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Photo by Gail Harvey, no reproduction without permission
What Are You Waiting For?
Marnie Woodrow I’m working with a remarkable group of women writers right now. A gift of human chemistry colliding with goals: this means I could teach all day, work all night [as I did] and still feel completely energized. Because merci dieu I love what I do. I love teaching, talking and cooking. Writing just is what I feel compelled to do as a brain-way, but all the other fun that comes of the old urge to story-tell is what delights me. When I get down on myself for not knowing Power Point and algebra inside out and gaze at my Official Adult Human Resume, I immediately have to laugh. Because nothing good and magical in my life has ever come from the official list of impressive achievements. The good stuff has always come from: hand-selling a terrific novel to a stranger on a rainy night such as this one in an independent bookstore five minutes before closing. Intuition, which is never ever wrong why do we fail to heed it? Decision making: lousy choice or perfect choice, make one already! I realize my biography would be the tale of a seeming dilettante but guess what: I have never ever been bored. Cooking after a hot shower on a lousy rainy night, ideally with roasted garlic and basil. Cooking, which is a form of writing where we use olive oil instead of ink…
It was by pure accident that the participants in the first Full Throttle Fiction week-end workshop were all women. Usually there are some guys aboard. Or one fella, and that guy is almost always up for the task of being brother in a sea of sisters. But when the group is smaller, we can do things differently. Talk more and still write. Write and talk about it. It isn’t about the all-female statistic when we dig deeper and have more time, it’s the smallness of it, which is special. Most places want to load up the room, bang for the buck, bums in the seats and so on. The bottom line keeps us all in salt and suitcases, of course, but I’m a quality over quantity person. I employ a restaurant metaphor here: keep the card short and dance it well, every item. Five thousand menu offerings equals astute people wondering immediately “How big is their freakin freezer?” Because you cannot be fresh for the masses. Seven items done well that make people dream: a perfect restaurant. Some would sneer and say, “That’s not a restaurant, that is a café.” And I can tell you, that’s crazy information. A label, not unlike ‘writer’s block’ and ‘procrastination’ –both of which give you the diagnosis and lots of promised ‘cures’ but absolutely no relief. Because they are not real. Words are not real. Facts are not necessarily truths. So-called ‘facts’ enslave us daily: truths run the show and whether we go there or not is the difference between the girls and the women. The boys and the men. To thine own self be true did not mean check your Blackberry every five seconds to signal to the people around you that YOU matter. It meant: care for yourself, care for others, care for the larger world. The perfect trifecta. Trinity. Use what works.
Dreams of publication are present in the room I’m lucky enough to be working in with these women but there is also a palpable passion for STORY which gladdens my soul. And when this soul is gladdened, well, you might want to get some protective eyewear, kids. The glow is fierce. I like to think of fireflies when this happens to me. I am engaged in something I love and something stars emitting light. Lighthouse light for some, and firefly find me light for others, and so on. Fireflies have their reasons for lighting up. You can google that.
If anyone cares, the moon was full in Aries this week-end. We might care to know that it is a hilarious and interesting night for Toronto’s Nuit Blanche to be taking place: night of rain, full moon, and intense play energy. Mull it over. Wars break out in Aries full moons and yet, great parties all also had on such nights. The best of baby and the worst of baby, essentially. Add some rain and some I can’t take it anymore Martha/George stuff and godspeed to all couples waiting for a subway or a cab round about 3 a.m.
THINKING IS A HABIT, she said. I mean it. The chant you give yourself at the typewriter or in the mirror is the habit no better than heroin, no more noble than drinking too much, no better than crack if you can’t stop pounding that “I am too fat and therefore all else sucks” drum. Do you know how precious it all is? Act as if you are on the verge of not having the chance to…………. That’s what we’re doing in my workshops lately. And I love it.
Today I tried Korean food for the first time. LOVED the spicing, this story is just beginning. If I devote my next few blogs to my adventures in Korean food [without a single willing guide who actually speaks Korean to smooth the path, I must add] and if some film studio picks it up and turns it into a movie, well, let me just say this: the film I am writing for Meryl has NOTHING to do with a woman vowing to do something related to food in a period of time that is too long for the average film timeline to bear unless it is made by Merchant or Ivory. [I heard they broke up…]
Tonight I started a new job. It kind of sucks starting a new job, that first awkward day/night when you don’t know where the bowls are what goes on this plate who wants what when, all the ‘facts’ of a thing. But if you can walk into a new place and say, “I LOVE to cook, show me how it is here” you can pretty much deal with all the other stuff. Life is Saturday night dinner. You’re here. I had no idea what I was doing yet loved every moment of it. I like being scared, I thought as I walked in the rain away from that virgin shift. I like not always feeling like I know where the bowls are. I am not sitting in a drawing room sipping tea feeding myself lines about “I am an artist” because well, the thing I love to DO is to cook. Feed. Talk. Intuit. Why not? Turning 40 was the best thing that ever happened to me. It took me 6 months to get it, but I get it, and so…
I would like to dedicate this particular blog to a person. I have lately begun to do what I feel instead of what I SHOULD do/say. Whenever possible. While I am “teaching” or working with writers to be even more excited writers [as I prefer to think of it] in a lovely room at the Toronto Writers Centre, someone I know will be Running For The Cure, in the rain. Like many women in the run, she will be running because she lost someone to the unimportant disease that is breast cancer. The war of war is right now taking more attention, but this will change. But in the cold rain, at this annual event, there will be a runner I know who JUST lost the key player in her heart, someone who really did help her to make her path some days, from early on. “Who kindly shaped what could be next.” And I had the joy of meeting this gorgeous lady, if really, never “knowing” her but I did adore her, immediately, and she was a passionate reader, and a lover of life and yes, as we all can be too often, a delayer of actions needed, and she was a mother to someone I know needed her. NEEDED her to show up and be kind and smart and there. Glorious Laurie Tranter, who passed away on September 22, this one is for you. Someone is running for you and through you in the cold rain and I know she knows that life is for living, right here, right now. “I loved you on sight, and better on listen, may you go where the angels fear to tread.”
I tried Korean food because I have been wanting to and am here to try it. With THIS mouth and THIS brain.
Listening to: Rocket Man, Elton John and the theme from Rocky, which every runner needs.
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