On Late Bloomers, And Other Ridiculous Phrases

A few weeks ago I came across Elizabeth Gilbert's lovely bit of advice to writers. I'd read it before, years ago when Eat, Pray, Love first came out and I found myself devouring everything that was in any way connected to EG and available online, but this time around it was the lovely Kathleen Winter who pointed me her way via Twitter.

It's great advice. EG has always been good with her writing wisdom: funny, and passionate, and self-deprecating in just the right way. But this time around I found myself caught on something. I kept going over and over this little bit:

I watched Julia Glass win the National Book Award for her first novel, “The Three Junes”, which she began writing in her late 30’s. I listened to her give her moving acceptance speech, in which she told how she used to lie awake at night, tormented as she worked on her book, asking herself, “Who do you think you are, trying to write a first novel at your age?” But she wrote it. And as she held up her National Book Award, she said, “This is for all the late-bloomers in the world.”

And I thought: I wish there was no such term as a "late bloomer". I wish we could do away with the phrase altogether.

Conferences, Memory Lane, and West Coast Adventures

I'd promised myself I would be good about this. I honestly, truly did. It's no problem, I said. I'll find free time somewhere in my week in Vancouver and Victoria to update the blog. I really will. I want to stay topical and engaged and blah blah blah. 

Blah blah blah.


Well, what do you know: it's Monday, the beginning of the week after my trip, and it's been a full two weeks since I've posted. As it turned out, I didn't have all that much free time out West. I probably opened my computer a grand total of three times. I did, however, manage to scribble various things in my journal -- on the beach, on the ferry, at various stolen moments in a series of cafés. So I'm going to transcribe some of those scribblings here. I've altered them in some places to make sense to the blog-world, as opposed to the scribbled-and-messy-Amanda-journal-world. They are not nearly as coherent and lovely and smart as I was hoping this blog post to be -- but then, when does that ever happen?

In defense of the humble blue Papermate pen

Today I got a letter from Janet Fitch. Yes, that Janet Fitch. It wasn't addressed specifically to me -- it came as part of my ongoing subscription to Letters in the Mail, from The Rumpus -- but still, it was lovely to think that at some point in the not-so-distant past, Janet Fitch had plopped down in front of her computer and written a letter that eventually found its way to my mailbox.

It was a lovely letter. I was particularly tickled by this discovery: Janet Fitch (Janet Fitch!) writes in big black unlined artists' sketchbooks, just like me. Like me, she has a need to sprawl herself out on the page in order to get the words down.

However, unlike me, Janet writes with a series of ritzy black fountain pens. Never a blue pen, she wrote. Never that.

And suddenly I found myself thinking: why not, Janet? What  you have against beautiful, darling blue ink?

On how Rabble has saved the world, yet again

So, as it happened, a few days after I read that rather cringeworthy list from Glamour that included all of those helpful tips on how to live A Certain, Prescribed Kind of Life by the time you hit the big 3-0 ... I came across this article.

I like this one much better. Don't you just love Rabble? Megan Murphy, oh sarcastic writer of untold brilliance -- I salute you. You and your excellent advice about shoes. Here's hoping that your wonderful advice makes its way into a chain letter of its own.

(I'd read that chain letter. And I'd force it on all my female friends -- in the nicest way possible, of course.)

I Have a Degree in Being Useless ... What do YOU have?

This post has been turning over and over in my head for a while. I was hoping (my hopes are always grand when they first start out) that I could hammer my thoughts into an Actual Article, and maybe try my luck at something like The Huffington Post or, I don't know, Maisonneuve or The Walrus, but then last week I got sick with the flu, and spent nearly seven days sleeping and watching old episodes of Glee, and by the time I felt like a human being again I felt as though the topical nature of this would-be post had become, well, not so topical anymore. News rises and then disappears almost instantly in this here Internet age. And so here it goes on the blog, instead. Hammer back in my (slightly weak, underfed) hand.

Today I would like to talk about the 13 most useless majors in university. And, oh, the opinions of a certain Margarent Wente. And also the fact that the cultural world seems to be disappearing, and society as whole seems not to care.

I mean, who cares about culture anyway, right? Why even bother with a blog post? Who, to paraphrase our Prime Minister, wants to hear about a bunch of rich people complaining about how their slice of the pie just keeps on shrinking?