Tag Archives: memoir

Poet’s new book ruminates upon death

Brentwood Bay writer Eve Joseph’s new book, In the Slender Margin:  The Intimate Strangeness of Death and Dying, is essential reading for everyone.  She recently took the time to talk to Coastal Spectator Editor Lynne Van Luven. Joseph’s first book of poetry, The Startled Heart, was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay poetry prize, as was The Secret Signature of Things.  She is the recipient of the P.K. Page Founders Award for Poetry.  Joseph will launch In the Slender Margin on Wednesday, June 11 at 7 p.m. at Munro’s Books.

Eve, I so admire this profound book of nonfiction, which reads like the exploration of a lifetime. Can you talk about how long ago you started this book “in your mind” and how the compilation of the essays came together for you?

The idea for the book started in the fall of 2005. One year before I left hospice. I was burning out – saturated with images and thoughts about death – and that wasn’t something we talked about in any organized way at hospice. I clearly remember calling one of my colleagues from a phone booth in the Mayfair Mall and saying I could not continue working with the dying if I couldn’t talk about the work. We both agreed this was badly needed and, over the period of a couple of days, we contacted three other friends we worked with and started a group. We decided we would meet once a month, talk about death and drink whiskey. The Women and Whiskey group as we called ourselves. It was from those meetings that the book began to take shape.

I first attempted to write about death in my first book . . .  the poems –  ghazals – really only touched the surface but the associative nature of the form allowed me to use imagery without narrative and that was a breakthrough for me. When it came to this book, I knew I didn’t want to write a traditional narrative; rather, I wanted to build a kind of thematic resonance. One of the most immediate challenges was how to write about death without sentimentality and writing “fragments” as opposed to continuous story helped me do that. It was also really important to me to avoid the kind of false wisdom and new- age language often found in books on death and dying. It helped to have works by Joan Didion and Annie Dillard close by. Didion for her clarity of thought and Dillard for her imagery and the marvelous way she weaves things together.

In The Slender Margin started as an essay that was later published in The Malahat. I returned repeatedly to that essay and “blew it up” from within. I kept going back in and expanding my thinking. The greatest pleasure of writing this book was the opportunity to think on the page and to follow thought as far as I could. Don McKay once said to me my poetry was spare – as if I was a bird hopping from branch to branch. Prose, he said, requires one to be more “doglike.” Nose down, rooting along the ground, getting muddy and lost in the exploration. I’m more dog in this book than bird.

Your brother’s sudden death in 1964, when you were 11 years old,  appears to have been a touchstone-event for your whole life. Does writing a ruminative book like this assuage feelings of loss?

This question is interesting to me as it raises the topic of art versus therapy. In the book I tell a story about a friend of mine who teaches weaving on a reserve in North Vancouver. When she applied for a grant to teach local women, it was suggested she gear her classes for women with alcohol problems. She refused to run the classes as “therapy,” choosing instead to concentrate on creativity and tradition. As it happened, some of the women who came did have problems with alcohol and the course helped to turn their lives around. The intent was not to “heal” people but, interestingly, engaging deeply with the creative act was healing.

I did not set out to assuage an old grief, and I distrust that impulse. When people say “that must have been so healing” I feel grumpy and argumentative as if there is some unspoken belief that writing helps one to “let go” and provides some sort of “closure.” If anything, the opposite was true for me. Rather than letting go, I embraced my brother fully for the first time. I was immersed in thinking about him, in remembering and in learning new things.  In the end, the act of writing and remembering – of giving voice to sorrow – was cathartic. But it was never the purpose of the book.

I find it amazing that you were able to work in palliative care for two decades when so many of us fall apart at the death of a parent or family member. Does glimpsing the Grim Reaper daily harden one’s spirit?

I think it tires one’s spirit more than hardens. There is just so much sadness. As strange as it sounds, on one level it was just a job. It’s what I did to make money and support a family. There was a kind of compartmentalization – I did not feel the immensity of grief that family members felt because I was essentially a stranger to them. It’s completely different to lose someone close, and all my years at hospice don’t soften the grief I feel with personal loss.

To harden one’s spirit implies a shutting down or turning away from something. I don’t think I did this. The problem for me was one of deep weariness. We don’t have an adequate language in the West for problems of the spirit. My mother-in-law, who was Coast Salish, worried that my spirit was walking with the dead, and she encouraged me to pay attention and to practice certain rituals – which I did, but not nearly as often as she would have liked. As much as I appreciated her concern and suggestions, I felt as if I was “borrowing” something that wasn’t mine. If anything, writing has been the thing that has helped me to enter places of darkness and to maintain an open spirit.

In the Slender Margin is laced with wry commentary and humour. Do you think you would have lasted 20 years in your hospice work without a sense of humour?

Humour was an essential part of hospice work. It helped us to laugh at ourselves and at death. It kept us from taking ourselves too seriously and, for many of us, humour made death smaller and less terrifying. Sometimes it allowed us to see beyond illness. One of the stories I tell in the book has to do with a well-respected First Nations man who was dying of leukemia at home and had been in pain all day. When the nurse and counselor arrived from hospice to attend to him, he asked his wife if she had shown them the smokehouse. When she said “no,” he asked her to take them out to see it. Bewildered, she did as he said and showed them the rows of salmon slowly smoking in the shed behind the house. When the three of them returned, he looked over and said to his wife “you didn’t leave them in long enough, they’re still white.” Everyone collapsed laughing and for a moment he was a man with a sense of humour and not a man dying of a catastrophic illness.

People we encountered often called us “angels.” Humour flies in the face of that. It mitigates against the work becoming precious. The saying attributed to Abe Lincoln “I laugh because I must not cry” has a ring of truth to it. We found humour in the absurd and could share things with each other in a way we couldn’t with friends or family. I think it just helped us cope.

I love the ending of your book, when the Egyptian God of Writing, Thoth, tells you “You’re on your own with death.” I’ve always thought that to be the case. Is our final task on this Earth to figure out how to accept that reality, preferably with some modicum of grace?

Yes, it is our final task.  And, I’m not sure it is a task that one can prepare for completely in advance. There will be surprises and unforeseen circumstances and what we may have imagined in advance may or may not be possible. A friend recently asked me if I was less afraid of death having worked with it for years and my answer was mixed. On one hand, I’ve seen so much that I have way more ways to imagine what death could look like – the good and the nasty; on the other hand, at least with expected deaths, I saw that most people met their deaths without the struggle that one might fear or expect. In my experience, I saw that the dying most often enter into a kind of altered state in their last days. Maybe it’s that the body takes over. By the time things are shutting down people are often unconscious and so are spared the “bigger picture” in the way the living are not spared.

Of the few people I saw who fought right to their last breath, family often said that was true to their nature and couldn’t imagine it any other way. You have to remember, though, that I saw people dying in a hospice with excellent supports. The reality of dying in an under-staffed hospital might be quite different.

The analogy of birth makes sense to me. We labour to be born and we labour to die. Childbirth may be painful, but if it were intolerable no mother would have more than one child. The work of labour is so focused that other things disappear – I saw this exact thing with the dying. So, while I have no illusions about how we can die, I also know that most people do it with a modicum of grace.

When I first started working with the dying I didn’t believe in euthanasia. Over the years, I’ve changed my mind about that. I don’t think there’s “one” best way to die. For some people, probably myself included, I think the knowledge that there is a choice about the timing of our deaths could be a very good thing. We don’t have control but we can be active participants in our dying.

Who knows? I may well go out kicking and screaming. I have no wisdom to impart. The things I learned about embracing death and helping others turn toward it may be of absolutely no help to me with my own death.

It’s a funny business this death business. We just don’t know!

Deaf memoir speaks passionately

The Deaf House 

By Joanne Weber

Thistledown Press

274 pages; $18.95

Reviewed by Margaret Thompson

There is a prefatory Note to The Deaf House by Joanne Weber that explains the difference between deaf/Deaf and hearing/Hearing as they are used in the narrative. For many readers this may well be their introduction to points of view radically at odds with their perception of profound hearing loss as a disability. That the Note needs to be there at all, on the very first page, is a clue to the frustration and conflict the deaf/Deaf face in their attempts to survive and thrive in the hearing/Hearing world.

Weber relates her own experience to illustrate that struggle. We meet her first as a small child, baffled and disturbed by the sounds in her head. Her hearing parents, especially her mother, throw themselves into the task of acquiring every scrap of knowledge and skill that would help them help her. The result is a child who is amazingly successful at school, despite profound deafness. She loves books, and thanks to her mother’s constant insistence on correction and practice, on learning sign language and lipreading, speaks clearly and grammatically. To all intents and purposes, she functions perfectly, although she guesses much of what is said; she is even paraded as an exemplar of what a profoundly deaf child can achieve.

Weber gives an impassioned account of the inadequacies of this way of life. There is a frantic quality to the events echoed in the tone of her writing. We follow the compulsive student, the affair with a married man, the single mother of two small girls who keeps moving house, the frustrated teacher, torn by the professional requirements that tie her to teaching practices she is convinced are useless. The simmering anger effectively conveys the turmoil of those years, but it is the quieter moments that provide insight for the hearing reader: the younger daughter, weeping, placing her hand on her mother’s throat, for instance, or the image of Weber’s ideal house—open, doorless, so that she can always see people talking.

The tensions inherent in a lifetime of trying to function in a world whose rules are predicated on being able to hear are most clearly exposed in Weber’s accounts of her interactions with her students and the education system. Her attempts to make her students more proactive and independent are frustrated at every turn. The students have cochlear implants and think they need nothing else; they rely too much on interpreters; the interpreters sign sloppily and inaccurately, using a code invented by hearing people rather than American Sign; the students think of themselves as disabled, belonging only to the hearing world rather than to the Deaf community.

Weber uses many fictional devices to convey the chaotic nature of her life. She plays with time, cutting frequently forward and back, to her childhood, to the early days of her relationship with her daughters’ father, often repetitiously, and sometimes, distractingly. She has conversations with herself, and introduces different facets of her own personality in dramatized playlets—Ms. Hearing Weber, for example, Little Red Deaf Coat, Joanne Maybe Hearing, It Depends. Such restlessness “on this weary walk in the desert” needs an antidote, and it does come finally with the appearance of Johanna, who can tolerate compromise and failure, and say, “I must stop looking for ways to escape my Deaf body.” Her voice is the last we hear, calming the turbulence:

“There is no solution, no cure, no rehabilitation, there is my body that just is. Fired into the world, my Deaf body has become the house.”

There is satisfaction for the reader in Weber’s acceptance, but also, perhaps, a sense of an opportunity missed. For those who can hear, deafness is an unfathomable state; how illuminating it would have been to devote more space to a discussion of the role of language, for example, or to explore the choice by the Deaf to not pursue technological or surgical remediation. Dwelling so exclusively on the personal engenders sympathy for an individual, but information and analysis may lead to understanding and action for a community.

Margaret Thompson’s new novel is The Cuckoo’s Child.

Love thy grandmother, says memoirist

The Truth About Luck

By Iain Reid

Published by Anansi

254 pages, $18.95

By Richel Donaldson

The Truth About Luck is Ontario author Iain Reid’s second memoir. Reid, whose first book was about moving back home after university, was recently named as one of five up-and-coming Canadian authors by the Globe and Mail. In The Truth About Luck, Reid invites his grandmother, 92, on a five-day vacation. When it turns out that the vacation is really a stay-cation in Reid’s apartment, his grandmother takes the opportunity to share some of her life story with her grandson. What ensues is a charming and bumbling dialogue between two people getting to know each other.

Reid’s writing is honest and self-deprecating, full of humor and detail.  Readers can easily put themselves in his shoes when he describes waking up in the morning, his fear of house centipedes, or his nightly insomnia: “I might start thinking of all the moments in a day when it’s possible to choke on food or catch a foot and fall down some stairs. Other nights I think about something completely arbitrary.” The way he so carefully describes his grandmother brings her to life in the same way: “Her hands have held on to elegant toughness, apart from the odd liver spot or new freckle  . . . they’re strong, womanly hands.”

The narrative starts almost too slowly. It takes a while for Reid and his grandmother to warm up to one another, and the awkward silences become monotonous.  Only when Grandma starts telling her stories does the memoir become engaging. The actual events of the story exist in a confined environment – mostly the apartment – and a brief time span. Reid’s grandmother’s memories about her little brother Donald are some of the most powerful in the book:  “There at the bottom of the stairs was this lanky figure, a few feet away, a boy. I never would have thought I could recognize his posture, but I could . . .I knew it was him.” Grandmother tells stories about her experience in the war and childhood memories with such vivid sensual experience that when she stops, and the focus returns to the vacation, it is almost a letdown. Reid’s attempts to entertain his grandmother and make her comfortable are heartwarming, but they pale in comparison to the richness of his grandmother’s recollections.

Even though some parts of the memoir may be monotonous, the read is worthwhile. Reid’s realizations about his grandmother are incredibly powerful. She teaches him a great deal in the course of five days — about what it means to be alive and how to approach death. The ending of this book will make you want to grab your grandmother and listen to her with the dedication and interest that Reid did.

Richel Donaldson is a political science student at UVic. She grew up on Vancouver Island surrounded by family. She enjoys writing about indigenous culture and has learned a great deal from her own two grandmas. 

Vagabond’s candour makes memoir worthwhile

Wanderlust: A Love Affair with Five Continents

By Elisabeth Eaves

Seal Press

304 pages, $17.50

Reviewed by Isabela Vera

Elisabeth Eaves first began her love affair with travel as a college freshman, spending the summer in Spain as an au-pair with a penchant for Pepe, the suave bartender down the road. Now a middle-aged freelance writer living in New York City, she returns through her travel memoir to reflect upon a decade and a half spent pursuing pleasure in places that the meeker among us may only dream of. Wanderlust: A Love Affair with Five Continents untethers Eaves from the grey, drizzly backdrop of her “disappointingly unexotic” university life in early-90s Seattle, pushing her through roles ranging from an exchange student in Cairo, a backpacker in Australasia, a hiker in Papau New Guinea, and a Master’s student in New York.

“I had woken up at the age of thirty-four to realize that I wanted to go home, only to discover that I had no idea where that was,” writes Eaves in her opening prologue.   It is our first hint that Wanderlust may not be your run-of-the-mill tale of self-discovery. Eaves’s memoir is darker and more thought-provoking than its cheesy tropical cover suggests. Although this final revelation looms over readers from the start, we initially indulge in 20-year-old Eaves’ adventurous spirit. Her opportunities seem endless, and we barely bat an eyelid when, after a failed attempt at diplomacy in Karachi, she writes that “the ebbing of this professional direction didn’t yet worry me much . . . what I most wanted was to travel more, without an end date or obligation in sight. I wanted to wander and feel free.”  The memoir moves constantly between different men and countries as her wanderlust intensifies. Each new part of the world is revealed through a lens of love, separation, and sex.

Her journey has a theme: “travel equals longing equals love.”  For Eaves, the conventional aspects of  travel–the food, the culture shock, the self-discovery–have always been entangled with desire. If we can first accept the memoir’s romantic focus, than we can appreciate her personal revelations. Wanderlust flirts with the men and the places, but at its core lies Eaves and her inability to stay with them. “I know that I’m the problem,” she writes. “I’m perverse . . . Nothing with me can last.”

This problem makes Eaves a frustrating protagonist. We begin to mistrust her judgement by the book’s second section, when she tells us that “the jungle, with its never-wavering pattern of life and death . . . was a rational place compared to my own heart.”  In moments of emotional climax, her attention to other characters is minimal, and we feel that she cares little about them. It is the frank exposure of both her strength and her vulnerability that keeps us with her. “Even if I don’t love the reality . . . want to have the enviable life, just because it’s enviable,” she admits. The prose is simple, humourless, even narcissistic. The honesty is refreshing and forces us to admit that we, too, were once seduced by her limitlessness.

At first, each new sexual and geographical conquest is exciting to us. By the memoir’s last section, it all feels repetitive. Eaves does a clever job of closing down the opportunities we once saw as never-ending, making us want to scream “enough!” and book our own return flight home. She drags us through the claustrophobia to reward us by picking up the pieces, acknowledging “when traveling stops changing you, it’s time to go home.”

Wanderlust is not so much a bubbly beach read but a companion for a long, winding journey, preferably with a lot of time to spend staring out the window of a train. The author’s candour ultimately makes the entire tumultuous ride worthwhile.

Isabela Vera is a tea-loving world traveller and a UVic student.

 

 

Daughter recalls father’s past with heart, humour

Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter; Growing up with a gay dad

By Alison Wearing

292 pages; $24.00

Reviewed by Cecania Alexander

When I pick up a book, my dearest hopes are, admittedly, a bit unfair. Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter – a nonfiction family memoir about Wearing’s growing up as her father discovers his gay identity in a time of political turmoil – met all of them, and threw in a few delicious surprises.

Wearing’s voice is delightful, not surprising as she is a musician, a dancer, a theatre performer, an award-winning one-woman-show star (including an adaptation of Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter). Her first book was an international bestseller (Honeymoon in Purday: An Iranian Journey). Wearing conveys humour, emotion and soul through art – she could make a fun, heart-warming journey out of peeling a baked potato.

In Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter, anecdotes, research, and lively stories are combined with her voice to form a fantastic ride. The memoir  begins in peachy childhood with an artistic, caring mother and a goofy father who “enjoyed skipping down sidewalks singing choruses from Gilbert and Sullivan operettas while pumping his elbows out to the ides and snapping his fingers like castanets,” and all things “festive.” But Wearing grows up amidst choppy waters as her father explores his gay identity, keeping his double life from the family, eventually coming out amidst great obstacles. At times I was dumbfounded with shock; at others I felt a surprising familiarity and connection to the family’s struggles; mostly, I was laughing.

The disruption of Wearing’s family was hard on her, as was accepting her father’s homosexuality but the strife is washed with wildly hilarious stories in which Wearing pokes fun at her family (recounting one brother’s obsession with poo, a family Christmas in which everyone accidentally ingests hallucinogenic mushrooms, and of course her father’s many quirks), and at herself   At one point she describes her hair as “thick knuckly masses, something a (brief) boyfriend was once generous enough to inform me was the stuff that makes up a rhinoceros’s horn.”

About two-thirds into the book, the point of view shifts to her father via diary entries, newspaper clippings, letters and notes during his coming out. These scraps of overwhelming struggle blew me away, revealed a violent world that I could not have otherwise fathomed. The story culminates in a sentimental, occasionally overly sentimental, acceptance, love and appreciation for family in all its fairy dust and demons. However, I forgave the story its sentimental weight because I just plain enjoyed it so much, and felt its resounding relevance.

This is an important memoir. Fortunately, it is also a story that anyone with a heart will enjoy.

Cecania Alexander is a fourth-year Creative Writing student at the University of Victoria.