Extracts from two pieces in the latest issue of Brick:

“I have a book of poetry called Book of Longing, and it’s poems and drawings and it has a wonderful cover [drawing of] a bird. What I like about it is that it was a drawing I had discarded and had no use for, but I endlessly recycle my scribbles and sketches, and it’s really wonderful when something reappears. You should never throw anything away, including people and ideas. It’s really true that you should never give up on anyone. Everything can be used.”

— from Shelagh Rogers’ interview with Leonard Cohen

Writers are notorious for making something of nothing. We weave scraps and found things, our bits and pieces out of which, each time, we are convinced we can make a whole. We bring them from different parts of the world and throw them together. The story builds like a bird’s nest, stuck together with our spit and other excretions, because we have to, because we can’t leave the world alone but have to remake it, give it another look. […] I remember a writer in Scotland, years ago, telling me, “Don’t throw anything away! You can always cut it up and use it for something, turn it into something else!” The quilt theory of literature. Don’t ever throw anything away, it may be useful! I make stock with bones, even here, in America, where my husband says to me, “World War Two is over, you know.” I save my scraps and hoards, my bits and pieces, in case.

— Rosalind Brackenbury, from “May 19, 1942”

Inspired by this theory I have scavenged a scrap from my own hoard of “seeds”: a glimmering that I jotted down at some point in the past in the hopes that, with a small amount of nurturing, it might one day grow into a proper entry for t&p…

Rowing after dusk a dozen oar-lengths off the island’s shore; the sea’s surface so calm that it is as if we are all balanced on a mirror. Two wooden dinghies containing an assortment of nieces and nephews, chattering and laughing softly; J and I paddling the canoe; the eldest nephew by himself in the skiff, describing slow circles around the rest of us, watching and listening in silence, thinking his adolescent thoughts. All of us are floating on an evening sky which also arches over us, filled with the last wash of sunset, a scattering of clouds dipped in shades of orange against a sky which deepens from blue to black towards the east. At this time of day the land is dark, the island visible only in faint outline: an undulation of arbutus, fir, and cedar, punctuated with yellow cutouts of varying size, each one opening into a bright, noisy room; rooms filled with televisions and telephones, rooms where the day will not end with this slow, beautiful diffusion, but abruptly, with the suddenness of a switch.