January 20, 2023
Fifteen Minutes
I have fifteen minutes before I head to the pool, but I wanted to check in here and write something, to write something without even knowing what I’m going to write, which is the advice I give to anyone who wants to blog but doesn’t know where to start. Start where you are and see where it takes you, and so here I am at the end of a busy week, but not too busy, because I don’t do too busy anymore. I used to go swimming before breakfast so my workday would not be interrupted but now I interrupt my workday all the day (I don’t have a full time job! Let’s act like it!) and it’s the precious hours outside it that are untouchable, time for decompressing, for relaxing, for reading. I got a new phone in November, my first iPhone and I really like it but the way in which it’s most improved my quality of life is that it didn’t come with an electrical plug so I charge it through my computer downstairs, instead of at the plug in my bedroom where it was still accessible even though I mostly never looked at it after 9pm. Now I never look at my phone in the evening, and in the morning where I’d once spend the first twenty or thirty minutes of my day scrolling Instagram and checking my email (time that went by in a flash) I now pick up the book on my bedside and start reading, and I’ve been reading so much more since this shift. My mind is also in a better place, and I think that’s no coincidence.
Along those lines, I finished a big project today (actually the first quarter of an even bigger project) which I feel really good about because last spring’s edition came out so much later because I’d struggling so much from November 2021 onward. Getting it finally finished today is a sign of what a much better place I’m in that I was a year ago, a fact I’m still marvelling at, how much better something can be that once felt absolutely impossible. And I’m wondering about this, about gauging my well-being by my productivity, but I don’t think that’s actually it. My productivity is a symptom of my well-being, rather than the opposite. And it’s such a relief.
This week I also achieved a professional goal I’ve been working toward for a really long time, and I’m taking the time to really steep in this moment. As much as I’ve come to understand the way I’ve avoided feeling difficult feelings (an act from which my anxiety has stemmed), I think I’m also not very good at feeling good ones either. And so I’m trying to do that, which is harder than you’d think, but also really such a pleasure, and I’m looking forward to sharing my news with you as soon as I am able.
April 3, 2018
“Enlarge and Complicate”
I’ve been reading so much lately—book after book, and while my backlist TBR shelf is suffering from neglect (I have a Penelope Mortimer book waiting, for heaven’s sake…) the wonders of Spring 2018 Canadian books are overwhelmingly good. I’m averaging about three books a week, and it’s still not enough for me to read everything I want to read, which is why I cannot be entirely despondent about the state of “CanLit” even as its politics give us very good reason to wonder what the point is. But the point, of course, is the books, and the books are excellent, and I’m also grateful that so many of these excellent books are written by people of colour (even if I think it’s a bit of a dry season for books by Indigenous writers, Terese Marie Mailhot’s amazing memoir Heart Berries—which I read last week—the only one that’s really on my radar…)
Anyway one book that stands out even though I read it in a whirlwind in early February (to see if it would be a good addition to the 49thShelf.com “#MeToo Reading List” I made; and hey, it was!) was The Red Word, by Sarah Henstra. It was a mindfuck of a book, such hard work, but also impossible to put down, incredibly compelling, a novel about campus culture, sexual violence, culpability, and the meaning of justice. I had the opportunity to ask Sarah some questions about her book over at 49th Shelf, and her answers were fantastic:
49th Shelf: The Red Word is hard work, in the very best way. It complicates binaries, messes with our notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice. Why was it important for you that this book not be a polemic? And was it difficult to make that happen?
Sarah Henstra: The Red Word tackles complicated subject matter, so I felt it warranted a complicated treatment. My decision to have the Raghurst women stage their attack on the fraternity the way they do arose from two separate impulses I felt as a writer, one having to do with what story I was telling and the other with how to tell the story. In the 1990s on college campuses (as elsewhere), the dice were so loaded against the survivors of sexual violence that justice seemed an impossible prospect. The young women in the novel are so frustrated with inequality, so sick of recording and reacting to the misdeeds of the frat boys without seeing any real changes, that they believe this is the only way forward, and they’re convinced—for a while, at least—that the ends will justify the means.
In terms of the story’s structure, I sought a scenario that would leave open the maximum number of possible resolutions in order to allow readers to remain curious and to consider a wide variety of perspectives and points of view. After all, it’s the unexpected consequences of the plot—those surprise moments when events blow up way past the characters’ intentions—that keep us reading.
I’ve always liked Susan Sontag’s assertion (in her 2004 lecture on South African Novel laureate Nadine Gordimer) that good novelists are “moral agents” precisely because the stories they tell don’t moralize but instead “enlarge and complicate—and, therefore, improve—our sympathies. They educate our capacity for moral judgment.” It definitely took this book longer to find a publisher because of its lack of a “redemptive” or “hopeful” resolution, though. “What is the takeaway here for feminism?” one editor asked me. Luckily, the editors who strongly connected with it (Amy Hundley at Grove, Susan Renouf at ECW) loved it precisely for its refusal to come down cleanly on one side of the conflict.
November 30, 2016
Books of the Year (and on the radio too!)
49thShelf’s Books of the Year list came out on Monday, and I’m thrilled with it. It turns out that 2016 has not been a total disaster—maybe the books will save us after all? And I was on CBC Ontario Morning today talking about some of the picks that would also make great holiday gifts. You can listen to the podcast here; I come on at 37.30.
July 3, 2016
Summer Starts
There is no better way to travel then on trains, where the leg room is ample and there is so much time to read. When we booked this weekend away, the train journey itself was the destination, but we had to arrive somewhere, so we chose Ottawa, where we have best cousin-friends and even other friends, and cousin-friends who were kind enough to offer us a place to stay. And it was Canada Day Weekend, so what better place to be…even if the place we mean to be specifically on Canada Day is our cousin’s beautiful backyard across the river in Gatineau. And it really was amazing.
As we’d hoped, the train journey was a pleasure. I had more time to read than I’ve had in weeks. I finished Rich and Pretty, by Rumaan Alam, which I liked so much and will be writing about, and started Signal to Noise, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, which was lovely and so much fun. They also had my favourite kind of tea on sale (Sloane Tea’s Heavenly Cream) and so all was right with the world.
It was such a nice weekend—the children had children to play with and I got to spend time with some of my favourite people. We had an excellent time with our cousins, and met up with my dear friends Rebecca who took us to the Museum of Nature, and last night I got to visit with my 49thShelf comrades who I’ve been working so happily with for years but have only ever hung out with a handful of times. Apart from one traumatic episode of carsickness (not mine) and the night the children took turns waking up every twenty minutes, it was a perfect long long weekend. I also learned that it is possible to eat my limit in cheetos and potato chips, which I had never suspected. Also that it is probably inadvisable to start drinking before noon.
We came home today, another good trip, this time with me reading Nathan Whitlock’s Congratulations on Everything, which I am really enjoying, I also started reading the graphic novel of A Wrinkle in Time with Harriet, which we will continue this week. And we arrived home to find that our marigolds have finally bloomed, third generation. We planted them a couple of months back in our community planter, and have been waiting for the flowers to emerge. (Sadly, our lupines didn’t make it.) Summer is finally here proper, what with school out, and even 49thShelf’s Fall Fiction Preview being up (which is my main project for June), and my work days shift with the children being home. I’ve also decided to write a draft of a novel this summer, which is only going to make a tricky situation trickier, but who doesn’t like tricks? We shall see. We will do our best. And there will also be ice cream and holidays and barbecues and sand between our toes, and splash pads and ferry rides and picnics and pools and flowers. It will all go by so fast.
November 12, 2014
Toronto International Book Fair
I’m excited to be attending the Toronto International Book Fair this weekend, an event that is packed with all the very best of bookish things. On Saturday and Sunday, I will be helping to work 49th Shelf’s booth (where we’ll be giving out kisses of the chocolate kind, and giving you great ways to get involved with our site and win prizes) and also hosting events by authors Catherine Gildiner and Lesley-Ann Scorgie. It’s going to be excellent. Do come and say hi!
April 8, 2014
Things Have Been Busy at 49th Shelf
If you check out the 49thShelf blog regularly, none of this will be news to you, but if not, you’ll probably want to know about what’s been going down there lately because it’s good. March marked 3 years since I started out on the site as editor, and I commemorated the occasion with this amazing retrospective of my favourite posts from way back. Yesterday, we featured a wonderful excerpt from Katherine Govier’s new Mother Goose book, a reflection on the nursery rhymes she’s known all her life and read with her mother. (I will be writing about the book here very soon!). The excellent Ms. Kiley Turner has been putting together The Recommend Series this past while, and it’s full of great books and reasons to read them.
I wrote a post about memorable houses from CanLit. For International Women’s Day, I interviewed Rosemary McCarney, CEO of Plan Canada and author of new book, Every Day is Malala Day. And other cool interviews include one with author/librarian Ken Setterington for Freedom to Read Week about how censorship is complicated, and another with Nick Cutter, who may or may not be Craig Davidson, and who is author of the totally disgusting, excellent novel The Troop.
