Wherein My Son Doesn’t Die

Posted on August 11, 2016 by Jennifer Quist

My Middle-born Boy

My middle-born son, age fifteen, did not die on Wild Hay River last week.

He did not die there but he did go there on a canoe trip with his Scouting group. As they went along, the flotilla wound up in an unforeseen, dangerous flooded section of the river. I wasn’t there but I am told a couple of boys evacuating a nearby canoe accidentally capsized the boat my son, my husband, and another boy, only twelve years old, were in. All three of them were dumped into the river. The current was strong, rushing toward a large spruce log covered in spiky broken branches spanning the river from shore to shore. It was large and dense enough to obscure the view of what was on the other side of it. Beyond and beneath it, there would be more water, and maybe all hell.

In the water, the current divided my husband from the kids. He stood in deep, fast water on one bank, anchoring himself by holding onto slippery tree branches with his cut and bleeding hands, shouting out to the boys not go under the fallen tree but to try to grab onto it if they couldn’t get out of the water. Fighting to stay on his feet, he remained in the water, waiting to see if the boys would be able to stop themselves. If they couldn’t, he would let go and let the river push him after them—a bad but only hope. And that would be that.

The younger boy was closer to the opposite bank and strong and smart enough to grapple out of the water on his own. Our son was further in. He was leaning back against the current, digging into the rocks of the riverbed with his bare feet, his boots long gone. My son’s friends stood on the bank in shock. They watched him being pushed closer to the fallen log—a horrible, unknown. To them, the spiked log might have looked like a barrier in a video game—the kind that ends the level and uses up a life.

I have a vivid imagination. It’s an important part of my trade but it’s also awful. In that imagination, I can see a curly, blond, drenched head pushed along the surface of a rough, glacial river. I can see a little white face with eyes just like my grandfather’s in it, staring up out of the water at jagged spikes.

As the log came within his reach, my son rose up out of the water, moving higher and faster than anyone watching thought was possible. He took hold of the tree’s broken branches and stopped himself from being pushed underneath it. “I’m okay,” he told himself, and hand-over-hand, without the help of anyone he could see, he pulled himself out of the river. Safe, he turned to see his father give him a thumbs up and climb out of the river on the opposite shore.

Earlier this year, I had been invited to the Scouting committee meetings where the trip was planned and I didn’t attend a single one. I wasn’t there asking if the river had been scouted yet this season. I wasn’t there to insist on it or to offer to strap on a can of bear spray and scout it myself. I didn’t do any of those things but I get to keep my son anyway. Do not underestimate my gratitude for the grace extended to parents who mess up.

Sure, many good things will come to my son from this experience. He learned it’s possible for him to rescue himself. The boy who was so unsure of his abilities he didn’t perfect riding a bike until he was eleven has now had the experience of reaching out and saving himself. He also lived through one of those tricky human paradoxes where difficulties placed in our paths (like the fallen tree) are often themselves the ways out of the difficulty. He got more perspective on what he is worth to his father, both when his dad stayed in the water until he was out, and when he saw his father safe on the bank advocating for a difficult portage, for not getting right back into the river even if it meant abandoning the canoes in the woods and reimbursing the Scout group for the loss of them out his government salary. Stuff is nothing, work is nothing, money is nothing. You, boy, are everything.

These are all good lessons—powerful lessons, the kinds of mishap-lessons that find all of us no matter how we live our lives. The world is dangerous and unpredictable for everyone. However, I don’t believe these lessons are the ones Scouting has in mind when it promises kids adventure. It’s a stodgy old Commonwealth institution, actually, one with waivers to sign and plenty of liability insurance. It offers character building in terms of well-organized food drives, and gaining confidence and competence by going into the wild to learn to traverse, navigate, build shelter, find and cook food, and stay safe. It’s about exploration, not exploits—understanding the immense power of the natural world, standing close enough to sense its awesome power, and then taking a respectful, sober step back into the preparations and planning that are our best chance for coming home. We will go back and we’ll do better next time.

Downstream on the Wild Hay River, the canoe my family had been in—the one that had capsized and washed away, upside down, under the fallen tree—was recovered. It was sitting upright and aground on a gravelly bar. In it was the bag containing my husband’s driver’s license, and one of our son’s hiking boots. Gone was my husband’s sloppy Scouter hat I had openly hated. So sloppy–here’s to its passing.

外国人去过北京 or, Mute Dragon and Stuttering Phoenix Have No Idea How to Relax

Posted on July 13, 2016 by Jennifer Quist

20160708_120224[1]

I have trouble writing the monuments of my life. This summer has been rife with them. In June I attended the birth of my sister’s second-born, my own second-born’s high school graduation, and the veterinary clinic where we signed off on ending the suffering of the nasty little birdie who’d been our pet for over six years. All of it happened without much written comment from me. That will come later, in small ways, image by image as I properly take it in and bleed it out. July began with another monument, which I will post pictures of here at the very least, though I sense it will take years and years to write the whole of it.

My husband and I have just returned from China. Midway through our tour of Beijing, I posted the picture above, captioning it, “The Great Wall 长城, like everything about this place, is both far more amazing and more difficult up close.” A friend asked what I meant by difficult. Well, biased by childhood field trips to stone parapets of British forts made into National Parks in Maritime Canada, I expected the Great Wall to be something like a raised walking trail—all the dangerous parts closed off or refitted to modern standards. But the Beijing section of the wall runs along the top of a mountain range, like a spine on a rippling dragon’s back. The wall is made of stones and brick, dropping off in steep slopes, rising in uneven flights of stairs. In places,metal handrails have been added, long rusted red. Visiting the wall is not a walk but a hike, a climb. Despite the difficulty, it is crowded with people, all kinds of people: foreign athletes showing off their soccer moves, Chinese kids striking Kung Fu poses for their parents’ cameras, tough Chinese grannies unpacking bag lunches, and us, a blond waiguoren couple.

This has been my experience with everything Chinese. It is all more complicated and more difficult than anyone can tell looking at it from afar. The complexity is part of what makes

The Temple of Heaven, where I might have cried a little

it beautiful almost to the point of surreality. My contact with it humbles and chastises me—at times, punishes me–but I keep following after it anyway. Every time I think about setting it aside, something pulls me back. I can’t turn around in China without crashing face-to-face into myself, even while there is nothing there at all like myself. It may be a place to lose myself in order to find myself.

In Beijing we visited the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, towers and temples and shops. We cleared security and stood in Tiananmen Square, but didn’t queue for the two hours in the hot sun it would have taken to get into Mao’s tomb to see his body lying in a crystal coffin. We did go into The Underground Palace, an empty tomb of a Ming emperor and his two empresses. Their bodies had been removed and destroyed by the Red Guard decades ago. On our way inside, a beautiful princess-girl, just a little younger than the Red Guard would have been when they came here, approached me with delicate English. “Excuse me, would you like to take a picture with me?” She answered when I called her 妹妹 meimei, little sister.

At Mao’s Tomb in Tiananmen Square

Maybe it sounds forced or phony but believe me when I say the best part of our tour of China was the people, the ones I spoke to and the ones I didn’t. I liked the way, instead of being equipped with a whistle, the boat at the Summer Palace had a loud speaker the captain used to call out scoldings to the smaller boats drifting into his path as we chugged across the lake. I liked the way our cab driver changed his manner of speech when he pronounced the name Mao Zedong—something between esteem and perhaps sarcasm, impossible to tell, so perfect, so Chinese. At night, along the old city moat not far from our hotel, people gathered to sing and dance until the police sent them home at 10pm. Some of them danced in unison, through steps they came together to learn and practice even when the nights were hot and smoggy. We sat on the edges of the patios, with the dancers’ pet dogs and the men with their t-shirts rolled up over their bellies, all of them smoking like it’s 1977, and we watched.

Speaking and understanding Chinese in a classroom is something I can do with hours of careful preparation. Speaking and understanding Chinese in the streets is different. In our

Beijing Nightlife on the Moat

native language, my husband and I are professional communicators—people paid and petted for our skills in verbal and written expression. In China, my husband is illiterate and has a vocabulary limited to “thank you, hello, right, Canadian.” He was mistaken for Russian, which he also does not speak. But he loves me and came on a trip where he became the big, quiet bodyguard the cab driver was glancing at in the rear-view mirror, asking me what’s wrong with him. He could have booked a vacation on nearly any beach in this world, but instead he came to Beijing—to the heat and smog and smell—so I could grow a little.

As for me, I could barely read and every verbal interaction I had was a smoking wreck. There was a lot of me saying “I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” a lot of helpful Chinese restating of what I’d just tried to say only with the better vocabulary and pronunciation. Every time I was corrected, I said thank you because I was thankful. I didn’t go to China to leave just as stupid as I arrived. There were also kind compliments, encouragement, surprised nods whenever I managed to order rice without sounding like a beggar. Back at the hotel, I’d lay awake going over everything I’d said, recognizing mistakes too late, wishing I’d done better. And then it’d all flip inside out and I’d be shaking my exhausted husband, raving, “I used the Chinese! I did it. Did you hear me?”

Husby and 獬豸xiezhi, good-lookin’ pair, hardly anyone can say they’re as tall as a Chinese unicorn.

Late in the afternoon, after the Great Wall, our tour guide took us to The Sacred Way, a lavish imperial graveyard we had to swipe our thumbprints to get into. It was a long flagstone avenue lined with trees full of magpies, and old statues of standing and crouching animals. Our guide brought us to the Chinese unicorn, the symbol of law and judiciary, a respectful acknowledgement of my husband’s true identity as an erudite member of the justice system in our home country. We stopped to take this picture, long enough for China to make one more tug at me. A swallow-tail butterfly flitted out of a hedge and alighted on the top of my foot. On the stones of The Sacred Way, I stood still and waited as the creature fanned its wings.

Bad, Honest Advice on How to Write as a Young Parent

Posted on May 28, 2016 by Jennifer Quist

This 25 year old mother of two is me. Lazy butt had written precisely zero novels.

Enough people have asked how I managed to write two novels while at home with my kids that I thought I’d better craft an answer a little more thoughtful than “by being a crap mother.” Here it is, some very honest and probably very bad advice on how to launch a writing career while masterminding a large, young household.

Stop cleaning the house. This is done by a) quitting once conditions become sanitary without proceeding all the way to spiffy and, b) looking at your children the way our great-grandmother’s (and my parents) looked at their children: as a private workforce, a domestic militia of barely competent workers. Assigning one light chore every day and one heavier cleaning task on the weekend should do it.
Start mowing the lawn. Look, you’re not going away on writers’ retreats to the Banff Centre any time soon. That’s not the life you chose. But you do need to spend time alone with your thoughts en plein air, and pushing a machine that drives conversation away all around the backyard is better than nothing.
Stay up. My creativity comes in all-or-nothing surges. During a surge, I tend to get about four hours of sleep during the night, maybe less. This isn’t a desperate attempt to make the most of the hours when my house is quiet (though it has that benefit). There’s simply more energy in my mind when I’m creative and it keeps me sleepless for weeks on end. Don’t resist it just because your family needs to get up in the morning. Squeeze a ten minute nap or two into the daylight hours even if it means taking the bus and sleeping away the commute (trust me, most of my university’s student population does this, even the sleep-drooler population). Staying up to write won’t be your lifestyle forever. Think of it as a grueling but temporary training regimen, like going for long, long runs leading up to a marathon.
Keep reading. I was badly stuck during the writing of my current novel. There was a difficult decision to be made, I didn’t have the confidence to make it, but until I did, the book couldn’t move forward. The solution was to stop writing for the rest of the day and read some excellent writing that succeeds in doing the very thing I was afraid to attempt. I opened a collection of short stories by Mavis Gallant, read until 1am, and went to bed stoked to take the risk I needed.
Don’t spend too long lying around miserable about not being Mavis Gallant. This was an unintended side-effect of reading good writing. It’s inevitable and understandable, just don’t let it go on for too long.
Talk to your partner about your book. His input may not make it into the manuscript but airing your story’s sticking points out loud with an attentive adult who wants you cute and happy is a helpful exercise. It also downplays any burgeoning sense of resentment he may have for a) the project that consumes so much of your attention, and b) the way you hog the lawnmower.
Share with care. I don’t mean to say you should make your partner to read half-baked early drafts. Don’t do this to your loved ones. They often don’t know what to say and it puts them in an awful position. Instead, use a professional writer-in-residence based in your local library, university, or other arty institutions. These real, working writers are waiting to read fifteen pages or so of your writing and give an impartial, informed assessment of how you’re doing and how it could be better. Their services are free and competition for their positions is fierce so you can usually trust they’ve been well-screened for things like being a jerk. But having said all this, if someone asks you to read their work, do it. You can take a lesson from the writers-in-residence and limit the amount of pages you’ll read, but say yes. Strictly speaking, I don’t believe in Karma but I make a cautious exception when it comes to lending my pickup truck and to helping other writers.
Distract. If you have kids at home during the day, introduce them to pastimes they can do by themselves in the same room as you while you sit still and say very little—things other than screen-time, which won’t make anyone happy in the long run. What could those pastimes be? It depends on the kid. For some kids, nothing will fill this bill and you’ll just have to let them trash your house while you get some work done, or learn to type with their heads wedged into the triangle formed by the crook of your arm and the edge of your desk (been there). If they are willing to give you a break, get them some Lego, craft supplies, Play-Doh, a load of siblings, a bunch of ironing to do—anything.
Be honest with yourself about other interests competing for discretionary time. If you can’t give up crafting, cake decorating, direct marketing essential oils, etc. in order to make time to write consistently, it might be best to wait until you are willing to make writing a priority. There’s nothing wrong with other pursuits, we just need to be realistic and at peace with how we choose to spend our time.
Don’t call your writing a hobby if you’re doing it as a serious artistic project. Don’t let anyone call it a hobby.
Go easy on people. People are who you are writing for. Don’t tell me it’s all for yourself, forever and ever. That might be how things turn out but that’s not the goal you have in your heart. Spending time with your kids, your partner, your extended family, friends, colleagues, strangers is part of writing. Nothing is more inspiring than life going on around you. This is an advantage mothers surrounded by people have over other writers. When I was working as a columnist for a newspaper in Fort McMurray staffed mostly by young, single newcomers to the city, a pattern emerged when these people would try to write columns of their own. They’d write a few articles on food they ate or television they watched and then their columns would usually fizzle. What they lacked wasn’t talent or voice or experience, it was other people. They were isolated, lonely, and in many ways creatively bereft. You and I, we are none of those things.

And that is the awful truth of how I do it.

Call Me Binoo

Posted on May 16, 2016 by Jennifer Quist

Binoo, on his island, reads a book

In 2005, Quebecoise author Dominique Jolin’s popular children’s books were adapted for English television as Toopy and Binoo, an animated series headlined by an oversized, chatty mouse and a little white cat who doesn’t speak at all.

2005 was also the year my fourth son was born, delivered without a doctor in a Fort McMurray hospital during an April snowstorm. No one thinks her kids are ordinary but this boy has made an exceptionally strong case for extraordinariness. Ask anyone.

While he was still in his super-toddler form, his little brother, my fifth son was born. Baby brother’s birth wasn’t ordinary either. But instead of being a cavalcade of feats of frontier hardiness, my ultimate son’s birth drama was launched six weeks too early, beginning in an ambulance and ending in a neonatal special care unit.

By the time itty-bitty, needy brother made it safely home, our super-toddler had started identifying with Jolin’s cartoon mouse character, Toopy. I could tell by the way he called me nothing but Binoo and the way my new baby was renamed “Patchy-Patch” after the stuffed toy Binoo fawns over on the show. We all played along. It was hecka cute, cost us nothing, and benefitted us in ways I didn’t recognize during the haze of caring for five children under the age of eleven.

I’m not sure if Jolin wrote Toupie et Binou as a script for toddlers confronting the harsh fact
that mothers are busy people with more to their lives than indulging the whims of one child, no matter how extraordinary. When we make art, we may wind up expressing truth we don’t otherwise perceive. Either way, Toopy and Binoo is a work of genius.

In print, the script of an old-school episode of Toopy and Binoo would read as an uninterrupted monologue by Toopy, mostly spoken in the second person to Binoo. Toopy prattles on in the forefront while in the background Binoo cares for Patchy-Patch, makes small adjustments to keep Toopy’s surroundings safe, and gently redirects and makes suggestions without a word—no pop psych editorializing about social skills or recycling. Binoo plays along, lets Toopy’s imagination wash over him, engaging it, validating it without adding much to it.

This is what the daily life of a toddler at home with his mother (especially with a little sibling) really looks like. They are together in the same world, but each of them wanders within it. There’s constant interaction but its intensity ebbs and flows. The mother’s role in the child’s imaginary world is a supporting one, like Binoo’s role in Toopy’s world. She participates almost by default and, though it may be unwitting, fosters the child’s sense of being “fabulous” by letting him take the lead in play.

“Looks like Binoo has finished reading his book…”

For parents, there’s a self-serving side to this arrangement. A Toopy-kid—imaginative, caring, happy—is secure enough to loosen that strangle-hold toddlers like to have on their mothers’ attention. In the “Binoo’s Island” episode, Toopy can’t reach Binoo because he’s sitting on a blanket, wearing his glasses, reading a book. And it is not a crisis. “Looks like Binoo is on his very own island,” Toopy narrates, adding only, “Wow!” He then spends the rest of the show goofing around with the premise of a marooned Binoo but actually leaving Binoo the frick alone until Binoo himself decides he’s finished reading his book.

That’s some social modelling I can get behind.

There are lulls in the story where Binoo is not even looking and Toopy is happy just to be near him. Sometimes when a Toopy-kid is talking, a real Binoo-mom keeps looking down at her preemie infant or at her screen full of work and just says, “Uh-huh, uh-huh…” Toopy can deal with that. He knows he’s still “fabulous” even if other things and people need some space to be fabulous too. He knows the dividing of Binoo’s attention won’t last forever. Maybe Toopy and Binoo makes a case for the value of “quantity time” because parents are human, houses are small, everyone is important, and sometimes quantity time is all we want.

My penultimate son told me as much. One afternoon, I had been on Binoo’s Island for quite a while when he came into the bedroom where I was working on a novel and just stood at the foot of the bed. I looked up, greeted him, and asked if he wanted anything. “I want,” he said, “to be near you.”

Done.

Home in Fort McMurray

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Jennifer Quist

Little boys in a Fort McMurray “fire break,” winter 2002

Six months pregnant with my third son, I moved my family to Fort McMurray. My husband went along with it, then fell hard for it. We stayed for five years, had two sons there, bought our first two homes, planted trees, built a backyard fence to rival Stonehenge. Living in the city—in the place, not just at the time–changed our lives. In many ways, it made our lives—mine as a writer and my husband’s as a crime fighter. Today, I sat at a safe distance of hundreds of kilometres and cried at the news coverage of Fort McMurray in flames.

I have never done anything like what today’s Fort McMurray residents have done. I have never been an evacuee. My experiences with forest fire are nothing compared to theirs.

Most years, “forest fire” in the boreal north isn’t so much a freak of nature as it is a season. Forest fire season rolls with the year, like flu season. Everyone in Fort McMurray knows wild fire shares our world while caring nothing for us. Highway 63—the one highway in and out of the city in any direction—passes through large sections of burnt forest standing like skeletons along the road from past fires, hectares of the arboreal version of memento mori. We’ve all seen it. Inside the city, controlled preemptive burns of brush in ditches are a normal part of municipal maintenance. Neighbourhoods are ringed by swaths of grassy clay cleared of trees and known as the fire break. “Where are the kids? Oh, they’re back playing on the fire break.”

While we were living in McMurray, only once did a forest fire encroach on our human world with anything more than smoke. We were coming home after a weekend out of town and were almost at the edge of the forest, where the pastures end and the spruces begin, when we heard Highway 63 was closed about one hundred kilometres south of the city, at Mariana Lake, due to a large fire that had jumped the highway. The highway was open further north, where it connected to the 881—a road I will not call a highway. At the time, sections of it were marked on the map as undeveloped. In places, it wasn’t even a gravel road, just a graded track through a cut-line. We had to decide whether to turn back to Edmonton or press on to Fort McMurray on the 881. We stopped in Lac La Biche, stocked up on groceries, and took to the 881. My husband respected my need to manage stress by taking control and sat in the passenger seat as I drove the road myself in our Mazda 3, our babies strapped into the backseat.

We made it but I suppose it was rash, crazy. We were desperate to get back to our lives in Fort McMurray. We did it because we had to get home.

We had to get home.

During our time in Fort McMurray, our little house on the muskeg and the community of adventurous, open-hearted people all around it, was the only real home we had. If it was in trouble, if it was manageably dangerous for us to be there, we belonged there. I don’t say this to criticize the people who had to leave today—not at all. They did the only thing they could. I say this to empathize in the small way I am able with their grief. I know what I would have risked, what I did risk, to stay home. We are probably not much different from each other. In my way, I have a pale sense of the beginnings of their loss and I am awed by it. I also remember the strength, resourcefulness, the courage of the kinds of people who don’t just work in Fort McMurray but live there, raise families there, build their Stonehenges, open themselves up to experiences that will change and make their lives. I am awed by that too.

Thank you, Fort McMurray. This is not a eulogy, an apostrophe. Let me say, instead, for now, how very much I love you.

On My Mother’s Knee-Replacement Surgery

Posted on February 15, 2016 by Jennifer Quist

Mummould

My mother took this picture. It’s mould she found growing in the refrigerator, on the surface of a long leftover batch of homemade pea soup, when she came home from a vacation. It’s beautiful and she needed to show us all before she threw it away.

mumteeth

This is a picture she took of herself this winter, when she was propped open, clamped, half-gagged, left alone to wait for anesthetic to set in before root canal surgery. It captures the dehumanization of dentistry with blithely understated honesty where there could be shrill drama.

When I was learning to be a person, the eyes that framed these pictures framed much of my world for me. It’s not that my mother trailed along after me, doting, driving, fussing over making sure I’d grow up to be an artist. Actually, it’s kind of a joke in our family that when I was born, she still wasn’t quite finished babying my 13 month old big brother so she lobbed me at my father with, “Here, this one’s for you.” I’ve never been sorry for that and the truth is, I was never far from her anyway. My father had my ear but my mother had my eye. I saw what she showed me—mould and teeth, pineapple weed in the cracks of sidewalks, clam holes in the sand at the beach.

My aunties said no one finds four-leaf clovers as easily as my mother does. She’d press them in books—thick, heavy, green books by men like Dante and Plato and Milton. She didn’t care for those stories but the books were kept through thousands of miles of moving house for our sake—that is, for my sake, and maybe the clovers’ too.

Get well, Mum.

Angry Grizzly Bear on This Generation

Posted on January 12, 2016 by Jennifer Quist

Seen the #THISGENERATION graphics yet? The generation referred to in this series of red posters isn’t mine—the awkward demographic between Generation X and the Millennials. The generation in question isn’t the artist’s own cohort either. From what I can tell, he’s a salty old fella from the beginning of the Millennial spectrum. #THISGENERATION—the one harpooned in his simple red graphics—is that of my kids and current classmates.

I spend almost all of my time with #THISGENERATION. Like the artist, I am part of a university community filled with people who get younger and younger than me every semester. In my growing family and in my volunteer activities, most of the faces I see and voices I hear are those of #THISGENERATION. By my own choice, I move through their sphere, outnumbered by them, and perfectly content to be so. What have I found in their sphere? I’ve found the full breadth and depth of human character, intelligence, and kindness. It exists there just as it does among people my own age and among people much older than me. Humanity isn’t something we age into or out of. We’re all equally a part of it.

Of course, I have a huge problem with the way these red posters fail so utterly in representing how or why my children and my friends live the way they do. It’s part of my general revulsion for any sweeping statement made about an entire category of people, especially when those statements appear to be based on fanciful anecdotes unsubstantiated by any proper data and, frankly, smack of the petty mean-spiritedness.

Let’s pursue a methodical close reading of a few of the posters. In this one, #THISGENERATION is hassled for going somewhere private to take pictures of themselves to post in public. Sure, this is a situation that has and will continue to showcase a whole lot of terrible youthful judgment. But let’s hold our noses, take a page out of the gun lobby’s script, and remind ourselves that cameras don’t exploit people, people exploit people.

When I was in university, my bestie had a cheap, nasty film-camera and pestered me into appearing in ridiculous pictures. She was a genius, I guess. We were taking selfies before there were selfies. I wish two things about those pictures were different: that they weren’t so blurry and that there were many, many more of them. I no longer look like I did when I was twenty. And I certainly don’t blame anyone who is twenty right now for

An Aunthentic, Antique Selfie ca. 1994

understanding they will never be more beautiful and wanting to use the slick, cheap technology they have to document and revel in it. Heck, go ahead and pose in the bathroom if that’s the best place to relax and get a natural expression. Yes, some of today’s selfies will cause regret. That’s awful. But all those picture we don’t have from back in our day cause us a kind of regret too.

This one has more text so the weak points of its underlying assumptions are more glaring. First, the Candy Crush posts on my Facebook feed aren’t from #THISGENERATION but from older people. Most of us won’t commit to long, challenging gamer-ism so we play simple, free, throw-away games like Candy Crush. It’s mostly an old people game.

Beyond this sloppy misrepresentation, the larger problem with the comic is that it sets up a false dichotomy between online social contact and face-to-face contact. No one has to choose between these two options. Young people’s relationships span both social media and face-to-face life, just as they do for older people. The centre of young people’s social lives has shifted, moving toward a social space that didn’t exist in the past, the same way people’s relationships expanded to include phone calls during the twentieth century. However, the locus of new social contact points isn’t that different from what’s gone before it. My 19-year-old son observed that my 1990s social life required “a lot of legwork.” That’s true. But it wasn’t all about hoofing around, trying to find each other. We tied up our parents’ landlines, wrote notes to each other in class, wore earbuds and ignored our seatmates on public transit, sat together silently watching television because we had to share the same screen, bullied, and gossiped. Our social interactions weren’t always the rich, face-to-face encounters romanticized by “if you remember this your childhood was awesome” memes. My awkward generation also bored each other, hurt each other, wasted time, didn’t go outside enough, and let opportunities to enrich each other’s lives pass by.

In many ways, #THISGENERATION is more connected to their friends and acquaintances than young people have ever been. That can include being more connected to their parents. “So are you more of a friend-mom?” one of my classmates recently asked me. I do my fair-share of nagging and bossing but I do enjoy my kids. All those excruciating baby-years are paying off with these fantastic friends I made myself. That was the point of this parenting project all along— making people with whom to share my life. It’s come to include my online life.

I haven’t even mentioned the safety benefits of having kids in #THISGENERATION. When I was sixteen, my girls and I would get on a MetroTransit bus, leave Cole Harbour, and stay out until the last ferry brought us back from Halifax. We did this without any way for my parents to check on me, without anything in my pocket that could summon rescuers if something went wrong. My husband grew up in a rural area where he’d take a car and disappear into dark, icy prairies, unreachable for hours. I don’t know how our parents could stand it, and I’m glad I don’t have to.

How about this one?

I was amused recently to read a twenty-year-old paper warning scholars they ought to take spoken literature (orature) more seriously since it was all #THISGENERATION was going to abide. In the early days of texting, a prominent Canadian author wrote a novel including a vision of the future where both written and spoken communication had morphed into flip-phone era texting shorthand. Of course, that hasn’t happened. #THISGENERATION doesn’t often use their phones as phones. When dealing with people at a distance, they prefer written over oral communication. A phone call means someone’s dead or in jail. #THISGENERATION has become extremely literate, plugging away on Tumblr writing heavy text posts about art and relationships and social justice, learning creative writing in epic style on fan fiction sites, while older adults quip away in 140 characters. No one reads and writes more than #THISGENERATION.

None of this is meant as a glib “the kids are alright” brush-off of how hard growing up is for young people and the elders caught in the blast-zone. Things like pervasive online pornography, harassment, the permanence of online gaffes, and the ways compulsive gaming and social media activity can rob the achievements and relationships kids need to build their futures are all serious problems. So let’s stop snickering and get serious. #THISGENERATION ought to be able to look to older people for support, help, and love to ease their way. We can’t support people when we’re sneering at them. We can’t understand them when we’re oversimplifying them. We can’t show them much of anything if all we see can in them is their worst.

Another “Rock Show”

Posted on November 16, 2015 by Jennifer Quist

Voice Industrie, Nov 2015

November 14, 2015

Edmonton, Alberta

A day after maniacs shot up a “rock show” in Paris, France, we go to a concert in our own city.

This is not a case of us soldiering on with our usual routine in defiance of someone’s sick attempt at an awful new world order. The local techno-Goth music scene is not my usual routine. But I have a marvellously large, culturally far-flung family and one of my loved ones is currently in a band called Voice Industrie. It’s been around for years. “We’re a heritage act,” my sister-in-law explains, each of her earrings as big as my face, burgundy lipstick, six feet tall in black and silver high heels, standing in the evocatively shabby Garneau Theatre lobby. Even without any metal in her face, she’s the most striking person here. What kind of life do I have, to be able to say I’ve known and loved her since she was a child?

I greet her with a hug, announcing myself and her older brother with, “The dorks are here!” It’s okay. It’s true. There are no natural blondes at Goth shows. I am a freak of the freak scene.

Next to where we stand, there’s a young, indie author selling self-published copies of his urban fantasy-horror novel on a white table cloth. He’s done all the art and design for it himself. I buy a book, tell him about the novel I wrote with the word “death” in the title. When he signs my copy I say, “No, not there. Sign it by your name.” There’s a place, a use for me here after all. He gives me his hand and I shake it with that ladylike, finger-pivot-palm-pulse move I can’t keep from using anymore. I don’t know where I learned it.

We have to wait. The show is running forty-five minutes behind and there’s another band on before Voice Industrie. They spell their name with a “9” where most of us would use a “g.” They are not a heritage act. Their front man has his hair bleached swan-white, black pants, white blouse on top, a variation on the dress code our elementary school music teachers used to require at Christmas concerts. He’s a lovely thing, looking like Gerard Way’s long-lost little brother. He can perform too. Breath control—I always envy and admire people with great breath control. Their songs are about despair and gallows and stuff but the fact is, they’re adorable, up there swearing in their skinny jeans. Are their moms in the audience, their big sisters who love them like they’re still kids?

I haven’t been inside this theatre since I was in university the first time around. Nothing’s changed since then. I’d forgotten that the chairs rock back and forth, reclining and recoiling. It’s all the dancing I need, sit-down rocking for not-Gerard and the boys.

When Voice Industrie finally comes on, and people start to gather at the foot of the stage to dance, my husband stands up to join them. He hasn’t danced in public in years and years. “At least take your glasses off,” I say. I don’t go with him but even back in the day, I never did. If we weren’t able to dance without each other from time to time, this thing never would’ve worked so well for so long.

I can’t always see him though the crowd but I never lose sight of the grownup girl with the braids. She’s a beautiful dancer. I hope someone is in love with her. If no one was before, someone must be by now.

I stay in my seat, my rocking chair, right for old broads like me, bouncing back and forth until the lights come on and I stand up to blow kisses at my rock star. She takes her bow and runs off the stage, nimble in stilettos, past everyone else, and throws her arms around the two of us.

This is the “rock show.” For every one one of us–this is love.

Sistering is Published Today, or, Enough With the Eerie Coincidences Already

Posted on August 15, 2015 by Jennifer Quist

Summer 2013, my first novel is published. It’s a family saga about death and dying. The week it’s released, a close family member is diagnosed with a life-changing, life-expectancy altering illness.

Oliver, BC fire, 2015

Summer 2015–today, to be exact–my second novel is published. It’s another family story–a dark-hearted comedy instead of a light-hearted tragedy. It’s about sisters and fire and love and stuff. So, naturally, right in time for publication week, the mountain town where my sister Mary lives catches fire.

Ya can’t make this stuff up.

Upon waking on the morning of the unveiling of a five year project my future and my identity as an artist are inextricably linked to, my first thought wasn’t “book.” It was “Mary.”

The last images she left on Facebook last night included the one above. But while we slept, the lightning stopped, the rain started, the firefighters fought. This morning, my sister and her family (plus a second sister who just happened to be visiting this week, posting fire-photos on Instagram that ended up on the Global News website) have all reported in safely from their undamaged home.

I am relieved, finally ready to celebrate, and resolved that my next novel will be a tableau of fluffy bunnies nibbling wildflowers in peaceful meadows.

Oh yeah, and if you’d like to read my “wonderfully bizarre and surprisingly recognizable” book click the “Finding the Book” tab above.

“The Wrong Side of 40” or, the Peak of Our Powers

Posted on June 1, 2015 by Jennifer Quist

Mt. Robson, a few hundred kilometres from where I was born four decades ago.

At any time in my young adulthood, I could have been found sitting awkwardly breastfeeding, sitting awkwardly writing, or standing outside shoveling. None of these things was easy, none of them was without lasting benefits, none of them was any good for my left shoulder. Not surprisingly, for the first two winters of my mid-adulthood, my left rotator cuff has wound up sprained—weak and sore–by the end of January.

Despite not having done much breastfeeding, my father and older brother have the same repetitive stress injury in their shoulders. When I commiserated with Dad, he seemed like he’d been waiting. “You’re on the wrong side of forty,” he said, recommending his favourite aromatic anti-inflammatory ointment. Every girl dreams of growing old smelling exactly like her even older male relatives. That’s not what I’m objecting to here. It’s “the wrong side of forty”—I’m not yet convinced there’s much wrong with forty.

Come back.

I know. As a younger person, I was irked by forty-somethings marveling about how their lives are better than the sluggish, disease-ridden ordeals they might have been expecting. The more they went on about it, the more pathetic it sounded to smug young me. And hearing 40-year-olds reject the term “middle-aged” when the average lifespan in our country is in the 80s is still annoying. Life does not begin at forty. Counting works. Math is real. Knock it off.

People my age are well and truly half-dead. But for many of us, life has developed into something surprisingly good—surprising to our broke, baby-bitten twenty-something selves with piles of student debt.

A lesson known to fortysomethings who won’t stop crowing about enjoying life is the realization that, “It won’t last” –whatever “it” is. The wisdom is bittersweet, delivering comfort and demanding resignation at the same time. Is that what maturity means?

Anyways, here are a few things in my life that didn’t last–for good, for ill, for real. [Keep in mind I can only speak for myself—that’s what a personal blog is for–and I didn’t craft this list to make anyone feel badly about theirs. I have one life and it reads like this.]

My kids’ baby-years didn’t last. When I was a new mother–25 years old with two little boys–I got weary of older parents urging me not to wish the boys’ babyhoods away. They were difficult little dudes and I wished their babyhoods away pretty much every minute they were awake. My friend Jeannie—a lady my mum’s age—saw into my black heart and promised me my kids could grow up to be my best friends. It’s turning out to be true. My kids and I hacked our way through their babyhoods to their personhoods. There are still two elementary students in our household keeping us deep in Kidsville. But I can go for days without having to see their butts and I’ve learned to laugh off what might have made me cry when I was a difficult young mother. For instance, with my oldest kid now studying chemistry at university, I have the track record and confidence to tell our grade two teacher that six worksheets of homework is too many, we’re only doing two, and no one’s future will be destroyed.

Youthful looks don’t last. I didn’t come out of the child-bearing years in the same physical condition I went into them—which is actually fine since I began motherhood looking like a 16-year-old, raking in all sorts of pitying disapproval from strangers. I’ll spare us the details of my decline. Suffice it to say, my mother-in-law—who’s is in the early stages of dementia–keeps being surprised that my skin looks so different now than it did when we met the summer I was twenty-one.

“Did you get a sunburn? Did you get hit in the face?”

“No, Sweetheart. We’re just old now.”

In some ways, I’m healthier than ever. My kids getting old enough for me to ditch them didn’t do a thing for my bad shoulder but finding time to work-out means I can outrun—literally—the diabetes, high blood pressure, and knee problems that would have come with being overweight in a half-spent body.

Trends don’t last. I can calm the frick down about how people and things are decked out. When we moved into a house decorated in early 1990s brass and oak last year, I didn’t panic and start redecorating. Brass is already back. Oak can’t be far behind—and even if it’s not, what do I care? Best of all, my favourite boots from the 90s are back in rotation in my wardrobe, authentically vintage.

Being flat broke didn’t last. When I was 28, living with three kids in a two-bedroom Fort McMurray apartment complex where people sometimes got stabbed, I used to say all I wanted of the comforts of life was a dishwasher, a second bathroom, and the ability to buy whatever goodies I wanted at the grocery store. Fait accompli.

The generation older than mine won’t last. The Baby Boomers haven’t been the easiest generation to follow through history but that doesn’t mean we want to get rid of them. So far, more than anything that’s degenerated in myself, the progression of my parents and parents-in-law into illness, disability, and death has been the most difficult part of growing older.

A few things have lasted. My husband is still with me, with all his teeth and hair, without his appendix.

My stories have benefitted from aging as well. When I was in my 20s, childfree, too broke to do anything but stay home reading and writing, I was frustrated at not having much to say. I wrote brutish poetry because it was short, well-suited for venting burst of poorly-formed literary energy. My voice had potential but most of what I wrote lacked the substance I knew I wanted to invoke. It took me a long time to be able to write fiction that didn’t make me cringe. The stories I wanted to tell came the only way they could for me: slowly.

But then, looking back and looking ahead from this point I hope is the middle of my time, nothing about four decades seems slow at all.

Jennifer Quist, PhD

Writer, scholar, crier, author of "Sistering," "Love Letters of the Angels of Death," and "The Apocalypse of Morgan Turner"

Category Archives: Family