"Write in the Garden" workshops update

We're onto something here - the first writing workshop sold out in just over a week, with a waiting list! So I am planning another, for Sunday August 10th.  And I will set up a few more after that. Very exciting.  

There will eventually be a flyer with all the information, but here's what's involved: an invitation to my home in downtown Toronto, for a full 10 to 5 day of writing in fellowship with other writers.  It will start with coffee and tea, introduction and discussion of writing in general and the rules of the day in particular, and proceed to assigned topics for ten, fifteen or twenty minute writing sessions at various spots in my very long garden.  Then, gathering to read only if you are comfortable doing so, to give each other feedback, and to eat and drink.

The workshop is open to people who have a lot of writing experience and to those who have none. It's about learning to trust your own voice and your own stories, to pay attention to the creative self, and to gain confidence and direction from supportive feedback and the friendship of other writers all doing the same thing.  It costs $125 for the day, lunch, snacks and morsels of insight included.

In other news: Luminato, Toronto's spring arts fest, is over, and I'm only sorry that I missed so much.  I did see the "Midsummer Night's Dream" done by a troupe from India and performed partly in Indian dialects.  It was charming, with a superb set of ladders and torn sheets looking like a tenement in Delhi, through which the actors tumbled and dove.  It's clear that even when you don't understand the words, Shakespeare's characters are completely understandable.

Not part of Luminato but just as great, I saw two good friends, Daniel Kushner who runs and plays first violin in the Gala String Quartet, and Duncan Fremlin who runs and plays banjo in the blue-grass band Whiskey Jack, bring the bands together for an event called "Bach in the Saddle."  It was a compilation of all my favourites: Dvorak and the Everley Brothers,  Bach and Gordon Lightfoot.  The highlight was the haunting Ashokan Farewell from "Oh Brother where art thou?" played with many, many strings.   Heavenly.

So, on into summer.  With thunderstorms.

Go and see "Black Watch".

I've just returned from seeing "Black Watch," the National Theatre of Scotland play about a Scottish regiment serving in Iraq that's here thanks to Luminato.  And all I can say is, anyone who is in Toronto tomorrow, Sunday June 15, and who hasn't already seen it, should go.  

It's nearly two solid hours, without intermission, of what theatre is all about - brilliant cast, script, production, whirling into such a powerful finale that I could hardly breathe.  All I could see was my 23-year old son in uniform, off to serve his country in a terrifying and meaningless war.  The play is, more than anything, about young men and testosterone, which have been manipulated for centuries to serve political ends.  Young men who want to prove themselves, to bond with each other, to just do a good job.  

And the irony is, as the play points out, the enemy is made up of those young men, too.  Only theirs are willing to commit suicide to find honour, making them a kind of enemy our side has never fought before.

Again, it's documentary theatre - there are scenes of a writer asking questions of the soldiers at home afterwards, to turn their answers into a play.  And the play that was created out of those stories does what all the best theatre does - wakes us up and makes us think and feel, glad to be alive.   

Good will

My friends, it's a sad blow.  A shock.  How could a place so vibrant and useful just vanish?  But that is what is happening, step by painful step.  It is being dismantled, and today, when I went in and saw the decimation, the empty racks and empty spaces, I nearly cried.

My local Goodwill store is closing.

People who know me understand what this means.  I started shopping at Goodwill at university and then as a starving actress.  During my decade as a married matron, I didn't step inside a Goodwill, though I did buy my work clothes - the things I needed to be the "wife of" at fancy events - at a designer resale boutique. 

But after my divorce and when I embarked on an expensive course of therapy, I could not afford new clothes or much of anything else.  There was a large Goodwill store around the corner from my home.  One day I popped in and came out with a snazzy red Calvin Klein jacket.  It was $5.99, and it stank of mothballs.  Five days hanging on my clothesline, and it was perfect.  A junkie was born.  

I am a low income person with an enormous wardrobe of fantastic clothes.  Not to mention furniture, chachkas, interesting bits and pieces, and gifts for all my friends.  There is almost nothing that Goodwill has not provided.  I drew the line at underwear and shoes, the shoes only because that really was something that my truly low income neighbours needed more than I. Besides, I and my giant feet do very well at Winners.  But otherwise, practically everything I wear, and a great deal that surrounds me in my house including the art on the walls, the dishes on the table and the carpets underfoot, come from the Goodwill store around the corner from my home.

Once I was hooked, I started to go often, then more often, then daily, and occasionally, at a really bad time, more than once a day.  I called it huntin' and fishin'.  Swing in, check out the stuff that has just come out at the back; swing by the books, the coats, the baskets, the material, the purses, the stuff the staff thought was exclusive and should be priced higher.  Trolling. Checking.  Eyeballing.  The key was spending as little time as possible to come up with something great.  I called it my daily orgasm.  Oh my God, what's that gorgeous thing in maroon satin?  It's ... it's a Balenciaga ballgown.  Talk about an orgasm.  Oh my God!

Suits, pants, skirts, coats.  Vintage thingies, crazy things, toys, books.  Lots and lots and lots of books, from antique ones to the latest bestsellers.  It helps that I live in a neighbourhood with its share of wealthy folks, who drop off things like that.  One day I might find an entire rack of designer clothes, obviously brought in by some woman who had tired of or outgrown them. They probably didn't fit me, or had enormous shoulder pads, or were stained.  No matter - the orgasm prevailed.  I'd buy them and find someone who wanted them.

This went on for many years.  Wayson Choy raves about the British Rail pea jacket that got him through the winters, not to mention the Armani raincoat.  My other friends the same, all with stories of things I've found.  Last night I went out with Jane, who was wearing a pair of Ann Demeulemeister pants that fit her perfectly.  All I know about Ann Demeulemeister, and that does not include the spelling of her name, is that she's extremely avantgarde and exclusive, and that these pants are perfectly cut for a size 2 like Jane.  What is this bizarre skill that allows me to see a flash of beige, grab the pants from a giant rack and say, "Hmm, I think these are Jane." I don't know where it comes from - maybe my grandfather Kaplan, who was in the shmatta business - and maybe Sam Leadbeater, one of my English great-grandfathers, who was an early recycler, a "rags, bones and bottles" man. 

All I know is that for years, I have been providing myself and all my friends with clothing and other stuff from that wonderful cornucopia on Gerrard Street. And now it's closing.  My friends who work there, Stefania, Wanda, Linda, Donna, Aggie,  Aya - they're going on unemployment or have taken other jobs.  I went in today to say goodbye, and even though there's almost nothing left, I found a beautiful piece of Liberty fabric I'm using already as a tablecloth, and a Harris tweed jacket.  I've been looking for a Harris tweed jacket that fits for a decade.  A parting gift from this wonderful store.

At the door, I ran into my friend Leslie, who owns Eclectisaurus, a wonderful vintage store nearby.  She introduced me to her friend as "one of the great amateur pickers."  I felt so honoured. 

But now - a new hobby.  I need a new hobby.  

I need a place to wear my Balenciaga ballgown.  

I'm sorry to say that MacZine is behaving strangely again - this time, shutting down at odd times, which nice young Chris from Apple told me over the phone was a "colonel panic" - at least that's what it sounded like - or a "kernel panic"?  Did he say "journal panic"?  That's what I had after the fire in my home, when they packed everything up and took it away to storage, and I realised that a lifetime's worth of intimate writing was locked in a warehouse somewhere. Journal panic.  I don't think that's what my computer has.  Anyway, it's not good and she's off to the hospital again tomorrow, so I'll be back to paper and pen.  

I've just finished reading an extraordinary book and a classic of creative non-fiction, "The Things They Carried," by Tim O'Brien.  A well-educated writer and intellect, Tim served in Vietnam until he was wounded and shipped home.  Just as Anne Frank's diary helped us see, in one small voice, the reality of those six million dead, Tim's book brings the hideous reality of that vile war to life, in his portrayal of a team of very young men, lost in a jungle and trying to stay alive. 

But the author is also writing about the art of storytelling itself.  He speaks about the difference between "happening-truth," the cold facts, and "story-truth," the facts told by a writer to make them come alive.  This very issue was also discussed recently in a New York Times interview with the superb humour writer David Sedaris.  

O'Brien writes, "What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.  I can look at things I never looked at.  I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God.  I can be brave.  I can make myself feel again."  

"The thing about a story," he writes elsewhere, "is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head."

I dreamed along with you, Tim O'Brien.  

The miracle of the transformation

I had the honour a few months ago of being asked if I'd put my garden on the Cabbagetown Tour of Gardens, a fundraiser for the neighbourhood. My immediate response was, "What kind of lunatic do you think I am?" So much work, so much time and money. But when begged, I said yes.  O hubris.  

So my friend Dave Mayers, whose gardening genius has helped shape this long space, and I, set out to spiffy up the yard to Cabbagetown standards. We undertook an ambitious project, to fix up the very end bit, which was a pile of rubble.  But then a good friend of Dave's was hospitalised, and heavy work stopped. A tiny bit of stress resulted for the owner. The first two pictures indicate the state of the end of the garden TWO DAYS before hundreds of people were due to tour it.  This is the advantage of a deadline, which makes you work hard and finish - a message for writers as well as for gardeners.  At the last minute, by dint of ferocious work in what felt like 40 degree heat, Dave and I got the place more or less ready; I was still pruning as visitors were walking up the path. But the response was wonderful.  One woman told me she found this garden 'moving.'  Perhaps she intuited the effort that went into its presentation. 

Gardeners are the best kind of lunatic.  Year ago, I wrote in the Globe and Mail about my dear neighbour Dorothy, who marched into the disastrous pile of weeds and dust back there and got me started.  Dorothy died a few years later.  How I wish she could have seen it yesterday; she would not have believed it.  Step by step, plant by plant, the place bloomed.  She's the one who saw the potential and gave me the first giant push.  Yesterday was dedicated to Dorothy, queen of of the butterfly bush.