Calgary Through The Eyes of Writers

Shaun Hunter’s project Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers features The Veil Weavers today. I love the timing, days before a city council vote on a development project that would keep the water downstream of Confederation Park underground, instead of restoring it as a stream in Highland Park, as local residents are fighting for.

http://shaunhunter.ca/writing-the-city/2017/maureen-bushs-the-veil-weavers

Writing or Not Writing?

I’ve done very little writing in the last few months – instead, this time has been about deepening, becoming quieter, more still.

Odds and bits of writing arose, some of them quite marvelous and with great potential, but nothing with any discipline, and nothing completed. When the tap is on, I write. When it turns off, I stop.

I don’t know if a more focused or productive time is coming (my intuition says yes), or if this is simply the tail end of being a writer.

I’m fine with either ­– which is its own vast curiosity. But there it is.

I’m not dismayed. I am curious. What will today bring?

Maureen

From Quarry Lake, near Canmore

Let The Story Be

I came across the phrase people who love the interior world a while ago. I love this – it completely explains where I find myself right now. I don’t remember where I came across it. Apologies for not crediting a radiant phrase.

It explains the books I loved as a child, and my drive now to go deeper into silence, an amazing roller coaster of discovery. I’m diving deep into the interior world.

When I was a child I adored the poem Halfway Down, by A. A. Milne:

I remember myself at four years old counting our basement stairs, finding the middle stair and sitting, contemplating the end of the poem. It isn’t really anywhere. It’s somewhere else instead.

I loved the strangeness of Alan Garner’s The Owl Service, and the magic and wonder of Mary Stewart’s Merlin and Arthur stories – not the sword fighting, but the otherness, the mystery. I find it in transcendental poetry, and Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane. I’ve always been drawn to the mysteries of life, and now I find myself immersed in it. It feels absolutely right.

Now, can I catch this in stories? Part of finding the mystery is allowing myself to not know. Can I “not know” about writing? To simply sit with it, to let it emerge, to be what it needs to be, to let the story become?

I’m editing another novel manuscript. It became clear I need to edit it by retyping it entirely, slowing when I reached anything that isn’t quite right, and letting new words come from a quiet mind. Nothing cognitive, just being with the story.

I’ll hit a paragraph that just doesn’t feel right and let a rewrite flow. I move on through lines that work, that feel right, and when I reach another rough patch, I let the story become what it wants to become.

It’s oddly slow, coming in fits and starts, letting the story set the pace. Once again, I have to release all control and just let the story be.

Maureen