April 1, 2025

At a Loss for Words, by Carol Off

“Populist politicians blame the government for the disparity between classes, feeding public resentment, distrust and anger. But that anger isn’t aimed at the 1 percent who play little to no tax, or at those whose obscene wealth can now pay for private trips into space for just lark. Instead of resenting the greed that drives the income gap, people direct their anger exactly where the agents of chaos want it directed—at government and civil society.”

Instead of looking for sense and meaning in newspaper live-blogs lately, I’ve been digging deeper and reading books, which definitely has helped with overwhelm, even when the books themselves are far from feel-good. (I’ve made a list of such books at 49thShelf: “Instead of Refreshing Your Feed.”) And former CBC journalist Carol Off’s At a Loss For Words: Conversations in an Age of Rage was positively chilling, instead of feel-good, but it was also so wise and made all sorts of connections between disparate things that look like random chaos from a distance, but Off shows that there’s nothing random about it. And that for decades, right-wing billionaires with nefarious intentions have been putting the pieces into place to lock in power for authoritarian leadership. And part of the way they’ve done this is by undermining our language, which is also our common ground, turning meaning inside out so that it becomes hard to know if anything is true. Off selects six words she explores to show how this has happened: Freedom, Democracy, Truth, Woke, Choice, and Taxes. Where do these words and ideas come from? How have their meanings and solidity been undermined, and who benefits from this happening?

What makes At a Loss for Words so important is its Canadian lens, highlighting the connections between what happens in Canada and the US, but also the ways in which Canada’s history is different. Throughout the book, she returns to her own childhood growing up, the child of parents who had rose to the middle class, and for whom the lessons of Europe in the first half of of the 20th century were close enough that they did not take for granted living in a pluralistic society where neighbours could think differently but also still have fundamental values in common.

This book was published in a world where the outcome of the 2024 US Presidential Election was still unknown, and it’s prescience is startling and disturbing—especially the part in the chapter in “Woke” in which she outlines Viktor Orban’s systematic dismantling of the university system in Hungary, how he brought these institutions under government control in a manner that the current US administration seems to be emulating to the letter. The implications are real and scary—former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is now head of a global organization dedicated to electing right-wing governments around the world, and Orban has called him “a great ally.”

At the end of the book, Off tells us that it’s still not too late to change course, which seems harder to believe here in 2025 than it might have a year ago. But knowledge and understanding of what’s really unfolding is imperative, regardless and, having read this book, at the very least I feel better equipped to meet the considerable challenges of the moment.

March 31, 2025

A Bird in the House, by Margaret Laurence

My Manawaka journey continues! Except that I picked up A Bird in the House thinking it was the book Laurence published after A Jest of God, but it was not! Not that it matters entirely, because the books themselves aren’t published in chronological order—The Fire Dwellers takes place before A Jest of God, but was published after it. (I would be curious to know what order these books were written in, and one way to get to the bottom of that would be to reread Laurence’s wonderful collection of letters to publisher Jack McClelland.) A Bird in the House is also a story collection and so it was likely written across a wide span of time (with stories first published in magazines like Ladies Home Journal, Chatelaine, Atlantic Monthly, and by the CBC, which makes me nostalgic for such a literary landscape). Anyway, I’d already started reading when I figured out my mistake, and because I’m cool and laidback, I just kept on going, and am not bothered by the mix-up at all. (Note: This is a lie. I am! Alas.)

Okay, so A Bird in the House might be the Manawaka book with which I’ve had the longest and least complicated history. The copy I have, I think, might have been swiped from my mom’s bookshelf, a Seal paperback, which had become entirely unglued and fell apart when I opened it after all these years. So I went to BMV and found a newer secondhand copy, a New Canadian Library edition with a foreword by Isabel Huggan, who I was friends with before the pandemic but we’ve fallen out of touch. And just like a story from Huggan’s collection The Elizabeth Stories, I believe I first encountered one of the stories from this book (either “The Sound of the Singing” or the title story “A Bird in the House”) in The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in my Grade 12 English class (which I wrote about here). I must have read the entire collection (which also constitutes a novel, a bildungsroman) at least once, but I don’t think I read it more than once, and the aspects of the story I remember are those I encountered in the short fiction anthology—young Vanessa, and the brick house where her grandfather lived, and the harbinger of death that was the sparrow, and then her father died not long after.

Unlike, say, The Stone Angel, stories from A Bird in the House are well suited for young readers, and Laurence’s narration is more traditional in these stories than her other books are, which are very much interior-focused. Vanessa MacLeod, on the other hand, is looking outward, telling the stories of her parents and grandparents, of the world around her, albeit not connecting any of the dots to understand or explain what those stories mean, and this means that my impression of these stories was that they were simple and straightforward, but it turns out that was just by perspective that was simple and straightforward, and I’m now wise enough to understand what was going on between the lines in these stories, the pains and struggles of these characters’ lives. I really read it and thought was about a house, a girl, and a bird, but there is so much more than that. My own dawning awareness is analogous to that of Vanessa herself:

“For me, the Depression and drought were external and abstract, malevolent gods whose names I secretly learned although they were concealed from me, and whose evil I sensed only superstitiously, knowing they threatened us but not how or why. What I really saw only was what went on in our family.”

And when she gets a little older and writes about the music of her youth: “The music seemed the only music that ever was or ever would be. I had no means of knowing that it was being set into the mosaic of myself and that it would pass away quickly and yet remain always mine.”

About war: “It was then that war took on its meaning for me, a meaning that would never change. It meant only that people without choice in the matter were broken and spilled, and nothing could ever take the place of them.”

March 27, 2025

Storm the Ballot Box: An Inside’s Guide to a Voting Revolution, by Jo-Ann Roberts

The big picture continues to be overwhelming and terrible, and I’m finding solace at the granular level, with books like STORM THE BALLOT BOX, by Jo-Ann Roberts, a long-time journalist whose career in politics began when she was a federal candidate for the Green Party in 2015. After years of covering Canadian politics, Roberts figured she had a good sense of how her candidacy would unfold, which turned out not to be the case, partly because politics is always different when you’re in the thick of it, but also because 2015 was a pivotal point in politics, with new dynamics brought on by social media, less local news coverage, a promise by the Liberals of voter reform, and a whole lot of weirdness. (Remember the guy who peed in a mug?).

In this breezy and engaging book, combining memoir and reportage, Roberts shares her experiences in politics, and also shares her frustration with the fact that so many Canadians she encountered through her door knocking were disengaged with the political process. (Not me! I’ve only missed one election in my adult life, when I didn’t bother to show up to vote between David Miller and Jane Pitfield for Mayor in 2006, because I knew he was going to win and was fine with that, and I’ve been embarrassed about this ever since, that I would have been so blase about this right who other people have died for.) She also shares her understanding, however, about why it might be so easy for so many to feel disengaged with the political process—the allure of strategic voting, which limits real choice; the way that polls end up determining the story instead of telling it; the broken promise of proportional representation; parties engaging in disinformation instead of talking about the real issues that matter to Canadians; the unequal ways in which Canadian political parties are funded; and more.

To all these problems, Robert offers real and practical solutions—and also smart explanations, though I must admit that I still don’t understand what a polling margin error means in the slightest, but that’s the point, really, and maybe I should stop reading up on polling numbers like I do. What if media outlets were only permitted to release polls within a particular margin of error? What if Elections Canada was made responsible for voter turn-out? Roberts proposes a referendum on electoral reform, followed by an election under the new rules, and then another referendum for Canadians to determine if they wanted to keep the process? What if political parties were removed from ballots? (And did you know that political parties were not recognized under law in Canada until 1970?)

Storm the Ballot Box is as fascinating as it is inspiring. This is the kind of revolution we need.

March 26, 2025

A Return to Analogue

I remember the friction of pulling that tag off the shelf, its plastic a perfect fit inside my palm, and how it felt like I was holding a key to something vital. I would carry the tag to the counter where it would be traded in, more often than not, for the 1988 Lily Tomlin/Bette Midler vehicle Big Business on VHS, a video my sister and I rented from our local corner store so many times that when I watched it again more than 30 years later, I knew the whole thing by heart.

Video rental was such a big deal for the first 20-some years of my life, its high stakes made clear by the FBI warnings that preceded every film, the responsibility to be-kind-please-rewind, and the sinister curtains behind which the dirty movies were kept, not to mention how a certain title’s availability or otherwise would have the power to make or break one’s sleepover party.

I could chart the course of my life by video stores, from the pre-chain hometown joints, to Bay Street Video (which lives on!) during my university years, to our local video store in Japan where we’d pray for subtitles, and then the Queen Video locations we frequented back in Toronto until the last one closed in 2019—although it wasn’t very frequent by then because we didn’t have a DVD player any longer.

But at the end of January, we bought another one, part of a grander plan to combat the overwhelm (at which we’ve not always been successful, I’ve got to say; sheesh, it’s been a time) by cutting ties to corporate entities where possible and focusing on tangible finite things. Streaming services never once delivered the satisfaction I’d received from bringing my plastic tag up to the counter, and they also made my children wrangey and frustrated as there was never anything they wanted to watch enough but always something to suggest they should not give up trying.

So we went back to DVDS, and I want to tell you about the joy of heading to the library DVDs shelf with my 11-year-old daughter for the very first time, about what it felt like to recall the sweet serendipity of this kind of selection and to have her experience it for herself. At dinner the night before, her dad and I had been remembering the 1986 movie Flight of the Navigator, and there it was on the shelf. She also borrowed a collection of Pixar shorts and Inside Out 2, and we felt so lucky and excited at finding these—for free, even. We’re currently #850 of 1125 on the library holds list for the DVD copy of the Wicked movie. We’ve got time and are happy to wait.

Our local secondhand/overstock bookstore has an entire basement full of tapes, CDs, records, VHS, and DVDS, and more, and I’d never been there before a couple of weeks ago when I went to scratch my new DVD itch, and descending those stairs was like arriving back in time (it didn’t help that the walls are the same shade of orange as the High Fidelity poster). We got Four Weddings and a Funeral because my Paddington-watching children have never known floppy-haired Hugh Grant, and Midsomer Murders, and the first season of Glee. There were no Velcro tags in the place, but I could almost imagine them, especially when I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds of flipping media all around me as customers were shuffling and riffling, almost paradise (and yes, I picked up a copy of Footloose while I was there).

-Check out “I don’t want to live in a world without video stores” from the West End Phoenix

(This post is taken from my monthly ENTHUSIASMS newsletter, which is free to all readers. You can sign up for it here. Or you don’t have to, because this site continues to be my home on the internet and you can always find me here!)

March 26, 2025

Gleanings

• “The battle for American decency happened to be here this year,” Sherman Burgoyne wrote to a distant sympathizer. “We fought it and won. Next year it may be in your part of America, and I’m counting on you to stand true.”
• She seems allergic to earnestness, this woman, but also addicted to shock, or attempts at shocking. We get it: you’re cool, you swear, you don’t conform.
• The older I get, the more I fall out of love with efficiency. I’ve struggled enough mentally to know that many of the experiences that are most edifying and healing for me are slow and full of friction
• Little by little, as the frequency of my syncopes has decreased, I’ve begun to feel my innate rebellious sovereignty return which is, of course silly in anybody as old as I am. But what is the use of being a willful and cantankerous old hag if I can’t be silly on a whim?  I’m now happily anticipating hiking and photography in the solitude that has always been so dear to my heart.
• Most things I create are an amalgam of stealing and dreaming. I like to think of our brains as containing one of those moving carousels filled with images captured over time; one never knows what images will show themselves when and how we will distill them into the things we create.
• Where are you right now? What is possible? Because the goal of life, not just art, really is rapture — dropping into that eternal now.
• And so living well, and living in community, and living with others, and taking care of your people, and even not your people, is not just self-care in order to keep fighting. That was the 2016 idea. It is actually inseparable from resisting their big project.
• There used to be a little book shop in Toronto, near the corner of Yonge and Eglinton. This was back in the early 80’s. I lived near enough to ride my bike over on a Saturday morning. The shop was above a bakery and I may or may not be imagining that you were allowed to take your goodies upstairs and sit on one of the couches or at little tables (my imagination also recalls a fireplace) and browse the bookshelves.
• In the end, Picnic at Hanging Rock is more than just a tale of a mysterious disappearance. It’s a colonial artifact, shaped by Lindsay’s own privileged background and the broader societal structures of the time.
• Watching Oscar sprinkle some cochineal bugs on my palm, crushing them to a carmine paste, adding a little lemon juice, which turned the paste orangey-red, then adding some soda, which turned the paste royal purple, I thought, I can do this. Not well, perhaps, and maybe I’ll make a mess. But I am drawn to the work and will spend the nicer weather making my workshop and then seeing what happens.
• Dear smut writers: I do not want to police your language, but just know that I’m always going to hate “intimate folds.” The vulva is not origami.
• It’s easy to send an observation, a compliment, a thank you out into the ether. It might make just the difference to someone, and might also collectively help to redeem our online commons at a time when we especially need to share beauty, kindness and respect for each other.
• We make connections, we lose connections. We make gains, we lose pieces of ourselves. We create ripples that go out, and we never know if they reach someone. And they never know if their ripples touched us.
• My ghosts are all over this place—that’s one of the cool things about living in the same city for such a long time—and one of them lives in the Central Branch of the Regina Public Library. She went to see the Writer in Residence there about a decade ago, clutching a half-baked manuscript that needed two more years of edits before an agent would take it seriously, basically to ask if she was any good at this writing thing or if she should quit. 
• What is true for both of these men—my sweet, fading father and the monster in the White House—is that they can do nothing to avoid dependency. It came for us in the beginning and it comes for us in the end. And if you stop fighting it, if you surrender to it, it can become a final exquisite experience of just how much you are loved—flesh and bone, the laughter and lightness of giving up the ghost, deserved, not earned, just because you are a human living inextricably with other humans.
• So take a news break. Spend time with people who fill your cup and see how long you can go without talking about the latest headline. Better yet, link arms with people working to make things better, whatever form that might take for you. Find the helpers—they’re there if you pay attention.
• Oh how our individual lives and living isn’t as much about us as we’re led to believe, sandwiched as we are between a past and future unknown.

March 24, 2025

Votive, by Annick MacAskill

In February (for the second year running!), my eldest daughter’s high school drama group won their district-level competition for the NTS Drama Festival (which many of us will recognize from back when it was the Sears Drama Festival), and I’m very excited that they’ll be part of the regional competition at Hart House Theatre in April performing their wonderful play, something infinitely more useful than poetry.

And I’m excited, not just because the play is terrific (it is!), but because it’s based on poetry by Governor’s General Award-winning Annick MacAskill, whose beautiful books are published by Gaspereau Press in Nova Scotia, and the opportunity to see teenagers reciting Canadian contemporary poetry like they mean it is so good for my heart. It also meant that I had a perfect excuse to buy MacAskill’s latest book, Votive, and leave it lying around the house and my teen would even pick it up and flip through it.

Votive includes the poem “Praying for Rain,” which closes the performance, and from which the play takes its title, my daughter reciting, emphatic, “Still rain/ seemed like the only hope,/ the way it might charge the gaps/ left by humans, machines, and words.” (The high school performance does not continue into the next line about hot flashes….)

I loved this book, whose allusions include Freddie Prize Jr, Calla from Margaret Laurence’s A Jest of God, Penelope, and Sinead O’Connor. These are poems about rituals, about devotion, religion, love, coming-of-age, queerness, knitting environmental devastation, the internet, good poems, bad poems, and the patron saint of rain.

Bring it.

March 20, 2025

I Don’t Believe in Seeds

I don’t believe in seeds. I just can’t fathom the fact of what happens when you plant them, no matter how many times I’ve watched the miracle happen, which it always does, and it’s still never not blown my mind. That new life is possible*, how this can turn into that, the ordinary miracle. I still don’t believe it, I can’t. I mean, not so much that I don’t sow seeds every single spring, because I do, the most hopeful gesture I ever enact. I remember how counter-intuitive it felt to sow seeds in the darkness of March and April 2020, how beside-the-point, and even pointless, but I did it anyway, which felt daring and subversive in the depths of my anxiety, to imagine such a thing as a future. I like the hope and the promise therein, but I still don’t believe it, I never do.

Which means that when I do plant seeds, I go overboard. What are the odds, I consider, that a single seed is ever going to sprout? It’s a gamble, so I might as well sow five of them, maybe ten. What kind of magic is this, from a fairy tale, it seems like, spinning straw into gold, growing a single speck into a snapdragon, a gangling plant whose blooms I’ll be clipping until into November. To sow seeds is to take the long view, to have vision, to have faith, except I don’t, as we’ve established. Not really. Not enough that I can simply trust, instead hedging my bets, an entire handful of snapdragon seeds flung into the soil, because what if I was measured about it and then nothing happened?

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about faith, about notions of A faith, and about how useful and comforting it would be to have such a thing at this moment. To have a sense of the world and in justice and progress that had not completely been turned upside down and inside out, leaving me wondering if I really know the world at all, what I ever knew about people, and progress, and what the project of these lives we’re weaving together. I watch the world through my news feeds with terror and dread, so much grief and sadness, and I long for something firm to hold onto. I want to keep believing in people, and possibility, in this beautiful world and for our little place in it, and good things being possible.

But I guess that’s what faith is, when it’s hard to believe, but you do it anyway. When we sow those seeds, even when it seems impossible that they’ll ever turn into anything. And what if any doubt we have is a reason to chuck in a handful of seeds, instead of permission to give up sowing altogether?What if sowing seeds shows us that miracles happen all the time?

I woke up this morning, the first day of spring, to find that the seeds I’d planted on Sunday evening had already begun. After a beautiful morning singing songs of peace and joy, I came home and dove into edits on my fourth novel, which will be coming your way in a year less three days.**

I still don’t believe in seeds, and yet. Here we are.

*Not unrelated: I also can’t believe that my children exist. Like, what even is up with that? Where did they come from and how do they just keep getting more and more magnificent all the time?

**Which is exactly five years TO THE DAY after I first wrote about the project: “Making: A new novel that’s inspired by Barbara Pym’s books, and I just hit 10,000 words. It might not be good, it might never be published, but my goodness, am I having a good time.”

March 18, 2025

Three Musical Notes

1. Am currently being haunted by “Holding Out for a Hero” by Bonnie Tyler. I’m not mad about it. We watched Footloose on DVD a couple of weeks ago, and my kids were struck by the wonderful weirdness of Kevin Bacon dancing in a warehouse (especially after having watched Jennifer Beals dancing in a warehouse just a couple of weeks before that in Flashdance, albeit one that’s post-industrial). A few days later, I danced around our living room to the song’s very dramatic Steinmen-esque opening imagining that I was Kevin Bacon, until I ran out of breath about 45 seconds later. Later that day my kids were out and heard “Holding Out for a Hero” playing at the grocery store. The next day, it was playing at the pool where I was swimming. Today it was playing in the background of a stupid casino ad I was served on a podcast. I can’t wait to hear it next. Truly, the lyrics have never felt so resonant, though that might just be my daddy issues talking.
2. I have spent over 40 years confused by the song “Our House” by Madness, and how exactly their house was in the middle of the street, which always seemed really dangerous. Eventually, I reasoned that they likely resided in the kind of flatiron structure that turns up in English movies like Bridget Jones Diary and Spice World, and truthfully—after now having spent a fair bit of the time driving in the UK, where houses turn up in the middle of streets all the time and the roads have to be routed around them, and where you might stand a good chance of knocking off your side mirror one somebody’s front room window sill—it almost made a kind of sense. But now I’ve just informed that “our house in the middle of our street” actually means that the house is just in the middle of the row of houses on the street. Like, “Our house is halfway down the block.” I was disappointed; doesn’t that just sound incredibly dull? My husband (who was correcting me on all this) responding that the rest of the song isn’t terribly interesting either, with lines like, “Our mum she’s so house-proud/ Nothing ever slows her down and a mess is not allowed.” Which, I guess, is why they brought in horns, to liven the whole thing up a bit.
3. I have only ever been bored by the song “A Girl Like You,” by Edwyn Collins, which was all too ubiquitous after showing up on the 1995 soundtrack to the movie Empire Records, and I never listened close enough to consider there might be anything interesting about it. Also, wasn’t Edwyn Collins just some old guy, in my mind tainted by his association with Phil (who was actually no relation)? This question and other misconceptions are considered fascinatingly in the latest Bandsplain podcast, whose biggest twist continues to be that I can listen so avidly to a conversation about a song I don’t even like, or at least I thought I didn’t like it, but now I do.

March 14, 2025

All the Days and Nights, by William Maxwell

My first William Maxwell was his novel The Chateau, which I read a couple of years ago in a reading group all about books about houses that Anne Fernald ran online via the Center for Fiction, and that book was the perfect introduction to Maxwell, who published six novels between the 1930s and 1980s, along with many short stories, and also was fiction editor of The New Yorker from 1936 to 1975. Maxwell is the most Woolf-influenced male author I’ve ever encountered, and The Chateau made that clear, although not as clear as his second novel They Came Like Swallows, whose structure borrows much from To the Lighthouse and which is based on Maxwell’s mother’s death in the 1918 flu epidemic. It’s a biographical thread he picks up again and again his fiction, including in the short stories collected in All The Days and Nights, which makes for a strange and emotional experience for readers familiar with his preoccupations—unlike his characters, we know what’s coming, and yet haplessly hoping for some other outcome all the same. There’s something so vulnerable and real about Maxwell’s characters, their flaws and imperfections. He’s the only mid-twentieth century author I’ve ever read whose male characters struggle with infertility, which was also based on Maxwell’s own experience, and the way he writes about love and marriage is so tender and moving and honest. He writes about people at the mercy of fate, and I really love his work. So very much that I even read the entirety of his collected stories, which is a big deal. Big doorstop collected stories are nice to have, I guess, but not great for reading, and the only one I’ve ever successfully completed is Grace Paley, and she didn’t even write that much. Poor John Cheever’s collection just sat gathering dust on my bookshelf for years until I finally gave up the ghost, and got rid of it. But William Maxwell! I read the whole thing, and it was really great.

March 10, 2025

Women Who Woke Up the Law, by Karin Wells

Karin Wells’ Women Who Woke Up the Law is hardly a feel-good book—it tells the stories of women who had to fight for very little, and often didn’t even get it—but it made me feel good anyway. Not because of good triumphing over evil, because in the end justice prevails, nope, not that at all. But instead because it tells the stories of women (and their lawyers, many of whom were also women) who nevertheless persisted, planting seeds that might take decades to grow, if ever, stories of the incremental pace of progress (along with requisite setbacks). Progress is not inevitable, as we’ve never learned in starker clarity than we’re learning right now as decades of progress are ripped apart and there are even people cheering for it. But progress is still possible, and it takes courage, and grit, and the work of it is hard and often unrewarding. And yet.

Wells, whose previous works instead one of my favourite books about Canadian history, The Abortion Caravan, once again brings the past to life with Women Who Woke Up the Law, each chapter telling the stories of the women behind fundamental changes to Canadian law. These include Eliza Campbell, whose gravestone at Mount Pleasant Cemetery still proclaims “I Did NOT Commit Adultery,” after she was accused by her husband, and fought valiantly for her reputation (and alimony), leading to eventual changes to Canadian divorce law. Also Emily Murphy, the first female magistrate in the British empire, “a complicated and dubious feminist icon,” who was part of a push to give women a share of their husband’s estates. Florence Murdoch, a ranch wife and survivor of brutal spousal abuse (she was beaten so hard to had to have her jaw wired shut) who fought for a portion of the ranch she’d put years of work into, though the Supreme Court of Canada would declare her not eligible, that her “twenty-five years of cutting hay, moving, dehorning, vaccinating and driving cattle… ‘was the work done by any ranch wife.'”

Wells shares stories of women whose courage helped to slowly move the needle on consent laws; of a woman who fought the system for unemployment insurance when she left work to have a baby (judges that argued that women could not be victims of sexual discrimination because in order for there to be discrimination, men and women would have to be equal, which they were not); of Jeannette Corbiere Lavell who fought to keep her Indigenous status after she married a non-Indigenous man (Indigenous men did not suffer such a penalty when they married non-Indigenous women); Chantale Diagle whose abusive partner tried to prevent her from accessing an abortion in the 1980s; Jane Hurshman who killed her sadistic partner after years of abuse and would go on to speak publicly about domestic violence; and Viola Desmond and Rachael Baylis, two Black Canadian women who, decades apart, would help to bring intersectionality in legal parlance. And so many more ordinary extraordinary lives.

As with her previous books, Wells is skilled at pulling threads and making connections, weaving these wide-ranging tales into a fascinating tapestry.