September 10, 2021

September

My children went back to school on Thursday, and two days seems about the appropriate length for the first week of school after six months at home. Happy to report that both kids are having a wonderful time, but that two days is not really sufficient for a work week. Also that going on summer holiday repeatedly is not conducive to productivity, particularly when you keep booking mid-morning swims at the public school. All of which is to say that I’ve had a very good summer, but have a lot of catching up to do. Further, my blogging course is running again this month (it’s been two years since I launched Blog School) and, once again, my group is amazing, and I am enjoying their work so much. And hoping that five days next week to sit down and focus will yield great results in terms of me catching up on everything I’m behind on. In cased you missed it elsewhere, I abandoned a 72,000 word novel in June because it wasn’t even halfway done and didn’t have a plot, and then I started something new that is proving achingly slow-going but perhaps is really good. Just got to 26,000 and I’m really pleased with it, but it’s hard. Though this project will soon be temporarily put aside when I get notes back on my next novel and get back to revising a book I’ve been writing since 2015. In wonderful news, you’re going to be able to read it one of these days, and yes, working on something that will one day see the light of day will prove to be a most refreshing change.

September 7, 2021

Gleanings

• When I set out on my walk, I hadn’t expected to find Bertrand Russell and Judith Krantz curled up together.
• In a way I think of frogs as my familiars. I don’t mean this in a New Age way, or maybe I do.
• I debated googling “how to swim in waves”, but strapped on my orange tow float, and went straight into the water, remembering how much easier it is to let the waves carry you, instead of standing and having them crash into you.
• But there is something I’m beginning to crawl towards, a small crack embracing and flowing with the beauty of the imperfect chaos of life, a reminder of life’s cyclical patterns, an inner orientation of being with what is, versus controlling or perfecting it … noticing and marveling at the wonder of life, and that there is never an arrival, that all things, especially cleaned counters, are impermanent and fleeting.
• And I am and it is, but why the need to explain away a pretty serious injury? Why minimize the trauma just because, well shit it could have been worse?
• Thirteen years ago today, I bought the convertible VW bug an early  50th birthday present to myself. I fell in love with this car the moment I saw it. A mid-life crisis? Maybe. But my motivation was driven more by the fact that I no longer needed to ferry my girls to softball games and I now had the time and the means to head off on road trips.
• There it is again, the idea to start small. All you need is a little inkling, a little idea.
• I’ve been trying out new things. This past year and a half, this pandemic year, staying home has stretched me further. Take my painting endeavours – Please! (Sorry, bad joke).
• Every day the light is different. It illuminates this then that.
• in my head i’m calling people cocksuckers a lot. i’ve also had the kids today for ten days straight with no break and so i think i need a literal quiet moment and also a much larger reorganization of my entire life.
• It made me realise the horrible cycle an exhausted mind and body will find themselves in and struggle to get out of. It made me re-think reaching out to the therapist a friend recommended the other day. I was interested because honestly, who couldn’t use therapy after the last 18 months, but turned away because I figured I was fine. I think my body has been trying to tell me otherwise.
• So, yes, I’m taking them as sign and symbol, my perfectly wonderful twenty-four jars, of the fabulous years we’ve had and the many good things to come.
• They had come by once, they might come back again. 
• Regardless of the outcome of Election 2021, on Tuesday morning, 21st September, the politicians will all disappear — some home to pack for their Ottawa residencies, others to resume their former lives. The rest of us will still be here in the trenches, slogging through the same mire, trying to find solutions to impossible problems, trying to get the necessary assistance for our vulnerable.
• But The Mimifesto has become one way I measure—and capture—time. Here are a few others.
• Keeping in line with my inadvertent summer theme of fantasy novels, I recently turned the last page on A Deadly Education, the first book in Naomi Novik’s projected Scholomance trilogy.
• But what if we all just started planting a LOT of flowers, metaphorically speaking? What if we filled up our metaphorical walls with ART?
• That night, in the middle of the night, the refrigerator began working again, but for how long? 
• Sounds of summer have already begun to transition into those of autumn.
• It will get dirty and it will fade and I don’t have a perfect plan for keeping it clean except, perhaps, to take it down from its hooks should I have the need to deep fry a batch of beignets. Good thing the objective here isn’t perfection and there’s a donut shop down the street.
• Her Name Was Margaret is a compelling, unputdownable and strangely optimistic book for many reasons, not the least being that Davy shows us there IS a way out, a way both humane and economically viable. For that reason alone it’s must reading.
• One of the things I love about travelling is coming home.
• It’s the time of year, I guess, or the time of my life, or maybe my eyesight is fading. Or maybe this is how I will see the world for the next few years as I write this novel. This novel? I’m going to leave the question mark there for now.
• Because for all the talk these days about blogging being over, it remains, for me, the best form the internet has come up with for the kinds of things that I value about the internet.

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September 3, 2021

Householders, by Kate Cayley

I was a big fan of Kate Cayley’s How You Were Born in 2015, and have been looking forward to her latest release, the short fiction collection Householders, which is out this month from Biblioasis, and it didn’t disappoint in the slightest. The first story, “The Crooked Man,” literally took my breath away, a story of overwhelming motherhood, family life in the city, and violence on the margins of everyday experience, and a similar ominousness infuses all the stories throughout the the rest of the collection. That no matter how much we try to hunker down in our houses (whether they be a Toronto semi, a bunker during the zombie apocalypse, or a commune in rural Maine), the world creeps in, and we can’t stop it.

The stories are loosely connected, the narrative about the commune in Maine serving as an anchor. Carol and Nancy arrive there in the late 1960s, and Nancy stays, becomes Naomi, falls under the spell. Naomi’s story and that of her daughter are woven throughout the rest of the book, right up to the present day, amidst stories of a man who offers mercy (or is it?) to a legendary musician past his prime; a woman who pretends to be an nun online; a woman reflecting on a strange and complicated relationship with a troubled woman she’d known during her university years.

Kate Cayley is splendid in her deft arrangement of the sentence, and in her depiction of the quotidian but just askew enough to be new and surprising. These stories are rich, absorbing, and oh so satisfying, and I predict this as one of the big books of the fall literary season.

August 31, 2021

Sidewalk Stories

There were so many children I swore I’d never have—the three-year-old with a soother; the baby in my bed; giant child in the stroller—but one I’ve successfully managed to keep at bay was Annoying Bicycle Bell child. The bane of my pedestrian existence, Annoying Bicycle Bell child is the kid riding his bike along the sidewalk who wants you to get out of the way so he can get by, and demonstrates this by ringing a bell. As though you weren’t two human beings, one of whom has a voice, the other who has ears. I found ABB child so insufferably rude, and omnipresent on my sidewalk journeys, that it got to the point where I would turn around and exclaim, “You know, you could say ‘excuse me.'”

My children always say ‘excuse me’ when they’re riding their bikes on the sidewalk. They don’t always ride their bikes on the sidewalk either, because there is an impressive spread of bike lanes throughout downtown Toronto these days that makes cycling safer and accessible for all of us, but on streets without bike lanes where traffic can be treacherous, I make the choice that most likely to have my beloved babies not be hit by a truck.

And so they ride on the sidewalk (not fast!), and they ring their bells when they’re riding past cars with occupants inside to avoid being doored (as they do when they’re riding in the cycle lanes), but when they’re faced with other people who are also using the same sidewalks in other ways, I’ve taught them to say, “Excuse me!” and then to say, “Thank you!” once the person has moved aside to let them pass.

I am writing about this now not to be smug (though I am smug, I am always smug, from which I’ve learned the lesson of smugness: “whenever I’m smug about anything, it bites me in the ass”), but instead because teaching my kids to engage with public space and other people this way is not just about sidewalks and cycling.

It teaches them their entitlement to take up space, to use the space that’s provided in a way that’s safe. It also teaches them not just entitlement, which can be obnoxious, but gracious entitlement, which is not about apology but instead about respect for our neighbours and to the people we share spaces with (and for ourselves!). Not being rude is really important.

They learn too that everything about living among other people is about negotiation, and we owe those people something, but also that they owe us the same consideration in return.

And finally, I like too the way it’s made them comfortable talking to adults, and how it makes speaking up and advocating for themselves into a habit.

Bicycle bells are important to have, but knowing how to use one’s voice is even better.

August 23, 2021

Holiday Reading Part 2

There were no duds in this stack, and even the title I was most intimidated by (hello, novel about the Trojan War!) blew me away. Every single one of these very different books was an absolute stunner, and the connections between them (as always!) were fascinating—see chart below. I was also so happy to reread Turning, which I’d read on vacation three or so years ago, and which I enjoyed but found so SPECIFIC that I wasn’t quite sure it would resonate again, so I gave it away, which I regretted for years. A new copy found its way back into my life this year, however, so I was happy to read it again. By a lake, of course.

I LOVED Malibu Rising—while I liked her previous novel, it didn’t quite live up to the hype for me. This one, however, was amazing. Every Sue Miller book I read is a pleasure. The Laura Lippman book was the most wonderful mindfuck, as was The Other Black Girl, both of which take on writing and publishing. Happy to read my second Marian Keyes—she’s really so good. A Thousand Ships was incredible, and Stuart and Harriet both devoured it after I did. Wild Swims was weird, but neat, and short, which is just the kind of portion I can take my weird in.

And finally Deacon King Kong, which I heard of somewhere, and then found in a Little Free Library shortly thereafter. It was rollicking, kaleidoscopic, huge in its scope, and tragicomic brilliance. Absolutely amazing.

August 13, 2021

Steadily Outward

“After all this exploring, we should be gazing steadily outward, beginning to find others again, and the brilliance of the world outside our doors.” —Julia Baird, Phosphorescence: A Memoir of Finding Joy When Your World Goes Dark

(I loved this book so much!)

August 13, 2021

The Path Forward

Pandemics end, as history has shown us, but the other thing that history has shown us is that they do tend to go on for a while before that. This is in their nature, such a formidable foe that we can’t simply put down their persistence to bad government policy or even poor public health policy. Even with great policy and robust public health measures, the pandemic would continue, a problem without an immediate solution, and that’s before we factor in those people who are challenging/undermining public health measures, spreading misinformation, and “just asking questions” that make us much more vulnerable as a community than we necessarily have to be. While it feels better sometimes to have people to rage against, someone to blame (and there sure are people whose actions have made everything so much more awful!), it doesn’t really change anything about where we’re at.

I’ve been observing the ups and downs of pandemic life over the last year and half, which are indeed a reflection of case counts, but the waves I’m thinking about are more emotional ones. It felt pretty fantastic to be in Ontario in June with the city returning to life, with LIFE returning to life, to see friends and family and experience something close to normalcy. This summer has been glorious, which is just what I was hoping for as it was so hard to drag ourselves through a rather dismal spring of field hospitals and virtual school. Last summer was also pretty grand, and this is what I’ve tried to keep in mind as we ride the pandemic roller coaster—that nothing lasts forever, for better or for worse. All of us who kept going toward that light at the end of the tunnel, and for the last six weeks we’ve been bathing in it. There is a point to persisting.

And now it looks like we’re heading back into the tunnel again—and anyone who’s been paying attention to the UK and US should have seen this coming.

But it’s not the same tunnel—you know that, right?

In a few ways, it’s definitely a shitty tunnel, it’s true. A highly contagious variant that disrupts many of the things we’ve come to take for granted about Covid and what’s safe to do. But in so many more ways we’re in such a better place—so many of us did the right thing and went out and got vaccinated (which meant that those people who aren’t able to be vaccinated—including my 8 year old—are safer). While vax rates have fallen off (I wish news media would quit comparing rates to that ONE DAY when Toronto set a world record and vaccinated 27,000 people—not a fair measure!), more people are still getting their shots ALL THE TIME and people are coming up with all kinds of creative ways to reach those who haven’t had access yet. And while so many Twitter epidemiologists are still flexing their egos and (seriously!) because VERY OBNOXIOUS, scientists know more about Covid than they ever have. We’ve come such a long long way. Even better—think of what it means that 72% of Ontarians are vaccinated, and how this undermines all kinds of common narratives perpetuated by grifting quacks. In this way, so many of us really have been all in it together, and that’s amazing and powerful.

We’ve also made it this far and learned a lot in the process about how to take care of ourselves and and each other. Mask-wearing is unremarkable now. Outdoor gatherings are the norm. Most people aren’t washing their bananas in Lysol anymore. Handwashing is a habit. Sanitizer is everywhere. And all of this matters. (Even the Lysol! Because washing your food with Lysol is NOT GREAT!).

One thing I’ve learned is that I really was too cautious in isolating myself and my family from others. My kids were in school, so the stakes seemed high (and they were) but I think I went too far in SAFE direction, taking measures that really didn’t have any measurable effect in the end. I’m not going to do that again. I’m going to continue to see people outside if they’re vaccinated. I am going to do my best to live my life as fully as possible within the parameters of sense. I don’t have to be a martyr. I don’t have to get frustrated at people who are making different choices than me (because it really doesn’t help anyone if I do).

Another thing I’ve learned in the last year that’s proven essential is the importance of CHILLING OUT. When my kids went back to school last September, I quit Twitter and cut out numerous voices who were making an anxious situation even worse. I try not to think so much about the big picture, because the big picture is overwhelming but also I’m not in charge of the big picture, nobody pays me to look over all of society, and so I just have this little patch that I’m responsible for and I’m doing the best I can.

As @yellowmanteau has written so gently and perfectly, limiting your Covid intake is advisable. I read just a handful of news sources (and one of them is my Guardian Weekly magazine, whose latest cover is all about the UK emerging from its latest wave, which is a wonderful forecast of the future). I only check the numbers when reading them makes me feel good.

I also recommend reading the article by Ed Yong in The Atlantic on the new route out of Covid now that Delta has made everything harder (and the path longer). @science.sam shared it in her stories and it’s a clarifying view of the path forward, affirming what @science.sam has been saying all along (and saving my sanity in the process) which is ALL PANDEMICS END.

We’ll get there. Keep going! You’re doing it. (Unless you haven’t been vaccinated yet: go do that.)

August 6, 2021

Everyone in this Room Will Someday Be Dead, by Emily Austin

I will confess to having very little interest in all the sad, languishing literary heroines, the kind who embark upon years of rest and relaxation, spending entire chapters imagining what it might be like to have a job, asking such questions as, “How should a person be?” These literary people are just not to my taste, and so I was wary of Emily Austin’s debut novel, Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead, about Gilda, who is overwhelmed by depression. And also a lesbian atheist who accidentally gets hired as a receptionist at a Catholic Church, and Gilda deals with this complication as head-on as she tackles everything in her life, which is to say: not at all. There’s also the mystery of her predecessor, an elderly woman whose death was suspicious. And the question of how many dirty dishes she can store in her closet before she’s forced to run some water in the sink.

I loved this book, which is very much internal, but where all the sad, languishing literary heroines are impossible company, Gilda is delightful. Her point of view entirely sympathetic, and the reader begins to cheer for the ER staff who receive her with tenderness as she arrives again and again with issues relating to anxiety. The whole narrative gets a little too madcap and threatens to go off the rail in places, but it holds steady, as Gilda doesn’t, and her despair has real resonance, her grappling with meaninglessness so meaningful, and yes, this is a book that ends with hope, which is definitely why I like it so much. But it’s also a really compelling depiction of the experience of mental illness, which was important to Austin, she writes, so that some readers will finally see themselves and that others might finally understand.

July 30, 2021

Summerlong

Summer continues! We had a lovely long weekend on Lake Huron recently, and I brought ATTACHMENTS, the first novel by Rainbow Rowell, and loved it so much. I’d had a rough week before we’d headed out of town and so even though I’ve gathered a pile of newly-released thrillers, I knew I wanted something more cheerful. The Rainbow Rowell book was not immediately appealing, however, because I’d found it in a Little Free Library and someone had spilled water on it once upon a time, but it turned out to be perfect, and now I keep recommending it to everyone. Such a great book that manages to be about work and friendship AND a romance all at once. It definitely brought back memories of nascent online culture in the workplace circa 1999/2000. Remember when your emails used to get flagged for using certain language? I worked in an office once where I inadvertently downloaded something that turned my cursor into a fairy wand, and somehow the IT guy knew immediately, and it was very embarrassing, and we didn’t end up dating, but they do in the scene from my next novel that I created out of this situation.

July 19, 2021

Getaway

How I spent my summer vacation! So nice to read such an eclectic selection of fiction.

The Final Revival of Opal and Nev is one of the most hyped books of the season, and I really liked it. A fictional oral history of a 1970s’ pop act, it’s also a fascinating treatment of how race and gender can eclipse talent, and a withering indictment of white allyship.

I picked up Picnic at Hanging Rock after it was included on the Topaz Literary Summer Reading Round-Up, and I am so glad I did, because indeed it’s a sultry, languid read, weird and disturbing, the story of the unsolved disappearance of three school girls in turn-of-the-century Australia.

Single Carefree Mellow was everything I was hoping for in a Katherine Heiny book, so sparkling and weird, and definitely a riff on Laurie Colwin who knew better than to assume that love and infidelity were interchangeable, because real life is more messy and complicated. The only problem is that now I’ve read all her books, and so she has to publish another one pronto

I read Burnt Sugar next, by Avni Doshi, so unrelentingly bleak, kind of holding up a magnifying glass to its characters so we could see ever errant hair and enlarged pore, and there was so much ugliness. I didn’t like it, but that’s not to say it wasn’t really good.

And then I read Long Live the Post Horn next, by Vigdis Hjorth, and wasn’t crazy about it initially. I am allergic to the works of Ottessa Mosfegh, and this was kind of similar in the beginning, not far from the bleakness of Burnt Sugar, with characters numb and detached, but then it clicked for me, mostly because it’s about hope and the postal system, which is definitely my jam. And I don’t think I’ve ever read a Norwegian novel before.

After that: Maeve Binchy! I read Circle of Friends years ago when I was a teenager who cut out pictures of Chris O’Donnell from magazines and hung them on my wall, but never read anything else, deciding that Binchy was for biddies, but for the last few months I’ve been listening to the You’re Booked podcast and they talk about her all the time, and so when I found Light a Penny Candle in a Little Free Library, I brought it home, and it was delightful, which I don’t say about most books more than 800 pages long, and it only became COMPLETELY ridiculous in the last few chapters, which is pretty impressive. A really wonderful look at friendship, and also of women who are allowed to be different and now just foils.

And finally, Astra, by Cedar Bowers, which I started on the last night of our trip, a novel in pieces, and I am waiting until I get to the end of give my assessment, but maybe smart people are saying many good things about this book.