October 13, 2021

Gleanings

• And so, I find myself squarely in the land of paradox. Learning to live and co-exist in the both/and. The contradictions and complexity. That we are both but one in the universe, and the universe itself. Both the inconsequentiality and significance of it all.
• I’m sure some people wonder why the heck I do this blog for little fanfare or acclaim or cash damn dollars. I always come back to this answer, that I love it and so I am constantly paying myself. Don’t get me wrong I also love dollars, but I can’t think about them, I just have to think about what I love.
• So I kept on doing the work that was before me, despite being consumed with self-doubt.
• The older I get, the more intentionally I think about who I am and build my work around that.
• Soup is the great solace of autumn, pots of turkey noodle, roasted squash, comforting borscht, potato and kale, Greek lentil.
• And, it turns out, I don’t have too many clothes. What I had was a wardrobe overstuffed with dreams and sadness. And now I don’t. And my mood, my mental health, everything, is better for it.
• For the frog in the tomato bed, the ladybug in the shower, for the person I saw swimming in the ocean and mistook for a seal until they emerged and I realized they are not a seal but a selkie and who has since become an almost friend. Who would not want a selkie as a friend?
• I would argue that it’s art too, because it shows me the world in a new way.
• When I contemplate why the fresh eggs brought such delight, I realize the mind needs to be serene to see the beauty in the ordinary.

October 13, 2021

It’s art too

“I would argue that it’s art too, because it shows me the world in a new way.” —Alice Zorn, articulating the very thing I was pondering when I took in the leaf that landed on my picnic blanket yesterday, its seemingly random and yet so very specific placement, what does it mean, the kind of pondering one is prone to when one is reading a new book by Shawna Lemay

October 12, 2021

One More Time

I know that loving swimming is not a substitute for having a personality, but it’s come to constitute a large component of mine, which I sometimes think might be me hopping on a bandwagon, as I’m prone to doing, back around the time that #WildSwimming became a trending hashtag. But then I remember how much swimming has meant to be always, and all the sometimes impractical places I’ve jumped in—the Danube, the Sea of Japan, a duck pond in the middle of our Midlands town where there was nowhere else for a dip (and let me tell you I got a rash from each and every one of these)—and I think that loving swimming has been a part of me for a long time. And, since June 18, after a very long hiatus, I’ve been back to swimming on the regular. As in, I last went swimming this afternoon, and before that was yesterday, and my next swim is scheduled for tomorrow.

How can a single life contain such riches?

But it’s yesterday’s swim I want to talk about now, my last lake swim of the season, which comes two weeks after which I’d previously thought was my last lake swim of the season, though I think I really mean it this time, because today is the twelfth of October after all. I wore my bathing suit on the bus down to the beach, and brought a towel and a pair of underwear to change into, though I wasn’t making any promises. I don’t like swimming in cold water, really, am physically incapable. But the forecast was calling for 20 degrees and anything is possible. I was with my family and our friends, and I told that they were going to watch me dip my toe and then turn around again, because I’m certainly no polar bear. But then it wasn’t cold. A little bracing, yes, but getting right in was only a pleasure.

And then I was floating, the waves large and dramatic, but playful enough, and I couldn’t swim, really, with the water so rough, plus I’d left my goggles at home, and so instead I just let the lake carry me, and everything in the world was reduced to the essential, to blue, to water and sky, and me, and the odd seagull, and I could have floated forever, save for my people on the beach, and when I returned to them, I couldn’t stop smiling, what we call my “resting beach face,” a goofy grin which doesn’t even begin to equal the euphoria of the experience, how it makes me feel so small and alive and connected to a big incredible world, blood coursing through my veins like the waves onto the beach, and just the sheer power of it all, I can feel it, the way the beach and the lake feel like the edge of the world, the beginning of all possibility.

October 6, 2021

Apples Never Fall, by Liane Moriarty

Liane Moriarty is a master of fiction, her genius undermined by her popularity, which makes many readers suspicious. Because how good can a writer possibly be if her bestselling novel gets made into a series by Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman? A question to which I reply: she is so good. Truly Madly Guilty and Big Little Lies are both fantastic novels weaving BIG PLOT with the most sophisticated characterization, her fictional people complex and multi-dimensional, revealing their secrets in rich and surprising fashion which means the plot twists generally deepen the story instead of undermine it. I LOVE HER. The plots themselves undeniably frothy and too much, but in the best way, anchored by the human people at the heart of them. And her latest, Apples Never Fall, does not disappoint.

Which is a relief, because her previous novel, Nine Perfect Strangers, arrived as a bit of a letdown, Moriarty having come up with a fantastic cast of characters, each with luscious backstories, but it all failed to coalesce with an over-the-top preposterous plot and would have made a better short story collection. Because the trouble with a novel about perfect strangers is their lack of connection to each other, which is the kind of spark that lights the fuse.

In Apples Never Fall, however, she’s made her characters a family, which means there are sparks aplenty, decades of grudges and misunderstanding. Joy and Stan Delaney are celebrated tennis coaches whose own children were raised in an ultra-competitive, high intensity atmosphere, each of whom knows they’ve proved disappointments in their own special way. And when Joy suddenly disappears and Stan appears to be the prime suspect, each is afraid to voice their suspicions for fear they might be true.

It gets worse—detectives find a t-shirt soaked with Joy’s blood. Stan is becoming more and more difficult. There there is the matter of the curious house guest, a wayward girl who’d stayed with Joy and Stan after fleeing an abusive relationship a few months before whose story is not quite what it seems. Each of the four Delaney children suspicious of their father, but also each other, and wondering what else they know about their family might turn out to be founded on a lie?

I liked this novel so much for the way it complicates all kinds of ideas about family, marriage, truth and lies, about domestic violence, and anger, and the ways in which we know and fail to know each other. I love how each twist had us understanding these characters on an even deeper level, and how these twists also demonstrate what these characters don’t even know about themselves. And I love how all the threads come together at the end of the book in a way that was surprising, and even refreshing, such a perfect culmination of a most enjoyable read.

October 5, 2021

Gleanings

• As I awake in the mornings, the fall sun late to arise, pulling the covers up to my chin attempting to avoid the nippy air around me, my brain and body are beg for just five more minutes. But as my feet hit the ground, and I head out the door, my experience so far, hasn’t been anything miraculous, but more of a quiet, contentment of just being.
• here’s hoping that the tough-talking swaggering braggarty chick that i always wanted to be still lives inside me…i think she does.
• Writers have been describing residential schools for decades. So have the elders. But, we have not seen what we were seeing.
• So I was thinking all this and wasn’t falling asleep. Suddenly I wanted to hear Charley Pride once again.
• I feel like there are bubbles of the past around my house that I walk into by accident, and am transported.
• More music: listening to Prince “Gett Off” and the line about 23 positions in a one-night stand just seems improbable, or maybe even indicative of trouble, like something wasn’t working.
• If I knew the story, I don’t think I’d bother writing it.
• the way orange sneaks up on you
• That morning light, the shadows. Light fades into shadow — it always attracts me.
• I’m only now, in this late stage in life, this third act, really seeing the beauty in art, although it has hovered on the perimeter of my consciousness for years. 
• If I were a millennial, I would get a tattoo of a bassoon on a part of my body I wouldn’t mind showing to strangers, such as the back of my hand or my bicep muscle.
• The constancy of the histrionics of these angry people is utterly exhausting to decent folk who are finding their patience and tolerance stretched to the max. This cannot go on.

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October 4, 2021

On Self-Respect

In January, I was attending a virtual book club discussion about my latest novel when one of the attendees mentioned a particular Goodreads Review of my book, and I didn’t know anything about it.

And here’s the thing: I really didn’t. This isn’t just me trying to seem above-it-all, like someone who doesn’t google myself on a regular basis. While my character is overwhelmingly constructed of hundreds of strung-together disciplinary lapses, in this one single area I’ve managed to be resolute. Goodreads is for readers, and it’s not for me, and there generally isn’t anything helpful or constructive that the site’s users can tell me about myself or the work I do.

But it’s taken me three books and several years to reach this point. When my first two books came out, I was so absolutely craving anything in the way of feedback that I read every single Goodreads Reviews, and “liked” them, even the critical ones. Desperately seeking validation, of course, an acknowledgement that my art existed and therefore I did. I was hungry for feedback, the same way any of us is hungry for feedback when we make anything. A response from the question we put into the universe: “Is there anybody out there? Does anybody care that I am here?”

Lately, however, feedback has become less interesting to me. A symptom of being in my 40s perhaps, and caring much less about what others think. But this lack of interest is also because of how feedback functions as a distraction, as noise that keeps me from hearing/knowing what I think about things and forming a deeper understanding.

Lately, feedback has become less interesting to me.

I think about this in particular in connection to politics and social justice, where the shallow memeification of activism serves to simplify complex issues and attempts codify the correct way to think and speak, which I don’t think is a bad thing per se (“cancel culture” or “political correctness gone mad,” yawn), but instead the function of a movement created by young people, and my main problem with it is just that such directives serve to obfuscate my own thoughts and ideas, and I would like to continue the never-ending project unpacking, interrogating, of getting to the bottom of it all.

A while ago, the author Deryn Collier (whose thoughts on creating and creativity I appreciate so much) shared an Instagram post with the line, “We do not need artists to have thick skins.” About how being sensitive to the world around us was essential to the labour of creating art, and thick skins only serve to protect us from feeling.

But I, of course, had been thinking a lot about this idea of feedback and noise, and so spun the idea off in that general direction. And determined that no, it is true, that a rhinoceros hide is not what anybody needs, save for the rhinoceroses, and instead what we people need most to respond to the world and its overwhelming messaging—telling us who we are and what we ought to think about the things we make, and about the kind of world we want to live in—is something solid at our core. Not solid so as to be unmoveable, unchangeable, because we’re human after all, but still, something intrinsic that can remind if us who we are and what we know.

In a recent blog post, my friend Amy Rhoda Brown declared this “something intrinsic” as trust.

“I’m not sure if fear needs an antidote, actually,” writes Brown in this post about fear and survival, about venturing into a dark place and ultimately finding light:

“An antidote neutralizes, and maybe fear shouldn’t be neutralized. Maybe it should be seen and respected and understood.

What fear needs is a companion, something that can make scary situations easier to face, failures easier to recover from. Something that can turn risk into opportunity.

I think the best companion to fear is trust.

Trust in yourself that you can recover when — not if — things go wrong. And trust in the people who love you, that when you fall, someone, or many someones, will be there to help you get back up again.”

Which was precisely what Joan Didion was writing about in my favourite of her essays, “On Self Respect”: ““To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is to potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent.”

What we need most to respond to the world and its overwhelming messaging—telling us who we are and what we ought to think about the things we make, and about the kind of world we want to live in—is something solid at our core.

Didion goes on, “To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect.”

(And my favourite line, “[C]haracter—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s life—is the source from which self-respect springs.”)

So how do you cultivate it? Didion, who prides herself on specificity, is uncharacteristically vague in this one aspect, although she gives a hint in the line, “That kind of self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth.”

And so for answers, we to turn to Phosphorescence, by Julia Baird, one of my favourite reads of this year, a book I first borrowed from the library, and then I bought a copy for myself, and even purchased another for a friend currently undergoing cancer treatments. Subtitled, “A Memoir of Finding Joy When the World Goes Dark,” Phosphorescence is literally about finding that light from within, about locating that intrinsic core, that trust, one’s very own compass points. It’s a book about the uses of awe, connection, of purpose, of learning to listen and to see. And it’s wonderful.

 “After all this exploring, we should be gazing steadily outward, beginning to find others again, and the brilliance of the world outside our doors,” Baird writes.

And that’s the secret, I think, to uncovering that trust, that necessary self-respect to be a human with a solid core. Not navel-gazing, not at all. The secret is awe, and wonder. It’s remembering to look up, and to ponder the nature of the universe, its infinity, and to be continually bowled over by what a miracle it is that any of us get to be a part of it at all.

“After all this exploring, we should be gazing steadily outward, beginning to find others again, and the brilliance of the world outside our doors

Julia Baird

September 30, 2021

Fight Night, by Miriam Toews

Nobody in any of Miriam Toews’ novels is ever any good at being anybody but the people who they are, which are people who are so achingly real, human, complicated, messy, furious, alive. It’s also impressive that while Toews returns to the same themes over and over in her work, in particular the experiences of contemporary secular Mennonites, she never writes the same book twice, pushing the limits of point of view and just what a novel can possibly contain, and her reader gets the sense that she’s actively resisting anything close to boredom. Which means her books are never boring, even if—as is the case in her latest, Fight Night—not much actively happens in the way of plot at all.

But no matter. Who needs plot when you’ve got voice? And to that end: meet Swiv, whose point of view propels Fight Night from start to finish, a Toewsian voice if there is such a thing. A young, precocious misfit who is wise beyond her years, Swiv had been kicked out of school for fighting and spends her days with her eccentric grandmother watching Call the Midwife while her very pregnant mother, an actress, rehearses for a play. Swiv’s aunt and grandfather have both died by suicide, and she’s concerned her mother is headed for a similar fate, all the while she’s terrified her grandmother might pass away at any being, kept alive as she is on a cocktail of various medications.

The novel’s structure is a letter Swiv is writing to her father as she anticipates the birth of her new sibling and also her imminent abandonment by everyone she loves. She doesn’t actually know where her father lives. Swiv is terrified, and taking responsbility for all the adults in her life who are being overwhelmed by their own burdens.

And have I mentioned that the novel is terrifically funny? If you’re familiar with Toews, you’ll already know that. The gap between the world as it is and how Swiv’s sees it is very funny, as is her fierce dignity, and her prudishness in contrast to her ribald grandmother who gets quite a kick of mortifying her. But of course, (and if you’ve read Toews, you’ll know this too) it’s also heartbreaking, especially that this young person is carrying the entire world on her shoulders.

So there is laughter, yes, and there is crying. There is life, and there is death. There’s also a trip to California, a perilous plane journey home, Jay Gatbsy perpetually knocking at the door, busses and boats, and books sawed in half so they’re easier to hold. There is love and there is rage and there is ferocity and gentleness, and so many ways to keep fighting, so many reasons to fight.

September 29, 2021

Gleanings

• The process shows me that diversions and detours are as important in writing as they are in travel. And as in climbing, there are no shortcuts.
• This year I’ve been feeding my creative side, hoping that it will grow stronger.
• With uncertainty, (and a dash of contempt), I decide instead to just be in the moment, watching and noticing the whales, no recording or pictures, and risk the fleetingness of the moment of simply seeing the white bodies of the magnificent belugas swim by.
• In the end I feel I am hardwired to be this way — it’s how I respond to and live in the world. But still the question what is it trying to tell me? is a good one.
• If you thought SSJ was largely made of Love-To-Do-Lists, you were right.
• If I ever need a reminder of what it truly means to ‘live in the moment’ I only have to watch Doug. I am so thankful that he appears to be content, and that so many of his moments appear to be filled with joy. 
• Really. Keep the faith. Anything is possible.
• I wonder, was I too close to see her as a woman? Or did I have so few stories from her life outside of these roles that I couldn’t see her as anything else?
• You know there are times I have thought it would be okay to send out some good vibes, a kind of secular prayer of sorts, to the unvaxed, at least to those sitting on the fence, a little unsure. And maybe the above would suffice.

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September 28, 2021

Getaway

“I can’t believe we’re going camping tomorrow,” Iris kept repeating on Thursday as we moved through the motions of a perfectly ordinary weekday. (A perfectly ordinary weekday. Can you imagine? Getting breakfast on, walking kids to school, greeting friends at the school gate? And can you imagine what a pleasure are these motions, especially after so many months without them?”) And I felt exactly the same as she did, back on the roller coaster of work and school, deadlines and dates on the calendar, even if that roller coaster moves more cautiously than it once did, easier on the twists and turns. Because once we’re stuck in our routine (and I love our routine. For months and months, the familiarity and support of our routine was everything I longed for, but still) it seems impossible to imagine any other way of doing things. But in July, with still no idea what the near future would hold, I’d booked a camping trip, just to keep summer going for a little bit longer, and because I had this suspicion we might find ourselves in need of a getaway.

And so we went, impossibly. On Thursday both children were learning at their desks, and on Friday they were helping us pitch a tent on the shores of Lake Erie where we spent two days offline and in nature, and it was wonderful, and significant for being our first off-season camping venture. Even more significantly: our last outdoor swims of 2021 as well in the churning waters of this great lake (our third Grade Lake in as many months!).

A reminder that sometimes what makes the impossible possible is one simple thing: you just do it.

September 21, 2021

Gleanings

• And while the abortion storyline is fast-paced and enthralling, what really propels the novel in all its facets is Wall’s impressive facility with language.
• i have spent money, i’m not going to lie, but there are several bottles lying around that have been used for about a week and then forgotten. looks like i’m just going to age
• The difference is that I am now focused outwardly rather than on myself, as I begin to explore how to bundle up my wisdom and experience to benefit others.
• OK, yes? but also, no? Not no to every claim, not no to anger at patriarchy, but no to wanting to be yelled at about it for pages, especially because I already basically agree.
• Do you make a hoard of summer memories to keep against the cold ahead?
• For some of us, the sky is as important and vital as water.
• And yet, if one essential premise of short stories is that they are different in nature from chapters in a novel, it’s hard to see how the thirteen self-contained pieces in The Most Precious Substance on Earth don’t qualify.
• Through this I’ve come to realize that picnicking is one of my favourite things to do — I prefer it to dining in a restaurant any day. And the Chill Buddy has been a reliable and consistent dining companion.
• if you leave a wrestling show and your throat isn’t hoarse from screaming at the heels and screaming for the faces, then either you or the wrestlers have not done their jobs.
• Once I called Canada home, it stuck.
• I am continuously taking pictures of “paths” in nature.
• I’ve been writing occasionally this year (okay, actually a lot) about how Pyjama Writing has transformed my practice. 

Do you like reading good things online and want to make sure you don’t miss a “Gleanings” post? Then sign up to receive “Gleanings” delivered to your inbox each week(ish). And if you’ve read something excellent that you think we ought to check out, share the link in a comment below.