June 16, 2022

No Second Chances: Women and Political Power in Canada, by Kate Graham

“Democracy is, I would say, so important in our collective lives, in our states, that you never question it even if goes against what you believe.” —Pauline Marois

If politics is messy, actually governing is even worse, the challenge arriving with realities and demands that most of us observing from the sidelines barely understand. And being a woman in government, as Kate Graham shows in her book No Second Chances, based on her 2020 podcast of the same name, makes the challenge even harder. As noted by Kim Campbell, Canada’s first and only female Prime Minister, “When you are not prototypical—when you are not like the others who have the done the job—it becomes very difficult for people to overcome their visceral sense that something is not quite right, so you never get the benefit for the doubt…”

In Canada—even where there was a moment a few years back where half of our First Ministers were women and it seemed like something like equality had finally been attained—not a single female First Ministers has never been re-elected.

Throughout the interviews in this book, Graham teases out a handful of reasons why this might be the case, and none of are that women are necessarily inferior at political leadership. The interviews take place with women across a wide range of the political spectrum too, whose experiences turn out to have far more in common than one might suppose.

These interviews are as fascinating and insightful as they are infuriating, which is sure saying something! Confirming a lot of what I’d already supposed, about how women are often given opportunities for leadership when everything’s about to collapse, about how they don’t receive the same benefit of the doubt as their male colleagues (and even from their male colleagues), about how the media still doesn’t know how to talk about women in leadership in constructive ways, and more.

The most surprising takeaway though, though it’s not explicit in the text, is that so many of us are also responsible for the problem. I think about how I know so many women in these interviews from hearing friends in other provinces express their grievances—Alison Redford, Kathy Dunderdale, Christy Clark, and even Rachel Notley (whose leadership in Alberta would bring with it compromise). I thought about the vitriol directed toward Kathleen Wynne in Ontario, like nothing I’ve ever witnessed before. There is just something visceral in the way these figures are disliked that doesn’t happen with men in similar situations. And while one exception to the rule might be Jason Kenney, I feel like this proves the point—he’s about seventeen times as terrible as any of the women I’ve just mentioned, and only now have things gone wrong for him.

I’m tired of blaming the problems of politics ONLY on the other guys, an idea I wrote about last fall, because this suggests that there’s nothing I can do personally to ameliorate the situation, and also because it just isn’t true. Across the board, I think we tend to have unrealistic expectations for what our governments can deliver—and parties/candidates don’t help the matter by drumming up simple messaging in campaign-mode belying the true complexity of solutions our current challenges require. The truth of the matter is that all this is hard, compromise is necessary, and that we all need each other—and faith in each other—for democracy to function.

June 15, 2022

Suddenly Barbara let out a cry, her umbrella was no longer on her arm.

“…Suddenly Barbara let out a cry, her umbrella was no longer on her arm. She distinctly remembered starting out with it, from the apartment, and she was fairly certain she had felt the weight of the umbrella on her arm as she stepped out of the taxi. She could not remember for sure but she thought she had laid it down in the china shop, in order to examine a piece of porcelain.

They left the steps of the Madeline, crossed through the traffic to the shop, and went in, The clerk Barbara spoke to was the not the one Harold had wanted her to ask. No umbrella had been found; also the clerk was not interested in lost umbrellas. As they left the shop, he said: “Don’t worry about it, You can buy another umbrella.”

“Not like this one,” she said The umbrella was for travelling, folded compactly into a third the usual length, and could be tucked away in a suitcase. “If only we’d gone to the Rodin Museum this afternoon, as we were intending to,” she said, “I’d never have lost it there.”

“He went back to the Madeleine and waited another quarter of an hour while she walked the length of the rue Royale, looking mournfully in shop windows and trying to remember a place, a moment, when she had put her umbrella down, meaning to pick it up right away….”

—William Maxwell, The Chateau

June 14, 2022

Gleanings

• To bring a child into this world has always been an act of hope. The past was its own parade of horrors. The best estimates we have suggest that across most of human history, 27 percent of infants didn’t survive their first year and 47 percent of people died before puberty. And life was hard, even if you were lucky enough to live it.
• When I write about Woolf myself, I feel the same anxieties Queyras expresses in their book, about taking Woolf as a subject and about adding to what’s already been written about her. It’s hard not to feel both inadequate and superfluous.
• Some times there are moments when everything hard falls away. You forget you’re tired because the sunlight falls just so across the table you’re sitting at
• the summer pushes me right out of my wrappings and out into the light. I hate it. I love it. (mostly I love it when its over, and I look back on what i have survived.)
• We may think we make ‘airy-fairy’ wishes, then forget all about them. But they remain deep inside us, percolating, finding ways to emerge and become real.
• As someone who has side-gigged at bookstores and libraries most of my adult life, I’ve always been fascinated by how we find books and authors, how sometimes the right book will find us at the right time.
• “I love for people to know more about books and reading, especially Black people,” Nurse says. “I want them to experience the power of their own imaginations. We are not entirely reliant on this crazy white world; we can go places in our heads and make things happen.”

June 9, 2022

I want to read your fiction!

I’m just a woman…

standing in front of a mural…

…dreaming up ways to help you take your fiction W.I.P. to the next level!

I’ve got spaces available for manuscript evaluation this summer!

With decades of expert-reader experience (including as a book reviewer and anthology editor), along with everything I’ve learned (a lot!) as author of three novels, I know I can help you get your manuscript to where it needs to be.

Email me (kerryclare@gmail.com) if you’re interested! I charge $1000 CDN for a manuscript 100,000 words or less, and only accept projects where I know I can give you your money’s worth (ie for your novel about faeries, you may need to talk to someone else).

Looking forward to working with you!

June 8, 2022

Night in the World, by Sharon English

“There’s so much to learn—and to unlearn. It’s urgent yet can’t be rushed. The world stands on the edge of losses so radical no one can fathom the consequences, while possibilities for reconnection and renewal wait to be discovered in the dark.”

I don’t want to read your climate change fiction, that novel you wrote about children afloat on a raft as the world is overwhelmed by sea. I don’t want to read about your desolate prairie wasteland, about drought, about despair, about the impossibility of a habitable future. And not because I don’t think that the climate crisis is pressing and real, but because I know that it is, and I know your post-apocalyptic fiction isn’t going to do anything to ameliorate that reality, or lessen my anxiety. Perhaps also because I don’t think I believe in apocalypse at all, but instead that in the midst of disaster, ordinary life goes on—babies are born, flowers grow, people do their best, and help one another. Reality is not so stark. The story, as always, is complicated.

And this is the kind of story that Sharon English—celebrated author of two acclaimed short story collections—has decided to tell in her debut novel Night in the World, a novel whose disaster setting feels a lot like now, and why shouldn’t it? Freak storms knock out power grids, water levels are rising, toxins are mucking up the waterways, and anyone who speaks out against the pervasiveness of, say, fluoride in drinking water is just dismissed as loony toons. Entire species are being eradicated as their habitats are destroyed in pursuit of profit and development, few people pushing back against the status quo, underlining its unsustainability.

Night in the World is the story of a pair of brothers, one a successful restaurant-owner who finds his middle years are drained of meaning, the other a former environmental journalist who’s thrown it all away for a job that seems less futile, helping to run a gym in East Toronto. And the third character at the centre this story is a late blooming grad student who lives in Peterborough, and is studying moth species around the shores of Rice Lake, and elsewhere, trying to find a way to do her research without damaging the fragile creatures she’s pursuing. Is a little harm excusable if it’s the name of a greater cause?

The novel traces the lines of Toronto’s waterways, the creeks and rivers underlying the modern city, stories that refuse to stay buried, as well as the ever-shifting shores of the Toronto Islands, formerly a peninsula until a storm cut them off from the city more than a 150 years ago, and Rice Lake, an important agricultural spot for Indigenous people…until the radical disruption of the Trent Severn Waterway, all of this conjuring moth’s more colourful cousins, and what can happen when one of them flaps its wings. The infinite ways in which every little thing is connected.

“This novel was over a decade in the making,” English writes in her acknowledgements, and I will admit that sometimes it reads as such, the story big and sprawling with many disparate parts that sometimes fit together awkwardly. In terms of plot, there’s nothing taut, and I wouldn’t say that it’s a great novel, but instead that it’s a very good and wholly worthwhile book, a book packed beautiful sentences and details so fascinating I kept reading facts aloud (the part about the cicadas!), bursting with research, and ideas, and questions, poetry and philosophy.

June 7, 2022

Gleanings

• It’s peony season, and peony season signals my annual pilgrimage(s) to the corner of Sussex and Brunswick where peonies bloom in abundance.
• What expectations should we be setting aside so that the messages arrive? How can we set aside our fucking reticence and send messages?
• Forget the 10,000 hours. Use whatever hours you have.
• But creativity doesn’t work that way. It likes to take the long drive and visit all of the small towns and historical monuments on the side of the road first. It wants to hang around on the front porch of an old general store and look at the ancient ice machine, or Pepsi sign in detail. It can’t tell you why, it just does.
• It’s only the omnipresence of violence, including its institutionalization in the military, that makes it possible to encounter that one death and think, for a minute, that it’s not much, not that big a deal. In fact, in its singularity, because of its singularity, that one death is everything that matters, as everyone who has lost a loved one knows.
• Not as a resignation, or avoidance, but as an invitation to let be, let go, and to unclench the grasp of should and could and what ifs, the stories or avoidance of how life really goes … of course. It doesn’t mitigate the feelings, but it does pull us back into present moment with what is.
• Possibility –– it’s one of my favourite words. Derived from the Latin, possibilis, “able to be done,” possibility walks hand-in-hand with hope, potential, and the idea that there is always room for something else to emerge, something different, unexpected and exciting.
• Although I was in Ukraine and although I had a Ukrainian grandfather, I didn’t—couldn’t—think of myself as Ukrainian. Could I? My daughter? My husband, born in Yorkshire? A man pounded the table and said, You are married to a Ukrainian woman so you are Ukrainian! He toasted us with the fiery horilka flavoured with mountain ginseng.
• And a general delight in spring, with fresh starts and new beginnings for which I’m always grateful, even as I never forget that those starts and beginnings both build on old knowledge and exist in the context of a difficult world. 

June 6, 2022

This Time Tomorrow, by Emma Straub

Is novelist Emma Straub overhyped, I wondered, as I pre-ordered her latest novel This Time Tomorrow? And if indeed this is the case, am I part of the problem, pre-ordering her latest novel when the truth is her previous book didn’t really blow me away? I was a big fan of The Vacationers many years ago, and I’ve enjoyed her releases well enough since, but I was kind of resigned to This Time Tomorrow being something of a let-down, as are too many buzzed-about new releases. But oh, I’m so glad I didn’t miss this one, because it’s one of the best books I’ve read so far this year.

Though it matters, I think, that I’m something of a time travel fiend. Tom’s Midnight Garden, Charlotte Sometimes, and A Handful of Time are some of my favourite novels from childhood, and Straub’s references to movies like Back to the Future and Peggy Sue Got Married were absolutely delectable to encounter. It matters too that this is a time travel novel wholly self-aware of its genre and its place in the canon. In this case, it’s personal—protagonist Alice Stern’s father is author of the iconic novel Time Brothers, a time travel cult classic.

When the novel begins, Alice’s father Leonard is dying, silent and still in his hospital bed. Alice herself is on the eve of her 40th birthday, still living in the New York City she grew up in, still working in the same Manhattan private school she’d been a student at. She likes her life well enough, but her father’s condition and her milestone birthday are inspiring her to take stock and wonder how they got there and what else could have been

The novel features amazing Russian Doll vibes—after visiting a bar called Matryoshka, Alice wakes up in her teenage body, and proceeds to relive her birthday again and again, each time returning to the present to find her life very different due to choices she’d made. And while being trapped in a time loop might seem like a problem, to Alice it’s an opportunity to spend time with the father whose humanness and availability she’d always taken for granted when she was young. As one does.

What I love about this book is that almost none of the story was taken up by Alice trying to hide her situation from those around her. No, like any reasonable human, Alice takes advantage of her best friend’s intelligence and her father’s expertise in the area to loop them in and ask for help, so that the story becomes one about bigger questions, about the connections between generations, about the choices we make, and why they matter (or don’t!), plus a wonderful exercise in ’90s nostalgia.

It was smart, warm, and so delightful.

June 2, 2022

Swimsuits are for Swimming

I bought a bathing suit online a while back, and it probably could have been a size bigger.

But I’m very pleased to announce that after about six weeks of consistent workouts via swimming laps, it finally mostly fits me properly.

Not because my body has changed at all, but because six weeks of wearing a bathing suit (and running in through the spinner) is going to stretch a garment out.

Six years into regular swimming, my relationship to bathing suits is much less fraught that it used to be. I don’t actually remember if it ever was so fraught, but this is such a common trope, women trying on bathing suits and hating their bodies, that it’s probably embedded in my DNA.

I do remember that buying a Speedo tankini when I was in university that quickly ended up with a hole in the bum.

I took it back to the store, and the clerk informed me that it had disintegrated because I’d been wearing it to swim.

“It’s not a swimming bathing suit,” she told me. “It’s a fashion bathing suit.”

And these days, my bathing suits have no style at all, basic sporty numbers I can find in my size on clearance. For a couple of summers, for style, I’ve bought a cheap but cute suit from Joe Fresh, but these became stretched out and unwearable so quickly that I’m not sure they’re really worth it.

These days how I look in a bathing suit is an idea that just never comes up.

(Although I took heart when I saw Yumi Nu on the cover of Sports Illustrated recently. Her swimsuit didn’t really fit either, and she still looked pretty fine.)

I honestly never ever think about how I look in a bathing suit, which is bonkers because I wear a bathing suit almost every day. Because a bathing suit is a bathing suit, tight and gaping, revealing. But I never think about how I look in a bathing suit because it doesn’t matter how I look like in a bathing suit.

What matters is what I do.

That I SWIM.

The transformation from object to subject is complete.

June 1, 2022

This is How We Love, by Lisa Moore

You wouldn’t say that Lisa Moore’s new novel This is How We Love is unputdownable, but I honestly think that’s a lot to ask of a novel . It took me almost a whole week to read it, because it’s kind of long, and I had a lot going on, so I kept picking it up and setting it down again, and the narrative style was doing something similar. The novel far less taut than you’d think for a plot with the stakes of a critical stab wound, an ICU, and a once-in-a-century snowstorm that brings St. John’s to a halt before it buries it under. But taut plots aren’t really what Lisa Moore is all about anyway. Or at least I don’t think so—nine years ago I read the first half of her novel Caught, which of all of them might be a contender for taut, while in labour in the bathtub, and afterwards I had strong aversion to ever reading the rest of it. From the rest of her novels, however, I know she’s all about the sentence, one word after another and how they all flow like waves, but they’re pushing us out to sea instead of drawing us to shore the way that actual waves do. Until we’re stranded on an inflatable raft like Trinity Brophy was before the authorities removed her from her mother’s care and delivered her to live with Mary Mahoney, the foster mother who raised her across the street from Jules’ house.

I wouldn’t say that Lisa Moore’s new novel This is How We Love is unputdownable, but I can say that over a week since I finished reading, I can’t get the story out of my head. About Jules, whose son Xavier is stabbed while she’s on vacation in Mexico and there’s only one seat on the first flight back so she takes it, arriving just as St. John’s is shut down entirely. So she’s there to deal with the peril of Xavier’s condition, and then all the snow, which falls and falls so the doors are blocked, except the back door, but it’s only because there’s been so much snow that the deck fell off the house.

The story moves between Jules’ point of view—her perspective on what’s happening to her son and reflections back in time too, to her mother and mother in law, to the early days of her marriage, her experiences as a mother, a stepmother. This is a book about care, about who we care for and who we don’t, and how some people belong to us, and other people don’t, and what happens to everyone when those people fall through the cracks—and those of Xavier himself, and Trinity Brophy, his childhood playmate who is somehow connected to what happened to him. Moore weaving so many different narrative threads together to begin to answer the question that’s mostly preoccupying Jules, which is WHY? Why did somebody hurt her son? Why would anybody want to do something like that?

Spanning decades and families, This is How We Love underlines the infinite ways in which lives are all connected. Part novel, part guidebook to the wondrous challenges of being a being.

May 31, 2022

Gleanings

• But what is this world, life, trying to wake us up to? And how does remembering we are all connected open possibilities for reimagining the world we … you … I want to live in?
• Whether it’s writing a scene, or revising a story, or playing around with a writing prompt, or creating a blog post. I just feel better if I’ve written something.
• This is a post that begins and ends by saying, “trust me.” This is a post written from a place of pure love. This is a post about how an author can change your life, about how books matter, and about how writers are simultaneously magical and utterly real. It’s also a post that references a line from Jane Austen about how if I loved this book less, I could talk about it more.
• My brain tends toward disaster thinking. What is it good for, disaster thinking? I’d love to learn how to prevent it altogether, but my sense is that instead I’ll have to keep noticing my personal tendency to imagine the worst (in vivid detail) and find ways to turn away from indulging that tendency, over and over. (It helps to have a partner who counters my fears with, “Okay, but what if everything works out?”)
• I constantly remind myself there is no there or arrival point to strive to achieve in any aspect of life, but a returning again and again to each moment, me being me as I am, with you as you are.
• That summer of 2007, we were caught in a meander, the current winding and turning back on itself, not measurable as the crow flies, but singular. In another version of the story, the river erodes the banks, turns, finds another route. In river systems, old meanders are sometimes abandoned and become lakes. That summer is a lake in my memory, forgotten by the river’s flow.
• It’s by coming to the coast where land and sea meet that I’ve learned more about the way the Earth tilts than any lesson taught in school. I’m a hands-on learner.
• “The good news is that the solution to a plant problem is rarely complicated –– often the smallest adjustment can make the biggest change.” Human problems are more complicated, although the same applies; one small adjustment leads to another, and then another, and so on.
• The Awakening, though told with lovely prose and offering insights of a very specific perspective, is only really a partial awakening. Edna Pontellier has a ways to go still.
• As a child, I was a daydreamer, living in my own little world, but now that I am older, I spend more time in the present moment. My mind may drift off these days, but I would not call my thoughts daydreams. What about you? Where does your mind go when it wanders? Do you still daydream?
• On my way into Presqu’ile Provincial Park, and as I pulled away from the gatehouse driving along Presqu’ile Parkway, I felt an ethereal reverence for this place that I love so dearly.