Martha Brooks

My daughter was born in 1972 and after that came the birthing of award-winning plays, novels and short fiction such as Bone Dance and Being with Henry. I am just finishing True Confessions of a Heartless Girl, which will be published in Canada by Groundwood Books and in the U.S. by Farrar Straus and Giroux.

All this aside, my voice as an artist first came to me through music. In the last half-dozen years I've returned to those early roots and now enjoy a parallel career in the Canadian jazz world as a singer. With the release of my first CD, Change of Heart, has come a sense of freedom. Duke Ellington once advised Tony Bennett — who was wrestling with the idea of singing and painting as a double career — "Do two things instead of one, because if you're doing one thing you get burnt out." It's great advice. I've taken it to heart. The landscape that you read about in my piece, "One Woman's Experience with the Ecstatic," is also all about balance.

I still spend as much time as I can — from spring to late fall — at Pelican Lake. In Iceland, where my mother's ancestry originates, they would sooner build a road around a rock than blow up that rock — a nod to the indwelling spirits or huldafolk. That sensibility imbued the vision of the early settlers in Manitoba's beautiful interlake area. At my grandparents' knees I learned that there is mystery and immense hope in the life force that seeps through plants and rocks, and in the relationship we have with all living creatures. This knowledge was fostered, equally, by both my parents — my father, a surgeon, came from a family of transcendentalists.

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© Thomas Fricke