Women’s stories, life lessons shared

Abena Beloved Green calls her book, Ode to the Unpraised: Stories and Lessons from Women I Know (Pottersfield Press) “an experiment in representing the voices of others authentically with an artistic spin.” The Antigonish-raised poet, writer and dancer did this by blending poetry and interviews with thoughtful women in her life. The stories Green collects from friends, mothers, and community leaders range from reflections on life to practical advice for living.

“Ode to the Unpraised seeks to explore the practical knowledge, life lessons, and personal essence of everyday women through conversation, prose, and poetry. Many of these women don’t hold professional titles and may not be interviewed or written about outside of this book. Their experiences and knowledge are valuable and their stories are humorous, informative, and insightful,” Green writes in her book’s introduction.

“My goal was to draw forth the poetry from the lives and words of these twenty-six women. I hope that readers will find treasure in the anecdotes of these hidden figures and that perhaps they too will discover, in those around them, poetic gems of experience and insight.”

Green’s work started in 2014 with a plan to interview her grandmother in Ghana. But her grandmother died before she could have her questions answered. Rather than end the work, Green decided to interview other members of her family and other women who raised and inspired her. The women live in Nova Scotia, Ontario and Ghana.

Each section of Ode to the Unpraised opens with the woman’s name, a biographical paragraph, and their answers to questions asked by Green. Each section closes with a poem or poems.

“The poems in this book are written in a few ways: in my words as a response to the women’s words; using mostly the women’s words; and adapted from drafts of poems written prior that I thought aligned with the person or parts of our conversation,” writes Green.

One of the women Green interviewed was Lameia Reddick, a community leader and storyteller from North Preston. She speaks about her healing journey that led her to write love letters to her parents.

Green’s poem Love Letters follows Reddick’s biography and reflections in the book. The poem begins: “Homegrown love child sprung from a legend. Puddy’s daughter Sondra’s girl.

She notes the pattern in their presence and writes love letters to each of them FULL of come-to-the-light questions and thank yous, reflections on how she came to be.”

THE SWEETNESS IN THE LIME

The year 2020 seemed to come and go before I could read or promote all the interesting books published in Nova Scotia last year. Author and journalist Stephen Kimber’s The Sweetness in the Lime (Nimbus Publishing) was one of them. A bittersweet story set between Cuba, Miami, and Halifax; the book explores the complexities of love at middle-age.

“My initial inspiration for The Sweetness in the Lime came from a series of early 2000s newspaper stories about a Canadian fisher who’d travelled to Cuba, fallen in love, and then spent years trying to get his girlfriend, bride, and ultimately mother of his child permission to join him in Canada. Days after he succeeded, she left him. He’d been her ticket out.”

That is not this story. But it got me thinking about “What is love?” and “What’s love got to do with ....”

Which led me to Eli Cooper, a resolutely single, fiftysomething newspaper copy editor who spends his nights obsessing over unnecessary “thats,” his days caring for his demented dad. Then, one day, his publisher shutters the paper where Eli has worked his entire career and his father, left on his own, wanders off into a snowstorm and freezes to death.

Guilty, alone, and adrift, Eli ends up in Cuba for a forget-it-all vacation. There, he meets an off-the-books tour guide named Mariela, falls in love, and lives happily ever... Well, not exactly.

Eli and Mariela both have secrets they’re not sharing, needs they’re not acknowledging, and a lifetime’s worth of damages they’ve yet to undo.

Set in the starkly contrasting worlds of Havana, Halifax, and Miami, the novel asks whether it’s possible to find sweetness in the lime of life.

“And, if so, what that happiness really is,” Kimber asks readers at the beginning of his novel.

BRIGHTEN THE CORNER WHERE YOU ARE

In Brighten the Corner Where You Are: A Novel Inspired by the Life of Maud Lewis (Nimbus Publishing), Carol Bruneau imagines the folk artist narrating her own story. In the process, Bruneau creates a literary response to Maud’s artistic legacy, adding to readers’ understanding of the shy artist who created joyful paintings yet lived in poverty with crippling rheumatoid arthritis.

“And in the end, what sweetness it is to enjoy a blue moon and just paint it in your mind’s eye, no need to fumble with a brush! It’s easy to love something named for a colour,” Bruneau writes in her novel.

Through extensive research and her own creativity, Bruneau imagines: What was Maud really like? How did she manage living in a one-room painted house with no running water, married to Everett, a miserly man known to drink? Was she happy, or was she miserable? Did painting save her or enable Everett? In her novel, Bruneau allows Lewis to speak her mind freely from beyond the grave and tell her story her way.

“As with many things in life, I suspect the reality of her experience lies in between abject darkness and cheery sunshine, in the grey areas of shifting light. Not to sugar-coat any aspect of Maud’s life, but in dramatizing parts of this shadowy ground, I ask you to remember that, as Margaret Atwood says, all fiction is speculative,” Bruneau writes in the author’s notes at the end of her book.

HEALTH MIND SOUL: EIGHT STEPS TO FINDING YOUR INNER PEACE

A recent article in Greater Good Magazine, Why New Year’s Resolutions Matter More in a Pandemic, caught my attention. Why do they matter more? I wondered. According to the article, we are in what Harvard Business School’s Rosabeth Moss Kanter calls the “messy middle,” where everything is hardest. Collectively we’ve been through big change. And with all big change the more tempted we are to give up, to turn our attention away from our long-term goals and to seek short-lived pleasure, writes Christine Carter, the author of the article.

But Carter urges us to not give up. She encourages those interested in setting resolutions to ask themselves five key questions to set their mid-pandemic course on a good path. What do you want to take with you when this is all over? What are some aspirational goals that you could set for yourself? What new habit have you wanted to get into for a while now? How can you invest in yourself? What do you want to feel more of in 2021?

Local self-help author Jeff Simpson might also be able to offer some help. He recently published Health Mind Soul: 8 Steps to Finding Your Inner Peace (Tell well Talent).

“Maybe you’re down and out at the moment going through a divorce, job loss, and midlife crisis. It could be anything. I’ve personally been a part of those as well. It’s never too late to add something new to the mix that just might give you back the spark you need to get energized about life. We have a short go on this Earth, and we should try to maximize every possible day,” Simpson writes in his book’s introduction.

Simpson’s steps include finding passion in your career, meditation, journaling, maintaining healthy relationships and healthy living habits, nurturing gratitude, forgiveness and finding joy.

For more information on Simpson and his book visit his website, www.healthmindsoul.com.