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
Category Archives: Personal
Tidying Up
17
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
What was the highlight?
“What was the highlight?” I’m frequently asked this question about my recent trip to Europe with my daughter C.
A good question, and a completely reasonable one too, even its built-in hint for the Coles Notes version, please, not the Complete Works Of… And I do love to answer it. But honestly, it’s difficult, because once again I realized–more forcibly than ever this time–that travel accrues intensely and steadily in a long series of experiences, moments not huge in and of themselves perhaps, but memorable in their combination. Continue reading
Borrowing Bones 