January 25, 2021

Jack, by Marilynne Robinson

It took me so long (by my standards; yours might be different) to finish reading Jack, Marilynne Robinson’s latest book in her series that began with Gilead. I started reading on Wednesday, feeling like it seemed a good day to read a great American novelist, but I just had all the feelings that day and was exhausted, and wasn’t in a great place to begin a book that asked much of its reader, even if it delivered rewards in return. This is not a book with a furious plot, or much of a plot at all if you consider that predestination renders plot kind of moot. This is the story of John Ames Boughton, disgraced and formerly of Gilead, IA, whose story we know from previous books in the series (and this book is the final). Though, truth be told, I don’t remember very much about the other books in the series, not specifically. I have read most of them twice, but I recall them more in general than specifically. But I didn’t need the references much at all to appreciate the value of Jack, whose protagonist is cut off from his past anyway—but not entirely. And what he’s been up to gets told in kind of a sideways manner, Jack never the kind of person to confront anything head-on. Out of prison, just barely getting by in an down-and-out rooming house, he has come into the company of a young Black school-teacher who is, like him, the child of a preacher, and the two are drawn together for reasons that Robinson manages to make complete sense of, no matter what a terrible idea their relationship is for reasons of legality and otherwise. Because of course a white man and a Black woman cannot be a couple in 1950s’ America, and Jack Boughton a terrible bet anyway—and yet you’d wager. That’s what I love about this book. The way that Robinson makes clear the anguish of being Jack and loving Jack, and of watching him make terrible choices over and over again, and there is just a kernel of goodness we’re determined to put there (and so is Jack’s father, and Della too, the school teacher), even if Jack doesn’t seem it himself.

Slow, rich, and satisfying, is how I found this book. There was something soothing in its meditativeness and it as a pleasure to get lost in its evocations.

January 25, 2021

On Teaching Algebra During an Insurrection

I was sitting in the kitchen when I learned about the riots at the US Capitol on January 6, alerted by an Instagram post around the same time that my daughter in the living room heard about it from this kid in her class who seems to be streaming CNN during virtual school. This kid is always first with breaking news, and that day it was their math class he interrupted to inform his teacher and his classmates that a terrifying mass of marauding thugs were storming the Capitol, and then their class went back to their regularly scheduled programming, which was algebra.

I was a wreck that day, whacked out on stress and anxiety. I took my children for a walk after virtual school was done for the day, and my youngest daughter said, “If this was a dream, it would be a bad one.” I had gotten no work done all afternoon, and I was grateful—as I often am—that I’d never gone to teacher’s college, “just to have something to fall back on” (as they say). Because this means that I will never have to teach a Grade 6 algebra class online during a global pandemic as terrorists mount an insurrection in the nation next door.

The following morning when both my children returned to class, they had their headphones on so that I could hear only their (particularly shouty) ends of the conversation, teachers apparently guiding them through discussions about what had just transpired in Washington. The Grade 2s were talking about voting and fairness and democracy, and over in Grade 6, my daughter was indignant about the latitude granted to those in the Capitol rampage when compared to police crackdowns on Black Lives Matter protesters the previous summer.

As a society, we ask our educators to carry a heavy load. This was the case even before the pandemic, staff at my children’s school forming task-forces to assist families living in poverty (collecting winter coats and boats, canvassing to furnish apartments for families moving out of refugee and domestic violence shelters) and to help students deal with skyrocketing levels of anxiety and other mental health challenges. All this is on top of the usual fare—sports teams, choirs and bands, lunchtime clubs, answering parent emails on the weekends, plus curriculum nights, and holiday concerts, which educators are expected to volunteer their time to.

For two and a half years, Ontario teachers have been serving on the front lines of our government’s reckless cuts, including reductions to minimum wage, cutting supports for the opioid crisis, cuts to social services, autism support, healthcare, housing, mental health problems, domestic violence, poverty—you name it, and never mind the cuts to education. Helping to stop up these gaps in our social fabric has become what teachers do every day in their work, in addition to teaching (which teachers do well).

And then the pandemic happened, school closures pushing working families to their limits—underlining the foundational role that schools and their staff play in the day-to-day functioning of our society, a role that so many parents had always taken for granted. When Ontario schools reopened in September, amidst so much fear and uncertainty, teachers masked up and returned to the classroom, my youngest daughter’s teacher telling me, “There is nowhere else I’d rather be.” And she was assuring me, of course, because this is what our children’s teachers do, taking on our burdens and struggles as parents, and our children’s struggles too, helping to make the load a little lighter. Teaching is about so much more than teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic, and more than ever in 2021, as we all navigate challenges that sometimes seem insurmountable.

The other morning, I got to listen in to a bit of my daughter’s Grade 6 class before she got wise to my eavesdropping and put her headphones on. Her teacher mentioning an article she’d read about people having trouble sleeping. “These are stressful times,” she said, and she surveyed the class to see if anyone else was having trouble, opening up a conversation about mental health, about anxiety. A throwaway conversation, so it seemed, but of course it wasn’t, instead a vital check-in, the kind of thing all good teachers now need to weave into their curriculum in this most unprecedented age, but so seamlessly that it is easy not to notice. 

It is so easy to underestimate what educators do, and the outsized role they play in supporting the wellbeing and prosperity of all Canadians. For some, it seems like a reflex to malign the entire profession for their good pay and holidays, as though to value the work of educating and supporting future generations was foolhardy and not instead an investment that pays out for all of us. But the events of the past year have made clear the limitations of this point of view, showing us all how essential educators really are.

This year, teachers have shown up for us, and I hope many of us will return the favour in years to come by showing up for them, electing governments that value and support their role instead of constantly undermining it.

January 23, 2021

What Norman Rockwell Left Out of the Picture

How old were YOU when you learned that when Hank Aaron eclipsed Babe Ruth’s home run record in 1974, he was subject to hate mail and death threats by fans furious that a Black man could outrank a white baseball legend? That his successes were snubbed by baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn, who would have been expected to congratulate him and didn’t?

I only found out this morning, myself, reading Hank Aaron’s obituary in the Toronto Star over my cup of tea, and I’m not really going to beat myself up that, because that I was reading an article in the sports pages at all was kind of remarkable. But it’s also typical of the limitations of my understanding and experience, as someone who grew up in the 1980s and came of age in the ’90s, believing that the fight for civil rights had long ago been won.

We thought a lot about Martin Luther King Jr., but never about the fact that someone had murdered him. I knew about Ruby Bridges from Norman Rockwell’s iconic image of the school girl, but never once in my life had I seen a photo of the ferocious mobs of white people (mostly women) who were screaming at her as she entered her school. I knew that baseball players like Jackie Robinson and Hank Aaron had overcome adversity and racism to succeed as they did in baseball, but all that strife was kind of abstract. Until this morning, I’d never really considered the kind of violent rage that would cause someone to write a death threat to a baseball player, to put a stamp on it. That this is literally white supremacy—a phrase that gets tossed around a lot these days, but possibly because it’s everywhere: the unfettered rage of a white person at seeing a Black athlete shine.

A lot of people like to spend their time maligning “wokeness,” and in some ways I understand the cynicism, and I actually see the fallacy of viewing everything that happens in the world through a social justice lens, but I also can’t think of a better metaphor. That I must have been sleeping, for what other excuse could there be for having failed to notice that those furious white women screaming at Ruby Bridges didn’t just disappear with the Civil Rights act, and neither did racism? That even if “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” there are so many people intent on throwing obstacles in its way?

That the story of a hero like Hank Aaron isn’t actually one of triumph in the end, but instead that of an incredible talent who lost his love of the game, because racism and white supremacy beat it out of him—and this story is so exhausting. It often seems never-ending. And people who haven’t woken up yet, who continue to insist that race doesn’t matter, that none of us are or should be judged or valued by the colour of our skin, that “making everything about race” is a thing that people go out of their way to do in a world where men get death threats for hitting home run records, in a world where race seems to be about everything—they’re only making that story even longer.

January 22, 2021

It Was Capitalism All Along…

“It was capitalism all along…” So goes the tagline of my favourite podcast, You’re Wrong About, which I have been in love with for months now. I was the only person on earth who was calm the week of the US election in November, because I just ignored the news and listened to the episode about Gary Hart instead, which was really the same story anyway. I really love the counterintuitiveness of You’re Wrong About, and also the judgment-free perspective of the hosts. Or maybe it’s not that they’re judgment-free—that would be no fun. So many people deserve judgment, but the pod really makes you think about where you’re putting yours, that who we’ve been led to judge is what we’re wrong about after all, but they also don’t do it in a virtue-signalling sanctimonious way either (as in, they don’t call marginalized people—or anybody—”folks”).

I have been reading Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, for the last month or so, slowly, upon the recommendation of everyone. She writes about gift economies, and what it would be to show up at a farmers’ market where everything was free, and how you would be encouraged by this structure to take only what you need. As opposed to capitalism, which suggests hoarding and competition. If something at capitalism farmers’ market’s on sale, you buy up as much as you can, but gifts would be different:

From the viewpoint of a private property economy, the “gift” is deemed to be “free” because we obtain it free of charge, at no cost. But in the gift economy, gifts are not free. The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships. The currency of a gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity.

Robin Wall Kimmerer

A couple of weeks ago, we headed back into lockdown in Ontario, with schools closed, many things shut. And I was talking with my husband about how difficult it seemed to be for many people to comply with stay-at-home orders, how they kept complicating instructions, looking for loopholes. Trying to game the system, really. And it was my husband who connected the dots, brought it full circle, how it really was capitalism all along. How in capitalism, we’re primed to take everything we can get, even to gamble. Lockdown advisories come out and the response of so many people seems to be, “How can I get the maximum return on these guidelines?”/ “Just how far can I possibly push these limits?” There is no sense of reciprocity, or humility, or duty. Anti-vaccine sentiments are in keeping with this idea too. Public health and capitalism are so very much at odds, but of course, you’d know that already if you’ve listened to You’re Wrong About the Exploding Ford Pinto.

January 21, 2021

Little Threats, by Emily Schultz

I really liked Emily Schultz’ new novel Little Threats, a book that read like a cross between Ben Lerner’s Topeka School and Jennifer Hillier’s Jar of Hearts, and was a thriller that hooked me from the start and didn’t let go. Set in 2008, years after Kennedy Wynn is released from prison for a crime she has no memory of committing, the murder of her best friend, Haley, the novel follows Kennedy as tries and fails to reconnect with the world she left behind—her father who drinks away his troubles, her twin sister who’s battling her own demons, Haley’s family who will never believe that justice has been served, and the charismatic older guy turned middle-aged schlub whom Kennedy finally sees through. When producers of a true crime series start knocking around asking questions, the story around Haley’s murder begins to unravel, but will the truth prevail? The plot was a little wobbly in places, and the conclusion less than shocking, but I still really liked this novel, its portrayal of 1990s’ culture, and exploration of girlhood, womanhood, and sisterhood.

January 20, 2021

Finally

While I always knew things would be bad, I didn’t quite suspect it would be this bad, that the now-departed president would live down to my worst expectation at every single turn, and then some, never once surprising me by actually doing the right thing—and I was really willing to be surprised. How badly I wanted to be wrong about everything four years ago. I would have been happy to be wrong every single time rather than to have had witness the nightmare of the last four years. But we saw it coming, we did. The violence and hatred of the rhetoric, the undermining of civility and social norms, the Orwellian inside-out messaging of truth and justice, and the way it messed with every rational person’s sense of reality, wearing down the institutions of justice and democracy, making the carnage that transpired on January 6 a surprise not at all.

I think we put too much importance on being right though. I think a fear of being wrong keeps a lot of people from being brave enough to change their minds. I think a fear of being wrong keeps people from being brave enough to hope—the abject certainty of despair, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But it was hope I was feeling four years ago, less a day, as thousands rallied in our city, in cities all over the world. Hope for the first time since that terrible night in November 2016 as the world turned inside out, the end of a terrible year that would be the beginning of a string of them, and it was hope that was sustaining. Like most things to do with women, the Women’s March gets so maligned, but it was an incredible moment.

I don’t actually remember the now-departed President’s inauguration (except for Kellyanne’s terrible jacket, “indelible in the hippocampus,” as one great woman would later say about another matter entirely), but I remember the Women’s March, the way that so many people came together to stand up for decency and justice, and what a rush it was to be part of that.

To imagine that there could be light at the end of the tunnel, and now four years later, we’re here.

January 19, 2021

Gleanings

• Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
• I was looking for something in Livesey’s book that would be an “aha” moment for me about creative writing as something that can be taught.
• I have learned to forgive my mom. I’m learning to forgive myself as well. It’s a layered process. I get the sense that mom learned to forgive me too.
• Truly, I did walk into his circle of friends, and he into mine, and those friendships have been one of the greatest gifts in our life. 
• I grew up with Savoury Toast and it’s a life-long favourite to be turned to when things are tiring or overwhelming or a bit chilly out.
• the other source of inspiration was buying two new pencils. Yes, buying pencils actually inspired me.
• I don’t want you to wait. I want you to find a way to build writing into your weekly routine so that it provides sustenance and sanctuary for you in hard times, as well as in easier times. 
• This morning the light is subdued by mist but I think it might be clear up the mountain.
• In the meantime, Roethke also said that if you can’t think, sing. And though I can’t sing, (not being modest) maybe you can.
• It’s a lot to ask, that stories drop into my hands from their perfect mutability in my mind.
• I suppose it’s a bit weird and somewhat selfish to think “Yay, you’re blogging again because life is shit!” but reading the blog was a true comfort and rediscovering it has felt a bit like reconnecting with an old friend.

My new blog course MAKE THE LEAP runs through February. Sign up today!

January 18, 2021

On Peaks and Troughs

My friend @nathaliefoy posted this image last week. It’s SO GOOD! And I’ve been thinking this week a lot about peaks and troughs. When things were overwhelming in China last February. Watching cases rise in BC last spring before they got a hold on it. By April, it was our turn in Ontario and everything was terrible. When we were feeling pretty good in August, but Melbourne was on heavy lockdown. Cases exploding in Alberta in December, but by now there is improvement.

Nothing is static, is what I mean. Even if it goes on a long time, it moves from better to worse and back again. And sometimes we’re in the eye of the storm, and other times we’re onlookers, and the only way out is through.

But it’s so hard. I remember in November and December, and experts forecasting a dark winter, and I wondered, But how much darker can things get? AND NOW WE KNOW!

But guys, people in Melbourne are going to the movies. And this is the time of year anyway when you look outside, and everything appears to be dormant, ugly, grey and unchanging, and it’s easy to look at the healthcare disaster and think this is going to be it forever. But anyone who’s ever made it to an April knows this isn’t so.

We’ve got to just keep going, even though it’s hard. Someone I follow shared a screenshot of an alarming tweet by a US researcher, that deaths are higher than ever. I sought the tweet out, because context is always always reassuring, and she’d gone on to tweet about how with so much out of control, it might be simplest just to throw up our arms and decide that nothing we do actually matters, but she had examples that show that this is not the case, that moving the dial is possible. That we will get through this.

Remember coming out into the light last summer? Progress is never a straight road to travel, but that’s no reason to lie in the ditch. Or at the very least, once you’ve been lying in the ditch for a little while, pull yourself up and keep going some more.

January 14, 2021

Celebration Wednesdays

#CelebrationWednesdays is a thing I made up yesterday as an excuse to be baking a cake with rainbow sprinkles in the middle of a roller coaster week. Roller coaster week in the pandemic sense, of course, which meant that I barely left the house, but the world has been hard and the weather is grey, and I’ve had plugged ears since Boxing Day that have only become worse since I started squirting random liquids into them in order to ameliorate the situation.

And so the answer was cake. (The answer is always cake.)

I made Smitten Kitchen’s confetti cake with butter cream icing, and it was so very delicious. And I determined that, for the duration, we’ll be celebrating something ever Wednesday, no matter what. And yesterday, that celebration was vaccines. The friends of ours who work in health care are beginning to get theirs. Our friends in New York are getting theirs too. A friend told me that school staff in Ontario will be among the Stage 2 vaccinations too, which is the best thing ever, and it all makes me so happy and is definitely reason to celebrate. It will be some time before I get the shot myself, I suspect, but seeing as I don’t get out much these days, I’m willing to be patient.

Right now I am reading Penelope Lively’s A House Unlocked, the story of her grandparents’ house in Southwest England and the role it played as a backdrop to the tumult of twentieth century. During World War Two, Lively’s family sheltered six small children evacuated from East London, and she put the story in a context I’d never considered before, having taken these evacuations for granted as part of history. But how bizarre it must have been—officials would come to rural homes and take stock of their capacity, and then inform residents of many people would be arriving. People who would stay for years (and had nits and wet the bed). Can you imagine going through that? What mass organization must have been required. And some of it was very disorganized—Lively writes of plans made for specific people to billeted in particular places, but when the time came, the London stations were so overwhelmed with passengers, they had no choice but to just put them on the first trains available, no matter where they were going.

She also writes about the national spirit in 1939, which I’ve never really thought a whole lot about. During the past year in particular, I’ve found myself wondering if my grandparents ever looked at each other and muttered, “Goddamn you, 1943,” but then of course they didn’t, because my grandfather was away at sea. But Lively writes about the very beginning of the war, about the catastrophic predictions for aerial bombardment from the Germans, which experts had been talking about throughout the 1930s. This was no 1914, “this will all be over by Christmas.” Lively writes, “Anyone alive to official anticipation of what would probably happen in the first days and weeks of war would have been expecting the end of the world they knew.”

The story of these mass evacuations was also one of extreme poverty, vast income inequality, a need “to preempt… mass panic and consequent breakdown of law and order” as attacks began.

Anyway, it all made me think about how there is nothing new under the sun… And about the strangeness of living through history, which I never experienced properly before the last five years or so. I was 22 on September 11, 2001, but for me that was too young to properly understand the implications of those events, or how I was connected to them. One day I think I will write something about how it was watching Mad Men that prepared me for the tumultuous times that we’ve been living through. The visceral way that the show presented what it was to experience the 1960s, the deaths of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. (“WHAT IS GOING ON?”)

Anyway, the great thing about Celebration Wednesdays is that they lead to Leftover Cake Thursdays.

Whatever gets you through.

January 13, 2021

The Push, by Ashley Audrain

“Sippy-cup sinister” is one of my favourite literary genres, books like Emily Perkins’ A Novel About My Wife, Harriet Lane’s Her, Melanie Golding’s Little Darlings, and other forbears including We Need to Talk About Kevin and Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child.

Helen Phillips’ The Need also falls into this category, and I’m still overwhelmed by how perfectly she nailed the nightmare of being awoken in the night to a small child standing over you. As terrifying as anything you’d ever fear discovering under the bed.

And Ashley Audrain gets that uncanny disquiet in her buzzed about debut, The Push, and a woman for whom motherhood fails to take, raising questions of nature and nurture, and eventually culminating in her worst nightmare.

The novel is wholly successful as a thriller, full of twists and surprises, and so compelling in its ambiguity, even if that ambiguity is enraging, but that’s the point, the nightmare. (My one criticism is that the back stories exploring the protagonist’s maternal lineage seem insufficiently fleshed out and are perhaps unnecessary…)

But I couldn’t stop thinking about The Push in the context of Sue Miller’s The Good Mother, which I had read just before it. A very different novel, but similarly exploring the ways that mothers are not permitted complexity, whether it’s desire, ambivalence, fallibility, or fears.

This is a novel whose effect is to make you uneasy. It resists neat conclusions and doesn’t exactly satisfy, which is not a criticism at all, instead a testament to the novel’s power—The Push isn’t finished with it’s reader even after the reader is finished with it.

I’ll be thinking about this one for a very long time.