Combing the smooth, snow white tail of a tall albino pony A figure of chastity I look into its eyes and struggle with my addictions. It feels good when it’s tracking my veins And running right through me So fast it takes over my mind. I depend on it to soothe me, Like soup for my sore, tightened heart, Like a wool sweater and socks For my cold self-belief Seeking snug plenty, curling up between my joints When it smells like burning leaves And seasoned monster flesh When chills run up and down my arms. Like invisible ants And I feel homeless Like the wind Bawling Plucking the leaves for tissues Only, they turn away gladly from their lofty homes in the hills To offer comfort, falling gingerly to the wind’s feet Ready at its beck and call. For me there is no one But the promise of whomever I choose. The promise of everyone And a guarantee of distraction. You sketch for me a forest of evergreens An emblem to trust that I can remake myself. I can last forever. And there’s a sudden burst of sun in the background. The landscape comes off the page and into life. We’re in it. It momentarily lightens the shadows of our actuality When it fills the rolling, unreasonable uprising Between the earthy tones of my shelter Aglow with pools of candle light And the fluorescent rifts you create that I can’t stop hallucinating about. You feed me white sticks, Fill my lungs with smoke —the only way I let you in— And the taste of bones. You’re my dream mood, The flavor of rebellion, And the first person to make me want to Snap my pen in half making ink splatter every which way, Prick myself with your thorns, Dig my nails into my upholstered skin and scrape off the prettiness, Climb down from my Ivory Tower, Jump off my High Horse. Away from everything . . . Including you. Say whatever you want, Say it all. It doesn’t have to be coherent. It never is when you open your mouth. You’re all over the place Thinking you’re servile enough for me to return. I said I was struggling with my addictions, Not that I was giving into them.
June 2013
Single Word Inspiration
The writing exercise I would recommend to anyone is to set a timer for 5 or 10 minutes. Choose a random word from a handy book, start the timer and write, inspired by this word, without stopping or crossing out until the timer goes off. Read it out loud. This is a good way to tap into what’s going on in your unconscious and to also have the freedom to write without the pressure of being good or perfect. It’s an exercise from Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones.
You Look Great Too
MAGGIE’s living room. SHE and SALLY are surrounded by paperwork from MAGGIE’s back taxes. THEY take a break; having a few glasses of wine while playing a favourite game of “My House.”
MAGGIE
My house . . . My house is one of those big old places on Palmerston. No . . . Brunswick! The kind that’s been divided into twelve tiny apartments. But we knock down the dividing walls and rip out the extra doorbells—
SALLY
Who’s we?
MAGGIE
My husband and I.
SALLY
Oh.
MAGGIE
Anyway, we are both so successful in our careers that we are able to pay for this house in cash.
Sally
Yowza!
MAGGIE
I know. We renovate and decorate. We turn it into a comfortable home and a showplace for entertaining. The neighbours say it’s the best the house has ever looked and everyone says how great it is that we never have to move no matter how many kids we have.
SALLY
How man—
MAGGIE
Three. But I only have to get pregnant twice because the two youngest are twins. I get my figure back right away without even trying [SALLY tries to interject but MAGGIE is on a roll. SHE becomes more and more frenzied to the end of the speech] and the best part about our house is that we live a block away from where Adam is still living in his dingy basement apartment. Every day, he walks home from the subway in his Canada Customs uniform and he cringes at the possibility of running into me and or my secure, successful, gorgeous husband and our equally gorgeous children as we push them in their multiple stroller or drive them around in our four door, four by four, limited edition, red Jeep Grand Cherokee!
MAGGIE
He has to move. And not just to another neighbourhood. He moves out west. To BC. There, he tries his best to forget me, but the woman he marries always has a sneaking suspicion that he’s had this one true love that he secretly keeps comparing to her.
On his dying day, he murmurs my name in that bittersweet way that says he was richer for knowing me but is filled with the deepest regret for ever hurting me.
SALLY
You spend way too much time alone.
MAGGIE
I know.
Author of the Month: Marcia Johnson
Tell us about yourself.
I’m a bit of a late bloomer. The older I get, the more confident I feel of my abilities and the more deserving I feel of success. In my younger years, the slightest disappointment or routine rejection would set me back for months or years. I’m happy to say that I’m now much better at letting things roll off my back.
When did you realize you had a passion for writing?
I’ve always dreamed of writing. I loved books that came in series such as the Anne Shirley, Little House, and Narnia books. As a child, my goal was to write about my own series. Ten years into my acting career, I had the opportunity to collaborate on original pieces. This gave me the urge to write on my own.
What pieces of writing/authors have had the greatest impact on you?
Lynn Nottage is one of my favourite playwrights. She writes about such difficult and painful things like the plight of women in the Congo (Ruined) without ‘beating up’ the audience. She shows respect for the topic but folds in much-needed comedy and subplots.
I’m also a huge fan of Tony Kushner for his masterpiece Angels in America plays. This fantastical play addressed AIDS, homosexuality and homophobia in the eighties. These were issues dear to his heart and he shared them brilliantly.
How and when do you find time to write?
I like to write first thing in the morning before I talk myself out of it.
What has been some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced as a writer?
I learned the hard way to not read reviews.
How have you changed as a writer over the years?
I’m much better at writing dialogue and creating distinct voices for different characters. In my earlier work, the lead character (always based on me) had a lot of monologues and tended to have the last word. I hope that my interactions are more realistic now.
Homecoming
I
The train was packed, but because Mr. Dalal arrived early, he managed to get a good window seat. Somehow, while waiting for the train to commence its journey, he must have fallen asleep because when he awoke, hot and sticky, he felt something hurting his left side. He found that he had been squeezed into a corner by a tall bony man who now sat pretending not to notice Mr. Dalal’s heavy-lidded look but stared blankly into space.
Standing between himself and the man was, Mr. Dalal assumed, the man’s wife. He could could feel her hot, moist breath on his neck and sense her stare telling him—almost insistently so—that he make way for her but he refused to give her the satisfaction of seeing him move.
A ghost from his memory appeared and went by in a flash. At one time, the thought of remaining seated while a woman waited standing would have shamed him into offering her his seat; maybe he would have even considered sharing a paan with her husband. But things had changed since that time. Now even wild horses could not make Mr. Dalal budge. No, the time for weakness and vacillation was over. The time had come to make a stand.
He chose, instead, to turn his neck towards the window and focus his eyes on the city that swept past behind him, and to watch it slide past at the speed of the ambling train. He was filled with an unknown pleasure as he left the city, perhaps for good; the sight of it sinking deeper into the mess that it had created for itself gave him a malicious, even sinful satisfaction.
The train sped up, clack-clacking, swaying slowly from side to side. Soon, he could not see much of the city apart from the glutinous mass of bodies that semed to fill virtually every inch of visible space. Mobs, that’s all this town is going to get now, he said to himself, mobs and fools like this one who is intent on making me move.
Everywhere there were people: apart from the hordes that had detrained at local stations and were now making their painful trudge home, there were those who lived on and by the railway tracks, eking out their existence in flimsy, ramshackle huts which would have taken only a single monsoon shower to topple them.
Mr. Dalal was shocked by what he saw, but even more troubled by how callous he had been that he had been totally blind to this devastation. How could so much have changed in the few months that he had been away? Or was it him who was looking at his old world with new eyes? This suburban rail corridor was part of his daily commute and much of what he was seeing now had just slid by in the past. Had he allowed himself to become so indifferent, Mr. Dalal wondered, that all this which so horrified him now, had been a tacitly accepted, if never spoken, part of his life?
By the tracks, what were private, even secretly unacknowledged acts for Mr. Dalal were now played about openly, shamelessly, he thought, before his very eyes. There, men bathed, furiously soaping parts of their bodies that Mr. Dalal would quiver to touch even in the solitude of his own bathroom; elsewhere, with their backs turned to the trains, men defecated, oblivious to the presence of the bloated pigs that greedily eyed the turds snaking out of their intestines; there, next to stagnant pools of dirty water, buzzing with flies and mosquitoes, women had somehow lit feeble dung fires, and were now rolling chapatis for hungry families that sat patiently waiting to be fed. And, amidst all the dirt and squalor and the appalling stench, were children—the only resource that this land of garbage (wasn’t that what Shirish had called it?) seemed to have in abundance. Millions of gaping mouths and bloated, unfed stomachs—children, millions and millions and more millions of them—yet, the children played.
As the train began to gather pace, and everything began to fade into a blur, Mr. Dalal’s eyes caught a last image—a man stretching his arms over his head and settling down comfortably on his charpoy, using his filthy lungi to shield his eyes. In the man’s last gesture, shutting out the world as it were, the sum total of everything that he had seen in the past few seconds came together for Mr. Dalal.
Not one of them had looked or even physically acknowledged the presence of the trains that roared past them. Perhaps, by averting their eyes from the millions that stared, gazed, examined, magnified every part of their anatomy, they preserved their privacy and remained intact as individuals with their own lives, their own secrets.
Disgusted, Mr. Dalal rolled the phlegm that had gathered in his throat into a ball and contemptuously spat it out of the window.
He turned back to the man who was leaning on him and firmly pushed him off his shoulder. The man looked as if he was about to argue but seeing the determined look on Mr. Dalal’s face caused him to change his mind. A few moments later the man left, muttering audibly to his wife about the harm that would come to ugly, old, middle-class men when they realised that the Indian people were not going to continue to take the treatment that was being meted out to them. Mr. Dalal made as if to get up, but the man had already retreated into the back of the compartment and was soon gone.
Author of the Month: David Layton
Tell us about yourself.
This is the sort of alarming question that inevitably leads towards the false accounting of a resume. I’ll let others try to describe me, preferably when I’m out of earshot.
When did you realize you had a passion for writing?
I’m not sure I ever had one. When it comes to writing I follow Thomas Mann’s assertion that, “a writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
What pieces of writing/authors have had the greatest impact on you?
Two authors who had a huge impact on me were Henry Miller and Ferdinand Céline. It was my mother who gave me Tropic of Cancer, a book I recommend, and should be read by every fifteen-year-old boy. Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan are astonishing pieces of writing.
How and when do you find time to write?
The trick is not to try and find the time, as if it’s something you need to go looking for, but rather to make time so that you are its master and creator.
What has been some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced as a writer?
Believing in the words I just wrote in the above question.
How have you changed as a writer over the years?
For a young writer the linked attributes of arrogance and inexperience are absolutely imperative. The only thing age takes care of is the arrogance.