Hidden Wolf Within Me: Serendipity

Often when I'm creating a collage it's not until afterwards that I notice serendipity - what I thought was a random word seems to align perfectly with an image or something in the placement of a particular piece balances out another "randomly" placed piece. There was a few things that came together when I did this piece for a mail art call, The Hidden Wolf Within Me, which went to the Philippines.

First, I printed this vintage image of a wolf on a page from a children's dictionary. I used the page with the word wolf on it, but just fed it into the printer without fussing with alignment. 

And this is what resulted. See how wolves aligned just above the eye? Serendipity for sure. 

That was cool, I thought, but then this happened.

Here is the reverse of the envelope (with a packing tape transfer added.) See how the word "within" just happened to be at the top of the page of the dictionary? Serendipity rather than any brilliant planning on my part (although my friend, Rebecca would disagree). 

So I added this. 

Writing Process "Blog Hop"

My friend, Jane Warren, whom I met at grad school (which she completed and I didn’t!), invited me to be part of a virtual game of blog tag. Fellow writers link from writer to writer, answering a few questions as we go. Since at the moment I am thinking about writing a lot more than doing it (kind of like I was thinking about writing my thesis instead of actually doing it), I thought this exercise was apropos. So, thanks for the invite, Jane. Make sure you take a moment to visit Jane’s site. She’s a very witty, intelligent writer and I look forward to reading her forthcoming work. 

Below I have tagged three writing friends: Kristin Butcher, Shelley Leedahl, and Sheryl McFarlane. Please take the time to visit their websites and/or blogs. (They'll be posting and linking to other great writers after May 12.) 


What am I working on?
I’m working on filling the well. My last major project was Long Beach Wild, which came out in 2012. Planet Ark, for young readers, came out in 2013, but I think it was Long Beach Wild that drained me. I had been thinking about this book for a long time and worked on it for at least five years. A good deal of primary research went into it and then there were the issues of having to pretty much cut it in half when it got to my publisher (sob) and having it just slink in under the wire before my publisher went in to creditor protection. (All resolved now and the book is out there in the world.) Those last two books were good projects I’m proud of, but other than having a few ideas stewing, I’m not working on any of my own projects at the moment. I am helping a friend write down her memories of living on a small island near Tofino, which is very enjoyable, and it's nice just to be the scribe and not the “creative genius” for a while. I also have a small publishing company, and we are slowly (very) releasing books, so that is keeping me close to books, even if I’m not actively immersed in writing one at the moment.

One note though. Even though I’m not working on an essay or book at the moment, I am writing. I’m writing more letters, which has been very enjoyable. And, for the moment, art – specifically collage and “correspondence art” (a fascinating movement I’m trying to learn all I can about) -- is helping provide  a creative outlet. 

How does my work differ from others of its genre?
This should be a shorter answer. The work I am most passionate about is rooted in place. My favourite essay, Stone Heart, was written when I was sailing in Haida Gwaii; Long Beach Wild comes from a fascination with local history and after spending years walking that long stretch of sand. I suppose my voice, which I try to stay true to, makes my work slightly different, but I don’t think you could pick it out of a lineup! I’m a fairly “straight up” writer and I think that’s why I’ve had a fair bit of success writing about science for children. You have to be able to explain things in a way that makes sense, while, hopefully, still holding the reader’s interest.

Why do I write what I do?
There are a few ways to approach this question. I write non-fiction because I love doing research. I feel as if I could research forever – visiting archives, doing interviews, travelling, etc. – but at some point you actually have to start writing!

Ideas get in my head that I can’t quite shake. The one and only novel I’ve ever worked on – a novel for children – started from an idea I had over 23 years ago. I can still remember the exact spot I was sitting when the idea came to me. I think about this story often and occasionally jot down ideas. Perhaps one day I will actually finish it. I live in eternal hope. 

More and more though, I write about the history of the west coast of Vancouver Island. Interviewing local people, visiting First Nations communities, spending time on the ocean and in the forest, are endlessly fascinating to me and this has been some of the most personally rewarding work I’ve done. I’ve met entirely new groups of people that I might not otherwise have met because I was interested in hearing their stories. For the most part, people just love to be asked.

How does my writing process work?
I am a morning person. When I was writing full time (and had young children), I could often get up at 5 or 5:30 and get right to my desk. Sometimes it felt like I started to work even before I woke up, because I often had an idea in my head that I just needed to get down. (More often than not it wasn’t actually a very good idea, but it felt urgent at the time!) I would do most of my writing during the morning and would try to save the early afternoon for research, answering emails, tending to the business of writing. By mid- to late-afternoon, I’d be done and ready to hit the beach or the garden. Now that I am working full time (at a "real" job), I  write when I can - in the evening, on weekends, or jot down ideas in a notebook when I'm on the beach. 


 KRISTIN BUTCHER

I’ve known Kristin for several years now. We’ve met at retreats and through various writerly events as we’re both part of the network of children’s writers on Vancouver Island and in British Columbia. Kristin is a whirlwind of energy and output. She is endlessly prolific and when she’s not writing, she’s creating art.

Kristin’s bio: Award-winning author, Kristin Butcher, is addicted to pencil and paper. She might be reading, writing, drawing, or painting, but it’s a sure bet paper is involved in some way. A teacher for 17 years, but a writer her whole life, Kristin published her first mid-grade novel (The Runaways/Kids Can Press) in 1997. She now has 21 titles for children and teens, with two more waiting in the wings. Look for Alibi (Orca Currents) in the fall and In Search of Sam (Dundurn YA) next spring. Learn more at: www.kristinbutcher.com

SHELLEY LEEDAHL

I first met Shelley about 14 or so years ago when we both attended the Labrador Creative Arts Festival. I suspect we are both still dining out on the stories that came from that experience! We’ve stayed in touch over the years and I am so delighted that she has just moved to Vancouver Island. This is very welcome news. Shelley is one of the most dedicated and hard-working writers that I know and I’m proud to have a section of my bookshelf dedicated to her poetry and fiction.

Shelley’s bio: Shelley A. Leedahl is a multi-genre literary writer, editor, and instructor. Aside from her numerous publications--including her most recent books, Listen, Honey (stories, DC Books),  Wretched Beast (poetry, BuschekBooks), and the forthcoming I Wasn't Always Like This (essays, Signature Editions) -- Leedahl also works part- time as a radio advertising copywriter. She was born and raised in Saskatchewan, and recently moved from Edmonton to Ladysmith, BC. Learn more at www.writersunion.ca/member/shelleya-leedahl.  

SHERYL McFARLANE

Back in 1988, when I first started to get into the publishing biz, there weren’t really that many of us around. But Sheryl McFarlane was and still is. Sheryl’s book Waiting for the Whales, is one of my all-time favourite children’s book. My editor gave it to me when my first daughter was born and I will never give this gem away (except, perhaps, to my own children’s children). Sheryl is a prolific writer of books for children and young adults and she is just plain passionate about books for young people. I so appreciate her work reviewing books and advocating for writers, writing, and literacy, which she keeps up on her blog, sherylbooks.wordpress.com.  

Sheryl’s bio: Sheryl McFarlane is the author of more than a dozen award-winning books and Ebooks for kids and teens, including Waiting for the Whales, Jessie's Island, and Eagle Dreams.  Island Santa, her latest picture book, is based on a west coast tradition of delivering gifts by boat at Christmas time to those living in isolated coastal communities. Sheryl lives in Victoria, Canada. Learn more at www.sherylmcfarlane.ca and  www.sherylbooks.wordpress.com

Slightly Random Round-up

A few upcoming events and things that caught my eye:

If you live in British Columbia, particularly if you're close to Vancouver, and you are interested in writing for children, mark March 10 on your calendar. That day, several talented artists and illustrators from CWILL-BC (the Children's Writers and Illustrators of BC) will be holding a workshop with lots of tips on the industry. And on March 8, there's Serendipity, an event put on the the Vancouver Children's Literature Roundtable. This wonderful event brings together writers, illustrators, publishers, bloggers, all with a shared passion for children's literature.  This year, Caldecott award winning illustrator, Paul Zelinsky, will be presenting as will be Canadian writers, Arthur Slade (winner of the Governor General's award for children's fiction) and Hadley Dyer, who just recently won the Children's Information Book award.

Who knew there was such a thing as a Rubber Stamp Archive?

There are (hundreds) more female writers on the Canadian lit scene than Atwood, Shields and Munro (obviously), but CBC gives us a list of 10 Canadian women you need to read. It's a great start. (Especially Ania Szado.)

And dust off your fountain pens, pull out that stationery you've been hoarding, February is A Month of Letters. The idea is to send out at least one letter or card a day. I had a pretty high volume in January, so I'll try to keep up the pace.

And would another country (or planet?) please take these jokers off our hands?

Art As Therapy

We've been talking a lot about happiness, perspective, one's purpose in life, etc. in our household. Big questions brought on by some challenging times. This morning we read something about happiness and the "tipster" doctor in the article said how one of the keys to happiness is to find something that you can get completely lost in. I'm not entirely sure why, but that's how I feel about collage at the moment. The sorting through bits of paper and ephemera, the tiny snips with scissors, the positioning of random papers together into something that makes a pleasing whole. It's a meditation of sorts and it seems to be leading me at the moment.

This video by Alain de Botton (he of The School of Life; how cool is that?) was very inspiring and timely. It's well worth a watch and when you're done, hop on over to Brain Pickings for more on de Botton's book, Art as Therapy.

The Joy of Books

The Joy of Books, indeed. What happens in your local bookstore at night?



This is what the owners of Type wrote re. the video:

After organizing our bookshelf almost a year ago (http://youtu.be/zhRT-PM7vpA), my wife and I decided to take it to the next level. We spent many sleepless nights moving, stacking, and animating books at Type bookstore in Toronto. Everything you see here can be purchased at Type Books. Grayson Matthews generously composed the beautiful, custom music. But none of it could have been done without all the volunteer hands who shelved and reshelved books all night, every night.

Thanks to Patricia Storm via Quill and Quire.

A Book Cover Love Story

Such a great short film for bibliophiles (and lovers of bookstores, cheesy love stories, Paris, fabric art and such). (Disclaimer: The last few minutes aren't for children!)

Spike Jonze: Mourir Auprès de Toi on Nowness.com.

You can read more about how the film, Mourir Auprès de Toi, came to be over at director Spike Jonze's site.

Thanks, once again, to the fabulous Brainpicker for putting me onto this. You should subscribe to her feeds and support her. Really. Her compiling of all things fabulous is so good.)

Like I Need Another Project

But this is a short one! A project to celebrate (or perhaps, mark, is the better word) my half-century on this planet.

The Elements of Style (rap version)

Terrible moustaches, good advice.

Bat in Hat

Last year I received a very interesting gift and it spurred the start of a new Christmas tradition around here:



Yup, that's a bat in a "hat" on the top of our tree.



It's a very cool bat puppet that my sweet sister got me last Christmas. (By artist Susan Cain of Hornby Island.) The hat is actually a sock I knit for one of my girls when they were little. It makes a good stand-in for a Santa hat.

So what's on the top of your tree this year?

PS This is the beauty that the bat replaced.



What do you think? Did we make the right decision?

(Apologies for the poor quality of the photos. I have a new camera and am too impatient to read the instructions.)

Kids Need Books (and many don't have them)

This is a pretty startling report from the UK.

So I learn with despair of the latest findings from the National Literacy Trust which show that a third of all children – nearly four million – do not own a single book.

It's a simple thing we can all try to do something about. (One easy idea that we started at our local school -- where I suspect this issue is a reality for some children -- is to set up a bookshelf near the front door of the school. We ask people to drop off gently-used children's books. The children can take a book if they'd like. What they do with it then is up to them. They could keep it, return it, share it with someone else. It doesn't matter.)

Telling a Story, Stitch by Stitch

I have a thing for fabric and textiles. I'm not sure where it came from, but whenever I am trolling through thrift shops or yard sales, it is the fabric, needlework, and such that catches my eye. So I was in heaven over the last two weeks as I travelled through Nova Scotia as I took a short vacation and delivered Daughter A to university. So many lovely quilts and, oh, the rugs. I don't have room for a quilt or the cash for the rug I would have loved, but I certainly took time to look over them and appreciate the work. And I thought about the stories, because they all have one. Perhaps it was just a record of a place captured hook-by-hook in wool or there are the stories of who a quilt was made for or why a particular fabric was chosen. But the hand-stitched work that will be forever etched in my memory, is the four panel story of Fort Anne, that greeted me as I walked in the historic site's visitor centre. Here are two of the four panels. [Photo from here.]

This beauty was four floor-to-ceiling panels high. The Fort Anne Heritage Tapestry was designed by Kyoko Grenier-Sago, who then painted the work onto the needlepoint canvas. It took 100 volunteers over 3 million stitches to create this beauty — the story of Fort Anne. If you find yourself in Annapolis Royal, you must go see it for yourself. (Or, you can take a virtual tour of the site, which was fabulous and a must-see for all Canadians. So much of our early settlement history started here.)

Jane Yolen's Tea Party

I adore Jane Yolen and her work and I find this very frightening. I guess I could laugh it all off, but something nasty, perhaps sinister?, seems afoot in our neighbour to the south and I find it deeply unsettling.

Stories in Scraps

My goodness. I hardly know what to say about these and the stories behind them, except that I want to learn more and I want to visit this place one day.

[Thanks for Wild Muse and Cafe Cartolina for their links.]

A Random Sunday

I've been busy with several writing projects - a new children's book, the last details on the Tofino walking tour, and finally finalizing the details on a book I affectionately call The Long Suffering Beach Book, but I've been trolling the Net as per usual too, and here are a few links I've been meaning to share.

Three new takes on the alphabet book.

Recently bought to satisfy the wannabe field naturalist in my nature, at least voyeuristically.

Incredible images from plastic cups, repeated words, plastic dolls.

My absolute favourite new go to website. (With the best name.)

Another new favourite, New to Nature.

Look what you can do with 35,000 staples.

Ten things I should really try to do.

Thoughts on darkness in YA fiction from writer Jocelyn Shipley.

Typewriters of the Literati

There's something about the clackity-clack of a typewriter. It's nostalgic, but I seem to recall having to really whack the keys of the old style models. It probably hurt. Good therapy perhaps?

I dropped French to take typing, so I'm a pretty good typist and know my way around the keyboard (but I really wish I knew French too), but I'm glad our current keyboards are quiet and don't require carbon copies (actual ones), White-Out, and re-typing a new version every time you make a mistake.

Here are some writers and their typewriters. I do love my grandmother's though.

My First Published Work

Although I am trying to reform, I am a bit of a pack rat. But, in my defense, I think I come by that honestly. My father is an archivist and my mother, well, she keeps the best things. I was just home for a few days and I promised my soon-to-graduate daughter, A, that I would find my high school grad photos. Well, lo and behold, I also found two of my first attempts at writing, which were published in the Doncaster Gazette (or something like that; I can't find the original student publication although I'm sure it's stored away somewhere). So here, for your reading pleasure (or not), is my first story, The Story of a Elephant and a Canary.



As you can probably tell, we must have been studying Aesop's Fables in my grade one class (with my beloved Miss Little and her beautiful mini beehive). I think this must have been a riff on Androcles and the Lion (or maybe it was The Lion and the Mouse?)You can see how I sort of forget half way through and change the elephant to a lion? Where was the editor? Anyhow, this cracks me up every time I read it.

Here is Miss Little and her circa mid-1960s not-quite-as-much-as-a-beehive-as-I-thought:


And here is moi in the same era:

Letter to the Tooth Fairy

Once upon a time, I wrote the tooth fairy and she answered.



It is very faded, so this is what it says (with spelling intact):

Dear fairy cod
you draw a Picture
of yourself and
your name.
From Adrienne

your name [The tooth fairy wrote "Twinkle" in this space.]

picture [with arrow pointing down]

The tooth fairy drew a self-portrait in red crayon.

A Room of My Own (2)

Okay, the second wall. My office is such a mess (an organized one, mind you) that I have been putting off posting this, but here I am; the truth of it all. This is my second desk, where I usually shift when I want to spread things out (ahem, once the surface is cleared as much as possible) or write by hand. It is also where I dump my junk when I come into the office.



When we had our house renovation done (which is when I got a real office and not just a corner in another room) we added these cubbies as an after-thought. I am so glad the carpenter suggested them. Some of them are specifically kept to file the papers and books I need for a specific project —



Others are kept for little vignettes because, well, I'm a bit of a pack-rat and like any self-respecting pack-rat, I like pretty and interesting things.



(The cubbies also are a great surface for sticky notes, something that breed in my office environment.)



The Golden Book of Biology is my gem. I love it, because I love Charlie Harper's art (plus, I'm a biologist) so I was delighted to find out it was worth a bit of cash. Only when I am absolutely desperate will I part with it. (Or maybe not.) Other things here are two hearts (one in stone, one in wood) carved by men (well, boys, actually) other than my husband (see note above about pack-rat-itis), rarely used lipstick, round stones I love, ear phones, iPod, etc. and a great little change purse that says, "old enough to know better...young enough to give a rat's ass." (Apologies to any young ears.)

A Room of My Own (1)

Besides, "How old are you?" or "How much money do you make?" (favourites of younger audiences), one of the most common questions I get asked is "Where do you work?" (Or, "What is your writing routine?")

Routine? I guess I have one, but since I do other things than just write books, it depends at bit on what is going on. Generally (read: on the best of days!) I try to rise fairly early, about 5 or 5:30. I am a morning person, so can easily get a cup of coffee and get right down to work. That's when I do my most creative work. By mid-morning I switch over to editing or research and by mid-afternoon I'm usually down to paying bills and sorting piles. I try to fit in some sort of exercise in between it all - yoga or some light weights, a walk, or a bit of time on my "tread desk." (More on that coming soon.) This schedule, such as it is, goes to hell when I have a looming deadline. Then, I work when I can, including evenings and weekends.

As to where I work, I am lucky to have a room of my own. It is frequently overflowing with piles of papers and books, but there is a semblance of organization and is possibly my favourite room in the house. (I do love my work, but it's good to shut the door at the end of the day.) I thought you might want to take a peek, so I'll be posting pictures of various angles. I did not clean up before pressing the shutter. (That is probably more than apparent.) First up:



This is my "filing system" for a very large project I've been working on for several years. I had huge amounts of research to organize and this is only a part of it. I originally had piles all over my office floor, then finally hauled this old bookshelf out of the shed and put it to good use. This photo was taken when I was finally finished (as finally as I can be for the moment; there are lots of edits to do) so I was sorting and cleaning. Each shelf once had three piles about the size of the one in the lower right corner. I've now squeezed them in to five bankers boxes. The two large flower paintings (one only partially visible) done by Daughters A and P. The smaller one is a thrift store find. I have another large flower painting from Daughter A to add to the wall.

(By the way, the little book you can see on the top shelf in the upper left, is The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin as a BOARD BOOK, which I find hilarious. Honestly, what baby would care less? And I would love to see parents trying to explain it all to their wee one. (And having written quite a bit about evolution, I can't imagine that someone would think condensing it in to five pictures was an easy thing to do.) The book is one of a series of four board books, "Children's Condensed Classics." I also have Shakepeare's All the World's a Stage and Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in board book version!)



On the top shelf is my grandmother's old Underwood typewriter. It is just so beautiful and so heavy. I could build some serious biceps by bench pressing it! I love having it nearby and will have to track down from tape so I can actually use it.

Is Your Blackberry Working?

This reminds me of a cartoon I saw years ago with a duck holding a mallet above his computer. The caption read, "Hit any key."