Home Articles posted by Siri Paulson (Page 7)

Two Poems in Memory of Ursula K. Le Guin

by Siri Paulson A Bit of Background Ursula K. Le Guin has always been one of my favourite writers, but I had drifted away from her over the years, as one does. When she died in January 2018, I decided to go back and read all of her Hainish universe works, many of which I had missed (she wrote novels, short stories, and various lengths in between). I’m about halfway through, reading each of them in order. It was fascinating to watch her craft develop. I fell in love with her work all over again. And…well, I’m a writer, so I process things by writing… The first poem is about a (fictional) invention of Le Guin’s called the “ansible,” a way to communicate faster than light in her Hainish universe, which does not have FTL travel. The second poem is about her three early SF novels and how they led her to writing her fifth and most famous novel, The Left Hand of Darkness. (The first Earthsea book is her fourth novel, but I left that out since I haven’t reread it yet…might need to write more poetry later on!) Enjoy! Ansible vast gulfs of darknessseparate humanityeach in our own tiny orbitbridging that distancewould take years she gave us a wayto reach out,not to touchbut something greater—conversationthe yearning to hear another,satisfiedthe need to be heard,metthe wish to understandstill out of reachbut just a little closer we whirl in our orbitsknowing nowthat we can talkand for just an instantthe vast distance…

Continue reading

NaNoFail?

This year, I set out to do National Novel Writing Month for the first time in most of a decade. I’d won NaNo six times between 2005 and 2011, and then hadn’t really tried again since. Oh, I had made halfhearted attempts to use that NaNo energy to finish a partial novel or edit a draft, but I’d never come close to the wordcount and the free abandon of my six 50,000-word drafts. (No, none of them are available on Amazon. Because, that’s why.) So I really wanted to prove to myself that I still had the chops. Then Real Life hit. It wasn’t entirely unpredictable. In fact, it wasn’t unpredictable at all. I was out of town the first weekend, then back to work without a break. Then I started some new meds that gave me horrible insomnia for a week (a known side effect, so that wasn’t even a surprise). By the time I caught up on sleep from all of that, the month was half over. It’s not that I wasn’t writing. I took my laptop with me on the weekend trip and squeaked out a few hundred words each day. I came home and every day, even through the insomnia, I would put down another few hundred words. But for NaNo, you need to write 1,666 words every day for a month. If you miss one day, every other day requires more words. So I kept thinking that my daily wordcount would pick up after I…

Continue reading

Contra Dance Love

This time last year, I was writing about contra dance and all the things I love about it, inspired by a weekend of dancing that I’d just gotten back from. Well, that’s an annual weekend, so the more things change… Since I wrote that post, I set in motion a big change to make my home dance community more LGBTQIA+ friendly, and turned into a community leader (!!!) in the process. The change was painful in some ways, but it’s completed now and the community is thriving, with lots of new energy from some younger, newer dancers who would not have felt so welcome before. Right now, I’m a committee member-at-large, because shepherding that process AND doing our twice-monthly newsletter was too much. So instead I’ve been rewriting parts of our website, networking with organizers of dances in other cities, going to the occasional committee meeting, and posting dance-related memes from our Facebook page. Every once in a while it hits me that this isn’t just an activity I do, this is my community. At the dance two weeks ago, a friend and I were floor managing–doing setup and tear-down, and monitoring things during the event–and a couple of minor crises popped up. (They were both related to the fact that for a while during the event, nobody in attendance had a key to the venue.) We nabbed the other committee members who were there and solved the crises, then worked together to set up new systems so they wouldn’t…

Continue reading

Outwitting the Inner Critic

If you’ve been around here for a while, you’ll know that the Inner Critic is my worst enemy as a writer. That’s the little voice in your head that says “This story is so derivative, the dialogue is wooden, your characters have no personality, and you don’t write enough to be a Real Writer anyway.” (Your mileage may vary.) Periodically I find a way to fight it. Then I forget what I did that worked. So here’s my latest attempt to write down what worked in hopes of cementing it into my brain (or at least referring to it next time I need it). And if it helps you too, so much the better… Some context: Last month, I went off on a week-long writing retreat and took some short stories that I wanted to revise. Normally, for me, revising is a great way to get the Inner Critic to come out and play, I mean stomp all over me. (Ironic for someone whose day job is actually editing, but there you go.) I can write first drafts (sometimes) and I can tinker with line edits (usually). But if a story needs anything bigger, I just…freeze up and have no idea where to start, or else write endless brainstorming notes and never get any closer to having a reshaped story that I’m happy with. This time, neither of those things happened. Here’s what I did. Start sessions with handwriting. I brought along a book of writing exercises/prompts and had them…

Continue reading

Gardening Lessons Learned: A List

Things we have learned about gardening this year (so far–there are another six to eight weeks left in the growing season here, so stay tuned): If you buy an oregano plant, put it in your garden, then start eating it and think “Hmmm, this doesn’t taste anything like the dried stuff”, chances are good it’s not oregano even though that’s what the label said. (Turns out it’s an herb called summer savory. Thank goodness it’s still an edible herb, since we ate it for weeks before cluing in…) Basil goes with eeeeverything. We have basil coming out our ears. We’ve eaten it in tomato salads, in stir-fry, on pasta, on skewers with cherry tomatoes and bocconcini (small balls of mozzarella cheese), and there’s still more in pesto form in the freezer…good thing we love the stuff! Related: once you have had fresh herbs, it’s very hard to go back. Or garden-fresh or made-from-scratch anything, really. Since my spouse and I are not actually homesteaders or even homemakers, this is a problem. (We haven’t gotten as far as canning yet, but we did just make fresh Irish soda bread, peach compote, and refrigerator pickles, and our freezer is filling up with slow-roasted tomatoes and chicken broth. We miiight be wannabe homesteaders.) Beets are prone to diseases and pests (at least ours are). But you can still eat the beets, just not the leaves…which is sad because the leaves are tasty too, as it turns out. Squirrels like cucumbers even more than…

Continue reading

Resting

On my Instagram, I’ve been following this account called The Nap Ministry, a performance art project by Tricia Hersey about how resting is a form of political resistance. She posts about how rest was something practiced by the leisure class as they exploited the working and enslaved classes (with both economic and racial inequities). Today there’s an emphasis on hustle, on being busy, on having side gigs. That’s at least in part because it’s hard for many folks to get a regular, steady 9–5 job with benefits that pays the bills without side gigs, but also because being busy is glorified in our society. Lean out, Hersey argues—lie down, and reclaim your right to rest. I’m thinking about that today because we’ve just had a long weekend, heading into a week off for me. My day job has been incredibly busy as we race to get a big project out the door. (It’s not quite out yet, but my colleagues are handling it, thank goodness.) At the same time I’ve been doing edits for the next Turtleduck Press novel, coming from KD Sarge in just a few months. And I even ended up spending Saturday afternoon working on a piece of the day-job project that arrived, naturally, on the Friday afternoon before a long weekend. After all that, I’m feeling more exhausted and brain-dead than I have in a long time. I spent the rest of Saturday staring blankly at things. Sunday and Monday I started to feel human again,…

Continue reading

The Gardening Saga Goes High

(No, not that kind of high…although marijuana is now legal in Canada.) In this year’s edition of the battle with the bindweed, spouse and I decided to put in raised beds for our vegetable patch. There is now landscape fabric underneath the beds (with a hole so the worms could get through and work their magic on the soil), and fabric and mulch on the paths between the beds, and new, uncontaminated soil IN the beds to give us a head start. And all the digging and weeding will be an awful lot easier on our backs. Having the beds built in the spring meant that we got a slow start on the planting. It was too late for most things that go directly in the ground as seeds, so we only put in a few–beets, carrots, and bush beans (unlike most beans, these don’t need to grow up a pole, so they won’t shade our neighbours’ vegetable patch that is directly to the north and now two feet lower than ours). I keep meaning to try a fall crop of seeds, too, if we can get anything harvested soon enough so there’s space. (Our first frost date is somewhere around the end of October or beginning of November.) New this year, we’re trying potatoes, which are growing like mad, so that’s exciting. I’m hilling up the soil around them so they’ll be easier to harvest later, but they’re growing so fast I can barely keep up. We’ve also got…

Continue reading

Coat of Scarlet: A Clockpunk Tale, Part 5

by Siri Paulson Read previous installments: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 Marius leaned on the railing of Niko’s airship, watching the dock workers as they clung to the spire below and untied the ropes that had tethered the ship. On the deck to either side of him, pirates hauled the ropes in and coiled them with impressive precision. The air sacs swelled, and the sails filled. The vessel slipped away gently into the night. Behind, the lights of the city gleamed like cloth-of-gold; ahead were the more scattered lights of the countryside, and beyond that a wide velvet-rich blackness that must be the sea. Nobody had paid him any mind, once he understood to keep out of the way. The pirates rushed to and fro, climbing and hauling and shouting. Niko stood on the raised deck at the…stern?…of the ship like a veritable island of calm, only making gestures now and then, or speaking to a crew member who rushed off to convey his orders. He looked like a man who could pull off a scarlet justacorps coat – not flamboyant, but self-assured as Marius himself could only dream of being. Just watching the man made his blood quicken. Marius watched, fascinated, until he realized he was trembling with cold. Now he understood the long coat and woolen tricorn hat, which had seemed above Niko’s station, for all that he wore them well. The crew seemed warm enough, moving about in shirtsleeves, but he…

Continue reading

The Hibernator

Surprise, it’s me again! Kit had to bow out this week, so you’ll get her twice later on instead. It’s been a tough spring around here. The weather has been cold and wet for months (my day-job boss made a crack about how we seem to have moved to Vancouver — think Seattle if you’re American, or Scotland if you’re British), the world continues to be a dumpster fire in new and exciting ways, and all I want to do is hibernate. So I’ve been hibernating. Aside from the attempts at nesting I told you about last time, I’ve been reading more, watching Netflix (our new favourite show is The Good Place), and getting constantly sucked into Facebook. Some of those things are healthier coping mechanisms than others, I will admit… On the nesting front, we’ve also been tinkering with recipes. Most recently we’ve worked out: an excellent salad — arugula, cherry tomatoes, walnuts, some kind of cheese (blue, goat, Brie, Camembert, you name it), and homemade vinaigrette (based roughly on this) our new favourite brunch dish, huevos rancheros — our somewhat inauthentic version involves layering cheese quesadillas, BBQ pork or beef (fried up with some vegetables), and fried eggs, with maybe some hot sauce on top roasted beets — why do we never think of buying beets? Roasted in the oven with a little oil drizzled on top, they’re so flavourful, as it turns out! Perhaps helped along by all this delicious food, I’m gradually coming out of this…

Continue reading

Misadventures in Decorating

I’m a firm believer in the importance of what I call “creative cross-training”–doing creative things that are not your primary hobby (or calling). It’s good for the brain, and it’s relaxing in a way that, say, writing a sequel isn’t. *ahem* But that doesn’t mean there are no challenges. Have you ever watched a home decorating show or flipped through a decor magazine? They make it look so easy. And yet… My spouse and I have been trying to turn our attic into a cozy sitting room / writing retreat space. It’s been a multi-year process. First the room had to be finished and refloored, then climate-controlled. Initially it was going to be a workout room that doubled as a guest room. We bought a daybed, a padded bench, curtains and storage, a decorative wall mirror that was also big enough to check your form on yoga poses. That worked for a while, but it wasn’t getting used enough in either capacity. The next plan was to create an at-home writing retreat. The rest of our house is fairly utilitarian or at least halfheartedly/haphazardly decorated, so I was excited to make one space that looked deliberately designed. I hopped on Pinterest and pinned a ton of cozy cabins and home libraries, lots of wood and an old-fashioned vibe that made me think “fantasy world”. Then the plan met reality. Even the scaled-down version turned out to be wayyy beyond our capacity to actually create. Did I mention this version of…

Continue reading