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​When a person goes to a psychologist, the hope is that the professional will be a person of some significant smarts. Of course, you want that psychologist to really understand you and what you are going through. But also, it’s important for that professional to know a lot about things like mental health disorders and ways of helping.
 
But those are two different vastly different kinds of smarts. One is receptive and connected, the other is objective and analytic. Over the course of my career I found that among professional colleagues there was not always a good balance between the two.
 
Some of my former colleagues were really good at the analytical side. They could add up symptoms really well to make a definitive diagnosis. Psychologists of that kind were really good at saying what was wrong with the people they served; that was totally what they focused on. When they entered into treatment, they followed the protocols, always knowing where they were in the treatment process.
 
But then there were those with the other kind of smarts. Psychologists good in this other way were intuitive and sensitive. More important to them than “getting” the diagnosis right, was that they “got” the client. They strove to really understand the suffering, perspectives and, values of the person they were with. Rather than standing at the distance of objectivity, these psychologists were right there with the subjectivity of the person they were helping.  From the very first contact with the client they were easing the suffering. And then in the midst and even the end of their work with the client they still were learning and appreciating the uniqueness of that person. Somehow, they were always somewhere in the middle of the work of relationship with the people they served.
 
Good service to the client meant that both types of smarts were held in balance. Intuition and sensitivity needed to be tempered by clear thinking and the ability to make sound judgments. At the peak of my career, I remember the two smarts running side by side. The intuitive and sensitive side ran the interview with the client, pacing the flow and focus of our conversation. The analytical and critical thinking side ran in the background, always focused on keeping on track in providing the professional service.
 
But then I got tired of that analytical and critical thinking part. I came to increasingly value the intuitive, human, side over the objective, critical thinking side. Funny thing, that.
 
In retrospect, I sense that as psychologists get good at one or the other of the two smarts they came to rely on just it more and more. I noticed the profession become increasingly polarized between the two. With the polarization came less respect for the other, and perhaps even more concerning, fear of the other. Toward the end of my career I watched as the critical thinking, analytical ones kept making up rules they expected the intuitive, sensitive (and, dare I say creative?) ones to follow. By the time I retired, the profession was becoming increasingly obsessed with rules and protocols of practice.
 
So now I venture into writing. There is a part of the process that is deeply intuitive, perceptive and sensitive to the characters and their circumstances. That writing has a sense of discovery as the plot emerges and characters display their idiosyncrasies, baggage and courage. Then there is the editing process, a practice of great discipline. The editing provides the polishing so the reader will be able to easily and knowingly grasp the story, its people, and the vicissitudes of the plot.
 
Discovery versus discipline. Writing versus editing. If the first comes as a gift, the second is an acquired skill.
 
Did you know that there are 18 things to watch for when an author edits their own work? I learned about it in a self-editing workshop. It’s best to do them one at a time. 18! Wow! One of the things to watch for are the darlings. Darlings are little bits that feel really great at the time of writing but don’t really contribute to the plot. In the editing process we are supposed to get rid of them. This makes the read more straightforward and gets the word count down. By the way the “18!” and “Wow!” above are darlings. This paragraph would’ve fallen flat without them.
 
You might want to check out my short story Four of us, (clickable link) a contest winner available on-line. There are darlings in there; see if you can spot them. They don’t really add to the plot. But when you get to the punch line at the end (the required element of a wooden mask) they make the whole story more poignant.
 
These little darlings are much like the diagnostically unnecessary parts of a client’s story that deepen the therapist’s sense of the person for who they are.
 
I recently read a book that was devoid of darlings. You can catch the review of Science and the Good: the tragic quest for the foundations of morality (clickable link). It does yeoman service to summarizing the philosophical quest and the recent scientific pursuit of what makes something good. But I was neither compelled by or satisfied with it. As much as it broached a topic that is fundamental to human nature, both our peril and our promise, it lacked the sparkle of passion and the insistence of insight into what it means to be a moral being.
 
And so, venturing along this different vocational path, now as a writer rather than a psychologist, I strive for the same balance. In the writing, I wish to be deeply receptive to my characters as persons navigating the struggles of human nature. And then, through the multiple rounds of editing, I discipline myself for your sake, my reader. I want your experience to be impactful and deeply human, too.
 
But as necessary as is all the editing that I do, the piece is nothing if it doesn’t have at its very heart the intuitive, the sensitive, and the creative. It is those very smarts that lift the piece above the otherwise drab, dutiful or downright dreadful.

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When I worked as a psychologist my daily life was filled with stories. They were poignant and personal, the intricate happenings in the lives of my clients. There were recurring themes, there was drama, there was the interplay of what was felt inside with what was going on outside.
            Sadly, acculturated into the practices of my trade, I was expected to turn elements of those stories into symptoms. And once that was done I was to add up those symptoms into a medically acceptable diagnosis. When I worked in a mental health agency, I was expected to go looking for related symptoms my clients didn’t even think to mention so I could meet diagnostic criteria. The premise of this all was that if I went through that process I would know objectively what to treat. Notice the use of the word what. When subjective suffering is turned into symptom, the person gets lost.
            During a bizarre half dozen or so years of my life as a psychologist I was required to tell those client stories -- once they had been reduced to symptoms, of course -- to a team of colleagues. We operated under the illusion that this was a quality assurance mechanism to make sure we had found all the symptoms and added them up correctly. We all got quite proficient at presenting our cases so that our diagnoses would not be questioned.
            But we were telling someone else’s story, morphing it for our own ends.
            Over my decades, I gradually came to see that this process does violence to others. As much as we might rationalize it as being for the good of the client, the objectification of the felt experience of that other person harms. Reductionism wounds.
            If we lose the sense of story, we can lose the human being who lives it.
            And in the process we can lose ourselves.
 
Now as an author, I still deal in stories. And I have this sense there is also a set of practices I am to observe to objectify this process too -- there must be a proper number of characters to inhabit a novel of a particular length, the right balance of dialogue and description, the optimum number of plot points and twists, the right length of denouement. I suppose that if I got good at all that, publishers would want my work and readers could enjoy it with the least amount of effort.
            But I find I’m grappling with the same issue all over again. Whose story is it, anyway? Who should get to tell it?
            I have a confession to make, one that my former colleagues might wish to reduce to symptom rather than subjectivity. It is this: I experience my characters as real presences with me. I hear them speak and then transcribe what they say into dialogue on the page. They do things and those things become the plot of the story.
            For several years now I have been working on the sequel to my novel An Incoming Tide. At the moment (or in these months) I’m doing a massive re-write. In the process I’m shifting from it being a third-person story with a narrator who sees all, to a first-person story with only events that occur in the presence of my main character, told only as they are perceived her.
            Yes! I’ve decided to let the story be told by that character, Estelle: not by me as the author with some all-knowing presence, but by her as the one who said the words and experienced the events. And the story is not just the words she said out loud or the happenings she witnessed, but what was going on in that troubled mind of hers.
             For much of the story, she -- the capable Estelle, a psychologist, no less -- wasn’t coping very well at all, her mind kept going away. I don’t think Estelle would mind that through the novel we know all the troubled stuff about her. Given her personality, she’d be generous in sharing that intimacy with the reader so we can understand better things like trauma and healing. And, no spoiler alert here, when you finally get to read Dead Daffodils you’ll probably feel relieved by where Estelle got to in the end.  
            But it is Estelle’s story. As raw, and as vulnerable, and as hopeful as it happens to be.
            As an author, as a conveyor of Estelle’s story, I am always looking for beta-readers (prepublication readers who give feedback to the author). Let me know if you would be interested by sending me an email. wilton@twiltondale.ca.

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​Upon closing the door to the therapy room, entering as a psychologist with someone in emotional distress, conversation ensued. Really ... that’s all we had. But it was a conversation leavened with inter-subjectivity. Wishing to understand and help, I needed to hear the subjective experience of the person I was with: the circumstantial struggles, the emotions that went with those struggles, and the values and hopes that provided context to them. To be a fully present human in the room as well, I also needed to experience and communicate my own subjectivity in response to the person I was with.
      Philosopher Martin Buber identified the difference between the “I-Thou”, relational interaction, as contrasted with the “I-it”, interaction with some other discrete entity. The difference is enormous.
      Unfortunately, inter-subjectivity was not what the institutions of psychology thought I should be doing. I was supposed to be objective. The client was to be diagnosed so their psychological disorder could have an approved treatment protocol applied. When personal suffering is reduced to symptoms of an illness, the professional can end up interacting with an “it” rather than the human being present.
      I had the opportunity to sit in on a diagnostic interview of one of my clients conducted by a psychiatrist. He did that other thing well. I was impressed with the decisive manner in which the psychiatrist asked the crucial questions, honing in to the most apt diagnosis. It felt like an enactment of the decision tree provided in our diagnostic manual. He probably got to the right answer, analytically and unassailably, but in the end the process did my client little or no good. In fact, it probably did some harm. I’m glad to say that client ended up doing well in therapy. I suspect he did so based on the inter-subjective nature of the conversations we were able to have, conversations that allowed him to figure out what was happening within him and explore what he could do about it.
     Relational interaction in professional services not only changes the other (e.g. suffering reduced) but the professional is changed as well -- we can hope deepened in humanity, wisdom and compassion through the relationship with the person suffering.
     And now, I have discovered this same power of inter-subjectivity in a whole other context.
     I’ve just returned from 12 days in Europe during which I posted a daily travel blog. Posting each day is a bit of a challenge. There is little time for editing, so the writing has to be quick and focused. Daily posting each blog with a photo on two Facebook pages (my own and that for Viking River and Ocean Cruises Friends) meant I got quick feedback. What prompted the most comments -- both in terms of the writing but also as other readers recounted their experiences -- were the blogs where I shared my own subjective experience: the felt sense of how I was responding to what I was seeing. For example, it wasn’t just that the cathedral was beautiful but also, more importantly, the beauty of the cathedral lead me to feel a sense of settling, conscious of my spirit and soul within.
    You might want to read that travel blog. You can do so by following this link. https://www.twiltondale.ca/rhine-getaway.html
     For inter-subjectivity to occur I must disclose my own humanity. As I do so, I invite the reader also to do so, too. But this must be kept in balance. If I focus too much on my own experience the writing can become egoistic, all about me rather than inviting the reader to explore their own subjective self. The replies to the Facebook posts provided an opportunity for my readers and I to share some “I thou” interactions within the Facebook community.
     You will notice photo-editing done on some of the images I’ve posted with the travel blog. I’ve tried to stay away from the over-saturating of images that is so popular these days; the colours in the sunlit Keukenhof Garden were actually that bright and vivid. However, I did use a filter to make the castles on the Middle Rhine look especially broody and old, to make the sunlight coming into the Cathedral in Speyer especially transcendent. That was the way I felt when I witnessed those scenes and I hope I conveyed that sense to you in those images. You will find some images create a sense of peace and centring because of their symmetry. Others will invite a desire to go off and explore through their asymmetry. That’s what I felt. The photo-editing was not just to create a pretty picture but to share my own subjectivity of being in that scene.
     There’s been another example of inter-subjectivity that has taken me by surprise. At times I’ve read my fiction aloud to those willing to listen. While I expected the listeners to be curious about the psychological profiles of my characters and the oddities of human nature in the plotlines, they were not. And, I was disappointed. What I often heard was what the story had reminded them of something from their own life experience. That reflecting on their own life, as prompted by my fictional tale, was their subjective experience of it. And, that is good.
     When I was providing psychotherapy, and now in writing, I’ve hoped to stimulate others to explore and value their own subjectivity. So, my valued reader, as you finish this blog sit back and notice what comes to mind prompted by what I’ve written for you this month. Perhaps you might spend some time over on the travel blog and see what comes up for you emotionally, experiences you’ve had prompted by the photographs and the stories there.
     You can always send me an email to let me know, just so we can celebrate together. wilton@twiltondale.ca.
​

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A disturbing Trend

​In the last decades of my career as a psychologist a disturbing trend took hold in the profession. The venture of psychotherapy, which had traditionally recognized the importance of the relationship between therapist and client, was taking on a different fundamental nature. Psychologists were more and more required to follow established therapies dispensed in step-by-step protocols. Not only was this how quality was defined in the profession, but it narrowed the freedom of its professionals to respond uniquely to client needs.
 What had been the hallmarks of the psychologist’s profession --- intuition, curiosity, empathy, creative problem-solving and compassion --- were thus diminished. In their place, the professional was to become a technician skillfully dispensing research supported protocols, defensible in court if the psychologist was ever sued.
 
In my first novel, written a scant five years ago, I wrote about therapy being provided by an avatar interacting using artificial intelligence (AI). Since then, AI has increasingly taken its place in our society. AI chat apps have come along for the lonely and ChatGPT writes college essays so students won’t have to develop their own critical thinking skills.
 
This concerns me as a human being. And as an author, too.
 
Because, of course, before long the AI algorithms will be writing our novels.
 
As the literary algorithms improve, and do so within a profit-driven consumer system, novels will be increasingly tailored to saleability. Because authors will no longer ponder the human condition to depict it with insight and wisdom, readers will no longer be challenged to do the same. Algorithms will learn what satisfies the most people most often, serving it up on sales tables and through social media for on-line ordering.  
 
Murder mysteries will have the ideal number of suspects, the most aptly placed red herrings, the right number of plot twists, and the most benign of a final chapter denouement. Literary fiction will have the best mix of past and present, a satisfying number of fascinating secondary characters, and serve up thoughtful nihilism and despair with a faint glimmer of human hope. For the romance reader, the perfect number of adverse events will occur before a couple falls into satisfying love, over and over again. And for sci-fi buffs, there will only be the optional blend of human traits and weirdness for the aliens. For the dystopians, you ask … well, maybe we shouldn’t go there.
 
However, literary AI can only produce an anti-novel as it creates variations on fiction based on what has been proven to work the best. Novelty will give way to success.
 
This is chillingly close. An author friend showed me the AI generated graphic for his book cover. It was most excellent, or should I say, too excellent. I still can’t get the image out of my mind, an image created by a digital programme with just a handful or prompts from a human being. Probably the human being of this process will become disposable in the future.
 
The algorithm designed to keep me strolling on Facebook has figured out that I am interested in this developing trend for authors. Ad postings for learning opportunities to enable me to write the successful novel come frequently. Apparently, there are easy steps that I can follow to write a best seller, can do so in just ten days rather than the years I put in to writing my novels now. The algorithms are being worked out, first for humans of course, but subsequently they will be used in the AI programmes.
 
Ah-ha, what can this be but deja-vu all over again? What happened to psychotherapy can, probably will, also happen to fiction. But my fear is that the more we pursue what works best, the more we will reduce what is best.
 
Of course, literary critics will be tasked to spot the fakes. Investigative journalists will probe the identities of the supposed authors at book signings to figure out which ones are just actors sitting in for the digital algorithms that had produced the best seller. Bookstores will develop a special section for titles published before Artificial Intelligence. Over time, both that section and the one for classics will need less and less shelf space because buyers will only want to browse the front tables.

Decades ago, the black and white photography in Life magazine helped us learn to see our world in a different way. National Geographic did that too, in colour no less. Now with digitally enhanced photographs we just have nice pictures to look at, colours are highly saturated and distracting elements are photoshopped out of the frame. We look at the image for 10 seconds (or less) on social media, get a brief hit of wellbeing, and then move on. We are never challenged to think, or even to consider that a photographer thought about what could be captured on film, how best to do so, and what that photo would say about the world we live in.
 
How do we stop this happening in literature?  
 
Perhaps you might want to get to know an author, like one who is a real human being. I’d be open to that, my contact email is wilton@twiltondale.ca. You might find out that behind every Pre-AI book is a real human being, an interesting one at that. If you doubt I’m really real we can meet on zoom (complete with my warts and thinning hair). Perhaps we’ll both have to do a little computer-user graphical thingy to prove neither of us is an avatar.
 
But you can also cherish and celebrate the aspects of being human that AI can’t really satisfy, things like acting toward another human being with compassion (there is a hit of wellbeing that comes in doing that) by becoming a good observer and appreciator of the real world (the buds coming out in spring are really vibrant) and taking the time to scratch your chin and say a hmmm in response to a really interesting blog.
 
Good luck.

Blog  archives.   (with clickable links)

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​There is something about being in the middle. As comfortable as it might be, it can be blinding too.
            I just spent a diligent couple of weeks doing two start-to-finish edits of my latest novel, Saving Steven. I set myself a goal of getting it out to beta-readers by the end of January — and didn’t make it … but got close and it’s out there now.
            And in working so hard at it, I was caught in the middle of it: caught by those vivid images and deep emotions that carry the writing forward; weighed down by my characters sitting on my shoulders insisting that what they did and felt needed to be gotten right.
            Then a few days later, after it had already been sent out to half-a-dozen beta readers, I realized a flaw in the flow of plot. Upon being unembedded now I’m aware that a carefully constructed character would’ve been doing something different than I had him doing at a particular point in the novel. It is more an error of omission than commission, but still. My mind let out that anguished ARGH!
            Caught in the middle of the work, I was blinded to something that I could only see once I had extricated myself.
            And, that’s how the fun begins.
            Oh, the fix is going to be relatively easy, once I’ve stopped beating myself up for already sending it out to those poor souls who are reading it as it is.
            But then came the thought that just as I got myself embedded in the way this peculiar little novel unfolded… well, maybe those readers too will just end up caught in the middle of it too, not notice that glaring error. Or if they do, now knowing from this blog it’s there, they will have that ah-ha moment and let me know they found it.
            And I think I might make this into a Where’s Waldo sort of thing. You remember, that nerd in the red-striped shirt who loved to hide. What fun we’ve had with that, the way we’d get annoyed with ourselves when we couldn’t find him then have that bursting ah-ha when we did.
            As an author now, I’m no longer in the middle of my old psychologist self … Well, at least I hope I’m not. If I was, at this point in the blog I would lapse into an explanation about how we habituate to the things we see around us all the time, stop noticing them. You see, our brains are primed to detect novelty. When the same something is in the same place we stop seeing it.
            Oops, I did it again, that psychological explanation thingy. ARGH. (note: second argh in this same blog!). Maybe that little lapse is because I’m fingers-to-keyboard with the same aging MacBook that used to record my clinical notes and write my reports. Or maybe I’m just getting old and have a tendency to live in the past, like my main character from Saving Steven.
            But setting that aside, now as a writer I’m right into novelty. It’s fun to embed something totally surprising in the midst of what seems to be absolutely ordinary and routine. There’s a ton of that happening in Saving Steven. I aim for my readers to have that amazing experience of I-didn’t-see-that-coming but­ I-can-see-how-it-could. As an author I find myself enjoying making those middles to put something into, and that’s just about as much fun as the moment of novelty. Both of those elements are equally important to create the effect.   
            So what is emerging for you, blog reader, as you come to the end of yet another blog? As you look up at familiar surroundings what do you now notice? What has your eye glossed over that suddenly emerges again, to amuse or annoy or animate or make you wonder how it got there to begin with and what you can do it with now that you notice it again?
             Ah-ha! There it is. You’ve got this.
            Oh, and by the way. If you want to play literary Where’s Waldo with my fourth novel, please be in touch — wilton@twiltondale.ca.
 
 
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​There’s an event described in my current fiction project. It’s about a person who dies of a heart attack doing something that was his passion and fulfillment. A comment is made about how he had done his work with his heart, and how his heart had given all it could.

 But there’s a writerly thing about the way it’s included in the project. The event is told second-hand in the flow of plot in this different sort of novel. I didn’t take my reader there to witness it but had one of my characters recount the event to another. In the dreaded parlance of fiction writing, I told it rather than showed it. We fiction writers are not supposed to do that.

 Last Friday, when I was walking on the treadmill in the cardiologist’s lab I wasn’t thinking about this, this bit of subjective distancing that happened in the work of fiction that I’m creating. The imperfectly self-aware, post-psychologist me latched onto this realization upon reflection. It was too difficult for me to take my readers right there as it happened. I had to tell it in a past-tense, third-person account.

 You see, a generation ago my father, who was just a scant few years older than I am now, died of a massive heart attack. He did so about 3500 kilometres away from me when my life and his had quite significantly diverted philosophically as well as geographically. My father and I engaged quite different works of the heart.

 My father’s heart was filled with Jesus being in there. In the religion of my childhood, that which defined my father’s life from his adolescence on, having Jesus in one’s heart was a very important thing. It was full of reassurance and hope. My father’s heart attack was Jesus taking him home.

 My heart has been filled differently. I outgrew choosing the sacred for the various self-benefits of an assuring faith: you know, being one of God’s chosen, a person whose prayers get answered, having Jesus as a BFF, getting to go to heaven when you die or getting to ride a cloud into heaven at the Second Coming. What has filled my heart instead, what the sacred has been …. Well, I can only hope that sacred heart work has been living with compassion, empathy, gratitude and grace.

 But at that, undoubtedly, I have only done so only imperfectly.

This entire theme is under development in my current writing project. That’s what writing fiction does for me as an author. The various undercurrents of human nature, what I have experienced through my former professional work and the living of my life, get to be projected out onto characters. Once out there I can watch it happening and understand it more deeply. Three novels have explored that theme with respect to my work as a psychologist. The current project explores the theme by examining the contrast between a religion, with its drive toward evangelizing its doctrinal correctness, and lovingly responsive relationship.
 
But let’s get back to the cardiologist standing beside me at the treadmill. While I panted away for a long time just to get my heart rate up to 85% of its maximum, he stands there quite calm and clean and crisp. He has a job to do, and does it with efficiency and clarity. I’m sure his heart rate doesn’t go up at all. He’s reassuring to the extent that he can be, simply letting me know that I’m really not his problem to deal with given my performance on his treadmill and the symptoms I report. I suspect he flawlessly goes through this diagnostic routine a couple of dozen times a day, each time with the same clean, crisp, calm clarity.

 The experience was everything that I could have hoped for and sadly disappointing at the same time. I’ve spent my life trying to do my work and live my life with a sense of heart and this guy totally knows about hearts. But in the final analysis, he was just about his diagnostic algorithm and the blips on the 12 lead ECG machine connected to his treadmill. And I guess that’s what the system of medical diagnostics believes I most need at this point in my life.
 
He qualifies for a character in a novel, somewhere I need a foil to someone who really knows what heart is about. You know the really hard heart stuff that is messy, and chaotic, and unclear and hopelessly subjective but deeply connects two people together.

You can always be in touch to offer your reflection on my blog, or to get your hands on that fascinating current writing project by emailing me at wilton@twiltondale.ca. 

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We all make up stories--not just us author-types.
            And even when I’m not writing fiction I still make up stories in my head--like why I knocked over the carton of orange juice on the counter this morning. My spontaneous headspace story was quite unnecessary, uninformative actually, and not at all entertaining. And, oh, just to reassure you—the cap was still on the carton so the juice didn’t spill.
            We make up stories so we can make sense of the world and what we face within it. It’s only natural that we do. We do it constantly without thinking about it. Well, that’s not quite right, those stories are our thoughts--without self-reflecting on it.
            The short story on offer this month on the ENGAGE page of this website deals with making up stories. Little Steven, a grade three student back in the 60s, makes up stories about the pictures of movie stars he finds on the underside of milk bottle caps. At school, he hears the formal story of the Swiss Family Robinson, a popular novel just made into a movie with those very same stars. Every afternoon, just before recess, his teacher reads some of the novel to his class. After school while he delivers the papers on his paper route, Steven makes up his own stories about that family marooned on the desert island.
            But Steven is admonished by his mom for making up stories because of the family’s religious beliefs. Stories are like lying, and as a family they hold strong to the truth--perhaps here the word truth should be capitalized given the way their particular religious truth is perceived by Steven’s family. And months later, once the movie is released, Steven is punished for going to see it with his class. His family doesn’t think going to the theatre is the proper thing for a good Christian to do.
            This didn’t happen to me when I was eight--the Swiss Family Robinson / milk bottle caps thing. But I was admonished for going to a movie, a different one. It was called Big Yeller, a story about a dog. Going to the theatre was the entertainment at a birthday party for one of my friends when I was about 6. My mouth wasn’t washed out with soap as was Steven’s in this month’s story and I wasn’t strapped. But I was told clearly that Christians weren’t supposed to do the worldly things that others did, just so we could be a witness to them (here witness means an example of someone leading a godly life).
            So the Steven story is fictional, but it tells a truth about my childhood. Not a literal, objective truth as would’ve been recorded on that 8mm movie camera my dad had. But a truth none-the-less about the sway over a child that could come with particular ideas of what Christianity is. There’s a lot of that in the emerging collection of Steven stories.
             I’ve been especially careful writing these stories that the characters are not my specific family members. The Pastors in the Steven stories are different than the ones in my childhood church. That said, the pastors in the stories play as prominent a role in family life for Steven as missionaries did in mine. And even though the events are not specifically the same, through them I intend to tell a deeper truth about my childhood life.
            Now just so you know, Steven grew up to be a lot like me. In fact, in the collection of stories there are quite a few when he is seventy. His job through his working years was getting people to tell their stories, as was mine. He did it as a newspaper reporter, I did it as a psychologist. And in his senior years, he’s looking back over the stories of his life to make sense of it all, as am I through my writing.
            Oh.. oh … I have to tell you. In the collection of stories, Steven gets saved! Just in case you don’t know, getting saved is a pretty big deal in gospel churches like the one I grew up in. It meant getting right with God. And I apologize for the jargon here, there’s just not a better way of saying it and I hope you’ll get the gist. But Steven is not “saved” through the doctrinaire beliefs, but from them. His salvation comes in a subtle thread through the stories, woven in to the mix of confusion and compulsion that surrounds him, discovered after the fact to be celebrated in retrospect. Ah, the truth of that, eh?
            Oh, and just as an aside, according to the stories about Jesus written decades after his life, he made up stories, too. We call them parables.
            I sure hope you’ll follow along the Steven Stories with me. Many of them can trigger a good laugh. Others, a tear. Monthly I’ll announce one of them (or something else) on the ENGAGE! page of this website. I can also send them out in the process of their writing and compilation as an eBook. I intend to make audio recordings of them too.

Please let me know if you’re interested by sending me an email to wilton@twiltondale.ca.

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Facing one's fears

​When I was a child I was close to my grandmother. She took care of me every Friday evening when my parents and older brothers went to the church. I was too young to go, that’s why they had to have someone babysit me.
            I’ve fond memories of those nights in Grandma’s little apartment on Main Street West in Hamilton, Ontario—of the Coca-Cola and scotch mints she gave me. Grandma was afraid of the China-man working in the garage across the street. Mom tried to help her with it, but some fears just don’t go away. I used to watch out the window of her apartment with him, just in case I might catch of glimpse of him there.
            My grandmother died in her nineties when I was in my late teens. She’d been progressing with Alzheimer’s for about a decade. Mom and I used to go and visit her in the nursing home every Sunday and I’d play her favourite hymns on the piano for her. She loved The Old Rugged Cross. One day I guess I didn’t play it well enough because after I was done she looked at me and said, “That was nice, Terry, now play The Old Rugged Cross.” So, I played it again.
            Another day at the end of our visit she said that she was glad that she’d met me. By this point in her dementia she’d forgotten I’d been a part of her life for all of mine up until then. I guess she thought I was just a stranger who happened to spend time with her on a particular Sunday afternoon. And she called my Mom by Mom’s dead sister’s name. That was hard for Mom.
            A generation later, my mother died in her nineties. Throughout my childhood, mom and I did things together like baking cookies. At one point Grandma told my mom that I was almost as good as a girl; I think she meant that as a compliment.
            After I was married and moved away from hometown Hamilton, Mom and I would talk weekly on the phone and Mary and I would go back home to visit as often as we could. I remember her saying “Oh, Terry …” in that voice that was both amused by and annoyed with me. We always cared for each other.
            Eventually, Mom and I didn’t talk on the phone any more as her dementia progressed. Now she was the one in a nursing home. Mom had a different sort of dementia, caused by progressive strokes, not Alzheimer’s. More and more of her abilities fell by the wayside and her pain with arthritis took away her mobility. The last words I remember her saying was an agonized, constantly repeated, plea for help. The nature of help she needed was never really clear. It was so difficult for me to hear because I was part of the helping professions and yet couldn’t do anything to alleviate her distress.
            So why do I blog this?
            I blog because I’m doing that psychologist thing called facing one’s fears. Both of these important relationships in my life had their final years severely mentally compromised. It seemed a sad and tragic way for their lives to end given the vitality and amazing competency of their adult lives before their dementia.
            I made my way professionally in this world through the capacity of mind and heart. For over four decades I cared for folk with mental health challenges. It was a caring that required mental acuity and flexibility, that and the capacity for empathy and compassion. But now in my seventh decade I recognise that my genetics might carry me down the path of dementia (if some other health issue doesn’t get me first).
            It terrifies me—the possibility of dementia, not the death.
         So to face my fear, I’m writing. Obviously, this rather explicit blog acknowledges the fear. But I’m doing so with another project too. Currently, I’m writing a novel about a seventy year old fellow who is starting to show mild dementia. He doesn’t really notice, but others around him do. The stories of his earlier life happen to be annoyingly vivid in his mind, so strong that he can forget where he is in the present, wander off, not handle things well.
            Of course the main character, Steven, is me, me done up with enough changes of life work and family members and events so that it’s all quite fictional. There are some similarities though. The ideological context in which Steven grew up was very much like my own (the Gospel church). What Steven came to value through his life work was very much like what I came to value in mine, the humanistic undercurrent of respect for the uniqueness and values of others.
            I’ve come to believe that good works of fiction reveal what is true on the deepest human level, a deeper level than the psychological theories of my past profession. It’s not circumstantial or objective truth, not the sort of reality that can be proved by statistics, but the truth known through meaningful relationship and judicious self-reflection. It is the sort of truth that emerges within the individual mind as it looks back out at the world through the lens of honesty and integrity.
            I’d love for some of my blog readers to come on this writing journey with me. This new novel is structured using a succession of short stories, each complete in itself. When the collection is taken together it forms its own story arc. Given this structure, I can easily bring you on board with some short stories, the kind you can read in about ten minutes with a coffee or a cocoa. You can find out more about getting access to these stories on the ENGAGE!  page of this website.
            If you’re interested in this fascinating, yet fearsome, journey send me an email and I can get you started. wilton@twiltondale.ca.
 
             

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​You’ve encountered them.
            Sometimes they were the most unlikely of folk. Just ordinary people, neither attractive nor recognized as important. They didn’t put themselves forward as special in any way.
            Yet they made a difference in your life.
            We meet one such person in this month’s short fiction, The Bookery. He owns a second-hand bookstore, rundown and disorganized. But he has an uncanny ability.  Through the magic of it he becomes the springboard for dramatic, constructive change in his customer’s life.
            Such characters are the essence of good fiction. They are the ones who you remember after the back cover closes on the novel. They perturb the flow of plot and challenge the character who has captured your heart as a reader. In fact, if there isn’t one or more such character in a work of fiction the entire venture becomes bland, or predictable, or just another trope turned out with a contrived plotline using sensationalism to keep the reader hooked.
            There is something about these characters, be they real people in our lives or occupy transitional, transformational, roles in created stories. They take us more deeply into what it means to be human. They are equally apt with foibles and courage. They bid us forward to become more deeply who we can be. They love, not lustfully but unselfishly. In doing so, they help us to do so too.
              As a reader, as you must be to have gotten this far into a blog, take a few minutes to think about a worthy work of fiction—or if not that, a drama you’ve recently streamed. Who beside the main character, the one whose shoes your feet slipped into, had a profound and deepening effect on that character?
            And you also have a life outside of your reading, media scrolling, and screen watching. In that life, who’s eyes met yours and suddenly you had a sense of a real person being there with you? Who is that friend who always seems to bring out a sense of belonging within you? Perhaps, if you were to ask them, they might say that you have the same effect on them too.
            But there’s also another side to this. We encounter transitional folk who are but cautionary tales in our lives. In their machinations they illuminate paths that we’re better off not to trod. They steal our energy to use for their own purposes. They highjack our thoughts and bend them to their own obsessions. They demand an acceptance from us that compromises the life force within us. They seduce us into their devices and hold us in their thrall so that our own critical thinking yields to their chaos.
            When we can get free of these folk, shake off their spell, we realize we can choose a different direction for our lives. And once we have done so, we can be thankful they’d come along as awful as our sojourn with them had been.
            During a recent book club discussion of my novel An Incoming Tide I categorized the evil characters (the ones who propelled the plot of the story) using the objectifying mental health lexicon of professional psychology. Currently, unfortunately, that is the current extent of our culturally accepted understanding of human evil.
            Truly within An Incoming Tide, there is that dark flow of circumstances encountered by the strong and the noble characters—Estelle, Nali, and Leanne. But they survived, outlived the evil. One was rescued by unselfish love, and another by the strength of a cobra body tattoo. In the sequel novel (currently in the editing stage) we see them transformed through the healing process.
            This is what worthy fiction does—it reminds us to attend to the folk who bring life and deepening to us through their humble engagement. It also nudges us to recognize those who are but cautionary tales of where we ought not to go.
            So, now you’re ready to read The Bookery—a study in transformation. I’ll send it to you by email in exchange for your comments on it back to me. Let’s both celebrate what it means to become more complete and true to the self we have within.  
            Get your copy of The Bookery by emailing me at wilton@twiltondale.ca
                       

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By any chance are you going through some stuff right now, a bit a transition say? Transitions can be tough. 
        Consider the story of a little boy who’d enjoyed playing at a friend’s house, that big white one down the block. And it comes time to go home but he doesn’t want to—he sure likes the toys in that house and the ways he’s been made to feel special there. He says that it isn’t fair when people tell him he has to go. So, he throws a temper tantrum, a big one. Things get broken and even some of the adults standing around get hurt. In the confusion and mess of having to go back home he slips some of the toys from the big white house in with his stuff, sneaking them out to take them home with him.    
        Anyway, after he's finally gone people realize that he’s taken things that really don’t belong to him. When they try to get them back, he says they’re MINE, they’re at his house now and nobody has any right to take them away.
         Yes, sometimes we have trouble with transitions.
         All of us.
         My last two blog posts have looked at the difficulty we face with emergent phenomena and the way we struggle when things we’ve grown to count on fade away. Transitions contain both, both at the same time. We let go of what was and then have to grasp on to what’s new.
        Our brains, as adaptable, don’t easily give up the ways they’d organized the world before the external demands for making a transition came along.
        Consider the aged-out newspaper reporter in this month’s story, Riding the Bus, featured on the ENGAGE!  page of this website. We meet up with him a few years after he’d given up his vocation of seeking out stories in his home town, the sort of stories that tweak a nerve of nostalgia or memory of something once meaningful but now gone. Mixed into those recollections he notices shocking new ways that the world happens to present itself now—the rude graphic on a teenager’s black hoodie or a disrespectful bumper sticker on a t-boning pickup truck. I hope you’ll love that story.
           I’m a few years into my own major life transition. As a psychologist my world was rich with stories, other people’s stories. The whole venture of providing psychotherapy was focused on helping my clients get their story out in a way that could help them achieve peace and productive personal change. Now I write my own stories.
         And when I was with clients as a psychologist I needed to be circumspect of sharing opinions other than as the knowledge and theoretical structures of the profession would interpret the client’s difficulty. Now I write a blog.
         When my clients were going through transitions, I advised them not to strive to make the “right” decision. Instead of that, I recommended that they make a good decision. And then, as they act on that decision and their circumstances change, along comes the occasion to make the next good decision. Over time, the sequence of goodness builds into its own new direction.
        My retirement from the profession was a good decision, perhaps too long delayed but it has worked out well. And the decision to write, that has been a good one too. For example, I have this terrific website that I can modify and adapt—for sure that’s been very good. Over the space of a year, sharing my fiction freely on the website was a good idea and I watched the number of hits on the Fourth Comings page grow every month.  Lately writing days have been spent exploring the religious context of my childhood, the seeds of a next novel have been planted there, and boy are those stories growing!
        Now it’s time for yet another transition, and another (I hope) good decision. Fresh fiction each month is still available to you as a reader, but now it comes with the opportunity for connection between us. As of this month, I’m sending the stories out to readers who request them by email rather than publishing them directly to the website. In exchange for getting them I ask you to give me feedback, just a quick rating the stories for readability, credibility and emotional impact. Easy-peasy as they say!
        So let’s start with you taking a bus ride with me. And yes, as you read Riding the Bus that’s me you’re with. A little autobiographical that story is—but yes, totally fictional too.
        You can request your copy of the story by emailing me at wilton@twiltondale.ca. Let’s make this good decision together.