The Interview

I’m in the chair next to beloved CBC host David Greirson - we’re on air, talking about songwriting. My palms are damp, the air is electric. David asks, “Do you have compatriots the way other writers have their groups, people who love to talk about craft, who support and challenge you as a songwriter?”

I’m about to say no, not really - I don’t have an enviable social life full of eccentric and passionate creators. My heart is sinking. This is why I’ll never be great on radio - I can’t think on my feet. But David is still talking. I wish … and then, there in my mind’s eye, I see P, who lives far away in California. We’ve kept our songwriting friendship alive for years with handwritten letters and hour-long phone calls, talking over our lives and our work-in-progress. David looks straight into my eyes as he wraps up his question: “Who puts your feet to the fire?”

Panic. Flames crackling dark and bright hands behind my back rough bark pressing coarse ropes - I'm in the fire. Faces flicker, people I know - their eyes bright. Mouths open. I can’t recant. I burn.

Blink. David. CBC. He’s simply asking about being held to account. I rally. Enthuse about P and me, our empowering songwriting group of two, while my heart pounds. In no time the interview is over and we are off the air.

What. Just. Happened?

The Year We Lived in Seattle

I discovered how it felt to miss someone the year we lived in Seattle. We had driven the green station wagon all the way across the country so Dad could study oceanography. I was nine. Lying in my bunk at night, I’d imagine the face of Mary, or Jane, my best friends from Waterloo, and I would yearn for them. This new, twangy feeling fascinated me; I knew I was growing up, just a little.

My school, Olympic View, had a band program and Mom and Dad were excited for me - all they had to do was find an instrument. Dad thought I should play french horn, but when they located a second-hand clarinet for cheap, that was that. The smell of the cork grease, the stale taste of the reed, the pain in the side of my right thumb, the tickle in my lips, the pressure in my cheeks, none of it mattered when my first squawks gave way to fuzzy dark tones. Suddenly I had a new, deeper voice, like unsweetened cocoa mixed into spaghetti sauce. It didn’t take much practice to be the best in the class and I loved Mrs. Ryker our band teacher. We played Little Red Caboose and My Country Tis of Thee, but best of all was Arabian Dance. Mrs. Ryker explained that it sounded different because it was in a minor key. All I knew was that when I played it I felt exotic and, for the first time, musical. It didn’t occur to me to tell anyone.

Out on the rough-paved street with no sidewalks that ran past our house, I made friends with Florence. Florence had that fluffy, coiling kind of almost-white hair and she was nice and she said I should come to Campfire Girls. My Mom met with her Mom, and they agreed that I could, so I did. I liked the name of it better than Brownies. Campfire meant staring into flames, cooking potatoes in tinfoil, being outside in the dark night and singing.

Meetings were held in Florence's basement. We glued small vases into towers and glazed them with a green chemical that made frost patterns all over the glass. We earned painted beads and sewed them into patterns all over the felt of our matching navy vests. The other girls had been Bluebirds the previous year so almost right away we were getting ready to ‘fly up’ to Campfire Girls. There was a ceremony and everything - I was going to graduate! When the moment came, we stood up tall and said together the words we had memorized, the Trailseeker’s Pledge:

I desire to seek the way

which has become a delight to my feet

for it shall lead me to the fires of human kindness

lighted by those who have gone before me

on the campfire trail.

It filled my heart to imagine that kindness was ahead, just up the way. I savoured this new idea of me: I was a seeker. I was on a trail, moving toward fire.

Of all the songs we must have sung in Florence’s basement, only one stayed with me:

Peace I ask of thee oh river

Peace Peace Peace

When I learn to live serenely

Cares will cease.

From the hills I gather courage

Visions of the day to be

Friends and faith for me to follow

All are given unto me

Peace I ask of thee oh river

Peace Peace Peace.

I loved how the opening lines rose like a question. I loved the idea that you could talk to a river. Could I learn to live serenely? Really? It didn’t make any sense to me that courage could be gathered in the hills. And faith, that was a word we didn’t use in my family - faith was all about church, which my parents had little use for, though we knew enough not to say so. This whole middle part of the song had me drawing a blank. But then came the end, just like the beginning, except instead of climbing, the notes went down and settled, and when I sang it I felt quiet inside. Like a deep dark river.

So much else happened the year we lived in Seattle. I got a magic kit for Christmas. My baby brother was born. There was an earthquake. I learned what fuck meant. But my re-membering circles around these three: singing as supplication, embracing a vision of being a seeker but not a loner; and bearing down on a mouthful of wood and bamboo to make not just sounds but music. I want a word, now, for what these have in common, a word with the weight and colour of what these moments evoked in me. It is a word I’ve never owned. Soul. I felt soulful.

ReplyForward

The Family Room revisited

The Family Room oil on canvas by Susan Ellenton 2004.

Propped in pieces in the corner fireplace my Dad built when I was six

the cast iron black lion seemed to say,

Don’t go there.

That room was never warm.

*

Exercising my imagination, I finally

told my husband last night, that’s what

I’m doing these days.

That’s what you did when you painted these,

he affirms, gesturing to our livingroom walls.

This morning I stand and turn, meeting my decades-old canvases:

The Gift, The Mermaid and the Shaman,

The Big Picture, The Watchers

- improvisations, I said at the time, I’m fascinated by

sensations of meaning arising and fading away -

and hanging in the corner of this house, the one I/we have made my/our own,

The Family Room: a rectangle of rectangles

slashed by an errant hockey stick

not aimed at, not watched by

the on-looker who is

somehow out of the picture but in it.

She gazes at

the forbidding fireplace. Opaque, impassable.

Tell that girl to stare the lion down. The only way out is the only way in. Through fire. Hers.

Memoir excerpt

Camp Wabinaki, 1967. I’m lying on my bunk, on my back, in the dark, listening to our counsellor, Monica, read us a story, when she gasps, “Oh! Look! It’s the Cross!”. Monica points to the cabin window and we all wriggle to sit up without unzipping our sleeping bags. Whoa, there is a cross, a cross of white light coming out of the moon. How come I’ve never seen that before? It’s not magic, it’s … spiritual. 

Except. I move my head, and the cross moves too. I tip to one side and that’s when I notice the screen. We’re looking at the moon through a screen. It keeps the moths and mosquitoes from getting in. It’s the screen that makes the light stream out that way, not Jesus.

I have to say something. Because, I think they need to know. To not be fooled. "You guys,” I start, and even though the cabin is the same size as always, my cabin-mates on their bunks suddenly feel very far away. My voice goes small, like a wind-up toy winding down. And then I’m done. There’s no argument. Monica sighs. “Aww, Susan. You spoiled the feeling.”

The next day I see everyone being nicer to Linda B., Linda who has stringy hair, who used to be the outcast. Now, the outcast is me.

Snippet

Impossible to bite into with grace - I need all my fingers to manage this thick rectangle whose name I can’t pronounce until I realize it’s French. Not milly-foil but meal-fwah, a mouthful of collapsing flakiness squirting sweet pale yellow vanilla pastry cream.

Friends who write together...

concoct a silence charged and containing, excluding the extraneous; in intimate apartness we write. I hear your palm slide and stop, your pen slip and linger. You shift in your chair, put one hand - fingers pinched - to your mouth and stare into an invisible landscape. When your ankle turns is your story turning too? The faint thunder of a turning page. Our silence quivers and abides. Four pens. Eight slippers. One pot of tea.

Susan Ellenton is a Victoria BC based writer, musician, artist and jewelry maker.  She can be reached here or at her own site, here.

Movement

Whether I'm painting, singing or cooking, I like to improvise. Improvisation is essential to my writing practice too, so I'm all ears when someone offers insight into how to 'get into the flow'. I recently attended Vocali, a music camp that invited us to "Put your music where your mouth is." One outstanding facilitator, vocal percussionist Sam Rogers, asked us what we thought the most essential element of improvisation might be. We considered Listening, Commitment and Risk. All good answers, Sam said, and then he added that Bobbi McFerrin (brilliant vocal improvisor) has declared it's Movement. He's not the only one to say so, of course. Here's Mozart: "I really can say no more on this subject than the following, for I myself know no more about it and cannot account for it. When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer - say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal ... it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly." I know the truth of this from experience. So it's got me thinking - how can I use movement to free up my writing? Can I write and walk at the same time? Move and speak and record it all for later transcription? Dance in my writing chair?

Susan Ellenton is a Victoria BC based writer, musician, artist and jewelry maker.  She can be reached here or at her own site, here.