We will be heading out from Snow Road this morning, saying goodbye to Jo and Peter and setting off for Montreal, where we will spend a day with Jessie and Eric. It’s been a pleasant couple of days. Jo has spoiled us with her fine cooking, we’ve spent a lot of time lounging on their deck or sitting down on Pete’s Beach by the river, or hiking.
Yesterday we walked the Palmerston Canonto Conservation Area Recreational Hiking Trail. Evidence of last May’s Derecho was everywhere to be seen, trees uprooted and blown over at every turn. The cataclysmic weather event is described in Wikipedia as:
…a high-impact derecho[5] event that affected the Quebec City-Windsor Corridor, Canada’s most densely populated region, on May 21, 2022. Described by meteorologists as an historic derecho and one of the most impactful thunderstorms in Canadian history,[6][7] winds up to 190 km/h (120 mph) as well as several tornadoes caused widespread and extensive damage along a path that extended for 1,000 kilometres (620 mi).
Eleven people were killed and an estimated $875 million was caused by the storm, rated as the sixth costliest disaster in Canadian history in terms of insurance claims. These kinds of events are becoming more and more frequent. The prairie provinces are bracing for a heat wave; BC is still coping with extremely hight temperatures; a forest fire is raging in Newfoundland.
Viewing Canonto and Palmerston lakes and the surrounding forest from the rocky, humped lookouts along the trails we were reminded yet again of the beauty of Ontario’s wilderness and rural areas. The landscape here is rolling and softened by its canopy deciduous trees, compared to the steep, spiny and somewhat darker profiles of our West Coast. I can see why people are attached to this region. But coastal Vancouver Island is my homeland and I don’t see myself living anywhere else.
We were docked in an unofficial pullover near Keys Provincial Park, east of Thunder Bay. All was calm, except for the muffled sound of traffic passing by on Highway 17, until one utility truck, then another and another, passed by the Realta, heading for a bigger cleared area behind us, where they parked in a row. At first we thought they might be workers preparing to do some maintenance on the nearby bridge, then – because of the methodical way they went about their business – that they might be a rescue crew, looking for some poor soul who had fallen into the adjacent ravine. We were confirmed in this guess by the sudden whump, whump, whump of a helicopter that landed in the clearing, one that had a basket on the side used for carrying stretchers.
Ever the reporter, I grabbed my camera, jumped out of the Realta, and started taking pictures.
Turns out the operation was not search and rescue, but a maintenance crew doing work on the nearby transmission lines. Fascinated, I recorded as best I could, as the chopper ferried workers and equipment up to the tower, edged up to the metal arms so the men could climb off, then lowered the materials and equipment they needed to effect repairs. It was an amazing operation, carried out with military teamwork and precision, and an exciting event on our Realta Road.
What a beautiful city! That was the reaction of both Diana and I to Thunder Bay, almost from the moment we rolled into town.
We came in via route 102, passing by a cluster of heritage buildings and churches, which give the place an immediate sense of history and solidity. Then we rolled into the ‘Kingsway zone’ as we call it, that long nondescript stretch of car dealerships, gas stations, motels that you’ll find in almost every town. But even that zone was tidy and – in sharp contrast to our experience in other places – had people on its sidewalks.
We headed back along the waterfront, past gigantic grain terminals, and ended up in a park that took up much of the city’s foreshore. The park is filled with activities, sculptures, and viewpoints – an inspiring stroll that demonstrates what planning can do to draw citizens to a place for recreation and leisure. Skateboarding, exercising, dog walking, splashing around in a water fountain, the park bustled happily
It’s almost like being on the ocean, Lake Superior is so big. And everywhere you go there’s the sounds of gulls squabbling and crying. One feature that amazed us was the huge breakwater that encloses the Thunder Bay waterfront. Can’t imagine the amount of work it took to build it!
After a boondock farther down the rail line but still on the foreshore, we went for a walkabout in the town, breakfasting at a place called Roosters. Great food, friendly service and relaxing ambiance.
Thunder Bay is a definite stop if you’re heading west to Lake of the Woods, or east into Great Lakes territory.
It was like stepping into a time tunnel and heading back more than 50 years, walking down that long corridor; passing students chatting, laughing, hurrying heads-down between classes; then up the stairs and into Room 215, where he was expected to share his observations as an author and sometime poet.
He stepped over the threshold with a sense of foreboding. An eerie premonition that, despite the sameness of it all, everything had changed in the half century since he’d celebrated his graduation from St. Laurent High School back in 1969… and awakened the next morning to a splitting hangover.
My hair has greyed, skin wrinkled, reflexes slowed and primal urges waned, he thought. My kids have grown up, and I’ve become a grandfather… I’m history.
While the students settled in and Ms. Drury introduced him, he realized there’s nothing like making a presentation to a Grade 12 English class to remind you just how ancient you have become. How irrelevant!
Unlike indigenous peoples, North Americans of European extraction – the majority in Room 215 – don’t really have a tradition of cherishing the wisdom of their ‘elders’. To them senior citizens are alien creatures, apparitions from the world of rotary phones, black and white TV, Underwood typewriters, cursive script and cheap gasoline.
Generation Pre, he figured. As in ‘pre anything digital or online’.
A Google reference had informed him that he’d be addressing students of Generation Z, ‘our first true generation of digital natives,’ according to the write up. ‘Born into a technological world, information has been placed at their fingertips and social media use has become the norm.’ The article was titled ‘Gen Z and Gen Alpha in the Classroom: The Importance of Digital Learning’. It ran under a photo of a girl wearing a pair of virtual reality goggles, her hands reaching out to touch something he couldn’t see or even imagine.
He considered it an iconic portrayal, troubling with its certainty that two beings can exist in the same space, at the same time, and yet be on entirely different planets. My version of Room 215 might just as well be off Platform 2153/4, he thought. An utterly alternate reality.
Buck up! he rallied. Don’t be pathetic.
And so began his laboriously prepared presentation. Later, he would describe the episode to Maria as, Sort of like being a fly, droning around in a room, looking for a place to land. “I’m still laughing at myself.”
When she consoled him, he shook his head. “They were being honest, hon, not rude. And I learned more in that hour or so than I care to admit.”
“Like what?”
“That even when kids are smiling and nodding at my rambling, for them it’s like talking to someone who’s dialled the wrong number, long distance, from another world.”
“I’m with them on that one,” she joked, and they had a good laugh.
Thankfully the session had ended on a high note, he remembered. They had a brief conversation about how authors deal with rejection, which he morphed into an oblique commentary on his then-and-there. “I referred back to comments I’d made earlier about the writers’ vocation of ‘experiencing and expressing life’, and his belief in the personal importance of the literary cycle… “How that gives you the strength to push through and carry on,” he explained.
“Then, when Ms. Drury said thanks as I was packing up my books and papers, the students gave me a fulsome applause!”
“You’re sure it wasn’t just because you were leaving?”
He ignored the quip.
“I suspect it was in recognition of a determined effort by someone hopelessly out of his depth. Appreciation for his refusal to give up – like cheering on a water buffalo who’s blundered in a pit of quicksand.
“I do believe they were telling me to keep trying.”
Not that they’d want me to book another performance before the end of their last year in high school, he thought. But perhaps to inflict myself on the Generation Alphas, who will soon be occupying their seats in Room 215… or is it 2153/4?
“I have to say, daunting as it remains, the thought of having another go appeals to me,” he admitted to Maria. “And I sort of hope I’m invited!”
They hugged, then got on with the business of preparing dinner.
Toward the end of our session Dr. Nolan said, “It would help if we knew what your daily routines and rituals are, Bob. Don’t you think?”
He has a way of doing that… inviting me to approve every next step in our ‘journey’ so it will be my fault as much as his if we get lost in the metaphorical forest or I walk off a cliff. I suppose I could have said, ‘No way. I’m paying you to get me out of this mess!’ But that’s not how things work.
Besides, I’m not paying him; my boss is. It’s one of the ‘employee benefits’ we lucky clones at college receive for dedicating our souls eight hours a day to the education of a cadre of snotty rich kids. ‘Education?’ That’s a laugh. I could just as easily teach a bunch of baboons the intricacies and nuances of English Literature.
The ‘mess’ I’m talking about occurred three months ago, when I shoved Lenny Hertz and he tripped over the coffee table in the staff room. He bruised his elbow, a small price to pay for his crude arrogance. I apologized and helped him up, but he lodged a complaint anyway and the verdict turned out to be anger management counselling with Dr. Nolan.
It’s my penchant for ritual that got me into trouble, he believes… or rather, he’s nudging me toward that belief. The sessions last an hour, the conclusions marked by his hummingbird alarm. When the hummingbird zooms through the room – an audio avatar emitted by an app on his iPhone – we are supposed to sum up our day’s progress, and prepare for the next session. Dr. Nolan always smiles when the hummingbird hovers, as if he’s imagining it landing on his shoulder.
I hate the hummingbird, because it reminds me where I’m at, and why, and what we’ve talked about during the last hour. I imagine it hovering next to my ear, sticking its pointy beak inside, and sucking all the private nectar out of my brain.
The objective of my ‘conversations’ with Doc Nolan is for me to become aware of the ‘detonators’ that caused me to shove Hertz, and to be able to ‘defuse’ the situation when – not if – it recurs. His logic goes something like this: I am ritual bound; my rituals are sacred; if anyone makes fun of my rituals, anger builds; if, like Hertz, they don’t stop making fun when I signal my displeasure, I am likely to explode.
My theory is much shorter: Hertz is an asshole.
Doc Nolan says we have to ‘unwrap’ the meaning of words like that. They are the labels we slap onto our ‘perceived enemies’ to avoid having to them becoming real people. “What you have to do, Bob, is become aware of the human beings who have become the antagonists in your life’s stories, and deal with them on a mature level.
“Make yourself bigger than them, then invite them to grow up with you.”
In our fist sessions Doc Nolan and I reconstructed the day leading up to the staff room incident. In retrospect he forgave me. Said I’m not alone, when it comes to living by rituals. “Everybody has ‘em,” he proclaimed. “We like to think of ourselves as ‘free spirits’ and ‘spontaneous’, that’s how the marketeers portray us, but truth is, as soon as we start analyzing our lives we find they are made up of routines, which are actually the stem cells of ritual.”
That assurance in place, he said: “Describe a typical morning, Bob.”
Anger management training is not so much an exercise in healing as a perverted form of punishment, it occurred to me in that moment. For session after session you are forced to decide between the truth, or denial, or silence, or a lie. And you realize gradually that you’re not going to shove dickhead Hertz next time, because you’ll have to go through this kind of counselling torture again, and again… that you’d rather leave him to his smug taunting and go put your fist through a bathroom mirror or something…
“Bob?” Doc Nolan coached.
The first thing I do in the morning is look at Maria, lying next to me, and thank her for being there, and hope I will be able to make her happy. I have to confess, I’m not the best of husbands. I’m boring, I know. And weird in so many ways. And resentful of Maria’s interminable efforts to ‘liven me up’ and get me ‘eating healthy.’ The least I can do is love her, and renew my vow to make her smile, keep my love from becoming threadbare.
“And after that?” Doc Nolan prodded, murmuring in that tone counsellors have mastered, a subtle frequency that sounds like benediction emanating from somewhere deep inside your own brain.
Lordy, I found myself mocking. If only I had a couch to lie on.
“Bob?”
“After that, I hang ten and stretch for the sky.”
“Hang ten?”
I sit on the edge of our mattress, a gigantic aerial raft of memory foam, my tootsies dangling like pulled roots seeking ground, my crown expanding toward the overarching light. And there, in equipoise between being and not, I imagine the dawn of another day.
“You do this every day?”
I have to admit, his surprise gave me a fillip of pleasure. The thought of my own counsellor thinking of me as a nut case made me feel special. I pictured him at his next mind-benders’ convention, offering me up a an example of weird and wonderful that would surely outdo the tales of his colleagues…
And my feet hadn’t yet touched the floor.
“Then what?”
The rites of brushing teeth, letting out the cat, shuffling into the kitchen and getting the coffee brewing seemed hardly worth mentioning, although none of them are routine, now I think about it. Routine is the things that happen on autopilot. You’re not actually there. I’m a priest at my bathroom sink ablutions; a prophet, sending Rusty out into his dangerous world; a saint, counting scoops into the French press for the coffee I’ll offer Maria in bed. But Doc Nolan wouldn’t appreciate that. Those daily chores are too ordinary to parlay into anything verging on madness. Quirky, perhaps, but in unexceptional ways.
What he was really rooting around for, like an earthworm in my gut, were the five affirmations, and that clumsy ballet I perform in their honour every day, when I think no one’s watching… Maria excepted. She has intruded on my ritual often enough to know about it. We laugh when she refers to it as the platypus’s dance of the sugar plum faery; laugh even harder when I accuse her of being unkind to platypuses.
“The five affirmations?”
Value Life; Complete the Circle; Give with Joy & Grace; Receive with Gratitude and Appreciation; Experience and Express the Tetrahedron. I sometimes wish I was a hologram so I could enact those things with the fluid movement they deserve, a whirlwind of flashing light, limbs spiralling like constellations, toes and head axles of a universe without boundaries.
But I’m only human, and Hertz caught me unawares, doing my clumsy dance in tune with the final chant of the fifth affirmation. I was balanced on one foot, the other leg stretched out behind me, arms reaching toward the horizon to give and receive. Spirit is the fourth corner of The Tetrahedron, and I was lost in its meanings, so immersed that I didn’t notice Hertz suddenly there, behind me in the staff room.
I knew Dr. Nolan couldn’t possibly understand. At best he could misunderstand and misrepresent. “Spirit consists of four definitions that are beyond comprehension,” I explained.
“Go on.”
“Infinity, Eternity, Omniscience, Omnipotence.”
“God?” he guessed.
“Not God,” I corrected.
“What then?”
“Not God,” I repeated.
I admit it was wrong for me to have shoved Hertz, even though it wasn’t really much more than a nudge, which he exaggerated into something more dramatic. But the idea of Not God next to the reality of Hertz was just too much for me to take. I confess, I wanted his smug, leering face out of my sight and I won’t forgive myself for that, even though it wasn’t a sin, it was just being stupid.
For the very first time in I don’t know how many years I don’t feel like writing (and yet, here I am writing!)
I can’t imagine this as a permanent state of mind; I’m thinking of it more as a hiatus… an opportunity to sit here, watching the half moon greet the rising sun, and listening to the chirping of a robin across the way, and feeling the cool, fresh air on my skin, and thinking of myself gliding over Stuart Channel in my kayak.
After a cold and dreary month, it’s nice to pause and simply celebrate our belated spring with all the other creatures on the edge of Wu’laam Wood.
So again, I ask: Why write?
Because, as I have just experienced, writing helps me expand and connect thoughts and feelings in wonderful ways. It’s a peculiarly human perspective on the world and an integral aspect of my being.
So I only get to imagine the photo I might have taken of him in front of the clattering bird he had once flown on its metal wings, me behind the camera, Dad looking impossibly old and feeble, but heroic just the same. I only get to remember that touristy shot as it might have been, an explicit moment where – with the click of a shutter – we got to forgive each other our complicities, our sins, our armageddons.
The earliest evidence of my existence isn’t preserved as a proper memory. It’s been reconstructed based on family photos, blurry black and whites captured by an Eastman Kodak ‘Hawkeye’.
Dad’s never in those seminal shots because he’s the guy working the camera, and I don’t figure in many or them either because my older brothers Frank and Kevin were the stars along with my sister Natalie.
There’s one of me in a baby carriage, parked on a sidewalk, my face wrinkled and scrunched up like I’m getting ready to howl. If I try really hard, I can imagine Dad hunched over the view finder, divining just the right moment to trigger the shutter and capture another chemically rendered pattern of light for posterity… this one of his prune-faced youngest.
What was going on inside his head? I wonder. What sequence in the charged neural plasma determined the exact moment the hologram of me got burned into the photo emulsion? And what was mother thinking when she scribed on the flip side of that archival image: “Arthur in his carriage at Portage la Prairie.”
Then there’s a shot of us kids and Mum posed in front of the family Christmas tree, taken in some living-room I can’t for the life of me remember. Frank and Kevin are playing with their shiny-new truck and grader; Natalie looks petulant and pouty, as if she already knows Santa’s never going to bring her exactly what she wants; Mum looks like she’s staring into the headlight of an oncoming car. I’m toddling in front of the montage, slightly to the side, looking doubtful – as if I haven’t yet figured out who this guy Santa really is, and why I’m getting presents and having my picture taken in his name.
Dad wasn’t much of a family man back then. I suspect he took the photo as a form of misrepresentation. But since the Hawkeye didn’t have a timer, he couldn’t insert himself into the happy montage – could only claim that he’d been there in absentia. How would he have fit in anyway: still young enough not to have succumbed entirely to the dreariness and pettiness of it all… to believe if you drank hard enough and laughed loud enough, maybe things would turn out alright. If he could have swapped himself into the scene quicker than the speed of light, I think he would have struck an intrepid explorer’s pose, looking over the top of the camera’s infallible lens into a future none of us could either foresee or forestall.
The first shot I can actually remember being in with Dad was taken on the edge of the Atlantic. The family trekked to Sydney every summer, our pilgrimage to Dad’s ancestral home. Our favourite destination from there was Kennington Cove, about an hour south, just past Louisbourg. To us kids the waves rushed in like liquid mountains, as if the God we still believed in had grabbed the far edge of the flat world and was shaking it like a sheet. Frank, Kevin and Natalie would have been out there in the surf, but I was too young. So I ended up in Dad’s arms. Mum must have snapped the picture.
His right arm is wrapped around me. I’m clinging to him and squirming at the same time, my left hand planted on his neck. It’s hard to tell if Dad is really aware of me or if he’s successfully ignoring my struggles, but I like to think we’re connected somehow. He is aware of the camera all right, striking a relaxed pose, leaning against a boulder, the ocean roiling in the background, hissing up and down the strand.
That photo sucks me in like the Atlantic’s undertow. Whenever I see it I am suddenly there, at Kennington Cove; held tight in my father’s arms; my chubby baby’s hand splayed against his neck and cheek. I mustn’t forget that. Despite everything else that would happen, I have to recall the tight muscles of his neck, the rough stubble of his cheek, him peering ahead as if there might be something dangerous, lurking out there on the bluffs, me fascinated by the breakers collapsing onto the beach behind, where Frank, Kevin and Natalie frolicked.
Family photos are counterfeit memories, reproductions of light that has long-since been absorbed by the landscape or bled off into unalterable dimensions of space. We preserve them in battered valises, in dusty attics, in houses moved away from long ago. They never get thrown out; instead, we simply leave them behind for someone else to deal with. They molder away in dark attics, forever waiting to be discovered. Like crematory urns, they become repositories that reassure us simply by existing.
It’s the images never taken that define us – the photos not allowed.
I don’t remember a single photo of Mum and Dad holding hands. There’s a picture somewhere of Mum sitting on a grassy slope, her skirt hiked up above her shapely thighs. She looks directly into the camera, laughing at the man who would be her husband. On the back, in her neat script: “Taken near London, during the war.”
Odd, we still call it that: ‘The War.’ As if applying the title to any other of the murderous cataclysms that have bloodied and tortured the planet in the last six decades would be a misuse of language. Ten billion lifetimes since Hiroshima and Nagasaki supposedly put a full-stop to hostilities, and we still look back on that global paroxysm as present and playing itself out in the here-and-now.
I can’t be sure why there are no photos in our family albums of Mum and Dad holding hands. Never really thought much about it. I have a slight aversion to hand-holding myself – as if it’s a species of weakness, an act of self-delusion, like offering a stuffed toy to someone waiting in line, patting him on the back and saying: “It’s okay kid, everything’s going to be just fine.”
There are other pictures of Mum and Dad during the war: the one taken on their wedding day, Dad in uniform, clowning around, making a face, his hat turned sideways on his head, Mum laughing, leaning into him, his arm around her shoulder; My sister in a pram, somewhere in London, the lineaments of our shared genetic code showing clearly, even then, in her frown.
But there’s not a single image that breaches the unofficial secrets act. Not one that breaks the unspoken code adopted by sane men whose job it was to fly over the blighted, blasted cities of Europe and drop pulverizing incendiaries onto the innocents below: children, women, men. Dad never talked about it, so I invented that period of his life – his hands gripping controls, nudging throttles, easing the lumbering bird of vengeance up into the sky.
I once asked him to accompany me to the Royal Canadian Air Force museum, where the preserved carcass of a Lancaster bomber sits on display, as if it were some breed of mechanical pterodactyl. He avoided the topic at first, then turned me down flat. Mum said he was afraid he might have forgotten too much about those times, what it was like to fly those ancient machines and might have been embarrassed.
I think it was because he didn’t want toremember.
So I only get to imagine the photo I might have taken of him in front of the clattering bird he had once flown on its metal wings, me behind the camera, Dad looking impossibly old and feeble, but heroic just the same. I only get to remember that touristy shot as it might have been, an explicit moment where – with the click of a shutter – we got to forgive each other our complicities, our sins, our armageddons.
At Dad’s funeral they couldn’t get the hands right. The way they were arranged on his chest, against the blue serge of his blazer, under the Royal Canadian Air Force crest, was… and there’s no other language for it… fake, grotesque.
Rigor mortis sets in about 12 hours after death. The muscles tighten around the bone, jerking the limbs into a sort of fist, which is unable to let go because the enzymes that normally complete the cycle of clutching and releasing are no longer being produced by the body. It remains in that state about 48 hours, then as decomposition sets in, the body relaxes, accepting – it would seem – that it has truly died. Dad’s hands never did relax, so the mortician arranged them as best he could, the fingers meshed like cogs in a gear-train.
His face looked almost normal. You could tell there was something unnatural about it, like it might have belonged in a wax museum, but at least you could imagine it once having been alive. The hands are what I remember, though, the message they conveyed in their involuntary language of signs.
Going direct-to-web is more than an experiment. It’s a mission.
Nine years ago I began work on what would become my first direct-to-web novel, The Boy From Under, a crime thriller set in Langley, British Columbia. I have since taken the story offline, and will be republishing it after I complete work on my second D2W book, The Mural Gazer, which I plan to publish in a print edition this summer.
I launched myself into D2W because, like many writers, I was frustrated with the length of time it took to get my work published; with the trickledown process that left everyone up the chain earning money, while I had to pay off ‘reverse royalties’ before a penny would come my way; and by the challenges of getting my stories off bookstore shelves, into the hands of readers.
D2W as an adjunct to print editions seemed a promising concept, which might address those issues. I am still convinced of its potential, even though I have become increasingly aware of the daunting magnitude of the undertaking – not the technical difficulties, which are surmountable, but the steadfast loyalty of readers to books on printed pages, between covers.
That isn’t going to change any time soon, certainly not within my own lifetime. The iconic image of curling up with a book in a favourite armchair is not going to be supplanted by the notion of reading or listening to a novel on your mobile while jolting along on public transit between home and office. For the foreseeable future print will be the overwhelmingly popular choice of readers.
So why bother with direct-to-web at all? Why not let young up and comers crack open that niche market for a new generation of readers?
First and foremost, because literature is too important to a healthy, vital society not to secure its place in the online, digital world as soon as possible. I’ll have more to say about that in a future post, but getting books online has become an urgent priority for me because literature remains the most powerful mode I can think of for sharing ideas and feelings. It’s foundational to a society that explores its motives and challenges its actions.
Then there’s the creative possibilities D2W opens up. When I started down the direct-to-web path, I considered it purely from a publication and distribution point of view. Inevitably, however, it morphed into a mode of writing that excites me. The Mural Gazer was created dynamically. I know many authors will shudder at the thought, but I posted episodes as they were written – the online equivalent of an author writing his book in a department store window.
Over the years I have also come to appreciate the tremendous distribution and marketing opportunities of D2W. I can share The Mural Gazer with readers anywhere in the world as a text or audio book at almost no cost. Readers can access the book immediately when they see it promoted on social media. With a click they can open up the story on their mobile phones, laptops or desktop computers. After reading a few chapters, they can pay for the book online, too.
Finally (for now) there’s the matter of control, a decidedly two edged sword. I don’t really want to be a writer/publisher/promoter/bookseller because I value the knowhow of partners in the literary realm and would love to narrow my focus more on writing. For the time being, however, I have no choice. Until there are collaborative pathways from writing to publishing and selling, I will have to multitask as a D2W author.
A retired journalist and communications manager, I am in the tempting position of being able to take on that do-it-yourself book writing and publishing role. But I know it’s not a viable, sustainable model. What I envision are collectives, bringing the necessary skills together to see the dream of storytelling from conception through publication and sales in D2W and print formats made real.
That’s my goal for Books Unbound. I’m happy to share ownership.
Flibber T. Gibbet, An Adventure on the Hermit’s Trail will be published this summer. Readers can crack open the cover online in the preview slideshow above.
Encourage online readers to take your book off the shelf
Imagine your newly released book face out on a bookstore shelf, just waiting for an avid reader to reach for it. What’s the first thing they are going to do?
Now reel back that opening scene and imagine your reader glancing at the cover of your book for the first time online.
How are you going to translate that website experience into something reminiscent of the in-store type of experience your audience is most familiar and comfortable with?
As illustrator and partner Diana Durrand and I ready our soon-to-be-released young readers’ story Flibber T. Gibbet, An Adventure on the Hermit’s Trail for launch, that’s a question that needs answering. What has emerged for me as an author/producer/publisher is a web slider modelled on the in-store experience of deciding whether or not to buy a book.
The first thing visitors to my craigspencewriter.ca/flibber-t-gibbet page will see is the book’s cover, not as a stand alone reproduction, but as the first image in the slider posted at the top of this post. In that frame they get to: meet the main troublemaker of the story, Flibber T. Gibbet; see protagonist Lincoln Cranston, running up the Hermit’s Trail, where the story is set; and gain a sense of the audience the book is written for.
What would they do next? My guess is an interested browser might flip the book over and look at the back cover for a description. The second slider image goes there, offering readers an overview of the book’s highlights. (Please note: If they’ve got this far they’re already readers, even if they aren’t yet buyers.) The back cover foreshadows the adventures they will experience in the tale and gives a flavour of the author’s writing stye.
At that point, I’d want to know a bit more about the author and illustrator. So slide three takes our audience (Note: as an internet era writer I am redefining the nature and habits of potential readers) to a very brief introductory page, describing Diana’s credentials and achievements as an artist and my own as an author.
If I had my marketing hat on straight, I would insert a final slide, linking visitors to options for purchasing copies of Flibber T. Gibbet. But determining a distribution and sales strategy is a work in progress, one that will be the subject of future Books Unbound posts. So for now I’ve inserted a placeholder announcing the anticipated release of the book in print.
Stay tuned by going to my Connect page for options. Thanks for visiting.
I didn’t say it out loud, of course – not right away – and can’t determine to this day if the thought was true – I mean sincere in all its dimensions, down to the place where sole meets concrete reality. But it was the best I could come up with on the spot, and even though I didn’t voice the sentiment right off, she heard me. That’s the trick I believe: Think things before speaking. Sometimes keep them as thoughts forever because you’re bashful, perhaps. Or maybe because the person you’re interested in is perfect and you could only detract from that by wheedle-wording your way into their affections.
I had instinctively done an up and down of the sandals’ occupant – that checkout-scan we males of the species do when attracted by something potentially sexual in our peripheral vision. But it was her footwear – and I must confess, her feet –my roving eyes locked onto.
Her toenails were painted pink!
Not gaudily, in that slapdash way you sometimes see and feel embarrassed about – usually for bubblegum teens. The polish had been applied with artistry. Details like that say something, don’t they? She had a conception of self that was bold and subtle, I figured.
So maybe I was indulging just a little. But it’s okay to try and fathom why someone’s special isn’t it? And at first, we have to draw assumptions from observations as seemingly insignificant as pedicure, don’t we? You’re a liar if you say no. The forensics of love are based upon minute chips of evidence, hinting at theories made up as we go.
To me the convex surfaces of her nails were intriguing as conch shells turned inside-out. Can you imagine such a thing? My eyes stuck on the tops of her toes for a breath or two then – without my thinking, without conscious intent – zoomed in on her sandals, recording every facet of those elegant slippers.
Even as my eyes went about their rogue’s work, though, part of me realized there was nothing so very remarkable about Gloria’s sandals… aside from the fact that she was in them. I can think of a thousand movie stars and a thousand more princesses who would have turned up their noses, if asked to wriggle their dainty nether digits into such a pair of Walmart flip-flops. But on Gloria’s feet! Oh my!
“Oh my!” as grandmother would cry when occasion warranted. Of course, her delight was usually over events as homey as cherry pie coming out of the oven, or particularly brilliant works of crayon art, not over anything so exotic as the footgear of a complete stranger. For grandmother agape wasn’t so much about miracles as discovering the miraculous in everyday things – about seeing through the veil of ordinary and triggering suspirations as emphatic as a last-gasp.
By the way, mentioning Gloria’s name right now makes everything from here-on-in non-sequitur. I didn’t know her name at this point in the story. True, I was cultivating an intimate relationship with the bone structure and musculature of her feet, the same way Toto might have got to know Dorothy before they ventured into Oz. But that’s not the same as knowing a body’s name, is it? Love works backwards. We fall into it then double back, tracking down the meanings and consequences of ’til death do us part.
I’ve broken sequence because I can’t bear talking about Gloria as ‘her’ or ‘she’. I have to give a name to those theoretical references. So I have christened her even though a name at that point would have been as naively symbolic as graffiti sprayed anonymously on whitewashed stucco, or rote declarations carved into the trunks of trees or the planks of park benches. At that point in our relationship her name would have been a catch-all of fantasies. A concatenation of dark eyes, long black hair… an aura you could best see through eyes half-closed.
In truth, if Gloria had dematerialized before I got a chance to talk to her – whisked out of her sandals by powers unknown into some sci-fi Nirvana beyond the frequencies of daytime TV – nothing would have seemed remarkable about her footwear left on the corner of Quadra and Hillside. Other than the fact the sandals were there – placed carefully on the cracked concrete as if the intersection were a portico into some alternative dimension, and she had been called away suddenly. Barefoot.
The thing about Gloria is she even stands with her shoes neatly placed, and she never just kicks her footgear off. She’s neat that way. Fastidious. It makes me laugh. And because of her, I place my work boots carefully on the mat inside the vestibule door, too – toes pointing toward the wall, heels knocked together. She’s aware of details like that, so it pains me to bring disorder into our lives, especially when it’s so easy to do things right.
There’s meaning to the precise placement feet on a sidewalk; someone needs to see that. Imagine yourself in the presence of a goddess. You’ve been schlepping your way through life down at the pit, a latter-day Sisyphus crunching stones into various grades of gravel, then suddenly she’s there, and you know sheis a goddess, that she already knows everything she needs to. What do you say to her? What’s your conversation starter?
In a way, Gloria was aware of every rhinestone glued to those bargain basement sandals of hers. Not individually, of course, but as elements of a sensory field, if you will. I wondered which tiny mirror I might have been reflected in, standing beside her, my bike held between us like a barrier. What did she think of this guy? Of his long hair and never-quite-matured beard, his knobby tired bike? She hadn’t even glanced my way – a sensible rebuke. But I did want her to appreciate the nobility of my feelings… that if the sun could be positioned just-so behind me, I would glow, too, with my own halo effect.
I glimpsed her profile, then surveyed the intersection for clues. Perhaps there were points of convergence, shards of data that proved we dwelt in overlapping dimensions. Which of the drab architectural features could I point to and say, There, that’s us. The San Remo Market Deli & Café? The Salvation Army Community & Family Centre, across Hillside? The Money Mart (real people fast cash) diagonally opposite? The Sally Ann thrift store on the west side of Quadra? The garbage receptacles, and bike racks at every corner to dispose of stuff we no longer valued and lock up the things we did?
We were none of that, and perhaps – without knowing it – denial was the point of convergence I had in mind.
“Nice sandals!” I said.
No kidding! I said it out loud. Breathlessly. Disguised as a brash joke, because any second now the light on Quadra would wink green and the little silhouette that says walk would let her get away, and I couldn’t let that happen without at least a memory of me – strange and deformed as it might seem – hankering after her. Things had spiralled into a place where an inkling of madness is the only reasonable state of mind – not stark raving lunacy, but a sort of emotional Pi, never quite defined, always panicked by another incremental digit of yearning.
If only we had it in us to feel that way about every living thing, we would truly be incarnations of our imagined gods.
The light changed. Gloria stepped off the sidewalk into the intersection. I walked beside her, thinking: This is it. It’s finished. She still hadn’t glanced at me. I studied her profile for signs. She wasn’t ready to offer any – and how could I blame her? But I took comfort in the fact that we were walking in the same direction – that the imagined pat of her sandals on the pavement didn’t seem hurried or doubtful. She was willing to abide my company to that extent at least.
Gloria strode on, back straight, black pantaloons fluttering in the breeze, pleated jacket conforming precisely to her slight, angular build. Did I imagine it, the faintest hint of a smile turning up her lips? I’m not sure, but the words rushed out of me anyway when I saw what I took to be a cue, as if I’d waiting to blurt my intentions for just-about-ever. “Maybe you won’t take it wrong if I walk with you a-ways?”
Creep! Is that what she was thinking? She stopped, looked straight at me, her head swivelling round like a security camera on a pole, eyes locking on. This is it, I thought. It’s finished.
Then she smiled and laughed out loud, and… Oh my God!
We plan on having kids someday, but there’s still lots of time to think about how I might answer, if one of the little rascals ever asks, when they’ve attained the age of reason, or at least a mature state of curiosity: “Hey, Dad, how did you and Mom first meet and fall in love?”
Perhaps if I framed it as a joke, I could admit to my temporary state of foot-fetishism at the corner of Hillside and Quadra while I was on my way to the pit and Gloria off to her studio. Or maybe I could fast-forward to our first date, on the evening of that first day, at Caffé Fantastico just a couple of blocks away from our point of departure… I paid; Gloria objected; we laughed at the clumsiness of it all… our perfectly memorable ineptitudes.
To be honest, I was amazed she showed up at all, or that I’d asked her to, when we parted ways that morning, me pedalling down Bay Street, heading for the pit; her, carrying on up Quadra. Gloria walks without making a sound, it’s like she rolls the soles of her feet through each step, feeling the ground beneath her, sensing its contours, its tilt, its flaws and fractures. Silence is what she leaves behind when she walks away from you or out of a room. Don’t get me wrong, she’s not an angel or anything, and I’m not a worshiper. But that silence she leaves in her wake? Your instinct is to fill it with thoughts of her.
The circular patio table we chose on the sidewalk outside Caffé Fantastico had a rippled glass top, so I could still make out Gloria’s feet after we sat down. They became a point of reference – their muscular arch, perfectly articulated toes and meticulously painted nails a sort of permissible zone of psychic gravity, which assured me the rest of her was still there, that she was real in an incomprehensible way… there’s a difference between comprehending someone and figuring them out, I think. Comprehending is like hugging your partner, knowing you’ll always be wondering how amazing she is; figuring her out is like taking her apart so you can adjust the mechanics of her soul – like tuning a bicycle.
A lot of my friends have got round to asking me – in one way or another – why I majored in philosophy at UVic. They don’t come right out and say: “Hey, you could be doing a hell of a lot better than crunching gravel down at the pit, if only you’d go into law or something, or maybe take a few more PSYCH courses, get a master’s? Get into counselling? Or teaching? Heck, why not try for a PhD in something or other; you’ve got the smarts.” And maybe they’re right; maybe I will someday. But all that misses the point – the vanishing point of our existence, you might say. I can’t map things out in a straight line, like I was crow flying from here to there, and happened to land on a lamppost in the epicentre of Nirvana. Life doesn’t move in straight lines or elegant curves that can be described by some sort of derived calculus.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I took philosophy so I could understand the meaning of Gloria’s feet, seen through the rippled glass of a patio table. Intimacy is the sudden awareness that your partner is too beautiful to take in at a glance, that you have to look away, take time to grow-yourself into it, expand your ability to appreciate every facet of her being… now there’s a word that takes me back to the Big Bang of prenatal existence.
There’s a theory I call bracketed infinity. Choose any points as your arbitrary beginning and end, and the information you would need to decode the significant events between will be infinite. We divvy up experiences as if life had a shutter speed and we can string moments together like the frames in a movie. But that’s not how things really work…
Get it?
Can’t say as I’ve figured it out yet myself, so you’re smarter than me if you have. All I know is, when I wake up beside Gloria, and we smile, my future, past and present areright now.
~ The End ~
Hope you enjoyed Feet First in Love There’s more in The Feel of Gravity collection.
