Starting the second-last Sunday of July the construction industry in Quebec goes on vacation for two weeks.

From The Guardian, How you attach to people may explain a lot about your inner life:

Things get even more puzzling if you consider the sheer number of therapies on offer and the conflicting methods that they often employ. Some want you to feel more (eg, psychodynamic and emotion-focused approaches); others to feel less and think more (eg cognitive behavioural therapies, or CBT). The former see difficult emotions as something that needs to come out, be worked through and re-assimilated; the latter as something to be challenged and controlled through conscious modification of negative thoughts.

One of the things I never got to the bottom of when I was involved with Home & School was whether or not the the psychologists in Prince Edward Island schools are hired based on an attachment to a particular school of thought regarding psychology: that there are some psychologists who encourage feelings, and others who don’t, seems like a pretty significant divide to leave to chance.

Kiosque laverie Revolution: an outdoor laundrette in France.

I’m sure I must have seen the cover of the July 1983 issue of 80 Micro at the time, but its whimsy was likely lost on my 17 year old self.

I especially appreciate that at the heart of the whimsical map lies Peterborough, the actual home of 80 Micro, and, for a time, the heart of the computer magazine publishing region of North America (I have more than a few colleagues, past and present, who spent time working with Wayne Green over the years).

Bruce Stephenson is credit as the illustrator for the cover.

For years I’ve been carting around an old cookie tin filled with rubber stamps I’ve been collecting for more than 30 years, and I finally took it off the shelf today to see what was inside, newly-equipped with an ink pad from Denis Office Supplies.

I wonder if it’s still possible to send 1st, 2nd and 3rd class mail. I wonder why I have a rubber stamp of AMBER.

Penn Jillette on Donald Trump, last August, on the The Joe Rogan Experience:

More than most things I’ve read and watched about Donald Trump, I found Pillette’s insights useful.

Speaking about Trump’s qualities that recommended him as a host of The Apprentice, where Jillette was twice a contestant:

You want someone capricious, and crazy, with no filter. That’s what you want.

And that’s what we got.

And so he makes arbitrary decisions… you know, the human brain tries desperately to make those make sense, and that ends up being some kind of entertainment. 

Donald Trump got elected President because there was enough of an audience who wanted to see what would happen in his next episode. I have a close colleague, a now-deeply-remorseful Trump voter, who admitted as much to me about his own reasons.

Jillette continued:

Donald Trump Jr. said to me “of all the people we’ve had on the show, you seem like the only person who’s ever liked my father.”

He said “you actually seem to like him.”

I said, you know, I have a fascination and a respect and a, um, affection, for people who are able to get out of their filters.

And I said some people do that with pure genius, like Bob Dylan, some people do it with bravery, like Lenny Bruce, some people do it with drugs, Neil Young, perhaps, Jimi Hendrix, perhaps, and most people do it with a mixture of stuff.

But I said, Thelonius Monk said “genius is the one who is most like himself.”

And I said, with some sort of mental problems, coupled with, um, greed, and a lack of compassion, your father has somehow found a way to throw off the filters. 

I’ve long maintained that “entrepreneurship” is, at its core, a learning disability: it’s not the presence of some elusive business genius, it is simply common sense coupled with an inability to care what other people think. Trump is the prime example of that. As Jillette rightly points out, this learning disability is similarly useful for creating great art, theatre and music.

Unfortunately for the world, this learning disability does not equip one to be an effective President of the United States.

The similarity between Puritan signage and COVID signage has never been as obvious as at Canadian Tire.

Four of Canada’s preeminent folk musicians—Stephen Fearing, Connie Kaldor, James Keelaghan and Shari Ulrich—sing Hard Times Come Again No More in support of Unison Benevolent Fund.

Brilliant.

I started a new sketchbook on May 26, 2020, on the 3rd day of the “pandemic reopening” at The Bookmark; it’s a paper-oh Circulo Orange on Grey A6, an old favourite.

I try to carry the sketchbook with me everywhere I go–you can’t sketch sketches without a sketchbook–and to fill the time I would otherwise spend mindless on my phone with making a sketch of whatever is handy while I’m eating lunch, or waiting for someone, or just taking a break.

Province House Hoarding

July 10, 2020. This is a corner of the hoarding around the Province House restoration site, colourfully emblazoned with Parks Canada messaging. The tiny window on the right is where you can see Eckhart.

Receiver Coffee on Victoria Row

July 13, 2020. While sitting on the patio drinking coffee at Receiver on a still-cool summer morning. A helpful reminder of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter both.

From Victoria Provincial Park

July 19, 2020. Oliver and I got takeout lunch at Casa Mia by the Sea and took it to Victoria Provincial Park to eat; I made this sketch of the Westmoreland River and the hills beyond sitting in back of our car in the shade of its hatchback.

Phở Queen

July 20, 2020. Another sketch from the patio of Receiver Coffee on Victoria Row, this time facing the opposite direction, looking at The Guild (right) and Phở Queen, the new Vietnamese restaurant next door to it.

Victoria Row Flower Box

July 29, 2020. Another Receiver patio sketch: the flower box at the downstairs entrance to Happy Glass.

Rob MacDonald at Work

July 29, 2020. Rob MacDonald and I often share Receiver Coffee in the morning, and Rob, who’s “at the office” when he’s there, is almost always wearing headphones. Yesterday I was sitting right behind him, and couldn’t pass up the chance to capture the moment.

Cherry Valley School

July 30, 2020. Several years ago the daughter of a good friend landed on PEI with a group of friends intending to stay at a cottage in Earnscliffe. Their ambitious plan to cycle there from town was aborted when they realized how far it was, and so I volunteered to drive them out, catching a glimpse of the old Cherry Valley School on my way. I returned there this morning to make this sketch. It’s a lovely building.

Christ Church Cherry Valley

July 30, 2020. Christ Church Cherry Valley is a church in the least likely of places, down a one-lane road where only a tiny sign at the highway telegraphs its location. I set myself under a tree and made this sketch this morning.

Point Prim Lighthouse

July 30, 2020. The Point Prim Chowderhouse was my ultimate destination this morning; after placing an online order and having 20 minutes before picking it up, I drove down the lane to the parking lot by the lighthouse and made this sketch.

While I’ve been in the habit of simply taking photos of my sketches before posting them online, this time I used a Konica Bizhub C554e photocopier to scan them as 400 dpi JPEGs, full-colour. It’s a less forgiving method, but I like the results.

I used to push my sketches to a Google Photos shared album, back when I was an Android user, but I’ve since gone all-in on Apple’s ecosystem, and there’s no obvious analogue. Which is probably good, as The Dark Ages of Share on OVI taught me. So I’ll post them here from time to time.

I watch a lot of YouTube: the “Screen Time” setting on my iPhone tells me 90 minutes this week, and that’s only on my phone; I watch as much or more YouTube on Apple TV.

This means that I “Skip Ad” hundreds of times a month, and get annoyed by a lot of advertising that is mis-directed at me. Ads for Ford F-150 trucks and for the Christian Heritage Party abound.

I’ve experimented with turning off what Google calls “ad personalization,” but that makes things ever worse, as, whether by design or happenstance, the torrent of ads I see then are loud, annoying and offensive.

In attempt to stanch the worst and most annoying, I set out to edit my “How your ads are personalised” settings for Google (and thus YouTube). 

Before starting, here’s how Google has me pegged:

• 45–54 years old
• Accounting & Financial Software
• Action & Adventure Films
• Apparel
• Autos & Vehicles
• Books & Literature
• Camera & Photo Equipment
• Canada
• Career Resources & Planning
• Coffee & Tea
• Collaboration & Conferencing Software
• Combat Sports
• Cycling
• Electronics & Electrical
• Food
• Football
• Gourmet & Specialty Foods
• Green Living & Environmental Issues
• Greetings Cards
• Hockey
• Home Appliances
• Home Automation
• Home Furnishings
• Home Improvement
• Household Income: Upper Middle
• Indie & Alternative Music
• Kia
• Kitchen & Dining
• Lexus
• Local News
• Luxury Vehicles
• Mazda
• Microwaves
• Mobile Phones
• Motorcycles
• Movies
• Music & Audio
• Music Streams & Downloads
• Network Monitoring & Management
• Networking
• Nintendo
• Office Supplies
• Online Video
• Performing Arts
• Pets
• Photographic & Digital Arts
• Product Reviews & Price Comparisons
• Refrigerators & Freezers
• Restaurants
• Rock Music
• Science Fiction & Fantasy Films
• Shopping Portals
• Skiing & Snowboarding
• Sports
• Travel & Transportation
• TV Documentary & Non-fiction
• TV Dramas
• TV Sci-Fi & Fantasy Shows
• Urban Public Transport
• Women’s Interests

After (using Google’s obviously-purposefully-hard-to-use) altering my settings, I ended up with:

• 45–54 years old
• Books & Literature
• Canada
• Coffee & Tea
• Cycling
• Electronics & Electrical
• Food
• Gourmet & Specialty Foods
• Green Living & Environmental Issues
• Indie & Alternative Music
• Office Supplies
• Performing Arts
• TV Documentary & Non-fiction
• TV Dramas
• Urban Public Transport

Let’s see if this works.

What’s most remarkable about the extended Wainwright-McGarrigle musical family is not so much the talent that lives in each of them as individuals, but how well it works in harmony when they sing together: witness their rendition of Hard Times Come Again No More: can you imagine a better mixture of voices?

(See also the Stephen Fearing coalition singing the same song).

It all started with a letter in the Eastern Graphic.

I subscribe to the Graphic again, after a year break: I love the new extended tab format, and I am happy that my friend Allan Rankin is back in its pages.

The letter in question, from Jean Selines, concerned St. Margaret’s Beach and damages done to its dunes by a recently-arrived cottager. Jean’s letter began

For as long as anyone in the St. Margaret’s area can remember locals, summer residents and annual visitors have been enjoying the beautiful and pristine St. Margaret’s Beach. This beach is located on the north side just past the St. Margaret’s Pioneer Cemetery.

My 93-year-old Dad has been coming here since he could ride his bike to it in the 1930s. I and my siblings and cousins have been spending time here since the 1950s. More recently our children and grandchildren have played in the river that runs across the sand, learned to swim in the surf and built sandcastles on the shore. It is the spot to reconnect with relatives and friends on a Sunday afternoon and enjoy a picnic lunch while catching up on the local news.

Jean’s description of the beach was compelling enough that I decided that we needed to go and see it for ourselves. And so we powered up the EV and headed east.

We made good time to Souris, heading out the 48 Road to Cardigan, and then northeast through Bridgetown and Dundas to Dingwells Mills and then east through Fortune Bridge and Rollo Bay.

Our first stop was The Poké Shack, where we’d been almost exactly a month earlier; we picked up two poké bowls to go, and put them on ice in the cooler in the car (because I’ve now become that kind of organized person who carries a cooler in the car for summer road trips).

We charged up the car at the Irving, and then continues east until we could continue east no more (did you know that East Point is closer to France than it is to Fredericton?), stopping to eat our supper at East Point Lighthouse:

Our first choice for a supper spot was a couple of red Adirondack chairs set up on a platform overlooking the ocean:

We unpacked our food, only to realize that we had entertained the attention of a curious fox, a fox that crept ever-more-gradually our way:

The fox came close enough that we decided it was better to relocate than to try to shoo it away every minute or two, so we decamped to a picnic table nearer the lighthouse.

It seemed we’d lost the attention of the fox. Until we hadn’t, and it crept ever-closer (it’s actually a little farther away at this point than the photo makes it appear):

At this point we decided to retire to the car to finish our meal; as we walked away, the fox leapt up on the vacated picnic table to smell around for leftovers.

We finished our stop at East Point with a visit to Cherry On Top Creamery in the lighthouse cottage and then continued along to the north side to find St. Margaret’s Beach.

St. Margaret’s Beach turned out to be everything Jean Selines promised it would be.

We arrived about 7:00 p.m. and found that we had the entire beach to ourselves:

The river that Jean wrote about–Bear River–does, indeed, run through the sand to the ocean, giving us an opportunity to do some freshwater swimming just steps away from the saltwater ocean: 

The water was the perfect temperature, and the river a perfect depth for sitting in and contemplating the view.

After about an hour of paddling about and then changing out of our wet swimsuits, the sun was starting to come down, and the 8:30 p.m. Friday Night Family Zoom was imminent, so I snapped a photo of the sunset:

And another of a fisher about to set up at the mouth of the river:

And we were off back to Souris.

The road back to Souris took us right by one of the least-traveled roads on the Island, the lovely-named Mickle Macum Road, and through the community of Bear River, the name of which has, as you might expect, an interesting backstory:

Captain Roderick MacDonald, grand uncle of Marjorie MacDonald, killed a bear at Norris Pond, which is east of Souris. He was walking out of the woods and wearing his greatcoat. Suddenly, he was attacked by a huge bear, and, having an axe in his hand, threw it at the bear. Unfortunately, the axe flew off the handle, and missed the bear. The bear managed to knock him to the ground, and started to maul him, but his heavy coat protected him from the bear’s claws. He quickly shoved his hand and arm down the bear’s throat as far as possible, and pulled with all his might. After a long struggle, the bear let go and rolled over.

Captain Roderick scrambled to his feet and fled as fast as he could expecting that the bear would be at his heels any minute. However, he managed to reach home safely, thankful that he had worn his greatcoat which defended him against the bear.

The next day, he was relating the story to some friends who were sceptical of the event. So, he decided to take them into the woods where the event occurred. There lay the big black bear, just where he had toppled over. The mighty captain had killed the great beast by dislodging some of its vital organs.

Captain Roderick was considered a hero by all who knew him.

There are bears no longer on Prince Edward Island, so the way to Souris was clear.

We set ourselves up for Family Zoom, using a strong LTE connection on my iPhone, from the parking lot at the beach, and enjoyed spending time with family from Ontario, sharing stories in the spirit of Catherine’s father, who turned 89 years old this weekend.

By the time our call was done, the sun had set completely and the almost-full-Moon had come out over the harbour:

We walked down to the water for a bit, and then, mindful of the late hour and the long drive ahead, piled back into the car, popped up to the Irving to top up the battery, and drove through the cool summer night, Taylor Swift blaring from the hifi, arriving home just before 11:00 p.m.

Thank you to Jean Selines for the inspiration.

(Our route, over OpenStreetMap, map tiles from Stamen Design)

The German Netflix series Dark, which I’ve now watched through, and loved all three seasons of, returns to a parable several times:

A human lives three lives. The first ends with the loss of naiveté, the second with the loss of innocence, and the third with the loss of life itself. It is inevitable that we will go through all three stages.

I have now spent more of my life on Prince Edward Island than off, a milestone I reached mid-March when the clock ticked over 27 years. Because Catherine and I moved here only 18 months after meeting, “life on Prince Edward Island” overlaps to a great degree with “life with Catherine”: PEI is the stage upon which our lives together played out.

So my life now neatly divides into three (I’m choosing to be optimistic about having another 27 years in me):

It doesn’t take much to shoehorn this into the Dark construction, as moving to PEI did coincide with a certain loss of naiveté, and the death of my father and of Catherine involved a rather dramatic loss of innocence. 

June and July were therapeutic months for me: I did a round of one-on-one therapy with my psychologist, and, in parallel, attended an 8 week men’s grief group (which I dubbed “grief club” to my fellow bereaved).

The life lesson from both, boiled down to their essence, is “feel all the feelings.” Easier said than done, especially when you try to do it all by yourself, which is how I’d been attacking the problem from January to June. Indeed, when the instigator of grief club phoned me one Friday in late spring to invite me to join, my first reaction was “thanks, but I’m okay.”

On Monday I changed my mind, phoned back, and signed up. I booked my first appointment with my psychologist on the same day.

Truth be told, the most important part of both experiences happened that day: the simple act of saying, to myself, “no, I don’t got this” was the most important step of all.

Catherine died 200 days ago; I’ve spent much of that time dwelling on the years we spent together, on her illness and death, and trying to figure out the practicalities of how to live now, as a single father and a single man.

I’ve also spent a lot of that time running away from feeling (I uttered the phrase “I’m not sure if it’s okay to feel this” more than once during therapy), and trying desperately to attach some sort of blueprint to what happens next.

That lack of a blueprint is daunting: I’m so, so used to having a blueprint, most recently the sad and inevitable blueprint of Catherine’s illness and death, that not having one left me grasping every which way for one. It was my brother Mike who pulled me out of its whirligig, telling me, when I proclaimed frustration at not knowing what the coming months and years would hold, that it’s okay to not know, that, for that matter, it’s not possible to know. That was good to be reminded of.

So “now until death” lays out before me. The purple era. Twenty-seven years of?

I vacillate between seeing it as a free and open road and a frightening forest path, but I’m spending more time in the former these days. There is a power in the loss of naiveté and innocence, something I didn’t anticipate: I have been to the top of the mountain; it is dreadful and sad and terrifying, but it’s also beautiful and full of promise to look out from that vantage point, and empowering to have made that climb and survive.

A friend of mine, consoling me after the death of my father, said that he had never felt so intensely alive after the death of his; I know exactly what he was talking about.

What’s next?

Alec Baldwin talks to writers Kaitlyn Tiffany and Ashley Fetters about contemporary dating. 

Baldwin is his usual naturally curious self; Tiffany and Fetters rise to the challenge, and what follows is a compelling state of the union.

From 2014 to 2020 I used the free Tinyletter web app to manage a small mailing list that I used to update Catherine’s family and friends on the progress of her cancer. I made 121 posts in all, starting with this explanation:

Apologies for moving so quickly from handcrafted individual emails to a mailing list, but I was beginning to lose track of who I’d told what about Catherine and her progress, and this seems like a way of doing so that’s sustainable, but without the publicness of a blog, which would make Catherine uncomfortable. Catherine has, however, blessed this alternative.

I’m writing mostly because I need to write to process things – that’s what my blog is for, and with that off the table, I still need a way of processing things. So I apologize in advance if what and how I write sounds overly technocratic or emotionless; that’s how I’m used to writing, and I’m pretty sure if I just started crying I wouldn’t be able to get the details down as I want to.

While I didn’t intend the updates to be anything more than a way to prevent Catherine having to answer the “how are you?” question 100 times a week, together they are also a journal of twists and turns  and details long-since-forgotten of life with cancer.

Reading my friend Elmine writing about her migration away from Mailchimp today, I was inspired to go to export those 121 posts from Tinyletter for posterity.

It turns out that Tinyletter doesn’t have a way of doing that.

So here’s what I did as a hacky workaround:

First, for each of the 121 posts, I checked the “Show in Letter Archive” checkbox. There’s no way to do this en masse, so I had to edit 121 posts individually:

Next, I turned on the “Show sent messages on your archive page” setting for the Tinyletter account:

With these two done, I was able to see the first page of an archive of my posts at the archive URL, https://tinyletter.com/ruk/archive.

I figured out that I could see every post if I modified that URL with some parameters:

https://tinyletter.com/ruk/archive?page=1&recs=121

The “page=1” simply says “start on page 1.” The “recs=121” is how many posts I want to see per page: I wrote 121 posts, so that’s why I use 121 here.

Finally, from the command line on my Mac I used wget to scrape the entire archive, including any linked images:

wget \
     --span-hosts \
     --recursive \
     --no-clobber \
     --page-requisites \
     --html-extension \
     --convert-links \
     --execute robots=off \
	 --no-parent \
     --domains tinyletter.com,gallery.tinyletterapp.com \
         "https://tinyletter.com/ruk/archive?page=1&recs=121&sort=desc&q="

This took about 20 seconds to run, and when it was finished I had a local archive: two folders, gallery.tinnyletterapp.com holding the embedded images and tinyletter.com holding the HTML of the posts, 121 in all:

I’ll have to do some more text processing to extract these into a useful chronological archive, but I now have all of the component parts to do that.

On our walk last night after supper, Oliver and I noticed that David’s Tea on Great George Street was stripped of stock and fixtures, a victim of the company’s plan to close hundreds of stores.

On hot summer afternoons I would sometimes sit at the front counter over an iced tea, as much taking advantage of their air conditioning as anything. And Oliver and I would frequently stop in for tea on our evening walks.

Catherine was a more serious David’s Tea customer: our tea cupboard was often filled with half a dozen canisters; we own two iced tea flagons and a tea pot purchased there, and innumerable tea strainers.

While we certainly don’t lack other places for a good cup of tea in Charlottetown, David’s, with its friendly staff, colourful merchandising and long hours, it will be missed.

One morning early last October I went to the fridge to get milk for my coffee, and what I poured into the steaming cup emerged as a glop glop glop of milk gone bad. I checked the refrigerator: it was as warm as the room. Same for the freezer. 

While there’s no convenient time for a fridge to conk out, this was a particularly inconvenient time: Catherine was just out of hospital and the household was not operating at peak efficiency.

The fridge’s death was not unanticipated: it was 19 years old, with decaying seals and a noisy gait. So we opted to consider replacement rather than repair.

I made the rounds of the city’s appliance stores: M&M, Leons, The Brick, Best Buy, MacArthur’s, Home Depot. The search was made both easier and harder by the restrictions imposed by Catherine and by the available space: the replacement had to fit within 32” deep, 30” wide and 67” high, and it had to be a fridge with a freezer on the bottom. Put together, that narrowed our choices down to 1 or 2 models.

The search was further frustrated by the lack of stock in city stores: the quickest we could have a fridge in place was 10 days.

Perhaps repair was the only option? We consulted a friend who consulted a friend, and the advice we got back was to empty the fridge and freezer, unplug, wait 12 hours, and then see what happened.

This worked!

Our fridge, if not quite “as good as new” after an overnight rest, was back to cooling things.

I restocked.

At this point the logical follow-on action would have been to order a new fridge, but life interceded with distractions and complications, and, hey, the fridge was working.

And it kept working. And working.

This summer, though, I began to notice additional signs of decay: increased ice buildup in the freezer, condensation in the fridge, and anything put in the “crisper” drawers would freeze solid.

A week ago I went fridge shopping, using the same limitations, and a single model of fridge emerged as the clear choice: a Whirlpool WRB329DFBW. It fit the space. It had a bottom freezer. And there was local inventory: if I ordered last Monday, a new fridge could be delivered in a week.

But I hemmed and hawed: it’s a large investment, even if it will be amortized over the next 20 years. I shopped around. Checked Consumer Reports. 

It wasn’t until Saturday that I went out to actually make a purchase, from Birt’s Furniture (selected for having a fridge in stock rather than for any preference otherwise). Deal done. Delivery in a week.

On Monday night I went to pour myself a refreshing glass of iced tea, iced tea that had been chilling in the fridge for 5 or 6 hours. It was still hot.

I checked the thermometer in the fridge: 17.5ºC. Damn.

Unable to face the task ahead immediately, I left things as-is and went to bed. Tuesday morning I got up early and cleaned out the fridge (miraculously, the freezer is still working). Truth be told, it was in need of a clean-out: there were still not-very-perishable things, in back of the back, that Catherine had purchased before Christmas.

I called Birt’s to see about moving up the delivery date, and I’m waiting to hear back.

And I’m kicking myself still for my reticence a week ago: had I bought the fridge then, all of this could have been avoided.

Doug Boylan died on Saturday.

My first encounter with Doug was an indirect one: on the evening of the Provincial General Election of 1996, before the phones started to ring with results, I was in “election central” chatting with Charles MacKay, Clerk Assistant of the Legislative Assembly, who was running the logistics operation.

Charlie described to me how he’d gone into the attic of Province House to retrieve the materials for election night, and found there an impeccably organized collection: in-boxes and out-boxes and signs and instructions. This, he told me, was Doug Boylan at work, Doug from whom Charlie had inherited the election central managerial role.

Eventually I got to meet Doug himself, at several of Catherine Hennessey’s parties over the years, but our relationship didn’t really cement until, many years later, we ended up as breakfast regulars at Casa Mia Café on Queen Street. Every morning for several years, after dropping Oliver off at school, I would walk down to Casa Mia for coffee and a muffin and, more days than not, I would find Doug at a table near the front, carefully writing in a complex-looking set of books and binders I never learned the nature of.

Every now and again, when it looked like I wouldn’t be disturbing him too much, I’d stop for a chat on my way out the door. We’d talk politics, and Province House, and the Development Plan, and all manner of topics around and about Prince Edward Island. Doug had a cynical air about him, but it was a cynicism born of experience, and one rooted in a love for this province and its institutions. I suspect that, given his many roles in the public administration of the province, there was no single person who knew where the bodies were buried more than he (I may, in his memory, finally seek to determine which former deputy minister absconded with the cannons that formerly graced the front yard of Province House).

Doug became an enthusiastic supporter of my letterpress printing efforts, and was one of my Mail Me Something subscribers in 2011 (he was among the few the contributed financially to the effort: upon my return from Berlin that summer I found an envelope with a $20 bill and a thank you waiting in our mailbox). We exchanged more than a few emails over the years about typefaces and design.

Goodbye, Doug; you will be missed.

Author Lisa Halliday, with Tonny Vorm for a Louisiana Channel interview:

Halliday: I begin with a character in the sense that I begin with someone I want to spend a lot of time with, with someone who has either a certain kind of brain, that reverberates with my brain, or someone who is interesting and for whom I can find a kind of aesthetic solution, as I flesh him or her out. So I do begin with a character, yes I begin with a character, I realize now, that you ask, 

Vorm: And do you know, when you start writing, where the story will take you?

Halliday: Yes, to a degree, maybe 70% of the way. Or rather I know where the story will take me, but I don’t know where I will stop telling it to the reader.

The idea that there are parts of the story that keep going in he mind of the author, untold to the reader, is fascinating to me.

As is the idea of conjuring characters that are fun to hang out with.

If you’re going to look at a part of Prince Edward Island in Google Earth Timelapse, the area of Prince County from Birch Hill to Northport is a good one to start with, as much has happened over the last 35 years:

Notice in particular the dance of the barrier islands, and the expansion of the peat mining operation: