Hi Everyone,
How was November for you? I usually find it one of the difficult months of the year. Life feels subdued and contracted. Here in the Okanagan Valley, the clouds have taken on their seasonal battleship grey colour as the days shrink to their stingiest hours. In keeping with the theme of my last issue, I’m opening this one with a view of my office from the outside. It was early morning. Not yet 7 am. As you can see, it’s dark. And yes, I was outside in my pyjamas.
For the last few months, I’ve developed a new routine of going to my writing desk for a couple of hours as soon as I get up instead of waiting until I’m ready to face the page, which is sometimes not that day. Now I roll myself out of bed, drink some water, and sit in my chair. I write about nothing for about twenty minutes, whatever comes into my head. When I first sit down, I’m usually wondering what the heck I’m going to write about, certain that my mind is completely blank, but it’s not. This morning it was “it’s 7 am and I’ve just taken a picture outside my window . . .” And a surprising thing happens. Once I get the pen moving, the words flow. Then I take a short break, make some herbal tea, and turn my warmed-up brain to my new project.
Writing first thing in the morning is a habit I have stopped and started repeatedly in my life. Some of you might recognize it as “the morning pages” from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, published way back in 1992. I still have my original copy. I haven’t touched it in years, but a few months ago, I reached for it. In the opening chapters, Cameron gives her readers two basic “creative recovery” tools: The Morning Pages and The Artist Date, where you take yourself on a date with yourself for a couple of hours. She also provides a contract for the reader to sign and I did just that.
I don’t know why I used red ink, but 1995 was before my teaching years. Red is a hot energetic colour, but it’s not good for signing contracts or marking student essays. Today, I would use green. As you can see, this contract stipulates that I will do my morning pages every day and take myself on an artist date every week. Predictably, I went to art galleries and museums to start with, but soon my weekly artist date was an uninterrupted hour in a quiet coffee shop or the dark of a movie matinee.
As I flipped through the old book, I read the notes I’d scribbled in the margins and the passages with penciled stars beside them or squiggly underlines for the words that really spoke to me. After the introduction, the book is structured in weeks, one through twelve, building the basis for a fully engaged creative life. But about two-thirds of the way through the book, all my handwritten notes and stars and underlines stop. After Week Eight, there’s nothing, not one mark. It’s as if I stopped reading, which means I likely stopped writing as well. I don’t remember why. Maybe it was one of the times in my life when my writing went on the back burner for a while.
There have been a few of those. They often happen in the summer, when the urge to sit at my writing desk wanes. But fall is another story and over the past few months, it has felt very good to settle into a morning writing routine again. By the time I have my breakfast, I’ve already created something. It doesn’t matter if what I’ve created is good. All that matters is that doing it feels good. If I get nothing else done that day, I’ve done that.
Julia Cameron is still writing and publishing. I recently went through her latest book, Write for Life (2023). Thirty years after The Artist’s Way, this is a refreshing revisit complete with morning pages and artists dates. One change I noticed is the original chapter on “reading deprivation,” which advised not reading newspapers for a week, has been revised to “media deprivation.” I think it was easier to do that back in 1992.
These days, when Geo and I meet in the kitchen to put dinner together at the end of the day, it’s already dark again. Like most of us, I am a light-seeking creature so when the dark time of year hits, I become a magnet for light of any kind. A few days ago, I was driving around town on daily errands, when I noticed that I could hardly see out my back window because there was so much road dust on it. I remembered that I had a free car wash voucher in my wallet. And so, on an afternoon growing dimmer by the minute, I took myself on an Artist Date and went to the car wash.
It wasn’t a real artist date, because it took only about ten minutes, but I liked the feeling of being snug in my car as it was engulfed in suds. I listened to the swish of the brushes, the flap-flap of the long heavy washing straps going over the roof, the flow of the rinse water and the blast of drying air. And then there was the light show. Pink and turquoise and yellow.
Then a solid frame of vivid purple. It sounds migraine-inducing, but it wasn’t. It was like ingesting a super-charged light vitamin. Who knew a car wash could be light therapy? It felt so good when I got through it that I wanted to turn around and do it again.
I’m looking forward to the weekend when I’ll be back in Edmonton for a few days. On Sunday afternoon, Dec 3, I’ll be at Audreys Books on Jasper Avenue at 2 PM to talk about my latest book, She Who Burns. If you’re in the area, I’d love to see you there.
Thanks for reading Me Who Writes. If you enjoyed this issue, please share it with a friend or two. And if you want to ensure that you don’t miss an issue, please sign up for a free subscription below.