Tag Archives: jennifer quist

Travels with GenX — Finally

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My husb and I did not grow up blessed with international travel. Husb stayed in a motel with his parents precisely once. It was the Bluebird Motel in Claresholm, Alberta and it lasted as long as it took for their car to be repaired. My family did travel all over Canada and the US, always by car and almost always as part of a grueling long distance move. 

In our 20s — prime backpacking age — husb and I were in school, then in diapers (our little kids were, that is), and deep in debt. For us, big-travel did not arrive until our 40s, beginning as a necessity of my career as a writer and scholar before becoming part of who we are now. 

If you’re not a big-traveler yet, and especially if you’re like us — too young to throw in with the Boomers on the group tour packages, too old for flirty bedbug hostels — here’re some tips. If you’ve already got the GenX nihilism, whatever your age, then, whoa, you’re halfway there.

  • If you’re traveling to try to revitalize a relationship, choose something easy and luxurious like an all-inclusive resort or a cruise. Do not attempt a DIY adventure in a foreign country with someone with whom you do not already enjoy spending a lot of time and with whom you are not really, really comfortable exchanging apologies. I have a sister who has yet to do big-travel but I know she and her husb will be great if they ever do because they happily summit local mountains together every weekend. Find a local “mountain” and take that relationship on a trial run before booking a flight.
  • Give yourself lots of time for everything, especially airport connections. Faster is not always better. Don’t just take it from a girl who has run up stairwells in the Frankfurt airport lugging baggage, take it from the much younger and sweatier man we ran past in time to hear him tell his companions, “Just leave me. I’m not going to make it.”
  • Get over car travel. You go everywhere by car at home where public transit is terrible and expensive but things may be different abroad. A ticket on a train in, say, Norway is a sacred trust and you will arrive at your destination promptly and safely even if the train you booked derails outside Oslo before you even board it. Norway Trains will provide a way. And when the Eurovision song comes on in a maxi-taxi with purple LED lights in the ceiling, blazing through the Swedish border without slowing down, everyone will be singing.
  • Wear your wallet. This is what our 90s cargo pants were made for. Zip or button your passport and cards right into your clothes or get a belt bag and wear it across the front of your body where you can see it all the time, with or without the progressive lenses you should be wearing too. If you leave a bag behind in that Paris restaurant with the distracting wasp problem, it’s just going to be you and your high school French trying to convince the nice, somehow wasp-hardy immigrants who run the place that it’s yours.
  • Be so for real about your not-young body. Sleep. Sit. Leave the pharmacy labels on your medication and bring all of it with you (including—especially—the good pain killers). For me, this has meant traveling with my big, cartoon syringe packed in ice on any trips over nine days. It can also mean lying under an overpass in the West End of London somehow overlooked by hostile architecture with your head in your loved one’s lap, or trying to soak in a bathtub in rural Scotland with your foot pressed to the stopper to keep the hot water from draining long enough for it to have its therapeutic effect.
  • Don’t bring those shoes. Your Docs are too bulky for your carry-on bag. Get some good sneakers, wear them everywhere, and get over the fact that they’re all you see when you look at photos of yourself.
  • Take photos of each other. You’re the only one who expects photos of yourself to look like they would have when you were in your 20s. It might creep everyone out if they still looked like that. And there’s no point photographing empty landscapes anyone could find better shots of with a Google image search. When it comes to my husb’s Instagram, he acts like his sick little old lady companion is a supermodel. I am so not, but I stand up straight, try to open my eyes, dress mindfully, and so far, no one is impolite enough to mention it.

Travel is a privilege no one deserves and not everyone gets. 20s me with the kids and the debt—she never saw all of this coming. Old me is grateful for travel, getting better at it, and wishing you the same.

This is not a Eulogy: Un-Useful Tips at the End of My Degree

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My regalia and my sensible shoes.

I keep trying to write about the seven year project of earning a doctorate in my 40s, but it keeps lapsing into a eulogy – a sober retrospective, a farewell, a melodramatic coda. And though a melodramatic coda wouldn’t be false, it’s not what I want to say. 

What I want to say is that I’m grateful, still tired, changed, etc., and that I was happy all along. My bff gets it, and she sent me a McDonald’s gift card (I love this girl) and a note about the “joy” I took in all of this. Well said, my dear.

So I’m marking the end of my degree with the same kind of written tribute I published on this site when husby and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary. It’s not really a list of advice, not exactly tips anyone could use, but it does note some of the things that went into my successful PhD program.

As always, no guarantees expressed or implied.

  • During your program, you’ll be given deadlines, not power over death. Ask for extensions. Go to the doctor. D.A.R.E to say no to Ibuprofen and mindfulness and get prescribed some proper drugs.
  • If your program has a language requirement, don’t fulfill it with two more semesters of a perfectly good language you’ve studied in the past. Start from nothing with a new-to-you language. Does it use the same alphabet as your primary language? Hm. Different alphabet? Hm, naw. No alphabet? Yeah. Yeah, that’s the one.
  • Your best friends are now twentysomethings. If you fail to befriend them, you may very well fail everything else about this. Eat lunch with them, go to hot-pot, room together in China, don’t let the embarrassment of them knowing how often you go to the bathroom hold you back.
  • The straight-middle-aged-woman/young-gay-man pairing is a power-friendship.
  • If you’re a lifelong anglophone, your privilege comes with a responsibility to help colleagues with their questions about English grammar and usage. Give it up.
  • Enjoy a student social life liberated from dating. No matter what Hollywood says, if you don’t understand you aren’t at school to date twentysomethings, you’re not fit to be there, you hecking creeper.
  • Involve your own kids in your schoolwork. Grind through what the YouTube essays don’t tell them. Oh, and remember to take them to the doctor too.
  • Never end your comment with “if that makes sense.”
  • Say “I don’t know” right out loud and with your ego intact. No one here is under the delusion that you know everything. Believe me.
  • Print the article so you can write all over it and then hoard it in a binder like a little rat.
  • Don’t spend the whole conference trip in sessions. Your talk will be sparsely attended and someone else is going to take up most of your time, so enrich your education with the chaos of a foreign municipal transit system.
  • Don’t panic when someone at your candidacy exam tells you their hubby thinks the dissertation you’ve proposed is a waste of time. 
  • Don’t convert to a philosophical theory. Study isn’t discipleship. Theory exists to serve your intellect, not the other way around.
  • There’s no need to wait until you’ve finished the dissertation to start writing another book. 
  • Yes, you have ADHD. Diagnosed or undiagnosed, it’s an unspoken job requirement in academia and, for us, a superpower. Congratulations. Where did you leave your keys?
  • Never say no to a teaching assignment. You may not be an expert in the fine details of the class material the day they offer you the job, but you’ve got the theoretical background, the skills, and the support to be everything anyone in the class will need in the end.
  • Don’t try to teach or research contemporary pop culture like video games, tiktok, fanfiction, ChatGPT, etc. without experiencing them as a user, you hecking poser.
  • Take the nightwatch at the deathbed. You’ve got a lot of reading to do anyway, even if all you can handle is that fanfiction.
  • Tell your students they’re your kids’ ages and you already like them. Don’t apologize to them if your lectures make you cry a bit.
  • When there’s a global crisis and you need to lecture from your home office which is also a laundry room, don’t hide the electric clothes dryer that’s always in the shot. Maybe move the pile of ironing.
  • Don’t fight changing ideas and technologies. They are on our side, even if we’re not sure how just yet.
  • In the same vein, end the denial and get the bifocals.
  • Ask your Chinese Studies professor about the feng shui of the exam room before you choose where you will sit to defend your dissertation. If he tells you to sit where an emperor would, you’re going to do just fine.

Of the 90s, but not in the 90s

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I’m teaching English 111, Introduction to Literature and Composition Part I, degree requirement basics. It’s not at my usual university, bleeding funding and scholars. I’m at a small school overlooking Wayne Gretzky Drive, built out of brick by tall Lutheran men, furnished with wooden lecterns too tall for me to see over. It’s a secular university now, but in a little-used courtyard there’s a granite memorial bench engraved with a Bible verse about perfection in weakness where I set my bag while I slip into a mask every day. 

True enough, and even from beneath the lectern, I am qualified as anything to do the job, not at all an imposter. I have everything I need, though some of it is dusty, a bit beige, like the opening unit on English poetry, with its technicalities of rhythm, meter, rhyme, form. 

Quick, how many beats in an anapest, and which of them is the one that is stressed?

My books on these are from the 90s, and they are thick as bricks, marked with the name I got from my father rather than the one I took from my husband. The edges of their covers are reinforced with sello tape, holding up well. The world is different now, and rereading them is opening a familiar window to find the view has changed, and the way the light refracts now makes the place where you stand to open the window look different too. 

I will not call this rhyme feminine. I will not fail to mention that norms of academic English diction are colonial gatekeeping. And I will say, “Don’t necessarily think of Shakespeare as the OP, but as the first big account to repost that trope or saying.”

None of this is to say that the 90s, the old books’ decade of origin, are now lost on me. I started the decade a high schooler and left it a mother. Ten years is half of everything when you’re in your twenties. Big Shiny Years.

Books and music were the only art I could afford in the 90s, and so I’m listening to Blur as I reread for English 111. Past the holiday sarcasm and the Woohoo, it’s more like flawless, earnest harmony not properly appreciated in the – well, in the blur of coming of and out of age in the 90s. 

Still can’t believe Dolores went and drowned.

There will always be Nirvana, I suppose, on the car radio just this week. I’ll usually pass it over. Our songs weren’t radio tunes. (I’ll wear a shield, I’ll go out of my way to prove) to my son, next to me in the car, that I kept the words to “All Apologies.” Try not to cackle when you sing to your kid, “EVeryTHING is my FAULT.” Oh, that last anapest, it might be a joke.

Still in the poetry unit, I found the stack of unworn jeans my last son had outgrown before he could wear them. Tags still on, maybe I could keep them, wear them 90s-ly (or is it 2020s-ly), high and loose everywhere. Scuffing around the house all day, legs dark and stiff, the waistband floating around my ribcage, tripping me on the stairs. Couldn’t make it work then, can’t do it now.

And on the night when my disease flared and I couldn’t eat at dinnertime, my husband brought a tub of chocolate ice cream to bed, and we chipped at it with one big spoon as it softened around the edges of the container, as if we were the only people here to feed off it.

“I haven’t done this in ages,” I said, as he clicked the next episode. “This is how I treated myself in the 90s. I’m telling you, it’s all about the 90s right now.”

He’s not used to thinking about it anymore and asks, “Were we really in it?”

If we hadn’t been there, there’d be no tape on the books, no names, no fault. We were there, thereabouts, in it enough to see selves of ours in the poetry, in the archeology of someone else’s twenties, in English 111.

Things to Hold at the End of the World – Health, Faith, Family, Work, Art

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Me, “chewing through” my medication

I got good news this week. 

My doctor is doing appointments over the phone for now, and he called early, catching me in the bathtub to let me know the scope and the scan I had this summer, almost two years after a life-changing flare of Crohn’s disease, showed I have scar tissue but no actively diseased tissue in my colon. 

He was so proud of us, genuinely happy. 

Not everyone experiences Crohn’s the same way, and the damage I suffered was particularly gruesome and dangerous. Based on that, some setbacks this winter, and a natural drug tolerance that had me, in his words, “chewing through” my fancy IV medication, he didn’t expect the results he found. He expected to be increasing my medications, and the possibility of surgery remained a live one. He was not only proud but openly surprised none of this will be necessary.

I was the opposite of proud. I’m a spiritual person and I embraced the good news as an exchange of grace I don’t deserve or understand, something connected to my father’s faith as he did his dying this spring. It’s a religious person thing, meaning made in the best of faith…

Anyways…

I need to keep taking IV medication to stay this way. The bowel isn’t the only part of the body affected by Crohn’s, and many other symptoms — typical auto-immune garbage — are still with me. The side effects of my medication remain too, a lesser evil but evil all the same, one which leaves me immune compromised during a pandemic. Yes, I am part of the “it’s only the…” population so many are willing to make into human sacrifices. Into the volcano with us. Cheers.

Still, nothing ruins my good news. This year has been astoundingly bad all around. As the year I lost my father to a long illness, it certainly includes some of the worst days of my life. But there have also been moments in the pandemic that bring goodness home to me, not always unlikely remissions, but things worth remembering.

Like…

  • My kids – It became obvious that my programmer son could work anywhere, so he moved 3500km from head office, back to the city where the rest of the family lives. Bonus is that, according to his youngest brother, “he is nice now.”
Home Office
  • My sibs – The sibling group chat (seven of us) has been a lifeline. As we work out Dad’s death, there isn’t much that needs working out between all of us. At the end, my sisters and I (five of us) moved into my parents’ tiny house for two weeks under the most stressful of circumstances, and we couldn’t have loved each other better or more. It was a great testament to my dad’s gift for making families. Elton John’s “Your Song” and Keane’s “Somewhere Only We Know” — basically any bittersweet Brit-alt-pop covered by a woman with a sweet voice — is about them.
  • Love – My husband will still kiss me goodbye for the day, even if I’m in a zoom classroom with twenty teenagers.
  • The earth – My modest yard is dominated by a pair of huge white spruce trees. For the six years we’ve lived here, we dismissed their corner as a black hole of sharp needles and mad insects. But this year, we took the time to see that many of their lower branches had died off. Once we pruned them away, it left the perfect spot to hang a hammock. The bugs hated it and left in a huff. We spent hours out there, in a fake boreal forest, like a place from my childhood. In this spot, I read reams of heavy philosophy that might have been unbearable otherwise. And yeah, it’s close enough to the house to get wifi.
  • My work – I’m a writer and a PhD candidate and this late in my degree, I would continue to do my work whether I was paid for it or not. But I do get paid for it. Months into the pandemic, the government of Canada continued to award funding for research in the humanities, and I benefit directly from that. Clearly, culture and art have been comforting and sustaining people through this crisis. And even as people I know and like fall for anti-intellectual, anti-humanities conspiracy theories, unaware of the irony of the parallels to Maoism in what they repeat, ill- and misinformed about what we do and how and why, I’m still in a place where I can keep working and creating.

Grief is work — grief for what we lose in global disasters, what we lose from our families, from our bodies. 

Grief is collaborative work done with my family, my medical team, in publishing, in research, in social media posts of my feet in my hammock. 

Grief is creative work. Writing my dissertation and my creative projects under newly pruned spruce trees dripping with sap is the same work as making sense of Dad’s death, which is the same work as healing my colon, which is the same work as taking care of my husband and siblings and long lost children, which is the same work as all of this.

Gear and Clothing in Las Vegas (and Cedar City)

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JQLV2019Last week, I went to a conference in a small city best reached by an international flight to Las Vegas. It wasn’t a big conference, wasn’t particularly relevant to my current research, and in the end, I made my presentation to six other people, mostly conference organizers attending out of the kindness of their hearts. But that’s what conferences are really about anyway, right—the friends we make along the way?  An important point of the trip was its function as a test-flight for my upcoming big conference trip across the Atlantic, to London. Air travel with a chronic illness—can I do it?

The test-flight was a quick one, booked on ultra discount airline Swoop. What’s it like to fly Swoop from anywhere to Las Vegas at the beginning of the May long weekend? Remember that 1990s dance song “The Venga Bus,” the one about the “inter-city disco”? Disappointed there isn’t more beer spilled on your flight? Fly Swoop.

It was my first time in Las Vegas but it had a familiar energy. Strangely, unexpectedly, it felt a bit like China—fat, English China, where what made me stand out in a crowd was nothing but the fact that I was there, in Vegas, alone.

In the dark, I drove north, into mountains which probably have a name, up to Cedar City. In a dormitory with no China-energy at all—mattress on the bed, potable water–I went to bed exhausted and keenly aware of something I hadn’t thought about for at least two weeks: the illness deep in my guts. It was there when I woke up, mounting through the day. Ignorable enough to leave me a clear head for making a comment on the presentation of the one woman who spoke during the morning. In the afternoon, I accidentally went to a talk on water management in Utah but got through it, even the question and answer section where someone asked what changed between the state’s early communal religious settler days when it was a model of responsible water use to now when it’s a complete mess. I did not jump up to yell, “Capitalism! Are you kidding me? It’s capitalism!”

Dinner was fabulous. USA, USA. The keynote address began at a little after six, in a room decorated like Hogwart’s dining hall. By 7:55, the Q&A was still in full swing. I had good will for the man speaking but realized I would be walking out at 8pm whether he was finished or not. And anyways, like most of the speakers I’d heard that day, it was more twentieth century Western theory for 2019 global issues and it was wearing away at me. The trip, the T.S. Eliot quotes, the May weather that would have been bad even in Canada—it was over for me, the conference’s queen of chronic malaise.

I needed drugs and a bathtub. Back at the dorm, damp and freezing, I looked at the raised lip of the shower stall and didn’t wonder for very long about whether I could stop up its drain and rig a tub out of it. No, drugs alone would have to do. And they did. In my own homage to the twentieth century, I laid in bed watching clips of Wayne’s World, lingering on the parts where white people speak Chinese. That’s the joke. That’s the whole joke.

In the morning, the symptoms that had me fantasizing about getting back to Canada and going straight to the emergency room had vanished. I went to just one more talk before rolling out. The conference had been fruitful. I met smart and good people, two of whom invited me to submit the paper I presented to their publications. I left right before another all-girl panel like mine began. Before heading down the mountain, I went up, to the tip top where my church has built a temple. It was a beauty, new but built after the style of the nineteenth century. The parking lot was full, the front plaza lined with people in Sunday clothes—wedding guests. Congratulations, y’all. Share your water now.

Utah, Arizona, Nevada and Vegas on a Saturday afternoon. My big backpack and the sweater I put on in Cedar City were making me look like a lone gunman, parking her rental car one block north of Mandalay Bay. Not the look I wanted, so I went into Ross Dress for Less and bought a summer dress—a red one with an elastic neckline. I wore it over my jeans.

Down at the Bellagio fountain, music came up with the water—bongos and an acoustic bass. How had I not known the soundtrack was “Viva Las Vegas”, the Elvis Presley version, the voice of the ghost of this city, heard half hourly, turning day into nighttime, turning night into daytime?

It was almost time to report back to Venga Airways. I needed to sit and gather strength somewhere out of the sun. I sat down in front of a slot machine, fed it a dollar bill, and pulled the lever, the rent for the seat. When I told a colleague of mine about it, back home, he was shocked. “Capitalism got our star student!” I heard his voice in my head as I read the text, his Shanghaiese accent.

Travel is part of this long, difficult, costly education of mine. That is actually what conferences are all about. The friends are nice but the learning also comes in being alone, unprepared, surprised, suffering a little as we take the schemes we dream up in our offices out into the world, into other people’s worlds, to see if there’s any truth to them. In Vegas and Cedar City, the work I’d done on an obscure problem of East-West ontological and epistemological theory hit the road and found some traction.

Still, when I go to London, it will be as we.

Writer Time: Kicking Off My Term as the Capital City Press Featured Writer

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My morning TV news swag

 

Every time I have a book published, I find it’s harder than the last time for the book (or me) to get noticed. This is contemporary publishing. There are so many compelling new books each season, so many talented and interesting writers, that it can take some special magic to stand out. So of course, I was thrilled something was sparking when an email arrived last fall from the Edmonton Public Library’s Capital City Press program offering me a term as their featured writer. It’s a chance to hold some workshops, and use their platforms and resources to meet with local writer and reader communities. The past year has been high on studies and sickness, low on the writer’s life–whatever that might be. Not this morning, when I was out talking on TV about being, above all other occupations, a writer for at least the next few months.

I got to choose the workshops I’d like to run while in this position and I chose one on Fan Fiction (for writers, readers, and the curious–I’m looking at you, parents) and one on building a writing career within a busy household full of little dependent peoples.

Watch the website for details, read my guest blog posts, and show up to celebrate writing with me. Find it here.

In Hysterics

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sickfeetI’ve been sick. I’m now well-medicated and functioning but I’m still sick-ish after two months—a personal record. It began early this Fall, when in the space of four weeks, I had two colds and one stomping stomach flu. It wasn’t an ordinary bug that razes everything for 24 hours before blowing over. It dragged through an entire week, attacking and then relapsing on all 30 of the people who caught it at our family’s Thanksgiving potluck. My immune system cleared all of that up then opted for something other than its usual return to idling in the bod’s background. Sensing the state of me, maybe—the stress and overwork of preparing for a looming week of PhD qualifying comprehensive exams, my grief at the hard times of some of my loved ones, or tens of thousands of things—my immune system cranked the throttle open, blew me into bedridden bits for weeks.

The world of a sick person is small and terrible. Reading made me feel ill. The to-do list I’d been compiling during the months of exam preparation—catching up on satisfying household projects, overdue time with my kids—all of that was beyond me. Not even my lifelong fix, food, was available. Unable to eat much, I lost about 13% of my weight. (Never congratulate someone on sickness weight loss. It’s just suffering made visible.) But in small worlds, small me, there is still gratitude. As I lay in bed, I was glad to have a bed—a comfortable, warm bed in a safe place. I thought of my ancestors, with the same physical problems I have only trying to rest in cold, damp, crowded cottages without big tubs of running hot water to soak their bones in, and I was grateful.

I was grateful for the kindness of my family, especially my husband, especially when I’m doing nothing to earn it. I wasn’t unkind to him but I wasn’t a very thoughtful partner to him during this illness either, like when I brought him with me to the mother-of-all rounds of blood tests my doctor ordered to rule out every infection he could before putting me on a drug meant to depress my immune system. I forgot that the sound of the vials of blood coming on and off the needle makes my husby woozy, and he didn’t remind me as he stood beside me in the lab, shaky and pale having to hear it all.

Beds and caregivers—in my country, these are considered basic rights of sick people and I’m grateful that these are our collective ideals even though we fall short of them. The next thing I am grateful for is more rare. I’m grateful for spiritual guidance through my illness. While I was sick, we reached out to our faith community and someone arrived at our house with food and treats for my children, friendship, prayer, and what I must acknowledge was true inspiration. I remember our visitor saying in prayer that I needed medical attention. If I was a different kind of person, this advice might have been trite. But I am this kind of person. I am a rundown middle-aged woman with pain, fatigue, bad digestion. When physicians first coined the word “hysterical”, they were talking about me. The inspiration was at once advice and a warning. If I wanted medical attention, I would only get it through insisting, persisting.

The first doctor I saw told me I likely had bursitis in my elbow from leaning on it while holding books to read. He suggested a fancy drug I might not have thought to try myself yet called “Advil.” I cried and begged and he prescribed a stronger pain killer so at least I could sleep. When I ran out of it, I couldn’t bring myself to beg again and I ate the old pills I hoarded from my sons’ wisdom teeth extractions. The hysterical have learned to be resourceful.

The third doctor I saw told me it was just fine for someone like me to give up eating and phoned a GI specialist, talking extremely loudly, announcing my full name, birth date, and current bathroom habits to an emergency room ward crammed with people. This doctor’s medical attention came with a vague insult about my middle-aged figure and a flagrant lack of regard for my dignity and humanity. But heck, it was nothing more than I deserved for following the advice of my second doctor, my family doctor, and clogging up the ER, desperate to make an end-run around the appointment desk of a specialist’s office by gambling on seeing one in the hospital clinic. The maneuver failed and I was sent home with an assurance someone would call me with an appointment. Still waiting.

By this point, medical attention had been awful and useless. It reduced me to something mewling, dirty, sneaky, superfluous—a noisy waste of time and space. Make way for a baby with a rash, a guy who dropped something on his foot. The hysterical’s fight for medical attention can be hopeless–painful, please stop paying attention to me. I don’t want any more. I’ll go.

Truly, I would have quit and gone home to bed, given up on the life I used to think I’d have, if it weren’t for the confidence I had in the spiritual guidance I’d received. This kept me hounding the clinic until my family doctor, working outside his professional comfort zone, found the confidence of his own to prescribe the medicine I need right now. Confident is the opposite of hysterical. The spiritual provides a vantage point to see “things as they really are” rather than things as a lifetime of systemic bias against us can dupe us into accepting. Do not accept it. You need medical attention. You are worth it. Carry on.

Writing in and about Edmonton: Capital City Press Book Festival with Edmonton Public Library

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This weekend the whole fam will be participating in our city’s annual food drive.

Next weekend I’ll be at two separate, very different writing events.

The first is an event at the University of Alberta where I’ll be sharing some translation I’ve done of Lu Xun’s early modern Chinese writing. Yeah, it’s not everyone’s idea of a fun Friday night.

However, the second event of the weekend is a panel at the Capital City Press Book Festival with the Edmonton Public Library. The library’s downtown branch plays a part in the story and the sense of my latest novel so I’m very excited to be working with them in real life. Always wanted to write something set in an unusual city? Come let a panel of authors, including me, talk you into it.

Details here

“Crotchetty, De-Crappity, Schnappity:” Goth Red Green and How My Summer is Going

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I know two things about cleaning gravestones:

  • Don’t use bleach
  • Don’t use a big freaky gas-powered pressure washer

I learned this watching grave restoration clips on YouTube—an activity that’s turned out to be my preferred mental break during a summer spent in a very strange headspace, fighting to finish reading the 61 books and articles I will be tested on in November to see if I can continue in my doctoral studies. Ideally, I’d be done reading in two weeks, but as of right now, I still have ten partly finished books and one I haven’t even started. I love everything about grad student life except this and funding applications so it’s been a rough summer of paying my dues and trying to get paid for my dues.

Clearly, gravestone restoration videos were the answer.

Most of the videos are narrated by biocide salesmen (the crud on gravestones is generally biological–algae, moss, lichen, all of it alive), earnest professional conservators, or amateur genealogists who are just so disappointed. They use soft-bristled brushes, approved cleaners with PH levels matched to the stones, and rinse it all down with a gentle slosh of plain water out of a bucket.

“That’s not tap water is it?” a heckler calls from off screen. “There’s chlorine in that!”

Welcome to Gravestone-Restoration-Tube.

But then there’s Bill.

From what I can gather, Bill is a senior groundskeeper-handyman working for a municipality in eastern Ontario. His personal YouTube thumbnail image is a John Deere themed open casket and his YouTube channel chronicles the maintenance he does in around the town cemetery (at least, it did until a board of directors banned him from filming anything past the cemetery’s front gate).

He’s like a goth Red Green (something for non-Canadians to Google), letting a slightly affected Canada-hick accent fly as he welds an old tank still full of diesel fumes without blowing himself to bits, and, yes, pressure washes the “friggin crap” out of gravestones, even a soft white marble one he begins the video by showing us that it’s a good exfoliant for his dirty thumbprint, improvising a tripod function out of the bucket of his skid-steer. He likes puns, mocks Nazis, gets distracted by interesting bird calls, and works the graveyard humor with quips like, “K, we’re here, live on location—well, least I’m live on location.”

And I can’t help thinking, but for a few decisions, maybe if I wasn’t so chicken when it came to the welding unit of my junior high industrial arts class, I could have been Bill. It’s a good life—creative, inquisitive, self-aware, brilliant in its Jack/Jenny-of-all-trades makeshift-ery. Dang, for all the lives we don’t get to live, languages we don’t learn to speak, people we never have “coffee” with, books we write that might never be read, books other people write that we might never finish reading.

I need these exams to be over. Until then, rock on, Bill.

Reelin’ With the Feelin’, or, Giving My Books Away

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LIttleFreeLibraryThe world of book marketing is fairly straightforward: the more money a book has behind it, the better it tends to sell. Does that sound cynical? Maybe, but it’s also evident in industry practices like giveaways for newly released books on the Amazon-acquired mega social network for readers, Goodreads.com. Not that long ago, during the heavy marketing phases of my first two novels, anyone could post a book giveaway on Goodreads and hundreds—hundreds—of people would see that book, look at its cover and title, read its synopsis, maybe even the author’s name, and add the book to their to-be-read list in exchange for getting a chance to win a free copy. All it cost publishers and authors, big or small, was the wholesale price of the book, and postage. But by the time my third novel was published, Goodreads was charging hundreds of dollars to give away books on the site. Isn’t that nice? It’s great to see big, well-funded enterprises sticking together.

Like I said, the big marketing pushes for my first two novels have passed. The books are still in print but settled into my publisher’s back catalogue, a place without room for all of the remaining printed inventory. Some publishers would just “pulp” these excess books but mine offered to give them to me as long as I paid to have them shipped across the country. The shipping bill was in the two-digits so I agreed, and for the past few months, the storage room in my basement—the cold room—has been a crypt for overstocked books. Talk about being haunted…

Well, you know what? I don’t need to hoard these books and I don’t need permission or money to give them away. With a new novel to promote, what better ad could there be for it than a bunch of freely available copies of my previous work?  And so I spent today driving all over the Edmonton area sniffing out Little Free Libraries. They are adorable little cabinets, or repurposed newspaper boxes (look at that, newspaper infrastructure doing something for book culture again), and even one salvaged doll house set up in cafes, parks, and private citizens’ front yards. The rules of the Little Free Library system are simple: take a book if you want to read one. Be courteous, take good care of it. Don’t use it to balance a table or roll a smoke. Ideally, leave another book in its place or bring it back when finished.

I hit every Little Free Library I could drive to without seeing any cows. When I travel to Calgary later this week, past so many cows, I will hit some more LFLs there—slide my book in between all those copies of Animorphs and the fragmented works of Stephenie Meyer (her Breaking Dawn appears most often). If it turns out the LFLs are somehow centrally catalogued and controlled, I expect a cease and desist order soon. Until then, I’ll keep placing my books, like messages tossed out in bottles, because we all know that’s better than reaching no one.

But my giveaway madness isn’t limited to the domains of cabinet-making-book-swapping-LFL librarians I’ve never actually met. It’s also for all of you, my dear friends. Purchase my new novel from me and get my first two books as a free gift. Or don’t buy anything. The gift is still free. Message me and it’s yours.