March 28, 2024
Sharp Notions: Essays from the Stitching Life, edited by Marita Dachsel and Nancy Lee
I’ve been around for a little while, and I think it’s safe to say that Sharp Notions: Essays from the Stitching Life, edited by Marita Dachsel and Nancy Lee is the best literary anthology I’ve ever read. It’s a beautiful volume, as aesthetically as pleasing as you’d expect for a book about art, a beautifully crafted object in its own right, complete with colour photography of beadwork, quilts, Kelly S. Thompson’s knitted bull terrier, a conversation in embroidery, and needlepoint.
I’m not actually sure of what the difference is between embroidery and needlepoint (I’m a lapsed knitter myself, without much of a stitching life at all) but I still really loved this book, the different approaches of its essayists, the capaciousness of “the stitching life” in general and its connection to many different backgrounds and traditions, which means that every reader has something new, and fresh, and inspiring to say.
A common thread (oh, no. I’ll stop…) is the way that various kinds of stitching have sustained the writers through periods of difficulty, how needle crafts have managed to be transportive at moments when the crafters themselves weren’t going anywhere. My favourite piece was Jess Taylor’s, a meditation on pain, healing, trauma, and productivity. I loved Anne Fleming on knitting and gender; Danielle Lussier on bringing Indigenous beading traditions to her PhD thesis; Laura Cok on infertility and knitting for a pregnant friend’s baby; Lorri Neilsen Glenn on the stitches that have been with her throughout her life; Rob Leacock on knitting as a way to be alone; Carrianne Leung on stitching her way through pandemic days; and Theresa Kishkan (such a beloved writer!) on stitching through uncertainty.
These essays are stories of connection, with the past, present, and future. Stories of creation, solace, and possibility. These are stories of kinship, and it’s a privilege to join the fold through reading.
March 19, 2024
The Afterpains, by Anna Julia Stainsby
Anna Julia Stainsby’s debut The Afterpains has been a hot topic of conversation in one of my group chats lately, so I was happy to get my hands on a copy and check it out for myself. It’s the story of three women and their respective experiences of motherhood and loss woven together with those of the people who love them, a testament to love and friendship, first and foremost, and the transformative possibilities of both. It’s the story of Isaura, whose teenage pregnancy was part of a long family history that seemed like a curse, and how she had to leave her daughter behind in Honduras while she travelled to New York to earn a living to support her child. Nineteen years later, the two are living a pretty good life in Toronto and it seems like daughter Mivi—on a cusp of heading to university to pursue her dream of being a doctor—has managed to defy the odds of the matrilineal curse, which Mivi is particularly grateful for because she happens to be in love with Eddie and the second part of the curse necessitates the man involved dying suddenly. Meanwhile, Eddie’s mother, Rosy, is still steeped in the grief of the daughter she’d lost to SIDS twenty years before, a trauma that has kept her too afraid to ever get close to her son, to allow herself the possibility of such a loss ever again. This is a story of grief, love and loss, what it means to have a child who is far away, or no longer alive, or growing up and away from you, which is just as it should be, but also excruciating and wondrous at once.
March 18, 2024
The Gift Child, by Elaine McCluskey
With her seventh book, The Gift Child, short story superstar Elaine McCluskey has pulled off a novel that’s as great as one of her sentences, which is saying a lot. It’s a novel in the form of a memoir by Harriett Swim, a photojournalist who lost her career when the bottom fell out of the industry, and lost her marriage around the same time for reasons she’ll eventually make clear, which is also to say that she is struggling. Age 52, she’s returned to her hometown of Dartmouth, NS, where she’s got a job at the casino and can’t help getting sucked into the vortex of her father, Stan, iconic news anchorman, philanderer, narcissist, pathological liar, and jerk. But does the story of what’s wrong with Stan and all his various crimes have to do with who Harriett is? And what about her cousin Graham, a bit slow, last seen riding a bicycle with a giant tuna head in the basket and missing ever since? What if it’s easier to get to the bottom of the mystery of what happened to Graham, what happened to Stan, than to unpack the reality her own trauma and heartaches? (“Focusing, as people often do, on the peripheral, because the real problem was too unmanageable.”) What if family ties weren’t necessarily destiny? But then, if that were true, what would explain it all? What stories would we tell?
This is a novel ostensibly made of bits and pieces, and diversions, but it’s also fundamentally a poignant journey to the heart of things. Further, it’s an assemblage of the weird and wonderful—aliens; Dartmouth separatists; an exploration of the culture of “paddling,” which I never even knew was a sport; off-colour adventures of the down and out; the crime beat; Russian spies, and hockey heroes. I loved it all so much.
March 13, 2024
Home, by Toni Morrison
“It’s only been in the last few years that I’ve started to read the novels of Toni Morrison—Beloved, Sula, Jazz, and just recently her debut The Bluest Eye—and for me, this has been a process of becoming, of watching the possibilities of literature unfolding. Mesmerizing, and also disorientating. I’ve found understanding these novels to be difficult. The kinds of places where the bottom land is high up on the hill. Where the unsaid is articulated, where the wicked are permitted sympathy and understanding. Whose love is a kind of gutting desperation, an urge toward destruction. Stories that are strange, true, and irreducible…”
In the two years since I wrote those words (in a mini-essay I just loved writing) I’ve continued to make up for my Morrison deficit—I’ve since read read SONG OF SOLOMON, PARADISE and now HOME, that last one under the influence of Donna Bailey Nurse who posted about it on the last day of Black History Month: “Morrison jazzes our idealistic image of 1950s America. She scratches the sepia-toned album of post-war prosperity, small-town security, domestic bliss, and the nuclear family.”
HOME seems to me more straightforward than Morrison’s earlier books, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a whole lot going on beneath its surface, in the space between the lines. Between the actual chapters even, as Korean War vet Frank Money—”An integrated army is integrated misery. You all go fight, come back, they treat you like dogs. Change that. They treat dogs better.”—engages in dialogue with the author writing his story (“You can keep on writing, but I think you ought to know what’s true.”) The story of his journey through 1950s’ America to come to the aid of a beloved younger sister who’s in trouble, a journey whose obstacles include trauma, addiction, vagrancy, bad luck, and violent racism. A brutal story underlined by extraordinary gentleness and so much love.
*If you too have a #ToniMorrison deficit, I think HOME would be a great place to start remedying that.
March 11, 2024
Bury the Lead, by Kate Hilton and Elizabeth Renzetti
“There’s nothing to worry about, Glenda. It’s just routine. There’s no way the cops will think a butter tart feud is enough motive to kill someone. This isn’t Midsomer Murders.”
I first read BURY THE LEAD back in January in preparation for Bookspo Podcast (the episode went live last week!) and returned to it again this weekend as I’ll be interviewing co-authors Kate Hilton and Elizabeth Renzetti (who are friends of mine) as part of House of Anansi Press’s Beer and Book Club at Henderson Brewing this Wednesday March 13. And it’s something to read a mystery novel a second time, when you already know whodunnit, and can pay attention to how the machine is working, all the moving parts. For some books, that might take all the fun out of the experience, but not this one, which I liked even more the second time around. I loved the humour, the similes (the old newspaper that “looked like it had been typeset with a machete”), the fact that it’s concerned with newspapers at all (veteran journalist Renzetti brings her years of experience at the Globe & Mail, and a passion for locals news and journalists in general), the fierce feminism, the small-town Canadian cottage-country setting. It’s the story of Cat Conway, who’s turned up in Port Ellis (where she’d spent summers with her grandparents years before) on the burnt out trail of a marriage and a career both gone out in flames. Very soon, however, it seems that her new, smaller, quiet life is not going to be so quiet after all when the lead in local theatre production (who is a world-famous actor) turns up dead on opening night, and not of natural causes. Ever the reporter, Cat is determined to get to the bottom of the story, along with her posse of news colleagues, a motley bunch if ever there was one, except that it seems like somebody in town is intent on getting between Cat and the truth. But is there anyone more indomitable than a middle-aged woman fuelled by rage who has nothing left to lose? Bury the Lead is pure delight.
March 8, 2024
The Hunter, by Tana French
Tana French is my favourite. Her new novel, The Hunter, is the second book in her new series featuring Cal Hooper, a retired Chicago detective who buys a rural home in the west of Ireland to discover that the big city’s got nothing on the village of Ardnakelty in terms of darkness and depravity. I read the first book, The Searcher, in 2020 and then forgot everything about it, but no matter because The Hunter doesn’t require a reader to be wholly up to date. And I will likely forget everything about The Hunter too because, as with when I read any mystery novel, but especially Tana French’s, I’m more just steeped in the atmosphere than sorting through the details. And the atmosphere is HEIGHTENED in this latest release, set during a sweltering summer as crops fail and everyone’s on his very last nerve. Cal has created a healthy relationship with local teen Trey Reddy, but it’s all set to go awry when Trey’s father reappears after years away in the company of an Englishman who’s probably not what he seems, and when the locals try to pull one over the both of them, it might just be that they’re being swindled themselves, and just when Cal thinks he’s got a handle on things, a dead body turns up in the road on the mountain. Could not love it more. My only complaint is that now I can’t stop saying “Feck.”
March 5, 2024
Broughtupsy, by Christina Cooke
It’s dizzyingly (dazzlingly) disorienting, the narrative of Christina Cooke’s debut novel Broughtupsy, and that’s by design, for it’s protagonist, Akúa, is racked with raw unprocessed grief after the death of her younger brother and the end of her relationship. Never mind that she’s been trying to outrun grief and gathering losses since the death of her mother years before, after which their father moved the family from their home in Kingston, Jamaica, to Texas, and then Vancouver, Akúa’s older sister, Tamika, refusing to come along for the ride. Akúa, only twenty, is so old and so young at once, essential parts of her stopped at the point where her mother died and her family fell apart. She’s not thinking clearly, her choices are impulsive. She’s decided to take out a student line of credit and bring her brother’s ashes back to Jamaica, to face her fierce older sister for the first time in ten years, both sisters bringing so many grievances and resentments that it’s impossible to connect. But the kinetic vibe of Kingston’s streets turn out to be a useful counter to Akúa’s grief and numbness, and Tamika’s own volatility has a similar effect, however complicated. It’s not healthy, but Akúa doesn’t want healthy, instead she desires to push her luck and flirt with danger, indulging herself with sensory experiences, reminders of who she used to be, the fact that she’s alive.
She meets Jayda, a stripper, and can’t help but be drawn to her, to her world, a world so far away from the staunchly devout Tamika and her judgments of Akúa’s sexuality, her relationship with a woman. Tamika insisting this judgment is not simply morality, but also practicality, because it’s different for a gay woman in Jamaica, it’s dangerous… But what does Akúa really have to lose?
The novel entire is the answer to that question, and it’s ending is powerful, moving, and so satisfying cathartic.
February 21, 2024
The Roosting Box: Rebuilding the Body After the First World War, by Kristen den Hartog
Whoever you are, I can likely promise you that The Roosting Box, by Kirsten den Hartog, is not like any book you’ve read before. den Hartog is an award-winning novelist, co-author of two other books of historical nonfiction, and her approach to history in this latest offering is lyrical (lines in italics throughout the book which are embedded in her own prose are actually borrowed from poets who died in World War One, figures she sees as ghosts who haunt the text), whimsical (“In a way it was a magical time,” the book begins, “given that magic can be dark or bright or both at once. Men by the thousands travelled up into the clouds in flying machines. Submarines lurked below the surface of the water and the men inside fired torpedoes at the enemy just like toys come to life. Little figurines full of wishes and nightmares.”) with the most prosaic setting possible (a former cash register factory beside the railway tracks, not far from the tannery with a view from the roof of the Ford Motor Company) that turns out to be the springboard for so many true stories, some heartening, most harrowing, making clear the enormity and inhumanity of what people and other creatures are forced to survive (and/or perish by) in war.
But then den Hartog has a better metaphor (this is why she wrote this book, and I didn’t)—not a springboard, but a roosting box, “a communal space that provides ideal but temporary shelter for [the] vulnerable.” That space is the National Cash Register Factory in Toronto, which by 1918 was converted into the Dominion Orthopaedic Hospital, and would become the Christie Street Veterans Hospital. The book is not a history of the hospital itself per se (though it’s loosely structured around its opening and ends with its replacement by Sunnybrook Hospital in the 1940s, as a new generation of wounded soldiers came home from another war), but instead a collection of stories about the lives of people who graced its halls, patients, doctors, nurses, and more—dietitians and occupational therapists (both new professions for women that emerged at this time), artists and sculptors involved in facial reconstruction, no less than Frederick Banting, whose studies were tested on diabetic patients at Christie Street. “So while the hospital is at the centre of this book, the story travels off from that point in many directions—to battlefields, to small hometowns in Canada and abroad, into makeshift hospitals on the frontlines, and across the ocean on warships. It moves backward and forward in time, always returning to the place (and the concept) of healing.”
War does the most horrifying things to people’s minds and people’s bodies, which den Hartog makes clear in all these stories. She writes about field hospitals and medical boats coming under attack—justifications that the former was build too close to strategic targets and that the latter’s conspicuous red cross was a trick. The images are indelible of nurses’ bodies resurfacing in the water long after, their long blue dresses, and huge white veils. Did you know what being buried alive, even temporarily, does to a person’s digestive tract, let alone their psyche? She writes about the 1918 Influenza Pandemic sweeping the world, aided by the wartime necessity of people in such tight quarters, and how it took down the vulnerable patients at the Christie Street Hospital. Including Indigenous patients, many of whom served as essential snipers at the war front, but would come home again to be denied veteran’s benefits. Patients left mentally shattered by war were also scarcely supported after the fact, it being supposed that anything otherwise would be coddling. The week before the Christie Street Hospital opened, Toronto’s artificial limb workers went on strike, demanding that the industry be helmed by a returned soldier instead of a government bureaucrat. There was an artificial limb industry? I’d had no idea—I was born 60 years after armistice and until reading The Roosting Box, I’d never properly understood how huge the wounded population would have been at the time. I knew that the War Amps nonprofit was a thing, but I’d never thought about why. (Also, the prosthetics weren’t great. Even now, prosthetics can be painful, cumbersome and very expensive, but a century ago, it was sometimes easier to go without.)
A warning: once you pick up this book, you will likely annoy everyone around you by spouting fascinating facts out of context, like a bothersome robot, but pick it up anyway. In The Roosting Box, Kristen den Hartog has brought a piece of Toronto’s history to life, and the effect is pretty dazzling.
February 16, 2024
Good Material, by Dolly Alderton
There’s this weird scene in Dolly Alderton’s second novel Good Material that reminds me of that weird scene in The Great Gatsby where Nick Carraway finds himself between ellipses in a room with a man in bed wearing just his underwear, though in the end it was not like that at all, but maybe the unreliability of the narrator was not so dissimilar, and neither was that this was supposed to be a book about one person (Andy’s ex-girlfriend, Jen) when it was really about the narrator framing the story just so, choosing to see what he wanted to see, and be seen as he wanted to be seen. And that is the end of my The Great Gatsby analogy, and my queer reading of Good Material (though you never know) and maybe the heart of what I’m trying to say is basically along the lines of, there’s a lot going on here.
When middling stand-up comic Andy’s girlfriend of four years ends things between them, he doesn’t seen it coming, but then there’s a lot that Andy doesn’t see, even if he does manage to manipulate his phone to perfectly capture the expanding bald spot at the back of his head. One day he goes through his friend group’s chat history, and notes that he’s only actually listening to his own voice notes, his takeaway from this not that maybe Andy ought to get his head out of his ass, but instead that he really should start a podcast. Let’s just say that Andy’s attempt to get to the bottom of where Jen might be coming from will be so far off the mark, because Andy hasn’t actually comprehended that he’s not the only person in the planet with an interior world.
Over the course of a few months, however, with the aid of some friends, his supportive mom, a job working a cheese stall, as well as an octogenarian housemate with a bomb shelter out in the garden, Andy starts to figure out a thing or two about himself, and others, and being a person in the world. The novel arrives at a satisfying ending, but one that is further complicated by Jen finally giving her side of the story, showing how connected these former lovers actually are, but also the ways into which they’ve always resided in two separate universes.
February 13, 2024
Black Boys Like Me, by Matthew Morris
Three pages into the first essay in Matthew Morris’s new collection BLACK BOYS LIKE ME: CONFRONTATIONS WITH RACE, IDENTITY, AND BELONGING, and I was hooked, as Morris describes a 4am journey through Brooklyn, the way he adapts his performance of self as he passes a police station (“stage my innocence”) versus how he would have acted if he’d run into another Black man on the subway who presents himself in public as Morris does (“I would have amplified my Blackness—for survival”). The former I could have discerned, but I’d never considered the latter—how racism and anti-Blackness could be as pervasive as that.
I loved this book, each essay blowing my mind a bit, framing the familiar in ways that are new to me. How does Morris, as a Black middle-school teacher, get dressed to go to work in the morning, and how are his fashion choices judged in comparison to those of his white colleagues? (What is “professionalism” anyway? What kind of people get to “profess”?) “Still, how are the Jordans I chose to wear to work less professional than the boat shoes Tanner rocked?” He writes about his mom buying him a Snoop Dogg CD when he was nine at the Sunrise Records at Cedarbrae Mall, and what hip hop has meant as a reflection of Black identity when there is so little representation of Black masculinity in pop culture otherwise, but what was complicated about that: “Those rappers were me, but that didn’t mean I was them. Outsiders couldn’t see the difference.” About pursuing his dream of NFL stardom, and the what that pursuit did to his body—he connects the distribution company where his dad worked (and where Morris and his brother worked the summer before he left to play football in Ohio), a company where the workers on the floor were all people of colour, and management was white, to professional sports where white owners reap their fortunes from the bodies of Black athletes. Though the connection is made implicitly, and this is the art in these essays, Morris laying out the evidence and letting the facts speak for themselves.
And herein lies the artistry at work here, in terms of structure, and prose that calls attention to itself in the most vivid and compelling way. I’m going to suggest that that first Snoop Dogg CD was the beginning of an education in the poetics of hip-hop, and that the influence of that poetics is discernible on every page of this book. Although I feel like I’ve never been more middle-aged white lady as when I’m supposing I can discern the influence of hip hop, um, anywhere, but there is just such a rhythm and a feel to Morris’s sentences, their cadences and alliteration. And then I think of the essay “The Fresh Prince Syndrome,” teenage Morris performing Will Smith’s character in school…because the alternative was being Carlton and alienated from his peer group, and I think of the high school teachers who wrote Morris off for being the smartass Black kid mouthing off in the back of the classroom, and is my supposing the influence of hip-hop similar to that, as opposed to a more traditional kind of literary influence? (What is tradition? Who gets to tradish?)
A thread running through all these essays is Morris’s relationship to his family, especially his mother (who was white, with a Polish-Jewish background—interesting to encounter not long after reading James McBride’s memoir THE COLOUR OF WATER), and—more subtly, but essentially—his younger brother, whose trajectory of life as a Black man would be wildly divergent from Morris’s for awhile. While Morris pursues his football scholarship dreams, his brother gets involved with drugs, with drug dealing, and eventually winds up in prison. “Despite thirty years spent knowing and touching and loving each other, we couldn’t be further apart in the routes we’d taken to preserve the collective sense of what Black masculinity meant to us. Of what Black boyhood had meant.”
BLACK BOYS LIKE ME is a complicated work with multitudinous facets, and every one of these surfaces shines. This book is a celebration and a gift.
