a dreadful fascination

~ carin ~ 10 Comments

A few [not entirely precise] quotes from today’s International Festival of Authors event in Uxbridge, hosted by Blue Heron Books, where authors Jane Johnson and Laura Lippman were in lively conversation with Siri Agrell, and where the vibe was very living room, casual and writerly. The only thing missing was wine.

But, given that it was a brunch, this can be forgiven.
In no particular order, a few gems…

On writing the opposite gender and why women are better at it than men:

—The prey knows the predator better than the predator knows the prey. –Laura Lippman

—It’s less urgent for men to understand women. Historically, few men have had a female boss, for instance. —Jane Johnson

—Women have been learning to read faces since they lived in caves and stayed in groups, tending the fire, while men were out hitting things over the head. — Jane Johnson

On the secrets to success:

—Luck is what makes a book work. – Jane Johnson (meaning that’s the one thing the writer can’t control so if it doesn’t always hit the mark, don’t take it personally)

—We only make mistakes when we’re so sure we know something and don’t bother checking. – Laura Lippman

—Write a good sentence and move on. – Laura Lippman quoting Rebecca Lee

On characters:

—I once had a character change gender in the middle of a first draft. – Laura Lippman [her point, to keep writing, it’s a detail, deal with it later; first drafts are meant to allow the ‘barefoot wild child’ to just write without thinking…]

—A writer inhabits all her characters, the good and the bad ones. This is our empathy with humanity. – Jane Johnson

On process:

—When I start writing, I may know the beginning, middle and end of a book, but it’s how I get from one to the other that makes it live. – Jane Johnson

—What starts a book? A dreadful fascination. – Jane Johnson

—The danger is you can edit the life out of anything. – Jane Johnson

On publishing:

—The industry likes people who know what it is to work in an office. [versus the kookie eccentric ‘artiste’ type] – Laura Lippman

excuse the rustle

~ carin ~ 6 Comments

You there, measuring
worth in French cuffs
unable to discuss
the art of burning leaves
in a backyard pit, the smell
reminds you of nothing, the rustle
of ten thousand on the street
only gets in the way
of your feet
as you run
in wicking shorts,
and blinders.

the power of dark

~ carin ~ Leave a comment

This morning’s walk in all that lovely blackness, stars still out and street lights on—just the way I like it. In a few weeks we ‘fall back’ and mornings will be much brighter. I have no idea why we persist in this time altering routine every year. Didn’t it originate with children needing to help with farm chores before walking ten miles to school? Uphill. Both ways. Something like that. Light was important, that’s all I remember.

But that was before it was everywhere. All the time. Surely we could do with less of it now.

So I get up early and walk and in the darkness, I pass a young woman, she looks cosy in a pink hoodie, carries a large drinking container, presumably coffee [I’m not sure tea drinkers are as prone to wander about with flasks of chamomile and lapsang souchong, but I could be wrong]. Beside her an acorn coloured dog about the size and shape of a rolled up newspaper, walks in that sprightly way of short-legged canines who stroll with long-legged humans. She stares straight ahead, and the contrast between her yawning demeanor and the dog’s peppy Isn’t this great, isn’t this fun, doncha love a walk, doncha, doncha, doncha, wanna go faster, wanna throw me a stick, go ahead, throw me one, throw me one, isn’t this just so GREAT??!! vibe makes me smile. We exchange pleasant good mornings as we pass each other and I think what a civilized thing it is to greet a stranger so early in the day. A tiny celebration of being alive, the kind of greeting that doesn’t always happen on brighter occasions.

We walk the same loop but in opposite directions so a bit later meet again, this time both of us doing what Douglas Adams in The Meaning of Liff  calls the corriecravie:

“…[a] highly skilled process by which both protagonists continue to approach while keeping up the pretence that they haven’t noticed each other…”

By now the streetlights are off, the day’s crept in and we can see each other quite clearly. Pink hoodie maintains her part in the corriecravie by chatting with the previously-ignored acorn pup while I feign interest in the leaves I’m kicking through, although we’re probably both en guarde for making eye contact and chuckling if necessary.

Turns out it’s not.

In the light of day we pass each other without a glance.

this explains everything

~ carin ~ 7 Comments

So I’m in bed Sunday morning reading and loving the stories, the reminiscences of various Canadians in Everybody’s Favourites as they recall special books from their childhood. I make a list of titles to get—for me, for friends, nieces and nephews, ones to browse through at the library. I note that many of the books mentioned I haven’t read and I begin to wonder what kind of childhood did I have…??

Then a title jumps out at me: Island of the Blue Dolphins.

I know this book.

I can see the cover, a darkish blue, the illustration of a girl on the grassy edge of a cliff by the sea, a cradle floating in the water. I remember that it’s a slim hardcover and suddenly I’m overwhelmed with a whim to see it, maybe even crack it open again. I go down to the basement, sort through my sadly unsorted kid collection.

I find it.

And I’m right about the cover; it’s exactly as I remember. Only it’s not Island of the Blue Dolphins. It’s a completely different book— Child of the Western Isles, by Rosalie Fry.

No dolphins.

Familiar as I am with the cover, I don’t remember ever reading it but it has drawings [by the author] and so I take it upstairs and snuggle back under the covers and after a page or two… I do remember… and I’m eight or nine or ten again and it’s summer and I’m not sitting on my front porch amongst pots of wax begonias but am right there on one of those wind-swept, wildflowery all-cliffs-and-rocks-and-sea islands off the coast of Scotland wherever Scotland is, and I’m tearing around with Fiona, who was born in the Western Isles, lucky bugger, but left as a child with her family to live in a city where a few years later she became unwell and the doctor ordered her back to the health-giving properties of life by the sea with her grandparents where she adventures about, rows boats, plays with oyster shells, befriends seals and finds a lonely cabin to live in before eventually uncovering the mystery of a long-lost baby brother.
Spoiler alert: there’s a happy ending.

How could I have forgotten this story? I used to want to be Fiona (that is, when I wasn’t wanting to be Nancy Drew). In fact, I think it may be Fiona, Child of the Western Isles, that’s responsible, at least in part, for my love and fascination of watery environs, of gulls and oysters and wind-swept hills. Not to mention lonely cabins and row-boats.

It may even be this story that led me to invent a baby brother one year. When my teacher asked if my parents would be coming to the parent/teacher night, I replied that no, they wouldn’t be going because my mother was in the hospital having a baby, a boy, I said. I’m not sure if I gave him a name. I only remember my mum and dad coming home from the event and telling me how surprised Mrs. Thingy was to see them…

This book, I notice, is one of the handful I own that is stamped with the name of my elementary school and that I possibly forgot-to-return, aka pilfered. So ancient is it that it has a strip of foolscap glued onto the back inside cover with the word Due handwritten at the top and a list of dates written below it in a variety of ink and handwriting styles. March 1st [no year] is the last date. I really can’t give it back [by that I mean I really don’t want to], but I’m thinking I’d almost like to write to the school and pay for the book. [But not the late fines!]

Then again, I wonder… is owning up a noble and good idea or am I just inviting the very-late-and-possibly-pilfered-book-patrol to show up at my door with a warrant?

this is not a review: malarky, by anakana schofield

~ carin ~ 2 Comments

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: my favourite books are the ones in which nothing happens, except that whole worlds change.

Anakana Schofield’s Malarky  fits the bill perfectly.

The world in question belongs to a middle-aged widow as she speaks to a counsellor, this after having become ‘confused’ or possibly temporarily off her nut [though she strikes me as saner than most] following her husband’s death. Between what she tells the counsellor, who she refers to as Grief, and what she tells us and what is told us via third person narration, we learn that she, Philomena, aka Our Woman, some years previous, and quite by chance, meets the mistress of her cattle farming husband, known as Himself. Turns out said mistress [The Red Twit] feels compelled to share details of the dalliance that Our Woman would be happier not to know.

And it’s not as if her head isn’t already full up with images of her son and another lad having it off in the pasture, after which he joins the military and she, Our Woman, knows, just knows, he won’t be coming back in one piece. And there’s no consolation to be found in her husband. Even if he weren’t indulging himself with The Red Twit, she cannot discuss the simplest things with him, much less anything of an emotional nature. Certainly not anything beyond cows.

In fact, he blames her for the son being ‘soft’.

So she keeps much inside herself, does Our Woman. Or, I should say, she keeps much from the people in her life. With us, the reader, she’s very good at sharing.

“The thing people don’t realize about patchwork women like me is how given to exasperation we are. On the surface, we fuss over the cleanliness of a work surface, or kitchen counter top, we notice the scum around the bath, we may, the most desperate amongst us, brasso the door handles each week, but do not for a millisecond misbelieve that as we are doing this undulating task we are not awash with rage and salty sentiment the likes of which would sting the eyes of out of the most coarse rumped pig.”

Soon enough she meets a man who is driven by strange curiosities about the mechanics of reproduction from a woman’s point of view, and, although he is slightly younger than would have been ideal, his interest in practicalities, in the anthropology of sex rather than the emotions, suits her in many ways, not the least of which for its quality of distraction. She begins an affair with him, partly to even the score but mostly to understand her son.

“Jimmy’s absence taking all of it, more than I wanted gone. No sooner is something gone than we must know more of it. Why’s that? I often felt this same way when a cow leaves to the factory. I’ve no interest in the animal, but once missing, a hole forms for her. I look for her. I miss her in a whole new way.”

It should be said the book is not about sex.

Not in the slightest.

It’s about language. The way we speak, the way we hear, what we communicate and why and how and how we pick our moments to reveal the things we do. And to whom. And then we’re back to why.

Why do we marry, love, befriend, hate? Are these even choices? What do we accept, what do we hope to change? And then we’re back to the how.

“Everything about widowhood is exhausting because you’re trying to recall, unable to recall and then expected to explain why you cannot recall. It is not as simple as living. It is not as simple as being irritated. Being alive and married is like sanding a windowsill. Maybe it is dusty, it may get in your eyes or knick your fingers but you can look at it and see there’s a windowsill. You can look at your husband and feel no need to say anything to him.
“The curse of the widow is the non-stop chatter outside and around your head. Like a television talk show where you loathe the questions, but cannot turn it off.”

I adore the way Our Woman notices the details of life even as its biggest boulders are falling on her head, the way a character “…ponders how it all went wrong, while her biro did a word search.”

Schofield’s use of language, the playfulness of it, including local dialect and turns of phrase [the story is set in the countryside outside Dublin], as well as clever stylistic choices, all conspires to convey the message of how we communicate—and is pitch perfect. Gorgeous in fact. And even though I’ll admit the sometimes unusual sentence structure and occasional [intentional] missing punctuation annoyed me at first, I couldn’t stop reading. Much like meeting up with someone who rattles on and on and you think, god, how do I get out of this, but then, something in their eyes, some gesture, some honest inflection in their voice makes you hear, really hear, what they’re saying and it’s so real and they’re sharing it with you and you realize that’s no small thing and so you listen and before you know it you’re leaning forward across the table, yes, yes, go on, you’re saying… and when it’s time to leave you make a date to meet again soon and as you walk away in separate directions, you notice not much is different except a shift in the world… by just the tiniest degree.

Reading Malarky is like that.