January 19, 2024
Who’s That Girl?, by Mhairi McFarlane
“The Midlands were in-between, just like she was, and the landscape, flat and unassuming, suited her needs. Low and soft, just like a heath, an ideal place for her to land.” —Asking for a Friend
I didn’t know how much it would mean to me to open the pages Mhairi McFarlane’s Who’s That Girl? and be transported back to the city of Nottingham. I haven’t been this excited to be back since I first read Saturday Night, and Sunday Morning, except back then it had only been a handful years since I’d lived there, and now it’s been more than 20. More than 20 years since the last time I walked down Mansfield Road, and then up Sherwood Rise on my way to my little house in Basford. More than 20 years since I’ve been to a Goose Fair, visited the Old Trip to Jerusalem Pub, or contemplated the spiritual distance between West Bridgford and The Meadows. 20 years ago, there wasn’t a burger joint in The Lace Market, but I was so excited when McFarlane’s protagonist, Edie, goes to The Broadway. Her best friend gets divorced and moves into a depressing bachelor pad in Sneinton. She hangs out at the Arboretum. A picnic at Wollaton Hall! I was only disappointed that she doesn’t actually realize her dream of finding ducks to feed on her birthday, because I was very into ducks when I lived in Nottingham, and she wouldn’t have had to search so far to find some.
That, for very personal reasons, I was captivated by this novel about a young woman who slinks into Nottinghamshire with her whole life in shambles (Edie has just attended her work colleagues’ wedding in Harrogate [it becomes Harrogate-gate] and been caught snogging the groom, even though the groom was snogging her, but no matter, she’s on the verge of losing her job as well as her social standing, and her only chance at redemption is coming back to her hometown and ghostwriting the autobiography of a pampered movie star, who is also a Nottingham native) doesn’t mean that this isn’t a story that anyone might enjoy. This is the third novel I’ve read by McFarlane, and I think I love her. She writes romance in which the romance itself takes a backseat to complicated and difficult stories of living through and overcoming trauma, complete with vivid characterization and sparkling humour.
PS A McFarlane has just announced that a sequel to Who’s That Girl? is coming out this year!
November 23, 2022
Postcards to the Future
A few weeks ago, we received a postcard from our friends Paul and Kate who live in Vancouver. I will admit that I did not read the note on it very carefully (the image on the front was a diagram of the respiratory system?), but it read something along the lines of that they’d written the card at a street festival “where they mail postcards to the future.”
Which was kind of remarkable, I guess, but then aren’t all postcards letters to the future after all?
The salient part for me, however, was the way the postcard concluded: “…and we will eventually be there, in the future with you!” Because we haven’t seen Kate and Paul since 2019, but this month they’ve finally returned to Ontario for a whirlwind visit, and we’ve been lucky enough to be part of it, which is what I’d so been looking forward to when I received this postcard at the beginning of November.
Tonight we all sat together in my living room eating Thai food, celebrating Stuart’s birthday, Kate and Paul, and our friend Erin, and 3 year-old Clara whom we last saw as a baby, and her little brother Gabriel, who has just learned to climb stairs, and who we’ve been overjoyed to be meeting for the very first time.
“Oh, I got your postcard!” I exclaimed suddenly, remembering. Kate and Paul were both confused. They hadn’t sent us a postcard. “No, you know. The one from the street festival? Where you were sending a message into the future.” They had no idea what I was talking about. “It’s on my fridge!” I insisted. “Here, I’ll show you.”
I went to get it…and realized the most important thing I’d missed when looking at it before. The date at the top: June 23, 2018. The people at the street festival really weren’t kidding about the future thing. I realized too that the note was only signed from Kate and Paul, because Clara and Gabriel didn’t exist then. We hadn’t had a pandemic then. None of us had had any idea of what was coming. And yet.
“…and we will eventually be there in the future with you.” A line that might have hit very differently if this letter had arrived at any other moment during the last few years. But it was a promise.
What are the odds of this very postcard to the future arriving on the cusp of the first time we’ve all been together in so long?
But here we are. I feel so lucky. And looking forward to what other wondrous things the future has in store.
September 23, 2022
My Hilary Mantel
I arrived at Hilary Mantel during what turned out to be the most impressionable and formative parts of my reading life (so far!), during the years after my undergraduate degree when I was living abroad, first in England and then in Japan where my favourite occupation was buying Penguin paperbacks from Wantage Books in Kobe. This was the period where I first started reading favourites like Margaret Drabble, and Joan Didion, and yes, Hilary Mantel, whose own expatriate novels, EIGHT MONTHS ON GHAZZAH STREET and A CHANGE OF CLIMATE inspired the novel I’d write for my Masters thesis a few years later. It was her dark comic novels I loved best though, EVERY DAY IS MOTHER’S DAY and it’s sequel VACANT POSSESSION are horrifying and hilarious (and based on Mantel’s experience as a social worker; I’d also worked for social services while I lived in England and deeply recognized the disturbing realism in these works). You will notice I don’t have her historical works on my shelf—I read WOLF HALL, but (forgive me!) it just didn’t do it for me, which was FINE, because it certainly had enough other readers to go around. I think what I love about Mantel is how wide ranging were her passions and preoccupations over the years, which means there’s a Mantel shelf for every kind of reader and I am so grateful this is mine.
August 3, 2022
Happy Anniversary
I’ve never observed my abortion anniversary before. I didn’t even know the date, had to look it up (20 years ago on August 1) but when the Supreme Court overthrows Roe Vs Wade on your birthday it’s not the time for business as usual. And so I’m so grateful for my woman friends who showed up in short notice on a holiday weekend to gather with me and commemorate the milestone of twenty years since this pivotal event that gave me my beautiful life. (I’m also grateful for the friends who would have been there and sent their love and support.) I asked my friends to come and bring flowers to add to a bouquet I’d started myself. Gorgeously, my vase overfloweth—and what a thing that my husband did the flower arranging. Twenty years ago, I was so lost and sad, but I am so grateful for the courage and conviction of that young woman who set me on the route to here, and what would I be without the friends who were there for me then and who are there for now (and my family too). What an extraordinary blessing, to get to own your own soul. I’ve said it before, abortion is unfathomable mercy. If that doesn’t resonate with you, I’d love you to get more curious. Happy anniversary to me.
May 20, 2022
Time Machine
We’re in the midst of re-doing our children’s bedroom, which was last painted in 2008, before we even had children, and the new bunk bed has no clearance underneath, which has required a lot of reorganizing, because all their out-of-season clothes had been stored in plastic bins beneath the old bed. And in the midst of the re-storing, I switched the contents of another plastic bin I had into a cardboard box, and found myself going through my diaries.
I kept diaries for years, though then there came a moment about 15 years ago when I got rid of a lot of them, culling them along with my stacks of photos, yearbooks, scrapbooks. All of it just too much to keep, to carry, in a practical sense, as well as a spiritual one, and there are benefits to not having a basement, a place for boxes of this stuff to live forever,
The past is also on my mind because next week is the 20th anniversary of my university graduation, and I’ve been charged with putting together a photo slideshow for our virtual event. And I’m also currently at work on the early chapters of my next novel, many of which are drawn from life, taking place about 19-20 years ago.
And so it was something to discover this specific diary, which I didn’t even know existed. (I had forgotten too just how detailed my entries were—I wrote so much and so often!). This one runs October 2002-May 2003, capturing the beginning of my relationship with my husband, the months I spent living in a backpackers hostel, working as a temp—initially charged with entering the details of thousands of years-old time sheets into a computer system, the most mindless, boring, pointless occupation imaginable.
And I write about this in my novel, a whole scene in which my character goes to the agency and BEGS for a different job, because she’s going insane from the monotony, and what a thing to find it all outlined in my diary—it really happened. And so much more, I was definitely a ridiculous person, young and unformed, but I was also so brave and strong and resilient, and I am so proud of that young woman who these writing gives me such a direct connection to.
There’s so much incredible writing outlining experiences and emotions I no longer have any recollection of. I’d had an abortion only months before all this, and so that whole experience was very much in process as I was writing. Twenty years later, I’ve made sense of it all, fashioned my own narrative, but it was so raw then, and I didn’t know where I was going, what my story might turn out to be.
In October 2002, I went on a date to the movies with someone I’d met, which was fun and exhilarating, and I wrote in my diary afterwards, “If there is anything I’m sure of not wanting in my life right now, it’s a baby.” What had happened to me, I determined, was “sad and beautiful.” Beautiful, because now I got to have my life.
And then later on the following March, reflecting on the one-year anniversaries of so many pivotal things, and the reality that I could have had a baby then in an alternative reality, an impossible reality. What surprised me about these entries was that *I was so angry* about what I’d been through—and not the abortion, because the abortion had ended the terribleness, though it wasn’t a picnic either.
I wrote: “I don’t regret, but I hate. So full of rage that it ever had to happen at all, that I ever felt so much pain. I am past it now but time’s parallels bring it back to me and it’s so unbearable I cannot bear it. It could drive me crazy to be back there again… I remember grieving in the Fall but I am so absolutely angry now. I broke down…but we’re going to Paris, where I should have gone last July. I am arriving late from a different direction…”
I have no recollection of feeling any of that. Those feelings especially visceral and striking in light on threats to abortion access, something that never even occurred to me in 2002 (when we were all post-feminist, ha ha, remember that?). To have ever been that desperate and not had a way out. What an unimaginable cruelty.
So grateful to this little notebook for a reminder of the person I used to be.
November 29, 2021
Smarter Than the Tricks Played on Your Heart
I’ve spent the last six weeks revising my third novel, which is actually my second novel, written between Mitzi Bytes and Waiting for a Star to Fall. A novel that, like the others, has a soundtrack, but with a twist—this one’s soundtrack is actually good! And how it came to be has been, I think, such an interesting and organic journey.
Beginning as I was brainstorming potential titles, and “Power of Two” by The Indigo Girls kept occurring to me, because my novel is the story of a long friendship and that song’s title, as well as many of the ideas contained within, are just perfectly fitting.
Before my latest draft, the single musical reference in the book had been to another Indigo Girls song, “Love’s Recovery,” misheard lyrics from the CD player in my characters’ kitchen where such music is perpetually playing. (Now there is so much more, and it includes Dar Williams, Tracy Chapman, Ani Di Franco, Lucinda Williams, and an opaque reference to Sarah Harmer’s gorgeous “Lodestar,” which I am OBSESSED with at the moment. It’s a 1990s female singer/songwriter GOLDMINE.)
And just last week as I was writing a new chapter, it occurred to me that my immediate task at that moment was writing a line that expressed the pivotal question from the Indigo Girls’ song “Mystery”: “And if it ever was there and it left/ Does it mean it was never true?”
Not even consciously, I’d been drawing on stories and ideas from their lyrics, songs that I’ve been listening to for almost thirty years.
As a woman who came of age in the 1990s while strumming basic chords on an acoustic guitar and singing in harmony with my best friend, The Indigo Girls have always been important. I’ve seen them live at least twice. Their “Romeo and Juliet” was my only “Romeo and Juliet” for so long, same with “Tangled Up In Blue.” Before I really ever thought very much about queerness, there was still Emily and Amy, who were both gay, we knew, but not a couple, which we hetero teens were always struggling to get our heads around. They were partners, friends. And because of the place and time in which they were coming up in the industry (they were from the American South; they lost out on Best New Artist Grammy Award in 1990 to actual Milli Vanilli) they sang love songs, but couldn’t be explicitly gay about it (kind of like my cousin who always brought a “friend” to Christmas dinner) which sucks, but it also means that growing up, I was privy to the most textured, nuanced and artful portrayals of I’ve always immediately perceived as platonic friendship.
Um, though clearly I was missing several signs, of course. Just what WAS the singer’s hand doing on the subject’s knee “Five miles out of the city limit” after all?
But intense friendship is very physical too, particularly when you’re young, as I expressed in my novel. Lots of bed-sharing and clothes changing, and hugging, and holding hands. Sure, I missed the signs, but so many of them were part of my own experiences of being with my friends. So maybe I was more solipsistic than ignorant.
(Maybe there is no maybe about it.)
How lucky were we to grow up against an Indigo Girls soundtrack, to find a place for ourselves inside their gorgeous harmonies? Their songs like tiny epics that I could use to understand my own connections to other women, to my best friends. How much it managed to articulate all my teenage longings, which seemed somehow inexpressible, beyond understanding, and there it was, all that wonder and amazement, pleasure and pain:
I could go crazy on a night like tonight
When summer’s beginning to give up her fight
And every thought’s a possibility
And the voices are heard but nothing is seen
Why do you spend this time with me
Maybe an equal mystery
October 13, 2021
Class Reunion: ENG 369Y 20 Years Later
During my third year of undergraduate studies, from 2000-2001, I was part of ENG 369Y, a creative writing workshop led by Dr. Lorna Goodison through the Department of English at the University of Toronto.
For so many reasons, many illuminated below, this class would be an unforgettable experience, though it seemed especially remarkable when—two decades later—four of us from the class would all be publishing books within the same year and a bit.
- Souvankham Thammavongsa’s How to Pronounce Knife was published in April 2020, and it was awarded the Scotiabank Giller Prize that year, as well as the 2021 Trillium Book Award, among other accolades.
- Faye Guenther’s Swimmers in Winter came out in August 2020, and it has been a finalist for both the Toronto Book Award and the 2021 ReLit Award.
- My book, Waiting for a Star to Fall, arrived in October 2020, and the Montreal Gazette called it, “Subtly complex […a] romantic drama tailor-made for the #Metoo age.”
- And Rebecca Silver Slayter’s The Second History found its way into the world this summer, with no less than Lisa Moore writing that it’s “one of the most honest renderings of romantic love I’ve ever read. [A] truly mesmeric story, tender, unflinching, quakingly good.”
To me, the serendipitous occasion of our new releases after all this time seemed like an splendid opportunity for us to reconnect and reflect on our time together, as well as so much that we’ve learned about writing in all the years since then, and so the four of us shared our thoughts and ideas via email.
tell us about 20 years in the writing life, about the trajectory of your writing life since our class together in 2000.
Kerry Clare: I don’t think I had a focussed relationship to writing at all in the first ten years after our class together, even as I completed a MA in Creative Writing at the University of Toronto from 2005-2007. There is a line in Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life that I may have misremembered, but it’s about a superficial idea of writer-dom being analogous to one admiring the way one looks in a particular hat, and I always thought she was talking about me, which was mortifying.
When I finished graduate school, I worked for two years reading financial documents all day long, which was not fun, but gave me stability and a salary, though little in the way of creative inspiration. It also gave me parental leave benefits, which I used when I had my first child in 2009, and becoming a parent really seemed to up the stakes for me writing-wise. I became invested in the world in a more meaningful way, and therefore had more to write about. My first big success in writing was an essay about new motherhood I published in 2011, and this led to my first book, the essay anthology The M Word: Conversations About Motherhood, which I edited and was published in 2014.
At this point, I wasn’t sure that writing fiction was going to be my destiny, and was even making peace with that (throughout this entire period, I’ve been blogging, which has been a creative lifeline), but then something clicked shortly after my second child was born and I finally figured out how plot works. My first novel, Mitzi Bytes, was published in 2017, and I’ve been writing them ever since, and though I am constantly terrified that one day I won’t know how to do it anymore, it seems to keep happening.
Souvankham Thammavongsa: I am not a very good example of a writing life because my trajectory isn’t a simple one and it is not for everyone. I don’t think anyone would want it. I worked for fifteen years in the research department of an investment advice publisher, I counted bags of cash five levels below the basement, I prepared taxes. This work helped me write what I want and it didn’t take away my desire to write. I still have that from 2000, this desire to write, but it wasn’t anything someone taught me.
Faye Guenther: I stayed at the University of Toronto to do undergraduate and graduate degrees in English. Then I went to York University and did a PhD in English. While I was a student during those years, the jobs I had to support myself weren’t related to writing, but they showed me things about the world and this is useful to a writer. I’ve found that no matter what you do, the key is to make the time to write. My writing life has also been shaped by who I’ve met along the way, including fellow writers. In 2017, I published a chapbook of poems and short fiction, Flood Lands, with Junction Books. In 2020, I published a collection of short fiction, Swimmers in Winter, with Invisible Publishing.
That is probably most of what I’ve learned in these two decades. How to take in all the advice, all that you’ve learned from other things you wrote, from things you read, from other writers, and then listen very hard for the tiny sound of this book calling for what it needs from you.
Rebecca Silver Slayter
Rebecca Silver Slayter: I decided to stop writing not long after that workshop. I think, to reverse what Souvankham said, I worried my desire to write might be something someone had taught me. That I had lost track of why I wanted to write at all.
So I stopped for a year. Or two. Or three? It felt like forever because I was 20-something and everything was forever.
And meantime I decided to make my life and work writing-adjacent. I interned at Quill & Quire and The Walrus. I worked for a startup children’s publisher. I did odd jobs to complete the financial math, yardwork and errands. Eventually I was hired for my dream job, working as managing editor for Brick literary journal.
Sometime in the midst of that, I met my husband, and told him, proudly, how I had made the tough, mature decision to give up writing, and he listened and nodded and then said, I know you are a writer, with such certainty that I didn’t know how to doubt him and I began writing again. And I found to my great joy what I had been missing in those earlier writing years; a desire to write that easily overtook the desire to be a writer.
I did graduate studies in Montreal, where I wrote the first draft of my first novel, In the Land of Birdfishes. When I graduated, I returned to Nova Scotia, and bought a house for a song in Cape Breton, which I will be renovating for the rest of my earthly days.
This is for me a very good place to write, near the ocean and the highlands, in a community where music and storytelling are woven into everyone’s daily life. Here I published my first book and then wrote and rewrote and rewrote my second book, which was just released this summer: The Second History. It took me eight years from first draft till now, mostly because I tried to write it faster than I’m able to. It turns out I’m a writer who needs to take my time…
That is probably most of what I’ve learned in these two decades. How to take in all the advice, all that you’ve learned from other things you wrote, from things you read, from other writers, and then listen very hard for the tiny sound of this book calling for what it needs from you.
what was the best thing the writer you were in our classroom had going for them? And what writing advice would you give that previous incarnation of you? (Though would you even have taken it?)
ST: My intuition. I listened to everyone, and knew when not to. This taught me how to pick through edits. When we see edits, sometimes it’s about the person and their life experience and it doesn’t mean they are right or know but you have to be generous and allow them to have their thoughts.
I wouldn’t give myself any advice. I think advice can be a disservice to a writer. There’s a lot I didn’t know and I want myself to not know and to live in that not-knowing in order to know it. I want myself to encounter and work through those difficult and lonely moments. I don’t want anyone to hold my hand or do me any favours or make it easier or easy. I like the difficult, and I want to continue with that difficulty.
RSS: One of my clearest memories of that workshop was of Professor Goodison saying, as we discussed one of my poems, “You come from preachers, right?”
I was tongue-tied with confusion. “What?”
“Your people, they’re preachers, right?”
I had absolutely no idea what she meant. “No….” I stammered.
“Then why are you preaching at me?” she asked.
Oof. Caught. I was constantly preaching. Trying to find a much-too-simple way of understanding much-too-large things. I had a weakness for sentences that began like “Love was…”
I think somewhere in this is both my weakness and strength as a writer (probably as a human too). It is writing-in-bad-faith to just polish up pretty turns of phrase that sound truish. To go around making tidy summaries of untidy things. But… I think if I mine deeper I can find underneath that impulse what drives me to writing still, and to reading itself… The sense that there is some luminous other way of noticing the world that will make it brighter, stranger, more visible. That certain words can be incantatory, a pathway to looking again and seeing more.
I have two small children, and have found it astonishing to witness language dawn within a person who formerly had none. How each child altered a bit around the language they used. How they learned what it was then to be nervous, even tired, even thirsty. How what began as the ragged, indeterminate longing of a baby’s howl became so clear, so precise, so unmysterious. And I miss a bit the mystery. The wonder of watching a peer being who doesn’t know what yesterday is. But I think there’s another way that language can give us back what experience has made ordinary. And I think that’s what I was searching for twenty years ago and search for still, but with a few degrees more purpose. And a lot more joy.
So I would maybe advise myself something like this: First, don’t write any more poetry. You are very bad at it. And for a time, don’t write at all. Wait until the desire to write is something you have to resist. Wait until it wells up in you. And then go find the joy of writing words that make you look again, more deeply.
I wouldn’t give myself any advice. I think advice can be a disservice to a writer. There’s a lot I didn’t know and I want myself to not know and to live in that not-knowing in order to know it.
Souvankham Thammavongsa
FG: I remember being openhearted and creative. The writing advice I would give my earlier self is to be bolder. I think when boldness is combined with a practice of being open with yourself and to the world, there is a sharpening of creative focus that can happen and a strengthening of creative perception, no matter what challenges life brings.
KC: The writer I was in our classroom had no idea how much she didn’t know, and far more confidence that she deserved to have, and I’m so happy she did because being 21 is hard enough. I was not a serious person or a serious writer AT ALL. (I remember that Souvankham appeared to be both, and it was such a powerful example for me, though I think I was still too young to fully appreciate it.)
What a tremendous opportunity to develop my skills that class should have been!! But I did not work all that hard, honestly, too busy checking out my look in the hat, remember? I mainly wrote poetry because you could finish a piece in a few minutes. This did not mean my poetry was good, however, although I think sometimes some of it was.
If I could give that writer I was any advice it would be to write something REAL, instead of something you think sounds like something that could be real. (And find writers you love, instead of reading all the writers you’re supposed to love.)
For the record: I would not have listened.
what roles have literary journals and small presses played in your writing career?
RSS: I know literary journals and small presses better as a worker than as a writer. But I am shaped permanently by my years at Brick literary journal, and by the trips I made then, twice a year, to Coach House Press, where the journal was designed at that time.
The Coach House basement was a kind of church I visited like a disciple of those beautiful machines for cutting pages and laying type … and of the people who made them run and knew the stories of an older Toronto and the mesmerizing adventures then had by not-yet-famous writers. In a way that is both corny and essentially true to me, that is what I feel a tiny part of when I write: all the people in all those tiny offices and studios and nooks making small-press books and magazines; their labours of love, their care and bravery, those parallel arts of ink and paper, alongside those of prose and plot.
They taught me what was foundational to writing; the courage and the care of the work. And the kinds of community it can build.
FG: Reading literary magazines gave me an awareness of community. They were the first space where I was published, and I know this is true for many writers. Smaller presses often foster innovative and ground-breaking work. They frequently publish voices and stories that historically have been marginalized. I think smaller presses are important for energizing and sustaining a vibrant creative culture.
My first piece of published fiction was in The New Quarterly in 2007. I will never forget the joy of receiving that acceptance
Kerry Clare
KC: My first piece of published fiction was in The New Quarterly in 2007. I will never forget the joy of receiving that acceptance, especially in the wake of the novel I’d written for my Masters thesis that went nowhere (because it was boring!) because I was really feeling kind of discouraged, and then this message from the universe arrived suggesting maybe I should keep going after all. In the next few years, I would publish pieces in TNQ and other journals, and the high of an submission being accepted has never diminished for me. And then Goose Lane Editions, a remarkable Canadian indie press with an impressive history, published The M Word, and did the book such justice. Without literary journals and small presses, I’d be nowhere.
ST: Literary journals teach you things a writing class or editor or a dear friend and family cannot. They don’t love you and are not beholden in any way. They teach you about rejection—what that feels like, what to do with it. They are often the first place where we get to see ourselves in print. It’s important for a writer to understand the difference between seeing yourself in print and publishing a book. They are not the same.
what are your favourite memories of our class?
ST: I remember the talent and fun. There were so many writers in that class who are more talented, more ambitious, more interesting…but they aren’t here, or with books. They became lawyers and engineers and professors. I always keep that in mind. Having a book doesn’t mean I am good.
KC: I have so many memories! I don’t know if we were particularly interesting as a group, or if it was the work of Professor Lorna Goodison in creating community, or just the particular mix of experience and personalities in our class, but I felt very connected to everyone. I think we were a well written cast of characters.
I remember Souvankham on the very first day, and how she impressed me so much with her sense of herself. I remember we had to write a poem inspired by postcards, and mine had a field of sunflowers and said, “Welcome to Michigan,” and I wrote a poem with the line, “I won’t forget the motor city.” I remember REDACTED who wrote a poem with the line, “Let’s make love in the astral plane,” and I was seriously impressed by how sophisticated he seemed. And someone else who wrote a poem about someone sucking on her toes while listening to Robbie Robertson sing “Somewhere down the crazy river.” Everyone seemed to be having a lot more sex than me. (One could not have been having less sex than me.)
I remember Faye seemed especially interesting, partly because she seemed kind of badass with a shaved head, and we always sat in opposite corners of the room. And how I was in love with the name “Rebecca Silver Slayter,” which belonged to the woman who often sat in the same corner as me and whose work I felt very drawn to.
I think it’s kind of wonderful that in addition to the four of us, plenty of others in that group have gone on to very interesting careers in academic, television writing, and more.
One of my memories of the class was discovering what a literary reading could be—the ways prose and poetry can be shared beyond their existence as words on a page and become something like music in a public space.
Faye Guenther
FG: I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to learn from our teacher Dr. Lorna Goodison. One of my memories of the class was discovering what a literary reading could be—the ways prose and poetry can be shared beyond their existence as words on a page and become something like music in a public space.
RSS: This sounds like very cheap, opportunistic flattery, but honestly, though I remember well many of the talented, interesting writers in the class and their poems and stories, what I remember most clearly is the three of you.
I remember how beautifully Souvankham’s work was always laid out on the page in lovely, tiny type—the form so perfectly echoing the work itself, the grace and economy and polish of her words; how her work seemed always already complete, and I was stumped on how to write any feedback that didn’t just feel like tampering.
How Kerry’s writing was funny and powerful at the same time, and I hadn’t even known that was possible. How she seemed so at home both on the page and in the classroom, warm and open and at ease in a way that awed me. I remember Faye’s compassion for her characters, their rich interiority. How reading her stories felt like someone whispering in your ear, that intimate.
My strongest memory of the class was the first one. When we went around the room and each offered up our names.
Souvankham was near the end, seated at the table perpendicular to the one where Professor Goodison sat.
After she said her name, Professor Goodison asked, “So what do you want to be called?”
I was caught off guard by the question, but Souvankham answered clearly and immediately. Without blinking or skipping a beat, she said: “I want to be called a writer.”
Professor Goodison looked at her and Souvankham looked back. Then she said, “I’m going to call you Sou.”
And I was as astonished as if Souvankham had wafted out of her seat and up into the air between us. I was at that time so uncertain, so full of twenty-one-year-old desires to be interesting, to be brave, to be invisible and/or famous. I would have probably told Professor Goodison she could call me whatever she wanted. Or tried to guess what she might prefer me to be named.
Year by year over these last twenty, I get a little closer to what Souvankham already had then. That certainty. That clarity of purpose and identity as a writer that struck me silent when I was twenty-one.
September 21, 2021
The End of Political Contempt
In September 2020, something shifted for me, after an agonizing decade of partisan politics. It was a decade that began with the inexplicable election of Rob Ford as our city’s mayor, complely bursting my comfortable left-wing Twitter bubble, continuing on to you-know-who’s election to the White House in 2016, and then Rob Ford’s less likeable brother becoming premier of Ontario in 2018. Which would kick off a roller coaster of a four year term in which incompetence has been matched only by sheer callousness.
So much has been terrible in Ontario since 2018 that it’s easy for all the specifics to be lost in a whirlwind of nightmarish absurdity. From the widespread consultation of parents on school curricula whose results were never released, to random plans to scrap the full-day kindergarten program, undermining conservation authorities to permit development of green space, policies keeping communities from accessing developer funds to build vital infrastructure, plans to gut public health programs, and so much more—including the egregious act of arbitrarily interfering with Toronto’s municipal structure in the middle of an election, subverting the democratic rights of millions of people.
Labour disputes beginning in the fall of 2019 meant that the school year was regularly disrupted right up until schools closed altogether due to Covid in March 2020—and children in Ontario would remain out of school for the following 18 months longer than anywhere else in the country.
But when schools reopened in September 2020, I just couldn’t do it anymore, the fighting, the anger, the rage. I could no longer go on treating the government as my adversary. It would be impossible to send my children to school and preserve my mental health under such an arrangement, and so I had to shift my perspective. It helped too that the government—in spite of numerous pandemic failings, in particular in the area of long term care, resulting in thousands of devastating deaths—stopped behaving egregiously with such consistency, and seemed to understand (although always too late, always as a reaction) that people need governments after all. And while they weren’t a great government, or even a particularly good one, they were the government that we had right now and I had to put my trust in them as we made our way forward into a most uncertain future.
When I look back on the last five years of my own political action, there’s a lot that I reflect on. I am grateful for the empowerment and unity of the women’s marches, for example, the first time I ever walked in a crowd carrying a placard. But I wonder too if we’d be seeing the same display of rabid right-wing activism today, seemingly ordinary moms putting their kids on display, if there had been no pussy-hatted inspiration. (Those people have never had an original idea in their lives.) I have also reconsidered my feelings about the government of Ontario’s illegitimacy after they were elected in 2018, joining in calls for leaders to resign. While I do think this government’s tenure has brought significant damage to our province and its institutions, both the last year in American politics and our most recent election in Canada have underlined to me how fragile our democracies are and that those who try to delegitimize democratically elected governments do so at all everyone’s peril. And I’m thinking again about the power of rage as a political tool, which seemed all fine and well when we were raging for our own truly noble causes, but what happens when other angry people start to use that tool too, and their anger is cruel, divorced from reality and terrifying?
When I look back at the last five years of my own political action, what I regret is the contempt I felt, contempt which is not so different from that which resulted from Barack Obama’s political success in 2008, and which has a direct line to the election of Obama’s successor 8 years later. It was actually Trump’s election which made our own contempt for Premier Doug Ford all the more vociferous—does the world really need more than one yellow haired angry populist? (Apparently we needed three.) But of course it was contempt for the previous premier, Kathleen Wynne, that had paved the way for Ford’s unlikely win in the first place.
“Contempt is the opposite of empathy,” Edward Keenan wrote earlier this month in The Toronto Star. “And as U.S. President Joe Biden has said, “empathy is the fuel of democracy.” If we cannot imagine ourselves in the shoes of other people, we have little hope of working with them in a healthy democratic society.”
The Ontario government has been terrible and inept, but they were voted in—not for better, but for worse, it’s true—by a fair election by my fellow Ontarians. And this idea that I myself perpetuated that somehow those people’ votes were less valid than mine or didn’t matter is so absolutely anathema to a functioning democracy—and we see the same dynamics playing out now in far right politics underlined by racism and white supremacy. “Canada use to be a great country to bad its not anymore cause of people like you,” in the brilliant words of a friend-of-a-friend on Facebook last week, and you could almost print that on a little red ball cap, you know?
“I don’t know how to explain to you why you should care about other people.” In the tidal wave of despair that was 2017 and onward, that viral phrase (often mis-attributed) was something to cling to, so perfectly articulating the powerlessness and despair that so many of were experiencing in the face of cruelty and obtuseness. The first time I saw that phrase, in a tweet, no doubt, I am sure that I RT’d it. THIS. But here is something else I’m thinking twice about, this politicization of care, or maybe the partisan politicization is what I mean, because care is certainly political. But I’m resisting the arrogance now that me and people who think like me occupy a kind of moral high ground, and that people who vote for other political parties don’t care for other people too, that they aren’t good neighbours, and generous friends, and charitable donors, and nurses, and teachers, and personal support workers. I’m resisting the idea that in order to care, you have to care the same way I do. I’m resisting the idea that we have no common ground.
Last night was the first election in as long as I can remember that didn’t, to paraphrase Sally Rooney in her latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, “make me feel like I was physically getting kicked in the face.” The election that nobody wanted, perhaps, but its low stakes were almost refreshing—the angry Trumpy man in the purple suit leads a racist fringe part emboldened by anti-vaxxers this time but, statistically speaking in Ontario, our anti-vax population is so tiny that they’re having a hard time spreading the Delta variant, let alone fascism. And while I know details are sketchy and shifty, the other parties were all talking about vaccine mandates, and climate change, and the PC leader was at least trying not to come across as a troglodyte who wants to get all up in my uterus, and I’ve got to give him points for that. It’s certainly better than the alternative.
It’s certainly better than the alternative. A phrase that’s occurred to me several times in the past year or so, especially since we’ve seen the alternative, glimpsed on January 6 in Washington DC, in democratic crackdowns in countries like Belarus and Afghanistan, and so many more, places where political contempt has opened the door to extremism bringing forth a vicious spiral of democratic unravelling. I don’t want to do that anymore.
January 14, 2021
Celebration Wednesdays
#CelebrationWednesdays is a thing I made up yesterday as an excuse to be baking a cake with rainbow sprinkles in the middle of a roller coaster week. Roller coaster week in the pandemic sense, of course, which meant that I barely left the house, but the world has been hard and the weather is grey, and I’ve had plugged ears since Boxing Day that have only become worse since I started squirting random liquids into them in order to ameliorate the situation.
And so the answer was cake. (The answer is always cake.)
I made Smitten Kitchen’s confetti cake with butter cream icing, and it was so very delicious. And I determined that, for the duration, we’ll be celebrating something ever Wednesday, no matter what. And yesterday, that celebration was vaccines. The friends of ours who work in health care are beginning to get theirs. Our friends in New York are getting theirs too. A friend told me that school staff in Ontario will be among the Stage 2 vaccinations too, which is the best thing ever, and it all makes me so happy and is definitely reason to celebrate. It will be some time before I get the shot myself, I suspect, but seeing as I don’t get out much these days, I’m willing to be patient.
Right now I am reading Penelope Lively’s A House Unlocked, the story of her grandparents’ house in Southwest England and the role it played as a backdrop to the tumult of twentieth century. During World War Two, Lively’s family sheltered six small children evacuated from East London, and she put the story in a context I’d never considered before, having taken these evacuations for granted as part of history. But how bizarre it must have been—officials would come to rural homes and take stock of their capacity, and then inform residents of many people would be arriving. People who would stay for years (and had nits and wet the bed). Can you imagine going through that? What mass organization must have been required. And some of it was very disorganized—Lively writes of plans made for specific people to billeted in particular places, but when the time came, the London stations were so overwhelmed with passengers, they had no choice but to just put them on the first trains available, no matter where they were going.
She also writes about the national spirit in 1939, which I’ve never really thought a whole lot about. During the past year in particular, I’ve found myself wondering if my grandparents ever looked at each other and muttered, “Goddamn you, 1943,” but then of course they didn’t, because my grandfather was away at sea. But Lively writes about the very beginning of the war, about the catastrophic predictions for aerial bombardment from the Germans, which experts had been talking about throughout the 1930s. This was no 1914, “this will all be over by Christmas.” Lively writes, “Anyone alive to official anticipation of what would probably happen in the first days and weeks of war would have been expecting the end of the world they knew.”
The story of these mass evacuations was also one of extreme poverty, vast income inequality, a need “to preempt… mass panic and consequent breakdown of law and order” as attacks began.
Anyway, it all made me think about how there is nothing new under the sun… And about the strangeness of living through history, which I never experienced properly before the last five years or so. I was 22 on September 11, 2001, but for me that was too young to properly understand the implications of those events, or how I was connected to them. One day I think I will write something about how it was watching Mad Men that prepared me for the tumultuous times that we’ve been living through. The visceral way that the show presented what it was to experience the 1960s, the deaths of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. (“WHAT IS GOING ON?”)
Anyway, the great thing about Celebration Wednesdays is that they lead to Leftover Cake Thursdays.
Whatever gets you through.
November 11, 2020
Poppies
As most people don’t care about in the slightest, for good reason, I have complicated feelings about Remembrance Day. Sometimes I feel like the messaging and symbolism are manipulative, an idea whose simplicity belies it’s true complexity. My grandfathers were proud of their service in WW2, but it was also them who taught me (in addition to “Don’t tattoo anchors on your forearm”) that what a waste is war. The trauma for the people who fight our wars and their families is often insurmountable, and these people do not receive sufficient support. War is bad for everyone, and while I understand that it can’t be obliterated altogether, I am sure there would be less of it if we didn’t have a massive industry that relies on its existence. The most amazing way I can think of to honour those we’ve lost in wars is to stop sending more people to be traumatized or die, instead of glorifying the waste of human life as sacrifice. One other way is to resist fascism in all its forms—my grandfathers (Canadian Navy), maternal grandmother (WW2 nurse), and paternal grandmother (held down the home front while her husband was away for years) were my OG anti-fascists and may their righteousness be our guiding light.
