Winter Survival

I’ve mentioned before my love of travel literature (on the nightstand right now is Paul Theroux’s first railway saga The Great Railway Bazaar). My other escape genre is the DIY/cheap living/how-I-dropped-out-of-society-and-lived-to-love-it treatise. Although book editing is a pretty good gig, Christmas and winter both make me especially susceptible to the gospel of simple, jobless living. I thought I’d share a few titles that I have not yet read but that will likely be in this winter’s lineup, in case you want to read along.



First is Possum Living by Dolly Freed, which was published in 1978 when the author was in her late teens. Her father quit his job and pulled her out of high school, and the book is her story of how they got by on little to no money and what she did with all the time she had to self-educate. It has experienced a recent resurgence with a new edition released by Tin House Books in Portland, Oregon, last year. Dolly also has a blog, which I see is on hiatus now but has included some interesting reflections on her old life.



Second is Novella Carpenter’s Farm City, published last year. I read a review and then devoured every last post on her blog and have still not got around to buying the book – I intend to remedy that soon. For the past several years Carpenter has squatted an empty lot in Oakland, California, raising goats and chickens, gardening, and hosting classes on such things. She is ambitious but also very frank about her failures. She also makes no bones about enjoying life in the city and is not a purist back-to-the-lander in that regard, which I find quite refreshing. She’s a journalist, too, and has interviewed some like-minded people, including…



...Philip Garlington, whose book Rancho Costa Nada: The Dirt Cheap Desert Homestead (2003) has been out of print for a few years and goes for about $60 on Abe. Garlington was also a journalist who, back in the 1980s, quit his job and moved onto a $300 piece of Nevada desert. He doesn’t actually recommend the lifestyle, but it combines two of my favourites, deserts and dropping out, so I can’t resist.

In the meantime, presents need wrapping and the job needs going to.

So You Want to Write a Novel

An editor friend sent this along and it completely slayed me. If you've ever told me you were working on a book and received an unimpressed squint in return, it is because this video is not much of an exaggeration in terms of some of the expectations of a particularly naive brand of aspiring writer. The makers of this nailed so many of the finer details. Clearly an inside job.

Atkinson at last

After almost a month of waiting, my copy of Kate Atkinson's new book, Started Early, Took My Dog, finally arrived at Bookmark. I was in Chapters the week before for David Sedaris's reading and dutifully did not buy it there. The wait was worth it (although I made good use of that time calling them twice, stopping by twice in person and giving them both my home and work phone numbers). I read the first few chapters Sunday night and then did a marathon on Monday night, stopping only to spoon cold leftovers into a bowl around 9 p.m. I missed Louise Monroe, the cranky Scottish detective, conspicuously absent, but Jackson Brodie is in good form. And...has taken up reading poetry, which makes this latest installment a bit more like the early Kate Atkinson. Split the lark!

Emotionally Weird, her third novel, remains my favourite and the one I recommend most to people I've decided need to partake in the Atkinson obsession. It's odd to see an author you've liked since their pre-mass-popularity days become massively popular. But if you're going to be a snob about reading the fun's gone out of it, right?

In an interview I read recently Atkinson said she's ready to move on from Jackson Brodie and I'll be curious to see what she does next. In the meantime, though, I see from her website that a Jackson Brodie BBC mini-series is in the works. To watch or not to watch? I love these characters. I don't know if I'm ready.

Although it's not a thoroughly positive review, this one from the Guardian gives a good overview of the feel of the whole quartet, for the uninitiated.

To Cariboo & Back in 1862

I mentioned a few posts back that I'd found an interesting limited-edition letterpress book on my visit to Powell's in Portland last month. When I pulled it from the shelf and saw the price ($9.95) I was certain I was having my own little "Gutenberg Bible at the garage sale" moment, but when I did a quick Abe search back at the hotel room I discovered that no, in fact, $9.95 was about the most any of the 350 copies in the edition were going for. That I hadn't heard of the book before should probably have been a tip-off, but I can be moronically optimistic at times. However, both the subject and the publisher interest me, so I'm pleased to have it anyway. (And if I ever need ten bucks...)



The book opens with not one but three introductions explaining the source of the narrative and the various people involved in bringing it back into print. Briefly, W. Champness recorded his impressions during a relatively short stint (he leaves England in the spring and is back in Victoria by December) in the Cariboo and had them published serially, along with sketches, in the April 1865 issues of a weekly magazine called The Leisure Hour. In the late 1960s/early 70s Gordon Bowes of the British Columbia Historical Association initiated a project to have Champness's articles reprinted in book format, and approached Glen Adams of Ye Galleon Press in Fairfield, Washington, whose workshop press was in the business of bringing back into print these sorts of things. The book was released in 1972, as far as I can tell in the edition of 350 that I have, and in a slightly less limited edition of 1,000 though I haven't yet been able to determine what the difference between those two might be.



Champness and his nephew travelled from England by boat to the Panama Canal, then by rail, then by steamer ship up to San Francisco, then to Victoria, across to New Westminster, then by boat up the Fraser River, and then on foot with pack horses into the Cariboo. Their guides and supplies for the last part of the trip came from Lillooet (which Champness spells Lilooett), my hometown. He writes a lot about expenses. The further into the interior the party goes, the more expensive everything becomes, which was no doubt part of the reason his time in the Cariboo was so short. Their group spent a total of two weeks at their destination, Antler Creek, and Champness dedicates just one paragraph to it! But the trip back to the coast is quite interesting in terms of his observations about the settlements and his predictions for their growth. And at Lytton they are invited to spend the night in a pit house, which he describes in (for him) quite a bit of detail.

So, not exactly the serendipitous rare find I thought at first, but definitely something I'm glad to have around, and from a printer I'd been curious about.

Johanna & the Giller

My sentiments exactly.

Marsh Ledger

I was in the Annapolis Valley last weekend and although I have been quite enjoying city living since moving to Halifax in January, the visit reminded me how great it is to be able to walk a few minutes down the street and suddenly be out of town. I haven't posted a poem here in a while, so I thought I'd share this one, part of a series on the dykelands outside Wolfville, where I used to walk several times a week.

5.
What they come for:
for the pipers it is shrimp,
full when they leave our mud,
half weight by Surinam.
For the shrimp, diatoms,
diatoms, dying spartina,
that blowsy grass that tufts
its way along the dyke, tightening
into funks, boy hair always at odds.
These quiet altercations
writ over and over:
what I come for.

Kate Atkinson

One more day until the new Kate Atkinson novel, Started Early, Took My Dog, is released in Canada. Warning to all other books in my stack: You are about to experience a bout of fierce neglect. But I can promise it won't be for long.