Author Archives: Theryn

Giant Inflatable Beavers

I saw this at So Anyway…

Share ten absurdly true things about yourself.

  1. When was a kid I hated cola, mustard, and cheddar cheese.
  2. In elementary school I’d always end my stories when I got to the bottom of the page, i.e. a story could be one full page or two full pages, etc. but not 1 1/2 pages or 2 1/4 pages.
  3. As a child I wondered (but did not investigate) why children in British novels were allowed to run around with flaming sticks. I was very disappointed when I eventually found out that their “torches” were just flashlights.
  4. I also didn’t figure out that “jumper” in British-English meant sweater until standing in the kitchen of a hostel in Australia with some dude who was talking about how he was cold so he put on an extra jumper. If my life were animated, a giant lightbulb would have appeared over my head at that moment.
  5. Until I was 16 or so, people often thought I was a boy. More specifically, they thought I was my little brother’s little brother.
  6. When I was in grade 9, I got the school medal for the Pascal Contest. They gave it me at the end-of-year awards assembly with like, everyone and their parents there. I was so embarrassed. (While I secretly liked being a math nerd, I didn’t want it advertised, ya know?)
  7. People often come up too close to my face (think: the close-talker) and ask if I wear colored/novelty contacts.  (Answer: No.)
  8. I can’t remember any French except for random words and French for Dummies sentences like  “Je ne comprende pas.”  It makes me sad because now there are lots of things I’d like to be able to read in French.
  9. I converted all my old cassettes to mp3s, thus preserving for all time! the quality 😉 only overplayed 20+-year-old cassettes can have.
  10. I am wearing a beaver hat. I think this means I am officially a collector of beaver stuff  (I blame Bellman & Baker; they started it ;-)). I am also a tweeter of beaver news (see #theelusivebeaver).

Hey, look! Giant Inflatable Beavers! And they’re trending!

Credit: Monkey See

Rebound

When a book I love is ending—no matter how devastating the final pages, no matter how desperate I am to know how things will turn out, and what the very last line will say to me—I slow down. Like a kid on a bike heading downhill, I use both my brakes and my feet, let the rubber soles burn off, will the book to magically grow longer before my eyes.

One musn’t wait too long before committing to the next book, though: this is how reading ruts begin. …

What I need is a rebound book, a palate cleanser.  Maybe today I’ll search for a thick-but-lightweight, no-strings-attached thriller, something that can rope me in quickly, make me forget, at least temporarily, the heartbreak I felt over the last book leaving me.

—Elizabeth Ames Staudt

Regardless of what story you believe

Personality is not who you think you are, it’s who you are. Some people think by definition that we are the experts on our personality because we get to write the story, but personality is not the story – it’s the reality. So, you do get to write your own story about how you think you are, and what you tell people about yourself, but there still is reality out there, and, guess what? Other people are going to see the reality, regardless of what story you believe.

—Simine Vazire

Someone is Wrong on the Internet!

I wanted to post this screenshot of my stats to illustrate a couple things:

  1. My blog has never seen so much traffic. I see all is back to normal, now, though, and I can go back to talking to myself 😉
  2. Even though I had 250+ visitors in two days, only four people commented. And one of those people I know. So three people who’d never been to my blog before said something. This isn’t a complaint; it’s an observation. Way more people just read than read and comment; if you’ve ever looked at your site stats you know this to be true.

Perhaps the strangest and most interesting thing about #creepythesis is the way people talked about it, about me. As if I was never going to see what they said. (More on this later.) As if Twitter were a private chatroom.

Which it most definitely is not.

While you were following #creepythesis on the weekend, an SFU staffer who monitors Twitter was following keywords of interest to him. You know, like SFU.

(You see where this is going, right?)

#creepythesis may have blown up and burned out faster than ’70s child star, but whether anyone actually intended to follow through on the twitterstorm is moot, because said staffer-who-was-monitoring-SFU-tweets emailed the dean about it anyway.

Anyhow. This isn’t about me, per se. It’s more a heads up for the next time someone is wrong on the internet.

Duty Calls

This is fair warning that I am totally turning #creepythesis into a paper. I’ll be posting some of my initial thoughts as I have time. I’ll tag everything with #creepythesis, so you can just follow that if you want to keep apprised but don’t want to read my other posts.

Somebody Somewhere

I just love this story:

[O]ne week ago today, when the snow was thick and the sky was gray (again), I received the loveliest surprise:  an email from a woman who’d been on the editorial staff at Quarterly West 15 years ago, when QW published my little flash piece, “In Theory.”

Currently teaching college workshops in creative writing, she wrote:  “I have managed to always keep a copy of that issue close-by so as to teach it, but somewhere in one of my moves, I misplaced my copy.”   She wondered if I had a spare I could send.

Who knew?  You see, you might think your work falls into a pool and just lies at the dark bottom of the pond like littering leaves, rotting away, but somebody somewhere might have been teaching it for 15 years!  You just gotta keep the faith.

—Joy Castro

Stories have formed us all

I was reminded of Carolyn Heilbrun yesterday when someone mentioned writers who committed suicide.

What matters is that lives do not serve as models; only stories do that. And it is a hard thing to make up stories to live by. We can only retell and live by the stories we have read or heard. We live our lives through texts. They may be read, or chanted, or experienced electronically, or come to us, like the murmurings of our mothers, telling us what the conventions demand. Whatever their form or medium, these stories have formed us all; they are what we must use to make new fictions, new narratives.

—Carolyn Heilbrun
Writing a Woman’s Life (1988, p.37)

Good For You

I do worry a little that the modern age has taken the failure stage out of the creative process. Now if you can’t get your manuscript published, it’s because the publishers are cowards, can’t see your genius, and you can self-publish it (and then send out slightly crazed emails to critics). There is a lack of humility, a failure to recognize that getting knocked on your ass is actually good for you.

—Jessa Crispin

A Necessary Thing

I often need to remind myself that I need to hear failure out, because by failing at doing an easy thing, a groupthink thing, a thing one has been taught to do for one’s career, one might be encouraged to make or do or be something more original and true. Because failing as an artist is a necessary thing, a thing I wish I could more easily accept.

—Rebecca Brown