Nature / Writing

When I was a kid, one of my favourite chores was polishing silverware. I can't say how many times I was asked to do it, though it couldn't have been very many. Most of the time the good silverware lived in a heavy wooden chest on the top shelf of the hall closet, waiting patiently for a few holiday dinners a year. But every once in awhile it would be brought down and placed on the big table on an otherwise unremarkable Saturday, and I would be set up with a little blue tin of silver polish and a soft white cloth. I would methodically work my way through the curious array of oversized spoons and undersized forks and oddly shaped knives, genuinely enjoying myself. I wish I could say my pleasure came from being able to contribute to family celebrations, but the truth is that I just really liked watching the tarnish disappear beneath my fingers. It didn't feel like cleaning; it felt like I was conducting a ceremony to remove a curse.  It felt like magic. Decades later, I don...

 ... eBird streaking that is. Along with being Earth Month, April is also Citizen Science Month . Citizen science is an umbrella term that covers a wide array of activities, but what they all have in common is that they provide ways for non-professionals to contribute in some way to scientific research and discovery. There are two ongoing data collection projects I try to contribute to regularly; iNaturalist and eBird.  iNaturalist is focused on observations of individual wild organisms (you can explore mine through my iNaturalist profile ), while eBird is a survey-style project based on observing all of the birds in a given area at a given time. Although I signed up with eBird about a year and a half before I joined iNaturalist, in recent years I've been using iNat (as the cool kids call it) far more often. But in honour of Citizen Science Month I'm currently trying to make up for that with a little bit of healthy self-competition: eBird keeps track of the most days in a row ...

Sometimes I find an activity I really enjoy; one that makes my day or week or month measurably better. Sometimes I get distracted or fall into old routines and drift away from that activity for no particular reason. And so it was with the #SundayFishSketch, which I was really loving about a year ago , and then three months later I just... stopped. But this morning I ate some cinnamon buns and drew a Lake Sturgeon, as one should:  I hope you are also enjoying life's simple pleasures, fish-based or otherwise.

My mother gave Magnetic Poetry Kits to both Steve and I for Christmas. Mine was nature themed and Steve's was for haikus, but since the haiku set was full of nature words as well, we decided to amalgamate them into a single mega-set. Behold! I actually had an original Magnetic Poetry Kit and a Shakespearean bonus set when I was young (also gifts from my mother). I don't recall how often I used them as a tween/teenager, though I seem to recall that I would compose one short work and leave it on the fridge for months on end. Which really fails to embrace the inherent strengths of the medium, I think. So will the same thing happen again? Only time will tell. But for now, here is a first foray into my career as an adult fridge poet: Listen to Lichen Listen to lichen Smile at seeds Make friends with a mushroom Walk with the weeds. ART!  (I will have to give up on rhyming pretty quick. There just aren't that many options)

I'm pleased to announce that one of my works-in-progress has been chosen for an 'Individual - Playwrights' grant from the Toronto Arts Council. I'm particularly excited about this because "A Warmer World" brings together two of the things I care most about—writing for young audiences and the environment. As I described it in my grant application: "A Warmer World" is a versatile episodic play for young audiences about our current ecological crisis, which explores the issues, the potential impacts, and the personal actions we can take around climate change, pollution, and habitat loss. The play consists of monologues and short scenes featuring primarily teen and tween characters, and is designed to be suitable both for a professional TYA company to present as a full-length show with a small cast playing multiple roles, or for a school to perform itself with flexibility in cast size and length. If presented in full, "A Warmer World" is expecte...

These two floofs right here. They are the reason the chairs in our house wear socks.  Several layers of thick socks, in fact. Below is what I recently did to the wooden legs of an ottoman: This white wooden stool, on the other hand, got the pool noodle treatment: This is all part of the steps we've taken to wobbly-cat-proof our home. Littermates Charlotte and Rubin both have the neurological condition cerebellar hypoplasia, sometimes also called wobbly cat syndrome. The part of their brain which controls movement and balance didn't fully develop in the womb, so they are two happy, healthy cats who happen to fall into things a lot. Over the years we've had them, I feel we've really upped our baby-proofing game, and have found all sorts of ways to pad all sorts of awkward corners. When I was taking the below photo of the two newly-padded pieces of furniture together, I didn't even notice that I was getting the worn-out-pajama-pants-wrapped desk leg and the pipe-insula...

This morning I got up, ate some pancakes, and drew a fish. Because y'know, Sunday. Meet the Iowa darter—or at least my best approximation of one. My weekends haven't always been this way. Back in February I went to the Royal Ontario Museum for a one-day workshop called "Ontario Underwater: Freshwater Fishes of the Great Lakes". This was—and I cannot stress this enough—for fun.  I've had a good handle on Ontario mammals since I was a kid. I started casually birding in my twenties (although I still have a lot  to learn) and more recently, my knowledge of local reptiles and amphibians has progressed nicely. But fish, fish! For the most part, fish remained a mystery. As I hoped, the workshop was a great introduction, but it was also a lot to take in in just a few hours. Luckily we were all sent home with a copy of the Freshwater Fishes of Ontario guide book, but what to do with it? With birding, you take your book and your binoculars and head...

We've been staying home and social distancing for two-and-a-half months now, as the spring of COVID-19 stretches into summer. All things considered, I'm surprised it took me this long to decide to spend some of this formless time giving my website a little refresh. When I was looking for a new banner photo, this image felt like the perfect choice. It's a lovely photo if-I-do-say-so-myself , but it's also a lovely memory. A year ago next weekend, Steve and I rode the Maple Leaf together, a train that connects Toronto and New York City. We'd travelled to New York before, once by plane and once by bus, but since then I'd discovered the joy of train travel during a three day solo rail trip across America (which is a story for another time). Although that trip was filled with once-in-a-lifetime sights, it was even better to rattle along a little closer to home if it meant I could watch the sunset with someone I love. This year, there's no travel lined up i...

Today would have been Jean Craighead George's 100th birthday. She passed away in 2012 at the age of 92, but even if she didn't make it into the triple digits, her booklist did. George was a prolific author, writing over a hundred books - mostly for kids and mostly about nature and animals.  As a child, animal books were all I ever wanted to read. E.B. White's stories were an early favourite and still sit on my shelf, alongside titles like The Wilds of Whip-Poor-Will Farm, Misty of Chincoteague, The Dog Who Wouldn't Be, Beautiful Joe, and Where the Red Fern Grows. When most girls my age were reading The Babysitter's Club series - well, I was reading those too, but I was also devoted to The Saddle Club . I went through a Jim Kjelgaard phase and a James Herriot phase, accidentally learning a lot about the American wilderness of the 40s and 50s and life in rural England in the process.  

Today I sent a brand new play out for some strangers to read. I had not read the lines out loud, or sent it to a trusted friend, or reviewed it any way. I hadn't even read the whole thing myself, start to finish. This is not, of course, the recommended way to do submissions. But such is the nature of entering 24-Hour Playwriting Contests, at least for me. It had been two years since I took on a play-in-a-day challenge, so at the last minute I decided to pay my fee and sign up for this year's Toronto Fringe contest.

(Cross-posted from my iNaturalist journal ) Last week a former co-worker dropped by the Arboretum and, just before he was about to leave, mentioned that one of his plans for 2019 was to do a personal “Big Year”, trying to see as many different bird species as he can in the province of Ontario in a single year. “I was thinking you should do it, too.”

A few months ago I first tried out an app called Litterati , which encourages people to not only clean up litter, but to photograph it, tag it, and place it on a map as citizen science, so that those who are trying to combat litter at its source have information on what kind of garbage is showing up where. The app also tracks your total count of what you've cleaned up so you can compare yourself to others and even create your own club for a little friendly competition and added motivation. View this post on Instagram Party's Over 🗑 #Litterati #litter #balloons #garbage A post shared by Marilyn Anne Campbell (@marilyn.cam) on Dec 3, 2018 at 6:16am PST I love the idea of the app, but it and my tablet are not getting along when it comes to mapping. That's part of why I stopped using it when I initially downloaded it in the summer. I decided recently to give it another go, but the problem persists. For exampl...

I haven’t been writing much lately. Nothing creative, at least. I have been writing more tweets than usual, and posting more in Facebook groups. Plus there was that one out-of-character Facebook rant for friends and family to enjoy. There have been extensive comments on proposed government policies, and corresponding emails to politicians. And I have some business and media types still on my to-email list. So I guess there have been a lot of words, just not a lot of stories. It’s hard to focus on making things up when so much real life is disappearing. My recent words have been about caribou, coyotes, and cormorants. November, once reserved for the dug-in flurry of fiction writing that is Nanowrimo, has instead been filled with public meetings and private missives sent to friends who I both hope and fear are feeling the same way I am. How do you take time to make art when the world is in ecological crisis? How do you live your normal life? And should you even try? I’m ...

Well, with this round of  Camp Nanowrimo  heading into the final 17 hours I can safely say I will NOT be "winning" this time around, seeing as I would need to do 16 more hours of writing to meet my goal and I do have a job to go to shortly. I did, however, succeed in writing three new short plays this month, made great progress on two longer plays, and started two picture books. So it was still a pretty good run. I actually made the decision not to finish yesterday, and was leaning towards that decision on Saturday. As soon as I looked at all the things I wanted to do with the past weekend and realized it was either do those things and write for a few hours or forget having a weekend at all and just write, I chose the more balanced approach. When I was younger I surely would have surrendered my whole weekend to an online writing challenge, but as I stated in my project listing on the Camp Nanowrimo website: The real goal is not the final tally though; if I get far b...

Today marks the halfway point for this month's  Camp NaNoWriMo , the set-your-own-goal online writing challenge tied to National Novel Writing Month in November. Rather than choosing a word count goal, I wanted to use this month to build a regular, daily writing habit. My current tally is at 18 hours, which would have me more than halfway there if I'd gone with a simple hour-per-day goal. But I had a different plan, as explained on my Camp NaNoWriMo Project Page : The goal is at least one hour a day (30 hours), plus one additional hour on the days I know I'll have off during the month (+12), plus at least two mini-binge days with two additional hours (+4), for at least 46 hours spent writing in April.   So with that in mind, I technically should have been at 23 hours today to really be on track. But since my ultimate goal is to build up better habits, I went into this hoping that the month would get progressively better, not planning to have it all come together on d...

Come April, I'll be participating in Camp NaNoWriMo, a month-long writing challenge where you create your own definition of success. It's the more flexible cousin of November's National Novel Writing Month, where all participants are trying to write 50,000 words in those 30 days. I've twice "won" at NaNoWriMo (and once at the now defunct Script Frenzy challenge), but that was over a decade ago. For my first time at camp, my whole goal is based on writing hours rather than word count or even a particular project. I've never been someone who wrote everyday, but in the past few years my writing sessions have become more sporadic than ever. So I'm going to Camp with the goal of creating new habits which I hope will last long after the month is over. Want to set your own writing goal for April and have some online friends to cheer you on? There's still time to sign up for camp !

So if you follow me on any social media, you probably already know that Volume 5 of the Toronto Comics Anthology Osgoode as Gold  is currently on Kickstarter. The campaign video even includes a shout-out from co-editor Megan Purdy for the story I wrote, "The Goosefighter", which has art by Austen Payne: "The Goosefighter" is a Western-inspired tale about a young woman whose day is ruined by a territorial Canada goose on the York University campus. It is one of 27 new Toronto-set short comics that fill the 220 full colour pages of this collection. Cover by Irma Kniivila As I write this, the Kickstarter is at just under $6000 raised out of an original $15,000 goal, with the rest of the month to go. I've been rather casually posting about it as a great way to support the T oronto Comix Press and the creators by pre-ordering your physical or PDF copy of the book. But today - TODAY - they announced the stretch goals. (If you're not familiar with c...

Yay book in the mail! Excited to check out this poetry collection for kids about space and aliens from @theemmapress . And I love the bonus bookmark! #kidlit #kidspoetry #indiepress #uk #inthemail #toread A post shared by Marilyn Anne Campbell (@marilyn.cam) on Nov 14, 2017 at 4:24pm PST And it turned out my excitement over the arrival of this anthology from the UK was warranted. Watcher of the Skies: Poems about Space and Aliens  is a fantastic poetry collection for kids - playful and insightful and sure to spark the imagination of young writers and explorers alike. The collection pairs the poems with notes and suggested connections (presumably) supplied by editors Rachel Piercey and Emma Wright, along with related facts by Rachel Cochrane, a PhD student from the University of Edinburgh's Institute for Astronomy. This is a wonderful way to put the book together, as it means the poems can rise to any level of whimsy, with the kid-friendly "footnotes" ...

I just finished eating a bowl of cherries. I can't remember the last time I bought cherries. Today's anomaly was 100% because of this: I've written before about being influenced by children's programming into eating more fruit . Apparently it isn't just kids shows that work on me. Musician and vegan Macka B's "Medical Monday" and "Wha Me Eat Wednesday" videos are currently working as a regular reminder for me that there's a whole world of healthy food out there. Like so many people, we discovered Macka B when his video about cucumbers ( cucumba! ) went viral. If you somehow missed it, treat yourself to it and several others below, then treat yourself to some fruit and/or veggies. Also, you can  follow Macka B on Faceboook .

Thanks to Brian T. Schultz and the Storybook Land Theatre 2016 company for putting on a fantastic production of The Knight's Errand, hosting me when I came out to South Dakota to see it, and letting me use the footage. :) The Knight's Errand - A Play for Young Audiences from Marilyn Anne Campbell on Vimeo . Learn  more about The Knight's Errand (The video is also on YouTube, if you prefer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUGhj8m0cIw )