February 21, 2024

The Roosting Box: Rebuilding the Body After the First World War, by Kristen den Hartog

Whoever you are, I can likely promise you that The Roosting Box, by Kirsten den Hartog, is not like any book you’ve read before. den Hartog is an award-winning novelist, co-author of two other books of historical nonfiction, and her approach to history in this latest offering is lyrical (lines in italics throughout the book which are embedded in her own prose are actually borrowed from poets who died in World War One, figures she sees as ghosts who haunt the text), whimsical (“In a way it was a magical time,” the book begins, “given that magic can be dark or bright or both at once. Men by the thousands travelled up into the clouds in flying machines. Submarines lurked below the surface of the water and the men inside fired torpedoes at the enemy just like toys come to life. Little figurines full of wishes and nightmares.”) with the most prosaic setting possible (a former cash register factory beside the railway tracks, not far from the tannery with a view from the roof of the Ford Motor Company) that turns out to be the springboard for so many true stories, some heartening, most harrowing, making clear the enormity and inhumanity of what people and other creatures are forced to survive (and/or perish by) in war.

But then den Hartog has a better metaphor (this is why she wrote this book, and I didn’t)—not a springboard, but a roosting box, “a communal space that provides ideal but temporary shelter for [the] vulnerable.” That space is the National Cash Register Factory in Toronto, which by 1918 was converted into the Dominion Orthopaedic Hospital, and would become the Christie Street Veterans Hospital. The book is not a history of the hospital itself per se (though it’s loosely structured around its opening and ends with its replacement by Sunnybrook Hospital in the 1940s, as a new generation of wounded soldiers came home from another war), but instead a collection of stories about the lives of people who graced its halls, patients, doctors, nurses, and more—dietitians and occupational therapists (both new professions for women that emerged at this time), artists and sculptors involved in facial reconstruction, no less than Frederick Banting, whose studies were tested on diabetic patients at Christie Street. “So while the hospital is at the centre of this book, the story travels off from that point in many directions—to battlefields, to small hometowns in Canada and abroad, into makeshift hospitals on the frontlines, and across the ocean on warships. It moves backward and forward in time, always returning to the place (and the concept) of healing.”

War does the most horrifying things to people’s minds and people’s bodies, which den Hartog makes clear in all these stories. She writes about field hospitals and medical boats coming under attack—justifications that the former was build too close to strategic targets and that the latter’s conspicuous red cross was a trick. The images are indelible of nurses’ bodies resurfacing in the water long after, their long blue dresses, and huge white veils. Did you know what being buried alive, even temporarily, does to a person’s digestive tract, let alone their psyche? She writes about the 1918 Influenza Pandemic sweeping the world, aided by the wartime necessity of people in such tight quarters, and how it took down the vulnerable patients at the Christie Street Hospital. Including Indigenous patients, many of whom served as essential snipers at the war front, but would come home again to be denied veteran’s benefits. Patients left mentally shattered by war were also scarcely supported after the fact, it being supposed that anything otherwise would be coddling. The week before the Christie Street Hospital opened, Toronto’s artificial limb workers went on strike, demanding that the industry be helmed by a returned soldier instead of a government bureaucrat. There was an artificial limb industry? I’d had no idea—I was born 60 years after armistice and until reading The Roosting Box, I’d never properly understood how huge the wounded population would have been at the time. I knew that the War Amps nonprofit was a thing, but I’d never thought about why. (Also, the prosthetics weren’t great. Even now, prosthetics can be painful, cumbersome and very expensive, but a century ago, it was sometimes easier to go without.)

A warning: once you pick up this book, you will likely annoy everyone around you by spouting fascinating facts out of context, like a bothersome robot, but pick it up anyway. In The Roosting Box, Kristen den Hartog has brought a piece of Toronto’s history to life, and the effect is pretty dazzling.

February 20, 2024

SUNSHINE

Once a year, I get stabbed in the neck for a needle biopsy at Mt. Sinai Hospital, and then reward myself with some new book purchases at the Indigo Spirit bookstore downstairs. They also had ASKING FOR A FRIEND in stock, and so I was bringing that copy to the cash with the books I was buying, and Radiant Human/Expert Bookseller Lisa spied my book’s cover on the top of my stack. “OH MY GOD, KERRY CLARE!,” she exclaimed, which I just think is absolutely the best way to overhear people talking about you when they think you’re not present. I probably should have pleaded ignorant, and said, “Oh, hey, rave a little more about this author, why don’t you,” but instead I told her that this was my book, and I wanted to sign it, and she was super excited because she’d been the one to order my book—as well as the Claire Keegan short story collection I was buying, and so she is CLEARLY a woman of exquisite literary taste. It was truly the nicest bookstore encounter, and turned my day—which began with box breathing on the subway and a neck biopsy—into SUNSHINE. She is very very excited to hear when my next book is coming out. LISA!! What a gem.

February 16, 2024

Good Material, by Dolly Alderton

There’s this weird scene in Dolly Alderton’s second novel Good Material that reminds me of that weird scene in The Great Gatsby where Nick Carraway finds himself between ellipses in a room with a man in bed wearing just his underwear, though in the end it was not like that at all, but maybe the unreliability of the narrator was not so dissimilar, and neither was that this was supposed to be a book about one person (Andy’s ex-girlfriend, Jen) when it was really about the narrator framing the story just so, choosing to see what he wanted to see, and be seen as he wanted to be seen. And that is the end of my The Great Gatsby analogy, and my queer reading of Good Material (though you never know) and maybe the heart of what I’m trying to say is basically along the lines of, there’s a lot going on here.

When middling stand-up comic Andy’s girlfriend of four years ends things between them, he doesn’t seen it coming, but then there’s a lot that Andy doesn’t see, even if he does manage to manipulate his phone to perfectly capture the expanding bald spot at the back of his head. One day he goes through his friend group’s chat history, and notes that he’s only actually listening to his own voice notes, his takeaway from this not that maybe Andy ought to get his head out of his ass, but instead that he really should start a podcast. Let’s just say that Andy’s attempt to get to the bottom of where Jen might be coming from will be so far off the mark, because Andy hasn’t actually comprehended that he’s not the only person in the planet with an interior world.

Over the course of a few months, however, with the aid of some friends, his supportive mom, a job working a cheese stall, as well as an octogenarian housemate with a bomb shelter out in the garden, Andy starts to figure out a thing or two about himself, and others, and being a person in the world. The novel arrives at a satisfying ending, but one that is further complicated by Jen finally giving her side of the story, showing how connected these former lovers actually are, but also the ways into which they’ve always resided in two separate universes.

February 14, 2024

In Praise of Made-Up Holidays, Especially in February

Yesterday, for the fifteenth year in a row, I made the banana oatmeal pancakes recipe I tore out of Chatelaine Magazine in 2008 when I was six months pregnant and obsessed with bananas. Anything to perk up a Tuesday in the middle of February, which is why I celebrate Pancake Tuesday wholeheartedly. It’s also why I am definitely in Valentines Day too, an occasion marked by my husband and I writing cards to each other, and books and treats for our kids. My husband shows he loves me every single day (I thought of this especially when I came home yesterday morning and he was in the meeting, and my teapot was full and waiting for me, thanks to him) but that doesn’t mean that Valentines Day has to mean nothing. After he dropped our daughter off at school, he came home with a bouquet of tulips from the convenience store, nothing fancy, something wonderful all the same. A made-up holiday, but then what holiday is not a made-up holiday? I reject the idea that we’re incapable of exalting the ordinary, of giving meaning and structure to these days of our lives, that all of us are merely dupes of capitalism or the patriarchy. That any of this must necessarily be about consumerism after all. And of course it should not be obligatory, any of it—I certainly opt out of my share of occasions, the ones that fail to light a spark in me. Doing something because you have to should never be the point, but I also think that it’s possible to inject richness and meaning into all kinds of days throughout the year, the days that appear on the calendar or otherwise. For those of us who live without organized religion, this is especially important, essential, perhaps. And possibly even people of religion need the same reminders not to be merely going through the motions, living by rote.

February 13, 2024

Black Boys Like Me, by Matthew Morris

Three pages into the first essay in Matthew Morris’s new collection BLACK BOYS LIKE ME: CONFRONTATIONS WITH RACE, IDENTITY, AND BELONGING, and I was hooked, as Morris describes a 4am journey through Brooklyn, the way he adapts his performance of self as he passes a police station (“stage my innocence”) versus how he would have acted if he’d run into another Black man on the subway who presents himself in public as Morris does (“I would have amplified my Blackness—for survival”). The former I could have discerned, but I’d never considered the latter—how racism and anti-Blackness could be as pervasive as that.

I loved this book, each essay blowing my mind a bit, framing the familiar in ways that are new to me. How does Morris, as a Black middle-school teacher, get dressed to go to work in the morning, and how are his fashion choices judged in comparison to those of his white colleagues? (What is “professionalism” anyway? What kind of people get to “profess”?) “Still, how are the Jordans I chose to wear to work less professional than the boat shoes Tanner rocked?” He writes about his mom buying him a Snoop Dogg CD when he was nine at the Sunrise Records at Cedarbrae Mall, and what hip hop has meant as a reflection of Black identity when there is so little representation of Black masculinity in pop culture otherwise, but what was complicated about that: “Those rappers were me, but that didn’t mean I was them. Outsiders couldn’t see the difference.” About pursuing his dream of NFL stardom, and the what that pursuit did to his body—he connects the distribution company where his dad worked (and where Morris and his brother worked the summer before he left to play football in Ohio), a company where the workers on the floor were all people of colour, and management was white, to professional sports where white owners reap their fortunes from the bodies of Black athletes. Though the connection is made implicitly, and this is the art in these essays, Morris laying out the evidence and letting the facts speak for themselves.

And herein lies the artistry at work here, in terms of structure, and prose that calls attention to itself in the most vivid and compelling way. I’m going to suggest that that first Snoop Dogg CD was the beginning of an education in the poetics of hip-hop, and that the influence of that poetics is discernible on every page of this book. Although I feel like I’ve never been more middle-aged white lady as when I’m supposing I can discern the influence of hip hop, um, anywhere, but there is just such a rhythm and a feel to Morris’s sentences, their cadences and alliteration. And then I think of the essay “The Fresh Prince Syndrome,” teenage Morris performing Will Smith’s character in school…because the alternative was being Carlton and alienated from his peer group, and I think of the high school teachers who wrote Morris off for being the smartass Black kid mouthing off in the back of the classroom, and is my supposing the influence of hip-hop similar to that, as opposed to a more traditional kind of literary influence? (What is tradition? Who gets to tradish?)

A thread running through all these essays is Morris’s relationship to his family, especially his mother (who was white, with a Polish-Jewish background—interesting to encounter not long after reading James McBride’s memoir THE COLOUR OF WATER), and—more subtly, but essentially—his younger brother, whose trajectory of life as a Black man would be wildly divergent from Morris’s for awhile. While Morris pursues his football scholarship dreams, his brother gets involved with drugs, with drug dealing, and eventually winds up in prison. “Despite thirty years spent knowing and touching and loving each other, we couldn’t be further apart in the routes we’d taken to preserve the collective sense of what Black masculinity meant to us. Of what Black boyhood had meant.”

BLACK BOYS LIKE ME is a complicated work with multitudinous facets, and every one of these surfaces shines. This book is a celebration and a gift.

February 7, 2024

She’s So High

The podcast I love more than any other is 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s, hosted by Rob Harvilla, author of my all-time favourite piece of music journalism, “How “Summer Girls” Explains a Bunch of Hits—and the Music of 1999.” (I wrote about my ongoing obsession with “Summer Girls” last year. It continues to be ongoing.) I started listening to the podcast—which is now into more than 100 songs that explain the ’90s, but let’s not be pedantic about it—with the Natalie Imbruglia “Torn” episode, featuring Sophie B. Hawkins as a special guest, and it continues to delight and make me reminisce and also make me think.

Last week’s episode, on “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls, in particular. And not just because it talks about working in retail while the Goo Goo Dolls play, and I did once indeed have a job folding t-shirts while “Black Balloon” played and articulated all my longing. (There was so much longing. I was twenty years old.) But also because the episodes are never just about one song anyway, and this one delves back to the movie High Fidelity, and how podcast host Rob used to take it as a compliment when people would tell him that he was a lot like the Rob in the movie. He used to think that guy was cool, and so did I (he was played by John Cusack after all). But. “High Fidelity is a horror film disguised as a rom-com,” says Rob Harvilla, and so was my idea of romance, to be honest. Informed by many John Cusack films, but also pop music in general.

“She’s So High,” by Tal Bachman, is the song Harvilla uses to articulate the problem of how women as love objects are presented in popular music. The point of existing as a woman, as per that song, and so many others, is to be out of some sad guy’s league. “Songs Sung By Sad Boys Who Dug Themselves into Mopey Bottomless Pits Singing Up at Fantasy Girls Marooned On Impossibly High Pedestals,” Harvilla explains.

Indoctrination into this culture in the 1990s meant that I thought romantic love meant some sad sack guy with an acoustic guitar who seemed to worship me in the most solipsistic manner possible. It means that it never occurred to a lot of sad sack guys that women were actual humans with multi-dimensions and struggles of their own. It meant that it seemed very reasonable for me to have relationships with men who were distinctly not excellent, because it was part of my job description to be “high above him.” In fact, it was my job to fix him, to save him, to exalt him above his own mediocrity. And that he would somehow be more authentic than other people for not even bothering. Romance was Ethan Hawk as Troy in Reality Bites telling Lelaina Pierce, “I’m the only real thing you’ve got.” It would never occur to me that I might possibly meet someone who could add to my own life, who could make my own world bigger and better. That the standard could possibly be meeting someone as smart, as passionate, as wonderful as I am. What it could really mean to meet my match.

The bar was low in the 1990s. I love the song “Head Over Feet,” by Alanis Morisette, but what does it mean that some jerk got an entire ballad written about him on the basis of the fact that “You ask how my day was”?

I had no choice but to hear you
You stated your case, time and again…

February 6, 2024

Gleanings

• We are barely allowed joy in this world in these dark times but we are allowed. When you get to your joy don’t feel bad about keeping it as long as you are able. Don’t apologize. You probably didn’t even invite joy. It’s not like a butterfly in a jar. Joy will escape from you no matter how you try and contain it so don’t feel guilty when it arrives. We are barely allowed joy but when you have it you can share it and that helps it remain a few glimmers and sparkles longer. There’s no definitive instruction manual or step-by-step to help you find it or keep it or string it along just a few more minutes. But when you have it, take a minute, drop everything. Drop everything for joy.
• There’s a kind of magic in this wondering, this sending of good wishes to other poets and writers and artists at work in other rooms, other spaces. This connection with others who are drawn to create. This curiosity about what they, and we, will create next. This belief in possibility, and in the value of dreaming “new possibilities,” even though we have “no idea if the ending is a happy one.”
• You might wonder (I did, at first), what the point might be of reading about these views when you can look at them for yourself, albeit by proxy. But there’s something differently but equally magical about Harvey’s descriptions, which convey not just awe or aesthetic appreciation but a profound tenderness for our miraculous, unlikely, impermanent floating home.
• Regular blog readers know that I met my husband when he fixed my fridge. My life might have taken quite a different tack but for the above-board transaction. When I reported to my mother that I’d met someone and how, her first question was “did he charge HST?” He sure did, and I still treasure his invoice from that life-altering day.
• One of the things that I love about lane swimming is that it’s both solitary and communal. I am alone in a giant salty bathtub of friends and strangers.
• Most often when we refer to a treat, our mind immediately goes to food particularly something that may be sweet or decadent (like my homemade dairy-free chocolate & nut covered oatmeal cups). But a treat is also an event or something that gives us pleasure.
• Like a vortex pulling me down, into this moment, my heart began tingling as I arrived back … here. That’s my line. I say it often -“I’ve got nowhere else to be.” But I certainly don’t feel that all the time, with a brain that seems to constantly be asking, “what’s next?” my mind is quite often not where my body is.
• At the start of this new year, which is often the point at which readers and those whose reading has perhaps lapsed make resolutions, we’re cheering everyone on. Whatever the types and numbers of books you read this year or any year, what you’re achieving is excellent. If you need to be reminded of that, hang out with other readers and you’ll feel cheered on, bolstered and encouraged!
• Grandma reminded me that other people are the gold in my life. She reminded me of the gifts within that I had been overlooking—the capacity to listen deeply, for example. The capacity to give my time and attention to others. To create welcoming spaces. To invite response. The joy in that exchange.
• So far, it’s been a grey year…but that’s okay. Grey makes me appreciate the subtle colours of snow, muted bushes, and bare tree branches. After the quiet grey, a blue sky seems garish. Bold. Loud.
• Then there is the actual word ‘retired’. People who dislike the word have come up with alternatives: ‘re-wired’, ‘revived’, ‘renewed’, ‘re-invented’ or ‘re-‘ something or other. But maybe it’s not ‘re’ anything. ‘Re’ in front of a word generally means doing something again. But this is a brand new phase of life. The Spanish word for retirement is ‘jubilación’. Sounds much better, doesn’t it?

February 5, 2024

As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow, by Zoulfa Katouh

It is impossible to read As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow—the debut by YA author Zoulfa Katouh, a 2023 CCBC book award-winner, an OLA White Pine nominee, and a finalist for the 2023 Governor’s General Awards—and not think about what’s happening right now in Gaza. Set over a decade ago in the city of Homs, during Syrian Civil War, the novel is about Salama, who—by virtue of having completed a year of pharmacy school—has stepped up to volunteer at a local hospital, removing shrapnel from people’s bodies, performing amputations without anaesthetic, saving whatever lives she can manage to save, which will never be enough, because she can’t save all of them.

Salama welcomes the distraction of her work at the hospital, which at least feels useful, and takes her mind away from not only the existential threat of death by bombs or snipers at any time, but also the figure of Khawf, an embodiment of her PTSD since the death of her mother and her father and brother’s capture by government forces. But she also feels responsible for her pregnant sister-in-law, who is also her oldest friend, and has not forgotten the promise she’d made to her brother to keep Layla safe, and she is trying to secure passage for her and Layla to make the journey across the Mediterranean Sea for asylum in Europe, though the journey is fraught with risk and Salama is ambivalent about leaving Syria behind, and abandoning the revolutionary cause that had inspired uprisings throughout her homeland.

Woven into this story—almost impossibly, and so gorgeously—is a beautiful love story, as well as a brilliant ode to the transportive powers of imagination in general and the works of Hayao Miyazaki specifically, works that have shown how love and magic are possible in the most unlikely places.

And I do not want to gloss over the book’s specificity, in terms of place and story—this novel is a powerful ode to Syrian culture, a love letter to the place itself, and to the possibility of Syrian emigrants one day returning to the freedom that so many have rallied, fought, and died for.

But it is also such an urgent call for the necessity of a ceasefire in Gaza right now, a testament to the suffering through which so many people are living…and dying. A few weeks ago, I read the words of a doctor in Gaza who’d amputated his own child’s leg on his kitchen table, and I just fell to pieces imagining being in such a situation myself: my child, my table. What’s the difference between him and me? What’s the difference between *this*—caring for children who are victims of chemical attacks, patients whose homes have been reduced to rubble, with babies left to die in their incubators because there are not arms enough to carry them all when the hospital has moments to evacuate before the building is bombed—and that one? This novel is a testament to the absurdity of there being any excuse for human beings to have to live this way, for any person to be so dehumanized that such depravity and barbarism is somehow justified. (Our current moment in which migrants are being vilified at border crossings around the world makes Salama’s story doubly, and even more tragically resonant.)

“If we weren’t in such a dire situation, this place would be beautiful. The blackness stretches out in front of us, with the moon casting his silvery glimmer, dimming the light of the stars nearby. It’s the same sky other people see in their countries. But while we watch it here, hiding, not knowing if our next breath is our last, others sleep safely in their beds, bidding the moon a peaceful good night.”

February 2, 2024

Two New Reviews!

• “I don’t know how to counter-sink a screw, but I like the term, and I enjoy the technical abilities of writers who routinely pull off good prose. Kerry Clare does throughout, and she’s particularly good at writing dialogue. Her characters come across as real people, not puppets, and they sound different from each other. That’s always important, but particularly so when the book is tightly focused on two friends.” New review from Lesley Krueger
• Some people may walk away thinking that Asking for a Friend was written specifically for them – it is that authentic. It felt that way to me. Even though it covers decades, you never feel like Clare is speeding through the story.  It is a well written book about a complicated friendship that is hard to let go of and it will one day make a great movie. New review from DIVINE
• Don’t miss the ASKING FOR A FRIEND book club kit!

January 31, 2024

Danielle Steel, and the Person I Used to Be

I’ve started 2024 with the intention of doing things differently, channelling the energy I’ve been putting into social media (rendering my thoughts not only fragments, but disposable fragments) into writing one essay every month. This is the first one, and I’m so happy with how it turned out.