I’m on a Tim Minchin kick.  He’s my new mentor, even though he doesn’t know it.  I shoulda stuck this in two posts ago but what the heck.  I really like the brain verse.

Oh, yeah, and he signs….

In no particular order:

Writers become famous when they let go of their inhibitions and start writing about interesting things.  Readers are interested in the things we can’t do every day; they want to read about the taboo.  Look at the Giller list:  not one of them is writing about being a nice person.  Northrop Frye may have had something when he went on for pages about the universal human event.  (This is the only time I will ever admit Frye said anything useful.)

My family runs as a democracy as long as everyone is being democratic.  The minute someone becomes autocratic, I get to take over as the autocrat.  No, this is not a form of dictatorship.  No, you cannot impeach me, regardless of your high grades in Canadian Law class.

Raising my children would have been a whole lot easier if I knew everything I now know.  I had my small niece and nephew over on the weekend; what I wouldn’t give to homeschool them. They’re both brilliant.

Students aren’t learning anything when you force them to study something they aren’t interested in.  I have proof.

Holidays begin a week before the holiday begins.

One man’s insecurities is the ending of another man’s story.  Thank you – you know who you are.

That “do unto others” rule is universal and timeless, and I’m not sure why we bother making a whole lot of other rules.

A germ shared is not a germ halved.  You may be very dear to me, but your germs are messing with my brain and making it hard for me to think.

It’s a very nice arrangement here in My World.
it’s always entertaining here in My World.
- from My World, Troutfishing in America

One of my sisters – although I’m sure the others think it, too – constantly reminds me that my world is not the same as anyone else’s world.  She says it in a slightly derogatory but resigned voice.   She once gave me a Christmas card with a green alien on the front that said “Joy to your world”.

I like my world.

My world has been clashing with other worlds lately.  My brains are a bit rattled and I’m grateful to have a day like today where my world doesn’t have to be ripped open and exposed.  However, the last 15 hours have been enlightening; I am convinced, without a doubt, that my world is perfect (for me, anyways.  You’re welcome to live in your imperfect world. )

I was slightly put out a week ago when one of the writers in my group told me that two men (in a long-term relationship) would never hug in the workplace because the gay world just doesn’t allow that.  I’d done a lot of research before writing this, but the entire story hinges on this one action so I decided to do some more research before I threw in the towel entirely.  I asked a lot of people a lot of questions, and received a lot of very helpful answers.  The best answer, though, came from someone entirely unexpected.  He said, “…you can really have the characters do whatever you like, as long as it’s true to who they are.”

Ah, yes.  Who they are.  In their own worlds.

Last night, the writers were ripping apart my story ( ’salright, it needed to be ripped apart ’cause I’m really stuck on it) when there began a loud-ish discussion about the worlds of my characters.  The writers were all trying to get me to define those worlds, and I just wasn’t understanding what they wanted.  I finally clued in, and asked if the characters’ sexual preferences were really all that important.

You know when someone says one thing but you can tell they mean another?  Imagine a split second of silence, and then five people saying  – in unison – “No, of course not!”.

Yeah.  My world.  In my world, it’s not so important to be defined by one word, whether that one word refers to food preferences, personality, sexuality, or even gender.  I like to be with people who are true to who they are, not what they are.  I now have to think about whether I want to write for an audience which defines their world with anything less than the entirety of Roget’s Thesaurus, or whether I want to write for people who live in worlds like mine.

My world has also won out in the world of teaching.  It seems that traditional methods of teaching ESL are not very effective when used over the internet, and that “properly trained” teachers are losing students.  Following rules is now seen as a bad thing because the rules don’t apply to everyone, they don’t cross cultures.  I’ve been asked to put together a training session to expose the teachers to the concept of students as individuals, and to show them how to think beyond their training.

So, my dear sister can continue to make comments about my world but, quite honestly, this world has done well for me for over 40 years.

I wouldn’t change it for your world.

My employer wants to standardise our curriculum

I have no problem with him doing that

as long as he doesn’t expect me to teach it that way

He’d have to standardise the kids, first

I dare him

Radio Free School recently put up a blog about changing the way we view teens.  I spend most of my time with teenagers; I actually think they’re not much different from adults.  I take that back: most of the time, they’re easier to get along with.

RFS  quotes Robert Epstein’s The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen: “Our views can reasonably be conceived of as a kind of irrational prejudice programmed by our culture-almost precisely the kind that mainstream Americans bore towards women and blacks until very recent times,” says Epstein.

They then say: What we need then is more avenues, more opportunities for this to take place-for adults and kids to come face to face in meaningful ways. Take your kid to school day won’t cut it.
I want to hear your ideas and experiences on what can be done (what is being done) to restore the continuum. Please write in.

Some of the suggestions include getting rid of high school and put the kids into something more like apprenticeship work programmes.  Not a bad idea.  Why do we expect children to go to school until they’re about 23 years old, and then go into work?  Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

I’d like to flip it around a bit, though.  Rather than having the kids live our lives for a day, how about we live theirs?  What if each teenager got to make an adult get up three hours earlier than they wanted to, hang around school for 7 or 8 hours, work a crappy job for a few hours, then do two or three hours of homework?  They could also make the adults sit on the floor in a big, affectionate pile and talk about love, religion, politics, society, etc.  They could make the adults listen to music which makes them feel extreme emotions.  They could show the adults what it feels like to risk their health-and-well-being by leaping fences, BMXing, fleeing the schoolyard in a frenzy of parkour or crossing the road against the light.  They could make the adults try something new or do something unpleasant just because it’s good for their character.

The teenagers didn’t choose this lifestyle for themselves: adults created it for them.  We decided this was good for them, and then we complain because they don’t act like adults.  I think we’re just ticked off with them because they still have youth and freedom and all those things we want to have but got rid of in favour of careers and money and material goods.  I think if our society is to the point where someone has the audacity to write a book about why we don’t like a whole group of people, maybe the fault is really, really easy to pinpoint.

Been thinking a lot about the process of writing.  Why can I really nail it sometimes, and other times miss the broad side of the barn?

I can’t remember where I read it but I once heard that Susan Musgrave ended up covering a creative writing class for someone and had to teach her own work.  One of the questions in the text was “What was the author thinking when she wrote this poem?”  Musgrave, of course, didn’t know the answer herself and said so in derisive terms.  Wonder if the students received better marks for giving a truthful answer.

Recently, someone has been asking me where I get the ideas for my stories.  I’m embarrassed to answer, not because I’ve been doing exotic or illicit things but because it makes me seem really quite schizophrenic.  Perhaps I was traumatised by my second-year Creative Writing professor (I use the term “professor” loosely; actually, I’m surprised I didn’t need therapy after surviving both my first- and second-year Creative Writing classes).  This would have been in 1989 (according to the literary magazine the poem was printed in, anyway) so forgive the lack of writing ability; I promise you I’m much better at it now.  Here’s the poem:

The Flower Gathering

Keane was putting nasturtiums in the salad

marigolds in the vegetables

pansies in the bread.

Joan pronounced the salmon to be ready

and

Mary and Andrew kissed in their newly-wed way.

Alex fell rather far into a bottle

of sweet red wine.

We all had hibiscus blossoms in our hair

braided hair and long

our skirts long

our thoughts longing.

Guthrie in one room

Dylan in the other

Charity had her guitar in the back yard

sitting among the blue delphinium.

This was our time of being.

Zachary ate the poinsettia leaves.

Each of us had to explain the thinking behind our poem.   Well, I was living in Windsor and the city had poisoned all the rats in the alleys so my roommate and I were having to clean up all the dead rats from the back yard.  My cat, Zachary, was sitting in the kitchen window, killing himself in his efforts to get outside and eat all the poisoned rats.  The last line of the poem wrote itself from this scenario, and the rest followed in order from the beginning.  I changed two words from the first draft.

The professor said I must be lying because that’s not the way poems get written.

That’s the way my poems get written.

Sometimes, like Susan Musgrave, I have no idea what I’m thinking as I write things.  My brain creates them, and I try not to get too close to my brain.  I believe my better writing – creative or otherwise – happens when I don’t think too much.  People compliment the things which are spewed from the 8th circle of my brain.  When I analyse and consider and contemplate, the pieces fall apart.  Nice, ordered pieces from the 1st level get comments like “Well, it’s good….”

So, this is my new criteria for writing: if I can answer any questions about it, the piece sucks and you shouldn’t be forced to read it.  If you really like it, I can’t answer a single question so don’t bother asking. If you persist, I’ll think you’re trying to get into my head, after which you’ll need therapy and I don’t think insurance companies cover Acts of Writing.

Haven’t been writing much here because I am apparently in one of those learning cycles where I’m the one doing all the learning, and sometimes it’s a bit chaotic in my head until I get things all sorted out.  Of course, once it’s all sorted out, I get handed another bunch of things to sort out.  Toss in the mundane life I lead (children, pets, laundry) and I can understand why the famous artsy types often resorted to absinthe.  I’ve never had absinthe but if someone put a bottle on my desk I might be tempted.

This week’s lessons involve writing of the creative sort.  I haven’t had a whole lot of work in the past couple of months, so I’ve been puttering away at some stories.  The TDot workshops (I gave up the meetups, ’cause they were just about socialising and why would I work on useful things like social skills when I found a group of people who indulge my inclination to isolate myself and play with words?) have been life-savers.  I traded stories with one person who has this absolutely… purified voice.  Not a word is wasted; no word could be replaced by a synonym.  Even though he writes on subject matter I wouldn’t usually choose, I love reading his stuff just because he can put together the clearest, most concise paragraphs I’ve ever seen.  He went through my latest stories, and this morning I was sitting in front of my computer repeating, “Oh, yeah, that’s what I meant to say.”  I’m gonna have to give him co-authorship if I ever get published….

This guy has one fault, though: he writes in American English.  I know, I’m being ridiculous.  One language is as relevant and acceptable as the other.  However, one is certainly more beautiful.  Yes, John Dewey had a point regarding the lunacy of British spelling but what about the elegance of the spelling?  When one is reading, would one rather read dialog or dialogue?  It’s the difference between sack cloth and silk.

I also have a problem with American punctuation because it leaves no room for self-expression.  What if the sentence really needs a pause before a conjunction?  Why would I put a period inside the quotation marks when the end of the sentence is outside the quotation marks? Punctuation should be used to communicate voice, not to standardise sentences on a page.  I think we should all learn punctuation from Virginia Woolf.

So, it’s 11 o’clock on a Saturday morning, and I’m still in my pyjamas, and I think I’ll go immerse myself in a fantasy world for another little bit before I face reality.  Dishes?  What dishes?  Dishes are better with absinthe.

Jesus, Mary, Mohammad and Vishnu.

Look what these guys did.

You’ll have to watch Tom Milsom’s video first (the one down below), but then scroll down a little and watch all the responses.

Science, religion, history, biology, philosophy, sociology, anthropology….

Utterly, wickedly cool.

I read this today on Radio Free School.

Then my cousin posted this on Facebook.

It’s like planets colliding in my head… which as not as disasterous as it sounds.  It makes nice little new planets.

In the movie Benny and Joon, the mentally ill Joon looks at Sam and says, “You’re out of your tree.”  Sam replies, “It’s not my tree.” (Try around 7:30 if you don’t want to watch the whole clip.)

These are some of the wisest words I’ve ever heard.

Yesterday, Walaikum asked me if I thought he was different than other students his age.  Short answer: yes.  The long one involves his thought processes and his personal views and his experiences (and the fact that no one is the same as anyone else).  Walaikum said he doesn’t want to be different, he wants to be “normal”.

I didn’t know what to say.

When I posted it on Facebook, one of my sisters made it a whole 9 minutes before not-so-subtly implying that perhaps he was talking to the wrong person if he’s looking for someone to put him on the path of conformity.

I’ve been thinking about it for 19 hours now; still can’t think of how to support Walaikum in his decision to be “normal”.  Think I’m going to have to be a terrible mentor and have at him about individuality.  Think I might have to find a way to demonstrate that his tree is the best tree for him.  Although, maybe it won’t be so terrible; while Walaikum doesn’t know me the way my sisters do, it must be pretty obvious that I don’t fit neatly into normal society.  Perhaps he knew what I would do.

Time to go plant a new tree.