Today is my forty-third birthday,

            All this writing about me, it’s most

            unseemly. But when thousands gather

            in the stroll garden for the three best days

            of cherry blossoms, do they not see

            themselves reconfigured, windborne?

                        Stephanie Bolster, Pavilion

Another birthday. Christine and I quietly settle into domestic, into our first year of married life. What has another year allowed? What of last year, or the one prior?

For most of my life, I’ve approached my birthday as an opportunity to take stock, to see where I’ve been, and where I might be going. I’m obsessed, some say, with age. Can this be true? Possibly. I ask myself the same rough series of annual questions, attempting to take stock, and gain clarity. Where am I now? Question, always question.

And then this recent revelation about my birth mother, which I am still in the midst of processing. I now have her name, and mine. Potentially forty-three years out of date, I now have an address.

[self-portrait in the bathroom mirror, yesterday] Forty-three years ago this morning, 8:15am, I was born 8 pounds, 10 ounces, not a mile or so from where we currently live, first emerging in an unknown room at the late lamented Ottawa Grace Hospital on Wellington Street West, by Parkdale. Every trace begins to disappear.

An early birthday present, Christine gifted a dna test from 23andMe roughly six weeks ago, and we await the results. I could discover genetic information regarding background, various health considerations I couldn’t otherwise know, or even potential relations. The implications are exciting, and make me slightly anxious. As an adopted person, what could this all mean? Could I find half-siblings, a distant cousin, anything? To my knowledge, the only person I’ve met that I’m related to is my daughter. The only medical or genetic trace we have so far is seeing what happens to me, and wondering how it might eventually affect her: eyesight, hearing, possible grey hair.

She has no one to blame, it seems, but me. I have no one at all.

The past year, one of my main projects (which I discussed a couple of months ago in my The Next Big Thing self-interview) has been a collection of short stories, temporarily-titled “On beauty,” with stories published and forthcoming in such places as The Puritan, Matrix magazine and Numero Cinq. I would like to complete the manuscript this year, perhaps even manage to place it. Once this manuscript is completed, I even hope to return to that most wayward of fiction manuscripts, “Don Quixote” [see the essay I composed moons ago on such, posted to Rain Taxi]. Might this story of failure become a failure in itself? I certainly hope not.

And I still hope for the conclusion of my post-mother creative non-fiction manuscript, “The Last Good Year.” I still hope for somewhere to even send it.

There are poems, poems, poems, even as I attempt to work long-form prose projects, and keep the poems as occasional projects. A poetry manuscript, “Signature form,” begins to shape itself. I have more than a couple of unpublished poetry manuscripts around the apartment. Poems here and here and here and here. It can’t be helped, it seems.

This year, too, a series of anniversaries, as The Factory Reading Series turned twenty years old in January, and above/ground press officially turns twenty years old in August. This fall, also, the semi-annual ottawa small press book fair turns nineteen. A strange thing to think about, such a passing of time; it never feels like that long. Didn’t I only start this activity half a decade ago? (Apparently not)

I’ve been reviewing now for twenty years, and blogging for ten.

Forty-three: I feel wistful, calm. I feel on the verge of many things. I feel busy, positive and overworked, but working toward the cusp of so much greater.

A year of such significant changes. The best is yet to come.

I feel no older than I did a decade ago, although far smarter, calmer. Focused. I am no longer in a hurry.

And of course, my annual birthday poem:

Birthday, 43

                        In every part of every living thing

                        is stuff that once was rock

                        In blood the minerals

                        of the rock

                                    Lorine Niedecker, “Lake Superior”

Years. We hardly suffer. Echo, mountains. Gravity: rips from the earth. This coastal road; no more lonely than a town. A nerve of balance. Walk across the street we focus on. Move, compression. Is just another day.

Darkness, it is not a dream. A light filled up with thought. Another coastal region. Once, when all is said. Half-made, half time. Candles know me, know this growing number. Instanted. Immediately, I’m here. Shells lined up along the counter.

The animal, untethered. Get winded climbing stairs. I can no longer say my name.

Angled: a particular set of memories. Clawing up against another. At three o’clock, cohere. Suspicion of the number, word.

Just when you think you know things. Shoulders, overhead. A lockout. Distances I’d been, considered. Body language; death. Ten times the facts. Just a preface, functions. Language, and translating. Speak, when are you spoken to.

Twenty years between; the world from both sides. Brays, a question. Philosopher’s language, stone. A backdrop. Definition. Just what I’d imagined: the failure to observe. How do you know.

How did I escape the womb? I wonder; pushed. Know not the whys and wherefores. Only the finished state. A mouthpiece. Systematic. Beset a mystery; pair a best friend with inquisitive mind.

The ides: it rains. More volatile, then. Let’s not get carried away. What we have here: a failure to obfuscate. The scaffolding, gone thin. Brilliance: water shone. A breathless reaction.

I am feeling a great fatigue. A volatile pathway. Presence. Doesn’t function as an image. Artificial. All too human. Economy. Gaze becomes the other. Visible, to make visible. An insight. More noise than answer. Frivolity.

Faithful to the company.

The biographical, come through. A cheetah distance. Into the sunlight, knowing. We seek chaos, explanation. I want this to be difficult.

Anticipating The Man Who Killed Don Quixote;

An article I wrote on Don Quixote, now posted on Rain Taxi, as I've been composing my novel, Don Quixote.

Further reading: Friday the thirteenth

1982 was the year when snow barely fell in Toronto. We were entranced by the lack of it.

On the night of December 3rd I was in my office on Markham Street tossing black olive pits out the wide open window into the matching black warmth. It was +20 Celsius. After the olives I ate sunripened dates. Then figs. Anything dark and warm against the thought of snow.

Snow fell on December 20th and melted by Christmas. Christmas eve was the warmest on record, and so was Christmas day. A six year old girl walked around in bare feet looking at Christmas lights.

That year I lived near Marshall McLuhan’s house, a big gray mansion next to a pond, where he dreamed up his ideas about hot and cool, or so I like to think. the house was in Wychwood Park, a hillside retreat founded in 1888 by a spice merchant who came home every night from his Pure Gold Manufacturing Company smelling of cinnamon and thinking of Cathay.

In Toronto we know about cold and long to be warm. McLuhan, for instance, fell in love with a southern accent.

‘Mississippi,’ the neighbour said. ‘I think she’s from Mississippi.’

Listening to his wife did McLuhan think about heat?

The hottest thought I had was New Orleans.

Porous is a word that keeps repeating through Ottawa writer Elizabeth Hay’s first book, Crossing the Snow Line (Windsor ON: Black Moss Press, 1989), a book I recently borrowed from the Ottawa Public Library, and I would similarly describe the book as a whole as the same, unable to specifically clarify it between stories (as the cover would tell us), novel or memoir, working through a lush and direct kind of liquid prose. Where are the divides we would usually expect? It’s part of what attracts me to Hay’s earlier writing, and I admire (and am envious of) the porous nature of this small collection, and the books that followed, from The Only Snow in Havana (1992; Toronto ON: Cormorant Books, 2008) and Captivity Tales: Canadians in New York (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 1993).

Art should never shift for the sake of public taste, but I’ve always felt a deeper kinship with her earlier works where this porousness exists, before shifting her prose into more traditional fiction, following her first three books with her Governor General’s Award shortlisted collection of stories, Small Change (Erin ON: The Porcupine’s Quill, Inc., 1997), and the three novels that came after that. I even published one of those stories, originally, in Missing Jacket, a writing and visual art magazine I once produced, back in the mid-1990s. What is it about early Elizabeth Hay and the porousness of writing love, geography, Canadianness and snow?

Some people are porous, snow without a crust: everything sinks in, all the visitors, all the noise.

Porous, yet I absorb so little.

Last night I dreamt I was standing in a woods and a caribou with magnificent antlers stepped through the trees. A hunter followed the caribou. When I caught up with them the hunter had wound heavy wire around the caribou’s neck and pushed silver studs into its flesh.

This limbo of not belonging. Worse than not belonging – resistance to belonging. I buy a Spanish newspaper and don’t read it. I just don’t want to.

I told the Bolivians who came to visit about winter in Yellowknife – four hours of
daylight, frostbitten skin, white and hard. The way they listened! ‘Does anything grow?’ they wanted to know.

‘What do you miss?’ I asked them.

‘Intimacies,’ they answered. ‘Mexico City is a place that encourages many friendships, few intimacies. It’s so hard to get across the city to visit people.’

I’ve never seen them again.

Another Friday the thirteenth in the space of a month, and I spend most of the day reading, moving through Elizabeth Hay, moving through Kenneth Rexroth’s Classics Revisited (New York NY: New Directions, 1986), The Art of Desire: The Fiction of Douglas Glover, ed. Bruce Stone (Ottawa ON: Oberon Press, 2004) and Travels with Virginia Woolf, ed. Jan Morris (London: Pimlico, 1997). Just what is it I’m looking for? Years ago, this was the day that my ex-wife and I had decided our anniversary, another Friday the thirteenth, and coming up faster than I can keep track.

The Woolf book, found second-hand a few days earlier, compiles essays, letters and journal entries into a book of what could otherwise be “travel writing,” thinking about my own journeys forth into further creative non-fiction (McLennan, Alberta), whether back to Edmonton in the bare space of weeks, or an extended upcoming Toronto stay. In a letter to Ethel Smyth from June 26, 1938 (three years to the day before my father was born), for example, Woolf wrote of visiting Hadrian’s Wall:

We were 2 days on the wall: lay on top of it the one hot day; and saw the landscape that to me is the loveliest in the world; miles and miles of lavender coloured loneliness, with one thread white path; dear me, were I a writer, how I could describe that: the immensity and tragedy and the sense of the Romans, and time, and eternity; and then the wild white hawthorn, and the sheep cropping, and 3 little white headed boys playing in a Roman camp.

How she says, were she a writer? As a bookmark, using a postcard the poet Phil Hall sent but a month ago from Bali, on a side-trip from Australia.

Now that I’ve got my second novel off to the publisher (waiting just on her edits), the past few days thinking more about Don Quixote, how my version might work how many other threads of the entire world; working in my own commentary on how cities are made, cities are built, and the city of Ottawa itself, writing:

Every city constructed out of a series of markers, of landmarks, but what happens to a city when it is constantly in danger of losing? What happens to memory when a city is constantly new? There is nothing to hold on to, there are no regulars to keep the rent in your restaurant. There is no heart, no soul, no loyalty. When a city is constantly new, it runs the risk of losing all meaning.

Why is it, no matter where I look, I can’t find a single copy of the original? I picked up the Rexroth because of what he wrote about Don Quixote, including this lovely ending to his little essay:

There are any number of editions of Don Quixote in paperback and hardcover. If the newcomer to the novel only had time and patience enough, he would be well advised to read and compare more than one translation, classic and modern.

There are, indicentally, a number of anthologies of the critical literature on Don Quixote that make fascinating reading, not least for their amazing disparity of interpretation. Were it not that my interpretation would then seem unduly flattering to myself, I would say that every man finds himself in Don Quixote, as Don Quixote finds himself in his adventures and as Sancho Panza is never lost.

I pick up the Rexroth for the same reason as I pick up Glover, working through further what he wrote about the novel himself, and the book-length essay on same I can’t find in my little apartment. Is this all about working to find one’s self, working back from the point of being lost? I am thinking about Toronto, I am thinking about travel. I am thinking about Edmonton. I am thinking about Don Quixote. Or, as Toronto writer Ken Sparling wrote in his For Those Whom God Has Blessed with Fingers:

You can’t go home. I am home. You can’t go home even when you are home. You’re never home. When were you ever home? Home captured you one moment. Maybe when you were little. It got you. This idea of home. And now you know about it because you can’t go there. It’s that place you can’t go to. You can almost go there. You get closest when you’re furthest away. Like calculus. You get further and further close. The other side of the planet. The moon. Finally, the true reason for travelling to the moon. To go back home. To go back. Whatever is back. Maybe abuse is back. Maybe it’s love. Maybe it’s so much love it becomes abuse. You go back. Breaking free is considered something of an accomplishment. But then, accomplishment. Trap. You get the picture.