This is an  eight session online course during which participants create a complete narrative (fiction or non-fiction)  that centres on a journey of some kind.  It was developed for a group of writers in the UK, and seems to be going very well, so  I think I’ll offer it again. Please use the enquiry form to register interest  or ask for further information.

Ticket to Write

Telegraph-Journal, New Brunswick, Saturday May 5^th, 2012

“In the Flesh, edited by Kathy Page and Lynne Van Luven,  Brindle and Glass, 240 pp

In this collection, 20 essayists explore complicated relationships with their bodies. Each writer focuses on a different part of the body and, in so doing, intimately reveals what’s inside and behind it.

The narratives are deeply personal. Sue Thomas rolls her gall- stones around in her hand as she thinks about her pancreas. Stephen Gauer explores organ donation through his own experience of donating a kidney to his granddaughter. In his meditation on skin, Taiaiake Alfred writes of his place in a racist hierarchy. Caroline Adderson considers the centrality of hair to our sense of ourselves, painfully illustrated by her visit to Auschwitz and its room of full of stolen hair.

This collection is not for the squeamish. Margaret Thompson’s reflection on the ear is clever and visceral with a description of someone with a beetle in his ear who “tried to flush the insect out with melted butter.” Trevor Cole’s Eyes is put together perfectly, every word where it should be, as when he describes his young allergic eyes: “The whites were a sickly yellow and bulging out grotesquely, surrounding the irises like rising bread dough.” Eww.

A story about the vagina is written by a man (André Alexis), while Merilyn Simonds writes of the penis, and this switch is an editorial choice that not all readers will agree with. This reader would have liked to read a woman’s perspective on her vagina, as in Lynne Van Luven’s funny and honest account of her conflicted relationship with her breasts.

In all, this collection is a thorough and provocative look at the body, broken down into its messy, beautiful and complicated parts.”

Rebecca Higgins for the Telegraph-Journal

Link to CBC North by Northwest  interview  about In the Flesh with Sheryl Mackay, Kathy Page, Lynne Van Luven and Juliann Gunn

“The collection, published by Brindle & Glass, is anecdotal and educational, witty and at times heart-breaking. Its finely crafted writing serves to underline the strange truths of how we inhabit and make sense of our forms, which are created both by nature and culture….” Review in the Gulf Islands Driftwood

“In all, this collection is a thorough and provocative look at the body, broken down into its messy, beautiful and complicated parts.”

Review in the Telegrpah-Journal

Lynne Van Luven introduces the book on Youtube

Language begins in and with the  body, and much work has gone into naming all of its many parts, and describing their function and malfunction.  But what  do we have to say or write about our physical selves, about the complicated way we experience of our bodies? Love them, hate them, can’t escape them…  Body and Soul, which focuses on narratives about illness and healing, came out  at the end of last year, and includes The Right Thing to Say, a short story of mine about genetic testing. You’ll find it here.

In the Flesh: Twenty Writers Explore the Body,  co-edited by Kathy Page and Lynne van Luven, came out in April 2012  and is  available as a trade paperback and e-book.   I’m biased, of course, but this is a fascinating book and it was  a huge amount of fun to put together.   Each author’s essay focuses on one part of the body, and explores its function, its meanings, and the role it has played in that person’s life.   We think of writers as cerebral types, but here they confront the suff they are made from  with candour, insight and wit.

We are doing events for In the Flesh at the moment, and just  as happened when Lynne and I were compiling the book, everywhere I look there seems to be a reference of some kind to the body, or a new and startling  image of it.

Visual representation of the body may well have begun  with a hand print on a cave wall; thousands of years of sculpture and mark-making  and a hundred and  sixty years of photography  ensued. Now we have not only Antony Gormley, but the likes of Orlan and Damian Hirst,  who use the body and its products  to make their art…  Recently,  I stumbled across the work of Spencer Tunick, who, ironically given that his second name suggests an item of clothing, creates installations in which thousands of naked people take up similar positions or stances  in a land or city-scape, and are photographed. Participants tavel the world to be part of these works and speak of a sense of liberation and  a powerful feeling of being connected with others,  and also part of something much larger than themselves.  As for the spectacle viewed from outside, what to make of it? Why are all the people pink? Does Tunick mean us to think of  the gas chambers?   How is it to be him, dressed, directing everyone?

Victoria

29th April, 2:30 PM at the Yoga Den, 1311 Gladstone Ave, Victoria, BC.

Readers include Dede Crane, Kathy Page,  Taiaiake Alfred,  Margaret Thompson, Julian Gunn and Lynne Van Luven.

Salt Spring Island

6th May, 7 PM in Artspring Theatre, 100 Jackson Avenue, Ganges. Sponsored by Salt Spring Books.  Readers include Brian Brett, Margaret Thompson, Lynne Van Luven, Richard Steel,  and Julian Gunn.

All welcome. Free. Please visit our Facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/InTheFleshTwentyWritersExploreTheBody

IN THE FLESH is an intelligent, witty, and provocative look at how we think about—and live within—our bodies. The editors and writers in this collection describe, in many voices, what human bodies feel now. Each author’s candid essay focuses on one part of the body, and explores its function, its meanings, and the role it has played in his or her life.

With original essays by Caroline Adderson, André Alexis, Taiaiake Alfred, Brian Brett, Trevor Cole, Dede Crane, Lorna Crozier, Candace Fertile, Stephen Gauer, Julian Gunn, Heather Kuttai, Susan Olding, Kathy Page, Kate Pullinger, Merilyn Simonds, Richard Steel, Madeleine Thien, Sue Thomas, Margaret Thompson, and Lynne Van Luven.

I’m very excited about this forthcoming title, In the Flesh: Twenty Writers Explore the Body.  The idea for a book of writing about the body first came to me over ten years ago, and I worked for a while on it with my friend Sue Thomas. It went through various metamorphoses, lay dormant for a while and then, in collaboration with another friend, Lynne Van Luven, it was distilled into its current form and taken up by Brindle & Glass.

Each writer was invited to choose (or, in some cases, gently steered towards!)  a particular body part and asked to write a candid personal essay exploring that part and their relationship with it. The assumption was that writers  had to possess (or have possessed) a particular part in order to write about it. However, we abandoned this rule in the case of two very significant parts, as you will see below.

The twenty essays that resulted from our rather odd invitations are fascinating and utterly distinctive in content and tone.  Witty, sad, quirky, passionate: each one reads beautifully alone; put together, they create a fascinating, multi-dimensional portrait of the human body and our experience of living within it.

Here, to whet your appetite, is the contents page:

Introduction: Prison and Paradise by Kathy Page and Lynne Van Luven

 Face, Hair, Tongue . . .

            Reading Faces by Julian Gunn

            120,000 Strands by Caroline Adderson

            The Tongue, from Childhood to Dotage by Madeleine Thein

Skin, Eyes, Ears . . .

            What I Think of When I Think of Skin by Taiaike Alfred

            Eyes by Trevor Cole

            The Covert Ear by Margaret Thompson

Brain, Hands, Feet . . .

            The Human Brain by Lorna Crozier

            Hand Over Hand by Kathy Page

            Pas de Deux by Dede Crane

Vagina, Penis, Womb, Breasts, Ass . . .

My Vagina by André Alexis

Twenty Questions (Eight, really. It’s never as long as you think), by Merilyn Simmonds

My Womb Works, by Heather Kutai

Life With My Girls by Lynne Van Luven

My Flat Cree Ass by Candace Fertile

Bones, Blood, Heart, Back . . .

Cage of Bones by Brian Brett

Blood Typing by Susan Olding

A Serious Arteriopath by Kate Pullinger

BAD Back by Richard Steel

Kidney, Pancreas . . .

The Frankenstein Syndrome, or Giving Away the Body by Stephen Gauer

 And Inside, Silence by Sue Thomas

This new piece, published in Carte Blanche,  centres on a day out with two nonagenarians: one of the last excursions my parents and I took together.  http://carte-blanche.org/the-perfect-day/

This article about emigration, gardening and family, was first published in Aqua Magazine, p28 on.   Click to  read it in the turning pages magazine format  with original illustrations. The text is below.

What I am planting, how it grows

In one of those windy, sunny days when  the light and sound levels are in constant flux, as if an exuberant  toddler  were  in charge of the effects, I crouch over my rows of carrot seedlings, thinning them to  a centimetre apart and knowing full well that I will have to do the job twice more before things are right. Every year I try and fail to sow them thinly enough. The seedlings are tiny, the first ferny carrot-leaves just appearing, their white stems fragile as hairs. I keep the plucked ones in my free hand to dispose of safely, since crushed foliage of any kind can attract the carrot fly.  It’s tedious, finicky work.  And at this time of day I should actually be working on my new novel, and I want to, I really,  really do – yet here I am squatting in the vegetable patch, an inane smile  spreading across my face.

In the bed behind me are rows of  huge lettuces with crinkled deep red and green leaves protecting tender green hearts.  To my right, onions, to the left, two kinds of potatoes and three kinds of beans,  rhubarb, beets, peas; over by the house, flowerbeds: all of them thriving under current wet then sunny conditions.   There’s a greenhouse  full of tomato plants over by the rocky knoll, and of course,  in between all these areas of cultivation lie vast  tracts of weed and wildflower, and round about it, the encircling trees.  The whole place hums with growth. What is it with gardening? Why do I love my lettuces so much?   Because I do: I love the crinkled gleaming look of them when they are thriving (this variety, Yugoslav Butterhead is as gorgeous as any flower), and I love the almost–sweet, wild taste and the soft yet very definite texture  of a just-picked leaf. Naturally, it delights me to be able to  avoid the pesticides and the supermarket, to feed my family and friends with what I have grown.  And gardening is certainly easier, mentally speaking,  than writing books… There’s all that,  of course, and yet there is more, too.

To use a gardening metaphor, my family and I transplanted ourselves here from England about ten years ago. Language, climate,  and values were in may ways similar,  so we didn’t  go into transplant shock on arrival, but I have come to realise that while there may be romance and excitement  to a voluntary move such as ours, it is also a brutal thing. Even though emigration  is  softer, less absolute than it used to be before there were planes, phones, the internet and so on, leaving one’s country to make a home in another is  a rupture – one that deepens, rather than lessens over time. I miss not only my family –  especially, now, my father –  and not just certain loved or archetypical land and city-scapes,  but  also unexpected things such as newspapers and  radio programmes, accents, trains and train journeys, certain bushes and shrubs,  clothes that don’t shrink, and the relatively high quality of  supermarket-baked bread…  Emigration disconnects you from the physical  locations of your past, and also from the future that would have flowed from that past, had you not left, and so even though Canada, and in particular this convoluted, rocky island,  has been kind to me,  I  sometimes  yearn (impossibly) to return.

So, I  dispose of my carrot thinnings and  then return to the garden to  tug out the chickweed and dandelions that have started to grow  between the garlic plants. This forest soil, sandy and acidic is not what garlic wants.  It takes at least five years of adding compost and manure to  darken and develop real fertility. But the summer light and warmth are wonderful,  and if, as we do, you collect and store the winter’s abundant  rainwater,  it will take you right  through the dry  summer months.   The garlic is already tall and as  I reach between the stems, the sun warms my back and somewhere out of sight an eagle sings – a   strange fluting noise quite incongruous with the bird.

The eagle and its call are emblematic of   the West Coast, and I think one of the things I am doing here in the garden is joining myself, literally and symbolically, to a new  land. The hours I spend  out here working are also hours spent listening to the birds, the rustle of the deer  and the wind in the trees. I  observe the sky and the way the light shifts and changes, the weather, the quality of the air: I experience the same patch of land, many different ways.  I’m learning it and at the same time becoming part of it.

Yet the thing about gardening is that I have done it all my life, and so, despite this garden being so very definitely on the Pacific Rim, a new place for me, five thousand miles away from where I was born, tending  it reconnects me to my past.  When I am in the garden I am me, now,  working with raised beds and fish compost, dealing with tent caterpillars in my fruit trees,  sowing  peas called Cascadia and  beans called Gold Rush;  I am also a young woman with an allotment patch in London, the owner of a window box and then of thin, shade-free  hundred foot slice in Norwich,  of a shady square, of a rubble-ridden rectangle in Tooting Bec  -  I’m all of those, but most  of all, but I’m  a child,  being shown by my father how to weed properly and how far apart to plant  the  peas.

There was a magnolia tree in the front of the house I grew up in, and Dahlias, plagued by earwigs,   grew to one side of the path that led to the front door.  Most of the garden was at the back, and it included both a  tree-house built  in a pussy-willow tree, and a swing  set close by a laburnum, the flowers and pods of which I was frequently reminded not to eat.   There was a peach tree on the south facing wall of the house, a  hazelnut, and several apple varieties.   A bed of azaleas and rhododendrons (which grow wild here) was treated annually to maintain the correct PH. Behind that  was a mysterious, key-shaped area surrounded in an ancient yew hedge that  had been  part of the grounds of the manor house on which the subdivision was built.

The vegetable garden ran down the  left side, from the kitchen to the  swing, and was my father’s domain:  the plants in  workmanlike rows, the soil  turned each spring. Before meals, my sisters and I would be sent out to pick. We were taught how to do that properly: how to  find the runner beans amongst the foliage, and take them before they got tough;  how to feel the pea pods and judge what was inside,  to turn potatoes without spoiling to many with the fork,  to rub the soil away from the tops of the carrots so as to make sure they were worth pulling,  and judge the ripeness of fruit. One of the best things was picking a  peach,  cupping it in your hand and  turning gently until it  came free.

My mother was in charge of storage: we wrapped lettuce or chard (which had to be picked or it would bolt) in damp newspaper  before we put it in the  salad drawer, and kept roots cool  in a  mini-cellar by the back door.  Apples and pears were wrapped in newspaper and stored in boxes in the garage. Convenience food was  increasingly available, but we had none of it.

My father commuted daily to his office job. My parents came from the inner city and grew up with untended, postage-stamp sized gardens, and none of our neighbours grew food. But it was what we did, and it’s what I do now. There’s no peach tree here, but I’ve shown my children (and my husband) many of the things I was taught.

The  wind  picks up. The  broad beans, which here we call fava, need staking – that’s what I’ll do next, and before I go in  I’ll pick rhubarb and some salad greens: lettuce, spinach, rocket – which here is called arugula.

My parents tended that first garden for over fifty years, their second, for less than ten. My  mother’s gone, my father no longer digs and hoes. But I call and  tell him week by week, what I am planting, how it grows.

It’s because of you, I tell him, that I’m on my knees in the dirt.

I think that’s as it should be, he says.

“Canada’s ReLit Award–founded to acknowledge the best new work released by independent publishers–may not come with a purse, but it brings a welcome, back-to-the-books focus to the craft.”  Amazon.com

The Find is one of ten titles short-listed for the 2011 Relit Award (Novel):

http://therelitawards.blogspot.com/

Storylines: a Workshop with Kathy Page

How does an idea become a fully-fledged short story, novel or non-fiction narrative? We’ll experiment with new ways to find and develop story ideas, and then begin to create the story itself. This workshop is an opportunity to start fresh work,  to develop something you have had in mind for a while, or even  to sidestep a block.

The workshop will be held 8th & 9th October 2011,  from 10 – 4 each day  in the author’s home on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, and is suitable for all levels of experience.

Max class size: 12

Cost: $190 includes tea and coffee; students  bring their own lunches.

For further information about Kathy Page’s books and courses, please explore www.kathypage.info

To register, or for further information about this workshop,  email: kathypage@shaw.ca