On disappointment

Posted on December 4, 2012 by doradueck

I’d anticipated writing a cheery post this week about Saturday’s trip to Dauphin, a small city about four hours northwest of Winnipeg. I was quite sure there would be something interesting to share — about the drive up, perhaps, or the afternoon reading I was doing at the Dauphin Public Library together with aboriginal writer Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair or the planned tour of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church or dinner and lodging with friends.

But, unless I write fiction, there’ll be none of that. We didn’t go. All the highways to our destination were closed because of severe icy conditions, so there we sat Saturday morning just outside Winnipeg, which was as far as we’d been able to drive, making phone calls, making our decision to turn around (not a real decision, though, since there was no option but to cancel) and feeling disappointment seep into our spirits. Continue reading →

Miriam Rudolph’s diary of places

Posted on November 26, 2012 by doradueck

Friday evening, H. and I enjoyed a show of Miriam Rudolph’s work at Fleet Gallery, featuring some of her autobiographical work — her “visual diary,” she calls it — including scenes of Paraguay, Winnipeg, and rural Manitoba. It was the closing reception of the show, and the artist was in attendance from Minneapolis, where she currently lives. We’d met her before, at the launch of her book, David’s Trip to Paraguay, and I’d viewed her work at her website, but this was a chance to see it “for real” and also to chat with her again.

Miriam Rudolph with print version of “Holding On” at Fleet Gallery, Nov. 23, 2012

Rudolph grew up in Paraguay, then moved to Canada to study. Her overarching theme, she said in an interview at Branch, is “the experience of places.” She develops a deep connection with places where she lives, but is “also always an…onlooker or outsider.” In her work, one gets a sense — sometimes whimsical, sometimes deeply serious — of what it means to leave places one loves, and to come to love the places where one arrives. Continue reading →

Oddity, muddiness: Emma Donoghue’s “Astray”

Posted on November 16, 2012 by doradueck

“I love the oddity of historical incidence, the ethical muddiness,” Emma Donoghue (of Room fame) has said, and it’s oddity and muddiness she digs into in her latest book, Astray, a collection of 14 stories set in places as various as London, the Yukon, and Louisiana, in years ranging from 1639 to 1967.

There’s a keeper’s persistent chatter to his elephant Jumbo in “Man and Boy,” and the voice of Nigger Brown as the slave conspires to murder his master and run off with his wife in “Last Supper at Brown’s.” There’s a series of letters to the New York Children’s Aid Society by the birth mother and adoptive father of Lily May with their competing claims upon the child (“an epistolary duet,” Donoghue calls it) in “The Gift.” In “Daddy’s Girl,” a young woman has just discovered, upon his death, that her father was actually female. Continue reading →