Beyond the Six String Nation #27: Mind the Gap
Failure as an inciting element
I had promised at the beginning of the year to endeavour to keep up the posting pace with the inimitable Richard Flohil, who is almost 30 years my senior. We did keep pace with one another on our walk-and-talk interview for a long-promised podcast series called “Walks of Life” (that I’ll talk more about when more episodes are in the hopper) but I dropped off my own publishing schedule after my post in May. And for that, dear readers, I’m very sorry.
In my defence, it has been an eventful last few months. Much of what you’ll read below is a fairly straightforward accounting of my time over that period, which may or may not be interesting to you. I’ve structured it as a single, semi-colon-separated paragraph to echo the relentless pace of it. If you tire of the reportage, feel free to skip to the more reflective section starting with the paragraph that follows that lengthy one, marked by the second divider that looks like the one below this Subscribe Button:
So…
I continue to grapple with the glacial pace of the legal niceties surrounding my executorship of my mother’s estate (though we crossed an important threshold with the Certificate of Probate just last week!). When you’ve never done something so adult before there’s real performance anxiety and a nagging fear that your incompetence will be revealed and you’ll let everyone down. But gradually you realize that much of the incompetence lies with the financial institutions that you’re supposed to be able to rely on at these times. Really, I’ve been just fine when I think about it! On top of those mundane frustrations, it’s just been an exceedingly busy time:
At the end of May I had a marvellous gig at Anne Walker’s adorable community music venue in an old church on her family’s property in Coulson, Ontario, about half an hour from Orillia. Friends James and Sherrill from Philadelphia drove up to see the show and we made a weekend of it – including a stay at what might possibly be our biggest AirBnB letdown yet on the lakefront in Orillia. Yet again, I felt the power of doing live events and the connections you make with musicians, audiences and whole communities. A 94-year-old residential school survivor came up to thank me and kiss me on the cheek after the show and I was in tears, of course;
later that week was my walk-and-talk with Flohil and then it was off to Huron County. John Miller, artistic director of the Huron Waves Music Festival reached out ages and ages ago and we’d been nurturing the idea for this week in the County for almost a year and all of a sudden it was upon us – nine school presentations over five days scattered all over the region and then a return to the town of Exeter, Ontario, for the public finale presentation. The Festival put me up in a terrific AirBnB in Southcott Pines, near Grand Bend, that was so ideal that Sarah brought her whole remote office set up and we became temporary citizens of the community. I’d head off in the mornings for a couple of school presentations each day covering communities like Wingham and Clinton and Forest and London and Exeter and Grand Bend and the Stony Point First Nation. I’d come home at the end of the day and we’d head down to the beach – a lifestyle I could possibly get used to (don’t hold me to that – I am a dedicated city rat);
from there it was direct to Ottawa for my niece Anika’s convocation from UofO. We didn’t attend the ceremony but we did host a post-event dinner at our favourite O-town cocktail bar, the Riviera on Sparks St. My sister Annalisa and her boyfriend John had flown in from Victoria and we left them with the car and took the train home while they and Anika and nephew Callum took the car to the cottage near Cobalt;
while they were doing that we returned to prepare for the Celebration of Life I was producing and hosting for my mum, Val, at the Heliconian Club Hall in Yorkville that took place on what would have been mum’s 86th birthday on June 19th. It was a lovely event and I confess it was a relief to have it done and off of a long list of to-do’s as it was draining on multiple fronts – logistically, financially and emotionally;
the day after the event, we hosted a backyard dinner at our place for my sister and John and Anika and my aunt Marya, uncle Chris and cousin Hannah who’d come in from the UK. Things started well enough but first came the drizzle, then the sprinkles then the rain and then an absolute deluge. There’s no safe way to navigate Hannah’s wheelchair up either our front or back stairs so we all huddled a little closer under the patio umbrella as the food turned to mostly soup. It was actually kind of fun;
the following morning we rose early to attend the Solstice Sunrise Ceremony at Toronto City Hall and as we breakfasted after the event I got a text from the florist who is the tenant on the ground floor beneath us asking if we’d had any flooding from the previous night, including with her message some photos of her soaked work table. We got home and did a quick survey of all the rooms in our apartment, which revealed no problems and it looked to me like maybe a downspout join on the outside of our building might have been the source of the leak that came through her light fixtures to her back room area directly below my office. The following day I had a private gig back in London Ontario and the next morning we started packing to go away for another week with friends to a rented cottage in Inverhuron while Annalisa and her gang took the car on a Maritime road trip and the UK crew returned home. That’s when I noticed the bubbling of the wall behind the framed prints above my desk and the bulge in the join between wall and ceiling. This was the leak Tam the florist had been wondering about. I got in touch with the property manager and let him know we needed this looked at but were on our way out the door. Within hours, the roofers (whose work was still under warranty, apparently) had come to fix the leak in the roof and the following day the handyman came to assess the damage in my office;
we arrived home to find the half the ceiling pulled down, most of the furniture pushed to the opposite wall and an industrial fan pointed at the gaping mess above my desk. It stayed in operation for a whole week, attempting to dry things out and prepping for a rebuild. We reconfigured our office set-ups and spread ourselves between the front and back of the apartment for the week and also hosted my sister and John for a night on the eve of their return to B.C.;
the following week was our turn for some cottage time at Bass Lake and we were spending it with Sarah’s parents, Trevor and Chris, and niece, Sydney. Darrell the handyman came while we were away and fixed up the wall and ceiling in the office like new – just in time for the infamous deluge of July 16th, where the streets of Toronto were flooded, people needed to be rescued all over the place by firetrucks and helicopters and there were power outages across the city. Ours lasted from about 12:30-7:30pm. Some folks weren’t affected, some had shorter blackouts and some much longer. It occurred to us that if we hadn’t discovered the sloughing wall ripples while we packed on June 22nd, the whole thing would surely have collapsed on July 16th!;
the following weekend Sarah and I both had roles in the wedding of her brother, Luke, and longtime partner Julie. It was a lovely affair in Niagara-on-the-Lake, which put us there just before it would have been the birthday of my dear old friend Mark Burgess, who died October 2022. When he was an actor at the Shaw Festival I used to visit him in NOTL and hang with all the actors after the shows at two pubs in particular: The George and The Angel Inn. We had Luke’s post-rehearsal gathering at the Angel and I was reminded of not only the good times I had with Mark and his theatre pals there but also that that’s probably where the bad alcohol habits that lead to his early demise likely got their foothold in him;
the day after the wedding was Trevor’s 80th birthday and Sarah and her mother had organized a brunch/lunch in a private room at the Stone Mill Inn in St. Catharines, attended by friends who came in special as well as family who stayed on after the wedding. That night we hosted Trevor and Chris – as well as Trevor’s brother Graham and partner Helen – for a risotto dinner in our suite that we’ve come to think of as our own on special occasions in St. Catharines. Sarah took the day off on Monday so we could have a late check out and do some errands on the way home:
the tasks before me on arriving home were really to get the office reassembled and that involved a bit more than just moving things back into place as I’d decided to get a standing desk and reconfigure this whole area where I’m typing from now. And it’s been stinking hot in this room without the AC back in place (that’s a whole other operation!) so that’s been a bit of an effort. And even then it was a short week because we accepted an invitation from Sarah’s pal Jen Tindall and her lovely parents, Chuck and Linda (and their adorable pooch, Molly) to join them for the weekend at their cottage in the Thousand Islands near Gananoque. We’re only just back from that jaunt yesterday and I’m still just putting the final pieces into place with the new office set up.
So there. You’re up to date.
And perhaps you’re thinking that was just a rather long and not-so-interesting diary entry/why-I-haven’t-attended-to-my-Substack-excuse. And what’s with the picture at the top of this post? What does that have to do with anything?
I was a writer from very early. I entertained my teachers in public school and junior high and could always pull off a B+ with an essay written the night before the due date in high school and university. From grades 10-13, I was involved in the gifted writers programs at the school and board level and continued my relationships with various Toronto authors past those school days. I started my own magazine in high school and contributed to a couple of different publications at UofT, but I never called myself a “writer”. That seemed presumptive on my part – something I hadn’t earned, hadn’t suffered for. It wasn’t until I was writing and hosting Global Village – a weekly national radio show for CBC – and continued to demur at the prospect of claiming to be a writer when someone said “You are a writer. Every week you write a script for a nationally broadcast show. Just accept it.” Fair enough. I joined the Writer’s Union just to try to convince myself a little more.
But still there is that issue of the (finally, the explanation) blank page pictured above. When I wrote a weekly radio show, when I lovingly crafted the scripts for The Wire, The Nerve and Invisible Cities for CBC, when I write all sorts of copy in support and service of Six String Nation, when I spill an accounting of a couple of months of Substack-absence in an act of atonement, I am writing to spec. There is a task to be fulfilled and a deadline to be met. What about the other kind of writing? The one that “real writers” do that starts with the blank page? I confess I still feel guilty about claiming the title of “writer” because I feel that’s where I fail. Just look at the things I referenced in the long diary entry I just presented to you: the Celebration of Life for my mother, which brought up all kinds of things for me; my experiences engaging audiences and communities with the thing that means the most to me; relationships with family, travel, cooking, the loss of my friend Mark – why have I not written about these things in more detail? What is keeping me from exploring the deep feelings and conflicting impulses around any of these topics when Substack is that blank canvas provided to me any day, on any occasion, at any time of day or night that I should care to face the blank screen of it?
There’s a lot more to come in my calendar this summer. There is more work to be done with my mother’s estate. I have meetings coming up in Washington D.C. about the 20th anniversary of Six String Nation, which arrives in 2026. I can report on these things here and I can also use them as excuses for not having written for a couple of weeks. But I also have a work of fiction I’ve had in mind for 30 years and I have another Six String Nation book I’d like to publish in 2026. Work on those should probably start here as well. Your support is you insisting: “You are a writer”.
Watch this space.
Thanks for staying with me.
Your personal messages edge in with such a deep, soft, fullness. So sweet to hear your voice there.
Substack is the same for us. Your audience is here for you. We are on your side .No excuses. Just write. Writer!