May 30, 2014
4 Mothers 1 M Word
I’ve been so happy to follow along as the writers at 4 Mothers 1 Blog have been responding to The M Word all week. Nathalie Foy wrote about reading the book as an exercise in empathy, noting: “It was glorious to look into that kaleidoscope and feel as much myself as ever; it was wonderful to look at difference without feeling the need to be different.” Carole Chandran read the book and felt relief at how far she’s come with carrying her own motherly burdens, which don’t seem so burdensome these days. And Beth-Anne Jones wrote about ambivalence, of which in the book there is plenty expressed. She writes, “Parenting isn’t about attachment or a helicopter, a tiger or a presence of mind; it’s a harrowing see-saw ride with such soaring highs that it can shock the breath right out of you and thud-to-the-ground lows that will diminish you, gut you, scare-the-shit-out-of -you.” I love that.
And today, I get to add my voice to the mix, expanding on my “non-fiction anthology is a revolutionary act” idea to show that women’s stories together are a powerful force and also the stuff that ordinary days are made of.
Thanks to Nathalie, Carole and Beth-Anne for having me, and for their wonderful support for The M Word.
May 29, 2014
Kids Books We’ve Been Enjoying
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales by Marcia Williams: We received this book after Harriet’s classmate’s Knights and Castles birthday party. (This classmate happens to have a notoriously bookish Mum who seems to be making a serious return to book-blogging–yay!). Harriet is comics-mad, loves a good story about knights, plus she’d been told that there was lots of farting in these stories. With her richly illustrated panels, Marcia Williams has made the Canterbury Tales fun and accessible to modern readers, and they were as bawdy as promised. These adaptations serve as an excellent introduction to the original tales, and keep these timeless stories in our collective consciousness.
Underworld: Exploring the Secret World Beneath Your Feet by Jane Price and James Gulliver Hancock: One day, Harriet and I spent ages lying on the carpet reading this book, whose every new page revealed something else to fascinate us. Egyptian tombs, Paris catacombs. the Tokyo subway, volcanoes, buried treasure, WW1 trenches, bomb shelters in the London Blitz, and underground cities in Turkey. Has a book ever so contained everything? It was pleasure to read a book from which both of us learned so much, and the design and illustrations of this one are really well done.
When Emily Carr Met Woo by Monica Kulling and Dean Griffiths: The creative team behind Lumpito (a picture book about Pablo Picasso) gets together again for this story about the eccentric Canadian painter Carr and her messy, extraordinary life, a part of which was the monkey, Woo. There is a bit of peril when said monkey devours a tube of yellow paint, but (spoilers!) disasters are averted. This is a fun take on an unconventional and important life.
Charlie Cook’s Favourite Book by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler: On Monday when we were all sick on Harriet’s birthday, this gift arrived from Harriet’s great-aunt and it was such a bright spot in a difficult day. This book thrilled us first because no one ever gives us books–we are an intimidating prospect owning so many books already. But we’d never heard of this one, and we love Julia Donaldson, and this one is so so good–a story of a book reading a book about a boy who’s reading a book about a book who’s reading about a book about a… A book within a book within a book! So great! So it’s a bit like that, but even better.
Today We Have No Plans by Jane Godwin and Anna Walker: I sometimes am so grateful that we don’t have a lot of extra money and no car because it means we’re ineligible for the hyper-scheduling that some families happily choose for themselves but which would never ever work for me. The one thing I’m glad to be rich in is time, and this book (which I bought at our playschool book sale for a dollar) celebrates such wealth, what it means after a busy week on the hamster wheel of piano lessons, carpooling, soccer practice, hurried breakfasts, rinse, repeat, etc, to be able to have a day with nothing in it (yet). To linger in your pjs over pancakes (and the paper). The very best days, plus it rhymes, so this book and I were always going to get along.
The Goldilocks Variations by Allen Ahlberg and Jessica Ahlberg: This book is weird and wonderful and full of pop-ups and silly jokes–is there anything better? Ahlberg (with his daughter doing the illustrations) riffs on the familiar Goldilocks tale in true Ahlbergian style–plus, there’s a book within a book. Of course! See Goldlilocks as she steals into the 3 bears’ house, and then the 33 bears’ (really tall) house, and then into an alien spaceship, and the one where she is thwarted by the furniture and a sheet called James. (Why don’t more sheets have names?) Stuff and nonsense. We love it.
There Was An Old Sailor by Claire Saxby and Cassandra Allen: Forget the old woman who swallowed a fly! This sailor ends up swallowing a whale, but not before a jellyfish, a squid, a krill. It’s a delightful twist on a familiar song, and perfectly complemented with vivid, striking illustrations that please the eye and give a modern twist to traditional maritime images. It ends with a belch, which will never not prove amusing, and then the reader will encounter some fun facts about the sea creatures in this book (like a squid has a beak–who knew?).
Jack and the Box by Art Spiegelman: After reading Michael Barclay’s piece on Toon Books, I was inspired to read Jeet Heer’s biography of their founder and editor Francoise Mouly, and also to buy a copy of Jack and the Box. Mostly because I loved this panel. It’s a wacky, startling and funny story of a boy and his unconventional Jack in the Box. The silliness is the best part. There is also a physicality necessary to the story which the comic form so perfectly expresses.
101 Things to Do With Baby by Jan Ormerod: Seriously, is there anything that can’t be expressed in a series of illustrated panels? Lately in our house, we think: no. Clearly, the folks at Groundwood Books agree, which is why they’ve reissued Ormerod’s classic after 30 years. And I love this book, whose first image of a mom reading to her small daughter while breastfeeding a new baby was pretty much how I spent my whole last summer. Showing the moments–funny, tender and mundane–which make up a day, Ormerod shows the trials and joys of being a big sister, and gives a wonderful child’s-eye view of the world.
May 27, 2014
The M Word keeps going…
The Great Sheree Fitch wrote a beautiful review of The M Word for the Telegraph-Journal in New Brunswick on May 10. The review is not online, but I received a clipping in the post yesterday, and it’s so wonderful. She writes, “The M Word felt like a kind of emotional labour for the three days I was reading. This is a motherlode of deeply personal truths, generous and courageous souls, bearing witness to lives shaped, if not defined, by, well, “life with a uterus,” as the foreword suggests.” I am honoured and thrilled by this review.
I was also very pleased by poet and critic Sina Queyras’s review of the book at Lemon Hound. I found the review interesting, provocative, and totally right in a lot of ways. She asked great questions (about the book itself and her own reactions to it), opening the book itself up wider. Mostly though, I like the part where she writes, “Would I recommend this book? I think so…” and I’l leave it at that. She’s right—The M Word is a start, and I never intended it to be an end. And that, I think, is part of the book’s power.
Finally, I am so pleased that this week, the excellent blog 4 Mothers will be focussing on The M Word all week long. Today, my friend Nathalie Foy writes about The M Word as an exercise in empathy. I’m looking forward to the other posts, and to having my own guest post on the site on Friday. The M Word is a start indeed. It’s really nice to see the conversations continue.
And they’ll continue at a really fun event we have coming up at Parent Books in Toronto on June 19, at which we’ll be discussing representations of motherhood in children’s books. I’m looking forward to this one. Stay tuned for details…
May 26, 2014
Harriet turns five
Harriet turned five today (I know! Crazy) and to celebrate, we all came down with a stomach bug. It was brutal, and poor Iris had it the worst of all of us. I do wonder if fate wasn’t hoping to counter any nostalgia I might have for baby days, now that my first baby is impossibly grown (5!) and my little baby is just days away from turning one. Waking the baby to feed, having to sit up to do so–ugh. And then walking around like a zombie this morning, all of us taken down by illness, sleeping lying sideways on my bed beside the baby while the strains of Frozen made their way up the stairs. I am so glad this isn’t my life anymore. Iris doesn’t sleep much, but she sleeps more than she did last night, and I’ll appreciate it now. We’re all feeling much better, and looking forward to a final day of convalescing tomorrow in which we’re feeling well enough to go to the park or even out to lunch.
So Harriet had the most disappointing 5th birthday ever, but it wasn’t so bad because we managed to throw her a party on Saturday, a little fete for five friends from playschool. The theme was Beetles Bugs and Butterflies, and we pulled it off beautifully, stringing up extra bunting for the occasion. Things were very simple–drawing bug pictures, hunting for plastic bugs, making antennae and dancing to The Beatles. Dessert was served in flower pots with gummy worms, and everybody got a copy of this fun book to take home. Nobody cried, which was pretty much our goal, and it was totally nice and un-overwhelming and would all have been so perfect had most of the guests not also come down with a stomach bug the next day (but so did many children in Harriet’s class who were not at the party so it’s not all my fault.)
So Harriet at five–what can I tell you? She never stops talking, she loves Wonder Woman (dressing up like her, reading her comic books, pretending to be her), is learning to read, still loves H best of all the letters but can write them all now (though she doesn’t see the point of lower-case). She does a terrific job of taking care of her sister, and the two of them have a really excellent time together, making one another laugh. She gets along well with friends at school and even tries sometimes to rise above the pre-pre-adolescent girl drama squabbles. She can be really helpful, empathetic and kind. When my book arrived in the mail and I showed it to her, she said, “Oh, Mommy…” and gave me a big hug. We have reached a comfortable arrangement in which she can tell me she hates me and I’m not bothered. She thinks that all families eat ice cream daily and sometimes twice. She is excited to get a scooter and ride it to school. She loves school and has learned so much this year. She is obsessed with Riders of Berk, and idolizes Violet from The Incredibles. She likes Ramona and Laura Ingalls, and loves to be read to. She is clumsy and uncoordinated but we’ve enrolled her in emergency dance and soccer classes and she’s happy to be learning and having fun. Her powers of observation are formidable. She is tone-deaf but we’ll never tell her. She is funny and smart, so aware of the richness of language. She finds the world interesting. Sometimes it is too much with her. I can’t believe she is that tiny bundle of baby I first encountered five years ago. It seems impossible now, and also like yesterday, and it seems like I’ve known Harriet all my life. And I think I really have.
May 23, 2014
Pluck by Laisha Rosnau, and a giveaway!
Having finally learned to read poetry has been the greatest revelation. And so I’ve been reading Laisha Rosnau’s Pluck for the last six weeks or so, living with the book, dipping in and out of it, carrying it in my bag. One day after reading it in the sandbox at the park (as you do), I opened it again while in bed and sand poured out of the pages, all over my duvet, which was definitely inconvenient but perfectly fitting too. Because Pluck is gritty, about nature and domesticity, about the spaces where they overlap, sometimes comfortably and sometimes otherwise. It’s about the spaces where our selves overlap too, the people we are and who we used to be, and who we hope to be, and what we might become.
The first poem I read aloud at the table was “Accumulation,” a poem that plays with language to illustrate the way that stuff builds up around us, particularly when you add children to the mix: laundry and plastic. And the heartbreaking, wonderful, so perfect ending, “Please me, you please, what pleases us, pleases them, again and again–yet/ how can we please each other, do each other justice, just us/ we and us and you and me and all we’ve collected, accumulated/ amassed, a mess, amen–”
These are poems about the chaos of family life, about what we have to prove to ourselves and each other. And this chaos is juxtaposed against a more natural order, a world outside where birds fly into windows and injured fawns show up on the lawn (and even inside the house, above the marriage bed, paintings of great horned owls hang on the wall). There are secrets and compromises in these tidy lives we have made, most strongly expressed in “The Music Class”, formally a variation on the villanelle (I think, though this variation may be its own form) in which a woman takes her child to a music class to discover the child and wife of a man who’d raped her years before: “Out children go to music class/ at the same school I went to as a girl./ We make up a life… then, he kept the radio on and I caught notes/ in my throat when he forced himself in my mouth./ We make up a life,/ Sometimes on instinct. I kicked open the door/ instead of biting down though, if I had, perhaps/ our children wouldn’t go to music class…”
The poems in Pluck are about the desire to create–our own lives, new lives, poetry–and about the way these desires are complementary and otherwise. I loved “Late” about a woman perusing obituaries critically (and I’ve been there–so fascinating): “The women, their lives canned and quilted, baked/ into the memories of their children, and I wonder;/ Really? Is that all that those left behind chose to record?/ I love a canned peach but, good Lord, if anyone mentions/ mine when I am dead, my time was not well spent.”
Pluck is a curious, surprising and absorbing collection, rife with familiar points and then shifts to keep one from getting too comfortable within. It’s a book that interrogates language just as it asks questions of the world, nudges into dark and dusty corners, and illuminates the complicated many-sidedness of love and life.
I was looking forward to this book, and it definitely lived up to my expectations. And so it is to my great joy that I can share the goodness. The publisher was kind enough to send me a review copy of Pluck, but I’d already bought a copy in the store (of course!) so I have an extra copy to giveaway. If you’d like a chance to win it, leave a comment below and I’ll make the draw on June 1st.
May 21, 2014
A Siege of Bitterns by Steve Burrows
From the start, I liked the premise: a birder murder. Though I am not a birder myself, I am fascinated with the species (the hobbyists, I mean), and take a great deal of comfort from the fact that they exist in the world. I also like a murder mystery, particularly those set in the English countryside, so when I stumbled across Steve Burrows’ book launch for A Siege of Bitterns at Blue Heron Books in Uxbridge not long ago, I was more than happy to buy the book. But would the book itself live up to the promise? Well, after a delicious weekend devouring it, I am happy to tell you: yes.
For some reason, television comparisons spring to mind. My beloved Midsomer Murders for one, with its semi-satirical and slightly absurd look at English society, and then also Broadchurch, in which the damaged, alluring, flawed detective genius rolls into town with a whole lot of baggage, and a high profile case is not the introduction to the job that he had in mind. The genius here is Domenic Jejeune, Canadian ex-pat and apparently a media darling, though we’re told very little about either why he’s admired or the past that he is fleeing from. He’s just as much an enigma to his readers as he is to his new colleagues in the Norfolk town of Saltmarsh.
From the television references, however, one is not to think that part of A Siege of Bitterns’ appeal is not its language. It’s a book that will appeal to those of us who covet collective nouns, and apparently it’s meant to be the start of a whole series (A Murder of Crows, A Charm of Goldfinches, etc). One of the book’s greatest charms is Domenic Jejeaune’s girlfriend, Lindy, a journalist, for whom grammar and editorial style is a preoccupation, which proves convenient to Jejeune as these semantical details turn out to be upon which the whole case rests. Birds and words: this is such a book for nerds! And I absolutely loved it.
The case is the murder of celebrity ecologist Cameron Brae, and the suspects begin lining up not long after his body is discovered hanging from a willow bough. Is it his unlikely second wife, a former Spice Girl-esque rockstar with a penchant for Motown music and a yearning to be her husband’s intellectual equal? Or was it Brae’s son whose cravings for his father’s attention lead to involvement with a radical environmental group? Is this about wind turbines, the fragile climate of the salt marshes, landowners with no regard for conservation, or does it all come down to a fierce rivalry among birders to get to 400 species sightings, which Brae was unbelievably close to? What of the note Jejeune finds scrawled in Brae’s study referencing the American Bittern? Could a man be murdered because of a bird?
Burrows’ background includes extensive birdwatching experience around the world, and editorships at the Hong Kong Bird Watching Society Magazine and Asian Geographic, which I assume have led to the deftness with which he writes about ecology and ornithology, applying these ideas to the mystery genre in a way that doesn’t feel like a stretch. I was a bit concerned in the book’s opening when Jejeune’s own background as a birder gives him special insight into a suspect’s false alibi–it was a bit to convenient. But after that, the birding didn’t seem conspicuous in the novel, and it was the mystery itself that had me so absorbed, as well as the complex and interesting characters that Burrows has created–Jejeune and Lindy, and Jejeune’s Sergeant Maik.
It’s obvious we’re being set up for a series here–Burrows has deliberately left so many ends wide open, and I can’t wait to find out where they lead. A Siege of Bitterns signals an original, well-crafted, clever and exciting new series on the scene, and it’s a really terrific read.
May 21, 2014
“Helter Skelter”
I am thrilled beyond measure to have a new published short story in the world, “Helter-Skelter” appears in The New Quarterly 130, and my name is on the cover, which means that you can sing this song about me now. It’s a great issue of a magazine that has done so much to support my work and which I credit for most of my career–both The M Word and my job at 49thShelf were spun out of their publication of my essay “Love is a Let-Down” a few years ago. I’m so pleased to return to their pages, and in fiction to boot. And it’s pretty wonderful that this story has finally found a home.
You can buy a digital or print edition of the magazine at the TNQ website, or wherever good magazines are sold.
May 20, 2014
On Visiting Winnipeg
I only knew Winnipeg through books, by Miriam Toews and Carol Shields and others, and so I had literary expectations of the city and it didn’t disappoint me. And the Winnipeg books I know were newly imagined in my mind as we drove along Winnipeg’s streets, streets whose winter had removed all road markings, as we visited so many of the city’s neighbourhoods, a literary map come to life. I’d been checking out the official site of Tourism Winnpeg too, and they really do a terrific job of selling the city and I began to be sorry we weren’t staying for a week. We were only staying for two nights, a day and a half. We decided to pack our schedule quite full.
We had the best flight ever (the baby slept, I read a book, and sipped a [terrible, but I won’t quibble] cup of tea). Some people might have supposed that flying with two children was something to be worried about, but those people evidently didn’t remember our disastrous flight to England last fall. This time, no one threw up, I didn’t lose our passports in Amsterdam, and we landed it two hours. In comparison, our journey to Winnipeg was like a week at a luxury resort.
In Winnpeg, nothing is located very far away from anything else. This means that we were able to get off the plane and be playing at the Nature Playground at Assiniboine Park within the hour.
And already, we were awash in literary references as we encountered the Winnie the Pooh Statue (the bear having been named for the city, naturally.)
The next morning, we visited the Carol Shields Memorial Labyrinth at Kings Park. I wasn’t sure it would be all that impressive without foliage, but turns out I don’t really know labyrinths. Tracing its paths was twisty, wonderful and full of surprises. It felt very emotional being there and being able to connect with the spirit of a writer whose work means so much to me (and whose words are the epigraph to the essay in the book I was visiting the city in promotion of).
Here is a photo of Harriet, Iris and I at the centre of the labyrinth. I was also moved by Shields’ own words which are etched into granite gates nearby, the granite in reference to her The Stone Diaries.
I was also excited to visit the Carol Shields Project Bookmark Plaque in Osborne Village, which makes reference to her novel, The Republic of Love.
And then later that afternoon, we encountered another literary landmark when we saw Kerry Ryan’s poems installed outside her boxing club in The Exchange neighbourhood. The poems are from her extraordinary collection, Vs. And the neighbourhood looked more liked New York City than anywhere else I’ve ever been.
We took care to visit Portage and Main, which was famous for something, but we couldn’t remember what.
Then we encountered a horse.
A highlight was the whole family hanging out in CBC Green Room as we waited for my radio interview. It was a pretty cool experience.
And then our wonderful launch that night at the extraordinary McNally Robinson Bookstore, where we were so welcomed and enjoyed a delicious dinner before the reading. And a quick shopping spree too. For it is impossible to visit a literary city like Winnipeg without coming away with a book or two. Or three.
We had such a wonderful time.
May 19, 2014
This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki
It’s a toss-up, the question of my favourite line from This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki. It’s either, “That’s the problem with being adopted. I have no idea how big my boobs are going to be.” or, “You can’t get herpes from a flip-flop.” And it’s remarkable that the lines stand out in a graphic novel, a books whose visuals are so overwhelming. A book whose graphics’ simple blue only emphasizes the detail of the drawings, the clutter in the corners. There are some graphic novels you are breeze through in one sitting, but this isn’t one of them. The illustrations are a marvellous mix of old-school comic style, complete with text to imply sound and movement, and images inspired by scientific drawings of birds, plants and stars. And then full-page spreads with surprising perspectives and you could read this book over and over and discover something new each time.
Summer is fitting for comics, the season allowing plenty of time for pleasure reading, summer cottages perhaps having stacks of old comics on hand. And also for the way that summer is so fleeting–just a few panels in the book of a year. So much of life goes on outside it, and yet these summer memories, these ephemeral experiences of jumping off docks and sitting in sand, are what our minds return to over and over again. Summer brings us to the same old places but we’re a different person each time that we come, as Rose is beginning to discover in the Tamaki cousins’ tale.
And they get the details just right–cottage-country traffic, the winding roads and the posts mounted with family names pointing in their cottages’ directions. When Rose’s family arrives, she goes to find her friend Windy, her cottage friend since age 5. They visit the general store to buy candy, ride their bikes, lounge on the beach, wonder about the local kids and their teenage dramas, contemplate the summer romances they’re still too young for, get bored, get into trouble, wait out the rain.
Outside this chronology of hours, how summer days can stretch so long, there is much more happening, so much that cannot be articulated, which is why this story is such a great fit for a graphic novel. Rose’s parents’ relationship has fractured, her mother seems to be suffering from depression, their family going through their familiar routines but not meaning much of it. The reader also infers that in subsequent summers the differences in Rose and Windy’s ages will start to matter more, that the friends will grow apart, which will be heartbreaking and complicated. But that is a summer still to come.
In the meantime, the girls are on a threshold, having not put away childish things, but beginning to glimpse an adult world before them whose puzzles they just can’t decipher. They still think the puzzles are decipherable, however, so they’re still young yet, looking on in fascination and fear at the possibilities before them, feelings best expressed in an awe-filled silence. And to fill that silence in the meantime, they talk, Mariko Tamaki’s dialogue ringing true. Riding bikes, slouched on porches and bobbing in inner-tubes, doing and talking about everything, and nothing at all.
