Birdwatching with Don McKay

The pace here at the Sage Hill Poetry Colloquium has been measured yet intense.  Because I'm working with Veronica's photographs, I don't have to wait for the muse; her work is my muse. I simply choose a photograph and read around it or stare at it long enough to find a way in. (Today I was reading Benjamin's Arcades Project.)  Many of them are almost metaphors for the human experience or condition or the human world we create:  they give me a rich range of things to write about.  Then sometimes less than a day later, we workshop it.  My colleagues here are exacting and helpful.  Then it's on to another poem.

So on Sunday, many of us needed a break.  Don McKay had checked out a park at the bottom of Last Mountain Lake, one where I've often been, and I suggested a drive along 99, a mostly dirt road that runs at the foot of the valley between Craven and Southey.  Nine of us scrunched into two cars, I leading, Don behind.  I can tell you a secret about Don McKay that is no longer a secret.  He's a fairly leisurely driver on roads marked 100 km, (in fact, you can lose him) but he goes like stink on dirt roads.  I got a little worried when I could no longer see the dust he kicked up.  But I also learned that if we're in bird-rich landscape, it makes more sense to let him be the lead car.  Rather than stopping because you can see that he is way behind you and has gotten out of the car with his binoculars, and wondering what he's seeing, you can stop just behind him and see the same things.

At Last Mountain Lake, I saw and heard many things that I've seen and heard before, except now I know what they mean.  There's a difference between merely passively seeing and actually noticing, a difference between  taking note, rather than simply letting the sounds and sights wash over you in a pleasurable but ignorant melange. We watched a Killdeer set up her nest in some mud, some shovellers on the shores, red wing blackbirds, terns, lots of geese and ducks.  Along 99, we saw a pair of Swainson's Hawks sitting on a fence, I heard a Western Meadowlark; two flocks of 6 pelicans serenely sailed the thermals down the  Qu'Appelle Valley.  I learned to tell a Barn Swallow from a Tree Swallow (which isn't rocket science).  It was a beautiful day; in fact, beauty swept you off your feet at every turn.  I was brought back to the magic of the Qu'Appelle Valley by the reaction of one of my classmates, who had never seen it before, and so who allowed me to see it anew and feel wonder anew.

In some ways, this wasn't a day off:  it was another poetry lesson.  I have a feeling that identifying birds isn't a matter of seeing them clearly posed on a nearby tree and recognizing them from their pictures in books.  Because you seldom see them that clearly.  You need to understand their behaviour, their habits, their songs, the patterns of their flight, their habitat.  Experience gives you fragments of some of these things--you can see a wing, a throat, or some tail feathers; you hear a bit of song--and you need to make something out of that, just as life's experience gives you fragments that you eke out with your own imagination to make a coherent whole that, when truly crafted, is as alive and perhaps as fragile as a bird.   Much like birds, you have to understand poems and all their unruly and unpredictable habits, or create them on the wing as they flit just outside of your consciousness, just at the edge of language, that place where you need the second language of form to help you unearth that uncanny, unearthly thing, the poem.

Sean Virgo was here earlier in the week, and he talked about the fact that it is the poet's job to create beauty.  I reached into my pocket of definitions and pulled out Alexander Nehamas's understanding of beauty--which has nothing to do with any kind of prettiness.  Nehemas normally writes the kind of philosophy where every point is pinned down before another one rises up out of the implications of the first.  But when he comes to define beauty, he suddenly gets very personal, talking about the people we love and their particular beauties.  For him, when we return to something or someone or some place time and time again because we know that each time it will repay our curiosity,  because it will tell us something more about itself or ourselves or our world, we have come face to face with beauty and perhaps with love.

I have been thinking a lot about voice here, with Don's voice at the fore.  How does such wisdom and knowledge of earth and human become these unerring, seemingly simple and humble lyrics that we listen to or read with such attention because we know there are depths and depths beneath the surface?  Watching his awe over a pair of hawks made me suspect that fleeting beauty and his love of it, his dedicated fascination with bird and rock and human  have become so much a part of him that they are transfigured into deep, humble knowledge.

Sage Hill's Generosity

Jane Austen has a lovely little metafictional moment in her first novel, Northanger Abbey, when she observes that many women writers don't read or praise the work of other women writers.  And if a novelist can't depend on another novelist, who can she count on?  I think the same is true of poets.  When you consider that more Canadians think that Elvis is still alive than read a poem in the last year, you realize that we are perhaps one another's most avid readers.  That might account for our behaviour when we get together.  No movie scripts, cat fights, or gossip columns here.  What I have found is the most remarkable and imaginative yet rigorous support.

The monastery helps.  There have been all manner of celebrations within these walls, and we hang around the dinner table with glasses of wine (sometimes to the dismay of our Franciscan hosts who would like to wash our dishes so they can finish their own days), telling our favourite (and often groan-inducing) jokes.  But there is also remarkable discipline suggested by our monastic rooms.  This sense of purpose is heightened by our sense of good fortune to be here working with Don McKay, one of Canada's finest and most generous poets.  The Qu'Appelle Valley helps. Sometimes there are as many as seven of us sitting in the comfy chairs reading or writing in a magical, pregnant silence, uninterrupted.  There has apparently been wildlife, though I've missed it all.  People told of a coyote chorus last night around 1 a.m., though all I heard were banging pipes.  There have been deer and owls and the obligatory and numerous ticks.

On our first full day together, we all talked about our projects, talked about their challenges and read a single poem out loud.  I learned, first of all, that I have to get my classmates' reading lists.  My own sense of what is happening in Canadian poetry right now is rather narrow, and I learned much simply from the joyous cacophony of styles and subjects my classmates are exploring.  Now I can analyze a poem with the best of them, but they have a way of bringing up issues of craft that I'd never considered.  (We're not just talking line breaks here.)

The first task Don set us was to take an object important to another classmate and write a poem that defamiliarized it, that looked at it as we might if we were from Mars.  He urged us to make conjectures about its secret life, to see its independent existence unconstrained by our sense of its use, referencing some Polish phenomonologists who no longer trusted ideas but only things.  I am ashamed to say that, caught in the drafting of a poem for my book and completely puzzled by what it was I held in my hand (it looked like a concrete bird that had been broken off something but was apparently the fossil of something--a claw, I hypothesized) I tanked on this assignment and would like to try it with something that perhaps wasn't arbitrarily chosen for me.  Perhaps we can only defamiliarize the familiar.

Don also talked about the creative imperative.  Some times we feel that there's a fence or earth wall or barricade in front of us.  He suggests we simply cross it to find out why it's there.  Sometimes those barriers are tabu, which makes them not only things perhaps to avoid, but things with energy.  He asked about our allegiance to intelligibility; I can tell you that mine is high, at least when it comes to syntax.  If someone can't sort out a sentence (I care less whether they can make it mean something), then I need to do some clean-up or rearranging.  He talked about the energy enjambment creates, the way we leap across the lines, the kind of syncopation or swing it creates that end-stopped lines or lines that are simply phrases don't have.

Our second group meeting was a workshop where my classmates argued and suggested and cajoled about issues of craft, ideas about what belonged in a particular poem, about ways to read and ways to write.  Even before they came to my work (I was the last one for the day), I learned so much from them that it made my head spin.  Next morning I woke exhilarated, ready to revise, torn between doing that and finishing a poem I'd begun a day before.  I feel as if I'm getting the hang of this syncopation that moves words in an entirely different way.

Don ended out first workshop with a remarkable mini-lecture that I certainly won't do justice to here.  He said the eros of poetry came from the love between the lyric moment--which wants to stop time, to go on being a moment as long as it possibly can, and the narrative drive, which asks "And then?" and "What next?"  He talked in a way I found helpful about the lyric novel which subverts that narrative drive with lyrical moments that don't want to go anywhere, and even explained what I might have been trying to do in Blue Duets.  He says you can create a lot of energy when you break the rules, but if I know myself as a writer and as a social being, I know that I often don't know where the rules are, what the rules are.  Sometimes that's a blessing rather than a curse, though if I knew the rules, I could ignore them, couldn't I?

Shadows

 Spring, as we have all been whining, has been extraordinarily reluctant this year.  This has left many of us in Saskatchewan disoriented, as we look out the window at 8 p.m.--and we know it's 8 because we feel that dinner has settled and that we're end-of-day tired--to see it still light outside and the blue hour coming down on snow.  I've been aware that the trees are reluctant to bud, the grass cautious about extending some green into the grey-brown lawns (are they also greyer and browner than normal?), because normally I am watching these changes as my poor students write their final exams.

So I've found myself watching the shadows on my walls.  I suppose in some way this is like saying that I'm watching the light.  But the shadow of branches with a bird at my feeder or the shadows of tangled branches on my kitchen walls have been, perhaps, a reaction to this spring's spare beauty--a beauty almost reluctant to arrive, but unable to stop itself.  There have been lots of butterflies in my back yard, but I lose them as the fly into the sun and can more easily watch their shadows.

There have been other shadows.  Saturday was Angela Oxman's funeral, and since her death two weeks ago, I have been aware of how she is a shadow:  how I think about her delight in spring and in her garden, how I realize that she should be out in that  lovely slanting end-of-day light to see what has ventured up, to admire the green shoots, maybe even admire the tenacity of this plant, that shrub, these bulbs, their determination to reach for sunshine when the earth itself it still cold.  Or I will think about her nurse's take-charge belief in life, and realize that this lives on only in our memories of her.  It is up to us to continue to carry her in the world, something I suspect her dear husband, who kept her home to the end, and her sons will do with aplomb and devotion.  

Maybe this is something about death that you only learn intuitively when you lose someone very close to you, someone whom you know so intimately that in a crowd you see their gestures out of the corner of your eye, hear their favourite expressions, see their world view right alongside yours as you consider a problem.  It's been difficult for me to explain, but my parents are more present than they were when my father was an unspeaking old man who could only take my hand or lean his head into my shoulder, or than when my mother was made completely unfamiliar (well, not completely) by her fury at losing reason, her ability to think, her grip on reality--a fury she hurled at everyone around her since she couldn't aim it at that abstract thing--time--that was stealing it. Now they come back as small joyous fireworks in phrases or memories that, over time, come as close to a mental hologram of them as it's possible to get.  For all that they are shadowy, it's the light they give off that surprises.  

Sunday night, Bill and I took our first long walk of this spring, both of us with our cameras, because they somehow help us pay attention to what's around us.  The trees have finally begun to bud, two weeks late by my estimate.  The blackbirds are back by the creek, the mourning doves' wings are whistling in my back yard, their sad coos lifted out of sadness by the light and warmth.  The robins' songs twine into my work room, where I don't mind being a little cool if it comes with birdsong.  Much of what is around us is dominated by the shadows of last fall and winter,  but the light is unmistakable.

Stories and the realities they create

Particularly in times of fear and confusion, we want stories; pointless violence like the bombs at the Boston Marathon makes us want stories that will explain why--even while many of us feel that any explanation the bombers could give would not be, literally or figuratively, a reason.  (I'll admit that I had problems with language in that last sentence:  which was a reason, which an explanation?  Let's just say that the explanation that made sense to the bombers would not seem reasonable to us.)  One of Obama's gifts as president, when he isn't being hamstrung by a Congress that has neither reasons nor explanations for their failure to pass gun control legislation, is to be storyteller-in-chief.  It's his job to create the narratives that go some small distance toward restoring order and confidence:  to tell the bombers that they will be caught, to tell the victims that they will run again, to assert the triumph of goodness and hope and will.

But even while we're hungry for this narrative we're also often disgusted with what that media offers us for stories.  Novel Prize-winner Daniel Kahnemann notes that the prevalence of stories about bird flu or child abductions--stories that make us frightened--set up what he calls "availability cascades."  That is, by over-emphasizing some threats, the media nudge us to take actions that are not really in our best interests.  Michael Cohen, writing in The Guardian, pointed to a crucial disconnection between locking down Boston for a day and Congress's failure to pass laws restricting the sale of guns without more thorough background checks:

"The same day of the marathon bombing in Boston, 11 Americans were murdered by guns. The pregnant Breshauna Jackson was killed in Dallas, allegedly by her boyfriend. In Richmond, California, James Tucker III was shot and killed while riding his bicycle – assailants unknown. Nigel Hardy, a 13-year-old boy in Palmdale, California, who was being bullied in school, took his own life. He used the gun that his father kept at home. And in Brooklyn, New York, an off-duty police officer used her department-issued Glock 9mm handgun to kill herself, her boyfriend and her one-year old child.

"At the same time that investigators were in the midst of a high-profile manhunt for the marathon bombers that ended on Friday evening, 38 more Americans – with little fanfare – died from gun violence. One was a 22-year old resident of Boston. They are a tiny percentage of the 3,531 Americans killed by guns in the past four months – a total that surpasses the number of Americans who died on 9/11 and is one fewer than the number of US soldiers who lost their lives in combat operations in Iraq. Yet, none of this daily violence was considered urgent enough to motivate Congress to impose a mild, commonsense restriction on gun purchasers."  (You can find a link to Cohen's essay below.)


 Here's my own recent favourite from last week.  CBC has been reporting 11 cases of a new bird flu in China, even though human-to-human transmission hasn't yet occurred.  At the same time, the media doesn't tell us that, world wide, approximately 2,740 people die in automobile accidents every day--for a total of over a million a year.  Our media and our leaders have clearly figured out that prompting us to be fearful helps their ratings or their election chances, but they're not quite willing to share the stories that might undermine our entire way of life, whether those stories are about guns or cars. Yet the stories they tell profoundly shape the way we feel about our lives and our world, perhaps because a sense of physical security is a cornerstone of our sense of well-being.

Stories make powerful explanations.  We can watch the fascinating narrative arc while at the same time waiting for the denoument that ties causes to effects.  They explain our world.  Yet at the same time, our confidence in stories as agents of explanation is perhaps misplaced. You've done it:  a friend or a family member does something that you find upsetting, puzzling, or hurtful.  So you make a story about it, linking it to other events or comments, only to find it's the wrong story.  It wasn't an insult; it was embarrassment.  They weren't avoiding you; they were trying to give you space. 

For my exam period entertainment, I've been reading a book of essays by Tony Judt called The Memory Chalet.  The essays arose from his middle-of-the-night conversations with his memory while he was in the later stages of ALS.  Unable to write or type, he would use a chalet that was part of fond childhood memories to help him construct fairly brief essays--he calls them feuilletons--that he would laboriously speak to his emanuenses in the morning.  In one of these, he admits that he thought he knew America:

"For West Europeans raised in the 1950s, "America" was Bing Crosby, Hopalong Cassidy, and overvalued dollars flowing copiously from the plain pants pockets of midwestern tourists.  By the 1970s the image had shifted away from the cowboy West to the Manhattan Canyons of Lieutenant Kojak.  My generation enthusiastically replaced Bing with Elvis, and Elvis with Motown and the Beach Boys; but we had not the slightest idea what Memphis or Detroit--or southern California for that matter--actually looked like" (158).

Similarly, Judt certainly had an illustrious career as an historian both in England and in the United States, but it wasn't until he had a midlife crisis that prompted him to learn Czech that he realized how partial his understanding of European history--one that ignored Eastern Europe--had been.  (I think I'll learn a language for my next midlife crisis.  It sounds at least more useful than a car or an affair.)

Judt's experience is not exactly a surprise.  Anyone who deals with ideas knows that any coherent narrative that maintains enough interest to grab a reader's attention is going to be problematic.  Historian Hayden White calls this the Content of the Form, a book of groundbreaking essays on history and historiography.  White argues that our expectation of a narrative arc determines what events we think are appropriate for history.  Good historical stories have heroes and villains, battles and triumphs or defeats.  The slow attempt, recorded by the French Annales school, to figure out how thickly to plant wheat and how heavily to lay on the cow manure in order to maximize one's crop doesn't make for captivating reading. But that struggle probably influences our contemporary lives more than, say, the Battle of Agincourt.

Yet I've discovered of late that even stories about institutions inadvertently create an inaccurate portrait.  This has happened of late at U of R.  The stories about IPAC finances have put the university's attempts to develop carbon capture and storage capacity on the front pages of the Leader Post and on the CBC news.  Ditto the story about how Engineering solved a $1.3 million shortfall.  At the same time, however, there were some quieter stories happening elsewhere that suggested that members of the university were quietly working to sustain the environment and develop links with the community.  For example, the university has community gardening projects, called "The Edible Campus,"  that make a profound difference in the community.  Last year, the gardens behind the library, outside the Language Institute, and at FNUC donated 1,500 pounds of fresh food to Carmichael Outreach.  At the same time, "Fruit for Thought," a student-led effort that evolved out of Katherine Arbuthnott's Psychology of the Environment class, harvested 30 trees and gathered 3,000 pounds of fruit, some of which went to the Regina Food Bank.  These two organizations have been rewarded for their efforts:  the Community Gardens received a Farm Credit Corporation Regina Spirit Fund Award, and Fruit for Thought was given a SaskPower Waste Minimization Award.  The Edible Campus (which includes these two projects) was given a Regional Centre of Expertise on Education for Sustainable Development in Saskatchewan Award for "contributing to creating and sustaining awareness of sustainable food practices in Saskatchewan."

On another front, RPIRG and members of the Faculty of Arts have been instrumental in the creation of the Public Pastures-Public Interest group which spearheaded the very productive Pastures Forum that I wrote about on November 30.  This effort has caught the attention of Margaret Atwood, who, along with her husband, Graeme Gibson, will be visiting the community pastures between June 24 and June 27 "to draw attention to the global significance of conservation programming and bird habitat at risk on federal community pastures now being transferred to Saskatchewan."  She will be tweeting about the experience to her 392,000 followers, attempting to raise awareness about these lands that are at risk.  And, apropros of the U of R's investment in Carbon Capture and Storage Technology, these pastures capture 2.5 times the carbon of any storage technology under development.  And they're already there, already playing an important role in protecting species, in rural ecosystems and in rural economy by providing work for pasture managers and managed grazing for ranchers.  

So what do we do about the fact that we are inclined to tell and trumpet the stories of IPAC and the Faculty of Engineering, when there are other, quieter stories of success and dedication?  Is it that we can't help following the big money?  Does money control more than we think?  Does it decide which stories are important?

Last Saturday night, the Saskatchewan Book Awards had its gala celebrating its twenty years and recognizing writers and publishers across the province.  Each of the writers who won awards had stories to tell about the people and the communities that supported them, about the curiosity that drove them, about the rewards (rarely financial) of the work they do.  For each of those stories, there were four or five others that any of the nominees might have told.  In turn, what we celebrated on Saturday night is the enormous and exciting variety of stories that sustain a culture. 


 You can find Cohen's essay in The Guardian here: http://m.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/21/boston-marathon-bombs-us-gun-law

Here's the link to the Public Pastures website: http://pfrapastureposts.wordpress.com/about/who-we-are/ 

 Here's a link to my earlier post, "Time and the Land" about the Pastures Forum: http://blueduets.blogspot.ca/2012/11/time-and-land.html

 Here is a link to the SBA web page, which will help you follow the upcoming readings: http://www.bookawards.sk.ca/index.php
There will be a reading over lunch at the Legislate Library on May 8.  Just in case it's an incentive, the library provides lunch.  Candace Savage will be one of the speakers.  I'll post updates on FB to keep you informed.

Rant about (problematic) truth

I get in these moods--maybe it's because it was another cold day, though the sun was shining so there was no earthly reason (I hear my mother's voice in that last expression) for it to be so bloody cold; maybe it's because I broke another knitting needle and must laboriously pick up the stitches, which will make my stockinette uneven, so I'll have to tink; (that's "knit" backwards); maybe it's just because.  Whatever "because" is, I've gotten to the point where seeing the glass half full, finding the silver lining, is too exhausting.  To use an expression of my brother-in-law, Bill, "Sure is stupid out."

Stupid today came in two sizes, small and large.  I began the day with the small size when my husband Bill alerted me to the article on the CBC website about the use of money donated by Wascana Energy to fund a research chair with a focus on heavy oil recovery processes to cover a deficit incurred in the Faculty of Engineering and Applied Sciences.  We are assured that the Faculty is now getting the appropriate oversight so this won't happen again.  To quote my mother, that's like closing the barn door after the horses are already out.  I have two almost visceral reactions to this news.  Note that I've been very careful in my minimal description of the story on the CBC website.  There's nothing careful about my reactions, however.  First, faculty members who are trying to defend their academic freedom which appears to be under negotiation in this round of bargaining have been told that the Faculty of Engineering doesn't share our passion.  They are much more interested in patents.  Yet what have we been told much of that $1.3 million was used for?  Let me quote the CBC story:  "The university provided some detail and acknowledged that more than $500,000 was spent by the faculty of engineering on legal fees 'for patent and intellectual property work.'"  Let me see if I have this straight.

I doubt there are very many academics who don't recognize how precious their academic freedom is.  The long tradition of this concept essentially acknowledges two things.  One is that someone needs a protected place from which to challenge those moments when powerful individuals or a society make decisions that are not in a culture's best interests.  The second is that the academy, which has as its central raison d'etre an attempt to strain or lurch or fly closer and closer to the truth, is the logical place for such protection to reside.  Our culture's well-being resides in our right and responsibility to declare the truth as we see it.  That truth doesn't belong to any single being:  it is the result of a long, messy, hilarious, and often acrimonious conversation about what matters, who matters, what we value, and what the facts--as far as we can discern them--are.  But when we mute some of the perspectives that might contribute to that conversation, the future suffers.  We know this right now, in Canada, because Canadians and scientists around the world are concerned about the muzzling of Canadian researchers.  We are playing with the planet's future, but we have decided to play with only a fractions of the facts at our disposal?  I don't think that, in my lifetime, I have seen an historical moment when academic freedom has been more crucial.  At the same time, we are being told that the University requires limits to that freedom.

But it is "all right" (I put those words in quotations marks because I don't know what was said behind closed doors; I only know the apparent outcome)  for a dean to use trust funds intended to create a research chair in order to pay legal bills to sort out issues of patents and intellectual property.  In order words--remember, these are my visceral reactions--profit is fine but critique is not.  This is how I felt about my institution this morning.  Doubtless I've missed some of the facts and doubtless there are all kinds of reasons that we don't know all the facts.  In the words of one of my mantras, there's always another story and the story is almost always more complicated than you can imagine.  But this is how I was forced to see the academy, and the academy's values, this morning.

The large size of stupid came on tonight's news, where we were told that the Canadian Government is going to create a website that illustrates how we are being environmentally responsible in our development of the oil sands.  These triggered off memories of various other ads about what the Canadian government is doing for the environment.  Someone out there thinks words, whether they are backed by facts or not, make something true. Who's going to do the fact-checking for this industry-funded website? 

On days when I'm in this mood, triggered by things large and small, I think that the human race is really fairly stupid, that we lurch around in the dark and only just miss exterminating ourselves by accident.  (Cold War anyone?  What on earth was that all about?  The economic costs of responding to climate change?  How much do you think it cost to clean up after Katrina and Sandy?  And you can't possibly put a dollar value on the suffering.)  We lumber around, spin on our heels, look behind us, and notice that something is a little better.  Child mortality and hunger is down.  AIDS is being controlled, though not quickly enough, particularly in Africa.  Human rights have expanded a little more, yet our intolerance has become more and more deadly, more and more explosive.  We  pat ourselves on the back and take collective credit or give some credit to governments.  But I feel that we have less and less leadership that is concerned with our well-being, and more government by ideology and special interest group. (The U.S. failure to pass a bill widening background checks on guns comes to mind here--another big version of stupid.)   I think that if someone tells me one more time that "the market" is the best solution to homelessness and food bank use, I'll....  I don't honestly know what I'll do.  I'm tempted to hit them with a Python-esque rubber chicken.  And then to turn away in despair.  Because what other reaction can I have to valuing of profit over an attempt to acknowledge, responsibly, and with a million caveats, what is true?

The roots and routes writers follow

The University of Michigan, where I took my B.A. and M.A., had an excellent journalism school.  I took a couple classes during both degrees, thinking vaguely that this might be a route to becoming a writer.  Yet even that sentence is too decided:  I'm not sure I thought about becoming anything.  My best evidence for that is my reaction to Robert Finnigan, the graduate chair at the University of Manitoba, telling me (with his army boots firmly planted on the corner of his desk) there would be no jobs for me when I finished my Ph.D. He was doing his due diligence, and I appreciated that.  At the same time, I airily responded that it didn't matter:  studying literature was what I loved doing.  As someone who struggled with depression, simply figuring out what gave me meaningful, enduring pleasure was perhaps more important than finding a job.  My first husband was playing trumpet in the Winnipeg Symphony, and we managed to live frugally yet well off his small salary.

This may be one of those ramifying essays that follows one branch to its tip, finds itself stymied, and goes back to the trunk, travels up it for a ways before discovering yet another interesting detour.  Let me start this again:  I took journalism classes  at Michigan.  In my second year as an M.A. student, I took a small seminar class that was probably called something like "Writing Nonfiction."  It was 1975, and the anthology, The New Journalism, edited by Tom Wolfe, that is probably the seed (let's do stay with plant metaphors) that grew into Creative Nonfiction, had only been out two years.  It attempted to understand what writers like Wolfe himself, Barry Lopez, John McPhee, and Joan Didion were doing with the essay that was different.  In complete contrast to their more literary approach to the essay, my prof told us that the best work he'd ever gotten in this class explained how to hang a door.  I can't even begin to parse the sexism and lack of imagination in such a prototype.  I wanted to write about Solzhenitsyn, who had just immigrated to the United States, and who, in so doing I thought, had brought his writing career to an abrupt end.   (It turns out I was right.)  I had been reading Russian literature in Russian for four years, and knew this body of work quite well; I had also taken multiple courses in Russian history.  I wanted to play, I would now say to my prof, the public intellectual.  He immediately challenged any expertise that I would have for such a project and suggested--rather forcefully if I remember--that I write about the Influenza Epidemic in 1918.  I dutifully went off and did lots of research, learning that in cities like New York, employers were creative enough to stagger their employees' start times so that the subways and buses wouldn't be too crowded.  Spitting in public was a crime.  Thousands died anyway.  I'm sure I wrote a dutiful report on the epidemic.  I also tried writing about quilts, but the prof was unenthusiastic.  My struggles in this class to find the intersection of my own terrain--the things that fascinated me--and the approved terrain of my prof, ended my engagement with nonfiction.  Perhaps I was simply too young to have a body of thought and knowledge and experience to write respectable nonfiction.  Perhaps my prof's approach was ultimately discouraging.  We'll never know, which is probably a good thing.

In spite of the fact that I used The New Journalism in creative writing classes I taught at Winnipeg Education Centre (an off-campus program at the University of Manitoba whose students wanted to become inner city teachers and social workers), in spite of the fact that I read Joan Didion's White Album with delight or that I was willing to read through a very long essay in Harper's that described the labour involved in wood-firing pottery and the contingencies that made their marks on the pots themselves, creative nonfiction was off my radar for quite a number of years.  Then the collision of several forces brought me back.

One was practical:  I was asked to edit a Canadian edition of a wonderful American textbook:  Barbara Fine Clouse's Patterns for a Purpose.  I read Ignatieff, Thomas King, June Callwood, Gabor Mate, Wayne Grady, Mark Kingwell:  in short, I discovered the remarkable range of Canadian creative nonfiction.

The second colliding force was the research I needed to do to begin writing Soul Weather.  Never mind that I had to be on top of what was happening with climate change and contemporary ceramics.  I also needed a better fix on the young people I would be writing about, something that went beyond what I saw in the classroom.  I read The Ego Boom, I read Days of Destruction; Days of Revolt, I read lots on the Occupy movement, I read autobiographies about anorexia.  I read Jack Layton's Homelessness and Bill McKibben's Eaarth.  I wanted to understand the present moment, and I realized that fiction wasn't telling me a lot about this.  I'm not quite sure what that says.  Do novels tell us about life at middle age because the novelists we typically read--those who have made it far enough in their career to make it onto our radar--are mostly over 35?  Certainly a lot of Canadian fiction at the present moment is historical.  I don't know how to understand that either.

The third force was my work on Virginia Woolf.  Normally, one reads her essays two or three at a time, but in order to understand what she was thinking about literature's form and force, I started with volume 1 and read straight through to volume 6.  Never mind being gobsmacked by the role she played as one of the important public intellectuals of her time or the endless inventiveness of her essays and the gorgeousness--always trimmed to appropriate dimensions--of her prose.  One gets a profound lesson in what the essay can do.

The fourth was publishing Blue Duets and being told by my publisher that I needed to keep a blog; in this climate, one needs to have an online presence to market books.  I had no idea what a blog might be, even after visiting some that were recommended.  But the publicist simply said that readers would want to know about my life.  Okay, I knew about public diaries.  I've read Nin's and Woolf's and Max Frisch's.  I could do this.  Yet after the initial readings and the brief tour was over, there wasn't much to say about bad roads or enthusiastic (and in one case nonexistent) crowds.  So I think my public autobiography turned into an autobiography of my mind.  I began to write about all those things I would have loved to wax eloquent about  in my classes, but knew I shouldn't--beauty, craftsmanship, art, the power of reading, the historical moment, our relationship to nature and the delight we take from it, climate change.

Two members of my community played roles that might surprise them.  One day Medrie Purdham generously said that she thought I was a wonderful essayist.  Essays?  Was that was I was doing--writing essays?  How had these little squibs of thought become essays?  Then Brenda Schmidt in her blog recommended Philip Lopate's remarkable  The Art of the Personal Essay and later Lopate's To Show and to Tell.  Lopate's advice made sense to me; some of it reflected what I was already doing.  His anthology gave me new models and ways of thinking about this elastic form.

And then there are my readers.  Many of you kindly and helpfully comment on what you have read, showing me two things.  One was simply those moments when I seemed to touch you.  The other was how the essay is part of the cultural conversation we are longing to have and that doesn't quite happen on Facebook.  I'll begin this spring by spending two weeks with Don McKay and 8 other fine poets at Sage Hill working on my ekphrastic poems.  Then I'll travel to Paris with Veronica, where she'll take more photographs.  Once home, I will settle down to the book on Woolf's aesthetics, hoping to get a draft finished by late August, just in time to plan a new class.  (This will be my last year of teaching, and I'm creating two new classes!)  But I thought I'd work slowly on an essay on minimalism, a topic I've returned to here several times.  I'd like to weave the aesthetic and architectural interest in minimalism into a personal narrative, to conclude that at this moment of my life and at this historical moment, minimalism beckons.  As I get older, I want to jettison things.  And as we look at the unsustainability of our economy and environment, I suspect we need to revisit minimalist values.  Certainly, I can see this in the academy where two trends--the expansive nineties and the corporatization of the academy--are not meeting the need for fiscal restraint in a context which is generating a lot of anger and angst.  What I love about writing nonfiction is the way craftsmanship is perhaps more important than inspiration or wild creativity.  Have you noticed how overblown plots are these days?  Nonfiction beautifully sidesteps that.  And simply creating clear sentences that echo the shape of my thought is profoundly satisfying in troubling times.  This academic year, simply sitting down to write a blog post has helped me keep my sanity.  One clear, fitting word after another is good discipline.

But here's the thing I'd like to close with in a way that is perhaps more "closed" than I normally like to be.  This moment in my writing life is the result of a series of accidents and of some generous (and ungenerous) moments.  It's easy enough to tell writers, or anyone who invites creativity into their life, to be deaf to criticism.  First, creative people tend to be rather vulnerable.  Second, sometimes criticism is just what we need.  Perhaps it's more useful to tell them to be open to accident and to the delight it brings them.

Rebellion and the minimalism of pain

I've decided not to go out today.  I'm skipping the gym, and am trying to pretend that it isn't the 7th of April and that we didn't get more snow last night.  I'm sitting in my blue-grey-green workroom with my back to the south windows, trying to pretend it isn't snowing, except I can hear that the world is a little quieter--except for the sound of tires on wet pavement.  The word you are all using is "relentless."  This weather is straight out of Doris Lessing's The Making of the Representative for Planet Eight, from her Canopus in Argos:  Archives series.   Planet Eight has a temperate climate where, under the guidance of the Canopeans, the mixed races develop a peaceful culture.  This is brutally interrupted when "interstellar rearrangements" bring about an ice age.  They attempt to hang on while the Canopeans prepare another home for them. But disaster strikes the new planet, and the the ice age will not slow.  At the end, they become mere being and join in a single consciousness that preserves the lore, wisdom, knowledge, joy, and struggle of everyone on the planet.  Will we all be freeze-dried into mere being before May?

I have another motive for my rebellion.  A couple of weeks ago, in the midst of intense marking, I realized I hadn't been sick since I returned from the Woolf conference last June.  Couldn't I come down with a minor cold or a quick bit of stomach flu?  I wanted a day in bed with cats and without responsibilities.  Our uncanny bodies often have a way of fulfilling such perverse wishes:  last Sunday, after a day of grading, I found that someone had been twisting a red hot corkscrew just under my left shoulder blade.  Rather than gaining the oblivion of a sleepy sick day, I was perfectly capable of marking and indeed had trouble sleeping.  Two massages and an awful lot of muscle relaxant later, I'm just a bit better:  I don't want to scream.

When I was writing about minimalism, Katherine Arbuthnott talked about the minimalism of pain, something she knows a good deal about.  So I decided on a kind of minimal day today, absolutely in line with my desire to go nowhere.  I learned a new provisional cast-on and started a blue raw silk sweater that will look springy when it's done.  I finally finished reading Blithedale Romance, which has been totally charming (and is relatively brief--225 pages), but which seemed to open out into extra pages behind every one of Zenobia's secrets.  (One of the oddities of the academic year is that just as you are bringing the winter term to a frantic close, you are asked to plan your fall classes and order books--hence my reading of Hawthorne's novel, which will introduce students to the way the novel has some roots in the romance--mediaeval, not Harlequin.  Tonight I'll begin Great Expectations as a sample of the Bildungsroman.)  I managed, accidentally on purpose, to take my second dose of muscle relaxants an hour early, and so settled down for nearly two hours of sleep with Sheba curled up on my belly, keeping watch.  Bill must have caught on to my desire for a sick day, because when he got back from his workout he came upstairs with a glass of ice water and watched me drink it, as he always does when I'm sick.  Then he suggested we had plenty of leftovers for dinner. 

When you spend a day in bed, you can manage to do quite a lot because you're only doing what is necessary.  Wayne Grady wrote a lovely essay "On Walking," in his book Bringing Back the Dodo.  It's a peripatetic piece that tells us about different kinds of walking--from Thoreau's sauntering to Bill Bryson's hiking the Appalachian Trail, about how our knees and backs aren't quite suited to walking, and about the differences between city and country walking.  But the essay's still point--literally and figuratively--is that walking slows down time because it has a human pace that allows us to notice the world around us.  In this weather, it demands we notice the world around us, watching for puddles and slick spots.  Is it too paradoxical to say that the minimalism of pain and a day in bed similarly slow time down to reflective dimensions?  I not only thought about how I'll teach the layers of Blithedale Romance, and learned a new cast on; I found memories that hadn't bubbled up in my mind for years.  None of these was particularly significant:  for some reason, I recalled the narrow shallow cupboards with beautifully carved wooden doors that every room in Stockwell Hall had for our toothbrushes and toothpaste, our Cleopatra eyeliner, our wash cloths and towels. Sheba seemed to be channeling my first cat, so I thought for a while about Bugsy's own brand of devilish sweetness.  Perhaps because I was reading Hawthorne, I thought about my long bus ride from central Boston to Brandeis, where I worked for a year.  I thought about the book on Japanese sand gardens I'd borrowed from the Brandeis University library.  Ordinary as the memories were, they affirm something of one's humanity that might get lost in frantic grading and unending winters and the ways we cope now with being overwhelmed. 

Tonight at dinner, we listened to recordings Art Tatum made in Hollywood in the early 1950s:  his fingers on the keys sparkle, perhaps with California sunshine.  Even though Tatum was a child prodigy who could play by ear by the time he was three, he was also nearly blind.  Long considered one of the jazz piano greats for his spectacular ornament and his subtle chord progressions, by the time he made these classic recordings he had been outmoded by bebop.  After that, I put on "Ella and Louis Again," for the remarkable musical partnership and the witty lyrics. Their first song began "Don't cry.  Oh honey, please don't be that way.  Clouds in the sky will bring the violets of May.  Tears are in vain.  O honey, please don't be that way."   Do you know how much weather there is on this album?  Not only rainy springs (which I suspect we'd be grateful for at this point), but "Autumn in New York." Then Ella tells Louis she "can't remember a worse December.  Just watch those icicles form."  Bill put on the Tatum for the sparkling cheer.  I added Ella and Louis because to a young woman watching the civil rights movement in the sixties (and who knows exactly where she was when the news came that Martin Luther King had been killed), this great jazz is never without an undertone of struggle.  So it gives you a kind of balanced perspective:  heartbreak and joy, whimsy and realism, great songs brought alive by musicians who playfully ignored the score.  But I didn't expect to get more complaints about weather.

The zigzag of reading and life

I've been reading D.H. Lawrence's monumental Women in Love, because that's the penultimate book in my class that looks at the fifty years between Daniel Deronda and Mrs Dalloway.  I took a whole class on Lawrence while I was working on my Master's at Michigan, and it was terrible for my style, which became overly coordinated, full of appositives and digressions, rather like this sentence.  I have a kind of love-hate relationship with Lawrence, not only because of his style (for, after all, who can argue with the man who profoundly wants to bring the body into the novel and wants to understand the relationship between the body's and the mind's desires), but also because of his revolutionary view of women.  Quite simply, he understood that diminishing or oppressing women simply wasn't on, ethically.  At the same time, however, you can see clearly in him, in his shrill defense of masculinity, the kind of anxiety this new view of women has unleashed.

David Bradshaw's excellent introduction to the Oxford World Classics edition makes clear the extent to which Women in Love is preoccupied with society after World War I, though the war is never mentioned.  Rather, there's an underlying violence that pervades human relationships and makes the characters cynical and wary--particularly Lawrence's stand-in, Birkin.  The book is comprised of these well-constructed, very scenic chapters that almost stand on their own.  Interestingly, because there is no forward thrust of plot (sorry:  I've been reading too much Lawrence), each of the chapters seems isolated from the others, creating the sense not only of a fragmented world, but of people who can't quite get the facets of their personalities to cohere.  In the chapter called "An Island," Birkin is patching an old punt so he can row around Willey Water, and Ursula comes upon him for a little intense, frank conversation.  Birkin confesses to her "It infuriates me that I can't get right, at the really growing part of me.  I feel all tangled and messed up, and I can't get straight anyhow.  I don't know what really to do."  Ursula, in her calm way asks him why he has to do anything; might he not be "really patrician, and to do nothing but just be oneself, like a walking flower"?

"I quite agree," he said, "if one has burst into blossom.  But I can't get my flower into blossom anyhow.  Either it is blighted in the bud, or has got the smother-fly, or it isn't nourished.  Curse it, it isn't even a bud.  It is a contravened knot."  She catches on and asks "And why is it...that there is no flowering, no dignity of human life now?"

I was surprised to find that Lawrence's post-apocalyptic novel resonated so fully with the pre-apocalyptic mood I've experienced from time to time over the last six months or so.  He asks an important question:  why are things refusing to bloom right now?  Why do we find our students, for example, either so filled with anxiety or so indifferent that they have lost the curiosity that almost belongs to the young?  Why, in the face of so many movements like Idle No More or Occupy, do leaders continue to pursue their own agendas so unswervingly?   A "contravened knot," surely.

At the same time, however, I've been reading Haruki Murakami's After Dark.  Like his famous and quite wonderful Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, After Dark has its surreal elements.  I'm not entirely sure I "get" him, though After Dark is at least small enough to keep close track of the characters and the way they are interwoven.  It takes place in a large Japanese city and studies the kinds of lives people live between midnight and 8 a.m.  There's a young woman who is finding places to spend the night reading a very fat book because her beautiful elder sister decided, a couple of months ago, to settle down for a good sleep and hasn't for all intents and purposes woken up during that time.  Meanwhile, we are given visions of that beautiful sister migrating in some disturbing way to entirely different spaces she can't escape.  There's a young jazz musician who makes friends with our young reader, and a former female wrestler who now manages a "love ho," and exacts her own kind of justice with johns who beat their sex workers.  What I love about Murakami's work is the sense that he presents a coherent universe parallel to our own where an entirely different (though often consistent) set of rules obtains.  He challenges our self-absorbed or lazy or indifferent sense that we know how the world works.

Yesterday I began re-reading Dianne Warren's gentle and moving Cool Water.  I was trying to explain to my first-years today what Alistair MacLeod was attempting to do with his very elegiac "The Summer Closing Down."  It's such a beautiful story and their silence was suggesting they didn't get it.  Literature sometimes simply seeks to bear witness.  In MacLeod's case, it's bearing witness to all the changes in the Cape Breton town where the narrator lives:  changes in the fisheries, changes to the miners' bodies, changes to relationships because the miners are gone for so much of their lives, changes to traditions, as their children pursue dentistry or law instead of mining.  I realized that this can be said of Warren's novel too:  she is bearing witness to the changes to the family farm, to the towns that support those farms, to the landscape around them. to the shifting dunes of the Great Sand Hills.

I want my students, at the end of English 110, to be able to read independently.  At the same time, I realize that Warren's construction of Cool Water creates some challenges for the reader.  I'd argue that almost any book worth its salt cannot simply be read.  Our first reading is merely a matter of finding out what we should have been looking for.  If we have loved the world, the characters, the world-view, then we know what to look for as we re-read.  Cool Water, which follows its small cast around Juliet, SK for a summer day, could have been a sequence of short stories, a character for each story.  But that wouldn't have given us a sense of how all these lives intertwine in Juliet's landscape.   Instead, the novel is broken up according to the time of day, and we are given brief chapters from the perspectives of half a dozen of the characters.  Combining the goal of having my students read independently with the necessity of re-reading, I spent last week writing questions for each of the main characters or sometimes for groups of characters, and sorted my students into groups to re-read the novel and attempt to understand the developments of a single character.  On Tuesday of next week, they will start teaching one another what they've learned.

After I spent a fairly intense weekend writing questions for eight characters or families, I needed a break.  I found it in Inhuman Resources, a novel by my colleague Jes Battis.  Let me be perfectly clear:  this is not the kind of thing I normally read, so if I'm clueless about this marriage between the crime scene investigation genre and paranormal fantasy, it's not Jes's fault.  I was thoroughly enchanted with his characters, particularly his lead detective Tess Corday, with her skills as a mage.  Like any good detective, she occasionally compromises those skills by being passionate and principled, by being a know-it-all, by over-reacting.  Thus is the detective taken out of the sphere of the superhuman, though that isn't strictly true for Tessa.  I found Jes's depiction of the underworld where the necromancerss live to be so imaginative that I might have wanted to spend time there if it hadn't been so threatening.  They travel by flower sometimes, other times on the backs of nightmares, to the centre of darkness.  The working out of a complex plot involving Velasquez's Las Meninas and a Picasso variation was a complete surprise.  Jes's novel took me out of myself into a world where I was enthralled--no paranormal skills required, only Jes's extraordinary imagination.

Now I am about halfway through Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, this blog post having taken a while--about two weeks of a passionate reader's life.  I'm not going to try to do a quick portrait of what is perhaps Woolf's most accessible novel.  What Woolf values most of all is daily experience and the way people claim and inhabit this experience.  Septimus Warren Smith illustrates how dangerous this intensity can be, while the almost tinselly Clarissa is redeemed by it.  Everything about the prose of Mrs Dalloway, the rhythm, the sentence structures, the detailed observations, the smooth flow from one consciousness to another, is designed to surround  and immerse the reader with that experience.

The psychologists tell us that this kind of immersed reading provides us with dress rehearsals for our own lives.  We learn compassion and empathy from reading, as we attempt to turn little black marks on the page into characters with lives and experiences and emotions that we attempt to recover and comprehend.  What I have loved over the last couple of weeks' intense reading is the opportunity to be so many people, to see many worlds from a myriad of perspectives, which is perhaps why we should read the unfamiliar, the challenging, the seemingly inexplicable.  Doing so, we can occupy many selves and many worlds.

A week-long birthday

When you come to be sixty-three, birthdays change.  I'm not, like any other 39-year-old woman, pretending that they're not happening, and I'm not a prima donna who wants everyone else to recognize then.  Rather, they're occasions for reflection and celebration, and sometimes they take a whole week.  After all, there's a lot to celebrate.  Until September of 2012, I'd have told you I have the best job in the world.  I have admitted unabashedly on Facebook that Bill is a partner whom I never could have imagined:  funny, compassionate, reflective, committed to equality--and not simply in our relationship.  My daughter Veronica and I are close enough to be working on a book together; I'm writing poems inspired by her photographs and they are taking me adventurously and gloriously outside my comfort zone.  We have what we call "quality time" (yes, we put it in ironic quotation marks) once a week and chat like a couple of old friends.  And that, of course, brings up friends, who are the rich soil of any life.  I am a lucky woman, and though there are disappointments and wounds, I'm going to celebrate my luck.

The reflection came through a sequence of gifts that started arriving last Saturday.  Outside Artesian, after Noah Richler's talk on non-fiction, I stopped to chat with former student Kris Brandhagen, who had gone out for a cigarette.  She shared her wonderful news with me:  that she will be studying art in Toronto next fall.  And then came the gift:  she remembers when, years ago, I sat down with my green pen and taught her how a sentence worked.  Saturday she confessed that she was something she'd struggled with that no one had quite addressed.  "You don't remember all your students, but they remember you and your green pens," she assured me.  Maybe I do have the best job in the world.  This was an unexpected gift on a reluctant spring afternoon.

Then Tuesday I decided it was time to wash the car, and so went to the new Co-Op out beyond Grasslands:  I had a couple of other errands there.  (I'm addicted to dried apples and can only get them at Bulk Barn.)  It's one of those car washes where you steer your left tire into a conveyor belt.  Except that from that position, short little old ladies like me can't reach the machine where you punch in your code.  So I had to open the car door.  Back inside, I got D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love out of the bag on the seat next to me and settled in for a little reading.  Until, that is, I noticed that the inside of my car was getting washed.  Every time the water let up a little, I tried closing my door, but the problem was that my seat belt had fallen out and was also getting nicely cleaned, as was my black cashmere coat and Lawrence's novel.  This could have ruined my day, along with everything else in Regina these days that simply makes life harder than it really needs to be.  (Yes, I'm thinking of those mounds of snow that make it very difficult to get out of my garage, and that make it hard to navigate everywhere.)  Except I'm living on a street with its built-in reality check, which shifted my mood by the time I drove up the back lane and struggled, this time, to get into the garage.

On Wednesday, I went to visit my wonderful neighbour, Angela Oxman, who is living with a diagnosis of terminal cancer.  From my bedroom, I can see the light on in the room where she takes her visitors and her meals and sleeps her troubled nights.  She is, as you might now guess, my reality check.  The moment I got in the door of her room, she burst out "There are some things I need to say to you," and I took her hand and settled in for wonderful conversation.  The hour and a half was essentially spent by two women celebrating what they've liked about one another for the last twenty-three years.  One of the things I've admired most about her was the way she retired.  She took some history classes.  She worked with the Stephen Ministry.  She spent time with her grandchildren and with the children at St. Theresa School.  Of children she simply says "Arouse their curiosity, and everything else will take care of itself."  On nights when she has difficulty sleeping, she gets out all her happy memories and pores over them like a fond, familiar book.  My time with her was one of the treasures of my week.

One of my former students, Scott McLean, was our waiter when Veronica, Bill and I had a birthday dinner at Fireside Bistro.   Scott's gift was birthday drinks.  In another corner of the room was another student, Elaine (her last name escapes me, though I know she went on to library science).  A lovely dinner there was followed by deadly lemon curd cheesecake made by Veronica.  Veronica bought me a book about knitting Estonian lace with some patterns that are going to stretch all my skills, and a lovely jar of papaya body butter which smells like summer--something we all need right now.  Bill gave me tickets to the Royal Winnipeg Ballet performance of "Sleeping Beauty" last night--which was magical.  Sometimes I forget how much I love classical ballet until I see it again.  The composers, choreographers, dancers, scene designers, makers of stiff tutus, all work toward a single goal: to make a vivid, timeless world that envelopes  the stories that speak to us. 

I gave myself a day to play, banishing all thoughts of time by appliquing the basket blocks you see above.  There's a wonderful line in Don McKay's poem "Winter Solstice Moon:  An Eclogue," about the fact that we sometimes want time to be pregnant:  full of possibilities.  At this point in the term, I'm working six days a week, so needed a day when attention to craftsmanship means I didn't worry about time passing, but about spending time well.

Then there were conversations with my sister, Karen, with Gloria, my sister-in-law, and with Jeanne Shami; then a Government House concert with Katherine Arbuthnott.  Their horn player, Richard Burdick, has long been trying to convince the RSO administration to just loosen the purse strings to pay enough for a second horn player so that a whole new repertoire is possible.  I heard an early Beethoven septet and a piece Josef Miroslav Weber, a composer I've never heard of who brought the audience to its feet with "From My Life," a musical biography with  a lovely reflective playfulness.

Here are all the good things:  friendship, loving family, reminders of mortality leavened with care and generosity and wisdom, memories of the privilege it has been to touch students' lives, to watch them grow and evolve, music and literature.  Women in Love has dried out, and over the weekend I turned my attention to Dianne Warren's Cool Water, which I'm teaching in my Literature and the Environment class.

The last gift came yesterday morning, in a conversation  with a colleague who is far more affected by the budget crunch--and hence by all the decisions we make--than I am.  He is understandably grieving, and bitter because his time with us may be suddenly brought to an arbitrary end.  It's a terrible position to be in:  to have your life on hold while administrators try to figure out what's important, and to have little faith that they will get it right.  I nevertheless set him a difficult task.  Do not let administrators shape your last days here.  If you love what you do, keep loving what you do.  Like Angela, spend your time with the good memories and the good experiences.

Which, of course, is good advice for me, too.  Yup.  I do have one of the best jobs in the world.  If only someone would come up with a vaccine for two epidemics:  comma splices and the unwillingness to think for oneself.  Guess that's my job.

Who comes when you call yourself?

Last Sunday night I found myself standing in front of the washing machine, chucking in the laundry as I sorted it, with the most peculiar existential question on my lips.  Who was I as I did this?  How old was I?  That last question was particularly noisy:  after a full day's work finishing Howards End for my honours/graduate class and responding to my honours and graduate students' research paper proposals, I had come home from the university, peeled carrots and parsnips, washed potatoes, and tucked them into my clay baker with a fresh chicken; then I had promptly gone downstairs to start the laundry.  (Lest anyone wonder where Bill is in all this, he'd cleaned the house earlier in the day.  We divide up the chores pretty equally.  Makes for a happy household.)  I don't like doing the laundry on Sunday night.  It makes me feel disorganized.  It makes me feel, if you must know, like I am fourteen and my mother still has to remind me to do things before I leave them until it's too late.  Also, my birthday is this month, so I'm all too aware that I am turning sixty-three, but those fourteen-year-old feelings wouldn't leave me alone.  Yet that was the easy question, the question that caused a dis-ease easier to describe.  Really, who was this person standing here?  It reminded me of the end of Woolf's Orlando where Orlando wonders who will come when she calls:

"Then she called hesitatingly, as if the person she wanted might not be there, 'Orlando?'  For if there are (at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how many different people are there not--Heaven help us--all having lodgement at one time or another in the human spirit?  Some say two thousand and fifty-two.  So that it is the most usual thing in the world for a person to call, directly they are alone, Orlando? (if that is one's name) meaning by that, Come, come!  I'm sick to death of this particular self.  I want another.  Hence, the astonishing changes we see in our friends.  But it is not altogether plain sailing, either, for though one may say, as Orlando said (being out in the country and needing another self presumably) Orlando?  still the Orlando she needs may not come; these selfes of which we are built up, one on top of another, as plates are piled on a waiter's hand, have attachments elsewhere, sympathies, little constitutions and rights of their own, call them what you will (and for many of these things there is no name) so that one will only come if it is raining, another in a room with green curtains, another when Mrs Jones is not there, another if you can promise it a glass of wine--and so on; for everybody can multiply from his own experience the different terms which his didfferent selves have made with him--and some are too wildly ridiculous to be mentioned in print at all"  (293-4).

You can imagine me, one hand on the top of the washing machine, one hand chucking stuff inside, suddenly stopping and calling, first, for the literary reference.  And then for myself.  Perhaps the call came from exhaustion, both physical and mental.  "Why can't one work 16/7 (with eight hours for sleep)?" I have often asked myself, never getting an answer but only the rather matter-of-fact "Well, one can't.  One's brain turns to soapsuds.  And one's self goes missing."

Perhaps it was the snow.  Chicken in oven and laundry in washer, I sat down to read David Bergen's The Age of Hope.  Looking out the window, I saw one of those mid-winter days when the world is nearly obscured by fluffy, floating snow almost suspended, draping the world in its curtain, obscuring it.  Such days can be almost cozy in December, an excuse to stay home and huddle under a quilt with cats.  But such days are out of place in March.  The day before, we had a nice man named Rob take down our back fence and bring in his bobcat and haul off the snow that would have ended in our basement when it melted.  We didn't need more snow.  But more than the frustration with snow that many people have called "relentless," was the sense that the light was wrong.  I was waiting for a late dinner, reading and watching the snow, and the blue hour was just coming down.   

Perhaps it was reading David Bergen's novel.  I realized that he was setting himself an important and intriguing problem in his attempt to represent the point of view of a housewife born in 1930s Manitoba, deep in Mennonite territory.  But the novel was dissatisfying in a couple of ways.  First, the more interesting moments in Hope's life (this is not a plot-driven novel) recall more successful works like Plath's The Bell Jar, or Doris Lessing's short story "To Room Nineteen" or even The Golden Notebook.  The territory of the woman who finds herself wanting more than what society has given her has been convincingly examined by other writers.  I'm not alone in this; Mark Sampson, writing in Quill and Quire writes  "Bergen channels Alice Munro, or perhaps Carol Shields, in trying to write a slow-boiling domestic novel with a political undercurrent. Unfortunately, there isn’t anything particularly new or inspired in The Age of Hope. Yes, things happen: Hope has a nervous breakdown and spends time in a mental hospital; her husband Roy’s car dealership fails and bankrupts the family; their son Conner marries a shrew who eventually leaves him; Penny falls in with a religious cult. But the book’s underlying themes have been presented before – and more skilfully – in countless other works."

But my dissatisfaction wasn't simply with the Hope's life or the novel's plot.  Bergen's novel is profoundly "told," much of it summary and little of it scene.  As well, the voice of Hope is almost entirely drowned out by the voice of Bergen's more analytic, educated, and formal narrator.  Hope's thoughts and experiences as obscured by the very novel that seeks to explore them. 

At the same time, I couldn't simply stop reading the novel; I cared enough about Hope, hidden as she often seemed to be, to keep reading.  I heard echoes of my mother's frustrated life.  Just as Hope leaves nursing school to marry Roy Koop, my mother left Normal School, where she would have learned to be a teacher, because she was homesick.  Neither of them found motherhood entirely satisfying (if, that is, motherhood is supposed to be entirely satisfying for anyone.  As a good feminist--someone who believes that what feminism seeks is more choice for everyone, men and women alike--I can't answer that).  Their frustration often manifested itself in the kinds of distance from and judgment of their children that society distinctly did not associate with "the maternal" in the 1950s.  Later in her life, her children grown, Hope asks herself who she is, a question that tugged at me and that perhaps had something to do with the question I asked myself as I was sorting the laundry.

But thinking it over, here's what I concluded--and I think it's a useful conclusion:  sometimes imperfect books, books whose imperfections are so clear to us, can still resonate.  They can still ask the right questions, even if they ask them awkwardly and tentatively.  They can remind us that ordinary stories, lacking car chases or political intrigue or sudden deaths or natural disasters, are important, are worthy of being stories.