February 3, 2020
Gleanings
- As for me, I love being outdoors at this time of year. Without leaves on the trees and bushes, the world seems so much bigger, more wide open, expansive. Beautiful. Not to be missed.
- Five Minutes for the Planet
- Fiction is a necessary construction, and sometimes it becomes a mirror.
- But within a year, Mark was gone. So, too, the Chinatown brownstone, the pub, Honest Ed’s, and Zipperz. And in their places, cavernous pits, large cranes and empty storefronts. The markers of progress in a city with a red-hot real estate market, but also indicators of loss, of absence.
- This is the pleasure, the delight of the “wrong” solution, the solution unknown to the algorithm.
- But just now, the light in the corner.
- You can of course watch a sunrise any day that the sky is clear, but this is the time of year when it doesn’t happen at 4:30.
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January 27, 2020
Gleanings
- Gurus, language scolds and comma queens
- Always keep a pot pie in the freezer.
- But here she is, walking through the world with her stuff and her thoughts.
- Down With Resolutions. To-Do Lists Are #Forever.
- It was fifty years ago today, January 26th 1970, that Bridge Over Troubled Water by Simon & Garfunkel hit the record shops.
- Nicknames that bully, nicknames that tease, nicknames that coddle. They underline a particular, not always flattering trait, and reduce the whole of you to that.
- Because teachers, whether we adore them or not, seem, especially to our small selves, a little god-like, not only for the power they wield, though there’s that (though that’s less and less), but their influence on us, which I wonder how often we even realize the power of… then, and now.
- Ideally, someone will bring over KFC to your chips and whiskey (or pop or club soda) party but that sort of fancy showboating is clearly not necessary.
- Oh, we built the deck the spring Forrest turned 2 because we had his birthday party there and that was also the time I planted the montana clematis against the posts of the deck.
- Seventeen is the time of tiny moments of panic that soon your kid won’t LIVE WITH YOU anymore. Let us not, as they say, “go there” as I am already in a fragile state.
- What do you do with your son’s toothbrush when he’s no longer alive. It’s just too much to think about.
- But a kindness tool kit required some thought…
- I admire the sky at multiple times of day and in all seasons—it inspires and invigorates me
- No matter where you are on earth, the sun rises at dawn.
- Just perfect! An anchor, a color of constancy, one we can rely on that will remind us to be big sky thinkers. Precisely the color we need this year.
January 20, 2020
Gleanings
- “It is worthwhile to point to the absences, the silences, the erasures in stories. But the questions should be an invitation to creation, not an end to conversation.”
- The book feels like listening to a friend tell the story of living eight years in a place she was initially only curious about but came to deeply love… including, and maybe especially because of, the tough moments.
- Telling stories helps. As necessary as bread.
- The character got a spark from the person once, but at this point the two flames burn entirely separately.
- What happens if you decide to just embrace something you love? Be a champion for that thing?
- Another good reason to double up our meetings, when and if we can, is simply because we love them and they’re an excuse to help us through the winter.
- Maybe, like Greek philosophy, parenting, too, can offer one model for holding the difficulties of the present moment in mind, but differently.
- Don’t you just love it when that happens, when you think… rum, again?? And it all begins to feel like a kind of reading serendipity is happening.
- I love going out for dinner with a friend. French fries. A Cabernet. Three, four hours of uninterrupted, juicy conversation. Equally, I love not going out for dinner. And not talking.
- Rather, time alone in the woods created a personal, quiet space in which I have always been able to find composure, contentment and serene happiness.
Do you like reading good things online and want to make sure you don’t miss a “Gleanings” post? Then sign up to receive “Gleanings” delivered to your inbox each week(ish). And if you’ve read something excellent that you think we ought to check out, share the link in a comment below.
January 9, 2020
Gleanings
- The one benefit of not being able to follow in our parents’ footsteps is that we are forced to make our own.
- When I’m standing on the shores at Middle Cove Beach, about ten minutes’ drive from our house in St. John’s, I’m thinking of other shores and other waters: the mudbanks in Suriname, the white sands in Vlissingen, the wind and waves around the Cape of Good Hope—and the lives and stories of the enslaved and indentured.
- Don’t call my experience a patient “story”
- I’m grateful for all of it, even the uneven stitches, the courses of squares that won’t align properly, the stars that often need to be picked out and begun again (measure twice, cut once)…
- Sticky toffee pudding is usually made with dates and almost every person I’ve ever told that to who has had it but doesn’t peruse recipes for fun and entertainment (crazy!) has found that baffling
- Recommended, even with Katharine’s bookish preferences, which are completely antithetical to blogging…
- The rising of Grace Paley’s feminist consciousness—its fits and starts, fears and regrets— may be traced in her stories.
- Reading is not a competitive sport, but that doesn’t stop me from challenging myself…
- It’s the time of year I make my annual resolution to be weirder, more eccentric.
- In the fog of my fever, I could see the finished chapbooks and they were lovely.
- THAT SAID … I may write more about books in 2020.
- This is an experiment in how one book calls to another …
- To get us in the mood for all things Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, Marmee and Laurie, I’m sharing two poems from the novel and a recipe from the new Little Women Cookbook by Wini Moranville
- Something in me relished the thought of going up to people and saying, “Listen to me, something terrible is about to happen, and I can save you.”
December 20, 2019
Gleanings
- The only legacy that feels right to leave them is a literary legacy. A shared love of books that we have read together. I like to think this would have happened even without a terminal diagnosis but with it the pressure is on to make every moment -—even moments spent reading—count.
- “Why is my stocking cold?” my mother asked nervously on Christmas morning in 1992.
- Create what you like, create what you want to eat (so to speak).
- Our urge to mark midwinter and celebrate the days growing longer precedes Christianity by thousands of years
- The magic of Christmas prevails regardless of such details. It’s in the anticipation.
- What Maeve and Danny are really contemplating when they park across the street from it all those times is their past, their family, their story, and in a way, isn’t that what we all do when we return, mentally or literally, to the places we used to live and the people we used to be?
- I’m simply just not good at Christmas.
- Did anything change when I learned it was actually a gun rack?
Happy Holidays! I am taking a holiday from the internet and will see you in the new year.
December 10, 2019
Gleanings
- What do you think? Shall we keep creating? Keep writing? Or is there another way you’d like to walk through the world?
- Winter has taught me to love what I am right now.
- Raving about the power and politics of translation inspired by Emily Wilson’s mind-blowingly less-misogynist translation of The Odyssey into English.
- I decide that I will not beg the trees to heal me. I believe they have enough to do.
- The only way I know to smooth out the knots of futility and despair, of doubt and uncertainty, of chaos, is to write.
December 2, 2019
Gleanings
- No one gets anywhere by scrolling, they get there by doing.
- Lake Superior just happens to be Linnea’s blank page.
- Community doesn’t just happen—we have to make it happen
- When women are killed because they are women, we have to acknowledge that, and not retreat in silence. Silence doesn’t honour the dead, and it doesn’t protect the living.
- Ten years into motherhood, and my children hang off my boughs much less than they used to.
- It has taken me no less than ten years to make the acquaintance of Olive Kitteridge.
- How ordinary we all really are. How meaningful it is, to be just that: ordinary.
- A book, especially one received as a present, is a thought made tangible–a gift from the past, a gift for the future, a way to touch those who have gone before and, if we’re lucky, those to come.
- This year marks the fifth anniversary of the Short Story Advent Calendar, one of the Christmas season’s most dependably enjoyable traditions.
Do you like reading good things online and want to make sure you don’t miss a “Gleanings” post? Then sign up to receive “Gleanings” delivered to your inbox each week(ish). And if you’ve read something excellent that you think we ought to check out, share the link in a comment below.
November 24, 2019
Gleanings
- We are made to believe that there is never enough safety, enough space, enough resources for us all to exist at once. This is a lie.
- What I really love about prizelists are the longlists.
- Let’s talk inner demons, unhappy marriages, and maternal mental health. Halloween might be over, but the haunting continues.
- I have never been good with authority. If I had a more compliant personality I would have lived a less useful life, I think.
- Such as coming from Edmonton as children to race down to the Winged Victory of Samothrace. What is time?
- 50 Holiday Gift Ideas for 2019
- Be kind to your work, even if it’s shit, because all new work is shit, and we all deserve kindness.
- I am too old to drink a damn morning coffee and too old to stretch on a whim, and the best part? Is that it only gets worse!
- When you grow up in a counterculture that explains the world without reference to science and logic, you spend the rest of your life deconstructing things you once believed.
Do you like reading good things online and want to make sure you don’t miss a “Gleanings” post? Then sign up to receive “Gleanings” delivered to your inbox each week(ish). And if you’ve read something excellent that you think we ought to check out, share the link in a comment below.
November 18, 2019
Gleanings
- …a reminder that anything is possible, and that sometimes, surrendering to the surreal is all we can do.
- The process of creating an alternative canon cannot be easy, especially in these days when the very concept of canon-building is viewed with suspicion…
- Can My Blog be the Good Place?
- Maybe we don’t make it through this world whole. But there are moments of clarity, amidst the confusion.
- All I know is that often, what you go looking for is already there.
- …making this the winter I walk in any weather.
- It’s just such meetings…that I know are going to get us through the cold and snow ahead.
- a small dark presence
- Bea’s Favourite Snickerdoodles
Wondering what to read next? Take my quiz to find your PERFECT LITERARY MATCH.
November 11, 2019
Gleanings
- Does a rainbow trout, like human beings, have to develop coping mechanisms to deal with the life’s great challenges?
- And thus Raphael became like my first boyfriend, someone I thought of fondly from time to time over the years, holding a special place in my heart although I had long moved on.
- Confessions of a Failed Self-Help Guru
- …it’s time we stop, as parents, crediting ourselves for our fortunate accidents
- The guiding principle of the bookstore, located in Toronto’s Roncesvalles Village neighborhood, is social justice, and it makes itself known right away.
- The university, I said, is not (despite what its denizens too often seem to believe) the only place you can have an intellectually stimulating life.
- The issue is women’s rights, pure and simple. Any campaign to reverse abortion rights is an attack on you — regardless of your personal beliefs.
- Almost without fail, the more bafflingly short an ingredient list and the more stunningly delicious the outcome, the more likely it is to rivet me.
- Which is a roundabout way of saying that time has passed, but yes, a month ago we were by the sea.
- How in the name of squatty pink-frilled alarm clocks?
- I’ve read other translations but this one has always felt like Homer to me.
- Because it feels weirdly lovely to be blogging from Rome and just sharing these things that I’m basically almost crying about when I see them. Rain on a windshield.
- “The book didn’t help my confusion at all, but I kind of think that’s okay,” she says.
- Life is too short for tepid colour combinations like greiges and taupes.
