doo doo, doo doo - doo doo, doo doo...

Not long ago I received an auto-generated email from Amazon saying,

Are you looking for something in our Mystery & Thriller Books department? If so, you might be interested in these items.

The first item shown was a book called, The Birthing House by Christopher Ransom. (Of course I had to go the author's website to find out more.)

The first thing I saw was this ominous message:

The only thing more terrifying than death...
IS BIRTH.

No, seriously, I'm not kidding... ;-)

In 2004, Mr. Ransom and his wife moved to a "140-year-old former birthing house in Mineral Point, Wisconsin."

Shortly after we finished unpacking, the former owners showed us a hundred-year-old, sepia-toned photo of a group of women standing on our porch. Dark dresses and pale countenances. Some were wearing aprons, others were wearing nurse caps. None were smiling. This did not appear to be a family gathering.

Our hundred-and-forty-year-old home was once a birthing house, we were told. A what? Yeah, a birthing house. You know. Doctor’s quarters. Midwives. Wet nurses. A birthing house. Neat, I guess. - Ransom's backstory at Cheryl's Book Nook.

Sound Familiar? What are the chances?

As I read on, I soon discovered how very different the imaginations of two authors can be...
Rather than the benevolent, maternal presence I had felt after moving into my birth house in Nova Scotia, Christopher Ransom's move brought on nightmares and terror.

Here's his account of the end of the dream that inspired his book.

It was at that time I experienced a sublime terror. I woke all the way up and the pressure lifted. I rolled onto my back and pulled covers up and blinked into the pitch-blackness of our bedroom, trying to see her. To see if she was still in there with me. And then I remembered the sepia-toned photo of the women standing on the porch of our house a century ago.
Midwives, wet nurses, maids. Mothers gone astray.

And I thought, What if one of them is still here? What if she suffered a loss . . . and wants compensation? -Ransom's backstory at Cheryl's Book Nook.

Eeeeeeek!

Whew, am I ever relieved that it was Dora and Miss B. who came knocking on my brain in the middle of the night...

All teasing aside, I'm actually quite thrilled to find that there's another author out there taking care of an old birth house and making stories from its history.

Happy Halloween and best wishes Christopher Ransom,
- from my old birth house to yours.
A. McKay.

don't stop believin'

It's official...I'm a "Gleek."
I absolutely adore Fox's new series Glee.

I sing along. I cheer for the music geeks. I hiss at the Cheerios. My heart breaks every time Rachel gets drenched in the face with yet another neon-coloured big gulp. I feel her pain...I really do.

"Glee is set in Lima, Ohio. (Ryan) Murphy chose a Midwest setting as he himself originates from Indiana, and recalls childhood visits to Ohio to the Kings Island theme park. Although uncertain why he selected Lima specifically, Murphy recounts that the location stayed in his memory as: "when I was a very little kid, there was a series of tornadoes that swept through Lima on Mother's Day" and his grandparents would often discuss the event.^[7] Lima Senior High School choir members were able to view an early release of the pilot episode, but found that it contained few references to the area, and commented that the depiction of the city was largely implausible and negative." From the Glee TV series Wikipedia page

Well, good for the real life members of the Lima Ohio HS Choir...glad to know life's peachy for them. I'm thinking maybe Ryan Murphy should have set the show in his home state - because as a former member of a high school show choir in Indiana I can tell you that he's getting a LOT of things painfully, hilariously, brilliantly, heartbreakingly right. (Take it from this Rachel, we had our share of Quinns and Pucks - the Tigerettes who joined choir for one semester their senior year because they needed another extra-curricular activity to add to their college applications, the basketball player who joined choir and S.A.D.D because he'd gotten caught drunk by his parents and was going to get his car keys taken away and his letter stripped off his jacket if he didn't do what his mother said.) Oh, the drama.

Yes, that's me...

On a recent trip back to my hometown to visit family, I came across a box of old pictures from my high school years. There were photos from marching band and show choir, madrigals, and Jr. Miss. When I got to the snaps of my graduation ceremony I burst out laughing. When my dad asked me what was so funny, I said, "All the boys look bored to death and all the girls look so sad. But I look downright giddy. I couldn't wait to get out of there."

My dad frowned at me and said, "I thought you liked high school. You always seemed so involved."

"No, Dad, I hated it."

"Really. Guess you had me fooled."

That's because I was smart enough to crank up the showtunes before crying my eyes out behind my bedroom door.



So here's to all the Rachels, Kurts, Arties, Mercedes and Tinas out there, struggling through your HS days. Take heart. It will get better. You'll get out of there and away from those kids you've been lumped together with and compared to since kindergarden. You'll go someplace where no one knows your name and become who you're meant to be. You'll sing your songs and write your stories and find other people along the way who feel the way you do about the world and fairness and art and love.

Don't stop believin' ...

This is Petra Harden - ONE woman singing all the parts, even the instrumentals!

The Kind of September

The other day, I handed in my manuscript for The Virgin Cure. There's still much to be done in the year before publication, but now the work becomes a collaborative effort with other voices and talents entering into the process. It's an exciting time, full of possibility.

So, it's seven days into September and this one's been lovely and good so far. And that's important - because I've had at least a couple of Septembers that have left me wrecked. One in the late 90's that ended in a personal upheaval of the heart and of course September of 2001 when I was, like the rest of the world, left fearful and lost.



Last year at this time I was in New York City, hoping to figure out what was missing from the story I was trying to tell in The Virgin Cure. I logged many hours at the library of the New York Historical Society (one of my favourite places on the planet!) I walked through the Metropolitan Museum of Art with my budding artist of a son, both of us awestruck over the J.M.W. Turner exhibit. I spent a beautiful evening with the NYC Buddhist community and people of all faiths setting lanterns afloat at the water's edge.



Then, I walked the streets and sidewalks that had once been travelled by my great great grandmother in her work as a medical student and physician in the late 1800's. As I went, I did my best to conjure up the memory of the women and children she served. I stood on Second Avenue, staring at the place where the Blackwell sister's infirmary once was. I went to Third Avenue and Thirteenth Street, to see where Peter Stuyvesant's great pear tree had lived for over 200 years. In those steps, on those streets that day I found my answer. I found the voice I'd been waiting for, the voice of my story, the voice of a little girl who wanted to become New York.

best birthday present ever...

This is what my artistic wonder of a husband gave me for my birthday this year!

It's a sheet of copper (about 8X10) that he turned into an amazing piece of art. First, he created the image on his computer - using a 19th century map of NYC, the title of my forthcoming novel, and a gorgeous image of a moth. (I can't tell you the significance of the moth right now, but the portion of the map he used is the exact area where the novel is set.)

He then printed the image onto a sheet of transfer paper, applied it to the copper and set it with a hot iron. This created a resist on the copper plate so when he placed the whole thing in an acid bath, it etched the image into the surface of the copper.

Last but not least, he applied India ink to the plate, and rubbed it into all the nooks and crannies created by the acid etching process.

We'll be framing it soon, but I couldn't wait to show it off in all its Steampunk -y glory!

My Tangled Bank

My desk. My tangled bank.

When I was small, I loved to visit my great aunt who lived in South Bend, Indiana. The Bader Avenue house was designed and built for her by her husband. It boasted many nooks and crannies that I adored - a rooftop landing off her bedroom, a cozy sunroom that was perfect for reading, a functioning dumbwaiter (large enough for a child to crawl into and ride between the floors), and a basement filled with old treasures. To me, the most magical of the things that had "gone to live below" was a Victorian pump organ. I used to sit at it, peddling away my aunt's requests one after another. When she passed on, the wheezing, wonderful beast was left to me.

Over the years, I dragged the thing nearly everywhere I lived, and along the way the bellows crumbled and its voice fell into disrepair. Not having the means to fix it, but knowing how much I still loved it, my husband gently dismantled the keyboard, stops and other mechanisms and replaced them with a writing surface. If I couldn't create music with it, I could at least craft stories while nestled in its gothic embrace.

The organ now sits in my studio in the rooftop of our barn, transformed into a writing desk. It has become a bit of a cabinet of wonders, adorned with stones collected from the beach, tea cups and fountain pens, an old brownie camera, a bunch of dried lavender from the garden, a hummingbird skeleton, my mother's favourite dancing shoes. I sit there day after day, putting pen to paper, mixing memories with imagination, willing stories to form. It is my tangled bank.

"It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us." - from Darwin's On the Origin of Species