Brick-laying, Fifteen Minutes at a Time

“Real writing, I was beginning to realize, was more like laying bricks than waiting for lightning to strike. It was painstaking. It was manual labor. And sometimes, sometimes if you kept putting the bricks down and let your hands just go on bleeding, and didn’t look up and didn’t stop for anything, the lightning came. Not when you prayed for it, but when you did your work.”
Paula McLain, Love and Ruin

For the past few years, I’ve been struggling with the task of writing my maternal grandmother’s story. I do mean, struggle. For the first couple of years, the story wandered here, there and everywhere. It had no focus. No purpose.

A course offered by the Alexandra Writers’ Centre in Calgary helped me find the focus and suddenly the story started coming together.

Until I hit That Chapter.

Some instinct deep inside me said, That Chapter is necessary to the story. I just couldn’t see how or why. I tried writing it a couple of times and got nowhere.

I stopped writing it. I stopped trying to write it.

It haunted me, stared at me, glared at me, dared me to put one word, any word on that virtual paper. I hid.

Until I read that passage above from Paula McLain’s wonderful book about Martha Gellhorn, an American journalist, war correspondent and author. If she could rise above the pain and struggle of writing, then so could I. I decided to use her analogy of writing as brick-laying and tackle That Chapter again.

I started with 15 minutes of “brick-laying.” You know, minimize the amount of self-inflicted pain, or something. So my hands wouldn’t be bleeding too much at the end of each session.

I set my timer for 15 minutes. I shut out the world. I starting writing. No editing, just writing. Just one word after another, one sentence after another.

Some days, 15 minutes went by in a flash. I was on a roll. I kept on writing. Other days, it was like pulling teeth (to use another metaphor). Those bricks were heavy and ill-fitting, and the mortar wouldn’t set. I was relieved when the timer went off. I went in search of metaphorical bandages for my metaphorical bleeding hands.

But guess what? That Chapter is now written. It’s terrible. It needs serious re-writing. And editing. But in the process I began to get a glimmer of why I first thought, way back when, that That Chapter was essential to my grandmother’s story. Now that I understand the purpose of That Chapter, it will be easier (relatively speaking) to write it.

Sometimes, even painful brick-laying pays off.

#Writing #WritersBlock #FifteenMinutes #MargaretGHanna #AlexandraWritersCentre #HighamFamilyHistory

Four Mile Hill

The gravel road going straight south from Meyronne to McCord gradually climbs up over a ridge of hills four miles south of the village. At the summit of these hills, the road curves around the highest peak. We called it Four Mile Hill.

It was no mountain but it was prominent enough to be noticeable. For me, it was a landmark I looked for whenever we (i.e., my family) were returning from a visit to any of the relatives. It was a sign that we were close to home, that the tedium of an eight-hour drive from Meadow Lake or Airdrie would soon be finished; that I would no longer be cooped up with my brother in the back seat of our 1958 Ford car; that soon the two of us would be unpenned and we could run off all our pent-up energy that, for the last hour or so, had been translating into spats and arguments that annoyed our father to point of his threatening us with the back of his hand. Or worse.

In 1965, I left home for university and work. Seventeen years later, I returned to Saskatchewan to work. One of the first things I did was drive to the family farm.

As I neared Meyronne, I started looking for Four Mile Hill. I couldn’t see it. Had I forgotten where to look? What it looked like? Was it smaller than I remembered? I still hadn’t seen it as I drove up the lane to the farm house. Where was Four Mile Hill?

All that’s left of Four Mile Hill

It was all but gone. A mere remnant remained. Several years previously, someone in his wisdom decided that the curve around the hill should be eliminated. Perhaps he deemed it too dangerous. Straightening the curve entailed going straight through Four Mile Hill. It was bulldozed, and all but erased from the landscape.

My reaction was visceral, emotional, intense. I was appalled, angry, hurt. How dare they destroy my landmark, my touchstone, the signal that I was nearing home! Yes, there were highways and road signs to guide me home – as if I needed them! – but somehow I needed Four Mile Hill. It was my North Star, my lighthouse guiding me home. And now it was gone. My home – not the house, not the farm, but my HOME, the landscape I knew as a child – was in some small way gone. Forever.

Cultural landscape theory proposes that the landforms around us are more than mere topography, more than a series of hills and valleys and lakes and streams. We imbue those landforms with meanings, memories and values that transform them from “places” into “spaces” filled with personal, historical and even spiritual significance. These spaces hold memories that trigger a host of other emotions – a sense of home, of self, of security, of one’s place in the world, of belonging. In other words, we humans are not apart from, we are a part of the landscape. We create, and are created by, the spaces around us.

The places I highlighted in my previous five posts of “Saskatchewan is NOT flat!” are those that hold exactly those kinds of memories for me. But not just for me. Everyone who has spent time there – who has climbed to the top of St. Victor petroglyphs, or learned to swim at Camp Woodboia, or gazed in awe at the gazillions of stars strewn across the night sky at Grasslands National Park, or seen the world laid out below them from one of Cypress Hills’ peaks – they have their own memories of those places, their own sense of attachment to them. All those stories are layered on top of all the other stories – many, alas, now forgotten – of all the people who preceded us.

The next time you drive across “boring,” “flat” Saskatchewan (or anywhere, for that matter), take a good look at the landforms around you. Imagine what stories they might tell, or significance they once held. If only we had the ears to hear, or the eyes to see . . .

#FourMileHill #MeyronneMemories #SaskatchewanNotFlat #ChildhoodMemories #CulturalLandscapeTheory #HannaHistory #MargaretGHanna