the fears of reading

As I mentioned earlier, I’ll be reading from my The M Word essay on Thursday night at Russell Books. I’ll be honest with you, I’m fairly nervous. Nervous because, while usually I love to read my work and know I can give a good performance, I’ve only ever read poetry. Not only this is prose, this is memoir-prose. And it’s not funny, or light. No, the essay I’m reading, “What Can’t Be Packed Away” is about loss.

Here I am in the airport, writing this, after a rush visit with my parents in my home town. Rushed, because my father was brought to emergency late Thursday night with heart failure. He’s home now, much better than the when he went in, but I will tell you that when rereading my essay to see what sections to read on Thursday night, I have a pang of guilt.

In the essay, which is largely about the fear of loss of my children, I wrote:

My father has been diagnosed with a terminal neurological condition. He is seventy-six. I know I should feel sadder than I do, but I can’t help but think: yes, this is how it should be. We hate to use the term, “old,” but yes, he is old. He is elderly. Of course, we would like another ten or twenty years with him, but I can’t help but whisper gratitude to the universe for choosing him over one of my children. This is how my superstition works.

And now, here I am, leaving from seeing my father so close to his own death to read to a group of strangers from this essay, I feel uneasy. It will be difficult reading an essay that explores the death of children I knew and the imagined deaths of my own children with this paragraph and my recent experience with my father so fresh. Frankly, it feels like I’m tempting fate.

I’m not shy about death. I think we need to talk about it in the world much more than we do, that we need to open about grief and loss. It is the only thing in life that unites us—we will face the deaths of those we love, we will die ourselves.

I’m reading Wallace Stegner’s All The Little Live Things right now and there is a lot about death in the book, a lot of talk and philosophizing. There are about two pages worth of quotes I’d like to copy out for you, but I’ve chosen this:

“It’s right there should be death in the world, it’s as natural as being born. We’re all apart of a big life pool, and we owe the world the space we fill and the chemicals we’re made of. Once we admit it’s not an abstraction, but something we do personally owe, it shouldn’t be hard.”

I don’t agree with Stegner’s character Marian, here. I think it death is always hard (though hard isn't the right word, either), but I think there should be more ways in this world to help us with death. Death doulas, choices, and more rituals/ceremonies, but this is a big topic and one for an essay, I think.

Now, I hope I haven’t scared you off coming to the reading tomorrow night. The M Word is an exceptional anthology, so many important essays in it. Please come and join the conversation.

The M Word on the Island

The M Word is coming to Victoria! I have the honour of launching this anthology with Fiona Lam, who is joining us from Vancouver, and Yvonne Blomer who will be reading from her essay in How to Expect What You're Not Expecting. We'll be reading at Russell Books this Thursday, May 8. Doors open at 7:00 and we'll start reading at 7:30.

I'm about to catch a flight, so I hope to write more about this shortly. I'm thrilled and terrified. If you're in Victoria, I hope to see you there!

Edmonton Poetry Festival

I'm not sure how to write this post, how to start it except by starting it. Part of me doesn't even want to write it because you know how it is when you have such a wonderful time and you start telling people about it and after a while the story and the event loses it's magic because you've spread it too thin? I can't be the only one who feels this way.

What I want to write about is the few days last week when I was at the Edmonton Poetry Festival. (All my crappy photos are on my phone on which my daughter is currently playing.)

There is so much to say, but it all can be distilled into this: I had a wonderful time.

The festival is one near to my heart as it was so integral to my four years in Edmonton. I was on the organizing board for the festival for three years and attended many, many events while I lived there. To be asked to attend as a featured artist was an honour and I was thrilled to be reading with a healthy mix of people I knew and people I wanted to know.

Aside from getting to see some (but, alas, not all) my Edmonton friends, I got to attend and read at some great events. My first night in Edmonton, I attended an event featuring the transcendent Joy Harjo. The next day I got to read with Shirley Service, Julie Robinson, and Sandy Pool. Sandy read from Undark and she blew me away. A fantastic performer and glorious writing. If you ever get the chance to hear her read, please do. The next day I did a workshop with grade eleven students transforming Macbeth into erasure poems. So much fun. Then I read with Rhea Trebegov, Paul Zits, and Kimmy Beach (with whom I got to spend a lot of time, lucky me!) Wednesday morning before flying back home.

It was a whirlwind and I was fortunate to experience some stellar poetry, spend time with good friends and great poets. Such a pleasure. Thank you, Edmonton. I hope it won't be too long until I see you again.

imaginary syllabus: California as Eden

I'm reading Wallace Stegner's All the Little Live Things right now (and will write more about it soon, I hope) and I can't help but make connections between it and two books I read earlier this year. I do this a lot and I'm sure I'm not the only one who does this, as in a sense, that's a part of reading, making connections between the text and all the things that inform our lives. I often think, ah! Someone should teach this book with that one, and that one.

So, I'm going to start writing these down here, because why not. And if you have anything you'd add to the list, please let me know. I'm not nearly as well-read as I'd like to be, so please help open it up for me.

Reading List for California as Eden found and lost
All the Little Live Things by Wallace Stegner
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Blue Nights by Joan Didion
Surfwise by Doug Pray

That's a pretty white list. What else would you add?

"creative recklessness is what it takes to be an artist"

"The freedom and creativity of that early life forms part of her theory about why there are fewer female than male choreographers in the ballet world. 'Things have changed a lot now but I think until recently, for a young boy to make a choice to be a dancer already takes a kind of courage and recklessness. It is easy for a girl to grow up in ballet and there is nothing she necessarily has to fight for or defend or endure in that journey. They require humility, obedience and blinkered vision and discipline, whereas a boy has to be really strong. To be able to take risks and to have this kind of creative recklessness is what it takes to be an artist, and you are not going to find that in many of the women who have gone through ballet school.'"

from an interview with Crystal Pite in The Telegraph

"the prevailing metaphor for women of my generation has failure built into it"

"'I think that’s not even to be wondered at,' he said. If you have a creative life, you can only do so much, he explained—something he, too, had had to come to terms with. 'If you give it in one place, it has to be taken away from another.'

Maxwell’s response to my puzzlement was so matter-of-fact that I didn’t realize until later that he hadn’t really explained the contradiction—he had just restated it as a fact of life. But that was the whole point: we were looking at the same thing in different ways, as men and women have been brought up to do. Men tend to see their lives, regardless of the balance of the various parts, as a unified whole, but the prevailing metaphor for women of my generation has failure built into it: we are said to “juggle” the various parts of our lives, and the only possible outcome if we concentrate on one ball in particular is that we drop the others. But this is not how Katharine White saw her life—partly because she could afford not to, by hiring people to juggle for her, but mainly because she just didn’t think that way. When I started looking at her life as she looked at it—and as she lived it—it suddenly seemed all of a piece."

from Lady With a Pencil by Nancy Franklin, an article about Katharine White, The New Yorker's fiction editor from 1925-1960

doing the work

I've been writing. Like really writing. Not editing, not doing research, not answering emails or hustling or blogging. I'm on a spurt and it's been great. I'm hoping to keep my head down and the eye on the prize (a finished first draft) by the time the residency is over. If I don't get distracted, it will happen.

Strangely, I have to thank the conversation I've posted below. Out of all the many books these women have written, I've only read Elizabeth Gilbert's most recent, The Signature of All Things (which I absolutely loved). I love how strong these women are, their friendship, and how they treat writing as work and just get it done.

Now I need to read Ann Patchett and more of Elizabeth Gilbert. If you can suggest which of her fiction I should start with, I'd be grateful. (I do plan on reading her This is a Story of a Happy Marriage soon.)

If you haven't watched this conversation, please take the time to. It's inspiring and entertaining.