14 Dec People & Their Places
I’m still full from a fun-filled night of Feliz Navidad-ing with the LOL last evening @ member, Vikki and her husband, Louie Drummond’s, fabulous Mexican restaurant, Fernando’s.
“Excellent Food and Great Margaritas”
The margaritas were tangy tasty…the salty tortilla chips served up with homemade guacomole and scrumptious salsa so fresh and warm…the Ladies on Literature–amigos of the book and tequila–so much fun…It’s truly yummy to talk about food and friends, so I’m just going to have to save the details of LOL’s evening of Christmas Cheers! until next day. If you’re keen to hear about “spray on legs”, our collective hatred of hose and one woman’s harrowing experience with stay-ups (demonstration by Gail), tune in to Free-for-all-Friday, coming to a computer near you, December 16th.
The atmosphere is warm and welcoming @ Fernando’s and we are talking about place in literature, so there’s my tie-in.
Last day we discussed how Annabel author, Kathryn Winter so eloquently offers a sense of the remote lure of the Labrador coast. “The village of Croydon Harbour, on the southeast of Labrador coast, has that magnetic earth all Labrador shares. You sense a striation, a pulse, as the land drinks light and emits a vibration.”
“Some know, from birth, that their homeland has a respiratory system, that it pulls energy from rock and mountain and water and gravitational activity beyond earth, and that it breathes energy in return. And others don’t know it.”
But just as beautifully and so poignantly Winters describes the sites and smells of Jacinta’s home city, St. John’s:
“When you came out of the Majestic and walked down Henry Street–one of the steep, friendly hills of St. John’s that open out onto Duckworth and onto the steps that lead to Water Street and the harbour, filled with trawlers and cargo boats and sailboats and men stacking pallets of melons and crates of wine–the city looked like a place where dreams would come true. You smelled fresh tar that workers were rolling onto the roof of Bowring’s, and smoke from the wine-dipped cigar of a man on his way to the lawyers’ office, and the faint sweetness of melons that had fallen and smacked open on the ground near the boats, and the perfume from a woman who had just disappeared around the corner…”
Pondering place and how beautifully some writers express our connection to it, brought to mind one of my writing mentors, Luanne Armstrong, MFA–a novelist, freelance writer, editor, and publisher, “deeply interested in writing about place and nature.” I loved Luanne’s ecological autobiography, Blue Valley, in which she asks: 
“How does a lifelong experience of the ecology of a place shape a person?” “In Blue Valley, Luanne Armstrong illustrates and expands our understanding of what it means to belong to a place.” Here’s a link to an excerpt from the book: http://ccfi.educ.ubc.ca/publication/insights/v07n02/contextualexplorations/armstrong/index.html
“Luanne is presently working on a book on the ethics of autobiographical writing for Pacific Educational Press as well as a book of essays about environmental ethics. She is an adjunct professor of Creative Writing, teaching online for the University of British Columbia. Currently Luanne lives on her organic heritage farm in the Kootenay region of BC.”
Check out Luanne’s additional work (including her fiction) …and check in with LOL this Friday.
Cheers!