Sep 14 2017

Yo, Canada. Also: I read poetry.

Rosemary

I’ve been having a bit of back-and-forth with Createspace and Amazon.ca, occasioned by my astonishment at finding that the Canadian price of the paperback of The Steerswoman on Amazon.ca was more than twice the price on Amazon.com!  Even allowing for the exchange rate!

As it turns out, the issue was that Amazon.ca is not yet itself selling the book — it’s just listing it for sale through Amazon.ca, but by third parties.   Other booksellers, that is; and these guys are buying it from sources in the US, importing it, and passing on all that extra cost to you, the purchaser.

But don’t worry; within a few days, Amazon.ca will itself be selling the book, and its price should drop to some reasonable amount.  I’ll be keeping my eye on it, and I’ll post a note here in my blog, when I see it happening.

In other news, still doing the hair-tearing part of writing…

In other other news: I’m reading Mary Oliver‘s collection of essays, Upstream.  I do not understand how this writer escaped my notice until so recently — she’s certainly been around long enough for me to have come across her.  And yet, somehow, I didn’t.

 

From the title essay:

“In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.”

I stumble across things, writers that I wish I’d known about years ago…

From “Sleeping in the Forest”:

“All night I heard the small kingdoms
breathing around me, the insects,
and the birds who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water,
grappling with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.”

 

The more I read of her, the more I find this sort of clarity of perception as being — how shall I say it?  Very steerswomanly.  To be that aware, and that observative, and that curious and questing.

From “Worm Moon”:

“In March the earth remembers its own name
Everywhere, the plates of snow are cracking.
The rivers begin to sing. In the sky
the winter stars are sliding away; new stars
appear as, later, small blades of grain
will shine in the dark fields.

And the name of every place
is joyful.”

It was Terri Windling who directed me toward Mary Oliver, through her blog, “Myth and Moor.”  Terri’s blog is, by the way,  a wonderful resource for thoughts about art, and creativity.   I’ve got it on my blog feed, so that I never miss a post.

My exploration of Mary Oliver’s writing has just begun, and I’m taking it slowly — you need to read poetry slowly.   We’ll see what comes up as I read more…