November 17, 2022
Francie’s Got a Gun, by Carrie Snyder
I loved Francie’s Got a Gun, a new novel by Carrie Snyder, whose Juliet Stories was a finalist for the Governor General’s Awards in 2012, and whose debut, Hair Hat, was part of a Canada Reads spin-off I ran in 2010. (Her third book, Girl Runner, was a finalist for the Writers Trust Fiction Prize.) It’s a taut, tension-filled story of a young girl who’s running with a gun in her hand, the question of “where did she come from” taking precedent over “where is she going?” because maybe the ending it inevitable. But is it? The story moving between Francie on the run and the story of what led to the events that sent her running, this latter told through a variety of voices—Francie’s family, her teacher, friends—and it’s a story of community, and responsibility, and how we do and don’t belong to each other, how we stand by and/or fail each other, and these voices weave a gorgeous tapestry of life and heart, a treatise on story itself. How one thing leads to another, for want of a nail the shoe was lost, etc. I started reading this book and found it hard to put it down, but refrained from posting about it until I’d reached the very end, so I’d be able to tell you with certainty that Carrie Snyder has pulled off, with flawless execution, a rich and sprawling story, and she really, really has.
November 15, 2022
Gleanings
- Every morning I ask — how do I find acceptance, let alone joy in the midst of it all?
- This is my advice to ten-year-old me: Sing it, little sister! You keep doing what you’re doing even when other people think it’s weird.
- It was always on my mind to do it. I had to gather the skills as a cartoonist and storyteller to do it well, and the distance to look at it with new eyes in a way — but not be so far removed from events that I couldn’t remember things anymore. So when it was time to make the book, it was now or never.
- When was the last time you were truly amazed? Astonished? Thunderstruck?
- Washi tape is pretty, am I right? And colourful. But in the quest to believe in your own ideas — those ideas that want to come into the world through you – washi tape is SO MUCH MORE!
- Back to the woman in my group who is reluctant to admit to reading (or writing) memoir. Let’s call her A. Unsurprisingly, A’s view on memoir as ‘cringe worthy’ was formed by remarks made by a man….
- The glory of a cottage bookshelf! Decades of mass-market paperbacks with their cracked spines and dog-eared pages. Put me in a cabin and the first place I’ll head is for the books.
- I feel as if I keep picking the wrong books, as if my reading radar is malfunctioning.
- It feels downright unfair that I figured out how to make the best molasses cookie — thick, tender, but also one-bowl, no hand-mixer required, the kind that makes your whole home smell like the holidays — and you’re only finding out about it today.
- becoming… more resilient by the day. It’s been such a turbulent few years for my family but each day I surprise myself and find ways to endure the rough days.
- It all got managed. Work, warmth, kids, food, laundry, creative thinking, all of it. Like a frosting swirl that is just the perfect amount and not too sweet. Perfect.
- And at last, I see how, through the years, I have been not just making my novel different—I’ve been making it better. The process has been circuitous, and I’ve learned a lot.
- I am not alone in my tears. Every Iranian-Canadian/America/European you know is crying. We are filled with hope, fear, despair, anger, and love for the people, the very young people, who are being killed every day. We are not doing well and we are also doing great. I have never experienced such unity in the collective pain of the Iranian diaspora community, such determination to help, and a sense of closeness with one another.
- I stop today to consider the word family and what it really means. The way life circumstances can turn a family upside down and then add people to it and put it back together anew
- There is a certain tree-falls-in-a-forest-quality of being an only parent. In having these moments of reconciliation with time. I often wonder if what I’m feeling is something other than what it is.
- Writer is a capacious carry-all for my spirit.
November 14, 2022
Palmerston
On Saturday we didn’t have a lot going on (a treat in itself), but I had to buy some berries (in preparation for guests on Sunday for whom we would be making breakfast, a friend and her beautiful family who we haven’t seen since 2019!) so we all walked over to Gold Leaf Market at Palmerston and Bloor (which is always the first place in the neighbourhood to get fresh rhubarb in the spring), and we decided to also stop by at the library. All these parenthesis, I hope you’ll understand, underlining the resonance of what I’m talking about, these local streets we’ve been circling through these difficult years as we’ve walked our way toward better times. No trip down the street is ever a straight line.
There are places we walked in the Covid times where we can’t bear to walk anymore—the small patch of woods at the university, the grubby little ravine just south of St. Clair and the ravine proper, any back alleyway and don’t even care about the garage door murals, nope. We walked those walks to save our insanity, and only managed it, JUST, or maybe we really didn’t, which is why we refuse to do it now. Nobody in our family can stand ice skating anymore, not that we really liked it very much in the first place.
Palmerston Library, however, is very different. A Covid destination for sure—our home branch was closed for a very long time beginning in 2020 and when the library reopened for circulation that summer, our holds were routed to Palmerston, which was the next closest—but it represented something different than walking in sad circles and feeling hopeless. I remember going to pick up a stack of books we’d requested and getting rhubarb on the way that spring and thinking what a miracle were both these things, how we were truly lucky.
“Remember when we had to put our cards on a tray?” I asked Stuart, and there was fondness to these memories, instead of despair. When the library opened again, we’d go pick up our books at the front door where plastic barriers were set up, and we’d hand over our library cards on a plastic tray that was slid back to us at the end, all of it slightly illicit, like a speakeasy, except books instead of booze. There were some weeks where going to pick up our library holds was the only item on our agenda, and so it was a big deal, and the librarians inside found even more ways to bring the books to us—there were grab bags geared to different age groups and genres, and also new releases in the window, each one numbered, so you could request the numbers you wanted, and somehow I ended up getting my hands on all kinds of new releases, like Beach Read, by Emily Henry, and The Girls Are All So Nice Here, by Laurie Flynn, and Sweet Sorrow, by David Nicholls, which I only chose because I liked the cover but I really really liked it.
I love to think about all this, about the treat of these wonderful novels in such a difficult time, about how much it meant to have a destination and not be aimless, and also about adaptation and ingenuity and the amazing ways that library staff found ways to make things work. (Remember when all circulating materials had to quarantine for a week before going out again, which meant it took SO LONG to get a book in demand, and also how we eventually determined that Covid was not being spread by library books, which was wonderful news?) I love to think about all this because it’s a story of trying things, daring to be different, of how much libraries and books meant to our communities, of being brave and taking chances, and how some of those chances work out exponentially (by which I mean that I am probably FAR from one of the only people you’re going to meet who think the library helped save her life).
Eventually, we could go inside again. I recall that we weren’t permitted to browse, but could pick up our own holds, and that computer terminals were available for those who needed them. I remember the first time I walked into a library again after so so long, and how I could have cried, and maybe I even did, because I was moved a lot in those days. And then when we could go back again and select our own books from the shelves, a little further down the line, and masks were required, though there would often be someone who didn’t have one (usually a person who was having other kinds of trouble), and we learned to be okay with that, which wasn’t easy, but it became easier, an essential lesson in sharing space with other people and how we can’t always (ever?) be in control of what other people do.
Our home branch opened again, and what a thing, and I can’t even remember when that happened, because it was just so ordinary, to stop in and pick up our books on the walk home from school, the kind of luxury I’d never thought twice about before, but it felt so wonderful after so long, and of course, things were not so straightforward. There was a while when our branch closed, and we were back to Palmerston, two steps back—albeit without the book quarantine and speakeasy card slide, so this was progress. But not every setback is a total disaster (something I often have to remind myself about after what we’ve all been through), and our branch reopened, and it had been such a long time since I’d been to Palmerston Library until this weekend.
And—unlike so many other things—it felt good to remember.
November 12, 2022
The Hero of This Book, by Elizabeth McCracken
Elizabeth McCracken is one of my favourite authors, one of those whose new releases are always a must-purchase. Ever since Thunderstruck and Other Stories, which I read in 2014, I’ve been dazzled by the wonderful strangeness of McCracken’s perspective; in The Hero of This Book, her narrator writes, “I have no interest in ordinary people, having met so few of them in my life.”
The narrator of The Hero of the This Book is not McCracken herself, for this book is not a memoir—and its narrator is just as sure that she is no memoirist (whereas McCracken herself has published a memoir before). The book cannot be a memoir because McCracken had always promised her mother that she’d never appear as a character in her work, never mind that McCracken’s mother would make a remarkable character if she did, and that the eponymous hero of McCracken’s novel (a slim book made up of reflections and memories, ideas about writing and storytelling, and episodes from a trip the narrator takes to London in 2019 in the wake of her mother’s death) bears a resemblance to such a character. “Everything makes more sense if you know what my parents looked like,” a section of this book begins, the narrator’s enormous father countered by his wife who was less than five feet tall, was disabled and walked with canes. “She was a Jewish girl of Eastern European descent, born in a small town near Des Moines, Iowa, the older of twin girls. She always loved what made her statistically unusual.”
It’s the most peculiar, extraordinary love story, an ode to a mother who never said “I love you,” because she didn’t have to. A woman fiercely protective of her own self, her own story, and who would—her daughter is sure—be affronted by being put in a book. But here she is, but it’s fiction, or is it, but it doesn’t matter. Like everything McCracken writes, it’s weird, rich and wonderful.
November 4, 2022
Ezra’s Ghosts, by Darcy Tamayose
It took me this long to pick up Darcy Tamayose’s Ezra’s Ghosts because of the line in an otherwise rave review in Publisher’s Weekly that said, “Tamayose’s experimental story structures and tight focus on academia make for a collection that will likely put off casual readers.” I thought this book was going to be difficult, but it wasn’t. It was interesting, and richly intelligent, and strange and surprising, but it was also gripping, and full of suspense. I read it as part of the Turning the Page on Cancer readathon last weekend, and it was just the best pick, pages flying by.
The eponymous Ezra is a Canadian prairie city, the book comprising four different stories set around there. In the first, the shortest, an academic returns from a research trip to China—his focus is on the Ryukyu Islands, where Okinawa is located—in early 2020, and finds his pregnant partner acting strangely aloof. The second story is about another academic, a professor, who finds herself in the afterlife following her murder in which the wrong person is put away for the crime, the murderer goes unpunished, and her family members steep in their despair. In the third story, on an isolated farmstead, a grieving journalist encounters a man, an immigrant from Japan in the early 1900s, who, at 130 years, claims to be the oldest person in the world, all the while dead birds are falling down from the sky in curious weather. And finally, in the last story, we’re taken more than 20 years into the future as the partner of the academic in the first story visits Paris against a backdrop of violence and chaos to which she’s become somewhat inured.
For someone who doesn’t know who Derrida is, I loved this book an awful lot, finding it gripping, pulsing. I loved its insistence on mutability, on the arbitrariness of borders, the Japanese-Canadian writer raised on the Prairies can write about an Island chain in the East China Sea, about ghosts, about missing and murdered Indigenous women, and blend critical theory with elements of murder mystery.
Ezra’s Ghosts was terrific and not a chore at all.
November 2, 2022
10 Days That Shaped Modern Canada, Aaron W. Hughes
Reading 10 Days That Shaped Modern Canada, it occurred to me that too many of us take for granted what a huge and ambitious project Canada is (and society at all, for that matter). I never properly knew what the stakes were as I lived through many of the historic moments Hughes documents in this accessible, engaging book, though this is usually the way with history, and also I was too young to properly understand—the 1995 Quebec Referendum, for example. It’s stunning to read Hughes’ chapter on that now in light of Brexit and the disasters it’s brought and to think that could have happened here, how perilous is our arrangement of French and English cultures, to the exclusion of the Indigenous peoples who were here from the start, not to mention the immigrant groups who’ve settled in Canada over the years, becoming part of Canada’s cultural fabric. I never knew that Canada’s multiculturalism act was inspired by groups such as Ukrainian-Canadians who felt Canada’s endless focus on French/English relations was unfair to other cultural groups. I never knew what the Meech Lake Accord was at all. Or that the real story of the 1972 Summit hockey series was not as heroic as we’ve been taught it was (and I hadn’t thought about Igor Gouzenko in years!). How Pierre Trudeau’s “Just watch me” relates to this year’s “freedom” convoy, and how the 1989 Ecole Polytechnique murders changed conversations about violence against women and gun control, and how—no matter what political party was in power‚ the project of federalism was such a challenging one, different means toward the very same ends, tension and conflict baked right into the recipe.
I loved this book, its breadth and thoughtfulness, the way that Hughes made politics and legal history understandable, and how the pop culture references were just as resonant and interesting. I also appreciate how the book is no definitive, but instead the beginning of a conversation about where we are and how we got here. I learned so much, and definitely recommend it.
PS If you’re my dad, you’re getting a signed copy for Christmas.
November 2, 2022
Gleanings
- Things fall apart, but the purpose of life becomes clearer in the debris: be where you are right now. Do what makes you feel good. Find ways to do good and serve others while feeding yourself. Look for beauty. It’s everywhere.
- On days like these, my curiosity feels infinite which would seem to imply it will remain forever unquenched; each curve in the path prompting another question, another thought and, with a bit of luck, a bit more insight. As the rain gently fell and the breeze teased my hair, I finished my trail with glee and dashed back to the car to dry both me and my gear.
- October is a beautiful month. It’s also the gateway to the dark months and I know there are those who miss and crave and yearn for the light and the warmth of summer and I get it! I do love a good summer backyard BBQ with friends and family, but my absolute favourite shared meals are inside.
- One doesn’t get older without knowing that what truly makes us unique is on the inside, but sometimes that bears
- And so what follows are just some things that have helped me. I’ve written about most of them in previous posts. But I thought it would be helpful and useful for me to have them all in one spot for when one of THOSE DAYS shows up, and maybe it will also be useful for you. Some days some of these “helpful” things will hit wrong, some days, they’ll hit right. Take what works, ignore what doesn’t. The usual.
- Years pass, paths diverge, and yet the sheer mystery and miracle that they ever crossed at all… a gift. Life is a rare commodity.
- I stayed until the end but I won’t be back. I will leave some nice, constructive feedback on the failings of the class, once I have simmered down a bit. I know it is stupid but I was a little teary when I got home after class, because I tried this thing SPECIFICALLY FOR KNOW-NOTHINGS but it turns out I was supposed to know something, and let’s just add it to the FAILURE column, yet more evidence that I am not good at anything but blog posts and blowjobs.
- The image I keep returning to lately is that it’s like I’m crossing a suspension bridge. It’s a bit unsteady underfoot, but as long as I look straight ahead it’s not too bad moving forward, just doing the next thing that’s in front of me, and the next, and the next. It’s when I look down and realize all over again what’s below it, or it’s shaken by a gust of wind (a memory, a place, a picture, or just a feeling) that the vertiginous sensations return — “O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed” — and I am overcome, unbalanced, beside myself, in spite of myself.
- A window so fleeting, so challenging, so beautifully and wonderfully intense that my memory could only hold on to so much. A t-shirt. And the girl who wore it.
- And I’m sitting in my house, getting the dinner ready and waiting for the kids to get back and the light is that perfect october light here, the leaves are on fire and your eyes hurt from the beauty everywhere. Its fucking heartbreaking. It really is. Its so beautiful, I am stunned into melancholy.
November 1, 2022
Muffins
It goes without saying that I support CUPE school staff in their fight for a fair deal.
When the world fell apart in March 2020, the centrality of schools to our communities and families was made more apparent than it had ever been, and of course I stand with the incredible people who care for my children every day and help them learn and grow and have kept them safe in their classrooms during the last two and a half years, which has been no small feat in a global health emergency.
It amazes me that, after all our schools have done for us since 2020 and now that we know how truly essential they are, Ontario voters would once again deliver a majority to a government with so little respect for what teachers and school staff do.
I’m still pretty disgusted that this government is offering families $200 a child to pay for education catch-up after learning loss over the last three years, which is barely going to cover two sessions of tutoring. Because do you know what would actually help to make up those gaps? Investing that money in our school system. Giving education workers the pay they’re asking for (especially since this government has currently bagged a surplus) so our kids can finally have a year without learning disruptions.
Oh, but I’m also super struggling with all this. Part of it is that it’s a reminder of the labour disruptions of 2019/2020 that turned out to be a harbinger of such an “unprecedented” time of upheaval and hardship all over the world. When staff and teachers were taking job action in those days, I went all-in with support, baking muffins for the picketers and marching in the freezing cold, organizing walk-ins and rallies, overestimating the impact of my actions, my ability to make a difference, my obligation in the matter, and also whose political ends I was serving. I’ve got to say that becoming so deeply invested, from 2017-2020, in situations that were actually outside of my control, imagining that the free world and the future of democracy (and public education) was riding on my specific shoulders, completely fucked with my mental health.
Perhaps there are people who can engage in politics without losing their minds, but I might not be one of them.
It’s something on the theme of everything I’ve been talking to my therapist about over the past ten months, which is that there are people who are actually being paid to be at that bargaining table, and I’m not one of them, and so maybe I could chill out a bit? That this (among many things) isn’t my problem to fix, and maybe muffins aren’t the answer?
(Muffins were my way to imagine I had any control at all.)
It’s been a hard three years. My littlest daughter had a field trip to the science centre on Friday that’s been cancelled and I’m more devastated about it than really makes sense, except that for me (whose mental health has been precarious, and whose main triggers are those moments where I can’t make the world alright for my kids) it stands for bigger and harder things than that.
I’m fed up with the political scripts from both sides. I resent the way that both are trying to manipulate my anxiety and emotions for their own purposes. I, like so many of us, feel incredibly fragile after these three very hard years.
It’s just difficult. Of course I support school staff, but I’m so tired.
October 31, 2022
Spooky Read(athon)
Happy Halloween! Yesterday was the Turning the Page on Cancer Readathon, which raised over $75,000 for Rethink Cancer, improving outcomes for people living with Metastatic Breast Cancer. I raised over $2500 for Team Melanie, in memory of our friend Melanie Masterson, who died in December (on the solstice!) and had the best time reading four spooky books which were fitting for the season. You’re going to be reading more about a few of these picks soon. All in all, a wonderful reading day for the very best cause.
