Good morning and happy nearly summer to you.
We are nearly through the school year here, oh thank goodness, and the weather has been quite lovely. While we were roasting away this time last year, so far this June the weather has been gentle and friendly.
This morning two of my readerly bookish friends and I were discussing how we store our books. Let me reassuring you that they are absolutely organized and their methods make sense. It was then, dear reader, that I realized that my method of book storage might only make sense to me. I know.
One of them asked if I was even actually a Virgo. Touche. I do love lists and organizing things. I have a system, you just might not like it. Mouahahahhaha.
Anywho, I was thinking maybe I could share some of my writing projects outside of Substack while showing you my books. And in this way, you might get an inadvertent tour of how my brain works. It is not for the weak of heart.
Steady on, friends.
UPSTAIRS
We live in a bungalow and there isn’t room for me to have an office, so I use that as a partial excuse for what you will see. I’m not sorry.
This is my main bookcase, upstairs. It’s in my walk-through closet. I’ve brought you into my closet. DO NOT TURN AROUND. Those bags of stuffies I’m standing on to take this picture are not mine, to be clear, but they do need to be sorted by a now nine year old child.
Top shelf is fiction. Chosen by me on the left. Books for the virtual literary salon I attend monthly and buddy reads in the middle. The right hand stack of fiction my mother has passed to me understanding that I will be slow to get to it.
Then we have non-fiction, with essays stacked horizontally. In the front, horizontal, are the non-fiction I think I want to read next, which will mean moving them to my nightstand, which is my pre-reading pile. So I guess this is my pre-pre-reading pile.
Poetry and literary essays are shelf three (includes the literary magazines Poetry and The Fiddlehead). The final two shelves are a bit of a mish mash, but they hold non-fiction - some that I keep there for reference purposes and some because I haven’t read them yet.
Second from the bottom, right side, is what is left of the large collection of books I have on dogs. The rest I have already read through and have tabbed info I find interesting and might want to write about. Dogs are my religion. I have a very rough, theme-only conceptualization of a book I might want to write about dogs. The goal would be to focus on things that are different from most of the other books out there and emphasize the ways in which we are both social species who have co-evolved together. We have buried them with us, they have led our souls to the afterlife, we see them in our constellations, and create buttons so they can talk to us. There is a sociology/anthropology of dogs that is worthwhile exploring. Just not yet. But it’s there. Waiting.
Also, did you know that a study of street dogs out of India suggests that when given the choice, dogs always chose a yellow bowl over a blue bowl to eat from.
This is another shelf in my closet and it holds my french TBR. Significantly smaller. I know. Don’t tell my mother. I’m not writing in French, but I did draft a single poem to play around. I might. I just don’t know.
The books that I am probably most likely to read next or that I started but set down live on my night stand. For anyone I complained to - as you can see, I did find my other pair of glasses. The dinosaur blocks the light on the top of the speaker. I like to sleep in darkness.
I also keep an e-reader at hand and do have a stand for it, so I don’t have to hold it. I find it slow to highlight text, which is annoying, but refuse to upgrade to better, newer versions, because I do still prefer paper copies of books or reading on my phone, still. I know, sacrilege and bad for my eyes.
I’m going to go through the Treadwell’s Book of Plant Magic again to inform what plants I need to add to my gardens.
This is where I keep the books I’m currently reading, my journal, and anything else, like magazines or seed/bulb catalogues.
This cute bb is Mango. She is four months old now. I will tell you about her in another post. I also keep a bag of journal articles that need to be read under this grey chair in case I run out of other things to read.
This is my hutch. My mother stained it in her early 20s. It lived in the kitchen at my parents for over 40 years. They used to keep an extra set of dishes in it, but my dad hated it and my mother hated only using the good stuff on special occasions.
So now the hutch lives at my house and my parents eat off the good dishes. Here it holds plants and the poetry and fiction I’m keeping. The poetry I don’t keep I send off to Alberta to a friend who likes both mail AND poetry ;)
I also keep my favourite flower books and some of the resource books I’m using for things I’m currently working on in here. I’d love to one day have a shelving unit for just the books I need for my writing projects. I think about turning my walk-through closet into a tiny office sometimes. Someone would have to sort through the bags of stuffies first though…
All this to say, when I need inspiration before writing or editing poetry, that bottom right is where I go. Currently I am doing a lot of editing and the goal is for fall to be a time of putting more work into the world, which will include submitting poetry and essays to various spaces for consideration.
I have also started keeping a log. Just the inklings of a future project, perhaps, of all the nature things. A good friend once talked about the seasonality of my life, especially because of the way things are structure at the moment : a time for parenting, a time for beekeeping, a time for maple syrup collecting/making, a time for gardening, etc. So I’ve made a separate Scrivener document and I’ve just been bullet pointing things by month, such as my efforts, so far in June, to slowly befriend a pair of mated crows. This would be a series of small essays, if it became something in future. Again, it will be there, waiting.
This is the top drawer of a small dresser I pulled into the dining area for the moment. This is where the reference books that I need to pull information out of live right now. A bunch of books with a bunch of colourful tabbies, just waiting for me to double check and reference in my writing! That is not a pipe. It is a crow call. I am slowly befriending two mated crows. Slowly being the operative word.
I actually don’t like the little dresser here at all, but it will stay there until at least next weekend. Evidence of all three projects in there so far. That’s funny.
This is the floor under the bench. My floor books. Look, I said I needed an office. I’m sure you have floor books. This stack of floor books are my Acadian memoir pile.
Also, if you’re interested in languages, please check out
’s book (Mother Tongue Tied) and her Substack.
The idea around a potential Acadian memoir has come about as I try and walk my son through our heritage. When he says things like, “Why do I have to learn French?” or “I’m not Acadian, I’m Canadian”. It has also come about because everything I see in Gaza reminds me, over and over again, of what it is to wipe out a population. What it looks like to destroy the cultural heritage, to remove a population, to try to ensure they never go back, to split up families to isolate them, to persecute for state or religious reasons, to target children, to eliminate the future.
This project mixes memoir of travel to relevant Acadian sites with aspects of the Acadian history/experience that I find personally interesting - like how maps (British vs French) are used in nation-making, the history of a land that used to be attached to its colonizer (irony) once-upon-a-millions of years ago, the ways archeology tells us a story of what remains, of silences in the archives, of official records disappearing, of diaspora and genetic inheritance through founder effects.
I’d really like to find some diary entries or letters that talk about what the colony Planters saw when they came to take over the lands the Acadians were forcibly removed from. I haven’t progressed that far yet though.
I have found a really cool pattern via ancestry software in which a number of relatives are in Massachusetts. They would be from the group that were deported and sprinkled along the colonies, as opposed to those who were taken to England, or those who fled.
219 is the province I live in. The others are all in the US - 138+46 in Massachusetts. I think it’s interesting.
Anyways, welcome to the basement. Just don’t look anywhere. I’m doing laundry and am in the process of removing things my son has outgrown. I’ll take the toys to local parks for the kids to play with over the summer. It gives the toys more life.
DOWNSTAIRS
My dad made me two of these when I was in undergrad. These bookshelves have seen almost 24 (?) years of books. Still stacked two thick. Can’t quit a good thing.
At this point we have reached peak no system. That second shelf has a lot of salon books. The rest is storage for books I refuse to part with (Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce series, which he started writing at 70 after retiring from the CBC) and research books I have finished with at the moment. The research goes from upstairs shelf, to nightstand, to table by the chair at the window, to the table/basket/drawer, and then into my laptop. Once in the laptop, it goes downstairs for storage.
At one point I had thought I would write a book about motherhood - about the science of it - exhaustion (and the negative side effects, like decrease in empathy) and the rage and the brain changes, etc. but then a whole bunch of books about motherhood and unpaid labour, etc. came out that year and I was put off the idea.
Instead, I turned my attention to time, memory, grief and started writing about what remains - about the ways we record our lives, about how nothing lasts forever (except possibly zircon), about journals and diaries and photographs, about how desperately I don’t want to forget my life, about how the original paper copy of Emily Dickensen’s herbarium might outlast the digitized version, about the ways the Earth logs her life and ours, and so on. It’s essays and some poems. I’ve also included some small pieces that I call fragments.
We have reached the baskets. This is my dark academia basket. I have finished the first draft of my dark academia novel and have started into the first round of aggressive edits before I print it off to read cover to cover.
This is some of my collection of creepy books or dark academia that I will pull out and review and explore to understand how other writers approached their worlds. My biggest worry at the moment is that my creepy is out of place. Feels tacked on. But, having not yet read it cover to cover, I can’t really say if I’m worried about nothing.
Shall I have a go at a first summary?
Audrey Morin is an exceptional academic. Asked to apply for tenure in just her third year as an assistant professor at the exclusive Hanlon University, she is determined to succeed, if for no other reason than the security of a well-paid tenured position.
While appearing like she has it all, Audrey feels like she’s drowning. In addition to her professorial work of teaching, revising grants, and writing journal articles, she’s also reconstructing the famous Canis Major tapestry. An illustrious example of 1400-1500s artistry with questionable provenance, she is under intense pressure to finish her work on time so the museum can feature it in an exhibit in time for tourist season to begin.
As Audrey makes the tapestry whole again, stitch-by-stitch, her own life seems to unravel. She begins having nightmares, is plagued by illness, and falls into a crushing anxiety spiral. With deadlines looming, Audrey can’t shake the feeling that something just isn’t right - not with the museum, not with the tapestry, and certainly not with her ex back in her life as the new chair of the Department of Physics. As she embroiders pale golden fur onto 500+ year old sight hounds, Audrey starts to wonder if her work is, quite literally, following her home.
This is the best I can do for now. Do with it what you will.
But this is what I’m doing on my deck most mornings - editing this around the messiness of life.
And finally, a catch all.
That top book - Voyageurs gives me excellent imagery to remind me of what Canada would have looked like in the earliest days of settlers to help with a long poem I have been puttering away at.
The other books are probably useful for The Seasons project I am not fully committed to, but working away at exploring. I’ve started to collect them in one place in case I need them. Just in case.
Other things I have been writing lately include emails to the school about bullying - and one to volunteer for a field trip - requests for Access to Information around violence in schools in our province, eulogies - he was 93!, birthday cards - he’s nine!, and appointments of all sorts - dentist, doctor, vet.
Welcome to the countdown. Five days left of school and then we enter a new routine of some sort.
Happy Sunday, friends. I hope you’re having an okay day.
N xx
I love you, but I'm sorry...TBRs in multiple places? I cannot. Also, floor books...you might be my mother's true daughter.
I am not even going to say how utterly disorganised my (our, beloveds included) books are, I am literally too ashamed! Suffice to say they adorn every shelf, clear floor space and empty surface and I'm scared to look upstairs in the attic!