Category Archives: Books

Why add to a tsunami of words?

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Last evening, we attended a reading at McNally Robinson Booksellers. It was the launch of Home Place 3, a Prairie Fire publication featuring Manitoba writers living outside Winnipeg. We enjoyed hearing samples of work, quite varied, including lovely “wilderness” poems by my friend Fran Bennett, poems by J.L. Bond whose work also appeared in the MB Herald some years ago and by well-known poet/professor Di Brandt; fiction by accomplished short story writer Lois Braun and by Paul Krahn, who once taught our sons at MBCI (his was a delightful excerpt about shopping at an MCC Thrift Store); and much more.

All well and good it was indeed, but there’s something about being at McNally’s, that amazing emporium of words, that pulls me two ways. As a reader, it’s heaven — I mean of the kid-in-the-candy-store variety: all this, available for me? As a writer, it’s overwhelming too but with a little anxiety to boot. So many hundreds of books seeking readers, mine on a shelf among them, one voice in a massive chorus of them all bleating, “pick me, pick me!”

In the latter frame of mind (I imagine the question hits most writers some days: why am I doing this, why do I persist?), I found two of the pieces posted at today’s Arts and Letters Daily encouraging. Alix Christie asks why, in light of the odds, in the midst of “this tsunami of freshly published words,” anyone would bother writing a novel. She sets the angst up well, quotes Mario Vargas Llosa that “fiction is an art of societies in which faith is undergoing some sort of crisis,” suggests it’s about courage, “an act of faith.” She provides something of a pep talk.

Then, an interview with South African writer Nadine Gordimer offers additional reasons to write. “For me, all writing is a process of discovery… the process of what it means to be a human being.” She makes a helpful distinction when she says it wasn’t the “problems” of her country that set her to writing (such writing would be propaganda) but rather, “it was learning to write that sent me falling, falling through the surface” of South African life. Great image that, and true: writing can send one “falling, falling” through the surface of things.

Last night, surrounded by books, we heard from established and beginning writers. Many of them will persist, as I will, in spite of the odds. I don’t generally like to talk about the discouragements of those odds. (Everyone, after all, no matter what they work at, has their challenges, and if there’s grousing to be done, it’s best done with colleagues in the same business. Enough to admit one has such moments.) Today I’m grateful for these two pieces of writing at Arts and Letters, for yesterday’s showcase of writers, and for the readers each of us finds for the words we add to the flood.

On the value of work

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On our road trip earlier this autumn, H. and I read – aloud – Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work by Matthew Crawford . (It was the first book in this season’s Take and Read.) We both enjoyed it.

Crawford is a philosopher and a mechanic with a Ph.D. who left a job at a think tank to open a motorcycle repair shop. In this book, he reflects on working with one’s hands, on the nature of knowledge, on human agency and self-reliance, on our relationship with material things. Essentially, he wants to rehabilitate manual work, to “give due credit to the cognitive richness of the skilled trades.” He quotes Anaxagoras: “It is by having hands that man is the most intelligent of animals.” Crawford’s not about making hand-work “precious” in some craftsy way, though, but about considering the rich ways in which we learn and know, about historical changes in work and what’s valued in work, and about ethical considerations in labouring.

H. is a drywall contractor who knows first-hand the shifts away from “shop class” Crawford is talking about, and the growing difficulty of finding workers in his trade (and the construction trades generally) who are interested in making a solid career of it. (And, says Crawford, a good career can be made of it.) H. also likes motorcycles (a lot) and I’m afraid he completely understood all those chapters about the education of a gearhead and Crawford’s involvement with a clutch road oil seal, which I floated through without comprehension, just taking his word for it!

For my part, I was intrigued by the chapter (“The Contradictions of the Cubicle”) on work shifts within corporations/institutions. The shift here, Crawford says, is one in which managers are “now encouraged to direct [their] attention to the states of minds of workers, and become a sort of therapist.” Office environments have taken up the obligations and mantras of personality — now more important than knowledge. It’s about preparing people for teamwork rather than focusing on specific competencies, and about managing “corporate culture.”

When I returned to the workplace after a couple of decades away, I certainly noticed this shift, though it’s Crawford who gives me words for it. I found emphasis on team spirit, buying into institutional mission, what kind of personality I am and how that relates to personalities around me. How, that is, I was doing as a person (or team player). Less ongoing attention was paid, in an external and formal way in the workplace structures at least, to my competencies as an editor or to the work I was producing.

These statements are not meant to cast that particular workplace (a church institution) in a negative light, but to affirm anecdotally that the shift Crawford documents is everywhere. It’s also fair to note that since reading Crawford’s critique of the ubiquitous new paradigm, I’ve found myself wondering how it’s affected, for good or bad, the ethos of the denomination in which I worked. All of which to say that this is a book worth reading and thinking about further.

The Matter with Morris

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With one Giller prize under his belt, and a nomination for another, David Bergen’s star is high in the Canadian literary firmament. In this his latest book, the protagonist Morris Schutt, 51, works his way through something of a midlife crisis – a crisis of grief, really — precipitated by his son’s death in Afghanistan, for which he feels vaguely responsible. Morris is conflicted in many ways, not least of all that he was raised Mennonite (though “had shucked that off quite quickly”) and wishes he were Jewish. He sees “all of us…marching towards non-matter”; he needs “to understand how he could still grasp and hold on to the essence of his life.”

There’s not that much that happens (the critical event having occurred already), except for Morris’ inner questing, and the small steps he takes both backward and forward to respond to his situation. These acts, little more than gestures at the time, gather however, and seem both significant and hopeful by the end.

I have to say I was disappointed with the book at first. Something about the writing/characters wasn’t ringing true for me (and I don’t mean Bergen’s trademark spareness). Was it striving for affect without giving sufficient support for it? Perhaps I was comparing it to The Time in Between, which I’ve liked best of Bergen’s books so far. (I’ve not read The Retreat, the book just before this one.) But I can also say that by page 70 or so – page 76 to be precise – the book (or I?) had found its stride; found depth.

I was struck by a tiny recurring detail: Morris pulling a blanket up over someone (for example, over his letter writing friend Ursula, the prostitute Leah, his daughter Libby, and his father), tucking them in for sleep. It had a parental tenderness, but eventually I felt intimations of the undertaker as well.

Bergen insists he’s not Morris. There are certainly parallels between them, though, and Bergen admits he’s “pillaged” his own experiences for the novel. Those who know his Mennonite background and community, as I do, may find this adds layers of interest to the reading experience, and perhaps questions and some dissonance as well. I think it’s a book that needs — and provokes — further discussion, more than I’m able to give it at this time. But I’ll certainly be interested to hear from others who read the book.