All I Want to Do is Read

I took the above photo on our front deck a few evenings ago. When the tiny trapped points of light in the solar-sensored mason jar came on, they signalled the end of our day.

This photo happened the next morning. Geo and I took an early stroll through Kelowna’s Farmers and Crafters Market, where we shopped for fresh garden veggies, followed by a stop at one of our regular downtown coffee spots. His coffee is hot. Mine is iced, because I’m already hot. That’s a loaf of sourdough multigrain bread that leapt into my hand as we placed our order. I ate the heel slice (I can’t resist fresh heel slices) while Geo savoured his cinnamon bun. By mid-morning, we were home and I had a book in my hands.

Right now, the temperatures are high where we live. Any activity is best done in the morning. These days, if I don’t get out for my walk before nine, it’s not going to happen. Once that’s done, I head straight for my reading pile.

Writing comes hard for me these mid-summer days. The heat makes everything slow down for me, including my mind. I don’t want to create — I want to consume. The only shopping I want to do, other than for food, is in a bookstore.

I spend my afternoons moving from one reading spot to another. I sit outside, under the cover of our deck, until I get too hot. Then I move inside to our air-conditioned (lucky us) living room until I cool off and move back outside again. My pile of books moves around with me, because I’m never sure from one moment to the next which one I’m going to pick up. I usually have about four or five books on the go at one time, various genres in various formats, bookmarks showing my place in each one. For these afternoon reading sessions, I like to hold a real book in my hands. This is my usual position.

I’ll switch from fiction to non-fiction to poetry to social commentary, although in the summer, I often reach for fiction. The afternoon heat makes me want to get lost in an absorbing saga with a bit of mystery and lots of drama. Sometimes something unusual makes its way into my hands - I truly believe that books find me when I need them. That’s what happened when I opened this book of essays, Ordinary Wonder Tales, by Emily Urquhart.

When I’m writing, some unexplained synchronicity often seeps into the stories I create. Not heavy-handed, just enough to acknowledge that not everything in our world has or needs a scientific explanation. I’m talking about something that gives a nod to a higher force, something that makes its presence known through an odd occurrence, something that’s less than a sign from above but more than a coincidence. Perhaps that practice is why I enjoyed Ordinary Wonder Tales so much.

Urquhart starts with a haunted room and moves through the dangers of being a woman in this world. She connects strange wonders with the ordinary events of human life. A child sees a ghost and the adult that child becomes continues seeing it for the rest of her life. She braids related themes, casually weaving together historical plague narratives with her own experience of pandemic living. She evokes old hags and poltergeists, tales of sexual trauma, narrow escapes, and lingering fears of predators. The quiet magic of folklore accompanies her revelations of personal loss.

I was attracted to this book not only by its charming cover of a tidy cottage in a glowing green glen, but also because I’ve read every novel written by Emily Urquhart’s mother, author Jane Urquhart. Reading Emily Urquhart’s latest book was like visiting with the daughter of a friend I used to know well (I’ve never met Jane in person) and hadn’t seen for a while. About two decades ago, I immersed myself in Jane Urquhart’s works, reading them one after another. If you ever want to explore her stories, my favourites are Away, The Underpainter, and The Stone Carvers. I was writing my PhD dissertation at the time. A dissertation is a peculiar genre: a weird mass of pages that should amount to a thesis and a worthwhile investigation. In my case, all I really wanted to do was write about what I wanted to read. One of the best things about that time of my life was being surrounded by piles of books waiting for me to pick them up.

This summer, I’ve been drawn back to my collection of books by Steven Heighton. I recently finished his latest, and sadly last, an exquisite work of short fiction called Instructions for the Drowning. It’s such a timely book because all its characters are of this cultural moment, this fire-seared summer of anxiety. These deeply resonant stories demonstrate what we don’t know, or want to admit, about being human. It’s not only that we have no idea how to save ourselves, but also that we don’t want to know that we’re drowning. If that sounds too depressing, I assure you it’s not. He’s offering genuine self-reflection for those who dare. It’s an invitation to acknowledge our fears, move beyond them, and let our minds turn to clear thinking.

In a tiny gem from 2011, Workbook: memos & dispatches on writing, Steven offers writers a buffet of random advice about survival. I return to this one often: it’s an essential guidebook for me. It’s so small that it fits in my sling bag and I occasionally carry it with me when I write in a coffee shop. I like that Steven signed my copy with a personal note from our time together at a writing retreat. I like that my own handwritten asterisks and underlining appear on many pages. My exclamation marks clutter the margins beside passages like these: “Failure and sadness are the great unveilers . . . Grief is the great muse . . . To be alive is to be molten, to flow . . . All literature constitutes an existential wake-up call . . . Writers, like others, live in hope, only more so.” Steven defines hope as “leaning into the future.”

These days, hopeful writing can be hard to find. So many new releases are apocalyptic writing, bleak visions of humans trying to survive in arenas of destruction. For a novel of hope, I recommend Shawna Lemay’s quietly wondrous tale of “magic hidden in plain sight,” Everything Affects Everyone. If you’re into angels, this exploration of creative legacy is a welcome discovery. To sample Shawna’s poetic and photographic insights, give her thoughtful newsletter, Transactions With Beauty, a look.

When the searing sun finally leaves the sky these days, I welcome the night as relief. In bed, I read e-books on my device so I can read in the dark, to me a delicious pleasure. When I wake up in the middle of the night (which is often), I don’t despair. I know I can read myself back to sleep. Without turning on a light, my hand goes immediately to my glasses. They’re right beside me, on my nightstand, on top of my ipad. I always have an e-book lineup ready: right now I have six on my virtual shelf and fourteen on hold.

As I read my way through this sun-drenched summer, I know that I will miss the warmth when the winter winds arrive. I also know that my writing brain will send me a wake-up call as soon as our daily high temperatures begin their fall into autumn territory. Until then, I’ll read. But no matter how many books I go through, my reading pile never seems to get any smaller. New books make their appearance every month. Next month, my new one (She Who Burns) will be one of them.

Thanks for reading Me Who Writes. If you enjoyed this issue, please share it with a friend.