reading in the margins: Bobbie Louise Hawkins

  

BARBARA [HENNING]: Did you get there?

BOBBIE [LOUISE HAWKINS]: Oh God, nobody ever gets there.

During pandemic mornings lifeguarding our young ladies in their e-schoolings, I sit on the couch with notebook and pen, amid various drafts of in-progress short stories, and a copy of Bobbie Louise Hawkins’ reissued 1984 novella, One Small Saga. Produced with a new introduction by Laird Hunt and Eleni Sikelianos, as well as a long out-of-print short story, this new volume also includes a lengthy excerpt of an even longer interview that Barbara Henning conducted with Hawkins across 2011. Throughout the book, Hawkins’ prose is sharp, attentive and coiled. Her prose is descriptively expressive in this really lovely subtle way.

I’ve been attempting to be more proactive about seeking out prose that strikes my attention. It isn’t as easy as one might think: as an active reviewer, I’ve received books in the mail almost every day for more than two decades, but the kinds of prose that really strike are few and far between. Lydia Davis, Sarah Manguso, Miranda July, Anik See, Kathy Fish, Heather Christle. Lorrie Moore. I pour through literary journals and pry open envelopes, but much of what I encounter reads as too straightforward; narratives that might be easier to adapt into film, but harder to hear the music of the language.

As part of a post-reading panel at the Ottawa International Writers Festival in October 2007, the late Quebecoise novelist Gil Courtemanche complained heavily about English-language North American novelists. “You don’t want to write books, you want to write stories,” he proclaimed, thanks to my notes from the time. He was on a panel alongside British writer Marina Lewycka and Newfoundland writer Michael Winter, both of whom he dismissed with a wave of his hand. Courtemanche declared the problem with “our” fiction was that we all wanted to be filmmakers. It was no longer about words, he said. It was no longer about anything more than action. He went on, of course, saying that he doesn’t bother reading North American fiction anymore, because something always has to “happen” in them, and writers can’t just write anymore. Where is the interiority, he accused.

He also complained about being prevented from smoking indoors, claiming we were a culture of barbarians. Once he left, we christened a side-room of the festival hospitality suite the “Gil Courtemanche smoking room.” It was where all the conversation occurred.

Hawkins’ is a name I’d heard for quite some time, but never quite got to, in those ways in which we all do, filing an ever-increasing list of names of writers that one wishes to get to, but haven’t quite been able to, yet. Julia Cohen, Paige Lewis, Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. In my own way, I do wish to get to everyone, but it does take some time.

My prior of Hawkins’ work was limited to the fact that she published a novel with Coach House Press at one point, and had been one of Robert Creeley’s wives. I only mention Creeley for how important his work was for me throughout my late twenties and into my thirties, having spent an enormous time learning through his rhythms and lines, and those other writers that surrounded him, although I seem not to have paid nearly enough attention. I first caught her name through the association, and possibly her Coach House title catching my eye in multiple second-hand shops over the years.

I slip downstairs through our fiction shelves, and there it is, Almost Everything (1982), a co-publication between Toronto’s Coach House Press and East Haven, Connecticut publisher LongRiver Books. A paperback set amid Elizabeth Hay and Fanny Howe and Sheila Heti titles. A price sticker on the front cover is dated January 1999, $3.99, from Toronto’s late, lamented community bookstore, This Ain’t The Rosedale Library. A whole book by Bobbie Louise Hawkins, there on my bookshelf, entirely unread. And so, to begin.

I’m fascinated by the ways in which Hawkins utilized the information of her life to shape fiction, writing out a narrative propelled by observation and commentary, composed over her own situations and experiences. She married a Danish architect when young, and begin to travel; so, too, did the narrator of One Small Saga. She was deeply pregnant during the cruise across the Atlantic; so, too, was her narrator. She uses the structures of her own life, but her work is fueled by her observations, her language. Her clipped articulations of what might not have been spoken of in fiction by male writers, or even caught at all. Her paragraphs expand, and then curl into conclusion. There is nowhere to go but the next line, the next thought. The language itself, propels. Hers is the most wonderful music, and one I regret not spending time with before this.