Um, hello Ms. Atwood – you write good…

Atwood. She’s coming…

I have been a reader and writer since I was a little girl. They are the two things in my life that have just always come naturally to me. I don’t remember learning to read. As far as my mind is aware, I’ve just always been able to do it. I love books like some people love religion – they feed me. They are to be respected and treated with reverence. They have the power to change your entire way of viewing life. Over the years there have been four instances where a book has changed something fundamental in me – they’ve altered me so profoundly that they have left scars on my heart. I have a scar on my right thumb, right below the nail, from my best friend’s first car, where it scraped off my skin one afternoon while I was trying to get a very stiff hood release to pull up. Whenever I look at that scar I am flooded with happy memories of trips we took in that car – I remember singing to Sublime at the tops of our lungs, I feel the warmth of summer nights spent driving around aimlessly, I feel the icy January mornings waiting for heat to start coming through the vents. Those are the kind of scars these four books left on me – the kind that make you instantly remember how you felt in a particular moment. Two of those books were written by Margaret Atwood.

When I was 15 I read The Robber Bride – it was the first time I’d read one of her novels. It was also the first time I remember reading more than just the words on the page. I felt like I’d discovered a jewel she’d hidden between the lines for me to find. In short, the story is about a group of women who have little in common other than their love/loathing of the female antagonist, Zenia. At one point in each of their lives she has gained their trust and even their love, only to betray them by stealing their men. You want to hate her – it’s easy to hate her. But real relationships are never that simple and my revelation was this: the women who lost their men to her were in terrible relationships with men they shouldn’t have been with. The one relationship Zenia never succeeds in completly destroying, is the only one in which the man is likely right for his female partner. In removing these men from their lives (or in attempting to, in the one case) Zenia had not only forced them out of these negative relationships, but she’d also forged a bond between the other women that they would not have had otherwise. In essence she created a situation that allowed them to access the most important and valuable relationships of their lives. To this day this book reminds me that relationships are more complex than we can ever really know from the outside, and that when things go wrong the answers are never black and white. It’s easy to vilify the person who committed the most glaring wrong – but there is always more to the story.

A few years later, after I’d moved from Manitoba to Ontario, I read Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners. I felt a connection to this prairie born author, who had also move to Ontario – I felt as though her words were my Canadian birthright – telling the tale of the Scottish families (like mine) who had settled in the prairies. For the first time I felt like I’d stumbled across an author who not only inspired me, but made me believe that even a girl from the prairies could become one of Canada’s most celebrated authors. She described Canada, and Manitoba, in a way that I could only someday aspire to live up to. It may sound small, but in many ways this might be the most important gift any book could have given me.

In my early 20s, while I was living in Japan, my mom sent me a copy of Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. The inscription she’d penned in the front cover said something along the lines of “A story about adventures far from home – may yours be just as growing, but not nearly as dangerous. Love, mom”. I’ve heard that it took Kingsolver something like 20 years to write this book – which wouldn’t surprise me given the depth of the plot and character development. Each chapter tells the story of one of the women of the Price family, dragged to the Congo on the verge of civil war, by their religious zealot, preacher father. Needless to say, things do no go well for them. To properly sum up how I feel about this book, and the lessons it taught me would be impossible. I will keep it to the two most important ideas I took away:

First - Our perspective of right and wrong is all relative to our experiences in life – or as it is so aptly put by Kingsolver herself: “Everything you know is right can be wrong in a different place.” Traveling in India really helped drive this home for me, because so many times I had to question my core beliefs about what was “right”.

Second - Pain, sorrow, suffering and fear are as necessary to human growth as fire is to a forest. Without being pushed to our outer limits we can never truly know the strength we hold inside – they carve out a sense of our own capability that we might never otherwise be aware of. So when life is joyful, not only can we truly appreciate it, but we can know in our hearts that we have the strength to battle through the inevitable pain that some new day will bring – and we will come out the other side a new incarnation of ourselves.

Atwood’s The Year of the Flood was the most recent book to have this kind of lasting impact on me. It is the second book in her recently completed Maddaddam trilogy. It was the first one I read in the series, and so far my favourite of the three (although I’m not quite half way through the final book, so I suppose I may feel differently by the time I am done) – the first two books happen more or less congruently and are different aspects of the same timeline, the third brings the two together, and hopefully provides us some closure on the story. Atwood has branded this genre of writing as “speculative fiction”, differing from “science fiction” in that it describes a future very much routed in a possible outcome of our current state. The genius of these books is the plausibility of the bone chilling future Atwood paints for us. The detail is stunning – down to the practices of the new religions that emerge, and the scientific meddling in all aspects of our lives to “improve” the way we live. Nothing is spared: food, cosmetics, clothing, sex – all engineered to deliver optimal results with minimal effort.

Food, and the many ways in which we’ve perverted it, is a recurring theme in the Maddaddam trilogy. From the prolific fast food chain “SecretBurger” (reminiscent of Soilent Green), to the 20% real fish, fish fingers served in the high school cafeteria, we are inundated with images of how distorted food has become. I was standing in line at Ikea for lunch one afternoon, when I was struck by the depth of the impact this story had on me. We were all herded into metal railed corrals, placidly staring around, while holding trays or pushing food carts meant to allow us to stack and carry many trays, waiting to be fed cheaply and quickly – and I watched in horror as person after person walked by carrying plates of brownish grey food, devoid of any colour save the lingon berry jelly for the spongy Swedish meatballs. It was so reminiscent of the way Atwood describes the food industry in her story, that I felt a wave of panic.

My worst fear is that someday we will view Atwood as a prophet, and not just a talented writer with a wild imagination. I wish I could send a copy of these three books to all the major world leaders with a note. The note would read “It’s not too late to change course!” But they’d probably see me in the same way the wealthy and powerful of Atwood’s world view environmentalists and those who believe in real food – a fringe lunatic.

The reason I’m telling you all this is because Margaret Atwood is coming to Winnipeg next month. The thought of meeting her both thrills and petrifies me. I’m going to meet the woman who penned two of the most impactful books I’ve ever read. I want to tell her all this, but somehow the words I say out loud never live up to the ones that run through my head – not to mention I’ll probably have no more than a minute or two as I hand her my books to sign to sum up the impact she has had on my heart. I want to tell her that part of the reason I love and respect her writing so much is because sometimes she writes books I love, and sometimes she writes books I hate (She has written 22 novels, 15 books of poetry, 11 works of nonfiction, and 7 children’s stories according to the information inside my copy of Maddaddam) – I have started Alias Grace no less than 5 times and have never been able to get more than about 50 pages in – because I think this shows how diverse her writing truly is. There’s probably someone out there who loves Alias Grace and hates The Year of the Flood.

When I was in University, I had a friend named John, who I worked with at Blockbuster video. John felt about the Tragically Hip the way I feel about Atwood. He’d grown up in Kingston, but they were famous and long gone by the time he was old enough to realize any of this. One day he was walking down the street, past the house where the guitar player’s parents still lived – and there he was, sitting on the porch playing “Grace Too”. John finally had his chance to express the impact their music had had on him. He took a breath, gathered his courage, walked up to the porch, looked his idol straight in the eye and said “Hey man. That’s Grace Too.” – “Yup” the guitar player responded as he continued to play. John turned and walked away, and as he went he thought to himself “That’s Grace Too???!!! – REALLY?? REALLY?? He knows it’s Grace Too – he wrote the fucking song!!!” I wonder if John ever really forgave himself for missing what might have been his one opportunity to tell this man what his art had meant to him.

Of course, in the grand scheme of life there are worse things than getting tongue tied in front of someone you deeply respect – but that doesn’t stop me from fearing the same fate. “Um, hello Ms. Atwood – you write good…”

The year's last, loveliest smile

Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall. - F. Scott Fitzgerald

What is it about September that feels so promising? I love September - everything about it. I love the crisp in the air, the pumpkin spice lates, fuzzy wool socks with boots, the deep rich jewel tones... there is nothing that is not great about September.

When you start to really think about it, September should be sad and depressing... another summer is over, cold weather is moving in, the trees and other greenery begin to die, summer holidays are at close and we are all returning to our school/work routines. Even those of us who do not get entire summers off know that nothing much gets done during the summer... or should I say, nothing new gets started during the summer. There are too many people away at any given time to consider new projects.
So again, I ask: Why is it that despite all this, September is so full of promise?

It could be that those years between 5 and 18 have so engrained us that we will always see September as the month the new year actually begins. Maybe we like our routines and the daily grind more than we care to admit? Maybe, if you are like me, you just love that “back to school” feeling that new adventures are around the corner.

I have to say that summer 2013 was really good to me. Sean and I spent 3 weeks traveling in Italy and France. My first real travel in Europe – I say “real” because I was in Germany when I was 15 for gymnastics, and didn’t actually see much more than the insides of gyms and stadiums; in 2002 I met up with some girlfriends in England and also spent time in Scotland – but they don’t really consider themselves part of continental Europe. What an unreal trip… I live a charmed life.

August brought my Nan’s 90th birthday – you wouldn’t believe she was 90. She’s got more love and more joy in a few strands of her white hair than most people are lucky enough to experience in a whole life time. My whole family came in from Ontario, the US, etc. It’s so rare that I get to see my whole family – we have our moments, but I was lucky enough to be raised side by side with my cousins at our family cabin in the summers, so I can say with complete honesty that I really, truly love spending time with them. I wonder what it must be like for my Nan to look around and see this enormous group of people (she has 14 grandkids, and there are a LOT of great-grandkids these days), and know that if it weren’t for her, none of them would be here.

Last, but certainly not least, my best friend got married. We’ve been friends since we were 10 years old and seeing her get married was one of the highlights of my adult life. She’s said for a long time now that she was happy in her long term partnership, and didn’t want to get married. So when she called me last spring and told me she was going to ask him to marry her, I was more than a little surprised. It was a whole month of wedding events, with the shower, bachelorette and then the wedding. They had a beautiful celebration at her family cabin, the last weekend of August.

So, like I said, this summer has been great – busy, full of fun and celebration. But the truth is that no matter how wonderful any summer may have been, I still feel a sense of excitement when the air starts to cool and I know fall is coming. I happily pull out my sweaters, tights, boots and scarves and I curse the days that are too warm to wear them. I secretly hope for highs of 15 degrees for the day. I start dreaming of baking apple pies and sipping cider.

Fall holds my heart... it snuggles me in fuzzy wool, and comforts me with delicious, spicy flavours and it wraps it all up in a stunning jewel toned bow.