Posted by: Gail Anderson-Dargatz - Author of Turtle Valley

I wrote about my many days of collecting butterflies in my new novel Turtle Valley, how I found the butterflies on the shoulders of country roads by alfalfa fields where they had been struck by passing vehicles. As I wrote in the novel, in these areas butterflies “littered the ground like yellow confetti” and when I picked them up, “the luminous scales from their wings dusted (my) fingertips like eye shadow.” These insects became a precious commodity for me, a gift that I collected by the dozens and stored in boxes, a bit of summer that I would pull out to laminate onto bookmarks on cold winter evenings. It should come as no surprise, then, that my working title for Turtle Valley was “A Hatful of Tattered Butterflies.”

There’s a bit of irony here, that I would immortalize the act of collecting these butterflies within the novel that marks the end of my homemade bookmark tradition, because it has come to an end, at least for now. I hesitate to say I’ve retired from this venture altogether, as so many authors claim to have given up writing, say, only to come out of retirement when a good idea (and an empty pocketbook) strikes. But I now have a blended family of four kids, I teach in the UBC Creative Writing MFA Optional-residency program, I’m at work on the next novel project, and I have a new, high tech hobby — blogging and running a forum — so there is little time left over in the day for seeking out dead bugs.

Still, I very much miss this exercise. When I hunted for materials to create my bookmarks, the world was suddenly full of riches. As Annie Dillard wrote in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, “…if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.” When I made bookmarks, finding the iridescent wings of a dragonfly literally made my day, as did stumbling across a clutch of skeleton leaves beneath a poplar, or, of course, finding the dead butterflies windblown and clustered along the roadsides like the petals from an ornamental cherry. I see these “pennies” less and less myself now, though I know they are there: my five-year-old spots and gathers them on our walks together, for his morbid and beautiful collection of dead butterflies and beetles, rocks, flowers, leaves and bones that he rightly calls his “treasures.” He whoops as he scoops up the pennies that I pass by. Still, the strange joys of this old hobby of mine linger on. When a butterfly flew through the open door into our house today, and my son captured it against the window within his cupped hands, I couldn’t help but notice the beauty of the insect’s wings, and how lovely they would have looked on one of my bookmarks.

Posted by: Gail Anderson-Dargatz - Author of Turtle Valley

I moderated a panel on publicity and self-promotion at UBC this past summer, and during that event one of our participants, Denise Ryan, features editor at the Vancouver Sun, reminded me of the pots of honey and the homemade bookmarks that I brought to media interviews and readings as I promoted A Recipe for Bees. I squirmed a little as she talked of the honeybees I had evidently laminated onto the bookmark she had received. (Geez, did I really do that? Didn’t they get squished in the laminating machine?) But, as Denise pointed out, she most definitely remembered me and my book because of those homemade bookmarks. In fact, she said, I started something of a trend as other authors felt they had to come up with homemade bookmarks too. “I felt this incredible pressure,” she said. “When my book comes out, will I have to make bookmarks too? I’m not crafty at all!”

Of course I’m not the only author to make bookmarks; other writers are just as “crafty” or more so. Eden Robinson’s bookmark for Monkey Beach featured a miniature perfume vial filled with sand from the real Monkey Beach. The one I have contains a tiny shell. And the fact is I rather fell into the whole bookmark making enterprise. Before I became a published author, when I still had time on my hands, I made paper. And so I ended up putting instructions on how to make paper into The Cure for Death by Lightning, along with many recipes from my grandmother’s scrapbooks. When the novel was about to be published, I made thank you gifts for my editors Louise Dennys and Diane Martin: homemade paper scrapbooks, complete with the photocopied entries from my grandmother’s scrapbooks that had inspired those in the novel. Diane and Louise said they loved them, and so I made a few more for other folks at Knopf. This lead to requests for scrapbooks for select media and booksellers and, well, the scrapbooks got smaller and smaller (making paper is hard work!) and I ended up making homemade paper bookmarks instead. They were a big hit (so big, in fact, that the cover for the German edition of the novel is a piece of my homemade paper in which a dead butterfly is embedded), so I made a whole lot more of the bookmarks, and, well, as I say, I stumbled into this tradition. Collecting the materials and making bookmarks became my new hobby.

The Cure took off internationally, and I found I had much less time for papermaking as I turned to writing fiction full time. So I started using commercial papers instead that I printed with the title of my books and showered with flowers that I picked from my own garden and dried between the pages of my phonebook. They were often quite pretty, if I do say so myself, and I enjoyed making them. People seemed to like getting them too, though I do remember one woman who refused a bookmark with the wings of a tortoise shell butterfly laminated to it. “I can’t even touch it!” she cried. Evidently bugs made her squeamish, dead bugs even more so. I hadn’t considered that readers might get creeped out by the bugs on my bookmarks. I just thought the butterflies, like the dried flowers and leaves that I collected, were beautiful. And I promise you: no insects were harmed in the making of these bookmarks. I only used road kill.

Posted by: Gail Anderson-Dargatz - Author of Turtle Valley

My husband and I had our honeymoon this past August at the Writers at Woody Point festival in Newfoundland, where I launched my new novel Turtle Valley. It’s a wonderful event where musicians and authors share the stage. Music, music everywhere, but I couldn’t get my man to dance. One of the local ladies, who I’d watched dance night after night, finally tapped Mitch on the shoulder and said, “You’ve got to let your inner Newfoundland out!” Mitch did find himself out on the dance floor in the end, but it took a wee bit of magic to get him there.

Stan Pickett and his band The Pickett Line were playing at the Old Loft Restaurant where we had supper one night. We were chatting away, only half taking in the music. Then I poked Mitch to get him to listen. The band was playing “Music for a Found Harmonium,” by The Penguin Café Orchestra. It was our wedding march! Mitch got up to tell Stan what the song meant to us, but I still couldn’t get him to dance.

At the wrap-up event at the Legion on the last night of the festival, Stan Pickett and his band were playing once again. After the party had been rollicking for a bit, Stan told the crowd that Mitch and I were on our honeymoon, and that he had a surprise for us: the band would play us “The Wedding Gift,” a slow dancin’ tune written by a friend of his, Dave Panting. What could Mitch do? Everyone at the Legion was turned to us. So he led me to the floor and I got my honeymoon dance with my husband, just a shuffle really, but when he whispered in my ear that he loved me, that was good enough for me.

For more of Gail’s adventures at Woody Point, check out her blog.