October 28, 2013

Red Girl Rat Boy Stories by Cynthia Flood

As much as I am pleased that we all love to celebrate the short story, the idea of “the short story” amuses me, as though it were only just one thing. To anyone who might imagine this to be so, I’d like to toss a copy of Cynthia Flood’s new short story collection Red Girl Rat Boy, which is likely to be world apart from the last short story collection you encountered, and is even worlds apart from the last short story collection by Cynthia Flood that I encountered (which is 2009’s The English Stories).

“This isn’t one of those stories puffed out with data about parrots or antique clocks or saffron… What happened, the doings that took me every-and nowhere-in this story, that’s all I intend.” –“One Two Three Two One”

These are stories without signposts, no smooth path laid out for the reader to find her way. Instead, we’re thrown blind into the mix, and we’re guided by voices, the illogic processes of the human mind. Some of these stories hang on specific hooks: the archaic technology of the answering machine in “Such Language”, in which a woman uncovers a terrible secret about her marriage, almost inadvertently, and then finally she has a story tell her friends at book club, who’ve felt that the security of her situation has implied that she thinks she’s above their problems. Real estate in “Addresses”, about a marriage that fails to progress (and is a great piece of circa 1970s’ high rise lit). Family photographs in “To Be Queen”, which reminded me of David Sedaris’ recent essay in The New Yorker. The dark and hilarious story “Care” is about the residents of a nursing home and their underpaid, under-respected aids–how those in both roles are exploited and abused, and how each undermines the system for their own devices. “Care” might as well be speculative fiction for how it takes the reader into a whole other universe.

I could cloak my criticism of this book in theory, perhaps, but with “the short story” in particular, I think it usually comes down to taste. The stories I liked in this book (including all those mentioned above) I liked a great deal, and those that didn’t work were those where the work required of me as a reader didn’t seem to come with a payoff. Flood’s two stories about members of a far-left political group I just couldn’t get into; no matter how many times I reread them, the context was elusive. So too the story of man managing a grow-op while failing to contain his exotic cat–their weren’t enough people misunderstanding one another in this story for my tastes.

I mention the cat and the grow-op to make clear that Flood’s narratives knows no bounds. Like the cat itself, her stories break through barriers, surprise at turns, and Flood herself is the hunter shooting right between the eyes.

October 27, 2013

Happiness Threads: The Unborn Poems by Melanie Dennis Unrau

Motherhood gets written about so often, I think, because we’re all trying to articulate the inexplicable. Edging closer and closer to the point, but never quite getting there, putting the most abstract, complex emotions and feelings into words. But poetry gets close to capturing the subtleties, in its smallness and delicateness, hovering just inches about how it is. I am thinking of Susan Holbrook’s poem “Nursery” from Joy Is So Exhausting, the workings of a mind through nursing marathons, as the baby moves from left to right and back again: “Left: Now that you’ve started solids, applesauce in your eyebrows, I’ve become a course. Right: Spider on the plastic space mobile, walking the perimeter of the yellow crescent moon. Left: Dollop. Right: Now it’s on Saturn’s rights; if it fell off, it would drop right into my mouth.” I am thinking about Sweet Devilry by Yi-Mei Tsiang.

And now The Happiness Threads: The Unborn Poems by Melanie Dennis Unrau, which is a collection of poems about making art and making babies, about birth and loss, and about the very strange community that is the online forum. The collection begins with a poem called “my children are not my poetry”: “a mother’s job is to know/ what matters and keep it alive/ a poet’s job is to feel/for a pulse…”

The first section is a series of poems about a miscarriage,a frank and raw exploration of the physical and emotional experiences of it. Of how death amd birth go hand in hand. The second section is about pregnancy, though it seems to be that it’s here that saying these poems are “about” anything becomes a little too simplistic. These poems are curious, puzzling, their imagery not literal and challenging our expectations, surprising us. These poems are pregnancy and motherhood are written with the first section of the book in mind, with an awareness that motherhood has its own dark side of the moon, that it’s love with an outline of pain. This poet knows what the stakes are by now. “the womb is… a nightmare nine months/ of falling no idea what it is/ to land.”

The third section is about birth and babies, though the poem “reclining buddha” contrasts the story of my life (“when you come to my bed with your/ whimpers and needs/ bird mouth searching for my breast/ i know i will hold you the rest of the night/ cup your bald head/ in my hands soft…”) with the story of a Cambodian mother whose grown soldier son returns home to spend a night in bed with her as he had as a child. “another birth story” sets the experience of a woman finding and losing herself through the birth of her child against the language of feminism, women’s studies and academia.

And then “happiness threads”, poems inspired by communication on an internet baby-wearing forum, with all the inane abbreviations that occur in such places. These poems include a glossary, which is telling, I think, how motherhood necessitates a whole new language near unintelligible to the rest of the world. Here, Dennis Unrau captures the shattered nature of a new mother’s existence, these conversational threads written in the dead of night, presumably as baby nurses. And the reader charts the evolution of this mothers experience, as she finds her feet, finds new challenges, redefines herself as a mother over and over again and the world never really does become steady. I love the idea of threads, especially in light of Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby, and thinking about these women on the internet in the middle of the night and all their literary antecedents thread-wise.

And then section five is “love poems”, whatever is left for the margins, conversation once the dishes are cleared and the kids are in bed. “don’t touch me i growl/ end of a day of cluster feeding/ your need does not move me.” Poems about the people we’ve come from. And then “Holiday”, which is so lovely, celebrating one’s partner in the chaos of it all:

your lullabies and page-turns are white

noise

    i sink

into a book notice later the music

stopped    you asleep together

map in one hand

a flashlight beam on a slack

cheek a moving eyelid

XX

Read an interview with Melanie Dennis Unrau at the Jane Day Reader. 

October 24, 2013

Lois Lowry!

Seven years ago, I sent Lois Lowry a fan-email to tell her how much her Anastasia Krupnik books had meant to be growing up, and she sent a kind and gracious reply. Three days ago, apropos of a conversation with Helen Spitzer on Twitter, I changed my profile picture to the cover of Anastasia Again! And then today, I discovered that Lois Lowry, Anastasia’s creator, was giving a lecture at the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books, mere blocks from my house. Today was also important, because it was Iris’s first time rolling off the couch, which was slightly traumatic, but not so much because she is my second baby. Also because she is my second baby: I can go out whenever I want, even if it’s for the third time in seven days, whereas with Harriet, I didn’t leave the house in the evening for nine months. So I went to the Lois Lowry lecture tonight.

(Yes, I am slightly wired. I don’t sleep much anyway, and then Jennica Harper’s new book turns up in the post, and it’s so good that I’m up late late on Monday reading it. And then yesterday, I discover that Margaret Drabble has a new novel, which is so fantastic that all I want to do is read, and that then today I get to be in the same room as Lois Lowry? Where do weeks like this one come from? [And yes, Iris is fine. Really. No injuries sustained. She actually landed on her bum, which was kind of weird because I looked down and she was just sitting on the floor, and I thought, “How did you get there?”])

Helen phoned me tonight to confirm I was going, and thought she’d stop by a bookstore en-route to pick up some Lowry and cram. What a fantastic idea, I thought, and calculated the unlikelihood of me finishing dinner, doing story-time, feeding Iris, and going to Book City in a twenty-five minute period, leaving enough time to get to the lecture. And then I started remembering Anastasia, and realized I’d never forgotten anything about her ever. I didn’t need to read up. And that she was incredibly important to who I wanted to be when I was young, and to who I am today.

Her parents, Myron and Kathryn Krupnik, and Myron’s old flame Annie, who turned out to be terrible. Anastasia who was in love with Washburn Cummings, who was black and always bouncing a basketball. How her father, a Harvard Professor, criticized her for using the word, “Weird,” which I still never write, because I hear Myron Krupnik saying, “Anastasia, you live in a house that’s full of books. Surely you can come up with a better word than that?” Her baby brother Sam, who was the weird one. One day she walked into a room and there he was, and he told her, “I am eating ice.” How she put her dad’s Billie Holiday albums on the radiator and they melted, and I didn’t know who Billie Holiday was (though I DID know what albums and radiators were), and got confused with Buddy Holly. How Anastasia got a job working for a rich lady called Mrs. Bellingham, and how, echoing her employer, Anastasia referred to residents of a public housing complex as “the great unwashed”, and her father blew a gasket. Her mother was an artist and always splattered with paint, wore jeans. Anastasia had the same reservations that I do about “the suburbs”, though I’d change my mind too if I ended up in a room with a tower. I love how her parents were so intelligent in their parenting, how they treated her like a person. I like how they were individuals in their own rights, with their own first names. These books introduced me to Freud (which was pronounced “Fraud”, I imagined), GertrudeStein (who was Anastasia’s next door neighbour, and she had a fish, I think, and a short-lived marriage with a man called Lloyd, who’d insisted the double L had a y sound). I remember Anastasia’s boyfriend, who was called Steve Harvey and wasn’t at all weird, and how he had no qualms about a girlfriend with glasses and intellectual leanings. Oh, and that other boy, with the briefcase, and how Anastasia had told him that her brother was disabled, which led to an enormous misunderstanding.

I remember buying Anastasia books at the World’s Biggest Bookstore on trips to Toronto, and we’ve forgotten how amazing that store seemed at the time. It was also there that I bought Pollyanna, with a foreword by Lois Lowry, which contained the phrase, “Goodness triumphs. I like that!” which I like very much too, except I misread it as, “Goodness turnips” and thought it a most peculiar expression.

I read her other books too–A Summer to Die, Find a Stranger Say Goodbye. I read The Giver just a few years ago, though it was not so much my thing. She told us tonight that her publisher asked her to stop writing Anastasia books, said her appeal had been exhausted, but never! What a spectacular heroine, smart and utterly herself. Which is what Lowry herself seemed like at the lecture, which was fascinating, funny, touching and wonderful. I left the house in a hurry and forgot to bring a pen and paper, so I didn’t take notes, but that was sort of nice, actually, because I got to just sit back and listen, and it was so enjoyable to do so.

She talked about being born into a family of readers, about being read it and learning to read. About the books that first impressed her, discovering how words worked, learning to tell stories through an elaborate lie she told to impress a counsellor at camp. She talked about her sister who’d died young, and about how, upon her death, she finally understood what a writing instructor had meant when he’d told her that she would need to suffer a loss before she could really write, and how she turned that experience into story. About how she lived in Japan as a child, riding her bike around post-war Tokyo, and the boy she knew but never spoke to, and how they met again on a stage years later when she won the Newbery Award and he was being awarded the Caldecott Medal for Grandfather’s Journey–he was the illustrator Allen Say. She showed us a still from a video of her playing on a Hawaiian beach in 1940 with her grandmother, and how eventually she realizes that it’s the USS Arizona in the background, which would be destroyed just over a year later, all the men on board killed. “And this is what literature is,” she told us. “The putting together of things.”

it was an extraordinary lecture, and something to behold: the actual sight of this woman whose books I’ve been reading for over 25 years now. I will be introducing Anastasia to my daughters, because apparently she’e just come back into print. But in the meantime, I bought Harriet one of Lowry’s books called Gooney Bird Greene, and tomorrow we will read it together.

October 23, 2013

The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit

I am glad that I don’t have to write a proper review of Rebecca Solnit’s new book The Faraway Nearby, that instead of taking the book apart to understand how it works that I got to simply let its impressions wash over me, to inhabit the narrative instead of examining its joists. The book itself, I found kind of by magic. I’d heard about it but it sounded too esoteric for my tastes, but then I kept hearing about it everywhere and seeing it references on social media, and one morning I turned on The Sunday Edition to hear Solnit saying, “Moths drink the tears of sleeping birds…” and I just kind of knew I had to buy this book.

And so I did, taking in its peculiar construction in the the process. Chapters 1-6, Chapter 7 is “Knot” and then Chapters 8-13 are titled as the first six but in reverse order. We finish where we started, with “Apricots.” And throughout the entire book runs a single line of text, an essay onto itself. I love this because it meant that as soon as I finished reading the body of the book, I had to open it again, go back to page one, and I respect any book that begs to be read twice.

As I said, we start with apricots, an entire tree’s harvest worth. Solnit’s mother is in decline, has entered a care home and the harvest is from the home she’s left. The apricots, Solnit tells us, are her inheritance, perhaps the most generous one she can expect to receive for her relationship with her mother has been fraught, complicated. But this is not just about apricots. “Sometimes the key arrives long before the lock. Sometimes a story falls in your lap. Once about hundred pounds of apricots fell into mine…”

She writes, “The fruit on my floor made me start to read fairy tales again. They are full of overwhelming piles and heaps that need to be contended with…” She writes, “Trouble seems to be a necessary state on the route to becoming.” I want to quote the whole book, really. ” Of the apricots: “It wasn’t that they were so hard to deal with as fruit, but that they seemed to invoke old legacies and tasks and to be an allegory, but for what?”

Solnit writes of books as places we inhabit, and books inside those books, and on and on, a series of Russian dolls. And it’s true that I felt as though my connection to this book was very personal, curious and magically construed. I think the point of this book is that any reader will feel this, which is magic after all. Mirror lead to glass, which leads to glace which is ice, and then Frankenstein. Here is anything you’ve ever wondered about Mary Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft, and mothers and daughters (and apricots) and death. Ice as destroyer; ice as preserver. (Solnit’s mind is amazing. It is a dazzling pleasure to feel as though one is inside it.) In the winter, I worked on a freelance project that involved much reading and thinking about the search for the Northwest Passage, which was fascinating, but did mean that I ended up having recurring dreams about travelling through endless night via sled-dog. And it was kind of a pleasure to be brought back there.

“The self is a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist.” (These were the points in which I started to think that Solnit was the intellectual’s SARK. Imagine this book rendered in rainbow print. Oh, but I don’t mean it. But I do. And don’t love the book any less.)

“In the years she gave birth to all those too-mortal children, she also created a work of ark that yet lives, a monster of sorts in its depth of horror, and a beauty in the strength of its vision and its acuity in describing the modern world that in 1816 was just emerging. This is the strange life of books that you enter alone as a writer, mapping an unknown territory that arises as you travel. If you succeed in the voyage, others enter after, one at a time, also alone, but in communion with your imagination, traversing your route. Books are solitudes in which we meet.”

She writes about getting lost in books as a child, about Narnia, and its doorways. She writes about how her own books became doorways, places that other people entered, and drew her into theirs, and how these encounters have changed her life. She writes about the apricots, her mother, deterioration. The coincidences that spark our lives, the coincidences that have shaped hers. And decay as transformation: oh! the places this book goes. She writes about preserving those apricots, canning. Fruit to still-life, and here she is writing all about vanitas, which is a term I’d never heard until I read the essay on Mary Pratt and vanitas. A book inside a book inside a book then.

Oh, what else? The Motorcycle Diaries, leprosy, her own cancer scare. (I am trying to draw you a map through this book. It would probably be easier if you would just read it, please.) “Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger.” On how those with leprosy do not feel pain in affected parts of their bodies, which become damaged as a result, and here she is talking about empathy. “The capacity to feel what you do not literally feel.” A sentence like, “I found leprosy useful for thinking about everything else…” “The self is a patchwork of the felt and unfelt…” I’m only half-way through the book and I’ve written nearly 1000 words.

And so it’s like this, a fantastic journey through a terrain with someone who sees deeper into the world than you’ve ever begun to imagined. Solnit is author of a book with the title A Field Guide to Getting Lost, and she makes digression into an art here, though it always winds back around eventually, the narrative accumulating. Winding, threading, Rapunzel and Penelope, spinning and spinsters. She makes connections between virtual threads and literal threads and fabric, and it all comes down to stories. It always does. “Moths drink the tears of sleeping birds.” What shape should a book be in a world where that is a fact?

October 22, 2013

Gift from the Sky

Donna Tartt’s new novel The Goldfinch came out today, and I’ve been looking forward to it. I remember when The Little Friend came out in 2002 and it was such an event. I was very broke, living on cans of tuna and long-life milk, sleeping on the bottom bunk of a bed in backpackers’s hostel in the Midlands. It seems momentous to be buying her new book all these years later, to measure out my own life by Donna Tartt releases: I own a couch now. The intervening decade has been good. So I trekked to the bookstore just now to pick it up, and also to get Kelli Deeth’s new collection The Other Side of Youth. (Read Deeth’s wonderful piece from yesterday about her devotion to the short story form).

So there I was at Book City, and in a hurry too because I had sweet potatoes in the oven, and what do I discover: Margaret Drabble has a new novel!! The Pure Gold Baby, just out at the beginning of this month. I had no idea! Can you believe it? The universe offering up one of my chiefest delights (to be reading a Margaret Drabble for the very first time) like it was nothing. And it’s even meant to be good, this book, and Meg Wolitzer says so. I am so excited. As if yesterday’s bookish gifts weren’t enough…

October 21, 2013

Harriet and Sheree Fitch at Eden Mills

The most wonderful thing that ever happened was captured on video! Here is Harriet storming the stage to help the great Sheree Fitch read Mable Murple at the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaOX6dValjY&feature=youtu.be

October 21, 2013

Excellent Mail Haul

Today was a very good day for the mail haul. Iris’s passport finally arrived, which is a good thing as we’re off to England in a few weeks. We also received a pair of orange socks for Iris, on the occasion of her first Halloween (thanks, Mom!). And then two books, one the latest collection by Karen Connelly, whose work I’ve admired for a long time now. And then Jennica Harper’s new book Wood, which is oh so exciting, because it’s not every day that you get a new book by one of your favourite writers ever. Very excited about this. Oh, what treasures a mailbox can hold!

October 20, 2013

Animal Stories (including woolves!) at the Gardiner Museum

We went to the Gardiner Museum today to see the Animal Stories exhibit.

“Elephants, leopards, dogs, squirrels and dragons… From exotic creatures, household pets, urban wildlife to mythical beasts, animals have been an active part of human experience, an inexhaustible trigger of the imagination. Animal Stories presents the many tales of our encounters with the animal world, shedding light on how our social, symbolic, affectionate, scientific and utilitarian relationships with animals have been visualized through ceramics from the 17th century to our day.” 

Fantastic events are scheduled as part of the exhibit, and today we were happy to catch the first of the Kids Can Press Reading Series, today with the lovely Kyo Maclear reading Virginia Wolf (with the assistance of her entire family). Afterwards, the kids got to make their own Virginia Wolf ears (which alternate as a big blue bow, depending on one’s mood).

Three readings are left in the series: Wallace Edwards on November 10, Eugenie Fernandes on December 8, and Nicholas Oldford on December 15. (And we got free passes for the museum through the Sun Life Museum and Arts Pass at the Toronto Public Library. Such a great deal!)

October 15, 2013

Watch How We Walk by Jennifer Lovegrove

Jennifer LoveGrove’s first novel Watch How We Walk recalls Miriam Toews’ A Complicated Kindness in that it’s the story of a young girl from a minority Christian sect whose oppressive religious community begins to bear down as her family falls apart. Emily Morrow is ten years old, a fervent Jehovah’s Witness who believes what she’s taught by her elders, swallows her discomfort as she goes knocking on the doors of her classmates, and leaves her classroom every morning to stand in the hall as her fellow students rise to sing the national anthem. She is eager to follow in the footsteps of her older sister Lenora, who had always been an exemplary student and daughter, baptized early at age 14. But lately Lenora has been changing, spending time with “worldly” friends, listening to disturbing music, and skipping meetings at the Kingdom Hall. Meanwhile, her mother is skipping meetings too, something about Uncle Tyler is making the elders concerned, and her father is refusing to acknowledge that anything is wrong, so focussed is he on making the right impression on the community and having his family do so too in order that he eventually can become an elder himself. There is little room for error by any of these characters whose elders will not hesitate to “disfellowship” or shun anyone who fails to tow the line, and the risk is causing Emily enormous anxiety.

Scenes of Emily’s childhood are interposed with those of Emily ten years later, living a lonely life away from her family and attending university, still trying to process some long-ago trauma involving her sister, and carving letters and numbers into her skin. These present-day scenes are particularly compelling and drive the narrative forward, the reader looking to discover just what has gone so wrong.

Young Emily is an empty vessel, taking in the world around her without much of an impression, which makes the childhood scenes come across as not particularly artful, slow in their mundanity. This is exacerbated by the fact that Emily is at such a remove from the world due to her religious upbringing, doubly unable to process what she sees. On the one hand, this makes sense, but still, I yearned for more complexity from this part of the story, particularly as the adult Emily chapters showed just how much depth this character–and this writer–was capable of. I wanted to know more about Emily’s parents, their relationship to each other and to their religion. And yet, there are some fleeting but wonderful scenes where LoveGrove shows us real sympathy for Emily’s parents and their struggles, shows that they are just a powerless against their fates in this system as Emily is herself, whole and flawed people in their own right.

Watch How We Walk is not a perfect novel, but it’s one I couldn’t stop reading, and whose images and metaphors have stayed with me since I finished it. LoveGrove provides fascinating insight into a little-known religious group and their practices, and has crafted a novel with mystery at its core.

October 14, 2013

in this world that is being made all the time

“I am, we each are the inmost of an endless series of Russian dolls; you who read are now encased within a layer I built for you, or perhaps my stories are now inside you. We live as literally as that inside each other’s thoughts and work, in this world that is being made all the time, by all of us, out of beliefs and acts, information and materials. Even in the wilderness your ideas of what is beautiful, what matters, and what constitutes pleasure shape your journey there as much as do your shoes and map also made by others.” –Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby