June 14, 2021

NISHGA, by Jordan Abel

With his first two books, award-winning poet Jordan Abel’s conceptual writing allowed him a fascinating avenue by which to consider notions of Indigenous identity and cultural appropriation, but also—as he writes about in his latest, and painfully personal, book NISHGA—for him to engage with his own lack of connection with the Indigenous culture of his father and grandparents—the land, cultural knowledge and language of the Nishga people. The appropriative works he dismantles with his poetry are significant for being a primary way in which he’s been able to engage with Indigenous culture as someone who was raised apart from his community.

“Where do you come from?” A complicated question for many people, and especially for Abel, raised in Ontario by his white mother, far from British Columbia and his father and grandparents whose lives had come to be defined by violence and abuse originating from their experiences at the Coqualeetza Indian Residential School.

Abel’s father was an artist. Ironically, he notes, his father Lawrence Wilson, whom he barely knew, designed the logo for the Vancouver Aboriginal Child and Family Services Society.

Throughout NISHGA, Abel uses his father’s art, superimposing his images with photography and text, connecting and engaging with, and disassembling. These images are included alongside government records, transcripts of talks Abel has given, and other notes and pieces about his experience as an Indigenous writer in Canada.

NISHGA is a complicated, vulnerable, brave and considered answer to the “Where do you come from?” question. Abel wrote this book, he explains, so that other Indigenous people raised apart from their cultures will understand that they are not alone in their experience.

For the rest of us, NISHGA, artfully, originally, continues to underline the enormity of the legacy of Canada’s Residential School system, and the questions of identity that many Indigenous and non-Indigenous people rarely even consider.

June 10, 2021

Refreshing

Cheri DiNovo, a former Ontario MPP, and retired Canadian Senator Nancy Ruth make the most interesting literary and political companions in recent books The Queer Evangelist (DiNovo’s new autobiography) and The Unconventional Nancy Ruth (an authorized biography written by Ramona Lumpkin). Both daughters of Toronto but raised in classes that were divided by stratospheres, each woman has made her career out of embracing seeming contradictions, putting principles ahead of political loyalties, and both identify as LGBTQ (DiNovo is bisexual; Ruth is a lesbian). DiNovo may be a proud socialist and Ruth a longtime conservative, but both women have also found a place for themselves within the the Ministry of the United Church of Canada…though within that institution each would prove herself ahead of her time.

I devoured DiNovo’s memoir in two days after reading an article in the Toronto Star about how she wished to show in her book that change is possible and the fight is worth it. Perhaps unsurprising for someone whose true calling is writing sermons, DiNovo is a wonderful storyteller whose easy, informal sentences make for reading that’s both breezy and inspiring at once. She tells the story of her traumatic childhood, of living on the streets as a teenage drug dealer, of turning her life around after support from a shelter helped her return to education, and then how she went from being a teenage Trotskyist to running her own headhunting firm during the 1980s’ excesses. Her corporate success, however, coupled with its inverse as the 1990s arrived and the economy spilled into recession, led her to spiritual questioning whose answers she eventually began to find in the United Church, where she was ordained as a Minister in 1995. After serving a rural parish, she began to work at an inner-city church in Toronto, helping turn the church’s future around by strengthening its connection to the surrounding community. She performed the first same-sex marriage in Canada in 2001. In 2006, she was elected as MPP for Parkdale-High Park in Toronto, a position she would serve in until 2018.

I reviewed the biography of Ruth for Quill and Quire, and you can read my piece right here. Ruth’s childhood was not the hardscrabble experience of DiNovo, but it was difficult and traumatic in its own way, and she faced her own struggles to find her place in the world, though she always had her family fortunes to fall back on. After inheriting her family money, Ruth devotes herself to philanthropy, supporting causes promoting women’s empowerment. She runs for office twice for the Conservative party, but is both times defeated. In 2005, however, she was appointed to the Canadian Senate, where she used her power from within as she always had—to advocate and agitate for progressive change.

What I find most refreshing about both women is the ways that they managed to get things done by reaching across party lines. In the Ruth bio, it’s noted that she donated to the leadership campaign of Ontario Liberal Lyn McLeod when she herself was a candidate for the Progressive Conservative Party, because she wanted to see women in positions of power everywhere. DiNovo was able to work with members of other parties to get significant bills passed in the Ontario legislature even when the NDP was in a third-party position. Both DiNovo and Ruth are far more interested in enacting policy change to improve the lives of vulnerable people than adhering to a party line, or ensuring an election win—and in their doggedness, they really do prove that real change is possible.

June 9, 2021

The Souvenir Museum, by Elizabeth McCracken

There is always something so delightfully skewed by Elizabeth McCracken’s literary world, which is populated by ventriloquists and people who play villainesses on children’s TV programs, with runaways and stowaways, and that voice on late night radio dispensing love advice. Literally uncanny, by which I mean that in her latest story collection,The Souvenir Museum, nobody is at home . A distant son takes his widower father on holiday to Scotland. A heartbroken woman checks into a hotel to drink her feelings, and narrowly avoids drowning in someone else’s bathtub. The TV villainess spends New Years with her brother in Rotterdam. A single mother takes her young son to Denmark to find an old flame to give him a watch her father had left him. A mother, the one character who never goes anywhere, is rendered homeless all the same when she loses her entire family. An older gay man takes his young son on a lazy river while his partner takes a break at the bar, and considers the unlikely course of his life. And speaking of unlikely courses, a mother buys her daughter the doll that she’s always wanted (a Baby Alive!) except that her daughter is grown up, expecting her first child, a recovered addict, and alive, while the child of a long-ago friend whose life had once run parallel to hers…is not. This story is called “A Walk Through the Human Heart,” its title referring to a scene set in a science museum, but the title is also an apt description of what it feels like to be reading this book, the exquisite agony of being alive, of being loved, of being left, and bereft.

Stories of Sadie and Jack weave their way among the others, starting near the beginning of their relationship as American Sadie meets her eccentric English relatives at Jack’s sister wedding in the middle-of-nowhere Ireland, and we see teenage Jack in London, later they spend time with Sadie’s mother, and these stories show the baggage that family brings with it, baggage that’s inextricably bound up with stories, some of them true, some of them otherwise. That to love is always, one day, to lose, but we embark on these journeys of a lifetime anyway, and yes, if we’re lucky, there are souvenirs.

These stories, their sentences—they’re disorientating (which is the nature of travel, of course). But they’re also strikingly evocative, marvellously descriptive—but sometimes too much? How can hair be “brown marcel”? Marcel means curly, I think? These are not images you breeze over. I’m imagining Elizabeth McCracken’s mind as a treasure trove of strange words and rituals and people and ideas, the world as we know it rendered in a funhouse mirror, strange and distorted, which is also to say just as it is.

June 8, 2021

Gleanings

• We should be upset. But what are we going to do?
• Poetry is demanding, too. It is a door through which we enter the needed work of making language toward new meanings.
• One of the (many) things I found alienating about “Ferrante fever” was the tendency to declare that Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet had captured something essential, even universal, about “female friendship,” as if there is any one version of it.
• And then in the Fall, with the wind pushing me along the beach on my 43rd Birthday, I surrendered. This isn’t what I want my 40s to feel like. I have mountains to climb, rivers to swim. Finally, the leaf let go of its branch.
• I crave adventure. And the minute I start having an adventure, I can’t wait for it to be over.
• One used to have to walk single file along certain stretches of the path, but a few seasons of social distancing have made it wider. What you see here is the work of many feet.
• Here is my almost-summer wish for us: I think we should bring a pan of freshly-baked, thick, buttery, crisp on top, and plush with a flavor that absolutely reverberates with corn underneath, to your next park/picnic/potluck.
• Once I discovered some contemporary authors that I loved, it was like falling down a rabbit hole into new worlds.
• For me, I’ve always found pleasure simply in how a book fits in the hand…
• The creek’s perpetual motion, its burbling over the occasional rock and the pebbly creek bed never fails to captivate me.
• These days I feel like we’re all that annoying childhood moment of being in the backseat of a long car journey whining: “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? How about now? Are we there yet?”
• I’m deeply in love with the ephemera in my life.
• And while it is possible to slowly untangle this kind of writing, I wonder if it needs to tangled in the first place.
• How well do you know your dog?
• I Can See Myself Being Invisible
• We each had our version of Snuggle Puppy that we just assumed was more or less how everyone sang it. But we were wrong!
• “The way that colonial violence impacted me in particular was by way of disconnection,” Abel says. “Growing up without my dad’s presence in my life, without Nisga’a language, the Nisga’a culture, and also without being on traditional Nisga’a territory. That was all this gaping hole in my life.”

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June 7, 2021

Gone Swimming

I swam! I swam! Not in Lake Ontario on Friday after we cycled to Ward’s Island, which would have been ideal because I had actually packed a bathing suit, but I didn’t swim there because the water was so cold and so was the air, although I did make it in to my waist and it was wonderful. (Both my kids swam though. It was incredible! I don’t know how they did it.) But the next day, which was Iris’s birthday, we drove to the Kortright Conservation Centre for a picnic and a walk in the forest, with intentions to dip our feet in the creek, and then it turned out that the one spot on the creek where we stopped was a perfect swimming hole, and so naturally I skipped down to my skivvies and swam right in, and it was GLORIOUS. The most beautiful spot, and there was no one else around, except for my children, who were mortified, but there was no one else around, and not all of us can swim at sub-arctic temperatures, children. Sometimes you have wait for the creek, the wildest swim I’ve ever taken, I think, although not so wild that there wasn’t a lifesaving float secured on the bank. Clearly I’m not the first person to take a dip there. But it was indeed a joyous way to kick off the 2021 swimming season.

June 2, 2021

Day For Night, by Jean McNeil

Day For Night hooked me from its first gorgeous lines, striking evocative prose, marvellous sentences that swept me along much in the way of Virginia Woolf’s Street Haunting. Something Woolfian about the project entire, though the copy on the back cover refers to Orlando. There’s also Walter Benjamin, whom I know nothing about, and I sometimes get deterred sometimes when writers write in homage to other writers I’ve never read before. This can be alienating, but here it isn’t. Richard is making a movie about Benjamin. It’s 2018 in London and Richard is still reeling from the shock of the Brexit vote, of the nastiness it seems to have unleashed in his world. There are parallels between his moment and that of Benjamin, who was exiled from his native Germany. Richard, born to a Kenyan father, an Italian mother. His history is complicated, sense of himself as a citizen of the world is anchored by his London home. Which feels like another world now. He feels alienated from his family as well, from his wife, a film producer, who’s proven to be far more successful than he has and her paycheques pay their bills. When he meets a young man who’s to play Benjamin in the movie, Richard becomes besotted. Something is going to happen. He knows this.

Day for Night reminded me of Ali Smith’s Seasonal quartet, in its immediacy, and engagement with the UK’s political moment post-Brexit. (Perhaps also because it’s about film and a man called Richard. It made me think of another Richard too, Richard Dalloway.) The novel’s immediacy, however, reads as otherworldly in 2021. The overwrought preoccupation with Brexit seems faraway now that it’s happened, and in light of the pandemic. I found Richard’s agonizing ill-aimed in places, too much. Richard, do you know what a privilege it is to cavort around a city freely while fretting about Brexit? How what is existential in 2018 seems almost frivolous just a few years later? There is something artificial about the way that Richard speaks. He’s more a mouthpiece than a realized character. The meticulous construction of his spoken sentences are even commented upon in the novel—just a quirk of his. But it’s definitely strange.

I will confess that for the first half of Day for Night, I wasn’t sure I could commit to this book. Richard was unnatural. In some ways, he was kind of intolerable. But I persisted, and I am glad I did. Because something happens halfway through that’s entirely unexpected, and changes everything. Casting the entire book in a different light, filters upon filters to understand what’s happening. There are so many layers of meaning, even the layer in which the current moment of this very contemporary story seems out of date now—this is fascinating. And it turns out that this novel has a broader scope than I’d first supposed. Stretching across centuries, and continents, and media. Between reality, and unreality. Summer and winter. Night and day. Male and female. Messing with binaries. Diffusing polarities. It’s a rich and satisfying project.

June 1, 2021

Gleanings

• But this time, I got caught up in a sense of hope and promise. It seemed impossible not to.
• It was a Joyspotting day again and nothing says joy to me like a wild daisy.
• When you swim regularly, you need it. You need the feeling of your aging body in water, you need the buoyancy, the silkiness as you reach out your arms to propel yourself forward and back.
• I’m quitting the pandemic to attend to the hum of the universe, to get back to universe mind.
• However, heartened and emboldened by my new paper doll, and by Julia Berick’s introduction that insists that Franny and Zooey holds up very well indeed, thank you very much, I have embarked at long last on a re-read. And I still love it. Phew.
• There is so much I wish I’d known when we started; there is so much I have learned. 
• Stepping outside of ourselves and reaching towards other people and beings, especially by trying to be useful to them in some way, is a powerful antidote to capitalism that brings the relief of contentment.

Do you like reading good things online and want to make sure you don’t miss a “Gleanings” post? Then sign up to receive “Gleanings” delivered to your inbox each week(ish). And if you’ve read something excellent that you think we ought to check out, share the link in a comment below.

June 1, 2021

May/June

May and June are my favourite months. They’re so much my favourite months that I like April even better for the sole reason that in April, we still have all of May and June before us. May and June encompassing what I like to think of as “Kerry Season,” from Mother’s Day until my birthday a month and a half later, and in between those two auspicious dates, both my daughters have their birthdays, we celebrate our wedding anniversary, and there’s that EPIC FESTIVAL known as Father’s Day, which is like Mother’s Day, but smaller. (Both my mother and my mother-in-law also celebrate their birthdays in June. So did Barbara Pym. How could 30 days contain such wonder?)

We are lucky in our household that anybody’s special day is everybody’s special day—we all get takeout and cake. We’ve been especially lucky this year in Toronto that the weather has been glorious and all the most incredible flowers are in bloom. May and June is the season of having so much to look forward to, even before we roll into summer proper. May/June is the season where sometimes we get tired of cake. May/June is before we start visiting places infested with bugs and before I start getting covered in rashes. Before everything is covered in sand, and beach days are just a delicious fantasy. But it’s not too soon for too much ice cream.

May and June are one of those rare experiences that I love and don’t encounter enough, which manage to be wondrous in themselves, but also on the cusp of everything. May and June are like the most wonderful swan dive off a cliff, gorgeous, in slow motion, and at the end of it all is the clearest, bluest lake you’ve ever seen. SUMMER.

May 31, 2021

Crying in H Mart, by Michelle Zauner

I loved Michelle Zauner’s memoir, Crying in H Mart, a book which was born from a 2016 award-winning essay in Glamour about how learning to cook Korean food helped Zauner begin to heal from grieving her mother’s death. An experience made all the more complicated by the fact that Zauner, at age 25, had only just began knowing and appreciating her mother again after the tumultuous drama of her teenage years. Zauner’s mother was as strong a character as her daughter is—she writes about how her mother would yell at her when she got hurt, the opposite of the other mothers she knew who’d be all cuddles and consolation. That Zauner’s mother is Korean only underlines the gulf between them as Zauner is growing up in Oregon—her American father had met her mother while working abroad and then they’d come to America together. In many ways, Zauner and her mother are alien to each other for must of her life, and in this book she explores how much of that was culture versus the particular person her mother was.

Crying in H-Mart is a coming-of-age story, about how Zauner connects to her place in the world through losing the person who delivered her here. It’s not just about loss, but as much about abundant love—as her mother is dying, Zauner hastily organizes her wedding so her mother can be in attendance. She also becomes committed to caring for her mother during her illness, though has not idea what she’s signing up when she decides this. Her efforts are also thwarted by other caregivers to whom Zauner is just in the way—the connection between mother and daughter is ever being negotiated. As in any real story about death and dying, nothing ever goes according to script and there’s never anything close to closure. And the end is also its own kind of beginning, Zauner beginning to take control of her narrative, and as she starts to achieve success in writing and music (which Zauner performs as “Japanese Breakfast”). She also begins to see her mother as a more complicated person than she’d first supposed, as an artist in her own right, and that perhaps she and her mother aren’t as different as she thinks.

I’ve read other stories about children of immigrants growing up between cultures, about stories of Asian parenting ala Tiger Moms. Crying in H Mart takes on similar things, but with a depth and texture I haven’t encountered before. It’s a familiar story, but also a particular one, powerful for how it stands for itself most of all and one extraordinary ordinary mother-daughter relationship.

May 28, 2021

Pfingsten

I’ve been reading Barbara Pym all spring, as I’ve mentioned several hundred times, and the Anglican rituals, for me, have always been the most curious aspect of these books—the vicars, and the curates, and the cassocks. What’s a cassock? I don’t even know. And especially: what is Whitsun? Whitsun, which is never a major plot point, but simply part of the course of the year (and occasion for a bank holiday). I had to google it—Whitsun is the Pentecost (and then I had to google that, and I still don’t really get it), celebrated the seventh Sunday after Easter. And frankly, not a lot—Barbara Pym aside—has been going on this spring, as Ontario moves into its eleventeenth month of lockdown, so I decided this was the year I was going to make Whitsun a thing. What that would entail exactly, I wasn’t sure. Definitely not church. But we needed something to look forward to, a goal to shoot for, and so Whitsun it is. (And indeed, this is cultural appropriation. Church of England Cultural Appropriation. It’s not the same thing.)

I decided this during a terrible weekend in mid-April where our provincial government’s incompetence took a swan dive off a cliff. Finally, after the government waiting to see whether modelling numbers predicting ICUs being overwhelmed with patients would play out in reality (SPOILER: they did! Who would have guessed?) the province moved into a locked-downier lockdown from the lockdown we’ve been locked down in since November 23. Six weeks on from then would be Whitsun. Surely by Whitsun, I told myself, we would find ourselves in a better place? Keep looking in the direction of the place you want to get to has been my motto all along…

And here we are, with falling infection rates, with vaccine rates that are really high. We were still in lockdown for Whitsun and the lockdown carries on, but it was so good to mark a milestone on a weekend with such beautiful summer weather. I’d also ordered peonies, because I’d received an enticing ad from a local florist, and the great thing about made-up holidays (all holidays are made-up holidays, even Whitsun, though I’ll acknowledge that my version of Whitsun was particularly improvised) was that you get to make them whatever you want. Whitsun peonies, I decided. And we’d make a Victoria sponge cake. I booked a car so we could go somewhere. We were going to make this the best Whitsun ever!

And it was! It was already a holiday weekend in Ontario and we’d gone for an epic bike ride the day before (Whitsun Eve). On Whitsun itself, we had Sunday waffles as usual but they just tasted better for it being Whitsun. I finished the book I was reading (Day for Night, by Jean McNeil, which I’ll be writing about here soon…). We went to Ontario Place, and had a second weekend in a row with two lake days in a row. We got ice cream. We came home (no traffic) and had an amazing barbecue supper, and then just as I was assembling the Victoria sponge cake (which was beautiful and delicious and did not look like it had been assembled by a blindfolded toddler—a first for me!) a friend sent me a text and asked if our family would like to join theirs for fireworks in the park that evening.

I can’t believe they were lighting fireworks for Whitsun!

Our children have never seen fireworks before and it turned out to be the most magical display, the first real life communal experience we’ve had while not sitting in a vehicle since March 2020 (albeit at safe distance for other people and also explosives). It occurred to me that if everybody just carried around lit sparklers all the time, we’d have no trouble staying six feet apart at all.

Even more cool things: on Sunday I was scrolling through the #Whitsun hashtag on Instagram, and what do I find. Peonies! Whitsun peonies EVERYWHERE. It turns out that the Pentecost is a national holiday in Germany and peonies (pfingstrose, translation Whitsun Rose) are the official symbol. Sometimes when you’re making it up you get it exactly right.

Not all days are glorious. Our bike ride on the Saturday before Whitsun was hot and full of whining. When we finally got to our destination, the beach was full of thick green algae and bugs were swarming us. A very loud church service was being amplified unavoidably, and it was weird and obnoxious. I was allergic to something and broke out in a rash, and on the long ride home we got caught in a rainstorm. “That was awesome,” we said at the end of the journey (20km) but also absolutely awful.

Whitsun though. Whitsun was perfect. Sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes you get to make it up and everything goes right.