November 7, 2012

Desperately Seeking Susans

When I heard about Desperately Seeking Susans, an anthology of Canadian poets called Susan, I was instantly delighted and knew this would be a book I’d have to get, and not least of all because it would probably include a poem by Susan Holbrook. So you can imagine my excitement when it all came together and I learned keeping Holbrook company would be Susans Briscoe, (Suzette) Mayr, Telfer, Olding, and Sorensen (oh yes, she of the A Large Harmonium fame!). The anthology (so reads its jacket copy) “brings together Canada’s most eminent Susans… paired with Canada’s emerging Susans”. It’s also edited by Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang, who wrote the wonderful Sweet Devilry (which won the Gerald Lampert Prize in 2012) and is author of a few of our favourite picture books.

Now I have very good intentions when it comes to poetry; unlike many people, I even buy the stuff. But I find sitting down to read it altogether challenging sometimes, because I’m a book devourer, and poetry doesn’t always lend itself to being digested in such a manner. And so it says something about Desperately Seeking Susans that I read it over the weekend, and that reading was such a pleasure. Not that many of these poems could be read in one go– I had to read most of them twice or three times but the nice thing about the anthology was the range of poems, that each one would require a different kind of mental muscle, and so I never got exhausted. Every time I turned the page, I would discover something different and new.

Discovery is the key here. Not being the most avid poetry reader, here is where I’ve discovered some of those “eminent” poetic Susans for the very first time– Goyette, Elmslie, Ioannou. I loved the range of subject matter, from “The Coroner at the Taverna” by Susan Musgrave and “9 Liner” by Suzanne M. Steele about the war in Afghanistan, to poems about children, about elderly mothers and fathers. I love that the book’s epigraph is a poem called “Susan” by Lorna Crozier, and that the book has been blurbed by Susan Swan. I loved the first poem, “First Apology to My Daughter” by Susan Elmslie, which ends with the tremendous last line, “I taught you the ferocity of hunger,”  Sue Goyette’s heartbreaking, beautiful poems about grief, Susan Holbrook’s “Good Egg Bad Seed”, which I had to read in its entirety to my husband before we went to bed on Saturday night (“You subscribe to Gourmet magazine or you don’t want fruit in your soup./ You get Gloria Steinem and Gertrude Stein mixed up or you get the Bangles and the Go-Go’s mixed up.”).

I loved Susan Glickman’s “On Finding a Copy of [Karen Solie’s] Pigeon in the Hospital Bookstore”, imagine a poem like Suzannah Showler’s with the fantastic title, “A Short and Useful Guide to Living in the World”. I was always going to love Susan Olding’s poems, which are “What We Thought About the Chinese Mothers” and “What the Chinese Mothers Seemed to Think of Us”.  I could go on and on; there is everything here.

I love this is a book founded on such a fun premise, and how the  richness and quality of the work did not have to suffer for that fun. It is an essential addition to the library of any Susan, or to anybody who loves poetry, or anyone who doesn’t know yet how much she really does.

November 6, 2012

Sharon Butala and Prairie Fire

My essay “True Crime” is featured in the current issue of Prairie Fire, as part of its celebration of Sharon Butala. I’m quite excited about this publication, as it’s about a book that meant a lot to me, and also because the project has been a long time coming. The opportunity to contribute to the issue came about 4 years ago when I was pregnant, and I remember accepting it with fear as I had no idea what my writing life would be like once my baby was born. “At the very least,” I remember thinking, “I will have one thing published in the next few years.” Which is funny to consider now, because I’ve been lucky enough to do so much with these few years.

I’m excited about this issue as well because it’s really beautiful, highlights a fantastic Canadian writer, and includes work by other great Canadian writers, academics and publishing folks. I’m really proud to be a part of it. Should be on newstands any day now.

November 4, 2012

The Vicious Circle reads The Wives of Bath

It occured to us to read The Wives of Bath after we read Skippy Dies last winter, whose female characters were scarcely invested with heartbeats let alone souls. We wanted some women with more than two dimensions, and in The Wives of Bath, we got what we were looking for. We liked this book, everyone. This is remarkable. Some of us had read it years ago, others encountering for the first time. A few of us kept talking about the movie Heavenly Creatures in connection. We talked about boarding school books, and how delicious they are, especially when the reader is young, even though the schools themselves are always terrible. Why the attraction then? It’s another world, it’s Lord of the Flies. We talked about Skim by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki, and Jo Walton’s Among Others. And then we broke out the Cheetos.

Mouse is the portal to the book, our connection to the story, which means we’re distanced from the story and predisposed for sympathy for her. We wondered if Mouse’s sad sad story was a weakness, if we’d been too driven to sympathize. How sad can one story get? And yet it was her personality rather than her tragedy than won her to us. She does guide the story, but then we related this to Great Expectations, to Pip, laying everything out for the reader. Certainly there is literary value in this approach.

We talked about connections between fact and fiction, about a real life murder than inspired the novel’s climax and about autobiographical elements of the story. We talked about how this was not a perfect novel, if there seemed to be more at work behind the book than the story itself. How the novel contained so many elements– gothic, intrigue, humour, violence, ideas– and that it lacked a certain seamlessness. It’s a book that’s doing so many different things at once. And then we pause: “But it’s so good!” It’s that we can sit down and talk about it so intensely, coming to new questions instead of conclusions. That such a readable book can have so much depth.

We talked more about boarding school, about ideas of gender which were less in the public discourse when the book came out. We wondered if different elements of the book would be focussed on now? We talked about bodies in the book, how they were all misshapen somehow, exaggerated, too big or too small. The sadness of the Father/Daughter relationship, and how she never gives up on her father. How we forget that Mouse is younger than she seems, and (as with most teenagers) she is probably not as hideous as she imagines herself to be. We are happy she no longer talks to Alice in the end. We think she is going to be okay. We talked about the film version of the book and how different it was, with its emphasis on the lesbian storyline, which doesn’t exist here, or does so less titillatingly because the lesbians in the book are two old women rather than two beautiful young girls.

We talked about what happened to Paulie, what made her the way she was? Was she transgender? Was it the trauma of her childhood? Or was her adoption of maleness simply a logical reaction to the way she would be treated as a woman in her society, as a refusal to cede her power. How ironic than a person with such disdain for femaleness would end up the ward of a lesbian in a girls’ boarding school. And then we thought about how interesting it was that everyone (and us) wants to know what is wrong with Paulie, and no one ever says, “And what about every single thing that’s wrong with the world around her?”

November 4, 2012

Wild Writers in Waterloo

I took all the wrong pictures in Waterloo yesterday at the Wild Writers Festival. The pictures that I should have taken included one of a room full of about 30 students (with such friendly faces!) who’d turned out to listen to me talk about blogging for an hour and a bit; the Wild Women Writers panel with Miranda Hill, Alison Pick, Carrie Snyder and Kerry-Lee Powell, which was such a joy and inspiration to listen to; Miranda Hill’s book Sleeping Funny, which I had to buy because its author enchanted me; photos of all the people I know from online only and was so thrilled to meet in person finally; and pictures of The New Quarterly staff and their terrific volunteers who worked so hard to make things run smoothly and make the day so enjoyable for us.

The pictures I did take were of my gourmet lunch box, which I’d been ridiculously looking forward to and which surpassed all my expectations and then some. The box was massive, and the food was so so good. I also took a picture of (part of) the booksale table (by Words Worth Books), because they’d brought in Best Canadian Essays 2011 (with my essay in it!) and put it on display beside all the other festival presenters’. I am sure it sold like hotcakes, but yes, it was kind of the honour of my life to be a little old blogger up there beside some of Can-Lit’s finest. A thrill I will never, never forget.

Rumour has it that the event was a success, and they might put it on again next year. Here’s to the beginning of a fantastic literary tradition!

November 2, 2012

Where my tea rests

I don’t have a desk. In another life, I worked in a closet, but now the closet is stuffed with baby paraphernalia and there is no room for me and mine. Which isn’t bad, in fact it’s fine. For the past three years, I’ve made the western half of our couch my working home, which you’d be able to tell if you ever sat on it. The springs are shot. My seat is right beside the tall bookcase which houses authors A through H, with a table nearby to pile books and set my laptop on. Often, my husband is situated nearby too, which makes for an optimum working environment. I like it also because I get to work whilst lying down.

What I appreciate most truly, however, is the place where I rest my tea. From my Random House mug, of course, because what’s a point of a teacup if it isn’t enormous? But not so enormous that it can’t perch exactly within arm’s reach, right beside Anne Enright and Alice Thomas Ellis. I think my tea keeps really good company– the gorgeous spines of my Anne Fadiman books, and even Deborah Eisenberg. It’s always right there when I need it. But not so near within my reach that my flailing arms have ever knocked it over. Yet. Knock on (bookcase) wood.

November 1, 2012

The Elizabeth Stories by Isabel Huggan

Isabel Huggan’s The Elizabeth Stories is the book I’ve been talking about for a week now, desperate to shove it into someone’s hands so they can know, or else to encounter someone who already knows just how wonderful it is (and this has happened a lot). In terms of Canadian short stories masters, we don’t have to pick sides, but I liked this book better than any I’ve ever read by Alice Munro or Mavis Gallant. Less a novel in stories or a short story collection than a book— but then I can also reflect back on the individual stories. I think that “Sorrows of the Flesh” might be the best short story that I have ever, ever read.

As a bildungsroman, The Elizabeth Stories visits familiar terrain–young girl growing up in small town Ontario, constrained by convention, a misfit, confused by how the conservative society she lives in has no regard for her burgeoning sexuality. The stories were familiar to me as scenes from my own life– anger at a school-yard victim and the horrible people they drive us to be; the epic nature of childhood humiliations; the pain of not fitting in; of being misunderstood; of that impossible love for a high school teacher.

And yet, these stories surprised me at every turn, Elizabeth surprised me at every turn, for her ordinariness, for the plainness of her situation, a plainness so rarely encountered in fiction. In The Elizabeth Stories, there is no justice, no ending is tidy. Elizabeth’s parents are unbearably awful people in very subtle ways, though we’re provided glimpses as to how their characters have been shaped. Elizabeth herself does the most terrible ordinary things, we witness moments that are unbearable to watch, that leave us thinking, “Oh, no she didn’t. But of course she did!” How shocking twists are inevitable just a page later. And how many shocking twists there are in this book that so much reeks of the ordinary, the domestic, the mundane. There is a brutal, horrifying stuff going on here, and I think of this at a time when women writers are crawling out onto crazy limbs in order to be gritty, shocking, to push the limits of what we’re allowed to write about. When Isabel Huggan was doing it all the while, such brutality right here embedded into this neat little package of a book. Maybe some of us don’t have to try as hard as we think we do, or maybe the point is that not everyone is Isabel Huggan, but still.

And oh, the writing. How the ordinary is illuminated (like Lisa Moore and sock-sorting in February— turns out there is more story in a laundry basket than we ever imagined). From “Queen Esther”: “As soon as I was tall enough, my household chore on Mondays was to bring the wash in after school. It was a job I never objected to, even when in the winter my fingers ached as I pulled at the pegs on the frozen shirts and sheets. The clothes, stiff and unwieldy, would be stacked like boards in the basement where overnight they’d go limp and damp, perfect for ironing on Tuesday. The grey-blue shadows on the snow, the sky like clear rosy tea steeping darker, the creak of the lined–the only part missing in winter was the smell. In all other seasons, I buried my face in the laundry and breathed it in, the delicate aroma of virtue.”

November 1, 2012

Kids' book review: I'm Bored

I was really pleased to review I’m Bored by Michael Ian Black and Debbie Ridpath Ohi in the October issue of Quill & Quire. It’s a funny, thoughtful book that takes the readers somewhere, and the scraggly-haired protagonist is just the kind of spunky girl I like to see in picture books. I also appreciate that it’s a book with a female protagonist that will appeal to boy readers as much as the girls.

From my review: “Fans of Mo Willems’ Elephant and Piggie series will delight in the latest book by American comedian Michael Ian Black, illustrated by Toronto graphic artist Debbie Ridpath Ohi. Echoing Willems, Black’s story is constructed around the dialogue of an unlikely couple, in this case a small girl and a potato. The text is perfectly complemented by Ohi’s quirky minimalist drawings.”

You can read the rest here.

October 30, 2012

Hatchback

Where have I been? Nowhere, actually, except consumed by projects and daily life, plus we’re giving up napping at our house, which is cutting into my reading time. And so the past few days, I’ve been reading instead of blogging when I had the chance– the wonderful Elizabeth Stories, which I can’t wait to write about here. Had a wonderful night out with Stuart on the weekend, with dinner and Ira Glass at Massey Hall! Halloween has also become a full-time preoccupation–we’ve had three parties so far, and it’s not even Halloween yet. I’m also getting ready for the Wild Writers Festival this weekend, where at my session I will advise writers not to write blog posts in which they apologize for not blogging. So I’m kind of breaking my own rule now, but then consistency has never been my strong point, and I’m not apologizing either. Also, I can’t believe I haven’t told you about the eventful IFOA night I attended last week (I am the anonymous woman calling out angrily), with the marvellous Anakana Schofield (who came over for breakfast on Saturday) and that I met Leanne Shapton!!!, which went much smoother than the time I met Joan Didion. Thank goodness.

October 25, 2012

My Grade 12 English Text

I’ve started reading Isabel Huggan’s The Elizabeth Stories, because mention of it keeps turning up here and there, and because I keep spying it on terribly clever people’s bookshelves. I got a used copy last weekend, and opened it for the first time this morning to start reading “Celia Behind Me”: “There was a little girl with large smooth cheeks who lived up the street when I was in public school.” And I realized that I’d read this story before, more than once. It was so strangely familiar, like something I’d known in a dream, but somebody else’s dream. So distant because I’d read it a long time ago.

A little investigation revealed that I’d read the story in The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories, edited by Margaret Atwood and Robert Weaver. I remembered the text, a row of spines lined up on the shelf in my grade 12 English classroom. I’d remembered “Celia Behind Me,” and also a story called “White Shoulders” (I remember being perplexed by it) which I was surprised to find out was by Linda Svendsen. (Alice Munro’s “The Red Dress” was not in the collection, but I remember reading that story too in the class.)

I was most surprised to discover that right there in my high school text were all these writers who I feel as though I’ve discovered in the last few years and who’ve become really important to me– Bronwen Wallace, Caroline Adderson, Cynthia Flood. And that Leon Rooke was there too, and John Metcalf, Clark Blaise, Diane Schoemperlen, Barbara Gowdy, Douglas Glover, Thomas King. I am pretty sure that we didn’t read “We So Seldom Look on Love” in my grade 12 English class, but I am just as sure that if I encountered many of these stories again, they would seem as instantly familiar as “Celia Behind Me” did.

This re-encounter has given me a new appreciate for the hoopla surrounding the Salon de Refuses and the Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories in 2008.  Well-curated anthologies are the optimum way for students to discover the short story, each one onto itself, one at a time. These seminal texts are also more important and influential than I’d before supposed, definitely sowing the seeds of love for short stories and for (Canadian) literature.

For me, it would take awhile for the love to bloom. I would not be exposed to contemporary writing this good again for years, and years, and I’d have to seek it out for myself. But maybe I hadn’t been on my own entirely. It’s been a meandering path from from there to here, but I am pretty sure that the me who picked up Isabel Huggan this morning (for fun) has The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories to thank for a lot of the journey.

October 24, 2012

On the Rosalind Prize

So thrilled to read about the advent of the  Rosalind Prize, Canada’s new literary prize for fiction by women. Which is not to say that Canada needs more literary prizes in general, but I think we need this one. Two years ago, I shared my thoughts on the Orange Prize, and I haven’t changed my mind. Oh, and you know my feelings on women and the Leacock Prize. Anyway, it turns out that the stats for women and Canadian literary prizes are as pathetic as all the others.

In a week during which the same old (justified) woes about women’s representation were aired again, and a venerable Canadian publisher faces peril, it is refreshing to see action for positive change and it’s really nice to be inspired.