Review: Birds Art Life by Kyo Maclear

Every once in a while a book floors me. It happened with Just Kids by Patti Smith. It happened with Us Conductors by Sean Michaels. This month it happened again when I was stunned by Kyo Maclear's elegant and wise memoir Birds Art Life.

Birds Art Life takes readers to city parks, harbours, and trails as Maclear seeks joy and solace through birding following a period in which her father's failing health consumes her. Though it is deeply appreciative of our feathery friends, Birds Art Life is hardly a manual for want-to-be birders. Rather, it's a contemplative journey exploring the ways in which the natural world can shape or influence our lives and art, yet at the same time, allowing us to escape them.

"For me, birding and writing did not — and do not — feel interchangeable. Birding was the opposite of writing, a welcome and necessary flight from the awkward daily consciousness of making art. It allowed me to exist in a simple continuity, amid a river of birds and people and hours. The stubborn anxiety that filled the rest of my life was calmed for as long as I was standing in that river."
— Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life

Birds Art Life is also about waiting. It's about the act of sitting quietly along a river or at a park for a momentary glimpse of a bird or birds — so small in the grand scheme of things, but with an ability to intensely affect a birder. It's about patience, even if a birding experience is happening amidst a hurried city. Like most of us, Maclear failed to notice the avian life around her until she made the effort to be watchful.

"Sometimes in the quiet moments of waiting or walking in a place empty of people, in vacant lots where the damage and hideous underview of the city was not to be denied, I felt a loneliness that struck me to my core. Why would anyone invite the experience? And yet there was also something undeniably uplifting in catching glints of life, sharing sightings with strangers. There was grace in witnessing the constant aerial motion and nervous twittering of common species."

Birds Art Life is one of those books that constantly saw me jotting down and sharing passages, not only those about the flit and flight of birds, but also Maclear's musings about books, reading, and love. Here are just three examples of Maclear's crisp, intricate prose that gave me pause, causing me to read them over and over again.

Kyo Maclear on Children's Literature
"The spark of children’s literature — stories lusciously rendered in words and pictures — was distinctive and determining. These books had a radiant quality, a quality that Anne Carson describes in her book Decreation. 'When I think of books read in childhood,' she writes, 'they come to my mind’s eye in violence foreshortening and framed by a precarious darkness, but at the same time they glow somehow with an almost supernatural intensity of life that no adult book could ever effect.'"

Kyo Maclear on Books and Reading
"Books have given me great stores of happiness, but if I am honest with myself I can see they have also taken something away. I glimpsed the real world between paragraphs of novels. I traced words when I might have touched the ground.”

Kyo Maclear on Small, Intimate Moments
"One morning while standing at a cafe counter staring at the magnificently thick brows of the man making my coffee, I discovered one should not gaze too long at faces unless one is prepared to fall in love again."

Review: In a Dark, Dark Wood by Ruth Ware

"I lay awake, trying to go to sleep, but instead I was thinking about the evening and the strange little group Clare had gathered around her this weekend. I wanted to leave so badly it hurt — to be back at home, in my own bed, with my own things, in the blissful peace and quiet. Now I was counting down the hours, and listening to Nina's soft snores and behind that to the silence of the house and the forest."

I began reading In a Dark, Dark Wood by Ruth Ware around the time it was released, in July; but after a few false starts I abandoned it. It wasn't that I wasn't enjoying it. It's gripping from its first page. But In a Dark, Dark Wood is far from a beach read. Suspenseful and nail-biting, it's far more appropriate for Halloween, which is around the time I finally devoured it along with a few battered books by R.L. Stine I've hoarded since my teen years.

In a Dark, Dark Wood is the story of Leonora — known as Nora or Lee, depending on who is addressing her — an English mystery novelist who has recently received a strange invitation. She's been invited to Clare Cavendish's hen (Known to we North Americans as a bachelorette party) in a glass cottage in the clearing of a forest. She reluctantly attends, despite not having spoken to Clare for a decade — under circumstances that aren't revealed to the reader until the book's final chapters. This decision thrusts Nora (as readers know her) into the centre of a plot fraught with suspense, friction, and eventually, murder.

Failing cellphone reception, a broken landline, and mysterious footprints quickly put Nora and Clare's other guests on edge, leaving readers to guess who, or what, lurks outside the cottage. In a Dark, Dark Wood is endlessly unsettling, and, for me, a novice suspense and thriller reader, it was never predictable. Finishing it in less than a week, it's no surprise to me that it was named an NPR 2015 Best Book of the Year and will soon be adapted as a major motion picture by Reese Witherspoon.

I read In a Dark, Dark Wood in an attempt to expand my reading horizons, which most often includes literary fiction and non-fiction. I must admit that 2016 has been a year of books that have become unlikely favourites for me, and this is one of them. I can't wait to read The Woman in Cabin 10, Ruth Ware's next thriller, which will be released next month.

Review: The Girls by Emma Cline

“So much of desire, at that age, was a willful act. Trying so hard to slur the rough, disappointing edges of boys into the shape of someone we could love. We spoke of our desperate need for them with rote and familiar words, like we were reading lines from a play. Later I would see this: how impersonal and grasping our love was, pinging around the universe, hoping for a host to give form to our wishes.” ― Emma Cline, The Girls

When I started reading The Girls by Emma Cline, I told people I was reading a story based on the Tate-Labianca murders, complete with a gaggle of obedient young female followers and a leader, Russell, echoing the personality and ambitions of Charlie Manson. I learned, quite quickly, that The Girls was anything but, rather it's a careful exploration of girlhood and identity set against the backdrop of a cult.

I read much of The Girls on a rowboat on Christie Lake while my better half fished and I fell in love with Evie Boyd, a curious and lonely teenager with the privilege of boredom and freedom in Northern California during a summer at the end of the 1960s. After catching sight of exotic Suzanne, a few years her senior, Evie finds herself on a run down ranch with a likeminded group of misfits also grappling with their identities and searching for a place to belong.

The Girls is hardly about a rabid cult hungry for murder. Instead, it's about place, and the human desire to belong and be part of something. Edie longs to leave behind the normalcy of her daily life and her parents' new lives following a divorce.

 "I may have smiled to myself as I watched the familiar pattern of the town pass, the bus cruising through shade to sunshine. I'd grown up in this place, had the knowledge of it so deep in me that I didn't even know most street names, navigating instead by landmarks, visual or memorial. The corner where my mother had twisted her ankle in a mauve pantsuit. The copse of trees that had always looked vaguely attended by evil. The drugstore with its torn awning. Through the window of that unfamiliar bus, the burr of old carpet under my legs, my hometown seemed scrubbed clean of my presence. It was easy to leave behind." 

The Girls is a brilliant debut by California's Emma Cline. (You may remember, it was at the centre of a bidding war, eventually selling to Random House as part of a three-book deal for a rumoured "$2 million and change"). Cline's prose is so delicate, it reminded me of Us, Conductors, and I found myself jotting down passages on almost every page: "You wanted things and you couldn't help it, because there was only your life, only yourself to wake up with, and how could you ever tell yourself what you wanted was wrong?"

I've written before that most of my favourite books are non-fiction, but every once in a while I find myself gobsmacked by a work of fiction that I can't stop talking about. The Girls is one of those books. It's thoughtful and intelligent, but above all else, it's relatable, a trait I didn't expect from a book loosely based on one of America's most grisly murders.

Read this book. Read it, read it, read it, and let me know how much you love it. I can't imagine you won't.

Review: I'm Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid

"I think there's a perception that fear and terror and dread are fleeting. That they hit hard and fast when they do, but they don't last. It's not true. They don't fade unless they're replaced by some other feeling. Deep fear will stay and spread if it can. You can't outrun or outsmart or subdue it. Untreated, it will only fester. Fear is a rash." — Iain Reid, I'm Thinking of Ending Things

I began I'm Thinking of Ending Things in the most idyllic of settings — relaxing on a beach in Playa del Carmen with the sea to my left and a piña colada to my right. I finished it in what's probably the worst place to read a psychological thriller — home alone at night in the middle of a rainstorm.

Gripping and smart, I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a fast (but harrowing read) that follows an unnamed narrator on a road trip with her new boyfriend, Jake, to and from his parents' farmhouse. An unexpected detour lands the pair outside (and ultimately inside) a deserted high school, a decision that culminates in more questions than answers. 

I’m Thinking of Ending Things is the first novel from Iain Reid, the critically acclaimed memoirist behind One Bird’s Choice: A Year in the Life of an Overeducated, Underemployed Twenty-something Who Moves Back Home, in which he returns to his familial home (his parents’ hobby farm), and The Truth About Luck, his tale of a road trip with his grandmother. It's no exaggeration to say that I'm Thinking Ending Things is a huge departure for Reid. 

“I think a lot of what we learn about others isn’t what they tell us. It’s what we observe”

I'm Thinking of Ending Things begs for a reader with a keen sense of observation. I'm going to be honest here — I'm not that reader. I was greeted by the last page of I'm Thinking of Endings Things with deep confusion.

Full disclosure: I didn't get it. Not even in the least. So I did what most confused readers would do, and I visited Goodreads where some kindly readers explained the ending to me. There seem to be two camps of people on Goodreads reviewing this novel: Those who were gobsmacked by the ending and those who didn't understand it. I was clearly the latter.

What I did find fascinating about I'm Thinking of Endings Things is Reid's ability to use his own experiences, as chronicled in his memoirs, weaving them into the unlikely narrative of a thriller. Don't let my experience with this novel deter you. I'm Thinking of Ending Things is haunting and tense, forcing readers to think. That said, it's not one for readers in search of neat, tidy endings. But there are many other books for that.

Review: The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood

"Everything in this town is retro, which accounts for the large supply of black vintage items in Accessories. The past is so much safer, because whatever's in it has already happened. It can't be changed; so, in a way, there's nothing to dread."
— Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last

In the centre of The Heart Goes Last, Margaret Atwood's first stand-alone novel in a decade, Stan and Charmaine are a young couple living in their car after an economic collapse crushes the middle class. Broke and living in fear of the roving gangs that populate this not-so-distant future, they're desperate for a solution. Charmaine jumps at the chance to enrol at The Positron Project, a social experiment that promises a refuge, at a cost. Residents in Consilience, the pristine town where The Heart Goes Last takes place, are promised a job and a home; however, there's a catch. They must spend every second month in the town's prison.

Modelled after the past, Consilience advertises a simpler life. Food is grown locally, television teaches family values, and Doris Day hits play on the radio. At first, Consilience seemed strangely familiar, though I couldn't place why. Its manufactured sense of safety and happiness made me recall one of my favourite children's books — The Giver — but, in true Atwood fashion, the dark underbelly of Consilience is anything but appropriate for children.

It isn't long before The Heart Goes Last becomes a twisting (and twisted) tale of adultery, blackmail, organ harvesting, and sex slavery created by unauthorized neurosurgery. Even babies' blood isn't safe in Atwood's vivid imagination in a book that also features robotic sex dolls modelled created in the likeness of dead celebrities.

There's no better way to say this (with deep respect to Ms. Atwood), but The Heart Goes Last is wonderfully demented. It offers satirical insight into capitalism, marriage, and the greed that characterize both, but it's also a hell of a lot of fun to read. It's always a treat to explore the worlds that exist within Margaret Atwood's head.

Review: This Is Happy by Camilla Gibb

I read the first pages of This Is Happy, Camilla Gibb’s first memoir, on the edge of Guelph Lake with a folk festival buzzing behind me. It was the final weekend of July, and I’d snuck away from the chaos: The sweaty bodies fighting for shade, the dancing women in flowing skirts, the line-up for overpriced beer. I found an hour of solitude as the sun began to set and hipster parents called their little ones back toward shore.

This is happy, I thought to myself.

“We come to know ourselves only through stories,” writes Gibb on one of these early pages. “We listen to the stories of others, we inherit the stories of those who came before, and we make sense of our own experiences by constructing a narrative that holds them, and holds us, together.” This Is Happy isn’t Camilla Gibb’s story. It’s her many stories, and don’t let the title fool you. Together they build a far from happy tale.

Divided in four parts — incubate, hatch, roost, and flight — This Is Happy begins where many memoirs do, at the beginning. Gibb’s rocky childhood, marred by her parents’ divorce and her father’s cruel outbursts, sets the scene. In these early days, we see a character struggling to belong, a theme that follows Gibb into an adulthood plagued by restlessness, illness, and profound heartbreak.

Amidst the often excruciating unhappiness found between the covers of This Is Happy, there is a light — a light so pure and fragile that Gibb calls it her egg. Her egg, a daughter, is born just months after Anna, with whom Gibb shared a “thorough, pure, unassailable” love, leaves suddenly, a loss that threatens to destroy Gibb at a time when someone so “pure and innocent and uncontaminated” is waiting to be born.

While the egg brings Gibb a light, it doesn’t cure the sadness that lives inside her, but it does give her a reason to survive. Around the egg, Gibb builds the family she never had with the help of Tita, the nanny, Micah, her drug-addicted brother, and her friend Miles, a “lonely gay.” The egg is at the heart of this chosen family that exists to protect her in the months that follow her birth.

“How do you protect a child from heartbreak? All I know is that the egg wants to be held all the time, and perhaps if I hold her all the time she will know that she is loved in such a fundamental and profound way that when her heart is broken as an adult, she will not fall apart, will know she is still loved and lovable.”

This Is Happy is a stunning memoir shaped by overwhelming highs and excruciating lows. It explores the commonalities all our life stories share: fantasies, failures, losses, and loves. It’s a memoir about finding light in a world that, for some, seems nothing but dark. As a reader, I couldn’t help but feel protective of Gibb, precarious and fragile, as she bears her grief, especially after her relationship ends.

“Grief is the overwhelming result of so many compounded losses that it is impossible to process as a whole. So you don’t. You spend a thousand hours in therapy talking about the thousand things that hurt, one by one, in excruciating detail. That mass of grief holds the loss of the person you loved, the idea of them, the person you were with them, the life you shared, the friends and community and extended family you shared, the idea of who you were together — it challenges the very idea of your life and yourself.

This quotation-heavy review should act as evidence that I loved this book. I loved it in a way I haven’t loved a memoir since I read Patti Smith’s Just Kids, my enduring answer to the question: “What’s your favourite book?” I found myself jotting passages from This Is Happy and sharing them with others. This is one of those books you want to tell the world about.

So often, memoirs are steeped in nostalgia, but This Is Happy looks instead toward a brighter future. It may in many ways be a memoir about new parenthood, but it’s about so much more. Ultimately, it’s about the need we all have within us to find a place to belong.

Review: Everything Is So Political

In a 2005 interview with Salman Rushdie, interviewer Jack Livings of The Paris Review asked a seemingly simple question of the author: "Could you possibly write an apolitical book?" Rushdie, known for his novels with overtly political themes, replied that he had "great interest in it," using the example of Jane Austen, whom he said could "explain the lives of her characters without a reference to the public sphere."

Rushdie's answer, of course, begs the following question: What makes something political? In the introduction of her recent anthology, Everything Is So Political: A Collection of Short Fiction by Canadian Writers, editor Sandra McIntyre argues that everything is political. In fact, everything isn’t just political; it’s so political, she says, borrowing lyrics from a Spirit of the West song.

Considering only the public sphere to be political is a "too-narrow and so literal view," writes McIntyre in the book's introduction. Using the works of Jane Austen as an example, she responds to Rushdie's comments, reminding readers that the role of women and the property laws that discriminated against them were crucial, and very political, parts of Austen's novels.

"We know that everything is political and that political means and has always meant more than 'government, politicians, and the state:' it means who we know, who we have sex with, what we eat or how hungry we are, where we shop, even what words we use," writes McIntyre. This belief was the catalyst for Everything Is So Political, a collection of 20 contemporary short fiction stories by writers from all over Canada.

This review originally appeared on rabble.ca. You can read the rest of it here. 

The Cutting Room

Pick up the latest issue of This magazine featuring amazing pieces by Alexandra Kimball, Chelsea Murray, Grace O'Connell, and Andrew Livingstone, as well as my review of Sarah Pinder's collection of poetry, The Cutting Room.

Hipless in Montreal

In honour of my long-weekend getaway to Montreal, and today's Twitter follow from Conundrum Press, I'm republishing a piece I wrote a few years back that originally appeared on rabble.ca.


Set against a backdrop of urban Montreal, The Hipless Boy is a collection of 45 semi-autobiographical short stories by Sully, the pen name of poet, graphic novelist and illustrator Sherwin Tjia. Originally a weekly column in the McGill Daily, The Hipless Boy introduces readers to Tjia's protagonist, aptly named Sully, who is your typical sketch-book carrying, sushi-eating, poetry-writing urbanite who grapples with his surroundings, feeling alien in a neighbourhood dominated by noisy nightclubs and girls in stilettos.

Tjia admittedly blends his real life with fiction, creating a funny and charming example of a graphic novel for adults. He is one of a growing number of artists sharing their own experiences in graphic form, including Adrian Tomine, David Small, Montreal's Julie Doucet and, of course, Marjane Satrapi, whose illustrated tales of her Iranian childhood have garnered acclaim all over the world.

In The Hipless Boy, Montreal's streetscapes bubble from Tjia's black, white and blue illustrations. The city acts as a fourth character, mingling alongside Sully and his platonic best friend, Minerva, and Owen, a visual artist whose attempts to be creative are usually offensive, making him an often unlikeable character.

Sully, as both a character and a writer, is remarkably observant, finding beauty and absurdity in the mundane, whether the subject of his story is a pigeon fighting for food, or a seemingly ill-tempered stranger on a bus. "The spectacularly bizarre things that actually happen to people is a continual and joyful surprise," Tjia writes. Unfortunately, Sully isn't always introspective, leaving readers to feel slightly disconnected from him, especially as he tackles tough issues, such as love and even a friend's suicide.

The Hipless Boy's appeal seems to lie in the contrast between the ordinary and unusual situations — going on dates to coffee shops, riding the bus to and from his day job and feeding pigeons in a park — he is also surprisingly open to new experiences, such as moonlighting as a "recreational cross dresser," showing readers that he's more in place in his hip neighbourhood than even he himself realizes.

Tjia's talent as both a visual artist and a writer are evident from the first page of The Hipless Boy, as his clean, crisp writing compliments his simple, yet detailed illustrations. Among the many accolades Tjia has received since The Hipless Boy was published last year, is a nomination for a coveted Doug Wright Award in the category of best emerging talent. The winners will be announced during the Toronto Comic Arts Festival on May 8. Even if readers can't relate to Sully or his non-conformist friends, readers, especially those living in large urban centres like Montreal, will appreciate Tjia's talent for capturing the ordinary shifting of urban living, recognizing the monotony, absurdities and unexpectedness of daily life. —Jessica Rose

Review: The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary by Andrew Westoll

A week ago, if someone had asked me about the last book that made me cry, I wouldn’t have had an answer. Thankfully, I didn’t inherit the crying gene that causes my mom to lose it to Hallmark commercials. That’s until I read the last few pages of Andrew Westoll’s The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary, which completely did me in, forcing me to become that unstable girl with tears streaming down her face on the GO Train.

My favourite books are those in which an author paints pictures of characters that are so tangible and vivid that I can’t help but hope for their happy ending. I didn’t expect to find these characters in a non-fiction book about Westoll’s time living and working at a sanctuary for retired biomedical research chimps, but that’s exactly what happened. Westoll creates loving portraits of each of the chimpanzees rescued by activist Gloria Grow when she started her sanctuary outside Montreal in 1997, resulting in a book that I have been recommending to everyone I know.

The chimpanzees living at Fauna were lucky to escape their traumatic lives as biomedical test subjects; however, they carry the psychological scars of their horrific experiences, which for some included being torn from their mothers shortly after birth, social isolation, and hundreds of operations and other cruel procedures. The book is a stark reminder of how alike chimpanzees and humans are, as Fauna’s residents experience post-traumatic stress, grief, depression, and at times, even self-mutilation even years after entering the “labyrinth of private and communal living spaces” that make up Fauna.

What makes Westoll’s book exceptional is that he is not simply an outsider observing the chimps of Fauna Sanctuary and interviewing the staff who take care of them, rather he is an active participant in their day-to-day lives, scrubbing crusted excrement from their belongings, blending and serving them smoothies, and slowly learning to recognize their unique and colourful personalities.

“This understanding comes with an unexpected consequence. As much as seeing each chimpanzee as a distinct being fills me with happiness, it also fills me with dread,” writes Westoll. “Real empathy has two sides, the joyful one and the grieving one. Everything that has happened to these apes, for better and for worse, is now a lot more personal to me. They have welcomed me into their world, and with this new citizenship comes a responsibility I’m totally unprepared for.”

Most readers will find themselves totally unprepared for what they read in The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary. As soon as one feels optimistic about the destiny of these often-misunderstood creatures, Westoll writes another startling scene, jerking readers away from any misconceptions that life at Fauna is a five-star retreat.

“Confronted with Annie’s body just moments after she died, Binky pounded on her with his fists over and over in a grief-fuelled attempt to wake her up,” writes Westoll in an especially affecting scene.

The emotions exhibited by the chimpanzees are so raw and written about so eloquently that my heart ached in a way that is usually reserved for unbelievable works of fiction. Thankfully, Westoll also shares the many small triumphs that Gloria and her team experience at Fauna, urging them to continue their heartbreaking, yet heartwarming, work.

“The Fauna team began to focus on these small triumphs, these passing moments of connection, to get them through the days: a faint expression of a unique personality, the pleasure of a happy memory, an act as simple as opening the fridge to a cacophony of hoots and hollers,” writes Westoll. “They had no choice but to persist; there was no turning back now. Somehow, they had to find ways to counter the profound distrust, fear, and anger that each chimpanzee held inside. Through simple acts of kindness and concern, Gloria and her sisters worked to lift, one small corner at a time, the veil of annihilation that had been cast upon these apes the moment they were born or sold into research.”

The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary may not always be an uplifting read; however it is a necessary one that readers are unlikely to forget. Personally, in the week since I finished the book, I haven't been able to shake the colourful cast of characters that Andrew Westoll made me fall in love with.

Review: An Exclusive Love by Johanna Adorján

“We don’t talk about that.” This was the reply most often heard from István (known as Pista) and Vera Adorján when their family pressed them for information about their life as Hungarian-Jews during the Holocaust. The time Pista spent in Mauthausen, a category III (“Extermination through labour”) concentration camp was never a topic of conversation.

The glamorous couple — he an orthopaedic surgeon and she a complex and temperamental music lover — spent many years at the mercy of history, surviving the Holocaust only to be forced to flee their home in Stalin’s Budapest, eventually settling in Denmark. Their lives together were marked with unimaginable challenges, but each they faced together.

Pista and Vera’s second-to-last challenge came when an ailing Pista was told he was terminally ill, leaving a troubled Vera to contemplate living without him for the first time since they were separated during the Holocaust. Her immense fear led to the couple’s final major challenge — deciding how they would kill themselves.

Their granddaughter Johanna Adorján was twenty when their bodies were found in bed, holding hands, in 1991. She suspects that it was her grandmother, then 71 and in perfect health, who orchestrated their final act of overdosing on a cocktail of pills, which were prescribed by Pista.

In her gripping memoir, An Exclusive Love, Adorján pieces together her grandparents' final day, based both on her own speculation and clues left behind by her grandmother who meticulously cleaned her home, wrapped presents for family members and friends, paid her bills, and wrapped her beloved roses for winter on her final day, attempting to lessen the burden left behind on her family.

These scenes weave together with scenes from Pista and Vera’s lives together, as Adorján recalls her own experiences with her grandparents, as well as those of family members and her grandparents’ surviving friends.

It would be easy to romanticize this true story, but Adorján is rarely, if ever, sentimental. She uses her experience as a journalist to peel away the layers of her grandparents’ secretive cloak, unfortunately failing more often than not. The former journalism student and amateur family historian in me begged for more facts.

“I say that as far as I know [my grandmother’s father] was an engineer. Inga shook her head, no, no, he went to sea,” writes Adorján. “[Inga] laughs. I suspect that my grandmother may have thought this version up because she liked it better. Or perhaps he really had been a naval officer in the First World War? And doesn't the navy need engineers? However, who knows how it really was!”

I desperately wanted to know how it really was. I wanted to hear about Adorján carefully poring over naval records to find the truth. I wanted to hear that she lost sleep trying to find answers to all her questions. I wanted her to follow the steps that surely I would have taken if I was trying to solve a family mystery (or many of them). If the records didn’t exist after the First World War than I wanted to know why! Were they burned? Missing? Lost forever? I hate to take the words of another reviewer, but the Toronto Star’s James Macgowan chose the perfect word when he used “skeletal” to describe certain aspects of the book.

Despite this, I was hooked, reading all of An Enduring Love in just two sittings. Just like Adorján was captivated by her mysterious grandparents, I was too, as I constantly danced between whether their decision was noble and brave or tragic and cowardly. They forced me to ponder many uncomfortable questions, among them “What would I do today if I knew it was my last?” and “What would life be like without the one that I love?”

An Enduring Love may not have been a perfect book for us who crave facts, but it was something else — reflective and stirring, but at times completely uplifting.

Review: Hey, Shorty! A Guide to Combating Sexual Harassment and Violence in Schools and on the Streets

“She deserved it.” “She was fast.” “She shouldn’t have been alone.” In 2001, Joanne N. Smith listened as young female students regurgitated the opinions of their parents, teachers, and peers, blaming an eight-year-old victim who had recently been followed, dragged, raped, and left bloodied on her way to school.

Smith, the founder and executive director of Girls for Gender Equity (GGE), was shocked. At the time, the Brooklyn-based grassroots organization had just begun, aiming to “improve gender and race relations and socio-economic conditions for our most vulnerable youth and communities of colour.” She knew that GGE faced, among many other things, the daunting task of teaching girls to deconstruct stereotypes and systems of belief after they had already been trained by society to internalize misogyny.

“Blaming the victim by identifying with the aggressor allowed the girls to distance themselves from her, thereby gaining a false sense of security,” writes Smith of this experience in the introduction of Hey, Shorty! A Guide to Combating Sexual Harassment and Violence in Schools and on the Streets, a new book co-written by Smith, Mandy Van Deven, and Meghan Huppuch.

Hey, Shorty! is arguably less a how-to guide about combating sexual harassment and violence and more a case study of the “incremental, slow-moving, and sometimes difficult to see” success of GGE, which, like most organizations of its kind, has faced systematic barriers and resistance since it began on September 11, 2001. Since its inception, GGE has operated on the belief that public schools should be safe for all children and that parents should feel good about sending their kids to school each day. Unfortunately, their research, much of which is presented in Hey, Shorty!, shows that this isn’t the case.

A 2007-2008 study conducted by young GGE researchers presented three major findings, each exposing truths about the sexist, racist, and homophobic violence embedded in school culture.

The study concluded that:
1. In-school harassment happens in many ways, to many people, and in many locations.
2. Sexual harassment is a “normal” part of young people’s school experience
3. Youth want and need more education about sexual harassment.

“ ... the girls shared their own stories of being propositioned in the hallways and in classrooms, having other students touch their bodies without permission, and people spreading rumours about their sexuality or sexual experiences,” write Smith and Van Deven, recalling their many conversations with young girls about sexual harassment. “By sharing their own personal stories, the personal became political,” they write of students who began to see themselves as agents of social change even when the education system failed to protect them from gender-based discrimination and violence.

“It is painfully clear that schools are failing to ensure students’ safety when they are “groped daily” or when their classmates declare it “grab-anything-you-want day,” implying that they have a right to grab another person’s body,” write Smith and Van Deven.

Teachers and administrators often adopt a “boys will be boys” attitude when dealing with instances of ogling, touching, and sexual teasing. Even students who are courageous enough to speak up to authorities aren't taken seriously leaving boys and girls who are sexually harassed with feelings of anger, powerlessness, and shame.

What I wanted most from this book was more. I wanted to know about the activist fatigue likely experienced by GGE organizers. I wanted to hear from students themselves, parents, and teachers. I wanted to know more about the roles privilege, race, and sexuality play in hostile school culture, and I wanted to know more about the repercussions of ugly words like “faggot” and “slut” echoing in the hallways of schools. However, I know firsthand how costly a book like this can be to a grassroots organization, and there simply wasn’t enough room to provide readers with GGE’s complete wealth of research and knowledge.

Hey, Shorty! is an especially important read for community organizers and activists attempting to give voice to vulnerable and underserved communities, but it should also be read by parents, educators, and young boys and girls who live the reality of an often unsafe and oppressive public school culture. The book’s Appendixes section brims with crucial information about how to stop and respond to sexual harassment; strategies for prevention for students, parents, and school staff; how to take advantage of teachable moments at home and in the classroom; and how we all can help to dispel myths about sexual harassment.

Not My Typewriter is part of the Hey, Shorty! Virtual Book Tour. Check out this link (http://www.heyshortyontheroad.com/tourdates) to see other stops on the tour.

Review: Monoceros by Suzette Mayr

I am thrilled to say that I was lucky enough to be a part of This Magazine’s 45th anniversary issue. It’s the first time I’ve written a review for This, and I have my fingers crossed that it won't be the last. It’s been a favourite for many years, especially since competing in their fantastic cupcake challenge as part of the rabble.ca team a few years back! (The judges didn’t pick us, but I continued to support the magazine anyway!)

Here is my review of Monoceros, Suzette Mayr’s beautifully complicated offering.

After Patrick Furey, a heartbroken and bullied gay student, hangs himself in his bedroom, there is no minute of silence, no special assembly. Instead, his school's closeted principal forbids staff to share any information, fearing a teen suicide would damage the school's reputation and possibly spawn copycats. Furey's death may happen in the first few pages of Suzette Mayr's fourth novel, but it echoes from cover to cover. His empty desk forces students and staff to contemplate the finality of his death, and the fact that they hardly knew the troubled student at all.

Mayr skilfully crafts each chapter from the perspective of one member of her colourful, but flawed, cast of characters. Furey's secret boyfriend, Ginger, suppresses his grief to keep their relationship hidden, especially from his jealous girlfriend, Petra, who had scrawled "u r a fag" on Furey's locker before he died. There is also Faraday, Furey's unicorn-obsessed classmate, who wishes she had done something nice for Furey before he died, like written him a note saying "Hi" or donated her virginity to him.

In a tragedy laced with humour, Mayr engages readers with her meticulous attention to detail, providing vivid descriptions of not only her characters, but also the heavy emotions — grief, confusion, aching — churning inside them. Monoceros may spark a visceral reaction in some readers, especially as the unnerving words "faggot" and "homo" roll off characters' tongues with teenage ease. But mostly, it is a thought-provoking tale of a boy who chooses to take "charge of his own ending" and the interconnected web of lost souls he leaves behind.

Reviews: Veganize It!

This article was originally published on rabble.ca. It is the second of a two-part series. Read the first part here!

 

The Complete Guide to Vegan Food Substitutions

by Celine Steen and Joni Marie Newman
(Fair Winds Press, 2010, $20.99)

Most people have that old family recipe that they can’t live without, whether it’s Grandma’s favourite casserole or Dad’s famous chili. Unfortunately, for vegetarians and vegans, many of these recipes call for animal products such as cheese, meat and eggs. Luckily, The Complete Guide to Vegan Substitutions boasts that “pretty much any dish can be vegan using your own hands and your own set of cooking and basic skills.”

This book makes it easier for home cooks to embrace a vegan lifestyle, providing more than 200 dairy-free, egg-free and meat-free dishes, along with tips to give readers the confidence to create meatless versions of their favourite recipes. It provides many soy-free, gluten-free, wheat-free and nut-free recipes for readers with allergies.

The Complete Guide to Vegan Substitutions is also full of fun facts (Did you know that the human race is the only species on earth that consumes another mammal’s milk for sustenance? Or that bananas can be used to replace eggs in some recipes? I didn’t!). Full of colourful pictures and informative charts and diagrams, this book gives new vegans answers to many questions, such as what dairy replacement to use (Almond milk, soy milk, coconut milk, rice milk) and encourages them to start from scratch, making their own animal-product replacements like vegan cheese!

Vegan Freak: Being Vegan in a Non-Vegan World
by Bob Torres and Jenna Torres
(PM Press, 2010; $16.95)

“We don’t care what Whole Foods says: there is no humane animal product, period,” write Bob Torres and Jenna Torres in the second version of their book Vegan Freak: Being Vegan in a Non-Vegan World. This sometimes abrasive book takes the stance that even local, organic, free-range and so-called ethical farming practices don’t cut it in the fight for animal rights.

Vegan Freak: Being Vegan in a Non-Vegan World is likely best read by someone who shares the authors’ beliefs that eating any animal product, even occasionally, is directly contributing to the exploitation of animals. If readers can get past the sarcasm that plays a huge role in this book, it is full of interesting and useful information for “vegan freaks” attempting to navigate a non-vegan world, including what happens when your partner isn’t vegan, how to raise your children vegan, how to survive the grocery store when you’re vegan and how to deal with vegetarians and ex-vegans who don’t share your beliefs.

Mary of Mud Creek
by Caitlin Black

If you were like me, you read Charlotte’s Web over and over again as a child, delighting in Charlotte the spider’s inventive way of saving Wilbur to pig from ending up on the dinner table. Toronto artist and illustrator Caitlin Black undoubtedly read E.B White’s book as well, as her new graphic novel, Mary of Mud Creek, is a much darker take on the classic.

Interspersed with facts about the Canadian factory farming industry, this daring black and white book follows Mary, Black’s protagonist, who visits a beloved pig at a factory farm, where sows are kept continually pregnant until they ultimately face violent deaths as illustrated graphically in the novel. It is a far cry from the picturesque family farm where Fern visits Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web.

Black’s story takes many twists and turns as Mary navigates the factory farming system, herself becoming a victim of it. Three pages of notes provide readers with links to more information about huge agribusiness and animal rights. Readers are likely to have a visceral reaction as Black illustrates many of the truths of the meat industry that many of us choose to ignore.

For more information and to see an excerpt of Mary of Mud Creek, visit the blog.

Generation V: The Complete Guide to Going, Being, and Staying Vegan as a Teenager
by Claire Askew (PM Press, 2011; $16.95)

When teenager Claire Askew first decided veganism was the right choice for her, she experienced a lot of emotions, including feelings of isolation, alienation and loneliness. In her new book, Generation V: The Complete Guide to Going, Being, and Staying Vegan as a Teenager, she argues that being vegan as a teenager, especially when still living at home, is much different than being vegan as an adult. So, she decided to write a book about it!

“Generation V is for all the teenagers out there who wander around just-adding-water to boxes of vegan food, trying their hardest to defend their choices to their friends, and thinking they’re they only vegan teenager in the world,” writes Askew in the introduction of her fresh, well-written, sometimes-funny take on veganism.

Askew, who first began questioning her relationship with meat at the age of 14, shares her own story about going vegan with readers, offering advice learned from her own experiences, including suggestions about how to break the news to friends and family and how to react to their responses, such as “You’ve been brainwashed!” and “It’s just a phase!”

Askew’s well-researched book, which provides insights into factory farming, staying healthy when vegan and vegan activism is one of the best books about veganism I’ve read while barricading myself between stacks of resources about eating vegan and living vegan over the past few weeks. It is smart — full of convincing insights, arguments, and links to resources and organizations — but it’s also so much fun and different than anything else I’ve read on the subject, providing information about everything from vegan clothing and toiletries to which bands have vegan members. It is truly the perfect book to end this series.

Review: Four Fish by Paul Greenberg

I have never had complicated relationships with most kinds of meat. I gave up poultry, beef, pork, and most others when I was fifteen without ever looking back. My reasons for giving up meat were murky back then, but since, I have cultivated a firm belief that giant agribusiness is harmful to both the environment and our health.

I avoid the word vegetarian as much as possible for two reasons. Firstly, I see the ways in which labels hurt movements. Constant struggles exist within many activist circles, where we point fingers and pass judgement for not being vegetarian enough, not being feminist enough, not being progressive enough. This fighting within movements doesn’t help any cause.

Secondly, I avoid the word vegetarian, because simply, I’m a fraud. I eat fish. If I were to label myself, technically, I would be a pescatarian, which is a person who abstains from eating all meat with the exception of fish. Unlike my relationship with all other kinds of meat (And yes, fish is a meat! People often I assume I still eat poultry and fish), my relationship with seafood has been a complicated one. At fifteen, I gave it up entirely, but was lured (pun intended) back by crabmeat soaking in warm butter. For years, I ate shellfish, but resisted salmon, trout, and all other fish, eventually caving completely when my Dad took a cooking class and I felt guilty not trying the fish he cooked at a fancy restaurant in downtown Hamilton. It was a slippery slope. Since then, fish has re-entered my diet about once a week.

I was reluctant to pick up Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food by Paul Greenberg, worried it would fuel the guilt that has already been propelling forward since watching a documentary at last year’s Hamilton ECO Film and Arts Festival, which made me cut down my consumption of all kinds of tuna to almost nothing. While I did feel twinges of guilt at times as I read Greenberg’s 2010 bestseller, I am so glad I picked it up. Greenberg’s book is a thoughtful and careful exploration of four archetypes of fish flesh — salmon, sea bass, cod, and tuna — “which humanity is trying to master in one way or another, either through the management of a wild system, through the domestication and farming of individual species, or through outright substitution of one species for another.” 

Greenberg, himself a life-long angler, takes a different approach than many food activists and environmentalists who urge consumers to stay away from farm-raised fish, instead arguing that wild catches simply can’t support the world’s immense appetite for fish. “If we take as a given that humankind will keep eating fish, more and more of it every year, then we need to come up with a way to direct that appetite away from sensitive, unmanageable wildlife and usher it toward sustainable, productive domesticated fish,” he writes.

If some nutritionists had their way, health-conscious consumers would be eating far more than the world’s wild catch of “170 billion pounds — the equivalent in weight to the entire human population of China, scooped up and sliced, sautéed, poached, baked, and deep-fried.” With countless health benefits, many consider it a necessary part of a balanced diet, so it’s unlikely that humans will stop eating it any time soon. Greenberg’s suggests that “A small-scale, artisanal, wild-fish fishery would be a great thing that could inevitably lead to better protection of wild fish.” Definite food for thought.

Greenberg attaches personal stories to these large issues, introducing readers to the people who fish salmon in Alaska and the scientists who first made fish farming a reality. He also brings readers face-to-face with troublesome truths, noting how whales have become considered “wildlife,” ferociously protected, while “no one has yet motored a Greenpeace Zodiac between a school of breaching bluefin tuna and the boat that would haul them in to a market.”

Four Fish is an excellent read not only for those — like me — who struggle with their own food-related choices, but for anyone who wants to be a better consumer or caring citizen of the world.

I see no better way to end this review than to include the words of wisdom that Greenberg used to end his important and thoughtful book:

“Wild fish did not come into this world just to be our food. They came into this world to pursue their own individual destinies. If we hunt them and eat them, we must hunt them with care and eat them with the fullness of our appreciation. We must come to understand that eating the last wild food is, above all, a privilege.”

Review: Night Gears by Bren Simmers

As I make this switch to Blogger, I will repost a handful of the reviews from my Wordpress site. This review was originally published in H Magazine.

In Bren Simmer’s impressive debut collection of poetry, Night Gears, ravens don’t just fly — they “twirl like paper airplanes.” Evening doesn’t just fall, it “approaches like a timid suitor.” And a spider isn’t just spinning her web, she is “darning” it.

These are just a few examples of Simmers’ obvious flair for descriptive language, which she skilfully uses to make the most ordinary of situations seem extraordinary. Night Gears pays tribute to the simplest occurrences of life, like “licking peanut butter off a spoon, CBC news, clean sheets, [and] dew.” Even the “fat fragile bodies” of bugs with “stained glass wings,” caught quivering in window frames seem beautiful in Simmers’ colourful language.

It’s no surprise that Simmers’ attention to detail seems most acute when writing about nature; She is a park interpreter in Vancouver with an obvious love of nature. Readers can’t help but visualize her muses, whether they are tiny insects or a gentle giant, like a thousand-pound moose. “Still, haunting creature, its silver-tipped whithers, last remnant of a winter coat,” she writes of the creature that is “listening at the edge of the road.”

Simmers’ poetry has been published in journals across the country. She is also the winner of the Arc Poem of the Year Award and she was shortlisted for the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award.

The pictures Simmers artfully paints with her words are not always rural, rather she excels at blending nature with modernity, the two often clashing. Tranquil scenes are interrupted by the growing realities of rural life — “Dump trucks lumber up the street, shrug dirt from their humped backs. Workers in reflective orange spacesuits emerge from underground bunkers to lunch in the loose gravel,” she writes in her poem “Road Work,” which pays homage to the roots of trees that have been replaced by “the labyrinth of pipes and cement, which we once took for solid earth.”

Simmers’ poems land readers in uninspiring offices and the small houses and buildings that dot small towns, however, it is her enthusiasm for nature that is most infectious. Among the best examples of this is “Northern Postcards,” a 20-page poem that makes up the last of the book’s four sections. Here, Simmers takes readers on a memorable road trip in the Yukon, making it nearly impossible to not want to jump in a car and drive across unfamiliar and often-desolate land.

Bren Simmers read from Night Gears on Sunday, December 5 as part of the Lit Live Reading Series at The Sky Dragon Centre. Night Gears was published by Hamilton publisher Wolsak and Wynn in September.