Not going there, thanks

I've noticed a trend in my social media feed, of people slipping back down into a spiral of sadness and depression because of the turn the virus has taken this holiday season. I am going to resist the suck of that particular undertow with every fibre of my being. This is not 2020. This is not the winter of desolation. This is a winter of vaccines, and a new strain that is not the Delta variant. This is a winter of memories of reunions this summer and fall, and how good they felt, and planning new ones. This is a winter of masks, and respect for each other's space and safety. This is a winter of not only seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, but also of realizing that the distance is really just a short jaunt. This is a winter of life, not death. This is not a winter of fearing that the world is ending and that there's no point of any of it. Anyone who knows me knows that I am the least negativist of all the creatures in Christendom. In my last life, I was a stout, no-nonsense Maritime fishwife living on a rock in the middle of the Atlantic with my ten children, and a husband who was always away on the boats, and with no time for codswallop and jackanapes. So yeah, no. Fuck you, Omicron. And fuck you, anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers. We've got your number. What I'm sad about this Christmas is missing my Palm Springs family, period, but also knowing (not hoping) that next year we'll be together again. The only thing that's going to kill me this holiday season is too much eggnog. 

TBT: Signing some copies, 2013

TBT: Signing some copies of Wild Fell at Chapters, in St. Boniface, Manitoba, December, 2013. 

The previous evening, we'd had a launch an a reading at McNally Robinson in Winnipeg. That afternoon, I'd done a Q&A at a beautiful Native centre. It was an absolutely wonderful couple of days full of old friends, and new friends of the work. One of the hosts of the Q&A made a comment about how cold it must be for me, "being from Toronto." 

I told him I'd spent four years at boarding school in Manitoba in the 1970s, when the average daily temperature was -40. I told him I found the temperature that day brisk and pleasant, which, I think, impressed him.

My father in winter, with Sarah

 

I took this picture of my father and my stepmother, Sarah Doughty, in September of 2016, on my last visit with my father in Victoria, B.C. I treasure it: you can see the love and caring in her face, and the utter trust in his. The sun had just come out from behind the low clouds and filled his room with radiance. 

So much of his memory had been erased by then—in some moments, he was still the diplomat who spoke of behalf of Canada at the United Nations. In other moments, he was my father. In yet other moments, he was a frightened, confused child-man whom I longed to gather in my arms and protect. 

The cruelty of his illness notwithstanding, it had also given each of us the gift his forgetting anything about our occasionally strained father and son relationship except the literal present, the here and now. All that was left was love and wonder. 

My father died the following summer, in 2017. We lost Sarah last week. 

So many of my friends have had disappointing evil stepmother stories—I have none. This elegant, gracious, intelligent, stoic Englishwoman gave my father his life back after the loss of my mother. Sarah never tried to replace my mother; she treated my brother and I with respect from the start, and with love right up to the end.  

While he was alive, Sarah frequently acted as a buffer between my father and I when either of us became abrasive to the other. In his last years, she smoothed a path so that my last memories of him are profoundly sweet ones. 

I will miss her humour and her kindness, and I'm grateful to have had the privilege of her presence in my life. She taught me a great deal without ever intending to. 

She's free of pain now, and that alone is a reason for joy, not tears. The heart however is illogical that way. The tears come and go of their own volition. But they're for my loss, not her free flight. 

Rest well, beauty. And thank you for staying here on earth with us awhile.  

Tasting a gust of wind

Without undue judgement, I admit that I'm baffled by folks who walk their dogs while wearing earbuds or headphones. When Beckett and I walk, it's a communion. I live for the way he smells everything, for the little grunts he sometimes makes, for the moments when he stops and throws his head back to taste a gust of wind with his eyes closed. We feel each other on our respective ends of the leash. There's literally nowhere else I'd want to be during that hour, and nothing I want to listen to but Beckett experiencing another day.

First publication, December 1977

 

TBT: My first national publication was this poem in 'TEEN magazine, in December 1977, when I was fifteen. I'd written it the previous summer. Like so many other "firsts" at that age, you never, ever forget the first time. On a Sunday night in early November I was at the bus terminal waiting for the chartered bus to take us back to school. The December issue of 'TEEN was there on the rack, like this was just any other day. The title was in bright pink letters. The model was Lindsey Erwin. I reached for it. My hands were shaking. I opened it to the page indicated on the table of contents. In spite of the acceptance letter that had arrived in October—on mint-green paper with the 'TEEN logo in darker green letters at the top, all the way from Los Angeles—right up until the moment I found my poem in the magazine, with my picture and my name, I was 100% sure it wasn't going to be there. It was too much to be true, even at the point. But it was, and it's one of the happiest memories of my adolescence, that "first." There have been others over the years since then—first magazine article, first cover story, first book, first award, first actual fan letter—but that moment at the magazine stand, on that dark December Sunday night, was holy.

George

I remember so vividly when John Kennedy, Jr.'s George magazine launched in the fall of 1995. There was still a sense of optimism in politics, with none of the scorched-earth nihilism we take for granted as a daily reality today. The notion of engaging everyday people in the political culture was a positive thing—pre-Facebook, pre-Twitter—and Tucker Carlson was still a cute, non-toxic libertarian media star in khakis and a bow tie; more like George Will's son than Hitler's grandson. While there's no point in crying over the very dark path popular culture has taken, and while there's no way to rekindle that specific spark of pre-9/11 optimism, it's maybe worth looking back and trying to remember what it felt like, so we can watch for it, and fan it, if it ever comes around again.
 

World AIDS Day

Today is World AIDS Day. In the summer of 1992, when I was doing a summer writing workshop in Cambridge, MA, I met John Preston, an acclaimed journalist, author, anthologist, and tireless activist for LGBT rights, when I interviewed him at home Portland, Maine. We became friends. He formally named me and two other writers as literary protégés that December, forcing me to legitimize my identity as a writer in my own mind, which is where such legitimacy always has to start. He published my early essays in handsome hardcover anthologies, and impressed upon me the responsibility to someday nurture and mentor young writers in my turn. I took this picture of him with Joan Nestle in Boston in October, 1993 for the dustjacket of Sister and Brother: Lesbians and Gay Men Write About Their Lives Together (HarperCollins, 1994) which also included my essay "Alex." He died in April 1994 of complications relating to AIDS. I remember John Preston every December 1st, and I speak his name aloud—with gratitude, inspiration, joy, sorrow, and with love. Speak all their names.

American Thanksgiving memory: Paris, 1981

 

One of the happiest American Thanksgivings I ever spent was in 1981. The exquisite American Church in Paris has an annual Thanksgiving dinner—I was 19, and it was my first year out of high school. I was thrilled to be in Paris, participating in that magical era, but also homesick. The church, with its glorious Louis Comfort Tiffany stained-glass windows became a regular haunt of mine. It served as a bridge connecting various nexuses of my childhood and my future, and the expats there were kind and welcoming. When I left Paris and returned to Ottawa, I arranged for a hymnal to be placed in the nave in memory of a classmate who'd drowned in the Red River at the end of our senior year. My profound love for, and identification with, Americans has deep, deep roots, starting with my American-born mother and our American family on her side; the years I spent going to school side-by-side with American kids; and, of course, later years writing for American political publications as a journalist. But even with all of that, 40 years later, what I can still remember, aside from the familiarity of it all, is the warmth of the welcome I received that Thanksgiving day in Paris, in such sharp contrast to the cold November rain outside on the Quai d'Orsay.

Transgender Day of Remembrance, 2021

This Transgender Day of Remembrance, I'm struck by two cruel realities—not only that this has been the deadliest year on record for murdered transgender or gender-variant individuals, but that the phrase "deadliest year," in this context, has been used with such chilling regularity, year after year. I'm immensely fortunate to have a blog that is read by so many compassionate, intelligent, forward thinking people. In a very real sense, I'm preaching to the choir here. That said, I beg every person reading this post tonight to reach inside and bring forth an extra measure of that compassion, intelligence, and forward thought, and re-commit to changing the world for our transgender brothers, sisters, and non-binary family. We don't need to "understand" transgender issues in order to put ourselves between a vulnerable trans or non-binary person and hostility or violence. All we need is empathy. We don't need to "accept" or be completely "comfortable" with gender variance to speak up when a trans person is used as the punchline for an obscenely unfunny "joke," or as offal "humour" fed to raucous crowds by millionaire comedians out of a payday. All we need is baseline human love, and an awareness of how poisoning the social climate in order to "other" certain groups has led to violence, murder, even genocide, throughout human history. Be kind, even when it might be more fun to be cruel. Just because we can get away with it doesn't mean it's right, or that someone else won't pay a terrible price in the long run. Don't roll your eyes at days like Transgender Day of Remembrance. All over the world tonight, and most nights, people are reliving the loss of beautiful souls they've known and loved—souls whose only reason for extinction was being born different, and being unable, or unwilling, to be something they aren't. Peace to all those who suffer tonight, and comfort to all the bereaved and the mourning.

Dad and Princey

 

Dad and Princey, 1971. I saw a Norwegian Elkhound in the park today, and I was unaccountably moved. They're rare in the city, and Prince was my first dog, and the first dog I ever loved. It sent my mind down a wandering path this evening. There comes a point in all our lives when we can touch memories of loss that used to cause us sadness, but now just give us a sense of gratitude to have been allowed us to experience them; and a sort of gentle, if wistful, transcendent peace.

Ruby Bridges

 

On this day in 1960, six-year old Ruby Bridges desegregated her school in the company of armed federal marshals, and faced a ravening mob of white adults, as well as children, calling her unspeakable names no six-year old should have to hear, and waving unspeakable signs no six-year old should ever have to see. I know sixty-year olds that don't have the grace and dignity she had on the first day of first grade.

Forthcoming publication news: Nate Gowdy's Insurrection

I'm thrilled to share the news of the forthcoming December publication of Insurrection by the brilliant young Seattle-based photojournalist Nate Gowdy, with an Introduction by yours truly. The book is a powerful photo essay of what he saw on January 6th, 2021 while shooting the riot for Rolling Stone. Gowdy's work has appeared in numerous international venues including CNN, Die Zeit, Fisheye, Al-Jazeera, The Huffington Post, Mashable, Mother Jones, Vice, and the cover of TIME. Earlier this fall I was invited to write an introductory essay for the book. I readily agreed. Given my longstanding admiration for his work, I would be tempted to call it a "dream collaboration," except it isn't really a collaboration at all: like the best photojournalism, Gowdy's work has always told a resonant, sometimes frightening American story without the benefit of any words. I was honoured to be asked to contribute mine. That said, after a decade of focusing primarily on fiction, I confess I enjoyed returning to my professional roots as a journalist, essayist, and political culture critic in the service of this beautiful visual record of one of the darkest days in recent American history.

Ten-year anniversary of Enter, Night

A cherished memory from 10 years ago tonight—signing Enter, Night, my just-published first novel, at McNally-Robinson in Winnipeg on the night of November 11th, 2011. Having gone to school outside Winnipeg, it was very nearly a homecoming, and it was absolutely a reunion with many loved ones.

Viola Desmond arrest anniversary

 

On this day in 1946, beautician and entrepreneur Viola Desmond was arrested for refusing to leave the whites-only section of the Roseland movie theatre in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. In 2018, Ms. Desmond's fight for her civil rights was celebrated on the Canadian $10 bill, the face of which she remains today.

Indigenous Veterans Day, 2021

In advance of Remembrance Day, which is Thursday, today is Indigenous Veterans Day. Naturally, on social media, the question "Why do we need a separate Remembrance Day for Natives?" has already been passive-aggressively asked more than once already. I suspect one answer might be that it's not "separate," it's complementary. And it seems particularly worthwhile to set aside a day to honour veterans whom many non-Native Canadians, with no discernible irony, thought of as something less than "Canadian," but who still courageously, and with valour, fought, bled, and died for Canada, in war upon war, anyway.