My Poetry: You

               

You rushed early into this world

eager to see what it was all about

locked your eyes on mine

and didn’t look away.

Then I knew. Knew

that it is possible for a heart to grow,

like cells building new life.

You take your time, assessing,

finding your place. Charming strangers

with your smile. Absorb the world

from my shoulder. Thank me

when I chase away the night-time

monsters. Take little imp as a compliment!

You share, without hesitation,

your treasures  -  your opinion,

and the mysteriously melted chocolate-buttons

smeared across your hands. 

If only time didn’t rush

if only it would be more sharing         

if it would

     trickle

just a little. Not a lot to ask.

(Written in the early 80's)

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Denise Howie World Famous in B.C. 

My Poetry: This Boy

This Boy 

This boy trains worms;

Chases geese, not seeing the danger;

Shakes his head that we don’t know they are only laughing.

Strides the mountain path, self-peeled stick in hand.

This boy wanders;

Digs in the rocks by the loch  

on his own and wonders what the fuss is about.

Makes dandelion-chains because no one else does.

This boy. This boy;

before he could talk, grasped my hands

and we laughed and couldn’t stop, at something

or nothing.  How can it be that someday this boy…

This boy will be a man?

(Written in the early 80's)

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Denise Howie World Famous in B.C. 

Prince Dhruva, Aged Five, Sees Eye To Eye with God

He stood in that one place

in the forest, on one leg.

Wild pigs foraged his shadow.

He stood, gown as white

as the chunam of palace walls,

like a painting of the women

who danced for the courtiers,

struck in a pose of the nautch.

As he stood in that place

in a clearing by a brook

and saw slender branches

bend beneath the kingfisher,

the child stilled his chest

until a breath spanned a day.

Through the cramp,

he saw the feeding doe start

as hoopoe dipped curved beaks.

As infant bones set,

he saw the giant Chinar tree

trap snow in outstretched arms.

Through splayed toes green shoots

spread, embracing, winding

tethering - he soared in the wake

of the crows who followed

bears for pickings, saw a beetle grasp its prey,

a tiger groom her young, finite forest on finite land.

Saw the world cupped in the palm of Krsna,

saw his own heart, and looked eye to eye with God.

And the child knew that he was blessed,

for if he followed this austerity

with celibacy, piety,

equanimity and charity, he might

perhaps, atone past-life sin.

And as the child was carried from the forest

he tried not to remember the despair

he had witnessed when he looked

into the eyes of God.

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Denise Howie World Famous in B.C. 

Nature's reading room

As a child, I gravitated toward reading outside. I like to think it was because I was imaginative and adventurous, but I suspect it had more to do with the fact that I had four younger siblings.

If you’ve never sat under a weeping willow with your favourite author, go - go do it now. (Take a flashlight if the sun has already clocked off for the day.) Not just any weeping willow, though; the tips of the branches must sweep all the way to the ground like a Victorian skirt, creating a private green room where little beggars - be they siblings, children, or even colleagues - can’t find you.

As a young teen, I graduated to the sturdier upper limbs of elm and oak trees. Fields of wildflowers worked too, provided there was a rock or a tree trunk to lean against. My friends and I even had a library in a forest. We wrapped our books in waterproof, waxed bread wrappers and tucked them into cubbies formed by tree roots, meeting daily to read, using mossy rocks as seats and tables. I suspect more than a few of those books are still hidden on the forest floor, all these years later.

Have you noticed - people tend to experience the world differently depending on their interests or professions. On a drive through Saskatchewan, for example, an Australian rancher friend pointed out coyotes lurking in ditches, a camouflaged deer in a field, and bear cubs clambering up a tree trunk. What had been a pleasant enough drive suddenly felt like a National Geographic special, simply because my companion was tuned in to what caught his eye. Another friend worked with power lines - not just poles and wires, as it turns out, but miles and miles of much more than that.

It’s the same for me. Even now, the landscape around me is mentally mapped into reading nooks: a cosy patch of grass by the riverbank, the inviting crook of a tree branch, a wooden pier dappled with sunlight.

The weeping willow remains my all-time favourite, but the nearest one is three streets away - and apparently they “ find it a bit strange for a grown woman to camp out on our lawn.” So I make do with my comfortable bed. The lamp casts a gentle circle of light, and except for the cat on my shoulder and the dog draped across my feet, it’s almost the real thing.

Almost.

Without the ants.

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Denise Howie World Famous in B.C.

A Gem of a Writing Job

(Originally published in 2014. )

Photo by Mary Whittaker 

Back in the 80’s with a handful of magazine stories to my pen-name I dreamed of being a newspaper journalist; not so much a reporter who is generally limited to facts, but a journalist who would cast a light on the lives of local artists and characters who were lost in the shadows of Thatcherism and MTV.

 Looking back, I have realised that dream…minus the British Press Awards… 

 Much of my current writing life is devoted to a local ‘Little Engine that Could’ The One Person Project: A small group in my hometown who harness the goodwill and skills of communities in the region to take realistic steps towards helping a community in Tanzania to become self-sustaining.  In-line with my goals I have also written articles about Okanagan writers, artists and businesses and was thrilled to be asked to provide the web content for Tourism Summerland earlier this year.

 I also had the good fortune of personally and professionally connecting with artist Karen Griggs who fashioned her passion for jewelry and love of community into an innovative award-winning business. Bead Trails is a marketing success-story that promotes Okanagan businesses and communities by providing a fun scavenger hunt where tourists and locals alike explore the Okanagan Valley in search of elegant and funky beads to create a meaningful memory bracelet.

 I look forward to writing the upcoming Bead Trail newsletters and blogs but to be honest, providing web & brochure copy, press releases and articles for Bead Trails has been a tough gig. Imagine having to spend your days visiting Okanagan wineries, galleries and artists, browsing book shops and boutiques and stopping off for a coffee and cupcake.

 But I guess that’s the price you have to pay if you want to do right by your community!

The creativity (and science) of habit

You’re struggling to finish that novel. You know there’s a box-office hit hiding out in your head. There’s a poem teasing at the edges of your brain - if only you had the time to write.

If we’re honest, though, however busy we are, most of us do have the time. The real problem isn’t time at all. It’s habit.

Habit is one of those buzzwords of success, attached to everything from exercise and diet to career advancement. And for good reason. Habits quite literally rewire the brain. It generally takes around 28 days. So if you want to change something in your life, or add something new, commit to it for a month.

There’s solid science behind this idea, and one of the most striking examples comes from NASA. In the early days of the space program, researchers wanted to understand the physiological and psychological effects of spatial disorientation in a weightless environment. Astronauts were given convex goggles that flipped their vision 180 degrees, forcing them to see everything upside down. They had to wear them 24 hours a day for 30 days.

As you can imagine, this made life extraordinarily difficult.

Then, on day 26, something remarkable happened. One astronaut found that his vision had turned right-side-up again - despite still wearing the goggles. Between days 26 and 30, the same thing happened to the remaining astronauts. Their brains had created entirely new neural pathways.

Just as fascinating was what happened next. It took roughly the same amount of time for their brains to readjust once the goggles were removed. In a later version of the experiment, half the astronauts were allowed to remove the goggles for just 24 hours on day 15. When they put them back on, it still took another 25 to 30 days for their brains to adapt. Breaking the continuity of the new habit - just once - sent them back to square one.

As Aristotle famously said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

In The Artist’s Way, the seminal book on creativity and creative recovery, Julia Cameron introduces Morning Pages - a simple but powerful daily practice. Each morning, you hand-write three pages about anything and everything that comes into your mind. The pages don’t have to make sense. You write first thing, she explains, because “you’re trying to catch yourself before your ego’s defenses are in place.”

This stream-of-consciousness ritual establishes the habit of writing, clears mental clutter, and creates space for ideas to surface.

And then there’s Stephen King. When he’s working on a book - which is most of the time - he writes every day of the year. That includes Christmas, the Fourth of July, and his birthday. King finishes a draft in about three months, but he’s also quick to point out that writing just 300 words a day is enough to complete a novel in a year.

In the end, it really is that simple.

It’s just a matter of getting into the habit.

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Denise Howie World Famous in B.C.

My Childhood: Fact or Fiction?

Don’t decide to base your first book on your childhood - especially if you lived in six countries and didn’t keep a journal.

I started writing this book thirteen years ago and I’m about three-quarters of the way through. I’m not lazy. I’ve been published many times in the intervening years, but this particular project is forever shunted to the back burner. Take a guess at what I was working on moments before I distracted myself by opening a fresh page on this blog…

I’ve always called it a novel because, although it’s rooted in the facts of a period of my life, I’ve had to invent conversations and events to bridge the inevitable gaps in memory. After all, the main character - me - is only five years old when the story begins. But really, I should learn to call it what it is: a memoir. All memoirs are crafted in the same way. The story tells the truth of the life being described, but by necessity, it cannot all be true.

My father was in the Royal Air Force - a blessing that meant my childhood was designed for adventure. Another blessing is that there are countless online groups and forums devoted to reminiscing about life as a services or military child in the 1960s and 70s. There is, it turns out, an eager readership for memoirs like mine.

And yet, this is also a curse. Those experiences matter deeply to my fellow brats (the Forces acronym for British Regiment Attached Traveller), and that sense of shared history comes with an unspoken expectation: get it right. Be accurate. Don’t muddle the details.

I’m not just describing my life - I’m chronicling a way of life. The peculiar, transient world of a military child in the 1960s. I take comfort in the fact that all any memoirist can do is recount how they experienced, and now reinterpret, the events around them. Even within one family, each person deciphers shared moments differently. Still, there’s a certain pressure in knowing that not only my siblings, but an entire generation of former brats, may quietly question my version of events.

Many of our family photographs have been lost. I’m the eldest child, and my parents both died while still in their fifties, so I have little tangible material to draw from. What slows me down the most is my unreliable memory of geography. Even with the help of the internet, so much time has passed that I’m often researching what feels like an entirely different planet.

Frustratingly, old maps don’t track my footsteps the way the Marauder’s Map does in Harry Potter. I know my peers will be forgiving, but it will undoubtedly jar if I describe turning left to reach the Malay village when, in fact, I could only have turned right. Then again, their retrospective GPS may be just as sketchy as mine. Here’s hoping.

Needless to say, my second book will be a proper novel. It will be set in space. The main character will keep a journal that she starts writing in at the age of five.

Because she is, quite clearly, a much smarter cookie than I ever was.