Radial Symmetry

The mission was to track down a thin publication, released in 1967, possibly by the Canadian Wildlife Service. The thing you don't realize before you work in reference is just how useful those old timey mid-century bibliographies are. They're on paper, actual paper, which means you can flip back and forth quickly instead of ticking off agonizing seconds while the screen changes to the digitized page you think you might want. You can unfocus your eyes enough as you flip though the book on the table and let the right word reveal itself to your brain.

I didn't find what I was looking for, in any bibliography of the CWS, Environment Canada, NRCan, on the Publications Canada website, or in the Canadian Publications catalogues. No. Dice.

But in one of those bibliographies, and this was before I was Collecting collecting, which means I was just scribbling little notes to myself on the backs of AMICUS printouts, there was a listing for another thin paper. Just a few pages, I believe, and if you've worked in non-profits or the gov, you know the type - 10, maybe 15 pages, thick staples leaving flecks of rust on the cover cardstock. A block of now-retro colour across the bottom half of the front, maybe avocado, maybe burnt orange, a square with rounded corners cut out to reveal the title on the title page. One corner with a diagonal tear where someone picked it up once with clumsy fingers.

I never did see the book, but the title was "This Trout is a Great Fighter."

A flat statement. A specific trout. I like to imagine one fish, fighting a great fight against a predator’s teeth, claws; the encroaching ice.

It puts me in mind of a poem I can’t remember – one that involves river water glinting like diamond scales. I thought it was “The Fish” by Marianne Moore. Or a poem by Elizabeth Bishop – maybe “The Fish” again, or “At the Fishhouses.” No and no and no. I think I’m focused too much on the fish-image instead of what was back of it. No mind, though. I can still see the river in the fall, running hard, small crests flecked with foam under moonlight.

If you've never done a systematic search for archival photos, well. It's a process. I took the training session twice, and still flopped around like a fish out of water doing this.

First you need to search our online database for photos - but only about 3-4% of the photos in the collection have been described individually (archivists say "at the item level"). So if you strike out there - or, in my case, found a couple of what you wanted, but wanted to see if there were more - you go to the paper finding aid for the collection.

Photos at LAC are organized by Accession. So we get a whole whack of photos from the Dept. of National Defence, e.g., and give it a number - in my case, the magic number was 1964-114, or, the 114th collection acquired in 1964.

For this fabled accession, there's a complicated finding aid, FA-22, a box full of ratty handwritten or typewritten or photocopied pages. I wanted the O-series - O for Ordinary, comprised of shots of the troops overseas doing, I suppose, ordinary things.

I suppose that most of what I found was actually reasonably ordinary. One or two photos of the xth battalion, buying oranges from French children. All the Non-Commissioned Officers from the nth battalion, a scarred field their backdrop: so many of them they are interchangeable in the camera's eye, pale skin and dark hats. A few men from another battalion are leaning back against the damp walls of the trenches, steely faced as a superior officer makes a brief visit. Few people mentioned by name.

In all of this, suddenly: Yvonne.

There wasn't another single page of the O-series that had this many ditto-marks. Yvonne, described as "the pretty railway gate keeper" the page before, was, I would say, hot shit for a war photographer at the front. As well as for a few of the other men from whatever unnamed battalions.

I could picture her - a thick rope of dark hair twisted and pinned at the neck. Swept off her face. High cheekbones in a pale oval face. Wide, dark eyes. Leaning on her crossing gate and staring with insouciance into the camera.

If I were interested in writing historical fiction, this would be a gold mine. What was Yvonne like? Was she really that pretty? How many men went to visit her in a day? Did she like the attention? What does a railway crossing gate keeper - pretty or no - do? Is pretty then the same as pretty now? Was she sad when the war was over and the men went home? Was she relieved to hear no more clumsy Canadian accents and choppy French? What was her family like? Did she live with her parents? Did the men compete for her attention, hoping for a few kind words, a bright smile in the midst of death, boredom and filth.

When I was blogging before, I was very very careful to not blog about the organization I was working for or even the cause we worked so hard on. Part of that was because I wasn't really interested in blogging about the topic, since I already spent all day thinking about it. Also, it's just stupid to write personal stuff about work on the internet, unless you want to spend all your time worrying about alienating your co-workers and/or getting fired.

Now though! HaHA! I am FREE! And I will be blogging about work all the time.

Though: nothing personal of course; and as far as your concerned, I have absolutely no thoughts about the grand machinations of my department. I'm still not stupid.

So, the big news, even if it is old by now. I started working as a Reference Librarian at Library and Archives Canada going on a year now. It was a very weird shift to go from being the webby-webby barely-librarian at a small non-profit to being the librarianest of librarians at the librariest of libraries.

The joy of this job is really in the collection itself. I spend my days answering questions, mostly about the published collection, but a little bit about our archival holdings as well. And boy howdy, is it ever an insanely amazing bunch of stuff we have. Depending on the question I've been asked, I could be looking at the correspondence of Stanley G. Grizzle, going through old train schedules, searching old government publications catalogues for a specific report, or photocopying articles on someone's famous Grandma.

The collecting I've been doing is amazing. Sentences, images. Words. I have no idea how all this stuff will come together. Yet. But stay tuned.

It's nice to think about the hows and the whys, and maybe that will get me there someday. Not fast enough. What do I do now to start writing again? Aside from exercising my word brain here.

There's a book I have been dipping into occasionally, and probably not as much as I should: The Creative Habit, by Twyla Tharp. Among her many recommendations: habit; collect.

Habit is almost everything, fuck. Why I'm in this position at all. Lots of things aren't that hard to do once you're doing them, but the starting feels as if it might kill you.

I'm a person who goes in cycles: I run for 2 years, then stop. I knit for 5 years, then stop. I lift weights for 18 months, then stop. I write for a decade, then dry up. Sometimes I start these things again (knitting), sometimes I don't (lifting weights), sometimes I really want to, but can't seem to make myself (writing).

Tharp suggests not thinking but doing. Your alarm goes off and you put your feet on the floor. You are already wet in the shower before your mind registers the indignity of being awake before 6 am. You sit and the keyboard and press your fingers fast before you realize you're scared of sounding like an ass, worse yet, a bad writer.

Frankly, that habit's not enough. Not for me. I got tired of re-hashing my daily life in blog. No real reason why, though I could come up with a half-dozen half-truths, I suppose, if I were pressed. I want something that is not my daily life to sink my teeth deep into. I want a project to plan and to push around, to push out when it's ready. I have some vague ideas, blurry outlines, but nothing that's coalescing.

What I will do until then is collect what my eye catches. Maybe all the bits will be too different to bring together, maybe they'll form too neat a pattern. Maybe I'll bring all my bits together and they'll make a pattern that no one else could have seen, but that rings true for people just the same.

There was a conversation I had with a roommate, oh so many homes ago, about creativity, innate talent, and hard work. It was a debate we had several times, and neither of us was ever able to bring the other onside.

He was a multi-talented kind of guy – great musician, good songwriter, fantastic artist. Walking by his room one day, I stopped to admire a portrait he was working on.

“Enh,” he said. “Anyone could do that. It’s all practice.”

I said, simply, “No.”

Not that he didn’t have a point – I could always see where he was coming from, and I also partially agree. When you see someone who’s really good at something, it’s highly unlikely that they just came like that. People who are really good at something have generally put a lot of effort into being that way. My roomie had gone to art school and had spent a lot of hours at the easel on his own because he loved it.

Next I asked him, “Why did you start?”

And he started, like most of us who get pretty good at something, because he enjoyed it, and because when he was finished doing what enjoyed, people saw something good in it and praised him. Which felt good, which made him want to do more, and so on. He had natural talent, and the relationship between that nascent talent, the innate joy of being creative and the societal reinforcement all lead him to put hours and hours of practice into becoming really really good.

Me, I couldn’t be an artist. Well, fine, maybe if I had three lifetimes of nothing else to do, sure, I could put in enough hours to train my eye to talk to my brain to talk to my hands a bit better. In this lifetime? Even if I had nothing else to do, artist is a long shot.

I could maybe have been a musician – I have some natural talent, and received a fair amount of praise when I was a kid. But the feeling I got when I played music was more often frustrated than satisfied.

But writing?

I have always loved words, as long as I can remember. The sounds of them separately and apart, the feeling they gave me of being somewhere else, even when I was tucked away in a corner at home or school. The prickle of them under my skin when they were particularly right.

It seemed, too, that I had a natural ear for the written word, if that makes sense. The words I put on the page sometimes sounded like they were supposed to when I thought them in my head. I was a good mimic – still am – and could make a fair facsimile of writing I liked, which garnered me praise from my peers and grown-ups alike.

And those things together, made me work hard. I played music when my mom made me. I wrote whenever I could, because I knew I could do it the best of all the things I could do, and there is pleasure in doing the thing you do best.

It's been a long time since I've written. Like, a long fucking time. And like, fucking anything outside of work. The last thing I handed in, I handed in to Bitch Magazine, on time and needing few edits. It was a total high, the email I got from the editor, saying how pleased she was with it. That on the tail of my story in Best Bondage Erotica should have left me feeling really good about what I'd been doing and where I was going. The high subsided, and quickly; I felt flat instead.

That probably bears closer scrutiny, but more obviously, my life was in complete turmoil. It's been quite a year and some.

Since this time last year, I got laid off, got another job, worked both jobs, welcomed This Charming Man into my house, and then we pretty promptly moved into bigger digs. I was freaked out, frankly, by just about all of it.

What I knew already, but learned well again, is that I do not function at a creative peak when the rest of my life is in upheaval. When I am worried about whether I will be able to afford my roof, I do not feel like writing sexy stories, or amusing blog posts, or interesting anything. My output becomes very quickly limited to list upon list - generally lost and re-written with a different pen, or in pencil or in the draft folder of another email account, or lodged and lost on the cloud - of how to cope with what I am trying to cope with.

And fair enough, eh? A person only has so much electricity to push through their circuits.

The problem, of course, is that when the anxiety circuits stopped needing so much energy, I discovered that my creative circuits had pretty much rusted out.

It's been stressing me out, but I don't really know what to do about it. So I figured this old blog, that once had me writing with frequency and pleasure, might be a good place to start.

Judith Halberstam is a name that looms large in my queer hagiography. The cover of Female Masculinity is as burned into my brain as those of Gender Trouble and Sexy Bodies and Sex Changes.

A tasty morsel drawn from my latest venus envy post.

It's been a long time since I blogged anywhere, eh? Well, my life has been nuts for, oh, the past 8 months, but particularly since early December, and particularly particularly since the end of January. It's been a whole lot of lotting Chez Butch.

Perhaps, when things calm down somewhat, perhaps in the next few weeks, I will fix myself a hot toddy and tell you a little about it.

After I've prattled away in front of a group of Erotic Talk workshop goers, throwing around terms like "cock" and "cunt" with abandon, I always see at least a few eyebrows raised when I say that I used to be incredibly shy about sex talk, especially the saucy kind you might do with a lover.

Doesn't make it any less true.

I was not always the filthy mouthed writer you see before you on this site. Once, I was too shy to speak.

The lastest VE post explains a bit about how that changed, and why I think it's important.

I love talking about sex, I love learning about people's sex lives. They're fascinating. I like learning how people's bodies work. I'd say I'm generally pretty good at happy casual sex.

Sex work, I knew, would have its ups and downs. But so did being a Research Assistant for a bitchy professor. And I figured the pay for sex had to be a hell of a lot better than $7/hr.

And there you have the juciest quote from my newest post for Venus Envy, about sex work and POWER.

It's the last one before the holidays, so merry merry and keep warm.

A new missive on the VE site, about what an excellent writerly week I had last week.

Maybe you're the kind of person who can just enjoy nice things. If you are, more praise to you. Hey, who knows, maybe I envy you a little bit, even as I worry that you won't be quite as well prepared as you could have been for the End Times.

But enough about you.

Includes a lot of hopefully entertaining bla bla and also an excerpt from the story I just got published in Best Bondage Erotica 2011. Woot!