A WRITER'S LIFE
A WRITER'S LIFE
A Writer's Life Barbara Black
Barbara Black’s newest book, Little Fortified Stories, published by Caitlin Press in 2024, is now available in stores. In this episode, Barbara delves into her creative process and shares how a literary workshop in Lisbon, complete with port wine and tiny notebooks, inspired this compelling collection of microfiction and flash fiction.
We explore how memory influences creativity, examining how experiences that feel like amnesia can play a crucial role in storytelling. Barbara, a versatile artist whose talents span writing, editing, and performance, has journeyed from North Vancouver’s natural beauty to the stages of classical and jazz music. Her work includes acclaimed poetry and fiction, alongside recent projects like a song cycle based on the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
Barbara’s artistic spirit extends to her garden, where she finds a blend of order and chaos that mirrors her writing.
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Welcome listeners to A Writer's Life. I'm your host Heigebohm, the author of the novel Secrets in the Shadows. A Writer's Life is a place where I'll be in conversation with fellow writers. We'll discuss all things writing, they'll read from their latest works and we'll explore what happens beyond the pen in A Writer's Life. It's gonna be a page-turner. I just know it. Pull up a chair and join us. Pull up a chair and join us.
Speaker 2:I'm recording on the traditional ancestral and unceded territory of the Squamish Nation. There's a character who has a tongue transplant and ends up it doesn't work out too well and he can't speak and his words come out very strangely and he's frustrated and he goes to a speech therapist but then he sounds like the speech therapist who has this kind of uppity East Coast American accent.
Speaker 1:Welcome listeners to another episode of A Writer's Life. Today I'll be in conversation with Barbara Black and I'm just going to dive right in. Hello, barbara, and welcome back to A Writer's Life, thank you. Let's kick off by diving into some nostalgic territory. What was one of your favorite childhood vacations with your family and what made it stand out as memorable to you?
Speaker 2:We used to go to the Okanagan, to West Bank, and I just loved it there because we stayed in a. I thought this was very special. We used to tent, but when we were a bit older we stayed in the little cabanas I don't even think those exist anymore generally and it was right by the lake there was a playground and I just loved being there. It had a huge one memory that sticks with me. It had a huge sort of like merry-go-round. It was just massive.
Speaker 2:Usually they're, you know, they're pretty small, but it was massive like this giant industrial disc Maybe that's actually what it was and you could fit tons of kids on it. So there'd be like, about you know, 10, 12 kids on it all at the same time, you know, just running along with it, jumping on it, jumping off it. I just that was just a kind of a weird thing that I'd never seen anywhere else since and I loved it. And so I guess those, yeah, yeah, those really stuck with me. Those memories. Okanagan was always nice and hot and I remember we would be driving in the car and there would be a certain point where I could smell the hot pine trees and I loved that, like yeah, that was like oh, we're there, we here. Now we're in the Okanagan.
Speaker 1:Ah, barbara, that was wonderful. Thank you for that. You're welcome On to your latest accomplishment, your new book Little Fortified Stories no doubt it is a page-turner Published by Caitlin Press in 2024, out in stores now. You have a lot of short stories in there on microfiction. Could you enlighten us on what microfiction is and what inspired this captivating collection?
Speaker 2:Well, microfiction is 300 words and under generally. Some people describe it as slightly more, slightly less, but generally it's 300 words and under. And so there are some pieces in my collection that are that short, and when they're bigger than 300, they're generally called flash fiction, and so I have a lot of those and the flash fiction is usually from 300 to about 1,000 to 1,500 words. So I have micros and I have flash in there and I also have sort of hybrids. I have some dialogues. I have some dialogues. I have some uh list stories. That's the great thing about this kind of uh short, short fiction is what I call it is. It's a it's experimental. There are rules, there's sometimes people stick to the rules about story arcs. Um, even the smallest change at the end is required, and I, many of my stories are like that and some of them aren't. So I like it for that experimental quality it has.
Speaker 2:And you asked about how it came about. How it came about was that I was in Lisbon for a literary workshop with Disquiet and I went to the port center, which was way up on the hill but still in the main part of the city, and I was sampling ports and I was sitting there and I had a line, a character voice come into my head and I had this tiny book that they'd given us as a complimentary thing. And I thought, this tiny book, you know what am I? I'm never going to use it, but that's all I had. So I wrote in it a very, very short story and then when I looked at it, I went, oh, this story has like the quality of the port in it. It had, you know, it was talking about dark fruit and you know colors like garnet, and I thought, oh, this is really cool.
Speaker 2:And so I, on my off time during the workshop, I would go up there and test I had white port, which is beautiful, I didn't even know there was such thing. Up there. And test, I had white port, which is beautiful, I didn't even know there was such thing. And, uh, started writing more stories based around those fortified drinks, which is what port is. And when I got home I decided to continue it and I so I added more spirits being, you know, gin and rum and scotch, and was doing a little sipping, I wasn't, you know getting drunk while I was doing it Drunk on words maybe, for either a character, voice or just a sentence would come into my head.
Speaker 2:That was just I knew it was perfect, and then I would just write off that. So I have a lot of other spirits in the collection and once I kind of was done with that concept, I also added eggfrastic works, which are writings from visual art or photography, and a couple of other sections, one on my ancestry. So that's how it all started.
Speaker 1:I haven't read all of it, but what I have read I really enjoyed. Oh good, kudos to you. Your book cover super creative. Can you share a bit about its creation and significance?
Speaker 2:It's a story in a in the section called Ancestral Fabrications and what that is. It's stories based around my ancestry, but because the records are a bit slim, I have fictionized many of them. Some are based on actual, true things and in fact there's a funny one that sounds like I made it up but it isn't One that my grandmother's mother locked her husband out of the house because he was drinking and he had to live in the backyard in the shed. I said what's actually? That was actually true. They thought I had made it up.
Speaker 2:So one of the stories in there is called the Jaeger family theater and so this collage is based on that story and it's about a girl who's in a family called the Jaeger family, which is my Swedish side. My Nana's originally name, original name, was Johansson, but her father or grandfather changed it because they were Johanssons and there were, like you know, 2 million Johanssons in Sweden. So he changed the name to Jaeger and the story is about a girl in the Jaeger family. It's a little bit surreal.
Speaker 2:A lot of my stories are a little pushed, a little bit out of reality and she is doing a ritual that they do in the family, where they're on a sort of a stage and they have a song they've been given and her song is from the Jaeger clan and the Jaeger is also a bird of the north, and so she has a song that she sings. It starts with Kriya, which is like the sound of the Jaeger, and so in this picture this is her sort of performing that right and calling out sorry, calling out that song, and she talks about her family. It's narrated by this girl, so that is how it came about.
Speaker 1:And you designed that. You put it together as a collage.
Speaker 2:It's nice Bits of this and bits of that from magazines and the frame is an actual metal frame that I collaged on top of.
Speaker 1:It's fabulous. I loved it. Well done. In one of your blog posts you mentioned your childhood experience with temporary topographical amnesia. Could you elaborate on that intriguing aspect of your past?
Speaker 2:Well, I didn't even know it was a thing and that it had a name until I was an adult, when I was a kid. In that blog I'll just explain it, since people haven't read it In that blog I talked about when I was quite little, probably even like six or seven I remember walking to school and suddenly the street I was on which was right where my house was it was very close by, I knew it well everything kind of went blank. All the things were there visually, but they had no meaning, they had no memory. I didn't really know where I was, know where I was. It's like I lost my you know, like an amnesia episode, and everything just looked generic.
Speaker 2:It was a generic street, it was a generic house and it doesn't last very long. But when you're in it it seems like it's lasting a long time and I would just keep walking and then, you know, maybe half a block, it would all come back in. And as an adult I don't get it when I'm walking, but I still get it when I'm driving, and it's usually a straight street and it's usually in the same places. There's a place that I drive that goes toward UV, uvic university of victoria, and I often get it there and I think I'm at ubc, because I just go to ubc and I think, and uh, you just last a few seconds if I turn left and turn right with my head, uh, it sort of breaks it out and I'm like okay.
Speaker 2:I know where I am and I'm at. It doesn't happen very often. It may be because I overthink too. I'm thinking too much while I drive. I was like that as a kid. I even wrote a little story that said, oh, I guess I was thinking too much. It was like grade two or something. So that's what that syndrome is all about.
Speaker 1:How did you find out about it?
Speaker 2:I don't know. I think I typed in what the symptoms of it were and it came up as an actual thing and that's how I discovered it. It's kind of interesting in a way to have had that experience, because you realize that everything you do and see is based in memory or it's making a memory, and when you strip all of that out it's sort of frightening. But it's also interesting because now you know that everything has meaning.
Speaker 1:Wow, that was interesting. Let's shift gears now into your journey as a writer, from your humble beginnings to where you find yourself now.
Speaker 2:I started writing probably in high school. I did write, I did like writing stories, and I always got remarks from the teacher, you know, oh, your story was very good. And I look at them, I go really, the other ones must have been really bad. But I was imaginative, I always had a good sense of language. And I do remember writing a story.
Speaker 2:In grade three we were assigned to write a story and we had a few days to do it and I did it right away, of course, and she thought it was great, so she posted it. And when the whole assignment was finished and people put their stories up, oh, I think I read it out loud to the class too, and everyone had their stories up and a lot of them sounded like my story. I thought that was well, I guess it was flattering. So, um, story writing. And then when I went to, uh, high school, I had these um binders, these, uh, the coiled binders, the eight by 11. And I I was, you know, you know you're a teenager, so you're writing all your thoughts and your secrets. And I was experimenting with language a lot, but mostly in sort of gobbledygook, like just making sounds. But I did write in it a lot and I got bored in class. So I would be writing in it sometimes and the teacher didn't know. Except for once In my French class. I was writing and I had my head down and the class kind of went silent and the teacher said, barbara, what are you doing? And I just said, oh, I'm writing in my journal. And she said, well, can you put it away now? So I wrote into university with those and got a little bit more sophisticated with what I was doing, trying to write short stories, and then the writing just went away as a personal activity.
Speaker 2:But all the jobs I had were writing. I worked at an ecology center and I wrote all the texts there and I had all contracts. I was mostly a freelancer. I worked at a newspaper and I was freelancer and I did anything. I did government contracts, but it wasn't creative writing. I was writing. I was writing. I was a book reviewer and I was a theater reviewer, but I wasn't writing in my spare time because it was my job. So years went past and I, in age 40, I thought I kind of feel like I have a book in me. Nice, I did, but it took another several years for that to happen. In my 50s I started writing and it's been great. It doesn't pay as well as some professional writing, but yeah, I've really enjoyed it. I've really enjoyed it. And here I am now. I have one book out and one coming out Wonderful.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you write poetry as well and you have been published in quite a few anthologies, correct, yeah, I do write poetry.
Speaker 2:It's harder for me, but I do write poetry as well and I'm in quite a few anthologies for that. And then more lately I've been doing entering flash fiction contests and yeah, and having doing well there were there any standout moments or challenges you encountered while penning this collection?
Speaker 1:yes, you should ask spill the beans.
Speaker 2:Spill the beans, I will well, when my publisher, when the music from a strange planet had, you know, had been out and and done, well, my publisher said do you have another? Do you have something else you know, going, I said, well, I have this manuscript, you know. It's like you know, short, short fiction and it's kind of, I don't know, two thirds done or one third done. And she goes okay, great, you know, I'll take it. I said, well, oh, okay and um, and then I immediately got writer's block, like within months, and I've never had that my entire life, and it was. A lot of people told me that that's common when you put out a book and you might need a rest period. So they were very great. The publisher was very good and she said she did you, you know. She kept saying okay, you know, just take it easy. And so that was a serious struggle with, uh, I. I tried to make myself right for a while and I tried different ways and then I, and then I just decided I'll, you know, I'm just going to leave myself alone and who knows what processes might be going on while I'll be doing other creative things. I just did I went and looked at art and I still kept art and writing in my life, but I just wasn't doing it.
Speaker 2:And I actually have a story in my collection those with the loss of their lexicon and it's about me and I didn't know when I started writing it I was listening to a piece of music, actually, which was a very haunting, um, kind of music in a different language, and I wrote this story and it's about a woman who stands on in the town square against a brick wall and she sings to people passing by. But I noticed I walked past, or the narrator, who actually is me. I didn't know that at the time. The narrator walks by and hears that she is singing my songs and by my songs really I mean my words and and I hear her doing that. And finally I ask her why and she says oh, because when you walk by, I see your words behind you and they want to be sung and so I sing them for you. That story just came out of my subconscious. I didn't really know what was going on when I wrote it and then I went oh, oh, that's, that's really neat.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Fabulous. You got to just love those moments right when you're reflecting, and the clarity of that is so yeah.
Speaker 2:I do find there's a lot of subconscious content while I'm writing a book. The first book was the same. You write it and thenughters, and it's just great how those come into your work. It's what you're working on on a different level when you write, and it does leak in, for me anyway.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, that brings me to my next question Are there particular themes or subjects that consistently captivate you, or perhaps ones you consciously avoid?
Speaker 2:Hmm, ones I consciously avoid that I don't know. But I do have themes of well. As I mentioned, mothers and daughters. I have a piece that's called that that I'll read, and I have a dream that I actually had about my mother being in the our old house and coming there. And there's another one that has has my mother in. It's a very strange one. It's more about a mouth that's speaking um, that one's very dark, not dark, but it's lyrical dark, and I have a few about that address climate change in in an oblique way, not an obvious way. I have one where I'm writing about an oyster catcher which I have here near my house, down by the ocean, and how it's sitting on a rock but the tide is coming up and I know that it will be inundated soon, and I'm at the same time thinking about, oh, how high is the sea going to go when the climate changes? Because I live very close to the ocean only half a block and so that's a sort of subconscious concern for me. So that's. There's another story I wrote in Sardinia when I was sitting up on a hill and there were just these beautiful, fragrant bushes in bloom and I didn't hardly saw any bees and I thought that was unusual, or, you know, maybe it wasn't, but to to me. I know that they are declining, insects, and so, uh, there's a story a man and his daughter, and they have an area they sequestered where they're trying to save all these insects, um and uh, and plants, because, uh, they're disappearing in the world. That's another thing.
Speaker 2:Artists, creativity I think that comes in a lot. And language, I seem to be very I wonder why. I'm very interested in language, and I have one about how language came about. That's a very cheeky story. And I have another where a woman is, she's kind of frozen for some reason, and a strange figure comes to her and offers her something that looks like tongues, which she puts in her mouth, and this also sounds like a writer's block as well. And in that one she starts, the snow around her starts to melt and she feels words coming from below in her body and coming up. So that's, in several stories there's language.
Speaker 2:Oh, there's a character who has a tongue transplant and ends up it doesn't work out too well. Ends up, it doesn't work out too well and, um, he, he can't speak and his words come out very strangely and uh, he's frustrated and he goes to a speech therapist but then he sounds like the speech therapist who is this kind of uppity east coast american accent. So he gives up and he trades his. I'm telling I'm telling away these stories, but that's okay, people will forget. And he trades his. I'm telling I'm telling away these stories, but that's okay, people will forget. He trades his tongue, he moves to the wilderness because he's embarrassed and he trades his tongue with another wild animal a wild animal. I'll just say Not, so I don't reveal everything and then he just doesn't speak anymore and that animal has his tongue. Yeah, my fevered brain. That's awesome, I love it.
Speaker 1:Can you discuss any specific literary or philosophical influences that have shaped your exploration of the human condition and the natural world in your writing?
Speaker 2:Oh, my goodness, I won't be able to think of the author's names right now, but lately I've read two books about plants and plants sentience. One of them was about plants sentience not, you know that they can, like, perceive things, but they can feel things that you'd be surprised. But they can feel things that you'd be surprised. And another one was about plants helping to solve crimes. They do that with insects, but they can do it with plants. Now too. What was growing there or what's unusual that's growing there that shouldn't be growing there, and how that's related to there being a crime or someone buried. So I found that totally fascinating. I love plants, I love plants gardener. Those were great and influence from what actually? I'd like to mention a book I just bought yesterday at one of those books and it is so fascinating. It's's called the Work of Art and it's by Adam Moss and what it is. It's all about the creative process and I already feel really fascinated by this book. It's super thick. It's about that thick and he interviews artists and writers, musicians, musicians, playwrights, about their creative process and, um, it's really fascinating and it it um kind of gives, makes me, event validifies. You know how I approach things, because sometimes I see advice to writers know, do this and write out an outline. And I don't work that way. I'm a very instinctual. Often I hear things in my head and then write them down and it's just fascinating to see the process people go through.
Speaker 2:I read one about a visual artist who had to design a giant sculpture out of sugar from a sugar factory and she just didn't know where to go and she spent I don't know quite a few months just thinking about what is sugar, what does it do, what are the history? There's the slavery and she ended up with a bust, us almost sphinx-like bust made out of sugar. I forget how the sphinx thing came into it. She got to there through this whole convoluted but, you know, interesting process of drawing and reading about sugar and I just yeah, it's the most fascinating book, very, very good.
Speaker 2:I recommend it and I have only read about four of the interviews so far. There was another one about a woman who had her third miscarriage an artist as well and she had a painting where she was bending down and tending to a plant, because that's what she did after her miscarriage an artist as well, and she had a painting where she was bending down and tending to a plant, because that's what she did after her miscarriage. She went back to touching plants and what the painting. She realized what it really was was she was bending down to a baby. She finally realized that that's what the painting should be. So I've just found that I'm not writing right now because I just put the book out. So I like reading about those kind of processes.
Speaker 1:I find it really interesting too. Last year, I started teaching online writing courses and I find it so fascinating with all the different writers that I'm guiding their processes and they're so different and there isn't you got to do this way or that way. You really want to be open to exploring how you want to express yourself, and each piece that you write has its own way of wanting to be written or told yeah, just be open. It's not just one formula. As humans, we are creative, so allow that to unleash. You know, open up to your own creativity.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that. Yes, I definitely go by that. I don't want to say rule that idea. Yeah, that's what I did in this, for this, for this book, and I. One thing that's kind of cool is that when you don't, you haven't found the way in to that piece of writing using the structure which they do a lot in. There's a lot of prompts in. I have a list story in my um collection about saint barbara, and that is because when I wrote it I was like this isn't, it's not working. It's not working. I can't get all these weirdnesses to go together. And then I realized, well, why don't you separate them and fragment them instead and let them contradict each other and one will be about, you know, a future and one one will be in the past or whatever, and it was all about saint barbara we used to celebrate her as a kid oh really, I didn't know that.
Speaker 2:I didn't think people even were familiar that there was a saint bar Barbara. There you go. I'm not a saint, by the way.
Speaker 1:How do you approach the creative process in your writing and what strategies do you employ to nurture and expand upon your ideas? And you've been talking a bit about that, but can you expand a little bit more?
Speaker 2:What strategies do I use? Well, when I'm writing, I do really like ekphrastic writing from art, and I have a section in the collection that has those kind of stories, Because, for one thing, I just love art, I'm very interested in art, and it does activate your brain in a different way when you're working from a visual. I really like that. I usually do pick kind of unusual ones too, that you, you know you can go somewhere, maybe a bit surreal, and so that is something I really enjoy. I listen to music a lot too, and there are quite a few stories in here, whether I say it or not, in the back, and the references that I wrote while I was listening to music generally, instrumental music and music that's not from my culture, that I especially am successful with that. I don't do it at home, but I do it when I cafe write. So I have headphones on because you know people are talking and I go into this envelope of sound and and that a lot comes out of that as well.
Speaker 2:Um, what other other strategies would be, as I just was saying, structures, um, which are really popular in flash fiction, and um, they, you'd think, oh, that's like restricting you, isn't it?
Speaker 2:But no, it's not. It's like when you write poetry and you have to write a sonnet, sometimes, um, having um restriction makes you more creative and it and because you can get lazy, not lazy you can get sort of stuck in a rut of a certain style of writing in prose or in poetry and when suddenly you can only write a story that doesn't have the letter A in it, or a sonnet or something just really really has a lot of rules about how you do it, you can come up with very interesting language or different ways to come into the story or to different language. Because you have to use different language because of that restriction, it makes you more creative. Yeah, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it's just I can't write this on it, but that's very helpful too. And, of course, reading others' works too, that's helpful. I have certain writers I like. I like strong voices and they are like my companions to keep me going. You know when I'm, when I'm stuck, or just to keep keep the momentum going when I'm writing, especially like a manuscript.
Speaker 1:Yeah, keep the momentum going when I'm writing, especially like a manuscript Reflecting on your early adulthood what's a decision you made that significantly impacted your path, and what lessons did you glean from those experience or that experience?
Speaker 2:the decision I made. One that comes to mind was when I went to university I had trouble deciding what I wanted to do and not one of those people.
Speaker 2:When I was you know 15, I'm like I'm gonna be a writer. I never said that. I never said I'm gonna be a writer. I did writing, but I didn't think I'd be a writer or an author. So so when I went to university, I started out in theater, as I loved theater. I did theater in high school and outside of high school and I just thought, you know, if I do this, I'm going to be unemployed all the time. You know, in between jobs which is funny, because I became a freelance writer. Jobs which is funny because I became a freelance writer.
Speaker 2:However, at that stage I thought, okay, I did that for two years and then I thought, no, I don't think this is it. I did well in it. But then I switched to education and I did that and I had the worst teachers ever were when I studied education, which was very sad. I was looking into special education and just regular education. And then I actually went to SFU and did two terms for that and I was writing. I realized at one point that the lesson plans I really liked writing the lesson plans.
Speaker 1:I love writing lesson plans. What is that?
Speaker 2:I love doing, that I know, and I went I like it more than teaching, I and I was doing well at the teaching and I finally told the, the teacher, I think I'm gonna drop out. She was devastated because of course then she didn't have time off. But but she said you're doing so well? And I said I just don't think I am meant to be a teacher. And that was when I decided I was going to switch to English and I moved to Victoria, went to UVic and squeezed as many English courses as I could into two years because I'd already done two years of university. And that is how long it took me to sort of feel the writer within and pursue, you know, studying English and writing.
Speaker 1:Nice, nice. Well, great decision because it's given us, given us, as the reader, great works to read, so that was a great decision.
Speaker 2:Oh well, thank you.
Speaker 1:What's something about you that most people wouldn't guess just by looking at you or reading your work?
Speaker 2:Oh boy work, oh boy, hmm, just by looking at that they don't know that I can actually say publicly yeah, I can admit to. Well, they might not know that I ride a motorcycle.
Speaker 1:Okay, there we go. What kind of motorbike do you ride?
Speaker 2:It's a Triumph Street Triple RS Cool, and it's quite speedy. Well, when I'm on it it is, and it's beautiful around the corners and I love it because when I ride, I'm in the physical world. There's no words, I'm not thinking, especially when you ride a motorcycle, you want to be thinking about traffic ideas, but not off in your head, and I just love the physicality of it. And the wind, excuse me, and the wind and everything is just more vivid when you're out in the air, moving through the air, and you can smell. And you can smell exactly, exactly. You know you're riding and you're like, oh, farm nearby, and oh, I can smell the, you know the early cherry blossoms now, and it's. You don't realize that you don't have that in a car until you do have it. When you ride the motorcycle, you're like, oh, I'm missing all this when.
Speaker 2:I'm in the car.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think a lot of your senses become heightened, mm-hmm.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I'm hoping well, I am going to do a motorcycle trip in August in um Chilcotin and it's partly adventure riding, which I have not done, I've just done a tiny bit of that. So it'll be go, you know, gravel roads and maybe going through some streams and back roads and, yeah, looking forward to that nice, nice, that sounds fun.
Speaker 1:Shifting gears no pun intended. Wait, what was that? I didn't quite get shifting gears. Oh, no pun intended, right, right. As a child, what was your favorite way to spend a rainy day indoors, and do you find yourself drawn to similar activities or comforts now in your adult life?
Speaker 2:I would say probably playing piano would have been something I would do on a rainy day, and in fact sometimes I skipped school on the day my mother went and volunteered and I played piano like all day almost.
Speaker 1:No, trying to get you to practice. Stop practicing and get to school.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, I was school was school was. You know I knew I could miss it because it was kind of slow for me sometimes. So I'm like I'm just gonna skip out. And that was when you could skip out, like I was a good student, so they didn't question it. But nowadays you wouldn't get away with that. I don't think so. Uh, that's one thing I do Now.
Speaker 2:You said a rainy day. If it weren't a rainy day, I would be outside looking at minutiae of like insects, little ants, you know, in the stairs and you know, projecting myself into their small worlds and playing outside. We lived right on the edge of Lynn Canyon and it was bush, it was all bush, and so just playing in the bush was fabulous. I can't say I do that very much now. Insects I'm still into that, especially with my garden and piano playing. I go through phases I have not played my poor piano for when I had like writer's block, you'd think I'd be doing it, but I almost dropped a lot of my. I didn't do collages, I had like a creativity breakdown, but I hope to go back to that. I was playing jazz tunes and just for myself and Nice, let's circle to your story Stitching.
Speaker 1:What inspired this particular piece of storytelling?
Speaker 2:Well, it might surprise you, but it was a memory from my 20s. I had a boyfriend who lived in kamloops and I went to um. I went up there to visit him while I was working for the summer and we went to his grandfather's house this is going to seem like a very wayward way to get to it, but it will make sense and we went to his grandfather's house and, um, I was not told he had a certain condition at the time and we were sitting in the living room and he was talking and while he was talking he just stopped and what it was? Narcolepsy. He had narcolepsy, but I didn't know. I found out. I said to my boyfriend, after what? Why was? Was he just falling asleep? He said no, no, he has narcolepsy and I don't know how I I guess they just remembered that.
Speaker 2:And that's what is happening to this woman who is sitting in her chair and um stitching, and except that I don't know what happens when you go, when you fall asleep, when you have narcolepsy, if you have dreams, but she actually has a kind of dream, or even I don't know if you could call it like she's actually there in the place, but of other women doing different things, doing different things, and she experiences the things that they are experiencing when she's in that state, non-conscious state.
Speaker 2:I don't really know how it came about that story, but, um, I do know that the first character, um, who's um, is based on virginia wolf. The other people are not based on certain people, but I don't know how that got in there. Maybe I was reading about her and that's how it came about. So it was sort of like a frame of a memory and it's always stuck with me and I was writing about it in my little writing book and I think I even maybe tried to write a story, but it was the one about the grandpa and it didn't work, so it became about a woman.
Speaker 1:so there you go last time, when we spoke on our first time we met on our on the podcast you mentioned, you were collaborating with a composer in Vancouver, katerina Gimmon, on flash fiction piece set in Victorian times. How is that project progressing? Oh, it's um it.
Speaker 2:It came together. Yeah, it was a challenge for me as a writer because I had never written, you know, for opera. Uh, so it was a different approach. You need to be more simple in your words, you need to to um, convey emotion, those simple words, and you need to know how the character might speak in a different way than the other characters. But I did get some help from katarina too on that and was spots where she felt you know, can you, can you, um, you know, have more of an arc here so that she goes up to a higher level of emotion and down, and it was a real learning experience. Uh, we did, um, I did get performed by the arado ensemble in vancouver and it was not staged.
Speaker 2:it was, uh, sung on stage but uh, it was acted, but we, you know, we didn't. It wasn't like a theater, yeah, or an opera setting and uh, it went over very well. It was very. I don't write a lot of comic things, which is funny because I'm just totally a clown in private. There's one thing people might not guess about me I do voices. I'm, you know, goofy. So it was fun to do just this totally slapstick kind of comedy. I'd like to try it again, actually.
Speaker 2:And people really did enjoy it and the singers were great. There were four singers and their acting was great. It was put on very. They didn't have a lot of time for rehearsal because that was just the way it was and they were all pros and they just blew it out of the water. It was great. And Katerina's music was great too, and she knows how to write comical music too. Oh good, she's super talented. She's really going up in the ranks right now in the choral world literally world. She's all over the place. So I was very grateful to have that opportunity to work with her.
Speaker 1:Nice Was that videoed? Is it on the net? I can't yeah.
Speaker 2:I think it is Okay, it is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'll Google that and maybe put a link to it. Okay, here's one. How do you view the relationship between creativity and the human experience, and what do you believe is the ultimate purpose or significance of storytelling in the grand scheme of existence?
Speaker 2:holy cow wow, um, um. Well, I think the great thing about writing is reading I world, whether you know whether it's fiction or whether it's nonfiction, you can expand your knowledge of ideas or people or emotions. You can see yourself in the writing, and it's a way we share our human life with each other. Writing and art, it's a way we illustrate the short time that we have here and are gone, have created those forests and they kind of live on as well, because they've, you know, painted a picture or they've written a book or they've made a sculpture or etc. Etc. So I think it's a super important part of our human existence to be articulating or illustrating our experiences.
Speaker 1:Nice Last one Spring upon us. Are you finding solace in the garden? Any new story ideas sprouting alongside your plants?
Speaker 2:Well, there's not much solace in the garden at the moment because I have made for myself a much too big garden and the weather has decided to be freezing, cold and rainy and unpredictable, and I have lost some very nice plants from, I think, just the temperature, uh, ranges of having warmth and then really, uh, quite cold, and it shocked some pretty hardy plants, um, and just I had giant formiums, which are from new zealand, these things with sort of spear-shaped leaves that are very long and they were like the, the exclamation marks of my. I had three huge ones in my garden and they all look just awful. One may survive and two just are just look very sad. So I feel sad about that because it kind of well, cause it ruined my design and just wow, they were. You know, plants are really tough, they're way tougher than we are Cause they they're, they're just sitting there and they have to, you know, adapt to the weather and insects and infestations and all that.
Speaker 2:So I have a great respect for plants, but I still love doing it. It's like the motorcycling, only not as fast, in the sense that when I'm out there my brain turns off. It really does. It's physical and it's meditative if no one's mowing their lawn at the time. I'm a kind of autodidact and I love learning about things, so I love identifying the native bees that I have and wasps and I love knowing what the plants are and what conditions they like and where, where they're from. Originally, the formiums being from New Zealand, they kind of just didn't do well with that super cold weather we had and that did them in um. So it's like my little eden back there with a little bit too much work attached to it, but I still I'm gonna go at it no matter what. Okay, I have a question for you. Yes, ever talk to your plants all the time. Oh, I'm not alone I'm not not alone.
Speaker 2:I do. I'm especially the ones that are struggling right now. I put my hand on them, I'm like, oh, come on, you're, maybe you're going to be okay, yeah, I tell them yes.
Speaker 1:And I'm out there in my pajamas bending over, looking at the ground, going, okay, where are the little seeds when? And I'm thinking, oh, my going okay, where are the little seeds where? And I'm thinking, oh my god, what are the neighbors thinking? I'm staring at the ground for hours.
Speaker 2:I have the neighbor thing too, I think they know me well enough now that I'm I talk to myself while I'm working too. I'm like, oh, maybe I should put that there and you know where's the spade. They're like she's out there again.
Speaker 1:So true, so true. On that note, would you like to read a piece from your new collection?
Speaker 2:Yes, I would, I would love to. Wonderful. The story I'm going to read has the title of Mothers and Daughters and, as we already talked about in the interview here, that is one of the themes, several themes, in my book, an unintentional theme, as we were saying. That just fascinates me, how these things come up from your unconscious when you're writing or you're processing old memories or traumas or whatever. They kind of seep into your words sometimes, but generally when that happens, the results are really good because it comes from a very deep kind of authentic place, I think. So this work is speaking of structures. It's a series of scenes in five parts, all about mothers and daughters, and here it is mothers and daughters One I walked into a landscape of dry hills.
Speaker 2:Up a very long ladder which extended into the sky, was a woman with her head inside a cloud. She was waving a net made of kerchiefs and old underpants. What are you doing? There's nothing up there to see. I called up Exactly what my daughter would say. She answered I'm catching moths for their powdery dust Up here. It's night. Once this net is full, I'll scatter the dust over her bed while she sleeps, to seal dreams into the bedclothes. Without dreams, we're just sleeping animals. Are they good dreams? That's up to the moths.
Speaker 2:Two she startled me, the woman with sprouts in her chin and hair rolled up in tin can rollers. Dressed in coveralls, she was laying out a dirt plot with traps constructed of broken tools and appliances, rows of sharp metal teeth and mashed gears glinted in the sun. Don't bother me. She barked as I opened my mouth to speak. I watched her roaming up and down the rows as if inspecting ranks of soldiers. She'll step into every one of these. That daughter, but why? I asked horrified. Because I set them, because I set them, I know her.
Speaker 2:Three there was a clothesline. A woman with breasts as enormous as bread loaves was hanging up babies by their diapers. Babies, chubby and wrinkly, thin and wizened, late born and too early born, pinkish and bluish, brown-eyed, hazel-eyed and green-eyed, bobbed up and down in their diaper slings each time she pushed the clothesline out. Hello. I called coming up the path of wildflowers. That's a lovely collection you have there, thank you. She answered with a voice as warm as milk. She answered with a voice as warm as milk. Are they all yours? Oh no, they're not mine. These are all the babies my daughter could have in her lifetime, but never will, never. How do you know that? Because I'm a mother, still, I'll take care of them. All these little possibilities. She plucked one from the basket, pegged it up in its diaper and whisked it down the line Four, striding in the distance, a woman dressed in a cap threaded with dangling bones. I picked up my pace to catch her. Who are you? She asked.
Speaker 1:Oh nobody.
Speaker 2:Are you somebody's daughter? She eyed me sideways. Yes, then you are somebody, she said. A gust of wind threw her hair up vertically, her cape alternately filled with air, then deflated, as if her clothing were breathing. Why are you wearing those? I pointed at her cape. These are the bones of daughters who died before their mothers. As I walk, their voices are heard through the clashing of bone, heard by mothers alone, heard through the clashing of bone, heard by mothers alone. I told her that it seemed a poetic type of remembrance Sometimes, she said. Some mothers hear it as music. Others feel the voices in their own bones as the most excruciating cellular pain, but still they want to hear it.
Speaker 2:Five A stunning lake, high in the mountains, clear and depthless, a bowl of blue On the slope. My mother stood tossing small stones, one at a time, into the water. Mom, I greeted her. Oddly, we did not embrace. This was not a reunion. What are you doing here? I'm throwing rocks. You never did that before. It's just what is done here, she replied. Each stone is a secret. A mother was not able to tell her daughter have you thrown in yours? Yes, just now. We stood overlooking the lake, the fathomless blue of her eyes averted from me. The rings traveled concentrically ever wider, ever weaker, like a spoken word fading into inaudibility.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Barbara, for sharing your remarkable insights and creativity with us. Thank you, who revel in highly imaginative prose that explores themes of interconnectedness and the subconscious. Barbara Black's Little Fortified Stories is an absolute must-read. Thank you again, Barbara, and best wishes with your ongoing literary endeavors.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on You're welcome.
Speaker 1:Bye-bye, Bye-bye. If you would like more information about Barbara Black, please check out her website at wwwbarbarablackca. And if you would like more information about her books and where to buy them, check the links below or take a look at your local bookstores. And while you're at it, why not subscribe to A Writer's Life? And if you want more information about myself and my novel, Secrets in the Shadows, visit my website at wwwhygabomeca.
Speaker 1:For a kinder world, take care of each other. Have you ever dreamt of being a writer? Have you wanted to write your memoir or that amazing story you've been longing to see in print? Now's the perfect time to start. Or that amazing story you've been longing to see in print? Now's the perfect time to start. At Crow Storyhouse, I offer online guided writing workshops designed to help you explore and learn the craft of writing. You don't need any prior writing skills to begin, just a passion for storytelling and a desire to learn. These workshops provide a supportive community and expert guidance to help you turn your writing dreams into a reality. So why wait? Embrace the moment and take the first step on your writing journey with me. For more information, visit crowstoryhousecom. Until next time, remember your stories matter, your life has meaning and you have value. Thank you.