March 30, 2021

Don’t Make Plans

Is there any way that I can possibly convey just how exasperating it is for Doug Ford, 13 months into this pandemic, to be telling me not to make plans?

Doug Ford, whose entire approach to handling the pandemic has been “no plans,” whose approach to school re-openings was LITERALLY “Let’s give this a shot, at least…and pray to god that everyone’s safe.” Doug Ford, who campaigned for the job of premier with a platform of “no plan,” whose Ministry actually thought it was totally okay for teacher-librarians to be finding out on Labour Day that the next day they’d be teaching kindergarten. Whose whole plan for the second wave was to do nothing until the pandemic was once again out of control, and whose plan for averting a third wave was to open up the province again while infectious variants are rising. Whose vaccine roll-out plans have been definitively NOT GREAT?

Who ever could have seen this third wave coming, not to mention the second one?

Um, EVERYONE.

Right now, teacher’s unions are advising the province to move schools to virtual after Easter weekend, and then keep our delayed Spring Break, which I think sounds like a fine plan, but because this is a government that prides itself on not listening to unions or people who know things, perhaps they’re probably not going to take that advice, and this is the kind of instability that’s been a hallmark of this group of ding-dongs since they were elected.

And maybe the Premier doesn’t make plans, but I do. Like everyone, I had plans for 2020, plans that got cancelled one after the other, and I’ve been mainly uncomplaining as I cancelled those plans, because some things can’t be planned for and you can’t control what happens (when you’re not the government), but instead how you react to it. So I’ve stiffened my upper lip, and gone without seeing friends and family, and my children have been brave as they’ve made giant sacrifices in their own lives, and I’ve tried to live up to their example, and so it was with Easter last year, and I cancelled our plans for an outdoor Thanksgiving, and Halloween, and Christmas was my mom coming over in the afternoon with us all wearing masks and the windows open, which was freezing, and I haven’t seen her since then. We had picnics in the park six feet away from friends in the summer, but haven’t socialized with people outside our household since our kids returned to school, and I’m still not complaining, because you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do, and also I continue to be so grateful that we’ve all been healthy.

But today I hit my limit. I am finished with having all my plans cast aside because of this government’s complete lack of a plan, and over and over again. This is not like last spring when nobody knew what was going to happen, or what actions would be necessary to control the spread of the virus, when all of us (including the experts) were still in the dark. For months, medical experts have been advising the government to implement paid sick leave to slow the spread in workplaces. Others have been advising widespread testing and tracing, particularly in schools, and this still hasn’t happened. There are all kinds of plans that could have been put in place to avert this latest wave of Covid, and the government has heeded none of it.

And now the Premier has the nerve to tell me not to make plans for Easter? When Easter is literally FIVE FUCKING DAYS AWAY? With absolutely no respect, Doug Ford (because it’s been a very long year), you’ve got no business advising anybody about plans, or messing with mine, because it’s your absolutely failure to plan that’s resulted in our current disaster.

Doug Ford telling me not to make plans for Easter is so absolutely patronizing, disrespectful, and insulting.

Doug Ford telling me not to make plans is like the pot calling the kettle a failure of leadership. It’s like the doctor who missed the diagnosis complaining about the funeral. It’s like the guy who pisses on your boots, and tells you that it’s raining, and then hands you a ticket for standing in a puddle.

March 30, 2021

Gleanings

• From early childhood, water was essential to Woolf, and to her work.
• The young man could not believe his eyes. It was Grandma Millie in ill-fitting second-hand clothes, sitting on a piece of cardboard and begging for change on the streets of Winnipeg, Man. How did this happen and, more importantly, how was she going to make it?
• The living that turned into dying has so many stories, and so does grieving in the wake of it, I don’t know where to begin telling any of them, or even if I should, because, really, loss is ubiquitous and telling is more like joining a song already being sung in many places.
• I’m going to give people the benefit of the doubt, which is something we always do in the library, and when we do, it works magic. I never want to forget that.
• By adapting the lexicon and ideas of science to their work, they’ve created bold hybrids in fiction and memoir that defy categories, challenge narratives and remark on the eerie culpabilities of discovery.
• So, I’m just saying. I really think there should be some sort of club for this, where we meet up outside and just scream
• When someone is in trouble, people get distressed and they want to help. It’s brilliant. What’s not brilliant is that difficult life situations are so nuanced that “out of the box” advice or judgements very, very rarely apply.
• At first I wasn’t entirely sure how to wrap my brain about such vast emptiness – a calendar with no entries – but slowly small projects began to seep in and now a whopper has come my way.
• While none of these may be print-worthy, they’re the result of letting go of certainties and embracing the bravery of experimentation and creativity.
• I’m so lucky to have been brought up in a house where it was so easy to fall in love with reading.
• A cake can turn a Tuesday into an occasion.
• The small moment when the bee stepped forward, reluctantly, into the sweetness of the yellow flowers, a few of their bells open on the drooping racemes, that moment is with me…
• “You look so happy”: that’s not the only thing reading can do, and it isn’t always what we want from our reading, but it’s a special gift when it happens, isn’t it, especially these days?
• The book isn’t finished. The book is in process.
• In one sense, Who Is Maud Dixon? is about the perils and consequences of taking this idea to its logical extreme. “Everyone in Marrakesh is pretending to be someone they’re not,” says a hotel manager when the two women arrive in Morocco.
• I want depth and breadth and art and wonder. I want more. I want more of the good stuff. The good good stuff.
• It’s play, this process. Like playing imaginary games as a child, where there were rules but you were making them up as you went…

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March 29, 2021

Summerwater, by Sarah Moss

Dread lurks in Sarah Moss’s Summerwater from the opening pages, from the book’s description on the inside cover, in fact. From the cover itself, which dark and foreboding, and this is such a pandemic novel, though not explicitly. The reference on Page 6 though: “There won’t be a plane this summer, or next. Who could afford to travel now.”—just a little uncanny. It’s a very contemporary novel in its immediacy, in the vein of Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet, but less overtly. There’s a Brexit backdrop though, and it matters a lot, questions of us and them, who belongs and who doesn’t. Set in Scotland, which complicates things even more, at a holiday resort with a handful of cabins nearby a loch, and the weather is dreadful. There is nothing to do but stare out the windows at the unceasing drizzle and also then at the other holidaymakers, each of them mysteries to each other (and to themselves). The skinny mother who insists on going running every morning, the old man who is frustrated by his wife’s increasing infirmity, the young couple on the cusp of a lifetime together, the couple with the little girl and the baby, the grumpy teenagers and their embattled parents, everybody more than faintly annoyed at the people staying in the one cabin—are they Romanian? Ukrainian?—where loud music plays into the night.

Isolation, paranoia, mistrust and frustration colour the various narratives, everybody isolated, far away from WiFi and phone signals. Moving between various dwellers of the resort, each character’s perspective is absorbing and fascinating (and also very funny, moving, illuminating, cringe worthy, etc.) Offering clues that suggest something foreboding, though I never called it right, what actually happened, and it was terrible, but also very satisfying, in the way that devastating conclusions aren’t always—and surprising too, casting the rest of this story in a very different light. Not a spoiler because I am quoting from the cover copy again: “It is the longest day of the year, and as the hours pass imperceptibly, twelve people shift from being strangers, to bystanders, to allies…”

I love a short book, one that can read in a day (especially a day that is rainy). Summerwater is a short novel that will never be called “slight,” and it might be just the thing for a reader finding their pandemic brain is having trouble with focus. I really loved Moss’s previous book, The Ghost Wall, and this one is similar in scope, though also its own creation entirely, and very much recommended.

March 26, 2021

Constant Nobody, by Michelle Butler Hallett

I loved this book. It was 438 pages long and demanded a lot of my attention, but I was so sorry when it ended (even though the ending was perfect!), because to read Constant Nobody, Michelle Butler Hallett’s novel set in 1937 Moscow against the backdrop of Stalinist purges when nobody could be trusted, is to just be so engrossed by the language, atmosphere, and plot.

And oh, and such plot—here’s how it goes. NKVD Agent Kostya, in the Basque region of Spain (there to do away with anti-Stalinist Communists) encounters a nurse who is actually British agent Temerity West who delivers the novel’s remarkable first line: “—Swallow each and every one, or your cock will fall off.” She’s given him pills to treat his gonorrhea, and he’s actually there to kill the doctor who works at the clinic, but he’s away, and a rapport grows up between the two, both of them polyglots. They pass a night together, chastely, recounting Russian fairy tales they both know because Temerity’s mother was Russian—and then when things come to a head the next day, Kostya lets her escape.

Which seems like something of very little consequence, but then everything has consequence in 1937 USSR, the very system a prison in which no one can be trusted and everybody fears for their life. Where punishment is arbitrary and can arrive at any moment, everyone just waiting for that knock on the door. Even Kostya, an NKVD officer who you’d imagine might be impervious to such threats, particularly as his adopted father is a powerful official in the agency. But Kostya is just as helpless as everybody else when he once again encounters Temerity West in a Moscow cell, not just to his feelings for this woman, but even still, he permits her escape a second time. A third seemingly random event bringing them together again, and now their fates are inextricably linked—Temerity is hiding out in Kostya’s flat, and it’s hard to envision a scenario in which this could possibly end well.

Temerity West is wonderful, akin to my favourite, Lane Winslow, their backgrounds uncannily similar, though of course Constant Nobody is less conspicuously delightful—except that it kind of is? Even amid the venereal disease and executions—this novel is brutal; there’s an awful lot of blood—there is a playful humour at work. And teacups! “Kostya raised his eyebrows in sympathetic dismay. How far might this hostility to teacups go? Would one’s loyalty be tested by tea? Could a man call himself Soviet if he preferred a cup and saucer? Samovar, zavarka and podstakannik: signals of orthodoxy? In these difficult days, might a man’s choice of how to drink his tea become the rubric which parted innocence from guilt?/ It’s just tea, Kostya wanted to say./ He knew better.”

There is a fascinating tension throughout the book—who is trustworthy? What does it mean to be loyal? And loyal to what? Temerity West is plucky as you like (and I like!) but Kostya is a flawed, troubled man. His adopted father too managing to gain the reader’s sympathy, although he does mighty little to deserve it, and I admire Butler Hallett’s ability to complicate our connections to these fictional people. Is Kostya admirable? Depends on your perspective. And will you root for him? Well, I did, in spite of my better instincts, and when the true extent of his harm is made clear later in the novel, I was gutted, but mostly because I felt how much it had surely broken this man to be the person he’d become. Butler Hallett complicates too our simple condemnation of people who are “just following orders” in an evil regime, where moral compasses have lost their poles, are spinning wildly really, where everyday life is a prison of the mind.

What a mash-up—Constant Nobody is a spy novel, a romance of sorts, historical fiction, a literary feat. It’s gripping, gorgeous, and unforgettable.

March 23, 2021

Gleanings

• But the silver lining of the COVID-19 lockdown was that suddenly there was nowhere to go.
• Amid the current furor and this long history, a question continues to cry out for an answer that doesn’t lead us back to the police: Just how do we make cities safer for women?
• “The indignity of being Asian in this country has been underreported,” the poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong writes…
• 10 Things I’m Keeping From This Year
• That’s why treating your writing as play can be so powerful. It allows us to release some of the rules and strictures we’ve placed on ourselves, even/especially the unspoken ones.
• I’d forgotten what day it is today until I entered the pool for my morning swim and realized that the lifeguards were playing Irish music.
• It’s a well-rounded approach to mothering that has earned her an army of fans and followers across the internet. And according to Emmy, the secret to her success is her absolute honesty about both the positive and negative aspects of motherhood./ To which Dan has one succinct response: “Bullshit. Bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit.”

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.

March 22, 2021

Something Amazing Happened to Me

I am always interested in what people are reading, not so subtly peering over the shoulders of strangers on benches, which meant that it was inevitable that sooner or later I would come across somebody reading a book by me.

AND TODAY WAS THE DAY!

There it was, my name at the top of the page of a book being read by a woman on College Street, and I definitely would not be playing it cool.

“Um, excuse me, do you like that book?” I asked her, imagining that if she said no, I could then get on my way (and jump into the path of an oncoming streetcar). She said she did. I said, “Because I wrote it,” and explained that by reading that book on that bench at that moment, she’d just made a lifelong dream of mine come true.

Well, then she informed me that we actually know each other, and it’s true, it was @lighttan, and we follow each other on Instagram, so maybe all this was a LITTLE LESS miraculous, but I am still pretty excited, because she’s not related to me or contractually obliged to be reading my book, and I don’t even think my husband arranged her to be sitting there in order to boost my self-esteem (I wouldn’t put it past him) and because I got to meet @lighttan IRL, which would have been nice even if she weren’t reading my novel.

Books are magic, and reading books is magic, and writing books that people read is an incredible bananas thing that I will never get my head around.

March 18, 2021

The Limits of Hashtags

For the last, well, seven years, to be honest, I have been frustrated by the limits of hashtag activism, not because the issues these hashtags have brought to the surface of public attention are not urgent and critical, but because they *are,* and I am not sure they are served by the simplification of a hashtag, which ultimately stands to coalesce a tangle of experience into a single narrative. The hashtag is a beginning, I think, but one single event or idea can never really stand for more than itself, because the world is so much more messy and complicated than that.

I was thinking about this all last week at news of the murder of a woman in London; I’ve been thinking about it with the news of the murder of 8 women, six of them Asian, in Atlanta. I have been thinking about how I want to resist the demand to share the same PowerPoint stories, employ the same hashtags, to use the same words as everybody else to respond to these incidents, because there is always more than one story and we ought to be suspicious when there isn’t.

How I want to respond with something more meaningful than adhering to that single story, as a tribute to the humanity of these people whose lives have been violently stolen. More meaningful than texting my Chinese-Canadian friends to check in with them as well, which seems kind of cringe worthy and cliched, and a burden for my friends. I don’t want to put a fucking candle on my porch. (Or a hockey stick. Good God, do I ever find public mourning rituals meaningless.)

Instead, I want to think, and share my process, and sometimes that takes time, and in fact it should. Instead, I will admit that I still don’t know what an appropriate response is, but that I’m rattled too, and that white supremacy is real, and that I am committed to anti-racism, which I think requires even more work than me yelling on Instagram in fact.

I learned a lot from reading Morgan Ome’s “Why This Wave of Anti-Asian Racism Feels Different,” an interview with Cathy Park Hong in The Atlantic, and so I think that is what I want to share now, in addition to the obvious show of love and solidarity. It’s linked in my profile and it’s great.

March 17, 2021

Taking Stock

Making: A new novel that’s inspired by Barbara Pym’s books, and I just hit 10,000 words. It might not be good, it might never be published, but my goodness, am I having a good time.
Getting: ready for summer! If all goes well, we will going on all the holidays, and even if things don’t go all THAT well, which is good planning.
Baking: I just baked a loaf of banana bread but didn’t have enough bananas (which I only realized after I’d melted the butter), so grated a giant honeycrisp apple into the batter and I think it was a very good decision. (Update: it was.)
Sipping: My 800th cup of tea of the day, an Earl Grey loose leaf that we got when we after takeout afternoon tea from the Windsor Arms Hotel.
Reading: Excellent Women, by Barbara Pym; Satellite Love, by Genki Ferguson; and Ruth Bader Ginsburg: The Last Interview
Waiting: to go pick up the kids from school
Looking: At crocuses and other buds poking up through the soil. Every year, it’s never less a miracle.
Listening: The Moon and the Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers, a new album by Valerie June, which is so good, and inspired Stuart to order a new stereo because it was so great but the quality of our phone speakers was so rubbish, and this music deserves to be heard properly
Wishing: for not much, actually! I’ve been feeling extraordinarily good these days. I made a pledge that my March 2021 would be more enjoyable than March 2020, and I’ve been surpassing that low bar in glorious leaps and bounds.
Enjoying: How light the sky still is at 6pm since the clocks went forward
Appreciating: The amazing work of my kids’ teachers to give them a more than half-decent school year
Eating: I had a tandoori chicken wrap from Elchi Chai Shop for lunch, and it was absolutely delicious
Liking: The experience of tuning out a lot of what is happening on social media, getting my news from a few trusted sources and not forcing myself to pay attention to every single gosh darn thing, because it’s a big, big world
Loving: my apartment. We’ve lived here for 13 years in April, which is the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere, and this year in particular has made me grateful for a comfortable place to call home.
Buying: Grin Toothbrushes
Managing: my household. I am so good at this, and it’s an underappreciated skill—although not in my household because I make sure everyone knows how excellent it is that we never run out of toilet paper, cinnamon, coffee filters, fresh baked banana bread, etc.
Watching: We just finished watching the Fran Lebowitz Netflix series, “Pretend It’s a City.” I loved it. A fantastic escape from our current moment

Hoping: For some good news coming soon about my next book
Wearing: A ratty old cardigan. Yesterday my husband ordered me a brand new cardigan because I think he’s fed up with this one, because he is the one who has to look at it. I am also wearing my new slippers I bought at the beginning of February, and maybe it’s a coincidence that I’ve been happier ever since they came into my life. Though of course, I am looking forward to warmer days and being finished with cardigans and slippers altogether
Following: the path of the light as the sun moves across the sky. I know it’s going to be a nice day when the sunrise hit the windows of the high school west of my house bedroom window.
Noticing: That almost every parent I hear from about parenting in the pandemic claims that fortunately their kids are at an easier age to be dealing with “all this” than kids who are babies/toddlers/tweens/teens. I know this is contrary to the whole “the pandemic has been brutal for parents” narrative that seems to be in play, but the world is complicated and interesting.
Sorting: I am sort of between sorts (which is much preferable to being out of them). We’ve gone through our apartment this year and done things to make these spaces more pleasant and livable—it’s all organized. Except for the upstairs storage closest which is a disaster, because we’re long overdue for a trip to Value Village to make a donation of all the stuff we’ve been sorting.
Getting: used to new variants, second and third waves, to not panicking. It’s all very boring, actually. I think a lot of this represents a failure of storytelling. Pandemics are more banal than you would have thought.
Bookmarking: Well, I read it already, but I think YOU should bookmark Saleema Nawaz’s latest column in the Montreal Gazette.
Coveting: So I got a flyer from Pizza Pizza in my mailbox, which is a regular occurrence and I don’t ever buy Pizza Pizza pizza because I am an insufferable takeout snob, so just throw the flyers in the bin usually, but this flyer was about Pizza Pizza partnering with the card game UNO to celebrate the game’s 50th birthday with a commemorative deck, and now I am totally obsessed with this, even though I already have an UNO deck, but I don’t have THIS UNO deck.

Coveting also: A new novel by Katherine Heiny! She was part of an online event I attended in February celebrated Laurie Colwin, and it made me borrow her first novel Standard Deviation from the library and I love it so much. I laughed and laughed and laughed, but it was also so beautiful and poignant, which is a tricky balance to strike.
Feeling: good! Which is great, because, Little Darling, it’s been a long, cold, lonely winter.
Hearing: Abundant birdsong out my kitchen door, especially cardinals. I love it.

I stole this from Pip Lincolne and I am really glad I did!

March 16, 2021

Gleanings

• Not loss, not yet, not while the daffodil leaves gleam in sunlight…
• I finished Cold Earth at lunchtime yesterday, a day where the sun was shining through my living room windows, warming my hair, and causing me to shed my ever-present (since the pandemic started, really) hoodie. And yet, I shivered as I read the final pages.
• Each place is evoked with such lucent, homey detail that it could make you homesick, even for a place that you’ve never been.
• What the room needed was somewhere to sit. Chairs. Just the right size of chairs.
• And Harry in particular became a feminist killjoy. He didn’t remain silent at the dinner table. He spoke up and spoke out.
• Have you noticed more radio-silence than normal amongst friends and family – unanswered texts, calls and emails? I sure have – and I don’t think I’m alone in this…
• I just finished reading Hot Milk by Deborah Levy, and I have emerged from its pages feeling sunburned.
• He said to me that morning, How can I ever thank you for everything you’ve done for me? And I answered, A greenhouse.
• There are scenes where I wanted to scream get out, or they’re only trying to help you, or you don’t need him. But I’m glad no one was listening.
• Have I said this before? I love this guy. He didn’t comment on me being alone. He dealt with the fact that I was alone.   
• If hope is the light at the end of the tunnel, what happens when it flickers and dies?  You either curl up or you cope.  I curled up.
• One thing I have learned about myself this past year is that I’m much more of an introvert than I ever thought I was.
• So I’m curating. Fewer “hot takes” (which I suspect is no longer what they’re called) and more considered opinions.
• Can asking questions be a kind of spiritual practice? What happens when we consider the opposite?
• I want my novels to be hybrids. I want to pack them with questions, and I want them to work on the surface as unified and compelling stories, and then work beyond their surface as metafictional, cross-genre, and cross-cultural conversations. 
• The pressure to appear just as normal has taken its toll. I find myself reminding people in meetings that “We are still in a pandemic, so maybe don’t knock yourself out?” And sometimes people laugh at that but I also remind them that I’m serious.

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.

March 15, 2021

The Spaciousness of Uncertainty: Hope Matters, by Elin Kelsey

In this year of pandemic anniversary reflection, I have been thinking a lot about hope, which I think has been my own personal guiding force through this particular crisis, and has served me remarkably well. I just erased a sentence here about this being excusable since I am neither an elected official nor charged with responsibility for public health…but I actually think that hope should be a part of public policy. Not thoughts and prayers hope, but I can’t help thinking of last summer and how autumn could have been different if the public had received more concrete messaging about the ways their actions in the first wave had made a difference, if instead of the news media focussing on the inevitably of a second wave, they had expanded the narrative to include other possibilities. (“The ones who tell the story,” says Ali Smith, as I have quoted on this here website six hundred billion times, “make up the world.”)

All this thinking compelled me to pick up Elin Kelsey’s Hope Matters: Why Changing the Way We Think is Critical to Solving the Environmental Crisis and one thing I had not been expecting was that this would be the YOU’RE WRONG ABOUT… regarding the crisis of our dying earth:

“Whenever we straitjacket an idea or issue into a single monolithic story…we lose the nuance and specificity of context. We miss positive developments and shifts in perception. We are left with an oversimplification that is so generalized it becomes inherently inaccurate.”

Elin Kelsey

It’s not that the challenges facing the planet aren’t dire, but instead that the presentation of these challenges is creating another crisis of mental health, and further, it’s all enough to make many people respond by throwing up their arms and deciding there is no point in even trying, rendering doom a self-fulfilling prophecy. And a huge part of the problem is the way we get our news: never in all of human history has there been more opportunity hear directly and constantly about every single terrible or catastrophic incident happening somewhere on the earth. That part of the equation is as natural as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, actually—and possibly just as harmful to ourselves and to the planet.

And so Kelsey suggests shifting the focus, underlining that there is no shortage of hopeful stories on the environmental front either, of habitats that have rebounded after devastation, stories of incredible resilience and recovery, of animals that have been brought back from the brink of extinction. These stories, she tells her readers, are presented as one-offs, if they’re presented at all. And there will be others who will suggest that such stories will make people complacent, undermining the urgency of the crisis facing our climate and our environment—but Kelsey’s evidence suggests the opposite, than when people are empowered to believe that their actions have an impact, make a difference, then they will indeed be compelled to act. Hope is a powerful force, and Kelsey uses examples of the last twenty years—a shift away from single-use plastics, people consciously decided to eat less meat in their diets, a movement that saw millions of people all over the world taking to the streets in 2019—to show that already there is so much positive change to build upon, and reason and incentive to keep moving forward.

As Rebecca Solnit writes, “Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and in the spaciousness of that uncertainty is room to act.” Elin Kelsey’s book inspires me to want to bother, and underlines that “wild and contagious” hope is not merely a privilege or indulgence, but instead is essential to help us both work through sadness and grief about what’s happening to our planet, and then continue to take necessary action for a better world.