Posted on

The Longest Day of the Year

I love lilacs. The scent, their simple elegance, their tenacity … every May and June, they brighten my world and remind me to stop, smell, and just BE.

The longest day of the year, the summer solstice … that’s a powerful invitation too and this year the lilacs were a bit late, leaving a few hardy blooms around in time for this special transition that only recently I am coming to fully appreciate.

It was on the longest day of the year that someone I care about became a widower, and it was on the longest day of the year five years later that I awoke with a story too vivid to ignore, a story so urgent in my body that I sat and wrote for a day until it was finished. It was a story of how they met, this man and his wife, the story of the longest day decades before. It was a tale of shy attractions and veiled hopes, of a watch that suddenly stopped telling time and a moonlight dash for forbidden lilacs from a cranky neighbour’s yard, shared with me in wisps and phrases. I wrote a story and created something new. At the time, it was something I couldn’t NOT do. After I worked up the courage to share it with him, it became a story we both were called to tell.

It was on that longest day that the Finding Maria series was born.  His story in four books. I knew not then the power of what I was writing, just that I could feel an expansion, a light, with every new chapter and I could see in him the courageous evolution he invited in sharing his story to process life choices and heal the grief. What has taken considerably longer is for me to sit with what writing the series did, and continues to do for me.

I offered him a powerful creation and wanted nothing in return. He stood firm and offered me an invitation – to step into the creator that I am, the writer that I am, the I AM that I am. And that is an invitation for which I have not always been grateful. After years of allowing my intellect to form my tiny controlled world, it became difficult to separate fact from fiction, the who I AM compared to the who I was trained to be.  After four books of another’s story, the fifth book rests squarely with me and I know in my body, as I did with that short story so many years ago, that this next book is mine: no fiction, no hiding. What has been buried in the fog of battle between ME as signal and the world my intellect is protecting are the words I choose to share, the story I want to tell. For years, what has percolated through the various shoulds and can’ts and musts and don’ts has been prose that to me feels wilted, crushed, unrecognizable. I have had to relearn how to write: not on demand and without thinking, as I have always done, not plucking the words and setting them down but releasing into the flow of energy that I am and allowing the words to surface. Sounds easy. Too easy, my brain hisses. And so I make it difficult, distracting myself, becoming insanely busy so I don’t have time to know I’m distracting myself … and all the while, my words, like the lilacs, fragrant and tenacious, wait for me to BE and notice.

I did that today. On this longest day of the year, and what has turned out to be one of the hottest days of the year so far, I spent the afternoon relaxing, listening inward, waiting for the physical cue saying Yes, it’s time, let’s write this. It may not read differently than anything else I’ve written. It may read worse. It felt good to write, and in all honesty, it has been a long time since I could say that. Writing had been at best a means to survival. I had never allowed myself to want it, to love it, to grow with and because of it. Just like with the man who inspired this writing journey, the man I call my Muse. I never allowed myself to own the power of our co-creations, the power of our interactions, the power of us just being in each other’s presence. It seemed too much, too unattainable, too good to be true. As I backed away, my words backed up and the book I meant to release five years ago remains raw, in pieces, and parts unwritten.

Today as I sat with my manuscript in progress, I found I had written about that, a massive metaphor.  Here’s a sneek peak at what I’m working on, shared here today in gratitude for my Muse:

With him I felt that I could not just write but feel beyond places and dates to the dance of the ocean, warmth of the sky, the aroma of joy itself. In his presence I awakened to the possibilities of a creative life, a connected life, feeling for the first time the essence of another, and being felt completely in return. And it was in his presence that for the first time, words failed me. We had been given a blank page for our co-existence upon which to create whatever we wished. I wanted to fill the page with adventures, experiences, memories. I didn’t want labels or constructs or obligations. But I had no words to explain, and when he would ask What do you want? I would mumble, repeat some well-worn story of ‘whatever was needed from me’ or ‘whatever I was meant to have’ with no insight, no hint even, of the person giving the answer.  So the page remained blank. Stuck, like the book I now struggle to write.

It hasn’t been easy for either of us in this world strange yet familiar, expansive yet fitting in nowhere and I’ve allowed my fear to govern my choices and reactions. Yet like the lilacs, we remain tenacious, coming back into each other’s presence and conversations, continuing to connect amid storms and stories that draw us in different directions.

Releasing into the chaos  means there is no fear, only awareness. Writing for me is no longer a means of survival. It is a key to evolution. It is a key to the life I want. It is the key to me being ME, because until I can be my full self I cannot have what I want with others. When I am ME, words never fail. 

The Finding Maria series produced, among other things, lilacs that will never fade 🙂

My creation from that first short story, in print and in life, is still revealing itself when I pause and ask to know more.  The blank page – of my story and in my life – no longer frightens. It does irritate now and then, which is a great invitation to embrace the fire of creative energy and get to it or, as my Muse has been saying for more than a decade, ‘get ‘er done.’

The lilacs have faded and light on the longest day is dimming. A new season and a new chapter has just begun.

 

Posted on

View from the Depths: a Mermaid’s ode to a book club

We are warmly welcomed into a room lined with books – on shelves, tucked under the coffee table, footing the window seat, surrounded by a view of water glinting defiantly under clouds leaden with the last of a rare summer rain. High on an island hilltop, it was a space by and for book lovers but at first glance no place for a mermaid.

“I must be a mermaid … I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living,” Anais Nin once wrote and by no coincidence I am drawn to the image of mermaids and the murky depths they call home. On this day, however, I surface in response to the generous invitation of Tuesdays at Two. This book club of gracious and well-read women has been meeting for a decade, longer than I’ve been writing books, and devote an annual afternoon to hosting a writer in the flesh. They list of a who’s who of local and CanLit guests of the past and I hear the tune ‘One of These Things is Not Like the Other,” from my childhood formed by Sesame Street.

Yet they have invited me here as part of this distinguished list to talk about Orchids for Billie and the little boy I created. In spontaneous acknowledgement of the unique story behind the story, they have widened their invitation to include the man whose life inspired the Finding Maria series, the real ‘little Jack,’ to speak to the experience of having one’s memories and experience crafted into a story and shared with the world. Even more rare than this day of rain during our dry summer is the opportunity for the two of us to speak together on this story we created. For more than a decade we have worked, explored and collaborated as a team, yet usually in the privacy of a one-on-one meeting or solitary reflection and response. This was a test: could I let go of my creation enough to let the person speak for himself? Would I hold my own in conversation or revert to detached observer and slip off into the depths? Would this public airing of our unseen connection be appreciated or painful?

In a word, it was brilliant.

In the years since I began writing the Finding Maria series I’ve come to own my desire for intense conversations, with no question too deep or topic too touchy to explore. Yet the art and beauty of conversation is too often lost in the world of tweets, sound bytes and fear: of offending, of intruding, of being nosy. The group gathered on the hilltop this silvery summer day was none of those things, nor could they ever be. They are informed, sincere, and genuinely interested in the story and the people who inspired it, and in that environment, there is no greater safety to explore, dive, and peer into darkened corners and blink at the revelations. It is the environment I first discovered in conversation with the man who quietly became my partner in business and creation and today sits next to me, sharing his story in a clarity of voice that our creation helped reveal. As one book became two, then three and four and the demands of our commercial venture took over, I had forgotten the beauty of revelation in the written word. I had forgotten how insightful and engaging that little boy could be.

Why?

While writing as a vocation is intensely rewarding and deeply revealing, it to me is wholly unattractive. Painters, potters and weavers, for example, are a joy to watch, their deft movements giving rise to a creation that takes shape before your eyes. Most days I feel like a human seive, absorbing all of life’s gobs and bits and chunks, then tasked with the process of straining our a clear, refined stream of consciousness ready to be sipped and savoured. Who on Earth wants to watch that?

For the longest time, not me and for years, I could do it without watching, thinking, or above all feeling as I quickly sifted through facts for the assignment at hand. Writing the Finding Maria series for the first time kept me in place, immersed in the chunks and bits, and I’ve too often responded in panic or rebellion. Now called to write my own story in the series, I am up to my eyeballs in the mess, the pulp, the unwanted and long-forgotten scraps, and it is easy to look away and pretend to be elsewhere, in a world too busy for such straining and sorting, in a life too full for new possibilities, in a space where feelings are to be toned down or ignored.

Tuesday’s conversation didn’t cut through the mess, but embraced it. Orchids for Billie emerged from chaos to offer a story of hope. It invited readers from many places, spaces and perspectives to a single room, on a single day, to add their own layers and colours to the words on the page. I sat in the presence of many wonderful stories by sharing the one I wrote, steeped in courage from the only man in the room, seated next to me, who outwardly chose none of this bizarre journey that is writing and publishing but is both allowing the unseen to take us where it will and permitting his story to be the interface.

A business coach and dear friend once told me I overthink my blogs. They don’t need to be so deep. They can be superficial, lighter, how-to hints or top 10 lists, and search rankings would prove her right. But I have floated in the shallow end for too long. This is deep and I like it there. Granted, it’s a great place to hide. But there is also great safety in knowing someone will invite you to surface every now and then and connect with those who would support and be supported by discoveries from the depths.

On a hilltop, on an island, there is no place to hide and in such a place, who would want to? To the ladies of Tuesdays at Two, may you go on to discuss hundreds of books and treat more lucky authors to an afternoon of your caring conversation. To those of you book lovers not in a club, start one. And to my partner in creation, thank you for your quiet yet unshakeable presence that invites me to shine a little bit more, added light by which to sort the flotsam from the jetsam as the quest for Book Five continues.

Thanks for reading.

– Jennifer

Jennifer Hatt is author of the Finding Maria series and partner in publishing company Marechal Media Inc.