Another Mom-Brag

I try to do this less as the kids get older — which is hard because in my opinion they get even more talented! But they also embarrass more easily. Sometimes, though, I just can’t resist. This boy has talent (in his mother’s humble opinion) and I love how he doesn’t sing in the slighty embarrassed, afraid-to-open-his-mouth way you sometimes see with young singers. Plus, I love this song. Here’s my kid — for those who didn’t already see this on Facebook.

Grand Concourse, Week Five: The Adventure Continues …

This week I’ve covered a couple more Grand Concourse trails, one by myself and one with Jason and Max, taking advantage of some nice warm evenings we’ve been having. This afternoon, while Chris was at home making VERY LOUD MUSIC with a couple of friends, Jason and I escaped, along with Max, Emma, and one of Emma’s friends, to walk a small section of the trail we’d never been on before. It’s a 1.5 km stretch connecting the Kenny’s Pond walk, where we often go (memorable as the first trail we walked this year to kick-off the Grand Concourse Adventure) with the long and winding Virginia River Trail, memorable as the trail on which I got a group of Pathfinders thoroughly lost last summer.

Kenny’s Pond to Virginia River is a bit of trail that winds through several playgrounds/parks in residential areas, never too far away from a busy street. It was a mild afternoon, but breezy and overcast with the promise of rain. The rain started just as we got back to our car, so we’re glad we got our walk in when we did. That makes about 9K on the trail for me this week.

Awards, Readings, and Big Shiny Things

Time for some of that tiresome stuff, Shameless Self-Promotion. This info is also posted over at That Forgetful Shore‘s website.

I was honoured to learn today that That Forgetful Shore won the gold medal in the IPPY awards — that is, the Independent Publisher Book Awards — in the category of Regional Fiction: Canada (East). As I learned when By the Rivers of Brooklyn won silver in that same category two years ago, the IPPY people do not use the term “medal” metaphorically — they actually send you a big shiny medal you can wear around your neck. Not that I have worn it, but maybe now that I have two, I will wear them both together and I will look gangsta. In fact, I will post a picture here of myself wearing both medals — I promise. Thanks IPPYs!!

Closer to home, That Forgetful Shore is nominated for Best Atlantic Published Book in the Atlantic Book Awards. This is an award Brooklyn was also nominated for, and it’s kind of an interesting award in that it honours the publisher as much as the author, as it’s based on the whole “package” of the book. Breakwater certainly deserves an award (especially designer Rhonda Molloy) for the lovely “package” that is That Forgetful Shore, so I’m quite excited about this. It’s an odd award, though, in that the nominees can come from any genre. When Brooklyn was nominated it was competing with a field guide to birds, and an aboriginal-language dictionary. This year the competition is a book about salmon, and a book about eco-innovators in Atlantic Canada — both lovely books that also richly deserve to win.

As part of the festivities surrounding the ABA’s, which are being held here in St. John’s this year, I’ll be reading downtown at Chinched Bistro on Sunday, May 13 at 7:00 p.m. and appearing as part of panel discussion at the Fat Cat on Wednesday, May 16 at 5:30 p.m. If you’re in the area, please drop by — especially to the reading at Chinched, because it’s a solo reading with just me, and I want to make sure there are actual people in the audience!

Goodbye April

Remember how I told you about all the walking I was getting done because we were having an exceptionally beautiful April? It really was incredible, with unseasonably warm temperatures and lots of sunshine. I even posted a picture taken on the trail down by the Waterford River showing a few shy, hesitant buds on a tree branch — something we never see in April.

Here’s how the tree buds were doing yesterday morning:

Yes, we woke on the last morning of April to a winter wonderland. But unlike some years (such as 1997, when I have cause to vividly remember a snowstorm that dumped about 70 cm on us at the end of April), the morning of wet snow barely lingered long enough for us to get our boots back out of the closet. By afternoon, snow had been replaced with rain, then with brilliant sun, and although it was still cold the return of winter was only a brief flashback.

Though it was a busy evening, Jason and Max and I even managed to fit in one more quick Grand Concourse walk, on the poorly-signed and oddly-named Confederation Hill loop, that appears to go about halfway around the hill where Confederation Building sits and then … blends into the sidewalk? I’m not sure. We couldn’t figure out how to pick up the trail to complete the “loop,” but hey, we were in the parking lot of Confederation Building so it’s not like it was hard to find our way back to the car. As our prematurely springlike April ends I’ve walked about 35 km, but there’s a LOT of unwalked kilometres of trail yet to cover in the next couple of months.

Productivity, or, Why I’m Not a Full-Time Writer

For most writers I know, the ultimate dream is to eventually make enough money off your writing that you can quit your day job and write full-time. This is not my dream, for a number of reasons.

First of all, “write full-time” often turns out to mean something other than “writing the fiction or creative non-fiction that you love full-time.” It can mean (as it did for me during my stay-at-home-mom years) taking on a variety of writing jobs for income, many of which are just as tedious and dull as anything you might find yourself doing in the workplace. Frankly, if I have a choice between writing quality-control manuals for meat rendering plants, or teaching English to young adults, I’ll take the latter. (The meat-rendering gig was not actually one I ever had to do, but I know a writer who did).

Second, I actually like my job, and the atmosphere in my workplace, so at the moment I’m not highly motivated to leave it.

But the most important reason I don’t dream of life as a full-time writer is that I suspect I wouldn’t be all that productive if I had all that time to spend on my writing.

Don’t get me wrong, I can be very productive at times. I write well when faced with a deadline and can produce a lot of words very quickly. I can make a schedule and stick to it. But give me an  unfettered space of time — like, say, an unexpected day off when I have to stay home with a sick child — and the vague expectation that I’ll “get some work done,” and I become a world-class procrastinator.

You could try excusing me on the grounds that I am, after all, staying home with a sick child, but the fact is that a twelve-year-old with a cold needs very little intensive nursing care. I have to be here for her, but there’s not a lot I actually need to do. No, the sad truth is that when I try to focus myself to write, I have the attention span of a developmentally delayed mollusc. The internet has made this worse. So much so that when I am writing the first draft of a novel, I use an AlphaSmart Neo, a word processing tool that only allows me to type and has no games, no internet access, nothing fun and distracting at all.

But today I didn’t want to write a first draft. I wanted to hammer a query letter into shape to get ready to send out. A simple enough task with the whole day stretching before me, you would think.

Here’s how it went.

Grand Concourse: Week Two

I promise, the Grand Concourse trails will not be the only thing I blog about this spring and summer, but right now I’m still finding them pretty intriguing. The good weather continued this week and allowed me, accompanied by various family members, to cover parts of several more trails. The longest walk this week was yesterday afternoon, when the four of us, accompanied by my cousin Jennifer (but not by Max) walked part of the section of the Grand Concourse that is also part of the Newfoundland T’Railway, starting in downtown St. John’s at the former railway station, Mile 0 of the T’Railway.

The T’Railway is the several-hundred-kilometre long walking/hiking/ATV trail that was developed after our railway tracks were torn up some years ago. One of my goals is to someday walk the whole T’Railway across the island, but that will have to wait for a time in life when I have fewer responsibilities than I do now! For about 15 km, from the old railway station out to the town of Paradise, a section of the T’Railway is also a part of the Grand Concourse. We did about the first third of that yesterday, from Mile 0 out to Bowring Park.

Grand Concourse: Week One

The first week of my plan to walk all the Grand Concourse trails in St. John’s has gone extremely well, due to 1) being off work all week, 2) having unseasonably nice weather, and 3) that surge of enthusiasm that always comes at the beginning of a new endeavour. Max and I have gone on four walks, accompanied by different family members each time. After that first walk with the kids around Kenny’s Pond, our next venture out was an evening walk through some of the city streets with just Jason, Max and I. We walked parts of the Elizabeth-to-Courthouse route and the Queen’s-Road-to-Elizabeth route, roughly making a big loop from our house on Freshwater Road, downtown and back up again. I think the city street walks will probably mostly get done this way, since I like city streets at night. Walking around St. John’s by night, especially on warm spring and summer evenings, used to be a great pleasure for Jason and me when we were dating and first married, before we had kids to keep us at home or even a dog to walk. Now that the kids are finally old enough that we can go out on our own for a little while in the evening, it’s something we’re starting to do again.

Last night all of us walked around Mundy Pond.

Today Jason, Emma and I took Max around Kent’s Pond (while Chris had gone to a youth meeting at church with a friend).

A Grand Plan

As you know by now, I love to set challenges for myself. Whether it’s reading through the Bible in a year or walking the Tely 10, I find myself driven to do more and better if I’ve set some kind of arbitrary goal and a timeline in which it must be met. Some of them — like spending a year reading poetry or being an extra on Republic of Doyle — don’t work out. Others do. I try not to beat myself up if I don’t meet my goals but I do like to have them.

One of the best books I’ve read this spring is Wild, Cheryl Strayed’s memoir about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. I liked it because at heart I’m just the kind of person to do what she did — set myself some impossible goal like hiking the entire width of the US on a challenging trail without proper training and preparation. Fortunately, I live a life that doesn’t allow me to do stupid things like that because I have a job and a family, so the initial burst of inspiration that made me say, “I should do something like that!” when I read the book quickly simmered down to, “What could I do that would be a fun and interesting challenge without completely dominating my life and possibly killing me?”

I settled on something very modest indeed — this spring and summer, I want to walk all 125 km of the Grand Concourse walking trails in and around St. John’s. Not all at once, of course. But in the course of the walking and hiking I do over the next few months, I want to make an effort to cover all the trails.

I’ve probably walked about 2/3 of these trails at one time or another (the 125 km includes some urban city-street walks as well as walking trails) but I think it will be a fun challenge to try to cover them all in a few months, and it will probably get me to some places I wouldn’t have gone otherwise. It’s a beautiful network of trails that our city is lucky to have, and I want to appreciate more of the natural as well as the urban environment around me so I think this will be a good way to do it. Also, I’ll post some updates and pictures here from various walks. I have a big map of the trail in my bedroom with highlighters so I can mark off trails walked, because that’s just the kind of personality I am and that motivates me!

Today the kids and Max and I got out to enjoy this ridiculously mild, sunny and pretty day — very sp****like for April (won’t jinx it by actually typing the S-word). We did a couple of loops round a very short trail we’ve often done before — Kenny’s Pond in the east end of St. John’s. There’s a little playground there where the playground equipment is specially geared to toddlers and preschoolers, and it used to be a favourite summer hangout of ours when the kids were little. How quickly it’s become a place they’ve outgrown! It’s also where the mini-golf course is located which my folks once drove past with Emma in the car (when she was 5 or 6) and Emma pointed at it and said, “My whole family golfs there.”

So, twice around Kenny’s Pond today … I’ll keep you posted on how the Grand Concourse Challenge goes!

The Biblical Game of Thrones and God’s Body Count

Just in case anyone thought I had given up reading through the Bible and getting disturbed by it, I promised I’d blog about it from time to time so here’s another installment.

1 and 2 Kings are tough going. I mean, they’re good for action and they’ve got more plot than many parts of the Bible, but if you’re trying to read them from a devotional, “What is God’s message for me?” perspective, they’re tough. There’s a lot of bloodshed; the body count is high. Sometimes I can’t figure out what the heck it all means.

For a lot of it, I’ve gotten through it by remembering that it comes out of a violent culture, that it tells the stories of flawed human beings, often battling for control of a throne. In fact, there’s a lot of 1 and 2 Kings that would fit right in with Game of Thrones. Maybe HBO should start adapting the Old Testament. There’s more than enough violence, gore, and nudity to meet their usual standards. Just last night, somebody brought Jehu a bunch of human heads in baskets. Wouldn’t that be fun to film? 

Keeping all that in mind, I’ve tried not to be bothered by the basketsful of severed heads, although God seems to approve of the action. I coped with it when Solomon, for example, pretty much waded through a river of blood to get to the throne, cutting down anyone who is a rival, might be a rival, might be related to someone who might be a rival …. Even though Solomon is obviously God’s personal choice for the throne of Israel and God gives him the gift of wisom, I try not to hold God responsible for that bloodbath. The Bible doesn’t, after all, claim that God told Solomon to kill all those people, and maybe I should just suck it up and accept that those murders (along with Jehu’s Baskets o’ Heads and several hundred other murders carried out by both the good AND bad kings of Israel and Judah), are just part of what it took to be king back in those days.

But the kind of story that’s harder to rationalize is the kind where God Himself seems to be the one racking up the body count. Let’s take the opening chapters of 2 Kings.

Living the Story

You already know that I like observing Lent. Well, “like” might not be the right word for a period of self-denial in which I give up reading fiction and (try, not always successfully, to) give up eating chocolate. But it’s something that’s meaningful to me, spiritually.

I also love Easter. I love Easter church services. Sometimes my own church doesn’t do enough to satisfy me at this time of year and I visit other services. I think my record was a few years back when I made it to a Maundy Thursday service at an Anglican church, a three-hour Good Friday vigil at a United church, Sabbath morning service at my own SDA church, Easter pageant at the Salvation Army Saturday night, and back to the Anglicans for sunrise service on Sunday morning. Most years I don’t manage to hit five services of four different denominations in four days, but point taken: I do like to celebrate Easter.

This year I’m not getting to nearly as many services (though I nearly always make Easter sunrise at the Cathedral) but I did get to do one thing I enjoy and haven’t done for many years: directed a group of kids (our Pathfinders, including my own two kids) in an Easter play at church last night. I thought it made for a great Good Friday service, with drama, readings and music; everyone seemed to enjoy it and get something out of it.

As I’m still wrestling my way through my Bible-in-a-year reading project and struggling with bits of the Bible that I find difficult (another post on that coming up soon) it led me to reflect on why I love Easter so much that I seek out worship experiences from other traditions and try to enrich the Easter experience in my own church where I can. I think I’m starting to understand why it matters so much to me.