We were glad to be on the trail in the middle of the lush green undergrowth, and made our way slowly stopping often for pictures and to revel in the quiet.

Long downward-sloping branches covered in moss, below the sound of a rushing creek, and moss-covered slopes above us.

The path was well-marked and spongy underfoot, with a gentle upwards slope.

Caribou moss dangled from branches in the bright late-morning sunlight

Along the trail we caught glimpses of huge skunk cabbage in the marsh below and closer looks revealed a variety of fungi.

In a mossy clearing we spotted a striking Amanita.

The path leveled out along an old rail bed and after four kilometers on the trail we arrived at the first bridge.

The second bridge was a further half-kilometer. A wooden signpost displayed the creek’s (old?) name Bent Iron Creek.

The waterfalls at both bridges were small and unimpressive, but the gurgling sound and view of the clear water in the quiet forest was refreshing.

’

Our trail guide said to continue past the second bridge, and to return along an old rail bed, but after about another half-kilometer we saw no sign of the rail bed and were still going in the wrong direction so we decided to return along the same trail we had come down and made a hasty retreat to the car.  Total traveled approximately 10 km.

Jimmy at work in his shop

“You like Greek?” whispered Jimmy in my ear. Instead of nodding my head with Jimmy’s clippers hovering close to my ear, I breathed a steady yes.

“Milo’s -  down the street — they have new management.” I haven’t been there for years, I told Jimmy. I remember they had good lamb.

“The best,” said Jimmy.

I haven’t been to a barbershop, a real barber shop for years either.  Probably thirty years or more. Sometime in the seventies or eighties, I began going to stylists and salons.  Started with razor cuts and shampoos.  I liked the little extra bit of attention, but mostly it was because barbers never did what you told them.  If you said, don’t touch the sides and leave it long in the back, they’d just get out the electric clippers and zip it all off anyway.  And afterwards, they’d get out the comb and scissors and pretend to shape the little that was left.

Just leave the sides, I told Jimmy.

“Okay, just a little trim around the ears and the back short,” he said.  I sat back in the comfortable chair and thought about how long it had been since I’d been to a barber, then when I’d first gone to one — with my Dad. I couldn’t have been very old, probably five or six ’cause I remembered the upholstered board the barber had placed over the arms of his chair for me to sit on.  It was a three-chair shop on 11th street south-west in Calgary, just a couple of blocks from the Birkett Manor on 17th Ave where we lived.  We probably walked there, Dad and I, but I don’t remember that part, just him sitting in one of the chairs reading a magazine while the old guy buzzed and snipped around my head.

Jimmy reached up and removed my glasses and placed them on the shelf. How much for a trim?

“Fifteen dollars.” I asked if he took credit cards.

“No, just cash.”  I fished in my pockets. All I found was  a five-dollar bill.  I don’t have enough cash I told Jimmy.

“It doesn’t matter. Don’t worry about it.”

Jimmy continued to snip and clip and I realized that for Jimmy it wasn’t about the money, or the hair, it was about being here — day after day, year after year, and chatting with the regulars and the occasional stranger like me who wandered in for a trim, or a shave or a buzz-cut.  The number of  young guys in Jimmy’s shop surprised me.  All five or six chairs were  filled with guys under thirty, most probably under twenty.  While I was there, a half-dozen more came in and sat waiting.

Jimmy took his time, even though shaping the tiny amount of hair I have left on my scalp is more of an act of faith than anything else.  Jimmy stopped once to take a phone call and waved to someone passing by on the street. Unlike the stylists I had gone to over the years, he kept the chair angled away from the mirror and toward the storefront window facing the street.  Jimmy’s chair is the first one at the front of the shop.  He had the best view and I sensed he spent as much time looking out the window as I did, while he worked his clippers over my head and in my ears and behind.

“You want your eyebrows done?  They’re too long.”  Sure, I said and closed my eyes as his scissors clipped, and clipped, and clipped some more over my brows.  I heard a different,  higher pitched sound and felt Jimmy reach over and expertly trim my moustache with a couple of deft swipes, then work deeper into my ears.  I’d been in the chair now almost half and hour. He must be done soon, I thought, but then another quiet whir began as Jimmy’s hand pressed hard into my shoulder.  He had a hand massaging unit on his hand and worked the vibrating magic fingers across my shoulders, across my back and around my neck, smoothing out the tension like an iron smooths out wrinkles.  When Jimmy finished, he whisked my face with a soft bristled brush. He splashed a few drops of perfumed liquid in his hands and rubbed it into my hair, the used his fingers to smooth everything into place. He swung the chair to face the mirror, handed me my glasses and raised a hand mirror for me to inspect the back.  Looks good Jimmy, thanks.  I handed him the five dollar bill.  It’s all I have I said.

“That doesn’t matter. Don’t worry about it.

The next day it snowed a foot in Victoria, but on the way to work, I went to a cash machine, then stopped in to pay Jimmy what I owed him. He looked up from the head he was working on, smiled and took the money.  “Thanks,” said Jimmy.

13 watt, 27 lumen compact fluorescent bulb

A couple of weeks ago one of the ceiling lights in the hallway began to flicker. I found the step stool, removed the shade. Inside was an unfamiliar shaped fluorescent tube which I now know is a dual-tube 13-watt, 27 lumen compact fluorescent (CF) model.  The brand was unknown to me and I thought, oh-oh, this will be impossible to replace, which was unfortunate because I realized we had at least ten other ceiling fixtures with these same odd little bulbs, including one in our walk-in closet that hums every time we turn it on.  Despite my belief that I was on a futile quest, I drove over to Rona Building Supply and to my surprise, there were several of these little bulbs on the shelf.  Some were the right wattage but too long; others the right length but the wrong wattage. I selected two lower wattage bulbs @ $10 each and brought them home.  Up on the step stool, I tried without success to insert the bulb into the fixture; no matter how hard I forced, the bulb refused to seat properly.  Meanwhile, a second bulb in the hallway began to flicker.

I called the store. Grant, the helpful lighting associate, retrieved my old bulb from his wastebasket and said he could order me the correct one. It would be a different brand, but should would work fine. Great, Grant, go ahead and while you’re at it, order nine of them.

A week later I called the store.  Another associate looked up my order.  No one called you? he asked.  No, I told him. Well, they’re here.  Come and get them.  I drove to the store, asked for my order.  The cashier couldn’t locate them, then called Grant, who also looked and couldn’t find them. He apologized and said his fellow associate shouldn’t have relied on the computer before he told me to come down. I left without my bulbs.

By the time  I arrived home, Rona had called and told me the bulbs were there after all,  in Receiving.  I drove back to the store.  A different cashier got my bulbs.  They were the wrong ones. Grant came and we spent the next fifteen minutes looking at miniature images of compact fluorescent units in supplier catalogs.  Again many were the right wattage but the base seemed was wrong.  Tell you what, said Grant, take one of these home, try it and if the base fits, I can order you the proper length.

Back home, I climbed the stool once more. The bulb fit into the fixture but was over an inch too long for the shade.  I called Grant.  We’re in business.  All-righty, I’ve got 34 in Calgary, I’ll get your order in right away and call you when they arrive.  Indeed, a couple of days later, nine bulbs of the correct length with the proper ends arrived. I replaced the two in the hallway and while I was at it, went after the hummer in the closet.  To no avail.  Even with a new bulb, the fixture hums.

I just took a look at the dining room fixture.  That sucker has weird-shaped bulbs too.  Last night I went to turn on the lamp by my desk. It crackled and burnt out.  Damn, it’s a forty-watt bulb and we don’t have any of those.

Blackberry Festival Powell River Pat Buckna photo

Most of us would agree that order and chaos are on the opposite ends of a continuum. Orderly behaviour tends to equate with stability while erratic behaviour is chaotic. These opposites could be described as formal versus ad-hoc, rigid or flexible, dictatorial as opposed to anarchic. When it comes to writing, predictable and unpredictable seem to be useful terms.

What are expecting when we read a book? Predictable outcomes or unexpected ones? If the text is too predictable we get bored, or even worse, annoyed. We give up. Too many plot twists or character shifts produce the same results. Either way, the author seems to be trying to be too clever, or too boring, too obscure, too distant, too aloof. Too…awful.

How can a writer strike a balance? Moving away from order means creating variation — changing sentence lengths or structure, shifting points of view, altering scenes, unexpected situations — are all ways of creating interest. Betsy Warland, poet, mentor and manuscript consultant I worked with during and after The Writer’s Studio at SFU has written an superb book Breathing the Page: Reading the Act of Writing that examines many of the fundamental techniques and considerations that writers must come to terms with if they are to successfully engage readers. Proximity is a term she uses to explain how a reader feels positioned to the writing. Has the author drawn me into the scene almost as a participant, or have they made me feel like a detached outside observer? Do I have a gut reaction to this character, or do I feel distant from them? As Warland  points out, these experiences of proximity are not random responses, but rather something a writer has consciously created during the act of writing.

“Respect your reader,” writing instructors often tell their students. What they mean is pay attention to how a person will read your work. If a reader is on page two of your book, all they know for certain is what you’ve told them thus far. Based on what you have (or haven’t) told them, most readers will have made  several assumptions already, assumptions about where the story is headed, or who is telling the story, or what this or that character it like. As the writer, you know much more about your story and characters than the reader does at this point, but if you’re not careful, your reader may not stay with you long enough to find out. You may forget to tell them some important detail that they need to make the shift into the next chapter, or added some extra extraneous information in a scene that confuses them. Like Anton Chekov said, “One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.”

What keeps readers engaged? Setting up a regular rhythm with not too many or too few shifts can work. But above all we must avoid repetition; readers can smell a formulaic approach miles away. There’s no doubt readers tend to like (and even need) consistency and reliability.When one character is talking (or thinking)  we (as readers) need to be certain we know who we’re listening to. Too much variation in a character’s speech patterns or point of view, and it’s game over. One of the first things we do when we start a new book is to try to get (pardon the pun) a read on a character and an author. We demand certainty about whoever is telling us the story. I there is any wavering in our belief in that voice, our guard is up and the author is in danger of losing us.

Unfortunately too much consistency will turn a reader just as quickly. A few unexpected words in a sentence, or a surprising event or action can pique a reader’s interest — but only if that reader find it credible. If not, red flags go up. This is one of the many dilemmas all writers face — how to put ourselves in the minds of all potential readers out there at once.  Seems hopeless, but all good writers have figured out how to do it.

During my year in the program, I worked with mentor Stephen Obsorne and other writing instructors, none of whom seemed to adequately address the questions I had about how to plan and write in a longer form. Stephen challenged me to write one good sentence and then a good paragraph, but I never seemed to get beyond creating short narratives. Perhaps I’m working in the wrong form?I thought, so I applied for workshops at Banff with short-story writer Barbara Scott, and with poet Elizabeth Philips. Scott assured me I wasn’t writing short stories, and Elizabeth brought me the the understanding that the form was secondary until I had wrestled with content. Am I writing a novel or a memoir? needed to decide if this was a novel or memoir or something in-between. the answer wasn’t clear, and of course, that was reflected in the writing.

Around this time I heard someone say that the real purpose of a first draft is to discover what it is you’re writing about. Until you’ve reached the end, you really have no idea what it is that you’re writing. When I finished my first draft, I did have a revelation So this is what the book is all about. Now that I know how it ends, I should go back and revise the beginning. I plunged into draft two, and soon found myself re-writing, not revising. Writers call it substantive editing, I think of it more as writing the whole book over again. Along the way, a somewhat different book emerged — one that had bore faint resemblance to with my first draft, but felt confident I’d complete the second draft much faster because now I knew where the story was heading. That’s what I thought.

Along the way, I enrolled in UBC’s Booming Ground with novelist Catherine Bush, certain that my book would be done before our twenty-week online session was over. Wrong. I enrolled in another session and somehow the book, which had begun as a memoir, began to reveal itself as a novel. Whenever I found myself needing to change the ‘truth’ about some event, which I knew had happened a certain way, into a scene that was fictional, I struggled. I agonized over the ‘facts’ and ‘the truth’ and what had seemed like an easy re-write became torture. I decided to work with an author who based her successful novels on events from her own life, Gail Anderson-Dargartz. I admired the realism of her characters, the pacing and structure of her narrative, and the unstoppable way her books moved toward their inevitable but always satisfying endings. Unfortunately, as it tried to fictionalize my life, many of my characters weren’t nearly as well-behaved, or forward-directed as I hoped. I knew that readers, even sympathetic ones, would be hard-pressed to get past the first few pages of my manuscript. My writing had become a daily burden rather than a daily joy.

Next began a long period of experimentation. With the support and encouragement of a group of other emerging writers who generously read the almost weekly rewrites of huge chunks of my manuscript, I added and removed scenes, changed characters, moved from present tense to past and back again, wrote in first person singular, then third, even tried out the strange and unconvincing second-person a couple of times. I reversed clauses, exorcised all my adverbs, re-positioned, removed and returned paragraphs to their rightful place, tried anything I could come up to find a way to connect the mountain of tiny fragments (and countless versions of those fragments) I had accumulated over the past few years. My book was now beginning to resemble, and bog down, just like a real project. I was getting nowhere. Slowly.

In a future post, I promise to tie all of this back to Complexity Theory. I’ll go over strange attractors, the fitness landscape, order, chaos and equilibrium, and perhaps even emergence and complex adaptive systems. Believe me, it will be fun. Oh, and might even get to the butterfly effect and the Sweet Spot. In the meantime, here’s a preview:

At work, however, my father was like a different person — almost gregarious, admired and looked-up to by all of his co-workers. This came, in part, from having worked at the plant longer than nearly everyone else, in the company’s employ for close to forty years by then. But I believe what others valued about my father were his strong opinions and the conviction he demonstrated and shared with others. He was never one to hide his contempt for some idiotic public figure who took people for granted, or to hold back insightful comments about some recent newsworthy event. For all the formal schooling he lacked, he had a clear way of expressing himself and was an aware and well-liked co-worker.

Mom also had opinions about everything, but unfortunately hers tended to side with whoever she’d last heard or seen on television. She saw multiple sides to all issues but found it impossible to remain consistent in her feelings about them. Except when it came to Dad. Whenever he did voice an opinion or express outrage at some fool who’d gone off and done something stupid, Mom would be there to defend that other person or what they’d done. If Johnny said things were one ways, she would argue they were some other. If Johnny felt an official was corrupt or self-serving, Mary had no doubt there was more to the story, and no doubt that official wasn’t that bad after all. Sometimes it seemed she just enjoyed being contrary. Conversations had a habit of beginning and ending very quickly around my parents.

Besides her magazines, which Mom brought home from various places and left stacked in piles all over the house, she read very little. The only ‘real’ book I remember of hers, besides a couple of Bibles, was a dog-eared copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover which she kept hidden away behind a sliding shelf in the headboard of her bed. For over thirty years, D.H. Lawrence’s classic was banned under obscenity laws in England and North America, because of it’s language and vivid depiction of sex, which I’m certain was it’s appeal to my mother. This, of course, was what appealed to me as a teenager, although I was surprised when I thumbed through it, how non-graphic and literary the sex scenes were, not nearly as titillating as the pictures in the Playboy magazines I would later thumb through at the plant.

The only other books Mom had scattered around the house were a number of Reader’s Digest Condensed books. I couldn’t abide these truncated versions of real books. They offended my sense of what books should contain — every word that an author had intended to be read, not just the ‘right’ ones that some hack editor deemed worthy of seeing. To me, condensed books were as offensive as the covers of hit songs by K-Tel artists, or cheap reproductions of famous paintings. They were of no value, certainly not something that should be on public display, let alone read.
Perhaps this lack of books in the home is what started me collecting books. I’ve never been a great reader, but I do like books. I like the feel and the look of them, the heft, the odour, and the variety of papers, the bindings, the various shapes and sizes they come in.

Despite my growing library of books, it wasn’t until fewer than ten years ago that I really learned how to read. In 2002, I attended the SFU Writer’s Studio with several emerging writers, most of whom were well read, literate. Many had strong ideas about good writing and good writers. Many of the writers they spoke about I had never heard of and never read, but I began to buy the books and the authors they were recommending and discovered authors like Joan Didion, Italo Calvino, Raymond Carver, John Berger, Jack Kerouac, Anie Dillard, Wright Morris and many more.

It wasn’t like I hadn’t already read and discovered several authors before this on my own. I owned (and had read) dozens of novels by writers such as Mordecai Richler, Robertson Davies, Timothy Findlay, John Irving, Margaret Atwood, Dostoevsky, James Joyce, Hermann Hesse, W.P. Kinsella and more. The more I began to focus on the craft of writing, the more I understood how difficult and demanding the discipline of writing really is; how authors struggle to make each sentence say when they need it to. I’ve now come to believe that in order to write well, you must first learn how to read well.

1962 Signet Edition (Canada)

Up until then I believed I could already do both. I had been a journalist and had written articles for magazines. I prided myself on an extensive vocabulary, wrote songs, listened very carefully to lyrics, yet when it came to books, I had never really examined what made one author’s writing stand out from another’s. I had a rudimentary understanding of story and narrative but had never closely examined what makes some books soar, while others fall flat. I’ve always known when I was reading good work, but I hadn’t really considered why or what it works. Just as learning to play music had changed how I listened, learning to write has taught me how to read.

I’m still not a voracious reader, but last summer when I moved from Vancouver up the coast, I brought along more than seventy-five boxes filled with books, which now surround and comfort me. Bookcases fill the walls and there are still several boxes waiting to be unpacked. I hope to get to them soon, and perhaps I will. No matter how hard you look, nowhere on my shelves or in any of the boxes will you find a Reader’s Digest condensed book. It just wouldn’t be right. But on one shelf, sandwiched between Women in Love and Sons and Lovers you’ll find the complete unexpurgated authentic authorized Signet edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover that once belonged to my mother. One of these days I’m going to dig it out and read the whole thing from cover to cover.

Design by Janine Stoll, Photo by Pat Buckna. Click to listen.

In summer of 2009, I attended a four-day songwriting workshop in Wells, BC offered by the Island Mountain Arts Society, the same folks who host the annual Artswells Festival each summer. An old friend Ken Hamm, who performed on my first album, Roll Me a Dream… was also delivering a guitar workshop and this was a great time for us to catch up. Wells is the nearest community to Barkerville, home of the Cariboo gold-rush and close to the world-famous Bowron Lakes canoe route.

My first visit to Wells was in 1980 when I was living on road and traveling throughout western Canada performing. I performed at the Jack of Clubs Hotel in the pub and met a number of interesting folks including an old miner named Lucky Swede. The Jack of Clubs burned down in a spectacular fire several years ago.

In the thirty years since, Wells has blossomed into an alternative community of artists and musicians. Many of the old buildings have been restored and painted in bright colours. Several artisans display their works throughout the town in a number of galleries, including one that was once an old church.

The workshop was hosted by David Francey and Craig Werth, a great tunesmith and guitarist who often accompanies him and held in the local school. A wonderful group of songwriters met each day to showcase their songs, and under David and Craig’s direction, paired off to collaborate on new material. Each person work with two others and several great new compositions resulted. I worked with Scott Cook from Edmonton, and also with Carl Johnson — a non-musician from Quesnel who had never attempted to write a song or lyrics before. The song Carl and I wrote, called Just One Note was one of the pieces one this compilation.

Cameron Catalano recorded most of the sessions and, with everyone’s approval, worked on re-recording and collecting the pieces for Hearts Swells. He released the CD in 2010 on his own Gladgnome record label and is now available for purchase or digital download from iTunes.

The recording is special to all of us, in part, because two of the participants Tempest Gale and Mike Webb have both since passed away and some of their songs are on the album. A portion of the proceeds from the sales go to the Artswells festival in appreciation for their efforts to bring great music to everyone.

Click to listen or purchase

In May 1982, Fort Smith poet Jim Green and I first experimented combining Jim’s writing with my music. Later that summer we performed a benefit concert at the Wildcat Cafe in Yellowknife. The benefit was broadcast live by CBC North radio and became the beginnings of this album. In December 1982, we received a Canada Council Explorations grant to research additional material for Flint & Steel. This album was the result. Much of the original music was composed and recorded in January, February and March 1983 on a Tascam 4-track reel-to-reel in Rufus Graves’ garage on Pine Crescent in Fort Smith during a reasonably mild winter when the temperature never dropped below –40.

The final vocals were recorded at Richard Harrow’s Living Room Recording Studio in Calgary between May 1983 and March 1984. In January 2009, Flint & Steel was digitized and released on cd and in downloadable format. Included on the album is an extra 13-minute instrumental piece entitled Echoes of the Northland

Nepean Point, Major’s Hill Park, Ottawa. Pat Buckna photo.

(See more Ottawa photos here.)

In late June, 2008, I flew to Ottawa for a week to teach. While I was there I spent a day wandering around Parliament Hill, the market and Major’s Hill Park. The hill was being spruced up in preparation for Canada Day ceremonies. Crews were lifted in cranes and using blowtorches to blacken the statues, others high in the air, were washing windows and sandblasting rock walls. Iron fences and railings had been freshly painted. Lilacs were in full bloom. People filled the streets, sat on stone stairs, looked out from viewpoint, and relaxed on the lawns

Much of the time, I spent examining the intricate carvings on the parliament buildings themselves. Many of the unique carvings are said to be the faces of the workers who carved and placed the stone. The more I looked, however, the more bizarre and intriguing the figures — a unicorn, an owl, Inca or Aztec faces, a Native archer in full feathered headdress, a beaver, a smiling moose, a dragon, a helmeted Roman soldier, a ram and a lizard. Faces peer down from behind cornices, leer from the ceilings of porticos, wait on ledges, cling to the sides of walls.

On the lawn next to the Centre Block, the statues of the suffragettes — The Famous Five — hold a tea party on the lawn near the trees. On the opposite end of the grounds immediately north of the West Block Lester B. Pearson relaxes on a chair, Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine hold a conversation in the lilacs behind the parliamentary library. Wilfred Laurier gazes across the Rideau Canal toward Chateau that bears his name; while a somewhat frightening Mackenzie King coldly observes the coming and goings of the countless strangers that wander the grounds and snap photos. Queen Victoria stands regally, a mace and scroll in her arms, a fierce lion sits beneath her and an attendant reaches toward her with a laurel wreath. Her great great grand-daughter Elizabeth in cape and leather boots sits astride her horse a watches a film crew at work on the steps, while Sir John A. MacDonald poses on a pedestal in his greatcoat, a pince-nez in one hand and a sheaf of documents in the other.

Across the canal, along Sussex Drive, past the imposing gray fortress-like walls of the U.S. Embassy, and the bustling shops of the ByWard Market, the silver spires of Notre-Dame Basilica gleam in the afternoon sun. On the plaza in front of the National Gallery, a giant spider stands, waiting for children and others to gather beneath it’s legs.