Messy Things Blog

I wrote this in Spring and forgot to post….but today (Elsa Schiaparelli’s birthday) seems as good a day as any to share a little pink…

I love spring walks. I love the bright bursts of flowers in our garden—beginning with the first tentative crocuses and low-growing scilla. By May, when I walk around our neighbourhood the streets are a riot of color. It’s always the pinks that jump into my eyes first and jolt my heart. Rose, coral, watermelon, blush, fuchsia, peach, punch, magenta: I love pink in all hues but in recent years I have come to love hot pink best of all. Brave and bold pink. Schiaparelli pink.

My newest book BLOOM tells the story of Elsa Schiaparelli (or ‘Schiap’ as she came to be called.) Illustrated by Julie Morstad, the story steeped us in Schiap’s life for several years. I’ve continued to carry a bit of her spirit with me. I think about her as I walk the spring streets. I think of her wandering through Rome as a child, looking everywhere, for the secret of beauty and finding it in the most unexpected and overlooked places—in the bark of a tree and in an upside down shoe, amid snails, beetles, in the dirt beneath her feet.

I think of Schiap when I see the swirling pink coat of a woman running down a windy street in combat boots and when I encounter shameless bursts of ranunculus at my cornershop.

Schiap grew up to become a brazen and iconoclastic fashion designer. She defied rules at every turn. She made clothes from fun fur, cellophane, oilskin, tree bark and sack cloth; clothes that looked like clocks and dresser drawers—clothes for boldest women of her time, including Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn and Mae West.

In the 1930s, her taste for the unusual led her to collaborate with the Surrealists: Jean Cocteau drew two facial profiles forming a rose-filled vase on the back of one gown. Raoul Dufy and Alberto Giacometti were inspirations. But her most notable collaboration was with Salvador Dali on her famous Lobster Dress— a white organza dress printed with a giant red lobster and immortalized by the Duchess of Windsor, Wallis Simpson, who wore it on her honeymoon.

People were used to fashion being dainty, pretty and graceful. They were not accustomed to hats in the shapes of brains, shoes and lamb cutlets. “A mockery!” some said. But Schiap didn’t let this stop her. She says ‘no’ to the obvious, to the idealized, to the confining. She said ‘yes’ to the stars and flowers, the fantastical dreams and wishes of her childhood.

Most of all, she said ‘yes’ to… PINK. Her signature hue was the color of deep hot bougainvillea. Electric. Wild. Confident. And, yes, shocking. She once described it as combining “all the light and the birds and the fish in the world put together.”

Today, my sister-in-law Sarah told me that pink reminds her of why she became a florist. Her studio, Rosehill Blooms, flouts convention, using unexpected colour combinations and eclectic local flowers. Schiap would be proud! For Sarah, pink— specifically “the shocking, hot, scene-stealer variety”—will always signal spring’s arrival with “the hot sun pelting down on backyard peonies, savoured while they last because their bloom life is brief.”

After a long and difficult winter, I think we need all the pink we can find. Pink milkshakes and pink popsicles, retro pink sunglasses, pink hats and pynk pop songs. And, of course: bright blossomy botanic pink. Happy spring everyone. May we all bloom and bloom.

“I gave to pink, the nerve of the red, a neon pink, an unreal pink.” —Elsa Schiaparelli

I missed my two aunts, my grandmother, my childhood home, the rushing sound of water cascading down the brass rain chain, the floorboards in the kitchen under which my Obachan used to ferment homemade pickles, the shoji doors repaired with sakura paper patches. All things I took for granted. This was my first trip back to Tokyo in a decade and so much of what I knew and counted on was no longer there. It was also the first trip for my younger son so I saw things through his beginner eyes, things I might not have noticed before either because it was all too familiar or because I was looking for something else.

Also spring in Japan is lysergic. I’ve always visited in summer or winter. So that was new too.

The cherry tree in this photo is 500 years old (!) We saw it during a short visit to Nikko. I was fascinated by the timber props used to support the branches. All that effort to support a tree that might have otherwise fallen naturally. I thought this might be a rare and uncommon intervention for a revered tree then I began to notice a range of tree propping techniques throughout Tokyo. Gingko trees. Pine trees. Everyday trees on everyday streets. Props used to assist a weak limb or trunk or to help a young tree grow to maturity. Care for the infirm or un-firm. Why had I never noticed these wood supports before? I was moved by the loving effort.

It’s good to be dehabituated. I woke up this morning thinking about a woodsy walk I once took with a mycologist who gently instructed me to look down instead of up. “You think you know this place,” she said. “But just look at what you’ve been missing.”

Today is the U.S. pub date for my new book Birds Art Life. It is also one day since we lost John Berger, who died at the age of 90 at his home near Paris.

These two events are incommensurable but somewhat linked in my mind because John Berger was my lodestar. This photo of him sits above my desk.

I started reading Berger when I was an Art History student and discovered Ways of Seeing. I have since read almost everything he has written. Berger modelled a liberated style that allowed for curiosity, digression, political engagement, dirt, physical labor, fresh air, and all the things we usually blot out as writers. His book Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos is a tiny work of huge hearted genius. I’d say Berger sowed the courage and permission I needed to write my own ‘unclassifiable book’— a book about stepping outside of cages, noticing the wayside, making art, finding friends, caring for family, and because I was led to these matters during a year spent birding, a book about the lure, the grip, the magic of birds.

“If I’m a storyteller it’s because I listen,” Berger wrote. To which I would add: “If I’m a storyteller it’s because I listened to the listener.” I miss him already. But his words and influence remain, everywhere. He will always be my paragon of hospitality, rogue & revolutionary thinking, and worldly kindness.

The reality of book making is that you write something and release it into the world never knowing how it will land. If you’re fortunate, your book may attract a few readers and, if you’re truly fortunate, those readers may feel roused and delighted by what you’ve done, and even budged from former ways of looking at the world. In the best of all scenarios, your book will gather luster and layers of connotation as it travels.

I welcome all readings and readers.

Yesterday, on a blustery autumn morning, I had the experience of presenting my work to a warm group of teacher-librarians alongside several other children’s authors and illustrators. We were there at the invitation of Eleanor LaFave, splendid owner of the children’s bookstore Mabel’s Fables in Toronto. Unbeknownst to me the theme of the gathering was “inclusivity and diversity” and so I was very interested that Eleanor chose to introduce my new book The Liszts as “the story of a family of list-makers who are one day met with a visitor who is not on anyone’s list,” adding emphatically: “This is a story of diversity.’

Now I am loathe to shoehorn my work into the diversity box for any sales or marketing purpose but I have to say I was elated—ELATED—that Eleanor got the book, I mean really understood the gist of the narrative on this level. And I say this not because I want people to read the story and extract some grand old “inclusion message” but because to have The Liszts included in a conversation that was heading in a fairly linear and literal “diversity” direction felt like an unexpected moment of swerve and expansion.

How to care for the strange stranger, how to welcome the unknown, how to broaden the boundaries of home and family—these are deep challenges. This morning I was reminded of this fact while reading a short essay by Teju Cole. It was about the incendiary use of language in a New York Times article (discussing the dismantling of a “squalid” and “festering” refugee camp in Calais, France.) Cole encapsulated his frustration with the NYT’s reportorial frame with the following question: “how do you stop telling the story of migration as though the travelers are a problem rather than humans caught in dire straits and deserving, like us, of every kindness?”

Framing matters. Unfriendliness and unwelcome are perpetrated on various scales, and embedded in our language, with varying consequences. What kind of problem is a visitor? What kind of possibility?

Over ten years ago, my great literary love, Ali Smith, wrote a novel titled The Accidental, which, like The Liszts, pivots around this essential question: What do you do when the person who is from the outside (i.e. a new arrival or a newly arrived situation) turns up at your door? As Smith asks: “Do you let that person in or not? And what if, as in all the fables and myths, that person is the gods? Or what if that person steals everything from you? Or both? We have to remember hospitality. We have to remember what it’s like to be humans, to be strangers in the world and be welcomed in.”

Ali Smith creates stories that open onto the unruly and unforeseen and I love her for it. She is a truly hospitable artist and by this I mean she is someone who does not start from a position of scarcity and meagreness—taking a kind of Noah’s Ark (or Post-Brexit) approach to the ‘problem’ of inclusion, where in order to survive (or avoid criticism, or ‘be on board’) we will include “two of this and two of that,” ticking boxes as we go. Smith approaches her storytelling, and indeed the vast complicated and suffering world, with a spirit of persistent and abundant welcome that proclaims, “Let’s throw the doors open and see what and who the heck arrives.”

On the subject of hospitality, I want to thank readers who have come to my (sometimes strange) books with open minds and welcoming hearts. Thank you!

And, finally, a toast of welcome to future visitors who may mess up my house, turn my stuff upside down, and (with any luck) keep a sense of surprise and communal hope aloft.

All images by Júlia Sardà from The Liszts. Published by Tundra Books (North America), Andersen Press (UK), La Pastèque (French) 2016.

“Tolerance is the opposite of hospitality.” —Jacques Derrida