I traded advice with my daughter the other day – we were talking about the brave leap that all creativity requires. It can’t happen if you belabour and pummel yourself. It takes courage and self-forgetfulness. She knows this as well as I do. But there are any number of ways to undermine yourself.

I know that reading poetry first thing in the morning renews me – helps me enter my own writing with fresh energy. Instead of poetry, however, I often drift into the crossword, whose answers I can’t solve without cheating. Or The Globe and Mail, which never makes me glad to be alive. Well, seldom. Sometimes an obituary will perk me up.

This week I read about the cowboy poet Harvey Mawson, dead at 81, whose earliest years were on his great-grandfather’s Saskatchewan ranch. His backyard was “mile upon mile of open prairie – the Brightwater Marsh with its rich bird and plant life, the exquisite sand hills, and the Round Prairie, where a group of Metis had settled in the 1850s.” As a boy his greatest pleasure “was to explore this land on horseback, learning its secrets.”

Ah, to be a cowboy.

On a recent walk to the river in the surging February light, we came upon a man and a dog, the golden retriever wide and happy, the man ready with a friendly hello. Coming behind them at some distance was a smaller dog making slow, steady, dainty progress. She was eighteen years old. Blind and deaf, but happy to be out on a clement day. Her fur was mostly grey and her body was like my mother’s back, curved and shrunken. Nevertheless, she managed to be stately in her dotage. The man said that the younger dog, only seven, had always looked to her to see how to react, and now that she was blind and deaf, he still looked to her.

The same day we brought my mother here for dinner. She paused before the arduous climb of our front steps, looked around, and said with her special alacrity, “The snow is puissant!”

It’s not the first time a French word has surfaced to startling effect in her addled conversation. In the Oxford dictionary there it is: ‘puissant’ meaning ‘mighty, powerful.’

“Chapeau!” I said, and raised my hat to her.

January comes to an end. It makes me think of crooked teeth, this difficult month. Winter in rack and ruin. Our skating canal lopped off at the knees by freezing rain. Snow thawed and refrozen a dozen times. Walking a punishment and Ottawa no city for old men.

A week ago we were in Toronto to see our daughter and we went for a walk through the Distillery District, enchanted by the momentary sunshine and all the old brick and stone buildings converted into studios, workshops, arts offices. I bought a completely unnecessary dress, a black, cocktail affair, and heard my late friend Rhoda say into my ear: You are out of control.

I bought a hat.

We returned home by train and I went back to the second volume of Samuel Beckett’s letters. I love his gloomy company. His wryness, tenderness, openness. His combativeness and considerateness. His poetry.

Beckett. The weekly dose of “Downton Abbey.” Drinking wine by the fireplace with friends. The lengthening light. My husband’s ever-hopeful despair about the canal and the world. My brother’s admiration of my mother. My son’s independence. My daughter’s determination.

It’s a month that demands strength of character, January. Nevertheless, good riddance, as my father-in-law used to say of his ex-daughters-in-law.

I find it extraordinarily sad, the sale of my proud and struggling Canadian publisher, McClelland & Stewart, to Random House, the German-owned conglomerate. Even though I can guess at the realities and appreciate the relief my friends at M&S tell me they feel, and even knowing it’s been in the wind for quite a while.

What a hue and cry there would have been once upon a time. Last spring, reading the correspondence between Margaret Laurence and Al Purdy, I came upon Purdy’s fiery denunciation of the sale of Ryerson Press to the American company McGraw-Hill in 1970: he immediately withdrew the book he’d been planning to publish with them.

What different times those were, yet not so different. As Purdy wrote soon afterwards, “the Ryerson sale gone ahead and completed as expected, everyone talking a good fight but not much action otherwise.”

Remember when Trudeau said that if Canada were to end, he hoped it would go with a bang and not a whimper?

As part of the present wrenchingness, if that’s a word, is the parallel bleakery, if that’s a word, of seeing the Harper government attack ‘foreign money’ the odd time it suits them. It suits them when they want to undermine environmental groups raising questions about Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway oil pipeline from Edmonton to Kitimat.

All this takes me back, of course, to the proposed Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline of the 1970s. In those days the bogeyman was ‘southern white advisors’ polluting the minds of the native people. See Late Nights on Air.

For different times, when Canadian cultural activists weren’t so thin on the ground, see Margaret Laurence—Al Purdy: A Friendship in Letters.

It’s tough to be sleepless at this time of year since we turn down the heat before going to bed. At two a.m. it’s on with my bathrobe, on with my llama wool socks and downstairs to hot milk, a shawl around my shoulders, a blanket over my knees. I start to read the first story in Transgressions by the Kentucky writer Sallie Bingham. “Apricots” is about having too much fruit and deciding to make jam. You see the jam being made and you see the story being made, one ingredient at a time.

What a lovely thing to be reading in the middle of the night, the Christmas tree dark beside me, Father Christmas on the coffee table.

Father Christmas I pore over every December, entranced by the book-wide panels of changing sky that St. Nick and his reindeer travel through on their annual round. Raymond Briggs has them pass through every weather and every hour: snow, rain, lightning, fog, first light, sunrise, morning. Did Paterson Ewen ever see this book? I think of his brilliant horizontal paintings on gouged plywood of atmospheric phenomena – rain, clouds, comets, sun, moon, storms.

It’s the progression from one thing to the next that enchants. The progression from a barren apricot tree finally bearing too much fruit to a 63-year-old woman deciding she will have to make jam but needs some help, to her selecting a young man to be the extra hand and thereby overturning her life. The progression of Father Christmas from his cozy arctic solitude out into the great world of skies and rooftops and chimneys that lead him into one home after another, until exhausted he makes the return trip to his own creaturely comforts of warm stove, hot bath, roast turkey, cognac, cocoa, bed, and beloved sleep.

One thing summons up another and you have a story. “And she longed to know what the apricots had meant, and continued to mean, even as she realized with dismay that her life was falling apart.” The falling apart is a late and embarrassing harvest that overwhelms her. What will she do with it?

I keep eight or so quotations on a corner of my desk, written on slips of paper and held together by a paper clip, reaching for them when I’m low or lost or ashamed of myself.

Here’s one. Jean Renoir writing about his famous father. The impassioned serenity of the final period, ‘a question of being alert and not getting nervous’. He approached with less fear, having discovered that the hunter’s buckshot was love continually renewed.

Renoir, My Father rescued me one lonely winter’s night in 2010 when I was stranded in London, Ontario. I had given a reading in the afternoon, then been taken to a hotel, deposited there, and I had nothing to do until my train left the next morning. I knew a part of London, since my parents had lived there for many years, so I felt doubly alone or doubly strange. I decided to go for a walk and soon found myself on a typically long, cold, wind-blown street with nothing at all of interest until I came upon a used bookstore and fell into its arms. I poked about for an hour, reasonably happy, but finding nothing I wanted to buy, then instantly joyous when I saw Renoir, My Father on one of the shelves. I knew it; I had borrowed it from the library years ago and loved it and always wanted a copy of my own. For that night and the following day on the train, it made my life worth living.

I wasn’t even a great fan of Renoir’s paintings – they were too blurry, too marshmallowy for me. But I loved reading about his progress from boyhood to great old age, his discoveries and decided opinions in the notebook he kept. The two I remember best: An artist must eat sparingly and give up a normal way of life, and Delacroix never won a prize. The second is especially useful to remember.

A few weeks ago I happened to see one of Renoir’s last paintings and looked at it for a long time, disarmed, finally appreciating the loose, breathing brushwork that brought forth the full body of the young woman and her incredible skin.

As for the hunter’s buckshot being love continually renewed, I understand that better too, reminded of something my husband said to me many years ago. “If you could only enjoy the people you write about,” he said, “instead of forever criticizing them. No matter how flawed, if you would only enjoy them!” Love continually renewed is the weapon that brings your characters close, or brings you close to them. You have them in your sights and your sights aren’t narrow. It has nothing to do with letting them off easy. It’s something else entirely.

Tomorrow my mother turns 92. Yesterday she was so agitated and confused. “The day has been sloppish, sloppish!” she said. “Just sloppish.” My lovely little crooked bird of a mother. I persuaded her to let me wash her hair in the bathroom sink and from under the tap, her face nearly pressed against the basin, she said, “I miss your Dad.”

She looked so much better with her hair washed and combed and pinned with three bobby pins instead of the usual ten or twenty she jabs into place. I got her to stretch out on the chesterfield and rest her head on a pillow, and I read to her. Usually I read things she has written herself, her painting memories or her memories of her childhood lake near Renfrew, and she gives me credit for writing them no matter how often I say, “No, all of the credit goes to you, Professor Higgins.”

I know what I’ll read to her next. Killdeer, Phil Hall’s new collection of poems, which I’m reading now with such love and envy. She will respond to them as she responds to music. In these realms she is as discerning as ever. We took her on Saturday to the live broadcast from the Met of Philip Glass’s opera about Gandhi. At the end she reached for my hand and said in a choked voice, “That was beautiful. It was just wonderful.”

Though her mind misplaces so much – she even misplaces who I am at times – she remembered the opera two, three, four days later.

The poems in Killdeer will do the same. They’ll clear away all the debris in her mind.

Two weeks ago I drove to a small miracle of a bookstore in the Ottawa Valley, the Arnprior Book Shop forty-five minutes northwest of Ottawa. Then last week I dropped into the London Review Bookstore near the British Museum. In each case, lovely cafés were attached – good coffee and cakes – the pleasures of the flesh matching the pleasures of the mind. Both shops had the feel of relaxed but heady village life. They were cozy, yet full of doorways to all sorts of worlds.

In the London Review Bookstore, I found a book I’ve wanted to read ever since my literature-studying son raved about it a few months ago. Not The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, the new Booker winner, but the original The Sense of an Ending published in 1966 by the critic Frank Kermode. Barnes borrowed the title and who can blame him. It’s a great title. Given the struggle I have with endings, I fell for it hard.

I bought poetry too, a couple of books by Louise Glück, whose work I admire deeply. In London I always reconnect with my fifteen-year-old self, the girl who moved with her family to England for a year and discovered one day in grammar school that she could write poems of a sort, and thereafter wanted to be a writer.

During that year in England, 1967, the world also opened up for my mother. She comes from the Ottawa Valley, not far from Arnprior, and grew up wanting to be a painter but never had the chance. In London that changed. She took art classes every day for the first time in her life. She was 48. These places, London and the Ottawa Valley, fold us together into one aspiring story. “I spent the year doing what I wanted to do,” my mother said to me yesterday. “That’s why it was so wonderful.”

What I take with me when I travel. Ear plugs. Sleeping pills (each divided in four). Books. This time American Pastoral by Philip Roth, and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. Tylenol.

Umbrella, since I’ll be in Vancouver for several days. Blackberry with charger. Lip balm. In my carry-on bag, a streamlined wardrobe for ten days.

An extra notebook in case I do more writing than I usually do when I travel.

Coral necklace for good luck.

Certain phone numbers, even ones I have by heart, since fatigue destroys memory.

Elegant boots. Cold cream in a small enough container that airport security doesn’t confiscate it. French magazine and dictionary in order to work on my French, though I wonder if I will open them.

A bar of chocolate and a bag of almonds so as not to be stranded by hunger.

Compare this with Huckleberry Finn. “I took the bucket and gourd; took a dipper and a tin cup, and my old saw and two blankets, and the skillet and the coffee-pot.”

Travelling light.

First posted on Canadian Bookshelf canadianbookshelf.com/

The Man from the Creeks, Robert Kroetsch, 1998, New Canadian Library

• Kroetsch’s sudden death in June made me pick up his last novel once again. I came to it for the first time a few years ago, ten years after it was published (I often come late to books) and fell in love with its tender, amused and desperate tone. What underlies the novel/adventure/yarn/love story is Robert Service’s ripping poem “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.” The poem calls to the storyteller/poet in Kroetsch and the resulting 307 pages are perfect.

Secular Love, Michael Ondaatje, 1984, Coach House Press

• Summer poetry – open, sensual, secretive, full of motion, full of love and humour. People often remark about the poet in the novelist when they speak about Ondaatje, less so about the storyteller in the poet. This collection gives us characters and place in all their dramatic singularity: marital breakup, drunkenness, sudden love, deep and lasting attachments to rivers, farms, fields, friends. I’ve read it many times and I am always seduced, inspired and envious.

The Outlander, Gil Adamson, 2007, Anansi

• The Some Like it Hot of novels with a great beginning that gallops all the way home to a great ending. It’s a tale of a runaway widow being hunted by two vengeful brothers-in-law and it brims with natural poetry and action. On every level it is electrifying and unforced. I’m rereading it to see how she pulled it off, and what I might learn.

A Long Continual Argument, The Selected Poems, John Newlove, 2007, Chaudiere Books

• I open this book in the middle and wonder why I read anyone else. He was a very difficult man (he liked to say that for his sins he lived in Ottawa) with such a pure voice, mordant and aching. He says things no one else says, and that I don’t realize I need to hear until I hear them. This is an excellent posthumous collection published by a small, valiant Ottawa publisher.

The Elizabeth Stories, Isabel Huggan, 1984, Oberon

• Isabel Huggan, who grew up in Elmira, Ontario and lived for a time in Ottawa, now has her home in the south of France. She made her name with this first collection of stories that still snap my head around with their own particular cockiness. There’s such a sense of letting the traces go, of throwing caution to the winds and getting at the real truths of family and small town life. I read it to remind myself to be funny and brave, and, above all, to believe in what I’m writing.

Enchantment and Sorrow, The Autobiography of Gabrielle Roy, trans. Patricia Claxton, 1987, Lester & Orpen Dennys

• Another book I love. No one writes more directly and effectively from the heart than Gabrielle Roy. I reread her autobiography for the details of her childhood and for her extreme attachment to her mother from whom she would have to extricate herself in order to become the writer she became. The quality of her emotions, the laying bare of relationships, the hard-won escape to France – it is all gripping and wonderful. The price she paid for her independence, and the price her mother paid, breaks my heart.

On September 6, I wheeled my bicycle past the bed of zinnias at the front of the house and rode downtown to the National Art Gallery. On the second floor I went looking for Van Gogh. There are two small paintings – zinnias and geraniums in a green bowl, and zinnias and geraniums in a vase. 1886. His zinnia year. I look at these paintings every time I come. On the adjoining wall is a painting of irises. 1889. No vase; they grow straight out of the ground of the mental asylum where he was living. His iris year, when he was in more distress than ever.

My father was very ill on September 6. He was much on my mind as I looked at the flowers, not least because he loved to garden. Then passing through the long gallery of early European art, I saw my father in the flesh and stopped. It was a painting of Job, 1631, oil on canvas by Jan Lievens. There he was, an old and depleted man in a grey loincloth, with thin arms, sunken chest, white beard, bare purply feet, supplicating hands and eyes. I sat down on the bench and stared, took out my distance glasses and looked some more. I realized that I would always be able to visit my father in the final days of his life by coming to this painting.

Over the next days, watching him die, his head back, fingers fluttering at his beard, those unseeing eyes trained on the ceiling, I was watching a figure straight out of an old master’s painting. They studied the old and dying with a powerful scrutiny. Without my knowing it, they had prepared me for everything.

The day he died, an eloquent friend wrote to say her sadness was shocking, indeed seismic; she hid herself from her less demonstrative family by descending to the basement and drowning out her weeping with the vacuum cleaner.

The same day the weather swept through with great amounts of wind and sunshine, rinsing off the world and adding an exquisite sense of wellbeing to my sadness. “It’s like a Greek tragedy,” I said to my husband, “the rise and fall of fortune.” The orange wave of New Democratic parliamentarians in May, the backwash of his rapid death in August.

“The gods sweep down,” my husband said, “and change things. Poor Jack.”

“Poor us.”

My husband has been reading The Iliad. The other day he came into the kitchen saying what a great storyteller Homer was. I asked him why and he thought for a moment. “He doesn’t rush. He takes his time to give details about every character. He has respect for the dead.”

It took time for Jack to find his feet. In the beginning I liked him, liked his optimism and energy and brashness. Then I lost my liking a couple of elections ago, turned off by his cockiness. The campaign was all about him rather than about the party, so it seemed. I reminded myself that anyone I knew who worked closely with him liked him tremendously. However, something wasn’t working in the way he came across. Then cancer dropped into his life a year ago, and his cockiness became pluckiness and his character rose above the fray.

It takes time, even as time is running out.

Don’t rush.

Revisit books you love. Revisit books you didn’t like; you might be ready for them now. Have patience with your son who seems adrift. Give him space and time (as you tell him to wake up and smell the coffee).

The night Jack died, my husband and I raised our glasses of wine on the back porch as the evening sun poured down and the temperature dropped.

“To the end of summer,” I said.

And he corrected me. “To the rest of summer.”

My son gave us names. He was Mister Deck, his father was Sneak, I was Shoe.

We were in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts, bicycling by day, camping at night and taking in music, dance and theatre between times at Tanglewood, Jacob’s Pillow, Shakespeare & Company. My two tall men bicycled straight up every hill while I chugged along behind on what felt like a tricycle, huffing, puffing, cursing, and rescued at various times by lemonade and one afternoon by a wonderful rainstorm in Stockbridge. We took refuge on the wide verandah of the Red Lion Inn and drank gin and tonics and read the New York Times.

Down the street, under tarps, a used book sale was going on and I found a slim volume about Willa Cather by her longtime companion Edith Lewis. Willa Cather Living. A lovely read, being a detail-filled account of her childhood and writing life. “[Willa] happened to mention to D. H. Lawrence that she always kept her flowers in the bathroom at night.” It made me eager to read the books of hers I haven’t read.

Now I’m happily in the middle of The Song of the Lark, impressed as always by the genius of her simplicity.

Another day we went to Melville’s house and stood in the large upstairs room where he wrote Moby-Dick with a view in the distance of whale-shaped Mount Greylock. The excellent docent supplied details that stick with me. The suicide of his oldest son; his habit of mercilessly teasing his youngest daughter; his final years as a customs inspector taking the ferry to and from Staten Island after the absolute failure of Moby-Dick and his later books to find an audience.

In the little gift shop I picked up a postcard with a quotation from one of his letters and here was the muscular, sea-tainted, human turn of phrase that makes you want to follow him around the world.

“I have been building some shanties of houses (connected with the old one) and likewise some shanties of chapters & essays. I have been ploughing & sowing & raising & printing & praying, and now begin to come out upon a less bristling time, and to enjoy the calm prospect of things from a fair piazza at the north of the old farmhouse here.”

And so we stumble upon great writers and great books.

I was asked again the other day how I come up with the names of characters. In hindsight I wish I’d said that the right name gives me the scent of the character. Then like an old dog on the trail, I can sniff her out. Connie Flood, for instance, in Alone in the Classroom, came alive only after she stopped being Stevie (my first name for her). ‘Connie’ summoned up a beloved uncle who named his son Conran, after his father; Conran then got shortened to Connie, more typically a girl’s name. In developing the character of a beloved fictional aunt, I was seeking out someone close to me whom I had never met, an invented character who would have implicit meaning, a personal scent.

If I have the wrong name for a character, my nostrils are blocked.

Smells are so important when you get to know a person or a place. I remember how thrown I was as a teenager, hired by a neighbour to babysit her children, to enter a house that smelled completely different from my own – deodorized, unnatural, dead. I felt one-dimensional and weirdly lost, and couldn’t wait to escape. I happened to be in Toronto last week and amidst the commotion of that huge city came upon certain things that enchanted me, the cemetery and the farm in Cabbagetown. But the air was foul. Back home again in Ottawa, I breathed in the sweet air of this city full of flowers and rivers.

My 91-year-old mother breathes in the good air with such gratitude. She grew up in the Ottawa Valley, moved away at seventeen, then moved back a couple of years ago with my father to live in a retirement home just down the street. Her profound reaction to the air reminds me of Thomas Hardy’s father asking on his deathbed for water fresh drawn from the well. He tasted it and relaxed. “Yes, that’s our well-water. Now I know I am at home.”

The other evening we noticed a huge bumblebee take an interest in the underside of the porch railing, in the cavity left open by a missing spindle. We watched it investigate and then make itself at home, curling upside down in the opening to sleep. The next morning at five a.m., on the porch with my coffee, I became aware of a flicker of movement and remembered the bumblebee. I went down the steps onto the grass and around to where I could look up at it. It was waking up, grooming itself like a cat (a river of black cats pours down the neighbour’s front steps and into our garden every day), before taking off straight upwards past the birdfeeder and into the sky.

Those lines of Shakespeare’s came to mind, something about where the bee nests, there nest I. I came upstairs and found them in “The Tempest”. Where the bee sucks, there suck I / In a cow-slip’s bell I lie / There I couch when owls do cry.

Dear Shakespeare, I’ve discovered where the bumblebee sleeps.

Merrily, merrily shall I live now / Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.

The first martini of the season last Friday.

The first swim on Saturday.

The first day of summer today. If only I had the constitution to stay up all night, but I’m only wide awake when I don’t want to be.

My daughter sent me back to the drawing board. “Think about what’s driving each character,” she said, after reading my attempt at a play. “What makes this night different from every other night?”

The question gets asked every Passover and for the first time I saw how clearly it sets up the drama reenacted through the ritual meal – the exodus from Egypt, the liberation from slavery.

What makes this night different from every other night? Sometimes it’s a movie. I gave my daughter something it’s taken me years to lay my hands on (since even the most specialized video stores have never carried it), a movie I’d been dying to see ever since reading about it years ago in Pauline Kael’s 5001 Nights at the Movies. I went online, finally, last winter and an outfit in Massachusetts sent me the videocassette in an envelope so carpeted with stamps I kept it. Then another little outfit on Bank Street transferred the video to CD.

“The Member of the Wedding,” made in 1952. Based on the stage version of the incredible novella by Carson McCullers, it has Julie Harris at 26 playing 12-year-old motherless Frankie, and Ethel Waters playing the housekeeper with a glass eye, and Brandon deWilde playing small, doomed John Henry. “The time is the summer,” writes Pauline Kael in that brilliantly incisive way of hers, “when these three characters, who have been clinging to each other, are torn apart.”

My daughter watched it and then we walked over to the tennis club (of which we’re not members) to have a beer on the balcony in the hot summer night and to have the joy of talking over something we both loved. How good the acting was, what a chord the story struck – being 12 and unable to articulate in a way that anyone can understand the confusion inside you. She mentioned the moment when Frankie persuades John Henry (whom she’d sent packing) to come back and sleep over with her in the empty house, and she’s brushing her teeth and has the revelation that she’s always been an “I”, she’s never been a “we”, and how much she wants to be a “we”. My daughter, overcome with feeling but refusing her father’s handkerchief, confessed that she still feels 12 years old. So do I, I said.

The warm summer air, her happiness in the sudden heat, her heart worked upon by a drama that’s sixty years old. Everything that matters came together on that night in June.

I promised my daughter I would write her a play. The promise has been floating in the air for several years already, sincere but vague and open-ended. A few weeks ago I trotted out the promise once again because she’s coming home for a week in early June. “This time I’ll have something for you in draft form.”

Probably it’s ill-advised, a mother writing a role for her daughter, particularly when the mother doesn’t have a clue how to write a play. But I see the struggle of a young actress trying to find work and it reminds me of the Great Depression when lack of opportunity led to such frustration and bitterness. All that creativity and no outlet. If I could, I would finance a theatre company on condition that my daughter get all the starring roles.

Whatever I write will probably embarrass her, either by not being very good or by being too personal. Still, it’s worth a try simply because it might lead to something we can’t yet imagine.

I went out into the garden last night and turned in circles as I always do at this time of year. The garden works so fast. A week ago the cherry blossoms were on their way out, while coming up from behind, like a hot pink moon, was Shirley’s crabapple tree. Now those petals are gone too. It’s like being surrounded by a gang of big confident boys roaring in from all sides and yelling green, green, green.

Loud boys in the garden.
Soft rain in the night.
And my daughter coming home.

I arrived home several days ago to the old, ongoing question of how to get new writing done when the business of life occupies your mind. My father’s health took a nasty turn in my absence and my sister and brother came to the rescue. So did my husband, who reassures me that sleep is overrated. It’s the fear of not sleeping that skewers me, and how I’ll manage without it.

This way. With paper and pen and coffee. I write down everything that’s been going on with my father and mother, both 91, including Dad’s remark to me. “Just sit down and relax.”

The blossoming trees are like suspended snow. The cherry at the foot of the garden. And all the tulips wide open.

On Saturday morning I took my mother for a walk and after we sat down in the courtyard of their residence, I asked her if she was worried.

“We’re at the end of our lives,” she said. “I just wonder—”

I waited, thinking that she must be wondering what would become of her if Dad were to die before her.

“What do you wonder?”

“If we’ve contributed anything.”

The transience of spring blossom and now the planning for the permanent hairdo of zinnias, nasturtiums – something to fill the poor front garden. While inside the house, my mother’s marvellous paintings cover every wall.

About four o’clock on Saturday afternoon our worries lifted when my father got out of bed and dressed himself for dinner, then went down to the dining room and ate well. He was back to himself again, if much thinner and weaker. That night I had a beautiful sleep.

My study is full of drafts of Alone in the Classroom that I need to sort through and file away, keeping parts that were edited out since they might bear fruit later on. I like this room so much – the windows, the oak rocking chair with its flat arms, all the books, all the surfaces, no matter how buried in paper. I remember a phrase from James King’s biography of Margaret Laurence, that she mothered herself with her writing. What a shock to rediscover that she was only sixty when she died.

My new boots, by the way, worked well. Made of soft leather that’s kind to the feet, and so chic they have eyelets but no laces.

How do you keep your head on straight during a book tour? Besides having regular little talks with your ego. I brought along the tiny volume of letters between Margaret Laurence and Gabrielle Roy. They wrote to each other starting in 1976, when Laurence was 50 and her last novel already several years in the past, and Roy in her late sixties – both of them noble warhorses afflicted with various sorrows and illnesses, deeply in sympathy with each other and each other’s work. The letters are “soul-to-soul.” I read them with a pencil, putting a stroke beside certain lines where they talk about what really matters. The capacity of a book to touch another person, to open minds and hearts rather than close them, that’s what matters.

Night struggles. Sleeping pills are very bad boyfriends. You trust them, they leave you high and dry. At 1:55 a.m. you wrestle with a small yogurt, breaking off the flap, finally removing the lid, and eat it with a plastic fork. It’s just a reading, you say. It’s just an interview. There will be make-up for the face and adrenalin for the brain. Everything’s going to be all right.

I have the great luck to read several times with Miriam Toews. Her daring is what I love. That fearlessness she has. Her splendid strong angular face is full of humour and energy. I hear her read the first chapter of her novel four times and never tire of it.

In four days I’ll be home.

I took my old feet into a shoe store for women with old feet and came out with beautiful, ankle-high Fluevog boots into which I’ve put an additional insole. Now comes the quiet suspense of seeing whether my feet will accept the boots.

Dressing myself isn’t as much fun as dressing my characters. In Alone in the Classroom I gave Connie brown suede pumps with peephole toes, the same pair that I admired in a museum in England a few years ago, shoes worn the very year I needed her to wear them, 1937. At other times in the novel I gave her a stylish brown dress or a black lace brassiere or a black woolen cape made in France with braided frog fastenings and “made to last,” since Connie is one of those independent women who knows how to navigate the world, a type that fascinates me. She doesn’t do it by being wasteful.

She would love my boots and understand that I feel more equal to what lies ahead when I wear them. A ten-day book tour begins the day after tomorrow and takes me out to Victoria and back.

I will have her company as I tour the book. I will also have a quiver full of sleeping pills, since my great fear is that I will not be able to sleep for nights on end and will start to drool out of the corner of my mouth. I think of Huck Finn setting out on the Mississippi with “an old saw and two blankets, and the skillet and the coffee-pot.” How different it is to be flying from one place to another, peddling a book.

I’ll have my notebook and I’ll be on the lookout for interesting people, places, stories. What I notice will prove useful down the road either in a story or in a blog post, since I hope to post on this site on a fairly regular basis.

Dear reader, I’ve decided to think of these posts as letters. I miss the letters that used to arrive in the mailbox, and like to think of this new venture as a return to the old letter-writing habit.