In their bedroom sits a little bookshelf where every secret of my parents’ marriage is hiding. Stacks of poetry books, given by Dad to Mom, neatly line up on shelves where I lean, searching through volumes, searching… for the stuff of life. 

Through all the happy clatter and chaos of growing up, words impressed themselves on me.  Most of the cards and letters given to me from my parents contain beautiful inscriptions, even this volume, given to me on Valentine’s Day a decade ago.

From it, some gems to share:

For my daughters and their friends setting out to conquer the world:

Roadmap

She wants a man she can just
unfold when she needs him
then fold him up again
like those 50 cent raincoats
women carry in their purses
in case they get caught in stormy weather.

This one has her thumb out
for a man who’s going her way.
She’ll hitch with him awhile,
let him take her down the road
for a piece.

But I want to take you where you’re going,
I’m unfolding for you
like a roadmap you can never again fold up
exactly as the same before.

– Harryette Mullen

 For friends wondering if they should still hope:

Love comes quietly

Love comes quietly,
finally, drops
about me, on me
in the old ways.

What did I know
thinking myself
about to go
alone all the way.

– Robert Creeley

For winter-weary lovers everywhere, including my own Valentine.

Warmth

Sometimes want make touch too much.
I hold my hands over your body
Like someone come in from the cold
Who takes off his clothes
And holds out his hands to the stove.

– Barton Sutter

Happy Valentine’s Day!

For more poetry see: A flame in two cupped hands

Photo credits Paschalis Gogos.

Courtesy: Bookriot

What are you doing this weekend?

I’m going to the Sketch Com-Ageddon finals at Toronto’s Comedy Bar. Can’t imagine what these comics have to laugh about, can you?

I need a good laugh as I finish off the last pages of The Orenda which has been bloody, gripping and disturbing as hell.

I hope every high school student in the country reads it, not to mention the rest of us. It might change your mind forever about the origins of this country. It did for me.

The Orenda is on the new Globe and Mail guide to 100 of this year’s best books, just released today. Hurrah, I say. A month ago we were all celebrating Alice Munro’s Nobel win. The world was toasting our smarty pants writers. Then, some other idiotic kind of celebrity caused their attention to waver. I hope this list is a good reminder that our writers are the real rock stars in this country.( read the whole list here)

If you don’t like that list, try the Guardian‘s list of best bets of 2013 from top writers and critics. ( read here)

There’s no shortage of gift ideas here for bookish types on your list but why stop there? Show the world your love of the classics with wearable word leggings.

( See Buzzfeed’s list of other ideas for the bookworm in your life)

Buying new hardcovers can be pricey. There’s always your local library. Or is there?

This Sunday, a first ever forum will be held on the future of our public library system, the busiest in North America, now under threat of serious budget cuts.

Show up at City Hall, at 2 pm, to join a panel of authors and others inside that rarefied space we have come to know as Council Chamber. If public engagement is truly on the rise*, here’s a chance to fill that chamber with a fresh, if welcome, blast of hot air.

( how you can participate: details here)

Have a great weekend. And don’t bother with the new flick  Delivery Man. See the original instead. Starbuck was the hit of last year’s festival scene and a hoot. You’ll have more way more fun.

*For more on the end of apathy, see: Maybe Rob Ford did us a favour

We turn our clocks back one hour on Sunday.

What will you do with that extra hour?

I will not spend it running errands, putting away garden furniture or cooking for family or friends, sorry all. The leaves are glorious but I won’t be looking up. Nor will I jump on my work pile with gusto which would be a sensible choice.

Screw sense.

I’ll be reading, thanks.

Scientists have recently suggested that people who read literary fiction are getting a “cardio circuit for the bleeding heart”. Reading makes us nicer, says a new paper in the journal Science.

I’m not sure about that. If you interrupt me when I’m deep in the pages, good luck to you. I don’t care what the research says, although it will come in handy when my books come out. Look for” Read this and be a better person” sticker on my future publications.

I read for sanity.  I don’t know if it makes me smarter or nicer but it does mean I am never as loony when I’m in someone else’s narrative. It is the great link to the human condition. Alice Munro is in my bag ( Who do you think you are?) and Maria Semple in my car ( Where’d you go, Bernadette?). They are my kill time joys.
There are stacks in my office, beside my bed, in baskets in the bathroom and by the couch.

There is a teensy room upstairs that is overrun with kids books and novels and I don’t care that we’re speeding towards an empty nest: they comfort me.

But I am losing time. In the great sleepless stage of waiting up late for teens to come home while worrying over aging parents, reading is a lost pleasure. Technology’s blinking presence stomps all over my scattered shots at books. I am lucky if I can finish my monthly book club’s choice. ( The Orenda this month, The Language of Flowers last month).

I know turning back the clocks means less sunshine. But I’ll take it if it means I can pull up the blanket and sink into stories.

Now I have science on my side. So leave me alone for the hour because it means more hugs and I’m pretty good at those on a good day.

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Alice Munro woke up with a phone call early this morning.
Her daughter told her, Mom, you won.
Won what?, responded the eighty-two-year-old writer, now living in Victoria, B.C.

Only the Nobel prize for literature,

only a million dollars, only the first Canadian, the thirteenth woman in a long parade of men like George Bernard Shaw, Ernest Hemingway, and T. S Eliot who have scooped the prize before.

She could be forgiven for asking instead, Won what now? Her award shelf is, after all, crowded with honours: three Governor General Literary awards, three Giller prizes, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the American national Book Critics Circle Award and in 2009, the Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work.

The Nobel is the big one. What it says to the world is pay attention: a master is here in Canada. She may be frail, as her long time editor Douglas Gibson has indicated. Frail be damned. This woman is fierce.

Already adored around the world for elevating ordinary people into perfectly crafted stories, Munro has said she once wished she could write novels instead to be taken more seriously as a writer. Soon enough, she abandoned that thought as her great achievements in themselves resulted in the short story form being exalted.

There is a disarming simplicity to her genius, maddening, really, for a lowly writer who attempts to parse the paragraphs as I do. Most of her stories are so rich that I put the book down and decide, right then, that I will just quit writing and be a reader forever. When I finished The Bear Came Over the Mountain (from Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage), I was still with the weight of it, cheeks wet, unable to shake it. It was a shock to find that I cared so deeply, in so few pages, about Fiona who says I don’t think it’s anything to worry about, I’m just losing my mind, and her once philandering husband Grant,watching helplessly as she is put in a care facility, leaving him with the ghosts of his past. Is there a better story anywhere of what dementia does to a couple? Filmmaker Sarah Polley was also moved, enough to make a wondrous film based on this story, Away From Her, that somehow managed to keep Munro’s magic intact. That piercing through layers of human nature is the thread that connects all of her work.

Yet this Nobel win can be nothing if not inspiring to me, to every writer who “looks around”, especially in this country where great writing is cherished, and for women around the world to witness one of our great feminist writers reach glory. Can it be inspiring enough to bring Munro out of her recent retirement?  She has published before after threatening to stop. Writer Katrina Onstad suggests the public doesn’t want an artist like Munro to put her pen down.

Willfully exiting the creative life goes against our conception of the quixotic, sacrificing artist. It’s not just that the optics are weird – it’s hard to imagine Francis Bacon at the early bird seating or Frida Kahlo taking up golf – but it seems somehow morally wrong for an artist to turn off the faucet by choice. It’s unappreciative, almost selfish; if you’re lucky enough to get the gift, how can you squander it with such a pedestrian enterprise as retirement? An artist is supposed to be moved by the muse, forever channelling from some otherworldly plain. That production can’t stop – and won’t, if it’s authentic – until breath does. We expect our artists to go out creating, like Michelangelo, who died at 88 still making plans for St. Peter’s, or George Orwell, writing and rewriting1984 while deathly ill in northern Scotland.

( read the whole piece here)

Ms. Munro, it’s okay, we accept your retirement. We can bask in your spotlight and all those stories. I am going to read them again, one by one.

Can you hear me cheering from here?

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House robbed, basement drains seeping sewage, and I’ve ducked outside to peer at the buds.

Can’t help it, it’s the default setting on this whacky ’64 model.

 Spring is the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky (e.e cummings), love hot and bothered in the back seat, black under your fingernails.

dirt

A dump truck leaves a mound of earth on my driveway.

 It sprawls there in misshapen form.

The girls abandon the bubbles and bound downstairs.

Bare and dripping on the steps, they stare,

pink bums longing to leap in the dirt

to rid themselves of clean.

Wheelbarrows later,

virgin soil cuts a black ribbon through the yard.

Moist from the dusk rain, it is an expectant bed

 beckoning my toes in.

 Soon too, my hands, arms,

 body burrowing down, down.

I am a root taking hold,

 my fetal blooms encased.

 Warm, ready, I’m a lover in wait.

 Sun rays ripple through the sod.

Send my colours exploding,

wild and bright against the jet ground.

Through the window,

my breath forms a steam cloud.

A garden.

Finally.

 from my 2001 collection , Holding Glass

Copyright © Anne Langford

 For a little Goodfellas and Dickens, read: Guarding the Nest

The landscape for women in Jane Austen’s time bears little resemblance to contemporary society. Expected only to be passive and pretty, women had no economic power, nor could they own land or exert political influence.  Up pops Elizabeth Bennet, a character that readers today adore for her wit, humour and sharp observations. Pride and Prejudice is 200 years old today and Elizabeth Bennet and her Mr. Darcy are their very own cultural construct.  The novel has inspired more adaptations than Austen could possibly have conceived. Would she have approved of the many variations on the theme?

Read More

 If you ever have the chance to study with a master, take it without delay.

Read More

It now seems to be settled science that the original notion of play, unfettered with schedules and structure, is disappearing. I choke a little on that dismal thought. How would I have survived without it?

Before Google, we played everywhere and anywhere: in our back yards, alleys, school yards and in my case, the rec room of my childhood home. I poked about for props and imagined scenarios with my four siblings and the Jones brothers next door (not a boy band but just regular boys next door). We didn’t know what cool was yet and there were few defining limits except the call to come for supper. Our notions came from the source material we knew best—stories and rhymes, devoid of pop culture.

I returned to that rec room, or one I recognised fully, at a zany new show, Alligator Pie, produced by the new Creation Ensemble of the Soulpepper theatre company in Toronto.
There, five talented performers create whimsical set pieces around the poetry of Dennis Lee , who wrote Alligator Pie in 1974.  Many are set to music like Tricking, a poem about a three-year-old picky eater. On stage, the picky eater in question become a rapper with sass. The audience hooted their approval, as did my four-year-old nephew and theatre escort. Other moments use props pulled from boxes as if just discovered and viewed as new found play gear. It is not all perfect. Nor is play in the best sense.

Like our childhood capers, the show is quirky, weird and wonderful.

Joining us at the show was my oldest daughter, now seventeen, also quite familiar with the source material. If parenting young children presents the longest days and shortest years, then Dennis Lee saved my sanity. For an hour before lights out, Serious Mom was shelved and out came Silly Mom who bounced and ballyhooed about the bedroom.  It was better than Tylenol, healthier than booze. My teen was as tickled as I was to revisit that cherished time as we watched an audience full of school kids giggle in their seats. 38 years later, Dennis Lee’s poetry done up in this fresh sweet spin had me rappin’ with them all.

I owe a great deal to this kind of poetry as a mom almost out of tricks at sundown, and as a child who loved mucking about in my rec room.  Alligator Pie, the show, gave me yet another reminder to be fearlessly creative.

The show continues through the month. Find a kid and go. Or be one yourself for an hour. The audience is a good place to soar.

If you forget the text of this classic, here’s a little reminder:

J. K Rowling’s first book since the Harry Potter series comes out today and it is most certainly NOT for children.

The Casual Vacancy, a rural comedy of manners, is set in the town of Pagford in the southwest of England. Glimpses of the plot have been rare although the New Yorker has a lengthy profile piece out in this week’s issue.
After “Harry Potter,” J. K. Rowling’s First Novel for Adults : The New Yorker

This tight clampdown on advance peeks has sent reporters into a tizzy of outrage as they squirrel around trying to figure out just how to cover what is sure to be a publishing phenomenon. Journalists who did get access to the book were asked to sign non disclosure agreements until today and many have complained the legalese is heavy handed.

Rowling has been declared a publishing despot by one British columnist; others are pointing fingers at her controlling behaviour over publicity interviews and quotes.

The assumption here is that Rowling cannot control the media if she indeed wants them to help sell her book.

The lady doesn’t need to play in the sandbox.
She owns the sandbox. Here is a writer who, from a spark of creative genius, lit up a generation before they got sucked away by little white earphones and text messaging. My children consider Mister Potter a family member and would surely have a place at our table for their beloved hero. Rowling’s tales of Potter gave birth to an industry of children’s series and a new crop of writers eager for her kind of wizardry. Potter was hers. She has a right to be litigious, and to be private, unheard of in today’s Twitter mad kingdom.

“I’m not a natural joiner”, says Rowling, to the New Yorker’s Ian Parker.

Let the book stand on its own merit.

I, for one, will be reading.