From a Spiral Notebook: Going Through Old Notebooks

Hi all,

First, as usual, some announcements:

• I’m hoping to see some of you at the drop-in writers’ group at Sidney Library on October 28 (note this is the fourth Saturday instead of the usual third). This is from 1 to 3 pm, and we meet afterwards at Small Gods Brewery for a drink to celebrate. You’re welcome to both or either. Monika and I enjoy these a lot. More info here.

• Also, near the end of November I will be offering an in-person poetry workshop, and another one early December. These will be on Saturday afternoons at the Cook Street Activity Centre in Victoria (though I shouldn’t say so, because we haven’t quite booked the room yet). More information to come in future newsletters.

Those of you who read this regularly probably know that I write all my first drafts in a spiral notebook with a fancy fountain pen—cheap notebook so I don’t feel I’m ruining a fancy one, expensive pen because it swishes so nicely on the page. You may wonder what I do with those notebooks afterwards. Well, I put them in a pile on my writing desk. Then I forget about them. Until the pile starts trying to fall over onto my laptop, at which point I go through the notebooks, earliest one first, and type out anything that seems to be interesting for further editing etc.

There are nine old notebooks in my pile at the moment, so it’s time to go through them. This is sometimes a tiring part of my writing practice, because I make it a point of honour to read every page, and I can be a moaning mess sometimes who writes a lot of boring complaining stuff. But there are always a few interesting bits to make it worth my while.

In honour of Going Through Old Notebooks Time (and it seems particularly appropriate to be doing this in the fall), I’m going to share two pieces from the spiral notebook today.

FROM THE SPIRAL NOTEBOOK

First a bit of memoir. These little pieces from the notebook get saved on my computer in the folder called “Memoirish Bits”. One day perhaps they will aggregate into something.

Snakes

It was at a family reunion down in the States. There were two little cages, made of fine mesh on all four sides. Inside, two little snakes in each. You could hear the snakes moving around, a dry rustling sound. They hissed and rattled their tails when you got close.

Dad said not to get too close because they could spit poison, could hit an eye.

If I were a snake stuck in a mesh-walled cage and tourists kept sticking their faces up to me and tapping, I would spit for sure. I’d spend all night in my little cage making poison to spit the next day. I’d get really good at aiming, hitting one big round-pupiled eye at a time, until there was no one left.

They slept on the roads down there, the snakes. At night, because the roads were black and soaked up the heat of the day. We were driving and Dad saw the snakes in the headlights, cold white light, no help at all to snakes trying to stay warm. He couldn’t run them over, of course, so he stopped and told Mom to go out and chase them off the road.

I couldn’t see the snakes from the back seat, but I could see Mom in the headlights, speckled by moths flying in the beams, her mouth moving as she told the snakes to go away, waving a stick.

I knew these were rattlesnakes and I worried she would be bitten and die. She wore sandals all the time, though I couldn’t see her feet now. She had stupid pants called pedal pushers that showed her ankles. I thought, I will be really mad at Dad if she gets bitten because he told her to go and move snakes off the road.

Finally, they moved a little, and she got back in the truck, and Dad drove around them in the dark.

Moon courtesy of Eleanor Andrews, mom and photographer extraordinaire

This next piece was written in a workshop, one of Deepam’s. The picture it was inspired by is sadly lost to the ages. I think it involved a big white circle or light (possibly a moon) and a boat.

Shooting the Moon

It was morning, and the hunting was over. They’d shot down the moon, finally, after so many months of trying. Here it was, wounded, tied down in its waxing gibbous more-than-half shape in the boat, bleeding luminescence.

They’d shot it because it was there. Up there. And they could see it. Some people can’t look at a beautiful thing without wanting to shoot it, mount it, own it for evermore.

The moon was too big to mount; it would pull the wall down. And it wasn’t dead yet.

But how to finish the job? A miracle is hard to kill, and harder still to preserve once dead.

It is not like a trout, but closest, perhaps, to a fish in the encyclopedia of things people have killed and mounted. The moon, too, swims in some other element. When stuffed the moon, too, must be coated with something to make it look wet.

How to kill a miracle? They tried, all the people of the hunting party, they tried standing in a circle and disbelieving. They took turns pointing out imperfections, finding faults. When that didn’t work they paid several scientists to explain to it that it was just a big rock in the sky, didn’t even have its own light. The miracle survived.

They took out an ad in the paper, saying they’d shot down the moon and it was nothing special. This added to the furor in the press (many had noticed the absence of the moon and the rumours had already been flying), but the moon lived on.

They invited a local school group and told them the story of the hunt. This made many of the children cry, but the miracle still lived.

They invited officials of several religions to help kill it, but even after being told in no uncertain terms by a deacon and an imam and two rabbis (and it was very hard to find religious officials willing to do this) that it was nothing but a physical phenomenon, the miracle refused to die.

Shooting it again and maiming and even skinning it didn’t work. It just sat there, magic as it has always been, bleeding luminescence.

Finally they put it back in the sky, as they couldn’t kill it or mount it or fit it anywhere, and their boat was starting to sink with the weight of it. No one believes, now, that they shot the moon.

NOTES

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Yours,
Kelsey