April 15, 2019
Gleanings
- Having no food traditions to call my own has suddenly become liberating— something I can use, I hope, to explain to my children the connection between history and freedom and the world they’re growing up in.
- I used to think that I had to leave all sorts of mementos behind for my girls when I died…
- How do we stop judging ourselves? By forgiving ourselves for not being perfect, by letting go of the past and accepting that we did the best we could do under the circumstances…
- Children have value and are deserving of respect, simply because they exist. It matters not that they don’t vote yet nor have an income that translates into purchasing power. The measure of their worth is not any company’s bottom line.
- The ability/ to simultaneously/ write and mother well.
- Instead of making up a clear, concise one-sided narrative and sticking to it, she was admitting an unspeakable, untweetable, politically unpalatable fact: Sometimes, the truth is complicated.
- No woman, dead or alive, could hope to win the nation’s heart by writing about seeking communion in a Kansas bar while her husband drove carpool in El Paso.
- what I find really depressing is the continuing buoyancy of the market for sexist crap
- Learning to balance my to-dos with my no-need-to-do-a-thing-right-now is my new to-do.
- The trick to freezing liquids in a mason jar is simply not to overfill the jar.
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April 8, 2019
Gleanings
- If you’ve heard me talk about the library, you’ll know that I value the photocopier as one of the unsung heroes of human exchange.
- 17 Strategies of a Born-Again Reader
- It’s time for the men to listen and to record and to stay quiet.
- You get what you get, when you get a child.
- Choose Kindness! Kids Books that Explore This Crucial Value
- But where it comes to that question – the one of whether or not to bring new life onto the planet, by way of my body – I and my presently fertile peers have chronologies to consider beyond our own.
- When I was first diagnosed I turned to Jilly Cooper…
- How an Email to an Astrophysicist Changed My (Book’s) Life
- Think about how things like desolation, sadness, an imbalance in the universe, even, have a way of sharpening us, too
- …we’ve allowed our friendship to steep and stew, to mature; gathering dust at times, shining brightly at others. Never discarded. Complex, still vital, preserved and cherished.
- The water and its glorious buoyancy makes all of us athletes.
- Lord Peter Wimsey, from the beginning
- Although I was often warned about getting Blasenguitar and I understood from the way she said it that it was painful and I would be sorry, she never explained what it was.
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April 1, 2019
Gleanings
- I am rereading Emily of New Moon because of Russian Doll.
- It only took 50 very nice, polite people, including several kids, to…disrupt his agenda.
- To rescue even one child with learning problems or special needs from humiliation in the classroom and at home and from lifelong feelings of low self-esteem, is exhilarating.
- Consider how different our public policy outcomes would be if lobbyists, government-relations professionals, and former political staffers did not dominate the newspaper columns or the evening punditry panels.
- I was opening a tin of mushroom soup for lunch today when this warm wave of recollection washed over me.
- A woman’s wisdom comes, in part, from the great juggle of her life.
- I lose the thread, I miss the connection, I falter, I am lost. What just happened?
- When I wake in the night, I have the sense that everything I know is connected, that I need to find way to stitch it all together like a useful and beautiful length of tapestry.
- But sometimes, I just need them to be game. Sometimes, I just need it to to be easy.
- and the best unexpected gift of all this is how the organization of it makes me feel like I suddenly live in my very own bookshop…
- I feel like this book is so tightly bound to the bookstore, and to your understanding that readers needed a book about a life crisis that didn’t result in hiking the Pacific Crest Trail.
- Paradox: How to be proud of and show off one’s work without being offensive. Not an easy task, not by a long shot!
- Being funny is, in a number of key respects, incompatible with conventional femininity.
- I’ve given up that mythical “trying to strike a balance in life” thing, and now I really just strive to not be shattered into a million pieces.
March 25, 2019
Gleanings
- ‘Well, Miriam, it’s a good thing we’re Mennonites. At least you won’t get shot.’ ”
- Dealing with criticism
- White privilege is thinking you’re an oppressed minority because you can’t wear a racist symbol without being called a racist.
- Canada Reads and the gender gap.
- Antiracism is a process. Decolonial love is a process. Our love is a process. I never want it to end.
- It’s about figuring out how to be open and capacious and to let everything in and see what happens.
- Liking Books is Not a Personality [ed: this is bad news]
- Grace comes in many forms.
- Jansson is always an astonishment.
- My objection to private education is simply put. It is not fair.*
- I don’t travel with my fountain pen because it’s magic and I’m terrified of losing it.
- There’s something new and insidious about confessional-commercialism, which preys particularly on young women through the language of solidarity.*
- …how a life unfolds from what a pencil projects.
- The women who get me and get my taste are the women I follow on Instagram.*
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*Credit for these items goes to Jessica Stanley, who publishes her own gleanings at Read.Look.Think.
March 18, 2019
Gleanings
- It’s why I love swimming. When I’m swimming, swimming is the only thing I can do.
- What if writing helps you understand the world and the people in it today just a little better than you did yesterday?
- I think I kind of love uncertainty, if I’m being honest.
- Collectively, we have a role to play against the spread of hate.
- Maybe what we need is not more explorations of how meaningless everything is, but a radical reassertion of that meaning, the kind of hope that kept Woolf alive.
- Ardern’s leadership not only impressed the world, but also sadly reminded us what’s missing in most leaders.
- “We’ve got a pact,” Ziegler said. “You have permission to read for an hour, with no other interruptions.”
- On unknowingly reading a Christian novel.
- …a lot of stuff has been written at my kitchen table. I’ve daydreamed there. I’ve been happy in my kitchen.
- I find it moving to imagine Welty reading To the Lighthouse when Woolf was still alive, just as Welty was alive when I first found that story.
- That’s precisely the way a “grab”-heavy text reads to me after a while.
- I have to admit that every time I seal up a letter or finish a postcard, I stand back and admire it with a feeling of warmth and accomplishment.
- Thanks mostly to all my farmer friends who have ever so patiently(?) educated me, I have a grander appreciation for winter.
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March 12, 2019
Gleanings
- Why can’t we have parent-friendly Parliaments?
- My mother, you see, was an avid recycler from way back.
- David Tennant does a podcast with…
- “Darling, I love you goddamn, goddamn, goddamn much.”
- I feel like cancer has made me give up enough in this life.
- “Just a humble, decent dude”
- Someone called this blur an ordinary loneliness.
- But more so I’m here to iron things out. There is a decision I need to make and neither choice is ideal or easy.
- Here’s another definition of irony: It’s when the woman who writes the story of her life feels she has to prove that the story is hers.
- It’s not hard to understand why some people take such issue with us being able exercise the most complex and significant power there is.
- I am so grateful for this conversation and the chance to stumble through these thoughts and try to get closer to what I think and figure it out. I don’t know about this idea that we’re all supposed to know everything all the time…
- Stop telling women they need to be different or learn different things and start building an organization where they are themselves.
- Something that I think I cannot examine and re-examine and remember often enough.
- The woman I am today is an amalgam of a great many snapshots…
- I’ve only discovered the Moomins as an adult…
- I logged it all here like a dutiful aughts-era blogger with no larger agenda for what it would become, because how could I have known?
- Does the place where one was a child imprint more deeply than anywhere?
- It’s always a little adventure, to delve into a handbag I haven’t used in months, years.
- She is seeking not so much escape as neutrality: reading is a form of withdrawal, a way of refusing or rejecting the whole otherwise intractable situation around her.
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March 4, 2019
Gleanings
- I read like a buzz saw cuts wood.
- But I think I’m often my best self in hotels.
- I’m at the point in my years when, looking back, I can see that my life has been an accumulation.
- There is maybe no better time, then, to invest some effort in happiness, in making good for ourselves and others.
- Despite my reproductive difficulties, I’d forgotten that the simplest things are often the hardest to make.
- “There is a sense of the established power being threatened by women gaining respect,” she said.
- And those words became a sentence and the sentence became a paragraph…
- “The idea of male experience being representative of general experience, and female experience being women’s experience only,” she says, “is depressing.”
- It is simply one of the saddest songs about unrequited love I’ve ever heard, and I think about it almost constantly..
- Because the word character has two relevant and related meanings.
- How do we turn the situation around so that people are more willing to share some of the abundance they may have generated?
- If there are more like Russian Doll on the horizon, this might not be the darkest timeline after all.
- You might already do this, but I’ve found subscribing to newsletters is also a bit of an antidote to the whole potential glargishness of the internet.
- What Happens When a Book’s Character Comes to Life.
- That’s the thing about wrinkles, on someone else’s face they’re endearing, quirky –– life’s map lines.
- Winter is long in this climate/ and spring—a matter of a few days
- How effectively a piece is able to instantly make me feel something is a good gauge of its worth.
- Toronto Letter Writers Society
- So I took pics of dogs who weren’t so fussy about their privacy–and you know what? Dogs show you a lot about the world they live in.
- And since winter isn’t over just yet, hot chocolate and homemade sugared marshmallows are the way to go here.
- But compared to my early mommy writings on this blog the old adage “things will get easier” is so true.
- …may I remind myself that I used to be the banana queen of the Don Valley Parkway.
- And the only primroses are in memory, the drifts of them in the hedgerows near the island where I lived for a time in Ireland and used to pass on my way to the nearest town for groceries.
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February 26, 2019
Gleanings
- She’s spent a lot of her career thinking about the province she calls home, but her stories aren’t usually warm and nostalgic.
- On not centring menstruation around fertility.
- Irises really are a grand and whimsical bloom.
- I love how much these children want stories. A book is a spell.
- Many of my dreams are semi-nightmares but this one sort of snuck up on me and I don’t like it, even though I’m all for the experiment with narrative form.
- Definitely a great discovery, this is prickly strange reading.
- Looking for midwinter inspiration, I took Rob to our favourite flower store…
- The Starship Enterprise Editing Technique.
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February 19, 2019
Gleanings
- I’ve had my fill of faux community consultations.
- I want to constantly renew my creativity in attempts, and tries, and blunders, and anonymity.
- …how often it’s the entire atmosphere of reading — current circumstances, personal life stage, other voices bumping alongside — that makes a particular book memorable.
- That’s really the richness and beauty of anthologies. There are debates going on, and some readers take sides.
- How much more robust would my education have been had I read more women, especially ones who were still alive?
- Little girls with mothers who are teachers-of-life grow up to be women who observe, taste, admire, explore, and appreciate.
- …and once I’m in the water, I wonder who that person was who had hesitated, so happy am I to be swimming back and forth and back again.
- There is something so satisfying in perusing other people’s bookshelves.
- They say one shouldn’t do a thing if one’s heart isn’t in it–but one probably also shouldn’t do it if the heart is too much in it.
- I realize that by using the term “chit-chat”, I’ve possibly belittled what this group has come to mean to me.
- How certain gestures, features, remain over time, in the intricate mathematics of inheritance.
- I do still adore The Stone Diaries and recently pressed it upon a student, and I can certainly see its imprint on this book.
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February 12, 2019
Gleanings
- By-gone letters pull us intimately into the moment of their writing and thus seem truer than memories.
- I like to believe that leaning is love.
- Literature strengthens our imagination. If we all have the tools to try to imagine a better world, we’re already halfway there.
- I like the smell of coffee percolating, the way tulips nod their heads when brought inside, handwritten notes and letters, walking barefoot in the sand…
- As a writer, what I’ve done is not as important as what I’m going to be doing.
- And I noticed it because I was looking.
- This morning I went out to see if the small dark animal that jumped into the bush beyond my study window left tracks in the snow.
- Who needs a canvas when you’ve got walls!
- Undoing crochet still leaves you with all the yarn, after all: you just have to make something else out of it.
- It’s a stance, bewilderment. It’s a way of entering the day, and of thinking differently, even in times that seem to call for its opposite.
- I recognize that this sadness is the cost of loving my daughter and I wouldn’t change that for anything.
- But it is not true that identity politics are necessarily divisive. Difference is a fact of life, to which divisiveness is only one response. Inclusiveness is another: not just tolerating but celebrating difference, fighting for the rights of all, not just the few.
- My Year of Slow.
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