Un-turtling with Louise Penny and others

Hello again. I know. I’ve been awol from this newsletter for a while. A long while. Since last April, in fact. I called my last post “Looking at Clouds.” And I shared with you that I wasn’t sure I would continue writing, that I was putting everything I’d been creating on pause. In short, I turtled, crawled inside my upside-down shell and stayed there. And for the next five months, I didn’t write one word. Well, other than emails and some miscellaneous reports that weren’t worth the paper they weren’t printed on. But as for a writing practice, I put that on hold. I had to. I had nothing.

It was around October that I finally felt an urge to play with some words. I decided it was time to get back at it. So I started slowly, just going through a few older pieces, getting the juices going by changing out some tired verbs for better ones, adding a few sentences, replacing a period with a colon, then changing it back to a period. I was editing more than writing, but at least I was at my desk.

And then I stopped again. The news of the world swirled into a louder tumult and I re-turtled. This is no disrespect to turtles. I admire their pace of life and the shells they carry around with them. Such practicality. I watched the four turtles in the photo above for about half an hour. None of them moved or even twitched while I watched, even the one at the end of the line with its head in the air, all four seemingly content with where they were in life, basking in the autumn sun on the way to nowhere.

Inside my shell, with nothing in my writing well, I read. Like most (all?) writers, I’m a reader first. My pile of books-to-be-read is always towering. But I had to change my choice of material. I had been reading anything I could get my hands on to help me understand my word paralysis. Then, halfway through an excellent book about grief — The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller — I realized I couldn’t go any further with its very helpful content at that moment. For many reasons: the unsettled state of a world in peril, a strange sudden yearning for my younger self, an uncomfortable friction between being very content in my current life combined with an impossible longing to create a different past. I felt great grief but realized that reading about what to do about it wasn’t helping. At all. I will return to Weller’s book someday, but not yet.

Meanwhile, I wanted to get drawn into something that would take me someplace else, something I couldn’t put down, something I could get lost in. So I set myself a reading goal. In the space of four months, I read every one of the Armand Gamache mystery novels Louise Penny has written, in order. There were eighteen and a half of them when I started out. Number 19, The Grey Wolf, is sitting on my bookshelf, as yet unopened. I like knowing it’s there, ready for me when I’m ready for it.

I am so grateful for those books. They completely absorbed me. As escape material, they are so much more: they have fascinating characters, intricate community relations, complex plots, scathing social commentary on the flawed structures of our world, and food! Wonderful Quebec food. Penny’s food details are so rich that I felt nourished every time she fed her characters. I am filled with astonished admiration that she was able to produce a book every year for the last two decades. Long may she reign.

I also returned to reading poetry by some wonderful writers: After That by Lorna Crozier, A Year of Last Things by Michael Ondaatje, Old Gods by Conor Kerr, Exculpatory Lilies by Susan Musgrave, Playlist for the Apocalypse by Rita Dove. All these books came to me at the right time, as books so often do. These writers used their own experiences with sadness and grief to create beautiful thoughtful works of art. They moved me to start reading through my own poetry, a collection I’ve been working on for at least a decade now. And I found that my own words drew me in. I began grooming them. Moving them around. Then I wrote some new ones. And it felt good. Really good. Those poems will never be seen by anyone else’s eyes but mine, at least in their present form. But I felt like a writer again. This photo shows what that feeling was like.

Over Christmas, I learned to play darts with my family. And I felt such simple joy. Now, here we are in January and the news of the world is not any better, to say the least. Yet here I am, writing. I am un-turtled. This post completes my emergence. I am writing again, and back on Substack, which I have never left. All this time, I have been here, not posting, but reading my fellow Substackers every day. Substack is a great place to stay quiet as well as speak up. And Substack writers and readers are a lifeline. The whole time I was turtled, when I was posting nothing, I was astonished to continue receiving messages from Substack that I had new followers. This amazed and encouraged me. Thank you so much for your patience. Thank you so much for reading these words. Stick around. I plan to be back in this space every few weeks. Me Who Writes 2.0 is just beginning. I hope.

My novel, She Who Burns, and my three other books are all available through the usual online sources and my website: myrlcoulter.com