March 31, 2022

Loopy

The past two years have, in some many ways, had me feeling as though I were caught in a loop, and such feelings were really what drove me down in December. I remember feeling devastated by posters around my neighbourhood—a local church had organized a Christmas Eve carol sing, and now all the posters had stickers pasted over them that said, “Cancelled Due to Covid.” A friend’s child was playing music in a local show, and that event got shut down. Once again, so many plans were shifted, just when we were beginning to think it was time to venture out into the world again. It felt like a trick.

One of my favourite things about right now, even with case counts rising locally, is how far away most of us are from that moment in which the idea of other people having fun made everybody furious. As Miranda Featherstone writes in today’s New York Times, “I am tired of judging the Covid choices of strangers.” I got tired a long time ago. For the last year, as vaccines arrived, I’ve been overjoyed to see my friends returning to the activities and pursuits that define their lives. Even sports. I hate sports. But I’m overjoyed at the sight of a packed stadium, and not just because I don’t have to be there. It means the world. It means connection. I welcome every little bit of it.

And in some ways, even with the infernal loop of decline and rise of case counts, things are starting to feel a bit less loopy? That friend’s child got to play their show the other week. Plenty of pals went away for March Break for the first time in three years. The cookbook writer Emiko Davies, who I started following on Instagram in March 2020, when Italy (where she lives) went into lockdown, has finally travelled to Australia with her children to see her parents. All these people I don’t even know—Sarah Harmer’s FINALLY getting to go on tour for her album Are You Gone? There is a week in May when I’m going to two evening concerts and a theatre matinee!

I love it. I’m here for it. Get vaccinated and booster, put on your fucking mask, and let’s do it.

On March 16 2020, we were due to fly to Manchester to visit my husband’s parents, and our one-year-old niece. My husband’s father was very ill from cancer, which made this trip especially pressing, and I still remember, the week before our departure, talking with my dermatologist about how it was going to be fine, and it was Italy and Iran that were the hot-spots. I remember how stressed out we’d been the week before that, riding the TTC and anxiously applying hand sanitizer, and how I’d shout at my children not to touch anything. They just couldn’t get sick. Because a pandemic is very a bad time to be flying across the world with a bronchial infection.

But of course, we didn’t go at all. That week following my appointment at the dermatologist (the last crowded waiting room I ever sat in) was one in which we all lived through about a decade of shifts and radical change, it became clear that travelling at this moment would not be responsible, and it would have been halfway through our time in the UK anyway in which the Prime Minister would have implored us all to come home. It would have been stressful beyond belief, and I know that cancelling our trip was the right thing to do that moment.

Two weeks from today, we’re scheduled to try again. And in some ways that is driving me crazy, especially as case counts rise. As though I were the centre of a sci-fi plot and this elusive trip to the UK a destiny in front of which the universe is determined to throw up walls, make impossible. Like Natasha Lyonne in Russian Doll every time she tries not to die. (Cue Harry Nilsson).

Although I even have a rational side that knows it’s probably going to happen. (!!) And knows too how wondrously cathartic it’s going to be when it finally does, to finally break the spell, to close that loop. Fingers crossed.

March 29, 2022

Gleanings

• What’s in a song? What’s in a robin song heard in the trees on a March morning?
• My daughter becoming a mother reminds me of what those first few months of motherhood are like.
• As they say, if you want to get fit, hang around with fit people. And, if you want to read more, hang around with readers!
• Every year around this time I see tulip leaves emerging in the gardens around Victoria College and I worry that they’re too eager, that they won’t survive another Spring snowfall.
• What if, after two years, we actually understood each other better instead of being convinced that only one of us is right.
• I’m not sure why or when I imagined I was supposed to know things or have a “valuable perspective” to offer. Or, you know, some kind of wisdom. Ha.
• I won’t suggest that braiding a rag rug is a quick and easy zero-waste solution to repurposing your used bedsheets. There’s nothing quick about making a rug, and while the actual process is easy enough, it’s a project that demands time and staying power, not to mention some muscles and balm for your soon-to-be tender pinky finger.
• But thick black eyeliner and jelly shoes aside, I’ve always found that the most difficult thing to express when people poke fun at the decade, is how we lived with a thick air of potential nuclear annihilation and destruction that permeated even the most French Formula-hardened ‘do. It was everywhere. And it followed us around for years.
• Our eyesight may be changing, but we start to see wider and further, from a different perspective. Our inner lives are richer than they were before. And we know there’s still more to know.
• And very practically speaking, writing every day has me quiet … listening, noticing, observing, reflecting … a necessity in order to have something to put down on this page each evening, trusting and seeing that when I arrive here, I don’t need to have it all, or any of it figured out, but just allow what already exists …
• Here’s to sitting in the darkness, then, with beauty and love, just sitting on our laps like cats — an orange one and a gray one.
• I’m not going to let my messiness stop me from loving this wild and precious life.

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March 28, 2022

The School of Mirrors, by Eva Stachniak

Last week, I read the same novel all week long, a novel set in 18th century France, no less, neither of which is my usual speed, but my friend Eva Stachniak is such a magnificent author that it was only a pleasure spending time with her latest, The School of Mirrors.

The story begins with Veronique, a young girl taken from her destitute family to be trained as courtesan to a Polish Count. But it turns out that the Count is actually the King of France, the girls discarded when he tires of them, all of this orchestrated by the King’s mistress and a network of other figures at Versailles.

Young Veronique soon becomes pregnant, and is taken away to give birth in secret, her child taken from her, and Marie-Louise overcomes a lonely and difficult childhood to study midwifery and pursue one of the vocations available for women. As with the girls of Deer Park, from whom Veronique’s story is imagined, the story of these midwives is taken from life.

By the dawn of the French Revolution, Marie-Louise is married to a radical lawyer pushing to make France into a Republic, and she keeps quiet about the story of her own origins, which she knows so little of anyway. But as the politics of the moment grow more and more intense, the consequences of Marie-Louise’s ties of Versailles become much more fraught. When she finally reconnects with her mother, who is poor and suffering from dementia after such a difficult life, the list of secrets she’s having to keep is growing ever longer.

“‘The present circumstances’ were growing worse. Hortense would come home from the market furious. There was no spring lettuce. Leeks had vanished. Vendors pushed wiltered carrots on her and when she protested told her not to be too picky if she wished to be served at all. Her regular cheese merchant tried to charge her almost double what he charged last week so she had to go elsewhere. Bread had gone up in price again. People said it was because of vagrants, though what vagrants could have to do with the disappearance of leeks or the price of bread was still a mystery. Try saying that at the market though. You get spat on. Or pushed into the mud. A young fellow got beaten up because a fishmonger called him a king’s spy. No one minded their own business anymore. Everyone had an opinion to defend. The more outrageous the better. People no longer talked, but yelled. Where was it all heading? Where would it end?”

The School of Mirrors

I wondered, upon reflecting on this book, if it’s not a case of “history repeating” as much as “this is how it always is.” The instability, drive for revolution and change, and also appetite for war, and how while women are never the drivers of any of this, they’re the ones left to pick up the pieces, to keep things going, to put food on the table, delivering the babies, delivering the future, birth and death being their business, always.

Stachniak’s writing is wonderful, the characters gorgeously rendered, and the era brought to life in terrific fashion. The School of Mirrors is an excellent read, providing fascinating insight into the experiences of women and their proximity to power, and meaningful connections to right now.

March 25, 2022

Good Bookish Things

One of the highlights of my March has been hosting the virtual lunch for Danielle Daniel’s debut adult novel Daughters of the Deer, which continues to appear on bestseller lists across the country—which is just the best news, and I’m so thrilled for the book’s success. As a token of thanks following the event, Danielle was kind enough to create a beautiful image of a a reader and my book, and I couldn’t love it any better.

March 24, 2022

Thinking About Masks

(Background: Ontario began lifting indoor masking requirements this week, after nearly two years.)

I am very pleased every time I see that a business is continuing to require masks in their establishments, not because I am wedded to masks per se, but instead because I fully respect the rights of other people to feel comfortable in their workplaces and to make such calls that feel right for them, and I’m so happy to accommodate that in my day to day life.

Because masks aren’t hard.

The whole masking issue is made simpler for me anyway, because while I’ll agree that, in general, the risks of Covid are quite low right now (cases tend to be mild), and perhaps it doesn’t make sense for everyone to mask up for an illness that leaves most people feeling crummy for a couple of days, the stakes are different for my family at the moment, three weeks out from plans for a big trip that was already once cancelled due to Covid and we’re just absolutely desperate for it to happen this time.

Basically, we can afford to get sick right now.

Though even if we didn’t have plans to travel, I suspect I’d continue to wear masks in indoor spaces. Because, as I said, masks aren’t hard. Especially since there are vulnerable members of our community who can’t afford to get sick ever. Especially since I don’t think that wearing a mask is more difficult than being sick is. (I had pneumonia in 2015 that left me bedridden for weeks and was the most physically devastating experience I’ve ever had.)

I am looking forward to a spring with travel plans, and tickets to plays and concerts (!!) and to me wearing a mask is just one more way to ensure that any of this is actually going to happen. (OMG PLEASE!)

While I am very pleased every time I see that a business is continuing to require masks in their establishments, however, I know this isn’t going to be universal, and I’m trying to ease myself into the fact that this is okay. I’m trying to ease myself into the fact that we’ll not be wearing masks forever, and I don’t want to be wearing masks forever, and there are plenty of smart and good people I know who are thrilled about the end of mask requirements, and they might have different priorities, understandings, or experiences of all this than I do.

As with everything during the last two years, there is no one right answer to the challenges of the current moment, and I continue to find that interesting.

Though I am sorry about all the bad actors and loudmouths whose efforts have made understanding this particular point of view incredibly difficult, who have turned the lack of a mask into something aggressive and threatening when I know this isn’t necessarily the case. But it’s hard to think otherwise living in a neighbourhood that, for example, has put up with two years of unmasked jerks barging into shops and confronting employees as a political stunt as part of weekly anti-public health rallies. Who have been the ones who turned masks into a symbol, when all along they have been a tool, an incredible tool that’s meant I’ve been able to ride public transit, do my grocery shopping, send my children to school, and so much more.

“Having the wrong opinions about COVID safety is not what makes someone a COVID jerk. Stipulate hypothetically that the risks of COVID are overblown. Assume for the sake of argument that COVID now poses little more risk than the ordinary flu. Even if that’s the case and you know it, you can still respect those who disagree. If someone thinks—however falsely, in your opinion—that your breathing maskless puts their life at risk, you can pull up your mask out of politeness and in acknowledgement that you might be wrong. It’s the dismissive attitude toward others’ concerns that makes a COVID jerk.”

In a way, I am most grateful for the end of mask requirements, because it’s going to mean the end of somebody not wearing one being perceived as an aggressive act of political defiance. Because I find all that so sad and disappointing, and I’m just tired of that. I continue to be baffled that two years into a public health emergency, there are people who’ve constructed entire identities on the basis of not caring for others. Which is separate from the other people who’ve tied themselves up in knots to convince themselves that rejecting masks and vaccines is actually what caring is, because it’s the masks and vaccines that are the true danger, these people having proven themselves to be particularly susceptible to misinformation. It’s all very exhausting.

(Have you ever smiled at a baby while wearing a mask and the baby has smiled back at you? This has happened to me. I’m no scientist, but I can tell you that masks and vaccines have hindered my children’s health and development not one iota. The overstatement of harms from these tools have made it impossible to have any real conversations about any of this.)

I have worked really hard to not to make my mask part of my identity. I have worked really hard to be flexible, not married to consistency (because Covid certainly isn’t!), and to be open-minded, and not histrionic or hyperbolic in my discussions around any of these issues. I have been bothered that as we move away from public health restrictions, many of the same people who’ve been fervent public health supporters over the last two years are losing faith because new public health guidelines aren’t necessarily those they agree with. I’ve found it interesting over the last few months that there’s been an overlap between anti-vaxxer parents and super Covid-cautious parents—they’re all threatening to take their kids out of the education system, insisting the public health decisions are motivated by nefarious factors, deciding that small risks are worth undermining general public health for.

Something else I find interesting is people insisting that their perspective on all this is stemming from justice, from community care, but the end result of this is that they’re just absolutely furious with a lot of their neighbours, which is kind of ironic.

I have to keep reminding myself not to imagine that I’m morally superior to the people who disagree with me. And not just because it’s morally superior not to think that you’re morally superior, but also because I’m not, and neither are you, and all of us, at our best, are just trying to muddle through, to figure this out together.

March 22, 2022

Gleanings

• If anything, ballet is forcing me to rethink my relationship with my middle-aged body and instead of noticing only the beginnings of older age descending upon me, I now marvel at what my body is capable of and the incremental changes I’ve seen as I’ve learned to stand with more confidence and courage. And as for the imperfections? They’re part of being alive. 
• …still one of the finest books of short fiction to appear so far in the 21st century.
• The key for me is that I keep writing, even if what I have to say is as frothy as a cappuccino. Because when the urge does come for me to express something weightier, I’m more likely to have the words.
• I missed the practice of framing the world through my viewfinder. I began wondering what I would find if I photographed my city as I would photograph Rome? If I looked at Edmonton, so often described in terms of ugliness, with love-coloured glasses?
• “In terms of the scope of the war, it’s the Russians who have done badly,” he says. “The ground campaign has been pathetic. And the whole world is watching.”
• The thing about having a practice, is to remember that it’s just that, a practice. It’s not something ever present, but something to continue to work toward. Sometimes there’s joy, sometimes not.
• The greatest gift I can imagine is if you give yourself the gift of a book.
• The rest of the intentions were along the lines of:  “Make more time for myself”; “Learn to accept myself more”; “Learn to say no more often.”  I wanted to feel empathetic towards the women, but all I could think was: blah…blah…blah…Self-improvement 101 stuff. (Perhaps I needed the retreat more than I thought I did?)
• Recently, I shared a photo of myself on an island beach trail. I looked at the photo and thought this is who I am.
• Somehow, that is, the end of Owen’s life has to become part of the story of my own life: rather than considering it a break, a catastrophic rupture, in that story (the way it feels to me now), I need to learn to see it as belonging to a new, different continuity. (Mrs. Ramsay, though dead, is still very present in “The Lighthouse.”)
• So I decided to keep writing, to let the plot unfold like the textiles in the small museum run by the cousin in Lviv, a city as haunted as any, and even if I can’t return, my character can go for the first time. She can hear an opera, drink coffee on Serbska Street, look at old books at the market by the Fedorov monument, and sit with her cousin, drawing the tree that gathers them both into its root system, families on each spreading branch.
• I began writing poetry and doing contemporary dance around the same time in high school, and they’re definitely connected for me—they’re both non-linear, non-narrative, and imagistic
• How we think we are one independent organism, living, breathing, acting on our own, and how I have so often felt so assured that I could, or even should do it on my own… and yet, there’s no possible way that we can’t not be interdependent. We need and are dependent on one another, and each provide gifts, seen and unseen, spoken and unspoken for the other, and receive what we need and more from others in return.

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 21, 2022

Rafael Has Pretty Eyes, by Elaine McCluskey

No one writes voice quite like Elaine McCluskey, and not just one voice, but all the voices, ranging from the news reporter just laid off after twenty-five years, to the canine companion of man whose brain damage to the front cortex has caused an unfortunate condition termed Witzelsucht, a bouncer with concussion symptoms, or the man whose story begins, “I am at a Toast ‘n’ Roast for my mother’s fourth husband, Wayne. Wayne, of course, is a dud. Who else do you get on the fourth attempt: Idris Elba?” And later on in the same story, “It’s Never What You Think It Is,” which opens McCluskey’s latest collection Rafael Has Pretty Eyes, the character notes that he’s convinced “that life is one inside joke after another and that people fall into two categories: the people who believe Trailer Park Boys is real and the ones who don’t, and I no longer know where I fit because last night I saw Bubbles driving a Masterati Quattraporte with smoked windows on the Waverley Road in Dartmouth and it seemed quite normal to me.”

I have loved Elaine McCluskey’s work for ten years now, as a search through my blog archives proves, ever since I first read her debut collection The Watermelon Social, and got hooked on this writer who, with a single sentence, can break my heart and make me laugh until I cry all at once. She writes about oddballs with such a remarkable immediacy that they’re relatable, and with such incredible specificity too (“a Masterati Quattraporte with smoked windows on the Waverley Road in Dartmouth,” for example) that she blows my mind with her acuity.

(Upon reading her latest, it also occurs to me that I love McCluskey’s work for the same reason I love Katherine Heiny’s, which might be the highest literary compliment I’m capable of giving.)

McCluskey writes about people who’ve fallen through the cracks, people who are hanging on just barely, suffering evictions, breakups, or being held hostage at gunpoint. The extraordinary side of ordinary—the radio DJ who’s come down in the world and makes his living now at a pay day loan outlet, the local city councillor for whom it’s all about to fall apart. Characters who seem like anybody you might pass on the street, rendered vivid by the power of McCluskey’s narrative voice, and then the story takes off, ending up in a place where you never imagined it going. (“Life is just one extended series of anecdotes strung together until they kill you.”)

I loved this book. Perfect for anyone who thinks the Trailer Park Boys are real or otherwise, and even those who aren’t always drawn to short stories, because these are short stories that underline why such things are worth reading.

March 18, 2022

Home Office

The desk we bought to replace a patio table we’d been using indoors at the height of WFH (about a year ago; things since then have improved and half our household now leaves the house to go to school) finally has a proper chair, thanks to Tiny Beaches Interiors, from whom we also got the desk. And I’m working here today because it’s March Break downstairs and I’m spending this morning working on Draft 2 of my new novel, which I’m billing as “Emily Henry meets Katherine Heiny, with maiden aunt Barbara Pym looking on approvingly.” It’s a lot of fun.

March 16, 2022

Mitzi Bytes Turns Five!

Mitzi Bytes turned five on Monday, which was also Pi Day, and so once again I made Nora Ephron’s chocolate pie to celebrate. I’m also giving away a copy of the new Harper Perennial Edition of the book. If you’d like a chance to win, enter over on Instagram before the end of the week.

March 16, 2022

Gleanings

• I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the ways in which social media and the theoretical shrinking and speeding up of the world impacts our ability to be nuanced thinkers and ethical actors, not to mention emotionally stable.
• “Zero risk is, I don’t need to wonder anymore,” he says. “Wondering is exhausting.”
• I’m not running away or hiding from news of the world. But I do recognize it’s not healthy to focus on it to the point of inducing anxiety over that which I cannot control.
• I kept to the classic script and every single person in my family, including the two who don’t like bananas at all, couldn’t get enough of it. I get it now, I really do. It’s far more complex than it seems, and abundantly cozy.
• I just bought five bunches of Hyacinths from my local corner shop that within minutes of entering the house muffled the smell of gym socks and meatloaf with their ethereal scent.
• Until the light returns/ The trees promise to remember how it felt to/ Be wrapped up in cool, endless shade.
• Time. Time is what I most long for. Time denied the Ukrainian mother-to-be and her child who were killed in the bombing of their maternity hospital. Time is also what I most celebrate. Individual moments of clarity are all the more precious when they emerge from a fog. 
• It’s been nearly a hundred and fifty years since this chair was shiny, and new, and arguably, plagiarized. As always, to me, those years are a comfort
• Poetry is a place, still, to work things out, work things through. I
• I realized I knew little about poetry. By little, I mean nothing. But I want to learn to appreciate poetry, the beauty of the rhythm and cadence of the words, the meanings within. 
• At times, I can disregard the boring days, the days that stretch on and need to be filled, the days of ordinary-ness, the days we’d long for if we no longer had them, the days, so many are wishing for in this moment, the days that make a life.
• Its the spring, things and thinks burst out from seemingly nothing. All this time, they’ve just been waiting. It can be its own overwhelm, but I am hungry for it. And overwhelmed by it. the irony, the ache. the swell, the burst. all of it.

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.