July 6, 2008
Reading stories is bad enough…
“It is extremely interesting,” Anne told Marilla. “Each girl has to read her story out loud and then we have to talk it over. We are going to keep them all sacredly and have them to read to our descendants. We each write under a non-de-plume… All the girls go pretty well. Ruby Gillis is rather sentimental. She puts too much love-making into her stories and you know too much is worse than too little. Jane never puts in any because she says it makes her feel too silly when she has to read it out loud. Jane’s stories are extremely sensible. Then Diana puts too many murders into hers. She says most of the time she doesn’t know what to do with the people so she kills them off to get rid of them. I mostly always have to tell them what to write about, but that isn’t hard for I’ve millions of ideas.”
“I think this story-writing business is the foolishest yet,” scoffed Marilla. “You’ll get a pack of nonsense into your heads and waste time that should be put on your lessons. Reading stories is bad enough but writing them is worse.”
“But we’re so careful to put a moral into them all, Marilla,” explained Anne. “I insist upon that. All the good people are rewarded and the bad ones suitably punished. I’m sure that must have a wholesome effect. The moral is the greatest thing. Mr. Allen says so. I read one of my stories to him and Mrs. Allen and they both agreed that the moral was excellent. Only they laughed in the wrong places. I like it better when people cry. Jane and Ruby almost always cry when I come to the pathetic parts. Diana wrote her Aunt Josephine about our club and Aunt Josephine wrote back that we were to send her some of our stories. So we copied out four of our very best and sent them. Miss Josephine Barry wrote back that she had never read anything so amusing in all her life. That kind of puzzled us because the stories were all very pathetic and almost everybody died…” –L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
July 6, 2008
Flirt by Lorna Jackson
My review of Lorna Jackson’s Flirt: The Interviews will be a mini review, because I really feel I ought to read it again. And perhaps one more time after that, Jackson’s linguistic acrobatics and underlying humour not immediately so easy to get one’s head around. But I post about it now because you should know about it, about its remarkable conceit. One that I was interested in immediately, as a person who reads interviews and aspires to write them (well). Jackson’s stories playing tricks with the form, playing tricks on the form, tricks on the reader too with fiction and fact.
Lorna Jackson’s unnamed interviewer is far more interested in plumbing her own depths than anybody else’s. Throughout the book she (fictionally) interviews characters including Ian Tyson, Bobby Orr, Alice Munro, Janet Jones-Gretzky. The book’s best line (though there could be many of these) being, “Jesus, Alice. I’m so sick of that anecdote. Can’t you give me something better?”
Our interviewer is suffering from a much-broken heart, a long-ago loss, a mixed-up today and unsure tomorrows. Seeking counsel in those she is supposed to be examining, much digressing, even her real questions shaded by her personal experience. She becomes a character, the entire book encompassing a sort of trajectory. Each interview standing alone as a most innovative kind of short story, relying on language alone for effect.
July 6, 2008
Nobody loves abortion
Yesterday I went to see How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Abortion at the Toronto Fringe Festival. I’ve mentioned before what I see as the reason for writers not exploring the theme of abortion in interesting ways: “Abortion makes for such boring narrative. Or at least everyone I’ve ever known to have had one has just gone on happily with the rest of her life.”
And so as a person who appreciates story, I thought the show seemed important, perhaps offering an alternative narrative to those ones all-too familiar: a) woman gets pregnant, decides on abortion, has a miscarriage and then is sad b) woman never considers abortion for aforementioned “boring” reason c) woman who gets abortion is rendered barren, and regrets her decision forevermore (and then goes to hell). Also to move pro-choice open debate beyond the rather limiting, “But what about victims of incest and rape?”
Writer Erin Fleck has done so, offering a show that is funny, poignant, surprising, and very well done. Didn’t do anything too easy. I was laughing hysterically at some parts, the ending left me on the verge of tears, and the story went in unexpected directions, absolutely shocking me at one point (with a twist, not with disgust, I must say), which I thought was sort of impressive.
Fleck writes on her blog (which also covers her difficulties promoting her show), “It frustrates me that the abortion question does seem to be the white elephant of debates…it just sort of sits there in the room and no one really wants to talk about it, for fear of angering a whole lot of people. And while everyone is so busy not talking about it…bills and laws are attempting to be passed to restrict it.”
Congratulations to her for being brave, getting people talking and even laughing. The show runs until next weekend.
July 6, 2008
Rereading Anne of Green Gables
The first time I encountered Anne in print was in an abridged version of the story at the beginning of my Anne of Green Gables colouring book. I first read the novel when I saw seven or eight, my understanding of which was greatly influenced by the film. My Anne was always Megan Follows, Marilla Colleen Dewhurst, etc. Try as I might, these associations refuse to be shed. Which is not such a bad thing.
The last time I read Anne of Green Gables was seven or eight years ago, the first time as an adult, and I read my wonderful annotated edition. I remember finding the annotations interesting, though I can’t remember any of them now. I do remember being struck by the novel’s humour. As a child I’d taken it all as sincerely as Anne did, but now I could see that much of the book was really quite funny.
This time rereading Anne of Green Gables, I went back to my old novel. It has become quite a treasure, though the dust-jacket is gone (I hated dust-jackets when I was little, how they’d get torn and ratty, and I used to throw them away). I wish I could remember what the cover had looked like. My edition is a reprint of the very first edition, old style fonts and textual decos, illustrations by Hilton Hassell with a line of text underneath each on. On the inside cover is inscribed, “To Kerry Lea, From Grandma and Grandpa, Xmas 1986”. Note that from my grandparents, I would go on to receive hardback copies of Anne of Avonlea and Anne of the Island for my birthday and Christmas 1987. In 1988, the whole rest of the series arrives from them, albeit in paperback. Perhaps the most long-lasting gifts I’ll ever receive. What treasures now…
Kate Sutherland has been rereading Anne, celebrating her centennial (for indeed she turned 100 years in June). She’s been part of the group Blogging Anne of Green Gables, sharing rereadings and providing some fascinating insights.
Certainly Anne is a fine book for revisiting. Rereading is an absolute joy, and like any book worth a trip back to, it’s amazing how much the perspective changes. The mark of any good book, such richness, and multiple layers readers can reveal for themselves as time goes on. As most young readers do, I identified with Anne, in all earnestness I wanted to be her. Because of her triumphs, I think, in the face of all adversity. I think all awkward little girls (which is most little girls) want to believe that triumph is possible. They’re sold on Anne’s version of romance, of her poetry, of the wilds of her imagination, just as her schoolmates are at the Avonlea school. How she casts a spell on the whole world.
Now I see though, rereading, that though Anne is the impetus, her story is about how that very spell changes Marilla Cuthbert. How Marilla realizes her true self through this bewitching orphan girl. “It almost seemed to her that [her] secret, unmuttered, critical thoughts had suddenly taken visible and accusing shape and form in the person of this outspoken morsel of neglected humanity.” How from the moment she encounters Anne, she is biting back smiles, swallowing her “reprehensible desire to laugh”. Until the end of the novel, when we find her in explosive fits of laughter, or when Matthew discovers her having a good cry. She learns to feel, to be, and to love. She is a wonderful, rich character, more than I’d ever thought to give her credit for.
I was also struck by the bookishness of Anne. Literary references scattered throughout the text, Anne’s quoting poetry, but it’s not just Anne. I’d always thought Diana Berry was a bit bland in comparison to her bosom friend, and so I was surprised to first encounter her as follows: “Diana was sitting on the sofa, reading a book which she dropped when the callers entered.” Her mother instructs her, “Diana, you might take Anne out into the garden and show her your flowers. It will be better for you than straining your eyes over that book. She reads entirely too much… and I can’t prevent her… She’s always poring over a book. I’m glad she has the prospect of a playmate– perhaps it will take her more out of doors.”
The little girls of Avonlea read with fervour, exchange novels like I did stickers at their age. They’re all variable types, none of them quite like Anne, but the bookishness is a common denominator I found fascinating.
July 6, 2008
Girls Fall Down by Maggie Helwig
Having lived away from Toronto from 2002 to 2005, I found a very foreign city depicted within Maggie Helwig’s Girls Fall Down. This city under siege, by paranoia underlined by strange happenings. The falling girls, the first one collapsing on a streetcar, and others follow, but no answers can be found. Authorities rule out poison– well, as much as they possibly can, which is not entirely. There are no significant abnormalities: “‘What does that mean…? What is an insignificant abnormality?'”
The first girl is the template, the precedent, for escalation. People whispering about bioterrorism becomes brown-skinned people beaten in the streets.
I do remember Toronto the morning of September 11th 2001. As Helwig writes, “Everyone waiting, almost wanting it, a secret guilty desire for meaning. Their time in history made significant for once by that distant wall of black cloud.” The week I left the city, about nine months later, a garbage strike was just beginning. The SARS epidemic outbreak during the year that followed, and that massive blackout the year after that– I missed it all, the brink of chaos. My city has always functioned in an orderly fashion, as much as possible with so many people in one place. This is the land of reason, logical explanation, and everything has always happened elsewhere.
And so I would suspect Helwig’s Toronto would be more familiar to those who were here then. Here is a fiction steeped in reality, Helwig’s Toronto so actualized that it fooled me, made me disoriented, but the problem was mine. All the part of the city I’ve not paid attention to– references to The Cloud Gardens, for instance, which couldn’t possibly exist, but it’s just that I’ve never been there. To Bloor Supersave, which I thought might be standing in for Dominion, or the ManuLife Valu Mart, but of course it’s its own place, right at the top of my road.
Against the city backdrop, is Alex, to whom a chance meeting has brought the past back in the midst of this chaos. Reconnecting with Susie-Paul, who broke his heart more than a decade ago, and she’s got him all wound up (the way she always could do) in a quest to find her missing schizophrenic brother. She accompanies him on his nighttime rambles through the city, photographing the city’s dark side (this theme, albeit in a very different style, reminding me of Haruki Murakami’s After Dark).
The particulars of the story at this novel’s heart weren’t its strongest aspect. Connection and significance somewhat tenuous at times, but all this is strengthened in the context of the novel as a whole. The atmosphere that Helwig creates, and the greater connections between the people that live in this place. Moreover Helwig’s fascinating exploration of girls, “the things that girls do.” Their secret lives, never entirely uncovered, and their power, however unconscious, the novel’s true heart. With such far-reaching ripples, the implications immense.
July 3, 2008
Isn't it splendid…
“Isn’t it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about? It just makes me glad to be alive– it’s such an interesting world. It wouldn’t be half so interesting if we knew all about everything, would it? There’d be no scope for imagination then, would there? But am I talking too much? People are always telling me I do. Would you rather I didn’t talk? If you say so I’ll stop. I can stop when I make up my mind to do it, although it’s difficult.” –L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
July 1, 2008
Celebrating the Short Story
I’m writing this now, lying on the carpet in front of my bookshelves. I’ve been thinking about this post for a long time, what exactly I wanted to write about, and I decided it would be best written with inspiration in sight, within reach. Where I’m lying now, I’ve got my books by authors J-L before me– I’m looking at Jhumpa Lahiri’s two books of short stories. Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures. Up above are collections by Jack Hodgins, Sheila Heti. Books by authors S-Sh are to my right– J.D. Salinger, Carol Shields. The Ps above that– Grace Paley, Emily Perkins. Flannery O’Conner is tucked over in the corner beside a Norton Anthology that contains “The Dead”. I really couldn’t think of a better vantage point for such a celebration than this (except if I were standing up, Twilight of the Superheroes would be within my grasp).
I’ve been wanting to celebrate the short story since I attended a reading of Luminato’s Festival of the Short Story last month, since I read Rebecca Rosenblum’s blog post after the fact, since I found out about Joyland, a new online home for short fiction established by writer Emily Schultz. One of the first stories posted there being “Clear Skies” by Lynn Coady, who’d moderated the Luminato writing I was at, and whose comments regarding the form were properly celebratory– the risks short fiction allows writers and readers, how it expands the possibilities of what fiction can explore, how the short stories are not miniature novels or long poems, but something onto themselves. Worthy of a festival indeed.
But not always celebrated, no. I’ve written before about short fiction’s illusionary portability, and I think a lot of readers get tripped up on this. Expecting brevity to mean easy, but it usually doesn’t mean such a thing at all. If anything, short fiction can take as long to penetrate as a novel does, reading it again and again instead of just once straight through. Which is an investment that doesn’t always make sense in purely economic terms (time is money etc.)– so much time and focus on a couple of pages, you might as well read a novel.
Further it’s hard to read a short story collection. I’m not always convinced collections are the best homes for short stories anyway– they work so well in magazines, I think, and online certainly could be close to ideal. But unless the collection was always meant to be a collection, as opposed to a stack of stories stuck together with string, it can make for stilted reading. And the time thing matters– how do you fit a short story collection into a day? One story might be too short for the bus ride, another too long to get through before you turn out the light and go to sleep.
Addressing any of this is a bit ridiculous because “the short story” is about as various as “the novel” or even “art”. Jhumpa Lahiri is barely related to Sheila Heti, for example. A short story is any/everything. The only thing that is certain is that a short story is itself.
I was a very undiscerning reader when I was in high school. I read what was put before me without judgment, because it was a book and books were good. Because I was Canadian, Alice Munro came my way, and I read Margaret Atwood– I remember liking Wilderness Tips. I read short story collections the way I did novels, voraciously, uncritically. But I do remember being vaguely unsatisfied by them. That I’d approach them looking out for what novels do, and when the stories failed to do it too, I didn’t know what else to do with them.
Which is not to say that I passed them over, but I rarely sought them out. I wanted to read whole worlds and not their pieces, failing to understand the key is to unpack the pieces, pick them apart to find the worlds inside. Within every single atom, if you’re lucky, and you will be.
The first short story collection I truly loved was Various Miracles by Carol Shields. Containing the story “Scenes” which is one of my favourites, itself made up of scenes (of course): “There are people who think such scenes are ornaments suspended from lives that are otherwise busy and useful. Frances knows perfectly well that they are what a life is made of, one fitting against the next like English paving-stones.” And the stories in this collection set up the same way– not linked, but fitted against, which is different. There is a space between. Engaging the reader to discern the connections herself, but it’s there– that voice, those themes. Here are pieces that equal even more as a whole.
One of the challenges of the short story– the effort required to read one’s way inside it– is conversely one of the best things it offers. The opportunity to read it again and again, engaging, becoming intimate, discovering its detail, the secrets inside. To get this close to a novel takes time, and perhaps was never even its purpose. Whereas the purpose of a story is to be steeped in, perpetually uncorked. To lie down inside so to look at the sky.
Discovering Grace Paley was a revelation to me, making clear more than any other writer ever had, that a short story was a short story was a short story, and that was that. Paley’s stories wore their storyness on their story sleeves, and I’ve never read anything else quite like them. They’re tough too– once through is not sufficient, you’ve got to go it again and again. She puts up blocks, strange twists, you’re not there to get comfortable. On your toes, get there and stay there. Read about a lady in a tree.
I read My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead this winter, edited by Jeffrey Eugenides, and decided thematic anthologies are where the story has never been more alive. To be steeped inside one story after another, storyness in general, all of them of superlative quality, and various, multitudinous as you like. There were even some I hated, and I liked the freedom to be able to do so. Any/everything, from all over the world. If you asked me, What is the short story, I’d hand you this book the size of a brick.
Short stories populate my library. As the sun has started to go down, I’ve turned the light on and I can see to the tops of the shelves. Laurie Colwin, Kate Atkinson, Timothy Findley, Kate Sutherland, Virginia Woolf. I received Forms of Devotion by Diane Schoemperlen for my birthday last week. I’m looking at The Journey Prize Stories 19 now, and the literary journals that help keep the short story in business. The space where Grace Paley used to be, because I’ve taken her down now. In preparation of celebrating stories in the way I know best– through reading them.
July 1, 2008
Canada Day
Though tomorrow is the big day, Canada’s 141st birthday, today means a bit more to me because it was three years ago that I moved to Canada. Moved back to Canada, I realize, but the return didn’t lessen the significance. That in addition to the luck of being born here, I had the great privilege of choosing it too– not everybody gets to do that. So to be home, doubly so, and this is a fine one, certainly.
June 30, 2008
Seen Reading Within Readings
Seen Reading Within Readings: Spotted on Page 75 of Maggie Hellwig’s Girls Fall Down, on the Yonge subway line south of Davisville, “someone reading Shopaholic Takes Manhattan, everybody pretending not to notice the man in the mask”.
