The Wisdom of Winnie the Pooh...by Sheila Claydon

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I often have children in my books and this was especially the case when I wrote Double Fault. The battle for their children, which was at the heart of the story, sometimes made me want to knock Kerry and Pierce's heads together. Yes, I know I invented the characters and wrote the book, but still...that's how it gets you sometimes!

Something else got to me recently. It happened when I was watching a Winnie the Pooh Disney film with my youngest granddaughter. It was the wisdom of children as illustrated by Winnie the Pooh and his friends.

Piglet: “How do you spell ‘love’?”
Pooh: “You don’t spell it…you feel it.” 

Such a simple question and answer, but one that goes right to the heart. And as a writer of contemporary romance, it's a philosophy that features in my books. Fanciful sometimes maybe, but how comforting.

And the pearl of wisdom below must surely be a translation of how Pooh's author, the writer A.A. Milne, felt sometimes when he was sitting in front of a blank page wondering what to write next.

“But it isn’t easy,” said Pooh. “Because Poetry and Hums aren’t things which you get, they’re things which get you. And all you can do is to go where they can find you.” 

And as he said later, when he was standing on the bridge in Hundred Acre Wood:  “Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.” 

And talking of Hundred Acre Wood, I've actually been there. It's part of Ashdown Forest in the county of Sussex in South East England, about 40 miles from London. It dates almost to the Norman Conquest when it became a medieval hunting forest. The monarchy and nobility continued to hunt there well into Tudor times, Henry VIII being the most notable. 

The forest has a rich archaeological heritage with evidence of prehistoric human activity dating back 50,000 years, and it contains Bronze Age, Iron Age and Romano-British remains.

It was also the centre of a nationally important iron industry on two occasions, firstly during the Roman occupation of Britain and then in the Tudor period when England's first blast furnace was built at nearby Newbridge, marking the beginning of Britain's modern iron and steel industry.

In the seventeenth century, however, more than half the forest fell into private hands. The remaing 9.5 square miles were set aside as the common land which still exists today, and it is the largest area with open public access in South East England.

Nowadays, it is more heath than  forest. Nevertheless, ash trees and hazel vie for space in the wooded areas and in Springtime it's carpeted with wild flowers.   It's the sort of magical place that small boys, like Pooh Bear's friend, Christopher Robin, love. A place of adventure, a place that feeds the imagination. 

”We didn't realize we were making memories, we just knew we were having fun,” said Winnie the Pooh to his friends. 

And when his best friend, Piglet, said, “‘We’ll be Friends Forever, won’t we, Pooh?’ 

‘Even longer,’ Pooh answered.” 

He even understood the need to talk things through with a friend when life gets tough.“You can’t stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.” 

“When you are a Bear of Very Little brain, and you Think Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.” 

The wisdom of Winnie the Pooh, aka A.A. Milne and the young Christopher Robin could, and did, fill books. And they made Pooh and his friends famous. So famous that many years later Walt Disney made some of them into films that captivated new generations of children (and their parents and grandparents). It wasn't all honey though, even though Pooh Bear considered honey (hunny) to be the cure for everything. For many years the real Christopher Robin hated the celebrity he had thrust upon him. He was teased at school and, in later life, felt he didn't live up to his Father's expectations. He was also estranged from his mother. But Pooh even has an answer for all of that, an answer that Christopher Robin seemed to acknowledge in his own memoir The Enchanted Places, which he wrote in 1974, and which is the basis of the latest magical film Goodbye Christopher Robin.

“You’re braver than you believe and stronger and smarter than you think.”

Or if, like Pooh, you sometimes look at it another way...

”The nicest thing about the rain is that it always stops. Eventually.” 

So there was even angst behind the magic of Winnie the Pooh, as there is angst in everyone's life to a greater or lesser degree. But pick one of Winnie the Pooh's snippets of wisdom and somehow nothing seems quite so bad. 

”I must go forward where I have never been instead of backwards where I have.” – Winnie the Pooh 

    

The Bay of Fundy by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

http://bwlpublishing.ca/authors/donaldson-yarmey-joan

I started my writing career as a travel writer, researching and writing seven travel books about the attractions, sites, and history along the backroads of Alberta, British Columbia, the Yukon, and Alaska. While working on them I realized what a beautiful country I live in. Since then I have switched to writing fiction but I still love to travel. 2017 was Canada’s 150^th birthday and to celebrate it my husband, Mike, and I travelled in a motorhome from our home on Vancouver Island on the Pacific Ocean to Newfoundland on the Atlantic Ocean. The round trip took us nine weeks and we were only able to see about half of the sites and attractions along the roads.

Today I’d like to describe our stop at the Bay of Fundy situated between the provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. The Bay has the highest tides in the world and was formally designated one of North America’s seven wonders of nature in February, 2014. (The others are Niagara Falls, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone National Park, Mount McKinley, the Everglades, and Yosemite National Park).

 

 

 

 

 

       From Moncton, NB, we drove south on Route 114 to Hopewell Cape and the Hopewell Rocks arriving in the afternoon. It was low tide so after we paid, Mike accepted the cart ride offered while I decided to walk the trail to the Rocks. I arrived at a viewpoint overlooking the ocean floor and the reddish rock structures.  Mike and I took the stairway down to the floor and wandered out among the tall formations. The ground was surprisingly solid with a few muddy areas.

       The Hopewell Rocks were originally a massive mountain range that was older than the Appalachians and bigger than the Rocky Mountains in Canada. Over millions of years the range wore down and after the retreat of the glaciers during the last ice age, water seeping through cracks in the cliffs eroded the sedimentary and sandstone and separated the Rocks from the cliffs. The incoming and outgoing tides have eroded the base of the rocks at a faster rate than the tops and that has caused their unusual shapes. Those shapes and the vegetation growing on top have given the formations their nickname of the Flower Pot Rocks.

 

 

 

       Due to the tides the Rocks are covered in water twice a day. Some visitors are able to see the high and low tides in one day but since the next high tide would be at night, Mike and I found a place to camp and returned to the Rocks the next morning. There is approximately six hours between low and high tide and the entrance fee covers a return visit to enable visitors to see the Rocks during both tides.

       Again, Mike took his ride and I walked. I reached the viewpoint and the change was astonishing. Just the tops of some of the rocks showed, the rest being under water. The tides can reach a height of 16 metres (52ft), which is as high as a four story building, twice a day. I walked down part of the stairs but the rest was blocked off to the public because they were under water. High tide is a good time to take a kayak tour and three kayakers were paddling around the formations.

 

 

       Seeing all the water and the partial formations, it was hard to believe that just the day before I had walked on the floor of the bay. It was an amazing experience.

Launching a Novel

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On March 26th I hosted a book launch for my new novel, To Catch a Fox. For the venue, I chose Owl's Nest Books in Calgary because I'd held launches there for my two previous novels and I love this independent bookstore which is so supportive of local writers. You'd think launches would be old hat for me the third time around, but I always find something new to worry about. This time, in addition to reading and answering questions, I tried out a power point presentation using a system borrowed from a friend. At the last minute, I decided to rent a microphone and am glad I did. It was easier to use than I'd expected. Close to 85 people attended the launch and those at the back would have had a hard time hearing my voice, especially after it was strained from 40 minutes of talking.

My friend advised me to make my book cover the first slide, for people to watch during the introductions  

For my talk, I wanted an upbeat mood despite the novel's dark material. So I chose a travel photo theme and showed pictures from my two holidays in Southern California to research potential settings for To Catch a Fox. I found I didn't need notes, since each slide prompted me about what to say next. My idea was to give a sense of how I worked my own travels into the story and make the settings feel more real for readers when they later encountered them in the book.

This woman conveniently photo-bombed my picture of the Santa Monica boardwalk. Julie, my protagonist, jogs along this same boardwalk.  

Initially, I planned to save my readings from the novel to the end of the presentation. Then I realized it would be more interesting for listeners to look at a picture where the scene takes place. So I paused part-way through my talk for my first reading. I was afraid this might break the flow, but it served as a transition between my first and second research holidays.

Julie questions a clerk in this bike shop at the Santa Monica Pier. Like my husband Will and me, Julie and her sidekick Delilah rent bikes and ride on the boardwalk. Their purpose is to question more bike shop owners, who might have known Julie's mother in the 1980s. Will and I simply rode for fun. 

As a non-techy person, I had to make three trips to my friend's house to get the presentation working properly. My friend's favourite part of the program was the cheesy apartment that Will and I rented for our first California trip. Julie and Delilah stay in this same place. Another friend who has started reading To Catch a Fox told me she'd have thought I was exaggerating the racy décor if she hadn't seen the slide show.

The boudoir, where Julie slept. Delilah slept in the sofa bed in the cluttered living room.  

I started writing To Catch a Fox when I got home from the first trip. After two drafts, I felt confident of my Los Angeles area details, but wanted to get a better feel for the novel's primary setting -- a fantasy retreat. All I had was a vague sense that it was about a two hour drive east of Los Angeles. When my sister-in-law suggested we join her on a cruise from San Diego, Will and I tacked on a road trip to the California interior. Our explorations wound up locating my New Dawn Retreat farther south than I'd thought, in a sparsely populated orange growing belt. We began the drive with a stop at the California Citrus State Historic Park and bought a bag of oranges. They were delicious.

This landscape below is the closest I could get to my imagined retreat. The New Dawn Retreat in my story features a broad lawn enclosed by hills, with citrus and olive cultivation on the hillsides.  

For my second reading, I chose a scene set at the New Dawn Retreat.


The presentation wrapped up with questions and door prizes, which included an Owl's Nest gift card as my thanks to the bookstore, a recently published chapbook of one of my short stories and, most exciting of all, bottles of Dawn dish detergent.   

What I find most fun about book launches is seeing people from different areas of my life gathered together in one place. Friends, family, my fellow hiking and book club members, writer acquaintances, readers who've enjoyed my previous novels. I don't get a chance to talk to them all, but it's wonderful to see their supportive faces in the audience and to touch base briefly with a few.

And now, what will I do for my next launch? First I'll have to write the book.