Tag: Tanis MacDonald

57. Iryn Tushabe, Everything Is Fine Here

Here’s my last blog post of 2025: a brief appreciation of Regina writer Iryn Tushabe’s Everything Is Fine Here. Before I get to that welcome task, I want to express some gratitude the fact that I’ve read some 60 books this year (I didn’t blog about a couple here but did elsewhere). I love my job, but it takes all of my energy, and the fact that I managed to read these (mostly short) books is a wonder. I have friends (I’m looking at you, Tanis MacDonald and Kim Fahner, but I know many other friends fit this description, too) who seem to read a book every day and even post capsule reviews of them online. My average of one book per week will have to do for now, even though it doesn’t feel particularly ambitious. I mean, one of my students, a talented and prolific poet, has set out to read Moby Dick over the holidays. That’s ambition. By comparison, I am a lazybones.

But I did read Iryn Tushabe’s Everything Is Fine Here. I wanted to read it earlier, and it became my holiday treat, filling the space usually occupied by Great Expectations, which contains my favourite Christmas dinner in literature (poor Pip!). Not that Everything Is Fine Here is a Christmas story: it isn’t. It’s a story about a family that’s divided by religious bigotry exported to Uganda by American evangelical Christians. One of the latest shapes colonialism takes, I suppose, although I’d hazard to bet that the British left sodomy laws behind when they decamped. It’s also a coming-of-age novel; the protagonist, Aine, is 18 years old, an aspiring naturalist and writer (is that a nod to another Regina writer, Trevor Herriot? I should ask Iryn the next time I see her), caught between her “savedee” mother and her courageous sister. I don’t want to say anything more about the narrative, which moves in surprising directions, because I don’t want to spoil this book for anybody.

What can I say, then, that won’t give anything away? How about a list of what I liked about this charming first novel? I really liked the book’s representation of Kampala, for one thing. I doubt I’ll ever go there, and my experience would be different from Tushabe’s, since she was born in Uganda, but she caught what I imagine to be the complexity of an African capital. I liked the chapters at Aine’s boarding school, too. They’re different from the boarding schools in Alpha Nkuranga’s Born to Walk–Nkuranga went to school in Uganda as a Rwandan refugee, and the cruelty she encountered shocked me–and I was heartened by the idea that not all such institutions are so horrible. Not that there isn’t cruelty in Everything Is Fine Here: the worst possible outcomes of Uganda’s laws prohibiting same-sex relationships shape the narrative, but the cruelties are smaller, more domestic and familial. Not that small cruelties are acceptable or easy–no. Even the savedees ought to understand that their God must’ve created people who love in different ways, and that if those kinds of love are acceptable to that God, they ought to be acceptable to us, too. Besides, those verses about same-sex relationships in Leviticus? That book of laws is full of lots of things that, if taken literally, would lead to our executions, including the shirt I wore yesterday, a mix of polyester and merino wool. No blended fabrics, according to Leviticus! Breaking that rule meant death. Yes, I know we’re probably supposed to understand that metaphorically, as a commandment against marrying unbelievers or something, but too many people take the commandments in Leviticus literally. If we’ve put the one about blended fabrics aside, if we’ve decided that makes little difference to us now, maybe we could put some of the other laws aside, too. Things have changed.

I loved this description of reading fiction, too:

Aine stayed outside on the veranda, engrossed in the novella. Time always flew by when she read fiction. Her senses sharpened, connecting her to a world where people were dealing with problems much like her own, making her feel less alone.

I’m reminded of the Life magazine interview where James Baldwin talks about the way that reading lets us know that our challenges are not unique to us, and I know Tushabe is aware of that interview, but the notion that reading sharpens our senses is new to me. If I ever get a chance to teach a course on fiction, I’ll offer this quotation as a hypothesis for my students: is this what happens to you when you read fiction?

I liked so many other things about this book: the straightforward incorporation of African languages into dialogue, the description of life in a small town, the recitations of the names of birds, the characters who are good and bad mixed together, whose behaviour can be understood even if it’s unworthy of them. So Everything Is Fine Here did turn out to be my holiday treat.

42. Michael Trussler, 10:10

A book titled '10:10' by Michael Trussler, featuring a white cover with circular images and text, placed on a wooden surface.

I haven’t been reading much for a couple of years, and that’s bothered me–a lot. The reasons aren’t hard to understand. I’ve been working too much and not sleeping enough, which has meant that when I get home, I’m too tired to concentrate. I still don’t get enough shuteye, but my job has eased up a little, and so I’ve been able to get at a few of the new books that have found their way into our house. Yes, even though I’ve struggled to read anything, I’ve still been buying books; I know that doesn’t make any sense, but it’s one of the things writers do.

I ordered Michael Trussler’s 10:10 when it came out last fall. Michael is a colleague and a friend, and I admire his writing. It’s erudite, thoughtful, concerned with the ways we are damaging the planet and ourselves, our horrific histories of genocide, and yet it also takes visual art–Vermeer, Rothko, Brueghel–as a sign of our potential, as a species, to do good things, to make beautiful things. Unlike me, Michael doesn’t seem to struggle to find time or energy to read, if the dense texture of allusions and quotations in 10:10 is any evidence–and it is. I’ve been meaning to read this book for a year, and I was finally motivated to open it when I learned, early yesterday morning, that it has been shortlisted for a Governor-General’s Literary Award. Yes, of course, many worthwhile books don’t get that kind of recognition, and yet I am so happy that Michael’s work is being recognized. He’s been prolific over the past several years, publishing three books of poetry and a memoir since 2021, and I know how much hard work and sacrifice has gone into that productivity. I knew 10:10 was on the shelf at work where I keep poetry, and I brought it home last night. I ended up devouring it in one sitting. It is a wonderful book.

The title made me think about time–Timex watches used to always be advertised with the hands showing “10:10,” and that’s true of other analog timepieces as well–and sure enough, the passing of time, and the way it is experienced in simultaneous layers, are both themes here. That simultaneity is hard to evoke in writing, since language tends to be linear (one word, one sentence, following another), but Michael plays with punctuation, enjambment, and textual interruptions of various kinds to suggest the way he might be sitting in his home office, writing, while remembering standing outside the building where Dutch diarist Etty Hillesum, who was murdered in Auschwitz, lived, while also recalling things she wrote about the experience of living in Nazi-occupied Holland. “The Edges of What’s Known?” includes lines from other poems or essays in the book–I’ve learned from Tanis MacDonald not to force genre categories onto hybrid texts, and I’m going to be careful not to make this mistake here–as another way to indicate a slightly different form of simultaneity. But that’s not exactly what 10:10 means. It’s a reference to Edward Kienholz’s large 1965 installation The Beanery, a life-size interior of a bar in which all of the human figures have clock faces, set to ten minutes after ten, where their actual fleshly faces would otherwise be. The title essay/poem, “10:10,” recalls different visits to Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, where Kienholz’s installation is located, in different decades of the author’s life, and it considers how his relationship to visual art has changed over time, as well as its connection, however oblique, to human violence: the war in Vietnam, the Holocaust. It ends with a couple of lines of poetry that interrupt a story about a 2014 visit to the Stedelijk, lines that seem to situate the text right here, in Regina, on a wintery day, far from Amsterdam, and yet on the following page we see a photograph (the author’s photographs appear at key points in this book) of a canal in that European city, “impossibly far from / here–.” Complexity, simultaneity, violence, and visual art as a kind of compensation: it’s all here.

So too are the climate crisis and the extinction event humans are causing, notably in “Solastalgia.” That title refers to Glenn Albrecht’s neologism, a word that combines nostalgia, solace, and desolation, or so I learned in a poetry workshop this week; it’s the sense of loss we experience when a place or ecosystem has been destroyed by human activity. The fragments in that text juxtapose different moments in Michael’s life, all of them suggesting the inexorable and accelerating passage of time, the need to love what remains NOW, because it’s leaving: “Better order now, the sky recommends, restaurant’s closing.”

I could go on about this book, which to be honest deserves a better, more skilled reader of poetry than I am. The winners of the Governor-General’s Literary Awards will be announced in a couple of weeks. I haven’t read the other nominees–that would be a worthwhile project, wouldn’t it?–and so I have no idea how 10:10 compares to them, but I’m happy that yesterday’s news prompted me to bestir myself to read it. Congratulations, Michael–you deserve the recognition.

18. Casey Plett, On Community

Last year, I shared a terrible essay with my writer’s group. One of my colleagues asked, “what is this really about?” (Excellent question, Roberta!) I thought about that for quite a while. Community, I decided–or, to be more specific, my desire for community. I wasn’t sure how to proceed with that essay, and so I let it sit while I wrote and revised other things. But now, looking at the list of things left to write for my second book (the manuscript is due in June–wish me luck!), I can see that it’s time to start working through the scattered research materials I’ve been collecting. I decided to start with Casey Plett’s wonderful little book, On Community, partly because another colleague, Tanis MacDonald, posted about it on Instagram. I could not have chosen a better jumping-off point.

On Community is one of Biblioasis’s Field Notes series–short books, or long essays, the titles of which all begin with the word “On”: On Class, On Writing and Failure, or the forthcoming On Oil. So far, I’ve read two in that series; both were excellent. A new item has been added to my bucket list: write a book for that series. I doubt that’s going to happen, but you never know. As the Victorian poet Robert Browning wrote in one of his dramatic monologues, “Andrea del Sarto,” “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what’s a heaven for?”

So, what makes On Community so good? The breadth of research, for one thing. Plett includes people I’d heard of, like Robert Waldinger, but she also brings in others I knew nothing about, or who I didn’t know had written about community. But also I appreciated Plett’s acknowledgement of the complexity of community–the way it includes and excludes, the way it is “equally capable of cruelty and health in the way of many ordinary things, mundane actions that happen every day with the capacity for both salve and sickness,” to quote her thoughtful words. “Humans need community, but there’s no good assuming it’s always a conduit for goodness.” As Plato says, and Derrida through Plato, it’s a pharmakon, both cure and poison. As a trans woman, Plett has experienced a lot of exclusion and rejection from communities, as well as inclusion and acceptance, and she is aware of how complex and fraught and necessary community is. The alternative, bleak and lonely isolation, is unthinkable, even if that’s what many of us experience now, given the epidemic of loneliness in our culture.

I loved Plett’s notion that community is a verb, too, and her argument that we are entitled to be wary around strangers even as we need to be open to them as well. And I loved the call she makes to her readers at her essay’s conclusion–that we should try to do the unthinkable, which includes working towards becoming part of something larger than ourselves.

I’m happy I read this, and if I can make that terrible essay into something worth reading, and if it ends up getting included in my book, and if you happen to read it, you’ll see the influence Plett’s On Community has exerted on my thinking.