Tricia Snell, Writer

Instructions to self:

- Take heart
- Have a shower
- Take the dog out for a second walk
- Pick up the garbage you saw on the path
- Say hello to your neighbours
- Review all you’re grateful for
- Seek out wise counsel
- Write to friends
- Work / create something
- Donate something
- Go to a movie with two good friends and eat popcorn

🪭 Thinking about Amy Lowell’s spectacular TOWNS IN COLOUR (excerpts here; full poem in link):

“The row of white, sparkling shop fronts is gashed and bleeding, it bleeds red slippers.”
…
“Dropping on the white counter like horn notes
Through a web of violins,
The flat yellow lights of oranges,
The cube-red splashes of apples,
In high plated épergnes.”
…
“Within the gold square of the proscenium arch,
A curtain of orange velvet hangs in stiff folds,
Its tassels jarring slightly when someone crosses the stage behind.
…
Little knife-stabs of gold
Shine out whenever a box door is opened.”
…
“Cross-hatchings of rain against grey walls,
Slant lines of black rain
In front of the up and down, wet stone sides of buildings.
Below,
Greasy, shiny, black, horizontal,
The street.”
…
“Fish.
Blue shadows against silver-saffron water,
The light rippling over them
In steel-bright tremors.”

Towns in Colour I Red Slippers Red slippers in a shop-window, and outside in the street, flaws of grey, windy sleet! Behind the polished glass, the slippers hang in long threads of red, festooning from the ceiling like stalactites of blood, flooding the eyes of passers-by with dripping colour, jamming their…

Here are few glimpses inside my hot-off-the-handbinding-table fiction chapbook, NELLIE (Little Books Collective, 2024). For more info including how to get a copy, see my web site link in bio. 📙

Here are few glimpses inside my poetry chapbook, ROOTED (Little Books Collective, 2023). For more info, see my web site link in bio. 📙

I’m inspired by my neighbour’s ginkgo tree … scooping leaves from the ground this morning.

My new fiction chapbook, NELLIE: An Imagined History, is now available for order online, as is my poetry chapbook from last year, ROOTED. You can find information here:

Shop - Tricia Snell books for sale

I'm leading a workshop at BOOKTOBERFEST in Halifax tomorrow, 3-3:45pm, and would love to see you. Details below. While preregistration is sold out, I hear that about five "walk-ins" can join in. We're going to have some magical fun, starting off with making up an on-the-spot poem, then reading deeply, then talking about the magic of revision with the help of writerly friends and groups.

Magic for Writers: Giving (& Receiving) Powerful Feedback in Writing Groups If this workshop is sold out, you may join the waitlist by contacting Andy at [email protected] Saturday, October 5, 3pm - 4pm, at Booktoberfest 2024 Writing groups are magic for writers, allowing us to make leaps forward in our thinking and imagining. But how to conjure that magic? This....

Come see NELLIE & me at BOOKTOBERFEST - Halifax Library, this Sat Oct 5, 1-5pm

ECSTATIC OBSERVATION 🍂 WRITING SESSION!

This fall, from Oct 21 to Nov 25 (six weekly Monday meetings via Zoom), I'm running a "Writers Session" focused on:

1/ sharpening your ability to observe and

2/ getting your words onto the page.

See flyer for details. Feel free to get in touch with questions, and please note that to register, email me first. (Cost, $125/Can$ or $100/US$)

Hope to see you!

🍂 “This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.”―Marilynne Robinson, Gilead.

🍂 "Art demands constant observation."―Vincent Van Gogh

🍂 "Observation, not old age, brings wisdom."―Publilius Syrus

I’m very excited that my new chapbook, NELLIE, is here 🥳. And community-based publishing means it’s 24 hands on deck for the twelve of us in this year’s catalogue (of The Little Books Collective, a project of Spot of Poetry). Today and tomorrow, it’s Zen and the art of folding & binding with Berdene Du Toit Owen and Erin Philp’s beautiful, hand-made wooden tools.

I love this…

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To celebrate the first day of autumn, here’s a poem called ‘The Problem of Writing Poems in the Shape of Deciduous Trees’

Nova Scotians, are you going to 📕 Booktoberfest 📕 in Halifax on Saturday Oct 5? The all-day event features a slew of Nova Scotian writers and publishers… it will be fun! I’ll be there with my very new chapbook, NELLIE, hot off the press! And I’m leading a 3pm workshop… details below… I would love to see you!

Magic for Writers: Giving (& Receiving) Powerful Feedback in Writing Groups If this workshop is sold out, you may join the waitlist by contacting Andy at [email protected] Saturday, October 5, 3pm - 4pm, at Booktoberfest 2024 Writing groups are magic for writers, allowing us to make leaps forward in our thinking and imagining. But how to conjure that magic? This....

Liverpool, England library, where I did some research lately for a new writing project I’m calling “an imagined history,” loosely based on my grandmother’s younger days. My first four chapters will be published in a chapbook this fall, through the Little Books Collective (Lunenburg NS).

My friend and writer Beverley Shaw has a story in the summer issue of The Fiddlehead (one of the oldest and finest literary magazines in Canada). She is a very fine writer and this is a beautiful publication. Click on the link if you’d like to order it.

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Current Issue | The Fiddlehead No. 300 (Summer Fiction 2024) Posted on July 18, 2024 Order your copy of issue 300 today! Canadian Addresses International Addresses Click on the highlighted links to get a sense of what issue 300 has to offer! Introductions 6 Sue Sinclair: Celebrating our 300th Issue 7 Mark Anthony Jarman: Panic Al...

Visiting Tintern Abbey, and in awe. Amazing to imagine walking the same ground that William Wordsworth did.
. .
Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour.

July 13, 1798

BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.—Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.

These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

If this
Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft—
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart—
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!

And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The picture of the mind revives again:
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years. And so I dare to hope,
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all.—I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.—That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompense. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.—And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.

Nor perchance,
If I were not thus taught, should I the more
Suffer my genial spirits to decay:
For thou art with me here upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once,
My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary in*******se of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain-winds be free
To blow against thee: and, in after years,
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,
And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance—
If I should be where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence—wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream
We stood together; and that I, so long
A worshipper of Nature, hither came
Unwearied in that service: rather say
With warmer love—oh! with far deeper zeal
Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!

After I get back from Ireland and the UK, I am looking forward to jumping back into music. Our Trillium Trio Nova Scotia is playing at Betty’s at the Kitch in Mahone Bay every Thursday evening this summer— that's Beverley Shaw on fiddle, Liam Britten on guitar, me on flute/whistle, and Leigh Wood joining us on bodhran … While I won’t be back til July, my musical comrades are starting this Thursday. Drop by and say hello! 🎶🍷🍕☘️🎻🪈🎸🥁

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Hello folks, come catch Trillium at Betty's at the Kitch https://www.facebook.com/bettysatthekitchns/ every Thursday evening this summer during their weekly lobster dinners. For the first two weeks we are without our lovely flute player, Tricia Snell, while she is away in Ireland, but will be supported by some excellent bodhran playing by Jody Conrad. Thanks once again, Dave Clingan, for this beautiful poster. Hope to see you there!

Woke up to a review of my chapbook of poems, ROOTED, in the Miramichi Reader (and much-deserved praise of Berdene Owen’s beautiful book-design, too). This is the second review of a Little Books Collective chapbook (first was of Logan Kennedy’s GROPING IN THE DAYLIGHT, also poems—check her Fbook page for it). I am so fortunate to be in the company of the Little Books Collective… See the first year of the Collective’s books at https://spotofpoetry.com/little-books-collective/ )

Rooted: poems by Tricia Snell How not to judge a book by its cover when production values of Spot of Poetry are so high? Heavy, cream, textured cover stock with French flaps and full colour and inside-cover graphics, designed by Berdene Owen.

I loved visiting the Museum of Literature, or MoLI (in Dublin, Ireland). Artifacts, recordings, film, reading area with books to peruse, interactive exhibits, a bookstore. Highlighting Joyce of course, Yeats, Beckett, Shaw, Heaney, as well as many women who didn’t get the attention their male counterparts did, such as Katherine Tynan, Eilis Ni Dhuibhne, Mary Lavin, Elizabeth Bowen, Maeve Brennan. Many more. Maeve Binchy was also well represented at the museum. And younger generations of writers I have yet to know.

Out behind the museum is a beautiful little garden containing a sculpture of writer and Cardinal John Henry Newman. If you look closely to left and above his head, you’ll see a chandelier hanging in the neighbours’ garden among the trees. A detail that has nothing to do with the museum, but still, a happy detail!

It strikes me that bookshops are international embassies for writers and readers… Here’s a nice one, The Winding Stair, in Dublin, just along the north side of the River Liffey. I have to be careful not to acquire books that will put my luggage overweight, but I can study the shelves and breathe in the ambience 📚☺️.

I couldn’t resist posting my music event on my writing page. Please come! ☺️🍃

Presenting a mix of Celtic, Classical, & Original music, with several sparkling young musician guests joining us! At-will donation (whatever you are able) at the door, 50 % of which goes to Spark!, a new bursary fund for youth arts education activities.

Hope to see you at: St. James Anglican Church (the yellow church!), 65 Edgewater, Mahone Bay

I have all of John Brehm's books in this series, and they are stellar. There's nothing like them anywhere in their high quality choices of poems, and their combined gravitas and joy. I refer to them regularly, and use them constantly in my teaching. I also have all of John Brehm's poetry books. Recommended with great love and appreciation!

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Poetry of Grief, Gratitude, and Reverence Poetry of Grief, Gratitude, and Reverence

Alice Munro…Queen of what I think of as the M’s, the writers I read through adolescence and beyond, and continue to read—Munro, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence, Mavis Gallant, Bharati Mukherjee, Marian Engle. It is hard to articulate what Munro has meant to me without sounding like I’m trying to claim some kind of special relationship for myself… she has been loved and heralded by the world, not just little me. But that’s part of her genius. She creates intensely private worlds, and it feels like she is letting you in as a trusted, intimate friend.

Here’s an article from the Globe & Mail (which I copied in here since in Canada you can’t share newspaper links). Thanks to SANDRA MARTIN for this May 14th article, “Tributes to Alice Munro pour in from across the literary community.”

The Canadian literary community is mourning the death of Alice Munro, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013 and the Man Booker International Prize in 2009.

A friend to many in the writing community, and beloved by countless readers of all ages, Ms. Munro died on Monday in a care home in Port Hope, Ont. She was 92 and had been living with dementia for a decade.

Her family, who confirmed her death to The Globe and Mail on Tuesday morning, has asked for privacy as they gather to mourn their mother and grandmother and to make funeral arrangements.

“We are all wordless,” Michael Ondaatje, himself the author of many prizewinning novels, including the Man Booker and the Giller Prize, wrote in a one sentence e-mail Tuesday, capturing the mood succinctly of both grieving readers and writers.

Margaret Atwood, herself no slouch when it comes to literary accolades, had a long-standing and often jokey relationship with Ms. Munro, which included shared anecdotes about fans mistaking one of them for the other.

In a brief interview about her friend, Ms. Atwood cheerily recounted incidents where she had been congratulated on winning the Nobel Prize, an award for which she is regularly nominated in her own right. On a more serious level, Ms. Atwood has shown her appreciation in several essays, including her introduction to Alice Munro’s Best: Selected Stories. Quite simply, Ms. Atwood asserted that “Alice Munro is among the major writers of English fiction of our time.”

As her long-time friend, novelist Jane Urquhart said in an interview: “Alice had a genuine gift for intimacy and friendship, especially because of her enthralling conversational skills.”

As a writer, Ms. Munro could pack more insight, nuance and suspense into a few pages than many others could cram into a novel.

Ms. Urquhart said Ms. Munro “was so intensely interested in her fellow human beings. Understanding them was her life’s work.”

As a writer, Ms. Munro could pack more insight, nuance and suspense into a few pages than many others could cram into a novel. “She was one of the great writers of the short-story form in the world today,” said David Staines, a literature professor and the former general editor of the New Canadian Library who knew her for more than 40 years as a friend and colleague.

He said he had invited her to be on the jury of the inaugural Giller Prize, an award she would subsequently win twice during her lengthy career.

“In her life, she evidenced the beauty of the word,” Prof. Staines said in an interview. Asked how she compared with other short-story icons, such as Anton Chekhov and William Trevor, he said, “She will outlast her times, as they did theirs.”

Her death drew tributes from the political arena, too. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called Ms. Munro a “true literary genius” whose gift for writing will be an inspiration for generations. “Alice Munro was one of the world’s greatest storytellers,” Mr. Trudeau said in a statement. “Her short stories about life, friendship, and human connection left an indelible mark on readers. A proud Canadian, she leaves behind a remarkable legacy.”

Miriam Toews, who has written seven bestselling novels, recalls a visit with Ms. Munro that shed light on her writing process. “Eight or nine years ago Rebecca Garrett, Alice’s goddaughter, and I were invited over to Alice Munro’s house for lunch. We brought Alice’s favourite things: Pinot Grigio, sushi and chocolate.”

Ms. Munro told them that her daily writing time was “a sacred thing,” and showed them where she sat every day, at the same time, for an hour or two, and wrote or didn’t write. “I love to imagine Alice Munro not budging from her writing desk, holding the line, and stubbornly and silently honouring that space and that time and that life, her writing life,” Ms. Toews said.

Ms. Munro spoke the intimate and often fractious language of mother-daughter relationships beginning with Dance of the Happy Shades, her first collection of short stories. It won the Governor General’s Literary Award for English-language fiction, the first of three Governor General’s Awards she received over the course of 14 bestselling collections.

Heather O’Neill, a Montreal novelist, poet and short-story writer, said, “I have been reading Alice Munro my whole life. She has meant different things to me at different times. No one has written about the loneliness and nakedness and sheer delight of being a woman in the way Munro has. She taught me to accept my own story, and that no matter what, a woman’s desire to be free is irrepressible.”

As Ms. Munro aged, so did her perspective on life and love in stories that became increasingly sophisticated but always accessible to her legions of fans, who read and reread her fiction for insights into their own lives and loves.

“Alice Munro is one of the four or five greatest fiction writers in English literature, ever,” said Adrienne Clarkson, Canada’s 26th governor-general. “The way she wrote, with deceptive clarity, was so extraordinary. It was a way she could catch your heart.

“There is a story of hers, Amundsen, which was originally published in The New Yorker in 2012. It’s a about a troubled female-male relationship, which she always handled so well. There is one paragraph I kept reading and rereading. The man takes her to a town and they are looking for parking outside a hardware store. Somehow in the description of the parking, you know their love affair is over. When you read every word of it, it does not say that. But you know.”

Measha Brueggergosman, the operatic soprano who championed Ms. Munro’s The Love of a Good Woman for CBC’s Canada Reads competition in 2004, said she “adored her – so humble, so gracious.”

Ms. Munro was the recipient of three Governor General’s Awards over the course of 14 bestselling collections.

Ms. Brueggergosman remembered going over to Ms. Munro at the televised Giller Prize ceremony in 2004, and sitting with her during the commercial break between dinner courses. “I handed her my lip gloss and said, ‘Here. Put this on, because you’re about to win.’ And, of course, she did win, for Runaway, her second Giller Prize. It’s heartbreaking to think she’ll never write another story, but we cling to and are forever inspired and challenged by the ones she allowed us to devour.”

Her long-time Canadian publisher Douglas Gibson met Ms. Munro in London, Ont., “way back” in 1974 when she had published three books at that point. “I could see that they were so good that her career was just going like a rocket, but everyone was telling her to stop writing short stories and to write novels. So, I said, ‘Alice, if everyone is telling you to stop writing short stories, they’re all wrong. You’re a great short-story writer. I’m a publisher. And if you’re to spend the rest of your career writing short stories, I’d be delighted to publish them. And I’ll never ever ask you for a novel.’”

Since then, they published 12 collections of short stories together, according to Mr. Gibson. “And with the Nobel Prize for Literature going to Alice in 2013, I guess you could say that it worked out not too badly.”

With reports from Marsha Lederman and Brad Wheeler

The end… 💔

Alice Munro, Canadian literary titan, dead at 92 | CBC News Alice Munro, the Canadian author who won the Nobel Prize in Literature and was acclaimed for blending ordinary lives with extraordinary themes, has died at the age of 92.

Lorna Crozier: Friend. Teacher. Fashionista. Generous donor. Brave innovator. Morning speed walker. Gentle mentor. Poet extraordinaire.

Lorna has been coming to Wintergreen Studios for well over a decade. As one of our very first workshop leaders, her inspiring teaching and larger-than-life personality have attracted participants from down the road and from across Canada. Year after year, in every season (even once in the winter when the snow was so high, we were snowed in for days), poets line up to learn. People learn from Lorna about writing poetry, to be sure, but they also learn deep truths about themselves, their place in relation to others, and their place in the web of life. The variety of projects that Lorna has been involved with at Wintergreen is staggering. In addition to annual workshops, there have been collaborations with other artists, including the splendid book The House the Spirit Builds, featuring Lorna’s poems and the photographs of Peter Coffman and Diane Laundy. Lorna’s online course through Wintergreen’s Virtual Learning Centre brings poetry to participants who would not otherwise be able to take part in Lorna’s workshops. So many lives have been enriched by her kindness and wisdom (to say nothing of her singularly awesome wardrobe. I mean, those red boots…).