From the Spiral Notebook: In a cafe writing a secret

Hi all,

First a few of announcements:

• The Sidney Writers’ Drop-In is on hiatus for the summer. We’ll be back, and I hope to write with you, in September!

• There are still a few places in my in-person five-day workshop at Naramata Centre in Naramata from July 21 to 25, 2025. Check out their website for more information, and if you scroll down on this page you can see the description by clicking on “Gathering Words of Summer with Kelsey Andrews”.

• I will be featured on a Writers Radio episode with fellow Canadian poet Jacinda (Jake) Oldale. The episode will play every hour at the beginning of the hour on the website from June 30 to July 20, or you can stream or download the podcast. I had a great time reading some poems and talking with Jake and Carole for this. The link is here.

This is an unknown flower from the garden earlier in the year. I always forget this bush/tree is there because it’s almost surrounded by a fatsia, and then it blooms and I’m reminded.

Next, a letter I penned on Saturday:

I’m sitting in a café, one of my favourite places to write. Sadly, because it’s quite busy and there are few tables in this café, I’m sitting at one of the tall chairs facing the window, so my back is to the rest of the place. This is sad because I can’t actually make out any conversations, just a general ebb and flow of human voices, except when couples or groups leave through the door which is near my elbow.

“There’s enough here. There’s enough here,” one woman says with some conviction while holding the door for the others in her group. Enough what?

The young man sitting on the other side of me is doing some kind of schoolwork on his laptop. He’s not enjoying it. Keeps taking his hands off the keyboard to turn and stretch as far as he can to the left or right. When he’s not sure about something he leans in to the screen, one hand under his chin.

I try to guess what he’s studying. Something financial, judging by how bored he is. Or math, to go by his confused peering. Or the truly dreadful trial of both at the same time.

A gothish woman with white hair (dyed, I think, though I can’t see her face so maybe not) walks by the window, arm in arm with a man in wide, chained trousers. It amuses me to call them trousers. It’s the chains that make it funny. Probably trousers with chains attached are more appropriately called jeans. I imagine someone, a British misanthrope, telling him to pull up his trousers as he passes the couple by. The look he would get back! The misanthrope has a little Yorkshire terrier on a faux leather leash, according to my imagination. The terrier sports a short puppy cut, because he struggles with tangles.

An older couple leave the café, putting ball caps on their short-grey-haired heads in concert—one forest green, the other dusky blue.

I have an important secret that I hold close to me as I sit in front of the café window. None of these people know that I’ve finished the first draft of my memoir, that I’ve got almost 65 thousand words tucked away in my computer.

Soon will begin the tinkering stage, when I write each scene on a post-it (blue for the current time-line, perhaps, and purple for the backstory) and place the current timeline post-its in a line, a long spine of what happened. Then I will affix bits of backstory along the spine like nerves, radiating to either side, explaining what happened by telling what happened before.

I’m not sure where I can construct my post-it spine as our house is rather full of Mum’s lifelong collection of art and photos, so we have a marked lack of empty wall space. my dog likes to eat paper and will cause a terrible post-it spinal injury if I try to build it on the floor in the hallway. Could I fit it all on the back of my bedroom door? No, a door is much too small.

But that’s a problem for another time. Now the young financial scholar beside me closes his laptop and grimaces around the last cold swallow of his coffee. Now he slides his laptop into his green backpack and moves to the far end of the café to put his cup in the bin.

Now for at least the next two weeks I’m not going to think about the memoir, except to hold it against my chest as a secret just for me, and now you: I have finished the first draft of my memoir.

FROM THE SPIRAL NOTEBOOK

I was published in the Spadina Literary Review a while ago, and I thought I’d share the link here so you could read two more Dad Poems. (Work on the Dad Poems continues apace.) Click here for two poems.

NOTES

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