September 27, 2022

Gleanings

• On a hot August morning in 2008, I titled the blog on a whim, and began sending out posts to the universe.
• An optimist at heart, I loathe to be maudlin, but realistically, even if I live to be 102 years-old like my Grandma Princess, I am well over half way there.
• Instead, and for many happy years now, I’ve been striving to enjoy every moment exactly as it is: The chores—cooking, cleaning, laundry and gardening. And the activities—watching the Jays, hiking, paddling, swimming, cycling, and, of course, photography. Living each moment as it arises, unadorned or improved, has given me a much fuller feeling of contentment.
• It’s also a bit like this blog post: I’m just trying to make the excellent link between still life and poetry. But I think it’s there without me nattering on about it. Or maybe it’s something I need to write more about, longer, elsewhere. And probably will.
• Fast forward several years, and I have still never hosted a holiday dinner. The china only gets used twice a year, on my daughter’s birthdays, when I serve boxed macaroni and hot dog coins off of it. Instead, it is the place we eat super together every night, often shoving aside an avalanche of paper or Lego to make room for our plates.
• A commitment to be with the sunset every day of this, my 37th year.
• In that intoxicating conversational flow from book to book, from book experience to book experience, from insight to insight, here are some of the flashes that glinted off the waves.
• Bring in the sheets, soft yellow (your favourites), bring in the towels, fold them, the scent of sunlight and early fall air (on the mountain trail the other day, you both noticed the change), bring in your bathing suit for this afternoon’s swim, pack it damp for a road trip tomorrow, when you will drive up Highway 5A, stopping at Nicola Lake to enter its cold familiar waters, stopping by the pine as you return to your towel, crushing its familiar needles in your hand.
• I’m experiencing a lot of thrill lately, and I just wanted you to know. There is a beautifully flowering tropical tree INSIDE MY HOUSE.
• Once, maybe as recently as pre-Covid, I would have referred to those as “simple joys.” This summer they were everything. 
• It seems many of us recognize autumn as our favourite season, and the reason is partly attributed to nostalgia. Nostalgia is typically derived from positive past experiences, and at 64, I have a lifetime of memories – no wonder I feel nostalgic!

September 26, 2022

Return Stroke, by Dora Dueck

In 2019, I founded a pretty sweet boutique bookselling operation called BRINY BOOKS, and Dora Dueck’s most recent novel, ALL THAT BELONGS, was part of our second lineup of titles, a novel I loved, just as I’d loved her previous book, the story collection WHAT YOU GET AT HOME, and I’ve also enjoyed her nonfiction over the years, at her blog and in literary journals, and so I’ve been looking forward to her most recent release, RETURN STROKE: ESSAYS AND MEMOIR, published by Canadian Mennonite University Press, and it’s everything I was hoping it would be. Dueck reflecting back from her 70s on her girlhood growing up in Alberta, her marriage and years of intensive motherhood, which included a stint living in her husband’s native Paraguay, and all the wonder and culture shock that experience entailed, and then her own evolving thinking about feminism, and faith, and her relationship to her church after her daughter comes out as queer, and she writes about getting older, the lightness of aging, and the heaviness too in an essay about the final days before her husband’s death, a gorgeous evocation. This is a book that brought me to tears more than once or twice.

What I love so much about Dueck’s writing and her thinking is that nothing is fixed, and she is eternally curious, taking notes and learning, about the past and the presence, much of her work concerned with memory and history, but in such a vital, living way, not as an affirmation but a process of discovery. The first half of the book is a series of essays, and the second (roughly the same length) is a work of memoir about her time in Paraguay in the early 1980s, and she writes about the revelation, as she returns to the letters and diaries that are her primary sources, “I’d been thirty-two…, which was, I suddenly noted, the current age of our youngest child, and that child seemed—well, young!” An entire page about how relative are the ideas of old and young—which was a mirror image to the revelations of Emma Straub’s protagonist in her latest novel This Time Tomorrow—and then this beautiful paragraph:

“That I was young is the truth, and yet, in the memoir-writing-effort of existing out of time, my youthfulness at thirties-young seemed an invention. And having coaxed this fiction/truth into text, I found myself suddenly standing next to my thirty-something children and in the flashes—swift and jaggedly stunning as lightning strokes—of knowing myself then and my children now, we seemed to meet as age-equals. As if we’d bumped into each other on some magnificent high bridge. The meeting amazed me, made me dizzy too. I was proud of these children, of who they were at the moment, and it pleased me more than I can express that the Me of the Chaco could, in this moment of meeting, be compared to them.”

Though I’m pretty sure the pleasure is entirely mutual, seeing what a privilege and a most illuminating delight it is to bump into Dueck in these pages.

September 23, 2022

My Hilary Mantel

I arrived at Hilary Mantel during what turned out to be the most impressionable and formative parts of my reading life (so far!), during the years after my undergraduate degree when I was living abroad, first in England and then in Japan where my favourite occupation was buying Penguin paperbacks from Wantage Books in Kobe. This was the period where I first started reading favourites like Margaret Drabble, and Joan Didion, and yes, Hilary Mantel, whose own expatriate novels, EIGHT MONTHS ON GHAZZAH STREET and A CHANGE OF CLIMATE inspired the novel I’d write for my Masters thesis a few years later. It was her dark comic novels I loved best though, EVERY DAY IS MOTHER’S DAY and it’s sequel VACANT POSSESSION are horrifying and hilarious (and based on Mantel’s experience as a social worker; I’d also worked for social services while I lived in England and deeply recognized the disturbing realism in these works). You will notice I don’t have her historical works on my shelf—I read WOLF HALL, but (forgive me!) it just didn’t do it for me, which was FINE, because it certainly had enough other readers to go around. I think what I love about Mantel is how wide ranging were her passions and preoccupations over the years, which means there’s a Mantel shelf for every kind of reader and I am so grateful this is mine.

September 20, 2022

Gleanings

• And here’s the sticking point, at least for me: While I did hold the late Queen in high regard, and felt sincere affection for her as an individual, I also have profound ethical misgivings about the system of government she represented, namely an inherited constitutional monarchy that is rooted in a legacy of profoundly corrosive inequity. Many of its conventions are, to my mind, risible and frankly indefensible.
• Due to a lack of “going out,” we haven’t cleared out and reorganized the front coat closet in a few years. This is going to require music. And wine, maybe.
• Nope. I’ve had enough. It’s partly a me thing – the amount and intensity of therapy I’ve had over the last few years has helped me accept and understand things about myself and the end result is…I’m too awesome to deal with your bullshit.
• Oh Adi, how I wish I could just give you the danged blue horse. Somehow make it all okay. But the truth is that it wouldn’t help. Wouldn’t teach. Wouldn’t prepare you for all the inescapable blue horses to come.
• For them (and for us all) each fresh start offers new lessons, new discoveries and new experiences. Children have an unfettered joy in the new and unfamiliar and can quickly make a game out of anything thrown at them. They love to explore and are constantly and easily amazed at their findings.  That’s the spirit I’m trying to foster within myself and for myself.
• What I’ve found uplifting is that libraries persist.
• Blogging can be a vulnerable thing (as is any form of writing and expressing yourself), in that you allow others a glimpse into your interior life. And that interior may be messy and chaotic, sometimes unpredictable, sometimes rich and meandering. You are allowing others to form opinions and judgements on that interior life. Writing is a solitary pursuit. But once you launch your words into the yonder, not knowing where they may land, you expose yourself. You throw out thoughts and words, reach out a hand, inviting people to simply read, or read and engage, not knowing what may return to you.
• I don’t know how to write poetry, but I do know how to stop and notice all of the ordinary moments in a day. And this in itself has become my poetry. For I no longer wish or live for what’s next, but find myself fully grounded in the now, and this too, I pause to notice.
• In terms of books that made a mark, The Westing Game is one of the most perfect novels I know.
• I am trying—to read, to write, to be—but it’s hard and uncomfortable and often I would rather not. Turning away is easier.
• I’ve been swimming daily since the middle of May and I don’t want to let the lake go, my relationship to it, with it. The way it’s held me buoyant for months, even when I didn’t feel particularly light.
• Maybe the greatest lesson of all is that I have no control, and any illusion that I do is what lands me in the hole to begin with.
• I know it’s hyperbole but when Cardi B. says “I gotta stay outta Gucci/I’m going to run outta hangers” I always think well you can BUY MORE HANGERS.

September 19, 2022

One More Time

For the second year in a row, we went camping in September, the kids taking a day off school before they’re even just two weeks in, just to prove to ourselves that we can, that we’re not fixed in place, that summer doesn’t end with Labour Day, or that it’s even the only season in which freedom is possible. Cozy in warm pants and sweaters, the campfire necessary because it’s cold, and dark by 8pm, so we sit around it, attuned to something primal, the rest of the world gone, and it’s only us, which is also everything.

September 13, 2022

Big Flex

September is a new season, a new year, in many ways (and this September marks three years since I started Blog School!). For me, it’s always been a time for reflection and renewal, especially having come off such a restorative, restful summer with the goal of bringing that some of that softness with me as I go back to the “grind.” (I also would like to aim to not ground down to dust, less grind in my grind, please!)

“I think this fall,” I said to my husband, “I would like to have a kind of structure for my days, but one where you can move things around, everything not rigidly fixed in place.”

“You mean, like a calendar,” he said patiently.

“OMG, yes!” (Or maybe I finally need a bullet journal after all?)

But what I’m really saying is that I want a framework with a bit of slack, where my days have different shapes and things can be moved around to accommodate whatever else might be going on. My tendency is to be so unyielding in my approach to my days, partly because you have to be protective when you are self-employed and work from home, because everybody always things you’re just sitting around waiting to have coffee all the time, and also because I’m worried that if I’m not disciplined, the whole structure will fall apart.

But the thing is that sometimes I actually do want to go and have coffee, and also that often I actually can!

And I know that for some people, none of this is complicated, and also that adaptable calendars might not even be a revelation, but it’s too easy for me to become inflexible in my approach to my schedule, to do the same thing every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc, for one to be this day, and one to be another. I keep envisioning a structure that’s less a grid than a hammock, one of those knotted ones that are full of holes, but not so large that everything just falls through. Just that there’s give, and it’s easy, it stretches wide and low when it has to.

Is this the beginning of me FINALLY becoming laid back?

Don’t bet on it.

But maybe I can be me with more room to breathe.

September 13, 2022

The Long Road Home: On Blackness and Belonging, by Debra Thompson

Debra Thompson’s The Long Road Home: On Blackness and Belonging is an excellent and bracing work of memoir and social science, providing a Canadian lens on topics explored in the works of Isabel Wilkerson and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Thompson writes about being a Black Canadian and her relationship to America, the land from which her once enslaved ancestors had escaped for Canada, which makes it a curious kind of homeland. And then about what kind of “escape” Canada offered after all, Canada’s own legacy of enslavement and racism seemingly muted in contrast to its southern neighbours, but that legacy lives. Growing up in Oshawa, ON, during the 1980s, Thompson was so often the only Black person, “[which] didn’t make me feel particularly unique or successful or special. It made me think that there was something inherently wrong with Black people and that I had to fight against it every day to defy what the fates had in store for us.”

After completing her doctorate (with experiences in academia rife with anti-Black racism), Thompson arrives at Harvard on a post-doctoral fellowship in 2010, just as the hopefulness of America’s first Black president was beginning to crest, and the story of her decade to follow traces a powerful trajectory in American history and politics, particularly in regards to race. She writes of her own ambivalence towards notions of American democracy, an ideal that has forever failed to live up to its potential and was imagined for the white men who have long been its beneficiaries, a process in which “African Americans are perpetual losers.” Her connection to American is further complicated as she moves on to teach in a town in rural Ohio, then in Chicago, and finally Oregon, as American moves from Obama to the election of Donald Trump, and then the “reckoning” of Black Lives Matter throughout the entire decade and public demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. (She wonders if racial justice, for many white liberals, wasn’t just another Covid hobby to cut through the boredom, up there with Tiger King and sourdough.)

n 2020, Thompson moves—with her American partner and their children—back to Canada, to Montreal, which offers a whole additional layer of complexity to her lens, as she takes on notions of Blackness in the very specific context of Quebec. And throughout all of this she’s mindful of her place on Indigenous lands, with teachings by Indigenous scholars such as Eve Tuck and Leanne Betasamoske Simpson underlining her approaches to political science and being a human in the world.
The Long Road Home is a sparkling and engaging work, and also a demanding one, for white readers. Not that it’s difficult to read (see previous sentence on “sparkling and engaging”; I read it in two days) but that it’s literally demanding something of us, white readers—our discomfort, our willingness to see the white supremacy inherent in our systems, to wake up to the realities of racial injustice and begin to imagine a better, fairer world.

September 9, 2022

Blue Portugal, by Theresa Kishkan

To those of us who’ve been following Theresa Kishkan on her blog for many years, the preoccupations of her latest book, the collection Blue Portugal & Other Essays, will be familiar, the quilts, the homesteads, the memories, the blue. But it’s the stunning craftsmanship of the book, the fascinating threads that weave the pieces together and also recur throughout the text, that make this book such a pleasure to discover. How quilting squares are analogous to the rectangles from which, one by one, Kishkan and her husband literally constructed their home on BC’s Sechelt Peninsula, and the blueprints, and the blues of dye, and of veins, and of rivers, and of how one thing turns into another—how? How does a body get old? How do children grow? How does a family tree sprout so many new branches? And from where did it all begin, Kishkan going back to seek her parents’ nebulous roots in the Czech Republic and Ukraine, in a 1917 map of lots in Drumheller, AB, in everything that was lost in the Spanish Flu, and how we’re connected to everything our ancestors lived through.

Kishkan, as she tells us in her preface, came to writing via poetry, which she put aside when her children arrived, and when she picked up her pen again, she wasn’t a poet any longer: “I had the impulse to write, I had ideas to explore, material accumulating in my mind as my quilting basket accumulated scraps of cotton, but I didn’t have a shape for my thinking any longer. The lines I wrote continued past the point where a poet would consider the stanza, the lyric, complete. At first I tried to wrangle them, contain them, but one day I just let those lines continue, as prose maintaining a certain rhythm but given the freedom of the wide space on a page, One line led to another, then another. Their purpose was not to create fiction but instead to make a map of my own reflections, main roads and secondary roads, river systems, mountains, an beautiful circled stars for settlements. One line led to another, a threads leading me into the heart of meaning I hoped would be there, a little knot at the centre.”

And the meaning is there, but the poetry is too, still, (but not still!), this book a heartful, artful offering.

September 7, 2022

Pop This: Obvious Child

Guess what, there was one last place on earth where I hadn’t yet talked about abortion, and that’s the awesome Pop This Podcast with Andrea Warner and Andrea Gin, who had me on a few weeks ago to talk about OBVIOUS CHILD, the Jenny Slate “abortion rom-com” I saw in the cinema in 2014, where a post-Roe America was unfathomable. I rewatched it this month in the company of my 13yo, which was such a great experience. If there had been films like this when I was a teen, I likely would have spent less time saying things like, “I’m totally pro-choice, but that’s not a decision I’d ever make myself.” (Ha ha!) Since we recorded the episode, I’ve also been thinking about what a good job this movie does showing the messy reality of human bodies, bodies that fart, pee, (and even pee-fart), poop, leak, and get pregnant unintentionally. And abortion is just as ordinary as all the rest of that, as OBVIOUS CHILD shows, and I love that.

You can listen here!

September 2, 2022

All of This, by Rebecca Woolf

Rebecca Woolf (formerly of Girls Gone Child) is the only blogger on the planet whose sponsored posts I could actually stomach.

She once wrote a post sponsored by an almond company, and I still remember it.

So it’s not exactly shocking that her beautiful, gutting, raw, and awesome memoir, All of This, has proved to be unputdownable, a brave and visceral story of marriage, death, and widowhood from someone who has made a career out of making the unvarnished truth shine.

As a long-time reader of Woolf’s blog and instagram, I was wholly invested in her family life, in her marriage, and the story of her husband’s painful death from pancreatic cancer. And because part of that investment involved my admiration of her ability to hold two truths at once—that, say, her own decision to proceed with an accidental pregnancy at age 23, and her staunchly pro-abortion feminist politics are not incongruous—that the story of her family life, marriage and Hal’s death turned out to be far more complicated and tumultuous than it appeared from the outside only seems to be only adding texture to the story we’d been reading all along.

I remember the rats in the walls. I remember her commitment to telling the story until it came true. I know how hard she tried.

And I’m awed by her capacity for truth telling, and growth, and learning in public.

What does it mean when your husband dies and you feel relief? To be a widow who wants to fuck? To be a mother of four children who’ve just lost their father, and also a mother to one’s own self, one’s own soul? Beginnings and ends all at once. Everything is a circle.

Extraordinary writing, candour, courage and generosity is on display in this beautiful memoir, and also so much raw and bloody love.