November 2025 Wrap-up
I am surrounded by talent
I’m participating in a Pitch Party and Newsletter Extravaganza with Courtney Kocak this month. Essentially, it’s a one hour live zoom class every day of the month for 30 days. I've written a ton - both getting my newsletter sorted and starting to learn what it means to pitch. The first couple weeks were completely overwhelming. I'm writing this at the end of the third week. My mood right now is complete go with the flow-ness but it's also strangely productive. The sit down and write every day practice has changed my relationship with getting productive things done. Stay tuned to see if it produces meaningful results..
For your reading entertainment (and mine), I came up with a few categories I’m going to try out.
All The Beautiful Things
Candace Rose Rardon’s illustrated essay “Home is a Cup of Tea” gave me that tingly feeling in my chest that’s both sadness and my body telling me, “pay attention - this matters.” Along side beautiful illustrations, Candace comes to two suggestions for how we can understand home. The first is an equation for home: relationships + rhythms + happiness + familiarity. She then adds another, “Home is the aggregate of our journeys.”
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what home might mean. Living in Alberta, that has meant pondering what it means to be living on indigenous land. I’m always thinking about food and home, namely where to find the foods that make me feel at home. Then there’s the way my books are my home.
The tea essay reminded me of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s description of what it means to be indigenous in Braiding Sweetgrass. “For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it.” Home is stewardship.
The picture I choose for today's newsletter is from Ellen Kartz's performance of If I Was Fearless at The Aviary in Edmonton. I like to think I'm kind of tough (I'm not) but I sat in the audience with tears running down my face. She dropped all kinds of wisdom along with some beautiful singing. She said..
Fear doesn't know time. Fear is there until you fix it.
And the said, "While I was keeping something safe inside - I was keeping them out. I didn't give them a chance to reject me but also didn't give them a chance to accept me." If you're lucky, you'll get your hands on her chapbook or she'll offer this one up at the Edmonton Fringe Festival. People transform when they share their stories and then it's always work (for me) to bring them back down to earth in my own head, to see them as human and equal, which we all are - and yet that talent, oh the shinning light of talent. Wow.
Trickster treats
Most weekdays, I drive my daughter to school along Whyte Avenue, which is the cool street next to the University of Alberta. At least that’s what it’s supposed to be, but I see a strip of ever changing so-so restaurants along side a couple wildly expensive clothing stores including my first Fluevlog retail outlet. Wow. When I publish my book, I’m getting a pair of super gorgeous Fluevlogs to wear on my non-existant writing tour so I can feel fabulous.
This week we saw guy in a pork pie hat driving the black Mini Cooper Countryman. He took driving a Mini and made it his entire personality. I admire people who do that, even as I giggle and watch my 13-year-old smirk. It takes some nerve, some serious bravery to just go with what you love, fashion be damned. Me? I’m in a frumpy sweatshirt and a pair of Blundtstones I wanted to buy for myself in 2000. Why didn’t I? Too expensive. Now everyone’s wearing them.
Hold on- should I get the shoes now? Am I messing with myself again? Feel free to weigh in. This feels like an important life decision.
Salty Aunty Opinions for the Hell of it
Post election, I think we could all use tips on how to do good conflict. Norman Mailer may be a role model. In the Ring is a collection of letter Norman Mailer wrote, published by the New Yorker in 2008. In it, he models priroritizing friendship over politics. That means having civil conversations with people who he disagreed with. He puts it beautifully in a letter to critic Diane Trilling;
“Why indeed should I give a damn what my friends’ ideas are—indeed let them cherish them for a while, they don’t matter any more than my own ideas.”
Imagine if we worked harder to prioritize the relationships we have with people and let go of the idea that we have to agree on everythign in order to be friends.
“Envy reaches out for Failure’s fingers, and together they squelch my better self.”
This line from Liz deBeer’s Brevity Blog post Envy Is and writing squeezed me right in the feels. It does the exquisite work of articulating a feeling that I didn’t know I experienced - is that what that feeling is? The one I describe as feeling my insides crushed together like tin foil? Envy is ugly unless we let it motivate us to work harder and find a way to be better.
TBR no more: book & reading notes
I’ve in a writing group with Elizabeth Austin this month and today, watching her talk about living in a home with two teenagers, three cats, and a dog as the only adult and knowing the writing work she’s done over the past year is humbling. Don’t tell her how in awe I am, it will make everything awkward. Her piece about working with editors is on target and a particularly good read for anyone who thinks they need to protect their writing from editors. My heart always sinks a bit when someone suggests I dig into a bit of writing because I know it’s going to be hard - but I also know it will make the piece better. Maybe one day I’ll write something as brave as this.
I listened to VE Schwab’s The Near Witch and will add it to a growing list of magic-lite books that have a fairy tale feel to me. The others are Premee Mohamed's The Butcher of the Forest and Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant. These books are set in worlds where magic exists but is not dominating every part of life.
There’s a path through Nabokov, Lolita, Switzerland, a Stacy Schiff talk at the EPL, Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, Claire Derderer’s Art Monsters that led me to listen to the audiobook of Vera: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov this month. Derderer mentions Vera in passing, mainly because she licked her husband’s stamps for him. It turns out, she did much, much more. A hugely talented and intelligent translator and linguist in her own right, she was more likely the other half of her husband’s creative process. Schiff wrote a New Yorker article that covers some of the book’s highlights.
Vera left me feeling conflicted. There’s the tremendous awe of a woman with her talents and then so many questions around her relationship with her husband. She was resolutely in the background, sometimes refusing to be quoted, and resolutely present, attending lectures, his interviews, and living closely together. I get the sense that Didion and her husband John Dunne were also that close. Yet Vera gloried in being Nabokov’s partner in a way that we don’t see today. Is that her loss? Was being part of someone else’s glory possible then in a way it isn’t now? I have a lot of questions.
Zadie Smith wrote an article she called “Killing Charles Dickens” but I would be tempted to call The Inevitability of Dick(ens) in which she describes her descent into writing historical fiction despite all efforts to avoid it and the way Dickens keeps turning up in her research. Things are like that sometimes, when we’re circling something we don’t realize we’re circling. It’s the way Didion has kept showing up for me (Mailer writes about her) and Jung and others. The book she was writing is The Fraud. I haven’t read it - any one else?
Alberta Adventures
In Her Defense is a true crime podcast by Globe and Mail reporter Jana Pruden who lives in Edmonton. I swear she was sitting at the table behind me in a cafe the other day, but since being the tiniest bit chill is my new life challenge, I resisted introducing myself. The first season is about Helen Naslund, who killed probably killed her husband and then went to jail for it. But it's messy because he was abusive for 30 years and she might be covering up for someone.
The second season is called 50th street and it's a MMIWG story - Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. There are way too many Indigenous women and girls whose disappearances haven't been properly investigated and this is one of those stories. It centers around a haunting recording of Amber Tuccaro speaking to an unidentified man who likely killed her.
Listen to both.
I've written a little about the dilemma becoming a settler on indigenous land and it continues to vex me. In October, Tanya Telaga was in town for LitFest, a non-fiction festival. She's what Canadians would call a big deal when it comes to reporting on Indigenous stories for the general public. My description would be something like captivating storyteller and role model woman fighting for a cause. Her new book The Knowing about trying to find what happened to her great-great-great grandmother Annie Carpenter is also a 4-part documentary you can watch on CBC Gem. I'm reading first, and it's a thorough introduction to indigenous history in what we now call Canada.
Brain food: information, articles and whatnot
It turns out that Wikipedia might not be as unreliable as we all thought or assumed it was, at least not according to a couple academic papers out there. One in the medicine area is kind of recent and an older one in Nature (the scientific journal of scientific journals) from 2005 showed it was about as accurate as the old paper encyclopedias. Perhaps an argument for being one of the 2% of readers who makes a small financial contribution. I use it nearly every day - how about you?
I met a marketing PhD out at coffee (always talk to strangers) and we ended up talking story structure. I shared my StoryCraft Method he shared me the presentation he used to teach, which included some cool examples. I particularly lved Tarantino talking about the situation vs the story (although I disagree with his assessment of US vs European film and character vs story focus). He's referencing Vivian Gornick's The Situation and the Story. Here's a neat summary of the key points courtesy of Maria Popova, one of my favorite thinkers on the internet.
I have a friend who is Fluevog fan and will be interviewing him soon for her book; I'll pass your piece along with my note telling her that I met you When Words Collided ...