Is it news that I finished the first draft of a novel, Easthope? It surprised me last weekend to find myself writing the final sentence! As it was very stormy week, with wild wind, power outages, and heavy rain, we were reminded to be grateful for our woodstove. My essay manuscript is currently making the rounds. And so it is. But I continue to try…. I was asked to make a list of my favourite books about plants!
It was difficult to limit my choices to just 5…. Such a lovely review of Sharp Notions! February 22, We did and the whole experience entered me like a gift from the archangels. But that first novel: I remember how deeply I immersed myself in valley history, various strands of it, and I remember asking my late friend Charles Lillard in one of our frequent phone conversations before his death in , How would anyone ever find out when a train would have stopped in Spences Bridge in enroute to Vancouver, and his response was to fax me remember fax machines?
This was before we had access to the internet at our house… a page from an old train schedule. So this morning, thanks to Google alerts, I found myself reading this extraordinary reassessment of Sisters of Grass and remembering how it felt to try to put into language the sensation of standing on the top of the Pennask Lake Road and having a small tribe of horses approach me, their heads low and friendly, and how it felt to wake in the tent in the campground on Nicola Lake with my children and husband sleeping around me, and how I knew that I needed to make something of this.
I needed to make a novel and I did and someone has read it with such care and attention. She sent a photograph of litter—she picks up litter on her walks, an admirable pursuit, and asks Canadian writers to riff on the photographs, another admirable pursuit—and I thought about it and of course I decided it was detritus left after a creek was daylighted….
Richard Pickard continues to read widely and luckily for me, he read my poetry collection, Black Cup. I have some copies of Black Cup stored away in a box in the printshop. Free postage for a single copy. I was surprised and really delighted to find this new reading of an old book, one I thought was forgotten entirely, online. Mnemonic: A Book of Trees was published in Richard Pickard is the most generous reader! More on this as details are firmed up.
