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.

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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.

April 15, 2021

Accidentally Engaged, by Farah Heron

I could not have loved Farah Heron’s sophomore novel Accidentally Engaged any more—I was already besotted by the end of the first paragraph when we first encounter Reena’s sourdough starter, whose name is Brian (obviously). It’s a very pandemicky novel actually, not in content in the slightest, but instead it’s wonderfully cozy, video content is important, and there is so much fresh baked bread. Which is what brings Reena and Nadim together in the first place, the aroma drifting from her apartment across the hall to where he’s just moved in. The attraction between them is instantaneous, but Reena can’t act on it—it turns out her overbearing parents have Nadim in mind as a potential husband for her, and she refuses to let them play this role in her life. And so she and Nadim become friends instead, as well as neighbours. They’re compatible, share the same East African background, and he sure loves her bread. And so when an opportunity comes along for Reena to make her cooking show dreams come true as part of a couples contest, she agrees to let Nadim pretend to be her fiance—but the whole thing is just an act. Or is it?

I loved this novel. Heron’s debut, The Chai Factor, was great, but this follow-up is even better, polished and so deftly plotted. (We also get to meet up with Amira and Duncan again in this book, as Reena is Amira’s best friend.) The humour is spot-on and so very fresh, and the complicated dynamic between Reena and Nadim is drawn out just the right amount, enough to be intriguing, not so much as to be preposterous. There’s a lot of cross-cultural romance going on in fiction right now, with books like The Chai Factor and Jane Igharo’s Ties That Tether, and so it was interesting for me to read a book where both characters come from the same background and even then the course of true love does not run smooth.

Heron challenges conventional notions of Muslim women—they have sex!—and Muslim families once again this second novel, and she writes beautifully about Reena’s pride in her identity as an Indian woman: “Reena loved being Indian. Loved the food, the glittery clothes, and today, she even loved the deep-seated traditions. Like sari shopping with aunties.”

This novel is such a delight.

April 14, 2021

Gleanings

• Squill is the common name for several species of Scilla and, ‘though by no means the earliest spring wildflower it has, perhaps, the most dramatic impact. T
• Streets are the biggest placemaking paradox, at once sites of immeasurable joy and delight and unspeakable violation.
• Last spring, when the weather warmed but the virus still raged out of control and playgrounds and parks were closed, I dreamed of a folding lawn chair.
• I miss speaking Serbian. / Since mom died, with a sense of vague unease, I am realizing I might be the last generation in my family to understand this language – anything from jokes and movie quotes to prose, poetry and song lyrics, might be lost for the generation I birthed.
• But here’s the truth revealed by the pandemic, in case I’d missed it: Change happens, no matter what. Time holds us to this promise.
• Does any of this really matter, though? Would we not expect media coverage of such an anachronistic institution to be, itself, anachronistic?
• And it was good to get out of the comfort zone, too, to let the dog make the decision, to be the follower for a change.
• When John cut the board we’re using to size, it was as though it was fresh cedar, the scent so spicy and beautiful that I remembered everything about the day it was made
• Sometimes when a time for something passes, it really passes and we can’t get to that initial moments of joy and happiness./ It changes into something else. Something more settled perhaps.
• This morning I was pleased to start the dishwasher, feed the cats, and otherwise start the day because it meant that my very unsettling dream of getting an abortion on a cruise ship had ended.
• So much of what might previously have gone on indoors, now happens outside.
• If my noting that Donoghue is efficient and competent seems like damning her with faint praise, well, you aren’t entirely wrong.
• I often was told my work was “too girly.” Now I embrace all of this but for a long time, I turned my anger inward, and wished I could “write like a man.” 
• Missing or broken shelf pins in less-than-perfect cabinets are just a fact of life in old rentals and having lived in my fair share over the years, I’ve found simple replacements to be perennially useful.
• Your work can’t be rejected if you never submit anything. And, related to that, your work also cannot be accepted if you never submit anything.
• My uncle died, and Covid spread like wild-fire in my family in Iran…
• Those weren’t just a bunch of mistakes, I told them. They were the writing I was doing on the way to making a polished story.
• Everyday, in my head, while I walk, I am writing drafts.
• Wuxia, for the uninitiated (like me), is “a genre of Chinese literature featuring the lives and adventures of Chinese martial artists” (Leong)
• What I’m missing is the lovely, irritating, noisy, hateful, endearing throng of humanity in all its variety.
• In Mandarin, “chǎo miàn” means “stir-fried noodles.” It’s always made in a wok, and it’s still the best and quickest from one, says McKinnon. But the sheet pan makes it easier in a different way, in that we can add ingredients and walk away, letting the oven give the noodles their signature crisp, while we… break up a fight over Legos, or pour a glass of wine. (The latter, please.)
• I’m buoyed by the idea of a methodology of wonder and I want to sit with the idea of responses to questions rather than answers, how profound that is.
• And it’s also true, because both/and, that (as I have said before here, recently): spring is exhausting. 
• None of this is permanent. Life, like the seasons, shifts, evolves and moves on. Cherry blossoms drift settling at my feet; eagles soaring like bold kites against blue skies; songbirds busy at living; chubby buds preparing to burst their delicate petals; daffodils bend and fade while tulips pierce their sword-like bodies from the warming soil bed.
• When my excuses ran out and when, as Martha Reeves sang, there’s nowhere to run to, baby, nowhere to hide, I felt motivated and found the tiniest modicum of courage to get started. 

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April 13, 2021

Why I don’t call authors by their first names

The book in my hands in this photo is LUCKY, the latest novel by Marissa Stapley, who I’m fortunate to call my friend—but when I write about her book, I’m going to refer to her as “Stapley.” And NOT because we’re the kind of friends who refer to each by our last names. No, I’m going to write about her as Stapley when I’m talking about her book, because it’s the feminist thing to do, and because women authors are the only ones any of us ever seem to be on a first name basis with. Think of the male authors you love to read, whose work seems to know your soul—it’s not simply a question of intimacy. Because sure, you might love Stephen King or John Irving, but have you ever come across a review in which either was referred to as “John” or “Steve”?

But with the women, we’re all “Marian,” “Farah,” “Jennifer” “Marissa,” and “Brit.” We’re excited to read these authors because it feels like we know them, and we’ve read their work so closely that it’s almost as though we do. Further, social media makes it possible for some of them to know us back, so the ties are real…but actually knowing an author only drives home to me the importance of using their surnames in book reviews. It’s a question of respect, for the author’s work, and for women’s work in general, which is so often devalued in comparison to the works by Johns and Steves. Nobody calls Shakespeare “William.” It’s a political act to declare a woman worthy of her surname, women’s surnames having been considered disposable through much of history anyway, which means that in historical record women tend to disappear.

As @kelly.diels writes, “We are the culture makers.” The authors, the bloggers, and the bookstragrammers—all of us. And with the power to make culture comes the power to change it, and I choose to acknowledge that power, to use it to help build the kind of world where women’s work is considered as serious and consequential as that of their male peers. Where a woman doesn’t have to be your BFF to get on your radar, and even if she is your friend, you are going to give her authorship the reverence such a thing deserves.

April 12, 2021

Eyes On the Prize

I was scrolling Instagram yesterday when I came across a sponsored post from The Washington Post that was only out to push my buttons, and I hate being manipulated, so I resisted for at least seven seconds, imagining that I wasn’t going to click on this piece: Intelligence forecast sees a post-coronavirus world upended by climate change and splintering societies. But, of course I was going to click, not because I was excited about or interested in the topic, but because such a headline makes me unreasonable anxious, and then I just have to click in order to clarify that it can’t be as bad as all that (which is the whole story of my entire relationship with Twitter, you might recall), and it pretty much was that bad, but of course they’re only forecasts anyway. And I’m distrustful of forecasts. My shameful secret is that I wish fewer people were into tarot, because it’s not sensible, and I’m just really wary of prophecies in general, because they close us off from possibilities, undermining the only thing that’s really clear, which is: nobody knows what’s going to happen next.

“…whoever makes up the story makes up the world.” From Ali Smith’s Autumn, and I think about this all the time. I think it might be the truest thing I know, and certainly it’s been true with the narrative of Covid, as we move from one wave to another with such a sense of inevitability, but it really wasn’t. We’re under strong restrictions here in Ontario right now because of this failure, and I keep thinking about how different things would be if the messaging wasn’t, “Stay home!” but instead, “Get outside!” If people hadn’t been laying bets on a second wave before the first one was over, and instead we’d been shown how to build on our success in bringing down virus levels in the spring, if we’d been empowered to use our behaviour to keep making a difference. If the people who were telling the story (and creating the headlines) had been more cognizant of the weight of their responsibility, the power that they had to shape how the story goes.

I continue to think a lot about this, about my own insistence on there being possibilities in addition to DOOM. I’ve written this before, but there is a correlation between being hopeful and being brave enough to possibly wrong. It takes courage to acknowledge the many different ways the story can go, and insisting on the certainty of worst-case outcomes can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I know the forecasters in the Washington Post article weren’t making their predictions based on tarot cards, and I know that tarot too can be an empowering kind of storytelling at their heart, but regardless, I keep thinking about what we told our kids when they were learning to ride their bikes. Telling them, “Keep looking at where you want to go,” which is a difficult thing to intuit, because you’re thinking about your feet on the pedals, and the wheels, and the path right in front of you, with the whole world whizzing by, but if you aren’t looking out at where you’re going, you’re never going to get there. Keep your eyes on the prize—and even you don’t arrive, you’ll have come to a different, better place than you would have if you’d never bothered to try at all.

April 7, 2021

The Relatives, by Camilla Gibb

I loved Camilla Gibb’s new novel, The Relatives, a slim book that reads up fast, but is also not remotely slight. It’s a single volume comprising stories of three different people who don’t know each other—Lila, an alcoholic social worker yearning for a child; Tess, sharing custody of a child after her breakup and disturbed by her ex’s plans regarding their frozen embryos; and then Adam, the American man who’s being held hostage in Somalia. Each of these stories worthy of a novel of its own, and the connections between them are subtle, but important, and the whole arrangement fits together so well, kind of seamlessly, which is a remarkable achievement.

And the seamlessness is the result of the plot and the pacing here, which never stops, and makes this easily a novel you could read in a day. Everything has gone wrong for Lila, who tells her story in first person. She has put her job on the line, overstepping bounds as she brings a young girl into her care who’d been found wandering in Toronto’s High Park and does not speak a word. Lila herself is adopted, never knew the woman who gave her to her, and her own mother has just died, reawakening old wounds but also suggesting new possibilities, and it’s clear that none of this is going to end well, as she tries to fill the hole in her world with the girl.

Adam, in third person, is just as cut off from meaningful ties, even before he’s taken hostage. He’s working for the State Department in Somalia at a refugee camp, undercover, as he investigates rumours of infiltration by militant recruiters…but maybe they’re on to him, and now he’s stuck in a hole, his body brutalized, and the worst of the torture is still before him.

Things are a little less dire for Tess (also first person), an academic who studies isolated islands and other isolated communities, though her personal life is in shambles, something of an island herself. Her ex’s one last chance at motherhood would be by implanting one of Tess’s embryos, but this is a lot of ask of anyone, and especially fraught for someone as prickly as Tess—is it even possible to navigate this situation with any grace?

These stories snowball, compelled by a sense of inevitability, though the specifics still aren’t clear, and this is the seamlessness I’d talking about, how one thing leads to another, and how our lives rub up against those of others, even against our will, and what it is to be related, to have a family, how we write our own stories onto those that belong to other people. Rich and absorbing,The Relatives is about the impossibility of islands, because connection is what humans do, for better or for worse, by accident and on purpose.

March 31, 2021

What Now?

“What now?” asked my friend Avery Swartz in response to the blog post I wrote yesterday, which I also posted on Instagram to much response. And at first, my answer to her question was, “Right??” Figuring she meant it rhetorically. “What, now?” Because it does truly boggle the mind, our government’s response to the current moment. The refusal to listen to experts, to do what needs to be done, to deviate from a plan that appears to be no plan.

But it was a genuine question: what does it mean when I say that yesterday I hit my limit, that “I’m done”? What does that mean for what I’m going to do today?

Me? I’m going to keep going. After falling off the patience train yesterday, I’m going to get back on it. I’m going to keep taking measures to protect me, my family and my community. We will continue to wear masks, even outdoors. We will mostly continue to associate with no one outside our household. We will definitely not be seeing anybody indoors, which has been the case for us for a year now. We will be doing everything within our power to limit the spread of the virus.

But I am going to have a masked outdoor gathering with my parents on Sunday. I cancelled plans for this at Thanksgiving, and I regret it now. With warmer weather returning, we have the opportunity for these small outdoor gatherings, which are low-risk, and I’m going to have this one and appreciate it, particularly because it will likely be some time before we have another.

What else am I going to do? I am going to continue to show my support for my kids’ teachers. I am going to use my voice in favour of serious lockdown measures in this province to bring the spread of this virus under control. I am gong to order takeout and support other local businesses.

I am going to start taking action to do what I can to make a positive difference in the 2022 Provincial election and help us get the kind of leadership we deserve.

I’m also going to chill out. Rage is not the answer, except to the question of how to destroy me. Chilling out has been my strategy since September or so, and it’s served me well, and certainly hasn’t made the broader situation any more awful. Disengaging from Twitter and a lot of online chatter is so important for me. There is so much noise going on there, in particular in the sphere of provincial politics, and so much of what everybody is in a flap about doesn’t actually really matter, or filter up to the real world. I found this a lot when organizing events in support of public education pre-COVID, that most normal offline people people didn’t care about so much of what I was enraged about all the time…and sometimes you have to wonder in a situation like that which of us is the person who’s actually missing the point.

I am organizing a community clean up. I am staying engaged with the world through select news sources. I am doing whatever I can to make life a little bit less terrible for the people I interact with who don’t have my privilege of being able to work from home. I am taking responsibility for the things I have control over and not losing my shit about anything that’s outside that purview.

I will keep going. And we ARE going to get there. It was just never going to be an easy road, especially because of our spectacularly terrible leadership. We all deserve better. And I hope we can work together to ensure we get it.