Vast Affection
I’m reading a book by an author I only recently discovered, Crow Lake by Mary Lawson. It's fiction, Mary writes fiction, but it takes place in a small Ontario town, up north, near a lake, not unlike the place where Mary is from. The father in the novel has the same profession as Mary’s father. The book contains the phrase, “I remember, I remember,” over and over again.
I’m sitting on the beach at the cottage looking out at the lake, its dancing colour, drinking in its sound. The horizon is distinct on this clear day, a white silo on a barn across the lake signals me, where the blue-grey water meets the far shore.
When my family moved to Toronto, to the Beaches neighbourhood, my mom told me she didn't like Lake Ontario. She was accustomed to looking out on Lake Simcoe; and Lake Ontario was too wide and barren for her. No land in sight.
(That was back before the Leslie Spit, and back when I used to think I had to hold the same opinion as my mother.)
Reading books teaches me to write books, and I have vast affection for writers, gratitude for them taking the time to sit down and write page after page after page for me.
Books entertain when time is creeping along too slowly, like the summer I was 16 and spent most of it lying in a hammock under those cedar trees over there reading Watership Down and waiting for my life to begin.
I’m reading this afternoon to pass the time. Dipping into the words of this memoirist pretending to be a novelist, and I am inspired. She's trod down a path to the story for me, leaving footprints on the beach which I will follow until the waves wash them all away.
Book Recommendations?What are you reading? Anything I’d like? Hit reply and let me know or comment wherever you saw this post.
New Book Cover!I am delighted to announce a new cover for An Empty Nest: A Summer of Stories.
What do you think?As a member of this email list you are welcome to a free copy of the e-book. Please contact me if you haven’t got yours. If you’d like a paperback, click here: An Empty Nest Paperback. Below is a lovely review the book got when it was first published:
I am so thrilled that Sandy Day offered me a copy of An Empty Nest to read and review because I absolutely loved this short story collection. At just under a hundred pages, I had assumed the book would be a swift read, but actually found myself lingering over certain stories and rereading others so I came away from the collection almost with the sense of having read a whole novel, and an emotionally charged one at that. This sense might also be because of how each story fits so beautifully into the whole work.
Set across the course of a single summer, An Empty Nest depicts one woman’s coming to terms with herself when there are suddenly no family members or pets to demand her time. At first angry and bereft at her abandonment, she gains perspective both from looking back into her past, and out into her present. I felt this book to be a coming-of-age story for women at a point in our lives when we are often overlooked. I loved the progression from our narrator’s fraught emotional state at the beginning, to a serene tranquillity at its close. In fact reading An Empty Nest, for me, had a lot in common with a meditation. I could feel myself calming and focusing in step with our narrator. I’m not sure I have ever experienced this physical reaction in quite the same way from a book before.
Day has a sensitive and evocative turn of phrase and I felt as though every word was here for a reason. Her writing is rich with observations and memory, but never feels bloated or padded out. Yet stories of less than half a page in length are just as satisfyingly complete as those of several pages. I admit to being envious of not only the summer cabin around which many of the stories take place, but also of Day’s ability to evoke this location! I think An Empty Nest is a stunning achievement. I would highly recommend it to introspective readers and women who, like me, are rapidly yet nervously heading towards that Certain Age. ~ Stephanie Jane (Literary Flits)
If you have a friend you think would like An Empty Nest please feel free to share this email!
For links to all my books, please visit my website sandyday.caThanks for reading, see you next weekend!
