March 11, 2010

House Beneath by Susan Telfer

On Monday, I read Susan Telfer’s first collection of poetry House Beneath over two nap times, delighting in its branches and its roots (and yes, its stunning cover design too). I would describe it as “a Carol Shields novel compressed into 78 pages”, which is high praise from me– that a book of poetry could have the breadth of a novel (a statement which makes me sound a bit ignorant about poetry and overly devoted to novels, both of which are true) and one by Shields at that.

In her collection, Telfer tells the story of a daughter who is losing her mother just as she’s becoming a mother herself, who has been let-down and betrayed by her father’s addictions, who is struggling to make sense of her parents’ history as she also faces forward to construct a family of her own. The book is explicitly maternal, breasts full and leaking, babies cradled, bodies aging and changing, and ovulating. It is the maternal that makes me think of Shields, of course, but also how photography is used, and the resonance of childhood, and its quiet feminism. Lines like, “On the tangerine trampoline, I/ levitated– all the new ideas/ of the world fell into my mind like/ shooting stars…

Telfer’s poetry is eclectic– “Mercy” is a glose; “Weaning Dance” is a gorgeous villanelle; “No Satisfaction” references The Rolling Stones, Betty Friedan, a family photograph and Dr. Spock. The collection is suffused with music– made-up songs a mother sings to he children, Helen Reddy on the record player, Depeche Mode a party soundtrack, poems are haunted by pianos, one is called “Mother Fugue”, another “Brahms’ Sonata in F Minor, 1853”. Some poems are songs, others dances, and a few are dirges too.

Some of these poem are rooted in pain, some in joy, and others come from a point of quiet solace. Their rootedness is important though– these are poems that are explicitly located, in dream-haunting houses, on the very edge of a continent, in places we don’t always want to go home to (but do).

(Read Susan Telfer’s poem “Staircase“)

March 11, 2010

Bunk

I haven’t seen An Education yet, but I read the book a few months ago. Which is really a different thing entirely– the movie is much fictionalized and based on just a chapter of Lynn Barber’s book, but the people in the movie are really beautiful and the book is absolutely fascinating, so I think all is as it should be. In particular, I’d recommend the book for its history of journalism– Barber got her start writing for Penthouse, then The Sunday Express, and has ended up quite renowned for her interviews in The Observer in particular. And yes, previous to that had had an affair with a conman (the movie using this as a springboard), which made for a good chapter, but the rest of the book is as worth reading.

But the book is also worthwhile for its history of a time, which I’m thinking about now that I’m all wrapped in Jenny Diski’s The Sixties (which is so good, by the way). How the two books are fine companions, two stories about the same thing as told by observers standing on different parts of the very same street.

I’m reading the Diski book having just finished reading The Uses and Abuses of History by Margaret MacMillan, who probably wouldn’t love The Sixties, because although she acknowledges that, “it is instructive, informative, and indeed fun to study such subjects…, we ought not to forget the aspect of history which the great nineteenth-century German historian Leopold von Ranke summed up as “what really happened.”” And I presume she means what really happened in addition to the fact that Jenny Diski had sex a lot.

In fact, there aren’t a lot of connections between MacMillan’s book and Diski’s, and they are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Though Diski is neither using nor abusing history, which MacMillan would probably find heartening, and also that Diski has never used The Munich Agreement to justify invasion of a foreign nation. Further, Diski has learned from the past, though perhaps too much, “What the young don’t get is that they are young; the old are right, young is a phase that the old go through. It’s just as well, I suppose, that the young don’t see it that clearly. Best to leave the disappointment for later.”

The point of all this being that these three books are banging around in my head at the moment, because two of them relate and because I just happened to read the other two one after the other. Though all three of them are written with such fierce, formidable intelligence. So that if you really must read something that isn’t a novel, you’d be all right checking out any of these.

March 11, 2010

ARM Update

I’ve just received an email update through Friends of the Association for Research on Mothering (see my previous post). Apparently, the response has been incredible, media coverage considerable and Andrea O’Reilly writes, “…that this was accomplished by everyday women reveals that grassroots feminist activism is still very much alive in these so called post-feminist times.” Indeed.

She writes also that they’re determined to keep Demeter Press running, and you can show your support by buying one of their titles at the new Demeter website. May I suggest Mother Knows Best: Talking Back to the “Experts”, which the likes of me have called “the very best book on motherhood I have ever read”? It’s worth an entire parenting library, I promise you, for $34.95. (Read my review.)

And I think I am going to get White Ink: Poems on Mothers and Motherhood.

March 10, 2010

On the Hair Hat Man

I have never met Carrie Snyder, but I started reading her blog just before Patricia Storms recommended Hair Hat for Canada Reads: Independently. (Patricia doesn’t know Carrie either– I checked. Because Canada is a very small town.) So Carrie and I have corresponded by email a few times, and I broke one of my own personal rules to ask her about her Hair Hat Man.

But first, my rule. I will never, ever ask a writer where she gets her ideas. I don’t care. I don’t care if the work is autobiographical, divined by magic, or hatched from an egg. The answers to these questions are rarely illuminating about the works themselves as much as they tell us what we want to know about an author. And just because we want to know doesn’t mean that it does us any good to do so.

BUT. Carrie Snyder’s Hair Hat Man was so impossibly weird, and I just didn’t get him. Though I understood that my inability to grasp him, pin him down, was part of the power of the collection, that the culmination of the stories serve to make him “almost plausible”.

I love the fact that the Hair Hat Man has had the same effect on Snyder’s negative reviewers that he has on the other characters in her book– he makes us uneasy. People hate the Hair Hat Man, within the book and without it, but any character who provokes that reaction must have some substance behind him. Or rather, the criticism is often that he’s more a device than a character, but I think the same thing applies.

So I had to ask Carrie where he came from. Not that it changes anything at all, but as the answer to such questions often is, what she told me was worth repeating:

In answer to your Hair Hat question (and it’s definitely the most-asked question about the book!) … my inspiration came from actually seeing a man with a hair hat. At least, I think that’s what I saw. I was a grad student in Toronto, and often stopped at a coffee shop on my way to campus (at the corner of Bloor and St. Joseph Street, near Wellesley). One day, while walking past the shop, I thought I saw a man inside with his hair shaped into a hat. I don’t even think I did a double-take, but afterwards kind of kicked myself for not looking twice.

Somehow, the image worked its way into my imagination. He first appeared in a song I was writing. A year later, he made his way into the first hair hat story that I wrote–“Queenie, My Heart” (and that title actually arrived a few years before I’d even seen the hair hat man, scribbled in the margins of notes I was taking for fourth-year English class). But that story went unfinished. For about two years.

I’d just given birth to my first child when I wrote another hair hat story: the one in the voice of the lone male narrator in the book, which includes that coffee shop. After I wrote it, I said to my husband: is this just too weird? Because I want to write more hair hat stories. So I did. They just kind of poured out. At that point, I’d written a novel which had gotten me an agent; the novel didn’t sell, but she was able to sell these stories (which were written over the course of about a year) to Penguin. That happened just before I gave birth to my second child. And then, it was only at the editing stage that I found the ending to my Queenie story. And wrote the last story in the book, which surprised me entirely. I had no idea it was waiting to be written, but it felt like the perfect ending.

March 9, 2010

"Staircase" by Susan Telfer

Staircase

I stand at the kitchen sink in my bare feet
that melting July morning as my mother was dying.

I hear the thumps start on the top steps
over my head. Know in that instant

that my baby has crawled up the staircase
for the first time and is now somersaulting down.

Turning from the sink and running through
the hall as I hear his soft body hit each step.

Reaching my hand out to catch his head
above the tiles. Scooping him up in my arms,

my heart bludgeoning through both of us.
Nursing him then as we breathe at last.

I caught him like when he was born in his sac,
that melting July morning as my mother was dying.

(from House Beneath by Susan Telfer)

March 9, 2010

Books in the City

Because I only ever read YA for purposes of nostalgia, I’ve probably not read a novel for young readers that’s been published since the early 1990s. I decided to read Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me after reading this piece on it at the Guardian Books Blog, and because it had won the estimable seal of the Newbery Medal. And yes, also because it’s the story of girl who’s reading A Wrinkle In Time.

I’d forgotten how wonderful YA fiction can be– there was nothing simple about Stead’s plot, and though the vocabulary was simpler than I was used to, and the font was bigger, she had me wrapped up in the story and completely baffled as to where it would go next. She wasn’t writing down to anyone.

When You Reach Me turned out to be a nostalgic read all the same, however. Perhaps in itself an ode to the great YA fiction of yore (whose heroines I’ve written about before, actually, on International Women’s Day exactly two years ago). The story takes place in 1979, which means its protagonist needs dimes for the payphone. And all the best YA took place in the ’70s, didn’t it? Which was sometimes weird, especially when girls needed belts for their sanitary napkins, or lost their virginity on unfortunate shag rugs, but there was something in the air then that leaked into these wonderful stories.

Stead’s Miranda is blunt, feisty, awkward, mortified by her mother (“…if she had the slightest idea what she looked like, she wouldn’t be laughing at all.”), gutsy, fearful and vividly drawn. The story was not at all dated (which makes it a bit different from the YA I remember so well– no one refers to anybody as a “woman’s libber”, for example). That Miranda lives in New York City too is only fitting, because everybody did then. With their unabashedly single mothers, in buildings without doormen, and they’d walk around the city with keys strung around their necks. It’s strange how much encountering adolescence in 1970s’ New York City is really a kind of literary homecoming for me.

Another book in the city I’ve read lately is Stacey May Fowles’ Fear of Fighting (which is a Canada Also Reads contender, and [insert “wow, do I ever love the internet!” comment here] available as a free download. Defender Zoe Whittall holds this book up as an example of an urban book set in the present day, the kind of book that cranky people like to complain doesn’t exist, and that many readers too fond of inter-generational prairie family sagas could end up ignoring.

I read Fear of Fighting skeptically, first, because I’m unconvinced that “contemporary urban tale” is necessarily shorthand for good. It’s very often been shorthand for complete crap, in my experience, with storytellers too conscious of what they’re up to, in Toronto referencing Parkdale for the sake of referencing Parkdale (and either not explaining what this means, or explaining too much), getting novel-writing confused with map-drawing, thinking they’re not required to actually do anything as storytellers because this is a “contemporary urban tale” after all.

I also wonder about this demand for contemporary urban tales– is this another way of asking for books about people like us? And I understand why a wide of variety of approaches to fiction is important, but I also know that when girls who collect shoes and go shopping a lot demand fiction that reflects their lives, the rest of us find that a bit disdainful.

Finally (and then I promise, I’ll stop with the provisos), unlike Whittall, I don’t necessarily love “good non-cliché-ridden mental illness narrative” (or perhaps I’ve just never encountered the first two descriptors).

When I started Fear of Fighting, I thought it had a YA sensibility, but having read When You Reach Me now, I realize that I was only recognizing another irrepressible narrative voice. Who doesn’t write down to anyone. Fowles’ work is so wonderful because it doesn’t try too hard, because her narrator is wry and discerning. After Marnie gets her heart broken, she eventually she stops leaving her house, even adandoning her lucrative career filing for a document shredding company. The book is the story of her piecing together what’s happened, and what she’s going to do next, and Zoe Whittall is right– the book is funny. “Fucking hilarious” may be taking it a bit far, but it’s true that Fowles’ Marnie is the most hilarious agoraphobe I’ve ever encountered in fiction, or anywhere.

March 9, 2010

Canada Reads: Independently 2010: UPDATE 8

I was looking through the twitter posts about Canada Reads today, and found one that said, “Every year, I get psyched about Canada Reads, and then life gets in the way and I don’t read any of the books”. Or something like that, in 140 characters. And for an instant, I thought that was profoundly sad, and pretty weird, until I remembered that the bookish circles amongst whom I travel the internet are probably way outnumbered by people like that. That though no doubt many people pay attention when Canada Reads rolls around, those who read every single book, those who start up spin-offs, and other spin-offs, or read the books from spin-offs, or blog the whole thing three years in a row, for example– these are sort of extraordinarily book-loving people.

All of which is to say that those of you who’ve read the Canada Reads 2010: Independently books are awesome, and that I very much appreciate you having my reading be just a little less independent. Thanks for all the feedback I’ve gotten so far with your top Canada Reads picks– others still have until Thursday to have your voice heard (even if you haven’t read them all). The Canada Reads 2010: Independently winner will be announced on Friday!

This week, Writer Guy read How Happy to Be: “I “got” Maxime, maybe because I could understand her dilemmas, her struggles. Ultimately, however, what makes it shine is Onstad’s prose: she’s a natural, seemingly effortless, writer. It’s easy to forgive and forget certain plot contrivances when the writing is skillful and fun.”

She who is Buried in Print read Wild Geese: “The dynamics of this story are complex; the emotional alliances between the characters are unpredictable and shift as easily as Caleb’s temper, and the reading experience is painful at times as, like Lind, we are temporarily immersed in this cruel world. But the overall sensation is one of endurance and survival, and it’s clear to see why this novel has endured in the Canlit canon…”

Charlotte Ashley (who has read Canada Reads AND Canada Reads Independently. Impressive, no?) read How Happy to Be and reports: “The figure of the girl who is directionless and out of control until motherhood finds her and gives her some purpose is not without precedent (I’m thinking Natasha from War and Peace, or in some ways myself). But by the same token, it made me feel that Max’s issues earlier in the book were not really that “real” after all, and all her whining and confusion was really just self-absorbed adolescence drawn out too long and she just needed to grow up. Maybe this was what Generation X lacked – the characters didn’t grow up.”

March 8, 2010

"ABC in CMYK"

I love this amazing alphabet poster that my husband has made for our daughter’s room.

March 8, 2010

Canada Reads (The Original!) Begins!

I’m listening to Canada Reads on my beloved CBC Radio One right now and immediately finding the panelists much more compelling than last year. And though I’ve not been reading along these last few months, once more I want to throw in my support for the wonderful Nikolski (which is NOT “a dude book!” Or rather, it is far more than one). It seems to have a wonderful champion in Michel  Vézina too (who dares to accuse those who’ve found it “thin” of “reading it thinly”. Roland Pemberton is also winning me over. Samantha Nutt put me off by suggesting that fiction has to have something to teach us about ourselves. Perdita Felicien and Simi Sara are also putting in a good show. Unless Nikolski is out tomorrow (heaven forbid) I’ll be listening all week.

March 8, 2010

How the Heather Looks by Joan Bodger

I was thinking of AS Byatt’s The Children’s Book when I decided I wanted to read Joan Bodger’s How the Heather Looks: A Joyous Journey to the Sources of Children’s Books. Byatt’s novel had stirred my interest in the history of English children’s literature, plus I’ve been reading a lot of it myself lately– we’re currently working on Now We Are Six at bedtime. Bodger’s book was first published in 1965, the story of a journey her American family had taken across Britain in the late ’50s in search of storybook places they all knew by heart. She was a writer herself, her husband John was a reference librarian, and they’d managed to instill a passionate love of literature in their two children, which is no wonder considering they were the type of parents who’d embark upon a journey such as this one.

The book is magical, sparkling. I was familiar with probably only about a third of the works referenced, but I’ve come away wanting to read the rest, and Bodger’s prose is so delightful, the trip itself twisty and turny and marvelous to follow along. Her research is stunning. And how wonderful: the very point is to discover whether maps they keep finding in their books’ end-pages could possibly map onto real places? And the story of what they discover is a wonderful ode to an Britain that was (times two),  and a testament to the power of children’s literature.

It is pretty typical, from what I know of England, that this American family on a madcap adventure rarely finds an English person who’s read the work they’ve travelled across an ocean in search of.  At the beginning of the book, the family arrives in Whitchurch in search of scenes depicted by illustrator Randalph Caldecott, and they stop at a school to ask for directions. Bodger wonders, “what it would be like to talk to children who walked to school each morning over the very fields and country lanes made famous in the Caldecott illustrations… [T]he experience [of introducing Caldecott’s work to the children] must be akin to holding a child up to the mirror for the first time and letting him recognize what it is that the rest of the world holds dear.”

The children don’t recognize what the world holds dear, however, and even their teacher hadn’t heard of Caldecott. And the Bodgers encounter this time and time again, as they go in search of Narnia, a lost colony of Lilliputians, the Borrowers’ home, of Robin Hood, Pooh’s enchanted wood, Toad Hall and Rat’s house, Camelot, Avalon, The Secret Garden, and Jemima Puddle-Duck’s garden too. Not to say that English aren’t accommodating, however. They meet with AA Milne’s widow, and Bodger stumbles upon an interview with Arthur Ransome. When Bodger has to make an urgent call to the London Library Association, the person who answered her call “did not seem in the least upset that I had asked him to find out where a fictitious water rat had entertained a talking mole.”

The Bodgers rarely find exactly what they’re looking for, but possessing spirit and imagination enough to embark on such a pilgrimage at all, they have enough too to find the magic they’re seeking. Which is partly due Britain itself, its layers of history, its mythical past (and its tea and scones, from which the family frequently takes its sustenance). Due also to the stories, their universal appeal and how they’ve endured. But also to the Bodgers’ particular appreciation of the stories, and of stories in general (and Joan Bodger would go on to found the Story-Tellers School of Toronto). These are parents who take children’s literature very seriously, which has rubbed off on their son who possesses that knowledge of battles, and history, and storybook scenes that only a small boy can. Particularly a small boy who used to rock in his crib to the beat of “Windy Nights” when his mother read the poem to him at bedtime.

In her afterward to the 1999 edition of this book (and Bodger died in 2002), Bodger warns those who might regard How the Heather Looks as a guide to family life, to creating wondrous childhoods. Indeed, however idyllic the family seems, one cannot avoid mention of what would happen to them: Lucy, just two years old in the book (“the only one among us who did not need a guidebook”, young enough to think of nothing walking into the world of storybooks) would die of a brain tumour at age seven, Bodger and her husband would divorce, her husband and son would both suffer from schizophrenia. Whichs  idevastating, and terrifying– I have this naive idea that with books, we can steel ourselves against tragedy, that we have any kind of control over that kind of thing at all.

But this unexpected ending doesn’t make the book any less magical, just as the Bodgers’ locating their favourite stories in the real world doesn’t diminish the literature itself. This is the stuff that the world is made of, is all, and a rare, precious thing are writers like Bodger who can see it that way, and then write it down so beautifully too, drawing such illuminating connections. Which is why I look forward to also reading her autobiography The Crack in the Teacup: The Life of an Old Woman Steeped in Stories very soon.