June 14, 2012
A Page From the Wonders…
This is the book I bought tonight in celebration of the Literary Press Group having their funding restored— Stephanie Bolster’s A Page From the Wonders of Life on Earth. The news was a surprise, and I’m only one of many readers who are overjoyed. You should be too, and your reading life will be better for this news, even if you don’t know it yet. And if you’d like to have a celebration of your own, I’d recommend any of the ones I mentioned in my original post, and also Sheree Fitch’s extraordinary new picture book Night Sky Wheel Ride, which Harriet shouts along to when we read it to her. Please also read Sheree’s gorgeous post on LPG funding and I dare you not to be moved.
June 14, 2012
Enter CWILA
I am inspired, excited and hopeful like I haven’t been in ages about Canadian Women in the Literary Arts (CWILA) which has apparently been simmering all spring and broke out into the world yesterday with a storm. A response to the American organization VIDA, CWILA has similarly compiled statistics about gender parity in book reviewing, and the results are predictably dismal. Less dismal, however, were particular statistics for Quill & Quire and THIS Magazine, whose parity negates the excuses of others as to why such a thing is impossible. It clearly isn’t. How wonderful.
From the site: “CWILA (Canadian Women in the Literary Arts) is an inclusive national literary organization for people who share feminist values and see the importance of strong and active female perspectives and presences within the Canadian literary landscape.”
It is an incredible honour to have such ranks to join.
June 12, 2012
Great City Picture Books
My love of city picture books continues, and these are some we’ve been enjoying lately, in particular for how they show the modern city in all its international multi-cultural richness.
Out of the Way! Out of the Way! by Uma Krishnaswami, illustrated by Uma Krishnaswamy (who are two different people! Really!). This wonderful, colourful book is Silverstein’s The Giving Tree meets Burton’s The Little House, but without the depressing saccharine of the former and the weird ending of the latter. A little tree sprouts in the middle of a path in an Indian town, and as a little boy kneels down to protect it, to admire it, passerbys in a hurry shout: “Out of the way! Out of the way!” The tree grows, the path bends to wind around it, and people come to sit under its branches, birds nest in the leaves, and a city grows up too around them as the path is steamrolled into a road whose traffic includes bicycles with dinging bells, bullock carts, and mango sellers shouting, “Out of the way! Out of the way!” The book gets bonus points for including fabulous pictures of the cars and trucks that crowd the streets, guaranteed to delight small readers (even a cement mixer!), and also for leaving the tree standing, a place for quiet and contemplation in the middle of the bustling city space.
Madelenka by Peter Sis: Not a new book, but new to us, about a little girl who lives “in the universe, on a planet, on a continent, in a country, in a city, on a block, in a house, in a window, ” and she is Madlenka and her tooth is loose. Sis’s drawings give us a bird’s eye view of the block as Madlenka goes through the neighbourhood sharing her news. Each of the shopkeepers she encounters comes from a different place– the baker from France, the newsagent from India, the Italian ice-cream man, the German neighbour Mrs. Grimm who knows so many stories. In some cases, we’re granted a tour of the shops in questions, and also a visual representation of the stories Madlenka has told to her: the South American grocer’s jaguar legends, her Asian neighbours stories of dragons, and even the fantasy world that she’s invented with her school friend Cleopatra which transforms their courtyard into the African savanna. The tooth gets lost and Madlenka goes home to report that in connecting with her neighbours she has been around the world. (You can take a virtual tour of the book on Peter Sis’s website).
A Bus Called Heaven by Bob Graham: We love Bob Graham and his heartwarming stories of community in urban places (though they’re often more inner-suburban, run-down homes, shuttered shops and factories next to grassy yards). His books are also just a little bit strange, poetic and surprising. They’re edgy in the softest way, and Harriet is entranced with this latest one, the story of an abandoned bus that transforms a city street. With no idea where the bus arrived from, neighbours haul it off the road and into Stella’s driveway. Shy Stella is transformed herself as the bus is turned into a community hub, everybody doing their part to make it beautiful. Now there is a place for people to gather and connect, Graham’s illustrations showing neighbours of all different cultures and backgrounds together. And when regulations about busses protruding into the sidewalk threaten to spoil the show, it is Stella who saves the day (and the snails. And the sparrows). We love this book.
June 11, 2012
Magnified World by Grace O'Connell
“And as navigate the city at the centre of the map, we realize that we, too, are part of the story, crafting new narratives of Toronto even as the city swirls and eddies around us like a buried river brought back to life.” –Amy Lavender Harris, Imagining Toronto
Recent Toronto books, including Sean Dixon’s The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn, Alissa York’s Fauna, Claudia Dey’s Stunt and Maggie Helwig’s Girls Fall Down are remarkable for not just their Toronto settings, but for how their authors engage with the city as myth-makers, building on old myths (and yes, ravines are useful for this) and also for creating new ones. For imagining a Toronto beyond Toronto, an other city that looks like ours but shimmers in a different way, in a way that makes us look at the city twice.
Toronto is engaged with in just this way in Magnified World, the first novel by Grace O’Connell who is Random House Canada’s 2012 New Face of Fiction. It is a story told by Maggie Pierce who enters page one wearing unfamiliar shoes and stumbling home without a clue as to where she’s spent the night. Her home is an apartment above Pierce Gifts & Oddities, her mother’s shop on Queen Street West (with tin ceilings!) across from Trinity Bellwoods Park in the late 1990s, a period in which the neighbourhood was on the cusp of significant change. Maggie’s most significant change, however, has been her mother’s death just weeks before by drowning in the Don River, her pockets full of zircon stones from the shop.
“For the first few weeks, I forgot sometimes that she was dead; not completely, of course, but in little, individual moments, when I would see the yellow zucchini she liked in a store,or smell the rooibus tea she drank. If they were still selling these things, if they existed, then she must be alive, to eat, to drink.”
We begin to see that Maggie was at a remove from the world even before her mother’s death, having spent most of her time working in the shop and caring for mother through her mental health troubles. Her parents’ marital problems have alienated her professor father from the household in all but body, and Maggie’s only other connections are her best friend Wendy and boyfriend Andrew, both of whom are making their own ways and growing away from her. And so when she starts suffering from blackouts and delusions, it’s almost part of a pattern, Maggie moving farther and father away from the world. She doesn’t react in the way we think she might, but it’s a testament to how alone she is, how grief-stricken she is by the loss of her mother. She seeks help from a psychiatrist at the nearby CAMH hospital, but then is taken in by his enigmatic colleague who promises answers and seems to have ulterior motives. All the while, she’s being visited by a familiar stranger named Gil who calls her “darling”, wants to write the story of her life, and may or may not actually exist.
The novel lags in its second third as Maggie’s blackouts and visions begin to seem a convenient way for the novel to evade any real explanation of what’s going on. The farther she gets from reality, the more implausible becomes the behaviour of the people around her, which sort of makes sense, but not entirely, and doesn’t make for spectacular reading either. But then the novel picks up speed again in its final third as Toronto becomes a character, a body: “Below was the Don, flowing like a great vein. If the city were a body, this was where you would draw blood.” The city is most alive in a wonderful scene in which Maggie walks the streets of a downtown which is about to experience its own blackout: “The streetcar went by and then another, and another, like synapses, like the city thinking of itself.”
Sometimes the language got away from itself. I struggled with awkward similes like, “I let myself spread out, mentally checking the city like a tongue running over the empty socket of a tooth,” but these instances were conspicuous in their rarity, against the general strength of O’Connell’s prose. And my reservations about aspects of the story were gone by the novel’s end, as I realized how much Magnified World was a novel about the city, about being alone in the midst of millions of people, but the hope implicit in that it’s not really being alone after all.
June 11, 2012
The best literature this country has ever produced
From my letter to my Member of Parliament and Minister James Moore regarding the federal government’s cessation of funding to the Literary Press Group of Canada:
“Canadian presses are right now publishing some of the best literature this country has ever produced. If you aren’t already familiar with titles such as Darcie Hossack’s Mennonites Don’t Dance (Thistledown Press, also nominated for Commonwealth Writers Prize), Billeh Nickerson’s Impact: The Titanic Poems (Arsenal Pulp Press), Madeleine Sonik’s Afflictions and Departures (Anvil Press, also nominated for Charles Taylor Prize), Daniel Griffin’s Stopping for Strangers (Vehicule Press, shortlisted for Frank O’Connor and Danuta Gleed awards), Mad Hope by Heather Birrell (Coach House Press), Mnemonic: A Book of Trees by Theresa Kishkan (Goose Lane Editions), The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud (Gaspereau Press, winner of the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize), I’m a Registered Nurse… by Anne Perdue (Insomniac Press), and Monoceros by Suzette Mayr (Coach House Press, nominated for 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize), which are only some of the best books I’ve read lately, then I suggest you seek them out. And then you will understand my concern about the LPG funding cut, and about how much we all stand to lose as a result.”
The matter is urgent. If you support Canadian readers, Canadian books, and Canadian writers, please write your MP and tell her/him so.
June 8, 2012
A bouquet of maple leaves
Taking these books back to the library today, and realizing that they do reveal a bit of a pattern in my borrowing habits.
June 7, 2012
Picture books are the most wild, innovative, untethered, experimental literary genre I know
From an excellent post by Laurel Snyder on the dangers of turning on to chapter books too soon:
“Picture books are the most wild, innovative, untethered, experimental literary genre I know.
The marriage of images and text is partly to blame for this, I think. Something about the collaborative process too, perhaps—an artist and a writer challenging each other, with a common purpose but different modes. But I want to believe that the main reason picture books can be so different is that kids are so different.
At the tender age when kids first encounter picture books they are open, accepting, free-thinking. A two year old doesn’t really expect anything when she picks up a book, and so a book for a two year old can be anything. Physical comedy. Visual art. A puzzle. Books for kids can pop-up or scratch-and-sniff. They can be meta-fiction. They can speak multiple languages or intertwine multiple distinct storylines. There are almost no rules to picture books. Kids scribble in them, build forts with them. Picture books are experiential on every level you can imagine, and some you can’t.
They’re awesome.”
June 7, 2012
Never Mind the Patriarchy Part 2: Myrl Coulter and Helen Potrebenko
Last week, I read Myrl Coulter’s The House With the Broken Two: A Birthmother Remembers, a memoir of Coulter’s experiences growing up in Winnipeg and being forced to give up her son for adoption in 1968 when she finds herself pregnant. Like Madeline Sonik’s Afflictions and Departures, which I enjoyed so much, Coulter shows “what happens when individual lives collide with their particular historical moments.” Unmarried and a teenager, Coulter was sent away from her family and community to live at one of those ubiquitous maternity homes while she waited to have her baby. As an unwed mother, she was treated by disdain at the hospital where her son was born, and expected to move on with her life after the fact as if the story had never happened.
Unsurprisingly, this moving on proves difficult, and the memoir goes on to show how Coulter carried her experience inside her for so many years in silence. Looking back, she questions how her parents could have let it happen, could have sent her away, could have let her give away her son. Eventually, years and lifetimes later, she and her son are reunited, and she’s forthright about the complicated nature of their relationship, and also about her anger at Canada’s closed adoption system that manipulated and wronged so many young woman just like her.
She writes, “…the feminist version of me… was born on a dark night in 1968 when I gave birth to my first child alone in a big crowded hospital. I knew at last that my feminism stems from the invisibility society demanded for unwed mothers back then; I knew that my sense of agency was born in a social order that dictated no one should stop to offer comfort to a frightened eighteen-year-old girl in labour simply because she wasn’t married… I knew.. that being a feminist and being a mother are inevitably connected, like fetus and placenta.” With excellent writing and perfect detail, Coulter paints a rather stark picture of life “back then”, though all of us who have ever been pregnant by mistake are well-aware that the experience carries a devastating stigma to this day.
There was no reason why I picked up Helen Potrebenko’s TAXI! to read next, except that both books had come in at the library at the very same time. But, as in my first Never Mind the Patriarchy experience in March, random books brought forth remarkable connections. Once again, I was reading a book that Anakana Schofield had recommended, this time TAXI!, which Schofield calls her “favourite Vancouver novel” (and you can believe it). It’s the story of Shannon, a female taxi driver in Vancouver during 1971 and 1972. The episodic novel follows Shannon as she philosophizes and longs for revolution, driving the streets of Vancouver with various down-and-outs and scumbags throwing up in her backseat.
Says Shannon, “There are so so few choices for women. They’ve got you in a cage. If you’re bad they tighten the bars around you so you’ve got no space at all. They they give you back the original cage and call that freedom.”
It’s a funny book, but timeless in a way that is tragic. Protesters erect tent cities in local parks, unions are striking, there is social unrest, not enough jobs for young people, and there’s a war going on. “The first time Shannon drove cab drunk out of her mind was the Christmas after the War Measures Act.” TAXI! could have been written yesterday, which is a mark for Helen Potrebenko, but bad luck for the rest of us. Shannon herself would probably not be so surprised, having never suffered any illusions about progress.
June 6, 2012
To market, to market
The market opened today, and it was a glorious bounty, perhaps due to our early spring. It was wonderful to see so many familiar faces, people we know from the neighbourhood and farmers we haven’t seen since last October who commented on how enormous Harriet has grown in the meantime. And it’s true– this time last year, I had to wear Harriet on my back to the market or else she’d escape, and then she’d scream whenever it was time to leave, and I think she got a bad reputation. Today, however, she stood at my side like an actual human being, and it was so exciting to see strawberries, beets, garlic scapes, cherry tomatoes, and kale, plus say hello to our favourite maple syrup and honey men. It is very nice to say hello to summer again, and also to see how far we’ve come.
