Marion Agnew

This year has seemed a little back-to-front. Suddenly we had some summer--just when the calendar started hinting at autumn, and I'd resigned myself to doing the indoor things that needed doing. Like that writing thing. Still, we're happy to have had the chance to finish some important-but-unglamorous projects that required manual labor. Adjusting to the weather always always always tests my (metaphoric) flexibility. If I have a morning blocked out to get through the revisions on a story, and the day dawns rain-free and temperate, going outdoors requires actual physical wrenching. I force myself upstairs to put on the mud-covered jeans and denim work shirt; I force myself outdoors: "Just bring back one load of stuff from the little place, and then you can quit," I tell myself. (Then I test my physical flexibility, which is also not naturally great.) Sometimes that one load really is all I do. Sometimes I do more. But I do something. And 99 times out of 100, I enj...

Not everything in life is a metaphor for writing. Probably. Maybe. For the past few days, people have been staying at the larger, less-rustic-but-still-rustic cottage* we own next door to our house (as opposed to the extremely rustic cottage on the other side of us). Their cottage has a wood heating stove in the kitchen and a fireplace and electricity; it has running (and hot) water pumped from the lake. It has no insulation, however, and significant gaps at a few places where walls don't quite meet rafters, and baseboard heat only in the bathroom (and the temperature has fallen below 5C/40F at night regularly for several weeks) with no organized heat anywhere else. In short, these people--who claimed to know what they were getting into, who claimed to welcome what they were getting into--have had to be a hardly lot. Their planned experience, a sort of retreat from their own lives into a physical location where they control their level of interaction with the outside world and...

This year, I'm reading all the books we have (with some exceptions) before buying new books. It's been an interesting journey so far (slowed somewhat by my decision to read an issue of The New Yorker every weekday during Lent). In no particular order, here are a few thoughts: 1. I have read several "just fine" novels in a row. One was for a book club; we picked it because it was by an author I'd long been interested in trying (and I got it from the library). The rest were already in the house and I'd picked them up on sale somewhere. They were...fine. Just fine. Some were Canadian; some American. All absolutely fine, but no more gripping/fantastic than that. I may read other work by these writers, but I'm not sure I'd buy it in hardcover. These are the kinds of books that gradually fall to the bottom of the stack because something shinier comes along. I'm happy to have read them, finally. Fine-ally, haha. 2. I read a short story anthology tha...

The grocery store’s air conditioning provides a welcome respite from the heat after a full morning of errands. With every hot sidewalk and parched parking lot, I’ve dreamed of a cold mocha. As the barista makes my frozen treat, I hear a wail. Peering around the corner, I see her. A little girl, not too far from her second birthday, stands in the basket of a grocery cart, fists gripping the seat in which NO, she WILL NOT SIT. Her chubby cheeks flush as pink as her sundress. Tears or sweat, I can’t tell which, pull strands of curly hair down her neck. Her eyes squeeze shut and she inhales for another round. “Here you are, sweetheart,” a woman’s voice croons. “So hot, I know, but this will cool you down.” Nana (or Mimi or Grandma) holds a small carton of chocolate milk to the girl’s baby-bird mouth. With expert timing, Nana tips and straightens the carton, watching with a hopeful smile. The little girl swallows, widens her eyes, and opens her mouth for more. She bounces a d...

Fun. When was the last time your creative work (for me, writing) was fun? When I asked myself that question, I got the mental equivalent of that little spinning wheel thing that you see with "buffering." In other words: uhhh. Been awhile. This summer, I participated in something that was really FUN. And although it was related to art, not writing (or perhaps because of that fact), I feel more playful in my writing, too. What did I do? Index Card a Day: invented, managed, organized, and curated (and copyrighted) by Tammy Garcia over at DaisyYellowArt.com . The idea is that you somehow "decorate" an index card (either 3 X 5 or 4 X 6) per day, every day, starting June 1 and ending July 31. That's 61 days in which you take 5 or 15 or 65 minutes and cover the surface of an index card. * Nothing more precious--index cards are inexpensive--and nothing more ambitious. (That said, nobody's stopping you from doing other stuff if you have time or want to!) *...

Words, words, and so many more words. Getting them in the right order. Difficult to "stay on task"  (= persevere) on sullen, fickle summer days. Therefore, go there and read this. Aimee Bender explicates what writers can learn from the Margaret Wise Brown classic, Goodnight Moon, here . "Yes, move around in a structure. But also float out of that structure." That, and she contemplates the ending. Endings = tricky. But: persevere.

As you may have guessed from the post about wallpaper in the guest room and my absence from this URL, two important things have happened: we have guests and the sun has finally come out. Before the guests, though, and before summer consented to hang around for awhile, a bird gave me a framework in which to write about my frustration. Today that writing appears on River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative , at their Beautiful Things blog. You can read it here . And I highly recommend the blog in general, especially if you're personally sad or grouchy, or if world events threaten to pull you down into hopelessness. I've found that each entry reminds me to look for the beauty in a moment, even (especially) in a moment of difficulty.