A trip to the Philippines is harder to coordinate than one to Greece, but we eventually got our schedules sorted out, and on Christmas Day I booked myself a ticket for a 20+ hour journey from Montreal to Vancouver and then Vancouver to Manila. I was excited, but this excitement promptly got swallowed up by day to day life. I worked a lot. I tried to write. We had houseguests and did typical Montreal things involving poutine and skating.

And now the trip is around the corner: I leave on Saturday. I arrive in Manila on Monday morning, where I’ll meet my mother, who has been there for a week and a half already. The weather will be very different from the snow and cold here in Canada, and I’m looking forward to this unexpected winter break. But other than the temperature shift, I have no idea what to expect. Either way, I’ll be arming myself with a camera, a notebook and my laptop. The trip is relatively short for such a long distance (two weeks), but I have a feeling it will be the kind that inspires many words, photos, feelings.

I’ll keep you posted. See you in a few weeks.

Too many consecutive late nights at the office over the past two weeks has made me preoccupied with time. Namely, not having time to write. How did people do it, I wondered: work and write? It was too hard to do it all! It wasn’t just hard; it was impossible.

(I know, cue tiny violins.)

A good night’s rest and a Saturday afternoon doing lovely weekend-y things has given me perspective. I’ve always done the working and writing thing; it’s something I can do. It’s just a matter of getting back into the habit again. Which means: back to Sundays at the kitchen table, back to printing pages out and reading them over at the foodcourt at lunch, back to typing on my laptop in bed on weekday nights, even just a little bit. Back to remembering that writing isn’t such a precious, precarious activity. Write like a motherfucker.

And I’ve found time to enjoy other things these days. Loudon Wainwright III’s Album I, the first season of Downton Abbey, Shame, Patrick DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers. Today I saw photos from Taryn Simon’s series, An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar. It’s so great: “an inventory of what lies hidden and out-of-view within the borders of the United States” and includes portraits of inbred tigers, a braile version of Playboy, sunken nuclear waste and more. (If you don’t trust my opinion, maybe Salman Rushdie will convince you?) If you live in Montreal, you can see these photos for free at the DHC.

So there is time. It’s just a matter of organizing it.

Two unrelated things:

1) Just wanted to point you in the direction of Carin Makuz’s blog, Matilda Magtree, where she was kind enough to interview me. Carin and I go back to the Humber days. Her site is worth keeping in your bookmarks – thoughtful and beautifully written with great photos as well. And she picks a perfectly appropriate meal to accompany my book.

2) When I was in Toronto over the holidays, I picked up a bunch of my old zines. I’m going to scan some of the less embarrassing pages for an experiment I’d like to do this year to teach myself the basics of e-publishing. In the spirit of the recently released Magnetic Fields song, here’s a sample of a page from melt the snow #5, created at the height of my Magnetic Fields fandom (click to get a larger image so that you can actually read the teeny tiny type).

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The first book I read in 2012 was I Married You For Happiness by Lily Tuck, over the course of New Year’s Day, and it was beautiful and sad. On New Year’s Eve we watched Hannah and her Sisters and also fireworks, which were across the city but the biggest, flashiest explosions could be seen from our balcony.

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A set of 6 plates bought for $18 from an antique store in Burlington, Vermont, just the right size, with perfect scalloped edges and a pretty green design.

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Went to the Musee d’Art Contemporain de Montreal to see the Quebec Triennial and was reminded of how modern art can make me cranky, bored, snarky and ecstatic within a short period of time. It’s exhausting. My favourite exhibit was called LOVELAND by Charles Stankievech, a video of a giant purple cloud of smoke in a big white room.

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As of this afternoon: 3,519 draftiest of first drafty words of a new novel.

Thank you for sticking around and see you in 2012.

xo Teri

2011 is coming to a close, and I’m in year-in-review mode. 2011 was a quiet year, a foundational one, I think, but I’m ready to launch into 2012 and leave this one behind.

My only writing-related goal was to work on my novel, and I did a lot of that. But how exactly do you measure whether or not it’s been a good or bad year for your own writing? I didn’t publish anything new (just a reprint of an older story). I wrote a lot, although it was front-loaded; I’ve barely written anything in the past two months. But, I did work hard in the first half of 2011 – Sunday afternoons at the kitchen table, typing and rereading and marking up drafts. It was satisfying and I’ve been missing that feeling and am looking forward to establishing a routine like that in the new year. And I had so many other great writing-related experiences: the QWF Mentorship, some fun readings, an evening at the Danuta Gleed awards. I’m happy to be represented by the HSW Literary Agency, which is something I didn’t think was possible a year ago. 2011, you weren’t so bad!

My favourite things I read were Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It by Geoff Dyer (or any of his books, really), The Keep by Jennifer Egan, 8 by Amy Fusselman (why didn’t I write about this book here? It was amazing), The Chairs Are Where the People Go by Sheila Heti and Misha Glouberman, all those issues of The New Yorker that I read in the food court at lunch time, The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides, It Chooses You by Miranda July, The Wife by Meg Wolitzer. And all of that Laurie Colwin. Sigh.

I was also inspired by so many of my friends this year. Lesley published her first book of poetry and started making serious headway on a non-fiction book. Samantha let me read the first draft of her novel, and I’m excited for the rest of the world to read her words. Soraya, late in the year, decided to get started on a memoir and has blown me away with how dedicated and productive she’s been, even if she doesn’t realize it herself. Leesa started getting published all over the place and knows exactly when to send me stories of hers that break my heart in the best way. Liz and Laura wrote a book about the Beatles and then published some of the essays as zines that are just… mind-blowing. I read one of Darcie’s new stories and it made me cry. Lindsey finished her MFA thesis! Kat always had wise words about the writing process, and Esme wasn’t afraid to let us into the hard parts. I am grateful for these ladies, to witness people I know slogging it out with words and not giving up and supporting each other.

And then there was some baking. Crack Pie and a Red Velvet cake. These were then brought to a Christmas party in the evening and devoured by 10 of us. Everyone contributed something to the meal, so there was rack of lamb and two kinds of potatoes and roasted beets and smoked salmon and cheese and wine. Some fruit too, for good measure.

There was a good brunch that involved breakfast sandwiches with two types of sausages and perfectly fried eggs and hash browns made with fingerling potatoes. And coffee:

It was somebody’s birthday. (Hint: not mine.)

There was a little bit of decorating for Christmas, the kind where you don’t really have room for a tree, and you won’t be there on Christmas Day anyway, but at least you can stick some branches with red berries in a vase to make your home feel more festive:

And then, after all of that, there was a Christmas concert, but not just any Christmas concert, one put on by the Wainwright-McGarrigles where they sang Christmas songs and quasi-Christmas songs and ended the night with a group sing along to Silent Night.

December! You are always a good month.

Work is busy these days, and so this week has felt long, and I’ve been despairing a little bit about my lack of time to work on Projects, although the truth is that I am currently between Projects, in that space where I’m waiting for comments on the one that’s completed and in the thinking stages of the next one, although the thinking I’m doing is more akin to daydreaming about how perfect it will be when it’s finished, and not at all about what I should do to get the damn thing actually started.

There aren’t any leaves left on the trees. It snowed for the first time in Montreal on Thursday night, but very briefly. We went to Vermont on the weekend and there’s this route home we take sometimes that goes through the Champlain Islands. You’re driving on one long skinny road (causeway?) surrounded by water on both sides. It was windy, and despite the cold and rumours of snow, there were windsurfers out in the distance who seemed to be sailing as fast as the car. I like this drive. It makes me feel hopeful.

Something else that made me feel hopeful this week was seeing Miranda July on Monday, who was in town to read from her newest book. Sarah took the picture above (and also provided me a ticket!). It was a great reading. It Chooses You is a collection of interviews Miranda conducted with strangers met from Penny Savers classified ads, but it’s also a book about creating, the Internet, feeling stuck and trying to be open to the universe and feeling silly about it, but then still stumbling upon moments that just make fantastically cosmic sense. It’s a lovely book.

Universe, I’m open to you, or whatever.

I remember when The Year of Magical Thinking came out because I was still working for an accounting firm. I was at a client in Bridgewater, New Jersey. Business travel had seemed exotic and interesting at first, but by this point I was tired of it and tired of always getting delayed at Newark because there was always some kind of weather system passing through. There’s a lot of weather in New Jersey. One night, sick of my hotel room and the conference room I worked in, I took the rental car and drove, not quite sure where I was going, half-scared of New Jersey highways, but in desperate need of a change in scenery. Eventually I came across the mall, and in the mall there was a Barnes & Noble, and when you can’t leave a place, at least there are books. I saw the new Joan Didion on a shelf and it was such a relief. I bought it, drove to the next closest place, which I hoped would be a diner, but was McDonalds instead, ordered dinner and sat in a booth, started to read and found myself crying big tears into my fries.

Reading Joan Didion in a too bright fast food chain in the suburban depths of New Jersey is one of my favourite reading memories of my life to date. Make of that what you will.

Of course I love Joan Didion. You would be hard-pressed to find a woman with a blog, Twitter and Instagram accounts and a novel draft on their laptop who hasn’t written their own version of “Goodbye to All That” in their diaries, on their blogs or in their zines at some point. So of course I was excited about Blue Nights, bought it the day it came out, devoured it. No New Jersey, no McDonalds. Just at home.

Blue Nights is slim and spare, and so much has been written about it. Barely a week after its official release date, every angle has been covered and analyzed somewhere – her thoughts on aging and parenthood and privilege – you don’t even have to read the book to know the major images, moments, ideas. So I don’t have much to add. I was frustrated by the book at first, by how skeletal and elliptical it was. I wanted something more robust, I guess, and then found myself feeling guilty for wanting that. More. By the end of the book I felt like Didion had given more than enough. And that last page is as good and powerful as anything I’ve ever read by her. I still wish that the book had more to it (although, what exactly?), but I don’t fault her for writing it the way she did.

The book is sad, and scary in its sadness. When she writes, ““You have your wonderful memories,” people said later, as if memories were solace. Memories are not. Memories are by definition of times past, things gone. Memories are the Westlake uniforms in the closet, the faded and cracked photographs, the invitations to the weddings of the people who are no longer married, the mass cards from the funerals of the people whose faces you no longer remember. Memories are what you no longer want to remember”, this is terrifying. It’s what grief looks like.

I’ve developed a bit of an obsession. It started Thanksgiving Weekend in Burlington, Vermont. Andrew and I had stopped at a barn stuffed with old furniture, mismatched china, broken instruments and fading paintings. It was the kind of place teeming with treasures (see the picture?), and I wanted a souvenir. There was a mildewy shelf of books and I noticed a copy of Another Marvelous Thing by Laurie Colwin. I’d read her non-fiction essays about food in Home Cooking and More Home Cooking, and had enjoyed them and her down to earth, comfy writing style, and figured I would probably like her fiction too. So I bought the book for two dollars. At another bookstore later on in the day, I found A Big Storm Knocked It Over for a few bucks. That evening, back in Montreal, I started reading and one story into Another Marvelous Thing I knew I’d hit the jackpot. The next day, on a walk around the neighbourhood, I popped into S.W Welch and found Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object. It’s Colwin’s first novel, about a woman who’s husband dies in a sailing accident. As someone who’s first novel is also about a man who dies in a sailing accident, the book felt like a sign. I added it to my collection.

And so I made my way through these books entirely too quickly. I thought it would be fun to find the rest of her bibliography in second hand bookstores on whimsical little weekend adventures, but I got impatient. I ordered more online and got them delivered to my doorstep instead. It’s hard not to read these books without mourning the fact that Laurie Colwin died unexpectedly when she was only 48. I’m trying to pace myself with the ones I have left, but it’s hard.

Colwin’s books are all about love and relationships. They’re set in New York City, although there are forays into the country – Maine, Connecticut, Vermont, upstate New York. There’s nothing particularly groundbreaking in these stories: heteronormative tales, often (but not always) about privileged families (think: generations of lawyers, spacious apartments in Manhattan for the week and country homes for the weekend). The biggest appeal of Colwin’s books is how warm these stories are, how much affection you have for the characters and their flaws, how much you root for them. Characters have marriages and affairs and babies and existential crises that they often try to keep hidden from the people closest to them. They cook meals for each other. They end up, basically, happy. Her writing is crisp and plainspoken, but, as I noticed in Home Cooking, cozy. (In A Big Storm I dogearred a page with the sentence, “Brilliant red maple leaves as large as demitasse saucers floated down onto the road.”) She also has a knack for throwing in sentences and paragraphs that make you think, Yes!!. (One passage I dog-earred in Happy All The Time was “How wonderful everything tasted, Misty thought. Everything had a sheen on it. Was that what love did, or was it merely the wine? She decided that it was love. It was just as she suspected: love turned you into perfect mush.”)

My favourite book so far has been A Big Storm, but one of my favourite scenes is from her first novel. Towards the end of Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object, the main character has realized that she’s deeply in love with the man that she will likely spend the rest of her life with, but despite that love, is on the verge of an affair with a man she’s just met. As a reader, you don’t doubt that she’s found her true love, but you also understand her feelings for the other man. Life, Laurie Colwin’s books say over and over again, is complicated like that. She’s just spent a few pages fretting about this dilemma, and then distracts herself by spending time with some new friends. The three of them sit by a pond, a little drunk, a little stoned, and start singing “That’s How Strong My Love Is” by Otis Redding. It’s hokey, but it’s also magical, the kind of moment that puts everything into perspective. Because, as Laurie Colwin’s books say over and over again, life is also simple like that.