Okay, I know many of my students, former and current, come here looking for writing tips, for bits of inspiration on the writing life.  And they leave disappointed because I barely ever freaking post here and so it’s a cold hard breeze blowing through this abandoned meadow of a blog.  Perhaps I put too much pressure on myself. I mean, really, I know almost nothing about writing except that to write one must write and not just gabber on and on endlessly about planning to write. And read. One must read.  So those are my sage tidbits, har har, for those who want to write.  That’s the writing advice from this obscure literary fiction writer eking out a living in a place no one has ever heard of.

I live right in the middle.

So onward to important things, which might be of interest to those who want to write (and those who don’t): cars.

Now why might this be of benefit to someone who wants to write? Because, as I yammer on in my classes, detail is critical, and if you don’t know the details of your own frickin life then most likely you won’t know the details of a character’s life.  We must be observant.

So, I’m going to do a series of blog posts (we’ll see if I do, ha ha, as I am ever so noncommittal to even myself) on cars, specifically all the cars I have known and loved in my life.  And there have been many.

Why, you might ask?  Well, it’s twofold.

First, the last year I’ve found myself loving Peter Cheney’s Globe Drive pieces in the Globe & Mail.  Always funny ha ha, often funny odd, always informative and speaks to my desire to understand our relationship with these metal vessels which transport us, in which so much of our lives unfold. Or mine. I can’t speak for you although I may, on occassion, try to, with no real success.

So, since moving to the country my life has revolved around vehicles and transportation. Yes, that’s right, good country living turns the most ecologically friendly into a big greenhouse gas-emitting maniac.  Ah, the gentle walks, the meandering bike rides. Ha ha ha, unless you are unemployed or living on an inheritance and can lounge about your country retreat, you have to freaking drive EVERYWHERE TO GET ALMOST NOWHERE.  It’s the biggest contradiction – so close to nature and yet roaring upon it.  We become hypocrites, living our lovely and gentle rural lives, then hopping in the car to get everywhere. So much for the village.  And so much for walking.  But I’m not here to feel guilty or make you feel guilty, if you are a country dweller.  We make up for our hypocritical polluting in other ways. Ha ha ha.  Really. We do.  Sort of.  Maybe. (Okay, not really).

And secondly, I don’t have a car anymore. It was sudden, the absence of a vehicle. Okay, I do have cars but none of them are mine.  It’s complicated. My car will come, the Highway willing, at a mysterious time in November and I’ll do the big reveal at that point, for all five of my blog readers.

It’s been the strangest time.  Living in these parts, people take having a car for granted, just like most people take their legs for granted.  I still might take vehicles for granted but not the kindness of friends (and strangers) who have helped me. I thought it would be fitting to pay tribute to the cars (and their owners) that keep appearing in my driveway, to profile car and owner.

But before I can do that, I want to do some posts on my previous relationship with cars.  I’m back to where I was when I was in university, avowing to never have a car, to be saddled with a vehicle, which is demanding as a dog, and which weights on the soul of one who can barely tend to a houseplant.

I have found myself without a car through an odd and unforeseen set of events this year.  And so it’s has me focused on my relationship with cars, in fact, the cars of my past, what they say about me, what they said to me, why I was in them in the first place.

Look, I’m not handy.  In fact, I will be honest — I’m afraid of cars, simply terrified by that which lies inside the metal.  Opening up the hood of the engine horrifies me. It’s not supposed to have so many parts, so much liquid, fluids, pulsing, whirrings, beatings. It’s just supposed to go. It’s supposed to be sleek and hard, its inner workings a mystery, just like a man. With that hood up, boy, it’s like the car is freaking alive and that is really horrifying.  I just want it to go without me knowing just how it actually goes.  Just like life.  I want life to unfold without me thinking too much about the whys and wherefores of the unfolding–how the past creates present, present creates future, what goes around comes around and all of that existential stuff that makes my brain ache…auggugghg. I just want to live.  Without thinking too much. It’s like electricity. I just want to flip a switch. I don’t want to understand wires and currents.  I just want the big sparkly light.

Electricians are like magicians to me and we all need a little magic, right?  And mechanics are wizardly. In fact, I think they should have tall sparkly caps. They do remarkable things with silver tools.  But I don’t want to know how it is they fiddle and tweak and pat and stroke and make it purr and hum.

So, car focused but car-less, I give you, not in any particular order, the cars of my life. We’ll start with the first car I owned, or rather co-owned, with another writer, Lynn Coady. We were both doing MFAs at the University of British Columbia.  Now, as we discussed in Home Turf on Bookninja (for those still hanging on for literary musings) we are both from Nova Scotia, Lynn from small town industrial Cape Breton and me from rural agrarian Annapolis Valley. Back in them olden days, we were both poor students and walked or bussed everywhere.  We felt stigmatized.  We wanted fancy wheels. And we felt we were losing hours and hours of our lives walking, waiting.  You do get tired of people watching and the romance of the bus falls away.  And not that we didn’t appreciate the grandeur of Vancouver, the soaring mountains, the beaches and the coffee Mecca of late 1990s Vancouver, things the slow commuter could really savour. But we got tired of the stupid slow savour.

I was staying with a friend in a ginormous house at the time and a filthy rich Swiss homestay student also lived there. He was about to return to the Alps (he lived in Zurich, I just want everyone to live like Heidi) and wanted to off load his “student car”.  He and a crazy affluent Brazilian tax lawyer owned it. They had bought it for 600 bucks from a previous set of foreign students.

Now being from Nova Scotia and feeling like we were perpetually living out Goin’ Down the Road (where Toronto had been replaced with Vancouver) I can see why we seemed foreign to these men who wanted $500 for it.  Seeing our dismay at so high a price, they quickly dropped to $300–$150 each and we had wheels, man!  Our very own 1984 Mercury Ford Capri.

Now I can’t find a picture  of the actual car (because  I just moved and life is tucked safely in boxes) but imagine this silver, with red vinyl interior and a whack of chrome, chrome, chrome.  That was our car.

Imagine this silver and you'll see our ride!

It would only start in the morning if it was parked facing down on a hill and we went to the gas station regularly to get, not gas but oil as they engine liked to burn it.  But we were free, gloriously free. Sort of.  Lynn didn’t have a driver’s licence. (Maybe she did but it expired?  I’ll try to find that out.)  Anyway, we had this “retro car” that a kindly mechanic told us was driveworthy for a time.  He said it wouldn’t explode but would just stop one day.  It was sporty in a meek kind of way. That was fine; the impoverished and downtrodden can really only hope to be sporty in a meek way.

And at first, despite the complicated night-time parking and the oil burning and the time spent endlessly filling up on oil, it was freedom.  We learned to just turn up the radio if the engine sounded funny. And then there was the day a piece of the engine fell off. We shoved in the glove compartment and hoped for the best.  No more waiting for buses, no more walking, we had arrived.

But it didn’t take long to discover the teensy narrow Vancouver roads not built for heavy traffic. We were constantly in dense lines of traffic, beside expensive cars driven by people wearing sunglasses that cost as much as ours. We spent hours in traffic, hours looking for parking. Suddenly biking, walking and bussing didn’t seem so bad.  Oh, so quickly our cool mobile became yet another prison.  Around this time life was taking me to Northern Ireland (for another blog post) and I left the car with Lynn. The last time I saw it, it was parked in front of her apartment building and all the oil in the world would not make it budge. I forget now, all these years later, if she sold it to a movie to explode (that was a popular way of off loading beaters) or if she gave it to a charity to rebuild and give to a family in need.

I just know I got an email in Northern Ireland telling me the Mercury Ford Capri was gone, the silver angel that became reluctant and cast off its wings on Alma Street, most likely blown to so many shiny bits.  That is sometimes just how it goes, our past exploding into so many glittery pieces…

Next up: The black 1982 Toyota pick up truck.

Amazing how every summer, or rather, with the approach of every summer (and I’m talking when there is still snow on the ground and the wood stove still roars) I make grand plans for writing like a mad woman through July and August.  Lazy summer days, the dog days, slow afternoons with fragrant country air, breezy evenings of stars and fireflies, you know, all these leisurely moments summer seems absolutely made of, the perfect time for endlessly writing. And it never ever freaking unfolds like that.

Why?  Because the romanticized aspects of the writing life are so hard to let go of, it seems.   And really, for those of at this for awhile, well, there is not much romantic about the actual process of writing, hours alone on your butt in front of a computer screen, hot and itchy in the summer, wishing to be outside, all the things of the real world that need done, fighting for that time to write with quiet mind, to stroll into the literary landscape of the mind.Writing is never easy. The idea is romantic but the act is not.  The memory of the act is romantic.  Hindsight can give a splash of romance to the most agonizing memory.

But still I buy into the romance of summer writing.  I do not learn, year after year.  This is a time many writers dread, with such splendid writing plans that end up composted like so many over ripe strawberries.

Time and time again, year after year, I sit by the fire on a bitter cold March day planning out my summer writing retreat. And then summer arrives and winter seems like a nasty collective hallucination as the flowers bloom and every night a wind from the Bay of Fundy comes through the trees, sweeps across the pasture, and flows into the house smelling of roses, and salt water and hay, this breeze, and the coyote howls are especially crazy, and the days fill up with berry picking and jam making and all those things children want to do, and while I fall in love with these splendid days, find myself longing for the quiet of winter, the house becoming a sepulchre for the free spirited side of me that is captured by summer, the part of me that is not tame, that does not do well sitting in a contemplative silence, falling into a world in my mind, that appears before me in words.  But in the winter, when the wind blows cold and sterile, when the colour is gone, when the dirt road turns white, it is then, then that I write.

I seem to write well when the outdoors goes to sleep.  It’s curious, this connection to nature, here on the dirt road on the North Mountain in Nova Scotia.  Would it be like this anywhere else?  I often think about this, that it’s this place that is my heartland, which truly comes to life in all ways in summer, that lures me from my work.  It’s in these summer days I find my inspiration and in the winter days when  the inspiration is clay and become stories on the page.

But all this said, I am going to write this summer. You see,  I am the eternal romantic, ha ha.

So, it’s a road trip to Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, for a weekend of literary events, tonight a public book club to talk about Heave.   The blog goddess Bonnie Stewart is the wizardress behind this wonderful event.  Bonnie is PEI to me, sandy and salty, down home, yet exotic, dramatic, a part of that bigger world.

And I can’t wait to get off this dirt road on the North Mountain and hit the dirt roads over there.  I’ve never done a public book club so I’m a bit nervous, but very excited.  I hope they don’t suspend me from the ceiling and examine me.  But I always did want to be an acrobat, ha ha.

I don’t yet understand my relationship with Prince Edward Island.  When I was there last summer teaching at Seawords it was a transformative experience.  I realize that words like “transformative” and “narrative” are, lately, flying around like black flies on a hot day in May.  So I don’t mean to be trite.  I just had this sense of being light in time and space when I was there, as though the past, the earthy weight of history in Nova Scotia, was set aside for a moment.  Of course, I love, normally, being mired in the earthy weight of Nova Scotia. But Prince Edward Island was Nova Scotia without the history.

sand and sky

Beauty, charm, the old world, but without a past.  And sometimes we need to be free of our past. As free as we can ever be.  And this might just be letting it go for a moment.  Like releasing a bird, maybe a sea gull, and watching it float and bob on the waves. It’s still there and you can see it, but it’s seperate, and it sails off over the waves, takes off up into the sky, and disappears.  It’s still there but you can’t see it, for that moment in time, as you stand on the beach and the horizon and the ocean meet in a line so perfect you can think of nothing else except the clarity of that union.

If you are in Charlottetown, come and join us:

Book(clubb)ed, 8-10 pm @ DB Brickhouse (the former Off Broadway).

I promise I’ll answer anything you answer me…well, almost anything

My ride, Box 761, is here.  Time to fly.

Sparklies,

CA

Well, it’s Spring and the snow has melted, and it’s reading time!  I’m very pleased to be crawling out of my writerly hibernation to do the following event, and I hope, if you are nearby, you’ll come on out! Nifty door prizes and best of all, Ami McKay. author of The Birth House, will be introducing me.  Spring. Love.

Snow, yes, there is snow all about.  Early March. It’s the time of year in the northern climes when it does feel like a collective hallucination.  Was there ever a time when roses bloomed, when fields of sweet hay swayed in July breezes, and the night air was alive with the smell of blossoms and the salty bay, fire flies flickering through the Bouncing Bett (that’s an old fashioned night-fragrant flower, people), and I praised mystic lava lamps that I’d returned to Nova Scotia where summer is truly the sweetest and most divine?

Winter is fine, for a spell. And then it grows wearisome. I want six months of summer and two months of winter.

I look out the kitchen window at a massive snow drift we call the Sphinx, that blocks my view of the herb and rose garden.  Yes, it’s March, and March is supposed to be whispering of freaking spring but this year, it seems, for all the world, still January. But of course the season will change, and the Sphinx will melt, and there will be life.  I tell myself this now that my love of mono colour fades, har har.

And what heralds the arrival of spring?   This book, that I just flipped open while the snow storm blew. Plants for Atlantic Gardens by Jodi DeLong.  It’s a gardener’s companion and an indispensable resource book. The book is beautifully written, both knowledgeable and personable, and at times poetic. And remarkably, the stunning photos were all taken by Delong.

As blogging is still very new to me and at times I writhe in despair over what to write, I’ve decided to profile books that speak to me. I review books professionally but here I want to explore books and writers that I find interesting, not because they are assigned to me.  So let us consider Plants for Atlantic Gardens and why this would speak to me as a novelist (I assure you, I am not gardener, although I have a passion for growing roses of all kinds).

When I first published Heave I was asked to do a top ten books of the year for The Coast, a nifty publication in Halifax, Nova Scotia, that has interesting political and cultural coverage. Anyway, I put together the list of books that I thought were the best of the year, and one of them was the Nova Scotia Road Atlas.  Now why would a literary fiction writer have an atlas on her top 10 list? It’s because, a writer like I am (I don’t know what I mean by that exactly, a writer who loves information, arcane information, nomenclature, people with specialties, focuses, areas of expertise), who uses references books when she writes.  Much of my work is either set in rural Nova Scotia, or it’s inspired by rural Nova Scotia, so a book of detailed maps that was put together for emergency workers to find the most obscure backwoods location, was a dream book. It opened up the land, if you will, the literal land and the landscape of my mind.

And so this is my new dream resource book, which is opening up the doors to the garden. I’ve been hard at work on my second novel, Listening for the Island, which links to Heave through setting—Lupin Cove and character, Fancy Mosher.  Listening for the Island features a walled garden. Yes, yes, I know that this climate does not lend itself to walled gardens but in my book the garden is built on Petal’s End, a rambling estate by an Englishman in Lupin Cove, built to replicate the climate of England. (Yes, yes, I loved the Secret Garden, a book I read as a child and have read with my stepdaughters.)

And a few years back, when I was staying in Northern Ireland, I traveled to the Republic of Ireland and there encountered, in the country on the River Boyne, near the town of Drogheda, a walled garden.  It was an abandoned estate, the Oldbridge Estate that of a family, landed gentry, who had apparently fled during the Troubles.  It’s an interpretive centre now but back then, it was forsaken. The country home looked out over the river was boarded. And to the side was a tangle of trees and the walled garden. And yes, yes there was a hole in the garden wall and through it we slipped. I’d never seen anything like it, a forgotten garden. It was magical, even in its wild state, the remains of a greenhouse, the kitchen garden, flower gardens, elaborate stone work and what had once been formal gardens. It was easy to sit on a mossy stone bench and imagine the garden alive with people, a garden tended and orderly, fruitful, tame.  Perhaps part of me preferred the lost garden and the story I could make up for it.

Upon my return to Canada I began work on my novel and part of that has involved a great deal of research on gardens, on what would grow in a walled garden, both in England, and here in Nova Scotia. I became interested in The Lost Gardens of Heligan, as part of my research, another walled garden, this one in England, lost in time, rediscovered and restored.  Oddly enough, down the way here in the Annapolis Valley, an English horticulturalist set up The Telegraph Tearoom and Garden School. And she was involved with the restoration of the Lost Gardens of Heligan. And when I would go to the tearoom this English flower lady would talk about local garden writer, Jodi Delong. Jodi is something of a legend and it was some time later I actually made her acquaintance. And so it was with delight I laid my snow-cold fingers upon her new book and fell, through the pages, into spring.

The book is gorgeous to look at and easy to use.  While I love gardening and flowers seem to love me back, I don’t do much gardening. I prefer to sit in a lawn chair and watch others garden, offer suggestions, which I know are most appreciated, especially when I shout them out. But if I wanted to garden, this book would make it easy.  The book is organized in sections, Shrubs and Trees, Perennials, etc., and each of these has an alphabetic listings of plants.  Each plant has its own page, with using information and a wonderful description on the plant, its history, how to grow it.  And if anything equals her botanical knowledge, it’s the wonderful narrative voice she writes with.  I can hear her voice, as I read, Jodi’s laughter and thoughtfulness, her ability to make gardening seem easy, worthwhile, giving each one of these plants significance and importance, and personality.

My favourite section in the book is The Salt-Sprinkled Garden, yes a section on plants that grow near the ocean, plants which can endure salt, or as Jodi calls them, salt-tolerant. I’d never really thought about plants that grow on the beach, or near the beach, plants and flowers that exist in salty fogs and brackish mists, the obscure sea buckthorn, sea pink, dianthus…

Another enchanting section: Ferns in the Garden. If you’ve ever wandered in the woods in Nova Scotia, inland or near the shore, or if you’ve wandered the Nine Glens of Antrim along the Irish Sea, you’ll know the ethereal power of the fern. Of course I had no idea there were so many different kinds of ferns, until I flipped to this section.

If you want to meet Jodi, go to one of her events, listed below. And if you live far away, then you’ll meet her in the pages. Reading the book is like having a conversation, sitting down with her on a stone bench, near the chestnut tree, surrounded by ferns and saltwater roses, and having Jodi walk you through your garden.  You’ll learn how to make your current plants thrive, and what new ones to add that will love their Atlantic zone.  And you’ll also learn from Jodi that sometimes plants die, and that’s okay.  Gardening is not about always getting it right. It’s about experimenting and discovery.  And for a writer creating a fictional garden full of intrigue, ghosts and deadly blossom tea, a book like this is an essential on the bookshelf in writing studio.

Where to Find Jodi

She’ll be signing books at the Box of Delights book store in Wolfville, NS on March 5^th from 2-4 pm. She will also be speaking at the Woodlawn Library in Dartmouth on March 10^th at 7 p.m.; to the Dartmouth Horticultural Society on March 14^th; the St. Margaret’s Bay garden club on March 16^th, the Brookfield garden club on March 22^nd and at Ouestville Perennials in West Pubnico on April 9^th.

Her interesting, informative and by times, hilarious blog :  www.bloomingwriter.com

Plants for Atlantic Gardens is a soft cover, 252-page book, published by Nimbus Publishing. It retails for $29.95.

Q & A with Jodi DeLong

Q: When did you first start gardening?  Your earliest memory of gardening…
A: My earliest memory of gardening is helping my DeLong grandparents on their family farm. Blue potatoes, strawberries, shelling beans, apples; these are my foundation plants on the edible side. My Chisholm grandparents in Berwick, Nova Scotia, grew a veggie garden where my grandfather claimed he was regularly chased out by the squirrels. My grandmother had a flower garden, so big orange oriental poppies, lupins, and Johnny-Jump-Up pansies still ring my floral bells.

Q: Do you have any formal horticultural training?
Jodi: Sort of. I went to Agricultural College to be a veterinarian, and fell afoul of calculus not once, but twice. At that point I cried uncle and switched to my secondary passion, plants. I did a plant science technician program at AC, then some years later went to Acadia with a whack of transfer degree credits in biology, especially botany and related topics, and picked up an Honours degree in English (with a double minor in botany and history) and then a Masters, just because I could.

Q: How did you get into garden writing?
Jodi: My project advisor at NSAC, Tom Halliburton, told me back in the day I wrote like an English major, very chatty and conversational and artistic–not the way science papers are wont to be! Later, after Acadia, I had begun doing a little freelancing, and remembered the mantra to ‘write what you know.’ I pitched a gardening column to one of my clients, Atlantic Co-operator, and all these years later, I still do Down to Earth. Others followed, of course. But I don’t only write about plants, of course.

Q: Why did you decide to write this book?

Jodi: Because of what I do, giving talks, writing columns and features, blogging about gardening, etc, I get a LOT of questions. Plus as a gardener, I’ve had and continue to have MANY questions myself about plants and gardening. It’s an ongoing education. But I wanted to write a book to encourage others, whether seasoned gardeners or just beginning, about how to garden in this climate. What to plant where. There are scads and oodles of fabulous gardening books, but they’re not all tempered to our climate and its peculiar challenges, so we needed something focused on us–though I’m assured by people across North America that this is a handbook for most every gardener, most of the time. So I’m glad it’s being found useful.

Q: Have you ever thought of doing YouTube videos, on how to do certain things, for hesitant gardeners, like me?  For example, forcing blossoms in the winter, forsythia etc.?

Jodi: People have asked me about that, and I’ve never really given it much thought, primarily because I’m not a video oriented person myself. I’d rather read a 100 page article than watch a video online, for example, and yet gardening IS hugely visual. So I shall say I never say never, and see what happens.

Q: Do gardens people keep reflect their personalities?

Jodi: That’s a really, REALLY good question! I would say yes, at least for my own garden, which would look chaotic to others, but has a joyous, ruthlessly eclectic design to it. Others are more formal, still others a riot of colour…it’s probably not the case for all, but I must look at that more closely when I go visit gardens this year.

Q:  I’m curious about gardens that have been lost in time. Do you have any thoughts on forgotten gardens? By this, I mean when you find the old foundation of a home, from years ago, and the remnants of the garden are there, lilacs, lilies, pinks, roses, lily of the valley, other plants that naturalize (as you gardeners call it, I think?) and seem so out of place in what has essentially become a pasture or field?  My feeling: these forgotten gardens, or lost gardens, are enduring symbols of beauty, quite testaments to lives

Jodi: Forgotten gardens make me both happy and sad. I love finding hidden treasures around abandoned farmsteads–roses, perennials, herbs, other shrubs–but hate finding the bad (goutweed or Japanese knotweed) that sometimes also takes over. I like the sense of history in a forgotten garden, and how it spurs my imagination to wonder many things. It also makes me elegiac, as I think about gardens that my family has left behind, different times we moved when I was growing up, and how often those are gone now, replaced by lawn, grass or other uninspired plantings. I wonder what will happen to my garden when I am ashes under the metasequoia (dawn redwood) out in the back field. I could go on and on about this…

Dead Time, my first young adult novel, was just published by Annick Press in January, 2011.  Dead Time is the story of Isabella, a teenage psychopath.  I suppose you could call it a horror novel.  It’s what I would have read when I was a teen and I still read the same sort of writing.  Do you remember having Stephen King on your desk, under papers, trying to sneak in an extra page? My literary snob friends won’t admit to this, I know, but I happily will. And then there was Lord of the Flies. So it’s a marriage between these two but it’s a girl book, a girl book in that it’s the story of a girl, but guys will like it as well.  I guess all this makes it cross genre. Anyway, what makes the innocent become so dark so early?  I wonder about this and in Dead Time I explore it.

Dead Time is part of  a flip book, the companion book being Shelter by the amazing Jen Sookfong Lee.  I’ll be posting a Q & A with her soon! And if you don’t know what a flip book is, well, you’ll find out then, ha ha ha ha ha.  Hope you enjoy.  Sparklies, Christy Ann

A question writers are frequently asked is why they write.  My answer to this has always been that I feel compelled to tell stories and express myself through words and writing.  In other words, it’s an affliction. Yep, that’s what I’m saying.  I feel compelled to do it, no matter how hard, no matter how much it demands, no matter how many things I miss because I’m inside in my dark office that looks out from one window on a wood pile and the other on the shed.  Urg.  But there I sit, on the coldest day or the hottest day, in front of a pink lap top, slipping into another world via words. But that’s on a good day. There are days where I sit in front of the lap top and I hear every rain drop and every cough of the wind and the writing feels hard.

But I’m busy at work on my second novel, Listening for the Island, which links to Heave through the character of Fancy Mosher.  And this takes me to the other reason why I write:  so people will read my stories.  I’m not content to write a story and then put it in a drawer or show it to my  beloved mum so she can tell me how great it is (or, in her droll but well intentioned way, how much work it needs, ha ha).   So it is with gratitude that I say, I write for readers, to share my peek at the world through stories and language and ideas. It’s an exploration and it isn’t to be taken alone.  I always loved how I could read a book and have my experience of it, marveled that someone could create 300 pages and then as a reader, i could find my own voice in their story.

I’d like to say every writer is grateful when a reader picks up their book but I don’t know if that is the case. But it is for me. I am grateful in this busy time we live in (perhaps all times were busy?) when someone picks up my novel, or a story I have in a journal or magazine, and begins to read.  There is nothing else, is there, for a writer?

And so I say, for all those moments spent reading any book, reading in a chair by a fire or on a subway, to a child at bedtime, reading on the beach, in the bathtub, late at night when you can’t sleep, whenever and wherever, thank you, thank you for reading.

Sparklies from the dirt road,

Christy Ann

Heave has been selected as one of the Top 40 Essential Canadian Novels of the Decade on CBC Canada Reads 2011!  Voting has begun to pick the top ten of this list and the deadline gallops towards us, midnight, November 7th, 2011. Click right here or on fancy book cover below to go to the site and cast your vote!

Vote for Heave by Christy Ann Conlin

This book was published in 2002 and it’s been a delight to have such a response from readers. I’ve been working away on my next book, Listening for the Island, which links to Heave through the character of Fancy Mosher and will be published soon.  My first young adult novel, Dead Time, will be published on January 2011 by Annick Press.  Exciting times here on the dirt road in Nova Scotia!

I feel like all I’m doing is driving these days and whenever I start to moan about it, fancy friends living in the city point out I’m driving on country roads — no traffic, the beauty of the Annapolis Vally in full autumn colour before me. I’ve always loved driving, driving and running, speed in body, and then my mind slows down. I’m not talking about driving like a maniac but that sense of motion you get when in a car or on a plane or train or even a bike. (I can’t imagine about being on a horse. I’ve been on horses but not for some time. I digress.) When I wrote Heave I would go for 15-20 k runs after writing and the story would go through my mind, as in preparation for the next writing session.

But it’s this good country living that involves all this driving. country roads…jeebus, country roads don’t have many walkers and the walkers are usually dog walkers, not people walking say, to work, or a friend’s house. Were there ever those days? I think there were, before my time. That’s what these teensy rural communities were about.

Speaking of rural communities, Burlington, a community near where I now live, and where I grew up, is a place I adore. I love the community centre. They have the most amazing Canada Day celebration and parade. Of course Canada Day here is more like a celebration of community than patriotism. Maybe that’s a new definition of nationalism.

This link, ha ha, is not to the community centre, because I can’t find one. But it’s a link to the place where I found the name Seraphina, the main character in Heave. When I was small, my mother used to take me and my brothers to this graveyard for picnics and tombstone rubbings. My mother was, and is, always out of the ordinary, kind, a tender spirit.

I really admire these people who have taken the time to restore this gentle place where so many came to bury their dead, back in the day when people did walk and did come by horse. And now come by car but some still by horse because this is draught horse country up here on the Mountain. When we were little there was a guest book, and this white outdoor cabinet where it waited for visitors. And it gradually fell into decline, until the community restored it.

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~canbrnep/burlingtCem.htm