So why write about it now? Well, one obvious answer is that I hope the show will have many revivals and go many other places. I have no idea what its future holds but I would love for people to see it on stage in Gander alongside Come from Away; I would love for people to see it at the Charlottetown Festival and in Halifax and in Toronto and in Vancouver and elsewhere across the country; I’d love it to travel all the way to Broadway and to London’s West End. As person who absolutely adores seeing musical theatre, I feel like this show is as good as anything I’ve watched anywhere and it deserves to be on big, big stages.

But that’s not really why I’m writing about it. I’m writing about it because I saw the play’s second-last St. John’s performance on March 21, and I’ve been thinking about it for the week-and-a-bit since.

It’s the story of an aging (mid-50s, based on internal evidence within the story) local rock musician, Dominic Porter, who never achieved the fame and fortune he dreamed of but made enough money from a ketchup-ad jingle he wrote years ago to avoid having to ever get a real job, allowing him to spin out 30 years as a charming man-child dreaming of his big break. Everyone else in his life — his best friend and bandmate Barry, Barry’s wife Nancy who has no time for Dom, Dom’s estranged daughter Tasha, and Dom’s upstairs neighbour Mackenzie who has (almost) enough of him — is moving forward, while Dom stays stagnant in the past.

The musical is built around the songs (but not the biography) of St. John’s singer-songwriter Sean Panting, and features the greatest powerhouse team in Canadian theatre: playwright Robert Chafe and director Jillian Keiley. Put together Sean’s music, Robert’s words, and Jillian’s stagecraft with a cast in which every single performer is a standout, and it’s a rollicking rock-and-roll musical that will leave you both laughing and crying.

Anyone who saw it could have told you that. And I can’t tell you to run out and get tickets for Man of the Year because I don’t know when or where it’ll be playing again, and also I’m not a theatre critic. Or much of a critic at all, really. My book blog is not so much about reviewing books as it is about keeping track of books I’ve read and occasionally spinning off into long free-form digressions about what a particular book meant to me at a particular moment. And the few times I’ve talked about movies or TV or music or stage plays on this blog, it tends to be the same thing: not so much “I can tell you whether this is good or not” as “I can tell you how it felt to be me, watching/hearing this thing, on this particular day of my life.”

I’ve been a little obsessed, lately, with stories about people in mid-life and beyond — stories that centre people over 50. In some genres, this isn’t exactly an untouched area: we have, for example, probably more novels than we’ll ever need about men in their 50s re-evaluating their lives and curing their midlife crisis through the magical rejuvenating power of sex with a woman in her 20s. Women over 50 haven’t traditionally starred in quite so many stories (leaving aside stunning exceptions like The Stone Angel), while TV shows, movies, and plays are often drawn both to the drama of young people’s lives and the fresh, unlined and unaltered faces of the actors who portray them.

The appeal is understandable: coming of age, falling in first love, forging your identity — this is the stuff of young people’s stories, and even when the writers are middle-aged and beyond, there’s a strong pull to explore and keep revisiting those fascinating early stages of life.

But Man of the Year is a great — I would say maybe one of the great, in terms of contemporary theatre — stories of a character in his 50s, having what you might consider a midlife crisis (though 55 is only midlife if you’re expective to live to be 110!!) but not curing it by sleeping with a younger woman. I’m not definitively saying he doesn’t sleep with a younger woman; I’m just saying that’s not the cure.

In fact, I think the key takeaway from Man of the Year is that there is no cure. The show has a lovely, bittersweet, hopeful ending, but it’s not an easy redemption story. There is forgiveness; there is a second chance, but there’s also a clear awareness that no late-in-life redemption can buy back the time you lost, the relationships you damaged, the years you didn’t get to spend with people who needed you to be there.

I had an interesting conversation with my daughter Emma, who worked on this show as assistant producer and associate costume designer: she said that when she talked to people her own age who had seen the show they tended to be dismissive of Dom, to say that he doesn’t deserve any forgiveness or any redemption arc. Whereas I think people my age are gentler towards someone who is recognizing the mistakes he’s made and the time he’s lost.

I think when you’re in your 20s (and maybe watching this show empathizing with the perspective of Dom’s daughter Tasha), you think that forgiveness is too easy, that it erases the past and absolves you from facing the consequences of your actions. And while I agree that people shouldn’t be forgiven if they don’t acknowledge the harm they’ve done and try to make restitution, what I think people over 50 realize is: even if you’re forgiven, even if you get a second chance, you don’t escape the consequences of your actions because you’ve already faced those consequences. You already paid the price, missed the chances, screwed up the relationship — and even if you’re forgiven, you’re not getting any of that back.

As his earlier play I Forgive You also demonstrates, Robert Chafe is a writer with a deep and thoughtful understanding of the concepts of forgiveness, redemption, and grace, and this understanding is on display once again in Man of the Year.

If you’re lucky enough to get to be 50, or 60, or beyond, you don’t get there without regrets. Mistakes. Missed opportunities. And while many of us may not have hurt the people around us as much as Dom does, we all stand in need of forgiveness, even as we all recognize that absolution doesn’t erase the past. We live with the consequences of the choices we’ve made over the past half-century or so, and we hope to do at least a little better with the time remaining to us.

All that being said: whether you’re young or old, if Man of the Year comes back on stage or comes to a stage near you, go see it. Where you’re at in life may colour how you see Dom’s story, but either way, it’s worth seeing and hearing.

As I don’t like or understand American football, the only reason I’m ever aware of the Super Bowl is so that I can make my annual joke about Superb Owls (a joke, that, by the way, existed online for long time before the memorable What We Do in the Shadows episode where the vampires mistakenly think they’ve been invited to a Superb Owl party). Owls are beautiful and majestic, so why not share a picture of a superb one once a year?

This year, though, I’m thinking about a different kind of OWL, and how to be a Superb one, or at least a very good one (Very Good OWL Sunday doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it?)

For several years now, I’ve been using the acronym OWL to describe the category of person I am: an Old White Lady.

OWLs are, of course, not a monolith, anymore than any other group of people. We all live in a tangle of intersections: some OWLs are poor, some are disabled, some are queer; many OWLs face more discrimination and structural disadvantage in an average day than I have in my whole lifetime. When I class myself as an OWL, I’m thinking mainly of middle and upper-middle class North American white women whose main experience of discrimination (a pretty big one) has been sexism.

Anyone who’s an OWL today (let’s generously say — over 50? over 55? I’m thinking of us old GenXers and the younger Boomers) came of age amid second-wave feminism, and probably was shaped by the feminist movement in some way. Women of our generation either enthusiastically embraced feminism, emphatically rejected it, or said “I’m not very political” while taking advantage of the rights won for them by feminists.

And whether we OWLs define ourselves as feminists or not (I emphatically do), we were grew up in a sexist society that had a lot of expectations about what girls and woman could and couldn’t do, say, or be. To some degree, many of us have spent our lives unlearning and pushing back against those restrictions.

Many of us OWLs are now enjoying our post-menopausal season of caring less about what people think and speaking our minds more freely. We view the world with the exact “I don’t have time for anymore of this BS” expression that Snowy Owl is giving in the photo above. We have fought to be free of a lot of expectations and a lot of limitations, and we enjoy that freedom.

You can’t talk about OWLs without talking about the subset of us once labelled Karens: the Old(er) White Ladies who use their voice and their privilege to speak to the manager and make a minimum wage worker’s life hell. You also can’t ignore the fact that OWLs made up a significant proportion of the nearly 40% of WLs in the US who voted for Trump in 2024. OWLs are using their power, but not always for (what I would consider) good.

And yet I also see OWLs turning up everywhere to support causes I do believe are good: there are OWLs on the front lines of every protest, OWLs caring for their neighbours, cooking and delivering casseroles, OWLs speaking up and speaking out about injustice. Using those voices that many of us had to fight hard to be able to use.

In the middle of social justice and protest movements, I also see well-intentioned OWLs get criticized for centring themselves and their feelings, as well as for indulging in forms of action (like knitting and wearing 2017’s pink pussy hats) that may feel more performative than effective.

And so, I think a lot about how to be a Superb OWL — how, in other words, to be an effective ally to people whose struggles are different from mine — and why even the most well-meaning OWLs are sometimes less than Superb.

I think when you have fought against sexism your whole life, it’s easy to sometimes slip into imagining that sexism (which is real and deadly and needs to be fought every single day) is the only “ism” that matters.

So when someone tells an OWL like me that in order to be anti-racist, I need to be quiet and listen to the voices of Black people, or Indigenous people, or other racialized people talking about their experiences, what we hear may be: Shut up and listen. And having been told to Shut up and listen (to the white men who were our preachers, professors, bosses and boyfriends) since we were little girls, Shut up and listen can be hard to hear.

When we’re told (correctly) that those of us OWLs who are also financially well-off, straight, and able-bodied, actually have quite a bit of structural privilege in this society, and that we need to sometimes pass the microphone to queer youth, or immigrants, or disabled people … we may be thinking, on some level, I fought damn hard to get this microphone, and now you’re asking me to hand it over to someone else? Hell no; you’ll have to pry it from my cold, dead OWL talons.

There are a lot more pieces to this puzzle that go beyond the scope of a blog post. But I truly believe the crux of being a good OWL involves listening and speaking.

Listening to people from other backgrounds, other life experiences, which sometimes does mean shutting up and being silent for awhile, even though we fought really hard for our right to speak. Recognizing that we OWLs have fought hard battles to get where we are today, but that other people are fighting other battles and we need to learn about those too. That we have spent a lot of time trying to crack glass ceilings, but there are people still in the basement who only dream about seeing the ceiling, and we need to be quiet enough to hear their voices and learn about their experiences so we can make room for them on the upper floors.

And when we do speak (because we can, and we’ve earned our voices), we speak not only on our own behalf, but on behalf of others. Sometimes that speaking may involve saying: “Now that I have your attention, I’m going to ask you to listen to this other person’s story.” And passing the microphone.

Sometimes it may mean channelling OWL power and privilege — the Karen energy, if you will, which like any energy source can be used for good or evil. If Karen can get an underpaid immigrant worker fired for messing up her pizza order, she can also use that same self-assured voice to advocate for that worker to have fair pay and working conditions.

Happy Superb Owl Sunday. I am not, perhaps, a Superb OWL yet, but I am trying every day to be a better OWL, by listening when it’s time to listen and speaking when it’s time to speak.

I can see that this is good in terms of giving people something to talk about. When you’re a kid they ask what you want to be when you grow up, what you’re doing after graduation, if/where you’re going to college. In young adulthood, it’s: Are you working yet? How’s that going? Are you dating anyone? If so, do you have plans to get married? If you’ve done that, what’s married life like? When are you having kids? And then if you do have kids there’s like a 20-year period where nobody ever asks you anything about yourself, ever again; they just want updates on how your kids are doing.

But when your kids are grown and no longer changing by the hour, and you’ve passed all your own life milestones save for death (which nobody wants to ask about) … the well of small talk can run a little dry.

Retirement is great for that. “So, how’s retirement?”

I always say, “Fantastic!”

I said that in October to one person who I know professionally and hadn’t seen in several months. “Fantastic!” I said, and she said, “Oh, is that sarcasm I hear?”

I was confused. It definitely was not sarcasm. Being retired is fantastic, but because I often am sarcastic about other things, it can be hard to calibrate my tone sometimes. Maybe she was expecting a different answer and was surprised at my overwhelming positivity.

Anyway, we’re six months in to this new phase of life now, and I have to say, the answer hasn’t changed. I still love getting up and not going to work everyday. And, again, this is coming from someone who actively liked their work about 98% of the time. But the best job in the world is no competition for not having a job. No job is the best job.

Of course, the very best job of all is to get up in the morning, not go to work, and still have a cheque appear regularly in your bank account. This is the deal you get if you stick with the school board (or any other pension-paying employer) for 30 years. That, however, is not the deal I’ve gotten. I made my career choices with eyes wide open and I don’t regret them, but they did not lead to a pension cheque showing up in my bank account regularly (or ever).

Instead, for the last six months I’ve been getting up every morning, not going to work, and then hustling like some Gen Z influencer on TikTok to drum up freelance work to replace that paycheque.

But you know what? It’s still been pretty fantastic.

There have been a few weeks this fall when I thought, “I am actually busier than I was when I was working.” But not all the weeks are like that, and even during the weeks that have been that busy, I’ve had the luxury of choosing the projects I want to work on, and for the most part arranging my own schedule. For me, that is the real upside of retirement: not that I’m not working, but that I’m choosing what to work on and when to work on it.

I’ve also gotten to do a few “for fun” things, some paid and some not, that I’ve always wanted to do but just couldn’t fit into my schedule when working. I got to be a Deputy Returning Officer on election day, which was really fun (and paid!). I also volunteered backstage at the St. John’s Players’ Christmas show, and since backstage work in theatre is something I’ve always wanted to do but never had time for, that was a delight. I’ve put a lot of time and effort into a passion project (Terra Arcana: the podcast!) that will never earn me a cent, but is hugely fun to work on.

As the final days of 2025 line up with the six-month mark of my retirement, I’m happy that a couple of long-term plans I lined up this fall are leaving me a little more financially secure heading into 2026 as a freelancer. This means that instead of constantly hustling for more work, I’ll have the ability to pick and choose what I work on even more than I do now, and I’ll be able to only say yes to paid writing and editing projects if I know they’ll be interesting. That’s a huge luxury, as is the peace of mind that comes with knowing I can still contribute to our household income!

As I look forward to 2026 being my first full year of retirement, I have to say, I fully expect to enjoy almost every minute of it. And if I have a New Year’s resolution, it’s only to say “No” more often, to make sure I actually do have some time to sit back and relax in retirement!

I’ve decided it’s time to share a story that, so far, only my family and a few close friends know about. It happened three months ago, and it’s the kind of experience you need to sit with for awhile before being ready to share with the wider world.

Well, that’s what I needed anyway. Some people might be embarrassed ever to tell this story, while others probably would have posted it as soon as they returned to the land of wifi. But, while the above video was filmed in real time as the adventure was happening, three months felt like about the right span of time for me to sit with it, reflect on it, and decide there was value in sharing it.

I posted last month about the concept of failure from artistic point of view, and how it conflicts with our idea of the “bucket list” — all those things we want to make sure we get done before we die. This post is a continuation of that — shifting the focus from art to the personal, even the physical. What do we do with those “I’m gonna accomplish this goal!” dreams that might be moving out of reach as we get older?

This video tells the story of my attempt to achieve one of my personal goals, and what I learned. I won’t say anymore, because it’d take too long to type out the whole story when I’ve already put it all in the video.

Recently I heard the Provost of Memorial University, Jennifer Lokash, say at Convocation that her personal motto is the same as mine has been for many years: Solvitur Ambulando — it is solved by walking. (That link is to a blog post I wrote 10 years ago, on the cusp of turning 50 — an appropriate pairing for the above video about a hiking adventure attempted just before turning 60). Dr. Lokash is an avid hiker and believes, as I do, that Solvitur Ambulando applies both literally and metaphorically.

However, since the day this video was made, I have a new motto. Most of the time, it is solved by walking. But sometimes it is solved by knowing when to stop, sitting still, and letting someone help you.

Most recently, I thought about it when the Kickstarter campaign that I launched to crowdfund a creative project with my daughter and co-creator, Emma, did not meet its fundraising goal. With Kickstarter, if you don’t raise the whole amount you targeted within the time limit, you don’t get any of the funds people have pledged — it’s all or nothing. So when writing an email to the people who supported us to talk about the future of the project, I included the phrase “Since the Kickstarter has failed…”

When I got Emma to preview the wording of that email, she said, “Don’t say failed.”

I knew what she meant, of course. I changed the wording on the next iteration of that message. When you’re promoting your creative project, you don’t say that any part of it failed. You focus on the positive — what you did accomplish, what you still plan to accomplish.

(It’s a cool project, by the way — a podcast audio-drama that we’re still going to make, though on a tighter budget. Loads of people told us how much they loved the idea, though most of those people weren’t able to donate. You can still check it out and donate if you’re interested, or just follow so you can listen when we finally release it!).

The language that artists use when they talk publicly about their projects nearly always skews positive, for obvious reasons. People talk about plays that they’re producing, books that are getting published, albums they’re releasing, galleries their art will hang in, grants and awards they’ve received.

Except among our close friends, we don’t often talk about getting turned down for grants or passed over for awards. About the book we started writing but couldn’t finish. The play we couldn’t pull together the funding to stage. The concerts and readings and art shows that nobody but our nearest and dearest attended.

Everybody fails … a lot. Some of us more than others, of course. And while I certainly don’t want to hear a constant chorus of complaints from artists moaning all the time about failures, I do think there’s something to be said for openly saying things like:

I got turned down for a grant I was pretty sure I was going to get, after I wrote what I thought was a great proposal.

I wrote a play that means more to me than most other things I’ve ever written, and it had a great staged reading, but since then, nobody seems interested in producing it.

Sometimes I see people nominated for a literary prize I’ve never been nominated for, or invited to read at a festival I’ve never gotten an invitation to, and I think dark thoughts like “My book is just as good as hers; why not me?”

I started a Kickstarter to crowdfund for a project because I was inspired by other local artists who’d successfully raised funds that way, but my Kickstarter failed to reach its goal.

All those are real whines of mine. And those are just from the past year!!!

OF COURSE the flip side is that I’ve had some wonderful, amazing successes. And in true artist fashion, I talk about those. I promote them. I share them on social media.

I understand the reluctance to talk about our failures. Not only because you have to put on a positive spin if you want to people to attend/buy/notice your art. But because there is psychological value in reframing failure, in recognizing that failure is part of growth. In crafting a story about your life and your work where failures are ultimately necessary and valuable.

I get all that. But I still think there’s value sometimes in saying — maybe even publicly — “I tried this thing, and it didn’t succeed. I won’t stop trying. I’ll learn from this. But yeah, that thing did not work out the way I’d hoped it would.”

I also think a lot about this in the context of aging. Does failure get harder or easier to bear as we get older?

In retrospect, youth is a wonderful time to fail at things — art, jobs, relationships, really anything. You’re young. You’ve got so much time and energy to bounce back, recover, try new things.

But I seem to recall it doesn’t feel like that when you actually are young. Failure feels disastrous in your 20s because you don’t have the perspective to know that you will bounce back. It can feel like one crucial failure early in your journey dooms everything and you’ll never succeed.

By contrast, failure in your 60s (or beyond!??!) can feel gentler, because you do have that perspective. You care less what other people think, generally. You know it’s a long journey with many twists and turns, and no one failure will define your career, or you as a person.

But when you’re in the second half of life, you’re also aware that … yes, life is a long and twisty journey, but also one that will come to an end at some point. And though no-one knows when that endpoint will be, we know it’s closer than it once was. The feeling that you have less time — to do things, to make things, to succeed — is hard to escape. With good reason, because it’s true.

Even though the term “bucket list” is of surprisingly recent origin, the concept that we all have things we want to accomplish before we die is hard-wired into human beings, and into artists more than most people, I think. For some people it’s about leaving a legacy — how will I be remembered after I’m gone? But for many of us, I think it’s more about: Will we have time to tell all the stories we want to tell? Paint all the pictures, sing all the songs, dance all the dances? If time is running out, and I fail at one of those things — whatever failure turns out to actually mean — is that a thing I’ll never get the opportunity to do?

So the weight of failure gets both lighter and heavier as we get older — in different proportions for each of us, of course, and depending on what we’ve “failed” at: some things matter more than others. There are projects we can let go of, things of which we can say “I wanted to do that, but it didn’t work out … but that’s OK, I’ll just do something else.”

But then there are the things of which we say “This was my life’s dream, and if I die without having made/created/done this thing, my life will be incomplete.” How do we deal with those failures?

I don’t have answers for this. Like most people, I’m living the reality — succeeding at some things, failing at lots of others. I know all the “right” answers about perseverance, re-invention, persistence … and I do believe them. But alongside that I’m trying to learn how to balance something else — accepting failure, maybe? Admitting it? Giving myself (and others) permission to fail sometimes, and talk about the fact that an idea or a dream or a project failed?

Maybe just getting past that decades-old fear of seeing a big red “F” on top of my paper. Banishing the idea that “Failure” is the worst F-word. Accepting that maybe … sometimes … it’s OK to say the F-word.

Sometimes things fail. I might even end up dying with an item or two unfulfilled on my bucket list, not because I never tried, but because I tried and failed.

Maybe that’s OK.

It’s the first week in September, and the question I’ve been asked most frequently by people who know I recently retired from a career in education is: “How does it feel not to be going ‘back to school’?”

In some cases, the question is based on the mistaken assumption that I’ve been teaching for the last few years (as I had for the several decades before) and that I would have had the summer off anyway, even if I hadn’t retired. In fact, since 2021, while I’ve still been working at the Murphy Centre, I haven’t been in a teaching role; I’ve been the intake/admissions coordinator, working through the summer, with the last two weeks in August typically being my busiest time of year.

However, if you work in education in any role, whether or not you have July and August off, there’s a specific energy to September. In fact, the September-to-June school year is so hardwired into most of us in North America that even in some non-education-related jobs, there’s a feeling of something new starting in September, people returning from vacation, things ramping up for a busy fall. And yes, having had the rhythms of my life ruled by the academic calendar for most of the last … wait, my entire life! … yes, it does feel different not to be going “back to school.”

I’ve been working hard at my own writing, at editing jobs, giving talks and readings, planning workshops and courses, all summer. I hit the ground running with writing-related projects immediately after my last day at work. But I also spent lots of time at the cabin, lazy days with plenty of swimming, kayaking, and lying in the sun. Almost everyone has somewhat of a vacation feeling about summer, so I had it too.

And now it’s September. Now I have to start really figuring out the shape of my life without the structure of the school year, the structure of my job.

Do I feel any regret, as I look at children and teenagers in the neighbourhood standing at the bus stop this week, as I think about the young adults I interviewed for seats at the Murphy Centre in September showing up this week for orientation, my former colleagues getting their classrooms ready?

Honestly, no. I search inside myself for regret, and I don’t find it.

At this point in my life, lots of people my age (and younger!) that I know have retired. I find two common attitudes towards retirement when I talk to my peers about it: people who were sick of their particular job or of having a job in general, and couldn’t wait to get out of them, contrasting with people who, whether or not they’ve yet retired, love working and have trouble imagining life without it.

I don’t feel like I fit into either of those categories.

I really did love my job. I’ve always enjoyed teaching, in all the different places and ways I did it. And I genuinely loved the Murphy Centre, both my 16 years of teaching and my 4 years as intake coordinator. I found both roles fulfilling, I liked both the participants and my coworkers, and although every job has frustrations and bad days, none of those were ever enough to make me feel unhappy going to work. I did look forward to Septembers when I taught, even though I missed the sunshine and the relaxing freedom and the added time to write that summer brought. I always looked forward to meeting new students, trying new things in the classroom.

And yet, leaving felt absolutely right, and the right time to do so.

This seems to be kind of a weird position, unless lots of other people feel this way and just aren’t talking about it: to truly, deeply love your work and also feel, without regrets, that that chapter in your life has closed and it’s time to move on. Will that feeling – the lack of regret – change as the school year progresses without me? At this point it doesn’t feel like it will, but who knows?

What I do know is that it’s September, and something new is starting. Yes, it started already – building a career for myself as a writer has been going on my whole life, and I’ve spent this summer putting in place many of the things I hope will pay off and keep me paid and occupied over the fall and winter. But I will always be seduced by the clean loose-leaf, sharpened-pencil feel of September, and I suppose as long as I live I’ll always be structuring my life and my projects around that feeling. A new year is here; I have new things to learn, new projects to launch; new work to do.

I don’t know a whole lot about what my first fall as a retired, 60-year-old, full-time writer is going to look like, but I know this is September and something new starts here. And I hope I’ll feel that way every September.

Every year since 2006, I’ve posted a list of some of my favourite books I’ve read in that year. Sometimes it’s a Top Ten, ranked, sometimes a Top Twelve or Top Fifteen. Some years I’ve gotten fancy and made a video or even done a contest. This year’s is just a simple list of ten books I really loved this year. You can see the titles above; to read more about my thoughts on these books and links to my reviews of each of them, check out this post on my book blog, Compulsive Overreader.

Although this blog belongs to a writer, in recent years I haven’t actually blogged much about writing.

Well, to be fair, I haven’t blogged much at all. With the rise of social media and the decline of blogs, then the descent into chaos of social media and the rise of “everybody has a Substack now but I literally cannot learn another new platform at this point” … what used to be “Hypergraffiti, my blog” has become more of “Hypergraffiti, the site where I post an essay every couple of months about something that’s been on my mind.”

That “something” might be my fraught relationship with the natural world, Christian purity culture and its impact on women, or the experience of riding on a narrowboat over a 126-foot-high aqueduct — really, whatever’s occupying my thoughts at the moment I sit down to write.

I spend so much time on social media and my website that promoting my own work as a fiction writer, that I rarely blog about those things here on my personal site. If anything, writing here on Hypergraffiti feels like a break from writing novels, promoting novels, and all the rest of the writer-business.

But having just come through a truly unique experience in my writing life, I wanted to write a post, not to promote my own work, but to reflect on it.

Since 2021, I’ve been writing a play that eventually came to be titled Is This the Hill You Wish You’d Died On?

There were two inspirations for this play. The first was a family story about my great-great grandmother, Bridget Dutton Macgregor (1855? – 1921), who married a Scots Protestant here in St. John’s against the wishes of her Irish Catholic family, and kept her deathbed promise him to him to raise their child Protestant. She brought her daughter Maggie to the Presbyterian Kirk on Sunday mornings and left her there, while Bridget went on to Mass at the Roman Catholic Cathedral.

The second inspiration was an idea I’d had for a long time, and played around with in various forms where it didn’t quite work, to write a story or a play where a contemporary woman confronts a woman from the past — perhaps her own ancestor, perhaps a woman whose life she is researching — and has to weigh her admiration for that historical woman with the outdated values that woman lived by.

Those threads came together eventually, in the story of Taylorbeth, a young woman in her 20s, who meets her ancestor Theresa in the graveyard where Theresa has been buried for 100 years. Originally the play was just about the two of them, but new characters kept arriving — some living, some dead. Abandoning my sure and certain knowledge that the fewer actors a play has, the easier it is to get it produced, I kept letting those new characters in to see what they could teach me.

The play ended up having seven characters — Taylorbeth, her mother, the ghosts of four women ancestors, and the more recent ghost of Taylorbeth’s dead friend. It also ended up being (with the possible exception of my novel Prone to Wander) the most personal thing I’ve ever written.

Because I write mostly historical fiction, I don’t write many things that are overtly autobiographical. Bits of my own personality and my own concerns find their way into my stories, of course — every writer does that; on some level we’re always writing about ourselves. Stories from my family history often make their way into novels too, especially the ones that are set in more recent Newfoundland history — By the Rivers of Brooklyn in particular borrows a lot from the stories of my mother’s family, and Anne in that novel is a bit of a stand-in for me, as the girl who grows up hearing those family stories.

But for the most part, when I keep my spotlight on the past, it means that my present concerns only make their way into stories obliquely, by the back door. When I began writing Is This the Hill You Wish You’d Died On? I realized that even though the story began with a woman from the past, those present-day concerns were knocking at the front door, wanting to get in and make their voices heard.

Like many people raised in church and in deeply religious families, I’ve wrestled a lot with that heritage. I don’t know if I’d call it “deconstructing” as many people do, because I still have a very strong faith — but it’s at least “reconstructing”; my faith and spirituality are in an ongoing process of being formed into something different, while still having their roots in the soil I was planted in.

It’s those roots I wanted to explore, and argue with, in writing this play. There was my great-great-grandmother Bridget (the inspiration for Theresa in the play) who clung to her Catholic faith yet raised her daughter Presbyterian. That daughter Maggie (who comes alive as Lizzie in the play) converted to Seventh-day Adventism when her husband did, and withstood all the hardships and prejudice that came with being an Adventist in those days, including sacrificing to send her daughters away to Adventist schools. Two of those daughters, Jean and Isabel (inspired by great-aunts Violet and Ruth) also make an appearance in Is This the Hill You Wish You’d Died On?, with their very different feelings about the heritage of faith they were raised with.

I know from the family stories that were handed down to me that these women devoted so much of their lives, their passion, their energy, to their religious faith. And they thought so much about how that faith would (or would not) be passed down to their children and grandchildren. These things mattered to them.

They matter to me, too, living more than 100 years after Bridget’s death, in a world so different from the one she lived in. I live in the tension between my deeply-held beliefs, and the knowledge of the harm beliefs like those have done in the world — often to people I care about.

While there are many ways in which my belief system today is not the same as that of my staunch Seventh-day Adventist ancestors, the core of that difference is not really about doctrine. I know there are Adventists and ex-Adventists who get all worked up (in one direction or another!) about the sanctuary doctrine, or the divine nature of Jesus, or the 2300-day prophecy — but honestly, none of these things impact my daily life that much, certainly not enough that I would publicly disagree with church leadership about them.

For me, the issue that more than any other that has made me publicly disagree with my church is its treatment of LGBTQ+ people (if you’re a long time reader of this blog, you know I’ve been writing about this since 2007, and telling stories that go much further back in my timeline about why this issue matters so much to me). And my conviction about that comes not from Bible study or preaching (though I certainly have studied the Bible on this and many other issues) but from watching and listening to the experiences of friends. Friends whose hearts were broken by their attempt to remain faithful to what the church taught and to the people they knew themselves to be.

That’s where my character Taylorbeth is in the play — she is a young person who has left the church of her childhood, and is skeptical and angry towards all religion because of the pain she’s seen a close friend suffer. Then Taylorbeth’s mother (not a ghost!) turns up, and she’s a middle-aged woman who holds on to her faith even while she tries to practice loving and accepting everyone. All the anger Taylorbeth has been directing at her ghostly ancestors gets turned on her mom, for not taking a firmer stance and walking away from those toxic religious systems.

The dead in this play are all, as I’ve said, based on my real ancestors; Taylorbeth is about the same age as my daughter, and her mother Gail is my age. But the conversation Taylorbeth has with her mother in their scene together is not a conversation my daughter has ever had with me — it’s one I regularly have with myself. Taylorbeth and Gail — and, really, the ghosts too — are all me, all reflecting different aspects of how I feel about this lifelong journey of having faith, being nourished by faith, struggling against faith, rejecting faith, needing faith, relying on faith. You could replace the word “faith” with “God” or “church” or any number of other words in that sentence and it would still be true.

Writing this play peeled back not just my family history, but my own beliefs, doubts, fears and inner conflicts in a way that made me feel much more vulnerable than writing usually does. Especially because it’s was a play, rather than a book that people can read in their own homes and feel whatever way they want about — a play that might someday be staged in front of an audience, where I might sit and watch this story that was such an intimate piece of my own self get acted out by and for other people, reacting to it in real time.

The opportunity to have a staged reading as part of the Persistence Theatre Company Women’s Play Festival in September of this year (a one-time event as part of the province’s Year of the Arts initiative) was an unexpected blessing. Persistence is the feminist theatre company that produced my first full-length play, The Mirror.

When they put out a call for plays for this festival, I wasn’t really sure Is This the Hill was ready to be read, heard, and seen by others, even after tinkering with it for three years through many different versions. But I took a chance, sent a proposal in, and it got accepted. As a result, I had the opportunity to work with the stellar Sharon King-Campbell as a director (and really a dramaturge as well, for the short time we had together) and a team of brilliant actors — not to mention my very own daughter as our costumer and production assistant.

It was a staged reading, so we only got one full day of rehearsal and the actors were still “on book,” but even within those limitations, Sharon and the actors were able to bring so much of what had only existed in my head before, to life. Everyone did a great job; Gabrielle Thierrien and Alison Woolridge, particularly, did the heavy lifting as Taylorbeth and Theresa, who are onstage almost the whole time, and they could not have embodied those two characters more perfectly.

I got to sit through the day of rehearsal/workshop, and then the live reading with the audience a few days later. Of course one part of my brain was analyzing the play critically as a writer, figuring out what lines worked with the actors (and eventually with the audience), where the pacing dragged, where there was repetition that I could cut and where tension needed to be heightened to keep everyone interested.

That’s what one part of my brain was doing: analyzing.

The other part was just experiencing. Seeing actors bring to life this story I’d created — which, if you’re a novelist who takes up playwrighting, never ceases to be amazing. (I guess it’s also amazing for a novelists whose novels get made into movies or TV shows, but that’s obviously not the life I’m living).

The weirdest piece of it was seeing not just these characters, but these thoughts, feelings, conflicts that feel so personal to me, out there being explored by and for a group of people who for the most part don’t share my same background or life experience. And realizing that while (like any play or any work of art for that matter) different people took different things away from it, people were connecting with these themes and ideas.

That was the amazing part for me — the part that let me know this play is worth continuing to work on, to eventually bring it to the point where it’ll be ready to be on a “real” stage as a fully realized production. It’s so scary to put not just your family history, but your own internal conflicts on the page or stage (but scarier on the stage) for other people to see.

But when I talk to someone afterwards and they get it, they understand what I’m trying to say and it connects with some piece of their own life experience, the questions they’ve been asking … that’s when I’m just so glad to have taken this risk. And so excited for what the future might hold with this project.

As a child, I had a complicated relationship with Nature. In my mind (and often in the books I read) it was printed that way, with a capital N.

I grew up knowing that Nature was very important, almost as much as God. And much like God, you were meant to love it. People who didn’t love Nature were deficient in some way: if not overtly evil, certainly lacking in key elements of their personality.

Loving Nature meant that you loved to be outside — outside the house, outside the city, surrounded by trees and grass and flowers and as far away as possible from roads and houses and cars. And it wasn’t enough to be there — while there, you had to be thinking important and uplifting and beautiful thoughts, which were inspired by Nature.

Unfortunately, I lived in a city (it did not occur to me that the trees in our backyard were also Nature, though I knew a walk in a city park counted as Nature); I wasn’t naturally athletic or outdoorsy, and I liked to read and watch TV — fundamentally indoor activities. I knew I was doing Nature wrong because a) I wasn’t out in it enough, and b) when I was, I couldn’t think the right thoughts.

Where did these overbearing beliefs about Nature come from? Not from my parents, but from the two other towering sources of information in my childhood: books and church.

I read voraciously as a child, and a lot of children’s books sing the praises of the natural world, but none more so than the author whose books dominated my youth: L.M. Montgomery. Anne of Green Gables famously went into raptures over the PEI landscape, naming trees and paths and falling in love with views. But, since I read all of Montgomery’s work, not just the Anne books, I learned that Emily of New Moon and Pat of Silver Bush felt exactly the same way about Nature, and their author spent just as many pages of those books rhapsodizing over how beautiful the world was and how her heroine was One With Nature.

As a result, I read this not as the quirk of a particular character (or of a particular writer, or a writer influenced by of particular literary tradition, both of which it was), but as simply the Way Things Ought To Be. People in general, but sensitive, literary girls in particular, were supposed to love Nature more than anything, to want to be outdoors all the time, to feel a deep, almost ecstatic spiritual transport in the presence of trees, flowers, rivers, lakes, the sky, the moon, etc, etc, etc.

Then there was church, where Nature was described to us as God’s Second Book. The Bible was, of course, His first and greatest work, but Nature was a close second, which meant that good Christians should spend time outdoors, reflecting on What We Can Learn About the Creator From Creation, walking down woodland paths while thinking profound thoughts about God’s handiwork. The only truly acceptable activity for a good Adventist child on a Sabbath afternoon was A Nature Walk, going outside not for the purpose of playing games or running around Causing a Ruckus, but meditating on the divine in the form of (once again) flowers and trees. And wildlife, if you could get any, but there was very little of that in my everyday life — apart from pigeons and seagulls, which I did not think of as Nature, but simply part of the backdrop of everyday life in a city by the sea.

I knew I was Naturally deficient, because while I didn’t mind being out in Nature, I didn’t love it the way Anne or Emily or Pat did. And it didn’t bring me closer to Jesus the way my Sabbath School teachers said it should. It was just kinda … there. Pretty, and everything, but a little boring. I couldn’t conjure up the right thoughts, though I tried. I even attempted writing poetry about nature, but it wasn’t a subject that awakened me to great heights of creativity. My childhood nature poetry is even more clunky and awkward than my childhood prose, or my impassioned adolescent poems about doomed love.

Most of my encounters with Nature came at our cabin outside the city, where we would often go on summer weekends. It was a beautiful spot, set in the sheltered cove of a lake (“pond,” as we call even big lakes here in Newfoundland) on which we sometimes went canoeing, surrounded by evergreen woods. Sometimes while at the cabin I would find a spot to sit under the trees, a little green glade such as Anne of Green Gables might have sat transported in for hours, bathed in the glory of the trees, forgetting to go back to the house and eat because she was so engrossed in Nature.

I tried. I really, really tried, to sit under trees and think Deep Thoughts, or Holy Thoughts, or really any thoughts at all. But after about ten or fifteen minutes I would have run through whatever Deep Thoughts I had managed to summon, and was thinking instead about the tree root digging into my bum and whether ants were crawling on me, and also how I wished I had a book.

Then if I actually got a book and tried reading Out In Nature, which I often attempted, I would have the same thoughts about tree roots and ants distracting me from my book, and wishing I was just reading inside on a chair like normal, while also feeling like a failure at Nature because I was reading rather than simply drinking in the Beauty of My Surroundings.

I’ll be honest, it was all kind of a chore.

I wouldn’t say I gave up on Nature as I became an adult, but I’ve lived a mostly indoor, urban life. While I enjoy a nice walk and a beautiful view as much as most people, I haven’t consciously tried to immerse myself in Nature, because deep down I knew I wasn’t experiencing it in the “right” way. Sometimes writers I admire talk about how important the natural world is to their spirituality, and the book resonates with me, and I think “I wish I could get all that from a walk in the woods.” (A great example is Barbara Brown Taylor’s An Altar in the World; if you read my review at that link, you can see me wrestling 15 years ago with the same issues I’m dredging up here in this essay.)

Then there’s the most daunting book of all about Nature: Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which I attempted to read in the early 2000s when I was immersing myself in a lot of women’s memoirs about spirituality, writing, nature and lots of connected topics. From the isolated quotes I’d read from Pilgrim I thought this book would sit right in the sweet spot of my interests. Instead, I found it an incredibly intimidating and difficult book, and when someone recommended it again this year and I gave it another try, my opinion had not changed. Dillard raises the bar for Deep Thoughts About Nature so high that, for me, it makes me want to go inside and bar the door and never venture out again.

But that’s not what I’ve done. More and more, as I get older, I find myself venturing outdoors — hiking, kayaking, sitting on my back deck in summer and realizing that my maple tree and dogberry tree are still part of nature even though they’re located on a city street. (For another book recommendation, Jackie Kirkham’s The Calm Place is a great short memoir about learning to appreciate the natural world in a tiny square of urban garden). Planting potatoes in the community garden. Downloading the Merlin app to pay attention to birdsong. Even attempting a little snowshoeing in my least favourite season, winter. And, now that I’m semi-retired and working only part-time, spending far more of my summer than ever before at that same cabin on the pond where I tried to Appreciate Nature as a child.

I still don’t have Deep Thoughts. I go kayaking on the pond, and my mind is still filled with the clutter of the everyday — I can’t cleanse or clear it, nor can I fill it with appropriately insightful or spiritual thoughts. Nor can I write poetry, or even good prose, about this little slice of the natural world that was given to me by my ancestors, that I love spending time in.

But I know the thrill I get on those same kayak rides when I happen across one or both of the loons who make their home on our pond. Or the even greater thrill I got a few weeks ago when my husband and I paddled into our favourite quiet cove on the far side of the pond and saw a bald eagle take off from a treetop — a bird I have never seen in the wild before. Or the absolute sense of peace and joy I feel when I’m swimming in the pond on a warm summer day and then drying off in the sun, reading a book in my hammock. Or the simple pleasure of having a morning coffee on the dock, looking out at the perfect glass stillness of the pond. Or the moment this summer when we saw a huge yellow moon making a brilliant path on the water, and jumped into the kayaks so we could paddle under that moon.

On none of these occasions did I have any Deep Thoughts. I’m not sure I learned anything about God, or about myself. I didn’t have any revelations worthy of a poem.

But I was there. And I am trying to learn, as I enter this last third (hopefully!) of life, that being there might just be enough.

This was of interest to me in general as an interested and concerned citizen, but specifically because I’m an alumni representative on the university’s Board of Regents, the governing body ultimately responsible for making decisions on things like “what is the university going to invest its money in?”

I’m not writing this post to talk about MUN Board of Regents’ decision — even if I wanted to, as a Regent I couldn’t say anything outside of the meeting about the board’s decision-making process. (You can read the Board’s statement here). Rather than having my member-of-the-Board-of-Regents hat on here, I’m wearing my lefty-progressive-Christian hat, so if you’re not interested in what I might have to say while wearing that hat, this post is probably not for you.

I’m also not here to talk specifically about Israel and Palestine, beyond saying that I deplore the tens of thousands of civilian deaths, that there should be a permanent ceasefire now, that I condemn anti-Semitism in all its forms, and that I believe you can criticize the frankly evil actions of the current Israeli government without being anti-Semitic. I would like to see a world where Israelis and Palestinians can live beside each other in peace and security; I have no idea how that can be achieved. I believe it’s valid to decry the current violence and call on all institutions here in Canada to take a hard look at their complicity in this and other wars.

So, having said what I don’t mean to talk about … here’s what I do want to talk about: false gods.

One thing I’ve heard over and over while discussing and debating issues like divestment is: “It’s complicated.” The question of where your funds — whether you are a university, a government, or an ordinary person putting some money into your RRSP so you don’t have to subsist on cat food in your sunset years — are invested, is beyond complicated. It’s byzantine. Turns out you can’t just call your Money Guy, or press a couple of buttons on your computer, and say, “I want to divest from these three companies because they’re making bombs that are used to kill babies.”

To do that, you have to say you’d like to pull your investments from these particular funds, with no guarantee that your investment managers would not immediately turn around and re-invest your money in something equally heinous. And while there are ethics guidelines for investment funds, these are also weirdly complex and don’t always guarantee the outcome you want.

Often, if you’re in any way involved in deciding where an organization’s investment funds go, you’re in a situation where if you try to make the “most ethical” decision, you may be also deciding to drastically limit the funds with which that organization can do its work, and/ or to make the lives of a lot of hard-working people (say, your employees) materially worse in their retirement years.

If you ask most working people “Would you like your retirement to be funded by companies that drop bombs on babies, or reduce our planet to a barely-inhabitable wasteland?” or “Would you like to have significantly less money to live on in retirement?” you’ll usually get a “No” on both of those questions. Making those priorities line up can be a lot more complicated than it seems, because of things like The Market, and How Investing Works.

In other words, huge portions of our lives and livelihoods are controlled by a large, mysterious, faceless force that holds the literal power of life and death over many people, whose actions we must acquiesce to whether we agree with them or not, whose decisions override our personal morality, and who is ultimately beyond question and beyond our power to influence.

I’m sorry to tell you this, but what we’ve got here is a god.

A false god of course; an idol. Something we created that has become so much bigger than ourselves that it threatens to destroy us, yet we are either afraid to take it on, or don’t know how.

This idea isn’t original with me, of course. The idea that “The Economy” is a modern-day god, a force we created but cannot control and must obey, is one I’ve been reflecting on for years. I can’t remember from what writer or thinker I first heard it from, but it may have been Walter Wink or someone along those lines, as it’s quite closely related to Wink’s thinking about what he called The Domination System.

But I have never seen this idea illustrated so clearly as in the discussions I have listened to and participated in around the idea of ethical investing. The sense of “We are powerless in the face of these mighty and faceless forces; we created them yet we cannot control or even fully understand them” makes me feel like I’m a pre-historic farmer scraping up sacrifices to offer to the unseen gods in desperate hopes of a good harvest.

Jesus, of course, knew and told us that Money was a false god. It always has been and it always will be. “No man can serve two masters,” He said. “You cannot serve God and Mammon” (Matthew 6:24).

But since Jesus’ time (and with the full complicity of us who claim to follow Him) we have only made Mammon, the false god of money, stronger and more powerful.

In Jesus’ time, only the rich were in great danger of worshipping Mammon. Like the guy in His parable who tore down his barns to build bigger ones (also saving for his retirement!), the rich have always been in danger of worshipping money. The poor couldn’t worship what they didn’t have and couldn’t access.

But now, because virtually everyone who has a job is invested, in some way, in “the market,” we are all bowing down to Mammon even if he isn’t making us rich. We are kept at arms’ length from the funds in our work or government pension that we hope will keep us from starving in our old age. Even if we have no wealth of our own to spend, we are still invested in this relentless machine that will sacrifice everything — peace, ethics, morality, even the actual planet we live in — to satisfy the endless gaping maw of its bottom line.

Mammon has become Moloch; we will literally sacrifice children to the false god of The Market.

It shouldn’t be this way.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Much like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this is not a problem I have a bunch of handy suggestions for how to solve. Better minds than mine deal with these things and try to solve them.

But I can call it out when I see it.

And I think it’s important to call it out, because as humans we have such a tendency to think that The Way Things Are is The Way Things Have Always Been, and, by extension, that that’s The Way Things Always Must Be. Our entire economic system based on the stock market is relatively new in human history; the system where every working person has their retirement income invested in these “funds” is even newer.

I, with my History and English degrees, am not the person to tear down this false god and figure out what we could replace it with. But I can recognize a false god when I see one, and point out that we are worshipping it, and that any idol made by human hands can ultimately be torn down by human hands.

Or, as Ursula Leguin said more succinctly:

“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”

Recognize the false gods we’re worshipping. Recognize they were made by our own hands and can be destroyed, and systems changed, by our hands.

It’s not everything, but it’s the first step.