March 7, 2012
The internet is made of wonderful things
For the benefit of anyone who’s not on Twitter: Larissa Andrusyshn (who wrote Mammoth, which I loved) is interviewed at The 49th Shelf and talks about “discovery channel poetry; really interesting interview with Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner about the upcoming season; Heather Birrell’s Mad Hope has been made into an actual book and we got to watch it happen; Rohan Maitzen on Virginia Woolf’s criticism, “Abandonment, Richness, Surprise”; an interview with Kyo Maclear on her new picture book Virginia Wolf (which we love); on Elephant & Piggie’s We Are In a Book as a meditation on death; Rebecca Rosenblum marks a decade in Toronto: “I survived SARS, Avian Flu, Swine Flu, the blackout, and I’ll survive Rob Ford, too.”; Daniel Griffin’s “Ten Stories Will Get You One”; Susan Swan explores past tense in the present; Maria Meindl on the perils of writing about family; and Elizabeth Renzetti leaves a box of books on the curb and watches to see what happens. Now reading Caroline Adderson’s Sitting Practice. And why don’t we all know already that Caroline Adderson is hilarious?
March 5, 2012
Author Interviews@ Pickle Me This: Carrie Snyder
I read Carrie Snyder’s first book Hair Hat in 2010 when it was one of five books selected for Canada Reads Independently, and had started reading her blog Obscure CanLit Mama around the same time. In the two years since, I’ve enjoyed getting to know Carrie through her blog and following her Juliet stories on their path to becoming The Juliet Stories.
I read the book last week and I promise you, it’s one of the best Canadian books you’re going to read this year.
Carrie was generous enough to answer my questions about her book via email from her home in Waterloo. The Juliet Stories was published by House of Anansi Press and is in stores now.
I: Although The Juliet Stories is fiction, it has roots in your own biography. As a reader, I tend to engage very little with these connections because they tend to limit the text rather than broaden it, but I know that most audiences find them interesting. How do you feel about this? Are you comfortable with such an engagement? Do you think your book is richer for these connections to your own story?
CS: First, thank you for opening with the elephant-in-the-room question. Without a doubt, “Is this real?” or “Did this really happen?” are questions asked most often about The Juliet Stories. Complicating my answer is the fact that yes, standing behind the scenes is my own family’s story. I did live as a child in Nicaragua, while the contra war was underway, and my parents were peace activists; further, one of my brothers had cancer as a child.
As a reader, I completely understand the fascination and desire to link the writer’s story to the story the writer has written. I’m reading Mordecai Richler’s biography now, almost through it, and there have been plenty of aha! moments of recognition. Humans like piecing together puzzles — in this case, the puzzle of how a writer takes an image or a moment or a place and weaves it into a story.
And there are so many different ways that the real can be used in fiction. An incident that remains mysterious and will never be answered — that could make an excellent starting place for a story. Personally, I often use settings that are familiar and likely recognizable, mainly because I can’t seem to imagine space/place in the same way that I can imagine plot or character. So a reader who recognizes a place might be fooled into believing the story is real simply because the setting is real. In that case, making biographical connections between me and The Juliet Stories would be entirely unhelpful.
I could pick apart The Juliet Stories crumb by crumb, identifying where various fragments arrived from (and it would no doubt be surprising and probably disappointing and not at all what readers might expect), but the question is: would the exercise get us anywhere very interesting? For purely critical purposes, I doubt the links add depth. After all, the whole point of creating a story is to build a fictional world replete with its own codes and themes and particular beauty and logic. And none of that actually exists in my real life. Which is at the core of why I write (and read): in order to create symmetry and wholeness.
Nevertheless, I wouldn’t dismiss biographical connections altogether. There must be some deeper psychological reason we, as readers, find these links compelling — that’s what interests me. Why do we want it to be real? Why do we want to know what experiences are sleeping under the surface?
I: I suspect readers’ interest is piqued by the rich texture of your narrative—even without the biographical elements, there is so much sleeping beneath the surface here. I’m halfway through the book now and sensing so many gaps—what Juliet doesn’t notice, wasn’t privy to notice or chooses not to notice from her childhood perspective, and also the circumstances of her life as an adult, from which this story is being told. How did you come to this particular point of view, a strange omniscience that straddles then and now? That point-of-view is so important in the spell your book casts for its reader, but I imagine it must have been difficult to navigate as a writer, to finally achieve that balance. Or did it come naturally as you were writing?
CS: The voice seems so natural to me now that I’m struggling to remember its creation. Once the voice arrived, it didn’t feel created, it felt found. That said, this was not a book that got written overnight, and in fact it began life as a novel from the perspective of the mother (whose name has always been Gloria), and then tried to be a memoir (a very short-lived attempt of no more than 10,000 words), and finally, at last, along came Juliet’s telling (her name was Mary in earlier manuscripts). But as soon as it became Juliet’s story, the voice came too. And once the voice came, the technically aspects of the story-telling style flowed naturally.
That said, there was a still a lot of finicky, tedious work to be done, finessing the voice. I completely trusted my editor’s wise and kind eye on the manuscript. I trusted her to tell me when the voice was too authorial. Too writerly. Too self-conscious. With her guidance, I removed many passages that I’d originally loved writing. But the secret to the voice and the point of view is that not much is needed in order for it to work. Those moments when we’re slipping forward in time, or we understand that there is an older Juliet looking over what is happening—those are like salt. Too much would spoil the meal; but just the right amount adds flavour.
As a reader and as a writer, I’m drawn toward the mysterious, toward those gaps you mention. So much of life is unknown to us, unregarded, or misunderstood, or lost in the moment. As you probably know from reading my first book, Hair Hat, I have an ongoing fascination with the individual’s interpretation of a shared experience. I think I’ll always be puzzling out the mystery of memory and perspective, exploring what’s missing, and leaving gaps for the reader to fill in. I don’t think the writer needs to tell the reader what to think. I think the writer needs to leave room for the reader to make her own connections. Here’s my writing philosophy: It changes the reading experience to be part of what’s happening.
I: Do you ever think about the kinds of readers who don’t like those gaps, don’t know what to do with that kind of responsibility? I’m thinking about a comment Lynn Coady made (which I’m paraphrasing because I think I only heard of it via a live-tweet from the Giller Prize gala) about it being the writer’s job to do the work of a book, not the reader’s. How do you respond to that?
CS: Hmmmmm. A long hmmmm. I guess I’ll respond by saying that it’s not my intention to make work for the reader, or to make the reader do the work. Rather, I’d say that I trust the reader. And I hope we’re going somewhere together, and I hope that it’s interesting to both of us. It’s not that I don’t think about that kind of reader, it’s just that I’m not that kind of writer. If I tried to connect all the dots I’d gum the whole thing up, it would look and sound artificial because that’s not my talent or my gift. In writing, as in life, I’ve had to accept what I’m good at, and what I’m not. It’s humbling, frankly. But also quite freeing.
I: There are points in the book where it seems so obvious that Gloria is the place from where these stories spring. It’s subtle, but there is a real attentiveness to Gloria’s point of view which shows us that Juliet has spent years putting herself in her mother’s shoes, imagining her mother’s experience. And I love these tracks in your writing, which have not quite been covered over in the finished book. (more…)
March 4, 2012
Arcadia by Lauren Groff
I fell in love with Lauren Groff in 2008 with The Monsters of Templeton, a crazy novel with its own sea-creature. When I read her short story collection Delicate Edible Birds in 2009, I discovered that I’d actually been in love with her since 2006 when I first read her work with the short story “L. DeBard and Aliette” in The Atlantic. And it has been a pleasure to love a current author so unabashedly in a time when so many books disappoint, though her latest novel Arcadia would make or break our winning streak. So it with great joy that I find I’m able to repeat word-for-word an excerpt from my Monsters of Templeton review four years ago: “I finished reading this last night near 1am, and couldn’t sleep for a long time, just thinking about it, and smiling.” Groff is not only as good as ever, but she’s better and better.
Lauren Groff is a rule-breaker, a boundary-pusher, a genre-blurrer. There’s nobody else quite like like her writing right now, and she writes on the shoulders of those who came before her, with references in her latest book to Greek myth, Melville, the Brothers Grimm, and Eliot. She also writes with a deep appreciation and awe for history, for the role of story within history, and for the epic. Her first novel had a larger-than-lifeness about it, which is not so unusual for a book a writer has been working her life for, but it’s less usual for a second novel and for it to be pulled off so successfully too.
Arcadia starts at the beginning of the world, Arcadia, a hippie commune in New York State near the end of the 1960s. It’s the only world Bit has ever known, Bit short for “Little Bit”, tiny from the day he was born, his early life spent with his loving parents Abe and Hannah in the Arcadia bakery truck. As the community grows and progresses, we see the Arcadians unable to isolate themselves from the evils of the outside world– even in Arcadia, Hannah suffers from profound depression, there is infighting among the community leaders, problems with drug-addicted runaways who keep turning up, and trouble getting enough food and resources to keep everybody fed and healthy. Bit and his peers suffer from extreme deprivation, and yet are also granted the security that comes from being so firmly knit into a community fabric and feeling a sense of belonging. When the balance tips too far the other way, however, Bit’s parents finally make the decision to leave, and he’s cast out into the world for the first time at the age of 14.
I was having a discussion with my husband yesterday about the difficulty of settling into science fiction or fantasy novels whose whole worlds have to be created in order for the story to finally start, and I had similar difficulty getting into Arcadia, coming to understand the specificity of this singular place, its peculiar vernacular, social and political structures. I like my fiction very much here and now, and Arcadia seemed so far afield from both these things. I wasn’t always altogether sure what the point was, what the payoff of my efforts would be. I’m not a sci-fi/fantasy person, and while Groff is not a sci-fi/fantasy writer, she plays with the tropes and structures of genre in her literature– she’s the one who put the sea-monster in her novel after all (but then she is also the writer who made me love a novel with a sea-monster in it. Miracles will never cease).
So although I enjoyed the book from the very start, I wasn’t swept away by it until half way through when we find Bit grown, twenty years since we saw him last, living in New York City with a young daughter. And suddenly, I had a sense of everything Arcadia had been working toward, and Groff’s method became apparent, this novel’s massive sense of scale and its ambition. Bit has married and had a child with Helle, an Arcadian he’d grown up with who’s been troubled for years, and has recently disappeared leaving him responsible for the care of their 3 year-old daughter. He is left to navigate his grief, the practical matters of single-fatherhood, and the fact of his still-alienation from the world around him, his idealization of his childhood. He’s still close to the other Arcadian children he grew up with, in fact they’re the only people he’s close to in the world, because no one else understands the peculiarity of his situation. He goes out on a date with a perfectly nice woman, but is unable to take things any further when she tells him, “I read Atlas Shrugged in college and thought, Oh my God, everything’s coming into focus, finally. You know what I mean?”
And of course he doesn’t, but he’s not entirely alone. He does feel a profound sense of connection with the city and its inhabitants. He notes that New Yorkers did not recover from the Twins Towers attacks in the the way he had expected, that what they had lost was
“not real estate of lives. It was the story they had told about themselves from the moment the Dutch had decanted from their ships…: that this place was filled with water and wildlife was rare, equitable. That it would embrace everyone who came here, that there would be room, and a chance to thrive, glamour and beauty. That this equality of purpose would keep them safe. “
Bit understands, Groff writes, “that when we lose the stories we have believed about ourselves, we are losing more than stories, we are losing ourselves.”
When we find Bit again, it’s 2018 and the entire world is in peril. Low-lying nations are being swept away, Venice sunk, and an epidemic is sweeping the world, drawing closer to New York City. Ordinary life goes on against this backdrop, however, and when his father dies and his mother is left alone to suffer the last stage of ALS, he must return with his daughter to Arcadia where his parents had returned to build a home for their final years. And it is here where Bit must make peace with where he came from, forgive his parents for their mixed legacy, and find a way to finally begin facing forward in his life, his own story, even as the end of the world seems to drawing nigh.
March 4, 2012
D is for Deli
Location: St. Lawrence Market
The thing about walking to St. Lawrence Market is that the trek justifies a lunch of a sweet cheese bagel, peameal bacon sandwich, banana crepe, cabbage roll, pierogies, a smoothie, a pickle on a stick, and a pepperette made of elk meat. All shared between three people, of course, which is further justification. We spent a splendid morning there yesterday, made even better for a stop at Ben McNally Books en-route, which was the first bookshop in six we’d found to be carrying Kyo Maclear’s Virginia Wolf, which just came out this week. We had big plans to take the subway home, because for Harriet, transit is always a trip’s highlight, but the subway was closed to due a broken watermain, so we had to haul the stroller onto the streetcar. Which turned out to be much more fun anyway because on a streetcar there’s a view out the window.
March 2, 2012
Our Best Book of the library haul: Zen Ties by Jon J. Muth
I must confess to not understanding very much about the spiritual nature of Zen Ties by Jon J. Muth, but still the book was immediately appealing. My impression is that it’s structured around several Zen koans, woven into a story of a group of children coming to know and appreciate an elderly neighbour. Presiding over this lesson is Stillwater, a giant panda whose nephew Koo has come to visit for the summer. Koo won my heart by speaking in haiku. It’s a lovely, calm, meditative story with gorgeous illustrations, and Harriet, for whom it’s just “the panda book” has been requesting to hear it over and over again. Though for her, Zen Ties is the second-best book of the library haul because she’s awfully stuck on a book called Air Show written by the actor Treat Williams (which, although lacking the depth of Zen Ties, is unterrible in an astonishing number of ways).
March 1, 2012
A cool thing
A cool thing that happened lately was discovering bloggers at The Book Mine Set and Perogies & Gyoza reading my short story “Georgia Coffee Star”. They both had lovely things to say about my story, and urged other readers to check it out. How lovely to see one’s work alive in the world, and to learn that readers are enjoying it. It means a lot to me.
March 1, 2012
Mog and the Granny, and questions of censorship
This week is Freedom to Read Week, for which I published a post at The 49th Shelf about challenged books in Canada— the list will disturb and amuse you. My post is adapted from Freedom to Read Week’s List of Challenged Books and Magazines in Canada, not all of which are Canadian, and which includes Judith Kerr’s Mog and the Granny. We had that book out from the library about a month ago when Harriet was a bit Mog-crazy, and it horrified me. And I’m not too easily horrified– I keep bringing home books with sexual story lines (this and this), and The Great Canadian Railway Trilogy comes complete with a picture of a hooker. I am also not always convinced that books with outdated ideas need be turfed into the recycling bin. But I couldn’t read Mog and the Granny as-is.
Most of the Mog books have lead me to suppose that Judith Kerr is intimately acquainted with hallucinogens. Sometimes they’re funny, sometimes they’re great, but most often, they’re just totally weird. And Mog in the Granny is case-in-point, from the perspective of a cat who uses his psychic connection to his owner to visualize her trip to America which mostly involves her engaging with stereotypes of Native people (and it doesn’t really help the book’s case to point out that in England [where Kerr is from] called Natives “Red Indians” is still pretty standard). The cat lacks the language and context to understand what’s going on in the images, and decides the Natives (in their obligatory headdresses) are “Bird People” and he’s concerned they’re going to hurt Debbie. But they don’t and she’s fine, and comes back from America with a baby Bird Person (doll). The end. Really, it’s just pointless. There are better Mog books out there.
So I understood why Kerr’s book was on the list. But what about John Reilly’s Bad Medicine, which also appears on the challenged list? Reilly is an Alberta judge and the book is about his experiences with Native peoples and justice. It was challenged by a group objecting to Reilly’s portrayal of First Nations governments and seeking a ban, which was overturned (though conclusion was that Reilly should resign from the bench if he is to take political stances).
Different context, I know, and a very different kind of book, but considering both books is a way to consider the issue of intellectual freedom and censorship from more than one side. How much also these questions need to be considered on a case-by-case basis, and even case-by-case, how it’s misleading to see anything important in simple terms of black and white.
February 29, 2012
Bookends: Joan Didion's Blue Nights and "On Keeping a Notebook"
As I read Joan Didion’s 1966 “On Keeping a Notebook” today, it occurred to me that this essay is the piece that is the bookend to her new book Blue Nights, and not The Year of Magical Thinking as so many critics have suggested. (I also don’t understand why no one talks about Where I Was From. I think it’s my favourite book of all of hers.)
But first, Blue Nights is not a book about Didion’s daughter Quintana Roo. So many readers have got that wrong too. As Didion writes in “On Keeping a Notebook”, “however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of what we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I’.” Like everything Didion has ever written, Blue Nights is profoundly about herself. She’s not even opaque about it, but some readers are still so unable to get around the fact of a woman writing honestly about motherhood than they’ve been hypnotized into thinking motherhood is all that Blue Nights is about.
But yes, to read “On Keeping a Notebook” after Blue Nights is to invest the essay with a whole new level of meaning. “Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singular blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up.” And then later, “…I have always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.” In Blue Nights, Didion writes, “How could I have missed what was so clearly there to be seen?”
And then further on the essay when she addresses her notes, her compulsion to maintain these notebooks in order to keep in touch with the people she used to be, “paid passage back to the world out there”. She was 32 when she wrote this essay, which is the age I am now, and it’s an age at which you feel there are whole lifetimes behind you, and it’s so fascinating to consider these. 32 is an age where your preceding decade has changed life beyond all recognition, and you’ve finally sensed an order to it all. How, as the older woman in Didion’s essay tells her, “Someday it all comes.” And none of it has started to leave you yet; the future is all promise, and it’s here.
Blue Nights is a 77 year old Didion looking back at her 32 year old self who’d supposed herself older than she’d ever be again. In Blue Nights, she notes the boxes and drawers in her apartment stuffed with history, the notebooks, the stuff she’s been acquiring through her years, all items she’d once blithely advertised as “paid passage back to the world out there.”
She writes, “In fact I no longer value this kind of memento./ I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted./ There was a period… when I thought I did./ A period during which I believed that I could keep people fully present, keep things with me, by preserving their mementos, their “things”, their totems.”
She writes, “In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment./ In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here.”
“It all comes back,” Didion writes in 1966, unaware of the shallowness of what she’d lost so far, convinced by the rhythm of her words. And Blue Nights is her realization more than 40 years later: there comes a day when it doesn’t anymore.
February 28, 2012
The Vicious Circle reads How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
We liked this cover the best.
Last Sunday, the Vicious Circle met again for brunch, every one of us in attendance. We wouldn’t say we got right down to it because Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe was a strange old book, not quite our thing. So we kept putting it off, because we had to talk about Mad Men, gossip, other books and ghastly things we’d read on Twitter. And then finally we started, the conversation began, and it flowed, and flowed, one of the most insightful book club discussions we’ve ever achieved. (Or maybe it just looks that way because the secretary among us took down some really extensive notes.)
We began with the central idea of the book, of the main character being stuck in a loop and how we could recognize that. That even before the part of the book where the character is both writing and reading his story at once, we had a sense of projecting ourselves and our experiences onto the story. (Which is perhaps the way that most of us read stories.) We talked about the books perceived depth versus its actual depth, and how it tricks you into thinking that there is a technical complexity to it but the complexity is emotional. This is shown when the father reveals his theory of time travel, which turns out not to be accomplishable by technology at all but by intellectual force instead, by the power of the mind. But that time travel was also a physical voyage– you don’t just appear in another place, but you have to get there. Which is sort of the way of everything.
Some of us loved TAMMY, the operating system of the main character’s time machine. But others of us were disappointed– TAMMY lacked emotional depth, one of us said. “She’s a computer program,” said another. “That’s not the point,” was the rebuttal, and that was rebutted with, “Yes, it is!” Some of us who’d read Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxywere disappointed by elements of the book such as TAMMY, which seemed to have been done better many times before. Perhaps it’s a homage though, one of us suggested. That its connection to other works was quite deliberate. (Two of us didn’t finish the book. We just couldn’t see the point.)
But this is the one most of us ended up with.
We loved the twist of “science fiction” being substituted for physics here as the laws of which the universe must obey, and how the laws of science fiction opens up the possibilities for so many things. We found the mother’s story compelling, stuck in a sixty minute loop and her son feels guilty because he didn’t spring for an hour and a half. We thought this book reminded us of The Raw Shark Texts in terms of how it treats loss, creates its own universe, and considers the book as object.
We had trouble situating the book in time, kept stumbling over logic problems– how long as the main character been away from his life? It’s tricky to figure out, this universe corresponding to the laws of science fiction after all, which are hard to gets one’s head around. And then we starting thinking about movies the book reminded us of– “Moon” by Duncan Jones, “Another World”. Also the book Among Others by Jo Walton, for its employment of fantastical elements. We remark that this isn’t a book that exists in a vacuum. But does this compromise its literary quality, we wonder? There is a shallowless to it, but no. It’s actually highly literary on a mechanical level, and we note how much of the novel is about how books and novels are put together, the nature of existence in the science fiction universe is determined by tenses. And though the book seems shallow upon first reading and requires skimming to get through, we note that the book itself is a loop and that meaning becomes deeper upon subsequent readings.
And it is literary– we remark upon the good writing, the emotional resonance of the scene with his father. And that the writer exercises a great deal of restraint in order to feed the loop structure– the nature of a loop is shallowness. That TAMMY stands for the fact that so many people spend their entire lives contemplating narratives that don’t really exist. That TAMMY is his projection of self. And we end on this note: TAMMY is Google, and everything it is we’ve ever fed to it.
Then we go back to the buffet for seconds.
February 27, 2012
On The Berenstain Bears
As the death of Berenstain Bears co-creator Jan Berenstain was announced today, I thought it would be a good time to finally write the Berenstain Bears post that I’ve been thinking about writing for ages. About how the Berenstain Bears were some of my favourite books as a child, and I wanted to live in their tree house more than I wanted to live anywhere else on the planet. I did think it was weird that Mama Bear was always in pyjamas, and also that Brother Bear kept turning up randomly dressed as a hobo in Dr. Seuss books, but I loved these books so completely, and their details are forever contained in my brain– the sitter with Cat’s Cradle, the messy room (I wanted a peg-board!) and Brother’s bird’s nest connection, Sister’s polka-dots, that they lived in a cave before they moved into the tree house, and their various dealings with the medical establishment. It never occurred to me that these books weren’t the very best that literature had to offer, and I read them over and over again.
And though it’s unfashionable to say, as an adult and a parent, I still like them a lot. In fact, I’ve found them enormously useful as a parent. We read …Go to the Doctor over and over before we got our flu shots last Fall, which made the experience a breeze. When faced with the prospect of a giant needle, Harriet felt secure in the knowledge that this was just like what happened to Sister Bear. When Harriet went through her whole “Big Bad Wolf’s going to get me and there are skeletons under my bed” phase, Papa’s lines from …in the Dark were perfect with which to explain that the pictures in our imagination are harmless, and moreover that they’re even good for us. I’ve also tried to pull out …Get the Gimmes to battle meltdowns with, though I haven’t had as much luck with that, but the fault is with the girl and not the book, I think.
Of course, I see now that the books are so sexist, are preachy and boring, that the later books in the series are terrible, and I know there is a whole world of books out there that are ever so much better. (I am also driven crazy by inconsistencies in the illustrations– the tree house and vicinity are remarkably different in every book, undermining the verisimilitude!!)I don’t consider them books proper and in our house they’re relegated to the box in the living room with truck-shaped board books and picture dictionaries, the kind of books we’d never lower ourselves to read at bedtime. But I also appreciate them when I see Harriet loving them as much as I did when I was little, their simple formula reflecting elements of her world and helping her begin to understand it. And the connection she feels towards them is showing her how magical reading can be.
