Chesterman Beach, a place I am fortunate to walk several times a week, at its moody best.

A few things that caught my eye and interest lately.

I’ve just returned from the Vancouver Writers Fest, which was fabulous as always. The big draw for me was seeing Rebecca Solnit, an essayist whose writing I find endlessly fascinating. (She’s a master at seamlessly connecting things that, at first glance, seem disparate.) I saw her twice—both times speaking on hope and climate change—and was also re-reading her book, The Faraway Nearby. I often copy out paragraphs I admire, so I filled a lot of pages with her writings. This morning, as I finished and read the bonus story that ran along the bottom of each page in The Faraway Nearby, she taught me a new word—lachryphagy, the drinking of tears—which led me to Scientists Say weekly word. Yay for interesting rabbit holes.

Check out these fabulous works of art created by Duke Riley from marine plastic. I especially love the reimagined scrimshaw on jugs.

Also at the Writers Fest I saw Lauren Groff, author of Matrix, which I’ve read, and The Vaster Wilds, which I haven’t. (Yet; it’s on the list.) She was a delight and it was great to read about her process, which is detailed in this New York Times article. (In short, she writes multiple complete drafts in longhand, then puts them in a box and never looks at them again, but the ideas and characters “start to take on gravity and density.”)

I’ve recently left my fulltime job as an editor at Hakai Magazine, to return to freelancing. I adored that job and my colleagues, and learned so much, but I’m ready to pursue some of my own writing and just have more flexibility in my days. As I am entering what some call the third stage of life—my “third act” let’s say—I find myself particularly drawn to older artists who are showing they still have lots to offer, damn it! Finding Margaret Fabrizio, a very spunky 90-something-year-old fabric artist and her kawandi quilts, was a nice surprise. I highly recommend following her Instagram feed. She’s a character and a half.

Speaking of phases of life, and of the ways we mark time over the year, I love the idea that there are more than four seasons. Maybe there are six? Or 72 microseasons, such as “peonies bloom” or “worms surface?” And the Nuu-chah-nulth people, in whose land I live, mark time by months: earth washing moon or geese in formation moon or spring salmon moon.

Rats: not all bad and endlessly fascinating, especially in the capable hands of JB MacKinnon, with bonus art by Sarah Gilman.

I didn’t have a lot of time to write while I was at Hakai Magazine, but I am happy that I got to write a profile of Robert Higgins, a man obsessed by meiofauna, the stuff that lives between the grains of sand. Bob died last December, but his work and the scientists he inspired live on.

Thanks to a post on Rob Walker’s Substack, The Art of Noticing, (also the title of his great book), I was introduced to P. Jean Oliver, an artist and writer who doesn’t live too far from me. Be like a crow, indeed.