happy canada day!

Not sure what today is doing yet, although we might be slow moving. Christine has been laid flat with a cold all week, & I've my broken foot, falling up stairs on Father's Day. Here is, at least, a short story I wrote a while ago set on Canada Day, at the Dominion Tavern in Ottawa's Byward Market (posted as one of those occasional short stories upon my substack, in-between other projects I'm attempting to further), which falls into my short story collection, On Beauty (University of Alberta Press, 2024). You've already pre-ordered a copy, yes? And how many short stories, do you think, are set at the Dominion Tavern? Oh, those were the days.

Both of our young ladies, obviously, have finished their school years. This past Thursday, Aoife completed grade two; the Thursday prior, Rose completed grade five. Let the summer of day-camps, potential travel and other randomness begin. Oh, and I'm reading in Toronto again at the end of the month?

The Unwritten

originally appeared via my substack:

I imagine a thousand Greek ships arriving, their hulls covered in black pitch, each with a single sail.
               Anne Simpson, “What Does Poetry Do? Notes on Sōphrosynē”

 

1.

To illustrate a point during his post-reading on-stage interview, the senior novelist mentions a story he once meant to write of an accountant named Artaud, who fell out of the sky. He fell out of the sky and survived, and no one could figure out how.

Is this something you’re working on now? the interviewer asks him.

The novelist waved off the suggestion with his hand. No, no. He was too old, it would take too long. There are other things I must do.

 

2.

He preferred to answer questions on his latest book, a nearly six hundred page epic that explores four generations of a family across two continents. The narrative stretches across more than a century, and took him twelve years to finish. He spent months wading through historical and personal archives, travelling six months from the United Kingdom through various points across Europe. How many more books might he have in him? He was already eighty years old. With every project, every book, the fear that it might be his last. And yet, every book was a new beginning. To start from nothing but scraps.

He'd spent twelve years splicing and braiding various odds and sods, including the whispered tales of his Great Uncle Silas, who may or may not have had to quickly abandon Dublin over the murder of a local shopkeeper. He wrote a sequence of four generations of men, from Lithuania to Belfast to London, before arriving amid the Family Compact of Toronto, and Upper Canada College. At points the story held shades of a spy thriller into a family drama, to a tale of romance, loss and instability. It was about seeking one’s home, and the sins of the father. A complicated romance of strangers, during the time of the First Great War.

And then there was Artaud, who scratched at the back of his consciousness. Why even bring him up?

 

3.

The fictional Artaud woke in an open field. The first cut had been poured into furrows, and he found himself lengthwise, laying across a bedding of dried hay and clover. How did he get here? He had scrapes on his legs and his arms, and a considerable bruise on his torso, but no broken bones. There were leaves in his hair.

He remembers the passenger jet during take-off. He remembers the ambient engine hum, enough that it soothed him to sleep.

Seeking his bearings, he recognized the surrounding fields, and the curl of the river. The tin roof of a farmhouse and red painted barn, past the trees. The bridge, further south.

And not a sign of the aircraft. No contrails, no wreckage. It was as if he had been plucked from his seat by an invisible hand and placed on the ground.

A breeze rolled up from the river. Three sparrows flecked by. A cool brush past his cheek. The sky a deep, endless blue.

 

4.

After the on-stage event, the novelist stood in the festival pub with a pint of some local delicacy. His agent asks about the story of Artaud. Is this something you’re working on? Is this a short story or novel? No, no, he responds. It isn’t anything. Well, the agent says, if you ever write it up, I’d be interested in seeing it. A knot forms in his stomach.

 

5.

Artaud was fifty-one years old, although numbers couldn’t save him. At least, not any longer. He had built his career around a certainty that numbers made everything possible. He believed in the God Equation. He had faith that a mathematical formula was indeed possible to explain creation, and everything that followed. He had faith in this, all of which came crashing down on that third day of June, in his fifty-second year.

Three thousand to forty-two hundred feet in the air.

He was flying home after a conference, to visit his widowed mother. She hadn’t been feeling well and Artaud wished to check in. He still bore the weight of the good son.

He was in the air. He was on the ground. He had his briefcase in hand. How did he get here?

 

6.

The novelist knew that Artaud would never be the same again. Four years after he woke in a stranger’s field, Artaud’s mother would suffer a stroke, and linger a few months before dying.

The plane landed, as it had been scheduled. Artaud was recorded as having boarded the plane, but there was no one at his destination to claim baggage or pick up his rental car. The airline offered a statement that pointed to human error, and the possibility he hadn’t boarded at all, before considering the matter settled. No crime had been committed, and no one had been injured. There was nothing to claim, and even less to refute.

The novelist knew he’d created a puzzle he hadn’t the bandwidth, nor possibly the imagination, to solve. How did Artaud make it safely to the ground? The novelist worried a younger writer would have been able to write his way out of it, or at least not paint up into corners. Were his best books, finally, behind him?

 

7.

From then on, Artaud couldn’t look skyward without trepidation. He never truly felt safe on the ground again. Was some part of him still in the air?

 

8.

The Wicked Witch of the West’s “Surrender, Dorothy” wasn’t directed at Dorothy. It was an excision from a longer quote, “Surrender Dorothy or die,” directed squarely at the people of Emerald City. She never expected the Ms. Gale to give up so easily. She knew her reign of terror would mean nothing to this stranger, this interloper. The Wicked Witch went after the people.

 

Did I mention I'm still working on a novel?

Some further untethered selections of this novel-in-progress:

*

Patience’s great-grandfather, Alder Buckley Adams, was known in his time for his business prowess in manufacturing. One hundred years ago there was the Famous Adams Match, for example, and the Adams Biscuit. For fifty years, AB Adams earned money from every item made, received or passed through Baltimore. Half the waterfront buildings carried his name, at one point or another. After he died, her grandfather, Leland Buckley Adams took the reins of what had become the family business, providing apprenticeships and opportunities for his own children, and later, setting up a monthly stipend for his grandchildren out of the company’s profits. These dispensations continue, maintained by one of her cousins, who currently runs the company. While the money may not enough for any of them to live off, and has changed over the years, it is a worthy amount. She is surprised every time it lands in her bank account.

All she recalls of her grandfather is his grand, empty house, and his library. From her memory as a six-year-old, his house was built out of carpets and dust and forbidden rooms. His library and study on the first floor. Bookshelves as far as the eye.

According to family legend, what prompted her grandfather’s gift was the death of his brother, Archibald Cornelius Adams, when Leland was six years old. Archie was only two years old when he slipped under a carriage wheel, and was instantly killed. The loss of his brother affected Leland profoundly, watching as it nearly broke their father in half. Their mother mourned for the rest of her life, and was often found weeping in Archie’s still-preserved bedroom. Leland would watch over his own children closely. It developed in Patience’s father, and his siblings, the inability to know their own minds, away from the comfort of family. We have to look after them, her grandfather would say. And for her part, Patience slipped from the family bonds as soon as she was old enough and able, and as quickly as possible. Those airless, empty, ancient rooms.

From the back of her house, you can hear the river. From the river, the lake. From the lake, the ocean. Patience has not yet seen an ocean. She imagines how an ocean might sound.

She dreams of the ocean. Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.

The east wind brings rain, taps at the shutters.

She has been dreaming of water. She dreams of water, although she wonders if this might be triggered by hearing the sump-pump click on from their unfinished cellar. It reeks of rust, of waste. A leak from the hose. She is surrounded by water, although none of it what she wants.

She preps her morning tea. She steps out on the porch.

 

*

Stella practices scales. The only time during the day I allow myself to stop moving. Thirty minutes of pause. Down the road, a pick-up truck with township logo slows down and stops, and men emerge to patch a particularly egregious pothole. Finally. I watch them work. I watch them work until they are finished, return to their vehicle and drive on. And once they do, I realize there isn’t a sound in the house.

 

*

When their boys were small, Felix established a dinnertime routine, asking everyone at the table in turn to say the best and worst parts of their day. Most days were benign in their offerings, but it allowed Felix and Patience to hear bits of their boys’ days at school, allowing more than the requisite silence of children. What did you learn at school today? Nothing. Who did you have lunch with? Felix claimed it was an extension of mindfulness, asking them to be attentive to a particular moment, their individual days. The stretch of weeks Hamilton would repeat the same schoolyard incident, before he understood better the passage of time. Vincent’s interest in trains, airplanes and race cars. The movement of snow, and of clouds. Of snow plows. They learned to weigh their days, and realize that tomorrow was always a way to start fresh.

 

*

Name any fruit or vegetable, and there is most likely a town or a village or a city that hosts a festival. An apple festival, a snap-pea festival, a currants festival. In the Valencian town of Buñol, in the East of Spain, they hold La Tomatina, a celebration of the tomato that includes a street-sized tomato fight. Wayne County, Ohio, annually hosts the Kidron Beet Festival. Are there festivals for butter, for loaves of bread, lobster or salt? A pepper festival, perhaps. Might every element of food production be allowed their own festival? Alliston, north of Toronto, is known for its annual potato festival, held for more than fifty years. I imagine kiosks that offer baked skins, French fried and even shakes, although I suspect they refrain from a similar street-sized fight to the Spanish. I imagine characters in costume, dressed as potatoes to entertain children. Just how far does it go?

 

I've a new short story, "The Truth about Sasquatches,"

posted this week over at Whiskey Tit. Thanks so much! Part of the work-in-progress short story manuscript, "Very suddenly, all at once."

(another) very short story;

 

I’ve been thinking about translation, or at least poorly executed translation. An early re-telling of “Cinderella” mistook fur for impossible glass, an error that has long replaced the logic of origins. One version of the list of Sumerian Kings wrote that Alulim ruled Eridug, one of the Ancient Mesopotamian city-states, for 28,800 years. How is this possible? And did Methuselah really live to 969 years old, or Adam to 930? One explanation offers that, given how all these Old Testament lifespans end with numbers 0, 2, 5, 7 or 9, they might simply be combinations of two “sacred” numbers: sixty and seven. Seven was Biblical, and sixty the Babylonian numerical base. Context remains so important. For the same reason that someone born two weeks prior to me, February 29, 1970, isn’t considered a teenager, instead of the cusp of fifty. And besides: who could ever walk in glass footwear without destroying their feet?

(another) very short story;

He didn’t understand why IKEA refused to explain why they won’t ship to certain areas. He realized that, apparently, we’re meant to piece it together ourselves.

Here We Come A-Noveling:

 

Robert Duncan once said there is no such thing as fiction. And that makes more sense than almost anything. And when at one point I started looking back through my stories, I thought, I have almost never written a fictional line in my life. Your mind gets on something and you just meander along with it. I don’t think that’s fiction. It’s all autobiography.
            Bobbie Louise Hawkins, interviewed by Barbara Henning, One Small Saga (2020)

Okay, so that’s a stupid title for a post, but I’m going to leave it that way. I’m reading Bobbie Louise Hawkins’ (1930-2018) newly reissued One Small Saga (2020), by Brooklyn’s Ugly Duckling Presse, with an introduction by Laird Hunt and Eleni Sikelianos, along with a portion of an interview conducted with the author by Barbara Henning back in 2011. I’m struck by the idea she referenced in her interview, that fiction is not but reworked autobiography, and I think I both agree and disagree with that entirely. Is that even possible?

Fiction is written out through experience, certainly, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing. I think of Hawkins’ work, or even Robert Creeley’s fiction, both of which emerged from direct experience, writing fictionalized accounts of their lives, or even Michael Winter’s first few published books. Is it fiction when it comes from life? Well, yes. Even a memoir is but a version of events, one that perhaps not everyone surrounding those events might agree on, and to tell a story is to provide a narrative structure of beginning and ending. To tell a story in a pub is to make narrative choices of where one begins, and where one ends, whether or not the facts of the story might remain intact.

In my own fiction, whether short stories or the novels, there are little threads, little elements I’ve gathered from my own experience. Much like the main character in white (2007), I have stood as a child in front of a mirror, and speculated on my biological origins: which elements came from either of them, and which may have been mine alone. As my main character, Alberta, did in Missing Persons (2009), I have sat on the back of a snowmobile that ran through fields and over fences, nervous about being caught up in the fencing. And yet, neither of these are autobiography. I know those speculations and I know those fields, thus can offer them to characters to add to their own experiences, although I have never lived in the prairie described in Alberta’s immediate surroundings, which I considered to be a fictionalization of an unnamed Lumsden, Saskatchewan (a geography I visited but one, but attempted a great deal of research during the novel’s composition). When I am constructing fiction, it feels akin to weaving, with multiple threads woven in to allow for what might emerge through the combination of elements. And after a while, the character, or characters, or story, begins to move in its own direction, the foundational elements providing their own suggestions of where to go next.

In my current project, I imagine the rural house belonging to one character to be that of the house immediately next door to where my father lived; the house where he died, actually. I spent a weekend there, caregiving, during my final weekend with him. I got to know the house rather well, and can see it, there, as I write. I write the widow, Patience, sitting quietly on her covered porch each morning, sipping her tea. She faces east, as the neighbours do.

And here, another untethered fragment of this novel-in-progress, one that utilizes some of the local knowledge gathered from being raised on that farm in Eastern Ontario. Years ago, poet John B. Lee mentioned a story of his bachelor uncle, who would take a load of garbage to the dump, and always return to John’s parent’s farm with more than he left with. A moldy set of Encyclopedia Brittanica he retrieved relegated to the barn. I’m sure John’s uncle wasn’t the first, nor would he be the last, to gather refuse with more enthusiasm than reason. This short scene also references my unfinished novel, "Signal Fires," composed as eventual precursor to Missing Persons (a manuscript where we meet numerous characters, including a twenty-something girl named Alberta, but who needed further development, thus Missing Persons emerged), that explored a stretch of deliberately-set barn fires that same summer, nearly twenty years ago by now. The randomness of it, and the violence of it, combined with the sheer amount of instances that year, made the whole of it rather frightening. In the end, it was a volunteer firefighter who was setting them, attempting to make himself the hero, once he set out to fight the fires. How many barns, how much livestock, may have been lost to this man's ego?

*

After lunch, Peter unspools a reel of electrical fencing. He stands at the boundary of backyard and field, beyond the garage, to repair a fresh break. Beyond their lone Douglas Fir. After days spent cutting and baling, the rain fell, before they could return to the fields to retrieve them. And to place wet bales in the haymow would mean a pressure of heat and the potential of fire. That’s the last thing he needs. He recalls the summer when he was seven or eight, a sequence of local barns in their area that burst into flame. Most had been arson, of course, but there were still some that investigators couldn’t determine. Or, what his father had said at the time.

He unspools, walks the length of the property there to the back, stitching new electrical fencing around where bales of straw sit in sextets, in pyramids. The girls chase along, climbing each stack in turn, laughing and scratching bare legs. The dog rushes at birds, runs on ahead. Next year, Peter will relocate the cows from the other side of the barn over here, so the fence needs to be settled. Once he turns back the switch, the sound of rhythmic tic from the back of the garage.

Standing out in the field, Peter is somehow reminded of a story he’d heard as a boy, of a great-uncle who had buried a car in the bush. He’d grown tired of owning it, and for reasons unknown, decided that hauling or driving it deep into the sixty acres of bush across from the farmhouse was the best way to dispose of it. He buried a car in the bush. When Peter was young, he and his brothers tried to figure out where it lay, where the car would have landed, roaming overgrown paths and occasionally finding themselves lost in the brush. Their father never believed it was actually true, but a story his uncle told the children to trick them into looking, the way uncles tease children. Uncle Rick, who returned from the dump every time with more than he’d left with. A perfectly good set of thirty year old encyclopedias. A concordance of lamps. Everything set into a corner of the barn, as Peter’s grandmother wouldn’t let any of it into the house.

He most likely took it to town and sold it, their father would say. Who would be stupid enough to bury a car? But the thought is still there. Peter can’t shake it. Does it have to make sense for it to have happened?

The fence finished, he turns to the house, calling the girls from the creek. Their legs are covered in mud.