Nearly a year ago I went to a small presses event at the Starlight which was excellent. Last night there was another evening of readings. It’s the kind of clubbing I like – book clubbing. The event was well organised and reasonably well attended (okay, I’m not sure why there weren’t people lined up outside banging on the doors trying to get in, but whatever, maybe reading books is an exclusive club thing). This year the presses were Coach House Books, ECW Press, and House of Anansi. Fab local bookstore Words Worth Books was also there in force. And there were also free cupcakes.

There were also 6 authors/poets reading; two sets of three with an intermission so that we could refresh our glasses at the bar or perhaps nab another cupcake. Did I mention the cupcakes? Each author read for between 5 to 10 minutes, so the whole thing wound up by shortly after 9, which is probably fine for a Monday night. I would have been just as happy (no, actually much happier) if each author had been given an hour or more, though I can see the logistics don’t really work if you do that.

The six readers were: Gary Barwin, Dorothy Ellen Palmer, Natalee Caple, George Murray, Sheila Heti. Evie Christie was also advertised but seemed to have transformed (without mention) into Cordelia Strube, which was a delightful surprise.

All of the authors were excellent (even if I didn’t get to hear each of them for an hour). Cordelia Strube was at last year’s event so I won’t single her out for special praise other than to say that I have read Lemon and it is indeed a very good read. Everyone else was new to me. I especially liked Dorothy Ellen Palmer’s When Fenelon Falls, and Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? But I heard others near me enthusing about Natalee Caple’s poems from her The Semiconducting Dictionary.

The only downside is that I’ll probably have to wait another year to go clubbing again.

For about a year now I have been a participant in the Kitchener Public Library (KPL) Writers’ Collective. I was delighted to discover the collective in the run up to Kitchener’s Word on the Street 2009 event and gladly committed myself to the monthly meetings where members share and discuss each other’s work. The collective isn’t well-publicised, so there isn’t much point in searching for it online. But I assure you that it does in fact exist.

The members of the collective range from beginners to published authors. Most participants seem to have been with the collective since its inception, a small but dedicated group. There are enough members at the moment for 3 groups of up to 8 participants. A group will stay together throughout the year with new members able to join in the autumn. Ideally each member will submit up to 5 pages from a work in progress, a short story or novel, or a set of poems. Discussion is mixed, often impressionistic, sometimes insightful, but always a bit awkward. It’s not exactly what I envisioned, having previously only heard about the writers circles that met in England, but it suffices. What you imagine, perhaps, is a small group of like minded individuals gathering over a glass or wine and a nibble of cheese with light classical music in the background. This collective is a bit more institutional.  Meetings are held in whatever board rooms can be appropriated at various branch libraries. Glaring fluorescent lighting and hard backed chairs keep us focused on the task at hand. There is no wine.

There are good reasons, I take it, for the setting. Disclosure of personal information, even such details as one’s surname, is kept to a minimum. The collective members tend to stay on a first name basis, exchanging their monthly submissions through an intermediary within the KPL. Thus avoiding the need even to exchange email addresses. Yet there is a perhaps unlooked-for benefit of such a design. The critiquing of one’s work remains superficially objective, or at least not personal. There is plenty of scope for learning in such an environment, and little need to take all criticism to heart.

Still, I sometimes wonder what my ideal writing club would be like. It would need a frisson of disagreement, a pinch of daring, a serious attitude to the hard work of craft, maybe softer chairs, and, yes, perhaps a post-meeting glass of wine. But for now I’ll be happy to stick with the KPL Writers’ Collective and see how things go.

Here follows photographic evidence of what I have been up to in the garden. Thanks to a delightful spring and early summer this has not required a great deal of effort. It turns out that most plants just grow on their own accord without call for my intervention.

A Guernsey Cream clematis that we planted in the autumn survived the winter and produced its first flower by 23 May. Later it developed four flowers that lasted for some time.

We also had a lovely crop of tulips out front from bulbs we planted the previous autumn.

And here is proof positive that finally we have managed to harvest something from our square-foot garden.

For a much more comprehensive view of our developing garden, you might want to view the following sets of photos on Flickr:

• spring 2010
• summer 2010
• clematis 2010

It isn’t exactly the first day of snow this year. We’ve had a few dustings. But it is the first day I have had to go out and shovel the walk. Winter is finally here. Almost a full month later than last year.

Yesterday I did something that I haven’t done in 30 years. I attended a music festival, the Kitchener-Waterloo Music Festival. My niece was competing in a piano class and as the venue was just around the corner I decided to walk over and hear her.

I have very few pleasant memories of piano competitions and all of them are from before the age of 11 or 12. My sisters and I were usually entered in to as many classes in the festival as we could accommodate. I remember my first festival in London, Ontario, when I must have been 6 or 7 years old. I was in 6 classes in one day, an absurd feat of scheduling. I placed first in every one. It was the zenith of my career in competition. There were lots of other highlights over the next 5 or 6 years, but I never managed to fully dazzle in quite that way again.

In fact within a few years I found myself increasingly incapable of going on the stage. Perhaps I was unconsciously acknowledging a lack of preparation; my habits of practising did degenerate as I got older. It may have been something else entirely. I have not managed to ferret out precise causes. The experiences alone were bad enough. These days I think they might be described as panic attacks. Circumventing them required ever more extreme measures. By the age of 15 I was at an end and competed no more.

It has taken me almost 25 years to be able to even sit down with any degree of comfort at a piano keyboard. Thus the gifts we are given in our youth both bless and curse us.

So it was no small thing for me, though few might guess it to see me, to head over to the hall in which this present festival is taking place even though I was merely an audience member. My niece does not suffer from whatever hindered me. She acknowledges a flutter in her tummy but nothing more. She is lucky. Perhaps she will not need to set aside a formative aspect of her childhood and youth for the greater part of her life as I did. I hope not.

Memories – inchoate, unsavoury, uncertain. How do you turn them off, make them safe?