January 6, 2010
On my newfound trekker, newfound confidence, and the mystery of defensive mothering
Oh, if I could go back seven months, what a lot of things I’d have to say to the me I was then. I would urge that shattered, messed up girl to, “Get thee to a lactation consultant” a week sooner than I actually did, and advocate better for myself and baby whilst in the hospital, and promise myself that life as we knew it was not gone, gone, gone forever more.
I would also tell myself to run out and buy a Baby Trekker. I know why we didn’t in the first place– I thought Baby Bjorn was the end in baby carriage, but that $150 was too pricey. Since then, I’ve learned that you get your money’s worth, and that Bjorn’s not where it’s at anyway. We’ve had the Trekker for about three weeks now, and I’ve used it every day (it’s snowsuit friendly!), whether to haul Harriet around the neighbourhood, or to cook dinner with her happily strapped to my back (and this has improved our quality of life more than I can ever describe).
If I could go back about six months, I’d tell myself to START PUTTING THE BABY TO BED EARLY. That she doesn’t have “a fussy period between 7:00 and bedtime”, but that she’s screaming for us to put her to bed then. Of course, I wouldn’t have believed myself then, and even once we’d figured it out, it took another six weeks to learn how to actually get it done. This, like everything, was knowledge we had to come to on our own. And most of motherhood is like that, I’ve found, and it seems to be for my friends as well, which is why all my well-meaning, hard-earned advice is really quite useless to them. But even knowing that we have it in us to do so, to figure it out, I mean, is certainly something worth pointing out.
Even more useful than my Trekker, I think, the best piece of baby equipment I’ve acquired lately is confidence. I had reservations with Naomi Stadlen’s book, but she was right about this: “If [the new mother] feels disoriented, this is not a problem requiring bookshelves of literature to put right. No, it is exactly the right state of mind for the teach-yourself process that lies ahead of her.” Though it actually was the bookshelves of literature that showed me I could go my own way, mostly due to the contradictory advice by “authorities” in each and every volume. (Oh, and I also read Dreambabies, which made it glaringly obvious that baby expertise is bunk.)
Solid food was the turning point though. I have three baby food cookbooks and they’re all reputable, and each is good in its own way, but they agree on nothing. When to start solids, what solids to start on, and when/how to introduce other foods, and on and on. It was good, actually, because I found that whenever I wanted to feed the baby something, at least one of the books would give me permission to do so. So I decided to throw all the rules out the window, and as teaching Harriet to enjoy food as much as I have the power to do so is important to me, I decided we would make up our own rules. As we’ve no history of food allergies in our families, and Harriet is healthy, we opted not to systematize her eating. We’ve fed her whatever we’ve taken a fancy to feeding her, without rhyme or reason, including blueberries, strawberries, fish, chicken, toast, cheese, beans, chickpeas, smoothies, squash, broccoli, spinach, spaghetti, and cadbury’s chocolate, and she’s devoured it all.
Okay, I lied about the chocolate. But the point is that my instincts told me that this was the best way to feed our baby, what made the most sense, and so I tried it and we’re all still alive. And it was liberating to know that the baby experts could be defied– I really had no idea that was even allowed. That as a mother, there could be something I knew about my child and our family that an entire panel of baby experts didn’t. And we can go onward from there.
What has surprised me, however, is that confidence hasn’t done much to reduce my defensive-mothering. You know, feeling the need to reassert oneself whenever someone makes different choices that you do. How not going back to work, for example, makes me feel like a knob, and moms going back to work feel threatened that I’m not, and we keep having to explain ourselves to the other, in fitful circles that take us nowhere.
It’s not just working vs. not working, of course. It’s everything, and this past while I figured it was my own lack of confidence that was making me so defensive. The best advice I’ve received lately is, “Never be too smug or too despairing, because someone else is doing better and worse than you are.” And it was good to keep in mind that any residual smugness was due to probably due to feelings of inadequacy anyway.
Anyway, it’s not just inadequacy, inferiority. Even the decisions I feel confident about prompt defensiveness when other mothers do differently, and now not because I’m unsure of myself, but because I’m so damn sure of myself that I’m baffled when you don’t see it the way I do. And there’s this line we’re meant to spout in these sorts of situations, to imply a lack of judgement. We’re meant to say, about our choices: “It’s what’s best for our family”, but that’s the most sanctimonious load of crap I’ve ever heard. Some things, yes, like me not going back to work, are best for our family, but other things, the other “choices” we’ve made: I’d prescribe them to everyone, and that not everyone is lining up for my prescriptions drives me absolutely mad.
Mom-on-mom action continues to fascinate, nonetheless. There are politics like nothing else, like nothing in the world of men, I think. It brings out the best and the worst in me, and I don’t think I’m the only one. And I doubt the action is going to be letting up anytime soon.
December 12, 2009
A masterful essay by Rachel Cusk on women's writing
Rachel Cusk’s “Shakespeare’s Daughters” is a masterful essay on women, women writers and women’s writing. I’ve just read it and feel blown away by the craft of it, how she has articulated a muddle of thoughts that have been clouding my head for years. I urge you to read it in its entirety, and I’ve also copied some excerpts below:
“The future, of course, never comes: it is merely a projection from the present of the present’s frustrations. In the 80 years since Woolf published A Room of One’s Own, aspects of female experience have been elaborated on with commendable candour, as often as not by male writers. A book about war is still judged more important than a book about “the feelings of women”. Most significantly, when a woman writes a book about war she is lauded: she has eschewed the vast unlit chamber and the serpentine caves; there is the sense that she has made proper use of her room and her money, her new rights of property. The woman writer who confines herself to her female “reality” is by the same token often criticised. She appears to have squandered her room, her money. It is as though she has been swindled, or swindled herself; she is the victim of her own exploitation….
It may be, then, that the room of one’s own does not have quite the straightforward relationship to female creativity that Woolf imagined. She, after all, had by dint of circumstance always had a room and money of her own, and perhaps being the eternal conditions of her own writing they seemed to her indispensable. Yet she admits that the two female writers she unequivocally admired – Jane Austen and Emily Brontë – wrote in shared domestic space. The room, or the lack of it, doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with writing at all. It could be said that every woman should have a room of her own. But it may equally be the case that a room of her own enables the woman writer to shed her links with femininity and commit herself to the reiteration of “masculine values”. The room itself may be the embodiment of those values, a conception of “property” that is at base unrelated to female nature….
Some of the most passionate writing in The Second Sex concerns the ways in which women seek to protect their privileges and property under patriarchy by condemning or ridiculing the honesty of other women. This remains true today: woman continues to act as an “instrument of mystification” precisely where she fears and denies her own dependence. For the woman writer this is a scarifying prospect. She can find herself disowned in the very act of invoking the deepest roots of shared experience. Having taken the trouble to write honestly, she can find herself being read dishonestly. And in my own experience as a writer, it is in the places where honesty is most required – because it is here that compromise and false consciousness and “mystification” continue to endanger the integrity of a woman’s life – that it is most vehemently rejected. I am talking, of course, about the book of repetition, about fiction that concerns itself with what is eternal and unvarying, with domesticity and motherhood and family life. The sheer intolerance, in 2009, for these subjects is the unarguable proof that woman is on the verge of surrendering important aspects of her modern identity.”
November 19, 2009
Mother Knows Best: Talking Back to the Experts
I suppose it’s not so different to those mothers that wish to see themselves in their children’s books, that I’ve been looking for me in my own reading. Or rather seeking representations of my experience since becoming a mother, not because I’m so entirely self-interested, but because the politics of motherhood are hard to understand. And motherhood is politicized, the whole of it, which is natural in the case of any group of people lacking power enough to properly go around.
Mothers are also a group of people desperately trying to tame chaos, which makes them perfect targets for authority of all kinds. And these authorities, I’ve noticed, do tend to be men and childless women, which is probably because these are the only people unlearned enough to think that babies could be a science. In Mother Knows Best: Talking Back To The “Experts” (published by York University’s Demeter Press, which also published Motherhood and Blogging: The Radical Art of the Mommy Blog), writers address this notion of “expertness”, and discuss the impact of these authorities on modern mothering.
And it is “mothering”, which the carefully benign “parenting” is usually an euphemism for anyway. Mothering a baby is scientific like the tide is, natural as anything, tied to the moon, but much more difficult to time by a clock. So that an expert will tell you that your breastfeeding pain is impossible, because Baby’s latch is fine, but feeding makes you want to die. Another will tell you that babies don’t get fevers whilst teething, even though you’ve had three children and it was the case for all of them. I read a book by a breastfeeding champion who said that babies do not require burping, that gulping does not cause gas, but he’s obviously never met my daughter. A baby’s poo (oh, of course I was going to talk about poo! Can you believe I waited until the third paragraph!), says the baby books, will always be yellow, but I’ve met mothers of the healthiest of babes with veritable rainbows. (And even worse, even the “experts” don’t agree with one another. This is very confusing. In making any major decisions about my child’s wellbeing, I’ve found the best solution so far is to throw the baby books out the window. They make a mighty thunk. What fun!)
All of this expertism serves to undermine a mother’s instinct and confidence, and the idea that there is just one way to be a baby or a mom is what pits women against one another so mercilessly. The conflict is apparent even in the anthology– in “Deconstructing Discourse: Breastfeeding, Intensive Mothering and the Moral Construction of Choice”, Stephanie Knaak questions studies that find any difference between breastfed and formula-fed babies. In the next article, Catherine Ma begins “If the Breast is Best, Why Are Breastfeeding Rates So Low?” with “The consensus on the benefits of breast milk is undisputed on both institutional and individual levels.”
So which is it? But in this anthology, that is not the point, which is instead to examine the politics of these ideas, which it does so effectively. And novelly as well, which is novel itself with arguments that have been rehashed over and over again. In “Making Decisions About Vaccines”, Rachel Casiday writes about those parents who “know” that the MMR vaccine was behind their child’s autism, just as that mother I mentioned before “knew” that fevers came with teething. Whether or not these parents are right is not the point either, and Casiday’s thesis is that this kind of parental “knowledge” has to be taken into account by authorities regardless. These parents have their own particular brand of expert knowledge, and the dismissal of their concerns by authorities is what leaves other parents torn between experts (for it was a scientific study, however now debunked, that made the autism/MMR link) and wary of having their own children vaccinated.
Mother Knows Best also examines breastfeeding and attachment parenting, and how these inform ideas of “the good mother”. How many feminists have embraced these practices, though they run so contrary to feminist politics. The fetisization of “the natural”, to justify breastfeeding and attachment parenting, though these ideas are out of place in the society in which we live (and in America, in particular, where maternity leave is pitiful). I have become quite accustomed, in the liberal circles in which I run, to turning my nose up at sleep training and Nestle, but it was interesting to interrogate these ideas, and question where they come from. To consider whether it might be egocentric to forego a career to be there for your child, and assume your presence will make up for whatever material goods the child will lack. How ultrasound imagery renders the fetus subject rather than object. How pregnancy guide advice compares to actual women’s experiences.
Though academic theorizing is odd to those of us outside the academy, I’ve found it quite useful to examine the politics of motherhood within this construct. Because discussions of motherhood get so personal, otherwise, and then defensive, mean and ridiculous. And all the experts who claim to come without agenda, but nobody is, so to take a step back is really worthwhile. An anthology like this is the closest thing to “the big picture” that I’ve been able to grasp yet of the big, big picture that motherhood is, and for that reason among many, I’m glad I read it.
November 7, 2009
Lizzie Skurnick for President
In “Same Old Story“, Skurnick writes: “But that’s the problem with sexism. It doesn’t happen because people — male or female — think women suck. It happens for the same reason a sommelier always pours a little more in a man’s wine glass (check it!), or that that big, hearty man in the suit seems like he’d be a better manager. It’s not that women shouldn’t be up for the big awards. It’s just that when it comes down to the wire, we just kinda feel like men . . . I don’t know . . . deserve them.
The conservatives are right: affirmative action is huge blemish on the face of our nation. And until we stop giving awards to men who don’t deserve them over women who do, we’re sunk. Because our default is to somehow feel like Philip Roth’s output is impressive while Joyce Carol Oates’ is a punchline. Our default is to call John Updike a genius on the basis of four very wonderful books and many truly weird ones, while Margaret Atwood, with the same track record, is simply beloved. Our default is to title Ayelet Waldman’s book, “Bad Mother,” while her husband’s is “Manhood for Amateurs.” Our default is that women are small, men are universal. Well, I know men get sensitive if you call them small. But gentlemen, sometimes you are.”
July 21, 2009
On women's fiction or women in fiction, again
“Lisa Moore gets better and better,” I wrote last month under “Recently Discovered” whilst reading her latest novel February. And then an esteemed acquaintance of mine emailed me asking, “When?” For he was reading February himself at that moment, and wasn’t getting into it at all. “A fairly conventional historical romance” was his initial assessment, disappointingly, because he’d enjoyed Moore’s previous work, and he wondered when he’d discover the brilliant bits of February that had so appealed to me.
I probably shouldn’t have told you that. What I really want you all to do is go out and read February, and to love it just as much as I did. In fact, I really thought that love would come with no trouble, that my feelings towards the book were so straightforward as to be universal. “It’s a rare thing,” I’d written, “a perfect book”, and I really thought that much was obvious. (And reviewer Caroline Adderson certainly thought so too.)
So I was surprised to find that another fine reader had found the book so unappealing. “When does the book get good?” he asked, of this book that had won me over with its very first sentence, “Helen watches as the man touches the skate blade to the sharpener.” Here was a book very much in the present, very much in the physical world, and I’d never read a novel that started as such, and so I wanted to read on.
Perhaps it was lazy to just figure the differences in our opinions had to do with gender. “Maybe this is a women’s book?” I suggested, and he replied a bit put-off by both my suggestion and also by a writer who would write a book that would shut male readers out. Turns out reviewer Alex Good had made an assertion similar to mine in his Toronto Star review: “This is a deeply maternal universe. Time and again, sympathy, solicitude and kindness for strangers are evoked. There are “geysers of love” and motherly feeling for vagrants, gas station attendants and of course the unborn. There is no sense of evil, aside from nature’s rage in the sinking of the oil rig, and hence no conflict. The narrative doesn’t progress so much as gestate, roiling around through a series of flashbacks until the hatching and matching at the end.”
Exactly! Good has encapsulated what I loved about the novel exactly: the pervasive good, the ruminating narrative, the sense of gestation resulting in such a satisfying conclusion. Except, of course, he means none of this in a good way. And I wonder about this, and reviewing in general– about how a description such as his is shorthand for “this book is bad/not literature”. And about how “this book is bad/not literature” gets to be a shorthand for simply, “It didn’t grab me.”
Is a novel bad because it’s a “women’s novel” or a “man’s novel”? As a woman, I don’t find Hemingway bad, even with all the bullfighting. Of course, there are novels that don’t fall into gendered catagories, and though universality is to be desired, I think that my very favourite novel Unless by Carol Shields (which is a maternal universe, if ever you’ve read one) is actually better for its specificity. I can understand how Unless might not be immediately appealing to a lot of men, but surely they could overlook that to see its literary merit.
But then, what is “literary merit”, right? Someone will inevitably argue “aesthetics”, but no one has ever been able to explain to me how “aesthetics” is not just a fancy way to explain away books one doesn’t like. In his review, Alex Good faults February for lacking conflict and a “fast-paced, forward moving” plot. So, in essence, he faults the book for not being a different book altogether, for not being the kind of book that would appeal to him, and I’m not sure that’s altogether fair.
I write this not as an attack on Alex Good’s review (which was actually far more interesting than most reviews I read) but to expand upon the ideas the review prompted for me. To remark upon my surprise that February did not appeal to everyone, and to ponder what “gendered” writing is all about. Good says the gendered nature of the book is not what bothered him, but rather “that those [gendered] parts of it are so transparently the stuff of commercial fiction.” But what does that mean? Rings, to me, like that common dismissal of women’s writing in general being un-literary and merely the stuff of commerical fiction. (Strange that Good suggests a fast-paced, forward-moving plot would have saved the material from being commercial fiction, for isn’t plot what commerical fic is made of?)
Has Lisa Moore let her readers down by writing a “women’s novel”? This very question, I think, is dismissive and sexist. But irrelevant, then, if there’s no such thing as a “women’s novel” at all. And is it dismissive and sexist to say that there is?
May 15, 2009
On mommy blogs, maternal ambivalence, and my worst tendencies
I’ve been thinking a lot about writing and motherhood lately, as I put one on the back burner and prepare for the other. I reread Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work yesterday, which is such a complicated, dark and beautiful book. And two ideas glared at me from her introduction– first, the inevitable backlash to any mother who dares to put her experiences down on paper (or blog). Cusk found herself taken aback, but reasoned the response with that “in writing about motherhood, I inevitably attracted a readership too diverse to be satisfied from a single source. The world has many more mothers than an author generally has readers.” So many people read her book because they were interested in motherhood, because of “the desire to see it reflected, to have it explained, all that love and terror and strangeness, even if it is immediately repressed by the far stronger desire for authority and consensus, for ‘normality’ to be restored: to me, the childcare manual is the emblem of the new mother’s psychic loneliness.” But more on this in a minute.
Second, Cusk writes “with the gloomy suspicion that a book about motherhood is of no real interest to anyone except other mothers.” Which I’ve been conscious of also here, as babies have become such a preoccupation of mine lately. As my personal experiences, the books I’ve read, the way I’ve been reading, and everything I’ve been doing have been so framed within the context of our baby’s imminent arrival. Though Pickle Me This has never been a particularly serious literary blog, it’s certainly become even less so lately. I’m not saying my hard-hitting criticisms of picture books aren’t worth noting, but there are some readers, I’m sure, who are less than enthralled. And I really don’t want to alienate any of my five readers.
Here’s the thing: I have read mommy blogs. (Note, I didn’t say “I read (present tense) mommy blogs”. But now I’m getting all Brian Mulroney pedantic.) The term mommy blog is a slur, as is “chick lit”, neither “genre” (let’s say) helping itself by mainly comprising compost. Stephany Aulenback recently remarked on the ubiquity of parents chronicling their children’s lives online: “I think when our children are grown up, they’re going to have different notions of “public” than we do now.”
My derision of women writing about their domestic lives (“compost”) sits uncomfortably with me, because it’s so easy to deride women’s domestic lives– everybody does it. By existing within the domestic sphere, these stories really serve to undermine themselves, which certainly bothers me when it comes to fiction. When with aesthetics as an excuse, fiction about women’s lives is so often deemed less than literary, as craft is less than art, etc.
The problem I have with mommy blogs, however, is that I watch them in the same way I’d watch a train wreck– even the incredibly well-written ones. I don’t necessarily admire these women’s “honesty” and how they “put themselves out there”, but sometimes I really do have to tear my eyes away. Their deliberate provocations are often horrifying, my knee-jerk response is catty, and I’m not the only one. As Cusk says, “The world has many more mothers…”, each one with her own opinions, and then fights break out in the comments section, commenters accusing other bloggers’ “followers” of being sheep, and then baa-ing themselves. Controversial topics include diapers, breastfeeding, reproductive rights, between working moms who work at home or out, and these are controversial topics, but it’s all handled a bit grade five. No one ever shows up to have their minds changed or expanded. My problem with these blogs is less with the blogs themselves, but how they feed on my worst tendencies.
(Though I also hate the smugness. The current trend is to embrace your inner bad-mom, and let her all hang out, but at the root of this is the sense that badness is in fact best. That anyone embracing domesticity has something up her ass, that liberation lies in the anti-domestic after all, but I’m really not so sure. I think a lot of these people might be misled. For all they’re anti-mom, they not beyond-mom, and they certainly define themselves in relation to their [albeit messy] homes. And this is a bit dangerous, can all go very wrong– I read one blog by a defiantly proud bad mom, and then her baby died.)
Which is not to say that maternal ambivalence, the experience of which these women are trying to project, is not real, or a subject deeply worth pursuing. It’s just not very often expressed in a particularly thoughtful way within these forums. Whereas I’ve found the idea explored well elsewhere, in the experiences of women artists in particular. Perhaps because these women have a medium with which to convey their experiences, because they are well-accustomed to expressing themselves. Because it’s a complicated issue requiring a high level of articulateness. We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Divided Heart, Who Does She Think She Is, Cusk’s A Life’s Work, Anne Enright’s Making Babies, and I was recently introduced to Marita Dachsel’s Motherhood and Writing Interviews (by writer Laisha Rosnau, who is the subject of one).
So somehow I find myself saying that inarticulate people have no business writing about their lives. Hmmm. (Or perhaps that they should, but I just shouldn’t read them because I’m not very nice). For your own interest, please do check in in about two weeks times to see how articulate I’ve become with a newborn, and then again six months later when my house is a mess and I’m smashing my head against the wall and the stove is on fire. When I’m just as bad a mom as any of them, reality sunk in. Don’t think I’m not aware of this, but it’s still scary to consider.
But it’s not simply black and white, good mom/bad mom and I appreciate the writing best that reflects this. How Rachel Power (author of The Divided Heart) wrote recently: “maternal ambivalence is not a state of being torn between love and hate for our children (meaning not them so much as what they’ve done to our lives) — but is a state entirely borne out of love. It is precisely this love for my children, being so excruciating, that I can feel has ruined me. This acute tenderness and sense of responsibility is something us mothers are never free of, and almost impossible to imagine until you’re in it.”
November 12, 2008
Author Interview @ Pickle Me This: Tricia Dower
Silent Girl, the debut short story collection by Tricia Dower, doesn’t so much address issues as raise questions and open up dialogues. The book’s structure is remarkable– each story inspired by a woman from one of Shakespeare’s plays, and addressing various modern day women’s issues. I came away from Silent Girl intrigued, and bursting with a variety of urgent questions, and so I am pleased that Tricia Dower took the time to answer them for me. She was in touch via email from her home in Victoria, BC.
I: Though the stories in Silent Girl show such a broad range of styles, narrative voices and subject matter, their focus on women’s experiences and common origins from Shakespeare’s plays suggest they were always intended to be collected together. Was this the case? What came first, the book or the stories?
TD: The stories came first — a creative exercise to see how many contemporary counterparts to Shakespeare characters I could find. It was a feminist exercise, as well: how far had we come or not since Shakespeare’s day? After the fourth story, I started to think I might have a book.
I: From your “Afterward”, I understand that you started your stories with the Shakespearean reference, then sought a modern-day counterpart. Was this step in-between difficult? How hard was it to go from The Taming of the Shrew‘s Katherina, for example, to your Kyal in “Kesh Kumay” (who is a young woman in Kyrgyzstan who is kidnapped and forced into marriage)? Did you have false starts? In order to determine if the story had legs, did you find actual writing or research was more important?
TD: The step in between was relatively easy for the stories in which I found a theme common to the plays and a modern-day situation. Marriage is a financial transaction in both The Taming of the Shrew and “Kesh Kumay,” social isolation influences events in both Othello and “Nobody; I Myself,” illusion plays a role in both The Winter’s Tale and “Deep Dark Waves,” and the boundaries of gender are fluid in both Twelfth Night and “Cocktails with Charles.” For other stories, questions I had about Shakespeare’s characters led me to contemporary scenarios. Take Hamlet’s Gertrude, for example. I had always been curious about what was behind her hasty marriage to her husband’s brother. Another is Marina in Pericles: if you’re kidnapped by pirates and sold to a brothel, would you really be able to talk yourself out of sex? Or, why might Hermione, in The Winter’s Tale, want to reconcile with a husband who had abused her and left their daughter to die?
I had a significant false start with the last story, “The Snow People.” Intrigued by the atypical mothering of Volumnia in Coriolanus, I had planned to write a story about gangs in Los Angeles. My story’s mother would by atypical in that she’d rejoice in her son’s gang leadership rather than be afraid for him. I read first hand accounts of gang life by members of the Crips and the Bloods, two of the largest LA gangs, and immersed myself in other aspects of gang culture. What I learned was so discouraging I could not bring myself to fashion a story around it. Before drug trafficking and automatic weapons took over, the gangs might have had noble goals but, today, they seem doomed to commit self-genocide. So I abandoned my original idea and imagined a fictitious oppressed people struggling for self-determination in an environmentally damaged future.
Research was equally as important as writing for several stories. Especially so for the title story, because I knew very little about sex trafficking and not as much as I needed to about the tsunami of 2004 and Hurricane Katrina. Without research I couldn’t have written “Kesh Kumay,” since I’ve never been to Kyrgyzstan. Although “The Snow People” is set in the future, research into ancient arctic cultures, including the Ainu of Japan, helped me create a history and culture for my imaginary Snows. I must admit I like research as much as or more than writing. I love learning something new. If a story doesn’t get published, I don’t feel that I’ve failed or wasted my time if I’ve learned something.
I: What were your research methods in writing Silent Girl? Which, usually, would be sort of a boring question, but the diversity of your themes is quite remarkable, as is the extensiveness of your details, so I would like to know.
TD: I used books and articles in the library and on the Internet, films and photos, discussions with people, and first hand experience to research the stories. I read up on mad cow disease and visited a ranch for “Passing Through.” For “Nobody; I Myself,” I read books written in the ‘60s, so I could remind myself of the attitudes and language we used back then in reference to civil rights. For “Kesh Kumay,” I read everything I could about the country, especially personal accounts of everyday experiences so readers could believe in my setting and my characters. I also watched a documentary and read government and NGO reports about bride kidnapping. I read Kyrgyz fiction, including large sections of the epic poem, The Manas. My research took so many months, friends would say, “Are you still working on that story?”
I: It is a credit to your skill, I think, that nearly every story in Silent Girl might read as though it was written by a different writer. You use such a broad range of voices, of styles. Whereas so many writers will discover their niche and stay there. Do you aspire to be the kind of writer who doesn’t? In what kinds of stories do you find you’re most comfortable? Are there any narrative situations you’ve found you’d rather avoid?
TD: I’m so pleased you observed those differences in style and voice. I don’t know that I aspire to write that way over any other way. I just find it interesting to get into the heads of my characters and describe their worlds as they would — with varying pacing, word choice, attitude, setting, and so forth.
I seem to gravitate to stories about people struggling with something BIG. I can write the occasionally amusing line, but I can’t see myself authoring a comic novel. I don’t do funny well. I envy people who do.
I: Along those lines, characters in your stories employ a variety of dialects, dialect being an ambitious task for a writer to take on. What was your experience of writing it?
TD: I need to “hear” characters before I can portray them fully. Understand their language before I can reflect their thoughts and beliefs, history and culture. Charles’s stuttering in “Cocktails with Charles” and Maw-Maw’s Cajun accent in “Silent Girl” were the most challenging. I wanted to be respectful toward the way they speak and present the flavour of that speech without exhausting readers. I grew up listening to black radio in New Jersey and it was relatively easy for me to hear both Joe and Brother D (and the differences in the way they sp
oke) in “Nobody; I Myself.” Listening to my Alberta farm-born husband over the twenty years we’ve been together gave me Jack’s voice in “Passing Through.”
I: You started writing later in your life– what in your earlier experiences made you the writer you are today? What might have led you to write a singular collection such as Silent Girl?
TD: Living all these years as a woman, I suppose, through courtship and marriage, childbirth and divorce, having a paying job and not having one. Experiencing the many ways women have been socialized to think of themselves as inferior men. I think I felt compelled to explore, through this collection, the effect of patriarchal values on society as a way to help free myself from those values and move on. There was something cathartic in using my decades-old textbook as reference and finally noticing that the female characters are listed following the male characters before each play, no matter how big a role they play. Even Cleopatra comes after her male attendants.
I: In the story “Deep Dark Waves”, you write of a woman who is complicit in the violence committed against her by her husband. What are the implications of her complicity? How does your story complicate how we’ve come to understand domestic violence, and why do you think this complication is important?
TD: I intended to write about the more typical domestic abuse situation in which the man is the sole aggressor. But in my research I came across less common cases of women who are attracted to and often sexually addicted to violence. Because female violence doesn’t fit the typical profile, there are few services available to violence-prone women and their families. And it isn’t politically correct in some circles to even admit that women can be violent. I found the less typical situation to be more interesting to write about.
I: Your stories do challenge roles women have traditionally played in stories, one of them “Nobody; I Myself” beginning with the line, “I am not a victim. You’re not to feel sorry for me.” Why was this distinction important for you to address?
TD: Those lines uniquely characterize the narrator in that story — my Desdemona. She sees herself as an activist, breaking new ground in the fight against racial discrimination by marrying a black man and trying to help him succeed, according to her definition of success. She doesn’t want to be pitied, wants to be remembered as having consciously martyred herself for her husband. It was important for me to acknowledge that some people we view as victims don’t see themselves that way.
I: As much as some stories do challenge women’s roles, however, others such as “Not Meant to Know” and “Passing Through” demonstrate the limitations of women’s experiences. In the former story, each female character plays a subordinate role to the men in her life, and Trudy in the latter story faces a lack of acknowledgment from the men all around her. Are these characters victims? Are we to feel sorry for them?
TD: In “Not Meant to Know,” the girls are victims because they are children. However, through Tereza’s defiance and Linda’s assertion of her independence at the end of the story, I’m suggesting they could grow up to be women who take responsibility for their happiness. You might feel sorry for their mothers who seem to be powerless, but you don’t have to admire their acceptance of that powerlessness, considering its effect on their daughters.
In “Passing Through,” I wanted to show how a woman’s desire for self-actualization can have negative consequences for her relationships with the men in her life. To avoid becoming a victim, she may have tough choices to make. The last line of the story hints at the struggle it will be for Trudy to choose the role she wants for herself over the role her son would like her to play.
I: You write, “It became apparent to me… that things haven’t changed for women since Shakespeare’s time… We need different kinds of stories– a new mythology perhaps– to free us.” If that new mythology is necessary then, why start with Shakespeare at all? Are your stories the past or the future, or a step in between?
TD: What a great question! It didn’t occur to me that we needed a new mythology until I’d finished writing the stories and had the chance to look at what they said in their entirety. In rediscovering Shakespeare for this collection, it struck me that many of his female characters have the symbolic force of the qualities they represent, qualities that were thought to be either particularly desirable in a woman back then or particularly odious. Marina: chastity. Desdemona and Hermione: stand-by-your-man-even-if-he-abuses-you love. Kate: defiance. The fact that they are presented through such a lens was strangely liberating for me. My imagination could enter their world knowing that Shakespeare had left much of their nature unexplored. They could be transformed from what they might have represented in Shakespeare’s time into what they might represent today. For example, is my Desdemona a model of selfless love or of unhealthy self-denial? By bringing her and others forward hundreds of years, I was able to take a fresh look at their so-called virtues and vices in the light of contemporary thinking. Thus, their symbolic force is in motion, not static.
I: What reactions to your book have surprised you? What have you learned about it since you let it out into the world?
TD: I’ve been pleasantly surprised that each story has been named a “favourite” by at least one reader who has given me feedback and that readers get emotionally involved in the stories to the extent that they ask me how a character’s “fate” could be changed or what will happen to this character or that after the story is over.
I’ve been humbled by the realization that my book is but one of many thousands people can choose to read. And Victoria, where I live, supposedly has more writers per capita than any other Canadian city. I attended a literary event where someone said, “You can’t go outside without spitting on a writer.” Among the better known you could spit on: Bill Gaston, Patrick Lane, Susan Stenson, Lorna Crozier, Patricia Young, Lynne Van Luven, Linda Rogers, Susan Musgrave, Lorna Jackson, and John Gould. Local media and bookstores are not the least bit impressed by me.
I: You quit a corporate job to become a writer. You’ve noted that for two years you “turned out stuff that nobody wanted”– but what changed? And what did you learn during those two years?
TD: I got better! I took courses and workshops and joined Zoetrope.com, an online workshop sponsored by Francis Ford Coppola. I learned (and am still learning) much about the craft and received constructive criticism that I was able to translate into publishable work. I will forever be grateful to The New Quarterly for giving me my first acceptance and the confidence to keep writing and submitting.
I: What was your ultimate motivation to change your life and devote yourself to writing?
TD: Survival. As a senior executive, I became increasingly dispirited by the single-minded goal of delivering shareholder profit and the often soul destroying (for me) actions it required. Stress and long hours were making me unhealthy, as well. I began to think I wouldn’t live much longer and, with a sense of urgency, started writing my memoirs for my son and daughter. Before long, more of my heart was in that writing exercise than it was in business. The pull was too strong to ignore.
I: Who are the authors who have inspired you most as a writer? What writers excite you at the moment?
TD: Alice Munro is my hero for depth of characterization and her ability to make the ordinary extraordinary. Others who’ve inspired me for a variety of reasons are Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Atwood, Carol Windley,
Jane Smiley, Timothy Findley, and Michael Ondaatje. At the moment, I’m into Kathy Page whose 2004 GG-nominated Alphabet is brilliant. And, Cormac McCarthy, wow! I’m also into him.
I: What are you reading right now?
TD: I just finished Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, which did not live up to its hype for me. On my list to tackle next are: Mary Swan’s The Boys in the Trees, Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo and David Wroblewsky’s The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. Reading more novels than short story collections is unusual for me, so I will no doubt go looking for Anthony De Sa’s Giller-nominated Barnacle Love.
Links:
Pickle Me This reviews Silent Girl
Tricia Dower’s website
Tricia Dower’s blog “Silent Girl Speaks”
Listen to Tricia reading
Inanna Publications
September 10, 2008
Silent Girl by Tricia Dower
“You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you’ve got something to say,” said F. Scott Fitzgerald, which is intriguing. However faulty, as of course merely having something to say doesn’t necessarily make one adept at the saying. A successful story is the result of various fortunate collisions, but I was thinking of the Fitzgerald quotation when I came across Tricia Dower’s story collection Silent Girl (Inanna). Stories pushed less for being stories than for what Dower has to say with them, how they “deal with a range of contemporary issues: racism, social isolation, sexual slavery, kidnapping, violence, family dynamics and the fluid boundaries of gender.”
I was interested also in the nature of this collection, its eight stories linked by a feminist theme. Each of them inspired by one of Shakespeare’s plays– for example, The Taming of the Shrew for a story of a kidnapped bride in Kyrgyzstan, Hamlet to show “Gertrude’s” side with the story, a widow left with a troubled farm after her husband’s death, and the comfort she finds in his brother. These allusions not necessary to appreciate these stories– my own Shakespeare could certainly use a brush-up– but just another example of the various collisions behind the creation of Silent Girl.
How would such a collection work, I wondered. Stories can often be collected at random, but in this case where they weren’t, would some read deliberately? Would the “something to say” take priority over the saying? Were the feminist links sort of a stretch, or were they actually a part of the book’s construction?
The stories within Silent Girl are various, points of view from women of many ages, from different cultures and places. It is this variousness that makes the stories’ main links (Shakespeare, women’s issues– that “something to say”) particularly interesting, as the connections aren’t really obvious until we come out of the stories’ individual worlds, backing away to look at the book’s overarching theme. Which is to say that many of the stories in this collection are wonderful, stand alone, and it is only when they’re grouped together that their “issues” become relevant. Remaining secondary to the stories themselves, which is how it should be, but still adding a worthwhile dimension. Stories taking full advantage of collectivity to expand on the ideas each raises alone.
The title story is perhaps the strongest in the collection, bookended by the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. Matsi the “silent girl” taken from Thailand in the aftermath of the former, living in New Orleans on the cusp of the latter, and working as a child sex slave. Her attempts at self-preservation are heartbreaking and heroic, and the spell never breaks Dower’s depiction of this child’s point of view so absolutely convincing. She must also be commended for a most spectacular narrative arc.
“Deep Deep Waves” manages to be as enveloping as it is troubling, the story of an abused wife whose role as victim is not so passive. Challenging perceived narratives of domestic violence (Dower here offering part of “a new mythology” she thinks necessary to move away from “locked gender roles and a patriarchal value system”), Sona implicates herself in her own story. In “Nobody; I Myself”, the narrator does the same but for different reasons, for love instead of violence.
Though it’s not all dark here either– “Cocktails with Charles” is charming, lively and funny at its heart, and a most delightful story.
Critically, however, and I’ve written of this before (Hello, Vincent Lam!), I’ve got an aversion to fiction requiring a “Glossary of Terms”. I feel any good story should have sufficient stuff to be filled out on its own, and though Dower’s glossary is not extensive, I note that the stories I found weakest are most cited. Perhaps with so much something to say, fact drowned the stories themselves, but this was only really troubling in the case of the collection’s final story. A longish allegorical distopian sci/fi bent, it wasn’t my thing anyway, but even less so considering the appendix. An allegory which puts a layer between the reader and the story, which is a shame after we’ve been so close to all the rest.
To finish reading Tricia Dower’s Silent Girl is to have the fortunate collisions continue, ideas emerging from the stories themselves, from their relationships to one another, and how they depict the status of women throughout the world. Making Shakespeare vital and relevant too, for as Dower writes in her afterword, “some things haven’t changed for women since Shakespeare’s time”. Plenty of valuable insight is also offered on Dower’s excellent blog and on her website for the ideas in her stories to continue their expansion.
For– and as Fitzgerald advised– however much the girl is silent, these stories have so much to say.
July 8, 2008
Good Links
Links of late include “The Cattle-Prod Election” from The LRB: “This endless raft of educated opinion needs to be kept afloat on some data indicating that it matters what informed people say about politics, because it helps the voters to decide which way to jump. If you keep the polling sample sizes small enough, you can create the impression of a public willing to be moved by what other people are saying. That’s why the comment industry pays for this rubbish.”
Rona Maynard writing brilliantly of “The Hillary I’ll Be Watching”: “She has become in defeat the woman she could not be while her victory seemed inevitable, or at least dimly conceivable—a woman freely and fully herself while stretching the bounds of possibility before the assembled cameras of the entire world.”
Luckybeans visits a tea estate. Rebecca Rosenblum encounters a roadside box of mugs. Celebrating The London Review Bookshop (whose success is partly down to cake). Dovegreyreader ponders Canadian Literature (and “A Case of You”) from her Devonshire perch. Fascinatingly, on why you’re probably wrong about probability. Lately I’ve been reading and enjoying Antonia Zerbisias’s Broadsides Blog, and today in particular, her links to comedian Sarah Haskins’s Target Women videos– “Yogurt” is my favourite. Justine Picardie on Henrietta Llewelyn Davies, “a psychic astrologer with a literary client list, and an Oxford degree in English literature” and blood ties to Daphne Du Maurier to boot.
Speaking of yogourt, I just bought three tubs of the stuff. As well as pudding, soups, banana smoothie ingredients, apple sauce, vegetable juice, and ice cream. I’ve got the day off work tomorrow. Any idea what I’ll be getting up to hmmmm?
July 6, 2008
Nobody loves abortion
Yesterday I went to see How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Abortion at the Toronto Fringe Festival. I’ve mentioned before what I see as the reason for writers not exploring the theme of abortion in interesting ways: “Abortion makes for such boring narrative. Or at least everyone I’ve ever known to have had one has just gone on happily with the rest of her life.”
And so as a person who appreciates story, I thought the show seemed important, perhaps offering an alternative narrative to those ones all-too familiar: a) woman gets pregnant, decides on abortion, has a miscarriage and then is sad b) woman never considers abortion for aforementioned “boring” reason c) woman who gets abortion is rendered barren, and regrets her decision forevermore (and then goes to hell). Also to move pro-choice open debate beyond the rather limiting, “But what about victims of incest and rape?”
Writer Erin Fleck has done so, offering a show that is funny, poignant, surprising, and very well done. Didn’t do anything too easy. I was laughing hysterically at some parts, the ending left me on the verge of tears, and the story went in unexpected directions, absolutely shocking me at one point (with a twist, not with disgust, I must say), which I thought was sort of impressive.
Fleck writes on her blog (which also covers her difficulties promoting her show), “It frustrates me that the abortion question does seem to be the white elephant of debates…it just sort of sits there in the room and no one really wants to talk about it, for fear of angering a whole lot of people. And while everyone is so busy not talking about it…bills and laws are attempting to be passed to restrict it.”
Congratulations to her for being brave, getting people talking and even laughing. The show runs until next weekend.
