Meanwhile, in other news, two spindle whorls were found at the site of the English fort at Jamestown, Virginia, dating from the early 17th century. This would seem to indicate that, at that time, there were European women in Jamestown engaged in spinning yarn. Presumably the guys needed clothes, sails, fishing nets, bags, etc.
The fact that they found the spindle whorls in such a recent (17th century) context is interesting to me, because, in my incomplete knowledge, I didn't realize that the ancient "drop spindle" method of spinning was still employed during that time. According to the Jamestown author the method was still used in rural England and, I would venture to guess that, because the whorls themselves apparently came from present-day Belgium, it was used there as well.
Why did folks adhere to the earlier technology? Probably because it allowed for more efficient multi-tasking by the women. If you're sitting at a spinning wheel, you can't do much else except, maybe, sing. But the distaff and whorl put you well on your way to accomplishing the womanly mission of being everything to everyone. Alternatively, it allows you to go hide away somewhere and spin a tale or two, take in the scenery, or simply philosophize on the nature of the cosmos, all while creating a strong, fine yarn.
The Jamestown spindle whorls are described here. Also, I wrote about Jamestown a few years ago. (It probably needs an update, but I haven't done that yet!) And I've written about Weaving, War and Womanhood (which includes a bit more about spinning).
Saturday, February 3, 2018
Thursday, February 1, 2018
Gingerly entering a new era, hoping not to jinx it
For my latest project, I'm doing some typically idiosyncratic, non-methodical reading about music, and about the Vietnam War.*
And while I didn't write on this site at all while I was full into researching, writing, and editing my novel Seeking the Center (Cuidono Press, 2016), now that I've moved on, I may occasionally "scribble" some ideas here. My new mix of topics - especially the war part - might end up fitting in somewhat with previous spindlewhorl posts, so it seems convenient. Additionally, and primarily, I don't want a third website. I can barely handle what I've got.
I welcome all comments!
*Incidentally, I do review most of the books I read, and if you're interested, you can read my reviews on Goodreads.
And while I didn't write on this site at all while I was full into researching, writing, and editing my novel Seeking the Center (Cuidono Press, 2016), now that I've moved on, I may occasionally "scribble" some ideas here. My new mix of topics - especially the war part - might end up fitting in somewhat with previous spindlewhorl posts, so it seems convenient. Additionally, and primarily, I don't want a third website. I can barely handle what I've got.
I welcome all comments!
*Incidentally, I do review most of the books I read, and if you're interested, you can read my reviews on Goodreads.
Tuesday, August 30, 2016
My new website is up and running!
Hi everyone!
I wanted to let you know that my new website is up. Please visit for up-to-date information about Seeking the Center, including some blogging on relevant topics. See you there!
P.S. We finally have an official release date, October 17!
I wanted to let you know that my new website is up. Please visit for up-to-date information about Seeking the Center, including some blogging on relevant topics. See you there!
P.S. We finally have an official release date, October 17!
Friday, July 15, 2016
Seeking the Center cover art!
You've been there, I know you have. You find the perfect one only to have your hopes dashed: it's not available. How could you have such horrible luck?
And then it happens again. Utter despair!
But finally, amazingly, you stumble across something that's even better than those earlier ones, the ones you loved before, the ones that broke your heart...
I'm thrilled to report that we've found the perfect cover for Seeking the Center! It's a photograph by Mike Wilkinson, of Wilkinson Visual.
We're still working on the design, but for now, suffice it to say that it's got it all: stick, puck, ice, clouds, and sky. Stay tuned!
Wednesday, September 9, 2015
Seeking the Center will be published by Cuidono Press
Seeking the Center is my second novel, but the first one to be finished. I started thinking about it all the way back in 2008 or so. It tells the story of Agnes Demers, a young Métis woman growing up in Saskatchewan in the 1980s and '90s. Here's what it's about:
Agnes Demers grew up playing hockey, skating with the neighborhood kids on the frozen ponds of her hometown, St. Cyp, through the long, cold Saskatchewan winters. For Agnes, hockey is the measure of all things - the ultimate test of passion and power, spirit and skill. But now hockey has betrayed her, left her watching from the bleachers - all because she's had the miserable luck to be born female.
Agnes moves to Wapahaska to work at the Indian Jewel Box with her friend Jo. She intends to ignore the town's minor-league hockey team, the Prairie Wolves, not to mention her childhood teammate Owen MacKenzie, the Wolves' star center. In fact, she intends to ignore the whole smug, self-congratulatory scene, but it isn't long before she becomes re-entangled with the game she loves, with Owen, and with the team's new enforcer, Claude Doucette, an older player who shares her Native heritage and aspires to live by its warrior creed.
Locked in a three-way tilt at the convergence of history and desire, Agnes must seek the center: the balance to stay on her skates, the opening to make a play, and the vision to reclaim her game.
No release date yet, but you'll be the first to know!
Agnes Demers grew up playing hockey, skating with the neighborhood kids on the frozen ponds of her hometown, St. Cyp, through the long, cold Saskatchewan winters. For Agnes, hockey is the measure of all things - the ultimate test of passion and power, spirit and skill. But now hockey has betrayed her, left her watching from the bleachers - all because she's had the miserable luck to be born female.
Agnes moves to Wapahaska to work at the Indian Jewel Box with her friend Jo. She intends to ignore the town's minor-league hockey team, the Prairie Wolves, not to mention her childhood teammate Owen MacKenzie, the Wolves' star center. In fact, she intends to ignore the whole smug, self-congratulatory scene, but it isn't long before she becomes re-entangled with the game she loves, with Owen, and with the team's new enforcer, Claude Doucette, an older player who shares her Native heritage and aspires to live by its warrior creed.
Locked in a three-way tilt at the convergence of history and desire, Agnes must seek the center: the balance to stay on her skates, the opening to make a play, and the vision to reclaim her game.
No release date yet, but you'll be the first to know!
Friday, January 2, 2015
Dear Reader,
Welcome to my new home!
Moves can be stressful and disorganized and this one is no exception. Please forgive the mess, the dining table mistakenly left in the bedroom, and the boxes emptied before the shelves are ready to hold their contents. It's going to take me a while to get it all together, so be patient. But don't hesitate to stop by and look around.
Moves can be stressful and disorganized and this one is no exception. Please forgive the mess, the dining table mistakenly left in the bedroom, and the boxes emptied before the shelves are ready to hold their contents. It's going to take me a while to get it all together, so be patient. But don't hesitate to stop by and look around.
Thursday, October 11, 2012
Meditations on 'The Monsters and the Critics' by J. R. R. Tolkien
I've just read Tolkien's famous lecture/essay on Beowulf, "The Monsters and the Critics." In it he takes certain literary critics to task for their assertions that Beowulf's author eschewed the lofty in favor of the trivial by placing the monsters – Grendel, Grendel's mother, and the dragon – at the center of the poem.
It is a beautiful, beautiful essay that, apart from scoring an absolute bull's eye (and applying the zinger: I have, of course read The Beowulf, as have most [but not all] of those who have criticized it), also weighs in on the power of myth and the importance of looking at art as art. It also demonstrates how we can gain perspective through a thoughtful examination of historical context.
Near and dear to my heart, and at the heart of his argument, Tolkien staunchly defends the northern mythological imagination. This is a balm to my soul! I show great restraint by not simply retyping the whole thing right here!
Though scarcely a child of the internet age, I wanted so much, as I read the essay, to send Dr. Tolkien an email, or tweet to him in sincere appreciation and in solidarity; but Tolkien, of course, was, as he himself said of Beowulf, a man, and that…is sufficient tragedy: man falls prey to death and then he is lost…! How fortunate that his words may live on, so that one may meditate upon them, as below.
A person alive and a person dead exist at the same time
Like Tolkien, I believe strongly in the significance of myth.
Myth does not unfold in an "historical" time, but rather in an imagined time. However, as Tolkien says, it is at its best when it is presented…as incarnate in the world of history and geography…
I would add that, in myth, meanings bleed to the surface of the ordinary, so that this bloodiness, this contact with the juice that (normally) flows invisibly within, becomes ordinary.
In my novel The Bear Wife, bones - skeletal remains emptied of a person's soul - are inhabited, pregnant, in a sense, with significance. (He who in those days said and who heard…[the kenning] ban-hus 'bone-house'…thought of the soul shut in the body, as the frail body itself is trammelled in armour, or as a bird in a narrow cage, or steam pent in a cauldron. There it seethed and struggled in the wylmas, the boiling surges beloved of the old poets, until its passion was released and it fled away on ellor-si∂, a journey to other places 'which none can report with truth, not lords in their halls nor mighty men beneath the sky.')
In this mythological way of thinking, a thing is both what it is, and what it is not. Or maybe what it is, and what it once was, both at the same imagined time.
In this way of thinking, a person alive and a person dead exist at the same time, in balance, as Tolkien describes the two halves of the Anglo-Saxon line of verse, halves that balance and build upon each other, "more like masonry than music."
In this way of thinking there is the sense of a building, a structure, "a tough builder's work of true stone," rather than a sense of moving forward, or of narrative. But I don't think – and I don't think Tolkien thought either – that this 'structure' represented a state of repose. Far from it; the balance, in fact, was an uneasy one.
In The Well and the Tree Paul Bauschatz discusses the lack of a future tense in Germanic languages. There are only the past and the present, two conditions, and the future is called necessity.
Some say the future is now. Perhaps, essentially, necessity is the now, the only weapon we may wield against the monster, a stonemason's tool in the delicate balance between life and death.
Quotes are from "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" and "On Translating Beowulf", both from The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, by J. R. R. Tolkien. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1984.
I also refer to The Well and the Tree: World and Time in Early Germanic Culture by Paul C.
Bauschatz. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1982.
It is a beautiful, beautiful essay that, apart from scoring an absolute bull's eye (and applying the zinger: I have, of course read The Beowulf, as have most [but not all] of those who have criticized it), also weighs in on the power of myth and the importance of looking at art as art. It also demonstrates how we can gain perspective through a thoughtful examination of historical context.
Near and dear to my heart, and at the heart of his argument, Tolkien staunchly defends the northern mythological imagination. This is a balm to my soul! I show great restraint by not simply retyping the whole thing right here!
Though scarcely a child of the internet age, I wanted so much, as I read the essay, to send Dr. Tolkien an email, or tweet to him in sincere appreciation and in solidarity; but Tolkien, of course, was, as he himself said of Beowulf, a man, and that…is sufficient tragedy: man falls prey to death and then he is lost…! How fortunate that his words may live on, so that one may meditate upon them, as below.
A person alive and a person dead exist at the same time
Like Tolkien, I believe strongly in the significance of myth.
Myth does not unfold in an "historical" time, but rather in an imagined time. However, as Tolkien says, it is at its best when it is presented…as incarnate in the world of history and geography…
I would add that, in myth, meanings bleed to the surface of the ordinary, so that this bloodiness, this contact with the juice that (normally) flows invisibly within, becomes ordinary.
In my novel The Bear Wife, bones - skeletal remains emptied of a person's soul - are inhabited, pregnant, in a sense, with significance. (He who in those days said and who heard…[the kenning] ban-hus 'bone-house'…thought of the soul shut in the body, as the frail body itself is trammelled in armour, or as a bird in a narrow cage, or steam pent in a cauldron. There it seethed and struggled in the wylmas, the boiling surges beloved of the old poets, until its passion was released and it fled away on ellor-si∂, a journey to other places 'which none can report with truth, not lords in their halls nor mighty men beneath the sky.')
In this mythological way of thinking, a thing is both what it is, and what it is not. Or maybe what it is, and what it once was, both at the same imagined time.
In this way of thinking, a person alive and a person dead exist at the same time, in balance, as Tolkien describes the two halves of the Anglo-Saxon line of verse, halves that balance and build upon each other, "more like masonry than music."
In this way of thinking there is the sense of a building, a structure, "a tough builder's work of true stone," rather than a sense of moving forward, or of narrative. But I don't think – and I don't think Tolkien thought either – that this 'structure' represented a state of repose. Far from it; the balance, in fact, was an uneasy one.
In The Well and the Tree Paul Bauschatz discusses the lack of a future tense in Germanic languages. There are only the past and the present, two conditions, and the future is called necessity.
Some say the future is now. Perhaps, essentially, necessity is the now, the only weapon we may wield against the monster, a stonemason's tool in the delicate balance between life and death.
Quotes are from "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" and "On Translating Beowulf", both from The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, by J. R. R. Tolkien. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1984.
I also refer to The Well and the Tree: World and Time in Early Germanic Culture by Paul C.
Bauschatz. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1982.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)