Sarah Emsley's Blog, page 14

Words that Heal

My friend and neighbour Renée Hartleib is the author of today’s guest post, and it’s a great pleasure to introduce her. Renée is an author, writer, and writing mentor, and she says her “greatest passion is to help others connect with themselves and bring their creative dreams to life.” She lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with her family, one dog, many felines, and a “book nook” in front of the house.

Her book Writing Your Way: a 40-Day Path of Self-Discovery was published last fall. I attended the launch at the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia and there was a tremendous amount of positive energy in the room as so many people gathered to celebrate Renée and her fabulous new book.

The book arose from the “40-Day Writing Project” she designed and has shared many times with different groups over the last few years. (You can find more details about her online writing community and sign up for her monthly emails on her website. If you’re looking for a writing mentor or editor to help you finish a book or assess a first draft, get in touch with Renée directly. She’s a fantastic editor and coach and I recommend her highly!) Each chapter begins with an inspirational quotation—such as Rainer Maria Rilke’s famous advice about learning to “live the questions”—followed by compelling stories from Renée’s own creative journey, along with writing prompts designed to help readers explore their own lives, past and present, and their dreams of renewal and transformation for the future. As I mentioned when I wrote about the book here last fall, when I read it I was reminded of what Jane Austen’s Fanny Price says in Mansfield Park about how “We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.” Renée suggests that writing can help us find that “better guide”—she says, “Some might call it your soul, your spirit, or your essence.”

I’m delighted to share with you Renée’s guest post about three of her favourite books, Four Letters of Love, by Niall Williams, The Camino Letters: 26 Tasks on the Way to Finisterre, by Julie Kirkpatrick, and Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives, by the late Louise DeSalvo.

Thank you to Sarah for inviting me to write a guest post on her wonderful blog! I’m excited to tell you about three of my favourite books. While they are all different genres they share a common thread. There’s a book of fiction I have long loved, a memoir I just finished, and a non-fiction book I return to again and again in my life and my work.

Four Letters of Love by Niall Williams is a novel I first read over twenty years ago and have re-read many times since. Whenever anyone asks me about “favourite books of all time,” it’s there. First because the writing is exquisite, but also because of the book’s powerful and overarching message of love and goodness, even in the face of obstacles, other people’s bad behaviour, and unfair twists of fate.

The book is set in Ireland and when it begins, our narrator, Nicholas Coughlan, is twelve years old. His world has just been turned upside down by his father, the family’s primary breadwinner, who has left his job and decided to paint for a living because God asked him to. Woven throughout this first person account are other chapters, written in the third person, that tell the story of another character, Isabel Gore. She lives on an island off the Galway Coast and feels haunted by, and responsible for, her younger brother’s physical paralysis.

There is an old-fashioned love story at work here, but simultaneously author Niall Williams writes about divine love and self-love and how healing is possible. It’s about the love that shines—like a shot of sunlight on the sea—through our moments of nearly unbearable sadness and grief. He reminds us what it means to trust in life and to trust in something larger than ourselves.

“There was in the air at that moment that rare feeling of healing, of things lifting and coming together, of the story being carried suddenly forward, the great whoosh on which everything suddenly rises and flows, and you know a great spirit is somewhere watching down.”

Every time I read this novel, I remember that life is a beautiful mystery and the best thing we can do is to embrace and explore that mystery and simply trust. In love, in life, and in ourselves.

The Camino Letters: 26 Tasks on the Way to Finisterre is a memoir I read when it first came out in 2010 and then again more recently because of my plan to walk the Camino de Santiago next year. As I prepare, I find myself drawn not only to guidebooks but also to first person accounts of walking this ancient pilgrimage trail in Spain.

I hadn’t recalled much about the content of this book; only that I absolutely loved it and it moved me. Second time around, it did not disappoint. Right from the preface, author Julie Kirkpatrick, who is a Canadian lawyer as well as a writer, makes it plain that she didn’t really understand what she was getting herself into when she decided to walk the Camino. The only nod to preparation was spontaneously asking 26 friends to assign her a daily task for each day of her long walk.

The book is made up of the daily letters she wrote her friends about the outcome of each of the tasks they assigned her. Some of the tasks sounded simple (listen to the wind, be mellow, give something away) but there was nothing simple about what she experienced on the Camino path. As Kirkpatrick says: “The act of putting one foot in front of the other, day after day, with only my tasks to answer to, led me on an interior journey that I was not prepared for and was not expecting.”

The letters are a deep dive into the backstory of the author’s life, written with incredible generosity and heart. Her writing is raw and vulnerable and and she is honest about her own shortcomings and missteps. She peels back protective layers to write with great candor about some of the most painful events of her life: losing her mother at a young age, living with an autoimmune condition that can result in sudden blindness, and the stillbirth of a child.

As the reader, it’s beautiful to witness the revelations and insights that happen over the course of Kirkpatrick’s journey, as both the Camino and the writing work in concert to bring about healing. The result is a profound reading experience for which I’m very grateful.

This is a perfect segue to the last book on my list. Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives by the late Louise DeSalvo was gifted to me by my writing mentor, Pam Donoghue, during our work together in the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia’s Alistair MacLeod Mentorship Program.

Over the last twenty years, DeSalvo’s book has had a huge impact on me personally, as well as guiding me on my path to become a writing mentor. I have suggested this book to more clients than I can count. In a nutshell, this book is about how writing, as a complement to therapy, can heal the most thorny and persistent and messy wounds of our lives.

“Why, then, should we write? Because writing permits the construction of a cohesive, elaborate, thoughtful personal narrative in the way that simply speaking about our experiences doesn’t. Through writing, suffering can be transmuted into art. And writing permits us to use our writing as a form of public testimony in a way that the private act of therapy doesn’t.”

As someone who has always written to make sense of my life, I found that DeSalvo’s book deepened my understanding of what writing can do for us. I have taken her words to heart over the years, first in blog posts and most recently in my book Writing Your Way, where I share personal stories about the things that have held me back from both creating and living fully.

What I discovered as I wrote my book is exactly what DeSalvo stated. Through the act of writing about some of my most vulnerable experiences I began to feel my way toward a new understanding and a healing of old wounds. Once I published my book and it was being read by both strangers and friends, that sense of healing only deepened as my words began to help readers discover their own hidden truths.

I hope you can see the thread that ties these wonderful books together. All three have inspired me with their magical combination of heart and soul and with the light they have shone on growth and healing. I hope you seek them out and that they spark something within you.

Happy reading and happy writing!

“She is my daughter … no outsider shall ever come between us again” #ReadingLanternHill

My friend Kathy Cawsey has written a guest post for the Jane of Lantern Hill readalong that I’m co-hosting this month with Naomi of Consumed By Ink, and I’m very happy to share it with you on this last Friday in May.

When I asked Kathy for a short bio, she said that she “gets paid to read and talk about reading at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.” She’s the author of a book on Images of Language in Middle English Vernacular Writings, and her research includes Later Middle English Writing, such as Chaucer, Malory, Margery Kempe, the cycle dramas, and medieval romances, and modern medievalist fantasy, such as J.R.R. Tolkien and Guy Gavriel Kay. Her current project focuses on the complexities of sexualized violence in medieval texts. She says most of her essays are academic, though she’s switching into a more personal style for some, including a very moving essay about reading Old English laments during the COVID-19 pandemic. (You can read it here.)

In this guest post about L.M. Montgomery’s Jane of Lantern Hill, Kathy writes about Jane’s grandmother in relation to her own grandmother. Like Jane, Kathy grew up in Ontario. She was very close to her grandmother, until her grandmother’s death at the age of 97. Here’s a photo from the celebration of her grandmother’s 95th birthday:

Rereading as an adult a book you loved as a child can be eye-opening. As a kid I loved the Narnia series, and read and re-read them; different Narnia books became my favourite book at different ages. But as an adult I found them oddly empty. C.S. Lewis’s worldbuilding power is such that the books opened up landscapes and storyscapes in my imagination that were never actually on the page.

Like the Wardrobe, sometimes when you go back into a childhood favourite, you meet only coats and a plain brown wooden wall. The magic is there, but inaccessible.

Reading the Little House on the Prairie books to my daughter was an eye-opening experience in a different way. I could still enjoy them as an adult in a way I couldn’t enjoy the Narnia books, but I noticed completely different things. As a child, I of course loved Laura, but Pa—because he so clearly was Laura’s idol—was also one of the major figures of the book. I never paid much attention to Ma beyond wanting to taste her vanity cakes and laughing at the stick-figure story-duck she drew to keep the girls occupied while Pa was missing in the blizzard.

As an adult, I no longer laughed. Pa was missing in the blizzard. As an adult, I realized that Ma was desperately trying to keep the children from thinking about that fact. Even the vanity cakes took on a layer of meaning I hadn’t seen before: they were a cheap treat to make for a party with “town girls” who could afford more expensive things. Rereading, I envisioned Ma wracking her brains for nights before the party trying to think of affordable ways to make it special—to show those “town girls” that you didn’t need money to have a good life.

Now a mother myself, I noticed Ma, while Laura and Pa faded into the background. Ma being uprooted from the abundance of the farm in the Little House in the Big Woods to go scratch out a living on the prairie; Ma badly hurting her leg miles and weeks from a doctor (what if it hadn’t healed right? what if it had gone gangrenous?!); Ma holding the family together while Pa was constantly off somewhere. Laura—even as an adult—barely notices Ma. I found myself wondering what Ma thought, what she felt. Resentment? Resignation? Bitterness? Constant anxiety?

But Ma remained impenetrable. Apparently—as far as Laura and the reader were concerned—imperturbable.

(Kathy says, “I hadn’t noticed until just now how the image captures exactly what I’m talking about—Laura running around in the main part of the picture with Ma literally underneath her working away!”)

I don’t know if I read Jane of Lantern Hill as a child. I probably did, but I don’t remember it. I certainly didn’t reread it the way I read and reread the Anne books, or The Story Girl, or even Emily. So reading it for this readalong was a strangely doubled experience: I was reading it for the first time (as far as I could remember) as an adult, while simultaneously being aware of how I would have read it as a child.

And, as with the Little House books, I found myself noticing the adults far more than the central child. (Sarah lent me Alexander MacLeod’s essay “‘They were ours, ours! and now they are gone’: Re-reading J.M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy,” about a similar experience reading a beloved childhood book to his children, and being more interested in the adults in the story.)

For me, the grandmother is the one who is truly at the centre of Lantern Hill, even though the narrator and the plot follow Jane. She is a “still, cold, terrible” centre. Several readers in this readalong have mentioned the unreality of the PEI scenes, their almost-daydream quality, and I do think there could be a convincing reading of Lantern Hill that sees all the Island chapters as the imaginings of a girl stuck in an unloving, cold house in Toronto. No character in PEI—even the father, even Jane herself—is as vivid as the grandmother in Toronto.

Though maybe the grandmother was only vivid to me, because in my mind my own grandmother slips easily into that character. Jane’s grandmother is what my Grandma could have become, had she made different choices, had life treated her differently.

Grandma was a wonderful person—loving, fun, with a great sense of humour. I never doubted her love for me. So in many ways she was nothing like Jane’s grandmother. She liked children; I have great memories of numerous tea parties with her child-sized dish set.

But there was another side to Grandma. The tea parties were great fun, yes, but they were also where I learned manners and polite, adult conversation. No plastic for Grandma: the dishes were creamy porcelain, elegant and breakable. Most of the fun of tea parties was pretending to be elegant, “proper” ladies. As we aged, we were allowed to graduate from invisible tea to tiny cups of coke, from which we would delicately sip. No spilling, though!—Grandma was fussy. There was a wet washcloth hung off of the bottom rung of our chairs, to wipe all the stick off our hands afterwards. (I hated the way she would wipe down right between my fingers, where stick couldn’t possibly have been.)

Grandma valued manners. And grammar. She was “proper” in the way only someone from a poor background could be. She had “married up,” into the lawyer’s family of Fergus, Ontario—but she was proud, and fiercely independent. Like Jane’s grandmother, her husband died young, and she was left with two children to support. Rather than living off of the charity of her husband’s family, she went back to work at a time when most women stopped teaching after they had kids.

I sometimes wonder what Grandma would have been like if my grandfather had lived, and she had become a regular fifties housewife, using her piercing intelligence to choose clothes or plan dinner parties rather than teaching blind children mathematics. Or if he had been richer, and had left her a large house in Toronto, say. She might have become small, and bitter, and petty, like Jane’s grandmother. Grandma cared desperately about what people thought, and that caring was reflected in how she dressed, how she carried herself; she was far more elegant at age 97 than I have ever been. I remember her telling me that if I spent ten minutes each day pinching down in long strokes on my nose, it would become longer and not be so squished.

In her older years—and she lived a very long life—she went through bouts of depression. Jane’s grandmother reminded me most strongly of my Grandma of those years. Grandma had depended on my mother, the oldest child, since her husband died, and they had a very close relationship. Had my mother been different, she could well have turned out like Jane’s Mother—flighty and thoughtless. Mom’s quiet rebellion was refusing to care about clothes and parties.

During those years of depression, Grandma was like Jane’s grandmother, wanting to keep my Mom to herself. I vividly remember Grandma once describing my Dad—whom she loved very much—as the “man who stole my daughter from me.”

Dad was mad, of course, but he explained to me that it was the depression speaking. But I know a small part of Grandma truly believed that fantasy of her and my mother living together forever, even though it could never have happened: my parents met long after Mom had moved out and was living on her own.

So Jane’s grandmother, for me, was a vision of what my Grandma could have been, had she lived and chosen differently. Someone who cared about money and property, and proper-ty, propriety. Someone who resented anyone their beloved daughter loved. Someone who valued appearances and being “proper” more than the happiness of her family. Someone who disdained people who prioritized mere happiness over dignity, respectability, decorum.

Jane of Lantern Hill ends before Jane goes back to Toronto, so we never see the grandmother’s reaction to her daughter’s moving out and buying the “little stone house in Lakeside Gardens.” Almost certainly things would not have gone as smoothly as Jane envisions. Probably they would have moved back into 60 Gay as a family while they waited for the Lakeside Gardens house to be ready; probably the grandmother would have thought she was acting exquisitely politely to Jane’s father, while bitter, snide remarks slipped out against her will. Probably Jane’s father would have steadfastly ignored those remarks. Probably Jane’s mother would have quietly kept the peace and prevented anyone from saying anything truly unforgiveable. Probably after they moved, the family would have gone to 60 Gay every week for Sunday dinner, putting the golf game on the television so there would always be something to talk about or to fill awkward silences. Maybe the grandmother would have moved into Lakeside Gardens when she had glaucoma, and would have learned to twirl spaghetti with her arthritic fingers, never saying a word about her hatred of the dish—because that would be impolite.

Maybe Jane would realize, as an adult, that her grandmother really did love her in her own, rather warped, way, which is why she cared so deeply about what Jane wore, how she behaved, and what school she attended. Maybe Jane would bring her newborn child to visit his great-grandmother in hospice, and even though by that point most of the grandmother’s personality had been nibbled away by multiple strokes, she still would have jumped and fussed when the baby spit-up.

That is my daydream for Jane. An adult daydream of complex, hard joy, rather than simple easy happiness.

Better than childhood fancies of going through the wardrobe to PEI, because I know it can actually happen.

Thank you, Kathy!

If you missed my earlier posts about the novel, you can catch up here:

“Back in Bonn with Bethie, #ReadingLanternHill”

“The Idyllic Island (#ReadingLanternHill)”

From Naomi MacKinnon: “Announcing a Readalong of Jane of Lantern Hill by L.M. Montgomery: #ReadingLanternHill”

From Rebecca Foster: “Jane of Lantern Hill by L.M. Montgomery (1937) #ReadingLanternHill”

If you enjoyed this post, I hope you’ll consider recommending it to a friend. I’m always interested to read your comments and messages. If you’d like to subscribe and receive future posts by email, you can sign up on my website, www.sarahemsley.com. Thanks for reading!

One Beethoven

During this trip to Bonn, I’ve visited the house where Beethoven was born (Beethoven-Haus Bonn), his baptismal font (at St. Remigius Church), and the 1845 statue by Ernst Julius Hähnel in the Münsterplatz; I’ve read Lisa Tunbridge’s Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces and watched a fascinating documentary called “Beethoven’s Ninth: Symphony for the World” (filmed in Shanghai, Sao Paulo, Osaka, Kinshasa, Barcelona, and Bonn, and available on Netflix in Germany, but not, alas, in Canada); and I’ve enjoyed taking pictures of the many Beethovens who appear in shop windows, outside restaurants, and sometimes in the windows of private homes. Some of these are reproductions of the 700 statues created by Ottmar Hörl for his installation “Ludwig van Beethoven – Ode an die Freude [Ode to Joy],” in the Münsterplatz in 2019.

“Freedom, going further—this is the only goal in the world of art, as in all of grand creation.”

– Beethoven

St. Remigius Church

Beethoven-Haus Bonn (and the courtyard behind the house)

My favourite room in the museum gathers together several portraits of Beethoven, including the famous one by Joseph Stieler of Beethoven with the manuscript of the Missa solemnis, and screens that display quotations from Beethoven’s contemporaries about his appearance and personality: “very proud, non-descript, magnificent mind, rushing, ugly and red-faced with pock marks, grumpy.”

On May 6th, Coronation Day in the UK, I attended a wonderful concert by Pèter Köcsky at Beethoven’s house, and my brother-in-law reminded me of Beethoven’s famous words to Prince Karl Lichnowsky:

“Prince, what you are, you are by circumstance and birth; what I am, I am through myself. There are, and there always will be, thousands of princes; but there is only one Beethoven.”

(“Fürst, was Sie sind, sind Sie durch Zufall und Geburt, was ich bin, bin ich durch mich; Fürsten hat es und wird es noch Tausend geben; Beethoven gibt’s nur einen.” From a letter Beethoven wrote to the Prince in October 1806; translated in David Wyn Jones’s The Life of Beethoven, quoted by Tunbridge.)

When I attended a performance of Tom Allen’s splendid chamber musical “The Missing Pages” in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia at the end of April—the story of the only Canadian who met Beethoven—I borrowed my daughter’s “Ludwig Lives” t-shirt for the occasion. On this trip to Bonn, I decided to buy a t-shirt of my own.

Bonn University Botanic Gardens

I spent a few glorious days in Amsterdam earlier this week, and—as you might imagine—I took lots of photos. I’ll put some of those together for a future blog post. I’m very happy to be back in Bonn now with my sister and her family. My brother, Tom, and his daughter have just arrived from Nova Scotia, and yesterday we visited Burg Drachenfels, a ruined castle that was built in the 12th century, and Schloss Drachenburg, a neogothic castle built in 1882. In the castle, we found one of the Beethoven statues by Ottmar Hörl, along with a stained glass window featuring Beethoven.

Tom and Beethoven

The view from Drachenfels

“True art remains imperishable, and the true artist takes inward delight at great products of the mind.”

– Beethoven

While I was writing this blog post, my ten-year-old niece was playing with her sister, and also making up a song as she watched me write, singing about how I was typing—“typey, typey, typey, that’s what you do”—and reading, turning the pages, taking a sip of coffee. “I can see you over there, typing again … my job’s to sing about what you do.”

If you enjoyed this post, I hope you’ll consider recommending it to a friend. I’m always interested to read your comments and messages. If you’d like to subscribe and receive future posts by email, you can sign up on my website, www.sarahemsley.com. Thanks for reading!

The Idyllic Island (#ReadingLanternHill)

At first, Jane doesn’t want to leave her mother to travel to Prince Edward Island—even though she dislikes living in Toronto—and she wishes the days wouldn’t fly by so quickly.

(If you missed the first post about L.M. Montgomery’s Jane of Lantern Hill, you can catch up here: “Back in Bonn with Bethie, #ReadingLanternHill.”)

As a very young child, Jane had once asked her mother if there was any way they could stop time, and her mother sighed, saying, “We can never stop time, darling.” Montgomery seems very aware of the passage of time in Jane of Lantern Hill, more than I’ve noticed in her other books. Once Jane gets to PEI, she loves it, and the idyllic life she finds there that first summer seems to go on forever. Then she has to endure nine months before she can return, and she ticks off the months one by one, and feasts on news from the Island.

Blackbush Island, PEI

Ferry to PEI

I love PEI with all my heart, but I have to say that I found some of the descriptions of the Island’s perfections a bit much. In Jane of Lantern Hill, it’s presented as a perfect world. It’s a place of delights, from the delectable food—“a box of doughnuts, three loaves of bread, a round pat of butter with a pattern of clover leaves on it, a jar of cream, a raisin pie and three dried codfish”—to the glorious landscape—“free hills and wide, open fields where you could run wherever you liked, none daring to make you afraid, spruce barrens and shadowy sand-dunes, instead of an iron fence and locked gates”—to the friendly and welcoming people. It’s a place where Jane “could do just as she wanted to without making excuses for anything.” Things happen so easily for her here! Unlike Anne Shirley, who after her arrival in PEI is always getting into “scrapes,” “Jane was very capable and could do almost anything she tried to do. … There was joy in her heart the clock round. Life here was one endless adventure.” Except it doesn’t sound like an adventure, not really, because it’s all so perfect.

My daughter took this photo at Dalvay Lake, PEI a couple of years ago

And it all happens quickly, too. Montgomery sounds to me impatient to make everything work out well for Jane. No one can stop time, but it’s as if she can’t slow down at all to dramatize any complications. Jane and her father set up house at Lantern Hill, and “By the end of a week Jane knew the geography and people of Lantern Hill and Lantern Corners perfectly.” Not only that, but she has a new “bosom friend,” Min. But since Min is only mentioned in passing, in the middle of a long paragraph about how well Jane settles in, we don’t get to see how the girls discover they’re kindred spirits.

While the secondary characters in Montgomery’s Anne or Emily novels are interesting as individuals, I found it hard to keep track of the assortment of characters who surround Jane and her father in their Island home, and I confess I sometimes ended up skimming passages. Jane may be able to “pick out Big Donald Martin’s farm and little Donald Martin’s farm,” but I can’t tell the difference. “Elmer and Min and Polly Garland and Shingle and Jane were all children of the same year and they all liked each other and snubbed each other and offended each other and stood up for each other against the older and younger fry. Jane gave up trying to believe she hadn’t always been friends with them.” I was left wondering why they liked each other, and how they snubbed or offended each other. There’s so much potential here—and I found I wanted more. She’s made friends fast, but they don’t seem like distinct characters to me, just names that appear in lists. “All Jane’s particular friends, old and young, came, even Mary Millicent…. Step-a-yard came and Timothy Salt and Min and Min’s ma and Ding-dong Bell and the Big Donalds and the Little Donalds and people from the Corners that Jane didn’t know knew her.”

I was relieved to learn that when Jane finds her father’s Distinguished Service Medal from the Great War, “breathless with pride over her discovery,” her father is dismissive and tells her to “throw it out.” Conflict at last!

When Jane is back in Toronto, desperate to return home to PEI again, we’re told “The Lantern Hill news was still absorbing,” but as a reader I didn’t feel absorbed in it, I guess because I didn’t feel invested in the characters there. More lists follow, full of news, none of it especially memorable. (I was reminded of the letters Anne Shirley writes in Anne of Windy Poplars, a novel I have always found excruciatingly dull.)

Even though I didn’t feel the same fascination with the news from home, I did feel a deep sympathy for Jane on her return to Lantern Hill, when she realizes “she had never been away at all. She had really been living here all along. It was her spirit’s home.” My heart breaks for her here, and for her creator, and for anyone who feels trapped in a place that isn’t their true home.

As I mentioned in my first post on this novel, Jane’s grandmother reminds me of Lady Catherine de Bourgh. I was glad to find that near the end of the novel, Jane confronts Mrs. Kennedy and demands, “What happened to the letter father wrote to mother long ago, asking her go to back to him, grandmother?” Like Elizabeth Bennet, who refuses to obey Lady Catherine, Jane speaks up for herself and for the truth. She extracts from her grandmother an admission that she burned the letter, and she states clearly that she knows her mother and father love each other still. I was cheering for her and at the same time appreciating the dramatic impact of her grandmother’s decisive reply—“They do not”—but then when the chapter ended abruptly, I was left wondering why Jane’s mother, who was present during this conversation, said nothing at all. Even if Robin isn’t as outspoken as her daughter, it still seems strange to me that she’d be completely silent during this fight between her daughter and her mother.

Maybe Montgomery was dealing with so much conflict in her own life that she didn’t feel able to include more of it in this novel.

I knew, obviously, that in choosing to reread Jane of Lantern Hill as an adult, I might find that I didn’t love it as much as I had when I was young. I wanted to love it, and I did, sometimes, but not all the way through. The story seemed to me sometimes like a draft that would benefit from further revisions. More details about the characters and conflicts between them, more dialogue in key scenes of confrontation, and a little less perfection in the descriptions of PEI.

In the end, Toronto is shown as a place of possibility, not just misery, as Jane envisions a happy life with her reunited parents in the “little stone house in Lakeside Gardens,” during the winter, and then summers at Lantern Hill in PEI. Toronto is a more complex place than it seemed in the first pages of the novel; I guess I wish PEI could be shown as a similarly complex place, rather than just as a perfect heaven.

(And yes, I recognize that I’m showing only idyllic aspects of the Island in these photos…. They’re all holiday photos, taken over the last few years, all of them before the Island was damaged by Hurricane Fiona last fall.)

My sister Bethie and I watched the 1989 Lantern Hill movie earlier this week, and we agreed that in this adaptation there’s a little too much of Wuthering Heights and Northanger Abbey, and not nearly enough PEI. There isn’t even a speck of red dirt on those country roads, or on the north shore cliffs, either.

I’d love to hear what you think of the Island and its inhabitants, and the happy ending Montgomery bestows on Jane and her parents, and on Jody, too. And/or any other aspect of the novel (or the movie) that you’d like to discuss.

If you enjoyed this post, I hope you’ll consider recommending it to a friend. I’m always interested to read your comments and messages. If you’d like to subscribe and receive future posts by email, you can sign up on my website, www.sarahemsley.com. Thanks for reading!

Back in Bonn with Bethie, #ReadingLanternHill

My sister Bethie and I are reading L.M. Montgomery’s Jane of Lantern Hill and I hope you’ll join us! As I mentioned here a couple of months ago, my friend Naomi and I are hosting a readalong for Jane of Lantern Hill, and we plan to post about it at least a couple of times this month—maybe more. Please join the conversation in the comments here on my blog, on Naomi’s blog, Consumed By Ink, on social media (#ReadingLanternHill), and/or on your own blog.

Bethie and I are also planning to watch the 1989 Jane of Lantern Hill movie while I’m in Germany. Have any of you seen it?

L.M. Montgomery started writing Jane of Lantern Hill in May of 1936 and completed it in February of 1937. As Caroline E. Jones outlines in an essay on “The New Mother at Home: Montgomery’s Explorations of Motherhood” (in L.M. Montgomery’s Rainbow Valleys), these months were difficult for her, as she worried about her sons Chester and Stuart, mourned the loss of her cat Lucky, and endured an event on January 29, 1937 that she never explained, aside from recording in her diary that “On that day all happiness departed from my life forever.” It seems this event may have had something to do with her son Chester, though no one knows for sure. Jane of Lantern Hill was published later that year, twenty-nine years after Montgomery’s first and most famous novel, Anne of Green Gables, appeared in print. The novel is dedicated to the memory of Lucky, “The charming affectionate comrade of fourteen years.”

In her magnificent biography of Montgomery, Mary Henley Rubio describes the pace at which this novel was written. In September of 1936, Montgomery wrote in her diary that she was writing up to five hours a day, working quickly to try to finish the book. The following winter, because of the challenging circumstances of her personal life, she found it extremely difficult to write the ending. Eventually, Rubio says, “she steeled herself to finish Jane of Lantern Hill … , managing to do so through sheer grit.”

Jones writes that in these later years, Montgomery “wrote her final books and reflected on a life that she believed had failed.” In her novels, however, “she offers her protagonists a wide sense of family and empowers them with the ability to find both their own mother figures and shape themselves as mothers.” Jane, for example, is always looking for ways to take care of others. When she first meets her neighbour Jody, who’s “sobbing bitterly” beneath a cherry tree, Jane’s first instinct is to ask “Can I help you?” and we learn that “those words were the keynote of her character.”

(I missed the cherry blossom festival in Bonn; only a few spots of pink remain on the trees.)

Jane’s mother, Robin, made me think of Maria Bertram in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. As Jones says, “Jane’s mother is depicted as a bird in a cage from which she envisions no escape, caught in a round of dances, parties, and afternoon teas.” During the visit to her fiancé’s estate, Sotherton, Maria Bertram—who is in love with another man—says that while “the sun shines, and the park looks very cheerful,” the iron gate and the ha-ha give her “a feeling of restraint and hardship. ‘I cannot get out,’ as the starling said.”

I know I read Jane of Lantern Hill when I was young, but I didn’t really remember much beyond a vague sense that I loved it, and the fact that at the beginning, Jane lives in Toronto with her mother and grandmother, but then travels to Prince Edward Island and starts to get to know her father. When I read it back then, I knew Montgomery had moved to Ontario after she married Ewan Macdonald, but I didn’t have any idea of just how difficult her life became, as both she and her husband struggled with mental illness and she worried about her sons and her career. I also didn’t know that she had considered writing a sequel to the novel, which was to have been called Jane and Jody.

I’m interested in what Rubio says about how the parallels between the novel and Montgomery’s own life are obvious. “Maud herself believed in the Island’s remarkable restorative powers, particularly with respect to her own complicated life in Toronto. She also knew that she was herself partly trapped in Toronto by her own ambitions. Furthermore, Jane’s grandmother bears uncanny similarities to the woman Maud could sometimes be: a mother who meddled in her children’s romantic affairs, who tried to break up relationships she considered unsuitable, and who had fierce ambitions for her offspring.” As Rubio says, in this novel, Toronto is a “miserable” place, contrasted with “magical” Prince Edward Island.

I’m curious to hear from those of you who are reading the novel with us. What do you think of the contrasts between Toronto and PEI? I was struck by the way Jane’s grandmother’s attachment to the Toronto house, 60 Gay Street, is described. She arrived there as a bride when the house was new and grand, and although it’s “hopelessly out of date,” she is going to “live there the rest of her life.” But then we’re told “Those who did not like it need not stay there”—even though neither Jane nor her mother Robin seems to have much choice in the matter.

What do you make of Jane? Lesley McDowell remarks that “Some may find this heroine, conjured up in 1937 by the author of the relentlessly cheerful Anne of Green Gables, a little too keen on being good, too.” Is Jane too virtuous? (Fanny Price, the heroine of Mansfield Park, is often accused of the same thing.)

I thought more than once of the imperious Lady Catherine de Bourgh, from Pride and Prejudice, while reading about Jane’s grandmother, Mrs. Kennedy. In the early pages of the novel, when her grandmother speaks, Jane obeys. Jane says she was “running just for the fun of it,” her grandmother says, “I wouldn’t do it again if I were you, Victoria,” and “Jane never did it again.” (How frustrating it must be to be called Victoria or Victoria Jane when you know in your heart that your real name is Jane!)

It doesn’t take long, however, for Jane to stand up to her grandmother. Unable to do so for herself right away, she can nevertheless speak up for her friend Jody when her grandmother forbids her to play with Jody, calling her “riff-raff.” “You are not fair,” Jane says, looking directly at her grandmother. I was pleased to see Jane standing up for her friend—and then a little disappointed that we don’t get to hear her grandmother’s response to this speech. The two girls just walk away.

I’ll stop there for now, and write more next week about the idyllic world Jane discovers when her father sends for her and she goes to spend the summer with him in Prince Edward Island.

I’ve posted many photos of PEI on my blog over the years, and I suppose I could search through old photos that would illustrate some of the Island’s many beauties. Maybe I’ll do that for next week’s post. Since I’m in Germany at the moment, I’ll include some photos from here instead. I like to think Jane and her father would approve, given their shared fascination with history and geography, and his promise to take her to see the world someday, including “castles on the banks of the Rhine.” I haven’t seen any castles on this trip (yet), but Bethie and I walked to the Rhine yesterday, and then we talked about Jane of Lantern Hill on the walk back to her house.

In the distance, in the photo above, “The castled crag of Drachenfels / Frowns o’er the wide and winding Rhine” (Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage).

Here’s the castle in Cochem, on the Mosel River, that we visited when I was here last fall:

I can’t resist adding some photos I took this week, of flowers and trees in springtime, plus photos of Bethie and me having “coffee with Beethoven” in the Münsterplatz:

For further reading:

“Announcing a Readalong of Jane of Lantern Hill by L.M. Montgomery” (on Naomi’s blog, Consumed by Ink)

“The New Mother at Home: Montgomery’s Explorations of Motherhood,” by Caroline E. Jones, in L.M. Montgomery’s Rainbow Valleys: The Ontario Years, 1911 – 1942, edited by Rita Bode and Lesley D. Clement (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2015).

Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings, by Mary Henley Rubio (Anchor Canada, 2008).

If you enjoyed this post, I hope you’ll consider recommending it to a friend. I’m always interested to read your comments and messages. If you’d like to subscribe and receive future posts by email, you can sign up on my website, www.sarahemsley.com. Thanks for reading!

“Holding true to herself”

I’ve just finished reading Maira Kalman’s beautiful book Women Holding Things. (My friend Lisa recommended it to me, and we decided to give each other copies of the book, just as we did with Heidi L.M. Jacobs’s novel Molly of the Mall and Juliette Wells’s edition of Jane Austen’s Emma, to mention a couple of examples.) Kalman considers “all that can be held. And not held.” She says, “Holding a specific thing is a very nice thing to do. … The simple act of doing one thing.” She writes of (and illustrates) a woman “holding opinions about modern art”; of “Gertrude Stein holding true to herself writing things very few people liked or even read”; of “Hortense Cézanne holding her own”; of a woman “holding consoling and comforting her daughter”; of a girl holding a violin, a tutu, a doll and book; a woman “holding her red cap after swimming across the Hudson River”; of “women holding malicious opinions while I play piano”; of “Virginia Woolf barely holding it together”; of “Sally Hemings holding history accountable.”

She draws a portrait of her mother’s family in 1931: “They also loved holding things before half of them perished in Auschwitz.” On a page devoid of illustration or colour, Kalman writes,

The terrors of the world exist.

And we are wounded.

“It is hard work,” she says, “to hold everything.”

Another of Lisa’s recommendations is The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise, by Dan Gemeinhart, in which Coyote and her dad, Rodeo, who’ve been driving from one state to another in an old school bus named Yager, begin a journey back to Washington State for the first time in five years. Coyote is determined to dig up a memory box she and her mother and sisters buried in a park near their old house, and her dad is equally determined not to return to the place where the five of them were a family, before the two sisters and their mother were killed in a car accident. I loved reading about the bond between Coyote and Rodeo, and the tensions between the two of them, and the friendships they make with the people and animals who join them on the bus on the long drive across the country: Lester; Salvador and his mother, Esperanza; Val; a kitten named Ivan; and a goat named Gladys.

Coyote’s courage is remarkable. She’s dealing with a tremendous amount of sorrow, and she has tremendous compassion for the sufferings of others. “I guess sometimes life does seem like too much, especially during the big moments,” she says. “But usually you can dig inside yourself and find what you need. You can find what you need to grow into those big moments and make ’em yours.”

I’ve been rereading some of the short stories and plays Jane Austen wrote when she was a teenager, including “Jack & Alice,” in which we meet the Johnsons, who, “though a little addicted to the Bottle & the Dice, had many good Qualities.” I also love “The beautifull Cassandra,” in which the heroine “proceeded to a Pastry-cooks where she devoured six ices, refused to pay for them, knocked down the Pastry Cook & walked away.” I think her play “The Mystery” is hilarious—full of secrets, not one of which is ever revealed. “Shall I tell him the secret? … No, he’ll certainly blab it … But he is asleep and wont hear me … So I’ll e’en venture.” Such fun to hear the voice of young Jane!

If you’d like to hear more about Jane Austen’s early work, you might be interested in this conversation with Emma Clery on the TLS podcast (from last year): “Crossing the threshold into Jane Austen’s unpublished writings.”

I chose “Holding true to herself” as the title for this post because I liked Kalman’s description of Gertrude Stein, and because it reminded me of a favourite line from one of Jane Austen’s letters: “I must keep to my own style & go on in my own Way; And though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other” (April 1, 1816).

(The painting and the message in a bottle were created by my daughter when she was younger)

I want to recommend a couple of novels by Nova Scotia writers. First, Hold My Girl, by Charlene Carr, a gripping page-turner that explores what happens to Katherine and Tess, whose heartbreaking stories of infertility, IVF treatments, pregnancy loss, and motherhood intersect in ways neither of them could ever have imagined. After Tess endures the pain of losing her daughter Hanna, who is stillborn, and Katherine gives birth to a healthy daughter, Rose, the two women learn from the IVF clinic that their eggs were switched. As Tess begins her fight to be involved in Rose’s life and Katherine tries desperately to keep Tess away from Rose, both women struggle with profound feelings of failure.

“On the surface,” Katherine had “kept up the charade. She built her business. She kept fit, kept house, playing the role of perfect daughter, perfect daughter-in-law, and as best as she could perfect wife. Not letting anyone, even her mother, know her pain.” When Katherine’s efforts to protect her role as Rose’s mother make Tess feel like she is “nothing,” Tess longs to numb the pain. “Instead, she had to rein it all in, walk down Spring Garden Road with her head held high, gait measured, looking perfectly normal as every cell within her felt it was exploding.” This is a novel about the complexities of defining motherhood and family, but it is also about the challenges of pretending everything is fine, and the cost of keeping a secret.

Next, The Berry Pickers, by Amanda Peters, a powerful, deeply affecting novel about family, grief, and injustice. When a Mi’kmaw couple and their children travel from Nova Scotia to Maine in the summer of 1962 to pick blueberries, their four-year-old daughter Ruthie disappears. Unable to find her, they appeal to the police for help, only to hear that there’s “nothing much we can do. She’s not been gone long enough, and you not being proper Maine citizens, and known transients.”

Ruthie’s six-year-old brother Joe was the last to see her, and he feels responsible, having wandered away from her to skip stones on the lake after the two of them had eaten their sandwiches together. When he hears other women at the camp talking about how losing a child is “the worst thing that could happen to a woman,” he begins to think he ought to have been the child who disappeared, not Ruthie. His mother has three boys and two girls. “I was the youngest boy and one that could be spared. At least that’s what I told myself that night, the firelight throwing sad shadows on the ground. It was a simple matter of math.”

The Berry Pickers asks why “no word exists for a parent who loses a child,” no word comparable to “orphan” or “widow/widower.” Perhaps “the event is just too big, too monstrous, too overwhelming for words. No word could ever describe the feeling, so we leave it unsaid.” This beautiful novel shows how the traumatic disappearance of Ruthie reverberates through the lives of every member of the family over the decades as they search for the truth.

Here are a couple of other books I heard about recently and would like to read:

The Lioness of Boston, by Emily Franklin, dramatizes the life of Isabella Stewart Gardner. Franklin says in her introduction to a reading list she put together in honour of Gardner’s Boston that “after early rejection and tragedy, Isabella might have cloistered herself away in her lovely Boston home. Instead she explored the greater world—infiltrating the male-dominated Harvard intellectual world, collecting art, and finding friends in other misfits, and her place in the larger world.”

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum:

I’m also keen to read Twice Upon a Time: Selected Stories, by L.M. Montgomery, edited by Benjamin Lefebvre. Thank you to my friend Deborah Knuth Klenck for sending me a copy of Catherine Taylor’s review of this book in the TLS, along with a beautiful card. (Having written about Shawna Lemay’s theory of the “sponge-cake model of friendship,” I now think of cards and emails from friends and family as sponge-cakes.) Lefebvre writes that the book includes “stories that, with a few exceptions, were first published in periodicals between 1898 and 1939, and that consist of early versions of well-known characters, plot points, conversations and settings in her books …. [it] seeks not only to add to the canon of known Montgomery texts but also to trouble the notion of a canon, showing the complex relationship Montgomery saw between periodical work and book publication.”

A couple of days ago, my mother and I watched an online celebration called “Poetry & the Creative Mind,” hosted by the Academy of American Poets, and we enjoyed hearing poems read by Kimiko Hahn, Malala Yousafzai, Ada Limón, and others. I especially liked hearing Ethan Hawke read W.H. Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening,” part of which he had performed in the 1995 movie Before Sunrise.

And I was glad to hear poems that were new to me, including “Why We Oppose Pockets for Women,” by Alice Duer Miller (“4. Because women are required to carry enough things as it is, without the additional burden of pockets”), and “Note to Self Work,” by Beau Sia (“beat the drum when hands / want to become fists … be a metaphor / when literal is too much … be too vibrant for lingering / on those who neglect”).

I’ll end today’s post with some photos I’ve been collecting to share with you. From my sister Bethie, a photo of “coffee with Beethoven” in Bonn:

From me, a few photos from a trip my friend Marianne and I made yesterday to St. John’s Anglican Church in Lunenburg, NS, for a wonderful chamber musical called “The Missing Pages,” by Tom Allen. It tells the story of Theodore Molt, the only Canadian who ever met Beethoven. Molt signed one of Beethoven’s conversation books—but then the next four pages were torn out. Allen imagines what might have happened between Molt and Beethoven during that visit in December of 1825. There’s another performance tonight in Halifax, at the Music Room, and I think there are still tickets available. (We also went book shopping in Lunenburg—Marianne bought a copy of The Berry Pickers, and I bought Claire Keegan’s Walk the Blue Fields.)

From my parents—who are always up for an adventure!—photos from their trip to Jordan earlier this month: the Temple of Artemis, the Dead Sea, Petra, and Wadi Rum.

From my friends Sheila and Hugh, photos of spring flowers in Kent, England:

And (from me) a couple of pictures of Admiralty House in Halifax, where Jane Austen’s brother Francis lived when he was Commander-in-Chief of the North American and West Indies Station of the British Royal Navy, between 1845 and 1848:

Sheila and I created a walking tour, “Austens in Halifax,” which provides more information about the years Francis and Charles Austen spent in Halifax with their families.

I Feel Sorry For My Books

My friend Susan Kerslake told me recently that she feels sorry for the books she’s bought. I asked if she’d write a guest post for my blog explaining why, and I was delighted that she said yes.

When I asked Susan for a short bio, she replied to say she’s been an author and is now a reader and pet caregiver. And she’s a vegetarian. And she turned 80 yesterday—happy birthday, Susan!!

Susan is a long-time member of the Friends of the Public Gardens in Halifax, so I thought I’d include a few photos of the Gardens at the end of this post. I took these last Saturday.

Oh woe! I lament the fate of my latest book purchase (Ursula K. Le Guin’s No Time to Spare) as I stack it on the tower of books beside the bed.

Along with:

The Lotterys Plus One (A recommendation from Lisa at Woozles after I inquired about something along the Penderwicks line.)

The Marrow Thieves (I’ve been going to lectures at the library on Environment and Literature, and this was suggested by the professor, Renee Hulan).

Frankenstein (Renee read us a paragraph or two in class, and I found a copy on the free shelf at the library!)

Superfly (Which is indeed about flies.)

A Mercy (On sale at Bookmark, on the charity bookcase.)

These Silent Mansions (A woman’s meandering and pondering on cemeteries in England.)

The Memory Palace: A Book of Lost Interiors (This guy is fantastic: Edward Hollis. A follow up to The Secret Lives of Buildings.)

Blood

Peace by Chocolate: The Hadhad Family’s Remarkable Journey from Syria to Canada

Curiosity

Bel Canto

And Crime and Punishment. (And what, you ask, would Crime and Punishment be doing there, but I was supposed to be reading it with a friend in BC. That petered out.)

Though sprouting bookmarks all, they are in medias res.

And what of The Corn Maiden by Joyce Carol Oates, whose sheer bolt of energy in her writing is a spur. That book, almost finished, because, you guessed it, it is a library book and due next week.

“Old Rusty Metal Things”

Today I’m delighted to share a poem by my friend Sandra Barry, entitled “Old Rusty Metal Things.” Sandra is a poet and freelance editor and an Elizabeth Bishop scholar. She’s the author of a wonderful book called Elizabeth Bishop: Nova Scotia’s “Home-Made” Poet, which was published by Nimbus in 2011, the centenary of Bishop’s birth.

Elizabeth Bishop went to stay in Great Village, Nova Scotia in 1915, and she continued to live there with her grandparents after her mother, Gertrude, was hospitalized for depression at the Nova Scotia Hospital in 1916. In the fall of 1917, when Elizabeth was six years old, her grandparents took her back to live in Worcester, Massachusetts, where she had been born. She never saw her mother again, even though Gertrude lived at the hospital until her death in 1934.

Over the years, Bishop made many trips to Nova Scotia and wrote about the place and her experiences here in both poetry and prose. As Sandra says in her book, she “referred to herself as 3/4ths Canadian, as American, as a New Englander, as a ‘herring-choker-bluenoser.’” Robert Lowell described her as “Half New Englander, half fugitive, / Nova Scotian, wholly Atlantic sea-board.”

“Home-made, home-made! But aren’t we all?” Bishop wrote in “Crusoe in England.” “As important as her formal education, world travel, and poet friends were to her artistic development, Elizabeth’s childhood in Great Village and her mother’s family were her earliest and life-long influences,” Sandra says in her book. “Her grandparents’ house in the village was a home-made world,” she adds, saying that Bishop “maintained a deep respect and admiration for this time and place and these people her whole life.”

If you’re interested, you can listen to Elizabeth Bishop reading her poem “Crusoe in England,” recorded on April 14, 1974 at the Coolidge Auditorium at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.

Sandra’s dedication to Bishop’s life and work is truly extraordinary. She co-founded the Elizabeth Bishop Society of Nova Scotia, spent a decade as the administrator of the Elizabeth Bishop House in Great Village, and posts regularly on the Elizabeth Bishop Centenary blog.

I first met Sandra at the Women’s Council House in Halifax in 2011, after she had given a reading from her book about Bishop, and a few years later, I spent a lovely afternoon with her in Great Village at the Elizabeth Bishop House. I took many photos on that trip, and I’ve been thinking of putting together a collection of them for a future blog post.

It’s a great pleasure to introduce “Old Rusty Metal Things,” which Sandra wrote some years ago after she had visited an old barn in Great Village with her friend Roxanne. Many thanks to Sandra for the poem and to Roxanne for the photo of the barn, which belonged to Logan Spencer.

Sandra writes that “One day years ago, the photographer Roxanne Smith asked me if I knew of any place in Great Village where she could photograph ‘old rusty metal things’—those were her exact words. I instantly thought of Logan’s barn—so we met at the EB House one day and went across the road and asked Logan if we could have a look. What a place it was—it has long since been dismantled—but the barn was ancient—well over 100 years old. I was so taken with the experience of just walking through this space and looking at everything, this funny little poem came out. Alas, the barn is itself a ghost now.” She says Logan is now “heading toward 90 and still out in his field. He was out there nearly every day during our visit to the EB House last August—we would sit on the verandah and watch him work clearing away alders and other brush from along a fence line at one side of his pasture by the river. We were simply in awe of him. He never hurried—just worked slowly and methodically—and he accomplished so much.”

Here’s a photo of Sandra by her sister, Brenda Barry, taken on the veranda of the Elizabeth Bishop House last summer. The house, she says, is “just a stone’s throw from where Logan’s barn used to be.” The photos that follow the poem are also by Brenda.

Old Rusty Metal Things

for Logan Spencer

The barn was built. Moved. Rebuilt.

Weather aged its wood grey as stone.

It has stood for a century.

Filled with old rusty metal things.

Tractors. Tools. Sleds. Pumps.

Anchors. Chains. Scythes. Shoes.

The stalls and chutes are shadows.

The loft a cavernous home

for countless pigeons.

The ghost of hay haunts the rafters.

Ladders climb nowhere; lie buried

beneath thick earthy odors.

Doors and windows crusted;

corners veiled with cobwebs.

In its heyday the barn was a hive.

It was alive with life and death,

a hinge of hard work and injury,

an axle of ancestral habit.

Now it is an ark afloat

on its own stories and waist-high

meadow grasses.

The barn is a mind

holding its own collapse

in a strange suspension.

It has forgotten nothing.

It knows it will disappear.

The empty space left to the air

a silent echo in the sun and rain.

Returned to the elements

the barn is homage to the world,

the word, to the whole of what

can be and not be known.

Red-winged Blackbird

Evening Grosbeak

Snowdrops

“A glint of silver-blue”

I’ve admired the poetry of A.E. Stallings ever since my parents gave me a copy of her book Like, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2019. I love the opening lines of “After a Greek Proverb,” which also appears in her new collection, This Afterlife:

We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query—

Just for a couple of years, we said, a dozen years back.

Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

The preoccupation with what is temporary and what lasts continues in “Glitter”:

You have a daughter now. It’s everywhere.

And often in the company of glue.

You can’t get rid of it. It’s in her hair:

A wink of pink, a glint of silver-blue.

It’s catching, like chicken pox, or lice.

(The epigraph to this poem is a quotation from British Vogue: “All that will remain after an apocalypse is glitter.”)

The ordinary challenges of modern life—trying to clean up glitter; hunting for a lost piece of Lego—appear in these poems alongside big questions about time, memory, life, and death. “You can’t go back,” we read in “Burned.” “Although you scrape the ruined toast, / You can’t go back.” Just as “The butter cannot be unchurned,” “You cannot unburn what is burned.” Even the parent reading “Another Bedtime Story” has to face the fact that

The tales that start with once and end with ever after,

All, all of the stories are about going to bed,

About coming to terms with the night, alleviating the dread

Of laying the body down, of lying under a cover.

My sister Bethie sent me a photo of her copy of This Afterlife.

Stallings’s “First Miracle,” with its focus on what the body can bear, made me think of the ending of my friend Margo Wheaton’s poem “Seeing Me Home,” in The Unlit Path Behind the House:

This is just the pain

in living, impossible to bear

and bodies, bearing it.

Stallings writes, “Her body like a pomegranate torn / Wide open, somehow bears what must be born.”

I couldn’t find my copy of The Unlit Path Behind the House (I realized later I had lent it to friends), and when I asked Bethie if she’d take a photo of her copy, she sent me this picture of the book on the path behind her house in Bonn.

For Poetry Month, I’ve also been reading poems by Rita Joe, whose book Song of Rita Joe: Autobiography of a Mi’kmaw Poet I mentioned here a couple of weeks ago. In Song of Eskasoni, she speaks of

Listening to old folks telling stories

Of long ago, when the earth was young.

Their deeds woven into history

in Eskasoni, near mountains, waters and trees.

In an untitled poem, #14, from We Are the Dreamers, she says

Our home is this country

Across the windswept hills

With snow on fields.

The cold air.

Before the pandemic, I went to a launch for two picture books, one featuring Rita Joe’s poem I Lost My Talk, and the other featuring a response by Rebecca Thomas, former Poet Laureate of Halifax, entitled I’m Finding My Talk. In Joe’s poem, she speaks of how her “talk” was taken away from her “When I was a little girl / At Shubenacadie school.” Her daughter Ann Joe says Joe “used to say writing was her therapy. She had a lot of painful memories and she had to get them out. She became a writer because she wasn’t allowed to write. The more they tried to break her will, the more she went her own way.” The poem acknowledges the enormity of what was taken from her and from other students at residential schools, and ends with hope:

So gently I offer my hand and ask,

Let me find my talk

So I can teach you about me.

Thomas’s poem is similarly hopeful:

I’m finding my talk

One word at a time.

            Kwe

                    Wela’lin

                            Nmultes

Another Nova Scotia poet I admire is Budge Wilson, author of the beloved and bestselling prequel to Anne of Green Gables entitled Before Green Gables. In that book, she accomplished something truly extraordinary: even though pretty much every reader knows it will end with young Anne Shirley arriving at Green Gables for the first time, Budge created a story full of suspense, right up until the moment when Anne leaves Nova Scotia for Prince Edward Island on the ferry. “Bewitched by the limitless expanse of sea, the galloping whitecaps, the wheeling gulls, the smell of salt and seaweed,” Anne thinks, “This is what I’ve been waiting for my whole life.”

Over the course of her career, Budge published many stories and novels for readers young and old. Her first book, The Best/Worst Christmas Present Ever, was published when she was 56, and her first book of poetry, After Swissair, was published when she was 88.

The rocks at Peggy’s Cove are often chilly

even in the midsummer sun

In the black of that September night

and in the awful dawn

they were as cold as death

and unforgiving.

The cover of the book features a quilt by Barb Robson entitled “Sea Change,” which was inspired by Budge’s observation that a sea change had taken place in the community in the area near the spot where Swissair Flight 111 went down on September 2, 1998.

Last weekend, on a rainy Saturday afternoon, I turned to poems by Mikko Harvey, an old family friend—well, he isn’t old, but our family connections go back a long time—who lives in Western Massachusetts and has published two books: Unstable Neighbourhood Rabbit and Let the World Have You. Jim Nason writes in a review of the former that “Harvey’s ability to make normal situations new and strange is one of his greatest talents. Combining metaphor in equal amounts with a distraught psyche that’s allowed to freefall, he heightens and liberates language.”

Two of my favourite poems from Unstable Neighbourhood Rabbit are “Swivel”—“Sometimes, I spend the whole morning searching / for the morning”—and “Intimacy”—“So introduce me / to your friends: I promise to wear my best face.”

Here’s a link to a photo essay by Mikko, of things and places that inspired him when he was writing Unstable Neighbourhood Rabbit, including The Moomins, a basketball court in Columbus, Ohio, and a giant sandpit in Johannislund, Finland—“an archetypal place of play and wonder.”

In Let the World Have You, I especially like “Personhood”: “I regret / 96% of my backward glances, / but to regret is to glance backward, / and thus we proceed toward 97.” And “Secret Channel,” which begins:

When you realize you are only a subplot

in the story the day is telling, you are

devastated; it would have been better

to be everything or else nothing.

“For M,” which is included in Let the World Have You, went viral last year. Part of the poem appears on the back cover:

My husband and daughter were in Boston recently, and I’m going to include a few photos from their trip in this post, because over the years we’ve spent a lot of time with Mikko and his family in Boston and Cambridge.

I enjoyed reading this list of “30 Ways to Celebrate National Poetry Month,” from the Academy of American Poets. I’ve signed up for “Poem-a-Day,” which is curated in April by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. I liked the suggestion about reading and sharing poems about the environment in honor of Earth Day, and it was a lovely surprise to find that one of the poems on their list of Poems About Climate Change is by Mikko. “The Poem Grace Interrupted” begins, “There once was a planet who was both / sick and beautiful.”

I read several of the poems on the list, and one of my favourites was Catherine Pierce’s poem “High Dangerous”:

is what my sons call the flowers—

purple, white, electric blue—

pom-pomming bushes all along

the beach town streets.

I can’t correct them into

hydrangeas, or I won’t. …

The League of Canadian Poets also has a list of ideas for celebrating Poetry Month, including sharing a poem on social media using the hashtag #todayspoem. I like their promise at the end of the list that “there’s a poem just for you, and we know someone wants to help you find it.”

One of my recent discoveries was a splendid new poem by my friend and neighbour Brian Bartlett. (Thank you to Sandra for telling me about it and Brian for sharing a copy.) “Bishop’s Hues” was published in the Winter 2023 edition of Riddle Fence. The poem looks at two photos of a collage by Elizabeth Bishop, along with vivid phrases from her poems, including “white-gold skies,” “silver and silver-gilt,” “bright violet-blue.” Like the Stallings poems I quoted earlier, “Bishop’s Hues” focuses on change and loss:

The blue of the Blue Morpho

fades, sky-tinge left only

in one wing’s half, earth-brown

replacing the namesake hue.

Though the blue of the butterfly is “diminished,” Bishop’s words are alive and in constant motion: “Rereading after rereading, / her lines rise, veer, skim and tilt.”

I love seeing crocuses and snowdrops at this time of year in Nova Scotia. As a kind of tribute to the vibrant purple crocuses in my neighbourhood, here’s a quotation from a picture book I’ve loved for years. This is from Mabel Murple, by Sheree Fitch, another Nova Scotia writer, whose work for both adults and children captures the sorrows and joys of life with wisdom, humour, and a profound understanding of the power of the imagination.

what if …

EVERYTHING was purple

     I mean a WHOLE PURPLE WORLD

And there was someone just like me

     I mean a purple sort of girl

And if …

There was a purple girl

     How purple could she be?

Would she get in purple trouble?

     (She would if she were me!)

I’ve long thought that Mabel Murple and Jane Austen’s “Beautifull Cassandra” are kindred spirits, but that’s a story for another day….

These crocuses are so tiny that I almost stepped on them when I got out of the car. Thank goodness I spotted them in time.

I return often to Sheree’s collection of poetry for adults In This House Are Many Women, especially the words of “When Atmospheric Conditions Permit,” which opens with “Siren sounds” that “swirl” and “scream,” making it difficult to sing a lullaby. “There’s so much love but the world’s gone wild.” Even so:

I pray

by the light of the moon

you find a way to make

a kaleidoscope

that from bits of shattered glass you’ll keep creating some

things     beautiful.

I’ll close with a link to a tour of the beautiful garden at Lake House in Norfolk, England, full of bluebells, light blue periwinkle, and other April flowers. This is from a blog I’ve followed for several years, called “The Garden Gate Is Open.”

Happy Spring, and happy Poetry Month!

What is Said and What is Not Said

Jill MacLean is the author of today’s guest blog post, and I’m delighted to introduce her. She’s chosen to write about three books she admires and would like to recommend: Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan, and Summerwater and Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland, both by Sarah Moss. This short essay is part of an informal series in which I ask friends to write about what they’ve read recently, and/or books they return to again and again. The first post in the series was by Naomi MacKinnon, who wrote about “Reading Close to Home.”

Jill is an award-winning author who has published five contemporary novels for middle-graders and young adults. Nix Minus One, a YA novel that won the Ann Connor Brimer Award for Children’s Literature, is a particular favourite of mine—a brilliant and heartbreaking book. Written in free verse, the novel explores the complex relationship between quiet fifteen-year-old Nix and his older sister Roxy as her life spirals out of control.

Jill is an avid gardener and canoeist and she lives in Nova Scotia near her family. After a period of writing for younger readers, she says that “to avoid the risk of falling into a literary rut,” she had adult readers in mind when she started to explore her “longtime fascination with the medieval period.” She was born in Berkshire, England, the setting for her new novel, The Arrows of Mercy , which has just been published, and is available from Bookmark Halifax (and from other online sources, including Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org). She writes that revisiting Berkshire—“in reality in the 21st Century and in imagination in the 14th”—has given her “much pleasure.”

I’m excited about the opportunity to return to the medieval period by reading The Arrows of Mercy. (Some of you may know that before I started writing about Jane Austen, I wrote an MA thesis on Middle English marriage poetry.)

Anne Simpson, winner of the 2021 Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award for her novel Speechless, calls The Arrows of Mercy “richly imagined and compellingly realized,” and says that the novel “draws the reader into a story of the past that is imbued with the urgency and immediacy of our own time.”

If you’d like to hear more about The Arrows of Mercy, you can sign up for Jill’s mailing list. The Halifax launch is on Sunday, April 16th, from 4-5:30pm at the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia (1113 Marginal Road, Halifax, NS). 

Please join me in welcoming Jill!

One of my criteria when I read is whether the book inspires me to become a better writer by sharpening my technical abilities and my imagination. There is a cost to this mindset. Because my inner editor is so active, I’m halted by the perfection of a sentence, by a surprise in the narrative, by a conclusion open enough to match our own open lives but satisfying in terms of all that has gone before. I am, to use John Gardner’s phrase, pulled out of the fictional dream.

I therefore crave stories that immerse me and sweep me along, silencing that nagging editorial voice. Claire Keegan’s novel, Small Things Like These, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, is one of those stories. The novel itself is short, 114 pages. I’ve read it twice. I wish I could write with such economy and truth, that I could mingle so wisely what is said and what is not said. It is a quiet book, without a hint of melodrama, yet it takes on the enormous subject of the Magdalene laundries in Ireland, the last of which did not close until 1996. These institutions were responsible for countless deaths and for the ruination of thousands of “fallen” women’s lives—all at the linked hands of Catholic Church and Irish State. I cannot help thinking of our residential schools.

The protagonist, Bill Furlong, is himself illegitimate, he and his mother saved from the local convent’s laundry by a kindly, non-judgmental Protestant woman. He is now a man nearing forty, a coal and timber merchant in this small Irish town on the banks of a river “the colour of stout”: a town that has fallen on hard times, for these are the Thatcher years. He, his wife and five daughters attend the Catholic Church and his girls are all doing well at the Catholic school. On the other side of that school’s wall is the convent, its walls topped with broken glass, its doors padlocked, its windows metal-barred and blackened.

From the first paragraph I am in the hands of a wordsmith with an acute eye for detail. I am snagged by rosary, Angelus bell, Moses basket: religion still has power in this town, as do drunkenness, bullying, gossip, unemployment and poverty. A schoolboy drinks milk from a cat’s dish behind the priest’s house, another boy scavenges for sticks for the fire, and Furlong knows how easy it would be to lose everything, all too aware that he and his wife, although working from dawn to bedtime, are not getting ahead, and perhaps never will. A masterly paragraph about his earliest memories culminates in the two-toned, tiled floor like “a draughts board whose pieces either jumped over others or were taken.” What better metaphor for a society subjected to unleashed capitalism?

And what, he wonders, is it all for?

Tension gathers as December darkness drapes the town, a darkness unleavened by the lighting of the manger scene with its Virgin Mother. Virgin. The word resonates. Scenes are vividly evoked, like the making and baking of the Furlong family’s Christmas cake, poked with a knitting needle to see if it is done; the loan of a kettle to melt the frozen padlock on Furlong’s yard on a bitter morning when he feels “the strain of being alive”; the ever-watchful, often spiteful congregation shuffling on their benches as the purple-robed priest swings up the aisle; ill-nourished convent girls on their knees on the chapel floor polishing “their hearts out,” looking “scalded” when they catch sight of the coal merchant watching them from the shadows.

Furlong is a reflective man who has little time to reflect, yet whose insights constantly nudge him. “Was it possible to carry on through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there?” And therein lies the crux of this novel, the conflict between “the ordinary part of him” that needs to stay on the good side of people and look after his beloved daughters, and his deeply held, contrary and powerful need to do right. Inadvertently at first, then purposely, he breaches the convent’s walls and is brought face to face with himself—as man, as husband and father, as Christian.

Do we have a duty towards those of our neighbours who have drawn the short straw? Do we inure ourselves to their fate or do we act? Do we, like Furlong, ponder small things like these?

Sarah Moss is a British writer I came across when her novel Summerwater was chosen by my book club. At the end of a ten-mile single-track road in Scotland is a group of rented cabins, where twelve families on summer holidays are trapped by horrendous rains. The twelve main sections in the novel, each told from a different point of view, are subtly interconnected. The atmosphere is one of foreboding—and having read Ghost Wall and The Fell, I can attest that Moss does foreboding in spades. Characters spring from the pages, revealing themselves from the inside out; the stress points of relationships emerge; surveillance through the cabins’ windows progresses from curious to judgmental, from hostile to enraged. How does Moss resolve the tension she has created? To some extent—discussion was lively at book club!—you will have to decide that for yourself.

I’ve also read Moss’s memoir, Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland, about the year she and her family spent in Reykjavik while she was teaching 19th century British literature at the National University. They arrive in 2009, just after the financial collapse. She feels like a foreigner. She is terrified of the way Icelanders drive their massive SUVs. She is slow to make friends. But gradually she delves below the surface of a country encrusted in lava, its inhabitants supposedly non-hierarchical, poverty-free and crime-free, a country of elves and knitting, of eruptions and boiling mud and fierce storms at sea. A country with a revisionist history, a country that, despite its swaths of emptiness, has its share of corruption, complications and contradictions. Sarah Moss has her own contradictions: a critically acclaimed author who believes herself inadequate to join a local writing group; a protective mother who has to adjust to Icelandic parents’ more casual—frighteningly casual—attitudes; a highly intelligent woman who feels stupid faced with (possibly) xenophobic bureaucrats. Yet she does delve, and effectively so. I admire her curiosity and, yes, her intelligence, her balanced judgements (the exception: Icelandic drivers), her courage in seeking out difficult conversations, and her lively sense of humour.

Her novel Night Waking, according to a friend of mine who has read both books, has some interesting parallels to that year in Iceland. I can’t wait to read it.