Month: July 2025

36. Matthew R. Anderson, Prophets of Love: The Unlikely Kinship of Leonard Cohen and the Apostle Paul

When I was a boy in Sunday school, I disliked the Apostle Paul. Intensely. His rigid rules, his asceticism, his demand that people live as if their actions might lead others astray–I hated all of that. But I’ve been a fan of Leonard Cohen for decades: his poetry, his fiction, and his music, from his first LP, Songs of Leonard Cohen to You Want it Darker, which released in 2016 just three weeks before his death. I would never have thought that Paul and Leonard had much in common, aside from being Jewish. In Prophets of Love: The Unlikely Kinship of Leonard Cohen and the Apostle Paul, Matthew R. Anderson argues, convincingly, that despite their many differences, they share many, many things.

First of all, Anderson would tell me that I’ve got Paul all wrong. Only seven of the letters ascribed to him in the New Testament were written by him; the rest are almost certainly not his, according to recent scholarship, including the ones that used to bother me so much. Still, he writes that “after decades of studying, teaching, and researching his life and letters, I know I would almost certainly not get along with Paul in person.” He was volatile, argumentative, rude, passive-aggressive, imperious. Leonard, on the other hand, was charming and seductive. When Anderson listens to his “bleak and magnificent poetry,” he finds himself “startled–sometimes to laughter, sometimes to regret, and most often to an appreciation of the dark, rich, sweetness of love and loss.” (I’m following Anderson’s use of first names, which makes sense, since Paul doesn’t seem to have had a surname.) At the same time, though, Anderson acknowledges, “I might not always have liked everything about Leonard Cohen in person.” Seen through the lenses of gender and power, Leonard’s life and work generate discomfort. The complex response Anderson has to both figures is one of the qualities that links them together for him.

That’s where Prophets of Love begins, but it’s not where it ends. In the first chapter, Anderson lays out the framework of the comparison he intends to make. Both Leonard and Paul were Jews; both were religious, both were writers. Both knew how to persuade others with their words. Both worked hard “to encourage warm identification with their audiences, despite suffering very public moments of relational failure and raw vulnerability.” From here, the book explores these points of similarity: their Jewishness, their fascination with Jesus (although that fascination took different forms for each of them), the way both surrounded themselves with women (although, again, the way they related to women was different for each of them), their asceticism (celibacy for Paul, fasting and the boot-camp life Leonard lived in the Zen Centre at Mount Baldy in Los Angeles), their masculinity, their rhetorical abilities, their senses of divine vocation, their mysticism, their awareness of suffering, the way their work carried on after their deaths. By the end of the book, Leonard and Paul have become nearly interchangeable, despite their differences. For Anderson, “it was precisely because Leonard knew how fleeting success could be, and how fickle humans love, that he could write about divine mercy and diving judgment that speak to us above and beyond history.” At that point, he stops–a pause marked by the beginning of a new paragraph–and asks, “Did I just write that about Leonard? It could have been Paul.”

Prophets of Love is the result of decades of classroom experience; it guides its reader through its comparisons carefully, not making claims it can’t support and qualifying the similarities it finds between Leonard and Paul with recognitions of their differences. Each chapter even ends with homework: songs and writing on which to meditate, additional reading for the ambitious or fascinated. The last chapter even ends with a suggestion about how people teaching Second Temple Judaism to undergraduates could use Leonard’s poem “Song of the Hellenist” to get their students thinking about the experiences of Hellenized Jews in the second century BCE. Throughout the book, I sensed the presence of a warm, friendly teacher helping a skeptical student (me) understand how two very different figures could share so much. I’ll bet Leonard, if he was still with us, would enjoy this book, too.

35. Jenna Butler, Revery: A Year of Bees

I read Jenna Butler’s 2020 book Revery: A Year of Bees several years ago, and I was impressed by it—so much, in fact, that when I decided to teach a course on place writing this summer, I decided to include it on the reading list. It’s a sort of sequel to her earlier book of essays, A Profession of Hope: Farming on the Edge of the Grizzly Trail—the same farm, more or less, but this time, the focus is on those tiny domesticated creatures, honeybees, and the wonders they give us: sweet honey and wax for candles and balms. The book, which was nominated for a Governor General’s Award and longlisted for the CBC’s Canada Readscompetition, goes beyond honeybees, though; it thinks about the way we might connect with place through what the anthropologist Tim Ingold calls a “taskscape”—through labour, care, and attention—and the challenges inherent in attempts to make that kind of connection.

Revery: A Year of Bees has two structuring principles. As its subtitle suggests, it follows Butler through the annual cycle of work involved in stewarding a small organic farm and bee yard on the edge of the boreal forest in northern Alberta. At the same time, though, it’s also an excellent example of what writers call a “braided essay”—or, perhaps, more accurately, it’s a braided book of braided essays. The text moves back and forth between personal writing about Butler’s experience and informative writing about beekeeping. As Nicole Walker explains in an essay on braided forms of creative nonfiction, that continual shift in perspective sets up a “tension between two unlike things working against each other” which, through repetition, presses out meaning. Revery: A Year of Bees does exactly that by moving between Butler’s experience and its broader context. As Butler herself has argued in an essay on braided forms of creative nonfiction, that kind of writing allows writers “to tell stories at length that may be crushingly hard, balancing that sustained, clear, and factual telling with moments of beauty or humour.” In fact, towards the end of the book, when Butler explains how working with bees has helped her with the lasting effects of violence and trauma, readers come to see the value in the braided structure she has constructed; it allows us to understand the ways in which personal experience, past and present, affects our work and our relationships, and the ways in which that labour and connection change us. Her description of that trauma, by the way, is both bluntly honest and tactful, something many of us who want to write about our difficult experiences might want to learn from. I certainly could.

Before my students read Revery: A Year of Bees, I asked them to read Robert Macfarlane’s essay “A Counter-Desecration Phrasebook,” published in a collection of poems and essays, Towards Re-Enchantment: Place and Its Meanings, edited by Gareth Evans and Di Robson. There, Macfarlane argues, among other things, that having a specific language of place allows us to see what is valuable and important in the world around us, as well as our connections or relationships to that world, things that modernity, according to Max Weber and Martin Heidegger, has taught us to ignore. Instead of seeing a forest as something special, even enchanted, an ecosystem or a place we might get to know but never fully understand, for instance, Heidegger contends that we now see that forest as a “standing-reserve,” as so many board feet of lumber or tons of fibre for paper or disposable diapers. The forest becomes fungible: we think we translate it from one thing, a living place, to something else, economic activity and profit, without losing anything worth saving. Seeing places in a different way—as something rather than nothing—might help us to avoid destroying or “desecrating” them (note the overtones of the sacred in Macfarlane’s use of that word). Writing like Butler’s encourages us to think the way Macfarlane advocates: to consider our relationships to place and land, to wonder at the ways they exceed our knowledge and understanding, to approach them with respect and awe. That’s part of what makes her writing worth paying attention to.

But that’s not the only reason I admire Revery: A Year of Bees. Butler’s account of how the bees she works with pick up on her emotions, how they respond to her when she’s overwhelmed by her nearly unspeakable emotional and physical traumas, is fascinating. Like horses and dogs, bees sense the moods of the people around them. On her bad days, she can’t approach the bees, which feel threatened by her “cloud of energy.” It’s yet more evidence of our deep connections to the world and its inhabitants, and a sign of the way that forming relationships with the land can heal us. We need to learn those lessons, and Revery: A Year of Bees is a kind and gentle teacher.

Morning at Hidden Valley

This morning, we joined a group of people for a walk around Hidden Valley organized by Nature Regina. We were guided by naturalist Dale Hjertaas. I hadn’t been there for a while, and new marked trails have been cut through the thickets of saskatoons and chokecherries. So many wildflowers are in bloom, and I learned so much about insects and birds and, not surprisingly, plants. We even saw a spotted twohee, which I’ve heard singing (or do Merlin has told me), but had never seen. Nature Regina has more events coming up; I’m going to make a point of participating.

34. Dave Margoshes, A Simple Carpenter

I heard good things about Dave Margoshes’s novel A Simple Carpenter when it came out last year, and although I meant to get a copy, for whatever reason I didn’t. Then I traded John Kennedy, one of the principals at Radiant Press, the Regina publisher that put out A Simple Carpenter, a pair of rain pants for a selection of books, and lucky me! A Simple Carpenter was part of the group.

This novel is a page-turner! I found it hard to put down, and I read it quickly. The picaresque (sort of) plot carries us along as the main character tries on different professions and identities; there are lots of surprises and odd foreshadowings of things that may or may not happen. The book is courageous, too: I’m not sure I’d dare, in the current geopolitical climate, to send a book in which a Palestinian or perhaps Jewish protagonist, perhaps born in Gaza and perhaps not, who has lost his memory and might or might not be the second coming of Jesus Christ, wanders around in Lebanon and Israel. The book’s magic realist aesthetic is imaginative and charmingly strange. For instance, the main character–because his name shifts as he moves from place to place, I’m not going to bother telling you what he’s called–is able to speak and understand every language, from Aramaic and ancient Greek to English and French, even though he has amnesia. I was particularly struck by the characters he meets during his week-long walk from Acre to the Sea of Galilee: a village where the young men become elderly in early adolescence, another inhabited by giant women, a third where every family supports its own synagogue or mosque. There’s so much more invention in A Simple Carpenter than I’ve given as examples here; it’s a lot of fun.

I must say I didn’t quite understand the somewhat abrupt ending. The writer Sharon Butala, who provides a blurb on the novel’s back cover, refers to that ending as “startling,” which is accurate. I wanted to know more about what the character discovers, but that desire is destined to remain unfulfilled. Because I was confused, I checked online to see what reviewers had to say–something I don’t usually do when I write these little posts. Steven Mayoff, in his review, suggests that the protagonist’s journey, and the revelations the ending of that journey provide us, “raise serious questions about the role each of us plays in the story of our lives and the interchangeable perspectives between who are the villains and who are the heroes.” Mayoff’s argument about the book, which I think might be correct, is that A Simple Carpenter asks us to consider whether its protagonist is in fact at the centre of his own story, or whether he’s a bit player in the larger dramas that surround him. In that case, the ending’s openness might demand that we continue asking ourselves that question–about the protagonist and, perhaps, about ourselves as well. If so, this playful novel is also a deeply philosophical one.

33. Rebecca Solnit, No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain

I’ve been a fan of Rebecca Solnit’s writing since I read Wanderlust: A History of Walking ten years ago. I’ve always meant to return to that book, but I’ve never found the time. I like her book on hope, too, Hope In the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, which I mention several times in my forthcoming book, Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road. So when I saw No Straight Road Takes You There in a store somewhere, I bought it.

Yesterday, I started reading it. “Maybe it’d be useful to teach from,” I thought. I think it might be. The essays are short, and because they were mostly published in newspapers and online, primarily in The Guardian and Lithub, they’re relatively accessible. They cover a range of topics–climate change, politics, feminism, hope–from Solnit’s particular perspective. Of course I would not expect students to agree with her on anything, but I would expect them to learn to summarize her arguments accurately, especially if they don’t think they’re correct, before responding to them. In particular, her arguments about hope might speak to young people who seem to lack that vital approach to the future. She points out, correctly, that history is full of events that surprised people at the time. We might think the end of the Soviet Union was inevitable now, looking back at the events of 1989 through 1991, but at the time, she points out, it was unimaginable. I remember William Gibson pointing that out in an interview; in the speculative fiction he wrote in the early 1980s, he imagined all kinds of possibilities except that the Soviet Union would end. Change takes a long time and requires patience–something the American right has learned over the past decades–and we have no idea what the effect of our actions might be. Hope asks us to understand that the future is a story yet to be told, while pessimism and despair and optimism all pretend that we know what’s going to happen, positive or negative.

It’s hard to say what will land in a classroom, of course, and I could easily be disappointed by the response students have to this book. But I could just as easily be pleasantly surprised. And it’s also possible that reading No Straight Road Takes You There might plant seeds that germinate long after the course is over. Teaching has to be a hopeful activity; otherwise, what’s the point?

32. Sadiqa de Meijer, Fieldwork

Is including a chapbook in this list cheating? I’m not sure, and frankly, after reading Sadiqa de Meijer’s Fieldwork, I don’t much care. I’m a fan of de Meijer’s writing; I taught her 2020 book alfabet/alphabet: a memoir of a first language for a couple of years, and I loved its combination of luminous prose and learned discussions of language acquisition, migration, translation, and poetry. It’s no wonder that book won the 2021 Governor General’s Award for nonfiction. She’s currently the poet laureate of Kingston, Ontario.

If alfabet/alphabet is a main course, Fieldwork, a lecture delivered at Queen’s University’s Page Lecture, named in honour of Kingston poet Joanne Page, is a dessert. I loved this short essay, particularly the notion that non-Indigenous languages on Turtle Island are like the introduced species settlers brought with them and which have become ubiquitous: dandelions, starlings, burdock. I had no idea de Meijer was also a visual artist, but the references to her work in a 2023 group show at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, With the Land, had me searching the internet for images (which were easy to find). I loved the reflections on Etty Hillesum and her reflections on how the material of writing–whether one is writing on clay or palm fronds, on a vertical or horizontal surface–will determine how the language comes to be written down. I wonder if Fieldwork is in part an appetizer for her forthcoming book, which is due this fall. If so, I’ll be looking forward to another meal of her words.

Chapbooks can be hard to find—they aren’t stocked by most retailers—and you can find this one at Knife Fork Book’s online store.

Canada Day Walk at White Butte Trails

This morning, before the temperature got close to 30 degrees, we drove out to White Butte Trails and wandered around for an hour or so. We listened to house wrens and clay-coloured sparrows and I took photographs of wildflowers: northern bedstraw; Canada anemone; smooth blue beardtongue; and some western red lily, the provincial flower, surrounded by leafy spurge. I was happy to see the western red lily, but I was a little concerned about its future prospects, since leafy spurge, a noxious and invasive weed, will take over if it’s allowed to spread, and it doesn’t look like anybody is monitoring its progress.

One surprise: I saw a lot of June grass, something I didn’t think would be there. Cool season grasses like June grass tend to be outcompeted by cool season sod-forming grasses, like Kentucky bluegrass, which is everywhere at White Butte Trails and, despite its name, not a native grass species. I saw quite a bit of beaked sedge, too. Its dark green stands out among the slightly paler grasses, even though most of the flowers have been mown off.

When we returned to the city, we had coffee and shared a donut at Everyday Kitchen. It was a pleasant way to spend the morning.