Anxiety Pancakes: Life in the Middle of a Novel
I’ve decided I’d keep a diary about the ups and downs I go through writing my novel. Years ago, I did an investigation with art curator Peggy Gale into the relationship of anxiety to creativity. We discovered that some anxiety is necessary; it inspires us to write or make art but if there’s too much anxiety, the anxiety will shut down your creative powers.
I’m thinking about our insight into anxiety this morning. I’m half-way through a novel about a white collar criminal who runs a dead pool in prison where the prisoners bet on which of the list of aging or frail celebrities is going to die first. My character also goes through a spiritual change in prison. Or mimes going through a spiritual change. I keep changing my mind about this. It seems to me that people become their environments to a large extent so it’s possible he’s in a place that leads him to spiritual reflection and emotional change. But once he gets out, he goes back to his old ways.
But to begin. My main job right now is to keep writing. And that means keeping anxiety and self-doubt dialed down. I have a tendency to question what I’m doing, and ask–is this working? Those questions are like a meal of anxiety pancakes because I end up feeling stuffed with heavy, leaden feelings that lead me nowhere. Anyway, anxiety pancakes are my subject in this blog. I’ll try to post a few paragraphs every day. That’s a promise.
My Novel-Writing Secrets, and Essay Writing too
PREPARE, ORGANIZE, DICTATE!
OK, I’m going to share some of my novel writing secrets with you. I’ve promised the Huffington Post I would. So here are three fool-proof ways to face the blank page if you are a novelist, and believe me, my methods will work for other types of writing too, but you need to follow my instructions carefully:
First, pull out a large piece of drafting paper. You’re going to use it as a map of your novel, or your non-fiction book, or your article or your essay. If you’re a novelist, write down the names of your four main characters and their three favourite words. Write down any images that come to mind, images that may convey something your characters do or who they are. Next write down what you think your story is about — obsessive love, fraud, emotional loss. (It doesn’t matter if you guess wrong. Writing is rewriting, as a wise writer once said, and you will have lots of chances to revise your thinking here.) Then start listing the scenes you see in your mind’s eye. Now go to one of the scenes that seems most interesting to you, and write down where it is and what happens. I call this stage of facing the blank page “courting a novel.”
If you are writing an essay, write down your three most important points on the drafting paper. Write down what you think your main point, or thesis statement, is (even if you aren’t sure what it is yet.) Then start listing specific examples that prove each of your three points on the paper. The three points will support your thesis, and the more specific your evidence is, the more convincing it will be. You will be amazed at how much more easily your ideas will coalesce if you see them visually. Virginia Woolf once compared this process to fishing. You throw a line in the river and wait to see what comes. And there is a certain patience involved in storytelling or making an argument. I call it trusting the process.
Second, you need to write the scene from the novel that interests you. It may be your opening. It may be your ending, or it may be a scene somewhere in the middle. It doesn’t matter where you start a novel because all the scenes and passages can be re-organized into the right sequence later. Many novices believe writers write a novel from A to Z. Not true. John Irving writes his ending first, and he says he hears the rest of his novel as a kind of music moving towards his final sentence. That’s how John Irving does it. But all writers have their own process, and if you’re like me, you go to the scenes that spark with the most heat or obsessive energy, and then you write those scenes first.
Why? Because those scenes are the most fun to write, and they’re also likely to be the key scenes in your story. There is nothing wrong with going straight to the heart of things. It will save you time with your essay because you will need to find your thesis statement, which could be something like, “Rob Ford is the most controversial mayor Torontonians have ever elected.” (Now there’s an argument that won’t be hard to prove!) Often the hardest part of writing an essay is figuring out just what that statement is. And often one of your three main points is your thesis.
Lastly, if you are still daunted by the blank page, dictate your most interesting scene into a tape recorder. You can do the same thing with your three main points. Using a tape recorder will feel shamefully easy at first, as if you are playing hokey and not sweating enough from your labours. Ignore pangs of guilt or self-consciousness. The beauty of the tape recorder is that it skips over the inner critic and lets you blurt out what you’re interested in writing. Yes, you will need the inner critic later when you are organizing what you have written. But you don’t want he or she showing up too early. It’s like inviting the food critic to a feast when you are still chopping onions.
Susan Swan’s new novel The Western Light was recently nominated as one of the top ten 2012 fiction and nonfiction books by the Ontario Library Association.
How to Stare Down the Blank Page: Dictate!
Huffington Post Canada
Huffington Post Canada – Canadian News Stories, Breaking News, OpinionThe New, Expanded Heroines of the Sexual Gothic show in London, May 2, 8 p.m.
Thursday 2 May 2013, 8:00 p.m.
Meet & greet reception with the artists to follow the performance
Featuring Canadian Author Susan Swan
& Toronto’s popular all-woman opera noir quartet, The Billie Hollies
Directed and Produced by Louise Fagan
Brescia Auditorium, Brescia University College, London
Tickets: $20.00; $15.00 for Circle members
Tickets available at the door OR
Click HERE to buy tickets online!
Free Parking
“A profound, hilarious and subverting evening of prose and song from among the best”
– Dave Bidini, Guitarist & Lead Vocalist, Rheostatics & BidiniBand
In Heroines of the Sexual Gothic, critically acclaimed author Susan Swan explores her relationship to some of her most intriguing characters — the giantess Anna Swan, the fiercely independent Asked For Adams and the romantically idealistic Mary “Mouse” Bradford. Woven throughout Swan’s explorations is original music composed by Donna Linklater and performed by The Billie Hollies, Toronto’s popular opera noir quartet. The soulful sound of The Billie Hollies singing passages from Swan’s novels bring these characters to life, allowing the audience to powerfully connect to their own hopes, humour and struggles.
Heroines of the Sexual Gothic is a theatrical performance that illuminates the body as an ongoing cultural dilemma for women and for men, while exploring how overcoming limiting perceptions of one’s self can lead to brave and daring triumphs. Employing both poignancy and hilarity, Heroines asks what the creation of Swan’s characters tells us about the current cultural situation for women–a time when many young women are reclaiming feminism (yes, they are!) and re-launching, re-visioning and re-inventing initiatives to continue the work started by their mothers’ generation of feminists.
Join us for this unique evening of performance – Susan Swan, Louise Fagan and The Billie Hollies have created an evening of talk and music you’ll never forget!
Assistant producer and director: Mariel Marshall
To learn more about this multidisciplinary performance visit:
www.heroinesofthesexualgothic.com
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MOUSE BRADFORD AT HAMILTON’S BATTLE OF THE BOOKS
MOUSE BRADFORD AT HAMILTON’S BATTLE OF THE BOOKS
At Hamilton’s Battle of the Books this week Jean Rae Baxter dressed up as my heroine Mouse Bradford in The Western Light. Jean is a writer too. (Some of her fiction titles include: The Way Lies North, A Twist of Malice, Broken Trail.) Here’s Jean wearing a cowboy hat. Mouse always wore the Lone Ranger hat her father gave her. Jean also hobbled around the stage on crutches talking about why she liked my novel and wanted it to win this year’s Battle of the Books. Mouse limps around in a Boston brace because a bout of polio left her with a weak leg. For anyone who doesn’t know, Hamilton is one of the most enthusiastic literary kingdoms in Canada and possibly in the US too. They take their books straight up.
Here’s My Scoop on Literary Fathers and Daughters–For the LRC
MEETING YOUR FATHER ON THE PAGE:
Gardiner Museum talk about Literary Fathers and Daughters, for the Literary Review of Canada, Jan 25, 2013:
- Athena emerging from the head of Zeus
My novel The Western Light started with a family letter sent over one hundred and fifty years ago. It was sent by a distant relative, an illegitimate boy, who left Scotland to look for his father in the new world. The boy touchingly signed his letter to his long lost parent as, “your constant well-wisher.” But when the boy arrived in Sarnia, Ontario none of the men in his family would see him. I don’t know how he felt about their snub because he didn’t write a letter about it. No doubt he carried the snub to his grave. But his search for his father didn’t stop him from using his father’s last name and settling in Sarnia and starting a family of his own.
The letter from the illegitimate boy started me thinking about my search for my own father. And a few years later, I wrote The Western Light, my novel about a young girl named Mouse Bradford—failing to get love and attention from her hard-working country doctor father and turning to a dubious father substitute. In The Western Light, the father substitute is an ex-NHL hockey player Gentleman John Pilkie who has been incarcerated in the local asylum—known in the community as “The Bughouse” for murdering his wife and child. I should point out that my novel is set in a tourist town on the Georgian Bay in 1959 and that Mouse Bradford was also the protagonist in one of my earlier novels, The Wives of Bath. That book tells the story of a clique of girls in a Toronto boarding school who don’t want to grow up to be women. You don’t have to read The Wives of Bath to understand my new novel but what both books have in common is the protagonist’s need to get her father’s approval and attention.
In The Wives of Bath, the father is a minor character but in The Western Light he plays a major role for the first time. It seems to have taken me most of my life to build up to writing more directly about my own hard-working country doctor father, who died when I was seventeen. It was as if I was too daunted by the paradox he presented: the community hero who neglects his child. To question his goodness seemed to question the very notion of goodness itself. To give you an example of the kind of hero worship my father inspired a mourner at his funeral proudly told my mother that he had belonged to the community, not to her. My daughter once said that I invented Morley Bradford so I could continue to have a relationship with my dead parent on the page. No doubt she’s right.
Like Mouse, when I was growing up I, too, had a father substitute but he wasn’t potentially dangerous, the way John Pilkie might be for Mouse. My crush went to the University of Western and he wrote me long, philosophical letters about life and what it meant to grow up. I used to skip over the philosophy in his letters and search instead for any signs of romantic interest, and I was over the moon if the boy signed “Affectionately” before his name. I longed for him to fall in love with me even though he was thirteen years older, and there was no way my parents would let me go out with somebody that age.
But like Gentleman John Pilkie, or the hockey killer as John Pilkie is sometimes called in my novel, the university boy I admired was emotionally present for me in a way that my father was not.
In any event, the shadowy nature of the fathers in my novels is in keeping with the historic role of fathers in Western culture. Traditionally, our fathers have been mysterious. They have lived at a remove from the family and they have been less inclined to share with their children what they are thinking and feeling while behind the father stands our culture’s powerful archetype of the father as ruler, protector and family provider.
In his celebrated non-fiction book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell claims reconciling with the father is the most important stage of the hero’s journey to self-realization. In stage four of the hero’s journey, Campbell says the hero must confront whoever holds the ultimate power in his or her life, and often this is the father (although this figure is not always male.). The hero must kill the powerful authority figure so the new self can emerge. Sometimes this killing is literal the way it was in the Star Wars film when Luke Skywalker fought Darth Vader. But other times the killing is metaphorical.
Alright. I’ve already admitted that authors like myself can use the novel as a way of killing or atoning with the father figure in our lives. But as Campbell points out, killing or reconciling with our fathers is everybody’s quest. Both men and women face the struggle of seeing their fathers as they are so they can make safe passage into adulthood. For women, the quest tends to be more complicated because our fathers are even less familiar background figures compared to our mothers whose bodies we share and whose feelings we are more likely to identify with.
And in literature, as is in life, a daughter’s search for her father comes with perils as well as the exhilarating possibility of self-actualization. Let’s start with the perils, and I’m going to talk for a few minutes about what other women have written about their fathers before I come back to what The Western Light says about my own quest.
In her memoir, Daddy, we hardly knew you, Germaine Greer writes: “It is a wise child that knows its own father. I knew as I held my father’s old hand in my own its exact replica, and watched my own skull emerging through his transparent skin, that I am my father’s daughter. Now that he can be hurt no more, it is time to find out what that means.”
Greer’s father had died by the time she started to research his life. And at the start of her quest, Greer is optimistic and determined, not knowing that her search to find the identity of her charming, aloof, well-dressed father risks her sense of wellbeing. She spends two years doing research and drives three thousand miles across Australia talking to relatives in the Greer family only to discover that her father was the result of an affair with a maid and upper class Australian boy. He was an imposter, in other words, who pretended to be from a good Tasmanian family when, in fact, he was an illegitimate child raised as a ward of the state by a foster mother. Greer’s father later severed all ties with his foster mother because he didn’t want his background known.
Greer meets up with her father’s adopted brothers and sisters, who were children of the same foster mother and discovers that the foster mother treated her father kindly, and that there was cruelty in her father’s refusal to acknowledge his background.
As a girl, Greer had idealized her father. But by the end of her quest, she is disillusioned with him, and decides that her father is like the landscape of Australia, which has undergone a rapacious colonization by European settlers. Australia has experienced a destructive make over that’s seen in acts like replacing indigenous trees with Monterey pines. And after her three thousand mile trip across Australia—she begins to understand that the land, like her father, has a need to pretend to be other than itself—a refusal, in other words, to be who you are to the world. She also discovers, to her humiliation, that her father did not love her and he disliked her intellectual pursuits and questioning intelligence because he feared it might expose him.
So for Greer, the quest to find her father does not bring a transformative change at the close of her book. Her memoir ends with sleepless nights and a sense of mourning. “In finding him,” I lost him,” Greer writes bitterly about Reg Greer alias Eric Greeney who dyed his hair and wore expensive bespoke clothes to disguise the fact that he was a bastard. “He is no longer beside me with his face turned away, but lying in my desk drawer in tatters, a heap of cheap props.”
As I said, the literary quest for the father can come with a price. American author Mary Gordon shares Greer’s experience of disillusionment with her father, an adored childhood figure who died when Gordon was seven. Gordon’s mythology about him kept her going until adulthood. Until she went on her quest to figure her father out, Gordon saw her father’s death as the single most defining event of her life and she believed that her early identification with him had been essential to her conception of self, both as a creative writer and worthwhile person.
Then during research for her memoir, The Shadow Man, Gordon learns that her father was not the person she thought. To her chagrin and despair, she discovers that her father’s persona as an intellectual and graduate of Harvard was utterly bogus. He was an immigrant from Vilna in Eastern Europe who never finished high school. He was also an anti-Semite and a Fascist who wrote pornography. And like Greer’s father, Gordon’s father disowned his siblings, including the one who died in a mental institution.
Flawed father figures also appear in the work of Canadian novelist Miriam Toews and U.K. author Zadie Smith. However, these fathers weren’t imposters although they were marginal figures that couldn’t offer their daughters a version of Western culture’s archetype of the father as successful ruler and protector. Instead of rejecting their parents, both authors have poignantly defended them, accepting their fathers’ struggles as authentic and forgiving them for whatever potential harm they might have brought their daughters, who remain eager to redeem them in the world’s eyes.
Smith has said that her character Archie Jones in her novel, White Teeth, is based on her father. In Dead Man Laughing, one of Smith’s essays in her collection in Changing My Mind, she talks more directly about him. Smith’s father Harvey was a victim of the low income British family he came from, an isolated figure who died in a government nursing home after two failed marriages but who, nevertheless, kept his sense of humour to the end. In her essay, Accidental Hero, Smith lovingly praises her father for not giving into the villainy of war after his battalion captured a Nazi officer. Smith’s father talked the other soldiers out of killing the Nazi. Instead he made the German walk for five miles in front of their tank, an act that her father wasn’t especially proud about later on.
“He (my father) didn’t lose himself in horror,” Smith writes in her essay. “Which is a special way of being brave … and a quality my father shares with millions of men and women who fought that miserable war.
Canadian author Miriam Toews also defends her father in her memoir about him, Swing Low. One morning, her father Mel Toews put on his coat and hat, walked out of town, and took his own life. Until that day, he had been a loving husband and father, a faithful member of the Mennonite church, and for forty years an immensely popular schoolteacher. Yet he committed suicide after his lifetime of struggling with bipolar disorder. In the opening of her memoir, Toews quotes her father as saying: “Nothing accomplished.” I didn’t know what my father meant when he said it, Toews writes. “I had asked him the day before he took his own life what he was thinking about and that was his reply. Two hopeless words, spoken in a whisper by a man who felt he had failed on every level. This book is an attempt to prove my father wrong.”
Of course, not all literary fathers need defending, or debunking. A classic example of Joseph Campbell’s reckoning or atoning happens in Margaret Atwood’s novel, Surfacing, written in the 1970’s when books set in Canada by Canadians were starting to be popular. At the beginning of Surfacing, the narrator has been called up to her family cottage in the wilderness of northern Quebec because her well-respected scientist father has mysteriously disappeared. She goes with another couple, and her boyfriend, Joe, and gradually becomes estranged from her friends and civilization as she searches for her father in the remote woods and lakes. Finally, she sees his floating corpse and then his ghostly spirit:
“He is standing near the fence with his back to me, looking in at the garden. The late afternoon sunlight falls obliquely between the tree trunks on the hill … clouding him in an orange haze, he wavers as if through water. He has realized he was an intruder: the cabin, the fences, the fires and the paths were violations ….
I say Father. He turns towards me and it’s not my father. It is what my father saw, the thing you meet when you’ve stayed here too long alone. … it gazes at me for a time with its yellow eyes, wolf’s eyes, depthless but lambent as the eyes of the animals seen at night in the car headlights …
Atwood’s father character has turned into the spirit of the wilderness—a spirit that understands the natural world has a right to exist alongside the civilized world, which keeps destroying nature in the name of profits. After Atwood’s narrator encounters her father’s spirit, she finds some footprints near the fence. At first, she thinks the footprints belong to her father but when she puts her own feet inside the prints, she realizes the prints are her own.
The recognition of her father and the natural world he inhabited is a cleansing insight for the narrator, and she steps tentatively into adulthood, proclaiming that she refuses to be a victim, perhaps Atwood’s most famous literary declarations\.
My own quest to find my father, described in my novel, The Western Light, is different again. Unlike most of the men in the other books I’ve talked about, my father was a hero in the sense of the Western archetype: he was a country doctor before the days of health care, and he spent his life delivering babies, pulling people out of car wrecks, sometimes performing surgery on the spot. He would help anyone in trouble, often to his own detriment. He was also tall and physically powerful, and he did what the archetype demanded: he provided a home and a sense of safety, but he gave his life to his community and spent little time with his family. So I found it hard as a young girl to find a place for my own feelings of longing for his love and attention.
For one thing, my needs felt embarrassing and uncalled for when other people needed him more, needed him so much it was sometimes a matter of life and death. I also found it hard to talk about how I felt with anyone because in the 1950’s my father was a beloved figure in our town on the Georgian Bay, the single most important person next to the minister. Nobody spoke ill of him although he was often gossiped about. So I fell into the trap of doing what children of absent heroes often do, which was to blame myself for my father’s neglect and continue to struggle to be good enough to win his love.
Mouse Bradford represents this aspect of me in The Western Light, and she shares my tendency to see the fault in oneself rather than in the people around you. In my novel, Mouse is the only child in a household with her neglectful, hard-working father. She spies on the adults, reading their letters and listening in on the phone conversations of the housekeeper Sal, and her aunt Little Louie who has been sent to look after Mouse because Mouse’s mother died when Mouse was small. Mouse had polio when she was six and she wears a brace on her left leg. Her handicap makes her particularly susceptible to the dark charms of John Pilkie, the fleet-footed father substitute, the ex-NHL star and possible murderer who skates like a champion. In my novel, Mouse has conversations with her weak left leg, which she calls Hindrance. What is moral courage, Mouse asks Hindrance. Is it something rare and profound? Or is it something more ordinary? And are you a hero if you neglect your family? Here’s an example of one of Mouse’s conversations with Hindrance. It happens right after the day John Pilkie (who is also called the hockey killer in the novel) rescues Mouse from a gang of bullying boys:
Hindrance On Our Moral Nature
––If I were you, I wouldn’t take getting rescued by the hockey killer seriously, Mouse. People are either good or bad, and John Pilkie is bad.
—-That’s not true, Hindrance! People are good so their fathers will love them.
––You may as well not have a father for all the time he gives you.
—You think so, Hindrance?
— A girl without a father is like a town without streetlights. She can find her way but a lot of the time, she’ll be groping in the dark.
A girl without a father is like a town without streetlights. I kept thinking about what Hindrance said and wondered if it was true of Morley and me. It wasn’t like my father had gone and died on me. He was home three times a day, and we ate lunch and dinner together. But he wouldn’t have time to rescue me from the Bug House boys. He had more serious problems than rescuing me from a bunch of creeps bent on humiliating whoever crossed their path.
Or was it that I didn’t count in Morley’s eyes? Don’t be a nincompoop, I scolded myself. You have to take Morley’s love on faith and one day, you’ll spring from Morley’s noggin like the Greek goddess Athena. She, too, had a strong, absent father and she rushed out of Zeus’ forehad, fully armoured and ready to take on the world.
In his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell points out that it is the job of the traditional hero not only to go out and conquer worlds but to bring back what he has learned from his hero’s odyssey and share it with his community, his family and friends. And this is something that Mouse’s father does not do. He is serving his community but he doesn’t extend the emotional rewards of his heroic journey with his own family, who need him. He doesn’t have time.
So we’re left with the obvious question: how does Mouse solve the dilemma of reconciling with her father? Can Mouse have her moment of reckoning the way Atwood’s heroine did when she glimpsed the vision of her father in the forest? Does Or is her story more similar to the quests of Greer and Gordon who uncovered nasty imposters in their search for their fathers? Well, this is the part of my talk that is a bit of a cheat because I can’t tell you today how Mouse solves her particular quest and what the search for her father will mean to her life. That’s because my publisher wants you to buy the book to learn the answer.
But I can say this: the stories that women (or men) write about their fathers may finish with the atoning moment, the one that is crucial if the protagonist is going to move into full adulthood. But neither life nor literature ends there because adulthood demands that we stop holding our fathers accountable for failing to fulfill our yearnings. To persist in expecting our fathers to be the person we want them to be and not who they are or were, that expectation has the danger of keeping literary daughters as well as literary sons frozen in a state of adolescence. We don’t need our fathers to validate our existence; we need only see what our fathers gave us instead of what we wanted them to give and then we can move on.
A Girl Making Herself Up
Here’s a 53 second video of my granddaughter Jane making herself up. Telling stories about ourselves begins in childhood and you can see her imagination in full flight here. What will my granddaughter be? A movie actor? A director? A writer? An investment banker or maybe a politician? Or a vet–the vocation she has chosen for herself at age four?
The Sunday Morning Writer’s Blog is Back
OK, the Sunday morning writer’s blog is back. Why? So I can put down thoughts about writing for my creative writing students without having to repeat the same things to each of them. Last winter for instance, I wrote about what James Wood calls ‘the free, indirect style.’ And it’s time to have another look at it. In essence, the free indirect style chops off the need for phrases, like “feeling terrible” in the following sentences:
He looked out the window at the falling snow. “I hate winter,” he said, feeling terrible.
If you use the free indirect style, the same sentences will take on the character’s feelings without attaching them to the character. So the same sentence will sound like this:
The snow was coming down hard. Loathsome winter was back. “Gees,” he said.
What happened? The same emotions described in the phrase “feeling terrible” have been put into the sentences without saying who is feeling terrible. Letting the sentence express the character’s feelings without your character, or you, the author, directly reporting on those feelings, may seem like a minor tweak but using the free, indirect style will make your work read like a pro.
Of course, the free, indirect style works so subtly you may not notice it when you see it. But its impact is powerful because it closes the psychic distance between the reader and the character on the page. Like a camera, the psychic distance in fiction can move in for a close up or do a sweeping panoramic shot. And for those of you who rely too heavily on dialogue to move along your story, the free, indirect style plus less dialogue will solve the problem in a pinch. And in many cases, it will eliminate the need for dialogue in direct quotes because the information is there in the indirect sentences. In other words, you can describe something without you having to tag the feelings to the character or to yourself, the author. Do you get it now? Send me a note if you’re still puzzled. I’ve still got some things to learn about the free, indirect style myself.
(There is more about the free indirect style on page 9 of www.susanswanonline.com)
My Fun Trumps Fussy Family Christmas in Globe and Mail (plus recipes)
Why a fun holiday trumps a fussy one
In the 1980s, Susan Swan’s uncle John (at the head of the table) started displaying his Christmas trees in unusual ways. (Photo courtesy of Susan Swan)
From the moment I sat down to write the scene that describes a traditional Southwestern Ontario Christmas dinner in my new novel, The Western Light , I knew exactly what I was going to say, since my family has served the same meal during the holidays for more than a hundred years.
It only seemed natural to model the lavish spread in my book after the dinners prepared by my late grandmother, Pauline Cowan, who was born in 1892 and whose spirit still dominates our Christmas gatherings. Christmas for her – as it is for Big Louie, the character in the novel endowed with my grandmother’s extraordinary gusto – was a chance to celebrate the pleasures of food and drink with a vengeance. One of our ancestors was a temperance reformer who walked from Vergennes, Vt. to Augusta, a small Ontario village near Brockville, in 1830 – and we have made up for his austerity ever since.
Susan Swan’s family recipes
From the 1920s to the 1960s, dinner was held in my grandmother’s French-style Victorian home in Sarnia, Ont. The table was set with finger bowls that held floating red carnations and a thick chunk of homemade soda bread was wrapped up in the linen napkins – a Scottish practice that may have been inherited from my grandmother’s husband, John Cowan, whose family was immigrant Scots.
Those rituals have been tossed – we’re less formal now – but we still cook most of the same dishes, including turkey hens with giblet gravy and traditional plum pudding served aflame and garnished with holly. And, when global warming doesn’t interfere, we still cool our Christmas wine in the snowbank – a throwback to my grandmother’s icebox days. Ice was precious then and delivered to the door, so cooling the bottles outdoors became habit.
Our family, a group that today can swell from 10 to 25, still sits around the table in pre-Confederation leather chairs that were used in the Upper and Lower Canada legislatures. They belonged to my great-great-great-grandfather, Timothy Pardee, a Liberal cabinet minister who voted against his own party to win the right of women to work at Queen’s Park. He bought the chairs at a fire sale in Ottawa and used them in his dining room before passing them on to his son, Fred, my great-grandfather, a Liberal senator and house whip for prime minister Wilfrid Laurier. Fred passed them on to his daughter, my grandmother, who gave them to her son, my uncle John, current host of the annual family meal at his house on the shores of Lake Huron.
It is there that preparations begin early in December on the rambling property that in 1917 was bought as a wedding present for my grandmother by my great-grandfather, the senator. My uncle and aunt turned the plot’s 142-year-old-cottage into their home in the early 1970s and started holding the family Christmas there.
Every year, my uncle cuts down a white pine to be trimmed for the meal. For a joke one Christmas in the 1980s, he hung the tree upside down from the original beams in the old dining room. Another year, the tree protruded straight out from the wall. On yet another occasion, it was hung from the ceiling fan. When my cousin’s wife was tricked into turning the fan on, the tree spun round and round, spraying silver balls all over the room.
The prank would cause ulcers in some homes, but, for my good-natured family and their jolly, misbehaving dogs, it was just another excuse to laugh.
Susan Swan’s mother Jane Swan and grandmother Pauline Cowan whose gusto inspired Big Louie, the grandmother in Swan’s novel, The Western Light
My grandmother’s Christmas was the triumph of fun over earnestness. She was a young wife in the Roaring Twenties, when she began hosting it. She sang flapper songs while my grandfather played the piano. He and his huge Sarnia family loved practical jokes. A taste for mischief still lingers alongside a love of Edwardian elegance. But we don’t elaborate on tradition in our family. When it comes to entertaining, our style is simple, not self-conscious. Besides, fussy, grandiose courses means less time for gags.
My grandmother showed my mother how to do Christmas and my mother showed me. Our meal always starts with vegetable platters, as though we need to appease our guilt about feasting on two 15-pound hen turkeys – we always choose hens because male turkeys are tougher – whose cavities have been crammed with simmered onions, bread and lots of butter, salt and pepper. (According to my mother, a stuffing any fancier takes away from the taste of the bird.)
There are mashed potatoes with butter and cream, perfectly browned turnips and bottles of sparkling Burgundy. My grandparents always bought Crémant de Bourgogne for Christmas. It’s made from the same grapes as Champagne and a good bottle can still be had for $20 or less.
Along with the bird come the traditional trimmings: cranberry sauce flavoured with brandy and ginger; bread sauce for the turkey made with cloves and mace and served in an ironstone gravy boat; hard sauce for the plum pudding, prepared a few days ahead.
When my grandmother ran Christmas, her housekeeper cooked the dinner – just as her mother’s housekeeper had before her – and those recipes have been lost. So my mother had to come up with her own versions based on the originals. She always single-handedly cooked every dish, right down to homemade plum puddings, trifles and mince tarts. Now we all chip in and Christmas desserts often come from a local bakery – including a store-bought pudding. Sometimes the men step in and barbecue the birds.
Nevertheless, there are still party crackers at everyone’s place setting, as there was when I was a child in the 1950s. My grandmother’s red carnations are known to show up in dinner vases. And by the time we sit down to eat each year, we’re all wearing colourful paper crowns and occasionally party masks handed out as prizes. Like my great-great-great-grandfather’s chairs, my family has lived through the birth of a nation, the vote for women and seismic shifts in male and female roles. But some things don’t change much. For us, Christmas dinner is one of them.
Susan Swan’s new novel, The Western Light (Cormorant Books), is in stores now.
Some Wise Things I Forgot I Knew
Recently, a psychic told me to remember what was happening to me when I was 45. He said how I was during that year would help me with my life now. So I looked up an old journal from January to March 1990 and found these forgotten, permission-giving thoughts, which describe the importance of connecting to the inner self:
1. Don’t confuse the uncertainty of creation with a lack of confidence in one’s ability–not the same thing at all. (I was starting to write my novel The Wives of Bath at the time.)
2. Women must learn the self-love, the self-idealizing, the self-mythologizing that has made it possible for men to think of themselves as persons.
3. I seem to go through periods of dutifully submerging myself in feminine roles (as a mother, daughter, wife, girl friend or friend) and then burst out and reclaim freedom and myself.
4. Why do I forget that I am far more interesting when I get back inside my thoughts and feelings and experiences than whatever paradigm of success exists at the time?
5. Today, my friend and yoga teacher Mary Paterson reminded me of something I told her and have since forgotten: don’t write the last sentence. That is, don’t write the end of something (affair/work project) unfolding in your life before it’s over. John Irving may write the last sentence of his novel before he begins but in real 24/7 life, jumping too quickly to a conclusion, particularly about a love relationship, is usually about the fear of being vulnerable and not necessarily the truth of what you need and love.
Mary Paterson is the author of a non-fiction book released this fall, The Monks and Me (How 40 Days at Thich Nhat Hanh’s French Monastery Guided Me Home). Her insightful new book is full of practical wisdom for busy North Americans, and it is published in Canada, the US, the Netherlands. As one of her critics put it, there is nothing better than a Buddhist with a sense of humour. http://www.amazon.ca/s/ref=pd_sl_1t6zi35gj8_e?ie=UTF8&keywords=the+monks+and+me&tag=googcana-20&index=stripbooks&hvadid=2604966