October 21, 2013

Excellent Mail Haul

Today was a very good day for the mail haul. Iris’s passport finally arrived, which is a good thing as we’re off to England in a few weeks. We also received a pair of orange socks for Iris, on the occasion of her first Halloween (thanks, Mom!). And then two books, one the latest collection by Karen Connelly, whose work I’ve admired for a long time now. And then Jennica Harper’s new book Wood, which is oh so exciting, because it’s not every day that you get a new book by one of your favourite writers ever. Very excited about this. Oh, what treasures a mailbox can hold!

October 20, 2013

Animal Stories (including woolves!) at the Gardiner Museum

We went to the Gardiner Museum today to see the Animal Stories exhibit.

“Elephants, leopards, dogs, squirrels and dragons… From exotic creatures, household pets, urban wildlife to mythical beasts, animals have been an active part of human experience, an inexhaustible trigger of the imagination. Animal Stories presents the many tales of our encounters with the animal world, shedding light on how our social, symbolic, affectionate, scientific and utilitarian relationships with animals have been visualized through ceramics from the 17th century to our day.” 

Fantastic events are scheduled as part of the exhibit, and today we were happy to catch the first of the Kids Can Press Reading Series, today with the lovely Kyo Maclear reading Virginia Wolf (with the assistance of her entire family). Afterwards, the kids got to make their own Virginia Wolf ears (which alternate as a big blue bow, depending on one’s mood).

Three readings are left in the series: Wallace Edwards on November 10, Eugenie Fernandes on December 8, and Nicholas Oldford on December 15. (And we got free passes for the museum through the Sun Life Museum and Arts Pass at the Toronto Public Library. Such a great deal!)

October 15, 2013

Watch How We Walk by Jennifer Lovegrove

Jennifer LoveGrove’s first novel Watch How We Walk recalls Miriam Toews’ A Complicated Kindness in that it’s the story of a young girl from a minority Christian sect whose oppressive religious community begins to bear down as her family falls apart. Emily Morrow is ten years old, a fervent Jehovah’s Witness who believes what she’s taught by her elders, swallows her discomfort as she goes knocking on the doors of her classmates, and leaves her classroom every morning to stand in the hall as her fellow students rise to sing the national anthem. She is eager to follow in the footsteps of her older sister Lenora, who had always been an exemplary student and daughter, baptized early at age 14. But lately Lenora has been changing, spending time with “worldly” friends, listening to disturbing music, and skipping meetings at the Kingdom Hall. Meanwhile, her mother is skipping meetings too, something about Uncle Tyler is making the elders concerned, and her father is refusing to acknowledge that anything is wrong, so focussed is he on making the right impression on the community and having his family do so too in order that he eventually can become an elder himself. There is little room for error by any of these characters whose elders will not hesitate to “disfellowship” or shun anyone who fails to tow the line, and the risk is causing Emily enormous anxiety.

Scenes of Emily’s childhood are interposed with those of Emily ten years later, living a lonely life away from her family and attending university, still trying to process some long-ago trauma involving her sister, and carving letters and numbers into her skin. These present-day scenes are particularly compelling and drive the narrative forward, the reader looking to discover just what has gone so wrong.

Young Emily is an empty vessel, taking in the world around her without much of an impression, which makes the childhood scenes come across as not particularly artful, slow in their mundanity. This is exacerbated by the fact that Emily is at such a remove from the world due to her religious upbringing, doubly unable to process what she sees. On the one hand, this makes sense, but still, I yearned for more complexity from this part of the story, particularly as the adult Emily chapters showed just how much depth this character–and this writer–was capable of. I wanted to know more about Emily’s parents, their relationship to each other and to their religion. And yet, there are some fleeting but wonderful scenes where LoveGrove shows us real sympathy for Emily’s parents and their struggles, shows that they are just a powerless against their fates in this system as Emily is herself, whole and flawed people in their own right.

Watch How We Walk is not a perfect novel, but it’s one I couldn’t stop reading, and whose images and metaphors have stayed with me since I finished it. LoveGrove provides fascinating insight into a little-known religious group and their practices, and has crafted a novel with mystery at its core.

October 14, 2013

in this world that is being made all the time

“I am, we each are the inmost of an endless series of Russian dolls; you who read are now encased within a layer I built for you, or perhaps my stories are now inside you. We live as literally as that inside each other’s thoughts and work, in this world that is being made all the time, by all of us, out of beliefs and acts, information and materials. Even in the wilderness your ideas of what is beautiful, what matters, and what constitutes pleasure shape your journey there as much as do your shoes and map also made by others.” –Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

October 11, 2013

On Alice Munro, Short Stories, and Gossip

Alice Munro display at Book City in the Annex

Alice Munro’s Nobel Prize win was the perfect answer to the David Gilmour tomfoolery of a few weeks back. Such a wonderful affirmation of a brilliant career, and of short stories, a form which is dear to my heart. My favourite Alice Munro book is Who Do You Think You Are?, though I read her best-of a few years ago, and discovered that her terrain is deeper and richer than I’d previously suspected. I am fortunate to have so much of her work left to explore.

If the Munro win gets you on a short story kick, may I suggest you check out Shaena Lambert’s Oh, My Darling and Rebecca Lee’s Bobcat, which are two of the best books I’ve read this year. And also The Journey Prize Stories, which I purchased this morning, inspired by short story fever, and a rather fetching window display.

In further news, 49thShelf got a shout-out from Lainey Gossip today. So that was a little exciting!!

October 10, 2013

Breastfeeding Babies in Picture Books

Every week is Breastfeeding Week at my house, which is my best excuse for being a few days late with this post specially designed to coincide with World Breastfeeding Week (which ended on Sunday). But let the festivities continue by picking one of these great picture books that celebrate and normalize the image of nursing mothers. These are not books about breastfeeding, but instead stories with breastfeeding taking place in the background, with breastfeeding as part of ordinary life, just like it is in the real world.

Kisses Kisses Baby-O! by Sheree Fitch and HildaRose: Baby love is bursting from the pages of this board book whose story narrates the pattern of a baby’s day. And a part of that day is “Shhh. Hushtime. Slurping Burping Snuggle Huggle Sleepy Sleepy Baby-O”, the accompanying illustration of the nursing baby from its Mama’s point of view. Even better: families of all different races are depicted in the book, which exists also in French and Mi’kmaq translation. (And do check out a the scene about expressing milk into a bathtub in Sheree Fitch’s novel for adults, Kiss the Joy as it Flies, which includes the line, “Holy shit… you’re like a goddamn cow”).

Everywhere Babies by Susan Meyers and Marla Frazee: This beautiful book with its bouncing rhythm never ceases to be a joy to read aloud, and I especially love that the babies in the book belong to so many different shapes of family. But this book is most remarkable for featuring my favourite image of a breastfeeding mother ever, for she is reading, and as far as I am concerned, that’s the only way to do it.

The Baby’s Catalogue by Janet and Allan Ahlberg: My copy of this book is disgustingly battered and covered in food splatters because we took it everywhere when my older daughter was little. It’s one of the lesser known books by the Ahlbergs, the creative team behind Each Peach Pear Plum and The Jolly Postman, and is full of several stories through images of different babies and families going about their day. A day which involves mealtimes, of course, and breast-milk is just one of many items on the menu.

Hello Baby by Jorge Uzon: This is the first in a series of four board books by Toronto photographer Uzon which document the first year of his baby’s life. That baby is brand new in Hello Baby, which documents the baby’s tiny fingers, tiny toes, and his very first feeding at his mother’s breast.

Cinnamon Baby by Nicola Winstanley and Janice Nadeau: Cinnamon Baby tells a story that’s familiar, as a new baby cries and cries but nobody knows why. Breastfeeding in just one of the soothing methods the baby’s mother attempts, along with puppetry, juggling and walking on her hands, but nothing works. The solution to Baby’s woes turns out to be its mother returning to her essential self by going back to work at her bakery–the child is finally quieted when the smell of cinnamon bread fills the air.

Dogs Don’t Eat Jam (and Other Things Big Kids Know) by Sarah Tsiang and Qin Leng: This is “What to Expect When You’re Becoming a Big Sister” in the  guise of a guide to babies that’s written from Big Sister’s perspective. “So you’ve been born! Congratulations…” it begins, and goes on to outline to the newborn all he/she has to look forward to. “You’re learning to drink milk,” Big Sister patiently explains, with an accompanying illustration of Mom with baby at her breast, before going on to show that Baby will learn new things every day.

Note that Sarah Tsiang is also the poet Yi-Mei Tsiang whose award-winning collection Sweet Devilry includes some of the best poems about motherhood I’ve ever encountered: “Learn a good latch, Kiddo–/ It pays to hold on/ to someone you love.”

Katie Morag and the Dancing Class by Mairi Hedderwick: I love the Katie Morag series for a million reasons, including the map of her island village at the beginning and end of every book, how the characters challenge gender binaries, the clutter in the corners of every illustration, and Katie Morag’s irrepressible spirit. These books are so vivid in their realness, and accordingly, breastfeeding is depicted. In this story, Katie Morag’s mother is shown breastfeeding Baby Flora Ann (as Little Brother Liam tries on a pink tutu), and the chaos of their household is all a-swirl around her.

Have Milk, Will Travel: Adventures in Breastfeeding by Rachel Epp Buller (Editor): Not a picture book, but a brand new anthology from Toronto’s Demeter Press, a collection of short essays and anecdotes from breastfeeding mothers in the trenches (and some who were lucky to escape with their lives). Breastfeeding is often presented as an all-too serious, divisive issue, but these essays are light and humorous, and will provide any expectant mother with great perspective, and makes a fun read for those of us who’ve been there.

October 9, 2013

Sadness and Rainbows

It’s hard to believe that it’s been only a year since Malala Yousafzai was shot, propelling her into the public consciousness, because I feel like I’ve always known her name. It was a name that solved a small problem of mine, the problem of why we no longer name our babies for heroes. I think we no longer name our babies for heroes because there are so few heroes, and heroes are so fallible that their names could become a burden. But it was different with Malala, whose miraculous recovery made her story a triumph. Now there’s a hero, I thought–somebody brave, smart, articulate, young and inspiring. I love that she is living proof that nonviolence is more powerful than a gun is. I was early in my pregnancy when Malala’s story landed on newspaper front pages around the world, and we decided that if our baby was a girl, we would name her after her.

Malala is a big name for a little baby to live up to, particularly our little baby, who is small, bald and funny-faced. It is Iris’s middle name, and we call her both names sometimes because the name is so melodic, but it doesn’t entirely suit her yet. I wonder what her connection to the name will come to be, though already it means something to Iris’s big sister. She knows the story of Malala, how bad men tried to hurt her because they didn’t believe that girls should go to school. She knows about Malala’s bravery, the force of her nonviolence, and, most importantly, she knows that life isn’t the same for girls everywhere as it is for her. Perhaps even that freedoms are not to be taken for granted.

The name “Malala” means “sadness” in Urdu, and even Malala Yousafzai herself has confessed that it is a hard name to carry for that reason. The meaning had me considering whether this was a suitable name to give my baby–particularly as her sister’s second name is “Joy”. But we decided to name her Malala anyway, because three remarkable women have had this name even with the sadness entailed: the 19th century poet warrior whom the modern-day Malalas were named after, Malala Yousafzai, and also former Afghan MP Malala Joya who Malala Yousafzai claims is an inspiration.

We gave her the name because sadness is part of the story, as an acknowledgement that there is still much to be overcome. But the sadness doesn’t negate the light, the hope. The world is big enough to contain all of this.

But we did call her Iris too, which means rainbow. It’s a fascinating name–a flower, a part of human anatomy, a song by not only the Goo Goo Dolls but also Split Enz (which I listened to over and over again while we waited for her to be born), Dylan McKay’s mother, and a Greek Goddess. A good counter and complement to the sadness, I think, and she suits it (though has been perhaps unfortunately nicknamed Aye Aye, while she does not possess a special middle finger to fulfil the same ecological niche as a woodpecker).

October 6, 2013

Accusation by Catherine Bush

“I’m not a circus person,” explains the protagonist of Catherine Bush’s fourth novel Accusation, a line that had me nodding along in agreement. It’s many the author who finds literary inspiration in the circus spectacle, but books about circuses in general tend to bore me, with their freakish humans, chained-up animals and trapeze tragedies. I like my literary characters planted on the ground, preferably one that is concrete. Catherine Bush’s novel, however, is something altogether different from the usual circus story, no big-top for her, but instead a pared-down spectacle, a children’s circus in Ethiopia whose attraction is its performers and the amazing ways they can contort their bodies, how they can catch fire that they throw in the air.

Bush’s novels are always planted much more in concept than narrative and plot, and they are markedly unusual for this. They are also remarkable for their realism, details that plant the stories deep in the ground, on very specific sidewalks and streets, so that a book about a mother orbiting the Earth in Outer Space seems not so far from one’s own experience at all (as in her first novel Minus Time), and so too with this this novel about a journalist driven to explore a(n alleged) crime committed an ocean away amidst a community of street children turned circus acrobats. And this is just one way that this novel turns in on itself as we read it, for it is a story about how we project our own experiences upon those of others (and indeed, as Madeleine Thien read the novel through the lens of race, which never even occurred to me).

That Bush’s novels are planted more in concept than narrative does mean that they tend to be structurally weird, and weak in places. It takes Accusation awhile for its wheels to really start turning, and this is partly because Bush has so many narrative strands to establish. We have Sara, the journalist, who stumbles upon a performance by the children’s circus in Copenhagen. Back home in Toronto, she has a lover whose wife is undergoing cancer treatments. She also has pain her own past involving parents who are emotionally and geographically estranged, and an incident in which she’d been accused of theft and credit card fraud, sullying her reputation and severing important relationships. At a benefit, she connects with Raymond, the leader of the children’s circus she’d seen in Denmark, a black Canadian from Montreal who’d been working abroad for years. Curiously, he requests a drive to Montreal, six hours away. There has been an emergency with the circus troupe, a fall and a terrible injury, and he must return to Addis Ababa as soon as possible. On the long drive along the 401 through the darkness, she feels an affinity with him in his moment of anxiety and tells him the story of her accusation and trial. Just preceding this, there is a stunning scene of him breaking out juggling at a highway rest stop in the middle of the night, people gathering around him. The magic of this man who can summon magic into being with simple dexterity.

A few months after their curious journey, Sara learns that Raymond has been accused of abusing the children in his care, circus performers who’d defected during a tour of Australia. Due to her own past and also because of the odd intimacy of the few hours they’d spent together, Sara finds herself inextricably drawn to this story, journeying to Ethiopia in search of the truth. What she finds there is even more complicated, however, calling her deeper into this story in which she cannot truly be a detached observer, no matter how hard she tries. For better or for worse, and for all manner of reasons, her own thread in this narrative web alters the shape of the story she sees and tells.

Once the novel’s momentum is established, it continues at a heightened pace and nary a clue as to what twists the next page may bring. It was Page 262 where I gasped out loud. Eventually, the story of Sara’s own accusation began to seem extraneous and not sufficiently explored enough to warrant its place near the pinnacle of the novel, though I was so swept up by the more central plot that I ceased to mind that much. Bush explores the ethics of journalism, justice, story-telling, friendship and love, as well as the relativity of truth, or whether truth even matters at all. What is the line between the story as it is and the story we imagine? Does any story even really exist outside of our minds?

Accusation is ambiguous, complex and full of beautiful, multi-claused sentences that are sometimes as difficult to untangle as the novel’s plot is. But in the untangling, the reader becomes deeply engaged in the prose and the plot, part of the story herself.

October 6, 2013

The Things I Want to Keep

In our house, there is now a big plastic bin full of clothing that will never fit anyone in our family ever again. “Should we keep any of it?” I wondered yesterday, only because I thought I had an obligation to wonder. In actuality, we don’t have the room to keep anything and I’m so happy about that because it makes answering such questions much easier. But I wonder too if I will always feel this way, feel the urge to discard pieces of our history, like jetsam.

I haven’t always felt this way. Twenty years ago, I saved everything, any flower I’d ever received hung and dried on a line strung across my dusty, cluttered bedroom. Like most teenagers, I took great care to completely paper my room walls with ticket stubs, magazine cuttings, and photos. When the Blue Jays won the World Series, I saved that day’s newspaper in a cardboard box. I was born afflicted with nostalgia. (I imagine that I am quite human-seeming in this regard.) I remember listening to Meat Loaf’s “Two out of Three Ain’t Bad” when I was six, and telling my dad how it reminded of me of the old days (when I was three). Everything I ever did from age 16-23 was carefully mucilaged into scrapbooks. But enough time passed and so much was accumulated that eventually I could see the futility of my attempts to save everything that mattered, and also that the consequence of it all was stuff stuff stuff and necessarily room enough to put it in.

So we don’t keep much anymore. I only kept a few of the scrapbooks. I am aided in all this by living in an apartment and not having a basement, and also in that so much stuff now exists online, thereby not requiring room enough at all. My blog is perhaps my most precious repository. But I become overwhelmed even by a large number photos on my phone, deleting all those but the essential because I fear being carried away by too muchness. I hate that there are 18,000 messages in my inbox. Books aside, I feel so much lighter living my life without freight. I have decided to retrieve from that plastic bin the stripy sleeper that both my girls wore home from the hospital when they were born, and the rest will go to charity.

“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… 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.” –Joan Didion, Blue Nights

Nostalgia, I have learned with time, is an affliction that can’t be cured, or fixed with a totem. I will keep that sleeper with me, but it won’t bring the past any less faraway. Already, I cannot believe that anybody that I love was ever small enough to wear it.

We went out for posh sushi for dinner last night, our first time having it since our post-partum sashimi party when Iris was 5 days old. I’ve been awash lately in nostalgia for June, as Iris turns 4 months old and leaves her newborn self behind. June, not so long ago, of course, but forever irretrievable, a time like no other before or since for our family. Such a gentle time indeed, just like I knew it was while it was happening. I have no need to keep anything from that bin full of clothes, but oh, how I want to preserve those memories, those moments. That week I spent lying in bed recovering my c-section, when Stuart brought me all my meals and there were only four people in the world. I can no longer remember what it was like to not be able to get out of bed unassisted, or not to be able to turn over without a great deal of pain. All those memories gone, and I just remember the sashimi party in our room, that posh sushi. That was the night Harriet hung up the laundry, and played with her sticker book we’d just received from my friend Kate. How summer always is, the way you want to bottle it.

I remember Stuart taking Harriet to school in the morning, and then coming home to collapse into bed with Iris and I. I remember this one evening when Iris and Harriet were both asleep, and I sat down and wrote a review of a picture book. I remember reading The Flamethrowers, and Where’d You Go, Bernadette? I remember Harriet scampering up the stairs to crawl into bed with us every morning, and there would be all of us there, everyone I love best on a single mattress, an island in the universe. Stuart ensuring I was stocked with snacks, reading Harriet stories while I breastfed, how I was annoyed to once again be mobile because then I couldn’t read so much any more.

In June, Harriet watched the Winnie the Pooh movie with Zooey Deschanel over and over again, and we floated around our house like sleep-deprived lunatics, singing the “honey honey honey” song and “It’s Pooh! It’s Pooh! Pooh wins the honeypot,” whenever we changed Iris’s diaper and the situation called for it. How we’d be up at 4am laughing hysterically about Vladimir Putin’s relationship with rhythmic gymnast, and saying, “His virile persona….” which was alway hilarious. The afternoons when Stuart would strap on the baby and take the children away, and I’d be blessed with an hour or so of precious aloneness. I remembering leaving the house even–hobbling to the farmer’s market clutching my incision, going out for ice cream, walking to the playground to fetch Harriet from school. Her class’s end of the year picnic and glorious sunshine. The first time we took the baby out for a meal, for lunch on Father’s Day and she didn’t explode. Tremendous kindness from everyone: cards and presents in the post, meals dropped off, baked goods and visits. All this proof that we were connected to the world and that the world is good.

None of this particularly monumental, of significance to no one but me, though I suspect that it might remind you of your own precious memories, you own very best times. These are those memories that don’t dissolve into the blur of every day, though dissolve they someday will, all the same. And so to counter that, I write them down here, preserve them in my way. These are the things that I want to keep.

October 2, 2013

I’m going to be Wild again.

I am so excited to be returning to the Wild Writers Literary Festival in Waterloo this year, delivering a presentation called “Making the Most of Your Blog: A Guide for Readers and Writers”. I promise that my session will be useful, fun and illuminating, even. I am also excited that the famous gourmet boxed lunch will be making an appearance. And most of all, I’m thrilled by the company I will be keeping at this festival. Also on the bill: Catherine Bush, Karen Connelly, Nancy Jo Cullen, Elisabeth di Mariaffi, Miranda Hill, Helen Humphreys, Susan Olding, etc. etc. (Check it out: the lineup is fantastic). And I hope to see you too!