QWF Writes

Tag: habits

  • Homeschooling in a Pandemic—By Greg Santos

    Homeschooling in a Pandemic—By Greg Santos

    In April 2020, we invited writers in Quebec to submit a story of a single day during the strange, uneasy time of coronavirus and pandemic, of social distancing and self isolation, of lockdown and quarantine.

    We’re thrilled to announce that these stories have been gathered in Chronicling the Days: Dispatches from a Pandemic (Guernica Press). To learn more and buy the book, please visit https://www.guernicaeditions.com/title/9781771836579.

    Please also join us on the QWF FB Community page, and let the authors know if their words resonated.

    “You’re used to homeschooling your kids. What’s your advice to other parents who are now in your shoes?”

    In a Zoom meeting recently, I was asked this question by an acquaintance. Taken aback, I found myself struggling for a good answer. I rambled something incoherent about how it’s different now during the global COVID-19 pandemic, but I couldn’t properly articulate my thoughts, which left me terribly frustrated. As I write this, I am still struggling to make sense of all of this.

    To read the rest of the story, please support our community and check out Chronicling the Days: Dispatches from a Pandemic

  • To Write Well, Learn from the Badminton Court—By Pascale Duguay

    To Write Well, Learn from the Badminton Court—By Pascale Duguay

    “Don’t rush your serve,” I called to an enthusiastic senior student during our badminton match.

    “But Miss, I can catch people off guard this way.”

    “Don’t rush your serve,” I insisted.

    “But Miss, I’m ready!”

    “No, you’re not. Your feet are still moving. You’re off balance. Your shot is off. You’re not focused.”

    A glare. An audible sigh.

    I could tell she wanted to tell me to mind my own business and go back to the library where I belonged, but I stood my ground.

    Most of the high school students I see on a daily basis don’t think of me as anything more than their librarian. I totally get that, since I used to be a teen. When I impulsively asked the coach if I could join the kids at practice, I didn’t know if my body would be up to the challenge, but I allayed my fears by telling myself that even if I couldn’t perform at the level of my youth, I could at least share some of the dusty bits of knowledge stored in my brain. Even though I had not played badminton seriously in at least twenty years, I still remembered how to hit a proper serve.

    “Don’t rush your serve,” I repeated again and again throughout our match.

    What my opponent didn’t know was that I needed the reminder as much as she did. In the heat of the moment it’s easy to get carried away, to want to speed things along. Although badminton is a fast sport, it’s not about rushing. It’s about being in control—of yourself, not your opponent. If you can control yourself, you can dictate the pace, the direction, the energy, the flow, and eventually the outcome. And it all starts with your serve.

    That night, as I checked my alarm clock, I was tempted to set it for later than usual to give my aching muscles a couple of hours of extra rest. But that meant I would have to skip my morning rituals. As I pondered the pros and cons, I realized that my writing life also needs a solid foundation. It can’t get off to a good start if I don’t first make sure everything I need is in place. For me, this means starting my day at 5:15 so I can do my morning pages à la Julia Cameron. I use this moment to cleanse my mind as I write down everything that enters my head, from the most mundane (I need to stop by the post office after work), to the most brilliant flashes of genius (I could write an essay about badminton). No matter where my thoughts begin, they inevitably point me to how I can best use my writing time later on.

    As I scribble away, I underline important thoughts and ideas so I can easily find them again when I review my musings. Three full pages later and I feel like a brand new me, ready to face the day and with my mind open to any guidance I might receive from my muse or fellow earthly beings.

    When my three pages are done, I move on to my workout. In a way, it’s the physical equivalent of my morning pages. It helps me stay grounded and strong so that I have the energy I need to write in the evenings.

    Once these two things are taken care of, I can start my day fully in control. I know what I wish to achieve and the path I will take to get there, while feeling confident that I will have the stamina to see it through. Just as preparing for the serve lays the foundation in badminton, my morning rituals stop me from blindly rushing into the day. They help me stay on course so my writing doesn’t get permanently buried under the day’s demands and distractions, but can resurface when the time finally comes for me to grab my writing tools and let the words fly.

    Pascale Duguay

    Pascale Duguay is a freelance writer, high school librarian, and translator (French/English). She resides in the lively bilingual community of Quebec’s Eastern Townships. Pop in for a visit at pascaleduguay.com, where you can sign up for her sporadic but fantastic newsletter on the writing life.

    Photo credits:
    “Olympics 2016 Sindhu”by chaitanyak is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
    (header image); Jennifer Brown (headshot)

     

  • Hello Baby, Bye Bye Books by Mike Steeves

    Hello Baby, Bye Bye Books by Mike Steeves

    Man holds baby while reading a book

    My daughter was born on August 25, 2014, and during the interminable lead-up to her birth I was, like all new parents, subject to a deluge of unsolicited advice, warnings and thinly-veiled threats from family, friends and complete strangers about what I could expect as a new parent. One of the warnings I heard most often was that the time I had for reading was going to be severely curtailed.

    Maybe my friends didn’t appreciate how dedicated I was to my routine, because I soon discovered that it was actually pretty easy to carve out the three hours I needed in order to stay on top of the steady stream of books that I had begun purchasing early on in my wife’s pregnancy as a way of offsetting my anxiety over not reading enough.

    For starters, I used to bike to work. But once I realized that I could eke out at least forty minutes of reading on my daily commute, I started taking the metro to work, thereby forgoing the last form of physical activity I practiced with any sort of regularity.

    Another threat to my reading habit was the immense amount of time required to help my daughter sleep. Newborns spend a lot of time sleeping, but they are notoriously bad at it and require assistance (referred to as ‘soothing’). This basically amounts to walking the streets of your neighbourhood with your baby stuffed into one of those obnoxiously priced “carriers.” Once I was over the new-dad jitters and was no longer trying to impress passersby with the baby I had strapped to my chest, I got into the habit of doing laps around the pond at Parc Outremont while reading from a book that I held in front of me. I made my way through Michael Hamburger’s translations of Paul Celan this way, and while I typically have little memory for poetry, many lines from this work are now frozen in place, triggered every time I pass a fountain or leafless tree. And one of the most memorable reading experiences of the last few years is the time I spent on a cold bench at Parc Saint-Viateur with my daughter sleeping in the carrier as I read the final pages of Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams while kids dressed up as penises made their way to Halloween parties.

    Happy Halloween

    ” …the time I spent on a cold bench at Parc Saint-Viateur with my daughter sleeping in the carrier as I read the final pages of Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams while kids dressed up as penises made their way to Halloween parties.”

     

    My aforementioned friends, the ones who warned that I would have to sacrifice my love of reading to my role as a new dad, were also an enormous tax on the time I had for reading. By refusing dinner invitations, birthday party invites, brunch for babies, etc., typically blaming my absence on my daughter, I was not only able to keep up my reading schedule, but, after I had refused enough of these kind invitations, they no longer came in with any regularity, which also spared me the enormous time-suck of responding in a considerate manner something to the effect that “I would love to! But…”

    While it turns out that my friends were wrong about finding the time to read, there is one aspect of parenthood they were right about, but that I’d never taken very seriously: I may still manage to find a comparable quantity of time, but the quality of that time has been seriously degraded. I can sit for hours with Knut Hamsun’s Pan in front of my face, but I regularly find myself rereading the same line over and over again. Or an hour passes and I don’t even make it to the bottom of the page I started on. I’ve managed to read an impressive number of excellent and difficult works, but I’ve hardly retained anything. Within a week or so of finishing a book, I even struggle to remember what I had just read (except for the Celan). So while I have plenty of time to read, I can’t maintain the level of focus and attention I had in my pre-paternal reading sessions.

    Which brings me to the final obstacle to my reading habit – writing. Before my daughter was born I used to try to write at least a few lines every night, but even this small commitment now seems to take an inordinate amount of time away from doing the thing that I really enjoy (it would be quite a stretch to say that I enjoy writing). On account of the soul-wearying exhaustion I feel at the end of every day, I find it pretty easy to excuse myself from writing for the night and to settle into a good book. And by “settle into a good book” I mean “read the same line over and over again until I eventually pass out on the couch.” My friends say that it’s perfectly natural to neglect my writing for the next year or so, and that eventually I will find the time and energy to start up again. I hope they’re right. Goodnight moon.

    Bookjacket_M Steeves

    Mike Steeves lives with his wife and child in Montreal, and works at Concordia University. Giving Up is his first full-length book of fiction. Connect with Steeves on Twitter @SteevesMike.

    Photos: Via Flickr; no changes made (top); Mike Steeves (Halloween); Nikki Tummon (headshot)