Balancing Act - a poem

Kirkuk 1959

She did learn to spit

But only after she had learned
to walk along the craggy garden path
carrying stones on her head.

She was soon able to walk
barefoot back straight head held high
without rattling the stones
in the pan from her mother's scales.

When they grew up
her friends wanted to be nurses
or teachers
or just like their mothers.

She wanted to carry water
in a brass ewer on her head
without spilling a drop.

She wanted to spit
like the men in the suq
leaning against doorways
or drinking small glasses of tea
at wobbly tables
listening to tinny radios
as they took slow drags on their hookahs.

They never carried anything
on their heads
like the women
with their water
and wood
and heaps of fruit
dirty laundry on the way to the river
clean laundry on the way back again.

The men spat
as they talked and drank
and the women walked by
so tall so graceful
their steady gaze leading the way
never dropping a thing.

She did learn to spit
behind the pomegranate bush
at the bottom of the garden
while her mother slept
under a lazy fan
in a darkened room.

She was discovered by her father
who forbade spitting.

But he did allow her to borrow
the pan from her mother's kitchen scales
so she could walk around the garden
balancing stones on her head.

Summer memories 5

1. Locusts - always the locusts...
2. Walking around the garden balancing a pan filled with stones on my head
3. Watching women walk along the street with clothes, food, wood.. balanced on their head.
4. Men with tweed jackets over the dishdashas feeding their worry beads through their fingers as they sat over chai in the street cafes
5. Women in purdah, showing only their bejewelled fingers, sailing down the streets like ships in full sail.
6. All the Iraqi men's sandals looked as if they'd borrowed them from others with larger feet.
7. A nest of Pi dogs in an abandoned buidling.
8. The wail of desert jackals at night .
9. My first taste of halvah.
10. Date boats drifting down the river.

Summer memories 4

1. Mothers on the verandah holding sweating glasses of iced coffee to their necks.


2. Martin Sims and I hiding in the rhodos while the mothers chatted on the verandah - appalled and delighted when we heard one of them say the word 'bosom'


3. James Menhinnick (he of the handlebar moustache) yelling 'Hold onto your hats' as he drove like a madman across the desert inhis open Jeep.


4. Popping bubbles in the blacktop with a stick as it melted in the sun


5. Picnic on the livingroom carpet - hard boiled eggs and gepatti, ginger biscuits and tabouleh salad


6. A favourite swimsuit with pictures of coloured cigarettes all over it.


7. The monkey in Karim (the school bus driver)'s mother's house.


8. Clumps of dried milk powder stuck to the glass
   
9. The dark bloom of the Bedu's tents in the far distance
   
10. The sound of Fairuz singing from the suq cafe radios
    

The famed Lebanese singer Fairuz

Summer Memories 3

1. Toes gripping the rough edge of the diving board
2. Coke floats
3. Shopping for weekly candy allowance at the little shop known only as 'The Assyrian's'
4. Zayah high in the mish mish (apricot) tree, shaking the fruit loose
5. Watching the movie Pollyanna from an open air rooftop cinema in the middle of town, horns blaring all around
6. The smell of plastic 'poppa' beads extracted from a box of Tide laundry soap
   'Free necklace included'.
7. Breaking into the licorice factory through a hole in the wall
8. Fairy lights strung through the trees for a British Club dance
9. Running home from a friend's house in a sanstorm with a tea towel wrapped around my face.
10. Water buffalo being herded past the house from the nearby Shatt al Arab River
    
    
    Shatt al Arab River.

Summertime memories 2

Hoopoe

More summertime memories of growing up in Kirkuk and Basra, Iraq

1. Looking up from supper on the verandah to see a hoopoe in the bushes.
2. The flurry of coloured rosettes on the wheels of passing bicycles.
3. The glow of the brazier where the man poured roasted melon seeds and chick peas into paper cones.
4. Oil flares belching out smoke and fire as we drove across the desert in the dark.
5. The bitter lemon taste of sumac spice on lamp kebobs that Zayah cooked over a charcoal fire in the courtyard of our house.
6. The day the locusts came.
7. Going fishing with Dad in the mountains.
8. Doing handstands against the classroom wall at school.
9. A new bangle.
10. 'Inheriting' my favourite teacher Miss Flintham's teddy bear Edward.
11. Waiting on the hot tarmac with my fingers threaded through the mesh fence as we waited for my sister Judith to arrive from England.
12. Steven being told off for talking Pidgin English, rather than Arabic, to the gardener.

Summertime memories

Working on my kids' novel Return of the Summer Fish, very loosely based on spending a number of years in Iraq as a child... combined with a reading I attended last week by Natalie Goldberg, promoting her new book Old Friend From Far Away, and I came up with the idea of brainstorming a list of memories, 10-12 a day all summer (every day felt like summer then - the unending heat, shorts and rubber flip flops, hours spent at the pool, reading in the cool living room after lunch with the fan creaking overhead, a large insect scuttling across the tiled bathroom floor, ice cubes clinking in glasses of iced coffee that the mothers held to their necks as they discussed dressmaking on the verandah...) to write about later, and consider as elements in the story.

Today my list:

1. A mud-encrusted 45 record of Cathy's Clown found in a dry wadi
2. The crunch of pomegranate seeds
3. Warm goat's milk yoghurt in an enamel bowl
4. The bray of a donkey on an abandoned building site (or maybe that was Cairo, years later)
5. The muezzin's call at dawn
6. Standing still while my mother pinned the straps of a new sundress across my sunburned shoulders
7. Throwing up on that - or a similar - sundress as my mother pinned the straps across my sunburned shoulders
8. My friends Bethani and Luli's barebottomed baby brother Ahmed getting tangled up in the rope used to tie him to a post of their mud hut
9. Squatting beside the wheelchair-confined guard at the Coca Cola factory while my brother and he jabbered away at each other in Arabic
10. The vendor in the suq throwing out a banner of fabric to display a bolt of Swiss cotton to my mother
11. Black-blistered bread hot from the gasping maw of the clay oven in the suq
12. Bare feet sweeping the cool floor under the breakfast table.

A typical suq scene

'Iraq Loved & Lost' - my essay in Maclean's magazine 2002 here.

Summer Reading in Surrey

Planning early for some kind of literary activity over the summer. And I'm quite proud of the poster design, too.

Nominated

One of the few things I've ever won was a bottle of sherry from a jumble sale bottle stall. I was about nine. "You won't be needing that," said my uncle, who promptly relieved me of it.

He said he'd pay me ten shillings for it (this was in about 1960), but I don't think he ever did.

But I do believe he put a hex on me, ensuring I never won anything else again.

But today I heard that my first published children's book MEETING MISS 405 has been nominated in the chapter books/novels category of the 2009-2010 Chocolate Lily Awards. I'm thrilled to bits by the nomination alone.

My book's in great company - the complete list of nominees will be posted on the website any day. http://www.chocolatelilyawards.com/.

Winning is not the issue here (although if they happened to be giving our chocolate lilies I'd want to be first in line!). I'm just thrilled to be included with a line up of fine BC writers and illustrators whose work will be carefully considered by BC elementary school children as they cast their votes for their favourites.

Meet a real kids' author - in fact, 32 of them!

CWILL BC (Children's Writers and Illustrators of BC)
presents
SPRING BOOK HATCHING
32 authors ~ Door prizes ~ Book signing ~ Book sales ~ Presentations
~ Win an author visit to your school ~

Saturday, May 2, 1-3 p.m.

Vancouver Public LIbrary, Central Branch, 350 W. Georgia

(I'll be there - do drop by my table...)

Writers mentoring program launched - finally

After a couple of years of thinking about it, research, and tentative explorations, I'm finally ready to promote: Take Five - a writing mentorship program that starts Sept 2009 in the Surrey/Delta/Langley area of BC.

This pilot project will match five new/emerging (unpublished) writers with five experienced (published) ones who for five months will help them refine their craft, develop marketing skills, and connect with the writing community.

The writer/mentor pairs will meet collectively once a month for workshop sessions presented by the mentors. Between meetings, the individual mentor/writer pairs will work together in person/via email to help the writer develop a specific piece of writing, move it closer to publication and explore potential markets.

Individual writers will pay $100 for the five-month program - which will be used to pay for meeting space and other costs associated with the group meetings. Mentors will be asked to volunteer their time for this pilot project. Remuneration for mentors will be explored for subsequent sessions of Take Five.

At the first group session in September, the writers and mentors will draft a workplan, which will be used by each mentor/writer pair during the five months of the program.
Applications are now open to:
1. Published writers who would like to support a local writer in this way, and
2. Local writers who would like to be paired with a mentor to help develop and refine your writing and marketing skills.
Deadline June 15.
Mentor/writer pairings will be confirmed by August 15, in consultation with mentors to ensure pairings reflect the writers' interests and skill level. I am hoping that at least one writer in this first session will be a Grade 11 or 12 student.

If there is enough demand - and enough experienced writers willing to serve as mentors - this program will be offered again in March 2010.

I've posted all the info. and the application forms at my website at www.loispeterson.net. Now let's see what happens.

I'm pretty sure we won't have any problems coming up with five eager writers. Attracting four (count me in!) willing volunteer mentors might be the challenge. But I feel sure local authrors will come through.