WILLIAM BIDDLE GALLERY ~ 25 Cayuga St. N.(beside the Post Office)
GRAND OPENING Saturday 10:00 - 5:00
Sunday 12:00 - 4:00

Artist, William Biddle, welcomes Molly Cooper of Cayuga to his new gallery.

Excerpt from MOON WALK by MICHAEL JACKSON * ~

"Meanwhile, I was kind of detached, despite the terrible pain. I was watching all the drama unfold. Later they told me I was in shock, but I remember enjoying the ride to the hospital because I never thought I'd ride in an ambulance with the sirens wailing. It was one of those things I had always wanted to do when I was growing up. When we got there, they told me there were news crews outside, so I asked for my glove. There's a famous shot of me waving from the stretcher with my glove on.
"Later one of the doctors told me that it was a miracle that I was alive. . .I had third-degree burns on the back of my head that almost went through to my skull, so I had a lot of problems with it, but I was very lucky."

* Michael Jackson (Aug. 29, 1958 - June 25, 2009) pg. 237 William Heinemann, London 1988

(note: Doctor from Grenada is currently in a Los Angeles court, charged with involuntary manslaughter of Michael Jackson.)

Carolyn See, author of the book, Making a Literary Life ~ Advice for Writers and Other Dreamers*, recommends that her students of writing send "one charming note, five days a week, to an author, an editor, a journalist, a poet, a sculptor...someone whose professional work or reputation you admire...

"Life is a matter of courtship and wooing, flirting and chatting. If you don't know a soul in the literary world, you can choose to stay home and sulk until the cows come home. You can write stuff and look at it and agonize and worry and wait five years and send something out to a periodical where they've never heard of you and a bored clerk or intern will send it right back with a printed rejection slip."

Carolyn See suggests that by reaching out to people in the field, you can make your own literary life ~ an intriguing idea. Certainly, under any circumstances a complimentary handwritten note is probably a good idea. Five days a week could be taxing and impractical given our Canadian postal rates.

~ *Random House Publishing Group, 2002.

Some insightful advice from Canadian author Pierre Berton:
"In order to write effectively it is necessary to hear the rhythm of your own words. In my later drafts I listen for it after each sentence, and before the next I listen to both together. I then write the next sentence and listen to it in concert with the previous two. Thus the work proceeds smoothly, like a sonata, and the sentences don't go bump-bump-bump, like a car on a rocky road."
"There is no easy way to write a book... (letter to a writer)
Dear Mrs. P. I'm afraid I have to be fairly blunt with you. If your work is not selling, it is clearly because nobody wants to buy it. If nobody wants to buy it, it is quite clear there is something wrong with it from a professional point of view. Wanting to write isn't enough; you've got to know how. It is a long, hard apprenticeship and there is no room in it for amateurs."
~ Pierre Berton, Canadian author (1920 - 2004) The Joy of Writing, Random House of Canada, 2003

"The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way.

To the eyes of the man of imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees."

~ William Blake (1757 - 1827) English poet.

Photos: Along The Grand

A remarkable book about Hamiltonian Thomas McQuesten, brings to mind a sad fact: many a photograph, many a bit of history is lost when the contents of closets or drawers are discarded. Sometimes sheer volume of stuff makes it impractical to go through papers, correspondence, documents, photos one-by-one.
A visit to Whitehern some time ago, home of the McQuesten family in Hamilton, Ontario, provided me with an insight to the importance of taking the time. A regular search on the internet rewarded the staff of Whitehern with a missing artifact ~ an observant curator recognized an unidentified photograph as one of the family members and was able to acquire it for the collection.
Someone recently told me that he fondly remembers the hours he spent with an elderly aunt looking over old black and white photos of Cayuga. He then reluctantly confessed that family members brought in a dumpster on the event of his aunt's death and everything was apparently lost.
One can only ponder what early history of our village disappeared with that convenient dumpster.
~ Thomas Baker McQuesten, Public Works, Politics and Imagination, John C. Best, Corinth Press, Hamilton, Ontario, 1991
Photo: Colour along The Grand River today.