Kathleen Molloy

Really, is there anyone who doesn’t love Maggie?

Spent the weekend in a town was dripping with CanLit icons. Kingston WritersFest welcomed: Margaret Atwood

Gil Adamson Lorna Crozier Leon Rooke and The Dewey Divas (sans Dudes??)

Kingston, in the Autumn, with folks that love books … what could be better? How about Kingston, in the Autumn, with a book in hand and a warm bowl of chilli in the other?

Chilli Fest Kingston is hot stuff. Saturday, October 3, 2009 12 Noon to 4pm Confederation Park, Downtown Kingston

Dewey Diva Maylin Scott offers up 10 advanced reading galleys of The Winter Vault. She explains that “this big and lush novel follows a couple’s relationship over several decades in Egypt and Canada. It’s about big engineering projects, lost and displaced people, history and memory, and written with all the meticulous detail and poetry of Michaels’ best-selling novel Fugitive Pieces.”

The contest is open to Canadian librarians. Send her an e-mail to mscott@randomhouse.com with the words “Winter Vault” in the subject line and your library mailing address at the library where you work. She’ll accept e-mails until Friday, Dec. 5th at noon EST.

I love to see the many ways that readers thank local librarians. Thank you Maylin!

Yesterday my doctor noted that I have grown plump since my last visit to his office. He asked if there had been any significant changes in my life since my last annual check-up “besides the book.” Besides the book? I blame the book! Dining with Death and La Mort au menu have given me girth. Since the books have been on shelves I have been on the run doing promos and eating whatever I can when I can, and drinking too many cold coffee slurpies to wash down too many apple fritters as I bounce between my car and bookstores.

“Oh,” I confessed to the doctor, “I just sit around drinking bottles maple syrup as inspiration for the GREAT Canadian novel.” It was a lie but only half of a lie. I’ve been doing research. (No, the next story is not about Canada’s maple syrup industry.) When I’m in the research mood I’m able to block out every sound from the outside world – but not the hum of the refrigerator.

During my “research” hours I’m anchored to my keyboard until my tea cup is empty. Then I march down the kitchen to prepare another cup of tea, put the laundry in, wash the dog bowl, and carry out the recycling. While in the garden I pick juicy yellow tomatoes to make a tomato sandwich. Sticking my head in the fridge I’ll discover the brie to add to my plate and maybe some grapes. Once I’ve shaken the crumbs from my moustache I head back to the keyboard, dragging along my now cold cup of tea. And then the buzzer for the washer sounds and the clothes need to be hung on the line and while I am picking up the clothes pegs I’ve scattered off the deck I discover that little green bugs have been sucking the life out of my strawberry plants. I then rescue all the strawberries that I can scoop into my t’shirt with plans to prepare a bowl of strawberries so that the kids can have a fresh after-school snack. I count the berries to see if I have enough for a chocolate fondue for lunch. Back into the garden I go, nibbling the fondue chocolate as I harvest the rest of the strawberries.

“So you’ve been goofing off.” My doctor diagnosed.

I have Olympicitis. You know the symptoms: pinched squinty eyes, dramatic yawns that you can’t hide, and the droopy head bob when you dose off in the middle of the day. The worst part is the sudden rush of adrenalin followed by gasps, grunts, and shouts.

Olympicitis is brought on by trying to stay up late to watch the Games. I’m suffering terribly.

Thankfully this malady lasts for only about two weeks and only flares up every 2 years. For me, the summer bout is much worse than the winter bout. My Olympicitis is unbearable right around the 100 metres dash finals. And it seems I’m a sucker for punishment because I don’t try too hard to stave it off when it lingers into the 200 metres, the hurdles, and the relay. I regret that I now feel the Olympicitis burn when I watch the biathlon, rowing, and gymnastic events too.

My doctor suggested that I turn the TV off. She wants me to wean myself from CBC’s streamed coverage of the Olympic Games. She suggested I listen to the radio for summaries, defer to newspapers or the Internet for updates, and avoid water coolers and all costs.

She didn’t, however, suggest that I search for my armchair-athletics fix in a book. Why was that? Is it because she had never stumbled across a sports-themed book that got her heart racing? How can CanLit possibly capture a 10 second dash without riddling the tale with clichés? Sure there have been some great hockey stories, … there will always be great books about hockey and its Canadian legends, but what of archery? What about women’s punk weight wrestling? How many pages would a CanLit novel need to capture a gruelling triathalon?

For the 2^nd Canadian Book Challenge author Steve Zipp has selected 13 hockey-themed Canadian books to devour before Canada Day. This might be his cure for Oylmpicitis.

http://stevezipp.blogspot.com/search/label/Hockey

I need to compile my own CanLit Sweat List. I’d like to hear from readers who have stumbled across a sports-themed Canadian tale that has got them jumping out of their seats, to pump their hands in the air while yelling encouraging words.

If not now, how will I ever survive my Olympicitis until Vancouver 2010?

We were roughing it in the bush.  Susanna Moodie would have been proud.

At Forestville we spent three days in our trailer tent, damp and stinky (us – not the tent!). Our campsite did not have showers, electricity, or potable water but it did have the rolling waves of the St. Lawrence, plenty of polished red stones for the kids to collect, and proximity to a few mighty fine trucker breakfast bars.

One of the truck stops offered showers and we strategically rotated our wardrobes so that on Sunday we could enjoy a family shower. But when we rolled out of our tent on Sunday we discovered that the truck stop was closed on Sundays!

Forestville does not have a laundry mat. The resource-based town had a handful of cute B&Bs, all cute and all full. The local Econo Lodge was full; there was no room at the inn. To boot, many of the camp grounds between Forestville and Tadoussac were booked and those between Tadoussac and Quebec City had been flooded with over 200 campers having been evacuated.  

So we stayed put for three days at Forestville, waiting to see if the winds would pick up our trailer tent and toss us across the water to Rimouski. I bought the kids warm fuzzy pjs from the local discount store and we congratulated ourselves on how well we pulled together as a family, damp and stinky. We were roughing it.

And just when our damp and stinky pride because to shine through the cracks in the tailer tent that the mousquits had chewn through…a big honking Winnabego pulled in beside us. Encouraged by the hum of their propane heater that sounded like it was filling up a hot air balloon every two hours…the owners set up their sewage pipes, put a house plants on the picnic table between our sites, and cheerily installed their Express Vu dish.

We apparently had very different ideas as to what it meant to be roughing it.

And that got me thinking… it has been more than a century and a half that Canadians have used the term “Roughing it”. The first literary reference that I am aware of is the title of Susanna Moodie’s 1852 Roughing it in the Bush. 

By all accounts our adventures in Forestville were not “roughing it”– not compared to those of Susanna and her sister Catharine Parr Traill as they clear cut the land to build their homesteads in Upper Canada. Perhaps the only thing we truly had in common was the black flies. Did Susie and Cathy ever get used to the blood leaking from their ear drums from scratching black fly bites? Then again, if Susanna Moodie was truly roughing it, would she really have had the time to write over 300 letters, countless works for YA readers, poetry and fiction, and journals?You decide.See her works as noted by Online Guide to Writing in Canada:http://www.track0.com/ogwc/authors/moodie_s.html

fiction

• Mark Hurdlestone; or, The Gold Worshipper (1853)
• Flora Lyndsay; or, Passages in an Eventful Life (1854)
• Matrimonial Speculations (1854)
• Geoffrey Moncton; or, The Faithless Guardian (1855)
• The World Before Them (1868)

fiction for young adults

• Spartacus: A Roman Story (1822)
• The Little Quaker; or, The Triumph of Virtue (n.d.)
• The Sailor Brother; or, The History of Thomas Saville (n.d.)
• The Little Prisoner; or, Passion and Patience (n.d.)
• Hugh Latimer; or, The School-Boy’s Friendship (1828)
• Rowland Massingham; or, I Will Be My Own Master (n.d.)
• Profession and Principle; or, The Vicar’s Tales (n.d.)
• George Leatrim; or, The Mother’s Test (1875)

poetry

• Patriotic Songs [with Agnes Strickland] (1830)
• Enthusiastic; and Other Poems (1831)

 And to learn more about the sisters see what Collections Canada has to say about their family:

http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/moodie-traill/index-e.html

 For a review of Roughing it in the Bush look at this one from Trent University located in Peterborough, Susanna Moodie’s “bush”:

http://www.trentu.ca/admin/library/archives/zwommoti.htm

 And for the digital version look below:

http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/moodie/roughing/roughing.html

I’ve read Moodie. Enjoyed her works year after year. Sure, she found it difficult to settle into the brush around Peterbourgh in the 1840 – no doubt– but she also lived a privileged life. And I’m not convinced that she and I share the same definition of “roughing it”.  I suspect that if I met her in Forestville in the rain, she would be scooting between raindrops trying to get her houseplants back into the Winnebago before they drowned or the black flies carried them off.

The Dalnews asks  “What work of Canadian fiction would you recommend?”http://dalnews.dal.ca/2008/07/03/discuss-Canlit.htmlIn Autumn 2007 my sister treated me to a trip to Kingston Ontario for my birthday. We stayed at B&B, drank wine on terraces surrounding the fresh market, and lost ourselves in Kingston’s many, many bookstores. I picked up a 1970s reprint of Adele Wiseman’s The Sacrifice, (Macmillan of Canada, Toronto: 1956.) and the bookseller sighed. “It’s so nice,” he dusted off the blue clothe cover “that people are reading Adele again.”

The way he spoke of the author like a misplaced lover made me wonder exactly at what point Adele Wiseman fell out of fashion. To that extent was she ever in fashion beyond the academic circles? It was evident that he didn’t merely like the work but he was fond of the author.

As I read The Sacrifice I tried to do so in spurts. I didn’t want to read too much in one setting because, frankly, I didn’t want it to end. It really was a nice story about one new Canadian family making their way in their new world, in a community that treated them as others. It was a community of their own people – a home within a home, with a locked door.

The way in which Wiseman handled the father’s pride was tender and troubling. And in my opinion, it is perhaps our best example of the portrayal and betrayal of the family in CanLit.

I have added the following Canadian authors to my book crossing list. I’m always happy to trade Canadians as I continue to launch Canadian authors into the wild, via www.bookcrossing.com 

Pure Springs, by Brian Doyle

“Teenage boys lie. I know; I was a boy once.” It was the advice my father gave me when I got my driver’s licence. He said I could drive the Ford Bronco as long as I didn’t let any boys hitch a ride.  “Boys lie to get what they want,” he reminded me when I went off to university, “I know; I was a boy once.”

And so starts the story Pure Springs by west Quebec author Brian Doyle. The protagonist Martin O’Boy is caught in a lie that he can’t shake and it gets him deeper and deeper into trouble. “Now the thing about lying,” my paternal Grandma Molloy taught me “is that you have to remember the lie.” I think Martin O’Boy could have benefitted from the kindly advice of Grandma Molloy rather than the truisms he learned from his surrogate Grandpa Rip.

Set in the period of the Korean War the story lets us imagine how it might have been for a young fellow aspiring to be a man when all of his manly heros were off shooting strangers in the Orient and the closest male figures he had to look up to were a kindly but often confused old man and a crooked delivery truck driver. O’Boy is a character that Doyle has allowed to grow up.

I would be curious to know if today’s teenage boys in O’Boy’s age group (15 unless you lie and say 16) share the experiences of first love, of wanting to do the right thing in the wrong circumstances, and trying to make your way in life toward being an almost-man.  I don’t think we’ve heard the last of Martin O’Boy.

Pure Springs was the third book I selected for my 2^nd Canadian Book Challenge reading west Quebec authors.

Attached is a linked article from Doyle’s perspective, as published online by the Ottawa Citizen http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/arts/story.html?id=2e090c1b-edc7-43cb-b690-78f9d38c6dcc&k=61706&p=1

 Format: HardcoverPublished: February 22, 2007Dimensions: 174 Pages, 5.88 x 8.88 x 0.75 inPublished By: Groundwood BooksThe following ISBNs are associated with this title:
ISBN - 10: 0888997744
ISBN - 13: 9780888997746

Michael Bryson noted on his blog “And yet I am insisting that Hage’s novel is a Canadian novel. Because Hage is a Canadian. Is that the only reason?”http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com/2008/06/rawi-hage.html

Debating Canadian Identity has long been a traditional Canadian hobby. As a new Canadian, and a new Canadian of new fame Rawi Hage inherited this mess.

When asked in a recent Quill and Quire interview if De Niro’s Game was a Canadian book, I believe Hage replied that the Canadian granting system helped make it possible. Indirectly, his answer was “yes”. With that in mind, perhaps we can identify a Canadian author by the fact that they pay school tax in Canada. That doesn’t however, take into account the authors who can barely get by on their Canada Council grants and who can never imagine becoming a home owner, much less a home-owning school tax payer.

But defaulting as a Canadian writer doesn’t mean the writer’s work will automatically be categorized as CanLit. Can we lump De Niro’s Game under the CanLit umbrella? That depends on the criteria we select to test it against. I would argue that it isn’t Pinch-your-nose CanLit. Pinch-your-nose CanLit is the CanLit most Canadians teens were force fed in high school, swallowing it because it was good for them. No teen ever got indigestion from CanLit but few asked for second helpings until their literary taste buds matured.

Regrettably the CanLit debate becomes a default test. Ask anyone who hates CanLit to read De Niro’s Game and if they don’t pinch their nose then you know it isn’t CanLit. Ask a CanLit lover if De Niro’s Game is CanLit and readers will be pleased to lump it in alongside Shields, Blais, and Atwood. Why? Because we want to read Canadian voices reflecting Canadians. As a new Canadian of new fame Rawi Hage offers us a new Canadian voice.

Mr. Joaroz (87) from Toronto, Ontario noted while reading La Mort au menu:

“You must have enjoyed the works of Michel Tremblay in your youth. Your humour is also dark and perverted.”

And he’s right. On two accounts. 

Tremblay watches the street. He watches Montreal live itself out at street level and recounts the adventures he sees. Sometimes it is a little raunchy. But if it weren’t for the dirty little bits would CanLit be any fun otherwise? Yes, Mr. J, I have always enjoyed the plays and novels of Michel Tremblay…Tremblay never apologises.

Mr. J’s wife promised to book cross me Les Belles-sœurs. I look forward to gobbling it up in the original French.

For more on Tremblay see the fed’s spotlight on Canadian authors:

Michel Tremblay

http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/writers/027005-4000-e.html