In the morning, I arose late after another night of not much
sleep. The dreams of vampires and serial killers, that have plagued me in the
past, have returned in force, and a couple of hours sleep, or so, seem to be
all I’m afforded. Those who don’t know me well might think I probably have
those kinds of dreams all the time, given the dark nature of some of my
writing. But, fact is, those nightmares usually leave me alone for many years
at time, and they only come around when
I am at a dark place in my life and, true to the nature of any monster, only
when I am most vulnerable.
It’s been a difficult year – no point in honeycoating it.
It’s been a year that saw me leave my home province following the end of the
longest, most stable relationship of my life. That ending came after a couple
of very difficult years for both my wife and I, and leaving was an act of mercy
for us both, that created the possibility, ultimately, for some light to seep
in. But that would be getting ahead of the tale.
I’ll write about that journey some day, I’m sure – it wasn’t
for the faint of heart, especially for a lad who’d never driven very much and
had never before braved the aptly name Wreckhouse winds in the middle of a March
blizzard with the winds steady at 160 km/hr on the thinnest stretch of highway
imaginable.
Somehow, without any compass but blind luck and will, I
ended up in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, where I rented a cottage for a few months
and watched spring turn to summer in one of the most beautiful, healing places
on earth. In its own way, Mahone Bay was Rivendell to me, and it will always
have a fond place in my heart. I hated to leave it, but when I felt I was
ready, I reached out to the university community for some means of making a
living and continuing the teaching work I’d been doing for most of my life. I
was fortunate that my seniority at MUN allowed me to teach distance courses via
the Internet, something I hadn’t even considered until it became a reality.
Then, UNB in Saint John offered me a course to teach on campus, and I couldn’t
pass up the opportunity to meet with students face to face on a weekly basis.
So, I moved to Saint John, but found an even better spot at a cottage for rent
in a remote lake area of New Brunswick – so remote that even most New
Brunswickers squint and say, “Where’s that, exactly?” – and this is where I
continue to heal my soul and to seek out new stability and adventures, all at
once.
It’s been a strange year. Back in January and early
February, for three weeks, I was lucky enough to do a book tour of the
Maritimes – Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and PEI – including readings, signings,
the Fog Lit literary competition as guest reader, media appearances on CBC in
Charlottetown and Saint John, and a school visit at Harbourview High School
where I spoke with two creative writing classes. There was also an appearance
on GlobaI TV, after my nomination for the 2014 Dublin IMPAC award, which,
really, is what made the entire tour possible (well, that and the generous
folks at Fog Lit). I also conducted creative workshops in nearly every city I
visited, including Moncton, Saint John, Charlottetown and Halifax. Only Fredericton was cancelled because of an
adjunct faculty strike at UNB, as I had no intention of crossing the picket
line, especially of people whom I know work very hard for damn little pay and
virtually no benefits, and are among the most dedicated teachers I know. Yes,
that’s my little rant about the Dickensian attitude of universities towards
their contractual faculty – not so much those who do the hiring (many of whom
are allies), but those who do the paying. More on that some other time, too.
The UNB strike also caused the Saint John reading, sponsored
by the Lorenzo Society Reading Series, to be moved to a café downtown, and the
place was packed with an eager audience that asked brilliant questions. There
were big crowds in other places and smaller groups in other places, but it was
the experience of a lifetime to have been able to do it all – despite (or
because of) the blizzards, the long bus rides, the many nights in hotels and
eating road food night after night.
The spring was a blur. I spent it in Lunenburg County, a
stranger in a strange land, hidden (or so I thought) among the local folks,
eating good local food and spending many a moment at the picnic table outside
my cottage gazing up at the moon, or a blazing sunrise, a mauve sunset, or a
glorious double rainbow that lit the entire bay after a spectacular lightning
storm. In the mornings, most often, I would arise and go to Lunenburg where
Kate’s Sweet Indulgence café was quiet and welcoming, and there I would sit
with my iPad and keyboard and write.
It was mostly poetry. Not fiction. God knows, I wasn’t
feeling creative. It was, as I’m sure you can imagine, a very dark time. My
head was in a black fog, as it had been for a couple of years. The last thing
to enter it was a creative thought.
But the poetry saved me. It gave me something I could do –
something tangible and focused, though focused outward, or so I had thought.
But I’ve looked back on it since and see much of myself in it – my own attempts
to figure out the world when, really, I was trying to figure out myself and
what had led me down this rough path, as alone in the world as anyone has ever
been – or at least that’s how it felt, most of the time. I’m sure, in reality,
many, many people are more alone than that. But, when you’re talking degrees of
aloneness, or of isolation, or detachment, I’m not sure the comparisons really
matter. I’m not saying I was lonely. In fact, human companionship wasn’t
exactly on my to-do list. But alone is alone, and there’s no getting around it.
And, again, it was words that kept me afloat – when all
other lights failed, so to speak, it was the one that shone feebly through the
murk.
But this is all too serious. And yet, I felt it would be
disingenuous to return to the blog lagoon without some brief explanation about
where I’ve been and why I’d abandoned it. I’ve tried since the very beginning
of keeping this blog to be authentic, to try and speak my truth in whatever
form it took. But I found that my heart wasn’t in it this year. I had the
excitement of the tour, but never wrote about it –and what a strange time it
was. The exploration of Mahone Bay, Lunenburg and other parts of Nova Scotia
was recorded mostly in poetry, meandering thoughts and the occasional FB page,
with only a smattering of selfies recorded either for posterity or, for the
most, as part of a promise I made to some dear friends who extracted a pledge
from me when I was leaving St. John’s to offer the occasional proof of life. I
think, to a great extent, if Helen and Helene hadn’t asked for that occasional
sign, I might well have fallen into a black hole without any communication
through social media at all. It would have been easy to do.
But that’s all behind me, now. The summer was hazy –
punctuated by ellipses and commas, with the occasional question or exclamation
mark – as I took a road trip through the northern states, and somehow found
myself sojourning (or soul journeying, as it were) to the houses associated
with Stephen King, Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Louisa May Alcott,
and having tea at dusk on Walden Pond where Thoreau one wrote one of my
favourite books on (human) nature. I got lost, and was found. I had great
conversations with strangers, and strange conversations with people I would
rather not know. I met tourists, writers, students and waiters - and a lot more
hotel staff than I thought I would ever have the pleasure of knowing. In a way,
they became my family on the road. The faces would change, night after night,
but it wasn’t hard to find a friendly smile or a kind word from kindred souls
who sometimes were kicking at the dark from their own side of things.
Upon returning from the U.S. in late summer, the fall
semester was hard – teaching all new courses, with all new material, one course
without a textbook at all – and then there was the glorious Piper’s Frith,
about which I’ll have to write another time soon. It was a truly life-changing
experience, and I made some great friends after a week of literary splendour in
the wilds of Newfoundland. My workload only got more impossible after that, but
I got through it – as did my students – and now it’s nearly 2015. It’s amazing
how, in life, you can find yourself getting through some things you never
thought you could get through. Now, somehow, a new year has come and caught me mostly
unawares and unprepared.
And today, at my cottage, by my newly frozen lake, by the
light of my first solo Christmas tree, I spent six hours, at last, writing.
It’s been a long time coming, but, finally, I’m moving forward again. It wasn’t
fresh writing, mind you. I’ve been painstakingly revising my current novel,
which has been in limbo for far too long. Once again, writing is proving to be
my salvation as I kick at the darkness that, as it turns out, has a nasty bite
of its own.
I’ve gone for walks before supper, as the sun goes down
(unless it’s raining or snowing), nearly every night for the past two weeks,
including Christmas Day, and these walks inspire me. I talk to the creatures that
watch me from the woods. I stop and listen. Sometimes, all I hear is the wind.
Other times, a snort or the soft pad of footsteps – or maybe it’s just in my
mind. But, surely, these woods are full of creatures. And it’s all fodder for
my imagination. Today, quite unexpectedly, I saw two long, black cars as wide
as those gas-guzzling tanks our parents drove in the early Seventies parked
alongside a ramshackle cabin that I’d thought was abandoned. But there were no
lights on inside, and the cars were pulled right in tight to the house as if
their owners didn’t want them to be spotted from the road. There are rarely
cars on that road at all. When I go for my walks, I am the only one walking and
only once in a while do I see another living soul.
This is an isolated place, which is how I like it. It feeds
my imagination, for now, and I wonder what those strangers, whom I haven’t yet seen, are
up to. I’m a writer, so, of course, my instinct for a story tells me they’re up
to no good.
I’ve started writing again. I’m not sure if that helps
banish the demons or invites more demons in. Either way, I’ll take it and use
it, and answer the calling I feel to destroy, explore and explain to myself, to
put it all into words, to see what comes out and decide, after the fact,
whether it looks, tastes, feels and smells like something worth saying aloud to
anyone else.
As a result of the walking, the writing, the explaining and
even the wild creatures that surround me in the darkest dark of the darkest nights
– even now, I hear strange sounds out by the lake, but it’s too dark to see,
and so my mind conjures images of various animals, which, I assure you, is the
safest kind of beast to have around – I feel something like optimism creeping
into my soul. It never really left, I suppose. It was merely becoming what it
would become, waiting for the right time to emerge again and make itself known.
Much like myself, I suppose, in my latest incarnation.
Welcome back, for another few kicks at the darkness. If anyone
still cares enough to read my thoughts, I’ll not stay away for so long next
time. But, then, I’ll probably keep writing it anyway because that’s what I do.
It’s not like have any real control over it.
