Ashamed to Say: A Little Self-Censorship

This is the photo that I'm using on the hardcopy invitation to my book launches for my new collection of short stories, Desire Lines: Stories of Love and Geography next month.  

It's appropriate, in a way, because this sinuous path crossing the Champ des possibles open space near where I live started me thinking about the resonances of "desire lines."  They are, urbanists say, the paths people choose to make when they want to get some place.  They frequently have nothing to do with formal layout of streets and sidewalks and almost always they say a lot about  people's aims.

But I can't say I'm too pleased with myself for using the photo to promote the two parties we're planning to launch the book.  The cover, which I love, is a little racey and it's been mentioned to me that it's not the sort of thing that librarians and others might like to find in the hands of kids.

Since the image is a detail from a painting by Edwin Holgate, a member  of Canada's legendary Group of Seven parinters, it shouldn't get much flack.  But just the same I've buckled.  The e-mail invitation will use the book cover, though.

Whatever, you're all invited to attend one of both of the launches:
Wednesday November 6 at 7 p.m.

Librairie Drawn and Quarterly

211, Bernard ouest

Mile End, Montreal

(80, 435 and 160 buses)

And/or

Tuesday November 12 at 7 p.m.

Librairie Clio

245-N. Boulevard St Jean

Pointe Claire, PQ,

Plaza Point Claire

Halloween Coming Up: A Spooky Night at the Drawn and Quarterly Bookshop

Drawn and Quarterly is a Montreal publishing house that specializes in what is quaintly called "graphic novels."  They are far more than simple comic books: one of their best sellers a biography by Chester Brown of Métis martyr Louis Riel, a book that is celebrating its 10th anniversary.

It also has a great little bookstore in Montreal's Mile End district with a very electic mixture of fiction, non-fiction, and children's books from a wide variety of publishers.  October 30 it will deck itself out as The Haunted Bookstorre, with readings and other neat stuff for the young and old.

They've asked me to take part, and at the moment I think I'll read from my story "Nothing But Good Times" from my last collection The Truth Is which has a kind of spooky ending. Alternatively, maybe I'll choose a part of "The Jolly Corner," one of Henry James's ghost stories. 

Looking forward to this.  Here's the relevant info:

"The Haunted Bookstore

Wednesday, October 30, 6 to 8 pm, at Librairie Drawn and Quarterly, 211 Bernard W.  Montreal.

Join us on October 30^th at 6 p.m. for a Halloween party at Librairie Drawn and Quarterly. Come get tricked! Come get treated! Enjoy the spooky décor and listen to scary readings !"

Little Women's Dad: Geraldine Brooks on March

Ask me what book influenced my life the most, and I'll answer unhesitatingly: Lousia May Alcott's Little Women.  I got it for Christmas when I was in Grade Two, and began reading it immediately--but because I wasn't a very good reader it took me until April to finish it.

And then I re-read again.  And again.  And again.

Jo was my heroine for years, and the family's high-minded Abolitionist politics formed my own political conscience.  Alcott is responsible in a very direct manner for my participation in that famous March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, held just over 50 years ago.

The resemblances between the Alcott's creation, the March family, and her own are clear, I learned from reading at least one biography of her.   But I hadn't thought too much about the backstory of Marches themselves.  Then I picked up Geraldine Brooks's March: A Novel because I liked her Caleb's Crossing so much. 

What a pleasure to read Brooks's imagining of the adult world behind Little Women and the difficult moral choices the Marches made!

The book is told in two voices. One is John March, a Yankee preacher who had made a fortune as a pedlar in the South, to return north and become a militant opponent of slavery.  Marrying a young woman even more passionate than he, he supports John Brown's rebellion, gives all his money to the Abolitionist, tries to raise four daughters in reduced circumstances, and then volunteers as a chaplain to the Union forces once the Civil War begins. The other is of his wife, Marmee, who comes to his bedside in Washington when he is wounded.

That much any reader of Little Women already will know: the book opens with Mr. March away in the War, and ends with his return a year later.  What Brooks imagines is his conflict over going, his repulsion at the killing, his tortured attempts to reconcile his "cowardice" with very natural instincts to save himself, and his desire for both his wife and a young slave woman whom he met when he was young.

She also shows us Marmee's conflict, her realization that she should have, could have insisted he remain behind--he was 41 after all--and her sense of betrayal that he had given his fortune away without consulting her while keeping his brief affairs with another woman a secret from her all these years.

The tone appears to me to be spot on, Brooke's research is extensive, and the moral dilemmas her characters face,  truly thought-provoking.  The book won the Pultizer Prize in 2005: the judges that year  were spot-on.

The images are of Alcott and Brooks.