Progress: 15/30 - #18. read 30 texts that will aid in my teaching

I've avoided this memoir for a very long time, out of some deep-seated fear. I just read it, in the better part of two days. Most of this post will be in the form of chosen quotations, as they are both integral to understanding this text and more coherent than any of my "words in review" would be.  

Two small interpretations:

1. It is quite noticeable and notable to me that (in contrast to the rest of the memoir) she does not name any of the people by whom she is surrounded, in her residence and classes, in her most severe year of sickness - denoting only an anorectic's capability for extreme distancing and her inability here to make friends.

2. There is a notable difference in the content and tone of the afterward from the original edition, in 1998 (where she speaks of still being underweight and having forever one foot in and one foot outside the rabbit hole mirror), to the updated afterward from 2014 (where she writes, point-blank: "If this illness feels right now like a cage, please try to hear me: it isn't locked. It has been open all along. You are free to go." (Hornbacher 301) ) I want to know what the difference has been, besides 16 years. When she talks about "full recovery, the real thing, not that wan, halfway, half-assed recovery many of us have been told was the best we could hope to achieve" (300), how did she get from the 1998 edition to here? She is an active Facebooker, even with her fans, and I think of messaging her to ask this very question - but I think her individual answer is in here, too: something about the giving oneself the permission to live and to let go. I suppose you have to figure out, first, how to want to let go.

-----

"I have never been normal about my body. It has always seemed to me a strange and foreign entity. I don't know if there was ever a time when I was not conscious of it. As far back as I can think, I was aware of my corporeality, my physical imposition on space." (13)

"Eating disorders are addictions. You become addicted to a number of their effects. The two most basic and important: the pure adrenaline that kicks in when you're starving - you're high as a kite, sleepless, full of a frenetic, unstable energy - and the heightened intensity of experience that eating disorders initially induce. At first, everything tastes and smells intense, tactile experience is intense, your own drive and energy themselves are intense and focused. Your sense of power is very, very intense. You are not aware, however, that you are quickly becoming addicted." (105)

"I was on a mission to be another sort of person, a person whose passions were ascetic rather than hedonistic, who would Make It, whose drive and ambition were focused and pure, whose body came second, always, to her mind and to her 'art'. I had no patience for my body. I wanted it to go away so that I could be a pure mind, a walking brain, admired and acclaimed for my incredible self-control" (107-8).

"You begin to rely on the feeling of hunger, your body's raucous rebellion at the small tortures of your own hands. When you eventually begin to get well, health will feel wrong, it will make you dizzy, it will confuse you, you will get sick again because sick is what you know. I cannot explain why I remember this year with such joy. Perhaps it is because it was just the beginning." (111)

"People have this idea that eating-disordered people just don't eat. Wrong. They have rules about what they eat, and eat 'safe foods'" (113)

"People who've Been to Hell and Back develop a certain sort of self-righteousness. There is a tendency to say: I have an addictive personality, I am terribly sensitive, I'm touched with fire, I have Scars. There is a self-perpetuating belief that one simply cannot help it, and this is very dangerous. It becomes an identity in and of itself. It becomes its own religion, and you wait for salvation, and you wait, and wait, and wait, and do not save yourself. If you saved yourself and did not wait for salvation, you'd be self-sufficient. How dull." (131)

"The body, many of us find to our great dismay, will always win. Either it will survive despite our best efforts, dealing a blow to our egotistical notion that we can control it, or it will die, making emotional survival utterly moot." (134)

"But at the same time, physical contact has not come naturally to me. It seemed, and seems, laden with significance, so laden that one might like to avoid it altogether. One might, in fact, over a few years, begin to avoid it like the plague, begin to claim such absolute ownership over one's own body that contact itself - the brush of a hand, even, let alone the startling number of emotional and physical nerve endings jangled by an embrace - begins to seem a threat." (202)

"Self-mutilation. And he shook his head. I just don't understand that, he said. I understood. I understood so well, in fact, that I would begin to do that very thing a few years down the road. After my eating disorder was 'over', I would go in a blind search for something else with which to tear myself apart. I found a razor blade worked quite well. In Lowe House, what this girl was doing to herself made perfect sense to me. It seemed to me only that our means were different; our ends were very much the same. Carving away at the body to - symbolically and literally - carve up an imperfect soul." (206)

"In her presence, I was reminded again of why I was an anoretic: fear. Of my needs, for food, for sleep, for touch, for simple conversation, for human contact, for love. I was anoretic because I was afraid of being human. Implicit in human contact is the exposure of the self, the interaction of selves. The self I'd had, once upon a time, was too much. Now there was no self at all. I was a blank." (266)

"There is never a sudden revelation, a complete and tidy explanation for why it happened, or why it ends, or why you are who you are. You want one and I want one, but there isn't one. It comes in bits and pieces, and you stitch them together wherever they fit, and when you are done you hold yourself up and still there are holes and you are a ragdoll, invented, imperfect. And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way." (279-280)

"There is a difficult factor in deciding to end the game, and that is that most women are playing it at some level of intensity or another - and all of those levels have sublevels of dangers, not just the over-the-top-mortality-stat type of disorder. Eating-disordered people, for the most part, don't talk to one another. It is usually not a little sorority where it's all done in a very companionable way. It's usually intensely private. And when you decide you are tired of being alone with your sickness, you go out seeking woman friends, people who you believe can show you by example how to eat, how to live - and you find that by and large most women are obsessed with their weight. It's a little discouraging." (282)

"I threw out my scale. When I bought another one, I threw that one out too. I kept doing this until the absurdity of it outstripped the anxiety I felt without having a way to measure something totally irrelevant. To this day, when I'm at the doctor, I stand on the scale backwards and ask the nurse not to tell me my weight. After all this time? Yes. It's habit by now. It's a good habit." (303)

[Original goal list posted here.]

Completed: #39. try embroidery

I find that I develop obsessions with certain arts or crafts for extended periods of time, and it gets difficult for me to focus on anything different - no matter how comparable a craft. Lately, that focus has been beadwork, which I have been using to my advantage in order to gift freehand medicine pouches for special occasions, and fashion treecycled Christmas ornaments in peyote stitch.

Sometimes, in order to try something new, I must actively remind myself that, whatever my current obsession, I once did not know how to do that either. It takes a lot of concerted work to convince myself. (True story, according to my mother's pen notations in my baby book: My first full sentence, at 14 months, while trying to count to 10 and say my ABCs, was "I can't do it." Therefore, I have to believe that my defeatist attitude is at least partially innate. However, having mastered both the alphabet and counting to 10, I have to remind myself that this attitude may also be inaccurate.)

SO. I finally convinced myself to pick up this beginner's embroidery kit, which my dear friend Steph gifted me an embarrassingly long time ago. For what it's worth, I never forgot. I've stared at it in my studio many times.

Evidently, my hoop is 2" too small, but it is all I have. No big deal. I figured if I can position and tighten it, I can untighten and reposition. It worked out fine.

Now, I was surprised to find that the enclosed instruction set didn't have diagrams on how to do the stitches (which I later found out are conveniently and environmentally-friendily located on the creator's web site), so I relied on some YouTube tutorials and internet photographs. Some I couldn't figure out, so I just improvised. Oops.

For instance, while attempting a chain stitch, I actually used a split stitch, because this small memory that was previously buried in my brainfolds, I guess, resurfaced to remind me: "Oh, hey, my mom once taught me something like this as a kid!" I remembered her drawing in chalk on taut fabric and instructing me on how to form letters with thread. I think I may have stitched "I love you" and given it to my dad for some sort of occasion.

Anyway. This is not a chain stitch, but it works:

I did newly teach myself those fly stitches, though. Those were kind of fun.

(Also, for reference, here is the kind of thing my mom has been capable of embroidering FOR DECADES:

This was a gift she made for my dad in the 1970s, which now - resulting from sizing and symbolic purposes - now belongs to me. The students love it because it's OMG SO VINTAGE, and that sort of thing is in now, y'know?

Maybe someday I will make something of this quality. That day is not today. Alas, I had to start somewhere.)

Now, at some point I ran out of the supplied embroidery thread, due to using double lines when I should have used single lines. Fortunately, along with a lot of I-swear-I'll-use-them-someday materials that I possess in my art studio, I had some thread of my own. I started using it, as a result, and was kind of pleased with the colour variation.

Here are the final photos:

C'est ça. Someday, I would like to embroider my own design, at least. Someday.

[Original goal list posted here.]

Progress: 14/30 - #18. read 30 texts that will aid in my teaching

This appeared in my school library around the same time as Gord Downie / Jeff Lemire's Secret Path. It is a novella by Joseph Boyden, author of Three Day Road, centered around the same subject as Secret Path - Chanie (Charlie) Wenjack's attempted escape from the Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School near Kenora, Ontario.

I am grateful to my school library, and our lovely school librarian, for all attempts to remain relevant with contemporary literature and social issues. I am also grateful for her genuine knowledge and teaching ability, which annually leaves me with little to attend to for three days, while she educates our grade 10 students on the inquiry process, research sources, and chosen multimedia. As such, I sat in a comfortable chair and read this novella in entire, between brief student questions.

It's so beautiful. It takes on the form of twelve manitous - spirits, neither good nor evil, inhabiting various creatures  - who share narration with Chanie, following him on his journey, granting both treachery and comfort. At merely 100 pages in length, pocket-sized, with wide margins and medium-sized text, it is a quick (albeit richly layered and complex) read.

My only criticism is that I wish more credit was given on the cover page to indigenous artist Kent Monkman (whom I have long admired), as I feel that his illustrations are almost as large a contributor to the text as the narrative itself.

This novella, and its large overlaps with Secret Path, left me desiring to investigate commonalities that I didn't at first understand: the matchsticks, the windbreaker, the map, the other boys running. This left me reading a wonderful series of articles that brought a great deal of cohesion to this narrative for me.

Firstly, this interview with Boyden discusses this subject as a secret inter-artist Canadian collaboration to honour the 50th anniversary of Chanie's death this year. At Gord Downie's suggestion, it included himself, Joseph Boyden, Métis filmmaker Terril Calder, and Boyden's contribution to spoken word tracks on a Tribe Called Red's latest album.

Next, I managed to find the actual article from 1967 which inspired the works of Downie, Boyden, and Calder. I was amazed, actually, that something of this nature was written on the topic of residential schools almost 50 years ago. I feel like it's taken this long for the rest of Canada to catch up. This article left me seeking out the author who was daring enough to report. His name is Ian Adams, and he's now 79 years old. Sadly, and unsurprisingly, as a result of his 1967 article and the resultant letters of complaint, he was told that his writing was not a proper fit for Maclean's magazine. He sought out freelance work, eventually transitioning into filmmaking.

I've been posting all these articles for others to read. I've written this blog in hopes that others, still, may. Sometimes I feel like I am just shouting into the wind. I'm sure Adams felt the same.

As so perfectly, hilariously encapsulated in this meme, however, I will keep on keeping on:

[Original goal list posted here.]

Progress: 12/30 and 13/30 - #18. read 30 texts that will aid in my teaching

Someday, I want to teach in one of many schools that utilizes and celebrates indigenous studies - instead of dismissing course proposals with the systemic racism evident in the comment: "I mean, this is probably meant more for Northern schools; we don't have First Nations kids here." Little do they know - and, little should it matter. 

As Gord Downie writes in his rationale for "Secret Path", an album with an accompanying graphic text by Jeff Lemire, meant to increase Canada's awareness as to the enduring trauma of residential schooling through illustrating the death of Charlie (Chanie) Wenjack: "Chanie haunts me. His story is Canada’s story. This is about Canada. We are not the country we thought we were. History will be re-written. We are all accountable."

I agree with Downie, and I remain committed to reading texts that will continue to inform both myself and my teaching, with regard to indigenous issues.

I preordered a special edition of the above text and LP record. I grew up listening to Downie - my sister's choice, not my own - though I was always enamoured with his lyrics and subsequent poetry.

Jeff Lemire has been one of my favourite graphic novelists for a few years now.

I have been addressing residential schooling with grade 10s for the past three school years, anchoring the study to a cultural short story unit.

This purchase only made sense.

Opening it was a sort of a personal Christmas day. The text I read first - hardly any words, save for interspersions of Downie's lyrics. A visual narrative, really. "Harrowing," I called it. First impression.

The following week, I watched the hauntingly beautiful animated version on CBC: a fusion of Lemire's moving images, set to Downie's music. This, I want to show to classroom audiences. I would have done so a couple weeks ago, had my classroom computer not been down for repair for two weeks. The moment passed - and so it goes, but there will be another.

Watch it here:

The second text, Dreaming in Indian: Contemporary Native American Voices, arrived unannounced in my school mailbox one day this September.

I have only two guesses of where it could have come from - and, either way, well, it's noted and appreciated.

This entire short text is an arresting visual collage of stories, artwork, poetry, photographs, comics, articles, and anecdotes. It features the likes of author Joseph Boyden, visual artist Christi Belcourt, model/actress Ashley Callingbull, and throat singer Tanya Tagaq. These artist discuss topics of identity, re/appropriation, teenagerhood, bullying, suicide attempts, resistance and change. These are many stories I hadn't heard, from many names I had. Additionally, this text includes submissions from indigenous peoples, young and old, throughout the United States and Canada - identified by cultural and place associations of their own choosing.

This has been a busy month and - like many Novembers - not without its stresses. As such, these texts are short, but nonetheless important.

Thank you to everyone who contributes a voice to these causes: from the writers who write, the artists who draw, the educators who teach, the musicians who sing, and the publishers who say: "Yes, this is important."

Maybe someday, wherever I teach, a school where I belong will echo the same.



In the words of Louis Riel, whose importance we are to celebrate tomorrow: "My people will sleep for 100 years, and when they awake, it will be the artists who give them back their spirit."

[Original goal list posted here.]

Progress: 11/30 - #18. read 30 texts that will aid in my teaching

For those of you who do not know, I was blessed with an extraordinary talent for sleeping. I can fall asleep in bright light, to a backdrop of noise, on a bed barely comfortable. I often sleep for 16 hours at a time. I sometimes sleep for close to an entire 24. I fall asleep in minutes flat, and can easily fall back again if woken suddenly. I have fallen asleep on airplanes, buses, and suitcases; I have fallen asleep at the movies, baseball games, lectures, and tutorials. I once fell asleep on a computer keyboard and woke up with 90 extra blank pages on my assignment. I once fell asleep at the dinner table and my whole family just quietly ate dinner around me. I once fell asleep standing up in an elevator. Ad infinitum.

Therefore, it may surprise you to know that - save for the last one - the endless anxiety of summer's too-much-time-to-think has often brought me boughts of insomnia. I am not proud to admit this, but I went through a phase where I tried to remedy this with wee hour YouTube Dr. Phil marathons.

This is where I first encountered this memoir. Amanda Lindhout was the interviewee. As the former ransom-held prisoner of a militant group of young boys in war-torn Somalia, she has spent her time since being released writing this memoir and establishing a non-profit that supports development aid. I suppose I should have considered the interview source before adding this to my to-read list, but it sounded compelling in the case that I ever decided to start reading memoirs to help with 3U. (My interest was also heightened when I kept stumbling upon this book - as an Indigo recommended staff pick, when a fellow travel companion called it a "page turner".)

Before I launch on a tirade: This book was entertaining and readable. I don't know how much of the lovely prose to attribute to Lindhout, or her alleged "co-author" (who has no role in the actual narrative), Sara Corbett.

That being said, I have a lot of trouble mustering empathy for people who are intentionally reckless, without labeling themselves as being reckless. Call it what it is. Please don't attribute it to good intentions and an unwillingness to see negativity, or the potential far-reaching consequences of your actions. I can read narratives about self-injury, or alcoholism, or eating disorders, or drug addictions, or other similarly dangerous and self-consuming behaviours, so long as the authors don't act naive to the selfish suffering - albeit borne of deep sadness and longing - that they are inflicting on both themselves and others.

Like Into the Wild, this is not one of those memoirs. Any little self-reflection comes dangerously late. I am not in any way implying that the subjects of either of those texts were deserving of any harm, but to blindly hack through foreign terrain with good intentions and a lack of preparation is just, to me, not relatable.

Coupled with the following sentences, which are such offensive massive generalizations (again, under the guise of good intentions), I just - though I read it all - could not properly invest myself in the text:

"The Kuchis reminded me a little bit of the First Nations people back in Canada, independent and unintegrated and pretty much worse off for it." (82)

"She had the same angular face and elegant carriage as the Somali fashion model Iman." (317)

"He had a close-cropped beard and wide brown eyes and was the spitting image of the actor Morgan Freeman" (353)

Don't take my word, though. Feel free to read for yourself. It's actually won quite a few semi-prestigious awards. The review committee are entitled to their opinion - and, I, to mine.

On a more positive note, I'm back on track with book : time ratio. I will do my best to continue.

[Original goal list posted here.]

Completed: #1 - take French lessons

The amount of time I spend in my car pains me. It's literally almost 2 hours per weekday (10 hours per work week, 400 hours per work year, dear Lord.) In previous years, therefore, I have spent those 400 hours listening to sadbastard music on repeat. I figure this can't have been good for my psyche.

Now, I am an old person in more ways than, say, the love of making pickles and jam and hanging clothes on a laundry line. Please give me nothing for my car that does not involve a compact disc: no podcasts, no rigging my Samsung to the speakers.

Since my only language-learning/re-learning goals involved French and Mi'kmaq, I figured the former would be the more likely to find on an audio disc. Thanks to eBay, I snagged these mp3 lessons:

These audio recordings, by the late Dr. Christopher Kendris, operate on a whole language acquisition philosophy. It takes on the form of him teaching two students a basic conversational understanding of French through teaching verb tenses and sentence structure, while also providing historical context and tricks to grammar rules. It leaves space for the listener to also make attempts at sentence construction, before confirming the correct phrasing.

I have already completed the Level 1 & 2 audio course, finding it very useful, for someone who already has a basic understanding of French - though I don't know that I would otherwise find it as useful. I re-imagined myself on many a road trip to Gaspé, through small rural French towns, trying to order a Subway sandwich, and now feeling both capable of anticipating questions and providing answers in complete French sentences, as opposed to my usual combination of broken French words and pointing. I even noticed myself dreaming in bits of French, and silently understanding pieces of conversations from the immersion students.

I intend to continue on with Level 3 advanced, as it's nice to feel as though I'm doing something remotely productive with the 400 hours a year that otherwise fade into the ether.

[Original goal list posted here.]

Progress: 10/30 - #18. read 30 texts that will aid in my teaching

I've been steadily building a list of independent course texts for my grade 10 students, centered around the topic of culture. As a person who is very linear and structural in thought, I find it exceptionally difficult to mark an essay based around a text I did not even read - not to mention the lack of ability, then, to effectively answer any content-based questions. As such, I supply a steadily-growing list of books I have read.

Though the ENG2D0 course is infused with South Asian content (the course novel is Yann Martel's Life of Pi, and we watch either Jhumpa Lahiri's Namesake or Gurinder Chadha's Bend it Like Beckham for a group essay formative - comparing values in the filmmaker / author's own life with those represented in the film), I have found my own independent study list to not include quite enough South Asian literature. This, obviously, meant I needed to read more.

I picked up The Lowland at an airport in New Dehli in the summer of 2015. I had a 10-hour stopover, before boarding a flight to Toronto via Switzerland, so I figured I had some time to kill. As it turned out, I ended up using the last of my rupees to reserve a sleeping pod equipped with a shower. I napped for six hours instead, grabbing all toiletries for future use. Best $60 I ever spent. 

Anyway. The Lowland has been sitting on my shelf ever since.

I talk to my grade 10s, from day 1, about "ignorance" on its base level not actually being laced with negativity. It simply means a lack of knowing. If we intentionally ignore or reject the things we do not know, that is a different and problematic form of ignorance. Use those moments, I suggest, not as stumbling blocks but access points. I don't mean to sound patronizing, I say, but you have the entire world at your fingertips on a handy device in your pocket, backpack, desk corner, or glued to your hand. Use it for good. When I was a wee kid and we didn't know something, my mom would have to drag out dusty encyclopedias from the basement downstairs - and she would, always freely admitting when she, too, didn't know the answer.

Even with the best intentions, we can't know everything. If you come across a cultural / historical / religious term that is new to you in these short stories or ISU texts, use those devices. Regard those unknown terms not as reasons to be alienated, but as reasons to discover more.

I held up The Lowland. "Do you know about the Naxalite movement? Anyone?" No hands. "I hadn't either. I have been through 32 years of my life without knowing anything about it - and it started in the 1960s in Calcutta, it's still happening, and I've been to India. This book mentioned it, again and again, wanting me to know more than I did. Where did I look?"

"Google?"

"Yes sir."

This novel presents a variety of perspectives, hashing and rehashing these notions of right and wrong. I wondered, also, why it kept weaving the festival of Durga Puja into the narrative - until I read more to realize that, honouring the victory of the Goddess Durga over the evil buffalo demon Mahishasura, the festival itself greatly symbolizes the triumph of good over evil.

In its themes of inattentive motherhood, loss, abandonment, residual trauma, resentment, it greatly reminded me of a memoir I read in the late summer of 2015: Projection, by a former favourite professor of mine, Priscila Uppal. In its apparent emotional vacancy, the pain and resignation in wrong and hastily-chosen paths, it was reminiscent of John Williams' classic novel Stoner.

However, in its alternating viewpoints, historical content, transcendence of time and place, its ceaseless efforts to draft a rough cartography and then only fill in the small details in gradual piecework to present a full picture - well, The Lowland is something entirely its own.

And did I cry like a baby when it was over?

I cried like a baby when it was over.

[Original goal list posted here.]

Completed: #20. make my own jam

I am told I was born an old soul. I am also often called "childlike", so it's a strange balance. As a child, I was always quietly enamoured with my Gaspé grandmother's way of life: the indigenous influence in a small country town sort of apart from my suburban small city upbringing.

Laundry was dried on lines. Field berries were picked fresh and made into jams, kept in a cold cellar for up to a year, alongside jars of sweet bread & butter pickles, and ever-ready stashes of root vegetables. Produce was grown in gardens, fish was caught and sold fresh from the Atlantic, the only corner grocery store was small and family-run by my uncle.

As I age, this is the lifestyle I've steadily tried to infuse into my quote big city living unquote. It imbues a peace and calm in the ready-made mass-produced fluorescence of grocery aisles and major intersections. It speaks favourably to some very core aspect of my being. It helps me on the journey to becoming more the person I'd like to be.

Last night, I received what will be my last Mama Earth order. I started out, in one of my first exacted goals on this list, with a Farms & Forks delivery. That company, months later, was absorbed into the larger institution of Mama Earth. I have very few complaints - their produce is great, and their customer service is excellent. However, since moving to North York, my delivery day has been switched to Friday evenings. The deliveries generally arrive around 7pm, which presents large issues if I am ever away for the weekend. In short, I'll be changing over to a biweekly delivery from a smaller, North York-based organization called Fresh City Farms, which will bring my order on Thursday evenings.

Anyway, this final order contained a pound of Ontario coronation grapes. I have very specific feelings about grapes, as follows: red -> love, green -> like, anything else -> loathe. However, though I consume jam very infrequently, I know that I have always loved any variety of grape jam. Therein, this idea was born.

This morning was the first official weekend Geoff and I have both spent in our new place. After a late night of organizing, we slept in. I woke, washed my clothes for the upcoming work week (gah!), and for the first time, used my new laundry line that my parents helped me install upon request.

(Hanging these clothes flooded back all sorts of Gaspé memories. They also smell greater than anything I've ever washed. Today's first "old soul" accomplishment.)

After these clothes were hung, we headed out for the first in what I'm sure will become a weekend tradition of grocery shopping (and, next to cooking our dinners together, may also become one of my favourite domestic activities). Knowing that I intended to make grape jam (the day's second "old soul" accomplishment), I researched local gluten-free grocery stores and found Goodbye Gluten. It's no Sweet Potato, but it'll do. I bought a loaf of overpriced gluten-free multigrain and an Amy's gluten-free vegan mac & cheese microwave dinner.

I took a long nap in the late afternoon to early evening, waking to try the mac & cheese (which was decidedly tolerable), take down my laundry, and prepare the jam.

I very loosely based my recipe upon this one for concord grape jam.

Here is the very simple pared-down version (which is easier than pie):

1. Skin the grapes by squeezing them into a small bowl / container.

2. Keep the grape skins in a separate bowl. They will be added later on in the cooking process.

3. Put the shelled grape mixture in a pan over medium heat. Stir occasionally.

4. Bring to a gentle boil after 3-4 minutes. Boil for about 5 minutes, covered. Remove cover to stir occasionally.

5. Add grape skins. Set heat as high as it will go. Stir frequently.

6. After about 2 minutes, add a cup of sugar per pound of grapes. (I use coconut sugar, so that this is a completely vegan-friendly recipe.) Add this sugar a cup at a time, while stirring.

7. Stir constantly as jam thickens.

8. Use a spoon test for completion: If you lift the spoon and it drips into the pot, it needs to be cooked longer. It should slowly fall into the pot when it is complete.

9. Remove from heat. Add the jam to a jar if you are planning to keep it in the fridge for awhile before consumption. The heat from the berries should create a vacuum seal (if the centre seal is pressed down, you're generally good). If it does not seal after an evening, either complete a hot water bath, or make sure you consume the jam in fairly short order. (I only made a small amount of jam, which I intend to begin consuming tomorrow, so I just set mine aside in a tupperware container. Breakfast!)

I was really struck after making this with the same thought I had after making pickles for the first time (which was another goal on my last three-year set): This is so easy! Why does anyone buy these at the store??

I encourage you to try it for yourself.

[Original goal list posted here.]