A Poet's Park

On Saturday I went with a friend to Inspire!, Toronto's new book fair, which was a multi-stage riot of booksellers, publishers, readings, panel discussions, and children's activities. I've been forced to attend many a trade show on behalf of various former employers and always viewed them as dreadful ordeals: tiring and airless and schmoozy. Slogs to be endured. Now I know why those were so horrible (especially that godawful one in Las Vegas long ago): no books. In contrast, at the fun and inspirational BOOK fair I was energized by many hours of wandering past displays, chatting, meeting people, listening to writers, and oh right, buying books. I overspent wildly.

And a nice re-discovery, on my way from the Convention Centre to the car: a tiny Toronto park dedicated to 19th century poet Isabella Valancy Crawford, an Irish immigrant to Canada who lived for a time in Lakefield. I haven't read much of her poetry, and what I have read isn't, I confess, my thing. But it's impressive that the city formally recognized an impoverished young poet of the past. I'd like to know more about how the park came to be.

Once, years ago, my family was sitting on the little strip of grass in the shadow of the CN Tower. We were eating a cheap lunch bought from a hotdog truck when I noticed the plaques. It seemed a strange coincidence that of all the places we could land in the Big Smoke, we had happened upon a space commemorating one of the literary icons of our village.

So this time, even though it was dark and my camera is basic, I took photos. Another kind of inspiration.

  

Reno-mania

I'm going to try to write this post in the ten minutes available to me. That's the way blogging is supposed to happen, and I almost never manage it. So here goes, timer on. A few notes on our renovation in progress:

--Two guys just shuffled past me carrying part of a tub unit being installed today. Apparently it is heavy. There were stairs and corners to negotiate. I had to leave the computer, remove the desk chair, and hold the barking dog to help them do their job.

--First thing this morning (7:30, people, and I got the message about the early start around midnight last night!), one of the same guys showed up with a plumber and helper. Nice fellows. The plumber remembers us and our wonky pipes. We probably funded his boat or something. I'm hoping this visit is his last; he has replaced pretty much everything over the years.

--Plumbing trumps all--and just as we expected, it's led to mission creep. Demolition creep, involvement of another room. A wall in our tiny office (really a glorified walkway/storage dump) has to go in order to access pipes. The same wall we opened up last time, five years ago, and the time before that, twelve years ago. You'd think I might have been prepared, cleaned out the space before today. But this morning it suddenly HAD TO BE DONE. In record time I removed books and files and years of paper piles waiting for the shredder. Removed to where, you might ask? Exactly. Whole other rooms are now involved. And since we're cutting into walls, they are getting a fresh coat of paint, something vivid and warm. Options so far are cranberry cocktail, radicchio, raisin tarte, and aubergine. Tasty colours all.

Please vote.

--Time's up, no more writing. Despite all the chaos, things are very calm. The title of this post should be revised. It's not reno-mania around here, not a bit.

Have your kids go into plumbing for a secure future.

Why do I love this picture? It makes me wish I had a better camera than the one on  my phone. The contractor just walked by and said, "You won't see plaster done like this anymore." I was focusing on the sculptural, vaguely humanoid, composition formed by the electrical box and dust mask, but sure: plaster. Anyone can appreciate that. I am appreciating the hell out of it right now, as it's being covered.

Certain family members are tired of talking tile...

Freecycling makes the world go round. These disappeared within the hour

.

Demolition Begins

Can it be that more than a year has passed since I mentioned we were renovating a bathroom--that, in fact, a renovation was imminent? Of course. That's how we roll around here. Everything happens months and years after we say it will.

But now it really is beginning--total gut, back to the studs, with all the possibilities and pitfall$ an old house presents. This has been a big week. Add in Halloween and marks due and relatives coming to visit...yeah, that's all happening, somehow.

Day Zero, Tuesday: dumpster delivered. An item necessary to collect construction waste, of course, but reno veterans know that the hulking bin is an invitation to purge beyond the room in question. We are serial renovators.

Day One, Wednesday: Tim climbed the roof, strung tarps, punched exploratory holes (yes, there really is no insulation in the outer walls), and began hammering. As in past projects, we're doing as much of the demolition as possible before the contractor steps in next week, and Tim will also be rewiring the room. In fact, he's put in 98% of the sweat equity so far, but this weekend we plan to give the kids dust masks and safety glasses and let them do their worst with sledgehammers (maybe only one at a time, given small rooms and siblings). Meanwhile, our child chain gang will be kept busy hauling buckets of plaster and lathe to the dumpster.

Ripping out walls is therapeutic, especially if previous generations of homeowners opted for wonky corners and odd cuts of trim to accommodate the addition of mechanical systems. The house was built around 1902. Pretty sure indoor plumbing came later. 

Notice the original (?) wallpaper beneath layers of tile, adhesive and cement board. Notice the tile that I've hated for the fourteen years we've lived in this house.

Day Two, Thursday:  Major demo, major dust. The contractor came over for a pleasant chat first thing this morning, and this happened afterward.

Exciting, right? The possibilities are endless. I discovered the design website Houzz today, so that's a win for consumer excess. Since there are 468,000 photos of just bathrooms, I surmise that I'm the last person in North America to discover Houzz.

And then some cleanup happened.

Joe worked steadily for about an hour, making solid progress, but guess where I found him later?

I talked him down. Very calm, I was.

Here's the thing: we probably should have planned more before launching the destructo phase. It would be nice to share design ideas at this point, maybe post some paint swatches and tile samples, but I've got nothing. Complacent? Crazy? Surprisingly unstressed about it all. Next week will bring a different story. Stay tuned for the hurryup catchup decision-making phase.

And send advice, will you?

Everybody Knows: Inequality

Today I'm participating in Blog Action Day 2014 along with 1500 others writing from more than 100 countries about the topic of inequality.

Inequality is depressing and divisive, 100% bad news. Who wants to read bad news? Why should we? First, to raise awareness about the state of our world and our own communities, which are both damaged when inequality rises. Also, if you need further incentive to read to the end, there's a musical surprise related to today's theme. Stay with me?

Today is also World Food Day, when the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) releases its annual report on what people eat and how it gets produced. Another urgent topic is the Ebola outbreak, which the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a "Public Health Emergency of International Concern" back in August, but governments only began throwing money at in recent weeks, as it became clear that global really means global.

So, food and health care, both necessary to sustain life. What do they have to do with inequality?

Food

Enough food is produced annually to feed everyone on the planet, yet an estimated 805 million are chronically undernourished, according to the FAO's publication The State of Food Insecurity 2014. This is actually an improvement over previous years, but consider: 805 million. That's the equivalent of 2.5 USAs. It's the same as 24 Canadas. Nearly 1 in 7 human beings worldwide. All those people, hungry, with the accompanying misery, anxiety and lost potential. People no different than my children or yours.

Where are those hungry? No surprise, massive inequality mars this map of the world.

Have a look at another interactive map from the FAO. It's a wonderful tool to see how hunger has changed in severity and location over time.

Food insecurity for some households--that is, unequal access to food--is not just a problem in the global south. The rich nations of the world are also food insecure, in some places and for some populations. People continue to rely on food banks, particularly in hard economic times. In my community, a new report called Vital Signs indicates that in 2011-2012, the rate of food-insecure households (definition: those experiencing a shortage of good quality food, or at a risk of a shortage, because of a lack of income) in the greater Peterborough area reached 11.9%, compared with the Ontario average of 7.7%. Peterborough's rate has increased 4.1% since 2007. These are troubling figures.

Fortunately, local groups are taking action--trying to shape food policy and ensure that people have access to nutritious food. Vital Signs notes that 81,650 lbs of produce was harvested from 30 Peterborough community gardens in 2013. For a small city, that's amazing.

Health Care

For the first time, the World Bank has explicitly included the reduction of inequality as one of its goals, labeled as shared prosperity. In a speech in Washington, DC earlier this month, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim (a medical doctor) linked inequality and health care. Kim said:

"As the spread of the Ebola virus in West Africa shows, the importance of this objective could not be more clear. The battle against the infection is a fight on many fronts – human lives and health foremost among them. But it is also a fight against inequality. The knowledge and infrastructure to treat the sick and contain the virus exists in high and middle income counties. However, over many years, we have failed to make both accessible to low income people in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. So now, thousands of people in these countries are dying because, in the lottery of birth, they were born in the wrong place."

So much has been written about Ebola--the scaremongering media coverage of the few US cases diagnosed so far is itself a gross form of inequality. Three cases against thousands, but the three command intense interest. Sadly, for a lot of people our world amounts to an Us vs. Them proposition. Some social media posts even suggested that aid workers in the Ebola zone should just stay put if they get infected: too bad for them--they risked their lives to help foreigners in faraway places that don't matter.  

This makes me angry. Because we share a common humanity. Every life is equally important. We should care about the desperately ill facing this deadly outbreak, without regard to nationality, and if we have the means to help them--as individuals and as countries--we should. (Doctors Without Borders is doing heroic work, if you're looking for donation options.)

Globalization has gutted national borders in many respects. Countries no longer operate in isolation from one another to the extent they did in the past. And businesses benefit from that--our governments promote the free flow of goods and money--exports and investments. If I can buy fresh flowers in the supermarket that were grown in Colombia, drink coffee from Guatemala, receive telecom service from workers in India, fly to Germany to visit my friend, wear clothes made by women in Bangladesh (and before them Vietnam, Macau, El Salvador, or Mexico, because the textile industry is ultra-mobile), use a computer built with parts from everywhere, then I must also be prepared to extend a hand to the people who live in those places. (Also those who seek to migrate--but that's a topic for another day.) We are connected, and not only by commerce. Think art, literature, food, film, music, social media, family...countless connections.

It's not fair to accept the advantages of globalization and reject responsibility for problems beyond our borders. It's inequitable.

A Musical Interlude

Here, as promised: a song about inequality (and a few other things). Thanks to the great Leonard Cohen, Everybody Knows "that the dice are loaded."

Thank you for hanging in there, and please read on if you'd like a few more...

Links, Stats and Studies about Inequality

Oxfam, a key partner of Blog Action Day 2014, published a study in January 2014 showing that the 85 richest people in the world owned wealth equivalent to that held by the poorest HALF of the world's population. Since then, the situation has worsened--now just 67 billionaires own half of the world's wealth. This week, Credit Suisse released its Global Wealth Report 2014 which confirmed the continuing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, even while total global wealth has grown to record heights since the financial crisis. (See The Guardian for an excellent summary.)

The Half-life of Stories

 

In 2006 I bought a copy of Best American Short Stories and read the whole thing, marveling at the range of voices showcased in the anthology, the writers’ skillful execution of narrative. Until then I had not been a regular consumer of the BASS series, but Ann Patchett was the editor that year. I loved her novel Bel Canto. It was probably Patchett’s name on the cover, more than anything else, which moved me to pick up that particular edition of BASS.  

I was also hoping to figure out which literary journals were recognized for publishing the best work. The 2006 collection included the usual big names—The New Yorkers and Atlantic Monthlies of the world—as well as a handful of “little magazines”. I took note of the fact that out of twenty stories selected from thousands published in US and Canadian journals that year, two had originally appeared in One Story. Although One Story was founded in 2002, I had never heard of it, being clueless and about as far from New York City, geographically and psychologically, as one could get. I was impressed by One Story’s disproportionate representation in the pages of BASS.

And the stories themselves were stunning—Paul Yoon’s Once the Shore and Patrick Ryan’s So Much for Artemis had the power to transport a reader to an island in South Korea and Nixon-era Florida, respectively. I ingested them along with other stories by writers such as Yiyun Li and Edith Pearlman and David Bezmozgis, favorites of mine ever since. Their stories remain inside me, available at any moment for recall and examination. The character details or author names might fade, but they never disappear entirely. While my workaday life is full of forgetfulness, somehow it’s always easy for me to remember books and stories I’ve read.

One Story office

So I began to read One Story, to pay attention to the carefully published issues that appeared every few weeks in the mail. I referenced some of them as examples for the college class I teach and highlighted others in a recent post, Goodbye, 2013 Books. When One Story began offering online education programs I tried one, starting with Will Allison's excellent class on revision. That led me to apply for The Workshop for Writers, certain to be an intense experience.

Which brings me to last week. I’m still flying from the wonders of last week. Workshops run by Will and Marie-Helene Bertino (find an excerpt from her forthcoming novel on the Guernica site) anchored each morning with thoughtful, generous critiques of works in progress. Strangers newly arrived from Saskatchewan, Ontario, California, Brooklyn, wherever, turned into close readers and then friends—the funny, frank, supersmart friends you can trust with your work. Inspiring panel discussions, excursions and craft talks by Hannah Tinti and others rounded out the days with fresh insights and laughter. Heaps of practical advice and encouragement, superb organization, a beautiful venue in The Center for Fiction—who could ask for more? 

Final night, reading at the Old American Can Factory

Yet part of me was skeptical, at first. Wondering about the investment of time and money, worrying about my writing and getting along with others and—well, everything.

Until the third afternoon, in the middle of Patrick Ryan’s craft talk on merging two “okay” story ideas to create one compelling idea. I can mark the precise moment when I began to feel at home. It was halfway through his talk. He distributed a pamphlet, which turned out to be the 2012 prototype issue for One Teen Story, the journal of which he is now Editor-in-Chief. The featured story? My old friend, So Much for Artemis, showing up for a visit. Patrick’s story, which I remembered well but hadn’t connected with the entertaining speaker at the front of the room. The life of the original has been extended through, first, the BASS selection, and then re-publication in One Teen Story. I'm sure it has found a new audience with each appearance. Afterward, I asked Patrick to sign my copy, and he told an anecdote about how he learned that Patchett had chosen his work for BASS 2006. I told him I had just finished her new collection of essays, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage (so good—read it). 

How strange is it that eight years after I first read the tale that introduced me to One Story, One Story handed it back to me? Call it coincidence if you like, but I know the explanation. That story's life isn't over.

Goodbye, 2013 Books!

January 31st, 9:43 pm: Is this the last possible moment to present a roundup of everything I read in 2013? It may well be. Although the calendar is an arbitrary thing, January still belongs to Old Year/New Year comparisons, while tomorrow--February already--represents slogging through the slush of remaining months. So tomorrow will be too late.

I've been thinking about my list for a few weeks, and not quite typing it out. One problem is that I haven't kept a reading journal, so I had to reconstruct my year in books. I might have missed some, especially short fiction daily zapping around the Internet, stories from heaven, and hell.

A more mundane problem is household noise. Yakking kids, barking dog, TV in the background. Here's a little slice of our soundscape this evening: the History channel, which should be fine for young people, right? Let the educational bonanza begin. Except "History" was inexplicably running a show called Ancient Aliens, complete with so-called experts discussing star portals--whatever they may be--in Lake Michigan. And I was proud of, if a tad distracted by, the derisive hoots coming from my offspring. They know their history from their sci-fi, unlike the network programmers who are even now violating the terms of their broadcast licence.

At the moment, things are calmer. My son is watching the old film My Cousin Vinny, one of our faves. It's still in my ears, though, still slowing me down. I'll do my best to keep the inflections of the stern Southern judge character (played by the hilarious Fred Gwynne of The Munsters fame) and Joe Pesci's smartass Brooklyn lawyer out of this report to the world.

The thing about this list is how random it seems, even to me. It's the result of a mysterious combination of bookstores I wandered past, short stories I found online and in journals, book club dictates, and my abiding interests in food, migration, and big data/surveillance. Not included are books that I gave up on. At a glance, my list appears to be weighted toward Americans with some British and Canadian writers in the mix and achieves a rough balance between male and female writers, as well as fiction and non-fiction. Pure happenstance, all of it. Still, tracking reading habits is an exercise worth doing, if only to assess how scarce hours disappeared.

Allow me to introduce, and say goodbye to, my 2013 reading list. Here, in no particular order, are some books and stories you might want to read yourself.

Fiction

• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob DeZoet by David Mitchell: I'm slowly working my way through all of Mitchell's books. His Cloud Atlas is an inspiration (and the film version, while entertaining, doesn't touch that book's magic).

• 419, by Will Ferguson: winner of the 2012 Giller Prize, featuring a global plot sparked by Nigerian telecom scams.

• The Age of Miracles, by Karen Thompson Walker: first novel about a girl and her family coping (and not coping) when the earth's rotation begins to slow.

 

• John Henry Days, by Colson Whitehead: This may have been the novel of my year. It's not a new book (found in a in a New York bookstore bin), but I couldn't stop thinking about its intriguing thematic structure--spokes of narrative arrayed around the hub of a cultural icon, John Henry. It's funny and angry. The open-to-interpretation ending almost killed me. 

 

• NW, by Zadie Smith: wonderful, find my notes here, and I'll be rushing to get her new work, The Embassy of Cambodia.

• A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan: read on vacation, long after everyone else had stopped gushing (for good reason) about it.

• Tinkers, by Paul Harding, a gorgeous, compressed meditation on fatherhood that also manages to be rich in character and incident; winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2010 and somehow I never heard of it until September 2013.

• Beatrice & Virgil, by Yann Martel--allegorical animal stories within the story.

• The World Without You, by Josh Henkin: a family gathers for a memorial service for their son, a reporter killed covering the war in Iraq, and navigates the aftermath of grief.

• Notable short stories:
• Alice Munro's To Reach Japan
• E.L. Doctorow's A Writer in the Family
• Emma Donoghue's The Widow's Cruse*
• Mia Alvar's The Kontrabida*
• Amity Gaige's The Soul Keeps the Body Up*
  
• several stories from Edith Pearlman's collection, Binocular Vision; and
• a strange story called Birds in the Mouth by Argentinean writer Samanta Schweblin, translated by Joel Streicker, and recommended by PEN America on the Recommended Reading website.

 * These all appeared in the literary journal One Story, itself a huge find. Must renew subscription.

Non-Fiction

• Food Rules: An Eater's Manual, by Michael Pollan: short and sharp, find it here.

• Hungry for Change by A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi: examines the connections between hunger and obesity; the capitalist transformation of food production; and ways to address the global subsistence crisis, which affects us all. I loved learning about the ties between seemingly unrelated people and circumstances, such as Haitian and Lousiana rice farmers.      

• How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, by Stanley Fish: bought in e-book format and, while it was engaging enough for this word nerd, I'm glad I didn't spring for the hard copy.

• Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives, edited by Peter Orner: powerful and disturbing testimony, part of the McSweeney's Voice of Witness series. I wrote about this book previously.

• The Devil's Highway, by Luis Alberto Urrea: beautifully written account of a disastrous journey through the Arizona desert by a group of migrants in 2001. No surprise, it's tragic. A finalist for the Pulitzer, the book also has the distinction of being among a group of similar-themed works banned by Tucson district schools.

• Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace, by Ronald J. Deibert: I'm still immersed in this book, which came out before the Snowden revelations. It details many cases of cyber-espionage and hacking that University of Toronto's The Citizen Lab, which Professor Deibert leads, has uncovered. Everyone should read it. 

• Finally, I must include How to Expect What You're Not Expecting: Stories of Pregnancy, Parenthood and Loss, edited by Lisa Martin and Jessica Hiemstra, because encountering the wide-ranging, poetic voices of the other contributors was a revelation.

DIY Dairy

No, not milking cows. The title refers to do-it-yourself dairy products. I've been wanting to try making yogurt, sour cream, cream cheese and more ever since launching this slo-mo, haphazard Unprocessed Project a year ago. Homemade ricotta cheese, our first dairy experiment, turned out to be ridiculously easy.

I'm not ready to tackle yogurt, which requires both cooking and prolonged, temperature-controlled resting. But soon. Making your own yogurt sounds so hippie-ish, doesn't it? Pity that I was born too late to be a hippie.

Today's kitchen lab featured a less ambitious dairy project: sour cream made with a recipe from The Home Creamery--and, credit where it's due, I found this book through one of my favourite blogs, Obscure Canlit Mama.

The process is simple: mix some buttermilk into light cream. Cover and let stand 24 hours in a warm place. Stir, refrigerate another 24 hours to thicken, and then it's ready...we hope! I'll report back if disaster results. Meanwhile, here is the sour-smelling concoction warming in the cupboard over the heat vent, the only cozy spot in our drafty old house.

I was feeling a sense of accomplishment on the unprocessed food file this afternoon, having made not only the sour cream, but also brownies, hummous, and two kinds of scratch pizza, regular and beet-green. And then my son asked if we had any ranch dressing (for the pizza crust). Which of course we did not. And that was simply one dish too many. I invited him into the kitchen ("step away from the computer"), and the rest is edible history.

Joe's creation

Postscript: Anyone trying to feed a family based on Michael Pollan's 5-ingredient food rules will be defeated by the average supermarket dairy aisle. Most commercial dairy products contain long lists of ingredients, including milk protein concentrate (likely imported, made from milk possibly containing the synthetic growth hormone rBGH, which is banned in Canada but not the U.S.) and additives to extend shelf life, thicken, or emulsify, such as guar gum and carrageenan. Why not duck all that? 

Competing with Squirrels

Just over a year ago, I posted these pictures without explanation and never returned to the topic.

Perhaps it was because we were too busy dealing with this particular topic in the material realm. An overflowing topic, claiming space in boxes and pails, presenting itself as a chore that could be assigned to wayward children. They took turns--short turns--crushing nuts and sorting bits of shell from nutmeat before rebelling, quick to point out that they don't even like walnuts. Why do we collect them, anyway?

Yes, why: I don't know why. It has something to do with not wanting to waste nature's offerings. Our yard is surrounded by gorgeous black walnut trees that annually drop fruit at our feet. It also feels right to enact a ritual from earlier times. My paternal grandmother would have known what to do with all these nuts. My father (operating on genetic memory?) advised wearing gloves when peeling the green outer hull to avoid staining our hands black. So far, we haven't made our own dye, but that's an idea, too.

For my husband, who does 99% of the collecting and crushing, this extraordinarily labour-intensive activity is a race against his enemies. Every nut collected is one denied to the squirrels. He lives to defeat them, whether it's defending the bird feeders from rodent raids or, more recently, live-trapping and moving to friendlier territory the squatters nesting inside the ceiling of our mudroom (in the old summer kitchen, not inside the house proper, but still, ick...we could hear them up there, having a raucous party...they can't live with us, amIright?).  

So, here we are, one year later, sorting shells again. (And happy blog anniversary to me: 48 posts, not bad for the first year of an experiment, if I do say so myself.)

eldest daughter fails to employ walnut-avoidance tactics of her siblings

You, too, can harvest black walnuts and get free food. This tutorial will help. Thank you, friendly YouTube guy teaching us from Hamilton, Ontario. (Note: if the clip does not appear below, find it here.)

Somewhere online I read that people drive over the nuts to crush them, but that seems extreme, and our driveway isn't paved. The hammer method works. Tim wraps the nuts in cloth and demolishes a bunch all at once, but before the hammer, he tried crushing them with his vice, which broke. The shells are really, really hard.

I use the nuts in baking. Last year, we even had a few jars to give to relatives, to whom I offer a sincere and belated apology for any tooth-breaking shell fragments we might have missed.