A Peculiar Child up on Alice Street
Following the recent passing of my father Ed Sr., I must confess that writing has certainly been a therapeutic outlet. As a career writer I’ve never really felt my craft to be in any way a therapy for anything. When I write it’s always been serious business and my therapy, believe it or not, has been found miles away on the other side of the task.....when I can sit back and listen to music and rest my eyes and hands. In fact, my wife can attest to the determination and intensity by which I write.....such that I destroyed countless manual typewriters and electronic keyboards during my newspaper years. This is the longest serving keyboard now but then I’ve cut down on my writing work over the past two years its been in active service. When I was writing long-hand, which I still do on occasion, my wife showed me one day how my pen has actually dug down onto multiple pages.....you can feel it. When I seemed amazed at that, she told me to rub my hand over the pine table I used to work at years ago, and true enough there was an imprint there as well. Thus, not knowing it, my writing work has been much more a transference of aggression I suppose, than a therapeutic release of pent-up emotion. My family members might suggest that I often needed therapy after a long writing jag. Typically however, I was writing then about politics, local government foibles and environmental desecration here in Muskoka. No, I didn’t write to feel better.....I wrote to get even!
Over the past several years I have turned to writing more and more as a means of resolving issues that bothered me, and to engage readers who felt the same....or who at least were willing to offer a counter-point I hadn’t thought about previously. The blog has been my dearest friend, in fact, because I don’t have to battle an editor or publisher for space in their publication(s). And considering that I don’t have a particularly good relationship with any of the local publications or the folks who run them, the blog outlet has been amazingly contenting for many different reasons of expression.
When my father died on January 20th, after a short but painful illness, my first writing assignment was to pen a memorial tribute for the press and this Muskoka blog. It was something quite interesting because each submission was different. Firstly the public obit for the local media had to be shorter, and more to the point than obviously the blog submission. Writing for the press, I could feel the tips of my fingers starting to sting from the heavy handedness. It was even more aggressive after the first submission was ruled "too wordy" by editorial staff, and I was forced to revise. No, this wasn’t therapy but the blog copy was. I just explored everything I recalled about my dad that seemed relevant to a memorial......and then some. It wasn’t a tidy little piece of measured words but rather a rambling recollection, an editorial mosaic, depicting a man who had a difficult life at many points....yet was the kind of scrapper who didn’t give up because of set-backs. He provided for his brothers when abandoned as a youth, and despite losing his job numerous times, he always provided for us, and gave me a wonderful opportunity to travel, play sports, a chance to live in Muskoka, and he and my mother helped finance a university education from which I great benefitted. When I began writing the obit I felt there wasn’t too much more to add onto the skeleton of the newspaper copy. I just dropped my writing protocol for a few moments, and soon enough one fond memory fed another, and another until I was pleasantly exhausted but feeling complete about a story I’d hoped wouldn’t need to be written......especially by me.
While it’s true that I have habitually sat down to a keyboard with a mission at hand, I seldom have sat at my desk and doodled with words...... because I’ve always been project focused. I know pretty much what I’m going to write when I sit down, and my fingers assume the position. It has been rather refreshing, you might say, to have reached this mid life crazy, and feel right at home writing because it’s fun and unfettering for the soul. Even my work on other blog and web sites, in the past two months, has been less aggressive this way......, and possibly I’ve come upon a new way of expressing life and times in good old Muskoka without rage and thunder. It’s not likely I’ve stopped grinding axes or anything, and my critics won’t offer the opinion that I’ve suddenly become soft on local issues.....but I think this therapy writing might have some advantages. For one thing, I might not kill this keyboard with my blunt force intensity.
I haven’t had fun writing for some years. I’m sorry that it took my father’s death to realize something about my craft was missing. And it’s okay to write while pissed-off, just to do so happily and with the resolve that by the concluding comments.....well, I’m feeling much better that a point has been made, without even a trace of smoke coming from beneath my fingernails. Alas, after one editorial I’m eager to start another. Any journalist reading this would suggest that Currie’s had a burn-out and is on his way to poetry. Actually, I began as a poet so if I ended this way it wouldn’t be so bad.
I think a lot of writers are the same. While it’s of course necessary to be serious at one’s craft, being too consumed sucks the art out of writing. How many home decorators wish to hang an angry work of art in their family room? How many of you wish to read an angry editorial after having an anger-generating work day? I won’t surrender entirely to this therapy concept but I will admit being less pent-up and vengeful is nice for a change. Will I live longer because of it? No, I think my other vices will catch-up the pace but an improvement at my age is okay regardless. In my own obituary I’d include something relevant about this change of attitude and mission. "Like Dickens Scrooge, after the visits of three spirits, Ted found peace in being able to write with candor and resolve, nastily yet gently, spiritually but realistically, and painted with words such that we never knew if he was being condescending or approving by intent. He was a true Jackson Pollock of a writer, as abstract as life itself."
But by golly he had fun expressing himself!