By Lily Iona MacKenzie
From the window seat in our master bedroom, looking through the French doors into my study, I can see the white bookcases, lining one wall. They remind me of honeycombs we kept on the farm, books now the honey that my bees/mind is attracted to. They also are why I write, so I may add my own work to that collection.
Working on this current novel is an exercise in trust, writing and seeing where it all leads, believing that if I create interesting characters, that's enough. Letting go of my expectations to impress or create an important work. Otherwise, I'll be giving weight to the negative old man from my recent dream that wanted the women to be made up, unable to see or appreciate their natural beauty. I must remember primary processes, to get beneath all the shoulds to where something fresh and original lives.
Poetry is the one thing I write that I could do forever and not worry about publishing it. I have a very different relationship with poetry than I do with fiction, say, or non-fiction. The act itself is so satisfying that it doesn't matter to me if the poem has an audience or not, though, of course, I do publish my poems, and All This, a collection of my poetry, was published in 2011. But they don’t have the urgency that the other genres do to get out in the world; I don't feel I need to prove anything in poetry.
I'm reminded of something I read in an issue of Parabola:
...an inclination embodies or mirrors an unexplored capacity in us which, if allowed to flourish, might lead us further into wholeness. But very often the capacity itself is never left alone—the joy of singing is extended into a dream of being recorded, the transformative process of writing is extended into a need to be published. Ironically, the innate ability to recognize and put things together, no matter what form it takes, is often diverted into an insatiable need to be recognized.
In this way, a passion for a particular way of being turns into a grand goal of becoming, as if life did not reside in who we are but only in the dream of what we might become. Here, in the same way that the loved one is seen as the keeper of the gift, the idealized ambition—becoming a rock star or a famous writer or a wealthy businessman—is seen as the keeper of the gift that will unleash true living.
Writing for me is a necessity, a spiritual path, if you will. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum, unrelated to my life. It is my life, more fully so at times than what I do in the world—teaching, being a wife and mother, interacting with friends. Not that these activities aren’t fulfilling and terribly important. But I’m discovering just how interrelated all my various selves are. Writing is the way I come to know myself, one method for recovering and integrating the disparate parts of my psyche.
An interview I read in Border Crossings with Canadian artist Betty Goodwin expresses something similar:
A work is a deeply personal mixture of your earlier experiences and also your life at the present in this world. But I can't shred it and say it's absolutely this or that. It's based in something you don't even realize yourself until it gives you back information. It's like you're pulling and pulling and trying to get something. And then there's that magic time when it begins to pull you. If that doesn't happen, you can't push it any more and it dies.
This quote captures my feelings about how my writing connects with my on-going life, that somehow it’s shaping me as I shape it, just as dreams do. It's essential to have this dialogue with the work and my life.
Book Summary: Lily Iona MacKenzie’s debut novel Fling!, a wildly comic romp on mothers, daughters, art, and travel, was published by Pen-L Publishing in July 2015.
About Fling!: When ninety-year-old Bubbles receives a letter from Mexico City asking her to pick up her mother’s ashes, lost there seventy years earlier and only now surfacing, she hatches a plan. A woman with a mission, Bubbles convinces her hippie daughter Feather to accompany her on the quest. Both women have recently shed husbands and have a secondary agenda: they’d like a little action. And they get it.
Alternating narratives weave together Feather and Bubbles’ odyssey. The two women travel south from Canada to Mexico where Bubbles’ long-dead mother, grandmother, and grandfather turn up, enlivening the narrative with their hilarious antics.
In Mexico, where reality and magic co-exist, Feather gets a new sense of her mother, and Bubbles’ quest for her mother’s ashes—and a new man—increases her zest for life. Unlike most women her age, fun-loving Bubbles takes risks, believing she’s immortal. She doesn’t hold back in any way, eating heartily and lusting after strangers, exulting in her youthful spirit.
Readers will believe they’ve found the fountain of youth themselves in this character. At ninety, Bubbles comes into her own, coming to age, proving it’s never too late to fulfill one’s dreams. Here's the Amazon Buy Link:
About the Author: A Canadian by birth, a high school dropout, and a mother at 17, in her early years, Lily Iona MacKenzie supported herself as a stock girl in the Hudson’s Bay Company, as a long distance operator for the former Alberta Government Telephones, and as a secretary (Bechtel Corp sponsored her into the States). She also was a cocktail waitress at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, briefly broke into the male-dominated world of the docks as a longshoreman (and almost got her legs broken), founded and managed a homeless shelter in Marin County, and eventually earned two Master’s degrees (one in Creative writing and one in the Humanities). She has published reviews, interviews, short fiction, poetry, travel pieces, essays, and memoir in over 140 American and Canadian venues. Fling, one of her novels, will be published in July 2015 by Pen-L Publishing. Bone Songs, another novel, will be published in 2016. Her poetry collection All This was published in 2011. She also teaches writing at the University of San Francisco, is vice-president of USF's part-time faculty union, paints, and travels widely with her husband.
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