January 14, 2012
Rambling among the trees
“The purpose of this bulletin is to make it easier for people to become personally acquainted with our trees. It is believed that the securing of the interest of the people of the province in trees will be an aid toward an understanding of the importance to us of our forests, and thus pave the way for support of forestry principles.” –J.H. White, Toronto 1925
Which is from the preface to The Forest Trees of Ontario (1957 edition) which I found last winter in a cardboard box on Major Street and took home even though it smells like a basement. I love this book, though I confess I don’t know a papaw from a sassafras.
“When I’m in Toronto, I always drop in at the Monkey’s Paw Bookstore. Stephen Fowler, the owner, has an 
incredible eye. (I recently came back with a book of transcribed seance sessions, a history of women in uniform, a treatise on baking, and a book of party games for adults.) He had this book called the Native Trees of Canada displayed on a table. I flipped through it, and I immediately knew I needed to buy it. It was a government volume: unmediated and strictly informational. It was filled with very sterile, black and white pictures of leaves, placed on a grid for scale. While looking at them, I had vivid memories of picking at maple seeds on my front lawn, of wet leaves stuck to my shoes, of fallen leaves blowing through the screen door. I knew I wanted to paint them. “– Leanne Shapton, “The Native Trees of Canada”, Paris Review Blog, November 2010
Leanne’s Shapton’s book of paintings is Native Trees of Canada and it’s beautiful. And if there are two of us out there appreciating these old government-issued volumes, there are bound to be more. Which gives me faith in the world, actually, in readers and books, and the trees whose lives were given so that we can read pages. (Even old ones that smell like basements.)
Also, I have also discovered that the maple in our backyard is a black maple.
(See also my Tree Books list at Canadian Bookshelf, whose compilation brought Shapton’s book to my attention in the first place.)
“It is hoped that the bulletin will combine instruction with recreation for all who care to go rambling among the trees.” –J.H. White
January 12, 2012
How to Get a Girl Pregnant by Karleen Pendleton Jimenez
Sperm procurement is Karleen Pendleton-Jimenez’ basic challenge as a lesbian who wants to have a baby, a challenge further complicated by fertility struggles. Though the original challenge was pretty complicated from the outset– sperm is hard to come by for these purposes, and if you decide to go through anonymous donors, it’s next to impossible to find matches with your ethnic background, unless that background is white European. With precise, vivid and immediate prose, in her memoir How to Get a Girl Pregnant, Pendleton-Jimenez documents her journey towards pregnancy, which begins very early in her life when she knows she wants to be a mother as strongly as she knows that she’s a lesbian.
As a butch lesbian who wants to be a mother, Pendleton-Jimenez complicates ideas of butchness, and of motherness. But the arrangement has always felt natural to her, and her experiences co-parenting her partner’s children underline this instinct. As she approaches her mid-thirties, she decides to finally take the definitive step towards motherhood–and lesbians don’t do turkey basters anymore, she informs us. Turkey basters are too big, and sperm is far too precious a commodity to unintentionally get stuck up in the bulb at the top. There is also an amusing scene where she poses on her front porch for a photo with the tank the sperm is delivered in: “This may be all the baby gets to see of its biological parents together,” she writes, though upon reflection, she notes that she looks tired and unhappy in the photo. The stress of trying to get pregnant was already taking its toll.
Which would only get worse as she begins to undergo treatments at a fertility clinic, going in for regular visits for monitoring, to check for ovulation, and for fertilization. And in talking about infertility, she breaks a taboo, though this candidness does not come easily. She writes about the pain and isolation of what she’s going through, how women don’t talk about these experiences. She doesn’t want anyone to know, she doesn’t want to be pitied, to be “that woman who’s trying to get pregnant but can’t”, and so she is very much alone in the process. She also addresses the complicated dynamics of being a butch prone on a table being poked on prodded by nurses and technicians, learning to become accustomed to this, and of her strange pleasure in the compliment that her ovaries were “beautiful”. And in the hope each month that this time the pregnancy would take, and the predictable disappointment when it didn’t over and over again.
I know that longing, that desperation to be pregnant. Pregnancy came easily for me, but I remember how badly I wanted it, and identified strongly with Pendleton-Jimenez’ need for a baby. So that when she starts cruising for men at night clubs, I totally get it, and also admire the openness with which she writes, how she makes herself as vulnerable in her narrative as she did in the experiences she writes of. The openness works, because the writing is so good, beautifully unadorned and to the point. Pendleton-Jimenez also manages to write with both poignance and humour, and indeed, I laughed and I cried as I read this book. Like all great memoirs, this is an intimate story that manages to connect with the universal, and the narratives of pregnancy and motherhood are so much richer for it.
January 12, 2012
Nursery Rhyme Comics: 50 Timeless Rhymes from 50 Great Cartoonists by Chris Duffy (ed)
For me, motherhood has been a portal to the wonderful world of comics, and I’ve been making more frequent visits ever since Little Island Comics opened up around the corner from my house. As a child, I never got past Archie, which is not to say I was not a devoted fan, but Archie is hardly the cream of the comics crop. In the company of Harriet, however, I’ve been working my way through Tintin’s adventure The Red Sea Sharks, which is wonderful, and Harriet loves it too, though I’m pretty sure she understands about none of it. She also has a Silly Lilly book that I quite enjoy, and we enjoy the Moomin storybooks so much that we’re going to have get started on reading the comic strip collections.
I also think that it’s rude to hang out in bookstores and not buy anything, so when we were all there a couple of weekends back, we picked out Nursery Rhyme Comics, which was edited by Chris Duffy. Now, you mightn’t have thought that our household needed a fifth Mother Goose Collection, but we did! We did. If you scroll down to the photo of Harriet reading in bed, you’ll see that this book is what she’s been lost to, and her parents like it just as much. It includes some rhymes we didn’t know before, all the favourites we knew already, and each one reborn in the style of a notable contemporary cartoonist. (I am not very cool. The only one I’ve heard of is Kate Beaton, but I know that she is very cool.)
The old woman who lives in the shoe has a rock and roll band, Jack Be Nimble is petulant and ashamed with a hole in his pants, the King of Hearts is a terrible, terrible tyrant who gets what’s coming to him, Little Boy Blue’s sleeping is cause for a party, the hickory dickory dock mouse is actually a bell ringer. The cartoonists’ styles are remarkably contrasting, each one interesting and vivid in its own way, rendering simple nursery rhymes into stories, and this book a remarkably rich collection.
January 11, 2012
The Canadian Publisher as "important component of civilization"
Here’s what sprang to my mind when I heard about Random House’s takeover of McClelland & Stewart:
“I arrive in Toronto on the day that Coach House Press goes out of business. (Coach House’s recent revival could not be foreseen at the time.) More startling than Coach House’s death is the reaction to its demise. Where past politicians, even those ill-disposed towards the cultural sector, would have felt it expedient to play lip-service to Coach House’s achievements, Ontario Premier Mike Harris launched into an attack on the press’s ‘history of total government dependence.’ Though Harris’ characterization isn’t strictly accurate, I am struck by how many of the writers and commentators who respond to Harris argue from the same set of assumptions: they defend Coach House’s accounting and marketing strategies, arguing for the press as a viable business rather than an important component of a civilization… Canadian public debate has changed in ways that make it increasingly difficult to justify, or even imagine, the sense of collective endeavour that fuelled the writing community only a few years earlier.” –Stephen Henighan, “Between Postcolonialism and Globalization”
(As you can see, I got a lot out of Henighan’s book, which I picked up just after the death of Josef Skvorecky, whose work he addesses in the essay “Canadian Cultural Cringe” and which certainly provided a counterpoint to the Skvorecky obits. And then this Random House news yesterday afternoon. Seems Henighan’s ideas are very relevant at the moment.)
January 10, 2012
On literary debate, and Stephen Henighan's When Words Deny the World
Whatever I was expecting from Stephen Henighan’s essay collection When Words Deny the World, I had not considered inspiration. But at its best, Henighan’s book made me want to be a better writer, to dare to root my stories in Canadian places, to consider the loss inherent in Canadian authors’ fixation on situating their books in foreign lands (and I’ve been there. Living abroad can infect a writers’ brain. Henighan, with his Latin-American stories, has been there too). It didn’t make me want to take back the chesterfield (as Caroline Adderson dared to do in her novel The Sky Is Falling), because that would be unnatural– “chesterfield” has never been part of my vocabulary, and sometimes I think Henighan is dreaming of a Canadianness that has forever been elusive. But he has made me aware of the peculiarities of being a Canadian writer, as distinct from a British or American one, and what it means to our language and to our literature to be marginalized by two nations we share a common language with.
And I get it now, I do, that debate about Canadianness and the Giller from last Fall, which was so offensive to some, but just seemed foolish to me– who cared where a novel is situated, is what I thought. A story is a story. And I still believe it, what a story is, and I’ve no wish to denigrate the celebrated Canadian novel that takes place in 1930s’ Germany, but I now have a better understanding of the importance of having novels that take place in the here and now. (Perusing my list of books read, I see no shortage of “here”, but a deficiency of “now”. Though where do we draw the line with this? Where does “now” officially begin? And, as I stated in my review of Big Town: A Novel of Africville, the past can actually give a whole lot of insight into the present. Which is not a new idea, I realize, but this review was a great opportunity to make the connection explicitly clear.)
Henighan’s collection failed to resonate with me precisely where I knew it would, however: when he calls for debate, moans about lack of debate, prescribes debate, and tries to debate. Because I don’t like debate, I don’t do debate. Conflict of any kind upsets me, which could be an indication that I’m feeble-minded, but at the same time, I know that readiness to debate is hardly a virtue. I don’t know that debate is useful.
Because this is what debate does, see, it simplifies things. It gives opponents the comforting illusion that there are only two sides after all and, even more absurdly, that one of these sides is right. (I say this kind of thing and get called a relativist. One time in which I got called this quite a bit was around the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and we all know how well that went.) Debate renders the world into miniature, it turns real-life issues, serious matters, into a game, a question of logistics. And there are people who get off on it. It’s like war is. These things happen not to any particular end, but because there are people for whom it’s a pastime.
Nobody listens when they’re debating, nobody learns. Instead of listening and learning, there is plotting from clever rebuttal to the next, and it’s a closed cycle. Nothing happens. The kind of people who care enough to engage in debate are people so entrenched in their own beliefs that they’ll never change their minds.
And beliefs is exactly what it is. I’ve never been so much a relativist as I’ve been lately, ever since I joined a book club of remarkably intelligent women who’ve never once managed to arrive at a consensus on what a good book was (except the time we read Light Lifting. I’ve actually only heard of one person ever who didn’t like Light Lifting, and anyway, she was an idiot). Every month we meet and I walk in there with an idea of why the book does or doesn’t work, and I come up with all kinds of theories, arguments and points to underline my assessment, and my co-members show up in much the same fashion, but we rarely agree. And though it pains me to say it (because I really really loved Megan Williams story collection Saving Rome), I’m never any more right than the rest of them are.
By this, I maintain that “good literature” is relative. No one has ever been able to define it for me otherwise. Every time a critic speaks on any side, no matter how clever his argument and how couched in theory it is (and theory is also a simplifier), the argument stripped down is always, “I want more of the kind of books I like to read/write. I want books that reflect my background, and my reality. And I want those books to be celebrated too.” Of course, I don’t wholly believe this myself. I have my own conception of what great literature is, but I’ll also accept that yours is slightly different, even if I think mine is superior. We all think that.
Debate with an awareness of relativity could possibly be useful. At least it is at my book club where we listen to and are challenged by one another. None of us are so assured of the absolute rightness of our respective positions, though I don’t imagine that anybody actually is ever. Unless they’re deluded. There’s got to be that element of doubt that keeps the mind open. But debate requires a certain posturing, that you pretend that doubt doesn’t exist. It requires you to be fired up by your own self-importance.
Debating becomes less about reality than skewing facts to fit the argument. Or about deliberately misreading books so they’ll seem to say the things you want them to say to suit your purposes. Then you propose that the reason Douglas Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma wasn’t a commercial success outside of Canada was because it took place in a Canadian city (and oh my, anyone who’s read that novel could tell you that’s not why). Or you decide that John Berger and Jakob Beer are remarkably similar names, which means something. So that you end up proclaiming that only Wayne Grady and David Adams Richards are writing novels that reflect the way we live today (or at least how we lived in the 1990s. Perhaps things were more Grady/Richards-like then, and I’ve just forgotten). So that you forget that you’ve forgotten to include women writers in your canon. And your definition of “debate” begins to include you railing against curly haired women who look good in photos, and misreading/simplifying the work of Carol Shields to fit into a box called “Conservative Family Values”, and calling people names like Wasp, conservative, and bourgeoisie, all to suit some grandiose theory whose concoction began with a publisher who didn’t like your book once. (Or apparently did like it, but…)
See how quickly civility dissolves? Debate is a negative feedback loop. This is petty. We do it because it’s easy, and it’s momentarily satisfying, but real life goes deeper than that. This kind of discourse denies the world’s complexity, and that of literature too.
The alternative? Write an essay like Henighan’s “A Language for the Americas,” which posits that Canadian writers should use Latin-American writers’ use of language as an example for how to build a language of their own, an essay which, in the process of its arguments, inspires readers to pick up the works discussed, and think of their own language differently. An essay that takes us somewhere. Or what about a project like the Salon de Refuses. Or when you dissect a flawed novel in a national newspaper, do so on its own terms, rather than using someone’s art as an opportunity to extend an argument you’ve been having with nobody in national newspapers’ review pages for decades. Or find a way to write about the novels that aren’t flawed (please!), to celebate the writers who are doing it right and should be setting an example for the rest of us.
Debating for debate’s sake is all fine and well, but it will take a deeper and more meaningful engagement with reading, writing and literature to make our literature better.
January 9, 2012
Wild Libraries I Have Known: Frances Morrison Children's Library
Alexis Kienlen is the author of 2 poetry collections- She dreams in Red and 13. She currently works as an agricultural journalist, and writes a weekly book column for The Grande Prairie Daily Herald Tribune. She is a great lover of books and libraries and has a special place in her heart for teenagers and teen fiction.
The children’s library at the Frances Morrison Branch in Saskatoon is one of my favourite libraries. This particular space is what made me a library lover. Just look at how beautiful it is!
The giant Pooh bear has been there for years, and the entrance way and door to the treehouse haven’t changed since I was a child. I love that this library is created in a way that pays homage to a great literary character. (Note- the Disney version has never crept into this place.) Check out the decorations about the mudroom area, and the door to the treehouse storytelling area.
This space is wonderful, and always has been. This big window looks out onto the
street, and you used to be able to watch the activity at the Saturday Saskatoon farmers’ market. You can also see City Hall and the park in front of it, where my teenage friends and I used to play a creepy, made up game called “Bone Yard” late at night. If you sit up here in the window, you feel like you’re spying on people.
The Children’s Library is on the second floor of the library in its own room. The location is designed specifically for children, with a step-stool so children can sign out their own books at the check out desk, and water fountains at the perfect height for both parents and kids.
Pooh Corner is over 45 years old, and the branch held a homecoming to celebrate their 40th anniversary on November 4, 2006. All past patrons were invited to the celebration, and the library even created a blog and asked people to send in their memories of the space. (I liked the story about the family of three generations who visited Pooh Corner, and the story of the riot.)
I’ve travelled and moved a lot, and I’m convinced the children’s library at the Frances Morrison Branch is one of the best things I’ve 
ever seen. I grew up in Saskatoon and used to go here as a child to take out books and to attend story time. The story times were held in the Pooh Corner treehouse, which was shaped like a little cave. If I remember correctly, there are lights on the ceiling. It was here that you would get to hear great puppet shows and stories. (Apparently children went into the space with only a few adults. I bet that’s not the case today)
Many of the staff members have worked in the library for over 20 years. Some of the storytellers and librarians that I knew as a child are still there. And some of them were just wonderful! I remember one particular woman, Judith Benninger, who is now retired. Judith recited “The Cremation of Sam McGee” as creepy shadow puppets acted out the story behind her. All I have to do is think about her telling the story and I get chills up my spine.
One of the incredibly special things about Pooh Corner is the positive memories people have about the space. When I was working in the northern Alberta city of Grande Prairie, I met children’s writer and former librarian Linda Smith, who has since passed away. When Linda found out I was from Saskatoon, she got very excited and told me that she had loved working in Pooh corner and had fond memories of the best. “That is the best children’s library,” she said.
(As I left the library after taking pictures for this post, I ran into an acquaintance, who introduced me to his friend, who is the current director of Pooh Corner. Serendipity!)
January 8, 2012
This kid blows my mind
This kid blows my mind. I’ve been writing snarky comments on my Facebook wall about parents of “gifted” children, but naturally, I do suppose that Harriet is the funniest, most brilliant child the world has ever seen before. Basically, she is Jesus (who we know all about from the Dick Bruna Christmas Book).
Though we’ve had to stop borrowing Thomas DVDs from the library because Harriet is too obsessed, and has been talking about the episode where James fell in the mud for three weeks now. And she informed us that she’s changed her name to Harriet Tank Engine, her baths are “wash-downs” and she calls her bed her “round-house”. But it’s not just all cartoons, she’s also political: yesterday when The House came on CBC radio, Harriet listened for a moment and said, “They’re talking about Canada. I live in Canada.”
She can recite Hey Diddle Diddle, Little Miss Muffet, The Owl and the Pussy-Cat and Night Before Christmas. She’s totally potty trained, except that she’s afraid of toilets so still has to wear diapers outside of the house. She likes to coax us into playing her games by telling us, “It’s very good game, very fun” but then she yells at us when we do it wrong and the game is always pretty boring. Every day around 1:00, she decides it’s naptime and goes to bed on her own accord (which has only started since we ditched the crib), sleeps for two hours, then gets up and sings or reads in bed for about a half an hour more. She sleeps until 9:00 on the weekend. She eats sushi, pesto, felafels, blue cheese and hummus, and is quite particular about where she gets her croissants. (This is the kind of thing we parents brag about who have too much disposable income for our own good, and live in the city.)
She loves Chicken Pig and Cow, Katie-Morag, Curious George, The Berenstain Bears, Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel, Jon Scieszka’s Trucktown books, the letter H, chocolate, watching DVDs, getting mail, and when it’s garbage day. She displays that marvelous imagination that seems to be innate in all her peers (and where does that go? Why do so many of us lose it?) . She likes to help me bake and sometimes is even helpful. Lately, she’s been asking for definitions of words she doesn’t know: “What means ‘on purpose’?” This afternoon she wondered why there was only one cloud in the sky, and if it was lonely.
So yes, now she is two (and a half!), clever as clever. And I really hope she is two forever and ever. Really. Because there’s never been anything quite as marvelously good. We love her.
January 8, 2012
Man and Other Natural Disasters by Nerys Parry
Update: On Feb. 1 2012, Great Plains Publications became a Featured Advertiser at Pickle Me This. This review was published prior to our relationship. Pickle Me This does not publish sponsored posts, and all opinions expressed on the site are my own.
“I’m reading a really wonderful book,” is something I kept telling people last week as I was reading Nerys Parry’s first novel Man and Other Natural Disasters. Then of course I’d be asked what it was about, and every time I came up short with an answer, never did manage to do the novel justice. Because it’s hard to explain, this book, though it might help if you imagine a diagram. At its centre is Simon Peters, who works in the basement of the Calgary Public Library in Book Repair and Maintenance. He’s a loner, repairing broken books with precision, unable to navigate the ins and outs of society, so suited to the solitude of the job.
Now imagine a series of points around the Simon-centre, each one an idea with an arrow directed at Simon himself. From these various ideas, Parry reveals Simon to us, in all his multifacetedness and impenetrability. The first is Simon’s homelife, lived in an apartment with denim curtains in the kitchen and lined with hundreds of hoarded books. Simon lives with Claude, who we’re told at the outset is in decline and will eventually die of a stroke. It’s not clear what the relationship is between the two men, except that Claude once gave Simon shelter when he was homeless, that he gave Simon work in construction building skyscrapers high over Calgary, and that the two have been companions for over thirty years.
The second point is Simon’s past, which he begins to reveal when he meets a new colleague at work, a young woman called Minerva who bears an uncanny resemblance to Simon’s sister who was lost years ago. The sister had been killed in a fire, the first of three tragedies in which Simon’s family would be devoured by the elements– his father was later killed in a mine collapse, and his mother disappeared by air not long afterwards when a tornado touched down on their prairie ranch. So of course, Simon tells Minerva and us also, he now knows how he himself will die, and we also understand the trauma that caused his unusual shock of white hair.
But here’s the third point: the centre cannot hold. With the resurfacing of his tragic memories coupled with the loss of Claude, cracks begin to show in Simon’s vaneer. Is there a sinister element to his relationship with the older man? What about the violence he hints at in his childhood? What is his attraction to Minerva,. and why does the memory of his sister have such a powerful hold upon him? Could the stories he tells really be true? Is Simon actually dangerous?
Point four: a breakdown occurs when Simon discovers Minerva drenched in blood on his bathroom floor, and an alternate history is revealed through psychiatric records and Simon recounting sessions with his therapists.
And the fifth point is the story of the Doukhobor people in Western Canada, a religious sect whose children were interned and abused in residential schools during the 1950s. This atrocity was thought to be an answer to and (by the Doukhobors themselves) regarded as justification for acts of terrorism by an extremist Doukhobor group against government measures for assimilation. How exactly this story connects to Simon is best revealed by the novel itself, but the connection promises to add a layer of depth to a story that is interesting already.
The first half of the novel is an assemblage of mismatched pieces narrated by a man who seems autistic, which results in strange and stilted pacing. In places, the dialogue is weak, which only stands out because the prose in general is so remarkably good. (Though that a conversation with a man like Simon involves weak dialogue is not altogether surprising, but still, there is too much telling [us] going on here). Nerys Parry’s writing is gorgeous thoughout, passages that beg to be read over and over for the gloriousness of their descriptions, as when Simon puts forth the circumstances of his birth:
After nine months of immersion in the temperate, nutrient-rich fluid of the womb, the first breath an infant takes burns its virgin throat like acid. Then there is the lashing of light, the spanking of cold. To recreate the experience, drink a glass of double strength cidar vinegar through your nose, dive in a bath of ice and stare directly at a hundred-watt light-bulb without blinking. You can see why not too many come into this world smiling.
Following Simon’s breakdown, the pace picks up and the rest of the novel proceeds in a flurry of action. And it’s perhaps this disjointedness that makes the novel so hard to explain, which is not a flaw so much as the result of Parry fitting so many pieces together, of taking on the challenge of documenting psychological trauma, and attempting a novel whose shape is all its own. The effect is curiously imperfect, but impressive. Parry is a richly talented writer, and her first novel is an absorbing, rewarding read.
January 5, 2012
We are pretty impressed with ourselves
Stuart is excited because he built the walls, I am excited because I was the visionary of the floor, and Harriet (who hasn’t seen and/or broken the finished product yet, because it was completed after her bedtime) was pretty enthuasiastic about the opportunity to eat some white glue.
Thanks to Ruth Ohi for the inspiration.
January 5, 2012
Books I'm looking forward to in 2012
I’ve posted my Winter/Spring 2012: Most Anticipated Books of the Season post for Canadian Bookshelf, which I think is impossible to read through without being overwhelmed with some serious book lust. I’m looking forward to so many of these books, which will certainly be enough to carry us through the winter to the spring. In addition to the Canadian picks, I’m longing for Arcadia by Lauren Groff, who is perhaps my favourite American author of the moment– I loved The Monsters of Templeton and Delicate Edible Birds. I’ve already pre-ordered a copy of the latest Penelope Lively, How It All Began— she is wonderful, as is everything she touches. I know that Ali Smith’s There But For The came out last year, but I missed it, a mistake I will be fast to rectify. Can’t wait for Emily Perkins’ The Forrests, her latest book since Novel About My Wife. I’m also looking forward to finally reading Douglas Gibson’s Stories About Storytellers, about Gibson’s adventures in editing some of Canada’s greatest writers (which I’m particularly in the mood for after reading the terrific interview with Robert Gottlieb in The Paris Review Interviews Vol. 1). And then The New Republic by Lionel Shriver, which apparently is a reissue of a book from early in her career, and I will read it because Shriver is such a good writer, even if her novels themselves (save …Kevin) are not always altogether satisfying.
