Observables #42

on daffodils, covid playgrounds, and transforming pain into beauty

My guest today is Heather Debling is a fiction writer, playwright and writing teacher and coach based in Stratford, Ontario. Her fiction, plays and non-fiction often explore issues of duty, sacrifice and survival. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and is currently working on her first novel.

A man safety checking the playground equipment. Looking at him from a distance, I think he’s climbed up the slippery, curved metal of the slide itself. Once I’m closer, I realize (and am slightly disappointed to see) he used the stairs. He checks the swings next, tugs one chain, then the next, methodically working down the row. At the end, he puts his palm against the frame, checking its stability too.

I think back to two years ago when all this equipment was wrapped in yellow tape. Caution. Keep away. Often the tape would break (or be broken), the ends fluttering in the wind until someone from the city or the police came back and repaired it. Safety looked different then. I remember thinking I should take a picture of it, that in the future I would want a record of these times, but I never did. Maybe I already knew that everything we were grappling with—that we are still grappling with—the confinement and sacrifice and the care that we offer or deny others would be remembered and start to make sense in a different way. On the page.

The tape has been gone for ages now, and the only yellow in sight this morning is an explosion of buttery yellow daffodils and forsythia blossoms.

I’m partway through Sarah Winman’s Tin Man. I read her latest novel Still Life in late December and fell totally and utterly in love with it. Her work contains such hurt, and reading Tin Man, my eyes are blurry every few pages. But there is also beauty, and it’s often found in the relationships between the characters, the families they create and the love and community they find with each other.

Winman’s fiction is big-hearted and life-affirming in the sense that it holds the whole mess of us—the pain and the loss but also the possibility of beauty and transformation. Her stories remind us that all we have is each other and that is an extraordinary thing to have.

Early on in the pandemic, I created a playlist called “Solace,” and I still find myself listening to it most evenings. Comfort and consolation seem to lie for me in songs like Hozier’s “The Parting Glass” and Finn Andrews’ “One Piece at a Time“ and Lily Kershaw’s version of “Smile.” I find it in The Wailin’ Jennys harmonizing on “Light of a Clear Blue Morning” or the Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zero lyric, “Come celebrate, life is hard.” Some like “Bird on a Wire” or “All Ye Tenderhearted” are songs I strongly associate with a particular piece of writing I’ve done. The music conjures the mood of a story or play or essay and reminds me of being in that particular creative process. Other songs evoke particular memories, like “Prayer” from Ghost Quartet, which was the last in-person theatre I saw pre-pandemic.

One recent addition to the playlist is Emily Scott Robinson’s “The Time for Flowers.”

The speaker of the song sees an older woman planting wildflower seeds and asks her:

Tell me what's the point in planting pretty things

In these days of darkness and disease

The world is burning, have you not heard

Similar thoughts come into my mind more often than I like to admit. The older woman in the song, though, smiles and speaks of the cycles of things and says that as dark as it is now, “the time for flowers will come again.” If there’s a thread that runs through all of this (and as a structure-obsessed writer I’m always looking for that thread), it’s that these songs, like Winman’s fiction, capture the hardness of life but they also speak of surviving it—of doing more than surviving it. As Susan Cain writes, “we are creatures who are born to transform pain into beauty.”

Or to quote something else I’ve been listening to non-stop for days—

Is this how it is?

Is this how it's always been?

To exist in the face of suffering and death

And somehow still keep singing?

There is pain and hurt and ache, but there is also consolation in words written or read on the page or sung in songs that feel like an embrace. There is the connection and community we have with others, even if so much of it still happens in Zoom squares. And there are flowers. Daffodils and forsythia now, soon—or maybe already where you are—tulips. Then there will be peonies, poppies, iris, roses, a whole garden of blossoms to offer us solace, a place where we can seek out comfort and consolation.

Thank you, Heather for contributing!

In other news…this week on the podcast Nat and I reframe…wait for it…a Hallmark movie. Because we’re writing one! And we want to consider the binary of high/low brow art and see if can do away with that hierarchy.