Monthly Archives: March 2024

First, burn the Morning Pages, then, burn the body

1

I did a very stupid thing this weekend.

I sampled a decade of my Morning Pages.

I didn’t plan to. It just happened. But wait. I’m telling the story badly.

Morning Pages are the foundational practice of The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron’s 12 week recovery program for blocked creatives.

Shut up. I know it sounds woo-woo. It is. It’s ridiculous. There’s too much god in the book, also, kindergarten craft activities involving glue, glitter and imagines from magazines, exercises about childhood memories and worse.

It’s kooky.

It’s 100 per cent not science or research-based. The word “intuition” appears about twice a paragraph.

It steals wholesale from the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.

It works.

The Artist’s Way works.

And the Morning Pages are its foundation. Three pages of long-handed writing, written right after you wake up — according to Julia, before you have coffee, do yoga etc. (I think she allows you to pee, although that’s not explicitly mentioned.) Me, I make the coffee first and drink it as I write, but that’s the only cheat I engage in.

I make the coffee, I sit down and I write.

Three pages.

About nothing, about everything.

My pages are often about how I don’t want to write them. I have nothing to write about. Or, I have too much to write — I want to jump right into the current work in progress. Or, these days, get to work and do all the things I’ve got happening that day — I want to get started now!

Sometimes, they’re about how I’m hungry and I can’t wait to eat breakfast. Or a debate about whether I should make more coffee after I finish writing, because I’m just on page two and the press is already empty…

Sometimes, I write this: Letters make words. Words make sentences. Look, that’s three sentences. Actually, a paragraph. At which point will this rambling become a thought that can be split across to paragraphs. Words. Word by word. Write. Just keep writing.

Silly, right?

But also — it’s in the morning pages that I’ve planned all of my novels, tried to find ways to stay in my marriage, found my way to divorce, anchored myself and stayed breathing and functioning when all else failed.

Morning pages are like journaling, I suppose. But also, different. You get three pages. You must write three pages even if you don’t want to write, even if you feel you have nothing to write about. Word by word. Sentence by sentence. Write until something comes. And you write. And at a page and a half, like clockwork, the hard truth appears.

At the end of page three, you stop.

You want to write more? You can’t, says Julia. You still have something to stay after page three? Execute. Turn into into art. Write a scene, a poem (a blog post).

Draft a screenplay.

The pages are a place to rest, sort, get inspired — to move you to action. Not to hide.

I told you. Woo-woo. Kooky.

They work.

2

The other rule of Morning Pages is you don’t talk about Fight Club. I mean — you don’t show them to anyone. Not your therapist, not your writing group — not the people you’re working through The Artist’s Way with. Julia’s advice is to not even show them to yourself. Put them away. Revisit them later if you like, but not the next day or the week after.

Julia also suggests you make arrangements with a trusted friend to have them destroyed when you die, so you don’t traumatize your children and friends. Or, I suppose, strangers…

She re-reads her pages periodically, to see where they are guiding her.

I don’t. I haven’t for 10 years.

My advice, after this weekend? Destroy them as soon as you write them.

3

I started keeping Morning Pages in September 2014, about a year after the Calgary flood and my monumental not-really-flood-related-but-everything’s-conflated post-flood crash. I promised to start them because a cute girl insisted I give The Artist’s Way a try. I had to trick myself into the process. I had burned all my diaries and stopped reflective writing when I was 16, for very good reasons. I did not want to expose myself like that again.

So for the first two months, I did not write Morning Pages. I wrote in the morning, and I wrote about three pages, but I used writing prompts to draft random scenes of what would become my second novel. And then, eventually, with gritted teeth, I told myself to do the whole 12-week program, glitter and all. If I managed to do that, I’d let myself consider a creative writing MFA. A writer’s retreat. A trip to Cuba.

Something.

Instead, the Morning Pages helped me write a third novel. Then a fourth. Then another. And another. A trilogy. An idea for a seven-book series. Redefined my marriage. Kept me on this side of sane while my child fought for her life. Helped me end my marriage with grace. Saw me through the pandemic and the end and beginning of so many, many things.

They took me to Cuba, too, actually.

Everything is in my Morning Pages.

They’re full of 10 years of terrible things.

4

Not just terrible things, of course. Plenty of good things happened in that decade too.

But all the terrible things are there. In grotesque detail. Writ large in pain.

5

I’ve never counted the notebooks and math is hard, but it takes me about two and a half months to fill the average notebook. So that’s about 5 notebooks a year. Times 10 years. About 50 notebooks. Plus some sketchbooks and process journals. 

I threw most of the process journals and sketchbooks away, easily. They’re not meant to be product. Or to be revisited.

The Pages, though.

I was going to throw them away. All of them. Burn them. Ritually.

But what happened is, I flip one open. I see a story. I don’t remember the story. I don’t remember the memory. Now I do. I flip over a few more pages. Pain. Lies.

The lies are the worst — the parts where I see myself lying to myself. (I know they’re lies, because the truth comes eventually. Later.)

The pain is awful, but at least it’s true.

The lies are a betrayal. Stupidity. 

They bring shame.

They need to be burned.

But.

In-between the pain and the lies—story origins, story ideas, story attempts.

I hesitate.

That’s a really neat one. I don’t remember it—but oh. I want to write it. Maybe now I have the chops to write it. I didn’t back then.

In the end, I don’t throw away the pain and lies, because I want to keep the stories.

6

I don’t have a cute wrap-up for this post. Truthfully, what happens is, I don’t deal with it. I stack 10 years of lies, pain and stories — and good moments too, but you know, where’s the drama in that? — in the corner of the crack house living room and hide them with my reading chair. I’ll burn them eventually. Soon.

I will not carry them with me into the future — I will not move with them again.

I will leave them behind.

But first. I will go through them and rip out the stories.

Not today though. Not next weekend.

But soon.

Eventually.

xoxo

“Jane”

PS Flora, my child, if I die before getting my act together and destroying the journals, shred them all. Burn them all. Don’t read them, don’t let anyone else read them. Thank you. Love, Mom PS2 Remember, Murder Mystery funeral. I’ll leave a few different scenarios you can use but if you’ve got a better idea, do it. I won’t care — I’ll be dead. PS3 Not dying. Just freeforming. This is why you need to burn the Morning Pages. Decades of this shit, immortalized forever. Burn them all. Ok, thanks. Love you.

The meaning of life, redacted

i

I have a problem.

I’m about to turn 50 and I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.

That’s the question we inflict on children as soon as they master more than a dozen words. First day of preschool, first time you play with a fire truck or dinosaur: “What do you want to be when you grow up? A firefighter? A teacher? A palaeontologist? An astronaut?”

What, by the way. The question is what. Not who.

I think I know — no, I know, I know — the who. I know who I am. I am myself. I am a mother. I am a writer. Usually a human, sometimes a feral animal. I am myself — I am at peace with who I am. For the most part.

What I am, how I’m supposed to organize my life for the next 15 to 20 years to make sure I don’t spend my twilight years under a bridge somewhere… apparently, I haven’t cracked that yet.

You: You seem to be doing ok.

Jane: The operative word there is “seem.”

I seem to be doing ok. I have not just a job but a career. I’ve done the thing that I thought I had to do for my life to have meaning and not just once or twice, but, depending on how you count, four to 10 times (the novels, I’m talking about the novels, not the revolutions). I’ve birthed and almost shepherded into adulthood some fabulous new humans. If I died in a fiery car crash tomorrow — I think about this a lot — I’d largely have no regrets.

The thing is, I have to live for another 28 years, give or take half a decade on either side (but no more, please, and I’m ok with less). At least 15 of them should be productive, creative, meaningful, working towards some kind of larger purpose beyond that of keeping myself and my children alive, fed and housed. Right?

Or is that a first world whine, a neurosis of affluence?

ii

Sometimes, I just want to be a cat. A kept woman. A retired snowbird. An entitled parasite.

Sometimes, even the little that I do seems to take too much effort.

Sometimes, I want to sleep and not wake up.

iii

I always wake up.

I always do what needs to be done.

I always find something to chase, to build, to dream about.

Often, it takes a while, butI always get there. Eventually.

I’ll get here this time too. Eventually. Hopefully before my 50th birthday.

I’d like that.

iv

Interlude from a coffee shop, unedited:

The three baristas behind the counter form a funny triad. He’s at least 6’4, a mountain of a man. Not a Rocky Mountain — maybe that’s the wrong metaphor. He’s more of a giant hill —  sloped, rounded shoulders, a bell of a belly, a triple chin, an overall impression of softness. But you can’t say, a giant hill of a man. Bad metaphor. A mountain of a man. But mountain of a man makes you think of someone… less squishy. More powerful. Work on that. Still. Mountain of a man. He towers over his two colleagues, both female. They barely reach his belly button. Ok, I lie. But they definitely do not reach his chest. Their size difference would make a sex scene quite difficult to write. Don’t go there, why did you write that? But seriously. To talk to him, they crane their necks up at an angle that looks painful. He also cranes his down. All that craning. Ouch.

One of the small women likes him and thinks he’s funny. She’s laughing, chatting, flirting — tilting her head up like a flirty bird. The other is intimidated. By his size? By the repertoire between the other two? She talks to both of them always from a distance.

But she cranes her neck up when she talks.

When he leaves — end of shift? Just a break — and the two small women are left alone, they don’t talk to each other.

Yes, small, not short. That’s the right word. They are not just short but small in my head. An objective assessment or did their mountain of a colleague shrink them?

I don’t think there is an idea here. Is there?

v

Maybe it’s not a problem.

Maybe we’re not supposed to know.

No.

I need to know.

I need to be working towards something, building something.

Feeding the kids and paying the rent is not enough, it never was.

First World neurosis, mediocre artist problems.

vi

I plot out a love triangle between the three baristas but I’m in a mood. One ends up dead in the coffee shop bathroom, one of the lam, one devoured by guilt, everyone alone.

I do a take two.

This time, everyone dies.

When I leave the coffee shop, I feel like a murderer. The two women behind the counter — their mountainous colleague never came back — smile at me, say goodbye.

I avoid their eyes.

You should not look into the eyes of the dead. It’s bad luck.

vii

I have a problem but perhaps it’s not what I think it is.

And it could be worse, right?

At least I know who I am. 

Do you?

Xoxo

“Jane”

Rumour has it, spring is coming

i

It’s not depression, I say. It’s February.

You: Baby, it’s March.

Jane: Look outside. It’s February.

The sun is back, though, and the weather forecast promises above weather zero again, so the prognosis looks good. I will probably make it to another spring.

But I’ve got to tell. you, kittens, the amount of energy I expend November through February to make sure I see March is excessive.

Perhaps that’s why I want to be in bed 12 hours a day.

It’s March.

So they say.

I expect I’ll make it.

ii

I’ve actually done ok this winter. Really. Two weeks in Mexico in November saw me through a crappy December. January and February were brutal but I made arrangements. I freebased Vitamin D. I went to the theatre, twice. I danced (twice!). I RSVP’ed to events and usually showed up. I took my sons places and I fed them decent suppers. I even went out for a 1:1 lunch with a friend once, and a walk another time.

I’ve had worse winters.

My best winter ever, though, was the one I spent in Cuba. And I had sun.

It’s true.

I’m basically a plant.

iii

It’s March, you insist, but I still need help ensuring I’ll be here tomorrow. Plans help. I make a list of road trips, activities. I buy plane tickets.

I ponder moving. Maybe next winter, I need a place with bigger windows, better heating.

Somewhere closer to the equator.

It doesn’t feel like March, not yet.

iv

Exercises to remind you life is worth living:

Make a list of all the people who love you (yes, you’re on it).

Make a list of all the things you’re grateful for. Coffee. Books. Butterflies. Cats — when they’re not in heat. Keerist. Why have I not spayed this cat yet?

Don’t read the news. Do’t think about P@lestine, the Sudan, the Congo. Don’t think about what a pathetic First World Loser you are.

Go out for a fancy coffee instead. But not Starbucks.

Go for a walk.

Do not hit the person who suggested you go for a walk. But also, fuck you, I walk to and from work every day, I walk the dog two or three or more times a day, just because you’re so pathetic and inactive a walk seems revolutionary doesn’t mean it’s a cure all, fuck the fuck off with your stupid go for a walk advice, seriously, it’s just a walk, did we not prove over the pandemic that walking around the block is actually NOT all that we need to be happy?

Don’t say that. Choose kindness. Remember, people mean well. Smile a fake smile for two minutes, then take yourself for a solo sheesha date.

Go to John Fluevog and wind show for shoes. Don’t buy any, though, because all the spare cash (what’s that?) in your budget is going to the heating and electricity bill and to bolstering grocery store profits.

Make a list of all the people who love you again.

Turn it into a list of all the people who would come to your funeral.

Plan your funeral.

Make it really good, a combination murder mystery-escape room-dead disco-wake-no one gets out alive kinda thing.

Stop spiralling. Now.

Eat some carbs. Or ice cream.

There’s a new flavour of soft serve — Matcha! — at Luke’s. Go try it.

Oh — carbs with ice cream. Do it.

Try to remember why you stopped drinking and don’t go to buy a bottle of wine.

Go dancing.

Ok, that helped, a little.

Make a list of all the people you haven’t seen lately.

Screenshot

Text one of them.

Make plans.

Don’t cancel them.

Make a list of the people you want to invite to your next birthday.

Tell your cat she’s beautiful.

Buy a new houseplant.

Don’t feel too bad if you kill it within two weeks. Everything dies, everything passes.

This too shall pass, this mood. You know it will.

Have you eaten some carbs?

Ice cream?

v

It’s March. The calendar says it’s March.

We made it, baby, 100%, it’s March.

So they say.

You: It’s March. I promise.

I almost believe it.

I think we made it.

xoxo

“Jane”

PS We made it. We totally made it. It’s March.