January 9, 2023
Holiday Reads
Our holiday break started a day before it was supposed to, as a blizzard raged outside and cancelled school and I curled up with THEY CAME LIKE SWALLOWS, by William Maxwell, a novel set against the Spanish Flu Pandemic and made me wonder why the word “unprecedented” was used at all in March 2020, because it really wasn’t.
And I read and I read, books I’ve been picking up here and there over the last year and finally time away from work (and social media) gave me time to delve into them. Some new books, others authors I love whose backlists I still get to delight my way through (Sue Miller! Toni Morrison! Natalia Ginzburg!). Barbara Trapido, whose work I’m falling in love with. I read HAPPENING, by Annie Ernaux, 2022 Nobel Prize Winner. OMG, SONG OF SOLOMON! GIOVANNI’S ROOM! Connie Willis’s time travel epic (and I have its conclusion still before me).
What a satisfying stack this is, a stack that’s inspired me to read (even) more off the beaten track in 2023, to pursue my own curious avenues.
Also now my “to be read” shelf is as spare and orderly as it will be for at least another year, and so before the deluge of new releases begins, I want to take a moment and appreciate that.
December 22, 2022
A Box of Cloud
A year ago, a box arrived, a big box that was so light that it felt like we’d just had a cloud delivered to our doorstep, and at this point I was really suffering in a mental health crisis, and a cloud in a box felt like the gift of lightness. Even though we’d sent it to ourselves, eight big balls of wool because I’d determined that our family would spend the holiday break knitting scarves, such a calming and restorative occupation. And we did! And it was! By the new year we had four gorgeous scarves that attracted admiring comments from strangers when we wore them out and about (but not in a weird way). A great skill for our kids (and their dad!) to learn and we enjoyed the holiday knitting so much, we’re doing it again, this time to be donated to a shelter. I’m excited to get started. The wool was just delivered so it looks like the holidays are nearly here.
December 21, 2022
Gleanings
- Have you ever been to the theatre to watch a dance company perform a classical story ballet? If so, was your first, The Nutcracker? Mine was, at age three. My memory of that performance is understandably sketchy but I clearly remember being wowed. It was my first of many magical and fantastical ballet moments.
- *This post took me all day to write and I will never write in a coffee shop again**
- It felt like an adventure. It still does, here in the warmth of the fire, snow falling, remembering (and yes, wishing, wishing) the winter afternoon when friends knocked on the door, in snow, and came in bearing gifts.
- As the lyrics to this song go on to implore, “Pray for peace, people everywhere” and perhaps instead of waiting for ‘the Child’ to bring us “goodness and light” we could do what we can to bring goodness and light this year.
- Epiphany is actually an invitation for us to leave routine intentionally, because when we leave that structure that we are so comfortable in, we learn things about ourselves and about the world around us.
- My observation is, gone are the days of the shushing Librarian who lay in wait to collect a late fee. Contemporary libraries serve communities with programs to expand curiosity, kindness, and sharing.
- For hikers, there is a code to leave no trace behind. How does that translate to our everyday lives?
- I try and remind myself that social media has always been about the people we connect with there, but maybe it’s time to migrate our connections to better spaces yes?
- I am sure that if Davis were alive today he would be fighting alongside Ontarians against the current government’s anti-environment Bill 23 and Greenbelt land grab.
- Aries is a fire sign and to boot, I’m a double Aries, though I don’t know enough about astrology to explain what that means, but I do think it means I’m doubly fiery, which is both good and bad. Regardless, it requires some taming and being by a body of water does that for me.
- The truth is, I don’t know why I bother to write, but I listen and notice lately that I am writing myself somewhere unknown. And maybe it is there … there behind the intellect and the masks, the emotions and the knowledge, the will and the ego, comparisons or cares of what others think, past the external motivations and desires or bigger projects and clear pathways… maybe it is there, as I unclench my jaw, relax my belly, undo the button and let it hang loose, empty … I might find or hear … or glimpse…or write or dance my way towards something … somewhere … nearer to soul.
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December 19, 2022
Awesome
Once they started coming for positivity, I got defensive. *Who are you calling “toxic”?* I thought. Looking on the bright side, for me, is like a reflex. It’s how I make it through, and while I think all of us learned something from conversations around positive thinking (guys, don’t tell a person with terminal cancer, “You got this”) “toxic positivity” became one of those internet ideas thoroughly drained of its meaning, lugubrious people using it justify their worst impulses in a world that seemed more doom-laden than ever, and I was having none of it. That light at the end of the tunnel was my lodestar and, without it, I’d be a heap on the floor.
And then the light went out, and I lost my way, robbed of tool that had always served me to keep going, one day at a time, and it was at this point that I learned two things about my relationship to positivity. One, that I suffer from anxiety, and so what might look like toxic positivity from the outside is actually me recalibrating from the fact that I was convinced we were all going to die and then we didn’t and oh my god how amazing is that. And two, that while finally learning to feel sad hard and difficult feelings is my path away from anxiety, positivity has a role to play too on this awfully bumpy journey. In March I was really struggling, and actually started a gratitude journal, walking cliche that I’m becoming, and oh my gosh, it’s been a wonderful tool. Along with therapy, and reading, and learning how to dig down deep into painful emotions I’d been avoiding my whole life, and learn how to really feel them. As with all things, it’s not one or the other, but both. The pleasure and the pain, the darkness and the light.
And to that end, Our Book of Awesome, Neil Pasricha’s first “Awesome” book in a decade, has made for a most enjoyable year-end read. Pasricha’s career as a bestselling author began years ago at a remarkably low point from which he started climbing out of the darkness one awesome idea at a time, illuminating miraculous aspects of ordinary life (warm clothes out of the dryer!), which he’d post on a blog that became a book…and here we are. This latest collection includes Pasricha’s own mini-essays, as well as contributions from members of his online community, teachers who’d used the book in their classrooms, and more.
Seeing someone in an online meeting smile as they read the direct message you’ve just sent them in the chat. When a human answers the phone. Actual newspapers. Good hand sanitizer. Library holds. “When the cake pops flawlessly out of the pan.”
Yup. It’s awesome.
December 14, 2022
Gleanings
- I don’t want a neat ending. I don’t even really care about plot. What matters most to me is latching onto a voice that fascinates and challenges me. I’m still unraveling how this works and finding a way to describe it when I see it.
- Yes, I’ve felt unsettled. No amount of advance preparation or knowledge or planning could shift what came at me, poured through me, but as the year progressed, I got more comfortable with that. Comfortable with being unsettled. Or, perhaps more accurately, comfortable exploring the sensation.
- When will I ever learn to relax and leave it to the wind shifts and Angels?
- The other day I put on a coat I hadn’t worn in several months, put my hand in the pocket, and pulled out a scrunched up poop bag.
- Every year we are very warmly invited, indeed encouraged, to spend Christmas Day with friends. ‘Though generous and sweet, and ‘though we are very grateful for the offer and to have such thoughtful friends, we find it is not a day we want to spend in the midst of another family, much preferring our own wee celebration. And so it is.
- For a while, all of that worked, until it stopped working. When I took a year off writing novels, I took a year off from all of that as well. And that’s when things started moving forward, with barely any effort from me.
- And once we arrive at ‘the truth of life’, after decade upon decade of life events that bruise us and elevate us, crush us and uplift us, scar us and teach us, what do we do? We hide our glory. We conceal who we have become and what we’ve gained along the way. Because flaunting is for the young. Because who will want to know? Who will be interested in our stories? Who will say, “I am listening”?
- What is it I want? I want everything. I want to know the long line of my family going back centuries, I want to know their houses, their gardens, their sorrows, their hopes, the names of each and every one of them. I want to know about the feuds and the weddings.
- I think Bewilderment is, in part, about the limits of explanations, which are not, after all, instructions. What lies beyond them, as deep and vast and mysterious as space, is love.
December 12, 2022
2022: Books of the Year
A Convergence of Solitudes, by Anita Anand
Shrines of Gaiety, by Kate Atkinson
Cambium Blue, by Maureen Brownlee
What Storm, What Thunder, by Myriam J.A. Chancy
Marrying the Ketchups, by Jennifer Close
Susanna Hall: Her Book, by Jennifer Falkner
10 Days That Shaped Modern Canada, Aaron W. Hughes
The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, by Eva Jurczyk
Looking for Jane, by Heather Marshall
The Hero of This Book, by Elizabeth McCracken
Finding Edward, by Sheila Murray
Woman, Watching, by Merilyn Simonds
Francie’s Got a Gun, by Carrie Snyder
The School of Mirrors, by Eva Stachniak
This Time Tomorrow, by Emma Straub
Ezra’s Ghosts, by Darcy Tamayose
The Long Road Home: On Blackness and Belonging, by Debra Thompson
The Elephant on Karluv Bridge, by Thomas Trofimuk
Ordinary Wonder Tales, by Emily Urquhart
December 9, 2022
Reason to Believe
“I still love this song, but I no longer live in it,” is something I texted my friend Marissa this morning about the Counting Crows song “A Long December,” usually on constant rotation for me around this time of year. But last night I’d realized I’d made it eight days into December without listening to it once, and it occurred to me even that this is the first December in a very long time in which I’ve not been desperate to believe that “maybe this year will be better than the last.” That I’m not listening to those lyrics with the same sense of abject sense of loss and longing that characterizes every Counting Crows song, but this one in particular. And the feeling that it’s all a lot of oysters, but no pearls
I’ve written before about how my mental health was at a breaking point a year ago, and I entered 2022 resolving to do things differently, to learn to be okay even when things weren’t okay, which was a perfect resolution for 2022, really, a year of a lot of not-okayness. And I’m not saying I’ve managed it with aplomb—the first six months of this year were really hard for me and I struggled a lot, and still do here and there—but I certainly have learned a thing or two about how to manage this, how to be okay in the midst of uncertainty, how to keep myself steady when the world’s falling apart, when “the winter makes you laugh a little slower/ Makes you talk a little lower about the things you could not show her.”
What I have learned is that value judgements such as “worse” or “better” are ideas, and that reality is reality no matter how you frame it, and that leaning in closer to that reality and how it makes me feel instead of my ideas about it—what’s good and bad, worse or better—is how to live more fully and with less anxiety. That a year is a year, and also a year is a lot of things running a spectrum from wondrous to horrible, and this one—while far from easy—has been better than the last mostly because I’m finally figuring all this out.
The reason I thought about “A Long December” last night was because Christa Couture re-shared a link to her New Year’s song “To Us” last night, a song that started off my new year, and whose message was what I needed instead of Adam Duritz’s maudlin tones:
No I’m not one to tell you, hon, “we’re in the clear”
Of course we might be, but here’s the rub:
Probably not this year
So happy new year to resentment, to enjoyment, disappointment
To all the best laid plans we won’t pull off
Happy new year to the weary, to fury, and recovery
To that which doesn’t kill us that makes us soft…
December 8, 2022
Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, by Kate Beaton
In October I went to see Kate Beaton present her graphic memoir Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the force of that presentation kind of made the book itself beside the point, hence the reason I’m posting about it two months later, but it’s still on my mind.
Before Kate Beaton made a name for herself drawing ridiculously clever comics inspired by classic literature and history, she was an arts grad from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, with student loans to pay off and little opportunity for lucrative employment, and certainly not anywhere near her home, from which people have been leaving to find work since even before the coal mining industry went bust. In her AGO presentation (the most riveting, hilarious, generous, and vulnerable author talk I’ve ever been to, complete with music and singing), Beaton talked about her grandfather travelling to the prairies to find work as a farmhand, decades before her own journey west. She talked about what it does to a place to be robbed of its people and connections, and what it does to a self to belong to a place where you’re taught that a future isn’t possible.
In the early 2000s, Beaton moved to Alberta for well-paid work in the oil sands, and it was a strange and lonely existence rife with contradictions, which she captures beautifully in Ducks. Lonely and never alone, out of place but surrounded by people she recognizes as like those from home, earning money but nothing to spend it on, small in an immense awe-inspiring landscape being desecrated by industry.
Beaton’s drawings are composed in shades of grey, which is fitting for a story with such nuance. While Beaton doesn’t shy away from showing the reality of such a peculiar social environment, that women suffer in places like this, she also shows that the suffering isn’t limited, and that people being forced to travel far from home for work that is soul-destroying, not to mention ecologically devastating, are suffering too, and the real culprit is capitalism, a system that devalues people and communities, a system that pushes people to the point of breaking.
Beaton’s dream is to work in museums, putting her degree to good use, and she gets her break after a year in the oil sands, which she leaves for a part time position at a marine museum in Victoria…which turns out to barely be enough to live on, let alone pay off her loans, and so Beaton returns for another year in the Oil Sands, but here she begins publishing her comics on her Livejournal, pieces that would become Hark A Vagrant, from which Beaton would make her name, become a bestselling author, and (that rarest of things) an artist able to earn a living from her work. After a stint as a New York art sensation, Beaton once again lives in Cape Breton.
A happy ending then, but Kate Beaton is truly one in a million, and in the years since her time in the oil sands, she hasn’t forgotten what she saw, and what she learned. About humanity in the midst of inhumanity, and the worthiness of ordinary people to live good lives in the places where they come from. It’s not black and white, and that’s why Ducks is worth reading.
December 7, 2022
Gleanings
- As far as traditions go, chopping down a tree and planting it between the chesterfield and the tele for a month is pretty bizarre. But no one can dispute the delight a tree festooned with lights brings to a home and those who live in it
- I think it’s wise to check in from time to time with those stories we’re telling ourselves, about who we are.
- Considering myself one who’s typically up for an adventure, I’m always surprised how I long for familiarity. I’m still opening 3 drawers to find my hairbrush. I’m aware of the living room clock ticking and the buzz of the lights. I was cautious about setting off for a walk alone this morning for fear I might never find my way back.
- I was, and remain, furious at the caprice of memory. Someone mentioned to me recently being sorry they didn’t ask their parents more questions before they died and that’s the thing: I DID ask my dad all the questions I could think of. But you just can’t elicit interesting stories by demanding them–you have to know specifically that there was a ragman to ask if he had a horse, and to know that there was a horse to ask if anyone ever got to ride it.
- She says that if you think “I get you” often enough, you will feel the vulnerability of the other person and your judgement will shift to compassion.
- And so, to live a month in utter happiness, contentedness, joy: I can tell you that it rewired my brain, reset my soul. Obviously, I want to keep those good vibes going. How? So that will be my ongoing quest.
- Alissa achieves greatness (and very nearly the Nobel Prize). What does Roland have to show for his life, in his old age? A small hand in his, to lead him across the room. It’s an unexpectedly sentimental ending, from McEwan, another way in which this novel surprised me, but also pleased me. Maybe in his old age, he has tired of acerbity and cynicism, of twists that make us cringe or that shake our faith in each other and in the stories we tell.
- No heroism, no dramatic sopranos, no red capes. Just people being nice.
- There is a link here – but I’m aware I’m asking you, dear reader, to fill in some blanks*. Memories. Witnessing. Loss.
- I hope my work shines a bit of light in dark places and I hope it offers some inspiration and some joy, and I hope it’s always grounded in a bit of reality. Here’s to making a bit of magic where and when we’re able. Here’s to opting out of the traditions that don’t suit us. There are no supermoms here (or anywhere).
