When Sarah and I lived in Guelph, Ontario, we enjoyed walks from our house on Kirkland Street to the Bookshelf downtown, over at the Ignatius Jesuit Centre in the north end of town(where I had a writing studio), and at the Arboretum at the University of Guelph.

At the Arboretum, it was the David G. Porter Memorial Japanese Garden that particularly intrigued me. The garden was dedicated to past Ontario Veterinary College professor David G. Porter by his wife, Mrs. Bobbi Porter, in June 1995. It was inspired by the Zen gardens that the Porters visited during their trip to Japan in 1993. However, because many of the plants that grow in Japan will not grow in the southern Ontario climate, this garden utilizes other alternatives.

The flowers and trees in the Japanese garden include Lawrence Wisteria, Euonymus, Japanese Quince, Merrill Star Magnolia, Aromatic Sumac, Weeping Japanese Cherry, Scots Pine, Dwarf Japanese Yew, and a Katsura Tree.

Landscape architect Christopher Campbell designed the Japanese garden as “the Great within the Small.”

The elements of the traditional Japanese garden inspired me to think of the steps in one’s own tea house or writing practice. Although I haven’t visited the garden in many years, I like to remind myself, and others, of an intentional and nourished approach to one’s writing practice.

The pathway to the tea house could be a reminder to make an appointment with yourself to write in your journal or to continue with a project you’ve been meaning to get back to.

The salutation gateway is a chance to create your own writing ceremony: your own tea house practice. At the gateway, you are on a threshold of leaving your usual routines behind.

Clear a space for yourself at the table as a way to begin, like going into the stillness of the garden.

The Japanese garden is a contemplative garden. How do you practice silence? What will you hear in the silence?

In the Japanese garden, we are to stay on the stepping stones, a path that is both artistic and practical. You can design your own writing path.

A stone bridge crosses a reflecting pool. The water represents a simple lake with a rocky island. Confucius once said that “the wise find pleasure in water.” 

I am a floating reed,
waiting an invitation from the water.

Ono no Komachi, 9th century Japanese poet
(translated by Jane Hirshfield)

The Kenninji-Gaki bamboo fence is simple in design and provides a rhythmic balance of horizonal and vertical lines to help block out the world and its confusions.

Think about how you will protect your writing time away from the busyness and distractions of every day.

Ask yourself, what do I have to let go of to create more time for writing?

In the Japanese garden, the spirit rocks may represent mountains or rocky outcropppings. Spirt rocks could be your stories, your own inner wisdom.

The small tea house represents a small building in a tea garden designed to hold a tea ceremony called cha-no-yu. As an invited guest, you would wait on the bench until summoned by the host. Sitting on the bench, you could take in the surrounding garden such as the dry garden of gravel representing a body of water with three islands. The pattern of raked gravel mirrors the rippling water in the pool.

The host, or tea master,  would enter the tea house and make the tea in front of the guests, slowly and gracefully, simple and direct.

A Zen monk named Shuko (1423-1502) designed the tea ceremony to include four cardinal rules:

Urbanity – be elegant and refined;
Courtesy – be polite and considerate;
Imperturbability – be calm; and
Purity – be free from physical or moral pollution.

The atmosphere is meant to allow guests to attain serenity and harmony of spirit. The guests then focus on a certain topic such as a painting, a flower arrangement, or an art object to try to better understand it.

Some steps to think about in designing your own tea house ceremony, a soul-nurturing writing practice that is your very own.

There are more steps, prompts and questions in my downloadable workbook called Journaling as a Spiritual Practice: Your Own Tea House Practice available from the International Association for Journal Writing (iajw.org).

Here’s where you can purchase:
https://iajw.org/journal-writing-products/journaling-spiritual-practice-tea-house-practice/

The motto for the Writing Life circles I facilitate is: Nourish Yourself. Honour Your Voice. Write Your Stories.

“Nourish” is the word sitting with me these days as I’m considering rest as an essential part of the nourishment in one’s writing life. A prose poem I drafted a few weeks ago begins:

Monday, under a mackerel sky, and “nourish” is the word that comes to mind as I plot the week
ahead, etch reminders in my calendar, defy the rusted old list of ragged thoughts and mangy tasks
to embrace (rather than pine for) a spiral of divine dailiness, ongoing repair, make notes in a binder
of archetypes like nomad and gypsy – yes, the scratch of a pen rather than the click of a key or a
distracting arrow on a back-lit screen. My sanctuary is a womb of comfort, sunlit and magical, while
I embrace full-bodied thoughts of the ancient, a kinder earth-based society, vibrant and festive as well as
mysterious with an embracing shroud of memory . . . 

.An earlier writing circle motto when I began the circles almost thirty years ago was: Be seen. Be heard. Be amazed at what comes out of the stillness.

Stillness is one way to nourish ourselves. Not that the ideas stop, in fact, it’s an ideal time to have them percolate; a time to be open to new possibilities. Rather than jump on those ideas though, I’m finding it just fine to let them accumulate.

As creativity coach Eric Maisel writes: “Creative life demands more than endurance; it requires rhythms of stillness, reflection, and retreat. Artists who honor these rhythms recognize that the right to pause is not indulgent – it is essential.”

And yet I’m typing here and posting a blog! This writing began in my journal and has evolved over a number of days as I contemplate the need for rest and renewal. The natural world tries to teach us that all the time.

In a recent substack, Eric Maisel refers to a writer in Buenos Aires who took a year off and “let writing happen only when it wanted to.” That’s what I’ve been doing lately since back pain had me leaning against heat for most of several days. It’s best to take breaks before that happens.

I’m remembering Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way in which one of the six weeks of her course is meant to include “reading deprivation.” We have many more distractions these days than when Julia wrote her groundbreaking book on creative recovery. A break from all sorts of stimuli is a good rest for the nervous system. As Eric says: “Refusing to honor cycles of pause is to deny the rhythms of human creativity itself.”

Several years ago, when I also felt weary from a lot of outward-going energy, I attended a day-long workshop with David Whyte at Royal Roads University in Victoria, B.C.

During the workshop, called “What to Remember When Waking,” David said: “A good sense of rest is going to put you in touch with the world again.”

“Deep rest is deeply transformative,” David said that day. “Rest isn’t a non-doing but an intentionality.”

“Rest is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be,” David writes in Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.

“We are rested when we let things alone and let ourselves alone, to do what we do best, breathe as the body intended us to breathe, to walk as we were meant to walk, to live with the rhythm of a house and a home, giving and taking through cooking and cleaning. When we give and take in an easy foundational way we are closest to the authentic self, and closest to that self when we are most rested.”

Let’s take some rest as nourishment. That could mean saying “no” to some party invitations too as tempting as they are. Sometimes a one-to-one connection with someone or time spent quietly on your own, can be the best nourishment of all.

Last summer I was very enthused about Debbie Marshall’s art installation called ‘My Name is Margaret” at the Ladysmith Art Gallery (in Ladysmith, B.C.). Now I get to be enthused all over again as there’s another opportunity to see Debbie’s show in Courtenay, B.C. at Artful: The Gallery. (The dates, August 5 to 22, 2026, specific times and events are on the gallery’s website which I’ve included below.)

Debbie has been a journalist and for several years worked on projects highlighting the work of women during wartime. She is the author of two non-fiction books: Give Your Other Vote to the Sister: A Woman’s Journey into The Great War and Firing Lines: Three Women Write the First World War.

When it came to her latest work, “My Name is Margaret,” Debbie explored wartime trauma, mental illness and recovery with mental health being a major theme running through the displays. What makes this project different from Debbie’s nonfiction books is that from her research into the impact of war on women’s mental and emotional health, Debbie created Margaret’s life. Yes, Margaret is a fictional character, a composite of many women in postwar Britain.

If you live on Vancouver Island or are visiting, you have a chance to see Debbie Marshall’s show with an opportunity to meet Debbie at the launch party on Saturday, August 8 from 7 to 9 pm. She’ll be giving an artist talk on Saturday, August 22 at 2 p.m. All events are free.

Do have a look at Artful: The Gallery’s website where you’ll find a video of the installation as well as one that is an interview with Debbie: https://www.artfulthegallery.com/

I didn’t know about “fictive art” and “hidden histories through objects” as Debbie Marshall says of her immersive art installation, and others that combine the inherited and the invented as I refer to nonfiction and fiction. This is a whole new realm to explore.

Antoinette LaFarge who wrote Sting in the Tale: Art, Hoax & Provocation, says: “I define fictive art as fictions that their makers attempt to secure as real and true by producing all kinds of visual evidence in support of the project’s factuality. That evidence could be ‘historical’ photographs or memorabilia or actual artworks ‘created’ by an invented artist.”

Debbie Marshall has collected household objects, clothing, uniforms, and medical records belonging to the fictional character of Margaret. Debbie has even written Margaret’s diary.

Rather than a prank or a hoax which are usually humorous and “short-lived actions” as Antoinette LaFarge describes them, “Fictive art projects tend to live longer in the shadows and are much more rarely targeted to embarrass someone. There is likewise a much stronger commitment to developing a rich and expansive central fiction and letting it evolve over time.”

The four pillars of fictive art according to Lafarge are: First, fictive art is visual art in any medium; second, it has a strong central fiction narrative; third, the project purports to be factual, not fictional; and fourth, the art objects and texts serve an “evidentiary purpose.”

The “intersection and interaction between the central fiction and the visual materiality is really crucial and so I don’t centre the literary in the way I talk about this work,” Lafarge said in an interview.

Just think about what fun you can now imagine while browsing in thrift shops or looking in the back of your cupboards to gather items for your own story. As Debbie Marshall did, you can even make that gathering a fictional part of the story. I do hope you can see her show!

Remember the vision boards we used to make? People, I expect, still create vision boards to dream about an imagined future. Often those images are cut out of magazines and are specific so as to draw what one desires into their life.

I remember doing vision boards that included places such as retreat centres where I thought I’d like to offer writing circles. I realized at some point that actually, I’d like to stay closer to home.

For several years, I haven’t been going for specifics in creating a collage; I go for what has energy for me. I did that when Sarah and I were looking for a new place to live four years ago and it worked out very well. The images I was drawn to included trees, flowers, comfortable chairs for two, and not intentionally, a small bear in the corner. All of those aspects are part of the home we now live in, including the bear although we didn’t see him this spring! 

I’ve done collages for writing projects too to see what the collage has to tell me – again, choosing images that I’m drawn to.

In her book Writing Creativity and Soul, Sue Monk Kidd says she has created a collage to illuminate a fictional story. “Of course, it wasn’t just the pictures that were reverberating for me. The archetypes, memories, and emotions behind them hooked my attention and conspired with the storyteller inside who was gathering material.”

My interest in archetypes began a long time ago probably while reading portions of the work of Carl Jung. I’m fascinated by The Wild Unknown Archetypes, a card deck by Kimi Krans, and The Archeo, Personal Archetype Cards by Nick Bantock.

It was Nick Bantock’s deck and book that got me going on my own personal archetype cards. Some of the collages I did for the fun of it, or with an intention such as “My Writing Life,” became personal archetype cards. The collages came first and then the archetype I assigned to them. Among the cards are: Writer, Napper, Daydreamer, Note Taker, Interbeing, Memoirist, Collager. There are many more to come!

I reduced the collages in order to put them on cardstock to create the cards. I wrote about each listing the symbols and then a short description. You’ll see them in the photo above.

On the back, Napper says: Symbols: a woman with blue hair, suspended, a gift with ribbon, flowers, a tea cup, a feather in an inkwell, very thick books, words of Frank Ostaseski from “The Art of Caring.”
The description reads: My bedroom is like being at a cottage, a fresh spring breeze through the window from the forest behind. I read a bit before I doze and then dream as if suspended in the middle of my day. A feather lands on the outside sill. I bring it in to an ink bottle, scratch some words in the very thick books of my life. Afterwards, a cup of tea – this whole life practice, a gift of multi-layers.

One of my personal archetype cards is Collager. My description says: A collage offers hints of things, curiosity: What’s hidden? What’s underneath? There are blanks to be filled, or not. Sentences without beginnings or ends. From the images I chose, what do they have to tell me? There’s more to the story than meets the eye.

Exploring your personal archetypes is a wonderful way to celebrate and honour all aspects of yourself.

I find it intriguing and inspiring to see what others have done with collage. Diane Schoemperlen, a writer who lives in Kingston, Ontario, is a great collager. In her introduction to By the Book: Stories and Pictures (Biblioasis, 2014), Diane says: “Collage is the most accommodating and unpredictable art form, an often playful arrangement of visual fragments that produces a final collective image that is always much more than the sum of its parts.”

Diane’s book is made up of seven stories “based in various ways on old texts from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the tradition of the objet trouvé, especially found poetry, these stories take the form of a found narrative: an imagined, expanded, and embroidered rearrangement of the original material.”

The collages were constructed the traditional way, cutting and pasting with “real paper, real scissors, and real glue. This tactile experience was a vital part of the creative process that could not have been achieved by manipulating the images and text digitally.”

It’s that “tactile experience” that is most intriguing to me.

By the Book is a fascinating construction “or a deconstruction or a reconstruction (or maybe all three)” as Diane says. She refers to Octavio Paz who wrote in one of his volumes of essays (Alternating Current), about “the contrapuntal unity” of “fragments connecting, reflecting, and deflecting in variable relation to each other. The creative possibilities offered by this intersection of the written word and the visual images are unlimited, the juxtaposition of these two elements producing frequently starting exploration of connection and disconnection, resonance and dissonance, collision and collaboration.”

Such collisions and collaborations are fun with cut-out words from magazines to create collage poems. Also, using the lines of other poets found in literary journals or books of poetry can create a collaborative poem called a cento.

Eve Joseph in the introduction to her book of poetry called Dismantling (Anvil Press, 2026), half of which is made up of centos, says of the form that it “collapses boundaries between the living and the dead and allows for unexpected alliances and conversations.”

Eve wrote her centos in the form of prose poetry which she sees as a “collision.” “I am drawn to the energy of this impact and to the possibility of creating something new out of two established genres.” (Those genres are prose and poetry.)

I don’t know if Eve photocopied poems and then cut out lines to play with them physically. It’s something I did with an old copy of The Queen’s Quarterly which included the poetry of several poets.

The background is made up of ripped images from the journal and excerpts from the poetry of several poets are pasted on top. The cento begins with a line from “Happiness” by Ronna Bloom: “My eyes had become overstimulated by the brightness at the window.”

The lines that follow are from poets Michael McCarthy (“Sam Gosling’s Corner”); Claudia Coutu Radmore (‘ma famille francaise, Montreal, 1950s”); Russell Thornton (“A Seder”); Claudia Coutu Radmore from the same poem noted; and Tim Bowling (“Sweet Sixteen”). 

There are examples of such an approach in PoetryXCollage magazine introduced to me by my friend Debbie Marshall.

Volume One of PoetryXCollage features a collage by Rosemary Rae of El Cajon, California. As her bio reads: “Not all language is contained in words. Emotions and dreams are hidden in the shape of color or in a simple composition on a page, just as silence can be found in a strip of paper or an em dash.” Often a collage sparks a poem which is what happened in Rosemary’s collage called “Moon & Swan.” It contains old photos, fabric, pencil, torn book pages and her poem.

Here’s a link to the issue I’m referring to: https://shop.kolajmagazine.com/product/poetry-x-collage-vol-1

I hope you’ll consider gathering some words and images cut out of magazines, flyers, greeting cards, old books and along with a glue stick,and scissors nearby, explore the archetypes, memories, and emotions that can result from images that then inspire the written word. A tactile approach to writing.

Susannah M. Smith’s novel, The Alchemy of Paradise, begins with an epigraph by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche:

What have you truly loved thus far? What has ever uplifted your soul, what has dominated and delighted it at the same time? Assemble these revered objects in a row before you and perhaps they will reveal a law by their nature and their order: the fundamental law of your very self. Compare these objects, see how they complement, enlarge, outdo, transfigure one another; how they form a ladder on whose steps you have been climbing up to yourself so far . . . 

In the prologue to the book, Smith’s narrator, a curator, describes herself as writing a collection of “dream stories” that “slowly became an advent calendar in the shape of a book – a glimpse inside each enclosure revealed a world evoked through the act of writing.”

Smith’s fictional curator lives in contemporary England and wrote The Fairy Tale Museum, which is the title of Smith’s earlier book. (Both books are from Invisible Publishing; Smith lives in Vancouver.)

The Fairy Tale Museum begins with “Instructions for Collectors.” Among the seven instructions is:

Always listen to and follow the thread of what attracts you, what ignites your curiosity. For example, the enchantment of drawers, the nesting of artifacts inside boxes, the joy of the secret wardrobe, the home inside the home inside the home – such delicious pleasures. Your yes is your guiding light.

And this one:

Your collection tells a story. In this collection, you can be anyone you want to be.

In my last blog, I referred to Orhan Pamuk, author of The Museum of Innocence, a novel. Pamuk collected items by looking in secondhand shops and flea markets as well as “the homes of acquaintances who liked to hoard things” for his fictitious family. His collected objects led to the imagining of “situations, moments, and scenes suited to these objects . . . “ (from The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk.) Those collected objects are housed in The Museum of Innocence, Istanbul.

What a fascinating approach to writing fiction. If you have a character already, take them out for a walk to look for treasures. Some lost or discarded objects may be sitting by the roadside or on the sidewalk. Some years ago, I saw a bowl, tarot cards, a new shoe, an old toaster on sidewalks and garden walls while staying in Victoria, B.C.

Gathering items that belonged to your family or thinking about them, will help you write about the people who are the real life characters of your poetry or prose pieces.

What objects could become your memory prompts? “Every collection is a theater of memories, a dramatization and a mise-en-scene of personal and collective pasts, of a remembered childhood and of remembrance after death,” says Philipp Blom, author of To Have and to Hold: An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting as quoted in The Memory Palace, a memoir by Mira Bartok.

Some museums would have started with personal collections of ceramics, shoes, textiles for instance. In Zagreb, Croatia, there’s a museum of lost love with a couple’s collection of their possessions.Leslie Jamison’s essay, “Museum of Broken Hearts,” describes The Museum of Broken Relationships created by Olinka Vistica and Drazen Grubisic who ended their relationship in 2003. They found it difficult to divide their possessions and over a decade later found a home for their permanent exhibition which began as an installation at an art festival.

Jamison was inspired to write descriptions from her own life such as: “Exhibit 6: Paisley Shirt, San Francisco, California. It was sometime in 1967. We bought our paisley shirts from an outdoor rack in Haight-Ashbury. This was in the heady days of our relationship . . . “ (From Make It Scream Make It Burn, essays by Leslie Jamison.)

Poet and memoirist Carolyn Forché didn’t open a museum for visitors but when organizing and sorting through things while at home during Covid, she thought about her “museum of life” as described in her article in The New Yorker.

Here’s an excerpt from her poem “Museum of Stones”:

These are your stones, assembled in matchbox and tin,
collected from roadside, culvert, and viaduct,
battlefield, threshing floor, basilica, abattoir –
stones, loosened by tanks in the streets
from a city whose earliest map was drawn in ink on linen,
schoolyard stones in the hand of a corpse,
pebble from Apollinaire’s oui,
stone of the mind within us
carried from one silence to another . . .

Carolyn Forché, from “Museum of Stones”

One recollection leads me to another – Isabel Huggan’s memoir: Belonging: Home Away from Home. Huggan includes some fiction in her memoir such as “Starting with the Chair” in which the narrator describes objects she carries from place to place as “talismans against my own oblivion.” The writer, Huggan, is very attached to her basket of pretty stones, the bowl of seashells, and the box of letters she takes with her to each new place. She describes them as “silent stories of who you are.”

In her chapter, “Saving Stones, Huggan describes the odds and ends she has collected through the years. She finds them comforting, a way to establish place no matter where she happens to be living. “Emotional furnishings” is how she describes the things as besides their material presence, she is offered memories to prompt her writing. 

One of the instructions for collectors in The Fairy Tale Museum is: “Be ready to let everything go. The collection is meant to be shared. It starts its life with you and then you hand it over to other minds, other imaginations.”

I’m reminded of The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property by Lewis Hyde in which he writes about works of art as gifts rather than commodities. While a work of art can exist in a market economy, it is the “gift economy” that is essential.

The instinct of capitalists going back a very long time has been to “remove property from circulation, to put it in a warehouse or museum (or, more to the point for capitalism, to lay it aside to be used for production)” Tribal peoples “understood a cardinal property of the gift: whatever we have been given is supposed to be given away again, not kept.” When passing along a gift, it’s best if it is given to a third party. “The only essential is this: the gift must always move.”

Susannah M. Smith’s narrator in The Alchemy of Paradise is part of a “family of collectors” and has “loved assembling objects, artworks, and ideas together to draw attention to them.” She asks many questions such as these “worth considering” in the chapter “The Purpose of Art.”

What if life is the Grand Tour?
What if your life in particular is a curiosity cabinet,
and it is your job to collect all the beautiful things?
What if ideas are the root of all things?
What if your ‘work’ is to seek the beautiful ideas
and collect them and revel in them and keep directing
and redirecting your mind and spirit toward
these objects of beauty?

My personal museum once had a collection of dolls from different countries, racks of coffee spoons, mermaids of all sorts, and many rubber stamps. When writing about my collection these days I thought of inherited things, long-lasting things, paper things as well as things that are gone.

Inherited Things
A quilt made of Grandma’s old housedresses,
the cutlery we use every day once belonging to Mum,
one of Dad’s soapstone carvings,
his photo albums.

Long-lasting Things
The desk with its drawers and drop-down leaf where I did homework in my younger years, hid a pack of cigarettes in one of the drawers as a teenager. Mum didn’t seem to care about me smoking. She didn’t like the lie.

There are hidden histories through objects, my friend Debbie Marshall says. I’ll be telling you about Debbie and her work in blogs to come. (Debbie’s business card describes herself as Curator, Museum of Feminist Artchives.)

“Your objects are quietly telling your story,” says Donna Watson who offers art courses through Take Two, online.

I can imagine assembling “revered objects in a row” as Nietzsche advised. Think of the story you can tell as you look at and hold each thing. Rather than a chronological order, arrange the objects in their own unique way, see how they relate to one another and “transfigure one another”.

And to end, a question from The Alchemy of Paradise:

What is the legacy you will leave
when your tour comes to a close?

While that is one of the questions, Susannah M. Smith’s character believes is worth considering, I’ll leave you with some words from Mary Oliver popular poem, “Wild Geese.”:

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.