In 1912 Emily Carr had studied painting in San Francisco and England and France. She had exhibited her paintings. She had gone on sketching trips to northern British Columbia and lived with the First Nations people and painted their homes and art. She had gone to the government of British Columbia and proposed that she be employed in documenting the art and lifestyles of the First Nations peoples, which she (like most white people at the time) believed would soon cease to exist.

The government turned her down. The samples of art she had submitted were too "artistic", not realistic enough for a documentary project. However, they didn't hire anyone else to do it either.

Carr had a studio in Vancouver. She had worked for one month teaching art, but her students disliked her and she quit. Her studio did not make enough to support itself. She closed it and moved back to Victoria where her sisters lived. She opened a boarding house.

She didn't paint for 15 years.

That isn't entirely true. It wasn't, actually, fifteen full years before she was "rediscovered" by the Canadian art world. And during those years, she painted some local scenes. There's a self-portrait of her from this time, in which she is painting. She sent some of her work to exhibitions. But that's how she saw it - she had ceased to paint. And that's how it feels, that's how you think of your life. The narrative doesn't always match reality - but the narrative is what's important.

They can't have been entirely joyless years. She came up with nicknames for her boarding house and her lodgers. She worked in other mediums. She took up pottery and dog breeding. She was near her family. Biographies of her skip over this as a "depressing" period of "domestic drudgery", but it was fifteen years of her life.

In the late 1920s, when she was 57, she started to paint again. Canadian artistic tastes had changed, and people came to visit her to see her works, and her paintings were exhibited and sold. She travelled back up north to find source material. She invented new ways of sketching. She became very concerned about the impact of industry on the environment, and put that into her paintings.

She went fifteen years without painting, and then she started painting again.

I actually read this last December and wrote it up then, and then stuff happened, but I suspect many of you may enjoy a distraction.

Gendered Pasts: Historical Essays in Femininity and Masculinity in Canada, edited by Kathryn McPherson, Cecilia Morgan, and Nancy M. Forestell.

( 'When Bad Men Conspire, Good Men Must Unite!' )

( The Homeless, the Whore, the Drunkard, and the Disorderly )

( No Double Standard? )

( 'It Was Only a Matter of Passion' )

( Gender and Work in Lekwammen Families, 1843-1970 )

( 'To Take an Orphan' )

( 'A Fit and Proper Person' )

( The Miner's Wife )

( Sex Fiends or Swish Kids? )

( 'The Case of the Kissing Nurse' )

( Defending Honour, Demanding Respect )

I have enjoyed reading other people's, so here we are.

( Read more... )

So I was wondering why I wasn't really feeling much about the situation. There were specific anxieties, like dad being in the States, but in general I wasn't anxious and I didn't feel the need to check the news every hour and all my issues were more depression in reaction to the lockdown than the pandemic. And this is a coping mechanism in itself, which gaudior has written a post about that I'm not linking directly because I'm on mobile, but it was odd.

And now I've realized that what was actually happening is that my brain is dealing with the anxiety with its standard coping mechanism, which is somatization.

I haven't had serious anxiety like this in so long that I kind of just forgot about it. But yeah, that's how it goes - anxiety may or may not be noticeable on a conscious level but it goes straight to physical symptoms.

(I *also* have some kind of non-covid infection, labyrinthitis or something, but the anxiety is making it Much Worse and probably also responsible for me catching it at all given that I've barely seen people outside the house for three weeks.)

Also legitimate reasons or not, it's really annoying that when I *can't* write I really want to write and feel like I could if only I could concentrate, and when I have time to write it all goes to staring at the internet and distraction.

Title: Rely
Rating: M
Universe: Marvel
Characters: Clint Barton, Bucky Barnes
Summary: To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.
-- George MacDonald
Warnings/Enticements: BDSM, Sensory Deprivation, Blindfolds, Trust Kink
Word Count: 200

On AO3

So.

My college is switching to online classes, except they haven't done this before in the middle of a semester and also half of my classes have really important lab components which can't be done from home. They're saying the semester will end when scheduled; I kind of doubt that. They're supposed to have figured out how this works by Monday, and until then I get to review and be anxious.

All of my work's clients are cancelling their inventory counts, obviously. I am not seriously financially affected by this.

My 79-year-old father decided to fly to Texas last weekend. He's back now where we have free healthcare and my stepmother is in an AirBnB so that's resolved, ish, but wow, Monday night was not fun.

Unfortunately being stuck at home with my mother all day is not ideal for my mental health, but ... there's nowhere else to go and if there was I'd have to go on public transit. And it's still too cold to spend much time writing in parks. But I'm generally doing okay. Lots of knitting.

The problem with saying "use the time to write!" is that this is a major disruption of routine, with bonus anxiety, which does not actually lend itself to increased creativity. I don't have that much focus for reading, either, including my DW list, which come to think of it is probably a warning sign (so, now I know). There has nevertheless been some writing. Kate Bornstein is a treasure.

I am sort of doing more on twitter, but I would not really recommend going on twitter if you don't want ALL CURRENT EVENTS ALL THE TIME.

Recommendations for podcasts accepted, no horror or true crime, without frequent interviews or changing guests every episode. Basically I want to listen to a small fixed group of people talking about things they are interested in that will not give me nightmares. Examples are Jay and Miles XPlain the XMen, Lingthusiasm, and usually Sawbones.

Probably the last collection of my Three Sentence Ficlets—I'm going to Windsor tomorrow.

( Enchanted Forest Chronicles )

( Tam Lin by Pamela Dean )

( Firefly )

( Calvin and Hobbes )

Also, at be_compromised 's Valentines Mini Promptathon, this for the prompt, "Ace Natasha and pan Clint a la this fanart. They're a couple, so anyone Clint wants to sleep with has to pass the Natasha Test first."

For those adverse to digging through fifty-something pages of comments. This is just for the first post (now closed to prompts but still open to fills and comments); I will hopefully get one for the second post (open for everything) up soon.

Neither list will be anything like exhaustive. Also, for some of these it may help if you click show thread from start for context.

( Turns out there are a lot of really good fics there! )

More from Three Sentence Ficathon!

( Hamlet )

( Agent Carter (2) )

( Good Omens )

( Original Science Fiction )

The Hamlet drabble above and the Agent Carter drabble from last post are now on AO3.

marvelfemslashevents is having a Big Bang, signups open until the end of February.

And

is open on rthstewart's journal!

Also: