Marion Agnew

This year, I've been showing the photos I used in the calendar I create every year. You can find previous months and a link to the text they illustrate here . As you can imagine, northwestern Ontario is lovely in September. I always have more photos to choose from than room to show them. This month, I used these. Photos of places so familiar in summer, but now with signs of changing leaves and dying grasses, are extra special, rather like seeing someone you love with new eyes. I don't have kids, but I get the same feeling when I see photos of my parents when they were young -- far younger than I am now. "Oh,  the handsome fellow in his tux, the young girl in overalls posing hands-on-hips -- they are part of who you were, too!" It's no accident that songs about September are often poignant. It's hard not to look at the sun and wish it would hang around on its summer schedule for a few more months -- and it's hard not to feel that sense of summer...

Fall is still a new year for a lot of us -- whether it's a religious holiday or just the tradition of starting school. Notebooks, crayons (or colored pencils), sharpeners, erasers, glue (or glue sticks). New books, new ideas to write in them, new problems to puzzle over and (it is to be hoped) solve. Along those lines, Quinn McDonald, a writer and creativity coach based in Arizona, recently wrote a post called  Re-Packing Your Brain . In it, she says, "Every time we start a new project, change our business, choose a new perception, we have to 're-pack our brain.'" Wait...we choose our perceptions? And re-packing our brain around new perceptions can, in her words, give us a "new-found eagerness"? How potent that is -- but yeah, isn't that what new starts are all about?  In the past few weeks, I have adopted a new routine (still doing that 25 minutes of suffering!) and, wonder of wonders, I have been writing in the morning. I'm not ...

I have written before about transcending my upbringing . I have also written about zentangles in the context of projects that don't go the way you think they will . Recently, I've noticed another way in which  zentangles  help me (in the words of a former boyfriend, long ago) "get over my own bad self." I draw zentangles for no reason. Just because. I do it to do it. I have no plans for them beyond the doing of them. It's PLAY. Hear that? That noise you heard was transcendence, folks. In my family of origin, we had activities and we took lessons. (We also had time for lazing around, dilly-dallying, reading, and dawdling, when we could escape our mother's watchful eye. Thank goodness for siblings.) As we got older, we were expected to become more serious about our activities. I swam competitively; I took music lessons. I was expected to practice these pursuits as regularly and conscientiously as I did homework (which was top priority in our home). Becau...

It is, of course, September, but I couldn't resist the title.  In August, I learned that my essay "All I Can Say" will be included in   The Best Canadian Essays 2012 , published by   Tightrope Books . The book will be available in stores in October. This essay was also shortlisted for the   2009 CBC Literary Awards   and appeared in   Room 34.3 .  My thanks go out to Clélie Rich and the other editors at Room , and to Chris Doda and Ray Robertson of Tightrope Books. I am also extremely grateful to Eric, an extraordinary teacher and human being, and to my friend, poet   Veronica Patterson . One afternoon over coffee, I said, "I went to the funeral of a service dog last week." She leaned forward, eyes wide, and said, "And what was THAT like?" By way of answer, I started this essay.