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.

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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.

January 13, 2021

Gleanings

• But this year, the ritual of school drop-off has evolved into the most important social space in my life.
• If last year proved anything, it is that readers are devoted to the printed word and that booksellers, publishers, festivals, and other stakeholders are resilient and flexible in their desire and ability to continue getting books into the hands of those who want them.
• Does that tell you something? I just decided to do it. I was feeling desperate. I thought, Why have I done all these things for others, all these other things? I’ve written a chunk of this thing, but it’s not enough. So there was the chocolate bar bribe. There was the writing jar hack. And the desperation.
• Let’s not forget the surging river as the ice melts in spring.
• But whatever superpowers of fortune telling or planning that I lack, I’ve decided I make up for with the superpower of optimism.
• And while I didn’t plan out the book that would usher in a new year of reading for me, it turns out that I could not have chosen a better one to set the tone for 2021.
• 2020 was also the year in which I learned about mending, tending, and extending.
• I like post-apocalyptic literature as much as the next guy. Just not… now.
• Today I awoke with a happy sense of anticipation, resolved to live through 2021 bravely, gallantly; as an adventure.  
• Yesterday a cousin sends pictures of alpine snow heavy on branches, mountains, rooftops, and me here in the rain feeling snow envy…
• I was always glad to see people out walking, moving, striding along, whether with a friend or alone. 
• Once you’ve drunk tea from a handmade mug, no ordinary, mass made one will do.
• I once took apart an essay and put it together in a much better way, all while doing the backstroke
• We are here, I say to myself, what can we do with what we have?
• It’s not how many you read that counts. It’s that you read that counts – and it counts so very much.
• Anyway, I’d like to start a New-New Year’s tradition. Let’s not look forward, let’s fucking look BACK. Every year, on December 31st, let’s count our damn blessings.
• “2020 will begin on a high note,” I wrote at the end of 2019’s “Year in Reading” post. As far as reading goes, at least, I wasn’t wrong.
• It’s funny that they’re called English muffins because the only place we ever ate them was in Florida and Bermuda when we visited our grandparents.It’s funny that they’re called English muffins because the only place we ever ate them was in Florida and Bermuda when we visited our grandparents.

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January 11, 2021

Imperfection is a Privilege

The revelation I had last night when I was reading Ijeoma Oluo’s Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America, is that imperfection is a privilege. Imperfectionism being the gospel I espouse in my blogging course and elsewhere: “There is no place for perfectionists in the blogosphere. Blogs are inherently raw, wild and unpolished. The important thing is to write the best you can, get to Publish, and then onto the next post. There will be spelling errors, and sloppy grammar, and things will be formatted weird. You’ll get facts wrong, and often you will change your mind. (Ideally, you should always be changing your mind—or at least entertaining the possibility.”

The privilege of being able to be imperfect, sloppy, raw and unpolished in public and still be taken seriously—that’s what Oluo’s book is all about. But it’s relevant in my work too, which is mainly with white women, for whom overcoming the constraints of perfectionism is a challenge. But it’s doubly a challenge for people of colour, the demand for perfection coming from within and without, from a white supremacist society ready to jump on any imperfection as a confirmation of racist bias.

So what to do that that, I wonder? To recognize it first is essential, but of course, it is not enough. What else? To do my part to combat white supremacy, to help make a world where people of colour are as free to make typos as I am. Part of the work I do to this end involves reading works by writers of colour, and insisting on their excellence, because, as Mediocre shows, our definitions of excellence tend to be defined by white guys, and I wish to challenge that. EXCEPT that it takes us right back to where we started, where writers of colour are not permitted the same latitude as those who are white. The pressure for excellence is enough to keep a writer from writing forever, which so many people who started blogs and them quit them very well know.

How about to create space then, for writers to emerge and learn and grow? I have decided that starting now, I will reserve one space in each of my courses for people of colour. To continue to insist that imperfection is for everyone—because what is imperfection if not the right to be human after all?

January 7, 2021

What I Read On My Christmas Vacation

It’s my favourite thing! Time to read! This December, I took a nearly two-week-holiday from the internet AND from the new releases that occupy most of my reading life to indulge in the titles that have been gathering dust on my shelves for one reason or another, books that are a bit dated, which seem like work, for which there does not seem to be any great occasion to finally pick up and read, and yet I keep them around, waiting for the moment. And that moment is now!

Though Michael Christie’s Greenwood is not quite that kind of book. I bought this one last summer after three excellent booksellers (Kathryn from Lighthouse Books, Allison from Beggar’s Banquet and Shelley from Blue Heron) had cited it as a favourite, but it’s kind of long, and it’s written by a guy, and I was just not that interested, even after Stuart himself had read it, and he made me promise I would read it too (because I have this obnoxious habit of not reading the books he’s read, figuring that he’s read it for both of us). And so it was the first book I picked up on the break, and was it ever wonderful. Stuart describes it as “like Cloud Atlas, but less annoying,” and I just found it enveloping, and rich with hope, and such a marvelously bookish book. Three of out of three superstar booksellers AND Stuart can’t be wrong.

I started reading Greenwood as I picked up Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, which I feel like I’m the last person on earth to finally read, and I’ve opted to read it bit by bit instead of all at once, which has the interesting effect of the book being in conversation with whatever else I’m reading, especially Greenwood. Anyway, I am about halfway through now—this is not a book to be rushed—and enjoying it very much.

Something to be read at a faster pace, however, is Agatha Christie’s (no relation to Michael, as far as I know) Crooked House, which I bought secondhand because our family had been reading Marthe Jocelyn’s middle-grade Aggie Morton series, based on Christie’s early life and her works. (Read Jocelyn’s “6 Reasons to Hook Your Kid on Mysteries”) and the fact that I’d never read an Agatha Christie book was certainly an impediment to me fully appreciating what the Aggie Morton series was up to. And I really enjoyed it! Light and fun. I am going to pass it onto my 11 year old to read next.

William Trevor’s Death in Summer was my next read, which also kicked off my focus on Ireland (though the book itself is not explicitly set there, but it’s where the author comes from). I read my first William Trevor novel the summer before last, the super weird Miss Gomez and the Brethren, which I’d discovered in a provincial park camp store and bought for a dollar. William Trevor’s novels (so far…) are so absurd and a bit psychologically grotesque, unflinching in regards to class tensions, and I love them. In this one, a woman dies suddenly, and the question arises of who should care for her 4-month-old baby, which seems more pressing than grief since the woman’s husband is incapable of feeling and never really loved her anyway, and then one of the candidates for live-in caregiver (definitely inappropriate) becomes obsessed with the father, and starts haunting their property, culminating in the baby’s snatching. ACK!

Something lighter, I supposed, after murder and summer death, so I picked up The Mysterious Disappearence of Leon (I Mean Noel), by Ellen Raskin, whose The Westing Game has been a favourite of mine for years. She was also an illustrator and wrote many picture books (and designed the cover for the first edition of A Wrinkle in Time!) and her illustrations appear in this book, which, like all of her other novels that I’ve read, sadly are not as good as the The Westing Game, which was just as silly but had a certain heft. Not so this one, but it was funny, enjoyable, and a quick read.

And then I read Rebecca Solnit’s A Book of Migrations, about her travels in Ireland. I bought this book in 2014 when my local bookshop was going out of business so everything was on sale and I was obsessed with Solnit after reading The Faraway Nearby, but I didn’t feel any real connection to the subject (in spite of my strange Irish name), so never read it, but I should never have underestimated the capacity of Solnit’s writing to be interesting, I loved this book, which was an exploration of Irish history, geography, British colonial, home and rootlessness, and more.

I got three Sue Miller books for Christmas after becoming obsessed with her Monogamy this fall, and The Distinguished Guest lived up to my hopes that her other books would be as good. (I have since also read The Good Mother. OMG, Sue Miller is amazing!!) It’s hard to say what Miller’s novels are about, exactly, to take such a reductive approach, when they’re such a slice of rich, full loves. In The Distinguished Guest, an elderly woman ailing from Parkinson’s who found late-in-life fame as a memoirist—writing about her marriage which dissolved as she and her ex-husband, a minister, disagreed about how their church would support the civil rights movemen, with her husband supporting radical activism, as Lily took a more measured, middle class approach—comes to stay with her architect husband and his wife, the son finding decades’ old resentments rising to the surface. There are no peripheral characters in this novel, each and every one flawed and complicated, and real.

And then, inspired by the Solnit book, I picked up The Dancers Dancing, by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, which has been sitting in my shelf even longer. I don’t know I waited! Set in 1972 as a group of students from Derry and Dublin spend a month in rural Donegal, ostensibly to learn Irish, the book was such a delight. The novel was a finalist for the Orange Prize in 1999, and it’s richly innovative in terms of point of view, the most amazing omniscience. If you like Derry Girls, you will love this book, which is not like Derry Girls that much, but it scratches the itch, you know?

My final Irish selection was Elizabeth Bowen’s first novel The Hotel, which was funny and delightful in places (the part where the clergyman dares to use the bathroom that had been exclusive to Mrs. Pinkerton (including the loofahs!) but in the end I was glad to be done with it, because it was one of those twentieth century novels in which characters talk around around the thing which cannot be articulated, and I eventually cease to care. Still, I like Elizabeth Bowen very much.

And then! I returned to Natalia Ginzburg, whose work was part of my holiday break last year. I bought The City and the House after reading Melanie’s review, and really really enjoyed it. About a group of friends whose connection falls apart after one of immigrates to America, and the house where they’d all spent time is sold, the book is epistolary and the letters were a bit awkward initially (lots of exposition, unnaturally so) but then started to flow so marvellously. I particularly loved that these friends were at mid-life, because I don’t think we read a lot of stories like that. Yes, this is definitely not an uplifting read (everything that could go wrong tends to) but I really loved it.

I read Penelope Fitzgerald’s story collection The Means of Escape after that. And isn’t it funny how sometimes a book arrives at the very wrong time? I picked up the book a few years ago, and found the first story difficult and impermeable, but I think I just wasn’t in the right frame of mind, because all this time later, the story went down a charm, and I enjoyed the collection very much, and the wide range of Penelope Fitzgerald’s approaches to fiction. How can all that come from one mind?

The Fire Next Time was James Baldwin was after that, and I’ve never read James Baldwin before. But he’s the kind of writer whose words are so part of the atmosphere we breathe that so much of the book, right down to exact phrases, were familiar to me. And what can a person really say about James Baldwin, in all his brilliance, eloquence, generosity and righteous anger? The book is wonderful, and (sigh) as timely as ever.

And then I read The New House, by Lettice Cooper, a Persephone Books edition that I bought somewhere used. Published in 1936, it’s basically about everything I’ve spent the last year wondering about, about power, society, and how things ought to work. Cooper was a socialist and her point of view comes across in the novel, but is also interrogated—what happens when a woman refuses to be selfish, for instance? Are there instances in which looking out for one’s self is necessary? It was kind of an alternative twist on Howards End, a grand home being sold as modern estates are popping up across the countryside, and there is a generational divide, a sense that something is being lost, except that “something” involves terrace slums with eight people sharing a bedroom with an outside toilet, while the middle classes fret about being down to two servants. It’s a book that is a bit too informed by ideas, but also Cooper is uncertain enough about those ideas (and still curious) about them that the effect is not off-putting. And she also does a marvelous job at making the most unsympathetic characters human and real and relatable. I absolutely loved it.,

January 5, 2021

Gleanings

• If you’re swimming against the current, you’re acting with purpose. Effort can be clarifying.
• The question becomes, how do we keep the essence of our traditions, while allowing them to morph and evolve into something new?
• Even in the darkest dark, you will see, there is shimmering light ahead. Trust me, for I am a dreamer. I’ve missed you, too.
• COVID-19 has made me grateful that I’m a Psychrolute.
• Spread love, preach peace:  Be a light.
• It’s all really about attitude and we all have so much to be grateful for.
• Is it an accident that two of my favourite books of the past year both address the concept of receiving or claiming credit? (No.)
• Try not to die before Armistice, okay?
• I’m in it for the practice. The process.
• I’m closer to the ground. And my spirit is closer to the sky.
• It was a painless process, not like the stocks, and I am a better person for it.
• If it’s so trivial, why do so many men become so enraged when a woman expresses the desire to be known as ‘Dr X’?
• I am all too aware that there are things my husband can do now, that too soon he will no longer be able to do. I am aware, but I am still not taking notes.
• The times have caused us to recognize privilege and abundance of resources that are not accessible to everyone because of the systems that have shaped us for generations – colonialism, capitalism, racism, and the patriarchy./ We can find ourselves holding all of that reality, all the hope for transformative change, all the despair and all the love, all the fear and all the joy, all at once.
• Sometimes I give myself really bad coffee jitters on purpose, just to feel something.
• We shouldn’t be deeply embarrassed if we play a wrong note; we should be deeply embarrassed if we play an entire concert in the pursuit of perfection, forgetting our true purpose: to connect with each other.
• Stitching the grammar of rocks into cotton, making a trail of ancient writing for a friend living so far away it might be another time, another epoch altogether.
• I don’t tune out the din, I am learning to be with it.
• And that is how Fred and I come to spend the better part of our first evening together in the bar of The Four Seasons Hotel, me drinking fine brandy and tea and eventually ordering a cheese plate and salad, bits of which I lovingly shove through the wires of his cage on the seat next to mine

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