Included Below: Puzzles / Scratching / Manifesto / How Things Have Changed / SWDT. Click HERE for further information about this newsletter. To those from before and those who are new-
I. WELCOME!
Everything I do, I do it for you.
After a recent health issue, I’ve been trying to take care of myself a bit better. There are things that can be done to keep your body fit, but what about keeping your mind fit?
Last year, I made a conscious decision to try and do things that I enjoyed and which happened to be good for the mind. It was important to me to find offline things, as I already spend too much time staring at screens. I read that doing things like playing music, working on jigsaw puzzles, and learning languages were all good things to help keep the mind going.
I’m terrible at learning languages. When I was a kid, I grew up in Toronto and we did not have any French lessons. My family moved to Ottawa when I was eight years old and there was a lot of French. Plus, the rest of the kids had been taking it for years already. And as these things go, for some reason my first French teacher was not very nice and always seemed to call on me for answers, which helped me hate French class. So, I developed a not great relationships with learning languages.
I figured there were plenty of language apps and since it was so good for my mind, I could try to revisit this. I know, it’s on a phone and a phone is a screen. However, I figured that if I’m waiting somewhere or in a situation where I’d usually pull out my phone to scroll through, I could instead use it to do language lessons. I settled on one of the more popular apps and actually used it for a while. I started with French because that’s what I was most familiar with, but would eventually love to learn Spanish. I quickly learned that I was still terrible at languages. I’m not really sold on how the apps gamify learning. Sure, I could match up French and English words, or fill-in a phrase spoken by a cartoon character, but I doubt that I’ve retained that much information. I’ve since gone with a more traditional way of learning French, a more text-based app. More boring, less gamey.
Next I borrowed some jigsaw puzzles from a friend. I even bought a jigsaw puzzle mat. My grand idea was to always be working on a jigsaw puzzle. Just have a jigsaw puzzle designated area of my apartment and whenever I wanted to loosen up my mind, I’d pop in a few pieces. But, I’m also an obsessive person who really values closure. I also realized that I’m terrible at putting together jigsaw puzzles. I think I’m pretty good at creative puzzles, say, figuring things out when I’ve written myself into a corner. But, I’ve always been bad at things like puzzles - crosswords, sudoku, escape rooms - and should have known this would be hard. The puzzle pictured below is called Dracula in Dr. Seward’s Library by Edward Gorey and it’s taken me weeks to get this far. And it’s only 500 pieces. And I’m still not done.
Playing music really has been the easiest thing to take on. I took piano lessons as a kid and hated them. But, a few years ago, I wanted to play an instrument again, and was so thankful that I had learned how to read music. First, I tried a guitar, but it ended up attacking me, and I figured that I already knew the piano, so went with that. Actually, here’s a story from my book I’m Leaving It that I told at Stories We Don’t Tell about buying my keyboard in a suburban parking lot for my ‘son’ James.
When I started back playing the piano, I stuck to classical pieces. The kinds of pieces that my teacher made me work on. I soon realized that I was an adult and could play whatever the hell I wanted. I’ve got lots of different pieces - pop songs and classical - but the artists that really speak to me, on the piano anyway, is Guns N’ Roses and Simon and Garfunkel.
Oh, and one piece I play all the time. I actually found this sheet music in the piano bench at my mom’s house. I guess I snuck this one by my piano teacher. It’s perhaps the cheesiest song ever written, but it’s really fun to play.
Q - Do you play any musical instruments?
II. TALES FROM THE DREAM ROOM
Each month welcomes an exclusive excerpt of a story from a parallel world.
The Dream Room is a place that where everything is interconnected. The sights and sounds and people that inhabit this world feel familiar. The tales pulled from the Dream Room are sometimes true and sometimes fiction, they may scare you or make you laugh.
Now it’s becoming a series of novels. Every month this section will include an excerpt from a work in progress of the first volume in the Dream Room Series. The Dream Room is a place not to be taken lightly and if you’re ready to enter, read below and click on the link for the full story.
THE DREAM ROOM SERIES - VOLUME ONE: At the edge of the forest, the pine trees slightly swayed. There was a clear border between where the forest ended and The Campsite began.
Standing in the clearing was Isaac, the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun resting on his shoulder. The woman resembled a zombie, eyes looked right through him. She kept limping towards him. He cocked his head, narrowed his eyes. She walked right by him. He turned, his gaze followed her, she was still a threat and could have been faking.
Isaac whistled under his breath and signalled at the forest. A slight rustling and out of the pine trees popped Blair, her hand at her side, ready to unholster her staff. She nodded to Isaac, he returned the nod. More hand signals, and she took a wide berth from him. They both walked after the woman, each taking a side, surrounding her if things took a turn. As she was taught, Blair mimicked the steps of who she tracked, matching her breathing with the steps. This connected her to the other person or animal, focused her observation, forced her to notice imperceptible changes.
Click on this link for the whole story.
III. PAUL’S PICKS
A recommendation of something watched, read, or listened to.
Bernardine Evaristo is the author of the Booker Prize winning book Girl, Woman, Other. That book was definitely one that stuck with me. I saw the title of this book - Manifesto on Never Giving Up - and snatched it up right away.
This isn’t self-help or a memoir in the traditional sense, although, in a way, it does have elements of those two genres. For a creative person, this book will inspire you. And it is memoir in that Evaristo writes about her own life. But it is with purpose and specifically aimed at exploring how a seemingly ‘overnight’ success can take years and even decades.
Evaristo takes us through her many iterations of how she explored her creativity - in the theatre and poetry - and how she finally lands on writing novels. But, she stresses that she couldn’t have gotten there without taking these many diversions, both personally and professionally. Taken from a far, her trajectory towards writing novels was always there. But it is fascinating to see the journey of getting to a place that encompasses all her creativity and allows it to be fully realized.
Oh, and Girl, Woman, Other is pretty spectacular, so check that out as well.
I had entered my twenties convinced of the unassailable goodness of women, the beatific, idealized Virgin Mother of my Catholic childhood, and the belief that women were good (my mother) and men (my domineering father) were bad. In time, my thinking became more nuanced, which would in turn inform my approach to writing characters in my future fiction. I learned that no two people are the same and it was a lack of imagination to create them as such - all fictional characters need to be individuals; that the division of characters into goodies and baddies is a childish approach that should remain consigned to old-fashioned fairy tales; that homogenizing a gender or racialized group is a disservice to everyone’s humanity; that human beings of all races, genders and sexualities are complex and contradictory and capable of oppressing others, whether at governmental, communal or personal level; and that we are all capable of morally questionable behaviour. ——— Bernardine Evaristo / Manifesto on Never Giving Up.
Here’s a fun and interesting discussion between Evaristo and her editor:
Q - What is something you’ve never given up on?
IV. FROM THE ARCHIVES
An old story from my blog brought to you in a new way.
HOW THINGS HAVE CHANGED (MAY 2020): Given my chosen field of professionalism, you would have assumed that I had a visual imagination. This seems to work in overdrive for most of my waking life. Yet, I have no access to an active dream world. I rarely, if ever, dream. And if I do, I rarely, if ever, remember them.
The few dreams I do remember are quite boring. They usually involve people and situations I am familiar with in real life. The dreams are so close to real-life that I usually just assume they were memories that actually happened. Scratch that, I don’t mean to refer to my real life as boring. It’s just that at some point, I would have liked to remember a dream where I was flying or hiking up a mountain that was actually a giant ice cream sundae.
Over the last few weeks, I can proudly say that I have not only been dreaming more often and that I can remember them, they are also weird as hell. In real life, I was working on writing a pitch for a horror tv show and was reading a lot about the amygdala. If you don’t know, the amygdala is part of the limbic system within the brain, which is responsible for emotions, survival instincts, and memory. The amygdala is sometimes associated with playing a pivotal role in triggering a state of fear. I was playing around with a story about a young Ph.D. student wanting to move his bizarre theories about removing the amygdala into practical experiments.
At the same time, I have been re-visiting the work of David Fincher — Seven, Zodiac, The Social Network, Mindhunter, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo— and I’m thinking that he, literally, got into my head. I was a big fan of his several years ago, and I wanted to see if how I was influenced by his work still seemed to make sense. It sort of still does. The vote’s still out.
I’m telling you all this because that’s what my dreams have been about. David Fincher is making a movie based on my amygdala story.
Read the whole story at this link.
The trailer below has little to do with the actual story, but it’s just a great trailer. I admit, both the books and the movie were not the greatest (check out the original Swedish versions, in my opinion they are better), but I have a soft spot for these books and films because, well, maybe I’ll explain at some point.
Q - I rarely remember my dreams, do you?
V. WATCH, LISTEN, READ, OR DO
Something to take with you.
It has been very exciting to do live Stories We Don’t Tell shows again. I think it’s safe to say that other people were also excited since our audiences have been full to the brim. We’ve doing these shows for almost eight years and they have become a very special part of my life. I really can’t thank enough everyone who makes these events happen - the storytellers, the audience, our hosts, and my collaborators. We’ve got a few more shows on the horizon, including one coming up on March 18th, 2023.
Here are all the things you might be interested in:
Get your very own copy of the Stories We Don’t Tell book.
Listen to almost 150 episodes of the SWDT Podcast.
Sign-up to tell a story at a future event.
Q - If you told a story at one of our events, what would it be about?
You’ve probably noticed that I’ve included a question at the end of each section. No, this isn’t required homework. However, if you are compelled to write to me with your thoughts, I would love to hear from you. Who knows, I might even share some of the answers in future newsletters (anonymously, of course). Email me here: jpd@pauldore.com.
January 2023 Edition: The Wind / Ash & Blair / Wild Boys / Overhead Compartment / Stories We Don’t Tell.