DRUNK ON WORDS IN YMIR

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Ah...fall. Every season is my favourite as it arrives (except winter, although I'll give it pretty), but is anything prettier than an autumn drive past huge stands of orange-golden larch? 

 This weekend the destination was Ymir ("Why Myrrh"), where some 15 of us gathered for a writers' retreat. We took over most of the Ymir Palace (the building behind the hotel), and for 48 hours we ate, drank a lot of coffee and a little wine (or was it the other way around?), slept, and played with words. 

Ymir is a town with a population of two or three hundred. At the end of the 19th century it was a booming mining town. Now it's a bedroom community for Nelson, popular in the winter with skiers who come for the powder at Whitewater. These days it's one of the locations for The Tall Man, a suspense thriller starring Jessica Biel. (Note the head of the inflatable deer in the window.)

We had dinner at the Ymir Hotel where, we were told, anywhere from two to eight  musicians get together and play. They were great!

After a good breakfast Saturday morning that included lots of Oso Negro coffee, we got to work. 

Remember those Penny Loves Wade, Wade Loves Penny cookies from my last post? Rita brought some more, this time with all the letters of the alphabet. By mid-afternoon Rita, Cyndi and I figured out we could play make-a-word with them. Unfortunately, by the time we figured this out we'd eaten all the vowels except the E and the U so we had to be creative. But then, that's what the weekend was about.

We explored the best way to take photos that minimize those pesky little chin and neck problems that sometimes occur as we get older. (From now on I'm having any pictures of me taken from a helicopter.)

Many hands make light work, and we had many hands all weekend.

There was ample time to catch up with each other around the big table at mealtimes. 

It was such a great weekend. Being surrounded by writers is sort of like wrapping yourself in a warm blanket on a cold day.

Thanks to everyone for making it fun. Special thanks to Anne DeGrace who organized the accommodations, shopped for food and made two kinds of spaghetti sauce while in the middle of doing an exhausting line up of readings for her novel, Treading Water, which was the book chosen for One Book, One Kootenay this fall.

And thanks to Jennifer Craig, our rep for the Federation of BC Writers, who gave us all hope with her fairy tale story of how Yes Sister, No Sister, her memoir of when she trained as a nurse in Leeds in the 1950s that was first published by Breeden Books in 2002, has just been re-published by Ebury Press to glowing reviews. We in the Koots are very proud of you!

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OF WRITERS AND READINGS AND FOOD AND THE FUTURE

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It's been a busy week for writerly events. Last Thursday night we came with food to the Vallican Whole to welcome former Kootenay resident, Caroline Woodward, who is on a whirlwind tour of BC launching TWO new books.  Penny Loves Wade, Wade Loves Penny, is  an updated version of The Odyssey, with Ulysses reincarnated as Wade, a long-distance trucker, and his wife, Penny, who's keeping the home fires burning on their Peace River ranch. Here's a review from the Vancouver Sun. Singing Away the Dark is a simply beautiful children's story about a little girl who has to walk a fair distance to catch the bus to school and sings to keep from being afraid. My seven-year-old grandson, Kyran,  read it and after he was done he looked up and said, "This is a really good book." No faint praise from that one; if he hadn't liked it he'd have said.

Dan and Rita came up with cookies that fit the occasion

Caroline and Ted catching up before she read. Look at all those books!

Caroline's old friend, Rita Moir, introduced her

 The illustrations in the kids' book are by Julie Morstad. Go check out some of her work, it's just lovely. I'll wait til you get back!

 Caroline signed lots of books

 The next night she read to another appreciative home crowd, this time in Nelson at Oxygen Art Centre.

Here she is in front of a bunch of posters of writers who have come to Nelson to give readings and workshops under the auspices of the Nelson Kootenay School of Writing group (the ad hoc one that brings in writers who are funded through Canada Council as opposed to the Vancouver one, although they are related in that they both rose from the ashes of David Thompson University Centre that was shut down by the Socred government in 1984). Caroline and her husband, Jeff George, were both very involved with KSW when they lived here. The posters went up after her reading in preparation for yet another writerly event the following night. 

Saturday night about two dozen local writers met to discuss the future of Nelson's KSW. A scrumptuous dinner was catered by Jesse Phillips.

 Happy hungry writers

The upshot of the discussions was that KSW is indeed a welcome and integral part of the writing scene in Nelson. With a few new people on board to divvy up the tasks, we can expect to bring in more writers to enchant and inspire us. I won't be as directly involved any more. After 18 years (!) of sitting book tables, transporting writers, billeting, and doing a few posters, I'm taking a break. Maybe.

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AN APPRECIATION OF WATER

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I just found out today is Blog Action Day 2010  for Water.

Here in the Kootenays we are fortunate to be surrounded by water. Creeks, rivers, and mountain lakes so deep there are locomotives at the bottom and who's ever seen them? I live in Castlegar, a small town of 8,000 or so situated at the confluence of the Kootenay River, which is an extension of Kootenay Lake, and the mighty Columbia River whose headwaters are in the Canadian Rockies. A couple of years ago I was in Portland, Oregon, and was thrilled to get to see where the Columbia flows into the Pacific Ocean. We humans are funny creatures. So often we tend to think that whatever land or water mass is at hand belongs exclusively to us. Not so. It has been said the next great wars will be fought over water. I hope not. Because if that's true we're in big trouble around here.

Here, then, is a small sampling of pictures taken around Kootenay Lake and Slocan Lake.

Water

We play in it

And near it

 Sometime we just admire it

We must never forget

we weren't the first people moved 

to leave our marks beside it

The First People were

 Finally, two poems of mine that have to do with water:

 TRICKSTER MAGIC

At night I hear coyote voices.
One starts and the rest join in
a harsh cacophony,

triumphant, dreadful baying.

The cat’s ears twitch and he curls

tighter, imagines he’s a snake,

transformed by trickster magic. 

                                                                      

I want to go outside and stand

beneath the vigilant moon

say it’s time to bring the river back,

to welcome the anadromous salmon

but the coyotes are silent again

and the river doesn't answer.

LANGUAGE OF RAIN

“water is the first world”

                         Susan Andrews Grace

How do I know it’s rain

and not some colony

of suicidal river moths

slamming against the glass

in a kamikaze raid

interrupted by skylight

ra ta tat tat

not plink

not splat

no dreary drums

for here it comes

I know the voice of rain

I speak its language

Less intimate with the ocean

and her many tongues

I wander the beach

watch waves worry the shore

like a rat-mouthed dog, still

hungry for so much more,

for this is how we began,

dragging ourselves from water,

primordial birth,

our first, triumphant breath.

I want to remember this:

white caps streaming

behind the waves they almost were,

each spray more intricate,

more convoluted than the last,

like a suite of veils brought out

for the inspection of a bride whose marriage

no one thinks will last.

Don’t speak—

the wind does the talking here

waits for the waves’ crash,

begins again.

If water is

the first world,

is wind the last?

Is rain?

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