Finding The Narrow Point

November is National Novel Writing Month. Although I've never participated in the NaNoRiMo, I think about it every year, and it spurs on my writing in some way. NaNoRiMo, (short for National Novel Writing Month) flies in the face that it takes years to write in a novel. Instead, they believe a novel can be written in the thirty days of November. Valuing "enthusiasm, determination, and a deadline," NaNoRiMo isn't necessarily about quality writing, but about getting the deed done. Nowhere on the website does it say your novel has to be good, it just needs to get written. And really, sometimes when I'm working on a first draft, I'm just trying to get something, (anything!) down on paper.

 

 Although I won't be participated in NaNoRiMo this year-it sounds like a great way to develop carpal tunnel syndrome- I will be attempting to plunge deep into a novel I've been hovering around for all too long. (And perhaps I will be indulge in a little NaNoRiMo pep-talk reading. Who can resist a topic like, Five Steps to Building a Propulsive Story Cannon?) I think I've finally narrowed in on what the book is going to be about. Prior to this, the novel stretched out over 110 years in the life of one person. Really, you say, isn’t that impossible? Why, yes it is. I wanted the book to include Victorian factories, women travelers, rural childhoods, sister rivalry, fifty years of Indian history, World War 1 and 2, Indian Independence and separation, and British people staying on in India- just to name a few. When I envisioned the book, I saw not just stories, but lives scrolling ahead of me. I had so much rich research in my head (and computer), that I wanted to put it all in. Not only would this make a very big book, it would also be very thinly spread. I’m sure there are other writers who could write a rich book with such a great breadth, but I when I thought about it closely, I realized what I really knew about was Victorian women travelers and governesses.

 

Knowing deeply about one small part of the book was a very good thing. This helped me find what I call the Narrow Point. This is a small or pointed wedge that finally dives into the novel. Instead of traveling wide and thin, I now had a narrow groove to go deeply into my characters and their lives, and write a book that will be character driven, as opposed to a rollicking and-then-this-happened kind of book. (Those kids of books are great too, it’s just not what I wanted my book to be.)

Getting to this narrow point isn’t always easy, and sometimes I’m not sure how to get there. Mostly a great deal of thinking and mulling over occurs and just when I’m about to give up, I find I know how to start. Usually I find walking (or sometimes swimming or biking) helps too The past couple of summers I’ve found my narrow point by walking behind my cottage. Throughout the school year I sit at my desk and write on a morning schedule. During that time I don’t look at email or answer the phone, I just write. When summer comes my schedule falls apart. I travel, play with my kids and visit family in July. In August there are guests to hang out with and canoes, bicycles, swimming and yoga to distract me. I don't have a desk to work at, so I spend a lot of time walking up and down the hills behind my cottage and thinking about intractable writing-related problems. I talk to myself a lot on the old hill, running through all the novel's possible options. Should I start at the beginning of my character’s life? Should it begin with the death of the character’s protector? Is the book going to focus on her marriage, or what about the end of her marriage? Should I just start at the beginning and work my way through? What is the beginning story for this character? I re-read the hundreds of pages of notes I have and look through my research notes. Nothing is clear at first. Sometimes it takes days, other times months. And then I see where the story has to start, what the confines of the plot have to be, and a great sense of relief comes over me. Working within set limits and narrow areas of plot makes the writing come easier. Then I can can come up with a list of scenes to write, the kind of writing that works well on a set time frame at a desk during the winter months of writing concentration.

Mapping your Novel

My new YA book, Feast, is almost ready to go to my editor, Sarah. This is a good place to be! I’ve done the frantic early writing where my ideas feel fresh and new, and the long walks up and down the hill behind my cottage when I can’t envision how it will all fit together. I’m past the stage where I have to force myself to write scenes and new dialogue. I’m even past the stage where I’m reading the manuscript to eradicate unhelpful words like “really” “very” and “something.” The book feels complete, like it’s a story I’d be happy to show others. I’m sure Sarah will point out weaknesses I didn’t see, and I’ll have more work to do this winter, but for now I feel satisfied.

Novel Map for Feast

One of my final steps is to make sure all the various plot lines are developed logically. This involves a lot of jumping around in the text to find different scenes and read them sequentially. Most of the time my book feels bigger than my head and I can’t hold all the parts inside it and see if it progresses in a logical order. That’s when the writing program Scrivener is amazing. You can corkboard your scenes and then flip back to your outline easily. I used to do this on giant sheets of thin paper over my desk, with colour-coded scenes. I recently took down some of these posters, one for a book I won’t write, another for a long finished project. The wall is very blank now.

 

Somehow, my Scrivener scene list felt like not enough. When I merged my book into a Word document, I stopped updating my Scrivener Corkboard and was without a map to the book. I missed my giant wall posters. So, I decided to create one by hand for Feast. This was a great way to reacquaint me with a book I’ve taken a break from for the summer, and also allowed me to see where there were holes in my story development. And somehow, it was easier to have old-fashioned hand written notes to refer back to.

Bottle and Glass

I'm going to a book launch party for my friend, neighbor and fellow author, Morgan Wade tonight. Morgan has published in various journals and anthologies and tonight he'll be launching his second book, Bottle and Glass.  He's asked me to introduce him, which is a great honour.

I’ve already had the good fortune to read the meticulously researched and moving Bottle and Glass. The novel tells the story of two young English fishermen forced into service with the Royal Navy towards the end of the war of 1812. The two young men, stationed in Kingston, spend most of the novel trying to escape the military and return home. Many of the scenes in the novel take place in historic Kingston places, especially taverns. This  is because according to Morgan much of life in Upper Canada took place in inns and taverns. Apparently in 1812 there were a whopping 78 taverns in Kingston. The novel's title, Bottle and Glass is from one such notorious tavern, "Violin Bottle and Glass."

 

When I was reading the novel, my mind kept imagining an earlier Kingston. It made me think of Anne Fadiman’s essay from her collection Ex Libris, called You Are There. She describes the magical feeling of reading a book in the place it describes or is set in. For example, you go to Greece, you read Homer. In New York you read Salinger or Joseph O’Neil. When reading Morgan’s book, I had the sense of It Used To Be Like That Here. I could so clearly see the landscape I know, both as it was then, and it is now.

 

Not only does Morgan knows a few things about early Kingston, he also knows a lot pubs and drinks. I consider him my personal bar tender. He mixes a  mean Martini, he’s generous with his Scotch and he's always willing to make my personal drink of choice, a White Lady. He’s also a great neighbor and a wonderful friend.

 

Morgan's launch is tonight: Friday, September 25th, 9:30pm at the Queen's Inn, Kingston, ON.

 

Happy New Year or Some Thoughts on Teaching Hebrew School

My August reading pile. I also read and loved Americanah by
Chichimande Ngozi Adache, which was too good to keep to
myself and is on loan to a friend.

Forget books for a minute. Wait, I know you're thinking, isn't this a book blog? Well, it is mostly. Except I'm too busy to read much in September. I spent all of August saturated in good books. (If  you want to see what I've been reading, check out the photo at the side.) But now, it's September and I don't have much time for reading. Keeping up with my New Yorker subscription will be enough for a few weeks.

You see, September is about work for me. I just completed my first week of teaching, both at the elementary school where I teach French (and apparently Health and Music too this year) and at the Reform Hebrew school program I run for a small group of children, including my own sons. A friend pointed out that I'm teaching six days a week right now, as well as writing books. That's a lot of classroom time! I have to admit Hebrew school stresses me out. I'm always searching for a good craft, or wondering if I've got the curriculum right, or trying to figure out how to stuff Hebrew reading, culture, music, bible study, prayer and a snack all in two hours. Am I forgetting important things my students should know? Are they ever going to master the Shma? How is it me who is responsible for these kids' Jewish learning? These thoughts keep me up during the week. And also, I despise shopping at Michael's for craft supplies. And then Saturday morning rolls around and somehow I love teaching Hebrew school. In fact, its one of the most rewarding experiences in my adult life. This is an enormous surprise to me. Like many Reform Jews I have more questions than answers about Judaism. There are things about Judaism that make me squirm. There have been times in my life when I have done nothing Jewish at all. And yet, here I am.

I've done some thinking about what makes teaching Hebrew school so enjoyable, why I get so much from the experience. I've decided that the material I'm trying to get across to my students is coming from a deep place within me. At my regular job I teach mostly French. I think I do a pretty good job, but French is my second language. I didn't learn it until I was twelve and the culture is foreign to me. When I teach about Quebec or France, it's not something I really know from experience. But Hebrew school I know deeply. The songs and food and stories I teach are the ones I know from my family and community and camp experiences in Vancouver and from my yeshiva experience at Pardes in Israel. They're the things that drew me to people who were strangers to me in Kingston, but who are now part of my community. The lessons I teach contain important messages about values, about how to be a mensch in the world. When I teach Hebrew school I'm also teaching a way to live. And that's important to me.

This Monday is the first day of the Hebrew month Tishrei, which means its Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year. To some, having a new year in September might seem odd, but to me it's perfect. The new year does begin in September. My husband, kids and I all go back to school. The kids go back to soccer and piano, I go back to the gym, to writing, to work. The word Tishrei means beginnings, which is apt to me. 

 

I wish you all a Shana Tova v'metukah, which mean a happy and sweet year, whether it be your Jewish New Year, or a back-to-school kind of new-time-of year. I hope your year is filled with good health, valuable family time, learning, rich experiences and excellent reading. If your heart needs to be lifted, or you like Jewish videos made by yeshivas, check out Rosh Hashana Rock Anthem below or the Fountainheads singing Dip Your Apple.

Funhome

On a recent trip to New York the only musical I had planned was to see Funhome, the award-winning musical adaptation of Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir by the same name. I'm not a huge fan of musicals, at least not the big showy kind, but I wanted to see this musical because I really loved the book when I read it a few years ago.

 

 Bechdel is the author of the excellent serialized comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, which I used to read in feminist magazines when I was in university. Her graphic memoir, Funhome: A Family Tragicomic, tells the story of Bechdel's relationship with her father. He was a high school English teacher who also ran the family funeral home (which his kids called The Funhome), and a deeply closeted gay man. The book chronicles Alison's struggle to come out to her parents as a lesbian and to understand her father's homosexuality. Bechdel attempts to talk to her father, to get him to respond to her coming out letter, but they are never able to connect and speak openly about their relationship or their sexuality.

Bechdel tells a remarkable story through captions and dialogue, but it's her drawing that makes me keep coming back to her story. The family lives in a gothic mansion that her father has lovingly and obsessively restored, often paying more attention to period furnishings than his children. It's an apt setting for this family story that is delves into emotional abuse and failure to connect.

 I admit being skeptical to Funhome as a musical, despite its strong visual component. Yet, I really loved the play. Told from three points in Alison's life, the music played into both the comic and the tragic elements of the story. A Jackson Five inspired song for a Funhome commercial that the younger cast members perform was very funny, as was the college age Alison's song about falling in love, "I'm Changing My Major (To Joan)." By far the most moving song in the show was "Telephone Wire" sung by the adult Alison and her father, about their failure to connect. The opening lines reminded me of some of Ani Difranco's songs, emotionally earnest and completely uncampy. I also loved the youngest Alison, Sydney Lucas, singing "Ring of Keys."

 

The other thing I loved about the play was how closely cast the actors were to the drawings in the book. I've always been annoyed by movie adaptations of books that don't match up to the picture in my head of a character. Because the musical had the comic drawings to draw from, the play was exactly what I had imagined.

The three Alison actors in Bechdel's Funhome

The Goldfinch

 

My favourite read so far this summer was Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, the story of a young boy, Theo, caught in a terrorist attack in the Metropolitan Museum. While Theo’s mother is killed, Theo escapes from the museum unhurt, and with a famous and beautiful Dutch painting, The Goldfinch, intending to save it. The shock of losing his mother and the quick hand of social services quickly unravels Theo’s life. He lives first with the wealthy Barbour family on the Upper East Side until his reckless, gambling, conniving father returns to take him to live in the outer suburbs of Las Vegas, a subdivision so new the desert threatens to take it over, and so unlived in it’s not serviced by street lights or garbage removal.

 

 

The underlying sense of doom the father casts of the story, both physically in his gambling and poor character, and also as a hereditary shadow- the young Theo worries he’ll become like his father, make this book a tremendous page-turner. However, what really makes this book hard to put down, is the ill sense of danger of Theo’s need to keep the painting and his desire to return it without being incriminated for art theft. Like most secrets left to fester, the problem of the painting grows larger and larger until it explodes in Theo’s life.

 

Lest The Goldfinch sound like too much of a pot-boiler, Tartt also writes beautifully detailed prose, with characters I adore. My favourite, Boris, is Theo’s best friend in Las Vegas, a Russian emigrant who has lived all over the world with his hard-drinking, negligent and occasionally violent father. Boris is a great linguist, conniver and consumer of alcohol and drugs of all kinds. When he returns later in the story, with dramatic consequences for both Theo and The Goldfinch painting, I had to pause a moment and marvel at the architecture of the novel that was both so exhilarating and so satisfying. 

Music While You Write

When I'm developing a character for a novel, I frequently think about what music the character listens to. Their musical preferences don't always make it into the book, but knowing what they listen to helps me know them. Ellie in Gravity listened to Shlomo Carlebach, a rabbi who helped transform Jewish music. I could imagine Ellie's parents rocking out to Carlebach's Od Yishama while Ellie listens, tormented from the stairs.

 

 In my second novel, The Book of Trees, music was an integral part of Mia's life because she had played in a band. While writing the novel I listened to Patsy Cline, Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, the songs of her childhood. I also listened to Rockabilly singers like Imelda May and the Louvin Brothers, a country band that released a gospel album entitled, Satin is Real. (How can you not love an album title like that?)

 

The songs my characters love frequently become a background to my writing. The music has to be familiar enough that it's not distracting. Recently I've fallen in love with the band London Grammar and their album Metal and Dust. It's become the background to my current novel, Feast. Although my character Sydney never listens to any specific music in the book - she's got lots of other things going on- in my head this is the music, both eerie and lush, introspective and reverential that Sydney would listen to. 

 

A recent trip home found my brother and I belting out songs from our childhood in my parents' kitchen. We only seem to sing the same shmaltzy songs from a tape my mother once had of Jewish music. In particular we're fond of a song called "Jewish Child," which has some killer lyrics: "Jewish child, you are out there running wild/ You've got no strings attached to you/ You can do whatever you want toooo!" The song goes on to recount that people are praying at the Western Wall that the child will return home to the Five Books of Moses. As kids (and adults) we found this endlessly entertaining. (We sang this so much this trip that my husband, who isn't Jewish, was also singing it at the top of his lungs.) 

 

Moshe Yess

By googling one of the more popular songs on the tape,  "David Cohen's Bar Mitzvah Day," we discovered the singer was named Moshe Yess, a Canadian from Montreal who had once been in a psychadelic music group in the sixties, and then became a Chabbad entertainer.  He used American musical trends to communicate the values of Judaism. Yess died in 2011 from cancer at the age of sixty-five, but his music has made it to youtube and is covered by other Chassidic artists. 

 

 

 

Moshe Yess tape circa 1985 with my brother's printing

Although I still find the music shmaltzy and I bristle at some of the messianic messages behind his lyrics, this is the music of my childhood. I have exactly four tapes from my childhood collection and Yess' Megama hits is one of them. (The others are Madonna's Greatest Hits, much listened to when my husband and I communted together in Toronto; Beethoven Lives Upstairs, a childhood favourite; and a compilation my friend James made for me of songs my husband and I wrote in the late 90's in India and Nepal.) 

Lately I've found myself listening to some of Yess songs as I write. A chasidic singer named Yerachmiel Ziegler does a beautiful cover of "Jewish Child"that sounds influenced by Cat Stevens. Another musician, Tali Yess, plays a great acoustic piano version of "That's My Boy."

 

There's one Yess song I've avoided listening to, possibly Yess' most famous song: My Zaidy. In the song the narrator describes his Zaidy's escape from Europe and his new life in Canada, and the legacy of Judaism he creates for his family. I've avoided listening to the song because the Zaidy dies and it's too hokey and sentimental,  and it makes me think of my mother crying in the car for her father, my Zaidy, with my brother and I in the backseat.  And yet, this is the background to my novel, Feast. The main character Sydney has a grandfather who is this Zaidy: from the old world, involved in Judaism, frail and also difficult. "My Zaidy" is one of Sydney's songs and she feels as tortured and nostaligic for this song as I do. 

Starting a Novel- An Insurmountable Challenge?

The past couple of months I have been working on a novel set in the Victorian period about a woman who wants to be a travel writer. This is a project I've been thinking about for several years, maybe almost ten, researching, writing scenes and character sketches in between working on Young Adult fiction. This year marks the start of trying to write a draft.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Turkish
dress, 1756. She is credited with bringing
 the small pox inoculation from Turkey
back to England.

I started thinking about the project during my Master's when I read Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's letters from Turkey. I was fascinated with the liberty of traveling to a foreign country, combined with the restricted lives Victorian women lived. For my own novel, I imagine a woman traveling to India, a place I have visited. Yet most Victorian women didn't travel in India, they lived there, not as settlers they way they did in other outposts of empire such as in Canada or Australia, but as wives to temporary, but long-term employees of the Empire. Through reading I learnd that India, was not as I imagined a place to escape to, but a place with an even more rigid social structure than society in England. A character started to unfold in my mind. What if my Victorian woman protagonist chafed under these restrictions? What if she wanted to travel and write instead of marry and propagate? What if she read female writers like Emily Eden and Isabelle Bird, but didn't have enough money to be like them?

My questions have led to some exceptionally rich research reading. Judith Flanders',  Inside the Victorian House, A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England, taught me about Victorian women through the outlines of their homes. Ruth Brandon's Governess: The Life and Times of The Real Jane Eyres, made me think deeply about the lives of Victorian governesses. Margaret MacMillan's Women of the Raj provided details about the lives of women who went to serve in Victorian India. Most recently Emily Eden's Up The Country, a collection of the author's letters in the 1840's from her travels across the subcontinent has helped me imagine what writing my protagonist might have read that spurred her on to travel herself.

 

While certainly not an expert in the field, I now know a lot about the history of flush toilets and the development of septic systems and disease. I know about cholera belts that were to prevent disease by keeping "women's organs" warm.  I learned about "bokkus" boxes where visitors in British India left their visiting cards in a box to let someone know they intended to visit. I know that Whiteley's Department store in London was where women heading to India bought their goods. 

 

For the past six weeks I've tried to wade through all my notes, scenes, and character sketches to try and write some preliminary chapters. This has not been straightforward. Some scenes are in third person, some are in first, others are in present tense while others are in past. Not all are in the time period, or deal with the same plot. Scenes are written in different styles. I found a twenty page intro that read like a children's story. Luckily, they are all from the point of view of the same character, a hungry girl named Alice, who is neither girl nor woman, too old to be a girl, yet not married, so not really a woman. A whole entourage of characters have emerged around her, a kindly mother, a cousin who encourages her reading and writing, an eclectic aunt, a mentor who won't marry her.

Through all the many pages, I found one paragraph that I liked. One paragraph. This is both dispiriting and yet, even in my frustration, I was happy to find one small section that worked. Yet how does one face an entire novel of 75,000 words when one only has 150 written? It's enough to make you give up. There are other things that make me want to quit before I start: is writing about white women in India problematic? Have I done enough research to pull this off? What if my premise itself is wrong?

Whenever I face what feels like an insurmountable writing goal, I think back to my favorite writing book, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamont. The title comes from a chapter where Anne's brother as a child feels overwhelmed by an assignment on birds that he has left to the last minute. Anne's father advises her brother to tackle the assignment "bird by bird." Any difficult or insurmountable task must simply be started and worked on bit by bit. Every novel originally begins with one good paragraph, or even one good sentence.   

Trans Stories Part 2

I took a brief respite from reading for research this weekend to delve into Kim Fu’s For Today I Am Boy. What a wonderful book! Fu’s novel was on my reading list as part of my research on Transgender lives, but it’s also great fiction. For Today I Am A Boy tells the coming-of-age story of Peter Huang, a woman trapped in a man’s body. Peter grows up in small-town Ontario and eventually moves to Montreal, where he works in restaurants, dresses in women’s clothing on the weekends and lives a life of deeply sublimated desire.  For Today I am a Boy tells a story of transgender angst and pain in a way that make me think of the famous Emily Dickens poem, "Tell all the tuth but tell it slant." Fu comes at her story from an angle that gives it depth and a deeper picture of the way gender dysphoria affects people.

 

I’ve read several other transgender novels this past year, all of which I have enjoyed immensely. Mostly I've read YA novels that have dealt with transgendered teens in a more straightforward narrative. Parrotfish by Ellen Wittlinger is the story of a girl named Angela who feels she is really a boy named Grady and goes to high school under this new identity. I chose this novel because I really wanted to read about Female to Male Trans people. The novel has quite a light tone for a transgender story. Grady deals with bullying, his crush on a beautiful girl, but also his father’s annual Christmas pageant.

 

 

Cris Beam’s I am J, also a YA novel, is a heavier read, also about a boy trapped in a girl’s body. J cuts himself off from his family and their inability to understand that he is a boy as he takes on his real male identity. This book, with its detailed information about alternative schools for queer students and the process of taking hormones is both informative and has a deeply developed character and an interesting storyline. I like to imagine teens reading this book and taking solace and guidance in their own gender quests.

 

 

All three of these novels helped me understand on a deeper level what I read about in Kate Bornstein’s useful (and occasionally hilarious)  My Gender Workbook. In Bornstein’s book I learned several things. Primarly, I now understand that gender and sexual orientation are two very different things. Prior to that, the grouping of trans people within the queer umbrella had always confused me. Weren’t transpeople automatically gay since they were lumped with gay people? The answer is no. Gender and sexual orientation fall on two different axis and people fall in lots of different places within the quadrant. For example you can be a Female to Male trans person who likes men, or a Male to Female trans person who also likes men.

 

The second most important thing that I learned from Bornstein’s book has to do with why someone like me should learn about transgender people. I have to admit that sometimes my reading feels like curiosity, like voyeurism: who are these people and what are they like? What are their bodies like? Yet my interest is deeper than that. Reading about a variety of people's differences, be it culturally, sexually or in another way, deepens my tolerance for difference. As an educator, my students come from a variety of backgrounds and I strive to be compassionate to them all. Reading about trans people on a theory level helps me understand, but reading fiction about them helps me empathize.

 

I also highly recommend Kate Bornstein's A Queer and Pleasant Danger: The True Story of a Nice Jewish Boy Who Joins the Church of Scientology and Leaves Twelve Years Later to Become the Lovely Lady She Is Today. Not only is Bornstein utterly hilarious, her story (and title) is compelling reading. And unexpectantly, her experience as a  scientologist is even more fascinating than her gender journey. Who knew that scientologists operated off a ship off the Californian coast?

 

 

Best Wishes for Good Health in the New Year

Gung Hai Fat Choi to everyone! That means Happy New Year in Chinese. (Okay, the Year of the Goat began a few weeks ago, but I'm catching up on things, so I'm a little late.) When I talked to my sister on the weekend she told me about the dragon dance she saw in Vancouver and I was a little sad that no such festivities were taking place in Kingston. When I used to work in Markham, Chinese New Year was the biggest holiday my school celebrated, complete with a dragon dance and yummy treats. Since I was feeling a little left out of the festivities, I decided to make Vietnamese Spring Rolls since it was also the Vietnamese New Year, the start of their lunar calendar. (Being Jewish I have a fondness for cultures that celebrate their new year at times other than January 1st.)

I tried making Spring Rolls a number of years ago and was very frustrated that the rice paper kept ripping and tearing. My friend Dianne gave me some good suggestions about working with the paper, and this time my Spring Rolls were delicious and appreciated by all my family, even my youngest, and most fussy eater. (I highly recommend making these for fussy eaters since you can tailor each spring roll according to their individual tastes.)
Here's the recipe for the rolls.

8 spring roll wrappers
lettuce (about four leafs)
2 ounces rice vermicelli noodles, cooked
8 large shrimp (cooked, without tails) - You could also use fried tofu or cooked chicken
cucumber, thinly sliced (or carrots or peppers, or all three)
fresh mint and cilantro
3 or 4 green onions, chopped
Hoisin or other dipping sauce

Prepare all your filling ingredients. Then, dip a single rice paper wrapper in a bowl of hot water for a minute. Next, lay the wrapper on a damp towel and let it sit for about 30 seconds. Lay your ingredients in the center of the wrapper, using the lettuce as a cushion. (Okay you don't have to use the lettuce this way, but I liked the way it looked.) Then, fold the bottom of the wrapper up, then the sides in, and finally the top over. You can use a little water to seal the edges, but I found the wrap stayed together well.


There's another reason I've been thinking about Vietnam lately. One of the families from my son's class at school has several adopted children from Vietnam. The family has been in the news a lot because their youngest two children, twins adopted from Vietnam, have some serious health concerns. I've been watching their story unfold on Facebook and on the news. Bihn and Phuoc Wagner have Alagille Syndrome. Phuoc received her transplant from her father a few weeks ago. Although the media portrayed the Wagner's family situation as a difficult choice, it was in fact the medical staff at Sick Kids who made the decision that Phuoc should have the transplant first. Phuoc is recovering well, as is her dad, and a number of people have come forward to be tested as donors for Binh. I haven't heard yet that they have a specific donor for her yet, but
the medical team sound confident that Binh will have her surgery too.

Although I don't know the family, I've been thinking about them all the time and hoping for the best for them. Since I couldn't be a donor myself, I was happy to help the family a little by donating to their gofundme campaign. Binh and Phuoc's transplant is covered by health care, but there are lots of other transplant expenses. The Wagner family is half way to their fundraising goal, and if you donate too, they might be able to make all their costs. It would be a great way to celebrate the lunar near year.

How To Build a Girl

It’s not often that I read a book I deem so salacious and hilarious that I can’t read it in public. Recently I had such an experience. I was reading Caitlin Moran’s book, How To Build A Girl on the train to Toronto when I came to a section where Moran’s character describes trying to have sex with an overly well-endowed male.  Moran’s description was so explicit, and unbelievably funny, I had to close the book. Yet I also put the book aside because I sensed a tinge of sadness as her character contemplated why she was having sex with something so large it might possible leave her damaged.

How To Build a Girl is like this all the way through, wildly-entertaining, unabashedly honest in its depiction of female desire, vulgar, and shot through with feminist awakening. It’s exactly the kind of YA book I like to read, and the kind I hope teenage girls are sucking up. (As to whether it’s a YA book or not I haven’t been able to determine. It reads more like literary memoir to me, with an older character looking back on her misguided years, as opposed to a present tense, story-unfolding style I associate with YA books.)

How To Build a Girl is the story of Johanna Morrigan, an overweight, unattractive girl growing up in a poor family in the English Midlands in the 1990’s. Johanna wants to escape poverty and decides becoming a music critic is her best bet. She reinvents herself as Dolly Wilde, and then writes enough music pieces on spec until she’s hired by a music paper. Then Johanna goes about trying to have as many sexual adventures as she can, all with great lust, and rarely with a relationship in mind. While I kept waiting for pregnancy and STI’s to descend, this is not a cautionary tale, and none of the sexual morality I would feel compelled to write into a story occurs. Part of Moran’s freshness is her refusal to let the story wander into the clichéd territory of rags-to-riches tales. Johanna never gets skinny or has a great make-over, never becomes truly famous. I struggled with this; the Disney/Contemporary Magazine tropes are deeply imbedded in me, and although I knew I wanted Johanna to develop as a person, I couldn’t help wanting her to be a pretty face too. Physical transformation are so deeply attached to our ideas of mental betterment that they’re difficult to let go of. Yet what better message, what a more interesting story! Johanna's transformation is all about becoming a better writer and a better person.

Moran’s writing is bitingly funny, and endlessly inventive. She tackles taboo subjects with great verve. I’ll never look at my deodorant stick in exactly the same way.  

Off Pointe Book Launch

Tett Centre for the Arts and The Isabelle Bader Theatre

This past Saturday was the launch for my dance book Off Pointe (ages 11-14). Instead of launching the book at my favourite bookstore, Novel Idea, I decided to make an appearance at the Kingston School of Dance's Open House. The dance school has just moved into the newly opened Tett Centre for the Arts, a beautiful building on Kingston's waterfront, right next to the new (and also beautiful) Isabelle Bader Theatre. If you're in town, I highly suggest you check out both buildings.

Annabelle Chacon and me

So the launch was fun. Friends came and bought books, dancers checked out the building and ate cupcakes, and lots of small people ran around one of the gorgeous new studios and played with balloons. As a surprise, my friend Annabelle drove down from Toronto.

I was able to have the launch at the dance studio not only because the Kingston School of Dance is such a warm and friendly place, but also because I've been taking a contemporary dance class for adults. Most of the time I think this is an excellent idea and I've really enjoyed moving for art and not just exercise (or narcissism). At other times I question how wise it is to start dancing again after a fifteen year hiatus. It's not only my un-flexible body, but my un-flexible mind, which struggles to remember choreography. There's also the problem that I think I'm leaping across the room, but really I'm barely making it off the floor. This is all very humbling, and makes me think I should stick to weight-lifting and yoga. And still, I go on, because it's too much fun not to.

It's been a busy writing week for me. I did four author-in-the-classroom visits this week and I'm off to Toronto on Friday to sign copies of Off Pointe at the Ontario Library Association Conference. I'm not quite sure what it will be like, but the last time I went to the conference centre I had a husband, a baby and a toddler in tow, so I'm sure this will be a different (and less encumbered) experience.

To read about Off Pointe in the local Kingston news, you can check out The Whig or The Heritage, or a short clip on CKWS.

Trans Stories

The only thing I like about flying Air Canada is the online entertainment. Not only can you watch the latest movies, Air Canada also has a documentary channel that features Canadian films. 

Last summer I stumbled upon the NFB documentary, My Prairie Home about singer/songwriter Rae Spoon, directed by Chelsea McMullan. For forty minutes, I was engaged by the story of Spoon who is from an evangelical Christian family in Alberta, and identifies as transgender. 

Spoon sings both country, electronic and Indie music and their songs form the backdrop to the documentary, forming both a musical and queer coming of age.  Although it’s easy to be confused with reading Spoon’s external appearance, which is male, and their beautiful and distinctly female voice, ultimately it’s the quality of the music that gets your attention.

The documentary lead me to Rae Spoon’s book, Gender Failure, written with Ivan E Coyote. Both Spoon and Coyote are engaging storytellers and write movingly about the gender binary that forces people to identify with a single rigid concept of gender, either male or female. For both Spoon and Coyote, whose bodies and identities don’t fit into these narrow boxes of gender, navigating the world is complicated, from gender-specific bathrooms to pronouns that don’t fit.

I’ve long been a fan of Ivan E. Coyote work. I loved their novel Bow Grip, and especially the collection of essays, One In Every Crowd. In particular I always think of Coyote’s metaphor of gender being a pair of boots in which one is too small and the other two big. Gender Failure is Coyote’s most personal work as it talks about their decision to have their breasts removed.

Gender Failure and My Prairie Home have spurred me on to read more about trans people, both fiction and non-fiction, YA and adult novels. More to come on a transgender reading list in future posts. For now, please enjoy the following links. 

 

Listen to Sheilagh Rogers interview Ivan E. Coyote and Rae Spoon on The Next Chapter,

Watch the trailer for My Prairie Home on NFB or watch Rae Spoon's video I Will Be A Wall. For more of Rae's music, you can listen here.