red-handed

Illustration in ink on paper for an upcoming story (bh1476). Day 5 Up around 6 -- this way I can do some art before the day's full craziness sets in. C lurches out of bed around 7 ... which is incredibly early for her, but she's instructed Little Graeme (who C used to babysit a lifetime ago, who now insists on being a grown-up, living in his own house, driving a truck, having a dog and just generally being ridiculous) to drop by on his way to work. This is so she can have him investigate (and solve) the source of some "bad smell" coming from beneath the cottage. Despite C diagnosing it as everything from septic back-up to malicious ghosts, Little Graeme calmly informs us that it's just some pipe which needs a cap. While she has his trusting/helpful nature within her grasp, C immediately hits him up for her entire future works program. MLK might have had a dream, but it was nothing without sliding glass doors. In the afternoon I drive C into Sackville where we spen

Day 4 Starting to feel better. It's cool and windy outside but no longer like the set of Seven . And suddenly it all becomes very civilized ... we have breakfast, I grab a shave, we settle in to read. But after lunch this is all too much for C, and the darkness wells up again, so she phones around until she finds an electrician who will charge us $1200 to $1400 to upgrade the electrical. Unfortunately, my flinching muscles blew out ages ago. I can't even muster a reaction when C tells me how delightfully French he is! Everyone always comments on how wonderful the cottage is (or the idea of it is). But you know what else it is? It's the plumbing, the roof, the stairs down to the beach, the yard, the raising, the stones on the sea wall, the windows, the shed, the yard, the stove, the doors, the sinks, the beds, the chairs ... it's all this stuff that eats and eats, like that plant in the Little Shop of Horrors . Still, C's mood always improves dramatically whenever sh

Above: illustration for a story, pencil and ink in a moleskine. Day 2 I get up early (since I'm not sleeping anyway) and pack the car. I get the feeling this might be a recurring motif. Lead on, my little blonde Pharaoh! I love ancient history! Outside the motel room it's pants weather, or sweater weather, or oh-my-God-this-is-brutal weather. When did July become ghosts and fog? Welcome to Silent Hill! The whole day is like that, this gloom and cold and rain against New Brunswick's endless backdrop of hills and trees. If you enjoy driving up and down, and listening to radio stories about moose fences, then New Brunswick just might be the place for you. Meanwhile, my guts turn to lead. We get to Murray Corner around six in the evening and C is only slightly crazy with the cleaning and complaining and worrying and fussing and moving furniture around. What a shame, to see pregnancy slow a girl down like that. I mean, she didn't even mention that the living room rug was &qu

As promised, I'll be posting a wee travelogue about my recent holiday. We travelled from Kingston, Ontario to Murray Corner, New Brunswick, to a cottage overlooking the Northumberland Strait, and stayed there for three weeks in July. If you're wondering about the title, it refers to our last holiday before the baby comes (I love that expression, by the way ... as if I'm going to meet the baby at the airport). Above: cigar-tin story #35 . Day 1 We leave Kingston by nine a.m. -- goal achieved -- feeling more or less organized ... the lists and packing have been hurried but only slightly haphazard. Goodbye stinky cats. That part of the day driving through eastern Ontario is a microcosm of the month of June -- spotty, cloudy, dubious -- with disinterested rain showers honing in for effect. We drive in and out of it. The overall impression is still boringly humid. We survive the decayed jetscape of Montreal's overpasses and underpasses and multi-laned tunnels (arrays of lig

You drive and you drive and you drive ... you drive for eight or nine hours, then pull into a motel. You unload what you need from the car while your (roundly) pregnant wife puddles into the room, turns the heat up to eighty and slow-scrabbles into one of the twin beds. When you eventually take yours you'll crawl in diagonal so at least one of your feet doesn't hang off the edge, and dreamland will be the same as waking land, or driving land, where the sky chokes on its own shadows and cries foul murder against your windshield, over and over again, not so much weather as cheap-theatre grief, and all the other drivers speed and bunch and squeeze over and around you, like they're in a hurry to end up dying in heaps. And then the next day you get up early so you can do it all again. And then you're home, dealing with garbage and recycling and dirty clothes and cat shit and you wonder what that was all about. Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad:

Do you ever have one of those weeks? I'm having one of those weeks. Hope slides around but summer keeps giving way to rain, to every morning with these little black birds hopping around in the wet grass. I was beginning to feel a lot like this kid . {Above: a classic Stella drawing.} * * * * * But then, some good news: I've found a publisher for my short-story collection, and it will finally see the light of day in 2010. I'll be more forthcoming when I have a contract, but in the meantime it's nice to go on vacation with this in mind. {Above: abstract pen and ink, which C really hates for some reason.} * * * * * And finally: no internet for a month, my friends. It is, after all, the least of all things, the thing we never knew we needed until it became so necessary, until we began reaching for it every day. I'll take the ocean, no cats (yes!), long walks with C, some Scrabble, some schnapps, a cigar in the dark night air before bed. So, until August, this i

C tricked me (again) yesterday, telling me that it was a Canada Day tradition to spend the day in the garage repainting bookshelves, listening to good (reruns of interviews with Mavis Gallant and Nino Ricci, then the Debaters ) then bad (some piece about a special Canadian guitar?!) CBC radio, breathing in enamel paint and flies. I only got to come back inside the house when it was time to make lunch and dinner. And the bookshelf? Black. * * * * * The website for the Kingston WritersFest is up. It's pretty sharp, and festival looks like it will be first-rate. I have a small supporting role giving a workshop, where I'll be talking my usual talk about ambitious ideas in pocket-sized stories. Come August, I'll be blogging about this plenty . * * * * * Because of some violence done to a painting of mine by the US Postal Service (and how horrible I felt about it), I recently made and sent a new painting to the most-aggrieved party. Thankfully, it arrived in one piece