June 6, 2024
Message From the Middle
In December 2017, under the influence of Vicki Ziegler, and after much fretting and deliberating (was it really necessary to track my reads? Couldn’t I just read books like a normal person?), I finally started tracking the books I read in a notebook, which turned out to be the very best thing, and this week I reached the milestone of getting to the centre of my book of books. THESE THINGS I KNOW BY HEART, by Erin Brubacher, the 83rd book I’ve read this year, and the 1083rd book I’ve read since December 2017 when I began the notebook with LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE, by Celeste Ng. And I am so grateful to have this record, which is useful when anyone asks me what I’ve read lately (like I ever remember?) or I want to take a trip back in time to recall what I was reading on vacation in July 2019 (MIRACLE CREEK, by Angie Kim, PACHINKO, by Min Jin Lee, THE LAST ANNIVERSARY, by Lianne Moriarty), or later that summer when I was reading THE NEED, by Helen Phillips at Kew Beach, or the books that counted down the days before the world broke in March 2020 (POLAR VORTEX, by Shani Mootoo; DISFIGURED, by Amanda Leduc, all my little obsessions (when I reread Madeleine L’Engle’s Austin series in 2019, or 2018 when I read everything by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, falling in love with Sue Miller and reading EVERYTHING), the forgettable books that were forgotten, the UNforgettable books whose reminders make me feel so much (reading THE BURGESS BOYS while eating breakfast in a hotel lobby, how I couldn’t put it down). It’s not about the numbers, though the numbers are interesting too, but instead about the stories in the experience of reading the stories that the notebook has recorded, where over six years has taken me, bookishly and otherwise. And the other half of the notebook, its pages still blank. All that possibility, patiently waiting for each line be filled.
June 5, 2024
These Songs I Know By Heart, by Erin Brubacher
“Enthusiasm is actually the most important gift,” is a line I underlined in THESE SONGS I KNOW BY HEART, the debut fiction by multidisciplinary artist Erin Brubacher, which I think is true, and also might be why this book shone for me in a way that other autofiction usually doesn’t—though how would I know, really, considering that I almost never read it? But when I think about autofiction, I think of characters who are cool and detached, bored and languid—watch the me who is also not me while I lounge on a chair and do nothing—and so I rarely think about autofiction at all, but this book was different, vulnerable and earnest, about collaboration, about creation, the work of creating community, of creating a family that is part of a community, about friendship, and rituals, and all the acts that infuse our existence with meaning. The narrator is enthusiastic, that gift. She feels things, she wants things—which also means that sometimes she doesn’t get what she wants, or she loses what she has. Though what she really wants is a camping trip in Algonquin Park with her friend Alice, and much of the first part of the novel finds her there, reading and thinking and planning; hanging Alice’s lily-pad paintings up on the line with clothes pegs. The narrator spends a lot of time ruminating on her friendships, her connection to her ex-husband, her connections to strangers, her connections to the children in her life.
And then the narrative zooms out a bit, and back in time, and we learn the camping trip is situated during the uncertain summer of 2020, Brubacher telling the stories of the months leading up to it, the context, the narrator moving into a new home with her partner and stepchild, beginning the processes of IVF, her big beautiful world of art and company made tiny when the world shuts down in March. (“We’d managed to come up with the worst possible staging for the moment: the audience and performers were to be seated right next to one another…with a 150 person choir occupying the seats around the perimeter of the crowd, singing at them…. I’m levelled by the idea that, in this moment, a choir is the most dangerous thing… Everything in me wants to fight for the choir. I’m trying to figure out what that might mean, to fight for the choir.”)
Enthusiasm is a gift, and so too is this novel, which is steeped with enthusiasm, passion and feeling for extraordinary ordinary things, which is fighting for the choir.
June 5, 2024
Gleanings
- A while ago I had some of that Aesop hand soap that is something like forty dollars a bottle. Used it up. Refilled the bottle (it’s a nice bottle, not forty dollars nice, but nice enough) with plain old fragrance-free Seventh Generation and did not really think much about doing that, except just now I was like I wonder if there should be a note in the bathroom for guests to not get too excited about the soap.
- Yet, it does make sense, too. I just take one step and another. I text one friend and another. I cook one meal and another. I read one book and another. I write one sentence and another. I hang one item of laundry on the line and another. I’m seeking coherence to this grand brief project called life.
- It’s been brought to my attention that I talk a lot about the weather, which I’m assuming is partly because I’m Canadian, but mostly because I’ve loved clouds and snow and thunder for as long as I can remember loving anything.
- In this case, I’d say: “Faulkner is dead. Let’s get A/C.”
- Having been housebound for five days, our walk was neither long nor far, but perfect for my wants and needs – a healthy dose of nature’s serenity. Surrounded by nature, I feel engulfed by calmness and the result is always a sense of renewal and replenishment. It’s my personal reboot — equilibrium restored, peace in my soul, joy in my heart. Corny? Undoubtedly, but true nonetheless.
- And then, another turn, and you’re out in the sunlight again. Birds are singing, flowers are springing, war is still raging, and those young people you’d set your hopes on for the future, are mindlessly gunning their motorcycles down the street.
- I actually don’t know how I got to it, but in the spring of 1989, as I was graduating with a honours BA in poli sci and was planning my move to Toronto to do a Masters at York, I made the difficult and life-altering decision to stop weighing myself. And I haven’t weighed myself since.
- 48 Things I love today on my birthday
- The goal is not to stop helping or abandon my core way of gazing out at the world—with wonder and love for my people and passion for the possibilities of more beauty and justice. The goal is to become ever more attuned to when help is connected, or when it is a compulsion, when it is consensual, or when it is controlling, when it is diving deeper into the marrow of life, and when it is a subconscious effort to escape life’s inevitable and sometimes gorgeous and sometimes cruel chaos.
- The first time Anna made and brought me a cup of tea, I said that was all I needed from her. Her familial obligations had been met. But then she made me a carrot cake with cream cheese icing for my birthday this year, which seemed like more than anyone could want. More recently, she saw that someone she followed on social media was posting about heaps of morels in Assiniboine Forest, which is one of my favourite places on earth and where I’d only ever found one or two morels. So she screencapped/sent me the info, but at the same time remarked: “I can’t believe I just brought you local mushroom news.” I responded: “You’ve reached your final form.” Like she was a Pokémon.
- I just planted the last of the dahlias. Saving something over the winter to plant again and have hopes for, is possibly my pride moment of the year, aside from the guitar thing and the fact that my daughter is a flaming badass.
- Life is difficult, and navigating it is difficult. I believe in triggers, though I can’t always predict what might affect me. Despite the hurricane, I’m not scared of wind storms. The other day, however, a cookbook fell open at one of Doug’s favourite recipes and I blinked away tears. His handwriting. A shoe store window displaying the red running shoes he yearned for (he asked for so little) that we couldn’t find when we were shopping for sneakers. And this weekend, a tent full of butterflies.
- Yesterday, waiting for a break in the weather to swim, I finally went anyway, a light rain brushing my shoulders, the water cold, the sky turning above me in its otherworld of clouds. I don’t why I waited for so many years to swim daily in cold water, held in its generous buoyancy, the sun, when it comes, lighting pools of green so clear the tiny fish show up, glittering. I loved the way my footprints in the grey sand disappeared underwater almost as soon as I’d walked out, erased by waves, just like that. And how the hoofprints of the deer who’d come to the shore, earlier than me, to drink were imprinted deep in the sand like petroglyphs.
- I love that the pancakes were the ruse.
June 4, 2024
Part of the Fabric of Everything
At this time of year, in the celebration of the ten day span between my children’s birthdays, and with my own birthday on the horizon (which reminds me of turning 23 when I was pregnant by accident but didn’t know it yet, and then also of turning 43 on the day that Roe vs. Wade was overturned, ending 50 years of federally-mandated abortion access for American women), obviously I am thinking about my own reproductive choices, especially the abortion 22 years ago that I was lucky/naive enough at the time to even take for granted, to suppose that decisions about my body—to choose when I did or did not want to be pregnant—were mine to make—as opposed to some evangelical MP from Saskatchewan, an activist judge in Florida, Dr. Seuss-quoting members of provincial parliament who went straight from their home-schools to the legislature, or any other random dude on Twitter.
I don’t talk about my abortion as much as I used to, which was perpetually, which was because it seemed like the matter was urgent, and it was, but also I got tired of saying the same things over again, robbing my words and stories of their meanings, and I also realized that Performing My Politics was not actually a sustainable way to live my life. And so over the past while I’ve been seeking quieter, more human and ordinary ways to embody all the values that are important to me, to not be making noise for the sake of noisemaking, because there is so much noise, and I don’t think it’s helping.
And what I mean when I say “I don’t talk about my abortion as much I used to,” is that I don’t talk about it here, on the internet, that I’m not longer yelling about it on social media, that I’ve stopped standing on a soapbox because the view wasn’t great, and real human connection was limited, but abortion still just as much a part of my ordinary life as it’s always been, part of the fabric of everything. The marriage that would never have happened had things not transpired as they did, the children who would never have been born, the perspective I would not have been afforded (once upon a time, I was a person who said things like, “I’m pro-choice, but it’s never a choice I would make for myself”), the stories I would never get to live and tell.
I’ve realized that my children understanding how abortion was integral to the story of our family is far more important than any social media post I’ll ever write. That conversations with friends over coffee are what matters too, discussions that give others the courage to put words to their own stories and dare to stay them out loud with their own friends and loved ones, and that we don’t always need to be blasting our politics on loudspeakers and screaming on placards, and that powerful things can happen in a chat in the cereal aisle. That small things can add up, and life is a long game, and so I need to find a way to keep going, to not wear my story out, to not wear myself out.
If you’re curious about my story, however—it you see your own story reflected in it, and/or if you aren’t ready to tell it widely and require an intermediate step OR if you simply don’t understand at all how a person can be grateful for such a thing as an abortion every single day (I really am!), and are compassionate and curious—we should talk, like humans do. (Please reach out if you are interested!)
June 3, 2024
You Are Here, by David Nicholls
Okay, I think I did read David Nicholls’ novel US, though I don’t remember it, but I do remember seeing his novel SWEET SORROW in the window of Palmerston Library in 2021 when the library was closed to patrons but we could point to items in the window and staff would bring them to us at the door and the set-up was a bit speakeasy, and I’d only selected the book because the cover was pool-blue and at first glance the two figures are floating in the water, except that they’re wearing clothes and reading books and it turns out this isn’t a swimming book at all, but I loved it anyway, SO MUCH, and its rich emotional tapestry was still on my mind when I decided to pre-order Nicholls’ new book, YOU ARE HERE, plus Katie Clapham had written about it, explaining, “David Nicholls writes the romance of reasonable people, and that’s very sexy to me.”
She also wrote: “Sometimes things are popular because they’re excellent. Sometimes the experience eclipses the hype. Sometimes you should just buy the new book from the number one best selling author of global sensation One Day and sometimes, only a David Nicholls novel will do.”
And I think she’s right. I read YOU ARE HERE this weekend, and adored it, and was also put through an emotional wringer, laughed out like a lunatic, and temporarily through that walking England coast-to-coast might be something that I want to do (and then I changed my mind).
It’s the story of Marnie and Michael who are connected by a meddling friend who is trying to set each one up with somebody else, and the two end up on a walking trip together, both forced by the meddling friend into breaking out of post-pandemic malaise and isolation. Both are divorced, Michael freshly, Marnie otherwise, and both bring four decades of life lived to the present moment, to their complicated and gorgeous textured connection, the chapters moving back and forth between their different points of view, the particular circumstances in which they find themselves leading to real vulnerability and introspection and epic cock-ups and misunderstandings, and kissing, a brush with death, and chance for both at happiness again. “Even with her sore eyes and hot, aching head, she felt that time was passing quickly and lightly and that a real summer, the first for many years, lay ahead.”
June 3, 2024
12 Essential Lessons for Writers from BOOKSPO
Bookspo Season 1 is complete, and I’m now at work on Season 2, coming this fall, but in the meantime, I want to sum up some of the wisdom shared by writers in this first round of interviews, lots of great tips and insight from writers across a ride range of genres. This is writing advice worth listening again for!
Thanks to all the authors who generously donated their time to this project, and thank you also (and ESPECIALLY!) to everybody who was listening.
Episode 1: Kate Hilton and Elizabeth Renzetti, Bury the Lead
Your characters have to be vulnerable.
Episode 2: Charlene Carr, We Rip the World Apart
Trust your gut about your character’s journey, and don’t worry about what your reader will think.
Episode 3: Shawna Lemay, Apples on the Windowsill
Know the importance of being an ordinary human being looking at the world and sharing what you see.
Episode 4: Ashley Tate, Twenty-Seven Minutes
Don’t be afraid of pushing the limits of genre to write the book you want to write.
Episode 5: Waubgeshig Rice, Moon of the Turning Leaves
Enhance the literary world you’ve built by writing a character who sees it through a different lens than you do.
Episode 6: Emily Austin, Interesting Facts About Space
That not everyone is going to like your book is a a hit you have to take along with the gift of the readers who embrace it.
Episode 7: Leslie Shimotakahara, Sisters of the Spruce
Literary inspiration for fresh stories can be found in classic texts and family lore.
Episode 8: Robin Lefler, Not How I Pictured It
Writing outlines is really valuable (even IF you think you HATE THEM).
Episode 9: Adrienne Gruber, Monsters, Martyrs and Marionettes
It is possible to inhabit a liminal space between literary forms.
Episode 10: Michelle Hébert, Every Little Thing She Does is Magic
Compassion and curiosity are important when you’re writing a villain.
Episode 11: Deepa Rajagopalan, Peacocks of Instagram
Writing with constraints can be inspiring and useful.
Episode 12: Andrea Warner, The Time of My Life
Be honest and thoughtful about the culture that inspires you—nothing is above reproach.
May 31, 2024
Something With Good and Evil
My May essay is about rereading Toni Morrison’s Sula, reconsidering this book about female friendship that is so much more than “just” a book about female friendship—but maybe that’s the thing about great books about female friendship—they’re always about so much more, because that’s the tangle that life is. Read it here! Many thanks to new subscribers—writing these pieces is so satisfying and you’re the icing on the cake.
May 29, 2024
Vigil, by Susie Taylor
If you think you know Newfoundland writing, then you need to know Susie Taylor, who has followed EVEN WEIRDER THAN BEFORE, her sparkling queer coming-of-age debut, with VIGIL, a book that’s even better, though it doesn’t sparkle so much as tremble, quake, and explode. It’s a collection of interconnected stories (and I’m going to declare it, don’t @ me) each of which really is a stellar example of the form, but the collection also properly satisfies the requirements of a novel, set against the fictional Newfoundland community of Bay Mal Verde, a place on the margins of geography, about people on the margins of society, their lives rattled by poverty and addiction. They’re tragic, but also funny, and familiar, the question of what happened to Stevie Loder at the centre of the plot. The title story opening the collection, about the impromptu memorial at the Ultramar after Stevie goes missing (“Someone had stuck a whole untouched Happy Meal on the growing pile of tributes…and the gulls swarmed the thing.”) Stevie is something of a perpetual loser (I wrote “something of” so I’d seem more compassionate), a scrawny kid who gets knocked around by the world, including his father and his friends, and grows up for more of the same, the story of his disappearance unravelling as the collection unfolds, connected to the respective narratives of characters including Joseph the garbage man, who runs a drug dealing empire, and the people in his employ, including local thug Kev Babcock, who we come to have sympathy for—but is Stevie so expendable? Perhaps. There is Ryan, who was friends with the other boys, but had a route out of town via university, which means that encountering him later in the story is gutting. Carter, whose practical younger sister is also drawn to Kev, but who (thankfully) is smarter than he is, and a meta kind of character called Susie, “that running girl,” who is not from Bay Mal Verde, but arrived in town with her girlfriend, drawing suspicion from that, but she’s alone now, running the trails and narrowly skirting danger, reporting what she sees (except for a pivotal moment when she doesn’t).
The stories in Taylor’s Vigil are a chorus, and they make a song that soars, the bleakness of their concerns offset by the vitality of the voices, and the shimmering moments of redemption woven like miracles throughout the text.
May 28, 2024
The Rasmussen Papers, by Connie Gault
“How strange it is that our lives are not usefully taken apart, not instructive in their compartments, but everything in one life is twisted inextricably with everything else, and it’s impossible to decipher it all.”
What a fascinating, sly, and tricky novel is Connie Gault’s THE RASMUSSEN PAPERS, Alissa York’s blurb conjuring the image of a fox with a quicksilver tip to its tail, and that’s it exactly. An urban fox, of course, out of place, slipping along the sidewalk and disappearing down into a ravine leaving no trace, as though it had ever been there. Like Gault’s unnamed narrator, an essayist hoping to write a biography of the iconic but enigmatic Canadian poet, Marianne Rasmussen, who concocts a plan to rent a room in the home of Aubrey Ash, on the cusp of his one hundredth birthday and Rasmussen’s former lover. Once ensconced, the narrator hopes, she will find her way to Ash’s papers and finally undercover the mysteries and crack the code of Rasmussen’s most famous work—but all this turns out to be more complicated than she’d supposed.
Who IS the fox, after all? Is it our unnamed narrator, or Aubrey Ash himself? Ash’s attractive much-younger brother, whom the narrator is drawn to? Is it the cocky young literary critic whose many affectations include a cravat, who—inadvertently or otherwise—sets the narrator’s plan in motion? Is it the patriarchy, the oldest of old boy’s clubs? Or the city of Toronto and its seedy downtown east side, desperate people parked in doorways or screaming expletives on public transit, something scrambled in their brains, perhaps, or maybe they just see everything more clearly than the rest of us.
I loved this novel, which reminded me of Carol Shields in the very best way—imagine the preoccupations of her novels Swann and Unless. About the problems of biography, literary mythology, women writing, bystanding, and the impossible challenges of giving form to the world and to life itself.
May 27, 2024
Infinity Mirror
A few weeks ago, I googled the phrase, “moral clarity,” because I’d been hearing it a lot lately in the context of protesters for standing up for a ceasefire in Gaza and Palestinian statehood, and I realized I actually didn’t know what “moral clarity” meant.
And before you start thinking I’m that obfuscating bad-faith “just asking questions” guy, as I googled “moral clarity,” I’d also just sent an email to the President of the university of which I’m both an alumnus and a neighbour voicing my support of students encampments, suggesting that I’d prefer the university administration to work with the protesters and learn from them too, instead of the nightmare of having protesters violently cleared as we’ve seen at other institutions. I’m writing this post now weeks later with the protesters facing the imminent possibility of forcible removal, as though this was the most pressing issue of our time, instead of the people burned alive in Rafah last night, the very people for whom the university protesters are rallying. Like, let’s have some perspective.
But even against a backdrop of abject horror, our words matter.
The article I found when I googled “moral clarity” was Frank Guan’s 2019 essay from The New York Times, “What Could Be Wrong With a Little Moral Clarity?” written in response to a line uttered by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez the summer before after she’d won a Democratic-primary over an incumbent. “Until recently,” Guan writes, “‘moral clarity’ was more likely to signal combativeness toward the left, not from it: It served for decades as a badge of membership among conservative hawks and cultural crusaders.” He continues, “What adrenaline does for the body, moral clarity does for semantics: It generates a surge of willpower, serving as a prelude to—and maybe a pretext for—combat.”
And I was thinking about Guan’s essay as I read critiques and take downs of Zadie Smith’s New Yorker essay, “Shibboleth,” a piece I admired, which is also about how semantics becomes a weapon. Stacey Lee Kong of Friday Things (whose work I admire as well) called out Smith for “both-sidesing,” Kong and other readers discussing the essay as confusing, its point indecipherable, though I wish they’d tried a little harder to understand. That Smith’s piece is about the problem with “moral clarity,” with imagining that there is nothing remotely analogous about the following examples just because one happens to be on the right side of history (because everyone thinks they’re on the right side of history):
It is no doubt a great relief to say the word “Hamas” as if it purely and solely described a terrorist entity. A great relief to say “There is no such thing as the Palestinian people” as they stand in front of you. A great relief to say “Zionist colonialist state” and accept those three words as a full and unimpeachable definition of the state of Israel, not only under the disastrous leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu but at every stage of its long and complex history, and also to hear them as a perfectly sufficient description of every man, woman, and child who has ever lived in Israel or happened to find themselves born within it.
It is also a great relief to say, “Moral clarity.” Even though, as Smith writes, “Practicing our ethics in the real world involves a constant testing of them, a recognition that our zones of ethical interest have no fixed boundaries and may need to widen and shrink moment by moment as the situation demands.” Even though, “Hamas will not be ‘eliminated.’ The more than seven million Jewish human beings who live in the gap between the river and the sea will not simply vanish because you think that they should. All of that is just rhetoric. Words. Cathartic to chant, perhaps, but essentially meaningless.”
I’ve been thinking of Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger for months now, especially its consideration of Israelis and Palestinians being mirror images of each other, and how it turns out these mirrors are infinity mirrors, and moral clarity is part of the problem. And about how when protesters are speaking of “moral clarity,” as Guan writes, they’re unwittingly using language created by their political opponents, by Cold Warriors in the 1950s, by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, George W. Bush in his 2004 Presidential campaign, and Alan Dershowitz, author of the 2009 book The Case For Moral Clarity: Israel, Hamas and Gaza, whose moral clarity is a different moral clarity than than of the protesters—or is it really?
I think of how often, when you ever try to fight a monster, the monster turns into you.
Isn’t fighting moral clarity with moral clarity a bit like fighting fire with fire? I’m still thinking of that line I read in the newspaper in March: “Both sides brought large speaker systems and screamed duelling chants at each other.” And where we do go from there? And isn’t it moral clarity that got us here in the first place? Moral clarity and righteousness, and isn’t unpacking such simplistic notions (constantly testing our ethics, rather than smug certainty) the only way to break the cycle, for the mirror to finally shatter so we can see the world as it is?
