Writing Notes... and Reading Aloud
Morning Pages
I love doing my morning pages, a practice created by Julia Cameron. When I'm done filling up a notebook, I go back for a quick check, to see if I left any marked passages without revisiting them. Typically, a passage marked with a line in the margin will have either a checkmark, telling me I've already copied it, or the line will be scratched over, meaning I didn't think the passage was worth using. Sometimes it's useful material for my writing projects, like Seven Drifts, or for a blog post, or for a newsletter, etc. Sometimes it's just quick reflections, or ideas, more or less developed, about all kinds of subjects, or passages I find interesting or amusing, for which I have no immediate use, but that I'd like to keep at hand, on my computer. Because once a notebook goes to join the dozens of others just like it on my shelves, the chances drop drastically that I'll open it again for a very, very long time.
Here's a small bit of notebook: a short passage I had marked and forgotten, in the notebook I finished this morning. I didn't expect my explanation to take more space than the passage itself, but here it is.
"Why all this ranting this morning? To fill up pages until there are three of them? Nope. Because I know that sometimes, the most ludicrous notions give birth to the most beautiful ideas. So I revisit things, and sometimes, ideas with no apparent connection turn out to be connected after all, or rather, to have strange relations*, and from these strange relations, more ideas are born, new, young and beautiful, vital; essential to the survival of the species: the species of ideas. A baby idea grows slowly at first, wailing; it feeds every three hours and wakes you up at night; and it grows, and grows... You're a bit exhausted, but your small ideas become big ones, and a short story, a novel, and another story that might exist in another time and place, a draft, an outline, a plan, another draft, a discussion, some words, other plans, other drafts; you test this and you test that, and it all grows; it grows and adds up, it piles up; it also gets forgotten sometimes; you can drop some, and find them again at the bottom of the notebook or the file, and say... Hello, you!"
*A nod to Philip José Farmer's short-story collection Strange Relations. Worth a look!
And now, since we're talking about ideas that slip into oblivion, and even... books, or authors! Here's a little slice of life.
Reading Aloud
My father is a great reader. But nowadays, he has trouble reading on his own. He's still a great reader, though... thanks to my sister. She came up with the idea of reading aloud to him. They began with historical novels, then moved on to all kinds of fascinating things. I realized I could contribute too, so I made it a habit, in the evening, to FaceTime my dad and read with him. I love it! He loves it too.
He'd first suggested a book by literature professor Patricia Smart: Writing Herself into Being: Quebec Women's Autobiographical Writings from Marie de l'Incarnation to Nelly Arcan (we read the original French edition, Boréal, 2014; Smart translated it herself for McGill-Queen's University Press in 2017). With a few pages a day, we got through it in a few weeks, and it was fascinating. I would never have read this book without him. I wouldn't even have known it existed.
It taught me all kinds of surprising things. The author gathered everything she could find in diaries, letters and autofiction by women in New France and Quebec, from the 17th century to the present day. Together, we travelled through the Patriote era with Julie Papineau, the 19th century with a slew of diaries by young women from prominent families, writers' journals from the early 20th century, all the way to Nelly Arcan's autofiction.
One title came up a few times: La maison aux phlox, by Michelle Le Normand. I suggested we give it a look. Le Normand's books are long out of print, but they're all online, well archived, and easy to read (in French only). We started with La maison aux phlox, a collection of short stories published in 1941. Then we went back to the beginning of her work: Autour de la maison, 1916; Couleur du temps, 1919; Enthousiasme, 1947; and these days, Le nom dans le bronze, 1933. Most of them were published by Le Devoir's own press.
They're short stories about anything and everything, some passages a bit too religious for my taste, but they reflect the times, and some downright magical descriptions of Montreal, the Laurentians, the Gaspé Peninsula (Chandler and its barachois!), as these places were back then. Both very different and the same. Captivating. It's evocative, colourful, funny, touching; it reads so well, it rolls off the tongue and is a pleasure to hear. Perfect for a dad with a passion for literature and history.
Has anyone ever read aloud to you? Or have you read to someone?
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