December 9, 2010
I love my book club.
I didn’t sum up our latest meeting of The Vicious Circle, because I only caught an hour of it. A few weeks before, we’d realized that my husband would have to work late the night of our meeting, which had brought forth much distress at our house: I love my book club, and my husband knows how much I love it. So we came up with a compromise that suited everybody (except my husband who’d have to come home from an extended work day to put the baby to bed, but alas, he is a kind man): I’d book an autoshare car and dash out the door the instant he came in, and then drive like a law-abiding demon out to the west end where I could join The Vicious Circle for the last hour or so of our meeting. These are the lengths I go to, and if you were a member, you would understand.
I love my book club. I feel the need to voice this after reading “I broke up with my book club” in the Globe and Mail today, and after reading “Behind Enemy Lines: My life in an all-woman’s book club” in CNQ (though I feel the latter would have been better titled “I don’t like women, or most people, and I am smarter than you”). I understand why book clubs are derrided– I used to run them down myself. I was always an annoyingly obstinate independent reader (which is the reason I have still not read A Complicated Kindness), and the idea of being told what to read and then discussing said reading with a group of stupid people never held much appeal to me.
And then one day last winter, a group of distinctly non-stupid people asked me to join their brand new book club, and though my instinct was to run for hills, it was the kind of honour one couldn’t turn down. Some of these people were survivors of bad book clubs, and were determined to forge something different with this new experience. They’d chosen members carefully, each of us passionate about reading and connected to the literary life in various capacities: we have authors among us, of picture books, abridged classics and short stories; an illustrator; most of us blog about books; a lot of us work in publishing, in publicity; one of us is a journalist. Though we are bookish, we are various, and that none of us would be considered a casual reader is probably the one thing we all have in common.
We capped ourselves, because the survivors had learned that book clubs fall to pieces once there are too many to focus on one conversation. We picked our books casually, choosing from a pile of paperbacks we brought to the first meeting, and we’ve read all novels so far, contemporary or less-so. We do enjoy visiting one another’s houses, and snooping through nooks, and crannies, and bookshelves. Wine and cheese is popular, and so is dessert. We’re fond of gossip, and our name isn’t just clever– it’s apt. As the evening grows later, the talk gets louder, and more and more inappropriate.
But the best thing about book club is that we talk about books. Our conversations, our various points of view, approaches, and backgrounds all opening up new avenues in the works we’d never have found whilst reading alone. We challenge one another, ask questions, disagree and shout a lot. No one shuts down discussion: if you don’t like the book, let’s talk about why. We show up most excited for the meetings at which we’ve loved the books, but it’s true that the talk is always best at the meetings where we’ve hated it. There was one meeting where a blah book hadn’t elicited very much response, and admittedly that one time we did focus mostly on the guacamole. But it must be said that the guacamole was really very good.
So the problem is not book clubs, the problem is YOUR book club. The problem is that you’re doing it wrong. Maybe you shouldn’t be in a book club at all? (Book clubs should be the endeavour of choice for those who read already, not those who merely wish they did.) My book clubs exists as living proof that the institution itself is not to blame.
December 9, 2010
Course Offering: The Art and Business of Blogging
I am very excited to announce that I’ll be teaching the course “The Art and Business of Blogging” at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies in the spring. The course runs from April 11-June 13, and will explore the various uses of blogging, the blog as community builder and as a tool for promotion, the blogging gamut from Dooce to Gizmodo, the importance of storytelling in blogging, how to craft an excellent blog post, and the technical aspects of the blog. Among other things, syllabus still being under construction. Anyway, the course is still a while away so I’ll be mentioning it again in the next few months, but I just wanted to get the word out now, mostly because I’m thrilled about it.
December 7, 2010
Canada Reads Independently Spotlight: Lynn Coady's Play the Monster Blind
If I ever write a book, I would like Sheree Fitch to write a blurb for it. Though any “blurb” by Sheree Fitch would probably take the place of a whole back cover, but that would be all right. Because she would write something like, “Meet a world of big dog rage and oversized underpants, boozing, boxing, irreverence, complicated sex, cheap hotel rooms and searching men and women. Coady’s east coast of Canada , especially industrialized Cape Breton, is a landscape populated by the never get ways, the come from aways and the go aways. In Coady’s world there are razor -edged, truth-saying tellers; the smart and sassy, the off kilter and quirky and ordinary.” But only if I’d written Lynn Coady’s Play the Monster Blind.
Play the Monster Blind was published ten years ago to much acclaim and bestsellerdom and, for some reason that stupefies anybody who has ever read the book, is no longer in print. Which is odd for a book so vital that the Giller-shortlisted writer Alexander MacLeod just six weeks ago cited it in an interview as one of his favourite collections. Chad Pelley’s affection for the collection was apparent in the interview he conducted with Coady just last summer, in which he remarked, “I loved every single story…”
In her review, Karen Solie called the book, “a sure-footed dance to the often painful music of the working class of the Canadian East Coast, a tough but graceful negotiation of the living rooms, bars, workplaces, and childhood haunts where violence and tenderness, hilarity and despair, belonging and alienation coincide.” Margaret Gunning writes in January Magazine that “Coady has a deeper-than-intellectual understanding of human ambiguity which resonates in her audience as a sense of recognition”. Jim Taylor noted in The Antigonish Review that readers “should rejoice in the humanity of the Cape Breton characters who come to life in her landscape.” Open Book Toronto called the book “a keenly observed, imaginative collection”. Play the Monster Blind received a starred review in Quill & Quire, which found Coady’s “emotional arm’s length narrative style” even stronger here than in her award-winning debut novel.
Margaret Gunning writes: “To label [Coady’s] fiction “comic” is to do it a great disservice, because there is always so much more going on: delicate underlayers, dangling nerve-endings and things noted and remarked upon that the rest of us are trying to forget. Without the belly laughs to punctuate the unbearable truth-telling, her work might be too uncomfortable to enjoy.”
I’ve read Coady before in a few anthologies, and also in her novel Mean Boy which delighted me back in 2006 and was one of my favourite books of that year. My experience with that novel and my love of short stories in general leaves me with every expectation that Play the Monster Blind will be a book that I love.
December 7, 2010
Our cities unfold
“…the cities we live in are made not merely of brick and mortar, or bureaucracy and money, but are equally the invention of our memories and imaginations. We realize that our cities unfold not only in the building but in the telling of them.” –Amy Lavender Harris, Imagining Toronto
December 6, 2010
Scientifically conclusive long-term effects of horizontal parenting
When I first began horizontal parenting, I admit that I was far more lazy than I was confident. For seven months, my child would only nap whilst lying on me, and I wondered if I was setting myself up to become a doormat (albeit a mattressy one). For ten months, my child spent most of many nights in bed with me and breastfed like a drunkard, and I wondered if this was going to be the rest of my life (plus, my shoulder hurt, but it was better than not lying down at all). Though I gave my child everything she demanded of me (because I was too tired to challenge an indomitable infant, and whenever we made it into a power struggle, she won every time), I wondered what kind of pattern we were be setting. Would I be that mother with the screaming toddler in the grocery store pleading for a small piece of our power-share? Was I falling down as a parent in failing to set boundaries with my six week old? Shouldn’t I be encouraging her to be an independent six month old? Was this the precedent, and now forever I’d give her everything she demanded with a screech?
The thing is though, and I know this now and I didn’t know it then, that your six week old is a whole other person three weeks later, and that six month old is such a more completely evolved amazing being in comparison that you can’t remember she was ever small. And then six months starts being small, because your baby is a year old, and a year and a half old, and she’s walking, and talking, and pouring you endless cups of imaginary tea. And you’re now negotiating with someone altogether different than that screaming newborn, and it is here where setting boundaries and discipline does become important, but now you’re dealing with a(n almost) person rather than a helpless creature. It’s a whole different game– certainly not an easier one, but one that is not very much affected by anything that came before.
When my daughter was six weeks old and I was racked with guilt over my desire to buy an infant swing rather than rock her to comfort myself, somebody told me to do “Whatever works” and thereby set me on the road to horizontal parenting. I trusted the advice because it was easy, but eighteen months later I can now report with scientific conclusiveness that she was right. There are no harmful long-term effects to taking the easy way out in babyhood and shutting that screaming kid up however you can manage it. Hooray for soothers, and co-sleeping, and baby swings, and long walks in the stroller. Hooray for putting the baby to sleep in a sling, having her eat only avocado for a week, and for having the baby nap on your chest while you lie on the bed gyrating your hips to put her to sleep with the motion. (It works. How did I discover this works? I don’t remember. It was a long time ago.)
December 6, 2010
On reading independently
For me, the most fascinating thing about Canada Reads is how it’s everything to everyone. For me, a chance to pick up some obscure books I might just fall in love with; for others a chance to champion the books they’ve read already; for the more competitive among us, the fun of listening to panelists hash it out, employing nefarious strategies to ensure their own book’s dominance. And it’s interesting to me that the general vagueness with which Canada Reads Independently has been presented has brought forth much of the same variety of interpretations confusion.
There is one reason why Canada Reads Independently isn’t a chance to exclusively showcase books published by independent presses: I don’t think independent presses are in need of a special showcase. I thought a bit differently once upon a time, but I’ve evolved as a reader since then, plus I listened carefully when Biblioasis publisher Dan Wells once took me to task for segregation, and I realized that he was right. Independent presses in Canada are producing books every bit as good as, if not better than, in many cases, books being published by major publishing houses. This year’s Giller shortlist (and long list even) was a testament to that, and now everybody knows. Independent presses are amazing, and this is hardly news.
What I do want to do with Canada Reads Independently, however, is choose panelists who are well-read enough to know what’s going on in the CanLit scene beyond the Giller shortlist (whether that list happens to be indie-dominated or not), and I think I’ve done well with what we’ve come up with. Two books by indie presses, the CanLit stalwart is a book many of us haven’t read, an out of print book by a vital (and underrated) contemporary author, and a book usually only read in grad school (which is not necessarily to appreciate).
So officially indie or not, I still think we’re off the beaten track. Which is the very point of (my personal interpretation of) Canada Reads.
December 5, 2010
The New Yorker Stories by Ann Beattie
When I started reading Ann Beattie’s The New Yorker Stories last week, I was concerned I was doing it wrong. I’d never read any of Beattie’s stories before, and this collection of more than 40 stories written over 30 years might have been too much of a good thing. Surely, a collection like this meant to be savoured, dipped in and out of, but as I’m a little short on leisure these days, an overdose was my only option. And after the fact, I’m actually grateful, because these stories are small worlds constructed of tiny gestures, but the cumulative effect was to hit me with a wallop.
Beattie’s stories are very much fixed in their time, cars with make and year, characters listening to Sony Walkmans, a reference in a 1979 story to “a stereo as big as a computer”, a lot of pre-electric Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger playing on stereos, no matter the decade. This element of detail, however, gives the early stories the effect of a bad orange cover design. It wasn’t so much that the stories themselves were dated as were their backdrops, which made the collection difficult to settle into. But one or all of the following things happened: the stories got better, the sets got more modern, and I began to get a real sense of what Beattie’s work is all about (and this final effect is the very best thing, albeit an exhausting thing, about reading more than 40 short stories in a row).
Reading 40 stories in a row also revealed connections between them, providing the sense of what Beattie is all about. Revealing also that she only knows about seven men’s names, which are mostly Richard, that every dog is called Sam, and that dogs in general are a preoccupation. As are marriages gone sour (and there is no marriage that hasn’t), multiple husbands (though not all at once), children of divorce, deadbeats, misfits, and all the lonely people (who are sometimes justifiably so). At least three times, a character without use of a limb tries and fails to use that limb anyway, and is surprised by their failure. Betrayal, deception, sinister trespasses, and the kind of people who’ll break your heart over and over again.
There is a range to how these stories are constructed, many focused on the personal and the immediate, but the later stories in particular taking on a wider scope. In “The Cinderella Waltz”, a woman watches as her ex-husband breaks his boyfriend’s heart as he once did hers (and he’s breaking her daughter’s at the same time)’; in “Girl Talk”, a woman about to give birth confronts the reality of her lover’s family (and of her lover, and her whole life); in “In the White Night”, a couple still grieving the long-ago death of their child enact the inexplicable adjustments a complicated life demands of us: “Such odd things happened. Very few days were like the ones before”.
I thought of Grace Paley’s work as I made my way through this collection, the way her preoccupations became definite, the way her characters all eventually became thrice-married alter-egos of their author. The way that Beattie’s stories were the kind that Paley’s Faith’s father wouldn’t have understood, wondering why she didn’t just write beginnings, middles and endings. Beattie similarly ponders connections to aging parents, and plays also with the metafictional element in her story “Find and Replace”, in which her narrator (who is a writer called Ann) confesses that all her fiction comes from reality:
“‘People don’t recognize themselves. And, in case they might, you just program the computer to replace one name with another. So, in the final version, every time the word Mom comes up, it’s replaced with Aunt Begonia or something.'”
One phrase at the end of “Summer People” goes far to sum up what Ann Beattie’s stories are all about, and how a restive reader might encounter them: “For a second, he wanted them all to be transformed into characters in one of those novels she had read all summer. That way, the uncertainty would end.” But the uncertainly doesn’t in these stories, and novels these stories aren’t nor do they attempt to be. Here is story for the sake of story, for the sake of truth uncertainty provides. Another line from “Find and Replace” is an extension of this idea, and the very essence of the short story, of their perfection:
“You can’t help understanding. First, because it is the truth, and second, because everyone knows the way things change. They always do, even in a very short time.”
December 2, 2010
Wild Libraries I have known: Peterborough Public Library, Delafosse Branch
Things must have changed in Peterborough since I lived there last, because this morning I took a look at their website and discovered that they were open every day. This surprised me, because what I remember most about the Peterborough Public Library (in addition to the donut shop installed near the newspapers in the late 1990s) was the number of times I walked up the steps to the library only to discovered it was closed.
Now, in reality, the Peterborough Public Library’s Delafosse Branch is up there with the moving sidewalk at the Spadina Subway Station, Ontario Place, and hope for the future– it’s just another one of those things there used to be money for once upon a time. When I consulted the Peterborough Public Library website this morning, I discovered that the Delafosse Branch is only open fifteen hours a week, and I remember it being under threat of closure once or twice before. But no matter.
I have never ever visited the Peterborough Public Library, Delafosse Branch. However, with its exotic-sounding name, the illusion it gave of a library system with branches (multiple, instead of just one that was starved for funding), and the fact that my vision of it was never sullied by reality, the Delafosse Branch has become a stand-in for the library of my dreams. The Delafosse Library was open every day, and long into the night, had cozy fireplaces with nearby armchairs to curl up in, all the books in the Babysitters Club series, and the Anne books too. No one had drawn cartoon penises on its carrels, and the people who came in and slept all day on the study tables didn’t smell like pee.
The staff were well-adjusted, only the male librarians had facial hair, overdue fines flew away with wings, and the lost books were always where you left them. The library stools never had footprints. If you studied there, you were guaranteed to get an A. They were always dying to hire you as a part-time shelver. Mis-shelved books were unheard of, and the computers never went down. There were terminals enough for everyone to check their email. There was always a pen for you to borrow. They’d kept the card-catalogues in case anyone felt the urge to thumb through index cards, and many people did. Any book you needed you’d locate by climbing up a ladder, and the acoustics were such that though joy and laughter filled the place, no one ever had to say, “Shhh.”
December 1, 2010
Anvil Press Launch: December 8
Though there is nowhere I’d rather be than inside my house when it’s dark outside, next Wednesday I’ll be breaking with tradition and attending the Anvil Press Spectacular 5 Author Showcase. In particular, to see Kerry Ryan (remember her Pickle Me This Author Interview from earlier this year?) who will be (Toronto) launching her second book Vs.,which chronicles the foray of a bookish woman into the world of boxing. Poems which, according to Jeannette Lynes, “come at you like quick jabs of light – the writing is taut, worked over, sinewy, spare, and lean – but never mean. A delightful collection. What else can be said? These poems pack a punch.” I am looking forward to it.
