June 16, 2011
Introducing Canadian Bookshelf!
For the past few months, I’ve been thrilled to be part of the amazing launching the website Canadian Bookshelf. The site is a work-in-progress, which is pretty wonderful, because it’s fabulous already. It’s the largest-ever online assemblage of Canadian books of all kinds, with author pages and a reader community. A big feature of the site is reading lists, which I’ve had a great time soliciting from writers and hand-picked expert readers (and also writing my own– here is my own list of favourite bookish novels). I’m also pretty happy with the Canadian Bookshelf blog, with guest posts like this one by Anne Perdue, or my new post today on great books for Dads on Father’s Day. To learn a bit more about Canadian Bookshelf, you can read my introductory blog post. And if you’ve got some time to kill, kill away merrily with the Canadian Bookshelf Cover Shuffle.
June 15, 2011
Second Rising by Catherine M.A. Wiebe
Second Rising by Catherine M.A. Wiebe appealed to me as the perfect intersection between two books I’ve enjoyed in the past: Alayna Munce’s novel When I Was Young and in My Prime (about a young woman contemplating her grandparents’ decline), and Diane Tye’s food studies book Baking as Biography (which I love, love, loved). Though Second Rising wasn’t immediately resonant with me: the poetic language was hard for me to decipher, and though I worked hard to permeate the metaphors to get to the meaning underneath, I couldn’t find it, and this frustrated me. I persisted, however, mostly because of the evocative way that Wiebe writes about food. I had to shake off the urge to go and bake a loaf of bread, to fill my house with the fresh smell Wiebe recreates with her prose, and partake in the ritual of margarine-slathered heels. She writes about squash soup, and pickles, and ham sandwiches, and it was made me hungry, but also perfectly illustrated the connection between her narrator and her grandmother who are particularly close when the former is small (when therefore, according to the grandmother, the two are particularly close in age).
With the second half of the novel, however, the method of the first became clear to me. I began to understand that the language and metaphors of the first half had been so difficult to understand because they were spoken by the grandmother as she suffered from dementia. These wonderful ideas, this language with so much magic at its root, seemingly, is nonsensical, and yet in preserving it, Wiebe makes it otherwise. She writes about decline not as decline, but as a mode of still-living, with connections and singular moments just like in any life. Her grandmother’s’decline actually reawakens the narrator to the closeness she’d experienced with her grandmother when she herself had just been young, except that it is the narrator, now-grown, who is chief cook in the kitchen while her grandmother sits on the stool and watches. The relationship, however, is complicated by the narrator’s own ambivalence about her relationship with her grandmother, about her own absences while her grandmother was in the final throes of her illness.
This is a different kind of book than others about Alzheimers I’ve encountered– Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles or Michael Ignatieff’s Scar Tissue, both about the early-onset of the disease, would refuse to so give dementia its place, but at the end of a long life, there is poetry to the process of shutting down, the loss is not far removed from a natural process. And yet, Wiebe still addresses the practical matters of the disease– the notes the grandmother leaves, and how she preserves these notes and reuses them so that nobody notices her handwriting’s decline. About what it means when a woman who bakes is not permitted to bake any more, and there is a particularly poignant scene in which the granddaughter contemplates how the disease has altered the dynamic of her grandparents’ relationship.
Second Rising is a book about memories,about memories of memories and what distance does to our stories. And it’s about the role food plays in nurturing our family connections, linking generations as it feeds our bellies and souls.
June 15, 2011
Our Best Book from this week's library haul: Oscar's Half Birthday by Bob Graham
This week, we asked our librarian to recommend books about “alternative” families, because Harriet is obsessed with the construction of family units and we thought now would be a good time to broaden her little mind a bit, so we took out And Tango Makes Three. The librarian also suggested Oscar’s Half-Birthday, whose family construction is fairly standard, but whose urban, hipster, inter-racial parents will help acclimatize Harriet to families way cooler than her own. And happily, these details (along with the urban scenery of abandoned shopping carts and graffiti) are pretty incidental to a lovely story celebrating baby Oscar’s half-birthday, which climaxes with the picnicking population of an entire hillside erupting into song. (The song is also “Happy Birthday”, which is currently Harriet’s favourite, so we liked that too.) My favourite part of the book is big sister Millie, however, with her coat-hanger fairy-wings and green dinosaur puppet– if my daughter is going to have a role model from a book, I’d hope it could be one like this.
Also, the writing is so good. Like this, “…the half-birthday boy, OSCAR, sits tilted at an angle, his fingers curled into Millie’s tuna sandwich. His shoulders are hunched, his head nods, and the light shines through his ears, illuminating them like little lanterns.” Exactly!
June 14, 2011
Mini Reviews: What I've been reading lately
I put Kyran Pittman’s collection of essays Planting Dandelions: Field Notes from a Semi-Domesticated Life on hold at the library after reading the Globe and Mail review of it. I was interested in the book because I’m also a stay-at-home-mom who does not exactly self-define that way, and who feels a bit unsuited to the stereotype, however perfectly happy I am in this life. I also liked the way the author celebrated blogging in this profile. And as I read the book, during the whole of last Sunday when I was sick in bed, I also loved that this is a blogger-turned-author who can really write. (Though she’s got literary pedigree.) It was a wonderful collection of essays, and I particularly enjoyed her reflections of new parenthood from the vantage point of ten years down the line, her sympathetic examination of the attachment-parenting, organic-fooding, toddler-breastfeeding Mama she used to be, fierce in her judgment of others (and herself)– the perspective was refreshing, and illuminating. But the book is about more than that– though I was wary of her “party-girl turned housewife” persona (mainly because I was never a party-girl, and have a natural distrust for anyone prettier than I am), she kept it mostly understated. I loved her piece on raising boys, on her family’s financial struggles and its effect on her marriage, on raising her kids in the American South and the contradictions inherent in their pride in the place, and her own contradictory experience of being a Canadian in America, on her unwillingness to admit where she belonged. It was a great read.
Before that, I’d read Rachel Cusk’s latest novel The Bradshaw Variations. Rachel Cusk is one of my favourite authors, but we have an 
odd relationship, her and I. First, I’m never entirely sure that I’m enjoying her novels until I’ve finished one. Or perhaps I mean that “enjoying” is not what one does with a Rachel Cusk book, which is also the reason I’ve never been able to write a proper review of one either. Instead of being critically attuned to the text, I have to turn myself off and be completely immersed. It is in this way that she’s like Virginia Woolf– you’ve got to let the text take you where it needs to. Sometimes, the prose is so heightened (also like Woolf) that it gets to be too much, but then you realize that realism was never her intention. The story is beside the point, which is annoying, but then this is Rachel Cusk and the point is so so important, never mind the story. Anyway, I loved it, but perhaps I have to. What I don’t have to, however, is to point out that the second-last chapter of this novel is one of the best short-stories I have ever read. Disturbing, dark and hilarious, and absolutely perfectly executed.
The Soul of the World by Christopher Dewdney has been sitting on shelf for years. And no wonder– it is a book about the nature of time. Which is not something I’ve ever been moved to pick up, but nor to get rid of either, though I wondered as the dust-jacket became particularly dusty. But I am a girl who came of age on A Wrinkle in Time, Back to the Future, Tom’s Midnight Garden, A Handful of Time etc. And because I’m reading by to-be-reads from A-Z, I’ve made it to the Ds, and it’s time for Dewdney now: the book was wonderful. I rode the subway home from the NMAs on Friday whilst reading about the invention of hours, minutes, and clock faces. I loved the line that we are to time as owls are to air. I loved the paragraphs that were completely indecipherable to me, and then went to say, “And here’s where things get complicated…” Or, “Here’s where things get weird”. And it was all weird, because it’s about physics, wormholes, De Loreans, photography, the telephone, movies, seasons, Toronto, our expanding universe, the past, future and the present. Which is now. No, now. Absolutely ungraspable. As is so much that I encountered in this book, but didn’t worry too much about the details, and therefore just enjoyed the ride. Dust or not, this is a book I’ll be keeping.
June 13, 2011
Wild Libraries I Have Known: West Vancouver Memorial Library
Reader, Editor and Poet Kate Kennedy (who has known a few libraries in her time) tells us about the West Vancouver Memorial Library.
West Vancouver Memorial is my grandmother’s neighbourhood library and she’d often take my sisters and I along to browse when we were in the city visiting. It was significantly larger than our library in Lillooet (about four hours away) and we were always a little floored by the selection. We didn’t have borrowing privileges, but between them my parents usually got down to the coast every few weeks, and if it could be ascertained that the next visit would be before the next due date, we were allowed to take a few books out on Granny’s card. (The possibility of losing or damaging one of these books once you had it home was fairly terrifying.)
It was through these visits that I read most of Cynthia Voigt’s Tillerman family series (Homecoming, Dicey’s Song, and the rest). I wouldn’t say there was any real lack of tomboy characters in the fiction I read at that age, but Dicey Tillerman (particularly as depicted on the first-edition cover of Dicey’s Song, next to her boat, in her red sweatshirt) seemed to set the bar a little higher. She wasn’t ignoring her appearance because she’d decided that was the type of person she was, in contrast to, say, the artistic character, the flirty character, the geek and the baseball star. Her mother had abandoned her and her siblings in the parking lot of a grocery store and now Dicey had to take care of them all on their long trip to find other living relatives. Dicey didn’t have time to be a type of anything. I haven’t reread much of the fiction I read back then, but I think there was an authenticity to the high stakes in Voigt’s books that wasn’t so common, and maybe isn’t now either.
Apart from the books themselves, what I loved best about the library in West Vancouver was the pair of rounded, enclosed, 
wood-panelled study carrels up in the adult section. They were reminiscent of hollowed-out trees and illuminated by inviting pot lights, and the thought of having something to study in one of them was pretty thrilling. Then, when I was in grade eight, I got to spend a year living in the city, attending a private school that went in for the full tie and kilt uniform. Having by this time moved into a lot of boarding school literature (Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers series and Kit Pearson’s The Daring Game, among others) this was heady stuff for me. I found myself one afternoon at the West Vancouver Memorial Library, in my uniform, with a friend, having nabbed one of the precious study carrels, books spread open before us, watching in confusion as this friend began an elaborate process of removing or obscuring all the recognizable parts of her uniform lest we be spotted by public school students. But we were wearing blazers! With crests! In the world’s best study carrel! What could possibly be wrong?
The ambiance of that library was in part, for me, an extension of the ambiance of Vancouver, a city that was always a treat and that I didn’t want to leave when it was time to go, but that I also never figured out how to fit into properly. I eventually came to love the Interior, and would probably now choose it over the coast, but the coast will always feel a bit decadent, full of things that we didn’t have in our town, the books we had to hurry up to read in time but that we didn’t want to ruin by rushing through.
June 11, 2011
Remarkable things about the NMAs
1) I was pleased to learn that I can be gracious in defeat, though it wasn’t difficult under the circumstances. From Twitter, I gathered that being excited about the National Magazine Awards isn’t cool, but maybe those people get out more than I do. It’s not every Friday night that I get to get dressed up, turn up at a fabulous venue, drink wine, eat delicious, and celebrate Canadian magazines with 600 other well-frocked individuals. It was wonderful. And then, on top of it all, to have my piece on display, to hear my name called and see it up on screen with the other nominees for Personal Journalism– it was completely overwhelming, and more than enough, I thought. And when the winner was announced, and it wasn’t me, I realized that it was really, really was enough, and was happy to remain extraordinarily happy.
2) I was also happy because I spent the evening with Kim Jernigan and Amanda Watkins of The 
New Quarterly, and (seriously) the only disappointment I felt was that I wasn’t able to bring home a prize to them and their magazine, which has always been so good to me. Thanks to them, I never once looked forlorn amidst the hubbub. They were splendid company.
3) Speaking of good company, I was also happy to meet and speak with DB Scott, who was recipient of the Foundation Award for Outstanding Achievement.
4) I was also amazed to see that my postal phantom was nominated for a National Magazine Award. He also didn’t win, so there is still no confirmation that he exists apart from in the ether.
5) I saw Dani Couture, and Medeine Tribenevicius, met Priscilla Uppal, and Christopher Doda, knew the bartender from high school, and met Joanna from More Magazine who reads my blog (hello, Joanna!).
6) I really only showed up because I was promised a swim in the famous NMA chocolate fountain, but there was no fountain this year– the first discernible evidence I’ve seen that perhaps the magazine industry is dying. The ice cream sandwiches, however, almost made up for the loss. But maybe I just didn’t know what I was missing.
June 9, 2011
The Odious Child by Carolyn Black
I’m very happy that Carolyn Black has agreed to be next up at Author Interviews @ Pickle Me This. First, because it’s been awhile, this mostly because it’s been awhile since I’ve read a book that’s made me curious enough to go search the author out for some illumination. Second, because her book The Odious Child has left me so curious, most of all to discover who Carolyn Black’s influences are. I can’t figure them out. (Although she is thoroughly umPymmish, however, her characters do work in Pym-like occupations I find infinitely fascinating– indexers, librarians, museum cataloguers. Yum). She writes like no one else I’ve ever read, like a writer who’s standing on the shoulders of nobody, her stories’ own foundations are so very solid. There is a fantastical element to the stories, but nothing whimsical. You might call some of the stories’ structures “experimental”, but it’s not the right word because it suggests the author didn’t know her outcomes beforehand and Carolyn Black’s “experiments” are so incredibly, impeccably controlled.
The story that kept me up in the night thinking about it, and wouldn’t get out of my head the following day, was “Baby Mouth”, which is the very best illustration of maternal ambivalence I have ever read. Lionel Shriver also did it well, but she forgot to put the love there, and Carolyn Black doesn’t, with a story that so much echoed my own experience that the similarities made me shiver with every page I turned. About a mother who’s not perfectly suited to the new baby in her care, and how those dark early days come back to her almost a year old when her baby still hasn’t smiled. Wondering, but unable to confess, if a violent moment of abandon could have led to her baby’s problem… (Here is my obligatory clarification: we had no violent abandon at our house, except for the time I punched the wall [but not through it! There is restraint, albeit the wall’s, and not mine, but alas…])
The story is funny, as Black satirizes the absurd industry of modern parenting, but it’s also sad as the mother’s desperation mounts, and the love is tender, and Black’s empathy with her character is remarkable, which is the case through the whole book, even in the stories that are completely out there. And it’s where the solidity comes from, I think, from a writer who is so completely invested in her people and their points of view. Which, you’d think, would go without saying, but I’ve read a lot of books where this is not the case. Particularly not when the author’s people include, for example, a disembodied head…
Anyway, though Carolyn Black’s first book is one of the strongest debuts I’ve ever encountered, I’m not sure this is a book for the short story novice: it demands close attention and several leaps of faith, and these readers might not be ready for it yet. But for those who are already admirers of the form, The Odious Child will prove remarkably rewarding.
June 9, 2011
Our Best Book from this Week's Library Haul: Bumpety Bump by Pat Hutchins
Our best book from this week’s library haul was Pat Hutchins’ Bumpety Bump which we love for its rhythm, and also for the illustrations which wonderfully depict a rich garden growing above and underground. It’s a great book for this time of year when gardens are everywhere and Harriet’s prime fascination. Runner-up is Barbara Reid’s The Party, which I’ve read five times today.
June 7, 2011
Descant 110: Birthing
I am an unabashed devotee of small magazines, but secondhand back issues for sale always strikes me as a bit pathetic. Sort of like the used National Geographics in Nikolski, where they never managed to sell a single issue. Does anybody really want to buy a copy of The Fiddlehead from 2003? Every year, the Victoria College Book Sale seems to hope so, but I don’t imagine they have much luck. Or maybe they do–I don’t know. I just think that magazines are meant to be a bit ephemeral.
Not all of them, however, and here’s the proof. Here also is the proof behind that claim that small magazines are where our finest writers get their starts. Ages ago, I bought the Descant 110: Birthing, which was published in 2000. (Clarity note: I am not pregnant. Am reading it now because I’ve made it through the C books in my to-be-reads, and Descant starts with D). I picked it up at a used bookstore because the topic was interesting, and then I bought it because of the writers inside– most of whom hadn’t published books at time the issue was published. Who’s who? Jonathan Garfinkel, Laisha Rosnau, Michelle Berry, Jonathan Bennett and Stephen Marche. Also, Diana Kiesners, now of The Accordian Diaries.
It was an absolutely stellar issue, one of those wonderful thematic ones whose points in common just seem like a coincidence. One of my two favourite pieces was “Hardiness Zones” by JA McCormack, which was way too awesome and assured to have been written by a writer going nowhere. Some googling cleared it up: JA is Judith McCormack, who published The Rule of Last Clear Chance 3 years later, and also a chapbook with Biblioasis. She is also a lawyer, and a law professor, which might explain what’s she’s been up to in years since. (But I want to read her books now).
And then Diana Kiesner’s weird, wonderful and absolutely perfect essay “Long History of a Small Idea” about the practical considerations surrounding getting a poem written on the surface of an egg. And thank goodness the history is long, because it’s also funny, erudite, and full of practical advice should I ever require a poem written on the surface of an egg: “It is the making of something out of nothing; also of nothing (an abstraction) out of something (a perfectly good food source).” Totally weird, and absolutely masterful.
Anyway, this secondhand magazine is going to live on my shelf forevermore. So I guess anything is now officially possible.
Update: Do forgive. I have spent this week quite ill, sleepless and braindead, therefore I forgot to remark upon another exceptional piece in this issue. But then I just read Sarah Henstra’s blog post about clowns, which mentioned her vocal teacher Fides Krucker, who wrote the essay in question– this amazing piece linking the sounds of childhbirth with vocal training, how being a singer helped her in childbirth, and how having given birth made her a better singer. Remarkable for the way the writer describes sounds, and body. Once again, like nothing else I’ve ever read before.
