November 18, 2010

Behind every TPL Librarian…

In my experience, behind every Toronto Public Library librarian, there is a little bit of awesome. Take TPL Librarian Martha Baillie for instance, whose awesome behind her is the acclaimed and wondrous The Incident Report. I’ve already mentioned our local librarian Mariella, who goes around the world telling stories, but we get to hear her in our neighbourhood every week. A whole lot of awesome, I thought, but it turned out to not even be the half of it.

For the last month, we’ve been attending the toddler program at the Lillian H. Smith branch, being just on the verge of having outgrown Spadina Road’s Baby Time. And we love it– Harriet gets to run around, gaze at big kids, misbehave, sing songs, play games, do the beanbag song, and hear stories read by Joanne, who we adored from the get-go. Back at Spadina, I was telling Mariella about how much we were enjoying it, and she asked me if we’d read Joanne’s books.

“Joanne has books?”  I asked. Of course she does, and Mariella directed us to Our Corner Grocery Store and City Alphabet. The marvelous Joanne is actually Joanne Schwartz, who is as talented at writing books as she is at reading them. And I’ve really enjoyed them, her text perfectly complementing the images by photographer Matt Beam and illustrator Laura Beingessner. Both are generically urban enough to be from anywhere, but I can’t help but see Toronto on every page. Both books, in very different ways, celebrating urban communities and particular uniquenesses that characterize the places where we live. 

November 17, 2010

More thoughts on Emma Donoghue's Room

I liked Emma Donoghue’s Room when I read it last month, though I valued it less as literature than as a plot-driven novel constructed from an amazingly rendered point of view. Though Jack as narrator was key to the book’s stunning spell, his limited perspective also kept the book from achieving multiple dimensions. I said as much in my review, but I’ve come up with a few things to say since. And I will say them now in point form, because a certain small child kept me up most of last night and I am really, really tired:

• The Britishisms– did anybody notice these? I know Donoghue is Irish, so maybe it’s Irishisms I mean, but I know them from Britain. Throughout the text, I’d come across them and wonder where these people were supposed to live, their figures of speech so various. “Dead spit” I thought was a Jackism for “spitting image”, because I’d never heard of the former, until I came across it in another novel recently. And there are other examples of ways that Americans don’t talk– I wonder why an editor never picked up on this?
• I wanted to see what a man would think of this book, and I had a feeling that the gripping elements of the plot would pique my husband’s interest, so when I finished the book, I handed it to him and told him to give it a read. Do note that he knew nothing about the book, and he never saw its dust jacket (which was put away for safe keeping, of course). He finished the book and said that the first half of the book was amazing, the suspense was killer. Where were they? Had their been a nuclear holocaust or an environmental disaster? Was Old Nick a protector from a now unsafe world, and she was paying him with sex for the shelter? He had no idea what was going on. Which is so interesting to me, who went into the book knowing the entire plot beforehand thanks to publicity, friends’ reports, and ye old dust jacket. I wonder which of us got Room more the way it was intended to be?
• I read James Wood’s review in The London Review of Books, and he highlighted something I’d never considered: “Does anyone really imagine that Jack’s inner life, with his cracks about Pizza Houses and horse stables and high-fives, is anything like five-year-old Felix Fritzl’s? The real victim’s imaginings and anxieties must have been abysmal, in the original sense (unimaginable, bottomless), and the novel’s sure-footed appropriation of this unknowability seems offensive precisely in its sure-footedness.” I don’t know if I’m offended, but I’d never considered how utterly unrealistic the story is, how much it is unabashedly a fairy tale. Because so many elements of the story are startlingly realized (the maternal bond in particular), we forget that such a bond being fostered in that situation would be tremendously unlikely. Donoghue has taken a very particular story to tell us something very general, but I think the lack of particularities may be a serious weakness.

November 17, 2010

Bringing Books To Life

Tonight I gave a talk entitled “Bringing Books to Life” to a friend’s Early Childhood Education class in Literacy at Ryerson University. I knattered away about stuff and such, and read a bunch of stories. Concluding with one of Mem Fox’s many quotable quotes:

Reading isn’t merely being able to pronounce the words correctly, a fact that surprises most people. Reading is being able to make sense from the marks on the page. Reading is being able to make the print mean something. Reading is getting the message.

Books Read

• Sunday Morning by Judith Viorst
• Sleeping Dragons All Around by Sheree Fitch
• I Can Read With My Eyes Shut by Dr. Seuss
• Where Is the Green Sheep by Mem Fox
• Bubble Trouble by Margaret Mahy

Books Mentioned

• Reading Magic by Mem Fox
• “Sharing the Mayhem” from Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman
• Better Than Life by Daniel Pennac
• How the Heather Looks by Joan Bodger
• The Crack in the Teacup by Joan Bodger

November 17, 2010

That mythical village

“The novels are, of course, paradoxical. They deal with violent death and violent emotions, but they are novels of escape. We are required to feel no real pity for the victim, no empathy for the murderer, no sympathy for the falsely accused. For whomever the bell tolls, it doesn’t toll for us. Whatever our secret terrors, we are not the body on the library floor. And, in the end, by the grace of Poirot’s little grey cells, all will be well– except, of course, with the murderer, but he deserves all that’s coming to him. All the mysteries will be explained, all the problems solved, and peace and order will return to that mythical village which, despite its above-average homicide rate, never really loses its tranquillity or its innocence.” — P.D. James, Talking About Detective Fiction

November 16, 2010

We’ve got ourselves a logo!

Very excited. Plans are coming together for Canada Reads 2011 Indies, and I’m looking forward to revealing all come December 1st. Until then, may I whet your appetite with this fine logo, courtesy of our kind friends at CreateMeThis?

November 16, 2010

Penny Dreadful by Laurel Snyder

On the rare occasions I read YA, it will be a book I used to love, or a book that refers to books I used to love (such as A Wrinkle In Time, which was why I read Rebecca Stead’s beautiful When You Reach Me). Of course, as Laurel Snyder’s latest novel Penny Dreadful is brand new, I read it for the latter reason. On her blog she’s posted a list of books loved by her protagonist, books referred to in the text– Emily of New Moon, Little Women, Betsy-Tacy etc. etc. And this gratuituous bookishness convinced me that this was a book I had to read.

I wasn’t sold short– we learn on page 5 that Penelope has just finished an Anne of Green Gables book and is having trouble deciding what to read next. Later she wonders if a situation is like a disturbing book with an innocuous cover, “like Bridge to Terabithia“. Penelope Gray’s biggest problem is that her life is nothing like the characters in the books she devours, and she makes a wish that things could get more interesting…

And then they do, but not quite in the way she’d imagined. Through a series of events, her family ends up moving to a small town and encountering a cast of wacky characters, and what with all the wacky characters, a winding river, and the wishing well that started it all, Penny becomes assured of her place in the narrative that is her life. That she will find the hidden treasure after all, and save the day etc. Except that she’s not a character in a book (except that she is a character in the book. Fun!), and has to learn that even if things don’t work out to a perfect conclusion, life can still be okay.

Penny Dreadful is a timeless, lovely middle-grade novel with much bookish appeal. Made very rich by and a fitting tribute to the marvelous works it alludes to.

November 16, 2010

Judith Viorst-a-thon

My Viorst-a-thon begins tonight, after a few weeks of brewing. Which began when I got her picture book Sunday Morning out of the library, and completely fell in love with its mischievous narrator, silhouette illustrations, and wonderful Viorstian prose. And then I was turned on to the fact that Judith Viorst has also written a memoir about the adult Alexander (of the no good, very bad day), a comedy murder mystery, psychology books, and I already knew about her poetry. I want to read it all! But how, as my to-be-read pile continues to totter and grow with every day? By banishing the rest of it, of course, and immersing myself in Judith Viorst and the massive range of her work for as long as it takes. Everything else can wait…

November 16, 2010

The Royal Wedding: My Hunger For Good News and Happy Endings

I don’t believe in fairy tales, except for the “happily ever after”, and I think that’s meant to be the part that’s suspect. Even so, it’s totally baffling why I started crying this morning upon hearing on the radio that Prince William and Kate Middleton had become engaged. I don’t really care about celebrity weddings, I think any country in this century would be better off without a royal family (unless, of course, I was the queen), princess fetishization makes me sick, and back when Prince William was everybody’s favourite pin-up, he was never ever mine– so why am I so overjoyed? Why am I fully prepared to set a clock for whatever o’ clock in the morning one day next summer, and all set to run out right away to buy a commemorative plate, or cup and saucer?

I was only two when Diana married Charles in 1981, though I do remember the excitement of Prince Andrew’s wedding to Sarah Ferguson a few years later. What I remember most about the first royal wedding, however, is that my Nana had their commemorative plates displayed in a rack in her dining room, and that we totally loved Diana. To be so unjaded– I long for that. I learned the expression “on the rocks” from the headline of a supermarket tabloid a few years later, and I remember my mom reassuring me that Chuck and Di were not so– the newspaper was a rag, she said. It hadn’t occured to me that Prince Charles might want to be somebody’s tampon, never not even once.

This evening in a nostalgic mood, I referred to the authoritative text on the 1981 Royal Wedding, which was The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 3/4. How he felt it was his “patriotic duty” to hang bunting in the street, and his disappointment in his father whose celebration consisted in hanging a Charles and Diana tea towel on the door. “ROYAL WEDDING DAY!!!!!/ How proud I am to be English!/ Foreigners must be sick as pigs.”

Anyway, I do believe in “happily ever after”, though the world keeps conspiring to prove me wrong. Not always, however– miracles happen. Remember the time my next door neighbour rose from the dead? And now Tabatha Southey has gone and been returned to the Globe and Mail, because they were clearly nothing without her. So maybe William and Kate will stay as happy as they look, and I’ll never have to explain what “on the rocks” means to Harriet, or if I do it will only be in the context of Jordan or some Kardashian.

November 16, 2010

How to get hold of a book

“…I went off to work, stopping on the way at Kensington Public Library to get a copy of John Henry Newman’s Apologia, which I had long promised Maisie Young. She could quite well have procured it for herself during all those weeks, disabled as she was, but she belonged to that catagory of society, by no means always the least educated, who are always asking how they can get hold of a book; they know very well that one buys shoes from a shoeshop and groceries from the grocer’s but to find and enter a bookshop is not somehow within the range of their imagination.” — from Muriel Spark’s Loitering With Intent

November 15, 2010

Author Interviews @ Pickle Me This: Zoe Whittall on The Middle Ground

Photo by Shannon Webb Campbell

Zoe Whittall is author of novels Holding Still For As Long As Possible and Bottle Rocket Hearts, which was named a Globe & Mail Best Book of 2007. She won the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Dayne Ogilvie Award in 2008, was shortlisted for the 2010 ReLit Award, and is currently adapting both novels for screen. Her poetry books include The Best Ten Minutes of Your Life, The Emily Valentine Poems and Precordial Thump. She edited the anthology Geeks, Misfits & Outlaws in 2003. She lives in Toronto, where she works as a journalist.

When the clocks went back two weekends ago, I used my extra hour to devour Zoe Whittall’s latest novel. The Middle Ground is short, fast-paced and plot-driven, part of the Rapid Reads Series by Orca Book Publishers. I was particularly interested in the book as a tool for adults with low literacy, permitting them access to the bookish magic that so many of us are lucky to take for granted.

Zoe was kind enough to answer some of my questions about Rapid Reads, and writing a book like The Middle Ground.

I: Can you tell me about Rapid Reads? How did you come to be involved in writing for the series?

ZW: I learned about the Rapid Reads publishing program at Orca through my agent, Samantha Haywood at TLA. She knew they were looking for authors, and I had just finished writing HSFALAP and was taking a creative breather between big projects. I also knew I was about to start working on the script for the Bottle Rocket Hearts film. I was drawn to the idea of writing a short book that was straightforward and high on plot and suspense. I’ve never been that great at plot, so I figured this would be a really good exercise for me as a writer, and something that would help me when I started writing the script, because you always have to be mindful of action and conflict in every single scene. I read a whole bunch of mystery novels as research into how to craft suspense, and built on that. I’d spent years reading a lot of poetic prose, experimental narratives and literary novels, so switching gears this way was very helpful, I think, in the long run.

I: What direction were you given by the publisher?

ZW: I was given very specific direction by my publisher, and wrote several drafts of plot outlines before they approved it and we signed the contracts. Basically, the book had so be short, with simple vocabulary, employ no flashbacks, have no more than a handful of characters, and it had to move forward as fast as possible. It sounds easier than it was.

I: What challenges were surprising?

ZW: I only had a limited amount of pages in which to explore who Missy is and why she would decide to make so many unlikely or irrational choices. I read a fair amount about Stockholm syndrome and how different personalities might react to crisis or violence. I thought a lot about how she might feel about the three major aspects of her life – her job and financial stability, her love life, and her child and family – and if all three of those constants in her life were disrupted in one day, the same day that she is a victim of a crime, how would she deal?

I wrote the book while visiting the small town where my partner grew up, so I felt like the setting was easy to settle into it. I also spent my childhood on a farm, and identify with rural life, so that was comfortable. But Missy is about as different from me as you can imagine, so that was a challenge, but a great one. It’s like playing dress-up in a way.

It was challenging to orchestrate the crime scene as the end – I spoke with some police and former police to know how the cops would enter the space, and if Missy would be considered a victim or accomplice, all of those technical details. I drew a lot of diagrams, about things like “if his back is turned, and she’s by the garbage bins, and the people run towards the door, who would be able to see who, and how would they move fast in this short period of time? What could she say that would provoke him to shoot, where could she be shot so that she wouldn’t be die..” those kinds of details, etc.

I: Did you have to know Missy as deeply as you’d come to understand a character from your other novels? Was there a different way of going about coming to understand what she was?

ZW: Because I wrote this book in about three months, the bulk of it in a few weeks, I wasn’t as immersed in the story as I was with Bottle Rocket Hearts (ten years) and Holding Still (three years). I went about understanding her more methodically, strategically almost. All of my other characters generally appeared to me in those magical unconscious moments and, and then once I figured out some of their basic personality traits and personal histories, I slowly started making them do things. I knew Missy had to go through the story I’d decided ahead of time, so I got to know her in terms of what I know had to happen.

I: What is considered “simple” vocabulary? The vocabulary level didn’t seem terribly conspicuous as I read your book– did you have to work against your own writerly instincts to make it work, or did it come fairly naturally?

ZW: Sentences had to be shorter, and vocabulary had to be at a certain grade level. I can’t remember which one. When I handed in my first draft, the editor said they had to take it down a few notches with regards to some word choices, but that’s about it.

I: As a writer, what lessons did you learn about plot?

ZW: I had to insert some sort of conflict into each chapter, she always had to be making a decision or reacting somehow, so that it would move along. I suppose I learned not to be afraid of action, because it can be difficult to write in a way that is not cliche and television-like.

I: I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to be an adult with low literacy, and having most learning resources at your level geared towards children or idiots. So what a wonderful novel The Middle Ground is, in addition to a riveting read for anyone. Have you had the opportunity to receive any reader feedback on your novel?

ZW: Yes, it must be very difficult. I have not had any opportunity to hear feedback yet. Because it was just nominated for a Golden Oak, I will be making some author appearances in libraries and I hope to meet some readers at that point. It’s an entirely new market to me, so I’m looking forward to connecting with potential new readers.