August 22, 2019

Watermark, by Christy Ann Conlin

In order for a short story collection to really work for me these days, it’s got to be a book, which is not a popular opinion in short story circles, I realize. And while in other seasons of my life, I’ve had time for those collections that must be measured out (and I think I’ve even written blog posts in ode to them), right now I’m measuring my life in towers of books I’ve read, as compared to the even more colossal towers of ones I’ve got to get around to still—so I require momentum, some kind of arc, stories that complement each other and provide me with a very good reason to power through.

And Christy Ann Conlin’s latest book Watermark fits the bill exactly, which was why I was so happy to be devouring it last weekend. Most of the stories are set in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley, and even the stories that aren’t are about characters who cannot become untethered from the place, no matter how they try. There are a few links between the stories, though they’re not completely overt. And also links to Conlin’s acclaimed first novel, Heave, which was published in 2002.

But primarily, this collection is drawn together by by characters who are witchy women, or supposed to be so. Women who are dangerous, wayward, and refusing to conform…and indeed a writer can cast her net wide in that area, and still come up with remarkable breadth, as Conlin does here.

Ragey mothers, rebellious daughters, reluctant wives, and furious sisters populate the stories in Watermark. My one criticism of the collection is a couple of stories with way too much expository dialogue. But apart from that, the book is terrific. The first story that stunned me was “Occlusion,” about a woman with a messy life undergoing an examination for lumps in her breasts—and it intermeshes with other storylines about still birth, infertility, friendship, sisterhood, rivalries, and the possibilities of a family curse. (What kind of thing is destiny?) I also loved “Back Fat,” about a boat, a bad marriage, and an old friend who sticks around like a bad smell or the devil on your shoulder. “Desire Lines” is about a woman whose father fashioned himself as a mystic and who grew up as part of his commune—until a terrible tragedy severed her from him forever. But for better or for worse? “Beyond All Things is the Sea” begins, “Birdie says to go tits to the wind./ And I am going tits to the wind.” A rollicking, jilting (in more than one sense of the word) story that takes place in a van that is a getaway car as Seraphina is driven away by her two best friends from what was nearly her wedding—and I think this was the launch point for Heave.

There is death and murder, and accidents that may not have been accidents, or maybe the moral of these stories is that there is no such thing as an accident at all. Instead, there is purpose, precision, and an incredible haunting darkness, all of which are the reasons why Watermark is such pleasure to read from cover to cover.

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August 19, 2019

I Found an Egg Beater

Of all the machines in a kitchen, the egg beater has always been my favourite, and while the electric version has its advantages (the beaters detach for optimum licking), it’s the manual (or “rotary”, like a phone dial, both rotating around an axis) that has long been an object of my fascination, even though I’d be wary of getting my tongue stuck in a thing like that. Probably I wasn’t, however, when I was a child.

But my children have never seen an egg beater, which a) explains some of the trouble they’ve had in swimming lessons and b) was confirmed to me when Iris and I were reading a book in which an egg beater featured, and Iris only shrugged. I’d had an electric egg beater once upon a time, but I got rid of it when I got my first stand mixer over ten years ago, and back then the children were not yet in existence.

And then we were at Value Village on Saturday, exploring kitchenware, which is one of my favourite things to do. And it had occurred to me that I like exploring kitchenware at Value Village just as much when I don’t discover any treasure as I do when the search yields a new Pyrex bowl or midcentury crockery (I am mad for midcentury crockery) because when I don’t find anything, it means I don’t have go about locating a place to put it in my very crowded kitchen.

But I found an egg beater, in fact there were two—in additional to so many cocktail utensil sets. There are too many cocktail utensil sets in the world, and also George Forman grills, but we’re not yet overrun with rotary egg beaters, so I chose the one that wasn’t rusty, even if there were pieces missing from the plastic handles on the other. (Why corrupt such a wonderful object with plastic anyway?)

Iris was overjoyed to recognize the object, and then everybody started fighting over who gets to turn the handle and make the wheel turn, and we hadn’t even paid for it at this point. But it is so satisfying, the whir of the blades, the smoothness of the motion, the perpetualness of it. How I use my own energy to turn the handle, which makes the big wheel spin, whose grooves connect with the two little gears atop the beaters, and what genius thought of such a perfect machine? (Willis Johnson, according to the BBC, in 1884.)

“It’s an amazing thing,” I told my kids. “It doesn’t use any energy, and you can even make a cake when the power’s gone out.”

And then Iris came up to me hours later, as though she’d been thinking about this throwaway comment. “How do you see when you’re baking in the dark?” she asked me. “When the lights are out.”

But how do we even turn the oven on at that point? (We have a gas oven. Perhaps it might work?) I imagine us making a soufflé by candlelight.

In 48 hours, we’ve used the egg beater twice, to whip egg-whites for the Sunday waffles, and Iris got to do that because Harriet was playing Nintendo. And then yesterday evening I was making muffins for the week’s lunches, and Harriet wanted a turn, and then the two of them started fighting because Harriet was going too fast and all the eggs were getting beaten, and it really is such a clever little gadget, no matter that it’s disrupted family harmony.

Better than a fidget spinner—I could run that thing all day.

Posted in baking, curiosities, the homefront | 2 Comments »

August 15, 2019

Immediacy

I’m really terrible at Instagram. Or rather, I’m totally amazing at Instagram, were Instagram a blog circa 2004. I share too much; cannot hold back; it’s sometimes poorly lit and totally unfiltered—well, except the photos of me in the yellow locker room first thing in the morning, which are what filters were made for, aesthetics are not central to the experience, the colours clash, and my face is everywhere. You either like it, or you don’t.

But I love it. For me, my Instagram is an extension of my blog for sure, the place where my most mundane and curious content has migrated. It’s a scrapbook of my days, my moments, and it’s also got the community component that blogs had circa 2004, people I’ve never met who feel like my friends. And there are certainly things I’ve posted on Instagram that have turned into actual blog posts, but just extended. Sometimes Instagram is where the thought begins.

It’s the immediacy of Instagram (and blogging) that I love, the Insta-ness. It’s the insta that makes the whole project worthwhile. Although there is actually very little that’s insta about Instagram anymore, now that the feed is algorithmic instead of chronological, and we’re all supposed to schedule our posts for optimum brand engagement. But I refuse to be a brand, and keep on insisting on being an actual, real live and moderately-flawed human being. Not for everyone—and that’s okay.

How can you even schedule a blog post, or an instagram post? For me, blogging has always been about the moment, capturing the atoms as they fall (to paraphrase Virginia Woolf). Right now as I’m scrambling to write this down with twenty minutes to spare before we tumble out the door and onto the subway to meet friends for a picnic. Context is everything, and so is (I suppose) exuberance, which is what leads me to post nine photos in a row in a single afternoon, an effort to (impossibly) capture every single angle.

This green, this light. How it was exactly. (And now it’s gone. But not entirely.)

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August 12, 2019

Crime Fiction Round-Up

One Small Sacrifice, by Hilary Davidson

It took a bit of time for Hilary Davidson’s latest to grow on me, mostly because the novel begins after a lot of the story has already taken place. War photographer Alex Traynor escaped conviction after the death of his friend a year before, but Detective Sheryn Sterling has had her eye on him—and when his fiancee goes missing, Sterling is desperate to find her and finally get this dangerous character off the streets where he belongs. But of course, the reality of the situation turns out not so straightforward after all, as sections of the book from the point of view of Alex and his fiancee make clear. Even more difficult, Alex suffers from the effects of PTSD and isn’t entirely sure he can trust himself after suffering from blackouts. But once the novel got going, I was totally hooked, and there were plenty of twists I never saw coming. New York City also makes for a spectacular setting (that cover, right?) and Davidson evokes it so well. I really loved this one.

A Dance of Cranes, by Steve Burrows

Can you believe I’ve been reading the Birder Murder mystery series for six books now? Never a disappointment, even if sometimes plot lines strain for credulity. (Shocking for a birdwatching detective series, right??) But I continue to adore these books, this one which starts off with Inspector Domenic Jejeune back in Canada and split with his partner Lindy (for her safety, of course, though he doesn’t bother to tell her about that) but now Domenic’s brother has gone missing in a vast and remote park in Canada’s north (obviously, there are whooping cranes involved) and it’s up to Domenic to rescue him, risking his life in the process. All the while back in England, Lindy’s life continues to be in danger, but not for the reason everybody thinks it is (and obviously, there are cranes involved, though not necessarily whooping) and will romance finally blossom between Detectives Lauren Salter and Danny Maik? A fabulous instalment in a series that is reliably delightful.

A Better Man, by Louise Penny

And speaking of reliable, the latest Inspector Gamache novel is a summer highlight for me every year, even through credulity often suffers the same straining. But reading Louise Penny while camping is my favourite thing, and I’ve been doing it for years now, for so long that I no longer believe that Gamache carries the scent of sandalwood, as the narrative asserts, but instead: he smells like campfire smoke. A Better Man stays close to Three Pines—rivers are raging and spring floods are high, putting the province of Quebec in peril. And then a woman goes missing, and her abusive husband just might get away with the crime. Gamache has returned to Head of Homicide after a demotion and is serving with his son-in-law, Jean-Guy, for one more case before Jean-Guy and family begin a new life in Paris. The personal and professional remain interwoven in this story, which was everything I look for in a Louise Penny novel. Reading it is truly a pleasure.

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August 7, 2019

Get Excited and Make Things

Once upon a time, we had a sign on our fridge that said, “Get Excited and Make Things,” and I have no idea where it came from, but apparently the meme originated in a 2009 Will Wheaton blog post, and the sign was stuck on our fridge with a magnet for years. Coming down at some point, but the sentiment lives on, and I think it might have become our family motto, if the enormous piles of stuff on my children’s crafting table are any indication.

But it’s a sentiment I believe in, and one I clung to as I entered 2019 feeling somewhat dispirited, mostly because I didn’t have much to feel excited about. Excitement is my driving force, and I didn’t know what to do with the year that lay ahead, in which no plans and schemes were being hatched, so I decided to make some. I went back to the blog, remember? And I made Briny Books and Blog School (with the help of my husband who built the websites for both—it’s a family motto, remember?), and now my little world is overflowing with things to be excited about, and I’ve got butterflies in my stomach perpetually.

And this is what blogging is all about, right? It’s about making something out of your stories, experiences and ideas, a DIY aesthetic, making the whole thing up as you’re going along and learning as you go. It’s being a blogger that has given me the mindset to take on these new projects this year, figuring it all out as I go along, to not know the outcomes, but to have some faith in the path forward. Let’s see how it all turns out, is the blogger’s approach, which requires attention, curiosity, and a capacity for growing, learning, and—ideally—being excited all the time.

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August 6, 2019

Gleanings

PS Big News: The Blog School website is live and our official launch is September 16! Learn more…

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August 5, 2019

Keeping Blogging Weird

In the spring, @hkpmcgregor recorded an episode of Secret Feminist Agenda about “Keep Podcasting Weird,” and I’ve thought about the episode a lot in relation to blogging and book blogging. I had been blogging about books for awhile when publishers started sending me review copies in 2007ish, and while I was grateful for their attention and consideration, I lament now what it did to my blog. Because it turned my blog into a blog that looked like everyone else’s, and at the time I even thought that meant I was finally doing it right. But what gets lost—attention to obscure novels, my own unique perspective, the indulgence of my own curious avenues. It’s also just not as interesting to be blogging about exactly the same books that everyone else is, and what exactly is the point of this pursuit, beyond contributing to online homogenization.

I’d started blogging about books while I was a graduate student, so I’d been writing about Virginia Woolf and Victorian entomologists, and I was obsessed with the works of Margaret Drabble and Laurie Colwin…and then all of sudden here I was reviewing the new Ian McEwan. Yawn.
From my new online blogging course, Find Your Blogging Spark

More than ten years on, I’ve learned the virtues of keeping it weird, who wins when we do (hint: it’s everyone), and what a more interesting place is the blogosphere and #bookstagram when we make space for novels purchased for a dime at a provincial park camp store. Books you decide to spend that dime on because of a description that begins with, “Only the pub and the pet shop are still inhabited in the boarded-up wasteland of Crow Street Southwest London…”

I spent much of this long weekend reading Miss Gomez and the Brethren, an early novel by William Trevor, whom I’ve never read before, and the novel reminded me of Muriel Spark, that curious midcentury mix of slightly old fashioned and shockingly sly and subversive at once, with an outsider’s view of Englishness.

I absolutely loved it, and have been thinking a lot about serendipity, partly because the book is about just that (although in a darker and less whimsical sense) and also because of the odds of this book and I finding each other, the most perfect literary match. Whoever left this book—which I’d never even heard of—in the camp store so that I would find it because we’d ducked in to get out of a thunderstorm, lingering over ice cream cones to avoid going out into the rain. Someone left it and I happened to find it, picking it up because William Trevor’s on my long list of authors I’ve been meaning to get around to reading, and here was one of his books in my hands, the kind of summer reading magic that is impossible to manufacture, but I’ve been grateful to be a beneficiary, and have this book be part of a wonderful long weekend.

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August 2, 2019

Mrs. Everything, by Jennifer Weiner

I had an oddly optimistic revelation about the world the other day—odd, because I haven’t had an optimistic revelation about the world for at least four years—which was that when people look back on the literature published in the second half of this decade, they’re going to be thinking, “Good gracious, the Patriarchy (RIP) on its last legs must have been quaking in its ugly boots.”

Because the books are so feminist, and furious, confronting racism and violence against women. Fiction and nonfiction, commercial and literary—I promise I haven’t been even deliberately seeking them out. But almost every book I’ve picked up this year, and certainly every one that I have loved, has been staring the patriarchy in the face and having none of it. Refusing to submit, to be polite, to keep things uncomplicated, to tolerate the status quo.

And in 25 years—after the current US president has been found dead on a toilet, the stupid red hats have disintegrated (cheap production will do that), and a few remaining rat-men have built an all-male colony out in the ocean on an island constructed from millions of copies of 12 Rules For Life (I would LOVE to know the number of people who bought that book versus number of people who finished it; is that why it keeps selling? Because the reader hopes a different copy might prove worthy of their attention?)—these books will be what remains of this time, the culture we made.

It’s sort of like the illusion I once bought as a young person that the 1960s was only groovy and folk songs, instead of political assassinations, endless war, and racial violence. You know the expression, “You had to be there.” In this case, it’s kind of the opposite. It’s even better if you weren’t.

And this is the gist of Jennifer Weiner’s latest novel Mrs. Everything, her thirteenth novel and her tour de force, a novel that reminded me of recent work by Meg Wolitzer and Lauren Groff. My one criticism that it started out unsteady, the story of a family in the 1950s whose American Dream is coming true, a mother and father and two daughters who’ve just moved into red brick house in Detroit. The characters are a bit stock at this point, the good girl and the bad girl, their disapproving mother, some manufactured drama…but then the novel starts going and it never stops.

What I love best about this novel is what I love best about any narrative that features more than one woman (which is the only kind of narrative I love at all, to be honest). That the women in the book are not foils, that their characters and narrative development is sufficiently complicated, and that their relationship is as much supportive as it is fraught. And such is the way with Jo and Bethie Kauffman, the two sisters who grow up in that house in Detroit. One is posed to be the good girl and the other is the problem, and then fate intervenes and neither one ends up on the trajectory that she, the reader, or anyone else imagines for her. Jo will become a suburban housewife, Bethie the counterculture rebel, but neither archetype is the whole story, and the whole story is mostly that there is no right way to be a woman. We live in a society that’s going to mess with each and every one of us.

The novel takes the sisters from the 1950s through to the present day, and beyond, and its fabulous momentum builds as it goes. The sisters come together, are pulled apart, face heartbreak and trauma, keep going, keep learning and growing wiser all the time. This is a story of women, and civil rights, and the rise of LGBTQ rights as well.

The constants? Weight. It’s not a theme of the book, but it’s always in the background, as its always in the background (maybe not so far back) of the lives of almost every women I know. Feeling fat when you’re not, and then actually being fat—is it not remarkable that women are able to feel badly about themselves no matter what their size? It’s a fascinating narrative strand in the book. As is the idea of mothers wanting something different and better for their daughters than what they themselves have had to go through, but the thing about daughters (who are women, who are people) is that they don’t always want to dream the dreams their parents dream for them, and they have to learn from their own mistakes, and also none of us want to entirely believe that we’ll be subject to the same rules our mothers were. We’ll do it different, this time, and we do, but some things stay the same, as Mrs. Everything serves to underline.

As Michele Landsberg explains in her book Writing the Revolution: “Because our history is constantly overwritten and blanked out…., we are always reinventing the wheel when we fight for equality.”

But I would like to believe there is something different about the current moment we’re in, when women are finally courageous enough to call out discrimination, abuse and violence, to finally call things by their names. Because in not being able to do so before, were we blanking out our own history, our own experiences? Doing the work of the Patriarchy for it, but no longer. I hope.

Mrs. Everything misses absolutely nothing.

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July 31, 2019

Stop Waffling, and Write

I finally read Brigid Schulte’s essay in The Guardian, “What is women’s greatest enemy? Lack of time for themselves,” an essay I’d seen many people sharing online last week. And to be honest, once I got to it, I found the piece a bit…slight? Understanding why it had resonated with so many women for sure, but it also frustrated me, and made me impatient. I wanted more. I wanted something less waffley (no offence to waffles) and less cribbed from A Room of One’s Own, because it’s been 90 years, and surely we can do better than, “What would happen if…” and thought experiments about Shakespeare’s sister.

(What might you have written had you not sat down to write the piece about how women don’t take enough time to sit down and write?)

I’ve spent the last few weeks completing the modules of my blogging course, whose goal is to deliver women the confidence (the nerve?) to carve out their own little space online, to emphasize to them that their voices matter and so do their stories, and that the world needs both these things. I’ve written 25,000 words that I’m proud of and excited to share very soon that I hope will inspire and motivate people who are blog-curious or at least need a little jolt to get their blogging spark back…but at the heart of it all there really is just one point, and it’s this one: You just have to do it.

And you know what? We can blame the patriarchy. (We definitely SHOULD blame the patriarchy. See Toi Smith: ‘Let’s stop calling it “mom guilt” because that’s bullshit and not actually a thing. Let’s start calling it what it really is: internalized patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy which has conditioned women to believe that once we become a mother our pleasure isn’t ours, that our joy isn’t ours, that our creative force isn’t ours, and that our time isn’t ours.”)

But all this means is that when you finally do sit down to write, what you’re doing is more radical, awesome and profound than you might initially understand it to be—which only makes it all the more important that you actually sit down and write. Telling yourself that you’re not writing because you don’t take time for yourself is a decision you have made, and it’s kind of boring. It’s also like telling yourself that don’t write because you’re a perfectionist, or that you don’t write because you have a job, or because you have kids. (To be fair, if you’re not writing because you have kids AND a job, I get it. Though there comes a point when “having kids” stops being an occupation that takes up every ounce of your soul and your life.)

Because there are so many people who face these hurdles, but leap over them and write anyway. There are so many women who do make time for themselves and for their art, even if we live in a society that conspires to make them feel guilty about those choices. So to stare wistfully into our teacups and lament the choices we’ve made to limit our creative experiences (honestly, you could let that call from your mechanic go to voicemail) because that’s just how it for women, it’s what we do, is essentialist and very annoying.

It’s also just another excuse to avoid doing the thing, and Brigid Schulte gets it exactly right when she writes, “I wonder if that searing middle-of-the-night pain that, at times, settles like dread around my solar plexus may not only be because there’s so little unbroken time to tell my own untold stories, but because I’m afraid that what may be coiled inside may not be worth paying attention to anyway. Perhaps that’s what I don’t want to face in that dusky room I dream of.”

The biggest challenge lies in not finding the time to write, but in staring such fear in the face. But it’s possible. With the knowledge that even if you fail, you’ll be so much further along than you would have been if you hadn’t tried, and also that you will never ever be better than you’ll be if you start practicing right now.

Posted in bloggishly, feminism, woolf | 8 Comments »

July 25, 2019

Find Your Next Perfect Summer Read

I made a brand new literary quiz to help you find your next perfect summer read! The results will be a bit familiar if you’re a frequent reader here on the blog, but this will help you decide which one to read first. You can take this quiz here!

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