My sister Janet, tagged me with the following challenge:

1. Write a six-word memoir.
2. Post it to your blog including a visual illustration if you would like.
3. Link to the person who tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere.
4. Tag 5 more blogs with links.
5. Don’t forget to leave a comment in the tagged blogs with an invitation to play.

My sister’s memoir is brilliant. Mine not so much…

Her life: one book after another.

I’m only tagging Cheryl Rainfield, but if anyone else would like to play along, please leave your memoir here!

Last week I had the privilege of attending the graduation ceremony at Dalhousie University where Cornelia Oberlander was receiving yet another honorary degree. Giving the convocation address, she spoke the importance of taking risks. To paraphrase: “To make the world a better place, we cannot keep doing things the same old way they have always been done. We must take risks.”

What a treat it was, after this inspiring event, to spend some relaxing time with Cornelia - now that I wasn’t “trying to worm things out of [her]” (as Cornelia put it), and with her husband, who helped bring me and Cornelia together four years ago, when the seed of the idea for the book Love Every Leaf, the life of landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander was planted. And how tantalizing, to find out things about her that I would have loved to have been able to write about! Susan Perren was right when she wrote in a Globe & Mail review on May 17: It is questionable whether Stinson has quite “got” all of this remarkable woman: There is evidence from Stinson that at some level Oberlander didn’t want to be “got”.

One of the highlights of our time together was a trip down the south shore of Nova Scotia to the place where Peter Carver and I run our summer writing workshops, and which used to be the summer home of the Oberlanders’ friend, Humphrey Carver (Peter’s father). What did Cornelia do as soon as she got out of the car? Did she gaze out to sea as most visitors do upon arrival? No. She spotted some tiny plants in the rugged terrain and immediately dropped to her knees to photograph them! We should have known she would do this. We were treated to a botany lesson all the way down the south shore!

And just in case you’re wondering - despite the fact that Cornelia is thirty years older than I am (and I am no spring chicken), she had no trouble at all springing back to her feet to walk the paths that Humphrey had created over the hills overlooking the sea.

I’m back home in Ontario now. Cornelia has moved on with her husband to Montreal, where tomorrow she will receive an honorary degree from McGill. What a privilege it will be for McGill graduates to hear Canada’s “premier landscape architect” speak about the park on Mount Royal which they will know well and which was created by Frederick Law Olmsted, an inspiration to Cornelia and considered by many to be the “father of landscape architecture”. I wish I could be there with them.

A couple of weeks ago I received a very excited phonecall from Cornelia Oberlander. She wanted to tell me that April 2008 - the very month my biography about her was being released - had been declared “National Landscape Architecture Month”. The reason? The American Society of Landscape Architects wants to encourage students and parents to “Discover Careers in Landscape Architecture”.

That was part of why I wrote Love Every Leaf: the life of landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander too. I wanted people to know about this remarkable woman and the work she has done (and continues doing on into her 80s!) And I wanted young people contemplating their future careers to be aware of the landscape architect option. “It’s a magnificent profession,” says Cornelia.

The ASLA chose April as National Landscape Architecture Month in part because it encompasses Earth Day and landscape architects are hugely aware of their opportunities and responsibilities to help take care of the planet.  Cornelia (a member of both ASLA and CSLA, the Canadian counterpart) is one of the profession’s pioneers in this way of thinking.

The president of the ASLA has launched an “Each One, Reach One” campaign, challenging each of the Society’s 18,200 members to reach out to at least one K-12 student during April to introduce them to careers in landscape architecture. What better way for them to do it than by buying all those students a copy of Love Every Leaf!

Since that call from Cornelia, she has sent me an email telling me that the International Federation of Landscape Architects has all kinds of events planned for World Landscape Architecture Month! Why not make reading Cornelia’s biography one of them?!

Two big surprises at the Literacy Conference in Burlington last weekend.

1. The onsite bookseller, Different Drummer, had on hand a big stack of Love Every Leaf: The Life of Cornelia Hahn Oberlander - and it wasn’t scheduled for release till several days later! (It looks gorgeous, and after I spoke about it briefly during my keynote address, they sold out quickly.)

2. The night before the conference, I learned that Janet Lee Stinson and Arnie Stewart (see I’ve Got Mail posting) were planning to attend. Not only did I get to meet these two remarkable people, Arnie helped make my keynote address a truly memorable event for everyone there. After mentioning the correspondence I’d been enjoying with Janet Lee, I looked around for where they might be sitting, thinking the audience might like to recognize them. But Arnie surprised me (and his wife and Janet Lee) by coming up to the front of the room, where he described letters he has exchanged with children who have struggled with learning to read. He said he knows he will like my new book, A Pocket Can Have A Treasure In It. He then took from his pocket a stone and placed it in my hand. “Put this in your pocket,” he said, “and it will bring you good luck.”

Before going off to sign autographs (for 3 hours! what a great bunch of readers that audience was!), I had a chance to visit with Arnie and hear some more of his personal stories about learning to read. Janet Lee is working on his biography and plans to apply to a writing workshop/retreat that my husband and I are offering this summer. (See “Summer Workshop/Retreat by the Sea” posting.) I hope she does!

To read Janet Lee’s account of Arnie’s participation in last week’s event, and about how the good luck stone circle has been completed, visit Janet Lee’s blog (and find the entry for Apr9/08).

Happy reading!

I just finished a marathon, a marathon of reading — through 220 pages of notes, single-spaced, on my current novel project. They date back as far as February 2001!

Lots of despair in there. One note says: I hate having a vision in my mind’s eye of what this novel should be, but feeling with every draft - despite how much I might have felt at moments I was getting closer to it - that in the end that perfect, wonderful thing it could be has again eluded me. And if it will always be this way, why go on?

But moments of joy, too. After trying out an idea for a change to a scene: It works! Yippee! 6:00 and I can already call it a good morning’s work! (Yes, sometimes if I can’t sleep, I get up quite early.)

Now, to read through the draft of the novel I completed just before Christmas. If a month goes by without my reappearing here, would someone please come dig me out? Thanks!

6:00 Worked on my novel. Wrote a scene that makes better use of material barely touched on in a previous draft.

7:15 Ate breakfast - yogurt with bananas and almonds and cereal - and did a crossword puzzle.

7:45 Took Keisha for a walk up the line.

8:45 Had a shower and answered emails.

9:30 Drove to Toronto.

10:30 Delivered files to the Osborne Collection, where lots of archival material for my books (and lots of other authors) is housed.

11:00 Gassed up my car and paid my VISA bill.

11:30 Met writer-friend Frieda Wishinsky at The Flying Dragon. We went for lunch (I’ve already forgotten the name of the restaurant, but it was good, just a few doors down from the bookstore.)

1:00 Did a shift at the CNIB recording studio. Acted as technician on Radiance by Shaena Lambert, being read by Sondra Bolton

4:00 Drove to illustrator-friend Heather Collins’ house to get her to sign her latest book - Out Came the Sun - a gift for our grandson’s birthday

5:00 Did another shift at the CNIB. This time I read Turtle Valley by Gail Anderson-Dargatz.

7:00 Attended a book launch at Mabel’s Fables for Barbara Reid’s new board book of nursery rhymes.

9:00 On the way home dropped off a bag of clothes I don’t wear any more.

9:30 Chatted with Peter about our day’s activities.

10:00 Went to bed and read a few pages of Time was Soft There by Jeremy Mercer before falling asleep.

I would recommend every book mentioned in this untypical day!

Some months ago the subtitle on my biography manuscript had to be changed (and essentially, therefore, the whole title). Someone else had beat me to The Art of the Possible for their handbook about political activism. One of the working titles attached to my young adult novel-in-progress this year was Fault Lines. And didn’t Nancy Huston beat me to it with her new novel! (Can’t wait to read it. I’m a big fan of hers.)

The current working title of my ya novel is After Ivy – BUT I found out this week that there’s a documentary film coming on TVO this month called After Thomas! (Have to watch it. It’s about a dog changing the life of a boy with autism. I have a grandson with autism and boy does he ever love our dog Keisha!)

The novel is a long way from being finished and I’m sure I’ll come up with a good title for it before it’s done. What I came up for the biography is way better than my original title. But sheesh, a person could develop a complex!

Have I been upstaged or given a bit of pre-pub stirring up of interest in the subject of my new-next-year book?

The first time I met Cornelia Hahn Oberlander (in 2004) I was convinced she deserved to be better known, and soon I’ll be proofing galleys for my first ever biography - Love Every Leaf: the life of landscape architect cornelia hahn oberlander (to be published by Tundra next spring).

Want to know something about this woman who so quickly captured my imagination? Read “Queen of green” in the Sept/Oct2007 issue of Canadian Geographic magazine. It seems journalist Sarah Scott thought Cornelia deserved to be better known too!

Did you think I’d given up blogging after just two entries? No way! But it has been a busy six weeks, quite apart from all that’s happened in my garden.

The novel has now been submitted (and I can soon go to the cottage and forget I’m waiting for a response to it). I’ve also come up with new titles for two books scheduled for publication next year. (Sometimes I think it’s harder to come up with a title than it is to write a book.)

Maybe I’ll get brave one of these days and tell blog-readers what they are — if there is anyone out there reading my blog except my sister. This blogging business still seems to me a bit like throwing your diary open on the sidewalk, where it might get read or it might just get kicked in a ditch.

The result of a conversation with the expert I consulted to check my novel manuscript for any errors in legal procedure and language means a far more significant revision than I was anticipating before it will be ready to show a publisher. I could view it as a major setback, but I can’t help feeling excited about the new dramatic possibilities. Some awfully good writing (if I may say so) is going to have to go, but maybe I’ll be able to use it in some other story some day. Or maybe I’ll just have to post it on my blog!