on rereading: Short Haul Engine

I'm rereading Karen Solie right now, beginning with her first collection, Short Haul Engine. I realized that it's been a long time since I picked up her first book. I'm often returning to her third book, Pigeon, but cannot recall the last time I revisited her first, the one that made me fall in love with her work. (I was going to write her most recent, but I see that she has another forthcoming. Very exciting!)

I've reread more this year than any year before, and one thing that keeps surprising me, which really it shouldn't by now, is how little I remember from previous reads. Rereading Solie is no different.

There's lot to love in Short Haul Engine. It's an accomplished first collection, but like most first collections there is a rawness. It's a little messy, not at all self-conscious. I like that the edges haven't been all polished down.

I had forgotten that Solie once lived in Victoria, the city I now call home. I think of her as a Toronto poet from Saskatchewan, and I'm curious how long she lived here. There is a great poem in Short Haul Engine called "East Window, Victoria" about the longing for a real Prairie winter while living on the West Coast, where "Everything about the place/ demands affection." It was the second stanza that compelled me to read the poem to my husband last night:

In Edmonton, they are cursing
ancestors and old Volkswagens, shovelling
themselves into cardiac events.
In Churchill,
snow is an animal.

When I finished the poem, my husband said it was like the poem had been written for me. Here I am, living in what many consider paradise, but part of me longs for Edmonton, especially the winters. I know that I've romanticized our time there--my anger at the cold, long winters, the predatory johns, the crack-dealing neighbour have all softened. I loved all the free outdoor skating and I know I'd have become a cross country skier if we'd stayed.

Here, it's beautiful. Here it's always lush, even in the middle of December. Today, not only did I see robins, but also hummingbirds. It smelled of mud and new life. It felt like April. As Solie wrote, "So much evergreen. So much/ a constant."

The penultimate stanza sums up my longing, my strange allegiance perfectly:

But how dare you long
for those first mornings of frost
you bit into like an apple, the winters
skating an unbroken line
around your small clean body.
Ungrateful.

I do feel grateful to Solie for writing "East Window, Victoria" a poem I don't remember reading the first time, but now, where I am in my life both physically and emotionally, is the perfect poem for me. I suppose that's how all good literature works, but it seems especially true for poetry, that its meaning shifts as time does, as people do.

On rereading: East of Eden

I'm rereading Steinbeck's East of Eden right now. I've read it twice before, but the last time was about half my life ago, so I won't go on about how much I have forgotten.

It's a long and meandering novel. I know this is popular to say about books, but I really don't think it would be published now. Actually, maybe more to the point, I don't think it would be written like this now. The narrator is a very minor character in the book (Steinbeck himself as a child) but is also clearly omniscient. Are novels written this way anymore? I don't think so, though if I'm wrong, please let me know.

I'm only about 2/3 through (only! I'm on page 524!) and while I am loving so much about it--the vividness of his descriptions, his language--I am getting tired of the how the women are portrayed in this world. They are either saintly suffering women who cook and clean all the time, or they are devilish manipulators. There doesn't seem to be a middle ground, and I'm not sure this would even pass the Bechdel Test.

The novel does feel like a throwback, something from and for another time. It's interesting, to me, that it was published in the early 1950s and my beloved Gloria took place about a decade later. I wonder if Gloria ever read East of Eden?

on rereading Gloria, part four (and final)

I finished Gloria two weekends ago. When I was about fifty pages from the end and I kept trying to put it aside, not wanting leave Miss Gloria Cotter and 1957 just yet, but I couldn't. There is a momentum that builds that begs, no demands, the reader to read just one more page, until BAM you're at the end. And oh, what an end it is.

And then I spent the rest of the weekend googling characters and things from the novel, as if these were real people. Like Gloria's BFF Susie. I found this delightful video of a head majorette in 1950. Susie would have been a little younger than this woman, and I think she'd have been even better.



Fun, no?

I want to write about the ending and the book as a whole on last time, but I also don't want to spoil anything for those of you who haven't read it yet, but plan to, so I'm doing one of those fancy "after the jump" things. Trust me, you don't want to be spoiled, so instead of reading on, start on your copy of Gloria now.

Ahem.
Click here to continue (but only if you've read the novel!).

the God of poetry

"Gloria closed her eyes and tried to imagine her God--an incomprehensible, impersonal, sexless force--the God of coincidences, of her dreams and mental floodings, of the strange leaps her mind made when she knew something absolutely without knowing how she knew it; the God of love, certainly, and of the created world when it had been given to her to see it with heart-stopping crystal clarity; the God of poetry, she realized with a sudden inner leap--true poetry, she amended it--the God who inspired the words when they were true words--and her mind, taking off on its own, found the breath in the root of the word 'inspire.'"

from Gloria by Keith Maillard

on rereading Gloria, part three

I am now about two-thirds of the way through Gloria, but I'm not going to write about the plot right now. I want to talk about where Gloria sits in CanLit.

In a previous entry, I linked to Keith Maillard's own page on Gloria. In it, he wrote, "Gloria was short-listed for the Governor General’s Award in 1999. It is out of print." I couldn't quite believe that it was out of print, so I asked him via twitter, and he responded, "Yes, alas, Gloria is out of print. I am going to publish it as an eBooks eventually. A major project."

How can that be? How can a book nominated for one of the most important literary prizes in our nation, a book this good, is out of print? I've been thinking about this a lot and have a few theories.

Keith Maillard is an American born and raised and largely writes about America, most of his novels are set in fictional Raysburg, West Virginia. (I had always thought he was a draft-dodger, but reading his short autobiography, he clarifies that he was deemed unfit for service and left for Canada as a political statement.) He now (and by now, I mean for a good thirty years) lives in Vancouver, BC.

Those brief biographical details are a one-two punch. Would he be a more celebrated writer if he lived in Toronto? I honestly think so. Would he be a more celebrated writer if he was writing about Canada, or somewhere more "exotic" like India or Germany? I also think so.

Canadians have an uneasy relationship with the United States, especially when it comes to literary culture. A Canadian choosing to write about the United States doesn't seem very, well, Canadian. And, as much as things have shifted a little, Toronto is the publishing centre of the country.

Keith Maillard is a brilliant writer. His name should be mentioned when we talk about our greats: Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Mordecai Richler, Michael Ondatjee. And Gloria Cotter deserves a place in our collective consciousness, beside Duddy Kravitz and Anne Shirley.

But she won't. She's privileged, she's beautiful, she's smart. Her story is of the female experience in the 1950s--a young woman coming of age, discovering sex, poetry, and herself. She's the Prom Queen, the May Queen, a sorority girl, a country club brat. Class makes Canadians uncomfortable as does facing our privilege. We fancy ourselves underdogs, and Gloria is on the wrong side of what we like to experience, who we root for. (Though, if you've read it, you know that Gloria herself does feel like an outsider, a fraud. This is partially why I would consider this a Canadian book for a Canadian audience. We do see ourselves in this unlikely extraordinary young woman.)

It's a pity, as Gloria's story, while may not be universal, is vital. It's a woman's story told from a point of view we rarely experience. But above all that, it's beautifully written and a pleasurable read. Canadian literary culture is poorer for turning its back on Miss Gloria Cotter.

(There are about 80 copies of Gloria listed for sale on Abe Books. Pick one up, or even better, go to your local used bookshop to see if they have a copy.)

on rereading: Gloria, part two

Ken Henderson! For that section alone, I think all high school seniors/English 100 students should read Gloria. (I was going to say girls instead of seniors and students, but really, boys need to read this too.) I feel like all women have encountered a form of Ken Henderson at some point. I know I did, but I didn't have the sense to turn to Faerie Queene afterwards.

Also, we all need a Professor Bolton in our lives. I'm not sure I had one. I had potential Professor Boltons, but none were in my life long enough, or perhaps, I wasn't open enough to them to have such an impact.

Now, back to Gloria...

poetry was far more than a bunch of pretty words

"Poetry had always been the great love of her life, and so, of course, she'd cried over it before, but she'd never before heard music like Wyatt's, and now she understood what she must surely have always known: that poetry was far more than a bunch of pretty words--it was, of all the works of man, the most beautiful and profound and eternal."

from Gloria by Keith Maillard

on rereading: Gloria

As mentioned earlier, I am rereading Gloria by Keith Maillard. As of writing this, I'm about 200 pages into it and oh, how I am loving this book. It really is the perfect novel for me. Gloria, a young woman who loves clothes, boys, but above all, poetry.

I had forgotten that Susie was religious and the long conversations about literature. I had forgotten about Delta Lambda and being rushed. I had forgotten how early Billy Dougherty turned menacing. I had forgotten so much, but I am remembering the pleasure of reading the book and I wonder if the pleasure I'm feeling now is equal to, or even greater, than on first read.

A lot has happened to me in the fifteen or so years since reading it the first time and I know that there are things that are resonating with me thanks to my own life experiences that flew above my head the first time. I am now much closer to Laney's age than Gloria's, and I am far more sympathetic to her now. I am aware at how deftly Maillard crafts the family relationships, their conversations, how beautifully handles subtext.

I shall cut this short as I'd much rather use the little time I have to (re)read Gloria than write about it.

the pleasure of reading her again

I am turning forty this year. It's a big number, weighed down with baggage and expectations. I wish I could say that I'm staring down this number with grace and a light heart. Turning thirty was not a problem for me (I say, in retrospect--am I rewriting history here? I don't think so, but I might). I still have plenty of time in my thirties--the perk of being an autumn baby.

But I didn't want to write about aging today, so let me steer this post around.

It is fashionable amongst a certain set of people on social media to read only certain types of books in a year. A few years ago it was The Year of The Short Story (#YOSS). This year, I'm seeing a lot of The Year of the Woman (#ReadWomen2014) or The Year of People of Colour. I'm not one to jump on wagons of any sort, but I'm going to hitch my own this year--not exclusively, of course; I am a polyamorous reader.

But, staring down forty, I'd like to reread some books that were important to me earlier in my life. Steinbeck's East of Eden is the only novel I can think of that I've read as a teen and in my twenties. I'm going to reread it this year and will plan to read it in my forties as well.

I'm also going to reread Keith Maillard's Gloria. Gloria is a beloved book. I read it in my mid-twenties and it has stayed with my in a way very few novels have. I've said that it taught me how to be a woman, though I'm not quite sure that's true anymore. It at least shaped how I was a woman in my mid-twenties. I've been nervous to revisit it because I have elevated it so high in my mind and heart. But I am reading it again. I'm only about sixty pages in, but oh, it's so good to be back with Gloria. I'd forgotten a lot, but not everything, of course. Being with her is like being with an old friend. It all comes flooding back, and the past and present are richer because of it.

I'm a slow reader, so I'm not sure if there will be more books I will reread this year (both Gloria and East of Eden are long. There aren't that many that I can remember reading in my twenties that have really stuck with me, though as I write this, I few are popping in my head. But no grand pronouncements, no hashtags needed. Just the pleasure of revisiting a good friend.