May 29, 2011
Uncustomary Blogs
“It is now customary for authors to have character blogs…” someone tweeted from the Writers Union of Canada AGM this weekend, which made me think a bit. And then some more after I’d attended the AGM’s “speednetworking” event and spoke to a number of writers with questions about blogs and how to use them. “My publisher told me I should have a blog,” said one of them, but she had no idea what to do with that advice. What I thought about all of this finally is that the most successful author blogs have nothing customary about them.
Madeleine Thien’s blog was noted as the “customary” author blog, but I haven’t seen many other blogs like it. Set up to complement her latest book Dogs at the Perimeter, the blog uses her novel as a platform to launch further and deeper into Cambodian history, to expand upon the research she used for her book, and to round out her characters with a bit of metafictional fun. That her novel so nicely intersects history and story offers great potential for both of these to work together on the blog, to further engage readers who want to know more about the story’s background, to use visual materials that wouldn’t have worked in the novel, and to create a blog that is a work of art onto itself.
Sean Dixon has created blogs for both his novels that work in a similar way. I remember finding The Lacuna Cabal blog once I’d finished reading his novel The Girls Who Saw Everything and being so thrilled that these characters I’d been following could live beyond the page (and it’s not that the page wasn’t enough. It’s that I liked it so much, I wanted more). Unlike with Thien, Dixon is straightforwardly the author of his blog, but his work similarly blurs lines between fact and fiction and the blog is a great place for such blurring to continue. Dixon’s characters are so real to him that he’s happy to tell use more about them, and to provide more background information on how his story grew into an actual book. He’s having similar fun with the blog for his new novel The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn, using photographs of locales depicted in his book, and making connections between his book and the world through links to various things.
What makes these blogs work (and Ami McKay also did a fine job of this with The Birth House, also Amy Lavender Harris with Imagining Toronto), however, is that clearly their authors are enjoying what they’re doing, they’re invested in the project, the blog for its own sake instead of as a marketing tool. The blogs work because the authors find links they want to share with us, the blogs become compendiums of fascinating stuff, and their eclectic-ness is a reflection of the authors’ personalities. That personality is what makes readers keep returning, a blog as unique as the individual who wrote it. The chief attraction of blogs, of course, are the glimpses they offer into the people behind them.
But not all authors need to create blogs of such scale. Perhaps their books don’t lend themselves, or (importantly) the author is a not a big appreciator of blogs and has no idea (or interest) in how they work. It would sort of be like someone who’s never read a book trying to write one– inevitable disaster. Successful bloggers, I think, never have to try that hard– if it doesn’t come naturally, if it doesn’t seem fun, then it’s not worth it.
Blogs are useful for keeping websites current, however, and having a blog but calling it “News” is an easy way to get that practical benefit but not have to pour one’s heart into it. I also like the idea of a blog as a limited project, as with Anne Perdue’s road trip blog, so that the challenge of maintenance is no longer an issue. Establishing at the beginning that a blog will not be updated too often is also a simple way to keep it sustainable.
The nice thing about a blog is that it can be anything, and a writer can adapt the form to suit her needs and interests (and can further adapt as needs and interests change). She can decide how much of her personal life she wants to share, how much focus she wants stuck to a specific book, if she will take the voice of a mentor, an expert, or a friend, if she will focus on herself or her work, or other stuff in the world. She can create a blog that is not only of interest to her readers, but is also useful to her as a writer and a reader. She can–like Madeleine Thien did–choose not to make what is a customary blog, and it’s probably a wise choice. Because who wants to read the blog that is like everybody else’s? (Which, incidentally, is the blog that eventually fizzles out anyway.)
May 26, 2011
This cake is for the party…
We decided that a six-layer cake needed a bit more height, so we put it on a pedestal and added cake bunting. It was delicious. Only problem was that one slice fed all our party guests, so now we’re looking for some other parties for this cake to be for.
(I stole this idea from here, just in case you’ve mistaken me for someone original. And her cake wasn’t crooked. But then her philosophy also probably isn’t, “Bake a cake, but bake it slant.”)
May 26, 2011
I think you'll be two now and forever
I’ve written posts before about Harriet being older than she’s ever been, like back when she was seven weeks old, and I was amazed at how far we’ve come. Or when she was three months old, and when she turned one, or six months ago when she was a year and a half–these signposts that have us take stock and realize that we’ve been moving forward all along, even when we spend mornings reading stories on the couch and it doesn’t much feel like it.
But this is different. My friends, never before has Harriet been two-years-old, one hundred and four weeks, an upstanding (most of the time), fast-running, fierce shrieking, word-speaking, unabashed hugger and devourer of tiny muffins, counter of cars, page-turning, tutu-wearing feral creature who reads the newspaper while she eats her lunch, looking for advertisements with pictures of cars. Cars with wheels.
The age of two is a bit like colic. It’s a dreaded thing that everybody warns you about, and some people say it doesn’t exist, but others spent nine months suicidal because of it. I thought that since Harriet has been annoying since birth, we might miss out on the terrible. Her tantrums started when she was about a year old, so I was well-versed in the child lying face-down, kicking and pounding the floor and crying until she pukes. I thought I knew what people were talking about when they were talking about two years old, but like everything to do with each new stage of parenthood, I had no idea.
Two is terrible in a brand new way. It’s the kid who is trekked all the way to swimming lessons then refuses to get into the pool, the kid who won’t say hello to her grandmother on the phone, who won’t eat unless she’s sitting on her mother’s lap, who wants her father to get out of the way and so stands with her hands on her hips and says, “Bye, Daddy. Bye, Daddy.” It’s the kid who knows she can climb up on a kitchen chair to turn the stereo on, but also knows she isn’t supposed to, and is in thrall to the tension between these ideas. She’s fascinated by her ability to provoke a reaction, and by her dawning awareness of being a free agent in the world. She also has the self-preservation instinct of a lemming.
But two is also happiness beyond the wildest dreams. It’s the kid who’s fascinated by prepositions, and lying in bed between her parents on Saturday morning looked at both of us and said, “Harriet in family.” It’s the kid who wants to go outside always, and never wants to come in. Who loves to talk about her friends, and never sees any of them (or does anything) without having to be pulled away shouting, “More!” She loves chocolate, ice cream, and this weekend decided that cupcakes were called “Happy Birthday Muffins”. She has just learned the word, “Nobody” and loves to play her guitar, and makes up songs in a combination of English and Harriet-ese. She loves car-rides, puppies, dancing, teapots, puddles, stickers, clocks, digging in dirt, watering cans, and dustpans. Her favourite author is Byron Barton, among others. If it’s close enough to bedtime, she will laugh hysterically about anything. She loves to help with everything we do, and sometimes she even manages to.
Harriet is two, which is the oldest she has ever been, but also not much older than seven weeks old, relatively speaking, (and still “nearly new” according to A.A. Milne). And it’s true what they say, though it wasn’t for a long time–I can’t imagine my life without her. I don’t know how I got along before, but now I’m so glad I don’t have to. She is everything I ever wanted her to be, and me because of her.
We love her, we love her, we do.
May 24, 2011
Pickle Me This's Motherhood Library
Pregnancy Books:
– Bear With Me: What They Don’t Tell You About Pregnancy and New Motherhood by Diane Flacks
–How to Get a Girl Pregnant by Karleen Pendleton Jimenez
Birthing Books*:
– Great Expectations: Twenty-Four Stories about Childbirth by Dede Crane and Lisa Moore (eds)
– Birthing from Within by Pam England
– Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth by Ina May Gaskin
(Cannot vouch for the second and third book, as I had a scheduled c-section. But was definitely all right with the c-section on account of having read the first book, and I will never forget Stephanie Nolen on Ina May Gaskin, ever. So funny and made me feel better in retrospect)
Books About New Motherhood:
– A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother by Rachel Cusk
– Making Babies by Anne Enright
– Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott
Books About Babies/Motherhood/Parenthood
–The House With the Broken Two: A Birth Mother Remembers by Myrl Coulter
–Nobody’s Mother: Life Without Kids by Lynn van Luven
– Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood by Shannon Cowan, Fiona Tinwei Lam, and Cathy Stonehouse (eds.)
– Motherhood and Blogging: The Radical Act of the Mommy Blog by May Friedman and Shana L. Calixte (eds.)
– Reading Magic by Mem Fox
– The Philosophical Baby by Alison Gopnik
– The Big Rumpus by Ayun Halliday
– Between Interruptions: 30 Women Tell the Truth About Motherhood by Cori Howard (ed.)
– Dream Babies: Childcare Advice from John Locke to Gina Ford by Christina Hrdyment
– Mother Knows Best: Talking Back to the Experts by Jessica Nathanson and Laura Camille Tuley (eds.)
– Pathologies by Susan Olding
– The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood by Rachel Power
– What Mothers Do by Naomi Stadlen (this book is deeply troubling, by a writer with no understanding of maternal ambivalence. Which is too bad because I think ambivalent mothers would benefit most from the book, which explains how those tedious, dreary early days are so important, and so absolutely full of doing, but we just fail to recognize it and credit mothers for it).
–365 Activities You and Your Baby Will Love
Fiction:
– A Big Storm Knocked it Over by Laurie Colwin
– Goodnight Nobody by Jennifer Weiner
– Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins
–A Large Harmonium by Sue Sorensen
Poetry:
–Joy is So Exhausting by Susan Holbrook
–Hump by Ariel Gordon
–Sweet Devilry by Yi-Mei Tsiang
Books About Sleep (aka The Trajectory of a Downward Spiral)*
–The Baby Whisperer
–The No-Cry Sleep Solution
–Dr Sears’ Nighttime Parenting Book
*Note that none of these books did me any good, except the Dr. Sears’ book and only because it gave me permission to keep not doing anything. One day my daughter just learned how to sleep, without a book, even.
***
“If she feels disoriented, this is not a problem requiring bookshelves of literature to put right. No, it is exactly the right state of mind for the teach-yourself process that lies ahead of her. Every time a woman has a baby she has something to learn, partly from her culture but also from her baby. If she really considered herself an expert, or if her ideas were set, she would find it very hard to adapt to her individual baby. Even after her first baby, she cannot sit back as an expert on all babies. Each child will be a little different and teach her something new. She needs to feel uncertain in order to be flexible. So, although it can feel so alarming, the ‘all-at-sea’ feeling is appropriate. Uncertainty is a good starting point for a mother. Through uncertainty, she can begin to learn.” –from What Mothers Do by Naomi Stadlen (who I quote because in this, she got at least one thing right)
May 22, 2011
Mini Reviews: English Journey and Nightwood
This reading alphabetically thing is working for me, forcing open books that have been languishing on the shelf for far too long. The only problem is that I got three new books on the weekend (plucked out of a box on the sidewalk), which does make me fear that the alphabet will never be got through. The other problem is whatever weirdness will ensue by me following Djuna Barnes with Erma Bombeck, two writers with nothing in common except the letter B. In fact, I think that Djuna Barnes might be the opposite of Erma Bombeck. We shall see…
Anyway, I read Beryl Bainbridge’s An English Journey: Or The Road to Milton Keynes last week, which I acquired for $1 at the UofT Bookstore sidewalk sale back when my life was as such that I’d push a stroller for miles in miles in aimless pursuit of a nap. I’d never read Beryl Bainbridge, but I like England, and I’d just read this review of JB Priestly’s English Journey, a book commemorated by Bainbridge 50 years later in the television program recreating Priestly’s travels out of which her book was born. And I loved it, first because Bainbridge is a fabulous prose writer, with a marvelous dry wit. And because the contrast between her “modern” England of 1983 and today has made this book an historical document onto itself. Because of lines like a girl “with thighs shaped like cellos”, “It seemed there was neither time nor room for pedestrians. We were literally a dying breed”. How she describes her family: “Class conscious, [everyone was] either dead common or a cut above themselves. And “I’ve never worn a hat since my mother bought me on at the Bon Marche and I carried home potatoes in in when my carrier bag bust.” That this is a writer who can write, “I was in Coronation Street more than twenty-five years ago. I played one of Ken Barlow’s girlfriend’s before he married Valerie.” Which I appreciate, and I don’t even know Valerie.
***
I don’t know that there is a book that has sat longer on my shelf than Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, which a friend of mine gave to me in 
1997. According to a note on the inside cover, I’d read it in 2001, but I couldn’t remember having done so, and no wonder, really. With apologies to T.S. Eliot, I think I‘m just an ordinary reader. I’m not going to say that this is a bad book, but only that I was almost wholly unable to penetrate its goodness. Almost wholly, because there were certain parts of the book where I felt things had really got going, but then Dr. Matthew O’Connor would open his mouth and start talking again. (In his intro, T.S. thought the Doctor was the best part. This is one of the reasons I suspect T.S. and I are not meant to be kindred souls.)
Apparently, Barnes is quite Joycean, which might be part of the problem. Eliot wrote that the novel would “appeal primarily to readers of poetry”, and I get that, in particular because of how much Nightwood reminded me of “The Wasteland”. But even “The Wasteland” rendered as 170 pages of prose would be too much. In Nightwood, if I just let the words fall the way I do whilst reading a poem like “The Wasteland”, I would find myself having drifted entirely away. So then I read more carefully, get to the bottom of every line, which is also unsatisfying because the prose makes no sense at all except in a very general sense, sounds pretty, washes over, but then, oops! There I’ve gone away again. You see? For me, there was no joy in the exercise. And I don’t think it’s every a very good thing when one of the best bits of a novel is its brevity.
May 22, 2011
A prose that is altogether alive
“But I do mean that most contemporary novels are not really “written”. They obtain what reality they have largely from an accurate rendering of the noises that human beings currently make in their daily simple needs of communication; and what part of a novel is not composed of these noises consists of prose which is no more alive than that of a competant newspaper writer or government official. A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel-reader is not prepared to give.” –T.S. Eliot, in an introduction to Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, which I love for the honesty of a paragraph beginning, “When I first read the book I found the opening movement rather slow and dragging…”
May 19, 2011
Mini Review: Pleased to Meet You by Caroline Adderson
Remember Caroline Adderson? She popped up on a list of underrated writers last year, and it occurred to me that I’d never read her. Which was timely, because she had a new novel coming out, The Sky is Falling, which I read and loved, and then Nathalie gave me Pleased to Meet You for Christmas, and I’d been saving it ever since then.
I enjoyed the book entire, though it wasn’t until about half way through that the stories became really vivid to me. Beginning with the story “Knives”, which was the first of my two favourites, about a group of house-sharing university students whose new housemate disrupts their lives, managing to see inside their souls, steal those souls, and multiple knife sets in the process–he gives them weapons to destroy themselves with. Such a smart, funny story whose characters are idiots, but the dynamic between them invests them with multiple dimensions. And then with “Mr. Justice” about a family of miserable people, about losing a father you’ve never had, and about the breaks some of us have to make in order to find happiness. There are no good guys in this story, but we see its characters from every angle, most essentially these glimpses when they’re going on like they don’t even know that we’re there.
May 19, 2011
It's the houses, not the people
“For years, my route has been in Kerrisdale, the neighbourhood to the west of Shaughnessy, where I grew up. Like Shaughnessy, it’s affluent. The streets are pretty and tree-lined, with many of the original stucco and shingle houses. This makes Kerrisdale an unusual neighbourhood in a city with a propensity for destroying and remaking itself. Because I grew up in an old house, and because I live now in Fairview Slopes where in the eighties virtually all of the original houses were demolished and replaced with leaky condos, I feel protective of the houses that remain. It’s the houses I deliver mail to, not the people, whom I hardly ever see. It’s happening here too now. The dismay I feel climbing up the steps to an Arts and Crafts bungalow, depositing The New Yorker and Architectural Digest in the box, then turning and glimpsing from the corner of my eye an orange fence halfway down the block. Did I process a Change of Address? This was when I might have taken warning.” –Caroline Adderson, from “Mr. Justice” in Pleased to Meet You
