Selecky’s Party

by katiclops

 

 

sat down to write this hours ago.

It is nearly spring here. No, it’s finally spring here. The east coast in me can’t quite believe it yet, but it’s beginning to snow white cherry blossoms and the light has that liberated full-spectrum gilt to it at last. Nowhere else is winter as long as the dreary grey coast.

I biked home fast after work. I stayed a full ten minutes later than I had intended, wrapping myself up too tightly in a PowerPoint presentation and lost sight of the time. 4:15 means GO! This light you looked at so longingly is yours now! I frantically flew out the door and tried a new route home, up a side street and down a hill so steep I thought I’d fly over my handlebars before curling sharply onto the bikepath. The wind is still crisp and winter-clean, but the angle of the sun is a promise that can’t be revoked, and coasting over the clackety-clack wooden footbridge I wanted to scream at every person I crossed: we made it! The winter is done.

In celebration of our newfound daylight I nipped out for coffees before the cafés all closed at 6. The original plan was to write, but we got caught up meandering lazily home, and it hardly seemed worth it to rush over for the slim twigh-lit last half hour. I got take away cups. Because it is a special day (Day of Sunlight), I permit myself to a latté instead of a regular coffee, and I made his a secret decaf. Since the good weather hit the Island this weekend we’ve kept all our windows open, well into the night, like the people who flap around in sandals and shorts before the snow has melted. To compensate we’re both bundled in blankets and heavy sweaters, and Griz is curled up tight against me with her paws clamped firmly over her nose, but the air is fresh and promising and we sleep the sweep sunburnt dreams we’ve missed since September.

The coffee is ice now, thick and rich, forgotten.

I’ve seen Sarah Selecky’s slick little paperback around. It’s cute. The red Giller sticker is a beacon to the Canadian-lit junkie in me, it turns my head like a pretty bike. Or maybe Tiffany’s blue is has gravitational pull over all women. I like the cover, the empty cracked plate, and the title: This Cake is for the Party. It’s the kind of title you want to say out loud to yourself several times, and articulate every consonant, like the name Maggie.

I had picked up the book a few times at Munroe’s but always seemed to turn to passages where people were talking in weird accents (having read the book, I am not able to identify which passages I must have stumbled upon). Printed with a tightly bound spine, it’s a book that hurts your thumbs if you try to read it without cracking the binding. But it’s glossy and durable and I loved the typeface. Sarah Solecky was also the name of one of my best friend’s when I was five, which gave the whole book an eerie familiarity to begin with. Maybe that’s part of what put me off, and it never made it to the check-out pile. But then last week I read a great article in the Walrus (Gossip Girl, February 2013- you can read the article here). The article was light and funny, articulate and well-written, filled with the kind of insightful insecurities I look for in a novel. This Cake is for the Party: devoured 48 hours after purchase.

That kind of light, last year, Vancouver

I’ve read more Canadian lit this year than any year before in my life. One of my favourites, Zsuszi Gartner, is actually thanked on the inside jacket. Canadian contemporary lit has a strange little niche unto itself. We’re more somber and sober than our US counterparts, more stark and lonely. Our stories seem to stand out stoically against urban tundra. They seep a strange sort of arctic mysticism… I gauge the overarching flavour and temperament of this group I so desperately want to join the way I suss out the lake temperature by dangling one toe off the dock.

Selecky’s book was originally published in 2010 and is comprised of ten short stories set all over Canada. She writes like someone who has been trained to draw using guide lines. Like those books that I would save up for from the Scholastic catalogue, where they would start with an oval egg, add a cross in the next panel to show you where the eyes would go, and then suddenly a completed portrait in the last pain (with no traced of the x-egg to be found). Like foundation drawing, Selecky starts with simple oval mannequins and stick figures, abruptly filling in the fingers on one hand, the crumbled grass under one foot, the soft hair on her left ear lobe, leaving the rest faceless, ubiquitous. She describes people like pressed flowers no fewer than three times, and speaks about smooth pebbles from a river or lake just as many.

Float plane base, Victoria, Summer 2012

This interspersal of wide broad strokes and tiny intricate details is extremely evocative: it’s uncomfortable. In tandem with the fact that her stories take place in a glut of familiar but obscure locations (e.g., Manitoulin Island),  the visceral details that Selecky adds somehow burrow under your skin. They impregnant your mind with small bubbles of memory that flow like a marble through your veins until they unexpectedly burst in vivid total recall of some forgotten memory.

Part of what resonated most was the music she mentions: Broken Social Scene, Miles Davis, Metric, Arlo Gutherie. I finally know every artist she mentioned. I’ve lived them. I’ve also sung along loudly to that album in my car. I always wonder if Americans have this proximity when they read fiction. If you lived in New York does the New Yorker resonate with you differently? Are all of these things more vivid to your life? If I were twenty years older would all the literature I’ve been reading smell this much more real, more colourful? We are released.

*       *       *

Pathetic fallacy continues, yesterday’s brief spot of sun blotted out by the relentless rain. But the tension is broken, the promise is there. Technicolour summer is about to arrive.

Welcome to the Real World. We made it.

Yeah RIGHT this week I’m back on yeahwrite 🙂 Check them out!

Daily drop cap by the lovely miss Jessica Hische!