Iconic Women & Grouching Around
June 2023
I spent the month of June mostly thinking about wildfire smoke and Canadian women over sixty-five. Huge month for both. I have nothing novel to say about the smoke, it just felt intense, man. “Heavy heavens,” you know?
As for Canadian women! First, Olivia Chow became the mayor of Toronto, which was a somewhat surprising and actually nice thing to happen to our city after long-reigning neoliberal austerity ghoul John Tory resigned amid a classic cheating-on-his-wife-with-much-younger-staff-member snooze-fest. I’m ashamed to admit I know next to nothing about party politics, but I have known of and respected Chow since childhood — she was married to the late Jack Layton and the two are known together as Pride-marching, bike-riding, housing-first baddies. I don’t envy her the job of untangling the mess that’s been made of our town, but I’m glad she gets to try. I stayed up late and watched Chow’s victory speech and cried my eyes out, allowing myself to savour a good guy winning for once.
Also the incredible sex educator Sue Johanson, who’s local cable Sunday Night Sex Show I watched a ton of growing up, passed away June 28th leaving an absolutely sick legacy of straight-forwardly helping Canada, and later the US, talk about sex. She gave a talk at my high school and I remember feeling hyped and empowered after she demonstrated (with pantyhose if memory serves?) just how profoundly stretchy and indestructible a vagina is. Rest in power, Sue.
Finally, I happened to re-read Alice Munro’s entry in my collected Paris Review Art of Fiction interviews in the first week of June and it changed my whole month if not my whole life, as per below.
Writing:
A flashback: when I finished grad school one thousand years ago, my dear friend Allison and I went on a trip to Scotland together. We took a bus tour into the highlands, then abandoned the tour and booted around up there on our own for a bit. By and large it was rhapsodically fun, the moss-green humps of land and fog-shrouded lochs breathtaking. We laughed our way around the Isle of Skye and beyond. But sometimes we got sick of being soaked and frozen to our cores by the near constant rain, felt homesick for vegetarian food aside from jacket potatoes, forgot a favourite teeshirt on a ferry to the Outer Hebrides, whatever. Allison has extremely keen intuition and emotional intelligence and had the good sense to coin the term “traveling low,” early in our trip. So when one of us felt shitty but embarrassed to feel shitty about blisters or a broken shoelace on the trip of a lifetime , we’d say, “You having a traveling low, bud?” Or, “Sorry, I’m going to lie quiet for an hour, I’m having a traveling low.” And the naming would make all the difference.
Back to June: I kicked off the month in a horrible depression. While the vagaries of hormones and portent of the smoke likely played a role, I knew that the depression was largely writing related. I alluded to novel difficulties in March and April, but by mid-May I was convinced I was once again crushing it. I audaciously told my therapist, “This month feels like what I’ve always imagined writing should feel like.” Well. If that line didn’t repeat itself in my head in an unkind, mocking tone in the weeks that followed.
End of May, I printed the pages I’d felt so good about, read with my pen poised for light line notes, and realized what I’d done was all wrong. No flow, no fun, made no sense. As I work through this second draft of the novel, I continue to use Heidi Reimer’s 1coaching program as scaffolding. She includes a flexible structuring model that divides the novel into three acts with four beats per act. The beat tripping me up opens Act 2, and is called “Illusion of Success.” A further kick in the teeth, quite frankly. I was fucking stuck. Again.
This is, of course, simply the way writing is — any of us who have done it know it. But this time around I have an extra triggering twang when this happens because, as I’ve mentioned before, the last manuscript I laboured over for more than my entire thirties ultimately failed. (I keep trying to come up with a softer word than “failed”; then having an internal dialectic about how maybe our society’s whole problem is its attachment to the negative valuation of failure; then back to the softer word search, then…nothing, so. Attempting to use “failure” in a value neutral way until further notice?) When I get stuck, a big panic part flares and is like, “Holy shit, it’s happening again, don’t do this to your life, jump ship, holy shiiiiiit!” In some ways it’s harder than ever for me to sit with the stuck.
But in some ways, thanks to the ten billion hours I put in on that failed book, it’s also so much easier. I have lots of brain-tracks to run about how the stuckness is part of it, the work is simply hard, the bumps will cede to smoothness again soon because past experience shows they always do. I also have tons of actual things to do to mitigate stuckness and its attendant low mood — exercise, walk around, hit a patio, write in my notebook directly about the stuckness or aimlessly, do something else completely — dishes, laundry you’re always there for me! — take a day off, stare at the screen and scroll, mentally intoning, “You’re working, this is work, really-really!” But at the top of June, the stuckness felt too protracted for my comfort; I was starting to mistrust my tracks and tricks, believe in inevitable failure, and attach very hard to failure’s value as bad.
During this first week of June I was searching for a Joan Didion quote2 for last month’s letter and happened upon the Alice Munro interview instead. Here are some things she says:
Often, in about three quarters of what I do, I reach a point somewhere, fairly early on, when I think I’m going to abandon this story. I get myself through a day or two of bad depression, grouching around.
…I spend the whole day in a very bad mood. That’s the only time I’m really irritable. If Gerry [her late husband] talks to me or keeps going in and out of the room or bangs around a lot, I am on edge and enraged. And if he sings or something like that, it’s terrible. I’m trying to think something through and I’m just running into brick walls; I’m not getting through it.
After about a week of running into these brick walls, finally abandoning the story and trying to work on something else, Munro typically gets it back:
…usually unexpectedly, when I’m in the grocery store or out for a drive. I’ll think, ‘Oh well, I have to do it from the point of view of so-and-so and I have to cut this character out, and of course these people are not married, or whatever. The big change, which is usually the radical change.
I don’t even know if it makes the story better. What it does is make it possible for me to continue to write.
I love all of that, but the part that shifted my life the most were those words “grouching around.”
Just like “traveling low” it gave what I was going through a name. “I’m just grouching around!” I told myself, miserable yet delighted, as I banged my head against my own brick walls during the next few days. And you know what? One day, seemingly all at once, but actually as a result of all the kicking and prodding and walking and scrolling and internal screaming I had done the last six or so weeks, I found the radical change. I was missing a key bit of sea creature information in Act One, and only once I wrote it out, made it clear to myself, could I continue with Act Two. So I did that.
Like Munro, I don’t know that this change makes the book better; that info may change or evolve in subsequent drafts. But it was the key I needed to turn to be able to produce sentences again. As soon as the radical change hit, I promptly fell asleep for twenty minutes as if bonked on the head, then woke up and wrote easily, fluidly, for two solid hours, depression gone. The change isn’t always as stark and dramatic as that, but the feeling was familiar all the same. And now I have a name for what happens in the run-up, a name that both validates the depression and makes it less serious all at once. Grouching around! For the rest of June, I frankly wrote like a boss, but I’m glad I have that phrase to serve me when I need it again.
Reading
It was a rough month for reading, I bounced around from book to book, not finishing much except:
Jen Beagin’s first novel, Pretend I’m Dead, which was fucking great. I watched this interview with her, too, and she’s so funny and cool irl.
The new George Saunders in the New Yorker and his attendant pieces on how he wrote it. It was relieving to read that the story had required seventy-five drafts, and also reignited my interest in surveying authors about how they define “a draft”? Maybe a forthcoming project? We’ll see!
I started but haven’t yet finished:
A re-read of Miriam Toews’ All My Puny Sorrows which I’d remembered as heart-breaking, but has been too much for my wildfire-smoked heart to read much at a time these days.
- ‘s forthcoming book No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating. Both being veggie freaks, Alicia and I have chatted online for a few years now. In equal measure as she is a trenchant, provocative writer and thinker, she’s also an incredibly generous, kind colleague. One day I hit her up for help as usual, this time thinking through some fake meat confusion that I want to write about soon. Within minutes she’d connected me to her publisher for a copy of her book that examines the topic. A mensch!
So far my favourite part of the book is Kennedy’s unpacking of the myth of veganism being a bougie white people thing, tracing histories of Black and Chinese Buddhist veganism in America, among others. Can’t wait to read the rest! The book comes out in August and it’s available for pre-order (pre-ordering helps authors out a great deal I hear).
Eating
I’m skipping this section in hopes of churning out a stand-alone thing soon about SUMMER FRUIT. Stay tuned!
Thank you for reading, and thank you SO MUCH to those who did my poll recently. The vast majority of voters said they read this whole thing in one day and to just let it be long. So I am and I appreciate it A LOT.
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Long-time listener, first-time caller. I always look forward to your newsletter 🤩, and this one did not disappoint.
In regards to grouching around—having just returned from Lisbon—I offer a hefty Pessoa quote to counter, or to perhaps, in unity, soothe another struggling writer or join in solidarity with writers who adopt heteronyms to weather the cursed “block”:
“One day, on March 8, 1914 – I found myself standing before a tall chest of drawers, took up a piece of paper, began to write, remaining upright all the while since I always stand when I can. I wrote thirty some poems in a row, all in a kind of ecstasy, the nature of which I shall never fathom. It was the triumphant day of my life, and I shall never have another like it. I began with a title, The Keeper of Sheep. And what followed was the appearance of someone within me to whom I promptly assigned the name of Alberto Caeiro. Please excuse the absurdity of what I am about to say, but there had appeared within me, then and there, my own master. It was my immediate sensation. So much so that, with those thirty odd poems written, I immediately took up another sheet of paper and wrote as well, in a row, the six poems that make up ‘Oblique Rain’ by Fernando Pessoa. Immediately and totally... It was the return from Fernando Pessoa/Alberto Caeiro to Fernando Pessoa alone. Or better still, it was Fernando Pessoa's reaction to his own inexistence as Alberto Caeiro…”