June 29, 2021

Gleanings

• And then, every so often, I discover another way of looking at things which seems to make the process of reframing a titch less difficult.
• It’s the first Sunday of my two week vacation and I had to make a list. Vacation time should mean No Lists Required but we are where we are and I am who I am.
• Difficult to say. I’ve never had much of a poker face and my days of tolerating the senseless monologues of idiotic men are over.
• I figured that just because something can’t be used for its intended purpose, doesn’t mean it can’t be used.
• Meditation takes many forms and for me, it was a peaceful interlude in Jobe’s Woods, observing, contemplating, puzzling, desperately trying to conform the order of my life, to figure out my creative next steps. 
• For the time being, one very small way I take advantage of the heat outside the window is by brewing large jars of sun tea.
• I realize we all get different things out of poetry. What I get from this one is how it pairs the banal of the everyday with the nearly sublime of being alive with a peaceful heart.
• But I’ve seen the waving hands of those who will: other writers, who know the value of company in tough seasons. And I’ve grabbed hold.
• The sands are always shifting, right? And sometimes, they’ll bring you right to the oasis. Sometimes. They can. And why not?
• Cornbread means many things to many people.
• Often these days, I discover older women in books who I would like to get to know.
• I was lucky to be born in a family where writing and literature was celebrated, so I had no shortage of support and encouragement from my family.

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June 25, 2021

3 Things for 42

Yesterday was my birthday, and there were three things that I wanted to do.

I went to see my book in a real indie bookstore! I was lucky to see it in Indigo before the province shut down in November, but seeing it at Book City was definitely a dream come true. Even better: I got to buy books, after I’d signed mine.

I went to get my second vaccination! Stuart had his the day before. Harriet gets hers tomorrow. What a thing to have this all done before the beginning of summer. We are so profoundly grateful—for our opportunity, and also for everybody else who’s doing their part to get us to the end of all this.

And then after dinner, we went swimming! After no city pools at all in 2020 (they were open, but required lining up, and I am not big on line ups if I’m not guaranteed something at the end of one), it feels extraordinary to be back again. I’d tell you that I’ve learned not to take these ordinary things for granted…but I really never ever did.

June 23, 2021

Returning

Something that is surprising me about my feelings about the world reopening again after a very long and difficult time is that I AM SO READY FOR IT. Like ridiculously ready. There is no trepidation, or anxiety, or complicated feelings (though of course there are. But far fewer than you’d think). None of it is complicated in the slightest: I want to do all the things. Bring on the Roaring Twenties, Motherfuckers! Basically, if I’m not dead in Jay Gatsby’s pool by the end of August, what have I even done with my summer?

I have erred on the side of caution over the last year and a half. We did visit the museum and art gallery when permitted, and my children returned to school in person in September, but we haven’t socialized with other families since last summer when we’d picnic in the park. My mom came to see us at Christmas, but we sat apart with the windows wide open (and you can imagine how pleasant that was in the depths of winter). I’ve not been inside anybody else’s home, or eaten in a restaurant. We at dinner on a patio once in October, but only because we couldn’t find anywhere to get takeout from, and it definitely wouldn’t have been our first choice…

But now we’ve thrown all caution to the wind. (WITHIN REASON! I am still only gathering outdoors for the summer, keeping distance, wearing masks when I can’t. Tomorrow I receive my second vaccination shot.) I WANT TO DO ALL THE THINGS. Last Friday, Stuart and I celebrated our 16th wedding anniversary with a dinner on a patio. It felt like a dream. Sharing space with other people! Drinking beer out of a proper glass! Choosing to order dessert! I sat down and thought, “Delta variant!” but then put that bad thought out of my head, because I am finished with this pandemic. You know that thing that people kept saying all winter, something like, “The pandemic is not over just because you’re over it.” But you know what? It is. I am. BYE BYE BYE.

On Sunday evening, a dream came true. After a year and a half of (mostly) patient waiting, our family returned to our sacred swimming ground, the Alex Duff Pool at Christie Pits Park. Which seems much closer to our house than it did before everyone in our family became a cyclist, but now it’s just the most pleasant, swiftest journey away, up Brunswick and across on Barton. I didn’t dare to really hope that it would happen—the possibility of thunder clouds, or a pool fouling. I’ve learned over the past year and more not to think too far into the future, just to take things as they come instead, but it came. Six o clock, and we were let into the pool area (45 swim sessions reserved online, no use of change areas, but still) and there it was, the place I’d been dreaming of since Labour Day 2019, which was the last time we’d swam there. Even better? As the other swimmers began to arrive (attendance was capped) we discovered we had friends among them, and I jumped into the deep pool without testing the water, and it was like no time had passed at all.

June 22, 2021

Gleanings

• I’m always afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing, of offending inadvertently, and it’s easier to stay quiet. But although words can hurt, the right ones can help, and I suppose that’s one reason why I feel compelled to speak up now, in spite of howling Hakken-Kraks and MS speech and “cog probs.”
• For the past fifteen months, I haven’t thought much about the past or future. I haven’t often allowed myself to reminisce, no “gee, remember restaurants?” or “oh I can’t wait to”s. 
• And to this day I don’t know why. I don’t know what that triggered for her to stop talking to me and I just knew that I couldn’t be the one to call first and all these years later (my kid will be eleven this fall) I still regret not getting over myself and just calling her the next week to say I’m sorry or what happened or why did that upset you so much that you simply ghosted me.
• If we want to move towards a better world, it behooves us to take a moment to consider our words.
• There will be spots that wear and spots that don’t and that’s the beauty of denim isn’t it? We’re not even supposed to wash our jeans.
• I like renting rooms, even though I have a lot of bad hotel/motel/B&B/Airbnb memories. Faulty plumbing, drunken patrons, saggy bed, thin walls, all-night traffic, NO BEDSIDE LAMP FOR READING.
• You are worthy of your creative dreams and the time you need to pursue them.
• Now, don’t get me wrong: when you tell me I have spinach in my teeth, I will nearly faint from shame.
• Fifteen years later I’m taller (whoops, no), have more time on my hands (yikes, no), smarter (not always), and a much better cook (ding ding ding!), and over the last few months of making friends and family suffer through rounds and rounds of ice cream sandwiches, I have finally created the last classic ice cream sandwich recipe I hope we will ever want or need.
• Since those days on LiveJournal and then MySpace and then the early days of Facebook when you had to be a university student to have an account, I’ve been sending feelers out trying to find ways to claim space, to stretch a little and find myself in the world around me.
• Now it’s 3:24 and I can’t sleep, filled with hope that maybe life is not returning to normal exactly but that it’s taking a new form that just might be lovely. Sea breezes, fish tacos, conversation with old friends, and the sun coming out at exactly the right moment.
• oh boy. its here. they all arrive home in the next three hours and they won’t leave again until august.
• In my job as a mediator, not only I attempt to embody the teachings of my ancestors but also rely upon the poetry of giants whose words instilled the importance of kindness in me.
• I feel a pang deep in my stomach. Father’s Day will always suck for Filip.
• Well, Sufferance is a different kind of book. It is a strange mix of corporate thriller, small town politics, Indigenous history, and a hit of the Dead Dog Café. But it works. 
• And in these early morning sessions, the 1000 words just flowed out of me and onto the page.
• Returning to Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a sort of revelation for Thompson, who had acquired a PhD in the interim and was, by her own reckoning, much more informed about literature and history than she had been in her early twenties. “I realized that the book was actually a political book,” she says. “It was making a political statement.”

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June 16, 2021

How the Pandemic Has Changed Our Home

Every weekday morning for the past year and a bit, I’ve woken up in the morning and moved the furniture around in order to transform our living room in a yoga studio. Enough space for two mats, though not enough that a supine twist can be performed properly. I’d love to extend my arm, but there’s the matter of the sofa, and what can you do?

The home gym doesn’t stop there though—upstairs in our bedroom we have a stationary bike that I bought about five years ago, and used joylessly until I discovered that swimming was my ideal physical activity, and put away in the closet. I really supposed I’d gotten rid of it altogether, but it’s a good thing I didn’t, because it’s been our pandemic saving grace.

When our bedroom is not a spin studio, it’s the place where we hide for Zoom calls because it’s most out of the way. Until a few weeks ago, our “desk” was a patio table with a table cloth over it, but when spring returned, we wanted our patio table back for eating, and I was lucky enough to find a secondhand desk online. (Very lucky! Desks are hard to come by these days. I’m sure there’s not a spare desk in the city…) The desk has wheels, which means we can arrange things to ensure racks of drying laundry do not show up in the shot. I have spent the pandemic envying people who have sensible homes with offices and bookshelves, but these days I am just happy to not be sitting at a wobbly bistro table from Canadian Tire whose bolts really need to be tightened.

Last year our children were certain they wanted a beanbag chair, and bought one with their birthday money, because what else are you going to spend your birthday money on in 2020? So now there is an additional place to sit in their bedroom, even though it takes up most of the floor space. It’s been one of our favourite pandemic purchases, and makes for a comfy seat when someone’s tired of sitting at her desk for virtual school. Her sister does virtual school in the living room, which gets turned into a classroom once its done its yoga studio duties.

The children’s bedroom is also the only room in our house that has a door, and so it’s where everybody else hides when I’m doing an important online event at the desk upstairs. Alternatively, when I had to record an interview for national radio, I did it in the children’s room, although Stuart had to go outside and tell the guys with the leaf blowers to stop it. The children’s bottom bunk has also proved to be a fairly good escape from it all when there’s no one else to hide in a way that I might not have expected.

The kitchen table has always been my desk, and so my pandemic has probably been less disruptive than everybody else’s, and I have to share my desk now, but it’s with a person who regularly makes my lunch, and so its always nice to have him. He always refills my teapot when he makes a pot of coffee, and we take turns fielding queries from the children down the hall: “What do you know about phantom power?” “How do you spell luck?” (My answer to any of the spelling questions: “What do you think?”)

It doesn’t surprise me that so many people have pulled up stakes and decided to move during the pandemic. The last year and a half has highlighted so much about our lives, and opened new possibilities we might not have considered before. If you have to spend weeks locked down at home, it’s also really imperative that that home be someplace comfortable, which is just one of the many reasons we’ve considered ourselves so lucky during this time. Our apartment isn’t large, but it’s adaptable, and has different spaces so we can all have a little bit of space to do our thing. We have a backyard too, which has meant the pool that’s delivered us so much happiness while public swimming has been off the table. Even better, we love our neighbourhood, and I’ve appreciated being close to great stores and bakeries, so many restaurants close for takeout, and being here throughout these last fifteen months has been to be connected to others, even when that seemed like a scary thing. It required us to go out into the world with courage and also faith in our community, and both things have been good for the soul, I think.

June 15, 2021

Gleanings

• A damp day, too wet to work outside, and my writing stalled for a couple of reasons: why not gather petals and make some jelly?
• I’ve been thinking about the Greyhound bus a lot lately.
• Very often, I wake in the night. I’m not sure if it’s because of my age, my brain, my hormones or a heady mix of all of the above, but wake in the night I do.
• The syntax and vocabulary of racism bleeds into Canadian Media and conversation from American politicians, law enforcement officials and activists yet far too many of us engage with morbid curiosity rather than acknowledgement, commitment and action out of a very real fear and loathing for what is happening in our own country.
• With their inherent contradictions, 10-year-olds are a fascinating bunch.
• I’ve taken oodles of photos in my yard this spring. I can’t seem to help myself and I don’t apologize.
• But there it is. I am just old enough to feel the satisfaction of one less dead branch hanging over my tent.
• At one point I had a hefty, three-ring binder type thing with pages and pages of CDs. Remember those?
• Dogs are often labelled as “aggressive” or “anxious”, when in truth they’re actually fearful, responding to a threat the only way they know how.
• Summer books are almost too easy. This is one season that abounds with books.
• You do your work. You show your work. And you stay true to your vision. No apologies. No regrets. Okay, you can have regrets, and you can make art out of them. Onward.
• But it is not our actual townhouse that is home. Instead, it is the breeze that blows the trees outside our bedroom window, snuggling in bed with my husband enjoying our morning coffee, chatting with our neighbours over the backyard fence, and greeting our children with hugs when they come to visit.
• It’s the act of the storytelling itself, the bravery, the light, the humour, the small beautiful truths. It’s as Richard Van Camp says, a soul sigh.
• There’s so much more to the day than laundry and chickens. 
• I hope someone knows what your favourite sandwich is. I hope you smile when you open it up. I hope you also get chips or a pickle to go with. I hope your sandwich is a deep comfort to you.
• What I want to do now to move away from the ugly mechanisms that are at play in the world. I don’t mean I will turn my back entirely. I won’t. But right now I want to think about my own work and the solace it provides me when I wake, sleepless, and come down to my little study at the edge of the forest.
• I’m just four chapters into The Old Wives’ Tale and I already feel that I owe Arnold Bennett an apology. I never should have taken someone else’s word about him—not even (maybe, especially not) Virginia Woolf’s.
• I laughed out loud when I heard that Donald Trump quit his blog because no one was reading it.

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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.”

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.