June 7, 2022

Gleanings

• It’s peony season, and peony season signals my annual pilgrimage(s) to the corner of Sussex and Brunswick where peonies bloom in abundance.
• What expectations should we be setting aside so that the messages arrive? How can we set aside our fucking reticence and send messages?
• Forget the 10,000 hours. Use whatever hours you have.
• But creativity doesn’t work that way. It likes to take the long drive and visit all of the small towns and historical monuments on the side of the road first. It wants to hang around on the front porch of an old general store and look at the ancient ice machine, or Pepsi sign in detail. It can’t tell you why, it just does.
• It’s only the omnipresence of violence, including its institutionalization in the military, that makes it possible to encounter that one death and think, for a minute, that it’s not much, not that big a deal. In fact, in its singularity, because of its singularity, that one death is everything that matters, as everyone who has lost a loved one knows.
• Not as a resignation, or avoidance, but as an invitation to let be, let go, and to unclench the grasp of should and could and what ifs, the stories or avoidance of how life really goes … of course. It doesn’t mitigate the feelings, but it does pull us back into present moment with what is.
• Possibility –– it’s one of my favourite words. Derived from the Latin, possibilis, “able to be done,” possibility walks hand-in-hand with hope, potential, and the idea that there is always room for something else to emerge, something different, unexpected and exciting.
• Although I was in Ukraine and although I had a Ukrainian grandfather, I didn’t—couldn’t—think of myself as Ukrainian. Could I? My daughter? My husband, born in Yorkshire? A man pounded the table and said, You are married to a Ukrainian woman so you are Ukrainian! He toasted us with the fiery horilka flavoured with mountain ginseng.
• And a general delight in spring, with fresh starts and new beginnings for which I’m always grateful, even as I never forget that those starts and beginnings both build on old knowledge and exist in the context of a difficult world. 

June 6, 2022

This Time Tomorrow, by Emma Straub

Is novelist Emma Straub overhyped, I wondered, as I pre-ordered her latest novel This Time Tomorrow? And if indeed this is the case, am I part of the problem, pre-ordering her latest novel when the truth is her previous book didn’t really blow me away? I was a big fan of The Vacationers many years ago, and I’ve enjoyed her releases well enough since, but I was kind of resigned to This Time Tomorrow being something of a let-down, as are too many buzzed-about new releases. But oh, I’m so glad I didn’t miss this one, because it’s one of the best books I’ve read so far this year.

Though it matters, I think, that I’m something of a time travel fiend. Tom’s Midnight Garden, Charlotte Sometimes, and A Handful of Time are some of my favourite novels from childhood, and Straub’s references to movies like Back to the Future and Peggy Sue Got Married were absolutely delectable to encounter. It matters too that this is a time travel novel wholly self-aware of its genre and its place in the canon. In this case, it’s personal—protagonist Alice Stern’s father is author of the iconic novel Time Brothers, a time travel cult classic.

When the novel begins, Alice’s father Leonard is dying, silent and still in his hospital bed. Alice herself is on the eve of her 40th birthday, still living in the New York City she grew up in, still working in the same Manhattan private school she’d been a student at. She likes her life well enough, but her father’s condition and her milestone birthday are inspiring her to take stock and wonder how they got there and what else could have been

The novel features amazing Russian Doll vibes—after visiting a bar called Matryoshka, Alice wakes up in her teenage body, and proceeds to relive her birthday again and again, each time returning to the present to find her life very different due to choices she’d made. And while being trapped in a time loop might seem like a problem, to Alice it’s an opportunity to spend time with the father whose humanness and availability she’d always taken for granted when she was young. As one does.

What I love about this book is that almost none of the story was taken up by Alice trying to hide her situation from those around her. No, like any reasonable human, Alice takes advantage of her best friend’s intelligence and her father’s expertise in the area to loop them in and ask for help, so that the story becomes one about bigger questions, about the connections between generations, about the choices we make, and why they matter (or don’t!), plus a wonderful exercise in ’90s nostalgia.

It was smart, warm, and so delightful.

June 2, 2022

Swimsuits are for Swimming

I bought a bathing suit online a while back, and it probably could have been a size bigger.

But I’m very pleased to announce that after about six weeks of consistent workouts via swimming laps, it finally mostly fits me properly.

Not because my body has changed at all, but because six weeks of wearing a bathing suit (and running in through the spinner) is going to stretch a garment out.

Six years into regular swimming, my relationship to bathing suits is much less fraught that it used to be. I don’t actually remember if it ever was so fraught, but this is such a common trope, women trying on bathing suits and hating their bodies, that it’s probably embedded in my DNA.

I do remember that buying a Speedo tankini when I was in university that quickly ended up with a hole in the bum.

I took it back to the store, and the clerk informed me that it had disintegrated because I’d been wearing it to swim.

“It’s not a swimming bathing suit,” she told me. “It’s a fashion bathing suit.”

And these days, my bathing suits have no style at all, basic sporty numbers I can find in my size on clearance. For a couple of summers, for style, I’ve bought a cheap but cute suit from Joe Fresh, but these became stretched out and unwearable so quickly that I’m not sure they’re really worth it.

These days how I look in a bathing suit is an idea that just never comes up.

(Although I took heart when I saw Yumi Nu on the cover of Sports Illustrated recently. Her swimsuit didn’t really fit either, and she still looked pretty fine.)

I honestly never ever think about how I look in a bathing suit, which is bonkers because I wear a bathing suit almost every day. Because a bathing suit is a bathing suit, tight and gaping, revealing. But I never think about how I look in a bathing suit because it doesn’t matter how I look like in a bathing suit.

What matters is what I do.

That I SWIM.

The transformation from object to subject is complete.

June 1, 2022

This is How We Love, by Lisa Moore

You wouldn’t say that Lisa Moore’s new novel This is How We Love is unputdownable, but I honestly think that’s a lot to ask of a novel . It took me almost a whole week to read it, because it’s kind of long, and I had a lot going on, so I kept picking it up and setting it down again, and the narrative style was doing something similar. The novel far less taut than you’d think for a plot with the stakes of a critical stab wound, an ICU, and a once-in-a-century snowstorm that brings St. John’s to a halt before it buries it under. But taut plots aren’t really what Lisa Moore is all about anyway. Or at least I don’t think so—nine years ago I read the first half of her novel Caught, which of all of them might be a contender for taut, while in labour in the bathtub, and afterwards I had strong aversion to ever reading the rest of it. From the rest of her novels, however, I know she’s all about the sentence, one word after another and how they all flow like waves, but they’re pushing us out to sea instead of drawing us to shore the way that actual waves do. Until we’re stranded on an inflatable raft like Trinity Brophy was before the authorities removed her from her mother’s care and delivered her to live with Mary Mahoney, the foster mother who raised her across the street from Jules’ house.

I wouldn’t say that Lisa Moore’s new novel This is How We Love is unputdownable, but I can say that over a week since I finished reading, I can’t get the story out of my head. About Jules, whose son Xavier is stabbed while she’s on vacation in Mexico and there’s only one seat on the first flight back so she takes it, arriving just as St. John’s is shut down entirely. So she’s there to deal with the peril of Xavier’s condition, and then all the snow, which falls and falls so the doors are blocked, except the back door, but it’s only because there’s been so much snow that the deck fell off the house.

The story moves between Jules’ point of view—her perspective on what’s happening to her son and reflections back in time too, to her mother and mother in law, to the early days of her marriage, her experiences as a mother, a stepmother. This is a book about care, about who we care for and who we don’t, and how some people belong to us, and other people don’t, and what happens to everyone when those people fall through the cracks—and those of Xavier himself, and Trinity Brophy, his childhood playmate who is somehow connected to what happened to him. Moore weaving so many different narrative threads together to begin to answer the question that’s mostly preoccupying Jules, which is WHY? Why did somebody hurt her son? Why would anybody want to do something like that?

Spanning decades and families, This is How We Love underlines the infinite ways in which lives are all connected. Part novel, part guidebook to the wondrous challenges of being a being.

May 31, 2022

Gleanings

• But what is this world, life, trying to wake us up to? And how does remembering we are all connected open possibilities for reimagining the world we … you … I want to live in?
• Whether it’s writing a scene, or revising a story, or playing around with a writing prompt, or creating a blog post. I just feel better if I’ve written something.
• This is a post that begins and ends by saying, “trust me.” This is a post written from a place of pure love. This is a post about how an author can change your life, about how books matter, and about how writers are simultaneously magical and utterly real. It’s also a post that references a line from Jane Austen about how if I loved this book less, I could talk about it more.
• My brain tends toward disaster thinking. What is it good for, disaster thinking? I’d love to learn how to prevent it altogether, but my sense is that instead I’ll have to keep noticing my personal tendency to imagine the worst (in vivid detail) and find ways to turn away from indulging that tendency, over and over. (It helps to have a partner who counters my fears with, “Okay, but what if everything works out?”)
• I constantly remind myself there is no there or arrival point to strive to achieve in any aspect of life, but a returning again and again to each moment, me being me as I am, with you as you are.
• That summer of 2007, we were caught in a meander, the current winding and turning back on itself, not measurable as the crow flies, but singular. In another version of the story, the river erodes the banks, turns, finds another route. In river systems, old meanders are sometimes abandoned and become lakes. That summer is a lake in my memory, forgotten by the river’s flow.
• It’s by coming to the coast where land and sea meet that I’ve learned more about the way the Earth tilts than any lesson taught in school. I’m a hands-on learner.
• “The good news is that the solution to a plant problem is rarely complicated –– often the smallest adjustment can make the biggest change.” Human problems are more complicated, although the same applies; one small adjustment leads to another, and then another, and so on.
• The Awakening, though told with lovely prose and offering insights of a very specific perspective, is only really a partial awakening. Edna Pontellier has a ways to go still.
• As a child, I was a daydreamer, living in my own little world, but now that I am older, I spend more time in the present moment. My mind may drift off these days, but I would not call my thoughts daydreams. What about you? Where does your mind go when it wanders? Do you still daydream?
• On my way into Presqu’ile Provincial Park, and as I pulled away from the gatehouse driving along Presqu’ile Parkway, I felt an ethereal reverence for this place that I love so dearly.

May 27, 2022

Literary Tote Bag Hall of Fame

New series: welcome to my Literary Tote Bag Hall of Fame, in which I celebrate the hold-alls that really hold all, the bags that keep on carrying and play an integral role in my daily life.

Top of the heap is the bag I received from the Huntsville Library when I did an event with them in 2018.

This is a tote bag so useful, *it’s beginning to wear out*. It has pockets for pens, for cards, a pocket for a small water bottle. The side pocket is infinitely useful too—currently contains a toque in case of cold temps, and it’s also handy for a book.

This bag is especially precious to me because it’s my swim bag, ever ready, containing the essentials: suit, towel, hair towel, sandals, goggles, and my locker lock.

Great strap for carryout over my shoulder, but it also fits perfectly into my bike basket.

This literary tote bag is PERFECTION.

Until next week…

May 25, 2022

Thoughts and Prayers

I think a lot about sharing space while I’m swimming in the pool. I try really hard and sometimes fail to be patient. My ire is reserved for the people who wait at the wall until I too arrive at the end, and then they take off, and I have to wait. Or the very fast swimmer in the pool yesterday who was so much faster than everyone else, and kept overtaking me at the end of the lane so that I’d have to wait once they’d taken off again, and I wonder if they’d considered how much they were interrupting my flow. But of course my slower pace was messing with theirs. When I used to swim at the university pool, I was on the slower side of medium, but now that I swim at the community centre with an older demographic, I’m kind of a hotshot. I swim at a very even pace, and it annoys me when other people don’t, which is a metaphor for a lot of things. It’s interesting that I find the idea that everybody swim at a very even pace more than reasonable when the fact is that everyone’s in the pool for a different reason, some people with training regimens, timed swims, swimming sprints. How easy it is to determine what you do is reasonable. I want to question those assumptions. But I also think all of us need to be aware of the other people all around us.

*

The other day I was confessing how disheartened I’d become with politics, and the response I got was, “But you’ve still got to keep fighting.” And I think I can’t. I think my problem is with the verb, “to fight.” I’m looking for a different mode of engagement, I think. Keep going, keep being, keep learning, keep changing. But I can’t fight. It’s not me, and it’s not sustainable. And of course, I’m conflicted about this. Imagine if Rosa Parks had decided not to fight, John Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr. Sometimes I worry that 70 years ago against the civil rights movement, I would have still be put off fighting and calling for civility, and that idea is shameful to me. But then I think about our abysmal provincial government, the Minister of Education whose Twitter bio has always read, “Fighting for you…” Because he’s fighting too. Which is weird, because he’s the one in power—shouldn’t he have levelled up from fighting now? You’ve got to wonder about the rules of engagement. What if none of this is actually a game? What if the stakes are real and we all have to work together?

*

I am heartbroken and sad. I am tired of being heartbroken and sad. I am lucky that I get to be tired of being heartbroken and sad instead of being so steeped in sadness and heartbreak that other possibilities aren’t available to me. I’ve seen the photos of the children who were murdered, posing with their Honour Roll certificates issued in a ceremony the same day they died, how their moms and dads came to see them, how hard they worked, their teachers. How hard it’s been to be a teacher…forever, but especially in the past two years. I think of my kids’ teachers, I think of my kids, how fragile and precious all of this is. I am heartbroken and sad. And I am so tired of being heartbroken and sad.

May 24, 2022

Gleanings

• I still grieve the loss of those friendships, losses that are almost entirely my own fault. In casting aside those friendships, I discarded love, shared history, a different perspective on me and my life, and the gifts of wisdom, strength, and goodness that those two women gave me.
• But it’s also strangely, a bit perversely, encouraging just knowing there are so many other sad people out there. I don’t imagine that it feels easy to any of them, or that they are “over it” or have “moved on,” but there they all are, carrying on with their lives while also somehow carrying their grief. “How do they do that?” I still wonder, even though I suppose I am now doing the same, however haltingly.
• I liked the idea that I might have been at the forefront of the slow stitching movement! And doesn’t it fit with how I live my life these days? I have so much more time now that I am older; I am no longer running to the finish line. I like walking for the sake of walking, not the destination. I enjoy spending hours cooking in the kitchen with my husband and then savouring a tasty meal with friends as the sun sets and candles burn down. Slow walking, slow food, so why not slow stitching?
• This morning I’ve been thinking about Greece, a place I will probably never travel to again, and I am remembering how I took for granted the long warm days, swimming in a warm ocean, eating ripe tomatoes and cucumbers and salty cheese with glasses of golden retsina at lunch, and lying down in fragrant grass with Agamemnon.
• What better way to dive back into more regular blogging than to start a new series?! The days are so long and short of late, it might feel good to pause and make a wee list of where things are at?
• I firmly believe that the more creative you are, the more creative you are. When you’re a creative person, your default is creativity. Your default is flowering. Your default is fecundity. But. There will be obstacles.
• But I think the most valuable part of women’s friendships is the understanding, the listening, the forgiving, if need be, of lapses in judgment.
• To remember it’s all temporary and fleeting and to still love anyways… to still jump in and risk and engage with it all. To not shut down in anticipation of pending grief, numb or avoid, or for me … live in fear, but to allow and be in relationship with grief , with the sorrows and hardships in and of this world, alongside love and joy … this. This feels sacred, “a holy thing.”

May 20, 2022

Time Machine

We’re in the midst of re-doing our children’s bedroom, which was last painted in 2008, before we even had children, and the new bunk bed has no clearance underneath, which has required a lot of reorganizing, because all their out-of-season clothes had been stored in plastic bins beneath the old bed. And in the midst of the re-storing, I switched the contents of another plastic bin I had into a cardboard box, and found myself going through my diaries.

I kept diaries for years, though then there came a moment about 15 years ago when I got rid of a lot of them, culling them along with my stacks of photos, yearbooks, scrapbooks. All of it just too much to keep, to carry, in a practical sense, as well as a spiritual one, and there are benefits to not having a basement, a place for boxes of this stuff to live forever,

The past is also on my mind because next week is the 20th anniversary of my university graduation, and I’ve been charged with putting together a photo slideshow for our virtual event. And I’m also currently at work on the early chapters of my next novel, many of which are drawn from life, taking place about 19-20 years ago.

And so it was something to discover this specific diary, which I didn’t even know existed. (I had forgotten too just how detailed my entries were—I wrote so much and so often!). This one runs October 2002-May 2003, capturing the beginning of my relationship with my husband, the months I spent living in a backpackers hostel, working as a temp—initially charged with entering the details of thousands of years-old time sheets into a computer system, the most mindless, boring, pointless occupation imaginable.

And I write about this in my novel, a whole scene in which my character goes to the agency and BEGS for a different job, because she’s going insane from the monotony, and what a thing to find it all outlined in my diary—it really happened. And so much more, I was definitely a ridiculous person, young and unformed, but I was also so brave and strong and resilient, and I am so proud of that young woman who these writing gives me such a direct connection to.

There’s so much incredible writing outlining experiences and emotions I no longer have any recollection of. I’d had an abortion only months before all this, and so that whole experience was very much in process as I was writing. Twenty years later, I’ve made sense of it all, fashioned my own narrative, but it was so raw then, and I didn’t know where I was going, what my story might turn out to be.

In October 2002, I went on a date to the movies with someone I’d met, which was fun and exhilarating, and I wrote in my diary afterwards, “If there is anything I’m sure of not wanting in my life right now, it’s a baby.” What had happened to me, I determined, was “sad and beautiful.” Beautiful, because now I got to have my life.

And then later on the following March, reflecting on the one-year anniversaries of so many pivotal things, and the reality that I could have had a baby then in an alternative reality, an impossible reality. What surprised me about these entries was that *I was so angry* about what I’d been through—and not the abortion, because the abortion had ended the terribleness, though it wasn’t a picnic either.

I wrote: “I don’t regret, but I hate. So full of rage that it ever had to happen at all, that I ever felt so much pain. I am past it now but time’s parallels bring it back to me and it’s so unbearable I cannot bear it. It could drive me crazy to be back there again… I remember grieving in the Fall but I am so absolutely angry now. I broke down…but we’re going to Paris, where I should have gone last July. I am arriving late from a different direction…”

I have no recollection of feeling any of that. Those feelings especially visceral and striking in light on threats to abortion access, something that never even occurred to me in 2002 (when we were all post-feminist, ha ha, remember that?). To have ever been that desperate and not had a way out. What an unimaginable cruelty.

So grateful to this little notebook for a reminder of the person I used to be.

May 19, 2022

Mercy Street, by Jennifer Haigh

I spent a few days last week utterly gripped by Jennifer Haigh’s novel Mercy Street, which I picked up after reading a New York Times review and after someone else had mentioned it to me as being a novel about abortion. A bit like Jessica Winter’s The Fourth Child, in that it’s a novel about abortion as much as it’s a novel about anything, a story propelled by its own internal engine, which is just what a novel should be, I think.

This one beginning at a Boston abortion clinic during a brutal winter in recent times where a woman called Claudia counsels those arriving for various reasons—unwanted pregnancies, birth control, other health concerns. Haigh’s novel underlining the huge range of situations which bring a person to an abortion clinic, to have an abortion at all, some of them brutal and devastating, desperate and tragic, and others much more mundane. What does it mean for the addict who sits before Claudia, for example, to have to continue with her pregnancy? (Abortion in Massachusetts is legal only until the 24th week of pregnancy.)

Claudia enters the novel with her own story, of course—her mother was a teen-mom, she grew up in a poverty, a background she overcame for success writing for women’s magazines and a brief first marriage. She’s still friends with her ex, but her job in journalism is far behind her, Claudia finding more meaning counselling women who come to the Mercy Street Clinic, but the job is a lot, and there’s a weight on her that’s far heavier than the keys she possesses to her late mother’s single-wide trailer in Maine, a property Claudia has put off doing anything about for a very long time.

Claudia finds solace in smoking cannabis, and in the company of Timmy, her dealer, who’s trying to think of a different way to provide for himself and support his teenaged son who lives in Florida, and the narrative moves from Claudia to him, and then to Anthony, one of Timmy’s clients, who’s been on disability for years, still lives with his mother, attends mass daily at a local church, and takes care of local parishes’ websites. His online dealings putting him in touch with an antiabortion crusader called Vince who, over the past two decades, has been radicalized by the white supremacist undertones (and lately overtones) of talk radio, and is setting out a plan that could have devastating consequences.

This is a novel about a butterfly who flaps its wings, about fate, and agency, and how one thing, for better or for worse, leads to another. Gripping, galvanizing, sympathetic, and infuriating, I enjoyed Mercy Street so much.