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Loving: waking this morning to the weight of the cat on my legs and realizing I was sleeping in my own bed. As much as I enjoyed being in Victoria and Duncan over the past few days, I miss the way I know where I am, both in time and place, at home. How the light just beginning to come in through the white linen curtains (soon to dyed indigo) tells me it’s just after 4am, how the loons in the night tell me I couldn’t be anywhere else but home.

Hoping: that the peonies and roses go on and on and on.

Remembering: After the reading and discussion with Keiko Honda at Munro’s Books on Wednesday evening, John, Karna, Angie, and I went for a late supper to Wind Cries Mary, a restuarant in Bastion Square. I had one of those moments. Sitting at the table, drinking my glass of rosé and enjoying a plate of burrata with a tangle of greens, tomatoes, rainbow radishes, I looked up at the window more or less at street level and I realized the restaurant is in the former Leafhill Gallery location. In the early 1970s, my brother’s first wife, then his girlfriend, owned the gallery and I often dropped in, sometimes even to buy art (I bought a Wayne Ngan bowl and a Walter Phillips woodcut with extra scholarship money in 1973; I still have the former and wish I had the latter…) In 1970, when I was in grade 10, Pierre Elliott Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act following political kidnappings by the FLQ. I was trying to make sense of it. My father fulminated, which wasn’t much help. A social studies teacher talked to our class but was fearful about saying too much. So on a Friday evening, the day after the invocation, I was talking to my brother’s (then) girlfriend in the gallery about what the War Measures Act might mean to us. And through the window, the same window I looked up to on Wednesday evening, eating my burrata, we could see the lights of police cars in the alley, a number of them, and somehow the world felt troubled and on the brink of something I couldn’t begin to understand. And all that came back to me as I realized I’d been in the room before, and when, and how.

Reading: Ailsa Ross’s novel, Hovel, a strange and strangely beautiful book in which memory is a solace. Fragmented, almost an essay in some ways, the book is utterly itself. I loved it.

Listening: as we were driving our own long highway home from the ferry on Saturday evening, light falling past Thormanby Island, we were listening to Bruce Springsteen’s Western Stars, talking about his intelligence and how he fits within the tradition of musicians who take on the political issues of the time (I seldom watch television but when John called me in to see Bruce performing on Stephen Colbert’s farewell show, I loved seeing Bruce Springsteen with his guitar and his harmonica, singing “Streets of Minneapolis”, the ghosts of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and the living shadow of Bob Dylan gathered around), anyway, we were listening, and when “Somewhere North of Nashville” came on, I confess to pressing repeat.

I lie awake in the middle of the night
Makin’ a list of things that I didn’t do right
With you at the top of a long page filled
Here, somewhere north of Nashville

Appreciating: how bookstores and libraries are so welcoming to writers launching books, how they set up the chairs, open their doors, make space for those of us who are not on the bestseller lists, order our books, promote them, and how there is something so beautiful about reading from a new book in a room of books, all of them attentive and listening, as the people in the audience listen, asking questions afterwards.

Anticipating: my swim later this morning, even though it’s cool and grey, with rain waiting in the heavy clouds, even though the water will be cold, even though it will take me ages to warm up afterwards.

There are days when I look out at the morning, the early morning (it’s 6:03 as I write this), and I understand why some painters make sky studies. Keith Cunningham, though this is not his sky; JMW Turner, who might have understood this one, but perhaps not the van; John Constable, with his tumbling clouds. Mornings when I look, and then look again. How it changes in a moment as the wind blows an opening for the sun, how the pewter sea glistens underneath, how the weight of rain in one area makes me hopeful for the day. (Everything is so dry.)

I looked once, moving from my bed at the Surf Motel where I was drinking my coffee to the large windows facing the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Looked once, seeing lines through a blur of mist on the windows. A glance, in which the breakwater, where we’ll walk later, angled out into the water, the sea met the shore in a neat triangle, our little balcony, where we’ll sit later with a glass of Steller’s Jay Brut, just because, curved lines with a perpendicular line to the right.

All night I heard the waves in my sleep. When I woke several times, wondering where I was, I had to think for a moment. Window there, table, the big windows, a few of the blinds pulled down. This is a stretch of ocean I knew well as a child, and then later, as a young woman. Who was the old woman walking along the path earlier, her cane keeping her steady?

Sometimes you hear a voice through
the door calling you, as fish out of

water hear the waves, or a hunting
falcon hears the drum’s come back.
–Rumi, in Coleman Barks’ translation

Enjoying: a bouquet of flowers, delphinium, foxgloves, old roses, Siberian iris, daisies, long strands of fennel, peonies, mint, yellow flag iris, brought to my book launch on Friday by my friend (appropriately) June. I came down to make coffee and saw the jug of flowers on the blue tablecloth, a stone fish swimming by, flicking its tail.

Listening: not yet but as soon as I’ve finished writing I’m going to put on the music I was hearing in my dream, Eliza Gilkyson’s “Songs from the River Wind“, in particular “Bristlecone Pine”, a love letter to an ancient tree, and I think of the huge Douglas fir on the little beach where I swim most mornings now that it’s spring, moving to summer, and what I might say in a love letter to this beautiful tree, its roots stretching out under the sand brought in every year, its thick bark, generous canopy of branches — when John doesn’t swim, he often sits under it, in sun, in light rain.

For as I would slowly return to the earth
What little this body of mine might be worth
Would soon start to nourish the roots of that tree
And it would partake of the essence of me
— “Bristlecone Pine” (lyrics by Hugh Prestwood)

Remembering: Friday afternoon, just before my book launch at the Sechelt Library, wondering if anyone would come, and then seeing the room fill up, old friends, new friends, strangers, and warm their presence felt as I read from The Art of Looking Back, as I talked, answered their questions, and asked a few of my own.

Loving: the green shade of the west-facing deck, the one where we take our dinner most evenings, sitting among the orchid cactus, under the dense covering of wisteria and grape. Last evening John called to me as I was doing something in the kitchen and said that huge bumblebees were entering the cactus flowers and disappearing inside them.

Surprised by: the swift flight of a kingfisher as it skimmed over the surface of the lake as I swam the day before yesterday. A few years ago, I was swimming, as I do now, and I’d see the kingfisher, sometimes two, and I thought of the missiles hitting targets in Ukraine. I didn’t know what else to do so I wrote about it. I sent the resulting essay to many places but no one was interested so I put it up on Medium. I’m not sure it’s still there. But here’s the final section:

I remember driving along the Rybnytsya River, from Kosiv to Yavoriv, hoping to see a kingfisher. Not the belted kingfishers we have near us, but Alcedo atthis, the common or river kingfisher, green-blue, with rufous underparts. Instead, there were washed fleeces, white, ruddy, creamy yellow, grey-black, hanging on the bridge leading to a small farm, a woman weaving lizhnyks from yarn rich with lanolin, a wooden church, villages high in the mountains with smoke rising from chimneys and the scent of apples coming in the open windows. Earlier that day I’d found a quiet place near the river to pee, thinking myself alone in the kalyna bushes, and then noticed young boys down in the water, splashing and laughing in the sun-spangled air. They turned and turned in gleaming river light, 15 or 16 in 2019, old enough that maybe now they are in trenches near the occupied territories or in coffins draped with their country’s flag. I always thought I’d return. I never dreamed missiles would skim the air, that atrocities would be committed in places I’d visited, that rivers would flood fields and houses. 26 year old Margo speaks to the dead.

When I swim these early September mornings, almost always alone, I am aware of time passing, the wings of barn swallows just above me as they pluck insects from the surface of the lake. One, two, five, seven, swift as a thought. In the old stories, they stole fire from the gods and as punishment, the middle portion of their tails was singed, resulting in a deeply forked tail. They brought fire to humans and when I feel the whirr of their wings, I wince. In the haze of smoke from the great fires still burning—Central Okanagan, Shuswap, Caspar Creek, Stein Mountain—would I notice a swallow carrying fire? As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame. All the dangers of the world, what’s happening now, what’s coming, and I am swimming in cool water deep enough that I could drop down and never be found. Some days I want that, to turn away from the world.

In the Cave of the Swimmers, the bodies are alive in eternity, animated with caput mortuum, ultramarine, Chinese white, brown ochre, and raw umber. No one will remember my morning swims, when the world has burned to a husk. In green water I have left no impression, though the actions of my strokes make transverse waves, felt perhaps by the mergansers feeding near the shore. Maybe a dragonfly will pause as the water swells. I am swimming into a future I dread.

The kingfishers rattle and cry on a dying branch of cedar. Let the world stop, in this moment, as I watch them, their crests blown back by a light wind. Each mortal thing does one thing and the same. Some do a thing for which they can never be forgiven. Bakhmut, Soledar, Maryinka, Kreminna, in ruins, burned. Villages in the High Atlas Mountains reduced to rubble, farms underwater in Thessaly, boreal forests become ash. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.

And this, the place I have loved.

Anticipating: a reading on Wednesday night with Keiko Honda at Munro’s Books in Victoria. I remember Munro’s when it was on Yates Street across from the old Carnegie Library, the first library I knew as a child, and I remember buying books at that Munro’s as a high school student, maybe even the first copy of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, the book that encouraged me to become a writer myself. In the tangle of places and feelings that is Victoria to me, that store, that library, the wide lanes of Yates Street as it leads down to Wharf Street, the last block where Carnaby Street used to be (and Goodwill too), and where I bought the peacock skirt I wore the first time I met Jack Wilkinson, the painter at the heart of my new book.

Drinking: my first cup of dark French coffee, the one I look forward to every morning, usually in the green cup Solveigh and Joe gave me one year for my birthday, and look, it’s finished. Time to go pour another.

Yesterday was the official publication day for my book, The Art of Looking Back: A painter, an obsession, and reclaiming the gaze. The public use room at the Sechelt Library was full of well-wishers, Charlotte Gray gave a sweet introduction, Talewind Books had a table full of books, past and recent and this one, fresh off the press. Jane Davidson tucked a keepsake into the books she sold and after the reading, the questions, and during the cake —

— I signed copies, some of them to old and dear friends, and some of them to people I know a little, and some of them to people I’d only just met.

I’m still getting to know the book as an object separate from my self. It was a difficult one to write. I revisited old experiences, read letters written to me by the painter Jack Wilkinson over a 19 year period, read my journals, tried to piece together a narrative of what Freud called “a disturbance of memory”. I have no regrets about writing it, though I confess I had some help with coming to terms with my own vulnerability during the period when I was anticipating publication and wondering if I’d done the right thing.

But yesterday, and a few days earlier, Wednesday, when I read from the book at the Gibsons Library in a beautiful room looking out to the harbour, I felt a sense of completion. I did the hard work, often writing into the small hours of the night, and then the revising, finding the right publisher (Eve Rickert and Hazel Boydell at Thornapple Press are stellar), the editing (with Andrea Zanin), and copy-editing (with Heather van der Hoop), a bit of design consultation with Jeff Werner, and even trying to answer some intricate proof-reading questions from Alison Whyte on my tiny phone screen in a temporary apartment in Vila Nova de Foz Coa in Portugal. I remember receiving the first iteration of the proposed cover last August and having to take a moment to catch my breath. I don’t know what I expected or hoped for but this cover, designed by Jessica Sullivan and Naomi MacDougall at DSGN Dept., took my breath away.

There are a few more events in the next few weeks. Visit here to learn more. I’ve posted links to reviews and a podcast so you can share my excitement at how the book is being received.

Mostly, though? I feel gratitude. I was a young woman who became involved in something that she was not prepared for and which continued to haunt her for years. And then I wrote about it. I looked back at the art, particularly the portrait of myself at 23 hanging in the stairwell of our home, I read those letters, full of love and pressure and anguish and even threats, I sat at my desk looking out at the green woods in daylight and the darkness at night, and I listened to an old story, learned to have a conversation with that young woman, and the result is a book I am proud to have written.

From the other side of this gulf of years, I look back to ask questions I never knew were mine to ask. Did I simulate an art object, a naked woman holding a gauzy shawl over her head, a model, an enduring object of desire? Take the questions into the present tense in the time that is always now. Do I have power in this transaction? Can I say no? Can I ask that you (he) show me the images based on me? What will happen to them, where will they go? The questions that refuse the present tense. What I knew and didn’t know. Didn’t ask, fixed in time by his gaze.

I am almost finished planting out the seedlings started by the woodstove, then transferred to the greenhouse, the tomatoes (most of those were planted a few weeks ago but there are strays), peppers, 3 kinds of pole beans with two more coming along, and the squashes (Kogigu, Butternut, and Zombie pumpkins from seed bought at Kew Gardens in November). Cucumbers — a Lebanese one and another, almost white-skinned and very sweet, from seed saved from a sport from last year. Almost finished. And I am doing this gladly, happily digging out areas, making teepees of long poles for the beans, sinking stakes for the squash.

But what I really want to do is organize my outdoor dye area and begin some dye work. Last year I claimed the little deck where our hot-tub was (before it gave up), partly-covered, unfolding a long table for tying up linen, setting up a little homemade table with a hotplate for heating dye vats, with room for racks for drying finished fabric.

I spent days out there with beach stones, hemp twine, a notebook to record mordants and results, and then it was too late in the year to work comfortably outside so I put things away. Until now.

I have a big basket full of cottons, linens, some old sheets, and even some raw silk. I have some ideas in mind but mostly I like to find out what happens when you stir tied cotton/linen into a pot of rose madder, or dip linen heavy with beach stones in indigo, dip it over and over again, letting it oxidize between plunges. What happens. Sometimes this:

Or this:

Human beings have been coaxing colour from plants, rocks, their own urine, seeds, some of these the most unlikely sources, and all of them surprising. You expect one thing and the result makes you catch your breath. I want to take my little jar of cochineal, female insects that colonize nopal cactus paddles, and see what happens when I use alum (for silk) or soda ash (for linen and cotton). I want to look see what happens. Fuchsia, purple, red? And my favourite indigo powder, which I return to over and over, for its skies, its deep water, its moments of transcendence.

I’m almost finished planting the seedlings and while they grow, I’ll be heating the dye pot, my hands blue with indigo, pink with rose madder, surrounded by sky and roses.

I took my coffee out onto the deck this morning to smell the honeysuckle, listening to some large animal in the bush below the old orchard. I haven’t seen the bears yet this year, the sow who comes with her young, the star-chested male who sometimes climbs the deck to look through the sliding doors:

Last night I dreamed of high school. Maybe this was because there was a couple sitting at a picnic table when I came out of the lake yesterday and when we said hello to them, they seemed to want to talk a little. They were from Vienna. They were heading to Victoria to visit their daughter who was spending a year as an exchange student at a high school there. Which one, I asked. And it was the one I went to, Claremont. It was where two or three teachers recognized something in me that no one else had noticed, a writing ability, and also maybe a scholarly ability. They were the ones who encouraged me to go to university — I think my parents only hoped I would find a job; the notion of post-secondary education was beyond their understanding — and they were the ones who helped me fill out scholarship applications. One of them took our English literature class to UVic to take out books on his library card — he was finishing an M.A. degree at that time — and I remember browsing the card catalogues with such excitement. That excitement never went away over the next 4 years.

In my dream last night I was trying to gather everything I would need from my locker and things kept surfacing: old books, a paper I’d forgotten to turn in, old running shoes (I was on the cross-country team for a few months), It felt like an impossible task. When I woke to put the cat out, I was relieved I didn’t have to think about high school any more. I dream a version of this every few months but mostly it’s in the form of a math dream. I am trying to find the classroom, I haven’t kept up with the homework, there’s an exam and I know I’m not ready, or it’s the end of the term and I haven’t gone to class even once, even though I told myself I’d never miss even a single one. Ah, the old anxieties.

The large animal was moving away into the deep woods. The orchid cactuses haven’t stopped blooming since we put them out a month ago, their brilliant orange-red flowers drawing hummingbirds and bees and the beautiful swallowtails, pollinating with their long legs and tongues. So many years since I walked down Haliburton Road, along Elk Lake Drive, and through an orchard now built over with houses. I don’t have to take the math exam. I can stand on the deck and listen for birds, pinch off the finished daylily flowers, look at the wall above the planter given us 4 decades ago by an elderly woman who was impressed we’d built our own house. I’m impressed too, a girl who can’t do complex equations and a boy who was more interested in theatre than drafting.

Now their older counterparts live here, listening to the news, finishing their coffee before heading outside to take up shovels and rakes. There’s always work to do, though lakes and bears remain.

The country is broken, though hills and rivers remain,
In the city in spring, grass and trees are thick.
Moved by the moment, a flower’s splashed with tears,
Mourning parting, a bird startles the heart.
The beacon fires have joined for three months now,
Family letters are worth ten thousand pieces.
–Du Fu, translated by Mark Alexander

Yesterday we were down in Sechelt for errands and appointments. I had to pick up a book I’d ordered at Talewind Books. And look, my name on the window! I’d seen a bookstore post on Instagram where one of the people working at the store was holding a copy of my book in front of the window. I was thrilled. And then later, I noticed the writing on the window. (Am I slow or what?) And looking just now, I see a whole display of my books in the window too! This is what community means. That you write a book, that the bookstore you’ve known for decades supports it, even agreeing to sell copies of the book at the launch next Friday at the Sechelt Library (and libraries, oh, them too!), that book clubs invite you to come to talk about your book, that one of the friendly women working in the bookstore reviews your book on her blog, and that when you encounter a friend in a clothing shop, the saleswoman hears you both talking about your new book and wonders if she could attend the launch too.

This morning I was awake early, wondering what to read for the next few weeks of readings. (You can check the book’s page here for news of events and if you’re able to attend any of them, I’d love to see you there.) There are three strands that thread through the book, sometimes braiding themselves together, sometimes just two of them entwining briefly, and sometimes the pattern is complicated, and sometimes it’s as simple as a stitch to repair an old seam that’s come apart, fraying a little. There are reproductions of several of the paintings hanging in our house or in another house, images that have a place in the narrative and even on the cover. I think they serve as reminders that things that have caused pain or even shame can also be gifts. I see them this way now though I haven’t always. When I came down the stairs from my bedroom this morning, I stopped to look up at the portrait of a young poet who serves as one of the strands of the complicated story and I met her eyes. I wasn’t always able to. How to suggest these things in a reading, how to choose passages that allow a reader to understand the difficult and beautiful legacy I realized as I wrote this book. John moved one of the big red chairs to a place on the lower level of the deck beyond our bedroom. I saw it as I was getting ready for bed last night. Later this morning I think I’ll sit there with my book and select moments that might tell something of what it means to encounter your younger self, to listen to her, and to learn something of the art of looking back.

Turn to me, I tell all the young women in my house, the ones who are me, the ones who are resemblances, archetypes, versions. The one who isn’t. And the other one, too. Turn to me. On my walls you are beautiful, as you were then and still are, burnished by time’s soft-edged brush. There is so much in your future and I am waiting for you, waiting for you to turn and remember me, as I remember you.

Turn, I will ask the young poet with flowers in her hair, you who have kept a certain privacy for decades, watching me descend the stairs, you who also watched me climb them, weary or joyous or lost in thought. I carried sorrow up the stairs and down them too. I felt your gaze in the ascent and the descent. Watch me. Watch me open my hands, releasing the shame I carried, hidden mostly but always a weight, an unnecessary guilt. I took off my clothes and I am commemorated with Cadmium Yellow lightened with Flake White, Alizarin Crimson, Prussian Blue, Viridian, Chrome Green. The warm light shimmering with Titanium Buff, Yellow Ochre. My hair, Thalo Blue, Thalo Green, Alizarin Crimson, Indian Yellow, underlayered with transparent yellow. On the Irish island, I walked on the rocks in grey mist and wrapped my arms around my body to contain myself. “Let a body venture at last.” At last I am at least unwrapping the veil, shaking the words from its fine gauze. What happens next, happens. There is no one now to hold me in that fierce gaze, as dangerous as it was loving.

I woke early, still on Gatineau time, and after I’d made coffee, I went out on the upper deck. Robins and Swainsons thrushes were singing in the woods beyond the grass. Something else, maybe a Western tanager, raspy and shrill. The dog roses began to bloom in our absence, the first dozen or so, and many more buds at various stages. I love roses. I love the old French cultivars, the noisettes, the moss roses, the David Austin hybrids. But the delicate beauty of a dog rose, petals the softest pink imaginable, the scent faint and sweet: these might be the ur-rose for me. You can’t really cut them. They fall apart, the petals fine as tissue. In the fall, they have most elegant long red hips.

In a pot below the dog roses, the sweet lemon lilies are also blooming. These are one of two species used to breed fancier cultivars but I prefer their simplicity. On long stems, the flowers are clear and perfect yellow.

I am looking for something, looking as I walk among the flowers, checking out the progress of the tomato plants. Do you feel this, sometimes, that the landscape is changing? That you are changing, that you no longer know how to read the map? And are the maps you have the ones you need? I am looking for signs, shifts, turns in the road. I told my grandson E. that I thought I’d written my last book and he was very interested in this. He kept asking me how many I’d written (17), how long it look to write each one, how many pages there were in each book, in total. How much the books cost. I could see his mind doing a simple math. And of course it makes no sense, economically. It was never about that. What was it about then? E. wanted to know. He kept coming back to it. He’s 7.

This morning, holding a bud of dog rose in my palm to smell its elusive sweetness, I was thinking ahead. Next year I’ll return to university. E. was very interested in that too. Maybe he was thinking of his classroom and how a grandmother might look at one of the small desks, her pencils lined up, her notebooks new and ready. What would she write in them? He was concerned my French wasn’t up to much but we read a few books together, him reading the text and me translating, or trying to. With his help, I could improve! And maybe in a classroom, actual or virtual, I could learn other things too.

As we were settling into our seats on the plane for the flight home yesterday, a song was playing quietly: Neil Young’s “Birds”.

When you see me fly away without you
Shadow on the things you know
Feathers fall around you
And show you the way to go
It’s over, it’s over

The landscape is changing. I have things to find out, to follow, to understand, or not, but I want to try. Feathers weren’t falling around me this morning but a dog rose petal landed on the sleeve of my old Japanese yukata, soft pink on the faded blue. Patterns are everywhere. Maps. Shadows on the things you know.

There’s been garden work, shopping for a magnolia tree, reading with Eddy to improve my French, drinks in the shadow of the National Gallery, and fish tacos with mango salsa.