February 7, 2022

The Cure For Sleep, by Tanya Shadrick

“How I began to spend my time that season would enlarge my life in a way I would only understand later, looking back. At the water’s edge that very first day when I stepped out from the hidden and habitual along with my clothes, I couldn’t know that even a middle-aged mother swimming laps in a small town can send ripples through the universe. But it did.”

Tanya Shadrick’s memoir The Cure For Sleep: Memoir of a Late-Waking Life is a story of becoming, of wonder, awe and possibility. It’s a story of life after death, of creative fulfillment after motherhood, of fierce determination, and the triumph of artistic expression and human connection. Triumph that comes against the odds, for Shadrick grew up accustomed to hiding on the margins, shy and uncomfortable with her place in the world, the working class daughter of a broken marriage, rejected by her father, growing up in the shadow of her mother’s difficult second marriage. Shadrick makes it out of her hometown, however, attending university, where she falls in love with a boy who’s as comfortable retired from society as she is, and they make a life together whose foundation is books and ideas, questions and conversation. And then soon after the birth of their first child, a medical emergency after complications, Shadrick comes as close to dying as one can while still being able to tell the tale, and a vision in this moment causes her to re-imagine her place in the world, to find a way to live more boldly and grow through connection with others.

Shadrick writes about early motherhood as an expedition in a way that delightfully recalls Maria Mutch’s memoir Know the Night, challenging notions of maternal instinct as these were feelings she had to conjure by practice. After having told the story of her “First Life,” she begins to live her second one differently, venturing out to meet other mothers and finding connection there, the inverse of such a tiresome cliche, and together these women support one another and find new ways to make a village. Shadrick eventually leaves the security of her administrative job at the university she attended to begin collecting stories of people living out their last days in hospices. She also starts swimming during the hours she can find for herself, which proves most inspiring, and she eventually becomes an artist in residence at the swimming pool, writing what she calls “laps of longhand.” All these experiences leading Shadrick to become known by a woman called Lynne Roper, whose notes and diaries, after Roper’s death, are edited into a volume called Wild Woman Swimming, longlisted for the Wainwright Book Prize in 2019.

How does one build a life? How does one become an artist?

(And most pressing: what does one wear for such an occasion? Shadrick would recommended a headscarf and an apron.)

If you’ve ever been a human, you’ll intuit that Shadrick’s path is not straightforward. That her success does not extinguish her pain and longing that resulted from her father’s rejection. That her long and beautiful marriage does not continue without the complication of Shadrick falling in love with somebody else. That achieving one’s goals does not always (or ever?) deliver happily ever after, and a wife, a woman, a mother, is forever becoming, which is the best possible outcome, even if it means that such a thing as satisfaction is always out of reach.

I ordered The Cure For Sleep from the UK after following Shadrick for some time on Instagram (swimming connections, I think) and coming to appreciate her artistic vision, and the memoir was everything I’d hoped it would be. Rich and literary, complex and thought-provoking, challenging and absorbing at once.

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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!)

December 1, 2021

4 Great Memoirs I Rushed To FINALLY Read Before Year’s End

A Womb in the Shape of a Heart, by Joanne Gallant

Joanne Gallant’s A Womb in the Shape of a Heart is a story of motherhood and loss, a motherhood story that didn’t always promise a happy ending either, though Gallant had no inkling of this when she and her husband set out to have a baby. A pediatric nurse, a person who’d always seem in control of her own destiny, the grief and powerlessness of miscarriage and infertility would rock Gallant to her core.

A Womb in the Shape of a Heart is a beautifully woven story of loss and love, Gallant eventually giving birth to her son, but the pregnancy was fraught with anxiety, and the early days of his life were spent in the newborn the intensive care unit.

And it’s just a story so gorgeously crafted, honest and brave in so many ways, a story that encapsulates the experience of so many families but is still considered taboo or shameful. Joanne Gallant shattering that stigma with beautiful prose and such compelling storytelling that will assure so many people that they aren’t alone.

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Persephone’s Children, by Rowan McCandless

All right, this book is excellent. Which is remarkable because a collection of “fragments,” you’d think, would be inherently raw and unpolished. Especially when the fragments themselves are so curious in form: the essay as crossword puzzle, as drama script, as quiz, as diagnosis.

Pretty cool, right? A fun gimmick. But challenging to execute…

In her debut collection, however, Rowan McCandless gets it right, each of these pieces so meticulously crafted to tell a story of a difficult childhood, of growing up Black and biracial, of surviving and escaping an abusive marriage. She writes about motherhood, mental health, and living with trauma.

This is a book that’s going to surprise and delight you.

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Any Luck At All, by Mary Fairhurst Breen

Any Kind of Luck at All, by Mary Fairhurst Breen, is from one of my favourite literary genres: memoirs by women who’ve seen some shit. She writes about her suburban childhood, her father’s unspeakable mental illness, her burgeoning activist experiences, marrying young and perhaps unwisely, about parenting as her husband’s addictions overtook him, of becoming a single mother, a lesbian, of a career in nonprofits subject to the whims of government funding, of the struggles of finding work as a woman who’s over 50, and of supporting her daughter through her own mental illness and losing her to fentanyl poisoning in March 2020. Breen originally started writing down her stories for her daughters to read, and as a result they are told with such warmth, and are candid, breezy, funny, and wise.

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Fuse, by Hollay Ghadery

I enjoyed Hollay Ghadery’s uncomfortable-making, complicated, richly textured collection of essays, a memoir of daughterhood and motherhood, mental illness, eating disorders and biracial identity SO MUCH. Most things are not just one thing or another, but instead both, and neither, and everything at once. In Fuse, Ghadery unapologetically demands the right to have it both ways, to be a messy, conflicted, raging, loving, hungry and full to bursting human

November 10, 2021

Gleanings

• Baked in a disposable foil cake pan for easy door dropping and classic Deep n’ Delicious aesthetic, with frosting piped on with a star tip to complete the effect, I’ve baked this several times and it has been devoured each time – it’s wonderful, vegan or not.
• And then it gets weird. The Hong Kong avian flu introduced H5N1 to the world, a new and dangerous virus, transmitted from birds to people, causing fears of a worldwide influenza pandemic. The European Union experienced major floods, while a massive tornado stormed through Texas killing 27 people. Meanwhile, world leaders from 150 countries met in Kyoto to sign an agreement to address climate change.
• I am about halfway through You Look Good for Your Age: An Anthology, edited by Rona Altrows, and so the theme of aging—body and mind and soul—is clearly on my mind.
• A deliberate act of stopping, noticing, looking up, breathing deep, all in stillness – a necessity I am becoming more comfortable with, in this hunt for awe, whose closest companion, may just be gratefulness.
• I’ve got a lot of houseplants, dude. Each time a mood strikes me, I find myself holding a potted plant.
• Books have been a comfort to me since early childhood as I learned to navigate life in a world that expected much more from me socially than I would ever be able to give.
• I’ve had less flattering juxtapositions of “Taylor Swift” against other aspects of my identity, most noticeably in university when a Black friend pondered why a Black man would be listening to a “basic white woman”. The false description aside, my reason is simple: her themes embody the kind of writing I seek to create—emotive and universal, yet highly specific.
• I suppose what gets to me is this belief that we need to take classes to learn, to become perfect at something. What happened to just plain practicing? Why not sing, dance, paint, or write for the pure joy of it, rather than feeling like we need to be experts?
• It feels like the epitome of late fall to me, the kind of thing I can never resist on a lunch menu because isn’t it wonderful when someone else has already gone through the trouble of roasting squash?
• The power went out at 5:30 this morning, the small lights we are accustomed to at night–the shell nightlight in the bathroom, the glow of the modem in John’s study beyond our bedroom– extinguished
• What is a character without place? Even if it’s a place as small as a room or a country where the character does not feel she belongs.
• I’m miserable when I’m not writing in some form — so if I don’t write for too long, something starts to feel deeply off and so I keep coming back to this complex relationship.

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October 31, 2021

Hauntings: Books That Won’t Leave Me Alone

Ghosts, by Dolly Alderton

I loved this book, which I thought was going to be a smart and funny novel about modern dating and the phenomenon of “ghosting,” which it was, but it was also so much richer and more meaningful than that as Alderton’s protagonist comes to understand the different kinds of ghosts that are haunting her experience—ghosts of a past romance, of her childhood, and also of her relationship with her parents, which is changing and becoming more complicated as her father’s dementia progresses.

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Dream Girl, by Laura Lippman

Reading the latest Laura Lippman is a summer holiday tradition for me and my husband. We love her, and her latest, a literary homage to Stephen King’s Misery, is a marvelous mindfuck. Lippman moves from crime fiction to psychogical thriller in this novel about an author who becomes confined to his bed and then proceeds to be haunted/hunted by a character from one of his novels. We loved it, and the meta elements of it all were delicious.

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The Other Black Girl, by Zakiya Dalila Harris

This one checked a lot of boxes for me—set in the publishing industry, biting social commentary, and twisty and weirder than you’d think, billed as “Get Out meets The Stepford Wives.” Naturally, Nella is pleased when the new hire at her office means she’ll no longer be the only Black girl at her publishing company, but her comradeship with Hazel turns out to have an edge. The novel is a statement on racism and feminism, the notion of how much progress is enough, and a culture of scarcity that means supporting others could mean hindering one’s own chances of success. But it’s also more than that, totally bonkers, involving an underground movement, and a fight back after decades of oppression.

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Malibu Rising, by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Everyone keeps telling met that the The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is her best, but I haven’t read it yet. I did read Daisy Jones and the Six and liked it well enough, but I LOVED Malibu Rising, a holiday dream of a novel that I read in a single day and then forced until my husband who liked it as well as I did. Complicated family dynamics, Americana, California, and the sea. The novel had some furious momentum and I found it unputdownable. I can’t think of any literary ghosts in this one, but characters are indeed haunted—by lost loves, and the people they used to be.

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A Thousand Ships, by Natalie Haynes

We read The Odyssey earlier this year, and I ordered this book afterwards, inspired by that book and also events in The Iliad, though I confess that I wasn’t chomping at the bit to read it, figuring it would be difficult. Those Greeks, you know? But I loved it. Read it right after Malibu Rising and just as quickly while we were on holiday this August, and then my husband read it, and then our daughter did, and it brought these characters to life in the most vivid, devastating way, because this is a novel about death and loss and destruction after all. There is nothing heroic in these wars, which tell the story of how their experienced by many different women. I can’t wait to read The Iliad now

October 25, 2021

About Last Spring: The Vaccine Narrative I’m Holding On To

I’ve almost forgotten about last spring. Have you?

Because it’s been about 300 years since then, I think. We had a federal election, and a summer of climate emergencies, and the anxiety of school reopening, and real life returning, albeit slowly and cautiously here in Ontario, which seems to be paying off with a flattened curve, thank goodness. KNOCK ON WOOD.

But all this has been much overshadowed by the noise of a very small minority of our community members who distrust and refuse vaccines, community members whose grasp of science is perhaps as slight as their grasp of public relations—because I could have told them that the tactic of blocking hospital entrances and yelling at sick people receiving life-saving treatment was probably never going to win much support. A small minority of our community members who seem empowered by the idea that they’re part of a much larger movement, an illusion that fizzles out when you check out statistics such as that 73.7% of Canadians are fully vaccinated or that 87.9% of all eligible Ontarians have received at least once dose. Also 77.96% of Canadian 12-17-year-olds are fully or partially vaccinated, which seems to bode well for uptake once vaccines for 5-11-year-olds become available (and BRING IT ON!).

It’s such a far cry from the “vaccine-hesitancy” message that the media insisted on perpetuating as soon as vaccines were available, even as people were lining up around the block in the rain at 4 o’clock in the morning to get them. And it’s a far cry too from the anti-vax messaging we’ve been hearing from last hold-outs over the last two months, people who are becoming more and more desperate to own the narrative as it slips further and out of their grasp, and it becomes clearer that almost everyone you know believes in the Covid-19 vaccine project.

Back in April, however, there was no doubt about this. Just six months ago, at the peak of a devastating fourth wave that saw patients in field hospitals and pregnant women in ICUs, the Astrazenaca Vaccine was approved for people over 40, and suddenly we had a surge in vaccinations here in Ontario that brought us into a new era of immunity, one whose payoffs we’re all benefiting from right now, whether we’re vaccinated or not.

None of this was inevitable—we came into this new year hoping to get our first doses by September, if that. Opposition parties spent the first few months of 2021 bitching about the government’s “botched vaccination rollout,” never mind that we were lucky that vaccines existed at all. I remember the first person I knew in Canada who got a shot, a friend who’s a first responder, and we made him a celebratory card. In England, my mother-in-law got her shot. Other friends who worked in healthcare were vaccinated. And then there began to be more of it—friends who are Indigenous, those with underlying conditions. Every single one of these shots such a victory for every single one of us, bringing us one step closer to the project of herd immunity. There was a whole lot of crying for joy. And then in April, my parents had their shots. My mom got hers on Easter Sunday when we were in town for an outdoor visit, masks on. What a miracle, it seemed like. It was really happening. We just had to hold on, keep going.

I remember a few weeks later, it was Sunday night. Just hours after I’d read news headlines about AZ being approved for those over 40, I got a text from my friend M alerting me to appointments available at our local Shoppers Drug Mart the following week. I received that text while having a bath, and leapt right out again, dripping wet, wrapped in a towel, and phoned Shopper’s Drug Mart, which closed at 10:00. It was 9:30. I had to call back a couple of times before I got through, but when I did, I snagged an appointment for Stuart and I for the following Wednesday. And then I texted the news to my friend K, and my friend R, and both of them would get appointments for that very same week. I helped another pal get an appointment out of town. Other friends would also find appointments through similar ways, and still others could not get appointments at all and were angry and frustrated that they seemed so hard to come by. Huge teams of volunteers (Vaccine Hunters!) began helping to track down vaccine appointments online for complete strangers. On my neighbourhood Facebook group, people were sharing news of availability. More and more appointments were being rolled out all the time, and people were stepping up, helping others step up, and it was one of the most terrific examples of COMMUNITY that I’ve ever been witness to, let alone been apart of.

Not to mention the amazing public health agencies who made the whole thing happen. Sometimes even though it seemed like a systematic disaster—the lack of a central booking portal, random allocations of doses, the significant problem of vaccine availability not being accessible where infection rates were highest. Oh, it was a mess, such a mess, but it was also such a massive endeavour, and by the time I was booking my second appointment and even an appointment for my 12-year-old (CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?) things were smoother, and eventually there stopped being so much to complain about, and by the onset of summer, nearly everyone I know was fully vaccinated.

And this is the vaccine narrative that I’m going to be holding on to. What a rush and what an honour it was to be part of this singular moment, a moment that helped us turn a corner onto much better days and whatever comes after this. (We understand too that Covid-19 vaccines need to be made accessible to people all over the world—and to that end, UNICEF Canada recently raised $9.5 million for their #GiveaVax campaign, to be matched by the government of Canada.)

I’m so grateful to the millions and millions of people who got us here, and the way that each and every one them underlined my faith in people and my neighbours and US.

October 21, 2021

Back Home Again

After months of floundering around (and not so fruitfully) in the Land of First Drafts, it’s such an absolute pleasure to find myself back at work on a manuscript that has a four walls and a roof, plus windows and doors (not to mention precious editorial feedback). The imagery of a house particularly fitting between this is so much a book about homes and spaces, more rooted in place than anything else I’ve published. And while the story is fiction, many of the places where they’re set are not, homes and apartments I’ve lived in, plus the Lillian H. Smith Library’s Osborne Collection and and the Royal Ontario Museum, and the effect of becoming immersed in this project again is so completely transporting, plus kind of cozy as the autumn weather makes way for the inevitable chill.

October 13, 2021

Class Reunion: ENG 369Y 20 Years Later

During my third year of undergraduate studies, from 2000-2001, I was part of ENG 369Y, a creative writing workshop led by Dr. Lorna Goodison through the Department of English at the University of Toronto.

For so many reasons, many illuminated below, this class would be an unforgettable experience, though it seemed especially remarkable when—two decades later—four of us from the class would all be publishing books within the same year and a bit.

• Souvankham Thammavongsa’s How to Pronounce Knife was published in April 2020, and it was awarded the Scotiabank Giller Prize that year, as well as the 2021 Trillium Book Award, among other accolades.

• Faye Guenther’s Swimmers in Winter came out in August 2020, and it has been a finalist for both the Toronto Book Award and the 2021 ReLit Award.

• My book, Waiting for a Star to Fall, arrived in October 2020, and the Montreal Gazette called it, “Subtly complex […a] romantic drama tailor-made for the #Metoo age.”

• And Rebecca Silver Slayter’s The Second History found its way into the world this summer, with no less than Lisa Moore writing that it’s “one of the most honest renderings of romantic love I’ve ever read. [A] truly mesmeric story, tender, unflinching, quakingly good.”

To me, the serendipitous occasion of our new releases after all this time seemed like an splendid opportunity for us to reconnect and reflect on our time together, as well as so much that we’ve learned about writing in all the years since then, and so the four of us shared our thoughts and ideas via email.

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tell us about 20 years in the writing life, about the trajectory of your writing life since our class together in 2000.

Kerry Clare: I don’t think I had a focussed relationship to writing at all in the first ten years after our class together, even as I completed a MA in Creative Writing at the University of Toronto from 2005-2007. There is a line in Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life that I may have misremembered, but it’s about a superficial idea of writer-dom being analogous to one admiring the way one looks in a particular hat, and I always thought she was talking about me, which was mortifying.

When I finished graduate school, I worked for two years reading financial documents all day long, which was not fun, but gave me stability and a salary, though little in the way of creative inspiration. It also gave me parental leave benefits, which I used when I had my first child in 2009, and becoming a parent really seemed to up the stakes for me writing-wise. I became invested in the world in a more meaningful way, and therefore had more to write about. My first big success in writing was an essay about new motherhood I published in 2011, and this led to my first book, the essay anthology The M Word: Conversations About Motherhood, which I edited and was published in 2014.

At this point, I wasn’t sure that writing fiction was going to be my destiny, and was even making peace with that (throughout this entire period, I’ve been blogging, which has been a creative lifeline), but then something clicked shortly after my second child was born and I finally figured out how plot works. My first novel, Mitzi Bytes, was published in 2017, and I’ve been writing them ever since, and though I am constantly terrified that one day I won’t know how to do it anymore, it seems to keep happening.

​Souvankham Thammavongsa: I am not a very good example of a writing life because my trajectory isn’t a simple one and it is not for everyone. I don’t think anyone would want it. I worked for fifteen years in the research department of an investment advice publisher, I counted bags of cash five levels below the basement, I prepared taxes. This work helped me write what I want and it didn’t take away my desire to write. I still have that from 2000, this desire to write, but it wasn’t anything someone taught me.

Faye Guenther: I stayed at the University of Toronto to do undergraduate and graduate degrees in English. Then I went to York University and did a PhD in English. While I was a student during those years, the jobs I had to support myself weren’t related to writing, but they showed me things about the world and this is useful to a writer. I’ve found that no matter what you do, the key is to make the time to write. My writing life has also been shaped by who I’ve met along the way, including fellow writers. In 2017, I published a chapbook of poems and short fiction, Flood Lands, with Junction Books. In 2020, I published a collection of short fiction, Swimmers in Winter, with Invisible Publishing.

That is probably most of what I’ve learned in these two decades. How to take in all the advice, all that you’ve learned from other things you wrote, from things you read, from other writers, and then listen very hard for the tiny sound of this book calling for what it needs from you.

Rebecca Silver Slayter

Rebecca Silver Slayter: I decided to stop writing not long after that workshop. I think, to reverse what Souvankham said, I worried my desire to write might be something someone had taught me. That I had lost track of why I wanted to write at all.

So I stopped for a year. Or two. Or three? It felt like forever because I was 20-something and everything was forever.

And meantime I decided to make my life and work writing-adjacent. I interned at Quill & Quire and The Walrus. I worked for a startup children’s publisher. I did odd jobs to complete the financial math, yardwork and errands. Eventually I was hired for my dream job, working as managing editor for Brick literary journal. 

Sometime in the midst of that, I met my husband, and told him, proudly, how I had made the tough, mature decision to give up writing, and he listened and nodded and then said, I know you are a writer, with such certainty that I didn’t know how to doubt him and I began writing again. And I found to my great joy what I had been missing in those earlier writing years; a desire to write that easily overtook the desire to be a writer.

I did graduate studies in Montreal, where I wrote the first draft of my first novel, In the Land of Birdfishes. When I graduated, I returned to Nova Scotia, and bought a house for a song in Cape Breton, which I will be renovating for the rest of my earthly days.

This is for me a very good place to write, near the ocean and the highlands, in a community where music and storytelling are woven into everyone’s daily life. Here I published my first book and then wrote and rewrote and rewrote my second book, which was just released this summer: The Second History. It took me eight years from first draft till now, mostly because I tried to write it faster than I’m able to. It turns out I’m a writer who needs to take my time… 

That is probably most of what I’ve learned in these two decades. How to take in all the advice, all that you’ve learned from other things you wrote, from things you read, from other writers, and then listen very hard for the tiny sound of this book calling for what it needs from you.

what was the best thing the writer you were in our classroom had going for them? And what writing advice would you give that previous incarnation of you? (Though would you even have taken it?)

ST: My intuition. I listened to everyone, and knew when not to. This taught me how to pick through edits. When we see edits, sometimes it’s about the person and their life experience and it doesn’t mean they are right or know but you have to be generous and allow them to have their thoughts.

I wouldn’t give myself any advice. I think advice can be a disservice to a writer. There’s a lot I didn’t know and I want myself to not know and to live in that not-knowing in order to know it. I want myself to encounter and work through those difficult and lonely moments. I don’t want anyone to hold my hand or do me any favours or make it easier or easy. I like the difficult, and I want to continue with that difficulty. 

RSS: One of my clearest memories of that workshop was of Professor Goodison saying, as we discussed one of my poems, “You come from preachers, right?” 

I was tongue-tied with confusion. “What?” 

“Your people, they’re preachers, right?” 

I had absolutely no idea what she meant. “No….” I stammered. 

“Then why are you preaching at me?” she asked. 

Oof. Caught. I was constantly preaching. Trying to find a much-too-simple way of understanding much-too-large things. I had a weakness for sentences that began like “Love was…”

I think somewhere in this is both my weakness and strength as a writer (probably as a human too). It is writing-in-bad-faith to just polish up pretty turns of phrase that sound truish. To go around making tidy summaries of untidy things. But… I think if I mine deeper I can find underneath that impulse what drives me to writing still, and to reading itself… The sense that there is some luminous other way of noticing the world that will make it brighter, stranger, more visible. That certain words can be incantatory, a pathway to looking again and seeing more.

I have two small children, and have found it astonishing to witness language dawn within a person who formerly had none. How each child altered a bit around the language they used. How they learned what it was then to be nervous, even tired, even thirsty. How what began as the ragged, indeterminate longing of a baby’s howl became so clear, so precise, so unmysterious. And I miss a bit the mystery. The wonder of watching a peer being who doesn’t know what yesterday is. But I think there’s another way that language can give us back what experience has made ordinary. And I think that’s what I was searching for twenty years ago and search for still, but with a few degrees more purpose. And a lot more joy.

So I would maybe advise myself something like this: First, don’t write any more poetry. You are very bad at it. And for a time, don’t write at all. Wait until the desire to write is something you have to resist. Wait until it wells up in you. And then go find the joy of writing words that make you look again, more deeply.

I wouldn’t give myself any advice. I think advice can be a disservice to a writer. There’s a lot I didn’t know and I want myself to not know and to live in that not-knowing in order to know it.

Souvankham Thammavongsa

FG: I remember being openhearted and creative. The writing advice I would give my earlier self is to be bolder. I think when boldness is combined with a practice of being open with yourself and to the world, there is a sharpening of creative focus that can happen and a strengthening of creative perception, no matter what challenges life brings.

KC: The writer I was in our classroom had no idea how much she didn’t know, and far more confidence that she deserved to have, and I’m so happy she did because being 21 is hard enough. I was not a serious person or a serious writer AT ALL. (I remember that Souvankham appeared to be both, and it was such a powerful example for me, though I think I was still too young to fully appreciate it.)

What a tremendous opportunity to develop my skills that class should have been!! But I did not work all that hard, honestly, too busy checking out my look in the hat, remember? I mainly wrote poetry because you could finish a piece in a few minutes. This did not mean my poetry was good, however, although I think sometimes some of it was.

If I could give that writer I was any advice it would be to write something REAL, instead of something you think sounds like something that could be real. (And find writers you love, instead of reading all the writers you’re supposed to love.)  

For the record: I would not have listened.  

what roles have literary journals and small presses played in your writing career?

RSS: I know literary journals and small presses better as a worker than as a writer. But I am shaped permanently by my years at Brick literary journal, and by the trips I made then, twice a year, to Coach House Press, where the journal was designed at that time. 

The Coach House basement was a kind of church I visited like a disciple of those beautiful machines for cutting pages and laying type … and of the people who made them run and knew the stories of an older Toronto and the mesmerizing adventures then had by not-yet-famous writers. In a way that is both corny and essentially true to me, that is what I feel a tiny part of when I write: all the people in all those tiny offices and studios and nooks making small-press books and magazines; their labours of love, their care and bravery, those parallel arts of ink and paper, alongside those of prose and plot. 

They taught me what was foundational to writing; the courage and the care of the work. And the kinds of community it can build.

FG: Reading literary magazines gave me an awareness of community. They were the first space where I was published, and I know this is true for many writers. Smaller presses often foster innovative and ground-breaking work. They frequently publish voices and stories that historically have been marginalized. I think smaller presses are important for energizing and sustaining a vibrant creative culture.    

My first piece of published fiction was in The New Quarterly in 2007. I will never forget the joy of receiving that acceptance

Kerry Clare

KC: My first piece of published fiction was in The New Quarterly in 2007. I will never forget the joy of receiving that acceptance, especially in the wake of the novel I’d written for my Masters thesis that went nowhere (because it was boring!) because I was really feeling kind of discouraged, and then this message from the universe arrived suggesting maybe I should keep going after all. In the next few years, I would publish pieces in TNQ and other journals, and the high of an submission being accepted has never diminished for me. And then Goose Lane Editions, a remarkable Canadian indie press with an impressive history, published The M Word, and did the book such justice. Without literary journals and small presses, I’d be nowhere.

ST: Literary journals teach you things a writing class or editor or a dear friend and family cannot. They don’t love you and are not beholden in any way. They teach you about rejection—what that feels like, what to do with it. They are often the first place where we get to see ourselves in print. It’s important for a writer to understand the difference between seeing yourself in print and publishing a book. They are not the same.

what are your favourite memories of our class?

ST: I remember the talent and fun. There were so many writers in that class who are more talented, more ambitious, more interesting…but they aren’t here, or with books. They became lawyers and engineers and professors. I always keep that in mind. Having a book doesn’t mean I am good.

KC: I have so many memories! I don’t know if we were particularly interesting as a group, or if it was the work of Professor Lorna Goodison in creating community, or just the particular mix of experience and personalities in our class, but I felt very connected to everyone. I think we were a well written cast of characters.

I remember Souvankham on the very first day, and how she impressed me so much with her sense of herself. I remember we had to write a poem inspired by postcards, and mine had a field of sunflowers and said, “Welcome to Michigan,” and I wrote a poem with the line, “I won’t forget the motor city.” I remember REDACTED who wrote a poem with the line, “Let’s make love in the astral plane,” and I was seriously impressed by how sophisticated he seemed. And someone else who wrote a poem about someone sucking on her toes while listening to Robbie Robertson sing “Somewhere down the crazy river.” Everyone seemed to be having a lot more sex than me. (One could not have been having less sex than me.)

I remember Faye seemed especially interesting, partly because she seemed kind of badass with a shaved head, and we always sat in opposite corners of the room. And how I was in love with the name “Rebecca Silver Slayter,” which belonged to the woman who often sat in the same corner as me and whose work I felt very drawn to.

I think it’s kind of wonderful that in addition to the four of us, plenty of others in that group have gone on to very interesting careers in academic, television writing, and more.

One of my memories of the class was discovering what a literary reading could be—the ways prose and poetry can be shared beyond their existence as words on a page and become something like music in a public space.

Faye Guenther

FG: I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to learn from our teacher Dr. Lorna Goodison. One of my memories of the class was discovering what a literary reading could be—the ways prose and poetry can be shared beyond their existence as words on a page and become something like music in a public space.

RSS: This sounds like very cheap, opportunistic flattery, but honestly, though I remember well many of the talented, interesting writers in the class and their poems and stories, what I remember most clearly is the three of you. 

I remember how beautifully Souvankham’s work was always laid out on the page in lovely, tiny type—the form so perfectly echoing the work itself, the grace and economy and polish of her words; how her work seemed always already complete, and I was stumped on how to write any feedback that didn’t just feel like tampering. 

How Kerry’s writing was funny and powerful at the same time, and I hadn’t even known that was possible. How she seemed so at home both on the page and in the classroom, warm and open and at ease in a way that awed me. I remember Faye’s compassion for her characters, their rich interiority. How reading her stories felt like someone whispering in your ear, that intimate.

My strongest memory of the class was the first one. When we went around the room and each offered up our names. 

Souvankham was near the end, seated at the table perpendicular to the one where Professor Goodison sat. 

After she said her name, Professor Goodison asked, “So what do you want to be called?”

I was caught off guard by the question, but Souvankham answered clearly and immediately. Without blinking or skipping a beat, she said: “I want to be called a writer.”

Professor Goodison looked at her and Souvankham looked back. Then she said, “I’m going to call you Sou.”

And I was as astonished as if Souvankham had wafted out of her seat and up into the air between us. I was at that time so uncertain, so full of twenty-one-year-old desires to be interesting, to be brave, to be invisible and/or famous. I would have probably told Professor Goodison she could call me whatever she wanted. Or tried to guess what she might prefer me to be named.

Year by year over these last twenty, I get a little closer to what Souvankham already had then. That certainty. That clarity of purpose and identity as a writer that struck me silent when I was twenty-one.

---

October 6, 2021

Apples Never Fall, by Liane Moriarty

Liane Moriarty is a master of fiction, her genius undermined by her popularity, which makes many readers suspicious. Because how good can a writer possibly be if her bestselling novel gets made into a series by Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman? A question to which I reply: she is so good. Truly Madly Guilty and Big Little Lies are both fantastic novels weaving BIG PLOT with the most sophisticated characterization, her fictional people complex and multi-dimensional, revealing their secrets in rich and surprising fashion which means the plot twists generally deepen the story instead of undermine it. I LOVE HER. The plots themselves undeniably frothy and too much, but in the best way, anchored by the human people at the heart of them. And her latest, Apples Never Fall, does not disappoint.

Which is a relief, because her previous novel, Nine Perfect Strangers, arrived as a bit of a letdown, Moriarty having come up with a fantastic cast of characters, each with luscious backstories, but it all failed to coalesce with an over-the-top preposterous plot and would have made a better short story collection. Because the trouble with a novel about perfect strangers is their lack of connection to each other, which is the kind of spark that lights the fuse.

In Apples Never Fall, however, she’s made her characters a family, which means there are sparks aplenty, decades of grudges and misunderstanding. Joy and Stan Delaney are celebrated tennis coaches whose own children were raised in an ultra-competitive, high intensity atmosphere, each of whom knows they’ve proved disappointments in their own special way. And when Joy suddenly disappears and Stan appears to be the prime suspect, each is afraid to voice their suspicions for fear they might be true.

It gets worse—detectives find a t-shirt soaked with Joy’s blood. Stan is becoming more and more difficult. There there is the matter of the curious house guest, a wayward girl who’d stayed with Joy and Stan after fleeing an abusive relationship a few months before whose story is not quite what it seems. Each of the four Delaney children suspicious of their father, but also each other, and wondering what else they know about their family might turn out to be founded on a lie?

I liked this novel so much for the way it complicates all kinds of ideas about family, marriage, truth and lies, about domestic violence, and anger, and the ways in which we know and fail to know each other. I love how each twist had us understanding these characters on an even deeper level, and how these twists also demonstrate what these characters don’t even know about themselves. And I love how all the threads come together at the end of the book in a way that was surprising, and even refreshing, such a perfect culmination of a most enjoyable read.

September 21, 2021

The End of Political Contempt

In September 2020, something shifted for me, after an agonizing decade of partisan politics. It was a decade that began with the inexplicable election of Rob Ford as our city’s mayor, complely bursting my comfortable left-wing Twitter bubble, continuing on to you-know-who’s election to the White House in 2016, and then Rob Ford’s less likeable brother becoming premier of Ontario in 2018. Which would kick off a roller coaster of a four year term in which incompetence has been matched only by sheer callousness.

So much has been terrible in Ontario since 2018 that it’s easy for all the specifics to be lost in a whirlwind of nightmarish absurdity. From the widespread consultation of parents on school curricula whose results were never released, to random plans to scrap the full-day kindergarten program, undermining conservation authorities to permit development of green space, policies keeping communities from accessing developer funds to build vital infrastructure, plans to gut public health programs, and so much more—including the egregious act of arbitrarily interfering with Toronto’s municipal structure in the middle of an election, subverting the democratic rights of millions of people.

Labour disputes beginning in the fall of 2019 meant that the school year was regularly disrupted right up until schools closed altogether due to Covid in March 2020—and children in Ontario would remain out of school for the following 18 months longer than anywhere else in the country.

But when schools reopened in September 2020, I just couldn’t do it anymore, the fighting, the anger, the rage. I could no longer go on treating the government as my adversary. It would be impossible to send my children to school and preserve my mental health under such an arrangement, and so I had to shift my perspective. It helped too that the government—in spite of numerous pandemic failings, in particular in the area of long term care, resulting in thousands of devastating deaths—stopped behaving egregiously with such consistency, and seemed to understand (although always too late, always as a reaction) that people need governments after all. And while they weren’t a great government, or even a particularly good one, they were the government that we had right now and I had to put my trust in them as we made our way forward into a most uncertain future.

When I look back on the last five years of my own political action, there’s a lot that I reflect on. I am grateful for the empowerment and unity of the women’s marches, for example, the first time I ever walked in a crowd carrying a placard. But I wonder too if we’d be seeing the same display of rabid right-wing activism today, seemingly ordinary moms putting their kids on display, if there had been no pussy-hatted inspiration. (Those people have never had an original idea in their lives.) I have also reconsidered my feelings about the government of Ontario’s illegitimacy after they were elected in 2018, joining in calls for leaders to resign. While I do think this government’s tenure has brought significant damage to our province and its institutions, both the last year in American politics and our most recent election in Canada have underlined to me how fragile our democracies are and that those who try to delegitimize democratically elected governments do so at all everyone’s peril. And I’m thinking again about the power of rage as a political tool, which seemed all fine and well when we were raging for our own truly noble causes, but what happens when other angry people start to use that tool too, and their anger is cruel, divorced from reality and terrifying?

When I look back at the last five years of my own political action, what I regret is the contempt I felt, contempt which is not so different from that which resulted from Barack Obama’s political success in 2008, and which has a direct line to the election of Obama’s successor 8 years later. It was actually Trump’s election which made our own contempt for Premier Doug Ford all the more vociferous—does the world really need more than one yellow haired angry populist? (Apparently we needed three.) But of course it was contempt for the previous premier, Kathleen Wynne, that had paved the way for Ford’s unlikely win in the first place.

“Contempt is the opposite of empathy,” Edward Keenan wrote earlier this month in The Toronto Star. “And as U.S. President Joe Biden has said, “empathy is the fuel of democracy.” If we cannot imagine ourselves in the shoes of other people, we have little hope of working with them in a healthy democratic society.”

The Ontario government has been terrible and inept, but they were voted in—not for better, but for worse, it’s true—by a fair election by my fellow Ontarians. And this idea that I myself perpetuated that somehow those people’ votes were less valid than mine or didn’t matter is so absolutely anathema to a functioning democracy—and we see the same dynamics playing out now in far right politics underlined by racism and white supremacy. “Canada use to be a great country to bad its not anymore cause of people like you,” in the brilliant words of a friend-of-a-friend on Facebook last week, and you could almost print that on a little red ball cap, you know?

“I don’t know how to explain to you why you should care about other people.” In the tidal wave of despair that was 2017 and onward, that viral phrase (often mis-attributed) was something to cling to, so perfectly articulating the powerlessness and despair that so many of were experiencing in the face of cruelty and obtuseness. The first time I saw that phrase, in a tweet, no doubt, I am sure that I RT’d it. THIS. But here is something else I’m thinking twice about, this politicization of care, or maybe the partisan politicization is what I mean, because care is certainly political. But I’m resisting the arrogance now that me and people who think like me occupy a kind of moral high ground, and that people who vote for other political parties don’t care for other people too, that they aren’t good neighbours, and generous friends, and charitable donors, and nurses, and teachers, and personal support workers. I’m resisting the idea that in order to care, you have to care the same way I do. I’m resisting the idea that we have no common ground.

Last night was the first election in as long as I can remember that didn’t, to paraphrase Sally Rooney in her latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, “make me feel like I was physically getting kicked in the face.” The election that nobody wanted, perhaps, but its low stakes were almost refreshing—the angry Trumpy man in the purple suit leads a racist fringe part emboldened by anti-vaxxers this time but, statistically speaking in Ontario, our anti-vax population is so tiny that they’re having a hard time spreading the Delta variant, let alone fascism. And while I know details are sketchy and shifty, the other parties were all talking about vaccine mandates, and climate change, and the PC leader was at least trying not to come across as a troglodyte who wants to get all up in my uterus, and I’ve got to give him points for that. It’s certainly better than the alternative.

It’s certainly better than the alternative. A phrase that’s occurred to me several times in the past year or so, especially since we’ve seen the alternative, glimpsed on January 6 in Washington DC, in democratic crackdowns in countries like Belarus and Afghanistan, and so many more, places where political contempt has opened the door to extremism bringing forth a vicious spiral of democratic unravelling. I don’t want to do that anymore.