An eye for detail

Posted on June 30, 2020 by maddyruthwalker

This morning I sat at my desk in my pajamas, writing, enjoying the way the light spilled from the lamp onto the scarred surface of the wood. Appreciating these last couple of days of not working. After a whole year off, I go back to my job on Thursday. My phone was on silent, but I noticed a missed call pop up on the screen. It was from the hair salon where I had booked an appointment for 11 a.m. Lots of time yet. I called back and asked if there was a problem….Did they need to reschedule?

Detail from a drawing by Michael Carpenter. Pastel on paper.

“Well yes, your appointment was at 11 and it’s 12.”

“It’s 12? No, it’s 8:58 a.m.” Pause. “Wait a second, where are you?”

“Alliston, Ontario.”

“What? Really? Oh my God, I am so sorry. Aren’t you the Gallery Salon on Yates Street in Victoria, B.C.?”

“Where? Victoria? No, we’re in Ontario. Our salon is the Gallery Salon, and we’re on Victoria Street in Alliston.”

I was deeply apologetic, and then we both had a good laugh about it. After I ended the call, I thought about the details that I should have twigged on yesterday. I was looking online for a local salon that had a high rating—the Gallery Salon came up, located on Yates Street in Victoria. But I couldn’t find their website so looked for a Facebook page. Sure, the Gallery Salon has a FB page, but I didn’t notice it was a different Gallery Salon, one located in Alliston, Ontario. I tried to book with their online app, but got a FB message to call them to schedule an appointment.

Why didn’t I notice the 705 area code when I called? In the back of my mind, I figured the area code was some new cell phone code, like 778, which startled me when it was first introduced. The owner mentioned HST when we talked about pricing. Why didn’t that detail wake me up? in British Columbia we charge Provincial Sales Tax (PST) plus Goods and Services Tax (GST), whereas Ontario businesses charge a combination of the two, called the Harmonized Sales Tax (HST). Perhaps I had temporary amnesia and thought time had slipped back to 2011 or 2012 when B.C. briefly charged the HST.

In any case, my mind had done a superb job of filtering out information that didn’t align with my expectations. Selective perception? Frightening, really.

What does it mean to have an “eye for detail”? I expect myself to have eagle eyes because I am an editor-in-training. But each of us notices some details and not others. It depends on your focus, your task, your mood, your intention. Today I was interested in the details of lipstick shades. I was writing about Phyllis’s lipstick:

“Her lips, Geraldine noticed, were the colour of the heavy hardcover Roget’s Thesaurus she kept under her bed. Claret red. Revlon’s “Certainly Red.” The shade matched Phyllis’s certainty, her sophistication. Not like her grandmother’s “Candy Pink” from Avon, sold by Wilma from upstairs, the Avon Lady and Garnet’s babysitter. No, not that silly, girlish, domesticated pink. Far from it.”

I looked up Avon and Revlon lipstick shades from the early 1950s and old book covers of Roget’s Thesaurus (Geraldine, a 13-year-old philologist, keeps a dictionary and a thesaurus under her bed). So many shades of pink and red. Burgundy, geranium, candy floss, salmon, cherry, garnet, ruby, watermelon, and blood.

Some days I notice almost every plant we pass on our walks, marvelling at variegated leaves, unusual blooms, the shape of needles, the saturated cobalt blues and plums of the hydrangea petals. Other times I barely register my surroundings, my attention drawn inward or wrapped around an intimate conversation. An eye for detail, like everything else, is variable, relative, and contingent on context.

As I finish my first course in the editing certificate and work on the final assignment this week, I am grateful that I can switch on my eagle eye when I really need it. When it’s time to proofread, I can shut out distractions and use a ruler to move slowly down a page of text, my antennae out for anomalies, typos, extra spaces. When it’s time for big picture detail, my mind can range like a camera viewfinder, alert to where prose needs a signpost, where a key transition needs ballast.

I have reassured myself that if I weren’t so distracted yesterday by multi-tasking (making a hair appointment while reading my email), I would have noticed I was talking to the owner of a salon located 4,274 kilometres away from my hair. When I set my intention, I have a grand eye for detail.

And yet, I still need a haircut. . . .

Update

In my last post, I said that I would let readers know the results of my fundraiser. Thank you to Barbara Churchill who purchased the Four Seasons quilt for $260—all proceeds went to Black Lives Matter, Vancouver B.C.

No takers for my piece, the Eight Worldly Winds, but that’s okay. I like to see it hanging above my new desk, which is actually a used kitchen table we bought for $20 last week. I’ll be working from home now, and this is my home office. Thank you for reading. Stay safe.

Eight worldly winds hangs above my new desk

On unprized poems and why we write

Posted on September 29, 2019 by maddyruthwalker

Five years ago I got interested in corn. I found out about maize, its history, breeding, and physiology, about Barbara McClintock’s work on maize genetics, leading to her Nobel Prize. I looked into corn’s many creation myths told by Indigenous tribes and cultures. I read about how genetically modified maize under the product name StarLink was sold in hundreds of different food products (for example, Taco Bell tacos) before it was recalled, not approved for human consumption by the FDA.

I was also interested at that time in giving objects voice in my poems, making objects subjects.

I spent some time reading, researching, and then writing a poem in which I envisioned a cob of corn speaking to a little girl at a Fourth of July picnic. I wanted to express how food is sacred, it has its own history of being used, abused, loved, and narrated by humans. With a 7,000 year history, corn is an especially rich source of stories.

I entered the resulting poem in CBC’s poetry contest that year. Of course I didn’t win. David Martin deserved the prize for his ambitious poem, “Tar Swan.”

But not winning meant that I buried the poem deep in my computer’s archives and banished the thought of it. It was, after all, “unprized.” But does that mean it’s not worth sharing?

I’ve been using Caroline Sharp’s A Writer’s Workbook to get my daily writing practice back on track. Today, I came across her inspiring words of encouragement:

“Practice, practice, practice. Stretch your voice. Assert your talent and speak loudly because this is a short time we have here, to be alive, here and now, with this pen and this piece of paper. This day matters and this word matters and your story matters.” (p. 34)

So take heart, writers. Keep writing. Don’t permit not getting the prize stop you from setting words down and then sharing them. We write to communicate, and if we keep waiting for prizes and praise, we may never connect to readers.

Corn speaks

Alicia, before you eat me,
listen, child,
listen:

Teosinte is my wild cousin five genes distant,
her leafy bush concealed a few hard nuggets,
hardy ancestors to my lush abundant bumps.

Before your big white American teeth
crunch me, think of my long history.
How centuries ago, early farmers in what
we now call Mexico worked to breed,
selectively, the very best parts of me.

Native Americans mythed me into being.
I am sister to squash and beans, I am
Mother corn. I shake my thighs in secret to
birth my maize. Sons and grandsons,
voyeurs, are dismayed, disgusted.

Are you amazed? When you see an ear of corn
looks like a baby wrapped in silk blankets
you might pause. But eventually you’ll see we are always
already cannibals, my dear.

I am Mondawmin, the sky-boy. I came
down to earth, surrendered my fight with Wunzh, was
buried bare and bronze in the earth, sprouted green with
silk-bright hair so hunters could stop
wandering and become farmers.

You eat pure history in my sweet starch.
Butter slides like sweat across the brown ribs
of the tiller of primordial fields.
Time throbs your tooth against the cob.
Alicia, stop girl and bless me!

You eat the creamy flesh of time,
you are connected to the calloused thumb of a
brown woman who seven centuries ago
culled the best and plumpest kernel from the plant
and bred me into being.

Bless the starch, the flesh, the sweet
kin to your own silky meat.

Okay Alicia, your corn is done,
spent cob lays on your plate,
dull remnant of a summer feast
beside the stub of a stale hotdog bun.

Has any other food been used, abused, so vigorously?
Kellogg’s, Karo, your will be done,
but those sly modifiers, those slick scientists
crept into my buttery insides and played with
my genes; those white coats took my soul when they called
their stuff Starlink and hid it in a taco shell.
Fool’s gold it was, fool’s gold.

I love to serve, to submit to your extractions of
sweet, of starch, of ethanol to run your
cars, but don’t mess with my soul.

Alicia, warn your people that I am not
just vegetable. I am woman, mother, sister, boy, god, goddess,
baby. The history of the Americas rests deep,
deep in my kernel.
Get back to basics, girl. Get back to sacred.
Third week of August, ancient tribes
worshipped me, my yellow more precious than gold.

Bless me girl,
Bless the starch, the flesh, the sweet
kin to your own silky meat.
Bless me.