Authors galore

You drive into the country on the first Sunday after Labour Day, an hour from Toronto or 10 minutes from Guelph. If you don't drive, there's a shuttle service from the River Run Centre. You follow a sideroad threading across rolling hillsides, then turn into a grassy parking lot of a country church. From there you walk down a quiet lane past bright fields and stone ruins of an ancient barn. The air is full of insect sounds. Soon you pass a few rambling cottages, the road descends steeply and you enter a picturesque hamlet. An old mill stands alongside the Eramosa River. Normally quiet and drowsy, today the winding streets are crowded with people. In several places—beside the mill, in a private garden beside the river, and in the wide, green commons—they sit in lawn chairs or on blankets, or recline on the grass, listening to people read from podiums. You might recognize some speakers as Canada's most acclaimed literary figures. Along the main street vendors are selling books. You have arrived at Eden Mills Writers Festival.

In early September usually tired, distracted and broke, I've missed the past three years. But yesterday Danny and I partook, and if there's any event I look forward to, it's doing this again in 2007.

Most familiar was Margaret Atwood. We heard her read from her newest book of short stories, Moral Disorder—a tale about a woman, a farm, and an obstinate old horse—and it was surprisingly funny.

But the best aspect is learning about and hearing unfamiliar works and writers. Graeme Gibson's The Bedside Book of Birds has been added to my to-read list. My favourite offering was Jane Urquhart's, from a tale about a young girl obsessed with Wuthering Heights (I didn't catch the novel's title, but it is most likely Changing Heaven). Most intriguing to me was rising star Sandra Sabatini; we used to be friends in my old church, and I once babysat her daughter. Her reading, replete with Biblical references, was witty and surprising, but discomforted me with memories and associations.

The Fringe provided an impressive diversion: these are writers not yet widely published, chosen by a jury to read in a venue of their own. In past these were mostly younger writers, but the four we heard yesterday ranged from undergrad to grey hair. The two for whom I'll keep my eyes open are Pat Bourke and Kathleen Corrigan.

It would be best to take lawn chairs; seating is not provided. I noticed many people just lying back, closing their eyes and listening, so eventually I followed their example. With lush grass on a pleasant afternoon and outstanding literature to appreciate, nothing could be more idyllic.

One highlight was being recognized by someone who reads Eramosa River Journal. Sue Richards has posted several of my photos in her blog, Blog Guelph. I learned she also publishes Breast of Canada, which I've previously admired, an art calendar supporting women's health. She introduced me to the graphic designer, Gareth Lind, a handsome man who has often caught my eye about town but I had never met. He writes a satirical comic strip, Weltschmerz, and was selling copies of his book, Attack of the Same Sex Sleeper Cells. I've syndicated Sue's and Gareth's blogs on LJ as blogguelph and lindtoons.

Although my new schedule has some activities slotted on Saturdays and Sunday, I don't expect to follow those especially well. I do hope to work daily on the novel, as much as possible, but not necessarily. Weekends are weekends. Back home alone today, tired from staying up later than usual last night, I'm grateful for the routine to steer me back on course.

Margaret Atwood, and listening to a reading on the common:

In isolation

I'm supposed to be doing something else, but....

I'm trying to go headfirst into feelings, not push them away. Having dismantled the structure of habit, particularly those meaningless entertainments that typically fill my quiet weeknights at home, I encounter boredom.

And under the scratched surface of boredom, barely but carefully covered, something swells suddenly like an aneurysm to bursting. A feeling that used to dominate life terribly and unbearably. More recently I have come to terms with solitude, embraced it, recognized it's essential to my life and work. And I am well.

But tonight, having planned specific work (to start mailing poetry to journals), having nothing else to do because this schedule tears away false walls of avoidance, I find this thing lurking in the background.

Loneliness.

I used to fear it more than anything else. Now it's just a pang on a Monday evening. Sometimes I would rather see a familiar smile, hear a voice or movement in the next room.

The plant is Monotropa uniflora, Indian-pipe. It grows at the edge of my cottage garden, under some mountain maples. It's a wildflower adapted to deep woods. It has dispensed with chorophyll and cannot produce its own food. The old field guides call it saprophagic, meaning it lives on dead matter. Newer botanical understanding of plant communities would probably suggest a more complex reality, that the plant's roots are engaged symbiotically with certain fungi, connected in turn with tree roots. Forest ecosystems are intricately complex. The more we know about living organisms, the harder it become to separate discrete species. One isolated from those it depends on makes no sense.