behind the counter

So I work two days a week at Aqua Books. And I've joked a bit, in my posts here, about figuring out how to come home with at least some of my paycheque.

But M, Aa and I are a bookish ensemble, to the extent that Anna knows that a meal in EAT! Bistro is always accompanied by a browse through the kids' section.

In addition to the proximity to books, which alone could be fatal to my bottom line, I also get to see books as they come in, arriving at the store in grocery bags and boxes.

... Middle-aged people selling their kids' English philosophy texts or chunks of their late parents' libraries. People who don't share their loved ones' interests or simply don't have the room. People who want to keep books in circulation or need the money. ...

And then there's my staff discount...

And so, in addition to filling out my library of known and beloved authors (and recommending same to browsing customers) I've also taken a chance on new authors as well as authors-new-to-me. On one-of-a-kind books, chock-a-block with illustrations or what I'd call 'sociologically interesting' texts.

But after almost a year working at a bookstore, I've slowed down a bit. I've got three stacks of books next to my bed, three stacks in the living room, and a stack next to the desk in my office.

I can't read everything in my stacks, nevermind everthing piling up the bookstore.

But these books called last week. And I listen, sometimes, to beauty...

Reading Women by Stefan Bollmann (Merrell, London, 2006)

A Passion for Plants: Contemporary Botanical Masterwords by Shirley Sherwood (Cassell & Co, London, 2001)

Aubrey Beardsley Greeting Card Book, Ed. by Theodore Menten (Dover Publications, New York, 1975)

My only regret?

That I spent part of this evening, after dinner was consumed and Aa was packed off to bed, blogging on these books instead of leafing through their pages...

How to Get Rid of Fruit Flies

“Fruit flies have a life-cycle of 10 days, giving them plenty of time to punish you for leaving moist, fermenting, organic material in which they may lay eggs. Most fly trap ideas only serve to illustrate the flies' progress in taking over your home, and some will themselves provide a breeding ground. Sanitation is the only effective resolution.” - How to Get Rid of Fruit Flies, wikiHow.

The experts suggest fumes off the last inch of bourbon,
the lees of wine. They counsel lopping off the bright heads
of the flowers I brought home just last week,
the flowers I contemplated bringing home today.
And while the red-eyed things describing ragged orbits
around the fruit bowl might be killed, I know my wife’s rage
won’t be funneled, trapped, or disposed of neatly.
But still, I try to imagine myself bagging apples, burping each sac
before stowing the lot in the fridge. I try to imagine
my wife coming up behind me as I hop and swat,
palms smarting. And laughing.

Sanitize the counters? Launder the mop head? Ha!
I could cover us in plaster and granite dust, pour concrete
into private geometries…and there would still be the wet mouth,
the scent escaping closed legs between us.
No, the experts have nothing for this pestilence.
Every word is flyspecked. Every glance wriggles.
And so my wife’s rage, being fruitful, multiplies.

Her message to me, week after week after weak?
A bowl of thin-skinned pears, rotting.

Explicating

Yesterday was my first day-of-poetry-instruction, meaning that I had my first Senior Citizens' Writing Workshop of the new year as well as my poetry-focused creative writing course at the U of Wpg.

This is my fourth session (and second year) facilitating the poetry segment of the Writing Workshop. In the fall, I'd had my doubts if I had the energy, expertise, and curriculum to continue. And then, because M's grandmother died in November, throwing off all of our routines, I even missed one of my sessions.

I was mortified, of course, but this crowd, more used to these sort of interruptions than other demographics, couldn't care less. They stayed and workshopped their work themselves - poems that alluded to one of their worst moments but didn't name names - and crowed and mourned and exulted.

And then they started phoning and emailing to tell me how splendid I was as a teacher. Mostly because their work had started humming over the past few months and they could feel it.

And then the volunteer president of the workshop, Gisela Roger, won first prize in The Writers Collective poetry contest.

I was both proud and humbled by my third place finish in the same contest but resolved to think of this as a chance to share my work with people that wouldn't otherwise see it, the people who didn't read lit mags or follow lit websites.

Because it should be only about sharing the work and not about anything peripheral like winning or placing in lieu of showing.

And I was proud of Gisela, because she stood at the podium and let her poem take over. Because afterwards, the Free Press representative, Gerald Flood, came up to me and muttered admiringly about the power of the poem and the power of the woman giving it to the room.

Yesterday, we workshopped the assignment I'd hustled over to them just before they broke for the holidays. And, again, the poems had power. And grace. And humour. And it was wonderful just to be there.

And then we did a co-operative poem based on the one Leaf Press did, the call for which I was sent but didn't manage over the holidays.

Afterwards, I set them another assignment, something I was calling A backyard moment. Our examples were by Wendy Morton via Leaf Press' Monday's Poem archives and Mary Oliver via The Writers' Almanac.

In order to complete the assignment, they had to follow these instructions:

1. Write a poem about a winter moment in your backyard.

2. The poem doesn’t have to be about anything specific (like birds, for instance) but it has to be about something you’ve worked on, something you care about.

3. Think about what the snow covers and what it reveals. Think about who and what inhabits your backyard and how you co-exist with it/them.

And then I hustled over to the U of Wpg, where I was shocked to realize that in course of my varied education, in English and biology and journalism, I'd never learned terms like 'end-stopped' and 'enjambed' and even 'caesura.'

I'd been using the techniques these terms described for aeons but didn't have names for them. And while being able to use the techniques is the more important side of the equation, to my mind, it was nice to be able to stick a pin in each, to name and number them.

So I was quieted and sort of humbled all over again. But glad. Because even though I'd asked myself a little despairingly after the first class, if I really needed to be there, I know that I'll learn things. I just need to keep quiet and humble and tell myself its about the work.

Which is good exercize, because I'm a bit of a blowhard. Because my ego around writing poetry and where I should be is sometimes a pair of pants that are a little too tight.

And, so after dinner and bedtime for the squisher, I spent the evening in the Gary Geddes anthology we'll be using in the course.

Today I have to explicate a poem from the anthology.

And I'm glad and quiet and proud when my mind alights on poetry, mine and that of people I work with, like the members of the senior citizens' writing workshop, like the writers from near and far that have become friends and colleagues over the last several years.

I'm proud of all of us, goddamn it. Because this work, this life, is a good way to spend a life.

And I wanted to note that while also procrastinating just slightly in the writing of my explication. (And contemplating, for the first time, doing one of my own assignments...)

Heh.

Special Delivery

Great Expectations: Twenty-four True Stories about Childbirth
Edited by Dede Crane and Lisa Moore
House of Anansi Press, 314 pages, $21.95

Reviewed by Ariel Gordon


In the preface to their co-conceived anthology of birth stories by Canadian writers, editors Dede Crane and Lisa Moore declare "birth is everybody's miracle."

While this sounds like sentimental hoo-ha, it is technically true.

(If you didn't know anything about how babies were born and someone told you that women have to squeeze the eight-pound darlings out of their vaginas, would you believe them?)

Crane and Moore's next editorial assertion, however, isn't as defensible.

Birth, they say, is "complex, dramatic, full of human strength and frailty, fear, and humour, as well as invaluable wisdom" and is "all the stuff of good stories."

The problem with this statement is that birth stories come into the world along with babies.

Which makes birth stories as common as, well, dirt.

As such, most people don't care about the infinite details of anyone else's birth story the same way that most people don't care about the infinite details of anyone else's baby.

Given that Victoria-based Crane and St. John's-based Moore are writers of some renown, however, it stands to reason that the birth stories they (and their fellow Canadian novelists, journalists, and non-fiction specialists) would share would be buoyed by their literary merit.

And while the contributors list for Great Expectations includes some of this country's better-known writers (not to mention six men), it suffers from the same plight of most anthologies: uneven material.

The mark of a successful anthology is that the good material far outweighs the bad or even indifferent.

Luckily, this anthology contains a number of surprising and interesting stories, enough to make it worth adding to your library.

Moore's, incidentally, is one of the best of the bunch, including as it does the following speech from her husband, given at a critical moment in the delivery of their first child:

"Lisa, this doctor says he doesn't like your personality. He has asked you to shut up. Apparently, you might die, and they are doing an emergency surgery. They can't waste a second. The thing is, this guy is about to cut you open with a knife, and so I think maybe we should try to stay on his good side."

Some of the best entries work this darkly funny vein. Globe and Mail foreign correspondent Stephanie Nolen's entry is a satisfyingly profane description of a thwarted natural birth.

"I thought I just flew 7,000 kilometres to give birth with a midwife," she writes, "so I didn't end up on my goddamn back with my knees in my ears."

Novelist Karen Connelly is fearless in her description of how being a sexual abuse survivor impacts her labour, while Lynn Coady is (surprise! surprise!) funny and sad in her story of teenage pregnancy and giving up her child for adoption.

Poet Esta Spalding is tenderly elegiac, describing the twins she carried and the single child that survived. Edeet Ravel's contribution features a manic humour that makes for a nice change from the tragic romances on offer in her politically charged novels.

Some of the less original offerings ("I fell in love with my child instantly!" "The pain and hardship of labour and birth were all worth it!") are hobbled not only by the everyone-has-a-unique-birth-story problem but also by one of craft.

That's because in terms of story, birth is pretty straightforward: You start out with a hugely pregnant woman and you end up with a slightly less swollen woman and a baby.

It takes a remarkable writer to be both completely and starkly honest while simultaneously making a story we already know the end of interesting.

The male contributors, such as Giller Prize-winner Joseph Boyden and Brick magazine editor Michael Redhill, have a further difficulty in that they have to endlessly note that their role in the birth they're recounting doesn't compare to that of their partners.

That said, Edmonton-based Curtis Gillespie and Governor General's Award-winner Peter Behrens, both novelists, write well and movingly of their partners' birthing experiences.

A final, minor quibble is that the links between several of the writers are a bit too obvious. Coady's story, for instance, is followed by Christy Ann Conlin's, which references Coady.

Crane's story of her fourth birth is followed by that of her husband, novelist Bill Gaston.

It is natural that the editors would have asked writer friends to contribute (and even that writers would be friends with other writers of about the same vintage), but for readers, it may be best not to know.

All of that said, while Great Expectations didn't fulfil all one's expectations, it is still a good and earnest addition to the growing store of Canadian writing on pregnancy and mothering.

(You're just the cutest little anthology of birth stories! Yes you are!)


Winnipeg writer Ariel Gordon published a chapbook of poems about her 2006 pregnancy with Palimpsest Press of Kingsville, Ont., this past fall.

SPORED: Neglect

* * *

This gory pinwheel is what happens when you neglect a spore print, leaving the mushroom to decompose on your careful verses...

Imagining the wrath of Tracy/Brenda/Kerry/Gillian - and because I had a veritable spore print production line happening, what with the bounty of four books' worth of poetry and a lapful of gilled mushrooms - I carefully removed mushrooms from poems before they turned into...well, fungal matter.

Hence the clean spore prints I posted, lo these last few months.

But when it came to spore printing one of my own poems, all bets were off, as I'm bad at sustaining anger at myself. And so the mushroom slowly flattened and dried out on my poor poem.

I think if it had smelled, I would have got to it sooner...but rationalizations of my neglect aside, there I was with a liquified mushroom and an obscured poem.

I left it where it was for a while longer, thinking that really, it couldn't get any worse. Eventually, I removed it from the windowsill and picked at the mushroom crust half-heartedly.

Then it spent some time on the stairs to the second floor, where semi-important papers season before being added to another pile in my office upstairs.

But somewhere along the line, I started to appreciate the beast a little.

So I'm posting it.

The text, though you can barely read it, is from my poem Toddle, which is currently on the bottom of the pile at the CBC Literary Award offices. Okay, the CBC Literary Award cubicle.

But still. Maybe this spore-printed-call will generate a shortlisted-response.

Couldn't hurt, eh?