Present and Accounted For

Last week, I received funding from The Writer’s Union of Canada to go up North and do writing workshop presentations at the local high school there. I’ve done this before at other schools and it usually goes well, despite the incident in the spring where the teacher in charge confided that she hadn’t told the students I was coming. When I asked, “Why not?”, she said if they knew, NONE OF THEM WOULD SHOW UP, and if that isn’t a boost to the old ego, I don’t know what is. But the kids this week all knew I was their guest speaker and they seemed pretty jazzed about it. As for me, I was exhausted for a variety of reasons. First, after haranguing Ken about taking too long at work and making us late KEN, we set out on the 4 hour drive. We were about 20 minutes down the highway when Ken asked where I’d put the copies of the books I was taking to raffle off to the kids, and I realized with horror that I had forgotten an entire bag, which also contained the memory stick with my PowerPoint presentation. I actually started to cry at the thought of going back and losing even more time, as if I wasn’t stressed out of my mind with anxiety already, but there was no choice. Luckily, Ken isn’t the kind of guy to give me grief over things like that—goodness knows I felt bad enough. And not only was I exhausted after the now 6-hour drive, I also have a terrible time sleeping at hotels. I also felt grubby, because the motel we had booked smelled terrible and had no hot water. It made me appreciate social distancing even more because I kept 6 feet between me and anyone who could catch a whiff of ‘motel stank’.

But the students were lovely and very enthusiastic—until it came time to share their writing ideas with the whole group. Their reluctance was palpable. Luckily, I have a little trick up my sleeve that I use in times like this.

Me: I’m working on a new book right now, a murder mystery, and I need victims. So if you put up your hand and share your writing, I will name a character after you, and you get to choose how I murder you.
Students (all hands go flying up in the air): Me! Me!

Here are some of my favourites:

Matty – killed on stage during a musical number, possibly electrocuted by her guitar

Kennedy – flaming arrow to the chest

Zack – burned in a public place on a giant pyre

Grace – pushed off a rollercoaster at the top by a very strong 5-year-old

Jimmy – killed fighting a bear

It was simultaneously adorable AND terrifying how much thought they’d put into this. And it all reminded me so much of Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies. If you haven’t read it (click link if you want to have it read to you but it’s gruesome, just an fyi), it’s a very darkly humorous alphabet book: A is for Amy who fell down the stairs / B is for Basil assaulted by bears…and it goes on, only getting worse, as you can well imagine, but the illustrations are hilarious. Anyway, it was a good time and Ken and I made it home that night without having to stay in motel hell again.

But doing things like this is getting harder and harder for me. When did I stop wanting to explore the world and just stay home? I know it’s not just me—I was having a conversation with a friend the other day:

Friend: How did it happen? When did I become so old?
Me: I know, right? Like, all I want is to putter in the garden, write, make miniatures, and watch TV in bed with a glass of wine—that’s the dream.
Friend: One of my friends had extra tickets to the Pink show last week, and I LOVE Pink, but it was in Toronto, last minute, and I was like, go ALL THE WAY to Toronto and see a concert AT NIGHT without any chance to prepare? Hard pass!
Me: Ken wanted to go to a restaurant last week and I begged him to let me cook for him at home. Why would I want to spend all that money to WAIT for my food to come?!
Friend: EXACTLY!

Stick, meet mud. Maybe I was always like this, but I had the youthful energy to overcome it. Who knows. At any rate, if you’re looking for me, you can find me at home, nestled in my office writing a story about a boy who gets killed in a bear fight. I already have the last line written: “It was a bear, Jimmy. What did you expect?”

38 thoughts on “Present and Accounted For”

  1. I always enjoy reading about the colorful adventures in your life—it never fails to amuse me! Your latest story brought back a memory of when my mom was driving me back to boarding school in Buffalo, New York. She ended up crashing the car on I-90, and we had to spend the night in the most rundown motel imaginable. The carpet was threadbare with holes, the light switches had a mind of their own (one switch controlled every light in the room!), and the plumbing was literally held to the surface of the interior walls with bent nails.

    I was also surprised to hear you’re still using portable flash memory. Amelia and I finally made the switch to cloud-hosting everything on our own home server, which has been a game-changer for us.

    On a separate note, Amelia is working hard on a fiction book that we’re hoping to publish either later this year or early next. Exciting times ahead!

    Thanks again for the laughs—always a pleasure. 🙂

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    • It’s kind of scary how much thought they put into their own creative demises! I was probably like that as a teen too–now I just want to die peacefully in my sleep at a ripe old age!

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  4. The library where I work has a large collection of Gorey’s original drawings and writings. I went to a talk about him because, of course, but I don’t remember why the library ended up being a repository for him. I was too busy laughing. His dark humour hits me right in the funny bone, which would be a cool way to die. Electrocuted on stage by an electric guitar is good too. Performing on stage is violent: you either kill or die. Or sometimes bomb.
    Unfortunately I can’t relate to wanting to stay at home. But getting away is so difficult these days.

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  5. ROI on effort vs pleasure shifts through time. That and the definition of boredom transitions, fond memories easily substitute for adventures unknown.
    You’ve got a tall stack of murders ordered, I hope the chef has sharpened her knives.

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  6. I think speaking in front of a crowd is nightmarish enough, but speaking to middle and high schools students is terror personified, at least for me. All I have to do on occasion is speak with university students. And really not speaking, more like giving them the riot act if they don’t comply with their scholarship requirements. Which I actually enjoy because I can see the terror in their eyes when I say….”If you don’t comply with these requirements as set forth by us and NASA, we will revoke your funding and you are responsible for the repayment of your scholarship funds.” 😈

    I admire that you have the enthusiasm to go and talk to high school students about writing. I have no energy for anything right now, which is a segway into the conversation you had with your friend. I am completely there with you, I had to muster up the energy to go with my son to watch The Rocky Horror Picture Show in August at a local film festival. It was on a Weds night at 9pm and I was thinking up every excuse in the book to cancel, but my son had bought the tickets months in advance. So I just went and turned out I had a great time. The audience went up on stage to sing along with the film, it was a riot. I got up to sing “Dammit Janet” and my son was mortified, but I didn’t care. Then I called into work the following morning because we got home after 1am. But now, I get up early on the weekends to work on my front yard, Swedish Death Clean, plan my wardrobe for the week and I’m perfectly happy staying home watching Netflix and Hulu all day long. Just me and my cats having tea and sandwiches watching Agatha All Along on Disney, lol.

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  9. Such fun at the event. Ahem, my total sympathy for forgetting the stuff for the event. but don’t be so hard on yourself. AND… spookily enough as I read you first few lines of this post Edward Gory came to mind. He was so wonderfully dark and weary in his expression! Glad you had a such a success!

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  11. What a lovely story – sorry getting there was hard. I think as we get older, there’s simply the life experience of ‘been there, done that, & I even saw behind the magician’s curtain’…

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  12. I blame Covid! The real world is no longer the happy place it used to be. Or perhaps we just discovered that sitting in pj’s communicating via a keyboard is actually more fun? Or…yes, okay…maybe we are getting older. 😦

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