Yesterday, an e-book I had ordered through the Ottawa Public Library showed up on my list of resources ready to be borrowed and downloaded. It was Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott. I was hooked from the first paragraph:

I grew up around a father and a mother who read every chance they got, who took us to the library every Thursday night to load up on books for the coming week. Most nights after dinner my father stretched out on the couch to read, while my mother sat with her book in the easy chair and the three of us kids each retired to our own private reading stations. Our house was very quiet after dinner—unless, that is, some of my father's writer friends were over. My father was a writer, as were most of the men with whom he hung out. They were not the quietest people on earth, but they were mostly very masculine and kind. Usually in the afternoons, when that day's work was done, they hung out at the no name bar in Sausalito. But sometimes they came to our house for drinks and ended up staying for supper. I loved them, but every so often one of them would pass out at the dinner table. I was an anxious child to begin with, and I found this unnerving.

With just a few select words, Lamott transports me to her childhood home. I imagine a dimly lit living room, save for the light from lamps illuminating the books her father and mother devoured as they lounged in their favourite reading spots. I can see little Anne at the dinner table, absorbing everything her father and his writer friends were saying, but being appalled when one of them passed out.

Lamott writes that she had wished her father had been like other fathers: putting on a necktie and going off to work in a little office. Instead, he was a writer, rising at 5:30 each morning no matter how late he had been up, writing for several hours, pausing for breakfast, then returning to write for the rest of the morning. She continues:

So I grew up around this man who sat at his desk in the study all day and wrote books and articles about the places and people he had seen and known. He read a lot of poetry. Sometimes he traveled. He could go anyplace he wanted with a sense of purpose. One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around.

My daily practice of writing does make me more observant. And it commits to the record many anecdotes that I would otherwise forget. Indeed, it's often only when I read old blog posts that I recall an amusing story from my life. Today, for example, I spent a good portion of the day in the country, visiting with my mom on the farm. At one point, my younger brother pointed to a tract of land where, until recently, a fence row had stood. Gone were the rocks, debris and vegetation that had littered the fence row for perhaps a hundred years. In its place was a smooth patch of earth cutting through the middle of what had previously been two fields.

Lamott shares what she learned from her father:

Writing taught my father to pay attention; my father in turn taught other people to pay attention and then to write down their thoughts and observations. His students were the prisoners at San Quentin who took part in the creative-writing program. But he taught me, too, mostly by example. He taught the prisoners and me to put a little bit down on paper every day, and to read all the great books and plays we could get our hands on. He taught us to read poetry. He taught us to be bold and original and to let ourselves make mistakes, and that Thurber was right when he said, "You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backwards." But while he helped the prisoners and me to discover that we had a lot of feelings and observations and memories and dreams and (God knows) opinions we wanted to share, we all ended up just the tiny bit resentful when we found the one fly in the ointment: that at some point we had to actually sit down and write.

Some nights, when I sit down to write, I see only the effort required to make something from nothing, that is, to come up with a topic for my blog and to write about it. Almost without exception, however, once I've published my post, I'm pleased at what I've come up with. It's like staring at a pile of rock, debris and vegetation then smoothing it out so that something new stands where once only jumbled thoughts existed.