February 29, 2024

My February Substack Essay

As you know already, if you’ve been following along, I’ve set myself a challenge of writing a long-form essay every month this year. The second one went live this morning and I am really proud of it—“In Praise of Pieces: Commonplace Books, Friendship Quotes, and Our Bookless Book Club.” I’m posting these essays on Substack, because the opportunity to monetize my writing is something I want to explore, because I want to try something new, and also because Substack offers podcast hosting (the teaser for my new podcast came out yesterday!).

It’s funny though because Substack is working very hard to embrace elements of social media platforms (they just introduced direct messaging, their “notes” is like a hybrid of Twitter and Facebook) and I’m just not interested in any of it. As always, I keep coming back to my blog, to the opportunity to be read in semi-obscurity. And I appreciate the readers who show up here so much.

My first three Substack essays will be available for everyone to read, but thereafter (beginning in April) will be for paid subscribers only. To show my gratitude to the readers who show up for me here, I’d like to give away paid subscriptions to the first three people who get in touch to claim them. Drop me an email at klclare AT gmail DOT com! (I’ll put a note here when they’re gone.)

February 28, 2024

Leaps

There is reference to an act of suicide in this post, which might not be okay for you right now. Please take care. And no, it’s not mine, Mom. I am fine 😉

I like the idea of leap years, a bonus day, even if it happens to fall in February, 24 hours out of nothing with which I am welcome to use however I like (probably reading). But then the last time we had a leap year was, um, erm, 4 years ago, which was THAT YEAR, and I’ve always been a little bit superstitious, but THAT YEAR wrecked me (and everyone), and navigating the p.t.s.d. from that experience will likely be the project of the rest of my life.

What I’m trying to say is that I’ve been wanting to read this book called End Times, which has been sitting on my shelf for a while, but I haven’t, because in February 2020, I read a book from the same publisher called The Towers of Babylon that had some “end times” apocalyptic vibes, and I’m worried that if a pattern emerges, I might trigger disaster all over again. Sounds normal, right?

Two years later, I’d be (nearly literally?) out of my mind after a lifetime in pandemic years, the chaos of the trucker convoys, and the onslaught of invasion in Ukraine, and I remember eating dinner in a pizza restaurant as the TV news reported attacks on Ukrainian nuclear reactors, and I was so deeply entrenched in the catastrophic thinking that nearly wrecked me and convinced that we were all going to die, imminently, and I didn’t understand how everyone was acting normal. This was around the same time that I was waiting at a red light on Bathurst Street when something crashed down from a tall building under construction, and it wasn’t until long after I’d driven through those lights, until a few days later when I was reading the news, that I learned it had been a person who’d fallen to the street that day. Who’d jumped. Who’d leapt.

I feel like February is a rutted driveway, and I keep returning to those same tire tracks, noting the different designs of the treads, the shapes and patterns they make.

It was around this time of year, 11 years ago, that a very large cyst emerged in my thyroid, when I was seven months pregnant with my youngest child. And while I was far less practised in catastrophic thinking at that point, I’m still me, so I went straight there, to the small percentage of thyroid lumps that turn out to be malignant, and the tiny percentage of those malignant lumps that turn out to be fatal, which was a devastating diagnosis to receive from myself, obviously. But it turns out that I’m not even a doctor, and that sometimes weird and disturbing things can happen that don’t necessarily lead to the end of the world, which has been an important education for me. I really had no idea.

But even still! The magical thinking. I went for my annual thyroid check last week, and my thyroid is forever in flux, some lumps growing smaller, new ones emerging, which is not actually so rare for thyroids, and all of this change beneath the surface that I’d not even be aware of had that cyst not flared up all those years ago, placing me under watch. And my tests were all fine, once again, and I knew they’d be fine, that they’d probably be fine, but I felt even to say so might be a trick, lulling me into complacency. It’s just when give up on your guard that they get you, so my ever present anxiety whispers in my ear.

Deadly viruses. Fascism. Bodies falling from the sky. Lumps beneath the surface. The creative leaps my mind makes to suppose I might have control over any of this, over the universe at all. That the patterns are even there, signs and omens. I still can’t believe I wrote a blog post on February 21, 2020 about how, after five years of anxiety, I was finally learning how to be calm. Naturally, I am still not convinced that my blog post didn’t start the pandemic, in conjunction with that Babylon book, never mind that Covid-19 (which the blog post doesn’t even mention among all the other things I was worried about four years ago, and what if the problem was that I’d failed to watch out for it!?) had been circulating for months by then. But then the whole point of this is my inability to accept that the world exists outside of my mind.

February 26, 2024

Reading and Writing

If you receive my newsletter (February edition went out last week!), then you already know that I’ve had a rich and fulfilling month in terms of reading and writing, and creating. And if you don’t receive my newsletter, well, you’re now officially up to date, since you’re already here on my blog and my newsletter is a digested version of my blog posts and book reviews anyway. EXCEPT for my new creative project of writing a long form essay every month, of course. (Last month’s was about the delights of rereading Danielle Steele—have you read it yet?) I have taken exquisite pleasure in writing these pieces, and my next one will be arriving in inboxes on THURSDAY. It’s called “In Praise of Pieces: Commonplace Books, Friendship Quotes, and Our Bookless Book Club” and I’m really excited to share it with you. As with last month’s essay, and like next month’s, these essays will be available for all subscribers, and thereafter for paid subscribers only. As I wrote in my newsletter, “I entered into this enterprise with the lowest expectations, with the intention of finding a different way to be online and channelling my thoughts and ideas into long-form projects whose composition seemed like it might help to further mend my brain after more than a decade of fragmentation on social media. And let me tell you, it has felt so good to write these longer pieces, so rich and satisfying. And it has felt even better to have so many of you become paid subscribers to receive these pieces.” Thanks to everybody who has read, shared, or supported. Challenging myself in this way has been so satisfying. It has also meant that I got to spend part of last week rereading Katherine Heiny’s EARLY MORNING RISER, because my March essay is going to be all about her work and what it means to me.

If you’re not on my newsletter list yet, you can sign up here.

February 22, 2024

Gleanings

• But I also see where this urgency can lead us—myself included—to run roughshod over our own relationships, turning people we love into targets of our wrath.
• This wasn’t one of the better times in my life. That’s not Dar Williams’ fault, but regardless the emotional ups and downs of my final years in that university town came to have Mortal City as their soundtrack.
• I have not been to hell and back/ But maybe that’s not true.
• Socially, I was lukewarm: being known as the 15 year old who square danced with her parents was not likely to turn the temperature down to cool where I longed to be. (Becoming hot was never in the cards).
• A thing I like to do in the car: say “How dare you” out loud with different intonations and degrees of vehemence. My life is not dramatic enough to necessitate saying it for real, but I want to be ready. 
• I am always taken aback by the metaphysics of time and place. That you think of someone perhaps returning from a run along Mill Creek in Edmonton or skating with his children and he is thinking about dinner in the 5th in Paris.
• In these stories we find the extraordinary and the appalling happening all over the place, quite unremarked upon. The casual transfiguration of women into birds, of phantoms into songs. The unflinching brutality of murder and death. The inconsistency of time and geography, which can trap you or hasten you along. Not only airships, but wind that has a voice.
• It’s high summer in Melbourne and the city is absolutely effervescing with the excitement of Taylor Swift being in town.
• I’ve brushed my girl’s hair a thousand times. And braided it just as many. High pony. Low pony. Bows. Barrettes. Headbands with flowers as big as dinner plates. Ballerina bun. Top knot. Backcombed witch’s mane. Lice. Thrice. Graduation. First party. And then today, for the first time ever, Iole did my hair.
• Because here’s the thing about telling stories. We don’t need to know, or understand, or locate meaning. We just need to be open to receive, to see, to listen, to translate, transcribe, hunt down, search out, borrow, collect, connect, tell. 

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 20, 2024

SUNSHINE

Once a year, I get stabbed in the neck for a needle biopsy at Mt. Sinai Hospital, and then reward myself with some new book purchases at the Indigo Spirit bookstore downstairs. They also had ASKING FOR A FRIEND in stock, and so I was bringing that copy to the cash with the books I was buying, and Radiant Human/Expert Bookseller Lisa spied my book’s cover on the top of my stack. “OH MY GOD, KERRY CLARE!,” she exclaimed, which I just think is absolutely the best way to overhear people talking about you when they think you’re not present. I probably should have pleaded ignorant, and said, “Oh, hey, rave a little more about this author, why don’t you,” but instead I told her that this was my book, and I wanted to sign it, and she was super excited because she’d been the one to order my book—as well as the Claire Keegan short story collection I was buying, and so she is CLEARLY a woman of exquisite literary taste. It was truly the nicest bookstore encounter, and turned my day—which began with box breathing on the subway and a neck biopsy—into SUNSHINE. She is very very excited to hear when my next book is coming out. LISA!! What a gem.

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 14, 2024

In Praise of Made-Up Holidays, Especially in February

Yesterday, for the fifteenth year in a row, I made the banana oatmeal pancakes recipe I tore out of Chatelaine Magazine in 2008 when I was six months pregnant and obsessed with bananas. Anything to perk up a Tuesday in the middle of February, which is why I celebrate Pancake Tuesday wholeheartedly. It’s also why I am definitely in Valentines Day too, an occasion marked by my husband and I writing cards to each other, and books and treats for our kids. My husband shows he loves me every single day (I thought of this especially when I came home yesterday morning and he was in the meeting, and my teapot was full and waiting for me, thanks to him) but that doesn’t mean that Valentines Day has to mean nothing. After he dropped our daughter off at school, he came home with a bouquet of tulips from the convenience store, nothing fancy, something wonderful all the same. A made-up holiday, but then what holiday is not a made-up holiday? I reject the idea that we’re incapable of exalting the ordinary, of giving meaning and structure to these days of our lives, that all of us are merely dupes of capitalism or the patriarchy. That any of this must necessarily be about consumerism after all. And of course it should not be obligatory, any of it—I certainly opt out of my share of occasions, the ones that fail to light a spark in me. Doing something because you have to should never be the point, but I also think that it’s possible to inject richness and meaning into all kinds of days throughout the year, the days that appear on the calendar or otherwise. For those of us who live without organized religion, this is especially important, essential, perhaps. And possibly even people of religion need the same reminders not to be merely going through the motions, living by rote.

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.

February 7, 2024

She’s So High

The podcast I love more than any other is 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s, hosted by Rob Harvilla, author of my all-time favourite piece of music journalism, “How “Summer Girls” Explains a Bunch of Hits—and the Music of 1999.” (I wrote about my ongoing obsession with “Summer Girls” last year. It continues to be ongoing.) I started listening to the podcast—which is now into more than 100 songs that explain the ’90s, but let’s not be pedantic about it—with the Natalie Imbruglia “Torn” episode, featuring Sophie B. Hawkins as a special guest, and it continues to delight and make me reminisce and also make me think.

Last week’s episode, on “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls, in particular. And not just because it talks about working in retail while the Goo Goo Dolls play, and I did once indeed have a job folding t-shirts while “Black Balloon” played and articulated all my longing. (There was so much longing. I was twenty years old.) But also because the episodes are never just about one song anyway, and this one delves back to the movie High Fidelity, and how podcast host Rob used to take it as a compliment when people would tell him that he was a lot like the Rob in the movie. He used to think that guy was cool, and so did I (he was played by John Cusack after all). But. “High Fidelity is a horror film disguised as a rom-com,” says Rob Harvilla, and so was my idea of romance, to be honest. Informed by many John Cusack films, but also pop music in general.

“She’s So High,” by Tal Bachman, is the song Harvilla uses to articulate the problem of how women as love objects are presented in popular music. The point of existing as a woman, as per that song, and so many others, is to be out of some sad guy’s league. “Songs Sung By Sad Boys Who Dug Themselves into Mopey Bottomless Pits Singing Up at Fantasy Girls Marooned On Impossibly High Pedestals,” Harvilla explains.

Indoctrination into this culture in the 1990s meant that I thought romantic love meant some sad sack guy with an acoustic guitar who seemed to worship me in the most solipsistic manner possible. It means that it never occurred to a lot of sad sack guys that women were actual humans with multi-dimensions and struggles of their own. It meant that it seemed very reasonable for me to have relationships with men who were distinctly not excellent, because it was part of my job description to be “high above him.” In fact, it was my job to fix him, to save him, to exalt him above his own mediocrity. And that he would somehow be more authentic than other people for not even bothering. Romance was Ethan Hawk as Troy in Reality Bites telling Lelaina Pierce, “I’m the only real thing you’ve got.” It would never occur to me that I might possibly meet someone who could add to my own life, who could make my own world bigger and better. That the standard could possibly be meeting someone as smart, as passionate, as wonderful as I am. What it could really mean to meet my match.

The bar was low in the 1990s. I love the song “Head Over Feet,” by Alanis Morisette, but what does it mean that some jerk got an entire ballad written about him on the basis of the fact that “You ask how my day was”?

I had no choice but to hear you
You stated your case, time and again…