October 13, 2021

It’s art too

“I would argue that it’s art too, because it shows me the world in a new way.” —Alice Zorn, articulating the very thing I was pondering when I took in the leaf that landed on my picnic blanket yesterday, its seemingly random and yet so very specific placement, what does it mean, the kind of pondering one is prone to when one is reading a new book by Shawna Lemay

October 12, 2021

One More Time

I know that loving swimming is not a substitute for having a personality, but it’s come to constitute a large component of mine, which I sometimes think might be me hopping on a bandwagon, as I’m prone to doing, back around the time that #WildSwimming became a trending hashtag. But then I remember how much swimming has meant to be always, and all the sometimes impractical places I’ve jumped in—the Danube, the Sea of Japan, a duck pond in the middle of our Midlands town where there was nowhere else for a dip (and let me tell you I got a rash from each and every one of these)—and I think that loving swimming has been a part of me for a long time. And, since June 18, after a very long hiatus, I’ve been back to swimming on the regular. As in, I last went swimming this afternoon, and before that was yesterday, and my next swim is scheduled for tomorrow.

How can a single life contain such riches?

But it’s yesterday’s swim I want to talk about now, my last lake swim of the season, which comes two weeks after which I’d previously thought was my last lake swim of the season, though I think I really mean it this time, because today is the twelfth of October after all. I wore my bathing suit on the bus down to the beach, and brought a towel and a pair of underwear to change into, though I wasn’t making any promises. I don’t like swimming in cold water, really, am physically incapable. But the forecast was calling for 20 degrees and anything is possible. I was with my family and our friends, and I told that they were going to watch me dip my toe and then turn around again, because I’m certainly no polar bear. But then it wasn’t cold. A little bracing, yes, but getting right in was only a pleasure.

And then I was floating, the waves large and dramatic, but playful enough, and I couldn’t swim, really, with the water so rough, plus I’d left my goggles at home, and so instead I just let the lake carry me, and everything in the world was reduced to the essential, to blue, to water and sky, and me, and the odd seagull, and I could have floated forever, save for my people on the beach, and when I returned to them, I couldn’t stop smiling, what we call my “resting beach face,” a goofy grin which doesn’t even begin to equal the euphoria of the experience, how it makes me feel so small and alive and connected to a big incredible world, blood coursing through my veins like the waves onto the beach, and just the sheer power of it all, I can feel it, the way the beach and the lake feel like the edge of the world, the beginning of all possibility.

October 6, 2021

Apples Never Fall, by Liane Moriarty

Liane Moriarty is a master of fiction, her genius undermined by her popularity, which makes many readers suspicious. Because how good can a writer possibly be if her bestselling novel gets made into a series by Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman? A question to which I reply: she is so good. Truly Madly Guilty and Big Little Lies are both fantastic novels weaving BIG PLOT with the most sophisticated characterization, her fictional people complex and multi-dimensional, revealing their secrets in rich and surprising fashion which means the plot twists generally deepen the story instead of undermine it. I LOVE HER. The plots themselves undeniably frothy and too much, but in the best way, anchored by the human people at the heart of them. And her latest, Apples Never Fall, does not disappoint.

Which is a relief, because her previous novel, Nine Perfect Strangers, arrived as a bit of a letdown, Moriarty having come up with a fantastic cast of characters, each with luscious backstories, but it all failed to coalesce with an over-the-top preposterous plot and would have made a better short story collection. Because the trouble with a novel about perfect strangers is their lack of connection to each other, which is the kind of spark that lights the fuse.

In Apples Never Fall, however, she’s made her characters a family, which means there are sparks aplenty, decades of grudges and misunderstanding. Joy and Stan Delaney are celebrated tennis coaches whose own children were raised in an ultra-competitive, high intensity atmosphere, each of whom knows they’ve proved disappointments in their own special way. And when Joy suddenly disappears and Stan appears to be the prime suspect, each is afraid to voice their suspicions for fear they might be true.

It gets worse—detectives find a t-shirt soaked with Joy’s blood. Stan is becoming more and more difficult. There there is the matter of the curious house guest, a wayward girl who’d stayed with Joy and Stan after fleeing an abusive relationship a few months before whose story is not quite what it seems. Each of the four Delaney children suspicious of their father, but also each other, and wondering what else they know about their family might turn out to be founded on a lie?

I liked this novel so much for the way it complicates all kinds of ideas about family, marriage, truth and lies, about domestic violence, and anger, and the ways in which we know and fail to know each other. I love how each twist had us understanding these characters on an even deeper level, and how these twists also demonstrate what these characters don’t even know about themselves. And I love how all the threads come together at the end of the book in a way that was surprising, and even refreshing, such a perfect culmination of a most enjoyable read.

October 5, 2021

Gleanings

• As I awake in the mornings, the fall sun late to arise, pulling the covers up to my chin attempting to avoid the nippy air around me, my brain and body are beg for just five more minutes. But as my feet hit the ground, and I head out the door, my experience so far, hasn’t been anything miraculous, but more of a quiet, contentment of just being.
• here’s hoping that the tough-talking swaggering braggarty chick that i always wanted to be still lives inside me…i think she does.
• Writers have been describing residential schools for decades. So have the elders. But, we have not seen what we were seeing.
• So I was thinking all this and wasn’t falling asleep. Suddenly I wanted to hear Charley Pride once again.
• I feel like there are bubbles of the past around my house that I walk into by accident, and am transported.
• More music: listening to Prince “Gett Off” and the line about 23 positions in a one-night stand just seems improbable, or maybe even indicative of trouble, like something wasn’t working.
• If I knew the story, I don’t think I’d bother writing it.
• the way orange sneaks up on you
• That morning light, the shadows. Light fades into shadow — it always attracts me.
• I’m only now, in this late stage in life, this third act, really seeing the beauty in art, although it has hovered on the perimeter of my consciousness for years. 
• If I were a millennial, I would get a tattoo of a bassoon on a part of my body I wouldn’t mind showing to strangers, such as the back of my hand or my bicep muscle.
• The constancy of the histrionics of these angry people is utterly exhausting to decent folk who are finding their patience and tolerance stretched to the max. This cannot go on.

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.

October 4, 2021

On Self-Respect

In January, I was attending a virtual book club discussion about my latest novel when one of the attendees mentioned a particular Goodreads Review of my book, and I didn’t know anything about it.

And here’s the thing: I really didn’t. This isn’t just me trying to seem above-it-all, like someone who doesn’t google myself on a regular basis. While my character is overwhelmingly constructed of hundreds of strung-together disciplinary lapses, in this one single area I’ve managed to be resolute. Goodreads is for readers, and it’s not for me, and there generally isn’t anything helpful or constructive that the site’s users can tell me about myself or the work I do.

But it’s taken me three books and several years to reach this point. When my first two books came out, I was so absolutely craving anything in the way of feedback that I read every single Goodreads Reviews, and “liked” them, even the critical ones. Desperately seeking validation, of course, an acknowledgement that my art existed and therefore I did. I was hungry for feedback, the same way any of us is hungry for feedback when we make anything. A response from the question we put into the universe: “Is there anybody out there? Does anybody care that I am here?”

Lately, however, feedback has become less interesting to me. A symptom of being in my 40s perhaps, and caring much less about what others think. But this lack of interest is also because of how feedback functions as a distraction, as noise that keeps me from hearing/knowing what I think about things and forming a deeper understanding.

Lately, feedback has become less interesting to me.

I think about this in particular in connection to politics and social justice, where the shallow memeification of activism serves to simplify complex issues and attempts codify the correct way to think and speak, which I don’t think is a bad thing per se (“cancel culture” or “political correctness gone mad,” yawn), but instead the function of a movement created by young people, and my main problem with it is just that such directives serve to obfuscate my own thoughts and ideas, and I would like to continue the never-ending project unpacking, interrogating, of getting to the bottom of it all.

A while ago, the author Deryn Collier (whose thoughts on creating and creativity I appreciate so much) shared an Instagram post with the line, “We do not need artists to have thick skins.” About how being sensitive to the world around us was essential to the labour of creating art, and thick skins only serve to protect us from feeling.

But I, of course, had been thinking a lot about this idea of feedback and noise, and so spun the idea off in that general direction. And determined that no, it is true, that a rhinoceros hide is not what anybody needs, save for the rhinoceroses, and instead what we people need most to respond to the world and its overwhelming messaging—telling us who we are and what we ought to think about the things we make, and about the kind of world we want to live in—is something solid at our core. Not solid so as to be unmoveable, unchangeable, because we’re human after all, but still, something intrinsic that can remind if us who we are and what we know.

In a recent blog post, my friend Amy Rhoda Brown declared this “something intrinsic” as trust.

“I’m not sure if fear needs an antidote, actually,” writes Brown in this post about fear and survival, about venturing into a dark place and ultimately finding light:

“An antidote neutralizes, and maybe fear shouldn’t be neutralized. Maybe it should be seen and respected and understood.

What fear needs is a companion, something that can make scary situations easier to face, failures easier to recover from. Something that can turn risk into opportunity.

I think the best companion to fear is trust.

Trust in yourself that you can recover when — not if — things go wrong. And trust in the people who love you, that when you fall, someone, or many someones, will be there to help you get back up again.”

Which was precisely what Joan Didion was writing about in my favourite of her essays, “On Self Respect”: ““To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is to potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent.”

What we need most to respond to the world and its overwhelming messaging—telling us who we are and what we ought to think about the things we make, and about the kind of world we want to live in—is something solid at our core.

Didion goes on, “To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect.”

(And my favourite line, “[C]haracter—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s life—is the source from which self-respect springs.”)

So how do you cultivate it? Didion, who prides herself on specificity, is uncharacteristically vague in this one aspect, although she gives a hint in the line, “That kind of self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth.”

And so for answers, we to turn to Phosphorescence, by Julia Baird, one of my favourite reads of this year, a book I first borrowed from the library, and then I bought a copy for myself, and even purchased another for a friend currently undergoing cancer treatments. Subtitled, “A Memoir of Finding Joy When the World Goes Dark,” Phosphorescence is literally about finding that light from within, about locating that intrinsic core, that trust, one’s very own compass points. It’s a book about the uses of awe, connection, of purpose, of learning to listen and to see. And it’s wonderful.

 “After all this exploring, we should be gazing steadily outward, beginning to find others again, and the brilliance of the world outside our doors,” Baird writes.

And that’s the secret, I think, to uncovering that trust, that necessary self-respect to be a human with a solid core. Not navel-gazing, not at all. The secret is awe, and wonder. It’s remembering to look up, and to ponder the nature of the universe, its infinity, and to be continually bowled over by what a miracle it is that any of us get to be a part of it at all.

“After all this exploring, we should be gazing steadily outward, beginning to find others again, and the brilliance of the world outside our doors

Julia Baird

September 30, 2021

Fight Night, by Miriam Toews

Nobody in any of Miriam Toews’ novels is ever any good at being anybody but the people who they are, which are people who are so achingly real, human, complicated, messy, furious, alive. It’s also impressive that while Toews returns to the same themes over and over in her work, in particular the experiences of contemporary secular Mennonites, she never writes the same book twice, pushing the limits of point of view and just what a novel can possibly contain, and her reader gets the sense that she’s actively resisting anything close to boredom. Which means her books are never boring, even if—as is the case in her latest, Fight Night—not much actively happens in the way of plot at all.

But no matter. Who needs plot when you’ve got voice? And to that end: meet Swiv, whose point of view propels Fight Night from start to finish, a Toewsian voice if there is such a thing. A young, precocious misfit who is wise beyond her years, Swiv had been kicked out of school for fighting and spends her days with her eccentric grandmother watching Call the Midwife while her very pregnant mother, an actress, rehearses for a play. Swiv’s aunt and grandfather have both died by suicide, and she’s concerned her mother is headed for a similar fate, all the while she’s terrified her grandmother might pass away at any being, kept alive as she is on a cocktail of various medications.

The novel’s structure is a letter Swiv is writing to her father as she anticipates the birth of her new sibling and also her imminent abandonment by everyone she loves. She doesn’t actually know where her father lives. Swiv is terrified, and taking responsbility for all the adults in her life who are being overwhelmed by their own burdens.

And have I mentioned that the novel is terrifically funny? If you’re familiar with Toews, you’ll already know that. The gap between the world as it is and how Swiv’s sees it is very funny, as is her fierce dignity, and her prudishness in contrast to her ribald grandmother who gets quite a kick of mortifying her. But of course, (and if you’ve read Toews, you’ll know this too) it’s also heartbreaking, especially that this young person is carrying the entire world on her shoulders.

So there is laughter, yes, and there is crying. There is life, and there is death. There’s also a trip to California, a perilous plane journey home, Jay Gatbsy perpetually knocking at the door, busses and boats, and books sawed in half so they’re easier to hold. There is love and there is rage and there is ferocity and gentleness, and so many ways to keep fighting, so many reasons to fight.

September 29, 2021

Gleanings

• The process shows me that diversions and detours are as important in writing as they are in travel. And as in climbing, there are no shortcuts.
• This year I’ve been feeding my creative side, hoping that it will grow stronger.
• With uncertainty, (and a dash of contempt), I decide instead to just be in the moment, watching and noticing the whales, no recording or pictures, and risk the fleetingness of the moment of simply seeing the white bodies of the magnificent belugas swim by.
• In the end I feel I am hardwired to be this way — it’s how I respond to and live in the world. But still the question what is it trying to tell me? is a good one.
• If you thought SSJ was largely made of Love-To-Do-Lists, you were right.
• If I ever need a reminder of what it truly means to ‘live in the moment’ I only have to watch Doug. I am so thankful that he appears to be content, and that so many of his moments appear to be filled with joy. 
• Really. Keep the faith. Anything is possible.
• I wonder, was I too close to see her as a woman? Or did I have so few stories from her life outside of these roles that I couldn’t see her as anything else?
• You know there are times I have thought it would be okay to send out some good vibes, a kind of secular prayer of sorts, to the unvaxed, at least to those sitting on the fence, a little unsure. And maybe the above would suffice.

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.

September 28, 2021

Getaway

“I can’t believe we’re going camping tomorrow,” Iris kept repeating on Thursday as we moved through the motions of a perfectly ordinary weekday. (A perfectly ordinary weekday. Can you imagine? Getting breakfast on, walking kids to school, greeting friends at the school gate? And can you imagine what a pleasure are these motions, especially after so many months without them?”) And I felt exactly the same as she did, back on the roller coaster of work and school, deadlines and dates on the calendar, even if that roller coaster moves more cautiously than it once did, easier on the twists and turns. Because once we’re stuck in our routine (and I love our routine. For months and months, the familiarity and support of our routine was everything I longed for, but still) it seems impossible to imagine any other way of doing things. But in July, with still no idea what the near future would hold, I’d booked a camping trip, just to keep summer going for a little bit longer, and because I had this suspicion we might find ourselves in need of a getaway.

And so we went, impossibly. On Thursday both children were learning at their desks, and on Friday they were helping us pitch a tent on the shores of Lake Erie where we spent two days offline and in nature, and it was wonderful, and significant for being our first off-season camping venture. Even more significantly: our last outdoor swims of 2021 as well in the churning waters of this great lake (our third Grade Lake in as many months!).

A reminder that sometimes what makes the impossible possible is one simple thing: you just do it.

September 21, 2021

Gleanings

• And while the abortion storyline is fast-paced and enthralling, what really propels the novel in all its facets is Wall’s impressive facility with language.
• i have spent money, i’m not going to lie, but there are several bottles lying around that have been used for about a week and then forgotten. looks like i’m just going to age
• The difference is that I am now focused outwardly rather than on myself, as I begin to explore how to bundle up my wisdom and experience to benefit others.
• OK, yes? but also, no? Not no to every claim, not no to anger at patriarchy, but no to wanting to be yelled at about it for pages, especially because I already basically agree.
• Do you make a hoard of summer memories to keep against the cold ahead?
• For some of us, the sky is as important and vital as water.
• And yet, if one essential premise of short stories is that they are different in nature from chapters in a novel, it’s hard to see how the thirteen self-contained pieces in The Most Precious Substance on Earth don’t qualify.
• Through this I’ve come to realize that picnicking is one of my favourite things to do — I prefer it to dining in a restaurant any day. And the Chill Buddy has been a reliable and consistent dining companion.
• if you leave a wrestling show and your throat isn’t hoarse from screaming at the heels and screaming for the faces, then either you or the wrestlers have not done their jobs.
• Once I called Canada home, it stuck.
• I am continuously taking pictures of “paths” in nature.
• I’ve been writing occasionally this year (okay, actually a lot) about how Pyjama Writing has transformed my practice. 

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.

September 21, 2021

The End of Political Contempt

In September 2020, something shifted for me, after an agonizing decade of partisan politics. It was a decade that began with the inexplicable election of Rob Ford as our city’s mayor, complely bursting my comfortable left-wing Twitter bubble, continuing on to you-know-who’s election to the White House in 2016, and then Rob Ford’s less likeable brother becoming premier of Ontario in 2018. Which would kick off a roller coaster of a four year term in which incompetence has been matched only by sheer callousness.

So much has been terrible in Ontario since 2018 that it’s easy for all the specifics to be lost in a whirlwind of nightmarish absurdity. From the widespread consultation of parents on school curricula whose results were never released, to random plans to scrap the full-day kindergarten program, undermining conservation authorities to permit development of green space, policies keeping communities from accessing developer funds to build vital infrastructure, plans to gut public health programs, and so much more—including the egregious act of arbitrarily interfering with Toronto’s municipal structure in the middle of an election, subverting the democratic rights of millions of people.

Labour disputes beginning in the fall of 2019 meant that the school year was regularly disrupted right up until schools closed altogether due to Covid in March 2020—and children in Ontario would remain out of school for the following 18 months longer than anywhere else in the country.

But when schools reopened in September 2020, I just couldn’t do it anymore, the fighting, the anger, the rage. I could no longer go on treating the government as my adversary. It would be impossible to send my children to school and preserve my mental health under such an arrangement, and so I had to shift my perspective. It helped too that the government—in spite of numerous pandemic failings, in particular in the area of long term care, resulting in thousands of devastating deaths—stopped behaving egregiously with such consistency, and seemed to understand (although always too late, always as a reaction) that people need governments after all. And while they weren’t a great government, or even a particularly good one, they were the government that we had right now and I had to put my trust in them as we made our way forward into a most uncertain future.

When I look back on the last five years of my own political action, there’s a lot that I reflect on. I am grateful for the empowerment and unity of the women’s marches, for example, the first time I ever walked in a crowd carrying a placard. But I wonder too if we’d be seeing the same display of rabid right-wing activism today, seemingly ordinary moms putting their kids on display, if there had been no pussy-hatted inspiration. (Those people have never had an original idea in their lives.) I have also reconsidered my feelings about the government of Ontario’s illegitimacy after they were elected in 2018, joining in calls for leaders to resign. While I do think this government’s tenure has brought significant damage to our province and its institutions, both the last year in American politics and our most recent election in Canada have underlined to me how fragile our democracies are and that those who try to delegitimize democratically elected governments do so at all everyone’s peril. And I’m thinking again about the power of rage as a political tool, which seemed all fine and well when we were raging for our own truly noble causes, but what happens when other angry people start to use that tool too, and their anger is cruel, divorced from reality and terrifying?

When I look back at the last five years of my own political action, what I regret is the contempt I felt, contempt which is not so different from that which resulted from Barack Obama’s political success in 2008, and which has a direct line to the election of Obama’s successor 8 years later. It was actually Trump’s election which made our own contempt for Premier Doug Ford all the more vociferous—does the world really need more than one yellow haired angry populist? (Apparently we needed three.) But of course it was contempt for the previous premier, Kathleen Wynne, that had paved the way for Ford’s unlikely win in the first place.

“Contempt is the opposite of empathy,” Edward Keenan wrote earlier this month in The Toronto Star. “And as U.S. President Joe Biden has said, “empathy is the fuel of democracy.” If we cannot imagine ourselves in the shoes of other people, we have little hope of working with them in a healthy democratic society.”

The Ontario government has been terrible and inept, but they were voted in—not for better, but for worse, it’s true—by a fair election by my fellow Ontarians. And this idea that I myself perpetuated that somehow those people’ votes were less valid than mine or didn’t matter is so absolutely anathema to a functioning democracy—and we see the same dynamics playing out now in far right politics underlined by racism and white supremacy. “Canada use to be a great country to bad its not anymore cause of people like you,” in the brilliant words of a friend-of-a-friend on Facebook last week, and you could almost print that on a little red ball cap, you know?

“I don’t know how to explain to you why you should care about other people.” In the tidal wave of despair that was 2017 and onward, that viral phrase (often mis-attributed) was something to cling to, so perfectly articulating the powerlessness and despair that so many of were experiencing in the face of cruelty and obtuseness. The first time I saw that phrase, in a tweet, no doubt, I am sure that I RT’d it. THIS. But here is something else I’m thinking twice about, this politicization of care, or maybe the partisan politicization is what I mean, because care is certainly political. But I’m resisting the arrogance now that me and people who think like me occupy a kind of moral high ground, and that people who vote for other political parties don’t care for other people too, that they aren’t good neighbours, and generous friends, and charitable donors, and nurses, and teachers, and personal support workers. I’m resisting the idea that in order to care, you have to care the same way I do. I’m resisting the idea that we have no common ground.

Last night was the first election in as long as I can remember that didn’t, to paraphrase Sally Rooney in her latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, “make me feel like I was physically getting kicked in the face.” The election that nobody wanted, perhaps, but its low stakes were almost refreshing—the angry Trumpy man in the purple suit leads a racist fringe part emboldened by anti-vaxxers this time but, statistically speaking in Ontario, our anti-vax population is so tiny that they’re having a hard time spreading the Delta variant, let alone fascism. And while I know details are sketchy and shifty, the other parties were all talking about vaccine mandates, and climate change, and the PC leader was at least trying not to come across as a troglodyte who wants to get all up in my uterus, and I’ve got to give him points for that. It’s certainly better than the alternative.

It’s certainly better than the alternative. A phrase that’s occurred to me several times in the past year or so, especially since we’ve seen the alternative, glimpsed on January 6 in Washington DC, in democratic crackdowns in countries like Belarus and Afghanistan, and so many more, places where political contempt has opened the door to extremism bringing forth a vicious spiral of democratic unravelling. I don’t want to do that anymore.