May 31st, 2007

On Sleep

In my final semester at McGill, I somehow managed to nearly completely invert my circadian rhythm, and in the process discovered the horrid but fascinating world of Canadian network late-night programming: reruns, test patterns, infomercials, and soft-core pornography (listed in order of entertainment value). Such was the misery of that period that, since then, I have been a model of regular sleep. I could doze through the apocolypse, I am convinced, as long as it took place between 10:30 pm and 6:30 am. Between those times, I can and will attempt to be social, but you may notice me becoming increasingly bug-eyed and incoherent. I have trouble forming complete sentences on less than 8 hours sleep. It’s not pretty.

Somehow, this rigid but acceptable pattern has been thrown for a loop with the coming of spring. There just seems to be too much light–like a six-year-old, I wake up at five with my brain screaming, “It’s day! I hear birds and joggers! Let’s get on with it, we’re missing stuff!!” My body answers, like a grouchy adult, that it does not wish to get up and jog or do anything, because the long and gorgeous evenings are prompting me to stay up long past my bedtime every night. Even if I’m only writing (I’m usually writing), I like to watch the protracted sunset out the window. It seems to go on for hours.

The above two paragraphs are really only to say that I am very tired, and am a poor candidate for polar expeditions. But it sure is lovely in the world, these days. Even when exhausted.

Put your weight against the door / Kick-drum on the basement floor
RR

May 28th, 2007

Mid-year review and world report

I usually take the opportunity of my approximately mid-year birthday to look over my new year’s resolutions and see which are proceeding apace, which I’m falling down on, and which were actually stupid ideas. I’ll spare you the itemized list, but it seems I’m basically doing ok, except for the fact that I resolved to spend an hour a week (not much!) on current events. Anybody seen me do that? Um, no.

This is pathetic, obviously. There’s such a thing as a daily newspaper, and it’s not just for fish. I’ll read a six-hundred page novel, but if it’s real, something in my brain just quiets down. This is not an attractive quality, I know.

You, Rose-coloured readers, are encouraged to encourage me, but I am going to take responsibility for this irresponsibility as a global citizen. I’m off to CBC.ca after this report, I swear.

In other news, my weekend was made up of the sort frivolity that regularly distracts me from the serious issues of the day. In other words, it was a really nice weekend. Hanging out in my new (rose-coloured) swimsuit with the gang at a summer bbq, seeing the inner workings and sanctums of Coachhouse Books at Doors Open Toronto, eating Italian food, encouraging my thriving students (those little whippersnappers are *so smart*) and having good conversations near and far. Needless to say, I got little work done, which is bad, but when the sun is shining and life is so entertaining, it’s hard to care.

It’s the pause that refreshes / in the corridors of power
RR

May 25th, 2007

Summerish variety pack

Summer is coming on in Toronto, which means many places are refrigerated inside. This morning, I left the house bare-armed and bare-legged for the first time this year, and momentarily reveled in the air on my limbs. Then I got on the bus and started to shiver. My war with air-conditioning is decidedly lopsided, since I am out of step with most of the rest of the population, temperature-wise. I had dinner on a patio last night, and with the aid of tights and a cardigan, was able to last until well past dark, but indoor deep-freezes are harder to counter.

Enough with the kvetching; I had *dinner* on a *patio* last night. I’m going to a *BBQ* on Saturday! It is summer and life is sweet. Oh, and my birthday on Wednesday was lovely as well, thanks to all well-wishers. I ran and read and wrote and dined: these are a few of my favourite things.

Oh, and this starts out as a complaint, but then improves: I have more or less mastered the 15-pound dumbbells at the gym, but can scarcely twitch at the 20s, and was fuming of the lack of 17-pound dumbbells, at Hart House or possibly in the world. My solution was to do one set of pathetic half-raises with the 20s and then switch to 15s, and hope somehow (by osmosis?) I eventually get strong enough to do the 20s, preferably before one of the big boys of the weight room notices me and comments, “Um, you know you’re not actually lifting those, right?” The good bit? I just feel so *jocky,* having a problem with free weights, when all my other problems concern words.

With regard to that, this is going to be a CanLit summer, because another word problem is that I haven’t read near enough of the nearby literature. There will be exceptions, natch–already, I can foresee that I *must* read Then We Came to the End very soon or go mad with wanting to. But, yes, the bulk of my reading time with go towards my countrymen and -women. Onward, at this very moment, actually, to Clark Blaise, who has been precise and potent and deeply disturbing so far. I’ve been missing a great deal, clearly, and I intend to rectify that.

Get gotten
RR

May 23rd, 2007

What is Good

Once, in I believe the fall of 2002, I and a few similarly tinted friends created the list of “1000 Things We Like,” perhaps number 1001 being how easy it was (and number 1002 being that there is enough strange synchronicity in our circle that more than one person suggested “little staplers”). The world is overflowing with very good things. This weekend alone, were I still working on the list, I would’ve added,

1) Waterfront winds
2) Marshmallow-mandarin orange salad
3) Unexpected fireworks displays seen out the car window, over the school around the corner, at the house across the street, even three feet in front of me as I walked home last night (ok, that one was a little alarming)
4) The Ben Report–my brother phoned yesterday from Tel Aviv to report that he is fine. He swam in the Dead Sea and played chess with soliders (not simultaneously). He is en route to Cairo, if you’re following this.
5) Cranberry-based birthday confections
6) Free perfume
7) The new issue of The New Quarterly (#102), filled with a slow wry heart-break in Annabel Lyon’s novella *Palaces,* a sad hilarious snapshot of fabulousness in Russell Smith’s story “Confidence” and, well, just tonnes and tonnes of good stuff. And, um, a story by me. No, I can’t believe it either.
8) Teenaged punks who do their vocabulary homework just because I begged them to for months. No, I can’t believe it either.

Life is good. I guess there’s nothing to do but get on with it. Back to work.

You’re such a lovely audience / We’d like to take you home with us
RR

May 10th, 2007

Peevish

I really enjoy the term “pet peeve.” It implies that, while the human race essentially agrees on what sucks, each person can only live with extreme awareness of a limited number of irritations. It makes annoyance with trivia seem less morally unsound–we know war is worse than splinters, but sometimes we have to focus on the little, amusing irritants to get through the day. Or maybe I’m just looking for excuses.

People occasionally start to vent to me and then stop and say, “Oh, I really can’t complain.” But one certainly *can* and–judiciously, conscientiously, with consideration for one’s audience–one should. Once it’s out, perhaps it won’t bother you so much. Thereby I am posting below my up-to-the-minute top ten (they are actually not ranked, despite my need to number things) pet peeves, things that don’t matter but bother me anyway. Please feel free and encouraged to post yours, too–I’ll sympathize, if not empathize.

10. Accidentally tapping fork tines against any of the many hard surfaces in my mouth.

9. Days when I don’t get any mail.

8. When people don’t “walk left, stand right” on escalators.

7. Itchy tags, especially on hats and bras.

6. Papercuts.

5. Air-conditioning.

4. Stickiness.

3. People talking on cell phones in public bathrooms.

2. All manner of TTC malfeasance: standing in front of doors, not moving to the back of the bus, letting your dog lick the allergic who are trapped on the bus with you, etc.

1. When people say, “I’m the sort of person that…” This is, in my opinion, the worst tautological idiocy; if you do it/buy it/like it/eat it, you define the sort of person that does so, don’t you? I guess you could be making some counter-to-type point, ie. “I’m the sort of girl who likes to wear a button-down blouse under a pullover, but that doesn’t stop me from enjoying the slackwater stylings of Fall Out Boy and their ilk.” But even then, doesn’t “I like to wear a button-down…but…” sound just as good?

I wasn’t ranking these peeves, but maybe I hate this one the most, for no good reason. Just…why do people say that? Is it pretentiousness? What could they be pretending to? I think it’s just silly rhetorical padding, but it makes me insane. There is no “sort” of person who throws pasta at the wall to see if it is done, people just do it! It’s unextrapolatable!

Ahem. If you were thinking of listing this rant as one of *your* peeves, I’m way ahead of you. Shutting up now.

We do it in the dark / with smiles on our faces
RR

April 28th, 2007

Better Daze

Aside from an hour-long migraine that zonked me at lunch-time (who gets a migraine for an hour?) yesterday was pretty productive, and capped off with a delightful dining/book-searching experience with Mister Scott, who took time from writing stories upon stories (productivity all around!) to buy me hwae dop bop at Hosu and help me search for books! That was a really long sentence. Everything I write is really long, these days. The novella project is stalled while I try to complete a “short” story that currently stands at an utterly point 10 000 words. I’ll have to cut it nearly in half to make it make sense, which I knew from the get go–why can’t I write efficiently the first time? This is a question for another time, or likely the rest of my life.

For now, a short leftover anecdote from Thursday: my brother was eating a popsicle and he gave me half as we walked down the street. I dropped behind him for a minute, and when I caught up, he said, “Oh…no!” I had somehow covered my entire face in pink popsicle in 60 seconds, including my nose. As I wiped my face (with the back of my hand, because I am suave), he muttered, “I am so glad I gave you that!”

Somebody showed me a picture and I just laughed
RR

April 24th, 2007

More euphoria

If you are finding the Rose-coloured blog does not meet all your reading needs, perhaps you’d like to check outThe Hart House Review ’07, where you’ll find graceful poems by such as Helen Guri and Yavanna Valdellon, and a short story by me! It’s “All the Ghostlies,” and it won 2nd place in the HHR literary contest! Hooray! The journal has no web presence that I can find, unfortunately, but you can pick up a copy at Hart House itself. If your location precludes this but you still want one, I can likely be talked into getting you one without much trouble.

Despite this wonderful news, I am actually no longer euphoric, as I am plunged back into marking and sundry other pressures. I am starting to realize that I have committed to a lot for this summer, and it pisses me off that it’s going to be hard, because none of the projects are things I don’t want to do. How sad is that? I’m not even sure who I’m mad at–the world for being so interesting and giving me so many wonderful opportunities? Myself, for needing so much sleep?

My point is that I was euphoric yesterday, and probably will be so again, as soon as I mark 6 more exams, reread the failing papers (2 so far–sadness) and put all the grades into a Word document. And fill out some forms. Oh, and pay the hydro bill and reschedule my dentist appointment and write a new short story…I’ll sleep when I’m dead, I guess.

There was a hedge over which / I never could see
RR

April 1st, 2007

Let’s biograph!

The passage below is from a project of a few weeks ago, wherein I needed to come up with a “writer’s biography.” Of course, what I came up with was far too long and self-indulgent, but it did reveal to me how easy it is to become fatalistic in retrospect, assuming that you were always becoming what you ended up as now. This bio, which I’m happy to put in blog form, since it is otherwise useless (what I ended up using was so so so much shorter) makes it seem as if I always planned on being a writer, and never had a friend or a date or a job on the way that distracted me. Ahahaha. I barely know what I want to be *now* and, for all intents and purposes, I *am* whatever I was going to become. Anyway, with this is brief (but not brief enough) and ellided version of my past history as a writer, should you care.

I am from a very small southern Ontario town, a perfectly nice place to live, although perhaps a bit pointless to visit. My brother and I spent our childhood reading whatever our parents and teachers handed us, watching whatever came on television, and playing with whatever fell into the yard (snow, spring runoff, grass clippings, green apples, toads, dirt). Our town lacked a high school so we were bussed to a poshish suburb a half hour away. I’d always written stories, high school had a newspaper and a yearbook, for me to write for and later edit, and a literary festival for me to enter. I won often enough to get confused about the usual probability of doing so. I was often lucky—I won second place in a city youth festival, but the newspaper decided to run my piece instead of the winner’s because mine was shorter. I didn’t know the difference between a kids’ writing contest and a journal’s call for submissions, so I sent something to the latter and they actually took it. That seemed nice, but when the editor significantly altered the story, my teenage ego was horrified. In retrospect, I don’t know what either of us was thinking, because in both versions of the story, someone gets eaten by an alligator. That one gets left off my credits list.

In my final year of high school, I was able to take a writing workshop (it was a very good high school). Workshopping was concept I’d not seen before, but it seemed brilliant to me. I loved hearing what others thought of my work, and trying to help them with theirs. And so the pattern was set: I loved being edited and hated being published. I moved to Montreal when I was 19 to attend McGill. After some brief confusion about how good I was at math, I pursued an honours English degree with an irrelevant but entertaining geography minor. I eventually wound up as literary editor of the arts magazine, and published some stories there and in other student publications. McGill had no creative writing courses then (I hear with envy that they do now), but in my second year, a kind prof offered a non-credit prose workshop. Everyone worked like crazy for that non-credit.

The following year, I took a writing course at Concordia. There were some great minds in the class, but it was strangely embattled and ended in revolution. Since it hadn’t been an ideal experience and McGill was against fourth year transfer credits, I moved on to an informal writing group that some of my most likeminded Concordia classmates had started. It was (sigh) called “Write Club” after Chuck Palinchuk’s novel Fight Club and it was terribly masculine, despite the fact that I was not the only female in it. One of the boys wanted to be Charles Bukowski and they were always drinking absinthe. Another boy had a kitten named Chub-Chub that he kept in the hood of his jacket and even that was macho. I can’t explain it.

After I finished my honours thesis (on ironic distance in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Tom Jones), I graduated and, eventually, moved to Toronto. I started taking publishing courses at Ryerson in the evenings and being treated strangely at strange jobs during the day (a theme in my life long before and since, and one of the few autobiographical details I think is probably evident in my fiction). Finally I got a job that allowed me both school and leisure time, and I was able to write a bit more. I got to take a writing class for free at George Brown by winning a postcard story contest in which I may or may not have been the only entrant. It was the only writing class I ever took that had no workshop component, which I found odd. I joined a few writing groups with friends, all productive but none permanent.

When I finally graduated from Ryerson, I started taking continuing studies writing classes. In one, I finally found a group of people with whom I could workshop ad infinitum (so far, so good) but by then I was realizing that I wanted to give full-bore writing at least a little chance, so I enrolled in the MA program in English and Creative Writing at University of Toronto.

In the first year, I workshopped and took courses on Virginia Woolf, Bibliography, Magical Realism, Environmental Literature and Canadian Satire. I wrote a lot and learned a lot and found another brilliant workshop group. At the end of the school year, it also occurred to me that if I wanted to be a real writer, it might be good if someone who didn’t know me personally actually read my work. It had been a long time since the alligator story, and I had had a lot of feedback in the meantime, and learned to take it manfully (womanfully?) I figured I’d be ok no matter what happened, so I sent out everything I had on my hard drive. I got many rejections—not too many to count, but I’m not counting them anyway. I also got some acceptances, five so far, which isn’t huge but is in every way enough validation to keep me going. And so I keep going.

And then, as my dear friend Anne-Michelle would say, it was now.

I am answering the questions / I am asking of myself
RR

March 31st, 2007

That’s me

Well, I’ll just skip the boring parts
Chapters one two three
And get to the place where you can read my face
And my biography

That’s Paul Simon speaking–he says a lot of things better than I do. The quote is by way of introduction to the picture at right–that would be me, wearing my Grandmother’s apron, about to make some gingersnaps with the bowl and book before me. Retro clothes, slightly confused, big smile all make for a very representative pic, I think.