Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg

I just watched Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg, a captivating and very amusing documentary that reminded me so much of my own Winnipeg. It's a great black and white movie memorial that combines stock historic footage with home movies and present day reenactments. Naked super vixens, vintage hockey players, dead horseheads and buffalos compete with sleep walkers and endless snow scapes, fur coats and hudson bay blankets. The mystic nature of the forks and the magnetism of the place itself are juxtaposed with the intellectual ennui of escapist fantasies. And all of it revolves around the family reminding me of childhood and countless Christmas homecomings.

Vincent Massey High School reunion is coming this 2009 spring and Guys' nostalgic reminiscence has pushed me one step closer to returning again despite the old home being sold, Mom death and Dad living now near Ron in Ottawa.

Even now my memory conjures up a kaleidoscope of fond reminiscenses. There's the red brick house, Dad's garage and Mom's garden. Then the parks and the surrounding wheat fields. Fort Gary, Portage and Main, the YMCA, Manitoba Theatre School, MTC, and Royal Winnipeg Ballet. I'll never forget walking to University of Winnipeg, the snow flakes falling and the beautiful young faces. Neil Young's song's words 'all my changes were there' comes to mind as I remember church coffeehouses, hospitals and OR's. I loved my own first house in Riverheights. The memory of my friends taillored word work creations, dinner parties, dances. It's all a gift of a city where people are as warm as the outside is cold.

Even here Winnipeggers greet each other as ex patriots might in a foreign land. And I for one look forward to passing on the news of this tribute to an extraordinary city in the heart of the heart of the heart of the continent.

Nov.14, 2008 - Journalling

"Everything worth doing is worth doing poorly."

All beginnings are like children learning to walk. Falling down and getting up and falling down and getting up. The smile is what separates the child from the adult. The adult somehow thinks they are entitled to wings. Just because they learned to walk as children doesn't mean that rocket science should come easy. Yet there they are grimacing with the complexities of new knowledge, demanding that politics and love should progress smoothly and rapidly without a myriad of little falls or big kabooms.

The child laughs and cries where the adult trudges and groans. Walking on water would be standard despite the critics of myth busters and deceit of Ninja. A man has done it. But just because Daedalus melted his wings before the sun didn't stop the Wright Brothers. Learning is a natural curve of fits and starts and steady progress only with application. To parphrase Einstein, genius is 99% perspiration and 1 % inspiration.

I hear so many people saying they are unhappy where they are but are so unwilling to change one minutiae of their daily lives. And when the galaxy and universe conspire to push them forward a micron they give up with tears and pouts insisting they'll never be good at anything. Today there is so much reward for inactivity. The drug culture surplants the television world. Free heroin is the latest halcyon cry of government when we were only just trying to break them of the habit of offering free lunches we all but them must pay for.

Writing is just that. As a teen ager I made a decision to write, so admiring the books I found in the library and the lives and words of poets and authors I encountered there. The daily journal became a thing I carried along with keys and wallet A little black book that fitted pockets and went everywhere with me in an age of slide rulers and atom bombs. Looking back today I see I've been keeping a journal for nearly 50 years. Today I can write with greater ease and that connection between fingers and mind is a product of hours, days and years of writing. My favourite writers have but written more.

The mind is just a muscle. The famous nun studies showed that those who used theirs most were least likely to develop dementia. In addition to journalling I remember consciouslly trying my hand at different genres of writing. There was even a period of time when I wrote letters to the editor long before I wrote editorials. Anything can be done in this way. The proverbial baby steps with their crawls and falls and standing tall. It's beginning in the day and continuing in tomorrow.

That was the message of the last writing class I took to deal with my continued struggle with the sheer volume of the 'novel'. I'm now a master of a page or 10 pages even ,but am as overwelmed at the thought of 100, 200 or 300 as I was once at crossing continents or oceans in various conveniences. Jobin, that brilliant, witty, much published raconteur told us how she'd begun with one hour a day and a year later had a book that's gone on to television syndication. Her writing makes me laugh and I've always enjoyed the special connection that writing brings between my insides and the insides of others. Emotionally and intellectually we share this intimacy of idea, word and feeling.

But it really just is in the doing. Reframed, writing for me is just another way for "quitting" inertia, just overcoming sloth, the age old addiction today so commonly called "I can't" and "Yes, but". If I want to be a writer I must write. Writing is taking the mind and fingers out of park. Once in motion then I can drive to whereever I would go. A jaunt around my own community, out there on freeways to a foreign country or over here to some form of multiplicity machine.

I must remember though that publication never made me more than just that single gift to myself or lover, as in the Song of Songs. In the alpha and omega I am not writing for magazines or libraries but just for you. The you that Buber called Thou or just the you who laughed after falling and got up again to continue on when no one else was smiling and the unmoving were dead in the water. The writer must continue on despite rejection and just a little afraid of acceptance. It's really just another form of sharing. What was that line of Kurt Vonnegut's: all we are is just communicating peep holes on reality.

Hey, you, over there, are you listening. Yea, you. I saw you falling out of your peephole and think it terrific that you got back up. Have a great day!!! Sure, I'll pray for you too.

Nov.13,2008

Cornelia
-William Hay

I knew a woman doctor once
Who would not pay her taxes
Because she did not believe in war.
They threatened her with jail somewhere
When natives I knew preferred the jails
To the winter reservation,
Long after the Residential schools
Had been closed.

So who will get the new Sacrifice Medal
Which excludes those hit by "friendly" fire,
As if it never happened in Afganistan
Long after the Mulroney Chretien twins.

In the shadow of 9-11 and the hope of Obama
In prayers for peace
That Martin Luther, Gandhi and Sister Theresa
Aren't just names like Jesus has become.

China bails out America
As individuals flounder with birds in the oil spills
And corporate captains first leave ships
Without tradition and without face
Knowing judges have been paid in Florida
As the last train coast music dies
Only to be heard again in Indy.
There is no truth but Hollywood.

For you,my love
Half crazed, with pulcritude
Swimming in irony,
Your breath on mine
Wake me still
Dreaming this Court of Lear
Where they talk of silly things
As if we were not born yesterday,

Good Morning, America!
Canada, where are you?

William Hay, Writer

Nov. 12, 2008

The Canadian Authors Association met tonight at the Alliance for the Arts Building, 938 Howe Street Vancouver. I was asked to read. I chose the short story, Born Again, which was published in the Medical Post in 2005 and went on to win the Kenneth R. Wilson Award that year. The reader before me was a retired street nurse writing an autobiographical novel. Sylvia Taylor, President of the Federation of BC Writers did the featured presentation on the writer's "Platform" in the publishing industry.

I stumbled over some words, was glad not to cry in the parts of the story that still move me. Later, glad that it was over I appreciated the praise I received, surprised at how much that meant coming from other writers. I've read the works of several there, many are name brand authors, and it really does inspire me to be in their midst.

The idea of a writer's blog and a writer's curriculum vitae was raised. Now here it is. I've thought of it myself but the execution is happening thanks to Sylvia. She's bright eyed, blond, articulate, inspiring and accomplished. I took her writer's business card and thought, I've recommended this to people myself but do I have one. No. I 'd not heard of putting the writer's business card information on a book mark which was another great idea.

I do like this group!