November 25, 2008

Yesterday's Weather by Anne Enright

The first thing I ever read by Anne Enright was her LRB essay “Disliking the McCanns”, which happened to come out the week she won the Booker for The Gathering. The media hoopla meant her essay received far more interest than it otherwise would have, evidently by many people who did not know how to read.

Or at least by people who did not know how to read beyond the surface, beyond what the words line up literally say. Readers lacking an ear for tone, I suppose, and for nuance. So that they would not see that Anne Enright’s essay was an examination of her feelings rather than a statement or an affirmation of them. Nevertheless, from the essay I determined that Anne Enright is brave, forthright, a complicated writer, and honest to a fault.

I read The Gathering afterwards, enjoying its richness and its language, though I found it all a bit much to take in at once– probably due for a reread. Then I read Enright’s memoir Making Babies once I’d found out that I was pregnant, and I realized that it does take a novelist to write effectively about motherhood– to contain the beauty, the repugnance, the love and the loathing, and the fierceness and the fatigue all into one singular perfect moment. And now having explored Anne Enright in every other literary form, it was certainly time that I paid her short stories a visit.

Yesterday’s Weather contains all the stories published in the UK last year as Taking Pictures, in addition to stories from collections nearer to the beginning of her career. The stories here in reverse chronological order, Enright says, “…partly for comic effect… to see myself getting younger– shedding pounds and wrinkles, gaining in innocence and affectation– as the pages turn.” Which is effect as interesting as it is comic, to see the stories less precise, indeed more affected, and yet still containing some essential grain that makes clear Anne Enright wrote these.

As could be expected (and hoped for), her newest stories are her best, and it is remarkable what she does with minutiae, the domestic in particular. In “Caravan”, a mother forced to wash her family’s clothes by hand lives every moment of this. “She watched the cloth relax, and lift, and start to float, then she bent over again to knead and swirl and wring the clothes out for a second time. It was actually quite pleasant, as work went: tending to your family when they weren’t there to annoy you; loving them up in the shape of their clothes.” Enright writes of motherhood as precisely tangledly as she did in Making Babies, the devolution of these domestic themes in her work suggesting the experience of motherhood stamped her. (In her introduction to the collection, she remarks her younger self made the mistake of writing about women who had children and didn’t change.)

Her moments are perfectly composed, affording the reader short bursts of absolute illumination. At the end of “Yesterday’s Weather”, Hazel returning home from a miserable family gathering finds that her tulips have been blown down. Wondering how, so she could prevent it next time: “She tried to think of a number she could ring, or a site online, but there was nowhere she could find out what she needed to know. It was all about tomorrow: warm fronts, cold snaps, showers expected. No one ever stopped to describe yesterday’s weather.”

Enright writes stunningly of teenage girl dynamics in “Natalie” against a backdrop that could break your heart. “Shaft” is so close and devastating– about a heavily pregnant woman in an elevator with a stranger, the story beginning, “As soon as I walked in, I knew he wanted to touch it.” “Little Sister” about the complexity of sibling loss and holes in families touches on some of the same subject matter as The Gathering. Her stories deal with love and marriage, the straightforwardness of adultery. Her characters spend a lot of time cleaning and cleaning up.

Structurally, these stories are challenging and perfectly formed, and the way Anne Enright writes about women and domesticity is both disturbing and surprising. Setting an example of new and interesting approaches to domestic fiction, challenging it to say remarkable things, and not just things that have long gone unsaid (which may not be remarkable at all), but also to make connections heretofore unmade, think thoughts unthought, and imagine stories wholly unconstructed before. In entirely new ways, to write without a template, which in domestic fiction is decidedly rare. Such innovation is as much of interest and importance to those who like the linoleum stuff, as to those who think they don’t, but who come bearing open minds.

November 25, 2008

Shed Skins of a Snake

“It is interesting, but only in a sociological way, to see the sympathy two of my narrators have for men who have just lost their virginity. It is odd, but only to me, to read of the bitterness that exists between female friends, when my own girlfriends are so generous and important to me. These stories are not written by the person who has lived my life and made the best of it, but by people I might have been but decided against. They are written by women who take a different turn in the road. They are the shed skins of a snake.” –Anne Enright, “Introduction” to Yesterday’s Weather

November 24, 2008

Birthday Love

I’ve spent the past three month in a pregnant napping stupor, standing up friends, missing out on events and generally ensuring I was in bed by nine every night. Also staying in bed as long as possible in the mornings and napping through my lunch. As I move into my second trimester, however, there begins to be some light. You’ll not have seen any evidence of it here though, as I’ve spent the last two weeks writing for deadlines and working very hard, in addition to my day job (where I work less hard, but it still takes up time). Going forward, I expect to have a little more time free and you can expect to see some content up here more than once in a while!

This past weekend’s excuse was a good one though, as I spent it celebrating my beloved Stuart’s birthday. Now I’m up for celebrating Stuart at any time, but a special weekend set aside for him couldn’t be more deserved. We had a house full of friends over last night who felt similarly, and it was a wonderful time– I stayed up until 1:00, which is now the beginning of the second middle of the night in my new life. Never mind I could hardly stand or talk, I was there till the end. It was fabulous, if just a little crowded. We’ve spent today eating the leftover dips and crackers and cheese (and cake!), as well as taking in some brunch and spending a couple of hours at the ROM this afternoon (we recommend the Unbuilt Toronto exhibition).

So happy birthday to Stuart, who is my every dream come true. My partner on all my best adventures and on the most exciting still to come. Every year I marvel as what you’ve accomplished for yourself and for us, and I always know how lucky I am.

November 21, 2008

Aspiring to be literature

Stuart Evers at The Guardian Books Blog on “The good side of bad books”: “I think it’s worth pointing out here that not all bad books are properly bad. I’m not talking about Jefferey Archer or Harold Robbins, Danielle Steel or Norah Roberts. Their books have a specific function, a specific readership and for the most part they deliver what their readers want and expect. For me, truly bad novels must want or aspire to be literature, rather than simply product. Take By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart, for example…”

November 21, 2008

Outside the kitchen this morning

A changing season shouldn’t be remarkable, but it is.

November 20, 2008

A Passion for Reading

In other exciting news, Pickle Me This hits the road in early December for a trip to Ottawa. On December 9, 2008, I will be among four panelists speaking on “A Passion for Reading” as part of an Art Matters Forum organized by their Excellencies the Right Honourable Michaëlle Jean, Governor General of Canada, and Mr. Jean-Daniel Lafond. The other panelists come from diverse and fascinating backgrounds, and so I am looking forward to hearing what they have to say, and being part of such an exciting event. I am also looking forward to attending the presentation of the Governor General’s Literary Awards the following evening. It should be a very memorable couple of days.

November 18, 2008

Satisfied

Now reading and being absolutely blown away by Anne Enright’s collection Yesterday’s Weather. I just finished reading Justine Picardie’s Daphne, which was a wonderful literary mystery ala Possession except the sources all were real– remarkable, and I loved it. I also just finished The New Quarterly 108, and Kristen Den Hartog‘s “Draw Crying” was so awful, beautiful and perfect that it had me crying, and not just because I’m pregnant.

Also my dinner was really delicious.

Further, there are good things to read everywhere. Fabulously, on Iceland’s economic meltdown, and its ancient sagas, and its literature today. Who’s reading what at TNQ. Globe reviews this week: When Will There Be Good News, and Lucy Maud Montgomery: Gift of Wings. Good heavens: a book by a woman put forth as one of the 50 greatest. On snow books, and what to read in the darkness of winter. Miriam Toews (of the remarkable Flying Troutmans) wins the Writer’s Trust Award for Ficion. Listen to Esta Spalding reading Night Cars by Teddy Jam (who was Matt Cohen— I didn’t know!).

November 16, 2008

That vantage ground

Of the many fascinating stories within Mary Henley Rubio’s biography Lucy Maud Montgomery: A Gift of Wings, I was perhaps most interested to learn new things about Canadian literary history, and of William Arthur Deacon in particular. Henley Rubio writes of Deacon’s early ambition to establish himself as “Canada’s pre-eminent literary journalist”, at which he succeeded, as he would be book review editor of The Globe & Mail for over thirty years.

From A Gift of Wings: “Deacon was ‘infused with a sense of mission for the establishment of an entire, self-contained, dynamic Canadian cultural milieu– a Canadian authorship, a Canadian readership, a Canadian literature– and sometimes he called himself its prophet.'” “Deacon wanted to develop the literary consciousness of Canadian readers, educating the Canadian public into more ‘sophisticated tastes'”. “Deacon regarded hopelessly old-fashioned the readers who appealed only to ‘low-brow’ unsophisticates… He described these readers as a national embarrassment. In particular, he regarded [Montgomery’s] books as shallow sentimentalism and the ‘nadir’ of Canadian writing.”

Of course it struck me that literary arguments have gone much unchanged in the last eighty years. This point not unknown and particularly vexing to critics who still echo Deacon’s opinions today. One could be asking why Canadian literature refuses to evolve, to unfold, and yet to me, as a reader, it is also particularly telling about the ephemeral nature of criticism itself.

Deacon’s attacks on Montgomery (which were extensive, and went on for the latter part of her career) were intensely personal. On both accounts– that a writer whose work is so decidedly targeted becomes a target herself, and that Deacon’s approach was just as much about himself, his provocations an attempt to be noticed at the beginning of his career. And here I get as sentimental as they come– it was really mean. It was sexist, petty, small-minded, narcissistic, and self-serving, wreaking tremendous havoc on Montgomery’s mental health. One could argue that such is the way this literary game works, but nearly a century later– as the writers touted by Deacon are as unknown as he is, and Montgomery is still internationally read, now regarded as a writer whose work is worthy of serious academic pursuit– Deacon is scarcely a player. So what on earth was the point of him?

We need critics, of course, however wrong they might turn out to be. We need the kind of critics Virginia Woolf wrote about in her essay “How It Strikes a Contemporary”, “the Dryden, the Johnson, the Coleridge, the Arnold… [whose] mere fact of their existence had a centralizing influence.” But what kind of centralizing force would someone like Deacon have had, someone who made his career out of iconoclasm, out of destruction for its own sake? History shows now what a centralizing force was that.

There is a stupid confidence necessary to appoint oneself iconoclast– how can anyone be so sure? Seems to me the wisest critic would bear in mind the lesson Woolf put to writers in her essay “Modern Fiction”:

“We do not come to write better; all that we can be said to do is to keep moving… but with a circular tendency, should the whole course of the track be viewed from a sufficiently lofty pinnacle. It need scarcely be said that we make no claim to stand, even momentarily, upon that vantage ground. On the flat in the crowd, half-blind with dust… It is for the historian of literature to decide; for him to say if we are now beginning or ending or standing in the middle of a great period of prose fiction, for down in the plain little is visible. We only know that certain hostilities inspire us; that certain paths seem to lead to fertile land, others to the dust and the desert…”

November 16, 2008

Oh, I do love me a good literary mystery

“Ok, I’m sorry, there are a lot of librarians in this story, and libraries as well (which maybe doesn’t bode so well for originality). People are often dismissive of librarians and libraries– as if the words are synonymous with boredom or timidity. But isn’t that where the best stories are kept? Hidden away on the library bookshelves, lost and forgotten, waiting, waiting, until someone like me comes along and wants to borrow them.” –from Justine Picardie’s Daphne

November 12, 2008

Author Interview @ Pickle Me This: Tricia Dower

Silent Girl, the debut short story collection by Tricia Dower, doesn’t so much address issues as raise questions and open up dialogues. The book’s structure is remarkable– each story inspired by a woman from one of Shakespeare’s plays, and addressing various modern day women’s issues. I came away from Silent Girl intrigued, and bursting with a variety of urgent questions, and so I am pleased that Tricia Dower took the time to answer them for me. She was in touch via email from her home in Victoria, BC.

I: Though the stories in Silent Girl show such a broad range of styles, narrative voices and subject matter, their focus on women’s experiences and common origins from Shakespeare’s plays suggest they were always intended to be collected together. Was this the case? What came first, the book or the stories?

TD: The stories came first — a creative exercise to see how many contemporary counterparts to Shakespeare characters I could find. It was a feminist exercise, as well: how far had we come or not since Shakespeare’s day? After the fourth story, I started to think I might have a book.

I: From your “Afterward”, I understand that you started your stories with the Shakespearean reference, then sought a modern-day counterpart. Was this step in-between difficult? How hard was it to go from The Taming of the Shrew‘s Katherina, for example, to your Kyal in “Kesh Kumay” (who is a young woman in Kyrgyzstan who is kidnapped and forced into marriage)? Did you have false starts? In order to determine if the story had legs, did you find actual writing or research was more important?

TD: The step in between was relatively easy for the stories in which I found a theme common to the plays and a modern-day situation. Marriage is a financial transaction in both The Taming of the Shrew and “Kesh Kumay,” social isolation influences events in both Othello and “Nobody; I Myself,” illusion plays a role in both The Winter’s Tale and “Deep Dark Waves,” and the boundaries of gender are fluid in both Twelfth Night and “Cocktails with Charles.” For other stories, questions I had about Shakespeare’s characters led me to contemporary scenarios. Take Hamlet’s Gertrude, for example. I had always been curious about what was behind her hasty marriage to her husband’s brother. Another is Marina in Pericles: if you’re kidnapped by pirates and sold to a brothel, would you really be able to talk yourself out of sex? Or, why might Hermione, in The Winter’s Tale, want to reconcile with a husband who had abused her and left their daughter to die?

I had a significant false start with the last story, “The Snow People.” Intrigued by the atypical mothering of Volumnia in Coriolanus, I had planned to write a story about gangs in Los Angeles. My story’s mother would by atypical in that she’d rejoice in her son’s gang leadership rather than be afraid for him. I read first hand accounts of gang life by members of the Crips and the Bloods, two of the largest LA gangs, and immersed myself in other aspects of gang culture. What I learned was so discouraging I could not bring myself to fashion a story around it. Before drug trafficking and automatic weapons took over, the gangs might have had noble goals but, today, they seem doomed to commit self-genocide. So I abandoned my original idea and imagined a fictitious oppressed people struggling for self-determination in an environmentally damaged future.

Research was equally as important as writing for several stories. Especially so for the title story, because I knew very little about sex trafficking and not as much as I needed to about the tsunami of 2004 and Hurricane Katrina. Without research I couldn’t have written “Kesh Kumay,” since I’ve never been to Kyrgyzstan. Although “The Snow People” is set in the future, research into ancient arctic cultures, including the Ainu of Japan, helped me create a history and culture for my imaginary Snows. I must admit I like research as much as or more than writing. I love learning something new. If a story doesn’t get published, I don’t feel that I’ve failed or wasted my time if I’ve learned something.

I: What were your research methods in writing Silent Girl? Which, usually, would be sort of a boring question, but the diversity of your themes is quite remarkable, as is the extensiveness of your details, so I would like to know.

TD: I used books and articles in the library and on the Internet, films and photos, discussions with people, and first hand experience to research the stories. I read up on mad cow disease and visited a ranch for “Passing Through.” For “Nobody; I Myself,” I read books written in the ‘60s, so I could remind myself of the attitudes and language we used back then in reference to civil rights. For “Kesh Kumay,” I read everything I could about the country, especially personal accounts of everyday experiences so readers could believe in my setting and my characters. I also watched a documentary and read government and NGO reports about bride kidnapping. I read Kyrgyz fiction, including large sections of the epic poem, The Manas. My research took so many months, friends would say, “Are you still working on that story?”

I: It is a credit to your skill, I think, that nearly every story in Silent Girl might read as though it was written by a different writer. You use such a broad range of voices, of styles. Whereas so many writers will discover their niche and stay there. Do you aspire to be the kind of writer who doesn’t? In what kinds of stories do you find you’re most comfortable? Are there any narrative situations you’ve found you’d rather avoid?

TD: I’m so pleased you observed those differences in style and voice. I don’t know that I aspire to write that way over any other way. I just find it interesting to get into the heads of my characters and describe their worlds as they would — with varying pacing, word choice, attitude, setting, and so forth.

I seem to gravitate to stories about people struggling with something BIG. I can write the occasionally amusing line, but I can’t see myself authoring a comic novel. I don’t do funny well. I envy people who do.

I: Along those lines, characters in your stories employ a variety of dialects, dialect being an ambitious task for a writer to take on. What was your experience of writing it?

TD: I need to “hear” characters before I can portray them fully. Understand their language before I can reflect their thoughts and beliefs, history and culture. Charles’s stuttering in “Cocktails with Charles” and Maw-Maw’s Cajun accent in “Silent Girl” were the most challenging. I wanted to be respectful toward the way they speak and present the flavour of that speech without exhausting readers. I grew up listening to black radio in New Jersey and it was relatively easy for me to hear both Joe and Brother D (and the differences in the way they sp
oke) in “Nobody; I Myself.” Listening to my Alberta farm-born husband over the twenty years we’ve been together gave me Jack’s voice in “Passing Through.”

I: You started writing later in your life– what in your earlier experiences made you the writer you are today? What might have led you to write a singular collection such as Silent Girl?

TD: Living all these years as a woman, I suppose, through courtship and marriage, childbirth and divorce, having a paying job and not having one. Experiencing the many ways women have been socialized to think of themselves as inferior men. I think I felt compelled to explore, through this collection, the effect of patriarchal values on society as a way to help free myself from those values and move on. There was something cathartic in using my decades-old textbook as reference and finally noticing that the female characters are listed following the male characters before each play, no matter how big a role they play. Even Cleopatra comes after her male attendants.

I: In the story “Deep Dark Waves”, you write of a woman who is complicit in the violence committed against her by her husband. What are the implications of her complicity? How does your story complicate how we’ve come to understand domestic violence, and why do you think this complication is important?

TD: I intended to write about the more typical domestic abuse situation in which the man is the sole aggressor. But in my research I came across less common cases of women who are attracted to and often sexually addicted to violence. Because female violence doesn’t fit the typical profile, there are few services available to violence-prone women and their families. And it isn’t politically correct in some circles to even admit that women can be violent. I found the less typical situation to be more interesting to write about.

I: Your stories do challenge roles women have traditionally played in stories, one of them “Nobody; I Myself” beginning with the line, “I am not a victim. You’re not to feel sorry for me.” Why was this distinction important for you to address?

TD: Those lines uniquely characterize the narrator in that story — my Desdemona. She sees herself as an activist, breaking new ground in the fight against racial discrimination by marrying a black man and trying to help him succeed, according to her definition of success. She doesn’t want to be pitied, wants to be remembered as having consciously martyred herself for her husband. It was important for me to acknowledge that some people we view as victims don’t see themselves that way.

I: As much as some stories do challenge women’s roles, however, others such as “Not Meant to Know” and “Passing Through” demonstrate the limitations of women’s experiences. In the former story, each female character plays a subordinate role to the men in her life, and Trudy in the latter story faces a lack of acknowledgment from the men all around her. Are these characters victims? Are we to feel sorry for them?

TD: In “Not Meant to Know,” the girls are victims because they are children. However, through Tereza’s defiance and Linda’s assertion of her independence at the end of the story, I’m suggesting they could grow up to be women who take responsibility for their happiness. You might feel sorry for their mothers who seem to be powerless, but you don’t have to admire their acceptance of that powerlessness, considering its effect on their daughters.

In “Passing Through,” I wanted to show how a woman’s desire for self-actualization can have negative consequences for her relationships with the men in her life. To avoid becoming a victim, she may have tough choices to make. The last line of the story hints at the struggle it will be for Trudy to choose the role she wants for herself over the role her son would like her to play.

I: You write, “It became apparent to me… that things haven’t changed for women since Shakespeare’s time… We need different kinds of stories– a new mythology perhaps– to free us.” If that new mythology is necessary then, why start with Shakespeare at all? Are your stories the past or the future, or a step in between?

TD: What a great question! It didn’t occur to me that we needed a new mythology until I’d finished writing the stories and had the chance to look at what they said in their entirety. In rediscovering Shakespeare for this collection, it struck me that many of his female characters have the symbolic force of the qualities they represent, qualities that were thought to be either particularly desirable in a woman back then or particularly odious. Marina: chastity. Desdemona and Hermione: stand-by-your-man-even-if-he-abuses-you love. Kate: defiance. The fact that they are presented through such a lens was strangely liberating for me. My imagination could enter their world knowing that Shakespeare had left much of their nature unexplored. They could be transformed from what they might have represented in Shakespeare’s time into what they might represent today. For example, is my Desdemona a model of selfless love or of unhealthy self-denial? By bringing her and others forward hundreds of years, I was able to take a fresh look at their so-called virtues and vices in the light of contemporary thinking. Thus, their symbolic force is in motion, not static.

I: What reactions to your book have surprised you? What have you learned about it since you let it out into the world?

TD: I’ve been pleasantly surprised that each story has been named a “favourite” by at least one reader who has given me feedback and that readers get emotionally involved in the stories to the extent that they ask me how a character’s “fate” could be changed or what will happen to this character or that after the story is over.

I’ve been humbled by the realization that my book is but one of many thousands people can choose to read. And Victoria, where I live, supposedly has more writers per capita than any other Canadian city. I attended a literary event where someone said, “You can’t go outside without spitting on a writer.” Among the better known you could spit on: Bill Gaston, Patrick Lane, Susan Stenson, Lorna Crozier, Patricia Young, Lynne Van Luven, Linda Rogers, Susan Musgrave, Lorna Jackson, and John Gould. Local media and bookstores are not the least bit impressed by me.

I: You quit a corporate job to become a writer. You’ve noted that for two years you “turned out stuff that nobody wanted”– but what changed? And what did you learn during those two years?

TD: I got better! I took courses and workshops and joined Zoetrope.com, an online workshop sponsored by Francis Ford Coppola. I learned (and am still learning) much about the craft and received constructive criticism that I was able to translate into publishable work. I will forever be grateful to The New Quarterly for giving me my first acceptance and the confidence to keep writing and submitting.

I: What was your ultimate motivation to change your life and devote yourself to writing?

TD: Survival. As a senior executive, I became increasingly dispirited by the single-minded goal of delivering shareholder profit and the often soul destroying (for me) actions it required. Stress and long hours were making me unhealthy, as well. I began to think I wouldn’t live much longer and, with a sense of urgency, started writing my memoirs for my son and daughter. Before long, more of my heart was in that writing exercise than it was in business. The pull was too strong to ignore.

I: Who are the authors who have inspired you most as a writer? What writers excite you at the moment?

TD: Alice Munro is my hero for depth of characterization and her ability to make the ordinary extraordinary. Others who’ve inspired me for a variety of reasons are Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Atwood, Carol Windley,
Jane Smiley, Timothy Findley, and Michael Ondaatje. At the moment, I’m into Kathy Page whose 2004 GG-nominated Alphabet is brilliant. And, Cormac McCarthy, wow! I’m also into him.

I: What are you reading right now?

TD: I just finished Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, which did not live up to its hype for me. On my list to tackle next are: Mary Swan’s The Boys in the Trees, Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo and David Wroblewsky’s The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. Reading more novels than short story collections is unusual for me, so I will no doubt go looking for Anthony De Sa’s Giller-nominated Barnacle Love.

Links:
Pickle Me This reviews Silent Girl
Tricia Dower’s website
Tricia Dower’s blog “Silent Girl Speaks”
Listen to Tricia reading
Inanna Publications