Courage – Erin of the Hills

“Here is the country not in its Sunday best, but in its old clothes, unpaved, unfenced, full of character, ungroomed, unvisted, barely penetrable.”

-Elizabeth Hay, Alone in the Classroom

Recently, after a long hiatus, I have returned to writing in earnest. Not only have I been keeping up with these blog posts on a regular basis (finally) but I have also waded into the writers’ community here on WordPress. Aside from the – albeit important – fact that writing is good for my mental health, reading the wonderful posts by other like-minded creatives has encouraged me to continue expanding the amount of time I devote to the craft; you can only improve with practice, right?

In returning to my writing with more and more energy and zeal, I have also picked up the threads of my unfinished debut novel. Though I have never taken down the post-its that have served as a makeshift storyboard since I began working on this book *gasp* six years ago, the story itself has sadly lain largely dormant for the last three. Apart from a few halfhearted attempts to return to this world I had begun to create, I have not well and truly reentered it until this past weekend. And, let me tell you, it felt amazing. Almost like a homecoming of sorts – it felt right.

But, I did not set out in this post to write about my novel. I’ll get to that perhaps once I have finished at least this thread on the Gurski Grad Trip from all those years ago.

Continue reading “Full of Character” →

“But Three Pines itself was a village forgotten. Time eddied and swirled around and sometimes bumped into it, but never strayed long and never left much of an impression.” – Louise Penny, The Cruellest Month

One of the most incredible things about travelling, in my humble opinion, is arriving in a place that seems completed unhurried and unconcerned b the passage of time. You do not even have to go far to discover such a place – even in a country like Canada where 1000 year old ruins may not exist around every corner. Simply walk into the center of your nearest forest, or down to the banks of a local river outside the city center and take a careful look around.

Chances are that while much has changed in the intervening centuries between when Europeans first inserted themselves on this already lived-in landscape, you are looking up at the same, or at the very least a similar, sight as the First Nations people once did before their world was turned upside-down. Many lives have come and gone but the land was here before and will be here long after mankind meets its fate, whenever that may be.

Continue reading “Impressions of Time” →