Beginnings (and saunas)
I could fit a small sauna in the far corner of our backyard. I’d prefer it to be wood burning with double glass doors but would settle for an infrared barrel sauna. I’d make it solar powered. That’s possible! Someday…
The Finnish consider saunas to be a part of their national identity. In a land of five million people, there are over two million saunas. My kind of country. I would like to visit there. Someday…
I mapped out the characters for my novel in a Fitness World sauna. The dry warmth and the sound of the hissing, clanking heater helped to focus my mind.
And my novel begins in a sauna:
Kate practiced her yoga breath, inhaling the cedar scent of the sauna. She tried to tune out the muffled gym noises – the thumps of barbells, grunts of weightlifters, whirring of treadmills. Her thoughts pinballed from Henry to her idiocy to that damn song. An earworm. That’s what she had. Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. So true. She tightened the towel around her torso and left the sauna, her flip-flops squelching.
The Joni Mitchell lyrics might end up on the cutting room floor, depending on the licensing fees. Hopefully, I can keep them!
Years ago, I submitted the first page of an early draft of my novel to be anonymously read aloud and critiqued by a panel of editors at a local writers’ festival. What was I thinking? A (hard) lesson learned about where and when to submit your work. I clung to the morsel of positive feedback – they liked the setting in the sauna.
Several drafts later, I enrolled in a critique class taught by author Lori Hahnel. Over the course of a few months, I submitted a total of thirty thousand words (almost half my novel) for feedback and in turn, I had the chance to read and critique four other writers’ works-in-progress. What a formative experience in a safe and supportive environment!
I just finished reading Vermin, Lori Hahnel’s fabulous book of short stories that are linked by themes of loss. I love the dark justice meted out in the story, Vermin, and the money-making venture of the newly widowed character in Nurse Ingrid. Vermin recently won an Alberta Literary Award for best Short Story Collection.
If you live in Calgary, Lori be reading from her book later this month at cSpace’s Treehouse as part of Off the Shelf: The Group of Five Live.