Wednesday, Aug 6, 2014 | Books, Interviews, Soccer |
Today’s post is an unusual one, for me. While this is a literary blog, of sorts, I write it as a writer going about her daily life, not as a reviewer or critic. This means I don’t review books on my blog, don’t take part in blog tours, nor do I accept review copies. Which makes today’s post an odd fit — I was asked to be part of a blog tour for Michelle Berry’s brand new novel, Interference, and I said yes.
I said yes because I really loved Michelle’s book. In fact, I blurbed for it. That’s my endorsement, or part of it, on the book cover above. Here’s what I wrote, in full: “Michelle Berry’s Interference is an immaculately constructed page-turner that is also, miraculously, a redemptive meditation on loneliness and community. Read it for the beautiful writing, the cast of unique characters, and for a certain tender brutality that infuses the telling — by turns moving, darkly funny, and ultimately warm and illuminating.”
So I said yes to Michelle’s blog tour … then wondered how to make this subject not feel shoehorned in to the larger purpose of the blog. And that’s when it came to me: soccer. (There’s no soccer in the book, I hasten to add; but my life contains up to 60% soccer some days, so it was a natural leap. Stay with me.)
Interference is a book with many threads pulled together around an unusual focal point: adult women, who don’t necessarily know each other very well, gathering weekly to compete in a team sport together — in this case recreational hockey. Until last summer’s concussion, this was me: an adult woman joining other women to compete in a team sport (see: soccer!). I miss playing soccer. This book made me miss it even more. So I decided to ask Michelle (whom I haven’t yet met in person) about her connection to sport. Here follows our somewhat abbreviated conversation, for the record.
〉 Me: What’s unique about the team experience that made you want to write about it? Were you part of sports teams when you were younger, or is it something you came to as an adult?
Michelle: Four years ago my friend signed me up for hockey. Our daughters had signed up together and, as my friend said, “If they can do it, we can too.” Neither of us had played before. I knew nothing. The hardest part was putting on the equipment. I really had to concentrate on the order in the first season — what goes on first. Several times I had my skates on before my pants and had to take them off again. But when I was finally bundled up in my equipment, when I had figured out my hockey skates, and when I went out onto the ice, it was life-altering. To be a woman covered in equipment (no jewelry, no makeup, no worry about clothing or hair — I was a giant, hulking body draped in ugly, smelly second-hand pads) was freeing. To be a woman in a competitive sport working together with other women as a team was freeing.
〉 Me: In my case, as an adult and a beginner, I came to a soccer team wanting to play soccer, without giving much consideration to the social aspects of being on a team — and quickly discovered that social dynamics play into how well a team works together. But it was also completely different from being part of a neighbourhood playgroup or book club, in terms of building relationships and friendships around a shared interest. I feel like your book captures the way that being on a team is a bonding experience that leaves a lot of room for privacy.
Michelle: Yes, being on a team works better than playdates and book clubs because it’s a group of people who probably have nothing else in common sharing one same goal. We are there to win (although my team never does and we don’t really care…. not really). And we aren’t there to form friendships and bonds and to make sure our kids play together nicely. We aren’t competing intellectually or emotionally. We are there to do a job. Play a sport. Although friendships and bonds do get formed in the change room, we tend to leave those friendships there. Book clubs, playgroups, those kinds of things, are more about trying to make connections intellectually and emotionally. Hockey is all physical — play well, even play not-well but try, and you belong.
〉 For more information about Michelle, or to purchase the book, click here to visit her publisher’s web site.
So, what do you think? Do you play a team sport, or did you once upon a time? Maybe someday, I keep telling myself. Maybe someday, I’ll play on a team again. Because as much as I love running and spinning and yoga and kettle bells, I’ve yet to find anything that replaces it.
xo, Carrie
Tuesday, Aug 5, 2014 | Blogging, Books, House |
Welcome!
I am posting to you from my new home in Blogland! If all has gone according to plan, the transition has been seamless and you’ll find yourself here even if you’d gone looking for my former address. If I’d moved houses in real life, the same could not be said. This is much easier.
As with all moves, I expect there to be a few glitches as I figure out the plumbing, so to speak. I welcome your comments and thoughts, and hope you’ll feel just as much at home here as you did in the old blog. If you take a look around, you’ll see there’s more space now, rooms upstairs for events listings and news and information about my books, and the pictures are bigger, but the light feels the same to me. And the colours. And the faces. Just look at those faces.
Plus, I’ve brought along ‘most everything from the old place. All posts and photos are here too, going right back to the beginning. You can still subscribe via email, if you don’t already. Recipes and books-I’m-reading-now can be found in “Extras.” Packing up and moving all those boxes was easy too: my brother Cliff did the heavy lifting. (His company 10AM.ca does great work, if you’re considering a digital renovation, redesign, or move.)
So c’mon in. Keep your shoes on, we’re not fussy (even if we’re dressed up in this post; trust me, this is not the new normal). Stay awhile. And please come back and visit again soon. I’m really excited to share the new place with you. (Enough with the extended metaphor! Enough, I said! Okay. Stopping now.)
xo, Carrie
Friday, Aug 1, 2014 | Books, Reading |
I’m waiting on my new web site to be completed before posting photos from my sister’s wedding this past weekend. I hope that won’t be too long; as with any renovation project, it all comes down to those last technical, finicky details. The new blog is going to look so much prettier than this one that I can’t bring myself to post those gorgeous wedding pics here. Meanwhile, above, here’s what I’ve been reading this summer. Yep, that’s Girl Runner in the pile. With the fall booking up quickly, and the launch party set for Sept. 6th, I need to start selecting and rehearsing scenes for readings. (I did theatre; I’m a big believer in rehearsal before performance, and that’s exactly what a reading is.)
Oh, and about that launch party: invites are on their way, but meantime, consider yourself invited! It’s free, we’ll have food, books, entertainment, maybe even karaoke. I hashed up the Facebook invitation, by confusingly creating TWO pages for the same damn event, which is the sort of problem that comes from being a non-procrastinator born before the existence of the internet. I’ll send you to the event listed on my author page (click here), because it has far fewer confirmed guests, which doesn’t look good, somehow. Is it all about the optics? It’s social media. Of course it is.
I’m in a rambling mood, a confessional end-of-week mood. It’s been a week of big emotions and travel and hard work and waiting and celebrating and a lot of running, literally, including a personal best 10 kilometres this morning, which is nowhere near the personal bests of the best, but nevertheless had me shouting “Yes!” as I crossed my imaginary finish line. Such is the pleasure of achievement for its own sake. I even cleaned half of the house yesterday evening. A whole half of the house! And I played the piano and sang hymns. To sum up: that’s the kind of week it’s been.
Tuesday, Jul 29, 2014 | Adventure, Birthdays, Fun, Kids, Mothering, Play, Travel |
Taking the train to Toronto, yesterday morning. “We’re going in fast-forward!”
“I am going to the aquarium with only mom.” – Fooey, age eight, almost nine, recording the event for posterity on her train ticket.
Observation: it’s really hard to get good photos at an aquarium. This stops no one from trying repeatedly, including me. There must be thousands of terrible shark photos now in existence that were directly spawned by those who squeezed, squawled, and wandered with giant strollers around the aquarium in Toronto yesterday afternoon. Here are mine.
Good selfies are even harder than good shark photos. “This one looks eerie.” “What’s that mean?” “Like this.” “Oh.”
It was a very special day, with only us.
Thursday, Jul 24, 2014 | Feminism, Interviews, Mothering, Writing |
There is so much in this interview with Alice Munro, from 1994 in The Paris Review, that I want to go on quoting and quoting from it. Here is a sample. I urge you to read the whole thing (pour yourself a cup of tea and enjoy the length, depth, and breadth of the conversation). And one final anecdote, from the interviewers’ introduction.
MUNRO
I was like a Victorian daughter—the pressure to marry was so great, one felt it was something to get out of the way: Well, I’ll get that done, and they can’t bug me about it, and then I’ll be a real person and my life will begin. I think I married to be able to write, to settle down and give my attention back to the important thing. Sometimes now when I look back at those early years I think, This was a hard-hearted young woman. I’m a far more conventional woman now than I was then. INTERVIEWER
Doesn’t any young artist, on some level, have to be hard-hearted?MUNRO
It’s worse if you’re a woman. I want to keep ringing up my children and saying, Are you sure you’re all right? I didn’t mean to be such a . . . Which of course would make them furious because it implies that they’re some kind of damaged goods. Some part of me was absent for those children, and children detect things like that. Not that I neglected them, but I wasn’t wholly absorbed. When my oldest daughter was about two, she’d come to where I was sitting at the typewriter, and I would bat her away with one hand and type with the other. I’ve told her that. This was bad because it made her the adversary to what was most important to me. I feel I’ve done everything backwards: this totally driven writer at the time when the kids were little and desperately needed me. And now, when they don’t need me at all, I love them so much. I moon around the house and think, There used to be a lot more family dinners.
And one final anecdote, from the interviewers’ introduction.
After a while, Munro took us to Goderich, a bigger town, the county seat, where she installed us in the Bedford Hotel on the square across from the courthouse. The hotel is a nineteenth-century building with comfortable rooms (twin beds and no air-conditioning) that would seem to lodge a librarian or a frontier schoolteacher in one of Munro’s stories. Over the next three days, we talked in her home, but never with the tape recorder on. We conducted the interview in our small room at the hotel, as Munro wanted to keep “the business out of the house.” Both Munro and her husband grew up within twenty miles of where they now live; they knew the history of almost every building we passed, admired, or ate inside. We asked what sort of literary community was available in the immediate area. Although there is a library in Goderich, we were told the nearest good bookstore was in Stratford, some thirty miles away. When we asked whether there were any other local writers, she drove us past a ramshackle house where a man sat bare chested on the back stoop, crouched over a typewriter, surrounded by cats. “He’s out there every day,” she said. “Rain or shine. I don’t know him, but I’m dying of curiosity to find out what he’s up to.”
