My take on the Giller and the gala

Posted on November 11, 2015 by doradueck

Well yes of course I watched the Giller gala last evening: I was home and it was on TV. And this year, turns out I’d actually read the winning book, Fifteen Dogs. Which made me happy with the happiness one has in also having read what others regard as very important. Started Saturday, finished Sunday in fact. (It’s not a particularly long or difficult book.) I’d also managed to read Rachel Cusk’s Outline, which struck me on every page as a winner for sure, so flawless is the flow of her language and so compelling the conversations of marriage and loss, and several of the stories in Heather O’Neill’s Daydreams of Angels, which I enjoyed but in a weird way where I was watching what she was doing more than losing myself inside it (but then mulling it later). Continue reading →

Besides grape jelly

Posted on September 15, 2015 by doradueck

While the grape jelly lids pop and seal in the kitchen, a quick note from my desk to say what I’m up to on the writing front, as promised in the previous post. I’ve got that novel that I seem to have been working on forever more or less done (again) and cooling in a corner, but in the meanwhile have been venturing into some creative non-fiction. I’m pleased that one essay-length foray into CNF has landed on the shortlist of The Quarterly Review‘s Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest, and will be published in that most excellent journal some time next year. It’s called “Return Stroke” and weaves together the father-in-law I never knew, lightning (he was struck by it and his mother killed), and the making of biography. Continue reading →

Tidying Up

Posted on August 10, 2015 by doradueck

Recently, and almost back-to-back, I read two non-fiction books that are quite different, yet about the same thing: tidying up.

Plum Johnson’s They Left us Everything: a memoir, which won the RBC Taylor Prize for non-fiction earlier this year, is a compelling account of Johnson’s attempt to clean up the large family home, which was crammed to the rafters, after the death of her mother. What she expects will be a task of weeks stretches into years; there is so much to sort through and get evaluated and dispose of or divide among the siblings. A book about stuff may sound boring, but it’s not, because in handling the possessions of her parents, who seemed unable to dispose of anything themselves, this eldest daughter also remembers and confronts their past, and hers. Most of all, she attempts to sort through her fraught relationship with her mother. If ambivalence about that relationship remains at book’s end, the journey proves necessary and beneficial for the daughter and is a pleasure to share as a reader. Continue reading →