January 18, 2022
Gleanings
- Compare these two sentences: “My feelings are hurt.” versus “You hurt my feelings.”
- I stretch, starfished across the bed. What shall I do with this day, I wonder?
- We can’t turn off our fear of these unknowns. But here’s what I do know: It’s time to untangle morality from health. For our kids and for ourselves.
- Why do I hate asking for help, SO MUCH?? And here’s where things get ugly. Because I think I know the answer, and I don’t like it.
- In my experience, the most dramatic of the mama bears are those with the least realistic threats—the White, privileged moms, like me, who are used to getting things our way.
- For years, she was a jumble sale of smocked Liberty dresses, stripy leggings, glittery shoes and some ridiculously large flower on her noggin.
- So I’m having my bubblebath, this little self-care ritual that is really just a drop in the bucket of self-care that we all need, but at least it’s something, and I’d been wondering about how one even goes about collectively or as a group thinking-things-through these day when we’re all so separate.
- Yes, people wax on about how rewarding parenting is, and it is, but sometimes you can’t see that until later. Sometimes you’re so much into the just doing and coping and wondering and worrying above all else if you’re getting it right.
- The amount of this time stretch right now is practically imperceptible—only about a minute or so on either side—but it’s enough.
- And so I leapt … And found myself right back where I was … here, with the full-bellied yes to write random blog posts for no apparent reason other than joy and desire, rather than academic papers with long bibliographies and MLA-style references, that will be evaluated and praised.
- I sew my irregular stitches, never improving, while the world is on fire, dark with war, shadowy figures conspiring to violence, rafts sinking, and my only effort this morning is to stack logs by the woodstove and hope for the best.
January 17, 2022
Snow Day
My intentions for the next while are all about open-heartedness, about meeting what the world delivers instead of imagining that I might manage to out-maneuvre it somehow. Especially since…I was never really in control of anything anyway and imagining that I was just made me crazy.
And I think that there is nothing better than a wild walloping of a snowstorm to drive that point home. To remind me that sometimes just submitting is beautiful, to call all bets off, the usual rules not applying, the landscape rearranged. No school today. There’s been not a lot of work getting done.
We walk on the road and periodically sit down on the sidewalks, and embrace what the day has handed us.
January 17, 2022
Forever Birchwood, by Danielle Daniel
I could not have loved Danielle Daniel’s Forever Birchwood any better, her middle grade debut following her success as an author/illustrator with picture books including the award-winning Sometimes I Feel Like a Fox. (Daniel also published a memoir The Dependent in 2016; her first novel for adults, Daughters of the Deer, is coming in March; Danielle Daniel is no slouch!).
Forever Birchwood is a dream of a book, the perfect pick for anybody who ever longed to start a babysitting club or is still thinking about Judy Blume’s Just as Long As We’re Together. A nice dose of nostalgia for those of us who grew up reading those books brand new, Daniel’s novel is set during the 1980s during the week of Wolf’s thirteenth birthday as she and her three best friends begin to contemplate the possibility of changes ahead. Wolf is also close to her grandmother, who educates her about her Indigenous ancestors’ ties to the natural world, which makes Wolf feel extra devastated at the prospect of Birchwood, her friends’ clubhouse and the nature around it, being torn down to make way for a new subdivision. Even worse, Wolf’s real-estate mom is pro-development and she and her new boyfriend Roger are spearheading the project.
The most delightful part of this story, which features all the hallmarks of middle grade goodness, is its specificity. Set in Sudbury, Ontario, where Daniel was born and raised, the story takes on the unique aspects of Sudbury’s culture and landscape. Wolf and her friends are passionate about Sudbury’s regreening plan, reforestation and clean-up to counter decades of industrial pollution, which makes their attachment to wild places and the trees and animals there so much more precious. Sudbury’s mining industry, obviously, plays a big role in their characters lives—Wolf keeps special possessions in her grandfather’s old miners’ lunchbox. Mining is dangerous, perilous work, but it’s also the foundation their town is built on.
I don’t read tons of middle grade fiction, but Forever Birchwood is the kind of title that makes me question why that is. The story and characters show emotional complexity, the story’s packed with emotional heft, and while part of the appeal was definitely nostalgia, this novel has a unique and creative richness that is entirely its own.
I’m going to be interviewing Danielle Daniel at her book launch this Saturday. If you’d like to join us and pick up a copy from Another Story Books (and you should!) registration and purchasing information can be found right here.
January 14, 2022
Let’s Make It Work
Evergreen as we move through the weeks of this difficult winter.
“And of course it’s not the best, but I’ve been doing my best to learn from this time, to resist the way my own instincts are drawn toward certainty, rules, and constraints, even though that’s not really how the world goes. Last fall as families were making the call between in-person schooling and virtual learning, it was fascinating me that while we spend a lot of time posturing about there never being one right choice in regards to parenting, this really was one of those rare circumstances in which this was actually true. To the point where it really didn’t matter much what side you came out on, because nobody was sure of which was the right one, and all of us were just doing the best we could with the information that we had.
I have found it fascinating for there not to really be rules, for safety to be quantifiable. All of using the tools we have at our disposal to mitigate risk, to take those chances which are worthwhile for us to take. 18 months in, we know enough that this is finally getting to the point of being less frightening than genuinely interesting, license for each of us as individuals to think about what’s right for us. To be thoughtful and deliberate in our choices, and they don’t have to be the same as everyone else’s, and that’s really okay.”
I am trying to be openhearted, trying to operate from a place of understanding in regards to where other people are coming from. I am trouble by the reflexive thinking that’s always looking for someone to blame—other people, our leaders, failed systems, etc. But pitting blame doesn’t help. It isn’t even really real, because a virus is a formidable foe (I hope we have a new government in Ontario in June, but even if we had a different government now, all these things would still be a challenge) and it’s going to find the weakest part of any system, even those systems that are built on strength.
Which is not to say that our systems are robust by any means. But name me a system that is? I have doubts about the perfectibility of anything built by human beings, because imperfection is our very essence. (Speak for yourself, you say. Oh, but I am!)
All of us such flawed, fallible, fearful beings. And yet—we’re all we have.
January 12, 2022
Outside, by Sean McCammon
I’ve learned to be wary of stories about white guys finding themselves in Japan, particularly as someone who has lived in Japan myself, because I’ve met those guys (yikes!), but Sean McCammon’s debut novel Outside was a smart and soulful take on those tropes.
The novel weaves two narratives: the story of David’s first year teaching elementary school, and his urge to take his class outside and into wild spaces, which eventually leads to a devastating tragedy; and the story of David’s escape to Kyoto in the aftermath, where he’s strung out on pharmaceuticals, suffering from PTSD, broken and lost, and finds refuge in the company of a group of other travellers and Japanese people who eventually become his friends.
It’s a quiet narrative, but the reader is compelled through the story by the ominousness of what David is running from and the desire to discover what happened.
Outside is a story about teaching, learning, responsibility, grief, connection and human goodness. I especially like how McCammon gets at the peculiarities of gaijin culture without resorting to tired cliches—a tricky balance.
I really liked this book.
January 11, 2022
Gleanings
- For a while, grief is the only thing—but then the noise of life begins again. Now, as we pick up some of the pieces of what was once just routine, we all find ourselves confused by sudden vertiginous shifts between familiarity and estrangement.
- Though snow swirled yesterday and the roads were icy, though ravens have begun their courtship over our woods, acrobats of love, though the house is quiet and the cat is sleeping, I am happy to have reached my 67th birthday as the days grow a little longer and the sun dreams of summer.
- What secrets might be inside? Who could resist opening that little door? Definitely not me. Inside I found a small purple book which encouraged those who discovered it to share their dreams.
- Books did a lot of heavy lifting in getting me through this past year, I’ll tell you what.
- But I’m also very aware, increasingly so, that there’s more years behind me than ahead of me. And that these days, months, years are not to be frittered away being busy or seeking merely to be entertained or, god forbid, working on ‘self-improvement’.
- “It’ll be a mess,” one reporter said, “and in 24 hours it’ll be over“, and of course he was right.
- As for me, I do want to make of my life art. I want to be a witness to splendour. I want to get as much down as possible, whether by the light of photography or by the light of my weird noticing.
And one more (extra special) post! Kathy, whose excellent blog is Little Yellow Bungalow, wrote a really kind and generous post about her experience as part of Blog School’s MAKE THE LEAP course in September. My next course starts on the first of February, in just under a month. Sign up today to join us!
January 11, 2022
Old Year in the Books
Once again, we spent the final days of our old year putting photographic highlights in a photo album, an act that reminded me that 2021 was actually filled with a lot of light and joy, in addition to the challenges which seemed so front of mind as we’re facing a whole new wave of the pana-rama-ding-dong.
Printing photos is one of those new year’s resolutions that it’s not too late for you to try.
Check out Diane Schuller’s post with some tips on how to make it happen!
(You will be glad you did. My daughters take such pleasure in flipping through our albums, which have been regularly piled on the floor over the past two weeks…)
January 10, 2022
If the sun’s rays fall on the table, and nobody LIKES it, does the sun even shine?
I was explaining how important Instagram had become to me as a practice of paying attention, of noticing. “The way the sun falls across my kitchen table throughout the day.” And I was asked if I’d still be able to do that without posting, making me consider what it means to have an app as an intermediary between me and the world that I’m supposedly paying attention to. It’s interesting—why do I feel like I want to work everything out in public? A question I’ve never really known the answer to, or maybe I do and it’s somewhat self-indulgent. When I’m teaching writing via blogging, I put it down to the form’s epistolary origins. To blog (which, for many of us, is what Instagramming is) is to be asking, “Is anybody out there?” (Though is it also to be demanding, “Look at me?”?) What if, “Is anybody out there?” isn’t even the question I need to be asking anymore?
Last week, I felt like everything I read was a message to my wondering soul. Courtney E. Martin’s newsletter, and this post from artist Lisa Congdon about how, “Lately, though, I’ve been feeling like a don’t always have something to say that hasn’t already been said…” But/and then I listened to poet Maggie Smith on the JOMOcast (and immediately ordered her journal and new book, Keep Moving, from which the journal is inspired) and she was talking about the usefulness of working things out in public, about not having to feel like there is a divide between one’s public and private selves—and I get that. It’s everything to me.
And yet. I guess the idea of fashioning being into some kind of performance makes me tremendously uneasy right now. There is a certain self-consciousness to it that’s tripping me up, and it hasn’t always been this way, but maybe it’s just that I’m more conscious of all kinds of things than I’ve been in the past, my self just one item among them, and so it feels like a performance, whereas it didn’t used to?
Is hyper-conciousness a thing? Because maybe considering this is the beginning of articulating what I’m going through right now, picking up on all the vibes, and I’m looking for what’s real and solid instead of what’s trending, what’s distracting, what’s noise. On the sun on the table, I suppose, even when it’s not posted for everyone to see. On this blog, which is somewhat of a more private place.
What would happened if I really zoomed in, intent on focus? This day, this house, this moment. Right now?
January 7, 2022
The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, by Eva Jurczyk
Eva Jurczyk’s debut novel The Department of Rare Book and Special Collection ticks all my boxes—bookish mystery, rare book thieves, library setting, weirdo librarian characters, Toronto setting, and intriguingly feminist. Curiously, Jurczyk arrived at the idea for her book and her protagonist Liesl after she became a parent and began pondering the invisibility of women, specifically older women…and then she went and wrote a novel about a woman who’s about sixty, which isn’t the usual trajectory for a new mom/novelist, is all I’m saying.
And so Liesl was not who I was expecting, especially based on the book’s otherwise quite compelling cover which might mislead a reader (and it certainly did me) into thinking I wasn’t picking up a book about a character with decades of backstory behind her, a story about a woman in a long marriage with a grown daughter, a woman on the verge of retirement with plans of finally writing that book about gardening she’s been thinking about all these years.
But then plans get called off when the Director of the Rare Books Library (which may or may not be influenced by the Thomas Fisher…) where Liesl works is incapacitated by a stroke, and she has to step into acting in his role. Which her colleagues are put out by, never mind the university president with his ubiquitious bike helmet and obsequious regard for major donors. All of which would be annoying enough, but then Liesl begins to realize that things at the library are not what they seem, that any number of her colleagues could be keeping secrets, and then one of those colleagues goes missing, but no one wants Liesl to involve the police.
The bookish mystery here is fun and interesting, though it’s Liesl’s own story that’s most remarkable and compelling about this book, and I admire the deft way in which Jurczyk sets her character just past midlife (don’t tell any baby boomers I wrote that…) and yet manages to develop a rich and textured backstory without awkward exposition. Liesl’s relationship with her husband John is my very favourite part of this book, such a deep and sensitive portrayal of a long and complicated relationship. John has struggled with depression over their years together, the reader is able to understand, and I kept waiting for this to become a plot point (and so does Leisl, actually, ever aware of how the bottom can fall out) but (SPOILER ALERT) it really doesn’t.
I don’t know that I’ve ever read a novel before in which loving somebody with mental illness is incidental to the story, but also it informs our understanding of Liesl, and her experiences with John in the past will inform the challenges she encounters at work where she feels like she’s been stymied at every turn.
The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections was my first book of 2022, and it started off my literary year on such a high note. Even better? On January 21 at 1pm, I’ll be interviewing Jurczyk for her virtual event with the Toronto Public Library. You can register here if you’d like to attend. I’m really looking forward to it.
January 6, 2022
What I read on my holidays…
The end-of-year holidays is my very favourite reading period, when I shun new releases and top of the bestseller charts, and devote my time to smelly paperbacks I found in Little Free Libraries, novels I bought at used bookstores years ago with the best intentions but still haven’t read yet, and other books that have been sitting on my to-be-read shelf for far too long. It’s also the holiday where I’m not travelling, where my days are mostly full of hours to fill with reading (staying in bed for ages in the morning, reading all afternoon…) especially since it’s also the time of year where I mostly abandon the internet.
I love reading in the holidays because I get to finally make a dent in my epic to-be-read pile, to feel less overwhelmed by all the books before me and to get down to brass tacks. It was WONDERFUL.
Dear Exile, by Hilary Liftin and Kate Montgomery
I first read this book almost 20 years ago after stealing it from the youth hostel where I was living at the time, far across an ocean away from my own dear friends, including one that was named Kate. And so this story of two friends post-college on separate continents was very resonant, I recall. And then I mostly forgot about it…until I realized that my next novel, about two best friends, had definitely been informed by Dear Exile. And so I purchased a secondhand copy online and read it all again, and was bowled over by how extraordinarily good Liftin and Montgomery’s writing is. I don’t think anyone would ever publish that I sent my friends in a book. Also offers an extraordinary glimpse of late 90s dot.com work culture, whose tail end I had a sense of a few years later. A more innocent time. THE CYBERSEX!
*
When Things Fall Apart, by Pema Chodran
As I’ve written already, I rolled into the holidays in a mental health crisis, and so this title spoke to me when I encountered it on the shelves of the best store in the city. Definitely the book I needed in the moment—this book has showed me a glimpse of a world in which I don’t always need to be freaking out about what’s around the corner and instead just focussing on right now. Even if right now is hard.
*
Rocks Don’t Move, by Shari Kasman
Kasman and I have been sharing a swim lane on Mondays for a few months now (and we will again!), and after I read about her new book in The Toronto Star, I knew I had to have a copy. It was a remarkable book to read after When Things Fall Apart, actually, which its emphasis on subjectivity. What is a fact? What’s a feeling? An opinion? And what is community? This book grapples with these questions rather marvellously.
*
Sport, by Louise Fitzhugh
I either found this book in a Little Free Library or picked it up at a used bookstore this summer to add to my Louise Fitzhugh collection—and when it still felt like things were falling apart for me, to sit in my bathtub one Sunday night reading this while eating leftover fried chicken just felt like the greatest thing in the world.
*
Dirty Birds, by Morgan Murray
I met Murray in November when we both attended the Wordstock Sudbury Book Festival. Our hotel was as far away from the airport as was physically possible that weekend, and so we had lots of time to get to know each other in the airport van. Morgan Murray is notable for being a man who read my novel who is neither my relative nor a friend (though I might consider him one now—he’s wonderful). His debut novel was also nominated for the Leacock Prize and was such a delight to finally encounter. It has footnotes, AND cartoons. I really enjoyed it.
*
Voices in the Evenings, by Natalia Ginzburg
I’ve read a Natalia Ginzburg book over the past two winter holidays, and so was excited to read this one, which came out in English just this year. Truthfully, I loved it less than I’ve loved her other novels, but I loved them a lot, so that’s not saying much. She’s wonderful.
*
The Flatshare, by Beth O’Leary
I found this book in a Little Free Library this fall and knew I’d be looking for something light and cheerful. Like the Mhairi McFarlane book I read this summer, it was not as light as you think, but that’s probably why I liked it. Great character, some emotional complexity. Initially I was a bit suspicious that a novel about two flatmates who never meet would work…but it did!
*
The Ravine, by Phyllis Brett Young
Phyllis Brett Young’s The Torontonians is a beloved novel for me, and The Ravine is a noir novel she published under a pseudonym a few years later, reissued by Vehicule Press’s Ricochet Books with an introduction by Amy Lavender Harris, who was the whole reason I discovered The Torontonians in the first place. I really liked it—sinister, over the top, but with some interesting complexity and bit of a Shirley Jackson/Peyton Place England edge.
*
A Room Called Earth, by Madeleine Ryan
I spent a lot of early 2021 ordering books online from indie bookstores and this one was a title I threw into the order to make it worth my while. I read it on Christmas, which turned out to be perfect, because it was set at Christmas, albeit in Australia. Madeleine Ryan, who is autistic, writes about a character who herself is neurodiverse, though this is not made explicit in the text itself. Instead, the reader gets to see the world through the character’s unique perspective, which is extraordinary.
*
Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village, by Maureen Johnson
I gave this book to my husband for Christmas, as we’ve spent a lot of time watching Midsomer Murders together over the years, and it proved a lot of fun. Our daughter also read it and related because she’s a fan of Johnson’s Truly Devious series.
*
Orwell’s Roses, by Rebecca Solnit
I received Orwell’s Roses as a Christmas present, the latest from Rebecca Solnit, who’s become well known for her pamphletty essay collections on politics and feminism, but whose larger literary projects (especially informed by her background as a geographer) were how I fell in love with her work in the first place. In this delightful meandering book, she reflects on a garden of roses Orwell planted at his home in Wallingford, Oxfordshire, and how this and other factors complicate common perceptions of the writer. Orwell continues to be fascinating for his critique of the USSR and authoritarianism all the while not becoming a right-wing nutjob in response, which was the usual trajectory.
*
Turn, Magic Wheel, by Dawn Powell
I bought this book at a used bookstore years ago, and have been failing to pick it up for years. Dawn Powell published this in the 1930s and her obscurity has been lamented by such forces as Fran Lebowitz and Rory Gilmour. It is exquisite, sharp and clever, full of edges and surprises.
*
Eleanor and Park, by Rainbow Rowell
Rowell’s Attachments was one of my favourite books of last year, and everyone told me that I had to read Eleanor and Park, which I think we found at Value Village. And I really liked it.
*
If You Want to Make God Laugh, by Bianca Marais
Also so happy to finally read this novel by Bianca Marais, whose podcast has been a big part of my year.
*
My Mom Had an Abortion, by Beezus Murphy
And then this book arrived in the mail, which I’d supported through its Kickstarter—it was so well done, telling such an ordinary story that doesn’t get addressed enough—how many of us only exist at all because of an abortion. It’s a graphic novel geared to teens and manages to address what’s simple and complicated about abortion all at once.
*
To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis
And omg, this book, this book!! Be still, by Dorothy L Sayers/Barbara Pym/Jumble Sale loving heart, all wrapped up in a bonkers time travel plot. This novel was a gift and such a perfect novel to be reading as the new year began. (Grateful to Lindsay for the recommendation!)
