December 20th, 2008

Link it up

The Maclean’s blog calls me Rookie of the Year. A lovely review of *Once* on Rover Arts. Camilla Gibbs‘s blog (and next book?) are all about Pho! August and Writer Guy offer two different views on rejection letters.

In less litsy news, tomorrow Hannukkah starts! Yesterday and tomorrow we had/will have blizzards! And I am absolutely untroubled by any inclement weather, because for the first time since last December, I am on actual, really no-work-or-stress-involved holiday.

Let the frolicking begin!

Gonna keep on thinkin bout you
RR

December 19th, 2008

Siege mentality

I am definitely the first to complain about ice and snow (to the extent that I am actually banned from complaining about heat and humidity in summer, having used up all my complaint-credits in the first half of the year). Yet there is something a little exciting about blizzards. Not when you are out in the trying to do something or go somewhere or not get hit by a skidding car, but sometimes when you are just building a fort or rolling down a hill, it’s nice to be constantly coated in snow. And sometimes not.

Also cool is the sort of siege mentality of being indoors when the earth is going haywire beyond the windowpanes. I feel a little scared to go out, but very much appreciative of being in. How silly, I guess, but it is a fun white-out world out there, as seen from in here.

Maybe I wouldn’t say that if I weren’t beseiged in here with such deep supplies of gingersnaps and truffles.

Man, you’re in love
RR

December 17th, 2008

Tomorrow

I’ll be This Ain’t the Rosedale Library around 7:30, so that Pamela Stewart and I can help Jim Christy launch his new book, Scalawags.

It should be awesome, and I’m planning on being slightly less nervous than usual, emboldened by friends, glitter and pizza.

Without that worried head / there’d be just a bleeding neck
RR

December 16th, 2008

Matches and Misses

Remember September? Yeah, it’s blurry for me too, but I do recall going out to Winnipeg to participate in a couple events tat the very wonderful Thin Air Literary Festival. On of those events was The Matches and Misses reading with Daria Salamon, Nicole Markotić, Gerald Hill, David Bergen, Pasha Malla and l. There’s an audio recording of that lovely up now on the Thin Air podcasts list, if you want to feel like you were there. The evening was introduced and enlivened by Charlene Diehl and the whole thing was ace. It’s a long recording, and worth it, but if you are searching for my stuff, I’m fourth, just after intermission.

Yeah oh yeah
RR

Not sucking

Steven W. Beattie’s post about Canadian books that didn’t suck in 2008 is exciting overall, and not just because it includes *Once*, right next to My White Planet, one of my favourite non-sucking books of the year (see previous post). It is, however, such a joy to see *Once* out and socializing in such wonderful company.

New York was great
RR

December 15th, 2008

Making a list

Lately, there have been a lot of lists floating around the print media, the blogosphere, and every place else–something about the calendar year drawing to a close makes people want to enumerate what they’ve loved, liked, hated, eaten, read and watched; where they’ve been and what they’ve done.

It’s the book lists that I care about, obviously, though this year as most I don’t get as much confirmation/argument of my own opinions as suggestions. I (should I be embarrassed to tell you this?) don’t read very many brand-new books. If people are talking about something that sounds like the sort of lit-fic I enjoy, and people I respect are enjoying it, I will eventually read it, but not necessarily the year it gets published. I am reading more new books than I used to, but what with that whole 500-plus years since movable type came on the scene, I have quite a backlog from years past to get through.

The nice thing about books is that they stick around–almost everything I read this year is still in print and available, if you are reading these lists with an eye towards gift-buying. So while I’ve tried to stick to the best of the newer texts on this list, it’s been supplemented from other years. As well, I wouldn’t say these are the “best” books I read this year, rather those that stuck with me the most, that hit me the hardest, made me the happiest. A very personal list, but then, aren’t they all?

The notes are transcribed from my reading journal, the first-impressionistic semi-articulate paragraph that I write as soon as I finish anything. In case you were dying for a peek inside my reading process.

Books I Loved in 2008

The Killing Circle by Andrew Pyper
Deeply disturbing and profoundly well-written, a murder mystery about writers + how they maybe steal souls. If there weren’t so much genuine artistry to the prose, and so much writing about writing (my favourite thing) I would’ve found the violence too much. As it was, horrifying, but worth it.

Stunt by Claudia Dey
Wow. A sparkling, sparky, utterly new sort of book. Beautiful language provides a balm to the sadness of the plot. Slightly hard to follow the second half, but even if you miss a beat, the language and emotion carries you on. Lovely, aching work.

The Collected Stories of Leonard Michaels
It is something to read every short story a writer has ever written, starting in wild youth into elderly. When he was *on* he was brilliant and that was often: “Making Changes” (a really romantic orgy story), most of “Journal,” almost all of the Nachman stuff. Both comforting + alarming to find a few duds. I loved it more than I’d thought I would, + I planned to love it some.

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
A graphic novel about a homosexual dad’s relationship w his lesbian daughter, and with books. Fun, sad and beautiful. And wildly smart.

Various Miracles by Carol Shields.
Oh, I did love this. She makes formal constraints look like nothing, yet the stories are tight + spare + perfect. And warm + generous + just…oh.

Muriella Pent by Russell Smith.
Amazingly hilarious depictions of banal things–book club, Skydome, lit classes. Amazing dialogue, natch (boy banter!) Amazing sexuality (mainly). Can’t believe I hadn’t read this one until now.

Making Bones Walk by Alex Boyd
I am so used to working hard for my poetry–and when it’s worth it, I love to, but when poetry as accessible and urgently personal as this, it feels like a gift. Love poems, sleep poems, work + subway poems–my kind of poems.

Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About” by Mil Millington .
Hilarious lad-lit, both genders behaving dreadfully. Plot makes no sense, but set pieces + dialogue made me laugh aloud. Enormous (336 pages), v. satisfying.

My White Planet by Mark Anthony Jarman
Deeply challenging, yet repays all energies tenfold in insight and genuine pleasure. “Bear on a Chain” is like a blown-open story, still breathing and working brilliantly though you can see into the heart. Some terrifying violence you can’t look away from. Some great humour. Astounding achievement.

Flirt: The Interviews by Lorna Jackson.
Reputedly “difficult,” but I didn’t find it so. Funny + interesting + occasionally challenging, but mainly entertaining. Certainly a superlative act of imagination–a series of them.

Pardon Our Monsters by Andrew Hood
As good as expected, and then some. Very very honest + weird + violent, but also a real love of + joy in language. Also, hella funny.

Tom Thomson in Purgatory by Troy Jollimore
Very funny, wise, human. Stylistically tight, wild verb conjugations (don’t see that every day!), lovely to see sonnets that I can love heart and mind, and loved the characters behind it all, too.

The Quick and the Dead by Joy Williams
So brilliant + bizarre, sadness of characters not at all cloaked by the absurdities that surround them. Hilarious tragedy. Didn’t understand the ending, but don’t care.

The angels wanna wear my red shoes
RR

December 14th, 2008

Nice News

…helps, on a rainy, do-I-have-the-flu-or-don’t-I? sort of morning. News like:

*Once* on the Pickle Me This Indie Picks 2008 list.

Phillip Marchand reviews *Once* in The National Post.

I just can’t let this be
RR

December 12th, 2008

Language, Open and Shut

Writing is the only art form that mainly strives to be not itself. Any serious writer dwells in the beauty of language, the elegance of phrasing, sound and rhythm, but over the long-term, the longer-than-a-sentence term, good writing strives to make you stop seeing it, stop seeing the words on the page and start seeing the images and characters those words create. As a writer, I want readers to feel my stories as people and events, not in ink on paper.

To achieve this, of course, the writer is reliant on language, the very thing she wants to make you not see. To achieve an image that transcends ink and paper, you need language like a stone polished so brilliant that we see only the reflection of the world, and not the stone’s surface at all. The rightest word must be the most precise and specific, penetrating and resilient, in order to engage the reader in creating the image in his or her mind. If you just say “tree” the reader might see a budding maple from outside the window of her third-grade classroom, or she might see dying yellowed pinetree on the shoulder of an Alaska highway, but more than likely, the reader will just see the Times New Roman letters t-r-e-e, and nothing more.

A writer seeks to corner an image, an emotion, a sensation–to make it stay put for a minute so a reader can get a sort of fleeting, slantwise glimpse of what the writer sees in *her* head when she thinks about trunks and branches and leaves. You can never do it completely, and some writers are ok with more gaps in the fence than others. The task allottment might differ from writer to writer, or text to text, but the project of creating meaning in a story, novel or poem is always a joint one between writer and reader.

In conversation–well, in good conversation–statements are like story-writing. When I describe my day, date or dinner to you, I’m trying to give you enough information that you can recreate it in your own head. Same as a story. But dialogue is a much more delicate dynamic than text, and we not ever *just* offering information–in conversation we ask for information in return. And there is a very different linguistic necessity in asking questions, or even opening topics, than there is in making statements/telling stories.

I’ve had considerable sensitivity training, in the formal sense (there are many life experiences that qualify as sensitivity training, I know) and one of the things I’ve been taught is to open language as wide as possible, to leave space in a question for *every possible answer*.

You’d think that’d be easy–by the very fact of asking a question, we admit we don’t know the answer. But quite often, the words we use to ask can imply that we believe we know the range of the answer. When I point at a woman’s wedding band, and say, “How long have you and your husband been married?” that’s (say it together, grad school kids) heteronormative. When I suggest that an acquaintance buy a certain item, I suggest I know she can afford it. When I make an idle joke about a colleague being “off her meds,” I imply that I know she’s never taken mood-stabilizers.

And, as we’ve so often established her at Rose-coloured, what do I know?

Most people are tough enough to weather such slights, and generous enough to forgive them. But it’s alienating, absolutely, to misapprised (literally, mis-seen) again and again. And if one is going through a particularly vulnerable time, maybe you aren’t that tough. Around this time of year, there’s a lot of seemingly inoccuous queries about family that could be truly upsetting if your family is dead/abusive/too distant to afford plane fare. Never even mind that we aren’t all celebrating the same holidays–even as a Jew who enjoys Christmas, I don’t find it so unreasonable that *everybody* stick to saying “Season’s Greeting” to those whose denomination is unknown.

That my version of “open” language comes from sensitivity training leaves me open to a little bit of mockery, sometimes, and other times is just confusing. I am so well programmed (I actually eventually taught the class) that I really fear hurting someone by asking loaded questions like, “How was your Mother’s Day?” “Why don’t you buy a new one?” “Are you going to talk that over with a friend?”

So I’m a little over-delicate–I don’t ask a lot of questions if I can’t make them very neutral. Because I am actually passionately curious (read: nosy); I want to know everything about your life you feel like telling me. But there’s the thing, I want to know *anything*–and if I slant the question so that it sounds like I already know, or expect to know, why would you speak at all?

When I tell a story, on the page or in conversation, I want to give you the gift of what I know, more or less elaborately done up with paper and bow. When I ask a question, I want to give you clean a clean and empty box, with the flaps folded back, to make it easier for you to give me anything at all.

Can I put this lightly?
RR

Books for the Literati

*Once* makes Geoff Pevere’s Last Minute Shopping Guide.

Sort of amazing company to be in.

How I’ll hate going out in the snow
RR

December 10th, 2008

What Dreams May Come

Reading the Writing About Dreaming post on the Joyland Blog made me want to point out that I agree–nine times out of ten, a person talks about dreams in order to speak uninterrupted about him- or herself–who can contradict you, or even add information, if you are talking about what you imagined? It’s very annoying, especially if you, like me, mainly think that dreams are just myriad snipped-off ends and mangled impressions of the day that just passed.

But the other thing that post made me want to do is tell you about my dreams last night! I so rarely dream anything I can remember and then last night I did, and woke up to blogging about dreams and now I want to share. Here’s to contrarian self-absorbtion!

Dream #1: I needed to talk to this guy, but he’d gone camping.
Dream #2: An acquaintance was making fun of me for refusing to walk on the cracks between tiles on the floor (something I actually won’t do if I can avoid it. But the woman in the dream has never mocked me for it in waking life).
Dream #3: One of my friends was doing my laundry for some reason.

That’s it. Boring and pointless, yes? But that’s probably it for the week, Rebecca-dreamwise. And so it needed airing (well, not *needed*).

Soon one morning
RR