“I feel so anxious. What if I shouldn’t behave properly? You know i never had tea at a manse before, and I’m not sure that I know all the rules of etiquette, although I’ve been studying the rules given in the Etiquette Department of the Family Herald ever since I came here. I’m so afraid I’ll do something silly or forget to do something I should do. Would it be good manners to take a second helping of anything if you wanted to VERY much?”
“The trouble with you, Anne, is that you’re thinking too much about yourself. You should just think of Mrs. Allan and what would be nicest and most agreeable to her,” said Marilla, hitting for once in her life on a very sound and pithy piece of advice. Anne instantly realized this. – from Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery
Thank you, Marilla, for your sound advice tonight. I am reading Nora her story while she smacks lips and licks sticky fingers: home made bread and honey. As I tuck her into bed I tuck away the anxieties that have plagued me this month by turning my thoughts towards others instead. Friends are overdue a letter. Favourite flowered tights blown out on their first recess could use some mending. Wouldn’t it be nice to drop off a chive and cheese loaf for a friend?
The thing with writing every day is…one doesn’t have time to smooth over the moron bumps. If I had just waited a day to write about that audition…who knew the director would read my blog post?! Both he and the playwright weighed in and informed me I had done a great audition and they thought the way I had sung the song was a choice.
Ahhhh. Humbling! It was a good laugh. And very kind of them to write. It was also a good lesson to me about many things, including: avoid writing about recent work. The writing in my stories must be art, not a diary written artfully. “The trouble with you, Anne, is that you’re thinking too much about yourself.”
Earlier today, Nora and I rode our bikes downtown to watch some 3D squirrels and a pug. On our way home there was a debutante pink sunset. Nora gasped. “Oh Mama, wouldn’t it be amazing to dance around in a cloud that colour? The angels are lucky.” I hum. “Do you think those clouds are for the angels? I think they were created to delight us too.” Nora gazes at them wistfully, her bike helmet turned heavenward. “But they’re so far away, we can’t touch them.”
“Yeah, but from down here we have the perspective – the ability to see all of them.” Nora gasps and turns to me with a smile, “That’s true, Mama! I think they ARE for us!”
My ‘writer’s blog’ is for immediacy, stream of conscious. I didn’t reread anything at first though now I confess I often reread once for spelling and paragraphs. It’s the snapshot camera. It’s the ‘live’ coverage. I edit these medical legal reports ad infinitum and then present them lifeless in rooms where guns and money are de rigour. I loved that the play, Quilters, was art made from, what could well be called blogs, the writing of the Saskatchewan women home to England turn of the century. Blogs are these letters revived in an age when the Canadian Postal Service wants to be paid but doesn’t want to deliver mail anymore. That’s what I liked about the original ‘blog’ though perhaps that’s become the ‘tweet’. I like your blog for it’s originality and immediacy. I know your finished works are truly sophisticated art with layers upon layers of meaning and all manner of editing like the folded steel of a Japanese sword. The blog to me is like ‘improvisation’. I like that one of Hemingway’s, at least one of Doystoyevsky’s books and a masterpiece of Goethe were dictated. In the Artist’s Way, Cameron speaks of creativity that flows. Personally I’d like to be more of the ‘channel’ that Frank talks about. The blog by contrast is the opposite of the Presidential Address or the Wall Street press release. I love your blogs. I like your conversations with Nora. In Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals we learned that Nietze and Marx and several others were saying one thing and doing the very opposite. Your blog tells us that you’re like the CS Lewis figure in Narnia. It makes your plays even more extraordinary, that you do all those day to day living things and write the most incredible ‘polished’ plays. It’s apparent listening to your blod that you have the genius Michener spoke of when he said that to be a writer you must have to write “while” feeding your children at the breakfast table. I imagine the writer’s cabin and the writer’s life, far from the maddening crowd, but you prove the rule is the writer lives and shines and shares in reality, not away from it. Thank you for your blog. I look forward to reading it always. I’ll forever look at clouds as places to dance and sights to behold.
Thank you so much William, especially for sharing what Michener said!