Once in awhile I’m intrigued by a book simply because of its perfect title. One of those books is Once They Were Hats, about the history of the Canadian beaver. This week’s Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers features this book by Frances Backhouse, with an emphasis on the Calgary cowboy hat.  

For the first 18 years that I lived in Calgary, every June was rainy. I considered this the one consistent aspect of Calgary weather. So I was surprised when last year’s June turned out to be mostly sunny, warm and dry. Friends who visited from Australia, Britain and Ontario lucked out with their trips through the Rockies.

Despite rain forecast for this weekend, this June is shaping up to be on the dryer side. But who knows when we will once again experience the big one, as portrayed in this week’s Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers?

I’m back from my recent holiday in France and have finally found the time to catch up on Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers. While I was away, Calgary readers of this fine blog have travelled to:

the old Woodwards Department store, Chinook Mall, with Miji Campbell

Rouleauville aka Mission with Rona Altrows

Inglewood with Shirley Black

Heritage Park with Clem and Olivier Martini

Bowness with Anne Sorbie

and downtown Calgary during a not-so-unusual May snowstorm with Marina Endicott.

What a great tour of Calgary locations!

To research my  journey to Provence, France — Van Gogh land — I read The Complete Van Gogh by Jan Hulsker, Director General Emeritus of Cultural Affairs of the Ministry of Culture of The Netherlands.

Read isn’t the precise word. This is a coffee table book with plates of the painter’s entire works along with a fair amount of text, including excerpts from Van Gogh’s letters. Some of the text I read, other parts I skimmed or skipped, such as the author’s discussions on why he dates X sketch for June and not August, or for Van Gogh’s Arles rather than his St. Remy period.

The book’s presentation of the plates in chronological order made it interesting to follow Van Gogh’s evolution as an artist. He began with sketches of hands and people and gradually developed his techniques and style.

The vast number of drawings and paintings shows that Van Gogh worked hard. In the book Outliers, author Malcolm Gladwell says that it takes roughly ten thousand hours of practice to achieve mastery in a field. I have no doubt Van Gogh put in his 10,000 hours before creating his masterpieces.

The Complete Van Gogh also reminded me of the writing rule: Write What You Know. While many writers question this rule, Van Gogh certainly applied it.

He painted and sketched people he knew. His landscapes, for which he became famous, were done of his immediate surroundings. He painted his bedroom in Arles. During his self-imposed confinement to a mental asylum in St. Remy, he painted the view from his barred window. His famous sunflowers abounded in Provence, where he spent many of his most productive years.

It shows that genius can create wonders of anything.

While researching a holiday to Provence, France, I stumbled upon The Van Gogh Blues: the Creative Person’s Path Through Depression by Eric Maisel, Ph.D.  My husband Will and I plan to spend a week in the town of St. Remy, Provence, where the painter lived in an asylum toward the end of his life. During that time, Van Gogh painted a number of his major works, including The Starry Night.

The Van Gogh Blues turned out to be less about the painter than about depression, the disease many believe he suffered from. Others claim schizophrenia or epilpsy might have been the problem that led Van Gogh to cut off his ear and ultimately take his own life.

Maisel’s premise in The Van Gogh Blues is that creative people suffer from depression more than the non-creative. He offers no statistics for this. His view stems from his observations as a family therapist with a Ph.D in counselling psychology, a creativity coach and a creative writer who regularly contributes to Writers Digest magazine. He concludes that depression arises from the creative person’s need for meaning and his or her clash with the facts of existence. Non-creative people don’t seek as much meaning in their lives, either due to their personality makeups or the fact they already have enough meaning. For instance, the unwaveringly religious find enough meaning through their faith.

It follows that the collapse of traditional religion makes depression more common today than in the past, Maisel asserts this is true, but I wonder. I also question his statement that explorers, military personnel and professional atheletes have zero rates of depression. The reason, he says, is that these occupations contain built-in action and meaning.

Depression arises, he claims, when creative people fail to work toward the meaning they need. This can involve procrastinating, taking a job that doesn’t answer their creative needs, drinking, eating too much chocolate, anything to avoid the blank page.

Those who put in the work are bound to bump against the facts of existence. A writer’s book can’t find a publisher or it does and fails to sell. This provokes a meaning crisis that, if not handled well, leads to depression.

Maisel does admit that biological or psychological factors might also contribute to depression. Therefore, people shouldn’t necessarily avoid medication or therapy. But he believes these factors aren’t the primary cause.

It almost makes depression seem a positive trait, since those disinclined toward it are non-creative (lesser?) beings.

What the The Van Gogh Blues did most for me is make me feel pretty good about avoiding serious depression during my twenty plus years of writing. If it weren’t for the facts of existence — rejections, disapointments, criticisms — I would love the writing life. Nice to know feeling some misery about these downers is normal.

I also agree with Maisel that the solution is action — keep writing. Although, now and then a little too much chocolate or wine is nice.