March 7, 2022

The Swimmers, by Julie Otsuka

“Most days, at the pool, we are able to leave our troubles on land behind. Failed painters become elegant breaststrokers. Untenured professors slice, shark-like, through the water, with breathtaking speed. The newly divorced HR manager grabs a faded red Styrofoam board and kicks with impunity. The downsized ad man floats otter-like on his back as he stares up at the clouds on the painted pale blue ceiling, thinking, for the first time all day long, of nothing. Let it go. Worriers stop worrying. Bereaved widows cease to grieve. Out-of-work actors unable to get traction above ground glide effortlessly down the fast lane, in their element, at last. I’ve arrived! And for a brief interlude we are at home in the world. Bad moods lift, tics disappear, memories are reawakened, migraines dissolve, and slowly, slowly, the chatter in our minds begins to subside as stroke after stroke, length after length, we swim. And when we are finished with our laps we hoist ourselves up out of the pool, dripping and refreshed, are equilibrium restored, ready to face another day on land.” —The Swimmers, by Julie Otsuka

The most perfect encapsulation of a pool swim community I’ve ever encountered in a book. And then on page 77, the story shifts, becomes about one woman’s experience with dementia (and her daughter), and the pool is left behind, and how these pieces fit together is still something of an unsolved puzzle for me, but I am satisfied by the wondering so much.

March 4, 2022

Tunnels

I’ve had a very tough mental health week (what I mean by this is that I’ve spent a significant amount of my time experiencing the physical symptoms of abject terror for someone who is not immediately endangered) but I finally slept okay last night for the first time in a week and it’s helping. It is a lot to be a person who lives in the world right now, even if one is fortunate enough not to be a person in immediate danger, but one thing I am grateful for is that when it all fell apart for me in December, it was because I’d finally had enough to looking for light at the end of the tunnel. That light in the distance for me had been the most sustaining force for me, always, but then I’d become so tired of reaching, or maybe the light seemed so far away I couldn’t see it or else I was afraid I’d just imagined it was ever there, or maybe what I really mean is that reaching such light is as far away as one could possibly get from experiencing life in the present moment, and I was just so tired of missing out on that, of always looking ahead for a moment that might never come.

And so this has been my objective throughout the weeks of this new year, to learn to be here now and meet the moment whatever it’s bringing. To be open and strong and brave in the case of whatever fate may deliver, and when I made such plans, it was mainly Omicron I had in mind, and what’s come to stir my soul instead has been so much more messy, heartbreaking, and terrifying. For me the way so much unrest in Ottawa blended right into the invasion of Ukraine is not entirely disconnected, and in some ways, practically speaking, it really isn’t, though of course I wholly recognize the different of scale. But the point is that I’ve been scared for a month, and really for two years now, and now this, terror on such a potentially annihilating scale.

I’m beginning to wholly understand how everyone in the mid-20th century was on Valium…

But I’ve got away from my main point, which is not to say the light will never come. (It does. It’s all around us. We’re entering our third year of a pandemic, and yet hospital capacity is fine, we’re going out for dinner tonight, my kids have been in school since January, we’re planning to visit our family in the UK in April, green things are beginning to poke through the earth—I could not be more grateful for all of this if my heart were tied up in a sparkly bow.) But just that I am glad that I committed to learning to get along in the meantime, to learn how to be mostly okay even when most things aren’t okay, when all of my ducks aren’t in a row, and that I couldn’t have picked a better year to build up these muscles, and instead of trying to rail against reality, I choose to meet it open-heartedly, which is hard, and it hurts, but it’s also so much less impossible.

March 4, 2022

It’s Here, It’s There….

Images of Waiting for a Star to Fall out and about in the world lately, including in the company of a couple of excellent mugs.

March 2, 2022

Gleanings

• It has long been said that good fences make good neighbours and, sitting in the middle of this pandemic, I am convinced that a nice solid wall might make me a better person, or at least one who loses her temper with her children less often.
• In caring for a little piece of earth, one rejects the idea that scale is all that matters, or that all worthwhile labor is paid labor. One creates unruly beauty for its own sake.
• These individual stars expand into greater constellations, and it is up to the reader to do their part in piecing them together, recognizing the links and the shapes — in a sense, building the community.
• Here’s the thing about numbers: they measure some things really well. Money coming in and going out, for example. The number of words written, the number of pitches/pieces/novels/poems/whatever you wrote. But they don’t measure everything. 
• It’s hard to settle in. (Understatement). Maybe we’re not supposed to settle in. I’m flitting from book to book, from Twitter to Instagram, from post to post, poem to poem. I don’t have answers; I’m looking for hope. I’m looking for wisdom. I don’t wish for consolation even, but evidence of deep thinking. Evidence of the human and the humane.
• If it was possible to control through monitoring and scrolling and aquiring information, hell, I would have had most of the world’s problems cased.
• “Each piece of paper I cut is a prayer.”
• I woke just before 2 a.m., wondering about Ukraine. Wondering. Rather than going downstairs in the dark to sit in front of this screen, doom-scrolling, I listened.

March 1, 2022

Sorrow and Bliss, by Meg Mason

Meg Mason’s novel Sorrow and Bliss is as wide ranging as its title suggests, ostensibly the story of one woman’s experience over decades with an unspecified mental illness, which is to say that it’s also a novel about family, relationships, work, intergenerational trauma, growing, learning, falling, stopping. It’s about mothers and sisters, cousins and aunts, one particularly loathsome ex-husband, and pregnancy and motherhood, and medicine, and mental health, and about Martha’s marriage, to Patrick who has loved her since she was 14, a solid home that Martha has finally managed to burn down.

I loved this book, even though it was also a series of gut punches, so terrifically heartbreaking, but also wondrously funny, and Martha’s point of view is why we stick around as readers, and why those who love her have persisted for so long, so matter her propensity to be difficult. Except that point of view is so fixed that Martha can’t really see how others see her, and isn’t very perceptive of their situations either, in particularly her husband whom she’s never properly regarded as a fully developed character, but instead just another player in the drama of Martha’s life.

This is a novel that channels Woolf, and Didion, and Where’d You Go Bernadette?, but also manages to be itself in the most refreshingly original way. So breezy (this is Martha’s charm, see) that the reader can almost forget the emotional stakes of it all, which is so much, and therein lies the novel’s power.

February 25, 2022

Signs of Hope

I am devastated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, by the toppling of our world order, and while my mental health is reeling, I am buoyed by how people all over the world, leaders and ordinary citizens, particularly within Russia itself, are standing in defiance of violence and tyranny, standing FOR democracy and freedom (which in this case actually means something, for once). We are all we have, and it’s so very precious, and it’s everything. Desperate for signs of hope tonight, I found this one newly installed on Brunswick south of Bloor, and it meant a lot to me. Sending love to wherever you are. And let’s abolish nuclear weapons so nobody else ever has to be this afraid again.

More:

• On Saturday February 26, I’m walking 5km to raise funds for my neighbours at the Fort York Food Bank as part of the Coldest Night of the Year fundraiser—it’s not too late to contribute if you’re able. You can donate here, and thank you!
• Did you know that I’m one of the jurors for the 2022 Kobzar Book Awards, which celebrates excellent books with a tangible connection to Ukrainian-Canadian culture? Learn more about the shortlist. The award will be presented on March 24.

February 25, 2022

The Sentence, by Louise Erdrich

“Even one person of a certain magnetism in this time can seize the energy and cause a maelstrom to form around each sentence they utter. One person can create a giant hurricane of unreality that feels like reality.

‘That’s what’s happening,’ she said. ‘Just look around.’

I didn’t have to. I felt like I could see everything—hatred valor, cruelty, mercy. It was all over the news and in the hospitals and all over me. Watching and waiting…had turned me inside out.”

I loved this extraordinary novel so completely, The Sentence a fiction made up of all kinds of pieces from the world, its characters including its author, Louise Erdrich herself, who flits in and out of the text, and with Birchbark Books, the independent bookshop Erdrich owns in Minneapolis, the backdrop for much of the story.

Set between November 2019 and November 2020, the novel’s protagonist is Tookie, an Indigenous woman struggling with returning to ordinary life after an incarceration, and who, on one of her shifts at Birchbark Books, is one of the first staff members to discern that the store is haunted by one very specific ghost, namely that of their most charmingly annoying customer, a white woman called Flora who had been an enthusiast for all things Indigenous.

As the trouble with Flora’s ghost escalates—she keeps knocking books onto the floor—much else is going on, of course—it’s 2020 after all. Tookie’s husband’s daughter—with whom Tookie has always had a fractious relationship—turns up with a newborn baby son. And then Louise takes off on a new book tour in mid-February, as news of a novel coronarvirus is becoming ever closer and closer to home, and I had such a visceral reaction to this part of the novel, back when everyone was wiping down surfaces and proceeding “out of an excess of caution.” Erdrich captures it so well, the looming dread, the incredible unknown, and the unfathomable way that time kept passing.

The bookshop closes to customers and Tookie and her colleagues find their work deemed “essential”, and so they spend their days socially distanced and packing up online orders, which arrive in surprising numbers. (Another visceral reaction for me was recalling that sad forever spring, and how wonderful and uplifting it was to have an order of books from local indies landing on our doorstep…) And Flora, or her ghost, at least, is still there, her presence becoming more urgent, beginning to seem dangerous.

But danger is everywhere after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis that May, killed by police at the store where Tookie’s husband goes sometimes. The city erupts in rage and violence (the chapter is called “Minneapolis Goddamn”), explosive and uncontainable, and Tookie fears for her loved ones and for the future, her own impressions and experiences of police violence kept close to her chest, but here and there they burble to the surface and recall her own sentence in prison, and are complicated by the fact that her husband is a former officer. But still she feels with all those grieving Black mothers, and she knows the names of the men who’ve gone before, and she knows too that Indigenous people are just as likely to be murdered by the police, but you’re probably not going to hear about it, these crimes happening in more remote places where people aren’t happening by with cellphone cameras.

This book is everything. Comedy, tragedy, current events, recommended reading list (it’s so gloriously bookish!), ghost story, love story, a story of community, and also a harrowing tale of individual survival and resilience, and I just loved it so much, and it found it to be a comfort in the light of our own tumultuous moment, reminding me of all the things that really matter and the spectacular possibilities of books.

February 23, 2022

Thinking More About Freedom

Today I went back and updated a list I’d put up at 49thShelf.com a few years ago, a list of challenged or banned Canadian books on the occasion of Freedom to Read Week. And I realized that my thoughts about censorship had been complicated in the years since I’d last checked out the list, when the idea of banning a book for its gratuitous sex or LGBTQ content seemed patently absurd and I was wholly onside with every person’s right to read Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners, never mind all the fucking (which was, not coincidentally, all the pages in my copy at which the spine had been broken). Freedom to read had once seemed easy to believe in.

But reading through the annotated list of challenged books, I was reminded that these things are complicated. Should the library in Victoria, BC, have gotten rid of their copy of Mog and the Granny, by Judith Kerr, because of its outdated terminology and stereotyped images of Indigenous people? Maybe yes? And is there a reason to retain the Dr. Seuss book with ethnic stereotyping? Maybe possibly? And how is this example different? (Spoiler: all kinds of ways!)

It occurs to me that this is why we have librarians, that libraries and all book collections require curating and culling, and that this is kind of thing is complicated, yet another issue for which asking questions is perhaps more important than having answers.

Something I’ve found curious in public discourse over the past few years is the forefronting of free speech as a fundamental tenet of our society. Not because free speech is not important, but why is it more important than, say, income equality, or physical safety, or access to education, or environmental protections? This question is complicated by the fact that the free speech question has been hitched to the wagons of all kinds of bad actors, that it’s possible to build a powerful platform on the basis of “cancel culture” backlash, and that far too often these conversations are ideologically driven and thoroughly devoid of intellectual curiosity. Sunlight is turning out not to be the best disinfectant, but instead an amplifier of hate and misinformation, and there are plenty of forces who are counting on that.

Voltaire never said it either, but there are more than a few people to whom I’d never utter the phrase, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” I continue to think that these are the abstract principles that sound perfectly reasonable when you assume that all things are equal, except they’re really not, and there are all kinds of factors in play, including race and gender, that only seem irrelevant if they’ve never factored in your experience. There’s a lot of hyperbole around harm, this is true (see Sarah Schulman’s Conflict is Not Abuse), but there’s a lot of “free speech” out there that’s pretty dangerous, disingenuous, and can hurt other people in demonstrable ways—vaccine disinformation, for example.

It felt weird to consider Freedom to Read Week in the context of 2022, after five years of living in an era in which free speech has been weaponized by some of the most awful people for personal/financial gain. I still very much believe in the principles of free speech and anti-censorship, but I no longer think that these things are uncomplicated or straightforward. The whole thing making me quite uncomfortable…but maybe that’s the point, that it’s supposed to.

And with all that in mind, this afternoon I listened to Brene Brown’s conversation with Ben Wizner of the ACLU, “Free Speech, Misinformation, and the Case for Nuance,” which was fascinating. I learned so much, had ideas clarified, and even changed my mind, which is a true sign that one is really thinking after all. The greatest takeaway was that it’s not big tech’s content moderation we should be blaming for undermining and eroding democracy, but instead their monopolies and their hoarding of resources which are working to hollow out the middle class in America and elsewhere, which perhaps might be the biggest thread to democracy of all.

February 22, 2022

Gleanings

• But I was there and I can tell you this: People at the convoy don’t want democracy. They want no rules. And that’s definitely not the same thing. 
• Censorship is on the march once again in North America.
• It was 43 years ago today that a friend called and asked if I’d like to join him and another poet for dinner before a reading that evening at Open Space down on Fort Street.
• How Cookbooks And James Barber Helped Me Find Fat Joy
• To be able to feel our feelings, to be with the whole spectrum of them, without added stories or narratives, but to turn towards and be with the sensations in our bodies, to let them “ferment and season” us can be so hard, so uncomfortable to do …
• The world is opening up and life is about to get enjoyable and exciting complicated.  What happens when all the divided parties meet again over the dinner table? How can we choose what our own personal normal looks like?
• So much of what my friends give me is intangible: the hope, the reassurance, the emphatic listening, a weekly dinner routine, a push to go for a walk, or snowshoe, or ski. It’s lovely to have these reminders surrounding me too. I am not alone. All will be well. 
• God, it is hard to grieve. So damn hard. How to incorporate these prickles of loss, joy, -with appreciation, love, self-reflections on our own mortality, a life reflected upon, memories of earliest life, and latest, all the temperatures mix and all at one single minute and then you are left on a ravaged beach after a tsunami. not even ready to look at the remains.
• The two things I’ve heard or read most often about grief are “it takes time” and “wait until you’re ready.” These are helpful comments, as far as anything is helpful; they lessen my anxiety and confusion by reminding me that there is no timeline, there are no rules, there are no ‘oughts’ that follow from this shocking and disruptive ‘is.’
• In a way this a biography. We certainly learn a lot about Orwell’s life. But more importantly we learn about the interconnections of a life with the the currents of history and movements. That an individual can apprehend the horrors of political systems, the damage done to humans, but can also find room for hope and optimism.
• I feel an affinity for my bathroom spider. I wonder if Charlotte has anything to do with that?
• It happens quite often, that I am drawn to a piece of art, one that I want to share here, but that I don’t because the artist’s statement gets in the way.

February 21, 2022

Bowling

One of the smartest and most affecting books I’ve read this year is Oliver Burkeman’s 4000 Weeks, which I’ve been thinking about all the time in the weeks since I’ve read it, how we think of time, and how we use it, and how we even imagine that time is something to be used. It’s a book that’s come around for me in a quieter season, when I’ve been stepping back from the hustle and taking time to recover after a rough couple of months. When I’ve been trying to come to terms with my own relationship to production and productivity, which is not quite the same as the cliched Instagram memes about the importance of rest and self-care, but is worth interrogating all the same.

Yesterday I went bowling. It’s the Family Day long weekend here in Ontario, and we went to visit my parents yesterday, going on a snowy winter walk with my dad in the early afternoon. Later on, we met my mom at the bowling alley, which is just the best place ever with its retro vibes and how instead of a refurbishment, they just decided to install black lights.

None of us knows how how to bowl, really, and even if we did, it’s five pin bowling, which I don’t think actually counts. My mom had asked for our lane not to have bumpers, but for some reason we ended up with them anyway, which was possibly for the best and meant the children had more fun…and not just the children. I hadn’t a clue how scoring works, and can’t believe that once upon a time you had to figure it out yourself on a scorecard with the air of a tiny pencil, but thankfully none of us were tasked with such a thing, because these days a computer does all the work, the numbers it was generating seeming altogether random. But no matter, because we were there to have fun, not for competition, which brings me back to our original point: none us actually knows how to bowl.

So there we were, hurling a small ball down the aisle, illuminated by black light while loud music played and the only thing you could hear over it were the cheers of the bowlers whenever anybody knocked down a pin, or got a strike, or (in the case of our group) when we failed to do either.

I actually managed to get a strike a few times, but bowling arm becoming more confident and effective as the time went by, and I was a little impressed with myself, but not entirely.

Instead, what I was thinking, was what a joy it was to while my time like this, playing a game with people I loved whose rules were seemingly arbitrary, bumpers making failing altogether impossible, the inconsequentiality of all of it so essential to the experience. As close as you can get to doing nothing while doing something. There was not a single stake except togetherness, and having fun, and it was so easy to be present, and then eventually, after an hour or so, we’d all had enough, so we took off our rental shoes and went home.