October 18, 2022
Gleanings
- Who are we when we set out to challenge ourselves and what happens when we don’t understand or respect the land we’re on? What is the outcome worth, if it comes at a cost to others?
- That me taking care of and asking for, and going after what I need, is in turn, a gift that is given to you … and vice versa. Even, especially, if that need is time … space … for doing nothing.
- Old buildings attract me. Old doors and latches enchant me. Looking in and looking through unmasked windows satisfy my curiosity.
- What’s beautiful about this slither of Autumn is that the no matter how many leaves land on your doorstep, there are still just as many on the trees.
- He reminds me a lot of my dad. And my dad’s death. And my dad dying was part of why i knew i’d need to change my marriage, or leave it, and try and look for more than what I had. The sadnesses of this season are many. And I am getting better each year, and have been getting better for many years.
- I seem to revise a lot, which is fine — it’s one of the most useful, beautiful, and unpracticed parts of writing, in my opinion.
- Next weekend will be Thanksgiving, and three weeks from today the third anniversary of Doug’s first day in Long Term Care. In my dissertation I argued that “care homes for the elderly are transitional areas, home yet not home, often a last place to live before death.” The transitory, liminal nature of a care home. For the “elderly.” Ha. What did I know? (Yes, Ms Munro, who did I think I was, indeed?!)
- Unsurprisingly I quoted then the line that means a lot to me now. (It’s almost like we need to keep learning the same thing over and over 🙂 ). She says, “Wholeheartedness is a precious gift, but no one can actually give it to you. You have to find the path that has heart and then walk it impeccably.”
- As I shared each test result, treatment, and surgery–including my physical and emotional response–it’s like I felt obligated to add humor and lightness. I wonder a little about that. Was that for me or for my readers?
- What happened to the blog is that I got really into posting on Facebook during the pandemic.
- Sometimes, experiencing something familiar through fresh eyes is every bit as intriguing as a brand new experience. That was my goal for this walk through our splendid Carolinian Forest. Me? I’m usually looking down for wildflowers or up for birds. On all my forest hikes I’ve spent precious little time actually looking at the trees. But not this time.
October 17, 2022
Nine Dash Line, by Emily Saso
The most fascinating, original, well crafted novel I’ve read in a long time is Nine Dash Line, by Emily Saso, a novel whose premise—I will admit—didn’t grab me immediately, because it’s about a guy who’s stranded alone on an atoll in the South China sea, exiled by the Chinese communist government. All the things I tend to like best about novels are impossible in novels about people stranded in the middle of the sea—family drama, elaborate dinner scenes, bookshop settings, etc.—even if the guy on a atoll shares parallel chapters with a female US Navy officer who—for reasons as convoluted as the first character’s exile—has found herself marooned in an inflatable life boat, the sea around her rife with sharks and mines, about to wash up aboard a rusted out vessel belonging to the Philippines.
So how is this author going to pull this one off, you might ask?
To which I’ll reply with one single word: MASTERFULLY.
The book itself, it grabbed me at once, because oh my gosh, this is such a good one, built on the kind of premise that has to be pitch perfect to work at all, but it really is. By the end of the first chapter, I was absolutely hooked, riveted, Saso’s plotting and prose casting an incredible spell that held to the final page, resulting in such a strange and expansive novel, a story of geopolitics, about espionage, war, and ideology, and pain, and longing, and the necessity of living by one’s wits to survive impossible situations, about the impossible becoming possible, for better and for worse.
I’ve got no THIS BOOK MEETS THAT BOOK comparison here, because I’ve never read another quite like this one, a book so deftly imagined that I’m in awe of Saso’s talent, mind-blown by the creative skills required to even begin to imagine a book like this, let alone the technique required to execute it.
All I can tell you is that you’ve got to read it.
October 15, 2022
Two Spots Left!
I’ve got TWO MORE spaces for manuscript consultations in December before I close up shop to spend the next few months on on my own writing, so if you want to work together, this is your chance!
Here’s how it works: I charge $1000 CDN plus tax for fiction manuscripts 80,000 or less. I will receive your draft by December 1 and get back to you mid-month with a detailed letter outlining my responses and a draft of your ms with my annotations, and then we’ll have a one hour online meeting to talk about how great your book is and what its possibilities are.
My approach is big picture, plot and plausibility, character development, narrative style, and I’ve worked with everything from first drafts to manuscripts already contracted for publication. My job is to make you excited to tackle the challenges of your next draft, and to use what I’ve learned from my experience as an expert reader, book reviewer, anthology editor, and author of three novels to help you take your work to the next level.
I love this work SO MUCH, and that’s partly because of the confidence with which I can say I’m really good at it.
And I’d love to work with you! Email me to claim your spot.
October 14, 2022
Finding Edward, by Sheila Murray
After hearing great things about Sheila Murray’s novel Finding Edward, I finally picked it up last weekend to discover it lives up to the praise of critics like Donna Bailey Nurse (who’s written, “This beautiful necessary novel will become a touchstone.”)
And then this week, it was nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award!
Though it took a bit of time for all its pieces to come together for me, a book that starts off kind of quiet, which is fitting seeing as its protagonist, Cyril, is quiet, understated, someone you might not even notice if you passed him on the street.
Cyril, just 21, raised by his mother in Jamaica after his white English father leaves their family, is left alone after his mother dies, but he has an inheritance from a benefactor, his mother’s former employer, who’d encouraged him to pursue an education, and Cyril decides to finally take this advice and travels to Canada to enroll at then-Ryerson University (the novel is set in 2012), but being in Canada, and being Black in Canada, turns out to be far more complicated and fraught than he’d expected. His understanding of situation is deepened after he finds photographs and documents from the 1920s pertaining to a mixed race child called Edward, and begins archival research to determine Edward’s identity, thereby weaving in key (and under-celebrated) elements of Canadian Black history including Thornton Blackburn, who started Toronto’s first taxi company in the 1850s; Mary-Ann Shadd, the first Black newspaper publisher in Canada; the story of Nova Scotia’s Africville community; the experiences of Black railway porters (which is also portrayed in the Giller-nominated novel The Sleeping Car Porter, by Suzette Mayr); and more.
At the same time, Cyril’s violent encounters with police and precarious situation with work, housing, school and finances (he’s helping to support his two siblings back in Jamaica) are reflective how little has changed over the years, all this bringing him into contact with local Black activists who help him to imagine possibilities for a different kind of Black future.
Just a satisfying literary experience, plus a rich portrayal of Black experience in Toronto and beyond.
October 12, 2022
“Learning and Growing Through Our Entire Lives”: A Conversation with Ann Douglas
In 2013, when the anthology The M Word: Conversations About Motherhood was published, I was so thrilled to receive a blurb from parenting writer Ann Douglas, and so it felt like things had come full circle when I was able to provide an endorsement for her latest book, Navigating the Messy Middle, a book that marks a shift in Douglas’s own professional journey. “The best thing about Ann Douglas’s perspective, as always,” I wrote, “is her understanding that one-size-fits-all advice fits no one. Instead, in Navigating the Messy Middle, readers will discover an empowering guide to finding one’s own way through the ups and downs of midlife, a time when seeking strength in connection, embracing the changeability of the physical self, and focusing on one’s real values and priorities can create a powerful moment of (finally!) becoming.”
Thank you to Ann Douglas for agreeing to answer some of my questions about her book, which I enjoyed so much, and which you can pick up right now from your favourite bookseller.
What more can we ask of ourselves but that we remain open to the opportunity to learn and grow as humans, both individually and together?
Ann Douglas
Kerry: This book was born out of a midlife shift for you after years of writing about parenting. How did it feel to make this pivot (scary? exciting?), how did you decide on where to land, and in what ways did your experience tie into themes and ideas explored in the book?
Ann Douglas: I had been feeling, for the past couple of years, that I was aging out of the parenting books category. (It’s hard not to feel this way when your youngest child is 25!) Now don’t get me wrong. I will always care passionately about parents and kids, and I will continue to advocate on issues affecting them. But in terms of being immersed in the really hands-on years of parenting? I am well past that stage, and so it seems like the right time to pass the baton to the up-and-coming generation of parenting writers. And there are a lot of them doing really amazing work.
In terms of deciding what would come next for me as a writer and a person, that was more exciting than scary. I’ve always been the kind of person who has a million ideas for creative projects, so it was simply a matter of seizing the opportunity to write about something else. In terms of landing on which “something else” that might be, there was a bit of serendipity involved. I’d had a rollercoaster ride of a journey through midlife, so midlife growth development was very much top of mind for me. And then, out of the blue, I received an email from my literary agent, telling me that she was dying to talk to me because she knew what my next book needed to be about. She needed a book about midlife and she needed that book to be written by me! We started brainstorming the possibilities and developing a book proposal. That casual conversation (in September 2019) resulted in a book deal (in February 2020, right as we were heading into the pandemic).
I guess the common thread in terms of my career as an author is my life-long fascination with human development: how we continue to learn and grow throughout our entire lives. Midlife has been a deeply challenging time for me, but also an opportunity for tremendous learning and growth. In fact, I can honestly say that it has been my favourite life stage so far.
I guess the common thread in terms of my career as an author is my life-long fascination with human development: how we continue to learn and grow throughout our entire lives.
Ann Douglas
I wanted to capture that sense of possibility in this book, while also endeavouring to keep it real. Because no one wants to read a faux positive guide to anything in 2022—not after everything we’ve been through over the past two-and-a-half-years. That’s what I tried to do in this book: to be both “fiercely honest and wildly encouraging,” as the subtitle of Navigating The Messy Middle indicates.
Kerry: Fercely honest AND wildly encouraging? IN THIS ECONOMY, ANN??? How is that possible?
Ann: If there’s one thing I’ve figured out at this point in my life it’s that you don’t have to settle for a single emotion. It’s possible to feel anxious, hopeful, discouraged, grateful, and frustrated all at the same time. Heaven knows I feel all those things simultaneously myself—and I do so on a regular basis.
So honest and encouraging? It’s definitely possible to have both those things at the same time. In fact, I feel like I’ve been focused on those two experiences for my entire career as an author: trying to write with honesty while at the same time offering encouragement. (Over the years, countless readers have told me that they really trust me and I think that’s why: that blend of honesty and encouragement.)
If there’s one thing I’ve figured out at this point in my life it’s that you don’t have to settle for a single emotion. It’s possible to feel anxious, hopeful, discouraged, grateful, and frustrated all at the same time.
Ann Douglas
Kerry: As the shape of the book emerged, what parts surprised you the most?
Ann: This book ended up being much more political than the book I had intended to write—and that my book publisher had intended to acquire. As I note in the opening pages of my book, “My agent negotiated the deal for this book in February 2020, just as the pandemic was beginning to be felt here in North America. The days and months that followed ended up changing everything, including me. I found myself launched into an eighteen-month journey into rethinking pretty much everything about my life. And judging by the depth of the conversations I was having with other women, I know I’m not the only one who was profoundly affected by this multi-layered experience of pause—the pandemic pause layered on top of the self-reflective pause that is so characteristic of midlife.” So that was definitely the biggest surprise for me: the approach I ended up taking in writing about midlife—that mix of personal and political. I have to give my publisher a lot of credit, for allowing me to write the book that demanded to be written (as opposed to the one I had planned to write). So, kudos to Douglas & McIntyre.
Kerry: Almost every argument I have about anything these days (with myself or others!) comes back to the fact that the answer or reality lies not in anything definitive or black or white, but instead somewhere in a grey area in between. The middle, as your book shows on a variety of levels, is a magical place rich with wisdom and opportunity, but yes, it’s going to be messy. How do you try to reconcile that and be comfortable in that uncertain and variable space?
Ann: I feel like the pandemic has been a masterclass in learning to live with uncertainty. It’s become pretty clear that nothing is entirely predictable and that there’s no simple solution to anything right now. Life is messy. Life is complicated. And yet, as humans, we have brains that are capable of sorting through that that messiness in a way that allows us to spot patterns and land on solutions. Maybe not perfect solutions. (Is any solution ever perfect?) But the kinds of solutions that allows you to steer clear of endless second-guessing, and regrets. The kind where you can say to yourself, “I made the best decision I could with the information I had at the time—and I reserve the right to rethink this decision next week. Or maybe even tomorrow?” What more can we ask of ourselves but that we remain open to the opportunity to learn and grow as humans, both individually and together?
It’s become pretty clear that nothing is entirely predictable and that there’s no simple solution to anything right now. Life is messy. Life is complicated. And yet, as humans, we have brains that are capable of sorting through that that messiness in a way that allows us to spot patterns and land on solutions.
Ann Douglas
About Navigating the Messy Middle:
Roughly 68 million North American women currently grapple with the challenges of midlife, faced with a culture that tells them their “best-before date” has long passed. In Navigating the Messy Middle, Ann Douglas pushes back against this toxic narrative, providing a fierce and unapologetic book for and about midlife women.
In this deeply validating and encouraging book, Douglas interviews well over one hundred women of different backgrounds and identities, sharing their diverse conversations about the complex and intertwined issues that women must grapple with at midlife: from family responsibilities to career pivots, health concerns to building community. Readers will find a book that offers practical, evidence-based strategies for thriving at midlife, coupled with compelling first-person stories.
Offering purpose and meaning in a life stage that can otherwise feel out of control, Douglas pushes back against the message that women at midlife are no longer relevant and needed, highlighting the far-reaching economic, political and social impacts of these messages and providing a refreshing counter-narrative that maps out a path forward for women at midlife.
Both a midlife love letter and a lament, Navigating the Messy Middle both celebrates the beauty and rages at the many injustices of this life stage and provides readers with the tools to chart their own course.
October 12, 2022
Looks! Looks! It’s my books!
If you need me for the next month, I’m going to hard at work on the final round of revisions to my novel before it goes for copy editing (it comes out September 5 2023, which is less than a year away) but, in the meantime, how wonderful that my first two novels are still out there in the world, going places and being read! Thanks to everybody who’s reading and sharing.
October 6, 2022
Shrines of Gaiety, by Kate Atkinson
In Shrines of Gaiety, Kate Atkinson’s thirteenth book—which is truly an amalgam of her divergent literary preoccupations over the last twenty five years—there are secret exits, disorienting corridors, narrow staircases, and a bar that swings out of sight at the push of a button, and so too are there tricks in her prose, although they’re not cheap ones, and the prose itself is truly luminous (and also had me reaching for my dictionary several times—”testudinal”…who knew?).
Like all of Atkinson’s books, this one plays tricks with time—albeit less overtly than Life After Life, just say—the entire book taking place over the course of a few weeks, but its chronology including small jumps back in time to show readers what we think we already know from a different angle—and perhaps also suggesting that moving forward in time in 1926 was an uneasy prospect, the traumas of WW1 still unbearably present, no matter how nobody wanted to talk about it.
The novel opens with the release from prison of Nellie Coker, the notorious owner of several clubs in London’s Soho district, who’d been put away for a few months for her defiance of licensing laws. She’s the mother of two sons and a handful of daughters, plus the possessor of shady origins and dealings just as dodgy, which is why John Frobisher is on her tail, a police inspector relocated to the local precinct to look into corruption and possible alliances between Nellie and the force.
On top of that, women’s bodies keep turning up, and it’s two missing girls who’ve brought Gwendolen Kelling from York, a librarian who’s recently experienced her own change of fortune and who has volunteered to come to the city to seek her friend’s runaway half-sister and her companion, two young teens starry-eyed and looking for fame on the London stage and who are therefore ripe for exploitation…
It’s a seedy underbelly for a world that, on its surface, is so sparkling and fun, and it’s this juxtaposition that Atkinson explores, as well as the cheapness of that shiny veneer and what lies beneath it, which is trauma, addiction, violence, and longing. An exploration that feels quite resonant a century after the story is set—as well as ominous, because 1926 would be as good as it got for a very long time.
John Frobisher is no Jackson Brodie, and it becomes clear that Atkinson is not launching a detective fiction series here, the novel remarkably self-contained, all its ends tied up neatly—though perhaps with a bit too much fizzle after more than three hundred pages of sizzle. (So what, is the question I expect my favourite critic Rohan Maitzen will be asking, and I can’t wait to read her review, because I’m always just dazzled by Atkinson, while Maitzen holds her to the rigorous literary standard I think her work deserves…)
In the four days since I finished reading Shrines of Gaiety, however, the story has very much stayed on my mind, suggesting the novel is not mere frippery, but instead a work of literature that—like the best of Atkinson’s works—asks vital questions about the terrible sublimity of human experience and the real meaning of the stories we tell.
October 4, 2022
Gleanings
- We stopped at Pakan Church, beautiful in the grey light, and then continued back to Smoky Lake where our family was arriving to eat pierogies, visit the museum, watch a crane drop a giant pumpkin onto an old car, followed by a scrabble for seeds for next year’s garden.
- When it all is confusing and uncertain. When it’s murky and unclear. When the once clear why of every little thing becomes a challenge to see a why in anything. What does it look like to paddle to deeper darker depths instead of exhaustedly attempt to tread water towards the light?
- I really want to find my sense of humour again. It’s probably among my top three goals at the moment.
- When I began writing this blog post, I thought I would write about the attributes common to women with whom I feel a connection. I found that difficult to pin down. I reflected on Kasl’s words that we can only connect with people when we see them as distinct from us. I realized we share as many differences as we do similarities. You are not me, and I am not you.
- One thing that is very apparent is that there is a band wagon out there that a whole lot of people are jumping or climbing onto and it’s called ‘the ordinary.’ I’m pleased so many are also discovering the beauty and serenity in the ordinary.
- Stories are what is getting me through these unwell days. Disappearing into other times and places, especially when they are fairly gentle is just the tonic for me.
- This week, I find myself thinking about mothers and the stuff they leave behind. And how we decide what to save or toss. Like my mother before me, I’m not a big saver of things, but this silver and china and linens . . . I can’t let it go. But what will I do with it when it’s time for me to downsize?
- There is nothing quite so nice as a drive through the countryside. With my sunroof and windows open, the sights, sounds and smells aroused deep gratitude for this pretty fall day, and the beauty of the Essex paysage where there truly is good in everything.
- I could not help wanting more and more…of the experience, the food, the joie de vivre (okay that’s French).
October 3, 2022
Prismatic Thinking
I have a problem with proportion, with understanding proportion. I have a problem understanding just how big the world is and what words mean, and I have anxiety that causes me to leap to extremes, which I think is a more recent development, since everything became so extreme, but I’m not completely sure.
“The town is destroyed,” someone DM’d me last May after a tornado blew through a small town not far from where I live, and I still don’t know what they meant by that, exactly, and I thought about it again while obsessively following the news of hurricanes over the last week and a bit, clicking on headlines with words like “catastrophic” and “devastation”—see my previous point, I have anxiety—and trying to parse the scale.
Everyone I know who lives in places impacted by these storms came through them okay, relatively speaking, some with trees down, one lost a barn roof, another now on Day 9 without power, but still. Everyone I talked to remarked on how lucky they were, which is a human tic I’ve been picking up on since March 2020. Not on social media, where complaints run amok, of course, the common discourse, but in real conversations, these comments immediately followed by empathy for everyone who’d been less fortunate, and it’s patterns like that this make me despair a little less. That make me almost fond of people as a species.
But I still don’t understand what counts as catastrophe, what it means to be devastated, and I think a big part of this is a longing for everything to be okay, for me to find signs of that okayness, to look for the helpers, to quote a cloying phrase. Silver linings. There must be hope, and so there is, and there is, absolutely, because look how much was not destroyed, look at the persistent shoot taking root in a crack in the pavement. There is life, there is promise, but there also comes a point where this becomes denial of reality, a refusal to look upon how high are the stakes of climate change.
All these storms. And there have always been storms. And yet.
But I still don’t know.
I’m bothered by people who flippantly use terms like “the world’s on fire…” Partly because it scares me. I feel like that if the world’s on fire, than it’s not really the time for being glib. And partly because there have always been fires. (I’m doing it again, I know.) But mostly because the world is far too large for it ever to have been one thing, on fire, or otherwise, to be reduced to a single state, and this is what has been racking my brain about these last few months, or possibly forever. How to connect the infinitude all of these dots, this data, especially the parts that don’t connect at all.
I feel like the beginning of possibility for making sense of any of this might lie in the following passage, by Willow Defebaugh, Editor-in-Chief of climate/culture journal Atmos:
“I suppose that’s what it means to see the world through a prismatic lens. It requires us to embrace contradiction and multiplicity, to never be afraid of letting New perspectives read pattern our own. It’s about accepting that life is a kaleidoscope of every human imaginable, in shades of both light and dark, at once disarmingly fragmented and breathtakingly whole. And in those dazzling shards, we find our humanity reflected back at us—jagged, brilliant, and gleaming with possibility.” (Found here.)
September 29, 2022
Woman, Watching, by Merilyn Simonds
I LOVED this book! Louise de Kiriline Lawrence is the most fascinating woman I’d never heard of, born to Swedish aristocracy, goddaughter of the Queen of Denmark, trained as a Red Cross nurse in WW1, which is how she met her Russian husband, whom she followed into a post-revolutionary Soviet Union beset by civil war, and then he was eventually killed by the Bolsheviks, and in the aftermath of that loss, she emigrates to Canada to begin nursing in Northern Ontario, where she becomes the nurse to the Dionne Quintuplets during their first year of life…all this taking up just 64 pages in a book that runs for 300 more.
Because after those extraordinary formative experiences, according to Merilyn Simonds in biography Woman, Watching: Louise de Kiriline Lawrence and the Songbirds of Pimisi Bay, is where the real story begins, Lawrence buying a rural property where she builds a log cabin (without plumbing or electricity) and becoming one of the foremost ornithologists of her time, thanks to her own powers of observation and correspondence with other bird experts who informed her ideas. She’s able to note effects of habitat loss and other human interference before Rachel Carson became well known or celebrated, build support and information networks with other women birders, and write six books, many articles and magazine stories, and a foundational monograph on woodpeckers.
Born into affluence, Lawrence’s early years of hardship would have primed her to be resourceful and grateful for small pleasures, but even still, her strength and stoicism were remarkable—there is a part where she ventures into the bush to find moss with which to insulate her windows for her unheated cabin, and then she falls and dislocates her shoulder, but (as she reports cheerfully to her correspondent—she was also a prolific letter writer, fortunately for her biographer!) she was able to push the joint back into place AND ended up getting some of the best moss she’d ever gathered.
In some ways, this story of Lawrence’s cabin near North Bay reminded me of Virginia Lee Burton’s The Little House, with the city ever encroaching, growing closer. It’s also a story of the North American Conservation movement (some parts of this mapping beautifully with Michelle Nijhuis’s Beloved Beasts, another book I loved), of discrimination against women in science, of changes to science so that amateur observers have less to contribute, of the struggles in the career of a writer, and the perils of growing old, but most of all, it’s a story about birds, and what we might see if pay attention to the world around us, of the wonders and miracles of the natural world.
