April 27, 2011
S is for Science Centre
Location: Ontario Science Centre
Very exciting to venture out to Toronto’s inner suburbs today and visit The Ontario Science Centre. Partly because we get to mark off another letter in our Big City ABC project, of course. Though, sadly, Allan Moak’s illustration cannot be re-created because they’ve stopped letting kids touch that electrifying silver ball that makes your hair stand on end and maybe causes cardiac arrest. Silver ball has been replaced with the most fantastic kids play area I’ve ever seen, however, and Harriet and her friend Finn loved everything they came across (the water play area in particular) and eventually had to be removed screaming from the facility because they weren’t finished with the fun yet, but, alas, we had to get them home for nap time.
April 27, 2011
The Vicious Circle reads: Anthills of the Savannah by Chinua Achebe
We were concerned that Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah might have broken The Vicious Circle Book Club. We speculated at links between the book’s difficulty, our historically low turn-out, and that the majority of us present hadn’t managed to get to the end. “I made the mistake,” said one of us, “of judging the book by its page count.” 216 pages had seemed like a breeze to those of us who read as easily as we walk, until we tried to actually read them. Things Fall Apart this book was not: the text was dense, full of rambling parables, conversations in which speakers were not located, narration that shifted between characters’ points of view and omniscience, the plot (and there really was one) was obfuscated, and those of us who’d finished the book were still confused.
But of course Chinua Achebe is not in the habit of writing bad books, and we reasoned that there was method in his method. How do we approach it? Were we failing to give the novel credit for its roots in an oral tradition? Were we slighting the novel for failing to impose the narrative shape dictated by the Western canon? Also, we reasoned, this was probably just not a great book club book– not to be read once breezily and discussed over wine (and here we discover a book club’s limitation, we imagine). What were we ever do with it?
Things we discussed: that page 40 really was the gateway to the book’s readability; that Elewa’s miraculous sexual position was implausible (or perhaps Elewa was particularly spry); that we liked the characters a lot; we cleared up what had happened between Beatrice and Sam at the party; that we liked the scene at the public execution; and we really liked Beatrice’s character. We spoiled the ending too. And suspected that the book’s haphazard structure is a statement about the perilous nature of any political structure in a dictatorship. We talked how this book corresponds with current events in North Africa and the Middle East. We compared Sam to Hosni Mubarak. The ideas of dictatorships– one characters statement that if Kangan had at least been a real dictatorship, then things actually might have got done. And the inevitability of what befalls the main characters in the end– that they were tragic heroes. But then the obfuscated plot plays out strangely against that inevitability of fate. In another form, this book could have been a John LaCarre novel.
Then we talked about how the book outwardly suggested that race was no longer an issue in the nation of Kangan, but inwardly was saying otherwise– that the post-colonial government had merely appropriated colonial structures. That the powerful characters were all powerful due to their colonial ties and Western education. That the book is also about class, religion, and sex. About the way that women are left to pick up the pieces in the end, Ikem’s revelation about women being the last resort, but how the last resort is always too late. (And his ideas about an embracing of contradiction being the beginning of true strength). And inevitability again– women are left to pick up the pieces here, but there are signs of change. The new baby who is named not by the patriarch, and who is given a boy’s name even though she is a girl. And then how everybody celebrates by singing the maid’s religious song, which none of us got our heads around, but alas.
So we were relieved to discover that The Vicious Circle wasn’t broken after all, and that there is a lot a book club can do with a book like this. That all of us came away with a deeper understanding of the novel due to insights from other readers, with this puzzle of a book closer to being solved. And then we drank more wine, and ate more lasagna, and some of us today are sorry that we didn’t help ourselves to a second slice of chocolate cake.
April 25, 2011
Still mired
Forgive me. Still mired in the fat books, and then got doubly mired in a book that was thin but oh so dense– Chinua Achebe’s The Anthills of the Savannah for my book club meeting tomorrow night. So now I’m back in the Cheever (and oh, I love this book. I’m not far in yet, but these stories a wonderful to read. A bit bleak, yes, particularly with the Didion the week before, and he’s not afraid to break a child’s neck, but you’ve got to admire that). And then will return to any programming at all.
In other news, have I told you about my new gig at Canadian Bookshelf? Plans are afoot and they’re wonderful. Or that Heather Jessup came over to my house last week to deliver a jar of pickles (which, by the way, is the precise recipe for making me fall in love with you [oh, and Heather has a book coming out this fall with Gaspereau Press, and I’m very excited to read it])? Or that we’ve un-baby-proofed our apartment, and I have a desk again (with a couch right beside, so I have the option of typing whilst reclined, which is usually my preference). Or that we had a really lovely Easter weekend, and it was nice to drive home from visiting my parents and have it not be in a snowstorm. I also watched the Alfred Hitchcock film Beyond the Shadow of a Doubt, which was marvelously bookish and self-referential in a way that Scream thought was original fifty years later.
Anyway, as we don’t do blog posts about why we’re not writing blog posts, less of this, and then to bed, to bed, to bed.
April 20, 2011
Best book launch ever
We had the best time ever at the launch for Jessica Westhead’s story collection And Also Sharks. Jessica does most things as well as she writes stories, including throw parties, though she didn’t have anything to do with what, for us, was the evening’s best bit: a babysitter! But because of that babysitter, we got to indulge in fabulous company, drinks, an atmosphere redolent with popcorn and shark films as a backdrop. Jessica showed two awesome book trailers (you can see one here, from one of my favourite stories in the collection, which is also significant because it’s the only story I know that takes its form from blog comments), and read from her story Coconut. And then as a souvenir, Jessica’s husband turned us all into paperdolls.
April 20, 2011
Keep Toronto Reading video!
In which I make funny faces, over-enunciate and (quite obviously) talk without actually having prepared what to say. Hooray to Jen Knoch for once agan Keeping Toronto Reading over at the KIRBC. This year’s Keep Toronto Reading theme is books that have transformed you, and I chose Bronwen Wallace’s People You’d Trust Your Life To because it transformed me into a Bronwen Wallace devotee (and it did. I haven’t shut about this book since I read it). I know it will transform you similarly, and we’ll all be better for it.
April 19, 2011
Best Books About Bunnies
It’s that time of year again, when all the serious thinkers in the world start compiling lists of best books about bunnies. We’re still secular fundamentalists over here, but our inner pagans have happily appropriated Easter and all its spring-time loveliness (inc. Cadbury’s contributions to it). Plus we love rabbits–me: Miffy. Harriet: rabbits in general, which are “bunnies” always. Hate real rabbits though. Nasty creatures… But that’s another story. In the meantime, here are our favourite rabbits at the moment from the land of picture books.
Moon Rabbit/Brown Rabbit in the City by Natalie Russell. We have these books out of the library all the time, which give a laporine twist on the country mouse/city mouse scenario. The pictures are gorgeous, a bit retro, decorated with collagey patterned touches, and feature delightful things like teapots, guitars, and a double-decker bus. Moon Rabbit (which Harriet calls Moon Bunny) is about a city dwelling rabbit who looks out at the big moon and wonders if there is anyone else in the world like her. When she inadvertently wanders off into the outskirts of town, she meets a guitar-playing brown rabbit whose music makes her happy. They have fun together, until she begins to long for home, so she returns even though she’ll miss her friend, but he makes plans to see her soon. His visit is the subject of the second book, which is just as lovely.
Roslyn Rutabaga and the Biggest Hole on Earth by Marie Louise Gay. The illustrations here are vibrant, textured, and leap right 
off the page. Roslyn is a bouncy bunny with long ears and big dreams: she’s determined to dig the biggest hole on earth (and maybe even meet a penguin when she gets to the South Pole). She’s not sure where to dig the hole, however, and then once she determines where to start, she discovers she’s digging in a worm’s front yard, in mole’s living room, and in a dog’s bone storage area. Clearly underground is less barren than she ever imagined (and if I were preposterous, I would suppose that this story actually an allegory about European colonization). She’s just about discouraged when her dad comes outside and makes her realize (but in a most unsentimental fashion) that she can dig the biggest hole on earth in her imagination. And then they eat lunch.
Without You (and Me and You) by Genevieve Cote. We love, love, love Genevieve, who draws the best teapots, and this is the book that Harriet will receive as a gift on Sunday morning. This latest book is the story of two best friends (pig and rabbit) who have learned to celebrate their differences in theory, but find that day-to-day realities make the practice more difficult than they’d supposed. After an argument, they decide they don’t need one another anyway, but quickly discover that life is way less fun and interesting without a best friend to share it with. Not an allegory about European colonization, but a sweet and simple story that’s familiar to anyone and (spoiler alert) has a beautiful, happy ending.
The Velveteen Rabbit (Abridged) by Margery Williams, illustrated by Don Daily. My mom gave this to 
Harriet for Easter last year, and of course, it’s well known, but I highlight it here because the abridgement is great. For kids a bit too small to appreciate the full story, here is the story stripped down but not in a way that takes away from the plot or the prose.
The Quiet Book by Deborah Underwood, illustrated byRenata Liwska. Bunnies are just one of the creatures that features in this weird, wonderful book about the various kinds of quiet (“swimming under water quiet”, “Right before you yell “Surprise!” quiet”, “Trying not to hiccup quiet”). Not simply a list of quiets, a plot can be detected by the action in the pictures, but not entirely–for example, why was the little moose colouring on the wall? And we’re still trying to figure out how the little bear swimming underwater ended up with an injured tail. But I love that– picture books with as much subtext as a novel, and how the best ones are those you’ll never be altogether finished reading.
April 18, 2011
I have lost control
Harriet has now mastered the art of climbing up onto a chair in order to turn on the kitchen stereo, to turn up its volume (if necessary), and mostly to turn off The Current and replace it with something musical. Which means, basically, that it’ s all “Hippo in the Bathtub” all the time around here lately. I think that this is going to become a problem…
April 18, 2011
We read Room Magazine 34.1
I wasn’t planning to make a project of this, but I encountered so many wonderful things as I read through the latest issue of Room Magazine that I really had to share them. The cover, first of all, whose colours go so perfectly with the title, and this eye for detail is reflected in the design of the magazine all the way through. And it’s the case with every issue of Room, which is a feminist magazine run by a volunteer collective of women in Vancouver (and used to be called A Room of One’s Own, but decided to open up onto the world more).
Issue 34.1 is themed “Momentous”, and it’s their contest winners’ issue too. Though it reads more cohesively than you’d expect from that, and I forgot about the contest until I finished reading the magazine and reread the cover. I enjoyed Amy Kenny’s story “Chocolate Season” about a woman in an East Coast tourist town carrying on the family business after her father’s death. The full text of Chantal Gibson’s “The Mountain Pine Beetle Suite” is available to read, and it’s great, brutal, subtle and scary. And “The Goddess of Light & Dark”, which won the creative non-fiction category and one of the best things I’ve read lately, full stop, about the education that comes when the author becomes a clinical teaching associate at BC Women’s Hospital, a model and guide for students learning how to do pelvic exams: “Maybe revolutions are about knowledge”.
Sigal Samuel’s “Love and Other Irregular Verbs” is by a woman whose father has seen the women he’s loved as a portal to new languages, and how she learns these languages to erase the distance between them. I enjoyed the interview with Cathleen With about how her experiences teaching in Northern Canada have influenced her fiction, and the ethics of the decisions she’s made: “It’s about bearing witness; because there are many potential storytellers up there, and yet a lot of these kids are too busy being in it to sit down and write about it.”And I liked Wendy Marcus’s “Just John” about a mysterious neighbour and his legacy of plum trees.
I tried to read Nalo Hopkinson’s “Chance” but just couldn’t. I mention this only because Nalo Hopkinson has enough readers that she won’t even notice this one missing, but more because I am fascinated with my inability to read science fiction. I have so little patience with unpacking these stories, when I can find it for so many other works/genres. It is like the fantastical elements of these stories construct a barrier between me and the meat of the story, and I just can’t be bothered scrambling over it. Part of this is definitely my fault, but it’s also that there are some kinds of readers we were never meant to be.
The issue ends with several pieces that resonated with me: Laurie D. Graham’s poem “Say Here, Here”, about words, place and the depths beneath your feet; Christy Ann Conlin’s “Album”, which whisks its reader across decades and a continent; and “Six Reasons I Miss Being Pregnant” by Anne Panning and not just the “A free pass–however briefly– to wear giant corduory overalls”. And then Room’s backpages, which I always enjoy, which gives me the sense that as a Room reader, I am most certainly part of a wider community.
April 18, 2011
Mired in the fat books
Since I had a baby two years ago, my pile of books to-be-read has never been less than 50 books long. And the books that tend to have lingered have been long, non-fiction, or Great Expectations. This past week, I’ve made a point of picking up some of these (but not Great Expectations), so that’s what I’ve been doing. First, I read Irene Gammel’s book Looking for Anne of Green Gables, which I had trouble with, but ultimately enjoyed. I don’t have much truck with the idea of decoding fiction from clues in the author’s personal life. I mean, understanding an author’s background can provide a fictional work with new dimensions, but it’s not like the solution to a mathematical problem, and sometimes Gammel wrote like it was. (Sometimes she even knew how flimsy was the ground beneath her feet, so revelations would come with a caveat like, “Or maybe Maud never ate tofurkey, but it’s certainly something we can think about”). The best part of the book was the sense it provided of the literary world Anne of Green Gables was born into– what books and magazines had LM Montgomery been reading in the years before she wrote the novel? What with the proliferation of fictional orphans called Ann in the late nineteenth century? I also loved that Montgomery’s kitchen was also the Cavendish post office, and how handy that would have been for keeping private the arrival of rejection letters.
Next, I read Joan Didion’s After Henry, which hadn’t been lingering on my shelf but rather was too tall 
for the shelf, had been resting on top of the books, then had fallen behind them. So I’d forgotten I’d even had it, and picked it up without hesitation when I found it because it was her third collection of essays (after Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album). It lacked the magic of the other two, perhaps because it was not nostalgic and I think nostalgia is what Didion writes best. But it’s smart, and its treatment of the 1988 Democratic and Republican conventions was incredibly timely as we are in the midst of our own federal election. The essay “Insider Baseball” said it all. I loved her criticism of Patty Hearst’s memoir. And the final piece “Sentimental Journeys” kept me up well into the night on Friday, wrapt by her brilliance and challenged by so many ideas that made me uncomfortable. Didion is such an extraordinary writer.
And I decided to follow that with a collection of her late husband’s work, Regards: The Collection Non-Fiction of John Gregory Dunne, which is American-sized, but I love it, and is exactly what you’d expect from somebody who was Dominick Dunne’s brother and Joan Didion’s spouse. I spent this afternoon enjoying his essays about baseball, which is saying something. Now onto a bunch of book reviews. And when I finish this book, I’m going to move onto one that is going to take me ages, but if I don’t get around to it now, I never will. The Collected Stories of John Cheever for the love of the short story, and for its Mad Men-ishness. I am looking forward. Bear with me.
April 16, 2011
A stop on the Sarah Selecky virtual blog tour (with prizes!)
Sarah Selecky’s writing has been published in The Walrus, Geist Magazine, Prairie Fire, The New Quarterly, Event and The Journey Prize Anthology. Her short story collection, This Cake is for the Party, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize, shortlisted for the Commonwealth Book Prize, and longlisted for the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award.
Thanks to Sarah for making Pickle Me This a stop on her virtual blog tour. It has been truly lovely having her stop by.
I have taken a leave of absence from Toronto this winter. I’ve been lucky enough to hide myself away in one of my most favourite parts of Ontario: Prince Edward County. For two whole months, I have been house sitting in a beautiful home, all alone, with a big bathtub and a fireplace and a view of the river. There is nothing for me to do here except write.
My plan was to come out here and write every single day. I let all of my students know that I was on sabbatical and I put a hold on my editing and teaching work. I am working on something new – a book about writing – and I was sure that I would be productive and focused while on retreat. I thought that by the end of my time here, I’d have a good chunk of my first draft written.
The truth: I have not written very much while I’ve been on my writing retreat.
When the glittery carnival that was the Scotiabank Giller Prize happened last fall, it was a complete surprise. At first, I thought I could keep up with my regular life, that it wouldn’t be that big of a deal. But my days quickly became busy and strange. There wasn’t enough time for me to do Giller stuff and keep my regular life running smoothly. With all the interviews and phone calls that came each day, I could barely keep teaching, let alone do any writing. I started taking Gravol at night so I could sleep (thank you Susan Swan for that advice). Eventually, I succumbed to bi-weekly meltdowns (likely due to the aforementioned sleep deprivation) where I would cry my eyes out for about ten minutes and then get up, wash my face, brush my hair, and answer the phone or go to a cafe for an interview with whatever journalist I had an appointment with that day. I felt like the media could find me everywhere. A television crew spent twelve hours with me one day. My husband took that day off work so he could be in the footage, and then he ended up taking a few more personal days, just to make sure I remembered to eat and drink while I was doing other interviews. He also answered my phone for me and took messages. He made a little clipboard with my schedule on it for each day of the week.
Those autumn weeks were one hundred percent nutso. And amazing.
But I was just so – unprepared for it all. So by the time December came around, I felt depleted, exhausted, and completely out of touch with my family, my friends, and myself. I felt like a soggy orange rind that had been totally juiced – I was just the pulpy skin left over. Now, when I think back to last fall, many of my memories are blurry and unformed, like I wasn’t even there. It was official: I’d hit burnout.
So I packed up my suitcase, my laptop, and a box of books and I moved out to Prince Edward County for this writing retreat.
As I write this, I am watching a pair of swans float in the river just out the window. I realized today that I have only five more days left on retreat.
So, what have I done for the past two months?
I watched the entire Friday Night Lights series on DVD, knitted a purple hat and scarf, learned how to make sauerkraut by hand, finally read a book by Malcom Gladwell, attempted to write a song on the electric piano, wrote long handwritten letters to friends in faraway places, went cross-country skiing on the frozen river, checked my Twitter account, developed an addiction to raw cacao, learned the names of the three species of woodpecker that come to the bird feeder (Hairy, Downy and Pileated), listened to coyotes howling at the Supermoon, took long drives on country roads, stared into the eyes of cows, canoed in the river during the spring thaw, and drank shot glasses of locally-made maple syrup straight up.
Have I wasted my time out here, or what? I’m a writing teacher. Every day in my work, I try to help people develop a daily writing practice. I’m all about commitment to the craft: that’s my thing. I’m supposed to be writing about writing, for crying out loud! So, why didn’t I take my own advice? How can I tell people to write every day, when I don’t even do it myself?
Here’s the thing: I know I’m not going to have the energy to write another book unless I take some serious time off from writing. Not writing is important: it’s restorative. Taking a break from the work is also a part the work. Nobody really talks about that part of being a writer, and I know why they don’t. It’s scary. When I’m writing, I feel plugged in and energized and in sync. But when I’m not writing, I feel out of it. I have the very real fear that I’ll never be able to write anything ever again. When you look at the stiff, dark branches of trees in the winter, isn’t it hard to imagine those same trees all lush and full of leaves?
But winter happens. Then spring comes.
Yesterday, I sat down and wrote a rough outline for my new book. Five days left to write, and I just sat down and did it. I’m not going to come close to finishing a first draft in five days, but that’s okay, because after taking half a year off, I finally feel like writing again.
Leave a comment, and you will be entered for a giveaway to win a free copy of This Cake Is for the Party. And one lucky person who visits all of the participating blog tour stops will win an e-reader.
