“I want every children’s book editor and also every primary and middle school teacher and librarian in America to read this book. It is the antidote to plodding, plot-driven, two-line synopsizable, anti-imagination books. Ounce Dice Trice can be read cover to cover, back to front, middle to end, upside down, any way you like.” —Daniel Pinkwater, NPR
As a child, I remember my father whirling around the world. I seldom knew where he was going. But I knew the news would take him there. I also knew that of all the countries he visited, it was Vietnam that stole his heart. He made his first trip there in 1959, more than a decade before I was born, and continued to revisit on and off over twenty years. He was the first Western television reporter to show the bomb damage to civilian areas caused by American raids (“a countryside bombed so totally that it looked like the craters of the Moon”). In 1969, he broke the news of Ho Chi Minh’s death to the world and was the only reporter invited to attend the funeral. A year later he was the first reporter to interview American Prisoners of War. “In prison cells replete with Christmas trees for the extraordinary occasion, for the first time a few of the POWs are allowed to tell of their conditions and their sentiments.” These interviews caused a stir in the United States. In 1972, he saw the first US air strike on Hanoi. In the late 1970s, he obtained exclusive access to film from Hanoi’s military archives and began work on a comprehensive TV documentary on the war in Vietnam. Dien Bien Phu, My Lai, Khe Sanh… I grew up with the Vietnam War scrolling in the background. I have often wondered what it was like for other children of war reporters.
As a war reporter and later a documentary filmmaker, my father made a life of doing what most people avoid—he rushed towards disaster. He faced forward when others would have looked or run away. For reasons I never fully understood, war beckoned my father. Perhaps the brutal act of fighting was a clearcut expression of the drama of living. Or maybe it allowed him to step into a meaningful narrative. War is a good story. Someone is always losing something.
A few months ago, I clipped an article about a documentary called Under Fire: Journalists in Combat. When the filmmaker, Martyn Burke, was asked why he felt his subjects felt compelled to keep putting themselves in harm’s way, he replied that he didn’t know: “none of them ever gave me a real answer that I could hold onto…There are all the answers that are true—that it’s important, that it brings us news from places we need to know about, that there’s an adrenalin high and more—but there’s this unknowable personal component that’s still floating around in the ether and has not been bottled and examined, and may never be.”
It’s this “unknowable personal component” that continues to fascinate me when I meet people who put themselves in the line of fire. It’s the elusive backstory and motivation, not yet “bottled and examined.” In the end, I think it’s our fictions (the stories we dream up) that allow us to we get closest to these mysteries.
(My drawings of men and women who reported from Vietnam.)
Last week I spoke with CBC’s Michael Enright about Stray Love and my experience growing up with a foreign correspondent father. (The segment aired on March 25, 2012.)
I looked at the bookshelf in my study this morning and found Anne Carson sitting alongside Charles Schultz. I have no idea what they were doing there together, but I would like to think they were having a fruitful conversation. (They both like to draw. They are both observant and funny.)
There are picture books of all kinds on my “grown-up” shelf. Some I pilfered from my children. Some I bought for myself. Some are a little beyond me but I figure I’ll grow into them.
Lately unaccompanied prose feels bereft to me. Perhaps it’s all the time I have spent in the company of my young sons, who believe a book without pictures is a travesty. (Why not just make a book without a binding, or page numbers?)
In the belief that grownups need pictures too, I’ve assembled a selection of adult-friendly visual reads.
Here it is.
1.
A few weeks ago, I spent several afternoons at a book morgue, otherwise known as The Monkey’s Paw secondhand bookshop in Toronto. It was a refuge of sorts. I had been feeling slightly down about writing and wanted to linger in a place of pure bibliophilia. Like many novelists, I tend to experience an existential crisis every time I finish a book. Why bother? Why engage in such an intangible and self-involved vocation when I could be doing something more tangibly and socially useful? (i.e., stopping a pipeline, regrouting the bathroom.) Why write longform narrative in a world that prefers to live swiftly and episodically?
In the past, this soul searching has lodged itself in the personal-neurotic realm. But lately it has ballooned into a broader crisis about how much less novels matter to the mainstream than when I started writing.
I don’t want to sound self-pitying or ungrateful (I’ve been very fortunate) but the work of writing novels — literary fiction no less — just seems an increasingly weird and arcane thing to be doing with my time. It’s fairly obvious when I look around that fewer and fewer people I know and love are reading books. (And, here, I’m not referring to people who are opting to read books on screen over print — I’m talking about reading books period.) They don’t see the point. They’d rather be watching Downton Abbey or clicking through obscure indie news sites. They would prefer to be resting in Supta Baddhakonasana or sitting on a meditation cushion at their neighborhood Sangha. Or hanging out with circus friends in the park or blogging at their local coffee joint. You get the idea. They are drawn to culture, just not the culture of reading books. And to my dismay, this lack of books does not seem to have left a yawning void in their lives.
(To read the rest, click here.)
As a writer, I often retreat physically. As a parent, retreat is impossible. I am always being drawn out of my lair. Even though I like to practice benign neglect and don’t chaperone my sons through their free time unless absolutely required, my children are constantly catapulting me into the world.
Part of it is their sheer physicality. Galumphing and noodle-limbed, I can’t resist watching them move. Yesterday was a school holiday so we went to the gym to play basketball. For some reason, the gym was populated by a dozen members of the Chicago Bulls. This is only a slight exaggeration. Picture a handful of ill-coordinated small boys (my own included) playing with a crew of teenage smooth-shooters. It was pretty hilarious. At one end, there was my youngest son ducking and swerving as if caught in a bombing raid. At the other end, there was my eldest flailing his arms around like a crazy semaphore flagman. (Eventually my eldest stopped moving entirely and just stood in the middle of the gym, slack-jawed with eyebrows hiked to his hairline.) I was dumbstruck, too. For the next hour, I sat back and watched the big boys leap around while a booming hiphop mix played in the background. I’m going to go out on a hyperbolic limb and say it was transcendent. Really, it choked me up—the dancerly grace of the young men, the buoyant rhythm of their high-tops on the court, the arcing arrow’s flight of the ball… What especially got to me were the faces of the young boys in the room, each one tracking the big boys as if they were watching wizards in motion, or dreaming of themselves in ten years time.
I spend so much time with words, I can’t tell you how transporting it is to watch things that are essentially wordless. Yesterday was a reminder that an active body is as worth admiring as an active mind.
(Picture: “Leap into the Void” by Yves Klein, 1960.)
A love letter from one sister to another: Virginia Wolf.
I hope you enjoy this trailer that Isabelle and I created with the help of a few friends (Basia Bulat, Tillie Burlock and David Wall.)
A drawing gains its strength from paying close attention to the world, which, as poet Ted Kooser points out, is “as important to good writing as is good writing itself.” Perhaps it was with the intention of being a better writer that, a few years ago, I set myself a drawing exercise. From March to May, I drew the cherry tree outside our kitchen window every day. I drew it with pencil and ink, charcoal and watercolour. I started at the end of winter when there was snow on the branches and kept drawing as buds and leaves and blossoms appeared. The blossoms fell and the rain came and the sidewalk grew slick with white confetti. Green nubs appeared where the flowers had been. I stopped drawing just before the cherries ripened but by then I knew every knot, gnarl and branch on the tree.
This Sunday’s New York Times Magazine contained a beautiful piece called “how To see a Tree” by Michael Kimmelman which features five pages of glorious photographs by “tree stalking” Mitch Epstein. Moody and romantic, towering and totemic, it’s amazing to learn that all of these trees (including the ancient English elm shown above and a massive weeping beech) were shot on the streets of NYC.
p.s. Ted Kooser’s meditative new picture book, House Held Up by Trees, is out this Spring. With illustrations by Jon Klassen, it promises to be a heart-satisfying and eye-pleasing experience.
My husband and I made this trailer for my forthcoming novel using a mishmash of scenes from 1960s London and Saigon. My father— former CBC reporter Michael Maclear—makes a brief cameo. See if you can spot him (a younger, groovier incarnation).
p.s. I have a new Facebook page for book information. If you wish to stay in touch, please “like” it.
There are so many fantastic children’s book blogs but one of my new favorites is “Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast.” Jules Danielson is a librarian and wonderfully compulsive appreciator of all things illustrated. This week she invited Isabelle Arsenault to share early sketches for Virginia Wolf. Enjoy.
p.s. Jules also writes a weekly column over at Kirkus Reviews. You can read her thoughts on Virginia Wolf and other books about battling the blues here.