, and  soars, and not just on Frenchman or the more vulgar Bourbon Street. Young and some older musicians ride their bikes with instruments strapped to their backs - drums, horns, shapes I can't identify. On Sunday, Royal Street is blocked to cars and a duo of women set up with a violin and a guitar play through the afternoon. Closer to Canal Street, Roslyn croons a folk song and plucks a thumb piano while her partner David blows harmonica. On another corner a solo clarinetist wails the classic, Basin Street Blues...land of dreams, New Orleans. Klezmer at another spot, plain old folk-rock guitar/bass/ trio at still another.

If the streets seem dirty after a weekend that included the Bayou Classic, it isn't because there are no street sweepers out first thing in the morning swishing sudsy water over the pavement and sidewalks. The Quarter retains a long lived in, wel-lused ambiance and  December evenings can be just as steamy as Tennessee Williams made them seem with his sweating Stanley in "A Streetcar Named Desire".

The music, the weather and yes, the food. Much as I wanted to resist clichés such as Cafe du Monde, I'm glad that the aroma of frying sweet dough drew me in on a quieter Monday morning for coffee and a small plate of beignets that stayed hot and crispy under their drift of powdered sugar. In addition to that particular, "When you're in New Orleans you have to try..." was the muffaletta from Central Grocery, and the blackened shrimp at Felix's. But the turtle soup at the celebrated restaurant in the lovely, shaded Garden District ... was it really turtle? Not according to the gentleman who kindly invited me for a drink when I expressed interest in seeing the property where Tennessee Williams had lived. "They haven't had a turtle in that place for over 40 years," said this self-described gourmet, whose art-filled house adjoins  playwright Williams' former abode.

My sister likes to choose places she has heard of.  Many other travellers too, especially now with easily available online guides like Tripadvisor,  flock to places they've heard of, arriving with expectations, perhaps an image, an anticipated flavour, and the reality does not always meet expectation. The hefty foursome next to me at Cafe du Monde, for example, expressed disdain at what they called the fancy name of the place. Had they forgotten that New Orleans was once French, that the use of French words like rue for street and librairie for bookstore are not an affectation but a carryover from French roots? Sadly, no one seems to speak French anymore, not even in the French Quarter which is a bit of a misnomer itself, said one acquaintance, because the prominent if slightly fading architecture was created during Spanish rule. The balconies and galleries recall Barcelona and old Havana.

Lance, a Maitre d' who kept me company while I sipped wine in a bar T.W. frequented,  said that people come to New Orleans to consider their own possibilities, to maybe invent themselves. Ironic, really, considering the masks in store windows and in stalls at the French Market, another misleading tag, since it is really more of a flea market.  There's the mask, and not far beneath beneath the actual features. What is real? Authentic? Lance took out his phone to show me a document that proved there really was once an intersection called Elysian Fields and Bon Enfants. As for the non-conventional, and perhaps not really official guide at St. Louis Cemetery #1, he not only told good stories, he removed the bricks from tombs to prove, with the aid of our flash cameras, that layers of bones did indeed lay inside.

"It is impossible to say why he is here. Is it part and parcel of the complex business of coming up in the world, or is it because he believes that God himself is here at the corner of Elysisan Fields and Bon Enfants? Or is he here for both reasons: through some dim dazzling trick of grace, coming for one and receiving the other as God's  own importunate bonus? It is impossible to say."
The Moviegoer, Walker Percy.

Angels in Atlanta

On American Thanksgiving day in Atlanta, I woke thinking of  the man who, upon hearing me say I was from Canada,  said, "Je m'appelle Antoine," at least I think he said Antoine. The white brillo beard on his clear, deep brown face, the toque, the white tennis shoes. This occurred the afternoon of Thanksgiving eve, me heading down to Peachtree from the Greyhound Station, thinking I knew where I was going. Seeing me looking around, he asked if I was okay, and tolerated me when I insisted that 134 Peachtree Street must be close by because weren't we at 175? Him walking  alongside me, restraining himself when I insisted. Then, "Believe me m'am, I've lived here 9 years, and it is southwest Peachtree you're looking for. You gotta go back to the train."  But I read it on the website, I explained. "Believe me m'am, this is a bad neighbourhood. I'll walk you as far as the train.You got to go back to the train." When I saw no sign of the hotel I was booked into for my overnight stay, or any hotel, I gave in. "It is so nice of you to help me."

"I am a Christian man. You're talking to someone who has looked on Jerusalem." But he was also a vet and the United States doesn't treat its vets very well, he said, in a voice that carried no French accent at all. It was clear he needed money. I said the problem is I don't have any change, and that was true, but I could get change in the station, the MARTA station, where I would have to wait for the northbound train and get off at the second stop, according to Antoine, if it was Antoine he called himself. He showed me how to work the machine, his finger trembling a little as we chose the right lines to press on the screen. I thought I would give him five dollars, but really, I should have given him everything I had, because even though I doubted him, frankly profiled him - a street person, black, wanting money -  and had turned away to open my wallet, and continued to wonder if his advice was correct, even as he stood outside the station and blew me a kiss, it turned out that he was absolutely right. I walked down the nearly deserted southwest Peachtree Street to my destination and  I wished all night that I'd given more. Jesus loves a cheerful giver, said Preacher Little, in Savannah.

Then, mercy: a late train, which gave me time for a long conversation with the wise Elizabeth Daily, an Amtrak baggage clerk, whose reading and thinking over many years has taught her that we act as we do because it is hard for us to move away from archetypes.  A woman alone on a virtually empty street is prey. Even a black woman would think that way, she said, if she encountered a gangsta type dresser, in baggy pants and a hoody. Not that Antoine had been so dressed. The media imprints images that affect our subconscious, said Elizabeth, and not only that, but more. When I asked her about racism in Atlanta she said it was not so much race that divided people, but money. The economic gap has widened and for people on the wrong side, the gap has been getting harder and harder to breach. Poor neighborhoods had poor schools; a poor education limited possibilities.

Elizabeth became for me the grace before the juicy Thanksgiving feast that consisted of my Amtrak Crescent trip to New Orleans. The long roll through Alabama and Mississippi, Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, Hattiesburg, the pretty undulating hills and slim treed forests and a sunset that lasted miles and miles: first, bruised clouds, then the big sky coloured as if rubbed with a blood orange, while Bob and Muriel Lawrence and Pearson Cotton, and

Marva and the others enjoyed their Mimosas and their champagne glasses filled with some creamy desert, or perhaps an appetizer, and Pearson related to me the history of the region, the Creeks and Choctaws, Cherokee and Seminole Andrew Jackson had ordered  banished, but not before  they interbred with African slaves, their offspring being the ancestors of this party enjoying themselves on the long ride to New Orleans for the Bayou classic.

Happy Thanksgiving, called a stunning woman to her seatmate as he debarked from the train in Meridian. "Eat a lot of turkey and macaroni and cheese, collards and black eyed peas and sweet potatoes and sweet potato pie and red velvet cake!"

The final blessing of that day, Ruth, a white haired security guard who saw me lost again, roaming the near-deserted streets of New Orleans this time, and waved me into her big official building so I didn't have to wander in the cold. On her desk she had a covered plate of Thanksgiving dinner someone had brought her, and left it there to walk me around the corner to where I was supposed to be. Supposed to be? That's something that is not always clear.

Gawga on mah mind: it's personal

  The spreading oaks, the moss that lazes from their branches. An iconic image of Slo-vannah, as my hostess Jane says this beautiful city is sometimes called. The first day, yes, I can see why. The humidity penetrates even my lightest clothes. I walk at half my normal pace and sit to rest in Franklin Square. My feel for the city grows just as slowly. First outer Abercorn -  box store Savannah - then downtown,  the squares and the neighbourhoods clustered around them. The graceful houses and tours to learn about their architecture and the history of the most popular, such as the Mercer House where so many movies have been filmed. As Walker Percy wrote, movie connections lend a heightened reality to a situation. When a character lights a cigarette for William Holden in The Moviegoer, "... he has won title to his own existence, as plenary an existence now as Holden's..." Then the river and its long, too commercial for my taste, river walk. 

But Jane agrees to attend the service at the First African Baptist Church with me on Sunday morning, and that is when the Savannah theme begins to sound its sweet note, sweeter even than Jane's partner Carmela's  "y'all's", the gin-tility of the voices that first spoke in this region, and not another, the midwest, for example, or the north. It's personal. When Preacher Little speaks to his congregation, he speaks to individuals, he implores them to literally stand up for someone who needs help. He asks people to affirm the words he speaks: "Someone shout out, I'm covered!" And more than one person replies, "I'm covered!" When members of the congregation, including us, look at one another, they really look, they try to see; when we hold hands, it is a firm hand hold. The hugs not breezy air hugs, but actual embraces. Powerful. Jane and I, in our sort-of Sunday best, leave the church with wet eyes, both heavier and lighter than when we walked in.  In my case, I have lost some assumptions and gained some understanding, another theme on this trip.

Personal, too, my talk with a young man at a bus stop, the Savannah cop who called me a cab, and Shep, who had just come from his Thanksgiving dinner at the Old Savannah City Mission and offered to wait with me at the Savannah  Market for the cab to arrive.

Thanks to columnist Jane, I meet sculptors and soul food cooks, yoga instructors, health food store and wine shop proprietors, and Toby, who arrived in Savannah in 2005, having lost his Mississippi home to Katrina, saw a for rent sign on the Flannery O'Connor childhood home, moved into the top floor apartment had has stayed to become the guide and administrator of the shrine to this Southern author. Still soggy from the rain dripping off the banana tree leaves in her folk garden, Jane and I spend an easy hour or so chatting with Toby about Savannah and literature and recalling favourite O'Connor stories.

From what was her parent's bedroom, Flannery could see the cathedral spire that dominates that section of Savannah. When I stop into the church the next day, a children's choir is practicing Christmas carols. Perfect. "Sing in exaltation!"

In the haunting Bonaventure Cemetery, the description "Loyal" is etched into the marble wreathe above the tomb of a Confederate officer's wife. Not just a wife, but a LOYAL wife. That seems personal too.

Low country Carolinas

Not fair to pair the Carolinas when one is north, the other south, and when I have just skirted them, brushed up along beaches, and slipped into cities and smaller, pretty towns, like the colonial capital of N.C., New Bern, and the lovely seaside Beaufort. But it is true that people talked about shagging in both places, and not what the British mean when they use the word shag. Dancin, dancin, said Isle of Palms (S.C.) Dolly, who shags and does ballroom and takes lessons to improve both; and nephew Mark listed dancin along with guns, religion and football as the cultural lynch pins of his low country section of North Carolina.

In North Carolina, one bumper sticker said, " I'll keep my guns, my faith and my freedom, and you can keep the change," referring to the change Obama promised. Oh this president is not popular here, unless perhaps with the many black people, the African American population.  The lovely soft voiced Helen, for instance, who comes from the low country but taught in Washington for 30 some years; or the Preacher and his wife from Midway, Georgia, who invited me to their church in Savannah, or the young attendant whose eyes widened when she welcomed us to Thomas Ryan's old slave mart in Charleston with the reminder that "Human beings were bought and sold here." Or all the many others on the train, who laughed and called out across the aisles as we slowed and then stopped for track work just before Wilson, and one woman bundled up her things and her sons and almost got off at the wrong stop. Wonderful conductor on that run, so perfectly patient with the overweight young white woman who asked, "When w'all gonna get to Fayetteville? When? Are we gonna get to Fayetteville at 7:30?"

"M'am, I'll tell you when we get going again." White woman, black people. Well, it is a way of describing, to say black or white, Caucasian, African American, whatever.

 We have so few black people in western Canada.  Here I look and look. In fact I am pure-t momucked as some life long low country folks might say, at least I believed that I was mommucked when I thought the word meant amazed. Actually it means harassed or bothered, and I am not bothered at all by this broadening of experience with African Americans. Perhaps instead I am gob smacked (a phrase Irish might say to indicate amazement or shock) by my own ignorance, assumptions, because one has a tendency (even if she knows better) to generalize until experience becomes personal.

I might could research that word mommucked and other distinctive phrases, such as saying, "Can you carry me to the store?" which reminds me both of the song, "Carry me back to ole Virginny" and the French word apporter, to bring.

 Mud. Oh yes, we sank into pluff mud on Carrott Island, and I almost lost my niece's shoe, but we did see wild horses far off and horseshoe crabs and egrets and the wonderful spartina marsh grass, and it was warm enough that we could have been wearing swim suits, which we did the next day, on Atlantic Beach, watching the surfers, the surf, the jet trails in the sky.

Charleston! Elegant, with its own French quarter, Vendue Range, which originally could have meant selling street or row; and street after street of graceful houses, the sweet grass basket weavers on the street, the boys selling palm frond roses that remind me of Palm Sunday, and then the other world of the Islands with their newer graceful houses, some of them sprawling testaments to the hubris of owners who must feel they can defy hurricanes. Conversations employ Hugo as a reference point, as in pre-Hugo, post Hugo. Squadrons of pelicans cruise just above the water. Clusters of ibis poke their curved red bills into the sandy soil edges of the golf course.

Across the Inner Coastal from friend Susan's place is Goat Island, where a father of three young children recently hung himself. Adding to the tragedy for the family, is the fact that he hung himself from the end of his dock, the one that juts out into the Inner Coastal where barges and sail boats and yachts of all kinds can navigate from the Gulf of Mexico off Brownsville, Texas, all the way to the Manasquan Inlet in New Jersey. What did they think, all those navigators who passed, if they looked, if they saw.

On this rail journey south, my view encompasses the immediate side of the track, usually the right side, and the places I stumble upon or am shown. I can say only what I see, saw.

Oh say, can you see?

Stars and stripes everywhere, of course, and white pillars, like those identifying the big white house that is impossible to approach, even to reach the stipulated distance.

Monuments, memorials. Grand Lincoln on his marble throne taking me back to grade school where I had to memorize the Gettysburg Address. The sound of the words returns to me as I stand reading the text here, and the next day at the stunning Library of Congress, the Jefferson Building, where Lincoln's neat handwriting is on display, behind glass.

Heading south, this is a good start. "Now we are engaged in a great civil war." It is a war identified by many names. Most commonly known as the civil war, the further south I get, it is called the War between the States (Fort Macon), or the war of Northern Aggression (Savannah). Here in the capital of the nation, however, the emphasis is on the triumph of having kept the states under one flag, and what a splendid capital it is. The looming neo-classical buildings, the hum of argument that must be going on inside the hotels, and the office buildings as people try to persuade one other to cooperate or resist. Still a kind of civil war. In the news I hear about a broken congress, or broken government, but outside everything is beautiful; bright sunny days, brisk autumn winds, wonderful fall colours, red and gold being the coin of the season. With my personal guide to steer me to the best places, including the brilliant café at the Museum of the American Indian, which offers such native foods as alligator and blue corn bread, I pass through Washington without having been touched much. Only security everywhere and the bollards that go up, preventing access to any kind of close up view of the White House, only those things rouse the anger I used to feel at policies that seemed a joke in this so-called land of liberty.

I left the country to protest all that transpired during the Vietnam War and the inspired design of the memorial to that war amazes me for how it evokes the darkness of that time. We walk along the path beside the black marble bearing the names of all those poor soldiers sacrificed for something abstract and absurd as the domino theory and are literally overwhelmed by its shadow, even my tall friend Jimmy.

On my last morning I try once again to glimpse the White House, and it is a perfect day to walk the length of Pennsylvania Avenue, but no luck. I am stopped a block away, and so head back to Union Station, but by a side street that takes me to Ford's Theatre and the house where Lincoln died. Relics of history everywhere, and of conflicts that have morphed into different forms. Beneath its gleaming white beauty, the bones of Washington rattle.

Why I love this man

Walker Percy. How brilliant. When someone would ask who is your favourite writer, for many years I would say, Walker Percy. Now, re-reading The Last Gentleman, it's like encountering an old boyfriend and instantly feeling all that linked us. The title alone!

"There passed between them the almost voluptuous intercourse of bad news. Why is it, thought he, hunkering over and taking his pulse, I cannot hear what people say but only the channel they use?"

"...he knew the frequency of her channel, so he didn't have to listen."

Quebec to Montreal to New York

Aur revoir, belle ville, this cold sunny morning. Cold, sunny. On to snappy Montreal, St. Catherine's Street a profusion of red ...  poppies for Remembrance Day,  roses for Hussain, luscious long stemmed red roses, one of which survived the long walk up St. Urbain to Mile End, and fit perfectly in a wine bottle at Hil and Lil's place. Lunch at the Local Café, smoked salmon on a Montreal bagel. Leonard Cohen singing Halleluhjah. Snow flurries outside the window later that night, and in the morning.

Yes the morning, over the bridge, a last look at the St. Lawrence. Stop, the border; go, welcome to New York. Lake Champlain, Champlain, Champlain. The one long whistle blowing around bends, rock-cobbled coves. Thoreau came this way in 1850, started in Boston and travelled to Montreal for a fare of seven dollars, his goal being to take one honest walk in Canada "as I might in the Concord woods on an afternoon."

    Lake Champlain, then darkness, then New York City. Up the subway stairs at 14th St and 1st Avenue, and it's like someone has injected me with a sudden spurt of oxygen. Everything is faster, crisper. Nine-thirty, people indoors, out of doors, wind blowing, garbage blowing, darrrk, yet bright under the lights of Tompkins Square where the yellow leaves of a spreading tree glow as if with fairy light.

   Up a flight of stairs, up another, another, another, finally arriving at Five W, where friend Liz greets me with tea and we talk and talk and then sleep and morning breaks. One day. One day?  Heading down and over to Soho, I hear a man calling from a shaded door well. Bunny, Bunny! A cardboard flat of pizza slices rests on the edge of a garbage can, just in case somebody is hungry enough to ignore the proximity of God knows what. Walk, walk. There, McN's, the bookstore with its see-through book printing machine and an African American barista who styles his hair in an exuberant Mohawk. Good fusion, that. African American hair texture holds the Mohawk proud. And Allan, at last, in person, this native of the neighbourhood who is the King of graffitti photography and fills in his life story before we move on to Housing Works Bookstore and its tempting bins, tempting cases, beautifully arranged, the dark wood shelves, the dark wood railings around the balconies. But one day, one day! We say goodbye, we will meet again.

Uptown, Petra with the thin eyebrows, the blue shadow, the Slovak accent everyone mistakes for Russian. In the next booth a thin faced woman in dark glasses, her fine blown blonde hair, her lipstick smudged, with her maid. Or her attendant, or maybe I am making assumptions. Maybe this is not her only possibility for lunch but a joyous choice. Out the window of the Lennox Hill Grill city workers with brown Central American skin. A generation away from their indigenous ancestors who dressed in parrot feathers, perhaps, now outfitted in fluorescent vests and hard hats on the crazy streets of NY.

The day is going, what to see? William Kentridge's The  Refusal of Time. Fabulous. A non-linear narrative that comes together in a statement/observation as I sit on a chair between three huge screens, looped images, music that haunts, hollers, itself underscored by the elephant behind me, the machine that labours, the breath, the heart,  the tock of the clock, the beat of time that dares us to refuse it. More! More! Poetry! Seamus Heany's imagined butter coming up from a deep bog still white and salty, the precise sound imagery of his diction, all those poets and writers reading Heany's work with reverence and affection. Even Paul Simon, and the prolific Colm Toibin, all with memories of the great late man, but paying tribute with his own words. On, on, Venezuelan arepas, sleep. Goodbye till next time fifth floor Liz. On the crosstown bus fathers taking their children to school. Little Henry's boots are printed with orcas and they keep slipping off, as if the orcas are straining to swim away through the snow flurrying about the neighbourhoods of Manhattan.

To Penn Station, coffee from Zaro's, where two servers speak to one another in French, and I think of Pelagie, but no. L'homme vient de Haiti, l'autre de la Côte-d'Ivoire. "That's in Africa," she says. "My mother taught me."

11:35 AM, the Regional, #125 pulls out right on time, with stops in Trenton, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Wilmington Delaware, and Baltimore, Maryland, the city/state names rhythmic as the swaying car that carries me to Washington, D.C. Union Station. Be careful when you disembark ladies and gentleman. There is a space between the car and the platform.

Thomas (not Tom) Wolfe...the man could write!

Thomas Wolfe was one of the writers who inspired, humbled and stretched me when I was a constant reader in my teens and early twenties.  Now, on the eve of my train trip through the South, his Look Homeward Angel is the third book, and the first re-read, I have chosen in preparation, for novels evoke the spirit of a region far better than any tourist guide. Except I have to keep reminding myself that this is why I am reading this enormous book, TW's first novel, for the second time, decades later. Once again I am being swept away by his passion, his language, his deft ways with character. For example, he has Stevie, the character modelled on his oldest brother in this autobiographical work, speak of himself in the third person, which immediately shows Stevie to be an egotistical, sentimental, self-justifying failure.

Then we have Eliza, the mother, who talks and talks, the kind of tangential narratives that drive big W.O. Gant, the father, mostly referred to just as Gant, to  howl. In addition to describing Eliza's ways, Wolfe mimics Eliza's talk in rambling passages of dialogue that would make anyone howl. There is a lot of howling that goes on in this novel. Gant howls and builds huge spitting blazes in the stove and eats and eats, great steaming platters of everything. And he keeps an angel carved from Cararra marble on the front porch of his stone cutting/monument shop in Altamont, which is Wolfe's pseudonym for his home town of Asheville, North Carolina. The Angel is present in/as the minds of the characters, too, especially Ben Gant, Eugene's (aka TW's) favourite brother.

The way he presents his fictional father, it seems clear that Wolfe inherited much from the man he calls W.O. Gant; his bigness of language, his stature, his occasional broodiness. His self-centredness too, because knowing Thomas Wolfe only through what he wrote, and I am just beginning to refresh my acquaintance, I see few examples of modesty. He begins with the wonder of origins, how chance determined that his English Grandfather ended up reciting Hamlet to Dutch farmers in Pennsylvania, married, begot five children, but bequeathed only to his son W.O. a yen for travel and a tendency to hold forth in a booming voice. Obviously those gifts filtered down to Eugene/Thomas, who held forth to the extent that he published four gargantuan books during his lifetime and left many more that were published after his death at 38.

As a young reader I loved it that Wolfe placed his characters more or less in the cosmos, beginning with "a stone, a leaf, an unfound door". He seems to have felt acutely wrenched from whence we all spring. Forever alone, but in a romantic way that appealed to me, and perhaps him. At one point he writes about the "full delight of loneliness."  I remember kneeling by a window in our upstairs hall, my chin on the windowsill, looking out to the throbbing summer night, throbbing myself with an aimless passion that my age and his words had kindled.

Though his sometimes florid writing style is not to my taste any more, he continues to stretch me, making me want to observe every detail, be aware of the nuances of every thought, think of every character in terms of absolute specifics. come up with lines like this one, about his father... "a fanatical zealot in the religion of chance..." And this about his stand-in Eugene, reacting to an experience at the World's Fair in St. Louis:

..."His mind, just emerging from the unreal wilderness of childish fancy, gave way completely in this Fair, and he was paralyzed by the conviction, which often returned to him in later years, that his life was a fabulous nightmare and that, by cunning and conspirate artifice, he had surrendered all his hope, belief and confidence to the lewd torture of demons masked in human flesh, Half-sensible, and purple with gasping terror, he came out finally into the warm and practical sunlight."

Le vieux port en automne

The Emerald Princess taking on stores, vast sacks of potatoes and onions, flats of drinks, cartons of paper products, reminds me of novels I read, set in the tropics, lines of shirtless men hefting crates from hand to hand to hand towards a lighter that would ferry the goods to some tall masted ship.  The skin of the labourers seems to always have been glistening with sweat, their muscles straining or rippling. Of course these scenes took place under an equatorial sun - for some reason I think of Bahia, Jorge Amado - while  here in Quebec the air is brisk and the bateau croisière far bigger than any tall masted ship, almost too big to imagine it sailing, but it will, the last this season to be piloted out of the Port of Quebec, down le fleuve to the Gulf of St Lawrence and the next port of call. A bustle, a flurry of capped and gloved stevedores, if that is what they are still called, delivery vans and forklifts around the modern, plexiglass-covered gangplank. Thick blue nylon ropes hold the vessel to shore, for now.

In Bassin Louise, there are more rectangles of open grey water than boats alongside the slips. Only the lovely teaching vessel Marie Clarisse remains tethered to her usual place, for now. The Marché is virtually empty. Clear bags bulging with kilos of apples, Honey Crisp, Cortland, Macintosh and other varieties; bundles of green and white leeks like displays of stiff feathers at the front of the stands. Paper and nets sacks des pommes de terre, cheerful pumpkins of all sizes, some cut into chunks and packaged for soup, the sombre beauty of purple cabbages and eggplants, baskets of  the pale dependable butternut squash. The aisles are clear of the tourists that flock here in season, and the locals who shop on weekends. Stall keepers have time to answer questions, for now.

At  Les Cafes du Soleil, across Quai Saint André, reading  the hunting and fishing column in Québec's daily Le Soleil, I learn that a 78 year old woman bagged her first orignal, a mature bull moose, this season.
First snow this week. Last year the snow arrived a full month later.

Mentors, interns.. HELP WANTED!

#literary fiction

I remember reading Raymond Carver's homage to John Gardner, in the introduction to On Becoming a Novelist. It does not take much searching to find stories of more great mentor-novice pairs, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, Boudin and Monet, plus uncounted others, relationships between experienced writers and artists less well known, and younger writers and artists they not only inspired but often helped in practical ways, by, for example, recommending their work to publishers or galleries.

I think it is time for the energy flow to reverse, for young writers and artists, who are generally savvy about complex internet pathways, to offer to guide their elders through the vast web of possibilities for making useful connections.

My dear friend Geoffrey Smedley, for example, is trying to spread the word about his brilliant book Dissections. In his late 80's, still energetic if not AS energetic as he used to be, and having just recently surfaced from a work that absorbed much of the last 20 years, an ingenious four-part electrical mechanical sculpture, or metaphorical machine, as he calls it, that spoofs Descartes' view of man as a collection of mechanical parts, Geoffrey's direct approaches, and those made by supporters have too often found silence at the other end of the line; this seems to be the new, in my opinion, discourteous, way many traditional media outlets (perhaps also gallery owners, certainly publishers) deal with the great unsolicited. Just ignore them. It is not that people who see his work fail to respond; a critic who reviewed his exhibit at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal described Geoffrey's piece as one of the best and most mind expanding exhibitions he had seen this year.

The challenge  is GETTING anyone to look at it or read about it. In the new world of epublishing, the problem is called discoverability, and it is exactly the same thing I face as a novelist. Responses from people who actually find and read my book Shinny's Girls, the Trilogy are generally enthusiastic, but...Promotion has never been a snap. As a publicist I once worked with told me, it's easiest to promote things people already know about. But at least there were ways of doing it that were familiar, journals, newspapers, well established radio shows.

I suggested to Geoffrey that he call on old colleagues in the academic world to put the word out to potential interns. Students who would like the experience of making known  to the world the work of a fine artist in late career. Because everyone connects through the internet, I told him.  This "conversation" all took place via email, something even we mature writers/artists appreciate, adore. So I didn't hear but only imagined the sigh. With the future fast dwindling, with what has to be a limited amount of time to finish one's life work, does it really make sense to let oneself be swallowed by the bright brassy world of internet promotion? Half in and half out of its gorge, I holler (on behalf of all veteran artists and writers in this position), Help!

Contents Under Pressure

A relatively new e-reader, I am learning the advantages of  Tables of Contents. You want to know what's ahead  in the pages you can't see until you touch and touch and touch your screen and eventually get to them. But as a writer of short stories, novellas and novels, I have had different ideas about chapter divisions, and thus the necessity of including a Table of Contents at the beginning of my books. I loved writing short stories. I thought a short story had more potential to be perfect than a long sprawling novel. Then I read John Gardner, in fact I read and re-read John Gardner, and I remember his thoughts about the  novella, how it traced a single emotional line (or something to that effect). Then I wanted to write a perfect novella. In fact my first "novel" Centre/Center is really three linked novellas. It qualifies as a novel in terms of the breadth of material, number of characters, time covered, complexity of theme, etc, but I divided it into three sections that focussed on three different but related characters. The breaks between the novellas are equivalent to chapter breaks.

When a friend read my recently published novel You Again on her IPad, she felt lost without a detailed Table of Contents. She is a disciplined person and likes to read to the end of a chapter before she falls asleep at night, and she prefers to know what she is getting in for. Having been reading on my Kobo, first The Great Gatsby, and most recently, Confederates in the Attic, I now understand what she means (though I find guides such as Tables more useful in non-fiction, like Confederates). So I relented, and created a fairly thorough Table of Contents for You Again, still not chapters, however. Instead, as in Flashing Yellow, I have big chunks I call "Parts," and, in You Again, month divisions. Within each month, though, the narrative moves from one character's point of view to another's, and those are separated by simple lines. For me it's a matter of rhythm, breath. I wonder how it is for other authors?  My friend  quickly surveyed the novels she was reading and found different ways of handling contents that lead to Tables. She liked Kate Atkinson's very precise Table, but found less detailed Tables in Colum McCann and Achebe.
If necessity really is the mother of invention, perhaps my habits will change as I write texts that will be published electronically. I had to think about it again when I updated my Shinny's Girls Trilogy for epub, because I want the Trilogy to be available to libraries, where I find most of my readers. Epub seems to require only that divisions are clear within the text, then goes ahead and makes the Table of Contents automatically. Much easier than doing it myself, with Kindle, even though the instructional video I followed for Mac users featured an Englishwoman with a lovely, patient voice.
In this eworld of books, TOC's seem to be an aid for readers. That requirement is prompting me to consider how organize my contents and, more importantly, why I do so. Is it the instinctive rhythm, the stopping for breath I feel, and changes in narrative voice as points of view shift from character to character,  or a greater logic I have not yet considered?

("Contents Under Pressure" is the title of one of my friend David King's comedies for theatre.Thanks, Dave.)

Nancy Huston, Robert Le Page: images worth thousands of words

It would have been better to know the book Infrared, Infrarouge, before Nancy Huston's reading/concert last night. Instead, I read about the book beforehand, because, while I understand much of what I hear in French, I still miss a lot, and if I am missing too much, I drift. This brilliant writer, several of whose books I have read, including Cantique des plaines (en francais), knows how to deliver a performance that, for me, enhanced the text I only partially understood, cause de la langue. Pianist Édouard Ferlet augmented the rhythms of her phrases and the word play. Under his fingers, music rippled like water  that occasionally foamed exuberantly over the hard - sometimes literally hard - protuberances of the narrative. At points he abandoned the keys to play directly on the strings of the grand piano. A black piano. Édouard dressed in black, except for his feet, in red shoes. Nancy also in black, but with red sandals and a long red scarf that she arranged in various ways to differentiate characters.

During breaks in the reading, Édouard took over and Nancy moved close to listen, leaning on the piano like a jazz singer, or dancing around the sanctuary of the chapelle au musée de l'amèrique francophone, beneath the soaring, almost cylindrical, vault. In this season of yet another grand controverse in Quebec, about whether or not Quebec identity  might be compromised by government employees wearing ostentatious signs of religion, such as the hijab, it seemed that Nancy was directly challenging the full house of Quebeckers to notice that her head was wrapped in a red foulard here in this former Roman Catholic chapel.  The music, the varied inflections of her voice, as she moved from character to character, the red and black. Visual and aural images produced an effect similar to the infrared photography she uses as a metaphor.

Imagery, of course, is Robert Le Page's genius, and in the revival of Les Aguilles et Opium at Theatre Trident, he chose a revolving cube, (if that is not a contradiction) into and out of which moved his autobiographical character Robert, the literally airborne

Jean Cocteau, and a mute Miles Davis. Dizzying at moments, when it was hard to tell which was the floor, which the ceiling, the image nevertheless served the non-linear time scheme of the piece. Like thought, which is random and surprising, which collects and twins ideas and memories.

How it's going...

If I were to start a new blog, with advice either on writing, or on how to market one's book, self-published book, ebook, I would have to call it, Something you REALLY have never heard before... REALLY! Though I doubt I could actually think of something that has not already been written, posted, blogged, tweeted, shared. The web is more like a hive.

In my explorations, I have encountered people such as the Passionate Bibliophile, who confessed that yes he is a real person, if also an Amazon affiliate book store. I had to ask, because all the titles he posts on G + made me think he was either a speed reader or a computer program. But no, he is real and he likes books that affirm triumphs of the human spirit. Well who can argue with that? We all like to hear that people CAN overcome hardship, physical, psychological, situational, unanticipated, long standing. Even when we know that, perhaps, most often we accustom ourselves to living with whatever it is, since there may be no other choice, so many things cannot be overcome. At least not with un triomphe étincelante, or a sparkling triumph (though I like the French word for sparkling, which is kind of a visual onomatopoeia). Me, I like mixed motives, unresolved endings.

I persist in feeling most comfortable on sites for readers, such as Goodreads, though that site has come under fire from writers' sites, which now recommend Library Thing and, in Canada, the 49th shelf. Should I join everything, I wonder, just to keep up with the blazing changes in taste? One of the first sites I signed onto belongs to a librarian, Melissa, whose enthusiasm makes me feel as though I am part of an actual discussion, I mean a face to face discussion.

Many sites/blogs, whatever, collect other sites/blogs, just as I am doing here. Yet I find them hard to read. They are like textbooks with too many footnotes. Brian Fawcett, in his book Cambodia: A Book for People who Find Television Watching Too Slow, made literary use of the kind of attention splitting that happens when a reader is following one text and, at the same time, trying to keep track of the supporting information from another, or many other texts. I appreciate all the information people provide, while suffering mentally and ocularly.

Like a novice mariner lost at sea, I keep my eye peeled  for literary fiction writers who are in the same boat I hopped into a few months ago. A life boat of sorts. A literary lifeboat. For when conventional publishers do not share one's vision for presenting her work, there is now the option of e publishing. I thought I snagged a kindred spirit the other day, someone whose sense of humour and publishing experience led me to believe we might develop an on-line friendship. I was about to order one of her books when I saw that her novels are for young adults. No reason why I can't befriend a writer of young adult novels, and yet... Most of the writers whose posts I have read so far produce books that fit on easily labelled shelves.

I am still a baby in this new world, even if a veteran writer. The good news is that You Again, the third in the Shinny's Girls Trilogy, is now available as a separate ebook and will soon be available in print, with another great cover by Stephen (p0ps) Harlow.

Confederates, faceless men, draft dodgers...old wars reconsidered

Reading a paper book, and  an ebook, both concerned with the lingering effect of old armed conflicts. Civil wars, if wars can ever be considered civil. Confederates in the Attic is the ebook, and I am reading it in preparation for my southern odyssey in November.  I finished the first few chapters on the train from Toronto back to Quebec City, between glances out the window at sumacs dripping scarlet alongside the tracks, and white birch trunks composing a warp behind the turning maples.

Tony Horwitz writes about his boyhood obsession with the the war between the states, as it was called, his experience as a hardcore reenactor of life as a confederate soldier, and the southern loyalists he met in Salisbury, North Carolina. As the Via train rolled east, after a switch at the Montreal train station, (where I picked up a felafel sandwich from my favorite Libainaise food kiosk) I learned of the commitments people make to keep memories alive. There is even a group called Children of the Confederacy. Horwitz examines the South through a lens ground to a single focus. My aim is to get a general first  impression. Instead of following the trail bloodied by combatants in the 1860's, a subject that never really compelled me, except when I was in school and I had to memorize the Gettysburg Address, I plan to make my first trip to the southern U.S. a bit of a literary pilgrimage. I want to visit Asheville and think of the wordy romanticism of Thomas Wolfe; You Can't Go Home Again waits on my ereader too.

But here, chez moi, it is a novel en français, L'ombre du vent, or The Shadow of the Wind, that absorbs me. Even though I am not yet, nor may ever be, fluent in French, I can read well enough to savour the language, the style of Zafon, the compelling voice of his narrator, who, as a child, is taken by his father to a cemetery for forgotten books. That sequence begins a story haunted both by a man with a face burned so that he has no features, and, more intrinsically, by the Spanish civil war. But a cemetery for forgotten books! How wonderful! All we authors must wish for a kind of Graveyard day (I remember the Bobby Ann Mason story), when people would come visit our neglected books

That has happened to some extent recently with my novel, Centre/Center (Talon, 1992) which, coincidentally, also concerns war, the Vietnam war in this case, and consequent migration to Canada of draft dodgers and war protestors. A few messages from readers who discovered the book (in the kind of cemetery that now exists on-line), and a book club discussion have convinced me that the divisions created by that war also still exist, here in Canada and in the United States. It was a different kind of civil, rather, uncivil war.

Did I just say/write that? Again?

Reading my work aloud, as I did this week for the 100th episode of Artchat podcast, I  cringe when I  have to run my tongue over the same word twice in the same paragraph. There, I have done it again. Same, same. Often it is a word of little value; work, work, dead, dead (which could be seminal in a story) business, business.Yet, is any word in a text of no value? If so, what is it doing there? A long standing weakness, this unconscious word repetition. My latest experience concerned a passage I had reviewed dozens of times, and which was vetted by a copy editor. Yi! I wish I had stayed with poetry longer, to reinforce in myself  the importance of concentrating on the words individually instead of the stories they build, which always seem to demand urgent telling.

 But conscious word repetition. That can work for emphasis. So effective in theatre, the recurrence of an image or a line. A truism lauds the rule of three, but truisms exist to be challenged. If I say something three times, is it boring, emphatic, unforgettable?  Ie., value x three, three times more valuable? Less if I restrict my use of that word in a limited amount of text, say a paragraph or a chapter, to two times? More effective if I consciously sprinkle the same word throughout?

I fear my weakness could become fatal with age. What will ever stop me from repeating words that seem - at least at the time they spring to my thoughts, and then to the keyboard - the right ones in the right place? It may be only stopping altogether that stops me.

Bravo Grand Prix cyclists, bravo musique sacrée

What great audiences there are in Quebec. On Friday people lined the flats and the steep curving streets to applaud  164 Grand Prix cyclists, including the eventual winner from the Netherlands, Robert Gesink, as they whizzed by beneath circling helicopters, behind the sirens and flashing lights and speeding motors of police and race officials.

More choruses of "Bravo," sustained for long minutes, at the cavernous église St. Roch, where the Clarion Choir of NYand Musica Antiqua of St Petersburg performed the Rachmaninoff Vespers, or all night vigil, with its delicate, perfect harmonies. Sopranos chiming lightly as a crystal bell, the solemnity of the so deep bass ("I know the voices of my countrymen," said Rachmaninoff when confronted with the difficulty of finding a singer capable of achieving that low b- flat), the chant occasionally evoking images of fields with peasants bundling hay, at least in my mind.
 As many bravos for the Choeur Créole de Cuba Saturday night, different voices, also that combination of sweet high and visceral low, braided like currents in a clear stream, but more plaint in the mostly Haitien tales of mariners in trouble, a child begging for help, pourquoi Haiti pleure-t-elle?

Instead of the black in which the singers dressed for the Rachmaninoff, the six women wore traditional garb in bright yellows, with head wraps. Not absolutely a cappella, because one of the four men  beat sticks and sometimes drums, and the taller, thin man made sounds that reminded me of someone thumping a stand-up bass, but he did it with his mouth. Exacerbating the emotional effect of the music, after all the bravos, the choir walked down the centre aisle touching audience members on their shoulders, taking our hands, looking into our eyes. Bravo, indeed!

The ravaged heart, the bypass

Among the many ironies at Lac Megantic, the catastrophic train derailment and consequent explosion occurred just metres from the towering St. Agnes Church. From the church steps we looked out at the broad space, empty except for earth moving equipment, that used to be the heart of town. Butterflies and notice boards penned with messages of consolation decorate the wire mesh fences that keep people out. Inside the church are poster boards crowded with heart shaped notes in  bright colours: we will miss you. we are with you; and one poster boasting of a Pee Wee hockey championship. Goodbye Coach, reads the writing, we are going to miss you. Alongside the disaster site, a crematorium and a funeral home stand too glaringly now, as if constructed for the occasion.

     And there is a navette, or shuttle service, to ferry people who may not have cars, from one side of town to the other, a way of bypassing the centre now that it is impossible to cross on foot, as people have been crossing, perhaps for 12,000 years, when Amerindians lived along the lake.

Much later, in the mid- 1800's Scots settlers arrived and with the laying of track for the rail line, the town was officially born. Trains involved in the birth of the village, the life of the particleboard, furniture and door factories that provide employment, but also the death of 47 people, including children just past toddler stage, a very old woman, and that pee wee hockey coach.

Ma vie en français

J'adore la ville de Québec! Here I am, back after a six month absence, and so comfortable now. Just bought trois tournesols pour célébrer! Personne m'a repondu en anglais. I have made progress enough to understand and be understood en français.

This is the fifth time I have arrived for a stay of several months in this beautiful  City founded four centuries ago. J'adore le son de la langue française on the streets, des pierres partout, stone buildings with wooden window and door sashes in French blue, a rusty or bright red, ochre, light or deep greens. This time I live just off rue St Paul, on a small côte of cobblestone, in a 200 year old building with wooden posts at least a foot thick. Formidable! At this time of year the city is full of tourists whose faces are hidden behind cameras pointed up at mansard roofs, cupolas, spires. Bells peal from scores of church towers, a joyous sound no matter your religion.

The papers are full of opinion about Madame la Première's proposed charter of Québec values, the one that contains the contentious prohibition of religious garb in government workplaces. She was born feisty, Pauline Marois. In this age of multiculturalism, she must have known the furor this proposal would incite. Is it simply a matter of separating church and state, right down to dress codes for government workers, or is she trying to appeal to the worst in an electorate that has been under the threat of non-French invasions since the battle of the Plains of Abraham? Qui sait, mais c'est un commencemant intéressant.

As for la vie littéraire, my second night here I met with members of the book club who had  read Centre/Center, my third book. Pleased that they thought it a "true" representation of the 60's, that one woman in particular was sad when the book ended ( a real compliment; I have had that feeling about my favourite books), and surprised that the book evoked a spirited discussion about the Vietnam war. That old wound seems to fester still, and not very far below the surface.

Aug-sausted

Leggy petunias, yellow grass, berries shrivelling, water dribbling instead of falling, itchy feet, premature nostalgia, stacks of blue lined paper near the cash registers in the stores.

     Change begins with rain scalloping down the road, more spiders in the corners, chipmunks dashing up and down the walnut tree, and a note from Air Canada reminding me that my flight to Quebec City is only days away.

The more things change.... (Surviving as a Writer, 1991)

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. (The more things change, the more they are the same.)

Here is a guest editorial I wrote for Event magazine in 1991.

Surviving as a Writer

When Dale (David Zieroth) invited me to write a guest editorial and suggested as a topic, Surviving as a Writer, and I had to think rather than just grouse about it, one of my first thoughts was of a student who complained about being assigned to describe the plight of a fictional character: "How can I know how she feels?" he asked. "You use your imagination," I said, tempted to add, do you know what I mean? Because the expression on his face suggested he didn't: that he was not in the habit of drawing each day from his human capacity for invention.

I bean writing short fiction not because my imagination was unexplored territory, but because I needed to make what I imagined real. I wanted to be a writer and I started with short stories because I thought it would be easier to write something short.  I confessed as much to another writer once, as a way of describing ow naive I had been, and she remarked that we must all have been a little naïve to get into it. The person I'm referring to is more experienced than I am, she has more books on her shelf; she's further down the road. Myself I'm only far enough along to be able to glance back and see that a distance exists between then and now.

Imagination is one essential survival tool. The ability to stay on the road is another.
 
 As for putting food on the table for myself and first one daughter, now another, and making sure we have somewhere to put the table, I quit my last full time job about fifteen years ago. I recall the urgency I felt to get on with what I really wanted to do, to be a writer. At the time I was editor of a small newspaper, and though I wrote many thousands of words each week - columns, editorials, news features, reports on oil pipeline inquiries, Indian land claim negotiations - I did not consider myself a real writer, just as we who worked there did not consider our newspaper a real newspaper, not in the sense the New York Times was a newspaper.

My plan was to support myself by working as a free-lance writer while learning to write fiction in my spare time. Though I wasn't sure what free-lance writers actually did, I forged ahead with characteristic impulsiveness and, of course, found out over time that as a free-lance writer you do whatever you can do. One thing you must do is learn to live with a deficit. Since it is bound to be microscopic compared to what Ottawa and Washington run up, you may even feel virtuous since you're doing it FOR LITERATURE.


My mother never understood. As each new move - geographical, personal, career - seemed to entrench me in rather than eliminate my precarious position in life, she worried she might end up having to take care of me and mine. Despite my promise to outlast her, if only for this reason, the fact that I was not covered for my own funeral expenses bothered her a lot.

Imagination. The determination to stay on the road. A thorough disregard for regular pay cheques, insurance benefits, pension plans.

In her book, The Writing Life, Annie Dillard describes the writer's job as follows: "Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spins the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair." Faith. That's something else that is crucial to surviving as a writer, for as Dillard also writes, in the same book: "This writing that you do, that so thrills you, that so rocks and exhilarates you, as if you were dancing right next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else."

Which leads directly to my "host of readers" fantasy. While walking with a long time friend whose first book had just been published, we talked about the expectations we'd had when we wanted to be writers. As a kid who read while she was supposed to be doing most everything else, and who grew up to be the kind of person who opens newspapers and magazines to the book pages first, I had assumed, I told her, that a host of readers existed out there, people who were interested in, even eager for each season's new books. The profound indifference of the general population to books, to fiction in particular, was as hard to swallow as the lesson that short doesn't mean easier when it comes to writing stories. Still...

I'm working on a novel now and that's hard too. In the process of making the fiction real to myself I feel like an archaeologist gluing together the pieces of an object whose final shape she has only heard about. An act of utter faith, and, in my case, and act in slow motion.

A friend who travels the world from one meditation retreat to another called me the last time he passed through town. "How's it going?" he asked.

"Well, I'm doing it," I said. "But it's hard to see that it's getting done."

"Don't worry. My meditation teachers  say we must never check on our progress. And if we can't help ourselves, to limit the checking to once every ten years."

That too seemed a useful thing to remember about surviving as a writer.