the cassandra pages

A Year in a Sketchbook

Over the weekend I finished the last pages in my current sketchbook, with the watercolors of artichokes and fruit that are shown below. This particular sketchbook was started back in the fall of 2022, so it spans more than a year -- today, the view out my window is very much like the first page in this video, painted in January 2023, just without the snow.

Last winter I did all the drawings that went into my book Snowy Fields, in much larger drawing pads -- that explains the big time gap between the second and third pages in the video. I also began a dedicated sketchbook for our trip to Greece, and I keep a small pocket-size sketchbook in my purse for metro-sketching and car trips -- so that's why this larger one covers so much time. In any case, I thought I'd make a video of the pages from just the last year - late winter 2023 to mid-March 2024. I think two pages are missing, one that I tore up and one that I gave to a friend. The next task is to gather up the courage to draw on that very first, blank page of the new sketchbook which is already waiting for me on my studio table.

This book is the latest in the series I've been keeping since I started drawing seriously again in 2010. I'm not nearly as prolific as some sketchers, but drawing and making watercolor sketches has definitely become a regular practice for me, and even more so in the last five or six years. When I look through the sketchbooks, I can see the improvement, and yet I feel there's still so much to learn and to experiment with. But it's not just about drawing and filling pages...the sketchbooks are really a visual diary, and I can usually remember exactly where I was, and some of what was going on, when I was working on a particular page. I don't make many notes - just the date and sometimes the location on the back of the sheet. Maybe I should - I rely on my memory being pretty good, but it may not be forever!

For those who are interested in the tools-and-materials side of things, this is a Stillman&Birn Gamma series 6" x 9" landscape format sketchbook - the paper is slightly cream-colored, perfect for pencil or pen-and-ink, and heavy enough to take light watercolor washes. It has no texture or "tooth", though, and won't stand much re-working, nor is it good for powdery media like charcoal or pastel. It's not a watercolor paper per se, but is versatile enough for me as a multi-media sketchbook. Most of the ink drawings were done with either a fine-tip fountain pen or a fude-nib Sailor pen, and Noodler's ink; the rest are either pencil, or pencil and watercolor, or direct watercolor with no preliminary drawing at all.

Spaces of our Hands and Hearts

Does the space where we work influence what we are able to do there? I think so. Space affects our mindset so dramatically that I suspect it partially determines how much work we do there, as well as its quality. Frankly, in today's world, we should be grateful to be able to do creative work at all, and to have a roof over our heads. So whatever I write here about "spaces" comes from a conscious place of privilege.*

__

Ideally, the place where we do our concentrated work needs to be functional and supportive; it needs to suit who we are, and help us to feel good when we're in it. There are plenty of writers who've done their greatest work in rooms or chilly cabins piled with books and papers  -- think Seamus Heaney -- and artists, like Lucien Freud, who've worked in chaos. It's a question of knowing yourself, too.

It's hard for me to concentrate and work well when I don't have, as Virginia Woolf wrote, "a room of my own," even if that room is mine only part of the time. For most of my life, I've worked in somewhat makeshift studio spaces: repurposed or multi-purpose rooms in the same place where I was living. That's been OK when I was able to close the door and have some solitude and privacy, less so when I was working in a larger but shared space, or a space that other people walked through. For much of our time in Vermont, I did my design work and writing in a room that had, literally, six doors -- it was a former kitchen, with front and back outside entrances, a bathroom door, and doors leading to other parts of the house as well as the basement! I couldn't do artwork there at all, but, with my back to most of the doors, I was able to write.

Sometimes we don't even know what's good for us. After fifteen years, it was traumatic for me to leave our former large, dedicated studio space here in Montreal, downsize dramatically, and move into a 10' x 10' repurposed bedroom in our condominium. I thought it would be a disaster, workwise -- but I couldn't have been more wrong. The large studio had room to spread out, but it was always cluttered, and it was on one of the city's busiest north-south streets, with tons of traffic and a great deal of dust, as well as foot traffic and industrial noise from other tenants in the building. The best feature, for me, was a big wall where I could hang my work, and the ability to have separate areas for oil painting, printmaking, drawing, sewing. But writing there was difficult, as well as any kind of experimental work in general, since it was a big, open space I shared with my husband. I seldom had a sense of complete "head space", not because I was being interrupted -- simply because there was another human being in the room.

After a year and a half of working here in our apartment, I've come to love my new space (the picture at the top of this post is another view). The room is small but efficient, the north light is beautiful, and I have everything I need within reach, with most of it stored in cupboards out of sight. Instead of spreading out and working on several projects at once, I now do one thing at a time and put the materials and equipment away when I'm done -- and that's fine. The tables and storage units are adaptable -- as you can see below, I'm leaning the easel against a wall to take up less floor space, and using a drawer in the storage unit as a taboret. It works fine. 

I thought ventilation would be a problem in the winter, but I recently bought an air filtration unit which should work very well to filter the fumes of any harmful solvents, and if we have wildfire smoke again this coming summer, it should help with that too. The most important difference now is that it's a room of my own, with a door I can shut (but rarely do); all my artwork and writing and sewing take place here, as well as plenty of "thinking time." I've always believed that spaces take on a sort of energy of their own, over time, depending on how they are used, and this one now feels comfortable and personal in a way that our former, cluttered studio never did.

The pandemic years were especially hard, since we didn't use our big studio much at all and tried to do everything in our small, ground floor, former city apartment, where there was no light. We liked the apartment very much -- as a residence. During the pandemic, though, I basically lived at my desk in the living/dining room, with a lot of street noise all day, and poor J. was at a desk in the bedroom, looking out on an alley. I think that showed both of us, once and for all, what was important to us in a workspace -- privacy, light, adaptable table space, good storage, and a sense of peacefulness and quiet.

I wish I had a photograph of the back room in my parents' and grandparents' house where I used my mother's easel, which my father built for her, to do my first oil paintings, back in the 1960s -- that's the same easel I use here in Montreal now. When I moved back into the upper floor of that house, alone, after graduating from college, the pine-paneled back room became my study and studio; it's where I taught myself to paint in watercolor and do calligraphy at a professional level; it was where I listened to music, and worked hard every evening after coming home from my job; it's the room where I began to think of myself as an artist.

After working in various rooms in our Vermont house over the years, none of which were really suitable, we eventually built a garage that included a small woodworking shop for J. and a small studio for me.

My studio in the garage in Vermont, in 2006, just before we moved to Montreal.

I liked that room a great deal, and it helped me to have a space of my own during some difficult years when I was trying to figure myself out -- I was just starting to write seriously when I was about 40, and had begun painting again after deliberately taking some years off. In this room I had an electric kettle for tea, a space heater for the cold winters, a little desk with my meditation items on top of it, a rocking chair, bookshelves, and my easel. Although the windows were small, they looked out on my garden... I have lots of positive memories of being there.

Painting outside at our home in Vermont, probably shortly after I bought this portable French box easel -- which I still use at the lake today. This must have been in the 1980s or early 1990s.

All creative people need to train themselves to be able to work in less-than-ideal circumstances. I've always managed to work wherever I was, and it's been good for me to take a sketchbook and notebook (or now, tablet or laptop) wherever I go. However, it's clear to me, looking back, that the differences in my day-to-day workspaces made a big difference in my productivity as well as my contentment and sense of self, and they've also influenced the type of work I was able to do. When there's less distraction and more peace, I'm more able to simply buckle down and do the work. The main question for me has always been "can I center myself and concentrate?"

How do you feel about your own workspaces, and how are you doing, creatively, at this time of so much violence and destruction?

*More than 100 cultural sites have been destroyed in Gaza, along with the lives of scores of poets, writers, and artists. Thousands more have lost their homes or been injured, and yet we continue to hear, at times, their poignant words. Many of us, in the privileged west, have been so disheartened that it's been difficult to continue our own work. And yet we must, because the arts are essential in keeping our own spirits alive, and in giving hope that some of what we value most in human culture has a chance of continuing. When I think about "home" this always includes, for me, the place where I work. To lose it would be to lose a part of myself. Continuing to create, and to mindfully stand alongside those who struggle to do so, or have been silenced forever, is to be in solidarity. I hope to do more in the months ahead to contribute in other ways through my work and my ongoing protest. 

 

 

Returning to Oil Painting

When we were in central New York for a short time a few weeks ago, I started an oil painting. It was the first one I'd worked on since 2018 - a pretty big gap in time. The interruption of the pandemic and the fact that we took apart our studio and moved were, of course, a major factors, but except for the three oils I did back in 2018, I had actually done very few since we moved to Montreal almost twenty years ago. Instead, I concentrated on drawing and watercolor, on keeping a sketchbook, and on printmaking. I also did fair amount of bookmaking and binding, and sewing projects. The larger works I did were almost all pastels - dry media, rather than oil or acrylic easel painting. And all of that had to fit into our professional life, because we were working until about six years ago -- perhaps that's why I did those oil paintings in 2018.

When I reflect on the reasons behind these choices, I realize that the spaces in which I've worked have always influenced what media I used, along with what was going on in my life at the time -- and I'm going to write more about this in a subsequent post. 

But today, I want to talk about beginning again in what has always been the most important medium to me - oil. Why? I guess I just like it - the materials have a seductive and enticing quality that appeals to all of my senses. There is craft involved long before you pick up a brush - the preparation of your support, whether canvas, board, or wood, has to be done properly or the painting will not last. The materials are pretty expensive so you need to understand them. Then, the process of building a painting takes days, weeks, or longer, and it can be utterly absorbing as well as agonizingly frustrating during the period when you are living with it -- because that's exactly how it feels. Fortunately, oil is a forgiving medium, unlike watercolor -- it stays workable for a long time, you can scrape it away with a palette knife, dissolve layers with a solvent-soaked rag and begin again, and continually revise by painting over dried previous layers without the colors becoming muddy. You can work into wet paint for soft edges and other effects, without having to time your efforts down to the minute, as in watercolor. The colors themselves have a unique beauty, luminosity and depth. And all the while, there is a sense of being part of a lineage of painters who have wrestled with this medium over the centuries, trying to create works that are beautiful and that will last. Yes, modern conservation techniques allow us to preserve works on paper, but they are never as highly prized as oil paintings.

View up the Chenango Valley from North Norwich. Oil on prepared board, 12" x 16", February 2024.

I don't think my oils are better than other things I've done; often the liveliness of a drawing or quick watercolor pleases me more. But there is something about the process of creating an oil painting  -- maybe it's because you're with it for so much longer? -- that I find satisfying. It's always a journey, both artistically and emotionally, and there are always points where you're stuck or things aren't working, and you want to give up in frustration, but don't, and somehow find your way out of the thicket. The final painting may not be your best, but you've learned something that you can take with you into the next one. And the medium itself - the unctuousness of the paint, the spring or stiffness of the brushes, the smell, the joy of mixing exactly the right color and value, the way the paint becomes part of the surface -- all this is deeply satisfying. 

When there's been a big gap in time between when you stopped doing something, and beginning again, you can never pick up where you left off. That's because you aren't the same person anymore. A lot has happened in my life, and in the world, since 2018, as well as the fact that I have aged. All of that is carried in my body and mind whether it's formed into expressed words or not. And even though I've done a lot of artwork in other media during that time , and learned a lot from it, painting in oils is different from anything else. I'm very curious to see how these factors will affect my creative work in the long run.

Making new progress in this medium has been a goal of mine for a while, but I haven't been in the right space or frame of mind to start until recently. I'm not sure where I want to go with it, but I trust the process to show me that -- the way to find out is to paint. I don't know what a realistic goal is for the coming year, nor do I want to stop drawing or making watercolors. I don't think I can do a painting every week, but maybe I can do one every month. I do recognize an underlying sense of, if not urgency, then certainly a ticking clock -- if not now, then when? Because I too want to create a larger body of work that has a chance of lasting, being passed down to the next generations, having meaning to people because the work shows a place or a person or a feeling that resonates or captures some aspect of life that perhaps doesn't, in reality, exist forever. And I also want to challenge myself to do the best work I can and take myself, through it, into new territory. So this is a beginning, and I hope that I can keep at it and not let huge gaps in time occur again.

Starting with a winter landscape made sense, since I was completely absorbed in drawing such scenes all last winter. I feel like I've internalized some truths about them.

In this particular painting, I struggled just to get some technique back, as well as to make decisions about how much detail to include, how to handle the tangles of branches and shrubs and grasses, and the snow upon them. In the end, I simplified a lot, as you can see in the video about 2/3 of the way through. At one point I rubbed out the whole lower left section and repainted it; I also brightened the sky and added more blue, and changed the color of the hills, adding some scumbled color to indicate the trees going back. The conifers were lightened, and I added beige and pinkish violet to the bare-branched trees near them in the background.

When I reached the point shown below, I was pretty happy with the brushwork in the foreground and in the bare trees, and also with the small touches of color that I added. The deep blues gave a lot more depth and interest to the snow, while the touches of pink and lavender enlivened the dry grasses and shrubs and helped to unify the painting, since shades of both are in the background trees and sky.

I'm not sure I'm done with it, in fact probably not, but the work from here on will be fairly minor. It's a start.

 

Drawing Manon

Lately I've been working harder on trying to draw Manon from life. In spite of the fact that I've been drawing cats since the mid-1980s, I've never found it easy. There's something about their anatomy that's hard to capture; maybe there's so much fluff covering their skinny little bodies and skeletons that it's hard to see the underlying structure, and you end up with something that looks like a lumpy bag of fur. They move a lot, even when asleep. I also used to get the proportions wrong. A cat's head is actually quite small compared to their body, and I often drew it too large. Manon is a small cat, only 8 pounds. The fact that she's three-colored also complicates things when working in black-and-white.

It's been going better lately, especially when she's asleep. Above is the most recent effort, from the past weekend. Here's a detail:

And here are two other recent drawings:

Here are a couple of much older drawings, from a sketchbook in 2011, not long after she came to live with us. Doing quick gesture drawings of animals, as well as people, is a big help -- I should do more of that now.

Manon is at least 15 now, and a year ago in March we almost lost her. She bounced back, with the help of our brilliant vet, Julie*, who prescribed tiny doses of prednisone every other day. She's regained all the weight she had lost, and has had a good year. It seems like she wants to be around us all the time, even more than before, and is very affectionate while also maintaining her feline independence - as much as possible for an indoor cat. She's still pretty playful and energetic, even though she sleeps more, and she continues to be more vocal in her attempts to communicate. I never tire of watching her - to me, cats embody beauty and grace, as well as having the appeal of all their inherent quirkiness. We cherish every day with her, and I'm sure that's motivating my desire to draw and paint her while she's still with us. I must admit that photographs do a better job of showing her true personality, though -- this is a cat with a big presence! How fortunate we were to have ended up with such a companion, totally by chance.

*our vet is Dr Julie Bereza at Baker Animal Hospital in Montreal - I can't recommend this clinic enough

Centering and Simplifying

When I posted this watercolor sketch on Instagram, one of the comments (thank you, Michael) was that it seemed to capture "the essence of carnation". I thought about that quite a lot, wondering what happens when this occurs. What helps the artist get close to the "essence" of a subject, and is it something that can be "explained," let alone taught?

Sitting down one evening to do this particular piece, several things were going on in my mind. I was drawn by a vase of evergreens and carnations remaining from the holidays, while also wanting some respite from a long day and the constellation of anxieties, sorrows, frustrations and anger with which many of us are living. So I wanted to do something absorbing and, hopefully, to capture some of the beauty and peacefulness in front of me. I decided not to work in my studio, but right there on the living room table, so I brought out my watercolor palette, a large jar of water, sketchbook and brush, and adjusted the position of the flowers for the light angle I wanted.

Then there were a few minutes of considering potential problems. I wanted to do a direct watercolor -- with no pencil under-drawing, or pen-and-ink line -- because I felt that a spontaneous watercolor would better capture the delicacy and emotional feeling of the bouquet. Another issue was how to handle the white flowers against a white background, because their edges would be very hard to see. I decided I'd paint the shadows on the petals, and then add some pencil lines afterward, if needed.

The final questions were the placement on the page, and where to start. I began by mentally calculating the proportion of vase height to flower height and width, and estimating where these would need to be placed on the page. I then started painting with a brush line indicating the top edge of the vase (the whole vase appears in the full painting, as you'll see in the video below) and built the picture from there, placing the flowers before doing any of the foliage. I painted far fewer flowers than were actually in the vase; I just chose representative ones at interesting angles. As soon as I began painting, I became very quickly absorbed in it.

The painting itself took about 30-40 minutes. When I'm working on something like this I'm in a state that's somewhere between meditation and extreme but wordless concentration. I'm not talking to myself in my head, and I'm moving pretty fast because I want the strokes to be quick and alive. I don't fuss over things, but try to create an overall impression as rapidly as possible. The color choices and color mixtures are intuitive and come from experience; this just comes with learned technique and practice. As Zen teaches, you have to master your tools and technique first, and practice over and over so that you can let them go, not think about them, but rely on them when you are in a flow of action. During that time, your attention can be concentrated not so much on what you are doing but on becoming one with the subject -- seeing it with fresh, clear eyes and penetrating to what is essential, while leaving aside whatever is not.

Obviously, that is a goal, but not something I usually achieve! Nevertheless, without understanding it as an ideal, and without having put in years of thought, meditation, and technical practice, I don't think I'd ever be able to come close. Oddly enough, children sometimes approach the essence of things better than adults. They have so much less of a filter; they haven't been told what matters by other people or society, and they haven't learned to care what others think of their efforts -- that judging voice we become accustomed to as adults is not in their heads yet, but --sadly -- it will be soon. As adults, we have to un-learn a great deal in order to open up again.

The result of this process is a picture, yes, but it can also be a period of time that is enormously refreshing. We center ourselves, we concentrate, we forget our ego as we work, absorbed in color and form and the wordless communication between eye, hand, and spirit. It's a journey, and a space in time. There is no way to describe this in detail; as with many things, it's easier to say what it's not.

The detailed drawing above was done on the following day. Here I was trying to see the difference between a careful rendering of the flowers and what I had done in the painting. It's the opposite of the extreme simplification of the watercolor. The drawing was a helpful study in understanding "Chrysanthemum:" its frilliness, the skirt-like stiffness of the petals, the whorls of tightly wound petals that form the centers, the way the darker pigment is concentrated in lines on the edges. Although the drawing is still quite loose and spontaneous, it didn't create the sense of time-standing-still and complete absorption of the watercolor painting, because I was thinking about all of those things and how to explain them in words.

--

Some of you have been asking for some watercolor videos, so I made this short one, which shows me painting one flower from the previous composition, and talking about simplifying what I was seeing while painting. When I watch it, I notice technical things that I don't think about at all, like where I am holding the brush, how much pressure I'm applying. It's helpful for me to watch too.

(Click at lower right to view full screen.)

 

And here's that little sketch from the video so that you can see it better.

I wish everyone some moments of rest and renewal in the coming days. You don't have to be an artist to experience the kind of time-out-of-time that I'm talking about here. Look around you - something is calling for your attention. You don't need to paint it or write about it, just look... and then look deeper for ten or fifteen minutes, being conscious of your breathing, and see if you don't feel that something has shifted for the better.

 

What is Real?

Snow-dusted fields near Lourdes-de-Joliette, Quebec. Watercolor, 6" x 9" in sketchbook.

Whether we feel like we're gradually sliding, or hurtling, into the new year, I think most of us agree that it is not without trepidation. It's hard to think of 2024 with some sort of glittery, jovial anticipation - not after the year just past, and not with our awareness of how rocky the next months are likely to be. I, for one, feel like I'm hurtling headlong, with very little control over external events. Which makes me feel like it's more important than ever to slow down, look around myself, and do some thinking. Not making resolutions, which I generally find unrealistic, but considering some ways to approach life in these unstable and uncertain times.

The first thing I'm trying to do is think about what's real, and that's probably why the first painting of the year is the one you see here -- a Quebec landscape in winter. We saw this scene from our car window when driving out to see friends in the countryside the day after Christmas, and I painted it quickly, from my photograph, on New Year's Eve. The snow is probably gone now; the effects of climate change are undeniable this year - we've had very little snow at all and the temperatures have been right around freezing, which is unseasonably warm. But the landscape itself -- its flatness, the small copses of trees in the plowed fields, the low foothills of the Laurentians in the distance -- remains very real and very much itself.

I'm still comforted by nature, even though the warming climate is frightening. I'm comforted by the clods of earth in the fields, the winter clouds, the shapes of trees and the wind blowing through them, the tiny branches and black trunks of trees, the tall dead grasses in shades of ochre, russet, beige and brown, the way the cold bites my cheeks, the taste of the apple in my hands. All of it is beautiful to me, and real, reminding me that I too am a natural being, I too am alive, with the capacity to observe, feel, and think.

The world inside my computer, which reflects the outer world of human beings and their actions, tells me what is happening, and I pay attention to that and think about it a great deal, sometimes taking actions as a result. But I don't have to scroll very far to see that my reality is quite different from that of many other people. Around the holidays, I was literally bombarded with posts by people who wanted to sell me something, or were striving to say "look at me!," with no apparent awareness that 22,000 people who four months ago were also eating, breathing, putting on clothes in the morning and making something to eat, changing their babies or going to work, going to school, and loving their beloveds, are no longer able to do anything at all. They are gone, dead, many not even properly buried. And the rest of the world is divided between those who are deeply aware of this, and those for whom it mean next to nothing. How are we to think about reality in such a situation? And as extreme as it is, this is just one area of deep concern affecting our lives and our futures.

To make things even more absurd, when the news (let alone social media) attempts to "move on" from these difficult topics, what they offer us becomes ever more bizarre. Yesterday the New York Times ran a piece about the danger of not cleaning one's navel; all the stuff that collects in there, the writer claimed, can build up to a point where surgery may be needed. "Have we really come to this?" I wondered. As if we don't have enough to worry about -- or maybe because we do -- does the news have to manufacture such absurdities for the already-anxious to obsess about? Have our powers of reasoning become so distorted and weak that no one even calls such drivel out for what it is? But of course it is only a short distance from our culture's obsession with celebrity and wealth and consumption to its hyper-anxiety about health and mortality amidst great privilege. Many of the institutions we once had more faith in, from the judicial system to universities as a bastion of free thought, to women's control over their own bodies, are under constant attack. Meanwhile the extinction of species continues at a staggering rate, almost unnoticed.

Many of us are struggling with the resulting dissonance between what we know to be right and true, and how much of the society around us, the government, and the media are acting. I don't think this is going to improve anytime soon; it is a feature of our world as we enter 2024.

Therefore I think it is a time to gird our loins, as the saying goes, and prepare for a long haul. Our armor needs to be whatever is the most real to us -- the people we love, books, art, music, our communities of friends, nature, animals, our faith if we have it -- and in continuing to do our deepest and most heartfelt work. We need to be prepared to take care of each other, to find hope in unexpected places and to share it, and take a very long view of the future.

 

Someone said to me recently that one advantage of getting older is having the perspective of years. I find that to be true. The world has gone through many dark times, seen many despots and dictators, seen wars, famines, plagues, and natural disasters, and the accompanying tragic, devastating losses. And then things change. In my own lifetime I've seen many pendulum-swings in politics; I've seen conservatism and progressivism and conservatism again; I've seen greater justice and the backlash against it. At the same time, there have been enormous advances in science, technology, and medicine that have saved and improved countless lives. The Cold War didn't become a nuclear apocalypse. Children don't die of polio and measles; far fewer adults are dying of AIDS than we once feared. The story is not entirely dark, even when we seem to be in dark times.

So I refuse to believe that humanity is doomed, even though I may not live to see the breakthroughs that help turn the tide of what we're living through now. I don't know what will happen, be lost or irrevocably changed, before that happens. But I am going to choose to be a hopeful person while not being an unrealistic one, and to try to see what I can do in my own small corner to keep hope alive. Being more mindful of my senses is one way to immerse myself in what is real and present in each moment of life -- and it's the best way I know to keep despair at bay.

 

Books of 2023

I feel like I read a lot in the last year, but there aren't that many books on my list, mainly because several were very big ones. The two largest were The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, and Herman Melville's Moby Dick, both read with my book group, but Orhan Pamuk's Nights of Plague was also a long read. If you have never read Moby Dick, as I somehow had not, I encourage you to do so - it really does deserve its reputation as one of the greatest novels of all time.

It took me 75 or 100 pages to warm up to Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob, which is written in an unusual style that eschews detailed dialogue or description of the characters' thoughts or feelings, but instead relies on description of events. We found that challenging, because we just didn't have the normal ways of entering the characters' heads, but by sticking with it, the reader is rewarded with immersion in their world -- in this case, Jewish communities in eastern Poland/western Ukraine in the mid-to-late 1700s. At that time, a self-proclaimed "Messiah" named Jacob Frank appeared, and gained an ardent following. Of all the books our group read this year, this one probably created the most lively and wide-ranging weekly discussions.

Other books that stood out for our group were Lalla Romano's A Shared Silence, an intense novel about two couples in the Italian resistance, and Pamuk's Nights of Plague, an epic about a made-up Mediterranean island dealing with an outbreak of plague, and the politics and human behaviors that result.

I was thrilled about the publication of Teju Cole's Tremor, his first novel since Open City. Readers here will know that he and I are long-time friends, and I was privileged to be one of the first readers of the manuscript, so I don't feel that I can "review" the book objectively. I will say that it is beautifully written and conceived, as we have come to expect from Teju; it is timely, dealing with subjects from marriage to racism, from the ownership of art objects to the complexities of academic life, from friendship to, perhaps most importantly, death. It is also experimental, pushing the structure of the novel in new directions, and involving the reader in a reading experience that is not entirely linear. So, of course, I recommend it highly.

Greek Lessons, by the Korean writer Han Kang, intrigued me because of its title and also because of its knockout cover, and I was not disappointed. This book, also, pushes the form of the novel, and tells a poignant story of two people who use the study of language to address their own difficulties in communication. It's probably the most unusual novel I read this year. I plan to write a full-length review of it later.

While we're speaking of highly original writing, I was extremely impressed by Nay Saysourinho's The Capture of Krao Farini. This short, chapbook-length work defies categorization as to genre; it is listed by the publisher, Ugly Ducking Press, as poetry, and could be called a narrative prose poem of sorts; it includes illustrations that are integral to the text. It is a work of art that cuts to the heart of what human beings are capable to doing to each other; it's the most original thing I've read this year and I found it brilliant, deeply disturbing, and haunting.

More recently, our book group has begun John Berger's trilogy, "Into Their Labours", about the lives of peasants in the French Alps near Berger's home in the second half of his life. As V., one of our book group members, said, "I am attracted to Berger right now because of his deep humanity," and she was right; these are books that get to the essence of what is human, what constitutes survival, what we need most, and what is unnecessary. They are antidotes to capitalism, consumerism and fads, social media and modern conformity; they're not without violence, but it tends to be the violence of raising and slaughtering your own animals for food, or the rough feuds of local people. Likewise, Patrick Leigh Fermor's Roumeli speaks of Greece before mass tourism, when wandering tribes of herders still moved through the remote mountains, speaking dialects that were already in danger of being lost, and mountain-top monasteries were still inaccessible except by horseback or donkey. Having visited some of these remote places myself, his words were more meaningful now than when I first read the book some years ago, and I find myself feeling grateful to both him and Berger for writing down what they observed, and what came to matter deeply to them. This encourages me as a writer, too -- that the daily lives of ordinary people do matter, and it is in our hands as writers to preserve the truths of their existence.

I should also mention that I do a lot of online reading of shorter fiction and essays (in places like The New Yorker, Emergence Magazine, Beshara, The Guardian long reads, quite a few individual Substacks) and I'm a regular subscriber to Brick, a very fine Canadian literary journal which doesn't confine itself to solely Canadian authors, and publishes a lot of work by people of color, indigenous writers, and immigrants, and (I think) as many female as male writers. Do check it out; it's a good journal to support.

Please, as always, do share your own reading lists or highlights from this year! Here's my full list:

2023

The Abyss, Marguerite Yourcenar (in progress)

Roumeli, Patrick Leigh Fermor (rereading)

The Capture of Krao Farini, Nay Saysourinho

Pig Earth, John Berger #

Tremor, Teju Cole

A Recipe for Daphne, Nektaria Anastasiadou

*Greek Lessons, Han Kang

*Moby Dick, Herman Melville #

The War that Killed Achilles, Caroline Alexander

The Tentmaker, Michelle Blake

Three Short Works, Gustav Flaubert #

*A Shared Silence, Lalla Romano  #

The Sleeping Car Porter, Suzette Mayr #

Just a Mother, Roy Jacobsen (Barroy Chronicles 4) #

Nights of Plague, Orhan Pamuk #

Woman at Point Zero, Nahwal el Saadawi

House of Names, Colm Toibin

District and Circle, Seamus Heaney

Amsterdam, Ian McEwan

Night Train to Lisbon, Pascal Mercier #

*The Books of Jacob, Olga Tokarczuk#

The Other Side of the Mountain, Journals of Thomas Merton Vol 7., Fr. Thomas Merton

Enduring Love, Ian McEwan

The Innocent, Ian McEwan

The Shortest Day

Winter solstice sunrise, Montreal

We don't have to be pagans to feel, deep in our bones, that something has culminated today, and then, slowly, will begin to swing back in the other direction. In spite of all our protective armors of clothing, our central heating and reliable hot water, our automobiles and all the other conveyances that keep us moving comfortably in every kind of weather, and the technologies that manage to distract us from a more primal awareness, we are animals of this earth and this solar system, and we feel the changes in our bodies and spirits whether we acknowledge them consciously or not.

Today in Montreal, we had just 8:42 hours of daylight. That's not much. Unlike most of the previous week, which has been grey and overcast, today dawned bright and absolutely clear. I got up at sunrise -- not difficult, since it came at 7:33 -- and saw the sunlight hitting the buildings next to us, and the tall towers far in the distance. It was also very cold today, -9 degrees Celsius, and that sun felt very far away.

I always think of the sun, at solstice, as a traveler who's gone all the way down to Patagonia, and is lingering in Tierra del Fuego, before starting his long journey back north. Of course the sun hasn't actually gone anywhere, but it still feels that way. We could mark his path on our windows (I use the masculine pronoun because of Apollo, the Greek Sun God, probably) and it would be a long arc to the far points at the winter and summer solstices. But rather than the astronomical side of this long period of apparent movement, I'm more interested in how it affects us, and the ways we've devised to forget our deep connection to the seasons, the waxing and waning of natural phenomena, the planting and growing and harvesting times, and the long period of hibernation, quiet, resting -- and yes, danger -- that winter once represented.

I've just re-read the first book in John Berger's trilogy, "Into Their Labours," which is called Pig Earth. Berger shows us the lives of peasants in the French Alps -- people who are close to the earth, whose lives depend on understanding it. It's harsh, even shocking, to read about the annual slaughtering of cows and pigs, to hear of women whose only income comes from foraging mushrooms and mistletoe and anything else they can find, to sell to city dwellers, as the seasons pass. Much of it is shocking to our 21st century sensibilities, but how far are we really removed from it? There are subsistence farmers still, in the valley where I grew up, and there are plenty here in Quebec. Another series our book group read recently deals with life on a remote island off the coast of Norway, relentlessly exposed to the North Sea, the bitter winds and storms, the luck of the fishermen or lack of it, the attempt to augment one's income from cod with the sale of eiderduck down and gathered wild bird eggs, the dangers of accidents and failed harvests and dried-up wells, the great precarity of every single winter. Factory farming and fishing have done away with some of this way of life, but not all, and shouldn't we know something about it rather than being cocooned in our urban and suburban comfort and convenience?

Here, even in this northern city which gets plenty of snow, ice, and bitter cold, most of us have so much protection. We have our heated apartments, hot water on demand, and plenty of food -- which can be delivered, already prepared, to one's door if you really want. We walk short distances and descend into the tunnels of the heated metro, which whisks us to our destinations, many of which are also connected underground. Whether we complain about the weather or thrive in it, only the sans abri, the homeless people of the city, are exposed to the elements in truly life-threatening ways. How many of us consider whether we could survive if we had to sleep outside for even one night? Strawberries, oranges, pomegranates and persimmons, figs and dates, are piled in the markets for our holiday consumption, without us having to give a thought to where they came from. It is all...completely unnatural.

At the lake, last week, flocks of Canada geese slept on the water every night, leaving in the mornings to go feed in the cornfields and then return around sunset. It was a predictable pattern. But one night, toward the end of our stay, I heard a commotion among them in the late afternoon. At least half of the flocks swam into the center of the lake and then took off. The sun went down, but in the morning, they hadn't returned -- and they never did. What had they sensed? The weather wasn't a lot colder, and the snow that had fallen earlier in the week was all gone. There was no ice on the lake yet. No humans or other predators had spooked them. It was just -- apparently-- time to move on.

I'm so much more comfortable when I can witness these natural events that remind me who I am in the world. I like to be able to see the night sky, the winter constellations, the positions of the planets. I like to feel the cold on my face, and be able to see my breath; I like to make stews out of root vegetables and to bake bread. I'm old enough to remember when we didn't have a choice but to eat seasonally, and how that made sense. I enjoyed growing food in the summer, and preserving some of it for use in the winter. Of course, like so many other people, we buy strawberries in February now, and anything else that attracts us in the markets unless it's ridiculously expensive. Still, I don't want to forget who I am as an animal, a hunter-gatherer, a creature made mostly of water who can freeze quickly. 

For us in the north, there is a long haul yet to go, even if this night is technically mid-winter from a solar perspective. But the days will start to lengthen, and we'll feel differently as a result; we'll know the sun has started his trek back to us. 

Tonight I'm going to put on my heavy coat and hat and stand on the balcony for a little while, looking at the night sky. Even though there are city lights here, we can see stars and planets, far more faintly than in the countryside, but fairly well on a clear night like this. The stars always pierce my illusions of knowing much of anything, of being powerful or of any lasting importance. Frankly, I like that. When I sense how short and insignificant my life is, my love for everything becomes even more intense and precious. We all ought to be humble, and of course we aren't, because most of us live in a delusion, but the stars, especially in winter, remind me to be kind and to forgive others and myself for all the ways we forget who we are. This clear solstice night is a good time to go out and feel that once again. 

Review: A Recipe for Daphne

I'll probably never go to Istanbul in spite of it being a very enticing destination; my husband's Armenian heritage isn't compatible with Turkish politics or revisionist history. However, I was very pleased to read and review Nektaria Anastasiadou's  new novel A Recipe for Daphne, for Cha: An Asian Journal, which is based in Hong Kong. It's an engaging, well written novel about the dwindling Rum (Greek Orthodox) community of Istanbul, their complicated history and challenging future. I also reflected on the history of the different religious and ethnic minorities under and after the Ottoman Empire, including that of my Armenian and Protestant in-laws. When doing the research for the review, I learned a lot more about the history of the ethnic and religious minorities in former Ottoman territories and in Turkey -- and it is not a happy story. Please go to the review page on Cha if you'd like to read the full piece; I'll just excerpt a little of it here. Kosmas, mentioned below, is an Istanbul pastry chef who falls in love with Daphne, a beautiful American woman visiting her aunt in Istanbul and searching for her own roots.

Kosmas also turns out to be a romantic idealist, as symbolised by his search for a recipe for a once-famous pastry called the Balkanik. While Daphne returns to the United States to see her parents and make a final decision about moving, he spends months trying to recreate the delicacy for her, from notes in an old Ottoman cookbook unearthed by his Muslim assistant. The Balkanik was a sort of large éclair, filled with eight differently coloured and flavoured creams, representing each of the original tribes of the Balkans: Bulgarians, Romanians, Albanians, Greeks, Serbs, Croats, Jews, and Turks, all existing together in harmony.

---

I understand this longing. My own father-in-law was an Arab Protestant from Damascus who had lived under Ottoman rule, in a family that had survived persecution, and yet spoke movingly of the vibrant multiculturalism of all the great cities of the Near and Middle East, and his friendships with the local Orthodox priest, and Jewish, Muslim, and Maronite schoolmates. He too was a lover of proverbs. My mother-in-law was an Armenian, born in Turkey, whose father was killed in the Armenian genocide along with all the other men of their village, and who had managed to escape with her mother and small brothers for a life in Alexandria and then Beirut. During their lifetimes, they watched as the once-thriving Christian communities in many of these ancient cities became smaller and smaller, and deplored the religious and political fanaticism that caused it. Like Daphne’s parents, they had wistful memories, but little desire to go back.

A few months ago, I was in Greece myself, and spent a week in Thessaloniki, the largest major city close to Turkey. Once under Ottoman rule, and still retaining many ties to Istanbul through the Orthodox Church, Thessaloniki also offers many Turkish culinary traditions—like the Rums of Istanbul, we ate gilt-head bream, sesame bracelets, cream-filled pastry shells, and honey-drenched baklava, and sat for hours over our plates of delectable mezze while watching ships come and go on the sea. I could well imagine wanting to stay there for a lifetime. In Thessaloniki we also saw an exhibition of Armenian photographs taken in Turkey between 1900 and 1950, documenting the history of a family whose lives mirrored that of my mother-in-law. Thessaloniki is close to the Turkish border, but the exhibition would never be allowed in that country, where the Armenian genocide has never been acknowledged.

Thank you to Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, editor of Cha: An Asian Journal for publishing this review, and for all the tireless work she does on behalf of Asian literature and writers. I first "met" Tammy when Dave Bonta and I were editing qarrtisiluni, where she submitted excellent work that we published on several occasions. That was a long time ago! It's always a pleasure to find these old connections circling back around, and to make new ones.

 

 

Short Story with Swans

Mountains and Orchard

The large mountains behind the city of Edessa intrigued us, and one afternoon, curious about what we might find, we drove west of the city and up into them. After leaving the main highway, we followed a smaller paved road through huge orchards of densely-planted, unfamiliar fruit trees with an upright habit of loosely vertical branches -- were they almonds? I got out to take a closer look, and decided they might be cherry trees, but there were more than we imagined possible, stretching for miles in every direction, the only cultivated crop in what appeared to be a rocky, dry wilderness.

After traveling along these orchards for a while, we came upon a small hill village. It was built of rock, and although we saw a few cars and motorcycles parked along the roads or in driveways, there were no people walking around, just a few stray cats and the occasional dog. The little closely-placed houses seemed well cared for, with tall, blooming rose bushes and sometimes a heavily laden pomegranate tree in a front yard. But the village streets were so steep that our underpowered car needed several tries to gain the top of one of them.

After leaving the village, all signs of habitation gradually vanished. The road, now unpaved, climbed and narrowed; the slopes became steeper and rockier, and the vegetation wilder. Figs and hop vines scrambled with abandon over every tree and rocky outcrop. Just as we were about to declare defeat and turn around before the road became impassable, we suddenly came upon a blue lake with a flock of large white birds on it, in the middle of nowhere.

We pulled the car off onto the non-existent shoulder of the road, and got out; the water wasn't far from the road itself and you could stand on the edge and get a good look at the birds, who seemed unconcerned about the presence of human eyes. All of the white, large birds were swans but, closer to us, we could also see a flock of small ducks that I couldn't identify. Wildflowers, some of which were familiar and others not, bloomed on the edge of the bank, and behind the lake, the mountains rose: dry, rocky, bare except for the occasional patterned rows of a vineyard or orchard. Just beyond them was the border, and North Macedonia.

After ten minutes or so, we heard a vehicle approaching. It was a small beat-up truck that stopped when it came around the bend in the road and saw our car, parked on the side. The driver peered at us out his window, and then pulled off in a nonchalant fashion which seemed to indicate both familiarity with the road, and that there was seldom any traffic to worry about. Both doors opened, and a middle-aged Greek couple got out and walked closer. Initially they seemed concerned that we'd had a breakdown, but they quickly realized, when we gently gestured toward the water, that we were watching something.  I recalled "poulia" - "birds" - but couldn't remember the word for swan, which annoyed me because the word appears along with a picture of a swan on the red tins of the "swan" brand of Greek tomato paste and sauce. I had liked those tins so much that I had brought an empty one home, from our first trip here, to use in my studio. 

But the couple now said "swans" aloud  -- "keeknous!" - and nodded to us in some excitement. They walked over to the side of the road to get a closer look. "Mikres papies" said the woman, pointing at the little birds in the foreground, "little ducks." I nodded and repeated, "papies," which was another word I had learned and forgotten.

The four of us stood watching the birds on the blue water for a few minutes, and then they turned to us, quizzically. Both of them had open faces, and were dressed simply; they were probably local people who lived nearby. He was stocky, with a round face and short grey hair; she was short, smiling, and blond. "Tourist?" they asked. "Canada," I said, pointing at both of us. "We like your country," I managed to say in Greek, and in a combination of pantomime and words I conveyed that it was our third trip there. "How long?" they asked. "Three weeks." "Pou?" "Where?" "Edessa, Thessaloniki, Ioannina, Athens..." I stumbled over the word "Chalkidiki", the peninsulas to the east of Thessaloniki, and looked to them for help, and they quickly pronounced it for me.  We all laughed.

Before they had arrived, I had plucked a ripe fig from the tree growing wild on the lake side of the road, and the woman spotted it in my hand. Ah! she said, and told her husband to go look.  She brought her cupped hand to her mouth and raised her eyebrows, then pointing at my hand, wanting to know if I had eaten one. I shook my head no. The man went over to the tree and rummaged through the branches, looking for the best fruit, and picking a handful. He held out his open palm to me, and to my husband, proffering the small, dark figs. We each took one, and he pressed us to take more, so we did. The man nodded slightly, pointing his index finger toward me and then toward himself in a gesture that said, "Look!" He took a fig between his left forefinger and thumb, and began to slowly but deftly peel off the skin with his right hand, looking over at me to make sure I was watching -- it was a lesson. Then he split the flesh, examined it to make sure it met his expectations, and handed the peeled fig to me, gesturing to me to eat it. I took the fig and ate it in two bites; it was delicious. "Nostimo," I said. "Efcharisto!" ("Delicious, thank you!") and we all began to pick and lazily peel and eat figs, keeping the unconcerned, floating swans in the corner of our vision. The woman split a fig open, laughed, and shook her head "no", making a wiggling gesture with her finger as she showed it to me -- that one had a worm in it. I nodded, and glanced at Jonathan, who raised his eyebrows and surreptitiously dropped the fig he had been holding into the bushes.

Swan and wild fig tree

After a little while, we felt it was time to leave, and I gestured to the couple that we were going back to our car. They had been talking together and grazing on the figs, while J. and I took some pictures of the swans and the lake, but now we approached them to say goodbye. I smiled at the man and put my hand on my upper chest. "Elisabeth," I said. He grinned and said, in Greek, "Like the queen!" I got it and laughed and nodded, then pointed to Jonathan and said his name. They shook hands. The man touched his own chest and said, "Konstadinos," and then turned to his wife, who was also smiling at us, and said, in halting English, "She is  -- Chryseis. It means...gold."

We drove back through the endless orchards of fruit trees, down the winding roads through the stone villages, until we re-joined the main road that led to the Edessa highway. I couldn't believe I had actually met someone named Chryseis. At the beginning of the Iliad, a young Trojan virgin of that name has been seized by the Greeks and given to their leader, Agamemnon, as his slave and mistress. She is the daughter of Chryses, a high priest of Apollo, but Agamemnon refuses her father's pleas to return her. Chryseis, desperate, prays to Apollo. The god hears her and sends a plague that strikes the Greek camp...and sets in motion further events that alter the course of the war. (The name Chryseis literally means "of Chryses", and it is Chryses that means "golden".)

When we were finally back at our inn, we asked the innkeeper about the fruit trees we had seen up in the mountains. She asked us what towns we had been near. "Agras?" I offered. "Nisi?" She nodded, and answered, "Then they must have been kerasies. Cherries." She gazed at us calmly with that knowing, slightly sly smile we've seen on many Greek faces when suggesting something we must do or try: the special dessert they are offering "on the house", the free glass of homemade tangerine liqueur, the sight to be seen if we would just walk up to the top of the hill. "You must come back in the spring," she said, "when they are all in bloom!"