March 17, 2021

Taking Stock

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

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

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

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

March 16, 2021

Gleanings

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

Do you like reading good things online and want to make sure you don’t miss a “Gleanings” post? Then sign up to receive “Gleanings” delivered to your inbox each week(ish). And if you’ve read something excellent that you think we ought to check out, share the link in a comment below.

March 15, 2021

The Spaciousness of Uncertainty: Hope Matters, by Elin Kelsey

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

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

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

Elin Kelsey

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

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

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

March 12, 2021

There is No Fake Spring

There is no such thing as “fake spring.” There is only now, and if you’ve been given the gift of a beautiful day, you ought to take it, instead of hedging or apologizing, instead of deciding not to get too comfortable. It’s a funny meme, the idea of fake spring, and I understand it entirely, this being my 42nd March in the northern hemisphere, but I am also tired of the way that meme culture leaks into ordinary life rendering all of us cynical and blase about such extraordinary events as golden sunshine and blue skies, the stupefying certainty of despair. As though everyone is afraid to be hopeful, mostly because they’re afraid to be wrong, and it’s just easier to decide that nothing good can ever happen. As though we ever know more than the world does, with the miracle of its cycles and changes, all its secrets and mysteries, expansive capabilities. And while there indeed still stands a very good chance of there being ice storms at the end of April, why is that any less of a reason not to glory in the sun today, or require such glory to come with a caveat? Like those people in England who used to reply, “We’ll pay for it later,” anytime somebody commented on the weather (which was often) and the weather was pleasant (much rarer). As though fate were two columns of debits and credits, as though balance were the point, as though it’s bad luck somehow to take your win, accept your gift, to take a moment to stop and be thankful for all this, regardless of what comes after. As though now wasn’t actually all we have, which is another way of saying: everything.

March 11, 2021

Get Outside

I went for a walk with my best friend Jennie this morning, whom I haven’t seen since the summer, even though she doesn’t live so far away. The weather has turned spring-like, and we’ve traded our winter coats for spring ones for the time being, and we marched up past Casa Loma, down into Cedarvale Ravine, spending ninety minutes in each other’s company, and we never stopped talking, although we have been friends since 1992, so we have a lot of touchstones between us. When I got home, I said to Stuart, “Hanging out with friends is fun. I can see why people like it.” It was really lovely, though I will admit that hanging out with friends is not something that I’ve been actively missing. I don’t know that I’ve actually been actively missing anything, it occurs to me, which is kind of weird and seems far from other people’s experiences. Certainly in the early pandemic days, I was completely beset with grief—the vacation we never went on (which Google kept sending me updates about, ghostly reminders of what time to leave for the airport to catch my place), the loss of ordinary life and all those things it had never occurred to us not to count on. But eventually, I kind of found my even keel, and stuck with it. (Not counting, of course, the days in January when I was consumed by anxiety and it all felt so hard, and only exercising while listening to up-tempo Celine Dion delivered me any kind of relief.)

It helps that I spend 24 hours a day with another adult whose company I appreciate, and have no shortage of people around the house to bestow hugs upon, and the children’s schooling gives every day a framework and place for me to be at certain times, and even people to meet there. I’ve always worked from home so that part of my life is just the same as it ever was, and in fact it’s better because Stuart is home and often makes me lunch. And this is not a LOOK HOW GREAT MY PANDEMIC HAS BEEN post, because certainly I’ve been in as much despair as anybody and it’s been a long long road, but I think I’ve dealt with the burden of it all by focusing on what I’ve got instead of what I’m having to do without, and yes, probably lots of denial and a bit of numbness, and faith that there will be plays and book launches eventually so I don’t think about it very much, and yes, maybe I never much liked leaving the house anyway. I just think it’s curious, how everybody has their own coping mechanisms, and none of them are ever one-sized fits all, and sometimes I think my comfort zone has become infinitesimally small, so its a splendid surprise to be taken out of it sometimes, as I was this morning. Especially when I get to discover crocuses in bloom along the way.

March 9, 2021

Gleanings

• Never let it be said that book design doesn’t matter.
• Disagreement is a way of thinking, perhaps the best one we have… We can use it to turn vague notions into actionable ideas, blind spots into insights, distrust into empathy. Instead of putting our differences aside, we need to put them to work.
• Every story confirms that Doug has always been Doug.
• This is a book about discovery. Birds, yes. But passion mostly. It’s uplifting in a down to earth way; there are no promises that following your passion will lead you to what you expect, in yourself or otherwise, but, as Zarankin shows by her own example, there’s a very good chance it will lead you to the surprise of your own heart.
• I urge everyone to read this collection, and without delay! Audre Lorde’s intellect, insight, and wisdom were vast, but so was her heart. I can’t imagine anyone reading it and not wanting to try harder, to do better, to look at themselves and ask the tough questions.
• Two nights ago there were so many stars that I stood for a time just taking in the silvery shimmer across the vault of sky over the Douglas firs just beyond my house, the beauty settling in my whole body like a promise. This is here, I thought, despite everything else.
• It’s all about being ready. For the miracles.
• It’s like following a recipe for a Waldorf Salad, and then improvising with pecans and pears.
• Partially renovated bathrooms are more the rule than the exception. In the best cases, there’s a mismatched toilet or a handful of replaced tiles in a different shade of pink (or yellow, or blue).
• I like to listen to people talk. When radio became podcasts I was delighted.
• I concluded with “So, we have cake to celebrate being alive.”
• Of course this is an analogy for novel writing. It’s equally tedious and frustrating and even when you know you have all the pieces, that somehow they do all fit together to form a coherent whole, there are moments of doubt.

Read my article on comfort reads in The Toronto Star!

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 8, 2021

Half Life, by Krista Foss

Half Life, by Krista Foss, is a tricky book. The first three words: “Knock on wood.” It’s a door, and somebody is banging upon it, waking Elin from her sleep in the mid-afternoon. My expectations confounded at every turn, but then isn’t it fascinating, to think of knock on wood in the context of a knock at the door? A reframing. Wood and construction essential to the project here, but also fact of the fist’s effect upon the door, the disturbance of atoms, and a set of events that will be put into play by whoever it is doing the pounding.

I read this novel over two evenings last week, and found it wholly absorbing, though not in a comfortable sense, as a book to get lost in. Instead, it’s a novel full of booby traps and diversions, it’s tricky, as I say. As you would expect from a novel about trauma and abuse, although this description makes the book seem more dour and less interesting than it really is. Perhaps what I can say is that Half Life doesn’t ever sit still long enough to be about any one thing, and instead it’s about everything—family, physics, furniture, money, houses, glassware, explosions, mythology, motherhood, and the pleasures of pipe smoking.

Elin Hendrikson is a high school physics teacher whose methods are being constantly critiqued by the new principal, she fears her 19-year-old daughter is nearly lost to her, and she’s subject to her mother’s wrath with her more-favoured siblings living out of town, out of reach. But the whole family is coming together again for a ceremony in which a gallery will be named after Elin’s late father, a semi-famous modernist furniture designer, a household name in households where people know about such things.

It’s going to come to a head—it’s inevitable. And it’s hard to look away as Elin cruises for a reckoning with her past, her present and her future, and decides to finally stand up for herself and assert her independence from her mother and overbearing siblings. But of course, she’s not the kind of character for whom this will ever be graceful (which is why I love her—a scattered, messy, impossibly and achingly human kind of woman) so there will be drama, and lots broken glass, and wounded flesh and feelings.

I loved this book. I confess that I definitely owe it a second reading to get a full(er) grasp on the project, which seems to vast and ambitious, a novel that becomes its own universe, it seems, fully formed, down to every single atom, absolutely Woolfian in its attention to detail and nuance and destabilization. I found it fascinating, just as rewarding as it was a challenge, and ultimately such a triumph.

March 4, 2021

Let Me Tell You What I Mean, by Joan Didion

For years, I kept a photocopied piece of paper pinned to a cork-board that hung on my wall, the following lines from Joan Didion’s essay “Telling Stories”: …it was at Vogue that I learned a kind of ease with words, a way of regarding words not as mirrors of my own inadequacy but as tools, toys, weapons to be deployed strategically on a page.” And it’s strange now to think about piece of paper, because I don’t write like that I at all. I never learned that ease, or such strategy, and my reverence for this passage (and for Didion in general) has always been mostly aspirational. I never ended up writing anything at the desk that the cork-board hung over, eventually writing my books while lying on the coach instead, far too reclined to be deploying weapons.

“Telling Stories” is the only essay in Didion’s new collection, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, that I have read before—and I had to visit the sub-basement of an archive to find it, so if my experience is anything to go by, these pieces aren’t so widely known. Though my expectations for the book were pretty low—Joan Didion is 86, and hit the height of fame with her 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, a book that doesn’t really typify what Joan Didion’s work is all about. Written in the throes of grief as well, it would have surprised me if anything written and published afterwards could have been as sharp and pointed (“tools, toys, weapons to be deployed strategically on a page”) as her previous work. I have appreciated every one of her releases since then, but there does seem to be a lack of urgency in all of it, they’re mainly obligatory, though always interesting. But of course, this is a writer who has been looking back on things since her early thirties, at least, who was born supposing that the best of everything was well behind her, so maybe it’s all just in keeping.

I read a review of this book (somewhere! Can’t remember where) that remarked upon the strangeness of the title, incongruous with Didion’s work, whose words were so strategically deployed that such explanations were usually unnecessary. Interestingly, the title itself does not come up in the book, and instead is (I assume) altered from the far more typically Didion-esque “Let me show you what I mean by pictures in the mind,” from her essay, “Why I Write.” Always a shower not a teller, in her introduction to her 1968 collection Slouching Toward Bethlehem, she writes about the advantages of being so physically unimposing as a figure that the people she’s writing about scarcely notice she’s there.

But in this collection, perhaps to satisfy readers seeking …Magical Thinking levels of disclosure, she’s more of a presence than I’d been anticipating, and the title does not seem so unfitting indeed. I get a sense of how a writer is formed and of her process, and not just simply her observational eye (which is eviscerating in her essay about Nancy Reagan, then First Lady of California). She’s also very prescient, in a 1968 essay about parental expectations that anticipates parenting fixations of the 20th century, or her 2000 piece on Martha Stewart, and branding, and the World Wide Web, and the expectations for women to succeed in a culture that is always going to hate them for having done so.

March 4, 2021

More Cool Book Things

• Waiting for a Star to Fall makes the incredible TAYLOR SWIFT AS BOOKS instagram page!

• Listen to my interview with Shelagh Rogers on CBC The Next Chapter

And watch my interview with crystal fletcher on her booktube channel, ALL ABOUT BOOKS!

March 3, 2021

We Haven’t Been Going Nowhere.

We haven’t been going nowhere. You know that, right?

That while indeed it feels surreal to find ourselves in March again, seemingly right back where we started from, that is to forget or discount the cycles, seasons and emotional roller coasters we’ve travelled in the past year.

And I am NOT saying that there aren’t better ways to spend an annum, that whatever we’ve learned is worth what it has cost us, that there are lessons and takeaways we can tie up prettily with a bow.

THIS IS NOT A SILVER LINING.

But also none of us has been standing still, even those who’ve barely left the house or ventured down the block. Even when it’s seemed like life is on hold, every day has been bringing us closer to a time when it won’t be. We have found a way to render some good days out of these strange days, and to weather the bad ones. We have sat with hardship and uncertainty, anxiety and fears when it seemed like the world was ending—but it didn’t. We have born loss and kept going, and found ways to connect across distance, and we’ve grown things, and made things, and tried things and failed things, and while we might be gazing out at the same view tonight… we’ve all actually come very far.

Unimaginable things have occurred this year, but some of them have been so good that 2020 Me would be envious, switching places in an instant—we have vaccines, rapid tests, treatment options, new technologies. Virtual schooling kind of works. We know how disease is spread and I don’t have to worry much about cleaning my doorknobs or disinfecting my shoes. Plus Evermore and Folklore.

I know now more than I ever did before. I know that I am courageous and brave, that I can rise to the occasion and pick myself up again when I fail to, and that community doesn’t fail us, and other people will be what saves us, and that I really can get through this, and I know that you can too.