audreywhitson.com

Month: October 2013

  • All Hallows-Martinmas 2013

    It is St. Martin’s Day,
    we’ll eat chestnuts,
    we’ll taste the wine.
    Traditional, Portugal+

    This is the season of extremes. The land on fire and the land laid bare and all of it happens within a few short weeks, as if the earth blazes in glory before giving itself up to the quiet rest of winter. Last Sunday when I went for a walk, there were bands of colour laid on the sidewalk and against the dusting of snow: leaves of maple, elm, and mountain ash; golden, brilliant yellow, or scarlet-rust; here and there at sudden intervals; felled by the sudden freeze the night before. It is in these turnings, split seconds in Earth’s life, that the ancients believed we are opened to decision points.

    In ancient times, All Hallows Eve marked the start of an eleven-day feast that ended with Martinmas on November 11th. Martinmas coincided with one of the old Celtic Quarter Days (quarter for “four”) positioned midway between equinox and solstice. During this fall festival, harvest fairs were held, tenants and servants hired or dismissed, livestock slaughtered, and new wine tasted. In Scotland they now call the old Quarter Days, Term Days. There, they are still turning points, marking when contracts and leases begin and end and when interest and rents are paid. Martinmas is still celebrated in parts of Western Europe with bonfires, parades, lanterns, and candy for the children.

    I wonder if my fondness for this time of year is due, at least in part, to the discovery that my Great-Great-Aunt Agnes Whitson was married on Martinmas in 1835 in Swinton Parish, Scotland. Not long after, she, her new husband and her two brothers (or by some accounts cousins) sailed for Canada. In Scotland, they were tenant farmers. In Canada and Southern Ontario, they were settlers and landowners. I imagined them saying their goodbyes to family and friends and neighbours during the long harvest festival, of looking on during the hiring fairs, and once married, taking the road to the nearest port with ships to Canada, probably Glasgow. Our lives are the result of many such decisions, momentous and dramatic and everyday.

    Lately, I’ve been wrestling with a decision of my own. I liken it to struggling to catch my breath (my spirit), tossing and turning in the night, wrestling with an angel and not wanting to let go without a blessing. First, on one side and then on the other, each side presenting a different choice in my mind, each a different road. The more I try to control the outcomes, the greater the struggle. When I can let go though, when in the night I can see through the windows of my nightmares and come to terms with who I am, I wake up at peace.

    This time between fall and winter reminds me that decisions can be as dramatic and as sudden as that. And as peace-filled.

    Happy Halloween!

    Audrey

    + http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Martin’s_Day

  • September Launch: Audreys Books

    September 26, an exciting night: sixty-one people in attendance, an abundance of wine, stories and questions. Sixty books were in stock. Last week I couldn’t resist checking to see how many were left on the shelf: 4:)  Thanks to my niece, Alana Whitson, for the photos.

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  • To Bind Together

    “You aren’t religious are you?” a co-worker asked me after she opened The Glorious Mysteries and saw the title of the first story in my collection, “The Baby Jesus.”

    “What do you mean by religious?” I asked her. “If you mean a strict follower of a particular religious doctrine, no,” I said. “But if you mean, like the Latin root of the word, religio, to bind together, then yes, I very much have religious sensibilities. I look at the world as a place of connections.” What I didn’t tell her is that many of my stories critique or subvert the Catholic tradition itself, and I am not alone in this.

    Last weekend I was at a brilliant performance at the Citadel Theatre (in Edmonton) of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. ONeill’s characters are deeply influenced by Catholicism, often tragically so. Yet the divided family he presents in Long Day’s Journey could be any family dogged by addiction, failing, and disappointment and that is what makes his particular rendering of it, universal, Catholic and all.

  • Fact or Fiction and the Truth of It

    I had the privilege of travelling the province last month reading from The Glorious Mysteries. At Word on the Street, in Lethbridge, I had just finished reading “The Water Witcher,” one of the Alberta stories in my collection. There was an attentive crowd gathered, probably 30 to 35 people. It was an outdoor festival; we were under a tent. The skies were clear and warm, the winds were calm for Lethbridge. A hand shot up. A middle-aged man, dressed in the clean, white work shirt and pants of a painter or other tradesman, had the first question. I had watched during my twenty-minute reading as he paused at the back of the tent, leaned in to listen, and finally took a seat with the rest of the audience. “One thing I want to know, in that story of yours, did they really end up finding water in that place?”

    Often it’s the sign of a good story when a reader is “taken in.” The man was sincere and earnest. I almost didn’t have the heart to answer. “This is a work of fiction, but it could have happened and it does happen.” The man slumped a little lower in his seat, clearly disappointed. The context is southern Alberta, the summer of the Great Flood of 2013.

    That got me to thinking about fact and fiction and why our age demands so much of reality. Metaphors seem to pale beside the reality of devastation. There are fundamental parts of our world that are out of balance. And yet I would argue that stories illuminate and hold out more hope for the future than all the facts in the world. Just saying… but then I am a writer.