Remembering Canada's Black Loyalists during Black History Month, 2021

A detail from John Singleton Copley's "The Death of Major Pierson, 6 January 1781" (1783) features a Black Loyalist soldier fighting on the British side. During Black History Month in Canada, it's worth remembering that the Black Loyalists—former American slaves who joined the British side in the War of Independence—were among the original non-Native Canadians, and should be counted among Canada's founders and settlers, in spite of the terrible struggles they endured, against everything from the violent weather to various forms of institutionalized racism, in a new country that promised them acceptance and land, and frequently shirked on both counts. Many of the Loyalists eventually left Canada, travelling to Africa and settling in Freetown, in Sierra Leone. Those who remained, and established themselves in Nova Scotia and Upper Canada, contributed to the evolving fabric of the new nation. Until relatively recently, their achievements and histories have been downplayed in favour of Canada's (predominantly white European colonial) history.

The coat of arms of the Black Loyalist Heritage Society of Shelburne, Nova Scotia were granted by the Canadian Heraldic Authority in 2006, and the elements are as follows—

The shield: "Sable between three Loyalist civil coronets a ship’s wheel with four spokes in saltire Argent." The crest: "A demi-lion Or gorged of a Loyalist military coronet and holding between its paws an anchor Sable." The supporters: "Two lions Or each gorged of a Loyalist civil coronet Gules, the leaves Vert, and standing on a rock set with mayflowers proper."

Scent mapping

Does anyone else map out the writing of their books with mnemonic devices? Each of my novels has had an associated fragrance, usually via a scented candle, that acts as a device to immerse me me in my story as soon as the candle is lit. For October, I used a Yankee Candle Company candle in "Spiced Pumpkin," which deftly caught the Halloween season in my mind. For Wild Fell, my friend Elliot gifted me a French candle that called to mind the vast, dim interior of a cathedral during candlelit mass. In the case of Enter, Night I used sealed, unopened 70s-era vintage perfumes that recalled the era, and dabbed them on the lightbulbs in my office, including the obvious teenage fragrances, like Love's Baby Soft and vintage Chantilly by Houbigant (thanks, Ebay) partially when it came to writing the characters of Christina and her daughter, Morgan. The candle for the new novel is Voluspa's "Sake Lemon Flower." I purchased three of them, which will hopefully see me through the entire writing. The novel is set in the early 80s and the present day, so the scent is clean and modern, and sensuous without being overpowering. Next to music (each of the novels have their own writing soundtracks, too) nothing links me more tightly to memory, and narrative, than scent.

David Moss (1924-2021)

Last weekend, we lost David Moss at the age of 96. He was the father of my big sister, Nancy, whom some of you know from my books and essays. I met Dave when I was 11 or 12 in Geneva, where our two families were living. He was an American executive who travelled a great deal, and he was kind to this odd Canadian boy he frequently found in his house, who seemed surgically attached to his eldest daughter. I think I amused him, in the nicest possible sense. He had a patrician Gregory Peck quality, and, together, he and his wife Betsy radiated a particular sort of American glamour that might have been written by John Cheever; like a happier, expat version of the New Canaan, Connecticut families in Ang Lee's film of Rick Moody's The Ice Storm. Decades later in 1992, at Nancy's wedding in New Hampshire (shown here), I was her husband's best man. The father of the bride and I were able to spend some time as two adult men, albeit of different generations, and even in the midst of a hectic wedding weekend we had some good, deep talks. I came away with an adult's sense that he was a very, very good man, the kind worth emulating. The last time I saw Dave was more than a decade later at his home in Manchester-by-the-Sea. I won't even try to guess the date, which seems both like yesterday and a century ago. Among other things, I remember, we had a discussion about the ships that left England for Plymouth Colony in the early 17th century. He was delighted that I knew the Arbella, which sailed into what is now known as Salem Harbour in 1630, was the ship that carried the new colony's precious library. David Moss loved his daughters, he loved his grandchildren, and he probably knew, more often than not, that he was the most dashing man in any given room. He wore it lightly and gracefully and, as I remember, seemed to put that light on others instead of shining it on himself. I'm privileged to have known him through Nancy, and I mourn with her, and with her sisters, as well as with Dave's first wife, Betsy, all of whom I still consider family 47 years after we were all first brought together. Fate can be a capricious, often cruel mistress, but she is occasionally also a bestower of great blessings. Loving these people has been among those bestowed on me. Rest in peace, Dave, and comfort to those who loved you.

[Photo, viewer's L-R: Nancy's late son M. J. whom we lost last year; Dave; Nancy's husband, Jay; me, 1992]

It's funny what you wind up missing during a lockdown

It's funny what you wind up missing during a lockdown. The restaurant at the top of Nordstrom, Bar Verde, has a prime view of the mall—a view that was particularly joy-sparking at Christmas, when the tree was up. Almost from the start, the staff became pals, and the restaurant became a place where I established myself as a regular. The rush of human contact was a particular stimulant after working at home alone all day in a silent house. In the winter of 2018, I re-read Peter Straub's Ghost Story there over a series of snowy evenings. In December of 2019, I did my frantic last-minute revisions on my story for Matt Bechtel's anthology, The Dystopian States of America, there. I've had countless lunches and dinners with much-loved friends and colleagues there. Like the bar in Cheers, it was a place where everyone knew my name, and my preferred table was nicknamed "Michael's booth." With the city shut down completely, especially indoor dining, and social distancing and sheltering in place, "Christmas" has never felt more like a social media construct—so, thank God for social media, even as the snow falls and the neighbourhood lights sparkle. I miss my friends fiercely, and what I wouldn't give to be sitting in Michael's booth with them tonight, dreaming of flying to Palm Springs to be with my California family on the 22nd of December, as I have every year for the past thiry, looking out at the lit Christmas tree in the mall (where I was the Santa Claus in 1985), cherishing the memories, and blessing this season as an embodiment of the people and things I love the most in the world. On the other hand, it's only a year until Christmas 2021.

The children are home for Halloween

Today's post brought the author copies of the new editions of my three novels from my new publisher, Open Road Media. I couldn't be happier. 

Also, I love that the books arrived in time for Halloween. With COVID-19, we're not handing out candy and obviously not seeing friends. It'll be us, the dog (who's ten today, by the way—Happy Birthday, Beckett!—and some well-chosen horror films, and the new editions on the shelf. 

This was Beckett, on his first birthday with us—October 30th, 2012, when he turned two. I still see that "quizzical puppy" expression on his face eight years later. 

Unboxing the paperbacks

The highlight of this past week was undoubtedly getting these copies of Les Ombres de Wild Fell, the French translation of my novel Wild Fell, which arrived from Paris this past Tuesday. 

I've had my books published in hardcover and trade paperback, but I've never had one published in a mass market paperback before. Like a lot of horror writers who grew up in the 70s and 80s, paperback horror novels were a staple—for me, even a gold standard—to which I aspired. All of the horror writer I most admired (including many who later became good friends) had their books published as pocketbooks, either after a decent hardcover run, or in the book's' first and only form. 

Finally, in my 50s, I've achieved it. I may have missed the golden age of the paperback horror original as a writer, but this still feels remarkably satisfying. 

The Film Rights to OCTOBER Are Sold!

Well, it's official. The film rights to my novel October have been sold to L.A.-based indie filmmaker Dominic Haxton, as Publisher's Marketplace Deal Report announced today, in a deal quarterbacked by my agent, Sam Hiyate of The Rights Factory. 

I'm over the moon to finally be able to share it. I was a fan of Mr. Haxton's short films long before he approached me about making a feature film of October. I'd found his powerful short film, Tonight It's Me, about an encounter between a young trans woman, Ash, and a hustler, CJ, beautiful and remarkably moving. 

His queer horror short, Tonight It's You, on the other hand, which again featured the character of CJ, was as dark and chilling as its more optimistic predecessor was tender and revelatory. It's one of my favourite short horror films. 

In the afterword to October I mentioned a young filmmaker in California who had enquired about making a feature film of the novel, and what contemporary updates he might apply. 

That filmmaker—unnamed in the afterword—was the brilliant Mr. Haxton. 

Two years ago, he acquired a shopping deal for October, and earlier this summer, he purchased the film rights themselves, to make October as his first full-length feature. 

I couldn't feel more confident that the book is with the right filmmaker.  If you click this Tonight It's You link, I think you'll understand why. 

I can't wait to see what Mr. Haxton does with the novel when he applies his own elegant, modern horror aesthetic to the story of Mikey and Wroxy, and Adrian, and the haunted town of Auburn. 

We'll keep you posted as the process unfolds and develops. 

But for now, we're going to open some champagne. 

Cover Reveal à la Française

Here's the cover of the forthcoming mass-market edition of Les Ombres de Wild Fell, the French translation of my haunted house novel Wild Fell, which will be published by Editions Bragelonne in Paris, in October, 2020.

In the same way that many authors pine for a hardcover edition of their novel, I've always pined for a mass-market paperback edition of one of mine. I grew up on mass-market horror paperbacks. 

We all read them at school, traded them, collected them, hoarded then, and loved them to shreds. I still have some of my best-beloved ones from the late-70s and 80s. 

The late, legendary Michael McDowell, who wrote some of the best original horror fiction of the era, always said he was proud of being a paperback novelist—a writer whose books were published only in mass-market paperback. 

I always admired him for that, as well as for his tremendous storytelling gifts. 

Bragelonne published a beautiful trade paperback of the novel in 2016, with a glorious translation by Benoît Domis. 

I've never been able to read my work to myself in English without hearing my own voice, and finding things I would have loved to have done differently. It's a weird neurosis, but I own it. What I found, reading the book in French, was that it was like reading a novel by someone other than myself. I enjoyed that sensation. I likewise had a much clearer sense of the book when I didn't attach that authorial self-consciousness to the process.

I hope French readers of the new mass-market paperback edition enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it. There's an enormous amount of pleasure in imagining someone picking up the novel at an airport somewhere in the French-speaking world, maybe for a long flight, and imagining them spending those hours in the air, being transported, in their minds,  to Canada, to a remote, windswept island in Georgian Bay, and an old dark house presided over by a very particular, very possessive, quite terrifying châtelaine.

Bonne chance, mes potes. 

Meet My New Publisher, Open Road Media

I'm delighted to be able to share some exciting news, as well as some new book covers

Early in 2020 we were approached by Open Road Media about acquiring the publication rights for my fiction backlist, the novels Enter, Night, Wild Fell, and October. These novels, originally published by ChiZine Publications, have consistently remained in print since 2011 when Enter, Night was first published. 

A French edition of Wild Fell was published by Editions Bragelonne in Paris in 2016.

Open Road Media is America's premier global backlist publisher. Their roster includes legends such as Joan Didion, William Styron, Alice Walker, Dee Brown, Pat Conroy, Paul Monette, Joyce Carol Oates, Gloria Steinem, Octavia Butler, John Jakes, Pearl S. Buck, Walker Percy, and Sherman Alexie. 

Closer to home, I'm honoured to have my books appear alongside some of my favourite speculative fiction authors, including Graham Masterton, Robert McCammon, Thomas Tryon, Poppy Z. Brite, Elizabeth Hand—and of course, the elder gods: Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, J. Sheridan LeFanu, Ann Radcliffe, among many, many others. 

Best of all, the partnership with Open Road Media assures that my three novels will remain in print for the foreseeable future—certainly as e-books, but also as print-on-demand paperbacks and hardcovers further on down the line. 

The e-books are up for pre-order on Amazon. They will be released in October 2020.

Watch Out, World—She's Eighteen and She's Going To Change Everything

My beloved goddaughter Kate turned eighteen today and I'm all at sea.

Of course I'm thrilled and proud beyond measure that this glorious young woman, at the threshold of adulthood, has indeed crossed that threshold and stepped confidently into the sunlight of that new stage of life. 

She's part of that powerful generation of young people whom I have no doubt will save, and change forever, the world they've inherited. It needs saving, and it needs changing most of all. This is a generation for whom issues of the environment, of racial equality and empowerment, and issues of LGBTQ equality and empowerment, are not "goals," but actual starting points. 

Things that my generation strove to actualize, they grew up already aware of. If they didn't necessarily take them for granted, they knew right from wrong, and they know the importance of righting wrongs. This gives them tremendous power and I have no doubt in my mind that they'll wield that power in the most responsible way, and that they're going to change everything that needs to be changed. 

And yet, here I am, at 2:00 a.m. on her birthday morning, replaying memories over and over in my mind, among them the most cherished memories of my life. 

I'm gently haunted in particular by the memory of how her tiny hand fit into mine when she was very small and we walked together—in parks, along roads, through the woods up north. We walked together  a great deal. The hand grew, and the girl grew, but that particular memory is one I hold close. 

I loathe clichés, both as a writer and as a human being, but the question Where did all these years go? seems an inevitable one tonight. Where did they go? 

Well, to living, of of course. That's where years go. 

Memories are patchwork, and when you've made enough of them, you begin to stitch them together. Sometimes you don't realize how luxurious a quilt you've made until nights like tonight arrive. And when they come, what a Kate-quilt I have. The patches aren't ordered in a chronological or sequential way. Instead, they come into their design based on vividness and colour. 

Here's just one patch, for instance: Kate's tenderness and her gentleness—towards dogs, towards other children, towards beloved adults, including her two godfathers. Brian and I have a framed photo on the mantelpiece of Kate, at two or three, brushing our late yellow Labrador Harper's paws with a pink doll brush while Harper, entirely in her thrall, watches, fascinated. 

Here's another: her athletic fearlessness—skimming over the waves up at the lake behind her father's boat, wet blonde hair flying behind her, laughing into the sun against the hard blue August sky, the embodiment of Ontario summer.

Still other patches: Kate giving a talk about LGBTQ rights to her class in, what, grade eight? Grade nine? My immense and overwhelming pride in her upon hearing that it had been well received by her classmates and the teacher, thinking Of course it was well received—she's brilliant and she has a social conscience and she's not even sixteen yet. 

And others still: Kate taking up long-distance canoeing with a vengeance, joining the line of a family tradition that spans several generations—a very Canadian tradition at that. Kate running. Kate swimming. Kate skiing. Kate baking, Kate reading, Kate exploring the possibilities of her own life in discussions with Uncle Brian—her other godfather—about careers and politics. 

Reading to Kate before bedtime on the nights I babysat; her eyelids fluttering and growing heavy in the moments before the book was put away and light was turned off. 

Kate painting a canoe paddle at camp as a gift for Brian and I five years ago, as a gift for our anniversary, blazoned with the legend "Thirty Years Of Love." 

The memories fall like snowflakes, all of a pattern but each one exquisitely unique. 

And yet, even as I run my mind along the soft surface of this quilt of patchwork memories, all I can think of is how many others there are, and that even if I listed those others, I'd only be conscious of how many I'd missed. 

Kate's parents are two of the people I love the most in the world, full stop. 

They gave us an incredible gift many, many years ago:  they made Brian and I members of their family. With no children of our own, we were invited to participate in the miracle of Kate and her brother Michael, my namesake, literally from birth. We were invited to love and be loved by those two children (neither of whom are children as of this writing) and to watch them grow in to the forces of nature they now are. 

Our lives have been shaped and enriched by that love. We are who we are today in part because of it. 

On this, the early morning of Tuesday, July 14th, 2020, my goddaughter, who is probably asleep, is legally an adult. That is a phrase that will naturally mean more to her than it does to me at this point. That's as it should be—I remember the feeling very well from my own eighteenth birthday: a sense that nothing had changed from the day before, but, also, that everything had changed.

But what's really changed is this: a brave, brilliant, fearless young woman is about to boldly stride into her own life and into the world.  She'll be taking everything she has been, and everything she is now, with her.  

The possibilities are literally limitless. 

I've wracked my brain for hours trying to sort out my feelings, because this is all so intoxicatingly bittersweet. 

Don't get me wrong—it's absolutely sweet. But time carries weight, and to deny that weight is to deny how we experience memory itself. And still, even with an ocean of pre-fab birthday platitudes at my disposal for moments like this, I can't even imagine what to say to her besides Happy Birthday. 

Or else, I could say this: I could thank her for the glorious mosaic of the years spent watching her reach this moment.  I could tell her that she's extraordinary, and that I believe she'll live an important life, and that I believe that she, and women like her, will change the world. I could tell her that I'm prouder of her than she could even dream, and that she has been a source of inspiration since the first moment I held her in my arms, and that she is even more of one today. 

I could tell her how much I wish I could be with her today, and how bitterly I resent the degree to which COVID-19 has made travel impossible, denying us the chance to celebrate this milestone with her in person. 

And I could tell her that one of the reasons I can afford to dream of the greatness she'll achieve, and the love and joy she'll find in the years to come, is that I can still feel that tiny, perfect warm hand in mine. 

I can feel it tonight, as I write this.  I'll feel it tomorrow. I'll feel it forever. 

Riding the Peace Train

The thing about the interiority imposed by self-quarantine, particularly for a freelancer, is the loss (or at least the reduction) in daily markers. I used to joke that weekends for a freelance writer just meant a day when FedEx didn't deliver. The concept of a "weekend" exists only in relation to our intersection with the lives of "normal" people. Saturday and Sunday were two days to work on a deadline when we knew an editor wasn't going to be calling and wondering why whatever we were working on wasn't on their desk yet.

Before the self-quarantine, I used my husband's getting to, and coming home from, the office as a marker of not only time, but of days of the week.

Much like the timbre of light in the sky or "morning sounds" vs. "evening sounds," or Beckett's feeding and walking schedule, his movements through the tunnels of air that make up our days ad night have always been a reliable way to keep track of time. But of course, for the foreseeable future, I'm going to have use an alarm clock and an agenda like everyone else.

Now that he's working at home too, it's like having two freelancers under the roof instead of just one. I'm not sure what I think of that, not that it matters. It just is what it is.

I just went downstairs and made an offhand remark about how I couldn't believe it was Friday again already. He informed me that it was, in fact, Saturday.

So, I apologize to the editor I emailed earlier about a pending deadline in an attempt to get everything tidied up before "the weekend"—which was clearly already here. Sorry darling, my bad. Entirely.

In the past few days I've been revisiting the music I've loved.

In 2010, when I was writing my first novel, Enter, Night, which is set in 1972, I submersed myself in everything of the era I could find—I read the magazines, I smelled the scents (yes, I found bottles of 70s-era perfumes on Ebay, both to evoke memories of the time and to add to the my inner mental map of the character of Christina Parr, the female protagonist) and I listened to the music.

I loaded up my iPod with everything from pop and folk to the metal of the time. Some of it was an enjoyable revisiting of my earliest musical discoveries. Some of it was pure work—I won't need to listen to Deep Purple's Machine Head again until I decide to tackle a sequel to Enter, Night. But at the end of the day, it was about immersion in an an era in the service of the writing of my first novel. And when it was over and the book was written, I just put it away and went back to my real life, and my real life's tastes.

This past week, I've been felt drawn to some of that old music again. It started with a re-listen of some Joan Baez. I've always loved the gritty earnestness of her voice, particularly in songs like "Diamonds and Rust."

From there, I gravitated to Janis Ian's Between The Lines, still probably my favourite album of all time.  The phrase "soundtrack of my life" is a woefully overused one, but in this case I have to cop to it. I can place myself emotionally in every song of that album. It's the easiest route to memories of heartbreak, of feelings of inadequacy, of yearning for love, of being convinced that love was something for other people, for "girls with clear-skinned smiles, who married once and then retired," as well as for "normal" kids, among whose number I could often not find a place for myself.

Two days ago, it was Carole King and her Tapestry album, which features her version of her song "You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman." Like most people with a pulse, I am devoted to the Aretha Franklin version, which I consider the pinnacle recording of this song. But at my school in Switzerland in 1974, all the American girls who were my friends had this album, and it's as evocative of that time in my life as the scent of their Love's Fresh Lemon cologne.

Last night, I lit a fire in the fireplace, made a pot of mint tea, and indulged myself in a watercolour wash of Judy Collins' pellucid voice, a voice that still seems like a miracle half a decade later.

Today—Saturday, not Friday—has been all about Cat Stevens, aka Yusuf Islam.

In 1970, my American grandparents bought transistor radios for my brother and I, with cases in two different shades of grey to make them easy to distinguish. My parents were obsessed with the idea that my brother and I would fight over things. When we fought, it was very rarely over an object, and I don't ever recall the radios being an issue.

His was a darker grey, mine was a light graphite, and we never swapped.

How well I remember the nights of falling asleep listening to the miracle issuing from the tiny leather-encased box on my pillow. I was seven, and I believed all the music I was listening to was being recorded live down at the local radio station. (The discovery that the songs were all on records was both thrilling and devastating—I was thrilled that they were available in shops, but devastated to realize that rock stars weren't all visiting downtown Ottawa for the evening.)

"Wild World" haunted me. Even at seven, I recognized that someone was very, very sad to be saying goodbye. The first few times I listened to the song, I wept a bit at the thought of the loss. Upon later listenings, I was both attracted and repelled by the idea of a "wild world" where "a lot of nice things turn bad out there." But, ever the optimist, I focussed on the fact that love was driving this sad goodbye, and if someone could love the girl in question to hope she "has a lot of nice clothes to wear" and "makes a lot of nice friends out there," then it was probably all going to work out for the best in the long run, and always being remembered as "a child, girl" clearly wasn't a bad thing, particularly from my point of view as an actual child.

Later, in 1974, when Dad was at the U.N. and we were living in Geneva, I met Nancy, the American girl who was hired by my parents as a babysitter. I wrote about Nancy in the Huffington Post (you can click the blue link and read the essay "For My Sister On Her Birthday) in 2016, as well as in some of my non-fiction books.

From a chance cancellation by our usual babysitter came possibly the earliest defining relationship of my life. Plainly speaking, I adopted her as a big sister, and she adopted me back.  Forty-six years later, the only adjustment to that relationship has been a deep patina of shared experiences and shared love that has only grown in the four and a half decades since that fateful night.

We spoke this afternoon about how each of us were handling the self-imposed quarantine on opposite sides of the continent. As the conversation went on I was reminded again, as I so often have been over the years, how permeable the veil of time is when two people have our history.

When I listen to "Tea for the Tillerman" as I did this afternoon—an album Nancy owned, and one to which she introduced me—that's her for me. Music, like scent, is a time machine. It's a temporal barrier-breaker. I close my eyes and I'm sitting on he bedroom floor with my eyes closed, listening to the music flow over me, igniting my imagination like a fuse, feeling loved, feeling safe, and feeling connected.

And all the while, the music was writing itself into my history.

Nancy could play the guitar, and eventually she learned "Father and Son." We sang it together. Being Nancy—a young woman of incomparable patience, and possessed of a wry sense of humour—she allowed me to sing the third-verse background parts of both the father and the son, though by rights I should have only been allowed to sing one or the other.

This week, as an adult revisiting that personal soundtrack, I find that this music still has the power to map my life. My life today. It feels almost miraculous  It doesn't make me feel younger to revisit it, to connect the various threads that bind this music to the memories of my life, but it certainly makes me feel present in my life now. Present, and grateful.

In an moment as uncertain as the one in which we find ourselves right now, that's pure gold.

If these songs were a dream, I'd want to linger a bit longer before waking up.

Good morning, April

Spring is as close as the Early Snow Glories bordering the front walk. It's coming, whatever else is going on in the world. Like a coquette, it demands to be fêted and admired. I'm happy to oblige.

The View From Inside

And here we are, on the first perfect day of spring, and we're inside, looking out. It's a glorious afternoon. The flowers in the graveyard where I walk Beckett every day are making shy debuts.  The air is soft, for the first time in months. The earth is waking up slowly, stretching, and even smiling in the newly-yellow sunlight.

Last year at this time, I would have been outdoors all day—walking the dog of course, but also maybe shopping, or meeting friends for dinner after a day of writing, or going to the gym, or walking through the University of Toronto campus, which is always rich with memories for me at this time of year. Or wandering around downtown, marvelling at how much healthier and happier everyone looks in spring. Or any number of other things that I previously took for granted.

Freedom of movement, freedom of interaction, freedom of association. Freedom to hug someone, or to kiss their cheek. Freedom to let children pet Beckett in the park while I exchange pleasantries about the weather with their mothers and fathers, as neighbours do.

This past March, I published a short story in a groundbreaking anthology edited by Matt Bechtel called The Dystopian States of America. Some of the finest horror writers in the business set themselves to the task of sketching fiction about life under the current regime in the United States, or its aftermath. It's not an optimistic collection by any reckoning, but neither was it intended to be prophetic, and yet here we are, trying to remain indoors while a virus that appears to defy science is literally ravaging the world.

What we are asked to do is stay at home and restrict contact with others. It's not much.

Those of us who have the privilege and the luxury of being able to do that have, to my mind, even more of a moral obligation to do so. Inexplicably, some of us find this an impossibility. Even as I look out this window, I see children playing in the schoolyard across the street. I see groups of people sauntering past on the sidewalk as though it was the spring of 2005, not the spring of 2020, and I wonder what in God's name it's going to take for people to take this seriously.

I think of my many young friends in the restaurant industry who were barely making do before, and who now have no income to speak of. I think of the teachers who are learning new ways to teach, pretty much making it up as they go along. I think of the doctors and nurses who literally put their lives on the line every time they go to work, trying to save people who may or may not have laughed off the urgings of politicians and medical professionals to stay home.

I'm fortunate to have my husband at home with me now. His work has proved to be surprisingly mobile, and it has allowed him to turn his home office into command central. Ironically, we're spending more time together of late than we ever have in the 35 years we've been married. The fact that we each have home offices means we're not on top of each other, and are in no danger of killing each other. I like to hear his voice behind his office door, and I love the sound of his muffled laughter. After three and a half decades, my heart still flutters when I hear it.

When I was a child, people said I was "too sensitive," which was turned into the ultimate derision when adults used just the right tone of voice. It meant I felt things too deeply, or took things too personally, or too seriously, and that I was too "emotional." It was all code for "feminine"—the worst, most lethal insult that could be thrown at a boy in the late-60s and 70s.

It's taken more than half a century, and some excellent therapy, to realize that being "overly sensitive" (what does "overly" mean, anyway?) isn't my problem, it's my strength. It  allows me to feel the empathy required to write what I write, and to love as I do.

But yeah, there's a cost, particularly during these days of the new plague. Like many of us, I feel all of this. And I'm frightened, as most of us are, even as I'm genuinely optimistic.

I'm taking care of the people around me. I'm reading books I'd put off reading, and watching some excellent television. I'm working on a new book of my own, and finalizing the details of a potential film adaptation of one of my novels from a brilliant indie director in Los Angeles, of whose work I have been a fan for years.

I'm writing cards and letters by hand, and reaching out to friends with whom I've been out of touch. I'm focussing on love, forgiveness, and kindness, because our thoughts become our character more than ever in a dark time.

The other day someone reached out to me from Rosedale United Church, a church I attend less frequently now than I'd like, but for whom I have great affection and solid, joyful memories of winters of volunteering at a homeless shelter. Other friends have called or written, and I find myself sending and receiving more DMs than usual on Facebook. One of my beloved sisters-of-the-heart sent flowers the other day, with likely the most incomplete sense of how much joy and colour they brought me.

Social media—so often a nightmare world populated by vindictiveness and the wanton destruction of lives—has become a lifeline: a virtual phone-tree. It reminds us that we're not alone.

I don't watch the news anymore, because I already know the situation and it's like wallowing, naked and wet, in a bathtub full of broken glass. If something happens, pro or con, I'll hear about it. I don't have any profound, philosophical insights to share about life under COVID-19 self-quarantine, so I'm just going along as best I can, trying to help out whenever I can.

And staying home.

But it I have one takeaway, it's this familiar one: love and kindness are never wasted. Also, that you never know how blessed you are, or how much you take for granted, until it is taken away from you, either by force or circumstance.

When this is over, and it will be over, that will be my new life mantra.

Be kind to each other. We'll get through this together, one way or another.

Vampire Camp

Originally published in Quill & Quire, October, 2011


In the fall of 1972, the Holy Grail for my friends and me was a Saturday afternoon bike ride to the Kilborn Shoppers confectionary in our Ottawa neighbourhood of Alta Vista. On the spiral magazine rack by the window were the horror comic books and paperback horror novels, some of which I still own, lovingly tucked away in boxes the way other people might save sports ribbons or Wolf Cub badges. We’d pay our 20 cents, bicycle home, and barricade ourselves in our rooms and thrill to the perpetual Halloween that awaited us between those garish covers, especially the vampire comics like The Tomb of Dracula or Vampire Tales. 

In my late forties, I’ve been amazed and delighted by the number of writers  working in and out of the horror genre that share these particular cultural touchpoints. Last year I interviewed Benjamin Percy, a brilliant literary writer regarded by many critics as a young prince of American letters. Percy is a good 10 years younger than me, but still – like feral children speaking a private language – it took no time at all to discover that he was a classic horror nerd, with many of the same points of reference. The horror genre is the ultimate democracy.

            
As a writer, though, making the leap to horror (in my case from literary non-fiction and essays) hasn’t been without some amusing bumps along the way.

            
Try telling your friends or literary colleagues that you’re writing a vampire novel and watch their reactions – from the gleeful (“Ooooh, I love Twilight!”) to the snobbish (“Really? Why on earth?) to the mercantile (“Vampires are so hot right now! Is it going to be a series?”).

            
Then try explaining that you’re not writing about “sexy” vampires, that what you’re working on isn’t a “vampire romance,” but a good old-fashioned undead horror show set in a small northern Ontario mining town, with vampires that have the requisite old-school preoccupations – an aversion to crucifixes, a taste for shape-shifting. The kind that don’t “glitter” in the sunlight, but might explode into fire and stinking ash and smoke. The kind that sleep in coffins and caves, not penthouse apartments. The kind that don’t attend high school and hang with beautiful, sensitive, lonely outcasts, but who might happily eat one of them for dinner, and not in a nice way, either. And no, it can’t be a series, because the body count is too high.

            
Bless them, they usually don’t get it, but that’s okay. That’s the price of writing a vampire novel in the age of Stephenie Meyer, Inc.

            
My vampires are the Hammer Films vampires: Christopher Lee as Count Dracula, towering in the shadows at the top of the long stone staircase in Horror of Dracula, or Robert Tayman as Count Mitterhouse in Vampire Circus, terrorizing the Serbian village of Stattel. Or even Robert Quarry as Count Yorga, Vampire, sashaying through the corridors of his Los Angeles mansion in his waist-length cape like an undead Liberace in the company of his garishly made-up brides.

            
They’re the shockingly articulate, aristocratic vampires of Marvel Comics’ The Tomb of Dracula and Vampire Tales. They’re the Victorian vampires of Bram Stoker’s eponymous Dracula, the novel I read when I was 11 and never mistook for a “dark romance.” They’re Mr. Barlow, and the American vampires of Salem’s Lot.

            
I was a comic book kid back before they were called “graphic novels,” back when they were still considered something that would rot your brain, but even my ex-schoolteacher mother was impressed with the writing. 

            
So yeah, I’m old. 

            
But that’s okay, because writing my vampire novel, Enter, Night, was a bit like travelling back in time to a pre-Botox era, one where properly undead things slept during the day and rose up from their graves at night and sucked the life from your veins and didn’t try to become your bf4EvR 

            
Over the course of the writing, I listened to the music of the era, re-read the comics and the novels (some execrable) with the eyes of a professional writer, some holding up remarkably well) and re-watched a raft of 1970s horror films on DVD. I trolled eBay for vintage fragrances that might evoke scent memory, and vintage magazines that my parents might have had lying around the house in 1972. And I pored over boxes of pictures and school yearbooks. 

As a student at the rugged St. John’s Cathedral Boy’s School in Selkirk, Manitoba, I’d paddled approximately 2,200 miles through the wildernesses of northern Ontario and western Canada. The pure gothic beauty of Canadian badlands had imprinted itself on my teenage mind. That gorgeous isolation came surging back in the creation of the fictional mining town of Parr’s Landing and the people in it. By setting the novel in Canada —by finding our very own Transylvania in the forests and cliffs around Lake Superior and shading it with what could be considered gothic and grotesque in our history as Canadians. I brought the vampires of my 1970s childhood home.  

            
Best of all, I got to revisit the place where it will always be a cold October Saturday afternoon in 1972, and I’m flying through a cloud of windborne autumn leaves on the wings of a Schwinn banana bike and my own imagination. Not a bad place to have begun the journey of my own writer’s life so many years ago, as it turns out.  

            
All gold, no “glitter.” No offense, Edward. You’re scary too.

Statement on the Allegations of Racism by Chesya Burke

In the spring of 2013,  I posted a thread on my Facebook page addressing the media takedown of southern celebrity chef Paula Deen. 

The gist and intent of the thread was that the opprobrium being meted out to Paula Deen, a woman, was not commensurate with the opprobrium being meted out to white male celebrities in comparable circumstances, such as Don Imus, who had made reference to “n*ppy headed hoes” in a television interview. 

My premise was that this was due to sexism, ageism, and classism—in Deen’s case, because she was an older woman whose image was frequently mocked, derided and lampooned as representing a rural, regional, working class background that is often the butt of jokes. 

It was not in any way a defense of Paula Deen herself, nor a negation of the accusations of racism levelled at her. 

I also pointed out that, as a queer person, I was tired of hearing male rappers, and football players of any race, using words like “f*ggot” and “q*eer” as slurs, and that I would likewise genuinely welcome a pillorying of the next gay man who used the word “tr*nny.” And I said that what Paula Deen had said was both offensive and stupid, and that the Food Network was entirely right in firing her.  

At one point, Chesya Burke, whom I did not know at that time, having only recently accepted a friend request from her, joined the conversation. She was justifiably outraged at any perceived defense of Paula Deen, and said so, passionately. 

Earlier, the Supreme Court had struck down DOMA, but LGBTQ people were still not allowed to marry in all states, and could still be fired from their jobs or evicted from their homes, unlike any other minority in America.

This was still very raw and fresh in my mind at the time, and informed the later tone of my discussion with Ms. Burke. 

At that point, I wrongly engaged in a “misery comparison” argument, pitting homophobia against racism, that, in retrospect, was both unhelpful and disrespectful to the gravity of the topic, and Ms. Burke’s position itself. 

Ms. Burke asked why we were now talking about gay rights, and I replied that we were talking about it because of the hierarchy of slurs, and how some slurs resulted in severe opprobrium while others were given a pass. I posited that because of Ms. Deen’s age and gender, and celebrity culture in general, this had turned into “a feeding frenzy based on it being an extremely lazy way to feel good about fighting racism without doing anything at all.”

Ms. Burke suggested that I was defending Paula Deen, which I again denied, reiterating that, in the media, “this has stopped being about what Paula Deen may or may not have said, and is now about what Paula Deen represents in a cartoon sense,” and that “a mob mentality has taken over.”

I wrote (without abbreviations or asterisks) about the word Paula Deen was accused of using:

“Do I defend the use of the word ‘n*gger?’Not remotely. Do I agree with the people who are saying, ‘Well, black people use the word ‘n*gger,’ why can’t I? No. Quite the opposite. I disagree vehemently. As a friend of mind said, ‘I can call myself a f*ggot, and so can my gay friends. Straight people can’t.’ [The n-word] is not an across the board word."

I did not use the word to, with regard to, or about Ms. Burke, as was alleged—or indeed any other African American person—nor did I use it "at least 50 times" on the thread as was also alleged, and I used quotation marks around the word in each instance, both to indicate that I was quoting someone else, and in order to make it clear that the word was not being used or endorsed by me, and was, in fact repellent to me, and that I was using it here exclusively as it pertained to the discussion at hand regarding the hierarchy of slurs, and in denunciation of the toxicity of racist language. 

That said, I should never have spelled out the word at all—I should have used asterisks, or some other way of shielding the word in the discussion. 

I should have considered the impact my use of the word would have on Ms. Burke as a WOC, and I should never have used it more than once over the course of our interaction.  

The consistent position I had held prior to 2013 was that shielding any slur with asterisks gave cover to its offensiveness, by allowing readers to experience the slur while evading the experience of its deeply ugly impact, and thereby diluting the slur's impact and capacity for dehumanization.  

When I read Ms. Burke’s first blog post about our encounter, I was horrified by  how I  had come across to her in our interaction.

More importantly, I was abruptly aware that my position on spelling out slurs was a one of eye-watering and quite obvious white privilege, and that just because I, as a white queer person, had found a way to cope with the terrible, dehumanizing slurs used about me and others like me, still others justifiably find the ones used about them to be acidic and destructive, and indeed devastating to read in print. 

I also regret my occasionally condescending tone to her in our exchanges on that thread. Over the years I have cultivated an online delivery in some of my posts and comments that has not served me well. As a wise friend recently pointed out, the one who loses their temper first is the one who loses the argument.

Reading her 2013 blog about our encounter began a six-year process of reaching out to, and seeking guidance from, POC friends and colleagues about the power of those words, and how, exactly, I, as a white person, should use them—if ever. 

In the time since that encounter, I have been humbled by, and grateful to, those many, many generous POC friends for helping me understand, and especially for their patience in helping me understand the degree to which there is a hierarchy of oppression, and that anti-LGBTQ oppression and the oppression of POC is not the same thing—and how acknowledging that fact is central to successful intersectionality and reconciliation.

I have also been grateful to writers of colour for their work, which is not only essential to our genre, but also essential to non-POC writers to understanding how to better make room for the genre to grow. 

One of the books I treasured most  during the journey was Ms. Burke’s Let’s Play White, which I cited in an unpublished interview earlier this fall as teaching me about the perils of white privilege—including my own. 

I met Ms. Burke at Readercon in 2013, some weeks after our encounter on Facebook. I apologized, and told her how much I regretted the tone our interaction had taken, and how much I admired her passion and her activism. It was a cordial encounter. 

I still do, and I am deeply sorry for the pain and insult my words caused her in 2013. 

She deserved better, both as both a WOC and as a literary colleague. 

I have loathed the concept of white supremacy and racism my whole life—not only the overt and obvious racism we see around us everywhere, but the more insidious kind of structural, ingrained racism that has elevated white people at the expense of POC,  traces of which are unavoidable in those of us of white colonial descent, whether we think it’s there or not, and whether or not we believe we have benefitted from it, or whether we're actively aware of it. 

We have all benefitted, period.

Both my social media footprint and my published nonfiction work bears out my fervent hatred of racial oppression, and indeed my loathing of the oppression and exploitation of vulnerable and marginalized groups of all kinds by the wealthy and powerful. 

Aside from everything else, this conversation has refocused me on my ongoing, very imperfect life journey to becoming the sort of ally that POC and other marginalized groups need—and deserve. 

Thank you for reading this.

Michael Rowe