January 5, 2022

Shedding Stories

“Historically, you’d be more likely to find me evangelizing about the power of story, but these days, something else is happening. I’m shedding stories. I think people all over the country are. We’re turning away from trite, flat stories of the past (so much pain was redacted). We’re turning away from triumphant, entitled stories of the future (it requires so much denial). We’re admitting we are not authors in control, but unwitting characters, trying to ride waves of unknown narrative.

We’re settling into the small, fragile present. Into basic observation: this is my body, breathing in and out; this is my child, turning poker chips into macaroons; this is the feeling of my favorite sweatshirt and a 400-year-old tree and the light that emanates from a candle in a paper bag. This is my grief right beside my joy, my rage right beside my gratitude.”

—Courtney Martin, “Do not hope; instead observe.”

January 5, 2022

Spring 2022 Books on the Radio

What a delight to return to CBC Ontario Morning today to talk upcoming books I’m looking forward to in the next few months. You can listen to my segment here—I come on at 42.30.

January 4, 2022

Gleanings: Happy New Year!

• But COVID predictions, like election predictions, are often mostly about escaping from the feeling of unease and unreality and uncertainty that dominates the current moment.
• Was I really grieving the marriage all that time? All those jokes, that mistake of identifying myself as cold, or hard-hearted? Grief? Really? It makes me weep for the woman I have been.
• I am hesitantly stepping into 2022, much like stepping onto a frozen pond, not sure if the ice is solid enough to hold me.
• In 2021 I read 49 books, and I loved them all.
• …and our hearts each beat probably around 100, 000 times and the light of the day got the teeniest of a fraction longer, because this earth we all live on is orbiting a sun out in a galaxy and universe beyond that which we can even fathom.
• But as we all know, being top of the class means very little later in life, with how you might actually live your life.
• That’s a gift of living in pandemic times, for those of us who’d imagined we had more control over things — we get to see and feel and know how precarious our plans were all along.
• In any case, I don’t think any book I’ve written has ended up being what I thought I was going to write.
• It’s possible that R will never get the cookie he wants since he’s fixated on a memory of a variation that cannot be repeated. I should also add that the challenge is entirely in my own head. It doesn’t matter to him whether I make the cookies or not. But if I make them, he will offer an opinion. That is our dynamic. 
• What makes a house, a home? For starters, I would hope we can all agree it doesn’t have to be a house.
• I think, in some alternate universe, if the coat had been fine and never wrecked by moths, I wouldn’t want to wear it.
• Resolutions tend to be removing things from our life or ‘improving’ ourselves or how we do things. Bunk to that. Instead I want to focus on what I can add to my life to make it better, happier, more fulfilling. I want to focus on what I can do to bring more carefree joy to my life.
• This makes me question my own life’s ambition to write a biographical novel of Harriet Vane. But maybe that’s different because she is already a fictional character? I will have to ponder this…
• Today I whittled my inbox down to the essentials. I chased payments and worried over invoices. I put on a pot of beans. I tried to move gracefully from working in a quiet apartment with a scrappy mouse for company to navigating the converging energies of five whole humans at the end of their long days.
• I’ve found that these types of reading “goals”—the resolution to read books that challenge my expectations and complacency, that provide unexpected pleasures, that a small business believes in—have enriched my life in a way that “read all the XX nominees” or “read all the bestsellers” or “read XXX number of books” doesn’t.
• If I were to pick a word for the upcoming year, it would probably have to be contingency.

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 4, 2022

More Best Books

Maybe one of my New Year’s resolutions is to read more off the beaten track, just the way I did on my holiday break (more on that coming this week, you know you want it…). The above books were some of my favourite books I read last year that weren’t published last year. Each one made my reading year rich and interesting.

January 3, 2022

My Novel in STELLAR Company

A very pleasant end-of-year surprise for me was the inclusion of Waiting for a Star to Fall on this amazing end-of-year round-up! Thank you, Rochelle!

January 3, 2022

The Old Year Broke Me

The old year broke me—it did! Which I should have seen coming. Scrolling back in my Instagram feed, I realize that I spent much of November overwhelmed by difficult emotions, mostly stress and sadness. While my own situation was pretty stable, I was feeling everything in the world so deeply, and then the advent of a new pandemic wave absolutely sent me over the edge. And not even the prospect of the wave itself, but everyone else’s perception of it. I saw a news headline at some point mid-December which was, “Holiday Health Advice from 150 Experts,” which pretty much summed it up for me, too many voices in my head. It began to feel like everybody’s Instagram stories were yelling at me, and there was so much doom, which I suppose some people felt was informative, but in my fragile state I interpreted it all as, “We’re all going to die.” It felt like, I told my husband, there was an asteroid heading straight for me. I was having panic attacks, spending nights mostly awake in abject terror that the airplane flying over my house was in fact end times. One day, coming out of the gym, I caught a glimpse of the 24 hour news channel that absolutely destroyed me. My panicked responses were just like I’d been in the first wave of the pandemic, which was SO ANNOYING because I’d already looked back and realized how useless and idiotic my reactions to the crisis had been. AND NOW I WAS DOING IT AGAIN!

Except I didn’t. I called my doctor, after dropping my daughter off at the bus stop and walking up Major Street weeping, the same way I’d wept 12 years previous when that same daughter was born and I was sure I didn’t have Post-Partum Depression and it was just that everything was awful, but only now I understood that it wasn’t that simple. That everything might be awful, but that there’s still no reason to be crying like that, to have to bear the load this way. That maybe the feelings and chemicals rushing through my body have far less of a connection to what’s actually going on in the world, even if those things are hard, than I really understand. No, I surrendered, because I absolutely couldn’t do this. “I just want to be put into a coma for the next three months,” I kept saying, which at the time I thought seemed perfectly reasonable.

I couldn’t have timed it better. (Look at me, optimizing my mental health breakdown, whee!). I put on a pair of trackpants and a sweatshirt, and leaned right into cozytown. The daily toll of worrying about school outbreaks was getting to me, but we made it to the end, and the world seemed to be shutting down a bit just as I kind of needed it to. I finished up my work for the year. I started my holiday reading, and decided that our holiday television indulgence would be Ted Lasso, instead of the bleak murder mystery I’d been gunning for. I got a prescription for Lorazapam, to use as needed, and it helped so much, and then my friend Kate helped connect me with a therapist colleague who even managed to fit me in for a session before her own holidays began, and all of this—as well of the quiet of Christmas, reading When Things Fall Apart, by Pema Chodran, and disconnecting from all those too many voices—helped me so much to feel stable and safer again, though the process of finding balance will be, of course, ongoing.

So that was my December, and it’s all been very intense, and also illuminating, and I am grateful to have so many new tools in my belt as we head into what will no doubt be a winter of pandemic challenges (my pool reopened today and i got to go swimming this morning before it closed again this afternoon due to new provincial restrictions, which include a delay of in-person schooling, all of this probably for the best, but also disconcerting, because there is no careful planning involved, instead it’s like somebody shooting darts with their eyes shut).

In the weeks ahead, I am intent on working on the nature of just being, even in more challenging moments, instead of being overwhelmed by anger and judgment, right and wrong, good or bad. I also want to do better at keeping everyone else’s voices, thoughts, rage and anxieties out of my head. Because Instragram, which was the last social medium that brought me pleasure (though it still does, but omg, stop sharing screenshotted tweets. If I wanted to be on Twitter, I would be on Twitter, and I don’t!) was such a big trigger into my mental health spiral, I’ve also become really wary of of the platform and less excited about creating on it.

And so leaning into #BackToTheBlog is going to be a big part of my 2022 plan, I think. Writing stuff out on Instagram and elsewhere has been a huge part of me processing our experience those last few years, but I’m losing interest in process, or at least in what’s intended as the result of it. Something succinct, and conclusive, a revelation. Except I find myself in a moment where I don’t feel like I know anything at all, which is just fine I think, and I’m happy to sit with that unknowingness—as opposed to the wild speculation that delivered me nothing but anxiety and pain. And here on my blog, I think, is the ideal place to do this.

So, Happy New Year. (And really, I mean it!)

December 15, 2021

2021: Books of the Year

• Ghosts, by Dolly Alderton
• Phosphorescence, by Julia Baird
• The Most Precious Substance on Earth, by Shashi Bhat
• Constant Nobody, by Michelle Butler Hallett
• The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym, by Paula Byrne
• The Prairie Chicken Dance Tour, by Dawn Dumont
• Tainna, by Norma Dunning
• Half Life, by Krista Foss
• A Womb in the Shape of a Heart, by Joanne Gallant
• Instamom, by Chantel Guertin
• Early Morning Riser, by Katherine Heiny
• Accidentally Engaged, by Farah Heron
• How the One Armed Sister Sweeps Her House, by Cherie Jones
• Time Squared, by Lesley Krueger
• The Girl From Dream City, by Linda Leith
• The Souvenir Museum, by Elizabeth McCracken
• Summerwater, by Sarah Moss
• Big Reader, by Susan Olding
• Our Darkest Night, by Jennifer Robson
• Beautiful World, Where Are You, by Sally Rooney
• Wayward, by Dana Spiotta
• Lucky, by Marissa Stapley
• Fight Night, by Miriam Toews
• A Lethal Lesson, by Iona Whishaw
• The Fourth Child, by Jessica Winter
• Crying in H Mart, by Michelle Zauner

December 8, 2021

The Books of the Years

I’ve written different versions of this post a million times over the years, about the books that are launched into the world and how hard it is to tell as an author, for most of us, if our books ever really land, because while there are several metrics for taking stock of these things—awards nominations, rave reviews, billboards, celebrity endorsements, bestseller lists, appearing on the New York Times Notable list, etc—there are so many books and so few opportunities that most of us won’t end up making any of these. Which can be crazy-making, which I know from experience, and also every time I post anything like this, someone responds with an angry comment how about how I still haven’t reviewed their book yet*—one woman once did this ELEVEN YEARS after she’d sent me her book, which I’d say is a long time to hold a grudge, but then I’m an author too, so I get it.

But also, you’ve got to let that shit go.

It is very hard to release a book in Canada in 2021, and while I would have told you the same thing when I published my first book back in 2014, since then it’s only gotten harder. But one thing that’s the very same is the author’s lack of control over most of it, even if you hire a super fancy publicist.

Which is really hard, of course—that you can’t make magic happen. But also: the magic is going to happen without you, which is the very point of magic.

I’ve written this too before: the life of a book is long, and your book is out there in the world being picked up and put down, and picked up again, read, and reread, borrowed and lost, and found, and shelved, and picked up again. Even if you don’t know about it, it’s happening.

Yesterday I published 49thShelf’s Books of the Year list, a job I so enjoy being tasked with because I know how much it will mean for each and every author to have their book recognized by our humble little list. And I have another list of my very own coming up soon, with a few overlaps, another chance to shine light on the titles that I’ve loved best, but also to take stock and make sense of my own reading year. It’s really personal, mostly, and as arbitrary as any of these lists really are, in that they mean everything, and nothing at all.

Also yesterday, Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club announced their December pick, which is a big deal, this decade’s version of Oprah’s, and it just so happens to be my good pal Marissa’s latest novel Lucky, which came out in Canada in the spring, a truly life-changing opportunity for an author, and this is the kind of magic I’m talking about, a game of fortune and chance, and it’s the one thing that just can’t be plotted. I think we ought to just be grateful that they happen to anyone, and be glad we live in a world where books are still hot commodities, even if it might not be our specific books enough of the time….

To just keep going, and writing, and reading, and dreaming, and to be a part of the literary fabric of the world at all, as readers and writers alike—what a privilege that is. Most of the time, though it doesn’t pay the rent, it’s even enough.

December 8, 2021

Gleanings

• Art is such low stakes. Nothing depends on me getting a painting just right, not even my happiness! No one’s life depends on what I make. Nothing bad is going to happen if I don’t make art. And yet…
• For a writer, what’s important aren’t the tools but the words–except that I’m also a human animal who likes her creature comforts.
• In fact, it looks to me like there’s a resurgence of blogging as people seek out alternatives to being at the mercy of the social media bully boys. And why wouldn’t they? Social media is super convenient and lots of fun, but it’s also governed by a gang of democracy-crushing, money-hoarding, self-obsessed narcissists. It makes sense to seek out an alternative.
• I will miss you, little brother– maker of the best wooden toys, travel companion, shoulder to cry on, world’s best uncle, teaser extraordinaire, reasonable sounding board, and last of the male Pinniger line.
• They talk about traditions as being anchors, when we’re feeling unmoored, providing a place for us to hang our hats and connect the dots to our real here and now life … traditions as ways to mark us as who we are and attempt to draw us back to the places where we feel like we belong and come from.
• …sharing the food that I love to make, that I drool over and lick my lips in anticipation of, feels like an act of joy, pleasure and love towards the beautiful fat body that is my home.
• Meander too is Greek in origin, though now located in Turkey, near the ancient Greek city of Miletus, a river that gave its name to a concept.
• You still have to have a feeling of people here,” Cayley recalls Wells saying. “Not just your zombies and your billionaires and your underground bunker. That will not carry you.”
• So really, it’s thanks to sandwiches that I’m feeling more myself.
• Struggle is pivotal to books and movies, drawing us in, keeping us reading or watching. And yet, when struggle or conflict happens in real life, we want it gone.
• The town of Frank is the home of the famous Frank Slide where, in 1903, an entire side of Turtle mountain came tumbling down in an avalanche of rocks, some the size of crates others the size of boxcars.

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December 2, 2021

The People Who Can’t Understand, But They Do

The people I’m grateful for are the people who can’t understand, but they do.

“We share the similarities of our stories, lamenting the invisible pain of women, and I discover the physical side of abortions is the same whether they are unwanted or chosen.” —Joanne Gallant, A WOMB IN THE SHAPE OF A HEART

The people who could never imagine having an abortion themselves, who think they wouldn’t be able to live with themselves if they did. The people whose beloved babies were born at 26 weeks and had to fight for their lives. The people raised in religions where abortion is presented as anathema. People who can’t shake the ableism baked into arguments for reproductive rights. The people who gave birth to their first child at age 17, and it was the best thing that ever happened to them. The people who longed for babies they were never able to have. The people who’ve spent years pummelled by grief at babies lost before six weeks. The people who were themselves adopted and raised in happy families, and who are so glad they’re here.

And I’m not just talking about those people who might have experienced any one or more of these things, and had abortions also, because there are so many of these people. Each of us, of course, contains multitudes.

But no, the I mean the kind of person who would never celebrate abortion, for whom, perhaps, abortion makes their heart hurt.

And yet.

They know that every woman’s circumstance is different. They know they have no idea what it might be to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. They know that abortion, to so many of us, has nothing but life, our lives, the greatest liberation, to choose our own destinies. (As opposed to those destinies being decided by arbitrary laws, by strangers, or imperfect ideologues who’ve stacked a “supreme” court.)

They know that abortion happens, has always happened, and will continue to happen, even if it has to go on under the cover of darkness. And they know that if this is the case, people will die.

They know that abortions happen least often in places where abortion is most accessible, because in places where abortion is accessible, there also tends to be sexual education, contraception, and women are empowered to make healthy choices.

They know that in spite of our differences, there is still so much common ground, and it is on this common where these people come to support reproductive justice, however quietly.

So that other people can make a different choice.

And that is no small thing.