essays in the face of uncertainties : now available!

My suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties, is now available from Mansfield Press! I am extremely pleased to see publication of this wee book. Do you remember when I was posting weekly excerpts of the then-work-in-progress across those first few months of original Covid-19 lockdown? Huge thanks to Denis De Klerck (this is my second Mansfield title, by the by, after my 2019 poetry collection A halt, which is empty, which I still have copies of, as well), and to Stuart Ross, who worked on the manuscript as my editor (I would recommend him highly for any and all of your editorial needs). And of course, thanks to Sir Stephen Brockwell for permission to use his photograph on the cover. As the press release for the book offers:

This suite of pandemic essays exist within those first one hundred days of original lockdown, marking time through moments, anxieties and the elasticity of time itself. What are days, weeks, months? In this stunning collection of deeply personal essays, Ottawa writer rob mclennan wanders through literature, parenting, family, the constant barrage of cable news and the slow loss of his widower father across the swirling, simultaneous anxieties and uncertainties of an increasing sense of isolation.

I have a stack of copies on-hand, if anyone is interested ; if such appeals, send $18 (via email or paypal to rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com) ; obviously adding $5 for postage for Canadian orders; for orders to the United States, add $11 (for anything beyond that, send me an email and we can figure out postage); for current above/ground press subscribers, I’m basically already mailing you envelopes regularly, so I would only charge Canadians $3 for postage, and Americans $6 (that make sense?)

Or: if you live close enough, I could simply drop a copy off in your mailbox (or you come by here, I suppose); naturally, I’ll certainly have copies this weekend at the ottawa small press book fair (Saturday from noon to 5pm, Jack Purcell Community Centre, 2^nd floor; Elgin Street). I also have copies, still, of my spring poetry title, the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022) for $20 (same postal rates as above), although if you might be open to ordering both (and/or my other Mansfield title, as well), I think I could knock $5 off the total price. Otherwise, either send myself or the publisher a note for a media/review copy, and be aware that I’m rather good at answering interview questions.

The book even has some lovely blurbs! Really, I couldn’t ask for much better than this.

mclennan’s writing is clear and haunting. This is a book that will stay with you for years to come.

Anne Thériault

The short lyric essays that comprise this book in one long meditative stream are indeed written in the face of uncertainties: not knowing where the pandemic of 2020 and on will lead us or how it will change us. The narrator/author stays home with his wife and two daughters while the map of the fallen to Covid expands and the numbers mount. In the face of the terrifying reality of death and political neglect, we are ensconced in the peaceful home of a small family that continues to work and play in isolation. mclennan writes with great elegance and compassion, and his expansive reading of books and authors from all over the world is brought into his narrative with great skill and ease. As a result, we find ourselves at the centre of a very large world of writers talking to each other across the globe and we see clearly that in this lockdown we are not alone. We never were alone. This book is a beautiful companion for our time and a very absorbing narrative that is hard to put down once you begin. 

                        Kristjana Gunnars

 

essays in the face of uncertainties

“But to say that one is suspicious of absolutes,” writes Siri Hustvedt, in the introduction to her A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art,Sex, and the Mind (2016), “is not the same as saying, for example, that the laws of physics do not theoretically apply to everything.” I am thinking about change and about progress, and about the straight line. I am thinking how not even a perfectly straight line is consistent, given it has still a beginning, a middle and an end. Each element can’t be mistaken for another. Even if we appear unchanged by the end of this period, we will remain changed. What intrigues me is in how those changes might manifest, from the largest to the smallest. Who might we become?

I watch as more than a couple of friends via social media express frustration with their situations, whether the opportunity for quiet solitude, or the frustration of missing out on being able to meet up with friends or family. Some have birthdays they are unable to attend to; others, deaths. There is no simple solution. A few days ago, I was invited to participate in a birthday greeting for American poet Samuel Ace, asked to send in a video of no more than thirty seconds in length. I had our young ladies participate, fully aware of how excited they would be, yet again, to sing happy birthday. With no disrespect to Samuel Ace, a fine human being and remarkably gifted poet, I should point out that our young ladies would sing happy birthday just as easily and enthusiastically to a rock or a goat or a pencil sharpener, I’d wager, as to a stranger via video over the internet. The only variance is that when Rose turns at the appropriate time to be reminded who it is she is singing for, so she can sing out their name. Happy birthday, dear… (“Samuel,” I whisper) … Samuel, happy birthday to you.

American writer John Pavlovitz’s May 4 blog post, “I Think You May Be Wasting Freedom,” responds directly to those of his fellow citizens’ protests against lock-down. It is hard to comprehend how there are those in any part of North America that would conflate a Black protester’s anti-police violence sign “Stop Shooting Us” with a white protester’s anti-lockdown slogan “I Want a Haircut,” and Pavlovitz has clearly had enough. And why are so many of the signs by anti-lockdown protestors continually misspelled? As Pavloviz writes:

You are interpreting your temporary and fleeting inconvenience as perpetual and inhumane persecution—that’s how soft and sad we’ve become, how small our battles now are, what we see as worthy causes.

I am thinking about letters, and the amount I’ve sent out into the world, and the few I’ve received in turn. I am thinking about the social media responses to my postcards, Stuart Ross and Alex Porco responding with slightly confused delight at the poems that appeared in their mailboxes. Porco, specifically, who couldn’t believe I had sent him a poem by William Bronk, one of his favourite poets. How did you know? he asked. I seen him post on Bronk some days earlier, and decided that sending him a copy of the Bronk postcard I had on hand seemed most obvious.

Perhaps, this too, an example of something that can only be seen from a distance.

 

essays in the face of uncertainties

 

essays in the face of uncertainties

One element I’ve appreciated is how well our two young ladies play together, making up games and stories and songs. We knew of this prior, but our appreciation deepens. Once we wrestle them off the tablets, our first couple of weeks included the television on in the basement, which quickly became background to their attentions. After a while, they stopped even bothering going downstairs at all, unless they were wrapped up in some complicated game involving forts or babies or Cinderella. How many times has our dining room table become centre-stage for one of their structures, or where they’ve self-determined a Lego city, a mound of drawings or some other invention? Today, self-slathered in sunscreen, they navigate the hose and their wading pool out in the backyard, occupying themselves for hours. I grew up on a farm, after all, so I very early on learned the benefit of managing my own time, wandering the fields and collecting stones. The last thing I want to do is micromanage the young ladies, although I do attempt to get Rose to draw daily in one of her notebooks, and report on her drawing. We’ve only managed this once, but I keep trying her. I check in on them, regularly. Or they come inside, seeking freezies. Little wet footprints on the floor of my office that run down the hall.

Another element is the array of stories that have drifted up, out of the ether, of comparable stories from days-gone-past. This is not the first time in memory that those in the world have lived through such a situation, even if some of the details might be slightly different. Public television offers a small tale of a centenarian who is living through the current pandemic, born during the lock-down of the Spanish Flu, her mother somehow managing solo throughout birth and her newborn daughter’s first few months. You can do this, the piece offers. You can get through this. In the June issue of Smithsonian Magazine, Emily Moon writes “How the U.S. Fought the 1957 Flu Pandemic.” Her short article begins:

In April 1957, a new strain of a lethal respiratory virus emerged in East Asia, caught local health authorities by surprise and eventually killed masses of people worldwide. Today, in the age of Covid-19, that scenario sounds frighteningly familiar—with one key difference. Maurice Hilleman, an American microbiologist then running influenza monitoring efforts at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, saw the problem coming and prepared the United States ahead of time. “This is the pandemic,” he recalled saying. “It’s here.”

This is not historically abstract in the way the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic might appear to us, but something, for numerous people, that occurred within living memory. To remember the 1957 pandemic, one might say, would put you disproportionally right in the path of Covid-19. Back then, there was notice, notification and response, and 116,000 Americans succumbed to the disease, although far more could have been killed. Over email, Bay Area poet Susanne Dyckman offers her own:

When I was a baby I had scarlet fever, and the Chicago Board of Health tacked a quarantine notice on our basement apartment door.  My mother’s not alive (gone too early) but I so wish I could talk to her about it, how she managed with an infant and a five year old, even something as basic as how she got groceries. All she ever told me was that we, as a family, were under quarantine (of course, somehow my doing?)  Later, still being a kid when she told me the story, I didn’t think to ask questions.  Now I’m beginning to see what it takes to manage.

According to family lore, my mother caught scarlet fever while babysitting, although I’ve no clue if there were any quarantines for her, still living at home with her parents, and four of six siblings. It was this that, according to family lore, affected her health and began the eventual loss of her kidneys, and her inability to have children of her own. Isolated incidents are never that, and there are lessons to learn from any situation. And yet, we can watch in real time as segments of the population refuse the lessons and warnings of history.

It is hard to look at those numbers and see, on the other side, individuals holding up hand-made signs with “I want a haircut!” With fear comes desperation. And there is little logic to, or argument against, desperation. Someone on Twitter suggests that of course there are those who consider haircuts, the casino and other short-term pleasures worth the risk. Because they’ve no hope for anything else.

essays in the face of uncertainties

essays in the face of uncertainties

Fifty-seven days into lock-down, articles begin to emerge that speak of endings. How might this pandemic end? They claim the ending is two-fold, two-sided: the end of the disease itself, or the social ending, when those on voluntary lock-down grow tired, move to re-emerge, and simply live with the consequences. There are elements opening up into the latter as we speak, from parts across the United States, to Canadian provinces British Columbia and Quebec. A friend out west is called back as university bookstore staff, and schools are set to open throughout la belle province. What changed? A week earlier, Quebec was holding tighter than most, but now are willing to release their strict measures for the sake of reopening the economy. How much is a human life worth? How much is a population worth? A week ago, as Andrew Nikiforuk wrote for TheTyee in his article “We Are in a New Danger Zone” of lockdown exhaustion, fears of an economic depression and general fear for the future:

We want this emergency to end. And many want it to end at any cost.

And that is where the dangers lie. For we now live in the domain of a novel coronavirus.

Writing in early May for the CBC website on the unending lockdown and cold-weather records in Windsor, Casey Plett writes: “In a long winter, my body can enter an amnesiac stasis. I forget the world can be another way.” Articles speak of “murder hornets” entering the United States, a trickle that, unless stopped, could so easily become a wave.

Two further articles float by my Twitter-feed, that “Demand for P.E.I. school food program is 4-times higher than when pandemic started,” and that “This Energy Analyst Says the Oil Sands Are ‘Done’,” “COVID-19 is making many bearish about bitumen. Deborah Lawrence’s past pessimism has proven unpopular, and correct.”

We are living through so much of a space that is both the endless present and the impossible future. Will this be our new normal, with lock-downs, wearing face-masks while shopping or at work, or might this be something we barely recall in five, or even two years? Does anyone remember SARS, or H1N1? Will there be long-term effects of this global pandemic in how we interact with each other, or in the multiple social and income disparities being spotlit during this crisis? The Spanish Flu altered the ways our public spaces were built, and changes we aren’t even aware of anymore. On April 30, on the World Economic Forum website, Kate Whiting’s interview with science journalist Laura Spinney speaks of the difference of those with TB struck first by the pandemic, the increase in illiteracy compared to today, causing rumours and misinformation to run wild,, and the resulting baby boom of the 1920s from a population of young and healthy survivors. Also, as Spinney offers:

It gave a big boost to the concept of socialized medicine and healthcare, which no country had really got around to organizing yet. The pandemic is what gave the stimulus to do that because there was a realization that a pandemic was a global health crisis you had to treat at the population level. You couldn't treat individuals and there was no point in blaming individuals for catching an illness or treating them in isolation.

What will Covid-19 bring? Could all of those meetings really have been emails?

As Nova Scotia theatre director and playwright Ken Schwartz writes as part of his “Pandemic Diary” entry on the CBC website:

Today, I feel like a cobbler in a world of people who no longer wear shoes.

Once we wrestle the girls from their morning tablets, Rose and Aoife work to dismantle the living room and set up a substantial fort of all the blankets and pillows from their beds. By mid-morning, they insist I experience their structure from within. The inside of their fort is very dark. Even my voice seems muffled. Cool and quiet, it is all I can do to remain awake. Later on, a package of ordered materials arrives with the doorbell, and as I open to see what it is, Aoife breaks down in tears, deeply upset that it wasn’t her Oma. She misses her Oma, and wants to see her. I don’t know what to tell her.

                                                               

essays in the face of uncertainties

essays in the face of uncertainties

On May 8, someone on twitter asks: Why is it snowing? The following day, the same question. Today is colder than yesterday. The sky is overcast, and there’s even some rain.

I attempt to return to the head-space of writing, after my father’s funeral. This new post-father space. Given the three days I composed his obituary—between his death and the service—I’ve had to replace my background music from Brian Eno’s ongoingness to Chopin’s “Complete Nocturnes,” as performed by Brigitte Engerer. Eno had become infected with that onset of grief, an ongoingness within which I did not wish to live. I required a turn of the page. Chopin, for now. Until a further page reveals itself.

I feel emotionally exhausted, and attempting to figure out exactly what to do next. As Nathan Hill writes in his May “Postcard From the Pandemic: A Solid Little Feeling” for Poets & Writers: “It’s a paradox: I’ve never had so much time to be productive, yet so little will to produce.” If this suite of essays began as a deep dive into my distraction around global pandemic, another distraction has layered on top of another. I attempt to begin. I attempt some kind of spark or pilot light. As Ali Smith wrote, as part of her Artful (2013):

In the beginning was the word, and the word was what made the difference between form and formlessness, which isn’t to suggest that the relationship between form and formlessness isn’t a kind of dialogue too, or that formlessness had no words, just to suggest that this particular word for some reason made a difference between them—one that started things.

I am seeking that spark, that word. Can’t you smell oil? At my father’s funeral service, his former hired man, Jack McCourt, mentioning my father had said this during a visit, just prior to lockdown. Can’t you smell oil? Jack couldn’t, and neither could the subsequent furnace man my father called in. There’s nothing wrong here. Two weeks prior to my father’s death, his furnace exploded out from under him, bursting out black oil smoke throughout the farmhouse at 3am. The furnace, of course, is set directly underneath his main floor bedroom, underneath his hospital bed. How did the furnace explode out and not up? Bits of metal dug deep in the wooden stairs, but the cellar ceiling remained unaffected. And while everyone else panicked, he remained unshaken. You’re making too much of this, he told my sister. Can’t you just put me in the shed?

I don’t have to think about days of the week anymore. My tracking, every second Friday to head to the farm for a weekend of caregiving, is gone. I can’t track days. Christine offers that I could, possibly, start paying attention to Rose’s homeschooling, and the various Aoife and Rose school-related zoom meetings scheduled throughout each week. This is less suggestion than admonition. She’s right, of course, but she misses the substance of my loss of schedule, and the feeling of being untethered in my grief. My father, my final parent, and the loss of the last vestiges of the family home, the family farm.

In Sabrina Orah Mark’s column for The Paris Review, “Fuck the Bread. The Bread Is Over.” posted May 7, she writes:

I send my sons on a scavenger hunt because it’s day fifty-eight of homeschooling, and I’m all out of ideas. I give them a checklist: a rock, soil, a berry, something soft, a red leaf, a brown leaf, something alive, something dead, an example of erosion, something that looks happy, a dead branch on a living tree. They come back with two canvas totes filled with nature. I can’t pinpoint what this lesson is exactly. Something about identification and possession. Something about buying time. As I empty the bags and touch the moss, and the leaves, and the twigs, and the berries, and a robin-blue eggshell, I consider how much we depend on useless, arbitrary tasks to prove ourselves. I consider how much we depend on these tasks so we can say, at the very end, we succeeded.

essays in the face of uncertainties