November 5, 2020
If You Have US Election Anxiety…
If you have US Election Anxiety, I really recommend you revisit my recent post “You Get to Frame Your Own Picture,” and then start listening to the You’re Wrong About podcast. Unlike most people, I am having a GREAT week. Partly because I went to bed Tuesday night convinced of defeat, and woke up to that peculiar emotion called optimism that I’ve not experienced in years. Like, the climate might have a fighting chance? It’s an incredible thing, but in the meantime when there’s nothing to see or know yet, I recommended refreshing your browser instead to the absorbing stories of Chandra Levy and Gary Condit, Dan Quayle v. Murphy Brown, or the Preppy Murder, just in case you needed reminding that America has always been more than a bit ridiculous but also really hard to look away from
November 3, 2020
This Is Not a Victory Cake
If you go back in my archives, you’ll find my posts from four years ago about, first, the victory cake I baked, and then, afterwards, how much I regretted that cake. It did not taste good. I learned a lot from that unfortunate cake, and I’ve continued to learn in the months and years since. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how important it is to learn you can lose, that justice is not inevitable. The arc is longer than we thought. In early 2017, I was reading a biography of Jane Jacobs, and someone commented that Jacobs was so remarkable because she’s one of the few people who ever managed to win, and I’d never thought of that before. That goodness doesn’t always triumph, that it usually doesn’t—which is so counter to everything I ever understood growing up against the crumble of the cold war, the end of history and all. But nothing really is ever so definitive, and I think about this as I contemplate going forward and how to frame ideas, and about how going all or nothing is possibly to set oneself up for defeat. How it is necessary too to understand that winning/losing is not the binary you might think it is. Nothing is simple, nothing at all.
Except: don’t bake a cake before you’ve won. And I haven’t. I’ve made a cake though, and that’s because I have a friend stopping by to visit this afternoon, and it’s called hospitality. And also because we’re heading into that time of year where the sky gets dark fast and Smitten Kitchen’s grapefruit cake adds some necessary brightness, sunshine. You can make your own sunshine, no matter what else is going on, I suppose, is what I’m saying with this cake. Not blind optimism this time, fingers crossed, but light in the darkness instead.
November 3, 2020
Gleanings
- I’m Still Reeling From 2016. Am I Now Allowed to Hope Again?
- In this Year of the Weird, I’m coming to understand that pre-ordering can be a significant act of literary citizenship.
- I’ve been walking on this beach for three hundred years and have never seen stones this shape much less two,
- Last October, I started what may become a new tradition, recording my Octoberests, the seven most magical elements of the month!
- From start to finish, with two firings in between, a plate usually takes me about two weeks to make. And that’s just a plate. Imagine a teapot!
- It has no heroes and, surprisingly, not really any villains either, because those categories rely on absolute perspectives that are simply not sustainable.
- Tomorrow is Election Day. The past four years have hurt like hell. I wish I had words of comfort or inspiration to send out to the world, but I really only have a message of care. May we all take care, may we extend care, may we value the care we receive from others.
- On days when it’s easy to count far more than three blessings, this is a reminder of our great good fortune. On days when we’re struggling . . . this is a reminder of our great good fortune.
- If the pandemic has taught me anything, it’s that the answers in a crisis, as in ordinary life, change with the circumstances, require monitoring and reassessment, and must shift to take many factors into consideration. In other words: there are no easy answers
- Whatever happens next week, and I hope what happens will bring us before and into some great and formidable wedge of light, leaving us blinking and gasping, whatever happens, we will need to adjust our eyes.
- So, without further ado, as they say at the end of every episode of Writing Excuses: “You’re out of excuses. Now GO WRITE!”
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.
November 2, 2020
Santa Monica, by Cassidy Lucas
Oh, what would you give for a thriller that isn’t stupid?
Do you know what I mean? To be able to get lost in a book that is fluffy and silly, but doesn’t jump the shark to become completely preposterous. A book that is delectable as a hot fudge sundae, but whose characters are well drawn and real, with plausible dialogue, and who make sense as human beings? For a plot that is genuinely gripping and surprises you completely at least twice? Where “enjoyable” is not synonymous with “bad?”
I was expecting to have fun reading Santa Monica, by Cassidy Lucas, but that the book was so excellently crafted turned out to be the most amazing surprise. Beginning with the end, the much revered fitness coach found dead in his studio, and whodunnit? Cassidy Lucas (the pen name for writers Julia Fierro and Caeli Wolfson Widger) going back to the start to show how everyone has a motive: the woman he was sleeping with, her husband, the woman who was helping him steal from the fitness studio, and her husband, and his sister, and any of the nubile women of Santa Monica with whom Zack had been sleeping. Plus there’s a transplanted Brooklynite who is having trouble fitting in with her new California lifestyle, the perfect mom whose family is looming on the edge of terrifying debt, the housekeeper hoping to evade ICE authorities and raise her son in America, and more.
I loved it. Such a pleasure, and not a guilty one at all.
October 28, 2020
True Covid Confessions: I don’t miss literary events. All I ever wanted to do was stay home and READ.
As a literary enthusiast, a reader and a writer, it feels like blasphemy to declare it, but I don’t miss literary events. Not a bit.
I don’t miss yelling over the roar of a crowd to make awkward small talk, sitting through readings that last far too long, listening to that one guy whose outsized ego means he clearly holds his co-panelists in contempt, or being introduced to a writer for at least the third time (we even shared a panel once) who still claims not to know me.
I don’t miss paying way too much money for a drink I don’t really feel like drinking, or half as much (which is still a lot) for a glass of tepid orange juice.
And the audience Q&As. I don’t miss them at all. The woman who actually has a comment instead of a question, and the other one who wants advice on how to get published, and I’m still traumatized by the event back in 2006 when a man got up to ask Zadie Smith if she supposed she would have had as much success had she not been so physically attractive.
Or even worse, the events that only a handful of people have bothered to show up to, so that I am mortified on behalf of the author, the establishment, and humanity in general, and then I somehow feel contractually obliged to become that woman yammering on in the Q&A, since the alternative is crickets.
And while I do appreciate the opportunity to buy books at literary events, particularly when it enables me to support one of my favourite local independent booksellers, it is often the case that I have purchased the book on sale already, having pre-ordered it or ventured out to buy it on the publication day. So that I’m buying a copy of a book I own already, which is hardly a tragedy (I love deciding on the perfect reader to pass my spare copy on to) but it’s not exactly economically sensible.
I miss the cheese though—such irresistible cubes. The pieces I cut at home never achieve the same symmetry. And I miss seeing friends, and celebrating writers I love. I’m still buzzing from a 2018 conversation with Esi Edugyan and Meg Wolitzer at the Toronto Festival of Authors, scrawling Wolitzer’s brilliant words in my notebook: “The world will whittle your daughter down, but a mother never should, and my mother never did, and that is feminism in action.” I miss the inspiration of watching panels as fabulously curated as those at an event like The Festival of Literary Diversity, which is where I became acquainted with amazing writers like Cherie Dimaline, Carrianne Leung, and Amber Dawn for the very first time.
As a writer, I have gained a particular understanding of just why literary events matter so much, and I’ve been grateful to them creating opportunities for me to connect with readers and to enact the privilege of being an author in public—basically what dreams are made of.
But even my most hotly anticipated literary events, those opportunities to share a room with authors whose books and ideas are integral to my very being—these, I have secretly resented for the way they keep me from my number one pursuit, which is reading. If it was socially acceptable for me to hide in the corner with your novel at your book launch, I would do it, but the lighting never suffices, and enough people think I’m kind of rude already.
I have secretly resented them for the way they keep me from my number one pursuit, which is reading.
And so for me, there has been something of a relief in the cessation of the literary social calendar. Skipping the Zoom launches, and curling up with a book instead, and I’ve been doing so much reading. I’ve been doing my part by buying books too, and then some. The most joyful moments during the dark days of these pandemic times has been finding deliveries on my porch from local bookshops, who’ve worked so hard to keep their businesses going and keep us all in books while in lockdown.
Books and the reading proving to be the most delightful diversion and escape as well, the opposite of twitter doom scrolling. I’ve enjoyed finding online community too in a network of readers, which is rich and rewarding, even if lacking in cheese.
My new novel Waiting for a Star to Fall is out this week and you don’t even have to leave the house to celebrate!
- Purchase your copy today.
- Tonight (Wednesday), I’m doing an Instagram Live event with Indigo at 7pm.
- Tickets are still available for the Book Drunkard Festival Event tomorrow.
In 2010, I wrote this somewhat related piece, “Enough shameful author appearances for one lifetime”
October 27, 2020
Gleanings
- This is a collection of previously unpublished short stories ranging over the earlier years of Madeleine L’Engle’s writing career, now gathered by her granddaughter.
- In these very weirdest of times, where the ordinary feels extraordinary and precious, where we are forced to be creative and innovative in navigating life in a world that presents very real challenges to our physical, emotional and spiritual health, it was a good day.
- I want to find a way to be brighter, make the best of this situation.
- Sprinkles are entirely optional, of course, but we could all use more sprinkles these days.
- As soon as I finished reading this I thought: I want to read it again.
- October here is like a painting.
- Any literary genre is open to distinctions in readers’ taste, but arguably none more so than the horror genre.
- I could have spent the afternoon reading but instead I washed my husband’s body while he braced himself on his walker, helped him back into his bed, arranged the soft flannel sheet over his legs.
- The togetherness, tradition, self-expression.
- “Sometimes in the world of people who write or people who make media there is just this expectation that everything is on the table, especially if you’re two women who make media, that we’re supposed to just share our pain and everything that’s going on in our lives but that’s not fair and it’s not true…”
- I keep telling myself, I need a winter plan, a plan to get through, no matter what. I need some new winter mantras. (Quietly, quietly).
- Did you know that there’s a whole world out there beyond Harper Collins and Penguin?
- What to do when life takes a non-peachy turn
October 27, 2020
The Wait is Over!
Waiting for a Star to Fall is here! Thank you to everybody who has helped me welcome it into the world.
- Have you seen my cake??
- From the review in Saturday’s Toronto Star: “Waiting for a Star to Fall” surprised me. I read it in a day, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
- Waiting for a Star to Fall in the Peterborough Examiner!
- Q&A on Ann Douglas’s blog
- “Pick up Kerry Clare’s novel because it’s an entertaining, contemporary read. Stick with it because it is a perceptive, intelligent commentary of the world we’re in.” Thank you, Kaley Stewart!
October 26, 2020
Blue Monday
There’s reading and there’s reading, you know? The latter an intense and visceral experience, and I don’t know if it’s about the book or the moment, or an amazing alchemy involving both. I know you can’t plan it, and simply have to wait for the moment to arrive, often when you really need it (like when I reread Kate Atkinson last spring and it brought me back to life…)
I took part in the Turning the Page on Cancer readathon yesterday and read for 8 hours straight, which is pretty much my ideal way to spend a day even when it’s not for charity. Putting together a stack of books for the event late last week—books on my to-be-read shelf, books that weren’t too long so I could feel I was making progress. They all turned out to be blue, which is the opposite of the Breast Cancer pink palette, but I always like to do books my own way. (PS We raised more than $30,000!!!)
I didn’t read Louise Penny’s latest, All the Devils Are Here, as part of the readathon, but it was almost like I did because a) the book was also blue and b) I had to speed through it Friday and Saturday so it would be finished in time for me to begin the official stack on Sunday. And I enjoyed the novel so very much. I always love me an Inspector Gamache novel, but this one seemed particularly compelling, I think because of its close focus on a single plot plot-line. I was absolutely wrapped up in the plot, gasped aloud several times (and yes, all gasps are aloud, but you know what I mean…) and found the climax rich and satisfying. It takes us away from Three Pines, to Paris, where Gamache and Reine-Marie have gone to await the birth of their new grandchild. And when Gamache’s godfather is struck down in a hit-and-run that seems calculated, the whole family becomes embroiled in a crime with potential for massive devastation—but is there anybody they can trust?
I had been nervous to read Rumaan Alam’s new novel Leave the World Behind because I’d heard reports it was bleak and disturbing, but also that it was phenomenal and it’s nominated for a National Book Award. So what to do? Because I’m not exactly emotionally strong as steel these days, more like wobbly as Jello, and I wasn’t sure I had the stomach. BUT if I read it in a couple of hours in one sitting, in the morning…it wouldn’t be so bad, I decided. This story of an ordinary time that turns into an apocalypse, when a white family is staying at remote holiday home and then an older Black couple turn up, the home’s owners, saying something unspecific but devastating as taken place in the the city, and they have nowhere else to, and things just get weirder and weirder, and it was so good. Resonant in this plague year (the mother’s plea, “I just want everything to be okay!) and the writing and imagery so striking (the flamingos!) even if I do feel he gets women and sex wrong (in this book, a woman can’t find her child, and likens this to being as strange as not being able to find her earlobes or her clitoris, but man, I bet there are a lot of women who can’t find their clitoris, it just was very off.) Am I glad I read this book? Yes, it was so interesting and rich and propulsive. Do I kind of wish I’d never read it though? Yes, because I’ve been disturbed by its darkness and slightly frightened ever since I finished it, but what a testament to the book’s power, right? This one is definitely a mindfuck.
But Agatha, by Anne Catherine Bomann, is not, thank goodness. A charming tale, one that could have been twee, but wasn’t. It actually spoke to the very different Leave the World Behind in a variety of ways, actually, about the danger/desire to live apart from humanity, about existential longing, about trauma and despair. Also set in Paris, which took me back to Louise Penny the day before! This one is a slim volume and I read it in an hour, but I loved it, translated from the Danish by Caroline Waight and published in Canada by BookHug, About a therapist whose detachment from his patients and the world around him becomes blurry when a new patient arrives and his stalwart secretary leaves to care for her dying husband. It also contains a recipe for apple cake, so this one was always up my street anyway, but I adored it.
I also loved David Berry’s On Nostalgia, which I bought after his 49thShelf launchpad post, and while it’s also a slim volume, it’s packed and heavy and I am pleased that it was part of the whirlwind of my day, adding a bit of literary heft, and it tapped into similar existential questions I’d encountered in the previous two books. Why do we spend so much time looking back? Why do we disdain this impulse? How do politicians manipulate it? How is Back to the Future actually an anti-nostalgic exercise? How does the dynamicism of social media affect our engagement with it, and that we have no memories of sites like Facebook or Instagram which is changing our user experiences of them constantly? It was so interesting, and the prose was engaging and funny. I am very glad I read it.
And then finally Bluebird, Bluebird, by Attica Locke, whose first two novels I loved, and I picked this one up at Lighthouse Books in the summer. (Literally. And then had to buy because Covid.) I’m not so far into it now, but am riveted, about a Black Texas Ranger who’s caught between a rock and a hard place, a familiar situation I would imagine for Black police officers everywhere. He’s also a law school drop-out and pulled between the desire to challenge the law and to serve it—in which corner does justice lie?
On the eve of my own book release, with so much else going on in the world and my nerves all frayed, butterflies exploding in my stomach, etc, it was such a privilege and a pleasure to escape into reading this weekend, not to leave the world behind at all (SPOILER: IT IS TO MUCH WITH US!) but to give me new ways to think about it, and celebrate the magic that reading can do.
October 23, 2020
Launch Week!
There are just days to go before WAITING FOR A STAR TO FALL is launched into orbit, and I know that pre-ordered copies are already making their way into the world. Thank you so much for making my pandemic book launch a not-lonely experience and I look forward to sharing celebrations over the next week with you—including chances for you to win!
Sunday: Turning the Page on Cancer
If you need me on Sunday, I’ll be heroically reading FOR EIGHT STRAIGHT HOURS to raise funds and awareness to support people living with metastatic breast cancer. Thank you to everybody who has helped me meet my goal. I am so exciting that the campaign altogether has raised more than $20,000!
Monday: Official Cake Party
Fancy cake is an essential part of the Book Launch experience. I’ve got mine on order and would LOVE if you could have your cake and eat it too in solidarity with me on Monday.
PS I recently learned that Flo-Rida has a song called “Cake,” and while some people have suggested that his cake is a metaphor for salacious deeds instead of about actual cake, I’m taking him at his word.
Tuesday: Read-In and Win
I’m so excited at the thought of my new book arriving into the hands of readers on Publication Day. Share a selfie of you and the book on your blog or social media next week and tag me for a chance to win a $100 Gift Card from Inner Muse. Three runners-up will win a bag of Star To Fall tea blend from Clearview Tea!
Wednesday: Live Instagram with Indigo
Join me at 7pm on Instagram for a live conversation about Waiting For a Star to Fall! Links and info here.
Thursday: The Book Drunkard Festival
I am so excited to be part of this year’s Book Drunkard Festival, ESPECIALLY since they’ve gone virtual, which means everyone can join. And yes, because they have their own beer. At 7pm, I’ll be speaking with the amazing Bianca Marais about Waiting For a Star to Fall.Tickets for the event cost $30, include the purchase of the book, and are on sale now!
Friday: Official Champagne Toast
What a week! I will confess that it may not be authentic champagne with which we’ll be toasting my launch week, but a glass of anything will clink just fine. Please raise your own glass, and I’ll be toasting you in appreciation for your support and encouragement.
PS: Don’t Forget Your Book Plate
Guys, my sharpies ran out!! But I am buying more tonight so please send me an email with your address and I will be happy to send you a personalized book plate!
Star to Fall Tea Blend
And yes indeed, WAITING FOR A STAR TO FALL has its very own tea from Clearview Tea in Creemore, ON, an organic black tea blend featuring vanilla, bergamot and rose petals. On sale now for a limited time.
