April 1, 2011
Finding the Words , edited by Jared Bland
I once changed my entire life on account of an essay from the PEN Canada Anthology Writing Away, and I simply adored the most recent, Writing Life. So you can say that I’ve got a strong attachment to these anthologies, and so accordingly have been wondering what one would be were it not edited by the late Constance Rooke. In the latest, Finding the Words, I have my answer: it’s a different kind of creature, but still packed with inspiring, provocative writing, and proceeds of the books sales go to the same great cause.
My favourite essay was “How to Swim in a Sea of Shit” by Karen Connelly, about how the novel still matters. She writes with humour, and a light touch, and then her piece shifts effortlessly to the lessons she has learned from “writers in countries where writing words is an essential act of courage”. I loved Emma Donoghue’s “Finding Jack’s Voice”, with reflections on the processes through which children find their way to language; Lee Henderson’s “On Tuition Row” about corporate English, and how instead he tries “to ride the old roads of English”; Stephanie Nolen about the women in the Congo who gave her their words about their experiences as rape survivors in that war-wracked country; Michael Winter on the veil that falls and renders fiction as fact, or vice versa. Elizabeth Hay, Annabel Lyon and Lisa Moore write about finding their way into new novels. David Chariandy writes about not being at home at home, a theme of exile also touched upon by Rawi Hage. In “Affricates”, Richard Poplak asks, assuming land has a mother tongue, what language does the northern part of South Africa speak?
The book’s theme was too vague for the anthology to be cohesive. It’s the separate riffs on a concrete idea that I’ve always liked about the best anthologies, the PEN ones in particular, but this riffing on an idea that really didn’t mean anything in the first place kept the essays from banging together and illuminating one another, creating those fascinating intersections I love so much. So Finding the Words is a book that’s not necessarily more than the sum of its parts, but the sum still manages to be outstanding.
March 31, 2011
Something happens
“That is why I have ignored email and the Internet long enough to write and, as importantly — perhaps more importantly — to read. To read and read books, more books, beautiful books that smell of old paper and sometimes mildew and ink. Crisp new strangely confident books. I know that a good novel can change a life. Books changed my life. But as importantly, they have given me so much pleasure. Something happens when the right pages are opened at the right time; that invisible liquid lifts, flows up off the page, and the enters the reader’s mind and heart.” –from Karen Connelly’s essay “How to Swim in a Sea of Shit” from Finding the Words
March 30, 2011
A perfect book
I don’t know that I have ever read a perfect book. Sure, some books have had me under their spells: I remember the experience of finishing Elizabeth Hay’s Late Night’s on Air, and writing my review of it immediately after, pouring out my amazement at the wonder of the book. Others called the book overrated; I reread the book a few years later, and got a better sense of their arguments, though I still loved the book. But no, it wasn’t perfect, even if it had convinced me it was (but surely, that it did is a mark of success?).
I am thinking about this because I’ve been thinking about how to talk about books. What they mean to the people who write them and release them out into the world, and what they mean to readers who devour them, and critics who dissect them. What is it to read a book properly? What is necessary, for anybody, to experience a book?
I recently had a writer tell me that she never trusts a review unless it contains a hint of criticism, and my obligatory, nurturing response should have been something along the lines of, “That’s ridiculous! Don’t let the haters win! You are an endless ray of shining light, and let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.” The writer isn’t full of crap, however, and neither am I, so I had to admit that she had a point. The reader who sees your inevitable flaws while appreciating the book as a whole is probably a better reader than one who sings praises only. And I’ll admit that there are reviews in which I sing praises only, but for me it only means that the goodness so overrides the problems that the latter isn’t worth speaking about. (Or that the book managed to convince me it was perfect, even if only for a little while).
Is finding what’s wrong with a book a necessary part of reading it? For me it is, though I’m not sure if that was always the case. I think that blogging about books has made me look more critically at the books I read, which means that I have to examine how the books work. And figuring out how a book works requires an understanding of the ways it doesn’t. And here my mechanistic metaphor breaks down, because no book is ever just one book to its readers, of course. How a book works for me will be very different from how it works for another reader (and from how it will work for me the next time I read it, even). But anyway, sometimes that’s why reading a book too critically spoils the fun, because it breaks the spell that a really good book casts. Sometimes I think that a really good critic has to take into account the spell casting as much as the construction of the book itself. Sometimes I think that a book’s construction is also as subjective as the spell is.
It surprises me that any writer might imagine he’s written a perfect book. Not only because I’ve never read a perfect book, but also because I’ve never written anything that I have ever considered perfect. (And whether this is a mark upon my writing is a perfectly respectable rebuttal to my point, but let’s save it for another day.) I know there are writers for whom it is said that every single word is considered, deliberate, though that kind of criticism is as wishy-washy as any, really. I know that I don’t read books like this very often though, and that when I do, they were usually written sixty years ago. (Perhaps the book closest to perfect that I’ve read lately is Alexander MacLeod’s Light Lifting, but if you really pressed me, I could come up with something ever-s0-slightly wrong with it, but then I’d really rather you didn’t).
A book is never a finished product. (But then I also think that a book is never a product.) When a reader begins to read a book, it starts a brand new process, not just of merely unpacking what the author created, but also of the reader creating her own experience of the book through reading it. I suppose that act of creation is as subjective as every other subjective thing I’ve already written about here, but for me, finding the weakness in the book’s construction is a fundamental part of understanding the book entire. It doesn’t mean that the author left something unfinished, or even that he necessarily did anything wrong (although sometimes it does. God knows, sometimes it really, really does…), and one reader’s weakness is another reader’s strength (as we have discovered at every single meeting of The Vicious Book Club).
So I wonder what really constitutes a positive review. If I love a book, and write effusively about why this is so, but note that a character was not well drawn, or that a point in plotting was implausible, what does the writer take away from that? I know what other readers take away from it, of course, and they’re basically who I’m writing for, but when the writer reads my review (and no doubt, no one will read it with as much care as the writer will), will they understand how I can love a book and critique it at once? Or, even, will they understand that I am allowed not to like their book? And really, I’m even allowed not to “get” the book, if that’s the problem. That sometimes the not getting is a reading experience as worth exploring as any.
The reviewer doesn’t always get off so easily, of course. There are so many ways a reviewer can go wrong– my personal unfavourite is the reviewer who uses a review of a book about a dead baby on the prairie to further her personal vendetta against books about dead babies on prairies. Or the reviewer who hates Margaret Drabble reviewing Margaret Drabble’s new novel and getting the protagonist’s name wrong. Etc. etc. The reviewer doesn’t and shouldn’t have total license.
But neither does an author have license to determine just how a book gets read. The best books, however imperfect, will be perfectly able to take it.
March 30, 2011
Registration deadline fast approaching
One more time: the registration deadline is fast approaching for my course The Art and Business of Blogging at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. Caveat that blogging is more art than business anyway, but it is an art, and therefore worth studying. And we’ll get to the business angle too. I am looking forward to it, and hope to learn a lot as well over the next couple of months.
March 29, 2011
Good Food For All: The Stop Cookbook
Now that I can count down the weeks to asparagus season with the fingers on just two hands, I am thinking about eating springtime, and then summer and fall. It was around this time last year that I purchased Good Food For All: Seasonal Recipes from a Community Garden produced by The Stop Community Food Centre in Toronto, and it set us on a delicious course of seasonal eating in 2010. My only complaint about the book is that mine has fallen to pieces, but I suspect this is an indication of how good the book is rather than any of its deficiencies (save for binding).
Courtesy of Good Food For All, we have feasted on roast vegetable burritos, vegetarian shepherd’s pie, multi-grain supper salad, chicken burgers, beef stew, asparagus quinoa with peas and feta, stuffed swiss chard leaves, seared rainbow trout with greens, heirloom tomato salad, and strawberry bread. The strawberry bread in particular was the stuff of legend, and I am looking forward to strawberry season so I can make many of a loaf of that heavenly stuff. Once, I had to get rid of some beets and our dinner was an unappetizing sounding “beet bake” that turned out to be delicious. Another time, however, we had a tofu baked-bean casserole that was less so, but I feel like we should have known better. Otherwise, Good for For All has never led us wrong.
The book has beautiful photography, straightforward recipes and instructions, and follows the Stop’s educational mandate in such a useful fashion– a page devoted to different kinds of grains and how to cook them, for example, which was one of the first to fall out of my book. And I am happy because the cookbook is listed on The Stop’s website as “The Stop’s First Cookbook”, emphasis mine, because I’ll be first in line to pick up their second.
March 27, 2011
Spring Comes Suddenly: Raising awareness and money for Japanese relief efforts
Spring Comes Suddenly is a collection of haiku poetry I wrote from 2004-2005 while we were living in Japan. Stuart and I published 20 copies of this book in late 2005, each one with hand stitched binding and Japanese paper along the spine with a cherry-blossom pattern. It was the first of two publications by Pickle Me This Press, and we sold our entire lot. The digital version of the book came about last year when Stuart expressed interest in learning more about e-publications, but settled for making a PDF version when he learned that e-pub wasn’t great for poetry.
We are now offering free downloads of Spring Comes Suddenly in order to raise money and awareness for Japanese earthquake relief. Because Japan was once our home, it has been particularly dismaying to learn about the devastation the country currently faces. Knowing Japan as we do, we also know that few other nations would be better equipped to deal with and recover from disaster, but we still can’t help wanting to do our part.
Please accept this book as a token of thanks for any donation you may have already made to the Canadian Red Cross Japan Relief Fund, or to the charities highlighted by the Toronto to Japan effort. If you have not yet made a contribution, please use Spring Comes Suddenly as an incentive to do so. I make no claims to be a poet, but the book is a journal of our Japanese year, and a love letter to a country that provided us with so much kindness and generosity.
(Click on the image to launch the PDF of Spring Comes Suddenly, or right click and select “Save Link As” to save a copy)
March 27, 2011
That annoying thing that women do
This is not so important, but it occurs to me that I’ve been doing that annoying thing that women in my situation tend to do. Making comments about professional tea-guzzling and reading with my feet up, and though these things are practically absolutely true, they’re not the whole picture. I have a tendency toward self-deprecation anyway (it’s just easier that way), and I also don’t find the demands of stay-at-home motherhood particularly arduous, mostly because I have only one child who sleeps a lot, and a small house that requires little maintenance (plus we keep our standards very low). Life for me is very good, though to play the role of the idle hausfrau would be disingenuous (though this does not change the fact that tedious maneuvering really is the story of my life. Let that fact stand).
I thought of an excerpt from a review I read recently of Shirley Jackson’s work (“Dye the Steak Blue” 
by Lidija Haas), and though I’m no Shirley Jackson, obviously, I can understand why Betty Friedan was annoyed by her, and I’m setting the matter straight here because I’m a little annoyed at myself. From the review: “Friedan called [Jackson] an Uncle Tom, one of those women who disingenuously portrayed themselves as ‘just housewives’, ‘revelling in a comic world of children’s pranks and eccentric washing machines’, affecting to find a challenge in the most routine chores and concealing the ‘vision, and the satisfying hard work’ which went into their proper vocation, as writers.”
So though my washing machine is terribly eccentric (in fact, it would be better termed a “kind-of washing machine” and it sometimes smells like it’s about to catch on fire), and though I do take pride in managing my household (which is no small task, as anyone who’s ever lived in a household realizes), I only do housework when my child is awake, and whenever she’s asleep, feet-up or otherwise, I am usually at work on something related to writing. I work very hard at this blog, on my freelance assignments, at reading thoughtfully and writing book reviews that communicate this, at writing fiction, at creating new projects and at being a part of a wider creative community. At managing to contribute to our household income through my creative work. And I absolutely love all of it. It is tremendously important to me.
So this is not to be the writer’s equivalent of those wretched Facebook statuses that made me hate mothers just as much as the rest of society does (“So you ask, do I work? Uh yes, I work 24 hours a day. Why? Because I am a Mom… I don’t get holidays, sick pay or days off. I work through the DAY & NIGHT. I am on call at ALL hours. re-post if you are a proud Mommy “). I just think I was selling myself short before, affecting a little too much, which isn’t surprising– there is unease that comes with being a stay-at-home mother. But I am also a feminist, and I’d never want to let Betty Friedan down.
Also, I much appreciate the friends who’ve been so supportive about last week’s news. Since the shock has worn off, we’re very positive about things, and even grateful that the right decision has made, in particular because it’s one we might not have been brave enough to make on our own.
March 26, 2011
Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman
I’ve lately aimed to avoid the “this meets that” construction in my book reviews, but this one I really want to share: Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English is Emma Donoghue’s Room meets Lord of the Flies. Told from the perspective of Harrison Opoku, an eleven-year-old Ghanian immigrant living in the wilds of London, Kelmen’s first novel is the story of six months in a community wracked by gang violence, knife crime, drug abuse, poverty and other urban blights. Through the eyes of Harrison, however, we also see its spots of beauty– the delight of riding the tube, how the wind gusts at the base of the tower blocks, the doggy personalities of local unsavoury characters’ canine companions, the peculiar quirks of local language (and now I’ve just realized that the book’s cover features dual imagery, and now it’s making me cross-eyed). In particular, Harrison is attracted to the pigeon he feeds covertly from his balcony, and seems to serve as the kind of protecting force that he is otherwise quite lacking.
This is a braver book than Room, which sanitized the experience of its young protagonist. Kelman doesn’t soften blows, though Harrison’s is a refreshing perspective upon stories which are so familiar from the news. He is wide-eyed, taking in his new home without context, though even he recognizes that there is nothing ordinary about the blood on the pavement from the dead boy who was stabbed. (“The dead boy’s mamma was guarding the blood. She wanted it to stay, you could tell. The rain wanted to come and wash the blood away, but she wouldn’t let it.” Um, and this is on the first page. Regardless of the upliftingness of Harrison’s perspective, the story doesn’t get easier than this. Consider yourself forewarned, but don’t necessarily be deterred.)
The most ordinary facts of childhood take place in extraordinary places, just as Donoghue made quite clear in her novel. Harrison and his friends play games, run fast, he holds hands with his girlfriend, and get into innocent mischief. He fights with his older sister, wants to please his mother, and longs for his father and baby sister who are still back in Ghana. However the CSI-styled games he plays with his friend get him into trouble over his head– his clumsy efforts to solve the murder of the dead boy attract the wrong kind of attention, and soon childhood games and real-life thuggery are entangled in irrevocable ways. (Kelman also shifts perspective a little bit at the end of the novel, similar to what happens at the end of Lord of the Flies*, to show that real-life thuggery itself is an extension of childhood games).
Problems with the book are worth mentioning: yes, there are paragraphs narrated by the pigeon, which is kind of unfathomable (“don’t let the pigeon drive the bus!”), but it’s only about 1% of the whole book, so don’t let it throw you off. I was also slightly unnerved about Ghanian slang delivered via a white writer, no matter how much he knows about working class communities, but part of this my problem and that issues of cultural appropriation are constantly under negotiation. In my mind, Kelman’s perspective was altogether convincing and issues of authenticity should be debated by somebody who isn’t me.
Pigeon English is a book a lot like its cover. Not that it will necessarily make you cross-eyed, but that it turns into something different the longer you look at it. That perception is always a matter of perspective, and in Harrison Opoku, Stephen Kelman has delivered an especially “lovely” one.
(*I know a lot about Lord of the Flies, because I wrote an essay on it in 1996. )
March 25, 2011
You know, it's all fine and well
You know, it’s all fine and well to be a stay-at-home mother, professional tea guzzler, book-reader with-her-feet-up, but factor a husband’s job loss into the mix, and the whole situation is a little bit perilous. So you can imagine that we’ve had a bit of a stressful day at our house, and there has been much back-and-forthing between triumphant, “Onward, new opportunities beckon!”, and me crying and asking, “Why can’t everything just be easy?” We’re sure counting our blessings though. That our vacation was last month rather than next month (and that it was as splendid as it was), that we both have quite a bit of freelance work in the pipeline, that he has two months to go before his contract ends, that we’d been too lucky anyway and were about due for a kick in the ass. And no fear: this does not mean that I’m going to be cancelling my Royal Wedding party, no way, no how. At least it’s springtime.
So this is my full disclosure post, my “man, this kind of sucks” post, but once we’ve undergone the necessary period of uncertainty and anxiety, I have no doubt that he (and we) will be in a better place than before. And sometimes it’s nice to know that your worst problems are the ones you can still be sure have happened for a reason. We’re so lucky to have friends and family who support us as avidly as they do, and we’re also so lucky to have one another.
March 24, 2011
The original chronicler of motherhood
Lately I’ve been turning to Shirley Hughes’ Alfie books whenever I’m in need of parenting guidance. (I am also reading another book called Toddler Taming that recommends spanking and tying up children with rope, quite unabashedly, but then it was written in 1984 when that sort of thing was de rigueur. But actually, casual cruelty aside(!), it’s a great book. Just let me explain… Review to come.) I love Shirley Hughes, and I really love Alfie, and Harriet loves him too, so we’ve read his stories an awful lot.
And I don’t think the experience of parenthood has ever been better articulated in literature than with this one paragraph from Alfie Gets in First: “Mum put the brake on the push-chair and left Annie Rose at the bottom of the steps while she lifted the basket of shopping up to the top. Then she found the key and opened the front door. Alfie dashed in ahead of her. “I’ve won, I’ve won!” he shouted. Mum put the shopping down in the hall and went back down the steps to lift Annie Rose out of her push chair. But what do you think Alfie did then?”
This kind of tedious maneuvering is the story of my life, and if you’ve ever lived such a life, you understand that Mum has spent ages strategizing the perfect order in which to perform the tasks that will deliver her children and groceries into her house with maximum efficiency. I absolutely adore that recognition. Never mind Rachel Cusk as chronicler of motherhood, no, Shirley Hughes absolutely did it first.
I love her illustrations, and am fascinated by the interior of Alfie’s house. Harriet likes to comb the pictures for teapots, and I love to spot what else is cluttering the corners: discarded shoes, soccer balls, old ties, umbrellas, toy teacups, tennis rackets, folded strollers, and acorns.
Though Alfie’s mum, however rumpled, is a far better mum/mom than I am. Which I’m absolutely fine with, having chosen to take Alfie and Annie Rose’s dad as the parent upon which I model myself. He’s not around as much as Mum (and there I fall short. I never seem to go away), but when he is around, he’s usually behind a newspaper. I love that when in Alfie’s Feet, he takes Alfie to the park, he takes care to bring his book and his newspaper. A parent after my own heart, I think, and Alfie doesn’t seem any less content as he splashes through the puddles, his dad reading the paper on a park bench behind him.
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