May 4, 2021

Gleanings

• If you observe and you plan, in other words, if you adjust and you trust what the data shows, you can send a rocket ship to Mars.
• Seven Things You Don’t Need to be an Artist
• My kitchen table holds a small bouquet of flowers that have brightened each of my days in the past week.
• I probably shouldn’t complain when Mother Nature is showing off so beautifully but oh, what a labyrinthine year it’s been…
• It breaks my heart when people refer to him in the past, though I understand why they do. He is not the person we used to know. And past imperfect is the correct choice, alas, for many of his loves and hobbies…
• A moment in which most things feel possible; the moment in which I haven’t yet dropped anything irrevocably today and I can maybe pick up some of yesterday’s things. 
• Delight is not a respite from our troubled world but a direct and more mysterious engagement with it.
• I think that is what I like so much about soup. It is, by its very nature, a dish that you don’t have to apologize to.
• In 1990, I arrived at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, having no idea that the greatest gift of that seven-month fellowship would be the start of a lifelong friendship with Elizabeth McCracken.
• I have been thinking about Carl Sagan and his passion for science.
• I’m remembering how we learn to be parents—and thinking about what it means to offer love and support, when someone’s parenthood is new.
• Instead, she owns these actions and their role in her life. Many of them were physically harmful, all of them were attempts to lessen spiritual pain. And all are part of her, part of what she has fused to create herself—a complicated woman and skilled writer.
• What a wonderful thing to be at a point in your life when you can do something like this, unapologetically, and so beautifully.
• But we have no choice but to begin again. To roll out a fresh slab. Smooth out the bubbles. Wrap it well. Be patient. Cross our fingers. And our toes.
• So there you have it. The Curious Case of Janet Dailey and the Missing Author.

My next blogging course is coming in June. It’s called LET’S GET TOGETHER, and it’s a low cost, low stakes, high fun opportunity to dip your toes in the blogging water. I hope you’ll join us! Register today!

May 3, 2021

The Girl from Dream City, by Linda Leith

I have become unfathomably bored with the self-mythologization of male writers in my middle years, with all their memoirs and collected works, and stories about all the pretty young women lining up to fuck them. With the takeaway from their examples—that this what a genius is, what an artist is. That these men are the definition of the literary life. Their pompousness, and entitlement to take take up space—but of course, these men are usually compensating for something. If any of them had truly attained the status they believe they are due, wouldn’t they have other people to do the mythologizing for them?

And then along comes Linda Leith’s memoir The Girl From Dream City like the tall glass of water I didn’t even realize I was thirsty for. I loved this book. A book that Leith claims in the end is not a memoir, but more of an essay: “an attempt at approximating what really happened. A prose work, certainly. It has an uncertain basis in what really happened to someone who resembles this girl, the adolescent, the young woman, the older woman—all the characters I might have been, once upon a time.”

In The Girl From Dream City (the title taken from a remark by Pauline Kael about Carey Grant, referenced in Zadie Smith’s essay “Speaking in Tongues”), Leith writes about her extraordinarily peripatetic childhood—born in Northern Ireland, and then to London where her parents are ardent Communists until Leith’s father Desmond, a doctor, travels to Romania and becomes disillusioned with the realities of the movement, then they’re off to Switzerland, and then Montreal, and then Nairobi—but by that time, Leith is making her own way, studying in London, and then returning to Montreal where her literary life is rooted as she becomes a critic, literary magazine editor, novelist, and then founder of the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival, before creating her eponymous publishing company, continuing her celebration of translation, international writers, and really great books.

I love the audacity of a woman naming her company after herself, and that same audacity is so admirably present in Leith’s memoir, of claiming her triumphs and achievements, though this is a kind of audacity that was a long time coming, as she shows in the book. For while she grew up within a culture of storytelling, Leith herself was not encouraged in this respect, expected to submit to her father’s dominant narrative instead instead, and what he expected of his daughter (which was certainly not independence or any kind of challenge). “Whatever you say, say nothing,” from Seamus Heaney, is the epigraph to her first chapter, and this was also her parents approach to their own stories (particularly those of her father’s mental illness and exile from Communism). A lot of this beautiful book is Leith finally fitting together the pieces of the universe that took a long time to make sense to her.

I also love this book for showing that a vibrant domestic life is not necessarily opposed to a literary one. Leith marries young and has three sons, and during the years her life is consumed by her family’s needs (as she was also working as a teacher), she longs to write, and is not able to. And yet all this would become part of her process too—it reminds me of what Carol Shields writes in the afterword to Dropped Threads: “Tempus did not fugit. In a long and healthy life, which is what most of us have, there is plenty of time… This was not a mountain we were climbing; it was closer to being a novel with a series of chapters.” And full immersion in the literary world, in such a fabulous fashion, would be the chapter that—for Leith—arrives when her children are older, an excellent and fulfilling period that continues, bringing together the various threads of her life—travel, languages, literature, books.

Leith writes vividly about the longing she had for this kind of life as both a child, and as a young mother, dreaming of writing books and fabulous conversations with literary people. And in her memoir, she writes just as compellingly about how she made it so, and the books and writers her inspired her, about the trials and errors, successes and triumphs of her career. That this is what an artist is. That this is what constitutes a literary life, and it really is still subversive for a woman to stand up and assert such a thing for herself. To so fully own her story, and to dare to write her name on things, and it’s only subversive, of course, because self-mythologization is not something women are encouraged in—even when it’s most deserved.

Because what is self-mythologizing after all except telling the story of how one came to be?

In The Girl From Dream City, Linda Leith shows us the way.

April 30, 2021

The Forest App

Everybody in my household is obsessed with video games, except for me, who spends weekend mornings reading the paper while everybody else is intent on the Switch, and sometimes I feel a bit left out of the narrative, but mostly I don’t care. I am gad that video games are something my husband gets to share with our children, and I am glad that there’s an adult who’s paying attention to this part of our children’s lives, but video games just don’t factor into my framework at all…except for the one instance in which they really do!

I learned about The Forest App two years ago from an article about reducing cell phone addiction. I’ve used social media blockers on my laptop and phone for years, which is how I manage to write anything that isn’t a pithy instagram story, but the Forest App was kind of a cool twist on the idea of these blockers, generative instead of restrictive. I set a time limit on my phone and if my phone stays undisturbed during that period, I grow a tree in my forest. If I use my phone, the tree dies. And reader: I’ve never ever killed a virtual tree. It would break my heart to kill a virtual tree.

I even have a vague suspicion that I’d have to go out of my way to kill a virtual tree—a couple of times I’ve picked up my phone to check an email and my tree has kept growing anyway, so maybe it’s just the apps or clicking on them. I don’t even know. I don’t want to know. I love that this app that’s only vaguely restrictive and may not even be restrictive at all helps me make good choices for focus even when I could be making different ones. Which is much more meaningful to me than a lock and chains.

A few weeks ago, I finally purchased the pro version of the Forest App, partly because I’m trying to pay for the online things I value, but also because I realized this could make the trees in my forest much more interesting and diverse. Tragically, however, this process deleted the substantial forest I’d been growing over the past year and more, but what can you do…but luckily I was able to start again, and with a camellia tree to boot. As part of their Earth Day challenge, I was able to unlock the luminie plant. This week, I actually increased by focus time from 45 minutes to an hour because I realized I get TWO trees when I do this (and yes, I get extra work done too).

As I grow my forest (while focusing on the work I want to do) I acquire points. I can use these points to unlock more trees, which is how I recently got the camellia. I need 2000 points to plant a plum blossom tree or a weeping willow. And I’ve got my eye on the apple tree and the maple tree (with orange leaves, and a park bench underneath!), and as my forest grows, I’m ridiculously proud of it, beyond my pride at what it represents in terms of attention and commitment to my writing…and everyone I live with is very kind and encouraging and pretends to be interested in my virtual trees.

And of course they are! Because this is my video game! Like Animal Crossing for boring people (or so I assume—I am too boring to know). And what with my virtual landscape and acquired points, what is this whole business but a video game after all. But one that is not remotely a waste of my time. Instead, it’s one that makes the best of it.

Even better? I’m not going to be unlocking any new virtual trees anytime soon, and do you want to know why? Because I’m saving my points. I’m currently at 393 after that camellia tree cleared me out but if I focus hard and work intently, I can earn 2500, at which I can use the points to plant a real tree! The Forest App is involved in the Trees for the Future program in Sub Saharan Africa. I can’t think of better motivation to get down to work.

April 29, 2021

Lost Immunity, by Daniel Kalla

No one really needs to be reading about disease outbreaks during Year 2 of a Global Pandemic, you might argue, but I think you’d be wrong, because Daniel Kalla’s thriller Lost Immunity is about a different disease (meningitis) and because it honestly warmed my heart to come across the book’s references to Covid-19 in the past tense. And because while the book is a compelling plot-driven ride, the ideas it engages with are also timely and vital, and informed by Kalla’s own experiences as an emergency physician in Vancouver BC.

Kalla’s last book, The Last High, about the opioid crisis, was one of my favourite reads of last summer, and the follow-up is even better, mostly because it deals in ideas I’m constantly grappling with anyway these days, about risk and trust, vaccines, and disinformation, and how public health officials are meant to manage anything through all that noise. It’s really wonderful to see these ideas in action, to see them complicated and interrogated in a story about their real world stakes.

The centre of the novel is Lisa Dyer, head of Public Health in Seattle when a meningitis outbreak at a bible camp begins to spread through the community, killing children and teens. Turns out a pharmaceutical company has a new vaccine that’s been through trials and might be the only weapon to stop more people from dying—but she’ll get pushback from the “vaccine-hesitant” community, never mind the fact that both she and the drug company will both have to put their reputations on the line.

But of course because this is a thriller, there is a further complication—someone is trying to sabotage the vaccination program. This aspect of the story heightens the stakes, and underlines the importance of trust and safety, while not undermining the science of vaccination, of which Kalla is well aware. But he also manages sympathetic representation of different points of view—Lisa’s family is opposed to vaccination, and another character is a public anti-vaxxer who blames vaccinations for his son’s autism. Kalla shows that even when the science is sound, the situation on the ground can be complicated, and assessing notions of risk is different in practice than theory, and especially when it’s personal.

I loved this book. A gripping read, but it made me think, which is a perfect combination.

April 28, 2021

New Literary Quiz!

April 27, 2021

Gleanings

• Knowing what scientists still want to learn shows us how far we’ve come — and how far we have left to go to solve the mysteries of SARS-2 and Covid-19.
• I read Christa Couture’s memoir, How To Lose Everything, last night. It’s remarkable. And what I did afterwards was count everything I hadn’t lost, everything I was grateful for, and I ran out of fingers.
• There seemed to be a sense of collective action, generational solidarity and palpable joy at the opportunity to get the vaccine — and a sense of pride in rising to the occasion and in being a generation that firmly believes in science.
• Perhaps that’s the central challenge of being an artist: staying true to our work, even when we’re not certain that anyone will see it, or listen to it or read it. Having no guarantee that what we make, makes a difference.
• By all means tell me that you like it, and better yet tell me what you like about it, but I don’t enjoy replies that sound as if they are correcting my “mistake.”
• Something magical happens when seasons meet, like a gust of hot October wind lifting Autumn leaves off the pavement.
• I know I write the same things every year, how I go out to the garden and the apple tree is just beginning to bloom…and I know that there is a kind of sameness to my posts. But honestly? Is there a way to say how you forget, almost, over the dark winter days and nights, how lovely apple blossom is when you see the first tight clumps begin to open…
• I call it our house by the sea, but in this season of snowmelt, it’s our house by the hills.
• Find some space where you’re full aware that you’re not an employee, but rather luminous bits of the sun.
• So now it’s like, holy crap. How are my boyfriend and I ever going to last if we have to plan getaways around my damn PMS? How are we ever going to live together?!? Will I need to build my own 1-person PMS hut behind the main house and outfit it like a bunker, but it’s purpose is the safety and survival of people on the OUTSIDE?!?
• I want to behave virtuously and generously. I’d like to become wise. I do believe in the principle of developing skillful qualities and abandoning the unskilled but it’s proving to be a lengthy process. It is a goal. It is motivation.
• I’m finding that making things helps. Last week I made a cake, an entirely unnecessary cake, but one H. would have liked and one I could share, not to mention eat slowly myself.
• So there are always words – even when I struggle to find them. 

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.

April 23, 2021

Jane and Prudence

I didn’t plan on Spring 2021 being Barbara Pym Season, but the most interesting parts of my literary life have always happened by accident. It all began when the Barbara Pym Society Spring conference once again went virtual, which meant that I had the means to attend, and so I picked up An Unsuitable Attachment in preparation, and this, along with the release of Paula Byrne’s Pym bio this spring AND my voyage into writing an Pym-inspired novel, made me decide to reread her all her books. (As I wrote in my essay on comfort reading last month, they’ve always tended to blend together in my mind…) And so after An Unsuitable Attachment was finished, I read Excellent Women again, which for some reason I thought was her first book, though maybe it was because it was my first Barbara Pym. And then I decidedly to read in actual chronological order after that, beginning with her real first book, Some Tame Gazelle, which I enjoyed well enough but it lacks the depth and political bent of the rest. Pym began writing it as a student at Oxford, clearly having fun imagining the lives of the 50-something spinsters who would come to be her chief subject, but she wasn’t as good at it then—neither at writing novels nor grasping the brilliant multitudinousness of ordinary experience.

By Excellent Women she’s figuring it out, but how Jane and Prudence she’s on fire. Little plotwise actually happening in either book, but it’s about the nuances—the fit of a dress, the cut of a comment, what these things signify, and often so much is about the inferior status of women in society. Jane Cleveland sitting down to a meal in a restaurant with her husband, and noticing that he’s served more food than she is. “‘Oh, a man needs his eggs!’ said Mrs. Crampton… This insistence on a man’s needs amused Jane. Men needed meat and eggs—well, yes, that might be allowed; but surely not more than women did?”

I love so much about this very strange novel—first, that at its heart it’s about friendship (though I will admit the plot is a bit thin on what draws the two women together. We don’t really see their chemistry, but I don’t think is the point) between two women, women who are some years apart in age, and also one is married while the other isn’t. The women not serving as foils to each other either—neither marriage nor singledom is the answer to the question of how get the meat and eggs one requires for a satisfying life. Both situations bring with them complexities and quandaries. The realities of 1950s’ austerity apparent too—it’s a crisis in Prudence’s office because they’ve already finished their tea ration! (In Excellent Women, Mildred Lathbury attends church in a building that’s only half functional, because the other aisle was destroyed in a bombing…)

Jane and Prudence is actually quite a subversive novel. There is infidelity, inappropriate love affairs, the clergyman’s wife is ill-suited to the role but firmly herself all the same—her talents don’t lie in domestic sphere, and she’s fine with that. Both Jane and Prudence are unapologetic in all the best ways, and like all the best books about women, nobody has to change. The eligible widower too ends up with the the most unlikely prospect, and that the mousy Jessie Morrow finagled all that herself—I love it. And the wisdom too: “But of course, she remembered, that was why women were so wonderful; it was their love and imagination that transformed [men—] these unremarkable beings. ”

April 20, 2021

Gleanings

• Since the winter stay-at-home orders there has been some enlightenment on my part; whilst my emotions are spontaneous and indocile, my emotional reaction, how I process, is most definitely within my dominion.
• If you are anything like me, you have heaps of cookbooks and some of them may not have had a turn around the kitchen for quite some time. The Cookbook Circle reminds us to grab those bookish wallflowers and let them shine.
• This is one my favourite photos of my father.
• Daffodils open like unexpected suns.
• My children hide behind a bush; there goes our shady Mum, nicking flowers off trees again.
• I thoroughly enjoyed all of those things, but what I really loved about this book was its Golden Age-esque intelligence and complexity.
• “annual popular illustrated magazine dealing with Post Office questions, designed to extend public understanding of postal service, lightly written articles 2,500 to 3,000 words on Post Office matters…”
• I imagine they used a mason jar for preserves but also to save their coins.
• I do love a good seasonal read to really wallow in the unique characteristics of whatever time of year I happen to be experiencing. I think I would hate living in a place that didn’t have seasons.
• I have to write from a place of utter curiosity and an openness to hearing the layers of stories that are in any one story,” Echlin says. “It’s not just one story.”
• Maybe it’s worth something small though to yell out, yes I am dealing with the new dark parts of my soul! I honestly don’t know if this is true.
• Who needs to ask questions, when all the questions you’ve never even thought to ask are already being answered? I understand: And that’s my job, as advice columnist, at your service.
• “We came for the bookstore.” That’s what we used to tell people when they asked why we moved here.

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.

April 19, 2021

Tainna, by Norma Dunning

Almost four years ago, I had my mind blown by Norma Dunning’s short story collection Annie Muktuk and Other Stories, a collection of heartfelt, page-bursting, ribald gorgeous stories, and as soon as I started reading her follow-up, Tainna, I knew I was in for something just as great. The first story, “Amak,” about two sisters estranged for many years who come together again, even though one of them—the narrator—knows she’s walking into a trap. The way that decades-old traumas continue to be carried, and how they might be understood so differently by two people who experienced it together, and the nuance of that relationship, of that fraught and agonizing love that will always fail to deliver what either party desires from it—oh, Dunning nails it with such acuity. She gets it exactly right, which is what I love about these stories, their straightforwardness, how there is nothing extraneous or elliptical. They’re rich and vivid, and absolutely satisfying, but never trite.

“Kunak” is the story of a homeless man on the streets of Edmonton, Inuk like most of the characters in the collection, whose grandfather has passed on to the spirit world, but watches over him still. In “Eskimo Heaven,” a Priest touches the hand of a deceased member of his congregation and is taken on a journey to learn an appreciation for the culture of the people he lives amongst. A group of women just post middle-age get together on the regular to try to snare a rich man in “Panem et Circenses.” And Annie Muktuk is back in “These Old Bones,” this time from her own point of view, when she leaves the north and her husband after a devastating place and begins to build a new life for herself with assistance from a former foe.

That sounds heavy, doesn’t it? And it is, but the story is just as rich with colour and life as it is devastating. Nothing is ever just one thing in these stories, or stays still long enough to be. These are stories of how trauma is born and turned into stories, which is how these characters (and anybody) comes to understand their experiences. These are stories about character, about how character is formed by resilience and grit, and how survival comes from hands that reach out in the darkness, unseen, and how the people those hands are saving are so often unseen themselves, but Dunning makes them known in her stories, in startling, brilliant clarity.

April 19, 2021

Accidentally at the Beach

If you’re a fan of my blog, you’ve probably heard me talk about accidental cake, which is my own personal theory of serendipity. This past Saturday was another #accidentalcake adventure, the dream trip to the beach we never planned for. Friday night I was so devastated by the news, I baked @smittenkitchen’s hummingbird cake (the icing is not necessary) to feel better and also because I was intrigued by the pineapple banana combo. The next afternoon we had the carshare booked for a journey somewhere, and because I had this freshly baked loaf, I suggested we wrap up half and deliver it to our friends’ new house in the east end—they are moving in today. We were planning to go over to the Brickworks after, but Stuart suggested that since we were almost at the beach, how about we go to the beach. And so we did, because the cake brought us, and the beach was so beautiful and clean and while we there the sun came out and the sky turned blue, and our kids jumped on the rocks and I had my back to them so I wouldn’t yell, “Be careful,” and the ice cream store was open, and there was so much space, and sky, and it was not that cold, and the sun was glorious, and a swan came by, and we were all so very happy, and it seemed distinctly possible that our spirits will weather this storm and we’ll all come out the other side. And without that cake, none of this would have happened.