August 23, 2010

A Room of One's Own

In March, I spent $130 signing up for ten yoga classes, of which I’ve gone to two, and my pass expires this week. Which is good actually, because then I get to feel less bad about the money that’s gone to waste. I’m not typically a quitter, or one who doesn’t follow through, but when I signed up for yoga class, thinking it would give me a fine escape from the stay-at-home nature of stay-at-home-motherhood, I really had the wrong idea. After a long day alone with a pre-verbal midget, the last thing I need is to be silent in a room of levitating hipsters. It is also distinctly possible that I just picked the wrong yoga studio, but that is another story.

What the story is, however, is that it turned out I didn’t need that much push to get out of the house after all. Yes, indeed, I could probably do with more exercise, but I’ve also joined a fabulous book club, take part in an incredible writers group, and do some work for a charity’s board, and that takes care of quite a few evenings each month. And I enjoy these evenings out so completely, their social nature in particular, because it turns out what I need at the end of the day is company and conversation, but I didn’t know that in March.

Similarly, I have abandoned my garret. Tragic, I know, that the garret is forced to make do without me, and I find myself garret-less. And yes, the garret was a bit bleak, actually being the back of my very strange bedroom closet/storage area, and now it’s packed to the sloped ceiling with newborn baby gear (which, yes, we haven’t gotten rid of. Though it won’t be put back into use for a very long time), but it was a garret, and it had a window, and an outlet, and it was nothing to scoff at, being a room of one’s own. Or at least a corner of an expansive closet of one’s own, which was plenty.

But it turns out that after a day at home alone with a young child, spending an evening alone in the back of a closet is bad for the soul. Or so I imagine, having not bothered to try. For the last year, my office has been a chair in the corner of my living room, by the window with my laptop, with my husband busy at his actual desk on the other side of the room. I miss him when he’s at work, and when he’s home I like to be close to him, even if neither of us are talking and both of us are working on various projects. I’ve contemplated moving back upstairs, but this arrangement seems to be working, and so my desk in the garret sits terribly empty, a magnet for layer upon layer of dust.

One of the best things I own is my A Room of One’s Own tea towel, which was a gift from  my friend Paul. Due to its literary nature, it used to hang in our library, before the library became Harriet’s room. Since then, the tea towel has been homeless, and I’ve wondered where to put it, no longer actually having a room of my own (or rather, now that my room of my own is usually empty. Which would make hanging the tea towel there particularly sad).

Last night I finally hung it up in the living room, on the last bare spot left on our increasingly riotous walls. True, this room isn’t one of my own, but I’ve decided to regard Woolf’s idea as a metaphor. This idea underlined by Rachel Cusk’s suggestion that perhaps the greatness and distinction of women’s writing came from women not having rooms of their own, from their novels being composed amidst the hustle and bustle of family life.

Perhaps she’s right, or maybe that only works for some people, and I’ve no doubt my mind and my location will be changing one of these days, but having the tea towel up again, I feel that I’ve arrived somehow. Or that I’m home again, settled, and that it’s not so much a room of my own that I need as much as simply room.

*I guess this is my how NOT to be alone post. I never claimed to be consistant.

August 15, 2010

The Toronto Women's Bookstore, how I became a feminist (and how I learned to be alone)

Last Thursday, it was my absolute pleasure to be buying books at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore (and the book was Sweet by Dani Couture, if anyone’s asking, along with C is for Coco). It was my absolute pleasure, because a few months ago it looked like I might never be buying books at the TWB again, and I was a bit heartbroken about that. Although I hadn’t been around to the bookstore for a long time, truthfully, but about ten years ago, the Toronto Women’s Bookstore saved my life.

It all has to do with how I became a feminist, which, interestingly enough, has much to do also with how I learned to be alone. I can’t remember exactly what the catalyst was, but it all had to do with magazines like Bitch and Bust, and this place where I could go to buy them. But I’ll backtrack to just before that, to when I was about twenty, and would pick up a copy of Cosmo if I needed something to read on a long journey. I didn’t know that there was an alternative to that kind of media, and I was also the type of girl who claimed to be a “humanist”, because “feminist” was too confrontational, too exclusive.

I was also totally, and completely boy crazy, in a way that I never entirely got over, and there’s nothing really wrong with this, except that it seemed a boy’s opinion of me was my sole determination of self-worth. Which might have been fine, actually, if a boy had actually held a high opinion of me, but no one did, and it made me crazy, and lonely, and a little bit sad. (At this point in my life, I also wore tye-dyed t-shirts with floor-length skirts and running shoes. You really couldn’t have blamed the boys…).

Anyway, may I connect all this to the How to be Alone video that swept the world last week, and which Russell Smith opined was “anti-feminist” in The Globe & Mail (which I won’t link to, because I hate The Globe‘s link-baiting. What joy it would give me to link to an article because it was actually good, but anyway, you can read about it here).  When I learned how to be a feminist, it was when I learned how to be alone. It was when I began to let go of my obssession with using male affection to define myself and my value. It was when I realized that sex wasn’t as empowering as I’d considered it to be, because I’d thought I was garbage unless someone male was looking at me admiringly, and I would have done anything to make sure that look lingered. It was when I realized that I’d been waiting for a boy to come along and save me, to liberate me from aloneness, and I was thinking that only then would my real life finally begin.

When I became a feminist, it was when I realized that real life could begin anyway, on my own terms. And I learned this when I started reading magazines like Bitch and Bust, and magazines I’m now far to old for, and even scoff at, but back in the day, they were a revelation. First, I learned to celebrate a far more diverse kind of beauty than any I’d ever seen before in a fashion magazine. I learned about women’s sexuality in and of itself, beyond simply a way to attract male attention. I learned about women’s issues beyond my insular little world, and realized the need for something called feminism was as strong as it ever was. I learned about something I might have called “sisterhood” about thirty years before, but couldn’t put a name to at the time because “sisterhood” was twee, but it basically came down to the fact that womanhood itself was powerful. And I’d never even realized. All the things I didn’t need a man to do, let alone define who I was.

And yes, I remember the first time I ate in a restaurant by myself (during the summer of 2000), and taking off on my bike to Toronto Island where nobody knew where I was, and when I decided to produce my own photo-copied feminist zine (which became legendary in a certain circle), and going to the movies alone, and driving my own moving van, and how I was determined to spend the summer of 2002 backpacking through Europe all by myself, which I did, and it was the discovery of feminism, the discovery that I was a feminist, that made any of this possible. I was nothing before it.

And that even in “post-feminist” turn of the century Toronto, that there was a place where one could go to be a feminist meant everything. It meant the movement was still vital, and that a community was thriving (the proof in the plethora of flyers posted just inside the door), and all the books and magazines that so inspired me on my way. I was finally a part of something bigger than myself, and it even bigger than being a part of a couple.

If we were actually post-feminist, than none of this would have been necessary. If we were actually post-feminist, however, Russell Smith probably wouldn’t be writing articles about women in publishing being “hotties” either, and I also think it’s interesting how articles such as Smith’s hottie piece, with its abject objectification, actually condition women to feel badly about not being on the receiving end of the admiring male’s glance. How Smith is not even a symptom, he is the disease, and then he has the nerve to decide what “feminist” is?

The point of all this being that the Toronto Women’s Bookstore was so important to me once upon a time, and I shouldn’t have turned my back upon it just because I don’t need it anymore. Because you never know when I might need it again, or how many other women are lacking empowerment just like I was, and the freedom they’re sure to find there once they venture through its door.

June 28, 2010

Hers is still the second sex

‘It may be that today’s woman writer doesn’t have much to do with the concept of “women’s writing”. Feminism as a cultural and political crisis is seen to have passed. Marriage, motherhood and domesticity are regarded as so many choices, about which there is a limited entitlement to complain. If a woman feels suffocated and grounded and bewildered by her womanhood, she feels these things alone, as an individual: there is currently no public unity among women, because since the peak of feminism the task of woman has been to assimilate herself with man. She is, therefore, occluded, scattered, disguised. Were a woman writer to address her sex, she would not know who or what she was addressing. Superficially this situation resembles equality, except that it occurs within the domination of “masculine values”. What today’s woman has gained in personal freedom she has lost in political caste. Hers is still the second sex, but she has earned the right to dissociate herself from it.’ –Rachel Cusk, “Shakespeare’s Daughters”

June 9, 2010

On The Orange Prize

So pleased that The Lacuna took The Orange Prize.

I gave up talking about The Orange Prize a few years ago, because the conversation was always annoying (“No one puts Baby in the ghetto”), but this year having read 3.5 of the six books on the shortlist, I felt somewhat invested in the whole thing. I also felt as though the shortlist itself was an excellent example of how the prize is doing exactly what it should be doing: celebrating the very best in women’s fiction.

Because this shortlist is living proof of two things: first, that “women’s literary fiction” is often distinct from literary fiction in general, either because it reads as such (and it can, and it does! and is often wonderful for it), or because it’s come into the world via a woman’s hand and is therefore received differently than literary fiction in general. Sometimes both these things are true, sometimes one is, and sometimes neither, which brings me to my next point:

That women’s literary fiction contains multitudes! Of course, each book on the shortlist actully shows the incredible range of excellent books written by anybody these days, gender notwithstanding, but that these are written by women is just another reason to celebrate them. Oh, and yes please, ho hum, a men’s literary award would indeed be sexist and the Orange Prize isn’t, because a) of the million reasons why being a man and being a woman are not immediately parallel experiences, b) the world is a bit more complicated that these stupid lobs of logic back and forth over the net, c) there already is a men’s literary award and it’s called the canon, thank you very much.

Anyway, this is the boring conversation I vowed that I’d avoid, so I’ll just say that I adored Attica Locke’s novel Black Water Rising, but its inclusion on the shortlist was a bit curious because the novel was so unabashedly commerical fiction. But it was such a good book, so ultimately realized in what it had set out to be, and I think it was included on the shortlist to show that women are writing some of the most unlikely women’s fiction these days. Similar with Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which I’m slowly working my way through. I historically hate historical fiction, without shame, which might be more than a bit discriminatory on my part, because though Wolf Hall‘s heft is dragging me down a bit, it’s a pretty fascinating read. It’s all politics and executions, and even the women portrayed within it are as far from women’s fictiony as women can get. And with The Lacuna too– yet another book with a man at its centre. I adored this book, had previously decided not to pick it up because of bad reviews, then it was shortlisted and I decided to give it a try. And it was amazing– I want to shake the people who didn’t like it and tell them they read it wrong, but that wouldn’t be polite. Anyway, The Lacuna only had about three women in it, and it took on most of the twentieth century, and that’s what women’s fiction is doing now, amazing stuff. As is Lorrie Moore’s The Gate at the Stairs, which does tackle more feminine topics, but with dazzling techical mastery of language, because it’s Lorrie Moore, after all. (And oh my, all these four books were so wonderful, I really will have to read the other two.)

The one problem here, however, is that now I’ve caught myself saying, “Look at women’s fiction, everybody! Doesn’t even read like a woman wrote it!” Which is not what I mean exactly, because there are certain books that only a woman could ever hae written, and their womenishness is the best thing about them. I think women write the best books going. BUT the Orange Prize gets knocked around so often for institutionalizing/ghetto-ising women’s fiction as ala grim, drunken-father-beating, rape in a hayloft, botched abortion, killed in a car-crash whilst getting thee to a nunnery THE END that I am pleased to see the shortlist doing anything but.

And I am pleased to see that the best of women’s fiction is amongst the best of ficton period.

June 2, 2010

If I weren't the one who could nurse the kids

From the site, No Country For Young Women, writer Laurel Snyder on how being a woman has helped her career:

“So I’ll just offer this: I went to school, and got the right degree. I did summer conferences, and had a nice fellowship, spent some years adjuncting, and all that. But none of it really led me to a career. So then I got myself a day job working for a non-profit, because I needed health care. But then I got pregnant, and realized (to my horror) that I made less than a full-time babysitter. I could not afford to keep my job, and I couldn’t think of any way to make much more money, so I quit work to stay home with the baby and freelance on the side.

And it was then that I started thinking of my writing as a career—seriously sending out my children’s books to editors and pitching freelance stories to magazines. Because I made so little money and had a baby, it made sense for me to stay home, and that led to the time to take my work seriously, so that I could eventually make more money. I know it sounds a little crazy, but it feels very true. I don’t think it would have been likely to happen that way if I weren’t the one who could nurse the kids.”

May 27, 2010

Dear Carrie Bradshaw

I never understood why it didn’t work out with Aidan. My sister has tried to explain it to me, how you and Aidan didn’t have *it*, and how apparently you found *it* with another man who was never very nice to you. This all reminds me a bit of that book that came out a few months back that implored women to “settle” and defined “settling” as marrying someone who is kind, stable, and good. Undermining the value of *it*, it seems. But in your case, didn’t *it* really come down to a closet?

I liked you, Carrie Bradshaw. When I was lonely and sad, I loved that you were a Katie Girl, and it gave me courage to be myself. I know it is pathetic to get courage from HBO, but it was the turn of the century and I was a bit shallow, and so were you, but that wasn’t the whole of it either, was it? I loved your friendships, and I loved your friends. I loved your voice overs, and your laptop screen. Neither of us could have been so entirely shallow, really, because I’ve never known a shoe that wasn’t orthopedic, but I liked you, Carrie Bradshaw, still.

I liked you, though you’ve done harm. You have! The number of women I know who don’t believe it’s love unless it’s tumultuous– that’s down to you, CB. Who believe that tumult=passion. Not to mention a predilection for really expensive shoes and bags, and really expansive debt. I’m not sure that before you, these things were considered normal.

I liked you though, but I don’t think I like you anymore. I’ll never really know, because I haven’t seen your latest movie and I don’t plan to, but I saw a preview and I’m disappointed. Unsurprised, but disappointed. Because in your new movie, you appear to take a look at your life (the not-so-nice, emotionally unavailable man you married, your closet) and determine that the problem is marriage. That marriage is boring, and passion gets stale, and then you run away to become the Sheik of Araby (and here, the preview lost me).

Though I am still a bit green when it comes to marriage, that I’ve been doing it for five years is nothing to scoff at. And I’ve been pretty good at marriage, actually, right from the get-go, when I made a decision to marry a man who wasn’t an asshole. It was him, actually, who took me away from a life in which courage was HBO. So yes, in a way, it seems I required a man to save me, but he saved me from you, Carrie Bradshaw, and your fashionable post-feminism. And I’ve been pretty happy ever since, having put away the angst, the drama, the tumult, and without that baggage, I’ve gotten a lot of really good things done. If he hadn’t come along, I really do fear that I might have whiled away my twenties wearing a necklace with my name on it, and I wouldn’t even have been you because you’re a fantasy. I would have been wearing orthopedic shoes and I would have still been sad.

Marriage is wonderful, Carrie Bradshaw. It is a fine institution, and of course, it’s what you make it. And it’s not for everybody, maybe even not for you, but I resent how you deride it. I resent that the same women who’ve spent their twenties thinking it’s not love unless somebody’s throwing things are going to think that marriage should be more of the same. And that when the throwing stops, that’s boring.

Carrie Bradshaw, you’re boring. You make adolescents look mature. If you were real, I’d throw something at you, and that’s not love.

Yours sincerely,

Kerry

May 18, 2010

Literary Gala Raising Funds for Motherhood Research and Activism

With readings by Miriam Toews, Di Brandt, Margaret Christakos, Afua Cooper, Rishma Dunlop, Diane Flacks, Susan Glickman, Marni Jackson, M. Nourbese Philip, Althea Prince, Jane Satterfield, and Priscila Uppal

In support of the newly established Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (MIRCI).

Friday, May 21, 2010
7 pm to 10:30 pm
Oakham House
Ryerson University
63 Gould Street
Toronto, Ontario

When Andrea O’Reilly founded The Association for Research on Mothering (ARM), the world’s first feminist research association for the study of motherhood, she was amazed by the enthusiastic response she got. “We started in 1998 at York University, and over the years our association grew to have more than 500 members from two dozen countries, and ARM’s work included an academic journal and press,” says Dr. O’Reilly. “ARM recently moved out of the university and has been reborn as Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (MIRCI), an independent non-profit organization. Its focus remains feminist scholarship, activism, and community involvement concerning the issues of mothering and motherhood.”

Tickets are $65 per person and available at the website, or at the door.

March 24, 2010

Women's writing is going to remake our literature

“We’re going to change what we think of as literature, to a certain extent, in order for women to be fully felt, I think, in our writing. We have wonderful woman writers… who are bringing us their experience. And their work is an oeuvre; it has a different shape to it, and it’s not going to fit with the old formula of novels. Women’s writing is going to remake our literature and make it whole, I think.” –Carol Shields, “Ideas of Goodness” (from Random Illuminations by Eleanor Wachtel).

March 11, 2010

ARM Update

I’ve just received an email update through Friends of the Association for Research on Mothering (see my previous post). Apparently, the response has been incredible, media coverage considerable and Andrea O’Reilly writes, “…that this was accomplished by everyday women reveals that grassroots feminist activism is still very much alive in these so called post-feminist times.” Indeed.

She writes also that they’re determined to keep Demeter Press running, and you can show your support by buying one of their titles at the new Demeter website. May I suggest Mother Knows Best: Talking Back to the “Experts”, which the likes of me have called “the very best book on motherhood I have ever read”? It’s worth an entire parenting library, I promise you, for $34.95. (Read my review.)

And I think I am going to get White Ink: Poems on Mothers and Motherhood.

March 3, 2010

The Association for Research on Mothering, and Me

UPDATE: Ann Douglas speaks with ARM’s Founder and Director Andrea O’Reilly.

I am only one of many people upset at the news that the Association for Research on Mothering at York University is set to close at the end of next month. (This is particularly devastating, coming on the back of more bad news for the Toronto Women’s Bookstore, which played such a big role in my discovery of feminism via the magazines I bought there that I’d never seen anywhere else, ever). Though I’ve only been a mother for nine months, and my relationship with ARM has been peripheral, I can honestly say the two books I’ve read from their Demeter Press (which is also to close) have done more to enhance my understanding of my new life than anything else.

Mother Knows Best: Talking Back to the Experts is the very best book on motherhood I’ve ever read. I’ve been a smarter, more confident, more open-minded and better parent since encountering it in November, and have been much better equipped to deal with the onslaught of other resources constantly undermining my authority. Mothering and Blogging: The Radical Act of the MommyBlog has played a fundamental role in helping me to address my ambivalence toward mommyblogging (which in some ways is an ambivalence toward motherhood in general), and got me engaging with ideas I don’t think I’ll ever be finished with.

And though these were both scholarly texts, I devoured them. And not just because they were telling me things I needed to hear at a trying time in my life, but because they taught me things I need to know, and they challenged ideas I thought I knew. These two Demeter books were incredible, and to think there will be no more of them is an enormous cultural loss for everyone.

Please read Ann Douglas’ blog on more about the ARM closure, and plans afoot to try to do something to stop it.