November 27, 2011
True Stories: My Canada Reads Addendum
CBC Canada Reads is tackling nonfiction for 2012, which got me thinking about true stories. One of the best things about lately barrelling through my unread books in author-alpha-order is that I’ve finally been driven to pick up the nonfiction I’ve been so long putting off, fiction always being what I turn to first. And so I finally read Christopher Dewdney’s Soul of the World, biographies of Elizabeth Bowen, Gertrude Bell and The Eaton Family. Nonfiction I’ve been compelled to read without prodding recently have been Maria Meindl’s Outside the Box, the biography of Virginia Lee Burton, Bring on the Books for Everybody, and Cinderella Ate My Daughter. So yes, there has been a lot of nonfiction to appreciate.
But to show my true appreciation, and in the tradition of me reading alongside and offside what CBC folks are doing, I’m going to rereading a truly great Canadian nonfiction book this winter. It’s like Canada Reads Independently, but it’s one book, and a lot less trouble. I’m going to be rereading Joan Bodger’s memoir The Crack in the Teacup: The Life of a an Old Woman Steeped in Stories, and I’d love it if you could read along with me. If you’re following along with Canada Reads, I promise that your experience will be richer if you include this book along with the other five (and that it will blow the other five out of the water, no contest.)
From my blog post about the book: “Joan Bodger’s life was never, ever boring, from the grandmother who was killed in a shipwreck, to her unconventional girlhood as the daughter of a sailor, her stint in the army working as in decoding, the terrible sadness of her family life, what she learned about story and its power to transform children’s lives (and what I learned about Where the Wild Things Are in reading about this), her fascinating work in early childhood education, the loveliness of her second marriage, her shamelessness (which is learned, and earned with age), her honestly, her passion, that she placed her husband’s ashes in the foundations of the Lillian H. Smith Library which was then under construction.”
November 27, 2011
Launch: Best Canadian Essays 2011, December 6
The Best Canadian Essays 2011 will be launching on Tuesday December 6 at the Dora Keogh Pub (Broadview and Danforth) at 7:00. I will be there and will be reading from my essay, and I’d love to see you there!
In other events, I’m also looking forward to hearing Rebecca Rosenblum (The Big Dream) and Anne Perdue (I’m a Registered Nurse Not a Whore) read this Thursday December 1 at the Lillian Smith Library at 6:30.
November 26, 2011
A pile of books
Today we went to a book and toy sale at Huron Playschool, where Harriet will attend next year when she is three (and “when I am a boy,” she has noted, intriguingly). The sale was to support a trust fund for the son of Jenna Morrison, who was killed in a cycling accident two weeks ago, and whose death has profoundly affected our community, even those of us who didn’t know her.
We got a pile of books, happy to be able to do something to help. We brought them home and began to read through the stack, which wouldn’t have made for a blog post normally, except that every single book that we read was so incredibly good. We got Silly Lilly by Agnes Rosenstiehl , Owl Babies by Martin Waddell and Patrick Benson, Paddington Takes a Bath by Michael Bond, A Difficult Day by Eugenie Fernandes, Beneath the Bridge by Hazel Hutchins and Ruth Ohi, and The Alphabet Room by Sarah Pinto.
November 24, 2011
Midsummer Night in the Workhouse and My Friend Says It's Bullet-Proof
Midsummer Night in the Workhouse is a collection of Diana Athill’s short stories from the 1950s to the 1970s, published in Britain by the fabulous Persephone Books, and now in Canada by the just as worthy House of Anansi Press. I read it this week, and just happened to follow it with Penelope Mortimer’s My Friend Says It’s Bullet-Proof, first published in 1967 and reissued by Virago Classics in the 1980s. The lone connection between the two, I thought, was that I’d bought another of Penelope Mortimer’s novels Daddy’s Gone a Hunting at the Persephone Shop when we were in England last winter. But then something in the tone of the Mortimer book served to be illuminating the Athill all the way through, and never was this more clear than when I came across the line, “But what? What shall I do? It will all happen. When it’s happened, you’ll know what you did. Not until then.”
Athill’s characters are similarly detached from their own experiences, lately set adrift in narratives beyond their control, and yet they are fascinated by the drifting, by where it’s taking them. They are aware of the growing gap between how they’re perceived by the world and who they actually are, or perhaps by how the former is shaping the latter, and their adriftness allows them to inhabit that liminal space. These are characters all on the threshold of something, and Athill holds them there, poised, right before it really happens and they find out what they’ll do.
In “The Real Thing”, a young girl attends a party and has her first kiss, viewing the entire evening as a rehearsal for something great to come, her faith in herself still wholly unshaken, and her naivete is startling, funny, and heartbreaking. In “No Laughing Matter”, a young woman is rejected by the lover in whom she’d invested so much, and is able to view herself from afar, as had the character in the first story; she begs her future self, “Whatever it may seem to you then, you must remember that now it is like this, that it couldn’t possibly be more terrible. Please, please promise that you will never laugh.”
These are characters who are trying on guises, playing at being the people they will one day become. In other stories, those who are already established in themselves are also playing at something: romances enacted by lovers aware there is no future, characters on vacation daring to become somebody else for a while, what a wife will do when her husband is away, or when she does the unexpected and storms drunkenly after an argument in the dark of night. These are characters toying with the possibilities of narrative, just as much as is the frustrated writer on retreat in the title story. And when she finally finds her inspiration, the story starts flowing, almost just out of her control, and she follows it where it leads her, which is what all these characters are doing anyway.
Some fifty years old, Athill’s stories read like they’re contemporary, as does the work of Penelope Mortimer, though this could be because so many issues that women writers were grappling with in the ’50s and ’60s are still unresolved. Or at least this seems to be the case when one considers Mortimer’s work, the frustrated suburban wife and mother in Daddy’s Gone a Hunting scheming to get her daughter an abortion, or Muriel Rowbridge in My Friend Says It’s Bullet-Proof who has just lost a breast to cancer and is trying come to terms with what has happened to her and her body in relation to her identity as a woman.
My Friend Says It’s Bullet-Proof is The Golden Notebook meets The Edible Woman. Muriel is a columnist for a woman’s magazine in England, sent to Canada with a contingent of journalists for a cultural discovery tour. She’s the only woman in her group, and this is her first foray into the world since her surgery, and also since her breakup with her married lover. She is conscious of her status in the group, but more so of the prosthetic breast tucked inside her bra. She finds herself connecting on various levels with men she encounters on the trip, and finds that her missing breast and her experience with cancer renders no connection staightforward.
As with Athill’s characters, Muriel has been removed enough from her own context that she is free to experiment in looking at herself (which is also to be being seen) in new ways. New sexual experiences and an affair with a man who’s also known tragedy gives her a sense of renewal:
“She had found, after all this time of searching, an image: myself as I am. I prefer myself as I am. The implications came crowding in on her with the impact of light, air and sound after a long imprisonment. Boldness and freedom were both available. She could do anything she wanted to do.”
November 23, 2011
What to expect
“They named me Ruth Frances Beatrice Brennan, and took me home. They days blended together, one into another with no distinctions. The crying, the feeding, the changing, the chafing, the washing, the soothing, the burping, the singing, the sleeping, the waking. As new parents, James and Elspeth were surprised by their fatigue, as well as my dismissal of it. If someone had told them what to expect (and no one had), they hadn’t taken it in, and now, rather than forging ahead, they were rolling and rolling.
Sometimes Elspeth hung over me with smears of purple under her eyes, the skin there loose and fine, like something that would tear easily. She begged me to understand, though she knew she asked too much of me. Just as I asked too much of her, and him, and they of each other. James formed a habit of going to get things before they were needed, because it made him feel helpful and also allowed him to escape, just briefly, what he’d never expected to have to endure.” –Kristen den Hartog, And Me Among Them
November 23, 2011
Today, we get to celebrate
Today, we get to celebrate our beloved, who is now as old as I am. Who’s doing amazing things in his professional day-job life, and in his professional-freelance life, and who as a husband and father is second to none. He is truly adored, and we are very lucky to have him. We are also very lucky because his birthday is another excuse to eat this wonderful Oreo Ice Cream Pie.
November 20, 2011
T is for Toronto
Just in case I wasn’t totally steeped in Toronto already, having just finished the Eatons’ biography, they scheduled the Santa Claus Parade for this weekend. We’ve never been before, even though it goes by right around the corner from our house, but we made it out this year because Harriet’s at the perfect age to be overwhelmed by the magic of it all. She enjoyed the whole thing, found the giant Barbie appropriately disturbing, and said that the Mother Goose float was her favourite of all of them. Which is unsurprising really, because we’re Mother Goose mad around our house these days.
Since Harriet arrived in our lives, we’ve come into possession of no less than four Mother Goose Books, which you might think is overkill but each offers something slightly different– we’ve got Scott Gustafson’s stunningly gorgeous Favourite Nursery Rhymes from Mother Goose which is handled with care, a second-hand copy of Iona Opie’s My Very First Mother Goose which is loved with wild abandon, Richard Scarry’s Best Mother Goose Ever with its illustrations guaranteed to transfix wee ones (and also its admirably subversive violent edge), and the nice and portable Sing a Song of Mother Goose by Barbara Reid.
I’ve also come ’round to “Bat bat come under my hat…” and no longer think it’s stupid.
November 17, 2011
Our Best Book of the Library Haul: The Elephant and the Bad Baby
It was a very good week for library books this week, mostly because we showed up at the library on Monday not long after the librarian had replenished the featured book shelf, and then we took most of them. (Is this bad library etiquette? I’m never sure. Though even if I was, I’d do it anyway.) Stand-outs included the wonderful Dear Baobab by Cheryl Foggo, and Ella May and the Wishing Stone by Cary Fagan, and I think that if Harriet were older, either one of these would have taken the prize. But because Harriet is only 2, our best book of the week was not from the featured shelf at all, it was The Elephant and the Bad Baby by Elfrida Vipont and Raymond Briggs, which we turned up while hanging out in the stacks in the vicinity of Judith Viors and Bernard Waber.
The Elephant and the Bad Baby delights the parts of us that worship all things Albergh, and we think that Alan and Janet must have read this one back in the day. I love it most because just why the baby is “the bad baby” is never really explained (except once where he doesn’t say please), because I love elephants, and because when the elephant runs down the street, it goes, “rumpata, rumpata, rumpata” (of course!). The baby and the elephant run through town stealing things from shopkeepers, from sausages to lollypops (and maybe this is why the baby is the bad baby? Though the elephant really led him on), and being chased by the shopkeepers (some bearing cleavers), and then they all sort of work it out and end up back at the bad baby’s house where his mother makes them pancakes, and they sit around the table with a big teapot in the middle. Also, the elephant is drinking milk from a bucket, which Harriet finds no end of fascinating.
November 17, 2011
Of Eatons and Avenues
Last night I finished Rod McQueen’s The Eaton’s: The Rise and Fall of Canada’s Royal Family, which I was reading because Jonathan Bennett had included in his Power & Politics Book List, and then I found a copy in a cardboard box outside a house on Borden Street last summer. And to be reading this book right after Heather Jessup’s The Lightning Field is to be steeped in old Toronto now, to be rumbling up and down its avenues like the old cream coloured streetcars of my childhood. And to be so steeped is to be led down strange avenues online, pursuing the odd history of Dundas Street, or even leaving town to find this fascinating 1958 article in Macleans by Peter C. Newman about Deep River ON: “The Utopian town where our atomic scientists live and play has no crime, no slums, no unemployment and few mothers-in-law. But maybe you wouldn’t like it after all. Here’s why.”
McQueen’s story of the Eaton family was readably rife with scandal and gossip, and good old fashioned story. Art heists, a foiled kidnapping, cuckolds, Fascists, terrorists, Rolls Royces, idiots, feuding siblings, and fallen empires– you wouldn’t know this was Canada. How the Eatons myth was divorced from its reality, and the public was so determined to keep the myth perpetuated. The book ends in 1997, when how far the Eatons would fall was still not entirely clear, and that they only fell further doesn’t undermine the story’s importance. That this book is out of print, however, to be found in curbside cardboard boxes only (though thank heaven for such distribution really) is totally ridiculous.
November 16, 2011
I am in a book!
Today I had the remarkable experience of walking into a bookstore and finding a book with my name on it. The Best Canadian Essays 2011 is out now, featuring my essay “Love is a Let-Down”, along with other essays by writers including Caroline Adderson, Mark Kingwell, Stephen Marche, David Mason and Barbara Stewart*. The Best Canadian Essays series editor is Christopher Doda, issue editor is Ibi Kaslik, and I’m so honoured that they’ve included my work in this collection. Though I must admit that part of the thrill is the idea of being in a book at all. Me! In a book! Which is more than kind of a dream come true.
*We published a great essay “The God Edit” by Barbara Stewart on Canadian Bookshelf this week. See also Caroline Adderson’s book list Imperfect People. And check out Susan Olding’s wonderful article on the essay form, “That Trying Genre”.
