This is part II of Nancy’s “this is my blog and I’ll write about whatever I want” series. Today’s topic is canning, which followed soon after I realized that I was planting more beans and cucumbers than anyone could realistically eat at the time.

I come from a farming family on my mother’s side. She was one of 12 children who grew up on a farm north of Toronto and I have many fond memories of Sunday afternoons and summer holidays at “the farm” (it needed no other name). My grandparents even made me work once in a while, but mostly they were indulgent towards the horde of grandchildren scrambling around the house. When I wanted to learn to make pickles, I called on my aunt Carolyn. She and her husband Willie kindly ferried me from downtown Toronto to their house in the country and then spent the day teaching me the old family recipes for Dilly Beans, Bread and Butter Pickles, Dill Pickles, Celery Relish, and Sweet Pickles. I went home with a large number of jars which I had to work my way through on my own, since my husband doesn’t like pickles.

The next summer, the lesson was canned peaches and pears, and these my husband did find a use for by making a series of crisps and cobblers during the winter.

I’m now a steady follower of a number of canning blogs such as Food in Jars and make liberal use of Google if I think the first recipe looks too onerous.

Over the last two years, I’ve made various types of jam, Indian spiced pickled carrots, marmalade, zucchini relish, tomato jam, and a variety of chutneys born out of the need to use up the more than 30 green tomaotes I had at the end of last year’s stellar tomato season.

I’ve definitely made mistakes (do not confuse teaspoons of salt for tablespoons) and had plenty of “learning opportunities” (5 jars full of peaches displace much more water than 5 empty jars, weigh the Seville oranges AFTER you cut them up) but over the last year I’ve made:

– 3 jars of Strawberry Lavender Jam
– 2 jars of Strawberry Balsamic Jam
– 2 jars of Zippy Zucchini Relish
– 4 jars of Blueberry Lavender Jam
– 3 jars of Tomato Jam
– 4 jars of Bread and Butter Pickles
– 2 jars of traditional cornichon pickles (not a success – too much tarragon, cucumber spears do not make a good substitute for true cornichon pickles)
– 5 jars of canned peaches
– 3 jars of Plum and Walnut jam
– 2 jars of Green Garden Salsa (lost to the salt mistake)
– 4 jars of Green Tomato Chutney
– 2 jars of Roasted Garlic and Leek Jam (plus Leek and Potato Soup, Leek Gratin, and Leek Saffron Soup – I had a lot of leeks)
– 6 Jars of Seville Orange Marmalade
– 1 jar of Cinnamon Vanilla Sunflower Seed Butter (better with honey)
– 1 jar of Meyer Lemon Marmalade

Next up: Spicy white wine mustard.

I’ve mostly gotten over my fear I’m going to make a fatal mistake and kill everyone, and so can actually give jars away once in a while. After all, I’ve got even more room in the garden this year so who knows what I might have to learn to make.

And certainly not posting about much else, either, these days. I know this blog is really supposed to be about my writing (ok, really it’s supposed to persuade you to BUY MY BOOKS, let’s not pretend otherwise) but I don’t have much to say on that subject. I’m fearful of jinxing things, I suppose. Or of revealing how lazy I am.

What I want to write about is gardening and canning, so that, as this is my blog and I can do anything I damned well please, is what I’m going to do.

It was certainly a surprise to me when I started to become interesting in gardening. Every plant I’d ever had in my apartment or house died and I’d really never gardened in my life. It was a bigger surprise when I decided to trying canning, because I don’t cook. I never have. I’m fortunate enough to be married to a man who both likes cooking and is very good at it, but if I were single, I suspect I’d exist on a diet of cereal, grilled cheese sandwiches and take-out.

When we moved into our current house 8 years ago, it already had a well-established garden. The front was marred by rather large squares of interlocking brick and some half-empty beds but the back was an oasis of shrubs, lilacs, a little pond with a fountain, a magnolia tree and a very small patch of grass. I had absolutely no idea what half the plants were and what I was supposed to do to take care of them. I had been counting on my mother to help me with that but she was diagnosed with liver cancer just as we bought the house and she died without ever having seen it. Fortunately, my day job provides me access to lots of experts and at a BBQ at the home of the Canadian Living Editor-in-Chief, I met Sara Katz, a garden expert who wrote for several of our publications.

I promptly hired her for a consultation. On the appointed day, I trailed her around the garden with a sketched map and a notepad madly writing down what each thing was and what I was supposed to do with it. I hired her again the next spring to tell me what all these new things coming up were and eventually I had her redesign the front yard.

Her design made the most of the existing plants but eliminated the sterile interlocking brick and substituted a river-rock “river” and a selection of hardy, drought-tolerant plants. My husband and I did all the prepatory grunt work (with some help from my father, who claimed to be imported slave labour from the Maritimes) and on the appointed day, Sara arrived in her rubber boots, a truck followed with plants, and we spent a long day digging, planting and transplanting. The experience was invaluable, as Sara’s instructions gave me confidence that I wasn’t going to kill everything I touched.

My other “garden guru” has been my neighbour Joe. Now in his late eighties, a resident of the street since the 1950’s, Joe had an enviable swath of his backyard devoted to tomatoes, peppers, onions, and chard. He could remember the days in which the row of Italian neighbours, their gardens open all along the street, would gather to make tomato sauce from their harvests. When I tentatively started planting vegetables in pots, I would ask Joe for advice and do my best to understand his answers. I kept an eye on his activities and when he planted his onions, I knew it was time to plant mine. He’s slowed down considerably now and half his garden has been given back to sod (I almost lobbied to take it over but realized that might be a bit too much for me with my busy summer work schedue) and he now sits on his back porch directing his daughter, his grandson or one of his caregivers.

A few years ago, we dug up the useless patch of grass and turned the space into four beds for vegetables and herbs. Last year we cut down the magnolia to create two large beds with more sunlight. The magnolia was pretty but given the choice between more space for vegetables and a tree that blooms for a week a year – well, there was no contest.

I can’t claim to be a very good gardener – I’m lazy, I don’t have any eye for colour or composition, I’m easily seduced by anything that’s purple or has a cool name – but when I walk into the backyard after another long day of budgeting, I can feel my blood pressure drop. Poking around among the plants in the backyard, listening to the sparrows squabble in the “mystery bush” and contemplating what we’re going to do with everything the garden gives us (my husband makes a mean lavender martini), I think life is pretty good. And that’s enough for me.

The vegetable beds

The back yard

My friends at The House of Pomegranates and Gloometh have launched a fabulous contest to celebrate the launch of “Carmilla”, published by the House and illustrated by Gloometh designer Taeden Hall.

This is your chance to win one of Taeden’s Carmilla-inspired dresses, tailored for you, plus a copy of the book and more.

Just submit a piece of art (visual or literary) celebrating vampires and the dark minds that rule the internet (meaning all of you on Facebook) will choose a winner.

What are you waiting for? Get your masterpieces in now.

This influences thing has gotten all out of order, but c’est la vie.

While walking in the unseasonable sun and warmth day (16 degrees celsius on Jan 12th. Lovely as it is, I think we all need to be afraid now), an Emmylou Harris song turned up on the IPod. It got me thinking about her incredible “Wrecking Ball” album and the number of artists to which that single work introduced me.

Of course, I was familiar, at least distantly, with Emmylou herself, though I’d never really paid much attention. I was much more familiar with producer Daniel Lanois, through his work with U2, Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel and – even earlier – such Toronto New Wave mainstays as Martha and the Muffins and Nash the Slash. He was not exactly the first person I could imagine producing an album for someone I thought of a ‘country singer’. However, his brilliant solo album “For the Beauty of Wynona” showed that he had deep love of dark folk music, the kind of lonely songs that Emmylou’s voice suited perfectly.

There’s an incredible line-up of songwriters on “Wrecking Ball”: Neil Young, Steve Earle, Anna McGarrigle, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Lucinda Williams, Gillian Welch, Rodney Crowell, and Emmylou and Daniel themselves. Some I’d already known (Young, Earle, Dylan), some I now saw in a new light (Hendrix), and some were a new revelation. I quickly picked up work by Gillian Welch and Lucinda Williams and their songs went into high rotation on my CD player (yes, children, there was music in a time before IPods).

Music has always played an important part in my writing and most of the books had an unofficial soundtrack. For The Night Inside, it was Shriekback, whose songs provided the section titles. For A Terrible Beauty, it was Fumbling Towards Ecstasy by Sarah Mclachlan. For Cold Hillside (my work in progress), it’s a series of playlists which include songs by Emmylou, Gillian Welch and Lucinda Williams.

The moody wash of the music, the depth of Emmylou’s voice, the songs that move from dark portraits of modern life to folk songs that reflect old traditions to love songs both sorrowful and hopeful, make this one album that would definitely make it onto the proverbial desert island with me.

And seriously, what writer of dark fiction wouldn’t get a shiver up their spine at the line:
“So I ran with the moon and I ran with the night
And the three of us were a terrible sight”

Ok, I admit it. I did not keep a record of what I read and my memory is … um…. not what it used to be, so this is more a note about the best things I think I read in 2012 (or perhaps late 2011).

Deathless
Catherynne Valente

I’d previously read The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making but Deathless outdid all my expectations. It’s a dark take on the Russian folk tale “Koschei the Deathless” set in WWII Russia and less mortal realms. The authorial voice is stunning, with the cadence and tone that seems utterly perfect for the story. I bought it for my e-reader and then ended up buying a physical copy as well, both because it is a beautiful book and because there is a part of me that doesn’t consider e-books as “real”. But that’s just me – whatever way you choose to do it, you should read this book.

The Drowning Girl
Caitlin R. Kiernan
I read a couple of Caitlin Kiernan’s early books, back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but they didn’t resonate for me, possibly because they were conflated with the rash of “I’m much cooler than you will ever be” horror novels I read in the 1990s. However, the very astute people at Bakka Phoenix, recommended this to me and they were absolutely right. It’s a brilliant, sad, funny book about finding a way to live in the world despite dangers both internal and external.
Both of these books were mentioned more than once in the “year’s best” panel at the World Fantasy Convention, so you don’t need to just take my word for it.

A quartet of fine books from my friends at ChiZine:

From Helen’s quietly disquieting stories of scholars to the rip-snorting conclusion to Gemma’s Hexslinger series, from David’s “big fat bastard” book about Russian spies, psychic powers, giant squids, and gangsters to Michael’s journey in the darkness at the heart of a Northern Ontario town, these books showed once again why “the house that Sandra and Brett built” is publishing some of the best dark fiction anywhere. (It also shows that Toronto is home to an amazing number of talented writers and that I’m lucky enough to know them). I’ve got a pile of ChiZine books in the “to be read” pile and I’m sure they’ll show up on next year’s list.

And, of course, see my post regarding David Keyes’ wonderful collection “I do so worry for all those lost at sea”.

Happy reading in 2013!

No, I’m not going to talk about my cats (of which I currently have none). I’m not going to talk about other people’s cats (much as I am fond of them). This is the next installment of “Influences” so I’m going to talk about books about cats and about writing about cats.

As a child, I was definitely a cat-lover. I had cats from the time I was old enough to give them names that in this much less innocent time are very embarassing. When I started to read, books about animals were a steady part of my reading diet. Particularly influential were The Incredible Journey, Kpo the Leopard, Carbonel, and a book about a cougar I have been unable to track down, though the scene in which the young cougar’s mother falls during a leap across a gorge and is killed by dogs remains branded in my brain.

A good portion of the early fiction I wrote involved cats, though generally they were of the talking fantasy variety. Onto them, I grafted adventure (journeys, haunted houses, floods, fires, dogs…) and a certain amount of teen angst I absorbed from other books and television (romances, fights, misunderstandings…). I still have a few examples of these early stabs at writing, though I can’t bear to read them more than once every ten years or so.

We went to see the new Ang Lee film of the Life of Pi yesterday. The Tiger was exquisitely rendered in CGI, though I was always aware it was CGI, possibly because I knew it was CGI. That wasn’t really a problem, because the entire “adrift at sea” sequence is so stunningly beautiful that it exists on a plane that is almost more literary than cinematic. You never truly believe it, because it has the feel of a fairy tale. I’d be very interested to see the reaction of someone who had no idea what was about to happen, because of course my own responses were influenced by the fact I do know. (For the record, I believed everything in the book until the island. Then even my sf and fantasy-trained suspension of disbelief function started to fail. But I do know which version of the story I prefer.)

My interview on Speculating Canada is up now. Many thanks to Derek for his thoughtful questions.

Check out the other interviews on the site as well, especially the recent one with Helen Marshall, whose “Hair Side, Flesh Side” collection is currently in my “to read’ pile.

At a planning retreat for my day job, we were all given a Bond Girl alter-ego. I was lucky enough to be Diana Rigg’s character from “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”.

Sadly, I’m not in the least like either the Divine Ms. Rigg or her character. Sigh.

But this picture is definitely going on the door of my office.

A few words of warning up front: I am in no way impartial about the House of Pomegranates, the wonderful people who run it, and David Keyes’ new collection of short short I Do So Worry For All Those Lost At Sea. The House of Pomegranates Press published my short story collection and the illustrated Chrysanthemum Shadows, the creative team at its heart are dear friends, and I’ve loved David’s work for years.

This new collection features 11 short stories, some linked (or are all of them linked by some mysterious factor we can’t quite grasp?), some published before in one of David’s exquisite limited editions, some of them original to this book. The central core of stories revolve around the family who live in the mysterious The House of Sleep and their neighbours. One of these neighbours is a cartographer who also happens to be a wolf. Another is a large Hare who rents the vacant mansion nearby and takes photographs of the O sisters in stripey tights in the rooftop studio.

Putting Emily to bed, a small nightlight casts fantastic shadows about the warm room. Her angel wings hang upon the door.
“William, I am writing a novel.”
“Are you? Of what?”
“Of the people who live in this house.”
“You and me?”
“No, silly, not us. I’m writing about the other people who live here.”

In the other stories there are ghosts, sisters who flee to Paris, and a mermaid longing for the sea. The writing can be lush and dreamy, with an air of Edwardian elegance, or as spiky and modern as a half-coherent conversation with a lover down a bad connection to the other side of the world. It reads the way David’s artwork (sadly not included in this book) looks – just as his art looks just like the images his words conjure.

Reading these stories is like curling up in the window seat and watching dusk darken across the lawn, watching the fireflies spark against the trees, and listening to your eccentric friends and family talk about art and dinner and the moon, knowing that in a moment you’ll hear the sound of someone shaking up the perfect martini. There is heartbreak ahead – just as there has been pain and loss and grief behind – but for the moment, this moment, everything is beautiful.

Nancy - then and now

At the recent World Fantasy convention here in Toronto (ok, Richmond Hill), I was on a panel about the late, much-missed Twilght Zone magazine. I was fortunate enough to make my first professional sale to TZ, after having entered their annual short story contest and finished as a runner-up for my story “The Party Over There”. The editor, Tappan King, returned the story with the comments that “perhaps I should rethink the ending” and “it needs to be deeper”. Since the ending was what the story was about and I had no idea what “deeper” meant, I didn’t do anything. Then one day he called me at work. After I stopped gibbering, I admitted that I hadn’t sent the story back because I didn’t want to change it. He said “so send it back as it was and tell me I’m full of shit”. I made some minor modifications and did just that (well, minus the shit reference). He bought it and my next story “Exodus 22:18” as well.

At the convention, the panel included Elizabeth Hand (to whom I lost the first TZ First Publication contest – and the best story definitely won), Scott Edelman, Darrel Schweitzer and Lawrence Connelly. We shared stories about our experiences and what the magazine and its staff had meant to us. I was a subscriber for a year or two before I entered the contest and I found the magazine to be an incredible resource for book reviews, introducing me to new writers as well as classics, and a place to find the kind of dark fantasy fiction I loved by the best writers around.

Thanks to the convention team and my fellow panelists for a great hour of memories.

For more information, check the article on Lawrence’s site.