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What is Jerri Jerreat Reading?

What am I reading?

That is difficult. There are books piled beside my bed in various states of being read. I noticed the other day, picking up a Tamora Pierce YA fantasy novel downstairs and reading a good chunk in the middle, that it was echoing themes in Crow Winter, a beautiful, contemporary novel by Karen McBride. How delightful, I thought. Both have trickster gods, intelligent crows, and real issues: indigenous and settler people at odds. Social and environmental justice themes. Crow Winter is set in northern Ontario with a young university graduate coming home, mourning her father and at loose ends. I love the neighbourly look around res life with amusing municipal government troubles, moms and daughters, best friends and cooking. I just read the scene where Hazel goes to her first sweat lodge; it was so real that I had to towel off after. Hazel wants nothing to do with magic or the spirit world, which makes the appearances of my favourite character in the novel, Nanabush, even more delightful.

I recommend the entire pile, some to wake you up, some to journey through arduous adventures, with strong women and girls, lovable or bad men, refugees, poverty, plagues, different cultures, history, war, and laughter. Most evenings I choose one to suit my mood, then use the journal to note what I am grateful for.

Books, of course. (And family; sunshine; rain; trees.)

There is another in-use pile by my bedroom window, my covid-office spot. Those are for reading to my granddaughter, Sienna, on FaceTime, and to my mother, aged 92, on the telephone, nightly.

The other day, my author-child made a centerpiece of special books for a Mother’s Day supper. My secret books. I read that group to get lost in, to smile, and to forget that I may not be able to fly west to see Sienna this year.

 Everyone needs a secret fun stash. What books are in yours?

 

Jerri Jerreat‘s fiction has recently appeared in Feminine Collective, The Yale Review Online, The Penmen Review, The Antigonish Review, WOW online, Toasted Cheese Literary Journal and The Dalhousie Review among others. Sci fi stories set in Ontario are featured in anthologies Glass and Gardens, Solarpunk Summers,  and also in Solarpunk Winters, (World Weaver Press) and in Tesseracts 21 by Edge Publishers.  Her play was a finalist at the Newmarket National Ten-Minute Play Festival in 2019. 

Photos courtesy of Jerri Jerreat. Cover image by Matt Howard on Unsplash.

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One in the Bow and One in the Stern: Robert Reid and Wesley W. Bates on Casting Their Collaboration

Robert Reid is a writer whose career in journalism spanned forty years. Wesley W. Bates is one of Canada’s best-known wood engravers (whose work appeared on the cover of The New Quarterly’s Issue 138). Both are avid fly fishers. Casting into Mystery, published by The Porcupine’s Quill in February 2020, tackles their love of angling through creative collaboration. The book features a combination of text and image and provides a glimpse inside a sporting culture teeming with literature, art, and music. Discover more or purchase a copy from your local bookshop!

Robert Reid: Wes, we owe so much to fly fishing. It served as the foundation of our creative partnership, not to mention our friendship. When we met for the first time after many years, you asked whether I would be interested in working together on a book. Shortly after I began posting essays about fly fishing on the blog I started after retiring, I contemplated working with you on such a project. We were reading from the same page without knowing we shared a common book. 

Wesley W. Bates: Yes, it is a delightful fusion of our separate loves of angling and rivers that made this book happen. Before you and I met, I had tested the water with a couple of writers about doing something involving fishing. Back then, I was in the “romantic” grip of fly fishing and I suppose my aims were different from those of the authors I had approached. As I recall when we met, we chatted briefly about fly fishing because I had an engraving of the subject in the exhibition you reviewed. I’m sure that’s where the spark of our book was ignited, at least for me. Later, when I was introduced to your blog where you write so elegantly about fly angling, the hook was set. All that remained was finding an opportunity to pitch you the idea.

RR: Our goal for the book from the beginning was to blend word and image. Your engravings would be a visual narrative running parallel to my textual narrative. Our creative partnership would be like two fly anglers in a canoe, one in the bow and one in the stern, both paddling in the same direction but casting from opposite sides when fishing.

WB: Funny that you mention two anglers in a canoe. You triggered my memory of fishing with my father in the mountain lakes of central British Columbia. There are hundreds of small lakes that are stocked with Kamloops trout. Dad and I would paddle the canoe around a lake following the sun progress, as did the fish. We used fly rods, but we trolled with spinners and we were usually successful. Your image of two fly anglers casting off the opposite sides of the canoe does fit our approach very well.

RR: We were “casting from opposite sides” in the book, but there were some instances of crossover between text and image. Like when I refer to Tom Thomson as an artist with fins, and your portrait has him submerged in a lake along with a trout. Or when I talk about fly fishing as a threshold experience and you portray a great blue heron next to his mirror image on the surface of water. For me, these are examples of creative synchronicity.

“I like to think our book resembles the two-headed trout. You know the (fish)tale. A native brook trout makes his way to the Junction Pool where the Willowemoc meets the Beaverkill. Both rivers are so beautiful the trout can’t decide which one to navigate, so he grows two heads.”

WB: Your approach to the subject of Tom Thomson is refreshing and insightful. When I heard you give a talk about your understanding of Thomson as a fly fisherman, you opened a new perspective. I still see him as a major artist. And the mystery of his death retains a sense of intrigue. But now when I consider his work, I see deeper into his relationship with subject matter and his connection to nature through angling.

RR: I like to think our book resembles the two-headed trout. You know the (fish)tale. A native brook trout makes his way to the Junction Pool where the Willowemoc meets the Beaverkill. Both rivers are so beautiful the trout can’t decide which one to navigate, so he grows two heads. I think of our book as embodying that legendary trout. 

WB: It’s no secret my main interest is creating images, so I wanted our collaboration to blend two perspectives: one literary, the other pictorial. The medium I work in is wood engraving, which had its golden age in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Wood engraving dominated the book world as the preferred method of transferring an image onto paper. As you enjoy pointing out, that same period is acknowledged as the golden age of fly fishing. During the Victorian period, fly fishing was considered a form of art. The artificial flies created then were akin to pieces of jewelry rather than mere imitations of insects or bait fish. There are books filled with beautiful wood-engraved illustrations of angling scenes, gear, and fish as well as marvelously tied flies.

For me, the combination of type and wood engravings is a “hatch” made in book heaven. I wanted my engravings to convey a strong feeling of place by bringing the reader in intimate contact with the riverbank, an insect on a leaf, a trout in the water.

 

RR: Casting into Mystery began as a series of straightforward accounts of angling outings. My aim was accuracy. But as the personal accounts transformed into chapters for a book, I began hearing the voices of literary authors and angling writers, past and present. I heard the melodies of composers and the lyrics of songwriters, which were joined by the images of filmmakers and visual artists. I was no longer a fly angler who writes, but a writer who fly fishes. It was a creative transformation, a shift from accuracy to truth.

I consider my narrative as accessible to fly anglers and non-anglers alike. Like your efforts to convey a strong feeling of place to the reader, I want readers to pretend they are traversing a wide riffle to get to a pool on the other side of a river that holds big fish. The only way of getting across safely, and remain relatively dry, is to jump from boulder to boulder—Brad Pitt in A River Runs Through It. All the writers, artists and musicians to whom I refer are boulders that punctuate my prose narrative. 

WB: I like how you put it: “I was no longer a fly angler who writes, but a writer who fly fishes.” If I may cast an identical line: I’m an artist who fly fishes. For me, the transformation happened as I studied the work of two artists in particular. The Englishman Thomas Bewick and the American Winslow Homer. Bewick is credited with developing wood engraving in the late eighteenth century. He was an avid fisherman in the rivers and streams of Northumberland, near Newcastle upon Tyne. He engraved many angling scenes. The more I learned about fly angling, the more I appreciated Bewick’s work, not to mention his way of seeing. In the miniature space wood engraving allows, Bewick was able to depict landscape and personality in his figures.

Homer’s territory for the greater part of his artistic life—which included fly fishing—was the northeast United States, especially the rugged seashores of Maine and the wilds of the Adirondacks. His painting—in particular his watercolours—of fishing and hunting subjects are impressive for their lack of romanticism or heroism. The plainness, frankness, and truth of his visual narratives set him apart from his peers.

Both Bewick and Homer demonstrated how light illuminates our world. Bewick worked in a medium in which every stroke of the graver adds light to the image. Homer illumined with colour. Both artists had deep love and knowledge of their subjects.

RR: I’m fascinated by the connection between fly angling literature and the importance of place. Fly anglers cherish the home waters that shape their identity; likewise, writers define themselves, in part, by giving expression to place through their craft.

WB: I feel you evoke place very well in your writing. One has to be part of a place, and that requires long association. Before I moved to where I live now in Clifford, I visited the area to fish. It was twelve years before I left the city to set down roots in a rural community. Becoming part of a place is difficult if you don’t interact with your immediate environment. Fishing has been significant to my understanding of where I live. Standing in a river is an intimate act of relationship with the wider landscape, the flora and fauna and network of human relationships Water is the centrepiece of any community. My work as an artist developed through my interaction with riverscape—it’s a bonus that I can also go fishing.

RR: While the turn of the last century is recognized as the golden age of fly fishing, I contend that we are now living in the golden age of fly fishing literature. Incidentally, Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler, first published in 1653, is the most frequently reprinted English-language book of all time, save for the Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress. But it is only recently that fly angling writing has turned away from the hows of catching fish to the whys of fishing. Even though it is an apprenticeship memoir, a reader gains precious little instruction on how to catch fish from Casting into Mystery. It’s not an instructional manual by any stretch. Catching fish is incidental. Instead, it explores what is gained from fishing with fur and feather.

WB: You are so right. Thanks to social media, instruction on how to catch fish has been taken away from writers and artists. That allows us to engage our imaginations in other matters and with other concerns related to the “art” of fly fishing.

RR: With that in mind, I hope readers view our book beyond the confines of sporting literature. I have long been interested in what is sometimes referred as the Rural Tradition. The British writer Robert Macfarlane is a contemporary with whom I share a common literary goal. I try to do for fly fishing what he has does so brilliantly with walking and hiking.

Similarly, I see our book as crossing over into nature writing. While we might think of nature writing as exploring wild and remote places, devoid of human contact, the nature writing on which our book is based reflects Thoreau, Annie Dillard or Wendell Berry more than John Muir, Rick Bass or Barry Lopez in the High Arctic.

WB: The Rural Tradition interests me as well. In the engraving world, there are some great English artists, such as Thomas Bewick (already mentioned), Howard Phipps, and Monica Poole. The English have a long and rich tradition of wood engravers working with rural themes and settings. In America, there is Clare Leighton, an import from England, and Thomas W. Nason, known as the poet engraver of New England. These are the engravers who have most inspired me. Wood engraving is a slow and deliberate process. The time for observation and searching for detail is important, but for me it’s really about finding the light. I look for a balance between accurate detail and personal stylization, the proper anatomical gesture to complement the graphic strength in the subject. In our book, I’m not illustrating your words as much as adding a complimentary visual narrative of place.

To my way of thinking, the Rural Tradition is a weaving together of the natural landscape and the cultivated landscape. The narrative lies in the intersection of these two landscapes. A riverscape is a wonderful expression of the natural world; with a fly angler included, the wild and the cultivated take on the beauty of passion and devotion.

RR: Regardless of the tradition, though, the first thing a reader should do when they consider our book is interpret its title literally as well as metaphorically. Essentially, our book is an investigation into the mysteries of fly angling, which are emblematic of life’s larger mysteries. Fly angling provides the vocabulary, both textual and visual, through which we try to give shape and substance to the mysteries that envelop us. We could spend a lifetime looking for answers to fundamental questions and be thwarted in our search for meaning and purpose. Fly fishing has taught me that it is enough to wade a river, cast a fly, and surrender to the embrace of mystery.

WB: I feel fortunate to be collaborating with you on this project. I have learned more about fly fishing in the last two years hanging out and fishing with you than I did on my own over many years. It goes back to becoming an integral part of a particular place. Drawing and painting while up to my waist in a river is comparable to wading a river with a fly rod in hand. The perspective is the same, even if the intent differs. What I gain in knowing about where I am opens me up to my sense of place. At the same time, what I have yet to see and come to know is even greater. That’s where mystery comes in. It’s the kind of mystery that is a part of being there.

RR: One of the things that delights me most about our book is its subversiveness. On the one hand, we try to persuade non-anglers that fly fishing is not about catching fish. On the other hand, we try to persuade anglers that fly fishing is about more than catching fish. Whatever practical things fly angling offers, it also serves as a path towards healing. It’s not a sport in any conventional sense, like golfing or tennis—or even tossing a hard lure from a bass boat. At its root, fly fishing is an imaginative act, which links it to other forms of art and creativity. It’s no coincidence that so many artists are drawn to fly fishing and, conversely, that fly fishing inspires so much art.

WB: I couldn’t agree more.

Photos courtesy of Wesley Bates.

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True Story: An Interview with Eufemia Fantetti

Award-winning writer, Humber Literary Review (HLR) editor and writing prof extraordinaire Eufemia Fantetti released My Father, Fortunetellers and Me: A Memoir to great acclaim in 2019—the Toronto launch a spectacular blend of Italian hospitality, riveting tarot readings, and Eufemia’s not-to-be-missed on-stage interview with her father. 

TNQ subscribers can read an excerpt from the book here. If you’re not a subscriber, look for “The Sun” in the magazine’s fall 2019 issue, TNQ 152.

—Susan Scott,TNQ Contributing Editor

Let’s start with the backstory: how this gorgeous book came to be, and whence the notion of twinning each chapter with a tarot card.

The stars aligned is the short answer. More accurately, I posted heaps of conversations with my dad on social media where he developed a fan base. Mona Fertig of Mother Tongue Publishing reached out and mentioned she would be interested in publishing another book of mine. I gathered all my notebooks, journals and clunky grad school thesis and imagined (the correct term is ruminated) completing the memoir—a project that had lived in my heart, mind, and soul for years.

One of the biggest frustrations with my family was how frequently we accepted our lot in life instead of fighting back. (An oversimplified description which doesn’t factor in generations of poverty, peasantry, or the lack of possibilities my parents experienced in postwar Italy.)

I was considering our default-to-destiny modus operandi when Nicole Breit, the fabulous creative nonfiction instructor, sent me Sonja Swift’s brilliant essay “Tarot of Transformation,” and the frame fell into place.  

What were your worst fears when you sat down to write? And when you signed off on the manuscript—when you knew the story would soon go public—what then? It’s been a year since you submitted the manuscript’s final edits—have your fears shifted, over time?

Worst fears: Betraying my parents, portraying the worst of our family, revealing too much about myself, contributing to erroneous stereotypes about Italians and violence, and potentially increasing the stigma faced by individuals like my mother—people suffering with severe and persistent psychosis. My apprehension was fierce. A few migraines, stomach-aches, and a nervous eye tick developed from huge doses of caffeine, and many nights of interrupted sleep later, I’m fine. Coping with a traumatic past is another world—galaxies away from revealing personal history in print, and I’d forgotten that hard-learned truth.

Once, I gave my father an essay of mine that had been translated into Italian and he called me, concerned: “You wrote about me taking pills?” I thought he meant the seventeen pills a day he took for diabetes, depression, high blood pressure, and cholesterol. He explained, “No, you wrote about when I took all my pills.” After a nail-biting pause, I remembered the piece mentioned his suicide attempts. I offered to never recount his mental health in print again, and he gave me permission to continue. My hand shook when I hung up the phone. 

“Trying to capture my father’s voice and do him justice was another craft element that would swirl through my neural pathways late at night when I was trying to work out chapters and sequences.”

My Father, Fortunetellers and Me was released in October 2019. This is your second book with the West Coast indie press, Mother Tongue. What’s changed now that the book is circulating freely in the world? What are you learning from its reception, its audience—who loves this book, and why?

True story: My dad loves it, but he hasn’t read the book. Five fishy stars from him. He believes I’ve spun a golden memoir out of straw history because a few people have approached him and mentioned they loved the book. To clarify, these are neighbourhood folks he’s pressed into owning the book, and one fellow he loaned it to—he gave away several copies of the memoir and kept asking for a replacement. I teased him about being a terrible salesman and he came back with, “What difference is twenty bucks going to make in your life?” Safe to say my ego is not in danger of ballooning any time soon.

Readers who reached out have been diverse, and I’ve been heartened by their generous responses.     

Let’s talk about patterns. Certain issues haunt nonfiction writers: how to depict people in ways that are truthful, authentic, but not hurtful; how not to exact revenge; how to avoid diminishing or punishing your characters. It’s the dilemma at the heart of making art from trauma. Your story digs deep into the family vault, exposing generations of harm, including a mother who is ill and suffering, someone who’s caused unending heartache for herself and others. How did you balance the enormous pressures that come with exposing family trauma with the tell-all expectations that come with writing memoir?

Ethics is a fraught issue that wakes essay writers and memoirists in the middle of the night. I wondered for ages about whether I had the right to tell my own tale because it would be impossible to write without including abuse, battles, and unfavourable portraits of people I care deeply about. The stories I chose to reveal were selected and distilled, organized and edited with an aim to give as authentic a report as I could about growing up with an ill, abusive mother and a depressed, passive father. The added layers of confusing cultural beliefs, complicated language barriers, inherited trauma, superstitions, and dealing with a broken medical system were demanding and worrisome. I was antsy about getting details wrong or about delving too deeply into the despair the situation could produce.

I kept a quote, “There are three sides to every story: yours, mine and the truth,” above my desk, and some mornings I lit a candle and recited an incantation asking my ancestors to assist me. I spoke in Molisan, repeating my intention to be a truth-teller, and to walk the path without causing further harm. Like everything in life, this is much easier said than done. There’s a code of secrecy woven into family chronicles, but silence begets trouble. Toxic patterns are allowed to flourish and continue unabated unless we’re willing to name the damage done and wrestle with the accompanying shame.

Books have been my comfort food, teachers, and medicine—I return for remedies when I am hurt and lost in the dark woods of my wounded self. Memoirs are sacred texts: I didn’t receive the “How to be Human” guidebook at birth, and I misplaced the “Here’s How to Fix This Mess” memo, so I turned to other writers to learn. My goal wasn’t to humiliate anyone, but to make order from the chaos.  

Now, to the mother question. Conventions around how to talk about mothers are so strong—there’s a special place in hell for women who complain about our mothers. And yet, the “poorly mothered,” as Linda Clarke puts it—a long list of writers that includes Mary Gordon, Mary Karr, Jeanette Walls, to name a few—have pushed back on society’s assumptions about how daughters should behave. You could say these writers have placed truth above relationship. Or that their relationship with truth outweighed a conventional sense of duty to the mothers. What are your thoughts on this dynamic?

Uhm, first of all, thank you for putting me in incredible company—took a moment to swoon and pass out. I’m back now. That special place in hell has a room reserved for the ungrateful daughters of Italian mammas (down a rocky corridor route, past huge cisterns of molten lava, and low-hanging stalactites, turn left). To be a mother in Italian culture is to be a member of an exalted, celebrated group, and to a certain crowd my mother outranks me in respect simply because she became a mom—even though she was astonishingly unsuited for the role. On my maternal side, three generations of mentally unstable behaviour were recorded, and I’ll never find out how far back the strain extends.

Clearly, the situation is far more complex than individually being unmothered. Not long ago, Italy had the highest rate of femicide in Western Europe. At the intersection of imperialist Roman Empire Avenue and Monolithic Catholicism Boulevard (aka Ground Zero) thrives the blight misogyny. It wouldn’t be fair to explore my difficult mother or the lingering harsh impact she had without acknowledging the deeply flawed world that formed her. This requires a collective societal reckoning: until we can stop reading articles about domestic violence that state “The catalyst was an argument—”, and understand that brutality is frequently a precursor or predictor of catastrophic events—nothing will change. 

Family violence is another taboo you tackle, revealing stories that implicate you in the household cycle of violence. Wasn’t it exhausting, having to recall those scenes? How did you prepare yourself? And how did you survive the writing? 

Absolutely, the process tuckered me out. My feeling was, the only way to be fair was to show the devastation we wrought together and the part we all played in our disastrous union. We dealt with each other day-in, day-out with warts, blisters, and all on display. Imagine sitting down to dinner with family and the equivalent of an old-style pull station fire alarm goes off. The device never stops blaring, and no one arrives to turn off the noisy contraption. Everyone shouts over each other to be heard, nerves unravel, and the conduct is unbecoming to their humanity. We were a family in constant crisis—no one behaved their best.

When the process wore me out I checked in with friends, ate comfort food, and practiced the avoidance skills I had acquired and perfected in childhood. At times, unhelpful coping techniques were my best defense against the vociferous inner critic who berated everything I wrote. The hindering strategy I reference is code for copious amounts of sugar. I’m talking about an outrageous intake of sour key candies.  

Please, say more about self-care. 

 Of course, it would be an honour. I don’t think self-care is discussed as much as the subject is needed. And I want to be cautious with the topic because a well-being routine is as personal and unique as a fingerprint.

One thing I recommend to students is to make a self-care list of activities that soothe. Everything has to go on that list without judgment. Let me share part of mine to highlight what I mean: Cry. Consume chocolate. Call a friend. Slip under the duvet. Read. Drink a cup of tea. Have a glass of water. Eat spaghetti sprinkled with parmesan. Hoover potato chips. Shower. Order take out. Speak with dad. Watch Star Trek. Decorate a notebook. Sleep.

A self-care list isn’t the sole domain of creative nonfiction writers, but a form of dependable solace for anyone going through a difficult time—say, a pandemic. For years I felt embarrassed about the habit of viewing television shows I’d already seen or rereading a favourite book while others waited patiently in a pile for attention, but I’ve learned that the practice is common in individuals dealing with Complex-PTSD. The unsettled mind seeks stories with character arcs, plot lines, and endings that are already known as a source of comfort and calm. 

Your mother and father are still very much alive. We know when we put down the book that the heartache is ongoing—that the mother-daughter story, in particular, when it does end, might not end well. What are your thoughts on how to tell a story that is still in motion? 

This was the biggest hurdle for the longest time in large part because I bought into the self-help myth that one could change their station in life with hard work and adjust their busted self through serious effort. My father fervently believes people can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, and while I don’t agree, I still battle that beast. When I poke holes in the expression, he admits it’s untrue. Barriers exist that we can’t fathom, but we must.

In my distorted thinking process, it might have been acceptable to end with our story “still in motion” if we had an overall successful finish. This is where buying into the self-help myth is a form of interior pollution, and I think it’s also where the demand for inspiro-porn comes from; a dark and troubling tale is permissible if everything works out favourably in the final scene: readers trust everything will be “better in the long run”—everyone altered forever but wiser for the anguish they endured.

That false equation of suffering-plus-survival-makes-people-stronger simply indulges the broken systems within society while placing the blame squarely on an individual’s shoulders. It’s absurd and corrupt.

Resilience depends more on the support we receive than on our inner mettle. Anyone who says different is peddling snake oil. In reference again to the pandemic, the popular saying, “We’re all in the same boat,” was making its way across social media a few weeks ago. Thankfully, people pushed back noting that while we are weathering the same storm it’s sheer ignorance to assume we’re all in the same boat. I mean, how was that not obvious? Some people are in sailboats, some individuals will ride out this squall in yachts moored securely in a marina, some hoodwinked folks claim to miss the cruise ship adventure and many, many more are bracing to get through this tempest in life rafts or gondolas or worse—already clinging to flotsam and trying to keep their hope above water.

One of the things I love is how you handle class and dialogue—moving seamlessly between Molisan and English. Ocean Vuong talks about recreating working-class, immigrant bodies and voices in his novel, On Earth, We’re Briefly Gorgeous—he sees himself writing in the tradition of Melville, another local New England writer who took the working class (in his case, whalers) seriously enough to document their lives. Vuong places his work in a line he traces straight to Moby Dick. Immigrants, in art, are so often marginalized, invisible, yet in Vuong’s works they are lifted up, placed squarely in a literary tradition where they belong. Any thoughts as you reflect on this?

Trying to capture my father’s voice and do him justice was another craft element that would swirl through my neural pathways late at night when I was trying to work out chapters and sequences. I love accented English; honestly, I cannot get enough of that glorious speech choir one can hear on the subway in Toronto. I love the made-up words of the first generation (a vocabulary that often is lost or erased when their descendants learn to speak the “proper” language of their ancestors).

All my life, I watched people treat both my parents as if they were unintelligible simply because they had thick accents even on words that could be easily deciphered. Listening is a lost art. Combined with my intense dislike of snobbery, I was determined to include untranslated dialect that I hoped readers would understand by dint of context, and include some dialogue where we switched from our rural Italian dialect to English because that is how we converse. To state the obvious, accents are different on the page; the whole endeavour can come off sounding fake, or like a gross stereotype. I was confident readers would discern that the solid English sections of dialogue was in fact Italian. And when readers quote my dad’s botched idioms, I feel honoured that his charming expressiveness continues on.  

In Amy Tan’s fantastic essay, “Mother Tongue,” she addresses the problems with calling her mother’s English “broken,” “fractured,” or “limited.” I decided not to use those terms anymore because they were pejorative.

I speak mangled Molisan, and have been mocked for mistakes many times. I persist because I’ll lose this first language when my father is gone. Since he’s retired, my dad’s grasp of English is weakening and worsening. Let’s just say, I’m translating more medical appointments. This is how communication works—always in a state of flux.

In one sense, your memoir is the paradigmatic ugly story/beautiful art phenomenon—and yet you resist notions of the classic redemptive arc. You’re willing to challenge the notion that if the Truth (capital T) is told with heart, all will change magically for the better.

Life is messy in general. With a chronically ill loved one (even estranged) and an abusive past, so many days felt like I was juggling with fire and dropping a bunch of lit torches. The auspicious aspect: my publisher Mona Fertig was sending gorgeous designs of the book cover and encouragement from afar. Time flies when the calendar contains a deadline. 

The week after the launch in Toronto, my father went to the police with my aunt to attempt to put another restraining order in place. Peace bonds lapse, but abusive behaviour isn’t a carton of milk—there’s no expiry date. At the station my dad told the officer the situation was so bad, his kid wrote a book about her mentally ill mother. He produces the memoir and insists the account proves he was right all along—my mother is impossible, unbearable, and relentless. Remember: he hasn’t read the book and likely won’t, so he fantasizes one character the villain, when in reality our circumstances often brought out the worst in each other. 

Peace bonds are ridiculously complicated to enforce. I’ve thought about getting one, but my address would be required and I live in hiding from my mother. I’ve been lucky no one has given away my exact whereabouts; my mom is aggressive and exhausting in her search for me. There is no such thing as closure (another myth), and after taking so long to realize I would never officially “get over” what happened (an objective for many years), it would have been irresponsible to say I came out of my childhood, the ongoing battles with my mother, and the experience of writing a memoir a stronger, better, more improved version of myself.

Families don’t always survive their trauma. They implode, shatter, and disintegrate—home is lost but the painful memories prevail. Acceptance is a calm day with a light breeze, meeting a friend for a meal and observing a glorious moon over the city. I can still be grateful for the life I have without engaging in a thinking process that supports victimizing other women or the most vulnerable communities among us. It takes vigilance.  

Recently, I reread the ending, to recommend it in a memoir course, and found myself bursting into tears. “No longer troubling deaf heaven with bootless cries, we might look upon ourselves and bless of the sum of all who came before us…” The closing lines are shatteringly beautiful and deceptively simple. How did you resist the pressure to say “everything’s fine now,” the temptation to say that all the terrible things that happened were simply gifts that made you appreciate life even more? 

My heart! That is so generous and I’m deeply grateful. Even while I grappled with self-help mythology or the pressure to produce inspiro-porn, I was acutely aware that our story would be erased from the world if I didn’t endeavour to be as precise as possible about how difficult it was, and how troublesome it remains. And I was fortunate to have strong readers, excellent advisors (including you, Susan) and to work with a wonderful editor who helped as well: Pearl Luke.

What’s next in your writing life?

A collection of lyric essays, Let Not Your Heart Be Troubled, and a series of linked stories titled Mangiacake.  

And finally, how about some hard-won wisdom. The Paris Review has a column called Rx: readers write in with a problem (pandemic, lost job, death of a beloved), and a resident poet prescribes a certain poem with that heartache in mind. Naturally, you should have your own column, but for now, what would you prescribe for writers who are struggling as you’ve struggled?

Read Michael Ungar’s article in The Globe & Mail, “Put down the self-help books. Resilience is not a DIY endeavour” as an antidote to gaslighting (and then carry on with Rebecca Solnit’s writings and keep going). Seek out community. Help everyone you can when you are able to do so. Find free online workshops or classes. Read Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese,” and minimize your time with harmful people. Keep a safe distance. Memorize this line from Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata: “You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here,” and aim to embody this truth every moment of your precious life.

Eufemia, thank you.  

An absolute pleasure, Susan, thank you.

Photos courtesy of Eufemia Fantetti.

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Deborah Vail’s Writing Space

My office is an eclectic space, or as some have described it, a clutter. I found an antique oak desk on Craigslist for an empty bedroom. A few days later, my oldest son brought me a chaise lounge of the same vintage. From the basement I dragged up an old rug with black background and burgundy and beige flowers petals on it. My husband built me a sturdy wooden bookshelf that almost reaches the ceiling. It holds stacks of photo albums and jars filled with sea glass collected from the beaches I’ve visited all over the world. A large burnt orange, silk scarf that I found at an Australian flea market hangs over the window to filter the afternoon sun.

A binder of rejection letters rests on a corner of my desk to remind me that I’m still in the game, and I’m still passionate about my craft. The sting of receiving one is not so strong anymore because if a magazine rejects my submission, good chance it has accepted one from a writer I know and admire. There is always reason to celebrate.

This space is off limits to everyone but my puppy, Belle who has a way of encouraging me to keep working even through the harder days—it’s the glint in her eyes and her willingness to listen.

I have a view of my vegetable garden and fruit trees. For me, gardening and writing are close cousins. Both require passion, planning and execution. I rarely do one without thinking about the other.

Yet, as much as I love this writing space that I’ve created, it’s not where inspiration for a story or personal essay takes root. Most begin as jumbled notes on restaurant napkins or other scraps of paper when I am far from home.

My short story, Levi’s Practice is part of a collection entitled, Seal Teeth and the idea for this project came to me during a month long boat trip to Desolation Sound at the northern end of the Salish Sea off the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia. While stocking up on supplies in a small boat-in only community, I overheard talk of a swimmer who had been bitten by an injured seal. People speculated about how such a thing could happen and who was to blame. A fisherman said seals were a real nuisance and should be culled, the cashier said the man’s wife was to blame because she’d been feeding it off the end of their dock, and a woman off a sailboat asked if the man deserved to be bitten. My imagination was stoked.

By the time I returned home to my writing space, a collection of linked, fictional stories about complicated characters whose heartaches and dreams bump into each other as they muddle through life on a secluded island, had taken root. The next complicated step was to decide on the best point of view for each story. Two others have recently been published. The Seal that Ate My Father’s Fish, in Grain Magazine’s Summer 2017 edition Volume 44.4, and The Float Home in The Antigonish Review’s Winter 2019 edition, volume 49, 196. There are seven more in this collection, and I hope that one day soon, they can co-exist between the covers of one book.

Deborah Vail holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. Her fiction, book reviews and interviews have appeared in several Canadian Magazines. Her review of Dr. Sonja Boon’s memoir, What the Oceans Remember: Searching for Home and Belonging is forthcoming in The Antigonish Review. She lives in Mission, BC where she enjoys self-isolating with her partner and her new puppy.

Photos courtesy of Deborah Vail. Cover image by Nicolas Savignat on Unsplash

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Finding the Form with Kate Cayley

Doc took shape when I was listening to a lot of Townes Van Zandt and then looked him up. He was a brilliant wreck most of the time and at the end was looked after by his producer’s younger brother. There was a quote in which he said Van Zandt was his first child. Van Zandt described the songs he wrote coming to him as voices—something in the air that was separate from him, a visitation. The story took shape from there. Slowly.

Usually, I’ll write the beginning of a story in a rush—somewhere between a paragraph and two or three pages, hit a wall abruptly, and then need to let it sit anywhere from a month to two years until the rest comes. This was no different. I think I had three paragraphs for half a year before anything became clear. I used to beat myself up over that stuckness, but now I just make sure I’ve got a lot of things on the go at once so I can move between things when something is jammed. Nothing will loosen it but time. I definitely don’t hear voices or anything that fancy but I do think there’s an aspect of creation in which you need to take seriously that the characters will speak to you if you give them time and get out of way as much as you can. So I’m trying.

Kate Cayley has published a collection of short stories and two collections of poetry. Her second collection of short stories is forthcoming from Biblioasis.

Cover image by Skylar Sahakian on Unsplash

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What is Kari Lund-Teigen Reading?

My to-read list is miles deep, the order haphazard, determined in large part by when my holds come in at the library. On March 13th, Aleksander Hemon’s My Parents/This Does Not Belong to You arrived for me at my branch. I was busy that day: stocking up on groceries, looking after a kid at home with a minor cold that, in any other time, I would’ve sent to school. But this was not any other time. I’d been waiting for months for this book, though, so I squeezed in a stop at the library. Good thing I did: it was the last day the libraries would be open for months.  

 

The book is split in two, with two covers, two titles, even the spine divided down the middle, a title on each half. I pick My Parents to read first. In those first strange weeks at home with the news unfurling in previously unthinkable headlines and statistics, Hemon’s sentences land with eerie resonance. Like this one, about his mom before the siege of Sarajevo upended her life: “Back before the war, she, like many, was protected by the unimaginability of the unimaginable–a comfortable, if false, assumption that what cannot be imagined cannot happen, or even be happening.” A later chapter about his father’s passion for beekeeping (“A secret of healthy life was at least a spoonful of honey a day.”) felt, in my moorless days, like urgent advice. I forced a daily spoonful on everyone in my house.

“In those first strange weeks at home with the news unfurling in previously unthinkable headlines and statistics, Hemon’s sentences land with eerie resonance.”

The divided structure of the book seemed tailor-made for reading in those first weeks of the pandemic. The engrossing narrative of his parents, enriched by the depth of thought Hemon applies to their complexities, was the perfect place for my mind during the anxious waiting of the beginning days. As the days wore on and some bizarre new form of everyday life emerged, my brain began to fizzle, attention turned this way and that by kids and the endless spool of numbers and each dawning realization of how terrible this pandemic would be in so many ways for so many people. By then, I was reading This Does Not Belong to You, a series of intense, tiny capsules of memory unhooked from narrative structure but floating with the story of his parents in the background. I read these in bursts, gulping them like air.

What luck that I picked up this book that day. My pandemic companion. 

In addition to TNQ, Kari Lund-Teigen’s writing has appeared in Glimmer Train, The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, and Grain. You can listen to her read at drumlitmag.com.

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Cover image by freestocks on Unsplash

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Pearl Pirie’s Writing Space

My real writing room is between my ears, and on nearest piece or paper, or lately something digital since a broken wrist has wreaked havoc with my already iffy handwriting.

I write wherever I can find my laptop or phone. I may have to lift a cat or dog to find them, or I may have left them (them the device not the animal) to charge by the fire that was burning in the morning, or by where I was cooking in the evening. I think scientists call this search “environmental enrichment”.

In my home office I have a rocket-booster turtle to remind me of natural speed, and the comedy of trying to go faster than I can. A metal question mark reminds, does it matter, why, why, why dig deeper. Lenticular prints and various lenses that show things change with your perspective, and an array of things that represent transformation: rubber tadpole and frog, wood shavings and petrified stone, a snakeskin. Things of mortality and interest such as a cow’s tooth, a dragonfly, deer antlers. And things to play with that please me: a music box, hand drums, beaver sticks, pretty stones and feathers. And prints I enjoy looking at: a Gaudi roof, Kirk and Spock and Manahil Bandukwala’s man with mango.

 

I can tuck myself in there in the dimness, with no movement in my peripheral vision and no internet. I can sit with my stash of all the relevant reference books. To my detriment there gets to be a detritus of papers and book piles which can dominate the space. Physical clutter is mental clutter.

For editing I need a clear, open well-lit space. As Jonathan Ball said, write at night, edit by light. That in my case is usually out on the couch with the dog cuddled in, as a live demonstration of calmness.

Blankets and my best friend are my favourite parts of the editing space. They are key. When I fall into work I forget time, space and body. I get cold and cramped, until the cat biting my feet, the dog nosing at me, and Brian speaking, remind me that meals and outside exist.

They all herd me to the important matters of eating and walking. Ideally I’ll rouse myself sooner before I lose circulation and get dizzy from concentration, and before I keel over overwhelmed because I looked at a screen too long, and/or forget to eat, drink, rest and breathe. On high anxiety days, the nested causalities means all I get to do is gear down and let myself find equilibrium. Nested causalities being I want X. Y has to happened before X. But first I need to do Z. In order to do Z I need to do A. Then I just get crestfallen then nap on a lap.

I can tuck myself in there in the dimness, with no movement in my peripheral vision and no internet. I can sit with my stash of all the relevant reference books.

What writing space tips would you offer to writers like yourself?

Stretch breaks. When pain takes you down, you can’t be yourself, or anything but useless. At least I can’t. A couple hours of exercise a day will loosen breath, body and clenched mind. We aim to walk 2-5km each day. Forest time is healing. Not a city forest. They practically hiss with their compacted roots, damaged limbs and far-off root network, but out among old trees, as undisturbed and old as possible. Or whatever place is holy and grounding to you to not do but be.

 

Pearl Pirie’s fourth collection, footlights, comes in the fall 2020 from Radiant Press. Her newest chapbook is Not Quite Dawn (Éditions des petits nuages, March, 2020). Her epistle haibun chapbook, Water loves its bridges: Letters to the dead, is due out in Dec 2020 from The Alfred Gustav Press by subscription. 

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Photos courtesy of Pearl Pirie.

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Kate Cayley’s Writing Space

I have a home office with a bed in it which doubles as a guest room twice a week (friends from out of town who have to be in Toronto one night a week for work, one working for the AGO, the other a farmer who sells at a market here). Of course, we don’t have guests right now. So the bed is an ambivalent object at present. The desk is an old folding desk, which belonged to my grandfather and isn’t really meant for sitting at for hours, more for writing letters and paying bills, but I love it. It’s got pigeonholes and a compartment that locks with a key, which my kids really like. 

“I keep a few things on the desk that feel significant. A chestnut my father brought from out front of my grandmother’s house after she died, my grandfather’s pen that I never use.”

The space is often messy—receipts and library books and old toner cartridges I haven’t dealt with, but I hope that’s evidence that writing happens in the middle of your life and not to one side, rather than that I’m just lazy about cleaning. I keep a few things on the desk that feel significant. A chestnut my father brought from out front of my grandmother’s house after she died, my grandfather’s pen that I never use. I keep those side by side—the two of them had a cosmically disastrous marriage that I might try writing about someday, and hadn’t seen each other in forty years or so when she died. An inkwell that belonged to my great-grandfather, which his parents gave him after he got back from WWI needing to very painfully relearn to use his hands—I still can’t decide if this gift is unconsciously cruel or deeply loving. So it seems like a good double-edged talisman to keep in view. So many intimate gestures are almost impossible to interpret and can’t be easily explained, and I think when writing feels most successful is when I believe, or hope, that I’ve described something plainly while leaving the mystery of it intact. That doesn’t happen very often, but it’s nice when it does.

Kate Cayley has published a collection of short stories and two collections of poetry. Her second collection of short stories is forthcoming from Biblioasis.

Cover image by Sébastien Bourguet on Unsplash

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Finding the Form with Jann Everard

It wasn’t until I was asked to consider writing this blog post that I appreciated the tortured history of  “Watching Her Breath.” According to my records, my first version of a story set in the Marche region of Italy was drafted in the autumn of 2014, just after I’d returned from a two-week trip to a rural property near Mondaino. I wrote a first draft—entitled “Roundabout” and several revisions later, abandoned the story in December of that year.

In the fall of 2015, I drafted a completely different story—entitled “Stung”—set in the same location. I tinkered with this version over the course of three years, sending it out only twice. In 2018, I changed the title, revised some more, and submitted the story to the US market, even though I was clearly dissatisfied. I know this because, by late 2017, I had pulled out the scene I liked the best (the ending, featuring the ants) and started again from scratch. This story—the first to feature two sisters and originally entitled “Vanessa”—was the version that ultimately became “Watching Her Breath.”

Writing about Italy may have complicated my ability to find the story. I’d lived in Rome as a teenager in the tumultuous late seventies, and the trip in 2014 was the first time I’d revisited the country. Naturally overwhelmed, I couldn’t find my way through the nostalgia, and my early efforts were over-embellished, the characters flat. The final story eventually emerged when I used Italy as a backdrop to the anticipatory grief I was experiencing over my sister-in-law’s inability to overcome her disordered eating. She died of complications of anorexia nervosa in March 2018.

In this, and many of the fictions I write, geographic place is often a starting point, giving me the sensory details that animate the story. The war memorial described in “Watching Her Breath” is a real place (known as Point 204, Canadian Gothic Line War Memorial – see photo) and seemed to me the perfect location for the sisters to approach a tough conversation. And the old stone house was real, too—its nooks and crannies and additions over the years a metaphor for the twists and turns of life itself.

In the end, I have two very different stories with the same “ant-gazing” scene as endings. But this one held emotional truth. The other was a necessary step in my writing process. The imperfect result was, ultimately, just me reminiscing about a country I love.

Jann Everard divides her time between Toronto, ON, and Sidney, BC. She was the winner of The Malahat Review‘s 2018 Open Season Award for Fiction. New work is forthcoming in the Humber Literary Review and Belmont Story Review. 

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Image provided by Jim Everard. Cover image by La So on Unsplash.

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Kari Lund-Teigen’s Writing Space

This room sits just off the kitchen in my house. It faces south so on sunny days is full of light. Judging by its temperature in the winter, I think it used to be a porch.

Tempting as it was, I did not tidy or alter the room before taking this picture. It captures so much about my life at this moment, writing and otherwise. Around the computer, there are scraps of paper, a ruler, a math book, a copy of The Mysterious Benedict Society. None of these belong to me. Since the schools are closed, my kids need this computer for online learning. Tucked underneath the monitor is a draft of a book I was working on. The picture might not show it but I may as well admit it’s dusty.

 

That bizarre, carpeted ramp up to the ugly stacked storage bins? That’s for our cat who broke his paw last week and so now wears a splint and is not supposed to jump for 6-8 weeks. He wears a cone to stop him from chewing on his splint and so needs to be spoon-fed. He does not enjoy the cone, but seems more than happy for the spoon-feeding.

Though the details may be different, I’m sure the general outline is familiar to a lot of people right now: things are not as they were. Projects and deadlines and imagined progress shunted aside by the brute force of this new everyday life.

In addition to TNQ, Kari Lund-Teigen‘s writing has appeared in Glimmer Train, The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, and Grain. You can listen to her read at drumlitmag.com. 

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Photos courtesy of Kari Lund-Teigen.

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