January 7th, 2010

Dark Materials

It wasn’t intentional, but as soon as the holidays were over I started reading and watching much darker stuff than in late December. Though it wasn’t the plan, but it’s worked out to kind of suit my mood–it’s freezing in my apartment (and outside of it), the war with UPS rages on, and I have way too much work. Also, I miss the days when everything was about tinsel instead of to-do lists–where are you, oh halcyon days of late December??

But of course, if something’s going to be sad, it helps a lot if it’s also darkly funny and searingly realistic. I went to see Up in the Air because it is being marketed as a snappy romantic comedy and (sue me) I like those. But though there are a few rom-com type scenes (a groom with cold feet, a cra-zay party where everyone gets drunk and lets their feelings show), those wind up looking strange and out of place in the midst of all the dark and searing.

This film is about a man named Ryan (played by George Clooney) who is hired for a day or a week by companies who want to fire some of their employees but management can’t a actually face doing it. Ryan describes losing a job as one of the worst days of most people’s lives–and in this film, you get to see that, over and over. Many of the dozens of newly fired folks are played by real people who actually *have* been recently let go. They improvise their lines, and the pain apparent made me want to look away, and unable to look away.

So the film is about how people relate to their jobs, how Ryan relates to his job, and to the women around him. He mainly *doesn’t* relate to people in non-business relationships, until he meets a sexy lady in a bar, and that relationship somehow lets him engage with people like his sisters, his vulnerable young colleague, etc. So you see how this could have been an inspiring little love story, but I have been running around begging people not to see it if that’s what they’re hoping for.

The gooey middle of the story ends soon enough and the ending is a one-two punch that left my companion and I sitting like blast victims as the credits rolled and everyone else left the theatre. *Up in the Air* is a very good movie, but brace yourself.

There certainly are flaws in that film, despite my love for it. On the other hand, though in many ways grim, Denis Johnson’s short story collection Jesus’ Son is pretty pitch-perfect. Such immense clarity and respect he brings to even descriptions of suffering that I was really awed my the book, though again, I often wanted to look away. These are linked stories–they all have the same narrator, a young junkie of no fixed address with a string of unhappy girlfriends and a flexible relationship with violence.

The stories are likely what you’d imagine them to be, tales of deals gone wrong, confusion, suffering, gore, all with the hazy chronology and causality that comes from telling stories on chemicals. But there is an incredible beauty in these pieces, too, which comes partially from the narrator’s fractured viewpoint and partially from the circumstances he finds himself in, quite unlike what most of us will ever see. I saw the film version ages back (it was pretty good, I think) and the most memorable part involved Jack Black as a strung-out hospital orderly, and a patient with a switchblade in his eye. That incident is found here in the story “Emergency,” similarly striking but much quieter, much more ordinary in its strangeness and impossible beauty.

This is from the last piece in the book, “Beverly Home.” The 20 pages of the story feel epic as the narrator takes a job in a nursing home, dates a dwarf, goes to AA, struggles to live what he imagines a real drug-free life would be:

“One day, too, when I’d passed through the lot and was walking along behind a row of town houses on the way to the bus stop, I heard the sound of a woman singing in her shower. I thought of mermaids: the blurry music of falling water, the soft song from the wet chamber. The dusk was down, and the heat came off the hovering buildings. It was rush hour, but the desert sky has a way of absorbing the sounds of traffic and making them seem idel and small. Her voice was the clearest thing coming to my ears.”

So many people talk about how amazing this book is that I was daunted to read it–book almost never live up to that sort of hype. I am so glad this one did.

I’m, uh, gonna maybe do something cheerful now.

RR

December 23rd, 2009

Festive farewell

I just wanted to send a quick Merry Everything to y’all out there in blog land. I’m mainly dependent on the kindness of others for internet this holiday season (I am currently stealing wireless from somewhere to write this post) so likely there won’t be much action on Rose-coloured for the next week or so, although I can never really keep away from the interwebs entirely. But certainly, I wanted to wish all who care to celebrate a merry Christmas tomorrow, and to those who don’t, a very nice day!

I don’t know if any of you would have run into this, but my short story, “Christmas with My Mother” just got released as an audio download from Rattling Books Earlit Shorts 4. It was very weird to hear my work in another’s voice–brilliant, because Janet Russell gives the story a gentle and nuanced interpretation–but very strange since the only place I’d heard those words before was inside my own head. Add to that the fact that I wrote the story over a year ago and hadn’t even looked at in six months and the whole thing was something of a shock. I actually squirmed at the awkward moments in the story as I listened and once laughed aloud at a funny part (immodest? sure, but I also think that writers who don’t find their own funny parts funny should stop writing them.

That story is also included in this year’s Best Canadian Short Stories, which also came in the mail yesterday–merry Christmas to me! So there’s two ways to get that story, should you care to. I would like to point out that, despite the title seeming to perfectly coincide with the season, this is very much not a Christmas story, and might not be ideal reading for those of you cuddling down to read in the glow of treelights (or it might be exactly appropriate–depends on how you like your glow). But just FYI.

Other than that, there is very little literary going on around here, but lots that is good–family, old friends, a cake made almost entirely out of pudding, that ornament of a stocking I made in grade 2, 90s nostalgia music, and many hugs. That’s how I like my glow–I hope yours is however you want it to be.

Merrily,
RR

December 9th, 2009

Postal excellence

Today’s mail was extra good: 1 magazine, one letter, one holiday card, one return-to-sender misaddressed holiday card (the only down note, to be hand-delivered on Saturday), and 2 copies of the fall issue of The Antigonish Review (the issue is not yet online) containing my flash fiction, “Do.”

I am so delighted to see it there, and it is a story I am quite proud of, but it is somewhat jarring reading as it was written a few years back and is *much* different from what I’m doing these days (how much flash fiction are you seeing from me lately, really?) It’s nice to be reminded that I have a little bit of range, though it’s sequential–I can no more go back to doing what I was doing in 2006 than I can skip ahead to whatever I’ll be up to in 2012 and see how that goes. I can only hope the cycle repeats, one of these days.

Anyway…hope you enjoy the story, and the whole of a very attractive-looking issue (mine was in *3* layers of shrink-wrap–it’s like they *knew* about the slush-storm!)

RR

December 7th, 2009

For Your Information

1) The Fantastic Mr. Fox is pure unadulterated joy. Go if you like animated movies, film technology, Wes Anderson, or subtly weird humour. I think go if you like Roald Dahl, but I haven’t actually read the book on which the film is based (don’t start with me) so I can’t say for certain. That link above is the Rotten Tomatoes Top Critics page–the film got 100% tomatoes (that’s good, yo!) Also, I’m still slightly nauseated from laughing so hard. “I see…a fox on a motorcycle…with a slightly littler fox in the sidecar, along with what might be an opossum-type creature…this mean anything to anyone?” See it even if you are not or do not possess children–this film has enough layers for anyone.

2) Did you know Facebook has friend-spam? You get these friend requests from randos and then if you do it, they just send you ads and things. Well, they do, and this is why I never respond to FB friend-requests from people whose names I don’t recognize and who don’t send a note. If, however, some nice friendly blog reader thought it’d be fun to be my FB friend, I would totally endorse that. So, if you happen to be one of several people I don’t know who friended me in the past couple days, but are not a spammer or a stalker, please send me a note to that effect and friends we shall be.

3) I am listed as one of the judges for the University of Toronto Alumni Writing Contest, story division. I’m thrilled to be associated with the amazing stories that won, as well as the energy in the UofT Magazine office that got it together, and my groovy fellow judges.

However, a wee disclaimer here, as you might have noted that a very dear friend of mine won. So you should know that another judge read “Georgia Coffee Star” in the first round, and when it appeared on my list in the 2nd, I made arrangements to recuse myself in further rounds. Which wound up being a sort of fascinating experience, as the rest of the committee made exactly the decisions I would have made, for rather different reasons. Everything I do with short stories teaches me something.

Anyway, I’m so pleased for Kerry’s winning story–go read!

RR

November 26th, 2009

This week in review

Of course, this week is not technically over yet, but rather a lot has already happened. I think it was enough to occupy an entire week if it was spread out, and I am rather hoping nothing further will happen until next. Thus, I dare to pre-emptively summarize:

Tuesday: I attended the Writers’ Trust Awards. It is a pretty glitzy event, with roaming waiters and lots of excited chat before the ceremony. At the ceremony, the Journey Prize was the first to be awarded, which meant co-presenter Anita Chong and I could get our moment of stress out of the way early and enjoy the show! I had perhaps 200 words to say, and really people just wanted to know who won, but I was very worried about flubbing it, or not even making it to the podium because I had spotted a gap between the top of stairs and the stage where I could easily wedge my foot.

But nothing happened like that, and I was able to present the winner, Yatsuko Thanh, for her story Floating Like the Dead with no trouble. What an honour to do so, and what an incredible story. I was charmed by how sincerely stunned Ms. Thanh seemed, and was really glad I got a chance to meet her. And the other two incredible finalists, Dave Margoshes for “The Wisdom of Solomon” and Daniel Griffin for “The Last Great Works of Alvin Cale.” An evening like this one really makes me feel alive to all the wonder and diversity of wonders in CanLit.

I was also happy to see that Annabel Lyon took the fiction prize though I have not read the celebrated book, *The Golden Mean*. But if my intense love of her first book, Oxygen is any indication, I should. And I was pleased to hear that, though Ms. Lyon was also pretty stunned by the win, she remembered to mention in her speech all those smaller literary magazines where she got her start, and to please for no further cuts to arts funding in Canada.

Wednesday: On Wednesday morning I went out to University of Toronto Scarborogh to do a guest lecture in my fellow UofT Creative Writing alumni Daniel Tysdal‘s short story class. I did, as promised read the end of a story, “Massacre Day.” When I told the students that I would read the last three pages of that piece, I had the extraordinary experience of watching a roomful of students pull out copies of my book and prepare to follow along.

But that extraordinariness did not all compare with the level discussion after my reading and (very brief) talk. The students were reading intently and speaking insightfully, not just about my work (although I appreciated that very much) but about everything they laid their eyes and minds on. What a fantastic way to spend a morning.

That evening, was the Biblioasis fall poetry party, featuring Zachariah Wells, Shane Neilson and Robyn Sarah. The non-present presence of a 4th poet was Wayne Clifford, whose work was read by all three of the others to make up for his absense. It was really cool to get three interpretations of one voice.

Also last night, I got to meet London, Ontario, novelist A.J. Somerset who just won the Metcalf-Rooke Award. There’s a lot of literary winning going on this week!

Today, is the real American Thanksgiving, I’m pretty sure, so I am wishing you all a happy one of those–I remain as Thankful I was last week, on fake Thanksgiving. Also today, due to a minor incident, I was without tights for a portion of the day, and it was actually warm enough that I didn’t mind dreadfully, temperature-wise. The upside of global warming. What was strange is that I felt like a total scandal, bare knees and nothing under my dress but panties, when of course that is how I spent the entire summer. I think winter makes me puritanical.

I also spent part of today talking books with Kerry Clare while I lay on the floor eating scones and playing with her baby daughter. That was, as you might imagine, delightful.

To continued, low-impact delight.
RR

November 15th, 2009

*This* just in

The November/December issue of This Magazine, themed “Legalize everything” is on newsstands now (and has been all month, so this isn’t “just in” at all–I’m just slow and can’t resist a pun!) Among other bits of awesome, it’s got the results of The Great Canadian Literary Hunt, of which I was one of the fiction judges (along with Dennis E. Bolen and Kate Sutherland, with whom it was such a pleasure to share thoughts on the stories). I am so delighted for all the winners and encourage you to go seek out the inspiring weirdness of these stories immediately.

RR

October 6th, 2009

Cheer!

I promise this is the last time I mention it (for a while) but the new Journey Prize anthology is out today, and maybe you’ll like it (close to) as much as I do!!

And, if you don’t care about that, penguins in sweaters!

I’m not going away
RR

September 29th, 2009

Master Classes

If you read much of Rose-coloured last spring, you likely came across notes on my time teaching creative writing to grade 10s and 11s. From this, I learned so much–nothing makes you critical of your own assumptions, limits, and biases like trying to impart them to cranky teens. Every time they questioned me, I questioned myself, and discovered either renewed confidence in my ideas about writing, or renewed eagerness to come up with some better ones.

This spring and summer, I found another way to shake myself out of my habitual thinking and look at things in new ways: judging. When I was asked sit on the jury for Journey Prize 21 I was honoured and terrified–the nominated stories were selected by journal editors as the best they’d published that year! So they were all going to be *pretty* good, and how finely could I discriminate? How could I choose between one very good story and another without simply falling back on my own ingrained prejudices about what I *prefer* in a story, but is not always perfectly coincident with what’s *good*.

By reading really carefully and slower than is my wont, by taking notes, by rereading, rereading and rereading. Also, it turns out, by talking. The Journey committee deliberations had some email components, but also a long day in a room with nothing but a pretty view, a lot of delicious food, and stories to discuss. When I sat down with Camilla Gibb and Lee Henderson, I thought that it would be too indimidating to speak up, and yet too irresponsible to the stories not to. So I talked a little, and they were warm and collegial. So I talked some more, and though we didn’t always agree, we did always take others’ points seriously and honestly, and everyone was willing to return to a story and try to see someone else’s reading of it.

And I did too–it was shocking, the way school is shocking. You walk into class having done the readings and formed your opinions, and you aren’t even wrong–there’s just another layer, another dimension, that the prof (or fellow students) introduce and make you go back and reread and say, “Oh!” I think we were all able to provide these new layers on different stories for each other, and that was what was so amazing and educational–this 360 view on published stories (we do this all the time in workshop, but that’s with an eye to the story being rewritten).

The next time I was asked to be a story contest juror, I was much more eager and less trepidacious, and it was another wonderful experience even though, as it turned out, I didn’t actually get to do it. I was merrily reading and note-taking for the University of Toronto alumni short story contest when a story I recognized popped up in the second round. As said story progressed to the shortlist, I realized I had to recuse myself from the jury.

By then, though, I had some pretty strong attachments to the stories and was depressed that I’d miss out on what was sure to be a fascinating discussion about who should be a finalist and who should win. I’d also heard through the grapevine that the discussion was to be held at a really good restaurant. So I offered to be a silent audience, mouth opened only to put food in (it really was excellent). Everyone agreed, thank goodness, because this was a whole other education: to listen to the intelligent dialogue and short-story dissections of Andrew Pyper, Lee Gowan and Allyson Latta without the burden of self-consciousness. I had a very solid grasp on the stories, but since I didn’t have to be articulating that grasp every minute, I was able to listen ever more deeply to what the other judges thought and felt about the stories. Once again, we were not always in accord, but everyone presented their thoughts with respect for even stories that didn’t work for them, and with a willingness to see things from another perspective, should one be offered.

By the time it came around to adjudicating This Magazine’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt, short-story side, I felt like I was gaining some expertise (of course, not everyone would think it brilliant time management to agree to sit on three story juries in six months, but honestly, how do people say no to these cool opportunities???) This time it was an e-discussion amongst Dennis Bolen, Kate Sutherland and myself. Again, a vibrant mix of reading styles and expressive styles, and a great openness to very different readings of the same story (although this time, sadly, nothing to eat). Again, a feeling that the other judges had opened up the stories for me, making me read even those I loved in new ways, and giving me ways into stories that hadn’t previously spoken to me.

You can see the results of the UofT and This contests in those magazines’ last issues of the year, and you can see read the Journey Prize longlist starting next week, when the book is for sale. You can also come see me and Camilla Gibb announce the shortlist for the Journey, tomorrow at 10am at Ben McNally Books, along with a few others of the Writers’ Trust Awards shortlists.

Or you can do none of these things and simply trust me on this: people are writing really amazing short stories out there, and they don’t seem likely to run out of ways of surprising us with the form anytime soon. And people are thinking about short stories out here, too, and we don’t seem likely to be run out of ways of being surprised, either.

All the lies in the book
RR

September 8th, 2009

Rose-coloured Reviews Sherwood Anderson’s “The Egg”

Sherwood Anderson’s short story The Egg (1920) is the story of a poor farmhand slowly driven mad by his attempts to “get up in the world.” A few months ago, I read Anderson’s first collection, Winesburg, Ohio (that Wikipedia link freakishly calls the book a novel, apparently because there is a reoccuring character in most of the stories. Wikis can’t be perfect, I guess) That book is also about small-town and rural folks, mainly struggling with themselves and their lives within those contexts, and not often coming out very happy.

“Winesburg” is a wonderful book, with some rather penetrating insight into human beings, especially for 90-year-old insight. But that book takes itself very very seriously, and the moral intensity of it all sometimes becomes a bit grim, especially if a reader doesn’t quite buy into every situation and even finds a few a bit hackneyed (but oh goodness, not most–try the four-part “Godliness” for a little bit of deeply original and heartfelt misery).

“The Egg,” on the other hand, is from Anderson’s second collection, *The Triumph of the Egg* (the original title of this story). Though released only two years later, *The Egg* is different from anything in the prior book: it is wrist-slittingly funny.

The piece narrated by a young boy, but largely about his father. The father was as a bachelor a happy farmhand, but once he married and had his only son, his wife convinced him to try to “get up in the world,” for the sake of the boy.

Their first attempt at wealth is a chicken farm, in which they invest 10 years and untold toil and money, and which is a desparate failure. The sad spectacle of it is described with such perfect black humour that I’m actually worried for your sake that you won’t go follow the link and read the story. So I quote at length:

“Most philosophers must have been raised on chicken farms. One hopes for so much from a chicken and is so dreadfully disillusioned. Small chickens, just setting out on the journey of life, look so bright and alert and they are in fact so dreadfully stupid. They are so much like people they mix one up in one’s judgments of life. If disease does not kill them they wait until your expectations are thoroughly aroused and then walk under the wheels of a wagon–to go squashed and dead back to their maker. Vermin infest their youth, and fortunes must be spent for curative powders. In later life I have seen how a literature has been built up on the subject of fortunes to be made out of the raising of chickens. It is intended to be read by the gods who have just eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It is a hopeful literature and declares that much may be done by simple ambitious people who own a few hens. Do not be led astray by it. It was not written for you.”

You see what I mean? Hilarious, but in the end, the humour is not distancing–this is a quite intimate story about the death of hope, even if the faultiness of that hope is often maligned. The son cares for the father’s suffering, and we feel both the care and the suffering.

After the farm, the mother (whom some might call the villain of this story) decides that they ought run a restaurant by the train depot, and that that restaurant ought stay open all night. It is in the late and lonely nights in the restaurant that the father’s ambition runs completely afield of reality. He has brought from the farm a selection of glass jars in which he has preserved deformed chicks from his flock. He displays them at the restaurant as a form of entertainment, and eventually ends up deciding to expand upon this by becoming part restauranteur, part entertainer, with repartee and some tricks related to…eggs.

The narrator does not see his father’s most dramatic unravelling, as it occurred in the middle of the night with only one customer present, with the son still a child, upstairs and asleep. And yet, “For some unexplainable reason I know the story as well as though I had been a witness to my father’s discomfiture. One in time gets to know many unexplainable things.” So this miserable scene is the relating of the one patron, of course, and also of town gossip in general, but also in part the narrator’s own creation, the logic and coherence he has given to his father’s breakdown.

I got this story recommendation from my online short story discussion group, the Fiction Files, and they are also mulling over what exactly the egg represents in the piece. Me, I wonder if the egg is the curse of possibilities–like the oyster that might be a pearl when opened, but most likely isn’t. In the first paragraph of the story, the narrator alludes to his father’s single days of good cheer and calm, and adds, “He had at that time no notion of trying to rise in the world.” The narrator has made himself a story out of scraps and gossip, most likely not perfectly accurate and definitely distressing, but the story he has made is something he can live with. His father, unable to create things for himself, was reliant on fate and nature and other people to create things for him, and when none of those will cooperate, it wrecks him. I wonder if Anderson’s point has something to do with valuing life as it is or as we make it, and not putting too much stock in possibilities not yet hatched.

What are you thinking? I’ll give you 3 guesses
RR

August 24th, 2009

Reads

I would never tell you what to do, but if you were looking for something to read and you happened to *ask* me, I might suggest:

—Sherman Alexie’s wonderful new story, War Dances is worth reading just for the crisp dialogue, just for the laconic generosity Alexie extends to his characters, just for the long prose-poem/text experient/amazing section “Exit Interview for My Father.” Taken in total, this story blew me away.

–Dave Fiore’s new fiction blog, Montreal Fiores‘s slogan is “putting the character in local character.” For those of us who haven’t been local in a while, or even at all, these stories and scenes put you there in a detailed, pigeons and cigarette butts way that’s so true it’s occasionally alarming.

–As ever, the whole of the current issue of The New Quarterly is worth your concentrated attention. Particularly “Impetus for a Sketch” and “All We Will Ever Be,” two particularly striking stories out of an issue full of strong strong fiction. The latter is by the 2008/9 Metcalf-Rooke Award-winner, Amy Jones, by the way; so the torch has been passed and it looks like the flame is burning bright.

–But *Once* is still around, and the first story from the collection, “ContEd,” has received a thoughtful review at That Shakespearian Rag. In the course of this year, I’ve learned that almost every single story in the book is someone’s favourite, but “ContEd” sure does come up a lot.

There, I’m glad I got all that off my chest. Happy reading!

Summer to winter
RR