February 5, 2010
News and news
My goodness, haven’t things around here been anticlimactic since Family Literacy Week ended. You want to know the best thing about Family Literacy Week though? That it was totally made up. True story. Family Literacy DAY was the real deal, but I thought one day wasn’t enough, so I dragged it out for another six, and then people started walking around thinking it was legitimate. At least two people that I know of! This is certainly not the first rumour I ever started, but it’s probably one of the more productive ones. It was a very good week, and I am so grateful for everyone who contributed. And I am sorry if I misled you…
Since then, however, I’ve been busy with deadlines, and preparations, plus I’ve been exhausted thanks to this baby whose sleep habits are beyond appalling. Thanks to all of this (save the baby), however, we are on the cusp of some very exciting things. Amy Jones is coming over tomorrow afternoon for her interview (and I’ve baked scones for the occasion.) I’m starting Wild Geese tomorrow, and my Canada Reads Independently update will be posted this weekend. And sometime soon I’ll be rolling out my gorgeous new website over at my own domain! I hope you’ll all adjust your links accordingly, and follow me there. Stay tuned for the official announcement…
Of course, lately I’ve also been reading. Barbara Pym’s A Glass of Blessings, and Canadian Notes and Queries. From the latter, I especially enjoyed Clark Blaise’s story “In Her Prime“, Seth on Canadian Cartoonist Doug Wright, Ray Robertson (of the Canada Reads Independently Moody Food) “In Anticipation”. I’ve been reading Sylvia Plath’s The Bed Book with illustrations by Quentin Blake, and The Tree of Life by Peter Sis on the recommendation of Genevieve Cote. I’ve been reading Annabel Lyon on writing and motherhood. Mark Sampson on email interviews. Steven Beattie’s “The problem of sustained reading in a distracted society”. Meli–Mello celebrated Family Literacy Week also last week, and this week she’s talking about toys.
February 2, 2010
Embracing the Ego? A reevaluation
I changed my mind, sort of. After thinking a lot about why we should read, and deciding (along with Fran Lebowitz and Diana Athill) that we should read in order to escape ourselves, I realize that reading is not so simple. That here I sit spouting nonsense about what reading is for from a position of enormous privilege (read: literacy, internet access, enough of my immediate needs met that I have time to sit here spouting nonsense) about what reading is for, but I’m missing most of the story.
It is annoying, I think, when people who spend most of their time gazing into mirrors anyway choose to see literature also as a reflective surface. This, of course, is what Fran Lebowitz called “a philistine idea… beyond vulgar.” But I’m starting to realize that we’re only talking about a fraction of the population when we generalize in this way. There are people with real problems (and I’m sorry quarter-life-crisis-ers, but I’m not talking about you!) for whom literature would be a most productive therapy, and also for whom this kind of personal engagement might be their gateway into books (which is splendid!). For anyone to devalue this kind of reading is incredibly patronizing, and stupid. (And perhaps to devalue any kind of reading is patronizing and stupid too).
I am learning more about the work done by Literature For Life, about their Book Circles whose participants have often never read an entire book before . The first book their groups read is The Coldest Winter Ever by Sister Souljah, selected for being plot-driven and for the way in which the story might relate to readers’ lives. Confidence grows from just one book, and so does interest, so that someone who has only read one book before might go and pick up another. So that, yes, a reader is born, but also these readers can begin to address their own problems with the advantage of some distance, that they gain access to a new way of examining and understanding their own experience. Language becomes a tool for self-expression. Subsequent books read become more challenging, but all of them connect back to the readers’ experience somehow, and I see now how much is right with that.
Perhaps what I find most fascinating about the Lit. for Life Book Circles (whose participants are pregnant and parenting teenage mothers) is that these communities of readers approach literature from a wholly different angle than what I’m used to. We all like to go on and on about the use-value of literature, which for most of us is theoretical, but these readers put those theories in motion. These girls whose lives are changed by the power of one book– they are a testament to what literature can do. Those of us who take books for granted can certainly learn something from that.
Anyway, there will be more learning to come. I’m going to be doing some work with Literature for Life over the coming months, and I look forward to sharing those experiences here.
February 2, 2010
Foolscap is awkward to read in bed
“‘Will she expect a comfortable bed?’ Rodney asked. ‘Oughtn’t we to break her into the world gradually?’
‘I don’t see what difference it makes,’ I said.
‘Wilmet, have you thought what books to put by her bed?’ asked Sybil. ‘You must make a careful choice.’
‘I suppose some anthologies of poetry and good novels by female authors,’ I said. ‘Not devotional books, obviously.’
‘We have just completed an interesting report on the Linoleum Industry,’ said Rodney. ‘I could let her have a cyclostyled copy– the pages are bound together.’
‘Foolscap is awkward to read in bed,’ said Sybil. ‘Arnold has just published a paper in one of the archeological journals– that’s a handy size for night reading and there are some excellent drawings of pottery fragments done by an invalid lady who lives in Dawlish.'”– from A Glass of Blessings by Barbara Pym(!)
February 1, 2010
Meet the Smiths
I’ve got a family of Smiths on my bookshelf. Probably you do too. Mine are diverse but an excellently harmonious bunch. There’s Ali, of course, of The Accidental and Girl Meets Boy. And then Alison, of the poetry collection Six Mats and One Year. Next is Betty, who wrote A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Beside her is Ray, then Russell, and Zadie, who have brought to the library Century, Muriella Pent and White Teeth/On Beauty, respectively.
This is the largest clan in my library, save for the Mitfords who don’t actually count because they’re really sisters. And I’m not sure if this bunch is alike or unhappy in their own way, but I like how their jackets rub together anyway.
January 30, 2010
Raise high the roofbeam carpenters
Phoebe Caulfield was Holden’s nine-year old sister, plucky as a red-headed orphan, just lacking appropriate pigmentation and tragedy. Even Holden would affirm that, “if you don’t think she’s smart, you’re mad.”
Pheobe was a writer, composing the stories of “Hazel Weatherfield” in her multiple notebooks. As an actor, she was ecstatic to have the largest part in her class play, even if it involved playing Benedict Arnold. “Elephants knock[ed] her out.” Phoebe Caulfield was a force to be reckoned with, pouring ink down the windbreaker of anyone who dare cross her path and she could recite Robbie Burns on command.
She was also a realist. While her brother Holden tried to deny his bleak reality, Phoebe made a point of thrusting the thing in his face. Not allowing him the luxury of his skewed perspective, sick of tirades about phoniness, she says bluntly, “You don’t like anything.” In contrast, Pheobe herself was able to make the best of her difficulties. Holden’s drunken shattering of record he’d bought for her failed to hinder her enthusiasm for the gift: “‘Gimme the pieces,’ she said. ‘I’m saving them.'”
A beacon in her brother’s lonely existence, Phoebe’s love makes clear Holden’s real emotional capacity and the depth of his troubles. Upon learning that he’d been expelled from yet another school, hers is the first display of genuine, grounded concern anyone shows him. Her maturity outmatches Holden’s, and his tender feelings towards her highlight his own vulnerability.
In Phoebe, Holden also sees the innocence he has lost, but elsewhere in Salinger’s oeuvre is evidence that Phoebe Caulfield was wise rather than naive, and that her wisdom beyond her years (“Old Phoebe”) might never have disappeared. I like to think that if Salinger had continued the saga of the Caulfield family, Phoebe would have grown up to be someone much like Boo Boo Glass.
Of course, the details of Salinger’s salacious personal life widely reported him as something of a letch, and his stories contain their share of one-dimensional female characters. But he knew something about women, or perhaps something about sisters is more what I mean.
Boo-Boo appears in the background of Salinger’s Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roofbeam Carpenters. She also makes an appearance in “Down at the Dinghy” from Nine Stories, in which “[h]er general unprettiness aside,” writes Salinger, “she was a stunning and final girl.” Ever capable, Boo-Boo flew with the Woman’s Air Force in World War Two, bravely tackled anti-Semitism in her marriage to a Jewish man, and mothered her young son with the same insightful sensitivity Phoebe provides to her brother Holden.
In a tortured world of Seymour and perfect days for bananafish, Boo-Boo stands on the side of justice, for all things bright and good, however much in vain. And I am insistent upon optimism, so for me, it is her spirit that pervades Salinger’s best writing and makes me love it so. Her presence in Raise High the Roofbeam Carpenters consists solely of a note left on the bathroom mirror of her brothers’ New York apartment. “‘Raise high the roofbeam carpenters… Please be happy happy happy. This is an order. I outrank everyone on the block.”
(an earlier version of this piece appeared in the independent weekly on September 6 2001.)
January 29, 2010
Celebrating literacy in general, and those who promote it
For obvious reasons, this is my favourite page in The Baby’s Catalogue. Oh, children’s books. They’re as good as any book, but they’ve got pictures. And it has been a delight to celebrate them this week, to celebrate Family Literacy, and to find out that such a celebration is so contagious. That children’s books are made to be shared.
Of course, we’re preaching to the choir here. Anyone who’d be reading this blog in the first place (except for whatever curious person arrived searching for “sex with pickles”) is probably well aware of the importance of family literacy. I bet we were all read to as children, that we read to any children we have, and that we even read to children we don’t have.
And all of this, of course, is a luxury. Family Literacy Day is sponsored by ABC Canada, which promotes adult literacy through a wide variety of programs. We are fortunate that in Canada, illiteracy is rare, but less rare (and harder to acknowledge) are low literacy skills, which are experienced by 4 out of 10 Canadians. The implications of this are enormous, in particular at the family level, and at the workplace level, and through their programs, ABC Canada aims to provide adults access to the learning skills they require.
Another organization doing wonderful work for literacy is the Children’s Book Bank in Toronto, which provides children in the Regent Park neighbourhood with free books and a terrific atmosphere in which to enjoy them. The space is absolutely beautiful, like the best children’s bookstore you can imagine, and the books (albeit secondhand) are in good shape, excellently organized. It’s a place that respects itself, and the kids sense that, and feel better about themselves for just being there, and their pleasure at choosing books of their own is absolutely palpable. They also often come accompanied by their parents, many of whom end of learning English literacy skills from the books their kids bring home from the Book Bank. The Children’s Book Bank is a fantastic innovation, and I’d recommend it for anyone who is looking to get rid of good quality used children’s books, or as a good recipient for a book drive.
A final organization in Toronto that I’m just starting to learn about is Literature for Life, which promotes reading to groups of pregnant or parenting teenage mothers, and publishes a magazine by these women and for them. It’s an amazing idea, whereby not only do these women learn how reading enriches their lives, but they gain the skills to pass a love of reading on to their children.
***
Finally, I want to share my favourite Family Literacy Resources. Australian writer Mem Fox has an excellent website, including her instructions for reading aloud and her Ten read-aloud commandments (1. Spend at least ten wildly happy minutes every single day reading aloud.)
And more recently, I’ve fallen in love with Canadian author Sheree Fitch’s website. Sheree Fitch is an inventor of words, and she’s made up one called “thrival”, which is as important as “survival”, and is what literacy is necessary for. Read her excellent essay here. Her own list of literacy resources is here.
January 29, 2010
Family Literacy Recommendations from a Literary Mom: Carrie Snyder
In between mothering her four children, writing fiction, a blog and a parenting column, and all the other things that people do, Carrie Snyder found a few spare moments to write this beautiful piece about reading with her children. Carrie Snyder is the author of Hair Hat (which is currently competing in Canada Reads: Independently). Her most recent publication was three stories in The New Quarterly 112).
My favourite picture book of all time is A Day with Nellie, by Marthe Jocelyn (the original version, not the board book, which cuts some of my favourite sections.) This book has been with our family since my eldest was a toddler. He and I read it so often that we had it memorized. Both of my daughters loved it, too, and my youngest is now 22 months and “Nellie!” is far and away the first book he goes looking for on our shelves.
The charm of this book is in its simplicity. A preschool-aged child goes about her day: from waking to getting dressed, greeting her friends (mostly stuffed animals), eating breakfast, and so on. She plays indoors in daddy’s shoes. She plays teacher in the backyard–her students include the neighbours’ cat. She makes mud, slips and falls, gets dirty, takes a bath. Each page subtly illustrates a new concept: textures on the breakfast page, emotions on the naptime page, numbers on the picnic lunch page, et cetera.
But what elevates this book to greatness is Jocelyn’s original fabric artwork. It looks touchable. 
Each page is beautiful and colourful, and we could look at it for hours (and we have, and we do!). The pictures are full of narrative all on their own, which makes them perfect for the pre-reader. There is so much to point to and talk about in each picture. Nellie pouring water on her head. Nellie watching the big kids come home from school. (Particularly poignant for me, now, as I remember reading it with my eldest and watching out the window as the big kids walked home from school–and now he is one of those big kids walking home from school). I’ve never yet gotten bored of the book. And that’s high praise indeed.
The second book in the series is the best known and perhaps also the best place to start: Little House on the Prairie. The television series based on the books bears little relationship to them: there is no superficiality. This is the real thing. The writing is quite astonishing. It is straightforward, classic, and true. It amazes me every time I read it (I was about seven when my mother first read the series to us, and I’ve re-read it many times since). There is little to no analysis in her writing, no self-consciousness, just pure storytelling. That leaves room for questions, for interpretation, and it means that the experience of reading the books as an adult changes them: my perspective as a parent added new flavours and nuances to the story. Best of all, all of my children were drawn into her writing, even my eldest who is a boy. And it lead to many imaginary games of Laura and Mary and baby Carrie.
January 29, 2010
Family Literacy Field Trip: To Mabel's Fables
So it turns out there is a Mabel, and she is a ginger cat. And the place she lives is pure magic, with a bright pink door, and two floors of BOOKS! Upstairs there is a gigantic teddy bear and a princess chair, and downstairs are the books for little kids and babies, upstairs for the bigger ones, and there are even books for adults on the landing.
But perhaps the very best thing about Mabel’s Fables, the 
wonderful children’s bookstore in Toronto, is that Rebecca Rosenblum lives around the corner. So that we got to go to her house for lunch first, and she accompanied us on our first Mabel’s Fables visit. (I’ve never been before because the store is not on the subway, and I have this impression that anywhere not on the subway is really far away. Turns out that it isn’t.)
Harriet was pleased to be liberated from the snowsuit and seemed impressed by her surroundings. I was pleased to see so many of our favourite books and others I’d been coveting, and stuff I’d never heard of
by the same authors, and a space that was such a celebration of childhood and children’s books. We ended up getting our friend Geneviève Côté’s new book Me and You, which is a gorgeous celebration of friendship, individuality and art. We also got The Baby’s Catalogue board book by the Ahlbergs, because we love Peepo and Each Peach Pear Plum, and even though this isn’t a story book, it’s full of cool stuff for us to look at together and talk about, and there’s a breastfeeding baby inside (and you really can’t go wrong with breastfeeding in picture book art, oh no!).
Our final purchase was Sandra Boynton’s Bath Time!, because Harriet loves bath books and we like Barnyard Bath very much already. All in all, it was a very successful shop, and you can see here that Harriet very much enjoyed herself. These photos were taken during a span of about thirty seconds, as I tried to get her to smile for the camera but she proceeded to just pluck books off the shelf and chew on them. I wrenched them away from her eventually– I’m assuming Mabel’s Fables operates on a “you chew it, you buy it” policy, understandably. “Come on,” I said, pulling her away from the nummy bookish delights. “You’ve got plenty of books to chew on at home. ” But I must admit to admiring her appetite!
January 27, 2010
Family Literacy Recommendations from a Literary Dad: George Murray
George Murray’s new book Glimpse: Selected Aphorisms will be published this fall by ECW Press. His other books of poetry include The Rush to Here (Nightwood, 2007), and The Hunter (McClelland & Stewart, 2003). He lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland is the editor of Bookninja.com.
He shared his best bets for books to read together as a family:
My boys are five years apart, so it’s hard to find books they’ll enjoy 
together. The older one (seven) loves fantasy stories (like those by Kate DiCamillo) and is a precocious reader, while the younger (almost two) loves rhythmic rhyming books and bright pictures of animals (Hands, Hands, Fingers, Thumb, etc). So in between those two, I’d recommend Scaredy Squirrel books by Melanie Watt. The baby likes the pictures and pace and the boy likes the jokes and nuttiness (pun intended). Watt’s a fabulous writer and a delightful illustrator and I often find myself chuckling as well… At least the first 100 times or so…
January 27, 2010
Our Family Literacy Day Baby Literary Salon
It’s Family Literacy Day! To celebrate, we invited our favourite Mom and Baby friends to share some stories, and to sing some songs (as the theme of this year’s Family Literacy Day is “Sing For Literacy”). The event was a resounding success, and not just because of the snacks provided. No, it was a success because the guests brought even more snacks, including delicious fudge, green tea shortbread and jello treats for the little ones. (Forgive me for fixating on edibles, but for breastfeeding women, this is very very important).
Margaret and her mom Carolyn brought family favourite Tumble Bumble, as well as Margaret’s beloved book of the moment Boo Boo. Finn in particular enjoyed Tumble Bumble. His mom Sara came with a copy of one of her childhood favourites, the absolutely magical The Bed Book by Sylvia Plath. Who knew Sylvia Plath wrote a children’s book? No, not I. But I liked the elephant bed the very best.
Leo’s mom Alex brought along a copy of hardcore alphabet book Awake to Nap by Nikki McClure. The illustrations were beautiful, and “I is for inside” was the best one. Later, Alex read Margaret Atwood’s first kids’ book Up in a Tree, which was pretty delightful and might even impress the most avid Atwood-hater. Also remarkable was the character that looked like a baby Margaret Atwood, and was absolutely adorable.
I read Ten Little Fingers Ten Little Toes, as well as Harriet’s fave All About Me: A Baby’s Guide to Babies. And then, because of the singsong theme, we also read/sang Old MacDonald, Five Little Ducks and The Wheels on the Bus. The babies played quite happily together, and took turns playing with the best toy out of all the toys we own: a tin pie plate. Harriet fell down from sitting and now has her first bruise. Leo and Finn bonded over a set of plastic rings. Margaret showed us her mobility prowess. We listened to Elizabeth Mitchell, and drank tea, and ate delicious things, and in celebrating family literacy, we spent a splendid afternoon.
