Marie Wilson's Blog
August 13, 2013
After Picasso
After our parents’ divorce, our mother moved her bedroom to the den and my brother took over the old conjugal quarters. Like a 1960s version of Tom Sawyer, he sloshed a purple-wash over a beige wall, then got his teeny bopper little sister to finish the job. I was only too happy to turn the whole room into nighttime for his new black light.
I was a skinny girl of 14, limbs flying loose from oversized wooly sweaters and mini skirts, flailing in this direction and that; legs dancing, leaping, flying; just as free as all those answers blowin’ in the wind Bob Dylan sang about. But when the school buzzer sounded its mechanical call I stifled the wild child and filed into the drab hallways and classrooms of Como Lake Junior High, an institution where I was about as far from free as my hem was from the grey linoleum floors.
Forced to sit still in a little prison they called a desk, I clenched my fists and dug my nails into the palms of my hands while my hormones raced to the beat of some wild symphony only I could hear. While the teacher’s voice droned on in the stale air, I sought salvation in daydreams but if I was called back to answer questions, I had to confess I hadn’t been listening and I didn’t know the answers; they were blowing in the wind.
What is the square root of Free?
My creative and theatrical impulses made themselves evident even in school. When I had to sneeze I made the loudest “aaa-choo” in the land, making kids laugh and teachers scowl - except for my English teacher, Mr. Pecknold, who encouraged that sort of bold expression. “Bravo!” he would say after a volcanic sneeze punctured the sedate pen-scratching soundtrack of his classroom. He was also an Art teacher, although not mine, and when he found out how much I liked to paint, he lent me a handsome volume with page after page of colourful plates of great works of art.
I decided to copy one of the paintings onto a canvas board in my brother’s studio. Every day after school, I rushed home to my very own Girl Before a Mirror in progress. With a kind of ecstatic concentration I endeavored to mix the same blues Picasso had once mixed. I squeezed and stirred the oozy colours, rust red, spring green, tar black. The smell of the oil paints as I slathered them on was as fragrant to me as the hyacinths that grew in our rockery.
On the closet door that used to hold our father’s tie rack, my brother painted three fluorescent hearts. In one he inscribed “Sonny and Cher,” in another I put “Romeo and Juliet,” and in the last he wrote: “Mom and Dad.” Since our mother and father’s marriage had ended in nasty betrayals and terrible battles, this neon pink inscription made us smile ironically beneath the black light, glowing teeth concealing pain, confusion, fear.
One day while I stood before my easel in breathless abandon, a blob of turquoise paint landed on the book my teacher had given me, right next to the Girl, on a border as smooth and white as virgin snow. I was mortified and hurried to wipe it off, but the pigment had seeped in and left a vivid blue stain. I had deflowered the Girl, and the repercussions I imagined for this deed gave me nightmares.
When my masterpiece was done, I took it to school to show my teacher. Appraising the two-foot by three-foot canvas he smiled thoughtfully, and in a voice full of warm approval, said: “Call it ‘After Picasso.’ ” He told me to enter it in the school art show. I scrawled its title on the back and entered it that day.
Then, mustering all my courage I gave my teacher his book back. Quivering in my white go-go boots, I opened it to the blue blemish and apologized. He eyed the blotch with the same critical eye he’d given my painting. Then he looked at me and said: “I am honoured.”
My painting won a prize. I was awarded a sketchbook.
Thirty-six years after Pablo Picasso painted the Girl, I laid eyes on her for the first time in my teacher’s book. Thirty-nine years after that, I finally saw the original at MOMA. That was last year, and as I gazed at the painting, so large and vibrant and colourful, I became intensely aware of something about the Girl’s face. One side of her face is a soft lavender pink, the innocent child; the other side of her face is bright yellow accented with rouge, lipstick, and eye shadow, the emerging sexual woman. I realized then that I had painted a self portrait.
I had come a long way since tying my blonde Twiggy hair up and wearing bell bottoms. As the seventies kicked in, so did my sun-yellow woman, but I was still the lavender girl, too. Picasso painted the Girl’s future as contorted and anxious in her reflection in the mirror. I too was destined to know the dark night of my soul.
Violet, ochre, rust, black, verdigris, they’re all me. But mostly, I am that renegade splotch of turquoise paint that landed in my teacher’s book so long ago, that dash of joyful colour that didn’t go where it was supposed to, that runaway blob that made its worthy mark. And to be all those colours, I am honoured.
I was a skinny girl of 14, limbs flying loose from oversized wooly sweaters and mini skirts, flailing in this direction and that; legs dancing, leaping, flying; just as free as all those answers blowin’ in the wind Bob Dylan sang about. But when the school buzzer sounded its mechanical call I stifled the wild child and filed into the drab hallways and classrooms of Como Lake Junior High, an institution where I was about as far from free as my hem was from the grey linoleum floors.
Forced to sit still in a little prison they called a desk, I clenched my fists and dug my nails into the palms of my hands while my hormones raced to the beat of some wild symphony only I could hear. While the teacher’s voice droned on in the stale air, I sought salvation in daydreams but if I was called back to answer questions, I had to confess I hadn’t been listening and I didn’t know the answers; they were blowing in the wind.
What is the square root of Free?
My creative and theatrical impulses made themselves evident even in school. When I had to sneeze I made the loudest “aaa-choo” in the land, making kids laugh and teachers scowl - except for my English teacher, Mr. Pecknold, who encouraged that sort of bold expression. “Bravo!” he would say after a volcanic sneeze punctured the sedate pen-scratching soundtrack of his classroom. He was also an Art teacher, although not mine, and when he found out how much I liked to paint, he lent me a handsome volume with page after page of colourful plates of great works of art.
I decided to copy one of the paintings onto a canvas board in my brother’s studio. Every day after school, I rushed home to my very own Girl Before a Mirror in progress. With a kind of ecstatic concentration I endeavored to mix the same blues Picasso had once mixed. I squeezed and stirred the oozy colours, rust red, spring green, tar black. The smell of the oil paints as I slathered them on was as fragrant to me as the hyacinths that grew in our rockery.
On the closet door that used to hold our father’s tie rack, my brother painted three fluorescent hearts. In one he inscribed “Sonny and Cher,” in another I put “Romeo and Juliet,” and in the last he wrote: “Mom and Dad.” Since our mother and father’s marriage had ended in nasty betrayals and terrible battles, this neon pink inscription made us smile ironically beneath the black light, glowing teeth concealing pain, confusion, fear.
One day while I stood before my easel in breathless abandon, a blob of turquoise paint landed on the book my teacher had given me, right next to the Girl, on a border as smooth and white as virgin snow. I was mortified and hurried to wipe it off, but the pigment had seeped in and left a vivid blue stain. I had deflowered the Girl, and the repercussions I imagined for this deed gave me nightmares.
When my masterpiece was done, I took it to school to show my teacher. Appraising the two-foot by three-foot canvas he smiled thoughtfully, and in a voice full of warm approval, said: “Call it ‘After Picasso.’ ” He told me to enter it in the school art show. I scrawled its title on the back and entered it that day.
Then, mustering all my courage I gave my teacher his book back. Quivering in my white go-go boots, I opened it to the blue blemish and apologized. He eyed the blotch with the same critical eye he’d given my painting. Then he looked at me and said: “I am honoured.”
My painting won a prize. I was awarded a sketchbook.
Thirty-six years after Pablo Picasso painted the Girl, I laid eyes on her for the first time in my teacher’s book. Thirty-nine years after that, I finally saw the original at MOMA. That was last year, and as I gazed at the painting, so large and vibrant and colourful, I became intensely aware of something about the Girl’s face. One side of her face is a soft lavender pink, the innocent child; the other side of her face is bright yellow accented with rouge, lipstick, and eye shadow, the emerging sexual woman. I realized then that I had painted a self portrait.
I had come a long way since tying my blonde Twiggy hair up and wearing bell bottoms. As the seventies kicked in, so did my sun-yellow woman, but I was still the lavender girl, too. Picasso painted the Girl’s future as contorted and anxious in her reflection in the mirror. I too was destined to know the dark night of my soul.
Violet, ochre, rust, black, verdigris, they’re all me. But mostly, I am that renegade splotch of turquoise paint that landed in my teacher’s book so long ago, that dash of joyful colour that didn’t go where it was supposed to, that runaway blob that made its worthy mark. And to be all those colours, I am honoured.
July 23, 2013
E-Revolution
Many people don't understand that my novel is an e-book. They ask me where they can pick up a copy and when I explain e-books to them they say "Great! I'll pick one up at Indigo on my way home." Other people say they understand e-books but prefer to wait till it comes out in paperback. When I tell them Harper Collins won't publish it as a paperback unless it sells enough e-books they say: "Oh. So where can I pick up a copy?" Everyday I am facing this Zen Koan, this Catch 22, this frustrating reality of the virtual world.
June 28, 2013
Lady
When we reach Anarchist Peak, my mother pulls over and stops the car. The view of the Okanagan Valley is magnificent, but that’s not what we’re here for. My mother reaches beneath her seat and pulls out a twenty-sixer of rye and a small bottle of 7 Up. As she pours herself a drink, she asks if I want one. I’m seventeen years old. I have driven her metallic-blue Ford half the way on this eight hour trip. While she drove the other half, I propped my bare feet on the dashboard and belted out the latest Leonard Cohen tunes: Like a drunk in a midnight choir/I have tried in my way to be free… Although we still have some notorious hairpin curves to negotiate before we reach her farm, I accept a drink. It is my mother’s version of a rite of passage for her daughter. We toast the success of our drive through the winding heights and steep descents of the Crowsnest Highway.
My mother downs the last of her highway highball, then starts up the engine for the final stretch. I sip the strong liquor and wonder if they named Anarchist Mountain for my mom. In the Vancouver press she was once known as the Lady in Red and the Speed Queen. But despite the sound of those monikers, she was no shady lady strung out on bennies. Her other newspaper nickname was Queen of the Cinder Track. Yes, my mom was once a track and field star. And she wore red track suits. At sixteen she was deemed Olympic material and sent to Toronto to compete for entry into the games that were to be held in Berlin that year. But when wind of Hitler’s anti-Semitic rule swept the nation, my mom knew she would never get her stab at the gold. Like so many others, her coach boycotted the ‘36 Olympiad.
Years later when the story of my mom’s kiboshed shot at international fame had become legend in our household, the only Speed Queen around was the washer on our porch where she did the laundry for her husband and four children. She was still the Lady in Red though: her lipstick, crimson to go with her black-as-night hair, and in winter her red toque. But perhaps more evocative of that sobriquet in the late 50s was her clandestine sexual life. She had an affair.
My friend down the road from us had a good Catholic mother who was always in the kitchen. While she was in her apron whipping up strawberry shortcake, my mom was out drinking rye and seven in her high heels and pencil skirts. Not that my mom hadn’t ever made Jell-O or cookies. When I was little she’d baked with the best of them, and I can still remember rushing home after school to sink my teeth into a warm butter tart, fresh out of her oven. But when I (her youngest) was old enough to take care of myself, my mother got her real estate licence and was off travelling Vancouver Island, listing houses and showing properties - and much more, as it turned out, for this is when her cheating began.
In one of our home movies my mother smashes a sledgehammer into a wall and laughs. So began our kitchen renovations: new pine cupboards, stainless steel sinks, a garburator. Just months after its completion, my father would discover her infidelity. She may just as well have taken that sledgehammer to his heart.
My dad left, never to see my mother again. Nor did he ever mention her to us, except once when out of the blue he noted that “the man who broke up my marriage was named Jeb and the man your mother ended up with is named Seb”. In time I would see that this observation of rhyming names contained all the bewilderment he felt over the loss of his bride.
Following the divorce, my mother took my sister and me on a road trip through B.C.’s interior. We stopped in little towns where I bought souvenirs: a pocket knife from Revelstoke, a pennant flag from Golden. The Ookpik purchased in Olalla snuggled with me that same night on a Winnipeg couch in a Keremeos motel.
When I search my memory for that defining mother-daughter moment, the one story that describes our relationship, some words of motherly wisdom she left me with, I come up blank. There was no day when she revealed her dreams to me or let me in on her secrets.
But I can still hear her voice, deep and soothing, and her laughter. I wonder now about her extraordinarily wacky sense of humour. Was that part of the “drinking problem” I later learned of? Was she impaired half the time? Or half-cut all the time? Was she authentically loopy or just looped? Though I never heard her slur words or saw her tip over, I understood as I grew older that she was fond of tippling. When the Bloody Caesar was invented it instantly became her drink of choice, a taste of saltchuck in a shade to match her lips.
The last photo I have of her shows a woman of eighty-three, her hair still dark, her bone structure still chiselled, posing with a bobcat she’d just shot from her kitchen window. He’d been trying to get at her chickens and she took him out at a hundred yards.
But the image that stays with me is one of my mother standing at the edge of the creek that ran through her farm. It’s a hot afternoon and we’re there for a dip. She is wearing her blue bathing suit. Her skin is as brown as toasted coconut and her hair is as black as ink, grey strands glinting like silver thaw in the night. She stands as tall and calm as a tree.
In that moment I understand everything about her
My mother downs the last of her highway highball, then starts up the engine for the final stretch. I sip the strong liquor and wonder if they named Anarchist Mountain for my mom. In the Vancouver press she was once known as the Lady in Red and the Speed Queen. But despite the sound of those monikers, she was no shady lady strung out on bennies. Her other newspaper nickname was Queen of the Cinder Track. Yes, my mom was once a track and field star. And she wore red track suits. At sixteen she was deemed Olympic material and sent to Toronto to compete for entry into the games that were to be held in Berlin that year. But when wind of Hitler’s anti-Semitic rule swept the nation, my mom knew she would never get her stab at the gold. Like so many others, her coach boycotted the ‘36 Olympiad.
Years later when the story of my mom’s kiboshed shot at international fame had become legend in our household, the only Speed Queen around was the washer on our porch where she did the laundry for her husband and four children. She was still the Lady in Red though: her lipstick, crimson to go with her black-as-night hair, and in winter her red toque. But perhaps more evocative of that sobriquet in the late 50s was her clandestine sexual life. She had an affair.
My friend down the road from us had a good Catholic mother who was always in the kitchen. While she was in her apron whipping up strawberry shortcake, my mom was out drinking rye and seven in her high heels and pencil skirts. Not that my mom hadn’t ever made Jell-O or cookies. When I was little she’d baked with the best of them, and I can still remember rushing home after school to sink my teeth into a warm butter tart, fresh out of her oven. But when I (her youngest) was old enough to take care of myself, my mother got her real estate licence and was off travelling Vancouver Island, listing houses and showing properties - and much more, as it turned out, for this is when her cheating began.
In one of our home movies my mother smashes a sledgehammer into a wall and laughs. So began our kitchen renovations: new pine cupboards, stainless steel sinks, a garburator. Just months after its completion, my father would discover her infidelity. She may just as well have taken that sledgehammer to his heart.
My dad left, never to see my mother again. Nor did he ever mention her to us, except once when out of the blue he noted that “the man who broke up my marriage was named Jeb and the man your mother ended up with is named Seb”. In time I would see that this observation of rhyming names contained all the bewilderment he felt over the loss of his bride.
Following the divorce, my mother took my sister and me on a road trip through B.C.’s interior. We stopped in little towns where I bought souvenirs: a pocket knife from Revelstoke, a pennant flag from Golden. The Ookpik purchased in Olalla snuggled with me that same night on a Winnipeg couch in a Keremeos motel.
When I search my memory for that defining mother-daughter moment, the one story that describes our relationship, some words of motherly wisdom she left me with, I come up blank. There was no day when she revealed her dreams to me or let me in on her secrets.
But I can still hear her voice, deep and soothing, and her laughter. I wonder now about her extraordinarily wacky sense of humour. Was that part of the “drinking problem” I later learned of? Was she impaired half the time? Or half-cut all the time? Was she authentically loopy or just looped? Though I never heard her slur words or saw her tip over, I understood as I grew older that she was fond of tippling. When the Bloody Caesar was invented it instantly became her drink of choice, a taste of saltchuck in a shade to match her lips.
The last photo I have of her shows a woman of eighty-three, her hair still dark, her bone structure still chiselled, posing with a bobcat she’d just shot from her kitchen window. He’d been trying to get at her chickens and she took him out at a hundred yards.
But the image that stays with me is one of my mother standing at the edge of the creek that ran through her farm. It’s a hot afternoon and we’re there for a dip. She is wearing her blue bathing suit. Her skin is as brown as toasted coconut and her hair is as black as ink, grey strands glinting like silver thaw in the night. She stands as tall and calm as a tree.
In that moment I understand everything about her
May 30, 2013
What Book Are You?
Hello. I am Marie Wilson and I wrote a novel called The Gorgeous Girls. This book has been described by my publisher as “the thinking woman’s erotica.” I had a lot of fun writing it but the summer I was twenty years old I was writing an entirely different sort of novel, one that never got finished.
I was renting a room in an old house in Vancouver that summer. My landlady’s name was Lois Light and her house was known to the locals as The Lighthouse. My room was in the basement and although it was the size of a large closet, there was a lot of light admitted by a window that took up half of one wall. The rent was extremely low.
One day at breakfast another basement-room renter said to me: "You are an enigma." I knew what she meant. I wasn’t saying much that summer. I was working on that novel and when I did speak it was likely about the mysteries of the universe (which was what the novel was about which was why I never finished it).
But I felt that if people were to just quiet their minds and listen then they could decode not only me but the entire shebang. That morning, I downed my orange juice, looked my roomie in the eye and said, “I'm actually an open book." She arched a quizzical brow. I explained: "You just have to know how to read."
In the intervening years I have often wondered what sort of a book, open or otherwise, I might have been then. Or now. An epic romance? A toddler’s board book? A philosophical tome? A dime store potboiler?
Perhaps all of the above, perhaps none. But if I could choose just one book to be it would be the first book I ever fell in love with. I was nine years old and the book was called The Golden Pinecone. I can’t recall its plot or characters anymore; I only know that it was full of magic and wonder. There were fairies in it and of course the eponymous pinecone. The book is out of print now.
But me? I am still very much in print! And I still think that deciphering the mysteries of the cosmos (me and you included) is about quieting your mind and knowing how to read.
What book are you?
The Gorgeous Girls
I was renting a room in an old house in Vancouver that summer. My landlady’s name was Lois Light and her house was known to the locals as The Lighthouse. My room was in the basement and although it was the size of a large closet, there was a lot of light admitted by a window that took up half of one wall. The rent was extremely low.
One day at breakfast another basement-room renter said to me: "You are an enigma." I knew what she meant. I wasn’t saying much that summer. I was working on that novel and when I did speak it was likely about the mysteries of the universe (which was what the novel was about which was why I never finished it).
But I felt that if people were to just quiet their minds and listen then they could decode not only me but the entire shebang. That morning, I downed my orange juice, looked my roomie in the eye and said, “I'm actually an open book." She arched a quizzical brow. I explained: "You just have to know how to read."
In the intervening years I have often wondered what sort of a book, open or otherwise, I might have been then. Or now. An epic romance? A toddler’s board book? A philosophical tome? A dime store potboiler?
Perhaps all of the above, perhaps none. But if I could choose just one book to be it would be the first book I ever fell in love with. I was nine years old and the book was called The Golden Pinecone. I can’t recall its plot or characters anymore; I only know that it was full of magic and wonder. There were fairies in it and of course the eponymous pinecone. The book is out of print now.
But me? I am still very much in print! And I still think that deciphering the mysteries of the cosmos (me and you included) is about quieting your mind and knowing how to read.
What book are you?
The Gorgeous Girls
