getting a table

Just received another note from a blogee called Rose who, like Lynn, couldn't respond to a post. Luckily my dear friend Chris is coming from Vancouver on Monday to stay for a week. Like our mutual friend Bruce, Chris is a geek of the highest order. I hope he'll take a look and maybe fix some of the bugs. My blog needs a good facelift anyway; there's lots more stuff to add. The blogee, whom I don't know, wrote:

Once again, cannot overcome the technical hurdles to comment on your most recent post about your class dinner. Thought I'd finally been able to log in but nooooo. Below is the comment I attempted to post till my weary fingers failed -

Trying to understand why these blog posts always find me sayng, 'yes, o yes!' and responding. They are always accessible and ready to be jumped into, roomy with take-off points. I had just been mini-essaying my husband on the need for us to sit facing each other when we 'talk,' though for years it's been side by side chairs, facing the fireplace. Something about eye contact and conviviality. That does it! This Christmas I'm getting a table.

Love "roomy with take-off points." Many thanks. I wish you joy at your festive board, eye to eye with your husband.

Those who've been following my financial woes - are there no boundaries in this blog, girl? - will be happy to hear that I've rented both the downstairs flat and the upstairs room until the summer. A very nice guy who's in town only 2 or 3 nights a week, a friend of a student, has rented up, and a very nice quiet young woman down. Plus I have two new clients for writing coaching - so there will be Christmas on Sackville Street after all. Except that I've just noticed some tiles looking pretty banged up on the roof, and have called my roofer ... so we may be cancelling the festivities once more.

It was bitterly cold last night, but Alissa York and I found a pub on the Danforth and talked about writing and teaching and teaching writing over red wine and French fries for a few hours. Bliss. Alissa is a fellow teacher at U of T and a brilliant novelist, whose last book, Effigy, was nominated for a Giller award. She writes fiction. This means that she delves deep and invents a planet and all its people and everything that happens there.

I marvel at this. Effigy was extraordinarily inventive, about Mormons in Utah the last century - how did she come up with those ideas, especially as someone who's never been to Utah, is not a Mormon and is writing more than a hundred years later? She did because that's her job. She's what I think of as a real writer - someone who spends countless disciplined hours getting the words out and down. She said that sometimes it literally feels as if she's dragging herself by the hair, pulling out the pages. She does not get up every seven minutes to answer the phone or check her email, unlike some people I could name. Ah well. That is why she has just finished a new novel which will come out next fall, whereas my memoir is a work-in-progress bunch of bits. Still, she was very nice about my book. My one book.

Our conversation was roomy with take-off points.

the importance of sitting down

It's as if bitchy Winter said to herself, Enough fooling around, let's show these idiots a thing or two. Suddenly, overnight, we're in the dead of it - nine below, wind chill of minus seventeen. It feels worse because we haven't gone gradually into the deep freeze. Just whammo. But hey, we're Canucks, we can take anything she can dish out. Can't we? At least, until we have to call the army to dig us out.

A wonderful event last night - a Christmas pot-luck here with my home class students. I cooked chicken and ham, and they all showed up with gorgeous goodies. The star, as always, is Pat's husband's smoked salmon; he actually buys a salmon and cures and smokes it himself, and then BAKES THE BREAD to go with this unbelievably delectable treat. What, he doesn't catch the fish himself, what kind of sluggard is he?

The rest was fabulous too, sweet potatoes, fruit and green salads, cheeses, molten chocolate, decadent cake, accompanied by Prosecco; we were all groaning by the end, and yet working too - there were stories to read and critique, and I dug up a Christmas story I read on CBC's "Fresh Air" in 1997. So we groaned and we worked.

What was different about last night was that before the guests arrived, I dragged my breakfast table over to the dining-room table to make as big a seating area as possible. Before, people took their plates wherever they wanted, so there were little groups here and there. But last night, we were a family, with Jason, our man, at the head. Dad, we called him. The importance not just of communal feasting but of sitting down at table together is something I learned from the Blins in France, this past summer. Even when there were 35 people to feed, in the days before and just after the wedding, the family insisted on setting the table, and we all sat down at once. I resisted, in my efficient North American way - so much easier to pick up a plate, fill it and just go eat somewhere for God's sake! But no, we all sat. And talked and laughed and drank and ate and argued and made friends, for hours.

Of course, that's easier to do when you have an extremely long garden under the green oaks and hot sun of Provence, and an army of assistants to get food out of the kitchen and onto the plates. But what mattered most was conversation and community, at table. So from now on, unless there are an enormous number of people who simply cannot be accommodated all at once, we're sitting down. With real plates and glasses and cutlery, too.

Because we spend our time in class reading personal essays about our deepest thoughts and feelings, all of us at the pot-luck were already close. Still, by the end of last night, we were closer.

mourning Goldie Semple

Many tears today - mine, and those of my friend Chris Tyrell, who called from California when he heard the news, and I'm sure tears from everyone who knows something about the theatre in this country. One of Canada's most beautiful and accomplished actresses, Goldie Semple, died yesterday at the age of 56. Unbelievably - no, not unbelievably, if you knew Goldie - she was on stage all summer long, working at the Shaw Festival where she'd spent many successful years. As ill as she was with cancer, nothing kept her from her work.

Goldie and I worked on three or four shows together in Vancouver in the 70's, including the musical comedy "The Club," in which we played men in a turn of the century men's club, dressed in tuxedos and top hats, I with a moustache drawn in with eyeliner and Goldie with a distinguished 5 o'clock shadow. She was impossibly beautiful even as a man, tall, elegant and expressive, carrying herself like royalty, always. Later we performed in Chekhov's "Three Sisters," she as the unhappy Masha - "I am in mourning for my life" - and I as the vile wife of brother Andrey. Goldie was unforgettable, so intelligent and desolate, tossing her books aside in despair, then wracked by her illicit love. In rehearsals and at each performance, she was the essence of professionalism. I don't ever remember her getting sick or forgetting a line; she was dependable, solid, 100% engaged.

I left the stage not long after that, and along with many other Vancouver stalwarts, Goldie left Vancouver for the east - Stratford and then Shaw. She was that rare actor who, I think, was never, not once, out of work for more than a brief hiatus. We met on occasion after shows, had lunch or dinner together, talked about our children and our work, now so different. What a pleasure to watch her on stage through the years, statuesque, regal, the way she turned her head, the flash of her eyes, the perfect gesture of a hand - just, simply, her astounding beauty. She made me want to go back on stage, to work with her again.

Goldie Semple was a kind, loving woman and a wonderful actress. We are in mourning, now, for her life - for what was, and for what might have, should have, been.

another report from New York

Had to share this - I just received a note from Nina Capelli, the Director of Development for the Stella Adler Studio in New York. She did a great job making a flyer and programs and getting a good, full audience. And her note here is a great gift to me.

It was a wonderful evening and I am so glad that I was in the audience. Your talk is fantastic – warm and intimate and educational and inspirational. I hope our paths will cross again soon some time. Thank you for joining us and for bringing such a special evening to the Studio.

Many thanks, and a Merry Christmas to you too, Nina.

a guest blog

Slush. Actual slush today and high winds. We're in for it now.

My dear friend Lynn has just emailed from the south of France. I'll leave you to enjoy her note, just as she sent it.

I tried to respond to one of your blogs; but after 20 minutes of changing my password and copying out 10 different codes I gave up. So I'm copying it here. ( It was the blog where you complained - yes, yes, I know. It's hard to believe, but you actually complained about something!) and I'm responding to the complaint:

I love these weeks before Christmas. I love hearing 'Little Drummer Boy", and "It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas" as I walk along the streets of Montpellier in 18°C weather under a bright blue sky with a mistral blowing. I love the smile on the girl at the cash desk at the 2 euro store because she's already getting into all the joy of the people buying 2 euro junk to decorate their places for Christmas.I love all the hope there. It is indeed the most wonderful time of the year. No earplugs for me. But then again, I live above a bar. But you know that. lynn

My friend does occasionally rub it in that she is in the south of France and we are knee-deep in slush. We forgive her because she allows us to stay with her on occasion, even though, as she says, she lives right above a bar. But the bar is in Montpellier, which is one of the nicest places in France.

Lynn, thank you for giving me a glimpse of someone who actually enjoys that syrupy Xmas music. Mind you, it helps that, perhaps because of your years dedicated to Motown, you have obviously gone slightly deaf. This isn't surprising, given that you are that much older. But even so, a remarkably hot Ph.D. and living in the absolutely right place on earth for your best, much younger friend to visit.

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As I mentioned in that same complaining blog, there's an interesting discussion going on in the Globe and Mail's book pages on-line about the fact that Canada Reads, which happily has chosen Wayson's Jade Peony among others, has never selected a non-fiction book. Here's what I posted in response:

Just to expand the discussion a bit, as readers like MelissaW are limiting non-fiction, in this discussion, to mean mostly journalistic or informational writing - non-fiction includes memoir, of which there is a great wealth in Canada, also always ignored. Wayson Choy, for example, whose "Jade Peony" is now being honoured yet again, wrote a beautiful memoir called "Not Yet" this year, which despite rave reviews has been shut out of non-fiction awards.

Other personal favourites, superb books all: "The Danger Tree," by David Macfarlane; "Belonging," by Isabel Huggan; "The Way of a Boy," Ernest Hillen; "Running in the Family" by Michael Ondaatje; "Memoirs of Montparnasse" by John Glassco; "My Turquoise Years," by M.A.C. Farrant.

Even other non-fiction writers sometimes dump on memoirs, presuming them to be self-indulgent attempts at therapy, and some of them are. But books like these are rich and wise and will endure as long as any novel. Give me a true story, any day.

Someone has written in to say that with all the suggestions, they now have their Christmas book list. You can't go wrong with these. I am buying Not Yet for everyone. I beg you, please buy books as gifts this year, and buy them from a small independent bookstore - in Toronto, a place like Ben McNally's downtown, or Nicholas Hoare, or This Ain't the Rosedale Library - struggling to survive, all. You can pass on the joy of a good book - think non-fiction! memoir! - and support those brave booksellers at the same time.

And to my dear Lynn in Montpellier - I think I'll send the new C.D. of Bob Dylan singing Christmas songs. What a joyful, tuneful sound for her. She'd better turn it up loud, though, so her poor deaf ears can hear.

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PS Sorry about the confusion of sixteen different fonts today.